Inside, Outside, page 51
Lasser greeted Peter and me with bare nods as he walked into the magnificent living room. “Terrific place you’ve got here, Harry,” he said, with a note close to awe.
“Why, thanks, Skip.”
“And to think,” Lasser went on, “that it’s all built on shit.” Goldhandler’s proud smile faded. “How’s the shit program coming, by the way, Harry?”
“It’s all right.”
Lasser pointed a thumb at the platter. “What’s that for?”
“I thought we’d eat while we talk.”
“No time. I have to talk to directors and choreographers.”
Goldhandler showed him through the apartment as we went upstairs. Looking into the dining room, Lasser said, “Just imagine, how many people had to take a shit to furnish this room!” When we came into the office, Lasser whistled at the view. “Fantastic. Never seen anything like it, Harry. It needed an Empire State Building of shit to pay for all this.”
Such was Lasser’s genial vein. When Goldhandler acknowledged that he had not yet done any writing on the libretto, and started to ad-lib ideas, Lasser turned harsh. “Harry, save that bluffing for the shit sponsor. I know you. Tokhas af’n tish! (Put your ass on the table!) You’ve got nothing, and how come? You’re not doing anything but that shit show, are you? Do you want to do this libretto, or don’t you? Eddie Conn wants to work on it. He hasn’t had a Broadway show yet.”
Naming Eddie Conn to Goldhandler was like poking him with an electric prod. He leaped out of his swivel chair and slammed a hairy fist on his desk, so that the ashtrays, the Perrier bottles, the cigar humidor, and the scripts jumped. “You want Eddie Conn? Go ahead! Take your libretto to him!”
Having administered the prod, Lasser backed off. It was agreed that Goldhandler would deliver a revised libretto in ten days.
“You fellows still want to meet showgirls?” With that beguiling grin of his, Lasser addressed us for the first time as he was leaving the office.
Peter said, “Hell, yes.”
“Well, I can do better than your friend Fokety.” A wider grin. “You’re going to meet showgirls.”
That night Goldhandler was as low as I had ever seen him. Partly, I suppose, it was the weather. A blizzard was whirling and howling outside, big flakes splattering and sticking on the windows. At dinner he cut only a bite or two from the triple lamb chops on his plate, then pushed the food aside and lit a cigar. For Goldhandler, I thought, Skip Lasser had coated the whole penthouse with a thick layer of stinking ordure.
“It’s no way,” he said, breaking his long oppressive silence. “Running around all day, writing all night, how can anything good get done?”
“Balzac wrote all night,” said Mrs. Goldhandler, “just like you.”
Goldhandler replied sadly. “Balzac was only the greatest writer of his time.”
“You’re a great writer. Maybe the greatest of your time. Poor Rosalie is sheer greatness, isn’t it? It should have gotten the O. Henry prize, not that lousy honorable mention. Poor Rosalie is Maupassant. It’s Chekhov. It’s great, GREAT!”
Poor Rosalie was an early Goldhandler short story, one of the best. Mrs. Goldhandler had to reach back over six years of Lou Blue, Henny Holtz, Nicholas Panilas, Becker and Mann, and so on—ten file cabinets full of such stuff—to make her point. But when she said “great, GREAT,” her pale face reddening, her eyes flashing, a small white fist flailing, you could see the faces of her sons light up, and Goldhandler’s spirits revive. He sat up straight, grunted a laugh, and ate more lamb.
“We need sun,” he said. “That’s what we need, boys. A little sun. We’ll go to Florida. Five days. None of this night work, we’ll sit around in the sun, get some exercise and fresh air, and do that libretto with our ass. Nothing to it.”
We caught a midnight train to Miami, the four of us and Mrs. Goldhandler, and we checked into the Roney Plaza, where luminaries like Walter Winchell and Eddie Cantor got their winter tans.
***
It happened that Mama, Papa, and my sister Lee were already in Miami, at the kosher hotel where we had stayed years before, when we drove down in the twelve-cylinder Cadillac. I managed to visit them just once, for Friday night dinner. At the Roney Plaza, all ablaze and festooned with Christmas lights and decorations, with the loudspeakers blaring carols day and night, I had quite forgotten that it was also Hanuka. Pop had brought the old menorah from home. He said the blessing and lit the candles in their suite just before the Sabbath fell, when I waved aside his invitation to me to do it. We sang the Hanuka hymn, “Mighty Rock of My Salvation,” to the old melody of his father, the shammas in Minsk. All this felt awkward and odd, and so did eating in the big dining room, where Sabbath candles burned on the tables, and most men sat in skullcaps. Some young sparks were bareheaded, but when Pop produced a yarmulka for me, I put it on. Nothing brought home more strongly to me the distance I had travelled. I was more at home in the Roney Plaza than in this kosher hotel, and if I had a father to look up to, it was Harry Goldhandler.
By then, you must understand, I was seeing very, very little of Pop. Back at home, he would leave in the morning for the laundry while I slept. Once I woke I would go to the penthouse and stay on until dawn. On Friday evenings I would come home for dinner, and hold forth about Goldhandler and the celebrities I was meeting. Mama ate that up. She was telling her friends that I was having fun and making some money in radio before settling down seriously to law school; for of course I was going to be a lawyer, nothing flimsy like a writer. My sister Lee too was avid for the show-business gossip. The laundry talk, what I heard of it, was normal; idiocies of the partners, cliff-hanging money troubles and respites. In that small flat, a decided comedown from our West End Avenue layout, these things seemed as remote and dim as Aldus Street, compared to the adventurous brilliance of life in the Goldhandler penthouse.
Pop had joined the Orthodox synagogue and was chairing its building fund drive for a new Hebrew high school. He was president of the Manhattan Zionist chapter, too. One Friday night I went with him to a meeting. A fiery speaker, flourishing a smoking cigar, roared defiance of the British mandate and spoke of taking up arms against its decrees. This struck me as the most vaporous possible foolishness. Jews, fighting like soldiers? Pop’s other preoccupation, the Nazi threat to the Jews, seemed just as farfetched to me. Hitler had been in power for a couple of years, and nothing much had happened, except that German Jewish refugees were swamping Manhattan hotels and eating places.
Pop would take in with quiet wry amusement, half-proud and half-sad, my talk about Harry Goldhandler on Friday night; his sagacious brown eyes on me, his mouth compressed in a small smile as he listened and said nothing, while Lee and Mom would ply me with questions until the Sabbath candles burned down and I went back to the penthouse for the night’s work. Pop seemed to be waiting for me to come out with something, and I never did. Maybe it was this book. A little late, Pop, if so, but I’m doing my best.
***
“Finkelstein,” said Goldhandler, thrusting currency into my hand, “bet this on Idle Dreamer to show, quick. It’s two thousand. I’ve got to go to the can before I shit in my pants.”
We were at the Hialeah racetrack. Goldhandler had taken me to the races for company, because his wife was getting her hair done. All afternoon he had been devouring hot dogs heaped with mustard and sauerkraut, maybe six or seven of them. In his childhood on the Lower East Side, he said, he had had a hot dog about once a year; and he intended to eat as many hot dogs as he wanted, whenever he wanted to, for the rest of his life. The money looked strange in my hand; a sheaf of new stiff bills like stage money. I don’t believe I had ever seen hundred-dollar bills before.
Goldhandler had a new infallible system for beating the odds. He was betting only on favorites, and only to show. The return was small, sometimes no more than one dollar for fifteen or twenty wagered. But as Goldhandler explained the system, it was as riskless as picking up pennies in the street; just pick up enough, and you were a millionaire. A mathematical certainty! His neighbor in Beverly Hills, a retired film director, had played the system for years, and was fifty thousand dollars ahead. You just had to have the nerve, said Goldhandler, to venture big sums for modest returns. In point of fact, Idle Dreamer came in second, and paid Goldhandler two hundred and five dollars. I bet on the horse to win, and lost two dollars.
The Goldhandlers were going to Hialeah every afternoon, to the dog races in town every night; and after the dogs they would drop in on a casino for an hour or so of roulette. Miami was wide open in those days, and Mrs. Goldhandler seemed to relish gambling as much as he did. We would get to work about midnight for a couple of hours, then “go out for coffee”; that is, at an all-night delicatessen or Chinese place we would eat huge meals, and return to the Roney Plaza to work until dawn. We would sleep till lunch time, and start over. It was our penthouse routine, unchanged. The only sun any of us got, in the five days we were there, was in the box at Hialeah, which was so close to the track that you could smell the horses thudding by, and sometimes get hit by the flying dirt.
Yet in five nights Goldhandler redictated the entire Lasser libretto. One of us sat at a typewriter writing down his ad libs, another scrawled them into a script, and a third would catnap while Goldhandler plowed ahead like an iron man. He was not inserting old jokes at all, but improvising lines and whole scenes. I never admired Harry Goldhandler more. It was an astounding burst of creative work. Lasser had switched Schweik to an American army camp in the World War, a sound notion, but the libretto was long on antiwar sentiments and short on laughs. Goldhandler knew The Good Soldier Schweik by heart. When he was through, the libretto had recaptured the coarse and pathetic fun of that great book, and was the more effectively antiwar because there was no antiwar talk in it. Only the Lasser songs, like “Oh, What Fun To Die” and “The Doomsday Rag,” retained the social significance vein. Goldhandler had nothing to say about the lyrics.
The sun was coming up over the ocean when Goldhandler stumbled off to bed, the job done. Peter lay on a couch, out cold. Boyd and I sat looking at each other, Boyd hunched over a scrawled-up script, I at the typewriter, both utterly exhausted.
“My God, Boyd,” I said, “it’s marvellous.”
“He had something to go on,” said Boyd in hoarse weary tones, lighting perhaps his thousandth Melachrino of the Florida stay.
“He’s a much better writer than Lasser. There’s no comparison.”
“Lasser isn’t very funny,” Boyd said with professional calm, “but he’s inventive and smart. It’s his show, his idea, don’t overlook that. He went to Czechoslovakia, and got the rights to the book. It wasn’t easy. Goldhandler’s working on something Lasser’s already created.”
“Why doesn’t he just write shows himself, and forget the radio garbage? Aside from anything else, he’d make more money.”
Boyd gave me a strange look and said, “Let’s get some sleep.”
Our trip back to New York was gloomed over by a foray to Hialeah before train time. In two races, the favorites failed to come in third. I have never seen a man look more amazed and stunned than Goldhandler, watching the favorite of that second race shamble in last. Boyd later whispered that the boss had dropped eight thousand dollars. Mrs. Goldhandler, who had been down on the infallible system right along, somewhat repaired matters by taking a flyer of fifty dollars on a forty-to-one shot that came in. All the way to the railroad station, they bickered in the limousine. Why hadn’t she bet a hundred dollars, Goldhandler wanted to know; or better yet, five hundred or a thousand, as long as she had a good hunch? They would now be in forty thousand dollars! And why hadn’t they stayed for one more race? There was plenty of time. Actually, we made the train with about thirty seconds to spare. We absolutely had to be back in New York for the Lou Blue broadcast rehearsal.
As the Goldhandlers disappeared into their drawing room, Mrs. Goldhandler was snapping, “Just like picking up pennies on the street! Ha! A mathematical certainty! Ha!” I had never before seen them testy with each other, and I don’t recall that I ever did again. They were a strange pair, but one thing is sure, they were crazily in love with each other to the last.
“I once saw them go at each other worse than that,” Boyd said, as we sat drinking in the club car, “over the stock market. They’re both plungers, and they had to swear off. They made a big ceremony of it. I was the witness. They took off their wedding rings and gave them to me to hold. Then each one put a hand over mine, and they swore on their marriage, no more stock market. They’ve stayed out, too.”
“My father lost everything in the crash,” Peter said crossly. “He doesn’t have to swear off. It turned him into a nut about money, a conservative nut.”
“Gambling makes me nervous,” I said. “When I lose money I’m sick at the waste of it. When I win, which is seldom, I feel I’ve stolen it.”
“Jewish conscience,” sneered Peter.
“It was the gambling,” said Boyd, “that got him going on the libretto. He didn’t come to Florida for the sun, he hates the sun. He says the sun gives you cancer.”
Peter Quat said, “Why does he need those fucking card files, anyway? He can make things up. He’s original. That libretto is funny now, brilliantly funny.”
“Make up three programs a week?” said Boyd.
“Wouldn’t she rather see him write one Broadway show a year? Or every two or three years?” I asked Boyd. “What’s it all about?”
Boyd’s oval puffy white face went blank; his bald brow wrinkled up like an accordion and unwrinkled to blank smoothness. He slashed open a fresh box of Melachrinos with a thumbnail. “Another time,” he said, and he signalled to the waiter for more drinks.
Lasser liked Goldhandler’s revisions, and Bert Lahr was overjoyed. The great comic star was cast as Schweik. He was too old to play a doughboy, so Lasser had cannily premised the show on the drafting, through a clerical error, of a middle-aged grocer, who kept protesting to the army bureaucracy that it was all a mistake, that he didn’t belong in uniform. Lahr had signed to do the show on the basis of Lasser’s successes and the book’s fame. But he was bored by all the social significance, and threatening to pull out. Lasser did not invite Goldhandler to the reading for the backers; however, he telephoned that they had laughed, applauded, and even cheered, and that Bert Lahr had hugged him. “I gave you full credit, Harry,” I heard Lasser say. I was manning the switchboard. “Your name goes into the program, and on all the signs and advertising. Great job.”
And so Johnny, Drop Your Gun went smoothly into rehearsal at the Winter Garden, starring Bert Lahr. I don’t remember who else was in the cast, except for a singing showgirl named Bobbie Webb.
65
Backstage at Minsky’s
“Liebowitz, have you ever been to Minsky’s?” Thus Goldhandler, with a leer at me, a week or so after we got back from Miami.
“Sure.”
“Ever been backstage?”
“Me? No, of course not.”
“That’s where you’re going right now.”
“Wait, I volunteer,” said Peter Quat, halting his typing at an audition script.
“Not you,” said Goldhandler, “you’ll be jerking off for a week, and it’ll affect your work.” He was always making such remarks. He often accused me of abusing myself, too; and he had a whole routine about Dr. Quat trying to catch Peter and me doing it to each other, and always just failing to break in at the right moment.
My instructions were to take a cab to the Minsky burlesque house in Brooklyn. Joey Mack, a comedian, would give me the script of a skit called Dr. Schneidbaitzim, Yiddish for “Dr. Cutballs,” which I was to bring to Goldhandler backstage at the Winter Garden. Like every other adolescent frequenter of burlesque houses, I had seen “Dr. Cutballs” any number of times. I did not exactly see how Goldhandler could make it with kissing, but mine not to reason why.
Nowadays naked girls shimmy and squirm and wriggle for a living in every other neighborhood bar, topless and bottomless, but in those days any disrobing as public entertainment was against the law, unless it was part of an “artistic dance.” Thus the striptease was born. Minsky’s was its home. The carnal glimpses of uncovered female hide went with sitting through terrible old movies, harangues by candy butchers, and wearily drawn-out skits by comedians under orders to kill time, and lots of it. But there were kernels of classic comedy in those skits, and Joey Mack was a steady supplier for Goldhandler. Marlene Dietrich, for instance, never knew that she had played in a rewrite of a Minsky standard bit entitled, Oh, Doctor, It Feels So Good.
I set off for Brooklyn with a racing pulse and sweaty palms. This chance to peek backstage at Minsky’s was a teenager’s sex fantasy come true; and the reader knows what a teenager in attitude and experience I still was. What might I not see back there! I couldn’t wait, and the Brooklyn Bridge, crowded with traffic, seemed a hundred miles long. The metal stage door of Minsky’s squeaked open a crack, and a gray-bristled jowly face peered at me. “Whaddya want?” I quailed at the snarl. This watchdog obviously knew I was slavering to peek at naked breasts and buttocks without paying. That was all anybody wanted who knocked at that stage door, and it was his job to make sure that I damned well didn’t see a goddamned thing.
“Joey Mack is expecting me.”
“Who are you?”
“I come from Harry Goldhandler.”
He glanced at a scrap of paper from his pocket, opened the door enough to let me slide in, and slammed it shut. “Up two flights,” he said, pointing at an iron staircase. “First door left.”
I ran up the stairs and knocked at what I thought was the first door left. A young woman in a dressing gown, with a heavily painted face, opened the door. “Whaddya want?” She clutched the dressing gown tight over a full bosom, clearly reading my mind, too. It was discouraging to be so transparent to these people. I was there, after all, on an honest errand. My fantasies were my own business.
