The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street: A Novel

by Susan Jane Gilman

  * * *

  Everybody thinks that once you reach the top, you can lie back on a divan with a goddamn mai tai. No. Wrong. Success is not a mountain climb. Success is a treadmill.

  You should only know such pressures, darlings. At the peak of it all, in those meshuggeneh 1960s, twice a week my days started with a 4:30 A.M. wake-up call from NBC. On those mornings I slept in our guestroom so as not to disturb Bert. I placed our antique gilt telephone by the bed so I could hear it even if I took a Nembutal.

  Everything I had timed. Like an assembly line at one of our ice cream plants. At exactly 4:35 A.M., Sunny brought me my black-coffee-and-buttered-toast breakfast on a tray. Ten minutes later I bathed. At 5:00 A.M. Sunny helped me into my costume. In keeping with the times, my producers had decided that I should try to look “groovy” and “mod.” Cilla, the wardrobe girl, had developed a signature look for me. Whimsical. Cartoonish. Shiny vinyl smocks in rainbow colors. A stiff, quilted sherbet-colored minidress, a Mary Quant knockoff—though to the knee. At age fifty-seven, although I was in perhaps the best shape of my life, there was absolutely no need for gynecological hemlines, I assured everyone.

  After Sunny zipped me into my custom-made white orthopedic go-go boots and handed me my rhinestone-encrusted cat glasses, she turned me toward the full-length mirror. “Mrs. Dunkle, you look very nice, yes?” On the set I would don my ice cream crown and cape. But ta-da. Here I was. “The Ice Cream Queen of America.” The bona fide TV character of myself. I looked like I’d come from the future.

  By 5:30 A.M. I was in NBC’s town car, heading west. By the time I arrived at the studio no more than fifteen minutes later, it was usually pandemonium. The lighting crew, the sound crew, the camera crew, the handlers for the guests. Plus ninety-six crazed children who had been chosen by a lottery months before to appear on the show. So you can only imagine. We had the kids arrive early to allow for all the stomachaches, tantrums, pants wettings, and throw-ups that inevitably occurred just before airtime at 6:30. This was something, frankly, that Promovox, NBC, and I had not taken into account when we first conceived of the Funhouse. If you wanted to work with real kids instead of insipid child actors or puppets, you had to weather all sorts of nonsense.

  While Lanzo teased my hair into a mass of cotton candy, Harvey sashayed into the hair-and-makeup room, already dressed as Spreckles the Clown. “Seeing those brats out there makes me think Marie Antoinette was grossly under-appreciated,” he declared, flinging himself into his makeup chair beside mine.

  “Morning, Harvey. How’s your mother doing?” I said, my eyes closed beneath the dryer.

  “The same,” he said, reclining so that the makeup girl could work on him. “I keep telling the hospital that she’s only suffering from hypochondria, but of course no one ever listens to me.”

  “Well, do you go there dressed as a clown?”

  “Of course not. I wear my Mata Hari outfit. Honey, the only thing St. Vincent’s is good for are the magazines in the waiting room. Did you know that Debbie Reynolds is still offering Liz advice about Dick? I mean, where do I start with that?”

  While Harvey, Nilla Rilla, Chocohontas, and I got the finishing touches on our makeup (mine being the easiest, of course, since I was dressed as neither a clown nor an Indian nor an albino gorilla), the assistant producer herded the children into their seats, where they were instructed how to behave and entertained by a magician until the theme music cued. The sixty seconds before we went on the air were always the most nerve-racking. Since we were live, nothing could be edited. During our first season, in 1959, a real orchestra had played the opening music, yet NBC put the kibosh on it because the snare drum scared some of the children; when the camera panned over them, they were crying. Now, as the first taped bars of the Dunkle’s Ice Cream Funhouse theme song chimed, Harvey and I took a couple of swigs from the flask he kept stashed in his Spreckles the Clown prop box. Bottoms up! we said. Mud in your eye! On the other side of the set, Don Pardo stepped up to the microphone and boomed, Boys and girls of America! It’s Dunkle’s Ice Cream Funhouse, live from NBC Studios. Please welcome your hostess, Mrs. Lillian Dunkle, the Ice Cream Queen of America!

  Flame-red signs flashed above the audience: APPLAUSE APPLAUSE. With kids, however, you really didn’t need this. As soon as I stepped out into the spotlight, in my pink, fur-trimmed cape and my gold plastic ice cream crown, twirling my candy cane like a baton, they started shrieking. A few of the younger ones jounced up and down in their seats squealing, “Oooh! Look! The Ice Cream Queeenn!”

  Their enthusiasm, darlings, it was always rapturous. I’d stand there smiling, letting it pour over me like caramel, even as my heart thumped frantically. Such absolute, uncomplicated adoration of me.

  Like a politician, I began shaking hands with those in the front row. “Who wants ice cream?” I cheered. The set behind me was a garish cartoon schoolroom, with ice cream bars for desks and candy-cane window frames.

  “WE DO!” the children screeched back.

  And now, boys and girls, Don Pardo bellowed, please welcome your cohost, Spreckles the Clown!

  Harvey Ballentine ran out in a goofy semicircle, waving hugely at the children and, if he’d had another swig or two backstage, shaking his tuches at them in his ballooning, strawberry-colored fat pants. More than once, Spreckles the Clown got a warning from management. I myself, in fact, was once called to task for hiring him.

  “Where the hell did you find this guy, Lillian? Alcoholics Anonymous?”

  “Well, if I did, then he wouldn’t be drunk now, would he?” I sniffed. So what if Harvey Ballentine tippled a little? As long as he remained lucid. And vertical.

  After the ruckus died down, Spreckles kicked off the program by leaning on my shoulder and saying in his galumphing clown voice, “So, Miss Lillian, what kind of wholesome ice cream fun do you have planned for us today?”

  “Well, Spreckles, today we have a marvelous show for our youngsters,” I announced. “For our special guest, we have the pop-group sensation the McCoys, singing their number-one smash hit ‘Hang on Sloopy’ (APPLAUSE). We have some of your all-time favorite cartoons, courtesy of Warner Brothers (APPLAUSE). Nilla Rilla the Ice Cream Gorilla and his Indian friend Chocohontas are going to pay us a special visit later, to talk to all our youngsters here about good oral hygiene (APPLAUSE). And of course, Spreckles, I think it’s only fair that we host everybody’s favorite ice cream–eating contest, too: Dunkle’s Name That Flavor (WILD APPLAUSE).”

  “Sounds swell, Your Highness. But first”—and here Spreckles the Clown plopped down on the edge of the stage with exaggerated glumness—“can I talk to you and the boys and girls about a little problem a friend of mine has?”

  “Well, sure. What is it, Spreckles?” I feigned innocence. “Tell me, and maybe the boys and girls can help.”

  Since the original idea was to have our program fill the void left by The Mickey Mouse Club, NBC insisted that Dunkle’s Ice Cream Funhouse offer regular moral and ethical “character lessons” to children as a key part of the show. And so each episode began with “Dear Spreckles,” a segment where children sent in letters asking Spreckles for help with their daily problems. Today Eugene, age nine, from Syosset, wrote that he’d borrowed his friend’s bicycle without asking, then accidentally broken it: “I know what I did was wrong. Spreckles, what should I do?”

  Spreckles walked among the children in the audience with his microphone, soliciting suggestions. Maybe Eugene could tell his best friend that he’s really sorry, they offered. Maybe he should save up his allowance to buy him a new bike. Afterward Spreckles selected a few volunteers to act out the scenarios onstage so that all the children (including, presumably, Eugene watching back home in Syosset) could see for themselves how to resolve the dilemma.

  The studio lights were extremely hot, so during this portion I sat on the sidelines fanning myself. After the first commercial break—for Dunkle’s Ice Cream, naturally—came the guest-star segment: Always, for me, the
highlight. Because I was persistent and I played up my Jewish-Italian mama persona to great effect in both New York and Hollywood—and because Dunkle’s bombarded celebrities with free tubs of ice cream flavors concocted especially for them (Cherry Lewis, Bob Vanillin, Sean Cone-ery)—Dunkle’s Ice Cream Funhouse landed some truly marvelous guest stars over the years. Cassius Clay was on once. Sandy Koufax. Tippi Hedren and Mary Martin. Often the guests were musical. The Four Seasons performed. Dusty Springfield. Sam Cooke. And I got to interview all of them. What advice can you give our youngsters today? Whom do you admire most? And, of course, What’s your favorite Dunkle’s ice cream flavor?

  Then came the cartoons. Personal grooming with Nilla Rilla and Chocohontas. And finally the ice cream contest. Big. Messy. Thrilling. Every kid in the audience vied to participate. Ice Cream Relays like egg relays, except with a scoop of ice cream balanced on the end of the spoon. Scooper Troopers, perhaps best described as “Which team can scoop more ice cream out of the tub and transfer it across the set into a bowl without using their hands?” Or Name that Flavor, where blindfolded contestants raced over to a table full of “mystery ice cream” and had to identify each flavor while the clock ticked. Several years later, the game show producers for the revival of Beat the Clock stole several of these challenges outright, the pricks.

  For this segment the set was always covered in plastic drop cloths, and the lucky contestants were given rain ponchos and galoshes to wear. Oh, what a spectacle it was! As soon as I blew the whistle, the children went slipping and sliding on the slick, ice cream–spattered racecourse. The din of the audience’s cheering was deafening. Everything culminated in a terrific, gooey, Jackson Pollock–y mess. It made for marvelous television, I am telling you. This was what children loved to see. Not some guy talking to a goddamn sock puppet and putting on a cardigan.

  At the end, as Don Pardo announced that today’s grand prize was a special-edition Ross Apollo bicycle, I thanked all our youngsters for playing. Winners or not, I cooed, everyone would receive a complimentary Dunkle’s gift bag containing an Imperial yo-yo, Silly Putty, a Lactona toothbrush, a bottle of Mr. Bubble, and a coupon for a free Dunkle’s Nilla Rilla ice cream cake. If our special guest happened to be a pop star, everyone got a free copy of their latest 45 as well.

  Spreckles and I then waved good-bye into the camera in a rain of pink and brown confetti as the closing theme music kicked in and the dazed children were hustled off the set behind us. As soon as the red light blinked off and the producer shouted, “That’s it! All done, guys,” Harvey Ballentine yanked off his nose and said, “Thank God those little fuckers are finally gone. Oh, do I need a piss.”

  Bert was usually still asleep when I arrived back home at Park Avenue. I showered again, donned one of my suits, and called for the car to take me to the office, so that I could get there before 9:00 A.M. to see who arrived late, before putting in a full day’s work myself.

  Sometimes, as I shuffled about our room fastening my earrings, rummaging through the drawers for my compact and my keys, Bert would call to me sleepily from the bed, patting the empty space on the mattress beside him. “Doll, relax. Come back for a few minutes. Let Isaac handle things this morning.”

  But how could I possibly relax? I was the Ice Cream Queen of America, for Chrissakes. Sometimes I felt as if a roller coaster were careening inside me, cresting and plummeting, cresting and plummeting. So often I was out there in the spotlight by myself. I never for a minute forgot how cutthroat our business was. Narrowing profit margins. Enormous outlays and loans. Competition nipping at our heels. And although Bert was oblivious to it, we had enemies. Vigilance was imperative.

  I could not simply “let Isaac handle things.”

  Ever since he had gotten his degree from NYU—just as I’d once vowed he would—our son had assumed more and more responsibility at the company. When we first moved Dunkle’s headquarters to Manhattan, in fact, Bert had installed him in a spacious, glass-walled office right next door to his own. Though in the past I had experienced my son as standoffish, picky, and fretful, over the years these qualities had coalesced into a meticulous intelligence that I had come to value. My son, he had an eye for structuring deals, for analyzing numbers. He and I began having lunches together. Just the two of us. With our heads bowed together over a conference table—our matching deli sandwiches half eaten beside us on their mayonnaise-y waxed paper—we discussed finances and reviewed contracts that Bert could not absorb. Never had I felt so proud of my child. Nor quite so close to him. Business: It had become our shared secret language.

  Bert was in his sixties now. Increasingly he ducked out of the office to play golf and tennis. Physical things—things he still excelled at. He took long lunches at Sammy’s Roumanian Steak House with Edgar, our lawyer. Drinks at the Carlyle with men from Mayor Wagner’s office. A few times a year, he went on lavish junkets to Washington, D.C., to glad-hand senators and congressmen, taking them out for steak dinners at the Palm with representatives from the dairy lobby, Dow Chemical, Westinghouse. Inordinately good-looking people like Bert can always just sit at a restaurant table, nodding and not saying much. Of course, I understood the need for all his schmoozing, as we called it—big business needs big friends, after all. Yet the bills he ran up! He seemed to have reverted to his pampered childhood back in Vienna. Cigars. Bottles of Bordeaux. Jazz clubs. Junior suites. Receipts, I demanded. Give me the receipts!

  To my great amazement, Isaac backed me up. “Pop, Mom’s right,” he said one afternoon, clicking his pen. “All these little things accumulate. Don’t reach for your wallet in a restaurant until you’ve double-checked the bill, okay?”

  Finally, I found, I had an ally. My very own son, no less.

  Yet one Sunday morning back in 1962, Bert turned to me in the kitchen as he was cranking the coffee grinder. A puzzled, preoccupied look came over his face. “Lil,” he said vaguely. “Hamburgers. They don’t really go well with milk shakes, do they?”

  “Excuse me?” I was rummaging through the Frigidaire for a grapefruit.

  “People prefer soft drinks with their meals, yes?” His eyebrows pinched together like curtains. “Oh, never mind, doll. I did the right thing. I know I did.” But his hand, I noticed, stayed on the crank of the coffee grinder and did not move.

  “Bert, what’s going on?”

  He gazed down into the sink. “A restaurant owner from Illinois came to see me. He took me to lunch. At the Biltmore. H-h-h-he owns some h-h-h-hamburger restaurants. Out in the Midwest. Franchises, like we have.” Bert shook his head.

  “Oh?”

  “Apparently, he used to sell milk-shake machines back in the forties. Now he’s considering adding milk shakes to his hamburger menus—or maybe ice cream. He’s just ‘doing due diligence,’ he said, but he wondered if perhaps we’d be open to combining our Dunkle’s franchises with his.”

  I leaned back against the Frigidaire and crossed my arms. “And you did not even think to mention this to me?”

  Bert cast about the kitchen helplessly. “You were so busy with the TV show, doll. And the new grocery division.”

  “When exactly did you meet with this hamburger man?”

  Bert’s lips folded into each other for a moment until they disappeared entirely. “March,” he said quietly.

  “March? Bert, that was four months ago!”

  “I didn’t think it was important enough to bring up, Lil. This man, he didn’t want our full menu. Only vanilla and chocolate. Maybe strawberry. With Dunkle’s great variety—partnering with him, it just didn’t seem to be to our advantage—”

  “Did you at least offer to supply him with the flavors he does want?”

  “Oh, Lil. I know that was probably the wrong call. But it just seemed like an awful lot of expansion in a direction we didn’t think we wanted to go. I mean, we have over two hundred franchises now. And the vending trucks. And the whole new supermarket division. Do we really want to start supplying restaurants as well? What if we s
pread ourselves too thin?”

  “Well, how many restaurants does this guy even have?” I said. “Six? Seven?”

  Bert looked down at the new raffia mat that Sunny had placed on the floor by the sink. “Three hundred and twenty-one,” he said quietly.

  “What?”

  “Three hundred and twenty-one. So it wouldn’t be so simple, Lil. You see? It would be a lot of work. It could consume us entirely.”

  “Three hundred and twenty-one? You said no to supplying ice cream to three hundred and twenty-one hamburger franchises?” I thumped my cane so hard against the floor that all the dishes rattled in the cabinets.

  My husband shrank from me. He cupped his hands like parentheses around his eyes, clutching his temples, rocking back and forth miserably. He appeared to be in physical pain. “Oh, doll,” he whispered. “I know. I know. I made a terrible mistake. And for months I’ve been carrying this around. The thing is, Lil, Isaac and I, we just had an odd feeling about this guy. His last name, even. Kroc. As in ‘a crock.’ It seemed like a bad omen—”

  “Isaac?” I felt a stab in my gut. “Isaac was with you?”

  “Well, of course. And he had the same feeling that I did. The guy’s restaurants? They’re called McDonald’s. Like farms. Neither of us could see them having much appeal, frankly, beyond the heartland—and they’d only use two or three of our flavors at most—and it just didn’t seem—”

  Storming into the dining room, I poured myself a drink, though my hands were shaking. If the decanter wasn’t Baccarat, I’d have hurled it against the wall. “What happened to us being a team?” I shouted. “To us being ‘quite a pair’?”