The Magnificent Esme Wells

by Adrienne Sharp

  But somehow all this didn’t seem to add up.

  First, I could see my father wasn’t in any hurry to go in and start performing, and performers were usually backstage long before the audience began to arrive. He wasn’t moving, standing at the edge of the sidewalk with the other men. They were talking, tersely, a tight bunch. Then one of the men lifted his head to survey the crowd and I could see the visage beneath the brim of his fedora. Broken nose. Thick jowls. I recognized him at once. Mickey Cohen. The boxer. The Jew Boy. The man I’d seen at the shul and at the track.

  I ducked behind the thin trunk of an impossibly tall palm tree waving feebly in the dark sky. It looked like Mr. Cohen was giving my father instructions, my father nodding seriously. I watched Cohen nod to another group of men at the right of the porch and then he turned his gaze to the other side of the house and nodded again. I turned my head to look, too, but I saw nothing, only more men in suits and hats. I looked back to Mickey Cohen, but apparently he had finished taking his measure of the crowd, for he jerked his head in the direction of the doors and the group of men that included my father went inside. I should say they strolled inside. Maybe even swaggered. On tiptoe now, I saw the group split up in the vestibule, some of them walking to the right side of the auditorium, some of them going left.

  I knew better than to try to follow them in, though I wanted to. Instead, I edged closer to the crowd by the front porch. The amplified noise from within made itself felt all the way out here, where that electrified hum met the hum of this one, men talking, shifting, the backs of their suits wrinkled, their shoes not nearly as clean as my father’s. Even emerging from a garage where his clothes hung on a wire, my father looked good. A wallet lay on the grass—no, a little book. I looked around, then picked it up. On the front page I stared at words I didn’t recognize, not unusual for me, but still, the formations looked different:

  Amerikadeutscher Volfsbund

  Bundesleitung

  Ortsgruppe: Los Angeles

  Mitgliedskarte Nr.: 18952

  Name: Charles J. Young

  Wohnort: Alhambra, Cal.

  Strasse: 29 North Vega Street

  Geb. Am.: 16. May 1887

  And beneath all that was a signature, Hermann Schwinn, with a long, elaborately drawn H and S.

  A mystery. A puzzle. A code?

  I put the little book in my pocket and stepped quietly around the side of the porch. None of the men or women looked my way. After all, I was a slip of a girl, a pickpocket, an urchin, a soundstage rat, used to gliding unnoticed around the backlot and the grandstand. As I passed the tables, I swiped some papers off one of them and when I reached the side of the building, I leaned against it for a moment to look at my cache.

  The first paper was a black-and-white flyer with a picture of a Jewish star, a hook-nosed man and a pretty lady, a snake wrapping its way around her and through the double o’s of the word “Hollywood.” I recognized that word from the big sign on Mount Lee. I dropped the flyer to the ground, bitten. Next, a small slip of paper, no, a sticker, black and white, meant for a jacket lapel with a drawing of a hideous furry-legged spider and the head of a man with a grotesque nose, beady eyes, and rubbery lips. The head looked something like Louis B. Mayer or Louis B. Mayer’s worst nightmare of himself. Spiders. Snakes. Foreigners.

  I let go of the last paper, but once it was at my feet, I couldn’t keep from glancing down. The words shrieked red and black, half covering a fat man in a suit and a yarmulke leaning forward to shovel food into his open mouth. Greedy. Wanting everything. What kind of show was this going to be? Whatever this was, it was about to begin.

  I made myself walk forward, shuffling along the side of the building, the papers I’d dropped sticking to my mother’s sandals, which were already too big for me, but I had been wearing them, as I sometimes did all her clothes, not thinking I’d be leaving the house, that I would possibly find myself anywhere else, especially not here. My hands gripped at the ivy that climbed the building’s walls, my feet shifting on the uneven, uncultivated surface beneath me. Obviously, people weren’t meant to walk here, even people who weren’t wearing shoes too big for them.

  I could tell I was getting closer to my goal by the noise reverberating through the stucco. I must be approaching the hall and surely I would find my father in there. He would be angry with me, but he could never stay angry with me for long. Unlike my mother with her weeks-long grudges. He would clear off the chair next to him and put me in it, and then when we drove home together in the dark, my father would explain everything to me. By this time in my internal scenario, I had reached a French door.

  I was now looking into the large auditorium I had first glimpsed from the sidewalk. From this vantage point I could see a stage—so there was going to be a show!—which had been festooned with red-and-black colored banners, above which a flag of the United States flew. Against a podium leaned a framed photograph of Adolf Hitler, whom I recognized from the newsreels before the picture shows at the National. A winged beast cast in plaster perched on a platform by the podium, its beak turned, it seemed, right toward me, a swastika gripped in its claws. And that was not all.

  In addition to the fearsome display of emblems, twenty men in brown shirts and ties stood on the floor before the stage in military formation, their right arms hanging by their sides, their left arms bent, hands at their belt buckles. Above and behind them stood three more men in brown shirts, each holding a different flag, the flag in the middle America’s flag, the other two, ones I didn’t recognize. Though I had no way of knowing this then, I had followed my father to a Nazi Bund rally.

  There was something terrifying to me about the militaristic décor of the stage, and I frantically scanned the crowded audience for my father. But there were so many men dressed like him, so many hats and suits, he was indistinguishable. The arms of these many men were moving like a wave, they were clapping, the show was about to begin.

  And then suddenly a woman was by my side asking if I was lost. She had bent down, her face to mine, to better determine my expression. “Are you here with your daddy, honey?” she asked.

  “My father’s somewhere,” I said.

  Thank God for my grandfather’s blond hair, my grandfather’s blue eyes, my sundress, my mother’s espadrille sandals, the cloth peony, also hers, pinned in my hair. The woman took me for a pretty little Aryan girl, separated from my father by the crowd, my father, the Nazi sympathizer, come to the Nazi rally at the Deutsches Haus to shout his Heil Hitlers. For all I knew that was why he was here.

  If the woman asked me my father’s name, I would simply produce the little identity book I was clutching and tell her my father dropped it. Charles J. Young, my absentminded father. Lost his daughter and his book.

  “Well, come sit with me, sweetheart. He’ll find you. I’m sure he’s looking.”

  Ha.

  And she took me by the hand through the French doors and sat me by her in one of the front rows of the auditorium, gave me a little candy from her purse. It was a clear crystal candy that looked like a big diamond, and I, who never turned down a bite of food, even from a stranger, because who knew when I’d next be offered something to eat, unwrapped the crisp cellophane while she twisted her head to scan the crowd as if she had any idea who my father was or what he looked like. Maybe she was simply looking for a man who looked panicked, which my father, who had no idea I was here, of course, would not likely be. I sucked on my sweet, strangely comforted now that I had a chair and a guardian to protect me, even if she spoke her words with a German accent. I was always searching for ladies to look after me in those days. And I wasn’t surprised at all when she pulled a comb from her purse and attempted to use it on my hair, saying, “You want to look your best for Herr Schwinn.” She adjusted my pink peony hair ornament, while I smoothed my dress. I knew I was pretty, but unkempt, the first an asset, the second not as much.

  A man in a uniform, a brown jacket with a strap across it and a black armband and a
cap on his head as if he were some kind of military officer, approached the podium to the sounds of loud recorded music. He had a thin face, a thin mustache above his thin, pursed lips, and as he approached he was introduced over a loudspeaker. “Our Gau West leader, Herr Hermann Schwinn!” So this was the man I had to look my best for. Also the man who had signed the little book in my pocket.

  The auditorium erupted in even greater applause, and it wasn’t until the crowd had stopped clapping that I could make out what Herr Schwinn was saying. An announcement. Somebody important was coming to Los Angeles, Duke Carl Eduard of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, to the picnic grounds of Hindenburg Park in La Crescenta, where there would be a big rally to raise funds for the Fatherland! The audience cheered. Herr Schwinn raised his hands importantly and then lowered them to quiet the crowd. A magician. He took some papers from his pocket. He was giving a speech. So this was not a show, but a lecture. No singers, no dancers, no Robert Taylor or Norma Shearer. My father was here for a lecture? He might as well be painting houses.

  It took me a while, but slowly I began to understand what Herr Schwinn was saying. It had something to do with all those pamphlets on the tables. The official was giving a speech about Hollywood. About Jews. And I shrank down in my seat as if I’d been found out. The German woman smiled at me, thinking me a bored, squirming child.

  “The Jews own all the newspapers. We know their names. Their names are not a mystery. Annenberg. Newman. Meyer. Stein. And the Jews not only own the newspapers, they also control the radio and the telegraph. We know their names, too. Paley. Sarnoff. Jews! All of them Jews. And the Jews monopolize all the movies and the theaters. Ninety-seven percent ownership! Mayer. Cohn. Lasky. Warner. Laemmle. Loeb. Goldwyn. Jewish producers! Jewish picture directors! Jewish actors! The film industry employs thousands of Jews and absorbs its share—and more—of Jewish refugees. How is a star born? Ask the Hollywood Jew who owns one!” Herr Schwinn paused here, reluctantly, to allow for the applause.

  I knew what he said was true, at least about the thousands of Jewish refugees. The offices of the Writers Building and the Music Department were chockablock, my mother had told me, with all the Jews fleeing Hitler’s Germany, their serious novels and important play scripts and brilliant sheet music all packed up in a hurry in their suitcases and floated across the Atlantic until they washed up here onto these desks, where the Jews sprang open the suitcase locks and set to work translating their sentences from German to English, and changing our motion pictures from nothing much into a lot of something. From drivel to masterpieces. From silents to talkies, the Jews giving all the actors something interesting to say.

  But the first things the Jews created in the new world were new names for themselves. Cover stories. Everybody at the studios, whether they were composers, directors, or writers, got rid of their clunky eastern European names tout de suite. And the actors, especially the actors, changed their names immediately upon arrival at the studios. First thing they did, even before the requisite glamour head shot. Kiesler, Levy, Garfinkle, Hesselberg, Loewenstein. Not anymore. Goldenberg became Lamarr, the rest of them Goddard, Garfield, Douglas, Lorre, and Robinson. Did Herr Schwinn know this, too? After all, this was Los Angeles, so who knew what was real and what was fake? Even my mother had changed her name, from Dorothy Wolfkowitz to Dina Wells. No one was supposed to know who we really were, what we really were. Because of this, perhaps. Because of Americans like Herr Schwinn.

  Herr Schwinn raised his hands and lowered them again. “Hollywood is the modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah, where international Jewry controls vice, dope, gambling. A Jew is not an American. He is not a white man. He is a foreigner! He is a Jew, a peculiar, special creature of his own who stands out and apart. He is a parasite! Christian vigilantes arise! Boycott the movies!”

  And at this point he looked right at me and repeated, “Rise up against the parasite,” and then he gestured at me, waved me to come forward, to come to him, and the woman next to me said, “Go on, honey, he wants you up there,” and she pulled me to my feet, gave my back a little push, and I walked, mesmerized, toward Herr Schwinn, who smiled down at me and motioned to his brownshirts to help me up the stairs to the stage. The brownshirts smiled at me, proudly, affectionately, and lifted me up to Herr Schwinn, who took me protectively in his arms and brought me around the front of his swastika-bedecked podium. “Hollywood is dominated by aliens who wreck bodies and souls in a mad lust for destructive power over Gentiles. This,” he said, his hands on my shoulders, “this is who we must protect, this child, our children, our kleine kinder, blood ripe for the dark parasite. The Jew is a rat. And we must cleanse this city of him!”

  I spotted my father then, just for a second, standing up, looking at me, his mouth open at the sight of Schwinn’s kleine kinder, but then he was lost to me as the audience stood, too, one hysterical body emitting its applause, the woman who had found me applauding, too, nodding and smiling at me, her little adopted Aryan, so carried away was she and the rest of them by the words of Herr Schwinn. I wish I could say I wasn’t thrilled by the applause, by the standing ovation, by all those adults cheering for me, looking at me, but I was. I was thrilled, supremely thrilled, and I bowed my head modestly even though I didn’t feel the least bit modest, even though I was a shameless little fraud. I felt fervently alive. And I understood that this fever was what my mother so doggedly sought, the spark that lit it the blind love offered up by an audience, any audience.

  And now having made the acquaintance of that red-hot flicker, I would from that moment on begin to seek it myself. What other explanation could there be for my having ended up on a Las Vegas stage strutting beads, sequins, netting, and feathers? Is there any more obvious a plea, Look at me? It was only years later that I wondered what my father thought when he saw me, implausibly, impossibly, up there on that stage of the Deutsches Haus, wearing my mother’s clothing, which had to look ridiculous on me, smiling at the misguided adulation of my audience.

  But my reign as perfect Aryan child did not last long. Because even as those hundreds of people stood and screamed for me, I saw a group of men peel themselves from the pack hemmed in by chairs and rush at the stage, fists raised, knuckles gleaming ferociously, metallic and alien, ruining my moment, stealing my moment from me, and one of those men was my father.

  But I lost sight of him as quickly as I’d found him again as other men ran in from the back of the hall, where they too had been waiting for Mickey Cohen’s signal, and still more entered from the doors at either side of the auditorium, baseball bats and iron pipes in their hands, which they raised as soon as they crossed the threshold and began brandishing over their heads like batons. Or like Nazi thugs.

  All these men, who had seemed to me to look no different at all from the men in the audience, began to swing their bats and pipes at the brownshirts lined up so impeccably before the proscenium. Down went the brownshirts like bowling pins. Herr Schwinn and I were hustled hurriedly off the stage by one of his flag men, while the other two used their flags to poke and flail at the backs of the intruders. To no avail. The intruders simply climbed up onto the stage and whaled away at the brownshirts, beating at them with their bats and pipes and wrenching their puny flagpoles from them. One man’s teeth flew out of his mouth before he spun and fell to the stage floor, a spray of blood following his teeth.

  It was then my father climbed onto the stage, calling my name, “Esme! Esme!” brass knuckles on his right hand, right hand red with blood. He looked panicked—and exhilarated. I called to him, which was like yelling into a storm. Within the circle of his men, Herr Schwinn tucked me under his arm. While I watched from my vantage point, I saw the men kicking and punching Herr Schwinn’s men until their knees bent the wrong way and as they toppled, they were kicked and rolled off the end of the stage onto the prone bodies of their brothers. Despite their military attire, Herr Schwinn’s men didn’t really seem to know how to fight. My father, I could see, was not very good at fighting, either, but his eye
s were locked on me now as he pushed, kicked, and shoved his way across the stage toward me in the stage wing.

  Mickey Cohen, the ex-boxer, standing in the center aisle down in the auditorium, knew exactly how to fight, as did his minions. Even though Cohen was wearing a suit, it seemed not to constrain him in the slightest. His burly arms swung about so quickly they seemed to send his fists in eight cartoon-blurred directions at once and wherever his fists went, men fell. He seemed not even to move: he stood like a boulder, while men crashed against him and bounced off him into the folding chairs all around, which collapsed and splintered, the Germanic orderliness of the auditorium set all askew.

  My father had told me once that Mickey Cohen had been put in a jail cell with someone who hated Jews; Cohen had beaten him senseless, then sat there calmly reading a newspaper until the guard came by. That guard should see him now. Some of the brownshirts down on the ground by the stage had rallied, scrambled to help each other up, a few of them trying to run up the aisle to the front doors but running into Mickey Cohen instead, as if they were blind or The Jew Boy was invisible, others of them pushing futilely at the men with the bats and bars.

  The audience, including my surrogate mother, screaming all this time, now tried to flee along the side aisles in a great stampede after the retreating pack of brownshirts, some bulldozing their way directly through the chairs, devising an impromptu emergency exit route right up through the scattered rows. I saw one man climb onto a chair and begin kicking at everybody who ran by him, and then others began to hoist the wooden chairs up in the air and crack them over the heads of anybody they could reach. A pair of eyeglasses flew my way. A hat. A man’s shoe. I heard myself whimper. A man big as a refrigerator crashed through the line of seats right by the stage’s proscenium.