Stuart M Kaminsky, Carolyn Wheat, Edward D. Hoch, Annette Meyers, John Lutz, Elaine Viets, Angela Zeman, David Bart, Bob Shayne, Mark Terry, Gary Phillips, Parnell Hall, Susanne Shaphren, Libby Fischer Hellmann, Charles Ardai, Gregg Hurwitz, Steve Hockensmith, Shelley Freydont, Robert Lopresti, Mat Coward
Small Time in His Heart by CAROLYN WHEAT
T HEATRE 80 S T . M ARK ’ S
The Movie Musical Theatre
Screening Schedule, September-October 1972
SUN-THURS:
Girl Crazy
11 AM, 3:30 PM, 8 PM
Mickey and Judy put on another show, this time at a Western college. Great Gershwin songs stitch together a paper-thin plot; Judy shines as always.
For Me and My Gal
1 PM, 6:15 PM, 10:15 PM
Gene Kelly’s first feature for MGM has him high-stepping with Judy and then breaking her heart by dodging WWI draft (ahead of his time?). Great period fun.
Birch Tate, 1972
WALKING ALONG EIGHTH Street from the Village, you first crossed Sixth Avenue, under the benevolent eye of the Jefferson Market Courthouse Library. With its turrets and narrow leaded windows, it looked like a fairy-tale castle. You could picture Rapunzel letting down her long thick hair, which made Scotty laugh when Birch said it, because Scotty remembered when the old Women’s House of Detention was there and prisoners leaned out of barred windows, yelling at boyfriends and girlfriends on the street below.
Rapunzel, Scotty said again, and laughed.
If there was one thing Birch was getting tired of, it was being young. Too young to remember the Women’s House of D. Too young to remember Busby Berkeley. Too young to care much about seeing Judy Garland in a movie; to her, Garland was a boozy concert singer with a drug problem and a ruined voice. Which was cool when it was Joplin, but Judy Garland was old.
She was not, Scotty had decided, going to spend one more day in this abysmally ignorant state. Theatre 80 St. Mark’s in the East Village was running a Garland double feature and Birch was, by God, going to know by the end of this afternoon precisely why Judy Garland was the greatest star Hollywood ever produced.
They passed Orange Julius and the wedding-ring store, pushed through the crowd at Macdougal, and met the boys on the corner of Sullivan. Patrick and Stanley were even crazier than Scotty when it came to old movies. Patrick liked to say he was the reincarnation of Ann Miller, which was supposed to be funny because Ann Miller wasn’t dead. Stanley preferred somebody called Lubitsch whom Birch had never heard of, and then Scotty said, “But he didn’t do musicals,” and Stanley arched his eyebrow and asked, “What about The Merry Widow?” and Scotty said, “Oh, you mean that blatant ripoff of Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight?”
Who cares? was what Birch thought, and wondered how long she could stay with Scotty if all they were going to do was spend blue-sky Sunday afternoons watching old movies with a couple of-
Queers.
The word popped into her mind before she could stop herself. It wasn’t a nice word, and it was especially not nice because what were she and Scotty? But somehow it was different when it was boys.
The trouble was, she was new at this. She’d “come out”-and in her mind the words were always in quotes-only a few months earlier, and not by choice. She wasn’t even sure she really was one, except for one thing: there had never been a boy or a man, in the movies or in real life, who made her feel the way certain girls did. First Enid and now Scotty. She felt a stirring in her jeans just looking at Scotty-her elegant short hair with its slight curl, her long legs in those tight jeans, the silk shirt, the studded belt, the Frye boots-Birch looked down at her own feet, clad in moccasins, peeking out from under frayed bell-bottoms and wondered for the fiftieth time what a really cool chick like Scotty saw in her.
“My baby dyke,” Scotty called her. “My little tomboy from the Catskills.”
Birch didn’t mind being called a tomboy; she’d spent her entire seventeen years of life answering to that description. But “dyke” sounded so ugly. It had sounded especially ugly in the mouths of kids she’d known since kindergarten. When some of her former friends caught her holding hands with Enid at the Tinker Street Cinema last summer, they’d thrown stones at her, called her dyke. Now Scotty used the word with amused affection, as if it could never hurt.
Scotty, present
“ALL SINGING, ALL dancing” it said on the long red awning that stretched from Theatre 80’s double doors to the curb. You could see that awning from as far away as the Bowery, and you walked toward it with heart high, knowing that no matter how dreary the day or how low your spirits, the double feature at the end of your trek would change your mood more rapidly and surely than any of the illegal substances being thrust at you along the way. Who needed grass when you had Busby Berkeley? Who needed uppers when Fred and Ginger were dancing cheek to cheek?
Patrick I still miss every day. He was the brother I never had, and yes, I’m well aware that I have three brothers, thank you very much. Three brothers who hate me for three different reasons: Brian because he’s a Christian now and I’m going to hell, Ian because he’s a stuffy old fart and I embarrass him, and Colin because I had the nerve to be born at all. The only saving grace to Colin is that he’d feel that way even if I liked men.
So Patrick was my soul-friend, the girl I should have been.
Birch, 1972
“LIKE THAT PLACE in Hollywood,” Birch said, and Patrick rolled his eyes. Usually she liked Patrick, but she could tell she was about to get another lesson in how little she knew.
“That one’s Joan Blondell.” He pointed to the square of sidewalk with handprints and a scrawled signature. As if she couldn’t read. Of course, who Joan Blondell was and why her handprints belonged in cement outside the theater was unclear; still, she thought she recognized the name Ruby Keeler.
“I was here when she came,” Patrick said with a rapturous sigh. “Oh, she’s put on weight and her hair can’t possibly be that color in real life, but just to see her, to stand next to her-it was a dream come true.”
Scotty came back with the tickets and they walked through the double doors into the narrow hallway that led to the seats. The white walls were covered with posters and black-and-white glossies signed by the stars personally to the theater’s owner, Howard Otway. Patrick always made a point of blowing kisses at his favorites as they made their way to the coffee bar, a little black-painted cubbyhole just off the screening room.
No popcorn, just movie candy and tiny little cups of very black, very strong coffee. Everyone but Birch bought a cup; she decided on Milk Duds because they lasted nice and long. She suppressed a sigh. The little theatre reminded her of the Tinker Street Cinema back home, where she’d spent so many happy hours-until last summer.
Scotty, present
WHAT WE DID at Theatre 80 was buy our coffee in the anteroom, push aside the heavy red velvet curtain, and walk across the stage to our seats. Theatre 80 hadn’t started life as a movie theater. It was a legitimate stage once home to You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.
This meant that not only did the theater have a little foot-high stage, but the seats were nice and plushy, set wider apart than usual. There was also a real curtain that opened and closed, giving the showings a special touch you just couldn’t get at the Quad or even the Regency uptown.
The regulars were there: three old ladies I privately thought of as the weird sisters, a little matched set that reminded me of salt shakers. The old man with the liver spots and the burgundy-colored beret who sat by himself in the fourth row. Groups of gay men wearing sheepskin coats and laughing loudly. Black-clad film students from NYU, who discussed the social implications of the musical in not-hushed-enough voices. Patrick made it a point to steer us to seats as far away from them as possible.
We loved each other very much, Patrick and I, but we never actually sat together during a movie. He favored the center seats, and I had to have an aisle. No idea why, just an overwhelming need to know I could get up and run out if I had to-not that I ever did. It was just that the thought of being trapped in the center brought on a panic I couldn’t control. So I led Birch toward the extreme right side of the theater and found us two seats in the seventh row while the boys edged past a plus-sized couple who glared at them.
The lights dimmed and then darkened, the red curtain was pulled back, the projector began to whir, and a thin blue vapor emanated from a tiny window in the back, projecting an image onto the screen.
And not just any image: The MGM lion roared, and the audience clapped. We were notorious for applause. First the stars received their due (Judy most of all), and then the director got a hand, and the choreographer, and, from the gay men especially, the costume designer.
For Me and My Gal contains one of the great movie lines of all time. Judy and Gene play vaudevillians in 1917 or so. Just as they get the booking to play the Palace-that ultimate cliché of vaudeville musicals-Gene gets his draft notice to fight in World War One. He injures himself to beat the draft, and Judy, whose brother has just died in battle, catches him at it. She turns to him and in a voice dripping with contempt, says: “You’ll never be big time because you’re small time in your heart.”
Patrick and I loved this line. We repeated it often, cracking each other up every time. Of Richard Nixon the unspeakable, we said only, “He’s small time in his heart.”
So of course at intermission, when we met for a shot-glass-size cardboard espresso, we said the line in unison and laughed. Next to us, the weird sister with the whitest hair turned to her companion and said, “I remember the war. I was in high school. We were supposed to knit socks for the soldiers.”
“I knitted three pair,” the other said with pride. “My brother was a doughboy.”
“I only finished one sock,” white hair admitted. “And then the war was over.”
The little old man with the burgundy beret stepped into the room on light, dancer’s feet. When he saw me looking at him, he winked and did a little dance, humming “For Me and My Gal” under his breath.
He did a nice soft shoe, his leather soles gliding across the floor, no taps, just thumps of strong with the heel. His lithe body was perfect for the moves and the twinkle in his eye told me he was enjoying the little burst of applause that greeted his impromptu performance.
When he was finished, he bowed low and removed his beret. Long wisps of yellow-gray hair barely covered a scalp dotted with liver spots. He stepped to the counter next to me and ordered a double espresso.
Blinking lights in the lobby signaled the end of intermission and the start of the second feature. We made our way back to our seats, but the conversation, and the old man, was not forgotten.
Birch, 1972
GIRL CRAZYHAD maybe the dippiest plotline of any movie Birch Tate had ever seen. This playboy from the East, Mickey Rooney, gets sent to a Western college so he’ll shape up. Judy Garland works there because her grandfather owns the place or something, and she falls in love with Mickey even though he’s the biggest goofball on the planet. Mickey and Judy decide they need to put on a big show to make money for the college, only Mickey has no idea that Judy loves him, so he’s always making out with some blonde or other. It was really stupid, and Mickey Rooney struck her as a guy even straight girls would have a hard time finding sexy, but Judy Garland-well, Scotty was right. Judy was amazing.
There was that incredible voice, for one thing, and the big brown eyes and the way her face changed to show exactly what she was thinking all the time. When she sang “They’re writing songs of love, but not for me,” Birch found tears on her cheeks. The plot, Mickey Rooney, none of it mattered when Judy sang. The song went clear out of the stupid movie and into a whole world of its own, a world of love and pain and compassion, a world of someone who’d longed for love and wondered if she’d ever find it.
Birch knew that feeling. Back in her freshman year, she and her dad agreed that it was no big deal that nobody asked her to the school dance. She was only fourteen, and there was plenty of time to outgrow her tomboy stage. They both kept saying it as dance after dance came and went without anyone asking Birch (which was not her name back then but the name she took for herself when she realized she had to bend or she would break).
The junior prom was the first one that hurt. Not only had nobody asked her, but the boys she asked turned her down flat. Boys she’d known for years, gone hiking with, played baseball with, told her they wanted to ask other girls instead of her.
Then she took the dainty little watch with the real diamond chips her dad gave her for her sweet sixteen and exchanged it for a waterproof sports watch. For the first time in his life, Sam Tate allowed himself to say what Birch guessed he’d been thinking for a long time: Did she want everyone in Woodstock to think she was a lesbian, for God’s sake?
She wasn’t exactly sure what a lesbian was, but she knew it wasn’t good and it meant no boys asked you to dances.
Then she met Enid and the truth dawned. They were writing songs of love, but not for her, because nobody wrote songs of love for two girls.
So that was why the tears were there, not because Judy couldn’t get a stupid twit like Mickey Rooney to look twice at her.
FRI-TUES
Golddiggers of 1933
12:30 PM, 5:00 PM, 9:30 PM
Remember your Forgotten Man at this Depression-era classic. Powell and Keeler, Blondell and McMahon-can musicals get better than this?
Golddiggers of 1935
2:45 PM, 7:15 PM, 11 PM
Lullaby of Broadway” makes this the only noir musical in Hollywood history. Do boo Adolphe Menjou, but not during the movie, please.
Birch, 1972
THEY DID BOO Adolphe Menjou, first when his name came up on the credits, and again when he appeared in the movie. The booing was loud, long, and enthusiastic, and Birch was determined not to ask why.
The little man in the wine-colored beret who looked like a garden gnome gave a Bronx cheer when the dapper actor came on the screen. “Right on, Pop,” someone else yelled.
Birch remembered his cheerful tap-dance in the coffee room the last time she was at Theatre 80 and wondered what would make a nice old man behave like that.
When the double feature was over and she and Scotty rejoined Patrick in the lobby, he and the little man were deep in conversation.
“Busby Berkley was a tightass little shit,” the old man said, spittle gathering at the ends of his lips. “Little tin god-the way he treated Judy was a sin and a disgrace. And no,” he added, turning to Patrick, “he wasn’t one a youse, boyo. He liked girls all right-except when they were dancing.”
Birch didn’t wonder how the old man knew Patrick was gay. Everything about Patrick, from the open way he laughed, to the theatrical gestures, to his graceful walk, to the color-coordinated scarf he so carefully arranged around his neck, to his candid, flirty blue eyes told the world who he was. Birch admired that about Patrick; he never seemed to pretend or to feel ashamed.
“Remember that number in Golddiggers of ’38?” Patrick turned toward Scotty with a nod, inviting her into the discussion.
“ ‘I didn’t raise my daughter to be a human harp!’ ” Scotty quoted and both broke up laughing, neither bothering to explain the joke to Birch.
“Which was the one where Ruby Keeler danced on the giant typewriter?”
“Ready, Willing, and Able. Ruby’s last Warner’s musical.”
Birch turned to the old man and asked, “Were you in the movies?”
“Girlie,” the old man replied, “I started at Metro when its mascot was a parrot. The lion came later, after Sam Goldfish took over.”
Patrick’s face lit up with a combination of awe and amusement. “That’s Samuel Goldwyn to you and me,” he explained to Birch. Scotty just nodded; of course, she’d already known that.
“So you were in the Freed Unit,” Patrick said in a breathy voice. “You knew Arthur Freed? And Gene Kelly? And Vincente Minelli?”
“Freed Unit.” The old man shook his head. “There was no goddamn Freed Unit. That’s all made up by a bunch a people want to think the musical was more than it really was. Freed was a producer like all the rest, nothing special.”
The man in the beret might as well have tried to convince Patrick that Cary Grant wasn’t gay.
“Can we buy you a coffee?” Patrick asked. “We usually go to Ratner’s after the movie, and we’d be delighted if you’d-“
“Sure,” the little man replied. “My name’s Mendy, by the way.” His accent was deepest Bronx and his breath smelled of pipe tobacco. “Short for Mendelson.” He laughed without humor. “Of course, it was changed for the movies. Too long for the marquee, they said. Too Jewish for the marquee, they meant.”
Once inside the steamy dairy restaurant, he ordered borscht and when it came, sipped it loudly, smacking his lips in obvious appreciation, dunking hard pumpernickel rolls into it until they softened into an orange-colored mass.
Now Birch, her mouth nicely puckered from juicy dill tomato, asked the question she’d been trying to avoid. “Why did they boo that man? I thought he was okay in the movie.”
The old man’s answering smile was as tart as the dill tomato. “He was a Friendly.”
“Yeah,” Patrick said, his lips white with powdered sugar from his blintz. “He ratted on people he thought were Communists.”
“Only most of them weren’t,” Scotty added. “And even the ones who were-I mean, being a Communist wasn’t illegal when they joined the party back in the thirties.”
Birch spent the next five minutes being lectured to about the House Un-American Activities Committee, the Hollywood Ten, the blacklist, the graylist, Red Channels, a man named Dalton Trumbo, another man named Walter Winchell, and a lot of other ancient history that meant absolutely nothing to her.
Mendy sipped his black coffee, grimaced, and reached into his pocket for a tiny pillbox. With yellowed smoker’s fingers, he lifted the lid, took out a small white tablet, and slipped it into his coffee. He stirred, drank again, and smiled at Birch, who was watching the operation closely.
“My grandfather had nitroglycerin pills for his heart,” she said in a low voice. “But his doctor wouldn’t let him drink coffee.”
“These aren’t nitro, kid,” the old man replied. “Just saccharin. I’m a diabetic, gotta watch my sugar.”
“Ginger Rogers, too,” Patrick said. “Wasn’t she a Friendly?”
“No,” Mendy said, his sharp eyes narrowing with bad memories, “that was her ma.” He shook his head. “Poisonous woman. Had a tongue on her so sharp it’s a wonder she still had lips.”
“I always liked that Gene Kelly tried to fight the blacklist,” Scotty said. “Him and Bogie and Bacall.”
“Don’t forget the divine John Garfield,” added Patrick. “They all went to Washington to protest the Committee. But then the studios cracked down and they all folded.”
“The whole thing scared the hell out of Kelly,” Mendy agreed. “The First Amendment committee, Bogie, Bacall, Eddie Robinson. They make their big statement and then come back to Hollywood and find out they’ll be fired unless they tell the world they were duped by the evil Commies. It killed Garfield, the whole mess. Friends on one side, friends on the other, people going to jail-it ate him up inside, and one day he just died.”
Patrick asked the question on everyone’s mind: “Did you get called before the Committee, Mendy?”
“Believe it or not, I did. Went to a couple meetings, next thing I know I’m Public Enemy Number One. They hauled me up there, wanted me to name names. I said, hell no, I wasn’t gonna rat out my friends. Never worked again in the Industry. Not one day’s shooting did I get after that.”
“Wow,” Birch said, impressed. “But why didn’t you just tell them you were a Communist for a while but you didn’t want to name anybody else?” For some reason, she didn’t mind showing her ignorance before the old man. It was okay to know less than a guy who must be eighty years old.
“What you have to understand,” Mendy said, “is that you couldn’t do that. Once you answered one question, you had to answer them all. That’s why the Ten took the Fifth.”
Birch nodded as if this made sense. She supposed she knew what taking the Fifth meant, but who were the Ten?
“The Hollywood Ten,” Patrick whispered into her ear. “A bunch of writers. They refused to answer and they went to jail.”
“So if I’d gone in there and said, hell, yeah, I was a Commie and proud of it, or if I’d even said, I was a Commie and I’m ashamed of it now, they’d have asked me for the names of all the people I’d seen at meetings. Everybody I’d ever known in the old days would have been in trouble on account of me.”
“So you were blacklisted?”
“Made no sense to me. I mean, sure, some of the writers tried sneaking pinko lines into their movies, but I was a hoofer, for Chrissakes. What was I gonna do, tap Marxist slogans into my scenes?”
“How did you feel about that?” Birch thought the question was stupid; how would anybody feel about that? But then she realized Patrick already knew the answer, wanted the emotion, not the facts.
“Kid, what do you love more than anything in the world? How would you feel if you had that taken away from you for no good reason? Like they passed a law saying you’d go to jail if you-”
Patrick’s blue eyes glinted. “Honey, they did pass a law. I don’t need a blacklist to feel like a second-class citizen-I’m a faggot.”
Mendy lowered his eyes. “Sorry, kid. I kind of forgot.”
“That reminds me,” Patrick said with a snap of his slender fingers. “Did you know a dancer named Paul Dixon? He came out to Hollywood from Broadway, they wanted to make him a big star. He started rehearsals for, I think it was-”
“Summer Stock with Judy Garland,” Mendy replied. “Yeah, I knew him a little. In fact, he and I were up for a couple of the same roles.”
“Wasn’t there a rumor that he-” Patrick began.
Mendy nodded. “Yeah, that was almost worse than the blacklist, the way it killed his career. He coulda maybe beaten the Commie rap, but the other-that killed him dead.”
“What happened?” Scotty asked the question, which meant Birch didn’t have to.
“Westbrook Pegler-big columnist back then, not as big as Winchell, but big enough, writes a column calling Dixon ‘a mincing twerp with twittering toes.’ ” Mendy raised a bushy gray eyebrow. “I bet you can guess what he meant by that crack.”
“I could maybe think of something,” Patrick replied, his lips in a thin smile. “It’s one way of saying ‘swishy.’ ”
“I’m not saying that was the end of his career,” Mendy said, “but it was the end of any talk of leading roles. Your Astaires, your Kellys, your Donald O’Connors-they were all straight boys. You kept the swishers in the chorus, you didn’t team them with Rita Hayworth or Judy Garland.”
“So we never got to see Paul Dixon show what he could do,” Patrick said wistfully. “Tragic. Really tragic.”
WED-SAT
Take Me Out to the Ball Game...
