The Heart of the World

by Nik Cohn

  Telling it now, she felt foolish. A stray fleck of ketchup clung to the corner of her mouth; she buried herself in ice-cream sundae. ‘I was not born yesterday, if that’s what you think. I’ve been around the block,’ she said. Two bright-red spots like pinlights burned on either cheek. ‘I just felt I had no choice,’ she said. ‘No say.’

  When Smiling George switched the light back off and she could focus again, the first thing she saw was the wall full of old movie posters. One of them showed a blonde with big breasts in a skintight dress, sort of crawling on all fours like an animal, a jungle beast of prey. La Dolce Vita, the poster read: ‘One of my biggest,’ said George.

  By some bizarre coincidence, there was a similar scene in his next film. If Wesley liked, they could run it through. ‘Let’s see how you take direction,’ said George. But now he seemed not to care. Suddenly, it felt as if Wesley was canvassing him. ‘Tell you what I’ll do. I’ll give you a shot, see how the cookie crumbles,’ he said. ‘What have I got to lose?’

  Riffling through his shooting script, he pinned down the scene in question. It called for Wesley to take off her clothes, climb up on the office desk, and crouching on all fours, bark like a dog. But not just any dog. ‘A pedigree poodle,’ said Smiling George. ‘Miniature. Female. French.’

  Wesley was not properly prepared. Her only previous speaking part had been the March Hare in Alice in Wonderland. That had been in the eighth grade, and her stagecraft had grown rusty.

  When she started to undress, she seemed all thumbs. There was a vase full of plastic wildflowers on the desk. Crawling up, she knocked it over, sent the flowers flying. Stale smoke and dust choked her lungs, brought on a coughing fit. ‘But I did not freeze,’ she said. As Smiling George directed, she took up her position, awaited her cue. Then she shut her eyes tight, and she barked till she was hoarse.

  The take seemed to go on forever. In the darkness behind her, she could feel George watching her, judging. But he did not reach out to touch; he never made a move. At the end of forever, he just clapped his hands once. ‘Cut,’ he said. Wesley climbed back down again, began to put on her clothes. Smiling George was standing by the window, still watching her, black on black, but he did not say what he thought; he did not say anything.

  ‘Imagine,’ Wesley said. There she’d been, bent double, pulling up her new pink tights by L’eggs, and somehow the tights had got snarled, twisted tight in a knot. So she’d knelt down to unravel them; she bowed her head. And when she looked up, George was standing right above her.

  Up close, the smell of Obsession by Calvin Klein was so strong, it made her eyes sting and water. George’s hand fell on her shoulder, it felt cold and rigid like wax. ‘You want to be somebody in this business? A serious actress?’ he asked. She did not reply, just nodded her head. Her tights were ripped at the gusset. She wrestled them up around her knees, but could not force them any higher. ‘You want to be superstar?’ said George.

  ‘Yes. I will. Yes.’

  ‘Then you better learn Rule One.’

  Fatherly, he cupped her chin in his hand, raised her up. ‘When the director says French poodle,’ said Smiling George, ‘don’t give him a damn Pekinese.’

  She had felt just dreadful then. She’d thought that she was a total failure. But George must have seen something in her, raw sensual flame, after all. He had promised her a second chance, a proper screen test: ‘With cameras and everything,’ Wesley said. On the strength of that, she had saved $3.30 by missing dinner, $2.45 from lunch, and spent it on fresh makeup, a sachet of coconut-oil conditioner, YOUTH IS NOT AN AGE, JUST A STATE OF MIND, the blurb on its sachet proclaimed.

  ‘He promised,’ Wesley said. The last lick of sundae had been consumed; the tabletop was piled high with debris. ‘I wouldn’t treat a dog like that,’ she said. Then she heard what she had said. Her face split and crumpled, she looked about to bawl, but she got the giggles instead. ‘Smoldering. Sizzling. Simmering. Seething,’ she said. Among the ruins of her meals lay plastic packets of mustard and tomato ketchup. Grabbing up a fistful at random, she scrunched them tight. Red and yellow glop squirted over her hand, ran together. ‘Sexsational,’ said Wesley. ‘Like me.’

  Up and down Forty-second Street, the evening sidewalks were filling, overflowing. Outside the movie marquees, the night’s trade took up position, selling new sex and drugs, new deaths. ‘I got crack so good, it make wrong right,’ said a gray ghost by the Victory, leaning on a poster for Hot Saddle Tramp. He was seventeen, the same age as Wesley, but he had lost all his teeth except one, a top left molar, which he’d had filled with a diamond. It winked in his maw like a flashlight in an open-pit mine. ‘So good, so good,’ he said, ‘it certify your soul.’

  Underground was a whole other city. Between Times Square and Port Authority lay a labyrinth of subway corridors, platforms, and walkways, storage vaults, arcades. Men lived here, had lived here for years. Performers worked the junctions; doo-wop quartets singing ‘Heart and Soul,’ saxophonists playing ‘Giant Steps,’ mimes and jugglers, one-man bands.

  Below the Eighth Avenue exit, there were shinists and plastic-cheese sandwiches, vintage pinball machines. Set between a William’s Apollo and a Gottlieb’s Jack O’ Diamonds, at swim in stale urine, stood a Discover Your Destiny machine. STAND THE TEST OF FATE, it read; and one man did. A salesman clad in sky-blue polyester, he’d come here from Philly, got drunk, and had his wallet swiped. All that remained to him was a quarter and four pennies, but he was still game. He stuck the quarter in the slot and waited with hands upraised, fingers crossed. When Destiny’s card emerged, however, he was too soused to read it. ‘Fortune follows,’ he began. ‘Brave fortune follows brave.’ That much was clear, but the small print defeated him. ‘Snow use,’ he said. He tore the card into scraps, he hurled them at the wall. ‘No way to stand the test,’ he mumbled, ‘if the test can’t stand you.’

  Three blocks away, Larry Marshall heard the tale, and nodded. ‘Tell me ’bout it,’ he said. His laugh was strident, joyless. ‘It could have been me,’ he said.

  He sat alone in Barrymore’s, a theater bar on West Forty-fifth, sipping chastely at a Diet Coke. He had been testing for thirty years. He would not weep if he never tested again.

  It was strange in a way, because everybody on Broadway knew what he could do. Singer, dancer, and actor in one, he’d been in so many shows – Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar, The Three-penny Opera, a dozen more. He had sung doowop and Bernstein’s Mass, the Beatles and Palestrina. As Sportin’ Life in Porgy and Bess, he’d played the Met and all over the globe. He had even starred in a Broadway musical, Rockabye Hamlet. Admittedly, it ran only four nights. Still his name had topped the bill; he had lit up the Great White Way. That was a thing nobody could take from him. Yet here he was, facing fifty, still doing auditions.

  ‘It causes a man to ponder,’ he said. He was a walking lexicon, a glossary of performance. Perhaps some man alive on Broadway had worn more hats, played more fields. If so, nobody in Barrymore’s could conjure the name. ‘I covered the waterfront,’ Larry said.

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘I fell in.’

  Black, Irish, and Cherokee mixed, his flesh was a light caramel, his wide face dusted with freckles. He laughed a lot, very loud, and told many jokes. His melancholia seemed bottomless.

  In his nonage, he’d been rake-thin, a whip, but mileage had blurred the edges: ‘Scuffed the paintwork, played hell with the suspension,’ he said. There had been too many years on the road, too many rough nights in Jericho, and much too much to drink. Booze had hurt him, and hurt his work. In its thrall, he had grown bloated, lethargic: ‘A carcass,’ he said. But the drinking had stopped now; the weight was off. Inside Barrymore’s, Diet Coke in hand, Larry looked like an aging greyhound, race-scarred and a little lame, but a purebred still, styled to run.

  ‘How I got here from there? A very fine question,’ he said. He’d begun in Spartanburg, South Carolina, thirteen pounds at birth. His grandfather ha
d run away from a Cherokee reservation and married a black woman. He had a farm and a big old roomy house painted white, with chickens and goats in the yard, a horse, a cow. But he did not fit in the black community. He was a Catholic convert, a man of education. Priests said mass in the living room. Larry was named for St Lawrence. His mother was fifteen. For many years, Larry could not sleep unless he held her breast. His father, a sergeant from a nearby army post, had vanished overseas. Larry was told he was dead. Then his mother went away to Atlanta, to study in hair-dressing school. The house was full of aunts and uncles, massed cousins. Everybody talked at once. There was noise night and day. Out in the yard, alone, Larry killed baby chicks. Nobody could work out why. ‘Because they walk behind their mother,’ Larry said.

  He grew up circular, insatiable. He could not keep still, couldn’t seem to stay out of trouble. His mother married a man who worked in a funeral parlor and recoiled when Larry called him Daddy. More aunts and uncles appeared, a fresh batch of cousins. For Sunday lunch, Larry roasted his pet kitten in the oven. He was four, turning five. The weekend of his birthday, he wolf-whistled at a white woman outside the Palmetto Theater. His family decided he might be better off elsewhere.

  He had an aunt in New York, his mother’s elder sister. She’d married into a family of Cubans and Barbadians, they lived in Hamilton Heights, and Larry was sent on a visit. The visit never ended.

  ‘My aunt’s whole existence was a sigh,’ Larry said. She tried to keep Larry a baby forever, washed him and dressed him till he was ten. But not everyone was so pampering. In his life, somewhere in the neighborhood, was a man he would not name; and this man lived to punish. All week he worked and kept count of Larry’s sins, totting up the whippings due. Friday he got paid; Saturday he whipped. And on certain Sundays, for variety, he’d hold a pillow over Larry’s mouth, smother him till he turned blue.

  ‘An education,’ Larry called it. Hamilton Heights today was crackhouse heaven, but back then it was genteel, a symbol of black progress. Duke Ellington lived down the block, Mary Lou Williams around the corner. Larry’s uncle, a postal clerk, owned a four-floor brownstone, weighty as a citadel, all scrubbed and gleaming with dark-red woods.

  Locked in his bedroom, Larry lived in front of the full-length mirror. He was skinny now, a baggage of bones. A snapshot of him as an altar boy showed a Belsen child, sunken-cheeked, head lolling, with only the eyes left alive. At school he wore a West Point uniform and saluted each time a nun passed by. In his mirror, he was Captain Fantastic; he mimed to the Make-Believe Ballroom. He had two ambitions – to be a priest, to play the tenor sax – and could not choose.

  In a sense, he never had. By the time he entered his teens, he was a soloist with the Corpus Christi choir, performing Gregorian chants and Fauré’s Requiem; and smoking reefer and drinking Thunderbird and singing falsetto with a doowop quartet, a cappella in a local graveyard.

  The quartet was led by a smooth operator named David. They called themselves the Del-Chords and wore matching high-school sweaters with D-C logos. Jet magazine wrote them up; they seemed set for stardom: ‘Only thing wrong,’ Larry said. ‘We sang too good.’

  Too schooled, too clean – they did not sound black, but they couldn’t pass for white. It was 1960, the high summer of the rock and roll gold rush. At the Brill Building, 1652 Broadway, every office and broom closet held next week’s Elvis, last month’s Platters. You got in the elevator, and the Crests started singing Sixteen Candles. You stepped out in the lobby, and Jackie Wilson sang Lonely Weekends.

  At the corner, Broadway at Forty-ninth, was a coffee shop called the Turf. Its legal capacity was 83 but, one Monday lunchtime, Larry counted 226, all scatting and riffing at once: the Skyliners and the Spaniels, the Jesters and Chantels, the Ravens and Falcons and Flamingos and Crows; and the Cadillacs and the Impalas, the Eldorados and the Edsels; and Ben E. King and the Drifters; and Leiber & Stoller, and Goffin & King; Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman; and Neil Sedaka and Frankie Valli; and Little Eva, Lavern Baker, Clyde McPhatter, Sam Cooke; and one small squirt with thinning hair and bad skin, who never picked up a tab. Phil Spector, his name was.

  The Del-Chords were lost in the crush. They did a hundred auditions, stood a hundred tests, but always somebody sang louder and dressed flashier. Besides, David’s true dream was to be a gangster. When the group’s break came at last and they appeared on a Martha Raye telethon, he found he’d run out of cigarettes. So he robbed a drugstore. Next morning, when Larry woke to read the review in the Daily News, he found instead a front-page picture of David in handcuffs, screaming abuse from the back of a Black Maria.

  ‘Martha Raye did not book us back,’ Larry said. With the Del-Chords kaput, he moved to the Sierras. They made a record, ‘I’ll Believe It When I See It,’ that reached ninety-eight on the Billboard Hot Hundred. Then the girl singer, Cassandra, got pregnant or married, the Sierras broke up, and Larry could never again hear an Oldies but Goodies show without he felt sick to his stomach. ‘The Dubs, the Silhouettes. Lee Andrews and the Hearts,’ he cried. ‘It could have been me.’

  The saxman rebuffed, it was the turn of the priest. Even while he haunted the Brill Building, he had been conducting choirs, studying classical voice. Now he won music scholarships to Xavier in New Orleans, the New England Conservatory.

  He was twenty-one. In his life, he had never spent one day out of reach of mothering women: ‘Females trying to make me female, too.’ As long as he could remember, he’d ached to break free, be alone. And at last his chance had come. In New Orleans he played Beatles songs and hootenanny on Bourbon Street, got drunk every morning and laid every night; in Boston he played drums, sat in with John Coltrane. ‘I was my own man. Alone,’ Larry said, exulting. And his first trip home to New York, he got married to his high-school sweetheart: ‘Not to be alone.’

  His wife’s father was Avon Long, self-styled the Great Avon. He was a cornerstone of the black theater; had been, after John Bubbles, the second man to play Sportin’ Life in Porgy and Bess. Thirty years on, he was playing him still. The next time he went touring, Larry understudied him.

  ‘He tutored me the world,’ Larry said. For ninety days, the company rode America, pent up in a bus with a broken-down driver called Wrong-Way Wally. They traveled Tennessee and Georgia, Texas and Alabama, sharing seven-dollar rooms in Holiday Inns; snatching breakfasts in carparks while hating white faces stared in through the bus windows; playing cards all day, shooting craps by night; cheating, lying, pulling knives; hunting pigs’ feet and deviled brains in the Bottoms; rolling and racing, never sleeping: ‘Drinking, doping, just dying,’ said Larry. ‘I wished it would never end.’

  It was the first time he had been black. And the first time he’d had a father. ‘Avon Long?’ Larry said. ‘A piece of work.’ A man in a lavender suit, with accessories in green and gold, Avon played Sportin’ Life as a black leprechaun, mercurial, serpentine, all slick-sharp angles and hissing venom. ‘Picture Ariel as a motherfucker,’ Larry said. But off-stage, on the bus, Avon had been more like Prospero. ‘Cantankerous, capricious. A total egomaniac,’ Larry said. Yet a great magician withal. ‘That was the key,’ Larry said. ‘Everything else about him contradicted. He was a braggart, a blowhard, but he loved silence. He lived in bars but craved solitude. He’d been a Communist with Paul Robeson, he was a rebel always, but his hobbies were playing solitaire and watching reruns of “Perry Mason.”’ Only the magic was constant: ‘The sorcery of performance.’

  This was his great gift to Larry – the sense that performers were born special, a breed apart; that if they took care of their art, somehow God would take care of them. In his blood, he’d always believed it. But Avon made it law: ‘A life sentence,’ Larry said. ‘You got the gift. Go use it.’ He sighed a heavy sigh; he called for more Diet Coke. ‘I was not given a choice,’ he said.

  That was twenty years ago, rising twenty-five. In that span, theater life had changed utterly. When Larry first came to Broadway, there had been a kinship, a s
ense of shared excitement. ‘You didn’t just show up, do your stuff, and go home,’ he said. ‘You were part of something living. You belonged.’ Performers who worked together drank together, stayed up too late, talked too much, and got too loud together. They knew how to celebrate, and there was just cause for celebration: ‘You were alive, you were talented and working. You were on Broadway,’ Larry said, ‘and Broadway was the world.’

  Not anymore. In these last years, the theater had shrunk in on itself, grown grudging and hard as a shriveled walnut. Soaring overheads, Equity wars, the fifty-dollar ducat, the Japanese invasion, and the triumph of size over substance, special effects over special performers – the list of causes was tedious to recite, drabber still to contemplate. Broadway shows were now the province of corporate fatcats, all expense accounts and muffled snores. If you truly loved the theater, odds were, you couldn’t afford to go.

  ‘It used to be the Business. Now it’s just a business,’ Larry said. He himself had survived, just about. But it had been a split decision. He’d worked with Joseph Papp at the Public Theater, with Leonard Bernstein in Washington, with Allen Toussaint in New Orleans. He had worked clubs, cathedrals and casino lounges, La Scala and Covent Garden; played Cab Calloway in The Cotton Club, and Simon Zealotes in Jesus Christ Superstar; served fourteen years as Sportin’ Life. Yet always, even in his flushest times, he had felt himself teetering, scrabbling for footing and balance, one step away from a fall. ‘Petrified,’ he said. ‘Scared stiff to be alone. Scared worse not to be.’

  He seemed to have no safe niche. He was too light to be dark, too black to be white. On Broadway these days, there were plenty of roles for mail-order brothers. If only he’d looked more street, he could have played the pimps and dope pushers that honky producers craved. It could have been me. But he was not the type, couldn’t pass: ‘Not the right degree of nigger,’ he said.