As I began to read, my sister began to fall apart. I’m not sure if it was the “inappropriateness” (to her mind) of what I was saying, or the fact that I was crying and having difficulty reading the words, or that the torture she had undergone for six weeks had finally broken her, but she began writhing in Jerold’s grasp, and in a voice that could be heard throughout the funeral home hoarsely cried for Jerold to “make him stop, make him stop! Stop him!” Beside her, her daughter Lisa, my niece, snarled, “Shut up,
Mother!” but Beverly never heard her. She was manipulating her environment, and her lunatic brother Harlan was doing another of his disgusting numbers, desecrating the funeral of her mother. They finally manhandled her into another room, where her cries could still be heard. And I went on, with difficulty. And this is what I said:
My mother died three days ago. Her name was Serita R. Ellison. The R stood for Rosenthal, her maiden name. I’ll tell you everything I know about her.
My mother told me only one joke in her entire life. She probably knew a lot of others, but she never told them to me. I’ll tell you the one she told me.
It’s about these two Jewish fellows who meet on a street in Buffalo, New York. They are related, see, but not close; something like in-laws once removed. And Herschel doesn’t care much for Solly, because Solly is always trying to sell him some crazy thing or get him involved in some shtumie business deal. But Herschel gets trapped coming out of the butcher shop and Solly says to him, “Have I got a deal for you! And Herschel says, “If it’s as good as that last deal, this time we’ll go to the bankruptcy court hand-in-hand.”
And Solly says, “Listen, you can’t pass this one up. It’s terrific! A friend of mine is having an affair with a woman whose second husband’s brother is married to a girl whose father is in business with a guy whose son is a merchandising agent for circuses, and I can get for you, for a mere three thousand dollars, a guaranteed fully grown, two ton Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey elephant.”
So Herschel looks at him like he’s sprouted another head, and he says, “You know, you’ve gotta be out of your mind. I live in a fifth-floor walkup apartment with a wife and four kids, and one of them is sleeping in the sink we got so little room. What the hell am I gonna do with an elephant, you dummy?”
And Solly says, “Listen, only because you’re married to Gert, I’m gonna make this a special. You can have the elephant for two thousand five hundred.”
Herschel starts screaming. “Listen you yotz, what is it with you, are you deaf or something. I’m telling you I don’t want, I don’t need, I have no use for a two ton elephant, not for twenty-five-hundred, not for nothing. How the hell am I supposed to get the thing up the stairs? What do I feed it? You could die just from the body heat of a thing like that in a four-room apartment. Get away from me, you moron!”
And they argue back and forth, with Solly constantly reducing the price, till finally he says, as a last resort, “Okay, okay, you momser! You want to bleed me, a relative, you got no heart? Okay! My last and final offer. For you…not one…but two! Two two ton Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey elephants for five hundred dollars!”
And Herschel says, real quick, “Now you’re talking business!”
When Momma told me that joke she was laughing. She laughed very long and very hard, and I did, too. Not because the joke was so funny, although it’s not bad and she told it well, but because she was laughing. I never saw my mother laugh very much.
From May of 1949 on, I never saw her laugh at all.
That was when my father died.
It’s impossible to talk about Serita without talking about Doc. Of course I never knew them when they were young and running around the way young people do, but from what I’m told by members of the Rosenthal family, they were some kind of short, Jewish equivalent of Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda. They were in love, and they were nuts together.
When my father died, I think my mother’s life stopped. It was twenty-seven years of shadows for her. Just marking time. Waiting to join Doc. If there’s anything good about death, and anything that even remotely lightens the pain of my mother’s death, it is that finally, after twenty-seven years, she came up lucky and went to meet my dad, to take up where they got cut off in 1949.
I’d tell you how old my mother was when she died, but as anyone who knew her for more than an hour can tell you, she would rather have had bamboo shoots thrust under her fingernails than reveal her age. She was like that.
She was a good woman, and a decent woman, and had all the right instincts about life, all the usual things people say at funerals; she was also opinionated, stubborn beyond belief, a frequent pain in the ass, and capable of a dudgeon so high it would put the Queen Mother to shame. But God, how she worked for her kids. I don’t remember a time when she wasn’t working. Either beside my dad in the jewelry stores, or in the B’nai B’rith Thrift Shop, or somewhere. And no matter how much we took, she always came up with what we needed.
I remember once when I was a very little kid—and I was not the world’s most tractable youngster—when I did something grotesque and awful; and Mom said, “You’re going to get it when your father comes home.” No doubt I deserved it. I usually did. And when my dad got back from work, exhausted and anxious simply to sit down and relax, Mom told him what I’d done and that I needed a good strapping.
Now understand: my family wasn’t that big on corporal punishment. But my dad took me down in the basement of our house on Harmon Drive in Painesville, and he took off his belt and he did a good job on me.
After a while, I came upstairs, and Mom and Dad were nowhere to be seen. I climbed the stairs to the second floor and through the closed door of their bedroom I could hear my dad crying. The licking had devastated him much more than it had me. And my mom was crying, too. She was consoling him, telling him it was the only thing he could do, and together they were solacing each other.
The Rosenthals were a family with a capacity for unhappiness that was awesome to behold, and Mom was a Rosenthal to her shoetops. There was the endless ganging-up of brothers and sisters in ever-changing permutations of the familial equation, with my mom sometimes allied with Alice and Lew against Morrie, and sometimes associated with Morrie and Dorothy against Martin, and sometimes the hookups were so Machiavellian it was impossible to tell who was mad at whom. But throughout, no matter how affronted she thought she should be, my mother was a Rosenthal, who would take fire and axe to anyone who tried to harm one hair on the head of her kind. The Russian soul of the Rosenthals, which was so intimately a part of my mother’s makeup, kept her from tasting unlimited joy in her later years—my niece Lisa was the great exception—they were in no way like grandchild and grandmother: they were best friends, chums, and the love between them so enriched both their lives that I think Mom’s death is more crushing for Lisa than for any of us—but even so my mother managed to see Beverly well-married and the mother of two good kids, and me safely beyond any possibility of spending my life in jail. She took that to be treasure indeed.
I wish I could tell you more about Serita Ellison, but the sad, sorry fact is that we lived our lives as shadows to one another. We never really understood each other, the dreams never realized, the hopes set aside, the hungers that made us alien to one another. And so at final moments, as I speak of her, I try to hold the important memories; and the one that is richest, most recent is the picture of her in New Haven, Connecticut, in February of last year. I was invited to speak at the Yale Political Union, at Yale University, and I brought Mom up for the prestigious event. She was like a twenty-year-old girl. She was, as she used to put it, “in Seventh Heaven.” Her kid was lecturing at Yale! How she did kvell! What naches! Radiant, like all the suns of the universe. It was snowing so hard in New Haven, and the drifts were so deep, and it was so bitterly cold, I was terrified that a woman in her condition would suffer damage. But she strode around like a cossack. I had to run to keep up with her.
And at my lecture, when I in
troduced her, she stood up and nodded so regally to all the Yalies that I thought I’d burst from pleasure. And when they brought over my books for her to autograph, she wrote, “Thank you for liking my son’s books.”
Near the end, when she was clearly in pain and knew she was going away, we talked several times a day long distance, and I kept saying, “I’ll come down there.” And she kept saying, “No, I don’t want you to see me like this. Beverly and Lisa are here, and I’m all right.” She was more lucid than she’d been in years; I guess she knew it was all over; and she said to me during what I guess was the last time we talked, though it might not have been the last time, “You turned out all right and I love you.”
And now she’s gone, and there’s nothing much to say about the death of an old woman, any old woman, except that she’s dead and everyone who knew her now has a finite number of days and nights to lament never having said all the things that should have been said.
She was my mother, and I miss her.
By the time I stepped off the platform and returned to the family room at the side of the main chamber, Beverly had been returned to her seat. I’m not sure she even heard the eulogy beyond the telling of the “joke.” After the ceremony was completed—so briefly, so awfully briefly—no one would speak to me. No one came up and said, “That was beautiful, what you said about your mother.” My nephew Loren shook my hand and we hugged, because he was crying, too, and he said, very softly, “You did good.” Much later, Jerold took me aside and said, “Serita would have been proud of you.” But other than those two remarks, I was shunned. Beverly, the uncles and aunts, they didn’t stone me, but they made sure they didn’t even brush my shoulder. One holds oneself aloof from pariahs and other uncleans. And their outrage frees me of them forever.
My mother is gone, and I did what I wanted to do for her: she always enjoyed listening to me read, so I did it one last time for her. I know damned well she never heard it, but it’s an innocent conceit. And they wanted to put her down too quickly, with too few words being spoken. I would have read my eulogy and then asked Beverly and Lisa and Lew and anyone else who had something to say, to come up and say it. She deserved that much at least.
Eulogies are never for the dead. They are always for the living; to pay off debts; to say goodbye formally one last time. But no one should be sent down into darkness with too few words.
CENTERPUNCHING
This profile was written in 1968 on assignment for Eye magazine. The values which Harlan explores and the personal insights offered in this tribute to Steve McQueen make me very glad that a short-sighted editor bounced it from another, earlier collection, so that it can appear here.
“I don’t like anybody trying to cap me up. I don’t think anybody should try to cap someone else.”
McQueen said that to me, the first time we met. He was letting me know out-front that he didn’t want to be tied up in a neat little writer’s precis; encapsulated, predicted, fully-known. He didn’t want to be found out, and he sure as hell didn’t want someone wandering around in the dark, poking fingers, and presenting half-truth as fact.
So where do you go to find a man? Not into the mouth of the publicity animal, because down in that gullet all you find are the chewed-over remains of promotional persiflage. Not to his friends, because they lie, for or against, all in the name of fairness, and never know they’re lying. Not to his wives or lovers, because they either hate him or love him, and either way the truth vanishes in the mist. Not to his business associates, because they can’t get their heads free of how much he’s worth to them; so you never get an answer with any salt in it.
If it’s that difficult to find an ordinary man, where the hell do you wander to find Steve McQueen, who is anything but ordinary?
McQueen’s projected image, the shadowy pseudo reality of a million Hollywood hash-dreams, is roughly that of a corrupt Huckleberry Finn. So that ain’t where he’s at.
I supposed you went to McQueen to find him.
Maybe.
In an office building that looks like a motel (in L.A. all the office buildings look like motels…and all the motels look like churches, and all the churches look like 19 cent hamburger stands) I found him in the offices of Solar, his production company.
He came up from behind an uncluttered desk, and offered his hand. He gave me the same quick smile I was later to see him give a bit-player in the film Bullitt. In the film, McQueen is at showdown time with a killer, is trying to locate him on an outbound flight from San Francisco International, and the bit-player is an airlines ticket clerk causing him a momentary delay. He slides past her with that smile; that ready smile that says get out of the way. It was a wary smile, but straight enough for openers with me.
Casually dressed in sandals, white Levi’s with the tag cut off, and a seersucker Nehru shirt; with longish hair; he was about as safe as anybody ever really gets in Hollywood. But wary. Jesus, was he wary. How did he know I wasn’t another of those trickytoe writers toadying around for an inside grope on a McQueen feature, prepared to let Solar do me dandy on their expense account, and then turn around at publication time, and jam a bolo knife in his back. All that nonsense about McQueen the daredevil, McQueen the risk-taker, McQueen the man with the death wish. Or talk about some bum flick he’d made fifteen years ago, when he had to pay the rent on a railroad flat in Greenwich Village so small the mice were hunchbacked. How did he know I was an admirer, that I wanted him to open up and talk about where his head was at? He didn’t. So: wary. God, how wary.
We sat and let the tape recorder run, and some of it I can use, but most of it is too smooth, too safe, not what he’d want on his tombstone, and not what I’d want under my byline.
Forty-five minutes later I shut it off. “This is nowhere,” we both said, at almost the same instant. Then he grinned for real. Not the winsome smile, but the real one. He suddenly wanted to do a thing. He maybe really wanted to get into it. So we jackpotted about it for a few minutes, and he said, “A couple of times when I took writers out with me, to move around with me, to get a story, they took a very natural thing I might do, and made it look silly. But I’ll take a chance with you.”
Then he turned to Rick Ingersoll, his publicity man, and he said, more for my benefit than Ingersoll’s, “If I’m gonna go with him, I gotta go all the way, right?”
The instructions I’d been given to get to McQueen’s home read like the opening sequence of a “Mission: Impossible,” ending with the words: “Just before you reach the big wooden gates, you will find an intercom system. Ring the bell. Wait for an answer. Announce yourself. The electric gates will open. Drive up to the house.” I expected the instructions to self-destruct in fifteen seconds.
I drove up the winding approach to the house. A big, sprawling beast, sunk to its knees in the hilltop, overlooking exclusive Brentwood far below. A Spanish Mediterranean house of stone and wood and Mexican tile, built in 1937, hunkered down on four and a half acres of McQueen-owned pine trees. Littered with happy kids. Neile, McQueen’s gamin wife, slim and delicate as a Dresden figurine, came out of the house with him. They were walking close together, their arms around each other’s waist. If Steve McQueen never said “how great my old lady is” (which he does, frequently), the way they came out of that house would have said it all.
Inside: a front hall with a circular staircase and a rustic, round oldwood ceiling. Nice. Very nice. “Our Errol Flynn hall,” Neile Adams McQueen said.
In the living room it was quiet. Very masculine house, with solid, comfortable furniture. The backyard looked out over the pool and the tailored grounds, and far off down there below, Hollywood, all snapping and glaring with light, a big klieg searchbeam fingering the sky, announcing the opening of a shoe store somewhere. And it reminded me of something McQueen had said earlier that day, in the office, when we were trying to sound each other, to find out if we had mutual friends in the town. We’d both decided that we probably didn’t have any cross-path friends, for neither of
us hung too heavy with the glitterset, and McQueen—dead serious—said, “I pulled out a long time ago. I mean, all the way out. I’m married, and that’s where my heart is, in my home. I like it where it’s quiet.” It was quiet up here, up above Hollywood. A man could stay sane up here—where the breeze was cool and the nice lady always smiled with adoration.
Then Tim Kiley and Jerry Siegel arrived. Kiley, a slim, balding man with a wonky sense of humor, was the director of the “Ed Sullivan Show.” Siegel was an assistant director, out of Warner Bros.-7 Arts. And for the first time I got word where we were going: we were to drive to Palm Springs that night, and the next morning, in a projected heat of 114 degrees, Kiley and Siegel and Ed Sullivan were going to film a segment featuring McQueen doing wheelies in the low desert. Yeah, well, that was all right, too. I’d wanted to see McQueen handle a motorcycle. All right? It was perfect for me: if I wanted to find out who and where Steve McQueen really was.
Put a saint out in 114° heat for ten hours, and he’d come up for real.
Steve McQueen is 38 years old, a fact that is strangely absent from the publicity information available. March 24, 1930, an Aries with Scorpio rising. (McQueen puts a good deal of stock in astrology. He chuckles, however, at a parallel drawn between him and Hitler, also an Aries with Scorpio rising: at Solar, some of his employees put up a sign that read TODAY HOLLYWOOD, TOMORROW…THE WORLD!)