A few minutes later, the Stompers stood up to go. Riccio said he would be around to see them and help them plan their dance. They thanked him and left. Riccio looked around the room. “I used to come here when I was a kid,” he told me. “I got my name carved on the wall somewhere.” He looked for it for a moment, without success, and then said, “Well, we might as well run along.”
· · ·
We went outside and got into Riccio’s car. “Evelyn said if it wasn’t too late, she’d have coffee and cake for us,” Riccio told me, and I said that would be fine. He drove to his house and, after parking, leaned back in the seat and lit a cigarette. “I want to slow down a little before I go upstairs,” he said. We sat there quietly for a few minutes. I could hear the whistles of ships down in the harbor. “Benny and Ralphie,” Riccio said finally. “Those are the two to concentrate on. Maybe Eddie, too. But that Bruno—I don’t know how far you could get with him. He’s a disturbed kid. But you have to try. You have to try to reach him. That’s the whole trick—reaching them. If I could have reached Tommy Hanlon, he wouldn’t be dead now. I was just starting to reach him when he died. The last real talk we had, he told me he was scared to get a job. He’d quit school very early, and he couldn’t read or write very well. He was scared if he got a job they’d make him do arithmetic and he’d look stupid. He was scared that they might send him over to Manhattan on the subway and he wouldn’t be able to read the station signs. He’d never been out of Brooklyn. This was a kid there wasn’t anything anti-social he hadn’t done. Short of murder, there wasn’t a thing. He broke into stores, he broke into cars, he molested girls. And, of course, he was on narcotics. I tell you, I used to look at this kid and think, How the hell can you defend a kid like this to society? And I’d think, How the hell can I help him? What can I do? This is too much. At the same time, he was such a nice-looking kid. I mean, he had a very nice face. Never mind what came out of his mouth—he had the dirtiest tongue I ever heard on a kid. But I worked with him, and he was starting to come around. He was starting to trust me. I don’t think he’d ever trusted anybody in his whole life. I was his father. I was his mother. I was his best friend, his father confessor. I was all the things this kid had never had. And he was starting to move a little. The gang ran a dance, and he volunteered for the sandwich committee. You know what that meant? The kid was participating socially for the first time in his whole life. And he worked twice as hard at it as anybody else. I was starting to reach him. And then I quit the Youth Board.”
Riccio fell silent again. “I had to quit the Youth Board,” he said presently. “I had a wife and two kids, and I wasn’t making enough to support them. I was spending more time with these kids than with my own. So I quit. The day I quit, I went down the street to tell the kids. They were in the candy store and Tommy Hanlon was with them, and he looked at me and said, ‘What did you quit for?’ I told him I had to, and tried to explain why. ‘You know, I’m on the stuff again,’ he said. And I said, ‘Yes, Tommy, I heard you are, and I’m very sorry.’ And he said, ‘What do I do now?’ And I said, ‘Tommy, I’ll always be around. We can still talk. You can still come and see me.’ Then some other kid called me over to talk to him, and when I looked around Tommy was gone. Two weeks later, he was dead.”
Riccio paused, this time for a long while. His cigarette had gone out, and he looked at it blankly and threw it out the window. “I know,” he said. “The kid destroyed himself. He was a disturbed kid. If he wasn’t disturbed, he wouldn’t have been on narcotics in the first place. I went to the funeral and I looked in the casket and saw him laying there in a suit, with a decent haircut and his face all washed—and looking like a little old man. And I watched that kid’s father getting drunk with that kid laying there in the casket. And I wanted to get up there at the funeral and, everybody who was there, I wanted to shout at them, ‘You’re the people who caused it! All you big adults! All you wise guys on street corners that feel sorry for the kid! Now you throw away your money on flowers!’ I wanted to grab them by the throat.”
He paused again, and then said, his voice low, “We hear about a soldier, a normal guy, who goes through all the tortures of war and all this brainwashing—takes everything they throw at him—and comes home a hero. Well, here was a kid that had everything thrown at him, too. Only, he was all mixed up, and still he took everything anybody could throw at him for seventeen years, and that was all he could take, so he collapsed and died.”
Riccio abruptly pushed the car door open and got out. I got out on my side, and we went into the house together. Mrs. Riccio was both surprised and relieved to have her husband back so early. She asked if things had gone well, and Riccio assured her that things had gone very well. She went into the kitchen to make the coffee, and Riccio and I watched a quiz program on television until she came back. The three of us chatted awhile over our coffee and cake, and then, just before saying good night, I asked Riccio if Mickey had ever found the coat he lost at the dance. Riccio said that he hadn’t but that the Cherubs had given him the eighteen dollars and he had bought a new one.
Riccio called me a few days later to tell me that the Cherubs and the Stompers were observing their armistice but that the enmity between Ralphie and Bruno had become so pronounced that they had decided to settle it with a fair one. Both gangs had gone to Prospect Park one night to watch the two of them have it out. A squad car had happened along, and the policemen had run the whole bunch of them in. Riccio was on his way to court to see what he could do for the boys.
A NOTE BY REBECCA MEAD
N MAY 1958, Dr. Marion E. Kenworthy, the newly elected president of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and professor emeritus of psychiatry at Columbia University, reported that her profession was in fine health and undergoing rapid growth: there were eight hundred practitioners in the United States, with a thousand more in training. “People joke about psychiatrists because they are afraid of psychiatrists,” the Times quoted Dr. Kenworthy as saying, though whether she was smiling or not as she made this remark went unreported.
It wasn’t until 1980 that the magazine profiled a psychoanalyst—in the person of the pseudonymous Aaron Green, vivisected by Janet Malcolm—but by the fifties there was a good chance that the subjects of profiles might be undergoing, or have undergone, psychoanalysis themselves, particularly if they were in the fields of arts and entertainment. Richard Avedon, profiled here by Winthrop Sargeant, the magazine’s classical-music critic, speaks of his own possible unconscious hostility to masculine photographic subjects as offhandedly as if he were telling Sargeant about snarls in the crosstown traffic. It’s possible that Marlon Brando might have opened up to Truman Capote without having been in analysis first: Capote was a singularly cunning pseudo confidant, who worked without the use of potentially inhibiting tools such as a notebook. (Today’s fact-checkers would be in armed revolt.) But whether, without having been analyzed, Brando would have offered Capote a considered account of his mother’s alcoholism and its effect upon his own psychological development—as he did, to his almost instantaneous regret—remains open to question. It seems certain that, without analysis, Brando would not have given Capote the devastating opportunity to show him musing about his own exquisite sensitivity, with consummately unaware self-involvement.
Even if profile subjects in the fifties sometimes came preshrunk, the magazine’s tone was, as it had hitherto been, generally unpsychological. New Yorker Profiles do not tend to analyze their subjects, even in a cultural climate of analysis. Rather, a Profile is composed of laboriously accreted detail, lightly passed off as intuitive observation, and presented with a mildly ironical flourish and the withholding of explicit judgment. (Winthrop Sargeant notes that Richard Avedon once dispatched a newspaper reporter to interview his psychiatrist—an anecdote that tells the reader far more about Avedon than anything Sargeant could have learned from the psychiatrist in question.) One evolution in form from Profiles of earlier decades, however, is the increasing tendency
of the reporter to feature his or her encounters with the subject as part of the story. While Janet Flanner wrote mini-biographies from which she was absent—you might not be able to tell from her Profiles whether or not she’d actually met her subject—writers like Capote and Lillian Ross, an excerpt of whose profile of John Huston is included here, organized their pieces around scenes, directly observed, and did not worry if they themselves were occasionally in the picture. This was a method that, at the time, was surprising and new, even if today it has sometimes been degraded into cliché: “I’m sitting in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont, waiting for celebrity X to arrive.”
The five pieces included here are precursors of the contemporary celebrity profile—a genre that today is often characterized by a high seriousness of purpose, sometimes even, on occasion, in The New Yorker. (Such high seriousness may be an unconscious defensiveness against a fear of triviality, as a reporter undergoing psychoanalysis might acknowledge, were there any such reporters left.) That was not the New Yorker manner in the fifties. Philip Hamburger, in his lovely Profile of Oscar Hammerstein II, does not declare South Pacific and Show Boat and Oklahoma classics; instead, he lets it be known, in circular fashion, that they have been called classics so many times that they might categorically be described as such. Similarly, Winthrop Sargeant does not announce Marianne Moore to be America’s greatest living poet, or one of them, after visiting her in her finely observed kitchen on Cumberland Street, in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Instead, he states in varying forms that she is considered to be so by authorities whose opinion counts for something, among them T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden.
This lightness of tone—authority wielded through authority surrendered—is a signature of The New Yorker. It’s a fantastically comfortable garment to have inherited: put it on while writing, I find, and everything comes more easily and happily. Much has changed for the reporter, however, in the decades since these pieces were written. If Hollywood publicists today make every effort to circumscribe the access of a reporter to an actor, they are doing so in part because of the legacy of Capote—who, having been denied access to Brando, flew to Japan, showed up outside his hotel room one evening, and gained it anyway. Capote’s structural conceit—to tell the whole story of Brando within the time frame of a few hours’ conversation—is an exemplary case of turning a journalistic limitation into a writer’s strength. (No waiting in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont for him.) Meanwhile, few film directors are likely now to call up a reporter, announce that their studio doesn’t want them to make the movie they want to make, and say, Hey kid, come on over and I’ll tell you all about it, and you can write all about it—as John Huston did to Lillian Ross at the outset of making The Red Badge of Courage.
Kid! Being patronized by her unwitting subjects turned out to be Ross’s reportorial superpower for decades, while her piece about Huston’s movie became Picture, a book-length, genre-inventing account of art meeting commerce on Huston’s ranch in the San Fernando Valley. Like all the authors of these masterly profiles, Ross waited and watched and waited some more, and delivered what she learned without recourse to interpretation, saying all the more by doing so. “I said I would,” Ross writes, of her response to Huston’s invitation—a sentence that sums up the culture reporter’s deceptively simple calling, then and now.
Philip Hamburger
MAY 12, 1951 (ON OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN II)
SCAR HAMMERSTEIN II, the lyricist, librettist, and producer, went to the theatre for the first time when he was four years old. He considers the preceding years of his life a total loss. Now a robustly successful showman of fifty-five, Hammerstein recalls his initial glimpse of the mysteries and enticements of the stage with the mixed clarity and fuzziness of the possessed. For the better part of a year, he had been badgering his father, William, or Willie, Hammerstein, to take him downtown from the Hammerstein home, near Mount Morris Park, to see a show. Willie Hammerstein was firmly opposed to the notion. Oscar, he said, should stay home and play with his velocipede. Willie spoke with more than parental authority. He was managing Hammerstein’s Victoria Theatre, at Forty-second Street and Seventh Avenue, for his father, Oscar Hammerstein I, and he had turned it into the leading variety house of its day. There was no business like show business, Willie conceded, but he was dead set against any offspring of his getting a taste of it. Oscar persisted, however, and one afternoon, in a moment of weakness, Willie succumbed. He took Oscar, by means of a series of trolley cars, to the Victoria to see a matinee performance of a vaudeville show. When Oscar and his father walked into the lobby of the Victoria, his grandfather, a short, squat, determined-looking man with a goatee, was standing beside the box office, scanning the line of ticket buyers. He was wearing a black silk top hat and a black jacket. He had a cigar in his mouth. Willie took Oscar II over to say hello. Oscar I glanced down at him, shook his head two or three times, made an odd clucking sound, and turned away. “I don’t know what the old man had on his mind,” Oscar II said recently. “I don’t know whether he meant ‘What’s my grandson doing down here?’ or ‘What a silly-looking boy’ or ‘Good God, here’s another generation of Hammersteins inside a theatre.’ ”
In any event, within a matter of minutes, Oscar II was alone in a box overlooking the stage. The auditorium was crowded. As the house lights were lowered, a hush came over the audience. The orchestra began to play, and the curtain went up. Oscar broke out in a cold sweat. His legs trembled. His stomach quivered. His excitement was so acute that he could barely see what was happening onstage. Actually, nothing much was happening. Several young ladies were posed around a large, tangled fish net. A bright, golden haze filled the stage. The girls, it seemed, were drying the net. One of them, disengaging herself from the others, stepped to the footlights and sang what he remembers as:
“Oh, I am a water maiden,
I live on the water,
A fisherman’s daughter.”
Oscar was transported. The mist before his eyes was like a London fog. After the maidens performed a short dance, other acts came on, but Oscar recalls nothing more until intermission, when his father fetched him from the box and said, “Now we’ll go backstage.” He was led down some narrow stairs, through a dark doorway, and up a few steps; he then found himself backstage, and face to face with a large cage. The cage was occupied by a lion. The lion was prowling up and down, and did not look especially happy. As Oscar was watching it, the cage began to roll toward him. He was too stunned to move. The lion let out a roar, and Oscar was snatched to safety by a stagehand. Other stagehands rushed forward to stop the cage. Oscar felt that he just might get sick to his stomach, and asked his father to take him home. When he reached home, his mother put him to bed. He slept for fourteen hours, and when he awoke, he announced that the theatre would be his lifework.
Hammerstein has spectacularly stuck to his word. He has been associated with more notable musicals than any other showman in the history of the American theatre. He has either written the book and lyrics or collaborated on the book and lyrics for some forty musicals, including Rose-Marie, The Desert Song, Sunny, Show Boat, Oklahoma!, Carousel, Allegro, South Pacific, and The King and I. Of these, at least three—Show Boat, Oklahoma!, and South Pacific—have been called classics of the American musical stage so many times and in so many places that today they can categorically be described as classics of the American musical stage. South Pacific and The King and I, two shows on which he collaborated with Richard Rodgers, the composer and producer, are now playing across from each other, on Forty-fourth Street, and neither one has had an empty seat since it opened. Together, the two shows gross more than a hundred thousand dollars a week. Hammerstein has written the words to almost a thousand songs, including “Ol’ Man River,” “Who?,” “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’!,” “People Will Say We’re in Love,” “Some Enchanted Evening,” “We Kiss in a Shadow,” and “The Last Time I Saw Paris.” His songs are distinguished by such lucid wording, such unabashed sentimentality, such a
gentle, even noble, view of life, and such an attachment to love, home, small children, his native country, nature, and dreams come true that he has been called the Bobbie Burns of the American musical stage. He has been called this so many times and in so many places that today he can categorically be described as the Bobbie Burns of the American musical stage. Since Hammerstein became professionally associated with the theatre, more than thirty years ago, he has earned more than five million dollars—royalties, profits as a producer, and receipts from the sale of sheet music and phonograph records—and he now enjoys an income that ranges exuberantly between a half and two-thirds of a million dollars a year, before taxes. (The government permits him to keep approximately one dollar out of every seven.) Not the least phenomenal aspect of his career is the affectionate regard in which he is held by his fellow-showmen. By and large, whenever a producer or writer on Broadway has a hit, other producers or writers turn up the collars of their coats and wander off alone, to drink quietly. When a venture with which Hammerstein is connected is pronounced successful by the press and the public, his competitors often appear as exhilarated as they would be if they owned the property themselves. “The only trouble with Oscar,” a fellow-producer said not long ago, after the opening of The King and I, “is there’s no trouble with Oscar. You have to love the fellow. He works hard, he’s true-blue to his friends, he never speaks harshly to an actor, he’s modest, he drinks sparingly, he keeps out of the niteries, he’s in bed by midnight, he doesn’t fool around with dames, he has no visible quirks, he’s got a sense of humor, and he’s talented. He doesn’t sound human; he sounds like a stuffed shirt. Hell, he’s the most human man I know.”
The 50s Page 13
