[6/15/2011] Perelman Tonight: It started in Philadelphia -- Part 1 of "Westward Ha!" (continued)

S.J.P. by Hirschfeld
(from Listen to the Mockingbird)

"In no time at all -- five minutes, to be exact -- we were laughing and chatting away as though we had known each other five minutes."

-- Perelman, on his first meeting with Hirschfeld

Westward Ha!

"GOODBYE BROADAY, HELLO MAL-DE-MER"

Part 1

The whole sordid business began on a bleak November afternoon a couple of years ago in Philadelphia, a metropolis sometimes known as the City of Brotherly Love but more accurately as the City of Bleak November Afternoons. Actually, the whole business began sixteen years ago, as do so many complex ventures, with an unfavorable astrological conjunction, Virgo being in the house of Alcohol. Late one August day in 1932, I was seated at the Closerie des Lilas in Paris with my wife, a broth of a girl with a skin like damask and a waist you could span with an embroidery hoop. I had had three mild transfusions of a life-giving fluid called Chambéry Fraise and felt a reasonable degree of self-satisfaction. Halfway through my imitation of Rudolph Valentino in Blood and Sand, my wife wiped the tears of laughter from her eyes and arose.

"Look, Julian Eltinge," she smiled, naming an actor who had achieved some transitory fame for his powers of mimicry, "descendez de cette table, salop, et dinons (come down off that there table, sweetheart, and let us feed the inner man)."

Ever the thrall of a pair of saucy blue eyes, I good-naturedly complied and sprang down with a graceful bound, sustaining a trifling fracture of the spleen. There then ensued a long, absurd debate as to which of us would pay the tab. An innate sense of gallantry prevented me from taking money from a woman, but I stifled it and soon we were bowling along the Boulevard St. Michel in a fiacre. In less time than it takes to build a fourteen-room house, we had crossed the Seine, got lost in Passy, and arrived at a quaint Javanese restaurant in the Rue Pigalle. Lighting my cigarette with a hundred-franc note to show the maître d'hôtel I was a real Parisian boulevardier, I chose an inconspicuous table and ordered rijstaffel and a thimbleful of Holland gin for myself and a glass of water for my lady. Presently a young woman I knew, who reported the haute couture for several American magazines, approached, followed by a gentleman. My years in the Ochrana had so trained me to absorb vital details that I saw at once he had a beard.

"This is Hirschfeld," said the fashion writer, "the theatrical caricaturist of The New York Times.'' I instantly scented a touch and, furtively secreting my wallet in my wife's stocking, pretended to be stone-deaf. The young woman's tongue, ordinarily a quiet, reserved sort of chap, was wagging more than its usual wont.

"Hirschfeld wants to do a caricature of you," she said brightly.

"Je comprends pas," I shrugged, "me stony, you savvy? Plenty bankruptcy along me."

"It's free," explained Hirschfeld, who up to that time had been mute. My deafness vanished forthwith, and turning my good profile to him, I waited patiently whilst his pencil flew. In no time at all -- five minutes, to be exact -- we were laughing and chatting away as though we had known each other five minutes.

Hirschfeld left for the States that night, just before the check arrived, and I did not see him for a spell. One day in New York, I ran into him outside a little specialty shop in the Forties where I had just bought a black girdle with rose panels and a bias-cup brassière for my mother. We had a stoup of kumiss together and renewed our friendship. Whether he stole the cufflinks I missed subsequently, I would prefer not to say, but it seemed more than coincidence. Nevertheless, I am one who forgives easily, and it was hardly more than eleven years before I found myself one morning excitedly telephoning him.

"I've got an idea for a musical comedy, old man," I said directly (I rarely beat about the bush). "Meet me at the Lafayette Coffee Rooms at one o'clock." Had Hirschfeld not met me at the Lafayette Coffee Rooms at one o'clock, this might never have been written. Another thing that might never have been written, if it gives twenty-three despondent investors any comfort, was a musical comedy named Sweet Bye and Bye, which closed in Philadelphia like a ten-cent mousetrap the day this story opens.

Ogden Nash, who wrote the lyrics of Sweet Bye and Bye, Vernon Duke, the tunesmith responsible for its airs, and Hirschfeld and I, who spawned the libretto, had been sequestered in a room in the Warwick Hotel there for nineteen hours administering extreme unction to the show. At length our efforts were unavailing; as the turkey lay cold and lifeless on the operating table before us, Nash retired to his room to hang himself with a dangling participle, Duke returned to writing singing commercials, and we groped our way to the Anguish Room of the Warwick for a final cup of coffee. We were both sobbing brokenly into a wisp of cambric when the editor of a journal named Holiday, a furtive personality in a hand-me-down suit and linen of dubious cleanliness, shambled up to us. In an effort to shatter his torpor, I informed him that the show had just breathed its last. Our plight would have moved a heart of stone, and he certainly had it.

"What are you going to do now?" he inquired, stroking Hirschfeld's beard thoughtfully.

"Oh, I don't know," I replied carelessly, "I may join the Foreign Legion, or, on the other hand, I may take a hot bath." My companions looked around startled, under the impression that Noel Coward had spoken, but of course Coward was nowhere to be seen, as it was I who had spoken. Suddenly I became conscious of the editor's close scrutiny.

"Why don't you take a trip around the world for us?" he proposed. There was a moment of portentous silence. When a man you scarcely know suggests a trip lasting nine months and covering twenty-seven countries, you are justified in leaping to one of four assumptions: first, that he is an impostor; second, that he is hopelessly in love with your wife and will go to any lengths to get you out of the country; third, that you have blundered by mistake into an Alfred Hitchcock film; and fourth, that you have succumbed to a combination of ennui de moyen âge, wanderlust, paranoia, and brandy. Almost immediately, however -- in fact, just as soon as the waiters had finished applying cold towels to my forehead -- I regained my aplomb.

"All right, if you insist," I consented, stifling a yawn. "I suppose it's weak of me, but I just can't refuse you anything. Silly, isn't it?"

And before you could say "bo" to a goose, the whole matter had been arranged. Hirschfeld, who had done the Giant Swing once before, was unquestionably the ideal person to share my stateroom and illustrate our experiences; besides, I needed someone to protect me from whatever sultry womanhood, bloodthirsty brigands, and carnivorous fauna lay in wait. His qualifications were obvious: a pair of liquid brown eyes, delicately rimmed in red, of an innocence to charm the heart of the fiercest aborigine, and a beard which would engulf anything from a tsetse fly to a Sumatra tiger. In short, a remarkable combination of Walt Whitman, Lawrence of Arabia, and Moe, my favorite waiter at Lindy's.

Our itinerary was soon settled; commandeering an airmail envelope from the desk clerk, we drew a line west from Hollywood, hemstitching all the areas celebrated by Kipling, Conrad, and Maugham. For one delicious moment I toyed with the possibility of a side trip up to Tibet. My pulses throbbed as I envisioned us entering Shangri-La, our ears loud with the buzz of prayer-wheels, fawned on by the Grand Dalai Lama (played by Sam Jaffe [seen here in Frank Capra's Lost Horizon -- Ed.]). When Hirschfeld pointed out, however, that a couple of middle-aged aesthetes trained on corned beef and Dr. Brown's Celery Tonic were ill equipped to ascend the slopes of Kanchenjunga, I reluctantly gave way. Finally our route was complete -- Samoa, the Fijis, New Zealand, Australia, the Netherlands East Indies, the Federated Malay States, Siam, Indo-China, India, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Turkey, Egypt, the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, British East Africa, the Belgian Congo, North Africa, France, Switzerland, England, and Ireland. We would have included South America, Russia, and China, but my fountain pen, which writes even under hysteria, unexpectedly ran dry.

The financial arrangements, of course, were left to subordinates and bookkeepers, outside of a brief, spirited wrestle in which we kicked, bit, and gouged each other until our skins glowed. Eventually, the magazine grudgingly agreed to settle upon us as expense money a sum sufficient to feed a family of starlings through a Labrador winter. In vain I protested that my dependents would be reduced to beggary; the editor's face remained flinty. "About time those schleppers went to work," he grunted. "That brother-in-law of yours hasn't pulled his weight in the boat since you sprung him from Dannemora."


My heart was beating an irregular tattoo the following evening as I entered my apartment in New York, primed to make a dramatic announcement of the trip. I pictured the family's stunned surprise, the entreaties of my wife, the children whimpering at my knee and imploring me not to desert them. Poor little chaps, deprived of a father's wise counsel and love through a cruel caprice of Fate! I resolved at all costs not to yield to my emotions. From the living room, as I tiptoed toward it, came childish merriment, voices uplifted in song. Setting my shoulders squarely, I strode in.

"Well, folks," I said casually, "Daddy's off to the Seven Seas." Unfortunately, at this precise moment my foot encountered a roller skate lying athwart the threshold. As my wife and the dwarfs looked up in astonishment, I ricocheted across the room, clawed ineffectually at the toile de Jouy drapes, and stemming myself with a Christiania turn, crashed to the floor, taking a cloisonné vase with me. The memsahib sighed heavily.

"It's no use trying to conceal it any longer, children," she told them. "He drinks."

"Does he beat you, too, Mummy?" demanded the boy, a manly little fellow of ten, as he took a step forward and doubled his fists. "Because if he does, I -- I'll -- " So fierce was his ire I dare say he would have thrashed me soundly had not his mother interfered; but the good woman soon restored harmony, and, applying a raw beefsteak to my eye to reduce the swelling, I poured out a breathless account of my project. The effect was somewhat lessened by the fact that I was alone in the room, the others having gone to the movies in the interval, but upon their return I broke the great news and apathy was the order of the day. Soon the gentle snores of the household were the only sounds to be heard, and rolling myself in my blanket, I lay awake excitedly anticipating the morrow.


TOMORROW IN PART 2 OF "GOODBYE BROADWAY, HELLO MAL-DE-MER": While frantically preparing for departure, our hero suffers humiliation at the hands of map-store manager Cass Register


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