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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504032650 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The Permanent Press |
| Publication date: | 03/29/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 286 |
| Sales rank: | 703,180 |
| File size: | 745 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Rebel Without Applause
By Jay Landesman
The Permanent Press
Copyright © 1987 Jay LandesmanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-3265-0
CHAPTER 1
It never occurred to me that I could be a writer until my only nervous breakdown at the age of thirteen. I realized then that I had a way with words when I accused the woman struggling to keep me from throwing myself into the street of not being my real mother.
"If I don't get a pastrami sandwich, I'll kill myself."
Dragging me reluctantly back to our house, she was convinced I was an ungrateful child. When I showed no remorse, she hustled me off to a local doctor who specialised in nervous children. His office was in the same building as my sister's dance classes. I thought I was going for lessons; I had always wanted to be a tap dancer. Instead, I was given a diet of Scott's Emulsion Cod Liver Oil and sent to an open air school for children of nervous mothers.
By the standards of any day, my mother, Cutie, was a remarkable woman. Youngest and plainest of six children of poor New York immigrant parents, she was a petite, beaky, cross-eyed Jewish Cinderella who stayed home to do the housework while her mother looked for husbands for Cutie's two older sisters. It never seemed possible to Grandma that she could find a husband for Cutie until a handsome young artist from Berlin knocked on the door of their Hester Street flat.
"My name is Landesman. In the directory I see your name is Landsman, without the 'e'. Are we related?"
"Are you married?" Grandma asked. When he said no, she grabbed him by the lapels of his tight-fitting suit and sat him down in the kitchen with a nice cup of hot coffee. His first sight of Cutie was of her on hands and knees, scrubbing the floor. Benjamin was impressed; he knew a worker when he saw one.
He was on the way to St. Louis, commissioned by the German government to decorate their pavillion at the 1904 World's Fair. Over the next three years he established something of a reputation in St. Louis as a muralist, specialising in Teutonic cherubs and playful nymphs. But he didn't forget Cutie and returned to New York to collect her and the gold watch Grandma promised him when they got married. He never got the gold watch, but he won a 24-carat bargain with a heart of steel — my mother.
The only thing Cutie wanted in life was a big family. Her first child, a girl, was so beautiful, people would stop and ask if Gertrude was a baby or a Dresden doll. Her second child, Alfred, was a quiet child who remained so for many years out of sheer boredom. Eugene was born with a shock of red hair and a pinched face; the neighbours said he looked like 'another Trotsky'. It was 1917, the Russian Revolution, and Jews were proud of the ex-tailor, Lev Bronstein.
I was the youngest and determined not to be ignored. I was also the noisiest, making demands upon Cutie's busy life out of all proportion to my size and status. At an early age I had to invent new techniques to get attention and I continued to do so for the rest of my life. It was a necessity during childhood, a mission through adolescence, and in later life my only hobby.
A rebellious child was a novelty when I was growing up. Cutie couldn't understand why I resented wearing hand-me-downs from my two brothers, or why the Little Lord Fauntleroy suit she whipped up for my sixth birthday was not good enough for my tenth! None of the family liked the clothes Cutie made for them. My father's collarless silk shirts looked like nightgowns; Gert's little dresses were ten years out of style, and her own clothes looked like they came from Mrs. Pankhurst. It was no fault of her highly prized Singer sewing machine, whose hum was the most familiar sound of my early years. I sometimes thought that if it ever came down to a choice between me and the Singer, she'd have picked the Singer. I couldn't blame her, it was much more reliable.
Each summer, Cutie would take the whole family off to remote parts of Missouri's Ozarks, where running water and electricity were still novelties. She liked to keep us in touch with nature, leading us down to the creek every morning to plunge into the icy waters, thanking the Lord for giving her such a "big, wide, wonderful world to play in" at such remarkable low summer rates. She encouraged us to run around naked, but we had to wear shoes. She said that 'everything in nature is beautiful' but she was never without her fly swatter, her patent medicines, her jars of Mum, vaseline and the family enema bag. She gave us daily warnings about poisonous snakes, poison ivy and constipation, and she lived in fear that nature was out to destroy us in spite of its wonders.
Country life had charms for us that Cutie never imagined. The outhouse was one of them; it prevented her from checking up on our bowels. But to us it was a little temple of contemplation with the sexiest pin-ups in the world torn from the pages of the Sears Roebuck catalogue. By summer's end, there was nothing about women's underwear that I didn't know the price of, or range of size. The food we ate in the country was positively exotic compared to Cutie's kosher cooking in the city. Everything tasted fresher and cleaner; even pork was allowed us as long as it was cooked to a cinder.
Every day was spent trying to get away from her organized recreations, preferring to follow the farmer's children as they went about their chores. These summers gave me the feeling that I was part of a bigger family than just Landesmans. When father came out to visit us on the weekends and we were all together again, we behaved as we did in the city. We couldn't wait for him to leave so we could get back to nature's follies. But by the end of the summer we were glad to get back to the city.
City life had its charms for a skinny kid like me with an insatiable curiosity. Our house on the corner of Arlington Avenue and Minerva fronted US Highway 40. Everybody travelling west had to pass our modest two-family brick dwelling with its front porch, sloping lawn and a wild hedge that always needed trimming. The stop sign at the intersection gave us a chance to say hello or exchange insults with the children from far-away places with exotic license plates. Being first to spot what state they came from was a fascinating game we never tired of.
Cutie's warnings to stay away from the caravans that passed our house only added to the excitement when the gypsies came to town. Stories of kidnapped children fascinated me. Sometimes I wondered if I wasn't really a gypsy prince stolen by a middle class Jewish family. Whenever I had a fight with her, I thought I would get even by hitching a ride with the gypsies to some enchanted encampment. I would do anything to get away from the rules and regulations of home life.
Opposite our house was a city block of fenced property belonging to the St. Anne's Orphanage. Cutie always pointed out to me that I was lucky not to be behind the barbed wire with those poor orphans, but to me they looked like the lucky ones, running free, being attended to by pretty young women with bright wet lips and big breasts. We never understood that these women were there to have their own babies born out of wedlock, the fate of good Catholic girls gone bad. We were never allowed inside, but we were playmates all the same, throwing balls to one another over the fence, often holding hands through the wire. What mother could disapprove of being friendly to an orphan? Sometimes Cutie gave us brownie cookies to share with them.
At the other end of our block was Emerson school, where I spent my formative years in misery. The only comfortable place was the furnace room; I was on intimate terms with all the janitors. I respected them more than the teachers and had the impression that they knew more about a child's educational needs. Sometimes in winter I would do my homework next to a warm boiler; it was a lot better than doing it under Cutie's cold eyes. Not that I did a lot of homework. Instead, I developed a sense of irreverence with back issues of Bally-Hoo, an early mass market satirical magazine.
Being smaller and dumber than most of the children at school — my Sanford-Binet intelligence quotient was so low I thought it was my room number — I had to develop new skills to overcome my handicap. I became a part-time comic and full-time exhibitionist, appreciated by my fellow classmates but persecuted by the teachers. My imitations of Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor would have gotten me an A in any drama course, but because I performed them in Geography class I was penalized. School was a battle ground of wills that I emerged from scarred, but victorious. There wasn't a subject I took to which I didn't add a new dimension of juvenile peccadillos, including physical education and basket-weaving. If only the teachers had accepted my sense of humor, years of battling with their authority would have paid off.
Accused of harbouring general principles against the best interests of the school, I pleaded guilty with pride. Suspensions from school came as regular as clockwork, but Cutie forced the teachers to reinstate me; as the treasurer of the Parents Teachers Association she carried a lot of weight. Towards the end of my sentence I acquired a miraculous insight: school is one big joke.
What grown-ups in the 30s called a Depression, I called fun. The sidewalks and alleys were free and they were my stage. When my cousin, recently sacked from his job as a felt-presser in a men's hat factory, set up his apple stand on a busy intersection, I joined him in entertaining the tired men and women going home from work. While he sold his apples for a nickel and wisecracked about the shortcomings of capitalism, I set up a shoe-shine stand next to his and made up my first singing commercial in the style of Bing Crosby and the Mills Brothers:
Shine, shine, shine 'em up Mister
Only five cents per shine
(Ba bo bobo bo bo bobo)
I will shine your shoes
To satisfy you
And to keep you smiling all the time.
Black or brown, blue or white
I shine your shoes with all my might
So shine, shine, shine 'em up Mister
They're only five cents per shine.
(Ba bobo ba, bo ba bo)
The sidewalks were note books for the poor. I wrote some of my finest lines on them in chalk; "Irving HATES school," enclosed by a heart with an arrow through the word hate. They were our tennis courts, our exercise grounds and about the only thing we really owned. I remember it as a lifetime spent sitting on the curb watching the Fords go by.
What valuables lay in the gutter! King size cigarette butts, embossed cigar bands, silver foil from cigarette packages that you could sell if you could only collect a ton; or if you happened to get the lucky number from a pack of Lucky Strikes (or was it Camels?) you won a brand new Chevrolet. There were unused street car transfers and picture cards of baseball players, circulars for free home inspections, used postage stamps and leaflets for the Rosicrucians. Once in a while a soiled Irish linen handkerchief would be abandoned, and what was an almost new sanitary napkin doing next to it?
The alleys were the diamond mines of our street life. What treasures could be recycled in the ashpits of the alleyways: slightly used condoms and almost new batteries, Dixie paper cups by the score, cracked Bakelite household appliances, radio tubes, chipped crockery with years of life left in them. And the magazines that people threw away! Were they disgusted with themselves because they couldn't beat the time it took to read a Liberty magazine feature: 'THIS ARTICLE CAN BE READ IN FOUR MINUTES AND 32 SECONDS? It was their editor's brilliant contribution to journalism at the time.
Like millions of other good Americans during the Depression, our house displayed the New Deal's blue eagle in the window. My father, who by now was eking out a living as a part-time antique dealer, was invited by the Public Works project to join a distinguished group of unemployed muralists brightening up Federal Post Offices and children's hospitals with murals of nymphs and cherubs. Everyone was expected to do his bit for the country and at seventy-five dollars a week it was no hardship for Benjamin C. to pick up his brushes again. Cutie took over the running of the antique shop and once more he was wearing his artist's smock. Historians would have to say that the Depression was the best thing that happened to our family; under Cutie's reign the antique shop became a thriving enterprise. When my father returned to the business he was never again his own boss.
I remained fiercely independent having a whole string of jobs after school and on Saturdays. My success as a door to door salesman for the Curtis Publishing Company (Saturday Evening Post, The Ladies Home Journal and House and Garden) was inspired by all the salesmen that came to our house during the Depression selling Fuller brushes, large-size Hershey bars not-to-be-had in regular stores, and suits made to order at amazing low prices. A travelling violin lessons salesman was a particular source of inspiration. His great stroke was choosing my brother, Gene, to be the lucky candidate.
"Look, madame," he said to Cutie, "this boy has the hands of a virtuoso." Thrusting the violin under Gene's chin, he grabbed his right hand to place over the bow — when he noticed the deformed fingers of Gene's left hand. By no stretch of the imagination could they possibly do a simple fingering exercise, much less an intricate run, but he didn't crack a smile or show a sign of surprise. Placing Gene's gnarled fingers across the neck of the violin into a fingering position, he asked: "How does that feel, son?" He looked at Cutie. "Madame, this boy could be another Yehudi Menuhin." Gene was almost as surprised as the salesman when Cutie signed up for a full course.
My Saturday job was to light the furnaces of our Orthodox Jewish neighbors, who were forbidden to light fires on the Sabbath. My being Jewish didn't seem to matter to them; rather I got the impression they were secretly pleased that such a nice Jewish boy was so ambitious. One Christmas, taking advantage of the Christian spirit, I collaborated with Fred and Gene in a sure fire promotion. Gene stole the Christmas seals from Woolworth, Fred repackaged them with hand-drawn 'Greetings from St. Anne's Orphanage', and I, dressed in ill-fitting clothes in freezing weather, sold the packages door to door in rich districts. When the maid or butler appeared, I'd put the package of seals on their little silver tray and ask them to take it to their mistress. I never failed to make a sale or be served a cup of hot chocolate, frequently both.
Then I became interested in collecting stamps. In a few months I had accumulated enough from other dealers' stamp approval books to start my own stamp company. One of the antique shop's customers owned a big stamp company, and I got a job sweeping up the place on Saturdays. I swept up so many good stamps that I had deliberately dropped on the floor that I handed in my broom before I was caught.
I was approaching the age when a boy's thoughts turn from stamps to cars. I loved the smell of gasoline and the look of a really beautiful dash board. I learned to drive at a very early age, so when I had the opportunity to buy a model T Ford coupe with a rumble seat for twenty-eight dollars, I sold my stamp company to Fred to raise the money. It was hard to convince Cutie that it was a smart move; she saw the car as a hearse that would carry me to my funeral.
"It could be a money-maker, Curie." I explained my plan for charging my friends to take them to school. A deal with father to advertise the antique shop on the doors and rumble seat brought in a dollar a week, putting the whole operation into profit. Cutie was only convinced when she got a call from the advertisement on the car. The stamp collection was worth about two hundred dollars — which proved I knew nothing about business, but knew a lot about how to handle Cutie.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Rebel Without Applause by Jay Landesman. Copyright © 1987 Jay Landesman. Excerpted by permission of The Permanent Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
- Cover Page
- Dedication
- The Roots of Rebellion
- 1
- 2
- Neurotica
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- Falling in Love
- 8
- 9
- 10
- The Crystal Palace
- 11
- 12
- 13
- From Bedbug Row to Broadway
- 14
- 15
- Stars of Tomorrow
- 16
- 17
- Running Dry/Running Off
- 18
- 19
- About the Author
- Copyright Page