This is how we experience our lives now, but it is not boring. How entertaining to write about. We immediately recognize the Rabbi’s evil as ours, our neighbors’, the undertow of our world.
My wife Karen has the courage of a lion and goodness with no subtext. She has repaired herself and has become a psychologist whose presence is cherished by her colleagues and patients. What crippled and inhibited her is gone. She looks directly at me; she listens; she is not afraid. Her physical beauty is more intense than when she was young. I watch her read in her reflective beauty and she is the person now I wanted then.
And me? I rose out of the rubble too.
XI: Where You’re Terrific Even If You’re Good
In the bitter life I had carved out for myself in New York, sticking tenaciously to the writing I loved was the only thing that mattered. There was a purity to it, I thought simply, looking at myself in the mirror. I sacrificed everything else, everything, to get it done. I liked to quote Faulkner: “The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. If a writer has to sell his grandmother, he will not hesitate; the ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies.”
I worked at the office jobs I hated—as a typist, a temp, or a publicist—and at night would go to my studio off Times Square, drink hot coffee and flog myself to work until midnight or one or two. Then I began the most difficult part of the night: getting safely to the subway. I had to get down the 42nd Street block past the muggers, the pimps and hookers and the killers. I was vulnerable, with my beret, my books and notebooks and briefcase, walking in the neon lights past the porn shops. But I had certain advantages too: I looked weird, I was drunk from the shot of bourbon I had before leaving the studio, and I deliberately talked to myself and acted paranoid. I fit in a little better that way—even though the things I was saying aloud were really perfectly rational: stuff about making progress in my writing and avoiding summarization and cerebral content.
As I got closer to the subway entrance, I ran instead of walked. The biggest challenge was when I reached the entrance. That’s where they waited with their knives and guns. But I’d developed a strategy that worked pretty well. I ran up to the entrance and then, to everybody’s surprise, I threw myself down the steps, landing at the bottom, where the token booth and the cops were. This was painful, but it worked. Of course, I padded my knees with foam rubber. I was never mugged. Then, when I got on the subway, I looked so ragged and wild that nobody messed with me.
Unable to sleep, I would go into the office in the morning and ghostwalk. The cheery businessmen would spot my exhaustion and vulnerability and pounce on me. I went into the bathroom and wrote down what they said. Some of my best writing was about them.
It was hellish, it was fun. I did this well into middle age and thumbed my nose at all of those who did not do it: who tended to their families, went rollerskating with their children, chose good schools for them, joined the carnival of life. Yet I accepted Karen’s help and my father’s monthly checks and his abuse until I left New York. Handing me my check, he smiled and said, “You’re busy as a cockroach with your writing, aren’t you?” And he smiled and waved the check at me, pulling it back when I reached for it, as he’d been doing for forty-seven years.
And then I came back to show business, the world of the Catskills and the RKO Palace and Variety that I loved as a kid, in 1992 when I finally knew that books and writing were not enough, that literature didn’t make up for every possible failure, that spending ten years on a book was not a moral act if it meant partly living off Karen, and that those dark, enclosed New York rooms where I had celebrated the artist as loser, the writer as someone who sacrificed life for art—all that melancholy, self-righteous shit—could no longer save me.
I came to Hollywood at 47 to make a living. I was given a fellowship by the “Marv and Mark Film Company,” which was sponsored by a studio. Marv and Mark were congenial guys in their late twenties with a lot of hair. Marv, always on the phone making deals, sat behind his desk, while Mark lay on his back on the couch with a beer. They were always “psyched,” projects were “huge,” and every writer was “great.” And nothing ever happened.
Like so many other writers before me, in Hollywood I came to covet what I despised. I was tossed to and fro like a herring out of a barrel. Sitting on the Santa Monica pier beside a businessman reading Money Is My Friend, I thought, well fuck, yes. Look at all the degradation I’d gone through because I didn’t have it.
California had been the place my father’s family had emigrated to from dark and sodden Roxbury in the 1950s when Jolson beckoned with “California Here I Come” and the family had gathered around the radio imagining Jack Benny and Rochester, Burns and Allen, Baby Snooks, Phil Harris and Alice Faye in Beverly Hills and Art Linkletter in “beautiful downtown Bur-bank,” which was supposed to be funny, but still they imagined a bunch of laughing Jews around their pools in the land of permanent sunshine and achievable desire.
When I came to L.A., Uncle Phil, the last of my father’s brothers, was still there. He lived in a single room without a book. He had never known a woman, and almost never spoke. He had a handsome face, like my father’s untouched by human contact. At 80 he resented being called a senior citizen. He spent his days visiting other seniors in hospitals, and ate in the hospital cafeterias.
I knew that Robert Greenberg lived in Venice, but I was ashamed to call him because of the story I’d published about him in 1985.
I met mesmerizing characters who were in disguise: they claimed they were writers, or producers, or literary agents, or Nazi hunters, or foundation heads. Some of them had killed and castrated people and now they were sorry about it and wanted to become rich atoning and telling their stories in movies and becoming famous writers and producers and directors and enjoy the limelight all over again in the second or third acts of their lives. I sat down to talk with them, and found out that the writers couldn’t write, the producers couldn’t make a deal, and the agents couldn’t read. This was the Hollywood thing. There was Ron Fatino, the wiseguy who came to Hollywood with his crew and wrote scripts by the pool, flipping each page of creation to his crew members, who told him he was a fucking genius.
Then I met Frank Silvestri, a trusted former associate of John Gotti. Frank had ratted on him and went into the witness protection program and was now a burgeoning unproduced screen-writer. Frank had delivered body parts in bags as a message to hoods in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island, Manhattan and Jersey; castrated a man whose name he never knew; disemboweled a pimp in Harlem; robbed a bank under his apartment and escaped on his bicycle. “We schemed and scammed and stole and sniffed and streaked and fucked and sucked,” he remembered fondly, a glow lighting his youthful face. He had fallen in love with a hooker and burned down her brothel out of jealousy. Falling in love had ended his mob career; he turned over a new leaf. He had wanted to take the hooker to Scarsdale and settle down and have kids, push a baby carriage and bake cookies. When he went to prison she disappeared and when he came out he searched for her in every crevice. Now he wanted to make movies about all of these adventures. His days and nights were consumed with schemes to conquer Hollywood. He learned the lingo; he read Sid Field and knew all about first, second and third acts and plots and subplots and templates and backstories.
And there were prodigious old New York Jews who seemed to have been shipped fresh to California like onion bagels or seeded bialies from the old Jewish Daily Forward building and the Seward Park Library on East Broadway, from the immigrant classes at Cooper Union, from the soapboxes in Union Square, old men who seeped history and knowledge and literary and political engagement and passion. And I found the producer Julius Birnbach.
Birnbach was known to himself and perhaps some others as “the erudite and learned art film entrepreneur of Hollywood.” That’s what his press release stated. He greeted me by reciting from memory the first two pages of my last novel. In the f
orties he had imported films by Rossellini, de Sica and von Stroheim.
Julius was 90, and frail. His greatest hit had been the 1959 film The Curse of the Evil Midgets (“Small and creepy, they were big in their evil ways.”) Now he talked wistfully of producing a sequel (“They’re back, smaller and slimier than ever!”). Among his other fifty films were Dripping Skulls, Rock and Roll Yeshiva and The Screaming Bees.
Julius had lived in Rome and Paris for twenty years beginning in the 1960s and knew many Hollywood moguls. Yet his dusty office looked like the end of a journey. The scripts he hoped to sell had covers with titles written in crayon. He hadn’t made a picture in 18 years, and he was trying to sell off his inventory to the BBC. “Dealing with them,” he said, “is like having intercourse with a ghost.”
On Sunday mornings Julius and I walked on the Santa Monica beach. I would call him and he would say, “I’ll be at the corner. You can pick me up like a piece of soiled lasagna.”
He resembled a swizzle stick. A baseball cap was planted on his grizzled head. As we walked a slight wind knocked him over, and I caught him. At the restaurant, he handed his cap to the hostess and said, “Burn this.”
One Sunday as we walked toward the beach, a car came near him as we crossed the street. He stopped and raged, “Fucking son of a bitch, lousy piece of shit …” His voice was mighty, but Julius began to tip over as he screamed, and I gently pushed him upright.
“I’m working on an angle,” Julius said. “The Nun With the Red Glove. I have a friend who handles midnight shows. I wrote an ad: ‘See the nun with the red glove at midnight.’ Nobody knows what it means. But we’ll see what happens. Russ Meyer has made a fortune.”
Julius was a combination of old-time Socialist, well-read scholar, lover of Yiddishkeit and Hollywood hurly-burly carnival pitchman. He opened his life to me. When Sacco and Vanzetti were electrocuted, he told me, he went to the Bronx Botanical Gardens and sat with his Daily Worker, weeping for hours. “Before I got into show business,” he said, “I worked on the WPA with bricklayers, all Irish. This was in 1933. We didn’t have enough to eat in those days. Trying to rouse their working-class consciousness, I would say to them, ‘Fellas, what do you think the answer is?’ And they said, ‘Kill the Jews.’
“The Communists were so innocent,” he said. “They didn’t know Yiddish, but tried to use Yiddish expressions on their soapboxes to woo the workers. So when they tried to address the ‘women workers,’ they called them ‘whores of the street.’” He loved literature and with his faded eyesight he was consuming that week, Ian Gibson’s The Death of Lorca and Gustav Regler’s The Owl of Minerva. He talked with perfect recall and real insight about Henry Roth, Joseph Roth, Delmore Schwartz, Silone, Tess Shlesinger, Sciasca, Robert Lowell, Charles Reznikoff, Gogol and Laurie Lee. There seemed to be no book that he had not read, and we had exactly the same taste. And he could quote from these books at length. Daniel Fuchs, novelist of The Williamsburg Trilogy and screenwriter of scores of movies had died that week. He had lived at Park LaBrea in the Fairfax district near the old Farmers’ Market. Julius said, “Trilogy is probably the best book ever written by a young man.” I had loved Fuchs’ novels (I had even written him once from New York to tell him so, and he had answered me). He went on, “Fuchs loved Hollywood. Instead of being seduced by it, he seemed to like it.” He paused. “Writers are so different. I reread the Communist Joseph Freeman’s memoir, An American Testament. It’s like reading Sanskrit now. Like reading a buried language that has nothing to do with us.”
Julius paused and said, “Alfred Kazin had one book in him.”
“A Walker in the City,” I said.
“Yes, of course,” Julius replied. “As a literary critic, I never liked him at all. And I couldn’t stand his pomposity, the fact that he’d rubbed shoulders with so many big shots, such a pain in the ass. When I knew Alfred, I liked him because he had terrible pimples, and he was very shy, and he had a dirty old briefcase that had four hundred books in it. In Union Square I would be at the center of the crowd talking because I always had a big mouth. And he’d be on the outside.”
Julius’ wife had died three years before. He could no longer sleep. He went home from his office at four and tried to sleep until midnight. He read through the night, rose at three and was in his office by 4 A.M. He had endowed a weekly story hour for children in his wife’s memory in Jerusalem. He showed me a picture of the children gathered around the storyteller. He’d given away most of his huge library. “Since my wife died,” he said, “I no longer want to be surprised by beauty.”
He had spent an evening with Karen and me. “I worry about her, you know,” he said.
“Why?” I said.
“I just love her very much. I worry about lots of people.”
“She’s doing better than she ever has in her life,” I said. “You would have really been worried if you knew her before.
“I know that, Michael,” Julius said. “I’m aware of that. But the difference between apocalypse and disaster …” He trailed off as I heard my hysterical laughter.
Waving goodbye to me, he said, “Mikele, go back to your lair and your harp.”
Walking along the beach with him, I loved his ability to quote from books I cherished—Harry Roskolenko’s When I Was Last On Cherry Street, his love of the lower East Side streets I had never known but were in my bones. On another Sunday walk, he talked of his early success. “Sammy Webber and I made Evil Midgets together. It was when the going was very good for me. I was walking on Broadway. Sammy grabbed me: ‘Julie, how’d you like to make a picture called Evil Midgets?’ I said, ‘Of course.’ The rest is history. I made a bloody fortune. I thought this was an easy business. We made the picture for $75,000, and we took in a million six. So much for that. There’ll be other times, though. But now at the end of the day I feel so depleted and discouraged. I called Sammy this week and said let’s do the sequel. Sammy’s a good friend of mine. I’m the guy that let him loose on an unsuspecting, innocent and sweet public. I think he’s like that character in George Bernard Shaw’s Chocolate Soldiers. Shaw wrote that this guy never withered because he never blossomed.
“I want to write a book and call it History Of a Stupid and Crazy Jewish Commie Bastard. As a furrier, my father was known as the fastest botch on the lower East Side. He could never use a pattern, but he used to cut five coats a day. One coat was for a centipede; another was for a woman fourteen feet tall; another was for a woman who clung to the earth. Everybody used to work on furs like beaver and persian lamb. My father worked on things like baronduka.”
“What was that?” I asked him.
“I’m not sure,” Julius said. “I guess they must have been large rats. We had salesmen in those days who sold bedsheets on the never-never plan: they gave them to you and you paid them later.
“Anyway,” Julius said, rising from the bench, “It’s been lovely, my kind. But now I have a meeting with Barney Lovelace, the producer, in thirty minutes. I think this is gonna do it. I’m going to present him with a script idea that can be made for only one million.”
“What’s it about?” I asked.
Julius bristled at me. “What difference does that make? I don’t know yet.” He dug his cane into the sand and moved on.
At least Julius didn’t clasp his hands together in a prayerful motion and bow his head when saying goodbye to me like some of the younger producers did.
And then Julius was retiring to live with his son in San Diego. I saw him two more times on the Santa Monica promenade. I was with a friend, and did not stop. Julius did not see me. The first time I saw him, he was walking across the street from me toward a building entrance. He stopped, whirled around in a circle, raised his fists and shook them at the sky. He seemed to be shouting something, but I only saw the violent thrust of his fists.
The second time was one of those sunny Sundays when the promenade is ringing with the laughter and music of hundreds of young lovers, children, musicians, and char
acters like the man in the bowler hat and roller skates who dances to music in behalf of the Christian Children’s Crusade. It was the kind of day so ineffably beautiful it induced a sadness about how to embrace it before it was gone.
I recognized his familiar stance out of the corner of my eye before I saw his face. Julius was standing in the doorway of Woolworth’s and he was almost invisible in the hot sun. He was a shrivelled old man with a baseball cap, his arms folded in front of him. His head jutted forward. He was hungrily watching the spectacle through his one good eye, especially two babies in a carriage. I knew how much he loved children.
I kept walking. Julius: watching with bitterness, love, sorrow, loneliness and indomitable strength the carnival of life. Julius had been part of the carnival for a long time, unlike my father, unlike myself.
I remember the few days with Julius when, again and again, I was surprised by beauty.
Dean Martin died on Christmas night, 1998. Of emphysema. They thought it was drink, but he couldn’t go on stage in Las Vegas anymore and cough up phelgm every two minutes.
He’d become a ghost around L.A., drinking by himself at Dan Tana’s, eating at Hamburger Hamlet or La Famiglia, putting his false teeth on the table. The tabloids ran a picture of him stumbling at the curb, rescued by a neanderthal bodyguard. I always knew that he had stopped wanting to live and be funny when his son died in the plane accident.
I sat alone before the TV at the empty graduate center in Vancouver watching Dean every Thursday night, including Christmas Eve when he and Frank clowned around together. A shining TV light in the cold darkness. When I wanted to shoot my head off. This was before I met Karen.
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