I Shudder Page 6

  “So,” she said, after lighting a fire in her fireplace, taking a few calls, and finally sitting in an armchair opposite me, “why on earth would you want to be a playwright? It is a tewwible life!” At this point Helen had lived in New York for over forty years, and her accent had only deepened; it was particularly effective and intimidating over the phone. When the accent grew especially regal, she’d say, “Oh, I was just being the Countess,” and she’d usually add, “You know, I actually am a countess, but I would never use my title, it would be so pwetentious.” She’d arrived in America just before World War II, and I later asked her what life had been like back then, for a girl who spoke no English during wartime, and she’d replied, all aglow, “Oh, it was marvelous!”

  “I…I want to be a playwright because I love the theater,” I told Helen, “and because it’s all I’ve ever wanted to do, and because—I don’t know how to do anything else.”

  “Aha!” Helen cried. “So you want to be a playwright because you are totally useless!”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, we shall see.”

  I felt like, by admitting both my affection for the theater and my complete ineptitude, I had passed a test. Helen liked honesty, although rarely in herself. Like all good New Yorkers, Helen believed in complete and constant self-creation. Helen had come to New York in search of options, of infinite possibilities. She had wanted to see who she might become, through a combination of hard work, communion with other, equally driven people, and extravagant lying. It sounded good to me.

  I began writing plays, which weren’t very good and which no one, wisely, was willing to produce, so I supported myself with many odd jobs. These included:

  In coveralls, I’d lie on my back on a dolly and be shoved underneath the stage at the Juilliard School of Music to paint the underside with thick, black, fire-retardant goo. I’d become coated with this foul-smelling sludge, and people would move away from me on the subway. I felt strangely powerful.

  A Broadway production of The Importance of Being Earnest decided to use real plants for a massive greenhouse scene. I was hired to water the foliage every day, and then lower a bank of ultraviolet lights to keep everything alive indoors. Despite my best efforts, the plants kept dying, and I began using my meager salary to replace the corpses with plastic plants. Finally the grow-lights jammed and I accidentally flooded the dressing rooms and I ran away and I never went back and that’s why no one should ever use live plants onstage.

  When a publisher hired me to write dust-jacket copy, I’d diligently read the manuscripts of all the books I was assigned, so that I could summarize their contents in a paragraph or two. I soon learned that this was an unnecessary step. On the inside flap of their dust jackets, all first novelists were to be declared “the voice of a new generation,” all second or third novelists were to be called “a national treasure,” and every nonfiction author was “a champion of truth whom we ignore at our peril.” Each work from a genre writer—mysteries, thrillers, romance novels, etc.—was boosted as “an un-put-downable, page-turning, spine-tingling, edge-of-your-seat roller-coaster ride.”

  A soon-to-be-extinct magazine hired me to cover the auction of the Joan Crawford Estate. Among the available items was a pair of the star’s legendary fuck-me pumps, which went to an eleven-year-old child actress, who was using the event to attract personal publicity, and who distributed photos of herself as a supporting orphan in Annie, and who told reporters that Joan was her role model, “as an actress and a star.” The auction peaked when a security guard couldn’t stop laughing as he dangled a dusty plastic bag filled with dozens of pairs of Ms. Crawford’s pitchfork-caliber false eyelashes. The bidding was fierce, but the lashes eventually went to a guy who ran a housecleaning service and who swore that he only wanted to admire the lashes, as holy relics, and not wear them. I wondered if, in the future, Joan’s lashes might heal those born without lashes, or with pale, puny, unbattable lashes.

  Since I wasn’t making Helen any money as a playwright, she put me to work as a sort of indentured servant. I’d deliver packages for her, and then she began calling me at random times to escort her on mystery trips. She’d never tell me where we were going, but, for example, one afternoon she brought me to the apartment of an eager young composer/lyricist. Without any warning, Helen pointed to me and told the guy, “This is my nephew, Hanschen.”

  The composer/lyricist wanted Helen to represent both him and his latest project, a rock-opera adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses. He sat down at his piano and played and sang the entire score himself, pummeling the keys and singing his guts out, while Helen chain-smoked and I sat, as I’d been instructed to, cross-legged at her feet.

  After howling his rock opera’s thunderous climax, the exhausted but hopeful composer/lyricist turned to Helen and asked, “So what do you think?” Helen took a long, slow drag on her cigarette, exhaled deeply, and finally replied, nodding toward me, “He will tell you. Hanschen will tell you what I tink.”

  I was dumbfounded, but I knew that somehow, through mental telepathy, I was supposed to become Helen’s mouthpiece. That’s why she’d brought me along; it turned out that the composer/lyricist was a friend of a friend, and Helen had agreed to hear his work as a favor. Therefore, she didn’t feel obliged to come up with a coherent opinion. That was my job.

  “Well,” I began, at a total loss, “Helen thinks that your work is extremely promising…” As I went on, in terms of vague encouragement, Helen would nod sagely, and occasionally smack me on the back of my head to indicate agreement. After we left, I asked Helen why I’d been renamed Hanschen. “Today you are Hanschen.” she replied loftily, “Next time you will be Otto.”

  We repeated this ventriloquist routine at a number of auditions. One woman proclaimed that her new musical would be a surefire blockbuster because “it combines A Chorus Line with Star Wars.” The weird thing was, she was right: the piece was never produced, but it was in fact the story of starving, unemployed actors on other planets.

  As my relationship with Helen developed, I learned never to ask her any personal questions, as she maintained her Teutonic allure by remaining militantly private. Once in a very rare while, she’d drop some tidbit regarding her past, so I gradually found out that she’d had many passionate attachments in her life, and that they’d almost all ended badly. I began to understand why it was painful for her to talk about these attachments, but here’s what I began to unearth:

  Back in Germany, Helen had adored her architect father and battled constantly with her mother, “who wanted me to be a good girl.” Helen had a sister who was also now living in New York, on the Upper East Side, and another sister who she said was “cwazy.” “How is she crazy?” I asked, assuming that Helen meant she was stubborn or flighty. “Oh no, she is actually cwazy,” Helen said. “She’s in a mental hospital in Austwia, because she thinks she’s a Mother Superior.”

  Helen had been married to a handsome pianist, and she claimed that they had sometimes met in a confessional at St. Patrick’s Cathedral for clandestine lunchtime sex. The pianist had cheated on her, and when she’d tried to leave him, he’d locked her in a closet for three days. There was a stepdaughter, the marriage had ended, and Helen wouldn’t permit any more questions. I’m not sure what really went on, but with Helen, sometimes the most unlikely details turned out to be true.

  Before becoming an agent, Helen had been a successful photographer, and she’d been friends with people like Diane Arbus. There was a long-boarded-up theatrical hangout on Eighth Avenue, a restaurant called Downey’s. It briefly reopened in the nineties, and the walls were still lined with large, moodily lustrous black-and-white portraits of such stage stars as Richard Burton and Jessica Tandy, and it turned out that many of these pictures were Helen’s work. Helen only spoke to me once about this career. She said, “One night, I decided, no, I knew, I chust knew, that I wasn’t good enough, that I’d never be a gweat photographer. So I said, fine, alwight, then I will never take anot
her picture. So that same night, I took all of my pwints, hundweds of them, and my negatives, and all of my contact sheets, and I took them out into the stweet, and I shoved them into the public garbage cans. Done! But that night it wained, and the next morning I found all of my pictures, glued to the sidewalk, up and down Fifty-seventh Street. Can you imagine?”

  After abandoning photography, Helen spent some time in Connecticut, studying printmaking with the artist Josef Albers; Helen had a signed Albers print on her wall. But soon she became an agent, first with a partner and then on her own. I never felt that Helen still wanted to be an artist. She didn’t seem regretful, because reinvention and a rigorous lack of nostalgia were always her route to a happier future.

  While she was still taking celebrity portraits, Helen had met the very young, rising movie and theater star Tony Perkins. Perkins, whom Helen always referred to as “Toh-neee,” had been a teen heartthrob who was eager to pursue more serious work, and he was sexually conflicted. He had long-term affairs with men, including another screen idol, Tab Hunter, but he eventually married and had kids. During his early years, he and Helen had been extremely close, and had shared an apartment. Helen had helped manage his career, and Tony had managed Helen’s nose.

  Her nose, at the time, had been much longer and curved downwards. “Oh,” she told me, “it was a big one.” While Perkins was filming Psycho, he and the movie’s director, Alfred Hitchcock, both kept pressing Helen to have a nose job. She ultimately told them, “Fine, if you will pay for it.” They did, and Helen, her face heavily bandaged, had recuperated in one of her favorite vacation spots, the seaside Massachusetts town of Truro. Because of her trouble pronouncing the letter “r”, I absolutely loved to hear Helen’s interpretation of “Twuwo.”

  Helen’s friendship with Perkins dissolved; she once claimed that a psychic had told Perkins to distance himself from Helen. Whatever the cause, they became estranged, even though Perkins still lived only a few blocks away, with his new family. This was the pattern for many of Helen’s bonds, both personal and professional: she’d become tumultuously devoted to someone, and chaos would follow.

  Becoming an agent, as a woman in her fifties, must have been a struggle, but Helen was more than up for it. She especially relished being a one-man band; she represented mostly writers and theater designers, and there were no contracts. Helen had her own quirky business practices, based on trust and insanity. She would work tirelessly on a client’s behalf, but sometimes she’d drop clients without telling them. She hated confrontation, so if she decided to stop handling someone, she’d just stop taking their calls. Sometimes clients weren’t sure if they were still in fact clients; I completely understood when one crazed playwright appeared at Helen’s door waving a meat cleaver.

  Helen liked to think of herself as both impeccably well-mannered and devilishly raw. The high-toned Helen, when discussing someone’s new girlfriend, would say, “Oh, I am sorry, but I simply do not care for her. She is what I would call the ‘c’ word.” Then, after a beat, “You know, a cunt.” Helen would also augment her budget-wise wardrobe of rumpled T-shirts and threadbare pants with, say, an Art Deco brooch, set with diamonds. “All you weally need,” she’d comment, “is one piece of weally good jewelwy.”

  As a proud bohemian, Helen was disdainful of her profession. One night, during our early years, she had me accompany her to a fancy dinner party at a producer’s apartment. The guest list was high-powered, and I didn’t know a soul. Helen was seated beside another agent, a trendily shaggy-haired young hotshot from one of the mammoth uptown agencies, and he kept going on about all of his blue-chip clients and his eight-figure deals. Helen finally turned to him and asked, as loudly as possible, “My darling, tell me, how does it feel to be a pawasite on the awtist?”

  “Oh, schnookie,” Helen said to me, as I walked her home afterwards. When Helen was slightly drunk, I became “schnookie” when we were talking business, I was “Wudnick.” “Oh, schnookie, all of those tewwible people, at that tewwible party—what did you tink of it?”

  “I thought it was wonderful,” I said, just to provoke her.

  “You did not!” she all but spat. “But why do those people even exist? Oh, I suppose they are making a lot of money. But let us stop for a moment.”

  Helen then sat on the front steps of her building, and looked up at the sky. I wondered if she was plotting her next career, and her next personality, and her next life.

  “I am so old,” she said, “but I never complain. Not once. Tell me, haf you ever heard me complain?”

  “No,” I lied.

  “Gudt, that was the correct answer. But if I was to complain, do you know what I would say? I would say, here is the pwoblem, with the world. It is vewy simple. It is people. They are so tewwible. Oh, not you, not yet, you still haf time to become tewwible. Is that what you’d like, to become tewwible?”

  “More than anything!”

  “It is not a joke. Pwomise me, wight now, tell me that you will twy, not to become tewwible.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean—do not become someone who will do anything for money. Someone who does not wespect other people. Someone who tinks only of himself. A Nazi! An agent! A Wepublican!”

  Helen was difficult and controlling and, God knows, secretive, but she was also genuinely moral. She not only helped her clients, sometimes with discreet loans which she knew would never be repaid, but she supported community-action groups and a heroin-addicted nephew and just about anyone else who came to her with a sufficiently dramatic hard-luck story. She was the sort of person you never wanted to disappoint.

  “I will try,” I promised her, “not to become tewwible.”

  “And now you are imitating me! Mocking me! You swine!”

  I hadn’t meant to imitate Helen, not to her face, but that “tewwible” had just popped out.

  “I’m sorry!” I cried.

  “Well,” she said, “you should be. And now, do you know what I would like?” She’d turned wistful. “More than anything else in the world?”

  “What?”

  “An ice cweam cone.” She paused and then shouted, “Go get me one! Now!”

  2.

  If Helen was a creature of shadowy Continental intrigue, Peter was an all-American loon. He was a gifted director, and one of Helen’s clients, but his real genius was reserved for running toward friends or strangers on the street, with his arms outstretched, bellowing, “LAAAA!!!!” at the top of his lungs.

  Peter was probably the gayest man I’d ever met, and that’s saying something. Peter was, and I mean this as a compliment, scary gay. The first time I met Peter, I was at a party, and I felt a strange hand on my thigh. As it traveled upward I shoved the hand away. “Oh darling,” Peter said, now coming into view, “I just wanted to say hi, and pleased-to-meetcha. You know, to your dick.”

  In a very still photograph, Peter wouldn’t appear all that instantly, recognizably gay. He had the clear eyes, beaming smile, and perky outlook of someone in a TV commercial, an actor playing a friendly high school English teacher or a trustworthy young insurance agent. In reality, this wholesome, well-come-on-in package was wrapped around what one of Peter’s many therapists had termed “a high-functioning polymorphous perverse personality.”

  Peter was always ebullient, with absolutely no sense of inappropriate behavior. I once asked him when he’d come out to his parents, and he said, “Probably when I was five. They were having a cocktail party with all of their friends and I wanted to entertain everybody. So I came down the stairs into the living room wearing a towel turban and lip-synching to an Eartha Kitt record.” Peter’s adolescence was pure porn: he’d actually had sex with half the guys on his high school’s football team. When I asked him how he’d managed to do this, he said, “I was just really friendly, and most of the guys’ girlfriends wouldn’t have sex with them, or not often, and I would. What can I say, I was popular! Go, team!”

  After having sex with probably
everyone in his home state, Peter moved to New York. We would go out together, to parties and bars and clubs. Being with Peter was both wildly exhilarating and almost always embarrassing. On the one hand, he’d talk to anyone, which came in handy, for introductions. On the other hand, since Peter had no self-censoring mechanism, he’d say anything; if there was a lull in the conversation, Peter would grab the three nearest guys and say, “Okay, you, you, and you—let’s all go home together, have sex, and then make popcorn!” If he was on the street and Peter saw an attractive man, he’d grin and growl, “Hey there, sailor boy!” and invite the guy back to his apartment. Peter would try this on young studs, rabbinical students, and tourists out sightseeing with their wives and children. Peter’s glee was so spontaneous and untroubled that no one ever punched him, except his friends; his love objects would either run in the opposite direction or go home with him.

  Once, Peter and I were invited for a weekend at a friend’s woodsy country cabin, in the Catskills. Our rental car got stuck in a ditch at the beginning of the dirt road that led to the house. We hiked up to the front porch, and our host called the property’s caretaker, a grizzled local in overalls, a plaid flannel shirt, and steel-toed work boots. He arrived promptly, along with his mulleted, teenaged, high school quarterback son. By the time they got our car moving and came up to the house, Peter was in the kitchen, wearing a flowered apron, because he was busily tossing a bowl of fruit salad. In his mind, Peter had become a fetching suburban housewife, and easy prey for the local roughnecks. Peter was having trouble unscrewing the lid to a jar of mayonnaise, so, with the glass salad bowl balanced on his hip, he held out the stubborn jar to the caretaker. “Why don’t you try it,” he whispered, with a Marilyn Monroe breathiness, “Hercules?” As the caretaker speedily opened the jar, the host and I ran from the house. Later, Peter asked us, “But why did you two take off like that?” “Because, Peter,” I yelled, “you grew a VAGINA!” “Did I?” Peter giggled, tilting his head dreamily, now a winsome debutante awaiting her corsage.