The Telephone Booth Indian (9 page)

Women performers have a better chance of getting cabaret jobs than men, because they mix with the customers. Jerry, who grew up in the sheltered respectability of vaudeville, resents this. “I booked a man with a trained dog into one trap in Astoria,” he
recently said, “and after one night they canceled him out because the dog couldn't mix. There never was such a tough market for talent. I book an acrobatic act in which, as a finish, one guy walks offstage playing a mandolin and balancing the other guy upside down on his head. The understander only plays a couple of bars, you see, for the effect. I booked them for an Elks' smoker in Jersey, and the chairman of the entertainment committee didn't want to pay me because he said the members don't like musical acts. To stand this business, you got to have a heart of steel.” Most agents in the Jollity Building, when they supply talent for a whole show, book themselves as masters of ceremonies and collect an extra ten dollars for announcing the acts. Jerry has given up this practice.

“When I get out on the stage and think of what a small buck the performers are going to get, I feel like crying,” he says, “so I send Dave instead.”

A fair number of the performers who look for jobs in the Jollity Building have other occupations as well. Many of the women work as receptionists or stenographers in the daytime and make their rounds of agents' offices after five o'clock. Hockticket Charlie, an agent who is one of Jerry Rex's neighbors on the fourth floor, has a side line of his own. Hockticket Charlie is a tall, crosseyed man with a clarion voice and a solemn manner. By arrangement with a number of pawnbrokers of his acquaintance, he sells pawn tickets. The chief reason anyone purchases a pawn ticket is that he holds the common belief that a watch accepted in pawn for ten dollars, for example, must in reality be worth around forty dollars. The fellow who buys a ticket for five dollars is therefore theoretically able to obtain a fortydollar watch for a total outlay of fifteen dollars. Hockticket Charlie's pawnbroker friends, aware of this popular superstition, make out a lot of tickets to fictitious persons. Charlie sells the tickets
for a few dollars each to performers in the Jollity Building. Each ticket entitles the purchaser to redeem a piece of secondhand jewelry—for not more than three times its value—which the broker has bought at an auction sale. Hockticket nearly always pays off colored performers with pawn tickets which will theoretically permit them to purchase diamonds at a large reduction. By paying ten dollars to a broker, the holder of one of these tickets can often acquire a ring easily worth three dollars. Sometimes Hockticket engages a number of performers to play a date in what he calls “a town near here,” and tells them to meet him at the Jollity Building, so that they can all ride out to the date together. He loads them into a rickety bus which he has chartered for ten dollars, and the “town near here” turns out to be Philadelphia. If the acts traveled there singly, they would collect railroad fares for the round trip. Instead, Charlie collects all the railroad fares from the Philadelphia house manager who has booked the show. He often succeeds in paying the bus owner with hock tickets. Morty Ormont has a sincere admiration for Hockticket Charlie.

Another agent on the fourth floor, and the most sedate one in the building, is a woman named Maida Van Schuyler, who books stag shows for conventions and for the banquets large corporations give in honor of newly elected vicepresidents or retiring department heads. Mrs. Van Schuyler, a tall, flatchested woman with fluffy white hair, was at one time a singer of arch numbers like “I Just Can't Make My Eyes Behave” and “Two Little Love Bees Buzzing in a Bower.” As such, she recalls, she lent a touch of class to New England and Ohio vaudeville around 1912. The walls in an anteroom of her office are hung with numerous framed mottoes, such as “What Is More Precious Than a Friend?” and “Seek for Truth and Love Will Seek for You.” A plain young woman sits in the anteroom and takes the names of
visitors in to Mrs. Van Schuyler. When Mrs. Van Schuyler does not wish to see them, she sends out word that she is terribly sorry but one of her bestbeloved friends has just passed away and she is too broken up about it to talk. If the visitor waits around a minute, he may hear a loud, strangling sob. Mrs. Van Schuyler, who is very much interested in spiritualism, often says that she would like to retire from the stagshow business and become a medium. “There isn't a dime left in this lousy business,” she remarks. “The moving pictures have spoiled it, just like they did with vaudeville.”

Every now and then, one of Mrs. Van Schuyler's shows is raided but the detectives give her advance notice because she provides the entertainments for a number of police banquets. “We have to make a pinch, Mrs. Van Schuyler,” they say apologetically, “because the shooflies are working in our territory and we can't let a big brawl like this run without getting turned in.” Shooflies, as all the world knows, are policemen in mufti assigned to make a secret check on the activities of other policemen. Within a week or two after the raid, which never results in a conviction, the friendly detectives return and say, “It's all right, Mrs. Van Schuyler, we got the shooflies taking now.” With this assurance, Mrs. Van Schuyler can go ahead with her business. She seldom employs the ordinary entertainers who wander around the Jollity Building, but relies on specialists whom she lists in a large card file. “It is a highly specialized field of entertainment, darling,” she tells gentlemen who are negotiating with her for their organizations. “Our girls must have poise, discretion, and
savoy faire.”
To old friends like Morty Ormont, she sometimes says less elegantly, after an allnight party with a convention of textbook publishers or refrigerator salesmen, “You ought to seen those apes try to paw the girls.”

Performers on their way to see one of the agents on the
fourth floor are sometimes frightened by wild fanfares from an office occupied by an Italian who repairs trumpets. A musician who brings a trumpet to the Italian always blows a few hot licks to demonstrate that the instrument is out of true. When he calls for the trumpet, he blows a few more to see whether it is all right again. Once a swing dilettante stood in the hall for half an hour listening to the noises and then walked in and said that it was the best band he had ever heard and he wanted it to play at a rent party he was giving for some other
cognoscenti.

Not all the transients in the Jollity Building halls are entertainers making the rounds of the agents. There is a fellow known as Paddy the Booster, who sells neckties he steals from haberdashers, and another known as Mac the Phony Booster, who sells neckties which he pretends to have stolen but are really shoddy ties he has bought very cheaply. Naturally, Paddy looks down on Mac, whom he considers a racketeer. “It takes all kinds of people to make up a great city,” Jack McGuire sometimes tells Paddy, trying to soothe him. Also, every floor of the building has at least one bookmaker, who hangs in the hall. “In winter, the bookmakers complain because we don't heat the halls better,” the beleaguered Morty Ormont says. A dollar is the standard Jollity Building wager. The accepted method of assembling it is to drop in on an acquaintance and say, “I got a tip on a horse, but I'm short a quarter.” One repeats this operation until one has accumulated four quarters. It sometimes takes a long time, but there is always an oversupply of that. This system reduces the risk of betting to a minimum. On the infrequent occasions when some momentarily prosperous tenant bets important money on a race—say, five dollars—two or three of the hall bookmakers get together and divide up the hazard.

A stranger would be puzzled by some of the greetings exchanged
by performers wandering between agents' offices. “Why, Zasu Pitts!” a gaunt young man wearing suede shoes and an overcoat of mattress filling will shout at a girl younger, twenty pounds heavier, and obviously poorer than Miss Pitts, whom she doesn't even faintly resemble. “Clark Gable!” the girl will shout, throwing her arms around him. “I haven't seen you since I thumbed a ride from that crumb in Anniston, Alabama!” The man and woman are not talking this way for a gag; they are survivors of a Hollywooddouble troupe, a form of theatrical enterprise that has replaced the
Uncle Tom
show in outoftheway areas of the United States. In a double troupe, which usually travels in a large, overcrowded old automobile, all the members are supposed to be able to imitate Hollywood stars. They play in movingpicture theaters or grange halls, usually for a percentage of the receipts. Members of these companies seldom know each other's real names, even when they have heard them. In recounting their wanderings, they are likely to say, “Mae West was driving, see, and she goes to sleep. And only Ray Bolger seen the truck coming and grabbed the wheel, we would of all landed in some brokendown hospital in Henderson, North Carolina.” The Hollywood doubles earn less and eat worse than the barnstormers of fifty years ago, but they have the pleasure of identifying themselves with the extremely wealthy. Some players are able to impersonate two or even three Hollywood stars to the complete satisfaction of an audience in Carbondale, Illinois. Sleeping on dressing tables, the doubles dream that they are lolling at Palm Springs, like in the
Daily Mirror.
A boy who impersonates Ned Sparks and Jimmy Durante once told Jerry Rex that he was downhearted only once in his mimetic career. That was at a county fair in Pennsylvania where some doubles were performing on an openair stage under a hot sun. “I give them
everything I had,” the boy said, “and them appleknockers just sat there from sorrow. They never even heard of Jimmy Durante or Ned Sparks. They broke my heart.”

Summer, which used to be the dead season for entertainers, is now the period during which they eat most frequently. There are several rehearsal rooms in the Jollity Building, and throughout June they are full of uproar as the performers prepare for their migration to the Catskill Mountains resorts. “Up there the kids work for pot cheese,” Jerry Rex says. “Here they don't even make themselves a chive.” In the Catskills, a personable young man who can act as master of ceremonies, tell funny stories, give lessons in the conga, perform card tricks, direct amateur theatricals, do a screamingly funny eccentric dance, and impersonate stars of screen and radio can earn twentyfive dollars a week and room and board for ten consecutive weeks, provided he has a sensational singing voice. Performers at various hotels add to their incomes by uniting for occasional benefit shows, the beneficiary always being the entertainer at the hotel where the show is staged. “If a guy does not shoot crap with the guests,” Jerry Rex says, “he has a chance to save himself a buck.” Returning from the mountains after Labor Day, bloated with pot cheese, the actor sometimes survives until October, Jerry says, before developing doughnut tumors, a gastric condition attributed by him to living on crullers and coffee and which is usually a forerunner of the missmeal cramps. By November, the performer no longer feels the cramps, because he is accustomed to being from hunger and not having what to eat. Then he starts talking about a job that has been promised to him in Miami if he can get there, and he tries, unsuccessfully, to promote somebody for railroad fare. Meanwhile, he plays any date he can get. Sometimes he doesn't work for a week and then has a chance to play a couple of dates in a night, perhaps a smoker in the west Bronx and a church
party in Brooklyn, the first of which will net him $4.50 and the second $2.70, after the deduction of Jerry Rex's commissions.

The Jollity Building has at least a dozen tenants who teach voice, dancing, and dramatic art, and a few who specialize in LatinAmerican dance routines and acrobatics. The financial condition of the professors, which is solvent in comparison to that of the performers, musicians, and theatrical agents in the building, is a perpetual source of amusement to Morty Ormont. “The singers are from hunger,” he says; “the performers are from hunger, and every day we get saps in the building who pay for lessons so they can be from hunger, too.” Parents who believe their children are talented are the staple prey of the professional teachers. Seldom does a Jollity Building elevator make a trip without at least one bosomy and belligerent suburban woman, holding fast to the hand of a little girl whose hair is frizzled into a semblance of Shirley Temple's. Often several of the Shirleys and their mothers find themselves in a car together. The mothers' upper lips curl as they survey the other mothers' patently moronic young. The Shirleys gaze at each other with vacuous hostility and wonder whether their mothers will slap them if they ask to go to the bathroom again. All the Shirleys have bony little knees and bitter mouths and, in Morty's opinion, will undoubtedly grow up to be ax murderesses.

Barney, who owns the lunch counter in the basement of the socalled Jollity Building, never turns his head away from his customers for a second while working. Even when he is drawing coffee from the urn, he keeps looking over his shoulder, and this, in the course of his eighteen years in business, has given him a
nervous neck twitch. “I know their nature,” Barney says in explanation of this mannerism. “If I'll turn my head, they'll run away without paying.” With all his vigilance, Barney cannot foresee when a client will eat two
pastrami
sandwiches and then say, after fumbling in a vest pocket, “Gee, Barney, I thought I had a quarter in my pocket, but it turned out to be an old Willkie button.” Barney is a short, grayfaced man in his fifties who looks at his customers through thick, shellrimmed spectacles that are usually clouded with steam from the coffee urn or with dabs of cornedbeef grease. The customers see Barney against a background of cans of beans, arranged in pyramids. The cans, stacked on a shelf behind his counter, constitute a decorative scheme he never changes, except when he lays a fat, shiny stick of bologna across the can forming the apex of one of the pyramids.

Once, recently, Barney startled Hy Sky, the Jollity Building sign painter, and Morty Ormont, the renting agent, by announcing the return of prosperity. This was an event that neither of his listeners, confined for the most part in their associations to theatrical people, had suspected. “The taxi drivers who come in here are asking for sandwiches on thin bread, so they can taste the meat, and they are eating two sandwiches for lunch, usually,” Barney said. “From 1929 until very lately, everybody was asking for sandwiches on thick bread, one sandwich should fill them up.” The lunch counter is at one end of the Jollity Building's poolroom, and most of Barney's customers are either people who work in the building or pool players. The taximen are his only customers from the daylight world.