The Dick Gibson Show (29 page)

“Will I be good, do you think?”

“Perfect.”

“Do you really think so?”

“I have every confidence.” We laughed together at the word.

“Still,” he said, “I’m a naturally clumsy man, Miss Steep. My smoothness is only a veneer. Just tonight, getting off the bus to come here, I tripped and almost fell.”

“An accident.”

“Yes, but suppose I do something like that when I’m onstage?”

“Onstage, Arnold, you’ll be magnificent. You move like a dancer.”

“On
our
stages. Bare floors, familiar terrain, tamed place.”

“Anywhere. Everywhere.”

“Do you really think so?”

“Arnold, I’d like to see one last performance.”

“Oh?”

“A final dress rehearsal.”

“But it’s not here I’m worried about. This”—he gestured about him— “this is like singing in the bathtub.”

“I don’t mean here.”

“You don’t?”

“The staircase.”

“The
winding
staircase?”

“Yes.”

“The whole act?”

“Yes.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Tonight. Now.”

“But I—”

“Come.”

We went to the high room where the staircase wound its wide barber’s spiral to within six feet of the ceiling. Standing at the bottom and shading his eyes, Arnold leaned his head back and looked up to the top step. “Go on,” I said. He glanced at me for a moment and began to move up the stairs, at first holding on to the rail, then letting it go. “Ladies and gentlemen,” I announced, “it’s with great pleasure and pride that we now present one of the most amazing performers in the world. The man you are about to see isn’t an actor, for an actor, properly speaking, is one whose dramas are inflexible and fixed. There is nothing inflexible and fixed about the drama you will now witness. Nor do I now introduce a man who is a mere adept in some unvarying physical routine which, though impossible for average muscles and ordinary limbs, is simply the product of repetitive exercise. Like the actor, however, and like the acrobat as well, he is about to face an extraordinary challenge—a challenge which each of us sitting here tonight faces daily. Ah, but we
fail.
This man won’t. It is a challenge of getting and a challenge of having, of keeping and possessing—of reach and embrace itself. For he pits himself not as the stand-in actor against the poet’s contrived pressures, nor as the proven tumbler against a previously conquered gravity, but as the one man in the world against—simply—
everything!
To have it all at once, easier than Atlas, bearing all the awful tonnage of impression—the juggler of the living world …”

Yes, Dick Gibson thought, yes. Yes.

P
EPPER
S
TEEP
: “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you …
the one and only Arnold Menchman!”

Arnold stood on the top step, less than an inch between the ceiling and his head. He seemed colossal. He poised there for a moment. His hands—
his hands were in his pockets!
He looked directly at me. Then he closed his eyes, removed a hand from his jacket pocket and put it across his eyelids in a gesture I thought we had agreed to abandon.

“There are thirty-seven steps in this staircase,” he said softly, “one hundred and eleven balusters. The stairs are covered by an Oriental-type carpeting about four feet wide. Seven basic colors predominate. In the descending order of their quantitative representation they are: red, dark blue, light blue, rose, white, grayish green and black.

“Pick a number from one to thirty-seven, from one to one hundred and eleven.”

I didn’t say anything because I didn’t know that he meant me to. In the past he had often repeated something he pretended had been called up from the audience.

“A number from one to thirty-seven, please. From one to one hundred eleven. I’m waiting.”

“Fourteen, Arnold.”

“Fourteen, good. From one to one hundred and eleven. If you will, madam.”

“Eighty-three.”

“Eighty-three, excellent. Fourteen would be the fourteenth stair, balusters forty, forty-one and forty-two. Eighty-three would be the eighty-third baluster, or the highest baluster on the twenty- seventh stair. Choose right or choose left, madam.”

“Left.”

“My left or yours?”

“Your left, Arnold.”

“Thank you, madam. By the fortieth baluster—
my
left—you will find a rose-tinted curvilinear intersected at three angles by wormlike tendrils of grayish green, the tendrils given a slight suggestion of depth by being outlined on their right sides in a thin black. By the forty-first baluster—my left—you will have a small white snowflake shape sketched within a just larger but less rigid version of itself done in light blue. The forty-second baluster on my left is a simple run of red interrupted by four narrow, thrusting fingers of dark blue. You will have to check this information for yourself, madam, for you will of course have noticed that my eyes are shut!”

“That’s marvelous, Arnold. You’ve memorized the Oriental rug!”

“Am I
correct,
madam?”

“Bravo, Arnold. Bravo. The ninetieth baluster. My right.”

“A light blue bell.”

“The fifty-second.
Your
right.”

“A breast. White. A rose nipple.” He opened his eyes.
“Oh, Pepper,”
he said. He ducked his head shyly for a moment and then looked at me. Then he came down the stairs, his body sinking out of sight each time the stairway turned and reappearing as it opened out, his gaze still locked in mine. At the eighth step he spoke. “Oh Pepper,” he said again, reaching his hands out to me. “I’m so pleased.” At the bottom step he took my hands and held them.

“You were grand, Arnold,” I said. I had to look away.

“What is it?”

“Nothing. You were superb, immense.”

“No, please. What?”

“Nothing, Arnold. I’m being a little selfish.”

“You, Pepper? Oh, no.”

I tried to smile. “Well, you don’t need me any more—you know that, don’t you? Your performance just now. Even the way you came down those stairs, you could have been Fred Astaire. You just graduated from the Charm School.”

“Pepper, don’t talk like this.”

“No, really. Fred Astaire himself. You don’t need me any more.”

“I wanted to be good for you.”

“Well, you were. Very good.”

“Pepper?”

“What is it, Arnold?”

“Will you be my … manager?”

”I don’t know anything about managing anybody, Arnold.”

“Well, I don’t either. I need to be managed.”

I didn’t argue. I was honored that he’d asked me, and it must be pretty clear by now that we were in love.

B
ERNIE
P
ERK
: This is the darndest program.

P
EPPER
S
TEEP
: You have to understand something. I had been a model. A model—a glamour girl. You’ve seen our outlandish postures in the ads, our arrogance of shoulders and our hips off plumb. You’ve seen us standing on the public monuments and barefoot in cathedrals and lying in our spread gold hair on beds. Have
you
been so cool in jungles or had such bearing among the bearers? You’ve seen our faces, the mouths we make, like people photographed speaking French. Our eyes those of queens and courtesans. What persuades has never been your innocence or virginity. Contempt and scorn, disdain and contumely, and experience in the hatbag with the cosmetics and conditioners. But in bed less than waitresses, less than office girls or schoolteachers, so virgins of a sort still, drivers of harder bargains than those others. And anyway there are just not that many bigshots to go around.

So, I had been a glamour girl. I forgot to tell you—at one point I was a Goldwyn Girl. Do you know what it cost to feed and liquor me in those days? Four hundred dollars a week, and often more. I’m talking about
glamour,
I’m talking about being waved in ahead of the people in nightclubs behind those velvet ropes like a plush corral, about the high cost of living at Trocadero and Bill Miller’s Riviera and 21. Nothing’s a quarter at the Latin Quarter.

So, I’ll be frank, I had had men. Do you know something? Most of the men one sleeps with are called Jimmy, or Coco, or Johnny, or Chuck: glamour boys with yellow hair, big spenders on a first name basis not just with the maître d’, but with the kid in the parking lot as well. The tall and the fit—good crawlers, every mother’s son of them. To the victors belong the spoiled. But never an Arnold, not one, not once. Even at the end, at the time of his triumph on my staircase, Arnold might have played in nightclubs but couldn’t have gotten a good table in one. He was doomed to wait for his car in parking lots, to be seated behind the pillars in theaters, to read in barber shops while men without appointments took the chair ahead of him. And it wasn’t as if Arnold didn’t mind. He minded. Often, perhaps, there was murder in his heart, but what could he do? If you’re not born with prerogative you never have it. What could he do? Recite by heart the
New York Times,
or call off, down to the last item in column four, a thousand menus from a thousand Chinese restaurants?

We won’t talk of what I felt now, but of what I meant to Arnold. Imagine what it must have been like for him to have me, a Goldwyn Girl! Never mind that he was served last again, or that I was already a decade past my prime. He loved and desired me more than any man had ever loved and desired me even when I was still really something.

B
ERNIE
P
ERK
: I never knew she was a Goldwyn Girl. I remember those girls from the musicals. They were terrific.

P
EPPER
S
TEEP
: So …
two
things had happened. We were in love, and Arnold was ready to go into show business. I still had one or two contacts in New York and we agreed that I should go down and see what could be done about getting Arnold work. Of course we both knew that once he started getting some dates we wouldn’t be seeing each other as much as before. I couldn’t leave the Charm School, and naturally Arnold would have to go where his bookings took him.

I allowed myself a week to get him some engagements. I was very lucky. Inside of four days I had him booked in three spots—one of them a two-week run in an important lounge in Las Vegas. When I came back and told Arnold of our good fortune I expected him to be overjoyed, but instead he seemed worried, and I noticed that he avoided looking at me.

“That’s just butterflies, Arnold. All performers have them. You’ll be fine … You do understand why I won’t be able to go with you?”

“I guess so,” he said.

“Well, then. I think we’d better get started. We’ve got a lot of rehearsing to do. Your first date is just three weeks off.”

“Would you mind, Pepper, if I worked the routines out on my own in Springfield?”

“No, Arnold, of course not.”

“If you’re not going to be there with me, maybe it’s a good idea to get used to performing by myself.”

“Certainly, Arnold. If that’s what you want.” I sounded wounded, I suppose, but frankly I saw his point, and besides, I’d been neglecting the Charm School since I started working with Arnold.

His first booking was a club date at a convention in Atlantic City. At the last minute I decided to take time off and go down with him, but when I told him he said I’d just make him more nervous than he already was. He had to do it on his own, he said. I made him promise to call me just as soon as he got offstage, and I sent him a good-luck telegram at the hotel where he was to appear.