When I Stop Talking You (2 page)

About three years ago, after Ocean's Thirteen premiered, the people who run Grauman's said they wanted the stars of the film-Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, George Clooney-to put their prints in the cement. Clooney said, "Look, we'll do it, but Jerry has to do it, too." As a rule, Grauman's only honors actors, but they really wanted these guys, so they relented. As I was putting my hands in the cement, I looked up and saw the very window in the Roosevelt Hotel from which, all those years ago, I had looked out at Hollywood. While I was thinking about this-how strange to return to the same place, only now on the other side of the glass-I noticed the men next to me, my friends, were laughing.

A few days earlier, Clooney had called Pitt and Damon and said, "You know how when you go to Grauman's the footprints always look so small? Well, you don't want a kid out there, years from now, saying, 'Oh, God, look at Brad Pitt and Matt Damon-they had baby feet!' Tell you what. I'll pick us up size fourteen shoes, three pairs. Jerry? Oh, well, let's not mention it to Jerry." So these friends of mine have clown shoes, while I'm the guy with the tiny feet on the walk of fame. And you know what they say about small feet.

My father drove us all over LA. One night, we waited in front of a spot on Sunset Boulevard where the stars showed themselves. I think it was Ciro's. You have to understand what it was like back then. There were few cars on Sunset, no high-rises. It was still woods and wilderness, cactus fronds from the last joint all the way to the ocean. Beverly Hills was a country town. The clubs on Sunset sat in the middle of all that wilderness like a string of pearls. This was before TV, before anything. It was olden times, when the studio bosses, in need of publicity, would scheme their way into the news, which usually meant dressing their stars in finery and sending them, in matching couples, before the flashbulbs along the red carpets of Sunset.

So we stood in front of Ciro's, with the sun going down. The cars rolled up and the stars walked the carpet, frozen in the light of the flash, pop, pop, pop. The door opened and I caught a glimpse of smoke and swells and bubbles, a look inside the genie bottle. (I thought I had died and gone to heaven.) Standing out there, on the wrong side of the rope, seeing the stars disappear into the velvet interior-well, if that doesn't make you ambitious, nothing will.

I remember Joan Crawford coming out with her head down, throwing her arms up, turning it on, slipping into her car, a boat of a thing. There was a boyfriend, but she was driving. I remember Mickey Cohen, too, the gangster who ran the underworld. He was a pug of a guy, rough looking but shedding more wattage than any of the film stars. Mickey was shot soon after. (He recovered.) My father showed me the story in the paper. As I read the story, I imagined the strutting strongman, grinning in the paparazzi flash. That was Hollywood to me-starlets and gangsters, glamour and menace and a snubnose.38 going blam blam blam.

There was a guy named Delmer Daves, a fascinating guy, a movie guy, a writer and director and producer, who started in the business as a prop boy on a silent called Covered Wagon. I won't go into tremendous detail about Delmer Daves, except to say he was a Stanford-educated lawyer, lived with the Hopi Indians, made a half dozen classic films, and was interested in jewelry, which is how he came to know my father. When he heard we were in LA, he invited us to lunch at the Fox studio. I remember the day vividly. Driving to the gate, the guard checking the list for "Weintraub," the thrill of being on that list, our name among the names of actors and movie people. The lot was a hubbub of activity-these were the days of the old studio system, when everything important happened on those few acres. It was a circus, with extras in cowboy hats and chaps and conquistador helmets and spurs, starlets in gowns, cameras and microphones and the machinery of show business. And the sets, little glimpses of Paris and New York, alleys and stoops rebuilt to the smallest detail-the street lamp, the park bench, the window from which your mother calls-so perfect beneath the clean, Pacific sky.

We ate in the commissary. Daves talked with my father. Everywhere I looked, I saw stars. At one table, Betty Grable was in costume, killing time as the cameras were moved for the next shot. She wore a sheer dress, and, of course, my eyes went straight to those beautiful legs. She was eating a sandwich, drinking a soda. I could not take my eyes off her. As she was eating and drinking, and as I was watching, she belched. It might sound like nothing, but to me it came as an epiphany. Those beautiful legs. And she belched! It upset me, and elated me, too. It meant these big stars were just people, normal human beings. It meant I could live here someday, be one of them. I told Betty Grable about this years later, that my career was made possible by her belch-I don't think it thrilled her. She smiled and said, "Well, Jerry, I'm glad I could help."

My father took us to Beverly Hills so we could see where the movie stars lived. It was nothing then, just a sleepy little town, as I said, filled with mom-and-pop stores. We went through the roads above Sunset Boulevard, where mansions clung to the cliffs. In my memory, every house is midcentury Spanish with porticos and overlooks and guest cabanas and side porches where the desert wind blows through the Joshua trees and cypress. I live in one of these houses now. I've had it remodeled, but you can still see the bones of old Beverly Hills. (Imagine a madcap silent screen star wandering in the halls, getting drunk on champagne, wrecking her coupe then calling the studio head to keep it out of the papers.) I bought it in the early 1970s, in a moment of success. It is just the sort of place I imagined an old-time studio great might live, Harry Cohn, David O. Selznick, or Irving Thalberg. It's where I'm writing these pages, telling these stories, each on its own an anecdote, but together the life of the kid with a dream looking back when the dream has come true.

I graduated from P.S. 70 a few weeks before the trip, and had brought along my autograph book, which is what we had instead of a yearbook. I waved it at every celebrity I met-on the carpet at Ciro's, on the Fox Lot, in Beverly Hills. I carried it to the doors of several mansions. Just walked right up and rang the bell. (If you tried this today, you'd be "neutralized," a burlap sack would be thrown over your head and you'd be hurried off to a secret location.) I still have that old autograph book. It's like something from another age, small, green, filled with signatures-some from teachers, some from classmates, some from movie stars. Carmen Miranda, Bette Davis, Paul Douglas, each of whom added a few words of encouragement. "Keep going, Jerry!" "You'll make it, Jerry!" "You'll be great, Jerry!" Years later, when I met some of these people again, I showed them the book. And they laughed. Betty Grable wanted to take a pen and add, "You're welcome for the belch, Jerry." I told her not to do it. You really shouldn't tamper with a historical document.

I did not like school. I was crazy about sports, especially football, and liked girls, and being around other kids, but the classrooms, where you had to sit and listen because the teachers were in charge-not for me. Maybe I thought I knew too much, had too clear a picture of the world and its hierarchies and where public school teachers fit into those hierarchies. I sat by the windows in back of class, looking over the rooftops of the Bronx, the chimneys and pipes. Beyond school was the Grand Concourse, beyond the Grand Concourse was Manhattan. I was impatient to see the world, and thus a usual suspect for the truant officer. I would look into the hall before first period, sign the sign-in sheet, then take off. Hurrying across the avenue with my collar pulled high to cover my face, I would run up the steps to the platform of the elevated. The D train was my limousine as it tottered and wheezed its way into the city.

One afternoon, I saw a red jacket in a store window on Mt. Eden Avenue, just around the corner from our apartment. That red jacket changed everything. It was worn by a mannequin, in a casual, hanging-out, street-corner pose. It was an exact replica of the one James Dean wore in Rebel Without a Cause. I imagined myself slouching in it, leaning in doorways in it, speaking bits of tough, cynical dialogue in it. (All the time! I don't know what gets into me-but I keep looking for trouble and I always-I swear you better lock me up. I'm going to smash somebody-I know it.) I took it off the mannequin and slipped it over my shoulders. It fit like a glove and hummed like a wire. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I had to have it. This was the first time I felt that consumerist urge: need it, need it, need it. I dug in my pockets. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Sadness followed by determination. I went around the corner, got my father, and dragged him back to the store. He watched me take down the jacket, zip it up, and turn around, all the time nodding in approval. "Oh, yes, Jerry, that is a gorgeous coat. It looks great on you, too, like it was made for you."

"Can I get it?" I asked.

"Sure," he said, "do you have the money?"

"No," I told him. "Can't you buy it for me?"

"Oh, no, that's not how it works," he said. "You get a job, save your money, then you buy it. Then you'll enjoy it. Otherwise, it won't mean anything. You'll get tired of it in an hour."

It was the beginning of my life as a working man. I got the jacket, of course, wore it till I lost it, but, by then, the jobs I had taken to buy the jacket had become more important to me than the jacket itself had ever been. At some point, you forget the object, and the means becomes the end. You work for the joy of the work. My father must have known this would happen.

One of my first jobs was in a movie theater on 170th Street in the Bronx. I was fourteen years old. I had been sneaking into the place since I was a kid. You could swing onto the balcony from a fire escape. It was dangerous and exciting. One night, the manager caught me. His name was Mr. Allen, and he was a good guy. He could have called my parents, or the police, but instead said, "I know you sneak in here every day and see the same movies over and over. Why don't you just work as an usher?"

When I was thirteen, I got a job at Goldberg's, a resort in the Catskills. I started as a busboy but was soon promoted to waiter. One day, I was serving a big wheel named Abraham Levitt. This is the guy who built Levittown on Long Island. He invented the modern suburbs. He took an interest in me. He asked about my parents, my plans, my dreams. This has been a theme in my life: Somehow, I have attracted mentors. Again and again, who knows why, older men have taken me under their wing. Maybe they recognized something in me, a vision of their younger selves, before their wife left them, before they were disappointed by their children, whatever. "Why are you working here?" Mr. Levitt asked. "Why aren't you at the Concord or Grossinger's? The big places. You're never going to make any money at Goldberg's."

I told him I did not know anybody at the Concord or Grossinger's.

"Don't worry," he said. "I'll take care of you."

The next morning, he drove me over to the Concord and introduced me to the owner, Arthur Winarick, and to his children. They gave me a job at the pool. At night, I danced with the girls. I went there for years, first as a cabana boy, then as a guest, finally as a talent agent. Relationships are the only thing that really matters, in business and in life. That's what I learned from Abraham Levitt.

I started my first business around this time. It began with a sudden realization, an insight. There was a dry cleaner's on the ground floor of our apartment building. It was owned by a man named Angelo Bozanellis. I used to sit on the fire escape of our apartment and watch the men get off the train and rush into the store, then head home with their dry cleaning. I went to Mr. Bozanellis and said, "I can't stand to watch these men struggle every night. Do us all a favor. Let me deliver the cleaning. That way, a man comes home from work, he goes directly to see his wife and children. Maybe we'll save a marriage."

He said yes.

I asked what I would get paid.

"You'll make money on tips. People will give you nickels and dimes. But you gotta hustle. It's up to you."

Fine.

I made my deliveries every day at four, racing though the neighborhood, up and down stairs, in and out of the little, tomblike elevators, delivering the dry cleaning to housewives an hour before their husbands came home. One afternoon, I saw a regular customer coming out of the Chinese laundry with a sack of clothes, and then it hit me. The same people who were having their cleaning done were also having their clothes washed. So I went in and spoke to the owner, Louie Hong, an old Chinese man with dark, mysterious eyes. I said, "Look, Mr. Hong, as long as I'm delivering the cleaning, I might as well bring the wash, too. It's going to the same houses."

Just like that, I had become an entrepreneur.

But I had done a stupid thing. It did not take me long to realize my mistake. No matter how many packages I carried up the stairs, the tip stayed the same. There must be a business-school term for this: I was competing against myself, driving down my own prices. I figured out a solution. I would carry everything up in one trip, but hide the washing under the landing. First I would deliver just the dry cleaning, then loop back later to deliver the laundry. This way, I got two dimes instead of one.

Over time, the neighborhood took on a different aspect for me. I saw it with new eyes. It was no longer just streets and stores: It was needs and opportunities, money to be made. Once you see the world this way, things are never the same. It is like recognizing the pattern in the carpet. You cannot unrecognize it. The grocery, the fruit stand, the newspaper seller-I was making deliveries for all of them. Very quickly, there was too much business to handle on my own. I went to my brother and said, "Melvyn, I have a good thing going, but I need help." We recruited a half dozen kids from the corner, and I soon had a little army of delivery boys running all over the neighborhood, with a percentage of each tip sent up the chain to me.

I learned lessons from this business that I still follow today: People will pay you to make their lives easier; always take the time to make the pitch; personal service is the name of the game; never get paid once for doing something twice.

When I was fourteen years old, I ran away from home. I don't mean down the block away, or in the city overnight away, I mean away, away. I was standing on the corner with my friend Stuie Platt when the restlessness took hold of me.

"What do you say we get out of here?" I said.

"Out of here where?" he asked.

"Out of here, out of here," I said.

My uncle owned part of a hotel in Miami Beach. If we could make it down there, I figured he would give us bellhop jobs. In Miami Beach, being a bellhop is like being an aristocrat-that's what I told Stuie. We would earn pockets of cash parking Cadillac cars.

"How are we going to get there?" asked Stuie.

"We'll hitchhike," I said.

"How do you hitchhike to Florida?" he asked.

"What do you mean," I said, "You stick out your thumb-that's how."

We left with four dollars. We were on the road all day, eating in diners, resting on the median, the traffic breaking around us like surf. We had spent all the money by the time we reached Pennsylvania.

"How far to Florida?" asked Stuie.

"A few more days," I told him.

We got scared when the sun went down. We slept hugging each other in a field, but continued at dawn. Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina. We were starving and broke. You know who fed us? Black people. In those days, the blacks were on one side of the street, the whites were on the other. On the white side, we were shooed away like rats, chased, cursed. On the black side, we were talked to, looked after, given plates piled with food. We would fill up and go on, skirting the wood shacks with dogs barking and the sun beating down.

Two drunk men in a red Oldsmobile convertible stopped for us outside Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. We climbed in back. Here is what I remember: one of the men asking me questions; the squeal of rubber; the things along the road-trees, houses, signs-spinning past us; the car sailing off the pavement; breaking glass; being thrown; being in the air; landing in a bed of soft, black dirt, dazed; something screaming toward me through the sky-HUMPH! It lands at my side. It's Stuie. We stare at each other, confused. We get up and run. Away from the road, the car and broken glass and the drunk men.

We went through the woods into Myrtle Beach. We were crying, heaving, little-kid sobs, all the way. We asked for the police station. A young cop with white teeth called our parents in the Bronx, then drove us to an airport on the edge of town. There was a big, silver plane on the runway-Capital Airlines. The propellers started with a cough and spun into a void. I sat at the window. We sped down the runway, lifted off-the town and the sea were soon far below us. It was the first time I had been on a plane.

We landed at LaGuardia. There was no terminal then. You parked in a field and walked. My mother and father were waiting. I could see my father's face. He was angry, pounding his fist into his palm, muttering, "Wait till I get my hands on him." My mother pushed down his fist, saying, "Don't you touch him. Don't you touch my boy."

Four days-that's how long we were gone, but those four days changed my life. Because I was scared but kept on going and managed to survive.

When we got home, my father sat me down and asked, "Why did you do it, Jerry?"

"Why? Because I wanted to see the world."

Everything but the Girl

I had no desire to go to college. I figured the world would be my classroom. Freshman year was the U.S. Air Force. I enlisted in the spring before high-school graduation. At seventeen, I was not old enough to sign the form, so I had to ask my parents for permission. My mother was distressed, but my father knew there was no holding me. "Sign it," he told her. "Just sign it."

Why the Air Force?

Because I did not think I could survive the Marine training, because I did not want to be an Army grunt, because I hated the Navy uniforms.

My basic training started at Sampson Air Force Base, in upstate New York, then continued at Kessler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi, where signs on the lawns near town said: "No niggers, no kikes, no dogs." What you learn in such a place is not just what they are teaching. I mean, yes, they taught me to work a radio, talk in code, sit in a bunker with earphones on my head, tracking jets across the sky, but what I learned was America, the South, people from other parts of the country, how to stand up and take care of myself.

I had a good old boy, son of a bitch sergeant named Harley. He used to mangle my name at mail call, really Jew it up: WHINE-traub! WHINE-traub! WHINE-traub! I got lots of letters from my high-school sweetheart-she became my first wife. She used to send cookies and candy. Harley would rip open the packages and throw the cookies all over the floor, yelling, WHINE-traub! WHINE-traub! So one day, we're in chow line, just him and me, and I go up and whisper, so he has to lean close to hear me, "I am going to kill you."

He shouts, "What did you say?"

I speak even softer the second time: "You heard me, Harley. One day, I am going to find you in town, when you're alone, and I am going to kill you."

He goes nuts. "Who the hell do you think you are, Jew boy? You can't talk to me like that." He hits me across the mouth. I wipe away the blood and look up smiling. "Now I've got you, you son of a bitch. You're screwed." I went to the colonel and filed a complaint. Harley was gone. There are all kinds of ways to deal with an adversary: fists, words, taunts, compromise, submission, complaint, and courts-martial.

On one occasion, a service buddy, knowing I was far from home, invited me to his house for the weekend. We got in late Friday and went right to sleep. When we came down to the kitchen Saturday morning, there, sitting at the table, eating his breakfast, was my friend's father dressed in a white robe with a Klan hood next to him in a chair. I kid you not, this actually happened. I sit down, nervous, smiling. He shakes my hand, asks my name, then says, "Weintraub? What kind of name is Weintraub?"

"It's a Jewish name, sir."

"You a Jew?" he says. "No, you no Jew. If you a Jew, where's your horns?"

"Oh, they're there," I tell him. "Just had to file 'em down to fit under the helmet."

I got one of the bleakest postings in the Air Force- Fairbanks, Alaska. It was the wild frontier: dirt streets, trading posts, a saloon with the sort of long wood bar you see in old westerns. Soldiers and contractors stopped in town on their way to the Aleutian Islands, where we had radar stations and listening posts. It was as close as you could get to the Soviet Union without leaving American soil. These men were stationed on the islands for long stretches, did not see a woman for months, did not see the sun for just as long. When they returned to Fairbanks, they picked up their pay in a lump sum, then went on a spree. Aside from soldiers, the town was just bartenders and hookers, both in pursuit of the same mission: separate the doughboys from their cash. I learned a lot in Alaska. In the control tower, I learned how to read coordinates and communicate in code, which, even now, as I'm trying to sleep, comes back in maddening bursts of dots and dashes. In the barracks, where I ran a floating craps game-it appeared and disappeared like the blips on the radar screen-I learned the tricks of procurement. In town, I learned how to move product.