Best to Laugh: A Novel

  “Somehow I can’t see Gina Mills wanting to rise up,” I said.

  “But who really knows? Maybe she started out as a temp—maybe she’d grown up reading Betty Freidan and Simone de Beauvoir, and suddenly, the free lunches, the afternoon tea, the double-overtime pay—maybe it all got to her and made her want to take her clothes off and pose for Rogue magazine.”

  “And why not?” I said in a robotic voice, as I started to unbutton my shirt. “Donald Doffel is my lord and master.”

  32

  BY DAY I TYPED movie synopses and cast lists, passing Rascalettes in the hallways, pressing myself against the wall so as to not bump into their mammoth fake breasts (I hadn’t even known things like fake breasts existed, but Terry told me Rascalettes had silicone implants as casually as the rest of us had our teeth cleaned). And once I passed Donald Doffel, who, befitting his legend, always wore a silk robe over silk pajamas, a bottle of Dad’s Root Beer clamped in his hand.

  By night—at least Sunday, Monday, and Thursday nights—I appeared at my favorite open mikes at the Improv, the Comedy Store, the Natural Fudge. I had abandoned Pickles; the deli/comedy club never attracted much business, plus I always left there reeking of, yes, pickles, and Wally’s in North Hollywood switched its format to strictly country-western singers.

  “I can’t believe how much I love being onstage,” I said to Francis Flover, whom I had run into at Ralphs Supermarket on a Saturday morning. He’d been staring at the rows of cereal boxes with the concentration of an art gallery patron.

  “Frank says you’re a natural,” said Francis, after he’d made his selection and we headed down the aisle. “I’m very sorry I haven’t been able to get to one of your performances myself, but—”

  “Oh, don’t apologize,” I said, suddenly alarmed at the slow and halting pace with which he pushed his cart. “Of course, I’d love to have you see me, knowing show business like you do, but I know you’re a busy man.”

  Francis looked at me with a pained expression.

  “Please, Candy. I am many things, but at this stage in my life, busy is not one of them.”

  His groceries only filled half a paper bag, but I offered to carry them and was glad I did, because he could barely make it up the two slightly inclined blocks to our apartment complex.

  “I’ll bring you over dinner tonight,” I said as I put away Grape Nuts, a can of coffee, eggs, a pint of cottage cheese, and three oranges. “And next time, I’ll do your shopping for you. At least until Frank gets back.”

  Frank and his band had been delighted and astounded to have booked a two-week tour that took them to small clubs throughout California.

  “You’re as sweet as your name, Candy,” said Francis as he walked stiffly toward his dining room bar. “And as much as I’d love to offer you something tantalizing to drink, the liquor cabinet seems bereft of everything but soda water.”

  “Soda water would be great.”

  “Excellent choice.”

  The front windows of his apartment were open and a car horn blared on the boulevard and someone shouted, “Move over, ass-wipe!”

  From the bar, Francis sighed.

  “This used to be an address of some civility,” he said, pouring two glasses, and as he handed them to me I couldn’t help but notice the tremble in his hands. “Now the lunatics run the asylum.”

  As he walked toward the couch, his gait was spongy, as if he didn’t trust the floor’s surface, and when we sat down, it took him a moment to catch his breath.

  After several sips of water, he sat taller, seemingly rejuvenated after taking his old-man vacation.

  “Now, Candy, I want you to tell me all about this new career of yours. What’s your strategy?”

  “My strategy?”

  “Peggy Lee, for example. Her strategy was to lock you in her bedroom when she sang.”

  “It was?”

  Francis arched a silver eyebrow.

  “And Eartha Kitt. Her strategy was to bring you to a little dive that the cops were ready to bust, and then force you to spring for a diamond necklace at Tiffany’s.”

  “Oh.”

  “Now, Martin and Lewis, of course their strategy was to bring you into their private clubhouse, where tuxedos and clown suits were both acceptable apparel.”

  I nodded as if of course I knew that.

  “So you see, my dear. All great performers have a strategy. And I’m curious as to what yours might be.”

  “I . . . I’m flattered that you think I have one, but the only strategy I have is that I want to make people laugh.”

  Considering this, Francis nodded.

  “Get that album under there,” he said, pointing. “If you please.”

  I hefted a leather-bound book from underneath the coffee table and handed it to him.

  Setting it on his lap, Francis blew off a puff of dust and smoothed his hand over its tooled cover.

  “This is about all I have left of the Bel Mondo. Dust and photographs.”

  I leaned into him.

  “That’s Ward Bond,” he said, opening the album on the table our thighs made. “Recognize him?”

  I studied the man’s face. “Wasn’t he in—”

  “Sergeant York. It’s a Wonderful Life. The Maltese Falcon. On and on.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “He could play a tough guy, a tough guy with a heart, and a funny tough guy.”

  “And that’s Ethel Barrymore.” His drew his fingers across the photograph, as if he were petting it.

  “She wasn’t as good looking as her brother John or as accomplished as her brother Lionel, but I tell you, no one could liven up a party like Ethel.”

  He turned the pages slowly, taking me on a tour through a bygone era.

  There were pictures of Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman, Stewart Granger, Ava Gardner, Lana Turner.

  “Look at you next to Humphrey Bogart,” I said. Francis often posed with many of the stars whose short biographies he narrated, and in all the photos his hair was combed back and shiny with brilliantine, his smile dashing under a mustache. “You look like a movie star yourself!”

  “Tuxedos are a great equalizer. But I daresay, even a street bum from back then was better groomed than some of today’s stars.” Francis shuddered. “My own son wouldn’t have been able to get past the coat room of the Bel Mondo.” Pointing to photographs of Doris Day and Jean Simmons, he asked, “Can you imagine Frank and Mayhem Rules on the dance floor with her or her?”

  “No,” I said and we shared a laugh.

  I pointed to a lovely woman in a white dress. “Who’s this?”

  Francis leaned closer to the album.

  “Ahh. Leonora de la Graza. She was from Brazil, and if I had a list of the ten most beautiful women, her name would be number one. Considering the company I kept, that’s high praise indeed.”

  “Was she in the movies?”

  “She should have been, but she made the mistake of publicly criticizing someone who had the power to hire her, Louis Melchor. He was a studio head, notorious at the time for naming names in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. You ever hear about all that communist infiltration nonsense?”

  I nodded.

  “When Leonora showed up at the club—this photograph is from that night, when she first got there—the audience begged her to get onstage and perform her big hit, ‘Little Canary.’

  “She obliges us, but after she sings the song and is taking a bow, she sees Mr. Melchor in the crowd and says, ‘Hola, Senor Melchor—have you sung like a birdie today?’”

  Francis shook his head. “I remember it as if it were yesterday. There was absolute silence, and then some lugs started booing her, and although I’d wager there were more people who’d have liked to cheer her on, nobody did. One could criticize Louis Melchor in private, but he was far too powerful to criticize in public. Hedda and Louella, Hollywood’s most influential—too influential—gossip columnists, got a hold of it and it was all over the papers,
and Leonora’s movie career was over before it began. All for having the guts to say what everybody else was thinking.”

  He stared at the photograph, one finger under his nose as if stopping a sneeze.

  “What happened to her?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “She left town. I think she went back to Brazil, where I hope she led a rich and satisfying life. Which is what I hope you will have.”

  “Well, thanks,” I said, a little taken aback at the benediction.

  “Just remember, Candy, show business is cruel, but then again, so is life. It’s up to you whether or not to get undone by it.”

  It was getting harder to hear him; his voice only a degree above a whisper.

  “Are you all right, Francis?”

  He cleared his throat and spoke with a little more strength.

  “Look at this one, Candy,” he said, pointing to a photograph on the album’s last page. “It was taken just down the street.”

  I leaned in closer.

  “Oh, at the Roosevelt Hotel!”

  “We were at a party there after a movie premiere, I forget which one. See how some of us have champagne glasses? It was so crowded we spilled out of the hotel and into the street.” He chuckled. “That’s me,” he said, pointing to a man wearing a top hat and lighting a woman’s cigarette. And that’s Rita Hayworth—well, her elbow—right there. Too bad you can’t see the rest of her in the picture, because she was something else.”

  “Everyone . . . everything looks so glamorous.”

  “It was a different world.” He carefully unmoored the picture from its triangular corner tabs. “Here. I’d like you to have this.”

  “Thanks.” The word didn’t feel quite big enough.

  We sat on the couch, our knees a quarter-inch from each other’s. Several measures of mariachi music rose up from a passing car’s stereo and then June’s voice, scolding her yapping dog. We listened until both voice and bark faded down the boulevard, and Francis’s deep sigh didn’t speak of regret; it shouted it.

  “Melvin told me he told you about my troubles,” he said. “I would have preferred he didn’t. I’d like you to think of me as I used to be rather than—”

  “Francis, I think you’re—”

  He lifted a trembling hand in protest.

  “—I was something, but one ill-chosen act made me something else. Of course, that’s no excuse; even a murderer was something else before he pulled the trigger.”

  “Francis, let’s—”

  “—the thing is, anyone can rehabilitate. I just didn’t know how. At least to the level I should have.” He stopped then, seeing my face. “Pay me no mind, Candy. Those photographs just put me in a melancholic mood. Even old men can get the blues.” He snapped his fingers and wagged his head, as if the last sentence were lyrics to a song.

  Several minutes later, he apologized for needing to keep an early date with his mattress, and when I left his apartment I felt uneasy, as if I weren’t going to see him again.

  33

  3/30/79

  Dear Cal,

  Comedians are striking against the Comedy Store! The strike was so short, I only got a chance to join the picket line once. The comics prevailed, though, and even though their victory won’t affect those of us performing on Amateur Night, my goal of course is to get a regular slot there, which will now be a regular PAID slot!

  EMERGENCY VEHICLES LIGHTS PULSED and my heart pounded as I stood off to the side, watching the paramedics shove the stretcher into the back of the ambulance.

  “What happened?” I whispered.

  “I don’t know. He seemed fine and then all of a sudden he passed out cold.”

  “I want to go with him! I’ve got to go with him!”

  Terry and I watched as the twenty-three-year-old bikinied Gina Mills, on roller skates, chased after the ambulance carrying her fifty-nine-year-old boyfriend.

  “Doff! Doff!”

  Deirdre, secretary to Mr. Doffel, trotted over to the sobbing Rascalette, who’d been practicing her figure-eights on the tennis court when she heard the commotion and skated over hill, dale, and flagstone driveway to get to the downed Doff.

  “All right, everybody back to work,” said Deirdre, and as a group of cooks, office workers, and gardeners dispersed, she led Gina toward the mansion, clumsily trying to match her on-foot stride with Gina’s on-skates one.

  “Ow!” she said as Gina ran over her toe. “Watch it, will you?”

  Gina wailed harder.

  Deirdre rolled her eyes at Terry and me before asking what we were doing standing around when there was work to be done.

  Doff was back hours later after his physician gave him a diagnosis of simple overexertion.

  “The good doctor seems to think it might have something to do with the especially energetic calisthenics I engaged in with three willing young ladies last night. Seems I should have had some breakfast to restore all those calories I burned off.”

  He had delivered this news to his office staff, and Terry related it to me on our drive home.

  “Ewww,” I said, sticking my head out the window.

  “Tell me about it,” said Terry. “I just about barfed. As if I want to hear any details about that old lech’s sex life.”

  “Everyone else wants to,” I said, reminding her of the recent L.A. Times article Deirdre had copied and posted on every department’s bulletin board. It had gushed that Rogue was experiencing its biggest subscription year ever among men of an age desirable to advertisers, and that a survey of these same young consumers indicated their favorite part of the magazine was the Rascalette fold-out pictorial, with Donald Doffel’s “This Rogue’s Corner” column in second place.

  “You know what you should do, Candy?” asked Terry as she pulled up in front of my apartment building. “You should work the Rogue Mansion into your act.”

  “I’d probably get sued,” I said. “For invasion of ickiness.”

  THE THING WAS, it didn’t matter what material I wrote for my act; I was having trouble sticking to any of it.

  There were comics who wrote their own acts, even writing the word beat in parentheses to remind themselves to pause; comics who hired out writers; and there were comics who liked to wing it, talking about whatever came to mind. It was scary enough trying to make people laugh on stage and scarier still to attempt it without material, and so the comics who worked this way were in a distinct minority, a minority in which I was finding myself more and more.

  “First and foremost, you’ve got to have an act,” advised Danny Hernandez, who emceed Amateur Night at the Comedy Store. “Sure, you can improvise a little, but no one’s going to book you if you don’t have a rock-solid act.”

  It was my intention each time I got onstage to do at least one of the five-minute acts I’d written, but a minute or two into it I’d get distracted.

  On stage at the Improv, I noticed a couple sitting off to the side. The woman’s hair was sprayed into a blonde helmet and the man wore a black shirt with a white satin tie.

  “Hey, look,” I said, “It’s Pat Nixon out on the town with Vito Corleone.”

  The woman laughed along with the audience, but to describe the guy as “stone-faced” would be attributing more animation to his face than was there.

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Corleone,” I said, with an acquiescent little bow. “I won’t tell Dick.”

  I didn’t intend this lasciviously but it sounded that way, and the crowd erupted in laughter and applause.

  “Wow, who’d have thought, Pat Nixon out on the town with a big Mafia don? Then again, I guess she’s always had a thing for criminals.”

  The more I got into it, the looser Vito got, until his scowl was replaced with a big grin, and when my five minutes ran out, he cupped his mouth with his hands and shouted, “More!”

  This was a really fun discovery; people tended to like getting insulted from the stage (at least the ones who weren’t totally plastered). If your insults were funny enough. Or stupi
d enough.

  “I see you love New York,” I said to a woman whose T-shirt said as much. “You’re lucky—I just broke up with Philadelphia.”

  There was a huge groan, but sometimes the fun came in not just refusing to give up a bad joke but elaborating on it.

  “Okay,” I said, “it wasn’t me who ended the relationship. You know Philadelphia’s all about freedom.”

  When I saw a guy wearing a cowboy hat, I said, “And what do you do, Curly?”

  “I like to ride the range!” he said, and pleased with himself, he nudged his wife.

  “So are all your appliances covered in spur marks?”

  After letting the laugh settle, I said to his wife, “Does he try to rope the refrigerator, too? Corral the mixing bowls? Hog-tie the step stool?”

  I was having so much fun.

  “CANDY OHI, HUH? I LIKE IT. And I can’t believe how much you’ve improved from the last time I saw you.”

  “I should hope so,” I said, and shuddered at the memory.

  Mike Trowbridge swiveled on the barstool. “What was that, three, four months ago? Man, you’re a totally different performer.”

  “Thanks,” I said and sucked on the straw of my margarita. We had run into each other in the back hallway of the Comedy Store, and hearing that I’d be going onstage, he’d watched my act. Afterwards, we went next door to the Hyatt House for a drink.

  “Really, Candy, you had them right where you want ‘em: in the palm of your hand.”

  I batted my eyelashes. “Tell me more.”

  He considered me for a moment.

  “Okay, you’ve got a very pretty smile.”

  This I was not expecting and I ducked my head, discovering how interesting my drink coaster was.

  “So,” I said, taking a deep breath. “How’s Kristin?”

  “Kirsten. And she’s fine.” He laughed. “You know, I’m not betraying her by saying you have a pretty smile.”

  A fire flamed on my face. “Of course you’re not. Anyway. So . . . what were you doing at the Comedy Store on Amateur Night? You’re a regular.”

  “I was in the Main Room, doing improv.” He took a swig of beer. “Have you tried that?”