by Donald Dewey
Louie Sad was born in Lebanon as the
Maronite Christian Elias Saad. Brought to Brooklyn Heights as a child, he was
transformed by neighbors and school companions (and later by others who had
once gone to school) into the Syrian Moslem Louie Sad who must have had an
ethnic in with Ali Baba, Omar Sharif, and the swarthy brothers who supplied the
beer kegs for the annual Arab street festival on Atlantic Avenue. Louie seldom
disabused people of their preconceptions and misconceptions. A shy man waiting
to hear something funny and with a raspy, hyena-like laugh at the ready to
reward it, he often conveyed a sense of being on their territory, with
their ignorance about nationalities and religions part of a small but necessary
admission tax. Even on the corruption of his name, he smiled to me once and for
good that “Elias sounds Greek and I’m no Greek.”
Which was one of the few things Louie
wasn’t at one time or another. When he wasn’t whatever burnoused camel driver
lived in the minds of others, he was qualifying for all the jobs listed in the Daily
News want ads. There were several years in a ticket office where he
came to appreciate which theatrical producers had discovered the magic formula
for a hit and which ones left him trying to hustle twofers before the final
curtain dropped. There was another period when he did something on Wall Street,
though he always kept it vague about whether he was running Merrill Lynch or an
elevator car in the Merrill Lynch building. What stood out for me was his job
in a factory that made those big wheel pretzels that eliminated the need for any
other meal on the day. Louie’s task at the plant was monitoring the
infinitesimal dosage of lye dropped into every pretzel for preservation
purposes. His tales of other monitors who got into distracting arguments about
a previous night’s ballgame and had to be switched to other responsibilities
because they had allowed too much salted acid to proceed down conveyor belts
and out to street carts always provoked hilarity—and resolutions to stick to
hot dogs from sidewalk peddlers.
When he wasn’t working or looking for
work, Louie was satisfying his addiction to show business. There was the show
business of the downtown Brooklyn movies he checked out as rigorously as the
theater bookers, the show business of the television programs he asterisked in TV
Guide for appointments, and the show business of the Broadway producers
whose tickets he sold and (when it was twofer time) whose productions he
personally reviewed in the spirit of attending a wake for someone he hadn’t
known in life. But as much as in the celebrities he watched from a distance or
read about when they were marrying, divorcing, or slugging photographers, he
was also immersed in the closer show business of some neighborhood actor who
had just played a corpse in a New York movie or of an electrician who was
working backstage on the latest Shubert Alley musical. For Louie these tenants
across the hall or fellow bar patrons were equal to famous actors and singers
in their place in the glittery commotion he savored as a daily high. He could
be as gratified by gossip about E.G. Marshall as about Barbra Streisand, and
behaved as circumspectly as a CIA agent when he passed it along to another
party.
Well into his fifties, Louie squeaked
one of his hyena laughs at the idea of a show business career of his own, never
having hatched grandiose ambitions from selling his theater tickets or from
singing along late at night in piano bars. That too was their turf. But
then Lorna came along. Lorna was a tall, stately brunette 15 years younger than
Louie and with thick makeup bent on making it look 25. She might not have been
royalty, but she never sat down without fanning her skirt to mark a wide
boundary from her subjects, the way the queens played by Deborah Kerr in MGM
movies once did. During the day Lorna worked as a secretary in the
rectory of a Catholic church; afterwards and on weekends she took the voice
lessons she had been taking since a teenager, clinging to the thought of being
discovered one day by an agent or producer who would launch her professional career.
Her only conspicuous public performing over the years had been with her church
choir on Sundays, when parishioners never had to raise their eyes to know Lorna
was in the loft. Once she released her educated soprano, not only the other
choir members, but the priest on the altar knew better than to intrude upon a
star turn. The rituals could be observed any time; as the filled pews (and
substantial basket collections) demonstrated every week, Lorna reduced the
sermons to a bill filler. Mahalia Jackson would have understood.
Having all but converted to Roman
Catholicism to hear Lorna, Louie needed little incentive to talk up her talents
with anyone who had ever ridden in the same subway car with an agent or
producer. Since I had been in a couple of those subway cars, my wife and I were
invited fairly regularly to go out with Louie and keep up Lorna’s spirits about
eventually finding the maestro who would take her career in hand. In fact,
Lorna didn’t need me or anyone else to keep up her spirits. She had already
completed a thorough analysis of her hopes and requirements, concluding that
she still had reason to get out of bed every morning with bigger dreams than
alerting a priest to a telephone plea for the last rites.
In the hope category, there was Lorna’s
endless list of singers, actors, composers, comedians, painters, and sculptors
who hadn’t achieved their breakthrough until they were older than Louie. Anyone
who had met Lorna and didn’t come away knowing that Giuseppe Verdi had composed
Falstaff when he was 79 or that Richard Strauss had waited until his 80s
to write his most beautiful Lieder hadn’t been paying attention. What
did any of that have to do with the actual singing of Verdi or Strauss? Lorna
was amazed you had to ask. What she was even more baffled by, though, was
questioning the one and only restriction she had put on her eventual stardom—that
she could not stay away from Brooklyn Heights for any length of time, leaving
her widowed mother to fend for herself. When had her father died? Twenty years
ago. Was her mother ill? No, she smoked too much but was in the best of health
and still worked for Con Edison. So what was the problem? See, that was why the
question puzzled her. The problem should have been obvious.
Louie tried his best to pretend it was,
too—and then to move on to the less obvious as fast as he could. If Lorna had a
warehouse of stories about artists breaking through at 75, he had another
deposit of them about mothers who blunted the yearnings of their children,
mothers who had always wanted their children to succeed in show business, and
mothers who didn’t like being used as excuses for the behavior of their
children. He was particularly careful holding forth on this last group, of
course, voicing his own bewilderment when Lorna suspected he was referring to
her. Nothing of the kind, he reassured her, then went on to entangle himself in
a Louie Sad Rule about the map miles that would amount to abandoning a parent
and the distance that fell short of that crime. More than once, this prompted
debates about whether, say, a one-week engagement in Philadelphia was
practically farther from Brooklyn than, say, a two-night stand in St. Louis.
Mostly, these discussions wound down to two important points of agreement: that
it depended on whether a train, plane, or automobile was moving Lorna back and
forth and that it wasn’t worth getting upset about anyway until she received an
invitation to go to either place.
Off by himself, however, Louie was getting
upset with these futile calculations, and confided to me that he had taken a
step toward acting as Lorna’s agent. Instead of grabbing a sandwich on his
lunch hours at the pretzel factory, he began canvassing nearby community halls
and theaters to see what it would cost to mount an evening of Lorna and her
songs. The numbers that came back to him were not encouraging, they were
certainly nothing he could afford, and that was without even approaching a
performing palace like BAM to get an estimate. “There’s more involved than the
rental of the space,” he moaned. “You’d have to pay at least a piano player.
Then there’s the lighting guy and the sound guy and probably a couple of
ushers. And you can’t do a thing like this without a program. You know how much
these printers want for just a single piece of paper? It doesn‘t have to be
colored paper, either. Just the plain white.”
There was good and bad in Lorna finding
out about Louie’s lunch hour soundings. The good was in their relationship,
which advanced to her hanging on to his arm and pecking his cheek in public,
announcing that she believed in him as much as he did in her, whatever the
calendar or her makeup said. The bad was in her nudges about why he hadn’t
tried this or that place for her recital—an admission she had been going
through the Yellow Pages on her own and a veiled accusation of negligence he
sought to correct as soon as another lunch hour bell rang. Somewhere in the
middle was the reluctant decision to look for a hall further afield than
Brooklyn Heights, all the way out to Park Slope and Sunset Park, if necessary.
And when you came right down to it, wasn’t even Bay Ridge at the far end of
Brooklyn closer than both Philadelphia and St. Louis?
Louie soldiered on in his search until
it seemed everyone in Brooklyn knew that finding a recital hall for Lorna had
become as improbable as talking the Dodgers back from Los Angeles. Then one
evening, while waiting at a restaurant bar for Lorna, he ran into an actor who
had been hired as a ringer for one of the Lighthouse for the Blind’s occasional
presentations of popular musicals. Although the Lighthouse prided itself on
giving leads to blind actors, singers, and dancers (the raison d‘etre for
the undertaking), it also dropped in a sighted ringer or two—usually as members
of the chorus or walk-ons who had some barking dialogue moment—to serve as
guides for intricate stage movements. But in the case of the Guys and Dolls
then in rehearsal, the actor informed Louie, the whole production was in
jeopardy because the blind singer cast for the role of Adelaide had been forced
to quit and no replacement could be found. Against Lighthouse intentions, the
director was desperate enough to take on a singer-actress who could see.
Louie told the actor not to worry and to
alert the director his new Adelaide would be giving him a call in the morning.
He had a harder time persuading Lorna not to worry. Yes, she was familiar with
the Guys and Dolls score, and yes, she considered herself capable of
learning dance steps, and God knew, she had memorized enough opera roles to
handle lines. But she had never planned on performing with a cast of blind
people. To Louie’s objection that few people ever had, Lorna retreated to the
more worn excuses of her schedule at the rectory, the awkwardness of replacing
somebody in the middle of rehearsals, and her preference for bel canto
to popular musicals. As Louie would insist later, it was Lorna’s own acute ear
that finally heard all these evasive notes and led her to agreeing to see the
director.
Lorna’s reverberating audition rendition
of “Adelaide’s Lament” swept away any lingering reservations by the director
about taking on a sighted person. As soon as that was settled, the elated Louie
started rounding up more commitments for attendance than he ever had for Rogers
and Hammerstein from his ticket office. His joke was that he was twisting more
arms at his factory than his co-workers were twisting pretzels. As for Lorna,
she developed new worries—not about performing with blind co-stars, but about
what she detected as the waning strength of her voice during rehearsals because
of trying to keep up with the firm baritone of the actor playing Nathan
Detroit. It took a concerted effort by Louie and growingly irritated parish
priests to convince her she would worry a lot less if she didn’t spend just
about every minute of every day—at home, at work, in restaurants—singing
“Adelaide’s Lament” to whatever walls were around her.
There might have been bigger opening
nights for a Lighthouse show, but nobody remembered when. When Louie wasn’t
glowing over the numerous familiar faces he greeted at the entrance, he was
beaming over the scores of arrivals who hadn’t required his personal urging to
spend their evening with Lorna. His enthusiasm dipped only when Bessie, Lorna’s
mother, swaggered up. Most of Bessie’s long, straight gray hair draped down to
cover her face; the rest of it made for a façade of bangs copied from beauty
parlor photos; all of it was endangered by her tic of constantly tugging at the
ends with a Lucky Strike between her yellowed fingers. Bessie might not have
actually sipped anything stronger than tea for decades, but she carried herself
as if shaking off a leg cramp after rising from a bar stool. “This your idea?”
She greeted Louie with a Lucky Strike voice that made his rasp sound like a
trill. “You break my Lorna’s heart, I’ll break something of yours.”
Louie tried to think that was funny, and
kept his eyes on her as she negotiated the front door with a final siss at
having to toss away her half-smoked cigarette. “She doesn’t like me much,” he
said.
By the time the imposing-sized orchestra
from local schools went into the overture, a couple of hundred people had
filled the folding chairs rowed before a high stage. The fact that most of them
were relatives and friends of the performers didn’t dilute the objectivity of
their attention so much as strengthen the formality of what was being presented
to them from the elaborate sets. Whatever the professional or physical
limitations of the players, the traditional gulf between entertainers and
audience was quickly in place. Halfway into the first scene, there was little
patronizing of the blind in the air. The songs and dances were succeeding or
failing only on their execution, and the script didn’t call for any pratfalls.
Bessie didn’t hear any of the sour notes
or flubbed lines because she had made sure to plant herself on an aisle seat
from which she could get outside for a cigarette break whenever Lorna went
offstage. She seemed to have committed the score to memory as scrupulously as
any cast member because she timed her returns perfectly to Lorna’s entrances.
When a house manager standing in the back suggested she stop coming and going
and disturbing the rest of the audience, Bessie separated herself from the play’s
Salvation Army characters with her gravelly roar to “go screw yourself.”
But the main reason Bessie didn’t hear
any of the sour notes was that Lorna, for one, didn’t hit any. Just as in the
choir loft every Sunday, she swooped down on the golden oldies and shook them
with such vibrant force that they didn’t dare not gleam again. When she told
Nathan Detroit to “Take Back Your Mink,” he had to be forgiven for thinking it
was an order to reanimate the animals that had gone into the coat. The one
juncture at which the peculiar sponsor of the evening came to the fore was
during a dance when Lorna was outfitted in more beads than solid cloth and she
flaunted long legs that had no need of makeup. Behind the smile that had been
on his face since her opening number, Louie cast suspicious glances around to
reassure himself much of the audience couldn’t see what he wasn’t all that
eager about anyone besides himself seeing. He might have been more certain of
it if her drum-aided bumps and wiggles didn’t bring loud, hoarse laughter from
Bessie at the end of his row.
The repeated surges of applause at the
end of the show only confirmed what had been evident for a couple of hours:
Nobody had missed anything by not spending the evening across the river in some
Times Square theater. Back to his shepherding role, Louie led more than a dozen
people to a restaurant where he had reserved three tables. The one touch too
much was in having transparently indifferent but rehearsed waiters clap as
Lorna entered, but it didn’t bother her and she immediately kissed her
agent-producer for his part in her triumph. Only Bessie blew smoke on the
moment as she peered out from her hair in wonder that she hadn’t been brought
to a better place.
The food and wine went on for hours.
Lorna volunteered a couple of choruses for nearby diners who wanted to know
what was being celebrated, Bessie volunteered a couple of hacking coughs when
the pretzel salter next to her asked if she was related to Lorna. Louie didn’t
have to wait for somebody to say something funny to laugh since just about
everyone did. And then, over the sixth or seventh toast, Lorna stood up to
thank everyone for being part of “the happiest night I’ll ever have singing.”
Louie jumped up to top her, to predict there would be many more such evenings,
but she cut him off with a long kiss, this time on the lips. He didn’t know if
he was more flummoxed by the kiss or the tears in her eyes. “Sit down, Louie,”
Bessie croaked from across the table. “You’re rockin’ the boat.”
Bessie liked herself for the reference
to another of the show’s tunes, and several people at the table laughed with
her. Louie turned pale as Lorna sat down away from him. He knew he was rocking
the boat, too. It still wasn’t his turf.
Donald Dewey has
published 37 books of fiction, nonfiction, and drama for such houses as Little,
Brown, HarperCollins, and St. Martin's Press. His latest books, both published
in 2014, are the biography Lee J. Cobb:
Characters of an Actor and the novel The
Bolivian Sailor.
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