Inside, Outside, page 55
We saw the divorcée only once, when we closed the deal and she handed over the keys; a raddled blonde, very Hollywood in her talk, and inclined to show a lot of pretty leg. Her face was thickly painted, and her tailored gray suit had the football-player shoulders made modish by Joan Crawford. The apartment faced south. The sun shone straight in on her copious jewelry, and she sparkled like an art-deco chandelier.
“I’m being awfully nice to you boys,” she said in a gravelly voice. She had come down from a hundred thirty to a hundred a month. When Jan and I stayed in that suite recently, I paid a hundred fifty dollars a night. (On the other hand, we don’t have twenty-five percent unemployment nowadays.) The lady was in an almighty hurry to go out west.
“Remember,” she said, “I’ll be back June thirtieth, and you’ll have to find yourself another place.”
That short inconvenient chunk of time was the reason she was being so obliging. But Peter and I had fallen for the place, and Peter was ready to pay her price. I did the bargaining. Morris Elfenbein would have been proud of me.
“I will never be without a partner from the Bronx hereafter,” said Peter, when she departed, and we sat there in our April House apartment, still scarcely believing we belonged in it. With that edge of snotty condescension, the usual Quat note about Jews, there was also a respectful, even wistful, undertone. A complicated fellow, old Peter.
The place had its drawbacks: only one bedroom and one bath. I had not shared a room since, back in Aldus Street, Lee and I had slept together on a davenport. There was no place to work. Peter and I had to set up our typewriters on card tables. Nor were there any bookshelves. The only evidence we ever found that the lady could read was a copy of the Hollywood Reporter lining the garbage pail. We bought cheap bookshelves and put them in a big gloomy useless foyer.
What then was so hot about the place? Well, the view, to start with; it was on a high floor, and we saw the downtown skyscrapers—great gray spikes against the clouds by day, towers of golden light under the moon and stars—much as we did from the Goldhandler office; except of course that we were inside April House, a few floors below the sign. An exalting thought!
The living-room furnishings were starkly modern, as in Manhattan penthouses in the movies. Let me tell you about just one armchair. It was big and deep, with severely squared-off lines, and it was upholstered in what looked like peach-dyed mink. It hit you in the eye as you entered the place; so soft, so luxurious, so modern, so obviously waiting for Astaire and Rogers to come waltzing in! I was a goner as soon as I laid eyes on that peach mink armchair. I had to have that apartment. I’d have paid the woman full price, if she had held out, just for the privilege of sinking into that peach mink armchair whenever I pleased, until June thirtieth.
Soon after we moved in, we encountered Skip Lasser in the lobby. Johnny, Drop Your Gun had left Boston to go on to Philadelphia, and he was back in New York for the day. We invited him up to see our suite. “A lot nicer than my place,” he commented, with genuine envy, and so it was. Our suite was a real bargain. Long ago we had visited Morrie Abbott’s flat, which Lasser had sublet: one small room and bath, looking east at other tall hotels. “Perfect place to have parties. You boys are in luck.” He did not renew his offer to introduce us to showgirls. I had been haunted for weeks by thoughts of the singing girls in his show, but he had weightier matters on his mind, no doubt.
Important people like Lasser, and women almost as beautiful as those singing girls, passed through the April House lobby all the time. From the Orchid Grill, dance music drifted day and night. To come from my parents’ side-street home, or even from Goldhandler’s penthouse, into this posh lobby, to smell that magic April House smell—gone now, gone forever, obliterated by the ubiquitous Sheraton lobby odor, but strong in my nostrils as I write, the spicy odor of Manhattan wealth, Manhattan fashion, and young love in Manhattan—well, it was to have made it, to be on top of the world, to have arrived at last in the Goldena Medina. In all my life, I myself have never come any closer to seizing the ploika.
Almost as remarkable as the way I had risen from Aldus Street to April House was the rapidity with which I became used to it, though of course, there was an ongoing low power hum of self-satisfaction in my spirit. For Peter Quat it was less of a change. April House had been in sight from his bedroom since childhood, and Dr. Quat was a man of taste and means. But now Peter was living in luxury by the sweat of his own brow, not his father’s. That was a leap, too. What a lordly sensation it was, when for the first time we bought orchestra seats for $3.30 apiece, instead of our usual standing room, and walked down the aisles past the standees for the new Kaufman and Hart comedy, and sat among the old gray fat cats and their be-furred and be-gemmed women! Or when we went into restaurants like Dinty Moore’s or Henri’s, and ordered up what we pleased, and not on Harry Goldhandler’s tab! That was the life, let me tell you.
Having a place of our own subtly changed our status at the penthouse. We were no longer of the inner circle. We would taxi or walk to the penthouse around noon, and leave for dinner. Sometimes we came back for a night session, sometimes not. We worked better, away from the joke files. We found ourselves writing fresh, usable lines. The switchboard was not buzzing, Goldhandler and Boyd were not hurrying in and out, and we were not getting called to meals, or summoned to play Ping-Pong or Monopoly with a weary boss seeking a respite, or with whiz-kid sons wanting victims. Before Leslie Howard went on the air we managed to draft several episodes in advance, and even so Peter progressed faster in his literary labors. And of course we plugged away at first drafts of the joke shows as before.
Never think, though, that Harry Goldhandler sold our apprentice work for thousands, and was merely throwing us the bones, even at a hundred apiece. Whatever we did—Lou Blue, an audition, a Howard show—he would tell us what to write. Then he would take our draft and redictate it start to finish. He was the master, he was the source, he was the funny man, and he was the final editor. Even the jewel-thief drafts, including our first effort, he brightened. His “Noël Coward” dialogue was much better than ours. He didn’t need Peter and me to write that stuff, and my demand for a raise had been brash and risky. But his besetting problem was time. We saved him time. Big as our raise was, I think we gave him value for his money. His attitude remained warm, and we were still interchangeably Finkelstein and Liebowitz. But to the rest of the family our name was mud—or should I say, Eddie Conn? Karl and Sigmund turned cool. I’m not sure Mrs. Goldhandler ever smiled at us again, once we moved to April House. We had committed lèse-majesté by even desiring freedom from the presence of Balzac, not to mention our swinish greed for money.
As for the unfathomable Boyd, he perhaps became a shade more distant. Maybe not. We never knew what Goldhandler paid Boyd, but it must have been plenty. The whole machine would have ground to a smoking ruined stop without Boyd. Yet he remained ever-present or on call, vanishing to some side-street brownstone hole he slept in for a few odd hours, but otherwise still eating all his meals there, shadowing Goldhandler wherever he went, covering for him, and even responding patiently to the grandparents’ handy-man orders. He worshipped Goldhandler, he was totally committed to the adoration of one man, and when we left the household, I think we lost Boyd.
***
The desk clerk handed me an envelope with the return address:
Johnny Drop Your Gun
Winter Garden, New York
Inside were two opening-night tickets, first row center, mezzanine, perfect seats for viewing a musical; with a card clipped to them, Compliments of S. K. Lasser. I was amazed. We had not seen or heard from Lasser since his visit to our suite. Goldhandler had gone to Philadelphia, and had returned seething again over “fly shit” credits on the theatre sign. But the show looked like a hit. Dr. Schneidbaitzim was a high point. Lasser had wanted to cut it in rehearsal, but he had desisted, seeing Lahr get roars with it night after night.
“Hey, mezzanine! Great!” Peter exclaimed, when I brought the tickets up.
“Why do you suppose we rate, Peter?”
“Who knows? Maybe he wants us to joke up his next libretto,” sneered Peter, “so he can put up our names in fly shit.”
He resumed clattering with two fingers at a short-story typescript. Peter has turned out a million words, maybe, and he never has learned to type. I can do eighty clean words a minute; Goodkind words, alas, not high-priced Quat prose.
Next day the hotel phone rang. Lasser wanted to know whether we had received the tickets.
“I left a note in your box, Mr. Lasser,” I said “We’d like to pay for them.”
“Nonsense. Now, I haven’t forgotten about introducing you to showgirls. I’ll be up in a minute.”
Peter and I leaped around like crazy men. We were very young, both of us. Lasser came in and told us that he had put our names down for the opening-night cast party on the stage. “They’ll all be there. You’ll meet every last girl in the show.”
“That’s just marvellous,” Peter said, in a congested voice.
Peter suffers from a kind of sex dementia, as you may have gathered from his writings. To some extent he has turned it into art, but it has driven him into quagmires, clinical depressions, narrow escapes through windows, four divorces, a paternity suit, and a Section Eleven bankruptcy. Peter has paid for his fun, plenty. He may remind you of my Cousin Harold, but once Cousin Harold married his nurse and settled down, that was the end of it. You never saw such a hearth-hugger and TV-watcher as Cousin Harold. I don’t think Cousin Harold has so much as smelled another woman’s perfume since, except for the mothers of his teenage kooks. Peter Quat started late, but turned into a perpetual Cousin Harold. I don’t pretend to understand these quirks. It’s just how people are.
“The only trouble is,” said Lasser, “that cast parties are a madhouse. I’m having a little private party afterwards for a few friends. Bert Lahr, Moss Hart, Johnny Mercer, just a dozen or so people. I wonder, could I hold the party up here? My place is too small. I’ll provide the food and liquor, and I’ll invite two great girls from the show. I’ve already mentioned you to them, and they’d love to come.”
Peter and I looked at each other, smiled, and broke into loud laughter.
“You’re on,” Peter said.
“Good.”
“I suppose,” I said, “that you’ll invite the Goldhandlers.”
“Well, I’m sure Harry will be having his own party,” said Lasser, and he left.
“Shit,” said Peter.
“Maybe we should back out of it,” I said. But that was just talk, and we both knew it. Those girls!
Peter said, “No, let’s ask the boss anyway, and fuck Lasser.”
When we diffidently mentioned the party to Goldhandler and invited him, his face toughened. His reply, omitting the obscenities, was that he would not attend a Lasser party, even if Skip Lasser performed some physically unlikely acts in order to induce him; and anyway, the Goldhandlers did not go where they were not asked.
70
She Arrives
“Peter,” I called from the living room, “we’ll be late.” The clock on the Paramount Building showed a quarter to seven. Curtain was at seven-thirty. The growled reply from the bedroom was not suited to the family trade.
I stood at the window, looking out at the dark towers patchy with gold: the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, the forest of skyscrapers all the way down to the Battery. It was one of those clear starry New York nights in early March; snow predicted, a strong wind blowing, a full moon sailing through torn clouds, a faint whine at the window sash. I put my forehead to the chilly glass, and murmured, “She’s out there somewhere.” Moonlight did that to me. I was expecting nothing of this night, except the thrill of brushing unattainable glamor. A man about to be presented to the Queen of England has no idea of making her, the awesome thing is just to be meeting her. It was Peter Quat who was prancing with anticipation of “having a nice affair,” as he put it, with one of those two showgirls.
Peter’s receptionist was getting difficult. He had never brought her to April House. She did not like that. She knew that he was in funds and had broken free of the formidable Dr. Quat, and she was muttering about marriage. That horrified Peter. He did not want to be tied down to any woman, let alone to his doormat. She was “a nice Jewish girl,” in Mama’s way of talking, that is, she wasn’t a gentile. For a year she had been hoping that Peter would get so used to her that he would marry her. Now she was trying the desperate old game of withholding sex, which made Peter all the more eager to be off with the old and on with the new. What better replacement than a Grade A showgirl from Johnny, Drop Your Gun?
My frame of mind was different. I was weary of fooling with easy girls I did not love; weary, too, of the former college beauties still circulating, decorative but unresponsive dates, picked-over Dorsi Sabins who had not yet landed their Morris Pelkowitzes. What did I want? What was I asking of the moon? I wanted a passionate romance with a beautiful girl. It was that simple, and I felt that she was “out there somewhere.” She had to be. Sex would be a natural and radiant part of such a romance, once such a girl miraculously liked me.
As for marriage, I had no thought of it. I had not yet turned twenty-one. What I had in mind, if you come right down to it, was also “a nice affair,” I guess, though I would never have put it that way. Vaguely I envisioned a romance out of Hemingway novels, Millay poems, Cole Porter songs, and Coward plays; an amusing bittersweet amour of young lovers who gave no thought to such grubby practicalities as weddings, housekeeping, budgets, and babies, but laughed and loved around the clock for a month or two, and bye-bye. Ideally, of course, this would happen in Paris. I was a long way from Paris, but I was in Manhattan, which wasn’t bad either, and I was in April House.
She’s out there somewhere!
Yet the farthest thing from my mind was that she could be one of the two Nell Gwynns who were coming with Skip Lasser that night to April House. I thought Peter was kidding himself. They were not for the likes of us.
A hand on my shoulder. “Well, let’s go.” Peter peered out at the night. “I bet it snows. Romantic. Got the tickets?”
***
From our perch in the mezzanine, we saw the Goldhandlers come down the aisle. She was wearing that sequined thing from the Joan Crawford premiere. Bad luck seemed to dog that dress. An usher stopped them, looked at their tickets, and pointed to empty seats near the end of a crowded side row. To avoid squeezing past a dozen people already seated, they had to go back and come down the side. I could see that Harry Goldhandler bled as he trudged up the center aisle, and that his wife was red with rage.
In the first ten rows center sat everybody who was anybody: the producer, the composer, movie stars, the mayor, Noël Coward, the Lunts, Irving Berlin, and so on. Read an old show-business book of 1936, and fill in that seating diagram yourself. There too, of course, sat Skip Lasser, with Sugar Gansfried. The farther one’s seats were from that glittery section, the more agonizing were the Proustian pangs at being snubbed or downgraded. We were up on the mezzanine among the nobodies in street clothes. That didn’t matter. Status mattered only in the orchestra, among the black ties and the long dresses.
And it was a real outrage that the Goldhandlers were not sitting in that front center section. Why not? And why the fly-shit credits? And why was Lasser not inviting them to his party, in the apartment of Goldhandler’s own staff? Jealousy, vanity, an itch to hog the credit? Not altogether, not quite. On the Broadway bourse of reputation, Lasser rated as a “serious” writer, you see, concerned with social significance. Harry Goldhandler was a gagman. Lasser wanted to keep his distance from the gagman. Johnny, Drop Your Gun played the Winter Garden for a while, a modest success. You never hear any of the songs. They are lost to memory—though never to my memory. Lasser had several Broadway and movie hits, but this was a forgettable musical. Harry Goldhandler sat way over on the side of the fifteenth row, while the jokes I heard him dictate in Florida rocked the Winter Garden, and his ingenious variation of “Dr. Cutballs” brought down the house.
There’s no business like show business.
“That redhead is for me,” hissed Peter during the opening number, “second from the right. See? Oh, wow! Oh, Christ! Oh, I hope Lasser’s bringing her.”
Well, I thought all the singing girls looked unearthly there under the lights. This was not the Ziegfeld sort of show, where tall silent beauties paraded wearing glittery nothings to display their nudity. These girls had pleasant voices and they chirruped in simple harmonies, and they wore charming finery. Yet the main thing about them, too, was their looks.
Oh, what’s the use? I tried before to describe them, and gave up, and now they were ever so much more beautiful in the radiance of the stage. What can poor print convey of the brilliance of those young eyes, the curves of those young bodies, the grace of those young movements, the enticement of those young stage smiles? God Almighty, a beautiful girl is and will always be the most enthralling sight a man’s eye can look upon, and ten of them were up there on the Winter Garden stage. For trying to figure out which two Lasser would bring to April House, Peter Quat and I could hardly keep our minds on the songs and the jokes; except, I must say, for that hospital scene incorporating Dr. Schneidbaitzim.
