7

The Man with the Blue-Veined Cheek

(THE THIRD SHORT TALE OF SHMUCKERY)

I am happy to note that these doltish acts were committed in the first third of my life.

*   *   *

It was 1957, I owned an affordable home on Bonnie Meadow Road in New Rochelle, had a good marriage, good kids, and was gainfully employed. I was artistically content, having been twice awarded an Emmy for my Second Bananaring of television’s greatest First Banana, Sid Caesar, and still capable of embarrassing myself.

After the dissolution of the ground breaking musical-variety show Your Show of Shows, Sid Caesar went out on his own. He had rented offices and rehearsal rooms in the Milgrim Building on West Fifty-seventh Street and invited me to be a part of his new show, Caesar’s Hour. Besides being a second banana, I was also a trusted member of the creative team, which gave me access to Sid’s ear into which I could whisper advice, opinions, and suggestions for where to eat lunch. Knowing of my innate charm and my enviable ability to bullshit with the very best in the field, Sid would often invite me to attend the goodwill-type meetings that sponsors and network heads request when everything is going very well or very badly. This meeting, I believe was the obligatory season-opening let’s-see-if-we-can-get-those-ratings-up pep talk.

We all gathered in Sid’s well-appointed office. I knew most of the network brass but none of the new sponsors or advertising people. After some preliminary introductions and the accompanying chitchat, one of the new team of admen, who was seated in a corner of the big leather couch, waved me over and invited me to join him. I will call this gentleman Ted, because that may have been his name.

Ted spoke enthusiastically about last year’s shows and made complimentary references to a couple of my performances. Very soon after he started talking, I stopped listening and concentrated on trying to avoid looking at the left side of his face and forehead or acting as if I was not revolted by what I saw. I did all I could do to keep from grimacing, and told myself, If he can go through life accepting this disfigurement, I should be able to spend a few minutes behaving civilly.

As he talked, I kept thinking about the photos of fetuses I had seen in Life magazine, the translucent skin of the unborn baby’s face and head, allowing for an intimate and disturbing view of the circulatory system with its patchwork of bluish veins and red capillaries. On the left side of Ted’s face was a birthmark like none other I had ever seen—it covered most of his cheek and forehead.

Ted, a seemingly secure sort, obviously had come to terms with this thing and either chose not to have it cosmetically altered or knew it to be unalterable. It was thrice the size of the birthmark Gorbachev sported on his forehead. When I finally allowed myself more than a cursory glance, I saw what looked like a complex road map with finely etched blue-veined roads crisscrossing from just below his cheek to his forehead and ending at his hairline. It looked like a map of Connecticut, and I thought, Connecticut? He’s in advertising, half of the people in advertising live in Connecticut. Did he, when drunk one day, decide to have a map of his home state tattooed on his face? Tattoo, birthmark, skin disease, or a genetic capillarial fragility, whatever it was, I could not look at it, and I hated myself for being so squeamish.

My role was to cater to bigwigs like Ted, so I hung in. And good old Ted, by turning out to be a man of rare taste and perception, was making it more and more difficult for me to leave. How can I walk away from a man who tells me what a huge fan I have in his wife and who seemed genuinely interested in hearing about my wife and kids and the dynamics of the family. While I was thinking all this, suddenly Ted jumped up.

“Would you like some Perrier?” he asked, “I’m getting one for myself.”

While I was declining his offer, he was off to the drink and snack table. As he popped the top off a bottle of Perrier, Ted glanced up at the wall mirror behind the table and peered into it.

“What the fuck is that!?” he screamed, touching his face, “Hey, Carl, did I have this … thing … on my face while we were talking?”

I was tempted to say “What thing?” but I nodded.

“Why the hell didn’t you say something,” he asked, trying to rub out the map of Connecticut with his pocket hanky, “or are you in on a practical joke?”

I assured him that I was not and approached to get a better look at those blue veins which were now a messy, bluish purple smudge.

“So Ted,” I asked, lightly, “what the devil is that ugly, blue mess on your face—that I barely noticed?”

Ted suddenly slapped himself hard on his forehead and recalled leaning his hand on a piece of carbon paper when talking to the receptionist. (Remember carbon paper?)

“And right after that, I made a phone call and rested my head in my hand. Just before you sat down,” he said, clearing up the mystery, “I remember seeing this blue stuff on my hand and wiping it off on my hanky. But Carl, what the devil were you thinking when you looked at me? Why didn’t tell me I looked like a prune?”

At this point I told Ted the story that I related to you earlier—“Lovely Legs”—and how, because of that embarrassment, I had vowed never to make reference to or joke about anyone’s physical traits—except my own.*