She shook Lew's hand and took my arm and walked me
into the living room and whispered: "He's all through with her,
Marcus, he really is. He hasn't seen her since the shooting, only
once. She came to the hospital one day when I wasn't there, but I
heard about it. Now she's all a part of the past. Oh, Marcus, you
can't imagine how glorious it's been these past few months. We've
been so damned happy you wouldn't believe we were the same people you
saw the last time you were here."
She said he was upstairs napping now, and while she
went up to rouse him, Cordelia, the maid, mixed us a drink. Jack came
down groggy—and in shirtsleeves, baggy pants and slippers—and
gave us a few vague minutes. Then we were a group—Jack and Alice on
the sofa with Alice's pair of long-legged dolls in crinoline between
them, his hand in hers across the dolls, Lew and I in the overstuffed
chairs as witnesses to this domestic tranquillity.
"So you've got a deal," Jack said, and Lew
immediately went for his cigar case to get a grip on something. Jack
had met Lew five years back when Lew butted aggressively into a bar
conversation Jack was having, without knowing who Jack was. That's
another story, but it turned out Lew gave Jack a pair of theater
tickets that introduced him to Helen Morgan, who became one of Jack's
abstract passions. He never could understand why Morgan was so good,
why she moved him so. It was perverse of him to want to understand
the secrets of individual talent, to want secret keys to success. He
was still talking about La Morgan the night he died.
"I got a million-dollar idea for you, Jack,"
Lew said, stuffing a cigar in his mush but not lighting it.
"My favorite kind."
"
And you don't have to do a thing for a year."
"It gets better."
"I like it too," said Alice.
"You've got to be one of the most famous, pardon
the expression, criminals in the East, am I right?"
"I wouldn't admit to any wrongdoing," Jack
said. "I just make my way the best I can."
"Sure, Jack, sure," said Lew. "But
plenty of people take you for a criminal. Am I right?"
"I got a bad press, no doubt about that."
"Bad press is a good press for this idea,"
said Lew. "The more people think you're a bad-ass bastard, the
easier we make you a star."
"He's already a star," Alice said. "Too
much of a one."
"You mean a Broadway star?" Jack asked. "I
carry a tune, but I'm no Morgan."
"Not Broadway. I mean all of America. I can make
you the biggest thing since Billy Sunday and Aimee Semple McPherson.
An evangelist. A preacher."
"A preacher?" Jack said, and he gave it the
big ho-de-ho-ho.
"A preacher how?" Alice said, leaning
forward.
Lew said, "If you'll excuse me for saying it,
there's about a hundred million people in this country know your
name, and they figure you're one mean son of a bitch. Is this more or
less true or am I mistaken'?"
"Go on," Jack said. "What else?"
"So this mean son of a bitch, this Legs Diamond,
this bootlegger, this gang leader, he gives it all up. Quits cold.
Goes straight. And a year later he hears the voice of the Holy
Spirit. He is touched by a whole damn flock of flaming doves or
tongues or whatever the hell they send down to touch guys with, and
he becomes an apostle for the Big Fellow. He goes barnstorming, first
on a shoestring. A spiritual peanut vendor is all he is. A man with a
simple commitment to God and against Satan and his works. He talks to
anybody who'll sit still for half an hour. The press picks him up
immediately and treats him like a crazy. But also it's a hell of a
story for them. Whatsisname, on the road to Damascus. You know the
routine. Doesn't care about gin, gangs, guns, gals or gelt anymore.
All he wants is to send out the word of God to the people. The
people!
They'll sell their kids for a ticket. Tickets so
scarce you've got to hire a manager, and pretty soon you, he, winds
up on the vaude circuits, touches every state, SRO all over. A
genuine American freak. Then he gets word from God he shouldn't play
theaters with those evil actors. Oughta talk in churches. Of course
the churches won't have him. Fiend turned inside out is still a
fiend. And a fake. A show biz figure. So he has to play stadiums now,
and instead of six hundred he draws maybe twenty thousand and winds
up in Yankee Stadium with a turnaway crowd, a full orchestra, four
hundred converts around him, the best press agent in town, and the
first million-dollar gate that isn't a heavy-weight fight. More?
Sure. He builds his own temple and they come from all over the world
to hear him speak. Then, at his peak, he moves off to Paris, London,
Berlin. And hey. Rome."
Lew fell against his chairback and lit the cigar he'd
been using as a pointer, a round little man with a low forehead,
thick black hair, and a constant faceful of that stogie. He worked at
being a Broadway character, structured comic lines to deliver ad lib
at the right moment: "Jack Johnson got the worst deal of any
nigger since Othello" is one of his I never forgot.
Lew had bought the New York Daily Mirror and read
bits of it in the car on the way to J ack's, and now he pulled it out
of his right coat pocket in a gesture he said later was caused by
discomfort from the bulk, and tossed it onto the coffee table. Jack
opened it, almost as a relfex, and skimmed the headlines while all
the silence was drumming at us. Jack turned the pages, barely looking
at them, then stopped and said to Lew: "How the hell could I
preach anything anybody'd believe? I haven't made a speech since high
school when I did something from Lincoln. I'm no speaker, Lew."
"I'd make you one," Lew said. "I'd get
you drama coaches, speech coaches, singing teachers. Why, for
Christ's sake, you'd be a voice to reckon with in six months. I seen
this happen on Broadway."
"I think it's a fantastic idea," Alice
said. She stood up and paced in front of the couch nervously.
"You know the power you'd have, Jack?" Lew
asked. "Hell, we might even get a new American church going.
Sell stock in it. I'd buy some myself. A man like you carrying the
word to America what the rackets are all about, giving people the
lowdown on the secret life of their country. Jesus, I get the shivers
thinking how you'd say it. Snarling, by God. Snarling at those
suckers for God Almighty. Your stories don't have to be true but
they'll sound true anyway. Jesus, it's so rich I can hear the swoons
already. I could put together a team of writers'd give you the
goddamnedest supply of hoopla America ever heard. Force-feed 'em
their own home-grown bullshit. Tell 'em you've gotten inside their
souls and know what they need. They need more truth from you, that's
what they need. Can't you see those hicks who read everything they
can lay hands on about crooks and killers? Organ music with it. 'The
Star Spangled Banner', 'Holy, Holy, Holy.' You know what Oscar Wilde
said, don't you? Americans love heroes, especially crooked ones.
Twenty to one you'd get a movie. Maybe they'd even run you for
Congress. A star, Jack, I mean a goddamn one hundred percent
true-blue American star. How does it grab you?"
Alice exploded before Jack could say anything at all.
"John, it's absolutely perfect. Did you ever believe anybody'd
ask you to do anything as marvelous as this? And you can do it.
Everything he said was true. You'd be wonderful. I've heard you talk
when you're excited about something and I know you can do it. You
know you can act, you did it in high school, oh, I know it's right
for you."
Jack closed the newspaper and folded it. He crossed
his legs, left foot on right knee and tapped the paper on his shoe.
"You'd like to do a little barnstorming, would
you?" he said to her.
"I'd love to go with you."
Alice's faith. Love alone. She really believed Jack
could do anything. Such an idea also had pragmatic appeal: saving
herself from damnation. Show business? So what? As to the stardom,
well, the truth is, Alice could no longer get along without it. Yet
this promised stardom without taint. Oh, it was sweet! The promise of
life renewed for Alice. And her John the agent of renewal.
"What's your reaction, Marcus?" Jack said.
And when I chuckled, he frowned.
"I can see it all. I really can see you up there
on the altar, giving us all a lesson in brimstone. I think Lew is
right. I think it'd work. People would pay just to see you sit there,
but if you started saving their souls, well, that's an idea that's
worth a million without even counting next month's house." And I
laughed again. "What sort of robes would you wear? Holy Roman or
Masonic?"
Maybe that did it, because Jack laughed then too. He
tapped Alice lightly on the knee with the newspaper and tossed it on
the coffee table in front of her. It's curious that I remember every
move that newspaper made, not that Alice would've missed its message
without us, although I suppose that's possible. The point is that Lew
and I, on our mission for American evangelism, were innocent bearers
of the hot news.
Jack stood up. "It's a joke," he said.
"No," said Lew, "I'm being straight."
"Make a funny story back in Lindy's if I said
yes."
"Jack," said Lew, who was suddenly drained
of facial blood by the remark, "this is an honest-to-God idea I
had and told nobody but Marcus and now you and your wife. Nobody
else."
Jack gave him a short look and figured out from his
new complexion that he wasn't practical-joking.
"'
Okay, Lew. Okay. Let's say it's a nice try
then. But not for me. Maybe it'd make a bundle, but it rubs me wrong.
I feel like a stool pigeon just thinking about it."
"No names, Jack, nobody's asking for names. Tell
stories, that's all. It's what you know about how it all works."
"That's what I mean. You don't tell the suckers
how the game is played."
Alice picked up the Mirror and slowly and
methodically rolled it into a bat. She tapped it against her palm the
way a cop plays with a sap. I thought she was going to let Jack have
a fast one across the nose. Good-bye barnstorm. Good-bye private
Diamond altar. Good-bye salvation, for now.
Her crestfallen scene reveals to me at this remove
that she really didn't understand Jack as well as I thought she
did. She knew him better than anyone on earth, but she didn't
understand how he could possibly be true to his nature. She really
thought he was a crook, all the way through to the dirty underwear of
his psyche.
"It'd be fun, Lew," Jack said, starting to
pace now himself, relaxed that it was over and he could talk about
it and add it to his bag of offers. "It'd be a hell of a
lot of fun. New kind of take. And I know I got a little ham in me.
Yeah, it'd be a good time, but I couldn't take it for long. I
couldn't live up to the part."
Alice left the room and carried the newspaper with
her. It looked like a nightstick now. I can see her unrolling it and
reading it in the kitchen, although I was not in the kitchen. She
turns the pages angrily, not seeing the headlines, the photos, the
words. She stops at Winchell because everybody stops there and reads
him. She is not really reading. Her eyes have stopped at his block of
black and white, and she stares down at it, thinking of getting off
the train in Omaha and Denver and Boston and Tallahassee and
spreading the word of John and God and standing in the wings holding
her John's robe, making him tea, no more whiskey, washing his socks,
answering his mail, refusing interviews. Damn, damn, damn, thinks
Alice, and she sees his name in Winchell.
In the living room, standing on his purple Turkish
rug, framing himself against the blue silk he'd stolen from a Jersey
boxcar eight years before, Jack was saying he couldn't be a
hypocrite.
"That sound funny coming from me, Lew?"
"Not a bit, Jack. I understand." But I
could see Lew too, watching a million-dollar idea curl up in the
smoke of another Broadway pipe dream.
" 'Hypocrite? What the hell was he talking
about'?" Lew asked me later when we were on the way back to the
Hudson station. "Does he think I don't know who he is?"
"He had something else in mind, I'm sure,"
I said. "He knows you know who he is. He knows everybody knows.
But he obviously doesn't think what he's doing is hypocritical."
Lew shook his head. "All the nuts ain't on the
sundaes."
Lew too. Victim of tunnel vision: A man's a thief,
he's dishonest. What we didn't know as we listened to Jack was that
he was in the midst of a delicate, supremely honest balancing act
that would bring his life together if it worked, let it function as a
unified whole and not as warring factions. Maybe Jack thought he was
being honest in his retreat from page one, in his acquiescence to
Alice's implorings that he become a private man, a country man, a
home man, a husband. This behavior generated in Lew's head the idea
that if Jack could only stay down long enough, he was fodder for
American sainthood.
But Lew's conversion plan was false because Jack's
behavior in retreat was false. Jack wasn't a private but a public
man, not a country squire but a city slicker, not a home but a hotel
room man, not a husband but a cocksmith, not an American saint but an
insatiable extortionist. ("Fuck 'em," he said when I told
him about Warren Van Deusen's vigilantes.) And he was not the sum of
all these life-styles either, but a fusion beyond them all.