David Lazar

by Robert Kalich

  We weren’t exactly in Commerce High School. We were on the third floor, which encompassed Lincoln Park Honor School. We were going to take a demanding academic curriculum. Be prepared for college. We would be burdened with state Regents Examinations. French or Spanish. Physics and chemistry, algebra and geometry and calculus. The boys and girls at Commerce, on the other hand, were taking shop, typing, general courses and didn’t have to fret about Regents Exams or the pressures of preparing for college.

  “I picked Commerce,” I told Noah, “because I heard so much about its basketball program. Herman Wolf is one of the best coaches in the city. I heard this from guys like Dolph Schayes and Connie Simmons. I met them during my summers in the Catskills.”

  Noah had never heard of the Catskill Mountains. Dolph Schayes had played at NYU and was a superstar in the NBA; Connie Simmons was the center for the New York Knicks. I was always the kind of pretentious loser who threw out names. It’s one of my long-term Broadway Dave flaws, but at fourteen, I just thought it was natural. Simmons and Schayes played at Klein’s Hillside, the Catskill mountain hotel my parents and I stayed at summer after summer from the time I was six.

  Noah Weldon was special. It wasn’t anything that he said because Noah didn’t talk very much. It was just something about his humble manner, his thoughtful brow, the smooth untroubled reserve that his voice exuded. Noah and I stayed together all that first morning. I began talking about basketball, and I knew the game. The basketball played at Klein’s Hillside during the 1950s was not good or very good—it was great. George Mikan played there. Bob Cousy and Paul Arizin and Sonny Jamison and Paul Unruh and Eddie Younger and damn—the list of All Americans and professional stars was unending. By the middle of our first week, Noah and I were friends.

  “Noah, I had to go to the bathroom. There was this guy there. He’s on the basketball team. Must’ve been six foot eight. He asked me if I wanted a reefer. I said no. Noah, what’s a reefer?”

  Our homeroom teacher was also our French teacher, an owlish looking woman, fierce, with pursed lips, and a face that never opened. Mrs. Martin. She looked like every student’s nightmare. Yet, like with most human beings, once you got to know her, Mrs. Martin was a very nice lady. With me, it didn’t matter. Right after the first session of Mrs. Martin’s French class, I walked out and switched to Spanish. Didn’t help very much. I was always challenged when it came to foreign languages. On the other hand, with basketball, I knew every player in the NBA. I loved the game. Even back then I could gauge a player’s value. Project his potential within minutes. Just knew. In the future, this gift changed my life. Noah and I didn’t speak much about baskets. He was one of those boys you would never take for being gabby. We did speak about one girl that he had a crush on, her name was Joya Highsmith, and we spoke about Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle. Both of us agreed that these two major league rookies were going to be all-stars.

  “I saw Willie’s first home run off Warren Spahn, Noah. It went over the Polo Grounds’ roof. I’m telling you, Willie Mays is going to be as great a ballplayer as Joe DiMaggio.”

  “And what’s your prediction for Mantle?” Noah asked in a somewhat scoffing manner.

  “Mantle has more power and speed than anyone I’ve ever seen. He makes Johnny Mize look like a singles hitter. He makes Sam Jethroe look as if he were Roy Campanella on the bases.”

  Mickey Mantle at nineteen could run to first in 3.1 seconds from the left side of the plate and in 3.6 seconds from the right. He could hit a baseball over five hundred feet. Ninety percent of New York City teenagers became Mickey Mantle worshippers in 1951. As for Willie, he was in a class by himself. The same league as Sugar Ray Robinson in boxing; Bob Cousy in basketball; Jim Brown in football. These men were the Prousts, the Tolstoys, and the Joyces—not just of 1951 but of all time. Now that I’m eighty years old with perspective, I know that to be truer than ever.

  Noah and I talked about Mickey and Willie and Whitey Ford and Joe Ostrowski and Charlie Silvera and Yogi Berra and Paul Arizin and Sweetwater Clifton and Earl Lloyd and the two Bobbys—Wanzer and Davies. The two Bobby’s were the backcourt for the Rochester Royals. Noah told me Bobby Wanzer had played for Commerce’s bitter rival, Benjamin Franklin. Wanzer and Davies were Noah’s favorite backcourt in the NBA. Mine were Cousy and Sharman.

  “I admit Bobby Davies is great and Wanzer is clutch,” I said, “but there’s no one like Cousy. He’s a magician. The greatest point guard in the history of the game.” And Bob Cousy was just that until a player named “Oscar” came on court.

  Late October of that year, I casually mentioned to Noah that I had seen some of the guys who were on our basketball team in the school auditorium. “One of them was the fellow who offered me a reefer. All of them are as huge as the players in the NBA and look stronger.”

  Noah shrugged his shoulders and began talking about Gentleman’s Agreement, a book about anti-Semitism he had been reading and that he thought I would like. For some strange reason, he didn’t talk much about basketball after that. He avoided the subject, and then, before I gave it much thought, it was basketball season.

  The varsity was scrimmaging. Guys by the name of Williams and Gaines were our two stars. Both players had already been recruited by several colleges. Both were over six foot six, and both were jumpers. Noah was five foot eleven, perhaps a hundred-and-sixty pounds, probably less. He was preppy, delicate, pensive, like a Jewish boy from Riverside Drive. He was a good student, much better than me. I was getting mostly Bs, Noah was getting straight As. And then, one day, this best friend of mine for the last three months was in the school lunchroom with his girlfriend Joya and me sharing two of my mom’s gigantic salmon, hard-boiled eggs with slices of tomato and chunks of chicken sandwiches, and I asked him, “Today at three, the basketball team is having its first pre-season game. Want to go watch them play?”

  Noah quickly looked at Joya.

  “I can’t,” he said.

  I went alone. I walked into the Commerce gym with its old-school basketball court with the obligatory running track overhead where I jogged daily and spotted Noah. He was on the court. I was shocked. I watched him play for maybe ten minutes. No more. He wasn’t just one of the players. Noah Weldon was the best player! This fifteen-year-old boy was a great basketball player. I had thought of Noah as more of a nerd than I wanted him to be. My parents loved Noah. Whenever he visited our home, after dinner, when my mother hugged and kissed him goodnight, she would tell him, “I wish I had a daughter for you.”

  Noah was hurt badly in his senior year. He blew out his knee. In those days, surgery wasn’t what it is today. All but one of his forty-seven scholarship offers were taken away. The remaining one was at a small Catholic school. Of course, Noah took the offer. He played backcourt in college on one leg, but his transcendent quickness was gone. His speed was destroyed, so he played with craft and savvy. On one leg, he played Division One College ball, but his matchless game was gone and would never come back.

  Christmas of 1956, Noah went with his college team to Owensboro, Kentucky to compete in the All-American City Basketball Tournament. He called me in the middle of the night.

  “Dave, I’m sorry if I woke you. You’re not going to believe what just happened. The University of Mississippi walked out of the tournament because I’m black. Tad Smith, the Ole Miss Athletics director, said, ‘When we accepted the invitation to the tournament, it was with the understanding that there wouldn’t be any Negroes in it.’ My whole team went back to our motel. The guys refused to play without me.”

  Up until then, neither Noah nor I had known how sick the world could really get.

  “You’re not going to believe this either, Dave. When we were back in our hotel room, it must have been midnight, there’s this knock on the door. Brendan McKinney was the only one of us who wasn’t too scared to open it. When he did, there are these twelve white guys with crew cuts standing there. It was
the Mississippi team we were supposed to play. They wanted to apologize in person. We invited them into our room. All of us got to know one another. I think that was great,

  don’t you?”

  And now I’m squinting at a photo in my collage. It’s 1958. I’m in a tuxedo for the first time in my life. I’m best man at Noah Weldon’s wedding. He’s marrying Joya Highsmith, his high school sweetheart. Today Noah and Joya are over eighty years old and still in love.

  Chapter 5

  Those days working for the Mirror and living in my bachelor pad on 56th Street, life was full. And I was sleeping with Leslie Kore, when she had the time.

  Most of the time, she didn’t. Leslie was always juggling men, always hunting for a super-rich husband. I knew the last guy Leslie Kore wanted to marry was a $48-a-week copyboy. In those days, I read voraciously and attempted to write though I didn’t have much to say. I had an active social life, going out, having parties. Once I organized a paint party with my friends. We painted the walls in my West 56th Street apartment. I can still see the vibrant reds, blues, yellows, and purples on those walls.

  My friends were great. We had our own rat pack back then. Howie Puris was dating a woman twice his age. “What can I tell ya? Rose knows everything that I’d want a woman to know.” Al Kasha, who would win a couple of Oscars as a songwriter for The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure. Even Phil Spector came over once in a while. Phil would go on and on about this thing he had been working on, his “Wall of Sound” technique, which he liked to say was his Wagnerian approach to rock ‘n’ roll. At that time, he didn’t seem bizarre or crazy—just earnest and onto something big.

  Those were exciting times, but I was doing something most guys weren’t. I was fantasizing about one day becoming a serious novelist. I never wanted to be a Random House CEO like Bennett Cerf or Robert Gottlieb, the future president of Knopf. I never was a dedicated aesthete, though, as I said, I read everything, and I loved the ballet almost as much as Ron Nevins. I was bringing women—by which I mean long-legged dancers—to my 56th Street pad on a regular basis. We’d listen to Frank and Nina Simone and Ray Charles, and it worked for a while. And then I started to see Leslie Kore on a more serious basis. Leslie and I were open about seeing other people. In fact, we made a bet whenever we went to a single’s bar.

  “I’ll wager you, David, that I pick up six men before you get the phone number of one woman.”

  Leslie always won, but in those carefree days, it didn’t really matter.

  I was working for the New York Daily Mirror, I was twenty-four, and I was loving my life. And then Leslie began to bust my chops that I needed to make money. I wimped out and quit the Mirror, the job I loved. I telephoned my friend Ron Nevins.

  “Don’t worry, Broadway. I’ll speak to my father. I’ll get him to start you off at two hundred dollars a week. We can go to Le Cirque for lunch. Go to the ballet every night.”

  When I told Leslie, she started to take me seriously. The sex that night wasn’t half as good. Why didn’t that tip me off to the mistake I’d made?

  When I walked into the office of Mr. Nevins, he said, “Sit down, David. Make yourself comfortable. I’ve known you a long time, and I know you’ll hate it down here in the garment center. In good conscience, I can’t do this to you.”

  A return to the Public Assistance job looked right around the corner.

  As for Leslie Kore, from “Get a real job...” to “Take a walk...” took less than a month.

  Within six months, Leslie, with her looks and a preternaturally high 165 I.Q., was engaged to a dashing Harvard man, an investment banker. What was I doing? Pounding my head against my red, blue, yellow, and purple walls. And not only because of losing Leslie, but also because I had walked away from the Mirror. Of course, I’d loved the fabulous parties I covered and the beautiful women I met. But there was more to it. I loved being in a newsroom, being part of the unfolding investigative reporting, the shouting of the editors, columnists like Suzy, as much involved with the big stories as the hard boiled, big-bellied, black coffee, crossword puzzle newspaper lifers, the entire paper clamoring and buzzing, cub reporters, grizzled veterans, copyboys, rotary phones that never stopped ringing, copy desk white-haired antiques like Phil McGee scribbling succinct captions, asking me, “Hey kid! What do you think of this one?”

  I quit that fantasy job because of Leslie’s Kore’s ultimatum: “Your salary is $48 a week. Get real, David. You must make money.”

  I paid mightily for that mistake. And I would pay more yet.

  * * *

  It was 1962, and I was working in Public Assistance, this time, on 126th Street off Park. It was the same job, but I wasn’t the same, fresh-faced innocent I’d been in 1958. At twenty-one, fresh out of college, when being a Social Investigator was my first job, I was crazy to bring light into the world, as my father said. I looked forward each day to all the good I wanted to do. Five years later, so much jism had been knocked out of me, I could hardly remember my unstained self’s enthusiasm for the work.

  I was enthusiastic about The Tutor, the novel I’d written. I phoned John Farrar, one of the three head honchos at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. FSG was one of the most prestigious publishing houses in the country. It was like calling Elia Kazan cold and trying to convince him that you’re the next Brando. Miraculously, I got Mr. Farrar on the phone and told him about my novel.

  “Young man,” he said, “my wife and I are leaving the city for our country house in one hour, and it just so happens that I haven’t much to read this weekend. If you can be down here...”

  I raced out of the Welfare Department!

  On Monday morning at 7:15 A.M. John Farrar called me. “Young man, in all my years in publishing, this is the most special novel I’ve read by an unpublished novelist. What I would like to do is assign an editor to you. Mrs. Zasky is in Europe right now, but I’m going to fly her into New York when she finishes up the project she’s working on, and, if you are willing, have her work with you. Mrs. Zasky is the most suitable editor for your novel that I know of.”

  Eight months later, Mr. Farrar phoned. “I didn’t realize that we were publishing three iconoclastic novels this year. I can’t justify a fourth.”

  All of this took place immediately after Leslie left me for dead. I was still almost a hormone-flooded teenager. Still with dreams, the artless idealism of youth. And so was much of our society, in a manner of speaking. Doubly so in the world of New York publishing. In the sixties, words meant something. Literature, novelists, men of letters were relevant. People were reading. We—some of us at least—had our beaks in dense books, communicating with deep, angry roars, introspecting, studying philosophers, poets, Shakespeare. We had the naiveté to believe that we could help change the world. Yes, it was a different world, and, yes, I thought that I was a part of it. And, yes, I believed I had real value.

  I wanted to be a novelist. When that telephone call from John Farrar came in, I didn’t write again for two years. I coughed up The Baseball Rating Handbook and a basketball book. But I didn’t write write. I was dead inside. I was fragile. We’re all so fragile. Writing a book meant something. Being published was like touching God. With The Tutor I was trying to do something with dignity, something sublime. Something that involved all the best of me. A novelist was as good as the ladder he tried to climb and the challenges he undertook. The risks he took on his slippery trapeze. Once he compromised and didn’t make his reader move in the direction of an uncorrupted star, forget about it. It was time for Hollywood. It was time for handicapping.

  Chapter 6

  One year ago, I learned that Jessica Strauss had died. I hadn’t seen Jessica in more than fifty-five years, but I drove into the city to attend the memorial service. I took a seat in the last row at the chapel and listened to her friends and family tell their stories. Afterward, I couldn’t bring myself to go back to Westchester. Instea
d, I went to my penthouse. I couldn’t stop myself from thinking. Of what could have been. Of what went wrong. Of what a lowlife I’d been for so much of my life. Outside of a few years, until I was sixty-two and met Elizabeth Dunn, I’d lived a life dedicated to selfishness in everything that really counted. I paced my rooftop all night thinking about Jessica Strauss. How I almost cost Jessica her life when we were so perfectly young.

  Jessica Strauss came into my life in 1963. She was twenty-two. I was twenty-six. Leslie Kore had married that Harvard banker and been out of my life for almost two years. Soon Jessica and I became seriously involved. I proposed. She accepted. I arranged for our engagement party to be held at Danny’s Hideaway, one of the ultra-in places back in the day. Jessica deserved a cool party. She was the best person I had ever known. Kind, trusting, real.

  “I might be working for the Welfare Department, Jess, but I still have some influential contacts at the Mirror.”

  “As long as we’re together, it doesn’t matter to me where we have our engagement party or if we have a party at all. It just doesn’t matter. What matters is that we’re together. That’s what makes me happy.”

  We went to Yankee games. On weekends to L’Entre-Deux, a swank, private club in the basement of the Gotham Hotel on 55th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues frequented primarily by suave European trash. We’d dance to The Twist till one in the morning, then we’d go for a nightcap at Jimmy Wynn’s Harwyn Club or to the Eden Roc and dance some more. We always finished off our Saturday nights at the Brasserie on 53rd and Park, where the main room’s hostess, Marie, would direct us to the table where my friends were. Guys like the promoter, Stickers.