Triple Play: A Nathan Heller Casebook

by Collins, Max Allan

  “Would you…would you ever do it? Take your own life?”

  “I think not, child. We demonstrate the truth or falsity of our lives by the manner of our deaths.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Those who die in a tavern brawl like Christopher Marlowe or in a fit of desperation like Hart Crane leaping off a ship in mid-ocean reveal in their violent deaths the inadequate inner workings of their secret beings…. Are you familiar with this one?

  I shall walk down the road.

  I shall turn and feel upon my feet

  The kisses of Death, like scented rain.”

  “For Death is a black slave with little silver birds,” Marilyn said, “perched in a sleeping wreath upon his head.”

  “You do me great honor,” Bodenheim said, touching a hand to his chest, lowering his head, then chugging some whiskey.

  “So many of your poems are about death…and love.”

  “I am a man, and man is human, all too human, placed by the theologians a little below the angels. Life is the struggle between the pull of the divine and the downward drag of the beast.”

  She was leaning forward, rapt in the wise man’s words. “Is suicide divine, or beastly?”

  “Neither. Both. Perhaps I’ll answer your question in my next poem.” Then he shrugged and began working on relighting his corncob. “But as long as Ruth lives, I’ll not take my life.”

  “Ruth? Your wife?”

  “My sweet better half, with whom I share park benches, flophouse suites, and what remains of my tattered existence. We have an exquisite arrangement—she cheats on me, and I beat on her. An inventive girl. Burned down her parents’ house, you know. There are those who say that she is mad, but who among us does not have eccentricities?”

  “Is she a poet, too?”

  He had the corncob going again. “She’s a writer.”

  Marilyn swallowed, summoned bravery and said, “I write poetry.”

  His smile was benevolent. “You do, my child?”

  “Would you like to hear one?” She smiled. “I think I’ve had enough champagne to get the nerve…

  Life—I am of both your directions

  Somehow remaining

  Hanging downward the most

  Strong as a cobweb in the wind…”

  “You wrote that?”

  “Yes.”

  Bodenheim shook his head. “Sentimental slush.” He stood suddenly. “Stick to the silver screen, sweetie.”

  And he rose and stumbled off into the crowd.

  Marilyn had turned a ghostly white, her mouth slack, her face without expression, her eyes wide and vacant and yet filled with pain.

  Ben touched her arm and said, “Marilyn, I’m sorry…he’s a drunken no-good bastard. Hell, he thinks Ezra Pound stinks….”

  “Nathan…could you please take me back to the hotel?”

  “Sure.”

  But Marilyn was already up and moving out, and I was working to keep up with her. She didn’t begin crying until we were in back of the cab, and I held her in my arms and comforted her, telling her how much I liked her poem.

  At the door of her suite, I said, “He’s a Skid Row bum, you’re a goddess. They’ll be watchin’ your movies when this guy’s poems turn to dust.”

  She smiled, just a little, and touched my face with the gentlest hand imaginable.

  Then she kissed me.

  Sweetly. Sadly.

  “Do you want me to come in?” I asked.

  “Next time, Nathan,” she said.

  And sealed herself within.

  3

  I met Ben for lunch at the Pump Room at the Ambassador East. It was an atmosphere perfect for Marilyn Monroe—deep blue walls, crystal chandeliers, white leather booths, waiters in English Regency attire serving food elegantly from serving carts and off flaming swords.

  But the only celebrities in the room were local newspaper-men—fewer than last night at Riccardo’s, actually—and, of course, Ben Hecht and that celebrated “private eye to the stars,” Nathan Heller.

  “She flew out this morning,” Ben said, his bloodshot eyes matching the Bloody Mary he was drinking. His second.

  “When was she supposed to leave?”

  “Not until late this afternoon. We were going to meet with the Doubleday people after lunch.”

  “Hope your book deal didn’t get queered.”

  “Nah. I’ll meet with Marilyn back in Hollywood, it’ll be fine. How would you like to bodyguard her again?”

  “Twist my arm.”

  “You two seemed to hit it off.”

  “I kept it businesslike.”

  “You mean, that fucking Bodie queered it for you.”

  I grinned, sipped my rum and Coke. “Bingo.”

  “Well, Doubleday wants Marilyn to make an appearance at next year’s ABA, kicking off a promotional tour for the book. If I can talk her into it, which I think I can, I’ll toss the security job A-1’s way.”

  “I appreciate that, Ben. Maybe I’ll let you ghost my autobiography.”

  “Write your own damn book.” He laughed hollowly; he looked terrible, dark bags, pallid complexion, second chin sagging over his crisp blue bow tie. “Guess how much we raised for Bodie last night?”

  “Five bucks?”

  “Oh, much more…twelve.”

  I chuckled at this pleasant bad news. “He must have got even cuter after I left, to get such an overwhelming acclamation.”

  Ben’s smirk made the fuzzy caterpillar of his mustache wriggle. “He caught his wife coming on to a waiter and started screaming flowery obscenities at her and finally slapped her face. When Ric stepped between them, Ruth slapped him and started shouting, ‘I’m Mrs. Maxwell Bodenheim! I’m Mrs. Maxwell Bodenheim!’” He sighed and shook his head and sipped his Bloody Mary. “I think Max may have made the record books on this one—the only guy in history ever to get thrown out of his own benefit party.”

  “He’s a horse’s ass. What possessed you to fly him and his harpy out here, anyway?”

  He didn’t answer the question; instead he said, “That was awful, how he crushed that poor kid, last night. Little Marilyn may be built like a brick shithouse, but she’s delicate, you know, underneath that war paint.”

  “I know. I’d have knocked the bastard’s teeth out, if he had any.”

  Ben snorted a second to that motion, finished his Bloody Mary, and waved a waiter over, telling him we’d have another round before we ordered lunch.

  “Don’t be too tough on Bodie,” Ben said. “Language and a sense of superiority are all he has. He doesn’t have money to eat or buy clothes, just words he can use to make other people feel like they’re bums, too.”

  “He’s just a mean old drunk.”

  Ben shook his head, smiling grimly. “Problem is, kid, there’s a young man in that old skin. He lives in sort of a child’s world filled with word toys. He’s a poet who lives in a world of poetry…”

  “He’s a stumblebum who lives in the gutter.”

  The waiter brought Ben’s third Bloody Mary. Ben stared into the drink, as if it were a crystal ball into his past. His voice was hushed as he said: “We made a sort of pact, Bodie and I, back when we were young turks, cynical sentimental souls devoted to Art.” A sudden grin. “Ever hear about the time we spoke at this pompous literary society for a hundred bucks? Which was real cabbage in those days…”

  “Can’t say I have.”

  “We agreed to put on a full-scale literary debate on an important topic. The hall was full of these middle-class boobs, this was in Evanston or someplace, and I got up and said, ‘Resolved: that people who attend literary debates are imbeciles. I shall take the affirmative. The affirmative rests.’ Then Bodie got up and said, ‘You win.’ And we ran off with the hundred.”

  I waited till Ben’s laughter at his own anecdote let up before saying, “So you grew up and made some real money, and Peter Pan flew to the gutter. So what?”

  Ben sighed again. “I was hoping la
st night we’d raise some real money for the son of a bitch…”

  “Why?”

  “Because, goddamnit, I’ve been supporting him for fucking years! He’d send me sonnets and shit, in the mail, and I sent him two hundred bucks a month. Only, I can’t afford it anymore! Not since my career hit the fan.”

  “You got no responsibility to underwrite that bum.”

  “Not any more, I don’t. Fuck that toothless sot.” He opened the menu. “Let’s order. I’m on expense account with Doubleday….”

  4

  I had every reason to expect I’d seen and heard the last of Maxwell Bodenheim, and his lovely souse of a spouse, and to take Ben Hecht at his word, that he was finished with subsidizing the bard of Skid Row.

  But the first week of February, at the office, I got a call from Ben.

  “You want to do another job for me, kid?”

  “If it involves Marilyn Monroe.”

  “It doesn’t, really. Unless you consider it an extension of what you did for me, before. Did you hear what happened to Bodenheim, after the party at Riccardo’s?”

  “You told me,” I reminded him. “He and the missus got tossed out on their deserving backsides.”

  “No, I mean after that. Remember how I told you we raised a grand total of twelve bucks for him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, he spent it on rubbing alcohol. He was found in the gutter the next morning, beaten to shit, with half a bottle of the stuff clutched in his paws.”

  “Mugged?”

  “I doubt it. More like he’d been mouthing off and got worked over for it.”

  “This didn’t make the papers or I’d know about it.”

  “See, you don’t know everything that goes on in Chicago, kid. Even out in Hollywood, I know more about the town than you…I got a call from Van Allen Bradley.”

  Bradley was literary editor over at the Daily News. He continued: “Seems the lovely Mrs. Bodenheim, Ruth, came around begging for a book review assignment for Max, so they could raise bus fare back to New York.”

  “Ben, don’t tell me you flew ’em out one-way, for that benefit?”

  “Hell, yes! I expected to raise a couple thousand for the no-good son of a bitch. How did I know he was going to disintegrate in public?”

  “Yeah, who woulda guessed that?”

  “Anyway, Bradley assigned some new collection of Edna Vincent Millay, and Ruth brought the review in a day or so later. Bradley says it was well written enough, but figures Ruth wrote it, not Bodie. She stood there at Bradley’s desk till he coughed up the dough.”

  “They’re a class act, the Bodenheims.”

  “Listen, Heller, do you want the job?”

  “What is it?”

  “In June, back at the ABA, I talked to an editor with a low-end paperback house, about reprinting some of Bodie’s books—you know, that racy stuff about flappers fucking? Slap on cover paintings of sexy babes and Bodie’s back in business. I got nearly two thousand in contracts lined up for him, which is big money for him.”

  “So what do you need me for? Just send him the damn contracts.”

  “Nate, I can’t find the SOB. He’s a goddamn street bum, floating somewhere around Greenwich Village, or the Bowery. I know for a while he was staying at this farm retreat on Staten Island, for down-and-outers, run by Dorothy Day, with the Catholic Worker? I had a letter from him from there, and I called Dorothy Day and she said Ruth and Bodie showed up on her doorstep, with his arm and leg in a cast from that beating he took. He was there for several months, healing up, and I guess he even managed to sell a poem or two, to the New York Times, if you can believe it, for I guess ten bucks apiece…but Ruth started flirting with some of the male ‘guests,’ and once his leg healed, Bodie dragged his blushing bride back into the city.”

  “I’ll line up a man in New York to handle it for you, Ben. It’ll be cheaper.”

  “No, Nate—I want you to do this. Yourself. You got some history with Bodie; you might get through to him where somebody else wouldn’t.”

  “This could end up costing you more than these contracts are worth.”

  “Hey, I had a little upturn. I can afford it. I want to get some money to Bodie without gettin’ back in the routine of me supportin’ him. Anyway, I think it would do him good to see his work back in print.”

  I laughed, once. “You really are that bastard’s friend.”

  “He doesn’t deserve it, does he?”

  “No.”

  5

  The Waldorf Cafeteria, on Sixth Avenue near Eighth Street, was within a stone’s throw of MacDougal Alley and its quaint studios and New York’s only remaining gas streetlamps, in the midst of one of Greenwich Village’s several centers of nightlife. Here, where skyscrapers were conspicuous in their absence, and brick buildings and renovated stables held sway, countless little bistros and basement boîtes had sprung up on the narrow, chaotically arranged streets like so many exotic mushrooms. Longhaired men and shorthaired women wandered in their dark, drab clothes and sunglasses, moving through a lightly falling snow like dreary ghosts.

  Finding Maxwell Bodenheim took exactly one afternoon. I had begun at Washington Square, where I knew he had once pinned his poems to a picket fence for the dimes and quarters of tourists. A bearded creator of unframed modernistic landscapes working the same racket for slightly inflated fees informed me that “Mad Max” (as I soon found all who knew him in the Village referred to him) had given up selling art to the tourist trade.

  “He got too weird for the room, man,” the black-overcoat-clad artiste of perhaps twenty-five told me, between alternating puffs of cigarette smoke and cold-visible breath. “You know, too threatening—half-starved looking and drunk and smelly…the Elks won’t do business with a crazy man.”

  “The Elks?”

  “Out-of-towners, man—you know, Elks and Rotarians and Babbitts. Or cats from Flatbush or the Bronx who let their hair down when they hit Sheridan Square.”

  “So what’s Max up to, now?”

  “He’s around. Moochin’ drinks and peddlin’ poems for pennies in bars. Been runnin’ the blinkie scam, I heard, with some Bowery cats.”

  I didn’t relish hitting that part of town.

  “No idea where he lives?”

  “Used to be over on Bleecker, but they got evicted. Him and Ruth got busted for sleepin’ on the subway. Didn’t have the twenty-five bucks fine and spent the night in the can.”

  “It’s a little cold for doorways and park benches.”

  He shrugged. “They probably still got enough friends to flop for free, here and there. Just start hittin’ the coffeehouses and clubs and somebody’ll lead you to him.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Here’s a contribution to the arts.” And slipped him a fin.

  I started to walk away and the guy called out, “Hey man! Did you check with Bellevue? He’s been in and out of there.”

  “As a nutcase or alcoholic?”

  “Take your pick.”

  I called Bellevue, but Max wasn’t currently a guest.

  So I hit the streets, which were alive with native bohemians and wide-eyed tourists alike—it was Saturday and the dusting of snow wasn’t stopping anybody. I covered a lot of ground in about three hours, entering smoky cellar joints where coffee and cake were served with a side of free verse, stepping around wildly illustrated apocalyptic Bible verses in chalk on the sidewalks outside the gin mills of West Eighth Street, checking out such tourist traps as the Nut Club and Café Society and the Village Barn, gandering briefly at the strippers at Jimmy Kelly’s, stopping in at cubbyhole restaurants that advertised “health food” in conspicuously unhealthy surroundings, but eating instead at the Café Royal, which advertised itself as “The Center of Second Avenue Bohemia” and served up a mean apple strudel. The name Maxwell Bodenheim was familiar to many, from the Café Reggio to the White Horse Pub, but at the Village Vanguard, a deadpan waif with her raven hair in a pixie cut told me to try the Minneta Ta
vern, where I learned that the San Remo Café on MacDougal Street was Mad Max’s favorite haunt. But at the San Remo, I was sent on to the Waxworks, as the Waldorf Cafeteria was known to hip locals.

  What could have possessed the owners of a respectable, pseudo-elegant chain of cafeterias to open a branch in the heart of Bohemia, a place Maxwell Bodenheim had once dubbed “the Coney Island of the soul”? Its wallpaper yellowed and peeling, its “No Smoking” signs defaced and ignored, its once-gleaming fixtures spotted and dull, its floors dirty and littered, its fluorescent lighting sputtered with electrical shorts even while casting a jaundiced glow on the already-sallow faces of a clientele who had taken this cafeteria hostage, turning it from eating place to meeting place. The clatter of dishes and the ring of the pay-as-you-go cash register provided a hard rhythm for the symphony of egos as poets and painters and actors announced their own genius and denounced the lack of talent in others, while occasionally sipping their dime’s worth of coffee while nibbling at sandwiches brought from home, the cheap flats they called “studios.”

  Holding forth at a small side table was the man himself, decked out in a World War One vintage topcoat over the same shabby suit and food-flecked tie he’d worn to the Renaissance reunion, months ago. On the table, as if a meal set out for him, was a worn bulging leather briefcase. Sitting beside him was Ruth, in the pale yellow dress she’d worn to Riccardo’s. Both were smoking—Bodie his corncob with that cheap awful tobacco, Ruth with her elbow resting in a cupped hand, cigarette poised near her lips in a royally elegant chain-smoker posture. To the cups of coffee before them Bodenheim was adding generous dollops from a pint of cheap whiskey.

  Bodenheim, of course, was talking, and Ruth was nodding, listening, or maybe half-listening; she sat slumped, looking a little bored.

  I bought myself a cup of coffee and walked over to them, and bobbed my head toward one of the two untaken chairs at their table. “Mind if I join you?”