Underfoot in Show Business

  When I said that Irving’s face never lost its beaming smile I meant that he not only beamed happily, he could also beam sadly. He now beamed very sadly at the waiter and said:

  “I wish I could say it was great! I wish I could!” And he shook his head, still beaming sadly.

  “How’s the lady’s steak?” the waiter asked me.

  “What’re you asking her?” Irving beamed with a snort attached. “What would she know, she’s a starving writer, she lives in a tenement, where would she get a steak unless I buy it for her? To her it tastes good!”

  And don’t think it didn’t.

  After dinner, he put me in a cab, paid the driver and said, “Sweet dreams, dolling, I’ll call you,” before departing off down Broadway in a round, rolling, eager gait that would have done both Milne and Piglet proud.

  Irving was—and I hope still is—the happiest man I ever knew. He loved everybody and everything, but most especially he loved Broadway—where he lived, ate, worked and spent his evenings-out. He loved all of it, from the marquees and big neon signs to the honky-tonk gift shops and shooting galleries. Broadway was his ocean and he bounced around on top of it like a cork, on intimate terms with every wave, every piece of seaweed and every shark. (“Frank’s a very nice fella!” he told me earnestly, speaking of the notorious gangster Frank Costello. “He gives big to the Heart Fund!”)

  He called me one day, when I’d nearly finished the presentation, and told me to meet him for lunch at Dinty Moore’s and he’d sing me the score of Kisses and Knishes. But he didn’t sing it to me at Dinty Moore’s. He waited, and sang the score to me as we walked down Broadway afterward, he on his way to his office and I on my way to Monograph.

  Walking down Broadway on a spring afternoon with Irving Caesar singing to you at the top of his stentorian lungs is what they call an Experience.

  He’d finish a chorus of a song, and I’d say:

  “That’s a very pretty—”

  “NOW WAIT!” he’d holler, seizing my arm to halt me in my tracks in case I wasn’t planning to wait, and keeping a firm grip on me as he sang the second verse and another round of the chorus. Then he’d let my arm go and we’d walk on a few more steps while he set the scene for the next song for me.

  People were going by in a steady stream as we walked, and at every step we took, somebody coming along would wave or tip his hat or nod, and say, “Hello, Irving” or “Hi, Irving,” or “Hiya, Mr. Caesar.” Everybody who went by seemed to know him: cops and song pluggers, actors and fight promoters and prostitutes, bookies and Broadway producers and winos and panhandlers. Everybody spoke to him and Irving beamed back and waved and said How-ya-doin’? and Call-me-I’ll-buya-a-drink, and never lost a beat of the song he was singing from Kisses and Knishes.

  I finished the presentation and Irving pronounced it magnificent and predicted we’d both get rich on the sale of My Dear Public to some movie studio. He hurried off to sell it and I took a week to pick up my scattered wits and straighten them out.

  He phoned a few weeks later to tell me that all the studios had rejected My Dear Public. I said I was sorry.

  “Don’t worry about it! Forget it!” Irving advised me on the phone, his tone of voice as enthusiastic as if he’d just made a million dollars on the sale. “It didn’t work, that’s yesterday! Forget it, I forgot it already! I got a million projects, get yourself a project, dolling! Write a play, I’ll put money in it.’ “

  “It’s funny you should say that,” I told him, “because just this morning, for the first time in a year, I got an idea for one.”

  “See, dolling?” he said triumphantly. “So who needs the presentation? Write a funny play, I’ll put money in it.”

  That was on a Friday. The new play wouldn’t take form enough for me to start writing for several weeks and it would be one more unproducible dog when I did write it. But if you’re a writer and you’ve got an idea for something solid to write, you’re happy as Christmas morning. On Saturday night, therefore, I stayed out late, celebrating. One of the male readers at Monograph bought us a lavish pair of standing-room tickets to a Broadway musical and we went on to a party afterward. When I finally crawled into bed shortly before dawn it was with the secure knowledge that I could sleep till noon on Sunday.

  And I would have, if the phone hadn’t wakened me at ten. Without opening my eyes I sent an exploratory arm out toward the night table, located the phone and pulled the receiver onto my pillow. Still with my eyes closed I mumbled:

  “Hello?”

  “Wilk!” snapped my guardian angel at the other end. “Irving says you have a new play. How’s it coming?”

  11. “LHUDE SING CUCCU”

  “I’VE HAD SUMMER THEATRES,” I said to Maxine one spring day in the early fifties. “I’m going to apply to the MacDowell Colony this year instead.”

  “The what?” said Maxine.

  “It’s an artists’ colony,” I said.

  She threw me a dubious look.

  “What’s it like?” she asked.

  “Now how would I know?” I said. “Ask me when I come home.”

  When I wrote to the Colony’s New York office for an application blank, all I knew about the place was what I’d read in magazine articles: that it was in the pine woods of New Hampshire and had been founded (in 1906) by Mrs. Edward MacDowell, widow of the American composer. She had built it as a haven where composers, painters and writers could come for a few summer weeks, to work in absolute peace, free of the pressures of having to earn a living.

  The application blank arrived in the mail, along with a glossy brochure containing photos of a few of the twenty-five studios. You could apply for a studio for one of three six-week periods between May and September. On the application blank, you had to list your “Creative Achievements” and describe the work you wanted to do at the Colony. (I-won-a-fellowship-once, I-was-a-Theatre-Guild-protégée, I-have-a-play-under-option-and-the-producer-wants-it-rewritten.) You had to enclose with your application two letters of recommendation from “Persons Eminent in Your Profession” and I got Terry Helburn and Jake Wilk to write glowing testimonials for me.

  On the day the letter came telling me I’d been accepted, I wished I hadn’t applied. In spite of the brochure’s description of happy working days in solitary studios and long, cozy evenings with your fellow-artists, I set out nervously for Peterborough, New Hampshire, with a mammoth suitcase, my portable typewriter and no idea what to expect. (Unless you count my gloomy conviction that I was going to be surrounded for six weeks by Genuine Creative Artists who would look down on me.)

  I reached the Colony in time for dinner. And the odd thing was that even when I’d been there an evening and had seen all the main buildings, I still didn’t know what to expect.

  The main buildings were clustered together in a clearing in a six-hundred-acre pine forest. The chief building, Colony Hall, was a large white clapboard house with a big, old-fashioned living room, a dining room with half a dozen tables each seating four or five and a big kitchen where they locked up everything at night. (How I found this out is, five of us got hungry one midnight and spent half an hour ransacking kitchen cabinets looking for anything edible that wasn’t locked away in high cupboards. Nothing.)

  Next to Colony Hall was an old rambling frame house where the women slept, next to that was the library and way oft down the road out of sight was the Men’s Lodge where the men slept, built good and far from the women’s building to discourage That Sort of Thing. (Mrs. MacDowell had overseen the construction of the buildings in 1906.)

  Those buildings were all I saw of the Colony that evening, and all tourists ever see of it. You learn what the Colony is like on your first day—and from then on all days are miraculously the same.

  If you’re an early riser you’re up and dressed in a bathing suit with heavy wool sweater and pants over it at 7:30 A.M., when a teenaged waitress comes out of Colony Hall, stations herself on the lawn and clangs a cowbell enthusiastically. First cal
l to breakfast.

  You race over to the dining room and join the other early risers. There are only five or six colonists up that early and you all squeeze together at one table, known as the Early Table and so famous for its high good humor that now and then a late-riser would stagger into the dining room in time for the conversation at the Early Table and then go back to bed.

  You eat an enormous breakfast. (This is particularly true of the men, for reasons which will become apparent at lunchtime. From a masculine point of view, lunch at the MacDowell Colony simply passes belief.) At 8:45, you bid a reluctant farewell to human society and go down to your studio. If you can find it.

  You enter the surrounding pine forest by one of four main roads leading to the studios. But the studios have been scattered so far apart through the six-hundred-acre woods that the painter in one studio can hear neither the piano to his east nor the typewriter to his west. So each main studio road has several forks, each branching into a narrow dirt path leading to a single studio. The problem, as you trudge down your main studio road, is to remember whether you take the second fork to your northeast or the third fork southwest, always providing you know which way is north, which I personally don’t.

  And since the cardinal Colony rule is that no one may enter anyone else’s studio at any time without invitation, you cannot stop in at the Omicron, say, if you happen to arrive there by mistake, and ask the composer inside if he knows where the Veltin is. Instead, you go back to Colony Hall—if you can find that—and say to the manager:

  “Cousin, I’ve lost it again.”

  And the manager takes you down to your studio in the Colony truck.

  You’re probably wondering how a studio came to be called the Omicron. Any patron generous enough to donate a studio to the Colony may name it anything he, she or it likes. (Omicron was donated by some sorority, I think. I’ve no idea who, or what, Veltin was.) The patron is also entitled to build it any way he, she or it likes, so the studios run a gamut in nomenclature from the Alexander to the Monday Music, and in architecture from Italian Palazzo to Backwoods Monastic. Whatever its style, each studio seems to have one demented feature all its own.

  Take my favorite studio, the Veltin, which is the one I had that first summer. It’s a perfect example of Backwoods Monastic architecture: a plain wooden shack with a bare wooden floor, bare wooden work tables, two straight chairs, an old rocker and a big fireplace. Out back on the porch is what in Thomas Jefferson’s day was called a Necessary and that’s about all that can be said for it.

  Well, in the middle of the floor of this bare hut is a glossy, white-enameled staircase complete with newel posts, its five or six steps leading up to a landing, big enough for you to stand on with your head just clearing the ceiling (if you’re short). After you’ve stood there awhile you come back down because there’s nowhere else to go. The steps don’t go anywhere. Over lunch I used to speculate endlessly on what the architect had in mind.

  But whether you’re writing in the Veltin or painting in the Alexander (a replica of a seventeenth-century Swiss chapel, reproduced stone for stone and stained-glass window for stained-glass window), once you’ve walked in and shut the door, all studios are magically alike. All your life you’ve worked in dark rooms above noisy streets, with the phone ringing, the radio overhead blaring, the baby next door crying. Here in your studio you will work, for the first time, in absolute quiet and inviolable privacy through a long uninterrupted day. And you offer up a prayer for the soul of Mrs. Edward MacDowell, who gave it to you.

  As soon as you come in in the morning, you build a fire in your fireplace. Then you either nod to your tombstone or studiously avoid it. Your tombstone stands on the mantel over the fireplace. It’s a wooden plaque shaped like an old-fashioned headstone, on which you’ll find the signature of every colonist who worked in that studio before you. If your tombstone has a line reading:

  Thornton Wilder—Playwright—1937

  which tells you that Thornton Wilder wrote Our Town sitting where you’re getting ready to sit, it can put you off your aim—till you notice that his name is followed by a long list of writers you never heard of, which makes you feel better.

  Having made the fire, you sharpen your pencils, clean your typewriter, stack your typing paper neatly and put your cigarettes and ashtray within reach. Then you stare out the window at the trees. And then, having completely run out of dodges, you get to work. By one o’clock you’ve finished two days’ work. The sun is high and hot and you’ve let the fire go out and peeled down to your bathing suit. You go out to the back porch and splash your face and wash your hands and discover you’re so hungry you could eat anything. And you’re about to.

  You go out to the front step of your studio and take in the wicker basket which has been left there for you. You clear off a work table and take out of the lunch basket and arrange on the table: three little cellophane bags, four sealed paper cups, two thermos bottles, two plastic-wrapped sandwiches—one of which is known to colonists as “the Other sandwich”—and a rolled-up paper napkin containing cutlery. Bouncing around by itself at the bottom of the basket is probably an apple. For later.

  Cellophane bag No. 1 contains a carrot, a scallion, a radish and a stick of celery. This is salad. Bag No. 2 has whole-wheat crackers to eat with your soup, which is in thermos No. 1. Bag No. 3 is sugar for the coffee in thermos No. 2. Paper cup No. 1 contains half a stewed peach. This is not dessert, this is compote. How you know is, paper cup No. 3 has the dessert: last night’s cake doused with sauce (which is why they locked up last night’s cake after dinner). Paper cup No. 2 is mayonnaise for sandwich No. 1. Paper cup No. 4 is cream for the coffee.

  One sandwich contains meat. The Other sandwich may contain absolutely anything. Whatever’s in it is smooth, soft, a pretty color and hard to identify. You taste it, you smell it, you carry it to the window and peer closely at it—and still, you eat it without the slightest idea of what you’re eating. When you get back up to Colony Hall that night, you ask the cook what you ate. One, for instance, was a bright pale mauve and turned out to be cream cheese and apple butter beaten up together. Another was just plain mashed figs.

  (“They ask you,” a young composer said to me earnestly at dinner that night, “to write down on your basket all the things you don’t like. I wrote ‘liverwurst and sardines.’ Who thinks to put down ‘I don’t like mashed fig sandwiches’?”)

  After lunch guilt drives you back to the typewriter and you work till five or five-thirty, when you quit and survey the shambles. The floor is strewn with fireplace ashes and balled-up paper discards, your apple and one shoe are on the mantel, your sweater’s on the newel post, your pants are on the landing and you can’t find your other shoe. (It’s out back by the Necessary.) You’re hot, tired and dirty, but you burn the trash, sweep the floor and fireplace and stack the finished pages of your manuscript neatly before trudging back up to Colony Hall to shower and dress before the dinner cowbell.

  At dinner you meet your fellow-artists. Five or six, at least, are college professors—who, with their steady salaries, their tenure, their sabbaticals, Fulbrights and pension plans, are the Colony’s filthy rich. The rest are full-time working artists with an uncertain income and half the time no income at all.

  For the first few evenings you’re so mellowed by your utopian days you love everybody. After that, you find the four or five colonists most congenial to you and you spend your evenings with them—especially when, as happens at least once a week, the evening begins with a cultural crisis precipitated at dinner.

  Either Wanda, a wispy poetess, taps her water glass for attention during dessert, and announces that on Tuesday evening the Colony poets will give a Reading of their poems in Colony Hall for their fellow-colonists; or Alfred, a painter, announces that he will give a lecture on Nonrepresentational Trends in the library on Friday evening and he’s going to serve sherry afterward (if the kitchen lets him have the glasses). Or Professor Kimmel, composer, aged seventy
-two, lets it be known through a disciple that he can be prevailed upon to play a recording of his twelve-tone symphony this evening and his studio is large enough to accommodate everybody.

  When one of these gruesome offerings is advertised, you go off after dinner to huddle under a tree with your gang and have a heated argument about whether you have to go to this thing or not. (Pro: “We can’t insult our fellow-artists! Everybody’s sensitive, we can’t hurt Wanda’s feelings.” Con: “I worked hard all day, I’m damned if I’m going to spend the evening listening to Alfred run off at the mouth for two hours!” Or more simply: “I had Alfred for dinner; that’s enough.”) When two of these entertainments were advertised for two different evenings of the same week, we compromised: we went to the Poetry Reading on Tuesday; and on Friday, the night of Nonrepresentational Trends, we snuck off to Peterborough to see Joel McCrea in a horse opera. Alfred wasn’t speaking to us on Saturday, of course, but he got over it.

  You’re there for six weeks, and for five of them you’re blissfully happy. And then abruptly, early in the sixth week, you become violently sick of the place and you want to go home. It happens without warning when the Colony’s one zombie—in dyed orange beard and purple shorts—praises Ezra Pound’s political views once too often, or a mousy woman you’re fond of turns out to be a solitary drinker. Or a letter from home may do it.

  It happened to me when I came up from the studio one hazy afternoon to find a thick letter waiting for me, addressed in Maxine’s lavish, all-over-the-envelope handwriting. It was postmarked Washington, D.C., and written on Hotel Willard stationery, several pages of it, and after I bathed and dressed I parked myself under a tree to read it before dinner.

  “I just want you to know,” wrote Maxine, “that while you’ve been rubbing noses with the Intelligentsia, I have been making my singing debut. Of course, they only let me sing on opening night and I am a little put out about that.

  “I got back from the Cape on a Sunday night and there was a message to call Eddie at home the minute I got in. He’d left his home phone number—and when an agent wants you to call him at home on a Sunday night, you must be right for the part.