My Ears Are Bent (3 page)

I was once saved by the Hauptmann trial. In rapid succession I had interviewed a crooner making a come-back, an injured trapeze performer, the proprietor of a lonely hearts bureau, a student of earthquakes, a woman undertaker, a man who manufactures the fans used by fan dancers, a champion blood donor and Samuel Goldwyn, and had begun to whimper when I got near a typewriter. Then I was sent to Flemington, New Jersey, to write courtroom features during Hauptmann’s trial. The trial was a nightmare to most of the reporters who covered it and before it was over I had begun to talk in the unknown tongue, but at first it was soothing not to have to ask questions but to sit still and listen to those asked by the Attorney General of the State of New Jersey.
Compared with most newspaper work a trial is easy to cover—that is, a murder trial; a thing like the Bank of United States trial is another matter. A financial trial is slow torture. At a murder trial you simply sit still and write down what happens. After a reporter has covered features for a while there is nothing like a fast murder trial to get the lead out of his pants. It discourages him from trying to make literature out of every little two-by-four news story; a newspaper can have no bigger nuisance than a reporter who is always trying to write literature.

My office had at least ten reporters in Flemington through all the addled weeks of the Hauptmann trial—compared with our competitors we were under-staffed—and we covered it better than any other afternoon newspaper. We were able to do so because each night when court adjourned we left the fevered atmosphere of Flemington, where reporters were as enforcedly gregarious as fishing-worms in a can, and did not return until court opened next morning.

Throughout the trial we lived in Stockton, New Jersey, ten miles or so from Flemington, in a small hotel, the Stockton, which was established in 1832 and which is celebrated for its hearty American grub, things like breasts of chicken with thick slices of red, sugar-cured ham. We took over the establishment and installed a night wire downstairs. The hotel is operated by five brothers and their mother, the
Colligans. One of the brothers has a daughter who once won a prize in the Irish Sweepstakes. The hotel is a block from the Delaware River, and the Delaware toting ice is one of the most stirring spectacles I have seen. It makes you feel religious, or patriotic, or something. We used to go down there at night and watch slabs of ice as big as box-cars piling up against the bridge pillars; late at night we could stand on the porch of the hotel and hear the crunch of the ice in the river. There is a canal on each bank of the Delaware and they froze solid and we used to go down with two little sleds owned by the hotel and take belly-whoppers on the ice. Next morning we would eat great stacks of pancakes and Philadelphia scrapple and rashers of Mrs. Colligan’s red ham. I enjoyed the sledding in Stockton; it was the last exercise I had until the following winter, when I got in an airplane wreck near Cleveland after flying over the flooded Ohio River valley.

The hotel kept its groceries out back in a cave torn out of the side of a hill. In the cave was a big barrel containing
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red-legged terrapin which William Colligan, the eldest brother, had snatched out of a mountain stream in Sussex County. We had terrapin stew every night for a week, a stew made with sherry. After that we just played with the terrapin; someone would bring an armful of the terrapin into the bar every night. We had a lot of visitors in
Stockton. Each weekend our wives came out. One stormy night Thomas Benton, the painter, came out. He had been sent to make sketches at the trial by my newspaper. When he saw our oak fire he pulled off his shoes and sat down in front of it and talked until midnight about the beauty of the United States.

After dinner each night we had to leave the crowd in the bar—there were two bars in the hotel; one for the local farmers, one for the guests of the hotel—and go upstairs and write our “overnights,” stories written to run only until the trial got under way next day. That is, they would run in the Home and Twelve O’Clock editions and be thrown out of the Night. Everybody used one room, a big room with a fireplace in it, and by 10 P.M. the room would be full of cursing reporters whacking out nonsense on portable typewriters. Wesley Price, who acted as a sort of walking city editor during the trial, would go from typewriter to typewriter, snatching out takes of copy. He would look at the stuff, groan, and send it down, sheet by sheet, to the sleepy telegraph operator he had stationed in the hotel office. Girls from Trenton and Philadelphia used to come to Stockton at night and they would stand in the door and interrupt us to ask if we believed Hauptmann was guilty. One of our photographers would screw flash bulbs in the sockets in the bathroom and when one of the Trenton tramps went in we would hear her scream when
she switched on the light and got the full blast of the high-powered bulb right in her eyes. One of our reporters, Sutherland Denlinger, used to sing spirituals and military songs while working. He got so he could sing “Tiddly Winks God Damn” and write an analysis of the previous day’s testimony at the same time.

We kept the typewriters going sometimes until 3 A.M., stepping out on the upstairs porch at intervals to watch the snow piling up in the peaceful, deserted village street. In the morning all the ashtrays would be full of butts and the wastebaskets would hold piles of crumpled copy paper and empty applejack bottles. Whenever I see a bottle of applejack I think of the Hauptmann trial. It was a mess. I have seen six men electrocuted, and once a young woman who had been stabbed in the neck died while I was trying to make her lie still, and one night I saw a white-haired Irish cop with a kindly face give a Negro thief the third degree, slowly tearing fresh bandages off wounds in the Negro’s back, but for unnecessary inhumanity I do not believe I ever saw anything which surpassed the Hauptmann trial—Mrs. Lindbergh on the witness stand, for example, identifying her murdered child’s sleeping suit, or Mrs. Hauptmann the night the jury came in, the night she heard that her husband was to be electrocuted. The older I get the less I care to see such
things. I am callous enough to remember, however, that the trial gave me respite from the city room and a lot of country air and country food. It was a mess, but I had fun covering it, and there will never be anything like it again, God willing. That is the way I feel about many of the stories I have worked on.

Within a few blocks of virtually every large newspaper in the United States except The Christian Science Monitor there is a saloon haunted by reporters, a saloon which also functions as a bank, as a sanitarium, as a gymnasium and sometimes as a home. Dick’s Bar and Grill is such a place. It is sometimes possible to see more amazing sights in fifteen minutes in Dick’s—especially on a night when Jim Howard, the rewrite man, finds it difficult to roll anything but five aces in one, or on a night when the city editor of the greatest afternoon newspaper in the United States imitates a tree frog, or on a night when Louie, the bartender who likes Chinese food, describes his last square meal at Tingyatsak’s, or on a night when Elmer Roessner, the feature editor, gets on all fours to locate a die he has rolled into the fantastic debris behind the bar—than it is in an entire
performance of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus.

While I never drink anything stronger than Moxie, I often go into Dick’s to observe life, a subject in which I have been deeply interested since childhood. This place is down on a narrow street near the Brooklyn Bridge; it is one of those places with a twitchy neon sign, a bar which sags here and there, possibly because it was moved in and out of several speakeasies during prohibition, and a grimy window on which are stuck greasy cardboard signs advertising specials, such as “Special Today. Chicken Pot Pie. Bread & Butter. 35c.” There are a big bowl of fresh roasted peanuts and a bottle of mulligan on the bar, and the tile floor is littered with peanut hulls and cigarette ends and bologna rinds from the free lunch. The cook uses olive oil for frying, and he burns a lot of it during the day. On damp days the place smells like a stable, and there is a legend in the neighborhood that truck-drivers in the street outside have to restrain their horses from entering.

The proprietor, Dick, is a sad-eyed and broad-beamed Italian who often shakes his fat, hairy fists at the fly-specked ceiling and screams, “I am being crucified.” He hates all his customers, but he is liberal with credit and has a cigar box under the bar full of tabs. If he is feeling good, he slides the bottle
toward the customer every third drink and says, “This is on me.”

One time Dorothy Hall, a society reporter, took Dick with her to the Beaux Arts Ball. The costumes were supposed to be Oriental, and she got him a eunuch costume. She told him to speak nothing but Italian and introduced him as a big Italian nobleman from Naples. He danced with Elsa Maxwell, who was dressed as a Grand Eunuch.

“She sure did have good manners,” he said later.

When he buys a newspaper, he spreads it out on the bar and looks for girls in bathing suits. When he finds one he likes, he says, “My God! Look at this baby. My God! This baby has everything. My God! I would die for her.”

The customers hardly ever call him by his name. He is called “The House.” For example, a customer will say to a bartender, “Go see if The House will cash a check for me.” When he is shaking dice, he always sings. He believes he has a good voice, and his favorite song is “Love in Bloom.” When he comes to work, he ties on his apron and looks down the bar at his customers. Then he shakes his head and says, “They must have forgot to lock the doors at the asylum.” However, he believes he runs a classy place. He will say with pride, “The last time Mr. Heywood Broun was in here, he said I make the best gin rickey
he ever tasted.” One time someone stole a sign from one of the chain nut stores, the Chock Full o’ Nuts Company, and hung it on his door, and he was angry for days.

The place was once a speakeasy, and twenty minutes after repeal The House had broken all the 1,117 new alcohol regulations. In most of the new saloons, the bartenders reek with the idea of Service and treat the customers with respect, but here the bartenders also hate the customers. This hatred is mutual, and each night the bar is the barrier between two hostile camps. The bartenders do not sympathize with a customer who comes in with a hangover, and they do not prescribe remedies.

“I hope you die,” The House often says. “You should leave the state for what you did last night.”

There are two steady waiters, and they also hate the customers. One is named Horace. He is an Italian who suffers from adenoids and never shuts his mouth. He has a delusion about his head. He was in the Italian Army during the war, and he believes his head was shot off and that the doctors got the head of an Austrian and sewed it on his neck. He claims that the new head is not satisfactory because it is the head of a young man and often urges him into adventures in which the rest of his body is not particularly interested.

“My other head had a big mustache,” he said one night.

The other waiter is a Norwegian named Eddie, whose feet hurt. Fifteen minutes after he is given an order, he comes back and says, “What was it you ordered?” He keeps a bottle of gin on the roof of the icebox and takes a drink every thirty minutes. On Saturday nights, when the rush is over, he puts a raincoat over his waiter’s jacket and goes out to look up his enemies. Sometimes after such errands he does not show up for several days, and if a customer inquires, The House says, “He’s in Bellevue. I am being crucified.”

The cook has a bad temper. One noon a customer came in and looked at the mimeographed menu.

“How is the London broil?” he asked Eddie.

“I’ll go see,” he said.

In a moment Eddie returned.

“The cook says it’s no good,” he said.

“Go ask him what is good,” commanded the customer.

A few minutes later Eddie came back again.

“The cook says nothing’s no good,” he said.

Among the customers are four members of a federal inspection service, who are known in the place as “the G-men.” When one of them gets a telephone call, he hurries to the booth in the rear and slams the
door. This is a signal for the others to rush forward and bang on the wooden sides of the booth with telephone books. One night they tore a booth down. They keep yelling, “Listen to the tom-tom in the jungle.” They keep slamming the booth until their enraged colleague rushes out, and then they grab him. They throw him on the floor and sit on him. When he is exhausted and lies still, they take turns talking double-talk into the mouthpiece until the person on the other end hangs up. The fight is repeated three times each night, with a different G-man as the victim each time. The other customers rarely notice the fights any more.

There are two Southerners among the customers. One is from a state which still secedes from the Union at least once every fortnight, and he often talks in a very high-class Southern accent so people will ask him, “Are you from the South?” He is afraid to walk the streets after dark because of Yankees, and always carries a whistle he stole from a drunken policeman. Sometimes on the way home he thinks a Yankee is after him and blows his whistle, summoning police from blocks around. He used to say that corn whiskey was the only whiskey fit to drink and complain bitterly because The House refused to carry it. One night one of the bartenders went up to Harlem and bought a quart, and when the Southerner began complaining about never getting any good
old corn whiskey any more, he brought it out. The Southerner felt compelled to buy several drinks of it, and was sick for four days. When The House heard about it, he said, “We always try to please our customers.”

The other Southerner is known in the place as Jeeter Lester. He does not like the South, because he could never make a living down there, and now he claims he was born at the northeast corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street. The small, sylvan Southern town in which he was born was so quiet that he takes a psychopathic delight in noise. When he empties a beer glass, he often buys it from the bartender and throws it on the floor. Sometimes the floor around his feet is ankle-deep in broken glass. He was once converted to the Baptist Church by a tent revivalist, and when he is blue he sings hymns. His favorite hymn is “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder I’ll Be There.”