Tiffany Street

by Jerome Weidman

  “May I help you, sir?”

  “Yes, you may,” I said to the girl at the reception desk. “What is the noise I’ve been hearing ever since I got out of the elevator?”

  She cocked her head to one side. This caused her long, yellow, unfastened hair, parted in the middle, to sway all the way over. Like a couple of frayed hawsers whiplashing across the deck of a tug in response to a sudden thrust at the rudder from the wheelhouse. I realized all at once why this hair style was so popular. It had mystery.

  Until the girl moved her head she was just a body encased in yellow fringe through which she squinted myopically to see if the traffic light had changed. Then the hair swung aside, and you saw she had breasts, and you saw she was pretty, and you saw... Maybe at fifty-eight you shouldn’t, but you do.

  “Oh, that,” the girl said. “That’s the Coca-Cola man filling the Coke machine. Out back, behind that door.”

  She nodded again. Her hair swayed again. She reminded me of Hannah, swinging her head away from the Islington Crescent tea tray in 1942 to listen for the throb of the bombers coming in across Liverpool.

  “Why does filling a Coke machine cause that kind of sound?” I said.

  “Well, you see, sir,” the girl said, “they bring the cans up in cartons, and after they fill the machine they jump up and down on the empty cartons to crush them so they’ll take less room in the freight elevator going down. It’s only a few minutes, but while it lasts it does sound unpleasant.”

  Not if you had been introduced to the sound by Abe Lebenbaum in 1927.

  “It also sounds as though everybody is going to get their Coke ration today,” I said. “My name is Kramer. Benjamin Kramer. I have an eleven o’clock appointment with Mr. Mennen.”

  It was as though I had announced that this visit was not to be confused with my First Coming. She snapped up her phone, punched a button, and parted her hair to stare out at me. She did it the way I had always been led to believe Keats had stared at the printed page when he first looked into Chapman’s Homer.

  I was flattered but not fooled. I do not look like Lou Telegan. But neither am I a dead ringer for Lon Chaney. I look the way my experience as a trial lawyer has taught me it is advisable for a successful bank robber to look. A face that does not register on those tricky movie cameras that turn on overhead in the bank at the moment when the gun is pointed at the teller. The kind of face, if seen in a passing crowd, nobody will remember. So it was obvious that this pretty girl was staring at me with awe not because of what she was seeing but because of the man I had come to see.

  In forty years I have been in and out of enough offices to have encountered almost every degree of employee deference for executives. This was the first time I had ever encountered what looked like reverence. It occurred to me that perhaps I had made a mistake to base my opinion of TV solely on what I saw on my set.

  “Mrs. Hawtrey?” the yellow-haired beauty said into her phone. “This is Nell.”

  Miss Gwyn, no doubt.

  “It’s a visitor, Mrs. Hawtrey. He says he has an eleven o’clock appointment with Mr. Mennen. A Mr. Kramer? Benjamin Kramer?” She looked at me as though for confirmation. I nodded. “Yes, that’s right, Mrs. Hawtrey. Mr. Benjamin Kramer. He—” Pause. A look of perplexity. “Yes, of course, Mrs. Hawtrey.” She hung up slowly. “Mrs. Hawtrey is coming right out, sir.”

  She arrived so quickly that my mind jumped to what Sebastian Roon had said to me when he asked me to represent him with ABTV on the day we were having a drink in Will’s an hour after I had been mugged in front of Penn Station: “Jim Mennen says he wants this series desperately.”

  Except for the speed with which she had come out to fetch me, you would never have known from her face that Mrs. Hawtrey shared this desperation. It was the sort of face that seemed to belong between a bowler and a riding habit on the cover of the London Illustrated News. Those faces did not register desperation. Or even age. Mrs. Hawtrey could have been anywhere from thirty to fifty. If you have a thing for ice, you would have liked her.

  “Mr. Kramer,” she said, and then she astonished me. She put out her hand.

  Involuntarily, I took it, and I understood not only what Mrs. Hawtrey was doing at ABTV, but I was reasonably sure I could make a good guess about her salary. There are states in this country that pay their governors less. With the small gesture Mrs. Hawtrey had shifted some of the balance of power. She was not leading me into an executive’s office. She was conducting me into her drawing room.

  “Won’t you come this way, Mr. Kramer?”

  This way was the sort of passage through which Henry Vin used to move on his way to inspect a new bride. Paneled walls. Ormolu clocks. A wood-burning fireplace large enough to accommodate a putting green. Impressive English brass. The sort of furniture that both Hepplewhite and Chippendale would have been proud to claim but could no longer afford, including what were obviously several “signed” chairs. Bronze sconces that had once looked down on the signers of treaties that ended things like The War of the Spanish Succession. Tapestries that were bound to cause an international scandal when it was discovered that they had disappeared from the walls at Bayeux. Plum-colored carpeting as thick as a club sandwich. And not a sound.

  At the far end of this drawing room Mrs. Hawtrey stopped in front of a door through which Cecil B. DeMille could have, without crowding anybody, marched a Roman general and his entourage on the way to the Palatine for a Triumph. She tapped on the door.

  “Yes?” a man’s voice called.

  Mrs. Hawtrey opened the door.

  “Mr. Kramer,” she said.

  She dropped the three syllables into the semi-darkness beyond the threshold as though they were Christmas tree balls and she wasn’t sure whether she was dropping them into a bed of cotton or onto a marble delicatessen store counter.

  “Come in, Mr. Kramer,” the man’s voice said. I stepped in. Mrs. Hawtrey pulled the door shut behind me. At first I thought I had stepped into a movie theater. I blinked my eyes, and saw that in a way it was a movie theater. Several TV sets were built into the walls around the room. With my vision still impaired I counted six, but I saw the flickering of other screens in other parts of the room. Then I noticed that no sound came from all those flickering screens except one. At this moment somebody snapped a switch. The sound from that one screen died away. The pictures faded from all the other screens. And the room blazed up with enough electric light, all from fixtures concealed in the walls, to illuminate the Duchy of Luxembourg for a year.

  I could see at once that the scene into which Mrs. Hawtrey had so delicately thrust me had been staged by someone with a touch of originality.

  The room was big, of course. The presidents of corporations seem to function best in large quarters. So, at one time, did buffaloes. Bernard Baruch was never the president of anything, although he was confidential adviser to half a century’s worth of White House incumbents. Mr. Baruch functioned on a bench in Central Park.

  At the top of the big room was the conventional gridiron-sized desk. Just walking to it from the door would have qualified any boy scout of my day for the Hiking Merit Badge. But the man who had staged this scene had thought up something unusual. He had placed a simple straight-backed chair in front of the desk. Not behind the desk, where desk chairs usually sit, but in front of it. Way out in front of it. So that the desk was just a distant piece of furniture, far back in the enormous room. The chair faced the room.

  It was a pretty scruffy chair. The sort of chair on which, in movies about backstage life, stage doormen sit and study their dope sheets. Then, on both sides, in a V that fanned out from this modest throne, stretching and spreading all the way down the room to the far corners, the stage manager had arranged two long rows of very expensive executive-type chairs. They had plunging spring backs, and heavy leather headrests.

  The point was immediately obvious. The inferiors sat on thrones. The king sat on a stool. He stood up and came forward with hand outstretched, wear
ing a genial smile and about fifteen hundred dollars’ worth of Savile Row tailoring.

  “Mr. Kramer,” he said. “This is a great pleasure for me.”

  “Likewise,” I said.

  Why not? The locutions you learn at your mother’s knee never leave you. And on occasion can prove useful.

  “I’m Jim Mennen,” he said. “I’ve heard a great deal about you, Mr. Kramer. And not all of it from my legal staff. It’s good of you to come.”

  “I had to,” I said. “My client ordered me.” Mennen laughed. It was better than the smile. The smile had in it too many rows of beautifully capped teeth.

  “I don’t imagine you’re a man who takes orders from many people,” he said. “But I’m glad you took this one. Is this chair okay?”

  It was on his right, and it was one of the expensive executive jobs. In my own office I sit with no more elegance than Ira Bern once did. He was my first model. I have my secret loyalties. They help. “Of course,” I said.

  I sat down and stared at the two long lines of the V that stretched away from me and Mennen. There must have been a dozen men in that V, six on each side. Somehow they all looked alike. People who live the same way, and do the same things for long periods of time, take on the same protective coloration. The way married couples, if they’ve been together happily for many years, are frequently taken for brother and sister.

  What made all these men in Jim Mennen’s office look alike was not their physical appearance. Fat, skinny, tall, short. All the variations were present. But there were also two emotions in that room. Not visible to the untrained eye, perhaps. But Benny Kramer’s eye had been trained on Seventh Avenue in 1930. Those two emotions were rolling around in that room like a couple of loose cannonballs on the deck of the Bonhomme Richard in action against the Serapis. When they taught you history at Thomas Jefferson High, it stuck to your ribs. I could feel those cannonballs in that room.

  One, all those men hated being in that room. Two, they were all apprehensive about what was going to happen while they were in it.

  “These gentlemen on our left and right,” Jim Mermen said, “are members of my staff here at ABTV. It is not necessary for me to introduce them. Later you may want to meet a few members of my legal staff, Mr. Kramer, the men with whom you will be working. As for the others...”

  Mennen paused and looked down the two long lines of men, giving each glance more moments than it deserved. But the way he did it cleared away a small puzzle: why was it necessary to have a dozen executives in one room to discuss one TV show? From the way Mennen looked at the two long rows of men, I grasped that there would be no discussion. These men had been brought here the way heavy curtains are brought to the walls of a concert hall: to improve the acoustics.

  While Mennen looked at his mute audience, I looked at him. His head was long and well-shaped. In profile, however, the long, lean look took a beating as it descended from his scalp. It ended in a slightly but noticeably receding chin. I was willing to bet that before he reached fifty Mr. Mennen, who now seemed to be in his trim mid-forties, would be growing a neatly clipped, jutting Vandyke.

  “No,” Mennen said, bringing his glance back to me. “I don’t think it is necessary for me to introduce those others. I don’t want to waste your time, Mr. Kramer.”

  Ouch!

  I could almost hear thirty solar plexuses in that room wince from the impact. If someone ever decides to revive Murder, Inc., and he starts hunting for a president to succeed the late Abe Reles, I suddenly knew where he could find a dandy.

  “I’m sure Mr. Roon has told you about the project he and I discussed at lunch the other day,” Mennen said. He smiled. Worse this time. Only three rows of capped teeth surfaced. “Otherwise you would probably not have accepted his order to be here.”

  I smiled and shrugged. It was his scene. I felt no compulsion to supply any of the dialogue for him.

  “In any case,” said Mennen, “I feel it would help matters if I said a few words about the provenance of the project.”

  Thus he told me he was a college man. Origins was for the up-from-the-gutter tycoon. For the right-side-of-the-tracks mover and shaker, it was provenance all the way.

  “Mr. Kramer,” he said, “have you given any thought to the Bicentennial scheduled for Philadelphia in nineteen seventy-six to celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of the founding of our great republic?”

  It could have been a serious question. On the other hand, it could have been a casual probe intended to humiliate and thus soften up the man who has come to negotiate. “He who has once known Esther is free from destruction’s reach.” And he who has once known Shloymah Berel Schlisselberger is free from the amateurish efforts of James V. Mennen.

  “Frankly, no,” I said. “I remember the Sesquicentennial in nineteen twenty-six, when I was a boy, but aside from Tunney taking the heavyweight title away from Dempsey, I don’t recall what was accomplished.”

  “Nothing,” Mennen said. “Except that a lot of money was spent. Of course, in those days TV had not yet been invented so they lacked truly mass coverage, but even so, I think what went wrong was poor planning. I intend to correct that.”

  He paused and waited for me to ask how. For a moment I thought, Let him wait. Then I heard one of my most persistent correspondents: an inner voice. Come on, Benny, it said. Stop being a horse’s patoot. Seb could make a lot of money out of this. So I asked, “How?”

  “By providing the American public with a TV series called One Nation Indivisible,” Mennen said. “It will be an hour show, in prime time, and would run for a year before the Bicentennial opens. Then our reruns would be aired simultaneously with the Bicentennial.”

  “And the one man who will be the star of One Nation Indivisible,” I said, “that man will be Sebastian Roon.”

  Mennen smiled again. “I see Seb has briefed you thoroughly,” he said.

  Seb? He hadn’t told me he and Mennen were friends. Or perhaps Seb had not been aware that one lunch at The Huffing Hickey did the trick.

  “Except on one point,” I said.

  “What’s that, Mr. Kramer?”

  “It never occurred to me before,” I said. “But I can’t help wondering why you chose Roon for this assignment?”

  Mennen chuckled. Apparently he had at his command an inexhaustible arsenal of charming sounds.

  He paused and then he did something I have never seen before or since. With a slow turn of his head, and without uttering a word, Mennen managed to spray a stream of contempt on what I guessed surely added up to about $300,000 worth of TV executives on his left, and another stream of contempt on some $300,000 worth of TV executives on his right.

  “Yes,” he said, “my executives wondered the same thing. After all, they said, the series will tell the story of America during the past half-century. Roughly the years between the Sesquicentennial and the Bicentennial. It’s an American story. Why choose an Englishman to be at the center of it? You see, Mr. Kramer, it is because they ask questions of this nature that the gentlemen seated on your left and right are TV executives, but I, James Victor Mennen, am their president.”

  I have long ago learned to regret what I did next. I decided to strike a blow for TV executives.

  “But I asked the same question,” I said.

  Mennen gave me a bit of the chuckle mixed with a bit of the smile. Shloymah Berel Schlisselberger would not have wasted his time with such an obvious ploy.

  “Yes, Mr. Kramer,” he said. “But you are merely a lawyer.”

  That’s what does you in. The merelys of life. All at once I saw myself as James V. Mennen saw me. An easily replaceable artisan. A working stiff needed for laying the bricks and hammering into place the beams that support the towers in which the movers and shakers dream their dreams.

  “A lawyer representing Sebastian Roon,” I said. “I think it makes a difference.”

  I hoped he would not ask why. I didn’t know the answer. Not yet.

  “I agree,” Menn
en said. “That’s why I asked you to meet me here in my office, instead of in the office of my legal staff downstairs. I don’t believe any man could be as close to Sebastian Roon for as many years as you have, Mr. Kramer, without getting to know the man’s special qualities.”

  I thought about Seb’s special qualities. Great charm. Unusual good looks. Lank hair, now gone snow-white. The kind of white that is called premature and is, of course, sexier than Tony Curtis’ jet-black curls. Especially if the owner allows it to grow a bit long and curl up over his collar in the back. Seb did. What else? Well, a shrewd and firm grasp of the actor’s role, and how to use it skillfully within the limited terrain available to the eyes of an audience. Also, a capacity to convey without overt statement his desire to share with the world at large his inner sense of bubbling mirth. And, oh yes that accent, of course.

  “That seems reasonable,” I said.

  “Thank you,” Mennen said. “I consider that a compliment. I am the most reasonable man I know, but there are some who think otherwise.”

  The two lines of executives stretching down from us at the top of the V received a dose of glancing venom from Mermen’s eyes. Caught for a moment between the left spray and the right, I noted that Mennen’s eyes looked like the eyes of a teddy bear. Big brown shiny shoe buttons with glistening black dots in the middle. Hardly menacing, I thought, until I realized they were not embedded in a brown furry face fixed in a permanent smile. Far from it.

  The color of Mermen’s face was what house painters call off-white or oyster-white. The skin was not quite smooth, as though it had been delicately scarred by boyhood acne. Mennen looked as though his head had been encased in the material used to cover those cheap cigarette boxes that are sold in the furniture sections of low-price department stores: flock white plastic.

  “My reason tells me,” Mennen said, “that the eye of an outsider is sharper than the eye of an insider. Every year, when we start creeping up on the Fourth of July, the networks spend fortunes for TV spectaculars that tell the world all about the Revolutionary War and how it led to the Declaration of Independence. They get Gary Cooper, or whoever is still alive, to play John Adams, and then the ratings come in and what do they show? America has flopped again with the American TV audience. Does that stop them? Nothing, Mr. Kramer, stops the executives who run American TV. If you have the sort of intelligence that permits you to learn only one thing at a time, and you do learn one thing, you’re naturally not going to abandon it. Not at fifty thousand a year plus stock options. So next year they do it again. Not with Gary Cooper, of course, because he’s dead. This time they try let’s say Jane Fonda, because that’s a new angle, and she looks like Betsy Ross, and it costs the same six hundred thousand dollars of the stockholders’ money, and then the ratings come in, and guess what? Correct. Another bomb.”