IBID (21 page)

Along these same lines, Jonathan is reputed to have spent $35,000 in 1960 for a painting of two young girls with very tiny dots for eyes, allegedly painted by Walter Keane on an off-day and potentially so offensive to devotees of Margaret and Walter Keane and their big-eyed offerings that Jonathan took no chances and destroyed the painting upon purchase. “It would have ended my career if word of that painting had gotten out,” a very grateful Keane supposedly confessed to Jonathan. “Why didn’t you just dispose of it yourself?” Jonathan asked. “I needed the 35 g’s,” Keane allegedly responded. “I need paint and canvas for my new series—all the American presidents, each with large sad eyes.” (Interview with Patsy Esposito, former president of the North American Keane Fan Club, 14 August 1998—two weeks after her family’s successful intervention.)

5.
The Blashette Foundation rarely declined a legitimate request.
One of the rare occasions on which Jonathan did turn down a legitimate application for financial assistance involved the Chamber of Commerce of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, definitely not, in Jonathan’s opinion, one of the legendary Seven Cities of the Cibola. The businessmen of the town had sought his help in financing a public swimming pool for use by the town
youngsters. “It gets so hot here, especially in the summer, you understand,” wrote a member of the Chamber, “and the kiddies would appreciate whatever generous gift you might offer to help us provide them with a cool place to splash and play when the mercury licks the tip of the thermometer.” To which Jonathan, according to Rowan, is said to have responded, “I don’t send money to idiot towns that name themselves after stupid radio programs. Go put the squeeze on Ralph Edwards.”

Sybil Rowan in her ‘
Tis Better to Give: The Story of Twentieth Century Philanthropy
(Tucson: Holiday-Hays Press, 1981) contends that Jonathan had never been a fan of Edwards. The story, probably apocryphal given that Rowan’s corroborating source is untrustworthy, is that Jonathan had been nursing a grudge against the radio and television personality ever since Edwards allegedly spattered urine on Jonathan’s shoe as the two men stood at side-by-side urinals in Radio City Music Hall men’s room following a screening of
The Farmer’s Daughter
. According to the men’s room attendant who supposedly shared the story with Louella Parsons (it was unearthed years later in her “Not for publication” file), Jonathan pointed out to Edwards that he had just peed on his foot.” “Which one?” Edwards had replied. “You have so many.” Jonathan, peeved and now somewhat ammonia-smelling, left the washroom in a huff, but not without flinging on his way out, “Don’t do my life. You put me on
This is Your Life
, you big giggle-turd, and I’ll tell the world you piss on shoes. Don’t you dare test me on this.”

I can’t believe that Jonathan would have demonstrated such animosity toward a man so loved by millions, and especially given the fact that Jonathan was known to urinate on his own feet on occasion when his mind would wander. Nor do I find Jonathan to have ever been the vindictive type. My
guess is that he simply felt the Chamber of Commerce could easily raise money for the pool on its own.

In any event, Jonathan Blashette was never a featured subject of
This is Your Life.

6.
“Je
suis
debout.”
“I
am
standing up.” The four-foot ten-inch Miss Piaf didn’t see the humor.

7.
This was followed by another visit from Mister Zoster.
The shingles was much more localized this time, confined almost entirely to the right testicle.

8.
Davison left the lunch meeting much later than the others.
While Jonathan was battling his third outbreak of shingles, Davison was experiencing a new bout of dietary priapism, a condition which generally kept him in phallic straights for several hours at a time. Especially troublesome was the fact that the causal meal took place in the dining room of the Manhattan Tennis Club and Davison hadn’t had the foresight to change out of his tennis shorts. Abashed and dangerously crotch-tented, Davison was eventually able to draw a favorite waiter into his confidence and enlist the gentleman in securing an accommodating sweatshirt—in this case one that had been left on the premises by either Sydney Greenstreet or Alfred Hitchcock. However, the rescue wasn’t effected without a little good-natured fun at Davison’s expense. “Trick knee acting up again, Mr. Davison? Can’t get up?” “That’s right, Benito. It’s hard. Very hard. Now will you hand me the damned sweatshirt before I get myself arrested?” (Cubby Tertwillinger,
Victual Viagra: Fifty Stories of Dietary Priapism, Fully Illustrated
[Knoxville: Ogilby and Bibb, 1999]).

9.
“How often do you masturbate?”
Jonathan’s Diary, 13 February 1948. The question came out of the blue. Jonathan responded by removing himself to a seat on the other side
on the train. It was several days later, after reading an article in the newspaper, which was accompanied by a photograph of its subject, that Jonathan was able to identify the man as Indiana University professor Alfred C. Kinsey, author of the recently published
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
. The question, as it turns out, had been strictly and innocently academic.

10.
Other investors in the group were Darwin Crawley, grocery store chain magnate Owen Sampson, and Benito Jannuzzi
. Rowan,
’Tis Better to Give
, 28-46. Friendships with both men were short-lived. Sampson succumbed to a heart attack while attending a performance of Haydn’s
Surprise Symphony
. Jannuzzi disappeared at sea while attempting to disprove Thor Heyerdahl’s theory on the ancestry of the Pacific Island peoples. Heyerdahl set out in his rudimentary “Kon-Tiki” to show that Peruvians could very well have sailed and paddled their way to, as Jannuzzi contemptuously put it, “Bali Ha!” According to Jannuzzi’s more intriguing theory, Polynesians originally came from France. Jannuzzi’s hand-hewn boat, the “Funny, Little, Good-for-Nothing Mimi” went down somewhere off the island of Cyprus in the Mediterranean.

Jannuzzi, incidentally, was the husband of Naomi Fillcrest Jannuzzi, best remembered for walking up to General Patton at a London fish market in late 1943 and slapping him silly with a fresh cod. “That’s for the shell-shocked boy you struck, you insensitive cabbagehead lout,” she snarled as bobbies dragged her away from the red-faced general. Patton allegedly shrugged off the incident, although some witnesses noted that the surprise attack had the unfortunate effect of loosening his bowels.

11.
Each new undertaking proved more interesting than the one before.
Ibid, 56-57. Another project from which Jonathan drew special satisfaction was the commissioning
of a piano concerto for his fellow World War I trenchmate, Adam Hines. Hines, whose hopes of a career on the concert stage were nearly dashed, courtesy of a Hun-launched minnie, asked Jonathan for money to fund a unique commission. Inspired by one-arm pianist Paul Wittgenstein (also a “Great War” casualty) who commissioned composer Maurice Ravel to write a piano concerto for left hand only, the result being the now legendary staple of the classical repertoire,
Concerto for the Left Hand in D Major
, Hines made an even more audacious request. Having lost all of his left arm and all but one digit on his right hand, Hines proposed what would eventually, through the genius of French composer Henri Bagatelle (member of the junior varsity “Les Dix”), become the “Concerto for Thumb of the Right Hand.” The piece was unevenly received in its premiere performance in Paris on June 13, 1947, although
Le Monde
was effusive in its praise, hailing it as a “triumph of the human spirit, a testament to artistic ingenuity and brio in the face of missing limbs and digits.”

Despite infrequent performances, a tradition has evolved over the years. In lieu of applause, audience members customarily offer a Caesarian thumbs-up or thumbs-down at the conclusion of the performance.

12.
Though he was an avid collector of American art, Jonathan’s preference for the esoteric and unusual placed him, nonetheless, outside the mainstream.
I had an opportunity to examine the painting in question, which now hangs in the conference room of the national headquarters for the American Association for the Elderly in Grove Dells, Wisconsin. The folk art primitivism and unnatural perspective of the colorful, well-populated landscape make it doubtful that
Frolics in the Spring
could have been painted by anyone but Grandma Moses. But another hand—a clearly mischievous one—is also evident,
and Jonathan’s charge in an undated memo to Interim Foundation Director Alva Block that someone may have perpetrated a little artistic vandalism is a plausible one.

In the top left corner behind a barn, two tiny naked figures appear to be engaged in some kind of close body contact that may or may not involve copulation. At top center someone has endowed a draft horse with an abnormally oversized equine phallus. At bottom right, a Boschian devil figure is chasing a cow with a trident. Hanging from the roof of a small farm house is a Salvador Dali-like droopy clock.

I asked the Executive Director for AAE, Lemuel Boychoir, if he had ever noticed these anomalies before. He scratched his head and said, “Well, no.” Then he leaned in and examined the painting a little closer and said, “Oh, goodness.”

13.
He was laid out for several days with a bout of hepatitis.
Davison believes he contracted the disease from a tainted Bloody Caesar he drank at a family wedding reception. Davison’s diary, 20 April 1948.

14.
The rash covered his entire body.
Jones’s case was an exceptional one. Failing to settle the matter on his own, Jonathan dashed off this final letter, then turned the complaint over to his attorneys.

15.
The deposition took three days.
Jonathan’s relief upon completing the grueling examination by the plaintiff’s attorneys was short-lived. Upon receipt of the transcripts, plaintiff’s counsel immediately moved for the presiding judge to force Jonathan to be redeposed. The court reporter assigned to record the original deposition, a frustrated dramatist, had invalidated Jonathan’s deposition by turning his testimony (and the questions posed by opposing counsel) into a full-fledged play script. A “scene” follows. JBP.