IBID: A Life
Page 15
7. “Reno giveth and Reno taketh away.” Jonathan Blashette to Andrew Bloor, 1 July, 1936AnB.
8. Jonathan encouraged his best friend to pursue other interests. In late 1938, Davison, inspired by the success of Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dorothea Brande’s Wake Up and Live, and Walter Pitkin’s Life Begins at Forty, decided to write his own self-help book. Jonathan agreed to assist him in finding a publisher, should it be an effort that he found worthy of publication. The end result was How to Pick Up Women and Keep Them…Until Morning. The manuscript was never published. The following selection gives ample evidence as to the reason.
Four Sure Fire Ways to Grab Her Attention
1. Compliment her on her hat. (No matter how much you dislike it.) Women like to be complimented on their millinery. Keep your comments simple and direct and do not offer an excessively detailed appraisal. To speak too knowledgeably about the hat’s appeal will have her mistaking you for Edward Everett Horton or one of his mincing ilk. She will invite you to afternoon tea but never to her bed.
2. Be topical. Show that you respect her interest in current events and public affairs by commenting casually on some news item that may have come to her attention. Do stay away from the following conversation killers: Hitler and Mussolini (unless you are to criticize them roundly and impugn their medieval stands on womanhood), electrophotography, coelacanths, or Kate Smith (because you will inevitably make some unkind comment about her size, and this may, in one of many ways, come back to haunt you.)
3. Touch her gently on the shoulder as you speak. Women like to be touched in conversation should the contact be friendly and chaste. It demonstrates that you are warm and winning. Do not venture beyond a light tap, and use such only for punctuation. Do not use the touch to fill a break in the conversation, for it will draw far too much attention to itself. Do not touch her repeatedly or she will think that you are palsied or battling delirium tremens. Do not brush her clothing with the hand, or she may think that she has clothed herself in a garment that is attended by lint. In her mind, your effort to remove this phantom bit of fabric fluff will demonstrate that you believe she is unable to keep herself clean and kempt in public. Finally, do not—I repeat DO NOT paw her or allow the fingers to move independently of one another. You will be mistaken for a masher, lothario, or Ed Wynn.
4. Ask her if she would like to join you for a cup of coffee. Add that you are on your way to have a cup of coffee yourself, so the invitation need only reflect a desire to continue a pleasant chat with no additional expectations incumbent. Should she agree to join you, do not under any circumstances offer to buy her anything beyond the java. Purchase of a doughnut for the young woman will indicate a level of interest that may discomfit her. A doughnut by its shape carries Freudian implications that will only serve to create an atmosphere of subliminal discomfort. The following cautionary tale should serve to warn you away from all thought of food in this initial encounter: A young man offered a beautiful young woman he had just met a cup of coffee, and once seated at the lunchroom counter, a doughnut as well. She accepted the offer. He placed the order for the doughnut while at the same time ordering for himself a frankfurter with mustard and relish. The man, at one point, found both the doughnut and the frankfurter in his possession, and, exercising a shameful lack of tact, proceeded to insert the processed meat log into the inviting hole of the doughnut with short rapid thrusts, its entry amply lubricated by the slippery mustard and relish paste. The woman, horrified, fled from the lunchroom, and was, in fact, never seen by the man again. The man did not realize his error until much later. By then it was too late to make amends.
9. However, there is little evidence that the two ever met. I could find no mention in Jonathan’s diary of his meeting with Lou Gehrig a week before the ballplayer’s poignant farewell address at Yankee stadium. But Davison does note in his own journal:
“Last night Jonathan said he spent a couple of hours at O’Grady’s tossing back brews with none other than Lou Gehrig. He said that Lou ended up asking his help with a speech that wasn’t quite there yet and was grateful that Jonathan had edited out quite a bit of the foam.”
In Jonathan’s papers I did find a yellowed scrap of paper, with the scribbled heading “L.G. Goodbye Speech, July 4, 1939.” A good thirty to forty percent of the text had been lined through. A section follows (with elision noted in brackets).
“I’m lucky. When the New York Giants, a team you would give your right arm to beat, and vice versa, sends you a gift, that’s something. When everybody down to the groundskeepers and those boys in white coats remember you with trophies, that’s something. [When the fellows in the press box pitch in to buy you a shiny new toaster, that’s something too. So is getting a three-speed blender from your shoeshine kid who doesn’t have two pennies to rub together on the best of days. And when that woman who sits in the bleachers and sounds like a crow gives you cookie jar shaped like a fat chicken, that’s something that will make a fellow sit up and say,‘Gee! A chicken cookie jar from the crow lady!’ And when the guy who lives over your stoop with the Homburg and the caterpillar brows leans out his window and yells, ‘Hey, Lou—take this egg poacher—and oh yes, this “Champion” Croquet set with weatherproof varnish, and this “Waldorf”’ Wardrobe Trunk with vulcanized fiber binding and built-in shoe pockets!’ that sure is something too. I’ll say it again.] I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”
10. Jonathan changed his mind about converting to Catholicism. Fate would treat Father McNulty none too kindly. Several years after his highly-publicized sanity hearing, the priest was defrocked for trying to exorcise an epileptic maid-of-all-work. I should note that Jonathan maintained a close friendship with McNulty in spite of all of his difficulties, and even as Jonathan began to take his first tentative steps toward a full embrace of secular humanism, which at this stage involved working the punch ladle during the refreshment portion of meetings of the Society for Ethical Culture.
It has also been alleged that Jonathan’s decision not to join the Catholic church can be traced, in part, to Adam Powers’s scathing anti-Catholic treatise Onehundred and seventy-eight Questions You Should Ask Yourself About the Catholic Church, which received an ringing endorsement by the Indiana Ku Klux Klan, although all of their copies were accidentally burned in the infamous Hoosier Book Bonfire of 1928.
Dismissing the publication publicly, Jonathan admitted privately to finding some merit to questions 3, 45, and 79. Only one copy of this notorious tract is known to exist, and it lives in the heavily restricted “Bad and Very Bad” vault at the Notre Dame University Library. I gained access only through heavy cajoling and the bribing of a particular sweet-toothed librarian with a dozen of my Grandmother Sally’s tasty miniature apple pies (called “teeny pies” in family parlance). I’ve noted those questions below:
#3 Why do only Catholics and never Protestants see the face of the Madonna in lumber knot holes and the bubbles of simmering cheese fondue?
#45 If the Catholic Church believes that in Heaven all men and women will walk in equality in the warmth of God’s beatific gaze, why does it bar female participation in the echelons of its terrestrial church above the station of nun or rectory maid?
#79 What’s with the funny Bishop hats? What’s that all about?
Adam Powers went on to write a number of other controversial pamphlets—offensive even for their time, and each was praised by extremist elements of the political and religious right. They include the following titles:
Dark Skin, Dark Heart
The Insatiability of the Oriental Woman, Fully Illustrated
Why the World Needs Bubonic Plague
Tchaikovsky was an Aesthete; Thirty Cautionary Tales of Famous Aesthetes, Fairies, and Limp Wristed Polly Pusillanimitors with Extensive Glossary & Foreword by YMCA Chaplain William “Parson O’ the Gridiron” Huggins, author of The Muscular Christian
11. “I am not dating. I am merely spending pleasan
t evenings with pleasant women whom I meet.” Jonathan Blashette to Andrew Bloor, 4 September1939, AnB.
12. Sharine had lived a hard and checkered life. According to descendants of Sharine Picotta whom I was successful in tracking down, and who would talk to me for a price—specifically tickets to see Tanya Tucker performing in Blaine, Missouri and several pieces of pristine Revere Wear—Ms. Picotta was not a prostitute in the technical sense. Her handsomely remunerated services were strictly limited to the erotic art of adult wet-nursing, and her clientele among the rich and famous was reputed to have included Wallace Beery, Clark Gable, and German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel.
The fact that Jonathan saw Sharine for only one week may indicate a lack of interest on his part in “lactal lovin’.” Jonathan’s Diary, 12 September 1939.
13. Me be tarsing through the crevettes with the Bim-Bom-Bee. I have no earthly idea what this phrase means. HD.
14. “I asked if he was Judge Crater.” Jonathan had every right to ask. The man behind the counter of the small fishing purveyor’s shack looked very much like the famously missing Judge Joe Crater. It is unlikely, though, that the lure salesman was, in fact, Crater, the 1930s judicatorial version of Jimmy Hoffa. Nor is it conceivable that his nonagenarian companion was the equally missing newspaperman Ambrose Bierce, although Jonathan inquired about his identity as well. According to Jonathan’s diary, the Crater-look-alike responded to Jonathan’s inquiry with a sarcastic, “And Amelia Earhart’s in the back doin’ the dishes, ain’t cha, Fly-girl?” From the rear of the house came a woman’s voice, sheared with attitude: “Yeah, gonna finish these pots and pans and then go kiss me some damned clouds!” Jonathan’s Diary, 12 October1939.
15. “I got the damned runs three days straight! Believe it or not!” Jonathan met Robert Ripley in the public men’s room of the New York Public Library.
16. “I put on the fez, and I get head-hives. I take off the fez and the head-hives disappear.” Davison was never again to wear a fez. One wonders why he felt the need to put one on in the first place.
17. She was trampled in the Wilmington nylon riot of 1940. Barbara Sadler, Nylon Riots: An Exhaustive History, Volume 3 (Chicago: Sartorial Press, 1953), 255-57. Hiram Diles’s wife Cassia recovered within a couple of weeks. Her sister Magda required surgery and two years of intensive psychological counseling.
18. “German pansies are on the war path.” Here, I think Davison means German panzers. Davison’s Diary, 1 November, 1939HD.
13
BEI MIR BIS DU PRETTY
1. “I have been thinking about Great Jane a lot lately.” Jonathan Blashette to Andrew Bloor, 13 November1939.
2. “You should go down and see her.” Andrew Bloor to Jonathan Blashette, 17 November1939, AnB.
3. “I have done one better: I have brought her back to New York.” Jonathan Blashette to Andrew Bloor, 24 November 1939. Although both Jonathan and Great Jane had understood that their restored relationship would be chiefly a platonic one—the reanimation of an old and dear friendship facilitated by close proximity and, in Great Jane’s case, a vast improvement in life style—the decision was not easily understood or accepted by Davison, who wrote in his diary:
“…Apparently the woman was living on the street. He won’t tell me the whole story. Eating out of garbage cans—that sort of thing. It was sad. But what does Jonny do? Leave her some money for food, for her to get her own place? Get her checked into some sanatorium or hospital somewhere? Nope. He brings her all the way up to New York and sets her up right in his house.
I just don’t get it. He’s opened his home to this sorry looking creature with an Arkansas delta accent so thick I can’t understand half of what she says (and that’s when she’s got the teeth in) and for what? So he can fret and fuss over her the rest of her life? Like he owes her something? What does he owe this woman? They didn’t make a go of things years ago and believe you me they aren’t going to make a go of it now with all those open sores and what have you. She’s a sick, beat-up old woman who’s probably going to funk him out every day she’s there. Which could be years, or hell, she could kick the ol’ bucket tomorrow, and send him right into Depression Valley thinking of what he might have done to save her.
That’s the thing with Jonny. He wants to save everybody he meets and with his dumb luck he loses more than his share. And I really can’t get through to him. So I just keep hands off.
And worry.”
4. “Could you pick up Great Jane after her appointment at Elizabeth Arden?” Undated note in JBP.
5. She seemed to bloom in Jonathan’s daily company. Glover, Three Legs, One Heart, 189.
6. Jonathan introduced the former prostitute to penicillin. Ibid., 191.
7. “Great Jane is back in my life. I am a happy man.” Jonathan Blashette to Andrew Bloor, 14 December 1939, AnB.
8. “I told that man, ‘you couldn’t get elected dog catcher in this town!’” Taped interview with Amory Gumbert, Ottawaugus Oral History Project. After winning election as dog catcher in Ottawaugus, the small upstate New York town where he had purchased a summer home a few months before, Jonathan learned to divide time between the corporate board room of Dandy-de-odor-o headquarters in Manhattan and the shady lanes of Ottawaugus, where he chased errant mongrels to the delight of locals who’d never seen a three-legged dog catcher before.
The job was not without its perks. Jonathan fell in love with a sassy, long-lashed Chihuahua, which also fell in love with him, and which he named Señor Smalls.
9. He came within a hair’s breadth of winning the big prize. In Davison’s defense, the winning “musical question” on the radio program For Pete’s Sake! I Know that Tune! was a riff selected from Mexican classical composer Carlos Chávez’s torturously named concert piece Xochipilli Macuilxochitl. Previously, Davison had impressed Jonathan and others in the audience with the breadth of his musical knowledge and his on-microphone aplomb. In his article on Davison, “Harlan Davison, A Man Who Means” written for the journal Entrepreneurial History (13 [1990], 25-42), Griswold Lanham writes:
“Davison, in an obvious pickle, could only respond with, ‘For Pete’s Sake! I know that tune! I just can’t pronounce it!’
‘Well then,’ the host rejoined, ‘can you spell it?’
‘What do you think I am—an Aztec? Jeez Louise!’
‘Well, that’s a shame,’ said the host, handing Davison a box of Oxydol detergent as his consolation prize. Had the Dandy-de-odor-o executive answered correctly, he would have gone home with a check for $75,000 and extensive bragging rights.”
Later that night Davison nursed his disappointment with four double bourbons and eventually decked the barkeep when the man ran out of beer nuts. Jonathan bailed his best friend out of jail and let him sleep it off on his sofa. “At least you found something you’re good at,” Jonathan said consolingly over breakfast the next morning, and raised Davison’s spirits by singing the song that had gotten him into the finals the night before. Davison soon joined in as did Great Jane who trilled away from her bubble bath down the hall while little Addicus Andrew merrily galloped to the beat upon the impromptu hobby horse of Jonathan’s three knees—the house rocking with the joyous lyrics:
Hollywood party
At Hollywood and Vine!
Motor on over.
Ain’t it too fine?
Roll up the sidewalk—
Break out the booze!
Trip it, don’t skip it—
It’s tomorrow’s news!
Starlets and bar-flits
And tinsel tycoons
Are swinging and singing
Those Hollywood tunes!
Hollywood Party!
Come join the throng.
Trip it, don’t zip it.
We’re all going strong!
Hollywood Party—
The thing to do.
Champagne service
Straight from the shoe.
We’re waiting,
We’re waiting,
We’re waiting
For you!
The world was beautiful again…for the moment.
10. “The Japanese have bombed Hawaii. We are at war.” Jonathan’s Diary, 7 December 1941.
11. Hunter was first in line. Another reason for Jonathan’s stepson Hunter’s eagerness to fight for the Allies in the European Theatre had its origins in his childhood. Hunter’s eighth-grade homeroom teacher, a Frau Brunhilda Röhm, was a cruel martinet who delighted in humiliating her students. She was also German. Proud of her heritage, she was known to administer harsh punishment to any student who wrote her name without the umlaut. A rebellious child, as we have already seen, Hunter refused to employ the umlaut on more than one occasion, and on more than one occasion was punished by being forced to wear brightly colored lederhosen at intramural wrestling matches. The mortification he endured fed his hatred of Miss Röhm and by extension of Germans in general.
And of wrestling.
Hunter would later lose his life on Utah Beach during the D-Day Normandy Invasion. “He was a brave kid,” Jonathan wrote in his diary a week later, “a pain in the ass, but a pain in the ass I’m really going to miss. God rest him.”
12. On the secretary’s left buttock cheek was a small tattoo of a little bald headed man peering over a fence. Cloris Kern, Kilroy Was There Too (Daingerfield, Texas: Brenda Books, 1984), 132.
13. It was one of Davison’s life goals to see the Andrew Sisters naked but for tasseled pasties and crotch patches. Reinhold, The Story of Dandy-de-odor-o, 245.