The Rothman Scandal (31 page)

Surrounded as they were by great stars and celebrities, it had long been Lenny's and Charlie's dream to create a star of their very own, and they were convinced that in Adam Amado they had found just such a potential luminary. Adam Amado was a street person, of sorts, though he had the looks of a Jon Whitcomb illustration come to life. He could have been so much more!

Adam Amado was not his real name, of course. Who remembered what his original name was? The name “Adam Amado” was created for him by Lenny and Charlie after much thought, and after many alliterative combinations of names had been proposed and discarded. The name Adam, of course, connoted “first man,” and Amado, from rather loose Italian, suggested “loved one,” and Lenny and Charlie were certain that, with this young man's striking good looks, combined with his appealing new name, they had the makings of a new screen or stage matinee idol. Had they succeeded, as Adam's agent-managers they would certainly have become very rich, and would not have needed the help of the Rothmans.

At first, they had begun working on their discovery in the greatest secrecy, since their plan was to spring Adam on the world as a full-blown creation. To friends, during this period, they alluded to Adam's existence mysteriously as “a certain project we're working on.” Meanwhile, they were giving Adam speech and elocution lessons, acting lessons, singing lessons, dancing lessons, fencing lessons. He was even given karate lessons, and through this period they were also feeding and clothing him, for Adam had no money. They had his teeth straightened and capped to improve his smile line, they had a small bump on his nose surgically removed, and a slight cleft added to his chin, and they darkened his hair color and created a hairstyle for him that made him look like a blow-dried Rudolph Valentino. Though his body was in excellent shape, Lenny and Charlie supervised his daily exercise regimen. Soon Lenny and Charlie were telling themselves—and Adam—that they had discovered “the brunet Tab Hunter,” and a new teenage heartthrob, forgetting, perhaps, that Tab Hunter was a creature of the 1950s—as Valentino had been a creature of the 1920s—and that by the late 1960s, when all this was going on, there were no more bobby-soxers with heartthrobs.

The trouble was, in retrospect, that Adam was too quick a learner, too impatient to see his name in lights on a marquee. Once he had improved his diction, his posture, his walk, learned how to use his hands effectively and how to smile for the camera without squinting his eyes, he didn't see why he should not be elevated immediately to the pantheon of great performers. He refused to listen to Lenny's careful counseling that these things took time, patience, and step-by-step planning. “I won't pose for a toothpaste ad!” he would storm. “And I certainly won't pose for it in jockey shorts.”

“But you have a beautiful body, Adam. This is what's known as giving you exposure.”

“And I'm not going to do a voice-over for a used-car commercial that's not even
national
.”

“They'll pay you two thousand dollars, Adam.”

“I wouldn't do it for less than twenty.”

By the time Lenny and Charlie were ready to show Adam off to their influential friends—who could have done so much to help him—he had become arrogant, temperamental, demanding. And though everyone agreed that Adam looked great in the new clothes that Lenny and Charlie had bought for him, most people found him personally insufferable. Lenny tried enrolling Adam in a charm school, but later discovered that Adam had never attended the classes. Instead, he had asked for a refund on Lenny's tuition payment, and then apparently pocketed the money himself.

At the same time, Lenny and Charlie began to suspect that Adam had become dependent on certain prescription medicines. He took pills to wake himself up in the morning, pills to elevate his mood, and pills to help him sleep at night. Friends began to notice, though they did not immediately mention it, that when the boys brought Adam to their parties their medicine chests were raided—their Valium, lithium, and Dexedrine bottles emptied.

Adam had also begun drinking heavily. The boys noticed this when they saw how rapidly their liquor supplies in the apartment were dwindling. Soon it was necessary to hide the liquor, but one cannot really hide liquor from an alcoholic determined to find it. Secretly, the boys began to suspect that they had created a monster. And yet, at that point, they had already made a public commitment to Adam's success, and it seemed too humiliating to admit failure.

Meanwhile, he lived in their guest bedroom, and of course many people assumed that there was a sexual relationship there. But there really wasn't—not, at least, in any significant way, though it was clear that both Charlie and Lenny were devoted to Adam—hoping against desperate hope that something would change. As for Adam himself, he swung, as they say, both ways. Did that make him a bisexual? Lenny and Charlie simply knew that Adam Amado was a young man who was accustomed to taking sex wherever, and whenever, and with whomever, he found it.

There was more erratic behavior. He showed up late, or else failed to show up at all, for casting calls that Lenny had arranged for him. He showed up drunk on a nationally televised talk show, whose host Lenny had begged to use Adam as a guest. He urinated in the office fireplace of an important producer who had just offered him a part in an off-Broadway play. And there was more, much more, and much worse. And yet the boys persisted with their dream, their vision.…

Pity the Pygmalion who produces a flawed Galatea!

It was Mona Potter, of all people, who finally blew the whistle on Adam Amado. In a 1969 column reporting on a fashionable East Side party, Mona wrote:

The evening's festivities were somewhat marred by a certain Manhattan freeloader who calls himself an actor, but who acts best as a drunken deadbeat, who circulated among the guests telling them he was the next Rock Hudson. Yuk!

Even though it was a blind item, with Adam's name not mentioned, everybody knew who Mona was talking about.

Overnight, Adam Amado became a social pariah—to everyone, that is, except Lenny and Charlie, who remained loyal to him. Why? Well, for one thing, there was certainly nothing boring about those Adam Years, as they often referred to that period of their lives. In fact, the boys sometimes missed the excitement of that time, when no one knew what awful thing might happen next. They had become like two scientists, committed to finding the cure for some obscure, incurable disease through all disaster. They kept hoping that somehow, somewhere along the way, it would appear—the magic formula—and all their labors would be vindicated. But they also knew that their friends were laughing at them behind their backs and calling them damned fools. It was Marlene Dietrich who provided them with a rationale that enabled them to hold their heads high in face of all the ridicule.

Dear Marlene. Lenny often thought that if she had not possessed the beauty to become a great film star she would have entered the nursing profession. Marlene was drawn to sick people like carborundum to a magnet. She actively sought out the ill and the neurasthenic, and she thrilled at the prospect of treating the dying. She was a walking medicine cabinet. Her voluminous handbag was always filled with pills and potions, herbal remedies and exotic lixiviums and panaceas from around the world. She carried cures for everything from whooping cough to gonorrhea.

“Dis is a very sick boy,” she had told Lenny and Charlie. “He needs your help. De Almighty has given you dis meesion, to care for dis sick boy. Ees a sacred meesion. Ees what God has put you on dis earth to do, Charles and Lenny. You are like Albert Schweitzer in Africa! You are like Father Damion among the lepers! You are saints, Charles and Lenny. Both of you! Saints!”

Thus canonized by Marlene, Saint Lenny and Saint Charlie lifted their cross to their shoulders once more and carried on their God-appointed mission with renewed diligence and self-esteem.

And, basically, they loved Adam, and he could be amusing enough company, particularly when he wasn't drinking.

Unfortunately, the drinking periods far outnumbered the nondrinking ones.

But, thanks to dear Marlene, Lenny and Charlie were able to translate their continued tolerance of, and loyalty to, Adam Amado as a kind of advertisement to the world at large of their own grit and superior character. They would never, thanks to Marlene, be accused of being rats deserting the sinking U.S.S. Adam, the way the rest of New York was doing.

Of course, a certain amount of ego gratification was involved here. Sympathy was not an altogether bad commodity to elicit from your peers, and weren't the greatest tragic heroes in literature always those who suffered longest and with the least complaining? Lenny had even thought of having dear Marlene's words embroidered on a sampler.

For four more long, tortuous years the pair supported him. They had never known Adam's real age—he claimed not to know himself—but, in this period, he did not age well. Still, they continued to pay him an allowance, and loaned him extra money whenever they could. They took him out to dinner, and tried to keep him sober. They tried to soothe him during his drunken, hallucinatory rages. They held his head when he vomited in their toilet, and they nursed his hangovers. They tried to referee his increasingly violent battles with a series of increasingly inappropriate lovers. They put him into, and took him out of, a series of substance-abuse centers. When he was thrown in jail, they bailed him out. They gave him useful tips in dealing with the law: “If a squad car is chasing you, run the wrong way down a one-way street.” When his driver's license was taken away, they served as his chauffeurs. Even when it turned out that he was stealing money from them, they forgave him. Right up until the time of his horrible and unnecessary death—his death on a mission they most certainly would have tried to stop, had they known he was going to undertake it—they defended him. Of course, the circumstances of his death, ugly as they were, turned out to have a not-unpleasant side benefit, as they would later discover. “Hold on to these papers for me,” he had said, mysteriously, the last day Lenny saw Adam alive. “In case something should happen to me.” And he handed Lenny a long, sealed manila envelope.

Then, what he had apparently feared might happen to him happened.

Still, Lenny and Charlie had continued to defend Adam Amado, and his memory, to this very day. Looking back, the Adam Years had been the best years of their lives.

Hence, The Shrine. Across the length of the Spanish refectory table were displayed mementos of their fallen idol—the pair of aviator-type sunglasses that he often wore, his silver-plated crucifix on a slender chain, his billfold that he had not carried with him on that fatal day, and what appeared to be his high-school class ring, though its date and legend had been rubbed away. Here too were the monogrammed gold Tiffany cuff links that Lenny had given him one Christmas and which, because of the embossed “A.A.” monogram, he had been unable to pawn. Here, in a scrapbook, were collected all the little notes that Adam ever left for Lenny and Charlie, even notes of little consequence such as “
Be back in 1 hr.—A,
” which meant he had gone out to cruise the bars, and laundry lists, and all the IOUs. Also displayed were posters, handbills, and programs from Adam's most memorable performance, as Claudio in a short-lived off-Broadway production of
Measure for Measure
, and copies of the generally positive reviews (“Newcomer Adam Amato [sic] breathes a little life into a thankless role”—
The Village Voice
.) There was the sword he carried as Claudio, and there was the muffler Claudio wore in the last scene, when he was presented to his sister, Isabella. Oddly, there were no photographs displayed of Adam. They were too painful to look at, Lenny said. Photographs existed, of course, many of them—including an extraordinary series of Adam in the nude—but they were hidden away, and no one, since Adam's death, had seen them except Lenny and Charlie.

Perhaps the most extraordinary objects standing on the long table, and propped up against the wall, were a pair of stained-glass windows, which might have come from some church in rural England, and which Adam, inscrutably, left them in his will. That will, along with other bits and pieces of paper, was found in the long manila envelope, as well as the storage receipt for the windows from a Brooklyn warehouse. It had cost Lenny and Charlie three hundred and fifty dollars in unpaid storage fees to retrieve the windows. But how had someone such as Adam, who appeared to have no home or family, come by a pair of stained-glass windows? It was another of the riddles and mysteries about their lost friend that Lenny and Charlie would never unravel.

Now, nibbling on a stuffed olive and staring into his wineglass, Charlie Boxer said, a little wistfully, “Gus and Maggie Van Zuylen are having their big beach party in Southampton tomorrow night.”

“I know, dovey, but we weren't invited.”

“If we had a place in the Hamptons, we would have been.”

“But we
don't
have a place in the Hamptons, dovey.”

It was becoming a familiar plaint of Charlie's, particularly when summer began to roll around: What they really needed was a weekend place in the Hamptons.

“If we
did
have a place in the Hamptons, dovey,” Lenny said, “what would happen to our Sunday-night salons here? We'd be spending Sunday evenings fighting the traffic home on the expressway. Incidentally, Betty Bacall said she might pop by this Sunday. It's always fun to see Betty.”

“If we had a place in the Hamptons, we could have our salons out there on Saturday nights.”

Lenny shook his head. “No, dovey. Saturday nights are cocktail-party nights in the Hamptons. Saturday nights in the Hamptons are strictly reserved for serious drinking, and the accompanying nonsense-talk, to be followed by a drunken roll in the hay. If you ask me, weekends in the Hamptons are becoming a cliché—like that Razor Blade Maggie Van Zuylen.”