Bandbox (3 page)

Now beyond Copy’s door, Becky didn’t see Allen Case, who had just made the shoe
-schvantz
connection, blush to the top of his already receding hairline. Painfully shy, painfully thin, and astronomically farsighted, Allen was even more a fish out of water here than his supervisor, Nan. The formative influence upon his life had been a photograph he’d seen at twelve years old of a horse lying dead on the Somme battlefield. Since then he had been a passionate vegetarian and reader of Shavian pamphlets. Each morning, after saying goodbye to his pet bunny rabbit, Sugar, Allen left his room on Cornelia Street, shutting his eyes until he got past the pork butcher that lay
between his apartment house and the subway. He carried with him a lunch of dried fruit and zwieback toast, in addition to his flawless grammar.

Nan wouldn’t allow the office hearties to tease him about his lack of a girlfriend or his thinning, unbrilliantined hair. She protected him, not just out of kindness, but because he wrote like a dream. Allen could not only activate a writer’s verbs and resolder his infinitives; he could also, when a piece came in a few lines under, create sentences in the voice and style of whichever scribe’s prose had just crossed his desk. It amazed Nan to see him perform these ventriloquial feats, to
become
Stuart Newman or Max Stanwick or David Fine, just as completely as he entered the souls of horses on the street and cats in the pet-shop windows. In the course of a lunchtime walk with him, Allen would endow the poor creatures with anthropomorphic names and life stories that seemed less charming than eerily real.

Finally at the icebox, Becky chipped off what remained of the morning block, while she eyed the countess in the Research Department’s bull pen. Its lack of privacy hardly bothered Daisy DiDonna, herself a
rite de passage
for the boys at the magazine just as surely as Newman was for the girls. Becky put Daisy’s age at forty-five, though you’d never guess it from her still-nifty figure and too-tight dresses. Born Daisy Glazer, she’d been a young divorcée at the start of the war; by its end she was the Countess DiDonna, having gone off to Italy and married the seventeen-year-old Count Antonio DiDonna, a delicate asthmatic half her age. When he died in 1920, Daisy got the title; the count’s mother got the villa, as well as several injunctions against Daisy, who made a little splash, upon her return stateside, with
My Antonio
, a steamily lyrical memoir excerpted in
Vanity Fair
back in ’24.

She had met Harris in an elevator that year, not long after he’d taken over
Bandbox
. She handed him one of her vellum calling cards,
put her face the four inches she always deemed the appropriate distance to be kept from any male visage, and said hello with the sweet suggestive breathiness that could de-ice a windshield on even a night like this. He had hired her on the spot, though she couldn’t write (
My Antonio
had been ghosted by one of Nan O’Grady’s lady novelists at Scribner’s) and had appalling gaps in the common knowledge required by anyone in the Research Department, which is where Harris put her. Only two months ago, when checking a story about how Governor Smith could be expected to try for the presidential “brass ring” in ’28, Daisy had called the White House to make sure each new chief executive was indeed given this piece of commemorative jewelry. But on matters like which tomato belonged to which Tammany sachem, which Black Sox ballplayer still had his money, and what size shoes were under the bed in Arnold Rothstein’s apartment at 912 Fifth Avenue, Daisy was unbeatable.

“What have you got there?” asked Chip Brzezinski.

“Jeepers!” cried Becky, wheeling around so fast she sprayed some flakes of ice onto his shirt. “You scared me.” When she saw him looking through the clear tube with something like recognition, she quickly added, “Nothing,” and walked away, chilled with the realization that Chip Brzezinski, another of the magazine’s fact-checkers,
knew
about this photo. She double-timed it back to Cuddles’ office, worrying all the way about Brzezinski, who was known as the Wood Chipper, because of his smart mouth and reputed sexual prowess. A tough Chicago kid who’d hauled papers and ice and been knocked around by his old man way past what was normal, the already-balding Chip lived over on Ninth Avenue and mostly dated dance-hall hostesses and cashiers instead of the nice girls here and at
Pinafore
. No woman thought she could reform Chip, though his initiation period with Daisy had lasted longer than was customary, at Daisy’s request.

Since Jimmy left, Chip had been moaning about his general underappreciation and blocked ascent. For a while he’d been given little
fashion squibs to report and write, but now he was back to full-time fact-checking. He made no secret of how he would love to leave this place for
Cutaway. So what’s stopping you?
was the retort everyone from Hazel Snow up to Spilkes made when he started whining. Becky, darting past Nan’s door and then Stuart’s, now felt pretty sure
she
knew what was stopping him, at least for the moment: Jimmy Gordon was keeping Brzezinski here as a spy. When he delivered, he would get his reward: a job halfway up the
Cutaway
masthead.

“Here,” she said, allowing her hand with the cup of ice to precede the rest of her into Cuddles’ office. But he didn’t hear her; he was gone again—not out cold, just fast asleep. Putting down the ice, but holding on to the canister, Becky shook her head in silent sorrow over this man who knew more about music and books and politics than anyone else on the floor; who had given
Puck
and
Judge
most of their sparkle during the ten years he’d worked at each; who’d been Harris’s first hire; and who these days, having lost all clout and ambition, lay snoozing with his head atop a pile of the form rejection letters he had recently managed to stencil. Cuddles now affixed a combination of Bartleby and Coolidge to whatever submissions he received each day and returned unread: “I do not choose to run your piece in 1928.”

At a loss, thinking about how Cuddles was now up against both Harris’s wrath and the horrid little wiles of the Wood Chipper, Becky looked out the window and considered just tossing Leopold and Loeb the fourteen floors down to Lexington Avenue. It was no more than they’d deserved in the first place.

“And you’re letting
Houlihan
take care of this?” asked David Fine. He took a sip of grappa, his and Harris’s after-dinner usual here at Malocchio.

“Could it really wind up on a bus?” asked the editor-in-chief.

“Are you kidding?” answered his food columnist and confidant. “Are you the only guy in New York who hasn’t seen
this?
” He reached under the table for the
Daily News
, whose front page roared with the image of Ruth Snyder at the instant of her electrocution in Sing Sing. Late last night the paper’s photographer had strapped a camera under his pants leg, raising it at just the moment the screws pulled the switch. “You think the guy who took this picture is going to get a summons? Forget about it—he’s going to get a prize.”

Harris cringed at this sight of the blindfolded, husband-killing cutie, who’d been the subject of two
Bandbox
pieces by Max Stanwick: if the kiddies could buy a picture of Ruth’s sizzling flesh on their way to school, Leopold and Loeb ought to be riding the side of a private bus any morning now. Noticing for the first time that it was Friday the thirteenth, Harris realized he was jumping one more watershed in the age of You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet. He’d only managed to get Jolson himself onto the pages of
Bandbox
—in blackface and white tie—a month after
The Jazz Singer
opened last fall, which was really a month too late. Talking pictures were one more thing he now had to understand and keep track of. To Harris, it seemed more like the age of You’ve Heard Too Much Already.

Fine lacked anything more to say. The two men put the newspaper aside and returned to their grappa as the restaurant violinist launched
into “Sometimes I’m Happy.” Had David Fine composed the lyrics for this new tune, he would have made its next line “But more often I’m not.” It was Fine, chronically certain of his underappreciation by others, who usually got
his
reassurance and perspective from Joe Harris.

He had grown up in Philadelphia and come to New York in 1898 to cover baseball and the horses for the
Brooklyn Eagle
. Two decades later, fleeing a misguided engagement to a jockey’s daughter, the thirty-seven-year-old bachelor enlisted in the army and wound up winning a Bronze Star at Belleau Wood. Overseas, Fine had cultivated a taste for wine and food, subjects the
Eagle
had no desire to see him write about once he returned to America. So he went to work as the sommelier for Giovanni Roma at the then-brand-new Malocchio.

It was here that he’d met Joe Harris in ’23, when the editor was just assuming control of both
Bandbox
and his regular corner table. Fine had, in more or less the same breath, said something to Joe about Christy Mathewson’s fastball and a 1912 cabernet, and the editor had decided he was a man of parts. Within a month, Fine was writing “The Groaning Board”—his column about food and drink and anything else on his disappointment-prone mind.
Bandbox
staffers called the column “Fine Whines,” but Fine’s cranky, suspicious voice became immediately popular with readers, who liked the humor, intentional and otherwise, in almost everything he wrote. Harris felt sure Fine would eventually bring in a GME; he’d already attracted enough new subscribers that the editor was happy to put up with his constant complaints about being poorly paid; cheated by a cabdriver; snubbed by his landlady; stood up by a date. Now forty-eight, Fine lived alone in Brooklyn and occasionally went out with one of the secretaries at the magazine, but his real romance was with his expense account, upon which Harris instructed the bookkeeper to put no significant limits, even when Fine failed to write
a single word about some foreign clime he’d just spent two weeks eating his way through.

“So you haven’t told me,” he now implored Harris, who was sneaking another look at Ruth Snyder. “ ‘Williamsburg versus Williamsburg’?”

“Yeah,” said Harris. “Do it. It’s good.” The editor knew that it would be more than good, that a Fine column comparing the Brooklyn neighborhood and the Virginia home of William and Mary—popovers versus blintzes; college titles beside Yiddish nicknames; burgesses competing with rabbis—would be a hit with readers and maybe even the GME committee. “Spend whatever it takes,” said Harris. “And take as long as you have to.”

He began the slow process of lighting his cigar. Looking through the flame as it bobbed up and down a half-dozen times, he noticed some RCA executives and then Mayor Walker and then Horace Liveright, the party-giving publisher, all at tables less prominent than his own. His berth was reimbursement for the business
Bandbox
had been bringing Malocchio these past five years. Harris might have stolen Giovanni Roma’s sommelier, but he’d made 50,000 New York readers eager to get into this place the magazine kept pronouncing the essence of dining in style.

“Is a nice night, no?” said Roma, tapping Harris’s shoulder from behind. “So nice it make me stupid. I got the mayor here, and I come to sit with you, you fat
cetriolo
.”

Harris’s countenance lightened for the first time all evening. He turned around with his now properly lit cigar. “You’d better pay attention,
goombah
. Walker’s been as dry as my guy Newman since about September. Watch and see he doesn’t put your Italian behind in jail for serving what passes for booze here.”

“Nah,” said Roma. “He ain’t got religion on the subject. He just take the pledge to please his lady friend. Is a, how you say, ‘personal’ thing.”

Giovanni Roma had been born and brought up in Saugatuck, Connecticut, but from an occupational affectation he now spoke English with less facility and a thicker accent than his immigrant parents. He’d come to New York fifteen years ago, at the age of twenty-seven, when local scandal forced him off the family fishing boat. Gianni liked to chase the
ragazzi
, but after a year of waiting tables in the city, he had allowed a well-known older actor to chase and catch him. The price of temporary surrender was the stake he used to start Malocchio. For six years the restaurant had only just stayed afloat on the stream of newspaper guys and ballplayers that David Fine coaxed through the door, but things started to bubble once Harris designated the restaurant as his home with a mention in
Bandbox
every month.

“So when you go to London?” he asked Harris.

“End of the month.” With Jimmy Gordon on his tail, the editor wondered how he’d even find the breathing space to sail over for his annual tour of the men’s shops along Savile Row. A report on them always accompanied
Bandbox
’s piece on whatever sartorial rule had just been repealed by the Prince of Wales, but Harris made the trip mostly to enjoy evenings with Fine and Spilkes in the woody hotel bars that satisfied his longings for the antique.

“Before that we’ve got the editorial retreat up in Dutchess,” he said to Roma. “You’re going to do the food for me, remember?”

The restaurateur made a put-upon face and nodded, while David Fine complained: “I always catch cold up there. Why can’t we avoid all those Herkimer Jerkimers and do it down here? Rent a big hotel suite.”

“I like it there,” said Harris, thinking of his big weekend house, the woods latticed with snow. “Nobody pays attention if we stay in town.”

“You got to give me plenty notice,” said Gianni.

Harris and Roma and Fine made a tiptop male trio, combining
more comfortably than most much closer friends might have. Their libidinal variety helped: Roma remained as devoted to young men as Harris did to Betty Divine and the lost ideal of full-bosomed womanhood; Fine, at bottom, was more indifferent to sex than any man the other two knew. Together, the three sailed along in insult-hurling harmony, their self-display and jockeyings for a small measure of repute undisturbed by the slightest undercurrent of sexual competition.