The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  OPEN FOR BUSINESS

  Doris Hardware opens her whorehouse. It sits along with the other good-as-gold real estate in this Dumbarton neighborhood. Behind ivied walls and huge oaks and all the extra acreage Abe has padded the place with, it is more than a home away from home for the weary man in Washington. It is akin to Shangri-la, where cares are shed and dreams are worn instead. The women are very beautiful. They are also nice. From the day it opens until the day it closes, it flourishes. From day one, Doris knows her business.

  To keep himself busy, very busy, Abraham Masturbov continues to assemble major parcels of land. Bigger and bigger and more and more. He dreams on a larger scale than ever. He’s got a great deal to get off his mind. Not for him a mere apartment house or office building. Now he’s interested in what up north are being called “developments.” In New York there are Sunnysides and Morningsides and Forest Hills and Locust Valleys, even a Tuxedo Park, huge swaths of living quarters for those unable or unmotivated to build for themselves, which is almost everyone. Doris tries to point out to Abe that they are both pioneers in their own ways. He nods, but says nothing. He sees nothing heroic in anything either of them is doing.

  Developments should work in Washington, although no one but Abe sees the place as a growth area. Abe also sees more. How can the capital of what he believes will be the most important country in the world not become important itself? Doris, of course, is banking on her own growth industry.

  “Besides,” Abe says, “there’s going to be another war.”

  How can he tell so far in advance that there is going to be another war? Just when we’d managed to forget about the last one. “Anyone with half a brain can see there’s going to be a war. The rest of the world is crazy. Take a trip to Germany, or even to places like Belgium, where people are so poor and so brutalized that there has to be an explosion. I traveled and I saw. And I came back home to America and I could see America was too calm and placid and I just said to myself, It can’t last. People who don’t have so much get jealous. Like Japan. Listen to people who’ve been to Japan.”

  While she was busy making her house, Abe had traveled around the world. If his heart still was broken before he left, it certainly was when he came home.

  “It’s going to get really bad,” he tells Doris. He tells her about all the unemployment he saw wherever he went, “with armies of little hungry children living on the streets.”

  Doris is impressed when he talks this way. Maybe she should marry him. She peppers him with questions. He loves when she does this. Why won’t she marry him?

  “Jealous of what? Surely this is a new theory of warfare, Abe. More? We have more? No one here would believe that.”

  “Wars are always about jealousy. The parents and the neighbors get jealous someone else is better off. Only, the parents are all the countries of Europe—it doesn’t make any difference which side they’re on—and we’re the kids, still trying to please, still trying to find our way, still trying to stand up without falling down and instead tripping over gold in our streets. Compared to them we got gold in our streets. How can you not see a war is coming? Don’t you talk to your foreign ‘clients’? You really should, Doris.” Abe pays no heed to the hungry and the unemployed here. “Things like that pass soon enough in America. If you hold on long enough things get better. The stock market is falling apart? Now’s the time to buy!” He loses friends because they think he’s crazy. Good. The crazy man buys more of the land they’re happy to sell him.

  Although Abe already has more money than he’ll ever need, he is unhappy. How could he not be? Because of Doris, how could he not be? He’s mortified about the house for hookers. How could he not be? But he knows he and Doris are together forever. To live without her is not an option. So he buys more land. That’s what he always does to keep his mind off things. He’s rich? He’ll be even richer. It’s the same old recording. For a rich man there’s never enough. Ask any rich man and he’ll tell you it’s so. Ask any poor man, too. But that’s another history. This is the history of a very rich country that doesn’t know what to do with it. He, of all our cast of characters, knows this from an early age. He knows he doesn’t feel any better about Doris no matter how much land he buys. But he knows he musn’t stop. He actually is reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, unabridged, a little each night that Doris doesn’t come home. When it’s apparent she’s not going to come home at all, she is going to live in her house full-time, he reads many nights until the dawn, when he gets up and goes out to buy more land. He can’t stand her not sleeping beside him. It is the most yawning emptiness of his life, that empty space in their bed beside him.

  Ironically, the decade of the thirties is one of the biggest eras of growth for Washington’s Jewish fortunes. Jews have been living here since before the Civil War, and only land has been considered a good investment. But where Abe is now buying, it’s swampy. It’s buggy. It’s hot as hell. It’s too far from something else. Or what if you have to suddenly up and run? You couldn’t unload this land fast. Jews know about running and are always on the lookout for the next time they’ll have to leave in a hurry. They’re always on the lookout for newly fulminating forms of hatred. Dr. Abner Swartschild, a preeminent pediatrician, is turned down to head a new division at NITS for childhood illnesses. His mother, Sara-Elisabett Swartschild, quietly gives NITS a handsome donation for this new division and he’s still turned down. “It should not work this way,” Joab Swartschild, whose rich wife is one of those that goes back to before the Civil War, says to Abe. Abe listens and nods and says nothing. This has become his default position.

  He has also seen on his trip around the world what is brewing in Germany. Nothing surprises him anymore. Once again, how could it be otherwise, “if you had half a brain”? This becomes a favorite expression. He does not see many full-brained people. When Abe starts buying in Georgetown, a few smart Jews follow, including Joab. “You have to think ahead.” Abe always changes the subject. “There will be a machine to keep us cool. Best buy even the swampy land now which seems too hot to handle or by the time this machine comes the best empty land will long since be sold.” Indeed, Abe has already bought a lot of it.

  Jewish fortunes in cities are being made all over America. Gronsky, Todtmacher, Vergessen, Anstersh, the Gilders, even Bigger Below (a Lopp cousin of Ephra’s father who makes tennis racquets and all kinds of other sporting goods) are already on their way to greater wealth before the Depression ends. Many Jews did not lose money during the Depression because they did not do what the goyim did. “Don’t follow the goyim,” old Herman Masturbov had always advised. “Brokers and bankers on Wall Street won’t make us partners—then fuck ’em. We should get down on our knees and thank them,” Bigger is fond of saying. “Who wants to be a banker, such pisherdicka returns on your money?” Denver, Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Richmond, Baltimore, Detroit, Kansas City, The American People don’t have any idea how many Jews there are with so much money. Maury the Jew, for instance, left an estate of $100 million when he died sometime around 1890. No one saw him make it and no one saw him leave it. In fact, no one saw him period. When Commodore Vanderbilt died in 1877 he left $100 million, which was more than America’s Treasury held. When John D. Rockefeller dies in 1937, he dies America’s first billionaire. There is a Jewish billionaire by then too, more than one in fact, but only gentile money gets talked about in histories of American wealth.

  That somewhere there are also homosexual multimillionaires is still not widely known, even among other homosexuals, who don’t know each other yet, as a group. Yaddah’s principal benefactor, James Sterling, also the founder of the enormously successful Wall Street law firm Shearman & Sterling, dies an unrepentant homosexual who’s lived with his lover for some forty-plus years. Why, half the buildings and professorships at Yaddah are named Sterling. Yaddah should only know this, like they don’t know Elisha Yaddah himself was one too. Who were the wealthy homosexuals? We don’t know for certain even
now. No one’s doing the research yet. Why is it so hard for homosexuals to learn about themselves? Clarence Meekly Dridge left a billion dollars to the Dridge Trust “to find out who we are and where we came from and the names of others like us.” What happened to that money?

  Southern Jews are quieter and amass their riches with closed mouths. They bury their treasure. No gentile banks for them. That’s no place to keep a secret. This is a European trait. European fortunes are not open to the public. Only New Yorkers feel the commandment to be visible. A New York Christian, like a New York Jew, wants everyone to know it when he’s rich. The bigger the wealth, the bigger the house. Washington is a southern town. When you rise in wealth you do it quietly. Except for Herman. Except for Abe. What’s it gotten either one of them? Abe really wants just to live in a tiny apartment in a development with Doris and raise a family.

  Abe buys a huge amount of land in a place called Franeeda County. Hardly anyone lives there. He quietly starts building this first development. He is actually going to call it Masturbov Gardens. When it’s finished it will have three hundred “garden apartments,” a phenomenal number. His competitors make fun of him: Who will want to live so far from downtown? But increasingly, housing in Washington is becoming more difficult to find. It must be all those prescient people getting out of Europe. Masturbov Gardens will fill up quickly.

  HOORAY FOR HOLLYWOOD

  Oliver Wendell “Binky” Krank, a young lawyer fresh out of NYU, arrives in Hollywood in 1934, about the same time sound is getting perfected. He succeeds immediately with his first self-financed movie, The Accordion Man. So as to be beholden to no one he determines to finance all his movies with his own money. He is still some twenty years from meeting and marrying Dr. Monserrat Schnee, who will be important to our history. By then he will be one of the most respected film lawyers in the world, as well as an adviser to presidents. Right now he’s just a funny-looking, rather short but well-dressed young man searching for a life. Where did he get the money to make The Accordion Man? He represented Clarence Meekly and set up that gigantic Dridge Trust.

  Also in Hollywood in the thirties are Peter Ruester, Manny Moose, and Buster Punic, who meet and form a three-caballeros-type friendship that will actually endure through time. They go to whorehouses, they pass themselves around to both rich men and rich women for money, they have sex with each other. Caballeros do devil-may-care kinds of things. You come to Hollywood from the sticks where you don’t do things like that, and the minute you see other young guys your own age doing them, why you do them too. Buster is rich and Peter is poor and Manny is in between. They are all young studs in Hollywood, and California, if not the rest of America, is filled with hope and promise, and thus much devil-may-care. Where anyone comes from is unimportant. No one has a real past, only one for today. Most good friends don’t remember where they first met each other. It was at…? As the gay Cole Porter, who was there for much of it, writes, “Anything goes!”

  Anne Edwards, the indispensable historian of much of this era and its “celebrities,” including Peter Ruester, writes openly what others fear to utter. She says this, for instance, about Katharine Hepburn: “She told me, ‘I don’t care what you write as long as it’s not the truth.’ She was a woman who fictionalized her life to the public. She romanticized and fictionalized her relationship with Spencer Tracy, a bisexual, abusive alcoholic … She was not honest about her life. She lived a bisexual life most of her life. She and Spencer were great beards for each other throughout their lives.” Gary Cooper and Randolph Scott are living openly as lovers. Clark Gable’s face was all over the map. Erroll Flynn would fuck anything that moved. If you think stuff like this is unimportant, you’re wrong. As the great “walker” of First Women, Foppy Schwartz, will be fond of proclaiming, “Gossip is Life!”

  Peter Ruester is noticed naked in somebody or other’s pool or bed and is screen-tested and wins a contract with the Brothers Krakow Film Studio. His test is directed by Fenton Borriss, an extraordinarily talented and exceptionally ugly man. He wants Peter Ruester in his bed and in his arms and he gets him into both. He tells him to his face that he wishes he were a better actor, “but stick with it, kid, you may just bluff it through.” Borriss also gets Spencer Tracy in his arms and his bed on a number of occasions over a number of years. He even gets Spencer and Peter in for a threesome, but only once. Anything goes, indeed. Ambitious young actors will do anything for a good part, a good script, a good director. That’s why there’s no such thing, really, as a heterosexual actor. As Hollywood makes us what we are today, whichever “today” you’re living through, we shall have occasion to revist its denizens as a matter of history. When an actor becomes president of the United States, do we have any other choice?

  ME, GERMAN?

  Between the two world wars hordes of doctors fleeing Germany and Europe flock to America like the endangered lemmings they are, seeking a safer harbor. Because most of them are Jewish they are not welcomed in America with particular warmth. Welcomed only marginally more are the non-Jewish Germans who don’t like the smell/sound of things in the Homeland either. No sooner does each group land than each tries to protect itself from the other. Associations of German physicians spread the word that the newly arrived Jews are just as bent on poisoning the blood of gentiles in the New World as in the Old. Do they not mix their own blood with that of their patients while they are under the knife? Do they not fuck all their non-Jewish patients? The Association of Doctors from the Homeland, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, sees to it that 260 Jewish doctors, or some 35 percent of the state’s entire medical establishment, are removed from membership. The Moses and Abraham Association of Doctors in Chicago is no less energetic in whispering that German doctors were butchers there and are butchers here.

  From the moment of their arrival neither group considers itself German. The closer we come to war, the less German it is copacetic to appear. Everyone becomes American pronto. Teachers of elocution are in widespread demand. Out-of-work actors find a great deal of employment as English teachers. German is not an easy accent to unload. Women console themselves that they are sounding like Dietrich or Garbo.

  Given half a chance, will more people start hating more people the minute they have the freedom to do so? Will this eugenics thing actually accomplish this?

  HERMIA NOODLING

  “The man who stood at the apex of the German Reich on 30 January 1933 believed himself chosen by providence to be the redeemer of the Germans, indeed of the whole Germanic race,” writes Heinrich August Winkler in Germany: The Long Road West.

  … the Fuhrer intended his National Socialist movement to be … a worldly ecclesia militans, outside of which there could be no salvation, a totalitarian political religion. [His was] a regime in which political life was defined in terms of a struggle of friend against enmity; that violently repressed any manifestation of opposition and intimidated all dissidence by means of an omnipresent secret police; that eliminated every kind of separation of powers for the sake of a one-party monopoly; and that fostered through ideology, propaganda, and terror the acclamatory mass approval it needed to legitimize its dominance, both domestically and abroad.

  It should be obvious, it must be obvious, but it was not obvious, that there is no room in such a movement, in such a country, in such a totalitarian regime, for the homosexual. Is this the true modern beginning of the elimination of your people, Frederick? Though this word itself is not visible on the surface of this radical new philosophy, of everything that Hitler and his minions are now saying out loud and propagandizing so furiously everywhere they can (they are not subtle about any of this by any means), it is implicitly embedded in the total rejection of anything that does not comply with what they are now identifying as the norm. It is almost incomprehensible that from the very beginning of this man’s rise to power this is not seen by those who do not represent this norm, or fit into it, or want to be a part of it, or by most Jews. This blindness will abet the horrors that are short
ly to arrive. It is the classic case of no one listening to what is actually being said, and out loud. It is the classic case of total denial by those who do not want to hear what they do not want to hear. Most people have an unquenchable penchant for sleepwalking through history, despite all that has preceded them. Sir Geoffrey Wrench almost called off our wedding over my growing outspokenness about this. “Hermia, you will get us both murdered in cold blood.”

  I shudder to place on the table the realization that I do not remember where I was or what I was, or more important, was not, thinking when all of this was accruing to the history of evil in this world, which is to be my chosen field. Yes, this is the field that I was already “noodling” around. Noodling! Even now I attempt to lighten my load of responsibility, lest I take myself too seriously. England was full of Jews and homosexuals. Many were friends. Evidently they absorbed the coming of the furies silently; they certainly did not share them with their gentile countrymen, no doubt because we were and always have been such an openly anti-Semitic and, less so, anti-homosexual nation. I was just finishing Cambridge, I was a madcap intellectual running around drinking champagne with young Communists who were then the most romantic of young men to dash around with, and if you could find one for your very own, why, that was the king’s knickers. God knows how I wound up with Geoffrey, who can be such a bore. (But then almost every Englishman I have ever known can be a bore.) There were now so many riots beginning to occur everywhere in Europe and in the UK that I moved to the States. Sir Geoffrey got himself attached to our Foreign Office somehow and stayed home. There my new husband became a spy. At least that’s what he told me.