The Stork Club (6 page)

"Is this Shelly a boy?" he asked, not looking at her, still holding the cigar between his teeth while smoke came out of both sides of his mouth around it.

"Yes, Daddy."

"And is he going to marry you?"

Ruthie stood and took an ashtray from a nearby table and handed it to him. "He's gay, Daddy," she said softly. This he would never understand. Men, big strong he-men, my Martin and my Jeffrey, was how he always talked about her dead brothers. "My Martin could lift a box full of groceries on one shoulder and another one on the other shoulder and make a delivery like Superman." Gay wasn't something she expected him to understand. Nor would he understand the reason she wanted to fly all the way across the country to be with someone who was like that.

"Gay?" he asked. "What's that?"

The term. Obviously he had never heard the term. She would have to explain it with a word he would know, though it felt derogatory to her and she didn't like it. "He's a fairy," she said.

Her father looked into her eyes for a while, saying nothing. She loved his sweet little round mustached face. Whenever she wanted to do something unique or out of step in her life and her mother had been against it, that face would flush red and he would speak up and
be on Ruthie's side. He was awkward with her, and she was sure he wondered many times how God could have taken away his two wonderful sons, Martin, a talented violinist, and Jeffrey, so good in science he surely would have become a doctor. They were gone and he was left with only this lump of a daughter.

He had always taken her part. When Ruthie didn't want to be bat mitzvahed, when she wanted to get her ears pierced, when instead of working in a doctor's office she wanted to be an apprentice in a summer theater. She couldn't imagine what her life would be like if he hadn't stepped in and made certain her mother relented. Well, maybe now she could get him to be on her side again.

"A fairy," she said softly, trying again, aware of the giggling, squealing girls who were greeting one another at the dormitory mailboxes as they came in from their classes.

"Ruthie," he said, taking her chin in his hand, and when they were looking into each other's eyes he shook his head and said, "I don't believe in fairies." Ruthie tried not to laugh at what sounded like a line from
Peter Pan
, because he was serious and went on. "Because I'm a man, and men like women, and that's all there is to it. Believe me."

"Daddy . . ."

"And California is so far away," he said in a voice that made her certain that what was coming was a no. So she was surprised when, with the hand that wasn't holding the cigar, he touched her face and said, "But if you want it so bad, and you maybe come back to school in a year or two, it'll be okay by me."

"It will?" Ruthie asked, feeling light with relief and surprised that her father's face was red as if he might cry. "Thank you, Daddy," she said, leaning over to hug him as he quickly moved the hand that had been
holding the cigar out of the way so as not to burn her, even though the cigar had gone out.

She was four inches taller than he was, and while they hugged she looked over his head at the gray Pittsburgh day, and in her mind she was thinking the words, "You may be homely in your neighborhood, but if you think that you can be an actor, see Mr. Factor, he'd make a monkey look good.'' And she realized they were from the lyrics Shelly had enclosed with his letter, from "Hooray for Hollywood."

"You'll do good no matter what," her father said, then turned to go. When he was too far away to hear, Ruthie, who was still watching him, said to his parting figure in the distance, "Thank you, Daddy," and went up to her room to pack.

The day she arrived in La-la, as she and Shelly came to call it, he met her at the airport, at the gate, with a bouquet of daisies, and never said one word about how bad she looked. Just loaded her and her luggage into the beat-up Volkswagen bug he'd bought, handed her a newspaper, and told her to look for cheap furnished apartments.

They found a small two-bedroom in West Hollywood. It was a dive, a dump, a hole in the wall, but they didn't notice because they were together. Roommates, best friends, partners. Their big luxury was an answering service that picked up on their phone line. They told all of the operators to make a note to be sure and pick up on the first ring every time a call for them came in, and to only answer with the telephone number. If the two of them were at home when the phone rang, as soon as they were absolutely certain the service was on their line and talking to the caller, one of them would pick up and listen in to see who the caller was. If it was Shelly's mother, Shelly would say, "Oh, hi, Ma, I just walked in." If it was Ruthie's mother, Ruthie would
say that. For a long time, no one but their mothers called them.

They also rented a piano that they squeezed into the living room so Shelly could sit and compose melodies for which Ruthie wrote special lyrics, the way she had in the summer. They took odd jobs. Ruthie worked for a private detective as a process server, Shelly waited tables at the International House of Pancakes. Ruthie was a receptionist at a beauty salon, Shelly worked at the Farmer's Market at the seafood counter, and at night they wrote. First they reworked their act, and when they had it down and were ready to try it out they went to hoot nights at clubs where the audience, who was expecting a guitar player or a band, frequently booed them off the stage.

They put an ad in the trade papers saying they entertained at parties, and were hired to do a sweet sixteen where the birthday girl, who had taken Valium before the party and consumed spiked punch during the party, had to be rushed to the hospital right after their opening sketch. The same ad was responsible for their being hired to perform at the tenth wedding anniversary of Phil and Myrna Stutz, who called them and canceled on the morning of the party because they'd decided that instead of having a party they were going to get a divorce.

Their agent was a guy they met at the Comedy Store who was known as Shotgun Schwartz. Shotgun believed that 10 percent of nothing was nothing so if you were breathing he agreed to represent you, figuring the more clients he had, the better his chances were of making a buck.

The first time he sent them on an interview, they got an assignment to write an episode of a Saturday morning cartoon show about a musical dog, "Rudy the Poodle."

"It ain't exactly a short story for the
New Yorker
,"
Shelly said as the two of them sat down to work on the first script, "but we'll take a shot." They thought of twelve more "Rudy the Poodle" ideas, and sold nine of them before the show was canceled.

Every night no matter how hard a day they'd put in, they went to the Comedy Store and watched the comics try out new material. They would make notes, whisper ideas to each other, and when the show was over, they would ambush one of the comics at the door and beg him to listen to what they had.

"Jerry," they would say. "Have you got a sec?" Leaning on the door of the guy's car so he couldn't get in. Or, "Joey, listen. We've got a whole hilarious run for you." And once they had the comic's interest piqued, they would break into their material, right there on the cold cement, lit only by a purplish streetlight. Sometimes the comic would even pay them cash on the spot. But the stand-up comic to whom they would always give credit for the success of their careers was Frankie Levy, who had no cash that night so he gave them an IOU.

"Hey, kids, I don't have my wallet on me," Frankie said to them, "but I'm crazy about the supermarket run, and I'll pay you for it tomorrow night. Okay?"

Okay! Frankie Levy had once been on the "Tonight Show."

The very next night Frankie performed Ruthie and Shelly's supermarket routine and brought the house down with it. He was happy and very sweaty as he backed off the stage, both arms raised in triumph. For a few minutes he stood in the rear of the club shaking hands and taking the backslaps he knew he so richly deserved. Ruthie and Shelly elbowed their way through the crowd to get over to Frankie, waiting until the others around him had gone back to their seats to watch Eddie Shindler, who was up next.

"Way to knock 'em dead, Frankie," Ruthie said, holding her arms out wide. With the success he'd had with their material, Frankie would surely want to give her a grateful hug. In fact she was so close to him she could feel the dampness coming off his still-nervous body, but he turned on his heel as if he hadn't even seen her and walked out of the building. There was a moment of realization and then Shelly said, "He's leaving for Australia tomorrow, I heard him telling Mitzi. The schmuck is ducking us for the money," and they rushed out the door to stop Frankie Levy, who by the time they got outside was already at the top of the parking-lot ramp.

"Frankie," Shelly yelled, but Levy didn't turn around.

"You owe us money," Ruthie yelled. But Levy was already in his black Cadillac and in an instant he screeched past them.

"You thieving son of a bitch," Shelly yelled, running back down to the bottom of the ramp where Levy's car was stopped at the black-and-white wooden arm that had served as a momentary impediment to his escape. As Frankie was reaching out to get his change, in a move Shelly once saw in a James Bond movie he jumped on the trunk lid of Frankie Levy's car. Then as he stood there, not sure what to do next, Frankie Levy peeled out onto Sunset, and Shelly's moment of heroism was marred dramatically by the fact that he was thrown crashing onto the cement.

At UCLA Emergency the wait is always interminable. Shelly sat in the big windowed room, bruised and aching and huddled close to Ruthie on the couch as they waited for his turn to be examined. It was past two in the morning and there were several other people waiting: a dark-haired heavyset man with a beard, who had his hand wrapped in a tourniquet; a woman who told Ruthie
she'd brought her husband in hours ago with extreme chest pain, and he'd only been called in to see the doctor moments before; and a family who were sitting together staring up at a television watching an old Humphrey Bogart movie.

"What happened to your hand?" the woman asked the bearded man.

"I was trying to slice some meat for my wife on the electric slicer, and my hand was in the way," he said.

"Just your way of trying to give her the finger?" Shelly asked. The man laughed.

"How about you?" the woman asked Shelly.

"You'd never believe it," Ruthie answered for him.

Then, almost as a healing process, the two of them told the story of how they came to Los Angeles, and about working on "Rudy the Poodle," and how they spent their nights writing and selling jokes, and about Frankie Levy. Maybe it was the lateness of the hour or the absurdity of the situation that gave them a freedom and a relaxation and a punchiness, but the story was coming out so funny that soon all the assembled patients were laughing loudly. Ruthie and Shelly had never had a more receptive audience.

In fact it was a rude interruption when a nurse opened the door to call the next patient.

"Mr. Lee?"

She was calling for the bearded man, who before he followed the nurse out managed, with his good hand, to pat Shelly on the back.

"My name is Bill Lee," he said. "I'm a producer at NBC. I think I might have a job for the two of you on a prime-time show I'm doing for John Davidson. Give me a call tomorrow at NBC."

On their first day of work they tried acting nonchalant, but it wasn't easy to fool anyone since they'd arrived
an hour early. Their assignment, before they even laid eyes on John Davidson, was to write a dialogue between John and this week's guest, George Burns. "We need it by four o'clock," Bill Lee told them.

"Great," they said, but when they closed the door of the little cubicle of an office they'd been assigned, upstairs from a sound studio at NBC, they stared at each other in terror.

"What are we doing here?" Shelly asked. "Some of the best writers in the world have written for George Burns." George Burns had recently been a big hit in
The Sunshine Boys
. It was his first movie since
Honolulu
, a movie he'd made with Gracie Allen in 1939.

"Let's not panic yet," Ruthie said. "You be George Burns, I'll be John Davidson, and we'll see what happens."

Shelly picked up his black pen and held it in his hand cradled between his thumb and first two fingers, the way George Burns holds a cigar.

"Okay, I'm George Burns."

"That's good," Ruthie said. "It's a good start." She felt sick. They weren't ready for this. Couldn't they have started with someone less famous? Less funny? Shelly looked down at the pen, rolling it in his hand the way George Burns always did with the cigar when he was thinking.

"John Davidson," Shelly said, sounding a little bit like George Burns. "You're a nice kid. Handsome kid, too. How old are you?"

"I'm thirty-four," Ruthie answered, playing the part of John Davidson.

"Thirty-four years?" Shelly asked, then with a twinkle in his eye, he added in his best George Burns, "
I
pause that long between pictures."

"That's good." Ruthie laughed. "But let's not get overconfident, let's keep going." They improvised.
They switched roles. They wrote things down, typed them up, tried them again, changed them and fixed them. Tore the whole thing up twice. It was almost four o'clock. At four o'clock on the dot they walked into Bill Lee's office to read it to him. He laughed. He laughed harder. He congratulated himself with a grin that meant, I'm a smart son of a bitch for hiring these two. And he was. Two seasons later they were the hottest writers in television.

6

T
HEIR NAMES on a project gave it "heat," made it a "go," a "green light," and soon they were writing and producing their own series, and garnering huge consulting fees to come in and doctor the shows of other writers. They had a certain style no one could equal, genuinely funny, with a touch of poignancy and humanity rare in television half-hour comedy, so everyone wanted their work. Fifteen years after the George Burns joke, their popularity was still happening. Their success had made them rich, enabled them to support all four of their aging parents, to travel during their time off and see the world.