The Stork Club (4 page)

Barbara listened to Ruth Zimmerman talk about her son and the unusual circumstances surrounding his conception. When the message was over and she picked up the phone to call the woman back to make an appointment, she thought about what her daughter, Heidi, always said when things in her own life fell together in a pattern: "Totally spooky."

While she waited for someone to answer Ruth Zimmerman's phone, Barbara tried to remember her horoscope of a few days earlier. What was it? Something about unexplored territory and a life-changing opportunity. It was totally spooky.

4

O
N THE WALL of the messy undersized office of Ruthie Zimmerman and Sheldon Milton was a framed needlepoint sign which said
DYING IS EASY, COMEDY IS HARD.
It was made by Ruthie for Shelly long before they were a successful comedy-writing team, before the series and the Emmys and the big money. Shelly was sure the sign was a good-luck charm, so over the years he took it with them from office to office.

This space in the writers' building at CBS in the Valley was furnished with two back-to-back desks and two old upholstered desk chairs, plus a small upright piano that had spent most of its life in rehearsal halls. In every corner and on every shelf were piles of scripts. Some were written by Zimmerman and Milton, some were written by their staff, and some were written by hopefuls whose agents had begged Ruthie and Shelly to read them and consider the writer they represented for
a job on the show. And of course on both of their desks was an eight-by-ten photo of Sid Caesar.

When the phone rang it was Solly, their agent, so Ruthie took the call, and while Shelly waited for her, he did the
New York Times
crossword puzzle.

"Are you kidding?" he heard Ruthie practically sing into the phone. "It's no trouble at all. We'd love to. I'll talk to Shelly about it and call you back." When she hung up he didn't even have to look at her to know what was coming next.

"What did Sol have to say?" he asked, carefully filling in some letters across the top of the puzzle.

"There's no business," she answered.

"I'm praying," Shelly said, "that the next three words out of your mouth are going to be 'like show business,' but I'm afraid it's a faint hope."

"You're right," Ruthie said. "I wasn't doing my imitation of Ethel Merman. I was telling you what Solly told me, which is that the television business stinks, and how incredibly lucky we are to be doing this show instead of being out there in the job market." She watched him fill in a long phrase all the way down the right-hand side of the puzzle with that look of triumph he always wore when he deciphered one of those. "He's right, you know. We're truly blessed. And we can't forget that." Her voice was becoming what Shelly always called "soggy." The way it got when she was feeling awed by how far they'd come in their careers.

"Uh-oh," he said, looking up at her. "When you start sounding like Jerry Lewis on the telethon it means you've just volunteered our services to some fund-raiser so we can prove to the world and ourselves that we're thankful. Which one was it today?"

"The benefit show for the Writers' Guild fund, and they need us right away. It'll be good for us. We're always so busy with casting sessions and network meet
ings we hardly ever get to sit and write anymore. This'll keep us fresh."

"Can't we just use deodorant?"

"Oh come on," she said, taking the Arts and Leisure section out of his hand. She was glad to have a reason not to go back to looking at some set designer's elevations for next week's show. She much preferred to plop a brand-new yellow legal pad on Shelly's desk and one on hers, divide several sharpened Blackwing 602s between them, and say, "Gentlemen, start your pencils." This was their favorite part of working together. Finding their way to an idea, moving it along, exploring it, turning it every possible way, or as Shelly liked to tell the writing staff, "You take a germ and spread it into an epidemic."

"Okay, let's see," he said, planting his feet on the floor and twisting back and forth in the reclining chair the way he always did. "The Writers' Guild. Here it is. What if a husband-and-wife writing team realize that nobody wants to buy their material anymore, so they decide to make a suicide pact and kill themselves?"

Funny, Ruthie thought. Already it has promise.

"But of course," he improvised, "they have to leave a note. And since they're writers it has to be a great note. So they start to work. The husband sits at the typewriter; the wife paces. Suddenly the husband says, 'I've got it! We'll open the suicide note by saying "Au revoir, heartless universe." ' "

Ruthie knew exactly where he was going and she jumped in. "But the wife sneers and says, 'Are you nuts? That stinks! You can't open a suicide note without saying "Farewell, cruel world." ' "

Shelly was really working it now. "The husband laughs a mocking laugh and says, 'That is so kicked. I've heard it a million times.' "

"Which infuriates the wife." Ruthie put her feet up on her battered old desk, sat back and thought for a minute. "So she turns on him . . . she's always been a shrew, and she says, 'Oh yeah? Well, I happen to think it makes the point better than "Au revoir, heartless universe," which like most of your ideas is completely phony.' "

"The husband is hurt," Shelly said, "but he's going to be a martyr about it, so he gets very tight-lipped and says, 'Fine. Let's go on. We can come back to the salutation later.' "

" 'What later?' the wife shrieks. 'There won't
be
any later! Don't you remember? We're going to be dead.' "

"And he says, 'Yeah? Well, if we open with "Farewell, cruel world," we'll be
worse
than dead. We'll never work in this town again.' Hah!" Shelly laughed a cackle of a laugh at his own punch line.

"Funny," Ruthie said, taking her feet off the desk, sitting forward in her chair and looking pleased. She loved this man. Still found him so entertaining, so clever, so much the perfect counterpart to her that all the years they'd been hidden away in dimly lit closetlike spaces to write and produce shows were paradise for her just because they were together. And she'd felt that way about him since the night they met, eighteen years ago.

It was in summer stock in Pennsylvania when they sat lit by the summer moon on the big wooden steps of the White Barn Theater, where Ruthie was an apprentice and Shelly was a rehearsal pianist. As the crickets of summer throbbed and a yumpy-dump band from the cocktail lounge of the hotel across the way played "I Can't Get Started with You," the two of them exchanged horror stories about their respective Jewish mothers.

"Mine had a plastic throw made to put over the chenille toilet-seat cover."

"Mine couldn't get a lawn to grow in front of our house, so she cemented over the dirt, then painted the cement green."

"Mine told me if I ever touched myself you-know-where, I'd eventually get locked in a crazy house and she'd never come to see me."

That was when Shelly smiled and took in that kind of deep breath which means, Now I'm going to pull out all the stops and tell you the ultimate Jewish-mother story which you'll never be able to top. And Ruthie, who'd been looking for an excuse to do so all evening, leaned in a little closer.

"Mine," he confided, "made the ultimate sacrifice for me not long ago when I fell madly in love with a creature so magnificent, there are no words to describe the temptation into which I was led by this—and I apologize in advance—gentile." He is so funny, Ruthie thought, and so cute. "This," Shelly went on, fueled by her obvious admiration, "was a lover par excellence, who whispered to me one night in the heat of passion, 'If you really love me, you'll go and cut your mother's heart out and bring it to me.' "

Ruthie giggled, and Shelly tried to look serious. "Naturally," he continued, "I did what any red-blooded American boy would do under the circumstances. I ran home, grabbed the old bag, and not only cut her heart out, but to add insult to injury, I took a Reed and Barton platter out of the silver closet and put the quivering mass right on it. Without a doily.'' Ruthie would always remember the way the moonlight made it appear as if there were frost on the top of his curly brown hair and the way those hazel eyes behind the horn-rimmed glasses were so alive with glee.

"To say that I hurried back to my beloved's house would be a gross understatement. Unfortunately, blinded by my passion, I didn't notice a branch which lay across the sidewalk in my path, and sure enough the branch caught my foot, my ankle turned, and as I tripped and fell, the heart flew from the tray and landed in the street in a bloody, pulsating pile."

"No!" Ruthie said, grinning as she jumped into the game, loving the delight she saw in his face when she did.

"And as I lifted myself to my feet, my mother's heart spoke to me."

"Really?'' Ruthie asked, knowing the punch line was coming, and hoping she was offering the proper straight line. "What did it say?"

"It said," Shelly answered, taking a deep breath before he went on, " 'Did you hurt yourself, honey?' "

No one had ever told a joke that hit home so well with Ruthie, who let out a laugh of recognition, and Shelly laughed with her. So hard he had to take off his glasses and wipe away a tear from the outside corner of his left eye. There are very few things that make two people feel closer than laughing together, but just at the moment when it was clear that Ruthie and Shelly were feeling that closeness, Shelly looked at his watch.

"It's late," he said, patting Ruthie's hand. "I've got to go."

Later, in her cubicle of a hotel room, by the light of a bare bulb in a wall socket, Ruthie changed out of her overalls, dabbed some dots of Clearasil on the eruptions here and there on her face, slipped on her Pittsburgh Steelers nightshirt, and fell onto her bed. Then she reached into the bedside-table drawer for her little spiral notebook, in which she made a list of possible bridesmaids who would precede her down the aisle when she married Shelly Milton.

"What's the thinnest book in the world?" Shelly asked the next night.

"
Jewish Circus Performers
," Ruthie answered, having no idea where she got that answer. It had just popped into her head. "What's wrong?" she asked him. "You don't remember Shirley the Human Cannonball?"

"I do," Shelly said. "She was a terrible woman . . . but a great ball."

They both screamed with laughter. Soon they had ritualized their end-of-the-day meeting on the steps of the theater, each of them finding the way there after the long hours Ruthie spent building and painting scenery and Shelly spent pounding out the same tunes again and again for the rehearsing dancers. Just knowing they could look forward to the time they spent afterward laughing and mining their creative and bizarre minds enabled them to get through each day.

Ruthie thought it was the beginning of a great romance, though there was never even so much as a kiss on the cheek as evidence. She had the naïveté of the unsought-after girl who had never once felt the front of some eager boy's corduroys, lumpy with lust, pushing heatedly against her, since no boy had ever really desired her. And that was how she came to be nineteen and, with the exception of a few disastrous fix-ups from some of her mother's friends who sent a pitifully too-short son to call or forced a stuttering nephew to take Ruthie to a movie, she had never dated. Undoubtedly it was the fact that she knew so little which enabled her to continue to imagine that someone so obviously crazy about her was simply taking his time about declaring his romantic feelings.

Then one chilly night she woke in her bed at the Colonial Manor Hotel with an overwhelming urge to pee. She had never yet made it through any night in her life without being rudely nudged out of a dream by her
full bladder. At home where the bathroom was a few yards away and the floors were carpeted, those nighttime forays weren't much of a problem. But in the drafty old hotel with the cold hardwood floors, the communal bathroom was a long journey down the dimly lit hallway. Thank God, she thought, standing up, that my mother wasn't around to see me having to make this trip.

Groggily she stumbled toward the glow of the bathroom night-light that seemed to be miles away, passing the rooms of the other apprentices, sending a silent little message of love as she passed Shelly's room. Envying Polly Becker, the big-nosed forty-year-old costume designer who wore low-cut blouses and flirted with every guy who walked by, because Polly had arrived at the theater weeks before the others and thereby got to claim the room closest to the bathroom.

Just as Ruthie reached for the bathroom doorknob she heard an odd sound from one of the rooms. It was a long low moan. Somebody must not be feeling well, she thought. And it was certainly no wonder, with the disgusting food they served around here. In fact she'd felt a little queasy herself just last night after the lasagna. But then there was another moan, after which she understood that it wasn't the kind of sound that accompanies illness. She felt flushed, her whole body aroused by the idea of something carnal happening so close to where she was standing.

She was sure the sounds had to be from Polly Becker's room. So the old girl had succeeded in luring someone into her bed. And she was having a hot time of it too. The moans were moans of pleasure, a lot of pleasure, mingled with creaks from the springs of those uncomfortable old metal hotel beds.

"Oh, God. Oh, yes. Oh, God."

They got louder. Ruthie, embarrassed by her own
excitement, wasn't sure what to do. She closed the bathroom door behind her and stayed inside longer than she needed to, splashing cold water on her face to calm herself. She even flushed the toilet a few times to drown out the sounds. Finally she opened the bathroom door slowly, listened long enough to be certain that the hall was now silent, then made her way on tiptoe back toward her own room.

She was looking down at her own chubby toes, which were bent in their effort to keep her from clumping noisily and being heard, so when two big hands on her arms moved her to one side she took in a terrified gasp. When she let it out it was into the handsome craggy face of the company's leading man, Bill Crocker.