Getting Garbo Read online

  Copyright © 2004 by Jerry Ludwig

  Cover and internal design © 2004 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover photo © Corbis

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published by Sourcebooks, Inc.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ludwig, Jerry.

  Getting Garbo / by Jerry Ludwig.

  p. cm.

  1. Autographs—Collectors and collecting—Fiction. 2. Motion picture actors and actresses—Fiction. 3. Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.)—Fiction. 4. Fans (Persons)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3562.U29G48 2004

  813’.54—dc22

  2004013122

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Part Two

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Part Three

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  For Tobi,

  the miracle of my life

  Part One

  “What we are and what we think we are are really two different things. And the discovery of who one is is a soul-shaking experience.”

  —John Huston

  1

  Reva

  Do you believe in destiny? Since I was a little kid and I first learned the word, I always thought that it applied only to people who were rich or famous, like Marie Antoinette or Charles Lindbergh. They had a destiny. The rest of us just went through life and things kind of happened with no particular rhyme or reason. But sometimes, when you stop and look back, you see a pattern, maybe even an inevitability.

  This is how it started for me.

  Back in the late ’40s through the mid-’50s, my folks and I were living in this dinky cold-water third-floor walkup in a quasi-slum at the end of the IRT subway line in Brooklyn. Sickly and already undersized as a child, I wasn’t allowed by Mother to play with any of the neighborhood kids if they even had a runny nose for fear that I would catch whatever was going around. Not that any of them were clamoring to play with me; mostly whenever they paid any attention to me it was to chant, “Reva Hess is a mess.” So basically that left me with a grand total of no friends, except for one: it was the pre-television era, and the radio became my best friend. “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!” Fred Allen nasally calling for “Mrs. Nussbauuuum.” Gangbusters and the Kate Smith Show. “Jello everybody, this is Jack Benny…” Corliss Archer and Henry Aldrich. The stirring William Tell Overture that brought the Lone Ranger and Tonto galloping out of the West.

  “Tired of the everyday routine? CBS offers you—Suspense.”

  I feel real sorry for everyone who missed that time. Now, I know what you’re gonna say: we got the tube now and isn’t it much better to have words and pictures? Well, that’s just my point. I could hear and see. Incredible pictures, in living color, castles and jungles, distant battlefields and planets in other galaxies, bigger and better than even Cecil B. DeMille can afford to actually create for his movies, pictures woven only of words and sound effects, and here’s the best part: it was all happening inside my head. Sure, maybe you saw a different picture than me, but that was fine, too, because the only real limit on what you experienced was imagination, and I’ve always prided myself on having a lot of that.

  My top favorite radio show was Let’s Pretend on Saturday morning. They acted out fairy tales and I was transported to all those make-believe kingdoms. When Jack climbed the beanstalk that reached to the sky, I was right up there with him. I was Rapunzel letting her hair cascade down the length of the tower for the brave knight to ascend, and when the prince awakened Sleeping Beauty with a kiss, that was me, too. I never missed an episode. But I’d begun to notice something. Every Saturday morning, I pictured one familiar face besides mine. Sometimes it belonged to Aladdin or Hansel or even the court jester. My favorite characters. But they’d all have the same voice. His voice. Only I didn’t know that yet. Not until I persuaded Mother to let me accept the offer made by the announcer at the end of Let’s Pretend to write away for free tickets to attend a broadcast. Mother finally agreed as a present for my thirteenth birthday. It was 1950 and that was the first trip I’d ever made into Manhattan.

  It took over an hour on the subway, but when Mother and I climbed up into the center of Radio City, I didn’t know what to look at first. The skyscrapers, the neon signs, the honking traffic, Lindy’s famous restaurant (with signed movie star photos in the window), men digging up the gutter with jackhammers, a novelty store where I tried (unsuccessfully) to convince Mother to buy me a pet turtle with the Empire State Building painted on its shell. We stood with a bunch of people in front of a restaurant window where a black cook in a white coat and hat flipped pancakes and omelets in the air and caught them in his frying pan.

  Then there was the radio show itself, in a theater on 54th Street, just off Broadway. Unlike the movie houses we had in Brooklyn, it was clean. No wads of gum stuck under the seats or candy wrappers and sticky dried soda pop on the floor. And the floor was carpeted, which none of the theaters in our neighborhood were. Of course, there was no screen in the CBS radio theater. Just a narrow stage with a painted backdrop of fairy tale characters. The actors and actresses, all holding their scripts, sat on folding chairs, chatting quietly. They didn’t wear costumes, just ordinary business-type clothes.

  While we were waiting for the show to start, this young guy with shaggy chestnut brown hair wandered out. He was wearing a black windbreaker, a white shirt with no tie, and wrinkled khaki pants and brown work boots. I figured he was a stagehand because he looked like he should be pushing a broom. He adjusted the height of a microphone and placed a script on the stand in front of it. He went over to talk to the sound effects engineer, who was sitting at this complicated setup where they do all that stuff like patting their chests with coconut shells to fake a horse’s hoof beats or crinkling sheets of cellophane to crea
te the illusion of crackling flames, and they talked so long I thought maybe the shaggy guy was the assistant sound engineer.

  The story they were doing was “The Fisherman and His Wife,” about the guy who saves the life of the magic fish. The fish thanks him and the fisherman goes home and tells his wife about it and she tells him he should go back and ask for a wish. So he goes and asks for a house, and the fish gives it to them, but the wife still isn’t satisfied, so she sends her husband back again to ask for a palace, and it goes on like that, with the wife never content. Finally, the last time she sends him back, the fisherman tells the magic fish that his wife now wants to be queen of the moon and the stars and the sky. The magic fish is really irked by that and he cancels all the other good stuff he already gave them and they’re back where they started—with nothing.

  Mother said there was a moral to the story. I just thought it was exciting and wished the wife would slip and fall and die in the palace so he could find someone nice who really loved him. But guess who was playing the fisherman? It was him, of course. The voice. But big surprise to me: turns out the voice belonged to the shaggy guy in the windbreaker, who wasn’t a stagehand or the assistant sound engineer after all. Actually, he acted in a bunch of different voices, as a tiny beggar boy and a witchy old hag and if you weren’t watching, you’d never guess they were all him. At the end of the show the announcer rattled off the names of the cast, each actor or actress took a little bow for the audience, and that’s how I first found out his name was Roy Darnell.

  Afterwards Mother and I strolled down Broadway past the great movie theaters I’d heard of, like the Capitol and the Strand. Just below the Camels billboard with the man’s face blowing real smoke rings out into Times Square, we found a Nedicks stand and had hot dogs and orange drinks. Because it was my birthday, Mother broke down and bought me a bag of saltwater taffy for dessert. Then we were on 45th Street and the theaters here weren’t movie houses or radio studios. Mother explained that these were the theaters where the hit Broadway shows played with real actors on stage. Some of the names on the marquees I recognized, some I didn’t. Ethel Merman. Bobby Clark. Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. Spencer Tracy. Bert Lahr. Then I spotted Sardi’s. A name I know from the weekday radio show they broadcast from there, Luncheon At Sardi’s, interviewing the stars.

  Just when we approached the entrance, something really unusual happened. The fatso uniformed doorman was yelling at us, “Move it, move it, ladies, don’t block the way,” when who should come sauntering out but Danny Kaye and his daughter. Now, Danny Kaye was absolutely God in our neighborhood. He grew up there and went to the same junior high school I was in at the time. In fact, he was one of only two famous people who ever graduated from J.H.S. 149. The other one was Anthony Esposito, who became a hitman for “Murder, Incorporated,” and he went to the electric chair when I was in the seventh grade.

  But seeing Danny Kaye in the flesh wasn’t the unusual thing.

  The sidewalk in front of Sardi’s was real crowded, a regular mob scene of theater customers hotfooting it to their matinees, and a bunch of Damon Runyon–type guys blocking the sidewalk and kibbitzing in front of the ticket agency next door, not to mention the horde of other people shoving by in order to get to who knows where. But at the sight of Danny Kaye, a half dozen of the pedestrians loitering on the sidewalk suddenly came out of the crowd and closed in. It was like a squadron of vultures swooping in on their prey. Well, that makes it sound mean—it was more like a coordinated ballet movement. They must have been there all along, those half-dozen, but they’d been invisible until now. They came in all sizes, shapes, and forms, from teenage bobbysoxers to a leathery old woman. But they all had autograph books and pens in their hands now. They formed a circle around Danny Kaye and his daughter—and pushed Mother and me completely aside.

  As Danny Kaye began to sign his name for them, Mother poked me to get in there too. We didn’t have any paper, but she poured all the salt water taffy into her handbag and gave me the empty paper bag. But by then it was too late. Danny Kaye was about to get into a taxi. I don’t know where I got the chutzpah from, but I hollered: “Mr. Kaye, wait, I’m from one-forty-nine!”

  He turned and looked back. Right at me. So I repeated what I’d said and he shook his head. “You’re too little to be in junior high.”

  “I skipped a grade,” I told him.

  “So let me hear the school song.”

  Everybody was staring at me now. So I started off kind of shaky.

  “One-four-nine is the school for me…”

  He joined in on the second line and we sang it together:

  “Drives away adversity,

  Steady and true,

  We’ll be unto you,

  Loyal to one-four-nine,

  Rah-rah-rah-h-h-h!”

  Then everybody on the pavement clapped and he signed my paper bag. He wrote, “For Reva, Say Hi to 149 for me, Danny Kaye.” He drove off and while Mother was admiring the autograph, who else should come out but Roy Darnell with a pretty young lady. By now I was in the swing of things and asked him to sign the other side of my paper bag. The professional autograph hunters all crowded around us.

  “Who’zat?” one wanted to know.

  “Roy Darnell,” I said, proud to be of service to them. “He’s the star of Let’s Pretend on the radio.”

  “It’s nobody,” the leathery old lady said. And they all melted away into the crowd again. The pretty girl with Roy Darnell laughed.

  “You still want my autograph?” he asked.

  “Oh, yeah!” I said. And he wrote, “Thanks for asking, Reva, all the best, Roy Darnell.” Imagine that—he thanked me. That happened six years ago, but I can still hear him just like it was yesterday.

  2

  Roy

  Humphrey Bogart is telling a joke. So, of course, we’re all listening. After all, it’s Bogie’s booth. Second on the left as you descend into the main room at Romanoff’s restaurant in Beverly Hills. Where the elite meet to eat lunch and ogle each other. Bogie sits in front of his usual Scotch and soda, dragging on a cigarette in that special cupped-hand way that made smokers of so many of us and killed him two years later. Some of the usual suspects are gathered: genial actor David Niven, high-powered agent Irving Paul Lazar, Herald Trib columnist Joe Hyams, plus our imperious host, the royal pretender himself, Prince Mike Romanoff. And don’t forget me—Roy Darnell, the kid from South Philly who’s finally made it into the big time by way of the small screen. That’s us. The guys.

  “So there’s this man needs a new suit,” Bogie begins, “and his friend Harry says, ‘C’mon, let’s go see Pincus the tailor over on Fairfax Avenue. He’s a magician with a needle.’ They go over and the man tells Pincus, ‘I need a black suit, not navy blue. Black. Black as Joe McCarthy’s heart.’ Pincus assures him he’ll make a great suit. Pincus measures the man, tells him to come back next Tuesday.”

  Romanoff interrupts. The Oxford-borrowed accent. “Excuse me, Mr. Bogart, is this going to be a very long story?”

  “Shut the fuck up, Mike. So on Tuesday, the man and his buddy Harry come back and the suit fits like a dream. But the man holds a sleeve up to the light. ‘Whaddayathink, Harry? Looks just like very dark blue to me.’ Pincus swears to him it’s the blackest suit he ever made.”

  “Single or double breasted?” Lazar wants to know. Bogie glares. Like he used to at Conrad Veidt in the anti-Nazi flicks. Lazar says no more. Bogie continues.

  “So the guy pays Pincus, puts on the suit and they leave. Walking down the street. Still not sure. But here’s two nuns coming toward them.”

  “That’s supposed to be real good luck,” Hyams says.

  “You assholes,” Bogie says. “Just forget it. Forget the whole thing.”

  “Go on, Bogie, finish the story. I’m dying to hear the ending.” Niven could be razzing him along with the others. But Bogie enjoys the c
ommotion. Another toke on his unfiltered Chesterfield. Then he goes on.

  “So the man rushes up to the younger nun and says, ‘Excuse me, sister,’ and he holds up the sleeve of his new suit next to her nun’s habit. Then he turns to Harry and mumbles something. Now, the two nuns stroll on. After a minute the younger nun says, ‘I didn’t know persons of the Jewish persuasion could speak Latin.’ The older nun asks her what she means. ‘Well,’ says the younger nun, ‘when that gentleman held up his sleeve he said pincus fuctus.’”

  I laugh. But I’m alone. The rest of the guys just sit there.

  “Funny, huh?” Bogie berates Lazar.

  “It’s anti-Semitic.”

  “Up yours, Swifty. I’m more Jewish than you’ll ever be.”

  “You’re a full-blooded goy,” Hyams reminds him.

  Bogie focuses on me. “Tell ’em why it’s hilarious.”

  I pick my words carefully. They can all jump on me in a second. Including Bogie. That’s how the game is played.

  “Don’t you guys get it?” I say. “It’s about Hollywood—all the people who got screwed and lived to dine and whine about it. See, everybody tells a different story. But they’re really all the same. They’re all the tales of how Pincus fucked us.”

  Bogie chuckles in his mirthless way. “The kid’s the only one in the joint with a sense of humor.”

  I bask in my mentor’s approval. My punchline echoes inside my head: They’re all the tales of how Pincus fucked us.

  And this tale happens to be mine.

  • • •

  “Mr. Darnell, your luncheon companion has arrived,” Kurt, the maitre d’, confides to me in a Kraut accent. Prince Mike, nee Harry Gerguson from Brooklyn, likes to hire people with European accents. Classes up the place. Kurt gestures across the room to where Laszlo the waiter is ceremoniously seating a wind-swept ash blonde wearing oversized sunglasses and a fur coat that a stable of sables died for. Flash of good legs as she scuttles into her seat. She waves to me. I wave to her. In fact, all the guys at Bogie’s table wave to her.