After his success cutting grooves at Sun Studio, Elvis began making movies. His first film was Love Me Tender in 1956, followed by Loving You and Jailhouse Rock. Elvis enjoyed seeing his own movies, but not in public theaters, where he was always mobbed by fans. So he would come to private showings at a mini movie theater, a “screening room,” built by my grandfather M.A. and attached to his house on Cherry Road. It was there that I met Elvis myself, in 1960. The movie was G.I. Blues, one of the films Elvis made while serving in the armed forces.
(photo credit 17.3)
I remember Elvis walking in with two beautiful young women, one on each arm, and installing himself and his girlfriends on the couch in front. Apparently shy, Elvis hardly said a word for two hours. I was only eleven or twelve years old and not acquainted with the music of Elvis Presley, but I had begun to get wind of the excitement and mystery of the opposite sex, and one guy with two girls made an enormous impression on me.
KD Dance
M.A.’s screening room was a family treasure. Although my grandfather built it in the 1940s to preview new films, and it was indeed used for that purpose, the screening room also became the preferred venue for parties, small musical events, and illicit romantic liaisons. About the size of a large living room, it had a little glass case with chocolate mints and other candies, M.A.’s many bridge trophies on a shelf, and photographs of M.A. with Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow, Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney, and Gary Cooper. For seating, there were twenty plush seats in the back and a small couch in front. The screening room had its own bar, stocked with bourbon, absinthe, and gin; a little refrigerator; and a bathroom with a shower and clean towels. M.A.’s maid Hattie Mae, who cleaned the place, died with a thousand secrets.
The screening room was also the site of my mother’s high-adrenaline dancing lessons. These she taught twice a week, in the afternoons; she would have taught more, except that her students had no more spare time or energy. Under Mother’s tutelage, an entire generation of Memphis teenagers in the fifties and sixties learned the Viennese waltz, the fox trot, the cha-cha, the jitterbug, and various modern dances. The space wasn’t really big enough, but the demand was large, and the young people were willing to bump into each other as they thrashed about in close quarters. When I was thirteen or fourteen, I attended the dance classes myself, and I have vivid memories of my mother flying about like a beautiful bird—barefoot, gorgeous, and light, yet in complete command. I felt proud, even though I myself was awkward on the dance floor. Mother had far more stamina than any of her students. She could swing, twirl, and shake for three hours or more with an almost demonic energy. In a given session, she would use up a half-dozen male partners, strapping young men who were reduced to panting and slumping in chairs. Mother had an extraordinary metabolism. She burned up a colossal number of calories during the day, then ate all through the night. She slept very little. She once went to a sleep clinic in Maryland to discover the reason for her insomnia. Upon entering the clinic, she announced to the doctors that she slept only three hours per night. The doctors replied that she must be mistaken; even insomniacs slept more than three hours per night. They wired her up with electrodes. After a few days, the MDs told her that yep, she was right, she slept only three hours a night. For the rest of each night, she would pace around the house, make to-do lists for the next day, and eat ravenously to power her high rate of biochemical reactions.
In the late 1950s, Mother began taking classes and performing at KD Dance Studio, an offshoot of the all-black Katherine Dunham Dance Company, which had played Memphis in the mid-1940s. Katherine Dunham was a sultry and immensely talented black choreographer from Chicago. Drawing on her anthropological visits to Haiti, Cuba, and other islands, she combined American jazz and modern dance with Caribbean dance to create performances with titles like Tropics and le Jazz Hot: From Haiti to Harlem. KD wanted to do in dance what Elvis and Tom Jones had done in music: imitate the black artists. Although KD was more a workshop than a professional company, its members had to audition for admission and were all excellent dancers.
As in everything Mother put her mind to, she became obsessed with learning Katherine Dunham’s new steps. But something about these rhythms eluded her. She would come home from KD, sullen and jittery, and lock herself in her bedroom. Soon, we heard strange music and unusual thumping sounds coming through her door. At dinner, she barked at Blanche in the kitchen and harassed my father about his various shortcomings. One evening, she abruptly leaped from the table, put on an absurd headdress of feathers, and began flying about the kitchen. As the music poured out of her record player, she explained that Katherine Dunham wore such outfits, and perhaps they could “put her body in the groove.” My mother had mastered dance steps from all over the world, she inhaled dance steps, and she was determined not to let Miss Dunham defeat her.
The artistic director of KD Dance Studio was an overweight chain smoker named Phil. Phil had to suffer through Mother’s anxieties. He had blown into Memphis one day from Chicago, borrowed money, and leased space in a warehouse on Felix Street with high ceilings and a picture window overlooking the rail yards. At first he was worried about Memphis. He’d heard that people in the South didn’t read anything beyond comic books and carried shotguns in their pickups. But they could sing and dance. After sitting through a hundred auditions, he accepted fifteen dancers into the studio.
Unlike Lennie, Mother cared a great deal about what people thought of her. Consequently, she was mortified when she had to stumble over a new Dunhamesque step in front of the other dancers. She laughed nervously. She frowned. She jittered her legs. She tossed off her wristwatch and leg warmers, thinking they might be throwing her body out of balance. Phil would shout over to Ursula the pianist to back it up, and, while the other dancers waited, he would go over and over the step with my mother. “I’m sorry, y’all,” she’d whisper, unable to look at her colleagues. “I’ll kill myself if I don’t get this.”
“You can’t do that, Princess Jeannie,” said Phil. “I don’t have insurance.”
Even though exhausted from lack of sleep, Mother refused to stop during breaks and practiced alone in a corner while everyone else rested and drank sodas. As each performance loomed on the horizon, she became more and more jagged.
When she began hyperventilating and fainted in the middle of a rehearsal, Phil threw up his hands and called my father. “I am only a dance teacher, you understand.” Dad raced over from his office. Meanwhile, Mother revived, staggered to her feet, and asked to continue with the rehearsal. “Absolutely not,” said Phil. They argued. Then Mother realized that she was causing a scene, and she fled to the dressing room. “I’m not paid enough to coddle these people fulla stuffin,” said Ursula, slamming down the keyboard lid. At which point my father arrived. After conferring with Phil in hushed tones, he approached the closed door of the dressing room and began talking sweetly to Mother, as he had in their courtship.
My mother and father had been married a dozen years. By this time, both of them knew they were grossly mismatched as a couple. They were both well-educated Jewish southerners from good families, but beyond that there were few points of contact. For the next thirty-five years, until my mother’s death, through storms of depression and a suicide attempt, solo sailing trips by my father to escape from his life, neither asked the other for a divorce. My mother couldn’t bear the shame, and my father had long ago learned how to live in the absence of air.
“Come out, honey,” my father entreated. “I’m going to take you home.”
“Why are you here, Dick? I’m in the middle of a dance rehearsal.”
“Honey, you’ve gotten yourself riled up the way you do.”
Three days later, at the performance, my mother danced flawlessly. Many of the family members were there, lured to this dubious precinct of Memphis by the promise of a wet bar at intermission. Jeanne has a gift, said Lennie. She looked at my father, understanding everything. Yes she does, said Dad. She has a gift.
Stone Quarry
M.A.’s screening room is long gone. As is M.A. himself, felled in late 1958 at age sixty-seven while attending a bridge tournament in Detroit. But that was only his physical shell. According to Nate, M.A.’s phasma still walks his old house, poking around in disheveled closets, whispering to Aunt Lila as she dozes in her bedroom upstairs. M.A.’s phasma, in fact, could easily have gone back in time and haunted Papa Joe, M.A.’s father and my great-grandfather. Fathers are doomed to haunt sons, who are doomed to haunt their sons, but the phasma can do all the haunting for everyone.
Papa Joe was the first Lightman in America. From immigration records, we know that he was born in a little town near Budapest, in Hungary, arrived in Boston in 1881 at the age of sixteen, and soon moved to Nashville, where there was a large Jewish community and a new synagogue called the Vine Street Temple. Other aspects of his life are shrouded in mystery. In particular, no one knows with any certainty why Joseph Lightman came to America in the first place. A great-aunt once said that he came to the United States to flee conscription in the Austro-Hungarian army. Another ancient relative tells the story that Joseph Lightman entered the New World by accident. According to this version of history, he was working as a mess boy on a trade ship that plied the waters of the Adriatic Sea. The captain of the ship had a lady friend in Boston and, on one of his commercial voyages to Foggia, simply kept going around the coast of Sicily, west through the Strait of Gibraltar, across the Atlantic, and on to America, bribing the crew with liquor and stolen boots.
There are reliable accounts that Joseph dreaded machines of all kinds and refused to ride the electric trolleys in Nashville, preferring to go from A to B in a horse-drawn carriage. Given his phobia, no one knows how he first got from Boston to Nashville. Or why. There were certainly Jewish populations in Boston and New York. But if Joseph Lightman had not gone to Nashville, then he would not have met Fannie Neuworth. And if Joseph had not met Fannie Neuworth, then M.A. would never have been born. It stands to reason, therefore, that if M.A.’s phasma indeed went backward in time to visit Joseph, its first order of business would have been to make sure that its creator was created. But all of this is speculation.
The only member of the family who remembers Papa Joe firsthand is my ninety-year-old father, still living in his house next to M.A.’s old place on Cherry. “He was the first,” says my father, now almost deaf, unable to move about without his walker, and often unable to attend family gatherings. Although suffering from these and other infirmities, Dad never complains, and until a few years ago he regularly embarked on arduous sailing trips and exchanged appreciative glances with young women. He still has a full head of hair, silky and white. These days, his principal occupation consists of reading crime novels in his mechanized chair in the den or in the upholstered wingback chair in his bedroom. There he sits now, while I lean forward in the corner chair my mother used to inhabit. The room smells of medicines and talcum powder. Despite his age, Dad has the memory of an elephant. Name any film made from 1940 to 1985, the year he retired, and he can tell you the director, producers, and major actors. “Grandfather came from some little town near Budapest,” says Dad. “After settling in Nashville, he started selling fruits and confectionary. Then he opened a saloon. It was an odd business for a man who never took a drink.”
Uneducated but on fire to make good, Joseph managed to get himself certified as a notary public and then elected as a magistrate of the Nashville courthouse. People called him Squire. According to family stories, women were so enamored of his good looks and foreign mystique that they stood near the courthouse, under their parasols, hoping he might glance at them and tip his hat. By this time, Papa Joe had changed his allegiance from Franz Joseph of Austria to Grover Cleveland of the United States of America. But, my father recalls, he still spoke with a guttural German accent, playing musical counterpoint to the soft drawl of the South.
“He went into stone contracting around 1897,” says my father. He pauses and adjusts his hearing aid, which has begun to screech. “A few years earlier, he’d married Grandmother, who was also from Hungary. The family secret was that they slept in separate bedrooms. Hers was on the first floor, where it was cool, and his was upstairs, facing the backyard. But they had a great affection for each other. And they did manage to produce two children—my father, of course, and Aunt Regina, whom everyone called Mamele. Mamele is where Lennie got her wild streak. Mamele went into Papa Joe’s old saloon sometime during the war, that would have been World War I, and drank half a dozen soldiers under the table. She was in her early twenties at the time.”
With some money from his saloon and a sizable loan, Joseph bought a stone quarry and began excavating fieldstone, granite, sandstone, and marble. “Grandfather always had stone dust on his clothes. When he came over for dinner, he would first stand on the porch and pound his jacket and pants, sending clouds of dust into the air. Then he would begin sneezing. His sneezes sounded like a dog barking. Eventually, he would come into the house and sit at the table with an embarrassed look on his face.”
(photo credit 19.1)
In 1905, Joseph made a trip to Memphis by train, a journey he dreaded, but he wanted to take the whole family to see the sights. Memphis shocked him. At that time, it had nearly the highest crime rate in the country—murders, drugs, gambling, prostitution. The murder rate was seven times the national average. “Street walkers as thick as wasps in the summer,” wrote one newspaper. Joseph checked into a Downtown hotel with his family and didn’t realize the establishment was a brothel until two days later, when the madam got him alone in the lobby and put her hands on his crotch. An hour later, the family was out on the street with their suitcases, walking from one hotel to the next looking for a decent place to stay, Fannie begging to go back to Nashville, Mamele wailing nonstop, M.A. a strapping young man of fourteen and spellbound by the Negro women leaning out of second-floor windows in their underwear and smoking cigarettes. At one point, M.A. ventured off on his own, and the family had to go searching for him down narrow streets of grimy frame houses sitting back on barren lots, rows of wooden balconies from which they could hear people laughing and cursing, vacant lots full of trash and scrap metal and broken whiskey bottles, a saloon on every corner. This was the decaying town that Faulkner would write about a few years later. Joseph was robbed the next day, and he departed immediately thereafter, swearing never to come back. And he didn’t. It wasn’t until after Joseph died, in 1928, that M.A. moved to Memphis.
Back in Nashville, Joseph made a name for himself in the construction business. According to his obituary, Joseph Lightman built some of the landmark edifices of Nashville, including the Hillsboro Theater, the post office, and the Young Men’s Hebrew Association, where he later served as president. Nashville relatives used to say that Joseph’s own house on West End Avenue was a showplace, a large brownstone with graceful arches in front and a stunning roof line.
I open the curtains to let some light into the room. Looking out the window, I can see M.A.’s house in the distance.
“Grandfather felt inferior because of his lack of education. Whenever he thought somebody was trying to put something over on him, he said this thing in Yiddish: Du kannst nicht auf meinem rucken pishen … I can’t remember the rest. It meant something like ‘Don’t pee on my back and tell me it’s rain.’ ” My father begins laughing, which sends him into a coughing fit. He reaches for one of the dozen medicine bottles on his nightstand, and I offer him my glass of water. Then he smiles at me, something he never did when I was a child.
“Your glass or mine?” he asks. “If I wake up tomorrow with the flu, then I was drinking out of your glass. If you wake up in the morning feeling like you’re ninety years old, you were drinking out of mine.” He takes two pills and sips from the glass, slowly and delicately as if tasting a fine wine.
“You’re looking good today,” I say.
“What
?” He can’t hear me.
“You’re looking good,” I write on his notepad.
“Thank you.” He continues: “Grandfather’s contracting business did OK until World War I. Then it turned bad.” The sudden shortage of manpower caused the price of labor to skyrocket. Evidently, Joseph was obliged to complete a number of projects negotiated under much cheaper costs, and he went bankrupt. He and his son, M.A., personally had to work in the quarries to pay off the debts. This was just about the time M.A. was trying to get started in the movie business.
I try to picture M.A. wearing work clothes and boots, struggling to push a wheelbarrow laden with stone. Was this humiliating penance a motivating force? Or the source of his strength? Or some other festering thing that later created the phasma?
(photo credit 19.2)
A photograph of Joseph Lightman from around 1924, his debts repaid, shows a baldheaded man with a mustache, dressed in a crisp white shirt, suit, and tie. His eyes possess a quiet dignity. “He was a kind man,” says my father. “He worked like the devil, but he was kind. He once gave me a BB gun because Dad had given Eddie a gun and Grandfather thought I should have one too.”
My father is tired. I help him into his bed, holding his shoulder and hand. Inexplicably, his hands have remained the hands of a young man, slender and smooth, while the rest of his body has wrinkled and sagged with ninety years of living. After arranging his covers, I kiss him on his forehead. In recent years, he has shown a sweetness that I never noticed before, and he asks about what his sons are doing. He has uttered more words to me today than I can ever remember. Bits of Papa Joe’s story Dad has told me before. I wonder how much I have just now filled in myself and how much he actually said. Has he really been talking? Or instead napping in his chair, as all of us do in this woolen summer heat? I am so accustomed to layering his silence, attempting to create a thickness from gossamer. For a few moments, I listen to his breathing as he sleeps, then walk out of his room.
Screening Room Page 7