The Sunday Gentleman (30 page)

“After that transatlantic call, I was forced to play God. In fact, I wasn’t playing God. I was God. I knew that Nellie was a disturbed person, and that lots of disturbed persons do commit suicide, as she had threatened. I knew further that if she could help Larry, it would be an incredible blessing. He was living alone in a filthy, filthy slum. Aside from seeing me once a week, he had almost no human contacts (though plenty of inhuman ones, with landladies and neighbors). Larry was rotting. The years ahead presented a frightening prospect. And, meanwhile, Nellie kept assuring me that love could move mountains.

“There were enormous pressures on me from both camps. My own family and Larry’s family were outraged at the idea of my helping Nellie come over here. You see, her coming here was in my hands, for she needed letters from me promising she would never become a ward of the government. At the same time, Nellie was talking about suicide, and Larry was rotting. It was a genuine dilemma. You know how I decided, and only the real God above knows whether I decided right or wrong.”

What Burt finally decided to do was to cooperate fully in bringing about the reunion of Nellie and Larry.

Nellie’s troubles began the moment she walked down the gangplank in New York City. So overwhelmed and nervous was she, that she was unable to face Larry during her entire first day in the United States. Presently, the reunion was effected by Burt, and Nellie set up housekeeping in Larry’s wretched apartment. She could not be his legal wife, or even his common-law wife, because Larry still had a wife somewhere, named Harriet, who was too religious to divorce him. And, since Larry was legally incompetent, he could not sue for a divorce. From their first domesticity—as in the years after, and today—Larry and Nellie lived in gentle sin.

A friend, who saw them in their first weeks together, told me, “It was almost as if the two of them were trying to get out of a bog, Larry using her as a stepping stone, and the higher Larry rose out of the muck, the lower Nellie went in.” Suddenly, it seemed, Larry’s story became Nellie’s story. He leaned on her, and was supported, but like her predecessor, Harriet, she slowly began to collapse under the burden.

Nellie’s initial shock came when she faced the conditions of her new life on New York’s West Side. She had been catapulted from a neat, whitewashed, antiseptic, tightly efficient English atmosphere into a neighborhood crowded with impoverished and angry immigrants. She had moved into an apartment, half-furnished, primitive and dirty, crawling with bedbugs. There was not even the illusion of romantic privacy. The walls that sheltered them might have been of Japanese rice paper. In the day, the toilet sounds came through. In the night, the bed sounds tortured her. The next cause of shock was her companion, who wanted a nurse not a mistress, who was at once intelligent and unintelligible, whose habits were often as civilized as those of a roving animal.

Yet, she loved him and he loved her, and she determined to mold what was left of Larry into an acceptable member of the human race and into a good provider. He had once dreamed of being a professor, and had confided his dream. She would, she determined, make him a teacher, at least, a respectable pedagogue, and together they would escape this hellhole. Larry applied to Long Island University, to study in the school’s education department, and he was accepted. Nellie, working on what was left of his Princeton I.Q., studying with him, for him, got him through the required classes. With her help, he managed to become an accredited teacher. This had cost them $500, but now Larry, the teacher, was ready. He applied for positions. He was interviewed. Alone, without his collaborator, he fell down every time. The keen-eyed buyers of teacher-minds saw that his was not a dependable mind. He had the credentials, but no job.

Anguished over their defeat, Nellie insisted that at least they escape the slum. They moved to a cleaner apartment in a small New Jersey town, which was near the residence of one of Larry’s brothers. Nellie was still determined that Larry should make his own way. More of his savings were withdrawn, and he was enrolled in the Graduate School of Library Service at Rutgers University. Diligently, Nellie coached her charge, but to no avail. Larry failed his tests and was dropped by the school. Because money was needed, he obtained employment as a night manager in a movie house. Under Nellie’s soothing encouragement and guidance, he held the job for two months. Then he was dismissed.

Friends came to the rescue. There was an opening in the Princeton University Library. Larry was recommended, and accepted for the job subject to an interview. In high spirits, he invested a fifty-dollar deposit on a modern new apartment in Lawrenceville, to be near his library, and then he had his interview. Shortly afterward, a member of the library called Larry—apologetically, to be sure—to explain that the opening was no more, because its former occupant had decided to return. In short, in his interview, Larry had talked too much.

There was something about a possible post-office job in Philadelphia, so Larry and Nellie moved to Philadelphia. Once more, Larry bent to his books, and Nellie hovered over him, and finally he took his civil service examination. His grade was passing, but low. Jobs were given on the basis of grades received. Impatiently, Larry waited to be called. Once more, funds were needed, and Nellie went to work. This, then, became their life, Nellie, frail and fading and fearful, working, and Larry, agitated and angry and aggrieved, waiting. It was eighteen months before the Philadelphia post-office summoned him. Once more, the fateful interview. Once more, Larry talked. Once more, he remained unemployed.

At last, in Philadelphia, reality caught up with Nellie. She came to the knowledge that dreams are for the sleeping and not the waking hours. She came to see what her life with Larry truly was, and what it could truly never be. The weight of this disenchantment, atop her own neuroses, broke her down completely.

A friend who was with them in Philadelphia told me the next of Nellie: “The Seven Plagues of Egypt were visited on her frail and quaking little body and suffering soul. There were protracted periods of sweats, chills, insomnia, violent and alarming tachycardia. She had depression to the point of nausea. Then there was severe pyorrhea, to add to all else, or because of it, that cost one thousand dollars to repair. Inevitably, the total nervous breakdown. She was committed to the Philadelphia General Hospital. After three weeks, she was released as possibly cured. But she was still in black despair. Then followed private treatments—ten electric shock treatments—and this helped her considerably.”

All of that was 1962, a year that ended with one more job prospect for Larry, on one more far horizon. The prospect was in Sacramento, California, and so Larry and Nellie left Philadelphia and moved to the West, and the full circle had closed for Larry. He was back where he came from, in effect, but this time not committed to a hospital.

The job prospect in Sacramento did not work out. However, there was temporary employment, very temporary, as a salesclerk in a department store. And then, more important, there was something better. After ten years of resenting and missing his younger brother, Jack, Larry was reunited with him in the early part of 1963.

The years had not been easy on Jack since he had fought the Veterans Administration in a Los Angeles court to keep Larry institutionalized. True, in terms of career, he had grown and become successful. While still a struggling young publicity man, he had determined to risk going into business on his own. He established a talent agency. Because of his ingenuity and drive, he had prospered enormously. But there had been difficulties. One major problem was with his wife, Susan. Another was with his own neuroses, coupled with his guilts and uneasy conscience about consenting to Larry’s lobotomy.

For Jack, his marriage became untenable, and he and Susan drifted apart, until at last, in 1959, they were divorced. Now his guilts had become unbearable, and finally, on advice, Jack acted to make himself happier. Psychosurgery, especially lobotomy, had fallen into disrepute, and the new medical age was experimenting with, even favoring, mind-changing drugs such as LSD, mescaline, psyilocybia, and tranquilizers such as reserpine and chlorpromazine. Jack decided to undergo LSD treatments. He received nine treatments in all. As he told me, “When I went into LSD, I was filled with self-recrimination. All of Larry locked up inside me poured out. Other things poured out, too. And at the end of my treatments, I was a new person. It was the most remarkable and wonderful thing that ever happened to me.”

Freed from tensions by his divorce and his LSD therapy, Jack Cassidy married a lovely fashion model, had a son and by her, expanded his business firm, and thus fortified, determined to see Larry for the first time in ten years. Early in 1963, Jack flew to Sacramento to face Larry and meet Nellie. He recounted the reunion to me. “I had not seen Larry in so long. I was full of apprehension. Then there he was before me, and when I saw him, the dam burst, burst wide open. We embraced and kissed, and there were tears in his eyes, and I don’t mind admitting I cried. He was so very proud of his baby brother who had made good among the film stars. He was sweet, and all the old hostility was gone.”

Jack was thrilled at the transformation he thought he detected in Larry. “His face was cherubic and peaceful,” said Jack. “And he looked youthful. He is eleven years older than I am, but he seemed at least three or four years younger.” The several times that they saw each other, Larry was cleanshaven, and although his clothes were frayed and worn, they were immaculate. And the small apartment in which Larry and Nellie lived, while sparsely furnished, was neat and comfortable. Before returning to Los Angeles after his first visit, Jack bought the couple a television set, and also a shelf of books, since Larry had become a voracious reader again. Jack promised to find a medically oriented hypnotist, to help Nellie, and before departing, he promised to see them from time to time, to write regularly, and to assist them with money.

Larry and Nellie still live in Sacramento. Larry devotes his days to reading fiction, favoring mysteries, and to hunting for jobs. Most recently, he was trying to become a printer or an editorial assistant. At night, Larry and Nellie sit mesmerized before the new television set, so now both have an outside social life in their own living room. Financially, they struggle along on the monthly veteran’s check, the regular checks from Burt and Jack, and the income from the occasional job.

Larry receives no extraordinary medical attention. From time to time, he will hear from Dr. Goldsmith, who writes from Boston to inquire about Larry’s progress, mainly for the psychiatrist’s statistical records. Larry hates the psychiatrist, and rarely replies to him. Once, Larry wrote him to try to borrow money, but received no answer. Larry informed Burt, “I wrote to Dr. Goldsmith to tell him I’m now in Sacramento, and to ask him for advice on jobs. His only suggestion was that I should apply for a job as a garbage collector!”

And so, Larry today. I asked the two men closest to him, his friend, Burt in New York, and his brother, Jack in Los Angeles, what they think of his present and his future. While Burt tends to be mildly pessimistic, and Jack mildly optimistic, both are in full agreement that Nellie has improved Larry, brought him closer to the company of men.

According to Burt:

“Is Larry’s progress real or specious? I can’t be certain. I am no professional (if such there be, which I purely doubt), but I’d lean toward specious. Take Nellie away from him, take away the humanizing restraints she places on him, the proprieties she insists upon, and he might lapse within a week. In my opinion, it’s all Nellie. Because I suspect his lobotomy personality is still there. She is the one who keeps it contained. She is the supporting cast that enables him to play the role I’m sure he would have enjoyed playing in New York before her time, had he been able to find someone to play opposite him. He knows what words like status and respectability mean. He likes them. He wants status and respectability, but not if he has to do anything to get them. So Nellie does the job for him.

“Was I wrong to bring Nellie to him? I’ve come to this. It was an eye for an eye. Larry is vastly better off, and Nellie vastly worse. Have I any final judgment to pass on Dr. Goldsmith and Dr. Rogers and their lobotomy? Certainly not. As between the wretch who spent his days sweating and screaming, before the lobotomy, and the wretch who now has brought someone else down to his former level, but himself knows no pain, who can choose? Anyway, he wanted her, and she was ready to die without him. And that’s the way it is.”

According to Jack:

“Of course, today Larry’s handicaps remain, the same inability to get and hold a job, the same inability to sustain interest in anything, the same necessity to talk incessantly. Yet, in a sense, this is a story with a sort of happy ending, if it can be called that. I believe this. The life he lives would not be a meaningful or normal or happy life to you or to me. It is too limited. But for him, in relation to what he had been before, it is now better and happier than it has ever been since he became an adult. From his point of view, he has a life he can live with, thanks to Nellie.

“As to the lobotomy to which I gave my consent in 1947—well, I’ve come a great distance since then. I’ve learned to live with my part in deciding about his life. I get along with it now…But you know, often, so often, I say to myself—maybe if we had waited, just waited a little longer…”

PART THREE

THE

SUNDAY GENTLEMAN

ABROAD

8

Tourist’s Bible

Early in World War II, when Hitler assigned Hermann Goering the job of blasting Great Britain “from the map, Goering cast about for an accurate list of targets. He did not have to look far. On his bookshelves rested the one source that he trusted even more than his costly intelligence reports. He pulled down his red-covered copy of Baedeker’s
London
and Environs, studied it, then officially commanded the Luftwaffe to “destroy every historical building and landmark in Britain that is marked with a star in Baedeker.” Thus began the thunderous Nazi air attacks which came to be known to the English as “the Baedeker raids.”