The Most Dangerous Gift

Forget the Red Ryder BB gun guaranteed to "put your eye out kid". The Christmas gifts you have to watch out for are the ones that leave your eyes wide open.

On the first day of this Christmas, the Darling Spouse Person gave to me a copy of Stork Club, Ralph Blumenthal's account of the club that defined New York nightlife from the 1930s to the '60s. Better yet, in the p. 19 photograph of the club's Cub Room, the tall, lanky guy in the back of the picture looks a lot like my dad.

I grew up listening to Dad's stories of working at "the Stork" in the late 1930s and early '40s--of Hemingway's brawls, of stocking Walter Winchell's apartment with booze, of owner Sherman Billingsley's "calesthenics" with Ethel Merman in "the Gym". Dad said he started at the club switchboard with Victor Mature. Gertrude Stein loved them both so much she asked them to try out for the role of the spear carrier in her (then) new play. Dad blew it off. He wanted to make his career in the club business. But the role propelled Mature to stardom. Well, it got him cast in a lot of bad movies, at any rate.

Over the years, the DSP heard these stories so often, he could recite them by rote. So he was delighted to find a comprehensive history of the Stork Club complete with a juicy bibliography and lots of first-person anecdotes.

There was just one problem. The stories in the book seemed to run at a tangent to the ones we knew from my dad. Walter and Ethel and Damon Runyon were there. George Raft acted the part of the tough guy gangster my dad said he was. But Victor Mature and Gertrude Stein were nowhere to be found.

The DSP was apologetic. I was suspicious. In the early 1990s, I'd successfully pitched a book proposal based on my dad's Korean War experiences only to be forced to withdraw it. It turned out my dad borrowed some of his favorite war stories from movies and newspaper reports. To this day, I thank my writing stars I found out before the contracts were cut.

I hit the web. The weakest link in the story was Gertrude Stein. Somehow she didn't seem the type to go ga-ga for a couple of big strapping guys. Face it, Alice B. Toklas they weren't.

I quickly discovered Gerty Gerty Stein so rarely visited the U.S. during the '30s and '40s, her lone book tour, begun in October 1934, made national headlines. But there was no way my dad could've connected with her at the Stork Club while she was on the 1934 tour. He was still toiling away in a Lackawanna, NY, high school until the spring of 1935. I've got the diploma, pictures and clippings to prove it. In addition, the only Gertrude Stein stage production around in the late 1930s/early 1940s was Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights, an avant-garde opera generally performed as a stage play. Hmmm, an opera so out there it can't be sung... Victor Mature was famous for doing anything for a laugh (witness Head), but my dad? I don't think so.

Plus, I couldn't find a whiff of a hint of a suggestion anywhere in Mature's Wikipedia entry, his IMDB bio or his major fan site of any connection to Gertrude Stein. Gertrude Lawrence, whose 1941 production of Lady in the Dark marked his Broadway debut (in pink leotards and a leopard loincloth, no less), yes. Gertrude Stein? Never.

Okay, so maybe my dad or I screwed up the name. Thirty years had passed from the time Dad worked in the Stork Club to the time he began telling me the stories, and there were grounds for confusion. After all, they were both Gertrudes, they were both short, and even though Gertrude Lawrence did frequent the Stork and adored a "big beautiful hunk of man", she was rumored to have enjoyed a lesbian adventure or two.

But as far as I can tell, Victor Mature was one Hollywood actor who never ever got anywhere near New York, much less the Stork Club, until after he was a star. He left his home in Louisville, KY, for California in 1935 and stayed there until he had several movies under his pelt--er, belt, including the infamous One Million B.C.

So how did he work his way into my dad's Stork Club stories--and why?

It couldn't have been to impress me. When I was growing up, I didn't know jack and cared even less about the celebrity names sprinkled through dad's stories. Gertrude Stein might as well have been Gertrude Lawrence for all I knew. The Broadway and movie stars he talked about were all old enough to be my grandparents. Many were already dead. He was my dad and, by definition marvelous, and it was kinda cool that he worked in a nightclub and knew people who used to be people. But that was it.

I don't think they served a professional purpose either. After the draft caught up with him in 1942, Dad went Army all the way. Affiliations, no matter how past tense, with a former bootlegger perennially in hot water with the unions weren't exactly the sort of thing to advance a career in military hospital administration.

Another weird thing is how much truth was mixed in with the blarney. Dad did work at the Stork. When I was growing up, the priest who got him the job--Father Vincent Donovan, brother of the founder of the C.I.A. (for somebody weaned on James Bond movies, The Avengers and Man from U.N.C.L.E. reruns, that defined cool)--visited us whenever he got the chance.

I can also verify Dad also rose to a fairly high position in the club hierarchy (though for obvious reasons I'm no longer certain he was the "celebrity manager" he claimed to be). As late as the 1980s, Dad's Rhode Island cousins still talked about the hand-tailored suits he bequeathed them when he left for boot camp. Billingsley paid well, but then as now, you had to be very close to the top of the food chain to afford a bespokee suit, much less a full wardrobe with custom-tailored shirts to match.

Maybe the tall tales had something to do with Dad's never-realised ambition to write. The brutal realities of his early life forced him to abandon his dreams of writing The Great American Novel long before he ever landed on the Stork's doorstep. But there was nothing to stop him from fictionalizing his own life, as pointless as the effort seems to me now.

With Dad and Mom both dead, I'll probably never know his reasons. But that won't stop me from turning over rocks and chasing down any promise of insight to support my guesses. It's what writers do.

Besides, in many ways, the quest is its own reward. It speaks directly to the development of myths and legends. For example, there's a lot of talk in connection with the hero stories of the ancient Greeks and the tales of King Arthur about the validity of oral tradition. Supposedly, culturally important stories can be accurately handed down from one generation to the next without benefit of pen, paper or pixels.

My and the SDP's experience with the details of my dad's stories (barring the whole Gertrude thing, of course) suggests they can. But what if the stories or the details are themselves nothing but fabrications? Suddenly we're in that very interesting place where history and fantasy collide.

Back in late 1930s New York with Tallulah Bankhead and Orson Welles ("of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin" not!), gangsters, spies and restaurateurs. Now if my plot hamsters can just figure out how to squeeze a dragon into the subway, I'm in business.

Cheers and grins,

Jean Marie