Part 6
There remained little else to do in the way of arrangements except to break my present lease. It was not easy, but it was a pleasure. Now that I planned to move, my landlord’s attitude was something to behold. He danced the length of the shop on his tiny feet, his cane twirling madly, alternating between cries of “Excellent! Your future is assured!” and “But of course you’ll pay the rent here, too!” He did not know, he said, what “the corporation” would think of any proposal for subletting the premises. Finally he doffed his black hat, waved goodbye, and skipped out of the store.
A week later I heard from him. The answer on subleasing was a qualified yes. If I could get a tenant as responsible and dignified as myself and with equally brilliant prospects for success, they would consider it.
I advertised for weeks and no such madman responded. Then one day the answer walked in the door, a huge man with the general physique of the late Sidney Greenstreet, hooded eyes, and a great beard. He looked around, blinked like an owl, and said he’d take it. It was as simple as that. I realized, with a slight sinking feeling, that I was now perfectly free to move to the Avenue.
My formidable successor to the home of the Seven Stairs turned out to indeed be a man of brilliant prospects. He opened a Thought Factory, evidenced by a sign to this effect and bulletin boards covered with slips of paper bearing thoughts. Needless to say, he was in the public relations and advertising business. I have always felt grateful to him, but I never got up courage to cross that once adored threshold and see Mr. Sperry making thoughts.
When the Columbia Record people approached me concerning the possibility of a party in connection with the release of a record by the jazz pianist, Max Miller, it struck me this might be just the thing as a rousing, and possibly rowdy, farewell to the Seven Stairs.
Somehow, when I phoned our original fellows in literature, the gaiety of my announcement did not come off. I called Bob Parrish, who had once turned an autographing party into a magic show, and was greeted by an awesome silence, followed by a lame, “We’ll be there.” There was similar response from others on the list, but they _did_ come, all of them ... even Samuel Putnam, who journeyed all the way from Connecticut.
We had rented a piano and managed to get it in through the back of the building by breaking through a wall. The bricks were terribly loose anyway, and it wasn’t much work to put them back and replaster when it was all over. Max Miller had promised to bring along a good side man, and he did: Louis Armstrong. Armstrong was immediately comfortable in the shop. “This is a wise man,” he said. He didn’t know I was giving up the ghost at the Seven Stairs.
Perhaps the end of the Stairs was a symbol for more than the demise of a personal book store. During the period in which I had set up shop, the old _Chicago Sun_ had launched the first literary Sunday supplement devoted entirely to books to be published by a newspaper outside of New York City. At least one issue of this supplement, called “Book Week,” had carried more book advertising than either the _New York Times_ “Book Review” or the _Herald Tribune_ “Magazine of Books.” The _Chicago Tribune_ had followed suit with a book supplement and, together with the _Sun_, offered a platform for people like Butcher, Babcock, North, Apple, Frederick, Kogan, Wendt, Spectorsky, and others who were not only distinguished critics and authors, but who truly loved the world of books. Their efforts had certainly contributed to the climate that made the Seven Stairs possible. The diminution of this influence (today only the _Tribune_ carries a full-scale book supplement) was in direct relationship to the decline of my own enterprise.
For the last party, everyone came. There were the remaining literary editors, Fanny Butcher of the _Tribune_, Emmet Dedmon of the _Sun-Times_, and Van Allen Bradley of the _Daily News_ (the latter two fated to move along to editorial positions on their newspapers). There was Otto Eisenschiml and there was Olive Carrithers, for whom one of our first literary parties had been given. The psychoanalysts came: Lionel Blitzsten (who had assured everyone that I really wouldn’t, couldn’t, make the move), Roy Grinker, Fred Robbins, Harvey Lewis, and of course Robert Kohrman, who was still to see me through so much. There was Sidney Morris, the architect; Henry Dry, the entrepreneur; Ed Weiss, the advertising executive who discovered the subliminal world and asked which twin had the Toni; and Everett Kovler and Oscar Getz of the liquor industry. Louis played and sang and signed records and shook hands and sang some more, and Miller played and autographed while the apparent hilarity grew, the shouting, laughing, and singing. It was a very little shop, and had there been rafters you could have said it was full to them. But Ben Kartman was grim, Reuel Denny seemed bewildered, and above all, the old gang: Algren, Conroy, Parrish, Terkel, Motley, Herman Kogan ... they were being charming and decent enough, but something was out of kilter. I had never seen them more affable, but it wasn’t quite right—being affable wasn’t really their line.
Terkel occasionally emerged from the throng to m.c. the performance. Studs Terkel is a Chicago phenomenon, a talented actor and impresario of the wellsprings of culture, whether jazz or folksongs. In the early days of commercial television, when the experimenting was being done in Chicago, he created a type of entertainment perfectly adapted to the intimate nature of the medium. “Studs’ Place” was the hottest show in Chicago, so far as the response of viewers went, but it soon disappeared. Apparently what Chicago offered could not be exported. The strange belief continues to persist that the tastes of America can properly be tested only on the Broadway crowd (the knowing) or the Hollywood Boulevard misfits (the paranoiac). The crowds and misfits elsewhere do not seem to constitute a suitable national index. Anyway, so far we have not been able to export Studs.
In the growing crowd and increasing turbulence and raucousness, I didn’t care any longer what happened. I just stood in a corner and tried to look friendly. Rhoda and Jack Pritzker came in with a party of friends. People were crushing about Studs and Louis, urging Louis to sing and Max to play. Suddenly I was terribly tired. I wanted air. I was just getting out when the ceiling came down.
The toilet was on the second floor (it served the entire building) and, never very dependable, it had come to the end of the line. When it broke, the water came flooding down through the ceiling onto the people in the shop and taking the plaster with it. Louis was soaked. I shall always remember Rhoda Pritzker barraged by falling plaster and Dorothea Parrish losing her poise and letting out a war whoop. Studs got a piece of ceiling in his eye. Max Miller was directly beneath the broken pipe and suffered the consequences. For some moments it seemed as though the total disintegration of the aged structure was at hand.
I ran up the stairs and began applying my best flood control technique. Finally, with the aid of a pile of rags, we managed to staunch the flow. Those engaged were exhausted, but the party was made; now the laughter rang with real gaiety and the songs soared with enthusiasm. It was one hell of a wake.
The last song was “Honeysuckle Rose.” The damp musicians thanked everyone for listening and said goodbye. There was a hurry of leavetaking. Soon only Ira Blitzsten, Bob Kohrman, and Ben Kartman remained.
There was nothing left but to turn off the lights and close up, yet I couldn’t bring myself to rise from behind the desk. No more building inspectors, no more landlord wishing me good luck, no more broken plumbing ... just the end of the world. All I had to do was get up, look around for the last time, turn off the lights.
Look around at what? The old bookshelves made out of third grade lumber? The dark green walls that Tweedy and Carl Dry had helped paint? The absurd little bench with its hopeful inscriptions? I didn’t need to worry about the bench. I could take that with me.
There was the barrel in the corner, half full of apples ... the battered old coffee pot sitting on the hot plate ... and the string dangling from the ceiling from which a salami once depended. I always bought my sausage from a little old Hassidic Jew who appeared from time to time in his long black coat, black hat, and with a grey and black beard extending down his chest. We would haggle over the price and he would shower me with blessings when he left. All of this was spiced with Rabelaisian jests. Once I asked him, while studying the sausage situation, “Tell me, do you think sex is here to stay?” He thought a moment. “I don’t know vy not,” he said. “It’s in a vunderful location!”
Somehow, I did not see a salami hanging in my new Michigan Avenue location.
But onward and upward! Don’t turn back now, or Lionel’s prediction will come true. All is well. The lease is signed, the fixtures are paid for, you’ve o.k.’d the color the walls are to be painted, no one is threatening you, and you’ve put down a month’s advance on the rent. So please get up and turn off the lights.
It was not I, but a zombie moving mechanically toward the future, who touched the button, left the room, and softly shut the door.
8 On the Avenue
In all my life, I had never shopped on Michigan Avenue. I had no idea who was in business there or what they sold (except for a general feeling that they sold expensive merchandise and made plenty of money). It was only after I had opened the doors of Stuart Brent: Books and Records, that I discovered what a strategic location I had chosen ... strategically in competition with two of the best-known book dealers in the city!
Only a block down the street was the Main Street Book Store, already a fixture on the Avenue for a decade. A few blocks farther south stood Kroch’s, Chicago’s largest bookseller and one of the greatest in America, while north of me the Michigan Avenue branch of Lyon and Healy, the great music store, still flourished. And I thought what the Avenue needed was Stuart Brent with his books and records! Maybe it was, but the outlook did not seem propitious.
Now, ten years later, Main Street and I are still selling books and not, I think, suffering from each other’s proximity. Main Street’s orientation has always been toward art, and they run a distinguished gallery in connection with their business. Lyon and Healy eventually closed its branch operation, and Kroch’s left the Avenue when they merged with Brentano, an equally large organization with which I have no family connection, on the Italian side or any other. These consolidations, I am sure, were simply manifestations of big business. If I were to fret about the competition, it would be that of the dime store next door, which sells books and records, too.
In addition to the street-level floor, my new shop had a fine basement room which I fitted out hopefully as a meeting place. I immediately began staging lectures and parties and put in a grand piano so we could have concerts, too. Anything to bring in people. Business grew, but as I soon found I would have to sell things besides books in order to meet the overhead, I compromised on long-standing principles and brought in greeting cards. Within six months, I was also selling “how to do it books”—how to eat, how to sleep, how to love, how to fix the leaky pipe in your basement, how to pet your cat, how to care for your dog, how to see the stars....
By the time I had been on the Avenue a year, it was hard for me to see how my shop differed from any other where you might find some good books and records if you looked under the pop numbers and bestsellers. Apparently some people still found a difference, however. In his book _The Literary Situation_, Malcolm Cowley, the distinguished critic, wrote:
On Michigan Avenue, I passed another shop and recognized the name on the window. Although the salesroom wasn’t large, it was filled with new books lining the walls or piled on tables. There were also two big racks of long-playing records, and a hidden phonograph was playing Mozart as I entered (feeling again that I was a long way from Clark and Division). The books on the shelves included almost everything published during the last two or three years that I had any curiosity about reading. In two fields the collection was especially good: psychiatry and books by Chicago authors.
I introduced myself to the proprietor, Stuart Brent, and found that he was passionately interested in books, in the solution of other people’s personal problems, and in his native city. Many of his customers are young people just out of college. Sometimes they tell him about their problems and he says to them, “Read this book. You might find the answer there.” He is mildly famous in the trade for his ability to sell hundreds of copies of a book that arouses his enthusiasm: for example, he had probably found more readers for Harry Stack Sullivan’s _An Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry_ than any other dealer in the country, even the largest. Collections of stories are usually slow-moving items in bookstores, although they have proved to be more popular as paperbacks. One evening Brent amazed the publisher of Nelson Algren’s stories, _The Neon Wilderness_, by selling a thousand copies of the hardcover book at an autograph party.
We talked about the days when the Near North Side was full of young authors—many of whom became famous New Yorkers—and about the possibility of another Chicago renaissance, as in the years after 1915. Brent would like to do something to encourage such a movement. He complained that most of the other booksellers didn’t regard themselves as integrated parts of the community and that they didn’t take enough interest in the personal needs of their customers.... Brent’s complaint against the booksellers may well have been justified, from his point of view, but a visitor wouldn’t expect to find that any large professional group was marked by his combination of interest in persons, interest in the cultural welfare of the community, and abounding energy.
As a group, the booksellers I have met in many parts of the country are widely read, obliging, likable persons who regard bookselling as a profession and work hard at it, for lower incomes than they might receive from other activities. They would all like to sell more books, in quantities like those of the paperbacks in drugstores and on the news stands, but they are dealing in more expensive articles, for which the public seems to be limited.
_The Literary Situation_ was published by Viking Press in 1954. I had met Mr. Cowley on a January evening the year before. When he came in, tall and distinguished looking, I had given him a chance to browse before asking if I could be of assistance. He smiled when I offered my help, then asked if I had a copy of _Exile’s Return_. I did. He fingered the volume and asked if I made a living selling books. “Of course,” I said, slightly miffed.
“But who in Chicago buys books like the ones you have on these shelves?” he asked.
“Lots and lots of people,” I assured him. I still didn’t know he was baiting me. We began to talk about Chicago, as I now saw it and as it had been. In a moment, he was off on Bug House Square (Chicago’s miniature Hyde Park), the lamented Dill Pickle Club, the young Hemingway, Ben Hecht, Charlie MacArthur, Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Archibald MacLeish, Sinclair Lewis. I had to ask his name, and when he said, Malcolm Cowley, I took _Exile’s Return_ away from him and asked him to autograph it to me. He took the book back and wrote: “To Stuart Brent—a _real_ bookstore.” I felt better about being on the Avenue.
The next evening, Mr. and Mrs. Cowley came to one of our concerts in the downstairs room and heard Badura-Skoda and Irene Jonas play a duo recital.
America lacks the cafés and coffee houses that serve as literary meeting places in all European countries. I had high hopes for our basement room with its piano and hi-fi set and tables and comfortable chairs as a place for such interchange. In addition to our concerts, lectures, and art exhibits, there were Saturday afternoon gatherings of men and women from a wide range of professions and disciplines who dropped in to talk and entertain each other. We served them coffee and strudel.
Possibly the most memorable of our concerts was that played by William Primrose. He had promised long ago to do one if I ever had a shop with the facilities for it. We had them now, and quite suddenly Primrose called to announce that he would be stopping over in Chicago on his way to play with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and would be delighted to present us with a recital.
There were only a few days to prepare for the event. As soon as the word was out, we were deluged with phone calls. Our “concert hall” would seat only fifty people, so I decided to clear the floor on the street level, rent two hundred chairs for the overflow audience, and pipe the music up to them from the downstairs room. I hired a crew of experts to arrange the microphones and set up the speakers.
The show did not start with any particular aplomb, and it got worse, for me at least, as the evening progressed. Primrose came early to practice. It hadn’t occurred to me that he needed to. He wanted not only to practice, but moreover a place in which he could do so undisturbed. Since the “concert hall” was swarming with electricians, not to mention the porter setting up chairs while I ran up and down the stairs alternating between a prima donna and a major domo, it looked as though another place would have to be found for Primrose to practice. I therefore took the great violist into a basement storage room that served as a catchall shared by my shop and the drugstore next door. But Primrose settled down happily in the dirty, poorly lit room amid stacks of old bills, Christmas decorations, old shelves and fixtures, empty bottles and cartons of Kleenex and went to work.
In less than ten minutes, a little grey man who filled prescriptions came bounding down the stairs screaming, “Where is Brent? Where is Brent?” He caught me in the hall and continued yelling, “If this infernal racket doesn’t stop, honest to God, I’ll call the police!” It was no use telling him the man making the racket was one of the world’s greatest musicians. He had never heard of Primrose and couldn’t have cared less. The noise coming up the vents, he claimed, was not only causing a riot in the drugstore, but he was so unnerved by the sounds that he had already ruined two prescriptions. While he was howling about his losses, I began howling with laughter. But there seemed nothing to do but get Primrose out of that room.
I moved my star into our receiving room, a messy cubbyhole ten feet wide. He didn’t seem to mind, although now, since he couldn’t walk up and down, he was confined to sitting in a chair for his practice.
Meantime, a crowd far beyond our capacity had swarmed into both levels of the shop. Those who came early got seats. Others sat on the stairs leading down to the hall. The rest stood, and some even spilled out the door onto Michigan Avenue. I couldn’t get from one end of the place to the other without stepping on people. I found myself begging someone’s pardon all evening long.
Then the complaints began. Those seated in the hall were gasping for air. Our cooling system simply wasn’t up to handling that many people. I rushed to the boiler room where the gadgets for controlling the air-conditioning were located and tried to improve the situation. Of course, I made it worse.
Finally I introduced Primrose to the audience and beat a hasty retreat. Almost at once an “important” guest tackled me with his complaints. I beat my way upstairs (those sitting on the stairs discovered they were not able to hear a thing) and after tripping over dozens of feet and crushing against uncounted bodies was confronted by a thin, long woman wearing a turban hat, who seized me and, amid this utter confusion, began telling me I was the most wonderful man alive. Her eyes were burning and every time she took a breath, she rolled her tongue across her lips. I was fascinated, but desperate. “What do you want?” I begged, willing to do virtually anything to extricate myself. “I want you to be my agent,” she said, pressing me to the wall. “I’m an author and I’ll have nothing to do with anyone but you.”
I ducked beneath her outstretched arms, trampled some people, caught my foot in the lead wire to one of the microphones, and fell heavily into the lap of one of the most attractive women I have ever seen. She fell off her chair onto the floor and I rolled on top of her. A folding chair ahead of me collapsed, and before anything could be done, a dozen lovers of music and literature lay sprawled on top of one another, while those not engaged in this chain reaction pronounced menacing “shooshes.” By the time I had righted myself, several friends had come up from the concert hall to complain about the noise upstairs.
Finally the concert ended. I was later told that William Primrose gave a brilliant performance—something to be remembered and cherished for a lifetime. I would not know. All I know is that the “most attractive woman in the world” in whose lap I landed sent me a bill for eighty dollars to replace the dress which I apparently had torn beyond reconstruction. I paid the bill.
There were other fine parties, among them one that grew out of the arrival of a play called “Mrs. McThing,” a funny, whimsical, adroit production which could be the product only of a great goodness of the heart. Helen Hayes and Jules Munshin were the stars.
I loved every minute of the play, and in addition to being entranced by Miss Hayes’ remarkable performance, thought Jules Munshin to be extraordinarily comical in his role. One of his telling lines was, “Let’s have a meeting,” no matter what the situation that provoked it. The problem might be entirely trivial, but before a decision could be made, a meeting first took place. As things do happen, the morning after the play opened in Chicago, Mr. Munshin walked into the shop along with another member of the cast. It was impossible to greet him with any other words, but, “Let’s have a meeting!” We became friends instantly, and when the play neared the end of its run, we decided there should be a farewell party for the cast. Jules asked Miss Hayes if she would come, and I was properly thrilled when she agreed.
So on closing night they all came to the bookstore, along with about thirty people Jennie and I had asked to join us. The program did not have to be planned. There was singing, reciting, story-telling. Then, quite by surprise, Miss Hayes’ colorful husband joined us. The fun really began, not only in heightened conversation, but when the MacArthurs’ daughter sat at the piano with Chet Roble and played and sang. Roble is another Chicago “original”—an artist of the blues and a superb personality and musician who has been playing over the years at Chicago hotels and night spots and always attracts a large and appreciative following. He was part of the cast of Terkel’s famous “Studs’ Place” show. He represents an almost lost art not only in his old-time jazz musicianship, but also in terms of cabaret entertainment—the performer who genuinely loves his work and his audience and who will remember ten years later the face of someone he met in a noisy night club crowd.