Emma Who Saved My Life

by Wilton Barnhardt

  Periodically Emma declared herself utterly unreadable and worthless, a Major No-Talent, or—and this was a favorite term for others—“Multi-Untalented,” and that her writing was garbage—there was no hope for her, she’d scream. These fits of self-disgust (where her own bad passages were read loudly until Lisa or I smirked or betrayed the slightest sign of not liking something) ended in Emma opening the window facing the street and announcing to the neighborhood at large: “Here Brooklyn! Here’s some more trash for your street!” And she would hurl her latest work to the wastecans below, page by page.

  “Emma, stop!” Lisa would yell, wrestling Emma to a sofa, debilitating her by tickling until they both were laughing. “You’ll get arrested for littering. You’ll publish one day!”

  Emma through pained laughter: “If I published that I would be arrested for littering…” I’d run down to the street and collect the pages. We’d chalk this behavior up to Emma’s creative process.

  In the midst of all this, she produced a “Brooklyn Journal” which, before she’d written a word in it, was going to be the century’s only rival to Thomas Wolfe, and after she’d filled half of it, was declared “toiletworthy,” and was flushed page by page down the toilet until the water pressure and Emma’s interest in her dramatic gesture gave out. And so I have it now, that and a number of other excommunicated papers, odds and ends. They were thrown away, I think now, because they were sincere and sometimes awkward and always sentimental—everything Emma fought so hard not to be in conversation, in life, in front of us. I’ve kept something called “Brooklyn Serenade.” Here’s a piece of it:

  … To live in Brooklyn, even as an interloper, a refugee from the outrageous rents of the City, is to be born there; it holds you like the unwelcome grip of a Great Aunt who doesn’t speak English very well, it adopts you, it converts you to its pace, its poverty, its tremendous dreams hand in hand with meager expectations. You find yourself defending it at the Soho loft party, speaking of its virtues to someone without a place to live in the fall, you find yourself regularly at your window staring unthinkingly, accepting what plays before you. If you watch for it, observe carefully, you may see something flash, something catch the light momentarily, something beautiful have a brief life in the rude and filthy streets: innocence (the girl in the Catholic-school skirt twirling her hair, watching the boys play ball), faith (the mother storming from the house to retrieve her daughter out playing in her confirmation dress), hope (the adolescent boy standing on a crate, using a stick for a microphone, being Elvis, English his second language), and love, disguised and disfigured by explosive family fights heard up and down the block, borne in the faces of banished daughters, sons who said no to fathers, wives who went away but now are back, husbands trudging home from a second job.

  And when the sun begins to lower, behind that wall of haze over Jersey and Manhattan, and when it spills into the brick and brownstone canyons of Brooklyn, all tired and dirty with the industry of Jersey, the exhaust of Manhattan, and when—at the same time—you emerge from the hot, crowded subway and come up for air in what has become your neighborhood, and you stand there amidst the quiet bustle, its obliviousness to the sordid goings-on across the river, it is enough to stir in you an affection for this naked and therefore most ashamed part of America, and you too will share a sense of loss for a way of life fading as it thrives, fading in that second-hand light, around you a sepia photograph brought to life, warm and inclusive and as sentimental as an immigrant’s memory of home.

  About a week after she wrote it and liked it, Emma decided it was trash, written by someone, she said, who stayed up too late a little drunk, some twenty-two-year-old at three a.m.

  Those are the circumstances, I reminded her.

  “It’s not supposed to read like that,” she whined. “It’s supposed to read like George Eliot already. I refuse to grow as a writer—it’ll come out perfect right at the start or to hell with it. ‘Brooklyn Serenade’—MY GOD!”

  Okay, maybe calling it a “serenade” wasn’t so hot. I’m laughing a bit, because to read all this stuff, some of the short-story fragments, some of the poems, you’d have thought we were living in the heart of Hasidic Williamsburgh, the lone English-speakers amid a world of immigrants fresh from Ellis Island, women dressed in black trudging to mass, Poles over here, Lithuanians over there. Carroll Gardens wasn’t that exciting. Emma, just like me, you had a bit of the theater in you, you old fake.

  I picture her writing. We had this tree-lined street and our own tree in front of our window, a big turn-of-the-century ten-foot window with a window seat, sort of a Victorian projected window box, and this tree displayed autumn for a precious single week that fall and we mourned its passing, until we saw snow on the branches that December, which was to be only upstaged by the yellow-green buds that came the next spring, our own little Reminder of Nature, virtually in our living room. Emma no doubt sensed the clothesline Ellis Island Brooklyn out there somewhere, sitting in her window seat, her and the tree, gray Sunday afternoons, chain-drinking tea, pad in hand. Like this unfinished poem—

  I AM THE IMMIGRANT

  They arrive on jetplanes now.

  No babushkas, no more lives in a single suitcase.

  No more Ellis Island bureaucrat changing Padnowczynski to Patterson,

  No more lore and legend.

  Just green cards and a grocery to work in.

  And they don’t matter anymore.

  Now the story has been passed within,

  And the young of the country file into the City,

  From the small towns and flatlands.

  They’ve heard the streets are paved with gold,

  That silly statue speaks to them,

  They talk of dreams, American and otherwise,

  And they are willing to work and collapse for the bother, for the glory that comes from putting one’s hands on one’s future.

  The young actress, once Padnowczynski, now Patterson,

  Can tell you stories.

  I am the immigrant.

  I have come for

  And the poem runs out there, with a pencil scratching through most of it, abandoned to the trashcan, and maybe she was right to give that one up—what do I know about poetry?—but still. Still, that’s what I was thinking too, sort of. That’s why we all came there, and I recall thinking: thank god, in this generally cultureless, boring, narrow-minded grab-bag of a country we got it right once: New York City. What wouldn’t we do to appease the place? What wouldn’t we sacrifice? (The answers to these and other questions ahead …)

  But Emma’s writing angst was an acceptable part of the routine; it would have seemed emptier somehow without all her artistic suffering and self-mockery. Certainly Lisa (who’d never gotten a picture in a gallery) and myself (about as close to Broadway as Saturn) could sympathize. The routine changed, though, because in mid-summer I was given a chance to go daytime at the Venice Theater. That meant getting to politick and ingratiate myself with the directors and casting people. That meant leading a normalish life with nighttimes to play around with again. That meant the end to Emma’s and my truancy all day, dragging it out of bed at noon, drinking until four a.m. or until Lisa stormed out of the bedroom to tell us to go to bed as SOME PEOPLE had to get up in the morning.

  “Your going daytime,” said Emma, “is ruining our lives. There’s no sense in my not working every morning now, just like you—it’s back to temping, filing papers, making coffee. See what you’ve condemned me to? Think of all our projects we didn’t get to finish, all our plans.”

  Which included:

  1. Riding all the subways in New York. We’d already made our way, for the hell of it, to the amazing Broadway Junction in Brooklyn where the L and J trains, both elevated, met in a tangle of ramps and merging railways, with a railyard attached to make all the intersections even more confusing. We had stayed on the 6 line where, after everyone was asked to get out, the train turned around in an old unused station under City Hall,
one of the first subway stations in New York (chandeliers, gaslight fixtures, baroque tiles like it was some kind of Turkish bath)—Emma and Lisa and I were glued to the window, our hands shielding out the light of the train so we could see the ghost station. There was a ghost station on the 4-5-6 lines at 18th Street too. Nothing could beat the 5 line across the wastes of the South Bronx, square mile upon square mile of slumland, burned-out buildings unrecovered from the ’60s riots; plus this trip had the added adventure of surviving a trek through that neighborhood, the heart did beat a little faster.

  2. Eating cheap budget lunch-special lunches at every nationality of restaurant in New York; getting out the yellow pages, Emma had made a list: Algerian, Argentine, Austrian, Australian (“Must be a beer garden,” said Emma) … on through Zambesi.

  3. Going to the live, free videotaping of our favorite local talk shows (the smarmier the better) and participating in all those sincere questions-from-the-audience, asking even stupider questions than the real people there … which was a challenge.

  4. Decorating the apartment, painting, sanding, making messes.

  “And lots lots more, Gil,” Emma hounded. “But alas, your limitless ambition, your greed for power, for fame, takes you away to work all day long. You shall not be forgiven easily.”

  And so, there I was, in the thick of it, feeling at last that I was part of a theater and not a lackey consigned to the most menial chores (not that I stopped doing those either). I met all the actors and administrators and the one mainstay, my one support, rock, pillar, navigational aid, Joyce Jennings.

  Everyone’s best friend at the Venice Theater was Joyce Jennings, the secretary with the raspy voice. Joyce Jennings, in her day, had been a Broadway musical actress, a chorus girl, but that was when she was nineteen and it had been in shows with names like Follies of 1939, just as the Big Revue was going out of style and nobody seemed much in the mood for follies. Every theater has an ever-sympathetic, understanding mother figure, and also someone who has been around, and has SEEN IT ALL, and often an old-timer who is New York Theater and can evoke it in such a way that you never lose hope. The Venice Theater was lucky to have all these stock roles in one person: Joyce. The stereotype is the old stagehand who remembers Cohan, the crusty old night watchman or stage manager or custodian who is full of lore and history and warmth and good advice, but in my experience the old men who live their lives in the theater are cranks, embittered grouches who’ve lived hand-to-mouth for too long. It’s the women who remain who retain the magic and the faded charm and nostalgic sense of the Theater. They also know what’s going down.

  “You see that one?” she’d say, arching an eyebrow in the direction of the auditions manager. “Watch out for him. Boys, girls, everybody, anybody.” A slow drag on her cigarette. “Hands. In the hallway, in the dark. A mauler.”

  Joyce talked in what we called Joycespeak, a theater-gossip shorthand, abbreviated sentences we tried to imitate but never as successfully as Joyce doing Joyce. As administrative secretary, phone answerer, party organizer, all-purpose Competent Person, nothing much got around her, by her, near her without her knowing about it, and the directors of the theater themselves were careful to solicit her opinion. She had been in that one rundown theater for thirty-some years, and even though they could have fired her, there was some strange sense she projected of being able to survive everyone there, to be left still standing.

  Thanks to endless mornings of cigarettes (the only time I took up smoking) and coffee at her desk, I now can present for Historians of the Theater, in all its glory, in all its resplendent stupidity …

  THE HISTORY OF THE VENICE THEATER

  by Gilbert Freeman

  (compiled from reports of Joyce and hearsay)

  The gilded, rococo-embellished kitsch that festoons the Beaux Arts fcade of the Venice Theater (including a Venetian lion above the carved-in-stone TEATRO VENEZIA, two seraphim, the comedy and tragedy masks) gives the Venice the appearance of a faded 1920s movie palace. It was, in reality, a faded 1920s movie palace. (Hence the cramped changing rooms, the flats and props filling the narrow hallways, the unversatile stage …)

  Back then, though, it was the Teatro Genovese, owned by an Italian not surprisingly from Genoa. In 1929, he made the bad decision (the first of many in the Venice) that movies were pasśe and theater was the future—this, right before the age of talkies. His new theater struggled with ethnic shows (Italian, Irish, Yiddish) before finally going bust in the mid-’30s, having to be sold to the owner’s worst enemy, a loan shark of more southern Italian ancestry, who spent lots of money sandblasting the Genovese into the Teatro Amalfitano. It stayed that way for two years being the home of burlesque girlie shows and vaudeville acts. The owner’s love of drink and gambling and womanizing with the showgirls bankrupted the place and soon it was sold to his worst enemy, who quickly changed the name to the Teatro Venezia (they kept using Italian names so they didn’t have to pay to sandblast away the TEATRO), hoping to confuse people that this might be the once-famous Venice Theater of some note and repute that had folded in the late ’30s). Such shows as What Do I Look Like, Chopped Liver? and They Do It Every Time and Your Wife or Mine? were not exactly hits but people drifted by to see them for want of anything else, I suppose. There was a major disaster, a musical called Garfield, about the unjustly forgotten president, etc., and people were laughing by the time President Garfield got shot, which wasn’t promising for a long run. Mrs. Garfield was played by Lucille Lamont, who somehow connived the theater into producing a revue, a one-woman show where she was the one woman.

  Lucille Lamont had one claim to fame, the only song she ever originated, “Come Back to My Arms,” and there’s a picture of Lucille, her ample, meaty arms outspread, her face glazed with a touched-up actress smile, in the Venice foyer. The revue was essentially Lucille singing everybody else’s songs, songs written so long ago you might be tempted to think she had something to do with them. She opened the show with “Come Back to My Arms,” and reprised it at the end of the show, and if there was an encore she would come out and do it again. The show was called Come Back to My Arms: An Evening with Lucille Lamont, the Queen of Broadway. The Queen of Broadway part was in fine print.

  Interest waned after a week or so in the Queen of Broadway, and Lucille, to save face, asked her very rich husband to underwrite her revue, which he did. Figuring they’d never have another chance to unload the Venice Theater, the current owners approached Lucille’s doting husband about buying the theater. He said yes—probably with Lucille’s prodding; she envisioned vehicle after vehicle for herself—and soon the Venice changed its name: The Lucille Lamont Theater. No one called it that, but the name stayed until she died and the husband lost his passion for the theater and it passed on to their son, Dick Lamont, who was in real estate and unloaded it, writing the property off as a tax loss.

  In 1961, the Venice/Lamont Theater was rented temporarily to a china/porcelain/dinnerware/tacky-yard-ornaments manufacturer who used the theater as his emporium.

  In 1962 the theater was sold to a guy who had lent the porcelain business a great deal of money, who in turn sold it to a company called Smash Entertainment, Inc. (the name tells you all you need to know). They mounted a number of inexpensive musical flops before moving on to three big expensive musical flops: Go-Go Beach, an attempt to transfer the magic of bikini-beach movies to the musical stage; World’s Fair! which tried to capitalize on the breathless anticipation New Yorkers shared for the upcoming 1964 World’s Fair; and finally, Cleo, a bebop version of Anthony and Cleopatra.

  Smash Entertainment, Inc., also had the notion of renaming the theater the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Memorial Theater, but a downtown theater had gotten there first and as it meant going to court, the Venice kept its name. Then it became a porn theater.

  Thinking Broadway liberality had yet to reach its peak, they decided to stage a poor man’s Oh, Calcutta! called The Summer of ’69 which ran from 1968 to 1970 with the same title. Wha
t started off as a risqúe “adult entertainment” became your basic cheap, sleazo, Theater District LIVE SEX show with old men in raincoats, etc. “Oh what a time,” Joyce recalled for those of us who couldn’t conceive of Joyce in this environment. “Trash. Misery. The drinking, the drugs. Those girls were so messed up. I’d say, ‘Sheila, Candy, get out of the business, give it up.’” A puff on her cigarette, a sigh. “Management told me they’d fire me if I tried to get any of the girls to leave.” It apparently never occurred to Joyce that she might herself want to leave. “Ah,” she’d say, wiping the issue aside, “you gotta be amoral in the theater if you want to survive in it. Immoral helps too, but definitely amoral.”

  Ownership of the theater then passed to the Schmeens and the porn stopped. After one tremendous bomb by a fairly well-known playwright, the Schmeens toyed with the idea that the Venice Theater was more valuable as a loss. And while they were investigating how to save on their taxes, their accountant ran across an option: public, grant-funded theater. So Schmeen, Sr., leased the place in 1971 to the New York Children’s Theater Consortium, a group firmly convinced that children’s theater was the future of New York Theater, and the gimmick—and you gotta hand it to ’em—actually worked for a while: a production of a nine-year-old, starring twelve-and thirteen-year-olds, directed by a sixteen-year-old, billed naturally as the Future of New York Theater, a showcase of new young talent, and everyone associated with this project was deadly serious about their CRAFT. The Times did a big spread on this novel idea but a little children’s theater goes a long way and soon the theater fell into endless seasonal repeats of Hansel and Gretel, Amahl and the Night Visitors, and The Three Bears. Then one of the Consortium got an idea, an idea of such genius and commercial magnitude that it is amazing that it could ever have occurred under the Venice’s roof: Why not give classes for up-and-coming child actors/directors/playwrights? In other words, Stage Mothers of Manhattan, actual theater experience for your theater brat right now … think of the ŕesuḿes. Think of the lines around the block, mothers and little darlings, think of the auditions, think of the checkbooks and the contributions and the money changing hands, all of it going to the New York Children’s Theater Consortium and none of it to Schmeen.