Me and Orson Welles: A Novel

Saturday, November 6 One

This is the story of one week in my life. I was seventeen. It was the week I slept in Orson Welles’s pajamas. It was the week I fell in love. It was the week I fell out of love. And it was the week I changed my middle name—twice.

My memory of that period is of things happening—almost without cease. There must be a remarkable time in everybody’s life when the phone doesn’t stop ringing—when the mailman brings you nothing but success—when you walk down the street, the sunlight pouring around you, scarcely able to believe your own good luck.

That Saturday morning the phone was ringing again. My grandfather’s Model A was pulling up in front of the house. The living-room radio was blaring news about the Japanese invading China.

On the second floor, my sister was playing her Crosby record of The Moon Got in My Eyes for the eight-millionth time. It was the latest in a series of sentimental ballads that served as emotional chapter titles to what I imagined was her overdreamed and underlived life.

Change the needle! I said as I headed toward the bathroom. You’re wrecking it.

Twerp.

Another county heard from. This from my mother. She was knocking spiderwebs from the ceiling with a broom. "Your father works every day ’til nine o’clock at night, and now on Saturday he has to rake leaves yet? You enjoy giving him more work?"

I went into my Paul Muni impersonation from The Life of Emile Zola: "The day will come when France will thank me . . . for having helped to save her honor!" (Voice breaking huskily on honor to simulate overwhelming emotion.)

It’s no use.

What’s he shouting for, Nutsy Fagen? This from my grandmother downstairs.

I checked my reflection in the hall mirror. Not bad, I thought. Sometimes I really did look like somebody—a writer, an actor—the earnestness of Gary Cooper, the playfulness of Cary Grant, and maybe just a whisper of Astaire. I struck an Astaire-like pose, straightened an imaginary tie, and sang into the camera:

I’ve been a roaming Romeo,

My Juliets have been many . . .

Oh, I was crazy for songs that year. Knew all the verses; knew the names of all the composers and the lyricists; knew the shows and the movies they were from. I’d picked a lot of it up from my grandmother’s sheet music collection, but even more I’d learned from my near-obsessive listening to the radio. (The radio and the public library were my two connections to something bigger than Westfield, New Jersey.) My parents’ old Atwater Kent sat next to my bed, the hot dust from the tubes sweetening the air ’til two in the morning, filling the room with Benny Goodman’s Avalon, Mildred Bailey’s There’s a Lull in My Life, Glen Gray, Ruth Etting, Isham Jones. And Saturday nights there was Theatre News with John Gassner—and voices in my own bedroom were talking about the new George S. Kaufman play, and Richard Rodgers himself was playing the piano, and Lorenz Hart was speaking: "Here’s our first song hit, ‘Manhattan,’ from the Garrick Gaieties." And the Lunts were laughing about Amphitryon 38, and Harold Clurman was directing the new Clifford Odets.

I lay there at night, and I felt close to it all. New York City and the CBS Radio Workshop. Close enough to touch, if I could just get through the right door. Forty minutes from where I lived, Irving Berlin was writing a new song that two months from now every person in the world would be singing. All of it vibrating out there!

And some mornings when the light was good, and the coffee and the Fig Newtons were scalding through me, I’d think—at least for a few intoxicated seconds: You know, Richard, you can do all that, too. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to write songs or direct plays or write novels or maybe do everything—like the Jewish Noel Coward.

Sheldon Coward presents Hollywood!

So I pored through the memoirs and the back issues of Theatre Arts Monthly in the public library searching for the answer. I read the biographies of every actor and writer I admired for their secrets. How did it happen? When did they know? What was the breakthrough?

I’d just finished Noel Coward’s autobiography, Present Indicative. I thought it was the best book I’d ever read, and I kept comparing myself to him: O.K., Coward was twenty-five when he wrote, directed, and starred in The Vortex. That still gave me eight years. He wrote A Room with a View when he was twenty-eight, so I still had a little time there, too. But Berlin was only twenty-two when he wrote When I Lost You.

God, it was going to be hard to keep up.

Downstairs, the phone was still ringing. It was nearly always for me; mostly the guys at school—the Black Crow Crew we called ourselves, the seven of us, in celebration of our drinking exploits. (Black Crow was this toxically cheap beer we drank.) But it wasn’t the drinking that had pulled me to the Black Crow Crew. It was the energy of Stefan and Skelly and the rest of them—this vanguard of good-looking male power in Westfield High School. They had a kind of celebrity glow about them that just about defined the word desirable. That I was permitted to be close to them seemed nothing short of a miracle. Last year, Stefan had been standing outside of study hall eyeing up this amazing tenth-grader, Kristina Stakuna. We noticed each other staring at her ass, and we both cracked up laughing. We ended up sitting next to each other in that study hall for half a year, and so became friends. It was strange, because we seemed almost opposites. Stefan was five feet tall, tough, physically intense—about once a week he got thrown out of school for beating the crap out of somebody. I was taller and significantly less imposing, an Honors English type. Sometimes, with Stefan, I felt I was the pilot fish hovering just behind the shark. I think I gave him some sort of dubious intellectual credentials—and in return I fell under his protection. Nobody could mess with me, or they’d have to deal with Stefan and the Black Crow Boys. I rewrote his entire research paper on Walt Whitman. A+, Phil, it’s great to see you finally working to your potential. In return he set fire to Kimberley Kagan’s car when she refused to go to the prom with me. It was definitely a fair trade. Of course, Skelly, Stefan, Korzun, Townsend, and the rest of them knew every beautiful girl in the school—I mean, these girls were lining up for the privilege of dating these guys, or even being near them, sitting in the same diner as they did on a late Saturday night. And while those particular romantic spoils hadn’t yet fallen my way, just the proximity of beautiful women was exciting. I was sort of the approachable liaison to the Black Crow Crew. Gorgeous girls would stop and ask me if I knew whether Stefan had plans for the weekend. They were so close I could smell their perfume, could stare with perfect innocence at their impossibly lovely arms and the sculpted perfection of their stockinged legs. And, all right, I may have been invisible to them, but they weren’t invisible to me. One time Kate Rouilliard looked directly at me with the cool lamps of her enormous blue eyes, and I couldn’t sleep an entire week.

My grandfather was standing in front of the phonograph in the living room listening to my father’s Jolson records. He was still dressed in his hat, scarf, and black Chesterfield coat with the velvet collar.

So ’til we meet again,

Heaven only knows where or when,

Think of me now and then,

Little pal!

My mother handed me the phone.

Hi, it’s Caroline.

My heart leapt a little. All right, she was short, she looked a little librarian, but, hell, it was a start. I thought she was pretty. My affiliation with the mighty Black Crow Crew was finally beginning to pay off—although my relationship with Caroline Tice had become a sort of joke among the Boys. I’d been seeing her for two months now and hadn’t even kissed her. Pounce! Stefan and Skelly kept yelling at me. "Pounce that broad. That’s what she’s waiting for you to do. Don’t ask her, for Christ’s sake."

I’m getting there.

"He’s getting there."

Slowly.

Listen, said Stefan. "Broads aren’t interested in slowly. Their parents are interested in slowly."

Skelly was jabbing his finger in my face. He wore a white beer jacket signed with names and obscenities.

They want you to be aggressive, he said. "They want you to fight for ’em."

I looked at the ground and shook my head. I don’t know if that’s who I am.

Stefan nailed me. "And who you are—is that who you want to be?"

I don’t know.

At this point they usually slapped their heads in disbelief.

Even I sometimes slapped my head in disbelief, but this was my enduring problem with girls. I was always the friend and never the boyfriend. I shared all their romantic troubles during lunch; they showed me their diaries; I got the jubilant: "The big idiot finally asked me! I got: Richard, you’re the only guy I can really talk to. I mean, I can talk to you like a girl. But I never got the dream, the Unhooked Capacious Brassiere. I never got the you-can-take-off-my-stockings-before-my-parents-get-home." Which is exactly what Skelly got, and Stefan got. In abundance. Overflowing.

But I thought I had a chance with Caroline Tice. At least a slight chance. She was guileless and smart. Green Lutheran eyes. I liked her shortness; I liked her Lutheran eyes; I liked her ring size. She wore her hair as short as a guy’s, and I liked that, too.

And I was polite. Oh, God, I was polite. I bought her flowers. I wrote her parents elaborate thank you notes whenever they’d had me over for dinner—sixty-hour suppers where they smiled with courteous Lutheran horror at the Fast-Talking Jew Boy their green-eyed jewel had dragged home.

The show is at eight, Caroline was saying, "but I have to be there by at least six-thirty. And, Richard, please, no more rowdiness from your drunken friends."

It wasn’t us.

"It wasn’t we."

Caroline had the lead in Growing Pains, which was being performed that night for the second and final time. I’d gone the previous evening. It was a terrible play, a comedy of youth filled with characters named Dutch and Slim and Spats shrieking about roller skates and lost baseball gloves.

Anyway, the only really enjoyable moment of the play was when Kristina Stakuna (Amazon Queen of the Swollen Softballs) came onstage and the entire Black Crow Crew started stomping and giving her wolf whistles.

That artful uplift! called out Stefan.

Then Skelly got all seven of us singing to the tune of That Old Feeling:

I saw you last night,

And got that old boner.

At the intermission Dr. Mewling invited us to leave.

We goofed around on the front steps of the school, smoking my terrible Wings cigarettes and indulging in wildly obscene fantasies about Kristina Stakuna and the college goon she was dating. I heard when she visited him at Rutgers, said Stefan, "that he screwed her for nine hours straight. When he was done he had to go to the hospital. I’m not shittin’ ya."

I’d met up with Caroline after the show. That was really raw, she’d said. "You embarrassed Kristina. You embarrassed me. You guys are really raw." But even as she said the words, it struck me that she had actually enjoyed it—that she, too, had been briefly illuminated by the celebrity of the mighty Black Crow Crew.

Am I going to see you this afternoon? she asked, now on the phone. "Or are you going to drag me into New York again to look at old boarded-up theatres and say, ‘Did you know Eva Le Gallienne starred in Peter Pan here in 1925?’ "

1926.

"Look, I’ll see you tonight. And do me a favor: tell the Black Crow Crew they’re officially not invited. Tell them they can come to the party afterwards at Kristina’s house; I’m sure they’ll enjoy that."

"I’m sure you’d enjoy that."

"I am not interested in Phil Stefan, Richard."

Then you’re the only girl in the school who isn’t.

When I replaced the phone, Jolson was still wailing: Dirty hands! Dirty face!

Ma! I yelled to no one in particular. I’m heading out.

Gai gezint, said my grandfather.

I stood by the front door wearing my father’s old black double-breasted coat (too big for me, but I liked that it felt as if it were a costume from Uncle Vanya) and my battered black fedora—a five-dollar bill folded into my sock.

The leaves! called my mother.

Tomorrow! Ma, I’ve got nothing on my schedule tomorrow but raking! I’m going to do seventeen, maybe eighteen hours straight.

The front door was already shutting behind me.

It’s no use, I heard her say.

Two

I walked toward the library feeling that the weights I had been lifting in the mornings were finally beginning to show some results. I’d begun working out last spring under the direction of Stefan, who assured me that I could transform myself into him.

How influenced I was by every encounter that came my way. I still said out loud each morning: Every day in every way I am getting better and better—and who the hell believed that anymore? My parents had bought me Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People and that stuff was rattling inside me, too. Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.

I took a folded postcard from my wallet, and the librarian handed me a never-been-read copy of Rosamond Gilder’s John Gielgud’s Hamlet.

The immaculate newness of its shiny wrapper in my hands felt delicious. On the cover was Gielgud’s hawklike profile, framed in a high black collar. There were more photographs inside, set designs, plus the entire edited scripts of Gielgud’s famous 1934 and 1936 productions.

I started reading the book as I walked toward the train station. I could hear that evocative and autumnal Saturday-morning sound: the bass drums booming from the marching band as they practiced. Some small current of guilt passed through me; I was a drummer in that band, and I should have been standing inside the fieldhouse on Rahway Avenue with the rest of them. What the hell, I said. Sometimes you gotta pounce.

Somebody had left a Westfield Leader on the train, and I skimmed it as we rattled east.

Republicans Sweep Local Vote, Win All Four Council Seats.

What was my family doing here?

My father owned United Tire Sales on Broad Street in Newark, and instead of going bust in the crash, his used-tire business had wildly flourished. Nobody could afford new tires anymore, and he had thousands of used ones stacked to the ceiling. All at once he was pulling in so much money he didn’t know what to do with it. At one point we were hiding it in the oven. And in a daring gesture of social mobility (engineered by my mother, who, in her own way, was pretty courageous), we moved to our fairytale-looking Victorian house on Lawrence Avenue in Westfield, where the green-eyed Lutherans grew.

I changed trains at Newark for the Hudson Tubes, and I was trying hard to hold on to my sense of energy and optimism. I checked my reflection in the window— O.K., smooth the part in the hair, bring down the shoulders a little bit, loosen the intensity around the eyes, add just the subtlest suggestion of an ironic smile. Gabel in It Happened One Night.