The Purple Decades (12 page)
Read The Purple Decades Online
Authors: Tom Wolfe
Off to a Better Place
(“Ah, my dear, perhaps it's just as well. Your decorator called today. The David Hicks carpet won't be in for another six weeks, they dented the girandoles in shipping, he doesn't know what happened to the Hartman lamps, and the couch arrived but the pillows are filled with polyurethane chips instead of goose down.”)
U
p there in the office at Broadway and 52nd Street during the last days of
Confidential,
the old
Confidential
(1952â58), the most scandalous scandal magazine in the history of the world, everybody seemed to be ricocheting around amid the dolly lights and cracking up. Everybody, save one, namely, Robert Harrison himself, the publisher. Jay Breen's liver had gone into its last necrotic, cirrhotic foliation. Jay Breen used to write half the magazine, but it had gotten to the point where Breen couldn't stand to listen to the Reader anymore. Breen and his wife would come in and sit in the next room while the Reader read the stories for the next issue out loud. The Reader, whatever his name was, had a truly great voice, like Sir Ralph Richardson reading Lear soliloquies at a Bauhaus Modern lectern under a spotlight. Great diction, great resonance, etc. Harrison hired him just to read out loud. Harrison had a theory that if you read the stories out loud, every weak spot in a story would stand out. So there would be the Reader with a voice like Sir Ralph Richardson enunciating such works as “Errol Flynn and His Two-Way Mirror,” “White Women Broke Up My Marriage” [to a Negro entertainer], and “How Mike Todd Made a Chump of a Movie Mogul.” One of the writers would be in there muttering away because he claimed that the Reader had it in for him and was blundering over his best-turned phrases on purpose, thereby causing Harrison to throw whole stories out. But Jay Breen was long, long past all that, and presently he died, of cirrhosis of the liver. Meanwhile, Howard Rushmore, the editor, was beginning to look awful. He used to be such a
big robust guy, and now he looked like a couple of eye sockets mounted on a piece of modern solder sculpture. Rushmore was an ex-Communist and a complex person. He had a talent for gossip stories, but somehow it was all wrapped up with the anti-Communist crusade he was carrying on. There came a day when Rushmore and his wife were riding in a cab on the upper East Side and he took out a revolver and shot her to death and then shot himself to death. Harrison was the publisher of
Confidential
and he remembered that day very well. He had just come into Idlewild Airport from someplace and gotten into a cab. The first he heard about Rushmore was when the cabdriver said, “Hey, did you hear that? The publisher of
Confidential
just shot himself!”
p there in the office at Broadway and 52nd Street during the last days of
Confidential,
the old
Confidential
(1952â58), the most scandalous scandal magazine in the history of the world, everybody seemed to be ricocheting around amid the dolly lights and cracking up. Everybody, save one, namely, Robert Harrison himself, the publisher. Jay Breen's liver had gone into its last necrotic, cirrhotic foliation. Jay Breen used to write half the magazine, but it had gotten to the point where Breen couldn't stand to listen to the Reader anymore. Breen and his wife would come in and sit in the next room while the Reader read the stories for the next issue out loud. The Reader, whatever his name was, had a truly great voice, like Sir Ralph Richardson reading Lear soliloquies at a Bauhaus Modern lectern under a spotlight. Great diction, great resonance, etc. Harrison hired him just to read out loud. Harrison had a theory that if you read the stories out loud, every weak spot in a story would stand out. So there would be the Reader with a voice like Sir Ralph Richardson enunciating such works as “Errol Flynn and His Two-Way Mirror,” “White Women Broke Up My Marriage” [to a Negro entertainer], and “How Mike Todd Made a Chump of a Movie Mogul.” One of the writers would be in there muttering away because he claimed that the Reader had it in for him and was blundering over his best-turned phrases on purpose, thereby causing Harrison to throw whole stories out. But Jay Breen was long, long past all that, and presently he died, of cirrhosis of the liver. Meanwhile, Howard Rushmore, the editor, was beginning to look awful. He used to be such a
big robust guy, and now he looked like a couple of eye sockets mounted on a piece of modern solder sculpture. Rushmore was an ex-Communist and a complex person. He had a talent for gossip stories, but somehow it was all wrapped up with the anti-Communist crusade he was carrying on. There came a day when Rushmore and his wife were riding in a cab on the upper East Side and he took out a revolver and shot her to death and then shot himself to death. Harrison was the publisher of
Confidential
and he remembered that day very well. He had just come into Idlewild Airport from someplace and gotten into a cab. The first he heard about Rushmore was when the cabdriver said, “Hey, did you hear that? The publisher of
Confidential
just shot himself!”
“The publisher of
Confidential,
” says Harrison, the publisher of
Confidential.
“Where did the publisher of
Confidential
shoot himself?”
Confidential,
” says Harrison, the publisher of
Confidential.
“Where did the publisher of
Confidential
shoot himself?”
“In the head, in a cab,” says the cabdriver. “He shot himself through the head, right in the back of a cab!”
Harrison remembers that, well, here he was, right in the back of a cab, and he didn't have the slightest inclination to pull a gun on anybody inside or outside a cab. It had been wild for a while, forty million dollars' worth of libel suits, the whole movie industry had been after him, jukebox gangsters or somebody like that had hung him upside down by his heels out his office window, Congressmen and half the newspapers in the country were crucifying him, some guy from Chicago was going to fly in and break every bone in his body, starting with his fingers and toesâbut that was all pressure from outside. Inside, he wasn't drowning in his own turbulent juices like Breen or Rushmore. He was serene, and
Confidential
was beautiful. This may be a hard idea to put acrossâthe way Harrison found
Confidential
beautiful. But the fact is, the man is an aesthete, the original
aesthete du schlock.
Confidential
was beautiful. This may be a hard idea to put acrossâthe way Harrison found
Confidential
beautiful. But the fact is, the man is an aesthete, the original
aesthete du schlock.
Â
At the outset all I knew about Harrison was that he was living under an assumed name in a place called the Hotel Madison. To imagine the kind of picture that brought to mind, all you have to think of was the libel suits, the outrage, all the big people who were after him in 1957 when he sold
Confidential
and dropped from view. They must have crushed him like a Phrygian sacrifice. So the picture I had of Robert Harrison, the ex-publisher of
Confidential
, in someplace called the Hotel Madison was of a skulking fifty-nine-year-old man holed up in a hotel room where the view was a close-up of the air-conditioning duct of the short-order restaurant out back, hung with heavy-duty New York lint in clots like Spanish moss. That was until I saw the Madison, Reggie, Lately Miss BMC of Canada, and Harrison's cravat.
Confidential
and dropped from view. They must have crushed him like a Phrygian sacrifice. So the picture I had of Robert Harrison, the ex-publisher of
Confidential
, in someplace called the Hotel Madison was of a skulking fifty-nine-year-old man holed up in a hotel room where the view was a close-up of the air-conditioning duct of the short-order restaurant out back, hung with heavy-duty New York lint in clots like Spanish moss. That was until I saw the Madison, Reggie, Lately Miss BMC of Canada, and Harrison's cravat.
The Madison, on East 58th Street, between Fifth and Madison,
turned out to be a fairly posh and conservative old place full of big cooperative apartments and a lobby with plum and umber walls and servitors in white dickies. Harrison's sister, Helen, a polite, quiet woman with grey-blonde hair who has been his personal secretary all these years, opened the door, and there was what I later learned was the very same apartment he had lived in during the heyday of
Confidential.
It has a thirty-foot living room all buttressed with yards of faceted mirrors, a bar with Hilarious novelties on it, a pygmy tropical tree with a wooden ape hanging in the branches, ochre-colored neo-Moloch art objects, black and tan furniture, the total effect being the decorator style known as Malay Peninsula Modern. Pretty soon, out of one of the two side rooms, came Harrison, trampling through the wall-to-wall and tying the cravat.
turned out to be a fairly posh and conservative old place full of big cooperative apartments and a lobby with plum and umber walls and servitors in white dickies. Harrison's sister, Helen, a polite, quiet woman with grey-blonde hair who has been his personal secretary all these years, opened the door, and there was what I later learned was the very same apartment he had lived in during the heyday of
Confidential.
It has a thirty-foot living room all buttressed with yards of faceted mirrors, a bar with Hilarious novelties on it, a pygmy tropical tree with a wooden ape hanging in the branches, ochre-colored neo-Moloch art objects, black and tan furniture, the total effect being the decorator style known as Malay Peninsula Modern. Pretty soon, out of one of the two side rooms, came Harrison, trampling through the wall-to-wall and tying the cravat.
“Have you had breakfast yet?” he says. It was one in the afternoon. “I've been on this goddamned diet. Let's go to Lindy's, I can't stand it anymore. I lost two pounds. I got to have something to eat, some of that fish or something; you know, lox.”
Judging from his 1957 pictures, Harrison, now fifty-nine and grey-haired, may have a little more heft in the bags above and below the eyes, and a little more erosion in the jowls, but he is wearing his hair combed back long and on the rakish side, like Jon Hall in
The Hurricane
, and he has this silk cravat debouching like mad from the throat of his sports shirt. Furthermore, he still has a Broadway promoter's accent, the kind that seems to be created by hidden pistons, and one of those voices that come from back in the throat as if it has been Mello-cured like a Dr. Grabow pipe.
The Hurricane
, and he has this silk cravat debouching like mad from the throat of his sports shirt. Furthermore, he still has a Broadway promoter's accent, the kind that seems to be created by hidden pistons, and one of those voices that come from back in the throat as if it has been Mello-cured like a Dr. Grabow pipe.
And then, from exactly where I forget, materializes Reggie, a blonde. Reggie is one of these girls who strike you as more of an ensemble, a chorus, a tableau, an opulent colonial animal, than as one person. She has great blonde bouffant hair, a coat of white fur whose locks fluff out wider than she is tall, and a dog, a toy greyhound named Tessie. Reggie and Helen get into a discussion about the dog's recent alimentary history to see if it will be safe to leave it in the apartment with Helen while Reggie, Harrison and I go off to Lindy's. The dog looks just like a racing greyhound except that it is two feet long and wears a town coat.
While they're talking, Harrison shows me a copy of his latest enterprise, a newspaper he started last year called
Inside News
.
Inside News
.
“What do you think of it?” he says.
Obviously, from the tone he is not asking if I felt all informed by its inside news or was even entertained by it. It is an aesthetic question, as if he were showing me a Hiroshige print he just bought. The front-page headline in the newspaper is set in a great burst of red and says: “Castro's Sex Invasion of Washington.” The story postulatesâ
that seems to be the word for itâthat Castro is planning to smuggle a lot of Christine Keelers into Washington to ruin the careers of prominent officialsâand features a picture of a girl in a checkerboard bikini and these odd shoes: “The Castro cutie who could change Capitol Hill into Fanny Hill. Pics smuggled from Cuba by writer,” one “Marc Thorez.” The picture reveals mainly that Castro has stockpiled a pair of six-inch spiked-heel shoes of the sort that turned up in the girlie magazines Harrison used to publish in the Forties.
that seems to be the word for itâthat Castro is planning to smuggle a lot of Christine Keelers into Washington to ruin the careers of prominent officialsâand features a picture of a girl in a checkerboard bikini and these odd shoes: “The Castro cutie who could change Capitol Hill into Fanny Hill. Pics smuggled from Cuba by writer,” one “Marc Thorez.” The picture reveals mainly that Castro has stockpiled a pair of six-inch spiked-heel shoes of the sort that turned up in the girlie magazines Harrison used to publish in the Forties.
“This is going to be bigger than
Confidential,
” says Harrison. “The keyhole stuff is dead. The big thing now is getting behind the news. This is going to be big. What's his name, the big Hollywood producer, he drives up here to the newsstand every week in a limousine just to get
Inside News
. I see him every week. He comes up in a limousine and he doesn't reach out for it. He gets out of the car and goes over and picks it up himself. Now, I think that's a goddamned compliment!”
Confidential,
” says Harrison. “The keyhole stuff is dead. The big thing now is getting behind the news. This is going to be big. What's his name, the big Hollywood producer, he drives up here to the newsstand every week in a limousine just to get
Inside News
. I see him every week. He comes up in a limousine and he doesn't reach out for it. He gets out of the car and goes over and picks it up himself. Now, I think that's a goddamned compliment!”
From Harrison's face you can see that here is a man who is still trying to free his features from the sebaceous stickum of having just woke up, but he is already on the move. The old
aesthetique du schlock
is already stirred up and he is already thinking about his own story, the story about him and
Confidential.
aesthetique du schlock
is already stirred up and he is already thinking about his own story, the story about him and
Confidential.
“I think I've got a story angle for you,” he says. “The angle I like is, âNow It Can Be Told.' You know? Of course, you guys probably have your own ideas about it, but that's the way I see itââNow It Can Be Told.'”
And as the day wore on, you could see the first splash of red with a montage of photographs, tabloid headlines and feverish brush script over it, saying something like “Now It Can Be ToldââInside'
Confidential!
” Harrison always liked to begin a story like that, with a layout with a big stretch of red and a lot of pictures and lettering and type faces exploding on top of it. Actually, he would probably see it not as an article but a whole one-shot. A one-shot is a magazine, or a book in magazine form, that is published just once, to capitalize on some celebrity or current event. James Dean, the movie actor, dies and a lot of one-shots come out, with titles like
The James Dean Story, The Real James Dean, James Dean Lives!
or just
James Dean.
One-shots have been among Harrison's enterprises since he sold
Confidential
in 1957. He has put out one-shots like
Menace of the Sex Deviates, New York Confidential, That Man Paar,
as well as
Naked New York
. You can almost see Harrison putting together the stories for “Now It Can Be Told.” The lead piece would no doubt be called: “How
Confidential
Got Those âPrying' Storiesâfrom the Stars Themselves!” And there would be another big one entitled, “Why I've Started
Inside News
âTo Prove I Can Do It Again!” by Bob Harrison.
Confidential!
” Harrison always liked to begin a story like that, with a layout with a big stretch of red and a lot of pictures and lettering and type faces exploding on top of it. Actually, he would probably see it not as an article but a whole one-shot. A one-shot is a magazine, or a book in magazine form, that is published just once, to capitalize on some celebrity or current event. James Dean, the movie actor, dies and a lot of one-shots come out, with titles like
The James Dean Story, The Real James Dean, James Dean Lives!
or just
James Dean.
One-shots have been among Harrison's enterprises since he sold
Confidential
in 1957. He has put out one-shots like
Menace of the Sex Deviates, New York Confidential, That Man Paar,
as well as
Naked New York
. You can almost see Harrison putting together the stories for “Now It Can Be Told.” The lead piece would no doubt be called: “How
Confidential
Got Those âPrying' Storiesâfrom the Stars Themselves!” And there would be another big one entitled, “Why I've Started
Inside News
âTo Prove I Can Do It Again!” by Bob Harrison.
And along about then Helen comes into the living room from the room they use as an office. She has a worried look on her face.
“What's wrong?” Harrison says.
“Oh, I don't know,” Helen says. “Why are you bringing up all that?”
“It's all the truth, isn't it?”
“Yes, but it's all over. That's the past. It's finished.
Confidential
is over. I don't know, I just don't like to bring it all up again.”
Confidential
is over. I don't know, I just don't like to bring it all up again.”
“Why not?” said Harrison. “I'm not ashamed of anything I ever did!”
Helen says in a weary voice, as if to say, That's not even the point, “But what about ?”
“He was a nice guy,” Harrison says. “I liked him.”
“What do you mean,
was
,” Helen says. “What is he going to say if he reads about this. You had an agreement.”
was
,” Helen says. “What is he going to say if he reads about this. You had an agreement.”
“That was a long time ago,” Harrison says. “Anyway, he admits it. He's writing a book and he admits I gave him his real start in his career, the publicity he got in
Confidential.
He admits it.”
Confidential.
He admits it.”
“What about Mike Todd, and Cohn, that was part of the agreement.”
“They're both dead,” says Harrison. “Besides, that was a very amusing story. Nobody got hurt.”
“Still ⦔ says Helen, and then she just sighs.
Then he says, “Let's go to Lindy's. You go to Lindy's much?” I had never been in there. “How long have you been in New York? You ought to start getting around to places like that. That's where everybody is.”
A couple of minutes later we allâHarrison, Reggie and the dog, and myselfâget into a cab, and Harrison sinks back and says, “Lindy's.”
The cabbie gets that bemused, Jell-O-faced look that New York cabdrivers get when they are stumped and they have to admit it.
“Let's see,” he says, “where is that, again?”
“Where is Lindy's!” Harrison says in his Dr. Grabow voice. “What the hell is happening in this goddamned town!”
Â
At Lindy's there is trouble right away about the dog. Harrison and Reggie were counting on it being Sunday and things are slow. But the maître d' at Lindy's says it is true that this is Sunday and things are slow and he still can't let any dogs in; there is a law. One trouble, I think, is that the dog has this fey grin on his face. Harrison weighs the whole thing on the scales of life and does not protest. Reggie leaves in her remarkable profusion of hair, fur and toy greyhound to take the dog back to the apartment, but she will be back. Well, that is just a setback, that is all. Harrison gets a table where he wants it, over to one side where everything is orange curves decorated with stylized emblems of such things as martinis, trombones, and pretty girls, all set
at a swingy angle that reminds you of the Busy City music from the opening montage of a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie. Harrison takes a seat where he can see the door. One of the waiters comes up and says, “Mr. Harrison! How are you? You look like a million dollars!”
at a swingy angle that reminds you of the Busy City music from the opening montage of a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie. Harrison takes a seat where he can see the door. One of the waiters comes up and says, “Mr. Harrison! How are you? You look like a million dollars!”
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