Memoirs of an Amnesiac [First ed.] 0573606986, 9780573606984

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Citation preview

1 Total Recoil

MY

offspring are growing up. I finally said to them, "What

I love most are my children:• I don't think I had ever said it to them before. I also told them that they co11ld do anything except bring me their problems. Then I added: "There comes a time when parents are just a big pain in the ass." They greeted this with a silent embrace. (Unfortunately it's true. And when you say it, it's with a small pang of remorse.) My relationship with my daughters is permissive. I have three-Amanda, Lorna, and Marcia (lvho married recently). I

used to disaffect them by unpredictable Jimmy Porter-like outbursts of irrational rage, for which I was immediately chastised by my ,vife. These black moods have been kept in abeyance of late. Since then I have seizures of momentary sanity. My oldest daughter, Marcia, is an original. I recall that once wl1en I was particularly noncommunicative and groping for conversation and said something asinine, she warned: "Don't be fatuous, Father." It sounded like a bad Groucho Marx line. Which reminds me: when Marcia was born, on October 12th, it ,vas not only Columbus Day but also Yorn Kippur that year. [ 11]

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George S. Kaunnan suggested, "Call the baby Christopher Kipper. " Lorna, n1y second daughter, is a girl of enormous character and strength-probably reflecting her father and his slightly tragic overtones. She has a unique capacity for total recall. I discovered this when I relaxed at dinner and allowed her to indulge in reminiscences about my various taboos. I listened, then said, "Lorna, someday you're going to write a terrible book about me." She laughed, looking rather guilty. Actually, after this one, any book she'd ,vrite about me would be an act of supererogation. I made up with my youngest daughter, Amanda, not long ago. I couldn't afford not to. I told her that I preside over the house like an old, mad Russian tsar-and it wasn't a bad analogy, although personally I prefer Lord Kitchener. The reason for our rift was that she's been served her tea before my coffee for t,vo years, and I blew up. I sa~d that I should be served before she was. "Ladies first," she replied. That burned me. When my children were young, I would never let them leave the dinner table until they had finished their martinis. My suzerainty over the dining room table no longer remains unchallenged. My children and my wife June dominate the conversation due to my insularity and their vivid contact with the academic and social world. My daughters gossip in French and Italian, and I sit by helplessly. I am treated by my family as an infirm and powerless Richard the Third. Amanda, who is a great beauty, derives her looks from me, oddly enough. I refer to myself as a Caliban-like caricature of her. She has the piquancy of Audrey Hepburn (which I lack), and I call her an Audrey Hepburn with arms. I used to call Audrey Hepburn a walking X-ray. I'm infatuated with Amanda. With uncontrolled affection I told her, "Remember in Member of the Wedding ,vhen Julie Harris insisted on going on the honeymoon with her brother? If you're not careful, when you go on your honeymoon I'll be right there behind you."

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When my second daughter, Loma, was saying something agreeable about Leonard Bernstein one night, I told her I had declined Lennie's invitation to attend a rehearsal of Verdi's Falstaff. Never having seen Verdi's Falstaff, it would have been my first time and, like sex, the first time doesn't count. I think a lot of Bernstein-but not as much as he does. Lennie has no humor about his egomania. I do. *

* *

Our house is filled with paintings and photographs of the children, their friends, my wife and my wife's friends. Everybody in the Western Hemisphere is represented except me. There's not a likeness of me in the entire house. I once had pictures taken with President Truman, Toscanini and Adlai Stevenson, but mine were removed years ago. I actually didn't realize this until some people were looking at the pictures and someone asked, "Where are you, Oscar?" I wasn't there. I've been read out of the Party in my own home. It's how things go at our house. I keep saying the wrong things at home, to friends and on television. When Frank Sinatra, Jr., ,vas kidnapped, I said, "It must have been done by music critics." Or, "Anybody who engages Roy Cohn for his attorney can't be all good." That sort of thing. Or I say inept things. At a dinner party we were discussing When the Cheering Stopped, the book about Woodrow Wilson,

one of my heroes. "I was still alive when Wilson was President," I intoned. It didn't create much of a stir. I once said cynically of a politician, "He'll double-cross that bridge when he comes to it." That's the way I am about my faculties. I say things that go askew. On one discussion show I said to another panelist, "You are the greatest comedian in the world, alive-and not alive." He was puzzled, but not as puzzled as I was. I smile so seldom that I wonder at Arlene Francis, who smiles persistently. Like the Sorcerer's Apprentice, once she t11rns it on can she turn it off? Not long ago a well-known Hollywood savings-and-loan mil-

. .,. TfIE MEMOIRS 0F AN AMNESIAC

14

lionaire intruded on a conversation at my table at a restaurant. Worse still, he implied that he and I were equals. "Compared to you, I'm a Hapsburg," I told him. But it didn't offend him. He thought Hapsburg was a rival local banker. Yet I admire him. He's a self-made man. Who else would help? I never hold a grudge, especially when I'm wrong. I believe, too, that injustice should never be tempered with mercy. To my deep regret, I once said that intolerance is the first sign of maturity. I am, as I've told everyone, deeply superficial. And I'm no stranger to humiliation, even in my own household. Someone once asked me where I lived and I said, "On the periphery." Today I'm a neurotic basket case. My health is so bad that I may well be the next Premier of India.

* Instant unconsciousness had been my greatest passion for ten years. During the most acute phases of my mental depression, which lasted many years, my most unabated obsession was instant unconsciousness. For a short interval I was administered eighteen electrical shock treatments, which had dire results. Ho·wever, they had one incalculable pleasure-each shock treatment was preceded by an intravenous injection of sodium pentothal. Afterward I was hooked on intravenous injections of pentobarbital (Nembutal), which had an even more luxurious and longer lasting unconsciousness. This addiction was discontinued-it was short lived. I not only ran out of doctors, but out of veins. During these comatose seizures, the only exercise I got was stumbling, tripping and falling into comas. My deterioration was bottomless. At one time I was in a state of apathy and then later lapsed into a deep depression. During the deep depression period, where I became zombie-like, I would get nostalgic for the good old apathy days. Incidentally, "apathy" and "deep depression" are precise terms in psychiatric terminology. I would endlessly complain at the prospect of consciousness. Once I told June, "You ought to hit me on the head." But after *

*

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I'd said it I was frightened because I'd made such a remark, and the barbiturate dose she gave me didn't ,vork, due to my fear. Yet it's true: I had an insatiable craving for unconsciousness. It was my only surcease. I rated the drug Demerol over sex as the ultimate pleasure at one time. Now I don't have access to either. Speaking of Demerol and just for the record, it has been many years since I've been administered this deleterious narcotic. The other day I was walking upstairs and I was breathing heavily. "You know, walking upstairs is just as bad as sex," I complained. "I get the same reaction from both. Terrible chest pains.'' The horrors of my st1bconscious had left me ,vith a fanatical disbelief in myself, which displays sound judgment. I was an inert, happy-go-lucky derelict ,vho could have been created by Gogol. *

*

*

Rituals have taken the place of religion for me. These superstitions started the second time I appeared on Information Please in the late 30's. (The first time I appeared I didn't even know what the show was all about.) I had a cup of coffee in a drugstore in Radio City before the program and left a dime tip. Tl1is began the whole pattern. From then on, every time I was to appear on that show, no matter how late I was, I dropped into that drugstore, sat on the same stool, ordered a cup of coffee and left a dime. Often I didn't even drink the coffee. I never changed my clothes till I had a bad show. From this simple beginning, my program of rituals has become as complex as the Canadian Air Force exercises. Today my rituals are more elaborate and they increase with my anxieties as the years go by. At times I have to perform some of these rites in front of my wife, and she sneers. This deflates me and I beg for her tolerance; I can't give up either my rituals or my wife. When guests are there I try to perform them covertly, or if the compulsion is strong, I perform them flagrantly, but I am deeply embarrassed. The rites give me

•

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something-not necessarily peace of mind, but a kind of puerile comfort and security. In 1952 I had a heart attack. After I refused to go to the hospital, the doctor told me that I should undress and get to bed. I did, but I insisted on performing all my undressing rituals, even with the heart attack. I usually perform them when I dress or undress, when I go to bed, and when I open a pack of cigarettes. Everything that is pleasurable, I give a pagan benediction. l\1y analyst always said to me, "Why don't you give up your fears and superstitions?" One of the reasons I'm unwilling is inherent in Ernest Heming,vay's story, "The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber," about an unfortunate man whose cowardice emerges while he is hunting big game in Africa. His wife cuckolds him with a white hunter. Finally Macomber is released from his fear and shows courage, standing solid in the face of an approaching buffalo. He is killed (actually shot by his \vife) within seconds after he has reached his freedom from fear. That story poses an acute and terrible moral. A few years ago someone suggested that I read Spinoza. The first chapter in this particular volume was about superstitions and rituals. Here was my faith! Spinoza said rituals are all based on fear. My faith destroyed, I put down the book. My rituals are automatic, mechanical and absolutely necessary, and I perform them without thinking. But when I occasionally forget one, I feel a temporary euphoria, but it is evanescent. A sixth sense (I lack the other five) tells me that I am in serious difficulties. When I button my shirt, for example, I always button the lowest button first. ,iVhen I take off my shirt, I do it from the top down. When I turn on water faucets the first time, I tap each faucet with both hands eight times before I dra,v the ,vater. After I've finished, I tap each of them again eight times. I also recite a silent prayer. It goes: Good luck, bad luck, good luck, Romain Gary, Christopher Isher,vood and Krishna Menon. I also tap my clothes.

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There's no symbolism involved in the count of eight. I started out with smaller numbers but-due to inflation and increased anxiety-it's now eight. I skipped seven. I don't like the number seven. I stir my coffee four times one way with a teaspoon . . • then pause a moment . . . then two times more. I recently added two more stirs but discarded them because they took too long. The coffee got cold. My napkin has to be on the left side before I put it down. If the cream pitcher has a crack, I have it removed. I don't allow any cracks at the table; I demand an absolutely pristine, unadulterated topography. When I play the piano-a form of tactile tl1erapy-I always play a few bars of the Fourth Etude of Chopin, Opus 12, and as I finish playing I always add a few bars of the same, a few bars of the Eighth Etude, and then the coda of the prelude from the Prelude and Fugue in C minor of Bach's "Well-Tempered Clavichord.'' Then I go back to Etude 4, Etude 8, and then a little bit of Etude 4 again. I finish every practice period that way. I guess that's because I'm the fourth child. This has been with me for many years. George Gershwin used to practice the First Etude of Cramer in C major. When I resumed concert playing after Gershwin died, I adopted that and also always wore the specially inscribed wristwatch he once gave me. Then I suddenly gave up the Cramer Etude. Fortunately I have given up anything associated \Vith George. It was too obsessive. A girl I liked before I was married once gave me a pair of gloves. Before a concert, I'd touch the gloves; I don't remember how many times in those days-the economy \Vas different then. Later my wife gave me some gloves and I discarded the first . pair. I used to drive to Edgemont Hospital in Hollywood for shock treatments in 1956. Every time I passed a funeral parlor I would be sure that there was no cigarette in my hand. I would also stop breathing until the traffic lights changed and the car

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18

moved on. If anyone in the car spoke, I would become very disturbed physiologically. One of the funeral parlors has now been replaced, but I still observe my obeisance. I never look. I have many bottles of the pills I take. Some are tranquilizers. I gave up vitamin pills, although my doctor and wife insist that I take them. I never was convinced of the efficacy of vitamins. They were introduced publicly, incidentally, by the St. Louis Cardinals when they were called the Gashouse Gang. They presented vitamins to the public-public relations they call it-but in my lexicon it was chutzpah! Yet there is a certain method in my method, to uncoin a phrase. The sequence remains fixed. I take certain pills first, second, third and so forth. Then I arrange them in a precise order on the table. That's fix~d, too. It's like finger painting by a monkey. All my medicine bottles must be placed with their backs toward me, including the Sweeta; I never look at the fronts of the bottles. I also have a collection of old medicine bottles ,vhich nobody is allowed to touch although I'd like to get rid of them. If they're touched my day is ruined. They symbolize unfortunate experiences. When I go into the bathroom, I put the index fingers of both hands on the slit of the door and silently count to eight. I repeat this once more. On my exit, I also do this twice. I always keep the toilet seat covered at all times. If anything is one quarter of an inch out of place in my bathroom, I lapse into a deep funk. I raise hell. Pandemonium breaks out. I cannot stand an open door. Every closet door has to be closed. When I'm taking off my trousers or pajama pants, the count is eight. But when I lie down on my bed, I lean my head to one side on my pillow and silently count to five twice. I have rigid rules about my pillows-which side they're on. It takes a long time for me to open a package of cigarettes. It calls for the count of one to five twice over, and I take the tinfoil off during the latter half of the second count. If June talks during this ritual, I'm not allowed to rebuke her anymore

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because she'd beat the hell out of me, but I throw the pack away and wait until she leaves the room before I start opening another. Mine is always the most mangled pack of cigarettes around. The tinfoil must go into the silent butler and the paper into the wastebasket. But I allow very few things in my wastebasket. If it is anything of evil, sinister or possible catastrophic design, I put it in my wife's wastebasket. *

*

*

When I'm in the hospital or if I 'm not doing well in my career, I'm more relaxed about this ritualistic straitjacket. If I have nothing impending I relax, but as my engagements increase I get worse. I'm like a ballplayer on a streak. In the middle and late 50's I was in hospitals constantly. I was committed every time I drew a breath or took an extra twelve pills-which never affected me much because I'm not suicidal. Recently we were watching the Eleventh Hour on television. As the advice and behavior of the psychiatrist team became more and more appalling my wife shouted, "You're quacks, both of you I" Last year in the book review section of The New York Times there was an irate article by a psychoanalyst who did not approve of commitments, which he felt were often the worst possible of terrors and punishment. I read it and thought it was completely justified and was inflamed; my wife had committed me so many times. I took the article to her. "Just read this!" I demanded. She read it and shrugged. "You don't know what I've been through," she replied. Ethel Merman once said to me, "Oscar, your wife sure loves you." "She's pretty noncommittal about showing it," I grumbled. June yawned. "I guess I'll have to throw myself in front of a streetcar to prove it, Ethel." "There are no streetcars anymore," I pointed out in my usual Ii teral fashion.

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Ethel replied, "They go uphill in San Francisco." I've been pondering that one.

My favorite magazine-from 1925 when it started, to 1948 lvhen I appeared with Al Jolson on the Kraft Music Hall program-was The New Yorker. Preceding a two-week concert tour in the Northwest, I entered the Union Station in Los Angeles and as usual went to the newsstand and asked, "Do you have a copy of The New Yorker?,, The clerk (I loathed that woman; she spoiled my life) said, "I just sold the last copy. You're out of luck." That was 1948 and I'm so superstitious I haven't read The New Yorker since. Occasionally Ira Gershwin will read me something from it which I accept and am delighted with, but I will not read it myself. Still . . . I miss The New Yorker terribly. I did cheat a few times, but only a few. About twelve years ago when I still gave concerts, I read an occasional bad review which Winthrop Sargeant would give me. He was al,vays predictably damning about me. But otherwise I don't allow The New Yorker in my house. I have a lot of character. I don't give in. It shows how well adjusted I am. As a rule I never read bad reviews about myself because my best friends invariably tell me about them. (When I was on tour in the 50's, I used to buy copies of a Sargeant book on his orchestral musical experiences, to give to conductors. Much later I discovered that on the next to the last page he'd wrapped me up with another devastating critique.) And I never went into that magazine store again. Whenever I'd be in the Union Station, I would go to an inferior newsstand. I will never forgive that woman. What a thing to say to a customer! I remember that I had an armful of magazines and left them on the counter. They would have been tainted by her remark. I told her, "I am going to memorize your name and throw my head away." The irony is, my trip had been very successful. That should have resolved my problem. But it didn't.

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Florence, the best maid we ever had, used to come on Wednesdays. I always dreaded that day because my wife would have Florence dust the table in my bedroom where I keep my newspapers and magazines. They each have to be in just the right position. The most sanctified object on that table was my latest copy of the London Observer. One day Florence touched it while she was dusting. I exploded. She sat on a chair and cried. Then I apologized; I'm always dreadfully contrite at a time like this. I got down on my knees and begged her to forgive me. But she left and never came back. I complained to one psychoanalyst about my wife-not about anything irrational, but that she touched magazines or other objects that were quite holy to me. I told him I'd get into a cold sweat and a kind of paralysis and absolute congealed hysterics when this happened. The doctor said, "You can't blame your wife for behaving normally." I tried to use this as an antidote, but it doesn't work. *

*

*

Actually, it's fortunate that I have my rituals-I make no other consistent physical expenditure. My body is in a state of desuetude, I've had this kind of supine inertia for so many years. I sometimes fancy myself a reincarnation of Oblomov, Goncharov's indolent character, the Russian gentleman who hated to get out of bed. I find most forms of exercise repugnant and aimless; walking ,vithout an objective, dull and pointless. Also fatiguing. Psychologically it is important to know this although few may consider my views on the matter significant. It was better and more meaningful when I used to go shopping with my wife, when we had an objective, going from one store to another or going to a friend's house. Then the walking took on briskness and purpose. It's the difference bet1-veen practicing at the piano in your room and playing a concert. There is no tension in your room. The audience that you have to overcome (overwhelm is the better \vord) isn't there. Even playing in a room full of people,

.

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22

,vhich I haven't done for a long time, creates tension and therefore makes the playing more important. No matter how much you practice, I discovered years ago when I was concertizing, you are never in shape until after five or six concerts in front of the public. On the psychiatric floor at Mount Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles in 1958, there were exercise facilities that were abandoned later. They had a pool table and two cue sticks. There would be five patients playing. One of the cue sticks was broken, so we would hand each other the one cue stick in rotation. It was a maddening procedure. Then when the pool game ,vas over, they'd put a ping-pong table across the pool table. But the best therapy ,vas the punching bag. There was a young girl of fourteen who'd get hysterical and punch the bag like Sugar Ray. You'd hear the thuds all over the floor. I tried it. It's the greatest outlet I ever had. I don't mean I could perform like a prizefighter. It doesn't involve skill. Later, when I . had my television show and Archie Moore was on the first time, he promised to get me a punching bag. It's the only exercise that I can condone for myself; it provides an outlet for my aggres. s1ons. I bought a bicycle in the spring of 1958. I rode up to Pamela and James Mason's, and he ,vas so excited about it that he was envious. He took his daughter Portland's tricycle and got on it and we both rode through the streets of Beverly Hills. That was a good bike. When I was a kid, the brakes ,vere manipulated by the feet, but on this one they were manipulated by your finger. I had to get used to that. I kept forgetting one thing: whenever you go downhill, you have to go uphilJ to return to your starting point. I finally gave up riding it. It was too strenous, what with the traffic in Beverly Hills and the Tanner buses with the tourists. Every time I left my house the bus would stop and the driver would point his finger and give a lecture about me. I'd run in terror. I hate gapy tourists. They're the scourge of Beverly Hills. They block traffic. People in cars snail in and out, looking at

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the dilapidated old Spanish architecture. And the earsplitting cacophony of the Good Humor Man assaults my auditory nerves. Though it's involuntary, it's the only music I hear. The beauty of Beverly Hills is overrated. I have a pool which I put in on account of my children. Whatever profits I have go to the man who takes care of the pool, and the gardener. There's a law that you have to keep your lawns manicured. The Japanese gardeners in California have all been amassing private fortunes. They have their own banks, but lousy gardens. We have one avocado tree. It usually bears fruit, but this year • . . I don't know . • • I guess there was some wintry blast. I thought about sending a letter to President Johnson or Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman because our tree didn't come through this year. I think I should have farm aid. *

*

*

Recently I've had a yen for gefilllte fish. There are two makes: one is taboo in my home-it's called Mother's (an unfortunate commercial title); the other is Manischewitz. My wife bought some, but it was put on top of a couple of cans of sardines. When I was in my prime, I was an egomaniac and didn't allow my wife to buy the best sardines-the King Oscarswhich bear my name. I felt there should be only one king in the house. But I finally compromised and let her buy Oscar Mayer products. Yet this jar of gefiillte fish was on top of the sardines I wanted and I suddenly saw that it was Mother's. So I didn't have sardines for three months. I finally got up the courage to order my wife to throw out the jar of gefilllte fish. A couple of days after it disappeared she told me that it had been Manischewitz all the time. I have neurotic eyes. (Sometimes I have neurotic ears, too.) But I still didn't have sardines for three months because I was afraid that if I touched them, I'd get contaminated by my neurosis. It's quite volatile. Food confuses me. An unscrupulous doctor who used to prey on my weakness, using extortionist rates, ,vas once giving me shots and placebos and a few pills. My taste buds were dulled,

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as they are noiv, too. Suddenly I could only eat chili con came. I'd eat it about 12:30 at night. I had al\vays loathed chili con carne before. I like tart things. One midnight recently I told one of my daughters to bring me some salad \Vith sardines and herring on it. She was aghast, but that's my Ovaltine before I go to bed. My food obsessions change. The other night my daughter Lorna reminisced about the time I regressed to complete infantilism. We were having dinner and tapioca pudding was served. A ,vild glint came into my eyes and in the presence of my wife and children I shrieked at the top of my voice, "I love this more than anything in the world!" I had to be \vithdrawn from tapioca pudding slowly. It was one of the few times I \vasn't committed to achieve ,vithdra,val. I just had a teaspoonful less every night. The last time it was served to me it looked like soap shavings. At the table I sometimes discourse on the cynicism of the blintz, particularly our homemade variety, or the bottled anger and rapelike aggressiveness of Coca-Cola. About a year before my tapioca kick, I had a passion for chocolate--especially chocolate mousse and chocolate parfait. Whenever I ,vas in New York, I'd sit in a completely reclining position at Le Pavillon and \Vatch the waiters serve chocolate mousse. It became a hobby. I had so many chocolate stains on my suit that \vhen the waiter \vould come with mine I'd say, "Just serve it on my lapel."

*

* * One time in the 40's I ,vas taking my usual train trip to California from New York. During the stopover in Chicago I was restive and suddenly took a plane. My untrammeled fears about flying and the fact that it was Yorn Kippur provided an opportunity to broaden the spectrum of my superstition rituals. I created a new ritual which I retained until recently. I "read" punctuation marks, including parentheses, exclamation points, commas-even accents on French words and dollar signs. I mutely say all of them in my mind. On this trip I repeated phrases ten times, in case I missed a \Vord or forgot a comma.

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(W·hen the late President Kennedy was revealed as a speed reader, it took me three hours to read the article about it.) This includes Walter Winchell, with the three-dot form of journalism. Actually there are four, but I consider the first one a period, then I do the three dots. This form of journalese is characteristic of many of the trenchant modern American \Vriters. (The style is trenchant but the content is as phony as• whipped cream in a chain drugstore.) It's quite tedious and limits my reading time. And I know it's all a conspiracy to deny me pleasure. I love reading.

In New York in the old days, my shirts had to be put in backwards in the drawers. At that time I always smoked the cigarette of my sponsor. In those days it was Lucky Strike and they had a bad habit of putting the packs carelessly into cartons. Some cartons had tl1em upside down. I would never touch those. Lux Soap disturbed me a lot . . . L.U.X. They had "Lucky Lager" \vhich al,.vays makes me squirm. Olympia Beer must be pretty distressed-they use a horseshoe. I shudder at the hard-pressed situation where they have to appeal to the public with "Lucky" or a horseshoe. That's pretty inane and unimaginative. I have great contempt for that. Both words are taboo with me. When the Lucky Lager commercial is on, I don't smoke until the commercial is over--or with Olympia

Beer, either. I never smoke a cigarette when there is a commercial with an umbrella in a closed room. As a matter of fact, an open umbrella any place is taboo. I desist from smoking. Speaking of superstitions, Truman Capote and I finally 1net recently. I 'd read an interview with Capote in the Paris Review several years before and knew that he ,.vas as superstitious as I. He said he never allowed three cigarette butts in an ashtray. Since then, in my bedroom-the high altar of my rituals and the place wl1ere I'm most tyrannical-I've cut mine down to one butt per ashtray. Apropos of nothing, I asked Capote, "Are you for integra• tion?"

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He said, "Yes, are you for integration?" I said, "I'm for disintegration . . . personal disintegration." Until 1958, if one of my friends was sick, I'd cut him off and not see him again. I viewed it as a personal affront to me. Also ,,v hen someone once asked, "Do you remember me?" I replied giddily and with some joy, "Fortunately I'm suffering from amnesia." When I'm in the mood, I vary the reply to this question. A ,,..roman once tricked me by asking, "Do you remember when you and I were in the earthquake?" I dismissed her beautifully. "Every moment is an earthquake to me," I replied. And to another woman who squirmed up to me at a party ,vith the classic query, I answered, "No," and when she told me her name, added, "I make it a point never to remember you." Then I added guiltily, "Because I see you so seldom." I have acrophobia. It's not only the fear that I 'll jump off high places, it's that if I do . . . well, I hate mingling ,vith strangers. I won't get dressed unless my wife urges me to. And I 'm indifferent to my appearance. Years ago Stanley Marcus, of the Neiman-Marcus Department Store in Dallas, Texas, introduced himself to me. "We're supposed to look alike," he said. We both stared at each other in mutual horror. When I was young, I looked like Al Capone but I lacked his compassion. Once my composer friend David Raksin told me that he was taking his three-year-old son to the San Diego Zoo to see the gorilla. I told him to bring the child to my house and save the trip. Apparently I enjoy self-chastisement. When I used to speak of the lunatic fringe, I didn't know I was going to head it. People often ask me why I moved to the West Coast from New York. I like to explan that it was because the eastern ,.vaves aren't big enough for surfing. "Besides," I used to cry, "how can I go back to New York when my daughter is the chief pompon girl at Beverly High?" I understand that President Kennedy once considered me to

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head the physical fitness program. It was politics. I could have delivered the mental illness vote in a solid bloc. Instead, he chose Stan Musial, who has the Polish bloc. I get glimmers of my real character from time to time. Once a Beverly Hills cop stopped me when I was trying to enter my own house, and was going to arrest me because I looked so furtive. "Do I look like a criminal?" I asked indignantly. "You sure do," he replied. I took him into the house and had my wife identify me. At one time I was a pretty good driver, except I refused to back up my car and I never knew how to get into a parking place. Once I was going over the speed limit and a cop stopped me and gave me a ticket and told me what mileage I was doing. I said, "But I was humming the last movement of the Beethoven Seventh Symphony," and I sang it to him, in its furious tempo. Then I said, "You can't possibly hum the last movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony and go slow." He agreed. I didn't get a ticket.

* * * When I went to parties in the 50's, I always tried to talk to old people. They like to talk about plastic surgery. "How old are you?" one elderly lady asked me. "I won't tell," I answered. "You look thirty-nine," she said. "I'm way over thirty-nine," I told her. "How do you do it?" she queried. "Dope," I replied. A psychiatrist once diagnosed my troubles as "an abdication of will." I wake up, and the feeling of terror is so knife-edged . . . just the idea of waking up and facing a day of inertia and fear makes me long for a return to the unconscious. That's one reason why I address sleep with such great reverence; I can escape fear and melancholia. I see sadness everywhere; I could have ,.vritten Bonjour Tristesse. Speaking of Bonjour Tristesse,

. . f

•

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28

Somerset Maugham was once asked what he thought of the author, Fran~oise Sagan, who was at the time about nineteen. He replied philosophically, "I never discuss my contemporaries." I am always curious about how people fall asleep. I recently asked Sam Goldwyn, who is in his eighties, what he did about sleep. He replied, "I take a dull book to bed." I said to my friend S. N. Behrman, "If we knew the name of that dull book, we could clean up." June used to hoodwink me and give me placebos, which are just sugar candy and have no pharmacologic effect. She claims she knows more about handling my problems than any psychiatrist, and always makes this remark with great contempt. My nightly brew of sleeping potion is now controlled by my 1vife. Compared to my former sybaritic indulgences, my present dose, although possibly lethal to a normal person, verges on virtual abstinence. When my pill quotient was violently restricted, I wasn't even permitted an innocuous pill named Donato! as a mild palliative for my ulcer. It consists of belladonna and a quarter grai:p of phenobarbital. That quarter grain makes it taboo, although you could put it in your eye and not feel it. Quixotically enough, I am permitted an unrestrained amount of Dexamyl, which contains a small amount of sodium amytal. The whole idea is to keep me awake as long as possible. When the Dexamyl wears off, the interior of my chest feels like a drum solo by Gene Krupa. Medication today requires very little ingenuity or technique from a pha~acist. He merely takes pills from big bottles and puts them into little bottles. Igor Stravinsky once made a remark about his oratorio "Oedipus Rex" which, strangely enough, is in Latin, not Greek. Someone asked him why. "Because Latin is the language of prescriptions," he replied. That remark is very dear to me. Apropos of this, I commented, "There's a hex on the sex of Oedipus Rex." After many years of ordering enormous amounts of pills by phone, I made a personal appearance at the local pharmacy and

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never ,.vas greeted with more triumphant acclaim. I was voted Pill of the Year by the pharmaceutical society. I just want to make one brief statement about psychoanalysis: "Fuck Dr. Freud." I have become disenchanted with Sigmund Freud, who was once a hero of mine. There was a volume published in 1964, containing correspondence between Dr. Freud and a Swiss minister named Dr. Oskar Pfister. These letters were withheld until Dr. Jung died. There are some thunderbolts of anger from Freud about Jung. But in one of the letters that was quoted in a review in The New York Times, a quite eminent psychoanalyst named Dr. Kline (of Rockland State Hospital) printed one excerpt ,vhich vitiates, decimates, and negates the whole therapy of Freud. The cynicism of Freud about his own therapy was too much for me. He wrote to Dr. Pfister, who had recommended a patient to him: "Your patient has deteriorated because I told him the nature of his neuroses." Ever since that sentence I have become a great nonbeliever. I think the worst therapists are the orthodox Freudians. Although at one time my idolatry of Freud ,vas almost equal to that which I fe] t for George Bernard Shaw, both have now diminished enormously.

* * Once you're in a mental hospital, you might as well make up your mind to look after yourself and recognize my axiom: The patient is never right. A felv years ago when I was suffering from a nutritional deficiency and had anorexia they were feeding me pureed food, catering to my womblike regression. I hit upon a brilliant idea to supplement my nutrition. "Why not give me Metrecal?" I asked the doctor. He was impressed by my ingenuity. That's how much they get accustomed to routine. But the Metrecal disagreed with me. As for the axiom, I recall being given a sleeping medicine called Somnos, a form of chloral hydrate with alcohol in it. One night in the hospital my Somnos dose tasted weak, flaccid, a11d apparently watered and it proved inefficacious that night. I told *

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the head nurse that the dose was inadequate. She protested that it was the regular dose. I raised hell. The next morning my doctor bawled me out for questioning the word of the nurse. He practically accused me of being irreligious, his faith in the staff was so prodigious. Later one of the nurses admitted that I had been right. What had happened was that the bottle was nearly empty, it was a Saturday night, and they had forgotten to renew the order. On the psychiatric floor at Mount Sinai Hospital, which I've been in and out of from 1956 to 1962, the regime is strict and confining, particularly for the deeply depressed and catatonic patients. I don't believe that confining a deeply depressed patient in a solitary cell helps anyone-except the hospital administration. The attendants are nearly always Irish Catholic, for some reason. I once commented that you needed a permit from Pope John to get two Bufferin there. The meals come on the typical hospital schedule. I told Dorothy Parker that di_n ner was at quarter to five P.M. "That makes for a nice long evening," she replied. Life in a psychiatric ward is a wonderful panorama of horrors. Everywhere are terrors, real or fancied. Once at Mount Sinai an elderly man approached me when I was standing in the hall with my sleep mask on the top of my head. "Ohl" he said. "I thought you were wearing your yamilke." To have him believe that I was wearing the Jewish cap for worship upset me deeply. It reminded me of my strict religious upbringing, to which I had been unfaithful in my own fashion. I remember one patient, a little girl who had a horrible splash of acne on her chin and always carried a box of Benson and Hedges cigarettes. She would jump into my lap like Little Tich (and that's regressing to before I was even born) and make a big fuss over me. There ,.vas one nurse of whom I was very fond. Her name ,vas Nan. I guess Little Tich (fortunately I forget her real name), who was so fond of me, resented Nan because she was very attractive. O11e day she hauled off with all her might and slapped

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Nan's face. Nan didn't move; she didn't hit back-some of them do. Little Tich was like a bantamweight version of Tony Galento. Later she got to hate me. We had to use the same toilet. God! The choreography that went on in there! She was the craziest kid I ever saw, but she also had more perception than the other patients. Sometimes the more ill you are, the more perceptive you are. * * * I used to have an excellent memory, but when I was giving piano recitals "With Comment" (that was how it was billed), one of my remarks was that I was writing a book to be called Memoirs of a Man Suffering from Amnesia. I did indeed suffer from amnesia after my shock treatments. One time when I was home either recuperating or just treading water- I can't remember which- I was watching a television picture of an old English film starring Sir Ralph Richardson. June entered the room and asked, "What are you watching?" I explained that it ,vas an absorbing story in which Richardson played the role of a man who had an attack of amnesiaand I was anxious to see how it came out. June sighed. "You saw that movie last week," she said. At a party a few years ago Raymond Massey came in with his rather aggressive wife, who looks a little like W. C. Fields. As I rose to greet her she said, "Please don't get up, you'll wind up in the hospital again." I sa,v 11assey in his embryonic stage as an actor, and I don't know whether he ever outgrew it. But he's a nice man. "You were my first Hamlet," I said. He giggled shrilly. " I was my first Hamlet, too," he replied. It was pretty lousy, I remember.

* *

* I'm so guilt-ridden that ,vhen I watch The Defenders on television and the jury shuffles in and the judge says, "Have you reached a verdict?" I start to panic. When the foreman stands

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up and say, "Yes, Your Honor," and the judge adds, "Will the defendant please rise?" I always stand up. And get hysterically happy ,vhen the jury finds me guilty. Years ago there was a play called The Amazing Dr. Glitterhouse which was later made into a movie with Edward G. Robinson. At the end of the second act the judge orders the protagonist to stand, and announces, "You are guilty," and the man falls do\vn. When I got up for a smoke after that second-act curtain, I fell right down. It was complete neurotic association. Actually, about four attorneys general in different administrations could sue me for monopoly of guilt. Speaking of the theatre, I would like to see the Gabor sisters in Chekhov's Three Sisters., but in a little theater in Nicaragua, where they belong. They seem to dominate the banana countries. The only play I'm really available for would be a ~evival of The Cherry Orchard. I could play Firs, the old caretaker. At the end of the play they forget to remove him from the house and the house is locked. You can hear his lonely pounding as the curtain goes down. You can hear the workmen with their hammering destroying the cherry orchard. That's the way it is around our house. I seldom leave the place, but when I do, for a visit with my analyst (the only reason I resumed analysis is because I can't afford a subscription to Esquire), l am greeted by a horde of admirers who are let loose from the local home for the aged, and I wave to them like a five-star general reviewing his troops. It's a role I relish. I always identify with Lord Kitchener, the organizer of British forces during World War I, who proved such an outmoded holdover and so archaic that his demise was not unwelcomed in England. But he had his good points: He didn't recognize anybody, ,vas humorless, and never talked to his underlings. As I've already indicated, those are the qualities I use in running my home and family. I call the members of my family the goyim., the Jewish ,vord

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for Gentiles. They revel in eating baked ham and giving me shepherd's pie. My wife reminds me of what a loathsome Haitian dictator once said about himself: "A man like me appears once in every fifty years." Excluding the epithet loathsome, my wife is so unique that her type appears every hundred years or so. *

*

*

June's real name was Gilmartin. She had a stage name-June Gale of the Gale Quadruplets. They were in Broadway shows and were quite well known. My wife was the leader of her sisters, two sets of twins . . . where one would have done. Fred Astaire never forgot one of their entra11ces. June did a somersault, holding a cane. She was a kind of acrobat, and I've said that on our wedding night she held me clutched in her teeth, dangling out of a window. The first time I met June she was "playing" a piano and she had quite an effect on me. It was at a preview of a 20th Century-Fox picture, a musical. June played the piano in an all-girl orchestra. Naturally she didn't really play, but she appeared at the piano. "That's the best-looking pianist I ever saw," I remarked. She knocked me out ,vith her beauty. I met her again a few nights later in a group which included a friend of mine, Charlie Lederer, who was subsequently to be best man at our wedding. "May I call you up?" I asked. "No," she answered quickly. Everything was No. But I found her name in the phone book and called her the next day. June recently reminded me of the first time I dated her. I said to her, "You have an una,vakened face, but your mouth has possibilities." In those days I had so many interesting friends that I found it torturous and dismaying to spend the whole evening with my empty-headed picture actress. So I would spend most of the evening with the Gershwins or others and then meet June after her initial date. The first time this happened I drove my car to

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34

where she lived and waited for her. I watched her kiss her other date good night in a most horrendous fashion. Then she joined me. Not too long after I met June and when my proprietary rights were still questionable, I pursued her to a fashionable restaurant where she had been escorted by a rival suitor. I had invited Aaron Copland to dinner (incidentally Aaron and I had performed an all-Copland evening on two pianos at the George Antheil Galleries) so that I could brazenly spy on what I considered a faithless action. I pointed out this very young girl to Aaron and asked him what he thought of her. With his customary lack of perception about women, he replied, "Oh, she looks a bit faded to me." I was puzzled by this assessment of a radiantly young girl of nineteen. During the time of Information Please I was single and my then future wife June was oblivious to the fact that I was on radio. She was in Hollywood. I had proposed to her before. "You don' t want to marry me, do you?" I said. · "No," she replied. I flourished in her constant rejection. This negativistic attitude persisted except that I was unfettered by neuroses at the time. I created a phrase about us which later became obsolete from constant usage. I referred to us as the Gruesome Twosome. Judy Garland had a crush on me at that time. She was a throbbingly emotional girl of seventeen who wrote me letters. When I met her, she asked, "What do you think of me?" "You're enchanting," I told her. I thought she was a child, and I treated her as a child. "Don't give me that," she replied. "What do you really think of me?" So I paraphrased Julien Sorel in Stendhal's novel, The Red and the Black. "You're like a Mozart symphony," I said. Judy went out and bought all the recorded works of Mozart, including innumerable symphonies, piano concertos, chamber works and operas (this could literally break any rising young motion picture star). She couldn't make contact with the purity of Mozart's music. Judy always preferred the sensual music of

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Debussy and Ravel. She was furious that I'd compared her to a Mozart symphony. June heard about Judy's interest in me and suddenly started turning on the radio. Then, when I said to June, "Marry me and make me the most confused man in town," she came to New York. Due to the fact that I had been the defendant in my divorce case of years before, Morris Ernst, my lawyer, sent an assistant to aid me. June and I decided to go to Virginia to get married. We flew to Washington and then hired a car. I turned to the young assistant attorney accompanying us and said, "Confidentially, do you think I 'm making a mistake?" He was quite startled. When we got to Fredericksburg, June wanted some violets. They wound up as sweet peas; it was all we could find. I also bought her a ring there, and we went to a justice of the peace. He looked at me and said, "Have you ever been divorced?" "Yes," I replied. "I refuse to marry you," he announced. My identity was of no avail. My young la'¾ryer stammered and gasped, without any suggestions. Suddenly I said, "My former wife has been married three or four times since we were divorced." With this news the justice changed his mind. Right after the ceremony I told my wife, "You know I only married you to get even." June was very lovely in those days. She still is. I wish she'd grow old and lose her beauty. It's a terrible strain. Someone once told me that she'd never lose it. I gave up, like a character in a Kafka novel. Anyway, at that time she resembled a demure Jean Harlow. A young critic who had seen my wife in the road company of Stage Door, 6tarring Joan Bennett, said to me at an interview, "'Your wife is much more beautiful than Joan Bennett:· "I kno,v," I am said to have replied. "I almost had the choice." It was an apocryphal comment. June was too shy to inquire about so-called literature on music, and consequently never read anything on the subject until I

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had a heart attack and was sidelined. Then she became quite versed in music-exactly at the time when I became disenchanted with it. When I married June, she was a Catholic, and I told my {Tiends I wanted a well-rounded ticket. I dominated her completely after we were married; but years later during my states of depression she would sit in the living room with guests and start telling all my best stories, as if they were hers. She became a brilliant conversationalist. I was helpless to intercede. Clifford Odets once said that I submerged her when we were first married, but as the years passed she eclipsed me and I was a captive audience of my own works. As our marriage progressed it was like a reenactment of Angel Street which became Gaslight. I was the Charles Boyer character. Once June was reading a book and left it with the pages open. I looked. It was Page 13. I went into a state of frenzy and shrieked like a howling banshee. This was just the .first of a series of new superstitions. I adopted them more quickly than a Johnson Congress enacts legislature. But this was her first encounter with what was to be hell on earth. We quarreled incessantly. Once she left me in a restaurant and I followed her. I caught up with her at about 56th Street and Seventh Avenue and she called a policeman. "This man is bothering me and n1olesting me," she said. "Will you please arrest him?" "I'm her husband!" I shouted. I had to use all my persuasive po"vers to dissuade the policeman from arresting me.

* * * As of this instant, we have been married twenty-five years. When ,.ve were first married, Alexander Woollcott always introduced June as "Oscar's current "vife." At the moment I hope he's eating that remark-wherever he is. I keep thinking of literary efforts after this present book. I want to write a fantasy where the denouement has Princess Lee

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Radziwill marrying Jimmy Hoffa. Another is a monograph entitled The Hidden Meaning of Sam Levenson, who is the most bland, uncomplicated, so-called (semantics do not supply the right word) humorist in existence. I also want to write a play about Secretary of the Treasury Douglas Dillon and call it Dillon. I thought of this recently ivhen my wife, who goes to a dramatic workshop, had to do a scene from the play Dylan. She was nervous. To console her before she left for class, I said, "Just remember this. As Oscar Levant's wife, you should have no trouble playing Dylan Thomas' wife." I've been doing archaeological research and have discovered my own remains. The results may be found in the ensuing pages. Among the multifarious pills I take there is one that has nothing but side effects. It is conceivable that this book is one of those side effects.

•

2 Little Boy's Blues

MY

early recollections are a series of questionabie blurs. I was mystified by the facts of life and the acceptance was never forthcoming. My insularity precluded the resolving of many simple realities, and the density of my ennui at an early age was overwhelming. My mother told me I r an away from home twice when I was ten months old. I think the most awesome thing I ever said on television was in the spring of 1964 when Jack Paar asked me what I had wanted to be when I was a kid. I said that when I was a boy I told my father and mother, "I want to be an orphan." There was a delayed reaction in the audience-one of sheer, quiet horror. I was the youngest of four boys. When I was very young- my first recollection is at about four and a half years of age time passed like an immovable object. When my next oldest brother Howard, whom we called Honey, was at school, I would impatiently wait for his return home. Every hour until he returned seemed like another performance of Parsi/al. I had no diversions or techniques for self-amusement. [ 38]

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I slept in a large crib until I was eight years old-my feet stretched out like bamboo shoots. My brother Honey and I slept in the same room with our mother and father. Later when our older brothers left we were given their room. The walls were decorated with pictures of dead ancestors adorned with enormous beards. These hagiographic figures caused me deep melancholia and fright. At night I used to put my arm around Honey's neck and out of fear almost choke him to death. While he was clutched in this paralyzed embrace I would say, "Are you still here, Honey?" My infrequent filters of happiness were provided by my oldest brother Harry, who was twelve years my senior. His infrequent visits were moments of unalloyed joy. He would dangle me on his lap, kiss me on the cheek, and sing a scatological lullaby which went in part, "My brother Sylvest-with fifty pounds of shit on his chest." He was a roistering fellow who, while attending the University of Pittsburgh, played the violin on sundry professional engagements. His preoccupation with women, music, and even occasional jousts with drink brought forth tales of orgiastic wonderment to which I was given small clue but I mulled in envy-filled bafflement. My father, whose discipline was strict but pliant, would chastise him futilely. While playing the violin at the amusement park one summer, Harry was engaged in a vicious brawl over a girl and returned home with his face bloody and mutilated. Evidently he told my father that he wanted to marry this girl and in order to abort this unseemly marriage, my father took Harry to the station that very night and sent him to New York. Through the intercession of my uncle, Oscar Radin, a man of inordinate musical influence in the Shubert organization., Harry got a job playing the violin at the Winter Garden Theatre. When the show went on the road my uncle told Harry to keep an eye on a young chorus girl named Pearl Eaton, with vvhom he was slightly smitten. Naturally, my brother married her within a few weeks, which created a cataclysmic crisis in our home. My parents abjured marriage as an inevitable conspiracy,

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There ,vere secret meetings from which I was naturally excluded. This was the first in a series of marriages in my family which my parents accepted as an international plot against decency. In other words, women were created to despoil the Levant brothers. What made it glamorous to me was that Pearl Eaton at that time was declared to have the best legs in show business and her revealing pictures appeared constantly in the New York paper to which we subscribed. I was bedazzled. My next to the oldest brother, Ben, was ten years older than I, and my father's favorite. When he was an intern he eloped. I was alone with my mother on a Saturday afternoon. She had an inkling of something going on, was quite disturbed, and in order to locate him had me call all my brother's acquaintances. My mother was so distraught at the possibility that he might have gotten married that it was then and with some eloquence that I made my pronouncement of faith to my mother. I said that I not only would never marry a Gentile-I would never get married at all. My father, who was Russian, came from St. Petersburg (Leningrad). When he was told that Ben had married a GermanJewish girl, his prejudice against German Jews was so great that he fainted. This extraordinary reaction to girls and marriage colored my whole point of view. Girls were obviously insidious and bad and I made up my mind I would do without them. My two oldest brothers always played music at our house, and even at a callow age Ben was an excellent pianist and a great admirer of Jerome Kern. Ben was also a gifted songwriter. He composed the music for the Cap and Gown shows at the University of Pittsburgh. I beseeched my mother for piano lessons and Ben was my first teacher. Ben was the only one in our family, including my mother's family, who wasn't eccentric or idiosyncratic. He was always a paragon of good manners. Because of his manners and his contempt for eccentric behavior, we nicknamed him opprobiously "Prince James." I recall Ben playing the Chopin A Flat Ballade and Schumann's Faschingsschwank aus Wien. I used to play the Beethoven Symphonies for four hands ,vith Bennie. Not too much later, I studied with

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Martin Miessler who had received his training at the Leipzig Conservatory under Tiechmuller, a proponent of the archaic Czerny rigid finger action. I never quite overcame the limitations of this method, because the main characteristic of my youth was literalness. I had the same reaction when I was taught the Old Testament. The three great stresses in our house were good education (I was constantly reminded of the scholarly achievements of my older brothers), the strict adherence to an inflexible Jewish orthodox religion, and music. My parents ran a jewelry store on Fifth Avenue in Pittsburgh. My father was an expert watchmaker, a job he sometimes found tedious. He was always languishing on the couch in the living room, which adjoined the store. He conducted the jewelry business on the basis of skillful haggling and bartering, a practice which was limited to his customers, who had a wide ethnic range. This included Assyrians, Chinese, and all the Slavic nations. My father spoke all the Slavic languages with great fluency, but the main crux of his clientele was respectable American stock. He took great pride in his store and the quality of the goods he sold. I remember the expressionless fa~ade of a young Chinese customer when my father told him the price of a valuable watch: thirty dollars. My father respected the usual counterbid but was flabbergasted when the customer, ,vithout batting an eye, countered with an intractable offer of two dollars. The area 0£ haggling was completely vitiated and it was so outrageous that all my father could do was laugh. Once a customer asked for a written guarantee. My father wrote it out, then asked the customer to sign it, which he did. My mother never turned away any stranger who came to the store in need of food. She always ushered them into the kitchen where she tendered them hot food ,vith bread. When my mother, who was born in Russia, was on her way to America at the age of twelve, she and her family passed through Warsaw. Having come from a small town they were dazzled by the beauty of the city. Her mother said to her, "If Warsaw is this beautiful you can imagine what Pittsburgh is like!"

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My father was an insatiable opera addict and even managed to see Parsifal- I don't know how- the first American performance was a pirated version in 1903 in New York. My father, who loved music with a passion, once said in a debate with a crony of his, "A man cannot be great unless he loves music," which on reexamination doesn't hold up at all. But it is a peculiarly Russian remark. He had all the Caruso records that were extant in those days. He also liked the theatre and would take my mother, who allvays armed herself with rock candy on these momentous occasions. His favorite moving pictur e star ,vas Clara Kimball Young. His chief pleasure was the kudos and the accomplishments of his offspring, which caused a neurotic reaction in the r ecipients. His pronouncements of the exultations of motherhood were too extreme. I recall one Saturday night, which was usually my night for chastisement, hearing the following fable : A son murders his mother and cuts her heart out to present to his sweetheart. With the heart in his hand he rushes off to present it to his fiancee. In his hurry he stumbles, and the disembodied heart that he clutches in his hand cries out, " Did you hurt yourself, son?" The mother's solicitude for her son was unimpaired. That made me feel free and easy. No analyst I ever had ever found a fable to equal that! To me my parents were mysterious, divine personages. I don't recall being spoiled by them. My mother always lamented the fact that I wasn't a girl. It was her belief that had I been a girl our family life would have been on a higher level, as social life outside the family was practically nonexistent. Consequently, I wasn 't aware of the bare amenities. Once my mother and I were walking to a piano recital that I was to perform somewhere in Pittsburgh. I thought I was going to be tl1e man with my mother, and I moved to the inside from the curb. I thought, This is where the man walks with the woman. My mother reprimanded me and told me that my proper place was on the outside. When my older brother, the doctor, was staying at a resort, we went to visit him. After lunch in the dining room he left a

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modest tip. It fell to the floor and I picked it up for the waitress. I was told that this was improper etiquette. That has puzzled me ever since; I thought it was very gentlemanly. Finally, I was taught to say, "How do you do?" These three words were the extent of my social small talk. My mother was inarticulate about expressing affection. This was due to the fact that in her own family constellation, she was the least glamorous of that brood and bore most of the household chores. She even confessed to me once that she didn't particularly like her mother, which was quite a brazen confession for those pre-Freudian days. My father showed a derisive contempt for displays of emotion in other families. This subconscious inhibition of displaying affection for one's children has been perpetuated by me with glacial-like repression. I suppose that the first traumatic event of my youth occurred when I was about six or seven. My mother took me to a park band concert. It was quite a long walk from the streetcar to the bandstand. My mother had a lifelong passion for Tschaikowsky. She was ardently pro-Russian. When the band played the 1812 Overture, she kept telling me how the Russians had beaten the hell out of the French. Her most beamish moment was when Tschaikowsky introduces the Czarist National Anthem invoking the disarray and rout of Napoleon and his followers. This great victory of my mother's-composed by Tschaikowsky - made her ecstatic. Suddenly there was a clap of thunder followed by lightning and a heavy downpour. We couldn't find shelter. We ran around. I had my first shock: my breath stuck in my throat. We walked for what seemed like miles in this enormous thunderstorm and my breathing almost stopped. I simply couldn't catch my breath. This occurred several times at later dates, then disappeared. l\fany years later, on a return visit to Pittsburgh, I bought the first recording of the Tschaikowsky B Flat Piano Concerto. It was played by Mark Hamburg. It was the first complete recorded version and my mother and I listened to it all that summer. She would get up and practically hug the air and say, "I love him." 011ce when my motht::r was exulting about the won-

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ders of Tschaikowsky, I punctured her joy with a cryptic re• mark that Tschaikowsky was homosexual. She didn't quite understand but was livid, and temporarily banished me from the house. Strangely enough, I didn't play the Tschaikowsky Piano Concerto until after she died. Then I played it many times. My father had bought a two-wheel bicycle for Honey and me to share, ,vhich was the most splendid, the ultimate of gifts in those days. Once ,vhen Honey was riding downtown in traffic l1e ,vas run over by a garbage wagon and was taken to the hospital where he stayed a few weeks. I visited him every day, a trip of three miles on foot. The food he was served ,vas such a de• parture from our strict Jevvish cuisine that the custard encased i11 a green cup, which he shared with me, seemed a magical new discovery. The accident, which temporarily resulted in Honey using crutches, made him a glamorous figure. . My father was awarded $750 damages from the city, which was a sudden windfall of affluence. Under the blandishments of one of my uncles, a medical doctor who had irresistible powers of charm and persuasion, my father was influenced into investing the money in some oil stocks which gave us all great hopes of sudden wealth. It came to naught, there were no oil wells, the disillusionment was severe and it caused an irreparable rift between my father and uncle. It was unfortunate, as his visits were great events in my childhood. He ,vas a brilliant talker who would introduce such disparate subjects as Balzac, Gilbert and Sullivan, and the Kniesel Quartet. He could discourse on everything and had once been an intemperate music critic on one of the Pittsburgh papers. From time to time there ,vere hair-raising tales of his acts of volatile uncurbed temper. He had a consciencelessness that I had never witnessed before, but he was the most colorful member of our family. We ,vere hypnotized with admiration. He ate ham and bacon, ,vhich to us was unheard of. That kind of freedom made him seem a strange adventurer. He was the only sophisticated man we knew, completely emancipated from the strictures of religion and the in-

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sularity of provincialism. But he never gave up his harebrained, get-rich-quick schemes. One of the memorable events of my youth took place when I was eight. I was summoned by a fashionable dentist in downtown Pittsburgh to play the piano for Lillian Russell; the dentist had a grand piano in his office. I played while she had her teeth fixed, and when it was over she gave me a dollar to go to the ball game. That dollar was the largest sum of money I had ever received at one time, but the honorarium was negligible compared to the exhilaration I felt while playing for this resplendent woman. Lillian Russell ,vas majestic looking, with a bosom resembling Mount Rushmore. She was married to Alexander P. Moore, a newspaper publisher in Pittsburgh who later became Ambassador to Spain under Harding. Moore loved children and gave them free tickets to the amusement park. In those days the nickelodeons were the great meeting place of the pubescent and adolescent, and all kinds of dalliances and machinations with girls went on in the back of the theatre. The mystery of both sex and childbirth was never explained to me. I was amply satisfied with my mother's explanation that she had bought me at Kaufman's Department Store. Later, when some of my older playmates revealed the secret of birth, I rejected it totally. My secondary reaction was similar to the irrepressible nine-year-old in Vitrac's play, who was impossible to live with, and as a bad joke is told the facts of life. He recoils with horror and then kills himself. I eventually amended my strictured reaction and accepted the facts, but in my mind I excluded my mother from these venal practices. One day a newspaper story announced that Wally Reid was going to make a personal appearance at one of our theatres. I was breathless with excitement. It seems ironic: later he gained notoriety as a dope addict. I thought, How can a man do such a thing? At that time it was considered evil, not sick. He died very young. He was the first movie star I ever saw.

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THE MEMOIRS OF AN AMNESIAC

~6

Those ,vere the old Charley Ray days; the days of The Courtship of Miles Standish. Charles Ray was the paragon of virtue and I identified with him because I was what they call euphemistically "a good boy." This good boy syndrome is sometimes an ominous augury for a terrible and violent erup• tion in maturity, which could lead to either murder or sexual aberrations. I soon displaced Charley Ray with Richard Barthelmess, who also was a bore. Lillian Gish's pasty-faced impregnable virginity offended me. I cherished Charlie Chaplin and William S. Hart. The latter two never got the girl, which I thought was mutely eloquent. But my favorite was Douglas Fairbanks. He's still great in clips of his old films, and I always see them with pleasure. He was magical. Years later I heard a wonderful story about Douglas Fairbanks from the director, Henry Hathaway-a rugged individualist who in his youth was Victor Fleming's prop boy. Victor Fleming was a famous Hollywood director who directed a good deal of Gone With the Wind and some other great pictures. He was a very tough, iron man who bridged the gap between silent and talking pictures. Douglas Fairbanks was a virtuoso gymnast, but-oddly enough-height frightened him and he always used a double when it was involved. In one situation he had to jump from about ten or twelve feet. He turned to Victor Fleming. "It's too dangerous," he said. So Flemir1g said, "It's not dangerous, I'll show you," and he got up on the perch and jumped down. He didn't tell Douglas Fairbanks but he had broken both his ankles. He said, "Now you do it." Fairbanks did it and broke both his ankles. When I was very young, I studied the Old Testament in He• brew. It shocked me. I don't mean the sexual part-I didn't understand sex-but the injustice and the violence. Many of its characters had great sexual vitality. By contrast, it's strange that there are no sexual instances in the New Testament. It's an observation which I don't care to finish or explore.

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Years later, on reflecting about when God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son as a test of faith, I figured God must have had an off night. I also felt that there was a strong strain of Sammy Glick in young David when he usurped the power of J{.ing Saul who was his patron and benefactor. Another Biblical character, Jacob, had to work seven years at hard labor in order to get Laban's consent to marry one of his daughters, Rachel. Instead, Laban gave him the cross-eyed Leah. In order to get Rachel he had to work for seven more years. The Fair Employment Practice of today would never have condoned such a heinous employer-employee relationship. Later Jacob cheated Esau out of Isaac's blessing. I didn't see the religiosity of that unjust maneuver. Due to my mother's constant reminder, I was slavish in my adherence to Jewish orthodoxy and to its rueful overtones. In 1952, after my heart attack, my psychoanalyst Dr. Marmor relieved me of my enslavement to what had become painful excursions to memorial services for the dead. I feel I didn't betray God, but my mother. God will, I am sure, survive my defection. Although I have a violent dichotomy about the religious traditions, I am always uplifted and unswerving about the inspirational and enlightened achievements of Israel. Among the books in our house when I was a small boy was a whole set of Alexandre Dumas, whom I didn't like. I couldn't stand The Three Musketeers. I never liked physical adventure -it bored me. But I liked Edmond Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo. We had Bulfinch's Age of Mythology and Aesop's Fables, which didn't do me much good, though I read them ,vith fascination. Medusa interested me especially; she had a headful of snakes, and if you looked at her you turned to stone. In some ways, Medusa confirmed my attitude toward women. Like her victims, every time I looked at an attractive girl I turned to lambent stone. The mythological horror stories were my bible. I also loved Beowulf. (I later called a waiter at Lindy's Beowulf.) My other two heroes were Theseus and Roland. I was

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also consumed with anything that had to do with sports and 1nusic. A sinister inclusion was Brann's The Iconoclast. I also read Jack London. For some unknolvn reason, we had all of Booth Tarkington, lvhich I read again and again with great relish, especially The A1agnificent Ambersons. Another favorite of mine was Ring Lardner. I loved his You Know 1\1.e, Al, which was based on a conceited, callow rookie named Reh Russell, a pitcher for the ,vhite Sox who later became an outfielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates. In one of Lardner's books there was a chapter entitled "~fy Life-or The Story of a Wonder Man." I thought it was particularly hilarious. We also had Debussy's book of music criticism ,,vhich he wrote under the pseudonym of Monsieur Croche. When a Jewish boy reaches the age of thirteen, he is supposed to be matured, and he undergoes a ceremony called bar mitzvah. It's a festive occasion usually held on the Jewish Sabbath, Saturday. The parents go with him to the synagogue, and there is usually a celebration and gifts. I had the only bar mitzvah to take place on a Thursday morning at 8 o'clock. It was attended by my grandfather alone, except for the regular inhabitants of the synagogue at that hour. No one else from my family was there. My grandfather, \vho was in charge of the services, pointed to a passage in the Torah which he chanted and I repeated. There was no speech from me, which is customary. (I was secretly relieved about the speech.) We went home and my father had a schnapps with my grandfather. I don't remember that anything was said to me, and I received no gifts-which was unprecedented in my family. It didn't bother me at the time. Many years later, after my mother died, my brothers went through her possessions. She had left me a watch- the usual gift for bar mitzvah-which I had never been given. I ,vas bemused, bitter and touched, but I refused to take it. I never did. When my mother was quite old and sick, she persisted in her blind obedience to the orthodox Jewish faith, particularly in

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regard to the ritual of Passover. She went through all the transposition of dishes- tl1ere are two sets of dishes in orthodox homes. I asked, "Why do you bother?" "Well," she smiled, "I have such a good record, I don't want to spoil it." Her deep and abiding faith gave her great courage. Strangely enough, I became a Boy Scout because I could play the piano. I couldn't tie knots, but I'd be tied in them. But I was a good swimmer, and I joined a social club. And my brother Honey, who was two years older, would reluctantly take me to parties. They played a game where you throw a pillow and you kiss a girl. I thought it was just a coquetry that they never threw the pillow my way. Not once was a pillow thrown in my direction. But it didn't trouble me too much. I thought it was due to a lack of discernment and good taste on the part of the participating young girls, not to my wanton unattractiveness. When I was in higl1 school, I was oafish and doltish-a maverick. I didn't seem to belong anywhere. In grade school my conduct was impeccable, but as the years progressed in high school, I became increasingly resentful of authority. I incensed and outraged even Mr. Demmler who had been particularly warm and helpful to me. Oscar Demmler was the teacher of the musical appreciation course and was one of my major influences. The class was privileged to attend at student rates five concerts a year by the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leopold Stokowski. Each program was discussed and illustrated by Mr. Demmler and I would usually accompany him on the piano, illustrating the symphonic works. I also played in the high school orchestra and was once soloist at a concert, playing a piece by Mendelssohn for piano and orchestra. I suddenly refused to attend rehearsals of the orchestra which were held after school hours. In front of a class I said that Mr. Demmler was forced to attend because he was paid b11t I wasn't. I had practically become the accompanist for every youthful violinist in the city. Which remin.ds me of what George Ber-

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nard Shaw was purported to have written about a violinist, "Last night Pablo De Sarasate in his debut at Albert Hall not only left his contemporaries but his accompanist far behind." My uncontrolled passion was sports-as a spectator and hero\Vorshiper. My two obsessions were the Pittsburgh Pirates and the University of Pittsburgh football team, which was coached by the immortal "Pop" Warner. I wanted to couple my pleasure with making money but was stymied on both counts. In order to be a hawker of peanuts, hot dogs, or soft drinks it was necessary to appear early in the morning at Forbes Field where the Pirates played, and fill bags with peanuts for endless hours. This unpaid chore was a prerequisite for being picked as a paid vendor. When it was decided who would be the fortunate ones to sell these at game time, I was never picked. My other abortive attempt was selling chrysanthemums. I would stand outside Forbes Field at the Pitt football games with these glistening crisp flowers in my hand and a truculent.look on my face. I barely whispered my wares. I never sold one. There was something about me that didn't get people. But my brother Bennie usually got me in to see the game-this was solace enough. I loved basketball and prizefighting with equal devotion. * * * I had found a refuge in my accepted pianistic ability, which I used as a passport into social and athletic gatherings. I played recitals at the Y.M.H.A., in homes, and even assisted Mr. Demmler at private discourses on musical appreciation. My piano teacher had me play recitals in several homes in Sewickley, a fashionable suburb of Pittsburgh. I once played in the home of a prominent newspaper publisher for which I received five dollars. When I played my assorted recitals in varied locales in Pittsburgh my father was absolutely dictatorial about what encores I would play. Once I didn't follow his advice, choosing a quiet undemonstrative piece instead of his selection, the character of which was brilliance and brio. This angered him and he struck me across the face. He wouldn't tolerate disobedience.

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In high school they had what they called a social dance. I didn't know how to dance. I was furtive about it, but I wanted to go and I did. I think I was a Junior. There was a rather plain-looking girl whom I asked to dance. I didn't dare ask an attractive girl-unlike my later standards. A contest was announced and I found myself waltzing. I was as solemn as at a service at St. Peter's. One by one, couples were eliminated. Suddenly the possibility of victory entered my breast. There were just two couples left! This was my wildest dream come true. I was flat-footed, pigeon-toed, knock-kneed and lacked a certain grace, yet here I ,vas-one of just two remaining couples. Finally the other couple was eliminated! I thought, Victory! Chester Briggs, the coach of the school, came forward and gave us each a lemon while everyone roared with laughter at the booby-prize winners. I was so humiliated that I have never gotten over it. I don't allow a lemon on my table to this day. My lemon phobia creates problems for me. I used to be a famous coffee drinker and was even written up in Life as one. I'm excessive about everything I like. But my wife, ,-vho probably makes the best coffee in town, loathes it. Her mother once gave her some with castor oil in it; she hasn't touched it since. She drinks tea. This invariably leads to civil war between us, because you can't have tea without automatically serving lemon. In restaurants, too, lemon wedges are inescapable ,-vith oysters, clams or shrimp. I have the headwaiter remove them when I can, but it's pretty hard to escape lemon. That was the cruelest hoax; receiving a lemon for doing a stately waltz. I had no particular interest in that girl I danced with. In fact, I had to muster up all my courage to ask her. She was not attractive to me. I always liked girls who were shallow . . . girls who had no personality or emotional depth and who were temperamentally bloodless. This enabled me to endow them with all kinds of mystery. I set them on pedestals because they had no reactions. It made me work all the harder. I thought they were inaccessible and that it was only due to a lack of feeling on tl1eir par~

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Most of my girls were like this, except my wife June, who dou hie-crossed me by turning out to have both character and personality. It reminds me of what Tschaikowsky said about the Brahms Violin Concerto: "Brahms built the pedestal, but forgot to put a monument on it." I treat girls like that. I put them on pedestals, but they invariably neglect to provide the monument. An unforeseen tragedy of my youth came with a girl named Rose. This radiant girl attended the same musical appreciation class that I did. My main preoccupation was not to betray my deep feeling for her which, according to my twisted mores, ,vould have been effeminate. I would effectuate tangential meetings with her, but my conversation was deeply inhibited. Once I met her on the street and walked her home. My joy was boundless but my conversation restrained. That walk was the apogee of our relationship. After my father died, a tragic and horrible death which I won't dwell on, I persuaded my mother to let me discontinue high school and go to New York to study piano. Miracle of miracles, this girl Rose wrote me a letter which started a correspondence between us. As enthralled as I was, this correspondence intruded on my solitary and bleak attitude that writing to a girl betrayed indulgence and weakness of character. Without explanation or warning, I terminated the correspondence abruptly. At the end of six months of unrelieved loneliness and separation, I managed to get enough money to get back to Pittsburgh. My return coincided with my brother Harry's appearance there as musical conductor of Al Jolson's show Bombo. At my first opportunity, I waited outside the high school for Rose to appear. She came out accompanied by her new fellow and she dismissed me by saying, "Let's not rehash the past," which for fifteen is quite a remark. I had never phoned a girl in my life and I was too self-conscious to phone Rose. I felt her loss was irretrievable, but never discussed it with anyone. Against my wishes, I went back to New York to resume my piano studies, my mother's judgment being that if I remained in Pittsburgh I would become a poolroom bum. Six months later, in June, I was allowed to come home for a

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visit. How exhilarated and thrilled I was at the thought of seeing this girl again. I wanted a glimpse . . . no more. I stood in front of the high school, but she didn't come out that first day, nor the second day. The third day, school was over for the season. Despondently, I was walking home with a friend when he said, "Too bad your friend died." "Who's that?" I asked. "Rose," he replied. My first instinct was not to betray the fact that I knew her, which I thought would be a sign of weakness and unmanliness. So I greeted his news with poker-faced rigidity. But later I privately succumbed to grief. I don't mean tears . . . just bewilderment. I understand that at that age death never appears as a possibility. I didn't confide in a soul ; it was my private woe. Rose's family sent me a picture of her. During my second year in New York I played the piano in a Japanese roadhouse in the town of Harmon-on-the-Hudson, where I shared sleeping quarters with tiventy or thirty Japanese waiters in the cellar. I used to look at that snapshot every once in awhile. Then suddenly I said, "Oh to hell with it," and tore it up. When I think of that tragic girl of my adolescence and her untimely death, and that she chose me to be her writing companion, it always reminds me of the early days of my friendship '\-Vith George Gershwin. He would play a song for me that I had never heard before, because it was in temporary limbo. It was "They Didn't Believe Me," by Jerome Kern with lyrics (which nobody ever knows) by Herbert Reynolds. There's one line: "That from this whole wide world you've chosen me . . . " I always think about that girl of my youth who temporarily chose me. This refrain that I've just been intoning is too dolorous. It didn't really affect me, except for the rest of my life. Years later in the first twenty years of marriage to my indestructible, redoubtable and perdurably beautiful wife June, I never allowed her to have flowers in the house. When someone sent roses

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(rose was the key word), I went into an absolute catatonic rigidity of despair. No one but my wife knew why. As I have said, I was about fifteen when I first went to New York. My mother accompanied me and stayed for a week. I lived in various furnished rooms until I finally met a friend of my brothers' who was a bookmaker and one-time roller skater in the Hippodrome shows. He was my only friend then, though he was twelve years older. He would lecture me on the perils of sex, and he introduced me to the three other fellows who were to become my temporary roommates. I shared two large rooms in a brownstone on 80th Street with a homosexual, and a hunchback named Eddie Bennett. Eddie was the mascot of the Yankees (strangely enough, he was having a running feud with Babe Ruth at the time, if that can be imagined). My other roommate was a rather jovial Italian fellow who managed a Western Union office on nearby Columbus Avenue. I was devoted to the bookmaker and we would often ,valk along Broadway. We'd pass a blind man and my companion ,vould say, "Seel That's the result of oral copulation and syphilis." These were lectures the understanding of which escaped me. In my friend the bookmaker's opinion, the penalty of sex ,vas practically death. But it proved no serious deterrent. I got my first real education in coitus from Eddie Bennett, ,vho would regale us after his evening Don Juan exploits. He kept a score card of every affair he had. The total blinded me with envy. I had never known anyone of such great accomplishment. When my mother came to New York to visit me, I introduced her to my roommates. She pointed to the homosexual and said, "Why can't you behave like him?" She was impressed by his gracefulness and gentility by contrast with my oafishness. "There's a gentleman," she declared flatly. I've been amused by that ever since. My only physical contact with him was due to my acne, which flourished like a radish garden. He would squeeze my pimples and, for good measure, some of my blackheads. Other

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than that, we were merely "friends," as divorcees say about their ruptured relationships. The bookie took his bets on a Chinatown bus on 45th Street between 7th and 6th. I would sit with him in the last row. ,,ve were shills. When the bus was filled we'd get out and sit in another empty bus. It was rather boring. He also ,vas a bootlegger. He once had me deliver some cumbersomely wrapped gin bottles to a customer who lived at the then Pennsylvania Hotel. It frightened me and I only did it once. I didn't relish that errand but I always enjoyed the company of bookmakers. I had admiration for their mathematical ability in adducing the daily profits and losses. They had a comic philosophy. One of them, in a discu ssion about sex, said ingenuously, "I get the best women money can buy." The man who ran the Western Union office fell in love with a chorus girl who ,.vas in a Shubert unit. The Shuberts were trying to compete with Keith vaudeville, and each show would appear in New York weekly and then go on tour. The girl went on the road and my roommate was desperate. She was in New Orleans, and the separation was more than he could bear. He absconded with a $500 money order and fled to New Orleans. He sent me a message with the urgent r equest to destroy all evidence of any correspondence between him and the girl. While I ,vas tearing up his papers the detectives did come and qt1estion me. Five hundred dollars was a lot of money in 1922. I didn' t squeal. This strange camaraderie was dissolved. It had lasted only three ,veeks and the room had had the accommodating advantage of having a grand piano. My older friend and counselor the bookie left N ew York for a tour of racing tracks throughout the country. I felt bereft and lonely. With the disappearance of our Western Union ,vealth-symbol, we had to give up the rooms. I found a little room on 51 st Street between 8th Avenue and Broadway. The room was tiny, had an uncovered gas jet, no heat or running water. It was the quintessence of unrelieved squalor. I also found a place where I could practice, for which I paid.

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Some of those days were lean and often I didn't eat at all. I had 11ever seen anything like New York delicatessens, which looked like veritable Louvres to me-so attractively overflowing with gustatory art. One Saturday night I went into one and ordered what seemed the greatest of epicurean delights, a lettuce and tomato sandwich with Russian dressing on rye bread. I'd never heard of Russian dressing in Pittsburgh. I ate it, then went through a stealthy, choreographic pantomime of paying. I put my hand on the counter, with no coins to accompany it . . . waited a few seconds . . . then left. I didn't pay for the sandwich, but my God it tasted good. This was an isolated occurrence but the memory of that stolen pleasure remains vivid. Until that time I never was aware of contemporary literature or theatre. Due to my brother Harry's influence, I suddenly became an avid reader. I read Jean Christophe, Romain Rolland's overblown roman-fieuve. I didn't recognize the antiSemitic references; they wouldn't have bothered me anyway. But the character of the hero-based on Beethoven, Wagner and Richard Strauss-was of such heroic proportions that it had a destructive effect on me, because at that time I aimed at that kind of stature and nobility. I don't mean my adopting this fictional composite as my hero was wrong. He could have been imagined literarily, but in reality he couldn't have existed. It traduced me about normal human beings temporarily. I had to reassess my values shortly. Another book I read was The Rise of David Levinsky, by Abraham Cahan, then editor of a Yiddish newspaper called The Forward. It was the story of a Jewish immigrant worker in the garment industry. I read Dreiser, Cabell, Willa Cather, and mostly the kind of literature that struck out at conformity. One of my great disillusionments was the mediocrity of the then conductor of the New York Philharmonic, Joseph Stransky. There was a complete absence of contemporary music and his limitations were boundless. One of his musicians was supposed to have threatened him with, "If you don't behave I'll

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follow your beat." I had been spoiled by the Philadelphia Orchestra and Stokowski. It was at that time that I began to study with Sigismond Stojowski. At one of my early lessons he admonished me about making a too "copious" use of the pedal. I had never come across that word in Horatio Alger. Because of that flickering open gas jet in my small roomand flickering was indeed the word-I used to read in the Square between 46th and 47th Streets where Broadway and Seventh Avenue converge. It was called Longacre Square. I was sitting on a ledge there once when a middle-aged man (everybody appreciably older than my fifteen years was middle-aged to me then) came up and asked me if I would like to go to the Capitol Theatre. There was a ballet and symphony orchestra there and the musical presentations were lavish. I leaped at the opportunity. He took me, and we sat in the balcony. Before two minutes had elapsed, his legs were intertwined with my two legs. I didn't know what to do, but my instinct was right. I rushed from the theatre without a word, shocked and bewildered. It was my first and only experience of that kind. As I have said, my brother Harry was married to Pearl Eaton, a member of the famous theatrical Eaton family. She was an attractive, aggressive girl, and I had a crush on her. She had a tap dancing class, the pupils consisting of pretty girls from the current shows, and I accompanied them on the piano. The piece of music that I played for these classes was George Gershwin's "I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise." That was my first contact with the name Gershwin. I received a dollar for each lesson. Pearl's sister Mary was one of the stars of the Ziegfeld Follies that year. Mary was a doll-like creature, somewhat like Marilyn Miller, but she never reached Marilyn Miller's heights. My Uncle Oscar was the conductor of the Follies, and the cast included Will Rogers and Gilda Gray. I went as often as I could. What struck me most about Will Rogers was not his lariat-accompanied monologue but some sketches that Ring Lardner

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had written. And Rogers did a phone call which later became a cliche. He'd say, "Hello, Elmer. How are you, Elmer? Is that right, Elmer? Really, Elmer!" Then he'd hang up and say, "That ,vas Elmer." At that time it was very fresh. Gilda Gray did the shim1ny. She didn't mean much to me. I was enthralled by the theatre, and fortunately had cut-rate tickets. I went to vaudeville regularly and to every concert. It ,vas 25¢ in the gallery where I sat. Not since Hillary and Tensing did anyone climb such heights as did I in those years. My brother Harry was conducting Spice of 1922, a Shubert revue at the Winter Garden in which there were two chorus girls with whom I later became acquainted. They were Nancy Carrol and Joan Cra,\Tford. My brother allowed me to play in the pit during one of those weeks, and that was probably the most breathtakingly exciting week of my life at that time. It was my first intimate contact with the theatre. The star of the sho\v ,vas a film vampire called Valeska Suratt, and .after a performance Harry brought me backstage to meet her, and I played a special concert for her. She has now disappeared and even her memory has faded into oblivion. But the great catastrophe of that week occurred because, as the pianist, I had studied purely for concert and didn't k.no\v the technical terms of manuscript-a common situation at that time. The orchestrations were in manuscript. At one point in the show there was an adagio team in which one male dancer threw the girl many feet into the air and another caught her. The music read: "Tacit." I played oom-pa-pa \\Thile that gir1 ,~as propelled into the air. There was supposed to be no music at all. This great, climactic moment was supposed to be accompanied by complete silence. I ruined it. I had a rather well-to-do aunt who lived in New York. I dressed terribly, usually in one of my elder brother's cast-off suits. When I'd visit my aunt, the doorman of her apartment house would make me feel self-conscious and I would cringe with inadequacy. My aunt had an ornate dining room set. I once spilled some beet juice on the white tablecloth and was so castigated and

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publicly humiliated for that slight mishap that I refuse to eat beets to this day. That melancholy, traumatic event of my youth was similar to Lady Macbeth's "Out, damned spot!" scene. Whenever I accrued enough money I would make short trips back to the magnetic Pittsburgh. By this time I had gained experience in playing with orchestras. I had quite a fluid agile technique. One summer in Pittsburgh I had a remunerative engagement playing with a dance orchestra. We played in theatres and night clubs. It was at one of these night clubs that I used to see the legendary Harry Greb. He was once eating spaghetti, using a tablespoon and a fork and rolling the pasta. I watched him in fascinated horror, hoping that I'd never be confronted with such a complex situation. As I grew older and had broken my bonds of tiresome innocence, I joined my brothers (not Bennie) and one of my uncles in pilgrimages to a whorehouse on Colwell Street in Pittsburgh. They charged $1 straight, $2 French. The madam laid down a strict rule that you were not allowed to chew gum during the sexual act. I wasn't psychologically aware of all the nuances and ramifications of the act of sex, but I was puzzled by this regulation. Then I was told that gum-chewing was supposed to be distracting-which of course made it fascinating. It was an alleged delaying action maneuver. This was an interesting proscription they placed upon the cash-paying customers, and naturally anything illicit or prohibited appeals to me. I always had a wad of gum on the roof of my mouth. When a beautiful young lady was performing her act, I would chew madly. We were accorded family rates. The establishment was catered by a boxer friend of mine who when he was young had beaten Tony Canzoneri in the Olympics. I became an inveterate crapshooter. Once when the cops closed in on us I ran up a side street and hid in a doghouse. It was at that time that the slogan was "Eat raisins because they contain iron"- We changed it to "Eat raisins-shit rivets." One summer when I returned from New York, I found several of my Colwell Street friends had been found guilty of

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stuffing ballot boxes. They were busy discussing the merits and disadvantages of several jails to which they would be assigned. They were all hoping to be sent to the Lewisburg Penitentiary ,~hich at that time was. and still is, called the country club of the state jails. Their ability to cope with any situation was so forthright and cheerful that it was refreshing to behold. I loved Colwell Street. It was a radical departure from my family. I broke with my brother Honey and made friends with this tough neighborhood. I was as devoted to that street and its madams and whores as I later became to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. These fragmentary remembrances of my boyhood and adolescence are those of the dolt I really was. I had dark thoughts and a fierce ambivalence toward my parents, which I quickly erased from my mind as unpermitted maunderings. This created the crux of my later guilt. I had a delusion that time, a~d time alone, would take care of my blatant immaturity. As I write this I still believe in this sterile delusion.

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variegated pattern of my existence in the 20's may be

likened to a kaleidoscope, and recapturing it in its entirety is not possible. But setting down events at random, as they occur to me, perhaps will evoke a shadowy remembrance of a world that has all but vanished. During my first year in New York when I was fifteen, my mother paid for my piano lessons, which was a great hardship for her; and Harry, who was on the road, would write me a letter every week enclosing a five-dollar bill. But what I wanted and needed most was a job. I used to sit, hour after hour, in the outer office of a theatrical booking agent. His door seemed impregnable. In those rare moments when he peered out of the door, he seemed to me the most powerful and inaccessible of men. Finally late one afternoon, when apparently no other pianist was available, my great opportunity arrived. My persistence was rewarded. I was to play at a banquet. Although I had had no experience playing popular songs (in Pittsburgh it was considered a bad influence on my serious musical training) I was very anxious to get the job. [ 61 l

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The banquet turned out to be a stag at the Astor Hotel. The guests were very drunk and raucous, and I was quite apprehensive. I could play printed music but the first request was for "East Side, vVest Side," a piece we didn't have. Although this \Vas the theme song of New York, due to its reigning idol, Al Smith, I had never heard of it, and when I asked, "How does it go?" my ignorance was greeted as a frontal attack on New York culture. When I said, "Can you hum it?" I was practically evicted. The violi11ist, who could also play the piano, saved the situation. The next mishap occurred when we ,vere handed the music with which we were to accompany a girl dancer. She appeared nude. This confrontation was almost more than my untapped erotic senses could bear. I became so dizzy that I almost passed out. I was the youngest Reverend Davidson on Broadway. My next job was more consonant witl1 my ability and limited experie11ce. I played in a trio with a phenomenally gifted violinist and a cellist, both Hungarian. We played during the lunch hour in what was then to me the magnificent dining room at the Ambassador Hotel. My virtuosity in salon music was quite in evidence on that job. It was there that I first saw diners eating oysters, which from a distance, seemed to involve a mysterious ritual. I secretly hoped that I would never have to cope with such an arcane maneuver. The cellist, who was impressed with my pianistic ability, suggested that I move in with him and his wife and daughter. In return for my room I would give his daughter piano lessons. I packed up my things, consisting mostly of a trunk full of music, and moved in; but the suffocating feeling of being the stranger in a family was more than I could bear, and I moved back to my gas-jet room that same afternoon. My first extended engagement was in a Japanese roadhouse. A three-piece orchestra played on weekends but during the week there was just the piano and violin. We alternated between classical and pot1lar music. The place was called Mikado Inn. The rival restaurant, two miles away, was the Nikko Inn.

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Japanese restaurants were comparatively scarce, so it was ironic that the leading proponents of Japanese cuisine should have been within such a short distance of each other. Consequently~ the rivalry was keen. The upright piano on which I played had a horizontal string across it, on -v. hich hung a one-dollar bill-a not too subtle hint for tips, which were mostly forthcoming as the evening progressed and the clientele grew boisterous and drunk. The most popular request was that great American spiritual "Show Me the Way to Go Home." Almost as popular were "Charlie My Boy," and "Yes, We Have No Bananas." For dinner we played concert music. The proprietor, a rotund, jovial Japanese whom we addressed as Admiral Moto, was completely dominated by his forbidding Irish wife, a tall, dictatorial and quite respectable woman. Every Saturday night Admiral Moto would get loaded; and his fly would be open. There was great activity in the vast kitchen where the chef was a twenty-year-old Italian boy from nearby Croton. He had achieved his Oriental culinary skill under the tutelage of his predecessor, a Japanese chef who had left after a fight with Admiral Moto. This was an interesting anomaly: an Italian chef running a kitchen which served only sukiyaki. During that period I was continuing my piano lessons in New York with Mr. Stojowski. I was preoccupied with my adventures in the more advanced piano compositions of Debussy. Once, after the master class, I began to play "Fascinating Rhythm," from the show Lady Be Good. This piece was considered quite daring and original but playing it in that hallowed house was practically an act of musical blasphemy. Stojowski's two most famous pupils were Guiomar Novaes and Mischa Levitzski, masters of glittering, polished, beautiful tone-the apotheosis of romantic piano playing. Madame Novaes, with whom I became acquainted in later years, is one of my favorite pianists. Her interpretation of the romantics is imbued with a highly individual and exquisitely poetic quality which sets her apart from the American devotees of the strong arm approach. 1

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Stojowski was a pupil and disciple of Paderewski, whose fame at that time had a special panache of glory. He had renounced the role of virtuoso pianist in order to become the Premier of Poland. When he was ousted and sent into exile by Marshal Pilsudski, he returned to the piano. His first reappearance in the concert world, an event of great excitement, was as soloist for an all-Paderewski program at Carnegie Hall, conducted by Walter Damrosch. He played his own piano concerto and Damrosch conducted his symphony. The Stojowski class attended, and Paderewski's entrance was greeted with a tumultuous, standing ovation for a hero's return. As a special postscript to this event, Stojowski, who was a close friend and fellow Pole, arranged an all-Paderewski piano program and reception at the Plaza Hotel, at which his special pupils participated. I played the "Legende." At the end of a piece Paderewski, who had an imposing, magnetic personality, would congratulate the performer with a handshake and some ,vords of praise. A girl who had cried when she made a· mistake got a special kiss on the forehead-something she ,vouldn't have received if she'd played it correctly. This was my first personal contact with a world-famous artist. We also had a group picture taken with him. Stojowski confided to me that Padere,;-vski had said that I was very talented but years later I made light of this remark by saying that as Padere,vski patted me on the head he restrained his foot from kicking me. While my bookmaker friend was still in Ne,v York he used to take bets at a women's lingerie shop in a building at 49th and Broad,vay, on the same floor as the Irving Berlin Music Publishing Company. Songwriters were inveterate horseplayers. In my dreary lonely wanderings I would inevitably wind up at the Berlin Publishing House. It was a scene of merriment and lively encounters. There were song pluggers, song demonstrators, vaudeville acts, and sometimes great celebrities. I once had the opportunity to meet and hear the two great Negro pianists of that period, C. Luckeyth Roberts and Jimmy Johnson; the latter was to write the immortal "Charleston" for a show called Running lVild.

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The appearance of Irving Berlin was very rare and was accon1panied by noisy genuflections. I never drea1nt in those days that we were to have a lon.g and delightful friendship. At the Berlin publishing house there was an orchestrator who had a cubbyhole for an office, where he had on display a picture of Beethoven. On it he had inscribed To a swell little arranger, Ludwig van Beethoven. I later told this story to George S. Kaufman and he put it in his play, June 111.oon. I l1ad made friends ,vith an older and more experienced comn1ercial pianist, San1my \Vilson, who gave me hints and suggestions on ho,v to play dance jobs. Through his kindness and intercession I met an older woman for whom I had no ardor but with whom I had an affair. She took charge like the Secretary of Defense. I had harbored the secret belief that sexual ac:tivity would be the magical cure for my loathsome acne. After the event I rushed to the mirror, but to my great disappointment tl1e splotches and blemishes remained intact. Sammy \Vilson, along with other musicians, used to han g out at the St. Regis restaurant at 43rd and Broadway. One of the regulars ,\·as a gangster kno,vn as Big Frencl1y, who looked like Babe Ruth and vvas second in command to O\vney Madden. H e liked to dance, and Sammy and I ,vould often go to Proctor's Theater about midnight where some of the Roseland hostesses ,vould congregate. v\ie ,vould play ,vhile Big Frenchy whirled about ,vith the girls. O11e night Big Frenchy asked me, "Want to go for a ride, kid?'' "Sure!" I entht1sed. I didn't get many offers to ride in automobiles in those days. It ,vas the middle of ,vinter. ,,ve had started through Central Park-,vhen the car stopped suddenly. ""\Vill you see if the back tire is flat, kid?" Big Frenchy asked. I got out. As soon as I did, the auto began to move at about 15 miles per hour. It \Vas then three A.rvr. and freezing. I started to run to catch up. Tl1e auto would stop-then-just as I reached it-n1ove ahead again. This game went 011 for three

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hours and I was exhausted. But it was Big Frenchy's idea of fun, taking me for my first ride. Later, he was kidnapped by Vi11cent Coll in some act of gangland defiance. My first job with a big dance orchestra was at the popular I{nickerbocker Hotel. I had developed into what was called a flash pianist, full of technical ornamentation, appoggiatura and cascading frills, but in the jazz lexicon signifying absolutely nothing. I was outstanding in the band but I had developed special techniques at being temperamental. Although the job was tolerably remunerative, I felt it an unholy intrusion on my endless pursuit of concerts, theatre and reading, so without warning I quit. I got a very easy job at the George M. Cohan Theatre in a four-piece pit orchestra. It was a dramatic show called Hell's Bells. We played before the show, at intermission, and an exit march. The ingenue was Shirley Booth, in her debut, and Humphrey Bogart, playing a straight juvenile. My indifference to discipline was so marked that on openi?g night the curtain was delayed fifteen minutes because I was late. My playing filled out the gaping holes in this puny orchestra of not very competent players. During the play I prowled familiar haunts of Broadway, including a secret dice game run by the famous McManus brothers, professional gamblers, one of ,,vhom was later alleged to have shot Arnold Rothstein. After these sorties I would rush back to the theatre to finish my chores. With all these engagements I was always the youngest of the group-a role I played with relish. My first job with any status was with a six-piece, so-called society orchestra at Ciro's, the smartest night club in New York. Clifton Webb did a ballroom dancing act. Even those many years ago, his relationship with his mother Maybelle was more adhesive than any mother-son relationship in contemporary history. During a cruise in the 20's, Maybelle, a lvoman not averse to bourbon, once told Leonore Gershwin that even at the age of five Clifton t1sed to say, "Mother . . . tittie!" One time when he ,vas being interviewed he was asked ,vhy he never spoke of

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his father. Before Clifton could reply, Maybelle said: "Clifton s father didn't like the theatre. We never mention his name." A few years ago when Clifton lost his mother-she was in her ni11eties and Clifton was in his seventies-he was inconsolable \vith gTief. This went on for such a long period of time that Noel Co\vard was supposed to have said to him over the longdistance phone, "Clifton, one more sob and I'll reverse the charges." But l1e said to friends, "You can't blame Clifton. After all, he's the world's oldest living orphan." Clifton's dancing partner at Ciro's \Vas a cute little gamin, Mary Hay, who \Vas married to Richard Barthelmess. Frances Willian1s also sang at the club. Ben Bernie's brother Dave was in charge of the orchestra. There were two pianos-Dave Bernie played one and I played the other. Ben Bernie would come over from tl1e Roosevelt Hotel \vhere he had his own orchestra, and lead a couple of sets with us as an added attraction. This show \vent on a six-iveek vaudevil1e tour of Greater New York, including the Palace and the Hippodro1ne theatres. During the sho,v the orchestra appeared on-stage in tuxedos. At the matinee of the last show in Newark, I arrived late, having been delayed by a drawbridge, and the curtain rose while I was still half dressed. I kept my back to the audience the entire sho,v, and it ,vas particularly embarrassing as Clifton Webb had already gifted us ,vith extravagant cigarette cases. However, this engagen1ent led to my later becoming a member of the Ben Bernie Band. The Hippodrome show was memorable. The great comic Ted Healey and the Stooges were on it, and the cl1orus girls took my breath away. Another performer was the incomparable Florence Mills. She \Vas the greatest Negro star I ever saw. She \vas thin and reedy and her voice was immeasurably poignant. She also danced ,vondrously. Florence Nlills ,-vas to be the star of the first all-Negro musical, called Shu/fie A long. Eubie Blake and Noble Sissie wrote the score and Josephine Baker had a bit in it. One of the songs ,vas "I'1n JlISt "\,Vild About Harry." Although I had never met her, the memory of Florence Mills

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remains somewhat dimmed but lustrous. She was very youna0 when she died. On February 14, 1924, Paul Whiteman gave a concert at Aeolian Hall. It featured first performances of works commissioned by Whiteman and the composers were Victor Herbert, Deems Taylor and George Gershwin. That concert made history because of the stirring impact of Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue." I learned the piece immediately. Paul Whiteman had a night club in which the Rhapsody was the big feature of the show. The soloist was a pianist named Harry Perrala. Due to an unfortunate and increasing addiction to alcohol he became ill and I filled in for him one week. It was there that I met Bing Crosby and Al Rinker. Between dance numbers Rinker would play the piano for Bing, who sang in a highly original and relaxed jazz style. He would use a cymbal and a drumstick for odd slightly comic rhythmic punctuations. Bing was warm and friendly and gave me needed words of encouragement. When I joined Ben Bernie the only true exponent of liberated jazz in the band was J ack Pettis, an excitingly goodlooking hedonist who played a way-out tenor sax. He took me under his wing. Jack's enthusiasm for jazz was vast, and through him I heard everybody. He took me to the Kentucky Club to hear a five-piece band- it ,vas Duke Ellington's first. The drummer was Sonny Thompson and the pianist for the singers was Fats Waller. Both were completely unknown then. It was Duke who took Jack and me to Harlem and we had ,vild times up there. Once when I shared an apartment with Pettis I a'\-voke one night to find an unknown colored trumpet player sleeping between us. Later Jack took me to a club called The Buffalodians. We liked the pianist '\-vho sang through a megaphone. His name was Harold Arlen and we ,vere to become great friends. Whenever an instrumentalist would take a break (a two-bar solo improvisation) and if it lacked jazz invention, Pettis ,vould l101ler "\Vurlitzer," his word of opprobrium. If, in jousts of ravenous eating, one's plate was cleaned, he would say, "Give the flies a chance." We always played poker, and dollar bills were

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referred to as "tears." When there was a breach of discipline during rehearsal, Ben Bernie would admonish, "The old Maestro is bragish, yo,vsah" (bragish meaning a11gry in Yiddish). There were three or four members of the band who had Ziegfeld Follies girls. They got one for me. I wasn't much of a conversationalist at that time, but I had a static romance with this girl off a11d on for a couple of years. She was also a model for Maidenform Bra, but during my whole relationship with her it never entered my mind to either touch her bosom or look at her breasts. But I used to look at the ads like Oliver Twist asking for another portion of porridge. This girl was Irish with a turned-up 11ose. \Vhen she took a sho,ver, she abo11t dro,vned. As I said, take away her nostrils and ,vhat has she got? The rest of her face ,vas featureless. She was in Rio Rita, which was playing at the Ziegfeld Theater. I used to ,vait for her across the street in front of the Warwick Hotel. On one of her birthdays I bought her some silk stocki11gs. "All the girls were disappointed at my gift," she told me. So I said I'd go shopping with her the next day. She was a hustler. She took me to a jewelry store on Fifth Avenue and I paid $650 for a ring. "No,v I can look the girls in the face," she said. I'd meet her after the theatre at night and we'd go to a drugstore and she'd do all of her shopping and I'd do all of tl1e paying. She ,vas Mildred right out of Of Human Bondage. Sl1e

took me in many trivial ,vays, but they all added up; it called for a continual financial investment. We would sometimes fight and not see each other for intervals. Our romance ended when she told me that she had to go to Brooklyn because her cousin ,vas being ordained as a priest, and that same night I sa,v her go into George White's apartment. I remained intransigent about a reconciliation. I prided myself on breaking off relationships, so I ,vas adamant. There were wealthy bon vivants in those days. I could name several of them, but they're dead and their children are not. They all liked Follies girls. At dinner parties there would always be a $100 bill under each girl's plate. My girl wasn't averse

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to this, I'm sure, but-strangely enough- she Jater became the mistress of a well-known Communist ,¥Titer, one of the first voluble Communists in America, who lived on the 101-ver East Side. I \vould never have predicted that, after her adventures as a chorus girl, she would pick someone whose affiuence couldn't have been less than penurious. Years later she looked me up. She had broken off ,vith the Communist. By this time she \vas quite fat and I really couldn't stand her. Though I guess I could have been nicer to her than I was. During one of my spats with my irish Ziegfeid girl I went out with the. ineffable and fabulous Bea Palmer, ,vho had been i11 the Follies before my time. Bea was considered the 1nost modern singer of jazz of her era and ,vas extremely versatile in her musical ability. She kne,v all of L a Boheme a11d Debussy's "Iberia," and did "I Want to Shimrr1y Like My Sister Kate" ,vith equal style. But she would rarely appear professionally and would often cancel before the first performance. Later on, she ,vas with L ennie Hayton and in 1929 I heard her sing "I'm Coming, Virginia" with a Hayton arrangement that was extraordinary. Bea had a great reputation and her singing possessed a special kind of divinity. She never performed after that. For a time Bea was the lady whom Jack Den1psey was escorting. This made her pianist coach Al Siegel, who was quite famous in those days, furious. (Segal later coached Ethel Merman for her debut in Girl Crazy.) Segal claimed that Bea ,vas his girl. He was a slight little man with a glass eye, but he was so irate that he threw a punch at Dempsey. Naturally Jack was kind about it, but that, I thought, was the greatest audacity ever sho,vn by a pianist in the history of music. I ,vas the mascot of several Ziegfeld girls. In those days chorus girls had three choices-musicians, gangsters or millionaires. Usually the musicians wo11 out. One was typical. She'd already n1arried a banker from Baltimore, but she left him to marry a banjo player from George Olson's band. She made her appearance in a night club as a star about then and everybody on

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Broadway showed up. She recited "The Moth and the Flame," deluged in a flood of eerie light; that was her act. The most beautiful of the Follies girls ,vas Anastasia Reilly, my favorite. But she was unattainable, inaccessibJe and too old for me. Another well-known Follies girl was going to marry a silent picture star with a great name, but she once asked roe to sleep with her because she was lonely. She sought my advice, wanting to draw on my infinite ,visdom. No one ,.vas less qualified than I. I reassured her doubts but as far as the rest, I obliged. *

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My first real friend ,vas Phil Charig, a talented song ,vriter who wrote "St1nny Disposish." Bernie always introduced him as "Phil Charig, who wrote 'Su11ny Disposish' . . . and that's all." Ira Gershwin had written the lyrics, and the song had a ratl1er treacly philosophy. It ,vas Charig who introduced me to George Gershwin. I remember feeling that I was experiencing musical history in the making when Phil took roe to Gersh,vin's apartment, then on 110th Street; Gershwin \Vas working on his Piano Concerto in F. He had just completed the first movement and he played it, accon1panied by William Merrigan Daly on the second piano. It ,vas one of the great thrills of my youth. The rhythmic harmonies and melodic ingenuity electrified and stimulated me beyond words. Charig was also rehearsal pianist for Jerome Kern's hit show Sunny, which featured Jack Donohue, Marilyn Miller, Clifton \Vebb and Mary Hay. That ,vas about the time ,vhen Jerome Kern was at the height of his popularity and was considered the greatest name in musical comedy. Phil ,vas a rather effete man, and we had an occasional tussle. \Vhen Bernie heard of one of them, he came to me and inquired, "Did Phil scratch?" Yet Phil \Vas the musical arbiter and mentor of my youth; I could have been kinder to him in subsequent years. Ben Bernie used to confide to all his fellow comedians that if

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he was ever in a Broadway show, critic George Jean Nathan and the intelligentsia (that was the ,vord in those days) \Vould certainly favor him. Yet no one received a more cruel review than Bernie did from Nathan. It was quite a blow. Bernie was a joyous man and I loved him. Besides playing the Roosevelt Hotel, the Bernie Band also played the Palace and subsequently the Rialto. Every week, ,ve were either Swiss, Russian or German musicians and had to wear different national costumes. This made me rather ill, particularly the Swiss Alpine hat. When I appeared without my hat, Bernie ,vas furious. After he'd fired me a couple of times, I wore the hat. During our vaudeville days Bernie ,vas married to an enormous woman whom he called Chubby. Then he fell in love ,vith another rather large-proportioned girl named Dorothy Wesley, and I became his cover-up. I would take her to Reuben's every night. He would arrive and say, "'\Vhy, what are you doing here, Oscar?" Then he ,vould join us. I acted as l1is blind for a couple of years. There were a lot of great acts at the Rialto. R ay Bolger ,vas in a double with another fellow. Ray was a kid then, and so was

I. "Remenlber the Rialto?" I asked him recently. He said, "You were not only in the orchestra-you were the orchestra." I could play show music better than anybody. I asked Ray, "Whatever happened to your partner?" "My partner fired me," said Ray. Another member of the act was George Raft, who did a Charleston to "Sweet Georgia Brown." I would play a short version of "Rhapsody in Blue," and George, who was a great gambler, would bet with a friend on my playing of one passage in "Rhapsody." It consisted of eight bars in ,vhich the left hand makes jolting leaps to the bass-if you hit the right notes. The bet was on whether I'd connect ,vith those bass 11otes. The negative side rarely won. The Bernie band also played at the '\Vinter Garden with a

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Shubert revue. Sophie Tucker was one of the stars. Her husband at that time was AJ Lackey, a leisurely sort of man-abouttO\vn. After their divorce Al Lackey said cavalierly, "I'll say this about Sophie-not one of her checks ever bounced." I also played many social functions at private homes with a dance orchestra booked by Mike Markel, the Meyer Davis of his day. These were inexpressibly dull engagements, the standard of deportment for the musicians being as circumscribed as a Chinese commune. It ,vas axiomatic that jazz musicians were partial to drink and at these homes they ,vould invariably steal a bottle of liquor and hide it in one of their instrument cases. Liqt1or never had an attraction for me- I was the male Carrie Nation of the time -and I al,vays did resent the tyranny of drunks. However, due to my insatiable interest in reading, I would on some of these occasions furtively and with all the stealth of a Willie S11tton steal a book of rare quality and hide it in the saxophone case of a fello,v m11sician. A luminous, original star named Helen Morgan appeared in the 20's. Her first show was a miniature and smart review called Arnericana, for ,vhich George and Ira Gershwin \Vrote a song entitled "That Lost Barbershop Chord." It was Phil Charig ,vho advised Helen l\1organ to sit on the piano ,vhen she sang. Later, Jerome Kern took her under his wing and she appeared in Show Boat in 1927 and ,vas an enormous hit as Julie. Then she did another sho,-v with Jerome I