I Hated to Do It: Stories of a Life (12 page)

Duke and his orchestra always brought down the house by playing the pieces he composed that had become so famous and still are today, like “Take The ‘A’ Train,” “Sophisticated Lady,” “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing),” “I Got It Bad (and That Ain’t Good),” “Solitude,” and that haunting piece “Mood Indigo.” Of course he would play up in Harlem also, but we always saw him at the Rainbow Room.

I do have to admit that when we went to the Rainbow Room for performances by the Duke, I was always pleased that he would kiss Annie twice, even though he would only kiss me once. Duke knew what he was doing.

Unfortunately, the play never got written and never got made. Duke died in April of 1974 at the age of seventy-five, before he could write the music for the play. We had it all worked out how we were going to depict the pool scenes on stage. It was a disappointment that I shared with Kurt, who had been looking forward to working with Duke on this venture.

Duke’s Manager Cress and Lady Day

I had met the Duke through his manager, Cress Courtney. How I met Cress, I will never know. Cress was a bit beyond belief. He managed Duke and knew a lot about the business. In fact, his knowledge of the business and his knowledge of the lives of some of the people in the business turned into a very embarrassing adventure for us one evening.

Wanting to take Cress and his wife to an event that might be of interest to them, we hired a limo and picked them up at their brownstone in lower Midtown on the East Side. We knew Cress drank, as most of us did, and he sometimes may have drunk a little more than most of us did. That night he probably drank a lot more than most of us did. We were taking him and his wife, Shirley, to see a play,
Lady Day
, about Billie Holiday, which was at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. As fate would have it, the star of the show had written the book of the play and was also a client of mine. We were seated at the rear of the theatre, and about four minutes after the curtain went up and they were into the life of Billie Holiday, Cress, sitting directly in front of us, sprang to his feet and shouted for all to hear, “It didn’t happen that way!” His wife pulled him down and the rest of the first act was interrupted on several more occasions with shouts of, “It didn’t happen that way.”

Now it may not have happened that way, and Cress may have been right about how it did happen. But a play about Billie Holiday was taking place on the stage that night, and the author may have taken some artistic leeway with the actual facts, if anyone really knew what those actual facts were.

At intermission, my wife and I stayed clear of Cress and Shirley, but we think, from what we heard, that she had threatened to divorce him if he didn’t keep his mouth shut. There was some angry shouting back and forth. We returned to our seats, and during the second act, Cress did not say a single word.

Bruce Campbell and Dick Shawn, Funny Man

We had become very friendly with one of Kurt’s avid fans, Bruce Campbell. Bruce was a fascinating character who loved Kurt’s work. Actually, Bruce had produced one of the most famous antiwar movies of all time,
Johnny Got His Gun
. Bruce was also married and divorced from the daughter of Dalton Trumbo, the man who wrote the novel, published in 1938, that the film
Johnny Got His Gun
was based on.

Bruce was thoughtless on occasion. His memorable line was, “I should have grabbed a broomstick.” He took his young daughter for the weekend, and when his ex-wife wanted the kid back, Bruce just kept the kid. So when there were armed police officers in his front yard who wanted to take his daughter to her mom, Bruce appeared on the steps in the front of the house with a BB gun. Which is why, had he grabbed a broomstick, they would not have shot him in the leg, and he wouldn’t be limping around.

Wherever Bruce traveled, and he traveled a lot, he always carried trunks full of Vonnegut books and memorabilia, which he displayed. His father started one of the most famous talent agencies in the country, and Bruce knew people, but he was always broke. When we first met him, I think he was living out of his car; that is, before he moved into the gatehouse of Mommie Dearest, the daughter of Joan Crawford.

Bruce was always looking for a new venture for me and for Kurt. He decided that we should see this performer Dick Shawn, who was working in a club in LA. So Kurt, Annie, and I got on a plane and headed west. Dick Shawn was indeed funny. He had a major part in the film of
The Producers
, and Bruce got the idea he should be on Broadway. We caught the act and the next day lunched with Dick. He was a very smart, sensitive man, and Broadway was where we wanted to arrange for Dick to perform. What is ironic is that Dick Shawn never made it to Broadway, but rumor is that he had convinced Jackie Mason to do the Broadway bit, and he made a big success of it. Bruce told me that Dick Shawn was too insecure about the move to Broadway.

The act we saw in LA back then was memorable. Dick Shawn was inventive, and in addition to the humor, he often did routines with some social significance.

He dealt with the Big Questions. Evolution. Religion. Cosmogony. Freud. Everything was delivered in a Pirandello-like setting: you were never quite sure that his wacko theories—that dinosaurs perished because they could only walk forward, for example—were not really convictions of an odd sort.

The rubble of wadded newspapers has been a staple of the show since Shawn first performed it in nightclubs. The first part of the show is given over to a comedic monologue that could be entitled “The Evolution of the World According to Dick Shawn”: “In the beginning, man didn’t know he had a brain. What did he need a brain for? There was nothing to remember.”

Dick Shawn died onstage when he had a heart attack in the middle of a performance. I always thought he lived up to his reputation of being the funniest comedian of our time. Kurt, as we did, enjoyed his performance, but Dick never did make it to Broadway. We met him for lunch and talked about it, but it didn’t happen.

Discussions in My Office with Kurt

Kurt took the dollar bill for the rights to produce one of his plays in Japan and threw a dime on the desk for the commission.

A royalty check was just deposited for $15.83 for one of his poems that was used as the lyrics on a CD.

Kurt’s response: “Better than a poke in the eye!”

A royalty check for a few hundred thousand dollars was also just deposited.

Kurt’s response: “Almost worth a poke in the eye!”

A Polish Translation

In 1972 I received a copy of a Polish translation entitled
Rzeźnia numer pięċ
, which, since it had a number in the title, I figured had to be
Slaughterhouse-Five
. So what does Kurt write in the front of my Polish translation? “Dear Don—Why did the Pollack have fifty-three holes in his head? He was trying to learn to eat with a fork. Love, Kurt Vonnegut.”

Kurt had a chance twenty years later to tease me about something else Polish, and he did just that. I got involved representing Victor Kubiak (pronounced Wiktor), who produced and presented a musical play on Broadway entitled
Metro
. Victor flew Annie and me over to Poland for a weekend just so we could see the play in Warsaw. We loved the kids involved in the play, who were all poor kids that Victor fed and clothed and trained to be actors. We loved the Stoklosa music and hoped for the best. Frank Rich, the critic of the
Times
, gave it an awful review, and Kurt never let me hear the end of it. In fact, in addition to the Polish joke he wrote in the book, Kurt had to tell me that in Poland all Coke bottles said at the bottom, “Open other end.”

Rodney Dangerfield and
Back to School

I received a request for Kurt to perform in a Rodney Dangerfield movie. As usual, I phoned Kurt and we talked about it. The theme of the movie, as most everyone now knows, is Rodney goes back to the college his kid is attending and is buying people to do his classwork for him. Someone asks him, “Who’s writing your English paper on one of Kurt’s books?” There is a knock at the door, and Kurt looks in and says, “My name is Kurt Vonnegut.” When the offer of a few thousand dollars was made, Kurt and I decided it wasn’t worth his time to fly out to California and go to the trouble involved in multiple film takes, so I said they would have to “make us an offer Kurt can’t refuse.” When they quadrupled the offer, I called attention to the fact that the offer was still one that could be refused. A new offer of about ten times the original offer looked good enough for Kurt to make the trip to our beloved Hollywood. Kurt was paid handsomely for those five words, and the scene has become one of those film classics often referred to by film lovers. He was paid handsomely not because he wanted more money; he just didn’t want to do it.

Kilgore Rosewater

With me, his lawyer, his friend, his buddy, Kurt was social, business, and all things, speaking almost every day for almost forty years, sometimes three or four times a day, and missing a day on occasion. With this going on, how could one not know Kurt from every aspect better than anyone else in the world? “Better than anyone else in the world” did not necessarily answer many questions about Kurt.

It got to be a habit. Kurt and I would talk on the phone, usually early in the day for starters. That was when I would get to the office around nine o’clock, and this one day when Kurt hadn’t called by ten thirty, I called his home only to learn that Kurt was not up yet. I knew this was not like Kurt. I raced from the office, hopped into a cab, and was at his house in five minutes. I literally ran up the stairs to the fourth-floor small nest where Kurt worked.

Kurt lived in this brownstone, painted white, that had three floors and a narrow, winding staircase leading up to a small, very small, pigeonhole on the fourth floor where Kurt had his bed and his typewriter so that the typing would not bother anyone.

Kurt was mumbling not understandably, except I heard him sort of say, “I guess I had a drink and took the wrong pill.” There were several pillboxes on the window ledge and some appeared empty. I knew I would have to get an ambulance and get him to a hospital fast. I am about five feet seven and Kurt was about six feet three, so I knew I could never get him down the winding staircase from the fourth floor. I was very worried, so I called an ambulette, urging them to hurry, and they did.

The ambulette arrived with two husky guys who carried Kurt down those stairs to the ambulette, relieving me of the chore, which of course was an impossibility.

Other than the medical workers, I was alone with Kurt in the ambulette and he muttered, “Don’t let them take me to the hospital up here, I want to go down to the Village.” He knew another family member had a not very good experience at an uptown facility, and I made sure we got him to St. Vincent’s Hospital downtown.

The doctor in the emergency room at St. Vincent’s, Dennis Greenbaum, had met Kurt personally at our house, so when Kurt arrived, for good reasons he was smart enough to sign Kurt in and registered him in the hospital under the name I suggested, Kilgore Rosewater. It was not necessary at this time to publicize that Kurt was hospitalized. The press was in the dark, and unfortunately I had failed to notify some people that Kurt was Kilgore Rosewater in the hospital. An honest oversight on my part that didn’t sit well with some.

Annie and I visited Kurt while he was in the communal room for the patients who were mentally disturbed, where he and the rest of the patients were being watched. He was very funny. He said, “This is great. I go upstairs to the game room and the guys up there are so confused they believe everything I tell them, and I haven’t lost a single game of Ping-Pong.”

Kurt was partly sedated when Sidney Offit and I stood at the foot of his bed and we talked about what to do when he got out of there. Because we didn’t want to ask Kurt in his then state, Sidney and I never did find out for sure why Kurt took the “wrong pill,” but we talked around it with Kurt and we both knew. We both knew it was more than one pill, and we both knew why he took the pills, but that is one of the secrets that neither Sidney nor I have any intentions of discussing except between ourselves, which we did.

It’s one thing to help a person with his money, to pay the bills, to make the film deals, and it is another thing to advise a person about his personal life when you know that events in that personal life must have prompted the person to swallow a bunch of pills. Actually, not only did Sidney and I know why it happened, but Kurt knew that we knew why it happened. And Sidney and I, knowing Kurt, also knew that what we could do to help our dear friend Kurt was limited by Kurt’s mixed feelings and his emotional state of mind.

We decided that it would be a good idea for Kurt to spend some time living alone, and Kurt agreed with us, so we found a cozy little nest in one of those isolated mews of New York University downtown. The mews was a street that had a few compact, charming little living spaces, which were probably occupied by NYU personnel. It was a perfect spot for Kurt to recuperate without any outside influences. Kurt’s daughter Edie helped by putting some pots and pans and dishes in the kitchen, and when he left the hospital, that was where he ended up for a while.

***

The mews didn’t last that long, and Kurt decided to move back to 48th Street. It was of short duration, but while at the mews, Kurt enjoyed the opportunity to rest and recuperate. Sidney and I never inquired of Kurt why he was moving back, but we both knew and it remains our secret.

Sidney Offit

There were just a few of us that were so very important in Kurt’s life. Sidney Offit was one of us. We were Kurt’s two closest friends, and we each satisfied different needs of Kurt. I handled all of Kurt’s business and many of his personal affairs, and Annie and I were part of the Vonnegut family and vice versa. Sidney’s relationship was more with Kurt on a personal level, lunching with him and Morley Safer, the contributor to
60 Minutes
on TV.

It is an impossibility to even try to explain the accomplishments of Sidney, and I won’t try. He was an author, having written the young adult book
What Kind of Guy Do You Think I Am?
and
Memoir of the Bookie’s Son
, and many, many other important works. Sidney taught at The New School for Social Research in New York City and was a hit on a TV bit. Sidney the professor was the liberal who debated for five minutes against the arch conservative Martin Abend on channel five every weeknight during the seventies over a period of many years. The debates were striking and Sidney was impressive.