Inside, Outside, page 44
The title knocked the tits off both the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Literary Guild, I can tell you that. Because of all the hot trade talk, even the Reader’s Digest book club unexpectedly asked to look at the novel. I received the manuscript back by messenger the same day I sent it over, with a short note in red ink scrawled on the title page by the editor, an old friend: “Christ on a bicycle!” When Peter first sent me the typescript and I saw the title, I myself nearly fell out of my chair. I thought Peter was playing a practical joke on his publisher. But he was and he remains serious about it.
“Either truth matters in art, or it does not,” he wrote in his already celebrated ultimatum to the Book-of-the-Month. “Either Joyce and Lawrence freed the artist from the obsolete shackles of Victorian prudery, or they did not. Now, thirty years after James Joyce died, let us find out. The title stands.” The letter is in this month’s Penthouse, reprinted on a whole page in big type, with a handsome scowling picture of Peter on the porch of his Fire Island house, hunched barefoot on a rocking chair in Italian slacks and a sport shirt, narrowing his eyes at the world. A sensational plug, weeks before publication; and it comes right after a much-talked-about centerfold of a spread-eagled Chinese girl, captioned, “See, it isn’t true, what they say.”
I’m embarrassed to proceed, but I can’t possibly continue unless I come right out with it, so I’ll just have to worry about the family trade later. Well then, Peter’s title is nothing more or less than My Cock, and that is what his novel is entirely about, too. It is a dialogue two hundred and thirty-seven printed pages long between the hero of the book and his penis. How on earth is such a book possible? Well, let me quote the blurb on the jacket: “Peter Quat is the ultimate candid modernist. We are in the world of Joyce and Kafka, of expressionism and nightmare, where polite linear reality dissolves into the cloacal phantasmagoria that the human predicament actually is, and Victorian artificialities of taste dissolve before raw elemental truth.” I strongly suspect Peter wrote that himself. Somebody else should do his blurbs. That makes the book sound heavy and worthwhile, whereas, like all the Quat books, it’s just raucous fun in horrible taste, but quite easy to read. Either Peter Quat amuses you or he doesn’t. Peter has always made me laugh. Mark Herz is bound to throw his worst fit yet at Peter’s “traducing of his own people,” for Peter has rolled the ball down the middle this time for a ten-strike.
The book is about a Jewish college professor, of course. All American Jewish novelists are college professors, and they all write about Jewish college professors, who are writing novels about Jewish college professors. It is a strict literary convention of the genre, like the fourteen lines of sonnet form. This professor is named Yehezkel Dienstag, and one day Dienstag’s penis starts talking to him, as he is taking a shower. No explanation, it just does. The professor has recently been divorced by his shiksa wife for seducing too many female undergraduates, and so he is lonely and depressed and can’t work on his novel. Yehezkel is surprised, with the mild inadequate dreamlike surprise one finds in Kafka, at being so spoken to, and he asks his appendage to explain itself.
“I am the Jewish people,” the member replies. “I am the Wandering Jew, the Eternal Putz, and I have decided to speak out and tell you my story, so that you can tell it to the world.”
With that, we are off to the races. I tried and failed to get Peter to change or cut that monumentally tasteless “eternal putz” phrase, but nothing is sacred to Peter; he maintains that it’s his whole theme in two words, and it stays. Dienstag’s thing goes rambling through history, starting back in Egypt, jumping around in time. Its identity sometimes melts into individuals like Joseph, Samson, Solomon, and Job, sometimes becomes the whole people, as at the Spanish Inquisition, again coalesces into two persons, as in an argument between Spinoza and Maimonides. Spinoza was actually his scrotum, says the appendage, “bearing all the seeds of the future, and I was Maimonides, the rigid old theology.” I’m not describing the novel well, but try describing Finnegans Wake or Virginia Woolf’s Orlando sometime! The book is one of those. It turns out that the “stiff-necked” people is a Biblical double entendre for the eternal Jewish character; that anti-Semitism is actually penis envy, and so on. The book is short, which is fortunate, because it is basically one unnerving literary joke. But of course, leave it to Peter; he has fleshed it out with plenty of steamy episodes. Poriphar’s wife, and Delilah, and the Queen of Sheba, and Esther all make appearances, and there is stuff about Golda Meir, too, which may shake up the old Prime Minister some. Still, it takes a lot to faze her, and she’ll probably just laugh her head off.
The problem of the clubs was, naturally, how could they offer a book with such a title? How could they even prepare their brochures? Both clubs were mad for the novel itself. After Onan’s Way sold two hundred thousand copies, Peter Quat could do no wrong. Anyway, they both regard My Cock as a towering artistic breakthrough; in the words of a letter I got from a Guild official, “a marvellously original and sensitive tribute to the historical resilience of the Jewish people.” In this same letter the Guild proposed instead, as a title, Dienstag’s Dingus. They said they could live with that, and it would cushion the shock a bit for middle-American Guild subscribers. Peter remained adamant.
The Book-of-the-Month then weighed in with a truly ingenious alternative. They suggested that Peter call his book The Putz and I, pointing out that the parallel to The King and I would give it “respectability,” since everything Rodgers and Hammerstein did was so wholesome. Also, gentile subscribers might take the word to be the monarchical title of some exotic Asian ruler. This suggestion came with an offer of a handsome advance on club royalties; contingent, however, on changing the title.
Maybe I shouldn’t disclose this, in view of all the kudos Peter is now getting for his noble reply in Penthouse, but he was ready to take the offer. He thought The Putz and I wasn’t bad, laughed out loud when he heard it, and said the money was terrific. But just then two paperback offers also came in, both munificent; and when I checked with the editors, they were both aghast at the thought of changing My Cock. “Why, it’s the best-selling book title since Gone with the Wind,” said one of them. So Peter hardened up—though in this context that term may be slightly inappropriate—and wrote his famous letter, and the book will be known as My Cock, down the ages. The Guild gulped and took it. I’ve seen their advance brochure. PETER QUAT’S NEW MASTERPIECE in huge type fills the cover. The subscriber has to look inside to find out the title, and then either turns purple and cancels his membership, or sends off the acceptance card with a drool.
Jazz Jacobson has seen the brochure, and says it is “pusillanimous.” Jacobson is an articulate man. Maybe I should describe him, for those few backwoods readers who haven’t seen his picture in news magazines. He is just under five feet tall, skinny as a stick insect, entirely bald, no eyebrows, round face, and strangely shaped ears. He does not have a green head or bug eyes or anything, but he really does not look quite terrestrial. His outstanding earthly feature is, in fact, not human; it is thick black-rimmed glasses. In Variety’s Christmas issue, where the Hollywood big-timers advertise themselves, there is always a full page with nothing on it but a picture of the Jazz Jacobson glasses, with no face behind them. Long ago Jazz Jacobson was an agent. Today he is what they call a packager, putting together a star, a director, a producer, a bank loan, and a hit play or a best-seller, to create a sure box-office success before the cameras even turn.
“Mort Oshins is dying to do it,” Jazz Jacobson said to me this morning. We were breakfasting in the Gay Nineties Room, where Bobbie and I used to eat when it was just the April House coffee shop, and the waitresses wore plain brown uniforms, not black net tights and scarlet tutus, which afford you glimpses of waggling behinds with your orange juice. Jacobson was devouring ham and eggs as he talked. “It’s a major work of comic art, Goodkind. Based on Quat’s track record, it should sell three hundred thousand copies hardcover, three million paperback, and a million book club. We are talking of a vast pre-sold motion picture audience, a potential box-office gross, going in, of fifty to seventy million dollars. I can close a bank loan today to make this film—providing Oshins and Quat reach a meeting of the minds—of eleven million dollars, with payment to the author of one million dollars. Up front!” A guillotine chop of one stiff little palm marked off up front.
If I can convey how Jazz Jacobson utters the word “dollars,” I will give you the whole man. You and I, and most people, even TV commentators, naturally say “dollers,” throwing away the second syllable. Not Jazz Jacobson. Jazz Jacobson says doll-ARS, with a protracted powerful a: doll-AARS. When he says that, you hear dollars spoken of as we would all speak of them, if we put into our voices the yearning and reverence that we feel for dollars.
Probing a bit at this strange notion of making Peter’s book into a film, I said, “I can see that the character of Professor Dienstag is quite an actor’s challenge. But—”
“The professor?” Jacobson stared at me through those thick glasses, as though I were the insect presence from outer space, with no hair and pointy ears. “The professor? I don’t follow you. Of course Mort Oshins is going to play his prick. That’s the part.”
Some statements are called conversation-stoppers. That one qualified. I shut up while he finished his ham and eggs with a glass of milk.
I was still not sure what Jacobson wanted of me. He had telephoned for this meeting in New York from London, where Mort Oshins is promoting his new hit movie, Nailed, By Christ, about the Jewish thief who was crucified alongside Jesus. Oshins first leaped to fame with his comic record of the thief’s monologue, in heavy Yiddish dialect, based on the humor of his discomfort at being nailed up, and his impatient queries to Jesus about when they would go to Paradise together, and so forth. The hammering noise during the record got to be horridly funny—if you were going to laugh at this sort of thing—and the running gag, “OY! Easy mid det hemmer,” became a national byword. Now it is the title of the theme song in the feature movie.
Oshins is no fool, and Jesus is never seen or heard in the film. Crowd reactions and the lines of the other actors convey that presence. Some churchmen have approved the film as “bringing the Gospel story to the mass audience through the medium of humor,” though most of them have thrown the sort of fit that Peter Quat induces in Mark Herz and the more serious rabbis. Matching Oshins and Quat shows the Jazz Jacobson flair. Nobody else has thought of it, yet they go together, shall we say, like ham and eggs. Mort Oshins leans hard on Jewish humor in his movies, always playing a low Jew himself.
“It’s all going to hinge on one thing,” Jacobson said, delicately patting his mouth with a starchy napkin, “and that is whether Quat will give Oshins a free hand. Mort has written all his films himself, you realize. Never bought another writer’s material before. I gave him the galleys to read on the plane coming home. He’ll meet us here for lunch tomorrow.”
A business lunch on Saturday? Out of the question for me, as the reader knows, but I said only, “He hasn’t read it? Then how can he be crazy about it?”
“I described it to him. He fell for the idea, and began to improvise like mad. I’ve never laughed so hard in my life, Goodkind. He did twenty minutes in Yiddish dialect, right there in his hotel room, impersonating a prick getting circumcised. I had to beg him to stop. I was streaming tears. I thought I’d get sick from laughing.”
“But how does he do that, exactly? I mean, such an impersonation seems impossible.”
“Why?” Jazz Jacobson asked. “Did you see Zero Mostel in Rhinoceros?”
“Of course.”
“Did he look like a rhinoceros?”
“Not at all.”
“Did he convince you that he was a rhinoceros?”
“Absolutely.”
“There you are. And Mort Oshins convinces you that he’s a penis. I could see him standing there, all five feet seven inches of him, a big whang. It was uncanny.”
“Tomorrow is impossible, sorry,” I said. “Can we meet in Washington on Sunday?”
Jazz Jacobson looked grave. “I can call Mort in London and ask him.” He glanced at his watch. “But let me advise you to move your appointments around and make this lunch date right here, tomorrow.”
“Can’t be done.”
Jazz Jacobson dropped his voice. “Suppose it means losing the deal?”
Familiar Hollywood talk; on the other hand, there was my obligation to Quat.
“Well, would it?”
Jazz Jacobson dropped his voice still further, to a hollow dry outer space whisper. “Dreyfus.”
“I beg your pardon? Dreyfus?”
“Mort has a hilarious angle on the Dreyfus case. Paramount is ready to go with it, and actually I flew to London to finalize the deal. I picked up the galleys of the new Quat for something to read on the plane. It just hit me, this conception of Mort Oshins doing the book. It’s of the moment. It’s thrilling. But Mort is a whimsical fellow, Goodkind. He’s passing through New York overnight”—again, Jacobson lowered his voice—“his girl friend is here, and his wife is waiting for him in Beverly Hills. You’re not going to get him to Washington. If he returns to the coast without any further action on Quat, he’ll sign for Dreyfus on Monday. I beseech you to meet him here tomorrow. I’ll bring him right to this suite. It won’t take more than an hour. Surely you can work that out, for the sake of a brilliant deal.”
Of course Peter would pick an occasion like this to be incommunicado. False urgency is a staple of Hollywood trading, and your position strengthens once you shrug off the pressure. But I could not risk it without telling Peter. His agent is hospitalized with a kidney stone, and the whole thing is in my hands.
Peter is on a chartered yacht at anchor off Staten Island, I’m forced to mention, boffing the wife of his new publisher. She is a former fashion magazine editor, past forty but lissome and full of the old pizazz. She would be recognized in any halfway elegant New York hotel they might check into. So Peter has chartered this yacht, and she slips away when she can, hires a speedboat and goes aboard, and they make the beast with two backs. You would think Peter was getting old for this sort of thing, but not a bit of it. He is estranged from his fifth wife, so he doesn’t have the jealousy problem; on the other hand, he is suing to get custody of their son, on the grounds that she is living in adultery with an expatriate South Vietnamese poet, so he has to watch his step. The long and short of it is, I couldn’t pick up the telephone and call Peter about this. He told me he would come ashore and be in touch with me sometime next week. You wouldn’t believe how hot he was to get aboard that yacht. He was fairly jigging with eagerness.
So either I had to accept a business meeting on the Sabbath, something I haven’t agreed to since I started my own law firm, or—if I could believe Jazz Jacobson—I would be jeopardizing Peter Quat’s chance at a rich film contract. Jazz Jacobson is one of Hollywood’s most eminent and reliable personalities; the chance that he was lying was not more than eighty percent. The margin of possible truth was not to be ignored. An awkward situation!
“I’d appreciate it,” I said, “if you’d phone Oshins.”
Jazz Jacobson ordered a table telephone and called London. The operator there said Mr. Oshins was expected back in an hour. So Jazz left, saying he had an appointment with Heifetz.
“Jascha Heifetz? Isn’t he on tour in Europe?”
“Sammy Heifetz,” he said. “Best composer of movie scores in America. I want to tie him up for our project now, if I can. Fox is trying to get him for Franklin and Lucy, their big World War II movie about this woman Roosevelt was screwing on the side. That script was offered to me first, but I turned it down. There’s such a thing as taste. I’ll phone you as soon as I get through to Mort Oshins, but I implore you to stay for this meeting tomorrow.”
So he left.
It is now well past noon; in Israel, after six at night. Jan will not be telephoning any more. She has lit her candles. Jacobson called to say Oshins refuses to go to Washington, so I’ll arrange to stay over here. Drat Peter, anyway. Davey Goodkind, doing the Sabbath bit in April House! Peeping Tom will not believe his eyes. But Bobbie Webb would not be so very surprised. At heart she always knew.
58
Mort Oshins
September 15, 1973
The airport is fogbound. The last shuttle to Washington sits outside the terminal window in drifting floodlit mist. We’re promised a takeoff within the hour.
Peter Quat is going to become a very, very rich writer. The Almighty will have to forgive me for talking money on the Sabbath. It felt damned odd. I committed no technical violations, no writing, no telephoning. Still, I may well end up with a fat fee from this day’s money talk, and if so I’ll donate that fee to charity and skip all the contrition.
At the moment Peter is broke. That never bothers him. If he wants to charter a yacht for the somewhat special purpose of fornicating at anchor, why, he just does it, and then scrambles here and there for the money. Despite his big earnings, the price of pleasure past keeps his purse lean. Peter pays alimony to three ex-wives (the fourth has remarried), and he is putting several kids through school, one a by-blow. He avoided a paternity suit by settling a lump sum on the mother, a twenty-year-old receptionist in the office of his previous publisher. Peter is a creature of impulse, no doubt of that.
Now and then, I’m bound to state, I envy Peter’s gamy goulash of a love life. Since I married Jan there has been not one other woman. Nothing even close. If variety is the spice of life, I have been on a bland diet for thirty years. So has poor Jan, for that matter. The faithful creature eats up red-hot novels and sighs over them, and that—to my best knowledge—is that. Clearly monogamy agrees with me, and I must hope it does with her. I am as happy as they come in this vale of tears, partly because Jan is an enigmatic, shifty, and durably adorable little package, and I never know quite where I stand with her, or what is coming up next. Still, that is not the same as rogering your publisher’s wife on a chartered yacht, one more score in a lifetime of random rogering. Let us not kid ourselves.
