I Married a Communist (8 page)

After the letter was published, he was working one day up in the loading basket, above the hold of the ship, when the guys operating the basket threatened to drop him into the hold unless he shut up worrying about niggers. Repeatedly they dropped him ten, fifteen, twenty feet, promising next time to let go and break every bone in his body, but, scared as he was, he wouldn't say what they wanted to hear, and in the end they let him out. Then the following morning someone in the mess hall called him a Jew bastard. A nigger-loving Jew bastard. "A southern hillbilly with a big mouth," Ira told me. "Always made remarks in the mess hall about Jews, about Negroes. This one morning I'm sitting there near the end of the meal—there weren't that many guys left in the place—and he started to yap off about niggers and Jews. I'm still boiling from the incident the day before on the ship, and so I couldn't take it anymore, and I took off my glasses and I gave 'em to a guy I was sitting with, the only guy who'd still sit with me. By then I'd walk in the mess hall, two hundred guys sitting there, and because of my politics I'd be totally ostracized. Anyway, I went at that son of a bitch. He was a private and I was a sergeant. From one end of that mess hall to the other I kicked the shit out of him. Then the first sergeant comes up to me and says, 'You want to press charges against this guy? A private attacking a noncommissioned officer?' I quickly said to myself, I'll probably be damned if I do and damned if I don't. Right? But from that moment on, nobody ever made an anti-Semitic remark when I was in the vicinity. That didn't mean they'd ever let up about niggers. Niggers this and niggers that, a hundred times a day. This hillbilly tried again with me that same night. We were washing off our mess kits. You know the stinking little knives they have there? He came at me with that knife. Again I had him, I put him away, but I didn't do anything more about it."

Hours later Ira got ambushed in the dark and wound up in the hospital. As best he could diagnose the pains that began to develop while he was working at the record factory, they were from the damage caused by that savage beating. Now he was always pulling a muscle or spraining a joint—his ankle, his wrist, his knee, his neck—and as often as not from doing virtually nothing, no more than stepping off the bus coming home or reaching across the counter for the sugar bowl in the diner where he went to eat.

And this is why, however unlikely it seemed that anything would materialize from it, when something was said about a radio audition, Ira leaped at the chance.

Maybe there were more machinations than I knew of behind Ira's move to New York and his overnight radio triumph, but I didn't think so back then. I didn't have to. Here was the guy to take my education beyond Norman Corwin, to tell me, for one thing, about the GIs that Corwin didn't talk about, GIs not so nice or, for that matter, so antifascist as the heroes of
On a Note of Triumph,
the GIs who went overseas thinking about niggers and kikes and who came home thinking about niggers and kikes. Here was an impassioned man, someone rough and scarred by experience, bringing with him firsthand evidence of all the brutish American stuff that Corwin left out. It didn't require Communist connections to explain Ira's overnight radio triumph to me. I just thought, This guy is wonderful. He
is
an iron man.

T
HAT NIGHT
in '48 at the Henry Wallace rally in Newark, I'd also met Eve Frame. She was with Ira and with her daughter, Sylphid, the harpist. I saw nothing of what Sylphid felt for her mother, didn't know about their struggle until Murray began to tell me of all that had passed me by as a kid, everything about Ira's marriage that I didn't or couldn't understand or that Ira had kept from me during those two years when I got to see him every couple of months, either when he came to visit Murray or when I visited him at the cabin—which Ira called his "shack"—in the hamlet of Zinc Town, in northwest New Jersey.

Ira retreated to Zinc Town to live not so much close to nature as close to the bone, to live life in the raw, swimming in the mud pond right into November, tramping the woods on snowshoes in coldest winter, or, on rainy days, meandering around in his Jersey car—a used '39 Chevy coupe—talking to the local dairy farmers and the old zinc miners, whom he tried to get to understand how they were being screwed by the system. He had a fireplace out there where he liked to cook his hot dogs and beans over the coals, even to brew his coffee, all so as to remind himself, after he'd become Iron Rinn and a bit enlarded with money and fame, that he was still nothing more than a "working stiff," a simple man with simple tastes and expectations who during the thirties had ridden the rails and who had got incredibly lucky. About owning the Zinc Town shack, he used to say, "Keeps me in practice being poor. Just in case."

The shack furnished an antidote to West Eleventh Street and an asylum from West Eleventh Street, the place where you go to sweat out the bad vapors. It was also a link to the earliest vagabond days, when he was surviving among strangers for the first time and every day was hard and uncertain and, as it would always be for Ira, a battle. After leaving home at fifteen and digging ditches for a year in Newark, Ira had taken jobs in the northwesternmost corner of lersey, sweeping up in various factories, working sometimes as a farmhand, as a watchman, as a handyman, and then, for two and a half years, until he was nearly nineteen and headed west, sucking air in shafts twelve hundred feet down in the Sussex zinc mines. After the blasting, with the place still smoky and reeking sickeningly of dynamite powder and gas, Ira worked with a pick and a shovel alongside the Mexicans as the lowest of the low, as what they called a mucker.

In those years, the Sussex mines were unorganized and as profitable for the New lersey Zinc Company, and as unpleasant for New lersey Zinc's workers, as zinc mines anywhere in the world. The ore got smelted into metallic zinc down on Passaic Avenue in Newark and also processed into zinc oxide for paint, and though by the time Ira bought his shack in the late forties lersey zinc was losing ground to foreign competition and the mines were already headed for extinction, it was still that first big immersion in brute life—eight hours underground loading the shattered rock and ore into rail cars, eight hours of enduring the awful headaches and swallowing the red and brown dust and shitting in the pails of sawdust ... and all for forty-two cents an hour—that lured him back to the remote Sussex hills. The Zinc Town shack was the radio actor's openly sentimental expression of solidarity with the dispensable, coarse nobody he'd once been—as he described himself, "a brainless human tool if ever there was one." Another person, having achieved success, might have wanted to abolish those gruesome memories for good, but without the history of his unimportance made somehow tangible, Ira would have felt himself unreal and badly deprived.

I hadn't even known that when he came over to Newark—when, after I got out of my last class, we took our hikes through Weequahic Park, circling the lake and ending up at our neighborhood's dining simulacrum to Coney Island's Nathan's, a place called Millman's, for a hot dog with "the works"—he wasn't visiting Lehigh Avenue solely to see his brother. On those after-school afternoons, when Ira told me about his years as a soldier and what he'd learned in Iran, about O'Day and what O'Day taught him, about his own recent former life as a factory worker and a union man, and his experiences as a kid shoveling muck in the mines, he was seeking refuge from a household where, from the day he arrived, he'd found himself unwelcome and unwanted by Sylphid and more and more at odds with Eve Frame because of her unforeseen contempt for Jews.

Not all Jews, Murray explained—not the accomplished Jews at the top whom she'd met in Hollywood and on Broadway and in the radio business, not, by and large, the directors and the actors and the writers and the musicians she'd worked with, many of whom were regularly to be seen at the salon she'd made of her West Eleventh Street house. Her contempt was for the garden-variety, the standard-issue Jew she saw shopping in the department stores, for run-of-the-mill people with New York accents who worked behind counters or who tended their own little shops in Manhattan, for the Jews who drove taxis, for the Jewish families she saw talking and walking together in Central Park. What drove her to distraction on the streets were the Jewish ladies who loved her, who recognized her, who came up to her and asked for her autograph. These women were her old Broadway audience, and she despised them. Elderly Jewish women particularly she could not pass without a groan of disgust. "Look at those faces!" she'd say with a shudder. "Look at those hideous faces!"

"It was a sickness," Murray said, "that aversion she had for the lew who was insufficiently disguised. She could go along parallel to life for a long time. Not
in
life—parallel to life. She could be quite convincing in that ultracivilized, ladylike role she'd chosen. The soft voice. The precise locution. Back in the twenties, English Genteel was a style that a lot of American girls worked up for themselves when they wanted to become actresses. And with Eve Frame, who was herself starting out in Hollywood then, it took, it hardened. English Genteel hardened into a form like layers of wax—only burning right in the middle was the wick, this flaming wick that wasn't very genteel at all. She knew all the moves, the benign smile, the dramatic reserve, all the delicate gestures. But then she'd veer off that parallel course of hers, the thing that looked so much like life, and there'd be an episode that could leave you spinning."

"And I never saw any of this," I said. "She was always kind and considerate to me, sympathetic, trying to make me feel comfortable—which wasn't easy. I was an excitable kid and she had a lot of the movie star clinging to her, even in those radio days."

I was thinking again, as I spoke, of that night at the Mosque. She'd said to me—who was finding it impossible to know what to say to her—that she didn't know what to say to Paul Robeson, that in his presence she was tongue-tied. "Are you as in awe of him as I am?" she whispered, as though
both
of us were fifteen years old. "He is the most beautiful man I have ever seen. It's shameful—I cannot stop looking at him."

I knew how she felt because I hadn't been able to stop looking at
her,
looking as though if I looked long enough, a
meaning
might emerge. Looking not only because of the delicacy of her gestures and the dignity of her bearing and the indeterminate elegance of
her
beauty—a beauty hovering between the darkly exotic and the softly demure and shifting continuously in its proportions, a type of beauty that must have been spellbinding at its height—but because of something visibly aquiver in her despite all the restraint, a volatility that at the time I associated with the sheer exaltation that must come of being Eve Frame.

"Do you remember the day I met Ira?" I asked him. "You two were working together, taking the screens down on Lehigh Avenue. What was he doing at your place? It was in October '48, a few weeks before the election."

"Oh, that was a bad day. That day I remember very well. He was in a bad way, and he came to Newark that morning to stay with Doris and me. He slept on the couch for two nights. It was the first time that happened. Nathan, that marriage was a mismatch from the start. He'd already pulled something like it before, except at the other end of the social spectrum. You couldn't miss it. The enormous difference in temperament and interests. Anybody could see it."

"Ira couldn't?"

"See? Ira? Well, to be generous about it, for one thing, he was in love with her. They met and he fell for her, and the first thing he did, he went out and bought her a fancy Easter parade hat that she would never have worn because her taste in clothes was all Dior. But he didn't know what Dior was, and he bought her this big ridiculous expensive hat and had it delivered to her house after their first date. Lovestruck and starstruck. He was dazzled by her. She
was
dazzling—and dazzlement has a logic all its own.

"What did she see in him, the big rube who hits New York and lands a job in a soap opera? Well, it's not a great riddle. After a short apprenticeship, he is not a simple rube, he is a star on
The Free and the Brave,
so there's that. Ira took on those heroes that he played.
I
never bought it, but the average listener believed in him as their embodiment. He had an aura of heroic purity. He believed in himself, and so he steps into the room, and bingo. He shows up at some party, and there she is. There is this lonely actress in her forties, three times divorced, and there's this new face, this new guy, this
tree,
and she's needy, and she's famous, and she surrenders to him. Isn't that what happens? Every woman has her temptations, and surrendering is Eve's. Outwardly, a pure, gangling giant with huge hands who'd been a factory worker, who'd been a stevedore, who was now an actor. Pretty appealing, those guys. It's hard to believe something that raw can be tender too. Tender rawness, the goodness of a big rough guy—all that stuff. Irresistible to her. How could a giant be anything
else
to her? There's something exotic to her about the amount of harsh life he's exposed himself to. She felt that he'd really lived and, after he heard her story, he felt that
she'd
really lived.

"When they meet, Sylphid's away in France for the summer with her father, and Ira doesn't get to see that stuff firsthand. And so these strong, if
sui generis,
maternal urges of hers Ira gets instead, and they have this idyll together all summer long. The guy never had a mother after the age of seven, and he's starved for the attentive, refined care that she lavishes on him, and they're living alone in the house, without the daughter, and ever since he came to New York he's been living, like a good member of the proletariat, in some dump on the Lower East Side. He hangs out in cheap places and eats in cheap restaurants, and suddenly these two are isolated together on West Eleventh Street, and it's summer in Manhattan and it's great, it's life as paradise. Sylphid's picture is all around the house, Sylphid as a little girl in her pinafore, and he finds it wonderful that Eve's so devoted. She tells the story of her horrible experiences with marriage and men, she tells him about Hollywood and the tyrannical directors and the philistine producers, the terrible, terrible tawdriness, and it's Othello in reverse: ''twas strange, 'twas passing strange; 'twas pitiful, 'twas wondrous pitiful'—he loved her for the dangers
she
had passed. Ira's mystified, enchanted, and he's
needed.
He's big and he's physical, and so he rushes in. A woman with pathos. A beautiful woman with pathos and a story to tell. A spiritual woman with decolletage. Who better to activate his protective mechanism?