Another Life (32 page)

The Des Artistes is one of New York’s most famous apartment buildings, a spectacular, towering Gothic fantasy on West Sixty-seventh Street just off Central Park West, where the lobby looks as if Count Dracula was about to descend in the elevator, and the exterior of the building makes you look up expecting to find Quasimodo perched among the stone-carved spires, buttresses, and gargoyles. Constructed during the 1920s as a kind of artists’ cooperative because of the shortage of studio space in New York, the Des Artistes had its own restaurant, with sprawling murals by Howard Chandler Christy of naked nymphs cavorting in the woods, perfectly embodying the spirit of luxurious bohemian decadence and contempt for the bourgeoisie in which it was built, in the years before the Crash wiped out most of the people who had intended to live, paint, and sculpt there.

The ancient elevator bore us up to Hurst’s floor at a glacial pace, as if rising from a crypt. It creaked and groaned like a ship under full sail. An ancient majordomo ushered us into a dark vestibule as if he had just risen from his coffin to answer the bell and showed us into a big,
glassed-in living room–studio, two stories high, dimly lit by twenty-five-watt bulbs (in what had once been ornate gas fittings) and enough candles for a major funeral.

The windows were immense—two stories tall and filling one whole wall of the room—but they were draped in many square yards of black velvet, trimmed in faded gold, that came all the way to the floor. Against the other wall was a minstrel’s gallery in dark wood, with a narrow carved-wood stairway leading up to it and false windows in stained glass. Everywhere, standing in sheaves in tall vases under the dim light, were calla lilies, hundreds of them, giving off a sickly, sweet, cloying odor.

Swimming in the gloom were our fellow guests, dwarfed by the furniture and, for the most part, even older than the butler, who announced us in a low, croaking whisper, like a rusty iron gate swinging in the wind. It was difficult to believe that only a few floors below us was contemporary New York City. It was as if we had stepped straight out of the elevator into the gloomiest of haunted castles, peopled by ghosts. The men were small, ancient, dressed with a certain old-fashioned elegance not at all of this epoch; the women lavishly, if eccentrically, sported long evening dresses in dark, velvety fabrics, richly patterned, old-fashioned material that might have served as the upholstery in a nineteenth-century Venetian gondola. Their jewelry was on the heroic scale: many strands of beads, massive gold chains, much amber. Several of the women carried gloves. Almost everybody was smoking with a cigarette holder as they stared at us. One elderly woman was actually peering in our direction through a lorgnette.

An elderly waiter appeared out of the darkness, like a fish rising out of the depths of an aquarium, and offered us champagne from a silver tray. The flutes were green and shaped like the calla lilies.

There was a buzz among the guests, and they parted for a small, slim, elderly woman with imperious features and an aura of energy. She was wearing one of the most extraordinary dresses I had ever seen, a floor-length, skintight, high-necked garment of black velvet, rather like that worn by Jane Avril in Toulouse-Lautrec’s famous poster, around which curled embroidered calla lilies, the stem of one of them curling around her slender neck like a noose. Her complexion was not just pale, it was white, like that of Pierrot, against which she had slashed, with reckless abandon, scarlet lipstick and much eye shadow. This, clearly, was our hostess. My friend introduced himself and explained who I was,
at which Hurst fixed her gaze on me intently. Did she understand, she asked, that I was a book publisher? Modestly, I assented. Her voice was penetrating, but despite her curious costume there was nothing particularly formidable about it. If one had heard it on the subway, one would not have thought twice about it. It electrified the other guests, however, who seemed to have been brought back to life by simply hearing Fannie Hurst speak. Hurst put her arm in mine and led me through her living room, introducing me to a few of her friends, who looked very jealous indeed that she had singled me out for contact.

Would I like to see the rest of the apartment? she asked. I was dying to, of course—who could resist the offer? Hurst took me into the dining room, where a lavish buffet was laid out on a rough-hewn table, like that in a monastery. The food was displayed on elegant silver platters, a presentation spoiled only by the presence of a bottle of ketchup. The dining-room chairs looked as if they might have been designed by or for trolls or dwarfs. And indeed, the whole room itself was like something out of
The Lord of the Rings
: narrow, windowless, and very low ceilinged, the walls covered in dark, carved wainscoting, such illumination as there was coming entirely from candles. At the table sat three elderly women, one of them wearing what appeared to be a velvet, hooded cape. Hurst ignored them and drew me back through the living room to a stairway that was uncommonly narrow and steep and lit by elaborate lanterns clenched in fists at the end of muscular, patinated bronze arms fixed at intervals along the wall. I could not help staring at them. “A present from Mr. Hearst,” she explained, as we ducked through a low doorway into a gloomy passage.

“I’m only showing you this because you’re a publisher,” Hurst said enigmatically. Now that I was alone with her in the dark, I was beginning to feel sorry that I had accepted the house tour. The atmosphere was certainly sepulchral downstairs, but here it was thoroughly eerie. I was to experience much the same feeling of claustrophobia and apprehension many years later when, on a visit to Egypt, I climbed the steep, narrow passageway inside the pyramid of Cheops to visit his burial chamber. Here, Hurst’s presence, pressed up against me in the dark, was strangely disconcerting. Her perfume may have had something to do with it. It carried a certain odor of calla lily—everything in the house did—but it was at the same time sweet and sharp, so that it brought tears to one’s eyes.

We groped our way to the end of the passageway, where Hurst
threw open an ironbound oak door that could have held off a determined attack by Saracens. “This,” she announced, “was my husband’s bedroom. It’s kept just as it was when he was alive.”

It was a large though gloomy room, with the drapes shut tightly. On the dresser were her late husband’s toiletries—silver-backed hairbrushes, a manicure set, various expensive masculine bits and pieces in tortoiseshell, ivory, and morocco leather, as well as an ornate silver-framed photograph of Hurst, taken at a considerably earlier point in her life. On the floor were his slippers, neatly placed, as if he might appear at any minute to put them on. The most noteworthy thing in the room—indeed, it was impossible to take one’s eyes off it—was a large bed covered in black velvet, at each corner of which burned a big candle on a tall, wrought-iron pedestal, like those in a Spanish cathedral, as if a body was lying in state. But the bed, thankfully, was empty. Or almost so, for I noticed that it was covered in envelopes, a whole pile of them, as if somebody had dumped their mail here every day, except that all the envelopes looked similar. On the pillows rested a sheaf of calla lilies.

Hurst seemed lost in contemplation, then recalled my presence. “I come here every day,” she said. “Just to say hello.”

“I see.… And the—ah—letters?”

Hurst looked up at me, her large eyes filling with tears. She took out a lace handkerchief embroidered with—what else?—calla lilies and dabbed at her face. “What letters?” she asked.

“The ones on the bed.”

She looked at them as if they had only just appeared there. “Ah,” she said, “
those
letters. Well, every day I write to him, you see, and then I come up here and mail the letter to him by putting it on his bed.”

I was touched. Here, surely, was a love that rivaled that of Queen Victoria for Prince Albert—after his death, she had his evening clothes laid out on his bed before dinner every night for the rest of her life. I looked at the bed again, and slowly an entirely irreverent thought crossed my mind. “Ah, how long has he been dead?” I asked, in as tactful a tone as I could manage.

Miss Hurst frowned at the word
dead
. I wondered if she was a Christian Scientist. “He passed over,” she emphasized gently, “many, many years ago.”

I stared at the pile of envelopes. It was large certainly, but it could not have contained more than a few hundred letters. If he had passed
over many, many years ago, there should have been thousands of them on the bed. I pointed this out to Hurst, as gently as I could.

She nodded. “Of course you’re right,” she said briskly. “Every year or so, my editor comes over from Doubleday and gathers them up, then we take the best ones and make a book of them.”

She mused about this for a moment. “They do pretty well, too.
Reader’s Digest
loves them. The foreign rights aren’t bad either.”

She moved me out of the room and closed the door firmly behind us. “Well, you’re a publisher,” she went on, all business now, “so you know how it is with writers. It never pays to waste anything you’ve written, does it?”

I
HAVE
often wondered what it must have been like to be the editor assigned to the macabre task of collecting Hurst’s letters to her late husband at regular intervals. Of course, every editor knows that the most important task is to get your hands on the manuscript. It is astonishing how much time an editor spends coaxing pages out of the author’s grip or listening to reasons why the manuscript “isn’t ready to be shown yet.” Of course, in many cases this is intended to conceal the fact that nothing exists on paper, but more often it is a sign of the author’s panic. Most writers work in isolation and seldom show their work in progress to anyone. So long as nobody has actually
read
the manuscript, the writer can imagine the success, praise, and money that will be lavished on him or her—hence the reluctance to bundle it up in wrapping paper and send it off to the publisher, where, the author may assume, an editor will read it with a cold and fishy eye and demand all sorts of inappropriate changes or even, God forbid, deem it unsatisfactory and ask for the advance back.

In 1963 and 1964, I was sent off on a number of wild-goose chases to persuade various authors to surrender what they had written—if indeed they
had
written anything. This task was a kind of punishment, akin to bill collecting or process serving, and was invented for me by Henry Simon, who still smarted over what he saw as my defection, and was no doubt intended to strengthen my character. It reached its lowest point when I found myself sitting in a New Jersey roadhouse with the bandleader Paul Whiteman and his agent. Whiteman had been a big man in his heyday, broad shouldered, stout, and beaming as he stood in
front of his band, but age had shrunk him, and his clothes—tailored in the garish colors and shiny fabrics that had once been the mark of success in the big-band era—hung off him loosely, like deflated balloons. He had sunk to the point where he was conducting a very much reduced version of his band in shady-looking nightclubs, to audiences whose grandparents had danced to his beat, playing medleys of Cole Porter for kids who really wanted to hear the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. He still had the pencil-thin mustache and the toothy, gleaming smile of the showbiz professional, but his eyes were resentful and at times bewildered. Once he had played for kings, queens, movie stars, and millionaires; now he was doing one-night stands on the outskirts of Paramus. My presence—reminding him that he had a contract to deliver a book—did nothing to improve his day. We sat at a table near the bar in the stygian gloom of the roadhouse—What, I asked myself, is more depressing than being in a nightclub at noon?—with a tray of stale Danish pastries and a thermos of coffee provided by the management in the person of a swarthy, blue-chinned gentleman who might as well have a sign pinned on him that read, “Member of an Organized-Crime Family.” Whiteman was determined to give me each and every one of the anecdotes with which he had sold Henry Simon on the idea of his writing an autobiography, while my instructions were to return with pages of manuscript.

I finally interrupted the flow and asked if I could see some of the book. No problem, Whiteman said. He nodded to his agent, who produced a stout briefcase, from which he took folder after folder. I leafed through them. They were all photographs, meticulously captioned, showing Whiteman in happier and more prosperous days, most of them with his arm around some celebrity. “These are just photographs,” I said. “What about the text?”

Whiteman sighed and stared into the middle distance, his eyes avoiding me.

“Paul doesn’t respond well to pressure,” the agent whispered to me.

“
What
pressure? He’s years late. Nobody’s bothered him until now.”

“We figured that was because you guys didn’t care.”

“Of course we care,” I objected.

Whiteman held his hand up for quiet. He gave me a smile. “Listen to me,” he said slowly, even impressively, enunciating every word carefully. “It’s written, don’t worry.” He tapped a finger against his bald
head. “You go back and tell them that it’s all here, every word of it. The hard work has been done. Now it’s just a question of getting it all down on paper.”

Sidney Kingsley’s very words.

T
HE NUMBER
of times I heard this, or some variation of it, is incalculable. I heard it from Orson Welles—
his
book was already written, within that massive head, just waiting to come pouring out onto paper any day now. I heard it from Irving Lazar for nearly thirty years on the subject of
his
autobiography, and I have heard it from a wide variety of people over the years, ranging from Cher to Ronald Reagan. For some reason, celebrity authors always assume that the hard part of writing is the
thinking
, whereas the truth, as every professional writer knows, is that the actual writing is what hurts—thinking comes easy, by comparison, and nothing exists until it has been put down on paper.