Somebody had left a Westfield Leader on the train, and I skimmed it as we rattled east.
Republicans Sweep Local Vote, Win All Four Council Seats.
What was my family doing here?
My father owned United Tire Sales on Broad Street in Newark, and instead of going bust in the crash, his used-tire business had wildly flourished. Nobody could afford new tires anymore, and he had thousands of used ones stacked to the ceiling. All at once he was pulling in so much money he didn’t know what to do with it. At one point we were hiding it in the oven. And in a daring gesture of social mobility (engineered by my mother, who, in her own way, was pretty courageous), we moved to our fairytale-looking Victorian house on Lawrence Avenue in Westfield, where the green-eyed Lutherans grew.
I changed trains at Newark for the Hudson Tubes, and I was trying hard to hold on to my sense of energy and optimism. I checked my reflection in the window— O.K., smooth the part in the hair, bring down the shoulders a little bit, loosen the intensity around the eyes, add just the subtlest suggestion of an ironic smile. Gabel in It Happened One Night. Energy and maybe even a little arrogance. (“Yes, I love her, but don’t hold it against me; I’m a little screwy myself.”)
I held the Hamlet cover up to the window next to my reflection and tried to mimic Gielgud’s august and severe pose. I heard my John Barrymore record in my head: Presenting John Barrymore, crown prince of the royal family of the American theatre, as Hamlet, melancholy lover of Shakespeare’s immortal drama!
I arched my eyebrows with great dramatic intensity, pulled at my collar like the drunken wreck of a once-great stage performer, and, loudly, since nobody else was in the car, went into my Barrymore impersonation. It was an English accent that no Englishman would have found remotely recognizable. I knew the whole record by heart: “Ladies and gentlemen, I feel quite sure that you are all so well acquainted with this famous soliloquy from Hamlet that any attempt at elucidation on my part, other than the soliloquy itself, might be justly considered a bit of impertinence. As you remember, it goes as follows. (Long pause) ‘To be . . . or not to be . . . That is the question. Whether ’tis nobler—’ ”
The ticket-taker was staring down at me.
“Just practicing,” I said. “Vocal exercises.”
New York was alive with rich people in Packards honking their horns at the buses, beautiful women in fur coats, panhandlers begging for a nickel, and street-vendors selling steaming ears of corn.
I bought a bag of peanuts (“A Bag a Day for More Pep”) and turned up my collar against the wind. This indeed, I thought, was the figure I was born to cut—hands deep in the pockets of my enormous Russian coat, hat at a suitably Bohemian tilt, striding uptown with nothing to do but feel wonderful.
I needed a song. It was the game I played in New York, choosing my audition song for that moment when Jed Harris, leaning forward from his second-floor window, phone jammed against his ear, would cry out: “Wait a minute, Murray. You’re not going to believe this, but I think our Kid just walked by!”
So far this hadn’t happened.
I sang to myself “Have You Got Any Castles?” which was my favorite song at the moment. It was number five on the Hit Parade. And I was a serious chronicler of the Hit Parade; I listened with my notebook open, entering the top ten songs next to my neatly prenumbered list. My notebooks went back to 1935.
I walked up to the Gaiety on Broadway to look through the new sheet music. “Once in a While” was playing in the store. There was all sorts of stuff I hadn’t heard yet, including some new Richard Rodgers from I’d Rather Be Right.
At the upright piano in the corner, trying out a new song, sat a sort of poetic-looking girl about my age. She wore wire-rim glasses and had one of those dark-haired, milk-white faces that I’m a sucker for. Every year I fell for a face like that—and they were always named Gretchen or Marian. And they’d sit in Honors English and drop references to all these books I’d never quite gotten around to reading, quoting beautiful lines of poetry right out of the air. “Doesn’t Keats have a line about that?” they’d say to the teacher so quietly it was almost a private conversation. The teacher nodded and beamed, and the rest of us were thinking: “Who the hell is Keats?”
Well, she sat at the piano playing “Nice Work if You Can Get It”—so slowly it sounded like a dirge. She wore a floral vest over a large comfortable-looking lavender shirt, blue jeans, and unpolished saddle shoes. Her hair was pulled back in a George Washington.
“Swell tune,” I said. I leaned against the piano, smiling with the casualness of a natural-born fraud. “And you play it with real feeling.” (Make the other person feel important—and do it sincerely.)
“God, it’s so sad, isn’t it?” she said. “This just makes me want to cry.”
“You could probably pick up the tempo a little bit.”
“No, I mean Gershwin being dead and all. The fact that we’ll never have another Gershwin song.”
I nodded.
“No more Gershwin music—just this sort of dead air.” She stopped playing. “Wouldn’t that make a great title for a story—‘Dead Air’?”
“Sure. I guess. I mean, well, you know, a sort of depressing story.”
She whipped out a notepad from her back pocket and wrote down the title. The skin of her cheeks and ears was so pale you could see the veins beneath it. “Did you hear what happened to Porter?” she asked. “Had a riding accident and broke his legs? I wonder if he’ll still be able to write.” She stood up and massaged the small of her neck with her fingertips. “They don’t like me sitting here not buying anything.”
“You know so much about music, are you a songwriter?”
“I’m a real writer,” she said. “Of course, Gershwin is a real writer. Was a real writer.” Then she was putting on her coat, and the salesman was closing in on us rapaciously.
“So what do you write?” I asked. (Talk in terms of the other person’s interest.)
She stopped and touched her neck again. From one of the booths I could hear somebody listening to “Have You Met Miss Jones?”
“God, I like that song,” she said.
“Beau-dee-ful melody,” said the salesman: a short guy who looked as if someone had just poured hair tonic on his face. “There’s only one man on earth who can write a melody like that. Rodgers. Just got copies today.”
“His melodies are like lullabies, aren’t they?” the girl said to me.
“Beau-dee-ful,” said the salesman.
“And he knocks ’em out in ten minutes,” I said. “I heard him on John Gassner.”
“You listen to that, too? God, sometimes I think I’m the only one in New York who listens to that show. Can you imagine just sitting down and coming up with the melody to ‘Small Hotel’?”
“We got ‘Small Hotel’!” said the salesman. “Ten weeks on the Hit Parade. Couldn’t keep it in the store.” He was wildly trying to locate a copy on the wall. “People came in. Didn’t even ask what they wanted. Just handed them a copy.”
“I’d give my blood to write any five notes as beautiful as the first five notes to ‘Small Hotel,’ ” she said.
“What do you write, uh—”
“Gretta. I haven’t written anything very significant yet,” she said. “Actually, I’m trying to write a play.”
“A play? Wow. That’s interesting, because I’m a sort of actor.”
“Really? What have you done?”
“Oh,” I said, “you know, Federal Theatre mostly. It Can’t Happen Here . . . Injunction Granted . . . the Voodoo Macbeth.”
She smiled at my lunatic catalogue of lies. “I thought the Voodoo Macbeth had an all-Negro cast.”
“Well, I stood in the shadows most of the time. So you’re really a writer, Gretta?” (Remember that a man’s name is to him the sweetest and most important sound in any language.)
“I wish I could convince the New Yorker of that. And then my parents. And then myself. Actually, I’d skip my parents and my
self, if I could just convince the New Yorker. Did you read the John Cheever piece about his childhood maid? God, that was so beautiful. And so quiet, you know? Just this small miracle. Have you gone to the Times bookfair yet? Don’t. It’s lousy. And so crowded. I gotta go, uh—”
“Richard,” I said. “Do you want to have—”
“Good luck with your acting. Wouldn’t this make a great scene for a story?” she said. “Just two people meeting like this? Nothing more. It’s just so New York.”
Later that afternoon I took a bus downtown to the library. I thought maybe I’d read some plays.
I studied the piece of sheet music I’d bought: “Have You Met Miss Jones?” Sam H. Harris presents Geo. M. Cohan in the new musical comedy I’d Rather Be Right. Book by Geo. S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. Lyrics by Lorenz Hart. Music by Richard Rodgers.
The electricity of those names! They radiated a kind of significance. Kaufman . . . Hart . . . Rodgers. And they walked the same streets I did.
The bus stopped at 42nd Street in front of the library, and I noticed a little action down beyond Bryant Park. I walked toward Sixth, and there on West 41st Street was a truck, a ladder, and a group of people standing outside a theatre.
Three
On the side of the theatre, painted on the brick wall, an old sign still read Comedy Theatre, but a new electrical sign was being bolted into the brickwork at the center of the building. Its wires trailed through the third-floor window.
A dozen people stood outside. Nearly all of them looked to be in their twenties.
“Wait a second! Wait a second!” yelled a hatless guy with curly sand-colored hair. He was calling up to the electrician. “Don’t do anything ’til I come back.”
The guy on the ladder called down, “I shouldn’t be doing this on the Sabbath. The Talmud says—”
Everybody groaned.
“Thus spake the Rabbi,” said a heavy-set young man with a British accent. He leaned a foot on the fire hydrant in front of the theatre. He was dressed in an expensive-looking coat, and, clearly, he was in charge. Next to him stood a young woman holding a clipboard. She was hardly older than I was. She wore no coat: a gray sweater with its sleeves pulled back. College, I thought. Below the sweater she wore—long and loose—a brown and gray tweed skirt. The stitched collar of the sweater was highlighted by a string of pearls. Her face was round, shadowed—the eyes dark, sharp, staring down at the ground in thought. Her chestnut hair was parted exactly in the middle and then pulled back tightly. Running from behind her ears, around the top of her head, almost like a tiny garland, was a hairband designed to resemble a slender braid of chestnut hair. I thought: How could one city be filled with so many striking women?
She looked up suddenly, right at me—took my measure, smiled—then returned her gaze downward.
My blood pulsed.
“Will somebody go find Orson?” said the man with the British accent.
There came the sound of jackhammering down the street—and then there was an ambulance, lights flashing, pulling up in front of the theatre. No one seemed to notice it.
One of the lobby doors opened and the curly-headed guy ran out carrying a snare drum on a stand. “Wait! Don’t start ’til I get this set up.” He was like a one-man Three Stooges trying to set up the drum kit. The cymbal went rolling down the sidewalk. I caught it. He tentatively hit the drum a few times, then spoke into the drumstick. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, this is Ben Bernie and all the lads coming to you live from the beautiful Derelict Theatre on West 41st Street—yowzah!”
“Sonja, will you tell Orson to get out here?” said the British gentleman. He sneezed, then wiped his nose with his handkerchief.
“Difficult to tell Orson anything,” said the girl.
Somebody said, “Tell him there’s a dozen young, well-toned ballerinas out here. That’ll get him out.”
People laughed.
I watched as she pushed open the theatre door.
“Well, she’ll be gone for an hour.”
“Steady, lads,” said the British gentleman.
A delivery truck pulled up behind the ambulance. The driver dragged out some cardboard boxes. Attached to the top of each box was a sample of what was inside—a flier printed in blood-red letters on yellow paper.
“Notice there’s no date for the opening.”
“At least we’re opening in November.”
As the British gentleman signed for the boxes, the curly-headed guy was still trying unsuccessfully to play a drumroll. Somebody else tried, too—also terribly.
“This is the best drumroll the Mercury Theatre can come up with?” asked the British gentleman.
“It’s the best we can do with a nonunion drummer. Comes the revolution—”
“Strike! Strike!”
“All ready up here!” called the little man on the ladder. He had climbed into the third-floor window. “Later I’ll wire you a switch. Now I’ll just plug it in.”
“Will someone please get Orson!”
“Vakhtangov!” somebody cried. Then the cry was picked up by the others. “Vakhtangov! Vakhtangov!”
A poor skinny guy in a massively wrinkled white shirt headed into the theatre, tripping over the doorjamb.
“I’m going to plug it in,” said the little man in the window.
“Wait! Wait!”
They were still fumbling with the drumroll—and with a kind of crazy boldness and a sense of What the hell do I have to lose? I said to the curly-haired guy, “Give me the sticks. I’ll do it.”
“What?”
“I said I’ll play you a drumroll.”
“Oh, yeah? And who are you?”
“I’m Gene Krupa. Who are you?”
“ ‘Truly, my name is Cinna. I’m Cinna the poet.’ ”
Then there was laughter, and instantly about five of them were doing a scene.
“ ‘Where do you dwell?’ ”
“ ‘In the Capital.’ ”
“ ‘Whither are you going?’ ”
“ ‘I’m going to Caesar’s funeral.’ ”
“ ‘His name’s Cinna.’ ”
“ ‘Tear him for his bad verses!’ ”
“Tear him for his bad drumming!”
The little man at the third-floor window called out: “I’m going to plug it in!”
I sizzled into a killer drumroll on the snare. The Westfield High School marching band had never heard one better. Possibly all of America had never heard one better. The drumroll alone got me a hand from the crowd.
“Swell!” the curly-haired guy said. He wagged his forefinger and started truckin’. “Peel the Big Apple, kid!”
“Tear him for his bad dancing!”
I thought of Stefan’s words: And who you are—is that who you want to be?
And I answered him: Starting today it is.
The double doors of the theatre entrance flew back, and a young man emerged swearing loudly in an astonishingly deep and resonant voice. “Goddamn-sons-of-bitches! Is every single person in this show against me? Is this a goddamn conspiracy to wreck my show?”
It was Orson Welles. At twenty he had starred on Broadway in Romeo and Juliet. At twenty-one he had directed Macbeth for the Negro Theatre in Harlem—transforming the witches into witch doctors and setting the play in Haiti. Later that year he’d directed and starred in Doctor Faustus—then marched an entire audience to an empty theatre uptown when the federal government had locked out his production of The Cradle Will Rock. I’d heard that now he was forming his own classical repertory company on Broadway. He was to be the director, the producer, the star.
He was twenty-two years old.
Five years older than I was.
He held a bound script in his black-gloved hands, and he wore a blue pinstriped suit under an open overcoat. Sonja and Vakhtangov followed in his wake.
The British gentleman—who by now I figured out was John Houseman—handed Welles one of the newly printed fliers.
“This is comple
tely inadequate,” said Welles. “Very possibly the worst-looking thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”
“We just had two hundred thousand of them printed.”
“They’re not entirely bad,” said Welles, then he wheeled on me. “Can you play the ukulele?”
I looked up into the round boyish face from which that amazing voice issued. “Sure,” I said. I figured how hard could it be? It only had four strings. I kept the drumroll going. (Talk in terms of the other man’s interest.) “Mr. Welles, if you need somebody to play the ukulele, you couldn’t find anybody in this city better than I am.”
“The kid’s got balls. Will you work for nothing?”
“Orson—” Houseman said.
“Quiet! I’m negotiating.” He saw the copy of John Gielgud’s Hamlet that I had jammed under my arm, and he pulled it out. He frowned at the cover photograph. “Have you ever heard anybody so in love with the sound of his own goddamn voice as Jack Gielgud? It’s that drawing-room school of Shakespeare. Makes my blood boil. It has nothing to do with the violence, the passion, the blood of the Elizabethan stage. Did you hear my Hamlet on the radio?”
I had heard it on the Columbia Workshop last fall. God help me, but it was terrible. Even the papers had panned it.
(Don’t criticize.)
“Yes,” I said.
“What did you think?” He narrowed his eyes.
(Be hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise.)
“Considering the time constraints you were under,” I said, “trying to squeeze Hamlet into two half-hour broadcasts, I think the result was very close to brilliant.”
I immediately regretted the brilliant—too transparently ass-kissing—Christ, my whole theatrical career wrecked with one astoundingly stupid word choice.
Welles pointed a black-gloved finger right in my face. “That is exactly correct. People criticized me for cutting ‘To be or not to be,’ but dramatically, in terms of pure story, that is the most expendable speech in the entire play.”
Me and Orson Welles Page 2