THE LITTLE FLOWER
Like every other New York kid who came into his teens in the nineteen-thirties, I had President Roosevelt by heart (chin, cigarette, Groton accent, T.V.A., soak the rich) but felt much closer to Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. Stubby under his operatic black hat, hilariously busy, looking by turns indignant, disbelieving, and delighted, the Little Flower had piercing dark-brown eyes and a thick jaw that looked punishing when he was talking about fat-cat landlords or Tammany bosses but often fell into an engaging, half-open smile. He ran New York for a dozen years like a manic dad cleaning out the cellar on a Saturday afternoon. The La Guardia voice was high-pitched, excitable, and whiny—I should know, because I listened to it, from the next room, for the better part of nine hours one January day in 1936, while I waited for our interview. Well, maybe not “our”—it’s not as if he knew I was coming.
Home from boarding school on Christmas vacation, I had taken the subway down to City Hall with my friend David Maclay, each of us being in need of a celebrity interview as part of the tryout for a school newspaper. We weren’t competitors—David’s new school was in Pennsylvania, mine in Connecticut—but we were emboldened by our eight prior years together as classmates at the progressive Lincoln School, on West 123rd Street, a fountainhead of juvenile overconfidence. Mulling potential interviewees, we had rejected Fred Astaire (too far away) and Joe Louis (too scary) before settling happily upon the Mayor, who was just then winding up his second year in office. Arriving at eight-thirty in the morning, notebooks in hand, we presented ourselves before the Mayor’s secretary in City Hall—a youngish, not unfriendly fellow whose name I have forgotten.
“Press,” I announced.
“Here for a—uh, interview,” David said.
“No appointment, I take it,” the secretary said. He carefully wrote down our names and the names of our publications, and showed class by not asking our age, which was fifteen. “Take a seat, boys,” he said. “It may be a while.”
We had expected this, and had come prepared with magazines but not lunch. Eagerly, patiently, wearily, we sat and watched and listened as politicos and petitioners, City Council members, women in hats, editorialists, judges, commissioners, and real-estate magnates arrived, were greeted within, reappeared, and took their leave. Even when the tall door to La Guardia’s office was closed, we could hear the ceaseless mayoral yammer, rising in impatience or laughter, cajoling and caressing in argument, like an offstage tenor in a bad opera. Longer than an opera. Noon came and went, the light crept across the dusty windows of our chamber. Noticing us at last, a motherly looking woman on the Mayor’s staff brought us a couple of chicken sandwiches and an Oh Henry! bar. We sat on. Dark had fallen outside when the secretary, emerging from a brief exchange with Hizzoner, beckoned us forward. “You’re on,” he said, “but make it snappy.”
I can remember La Guardia’s dishevelled black hair, and the tough gaze that flicked over us while he gestured us toward a couple of chairs. He was in shirtsleeves. The mayoral feet, below the mayoral leather chair, did not quite touch the carpet.
“Reporters—right?” he said. “What’ll it be, fellas?” Whatever it was, it didn’t go well. We had some questions about the transportation system, I think—the Mayor had been promising to take down the El lines along Sixth and Ninth Avenues—and maybe about his campaign against smutty burlesque shows.
“But I’m on record about all that,” he said, breaking in. “What else?”
“Is Tammany Hall about to—” David began.
“Nah!” he said, holding up one hand. “Not a chance!”
We weren’t quite done. “Sir,” I said, reading from lines that David and I had put together during our long wait, “each of us is in the ninth grade in a really good private school. Do you believe that there are any students in the New York public schools who are getting the kind of education we are?”
“What!” he cried. “What was that?” Nuclear fission had not yet been discovered, but the explosion before us now mounted and thickened abruptly, darkening around its whitish inner fires, and drooping foully along the top. Rumbling and squeaking by turns, waving his arms, the Mayor unloaded his full package. Why, the New York public-school system was the envy of the entire United States—no, the envy of the free world. Boys and girls of all races and origins and from every neighborhood came to it, flourished and grew wise, and were set free. Didn’t spoiled kids like us know anything? Look at Billy Rose! Look at Justice Pecora, Eddie Cantor, Elmer Rice—New York public-school kids all. Borough President Lyons. Jimmy Cagney. Ira Gershwin, Ethel Merman. What about his own wife, Marie La Guardia, who had gone to school on the Lower East Side? Why, he himself, born on Sullivan Street but exiled to distant outposts in his youth (the Mayor’s father had been a United States Army bandmaster), had passed his boyhood yearning only to come back and go to public school in New York. Scrawling excitedly, flipping pages, underlining, David and I tried to capture fragments of the oratory on our narrow notebook pages. Famous city schools abounded, the Little Flower went on—Erasmus Hall, Curtis High, Stuyvesant. Art and music instruction flourished here, as in Athens. Had he mentioned Eddie Cantor? By the third grade, talented city kids were already playing on municipal violins and clarinets, not to mention enjoying a nutritious and delicious hot lunch every day. High-school swimming pools! Foreign languages! Chess clubs! Greek and Latin, even! Football. Calculus— There was a pause, and we looked up to see the Mayor staring at us.
“Hold on,” he said. “Wayddd a minute! Did you two…?” He pointed a finger. “Why, you kids set me up, didn’t you? You got me going—right?”
David and I exchanged guilty smiles. My face was hot.
The Mayor threw up his hands. “Ya got me,” he said. “I’ll be God-damned—I can’t believe it.” He shook his head. “Good night, boys,” he said, picking up some papers. “You got a hell of a story.”
Yelling and gabbling, David and I crowded onto the rush-hour I.R.T. and rode home in triumph. Each of our La Guardia stories subsequently saw print, and each of us made the paper. Was it that same week or later on, I wonder, when our exploit began to gnaw at me? Why should it have stayed with me all this time? All we had done was to strike an ugly pose, tell a trifling lie, in order to chivy some quotes out of an obliging public figure. How could we have let him down this way? We had behaved like little wise guys, just to get a story. We had become reporters.
Talk, February, 1999