Great Kisser (23 page)

“So I been going up there all these years. It was very inspiring, the solitude, perfect for Yom Kippur. It's a Franciscan order of atonement. They're into that. Then I became a born-again Christian. My friend Billy the Pistol, who was up on a murder rap for that which he did not do, asked me to join. I thought what the hell: Jesus was a Hebrew to begin with. And he died a Hebrew. It's the same thread. I see absolutely no difference.”

He grew up on a dairy farm in Buffalo. As a boy he was always shadow boxing. He would tie little one-pound weights to his combat boots and run backwards up and down a hill. “Then I put on sneakers,” he said. “I felt like I was flying through the air.” He rode bareback in local rodeos at 15 and hitched around the country during the Depression. He'd been a middleweight boxer, a fruit picker, a cantor in a synagogue, a bouncer in a whore house, an airplane riveter, a bareback rider, a worker in a slaughterhouse. He had worked on the cattle kill and the pig kill. He couldn't handle that, because the pigs squealed like hell and he had to wear ear plugs. “They use everything but the squeal on a pig. We made the frankfurters. In the inedible department they took all the crap, put it in these big vats, some guy standing there with five or ten pounds of beef in his hands, throwing it in there to cover the rest of it. And the stuff would come out like white paste. Then they'd go on a rack, a belt through a chimney and come out red. I didn't eat a hot dog for twenty years after that.

“Sit down, my little elf,” he said the second time I met him. I hated him calling me that, but I kept my mouth shut. “Whattya been doin'?”

“What do you mean?”

He mimicked me and said in a high voice, “‘What do you mean?' What do he mean, my little elf?” He stopped smiling, and said in a tone of genuine menace, “Well, you been making those spider moves: that's right, ain't it?”

I felt the first cold trickle of fear. “Don't call me an elf—” I began in a whisper, but Hymie didn't hear me.

I had as much courage as the old ladies sipping tea and eating finger cookies at the Schrafft's of my childhood, my father's favorite restaurant. He yearned to shed his dark Jewish immigrant skin and become, like the pale ladies beside us, “pure American.” Once he even, half in jest, wore a bonnet to fit in, but it didn't work. “Not becoming,” he said.

I have killed my father over and over again in my fiction, yet he keeps bobbing up like he always did, reminding me that life was a cruel trap to be avoided at all costs, that castration was the only safe route. No sports, no gyms for me, to develop my biceps like Hymie's. When I was 18, my father let me cross the street alone without holding his hand, but he wept and said that I had deserted him. “Alone!” he declared in a plaintive singsong, grinning at me. “Alone! Alone! I'm all alone in the world. All I have is you.”

Hymie said, “I'm a little tired. I'm like a bear who's had a lot of honey. I just fucked the woman next to me on the plane. She pulled her panties down. I said to her: ‘I know the pork chops are ready. I feel the gravy runnin' down the sides.'” He smiled, and then, as if he was being reflective, he said, “Well, it was a lust fuck, done with kindness and deference. Oh yeah.”

He paused, smiled at me and said, “I'll never forget Joe E. Lewis at the Copa when he sang, ‘Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam, and I'll show you a house full of shit.”

After lunch at the Polo Lounge (Hymie changed into his little powder-blue, terry-cloth cabana and suit and matching shirt from the '40s, eating the french fries from my plate after he'd finished his own—when he dropped a few, he leaned over to pick them up and swallowed them), Hymie drove me to the mansions where Mickey Cohen and Meyer Lansky had lived and to the current home of Ron Fatino, who was away that day. Hymie sat in the car with me for a long time in quiet deference to these giants. He lowered his voice to a reverential hush, speaking to me of their greatness and “sacred manhood.” Ron Fatino was a wiseguy who came to Hollywood with his crew and wrote screenplays by his pool, handing each page of creation to his crew members, all seated there in their undershirts like Ron, and who told him he was a fucking genius.

“Ron is a one-of-a-kind guy,” Hymie said softly. “They don't make people like him anymore. They broke the mold. A very unbelievable guy. A guy written up by
Spy Magazine
. If you noticed, they went out of business after that. All lies. That was their last issue. The last issue,” Hymie emphasized. “You don't see them guys no more. I sat there with Ronnie when he wrote them scripts. Page by page he handed them to me. He was writing furiously. I would say to him, ‘If I didn't see this with my own eyes, I wouldn't believe it.' There was no guy in his high position who had this kind of talent. He had a burning, yearning desire to create. And those fucking scripts were great:
Cement Lullaby
and
Opposites Attract
were cinematic trailblazers. There's the scene where the kid watches his father embracing this woman and he's got his hand on the back of her hair. He pulls it off and it's a guy. The father's gay, see? What a fucking switcharoo, huh? That's why it's called
Opposites Attract
. Get it? It shocked the shit out of me. And the father's a wiseguy. Now in the script he winds up getting clipped. You know you can't be gay and be a wiseguy. No way, Jose.”

Ron, Meyer, Mickey—Hymie's voice almost cracked with love and respect, grown soft and sentimental when he spoke about these killers. “These guys did their due diligence,” he said. He talked about walking down dark deserted warehouse streets on the waterfront at midnight “with no protection” to meet “important individuals” who, at the sight of him, opened their arms to him with delight.

A pretty young Polish waitress was hovering by us, listening to Hymie, who was flirting with her. He asked her for her “pedigree.” She said she'd come over from Poland and was working so hard, many, many hours. then she said to him, “I'll do anything,” and smiled steadily at him. I couldn't believe it. There was an ugly magnificence here that I didn't understand. He slid his hand beneath the table.

When she left, he told me about visiting the notorious Kray brothers in prison in England. “I met Ronnie Kray through Frank Frazier, or ‘mad Frank,' a stone-cold killer,” Hymie said. “He uses the word ‘lovely' a lot.” Hymie did an English accent. ‘“Lovely, lovely, Hymie.'” Hymie laughed. “And I got a big kick out of him.

“Frazier got me to Ronnie, as a movie was being done about the boys. There were three Kray brothers, but two of them were twins. I went to see Ronnie in England at Broadmoor, which is for the criminally insane. Believe me, the fox that bit Ronnie would die of lockjaw.

“It was a huge visiting hall. They can wear their regular clothes there. One guy had a girl sitting on his lap. All of a sudden you heard the clicking of these heels, like a military walk. And everyone stopped. 500 people in that hall and you could hear a pin drop. And it was Ronnie Kray. He did a right-about to get to me like he was in the Army. He was wearing a black silk suit. He had a white-on-white shirt with long lapels. He had a white-on-white tie. And spit-shine shoes. He had a flower in his jacket lapel. His nickname was ‘The Colonel.' You could readily see why. He clicked his heels, put his hand out to me, and he said, ‘You must be Hymie, right, mate?' I said, ‘Indeed I am, Ronnie.' I wanted to get up and he said, no no, sit right there, and he sat down.

“We talked of the movie in the works about the boys. I said to him, ‘Do you intend to let it all hang out about yourself?'”

Now Hymie did a Cockney accent. ‘“You mean that I'm a poof? Fuck 'em all.' He was a homosexual, but he was a fearsome guy, ya know, he had class, he was like a homicidal maniac in the '60s. When one of the twins visited the other in jail, they swapped clothes and left the other one. The one that visited stayed, and the one that was in walked out. Then they swapped again. So Ronnie asked me to represent him. Renee DeFraque and pals put up the front money. They were not exactly French poodles. They were the British counterpart to Good Fellas.” Hymie concluded, “Ba boom ba boom.”

Later, back in his office, Hymie was seated at his desk facing me. He ticked off his assessment of each writer whose manuscripts he owned: “O'Neill had a decent size schlong. Tennessee Williams five inches tops when hard. Hemingway's—pathetic. James Jones—Jones was a man, my son.”

Hymie got lyrical as he started talking about himself. In his mid-2os he had worked in the fireroom of a coal-burning tugboat, shoveling six tons of coal every watch. (He actually knew what O'Neill's
The Hairy Ape
was about because it related to his work experience, and thought it was the hand of fate that he now owned an O'Neill literary property). “I was wearing black glasses,” he said, “because my eyes were light-sensitive from resin poisoning I got three years before that when I was boxing. The glasses were black as the ace of spades. So there I was, throwing coals into these flames and staring into the goddamned fires. They were used for steam engines. I had a bandanna on my hair, a flannel thing around my waist. We had huge centrifugal vats that came down into the fireroom with a wheel on them that you could turn so they would catch the wind. It was 130 degrees down there.

“I was one of only two Hebes among 2,500 men,” he continued. “And all I know is when I stared into them flames, I was thinking about my fighting days. I was thinking about being born and raised on a dairy farm in Westchester.” He was around horses from the beginning, riding plow horses as a kid, working on a dude farm when he was 12, mucking stalls. By 15 he rode bareback in local rodeos.

“So I'd be staring into these fires, remembering. Middleweight boxer, fruit picker, airplane riveter, a worker in a slaughterhouse, and a member of the merchant marine. I started hitching around the country when I was 17. I'd become a club fighter. I used to go town to town unattached. I didn't have a manager. I'd sign up for fights, get a hundred, two hundred dollars. I had thirteen straight knockouts. My fourteenth fight I got blinded. Both eyes. Lasted seventeen days. I never fought again after that. The guy I fought never fought again either, for a different reason. I made up my mind that he would never fight again.”

In 1960 Hymie broke his back during a tugboat collision. He was recuperating in the home of friends. Going down to the basement of the house one day to inspect a litter of pups, Hymie noticed a bunch of dusty manuscripts on shelves beside the boiler. He leafed through them. A light bulb went on his head. “Holy mackerel,” he said aloud. “What I figured out was that the naked asshole of the business, as it were, the most important part, was the literary properties. He who controls them controls the production mounted on them. Simple as that. Like a guy in the construction business, without the land he can't put up the skyscraper, the shopping mall. The land!”—Hymie shouted—“the real estate property. In my business the literary property. I was, what 29 years old maybe. The properties were the key to opening the door. The literary nuggets.

“I didn't have a Big Daddy to lead me by the hand nor did I want any. I went out and keyed in on the critical guy, Jonathan Gilmore Germaine III, 90-year-old head of the Playwrights Foundation International. Strike the heart and the limbs perish. That's how I cornered it. See, nobody was championing the rights of authors' heirs. I did that. I wasn't doing it out of the goodness of my heart; I made good money from it. That's 'cause I would get these heirs their cash. I used to sign them up to represent them. Germaine had the greatest array of plays I've ever seen. In return for my not raiding him, he let me exclusively represent the Playwrights International catalogue for motion pictures and television production. This was on-the-job training for me I could never learn in any school.” When Germaine died almost immediately, Hymie somehow inherited the entire outfit.

At the same time Hymie owned two nightclubs in Jersey in addition to his literary pursuits. “One day, I was in the office of the Klutz brothers, who were talent agents,” Hymie recalled. “Sidney or Irving Klutz said to me: ‘Commere. I want to introduce you to somebody.' And there was Stanley Bieber and his dancing bears. The guy had claw marks all over his face. Old Scars. And he had this scrapbook of these bears.

“So I see these bears with hula skirts on them doing the hula hula dance. This was the time of the twist craze. I said, ‘What's the name of that bear?' Stanley said, ‘Rosie. That's her mother over there, Ida. Rosie will never travel without Ida. I keep Ida and Rosie in a big truck with an iron gate on it.' Well, I asked Stanley if his bears ever worked in a nightclub. He said no. I said, ‘If I got a twist band behind Rosie, and we took off that hula skirt of hers and she did her natural dance that you got her trained to do, everyone would think she was doing the twist.' He said, ‘Jesus, you're right.' Stanley also told me that Rosie skated on roller skates and rode a tricycle. So I said we'd book Rosie in my club.”

Hymie hired a plane and placed an advertisement on it: “Appearing Friday Night. Rosie: A Bare Twister.” “They'd think it was a spelling mistake,” he said. On Thursday, Hymie said, Stanley arrived with Rosie at the club. Ida stayed in the truck. “Now what I didn't know,” Hymie said, “was that a bear act is the most dangerous act in show business. I had a friend who was a director of the Miss Universe contest. She was giving me five of her girls, Miss Britain, Miss Iceland, Miss France, etc. to come down and twist with the bear for the publicity. And my secretary, Lolita Brown, a former Miss Louisiana, was also gonna twist with the bear.

“But the five girls all backed out of the deal when they saw that fucking bear stand up on her hind legs. The musicians quit too. I had to get a high school band. The comic refused to introduce the bear; he was scared shitless. So I would introduce Rosie.