by Vanda
“That sounds lovely. I’ll see what I can do, but now I must hurry off. Lunch, Al? How about next week before I go back to L.A.? Here’s my card. Give me a call. Cheery-bye.” She dashed from the room with a group of people buzzing around her.
“Not something you do, huh?” Max said.
“Well …”
The crowd around Barney began to thin. “I’ll be right back,” I said to Max, as he took our coats and his hat from the hatcheck girl.
“Al, what are you …?”
I ran to where Barney stood, surrounded. I waited for Miss Le Galliene to leave and then barged through the crowd of important people who now stared at me.
“Sorry,” I said to their disapproving eyes. “I uh—”
“Don’t apologize,” Barney said. “Be as tough as your inclination. Don’t sit on your instincts. If you do, you’ll never make it in this business. So, what’d you want?”
I felt eyes boring into the back of my head as I stepped away from the crowd. “I wanted to ask you something. Over here?” I walked away from the group, and he followed me. “I wanted to know—”
“You’re Alice, right?”
“Most folks call me Al.”
“Okay, Al. So?”
“Before, when I mentioned Juliana, you acted as if you barely remembered her, and I couldn’t see how—”
“I remember Juliana well. She’s a beautiful woman. That’s not easy to forget, but besides beauty she has talent. The problem is she doesn’t seem sure how to use it. Sometimes she was inconsistent in her delivery.”
“The ballads.”
“Yes! I’m impressed. I would’ve kept her on, given her time to work on her act, but she left after a week. I don’t have contracts with my performers so—”
“You mean she was the one who decided to leave? Why?”
“I have a theory, if you’d like to hear.”
“Yeah!”
“Excuse me, Barney,” a young man said. “The phone for you. Leon.”
“Tell him I’ll be right there.” He turned to me. “I have to take this. It’s my brother. But wait. I’ll only be a sec, and then we’ll have a drink and talk.”
Max, holding my fur, pushed through the exiting crowd. “Al, what are you doing?”
“Oh.” I laughed. “I forgot you were waiting. Barney’s gonna tell me something about Juliana. You can go if you want.”
“I’m not leaving you by yourself, but why are you pursuing—”
Barney hurried back to us, pulling on his overcoat, his gray fedora plopped haphazardly on his head. “I can’t talk now. My brother. Subpoenaed to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee. They want to send him to prison.”
Chapter 11
December 1948
IT WAS NOT a good day, and it wasn’t because of the snow. I moved Billboard Magazine off my desk onto the chair and thumbed through the mountain of papers I had to get through. Jergen’s Lotion had dropped Walter Winchell’s radio show. Jergens had been sponsoring his show for twenty-six years. What was he gonna do?
Thick snow flew past my window. It was my job to keep up with the dailies, weeklies, monthlies, anything that was going on in the entertainment industry, so we could stay ahead of things. Today my job was too hard. Under the load of papers, I found a letter from Tommie. That made me smile. Maybe it would help to read it now.
Earlier in the year, Tommie had opened in Born Yesterday. He only had a small part, but got terrific reviews for being the prissiest assistant hotel manager you’d ever expect to see on a Broadway stage. It’d been Max’s idea. Max knew audiences loved to laugh at swishy men, so that’s what Tommie became. Their idea of the sissy. No one ever suspected anything. After all, he was only acting. When the play transferred to The Henry Miller Theater, Tommie wasn’t with them. He’d signed a contract with RKO, Hollywood. I opened the letter.
“Al, I met George Cukor last week, and yesterday I went to his Sunday soirée! We swam naked in his pool. You would’ve perished if you saw all the naked lady movie stars there. Telling you that is my little present for you. There were a couple of beautiful boys in the pool that I had my eyes on. That was a present for me.”
I folded the letter back into the envelope. I’d read the rest when I was home and could concentrate. I leaned back in my chair. Then, restless, I got up to look out the window. The snow had made uneven piles along the sidewalk. Cars inched down the street.
I missed Barney. Over the past few months, I’d been spending more time with Barney Josephson. I guess you could say we’d become, I don’t know, friends? I’d go to Café Society, Uptown and we’d talk. There was always some blues musician rehearsing in the background. Barney told me about his mother and father, his brother, Leon, and his older siblings who were born in Russia. Barney was born in what he called “The Valley of the Israelites,” Trenton, New Jersey. I loved his stories. When he told them, it was like I was in his family, too, instead of the one I came from. To Barney, family was the most important thing in the world. His mother taught him that. I didn’t really understand, but I liked the idea. The other thing he told me was that he thought the reason Juliana wasn’t the big singer she should be was because she didn’t believe in herself. I thought he had to be wrong about that.
I wandered back to my desk, and my eyes fell on Dorothy Kilgallen’s “Voice of Broadway” column in The Journal American. How could this be the same woman? In this column, she glorified the simple joys of The Stork Club’s Sunday Morning Rumba Breakfast for parents and their children. Only a few months before, she was ruining Barney’s life by using her column to call him a communist.
Barney told me Leon didn’t believe in the House Un-American Activities Committee, otherwise known as HUAC, should exist because of the first amendment—it was taking away people’s right to have their own thoughts. Leon refused to cooperate, so they sent him to jail. The worst of it was they blamed Barney for his brother. They acted as if Barney was Leon, and not himself, with his own mind. People got scared to go to Barney’s clubs, and performers who’d known Barney for years were afraid to perform there. Westbrook Pegler, in his column in The Daily Mirror, called on Barney to disown his brother, but Barney believed too much in family. Pegler hinted that if Barney didn’t disown his brother, then he must be a communist too. Lots of folks agreed with him. What was wrong with everybody?
One day Max came into my office and said, “Al, I don’t want you visiting Barney anymore.”
“Why?” I asked. “He teaches me things, and he’s all alone.”
“I know. I feel bad, but—”
“You don’t think he really is a communist, do you?”
“No. It’s—self-preservation.” He tried to smile. “You’re not to contact him in any way. Don’t call him on the phone, or send him a telegram.”
“I can’t even say good-bye?”
“No.”
“But if all his friends desert him now—Max, nobody would ever think you’re a …” I whispered, “communist.”
“We can’t take that chance. We need to stay on the right side of the columnists. We have other secrets that can’t get out. The columnists are our bread and butter. They feed the cooks, and the waiters, and the bathroom ladies, and you. We need them.”
“But you said Barney was a good person for me to know, and now I know him, and you … that’s not right!”
He jumped up. “This isn’t about right and wrong, dammit! If you want to keep working here, you can’t see Barney again.”
“Is that an order? Or a threat?”
“Not an idle one. I can’t lose this club. I couldn’t go through that again. You have to choose. The Mt. Olympus is me, all the ‘me’ I have.” He walked out.
I flopped back into my chair. I wanted to at least explain to Barney, but I couldn’t betray Max. If only I could see Barney once … but what if Max found out? Or a columnist?
For the next few weeks, I had horrid dreams of the columns and Greek statues of the Mt. Ol
ympus crumbling and falling into the swimming pool. In one dream, I saw Barney coming toward me, walking blindly through a mist. He held a lantern to light his way, but it shed no light. “Al, where are you?” he cried out. He walked by me, not knowing I was right there. The columns turned into Max, bleeding.
I heard Barney was losing lots of money. He rarely had customers anymore, but that was okay because performers wouldn’t perform for him any more. They wanted to, but they were afraid they’d ruin their own careers. Then one day, at the beginning of the month, he sold his clubs and disappeared.
I picked up my copy of Billboard lying on the chair. I cleared a space on my desk and opened it to the back page. I ran my hand over the expensive full-page ad, pulling its significance into my own body. It read: “Bloodied, But Unbowed.”—Barney Josephson.
Chapter 12
February 1949
“AL?” MAX STUCK his head into my office as I was thumbing through The Journal and The Mirror. I was making sure Franklin Dodge, our PR man, was doing his job—getting us mentions, but not the wrong kind. “Mind if I come in?”
“…No.” I hesitated, because it sounded like something was eating him, and he was gonna hit me with a surprise I didn’t want. He sauntered in with a pose of, ‘I have nothing better to do today,’ which was never the case. His Galois was already lit and stuck in the holder.
“I mean I wouldn’t want to disturb you,” he said.
“That never bothered you before.”
“I see you’re reading the dailies. Good girl.”
“What do you really want to say?”
“May I sit down?”
“Since when do you ask?”
“Well, I think I’ve been rude to you, and I want to correct that. You’re growing up to be a fine young lady. One any man would—”
“No. Sit.”
“Al, after what happened to Barney Josephson, you have to consider—”
“What happened to Barney has nothing to do with me. And he wasn’t a Communist. His brother was. One who quit the party back in ’35. This lady here.” I slapped the American Journal. “This Dorothy Kilgallen, saying that Barney’s mixed race policy was a communist plot while her own husband runs around getting young girls pregnant and then dumping them.”
“Al!” He ran to shut the door. “My God, she’s a powerful woman! Anyone around here could be working for her.”
“Why doesn’t she clean up her own house before she goes around—”
“If she heard you talking like that she would be all over us. She is very sensitive about her husband’s indiscretions.”
“Indiscretions? That’s what you call them?”
“Please, Al, you’ve got to get this. Without these columnists’ good favor the Mt. Olympus will die just like the two Café Societies did.”
“Barney’s clubs didn’t die. They were murdered.”
“Perhaps, but you can’t say these things, not even to me. You’re scaring me to death. This brings me back to your getting married.” He inhaled a long stream of smoke. “Franklin asked me to talk you into it. He knows his PR, that’s why we pay him all that money, and he thinks we were lucky Barney had so much to dig into it distracted them away from us.”
“Our good luck is based on the bad things that happened to Barney? That’s horrible.”
“I didn’t say that. I simply meant we were lucky they didn’t go after us and find—you know. We may not always be so lucky. I was damn scared during those months. I still am. Franklin feels it’d be safer for everyone if you were married.”
“Everyone in this whole club’s safety depends on me getting married?”
“I wouldn’t put it that way. But it would certainly make our investment more secure.”
“And Virginia and Shirl think this?”
“I didn’t actually ask them, but Franklin—”
“This is only coming from Franklin? Tell him to go out and do his job. There’s nothing in this weeks’ papers about us. He’s blaming our not getting coverage on me so you don’t fire him. There’s something sleazy about that man.”
“Of course, there is. He’s in PR.”
“I wouldn’t know what to do with a man.”
“You don’t have to do anything with him. Only—live with him. You could have separate bedrooms. Separate living rooms. Kitchens! Even separate apartments. You need the license that tells the world you’re not ‘funny.’”
“I’m not ‘funny!’ But no columnist would put something like that in a newspaper. Their editor wouldn’t let them.”
“They put it between the lines. I don’t want them picking on you. This life is not right for a young girl. Don’t you want children like other girls?”
“No. I’ve never wanted them. There’s some part missing in me, but dang-it, our whole dang business can’t stand or fall on whether I get married on not. Can we stop talking about this?”
“Uh …” He turned in his chair and seemed to be looking past the window in my office door. “Sure … it’s … there’s someone—”
“No. Tell me you don’t have someone out there for me to meet.”
“Of course not.” He pulled open the door. “See? No one.” He stood with his hand in back of him, shooing away the “someone” who wasn’t there. “Would I do that without your permission?” He closed the door.
“Yes.”
“He’s a friend of mine.”
“Oh, Max.”
“You don’t have to meet him if you don’t want to.”
“Good. Tell him I’m sorry for his trouble.”
“His name is Bartholomew Montadeus Honeywell the Fourth.”
“Don’t you know anybody with a normal name, Maxwell Philbert Harlington the Third?”
“He comes from a good family. With money. That’d be good for your future security.”
A young man, about my height, who I suspected was Bartholomew was jumping up and down, and waving at me through the small window in my closed door. I waved back, smiling through gritted teeth. “Please, Max, do something.”
“I’ll get rid of him, but think about it. This nightclub life is hard and ugly and … well, you’re a girl—I know you’re plenty tough for a girl, but I think you’re going to need certain things that this life can’t … You should have someone to take care of you.”
“Him?” I pointed. Bartholomew was still jumping up and down waving.
Max ran out my door, grabbed Bartholmew by the elbow pulling him away, yelling, “What’s the matter with you?”
Chapter 13
January - April 1949
I SAT AT the counter of Hector’s Cafeteria finishing up one of Hector’s famous cream puffs, my thoughts on … who else? Juliana. Almost every night, I’d climb into bed and imagine her lying next to me. Then I’d … you know. It was the only way to keep her with me. But when it was over, I’d feel a hole in my stomach that I tried to fix by imagining Juliana taking bows at the Copa, and throwing me kisses from the stage ‘cause I was the one who got her there.
I looked down to see a brochure from City College on the floor with a dusty shoe print. I heard Juliana saying, “You’re the college type.” I picked it up.
Back then, I had no idea what she’d meant, but now I wondered; if I went to college, would I learn enough about business to make Juliana into a star faster? She almost went to college.
Max was all for it. He thought I’d learn modern business methods. I planned on studying business and music, but girls at City College were only allowed to major in Education. I wasn’t interested in being a teacher, but Max told me to do it anyway. He said, “An education is something no one can take away from you.” So in January, 1949, I registered as an Education major, one course: Music Appreciation.
I never got to know many of the other students ’cause I was always running from class back to the club, but when the Kinsey Report on Sexual Behavior in the Human Male came out, I had to stay and listen to what students were saying. I was hurrying to get back
to the club to get ready for my shift, but as I passed the benches and trees in the quadrangle, I heard a group of students talking about the book. Right out in the quadrangle! I stopped to listen. A student in a suit and tie, his jacket buttoned tightly over his belly announced to the other men and the one girl, “I think the book is enlightening. It’s about time we’re getting a glimpse into the dark world of sexuality …”
“Maybe it’s dark for you—” the girl said.
“The book on women hasn’t come out yet,” the guy shot back. “You don’t get an opinion.”
“Try and stop me.”
“Other people’s sexual practices,” a Negro with glasses, standing near a tree announced, “that’s what the book is about. Kinsey is making peeping toms of us all.”
“You’re afraid,” the girl said, “people will find out you’re one of those ten percent of men who are homos.”
“Don’t be disgusting,” the second Negro man sitting on the bench near the fat man said.
I’d never heard anyone speak so openly about sex, especially not in mixed company. And the book even spoke of homosexuals! No books ever did that.
* * *
One April afternoon, I arrived early for my Music Appreciation class. I’d heard from some classmates that they were planning a sit-down strike to protest religious and racial bias on campus. I wasn’t sure what a sit-down strike was, but the issue seemed important. The Chairman of the Romance Language Department had refused to give the Ward Medal for proficiency in French to a Jewish student who’d earned it. Another professor in charge of assigning students to dorm rooms was segregating white students from Negroes. Jeepers, even the army had been desegregated since July.
As soon as I walked through the main gate, the girl with thick glasses I’d seen in the quadrangle a few days ago jumped off the Shepherd Hall steps and pushed a sign into my hand—“Jim Crow Must Go”—and I joined the others who were walking back and forth in a line carrying posters.
Suddenly, the sound of sirens and police were everywhere. Their megaphones ordered us to disperse. “It’s our constitutional right to assemble and protest,” we shouted back at them. “We shall not be moved.”