Part 7

It was an all-night party. I talked with Miss Hayes about Ben Hecht, who had collaborated with Charles MacArthur on “The Front Page,” which opened quite a new page for the American theatre. She agreed that Ben could talk more sense, more dramatically than any author we knew. I had had an autographing party for Ben’s book, _Child of a Century_, an autobiographical study of his life and development as a writer. We sold almost 800 copies of the book that night. Ben came with his wife and daughter and sat behind the desk with a cigar in his mouth, his eyes dreamy, his mind tending toward some distant land, but he was most affable, while repeating over and over: “I’ve never done such a thing in my whole life. And I’ve been writing for forty years!”

Later Hecht had taken me to the old haunts of the Chicago literary scene. We sat in a tavern he had frequented while working on the now defunct _Chicago Journal_. He showed me where Hemingway took boxing lessons. We went to the building where Ben had lived on the fourth floor and Hemingway on the floor beneath. It was a time not long past, yet far away and long ago.

We viewed the former locale of the Dill Pickle Club, the famous literary tavern. Ben talked to me with personal insight about Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, Maxwell Bodenheim, Covici Friede, and others, among them, some of whose fame lay in tragic ends—death by drink, suicide, or merciless twists of fate.

Not long ago, I phoned Ben at his home in Nyack, New York. Red Quinlan, the television executive, had an idea for a series of literary shows to be called, “You Can’t Go Home Again.” He had talked to me about being narrator, and I in turn had suggested Ben Hecht for the first interview.

“Ben,” I said, “this is Stuart Brent. Do you remember me?”

There was a flat, “Yes,” as though he didn’t, really.

“I’m calling to tell you,” I said, “that we have a great idea for a TV show and I want to interview you for it. It’s called....”

“I don’t want to hear it,” he said. “I don’t want a living thing to do with TV. Don’t tell me what you have to say. I don’t want to hear it.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, “you haven’t given me a chance.”

“I don’t want to give you a chance,” he said. “I have no use for TV or anybody who writes for TV. It’s worse than snaring little girls away from home.”

“You still don’t understand,” I said.

“Look mister,” he said, “I understand. I just don’t want to hear your proposition. I want nothing to do with you or television. Is that clear?”

“Wait a minute, Ben,” I said, “this is Stuart Brent from Chicago, don’t you remember?”

“Oh, Stu. Where are you calling from?”

“From Chicago.”

“Oh my God. Why did you let me run off like that? I thought you were some two for a nickel joker from a television agency. I’m sorry. How are you, baby?”

“Fine,” I said, “but I do want to talk with you about a TV series that I hope I’m going to do.”

“Sorry, baby, the answer is no. Not for any money in the world.”

“Well, how are you financially?”

“Ach, you know. Same damn thing. But I don’t care. I’m busy, killing myself with writing. I’ve got a hot book coming out soon. Be sure and get a copy. It’s really hot.”

“I wish you’d hear what I have to say. It’s really a fine idea.”

“Sorry, no. How’s the bookstore?”

So we talked of books and the time I nearly blew a gasket when Ben autographed his book, _Charlie_, at another Chicago store. He had sent me a carbon copy of his manuscript on that talented and lovable bum, Charles MacArthur, and I had told him I hoped we could raise a stir with a real party when the book came out. He agreed, having been considerably impressed with the first party we held for him. Ben was in Italy writing a movie scenario when the publication date of _Charlie_ was announced. Upon receiving a cablegram requesting a Chicago autographing party date, he wired, Yes, thinking it was to be at my bookstore. It wasn’t ... and for weeks after the event was held, nobody dared get near me.

“I’m still sorry about that mixup,” Ben said. “Well, o.k., baby, take care of yourself. When you get to New York, give me a ring and I’ll meet you for a drink at the Algonquin.”

I remembered my original purpose and tried again. “For the last time, you won’t listen to me about this TV thing?”

“Absolutely, irrevocably, no. Goodbye, Stu.”

I was left pondering about the strange and rather terrifying creature that is Ben Hecht, a wise, witty man of the world with the disarming gentleness of a tamed jungle beast. I thought again of our sentimental revisiting of Hechtian haunts ... the small tavern across from Bug House Square where Ben paced off the original setting: “In this corner was a stage, here were the tables, and there were the two chairs that belonged to Charlie and me. Here, in this corner, we wrote _The Front Page_.”

Suddenly he put down his beer and said, “Let’s take a taxi over to the campus. I want to show you where Carl Wanderer lived.”

We hadn’t traveled far before Ben changed the course and directed the cab driver to let us off near the Civic Opera building. We walked down a few stairs into another tavern and Ben stood, cigar in mouth, looking. There were a few men at the bar and the bartender, leaning on outspread arms and returning Ben’s look inquiringly.

“Have you seen John Randolph or Michael Brown or Rudy York?” Ben said.

No one there had ever heard of them.

Ben muttered under his breath. “I guess they’re all dead,” he said. “I used to work with them on the _Journal American_.”

We sat down and ordered a beer. “I think this must be the place,” he said, “but I might have it mixed up. We had good times together. We had a real ball with this character, Wanderer. Do you know the story?

“Well, Wanderer was an ex-army officer who discovered that his wife was pregnant. He didn’t want the child because he feared it would interfere with resuming his army career. He wanted to re-enlist. So he arranged for a fake holdup on Ingleside Avenue. That’s where I want to take you now.

“Anyway, he got a bum off Clark Street and gave the guy a few dollars to make this holdup, assuring him it was just a trick to be played on his wife for fun. Wanderer took his wife to the movies that night, to a theatre, if my memory is correct, called the Midway. And on their way home, they have to walk almost half a block along the side of a school yard. The streets are poorly lit, and this bum sticks a gun to Wanderer and yells, ‘This is a stick-up!’

“The bum never had a real gun. But Wanderer did. He pretended to struggle with the guy and then shot him ... turned the gun on his wife, too, and killed her instantly. Then he wiped off the gun and shoved it into the bum’s dead hand. It looked as though the robber had been resisted and somehow shot in the fight. Wanderer became a hero overnight, and the newspapers played him up for all it was worth.”

Ben and Carl Sandburg, who was then a reporter on the _Journal_, were eventually responsible for breaking the case. They went to interview the hero and came away with mutual misgivings which they confided to the police. It was a triumph worthy of _The Front Page_, but I think it was the irony of the world’s readiness for hero worship that made pricking the Wanderer balloon such a satisfying episode in the life of Ben Hecht.

In spite of all our efforts, the lectures and concerts in our downstairs room did not continue to draw indefinitely. Sometimes we couldn’t get fifty people to come out of an evening to hear good music for free (and one of the finest chamber groups in the city was providing us with a series just for the chance to play.) Saturday afternoons were idle—people seemed to have become too busy to spend time in simple conversation.

Book sales dropped, too. Price cutting hurt the psychiatric mail order business, although we held out for several years. Finally we discontinued the catalogue, in spite of its definitive value as a listing of significant books in this field.

Again, something new had to be done and done quickly. I decided to go after business and industrial accounts and to persuade them to give books instead of whiskey for Christmas presents. My successes included selling a bank 250 copies of the Columbia Encyclopedia, with the name of each recipient stamped in gold on the cover. I’m not sure this did much for the human spirit, but it helped pay the rent.

One afternoon Ben Kartman came in with a friend who had some ideas about Brent and television. They arranged an audition, I was accepted, and for almost a year I had a fifteen minute afternoon show, sandwiched between a program on nursing and one on cooking. Financially it was a disaster. I was paid scale, which at that time was $120 per week, and after I paid my union dues and my agent’s fees, most of the cost of the extra help I had to hire to cover the shop during my absences came right out of my own pocket. But I did learn this: be very careful what you sign, re-read the small print, and be sure to see your lawyer—lessons that would be helpful when television again beckoned in ways to be fully described in another chapter.

Every morning as I turned the key in the lock and entered the shop, my heart sank. Each day brought trouble, process servers, trips to the lawyer. This was what came from entering a retail business without a financial “cushion”—and especially a business that demanded a large stock: for every book I sold, I had to buy three ... three books it might take months to sell. Sometimes I could visualize the credit managers sitting down for a meeting—their agenda: Let’s Get Brent. There was nothing to do but fight it out, worry it out, dream it out.

I have said disparaging things about the publishing industry and shall say more. But it was publishers and their representatives who, in large measure, saw me through. There was Robert Fitzhenry from Harper, now some kind of an executive, then one of the top salesmen in the business. He reminded one of Hemingway’s description of Algren: watch out for him or he will kill you with a punch. At one time you’d have thought from the titles on the shelves that I was a branch store for Harper. There was Joe Reiner from Crown Publishers, one of the first to sell me books out of New York. He too has graduated into the executive category. He taught me many things about the book business, and it was he who arranged for me to buy old book fixtures from the late Dorothy Gottlieb, the vivid, marvelous proprietress of the Ambassador Bookstore.

Bennett Cerf, master showman of the industry, gave me a measure of prestige when I needed it by making me an editor, along with Jessie Stein, of the Psychiatric Division of Random House. I was able to help their list with a number of important works by Chicago analysts.

Over the years people like Ken McCormick, Michael Bessie, Pat Knopf, Jr., Ed Hodge, Richard Grossman, Gene Healy, Peter Fields, Bob Gurney, Max Meyerson, Bella Mell, Bill Fallon, and Hardwick Moseley became more than business acquaintances and left their imprint on my life as well as upon my adventures in the book world. But more about that world later.

As business improved and as the light gradually became visible through the turbid waters in which I seemed immersed, my energies became increasingly focused upon the simple matter of keeping going, the business of each day’s problems, each month’s decisions, each year’s gains. Work and living have a way of closing in around one’s being so completely that when fate strikes through this envelopment, it comes as a stunning surprise. Fate does not care for what has been the object of one’s personal concern, and it seldom sends a letter or telegram to announce its arrival.

It had been just another day. Jennie had complained of a headache and some difficulty in focusing. In the afternoon we saw a doctor and in the evening an eye specialist. Evidently it was not glaucoma. Nonetheless we administered some eye drops and some pills. I fell asleep in the living room in my chair that night and was awakened early in the morning by three small children, vaguely perturbed, dragging their blankets behind them. Jennie was dead.

Death is not saying goodbye. One can no more say goodbye to death than to a statue or a wall. There is nothing to say goodbye to. It is too natural and final to be dealt with in any of the artificial, temporizing ways with which we pretend to conduct relations with reality.

My first impulse was to run—sell the store for whatever I could get, pack up my things, and leave. Take off perhaps for the little fishing village of Bark Point on the Northern tip of Wisconsin where we had a summer place and there retire in solitude and raise the children as best I could.

It was Bob Kohrman who got me to quit trying to react to death and to just go ahead and mourn. Death has no face, is no audience, has nothing to do with reaction. It is the life of the individual that demands everything, cries out to be lived, and if mourning is a part of this, go ahead. So I stayed where I was and worked and mourned, until one day the pain of loss stopped altogether.

Michael Seller had come over to the apartment one night and talked to me. “For one thing,” he begged, “don’t let irritations and problems pile up. Resolve them from day to day. And another thing ... no matter what the cost, come home every night for supper. Never let a day or night go by without seeing your children and talking with them.”

I followed Mike’s advice to the letter. Every night I was home for dinner at six o’clock, even though I might have to leave later and return to the store. My routine was established. I ate, slept, and worked, and after store hours I gave myself to the problems that beset all parents of small children: changing diapers and being concerned over unexpected rashes and fevers in the night. I remembered Tolstoy’s answer to the question: When is a man free? A man is free when he recognizes his burden, like the ox that recognizes its yoke.

I learned that I was not alone. It was not only old friends like Claire Sampson bringing over a turkey for our dinner, or Lollie Wexler, early one wintry morning unbuttoning the hood about her blonde hair and, flushed with the cold and her own tremendous effort, saying ever so softly, “Can I help?” It was also people I scarcely knew, such as the strange man whose name I invariably forgot, but who dressed so elegantly, a stickpin in his tie, his moustache beautifully trimmed, a small flower in his lapel, and who called everybody, “Kid.” He came in now on a wet November night and bought some detective stories. To my astonishment, when I handed him the books, he began to weep. The tears were irresistible, so I looked at him and wept also. “You’re a sweet kid,” he said, strangling, and turned and left the shop.

There was Marvin Glass, a genius at toy design, devoted like Mann’s Herr Settembrini to the total encompassment of human knowledge. I almost had to hire a girl to take care of his special orders alone, dispatching telegrams, night letters, even cablegrams for books he wanted yesterday. He spoke in confidential whispers, but his expression was always so precise that you invariably found yourself watching carefully over every word you uttered in response.

There was Bert Liss, who wore the most beautiful coats I had ever seen and a fantastic series of elegant hats: a Tyrolean hat, a checkered cap, a Cossack fur hat, a dashing black homburg. Whenever he went crazy over a book, at least twenty of his friends would order a copy. But more than that, he was a gentleman, firm in his belief in the goodness of man.

Sidney Morris, the architect who helped design the interior of the shop (and never sent a bill) was there, not only to buy, but more important, whenever I needed someone to confide in. There was Oscar Getz—Oscar, in vaguely Prince Albert dress, forgetting a life of business and civic responsibility the moment he entered the world of letters. Upon encounter with ideas, his eyes lit up and his body began to quiver. There was no doubt about his ability to entrance his listeners. Once, while driving him home after an evening spent at a small café listening to gypsy music, I became so absorbed in what he was saying that I was presented with tickets for two traffic violations, one for failing to stop at a red light and another for going in the wrong direction down a one-way street.

Another scholarly business man, Philip Pinsof, came in with his brothers, Oscar and Eddie, and together they made it clear that I was being cared for. In later years I was to enjoy Sabbath dinners at the Pinsofs’—where Phil’s wife was a most gracious hostess who would seat her husband on a red pillow, as if to say, “For five days you have received the slings and arrows of the marketplace, but on Friday night you are as a king in your own home.”

George Lurie came not only to buy books but to regale me with stories, such as the episode in which he attended the board of governors meeting of a major university and was invited to sign a book in which each guest had inscribed not only his name but his alma mater. George wrote his name in the book and cryptically added H & M. The gentleman sitting next to him asked, “Harvard and what? Massachusetts Institute of Technology?” “No,” said George, “Halsted and Maxwell”—the address of Chicago’s famous and still extant open air market.

Everett Kovler, president of the Jim Beam whiskey company, made it clear to me that I could call him and say, “Everett, I need a sale.” There were times when I did, and he always replied, “Fine, send it.” Another official of the same firm, George Gabor, was also my benefactor. Through a strange twist of fate, he was able to cancel a debt that plagued me, muttering under his breath as he bought a book, “About that ... it’s all been washed out.”

While the kindness of my customers served to cheer my heart no little, my peace of mind was greatly augmented by the personal friendship and professional concern of Dr. Arthur Shafton, the kind of pediatrician who would come to the house at a moment’s notice to treat bleeding or feverish children and soothe their hysterical father, the kind of physician who views medicine as an art. Sometimes when he dropped into the shop, he would take me in hand too, suggesting, “Perhaps you ought to go home now, you look tired.”

For a brief time, I also thought I had found a gem of an office girl. She was certainly unique and physically striking: a high breasted young creature at least six feet tall who responded to instructions by taking a deep breath, blinking her grey-blue eyes, and intoning, “Will do!” Then she would wheel on her spike heels, pick up her knees with an elevation that threatened to strike her chin, and walk away, a marvel of strange symmetry. She was the most obedient employee I ever had and the tidiest. My desk was always clean as a whistle. But when the time came for the month’s billings, I could find no accounts. I rushed to Miss “Will do” in consternation. She fluttered her lashes and said, “I threw them away.” That was how she kept my desk so clean!

As Christmas approached, the consideration and generosity of my friends and customers became positively orgiastic. Ruth Weiss called and said, “I’m telling everyone I know to send books and records for Christmas,” and apparently they did so. I have never seen so many art books sold at one time as on the day Dr. Freund and his wife, Geraldine, came in. Dr. Freund kept saying, “Lovely, I must have it,” to everything I showed him, until I became thoroughly embarrassed, and still he persisted in buying more. Sidney Morris sent books to all his architect friends, and the purchases of Morry Rosenfeld were so prodigious that May Goodman, my floor manager, was left speechless. The gentle Ira Rubel spent hours making copious selections, saying quizzically of each purchase, “Do you really think this is the most suitable?” A. N. Pritzker, Jack’s brother, made one of his rare appearances, and bought records—a little classical, a little operatic, a little ballet, a little jazz, a little popular, until he had a stack three feet high which he insisted upon paying for on the spot, although we were really too busy to figure up the amount.

It went like this day after day, until my embarrassment at so much kindness, and my inability to know what to say or do about it, became almost too much. Late at night, I would lie awake thinking about all these people rallying about me. And then my embarrassment turned to humble acceptance of so much caring, so much human warmth.

9 Bark Point

Whenever I travel, one thing is certain: that I will get lost. Perhaps if I could remember which is my right hand and which is my left, or tell north from south, I should be able to follow directions more successfully. But it probably wouldn’t help. I have an unfailing knack for choosing the wrong turn and a constitutional incapacity for noticing important signs.

It was therefore not surprising that, on a summer twelve years ago, while making my way toward Canada, I turned up Bark Bay Road thinking I had found a short-cut and very nearly drove off a cliff overhanging Lake Superior. Berating myself as usual, I looked around and observed a man working in a field not far from the road. He wore a battered felt hat, a shirt open at the neck, heavy black trousers supported by suspenders, and strong boots. His eyes were sky blue and his weathered skin, brown as a nut, was creased in a myriad wrinkles on the neck and about the eyes. When I approached and asked him how to get to Canada, he replied in an accent that I could not place. His speech was rapid and somewhat harsh in tonality, but his manner was cheerful and friendly, so I paused to chat with him. He said he was preparing his strawberry field for next year.

“This is beautiful country,” I said.

“Ya, it is that,” he said.

“I wish I owned some of it,” I said. “I think I could live here for the rest of my life.”

“Well, this land belongs to me. I might sell you an acre, if you like.”

As we walked across the field toward the bay, he said, “Are you a son of Abraham?”

I had never been called anything that sounded quite so beautiful. “Yes, I am a son of Abraham,” I said proudly.

“My name is Waino,” he said. “I am a fisherman. But I own this land.”

Trees, grass, and water ... there was nothing else to be seen, except a small house covered with flowers and vines a quarter mile across a clover field. “Who lives there?” I said.

“My brother-in-law, Mike Mattson. He might sell you his house,” Waino said.

I met the Mattsons. Mike looked kindly. His eyes were grey rather than blue, but his skin was as deeply brown as Waino’s, with as many crinkles about the eyes. Waino’s sister, Fanny, wore a kerchief about her head, tied with a small knot beneath her chin. She spoke little English and our business transaction was often interrupted while Mike translated for her in Finnish.

I bought the house and an acre of ground. The house had only two small rooms, no running water, no toilet. This didn’t matter. Like the room that originally housed the Seven Stairs, _I wanted it_. I had the identical feeling: no matter what the cost, or how great the effort and sacrifice that might be entailed, this place must be mine. My soul stirred with nameless wonder. I felt lifted into the air, my life charged with new purpose and meaning. I put down one hundred dollars as earnest money, arranged a contract for monthly payments, and became a part of Bark Point.