by Philip Roth
How did he get from the record factory to a network drama show? Why did he leave Chicago and O'Day in the first place? It could never have occurred to me at that time that it had anything to do with the Communist Party, mainly because I never knew back then that he was a member of the Communist Party.
What I understood was that the radio writer Arthur Sokolow, visiting Chicago, happened to catch Ira's Lincoln act in a union hall on the West Side one night. Ira had already met Sokolow in the army. He'd come to Iran, as a GI, with the This Is the Army show. A lot of left-wing guys were touring with the show, and late one evening Ira had gone off with a few of them for a bull session during which, as Ira remembered it, they'd discussed "all the political stuff in the world." Among the group was Sokolow, whom Ira came quickly to admire as someone who was always battling for a cause. Because Sokolow had begun life, in Detroit, as a Jewish street kid fighting off the Poles, he was also completely recognizable, and Ira felt at once a kinship he'd never wholly had with the rootless Irishman O'Day.
By the time Sokolow, now a civilian writing The Free and the Brave, happened to turn up in Chicago, Ira was onstage for a full hour as Lincoln, not only reciting or reading from speeches and documents but responding to audience questions about current political controversies in the guise of Abraham Lincoln, with Lincoln's high-pitched country twang and his awkward giant's gestures and his droll, plainspoken way. Lincoln supporting price controls. Lincoln condemning the Smith Act. Lincoln defending workers' rights. Lincoln vilifying Mississippi's Senator Bilbo. The union membership loved their stalwart autodidact's irresistible ventriloquism, his mishmash of Ringoldisms, O'Dayisms, Marxisms, and Lincolnisms ("Pour it on!" they shouted at bearded, black-haired Ira. "Give 'em hell, Abe!"), and so did Sokolow, who brought Ira to the attention of another Jewish ex-GI, a New York soap opera producer with left-leaning sympathies. It was the introduction to the producer that led to the audition that landed Ira the part of the scrappy super of a Brooklyn tenement on one of daytime radio's soap operas.
The salary was fifty-five dollars a week. Not much, even in 1948, but steady work and more money than he made at the record plant. And, almost immediately, he began doing other jobs as well, getting jobs everywhere, jumping into waiting taxis and rushing from studio to studio, from one daytime show to another, as many as six different shows a day, always playing characters with working-class roots, tough-talking guys truncated from their politics, as he explained it to me, in order to make their anger permissible: "the proletariat Americanized for the radio by cutting off their balls and their brains." It was all this work that propelled him, within months, onto Sokolow's prestigious weekly hour-long show, The Free and the Brave, as a leading player.
Out in the Midwest, there had begun to be physical difficulties for Ira to cope with, and these, too, furnished a motive for him to try his luck back east in a new line of work. He was plagued by muscle pain, soreness so bad that several times a week—when he didn't have to just endure the pain and go off to play Lincoln or do his missionary work—he'd head right home, soak for half an hour in a tub of steaming water down the hall from his room, and then get into bed with a book, his dictionary, his notepad, and whatever was around to eat. A couple of bad beatings he'd taken in the army seemed to him the cause of this problem. From the worst of the beatings—he'd been pounced on by a gang from the port who had him down for a "nigger lover"—he'd wound up in the hospital for three days.
They'd begun baiting him when he started to pal around with a couple of Negro soldiers from the segregated unit stationed at the riverfront three miles away. O'Day was by then running a group that met at the Quonset hut library and under his tutelage discussed politics and books. Barely anybody on the base paid attention to the library or to the nine or ten GIs who drifted over there after chow a couple of nights a week to talk about Looking Backward by Bellamy or The Republic by Plato or The Prince by Machiavelli, until the two Negroes from the segregated unit joined the group.
At first Ira tried to reason with the men in his outfit who called him nigger lover. "Why do you make derogatory remarks about colored people? All I hear from you guys about the Negro is derogatory remarks. And you aren't only anti-Negro. You're anti-labor, you're anti-liberal, and you're anti-brains. You're anti every goddamn thing that's in your interest. How can people give their three or four years to the army, see friends die, get wounded, have their lives disrupted, and yet not know why it happened and what it's all about? All you know is that Hitler started something. All you know is that the draft board got you. You know what I say? You guys would duplicate the very actions of the Germans if you were in their place. It might take a little longer because of the democratic element in our society, but eventually we would be completely fascist, dictator and all, because of people spouting the shit you guys spout. The discrimination of the top officers who run this port is bad enough, but you people, from poor families, guys without two nickels to rub together, guys who are nothing but fodder for the assembly line, for the sweatshop, for the coal mines, who the system pisses on—low wages, high prices, astronomical profits—and you turn out to be a bunch of vociferous, bigoted Red-baiting bastards who don't know..." Then he'd tell them all they didn't know.
Heated discussions that changed nothing, that, because of his temper, Ira admitted, made things only worse. "I would lose a good deal of what I wanted to impress them with because in the beginning I was too emotional. Later I learned how to cool down with these kind of people, and I believe that I impressed a few of them with some facts. But it is very difficult to talk to such men because of the deeply ingrained ideas they have. To explain to them the psychological reasons for segregation, the economic reasons for segregation, the psychological reasons for the use of their beloved word nigger'—they are beyond grasping such things. They say nigger because a nigger is a nigger—I'd explain and explain to them, and that's what they'd answer me. I pounded home about education of children and our personal responsibility, and still, for all my goddamn explaining, they beat the shit out of me so bad I thought I was going to die."
His reputation as a nigger lover turned truly dangerous for Ira when he wrote a letter to Stars and Stripes complaining about the segregated units in the army and demanding integration. "That's when I used my dictionary and Roget's Thesaurus. I would devour those two books and try to put 'em to practical use by writing. Writing a letter for me was like building a scaffold. Probably I would have been criticized by somebody who knew the English language. My grammar was God knows what. But I wrote it anyway because this is what I felt I should do. I was so goddamn angry, see? Y'understand? I wanted to tell people that this was wrong."
After the letter was published, he was working one day up in the loading basket, above the hold of the ship, when the guys operating the basket threatened to drop him into the hold unless he shut up worrying about niggers. Repeatedly they dropped him ten, fifteen, twenty feet, promising next time to let go and break every bone in his body, but, scared as he was, he wouldn't say what they wanted to hear, and in the end they let him out. Then the following morning someone in the mess hall called him a Jew bastard. A nigger-loving Jew bastard. "A southern hillbilly with a big mouth," Ira told me. "Always made remarks in the mess hall about Jews, about Negroes. This one morning I'm sitting there near the end of the meal—there weren't that many guys left in the place—and he started to yap off about niggers and Jews. I'm still boiling from the incident the day before on the ship, and so I couldn't take it anymore, and I took off my glasses and I gave 'em to a guy I was sitting with, the only guy who'd still sit with me. By then I'd walk in the mess hall, two hundred guys sitting there, and because of my politics I'd be totally ostracized. Anyway, I went at that son of a bitch. He was a private and I was a sergeant. From one end of that mess hall to the other I kicked the shit out of him. Then the first sergeant comes up to me and says, 'You want to press charges against this guy? A private attacking a noncommissioned officer?' I quickly said to myself, I'l
l probably be damned if I do and damned if I don't. Right? But from that moment on, nobody ever made an anti-Semitic remark when I was in the vicinity. That didn't mean they'd ever let up about niggers. Niggers this and niggers that, a hundred times a day. This hillbilly tried again with me that same night. We were washing off our mess kits. You know the stinking little knives they have there? He came at me with that knife. Again I had him, I put him away, but I didn't do anything more about it."
Hours later Ira got ambushed in the dark and wound up in the hospital. As best he could diagnose the pains that began to develop while he was working at the record factory, they were from the damage caused by that savage beating. Now he was always pulling a muscle or spraining a joint—his ankle, his wrist, his knee, his neck—and as often as not from doing virtually nothing, no more than stepping off the bus coming home or reaching across the counter for the sugar bowl in the diner where he went to eat.
And this is why, however unlikely it seemed that anything would materialize from it, when something was said about a radio audition, Ira leaped at the chance.
Maybe there were more machinations than I knew of behind Ira's move to New York and his overnight radio triumph, but I didn't think so back then. I didn't have to. Here was the guy to take my education beyond Norman Corwin, to tell me, for one thing, about the GIs that Corwin didn't talk about, GIs not so nice or, for that matter, so antifascist as the heroes of On a Note of Triumph, the GIs who went overseas thinking about niggers and kikes and who came home thinking about niggers and kikes. Here was an impassioned man, someone rough and scarred by experience, bringing with him firsthand evidence of all the brutish American stuff that Corwin left out. It didn't require Communist connections to explain Ira's overnight radio triumph to me. I just thought, This guy is wonderful. He is an iron man.
2
THAT NIGHT in '48 at the Henry Wallace rally in Newark, I'd also met Eve Frame. She was with Ira and with her daughter, Sylphid, the harpist. I saw nothing of what Sylphid felt for her mother, didn't know about their struggle until Murray began to tell me of all that had passed me by as a kid, everything about Ira's marriage that I didn't or couldn't understand or that Ira had kept from me during those two years when I got to see him every couple of months, either when he came to visit Murray or when I visited him at the cabin—which Ira called his "shack"—in the hamlet of Zinc Town, in northwest New Jersey.
Ira retreated to Zinc Town to live not so much close to nature as close to the bone, to live life in the raw, swimming in the mud pond right into November, tramping the woods on snowshoes in coldest winter, or, on rainy days, meandering around in his Jersey car—a used '39 Chevy coupe—talking to the local dairy farmers and the old zinc miners, whom he tried to get to understand how they were being screwed by the system. He had a fireplace out there where he liked to cook his hot dogs and beans over the coals, even to brew his coffee, all so as to remind himself, after he'd become Iron Rinn and a bit enlarded with money and fame, that he was still nothing more than a "working stiff," a simple man with simple tastes and expectations who during the thirties had ridden the rails and who had got incredibly lucky. About owning the Zinc Town shack, he used to say, "Keeps me in practice being poor. Just in case."
The shack furnished an antidote to West Eleventh Street and an asylum from West Eleventh Street, the place where you go to sweat out the bad vapors. It was also a link to the earliest vagabond days, when he was surviving among strangers for the first time and every day was hard and uncertain and, as it would always be for Ira, a battle. After leaving home at fifteen and digging ditches for a year in Newark, Ira had taken jobs in the northwesternmost corner of lersey, sweeping up in various factories, working sometimes as a farmhand, as a watchman, as a handyman, and then, for two and a half years, until he was nearly nineteen and headed west, sucking air in shafts twelve hundred feet down in the Sussex zinc mines. After the blasting, with the place still smoky and reeking sickeningly of dynamite powder and gas, Ira worked with a pick and a shovel alongside the Mexicans as the lowest of the low, as what they called a mucker.
In those years, the Sussex mines were unorganized and as profitable for the New lersey Zinc Company, and as unpleasant for New lersey Zinc's workers, as zinc mines anywhere in the world. The ore got smelted into metallic zinc down on Passaic Avenue in Newark and also processed into zinc oxide for paint, and though by the time Ira bought his shack in the late forties lersey zinc was losing ground to foreign competition and the mines were already headed for extinction, it was still that first big immersion in brute life—eight hours underground loading the shattered rock and ore into rail cars, eight hours of enduring the awful headaches and swallowing the red and brown dust and shitting in the pails of sawdust ... and all for forty-two cents an hour—that lured him back to the remote Sussex hills. The Zinc Town shack was the radio actor's openly sentimental expression of solidarity with the dispensable, coarse nobody he'd once been—as he described himself, "a brainless human tool if ever there was one." Another person, having achieved success, might have wanted to abolish those gruesome memories for good, but without the history of his unimportance made somehow tangible, Ira would have felt himself unreal and badly deprived.
I hadn't even known that when he came over to Newark—when, after I got out of my last class, we took our hikes through Weequahic Park, circling the lake and ending up at our neighborhood's dining simulacrum to Coney Island's Nathan's, a place called Millman's, for a hot dog with "the works"—he wasn't visiting Lehigh Avenue solely to see his brother. On those after-school afternoons, when Ira told me about his years as a soldier and what he'd learned in Iran, about O'Day and what O'Day taught him, about his own recent former life as a factory worker and a union man, and his experiences as a kid shoveling muck in the mines, he was seeking refuge from a household where, from the day he arrived, he'd found himself unwelcome and unwanted by Sylphid and more and more at odds with Eve Frame because of her unforeseen contempt for Jews.
Not all Jews, Murray explained—not the accomplished Jews at the top whom she'd met in Hollywood and on Broadway and in the radio business, not, by and large, the directors and the actors and the writers and the musicians she'd worked with, many of whom were regularly to be seen at the salon she'd made of her West Eleventh Street house. Her contempt was for the garden-variety, the standard-issue Jew she saw shopping in the department stores, for run-of-the-mill people with New York accents who worked behind counters or who tended their own little shops in Manhattan, for the Jews who drove taxis, for the Jewish families she saw talking and walking together in Central Park. What drove her to distraction on the streets were the Jewish ladies who loved her, who recognized her, who came up to her and asked for her autograph. These women were her old Broadway audience, and she despised them. Elderly Jewish women particularly she could not pass without a groan of disgust. "Look at those faces!" she'd say with a shudder. "Look at those hideous faces!"
"It was a sickness," Murray said, "that aversion she had for the lew who was insufficiently disguised. She could go along parallel to life for a long time. Not in life—parallel to life. She could be quite convincing in that ultracivilized, ladylike role she'd chosen. The soft voice. The precise locution. Back in the twenties, English Genteel was a style that a lot of American girls worked up for themselves when they wanted to become actresses. And with Eve Frame, who was herself starting out in Hollywood then, it took, it hardened. English Genteel hardened into a form like layers of wax—only burning right in the middle was the wick, this flaming wick that wasn't very genteel at all. She knew all the moves, the benign smile, the dramatic reserve, all the delicate gestures. But then she'd veer off that parallel course of hers, the thing that looked so much like life, and there'd be an episode that could leave you spinning."
"And I never saw any of this," I said. "She was always kind and considerate to me, sympathetic, trying to make me feel comfortable—which wasn't easy. I was an excitable kid and she had a lot of the movie star clingin
g to her, even in those radio days."
I was thinking again, as I spoke, of that night at the Mosque. She'd said to me—who was finding it impossible to know what to say to her—that she didn't know what to say to Paul Robeson, that in his presence she was tongue-tied. "Are you as in awe of him as I am?" she whispered, as though both of us were fifteen years old. "He is the most beautiful man I have ever seen. It's shameful—I cannot stop looking at him."
I knew how she felt because I hadn't been able to stop looking at her, looking as though if I looked long enough, a meaning might emerge. Looking not only because of the delicacy of her gestures and the dignity of her bearing and the indeterminate elegance of her beauty—a beauty hovering between the darkly exotic and the softly demure and shifting continuously in its proportions, a type of beauty that must have been spellbinding at its height—but because of something visibly aquiver in her despite all the restraint, a volatility that at the time I associated with the sheer exaltation that must come of being Eve Frame.
"Do you remember the day I met Ira?" I asked him. "You two were working together, taking the screens down on Lehigh Avenue. What was he doing at your place? It was in October '48, a few weeks before the election."
"Oh, that was a bad day. That day I remember very well. He was in a bad way, and he came to Newark that morning to stay with Doris and me. He slept on the couch for two nights. It was the first time that happened. Nathan, that marriage was a mismatch from the start. He'd already pulled something like it before, except at the other end of the social spectrum. You couldn't miss it. The enormous difference in temperament and interests. Anybody could see it."
"Ira couldn't?"
"See? Ira? Well, to be generous about it, for one thing, he was in love with her. They met and he fell for her, and the first thing he did, he went out and bought her a fancy Easter parade hat that she would never have worn because her taste in clothes was all Dior. But he didn't know what Dior was, and he bought her this big ridiculous expensive hat and had it delivered to her house after their first date. Lovestruck and starstruck. He was dazzled by her. She was dazzling—and dazzlement has a logic all its own.