“You signed off on it,” said Lord. “Late one afternoon,” he added, by way of explanation for the editor’s lack of recollection. “ ‘Skyscrapers.’ The pictures will have tailors holding tape measures, with little office windows instead of inch marks, against the boys’ legs. They’re nearly all six-footers.”
“That’ll get Daisy out of her funk,” said Nan O’Grady.
“What about Cuba?” asked Max Stanwick, returning to the business of story ideas.
“What about it?” responded Harris.
“Coolidge is there this week,” said Spilkes.
“We don’t cover treaty signings in this magazine,” said the editor-in-chief.
“He means the food, I’ll bet,” said David Fine, sensing an invasion of turf by Stanwick. “You should see what the chinks down there can do with pork.”
Harris looked puzzled.
“Chinks,” explained Fine. “Cuba’s crawling with ’em.”
“I’m talking about the nightlife,” Stanwick asserted. “The gambling, the goons. Hoods hacking up the honchos back at their haciendas. Señoritas stabbing their stogie-sucking suitors.” Nan, her ears and teeth set on edge by Stanwick’s staple alliteration, chewed a small hank of her red hair. Sidney Bruck, who had he been Adam would have found the Garden of Eden a stale cliché, put in his poisoned oar. “Oh, wonderful,” he said. “Here’s a way to use Peggy Joyce. Put her on the cover, maybe in a mantilla, or dressed up like a matador.”
Before Stanwick could punch out his lights with a look, a great crash rattled the glass in Harris’s office door.
“Perhaps I should have a look,” said Lord, getting up from his seat.
Harris ignored the fuss to concentrate on Stanwick. “You’re too busy to go down to Cuba.”
“No, I’m not. We just closed Rothstein.”
“Not quite,” Nan corrected.
“You’re not going,” said Harris.
“You know,” said Becky, “Japan presents some—”
“Japan?” asked Stanwick.
“Sure, Japan,” interrupted Nan. “ ‘Slick samurai slices sailor with sword.’ It’s got possibilities for you.”
“I wasn’t thinking of it for Max,” said Becky. “But I’ve heard that since the earthquake, the Imperial Hotel—”
“I could do it,” Paul Montgomery rushed in to say. He was already grasping the lyric possibilities: delicate geishas who’d made teahouses from the rubble; little Hirohito struggling with Western dress. “The Emperor’s New Clothes!” he blurted. “I could ship out in a week.”
Paulie’s long absence was a delightful prospect, but Becky had imagined the piece for a freelance, some young novelist with a bit of sensibility. She began to protest, but there was really no need. The Japan idea, like so many Monday-morning editorial notions, died out as fast as it had been uttered, drowned in the badinage of insult and conversational chaos created by the attempt to keep track of three different issues of the magazine in various stages of production.
“What about bank loans to brokers?” asked Spilkes. “They’re way up. They could make things dangerous for the market.”
“That’s a theme,” said Harris, “not a story. Come up with the guy who’s lost his shirt or gone to the clink or left some blonde holding the bag, and then it’ll be a story.”
“I’m getting two short pieces from Nathan,” said Sidney Bruck, like a weary magician extracting rabbits for his colleagues who couldn’t even find the top hat. After a pause, he deigned to describe the two casual essays he’d just paid George Jean Nathan, the American Mercury’s drama critic, to write. “One on leisure versus loafing. Another on how wisecracks are killing conversation.”
Cuddles Houlihan, who’d just entered the room, responded to Sidney as he looked for a chair. “Didn’t we already do euthanasia?”
“Proving Nathan’s point,” said Bruck, whose words were lost in the still-growing roar outside the office. It seemed to be coming all the way from the Fashion Department.
“Siddown,” Harris ordered Houlihan. Becky looked at her old boss and mouthed the words “Where have you been?”
“You might want to get out there,” Cuddles said to Spilkes. “One of the Columbia boys just clocked Waldo.”
“Lindstrom showed up?” asked Harris. “Good.”
“If you say so,” answered Cuddles, who at last found a chair next to David Fine.
Over the exterior noise, Harris told Montgomery he’d like something on Billy Durant, the motorcar manufacturer who’d lost all interest in making anything but stock-market killings. The head of Durant Motors now even lived in Deal, New Jersey, from which he engaged in marathon speculation. “We could pose him next to a rusting car,” said Harris. “Have him sitting on a solid-gold ticker.”
“Good,” said Andrew Burn. “I can sell Studebaker against the pages.”
David Fine, pouting over the offer of something this flashy to Paul Montgomery, leaned toward Cuddles and asked him what the hell was going on outside.
“Well, Waldo’s here,” Cuddles explained, “but not exactly all there. He looks like he just put two medicine balls’ worth of cocaine up his nose. Eyes like Cantor’s. He was getting made up and saw a couple of the court kings taking off their pants. He apparently thought he was somewhere else and dropped to his knees.”
“The rusty car and the solid-gold ticker!” exclaimed Paulie. “That’s swell.”
An agonized cry and some animal howling—plus the fleeing shadows of two shrieking girls beyond the frosted glass of the office door—finally made it impossible to continue the meeting. Spilkes went out to the corridor and hastened past Chip Brzezinski, who was again lurking beside Hazel’s desk. Once inside Fashion, the managing editor found the Columbia center holding his behind and screaming to high heaven. Gardiner Arinopoulos, being pulled along by some leashed creature of uncertain species, rushed past Spilkes while Richard Lord, with the merest suggestion of his fingertips, propelled Waldo Lindstrom in the opposite direction. Once both photographer and model were ten yards distant from the Columbia center, Daisy commenced the gentle application of what she called an old Italian remedy to the boy’s rear end. While massaging him with her drugstore cold cream, she explained to Spilkes that the mishap had occurred when Mr. Arinopoulos’s ocelot, which he’d brought from Queens for his shoot with Lindstrom, had attacked the center, but only after the hoop-shooter had attacked Lindstrom, of whom the animal seemed unaccountably fond. It would have been much, much worse, Daisy explained, had Allen Case, with some soothing words and fearless petting, not coaxed the animal’s teeth out of the boy’s behind.
In fact, as Daisy narrated these events to Spilkes, the young athlete was offering to buy Allen a thick New York steak as a token of thanks. The copyeditor appeared not even to hear him; he was staring in the direction of Gardiner Arinopoulos, with something like murder in his eyes.
“You can keep the suits,” Spilkes told the Columbia squad. The boys would have been given them in any case, ocelot or no ocelot, but they seemed surprised, and placated, by such generosity.
“See,” said Spilkes, satisfied he had taken charge of the situation. “Everybody wins.”
7
—Are you looking at my knees?
—No, I’m way above that.
Cuddles listened to the two Burns and Allen imitators who were closing the first half of the Palace’s afternoon bill. With half-blue stuff like this it was no wonder he hadn’t had to dodge any scalpers on the way in. He’d escaped from the editorial meeting just half a minute after Gardiner Arinopoulos’s noisy departure. The photographer and his ocelot had still been on the sidewalk waiting for their car when Cuddles exited the Graybar Building. Except for a quick detour to Manking, where Takeshi unlocked his vodka bottle for several fortifying snorts, he’d taken a direct route to the theatre.
Having slept through Taylor Holmes’s monologue from Ruggles of Red Gap—the sort of thing, no, the exact thing Holmes had been doing here since ’13�
�Cuddles now decided to drift off for the rest of the afternoon. He slumped further into his seat and cast his half-closed eyes up to the vast chandeliers and plaster rosettes that had once made this gigantic enclosure at Broadway and Forty-seventh a heaven beyond Brigham Young’s most wingèd, wild imagining. Now, of course, every burg half the size of Schenectady was getting its own lowercase movie “palace,” and you couldn’t deny that some of them were the equal of this tired paradise. Cuddles began, once more, to doze.
It would be untrue to say he had neglected giving the picture of Leopold and Loeb any thought this weekend, but equally false to claim that the minutes he’d spent pondering it had yielded any approach fresher than the time-honored, though frequently fallible, if-you-can’t-lick-’Em-join-’Em approach. He’d imagined hoisting Jimmy Gordon on his own petard in a first-thing-Monday-morning pitch to ’Phat: “It would make a great ad!” So Good It’s Criminal was the line of copy he’d considered telling Harris to stick beneath the photo of the canoodling killers.
But as Saturday had worn on, with Cuddles sleeping through three showings of The Wreck of the Hesperus at Proctor’s Eighty-sixth Street, and Kitty Sark, his unfed cat, greeting his homecoming with howls from beneath the coffee table, this strategy began to look less inspired. On Sunday, Cuddles managed to rouse himself from the couch only long enough to serve the creature some anchovy-topped kibble: “I’d say you’re six down, three to go, sport.” KS showed no sign of appreciating this jauntily dire bon appétit.
Today, sleep was the only nourishment Cuddles himself craved, but his current helping of it was interrupted by a sharp poke in the ribs. The sight that met his opening eyes was not the Palace’s celestial ceiling fixtures but Becky Walter in a purple cloche hat. Too startled to give her the “look,” Cuddles managed to murmur: “You can’t be my Gibson girl without a brim.”
“This style affords greater warmth,” she said, mimicking the fashion boilerplate that had so often passed between their desks. “And greater peripheral vision,” she added, as severely as she could.
“How’d you find me?”
“You may not have noticed, but you’re not cutting too wide a swath these days. After Takeshi told me you’d already drunk and run, BRYant 4300 sounded like the number to ring.” Beatrice, at the Palace box office, had confirmed Cuddles’ presence in one of the two seats she always kept for him in row G, center right.
“Why’d you bother with the edit meeting at all?” asked Becky, taking off her coat to sit down beside him.
“I’ve been asking myself the very same thing,” answered Cuddles.
“You’re tight.”
“You’re right.”
“Shaddup already,” said a voice from row H. The play-on music for Miss Patricola had already announced the second half, and the popular violin-playing songstress was entering to strong applause from regulars wondering whether she would begin her return to the Palace with “Me No Speaka Good English” or “Lovin’ Sam (The Sheik of Alabam’).”
“Listen to me,” Becky whispered to Cuddles. “You’ve got one last—”
He pointed in the direction of Miss Patricola’s violin, whose E string had begun wailing toward a first comic crescendo. “I’m seeing a distinguished afterlife for Kitty Sark,” he said to Becky. “As top-of-the-line catgut. Worthy of a Stradivarius. Delighting the masses and the longhairs both. It’ll be a far better world than the one he’s known with me.”
Becky shook her head, trying to figure out why she even bothered. “At least I didn’t bring Case with me,” she declared, realizing that Cuddles’ catgut fantasy would have further strained the copy-editor’s nerves. What poor creatures laid off from the circus for the winter, she now wondered, had done the opening animal act here this afternoon? She looked down at her program: oh, Fink’s Mules. She’d seen them once, years ago, with her father and mother, in Buffalo. An act benign enough for even Case, though not for the poor colored sap who had to get kicked by the supposedly high-IQ livestock.
Miss Patricola surrendered the stage to two aging precursors of Gallagher and Shean.
—I said goodbye to the train and jumped on my girl,
one informed the other, prompting Cuddles to mutter, “Jesus, this routine has hair on it.”
Becky hissed: “Exactly what are you accomplishing here?”
“I was—more or less—waiting for Dr. Julian Siegel, official dentist to the National Vaudeville Association. But then you put your attractive backside into the seat I’d saved for him.”
“Oh, really?” asked Becky. “When was he ‘more or less’ supposed to meet you?”
“Anytime this month. He’s been pitching himself as a subject. Maybe Fine could write the piece, what do you think? ‘This Guy’s Act Is Like Pullin’ Teeth!’ ”
“Tell me, are you going to put this story on Harris’s desk before or after he fires you?”
Cuddles hesitated a moment before responding. “After, I think. It’ll make him miss me.”
Becky closed her eyes, trying to decide how to stanch the flow of quips and get him to concentrate. It was time to reach for the strongest tourniquet she had.
“Aloysius?” she asked.
Cuddles’ given name had ages ago been replaced with this backformation from an adjective offered, at a supper party, by Mrs. Theodore Dreiser to her husband: “Mr. Houlihan seems such a cuddly man.” Months, sometimes years, now passed between utterances of “Aloysius,” but Becky had waited a moment too long to shock Cuddles with the sound of his real moniker. The wheezing comic duo were gone; the houselights were down; and the afternoon’s main attraction had stepped, all alone, into the next-to-closing spotlight.
“Soft,” said Cuddles. “She speaks.”
It was the great Nazimova. She had been playing the theatre, off and on, for almost as long as Taylor Holmes, inserting a cash-filled week at the Palace into her more stately schedule of Strindberg and Ibsen. With the first syllables from her throat, she reclaimed the house, stunning everyone from stagehands to Fink’s most ornery mule into rapt silence. Her offering today was “India,” a twenty-five-minute playlet in which she became a purple-saried young matron of the subcontinent, angrily mourning the baby trampled to death during a parade the local rajah had scared up for some visiting English prince. Assisted by two actors who might as well have been props, Nazimova proceeded, in less than half an hour, to make moving pictures seem a Coney Island contrivance, and their recent voice an unsynchronized joke. By the time she was through, everyone in the audience wanted to don a bedsheet and spin cotton with Gandhi, or just go out and pop the snoot of the first limey they found crossing Forty-seventh Street.
Cuddles was actually wiping a tear when the lights came up. “You know,” he said, sniffling, “you could have brought Case. She really didn’t blame the elephant.”
The Watson Sisters, Kitty and Fanny, had the thankless task of following Nazimova and closing the show. Midway through the girls’ duet, Cuddles leaned over to Becky and asked: “How about a late, late lunch at Manking? The boys looked like they were getting ready to do something special with a yak when I dropped in this morning.”
“No,” she replied. “You’re coming with me.” The moment the curtain dropped, she began propelling him, by his elbow, up the aisle. She was grateful for the help provided by the orchestra’s peppy recessional march, a surviving feature of the Palace’s shaky but still-in-place policy of only two shows a day. At almost any other vaude house, Fink’s Mules would already be back on stage.
Becky hustled Cuddles past the lobby’s electric piano and out the door, into air that over the weekend had gone from frigid to merely brisk. “Get that cab,” she commanded.
“What for?”
“It’ll be the most legitimate item on your expense sheet this month,” she promised, pulling him into the backseat and directing the driver to Broadway and Sixty-fifth.
Alarmed by the apparent specificity of her plan, Cuddles started to squirm. He looked out the taxi’s
rear window and muttered: “I’d thought I might go and find Dr. Siegel, the molar jockey. His office is the other way.” The cab was already clattering toward its destination, and Becky remained resolutely silent until it stopped, at her order, in front of the Macfadden Building.
Cuddles looked up and made a grim deduction. “You made an appointment for me in Personnel.”
No serious editor wanted to work here. In the world of print, Bernarr Macfadden, the frizzily pompadoured czar of Macfadden Publications—crazy with crusading belief in exercise, eugenics, free love, and cole slaw; just as ululant against booze, tobacco, and censorship—made Joe Harris look more buttoned-up than Coolidge. But Becky said nothing as she maneuvered Cuddles through the lobby and into an elevator car.
He pointed to the white-gloved operator and feigned calm: “So where’s the indoor aviator taking us?”
The car rose to the floor for Physical Culture, at which two muscle-men got off and three got on. It continued upward past True Romances, the magazine at which Becky sometimes feared she would wind up, should Joe Harris lose his war with Jimmy Gordon. Finally, the elevator stopped at the floor for the New York Evening Graphic. Becky tugged Cuddles forward.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph Smith,” he whispered. “The Ninth Circle itself.”
For the past four years the Graphic had been Macfadden’s tabloid orgy of tub-thumping and titillation. Electric fans blew a sickly sweet smell toward Cuddles and Becky as they advanced, like Hansel and Gretel, onto the floor where it was produced. The Graphic had not entirely recovered from its experiment with perfumed ink, and even now persisted in publishing itself each night on pink newsprint. At the far end of the newsroom—a term even the most loyal employee here used only loosely—Cuddles could recognize Emile Gauvreau, the respectable, constantly agonized managing editor Macfadden had hired to run the rag. Limping back and forth between two desks, tugging on his black forelock, Gauvreau was trying to decide which story to lead with tonight. Would the Graphic’s distinctive vertiginous headline, each letter a skinny skyscraper unto itself, go to a missing Smith College co-ed or to the sixty-year-old Episcopal rector with marriage on his mind?
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