Looking for a Love Story (15 page)

“Vaudeville was
family
entertainment—that was a big selling point. Before vaude you had variety shows that were aimed at a stag audience, and the material could get racy. But when women started wanting to have fun, vaude came in, and it was clean. There were warnings posted backstage at the theaters with lists of things performers couldn’t say, like
slob
or
son of a gun.”
Chicky’s voice chuckled. “Can you imagine what those theater owners would have done if they could see cable television today?”

I started making notes as fast as I could.

“My pop started out as half of a double comedy act when he was just a kid; he worked with a boy named Benny George. Benny’s real name was Benjamin Gerhardt; his folks were German and he’d been born and raised in the old German neighborhood on the Upper East Side. Benny and Pop came from very different kinds of backgrounds—and I’m not just talking about nationality or religion. Pop grew up in Little Italy, as the middle kid of five. His dad died when he was six, and his mother worked two shifts in the shirt factory, so the children pretty much raised themselves. Pop shined shoes, sold newspapers, and ran errands to bring in extra money. He stuck it out in school until he was thirteen, and then he hit the streets doing an act, telling funny stories and singing and dancing.

“As hard as Pop had it, Benny had it easy. His father died when Benny was young, same as Pop, but Benny was an only child, and his folks had their own business, a bakery that Mrs. Gerhardt continued to run as a widow. Benny’s mother gave him all the advantages; he had his own bedroom, nice clothes, and music lessons, and she always saw to it that he had a little money in his pocket.

“She wanted Benny to be classy, so one summer she hired a student from Columbia University to teach him how to speak without a New York accent and which fork to use at a dinner party. Mrs. Gerhardt had high hopes for Benny. She wanted him to go to college and become a professional man, a doctor or a lawyer or a CPA. She was a tough bird who expected things to go the way she planned. But her Benny was even tougher, and he wanted to go into show business.

“Pop and Benny met when Pop was twelve and Benny was fourteen. They each had an act they’d put together—Benny was singing ballads and, like I said, Pop was dancing, singing, and telling jokes—and they ran into each other when they were both trying to work the same street corner outside the Metropolitan Opera House. It was a prime location because people lined up there a couple of hours before the performances to buy the cheap tickets, and if the weather was nice, the pickings were good for a decent street act. But not for two acts. Pop and Benny realized they could either fight or team up, and since neither one of them wanted to get their clothes bloody they went to a nearby soda fountain and worked out the details of their new partnership. They started an act called Masters and George, the Laughter Boys. Pop was Masters and Benny was George. Doll Face, you’ve got a picture of Benny and Pop when they were kids. Benny’s the chubby one.”

I looked at the pile of pictures she’d given me. All of them had
been carefully numbered, with little notes telling me the order in which I was to view them. The first shot did indeed show two kids grinning into the camera for all they were worth. I recognized Joe Masters immediately; the face that didn’t quite fit together had been even more memorable on him as a youngster. But Chicky had indulged in wild understatement when she’d said Benny was chubby; he was round. His head was a sphere that rested without a visible neck on the larger sphere that was his torso, and his legs, while long, were essentially an afterthought. His face would have been attractive if it were slimmer; his long nose and full mouth were handsome, and he had a mop of thick blond curly hair. But his eyes had an expression I knew only too well from my own mirror. It was that half-defiant, half-hangdog look worn by kids who spend most of their lives battling their weight and losing the fight. Since he had several inches on Joe, as well as his poundage, Benny dominated the picture—but not in a good way.

“Benny and Joe did okay in the streets for over a year,” Chicky’s voice informed me, “but they wanted to work in a real theater. They started putting together a new act. They rehearsed in Benny’s mother’s apartment; you can imagine how happy she was about that. Picture it, Doll Face, these two kids trying to come up with an act that was going to make them stars, while downstairs in the bakery, Mrs. Gerhardt was rolling out pie crust and glowering up at the ceiling.”

I closed my eyes and pictured the boys I’d just seen, in a tiny turn-of-the century parlor. There would be wooden wainscoting halfway up the walls and some kind of dark wallpaper on the top half. A round rug on the floor that the boys would roll up so they could practice their dance routines. And below them, Mrs. Gerhardt’s malevolent presence.

“My pop was in the apartment when Benny’s mother found out
he had quit school to go into the business,” Chicky’s voice said. “Benny was sixteen and Pop was fourteen. Pop never forgot that day.”

A description of the scene followed. I listened to all of it. Then, despite Annie’s growled protests—she still harbored bad feelings about the Evil Laptop—I opened my computer, took a deep breath, and started typing.

CHAPTER 14

Upper East Side
,
New York City
1914

The bakery window was big, so it was way too easy for Mrs. Gerhardt to look out and see Joe Masters climbing up the steps that led to the family quarters above the shop. Benny’s parents had purchased the building before Benny was born, and when his father had installed the bakery on the ground floor, he’d had a huge window cut into the front wall so he could display his cakes and pies. But his doughnuts were the bakery’s biggest seller. Those small pillows of sweet dough were fried on the outside to crispy perfection, dusted heavily with powdered sugar, and stuffed with the fruit preserves Benny’s mother made fresh every day. When Benny’s father was alive, he woke up before dawn to heat the fryer, and the customers began lining up even before the aroma of the yeasty batter puffing up in the hot oil filled the street. After Mr. Gerhardt’s death, Benny’s mother took his place behind the fryer. She did a brisk business with commercial outlets too. There were
at least half a dozen grocery stores that sold Gerhardt’s doughnuts, and no self-respecting restaurant in the area would have dreamed of serving any others. Every morning, white bakery boxes with green trim containing one dozen doughnuts each would be stacked up in the window, waiting for the boy who would run around the neighborhood delivering them.

It was three in the afternoon now, and Joe was hoping Mrs. Gerhardt would be in the kitchen in the back of the shop. She spent her afternoons down there, whipping up batches of cookies and dinner rolls, emerging only when the front doorbell signaled that she had a customer. That was why Joe had timed his appearance at the house for this moment—so she wouldn’t see him. Mrs. Gerhardt hated Joe. It wasn’t anything personal, Joe knew that, she just didn’t want her son to go into show business and Joe was Benny’s partner in their act. If she caught sight of Joe climbing the steps to her front door, she’d stand in the huge window and glare at him as he rang the bell. Joe wasn’t afraid of her, exactly, but he did try to avoid her as much as possible.

This afternoon he was in luck. According to a sign on the bakery door, Mrs. Gerhardt was running an errand and would be back in half an hour. Joe made his way up the stairs, waited for Benny to open the door, and followed his friend to the parlor, where Benny had pushed back the furniture and placed their sheet music—carefully annotated with their key and tempo changes—on the piano. Next to the sheet music was a sheaf of papers that was even more valuable; it was the only complete script Benny and Joe had of their entire act—patter, jokes, song introductions, stage business—all of it painstakingly written out by Joe.

“You got past Ma?” Benny asked.

“She’s not in the shop,” Joe assured him.

“Probably out buying sugar.” Benny paused, then added grimly, “I’ve got to get out of this dump. Got to get a place of my own.”
He said that every time Joe came over to rehearse. Joe, who had already moved out of his family’s cramped apartment to make more room for his remaining siblings, thought Benny didn’t know how good he had it, with his mother still providing his bed and board. But he kept his mouth shut. Benny got furious anytime anyone tried to say anything nice about Mrs. Gerhardt.

“We in the contest?” Joe changed the subject. A vaudeville theater on Coney Island held a talent contest for new acts three times a year, and the first one of the season was scheduled for the following weekend. The winning act would be awarded a spot on a tour that was playing a string of small theaters in upstate New York. It wasn’t like booking the Palace, but for Masters and George it would be a big break. The challenge was getting into the contest; the list of entrants had been full for a couple of days by the time Benny heard about it. Benny was the one who stayed on top of theatrical opportunities for the act, but this time he’d been too late.

“I’m still trying to nab a spot,” Benny said. When he wasn’t keeping up on the latest show-business gossip, Benny hung around booking agents’ offices, trying to make friends with anyone who could help their act. But none of his contacts had an in with the promoters of this contest. So for the past few days Benny had been schlepping out to Coney Island with a box of dougnuts for the stage manager who worked the vaudeville house. So far this freeloader hadn’t agreed to put Masters and George on the list of contestants, but Joe had faith in Benny’s ability to sweet-talk him into it eventually. You couldn’t be as driven as Benny was and not succeed. And, according to Benny, the man was devoted to the doughnuts.

“Of course, he’d get us in right now, if I could … you know.” Benny held his hand out and rubbed his fingers and thumb together in the universal gesture of paying a bribe. He brightened
for a second. “You get paid tomorrow, don’t you? We only need a few bucks.”

Joe shook his head. He’d picked up a job working as an assistant for a house painter, but the money he was earning was already earmarked. “My rent is due. And my mother had to take my sister to the doctor,” he said. “Don’t you have any cash?”

“Just what Ma gives me.” Benny never worked. Now he shrugged his meaty shoulders and grinned. “Don’t worry, I’ll think of something,” he said. “Let’s rehearse. Take it from the top.”

And with that time-worn phrase, the boys began running through their material.

The basis of the act—which had been conceived and written by Joe—was that Benny was a bad piano player. And the truth was, he really wasn’t very good, because Benny had never had the patience to practice. So the act opened with Benny, the pianist, accompanying Joe, the singer, and butchering the song. As Joe became more and more frustrated—with lots of mugging and comic takes—Benny hit more and more clinkers. Finally, he stopped playing and the zingers started to fly. The verbal fight turned physical—this was the knockabout comedy section of the act, carefully staged and timed to the second so neither performer got hurt. Mid-battle, the script called for them to realize they were fighting in front of the audience. More double takes and mugging followed and finally, in perfect harmony, they finished the song Benny had been destroying at the beginning of the act. They were practicing the harmonies when they heard a voice behind them.

“So,” it said. The boys turned to see Mrs. Gerhardt standing in the doorway. She was wearing her second-best dress, a drab garment with a high collar and long sleeves that covered her arms down to the wrists. She only wore it for special events, and that—
added to the fact that her face was red and her bright blue eyes were shooting angry sparks—made it clear that something was up. But when she spoke her voice was low and calm. Too calm.

“So,” she repeated quietly. “All my son’s teachers tell me he’s a smart boy. He could go to college, they tell me. He could be a doctor or a lawyer, he could do anything. That’s what they tell me.” Her face was getting redder. “But does my son listen to them? Does he stay in school and make something of himself?”

“Ma—” Benny began, but his mother rolled over him.

“No, my son the genius quits. He gets into a fight—like a hooligan. Like a bum. And when they tell him he’s wrong he quits.”

Joe watched Benny’s face close down. “I didn’t start it,” he said stonily. The truth was, with his snooty way of talking, his fancy manners, and his weight, Benny was often the target of would-be bullies. These boys were surprised to find that Benny was not the easy victim they’d expected. In spite of his rarefied ways, he fought back. And Benny fought mean. “I was the only one the teacher put in detention,” he told his mother. “It wasn’t fair.”

“It was your punishment! A man takes his punishment!”

“School is a waste of time. Joe has to work, so I’m the only one who can make the rounds of the booking agents’ offices for the act. I was going to quit anyway.”