Great Kisser (25 page)

“I go to Cardinal Spellman's office. I was sent in there by some wiseguys. They sent me to see a guy working for the Cardinal whose nickname was Trigger. I told him I wanted the Cardinal to authenticate the ring. Trigger took me over to the side and said, ‘I don't advise you to do that. See, I have no control over it once I hand it to the Cardinal. He can appropriate it and send it on to the Vatican himself. If it's missing from the Papal ring collection, I can't protect you on that. I advise you to write His Holiness.'”

“So I did that. I tell His Holiness I got a client that has access to the ring, blah blah blah. So, okay. Then I hear from the apostolic delegate in Washington. This guy comes down from Washington and takes me to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. ‘What are we going there for?' I say. He says, ‘There's an expert there, blah blah blah.' I say, ‘But I thought someone from the Vatican could do this.' He says, ‘That could be arranged, if you would like to come to the Vatican.' So I'm thinking to myself, ‘If I go to the Vatican, they'll say I've violated a national treasury act, and snatch the ring. And who knows what they'll do with me. But the point is, the ring will be gone.

“I say, ‘Oh no, I won't go to the Vatican. I'll tell you what; I'll make it real easy for you. I'll meet somebody in Switzerland or Austria. But I'm not going into Italian territory.' The box the ring was in was shaped like a church. It had a glass door on it and the ring laid inside. The apostolic delegate takes the ring out, looks at it, and says, ‘Well, for a ring 500 years old, it doesn't show any wear or tear.' Now I know I'm in trouble. I jerked the ring out of his hand, put it back in the box, said ‘Thank you, pal.' Then I said, ‘Why should it show any wear when it's worn on a gloved hand only?' I got the hell out of there. He said he'd find out if they wanted to meet me in Switzerland. Meanwhile I got the ring.

“Robert Kennedy gets assassinated. That's the end of the deal with Bobby. So now a certain individual knows I got the ring. He calls me one night. He was at the Copacabana. He says, ‘You bring it down here.' I say, ‘You want to buy it?' He says, ‘No, no. Just bring it down here. I need it for like an hour.' I go down to the Copa. It was four in the morning. The place is shut down except for the regulars. The guy, Carmine, is there with a dozen of his subordinates, all knock-around guys. I put the thing on the bar. Carmine puts the ring on his hand. He's standing with the ring at the bar and the guys are lined up, one behind the other. He makes them come over; they had to kiss the ring and genuflect. Each time a guy came over, bent down and kissed the ring, Carmine's face got red like Heinz ketchup. I thought he was gonna have a stroke or something. I whispered in his ear, ‘Carmine, you keep getting this high blood pressure, something's liable to happen to you here.' ‘Calm down,' he says, ‘only three to go.' I really liked this guy, but he got his kicks out of this and I couldn't tell him I wanted a hundred grand. So I never sold the ring.”

I looked up, and Hymie's arms were outstretched toward me. In his cowboy hat, he sang “Some Enchanted Evening” to me. It was uncanny; it was as if Ezio Pinza had just entered the room. The intonation and enunciation were perfect. The parody of the schmaltzy Italian immigrant singer was outrageous and touching:

And somehow you know

You know even then

That somewhere you'll see her again and again.

End of chorus. He stopped. He saw my helpless laughter and his pug's eyes sparkled.

He was very pleased with himself.

Some enchanted evening

You may see a stranger

You may see a strain-juh

Across a crowded room …

He finished the chorus, even more emotively. Stopped. Suddenly arms in the air:

And night after night

As strange as it seems

The sound of her laughter will

sing in your dreams.

Three minutes later, he had drained it dry. I was exhausted from laughing. We sat there in the dust, looking at each other and smiling.

Hymie rose. “Let's eat, kid.”

In the restaurant, Hymie announced that in addition to the screenplay I would write about his life, he had hired Ron Fatino to write a movie version of
A Moon for the Misbegotten
. “Ron's done his due diligence and come up with a brilliant idea, oh yeah.” He paused for effect, and announced, “This will make you shit in your pants. All the characters in the movie will be on rollerskates.”

Hymie's hooded eyes were dancing.

VII

The next day, I met Hymie at his hotel room. He was trying to put on his boots, and he winced with pain. The diabetes, the heart were kicking in. I didn't think he was going to be able to do it. “Can I help you?” I said, moving toward him.

“No,” he said quickly. “I gotta do it myself.”

He picked up the boot, raised it, tried, and put it down again. He tried it three times, his face clenched. The fourth time, he squeezed them on.

I wondered what would happen if he had let me help him, how the balance would tip in our relationship. It was a line he would never cross.

VIII

When I showed Hymie my screenplay about him four months later, he said, “You made me into a gutter rat.” He didn't pay me, and he never spoke to me again.

Three years later, when I had moved back to New York, I called Linda, my ex-manager. She was in mourning. “Hymie died,” she said. “He was in a lot of pain at the end. When
Misbegotten
premiered at the Directors Guild, he invited twenty people. No one came.

“He was such a huge pain in the ass for such a long time. We did a lot of coke together. He married Roberta, you know. His cousin. He'd visited her in prison. He put everything in her name. She stole it. He felt she had completely lied to him. She did a lot of drugs. He was made a fool of in the end. She suckered him, outconned him. She even kept the horse Harry Cohn gave him.

“Hymie was going to have her killed, but he lost his concentration, he was so sick.

“Nobody noticed his dying.” Linda sighed. “He was part of history. At the end he owed everybody, he robbed everybody.

“I hate to say it, but I miss talking to him. Isn't that stupid? I was always looking for a moment from him, some kind of redemption. I never got it.

“Near the end, one of his movies was made in Mexico. He went and had all these shirts made to wear there. He wanted to look Spanish. These were accordion, caballero shirts. He went down to Little Havana and had all these outfits made. So that when he went to Mexico for the filming he would look right. Except the shirts were Cuban—and he was going to Mexico City. The movie was supposed to take place in Cuba but shot in Mexico.

“So he was dressed like a Cuban so he would look as if he was walking around in Cuba, just like in the movie. So when he got to Mexico looking like a Cuban, Tom Hanks would get it. But nobody in Mexico understood this. Nobody got it. They just thought Hymie looked crazy.

“I remember the contract you drew up for him, Michael. The ‘Family of Man' contract. There was no way he would sign that. He liked you, Michael. He just liked mugging people.

“He never gave me anything, except two things near the end. One was a bottle. I went into the ladies' room. He always had good coke. But this was baby powder. When I told him, Hymie pouted. ‘I get good stuff,' he said.

“Then, at his Peninsula Hotel suite in Beverly Hills, Hymie opened the drawer and gave me two blank eight-by-eleven envelopes that said ‘Hotel Peninsula' on them. He said, ‘You'll be glad you have these someday.' And I am. He felt he was bestowing something important on me. I said, ‘Thank you, Hymie.'

“I still have those envelopes.”

When he died, Hymie slipped under the radar—there were no major obits—through the cracks of the streets and gutters.

The gutters, the Supreme Court, Rosie's untimely crack-up, Jimmy Blue Eyes' tale of his childhood, the magnificent Ronnie Kray, sixteen years in naval intelligence, the endless shit of Mario's father, Cardinal Spellman's Trigger—it was a good, rancid ride.

Hymie, tripped up at the end by sultry Roberta.

Hymie also wanted his enchanted evenings.

After a long day of abuse, telling me I didn't know what it was like out there, that I was soft because of his beneficent care, his protecting me from all contact with the world, after I sat for hours waiting for my father to give me my monthly check, he finally handed it to me. My father held out the money and told me what he was doing to me, that he was ruining me.

Finally, at the end, my father handed me the check. As I walked away with my father's $250, he said, “I know you're a busy man. You're busy as a cockroach with your writing.”

Did I actually say, “Thank you” for that check?

I don't remember.

I'm sure that I did.

Rabbits in the Fields of Strangers

Kaddish

… upon Israel and upon all who live

as the sparrows of the streets

under the cornices of the houses of others,

and as rabbits

in the fields of strangers

on the grace of the seasons

and what the gleaners leave in the corners;

you children of the wind—

birds

that feed on the tree of knowledge

… to them and to you

life.

Charles Reznikoff

—1936

Oscar Schwartz hired me to tell his Holocaust story. I met him on 9/11, which was a drop in the bucket to him, I think. At least he never alluded to it on that day, or afterwards.

A Polish Jew, he had lived with his family in Cologne and been deported first to the Riga ghetto, later to the Kaiserwald and Kiel concentration camps and finally to a prison in Hamburg.

He thought all the stories had been told. He had no education and felt inarticulate and inadequate to the task. A small, grim-faced man with pursed lips, Oscar felt he was a second-rate Holocaust survivor. And he didn't think much of me either. “Michael, what is this doowop you write about?” he asked, not waiting for my answer. “It's not for me.”

I was there because as usual when I was broke, I was sucked into the agendas of those with whom I had nothing in common. Oscar Schwartz was an orthodox Jew. I came from a totally secular, if not insane Jewish background, had no religious orientation at all, didn't see a face up there, and did not read Yiddish or Hebrew. My favorite writers were generally not Jewish. I was always seeking relief from a lugubrious history, personal and historical. Oscar Schwartz eyed me balefully; there was no way of pleasing him, although I had plucked my gold earring out of my ear before meeting him. He seemed to squeeze the air out of the room. No more wearing my T-shirt with a picture of Dean Martin and the Gold Diggers, or my Jazz Baby Concert T-shirt that had the logo of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church on it and a drawing in black on white of Gerald Wiggins playing the sax.

Oscar had stood watching from a window as the Jews were rounded up to be shot in the Riga ghetto in 1942. Dr. Rudolf Lange, the head of
Einsatzkommando
, arrived to make his selection. Oscar, 14 then, watched from an upstairs factory window. Oscar's mother was in the courtyard. First Lange shouted, “I need a Jew for breakfast! I need a Jew for lunch!” Then he ordered the Jews to undress in front of him. They were ordered to go to the left or the right. The ones who were told to go right went on the truck to be taken to the gas chambers. Oscar's mother went to the left.

There are a million stories like this, millions of burning bodies, black chimney smoke soaring to the sky. Tadeusz Borowski tells it best in
This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
. So why am I doing this?

Another time Oscar stood at the window in Riga and saw the Nazis heading to his wooden shed. He was about to go to work at 5:30
A.M.,
and saw the SS guards approaching with a big load of trucks. He knew. He hurriedly took his niece Marta, a little girl of three, by the hand, took blankets, and walked her and her mother Tova up into the attic. He said they must not talk, they must be quiet. Oscar left the house and stood watching from afar as the Nazis grabbed children and old women and threw them on the trucks, shooting at random.

He went to work, and he came back at night to screaming and shouting down the street, mothers missing their children. But his aunt and niece were still alive in the attic. Juti, his niece, who had never seen an orange until he brought one for her. She would stand by the gates waiting for him to come back from work every day and say, “Uncle Oscar, do you have anything for me?”

Oscar had to report to Platt, the leader of the
Judenrat
—Jewish policemen chosen by the Gestapo to control the Jews—that he'd saved his niece and aunt. Platt started hitting him and screaming, “They took my own children away, you insolent prick. I took them to the truck myself as I was ordered to do by the commandant!”

“Then you're a fool,” Oscar said. “You brought your own children to the truck?”

“Yes! To set a good example! To show the Jews that I did it too, just like them! You have no respect! I'm going to report you, you ungrateful child.”

“Do whatever you want,” Oscar said. “God will help me.”

“This was the German Jewish mentality,” Oscar said to me in his New York office. He paused and smiled his bitter smile. “One day I was in the camp and a German plane flew overhead. The prisoner next to me looked up and said proudly, ‘One of ours.'” He shook his head.

Three months later, Oscar's niece Juti and Aunt Tova were taken. He was at work, and could not help them. “My aunt could have saved herself, she was young. She could have worked, they kept the healthy ones alive for a while. But she said, ‘I go with my child.'”

I have a memory of the end of the war. I am soapy and splashing around in the tub. My parents come running in. “Bubby, the war is over!” shouts my father, and there is joy in the house, and bagels, lox, cream cheese and onions.