“What have you two fuckers been up to?” Goldhandler grated as Peter and I came into the office. He picked the script off his desk and rattled it at us. “What is all this titter-titter crap? Where’s Lord Piffle? Leslie Howard will be here in half an hour.”
He was in his purple cashmere bathrobe, unshaven and haggard. He had returned on a midnight train, almost unconscious with fatigue, and had gone straight to bed. It was now about one in the afternoon. Peter was sullenly silent, so I tried to explain what we had done, and why. Goldhandler’s face clouded and he kept glancing at his watch. “All right, all right,” he broke in, “let me have the Piffle stuff.”
He headed for the bathroom, with the faded hectographed scripts and our draft. “Tell my wife I want to talk to her.” She came up and, not seeing him, went straight into the bathroom. They were that close, and he was usually that pressed for time.
Boyd had telephoned my home, just before he left to pick up Leslie Howard at Grand Central, to summon us to the penthouse quick-march. He had read our Leslie Howard draft and was appalled. “It’s not radio. Where are the laughs? And where do you get off ignoring instructions?”
“Is it any good?” I asked.
“Oh, it’s slick and facile, sort of fake Noël Coward. What good is that? I don’t want to be around when he reads it.”
Mrs. Goldhandler came out of the bathroom with the Piffle scripts and went downstairs, giving us in passing the look of contempt with which she would speak of Eddie Conn. Goldhandler followed her, slinging our draft on his desk. Not long afterward Boyd arrived with Leslie Howard, who greeted us with a shy smile and a soft “Hello, there.” Casually dignified, his chalk-stripe black suit unmistakably Savile Row, his sensitive long face calm and slightly wary, the slender blond star did almost make you feel in the presence of a lord. Goldhandler came hurrying in, smooth-shaven with some bloody nicks, wearing his double-breasted dark blue “bar-mitzva suit,” as he called it, intended to make him look as unlike a gagman as possible. It was not an impenetrable disguise. After the pleasantries he sat down in his swivel chair and lit a cigar with long flaming puffs.
“What we do here,” he said at last to Leslie Howard, “as you may have heard, is create radio programs with three or four audience laughs per minute.”
“Your reputation goes before you,” Leslie Howard said amiably.
Goldhandler acknowledged this with a gracious nod. “Coming from you, that’s something. There has never been a star of your calibre on the radio, you know. For guest spots, yes. For a show, no. Just vaudevillians, who live or die, from minute to minute, with the laughs they get. Nobody who can sustain a comic idea of any quality, a Scarlet Pimpernel, a Berkeley Square.”
Leslie Howard’s face subtly hardened, and he made a brusque gesture. “What do you have in mind?” He had not come to hear a gagman praise him. It shut Goldhandler up. He puffed at his cigar, looked at Howard through half-closed eyes, and got on his feet.
“We can give you your three or four laughs a minute,” he said breezily, beginning to pace. “That’s no problem. But what would you say to a truly bold departure? A show without a studio audience, without those moronic yapping laughs? A comedy of manners, light as champagne, in your inimitable farceur style?”
Peter and I exchanged a swift glance.
“Let’s say there’s this elegant Lord Algernon Throop, crossing the Atlantic aboard the Queen Mary in a first-class suite…”
My God, I thought, he’s cornered, he’s utterly desperate, he can’t think of anything!
“…as charming and suave a young nobleman as you’d want to meet,” Goldhandler went on, “only as it happens he’s not a nobleman at all, but an international jewel thief.”
The actor’s mouth twitched in amusement. Whether he was smiling with pleasure at the notion, or with disdain at the banality of it, who could say?
“Let me read you a page or two,” said Goldhandler, picking up our script, “of a little thing we’ve thrown together. Stop me any time you’d rather hear something cruder, or as we say in the gagman trade”—here he grinned at Howard—“more on the nose, up the alley, meat and potatoes, sure pop.”
“Go ahead,” said Howard, laughing at Goldhandler’s disarming self-mockery. Howard did not stop him at all. Goldhandler warmed to our lines, and even did elephantine imitations of Howard’s mannerisms which made the star chuckle. When he finished, Howard rubbed his mouth thoughtfully. “Ah, does this—ah, this laxative sponsor—like it?”
“Whatever Leslie Howard cares to do, any sponsor in America will jump at,” said Goldhandler, “but I need your okay first. Otherwise it’s too fresh, too innovative, for the kind of minds I deal with in radio.”
“Why, it seems all right. As you say, quite light. It might do. I’m not disappointed.”
At this foaming British enthusiasm, Goldhandler leaped up. “Then shall we go and talk to them now? They’re waiting to hear how this meeting went.”
“Why not?” Howard stood. Goldhandler lumbered to him, and seized him around the waist. Howard had to lean his willowy body away from him, holding a cigarette high in two fingers to keep from burning him, smiling in embarrassment at this close contact; and also, it seemed to me, at the irrepressible animal magnetism of Harry Goldhandler.
“We’ll kill them, Leslie!” Goldhandler hugged him tight and released him. “We’ll knock them dead, and start a new era of quality in this tawdry medium!”
The switchboard buzzed, and Boyd plugged in. “It’s Mrs. Fesser,” he told the boss, “for Mrs. Goldhandler.”
“Put her through,” roared Goldhandler, “and let’s get going, Boyd.”
When Peter and I were alone he said, “That script we did is thin crap. What’s the matter with Howard?”
“Peter,” I said on a heady surge of self-confidence, “we’re going to ask for a raise.”
He only blinked at me.
“I mean it. Howard wants the radio money. He was agreeably surprised that it wasn’t a string of old gags. He’s going for it, so Ex-Lax will go for it. Class! Peter, Goldhandler will get a fortune from Ex-Lax.”
“By Christ, you’re a pushy bastard, aren’t you? It’s that Bronx upbringing. All right. What do we ask for?”
Now remember, this was deep in the depression. At the time he was getting forty a week, I was making thirty, and it was good money for both of us. “A hundred for the team,” I said, “split any way you say.”
Peter shook his head at me, half in exasperation, half in admiration.
“Okay, if you want to try, go ahead. If you get it, we’ll split fifty-fifty.” Peter slipped into his shoes and put on his jacket. “Only I don’t want to be around, Davey. You handle it. A hundred! Christ, if you pull it off we can even rent an apartment, can’t we? I can get some real work done.”
About an hour later Boyd telephoned. “Well, Menlow danced around the room. I still say you two had some crust, but anyway, it’s in. Congratulations. The boss is on his way home. I’m going to bed, I haven’t slept for two days.”
Goldhandler strode victoriously into the office, puffing on a half-smoked cigar. “Where’s Finkelstein?” he inquired with a high-spirited grin.
“He had to go home.”
“Presumptuous pricks, both of you.” The tone was admiring. He sat down, rocking in the swivel chair. “Thanks.”
“It was all in the way you presented it.”
He nodded, still savoring the triumph. “No, you’re a good team. You made a hell of a contribution.”
What an opening! “I’m afraid I can’t keep Peter, though,” I said, “unless you give us a raise.” Goldhandler’s happy look faded into a cold hard stare. “He wants us to get an apartment together,” I rushed on. “He’s had a fight with his father. Right now he’s staying with me. He’s had two short stories accepted. I had to talk him into working on this jewel thief thing.”
Goldhandler knew very well of Quat’s literary aspirations. “What magazines?”
“Kenyon Review and Antioch Review.”
“Ha! I had stories in both of those when I was still in college. They pay in glazed farts. Nobody reads them.”
“He’s really ready to quit, however.”
Long silence. Goldhandler inquired soberly, “What are you two asking?”
“A hundred.”
He opened wide eyes, then squinted at me through the smoke. “Apiece?”
My stomach knotted, but in the tone and with the self-assurance of The Green Cousin, I replied, “Of course, apiece.” It was a pure Mama moment. He had said the word first, I hadn’t.
Frowning, Goldhandler picked up his phone and jabbed at an intercom button. “Come up, I want to talk to you.” Mrs. Goldhandler vaguely bleated on the phone. He barked, “I know Blue’s lawyers will be here any minute,” and he went into the bathroom.
She came trotting in, beaming at me as though I were Joan Crawford or Aldous Huxley. “Isn’t it lovely about Leslie Howard?” she carolled, heading for the bathroom.
When she emerged in a few minutes I got the Eddie Conn glare, and she slammed the office door.
“It won’t do,” Goldhandler said, wiping his hands on a towel as he came out. “Suppose you up and decide to go back to law school? Or Peter takes it in his head to quit and write a novel? For that salary you’ll have to sign a two-year contract, both of you.”
I could scarcely believe it. As nonchalantly as I could, I said, “I’ll have to talk to Peter.”
Goldhandler heavily nodded. “Yes, you do that. He’s a talented asshole, but too unpredictable. As for you—” He sized me up ruefully. “I don’t know. Beneath that yeshiva boy innocence, there’s a broad streak of ghetto cunning.” He looked at me in silence, then ambled to me and hugged me as he had Leslie Howard. “I think a hell of a lot of you, Liebowitz,” he said, and he went out to talk to Lou Blue’s lawyers.
***
Peter was stunned. “Apiece? Wow!”
He talked no more of quitting. Goldhandler’s lawyer drew up a contract full of hooks, but Peter laughed them off. I pointed out to Peter, for instance, that by the wording Goldhandler could claim to own any stories, plays, or novels we might write while under contract.
“Look, Davey, who cares? We’ll sign the goddamn thing, and then do as we please.”
Peter Quat’s attitude toward contracts has not changed to this day. That’s it, and it makes for problems. Wives can have writs out against him, publishers may be suing him, the IRS and New York State may be after him for back taxes—in fact, all those things are happening at the moment—but he pays my office charges punctually, no matter what, and leaves all that to me. He is the fun-lover, and I am the fixer. With that “Apiece” coup I won his confidence, and it has not wavered. I more or less respect him as an artist, if a horribly screwed-up one; he more or less respects me as a man of business and law; and that equation has held since “Apiece.”
Peter took a vindictive joy in letting his father know. He dropped unannounced into the doctor’s office. The poor receptionist, his mistress and doormat, let him walk over her, ahead of the waiting patients. Dr. Quat congratulated him, took credit for convincing him to stay with Goldhandler, and invited him to return home. Peter responded that he would never come back; but he would go on contributing to the rent if his father needed it. Dr. Quat, “vastly humiliated,” declined the offer. Such was Peter’s account of the meeting.
I felt sorry for Dr. Quat, then and always. He was an eminent surgeon and a thoughtful, decent man. Peter was and is a handful. His portrait of the doctor father in Deflowering Sarah is one of the rougher passages in the Quat version of the American Jewish experience. I heard that Dr. Quat talked about it on his deathbed, and said Peter had never been a happy boy, and he bore him no ill will. I heard this from the doctor who attended him.
“Are you crazy?” Mom said. “Why move out? Now you can really save up money! Why pay it to some stupid landlord? Listen to me for once. You have a nice room, you can eat here all you want to, it’s home. Don’t go into partnership with that Peter Quat! Partnership means only trouble.”
“It’s so silly,” Lee said. “Bernie lived at home until he finished his residency.”
As usual, Pop let the others talk first. He just listened with his tough business look to my account of the Leslie Howard deal, and my negotiation with Goldhandler; which Mom kept interrupting, to say it was obvious I ought to be a lawyer. Then Pop asked, regarding me with softened pride and concern, “You’ll come home Friday nights?”
“Yes, I will.”
He nodded. This place would remain my home, he said, but he would not accept any rent money from me hereafter. My own feelings, upon informing my family that I was moving out on my own, on a salary of a hundred a week, I remember as though it had just happened. Never since have I had quite such a sense of power, of manhood, of setting myself free. There is only one first flight out of the nest.
Yet in my rosiest fantasies I had not dreamed of where I would alight.