Palisades Park (6 page)
She looked into his eyes, saw the fear and hurt in them, and she said, “I do, Eddie. Yes, I want to get out of there. But I really do love you.”
He took her hand in his, and that big smile of his made her smile.
“I love you too,” he said. “So let’s get married.”
* * *
When word of their engagement got out, the park’s publicist, Perry Charles, came to Eddie and Adele with a curious offer: “Palisades will pay all your wedding expenses,” he told them, “ring, bridal gown, license, even a three-day honeymoon in Atlantic City—if you get married on our Carousel.”
Eddie laughed, then realized, “You’re not kidding.”
“No, trust me, it’ll be a great stunt. I guarantee it’ll make all the papers, and I bet we can get Pathé or Fox to cover it too.”
Publicity—which might be seen by his family—was the last thing Eddie wanted. It also reminded him a bit too much of the carny tradition of a “
Billboard
wedding”: couples sent a notice to the trade paper that they intended to live together as man and wife, and after the carnival closed for the night, they boarded a Carousel, someone waved a copy of
The Billboard
over their heads like a sacrament, and the couple simply cohabited together.
But Adele was transported by the idea:
“Oh, Eddie, the newsreels! What if some producer sees my picture and offers me a part? What an opportunity!”
She was so excited, Eddie couldn’t bring himself to say no.
And so that Labor Day weekend, Edward Stopka and Adele Worth began married life at Palisades Amusement Park, with Adele’s family in attendance along with a park photographer and a newsreel cameraman. Franklin was stone sober and Marie seemed only slightly mortified as her daughter prepared to take her vows on a merry-go-round.
Adele, in her white bridal gown, sat astride a red-and-gold-painted pony. Eddie, wearing a black suit, and a justice of the peace climbed aboard adjacent horses. Perry Charles called, “Start ’er up!” and the Carousel began turning, with calliope music in place of a wedding march.
“Wait a minute!” Eddie cried out. “We’re actually gonna
ride
this thing during the ceremony?”
“Of course!” Perry called back. “It’s good action for the newsreel.”
“Dearly beloveds,” the justice of the peace began, “we are gathered here today to join this man and this woman in holy matrimony…”
But he kept rising and falling along with the horse he was riding, as did Eddie and Adele; they could barely hear him over the din of the calliope.
By the time they got to the vows, Adele was coming down with motion sickness and having a hard time maintaining her sweet smile.
“Do you, Edward, take this woman, Adele…”
The real trick for Eddie was slipping the wedding ring onto Adele’s finger, when they were sitting two feet apart and kept bobbing up and down. “Please hurry,” she implored, “before I throw up.”
“Maybe I should grab one of the goddamn brass rings instead,” Eddie muttered. But finally he got the ring on, the J.P. pronounced them man and wife, and they even managed to kiss without falling off their ponies.
When at long last the Carousel came to a stop, Perry announced, “Now for the wedding photo!”
Adele posed astride her pony, while Eddie held on to a brass pole as he leaned in to kiss the bride. He felt like a horse’s ass, but at least he wasn’t the most prominent one in the picture.
The wire services captioned the photo:
HORSIN’ AROUND ON THE MARRY-GO-ROUND
Mr. and Mrs. Edward Stopka take their vows on the Carousel at Palisades Amusement Park in Cliffside Park, N.J. No word yet on whether the lucky couple will be honeymooning in the Old Mill!
But Adele truly didn’t mind getting married on a merry-go-round, because she’d been riding one for years—and now that the ceremony was over, she was finally able to jump off it.
* * *
Seven months later, on March 23, 1931, Antoinette Cherie Stopka was born. When she was old enough to use it, her playpen would be a big wooden crate with bits of straw, which once contained the pieces of “fine imported china”—from the Hex Manufacturing Company of Buffalo, New York—that were among the prizes in Jackie Bloom’s cat game. But Antoinette would want for little else; Eddie had taken an off-season job at the Grantwood Lumber Yard—only part time, but he was lucky to get any work in this worsening Depression.
It was Adele who picked their daughter’s name, wanting something European and feminine, and though Antoinette herself would come to soundly despise it, she would be mercifully unaware of the others her mother considered—Huguette, Twyla, Zéphyrine—and of how much worse, really, it might have been. “Antoinette” conjured images of elegant Parisian ladies wearing taffeta gowns trimmed with lace, dancing to lovely waltzes with dapper Frenchmen. Adele wanted that for her daughter, wanted her to be poised and feminine—she was thrilled at the prospect of having someone with whom she could share all the things she loved, someone she could dress in fashionable clothes, show how to apply makeup and walk in heels, as her mother had shown her. And who knew? Maybe Antoinette would grow up to be an actress too, and they could both make Franklin proud.
She was a pretty, fair-skinned baby with plump cheeks and a wisp of blonde hair that would soon darken to chestnut brown. Adele sometimes brought her to the home of Roscoe Schwarz and his family, whose house on Palisade Avenue adjoined the amusement park, to play with the Schwarzes’ youngest daughters. But to Adele’s dismay, as soon as Antoinette was old enough to walk she brushed past Hazel and Dorothy’s dolls and made a beeline toward eleven-year-old Laurent’s set of toy trucks.
As Antoinette began pushing one of the tin vehicles back and forth, she provided her own sound effects: “Vrooom! Vrooom!”
Laurent smiled in bemusement. “That’s pretty good vrooming,” he said, “for a girl. ’Specially a little one like you.”
Getting down on his knees, he began pushing another truck toward hers, veering away at the last moment, rolling the truck end over end while making crashing sounds befitting a two-car collision. Antoinette laughed delightedly and began preparing for another exciting traffic accident.
It was Adele’s first clue that perhaps everything might not be proceeding according to plan.
3
Palisades, New Jersey, 1935
I
N
M
AY OF
1935, Nicholas Schenck—eager to rid himself of a failing amusement park—granted a lease with option to buy to Jack and Irving Rosenthal, whose careers in amusement began when Irving was all of ten years old and Jack, twelve. At Coney Island, the brothers overheard a pail-and-shovel concessionaire grumbling that he would sell his entire stock for fifty bucks. The brothers promptly wheedled the money from their Uncle Louis and bought their first concession. When a tourist boat would arrive, Irving, at one end of the pier, distributed pails and shovels to every kid who walked off the ferry. At the other end Jack informed the parents, “Your child just bought a pail and shovel, five cents, please.” By then the kids were spot-welded to their new toys and the parents grudgingly forked over the nickel. It probably didn’t hurt that the two smiling little extortionists were barely out of knee pants themselves. That summer they earned more than fifteen hundred dollars.
They went on to operate rides and concessions at Savin Rock Park in Connecticut, and turned around the fading Golden City Park Arena in Brooklyn. Their earnings paid for their education—Irving studied dentistry and Jack became a concert violinist with the Cincinnati Symphony—but as Irving put it, “I always liked the sound of a merry-go-round better than a dentist’s drill,” and soon they were back, building the Cyclone coaster at Coney.
Now, at Palisades, they hired amusement veterans Al and Joseph McKee. Al would serve as general superintendent and brother Joe, an expert in roller-coaster design, would supervise the operation of the park’s rides. They also hired PR man Bert Nevins, who arranged a cross-promotion with Hearn’s Department Store in Manhattan, where thousands of free tickets for children to Palisades were distributed.
Some of the Rosenthals’ business decisions were met with skepticism. One was the installation of their niece, Anna Halpin—a tiny but formidable brunette—as manager of park operations. Some longtime employees complained that at thirty years old she was too young to be running a park this size—or maybe just too female. Several ride operators griped that she often came by and watched them like a hawk as they worked.
But the Rosenthals’ other decision was one that would have more public consequences.
* * *
Eddie and Adele had moved to an apartment house on Bergen Boulevard, an end unit on the ground floor with a small terrace in the shade of a tall oak tree, where the children could play in the afternoon. But in autumn, when the wind gusted through the tree, it shook acorns out of the branches at least once every thirty seconds, strafing Antoinette and her one-year-younger brother, Jack—named for the grandfather he would never know—with a fusillade of acorns that went
Bam! Pop! Bam!
as they peppered the concrete. Far from discouraged, she and Jack would retreat under a wooden crate or cardboard box and pretend they were taking tommy-gun fire from Jimmy Cagney, ducking out long enough to cry “You dirty rat!” and fire their Wyandotte water pistols at the imaginary Cagney.
The apartment was close enough that Eddie could walk to Palisades as Adele took the children to Marie’s, who babysat them while their parents worked. Marie adored them, as did Franklin, who remarkably even drank less when they were around. He would hoist Antoinette up into the air and call her “my baby’s baby,” which Adele found quietly touching. “She’s good for him,” Marie confided to Adele. “I think she reminds him of you when you were small, before everything started to go wrong for him.”
Business at the park had been modestly encouraging since it opened under the new management at the end of May, and Eddie was feeling cautiously optimistic. But his bright mood was dispelled on an otherwise sunny morning in June when, as he was making his way south down Palisade Avenue in Fort Lee, he recognized a familiar figure heading toward him from the opposite direction. It was Arthur Holden.
Eddie felt awkward as hell, but as he drew closer he put on a cheery smile and called out, “Hey, Art, how’s it going?”
Holden cut a far different figure from the dashing performer who used to stride confidently down the midway. As Arthur approached, Eddie could see that physically he appeared fine—no limp or any other aftereffect from a car accident that had sidelined him last season—but there was a sadness and loss in his face that almost made Eddie’s heart break.
“Hello, Eddie,” he said with a smile, the two men shaking hands as they met. “Off to the park?”
“Yeah, back to the grind,” Eddie said. “You’re looking good, Art.”
“I feel good. Good as ever. That’s the hell of it.”
Although fully recuperated from his accident, Holden had not been engaged by the Rosenthals for another season at Palisades. “They think I’m washed up,” Arthur said bitterly, “but I’m not. I can still do the act, Eddie, if only they’d give me a chance.”
Eddie didn’t know what to say, but Holden had enough to say for both of them: “Hell, do you know how many bones I’ve broken over the years? Both legs, three times apiece! Fractured a dozen ribs, my right foot, my left arm … not counting all the times I’ve been knocked cold hitting the side of the tank. And I always came back from it! Like I can now.”
“I know, that’s rough luck,” Eddie said. “Say, you used to play Olympic Park, didn’t you? Have you tried them? Or Coney Island?”
“Nobody wants to take a chance on a fifty-eight-year-old high diver,” Holden said bleakly. “Florence and I have been on relief for months.”
“Jeez, Art, I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” Eddie said. “You need some cash? I can spot you twenty bucks if you need it.”
Arthur seemed touched by that and put a hand on Eddie’s shoulder. “Thanks, Eddie, that’s damned nice of you. But all I really need is another chance to show what I can do. I guess I’ve just got to start all over again, like I did in Brooklyn. And if I can’t cut it, well, better to be out of the picture than just a sad old relic gathering dust.”
He held out his hand again and Eddie took it. “All of you at Palisades, you’ve been like a family to me,” he said with a melancholy smile. “I really appreciate it. Take it easy, Eddie.”
“Yeah,” Eddie said, feeling the opposite, a vague unease, “you too, Art.”
Holden strode away, continuing north on Palisade Avenue as Eddie continued south—disturbed, he couldn’t say why, by the whole meeting. It did seem as if Arthur had gotten a raw deal, but he wasn’t the only performer the Rosenthals had dropped, and Eddie suspected it was as much about their wanting to bring in new acts as about Arthur’s age or health.
Still, it was the man’s tone and manner—as if his life were effectively over—that bothered Eddie. And when he talked about starting over, “like in Brooklyn”—Arthur wasn’t from Brooklyn, was he? And “better to be out of the picture”—what the hell did that mean?
Eddie walked on, and it wasn’t for another ten minutes that it came back to him: the story Arthur had once told him about how he’d gotten his start as a high diver, how he’d made a name for himself.
He had jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge.
Eddie made a fast about-face. Arthur was now a distant figure making his way up Palisade Avenue, already having passed the strip of roadhouses and hot-dog stands, like Costa’s and Hiram’s, on each side of the street.
Eddie knew with a cold certainty that there was only one place he could be heading and began hurrying after his friend. He called out to him, but either Eddie was too far away or Holden chose not to hear. Eddie quickened his pace, trying to close the gap between them.
Arthur veered to the right, onto a side street.
Eddie ran as if he had a railroad bull hot on his heels. When he finally turned onto that same side street, he knew, of course, what he would see.
