Inside, Outside, page 52
“I have an appointment with Joey Mack.”
“Joey’s on after Anne. He’s backstage.”
I trotted back down the stairs. Now I could hear the pit band playing the bump-and-grind music of a striptease, beyond the flats, ropes, and curtains.
“He’s down here somewhere,” I said to the old bruiser at the stage door.
“Shit, yes,” he said, suddenly much friendlier, like so many watchdogs after the first bristly encounter. “Come with me.” He locked the door and led me around backstage. There was nothing to see but props, tinselly settings, spotlights, and such, all very sleazy, grimy, and battered.
“Joey, here’s that kid from Goldhandler.”
“Hi, kid.” A pudgy man with a red-painted nose, in baggy pants and an oversize jacket, was playing cards with a stagehand on a wooden prop box. The striptease music here was louder.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” a loudspeaker proclaimed, “Miss Anne Darling.”
WHUMP, whaa, WHUMP, whaa, WHUMP, whaa went the drums, trumpets, and trombones. I could see Miss Anne Darling in my mind’s eye, but that was hardly the idea.
“I’m supposed to pick up Dr. Schneidbaitzim,” I said.
“After the bit, kid,” said Joey Mack, yawning and playing a card.
(WHUMP, whaa, WHUMP, whaa.)
“Say,” I blurted, “can I, you know, can I watch?”
Joey Mack shrugged and gestured at the wing, where I could see the glow of footlights. I darted there and looked out at the stage. I was not alone. A stagehand in overalls and a bald man in a dark suit already stood there. Miss Anne Darling was flirting with the audience as strippers do, smiling, bridling, flashing her eyes, doing the standard strides, dips, and whirls. She was a tall blonde girl, very intent on her work as she went about peeling off a blue costume studded with rhinestones. It was an odd angle for viewing a stripper. Seen from backstage she was much less a fantasy object than a hard-laboring performer.
The French developed a whole intellectual mystique about strippers, way back then; “déshabilleuses tentatrices,” they called them, and also “les strippers,” and I do believe Jean Cocteau or Jean Paul Sartre eventually wrote a book about them. Some heavy Frenchman named Jean; or on second thought, maybe it was Albert Camus. Anyway, all that was about a stripper seen from out front by a heavy Frenchman. But there was something industrious and dogged about Miss Anne Darling, observed from backstage, that pretty much dissipated the good old hot erotic miasma of Minsky’s. I went on watching the free show, gulping and wetting my lips, but that was a Pavlovian reflex to the WHUMP-whaa music, rather than to Miss Anne Darling’s increasingly visible integument. There she was after a while, flailing her naked pretty breasts hither and yon and undulating her hips and belly, and she could hardly have provoked less indecent thoughts in me had she been a seal blowing “God Bless America” through her nose on a rack of horns.
She caught sight of us in the wing, as she half-hid herself coyly behind the curtain for her first encore. She gave us a horribly dirty look, then sailed out again to take off her rhinestone-bordered pants. As she danced around some more, all but naked, with very little protection on what Laertes describes to Ophelia as her chaste treasure, she managed several disgusted glares at us, between sultry ogles at the audience. It was quite a feat of facial mobility. When her act ended she snatched a robe hanging in the wing and pulled it on angrily. “Well, you creeps,” she said, her voice dripping venomous contempt, “did you get an eyeful?” And off she flounced. My ears and face burned. She might as well have caught us spying through a keyhole. Her outraged modesty was every bit that real. A strange business!
Then I watched Joey Mack, and an aging straight man I had seen in Minsky shows for years, do an interminable version of Boy, You Sure Look Natural, one of the dreariest of the time-killers. I spare you the details. The idea seemed to be to drive out of the theatre all but the most obsessive voyeurs, and the customers did go streaming up the aisles. As the curtain closed, the house lights came up, and a candy butcher began barking his wares: various candy bars and—so he assured the audience—incredibly obscene books from Paris, France, all in English, with very illegal pictures.
“Well now, let’s see,” said Joey Mack, in his dressing room atop the iron stairs, opening a worn suitcase full of flimsy scripts. “It’s here somewhere. Hmm. His Tale Touched My Heart… The Crazy Dentist… Who’ll Ride My Sister… Boy, You Sure Look Natural… Flugel Street… Slowly I Turned… She Wants Cream In Her Coffee…”
Joey Mack was such a valuable resource to Goldhandler because he alone among the burlesque comics had written down these “bits.” They were an oral tradition in commedia dell’arte style, the lines and business changing with every performance. Mack had laboriously committed skeleton versions to paper, and it was these that Goldhandler bought from time to time for good money.
“Ah, here we are.” Mack handed me a dirty dog-eared script of ten pages or so. “Dr. Schneidbaitzim. There’s too much kack in there,” he said. “Mr. Goldhandler will have to clean it up. You can’t compete with tits, except with kack.”
A rickety Taj Mahal set was being slapped up on a broad shaky turntable when Mack and I went downstairs. Girls were milling around it in Hindu dress; and boy, oh boy, here were my bare bosoms and cleft rears, sure enough! Everywhere I looked! Nipples! Buttocks! I guess my eyes popped, I don’t know, but I do know the vision was a disappointment. The girls were fussing with each other’s costumes or with their own, or looking for props, or fixing their hair. These were Grade C or D showgirls, to give them the best of it; some with lumpy legs, others with protruding stomachs, working women making a tough living, bustling about their jobs; so uninterested in sex, and so uninteresting! The nipples and behinds “looked natural,” but totally unprovocative. Women had these things, and what else was new?
“This Taj Mahal scene is nice. Stick around and watch it,” Joey Mack said. He spoke to one of the girls, “Hi, are we having dinner?”
“Sure, I guess so, Joey.”
Something like a gilt leaf hung on each breast, not concealing much. With a grin at me he lifted a leaf. “Don’t be funny,” she said sharply, giving me an embarrassed sad look, and she walked away.
I won’t burden you with the whole Taj Mahal scene. After some wooden pantomime by a rajah and his queen (Miss Anne Darling, robed to the ears), the rajah sang “Pale Hands I Loved” over and over, the turntable turned, and the Taj Mahal slowly and unsteadily revolved, I guess to give the customers every possible view of the showgirls posed all over it. The law was that they could display their charms in tableaux, providing that they didn’t move. They did their best to stay within the law, poor things; but keeping their balance was hard, and they had to hang on the scenery and each other, and their breasts would bob and their behinds quiver. No judge would have punished them for that, they were taking punishment enough. This was the dead of winter. It was cold in Minsky’s, and very drafty backstage. Most of the audience sat in overcoats. When I left, the turntable still creakily revolved, the showgirls were shivering, their breasts and behinds were turning blue, and on and on the baritone rajah bawled “Pale Hands I Loved.” The Taj Mahal number had to kill its allotted time.
One more fantasy blasted. On to the Winter Garden.
66
Grade A Showgirls
I came to that stage door, which for months would be my haunt, thoroughly de-fantasized—if such a thing is possible, like being deloused—turned off sex, expecting nothing, intending to give Goldhandler the script and go back to the penthouse. It is there yet, the Winter Garden stage door, forty years later. It has hardly changed, for theatres outlive actors and actresses and their loves. Showgirls pass through the door now as then; young men bring them there and wait for them to come out; and so they live again and yet again the old tale of young love in the big city, where the beautiful girls come to go on the stage, and the bright young men come to make their fortunes, and to love the beautiful girls. That Taj Mahal forever turns.
“Yes?” said the grizzled man who opened the door. He wore a suit and a tie, he had a thick wrestler’s neck, and he looked just as capable of kicking me into the street as the Minsky’s watchdog, but less disposed to.
“Harry Goldhandler is expecting me.”
“Over there, second door.”
In a long dressing room lined with mirrors and lights, Goldhandler sat alone at a typewriter in a fog of smoke. He read Dr. Schneidbaitzim and shoved it into a portfolio. “Terrific. Come with me, and”—he got up, shuffling papers together and giving me the old foxy smile, a Belinda clenched in his mouth—“mum’s the word.”
We hurried across the stage. Girl singers were huddled around a piano in slacks or skirts and sweaters, listening to a man play and sing “The Doomsday Rag.” In a large dressing room, Bert Lahr and Skip Lasser were having sandwiches and coffee. I had never seen Lahr up close before. He appeared older than on stage, and extremely worried. Yet the man was funny just to look at. He was funny biting into a sandwich, funny sipping coffee, and don’t ask me why.
“It’s that friggin’ hospital scene, Harry,” mourned Lahr, his face creasing into a thousand comical wrinkles. “We got to do something about that friggin’ hospital scene.”
“It’s a fine scene,” said Lasser, sitting with his feet up on a low table piled with scripts. “It’s a very meaningful scene, Bert, and you’re terrific in it.”
“It’s no scene,” said Lahr. “It’s a friggin’ hole. The show goes down that friggin’ hole.”
“I have an idea about that,” said Goldhandler, and he began to ad-lib. He had not gotten far when Lahr’s face, until then a funny mask of gloom, metamorphosed to a funny mask of joy. “You mean Dr. Schneidbaitzim!” he exclaimed. “Fantastic! Why didn’t I think of that?”
“What’s that?” Lasser asked. Goldhandler managed to throw Lahr a huge warning wink. “Something you did in another show, Harry? Now, none of that crap!”
Lahr hastily said he’d just been reminded of an old doctor joke. “Keep going, Harry. It sounds okay,” said Lahr with ludicrous solemnity. Goldhandler went on, working “Dr. Cutballs” adroitly into the show’s hospital scene, a confrontation between Schweik and an army psychiatrist. Lasser said he’d like to see it on paper, and he left. Lahr threw his arms around Goldhandler. “Dr. Schneidbaitzim! Couldn’t be better! But the way I used to do it, Harry—”
“Wait for me, Liebowitz,” said Goldhandler, waving me to the door. “We’ll go home for dinner together.”
On the stage a choreographer was shouting at boys and girls dancing to the piano music. I saw the singing girls lounging in orchestra seats, and I went and sat down close to them. They were absorbed in their talk, and I could stare at them all I wanted; and I realized that at last I was looking at Grade A showgirls.
Now, how do you go about describing beauty? I am not a describer. I have enough trouble just putting down what happened. Maybe I can write something of the effect those girls had on me. They were very different from each other, but each one was dazzling in her own way. They were all big slender girls, that they had in common; some with the broad shoulders of swimmers, others slighter and more delicately formed; some faces strong-boned, others softer and sweeter; and—another common feature—they all had huge eyes. They wore almost no makeup. Their working clothes were unglamorous. They were there to do a job, like the Minsky girls; but unlike the Minsky girls, they stirred the passions at sight.
Oh, Lord, the careless queenly desirability of those singing girls! They laughed, they sprawled about with shapely long silk-clad legs, they smoked cigarettes, they made unseemly faces at each other as they gossiped; but none of that could dispel the aspect of allure, the sense of their own beauty, that was their mark. The Minsky girls had been pathetic creatures; that Grade B girl of Billy Rose’s had been pitiable too, in her trembling eagerness to snatch up her skirt and land a job. The unaffected self-regard of these girls was what smote you. They knew their worth.
I had once despaired of ever laying eyes on a girl as beautiful and desirable as Dorsi Sabin. Fool! I was looking at ten girls, each one ten times more seductive than Dorsi Sabin. Dorsi was for the likes of Morris Pelkowitz. A monarch, a president, a billionaire, could fall for one of these girls and become her slave. That was a matter of luck, for such catches are few, but it was possible! They were a chorus of Theodoras, of Madame du Barrys, of Nell Gwynns. They were Grade A showgirls. And I might never win one of them—God in heaven, how could I?—but I could forget about Dorsi Pelkowitz, the lost goddess. She was a lost housewife.
“Let’s go, Finkelstein.”
I must have jumped two feet off the chair. Goldhandler glanced with amused comprehension at the girls, and I expected a coarse joke, but he said nothing. We went out to catch a cab on Broadway. Over the marquee, men on scaffolds were obliterating the name of the last show with white primer. “It’ll be nice at that,” said Goldhandler, “to see my name up there again. It’s been a while.”
We rode in silence in the cab. He puffed a Belinda. I stared out at Broadway, bemused, confounded, despondent. “Pretty girls,” Goldhandler said, startling me again.
“Yes. Pretty girls.”
“You’ll get a pretty girl, Liebowitz. In the end you’ll want one that’s smart. That’s the main thing.”
***
“You won’t believe this,” Boyd said as we came into the office. He sat at Goldhandler’s desk, looking as stunned as I probably had, contemplating the girls. “You missed him by two minutes.”
“Missed who?” Goldhandler asked.
Peter, batting out a script at a typewriter, made a disconcerting face at me.
“John Barrymore.”
“Barrymore?”
“He’s interested in doing War and Peace.”
Goldhandler stared at Boyd, for once in his life speechless.
“I picked up the phone, and it was Barrymore, I tell you,” Boyd said. “I almost died of the shock. They’re all interested, Ethel and Lionel, too. John’s coming east on business, and he wants to talk to you about it.”
Goldhandler fell into an armchair, cast his eyes up to heaven, and slowly breathed. “Holy… shit.” Then suddenly and sharply he said, “You didn’t tell him it was for Ex-Lax?”
“God, no,” said Boyd.
“Well,” said Goldhandler, addressing Peter and me, the old foxy grin breaking out on his fat face, “you two fuckers better get hot on the Battle of Borodino.”
John Barrymore actually came to the office, what’s more.
Talk about the difficulty of describing! Who is like John Barrymore today, that great Hamlet, that chiselled profile, that peerless movie idol? I had never missed a film of his since in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a silent movie, he had scared the daylights out of me at age ten. Barrymore’s Dr. Jekyll was a man as celestially handsome as a Raphael angel, as elegantly turned out as the Prince of Wales. His Mr. Hyde was a stooped pointy-headed leering horror, dressed in flapping funereal black, with writhing lips, claws for hands, and mad murderous little eyes. That story has been done to death since, but as a show it has always hung on the charm of Jekyll. Anybody can be tricked up as a monster; I could play a creditable Hyde, if there were any point in it, and there is no comedian who hasn’t parodied Mr. Hyde. But there was only one great Jekyll, one perfect figure of a man to contrast to the horrible Hyde, and that was John Barrymore.
And it was Dr. Jekyll who came to Goldhandler’s penthouse. Stories were rife about Barrymore’s decline, his drunkenness, his temper, his pranks and whims; but this was a quiet-spoken gentleman in a gray double-breasted suit and a gray homburg, who did not look thirty-five. He might have stepped out of Topaze or Twentieth Century, recent movies in which he had played a modish man of the world. He talked about the Tolstoy project with calm astute professionalism, and at last put the main question: what sort of money was in it, and who would be the sponsor?
When Goldhandler named the Lou Blue budget, one Barrymore eyebrow went up, and the head appreciatively tilted, just as in the movies. About the sponsor, the situation was delicate, Goldhandler said, involving the cancellation of a big program. Barrymore nodded, and did not press him. Goldhandler promised to submit sample scripts for his approval, and he left with the star, who was going to another appointment on Broadway. Boyd had been telephoning the Winter Garden every day about the sign. It had just been finished, and Goldhandler’s name was on it. No doubt he wanted to show it casually to Barrymore, and he was pretty eager to see it himself.
Peter Quat exclaimed when they were gone, “I feel I’m working in an insane asylum. This thing is preposterous! Dave and I have been beating our brains out uselessly for weeks. You can’t stuff Tolstoy into a series of radio half-hours, that’s all. It can’t be done, Barrymores or no Barrymores.”
“It’s class,” said Boyd serenely. “If the boss gets a twenty-six week contract, what else matters? We have to buy some more copies of War and Peace right away and start assembling half a dozen scripts. Boss’s orders.”
Goldhandler returned to the office with a face dark as thunderheads. He opened a fresh box of Belindas, held them to the light, and barked at Boyd, “Black! Coal black! I might as well smoke tarred ropes! Where are the mouse-colored ones?”
“Those are the mouse-colored ones,” said Boyd.
Goldhandler believed that mouse-colored cigars were the mildest, so that the thirty he smoked every day wouldn’t affect his health. With a grouchy mutter Goldhandler lit one, and sank in his swivel chair, puffing.
“Didn’t they put your name on the sign?” Boyd ventured.
“Yes, they did,” said Goldhandler, “in fly shit. ‘Book and lyrics by’”—he let out a frightening roar—“‘S. K. LASSER, and’”—he dropped his voice to a weak whisper—“‘additional dialogue by H. Goldhandler.’” He jammed the cigar into a Perrier bottle. “Faugh! It tastes like I’m smoking my cock.”
