The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks)

by Lillian Ross

  Handy has lived on Seventh Avenue near 112th Street since 1917. He has a lot of children and grandchildren. Two years ago, he went down to Memphis for a hullabaloo in his honor. A market place on Beale Street was made into a park and called Handy Square (“Beale Street Blues” was another of his compositions). Handy is just now arranging “Steal Away to Jesus” as a funeral march for brass band. His hobby is politics: municipal, national, and international. He says he predicted the World War twenty years before it came. He won’t venture a prediction about the coming mayoralty election.

  1933

  AS MILLIONS CHEER — Helen Cooke, Charles Cooke, Clifford Orr, and Harold Ross

  EVEN as you read this, the first large post-prohibition cargo of liquors, cleared frankly and legitimately for this repentant land, probably will be at sea, churning westward. Reports from Liverpool were that the loading had been completed early this week and that the ship was expected to sail Thursday, the nineteenth. It’s an eight-thousand-ton freighter, chartered by Park & Tilford, and bound for San Francisco. It is expected off that port about December 1, and the captain is instructed to lie twelve miles offshore until he gets a certain signal and then to rush right in as fast as his little propellers will carry him. A second ship, of twelve thousand tons, will shortly start loading 150,000 cases of potables for New York; and a third, and others, probably. The two boats mentioned by tonnage are chartered by Park & Tilford, our enterprising sellers of liquors, who have been doing all the full-page newspaper advertising lately. They are American boats, and the owners were so happy when they were hired that they exuberantly offered to repaint both ships any color Park & Tilford wanted. The San Francisco ship wasn’t redone, because there wasn’t time for the paint to dry, but the New York boat will be repainted in some appropriate color not yet decided upon and, to boot, will probably be renamed the Park & Tilford. It will be off New York by December 1 and P. & T. hope it will be the first liquor boat to land here, but expect a race, for at least one other importing company is known to have chartered a special ship for the deadline, and probably others have, too. There’s quite a bit of mystery about the business.

  We learned the foregoing when we called at Park & Tilford’s central office to inquire about prospects in the liquor business and the results of their big advertising campaign. They wouldn’t give us the figures on the advance orders they have received as a result of their advertising, but they did tell us that they considered it a terrific success and that they now intend to continue it right up to December 6, the date upon which they hope to land their first liquid imports. And it would have done your heart good to see the activity about the place—a dozen customers in the reception-room waiting to place their orders and make their deposits of ten dollars a case, and scores of clerks in the order-room with mail-openers, typewriters, adding machines, etc., receiving orders and lovingly filing memos for future deliveries. Orders and inquiries have kept a hundred clerks busy since October 5, we were told, twenty extra office workers being hired that day. October 5 was the day P. & T. ran full-page ads in six newspapers. Since then they’ve been running a page a day, rotating it among the papers.

  The firm wouldn’t tell us the names of any big orderers but said that the largest order received came from a very big political bug right here in New York: sixty-five cases of assorted Scotch, brandies, champagnes, and gins. The second largest came from a man in Denver (richest man in Colorado, they had heard): twenty-five cases of gin, twenty-five of sherry, and two of vermouth. The average order is for two or three cases. Scotch is the biggest seller, half the total. Orders have been received from every state in the Union, and the ads, although they appeared only in New York papers, have brought in five thousand inquiries about wholesale prices.

  1933

  HOUSE OF BRICK — Helen Cooke and E. B. White

  WALT DISNEY raised his own salary from $150 a week to $200 a week, as a reward for having produced “Three Little Pigs.” We got that from his brother, Roy Disney, who was in town last week. Roy manages the Walt Disney interests, and is full of figures about the pigs. They, the pigs, have been shown at 400 theatres in New York City alone, for a total run of 1,200 weeks. They ran for eight weeks at the Trans-Lux Broadway theatre, the only picture that was ever shown there for more than one week. It, or they, flashed on the screen one hundred times a week, and about 250,000 people cheered the opus at that one theatre alone. Out of town, the pigs were just as much of a smash, and Walt has received countless requests for further adventures. He doesn’t think he’ll make a series, though: thinks the chances are against his being able to repeat.

  The Music Hall gets the credit for having first shown “Three Little Pigs” here, the week of May 25th to 31st, 1933. Pinto Colvieg, a former newspaperman now working for Disney, gets the credit for the line “Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?” The song was published in September by Irving Berlin and in two weeks had become the second national best-seller, being topped only by “The Last Round-Up.” The Disney staff are just a bit sheep-faced about the pigs, because when Walt suggested the idea, in September, 1932, none of the directors reacted. It seems that the Disney procedure is, Walt proposes but a director disposes. Not getting any reaction, Walt shelved the pigs. They kept coming up in his mind, though, and he suggested them a second time. Again no reaction. The third time, the reaction came and the pigs went into production.

  A Mr. Frank Churchill, one of Disney’s 140 employees, took five minutes off and wrote the chorus of the wolf song. It is the first song hit ever to come out of an animated-cartoon studio (and incidentally it always seemed to us to come out of “Die Fledermaus”). Originally the words appeared like this: “Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf, big bad wolf, big bad wolf? Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf? He don’t know from nothin’.” The last line didn’t seem to fit, somehow, and the staff men convened and tried to find a word that rhymed with “wolf.” They huffed and they puffed, but they finally gave up and had the two pigs who sing the song play the last line on their flute and violin.

  Colvieg was called upon to speak the part of the wolf, and he also did the pig in overalls. Girls from a trio called the Rhythmettes, Hollywood talent, sang for the two jerry-builders. The cost of making a Silly Symphony runs from $18,000 to $30,000; and the pigs were by no means the most expensive to make. Most Sillies gross between $80,000 and $100,000 over a three-year period; “Three Little Pigs,” Roy told us, would probably triple that amount. Walt makes thirteen Mickeys and thirteen Sillies a year. All the profits go back into the business. Two new Sillies are all ready to be sprung: “The China Shop,” to be released in the next couple of weeks, and “The Night Before Christmas,” at Yuletide. The pigs are soon going into the French and the Spanish. We’ll try and get you the words.

  1933

  LENOX 1734 — James Thurber

  THE mansion where Joseph Pulitzer lived is as cold as the moon. We shivered for an hour up and down its tremendous sprawl of rooms and halls one afternoon last week; they are littered with débris and have been deserted for twenty years. The estate is turning the famous residence over to real-estate men to be made into apartments, and we wanted to see it as it was, back before the war, when the nervous genius of the World gloomed like a spider in his far, quiet corner of the rambling palace of sixty rooms.

  Most people had forgotten the abandoned masterpiece of Stanford White on Seventy-third Street just east of Fifth Avenue until the new plans brought it into prominence again. It was completed in 1902 and for ten years vibrated to the power of the eccentric man who lived in curious soundproof rooms at one end of it. Then he died and the life went out of the place. Nobody has lived in it for two decades. None of the bells in the elaborate system of bells rings now, none of the myriad lights will light. Cold, lonely, and sad, but still magnificent, and a touch mysterious, the mansion is like a grand duchess gone blind and deaf in her old age.

  Pigeons flutter disconsolately outside the windows beyond the organ loft. The organ console st
ands at the head of the central marble staircase, covered with dust. The gold-and-white woodwork of the impressive main salon on the second floor, fifty feet long, with a ceiling twenty feet high, is tawdry under its dust; the two large crystal chandeliers, one at each end, are gray and dismal. Dirty windows keep out the light and give the baronial dignity of the mansion a deep, melancholy gloom. Before long it will be altered, polished, and brightened up, elegant doormen and lively attendants will move about, people will live there again, but it will be a different kind of life.

  Joseph Pulitzer probably was never inside of three-fourths of the rooms. He lived in a few padded rooms of his own to the west. The old doors of his hideaway, soft as leather chairs, are torn and ripped now, but the thick walls and the triple-sashed windows still shut out most of the street sounds that tore at the nerves of the publisher, whose hearing was sharpened by blindness. He had lost his sight when he moved into No. 7 and never saw the palace he had built around his isolation.

  The marble façade, pierced by windows twenty feet high, is Stanford White’s reworking of the front of an Italian Renaissance palace. It is still white and un-marred except for a few names scrawled by children in chalk on the entrance pillars. Graceful marble cherubs smile in languid peace above the windows, as if time and the hour had not moved in thirty years. The heavy front doors of glass and scrolled iron are locked, and propped up with strong timbers inside. We went in by a side door, whose lock protested against the unfamiliar key.

  The library is filled with axes, wheelbarrows, and red lanterns belonging to the firm that will reconstruct the interior. High ceilings, wide, deep fireplaces, and elaborately carved mantels are characteristic of the house. There are many strange and unique rooms: a tall, circular breakfast room, an enormous dining-room whose six pairs of windows to the west are made of curved glass in panes more than four feet square, a squash court with a gallery in which we had to light matches to see anything at all. There are three floors in front and eight in back, counting mezzanines. The bathtubs are the high, clumsy monstrosities of their day, except for the master’s own, which is sunk into the floor. He had a washbasin two feet higher than any we ever saw and a specially made combined toilet seat and magazine rack.

  On one faded wall a card gave the telephone number of the Pulitzer residence when it was alive: Lenox 1734. There isn’t even any such exchange any more.

  1934

  JEANN AND JIMMY — William Shawn and James Thurber

  IT’S been five years since we checked up on Jimmy Walker through his tailor, so we called on Mr. Friedman a few days ago to see if they’re still friends. We should say they are. Mr. Friedman still thinks that Mr. Walker is the greatest fellow who ever lived, bar nobody, and he showed us a letter he had from him not long ago in which Jimmy spoke of Jeann as “the world’s greatest tailor and the best friend anybody in the world ever had.”

  The last time we called at Friedman’s shop on East Forty-sixth Street, he had just won a blue ribbon at the Custom Cutters’ Club show for a one-button dress topcoat designed for Walker. He has won other ribbons since then, and even made Walker another dress topcoat that would knock your eye out: a double-breasted, six-button, one-button-to-button model, with silk collar, lapels, and cuffs, which Walker took with him into exile. But the place has changed. It’s become a kind of Walker Memorial or Museum.

  At the left, as you enter, are two photographs of the Great Pal, each about two feet by two and a half. At the right, on a table, are two more pictures—of two Walker jackets photographed on Walker’s personal dummy. Standing in the middle of the shop is the dummy itself, draped in a dark coat. And running around the shop, looking as if he were struggling to remember something, is Togo, Walker’s Japanese spaniel, which he left with Friedman when he went away. On the wall is an old motto, read by Mr. Walker many times in good faith and high hope; it says “Don’t worry . . . it won’t happen.”

  The former Mayor used to have about seventy suits, and he always kept ten or twelve of them in Friedman’s shop, as spares. That was in the days when he was spending about three thousand a year on clothes. Now he has only about fifty-five suits and Friedman has shipped him the last of the reserves. And it’s been a full year since he bought a new suit; that is, a regular suit. Last fall Friedman made and sent to him an English walking coat and a dress suit—“with the most outstanding dress coat in the country,” says Jeann, proudly. The unusual feature of the coat, he explains, is a silk binding which goes five-eighths of the way around the edge; the fabric is a diamond weave and dark blue, not black. Friedman says Walker has always preferred blue to black in evening clothes, because blue looks blacker than black at night. The only change in Jimmy since he went away, Friedman says, is that his waist is down from 29½ to 29.

  Friedman is Governor Lehman’s tailor, too. He is making him two blue spring suits. Mr. Lehman wears only dark blues and dark browns, never grays, and he doesn’t go in for any fancy business, but nevertheless Friedman thinks he is probably the best-dressed governor in the United States. The Governor always whistles and sings while he is being fitted. Friedman likes him immensely, but nobody can ever take Jimmy Walker’s place.

  1934

  BRONX TIGER — Fred Wittner and James Thurber

  HENRY BENJAMIN GREENBERG, home-run hitter of the Detroit baseball team, which has just won its first pennant in twenty-five years partly on account of him, was born in Greenwich Village. A lot of the young men down there can point out the house: on the corner of Fourth and Barrow. The kids used to call him Bruggy when he played ball in the downtown streets with a broom handle for a bat; now he’s Hank, and the ablest Jew in baseball. He’ll be twenty-four on January 1st (his mother used to tell him that all the noise on New Year’s Eve was in celebration of his birth), and he’s lived most of his life in New York. When he was seven, the Greenbergs moved to the Bronx and he went to P.S. 44, at 176th Street and Prospect Avenue.

  The year—1928—that the late McGraw found a Jew named Andy Cohen who could play well enough for the big leagues, Hank Greenberg was first baseman for the James Monroe High School. His team won the city championship in his last year there and major-league scouts began to take an interest in him. McGraw apparently overlooked him, but the Yankees were after him and offered him a big bonus to sign up—that was in 1930, when he was playing semi-professional baseball with the Bay Parkways of Brooklyn. Hank was too smart to go with the Yankees, however; he knew he was too big to play anything but first base (he’s six feet four, and weighs two hundred and twenty), and the Yankees’ great first baseman, Lou Gehrig, hadn’t missed a game since 1925.

  Greenberg finally took the offer of the Detroit Tigers, which was six thousand dollars for signing a contract, and three thousand more for reporting for work. He quit N.Y.U. at the end of his first semester to join the Tigers at their training camp. The first year he got in only one game—as a pinch hitter—and then was sent to Hartford. He wasn’t very good there, so the Tigers took him back and sent him to Raleigh; later he played with Evansville, and finally with Beaumont in the Texas League. There, in 1932, he hit thirty-nine home runs and was a favorite with the fans. They liked him from the day he started a fight that finally involved all the players and substitute players of both teams that were playing. The genial Jewish boy had been taking a lot of “riding” and suddenly turned on his tormentors.

  Last year Detroit took him back and he did well, but this past season was his best yet. When he stayed out of the game on Yom Kippur, his team lost. The week before, he had played on Rosh Hashana because the Yankees were pushing the Tigers hard and he was needed. He hit two home runs and his team won, 2 to 1. Detroit, of course, is crazy about Greenberg, and Greenberg likes Detroit well enough, but the New York Giants have always been his favorite team. He used to go to see them play whenever he had a chance as a boy. Cohen, by the way, lasted only a year with the Giants and is now playing with Minneapolis. He was somewhat carried off his feet by the fuss made about him, but Greenberg
takes it more easily. He recently refused a testimonial dinner in Detroit that was to have been given by fifteen hundred Jews and at which he was to receive a fifteen-hundred-dollar purse. His salary is seven thousand dollars a year.

  Greenberg’s father is president of the Acme & Textile Shrinking Works on West Twentieth Street and came here from Roumania. He frequently goes to Detroit with his wife to watch Hank play and has bought four hundred and eighty dollars’ worth of World Series tickets—intends to take the family and a lot of friends and business acquaintances. There are three other children, including Joe, nineteen, who is a sophomore at N.Y.U. and shortstop on the baseball team there. Joe thinks he is a better player than Hank. Maybe that’s because Hank never plays very well in New York; he gets kind of intense and strikes out often.