My Father’s Guitar & Other Imaginary Things: True Stories

by Joseph Skibell

  “Jerry Janger had the sense to realize that acting was a game,” my father invariably told me during these conversations, “fun to play at maybe, but based entirely on chance, on luck, on fate.”

  Jerry Janger was another one of our cousins. He’d won a Mr. Texas Formal contest at the University of Texas in the early 1950s and, as part of his prize, was given a screen test. Taken on by one of the studios, he appeared in an episode of Father Knows Best and in a movie called Rumble on the Docks, but then he was drafted. When he returned from the service, the world had moved on. The people who knew him at the studio were no longer there, and he became a lawyer instead.

  “Now Jerry did the sensible thing,” my father often told me, “and he has no regrets. But Morris . . . Morris never grew up and now just look at him: unmarried, no children, no solid career to his name. What kind of life is that? Is that the kind of life you want?”

  Of course, it wasn’t the kind of life I wanted, but neither was my father’s. In all honesty, my father’s life, the life of a small-town businessman, appeared equally unenviable. Dad had been on his way to the University of Chicago for a PhD in industrial psychology, a young field back then, when, for reasons that were never fully explained to me, he changed his mind and went to work in the family business instead.

  Our family owned a small fleet of ladies’ ready-to-wear stores across Texas called Skibell’s.

  When I was growing up, Dad hardly seemed the happiest of men—I rarely saw him in a good mood, to tell you the truth—though I knew enough not to use that as an argument in my defense.

  “Oh, no, no, but you’re happy enough that I can afford to buy you a bicycle and a guitar and pay for your lessons and send you off to Europe on a People to People tour . . .” I knew he’d say.

  And so now, all these years later, it was strange to hear him urging me to call Morris, a little strange, if not impossible, for me to declassify Morris as a poor role model, as a ne’er-do-well, as a luftmensch, and reclassify him as a man on the inside, a relative with clout, an important contact it might behoove me to call.

  “Bob says he’s in with important people,” Dad told me, “that he’s got important friends.”

  Bob was Morris’ brother, Dr. Robert Berger. The two served as a kind of Jekyll-and-Hyde pair in my adolescent understanding of the world. Both had left Lubbock for glamorous Southern California and, though Morris, presumably, was miserable, living hand to mouth, Bob was a well-respected gastroenterologist with a beautiful wife, a swimming pool, and a thriving practice in La Jolla.

  As far as Morris’ important friends went, these included principally—my father told me—Jack Nicholson. Morris, in fact, appears in seven or eight of Nicholson’s films, though usually not for more than a line or two, a couple of small scenes, just enough, I suspected, to keep him a member in good standing in the Screen Actors Guild so that he could continue receiving health insurance.

  I was on a plane not long ago, half watching Anger Management, when Morris’ face suddenly filled the screen. Nicholson plays Dr. Buddy Rydell, an unconventional anger management counselor who, assigned to Adam Sandler’s case, moves into Sandler’s apartment to undertake an extreme cure. Dr. Rydell’s assistant, a tall man in hipsterish black, carries in Rydell’s suitcases. Leaning a massage table against a wall, Morris delivers his single line in extreme close-up: “Anything else, Dr. B.?”

  I MET MORRIS only once. I was nine years old when he came to Lubbock to visit his parents, Hazel and Abe. He had a small role in a movie called Kelly’s Heroes, a World War II spoof starring Clint Eastwood, Donald Sutherland, Telly Savalas, and Carroll O’Connor. As far as Lubbock was concerned, though, Morris was a bona fide movie star. There was even an article about the local boy making good in the Avalanche-Journal with a picture of Morris and Abe standing outside the Arnett Benson Theatre.

  My mother drove my brother Ethan and me over to the Bergers’ so we could get Morris’ autograph. I was a thin little boy with bangs, wearing a favorite blue cardigan, as I recall. Morris signed two eight-by-ten-inch black-and-white glossies as “Jeff Morris” and handed one to each of us. In the picture, he’s in character, in an army uniform, sitting in what looked like an army barracks. He seemed embarrassed by the whole thing, to tell you the truth, annoyed by it, bothered. I asked him if he could recite any of his lines from the movie, but he said he couldn’t remember them.

  “You can’t remember them?” I said.

  I thought remembering lines was what an actor did, but Morris told me it takes a long time, sometimes years and years, to make a movie and even longer sometimes for it to come out. He’d made Kelly’s Heroes a year and a half ago, and there was no way he could remember his lines now, and this seemed plausible enough to me until I went to the Arnett Benson and saw the movie and saw that Morris only had a few lines.

  In one scene, a battle scene in France—which I can still remember—an outhouse falls on Don Rickles and Harry Dean Stanton, both playing members of Morris’ battalion.

  “Oooh-weee, you boys fall into a cow patch or sum’pin?” Morris says to them.

  “Kinda makes you homesick, doesn’t it?” Rickles snaps in frustration, before stomping off.

  Morris and Stanton—their characters are simple country boys—look at each other sheepishly.

  “Kinda does, dudn’t it?” Stanton says.

  “Yeah,” Morris admits.

  MY UNCLE IKE and Morris had been friends as kids. Ike used to come to Lubbock from Chicago to visit Morris, and it always struck me as strange—the way normal things strike children as strange—that Ike had been in Lubbock long before my mother, who would live her entire adult life there, ever set foot in the city.

  Nothing strange about that, I realize this now. Cousins visit cousins, and cousins’ sisters sometimes marry cousins’ friends, especially in Lubbock, where marriageable Jewish women did not then and do not now grow on trees. When I was a kid, though, the thought that my Chicagoan uncle had walked and run and rode minibikes along the dusty streets of my hometown long before my parents married, long before Dad brought Mom there to live, long before my sisters and brother and I were all born, seemed like a miraculous instance of a life foretold.

  The two cousins remained close. In the summer of 1958, Ike even drove with Morris halfway to LA when Morris lit out for Hollywood. Barely eighteen, they spent a week gambling in Vegas before Ike returned to Chicago and Morris pushed on through the mountains into LA alone.

  They kept up through the years, and once when I was in Chicago, Ike told me that Morris had called him recently. He’d been in town filming The Blues Brothers with John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd.

  At the time—this was probably 1978 or ’79—Ike was living in his sister Adelle’s condominium on North Lake Shore Drive, sleeping on the pull-out sofa in her living room. This was only a temporary measure, of course. Their mother had died a few years before. After her funeral Ike disappeared, and no one knew where he was until about six weeks later when he washed up in New Orleans with no money and no idea what had happened to his car.

  “Hey, man, I’m here at the Drake with some of my friends,” Morris said to Ike the night he called. “Whyn’t you come over and join us? We’ve got some killer blow.”

  Sitting on Adelle’s pull-out sofa—it was pushed in now, of course—Ike told me the story, playing the role of Morris, his hand near his cheek as though it were a phone.

  “Really?” I said, leaning forward in my chair.

  “Oh, yeah,” Ike said.

  “And did you go?”

  “Of course not.”

  “You didn’t go?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Why didn’t you go?”

  He raised and lowered a single shoulder.

  This made no sense to me. I was nineteen or twenty at the time. Belushi and Aykroyd were huge.

  “And what did you say to Morris then? I mean, what did you tell him? What happened after that?”

  “What happened
after that?”

  “Yeah, I mean, what happened after that?”

  Ike mimed hanging up the phone.

  “You hung up on him!”

  Ike shrugged again.

  “But why?” I said.

  “What’d he think, that he could impress me with all of that stuff?”

  I sat back in my chair. The light off Lake Michigan poured through the tall windows into the room. This wasn’t how I imagined the story ending. It seemed a strange way to treat a cousin, a strange way to treat a friend. I looked at Ike, sitting on Adelle’s pull-out sofa, his arms crossed, one leg over the other. He seemed pleased with himself, pleased with the moment in its retelling, vindicated, as though hanging up on Morris had been the self-evidently correct thing to do.

  MY OWN CAREER in Hollywood proved a total fiasco. I’d come to LA thinking I could support my serious literary work with the easy money I’d make as a screenwriter, an idea based on a complete misunderstanding of reality. For some reason, it hadn’t occurred to me that I’d be competing for writing jobs with people who actually wanted to make movies and that this might give them an edge.

  Still, things had started out promisingly enough. Not long out of college, I’d written a screenplay called “The Hometurning” about a philosophy professor who returns home to Texas for Christmas only to discover that his redneck family have, in his absence, become Hare Krishnas and are going about their lives in the Texas oil fields wearing saffron robes and quoting, chapter and verse, from the Bhagavad Gita.

  In the early 1980s, Krishnas were in every airport in the country, and saffron robes, I thought, would be dazzlingly cinematic. Against all expectations, after only a few weeks in town, I had a manager and an agent at the William Morris Agency. The manager represented actors like John Malkovich and Willem Dafoe—I was their first literary client—and the agent was a tiny woman who pounded her fist against the top of her enormous desk when we met and proclaimed, “This film will be made.”

  She had read my script the night before, she told me, and she couldn’t put it down. “I’ve never laughed so hard in bed.”

  Sitting across the enormous desk from her, I bit my tongue, suppressing the thousand and one snappy comebacks that were on the tip of it.

  But saffron robes, it turned out, weren’t dazzlingly cinematic, and no one wanted to make a movie about Gita-thumping rednecks in the Texas oil patch. At every meeting I took, producer after producer told me how much they loved the script, how original it was, how funny and new and bold, before wondering if I couldn’t perhaps write something, well, a little less . . . weird.

  There was a movie out called Educating Rita that was a big hit at the time.

  “Couldn’t you write something a little bit more like, well, I don’t know, like Educating Rita?” they all said. “Have you seen it yet? Oh, it’s wonderful!”

  I tried. I really did. I did everything these producers asked of me. I saw Educating Rita. I bought a VHS machine, so I could watch movies at home. I even bought a television set—Barbara and I had lived for years in the mountains of New Mexico without one—so that we could use the VHS machine. I wrote two more screenplays, but I was too young as a writer. I had no craft. I had no control over what I was writing. I was like a character in a short story by I. B. Singer and Nathanael West, a Hollywood writer possessed by the wicked imp of a French surrealist, and the more I tried to write Educating Rita, the weirder my scripts became.

  The next one, “Eggheads,” was a 1930s-style screwball comedy about a playwright who, in order to pay off his gambling debts after a Broadway flop, is forced to work for a Hollywood studio with Kafka, Freud, and Einstein as his collaborators. It was a more or less symbolic representation of my mental state at the time, but at 134 pages, it was too long for Hollywood.

  “It’s as long as the Bible,” one producer complained to me.

  Still, it was a Sylvester Stallone movie compared to my next script, “Tales.” “Tales” took place in nineteenth-century Germany. It involved a ménage-à-trois between the Brothers Grimm and Dortchen, the wife of Wilhelm Grimm. The three Grimms had, in fact, lived their entire adult lives in one house together, and the story, narrated from within Dortchen Grimm’s womb by the yet-to-be-born child of this plural marriage, was, I thought, a tender meditation on innocence and experience.

  The one producer who showed interest in it couldn’t even sell it to German television, and even I began to realize I was never going to make it in Hollywood. I was never going to write Educating Rita or anything like it. My agent and managers were losing interest in me. No one was returning my calls.

  I had one last meeting at the Disney Studios. I drove through the gate and parked under a replica of the Parthenon supported not by graceful caryatids but by statues of the Seven Dwarfs and made my way to the producer’s bungalow.

  This was right around the time of the First Gulf War. Someone had procured a small black-and-white television set with a crooked antenna, and it was sitting on a coffee table in the foyer of the producer’s office when I came in. The producer, his assistant, and I—all Jews—watched in horror as Saddam Hussein’s Scuds fell on Tel Aviv.

  “You still want to have this meeting?” the producer asked me with a grimace.

  “I don’t know. What do you think?” I said. “I mean, I guess so.”

  And the three of us trooped dutifully into his office and took our seats. His assistant brought her notepad out and crossed her legs, preparing to write. I pitched my ideas. I don’t remember what they were.

  The producer nodded his head. “They’re thin,” he told me.

  “Thin? Okay, thin. So how do we fatten them up?”

  “You can’t,” he said. “They’re thin.”

  But thin things become fat all the time, I thought.

  Illustrating her boss’s point, the assistant brought up Capra.

  I brightened at the name. “Ah! You mean Fritjof Capra, the author of The Tao of Physics?” a book I happened to be reading at the time.

  “No, she means Frank Capra,” the producer said.

  “I meant Frank Capra,” the assistant said.

  “The movie director,” the producer clarified.

  His assistant gave me a sweetly pitying look.

  “Right, right.” I nodded. “Frank Capra, the movie director. It’s a Wonderful Life, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington . . .”

  I don’t even speak the language here, I thought. Here, where thin things cannot become fat and Capra is Frank and not Fritjof.

  BARBARA AND I were living in a little bungalow off Windward Circle near Venice Beach, and I drove home, along the 10, in a funk. What was I doing here? I’d wasted years of my life. I didn’t even want to be a screenwriter. I wanted to be a playwright, and maybe not even a playwright but a novelist. At the very least, I wanted to be a playwright and a novelist who had reluctantly sold his extraordinary talents out to the movies, but as usual, I’d gotten everything backwards. I hadn’t sold out. Who was I kidding? I was trying to buy in, and not doing a very good job of it.

  I stood inside our ramshackle beach house, filled with its odds and ends of cheap furniture, its shelves overflowing with books and record albums, my bicycle stashed indoors so no one would steal it. Barbara was out working. She wouldn’t be home for hours. She had a real job. I tended bar one night a week at the LA Tennis Club, and this was all the money I contributed to our household economy.

  Nearing thirty, I was a complete and utter failure as a man. My father was right. I was living the life he feared I would live: an unmasculine life of poverty and professional humiliation. I threw myself on the couch. I told myself I should take a walk on the beach to clear my head, but instead I picked up the phone and did the only thing I could think to do.

  I called Morris.

  My father had given me his number, and I’d copied it into my address book the way a spy keeps a tab of cyanide hidden on his body: for use in a dire emergency. This was that dire emergency, I told myself. The li
ne rang. A gruff voice answered. I can’t remember now if I addressed him as “Jeff” or as “Morris,” but I remember not knowing which name to use.

  I explained who I was.

  “And I just thought I’d call and say hello, you know, because I’m out here writing screenplays and . . .”

  “Oh, sure, you’re Irvin and Shirlene’s son, right?”

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “And you know I was real close friends with your uncle, didn’ya?”

  “Yeah, I think I knew that, yeah.”

  “Yeah, and did you know that I called him once when I was in Chicago?”

  “I may have heard about that, I think.”

  “And you know what he did to me?”

  “Well . . . I mean . . .”

  “He hung up on me.”

  “I mean, he may have mentioned that to me, now that I think of it, yeah.”

  “Sumabitch hangs up on me. Hangs up the goddamn phone! I’m in Chicago, filming with Belushi and Aykroyd, y’understand? I call him up. I invite him out, and the sumabitch hangs up on me. I knew him since we were kids, y’understanding me and the goddamn sumabitch hangs up on . . . He’s a faggot, dy’know that? Well, at least that’s what my father told me. Him and his sister. Both of ’em faggots. Never married. What my folks said. They warned me against him, my dad did anyway. Didn’t want me spendin’ time with him. But I’m doin’ all right, y’understand? I got work. I got friends. I’ve got important friends. Influential friends, you know what I’m saying. Take care of me. They take real good care of me. They look out for me, very influential people.”

  “Yeah, well, Morris, okay,” I said. “I just thought I’d call and say hello, you know, because I’m out here trying to write screenplays and . . .”

  “You tell your uncle you talked to me, a’right?”

  “Okay.”

  “And you tell him I told you all a’this.”

  I DIDN’T, OF course. I never mentioned it to Ike. I never mentioned it to anyone, in fact, until now. The next time my father implored me to call Morris, I told him that I had, that it hadn’t proved helpful, and he finally let it drop.