There Should Have Been Castles

by Herman Raucher

  “Ben, I want to die.”

  “You kidding? You’re a star. You were doing steps out there—shtik? Is that the word?”

  “Yes.”

  “You were doing such shtik, I thought Magnuson was going to split a gut. Your friend, Monty, he wet his pants. I think he wet Mara-Jayne’s pants, too. When did you all decide to put such a twist on the number?”

  I started to cry. “I ruined it, didn’t I? I ruined Richie’s whole show.”

  “The hell. You saved it. There was no way you could have followed ‘Sing’ with ‘Georgia Brown’ done straight. ‘Sing’ was so precise, so perfect, so all-out that, by comparison, ‘Georgia Brown’ would have looked like you were loafing. It was inspired.”

  “And no one’s angry?”

  “Bewildered, maybe. Stupefied. But not angry. Only problem is, can you do it that way again?”

  “I don’t even know what I did!”

  “That’s what I was afraid of. Oh well, it’ll come to you.”

  Back at the apartment, I hit the bed and collapsed, looking up at Ben, I’m sure, like a mortally wounded doll. He began to undress me very nicely. “Ben, what’s going to happen?”

  “Well, if millions of people were watching like they were supposed to, I’d say you’ll be getting more offers than a hooker in a barracks.”

  “I mean about the baby?”

  “Oh yes, the baby. I’d forgotten.”

  “How can you not know? My gawd!”

  “Well, for one thing, if you’re pregnant it ain’t mine.”

  “You’re not going to try that!”

  “I only know you two weeks. And when I met you you were a virgin, unless you’ve got a hymen you can take out and put back depending on who you’re with at the time…”

  “So I can’t be pregnant. It’s too soon. Right? Right?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s immaculate. You can get a lot of funny things sitting on toilet seats.”

  “But why should I feel pregnant?”

  “The word, Miss Nineteenth Century, is guilt.”

  “Guilt?”

  “You went to bed with a man and got pregnant. Isn’t that the way it works?”

  “Wow. So fast?”

  “Fastest pregnancy on record. Baby’s probably due in twenty minutes. I’d better get some clean sheets and boil some water. Hey—I’ve got a great name for the kid.”

  “What?”

  “Speedy Gonzales. Speedy Gonzales Burglemeister.”

  “Whatever happened to Troppenheimer?”

  “It was so long ago, who remembers?”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Ben

  1952

  After her big hit on The Joey Magnuson Show, Ginnie slept a lifetime. I peeked in periodically to see if she was dead or was trying to hatch the mattress, having just come through a rather traumatic false pregnancy. She’d mumble and drop back into her coma but I knew that she was still alive because the little trays of food I left her before going to work were empty when I returned at night, often with a note, like: “Thank you, Mystery Chef, but where’s the Pepto Bismol?”

  I certainly did love Ginnie Maitland. She was so quick to pick up on me, on what I was thinking or was about to say, that I was convinced that she had occult powers. As to our lovemaking, it was so natural and easy and unembarrassed and funny that it could not be improved upon, though we continually tried because nobody is perfect.

  In the office, Pat Jarvas still came at me but each time with less ardor, her passion for me gradually dwindling, slowly and insidiously being displaced by an iciness that turned my fingertips blue. And I remember what Dorothy Parker had once written: “Scratch a lover and find a foe.” Not that Pat and I had ever been lovers, it’s just that we had the record for the fastest fuck in town and I guess she wanted another chance to improve upon her time.

  My life at 20th Century-Fox was horrific but I was able to deal with it because I knew that it would one day end. Sam Gaynor, of course, was insufferable but I managed to handle him by doing everything he asked of me without whimper or complaint. It drove the sonofabitch mad, and once, grabbing me by my lapels, he pressed me against the wall and threatened me with a form of death too indelicate to recount here. I liked that. It meant that I was passively resisting the shit out of him. I did decide, though, never to be alone with him because, if he was going to hit me, I wanted some witnesses around—for the law suit and the homicide charges.

  As for Alan Morse, I withstood him, too. Needless to say, I was no longer writing copy. I was just an office boy and, as such, wasn’t even allowed to attend screenings. Mickey, who saw and felt everything, verbalized his curiosity: why was I hanging on? I told him that I needed the money and that he shouldn’t worry because I had a master plan.

  My master plan was simple. I would break into television as a writer of original dramas. The plan was more easily formulated than facilitated, especially as my first half-hour script was bombing everywhere, returning to me with the accuracy of a boomerang and always with the same message tied to its foot: “Thank you for submitting ‘Come Into My Studio, Said the Sculptress to the Guy,’ but we find, at this time, that it doesn’t fit in with blah, blah, blah, etcetera and so forth and fuck you.”

  So I wrote another, about a man who had a camera that could take pictures of the future. I called it “See What Develops” and Ginnie typed it up neatly and we sent it out and back it came with the same cursed rejection attached to its shaft.

  A similar fate awaited “Dead As They Come,” Don’t Look Now,” and “Whisper to Me of Blood.” Of the latter script I asked Ginnie if it wouldn’t better be done as the book to a musical. She didn’t laugh, suggesting only that I stop trying to imitate others and start trying to discover myself, which I thought was very sound advice, if I was America—but since I was not—what the hell did she have in mind? She didn’t know but had hoped that I would—otherwise she’d never have said it. So we kissed and made love while the typewriter, glad for the recess, looked on without saying anything.

  Still, the gist of what she was trying to say stayed with me. The function of the artist is to be heard, and he cannot be heard, truly, if all he does is join the existing chorus. He must step out and solo and make his own noise. All that remained was for me to figure out just what kind of noise I wanted to make. It didn’t take long. My noise would be “Tony.”

  I got home before Ginnie that night. She was rehearsing another two numbers for another Joey Magnuson Show. The Pickering Trio had been such a hit that Noah Sobel quickly booked them for one more appearance that season, and Sobel was also talking about next season.

  When Ginnie did get home I pounced on her with my new idea. I had told her about Tony and the thought that his story might become the basis of my first really original play really hit home with her. I went to work immediately, setting it all down in the illegible hand that only Ginnie could pry free. I worked nights, of course, but I also worked days, squeezing out of my scullery-maid chores a few minutes here and a few minutes there just to make notes, to record thoughts as they occurred to me. The days flew by, the pages piled up. It would be a one-hour script geared to shows like Kraft, Studio One, Theatre 60, Philco; and it would be important in that it would be important to me, for I wanted Tony alive again. I wanted to make a noise that would be his as well as mine.

  I don’t think I slept five hours in five days, and Ginnie was fabulous. As tired as she was, she would type up my pages so that both of us could see what I had written. For the truth was that my longhand, performed so quickly because the mind was quicker than the hand, was so unruly that I could not read it back. But Ginnie could. It was typical of the thing that was happening between us. She could read my writing, and I knew before she did that her period was coming.

  That it did come came almost as a relief to both of us for, as much as we loved making love, there were other things upon which people can build a relationship. We simply had no idea what they might be. We had been
burning our candles at both ends as well as from the middle out, getting precious little sleep and both of us with so much to do. We had five days off.

  More weeks passed. A month. Two months. I kept writing and she kept typing. She also kept rehearsing. They were to be on the last Joey Magnuson Show of the season and Sobel wanted it to be the best of the season. So they rehearsed as though for the last show of their lives.

  The day arrived, a Saturday, and I went with Ginnie to the Studio. I had no idea what the new routines were. I had asked Ginnie but she wouldn’t tell me, saying only that she wanted it to be a surprise. They had gotten Lucas Harrison into it again because his arrangements were as vital to its all coming off well as was Richie’s choreography. And that’s all I knew.

  I watched the dress rehearsal. The first number was kind of soft-shoe, Ginnie and Florrie wearing black pussycat costumes while Richie was dressed as Fred Astaire. It looked silly but they danced as though they were royalty, all snooty and blue blood, and the entire effect was one of controlled absurdity, performed to an aristocratic rendition of “My Blue Heaven” that only Lucas could have conjured up. It was so good as to be awesome. Monty Rivers sat next to me and kept quiet throughout. Only at the end did he nudge me and say, “I’m sick of pussycats, can you fix me up with that cutie-pie waiter?”

  Their second number was a jazz ballet done to Lex Baxter’s hit music, “Jet.” And I didn’t know what to think. Florrie and Richie did it while Ginnie sat next to me and watched. All through the dress rehearsal and the on-camera rehearsal Ginnie just watched that second number, studying it, taking it all in, learning every step, every move, familiarizing herself with it but never performing it. Why? I’d see.

  Air time came and, at the twenty-minute mark, the Pickering Trio did Fred Astaire and the pussycats and “My Blue Heaven” and brought down the house. At the forty-minute mark, they did “Jet”—the three of them. It was the funniest thing I ever saw.

  Florrie and Richie, in ballet attire and sober countenance, came out and did the first minute straight, like Russians afraid to be shot. Then Ginnie wanders on, this incredible blonde thing slung into black tights, this willowy waif, looking on as the other two dance. Then, shyly she does it by herself, off to the side, tentatively at first because she’s never done it before. Then, confident that she can do it, she joins the duet of dancers and hilariously fucks up the whole thing.

  Richie’s and Florrie’s approach to the number was to survive the intruder, to hang in like serious artists, classical troupers if you will. Ginnie, the clown wanting to belong, gave the routine its counterpoint. Gorgeous in her innocence, ablaze with the insouciance of I Love Lucy, Ginnie kept shaking them up, ultimately busting in so that Richie, not knowing how or why, was lifting Ginnie and leaving Florrie out in the cold. And up there, at the highest point of the lift, Ginnie registered such facial horror that the audience toppled out of its seats. The crusher came at the end when Ginnie attempted to lift a trembling Florrie while Richie, defeated, sulked off the stage.

  To Richie Pickering’s everlasting credit, he was aware of Ginnie’s inborn sense of lunacy and he trusted it, knowing that she could do it to perfection once but that if she were ever to have rehearsed it, all the spontaneity, all the risk and surprise so necessary to the comedy’s working would disperse, leaving the number to collapse under its own apparent ineptness.

  And out of it a character was born—the leggy blonde, the dauntless clown who simply had to dance no matter how the world turned and who she interrupted, the half-woman-half-child who didn’t seem to know whether she should be jumping rope or hopping freights. What Ginnie had done in “Sweet Georgia Brown” was an accident. What Richie Pickering had done in employing that accident as part of “Jet” was genius. It is a process repeated over and over again by men with enough sense to leave room for happenstance and thus harness the unexpected.

  Things proceeded to happen quickly and well for The Pickering Trio. Agents poured out of Sardi’s as if Toots Shor had yelled “fire!”—all the Lennys and Bernies, plus a few Shellies and Arnies, plus two Kevins and one Percy. They had all read the reviews, smacked their lips and come at the kids with pens poised, but to no avail. For Richie had signed up with Barry Nadler, a little guy in his sixties who operated out of a little office on West Forty-sixth Street with nothing in it but a telephone, a coffee pot, and a 150-year love affair with show business.

  The power of television in those days was devastating, and Barry Nadler had no trouble in booking The Pickering Trio into good clubs and for good bucks. Ginnie, of course, was delighted. The summer, conservatively, would earn the trio $15,000, and Barry was already weighing television offers for the fall. Richie’s cut was fifty percent with Florrie and Ginnie splitting the other fifty percent, which was more than fair. Ginnie’s share, less ten percent to Barry, came to well over $3,000, and she told me to quit the chain gang at 20th so that I could write full time.

  It was very tempting but I had yet to sell anything and feared that I might never sell anything so why give up my only source of income even if a coolie earned more? Ginnie’s feeling was that the only way I’d find out if I could write was to commit to writing totally. The compromise position, of course, was for me to quit the moment I sold my first script but to hang on until then.

  The night before she left for a six-week tour with the act, she typed up “Tony” so that it was presentable for submission. Then we made love as if we never would again, lying in each other’s arms as though she were the only girl in the world and I were the only satyr.

  She left in the morning, first stop Chicago, and I was never more alone in my life. I slept in her room that night where the smell of her cologne was so prevalent that I could pretend she was still with me. Two nights of that and I couldn’t stand it so I went back to my own room and abstinence. She called on the third night, or should I say morning—it was three thirty A.M. Chicago was a smash. We talked for an hour—so long that I half believed I was speaking to her from Fort Devens.

  I sent the original copy of “Tony” to Philco and the first carbon to Kraft Theatre because I felt that those two shows represented my best chances of a sale. I had two other carbons which just weren’t legible enough to inflict on any reader. It occurred to me that I was paralleling what Ginnie was doing in her act. Just as she stood and watched and then jumped in, so was I. All my life I had been a reader, an observer of writers—now I was jumping in in hopes of becoming a writer. It had worked for Ginnie, maybe it would work for Ben. For nowhere is there a rule that states that to be a writer one must do it from birth.

  I didn’t want to sign with an agent just yet, mostly because I didn’t want any of them reading my script and telling me I was lousy before I could have it demonstrated that such might well be the case. Barry agreed with me but still wanted me to show it to this one agent, a woman, for whom he had great respect. Only because I liked Barry, and his cigars, did I bring my script to Helen McIninny at the Morris office.

  She called three days later, having read it, and asked that I come to see her. I hadn’t heard from Philco or Kraft yet, so I went into Helen McIninny’s office knowing that hers would be the first professional opinion of my script.

  She was a nice enough lady, sort of dowdy and thirty-fivish. At first she did try to be kind, which I guess is what you do with someone who is obviously terminally ill. Still, inside of five minutes, during which time her phone rang eleven times, I was getting the message loud and clear that she didn’t think too much of my play. Finally, unable to pull her punches any longer, she smiled at me, very motherly, and said, “You’re no Henry Denker.”

  I must confess that, at that time, I had no idea who Henry Denker was, that he was then (and still is) one of the more versatile writers on the scene; that he wrote books and plays that, if not always financial hits, were always skillfully written and highly praised. I knew none of that which is why I hope you will understand why I responded to Helen McIninny’s statement as follows
:

  “Fuck Henry Denker!”

  “You don’t even know who he is.”

  “Fuck him anyway!”

  And I could see her hackles rise, though the tone of her voice denied it. “Henry Denker is a writer whose pen you will never be able to lift, let alone carry.”

  “And so that’s your opinion of me?”

  “Yes.”

  “That I’m no Henry Denker.”

  “Yes.”

  “What do I do, put it on my tombstone? ‘Here lies Ben Webber—he was no Henry Denker.’ What does he put on his tombstone, that he was no William Saroyan?”

  “He has a better chance of becoming William Saroyan than you have of becoming Irving Tannenbaum.”

  “And who the fuck is Irving Tannenbaum, if I may make so bold?”

  “Irving Tannenbaum is the worst writer since hieroglyphics, only he doesn’t know it, won’t quit, and is going to be very miserable unless he goes back to his original profession of dentistry.”

  “And he’s a better writer than me?”

  “By far.”

  “And what goes on his tombstone, pray tell?”

  “‘Here lies Irving Tannenbaum, Pulitzer Prizewinning orthodontist.’ Now get out of here. You’re as rude as you are untalented, and I’d rather answer the phone knowing it’s someone telling me that my house burnt down than spend another minute of my time speaking to you.” She turned away and answered her phone. I didn’t wait around to see if it was her house but I like to think that it was.

  The woman, of course, had originally planned to set me down easy, why else invite me up for a friendly chat about how untalented I was. But upon being confronted with my overreaction, she became equally overreactive, and because she had been doing it for much longer she did it much better. I skipped dinner completely, spending the rest of the evening with Johnnie Walker.

  In the office things proceeded as usual, but without Ginnie to go home to, it was becoming increasingly more difficult for me to cope, especially with Sam Gaynor continually on my back. I wasn’t sure how much more of him I could take. I knew not to get into any kind of fist fight with him, but, maybe, maybe if I came up behind him, with a stiletto, a gun, and a bomb…