he: A Novel(49)

He and Babe also suffer. They try hauling an empty crate up the steps, but the weight and balance is clearly wrong, no matter how gamely they act as though they are under strain. The only solution is to use a real piano, but real pianos are heavy.

The crate gets damaged each time it is dropped, and it is dropped so often that replacements must always be on hand.

Their bodies sweat, and the sun burns their skin.

Their hands accept splinters, and their shins bear cuts.

The picture is now called The Up and Up. That might work.

The crew spends hours waiting for the right light, praying that Henry Ginsberg doesn’t take it into his head to come and count beans. Sunlight is required for consistency, but nobody has informed the clouds. When at last they finish filming, he eats and drinks in the cutting room, rarely breathing fresh air, trying to match the sequences to the luminosity, and sometimes sleeps in his dressing room instead of going home to bed.

Lois does not complain. She is long past caring.

When the edit is done, he gathers the cast and crew at the community theater, and even amid the clicking of timers and the scratching of pens, it is clear that something special has been created.

Three reels, one gag, and all the world in a box.

Only Henry Ginsberg is unimpressed. Henry Ginsberg wants to know if it is a real piano that is destroyed at the end of the picture. He informs Henry Ginsberg that they created it from balsa wood and old parts, but he does not think Henry Ginsberg believes him.

And Beanie Walker, over whom Henry Ginsberg’s ax now hovers, and who is growing weary of its gleam; Beanie Walker, with his cats and cigarettes; Beanie Walker, with his fine vocabulary and terse notes; Beanie Walker, who writes dialogue but struggles to carry on a normal conversation; Beanie Walker, who rarely smiles and does not laugh; Beanie Walker, who has never been happier anywhere than on this lot, and will never be truly happy again after; Beanie Walker gives them their title.

The Music Box.





103


At the Oceana Apartments, Jerry Lewis is among his more regular visitors.

Jerry Lewis is – or was – one of the Jews in hiding. The Jews may have helped to build the motion picture industry, but if they are to appear in its productions they must do so under another guise. Over at Columbia, Harry Cohn, a Jew, casts his own people as Indians, and at MGM Louis B. Mayer, a Jew, refuses to put Danny Kaye, another Jew, under contract until Danny Kaye has his nose straightened.

The Jews must pretend to be that to which they aspire. They can play anything but themselves, in life as on screen.

So David Kaminsky becomes Danny Kaye.

Julius Garfinkle becomes John Garfield.

Meshilem Weisenfreund becomes Paul Muni.

Emmanuel Goldenberg becomes Edward G. Robinson.

And Joseph Levitch becomes Jerry Lewis so that bigots and anti-Semites such as Father Charles Coughlin and Gerald L.K. Smith may laugh at his jokes.

He likes Jerry Lewis as a man, and is touched by his obvious admiration and solicitude, but is ambivalent about his comedy. It is too crude, too reliant on a series of fallback expressions of idiocy. It is perpetual chaos.

Babe enjoyed the work of the Marx Brothers. He did not. He finds funny only the inadvertent creation of mayhem, the gradual, unavoidable descent into disorder. It is too easy to deliberately foment misrule. The humor and the humanity arise from the doomed struggle against it.

But Jerry Lewis does not care. Jerry Lewis is untroubled by the opinion of others. Jerry Lewis is entirely without fear.

Jerry Lewis always wears red cashmere sweaters with red socks when visiting the Oceana Apartments. He finds this odd, but is too polite to remark upon it. Either Jerry Lewis owns only one red cashmere sweater and one pair of red socks, and replaces these when they wear out, or Jerry Lewis owns entire closets filled only with red cashmere sweaters and red socks. Sometimes Jerry Lewis asks him if he needs a sweater, but he always declines. Also, all of Jerry Lewis’s clothing bears the initials J.L., and he does not wish to be mistaken for Jerry Lewis in the event of an accident that leaves him otherwise unidentifiable.

Jerry Lewis no longer communicates with his former partner, Dean Martin. Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin have not spoken in years. He thinks this is a shame. Jerry Lewis is like a younger brother estranged from an adored older sibling. But Jerry Lewis is also angry with Dean Martin. Perhaps this is another reason why he is perturbed by Jerry Lewis’s comedy.

Underlying it, there is rage.

Did you and Babe ever fight? Jerry Lewis asks.

– Only about his hair.

He cannot imagine a time when he and Babe would not have spoken.

There is, for a while, some awkwardness in the background when Jerry Lewis visits, although Jerry Lewis is unfamiliar with the concept of awkwardness and so he endures the strain of it alone.

The comedian Lou Costello’s daughter, Carole, is married to Dean Martin’s son, Craig. He is friendly with Lou Costello, so he does not mention Jerry Lewis’s visits to the Oceana Apartments when he and Lou Costello talk.

During the period of his marriage to Ruth – no, his second marriage to Ruth – Lou Costello sometimes comes to the house for dinner, where he and Lou Costello commiserate with each other over their treatment at Fox. Ruth always counts the plates and the silverware after Lou Costello visits because Lou Costello is notorious for stealing from studio lots, and Ruth is concerned in case Lou Costello becomes confused and starts stealing from her too.