Manhattan Mayhem (18 page)

To start with, I’m a centenarian, Sebastian Grady by name, and still fully marbled. My current address is Plantain Point, a retirement home on the California coast with a lot of residents from the entertainment world. To give you an idea, the president of our association is called the Top Banana, though most of the vaudevillians have died off.

As you can imagine, I’ve seen many younger generations come of age, and the current lot don’t seem too anxious to make the transition to adulthood. Don’t ask me if I blame them.

Evan is my favorite great-granddaughter. I never expected to be so fond of a girl with a guy’s name, but in this century of yours—mine was the last one—I guess one size fits all. I hadn’t seen her since she was
an infant when she turned up one day to interview me for a school genealogy assignment, I being the oldest relative available. But once the paper was done and graded, she kept coming back. She seems to enjoy my company.

She’s a mature sixteen by current standards. In some ways, she’s typical of her generation, including being constantly connected to every portable communication device that comes along, but she’s a smart girl, rarely says “like” except as a verb expressing approval or a preposition with a discernible object. She has an active social life, some of it with live people, does sports, gets good grades, loves puzzles, and likes a challenge. Her mind is always on the move. I’d unhesitatingly back her in a timed Sudoku contest.

On one recent visit, we were sitting on my eighth-floor deck looking out at the Pacific Ocean. Family news and current events exhausted, I said casually (but with an ulterior motive), “I’ve got a puzzle for you, honey.”

“Great. What is it?”

“There’s a list of sentences I want you to look up for me, tell me what they mean, where they came from, what they have in common, if anything. You can go on the Internet for this, look ’em up on Giggle or Garble or whatever it’s called. Shouldn’t take you long.”

She gave me that big, braced-teeth grin that always melted my heart. She knew I wasn’t quite as ignorant as I pretended to be. She’d taught me to use the Internet when she was eight years old; I have my own computer, and Plantain Point has Wi-Fi. “Does this have anything to do with one of your investigations?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Gramps, I know you’re an amateur detective.”

“No such thing, except in books.”

“Don’t forget I’ve read all your memoirs.”

Just the published ones, and there were some unpublished ones I hoped she’d never see. Maybe when she was older.

“Okay, you got me. There
is
a mystery connected to this list, and I’ll tell you all about it when you’ve identified the items.”

I passed it over, neatly printed in my still steady hand:

“Any of that ring a bell?” I asked.

“Nope, not at all. So what’s my deadline?”

“Try to get it done while I’m still alive.”

“Gramps, you’re full of it.”

“Get it done, and I’ll tell you the wildest story you ever heard, and every word of it true.”

“I’ll be back with the answers tomorrow,” she promised, and I knew she would. In the meantime, I let my mind drift back to the only century where I really felt at home anymore.

Now that I’ve passed a hundred myself, my old buddy Danny Crenshaw doesn’t seem quite so amazing as he used to. He only made it to ninety-four. But the last time I saw him, 1978 it was, same year he died, he seemed as happy and busy as ever.

I first met Danny in the late 1920s. He was among the Broadway headliners lured west by the advent of talking pictures. A little guy with tons of nervous energy, he always played younger than his age and never seemed to change much as the years went by. Multitalented as Danny was—actor, singer, dancer, songwriter—they never seemed to know how to use him in pictures, and he was homesick for New York.

“Seb,” he said to me one day in the studio commissary, “you heard the latest about the Empire State Building? They’re going to have a mooring mast for dirigibles. They’ll be able to load and unload
passengers 1,250 feet above the street.”

“Sounds like a goofy idea to me. What about the wind?”

“They’ve got all that figured out.”

“Okay,” I said. Of course, it didn’t work in the end, but smarter guys than me thought it could.

“Seb, I gotta get back to Broadway. I want to perform for people I can see and hear, not just a bunch of studio technicians. And I want to see that building.”

By the time King Kong took Fay Wray to the top of Al Smith’s folly only to be shot down by airplanes, Danny was back in Gotham City to stay. Over the next years, I’d pay him a visit whenever my work took me to the Big Apple, see him onstage when he was working and at home when he was resting. I was usually there on Classic Pictures business, that being my main employer in those days, and those times I was on my own, not nursing some pampered actor, I’d stay at a not-quite-deluxe hostelry the studio had a special deal with. It was within walking distance of the much classier Hotel McAlpin at the corner of Broadway and West Thirty-Fourth Street, where Danny lived for decades as a permanent resident. His upper-floor quarters were luxurious enough to suit his success, but he’d picked the place for its view of the Empire State Building, just up the street.

It was sunny in Manhattan one day in early 1946 when I walked from my hotel to the McAlpin. Passing through the heart of the Garment District, I dodged those huge clothing racks pushed along the sidewalks by New Yorkers in a hurry. Like the taxicabs, they somehow negotiated the chaos to get where they were going without mishaps.

The McAlpin had been the biggest hotel in the world when it was built in 1912. Impressive as the three-story lobby was, decorated in Italian Renaissance style, filled with marble and murals depicting women as jewelry, the most dazzling sight was the basement Marine Grill, where Danny, between shows at the moment, had invited me to a late lunch—as a celebrity resident, he had an in with the management. The food was undoubtedly fine, but all I can remember of the menu was the oysters—Danny loved oysters, another thing he missed
on the West Coast. The whole room, with its curving ceilings, was decorated in colored terra-cotta, and I’ll never forget the spectacular murals showing the history of the New York harbor. I was especially impressed by the depiction of a four-funnel ocean liner.

“Has that been here since they opened?” I asked.

“Sure, I think so,” Danny said.

“Is that ship by any chance the
Titanic
? I mean, what an irony.
Titanic,
1912.”

“I think they actually opened in ’13, had a sort of preview party for VIPs at the end of ’12. And relax. That’s the
Mauretania.
”

As we ate, Danny told me about the military plane lost in the fog that had crashed into his beloved Empire State Building the year before. He also rhapsodized about the show he would open in later in the year, produced by Belasco.

“David Belasco?”

“No, Elmer. David’s dead. You’ll meet him later. Elmer, I mean.”

When we got upstairs to Danny’s apartment, it was late afternoon. He said he’d invited a few friends to drop in and meet the visitor from Tinseltown, and he was sure his wife would want to say hello. She’d be back any minute. The number of Danny Crenshaw’s wives (four or five, I think) was not unheard of in show business. More unusual, to the end of his life he still seemed to like all his exes, and as far as I knew, they felt the same about him.

This one’s name was Mildred, and, looking back, I think he may have loved her the most, though she drove him the craziest. Like all Danny’s wives, she was lovely, and like most, she was taller than he was. Her bright, carrot-colored hair was her most striking feature, but her mild manner contradicted any redhead stereotype. She entered the apartment that afternoon loaded down with shopping and not expecting to find company, but I guess knowing Danny she was always ready for it. She was stylishly dressed and coifed in the fashion of the times: a brimmed hat with flowers at the front and a bow at the back, shoulder pads, gloves, clutch purse, nipped-in waist on a form-fitting skirt to just below the knee, ankle-strap shoes with wide heels. She greeted me
cordially, and the gathering grew from there.

The first drop-in guest was a tall and wispy fellow with a little mustache. From the casual intimacy with which Danny and Mildred both welcomed him, I had the impression he was a frequent visitor. “Seb, meet Jerry Cordova,” Danny said. “My old partner in the Lunchtime Follies.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“It was a spin-off of the Stage Door Canteen. We’d go out and entertain the workers during their lunch hours at defense plants and shipyards.”