Timebends (13 page)

My first movie was a haunting experience that deepened my misunderstanding of the real. One night, for some reason, the roof of our apartment house was turned into a makeshift theatre, with a few long benches and camp chairs facing a large suspended sheet. I was not yet in school, small enough to look straight ahead at my father's pocket, from which he took coins to pay our admission. It was a balmy evening, the first time I had been on the roof at night. (Had they gotten Mikush's permission to walk on his cherished black tar?) A light suddenly blasted the sheet, and large people moved about on it, laughed, chased one another, threw pails of water, and then, drenched, turned to face us and slipped on the sidewalk and fell, and a woman seemed to be weeping but then laughed when a friendly man walked into her room.

Now the light went out—the whole thing had lasted only ten minutes or so—and I asked my father where those people were. Of course he had no idea. So I gripped his fingers and made him follow me around the benches as the small audience was getting up, and we approached the sheet. Why was it so silent back there? I did not let my father's hand go as I peered behind the sheet, still expecting some wonderful vision full of light and strange scenery and a room where the action I had just witnessed had taken place. But there were only the pipes sticking up from the roof, and overhead the
usual stars in the night sky. “Where are the people?” I asked my father again. He shook his head in bewilderment and softly laughed. I felt anger, not at his inability to explain, but at his failure to take the problem I was trying to solve seriously. Had it been my mother, she would doubtless have cooked up an explanation that at least showed some respect for the dilemma.

Three years later in the Shubert Theatre on Lenox Avenue there was a different kind of shock when I saw a curtain go up for the first time. Here were living people talking to one another inside a large ship whose deck actually heaved up and down with the swells of the sea. By this time I had been going to the movies every Saturday afternoon—Chaplin's little comedies, Fatty Arbuckle, Pearl White's serials that always ended in frustration, with her head an inch from a buzz saw or the train roaring down the tracks toward her trussed body or her canoe poised on the edge of a waterfall. I had seen the great cowboys: William S. Hart, looking just like his horse with his long expressionless face and flat cheeks, and later William Boyd and Tom Mix, always cheerful and ready to help everybody—except Indians, of course. Yet once you knew how they worked, movies, unlike the stage, left the mind's grasp of reality intact since the happenings were not in the theatre where you sat. But to see the deck of the ship in the Shubert Theatre moving up and down, and people appearing at the top of a ladder or disappearing through a door—where did they come from and where did they go? Obviously into and out of the real world of 115th Street, of Harlem, and this was alarming.

And so I learned that there were two kinds of reality, but that of the stage was far more real. As the play's melodramatic story developed, I began to feel anxious, for there was a cannibal on board who had a bomb and intended to blow everybody up. All over the stage people were searching for him, a little black man in a grass skirt, with two bones knotted into his hair, who would show up, furtive and silent, as soon as the white people went off. They looked for him behind posts and boxes and on top of beams, even after the audience had seen him jump into a barrel and pull the lid over him. People were yelling, “He's in the barrel,” but the passengers were deaf. What anguish! The bomb would go off any minute, and I kept clawing at my mother's arm, at the same time glancing at the theatre's walls to make sure that the whole thing was not really real. The cannibal was finally caught, and we happily walked out onto sunny Lenox Avenue, saved again.

It was not only blacks but also Orientals who were depicted on
the stage as sinister. The Hearst press went periodicilly frantic about an oncoming “Yellow Peril,” with the Tong Wars in Chinatown as proof that Chinese were bloodthirsty, sneaky, and—as I would learn in one special vaudeville show put on to combat drug addiction—lustful for white women. Many were the front pages with the immense black headlines “TONG WAR!!”—accompanied by drawings of Chinese cutting each other's heads off and holding them up victoriously by their pigtails. It made me wonder why anybody went to Chinatown at all. I would ask my parents what tongs were, and they preferred not to talk about them, doubtless having no real notion that they were in fact fraternal organizations. Actually, as in the larger American society, there were feuding racketeers in Chinatown, which would have been reassuring had I known of their existence.

At the vaudeville show on Saturdays, always the most anticipated day of the week, the opening acts—the mildly amazing Chinese acrobat families with their spinning plates and flying children, fairly boring after you had seen them twenty times—were always followed by the equivalent of a visit to the dentist: the classical soprano and the grand piano accompanying her. At the first sight of that piano being pushed onto the stage every kid in the house groaned and began beating his friends and crawling around under the seats. “The Last Rose of Summer” would be followed by one endless “rendition” after another from sopranos who all seemed to share the same high bust and the habit of folding their hands in genteel poise over their ample stomachs. Later I would see them as a punishment demanded by our Puritan conscience and approved by the audience as penance for its otherwise enjoyable two hours.

These included jokers and singers like Eddie Cantor and George Burns and Al Jolson and George Jessel, the black tap dancers Buck and Bubbles and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, and the headline acts like Clayton, Jackson and Durante, whom my father all but revered. He was a connoisseur, having seen these performers so often during his days on the road that he could tell me how their routines had changed. He loved to whistle, and good numbers could keep him happy for weeks whistling the tunes around the house. His highest accolade for a performer was “He puts it over, I tell ya,” and his worst condemnation was “dry.” His judgment was accurate within its limits, and those limits were not narrow. He would hardly have been expected to sit through an hour of Shakespeare, but one day, after my plays had begun to be produced, he recalled
a Yiddish theatre production he had come upon years before in the Midwest. He could not recall the play's title, but the great Jacob Adler was its star.

“He played some kind of king. You know, it was the olden days. And he had these three or four daughters, I think it was three, maybe four. And he's going to give each one some of his money, and the one that really loves him the most he thinks don't love him. So he ends up half out of his mind looking for his buttons, and he's got nothin' and he's left standing there in the rain, it was some story. But that Adler, there was an actor, he put it over, I tell ya. I seen that show, must've been over forty times, because he was touring for years in it. What I would do I would go past the theatre and ask them when the last scene goes on, because that was the best scene, when he's out there in the rain. He would belt out a roar that you couldn't bear to look at him.”

He took performances personally sometimes, and if he adored Jacob Adler, he could almost literally not bear to watch Monty Woolley, a sophisticated bearded comedian who had a big hit in
The Man Who Came to Dinner.
The movies were low-cost balm and surcease for large audiences during the Depression and into the forties, and he and my mother would always find the quarter or fifty cents for tickets to the local movie house. When Woolley appeared, my father could not sit still and to my mother's amused annoyance would keep changing seats, moving back and forth across the theatre hoping to get a less irritating view of the actor from a different spot. Not only had he failed to understand how movies worked on the rooftop, but ever after too. Long before our marriage, I first met Marilyn Monroe on the set of a film in which she had a bit part—a movie starring Monty Woolley, my father's nemesis.

One afternoon at the Regent Theatre on 116th and Seventh—the acrobats having come and gone, and the soprano mercifully finished torturing us—a man in a business suit, the house manager, appeared before the lowered curtain in an unprecedented interruption of the flow of acts. We were now to “witness” a powerful play, he announced, brief but daring, as a warning to all our young people and even some adults about the evils of narcotics. Promising a thrilling and educational drama, he walked off, and the curtain rose on a Chinatown “crib” where foolish uptown white people surreptitiously came to indulge in opium smoking in order to enter “the land of dreams.” Along the back wall were double-decker bunks that, except for their untidy bedding, resembled
those in a summer camp dormitory. A couple of Chinese wearing long pigtails and wide sleeves and black pumps packed pipes with opium and fed them to customers who entered, lay down, and smoked with hardly a word to these evil clerks.

A beautiful young woman in a pure white evening gown entered with two fair young fellows wearing white tuxedos and straw boaters. They were all having a night on the town. First one fellow, the cocky one, took a pipe and lit up, then sat on the edge of a bunk and gaily fell back into it, giggling as though he had entered dreamland with one puff. The Chinese quickly wore down the mild resistance of the second, more judicious fellow, and even I understood that with both of her friends out for the count she would be totally unprotected against these slimy Chinks, which was exactly what happened. She in turn was handed a pipe, but she seemed a bit worried. I had all I could do not to rush up to the stage and knock the filthy thing out of her hand. How horrible it was to harm a girl so beautiful! But nothing could stop her from also taking a puff, and her eyelids instantly started drooping. Another puff and she was staggering to the bed. Two Chinese instantly pushed her onto it and conferred excitedly in their strange language. The house manager reappeared at the edge of the stage and announced, “They are discussing her introduction into white slavery and are planning to ship her to a house of ill repute in
Singapore
!” I was so desperate I wondered why the manager didn't stop it, but it was not to be. He turned and walked off the stage.

Now one of the Chinese started to climb into the bunk with her. The audience whispered in horror. Gangrenous green light covered the whole scene. Why oh why had she gone to Chinatown? She could have stayed on Park Avenue in her warm, safe home! The Chinese had one leg over the edge of her bunk. Ah, she was still apparently awake, if doped up, and resisted him, but so weakly, poor thing. His confederate reached in to hold her arms. A struggle. Gasps from the poor girl. And not a sign of life from her two idiot companions. Oh, how I hated them. Then, suddenly, offstage excitement, shouts and bustle, and on came an elderly but energetic gentleman and two policemen. Her father! A rich, clean, white, and hearteningly indignant man who, aided by the men in blue, pummeled the Chinks and collared them both, driving them off the stage. Shaking the two companions awake, the father upbraided both and warned them never, never, ever to touch opium again. With his ashamed and deeply grateful daughter supported by his strong arm, he exited, causing the green light to turn to
reassuring rose. Thank God. I, certainly, had learned my lesson. It would be many a year before I discovered that it was the English who had forced the Chinese government to lift its ban on shipments of opium from India, causing the Opium Wars, the failed Chinese resistance to the white man's poison. But no such perplexing news disturbed our feelings of white uplift as we, my mother and I, walked confidently down Lenox toward 110th Street and home.

Then as now the miracle of New York City was the separation of one group from the experiences of others. The city is like a jungle cut through by a tangle of separate paths used by different species, each toward its own nests and breeding grounds. Except for our teachers and Mikush our family knew almost no gentiles, and our prosperity helped seal us inside our magical apartness. It was my mother in her imagination and reading, and my father in his travels, who brought news of that other world where Jews were not the center of interest. His refusal to attribute naturally superior virtues to all Jews and anti-Semitism to all gentiles may have set up in me, if not a faith in, then an expectation of universal emotions and ideas. When it came to ethnic traits he was believer and skeptic at the same instant; the conflicting claims of family and vagrant sexuality, idealism and advantage, were as prevalent among Jews as among the gentile men he met on the road, whom his fair, blue-eyed appearance allowed him to get close enough to observe.

In the twenties, when he flourished, the Ku Klux Klan was riding high, swelling its membership immensely from year to year, and the Jews were their prime targets where there were few Negroes to threaten. The time was still far off when racism and bigotry would seem anything but natural and even praiseworthy ideas equated with patriotism and pride of ancestry. If ever any Jews should have melted into the proverbial pot, it was our family in the twenties; indeed I would soon be dreaming of entering West Point, and in my most private reveries I was no sallow Talmud reader but Frank Merriwell or Tom Swift, heroic models of athletic verve and military courage. As it turned out, we were building a fortress of denial that would take two massive onslaughts to crack—the Depression and Hitler's war. Nor was it only a question of Jews denying the world's reality, as events would show, but also a failure in practice of the most sacred claims of our democracy itself to a more
perfect decency and sensitivity toward injustice. By the early 1940s the world knew that the Jews en masse were being hunted down by the Germans, and by 1942 that they were being incinerated, but such was the grip of anti-Semitic bigotry on the American State Department and the British Foreign Office that even the official immigration quotas—which, small as they were, might have saved at least some thousands of Jews—were never filled, and the rail lines into the killing camps were never bombed even after other equally distant installations were. And the American Jewish community did not dare to demand that rescue efforts be put in motion, such was the fear of exacerbating the American people's hostility not only to Jews but to foreigners in general. If it was that bad in 1942 at a time when Democracy was avowedly embattled against Nazism, whose most prominent sin was its racism, what must the unacknowledged truth have been in the late twenties, with the Klan parades so well attended all over the country? Yet there I was dreaming of pitching the winning game for Yale or joining Tom Swift against the Germans in our own World War I boys' submarine. But as I said, escape and denial are hardly the monopoly of the Jews; one of the strongest urges in the writer's heart, and perhaps most especially the American's, is to reveal what has been hidden and denied, to rend the veil.