The Heart of the World

by Nik Cohn

  ‘Never has,’ Malvina sighed.

  ‘Nor never will.’

  His Broadway ramblings went back to early childhood. Maurice Roffman, his father, Distinguished Orchestra Leader and Composer, had used to lead the house band at the Elysee Hotel and walk his heir down the Great White Way between sets. Dick himself became a Vitagraph child-star, appeared in a couple of Our Gang comedies, then turned boy reporter with the New York Journal-American. He interviewed Dutch Schultz and Meyer Lansky, was a stringer for Walter Winchell, did PR for Sherman Billingsley’s Stork Club, and hosted his own radio show, Real Stories from Real Life. At last he found his vocation: ‘To be the catalyst.’

  It wasn’t much of a living. He did not charge fixed fees, was leery of legal matters. Sometimes he got paid in dollars, more often in promises. One journalist described him accepting a pair of secondhand gloves in return for a TV spot. But that didn’t mean that his clients did not value him. On the contrary, they believed him a true saint. Every year there was a Richard H. Roffman Birthday Tribute, staged by the Friends of Richard H. Roffman. Led by Dr Murray C. Kaye, Civic leader and retail beauty-world industrialist – owner of Murray Kaye Way Beauty Salon, all of his protégés would come together in the banquet room of some off-Broadway restaurant, or in Roffman’s basement TV studio beneath an automotive-parts distributor on West Fifty-ninth, and one by one, the genie of the accordion and the singing psychic, the podiatrist-humorist and the seashell sculptor and the society troubadour, the songthrush who needs no introduction, the nine-foot Jewish giant, the holistic health guru, and the cookie wholesaler, they’d sing and dance, tell jokes and recite poetry, do impressions.

  When the entertainment was done, there were speeches, and these speeches always said the same thing: ‘Richard H. Roffman made me what I am today. He made my dreams come true.’

  The thought made him flush with remembered pleasure. His eyes were watery; his white flesh mottled with pink. ‘For such good friends I thank God,’ Roffman said. ‘Noted Supreme Being.’

  He was almost the last press agent. In a few years more, the trade would be extinct, another Broadway gone. For as long as there’d been a Times Square, flacks had been its town criers. In a real sense, the place was their invention. It was they, in cahoots with the tabloid columnists, who had first enshrined it as the Big Drag, the Crossroads of the World: ‘A flaming witch who rides high on the wings of promise and brushes blinding siroccos into the eyes of those who would put faith in her.’

  Press agentry was always a cottage industry, underpaid and short on plumbing. But it had had its own seedy glamour. In the fifties, it had even spawned Tub-Thumpers Row, a cluster of office apartments on West Forty-eighth. Its center, Eddie Jaffe’s bedroom above Duffy’s Tavern, was then a Broadway landmark. Marlon Brando slept on its floor; Rocky Graziano put his fist through its steel-plated door. And there Margie Ward, Famed Burlesque Queen, announced she was going legit, to star as Clytemnestra: ‘I’m the wife of King Agamemnon,’ she explained. ‘He owes me twenty grand.’

  In that halcyon day, Cosmopolitan claimed that more than five hundred flacks worked Times Square alone. Now Richard H. Roffman and Dick Falk were left: ‘It’s sad,’ Falk said, ‘but not very sad.’

  He was seventy-eight, a dashing figure with a white goatee and white yachting cap, a white handlebar moustache. His cubbyhole office overlooked the corner of Broadway and Forty-second, the Crossroads of the World itself: ‘A grandstand seat,’ he said. ‘From my window, I can watch a mugging every fifteen minutes, buy one, get another for free, as they say on the TV, and never have to move a muscle. It helps keep me young.’

  He was Roffman’s polar opposite. Where the Pied Piper walked on gilded splinters, Falk strode with cleated hooves. His stride was voracious, his eye lubricious, and his voice a drill sergeant’s blast. ‘The history of Times Square?’ he bellowed, brazen-tongued as any Barnum. ‘It started out a stinkpot, then it went downhill.’

  He could not speak of the Golden Era, so called; that was before his time. But from the twenties on, the Big Drag had always been what it was right now – a carnival midway, a landlocked Coney Island. ‘People talk so much folderol,’ he said. ‘Gilded this, golden that. Believe me, the only gold worth a damn here was always cash in hand.’

  From decade to decade, the trappings might evolve, the dialogue and the sound effects. But the basic plot was set in stone. ‘Guys come here to get laid, gals come here to get paid,’ Falk said.

  A look of false alarm froze his eye. Tugging sheepishly at the upturned ends of his white moustache, he dropped his voice to a medium bark. ‘Is that a sexist remark?’ he asked. ‘It’s true, so it probably is.’ Then contrition passed, he brightened. ‘Serves me right,’ he said. ‘Flacks and truth don’t mix.’

  Self-deprecation ran through him like a trademark, the name in a stick of rock. Underneath his yachting cap, he was smooth-pated, as glabrous as Richard H. Roffman. But that was the price of admission: ‘All press agents are bald. They have to be.’ He sighed heavily. ‘Their hair gets burned off by the lies.’

  Falk, who came from Newark, New Jersey, had inherited a fortune in railroad stock and blown it by age twenty-one; had tried and failed to become a Hollywood actor; tried and failed in business; tried and failed to eat: ‘So I’m thirty years old, I’m living in the Washington-Jefferson Hotel on Eighth, nine dollars a week, I can’t even pay that, and I’m eating oatmeal at the Automat, you got a free roll before nine in the morning. So I’m sick, my stomach is killing me, I can’t get out of bed most days. So I think to myself, What’s left? What can a guy do that knows nothing, has no talent, no prospects, no hope and not a prayer?’ He waggled his fine eyebrows, stroked his snowy beard. ‘All answers on a postcard, please.’

  He’d worked fifteen years for the Shubert Organization, then struck out alone. Over the decades, his clientele had ranged from Jayne Mansfield to Norman Mailer, Barbra Streisand to Salvador Dali. Inspired by Dick Falk and ‘the pure, vertical, mystical, gothic love of cash,’ Dali had once deigned to design a series of Hallmark greeting cards. ‘But they didn’t sell,’ Falk confessed. ‘Neither did the Great Herman.’

  Herman – ‘the smartest, most versatile performer I ever handled, and the most perfect gentleman’ – had hit New York in the late fifties. Falk reserved a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria, summoned the world’s press. The hotel, warned to prepare for a Swiss acrobat who spoke not a word of English, sent up complimentary champagne and canapes, a German-Italian interpreter. Promptly at noon, a rented Daimler pulled up. Flashbulbs exploded all over the lobby. And out stepped the Great Herman, a flea: ‘But quite a big flea. And really a marvellous mixer.’

  This was the soul of flackery; the unsaleable in pursuit of the unavailable. If you found the chase puerile and tasteless, an insult to human intelligence, ‘you show fine common sense,’ Falk said, ‘and you got no business on Broadway.’

  His own Broadway had faded somewhere round 1970. Television was making the press agent obsolescent. New York, which had once supported nine major papers, was down to three and counting. And the clients, too, had changed: ‘Suddenly, they all wanted to play Hamlet. Even the Great Herman.’ Office rents skyrocketed, old colleagues kept dropping dead. In the square below, meanwhile, the Porn Age had come.

  In theory, Falk had no objections. ‘Trade is trade,’ he said. ‘A gal dancing topless on the bar, you stick a dollar down her panties and cop a feel, what’s wrong with that? If only Norman Mailer had been as honest.’ But the sex shows came with surplus baggage. ‘Pushers, pimps, and psychos. Sickies, skells,’ said Falk. ‘Dead flacks.’

  These days he worked shortened hours, did not ride the subway at dawn. But his crimson banner – Richard R. Falk Associates, Public Relations, 221-0043 – still bellied proudly from his second-floor window, and he was by no means inactive. Recently, a nobly white-bearded portrait of him in soulful profile had been circulating America’s colleges, announcing that he, Sigmund Freud, Distinguished Octoga
narian and Thinker, was available for lecture tours. But his greatest passion was flying.

  On his desk sat an outsized Quaker Oats box labeled AIR PLANE ASHES: ‘I offer a special service, the gift of eternal flight, I like to hope it’s unique,’ he said. For a modest fee, he would collect the ashes of crematees, pack them securely inside the Quaker Oats box and scatter them at sea while reciting the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. ‘Take the cash and carry, and let the credit cards go,’ he quoted, striking a tragedian’s pose. ‘Or something.’

  Sometimes, when the wind was from the north, he’d catch himself brooding on his own Quaker Oats. The thought did not oppress him for long. ‘A guy calls me up last week, he says he’s got cancer, he’s taking the count, and he wants me to handle his ashes. So fine. You do your bit, I’ll do mine, I say. Only it turns out, the guy’s terrified of flying. So what then?’ Falk mimed bafflement, consternation. ‘What could I tell the poor clown? I’ll take it slow,’ he roared. He banged his clenched fist on his desk, scaring dust and yesterday’s papers, the glossies of dead chorines. ‘Like hell I’ll take it slow,’ he said.

  It was six o’clock. Across the street was a sign for Delicate Touch, Topless Shines. For many years, it had been a Times Square staple. You climbed a long, darkened stairway to a corridor lined with shoeshine stands, polish tins and chamois rags, but no topless shinists. An old black man – ‘my name is my own’ – sat behind a wooden barrier and spelled out the deal: five dollars for a girl and a room for fifteen minutes, all extras negotiable. Or if you preferred, you could stay out front and have a girl shine your shoes. That had happened one time, the counterman said. But he did not recall what year.

  Now the old man had vanished, and the shoestands with him. In their place was a girl called Wesley, knocking stolidly at a locked and bolted door. She was seventeen, stark white with flaming red hair; she sought a man named Smiling George. ‘He said be here by six. Now it’s six,’ she said, ‘and he’s not here.’

  We walked out together on the Deuce. The shifts were changing, the old men going home, the young coming out for the night. Fresh crowds surrounded the three-card monte games. Cops in their prowl cars oozed by, but did not bother the monte men. What was the use? Cut off one and two reappeared. ‘I heard they cheat,’ Wesley said.

  She came from Concordia, Kansas; she had been in New York five days. ‘But I only ate the first three,’ she said, her face chalky white, her eyes red-rimmed and swimming. At Nedick’s, where I bought her a snack, she inhaled four hamburgers and four large orders of fries, four large Cokes, four ice-cream sundaes. ‘Four is my lucky number. Smiling George told me so,’ she said.

  She wore a green miniskirt with bubblegum-pink tights, a navy blue boy’s shirt. That was the reason she was called Wesley, her father had wanted a boy. But her red hair flowed gleaming on her shoulders; it smelled fresh of coconuts. She was an actress, or she was going to be, and actresses did not go sloppy in public. ‘They wash all the time, every day. They have to,’ Wesley said. Her gray eyes were painted purplish blue, shaped to slant like a Siamese cat’s. ‘In this business, your personal attractions are your bluechip stock, the one asset you never sell short,’ she said. ‘George told me that.’

  She’d only met him the night before. The way they found each other, it was so strange, it seemed like fate happening. Wesley had been standing on the corner of Broadway and Forty-fourth. It was getting dark, and she was starving hungry; she hadn’t slept in her bed for a week. To be honest, she felt lost. The only reason she’d come to New York, there was a boy she knew. His name was Martin; he was older.

  She’d met him at Easter, up in South Dakota, the Badlands National Park. She was touring with some girlfriends, they stopped at a picnic ground, and Martin had borrowed their salt. He was into acting, just like her, but he was way ahead of her. He already had a room in Long Island City, a steady job waiting tables. He took breathing lessons, he could tap dance and primal scream. He wore Obsession by Calvin Klein.

  The first time they made love, they were inside Martin’s Chevy Rambler, and he kept inching their bodies sideways, raising them up, till his left profile was caught in the rearview mirror. ‘He was just so dedicated,’ Wesley said. In the morning, she told him she was planning on coming to New York, the Big Apple. Which was kind of a lie in a way, the thought just jumped in her head. But Martin did not blink. Awesome, he said. Mi casa es su casa. So here she was. Only Martin had moved to Marblehead.

  ‘What’s that phrase? Something horny dilemma?’ Wesley asked. She couldn’t go crawling home, that wasn’t her way. ‘I was brought up to be a Marine,’ she said. But even Marines could get hungry, feel lost. She’d spent the last two nights in Penn Station, getting hustled from bench to bench; she still had a ten-dollar note tucked in her shoe, but that was her suicide fund. So what to do? ‘I started to cry,’ she said. ‘Well, not cry. Sort of sniffle.’ And Smiling George happened by.

  It was unreal. Just when she was fresh out of hope, she heard this man’s voice crying Jennifer! Jenny! Jenny Feffer! A white hand grasped her bare arm, and she smelled Obsession by Calvin Klein. But when she turned the man was old, maybe fifty, and looked close to tears. ‘You’re not my daughter,’ he said.

  He made it sound like her fault. People always did. Maybe it was her aura, maybe just her red hair. She’d had a friend in high school, Marianne Tibbs, who was kind of a mystic, and Marianne told her once that all redheads were fated to burn, consumed by their own flame. Elemental fire, they symbolized witchcraft, the forbidden unknown. ‘The siren’s song. Irresistible, yet deadly,’ Marianne had said. But Wesley did not feel like a witch. She felt like a miscalculation.

  ‘Somebody that should have been somebody else,’ she said. A boy or some nice girl, a lush tan blonde, a cool mysterious brunette. Anything but this carrot-topped white thing, all arms and legs and an ass as flat as Kansas, who was not this man’s daughter, never would be.

  At Broadway and Forty-fourth, the man kept walking round her in slow circles, inspecting her from every angle, checking and rechecking. ‘I can’t understand it,’ he said. He hadn’t been gone a moment. He had popped into La Primadora for one fat cigar, and when he came out, Jennifer had simply vanished, gone up in smoke. She was sixteen, just a child. If she fell among thieves, she wouldn’t have a prayer. ‘I am beside myself,’ the man said.

  Wesley looked in his face; it was the saddest face out. Every part of it drooped, the eyes, the ears and jowls, the long hook snout. It put her in mind of a beagle she found once. The beagle’s name was Trigger, and it had been abused. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘You’re not the blame,’ said the man.

  That was nice of him to say; but Wesley didn’t believe him. His look was full of hurt, a wordless accusation, and it made her feel so guilty, so rotten deep inside. ‘I’m sorry,’ she kept on saying. ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry.’ Still he stood and drooped; he would not disappear. ‘My only daughter,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Wesley, and surrendered. ‘Yes, I will, yes.’

  His office was a darkened room beyond Eighth Avenue, where Hell’s Kitchen used to be. The doorman wore a green cap trimmed with gold braid and, when he saw them coming, he clicked his heels, he winked. ‘How’s Smiling George?’ the doorman asked.

  ‘I am beside myself,’ said George.

  He was a movie producer. Though he was just George to his friends, his professional name was Federico Fellini. ‘That’s the game you have to play. In this business you’d better be Italian or some Jew, or you’re dead in the water,’ he explained. He shook his head, flapped his jowls. ‘It’s sick, but what can you do?’ he said. ‘This is a sick, sick world.’

  Posters of his old films covered the office walls. Wesley could not remember the exact names – they were all in a foreign language – but George said they had been megahits. ‘Blockbusters. Global monsters,’ he said. Still he was not satisfied. True artists never were. He had a new project in the works, guaranteed to tear the roo
f off the sucker. It was not a total package yet. It didn’t even have a title. But every detail was clear in his head. Plot, dialogue, publicity angle: ‘I even got the advertising slogan. You’ve Seen the Rest, Now Catch the Best,’ George said. Only the casting remained. ‘The lead actress,’ he said. ‘A movie like this, it could be Gone with the Wind or it could be Blood Sucking Freaks. It all depends on the star.’

  The way he explained it, the role required a unique gift. ‘A Hollywood actress couldn’t cut it. She’d be too jaded, too shopworn,’ said George. What he was looking for was freshness. ‘An incandescence,’ he said.

  The word was not familiar. Wesley was too shy to say so out loud, but George just seemed to sense it. ‘Incandescence,’ he explained, ‘an inner heat, banked fires, just waiting to ignite. A raw sensual flame like paint-stripper, all it takes is one stray match and every red-blooded male in America goes down with scorched eyeballs.’

  That kind of blaze did not lurk in every cattle call. Smiling George had been seeking it for months, make that years, without finding just the right face and figure. Sometimes he felt like giving up. Perhaps the vision he sought did not exist, perhaps it was just a mirage. ‘An impossible dream,’ he said. But he could not help himself. ‘It is my Holy Grail,’ he said. ‘The artist’s eternal quest for the divine.’

  As he talked, he paced his office floor, chain-smoking. Windows black with grime blocked out the light; there seemed no air to breathe. ‘Smoldering. Sizzling. Simmering. Seething,’ said George, his face growing longer and more doglike with each adjective. ‘Sexsational,’ he said. ‘Like you.’

  Wesley was sunk in an armchair, so deep and soft it felt like squatting in quicksand. Right above her was a hooded standard lamp. When George hit the switch, the glare blinded her. ‘Like you could be,’ he said. ‘If only you’d dare to try.’

  She was not naive. She watched TV like anyone else, so she knew about movie producers. They were not to be trusted. They took young girls’ hearts and threw them away like broken toys. But the light in her eyes paralyzed her. ‘Sexsational,’ George kept saying. She felt him moving somewhere above her, but she could not see. ‘Raw sensual flame,’ he said.