Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris
Italiam fato profugus Laviniaque venit…
“I SING of arms and the man,” the Roman poet Virgil began his Aeneid. We translated his entire epic poem in our twelfth-grade Latin class at Girls High, just one class now, of only eight girls. It was an elitist badge I wore with satisfaction.
There had been two Latin classes of about thirty girls each in the ninth grade. The attrition rate was due to the difficulty of the work. We had read Virgil as well as Ovid and others over those last four years, and we had vigorously competed in Latin projects with the boys at Central High. To our great dismay in twelfth grade, the boys in the Central High Latin class had outdone all our competitive efforts by not only translating the Aeneid but rendering their translation into English dactylic hexameter. Nevertheless, we eight girls knew we were among the best in the country in that archaic endeavor, and the best among us was Francine.
Francine Bowden and I had been relatively close during our years at Girls High. Initially, it was because of the alphabetical proximity of our last names. It was also because we were the only two colored girls in our Latin class. We had been the only two in it from the beginning.
Francine was a genius. She was able to sight-read the most difficult poetic passages in our Latin texts with superhuman speed and accuracy. Moreover, she demonstrated the same brilliance in calculus and chemistry and in all her other subjects. Francine, like very few others, had maintained a straight-A average from ninth grade through our year of graduation. Her record was even more outstanding considering that she had carried five instead of the usual four major subjects in her curriculum, an astonishing record, in light of the undeniably insuperable odds she had faced.
After school each day, Francine had had to go back into the bowels of North Philadelphia, where she lived and where, she told me, her family complained about her reading all those books that had nothing to do with getting a real job. She lived in a blighted area generally referred to as “Cross Town,” which I determined, on the one or two rare occasions I had been there, was distinguishably worse than any other place in Philadelphia—including York Street. She wore clothing that was clearly secondhand and shoes often held together by pins or staples. Her hair usually looked dirty, and certainly had not had the blessing, as it were, of the weekly hot comb that pressed and straightened most colored girls’ natural down. She had almost always eaten lunch alone, by benefit of the school’s charitable milk fund.
She had even borne up under the snide insults tossed at her by the “high-yellow,” high-browed colored girls at Girls High, running from themselves. She had accepted being left out of the exchanges among the intellectually snobbish white girls, who held white conversations in white cliques. They had made it absolutely clear to Francine—as they had to all us colored girls—that her grades and intellect would not remedy the flaw of her dark skin or dark life. Yet Francine had managed to endure all of it. She had plowed through those four years and emerged intact. Moreover, she was unquestionably the smartest girl in the class.
The aspect of Francine I pondered most, though, was that she was exposed. She had no ballet lessons or good hair or changeable voice behind which to hide. She was me stripped of all façades. She was at once everything of which I was terrified and everything I longed to be. She was poor and black, brilliant and proud.
Francine became the first person about whom I felt a sense of pride. I felt it as strongly as I had felt anything. I was proud of her and proud to know her, even though I shamefully never mustered the courage to come out and offer real friendship to her. No one I knew at Girls High had ever been socially friendly with Francine. All I had done was wield my North Philly toughness for her, to silence the nasty tongues of the other colored girls. I had also regularly hurled Francine’s academic statistics into the lily-white faces of all the smart white girls. I had reminded all of them, now buzzing over their acceptances to Vassar or Wellesley as graduation approached, that Francine had been offered no less than ten full scholarships to the best Eastern colleges and universities, including most of the Seven Sisters. She had accepted the scholarship to Temple University only because she could not have afforded even the incidentals at Smith or Radcliffe.
Francine was on my mind as I walked down the aisle of the Girls High auditorium, pristinely outfitted in my requisite white calf-length graduation dress. I thought of it as her day, a day of reckoning and retribution. It would be Francine’s day and, however vicariously, mine, too. For Francine was the lost Nita, resurrected; and she was a lost piece of me, and all of us colored girls, it seemed. She had taken our blows and held tight to our dignity. She was our Winged Victory.
I looked at Francine when I reached the stage and found my place in the front row of seats with the class geniuses, where she was, of course, seated. Although I had maintained relatively high grades, I was to sit there only because I had to have easy access to the grand piano on stage. I was to accompany the class in its vocal renditions of two traditional anthems.
Most of us ignored the graduation rhetoric. Everyone, especially the front row, was anxious to hear the announcements of the academic prizes. The faculty bestowed appropriate gifts on graduating girls for outstanding achievement in mathematics and science, in foreign languages, in the arts, and even in sports. When Francine was passed over for the calculus prize and then for the trigonometry prize, I became perturbed. When she was passed over for the English prize, I started to become angry, watching white girls in white dresses get out of their seats; watching white girls in the front row hand their bouquets of red roses to their neighbors to accept their prizes with boring little speeches; watching white girls sit down.
The Latin prize was finally announced, which only one of eight of us could possibly receive, which only Francine should have received. Francine was passed over again. It was an outrageous display of racial prejudice—a concept, a reality that was so profound it was not missed even by me, who wanted to be white.
In angry frustration, I held up the graduation exercise. I did petty things, like slowly taking off my bracelet—the wearing of which was verboten anyway—before starting the piano accompaniment to each song, and on the second song by refusing to acknowledge the choir director’s cue. Though ineffectually trivial, these gestures were grand little moments of menace amid the perfection and whiteness, where even a small splotch in the order was a blight.
At the stuffy graduation luncheon afterward, I boldly smoked cigarettes, one after another with Donna Lowe, the barely colored girl who was my best friend at school, to the great annoyance of the faculty—“Girls, Girls High girls do not smoke,” it had been announced time and again. In furtherance of my paltry protest, I talked aloud to Donna, as teachers and students stood before us making teary-eyed speeches, dragging out saccharine anecdotes of our past. In the middle of the principal’s address, Donna and I got up and walked out. Before leaving, however, I filed among the luncheon tables to find Francine to say goodbye, ignoring all the other girls I knew. As we could think of nothing else to make our point, Donna and I finished with our after-graduation family formalities and went over to Cherry Hill, New Jersey’s Latin Casino supper club, and got drunk on vodka martinis bought for us by men over thirty.
Temple University was considered a mediocre college refuge for a Girls High girl. I was not concerned, however, with Temple’s rating among that superficial bunch of girls, particularly since I knew some of them were enrolled in lowly state colleges and a few of them were even preparing to get married, albeit into well-to-do families, and become Hausfraus for the rest of their lives. I was even less concerned about my course of study at Temple, since I was attending college only because there was nothing else to do.
Although I was advanced into junior-level English and Latin classes after taking the placement tests at Temple, I discovered I was not so brilliant as to be able to skate through the academic rigors of that university. I had assumed I could operate there with the same arrogant attitude that had taken me through Girls High with a B-plus average. Temple required a routine with which I was unfamiliar. In order to obtain comparable grades, I had to study each night. That represented a conflict. If I studied, I would be like everybody else. It was necessary to be somewhere above everyone or crash to nothingness.
Studying had the additional burden of conflicting with my new schedule. I had begun going out virtually every night alone. I would go to one of the downtown bohemian coffeehouses to listen to beatnik poems and have esoteric conversations with un-conventional, free-thinking white people about the meaning of a Jean Genet play or an Ingmar Bergman film.
Going out alone seemed right. Everyone I knew from high school had another life now, as did my old neighborhood friends. Barbara worked as a secretary and stayed in North Philly most of the time. Nita, and now Kathy, had many children to take care of. Carol Hollins had miraculously been accepted into a state teachers college. In any case, North Philly was behind me, as life seemed behind me more than ahead.
In the past year, my dance card had been filled mostly with boys I could mistreat. There had been Venice, who used to give me lunch money nearly every day in the twelfth grade, and to whose meek request one night that we actually have sex I responded with rolled eyes, a smug laugh, and a simple no, thereby dismissing him from my life. There had been Joe Dixon, who was not so much malleable as he was poor, too poor to go out anywhere. He was, actually, an interesting repast who had introduced me to the sounds of avant-garde jazz and to the deliciousness of lovemaking. As that was the extent of our relationship, that became the extent of him. There was also Melvin, who clung to me for unknown reasons. Sometimes I allowed Melvin to take me to the coffeehouses. I kept Melvin in my life for two reasons: he looked very much like Frank Constant and he had a car. He would drive me to the coffeehouses and wait for me outside while I drank cups of café-au-lait with some white boy, whom I would leave after a while to go off with Melvin. It was, after all, the way to treat all of “them,” I had finally learned.
Although I did not make Dean’s List or any such thing at Temple, I managed to maintain a decent scholastic average that first semester. It was an impressive achievement, I thought, in light of the long nights I spent in the coffeehouses, and considering that I spent most of my days at Temple reliving those nights and hanging out with my pal Billy James.
Billy was a well-read, well-dressed Negro who had gone to Central High and had lived all his life in Germantown. Billy and I had seen each other around, mostly at the Germantown parties Barbara and I had crashed a lifetime ago. We had instantly latched on to each other at Temple. I had given some thought to contacting Francine, but felt I had nothing to say or, more appropriately, nothing to offer her since she was lost anyway to the premed laboratories at Temple. Billy was my kindred. In no time, we came to be soul mates.
Billy and I had each always felt alienated from everything, we discovered. Unspoken, it was our bond. We had stumbled along different paths to arrive at Temple only to find we were on the same lonely road, bastard children of forceful mothers who had tried to send us where they could not go. The problem was, neither they nor anyone seemed to know where that was. We had survived under the pretense that we were special, knowing that we were simply strange or estranged. Together, though, we convinced everyone at Temple of the former and made ourselves very popular.
We were the best dressed among the few Negroes at Temple, and even among the predominant number of rich Jewish students. We had gone to the best schools and were considered very smart. We were the best dancers and put together routines so exciting people at Temple dances formed a circle around us to watch. Our greatest point of popularity was our sharp wit, expressed usually before small audiences in the common areas of the Temple campus, where we would perch daily and rather loudly exchange satiric commentary about everything under the sun. But we knew. We knew a sense of separation from the mainstream of life, and we knew it had to do mostly with our inability to fit into any mold, anywhere. Billy kept my secret and I kept his, though we never assessed how important it was. We would have fallen in love had we not been so terrified of life. We just held on to each other. That was why Billy was devastated when I told him, in the middle of our second semester, that I was leaving him alone at Temple.
In Some Other Life
I could love you dearly.
In a life without stress
How our lips could caress
But I’ve found that the number’s too great
Of those who would have us wait
For Some Other Life,
Some Other Life…
I had written those lyrics for him at sixteen, and now he was walking toward me. I was outside Temple University going toward the bus stop. I had not seen or heard from him since the time he told me he had an ulcer at seventeen. He was nineteen now. Bob Ludwig’s blue eyes sparkled when we recognized each other; mine filled with tears. I had written all those songs for him and cried over him and vowed revenge on him and longed for him since then.
He had been in New York for the past year, he told me, playing drums in a jazz band in Greenwich Village. He had left his mother’s house forever. He had told her before he left that he would love whomever he chose, and damn the inheritance of his father. He told me all the right things, there on the streets of North Philadelphia outside Temple University.
“I have never stopped loving you,” he said, as though time had not passed, as though it would be easy to take up where things had died.
He was so beautiful, however. He was so perfect. I agreed to see him that night at his new apartment, ironically located in North Philadelphia, near Temple.
His Ludwig-brand drum set overwhelmed the uncarpeted apartment. He opened a bottle of wine and put Coltrane and Mose Allison on his record player. I tried not to whine about the pain of the past, to act as though I had not missed him. I listened to him tell me how much he wanted to be with me, only me, and wondered how much what he said had to do with his aspiration to be a jazz drummer. I heard him tell me how he no longer cared about color, any color, my color. I heard him swear he would sit shivah on his entire family for me.
Two years made me wary of his welcome words. But as I listened to him, his words became the words to all the poems and all the songs I had ever loved. As my head and my heart became filled with the words and the wine, I remembered the biblical refrain of Ruth. He kissed me and I felt I would faint. He fondled me, and the voice of Mathis echoed in my head. When he walked me to his bedroom, I felt a chill. My resentment and anger had not been kissed away. Limply, I sat down on his bed with him and watched him begin to make love to me. Gently, I pulled away from him.
“Let’s go to a movie tomorrow,” I suggested, quivering, straightening my dress.
He wanted to talk about it in the morning. I told him I would not be staying until morning.
“You think because I’m colored I’m easy,” I blurted out, ready to accept the consequences of my words. “You think you can slide back into my life after causing me so much pain and after all this time?”
He swore he had tried to find me. He begged me to consider what he had gone through when he found I had moved with no forwarding address. He screamed at me to, “for God’s sake,” understand what he was willing to give up for me. He was back in my life to stay, he vowed.
I refused to submit. He delivered his ultimatum. He told me that if I left him that night, he would never call me again. He never did.
I wrote more song-poems about Bob. I cried every day so hard, so unconsolably, for the next several months that my mother began suggesting I see a doctor. In between, I left Billy at Temple University. I had no reason to be there. My counselor at Temple told me, when I announced I was withdrawing, that I would have to pay the two hundred dollars I owed the university before I could get my transcripts, if I wanted them.
I spent the next year abusing Buddy. He was the nice Jewish fellow who owned the wholesale jewelry store at which I bought presents for my new coworkers. I had become the “token,” the first and only Negro service representative at the Philadelphia Electric Company. A month after I was hired, I was thrust into the window of the stately main office downtown. I accepted being so displayed because the new position came with a small salary increase, and because I rather relished the image of the company’s executives sweating. The newly elected president, John Kennedy, had demanded that private corporations begin integrating their legions of employees with qualified Negroes.
Buddy had asked me for a date every time I had gone to his nearby store to buy a trinket for some Electric Company worker’s birthday or baby shower. I had smiled and always refused him; he looked too much like Bob Ludwig to me. When I found out that Buddy owned the jewelry store, I accepted his standing invitation.
I tested him on our very first date. I suggested we have dinner at the most ostentatious place in town. I wanted to go where we would be seen by his people. As he agreed to my suggestion without a second thought, he presented me with a gift of gold jewelry from his store.
During that next year of ostentatious dates, Buddy presented me with numerous other pieces of jewelry. He also took me to New York whenever I decided we needed a change of pace. I had to see Richard Burton play Hamlet in modern clothes, for example, and I just had to be in New York for New Year’s Eve. Buddy also bought me clothes, and paid for a demonstration record he felt I should make of the songs I had written. Finally, he paid to have my front teeth capped—for they had grown in crooked, an ugly residue of York Street. Never once did I really thank him for anything, for which he often stated I was he very personification of the word “bitch.” It did not stop him from loving me, though. It also did not stop me from making him pay for more than he knew. I did not even say goodbye to Buddy.
The flight from Philadelphia was perfect. I had sold my piano and piddling stock in the Philadelphia Electric Company to pay for my ticket. I had three hundred dollars left. I was fleeing to California. I was fleeing York Street and Bob and a doctor named Horace Scott, and even my room with my mother. I did it without warning, suddenly, frantically. It was an Icarian escape.
What had really been so terrible in Philadelphia? I thought as the airplane lifted off. It was true there had been the specifics of poverty. I had survived the poverty, however, relatively unscathed, having lived in my maternal cocoon. I had never really been hungry or ill clothed or without a roof over my head. I had even been exposed to some of life’s finer offerings. I had certainly not experienced the nightmare of my mother’s reality, or my grandmother’s. I was a rich little ghetto girl, up from the ashes of my mother’s womb.
Why was I flying away, then? There was nothing to run from, except that by the time I had reached the magical age of twenty-one, I still could not go to sleep alone, or without keeping on all the lights and the television. I was terrified of being with myself; I had no self. I was not only terrified of sleeping alone, I was even terrified of being alone when I bathed, the hollow sound of a bathroom always reminding me of my nothingness. Even my own voice frightened me, its true sound distorted by the pitch and inflections of the variegated castes and colors I wore. I realized I was a fragmented being who could not choose a favorite color, much less a lover or a life work. It was not simply black or white. I lived in an amorphous gray. That was why I had to leave Philadelphia. I did not exist in Philadelphia.
“I am because I think I am,” my one-time idol Ayn Rand had screamed in her book Anthem. I had read every word in every book Ayn Rand ever wrote in the year I was nineteen. Those words, her words, had abated the pounding of lifelong angst, the consciousness of being born without the consciousness of being. After I had hungrily sopped up all of Ayn Rand’s tomes, I ran to one of her meetings. It was a gathering of the Dollar Sign Club, an elitist set of people who thought of themselves as “Atlases” who were organizing to shrug. I dragged Billy James with me. We constituted 100 percent of the Negro attendees. Though we were welcomed, we could not accept the ideas embraced by the strange white organisms who sat icily listening to what became clear as Rand’s, and her protégé Nathaniel Brandon’s, cold and antihuman philosophy. Billy and I ran out of there, with me finally settling on the unsettling idea that there was no philosophy for me.
California offered itself to me. It seemed to present the possibility of creating a life or finding one. It would be mine, and I would slip it on like a glove.
I had told everyone in Philadelphia, including my mother, that I was leaving to try my hand at being a professional songwriter. It was a real consideration, given the nearly three hundred songs I had written by then, mostly maudlin ones about love and other pain.
There was really no particular shape, of course, to the dream California held out. It did hold, however, a rare, sweet memory that had been a summer oasis on two occasions before.
I had gone to California by train the first time. It was with my grandmother, when I was nine years old. The next time, at fourteen, I went alone, on a new prop-jet airplane. It was all done with mirrors as far as I knew, for I never thought about how my mother provided for such trips.
Each time I had stayed at the home of my mother’s sister Frances. Frances was the only member of my mother’s family to have gone to college—primarily because her older sisters, including my mother, had paved her way with their hard-earned wages. She had finished college, become a teacher, and, best of all, married a nice colored minister. His Presbyterian Church had assigned him early on to parishes in California, first in Oakland, then Pasadena, and eventually in a middle-class Negro area of Los Angeles.
I had become preteen chubby at Frances’s house in Pasadena, where there was an abundance of fruit that fell off trees in their yard, and no roach wings in glasses or anywhere at all, and no mice scampering about near one’s feet for bits of dropped food. One could eat in California and smell grass in California and even sleep in the dark there.
On my second trip, I experienced an earthquake and the magnificent sequoias. Frances’s husband, John Doggett—brother of the famous jazz and blues organist Bill—had been part of a summer church camp that was held in the national park. Once we arrived among the redwoods, I had bowed my head with the Christian gathering, me in homage to a profound sense of belonging. I felt comfortable among those towering trees, my fears subsumed by their constancy and power. I would not be calling Frances this time, but California surely had something for me.
I thought the three hundred dollars I had when the plane landed in Los Angeles would be enough. It was April of 1965, and I had just turned twenty-two years old. In less than a week, I had spent most of my money on rent for an apartment in Hollywood, a fully furnished “single” that fortunately came with a television set.
I had spent the first three days in Los Angeles at an old hotel nearby. I had seen its picture in a brochure. The hotel’s photograph was, as might have been expected by anyone but a twenty-two-year-old, quite an exaggeration. That did not matter to me. It was a beginning.
I met an old man who lived at the hotel. He told me he was a film producer and that his name was Lou. I decided he was a kind man because he bought me dinner each of the three nights I stayed at the hotel. Moreover, he promised that he would keep a lookout for a part for me in an upcoming film.
Once I moved into the apartment, I pushed the notion of professional songwriting out of my head and began looking for work. By the end of the first week, I had no job and my money was almost gone. As the due date for my weekly rent approached, a spark of hope came with the ring of my new telephone. It was a woman’s husky voice.
“Lou gave me your number and said you might be interested in making some money,” the voice said.
I listened without responding.
“Anyway, I have a client I can’t see tonight. I have another appointment.”
I wondered what kind of client she meant, but remained what I felt was smartly silent.
“You’d be doing me a favor and helping yourself,” she continued. “He’ll pay four hundred dollars.”
“Four hundred dollars for what?” I asked earnestly.
“He has a number of problems and needs someone to make him happy.”
He was a “trick,” she explained. She told me what to do. I said I would do it.
When he came to the door, she told me, I should say: “You are my slave. You’ve been disobedient so I’m going to punish you.” I should wear black clothing and high-heeled shoes, and have a belt to use on him, because he loved to be beaten. I should also have on hand something called amyl nitrite, a drug contained in a capsule that I should break in half and place under his nose every fifteen minutes or so. She also told me to purchase a very strong perfume and to wear a lot of it.
“Do you think you can handle all that?” she asked.
“Of course,” I said, feeling rather shrewd.
I spent thirty dollars of my last forty dollars on the cologne and the amyl nitrite, a powerful prescription drug, I discovered, meant for heart patients. Amazingly, I was able to purchase it without a problem from a nearby drugstore.
When he came to my door, I was surprised to see how well dressed and elegant a white man he was. I just looked at him and forgot my lines.
“Am I your slave?” he asked, once the door was closed. His eyes changed even as he began to speak, as though he were being transformed into some supernatural being.
“Well, yes,” I stammered, trying not to snicker.
“I’ve disobeyed you and I must be punished,” he filled in solemnly.
He hurriedly took off his clothes, while I remained, as instructed, in mine: tight black pants, black turtleneck sweater, and high-heeled black shoes. I reeked with the fumes of Prince Matchabelli’s Albano.
He threw his huge naked fleshiness onto my convertible bed and begged me to beat him. I grabbed the belt and simply whipped him, as though I had done it before. He lay there whimpering and moaning, while I intermittently popped the amyl nitrite capsules under his nostrils. After nearly two hours, he reached a climax, face down on my sofa bed, his sweaty buttocks locked in ecstasy, facing me.
He sprang up suddenly, a “normal” being. He began chatting with me while I wondered how I should ask him for the money. As he was thanking me profusely, he stopped abruptly, realizing he had left his car parked in a no-parking zone. He jumped into his clothes to run outside to repark his car.
Even when I saw him snatch his watch from my nightstand, I did not understand. It was not until twenty minutes after he closed the door that I felt the humiliation. It had been a joke. I had been the “trick.” I was not so much humiliated by the act as by my stupidity. I cried for one hour until I slept, sitting up, to avoid his filth, which remained on my bed.
I managed to survive by pawning Buddy’s jewelry until I found a job selling books door-to-door. In a few months I left that job, because I could not continue to con people into buying the garbage I was successfully pushing on them as encyclopedia sets. I should have anticipated then that I would find myself with no place to live. Nevertheless, I was unprepared when I was evicted.
I broke down and called my Aunt Frances, making the un-desirable connection to Philadelphia. She admonished me for being frivolous, for quitting college, for not saving my money, for getting myself into such a predicament. She told me I could stay with her and her minister husband and their three children in their eighteen-room house for one week, and one week only. I declined her supercilious offer, thinking I would rather turn tricks than live with her and her Christian family. As I was packing up my things to go nowhere, an acid-head hippie I talked to on occasion, who lived nearby, showed up and offered to take me in.
His one-room cottage was at the foot of the Hollywood Hills. It resembled a Victorian parlor. It was a dark place, filled with furniture that appeared to have come from an East European home at the turn of the century. It was cluttered with books and records and plants. It seemed to complement his state of mind, however, a peaceful insanity, which was induced and assisted by his daily ritual of dropping one full capsule of LSD. Bruce Lynn, who had been Bruce Lev and Bruce Levin and Bruce Levinsky, took care of me with a maniacal kindness. He not only provided me with a place to sleep, he fed me, introduced me to the music of Bob Dylan, and turned me onto acid. He also found me a job as a cocktail waitress.
The Pink Pussycat was the hottest spot in West Hollywood. It was one of the numerous strip clubs in the area. Its claim to fame was that its strippers had stage names like Dina Martin or Samantha Davis or Frannie Sinatra. It had become popularized by such foolishness on The Johnny Carson Show. Carson, who had just moved his program from New York to L.A., seemed to think the idea of the place was so hilariously Hollywood that he regularly referred to the Pink Pussycat in his nightly monologues. After that, every white businessman from Maine to Iowa who could justify a business trip to Los Angeles made his pilgrimage to Carson’s Pink Pussycat.
They came in droves. Besides the strippers onstage and the booze and the scantily clad cocktail waitresses, these pillars of corporate America could stare at Hollywood’s rich and famous. Everyone had begun patronizing the place. It was that year’s thing to do. Business boomed. Wads of cash traded hands there, much of which stayed in the palms of the flashy waitresses, among whom I had become the one and only Negro.
In merely two weeks, I was taking home nearly a hundred dollars a night in tips. It was in 1965 dollars. It was September and I had not so much as batted one of my new false eyelashes over the recent fire that had been the Watts riots. My focus was on my handsome income, which was rising almost daily.
I was considered exotic by most of the patrons. They would say to me: “Are you from Ethiopia?” or “Buenas noches, señorita” or “What island in the Caribbean?” They were merely curious, I knew, about the particulars of my background; for I had learned in a short time that white men far away from home would go very far “to taste brown sugar.” That was why Jay Kennedy was so indistinct when we met.
Frank Sinatra was reportedly coming to the first of the two regular shows that night. The gossip in the place was that he wanted to take a look at his namesake. Lots of other stars had been there before. Sinatra, however, seemed to command the most respect. I could tell, because Fritz, our gay Austrian maître d’, had begun flitting about in a real dither over where Mr. Sinatra would sit and, more significantly, how much money he could demand from customers who wanted to sit near Mr. Sinatra. While the other cocktail waitresses haggled over who would get to serve the Sinatra table, I remained quiet. My assigned tables that night were adjacent to what was to be Sinatra’s. I knew, therefore, that I would make a bundle of money. When the doors finally opened, an orderly pandemonium took over.
Toward the end of the show, the platinum-blond waitress who had landed the Sinatra table called me aside.
“Jack wants to see you,” she said.
“Jack who, Diane?” I said curtly, imitating her Guys and Dolls New York accent.
“Entratter,” she finished snidely.
“Who’s he, Diane?” I asked, with a sigh.
She raised false platinum-blond eyelashes to heaven and sighed back, “Owns the Sands in Vegas. He’s with the Sinatra party.”
I threw back my head in victory over the undeclared contest in which we had all taken part. Turning my backside to her tight-lipped expression, I tried to act casual as I strolled over to Sinatra’s table.
“Thank you for coming over, ah…” a rather large man at the table said to me, standing up and extending his hand.
“Elaine,” Harry Schiller, the owner of the club, filled in for him. Harry had brazenly planted himself at their table. I noticed that he was actually licking his greedy lips over how happy he was that “they” had been pleased by at least one of his “whores.”
We were Harry and Alice Schiller’s whores in many ways. They taught us how to make money for them.
“Girls, if your Heavenly Father hasn’t endowed you with large breasts, endow them yourselves,” Alice would say to us every night. She would give us such instructions before the club opened, while Harry checked out the bar and cash registers.
“If a customer asks you out,” Alice would advise us, “never say yes and never say no.”
She insisted only that we push drinks and look beautiful. If anybody wanted to sell a little in between, that was not Alice’s business—unless it was to one of the vice cops who frequented the place. That was the essence of the Schiller philosophy. We practiced what they preached.
We learned to take a hotel key pressed into our hands along with a large bill by a customer at the first show and offer it to a customer at the second show for another large bill. We knocked over drinks so a businessman far away from home would be forced to buy more. We let customers tip us for each round of drinks by pushing a bill down our bosoms, if the bill was big enough. Most of us regularly had “dates” after work, which, most of the time, amounted to nothing more than breakfast at Ollie Hammond’s. Most of the time. We were definitely Harry’s whores when one thought about it.
“How do you do, Elaine,” Jack Entratter said, introducing himself.
It was hard for me to respond with the same civility, decked out in my merry-widow bra—the top portion of our outfits—the cups of which were stuffed to their outer limits with Pink Pussycat cocktail napkins to create the required cleavage. It was hard for me to feel dignified before those well-dressed men, much less the smiling Sinatra, in the black leotard bottom of the costume that was pulled up between the cheeks of my buttocks, which were thinly veiled by black fishnet pantyhose. It was impossible to muster any semblance of propriety in that uniform, completed by very high-heeled black shoes and a pink ostrich-feather “tail” that wrapped about my hips and swept to the floor.
Nevertheless, I tried to follow Entratter’s formal lead, nodding to each of the several men at the table as Entratter introduced him: “Mr. Sinatra…Mr. Kennedy…”
“We’d like to invite you to a small party at Frank’s house tonight, Elaine,” Entratter said after the introductions.
I had not had time enough to open my mouth in response when Harry quickly chimed in: “Go on, honey, you can leave now.” Then, adding insult to injury, he turned to Sinatra and said, “Sure, Frank, she’ll be happy to go.”
I rode with Entratter and his girlfriend, Corinne, to Sinatra’s house. We swished away from the brassy lights of West Hollywood and out onto Sunset Boulevard’s curves into the lushness of Beverly Hills, following Sinatra’s car. We turned off Sunset onto Delfern Drive and immediately into the imposing driveway of a virtual mansion. It was a huge white house supported by Corinthian columns right out of the Old South. I walked to the door in wide-eyed wonder.
Sinatra personally fixed drinks for the few of us there and joined us in his huge white living room to talk. At some point, Sinatra and Entratter began to get into a rather boisterous argument. Their voices were an echo to me, however; I could concentrate only on the fact that I was actually sitting in front of Frank Sinatra. Sinatra broke the spell I was under by snatching a huge brass bowl from his coffee table, which was stocked with about two hundred packs of cigarettes, and hurling it at Entratter’s head. As blood trickled down Entratter’s forehead, Sinatra demanded he pick up the bowl and every “fucking pack of those cigarettes.” From my still-distant place, I watched Entratter bend his huge, important-looking, well-dressed form down on both knees. He obediently picked up the bowl and refilled it with every pack of cigarettes that had been thrown at him. Sinatra went upstairs with some girl he had picked up earlier.
Blithely saying good night to Entratter and his girlfriend as they left, I finally realized why I was there. It was because of the old white man sitting on the couch next to me. We were the only two left. There was no party. I was to be the party. I woke up.
Jay Kennedy was talking to me about his latest book, Favor the Runner. He had been talking to me all along, it seemed. Now he was talking to me about “my” people, about W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Stokely Carmichael. I tried to follow what he was saying, mostly to keep his mind off what I knew was his motivation for having had me brought there. As he was not talking about money, he was not talking about anything. I had learned that much in six months in Hollywood. There was no way to keep up with him, however. He was going too fast, and I knew nothing about “my” people or anything else about which he was speaking. It did occur to me, though, that he knew an awful lot.
It was soon 4 A.M. and all very ridiculous, not the least aspect of which was the fact that I was still bedecked in my Pink Pussycat buffoonery, which had been covered only by the cape I wore back and forth to the club.
“I have a suite here,” he said finally. “Why don’t you stay till morning. Someone can drive you home then…please, I hope you don’t misunderstand me; I’ll sleep in the living room. You can have the bedroom to yourself.”
I was not thinking about the sleeping arrangements at that point. I was contemplating the fact that people had houses in which they also had suites for guests.
I properly uttered, “Well, thank you very much, Jay,” wondering if one called fifty-five-year-old men by their first name.
He escorted me upstairs to his suite, gave me a robe, and said good night. I lay awake for nearly an hour, despite my exhaustion. Two weeks before, I had literally had no address. It was quite a giant step to a bed in the house of Frank Sinatra.
It was not until the morning, after a white-uniformed maid, who might have been Swedish, had brought coffee and orange juice to my bedside, and after Sinatra had told me, timidly approaching the top of the house’s giant staircase, that his Negro chauffeur, George, would take me home, that I really took note of Jay Kennedy. He greeted me in the foyer as I was about to leave and asked me for my telephone number. He asked if he might call me to have dinner with him before he returned to his home in New York.
His blue eyes were tender and respectful. Despite his age, his physical strength became apparent to me, not only in the strong tufts of stark white hair that clung firmly to his head, but in his solid-steel stance. I said I would love to have dinner with him.
I had never heard of the Beverly Hills Hotel. It was a huge 1920s pink stucco, California thing that seemed to be “the” place among those who knew.
“Guten Abend, Mr. Kennedy.” The maître d’ bowed, and showed us to our table. We drank Piper Heidsieck champagne, bottled in 1952. We ate beluga caviar in the “queen’s way,” and then cracked crab with a mustard sauce. Our dinner was lamb, served on skewers, with wild rice.
It was in the soft and settled elegance of that room that I saw him for the first time as a man. His blue eyes, the color of the Caribbean, sparkled in the candlelight. They seemed to twinkle because of a wonderful secret only he knew but would reveal if one entered his place. His fleshy oval face was not so handsome as it was beautiful. It was a face that exposed the reality of the rough times along the way, with a humanity gleaming from it so brilliantly my heart trembled. As he came to life before me, I saw a being so filled with the passion of life I, too, began to feel alive. He was at once foreign and familiar, a character in a novel one could have read or a melody one hums on hearing it for the first time.
“Did you go to the March on Washington?” he asked me seriously.
“Well no,” I said, as if I had thought about it at all. Outside of the fact that I had not considered any of what was going on in the civil-rights movement pertinent to me, I had been unable to fathom, much less find acceptable to North Philly–trained responses, the nonviolent philosophy of Martin Luther King. It was incomprehensible to me that King’s followers would, for the sake of realizing rights guaranteed by the Constitution, nonviolently withstand dog bites and being spat upon and being viciously hosed—as I had seen on the televised news reports—by those who were supposed to protect those rights.
“I helped organize it,” he said, shocking me, making me feel instantly guilty about something. “It’s a tactic, you know, nonviolence. It’s not an end in itself. It’s really the only reasonable means by which blacks can fight racism and, eventually, its foundation, capitalism, to be free from oppression. This movement is bringing together the races, the masses of people in this country, on which a more powerful movement can be built to overcome our common enemy, which is not each other.”
“You seem to be talking about Communism, though,” I ventured, in an attempt to appear knowledgeable. “I don’t want to be a Communist,” I finished sincerely, noting that he had used the term “black” and not “Negro.”
“Communism is only a word, one we’ve been taught to fear. It’s a single, simple word that’s invoked every time people attempt to assert their human rights. Working people in this country, including most black people, are the backbone of industry, yet they receive few if any of the benefits produced by their labor. Communism has to do with sharing that wealth…”
I began to listen, but, hearing his subtle exegesis, I felt that his conclusions were inconsistent with his reality, with his apparently rich lifestyle. I gave little consideration to how relevant his conversation might be to me.
“But what about you?” I asked. “What has any of this got to do with you?”
“I have some experience with the hardships of life under capitalism in America,” he said. “Of course I’m surviving personally, in many ways because I’m a white man. But what kind of a man would I be if I understood what I do and turned my head away….You know, my family was so poor that I was only able to finish the eighth grade. We needed whatever money I could earn, once I was able.
“The streets of New York, where I grew up, were unkind to a young boy. I took any job I could find. I worked ten to twelve hours a day and still couldn’t feed myself or help my family. I was often so hungry I had to beg. The more I saw overstuffed people throw food into the garbage bins that waifs like me scavenged to survive, the more I realized that I would never make enough money to live on, because the owners of the places where I worked always took the profits for themselves.”
“But how did you survive? How did you learn to write books? What did you…”
“Oh, that’s enough about me for now”—he smiled—“for that was then. I simply want to gaze upon your sweet face,” he said, touching my cheek gently with a strong but smooth-textured hand.
He ordered violins to our table and sang a Russian folk song to me as they played.
The music I heard, though, was not in the old Russian melody he sang, nor in the strings that supported its refrain. It was the sound of his being that was the song that penetrated my soul, like Rachmaninoff or Ravel, evoking a life rhythm in me, a thing I thought I recognized from somewhere long ago.
We were there for hours. We found ourselves the last of the diners. There were moments during the evening we simply looked into each other’s eyes. I surrendered to a tenderness in me that had been forsaken and settled down to a comfort I had never known. Before the night ended, I felt I knew what it might be like to truly live.