American Dreams (34 page)

He strove to be chipper, smiling as he related tidbits of news while gently
Page 225

stroking her hand.

'Shapiro, Bernstein's hoping to reach a million copies with "A Girl in Central Park" in a few months. Their band department's marketing a symphonic arrangement. "Blue Evening" is doing well, eighty thousand copies. And guess what? This is exciting. Tomorrow morning I'm seeing one of the biggest producers in New York. Ziegfeld. He called me. He's doing another Follies this year.'

Each tidbit was received with the same fey, slightly bewildered smile that broke his heart. A little silver line of drool spilled from Flavia's mouth and spotted her gown. The attendants always reminded Harry that she was increasingly incontinent and had to receive special, personal care. He knew they did it to extract tips, but he paid without complaint.

When the shadows lengthened and the air turned cool, he signaled a bull-necked man in white, rose, and kissed Flavia's forehead. 'Goodbye, dear girl. I'll see you next week.' And every week as long as she lived.

Flavia had done so much for him, he could never desert or divorce her, eveji though he often thought of another woman. She was the one for whom he'd written 'A Girl in Central Park.'

He didn't know what had become of Paul's cousin. He read the cast list for every Broadway play and never found her name. Perhaps she'd left the city.

He watched the attendant wheel his wife inside. He cranked up the Model T and motored over rough dirt roads to an excellent Port Chester inn where he and Flavia had dined in better days. After an hour spent with a fine meal and wine he drove up King Street, the dividing line between the states of New York and Connecticut. The area was hilly, rural, abundantly green.

210

Pictures

On the Connecticut side of the road he drove down a lane and parked in front of a well-kept two-story farm house, between a sporty buggy and a large yellow Reo. A handsome woman in a tasteful black dress admitted him with a cheerful

'How've you been, Harry?'

'Just fine, thanks, Belle.' He laid his bowler and walking stick on a marble-topped table. Mrs. Belle Steckel was the daughter of a fine old Greenwich family. Early on, she had, as they said, gone wrong. She rebounded and some years later established this refined house that was never bothered by the county authorities. When Harry had first become a customer, he felt himself to be the worst sort of cheat and deceiver. He talked it over with Mrs. Steckel, who was intelligent and quite sensible about such matters. She reminded him that he was not an anchorite. An occasional visit would harm no one, certainly not Flavia. 'And I'll bet if she
Page 226

knew, she'd understand.'

'Martha is free and expecting you,' Mrs. Steckel said. Harry thanked her again, paid her, and climbed the stairs. While he was approaching Martha's door, Mrs. Steckel started a piano roll in the parlor. 'The Cherry Blossom Man from Little Old Japan,' his latest song. Harry smiled and knocked.

'Hello, Martha,' he said almost shyly.

'Hello, Harry, it's swell to see you again.' Her robe fell open on her nakedness as she stood. She gave his cheek a platonic peck. Martha was short, on the dumpy side, with little education. But she had soft, round arms, and she understood why he needed to visit. To be with her for an hour enabled him to carry on with his life without regret or self-pity. He had only one deep and shameful secret. Sometimes, at the height of passion with Martha, he pretended she was Fritzi Crown.

He stayed the night at the home in Port Chester that he'd shared with Flavia. It was a dreary, ghostly place now. Sheets covered all but a few pieces of furniture. A smell of dust pervaded the rooms. He suspected he wouldn't sleep because of the Ziegfeld appointment, and he didn't. After rolling back and forth most of the night, he jumped out of bed an hour before dawn, drank half a pot of coffee, lit the Model T headlamps, and set out for Manhattan on the wretched roads. The trip of about twenty miles took nearly three hours.

Harry still worked independently, from his office in the Muldoon Building on West Twenty-eighth, the center of New York's music business.

New York Music

211

At one time or another all the giants of the industry had been located in the drab and ordinary buildings along Twenty-eighth. From offices on all floors of Harry's building came music, though Harry always thought of it as noise, because a dozen performances going at once, different keys, different tempos, different voices, amounted to cacophony. Or, as the anonymous wit who'd named the district had it, like tin pans clanging.

Because he spent so much time in town, Harry kept two rooms at the Hotel Mandrake on West Forty-fifth. There he shaved and dressed in a fresh suit, shirt, and cravat. Powdered and sprinkled with scented tonic, he turned up at the office of Florenz Ziegfeld twenty minutes before his ten o'clock appointment.

Ziegfeld kept him waiting until half past ten. 'Glad to see you,' the producer said when Harry was finally admitted to his office. Ziegfeld was an impressive man, forty or more, tall and rakish and stylishly dressed. Some
Page 227

said his dark good looks and slanting brows gave him a Mephistophelian air. At the moment he was married to the famous soubrette from Warsaw and Paris, Anna Held, but that didn't curtail his activity as a philanderer of renown. He consumed women like pretzels; single or married, it made no difference. Morals aside, he was known as a man who demanded and paid for the best in the shows he produced. He never short-changed his audiences or his talent.

Ziegfeld noticed Harry eyeing a faded poster among many decorating the walls. The poster advertized an attraction called the Dancing Ducks of Denmark. A smile more like a smirk crossed Ziegfeld's face.

'Would you believe I was only twenty-two when I produced that show back in Chicago?' He offered a cigar humidor: Harry shook his head.

Ziegfeld lit up. 'God damn SPCA closed me down. Said I had stage hands lighting matches under the ducks' feet to make them perform.' A solemn wink. "I suppose it was possible.' Harry was too tense to do more than force a smile.

'You know what I'd like from you, kid?'

'I hope it's a song for your new show.'

'No flies on you. What I've heard of your stuff I like. Time's a little short, though. The next edition of the Follies starts rehearsal at the Jardin de Pans in four weeks.' The Jardin was a glass-domed venue on top of a theater building at Forty-fourth and Broadway, hell-hot in summer and leaky when it rained; patrons were urged to bring umbrellas.

'What ] need is a jungle number. I picture forty or fifty girls' -- Ziegfeld pranced around the desk - 'little palm frond hiding these treasures, 212

Pictures

another hiding this one, you get the idea. We'll wind up with them dancing in the damnedest rainstorm ever seen on a stage. But 1 don't have a song.'

'I'll try to write something in a couple of days.'

'Can I count on it?'

'I'll have something,' Harry promised. 'If it isn't right, I'll work until it's what you want.'

'You sound like a professional. I like professionals. I hate bullshit artists who promise and don't deliver. I never hire one of those more than once.

Then I make sure the whole street knows, so they don't hire him either.'

Page 228

His brow popping with little dots of perspiration and his voice cracking with excitement, Harry said, 'I won't let you down, Mr. Ziegfeld.'

The producer put a comradely arm over Harry's shoulders as he escorted him to the door. 'Flo,' he said. 'Flo to my friends and fellow artists.'

In the anteroom, two song pluggers of Harry's acquaintance looked at him with virulent envy. Both strained forward in anticipation of a few seconds of Ziegfeld's time.

'Go peddle your papers, boy. I'm auditioning chorus girls in ten minutes.'

Ziegfeld aimed his index finger at Harry. 'Make it good.' He went back in his office and slammed the door.

Harry was elated. He fairly danced through the noontime crowds.

America, the land of opportunity! How right he'd been to dedicate himself to reaching these shores, there to work tirelessly at a profession he loved.

Harry's songs came out of his head through his fingers, but the music was in the city. He heard syncopated melodies all around him as he strode down Broadway devouring a hot roasted sweet potato bought from a vendor. He heard boats tooting on the river, feet trampling the pavement.

He heard elevateds clattering and trolleys clanging and autos honking, a mouth organ growling and a black ragamuffin with thumb tacks in his shoes tap-dancing on the curbstone while an older black boy played a banjo. The song was 'The Cherry Blossom Man.' Harry gave them each a dollar.

He was perspiring and short of breath, filled with excitement. This was the year, this was the moment, he felt it. Getting a song included in Girls Galore had been the first step, but a Ziegfeld production would put New York Music

213

him on top, especially if the song was a hit. Once he was in demand on Broadway, asked to write complete scores, he'd soon reach his other goal, his own publishing company.

Harry hated all the sordid things in the music business: composers who stole melodies, performers who demanded payoffs to perform a number, publishers who doctored royalty reports in their favor. But he forgot all the negatives when he dreamed of his own company. He had a wonderful name for it. Homeland Music. Its symbol, inevitably, would be a waving stars and stripes. Harry had never considered anything else.

Page 229

Wilbur, watch out for the gentleman.'

The mother's cry roused him from his walking reverie. A lad of six or seven ran into Harry while examining a toy.

'Madam, my fault entirely,' Harry said with a gallant tip of his bowler.

Never mind that the little boy looked mean and ugly as a toad; Harry was willing to forgive almost any sin on this day of glorious opportunity.

Suddenly his gaze became fixed on the toy in the lad's grimy fingers. A small elephant cut from tin and painted gray with white tusks. Although Harry was nominally a Jew, he was familiar with Christian literature, including St. Paul's vision on the Damascus road. Hardly daring to breathe, he said:

'Madam, may I buy this toy for a dollar?'

Startled, the woman said, 'Why, it isn't worth a fifth of--'

"I insist.' Greedy little Wilbur eagerly took the money. Harry clutched the tin elephant and fairly raced to his office, weaving in and out of the pedestrian mob like a football runner. He flung his bowler on the floor and slammed the keyboard open. By five o'clock he'd written 'The Elephant Rag.' He even forgot Fritzi while he did it.

'Oh, the trunk will wag

Like a jungle flag

When the pachyderm does

The elephant rag.

All join in and (stomp foot)

Do the elephant rag.'

Flo Ziegfeld was wild for the number. Something about the combination of silly lyrics and catchy tune made the Follies audience jump up as one, screaming with joy, when forty-four girls hoofing in the artificial 214

Pictures

rainstorm all came down at one time with a thunderous stomp. An eightfoothigh elephant operated by two men inside danced in the final chorus.

Sales of 'The Elephant Rag' curved up like a Fourth of July rocket
Page 230

trail, with deals made for the song in England and throughout Europe.

Singing the song and stomping became a craze. Young and old stomped in schoolyards, on streetcars, in feed lots, even in church halls when the choirmaster wasn't looking. Proper Englishmen and stolid Germans stomped. Volatile Frenchmen and passionate Spaniards stomped.

Eventually reports drifted out of Africa about Zulus stomping.

Every paper from the Herald to the Police Gazette sent reporters to the Hotel Mandrake for interviews with the man who had set the world stomping. A colleague expressed his admiration simply:

'Harry, you're a God damn genius.'

41 Sammy

Across the ocean in London the sun rose unseen behind sheets of rain.

Paul tramped from Leicester Square to St. Martin's Lane, poorly protected by his black umbrella. He turned into dark and narrow Cecil Court, where several film companies, including Pathe Freres and American

Luxograph, kept offices.

He dodged a torrent of water coursing off the roof slates above the building entrance, shook himself like a wet spaniel, and dashed up the stairs. He'd stayed home with Julie an extra half hour to get the children started with their nanny, and to sit at Julie's bedside, holding her hand and worrying. Childbearing had never been easy for her. She was huge now, nearly full term, confined to bed most of the day. She insisted she was fine, able to handle all of her family duties, but her pale and haggard face told a different story.

Climbing the stairs with water dripping from his wet shoes and fedora, Paul hoped the long spell of bad weather didn't persist through the autumn; he was scheduled to photograph German army maneuvers in Bavaria. He'd been invited because his name, and his book, had drawn him to the attention of the German general staff. They valued publicity Sammy

215

and cultivated those who could provide it. Kaiser Wilhelm II, ever eager to play soldier, always took part in the annual maneuvers.

To Englishmen the Kaiser was the living symbol of 'the German menace.' He continually professed to be a great friend of England - was not his grandmother the late Queen Victoria, and King George V his first cousin (like the Russian tsar, Nicholas)? Michael Radcliffe sneered at these family connections. 'A rotten club of inbred hemophiliacs and paranoid
Page 231

war lovers pretending to be the dearest of friends while awaiting the perfect opportunity to stab each other in the back.'

Michael was right to be suspicious of the European monarchs. Vicious animosity lurked behind their friendly pronouncements. Kaiser Wilhelm II had mourned at his uncle's funeral but on other occasions had called the dead king 'Satan,' and 'the worst intriguer in Europe.' And Germany's aggressive naval program seemed directed against Britain. Admiral Tirpitz was building two dreadnoughts a,year. The kaiser insisted this was solely for defense against unnamed enemies, but a large segment of the British population, including many Whitehall diplomats, felt sure the fleet would be used to attack their country. The penny papers were full of fanciful scare stories with titles such as 'The War Inevitable' and 'How the Germans Took London.'