Brief Encounters Read online

  Not insignificantly, it raises again the question of how our most vaunted educational institutions bought into his oddball theories wholesale and helped perpetrate them, containing, as they did, more than a hint of racism. (As in his assertion that Negro and Hispanic brains stop developing early.)

  In a classroom a few blocks from the Yale gym where my classmates and I were recorded mother-nekkid for the camera and posterity, I learned, in a psychology course, of Sheldon’s now thoroughly laughed-off body type terms—“mesomorph” (muscular, fit), “ectomorph” (skinny, cerebral), and “endomorph” (comfort-loving, tubby). (Crude translations are mine.)

  Rosenbaum lays out how the mysterious acceptance of this theoretical crapola was bought wholesale by our highest houses of learning. The Yale professor George Hersey took the thing quite seriously, seeing it and writing about it as deeply sinister. He and others went so far as to connect the dread word “eugenics” to the whole mess, as well as the terms “breeding a master race” and, inevitably, “Nazi Germany.”

  Rosenbaum also recounts an incident involving me and the author of The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf. She informed Times readers that I, Cavett—as a guest speaker at her Yale graduation—turned the ceremonies into “the Graduation from Hell,” destroying her (and every young Yale woman’s) day by including in my talk the “posture pictures” bit from my old nightclub act, intending to show how Yale influenced my material as a comic.

  With the Wolf sense of humor on hiatus, she said she was “shocked” (but clearly not speechless) at my saying that the Vassar posture pictures “were stolen [reliable laugh], ended up on the pornography market [another], and they didn’t sell [boffo].”

  (Wolf’s tin-eared and decidedly vulgarized version of this could be entered in a botched quotation contest. Somehow she managed to get “New Haven’s red-light district” into my act.)

  Best of all, further venturing into fact bashing, she depicted me, at Yale, as George W. Bush’s buddy (is this actionable?) “in an all-male secret society.” (Yale had only males then.) I joined no society, secret or otherwise. And GWB and I were ten years—in many ways light-years—apart.

  What ice does it cut, by the way, if privileged viewers of this ritual in nudity were the same sex? Reader Ann Drachman Tartaul writes of some discomforts of her experience, including: “Radcliffe College in 1948 required naked posture photos in the gym. The two gym instructors who were directing this project were lesbians. We all somehow knew this and were doubly humiliated.”

  (Lenny Bruce on that subject: “Gee, Miss Thompson’s neat. She can throw a baseball just like a guy.”)

  Startling to hear from commenter “Thomas” that this was done to boys as young as thirteen at the, as he puts it, “once elite Hill School in Pottstown, Pa.” This deserves particular condemnation because of boys’ acute sensitivity about the unevenness of puberty ages. I can still see the sheepish looks and demeanor of the two guys in my junior high gym locker room, forced to undress and shower with all the other boys who had already (in my friend Ben’s case, spectacularly) fully bloomed, shall we say.

  Many asked the same question: Did anybody in the vast hordes ordered to strip protest? Or even question? So far it seems no one among thousands objected to this mandated humiliation.

  How I wish I could report having asked at least “Why naked?”

  Wouldn’t it be just as easy to detect swayback, malformations, obesity, lordosis, and kyphosis in both sexes while clad in their undies?

  It’s always hard to wind up a column so that it doesn’t seem to just stop. Let’s let a reader inspire today’s last word, a reader with a provocative thought and who apparently prefers to be known only as “SS”:

  Did the posture researchers aim specifically for the private schools, the Ivies, the places where they thought America’s future leaders would be found? There’s a subtle, twisted notion to play with!

  Thanks, “SS,” for allowing me to concoct the following fantasy:

  “Dear Presidential Candidate Bush: I have in my possession…”

  DECEMBER 2, 2011

  Deck the Halls with Boughs of Nutty

  You may see this as a companion to my last year’s bittersweet Christmas entry. Some found that one a bit too poignant.

  I envy, in a way, those who continue right through adulthood to just love Christmas—the way we did as kids, beaming at the thought of festooning the tree with tinsel, hanging the capacious stocking (faintly redolent of mothballs), and hoping Santa had gotten all our hints, and, if you’re old enough, cursing those damned strings of lights on the tree where if one burned out they all went out and you had to seek, one by one, the dead culprit. (How easy we have it today.)

  In my case, some affection for the hallowed time has returned markedly, after at least twenty Christmases spent on Virgin Gorda, British Virgin Islands, happily far from the familiar list of horrors that are part and parcel of Noël in Gotham, my favorite city.

  To call New York’s traffic at holiday time a nightmare is to understate. And, incidentally, was the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center dreamed up by a sadist? The presence of that bloody conifer helps achieve gridlock for acres in every direction. That lovely, unoffending tree, from its peaceful forest life untimely ripp’d.

  “Dumbos from New Jersey,” as a cop once told me, seem to think they can pile the family into the car, drive right up beside the big spruce, and pull off a few souvenir needles—learning the hard way that it’s probably easier to edge the car up to the White House and tap on the occupants’ windows. So, while disappointed kiddies squall, the parents discover they’re lucky to find a parking place from which they can’t actually see their house. As for the sidewalk mobs of loutish, pushy shoppers, these offer the less-than-jolly dangers of pickpockets, transmitted flu, and the possibility of a rib-cracking crush.

  I have, by way of contrast, lovely memories of many standard Midwestern Christmases in Nebraska, with happy families and jovial visitors and strung popcorn and peanut brittle and snoozing dogs by the hearth. You felt warm and protected, surrounded at a full dining room table by relatives who, before dessert, swore they’d begin their diets the next day and who stayed on for canasta or Monopoly.

  One salty memory comes back. Every year, my German grandmother insisted that my father place prominently on the tree a faded and ancient glass ornament from her earliest childhood memories in “the old country.” It must have belonged to generations of the Pinsch (her family name) clan since before Germany began starting wars.

  It was a delicate and remarkably unattractive twisted glass cornucopia, about five inches long. At its lower end, the opening of this horn of plenty, the partially faded colors of its fruits and vegetables were still fairly bright. One year, my dad seized the thing and barked, “Do we have to look at this damn thing every year?” Startled, “Grossmom” asked why he would say such a thing about her beloved treasure.

  “Because it’s ugly. It looks like a goose with a bouquet in its fanny.”

  (Exit Grossmom in tears.)

  Many years pass. Through an odd set of circumstances including sudden unemployment as a writer in Hollywood, owing to the cancellation by ABC of the imploded Jerry Lewis Show of 1963—a television mishap sometimes accidentally misfiled in archives between the Hindenburg catastrophe and the Titanic’s descent from view—I found myself, with five other people, the only passengers on a full-sized airliner on Christmas Day—the best day to fly. We were bound from that less significant coast to this one. Where New York is.

  I was yet a bachelor and, still freshly a New Yorker, living solo in the city of my dreams, partaking hungrily of all the advantages from cultural to carnal thereof. (The former outran the latter, by a mile.)

  My Christmas feast that year: a lone, late lunch at the Automat.

  Here’s the setting: I was closely flanked, at tables left and right, by two diners, each unaware of the other.

  To my left, a lumpish geek, munching and dribbling. Don’t ask me why
I imagined his first name to be either “Gort” or “Lunk.” I went with “Lunk.” His grubby costume was topped—as it so often is in such cases—by the thick, droopy earflap cap favored by the lumpish gentry. His teeth? Grounds for a dental hygienist to switch careers.

  His counterpart, the female of the species, resembling in face and costume one of the trio of “weyard sisters” who perform the opening number—“Double, double toil and trouble”—in a traditional production of Macbeth. I dubbed her “Gravel Gertie.” Her costume featured mismatched galoshes.

  Near each other, but at adjoining tables, they were in their own individual worlds.

  I was able to hear them both—mantra-like mumblings with similar but separate themes. Both stared into the middle distance. The day’s subject: an analysis of the city’s troubles. Brief samples will do:

  Lunk: “It’s the hook-noses that’s to blame. The hook-noses got all the money. The mayor’s a prize one if I ever seen one.” (He was referring to Robert Ferdinand Wagner. Of the R.C. Church.)

  G. Gertie: “It’s the black ones causin’ all the trouble. Look at that one over there. Look how they eat with their hands.”

  I looked and saw a nattily attired gent, dining solo. He was consuming not a handheld slab of zebra meat, as her words might have suggested, but instead—and she was right about the manual part—a small cinnamon roll.

  Both now lowered their volume and for a time proceeded to issue, in unison, a kind of unseasonal contrapuntal chant from which assorted varied and creative ethnic slurs emerged like grace notes.

  Arising to go, I got their attention and, to the amusement of some people at a nearby table, uttered what seemed an appropriate question.

  “Why don’t you two get married?”

  They blinked opaquely, and I bade adieu to Christmas at the Automat and stepped out onto Lexington Avenue. A pretty snow had begun to fall, and because of it, a sweet thing happened.

  The sublime final paragraph of James Joyce’s “The Dead” began to play in my head—the bits I could remember—about the snow that “was general all over Ireland … softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves falling faintly through the universe upon all the living and the dead.”

  Healing snow.

  I pictured the pair, after they had ceased to dine, and wiped their mouths—or failed to—heading for their respective lairs. That gentle snow would, without prejudice, descend on Lunk and Gertie. Softly and silently, in the season of brotherly love.

  DECEMBER 23, 2011

  Marlene on the Phone

  It was a bitter cold day on the end of Long Island. I was not alone out there; my two dogs and I had come in from a hike in the woods at the exact instant that the phone rang.

  A friend of mine who can “do voices” the way Darrell Hammond can would sometimes delight in fooling me, calling in a voice duplicating that of the then-not-late Walter Brennan, or Raymond Burr, or a cartoon character, or a contemporary singer, male or female. Once it was an impeccable Dudley Do-Right.

  This time it was Marlene Dietrich. I was a little cold and irritable and came back with, “And I’m Frank Sinatra. What can I do for ya, Marlene, baby?”

  As you may have guessed, it was not my lucky day. Or, at least, my lucky moment. The caller was indeed Marlene Dietrich.

  The room swayed a little as the throaty and infectious laugh, somehow both amused and forgiving, delighted the ear, making apology unnecessary.

  We had never met.

  Our connection was her daughter, the beauteous Maria Riva, who in the Golden Age of TV seemed to be the most employed actress on the tube: Playhouse 90, Studio One, Kraft Television Theatre, all of them.

  She had played the Shubert Theater in New Haven in Tea and Sympathy when I was at Yale. At my instigation, my roommates and I cornered her at the stage door and invited her to visit Yale the next day, and she did, nearly knocking dead a fellow student who dropped in, saw her seated on our (cruddy) couch, and gulped “Well, hello!” while catching his balance.

  But that’s another story. This is about “Shanghai Lily” herself.

  I still hold out hope of finding my long-lost notes from these conversations, because this was not to be the only call from Dietrich. They were loaded with gems, but I was about forty, which we now are told is when memory starts dropping things overboard. If my accursed sloppiness and disorganization haven’t claimed still another treasure not taken care of in an adult manner (I’d hoped psychoanalysis might cure this), maybe one day I can give you more delicious details now floating in the “limited access” section of the memory bank.

  Anyway, here’s one: As we chatted along, suddenly she asked, “What can you see from where you are right now?” What an original question. Never been asked that before or since. “Two things,” I said, and then told her: the Atlantic Ocean and a paperback screenplay of my all-time favorite movie, The Third Man.

  “The one with Orson on the cover, holding a gun?”

  It was. She asked whether I could see his nose. Before I could say that of course I could, Miss D. asserted in a sly tone, “No, you can’t. No moviegoer ever has. Orson has always been ashamed of his little tipped-up baby nose. Like Larry Olivier, he has a different nose in every movie.” Sure enough, he had a good, sturdy nose in the picture.

  Glad to have this bit of insider knowledge from one gargantuan star about another, I decided to be just a slight bit daring: “I suppose you two were, at the very least, great, great friends.”

  She managed to extend her wonderful laugh all through the sentence: “Mr. Cavett, what are you hinting at? And on what you might call our first date?” (I won’t even try to describe the fantasy-making potency of that remark.)

  Not sure my blush wasn’t audible, and before I could stammer something, she went on: “That could never happen, Orson never made even a mild pass at me. I was a little insulted until I realized the problem.”

  (Was she about to deliver some startling revelation about Orson Welles’s sexuality? The answer was yes.)

  “Orson could never be attracted to a woman”—here she wickedly paused—“who was a blonde. Never. Look at his girlfriends. Spanish, Italian, Indian, Rita—” (If you have to ask who “Rita” was, you probably don’t belong here.)

  She went on: “Then, what do you think happened? We made Touch of Evil and he made me up very dark and they dyed my hair black. After all that indifference, I was suddenly the dark apple of Orson’s eye. After all that time, overnight, it was suddenly, ‘I have to have you.’ I had to lock my dressing room door.”

  Impertinently, I asked, “While he was outside it, or inside?”

  She rewarded me with the great laugh and accused me of “dangerous wickedness.” Her tone was flirting. I ate it up.

  For the next three days the phone rang at the stroke of 10 a.m. (German efficiency?) and we resumed. I’m trying not to get icky about this, but each time that famous voice began to sound, I learned the meaning of the phrase “a heady presence.” It filled the room.

  Between talks #3 and #4, she bought the book Cavett and read it overnight. For the fourth call, instead of “Hello” I got “You are to eat up.” “Excuse me?” I said, hoping to hear it again, which I did. She said she loved the book (and by implication, me?) and could not put it down till the end.

  If it had been dark, I would have glowed.

  Her daughter wrote a deeply satisfying—and startlingly frank—book about her mother (“about her mom” doesn’t sound right for the Blue Angel). Yet she was a devoted mother and a doting grandmother, sometimes spotted, babushka-concealed, pushing a baby buggy in Central Park.

  A sincere tip: move heaven if not earth to see Marlene, Maximilian Schell’s great Oscar-nominated documentary about Dietrich.

  It was shot in the Paris apartment in which she had sometime earlier holed up and in which—having allowed virtually no one to see her for years—she died at ninety in 1992. You only hear her voice, in Schell’s brilliant interviews. I doubt that there’s
a better documentary about a legend. A must if there ever was one.

  I could happily have talked to her every day for a year. Finally I asked when we could meet.

  “Oh, dear. I’m too shy for that,” she joked mock-girlishly and changed the subject.

  She loved language, spoke several, and haunted late-night bookstores. Literacy was a must. I told her about a journalist who, when I used the word “profound,” said, “Ooh, profound—I’m going to have to look that up.”

  “Oh, God, no!”

  During World War II she was the most intrepid of troop entertainers, and not just in safe areas. Endearing herself to a generation of soldiers, she slogged with them through mud in Germany and Italy. She saw more combat than many soldiers, maybe even more than Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich, and George W. Bush managed to avoid. (Perhaps a trio to include in a “Monument to the Well-Known Dodger.”)

  She was raised a Protestant, but the war took her faith away. “After the horrors I saw and the preachers on both sides praying to destroy the other side, I refuse to believe those I loved and lost are floating around up there somewhere. If God exists, he needs to review his plan.”

  Amen.

  Of course I wanted to ask about a few of her best-known affairs: James Stewart, Jean Gabin, John Wayne, George Bernard Shaw (dubiously), and, less dubiously, John F. Kennedy. The story goes—this from a high-placed source—that after their initial encounter, JFK asked, “Did my dad really have an affair with you?”

  The scrupulously honest Miss Dietrich said no; to which the leader of the free world replied, with characteristic gusto, “I knew the son-of-a-bitch was lying!”

  Because she was a participant in and product of the sexually versatile Cabaret Berlin of the twenties, I would love to have gotten to know her well enough to get her to talk about that time. (To be fair to both sides, her affairs included the notorious Mercedes de Acosta, Garbo’s girlfriend.)