Inside, Outside, page 50
From the airport I went up to Jerusalem and saw Grandma. Another spur-of-the-moment decision. I spent the night with her, and she regaled me with reminiscences of her childhood. Even after we turned out the lights she went on with her stories.
Did she ever tell you the one about a sort of Boston Massacre they had in Minsk? The Czar announced some liberalization measures, and the Jews went pouring out in the streets, rejoicing and carrying on, and troops appeared and started mowing them down. She was out there in the mob, and she fell and was trampled. Later she crawled out of the main square, which she says was all covered with bodies, and went home, where they had thought she was dead. “It was the only time in my whole life that I was ever afraid,” she said. “That was what really made me decide to go to America. I was never afraid before, and I’ve never been afraid again. I want you to remember that, about me.”
I believe her. In that respect Grandma is like the people here. They aren’t afraid. They are mighty concerned about the Egyptians and the Syrians—the intelligent ones are, others are off on a euphoric binge—but their ability to defend themselves gives them, I don’t know, straight backs. That was what first attracted me about Abe Herz. He’s American to the bone and always will be, but he’s acquired that air. The Jewish fellows I knew back home didn’t exactly have it, and if you’ll forgive me, old father, despite your war service you don’t have it.
When I told Grandma I was making aliya, she said, “Oh, I knew you would. You like that American lawyer.” Exasperating! I think I convinced Mom there’s more to it than that. Whether I can convince you I don’t know, but that’s your problem. Actually Abe has extremely mixed feelings about my staying. He is terribly worried about the military situation. But I saw how it cheered him up, when I told him I’d turned in my ticket. “You’re even dumber than I thought,” he said, “and I thought you were pretty damned dumb.” Those were the words, but the music was nice.
If despite all the problems, I do stick it out and find my place, I’ll certainly miss America. Nobody has to tell me that. In my most radical phase, I only wanted America to live up to itself. I hated the Vietnam war, and the vile creep you incomprehensibly work for in the White House. God knows you made me aware of being Jewish, soaked it into me, but the result was only obdurate resentful negativism that spilled over into all my thinking. Your friend Peter Quat expresses how a lot of my generation feel. In my radical crowd, we anti-Zionist and anti-Israel Jews were doing straight “School of Quat” politics, as Abe’s father would call it. It’s natural, I assure you, if you’re disgruntled at what seems to be the unfortunate accident of being born Jewish in America.
Now that I know a bit about Israel, it is a social and political labyrinth unlike anything else one studies in political science. So I’ve lost interest in my thesis, or in any M.A. thesis right now, though Abe urges me not to give up the idea. One thing I might do here some day is teach, he says, if I do stay on, and a Johns Hopkins M.A. would “sweeten” my résumé.
A thesis I might do eventually is an in-depth comparison of the Israeli hawk and dove views. It’s a genuine study. I’m just beginning to grasp that, starting from identical facts of geography and population, with logic on both sides very hard to fault, they come to opposite conclusions. Curiously, they agree on only one point. Israel needs another million Jews—preferably Americans, because they have the highest level of know-how—but in a pinch any warm bodies, a million more of them. Then, says the hawk Landau, the Arabs will give up the hope of erasing a country of four million, and Israel can settle the territories in peace. Then, says the dove Lev, with no fear of being overwhelmed, Israel can make peace and give back all the territories.
Surprisingly my Arab gentleman friend (whom I presume you remember, old Dad!) said that, too, in a different way. With thirteen million Jews outside, and only a small fraction inside “the Zionist entity,” he argued, what kind of “Jewish homeland” is that? And even those inside are mostly refugees, and a lot of them leave if they can go elsewhere. Zionism is a fraud, he said, a vestige of British colonialism, a mere intrusion of the west into Islam like the Crusaders. Just an episode, and it will be liquidated the same way in the end. Another Holocaust, though he didn’t use the word.
Listen, old Dad, the Holocaust bores me. Shocked? That’s God’s truth. I mean the Holocaust studies, all that academic going on and on about it. Either you do something about it, or you forget it. They’re dead and gone. I wasn’t alive then. You were. What were you doing, Dad, when the Germans were killing the Jews? Do you wish you’d done more about it? And if they could talk from the grave, those dead six million, don’t you think they would say, almost with one voice, “Go to Israel, make it work, make it safe”? I’m quoting Abe again, but that argument of his hits home to me. How does it strike you?
Dudu just looked in, quite spiffy in uniform, and asked me to hurry up. I love the man, Dad, and I love these people, and I love this little land. What else can I tell you? I have to give it a shot. It’s a very rough existence, after America. I have no idea what I’ll end up doing. Teach? Could be, but learning Hebrew that well, what a job! I’m not a kibbutznik type, that’s for sure. So far all I know is, I’m marvellously happy here. No negativism, no alienation, much pain in the ass from pakidim, otherwise sunny joy of life. Also, a hope of doing something with my life that can matter and make a difference. That’s a brand-new feeling.
Do you know why I went to see Grandma? Because when we first arrived, and I saw her standing there in the airport, I was hit by a wave of relief and admiration. You had told me she was at death’s door. That was why you were making the trip. And by God she was not only there, she was on her feet! In a muddled way I can’t spell out, that feeling about Grandma and my feeling about Israel overlap. She’s where I’m from, and so is this place.
Abe’s main argument for what he’s doing boils down to this: if world peace ever comes it’ll start here, with the peace between the Jews and the Arabs. He believes that, and I’m beginning to believe it. He says that’s really why he has hung on. Peace is what the whole human predicament is now all about, and Zion is the place where it will start happening. Geopolitics and theology both point that way. He can give you two solid and rather mystical hours about this, and I can’t give you another line. Dudu is standing over me, and I still have to ink in all the missing r’s and m’s. Then I’ll be going back out to the lool, the turkey pen, where I work. It has the godawfulest stink in the world, that lool. Mrs. Barkai has assigned me there to earn my bed and board. Not much Zionist idealism about the smell of a lool! But to repeat, zeh mah she-yaish. I’ve batted this out all backwards and shallow, left out so much! But there was no time. Thanks, old father, for the Jewish awareness you drummed into me. You gave me the best thing you had.
I love you,
Sandra
That’s Sandra’s letter. Now what?
My game here is played out. In this paralyzed administration my “cultural and educational liaison” has become a joke. To educators and artists this White House is a leprosarium. I am still in charge of the President’s box at the Kennedy Center: that is, I decide which big shot gets to use that flossy cubicle, with its own toilet and bar, to watch operas and ballets. I attend board meetings of the Smithsonian and the National Gallery and so on, but nobody ever seems quite sure who I am or what the hell I am doing there.
Otherwise, all day at the White House, except for my rare confabs with the Chief, I’ve been scribbling or typing away at April House. I was up at dawn yesterday and wrote; went to my office and wrote; came home, and found Sandra’s letter. It was like a hammer blow on the head, but I staggered on, fueled by coffee and bourbon, and wrote.
After a nap between midnight and two A.M., more coffee, more bourbon, and I resumed scrawling. Now outside my library window, the dawn is just painting soft pink brushstrokes across the clouds over the Potomac, like the soft pink skin of a Grade B showgirl’s uncovered thighs. I’ve been back in the Goldhandler frame of mind, working as though night and day were time divisions for other people, and we just kept at it until the boss collapsed on the couch with an exhausted groan to Boyd, “Wake me in fifteen minutes, Liebowitz.”
I once asked Peter why he never wrote about the Goldhandler days. “That opinionated vulgarian? What’s there to write? Who gives a fuck about a thieving radio gagman in the thirties?” Such was his verdict, delivered with a frightening face. Nobody can sneer like old Peter. Well, he may be right but I can’t help it; this Goldhandler stuff has been pouring out.
“What did you mean,” I asked Jan this morning, telephoning her at three A.M.—in Tel Aviv it was nine in the morning, and she was packing to fly home—“when you said, There’s hope’? She’s not coming back.”
“No, she isn’t.”
“Hope for what, then?”
“Oh, I forget. See you tomorrow.”
From time to time Jan does the Delphic business.
***
The Vice President is going at last. He is still proclaiming that he will never step down, that he is the innocent victim of nefarious plots, clean as the Lily Maid of Astolat. This fellow, mind you, has been tub-thumping up and down the land for years about law and order, and decency, and honesty, and clean government, and patriotism, and all that time he has been a crook on the take. The blatant hypocrisy of it would boggle the mind, if further mind-boggling were possible these days. But the American mind has already been totally—and perhaps irreversibly—boggled. We may be a hundred years getting over the drop from George Washington and Abraham Lincoln to this administration. We may never get over it. The nature of our land may have been changed once for all, as is a virgin lad’s after he is had by a whore.
But I wander drunkenly, while pink streaks mount in the buttermilk sky. The hue and cry after the Vice President has given the Chief a respite. If ever I am to quit, without seeming the last of the rats diving off the wreck, now is the time. The media will gnaw the bones of the Vice President for a couple of weeks. I have stayed on mainly because I did not want to desert a man in a jam. His sensitivity for such things is acute. In this lull, he will not see me as putting distance between myself and a falling President.
Why then don’t I do it?
All right. I am tired enough, and drunk enough, to write down exactly why I will not quit today or tomorrow. My reason is this: every time I try to nerve myself to resign, a voice says to me, sounding clear and crisp as Jan talking on the telephone from Tel Aviv this morning: “NOT YET.” I will let it go at that, because that is the truth of it. I looked myself in the eye in the bathroom mirror awhile ago, splashing cold water on my face, and I was thinking that I must resign today, and I heard that voice say again: “NOT YET.”
Very well then, “not yet,” but damned soon. And to hell with that lonesome bedroom upstairs, me for this library couch.
Wake me in fifteen minutes, Liebowitz.
64
Johnny, Drop Your Gun
Goldhandler had put in the emergency call to us because he needed an audition script for Panilas in a hurry. Campbell’s Soup had suddenly shown interest in putting the Greek on prime-time network radio! But by the worst luck, Campbell’s Soup had also sponsored that now-dead German comedian, so the old programs were useless. One of those soup fellows might just recognize the material, and blooey would go pots of money, not to mention Goldhandler’s reputation for strict probity. Goldhandler already had his hands full, hence he had called us in to do a first draft while he attended to other things.
All he was sure of, for the coming season, was the Lou Blue Ex-Lax show. Two programs had unexpectedly been cancelled, and there was trouble about Becker and Mann, the husband-and-wife comedy team. In fact, there was trouble about Lou Blue. The Ex-Lax people were toying with the notion of dropping him, and going for “class” by sponsoring the Metropolitan Opera. The opera directors had voted against such sponsorship, in fact were aghast at the thought; but the opera treasurer was fighting for it, arguing that laxatives were, after all, healthier than cigarettes, and Lucky Strike was the current sponsor. For the moment the Lou Blue show was safe. In that penthouse we operated from moment to moment.
The acute crisis concerned Becker and Mann. The sponsor, a shoe company, had notified them that their act was worn out, and that unless Goldhandler could provide a fresh format, the show would be dropped. On the very day Peter and I returned, the shoe executives showed up in the office to hear Goldhandler’s new program idea. It was one of his masterly performances. Becker and Mann would play Hansel and Gretel, he revealed, not themselves, and would have all kinds of hilarious adventures in the woods with the wicked witch, and elves, and wolves, and evil woodcutters. Mann as Hansel would be the blundering fool, and Becker as Gretel the smart resourceful one.
Not such a blinding inspiration, you may say. But I swear, not five minutes before those shoe executives arrived with the two worried comedians, Goldhandler was pacing like a caged grizzly bear, begging us and Boyd to think of something, anything, that he could tell them. Once they arrived and settled themselves to listen, he was cool as a test pilot, lighting up a fresh Belinda and then launching into this Hansel and Gretel thing. God knows how it came to him—probably while he lit the Belinda—but you would have thought he had worked on it for weeks. He could perfectly mimic the team; and he rattled off one mad scene after another that had the shoe men guffawing, and the two comedians weeping with joy. The program was renewed on the spot. Sardinia brought champagne, Becker jumped up on Goldhandler’s desk in her stocking feet and did a fandango, and you never saw such happy carrying-on.
When they were all gone Boyd asked Goldhandler, “Will it work?”
“Are you kidding?” snapped Goldhandler. “With those two dummies? How the fuck can they play characters? They can barely read lines.”
“Then what’ll we do?” Boyd persisted timidly.
“Do? What’s the matter with you? From now on when they tell the jokes, it’ll be”—here Goldhandler did the comedians’ intonations—“‘Gretel, how many ribs has a monkey got?’—‘Well, take off your coat, Hansel, and I’ll see.’—That’ll be Hansel and Gretel.” That was it, too.
Well, so Peter and I drafted the Panilas audition script, drawing expertly on the card files. Goldhandler was pleased with it, and so was Panilas. But the overeager comedian fell apart during the audition, and in the middle of the show he actually stopped and begged the watching sponsors in a quaking voice to let him start over. Of course the audition failed. Goldhandler’s ribald abuse of the Greek, as we all rode back in a cab from the disaster, made us scream with laughter; but in sober fact the flop meant Goldhandler remained in real financial difficulties.
Still, he kept turning up more prospects. There were shoals of vaudevillians frantic to break into radio and willing to pay anything for audition scripts. He put Peter and me to work on these, while he and Boyd ground out the Lou Blue show and “Hansel and Gretel.” So the weeks went rolling by, and when law school started I was scarcely aware of it. Peter too was glad to be back earning money again, for all his grumbling about the demeaning nature of the work. His father had read our incomplete farce and called it worthless, which it was. Matters were sticky in the Quat household, until Peter resumed contributing to the expenses. Dr. Quat was not a skinflint at all, he just held stern views about a man past twenty-one not paying his way in life.
Early in December Skip Lasser came to the penthouse. By then there was real trouble. None of the auditions had caught on. Becker and Mann were gone, the Hansel and Gretel a fiasco. Lou Blue, the only show Goldhandler had running, had been renewed at the last minute by Ex-Lax on a week-to-week basis. The Ex-Lax officials were still dickering with the opera. Goldhandler, his back to the wall, at a meeting with them had proposed that, if they really wanted class, what they should do was sponsor the Barrymores—Ethel, Lionel, and John—in a serialization of War and Peace. What a breakthrough in class! The book was in the public domain, he pointed out; the rights would cost nothing. He said he knew the Barrymores well and would undertake to interest them.
Boyd told us that it was just a brainstorm, a straw the boss had clutched at to stave off the immediate cancellation of Lou Blue. The Ex-Lax men had gone into ecstasies over it, and now Goldhandler was committed to line up the Barrymores to do War and Peace on the radio. Peter and I were trying to compress the first chapters of the Tolstoy book into a half-hour audition script, with appropriate pauses for selling Ex-Lax; Goldhandler had an agent cautiously approaching the Barrymores; and all this had to be done in the strictest secrecy, because Lou Blue had somehow heard—though the sponsors had promised not to talk about it—that he was being threatened with replacement by a classy War and Peace show. Goldhandler kept assuring him at length over the phone that it was absolute nonsense, who the fuck would want to listen to War and Peace? But the comedian was calling up all the time in a great sweat about his script, and about the Tolstoy menace. I sometimes felt a little awkward, picking up the phone while typing some dialogue between Pierre and Natasha, and connecting Lou Blue to the boss, and listening to Goldhandler once more tell the comedian that the War and Peace rumor was absolute horseshit.
Well, what with all this turmoil, Goldhandler had given no mind to the libretto of Lasser’s new show for Broadway, Johnny, Drop Your Gun, the musical adaptation of The Good Soldier Schweik. He had brought the libretto back from Hollywood, but it had just sat on his desk. Now a reading for backers was two weeks away, and Lasser was coming to find out what he had done. Goldhandler’s job was to gag up the show, as he had the Lasser screenplay. Goldhandler called Skip Lasser “a titter man”; he could think of whimsical show ideas and write cute lyrics, that is, but he couldn’t make people laugh.
There was a huge delicatessen platter from Lindy’s in the living room, awaiting Lasser’s arrival. Goldhandler went to answer the doorbell himself, more nervous than we had yet seen him. He was desperate for the Lasser project, because of the growing trend in radio toward “class.” Another Broadway credit was just what he needed now, and Lasser had promised to bill him as a collaborator.
