Touch and Go

by Studs Terkel

  Remember the two-day silent blockbuster, Beau Geste? (Sure, its hero Ronald Colman had a growth, but he was a Brit, so it didn’t count.) Remember how this movie opens? There are louts, clods, and poltroons whom the screen offers us as heroes: the French Foreign Legion. Their fortress has guns pointed out of each turret, aimed at the advancing Arabs. We realize that in a moment the outnumbered Legionnaires will be dead. Among the Legionnaires, especially the Geste brothers were true Kiplingesque heroes . . . “Theirs not to reason why, theirs to do or die.” Among them is a wretched coward, Boldini, played by William Powell, mustachioed, of course.

  Comes the first full-length talking picture, Interference. We now hear the plum-rich voice of Powell; no villain this one. He, indubitably a good guy, gives up his life to knock off the troublesome Evelyn Brent and thereby save the marriage of Doris Kenyon, the woman he loves. We think further of Powell and his incredible good luck with talkies. He is teamed up with the wondrous Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles in the Thin Man series; cold martinis and the witty stuff of Dashiell Hammett.

  The one I best and most reverently remember as my mustachioed hero of the silents, aside from the Little Tramp of Charlie Chaplin, is Raymond Griffith. He was aptly described as Chaplin in a top hat, white gloves, and cape; with a slight buzz that added to his charm. I have no idea how talkies may have affected his career as an actor. But I shall never, ever forget him in a talking movie, an adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front. He didn’t utter a word, yet his quite brief scene still astonishes me. How long ago was it? Would you believe seventy-five years?

  It is during World War I. Lew Ayres plays the lead, a young German soldier, Paul. During an horrendous battle Paul finds himself in a foxhole with a French poilu, played by Raymond Griffith. Remember, it’s the first time I’ve seen this iconic comic actor in years. Here he is, stabbed to death a moment ago by Paul. As Lew Ayres, the actor, looks over the letters and notes of the dying Griffith, he bursts into uncontrollable sobs and begs forgiveness. Ayres was great, but it is the mute performance of Griffith that haunts me even as I type these words. His look is one of wonderment. Bewilderment. I never met this handsome young German kid in my life. Why has he bayoneted me to death as I had been taught to do unto him? That brief moment, lasting but a few seconds, his death pose in the trench, his eyes open yet unseeing—is that a world-weary Griffith smile pasted onto a corpse?—tells us all we need to know of the absurdity of war.

  We had known Griffith as the cheery, generous-hearted, slightly plastered peace courtier. It was peace at any cost. Consider, in a long-forgotten farce, the two attractive young women who love him and seek marriage. He loves them both. Equally. How did the Raymond Griffith modus vivendi work out in this instance? He packed both women into his roadster and off they drove. The film ends with a rear bumper sticker: BOUND FOR SALT LAKE CITY.2

  There are a number of memorable scenes in All Quiet, yet this is the one that’s hung on to me. Lewis Milestone, the director, chose the perfect actor for that tragic cameo role, a grand comic with a mischievous mustache.

  A long-delayed confessional. Call it contrition, though it warrants no forgiveness. Lew Ayres, as a result of his role in the film (still one of the strongest of antiwar movies) was converted into a conscientious objector. He took a public stand that no doubt may have disturbed his career. World War II had begun. I was conducting a local commentary series on a Chicago radio station. There were no tapes then. I have recently searched for a copy of the script, yet somehow I’ve lost it. Fortunately. It may have been the most craven thing I’ve ever done. I’m sure the loss was Freudian.

  I was criticizing Ayres, gently, of course (making it all the worse; I should have worn the mark of T for toady as Hester wore A for adultery). I was righteously addressing Ayres, in sorrow, of course (this sounds worse and worse as I type it) for his hurting the efforts to recruit soldier boys. I am fairly certain he never heard it. Mine was a limited local audience.

  I had the effrontery to call him years later while I was working on the oral history “The Good War.” I had intended to apologize and ask if he’d appear in the book as a conscientious objector. I had no chance to tell him my dirty little secret (he fortunately never found out). He was remarkably gracious, though by this time weary of the subject and planning a memoir of his own. I don’t think he ever got around to it.

  AS NATACHA, oh so gently, touched my cheek—eighty-six years later, I’d say “sensually”—Sam lit his Turkish cigarette. Murad was his favorite brand. I’ve always wondered why Russian Jewish tailors preferred Turkish tobacco to all others. It was, I suspect, more expensive than, say, Camels, for which, said the billboard, you’d walk a mile. I remember the popularity as well as the aroma of Helmar and Melachrinos among his collegial craftsmen.

  As a prelude to his lighting up, he invariably tapped the elegantly long cigarette against the hard Murad case. He was at the moment Noël Coward; but once he lit up and blew smoke rings in the air, the cigarette poised between thumb and index finger, he was transformed into Uncle Vanya. He offered Natacha one, of course. Her smoke rings matched his. They needed no Chesterfield ad to tell them what to do.

  The most popular billboard of them all was the Chesterfield ad: a pretty girl—was she a John Held Jr. lovely?—invited the unseen other to “Blow some my way.” As the smoke wafted in, hers was a more satisfied smile. No Mona Lisa, that one. I don’t recall whether she had as yet removed her earrings.

  Of all the works of billboard artistry, the ones that still impress me most were devoted to the delightfulness of cigarettes. From time to time, there were the scolds and Cassandras whom the tobacco industry had to deal with. The Lucky Strikers and the others did not have as rough a time as they do now, but there were troublemakers.

  During the resurgence of the suffragist movement, early in the century (the twentieth), the tobacco companies discovered an astonishing spokesman who was master of his craft. I had the enthralling experience of meeting Edward Bernays a number of times. Always there was the professorial air: the graying well-trimmed mustache; the spectacles; the easy, witty conversation. He was a pioneer, in fact; a revolutionary in his field. He had a reputation as a free thinker on the liberal side. But a job is a job is a job. He was the master of his. It was he and his way with words who transmuted “press agent” into “public relations counselor.”

  When we think of the press agent, we think of a cigar chosen from the lobby counter, of the medicine man hawking Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, or a jolly backslapping as a matter of reflex. A genial drinking companion.

  Edward Bernays, in the manner of a medieval alchemist, had transmuted dross into the semblance of gold. It doesn’t matter that the work itself hasn’t altered. They are still coat holders for their clients. What Bernays had done, in fact, was to affect our daily working vocabulary. When I was in the tall grasslands of Inner Mongolia some twenty years ago, I heard the Chinese interpreter teach his Mongolian colleague what a PR man does. He used the actual English initials. I realized in that revelatory moment that, among words or phrases universally understood, whether you are in Inuit country or Tierra del Fuego, “PR” rates along with “Taxi!” and “No problem.” Some years later, in reflecting on the pretty girl in the Chesterfield ad pleading “Blow Some My Way,” I thought of Bernays. It may have been a sign that the wind was blowing his way.

  The last time I saw Bernays, he was approaching the century mark. He was frail and hard of hearing, and his memory played hide-and-seek at times, but he still had almost all his marbles.

  I put the earphones on him. It was a tape recording we had done years before. Immediately on hearing his younger voice, his face glowed with the wonder of a child. The subject was the nature of his work and, in this instance, of his powerhouse client—the tobacco industry. He was recounting an early moment in the twentieth century, when the feminist movement was in its resurgence. Names come to mind. Margaret Sanger. Helen Keller. Alice Paul. Jane Addams. Florence
Kelley. They were advanced in many areas. Certainly the evils of tobacco were among them. Bernays himself was pro-suffragist as well as a peace and civil-rights advocate. But he did have a job to do, one of his biggest as a public-relations counselor: to make smoking cigarettes not only acceptable to the suffragists but a sign of liberation! And, to some extent, he succeeded. As I remember our conversation, to which he was listening at that moment, pressing the earphones tighter to himself, eyes wonder-wide, he had talked some of the spokeswomen, militant and courageous, into smoking during their celebratory march on Fifth Avenue. Puffing away publicly, lighting small fires of flaming tobacco, was their symbol of emancipation. As I relieved him of his earphones, he looked up at me. Mouth slightly open; a small boy bewildered by something. Was he aware of his giftedness and triumph? Did he realize the nature of his works, his expertise?

  Parenthetically, Edward Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud. Whenever he visited his uncle in prewar London he always presented him with a box of Havana cigars.

  MY FATHER was a master of his craft, too. He was a men’s tailor. I look at the gilt-edged daguerreotype of my two brothers, about four and six, in fancy woolen winter clothes sewn by Sam. What stand out are the earlaps, of identical corduroy fabric and design. They add just the right panache to the classy attire. You’d think the photo had been snapped by a Slavic Margaret Cameron. Oh, he was good, my father. I’m still much moved when I come across the picture of the three of us boys. There I am, in my little white nightgown, two years old, looking somewhat bewildered. I am standing on a stool as my two brothers (each in short pants, made by my father, of course) pose protectively on each side of their darling baby brother. When my father and his young wife, Annie, arrived in New York from the Russian-Polish border city, Bialystok, they were both good at what they tackled. She was a nimble-fingered seamstress. When she was not at the factory during a strike or slack time, I still see her, in our living room, on her knees, pins in her mouth, fitting a neighbor woman into a new dress.

  It may have been in 1902 or ’03 when they arrived. It was quota time instituted by the Brahminesque Henry Cabot Lodge, a quota aimed primarily at Italian immigrants. A shoemaker, Nicolo Sacco, and a fish peddler, Bartolomeo Vanzetti, may have been among them.

  I look, from time to time, at an old-world gilt-framed daguerreotype of my mother, Annie, and my father, Sam. It is so obviously unlikely a pairing, and the photograph says it all. His curly-cued flowing jet-black mustachio gives him an Italian look: a Calabrian or Sardinian. He is Mateo Falcone of Sardinia’s best credentials for honesty, courage, and above all, sanctuary to all seeking to escape from authority.3 His eyes appear bright, blazing and ready to face the day, whatever it may bring.

  She wears a pince-nez, which instantly adds an air of anxiety to her eyes that appears at odds with her piercing, squinty look. Could it be fear, for which I could sense no reason? I was about to say there was a wild touch to her portrait, but that would be redundant.

  These two were not born to be a vaudeville team. They were certainly no clones of George Burns and Gracie Allen. No, not even Broderick and Crawford, with the acerbic Helen and the easy-does-it Lester. HE: “Do you mind if I smoke?” SHE: “I don’t care if you burn.” How often had my brother Ben and I seen their act and how many times had we fallen out of our second balcony seats at the Palace on hearing that line as though for the first time?

  No, Sam and Annie were creatures of different spheres whom some God of the perverse had blessed and cursed into union.

  It was my father’s popularity among his landsmen and the women that I remember best. He was the one they all sought as a guest at gatherings. He was easy and quiet in speech and small matters, avoided gossip, admired Gene Debs because he thought all union people did that. It was Gene’s style of speech, easy as well as fervent, that won them over. My old man puffed away at his Mu-rads, sipped tea and sampled cakes—life was paradise now. Of the mother of us all, Annie, he said little in public; though there was much commiseration offered, he accepted none. The words he would say of her: “She’s a nervous woman.” He was right. She had from the moment she first appeared anywhere—a weekend vereins party, a neighborhood gathering—added not so much a spark as a blast to the proceedings.

  Consider a jovial gathering at the home of my wealthy uncle (the one who lent us money for our Chicago adventure, money which we returned), general laughter, sighs of contentment. It all changes in an eyeblink. She appears at the threshold. A sudden silence possesses the parlor. A tension. She merely poses, all 5’1” of her, smiles softly. The hostess timidly approaches her and offers tea and cakes. My mother demurely accepts. The festivities resume, but there is always the fear of some sort of outburst. It could be as mild as a narrowing of the eyes, or of slightly more dramatic intensity.

  Often Dora and Herb would appear at these gatherings of landsmen from the shtetl near Bialystok. Dora, working day and night running a bakery, is something of a lackey. Herb, always, always looking for work, somehow never finds any that suits him. Herb’s favorite pastime is puffing away on a Charles Denby ten-cent cigar. (Thomas Marshall, Woodrow Wilson’s vice president, memorably commented: “What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar.”) While Herb is looking heavenward, admiring the smoke rings, my mother simply takes the cigar from his hand. As he watches, she smashes it into the standing ashtray, grinding and grinding until it is bereft of smoke. “So much for you and your ten-cent cigar. Go help Dora in the kitchen. What is she, your slavey?” Perhaps she saw her own mother, Fanny, in Dora. Fanny, the widow baker, her hands huge from kneading, calloused and bruised.

  The story goes that Annie had once been engaged to a dentist. It was he who had been her first shot at the brass ring. Though nothing like a great beauty, she was lively, in her quicksilver Ruth Gordon way, but his family had rebuffed her. Not of the same class. On the rebound, she married the easygoing, genial Sam.

  Late on Friday nights, still awake though pretending sleep, I’d await my father’s return.

  I shared my bed with my father. There was a weekly poker game at the Harkaveys’. Usually, my father lost. In no way did that prevent my mother from going through his tossed-aside trousers and searching the pockets. When, on rare occasions, he wound up a winner, she mumbled, “Well, well, well,” and extracted a few bills. On the usual empty night of the hunter when the pheasant was not there, she cursed to herself. It was nothing loud, not even bitter; merely further proof that her life was one of wasted chances. As for Sam and Annie, how did these ill-matched two ever share a bed? More to the impertinent point, how did they ever cohabit? Helen Morgan, an iconic singer of American musicals, the ideal torch singer, is, in my mind, seated on the piano top. She sings “Why Was I Born?” Of course. I am guessing that my brothers had joined me in asking the most pertinent of all questions: How were we conceived?

  Annie doesn’t live here anymore and yet she does in me. I am genetically more hers than his. The imp of the perverse has come to possess me and has had a pretty good run of it. From time to time, a touch of contrition may appear. It is the best way of paying tribute to Annie.

  MY HEAD was often swathed in bandages due to my bouts of mastoiditis. It was described as an inflammation of the middle ear and frequently afflicted small boys. Abscesses came uninvited, aches that led us to tightly cup our diseased ears. I have noticed in recent years—say, 2006—young girls and boys walking the streets in like manner; hand over ear, intently listening, oblivious to all surrounding them, including fellow humans. Oh, my God, is there a recurrence of mastoiditis, as may be the case with tuberculosis? No, dearie, it is our young using their cell phones.

  I was a constantly sick child. I had a case of whistling asthma. It had its whimsical as well as its traumatic moments. At night, with my whistle-as-I-breathe especially clear, my eldest brother, Meyer, seven years up on me, would sing along, “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” or an ethnic pop song, “Lena is the Queen of Palestina.” And where did Meyer pick up
“I Shook the Hand of the Man Who Shook the Hand of John L. Sullivan”? Ben, five years my senior, would croon “My Gal Sal” or “I Wonder What’s Become of Sally.” Sally was, hands down, the most popular lost heroine of song and story.

  Aside from a foggy memory of being in a Manhattan hospital ward, the mastoid kid, with my bandaged head, my more graphic childhood memories lay in Clinton, an ever-busy street in the Bronx. There was often a moment of awe, and also a show of respect for our betters.

  It was usually in the late afternoon that an electric automobile made its ten-miles-an-hour tour of the block. Two elegant elderly ladies were seated up front. They wore Queen Mary hats. Had we worn hats, we’d have doffed them. Our tiny caps did come off. A matter of reflex. What I remember best is the silver lever in place of the steering wheel, so serenely handled. The confident manner—an up, down, and away motion—was an art form wholly strange to the children on the street.

  Ours was a triply diverse neighborhood: Irish, Italian, and Jewish. There was the occasional Dutch boy whom we reflexively called Van. He was no child of a wealthy patron. His father was a sanitation employee doing the best he could with the city’s considerable detritus. Yet the boy always called on his family’s escutcheon: “I am a descendant of Peter Stuyvesant.” Unfortunately, his constantly running nose, always wiped clean by his left sleeve (he was a southpaw) didn’t help his case.