Touch and Go (14 page)

About a week later there's a huge rally at the Opera House,
overflowing
with steelworkers. This was a bitterness rally after the Memorial Day Massacre. (My wife later told me that the Chinese had gatherings called bitterness meetings, in protest of wrongs.) I'm way up in the balcony next to a steelworker, and Carl Sandburg is taking a year-and-a-half to get a sentence out. Sandburg was a ham, and when he talked it took forever just for him to introduce a guy. “And, ah, they say . . .” and you're waiting, going crazy, “. . . there was a riot. And they say . . .” And you sigh. “. . . the strikers used sticks . . . and stones . . .” and the steelworker next to me says, “Come
on
!” Finally, “Now may I introduce the pres-i-dent of the brother-hood of . . . sleep-ing car porters . . . A. Phillip Randolph.”

The chairman of the rally, Robert Morse Lovett, a beloved teacher of American Studies at the U of C, gets up and says, “Mooney is a killer, Mooney is a killer, we've got to stop these killers!”

The next day, Robert Maynard Hutchins, the brand-new young chancellor of the U of C, is in his office. All kinds of calls are coming in, members of the board are saying, “Fire Lovett. We've lost five million in funds!”

Just then a popular old professor appears, James Webber Linn. The old professor says to the young new chancellor, “If you fire Bob Lovett, you'll have on your desk the resignations, signed and sealed, of twenty tenured college professors.”

Hutchins says, “No,
I
won't. My successor will.” That was the spirit of the times.

A
fter I returned to Chicago from Washington, I kept up with the Rep Group and again acted as a gangster in Chicago soap operas. By this time the Works Progress Administration (WPA) had begun. There was hammer-and-shovel work—millions repairing and building roads, construction of low-income housing and public buildings. There were the arts projects: painting, dance, music, theater. Out of the Federal Theater Project came a new style called the Living Newspaper. It was an invention of the columnist Heywood Broun, founder of the Newspaper Guild.

Living Newspaper was multimedia theater: It might be a piece of newsreel, a narrator, a dramatic scene, a bit of music. It always involved the social issues of the day. There's a bit of that in
Citizen Kane
—at the beginning you have
The March of Time.
Roosevelt's second inaugural address had a core phrase: “I see one third of a nation ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed.”
One Third of a Nation
was a Living Newspaper about the lack of housing. New York had a production, but Chicago had its own adaptation, about wooden two-flats rather than tall tenements. I played Angus K. Button-cooper, the “little man” narrator.

Meanwhile, I had applied to the WPA Writer's Project, submitting something in longhand about Tecumseh, the Indian chief, and his eloquence as a speaker. A new endeavor came out of the Writer's
Project—the Radio Division. There were six writers; Barry Farnol was our chief. We did a series in collaboration with the Art Institute. We'd consult their curators—I spoke with the French curator for a script on Daumier; the American curator for one on Albert Pinkham Ryder; the Dutch curator for one about van Gogh.

The scripts aired on WGN, with a director and professional actors. WGN Radio (along with the Chicago
Tribune
) was owned by Colonel Robert McCormick, known to all Chicago as “the Colonel.”

One day Barry Farnol comes in and says, “Would you believe what I've got? This letter went to the head of our project, Curtis McDougall: ‘I have just listened to your fine program about great artists on my station and it was wonderful. I'm so proud to have you with us, and I want to thank you for enriching Chicago's culture.' ” Signed “Colonel Robert M. McCormick.”

I'm convinced that the Colonel fell asleep long before the program ended, and certainly before the credits came on. The credits? “Written by: [say] Studs Terkel [or Arnie Freeman, or Richard Durham], under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration, Harry Hopkins, Director.” And if there was one person the Colonel hated more than Franklin Delano Roosevelt, it was Harry Hopkins. He had to have been sound asleep when those credits hit the airwaves.

The Colonel had something called the
Saturday Evening Symphony Hour
on WGN, heard throughout the country. Win Stracke was a member of the chorus. His friend Fran Coughlin produced the show and said to Win: “I've got a problem. The Colonel has to speak at one time or another in the show—five minutes about his adventures, and knowledge of the war, and the military. My problem : The Colonel has potatoes in his mouth. People automatically turn him off. The audience gets cut to a
third.
I gotta figure out how to do this. I won't have him on at a certain time, I'll keep changing it around so people can never be certain.”

Win witnessed one especially memorable performance. The
theater seats about five hundred people, the Colonel sits fifth row center so he can more easily come up to the stage to speak. Aisle seat, naturally. This day, four beings enter and parade down the aisle: The Colonel, his Great Dane, Governor Dwight Green (the handsomest governor Illinois ever had) with his red silk kerchief, and finally the Colonel's wife. That was the order: the Colonel, the dog, the governor, the wife.

The Colonel takes the stage: “In the battle of Ontario . . .” and the audience is immediately getting the glazed look. Fran Coughlin has his hands clasped in prayer, “Oh, God, I hope this will be over fast.” Just then the dog starts snuffling. The snuffle was
tremendous.
Heard all over America. Mrs. McCormick did the only logical thing: She reached over to the governor, took out his silk handkerchief, reached across the governor to wipe the dog's nose with the handkerchief, the dog snuffled into it, and then she put the handkerchief back in the governor's pocket, and the Colonel went on talking. Win said it was quite a wonderful moment.

 

 

A MAN NAMED ED GOURFAIN was my first benefactor. Eddie was an advertising agency guy, a fan of the Chicago Repertory group. He's the guy who got me started on the air as
myself
, while I was still working as a gangster in soap operas. Eddie liked my style, so during the 1940s, he put me on his show as a commentator—I was the only pro-Roosevelt commentator in Chicago at the time.

Ed happened to know a guy named Louie Greenberg, who was an accountant for the Mob in Chicago. Ed sent me to a meeting with Greenberg. Eddie said, “Greenberg's going to give you a watch, it's not going to work. He's going to give you something else, that's not going to work. But you have to remember that he gave you stuff.”

By this time Ed's agency had hired Paul Harvey and he was a sensation. He would outdraw me a thousand to one. No comparison. Louie Greenberg says to me, “Can you open a brewery for me?
Paul Harvey did.” In fairness to Paul, he had no idea who his sponsors were. I did. Harvey was always hail-fellow-well-met.

At the end of the meeting, Greenberg says, “Here, I want you to have this,” and it's a watch that doesn't work, and some perfume for my wife. Then Louie says he wants to show me something. “See this little book I got here? Some guys have books with the names of horses they want to play, names of girls they want to see. I have names of guys I'm going to get even with. They're all in my book.”

Except for one thing . . . one of those guys had Louie's name in
his
book, and one day Louie and his wife are found dead—a head job—outside a famous Emerald Avenue restaurant on the South Side where he'd taken us for our meeting. I felt bad that I hadn't come through for him.

 

 

THE FIRST SPONSOR Ed got for the show was Erie Clothing Company, Hyman Blumberg, proprietor. I had a sort of liberal, pro-FDR audience, and Erie Clothing was doing well. Blumberg himself had never heard my show; he took Ed's word that it was OK. Then I goofed up, in perverse fashion as it turned out.

The poet Archibald MacLeish had written a book called
You Have Seen Their Faces
, Margaret Bourke-White did the photography. I loved MacLeish's writing; it was powerful. The Colonel was socking everybody who had anything to do with the New Deal. First time he had color cartoons on the front page of the
Tribune
, all anti–New Deal, by John McCutcheon. They showed: “crazy professors” carrying a red flag; guys leaning on shovels, lazy no-good “boondoggling” bums. And one was an attack on Archibald MacLeish, whom Roosevelt had appointed Librarian of Congress.

One day, I read the Colonel's piece against Archibald MacLeish. I quoted some of Archibald MacLeish's poetry on the air. I said, “This is the man Colonel McCormick calls traitorous.” Then I blasted the Colonel. It had never happened before. The Colonel was
never
blasted.

Next day, Eddie Gourfain calls me: “We're in trouble. Hyman Blumberg is about to bounce you from Erie Clothing.”

“Bounced for what?”

“Because of your Archibald MacLeish thing.”

“You mean he didn't like the MacLeish thing?”

“
No
, no! You're about to be bounced because of the
reaction
to it.”

“What
was
the reaction?”

Ed does a takeoff on Blumberg, accent and all. “What happened? A couple comes in from Rockford, they drive all the way in: Protestant people, very rich, aristocratic, a man with a gray moustache and his wife. They come in and buy a thousand dollars' worth of clothes.” A thousand dollars was a lot of money back then. Blumberg is flying: “They buy all the clothes and they say, ‘Can we see the manager?'

“I come out, they say: ‘I want to congratulate you, Mr. Blumberg, you're the first one with enough guts to criticize Colonel McCormick. My wife and I have been waiting all our lives for this! We don't need these clothes, but we had to support you.' ”

And all Blumberg knows is: “I criticized Colonel McCormick? I, Hyman Blumberg?”

Eddie says, “But they bought a thousand dollars' worth of clothes!” The response?

“Me, Hyman Blumberg, criticizing Colonel McCormick?!
Get Toikel off the air!
”

So I lost my sponsor.

Another sponsor lost was a furrier, William Lewis. “Mr. Gourfain, you gotta do something about that Terkel. I depend upon the Polacks and the Schvartzers. I depend on them, don't I, for credits? Instead, after Terkel is on the air I got all kinds of phone calls about how great he is, and they buy stuff for
cash
. These schoolteachers and goddamn social workers, and library people, these intellectuals, they buy the stuff and they're paying cash.
Do something!
Get rid of him!”

You could say that was the beginning of my following.

T
he first time I saw Ida, I remember she was wearing a little maroon smock. She was working for FERA, same as Charlie DeSheim and myself. She was a graduate of the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration, which was like all seven sisters rolled into one,
the
school for social workers. Sophonisba Breckinridge was the head of the SSA, along with the celebrated sisters Grace and Edith Abbott, and Ida studied with them, she had the best of credentials.

A funny story: when she was twenty-two, twenty-three, a young social worker, she was assigned to someone at Mecca Flats, a huge complex, mostly African American. This was before public housing. She went to see a client, a middle-aged black woman, who answered the door: “Little girl,” she said, “I thought you was a settled lady, instead, you ain't nothin' but pig meat,” because she was so little and young. “Pig meat” was a phrase used affectionately about someone innocent and cute.

Working for the FERA, at times I'd go from agency to agency, and Ida was working at a West Side agency I visited. That first time we met, someone who did volunteer work for the Rep Group was also there and told me Ida was sympathetic to the kinds of causes we supported. The woman said, “See her, maybe she'll buy some tickets.”

I looked at Ida; she looked pretty good. I noticed that not only was she pretty, beautiful, really, but that people were drawn to her. It seemed like there was always somebody at her table; if not a client, her co-workers would be sitting there. Someone might be crying about something, or just talking intently. I liked something about her, liked that people opened up to her.

That first day she bought a couple of tickets, and that's how we started to get acquainted. She liked the plays, and then I guess she got caught up in the idea of a theater group. She would have been perfect as Mattie Silver in
Ethan Frome
, but she wasn't an actress. They needed someone to help sell tickets and that's what she ended up doing.

When we met, I was also working in radio soap operas, and I think Ida saw me as a sort of gangster. I wore my fedora down at a raffish tilt, and talked a certain way, with just a touch of the hooligan. I was Jimmy Cagney.
²⁵

Our first real date was when I took her to see
Club de Femmes,
a very advanced French movie that touched on lesbianism; it starred Danielle Darrieux, who later became a collaborationist. Ida was impressed Afterward, we went to dinner. The bar served peach brandy, a
horrible
drink. It came in a huge glass, which made it worse. We had peach brandy that night. Awful. But she agreed to go out with me again. I took her to see a lot of foreign films, French, Italian, Russian films.
Alexander Nevsky
, Prokofiev music,
The Baker's Wife
, with the great Raimu. She'd never seen films like that before.