Man With Two Faces

by Don Swaim

  “Then we will make him an honorary member. Lindy has visited Germany, understands the Nazi military is invincible, was awarded the Service Cross of the German Eagle, and he believes that if the Jews have their way they will lead America into war. A few Yids are all right, but too many create chaos, and we are getting too many.”

  “You said it, Heinz. Praise the Lord our Fuehrer is doing something about it.”

  “I will drink to that. Zum wohl.”

  While Hinrichs was an enthusiast of all things Nazi, he was no fan of Kuhn. As we funneled the booze down our throats, his lips loosened.

  “I have tried to work with Fritz, but he is a stechen, as we say in Stuttgart.”

  “Yeah, I’ve met a lot of pricks myself.”

  “Gut, Rolfe, you know our language good.”

  “I was bred in Milwaukee—and I did spend a little time in Hamburg. Wo ist die toilette?”

  “The important thing is I do not think Kuhn is—how you say it?—on the up and up.”

  “In what way, Heinz?”

  “Because… Uh, I had better clam up about that. Say, it is getting late. Let us order a schooner to go with our schnapps.”

  Pretty soon we were singing “The Horst Wessel Song,” and the entire schnockered crowd at Rambacher’s Bierstube joined in.

  The cacophony accosted the very sidewalks of Sauerkraut Boulevard, heart of America’s Deutschland, where the tenements were lined with Teutonic bustle and musik: Café Geiger, Maxi’s Bauhaus, Martin’s Rathskeller, Mueller’s Pork Store, Bavarian Inn, the Heidelberg, Kleine Konditorei, Café Wienecke, Platzl Café, Wankel’s Hardware.

  The marzipan at Elk Candy was delicious.

  As for Kuhn, a naturalized American citizen and former chemical engineer, I was worming my way closer, thanks to my palsy-walsy relationship with Heinz, who made the introductions at Bund headquarters in Room 5, 178 E. 85th Street, where they published their newspaper, the eight-page Free American.

  Kuhn, stocky and pasty-faced with a noticeable accent, peered into me through his wire-rimmed glasses.

  “Heinz tells me you have a background in security, Herr Schenk.”

  “Call me Rolfe, sir. I was once a doorman at T.A. Chapman’s Department Store on Wisconsin Avenue in Milwaukee.”

  “Why did you join our Bund?”

  “I desire the unification of all those of German descent, regardless of the sovereignty in which they are domiciled. The Bund alone recognizes the aspirations of our racial comrades to remove the barriers in our path. The weltanschauung of the Third Reich, with its lofty ideals, forms a trenchant contrast to the liberalistic capitalistic philosophy under which we exist in America.”

  “Das ist gut. I could not have said it better.”

  So true. Kuhn himself had mouthed those pompous words in a speech published in his little Nazi propaganda sheet.

  “You and I are of like mind,” he said. “We cherish sympathies for the greatness of the Reich, and we must stand like men before Herr Hitler and thank him for saving our Deutschland from that bloody, Godless Asiatic monster called Jewish Communism. There are thirty-million Germans living in the United States, Rolfe, and they must assert the rights of their blood by every and any means while preparing for the coming struggle with Communism and Jews. Sieg Heil!”

  “Sieg Heil!”

  It took me zero seconds to detest Kuhn and everything he stood for.

  From the unguarded coat rack at Bund headquarters, I swiped the name tag from inside his hat, pinning the label on the twenty-five-cent rag doll I bought for a hundred bucks from Mambo Miriam, the voodoo queen on Chartres Street in New Orleans. Daily I’d stick an additional pin into the devil doll, but so far I hadn’t seen any changes in Kuhn’s health.

  I was beginning to think voodoo might be a fraud.

  When the day came for the rally, tensions were rampant inside and out of Madison Square Garden. Twenty-two-thousand Bundists and their abettors crammed the arena, while on the streets enclosing Eighth and Ninth avenues, one-hundred-thousand anti-Fascists were in a righteous fervor.

  As one of the uniformed storm troopers in the hall, I was dressed for the part: brown shirt, armband with SS insignia, cuffless dark trousers, black overseas cap, Sam Brown belt, and brass knuckles in my pocket. Looked pretty good, actually—if you weren’t bothered by the gladiatorial attire of despots.

  Diana was a sucker for a man in uniform, and got wet and feverish whenever the United Parcel guy dropped off a package. One priceless night, while in the background Xavier Cugat’s band played rumbas in a radio remote from the Waldorf Astoria, Diana insisted I wear my SS uniform in bed. However, she drew the line at my brass knuckles.

  “Too lumpy,” she complained. “Chuck ’em, Tokee.”

  A pity Diana, who enjoyed a good scrap, had to skip the rally. She was working at the RCA Pavilion at the World’s Fair as NBC’s Miss Television. While Diana was the progenitor of radio’s most popular soap operas, slave-driving a covey of hack writers, she saw the limitless possibilities of launching her shows on the little home screen, whenever television became a practicality.

  The assembly at the Garden was kicked off by a Nazi drum and bugle corps made up of darling eight and nine year olds garbed in white shirts, brown kerchiefs, dark blue shorts, Sam Brown belts, and Basque berets. The little girls wore the same except for skirts. Nazi babies were adorable. Unfortunately, they grew up. Like cats.

  As Heinz Hinrichs and I guarded the stage, he lamented, “Seems like Lindbergh is a no-show, Rolfe.”

  “Doesn’t appear to have hurt enthusiasm. Looks to me like there’s a German ass in every seat.”

  A gigantic full-body portrait of George Washington flanked by American flags dominated the stage, while from the mezzanine dangled a banner with the nifty slogan, STOP JEWISH DOMINATION OF CHRISTIAN AMERICANS. Why didn’t I think of that?

  Swastikas fluttered like buzzard’s wings.

  After “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Fritz Kuhn mounted the stage to exuberant one-arm Nazi salutes, a standing ovation, and a drum corps’s relentless thrum, thrum, thrum.

  “You have all heard of me through the Jewish-controlled press as a creature with horns, cloven hoof, and a long tail. They will tell you I am putting on a hocus pocus, that what I say is propaganda from Herr Goebbels. As if no German-American is allowed to express an opinion that does not conform to the standardized order.”

  Kuhn went on to attack FDR as Frank D. Rosenfeld and condemn what he called the Jew Deal.

  Suddenly, he was interrupted by a heretic who rushed the stage. It was an almost suicidal act, the podium surrounded by jackbooted Krauts. How a protestor could even infiltrate the hall was hard to fathom. As the interloper was savagely beaten and kicked, his trousers ripped off, I joined the melee hoping to minimize his injuries, and when I pulled him into the clear I saw that he was Isadore Greenbaum of the National Jewish Council.

  Despite my disguise he recognized me through his blood and tears, but was quick-witted enough not to show it. Before Greenbaum could suffer even more grievous injuries, the cops moved in and dragged him in handcuffs to a paddy wagon.

  Hinrichs said to me, “Guess we showed that kike, huh, Rolfe?”

  “Yeah, poor bastard never stood a chance.”

  The speeches resumed, and the nonsense and invective were like crossed signals from an Atwater Kent.

  Spiritual rebirth of the German people…renewing Germanism on a racial basis…homage to our leader, savior of the world against Bolshevism…great American liberation movement under the swastika…service of the blood is our iron law…undue influence of Jewish-inspired British imperialism…preservation of our Germandom in the USA…assert the rights of our blood by every and any means…

  Not once did I hear a word about peace, love, hope, equality, charity, understanding. For those I’d need to turn to Father Coughlin.

  I noticed the columnist Dorothy Thompson, wife of my novelist buddy Sinclair Lewis, being dragged from the press b
ox by storm troopers. I learned later she was given the bum’s rush because she’d burst into laughter, intending to show how loony it was to take Bundists seriously.

  Outside the Garden, seventeen-hundred cops, many astride horses, kept apart Nazi-adherents and protestors, who included Jewish mobsters Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, and Mickey Cohen. Who knew Jewish racketeers had a good side? Despite the throng, there were only thirteen arrests and just eight injuries.

  As for Isadore Greenbaum, once he was patched up he was sentenced to twenty-five dollars or ten days in the can for disorderly conduct. Anonymously, Tokoloshe and Son Cleansing Services paid his fine.

  Hinrichs and I celebrated the Bund’s tour de force at Schweinsteiger’s Rathskeller with a passel of fellow stormers. Their coarse, guttural voices rankled like a squall of roosters and hens. If the Nazis needed a language, they’d never find one more glottal and ugly than German. As usual, the alcohol flowed, and predictably Heinz got drunker by the drop.

  Taking him aside, I said, allowing my own words to slur in solidarity, “You were telling me about Kuhn not being on the up and up…”

  “Yes, but I cannot say nothing about it, because I could get into much trouble.”

  “You’re with friends now, Heinz.”

  “All I can say is Kuhn is stealing from the Bund, like it is his private pirate chest. But there is something even bigger about to blow, although I cannot say nothing about that either.”

  “C’mon, Heinz, you know me. I ain’t gonna blab.”

  “I am not telling, except to say it is going happen late on Tuesday at one of the international pavilions at the World’s Fair.”

  “Which one?”

  ”My mouth is shut. But when it occurs it will be pip-pip and cheerio, old chap.”

  That’s all I got out of Hinrichs before he passed out.

  Whichever pavilion it was, it wouldn’t be Germany’s. There wasn’t one. Hitler was too busy getting his rocks off from his shooting match in Europe to invest in a fair, particularly after LaGuardia proposed a Hall of Horrors dedicated to the Nazis. This outraged the Heinies who called the mayor a dirty little Talmud Jew.

  RCA’s pavilion was shaped like a vacuum tube. It’s where Diana worked the floor as Miss Television, greeting visitors and explaining the wonders of the unfolding television era. To enter the pavilion and its Radio Living Room of Tomorrow, visitors passed a television set, the TRK-12, housed in a unique transparent cabinet, which displayed all its electronic guts.

  Most visitors, including myself, had never actually seen a television screen before—except in the pages of Radio-Craft, the magazine published by Hugo Gernsback, the one who coined the term “television.” But Gernsback was dubbed Hugo the Rat by his writers, who complained bitterly about his low rates, if he paid them at all.

  Diana was at her stylish best as she led the curious to a bank of closed-circuit receivers picking up live images of the waving crowds outside the hall. She passed out cards as souvenirs reading, I WAS TELEVISED, which to me sounded faintly carnal.

  Dumont, Westinghouse, and GE offered competing television exhibits, but mighty RCA, the rajah of radio, was the champ at touting the tube. Alas, there was but one station, W2XBS—video 45.25 mHz, audio 49.75 mHz.

  “Tokee, darling, I was wondering when you would get here,” Diana said, leaving a lipstick smudge on my cheek.

  I was sans my nose beard.

  “Got something important to tell you, dollface. I think the Nazis are about to—”

  “Now’s not the time, darling. I’m not only terribly busy, but you must meet David. His limo’s waiting to return to him the city, so his schedule is tight.”

  “Who’s David?”

  Diana waved to a distinguished, balding, rather heavyset man, who waved back. Taking me by the hand, she led me through the crowd to where he stood magisterially.

  “David, I’d like you to meet my fiancé, Tokol Tokoloshe. Tokee, this is David Sarnoff.”

  For a moment I was speechless. I’d just been introduced to the man who bossed the world’s most powerful network.

  Recapturing my wits, I said, “Mr. Sarnoff, without you radio wouldn’t be radio.”

  “Marconi had a little to do with it, Mr. Tokoloshe.”

  “Tokol, if you will. And now television?”

  “Ten years ago, Vladimir Zworykin showed me a cathode ray picture tube he invented called the kinescope, so I put him in charge of RCA’s television technology. He’s why we’re in this pavilion today.”

  “Skeptics are saying television’s an expensive fad.”

  “They said the same about the talkies Tokol. It’s a beginning. When Roosevelt opened the fair, his speech was carried live on television, a historic first.”

  “What were his Crossley ratings?”

  Sarnoff laughed. “The president may not have had many viewers, and Albert Einstein’s speech likewise, but it was a milestone. Bloomingdale’s and Wanamaker’s are already selling four models including a tabletop. W2XBS broadcasts only an hour a day—and sets cost… Well, I won’t say.”

  “I will, sir. Six-hundred dollars. Who in America can afford that?”

  “But I intend to bring prices down until there’s a television in every home. People crave visual images.”

  “Mr. Sarnoff, if it’s images, we’ve got lots of picture magazines: Life, Look, Pic, Click, See. What’s wrong with them?”

  “They don’t move.”

  “And what about this war business in Europe?”

  “If we do get into the conflict—and FDR assures us we won’t—commercial television might be slightly delayed. But if war’s declared, I intend to enlist in the Signal Corps as a brigadier general.”

  Sarnoff shook my hand.

  “Take good care of Miss Television here, Tokol. You’re a lucky man.”

  Sarnoff went on his way, while Diana cornered Vladimir Zworykin.

  “Tokee, let me introduce you to my friend Vlad.”

  Zworykin and Diana showed me around the RCA Pavilion, which displayed Vlad’s various experimental camera and picture tubes, a receiver that projected images onto a large screen, a useless gadget called a facsimile machine, and a collection of sleek cabinetry integrating electronic components into a room’s décor.

  Looking down on it all was a huge statue of Nipper, the terrier mutt on Victor phonographs listening to his master’s voice.

  Diana said, “Tokee, darling, when I’m finished here I’ll meet you at Le Restaurant du Pavilion de France overlooking the Lagoon of Nations. The entire staff was brought from Paris on the Normandie. You’ll adore their menu. Stuffed artichokes, lobster américaine with added cream, and cold capon in tarragon aspic. Or we could grab a hot dog and sit on a bench somewhere.”

  I wandered through the fair, all flowers and fountains and marchers and musicians, sprawling over a three-mile expanse. It would take days to see it all.

  The decade had been one of unrelenting gloom, from the dust storms in the heartland to the grim shadows cast by skyscrapers onto pitiless city streets. Photography emerged in varying shades of gray, often like storm clouds, ranging from stark to somber, such as Dorothea Lang’s images of haunted, migrant faces and the FBI’s most-wanted posters. Even Busby Berkeley’s screen spectaculars were shot in black and white, lacking a certain dimension in their superficial buoyancy.

  But the World’s Fair was a never-ending sunburst of color and light and motion and free Coca-Cola.

  Deliberately, the fair ignored the past, as well as the families on relief, the sick, the hungry, the abused, societal victims for whom no one claimed an iota of responsibility. The future was all: hope, promise, the bountiful. It promulgated the era’s sensation of speed, of streamliners hurtling to anywhere, airplanes soaring into the sun.

  I ran across a talking, cigarette-smoking robot, Electro, and his robotic dog Sparko; a doughnut-dunking bar; stands hawking nectarine frappe, crepe suzettes, roast beef sandwiches, and square hamburgers; the parachute jump
from Life Saver’s—one-minute up, twenty seconds down; elephant rides at Frank Buck’s Bring ’Em Back Alive Jungle Land; a sixty-foot egg; the time capsule documenting four centuries of civilization, including a Mickey Mouse watch; a stay-dry, walk-through waterfall; Carrier air conditioning’s gigantic igloo; Pedro the Voder, the machine with the human voice.

  In the Hall of Music, Gypsy Rose Lee stripped to her ample butt, along with other barely clothed cutie-pies advertising their anatomy at the Amazon Village, Cuban Village, Crystal Palace, Billy Rose’s Aquacade, and the Savoy Ballroom. Pasties and g-strings were obligatory, but if some of the equipment slipped, hell, accidents happened. The Fair’s inherent dignity may have been gingered up by the bump-and-grind flavor of a carnival midway, but I liked ginger.

  I got caught up in it all.

  The Savoy Ballroom’s pavilion was an outpost of the celebrated Harlem club on Lenox Avenue, sometimes known as “The Temple of the Jitterbug,” and home to “The World’s Greatest Colored Dancers.” Here, at the Fair, a troop of inexhaustible hoofers performed the Lindy Hop, Shag, Suzy-Q, Big Apple, and Shim-Sham—and the most beautiful dancer of them all was a statuesque, ebony queen who called herself Bathsheba, lithe and loose jointed. Not having seen a woman as enchanting since my time in the Belgian Congo, I immediately struck up an acquaintance with Bathsheba. And made an arrangement.

  But then it came time to get serious.

  With Diana.

  She and I sat on a bench overlooking Fountain Lake, mustard from the hot dogs dribbling into our napkins.

  “I was really looking forward to the stuffed artichokes, dollface, but this will do.”

  “Now what’s all this about Nazis, darling?”

  “Nothing much. Seems some of the Bund’s storm troopers plan to sabotage one of the pavilions.”

  “Dammit, Tokee, why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Careless of me.”

  “When will it happen?”

  “Tuesday, after the fair closes for the night.”

  “And you know all this because…”

  “My blabbermouth in the Bund, Heinz Hinrichs, one of the better Nazis—if that’s not a contradiction.”