Mad magazine had moved to Madison Avenue, and The Independent had moved to Park Avenue South, but The Realist remained in the old Mad building. I rented a tiny apartment a couple of blocks away. The telephone there was an extension of my office number, so it rang in both locations simultaneously. I would answer by saying “Realist” during regular business hours and “hello” in the evening and on weekends. Somebody might call when I was still in bed, but I’d clear my throat and answer “Realist” alertly as though I were sitting at a desk. If the caller wanted me to check a subscription, I’d explain, “I’m sorry, but I’m not at the files right now. Let me call you back later.”
I usually had lunch at a little diner where cops would cash their bribery checks. The owner specialized in “cheeserized” sandwiches. I met an actor there, Del Close, who would later become a teacher of improvisation. The first time I stopped by his apartment, I noticed that his bathtub was piled a few feet high with his collection of books.
“You may be filthy and unwashed,” I said, “but at least you’re well-read.”
Although The Realist had become a healthy combination of entertainment and the First Amendment, I became increasingly frustrated that it wasn’t more effective in serving people directly. Then I had dinner with George von Hilsheimer, who had been a child evangelist and was now a practicing humanist. He’d just spent a few weeks exploring public and private sources of support for a national expansion of child-care centers, and he was still in shellshock from dealing with bureaucracies. We were talking about Humanitas, an organization in Holland with twenty thousand volunteer social workers. He said he could live on $50 a week, and I guaranteed him a year’s subsistence to launch an American version of Humanitas called People.
The Realist soon began to serve as an organizing tool for this domestic Peace Corps—a community of idealists with nothing to lose but their armchairs. With my Playboy salary, I was already supporting the free birth-control clinic; the Neighborhood Pilot Project, a remedial reading program run by John Davis and Aggie Dodd; the Lower East Side Action Project; and a judo center run by Larry and Michelle Cole. Now I made arrangements to do a benefit at Town Hall for People.
Meanwhile, I didn’t have a steady girlfriend. I was lonely for my other half, but I didn’t want to be celibate while I was waiting. Early one morning I was in bed with a girl I had met at a party, when the phone rang. It was her boyfriend, a lower-echelon Mafioso. I thought of them as Judy Jewish and Gary Gangster. He asked if I knew where she was. I told him no, even as she was cuddling next to me. He said he would check his source and call me right back. A few minutes later he did.
“You were seen with her last night. You spent the night with her. She didn’t come home last night. You punk!”
He said that he was coming to my office—which is where he thought he was calling me—to talk about it. I told Judy Jewish she’d better leave, and I rushed to the office, but Gary Gangster was already waiting outside the Mad building, peering through the locked outside door into the lobby, expecting the elevator door to open and me to step out and open the door for him. Instead he saw me on the sidewalk coming toward him.
“What are you doing out here?” he said.
“Well, I came out just a minute ago, but you weren’t here.”
“I was calling you up because you didn’t come out.”
“Oh—I figured you had the address wrong, so I took a walk around the block.”
“Let’s go to your apartment.”
“Don’t you want to come up to my office?”
“I said. ‘Let’s go to your apartment.’”
“You don’t expect to find her there?”
“She leaves traces wherever she goes. By the way, do you have a telephone at your apartment?”
“Oh, yeah, well, it happens to be the same number as my office, incidentally.”
There was a certain tension between us while we were walking to my apartment.
“Tell me,” he said, “do you have many friends who smoke Tareyton cigarettes?”
I suddenly realized what he meant by “she leaves traces.” At the apartment, Judy Jewish was gone, but the bed was unmade and Gary Gangster couldn’t help but notice the semen stain on the sheet. Which, of course, was no proof that it was she who had been there. However, the ashtray was filled with Tareyton cigarette butts.
“Do you smoke Tareytons?”
“No,” I answered, “I don’t smoke any cigarettes.”
“I guess I caught you with your pants down, didn’t I?”
He picked up the phone and dialed a number. He was calling her mother. “I found him,” he said. “What should I do, throw ’im out the window?” I was scared that he might actually do it. He hung up the phone and I didn’t know what to expect. I thought, How could a realist have gotten himself into such an unrealistic situation?
Gary Gangster and I proceeded to have a discussion.
“I got the horns,” he yelled. “I gotta do something! It ain’t manly!”
“Look, restraint itself can be a form of manliness.”
“You know,” he said, “I could arrange to have you killed while I was having dinner with your mother and father.”
“Well, actually, they’re not having too many people over to the house these days.”
His low chuckle in response to that wisecrack marked a positive turning point in our conversation. He finally forgave me, and we shook hands. He borrowed $20, which we both knew I would never get back. He also asked for complimentary tickets to my show at Town Hall, and I said yes. But then he wanted to be staff photographer for The Realist, and I told him no. He said he understood, and we parted on friendly terms. And I vowed never to go to bed again with anybody who smoked cigarettes.
My performance at Town Hall was in January 1963. The audience was mostly Realist readers, looking each other over as though they were attending a Martian convention. Gary Gangster and Judy Jewish were there. I told my story about them, and I was relieved to see them laughing. From the stage, I introduced Realist writers and artists—who stood up so folks could compare them with their bylines—as well as the subjects of my interviews. When I introduced Joseph Heller, somebody else stood up, but since the audience didn’t know what Heller looked like, they applauded.
“That’s not Joseph Heller. This is right out of Catch-22.”
Then I introduced Norman Mailer, and again somebody else stood up. This time it was a young woman.
“I’m a friend of Norman’s,” she called out. “He couldn’t come tonight.”
“That’s the story of his life.” It was a cheap shot, but I couldn’t resist it. “He’s writing another book about it.”
When Jeanne Johnson was seventeen, her parents helped her run away to New York. Her mother gave her a green hide-a-bed, and her father—who was half Choctaw Indian—had all the floors done in linoleum that was supposed to look like wood. She lied about her age and got a job working for a book publisher. She had an affair and became pregnant when she was eighteen, but the relationship soured, and she went to Dr. Spencer for an abortion. She recalled:Now that I think back, I was lucky. It wasn’t some guy who picks you up on the street corner and drives you to some undesignated spot and asks if you suck cock before he puts you under. It was Dr.
Robert Spencer. He was a sunny little man with a red beret and red scarf and red cheeks who immediately understood that I was a child afraid and with not enough money to stay at the motel. So he gave me the keys to his office and told me I could stay there overnight. In the morning he found a nice couple to drive me back to New York.
Two years later, she left a wild party and went screaming through the streets. She thought she was being melodramatic, but the authorities assumed she was a mental case, and they put her in Bellevue for observation, her diaphragm firmly in place. An old friend, Norman Mailer, decided to do a good deed and get her out. Her parents signed the appropriate papers, and he became her legal guardian.
The night of my Town H
all concert, Mailer was busy meeting a deadline, so he sent Jeanne in his place. After the show, she came backstage and introduced herself. Most women then didn’t extend their hand first, but she did, and her handshake was confident. She had a pixie haircut, darkish skin, a vulnerable smile, and she seemed to veer at you from an angle. She had the aura of a Moroccan princess who had been kicked out of clown school for being too silly.
The next week she came to The Realist for advance copies of the issue with the Mailer interview. She was also looking for a job—and I needed an office scapegoat. I still had more interviews scheduled, so I told Jeanne I wasn’t sure yet. Then, a few days later, she called, using a Southern accent.
“I attended the University of Alabama where I majored in scapegoating.”
That did it. She was obviously qualified for the job.
Since The Realist office was near police headquarters, there were stores in the neighborhood that catered to their needs. When Jeanne saw a flyer in a store window promoting a groin holster, she talked the proprietor into letting her have it. The ad offered: “For the first time, a truly concealed holster that can be worn with leisure clothing! Ideal for all year round and especially warm weather. No jacket necessary; no outside shirt tails! Comfortable, convenient. Guaranteed. Used by peace officers everywhere.”
The accompanying photo sequence showed a man wearing shorts reaching into his fly and withdrawing his pistol. The guarantee read: “I understand that if I am not fully satisfied with my holster I can return it within 10 days and receive a complete refund of the purchase price.” Sure, if a purchaser was still alive. The cause of death might well have been a stuck zipper. This was a perfect item for The Realist, and Jeanne was a perfect Scapegoat.
She had excellent instincts. She persuaded me not to print a letter to the editor which gave instructions on how to perform an abortion on oneself, because it was too dangerous a procedure. She also was a superb bullshit detector. One time she was on the phone with a subscriber who said, “You have a lovely voice, you must be very beautiful.”
“Actually, I’m deformed,” she replied.
Later she was afraid that she might have indulged in cruel humor, but I insisted that the caller had asked for it. Her soulfulness was the basis of her irreverence. Watching the dwarf actor Michael Dunn at the Academy Awards on TV, she remarked, “I’ll bet he doesn’t rent his tuxedo.”
Jeanne was the queen of her own yin-yang universe. She could fit a complete set of checkers—twelve red and twelve black—into her mouth, and yet maintain a total sense of dignity. Challenge was her middle name. She once climbed up the side of a building, through a window, into an apartment, and out the door, confessing that she was “guilty of breaking and leaving.” She charmed my ass off.
Our relationship remained platonic, though, until she invited me to dinner at Norman Mailer’s house, where she was living, and we kissed goodnight, tentatively at first—she was, after all, my employee—but then her tongue entered my lips and touched my heart. My Scapegoat would become my Scapemate. In Mailer’s words, Jeanne and I “fell in together.” But, as if to prove just how special our connection was, we waited two whole weeks before falling into bed. In those days, that was considered a long time.
Jeanne was still living at Mailer’s house, but she would often stop by my little apartment in the morning on her way to work. I had a mattress on the floor and kept my clothes in a filing cabinet. I was working on the Lenny Bruce book at the time, and sometimes, while I transcribed his tapes, she would lay by my side, mimicking Lenny’s impression of a flaky Cardinal Spellman as played by actor Hugh Herbert going, “Whoo-whoo-whoo!”
We would fight sometimes, but then make up, and the relief was always worth the tension. Usually, the disagreement was based on a misunderstanding. Once we were coming out of an Italian restaurant, and she was complaining about the service. Quoting from one of Lenny’s bits about how not to act on a date—and mistakenly thinking that she had heard this particular routine—I said, “ What ’sa matter, you got the rag on?” In response, Jeanne punched me in the stomach. I was perversely impressed with the way she refused to play the role of a dependent female.
Another time, walking around Chinatown in the silent aftermath of an argument, a panhandler approached us. “Just give me one of your dreams,” he said. It brought tears to our eyes. We went back to my tiny apartment and made love. That was the night our child was conceived. Jeanne realized a few weeks later that she was pregnant.
“I want this baby,” she declared.
“So do I.”
We decided to live together. Although we were both anarchistic enough not to want the government involved in our relationship, we decided to get married—but not legally. Since George von Hilsheimer was a minister, but not licensed in New York State, he could perform the ceremony. I called my parents with the news. My mother had always asked if any girl I went out with was Jewish, and now she was asking again.
“I told you,” I teased her, “that I would never answer that question again, because it’s irrelevant to me. But if you want to ask Jeanne directly, I’ll put her on the phone.”
I could almost hear my mother asking, “So, are you Jewish?” I assumed Jeanne might respond, “Are you kidding? I was the president of Junior Hadassah.” Which was true, even though she wasn’t Jewish. But instead, she said with a chortle, “Oh, no—I’m anti-Semitic,” and made my mother laugh.
At that instant, I fell one step deeper in love with Jeanne. I had never known anyone who could dance on the edge with such spontaneity and grace. When she came to my parents’ home for the first time, I told them about that time she had punched me in the stomach. “But it’s different now,” I added, sticking my stomach out to display my trust. And Jeanne punched me in the stomach again.
“You shouldn’t have tempted me like that,” she explained.
Through People, I was now supporting a day-care center, a bail fund, and a children’s camp, inspired by A.S. Neill’s Summerhill School in England, based on the notion that learning should be fun. George von Hilsheimer was supposed to run the camp in Rosman, North Carolina, but there were threats against the Negro kids, so on June 30, 1963—the day Jeanne had set for our wedding at Norman Mailer’s house—von Hilsheimer and I were checking out another site in New Jersey.
I left him there so I could get back to help with wedding preparations, such as picking up the cake Jeanne had ordered with the words At Last decorating the top. Von Hilsheimer would be four hours late, and the ceremony had to be delayed. Meanwhile, guests were getting drunk, Jeanne’s divorced parents were flirting with each other, and a telegram arrived from the architect warning that the balcony could only hold a limited number of people.
My father suggested that my uncle, who was a judge, could marry us, but I declined without bothering to explain that this would’ve made it legal. My father took Jeanne and me into the kitchen, went to the stove, and turned on the gas jet beneath a teakettle. “You have to always remember,” he said, “that water doesn’t boil unless you put a flame under it.” Jeanne thought he was talking about sex, but I knew he was talking about anger.
Later, I asked Mailer if he had any advice about women for his new son-in-law.
“You’re putting me on,” he advised, gently jabbing me on the arm. As a wedding gift, he gave us a pair of marmoset monkeys. We named them Idiot and Delight.
Since Lenny Bruce was in San Francisco at the time, preparing for his trial, Playboy wanted me there to get him to write additional material for his book, so that’s where Jeanne and I decided to go for our honeymoon. On the way, the pilot announced that he would have to make an emergency landing in Chicago. Jeanne pouted.
“I guess we didn’t need to get round-trip tickets,” she said.
In 364 out of 450 airplane crashes, the automatic recording devices found in the wreckage indicated that at least one of the crew members began to whistle in the last few moments aloft. I wasn’t aware of that particular statisti
c, but I was holding Jeanne’s hand and whistling “Tsena, Tsena.” Special trucks were spreading foam on the ground, and we landed safely.
In San Francisco, we took a long walk to Lenny’s hotel in North Beach. On the way, we stopped at a barbershop where three Oriental men—with a guitar, a violin, and a bass fiddle—were playing “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen.” The shop was closed, but they let us come in, sit down, and listen, as long as nobody wanted a haircut. We tried to bring Lenny there, but he was too deeply buried in his legal papers to take time out.
“I’m fighting for ten years of my life,” he explained.
Jeanne recalled that meeting.
Listening to Lenny’s tapes, hearing his tales, I felt like his sister, because one can’t really feel like his friend; alone is written all over his face. His room was a kind of warm, seedy place, home of the night people and a few young, apple-pie delicious dumb hookers. It had a communal feeling, and when everybody was awake, late in the afternoon, most of them seemed to be occupied doing errands for Lenny, who never seemed to have a shortage of things he wanted, needed, or fancied. He never seemed to wonder why these people wanted to help—he was too busy—but I wondered what these big-titted, tight-dressed, high-heeled girls got out of it.
They didn’t understand him, he certainly didn’t look like he was successful, he was as down and out as the rest of them. He didn’t lavish attention on them, he didn’t even fuck them slow. What magic feeling, vibration, something special in our midst, or maybe he was somebody who just wanted something done and he knew who to ask for what, and there was great pride in taking his shoes to the shoemaker and doing a good job, just the way he liked it. Sometimes to see those broads sitting over a typewriter, slowly, painfully transcribing his tapes, with the mascara running down their faces, their dresses up to their crotches, their feet turned over at the ankles in their red shoes, sweat pouring off with the effort of it all, they sort of reminded you of the man on crutches in Greaser’s Palace who fell to his knees and said, “I can crawl again.”
Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut Page 13