The Price of Altruism (7 page)

They had moved from Hartsdale to the city, to a tenement on West Ninety-fourth Street. Rain came through the ceilings in the front hall, the bathroom, and the kitchen. The living room light fixture was falling down. The toilet did not flush properly, nor did the refrigerator work or sit evenly on the crooked linoleum. Alice wasn’t sure which was worse: the plaster coming apart in the bathroom, the three-pane windows ready to fall out in the bedrooms, or the water taps that ran as if with a mind entirely of their own. The more she wrote to her landlord to complain, the more he wrote back threatening legal action for her lack of payment, as did the Laundromat owner Isidore Stern; the boys’ friendly eye doctor, Ralph Singer; and the
New York Times
for overdue payment for an advertisement.
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Money had to come from somewhere, anywhere, quick. Alice decided to send her older boy, Edison, to a farm upstate owned by a family called the van Akins. With any luck his room in the city would fetch seven dollars a week. It made sense; after all, she must have offered to her aching conscience: Little George could be lugged along to the office, but Edison was often at home until late hours by himself, and Alice was afraid of “prowlers.”
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Display had gone bankrupt in September 1931. William Edison’s former partner John Higham had secretly formed a corporation for night baseball lighting, stealing thousands of dollars of equipment and running up a huge debt in the company name. Meanwhile the foreman of the shop, the diminutive Joseph Levy, and his accountant brother Saul joined hands in conspiracy with the secretary, Mr. Kook. When the lease on the company building expired, Alice was told that the only thing to do was to remodel a bunch of old stables at 410 West Forty-fourth Street. Unbeknownst to her it was Kook’s father-in-law who received the bid for the remodeling, and after it was pushed through against her wishes for a considerable sum, the Levys and Kook resigned and started a competitive business.
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At the same time the Irving Trust Receivership Company began selling off William Edison’s patents. Since he had been more a dreamer than a businessman, many of his inventions were assigned to the company rather than to his own name. The buyers, like Meyer Harris of the Columbia Stage Lighting Company, were invariably competitors, and Alice and Display were going under.
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The social fabric of America’s greatest city was coming apart at the seams. Privately funded mutual aid societies in the city were collapsing: From six thousand in 1920, only two thousand now remained. More than four hundred private social service institutions—one-third of the agencies in New York—closed their doors by 1933, and abandonment of women and children by husbands and fathers rose more than 135 percent. When hard times hit, it was now apparent, people had to fend for themselves.
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To Alice trust seemed just about as rare as a lucky dime.

First there were the Display men. Then a friendly lodger skipped town without payment, leaving Alice doubly despondent over sending away her boy for nothing but a swindle. A modicum of belief in the goodness of people was restored when a Mr. Walters began coming into the office from the garage to express his heartfelt sympathy. When she saw that he was hungry, Alice even gave him a daily food allowance. They were becoming friends. Walters started borrowing money for his hotel room (he was going to be thrown out, he said) on the promise that he would pay back with forthcoming moneys. It was only after he went off with little George’s glasses, provided by Alice after Walters broke his own in a supposed taxi accident, that she discovered that the checks he wrote her were fakes and that his real name was Ward. “These I should like to recover,” she now wrote stiffly to Chief Police Inspector G. G. Henry, “as my son starts school on the 26th.” George had a squint and his eyesight was growing bleaker, as, they were all learning, were their fortunes. It was a lonely time. “The children and I,” Alice wrote to the Transfer Tax Commission, “have nothing left in the world except each other.”
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A leading officer at the Scully Steel and Iron Company in Chicago, Gage H. Avery stepped in to save his sister. “There is no easy road,” he wrote to Clara in the winter of 1932. “It’s up to you to stop dreaming and go after the business.”
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Taking a deep breath and a loan from her generous brother, Alice bought back the name of Display from the receivers and decided to make a go of it. It was a hell of a mess. Creditors were knocking loudly and invariably filing suit. “I have always had a reputation for honesty,” she wrote to one of them, between court case and arraignment, angrily begging for his patience.

But Alice proved tough, and soon began to pick herself, as well as Display, up from melancholy doldrums. One by one theaters were won over, creditors paid back, suppliers assuaged, new contracts delivered. Even burlesques were no longer out of the picture. To the contrary, in venues like the Kelly Club and the Apollo Theater, burlesque had become the Great Depression’s signature entertainment. “Gorgeous glorified maids and models in a landslide of loveliness,” the signs said, lit to perfection with fixtures from Display.

There were different versions about how it had evolved. Some said that a chorus girl at the famous Minsky Brothers’ Winter Garden Theater on the Lower East Side had gone onstage accidentally without her starched collar and cuffs in what passed for public nudity in 1916. Others swore that the burlesque actress Hinda Wassau broke a strap of her chemise while singing the grand finale and, rather than dash offstage in midsong, bravely finished her number to enthusiastic applause. Whichever was true, burlesque now become the perfect form of entertainment for a depressed city and one of its only growth industries. Slapstick comedy “bits” and scads of scantily clad chorines didn’t exactly cost an arm and a leg to produce. Hundreds of out-of-work actors and actresses, comedians, and dancers were again on stage, and the audiences flocked to the theaters.
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Citing prostitution and public immorality, Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia promised to put an end to the “incorporated filth,” and ordered City License Commissioner Paul Moss to shut down the venues. This time, at least, he had everyone’s God on his side: “Information that has come to me of the spread, evil influence and destructive results from these disgraceful and pernicious performances,” the Catholic archbishop of the city wrote to Moss, citing “the cause of great concern.” The chairman of the board of Jewish ministers and a rather prudish figure himself, Rabbi Samuel H. Goldenson, agreed: “These houses cater to the lowest appetites and passions of men and women and altogether are a menace to the moral life of the community.”
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But as long as “these houses” brought in business, it didn’t matter one bit to Alice. One dollar was as green as another, whether it lit Shakespeare, Belasco, or tassels.
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However prudish, La Guardia was a master at choosing deputies. One in particular made a name. They called him the Baron Haussmann of Second Empire Paris, and Robert Moses deserved it. Some said he loved automobiles more than humans, but unlike city planners in other parts of the country, Moses came prepared to take advantage of a federal buck. Carving new shorelines, building bridges across the boroughs and highways in the sky—transforming neighborhoods forever—the “master builder” of New York was riding high on the New Deal. At one point one-quarter of federal construction dollars were being spent in New York, and there were eighty thousand men and women working under him.

He was a controversial figure. Some said he later caused the departure of the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants, destroyed Coney Island’s amusement parks, ruined the South Bronx, and abandoned the blacks. But others could see that however heavy-handed, with the moneys from the Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps, he was sculpting New York into a paradigm of modernism. From low-income housing to Rockefeller Center to European Modernist mansions designed by William Lescaze, New York was rising from the ashes of the Great Depression.
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The thirties were an exciting time to be a boy in New York City. The Yankees had released Babe Ruth in 1935, but the following year the rookie Joe DiMaggio led the team to an amazing World Series victory against the rival New York Giants. Cowboy movies were in vogue; a quarter got you through the turnstile to watch the latest adventure of Hopalong Cassidy. In music Artie Shaw and Fletcher Henderson had sparked a new era—the Big Band; it was so big that Benny Goodman gave the first nonclassical concert at Carnegie Hall in 1938.
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That very same summer the writer Jerome Siegel and the artist Joe Shuster mailed their creation to National Periodical Publications, and Super-man was born.
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George Price was a quiet and reserved little boy, but around him New York was hopping.

On one occasion he went down to the pier with his mother to see her lodger, Mr. Kafuco, off on the
Europa
. George and Alice presented him with a Waterman pencil, black with gold band trimming, and marveled over the “great boat.” Mr. Kafuco was some kind of Japanese dignitary, and George was overcome by the line of “distinguished looking Japs” who filed into his beautiful stateroom, each making a “very profoundly deep bow.”
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The world, he was learning, was a big place after all—bigger, to be sure, than motor-driven dimmers, shouting foremen, even the Display Stage Lighting Company. His brother, Edison, toughened by his months at the van Akins (“Hope you are warm in the shack these cold days,” Alice wrote to him), would be the one to enter the family business. The Prices had moved to a new and bigger apartment at 311 West Ninety-fifth Street, and Edison was spending more time at home and at the office. By fifteen he was already instructing his mother on how to deal with her creditors and debtors, not to mention coming up with lighting inventions of his own.
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In 1935 Edison graduated from the Birch Wathen School on West Ninety-third, where George was enrolled on a full scholarship behind him. The senior play that year was Sir James Barrie’s Edwardian-style
Alice Sit-By-the-Fire
, which seemed to fit the school just right. Established in 1921 as a private coeducational institution, it was run adoringly by its pair of staid—and perfectly coiffeured—headmistresses, Miss Louise Birch and Miss Edith Wathen. It was widely known that Miss Birch had been the tutor to the young Nelson D. Rockefeller, and even spent the summer of 1907 teaching Teddy Roosevelt’s grandchildren at the White House. DeWitt Davidson, Margot Lindsay, Warren Milius, Virginia Plaut: These were the sons and daughters of New York City’s socialite Protestant classes. At Birch Wathen they would be instilled with the appropriate aspirations. Music and the arts came before academics, socials and drama trumping science and math. Edison was reclusive and didn’t quite fit in. His yearbook page spoke of brilliance and profundity, of a “rare quality of intensity” and a fascination with Indian mysticism. His technical bent didn’t quite seem to correspond. Nor, in particular, did his dark Jewish looks.
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But George was different. Reddish blond and lanky, with a tie on he looked like an arrival from a Scandinavian Eton. His eyes were an intense hazel, his ears rather large, and he combed his hair straight back. He was well kempt. His manner was somewhat haughty. Athletic but not particularly strong in team sports (he was a substitute on the basketball and soccer teams), he joined the chess team and student council. His academic talents were obvious. Inspired by the name and scenes at the Apollo, at fourteen he produced a seventy-page paper on Greek temple architecture that would have satisfied any university professor. He loved to write, especially about affairs of state, and even more to think about physics and numbers. “We would like to repeat our thanks to those members of the faculty who spent much of their time in aiding the staff to publish this magazine,” the editorial of the
Birch Log
read in the spring of 1936. “To the person that made this magazine possible, Miss Birch, we owe an infinity of thanks.” Then it added: “According to Price the infinite is finite but our thanks are not.” George knew he was bright and was sharp at mathematics, and was more than happy to let other people know it.
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Business at Display was still rocky. The fiscal year 1937–38 had been tough; “we are right down to rock bottom at the bank,” Alice reported. George had been helping out at the shop all summer long, and Edison’s little new light, the Mite-Lite, was launched and promising to be quite a success among display men. “But alas!” Alice bemoaned in the fall in a letter to the school’s Miss Birch “we have no working capital to give it the send-off it deserves.” The fifty-dollar school registration fee was simply too steep. If the year would be a good one at Display, Alice would send George back to graduate. In the meantime he had successfully passed the citywide exam, and would be starting the eleventh grade gratis at Stuyvesant.
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