Touch and Go

by Studs Terkel

  Our themes were all about ordinary things, about daily life. Today some would say that’s too dull, the lack of glamour. But the ordinariness is what made it unique, and people loved Studs’ Place. The character I played was both good and bad, pointing up the frailties of human nature: I could be benevolent; I could be a faker and a phony, too.

  There were all kinds of actors around Chicago, and Charlie had the idea of doing a show about a bottle of cognac and a janitor. We hired Kurt Kupfer, a real honest-to-God Belgian actor who happened to be working as a janitor. He was a war refugee. In the show, Kupfer plays a janitor whose daughter is getting married. What shall we give as a gift? On the wall of Studs’ Place is a bottle of cognac, 1812 cognac, a Napoleonic brand of cognac. It’s fantastic, and it’s there to be seen. My pride as well as my ego is at stake. But Win has this idea: “How about us giving the bottle of cognac to the janitor and the daughter? And during the presentation we sip from it and toast the bride. Wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing?”

  I say: “Are you out of your mind? On a wall, it adds class. It’s there. People look at it. We’ll waste it!”

  Win says, “Is it wasting it to give it to a battered old boy at a high moment in his life? That’s real class.”

  Something happens during the show. We hear the old guy talking and I’m affected by his words. We take the bottle down off the wall, Win opens it, and Kurt Kupfer says, “Is this for me and my child?”

  “Yeah,” I say, “It’s for you. I thought we would toast your daughter.” I ask myself, rhetorically, “Now what’s more important, that or keeping the wine on the wall?” At times I can be such a phony.

  The show was so filled with the ordinary that people thought it took place in a real restaurant. Bev started wearing a waitress’s union button out and about, and often a waitress would say, “Why are you letting Studs talk to you that way?” Years after the show ended, people would say, “Where is it? Where is Studs’ Place?”

  We started rehearsing on Monday for Friday’s show. Tuesday we come back, it’s still very rough. By Friday it’s pretty well ready and we have a dress rehearsal and then go live. We never had a script. Charlie and I would do the plot, or a guy named Bob Hartman, or Red Bunning once in a while, but mostly it was Charlie and me, with Dan Petrie directing. We’d make it a simple plot, meet, and read it to the cast. Bit by bit, out of the actor would come the lines; the dialogue had to be from them, the words were the actors’ own. Thus the credits read: “Dialogue by the Cast.”

  Bev walked out after the first rehearsal. No script. She’s an actress. Whoever heard of no script? “Where are the lines?”

  “The lines come from you, your experience.”

  She said, “I can’t do that.”

  I said, “Try it.” She did and she was wonderful. She’d traveled around the country doing summer stock versions of Broadway hits. Being intelligent and thoughtful, she remembered waitresses from all these small-town restaurants, women who had a mother wit about them, and she used those memories.

  In Chet’s case, he was familiar with guys who hung around in the half-world. Chet had phrases like, “Here comes Joe Books,” an intellectual guy. “Joe Loot,” rich guy. “Joe Dames,” ladies man.

  We did a show about quitting smoking, way back around 1950. I knew a doctor in New Orleans, one of the first MDs to speak against cigarettes. We see Chet starting to light up and we’re going to fine him. “That’s ten bucks.”

  “What are you talking about? That’s not lit, it’s not lit.” Chet’s a good bit taller than I am and he’s pounding the cigarette against my forehead. “Is it lit? Is it lit? You don’t feel lit, do ya? Is it lit?! What do you think I am, a Dick Smith or somethin’?” He’d make up these names. I don’t know who Dick Smith was, but apparently in the underworld, they have phrases like that. “Dick Smith” might have stood for a liar and a thief, or a guy that didn’t keep his word. “What am I, a Dick Smith?”

  Every now and then we’d have con men in the plot. Charlie Andrews had an idea: two old con men, who are having a hard time, try to get a free meal. Of course, they have something to sell: a magic penknife. They come up to me, and in the meantime, Win, Bev, and Chet are suspicious of the two old mooches. We hired two very old actors to play the two old con men: Butler Mandeville, who was a gay guy about ninety, and Alex McQueen, a little fellow. This time, I’m being a good guy, I’m saying, “Gee, no kidding. A magic knife.” I like these two old guys ’cause they’re working so hard to convince me their knife is magic.

  Mike Royko once wrote a column about me and Willie the Weeper, this fifteen-year-old kid who weighed about three hundred pounds and mooched on Michigan Avenue. He’d corner you and start weeping, sobbing . . . “My mother . . .” And of course, you give him a buck. “My two little brothers, my sister . . .” Another buck. “Oh-h-h, the landlord . . .”

  Royko says, “Studs, you’re an easy mark.”

  I say, “Mike, have you forgotten what a great performance he gave? Now, how much would you pay to see Laurence Olivier or Marlon Brando? Here’s a kid who’s fantastic!”

  Same thing applies here. I know what these two old guys have is a plain old penknife. Mandeville says, “But it’s not a knife, it’s a remarkable thing.” He’s trying to pull it open, and it doesn’t work. “See what it does? Even pulling it out is tough.” They go into their routine.

  Meanwhile, Bev and Win are saying, “Gee, why is Studs spending time on this?”

  I say, “This is great. How much?”

  “Well, we’ll give you a bargain. We think ten dollars. This is worth a hundred.”

  I say, “You’re right.” I say, “How about a meal? We’ll call Louie the chef”—Louie never appears in person on the show—“Louie, a special meal! Bean soup, steak, everything, for our two honored guests.”

  It was a wonderful episode. I secretly sneak them a sawbuck. At the very end, the others are bawling me out. That’s when I say, “Didn’t you see a great performance? Didn’t you see everything they did? It was acting, good acting. Isn’t that worth a meal?”

  We finished the dress rehearsal and were going on live about two hours later. This was at the Studebaker Theatre on Michigan Boulevard. The show goes on in about fifteen minutes on the whole network, and suddenly the script girl is hollering, “Butler’s leaving!”

  “What?!”

  “Butler’s going into a cab!”

  “Oh, my god.”

  Butler says, “Well, the program’s over.” He was approaching senility and thought he’d put on the makeup and powder, done the show once, and that was that. We were lucky to grab him; we could have been in a hell of a jam. Live TV was a very different animal from what it is today.

  For a time we were kept going by a local sponsor, Manor House Coffee. Each week one of the cast took a turn. Flossie Murdoch of the Earl Ludgin agency would write a special commercial to fit each character, Win would sing a folksong, Chet would play a blues. I always signed off with, “We came to you from Chicago.”

  So it’s Chet’s turn, and Chet was impish, and in rehearsals he’d goof around and say, “Maxwell House Coffee”—which happened to be the name of Manor House’s big rival. We’d say, “Chet, don’t horse around.”

  “Nah, don’t worry. Maxwell House Coffee . . .”

  So the show is live, the commercial is in the middle of the show, and here comes the commercial. Chet’s playing and then he says, “So I give you . . .” We see him freeze, we die. He desperately blurts out “Maxwell House Coffee . . .”

  He finishes, and there’s a hush, and he turns pale. Now we have to pick up the show where we left off. Me and Bev and Win have one thing in mind: to keep Chet from jumping out the window—we were up on the fortieth floor. All we know is: Finish the show and grab Chet.

  Monte Kinney, who represents the sponsor, is on the set. The show ends, Chet runs out, we run after him, and Monte runs after all of us: “Chet, it’s OK, it’s not the end of the world.”

 
We try to grab Chet, he runs into the elevator, we jump in the next elevator and chase him. That was something. Imagine those last fifteen minutes. Somehow, we finished on time!

  One of the mysteries of the show was how we did manage to finish on time. To this day we still can’t figure that out. We talked about it for years afterward. How did we do it? We don’t know. It was free-flowing; a word or two might be changed as we went along. We got everything in and somehow it always finished on time.

  STUDS’ PLACE was finally dropped in 1951. The audience didn’t know why. It was a very popular show and I was being courted in New York, same as Mike Wallace. All of a sudden, we heard we were in trouble. NBC sent a New York public relations man in to see me. He said: “We’re in trouble because of you. There are all these petitions and your name is right near the top.” These were petitions for the Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, the Committee for Civil Rights, things of that nature.

  I said: “Yeah.”

  He said: “Don’t you know that Communists are behind these petitions?”

  I couldn’t help myself, I said: “Suppose Communists come out against cancer? Do we have to automatically come out for cancer?”

  He said: “That’s not very funny.” And then he says, “These days you have to stand up and be counted.” Well, another moment when the imp of the perverse, as Poe calls it, took over. I stood up. He said: “That’s not funny either.”

  We stopped being in trouble: They decided to drop the program.

  When we were finally knocked off the air, we did one last episode. In it, we lose our lease, and we’re saying good-bye to the joint. The show ends with Grace hanging up her apron, Chet closing the piano lid, Win hanging the guitar on the wall, and me just looking over the joint. That was it.

  Part III

  15

  American Dreamer

  I felt hopeful with the New Deal. During the Great Depression there was a feeling of despair. The people we had chosen to lead us out, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Eleanor, and the colleagues they chose, advocated governmental intervention as the free market fell on its ass. That gave me hope.

  I remember the day Roosevelt died. April 12, 1945. The Cold War was beginning and I was having trouble getting radio sponsors. This progressive guy from New York was sponsoring me and there was a gathering at the hotel. The word came, “The president is dead.” I left that party at the Palmer House. Everyone in the streets was crying, including me, leaning against a lamppost.

  Here’s the funny thing: Kennedy gets shot twenty-some years later, and this kid I know is visiting from my Air Force days. I’m about to take him out to eat and we get the word Kennedy’s dead. He starts crying, but not me. I felt bad, but I wasn’t crying. With Roosevelt a father died, you see. Someone who represented what you felt was hopeful. Someone you could lean on.

  When I interviewed Gardiner Means, an economist active in the New Deal, he said, “You have no idea how Washington changed almost overnight those first hundred days.” It was a slow, shuffling, fat city of the South, that’s all it was. Suddenly it became the center of an attempt to save a society. People came from places such as New York and Chicago, people who were never allowed in Washington before. The sons of rabbis, of priests, of ministers, of old professors arrived. Instead of approaching the country as though it were a Norman Rockwell painting, you saw a new approach of recognizing history and the needs of the people.

  Remember, Roosevelt was elected four times, and he died the second year of his last term. When we speak of the New Deal, for me, its brightest moment is FDR’s second term, 1936–1940, when tremendous revolutions occurred; when the federal agencies he’d created in the first term began to pay off by giving jobs and spirit to the American people.

  During the first term, 1932–1936, Roosevelt eliminated Prohibition right off the bat. With millions unemployed, he created the Civilian Conservation Corps, primarily for young guys, to help out their families, to provide unemployment relief. They planted trees, built roads, and sent most of the money home. Nineteen thirty-five was a big year: Social Security was enacted; the Works Progress Administration (WPA) came into being, run by Harry Hopkins, alongside the Farm Security Administration (FSA) and the Resettlement Administration (RA), headed by Rex Tugwell.

  It’s not that FDR himself was so brilliant, but he surrounded himself with people of vision: Hopkins, Tugwell, Frances Perkins as Secretary of Labor, Harold Ickes, who said of Thomas Dewey, “He looks like a bridegroom on a wedding cake,” and Henry Wallace.

  For the first two terms, Wallace was Secretary of Agriculture. He came from a family of longtime Republicans who had a populist sensibility. Wallace was a farmer and a brilliant agronomist who invented hybrid corn. That made him wealthy, but that didn’t change him. When he had lunch he’d ask, “You got any rat cheese?”

  Roosevelt appointed Wallace as his vice president in 1940. While Wallace was vice president he traveled around the world. When most vice presidents travel, they visit the mayor, the big shots and industrialists. Wallace was likely to go to the public library to look something up. So he’s somewhere in Bolivia or Argentina, gets off the train, no bodyguard, and has a look around. He sees a field, pulls up some of the wheat or corn and feels it, smells it. He speaks Spanish, and he says to the farmer, “This is good. Where did you get this? How do you do that?”

  He leaves and the farmer says, “Who is that guy? He sounds like a very good farmer.”

  “Oh, that’s the vice president of the United States.” That was Henry Wallace.

  Wallace was a key figure in the New Deal because he had all these ideas about improving farming methods and equipment. Having traveled, he’d picked up a thing or two and had some understanding of the rest of the world.

  It was Wallace who created the RA, under the Department of Agriculture, and along with the WPA set up these camps for the migrant workers. The camps were in particular parts of the country. In fact, there was a black camp. John Beecher, a progressive Southern poet and a descendent of Harriet Beecher Stowe, was in charge of a camp that had only black sharecroppers. They ran it and ran it beautifully.

  In the novel The Grapes of Wrath, Tom and Ma Joad, like thousands of other Okies, make the long trip to California hoping to get jobs picking crops of some sort. On the road they’re humiliated and beaten up by vigilantes, by the growers, by the Legionnaires. Suddenly they come to a camp. They think it’s just another jungle camp, but it isn’t, a sign says: RESETTLEMENT ADMINISTRATION, HENRY WALLACE, SECRETARY OF AGRICULTURE. An actor made up to look like FDR, wearing a pince-nez, says, “This is your camp.”

  Tom and his mother look at each other: “What do you mean, our camp?”

  “You and your colleagues who have come here are going to run this place. You people choose your committees. If someone is drunk, you kick him out. There are showers and ladies’ auxiliaries, and we try to find you jobs. But mostly you decide what’s going on.”

  Tom says, “Why aren’t there more places like this?”

  The guy says, “I wish I could tell you.”

  A man I call Paul Edwards in Hard Times describes how, as young men, he and his brother rode the freight trains going east, looking for work. They once found themselves on a fruit train, and because they were starving, they ate oranges until they couldn’t open their mouths anymore. Now and then there was a kindly railroad bull, but in the main the bulls just beat them and kicked them off. One day the train stops, the bulls come and say, “Everybody off!” Paul thinks, “Oh, God, here we go again, to the jail for vagrancy.” And instead, these are social workers, working for the federal government.

  The men are taken to this big camp and there are clean cots and clean linens and towels and soap and breakfast waiting—cereal, coffee, scrambled eggs. And Paul’s little brother, who was about sixteen, says, “Where are we?”

  Paul says, “We’re in heaven.” They find out this is part of the New Deal, the National Youth Administration (NYA). (Every state had one; in Texas
, the head of it was a young guy named Lyndon Baines Johnson.) They realize then that something new is going on: a government that cares. All this was happening under Henry Wallace.

  The RA is the group, in addition to the WPA, that set up these camps. Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, Ben Shahn, and Walker Evans, among the best of our photographers, were all part of the RA, and of what it later became, the Farm Security Administration (FSA). When we see the portraits made by Dorothea Lange, that famous shot of the mother and two kids, and the work of the others, all this came out of the New Deal.

  John Steinbeck might not have written The Grapes of Wrath were it not for the government. Steinbeck went to C.B. Baldwin of the RA and said, “I need somebody to be my guide, someone who can tell me how they lived, what they thought, the pea pickers, the fruit pickers.” And so a man named Tom Collins was assigned to him.

  Beanie Baldwin said, “What I did was probably illegal, but we helped him and Tom Collins with a buck or two.” Here’s a case where the government helped subsidize one of America’s classics.

  Steinbeck dedicated the book, not only to his wife, but also to Tom Collins. Steinbeck’s wife asked me to write the introduction to the fiftieth anniversary issue of The Grapes of Wrath. While I was working on it, Congressman Joe Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy’s son, called me to come visit the farmers of Iowa. Here it is the 1980s, and you’ve got farmers who are starving. You saw the Depression in the Iowa countryside: the topsoil worn out, dust, towns with FOR SALE signs everywhere. You’d see a mangy little dog running around, the only inhabitant of twenty or thirty streets.

  I ran into a farmer named Carroll Nearmyer, who could have been Pa Joad, his despair was so deep. He had a revolver at his side. He was prepared to kill himself. The circumstance was a replay of the Great Depression. But never once did you hear the word “Rea-ganville” in the eighties as you heard “Hooverville” in the thirties.