The Stork Club

by Iris Rainer Dart

  They also rented a piano that they squeezed into the living room so Shelly could sit and compose melodies for which Ruthie wrote special lyrics, the way she had in the summer. They took odd jobs. Ruthie worked for a private detective as a process server, Shelly waited tables at the International House of Pancakes. Ruthie was a receptionist at a beauty salon, Shelly worked at the Farmer's Market at the seafood counter, and at night they wrote. First they reworked their act, and when they had it down and were ready to try it out they went to hoot nights at clubs where the audience, who was expecting a guitar player or a band, frequently booed them off the stage.

  They put an ad in the trade papers saying they entertained at parties, and were hired to do a sweet sixteen where the birthday girl, who had taken Valium before the party and consumed spiked punch during the party, had to be rushed to the hospital right after their opening sketch. The same ad was responsible for their being hired to perform at the tenth wedding anniversary of Phil and Myrna Stutz, who called them and canceled on the morning of the party because they'd decided that instead of having a party they were going to get a divorce.

  Their agent was a guy they met at the Comedy Store who was known as Shotgun Schwartz. Shotgun believed that 10 percent of nothing was nothing so if you were breathing he agreed to represent you, figuring the more clients he had, the better his chances were of making a buck.

  The first time he sent them on an interview, they got an assignment to write an episode of a Saturday morning cartoon show about a musical dog, "Rudy the Poodle."

  "It ain't exactly a short story for the New Yorker," Shelly said as the two of them sat down to work on the first script, "but we'll take a shot." They thought of twelve more "Rudy the Poodle" ideas, and sold nine of them before the show was canceled.

  Every night no matter how hard a day they'd put in, they went to the Comedy Store and watched the comics try out new material. They would make notes, whisper ideas to each other, and when the show was over, they would ambush one of the comics at the door and beg him to listen to what they had.

  "Jerry," they would say. "Have you got a sec?" Leaning on the door of the guy's car so he couldn't get in. Or, "Joey, listen. We've got a whole hilarious run for you." And once they had the comic's interest piqued, they would break into their material, right there on the cold cement, lit only by a purplish streetlight. Sometimes the comic would even pay them cash on the spot. But the stand-up comic to whom they would always give credit for the success of their careers was Frankie Levy, who had no cash that night so he gave them an IOU.

  "Hey, kids, I don't have my wallet on me," Frankie said to them, "but I'm crazy about the supermarket run, and I'll pay you for it tomorrow night. Okay?"

  Okay! Frankie Levy had once been on the "Tonight Show."

  The very next night Frankie performed Ruthie and Shelly's supermarket routine and brought the house down with it. He was happy and very sweaty as he backed off the stage, both arms raised in triumph. For a few minutes he stood in the rear of the club shaking hands and taking the backslaps he knew he so richly deserved. Ruthie and Shelly elbowed their way through the crowd to get over to Frankie, waiting until the others around him had gone back to their seats to watch Eddie Shindler, who was up next.

  "Way to knock 'em dead, Frankie," Ruthie said, holding her arms out wide. With the success he'd had with their material, Frankie would surely want to give her a grateful hug. In fact she was so close to him she could feel the dampness coming off his still-nervous body, but he turned on his heel as if he hadn't even seen her and walked out of the building. There was a moment of realization and then Shelly said, "He's leaving for Australia tomorrow, I heard him telling Mitzi. The schmuck is ducking us for the money," and they rushed out the door to stop Frankie Levy, who by the time they got outside was already at the top of the parking-lot ramp.

  "Frankie," Shelly yelled, but Levy didn't turn around.

  "You owe us money," Ruthie yelled. But Levy was already in his black Cadillac and in an instant he screeched past them.

  "You thieving son of a bitch," Shelly yelled, running back down to the bottom of the ramp where Levy's car was stopped at the black-and-white wooden arm that had served as a momentary impediment to his escape. As Frankie was reaching out to get his change, in a move Shelly once saw in a James Bond movie he jumped on the trunk lid of Frankie Levy's car. Then as he stood there, not sure what to do next, Frankie Levy peeled out onto Sunset, and Shelly's moment of heroism was marred dramatically by the fact that he was thrown crashing onto the cement.

  At UCLA Emergency the wait is always interminable. Shelly sat in the big windowed room, bruised and aching and huddled close to Ruthie on the couch as they waited for his turn to be examined. It was past two in the morning and there were several other people waiting: a dark-haired heavyset man with a beard, who had his hand wrapped in a tourniquet; a woman who told Ruthie she'd brought her husband in hours ago with extreme chest pain, and he'd only been called in to see the doctor moments before; and a family who were sitting together staring up at a television watching an old Humphrey Bogart movie.

  "What happened to your hand?" the woman asked the bearded man.

  "I was trying to slice some meat for my wife on the electric slicer, and my hand was in the way," he said.

  "Just your way of trying to give her the finger?" Shelly asked. The man laughed.

  "How about you?" the woman asked Shelly.

  "You'd never believe it," Ruthie answered for him.

  Then, almost as a healing process, the two of them told the story of how they came to Los Angeles, and about working on "Rudy the Poodle," and how they spent their nights writing and selling jokes, and about Frankie Levy. Maybe it was the lateness of the hour or the absurdity of the situation that gave them a freedom and a relaxation and a punchiness, but the story was coming out so funny that soon all the assembled patients were laughing loudly. Ruthie and Shelly had never had a more receptive audience.

  In fact it was a rude interruption when a nurse opened the door to call the next patient.

  "Mr. Lee?"

  She was calling for the bearded man, who before he followed the nurse out managed, with his good hand, to pat Shelly on the back.

  "My name is Bill Lee," he said. "I'm a producer at NBC. I think I might have a job for the two of you on a prime-time show I'm doing for John Davidson. Give me a call tomorrow at NBC."

  On their first day of work they tried acting nonchalant, but it wasn't easy to fool anyone since they'd arrived an hour early. Their assignment, before they even laid eyes on John Davidson, was to write a dialogue between John and this week's guest, George Burns. "We need it by four o'clock," Bill Lee told them.

  "Great," they said, but when they closed the door of the little cubicle of an office they'd been assigned, upstairs from a sound studio at NBC, they stared at each other in terror.

  "What are we doing here?" Shelly asked. "Some of the best writers in the world have written for George Burns." George Burns had recently been a big hit in The Sunshine Boys. It was his first movie since Honolulu, a movie he'd made with Gracie Allen in 1939.

  "Let's not panic yet," Ruthie said. "You be George Burns, I'll be John Davidson, and we'll see what happens."

  Shelly picked up his black pen and held it in his hand cradled between his thumb and first two fingers, the way George Burns holds a cigar.

  "Okay, I'm George Burns."

  "That's good," Ruthie said. "It's a good start." She felt sick. They weren't ready for this. Couldn't they have started with someone less famous? Less funny? Shelly looked down at the pen, rolling it in his hand the way George Burns always did with the cigar when he was thinking.

  "John Davidson," Shelly said, sounding a little bit like George Burns. "You're a nice kid. Handsome kid, too. How old are you?"

  "I'm thirty-four," Ruthie answered, playing the part of John Davidson.

  "Thirty-four years?" Shelly asked, then with a twinkle in his eye, he added in his best George Burns, "I paus
e that long between pictures."

  "That's good." Ruthie laughed. "But let's not get overconfident, let's keep going." They improvised. They switched roles. They wrote things down, typed them up, tried them again, changed them and fixed them. Tore the whole thing up twice. It was almost four o'clock. At four o'clock on the dot they walked into Bill Lee's office to read it to him. He laughed. He laughed harder. He congratulated himself with a grin that meant, I'm a smart son of a bitch for hiring these two. And he was. Two seasons later they were the hottest writers in television.

  6

  THEIR NAMES on a project gave it "heat," made it a "go," a "green light," and soon they were writing and producing their own series, and garnering huge consulting fees to come in and doctor the shows of other writers. They had a certain style no one could equal, genuinely funny, with a touch of poignancy and humanity rare in television half-hour comedy, so everyone wanted their work. Fifteen years after the George Burns joke, their popularity was still happening. Their success had made them rich, enabled them to support all four of their aging parents, to travel during their time off and see the world.

  The only thing neither of them had was that elusive commodity so idealized by the very industry in which they were thriving, romantic love. Though at some point each of them had tried for it. Ruthie fell hard for Sammy Karp, a black-haired blue-eyed wild-minded stand-up comic who wanted to be an actor. She met him one hot summer L.A. night at the Improv, after his set, when she was standing at the bar with some other writers and Sammy came over to schmooze. When she congratulated him with a handshake for the good work he'd done, he kept holding on to her hand, looking meaningfully into her eyes. Then he said, "Ruth Zimmerman, I love your work. Let's do dinner."

  They did dinner at La Famiglia, dinner at Adriano's, dinner at Musso's. Somehow it was understood that Ruthie was the one with money and Sammy was struggling, so she always picked up the tab. When he made it, she told herself, he would pay for the dinners. It was also what she told Shelly when he asked. In the week of her birthday she thanked Shelly but passed on his offer to throw a small party for her. Sammy, she explained, was taking her dancing at the Starlight Room at the top of the Beverly Hilton.

  No man had ever taken her dancing. While a piano, bass, and drums played "Call Me Irresponsible," Ruthie and Sammy danced close with her arms around his neck and his arms around her waist the way she'd seen couples dance in high school when she'd stood by the punch bowl pretending not to be watching. She ached to have Sammy make love to her. And when he led her to the suite he'd reserved in her name she could barely wait until he unlocked the door to touch him, thanking heaven the champagne she'd just paid for was doing such a good job on her inhibitions.

  She was hungry for him, starving for him, and the things they did in bed made her embarrassed the next morning. When she woke up alone in what she saw by the light of day and sobriety was a very grand suite, she walked naked around the room trying to reconstruct in her mind what she'd said and done. Probably she'd been a complete fool. But then she looked in the mirror and saw the Post-it he'd left on her naked breast that said You're fabulous and I'll call you later and felt gorgeous and sexy for the first time in her life.

  That week Sammy called her at the office so often that she had to walk out of the casting sessions four different times to take his adoring phone calls. "How's it going, beautiful?" he would ask her, giving her the chance to babble on to him about the people who were reading for parts on the show. But it wasn't a coincidence that immediately after she told him that the part of the young leading man had been cast, his ardent interest in her seemed to end, because that was the night he didn't show up for their dinner date.

  "Giving new meaning to the term 'stand-up comic,' " Ruthie told Shelly while she looked out the window one more time for Sammy's car, and tried to make light of the rejection.

  Shelly had a wonderful romance with Les Winston, a beautiful, warm, gifted man in his fifties with white hair who always had a gorgeous tan. Les was a furniture designer whose teak outdoor furniture was sold all over the world. Piece by piece he'd rid Ruthie and Shelly's West Hollywood apartment of the tables, chairs, and sofa he called "early thrift shop," and replaced them. Ruthie loved Les's creativity and sense of humor, and their mutual admiration for Shelly sealed their friendship.

  The two men talked a few times about moving in together, and probably would have, but one day Shelly got a paralyzing call from Les's brother saying Les had died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage. It took Shelly two long painful years to recover from the loss.

  But the one who was the biggest heartbreaker of all was Davis. Lovely Davis Bergman. Ruthie met him one night at some show business party. One of those after-the-pilot celebrations at CBS studios on Radford. He was an entertainment lawyer. A partner in a well-known firm, Porter, Beck, and Bergman. He was Jewish, separated from his wife, they were filing for divorce, they'd never had children, and in the divorce settlement, he got the big house in Santa Monica. The perfect man.

  "What do you think?" a nervous Ruthie asked Shelly, who'd been standing in the corner at the party talking to Michael Elias, one of the producers of "Head of the Class," when she pulled him away.

  "I think he's great. From here," Shelly said.

  "Come meet him," Ruthie said. "He's funny. I can't believe he can be a lawyer and be funny too." She dragged Shelly by the hand to where Davis Bergman was standing and introduced them.

  "Shelly Milton, Davis Bergman."

  "I never trust a guy who has two last names," Davis said, shaking Shelly's hand. They all laughed. Ruthie felt flushed. Maybe it was because of the diet. The strict one she'd been on for six weeks, feeling cheated and deprived and miserable, but she'd lost seventeen pounds, and the healthy eating had made her skin look great too. So maybe this was God's way of rewarding her. Proving to her that good disciplined girls had the Davis Bergmans of the world beating a path to their doors, or at least talking to them at parties.

  Davis told Ruthie and Shelly funny stories about being a Hollywood lawyer, and when the party began to break up he looked disappointed, so Shelly—oh, how Ruthie loved him for this—suggested they all go for coffee at the Hamburger Hamlet on Sunset, and Davis agreed. Ruthie, who had come to the party in Shelly's car, rode nervously to the restaurant in Davis's Porsche, looking at Davis's hand as it shifted gears. Wanting to put her own hand on it, but being too afraid.

  "Comedy writers," Davis said in the restaurant, as if marveling at the good fortune that had brought these exotic people into his life. "I represent some screenwriters, but they're all very serious." The three of them talked and laughed for hours.

  Davis lived in Santa Monica, nearly all the way to the beach, and Ruthie didn't know if he would understand about her living with Shelly, so when they got out to the parking lot at the Hamlet she said, "Shelly can take me home," and Davis looked at her sweetly and said, "Great.'' As Shelly was about to pull his Mercedes out onto Sunset, Davis pulled his Porsche loudly up to their right, opened his window and gestured for Ruthie to open hers, then he shouted into Shelly's car above the din of his engine, "I've got tickets for a screening at the Directors' Guild tomorrow night. You want to come along?"

  "Sure," Ruthie said, hoping to sound nonchalant.

  "Pick you up?"

  "Meet you," Ruthie said hastily.

  "Eight o'clock," Davis said, and was gone.

  "He's dating you up," Shelly said in a teasing voice as he stepped on the gas. "Filling your dance card."

  "Shelleee," Ruthie squealed. "He is so adorable."

  "Please! I already hate the son of a bitch," Shelly said. "You'll fall in love and get married and I'll lose a roommate, then he won't want you to work anymore so I'll lose a partner too."

  He was teasing and she teased him back.

  "Shel, you know I'll never leave you. To begin with, you'll come over constantly for dinner, and for every holiday. After a while Davis will probably get so used to you, you'll probably come on vacat
ions with us. We'll be the Three Musketeers, I swear we will."

  The next morning she sent Shelly in to work alone and she went shopping at Eleanor Keeshan. She found a new sweater and some black pants to make her look nearly slim, and a royal-blue-and-black silk shirt that also went with the pants, so she'd be ready with something to wear on the next date, and while the saleslady called in her credit card number, Ruthie looked wistfully through racks of beautiful silk dresses and pants outfits, and at the Fernando Sanchez lingerie.

  Tonight her social life was about to experience a personal best. She was actually seeing the same man two nights in a row. Okay, so last night Shelly was with them, but it was still sort of a date. Maybe it was finally her turn to have something real. With someone who would appreciate her. If that was true, and they were to start dating, she would come into stores like this one and try on clothes for hours. Looking at each item and asking herself, Would he like this? What event do he and I have coming up that I have to dress for? Oh yes, dinner with his clients, and the lawyers' wives' luncheon.

  Davis, please, she thought, walking back to the counter to retrieve her package. When she passed the three-way mirror she caught sight of herself looking chunky despite the weight loss and vowed that for Davis she would starve off at least fifteen more pounds. When she arrived at the office and Shelly was out to lunch she sat down at her desk and did something she hadn't done in years. She made a list of possible bridesmaids.

  After the film they went to the Old World on Sunset. Ruthie ordered the vegetable soup, and Davis had an omelet. And just the way he reached over and put his spoon in her cup to get himself a taste was so intimate, it made her feel as if she could probably open up to this man. Davis was what she'd heard the girls she'd lived with in the dorms at Pitt refer to as "husband material.''