Walking Through Walls

by Philip Smith

  “Mom, this isn’t a cocktail party. Pop’s dead. Please.” She gave me one of her “Well, aren’t we spoiling the fun?” looks, which put me on notice to lighten up.

  Throughout the reception, I heard constant stories of how my father saved someone’s life through a remarkable healing. People stopped me, interrupted me, tugged at me to let me know how my father had cured them or a member of their family. It was gratifying to hear the sheer volume of stories about how he had helped so many, many people.

  My uncle Ron, who was married to my father’s sister, came up to me and said in his best Brooklyn mafioso voice, “Hey, what about paying back that fifteen hundred dollars I lent your father?” My father never, ever, ever borrowed a dime from anyone. At that point, I’d had enough. I walked away without saying anything and decided to go home. People asked to come back to the house with me and just sit “in his aura.” I needed time alone.

  The house was painfully quiet; a heavy stillness hung in the air. I tried to accept a death that I never thought possible. I started checking off all the areas of my life that my father would no longer be involved in. There wasn’t going to be much of my life left once I finished the list.

  I hit the power switch on his radio for some background noise as I continued to pack up his healing room. Not knowing the local stations, I left the dial exactly where my father had previously set it. Some sort of call-in show was in progress. After a couple of commercials, I heard the announcer say in a choked voice, “I have just received news that Lew Smith has died,” and she began to sob uncontrollably. She immediately cut to the show’s theme song, “Good Vibrations” by the Beach Boys, thereby indelibly associating that song in my mind with my father’s death. Eventually the announcer returned. “I apologize. It’s just that Lew meant so much to me and has done so much for me, especially when I was sick. I can’t believe it. If any of you have had an encounter with Lew, please call and share.”

  Speaking was Micki Dahne, Miami’s well-known psychic astrologer. Micki had brilliantly combined her psychic abilities with a bit of showbiz. She could entertain and foretell the future. Her headline-grabbing predictions were often published in the National Enquirer. During her weekly radio show she dispensed psychic advice for problems concerning love, health, and money. Despite the program’s regular half-hour format, this particular show was extended for an additional hour as the switchboard lit up with so many people calling to share the miracles my father had performed to save their lives. The stories were all testimonials to the extraordinary healings by my father—from getting this one off dialysis, and finding someone’s lost dog in Hialeah, to healing someone’s mother of pneumonia, saving a daughter from unnecessary surgery, curing heart failure, schizophrenia, testicular cancer, diabetes, allergies, and on and on and on. These calls served as the most wonderful and powerful memorial I could have ever imagined.

  For years after my father died, I tried to locate Micki Dahne, with no luck. She was not listed in the phone book, and as her public presence had died down, I assumed she had passed away. Fortunately, while I was writing this book, my mother came across a brief article in the Miami Herald about Micki in which they published her Web site address. I wrote Micki an e-mail explaining that I was Lew’s son and that I was looking for anecdotes about my father. Two days later she called and told me the following story:

  “About twenty-five years ago, some friends of mine called to tell me that their son was in the hospital with cancer. The doctors had given up all hope and expected him to die that evening. They had asked me to stay with them at the hospital. I remember that for some reason, the kid was having trouble voiding; they kept changing the catheter, thinking that was the problem. The doctors couldn’t understand what was going on and had just given up. Needless to say, the poor kid was in tremendous pain.

  “At some point, your father walked into the room. I had never met him before. He ran his hands over the boy’s body. He told everybody in the room that the kid was healed. The kid certainly didn’t look any better to me. Then your father took two strands of heavy white glass beads out of his pocket. He placed one around the kid’s neck and the other one around my neck. He said to me that I should go home and go to sleep, as there was nothing else I could do. Before I left, he told me that in the middle of the night these heavy glass beads would burst—they would explode after they absorbed all the disease. This would be a sign that the kid had been fully healed.

  “So what else was I going to do? The doctors said the kid was going to die that night anyway, so I went home. About three o’clock in the morning, I woke up terrified by a noise that sounded as if someone was shooting a machine gun in my bedroom. Then I looked down, and the white beads were exploding like popcorn around my neck. Minutes later the phone rang. It was the kid from the hospital. Just like your father said, his beads had exploded, and he had wet the bed. His systems had started working again.

  “The next day, the hospital released him. Two days later the kid was canoeing and having a great time. I’d never seen anything like this happen before, and, believe me, I’ve seen a lot. Your father had a gift that no one else had. Such a good soul, he gave so much to so many people. There was no one like him. By the way, he was an Aquarius, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was he buried?”

  “No, I cremated him.”

  “Oh, good. I’d hate to see an Aquarius mixed up with all that earth. It just doesn’t work.”

  “Well, those were his instructions.”

  “See, he knew what was the right thing.”

  Her comment made me smile. Only my father would have known someone like Micki, who knew the correct burial method for each astrological sign.

  Several weeks after Pop’s death, I was back in New York, having lunch at the Factory with Andy Warhol. Before we sat down, Andy wanted me to photograph him for an article I was doing on him. As I began to shoot, Andy started to sneeze. I put down my camera to wait until he finished. Andy called out in between sneezes, “Keep shooting, don’t stop!” This was one of the greatest art lessons I ever received: all reality is equal in interest and just as valid.

  While we waited for lunch, Andy and I chatted, as assistants brought in Marilyn and Cow prints for him to sign. Over the years that I had visited the Factory, Andy had heard about my father from various people, and he was always fascinated by the idea of a psychic decorator. Andy knew a lot of decorators, but none that could place furniture and heal appendicitis. He and his assistant, Ronnie Cutrone, would constantly crack jokes about my father that were hysterical.

  After he finished signing the prints, Andy turned to me and asked, “Uh, so what’s new?” I told him my father had recently died. There was a long moment of silence. I could tell that he was having trouble processing this information. He looked at me with a bit of surprise and in his cryptic but insightful way offered his condolences with, “Oh, but…but I thought he was magic.”

  And that he was.

  Epilogue

  “It was a mistake. Your father did not have to die.”

  Frank Andrews looked up from the tarot cards spread out in front of me. This man had never met me before. I hadn’t said a word since I sat down at his table, and he dealt the cards. It was 1991, the tenth anniversary of my father’s death.

  A friend had suggested that I visit Frank, a well-known psychic whose clients included John Lennon, Perry Ellis, and Princess Grace. Frank lived in a small Federal townhouse on Mulberry Street across from a church graveyard. His house was decorated with rare Biedermeier furniture, Tibetan skulls encrusted with rare gems, and a legion of small, yapping dogs.

  As Frank uttered these words, I felt a burning knife enter my body. I had always known that there was something unanswered about my father’s sudden death but had chosen to bury that idea as deep into my subconscious as possible. But now a total stranger had confirmed what I had always suspected. I did not need to hear any more details, but Frank continued without any prompting.r />
  “What happened was that your father got up from his nap and, while he was still slightly groggy, accidentally grabbed the wrong bottle. He took some of his girlfriend’s medication instead of his vitamins. The medication induced a heart attack. Because he didn’t know what was happening, he waited too long to call the paramedics. It took him by surprise. I also see that he had something to do with the spirit world. I’m getting that the spirits tried to contact him and help, but he was too confused to recognize their signals. The sad thing is that it was all a mistake. This should not have ever happened. He’d be alive today if he hadn’t taken those pills. But sometimes things happen for reasons we can’t understand, no matter how much we try. I can have you talk to your father. We would have to go upstairs, but you must never tell people what we did.”

  Something in the way Frank said this scared me. As much as I would have given anything to talk to my father, I imagined there would be blood sacrifices, animal sex, and horrible noises. I declined.

  Several years later, when I mentioned this offer to Frank’s sister, Terry Iacuzzo, also an extraordinarily gifted psychic, she said, “Oh, that must have been in the early nineties. At the time, Frank had all these weird spirits around him. He would go into trance, and suddenly jewels the size of eggs would materialize in his hands from thin air. All kinds of strange things were going on with him. There was a flock of spirits around him that temporarily gave him extraordinary powers. He would have definitely put you in touch with your father. I don’t know about now, though. Something happened between him and the spirits. It got too crazy, and they left for another dimension.”

  The reading with Frank had opened up a long-closed wound. For the past ten years, I had put my father in mental cold storage. It was too painful to think that he was no longer around. I had effectively put a wall around that part of my life and sealed it off with barbed wire and heavy cement. Despite this dead storage, I tried to carry on the best way I could.

  That evening, in an effort to distract myself from Frank’s revelation, I decided to see the new Charlie Chaplin film biography directed by Richard Attenborough. The timing seemed serendipitous. As a young man, my father had worked for Charlie Chaplin and Samuel Goldwyn. I thought that watching this film would serve as a nice remembrance of my father’s life.

  Only on a few occasions had he ever told me the story of his early days in Hollywood. Pop never liked to talk about the past. He made a real effort to live only in the present, given that he had lived through a lot of hard times—especially as a child in Poland, watching whole villages being burned because Jews lived there. As a result, it was rare when he brought up any of his memories. But the Chaplin story was the rare exception. He told me this story with great pleasure.

  When my father was just fifteen, he worked as an office boy for Samuel Goldwyn, who at the time went by his real name of Goldfish. Pop’s main job was to ceremoniously usher visitors into Mr. Goldfish’s office as well as cash the movie stars’ paychecks so they wouldn’t have to stand on line at the bank. Goldwyn loved my father, and when he left his job, Goldwyn told him that if he ever needed anything to just call him. Eventually, Goldwyn would move to Hollywood to found the Samuel Goldwyn Studio.

  When Pop turned twenty-one, he wanted a bit more adventure and hitched rides on the cross-country freight trains with the hobos to see how far he could travel on no money. I remember him telling me, “From time to time, the train would stop, and a conductor would come along and throw us off the train. We slept in the desert and made campfires. A lot of these guys were really scary. I jumped off the train in Los Angeles and started looking around for a place to stay. The police let me sleep in the jail for two days but then told me to move on. Somehow I found Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre. They were promoting the movie Ben-Hur and had placed these two huge chariots out in front of the theater. I was exhausted, so I crawled into one of the chariots and fell asleep.

  “One morning I decided to go see Douglas Fairbanks Sr. to ask for a job. I found his famous house. As I approached, he was just leaving to go to the studio. He asked if I’d like a ride into town.

  “Fairbanks was going to meet Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford at his studio. I asked Fairbanks if I could get a job there, and he told me to come over and talk to him at the studio. When I asked for the address, he said, ‘You found my house, find my studio.’ Fairbanks dropped me somewhere in town, and it took awhile for me to find my way to his studio. I told the guard I had an important package to deliver to Mr. Fairbanks. All I was carrying, besides my camera, was an empty box that I had found on the sidewalk. When I got there, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, and Douglas Fairbanks were out front talking. Fairbanks recognized me from that morning. Since I had my camera with me, I asked Chaplin if I could take his picture. He agreed and told me that this would be the first picture that he ever posed for outside his studio while in makeup. He was in the midst of shooting The Gold Rush. Then Chaplin asked if I would like to tour the sets for the movie. I knew right then that I wanted to be in the movie business.

  “After the tour I went to look for Mr. Goldwyn’s studio. I decided to see if he remembered me from New York and ask him for a job. When I found his office, I told the secretary that I wanted to see Mr. Goldwyn. She raised her eyebrows and gave me this look like, who the hell are you? I told her, ‘Tell him Lewie is here.’ You should have seen her face when Mr. Goldwyn said, ‘Send him in.’

  “Mr. Goldwyn greeted me warmly and asked what he could do for me. I told him that I wanted to make movies. He made a few calls, and by that afternoon I was on the set of The Gold Rush, and they were training me as an assistant cameraman. Eventually I did various things on the set, ran the camera, helped design and build sets. I worked on several Chaplin movies.”

  Hollywood was an exotic paradise compared to the bleak, hardscrabble streets of New York’s Lower East Side, where he had grown up at 64 Suffolk Street. His family lived in a one-room tenement with seven kids sleeping on the floor. There was a tub in the kitchen, and all they could afford for breakfast was a teaspoon of milk in a glass of hot water. Pop’s father was an electrician who helped Lewis Comfort Tiffany fabricate his famous lamps. Eventually the family moved to more comfortable quarters in Brooklyn.

  With friends like Goldwyn, Chaplin, and Fairbanks, his future in Hollywood seemed bright. Then, one day in the middle of a shoot, an urgent telegram arrived (just like in the movies): MOTHER DEATHLY ILL STOP COME QUICK STOP. Grabbing the next train back to New York, he said au revoir to Hollywood. So long glamour-pusses, boring Brooklyn here I come. Pop arrived back in Brooklyn to find his mother smiling and in perfect health. The telegram had been a motherly ruse to bring her son back home—she missed her little Lewie. Even with six other siblings, Pop was the favorite. If I’d had a choice in the matter (and many of the best gurus in India say that I did), I would have preferred being born the son of a Hollywood director rather than the son of a Miami decorator—though these days they are almost one and the same. Unfortunately, we all have our karma and our crosses to bear.

  Of all his stories about being in Hollywood, my favorite one was about the photograph he had taken of Chaplin, Pickford, and Fairbanks. On the few occasions that he mentioned this photograph, it was always with a great deal of pride about the uniqueness of the circumstances surrounding the taking of this picture. Watching the Chaplin movie reminded me of this mysterious photograph. Even though I had been through all of his papers when he died, I’d never found the picture. I began to wonder if that photograph ever really existed. Why hadn’t I ever found this precious memento?

  The next morning, I called my mother to see how she was settling into her new apartment. She had just moved that week. We talked about where she was going to put the sofa, how she loved the view, and that the cable guy hadn’t shown up yet. During our conversation she mentioned that the night before she was up very late, unpacking boxes of books.

  “Something strange happened last night. I was putting my books away
on the shelf, and all of a sudden one of my cookbooks fell off the shelf and landed open on the floor. When I went to pick it up, I noticed that there was a small brown photograph tucked into the spine. What do you call that? Oh, a sepia photograph. It’s just a tiny photograph, sort of wallet sized, all brown. I never saw this photograph before in my life. I have no idea who these people are, but there are three of them standing around talking.”

  “Maybe the people in the photograph are relatives of yours?”

  “No, I don’t recognize them. I don’t know how this photo got in one of my cookbooks.”

  “Maybe it was one of the books you bought at a yard sale. You should probably just throw the picture out.”

  “You’re right, I probably will. Oh, I forgot to tell you that on the back of the photo someone wrote in brown ink, ‘Charlie, Mary, and Douglas.’”

  I was stunned. “Mom, take a closer look at the picture. Tell me if you think that the man in the photograph is Charlie Chaplin.”

  “I can’t really tell, it’s so small. Let me put my glasses on.”

  “I think this must be the missing photograph that Pop always talked about. Please don’t throw it out. Last night I went to see that new movie about Charlie Chaplin. It made me wonder where this photograph was and why I had never seen it. Now suddenly it appears out of nowhere. You know, it’s ten years since Pop died.”

  “Ten years? Oh my God, that long?”

  “Wait a minute, how come you have this photograph? I didn’t think you had any of Pop’s stuff.”

  “Why would I have anything from your father? We divorced a long, long time ago. I must have bought this cookbook just a few years ago and never even used it. Even when we were married, I never saw this picture. I don’t know how it got here. This doesn’t make any sense. I’ll save it for you and give it to you next time you come down.”