JACK ENGELHARD:The Days of the Bitter End Recaptures the 1960s As no Other Historical Novel
http://www.dayraypress.com/BEch21preview.htmlPreview of Chapter 21
from The Days of the Bitter End
Cliff was zipping along and only those who knew him recognized the absence of enthusiasm in his sketches. He was going through the motions, faking it, phoning it in, according to the show biz slang. The people did not know that they were getting but half a John Kennedy and half a Cliff Harris. As long as he kept up the Kennedyesque patter accompanied by the Kennedy mannerisms and the Kennedy vocal inflections – as long as he did all that they were satisfied; thrilled, actually.
The skit where he’s serenading “Jackie” on her birthday with his rendition of the ditty “Roses are Red” drew wails of laughter. Adopting the Kennedyesque plainsong monotone, Cliff proceeded with, “Roses-are-ah red-ah, violets are-ah blue, sugah is-ah sweet my-ya love, and-ah, show are you. Now let us go fo-wawd and-ah blow out the-ah candles.” That was the show stopper; but then, everything was. “No Bobby (the president’s brother and attorney general who was even younger and younger-looking than Jack and thus the object of raillery about still being so wet behind the ears), you can’t lick-ah icing off the-ah cake.”
The mask, however, would soon be coming off, if all went according to plan, as Cliff was preparing to surprise them by switching to that sick routine, the sick shtick, that had Kennedy trading missiles with Khrushchev, Kennedy almost gladly offering up American cities for annihilation.
Wipe out Philadelphia? Why not? They’re all Negros! San Francisco? Take it Nikita. They’re all queers. Lenny Bruce material – only many perilous steps ahead. In other words he was going to zing them with a grotesque Kennedy and thus, in his view, awaken them from their slumber.
Forget the beatific stuff; here comes the ugly truth. Not necessarily the truth about Kennedy, but the truth about themselves, ourselves, that other America, the Nixon America that was slouching in the wings.
Cliff’s intention – and his intentions were well-meant – was to hold up a mirror that reflected an America with all its blemishes. The roundtable at McSorely’s had actually dis-suaded him from going ahead with the plan, he was fully prepared to drop it, but then he saw them out there and was provoked.
This was the time to reveal himself as Cliff Harris, a Cliff Harris with a message, a Cliff Harris with a prophecy. The prophecy being that given the right moment, the right leader, or rather the wrong moment, the wrong leader, we are all vulnerable to thuggery and bestiality. The line between civility and barbarism was as fragile as the frail gap between Beethoven and Hitler.
(Lest we forget Salem and McCarthyism and what we did to the Indians.)
Cliff did not have to go far to discover the ugliness that was percolating in all of us. He only had to look inside him-self. He did not like what he saw. Since it was true, according to the wisdom of the fathers, that each individual is an entire universe, therefore he, Cliff Harris, was no better and no worse than the rest, and when he was good, that is, when he was Kennedy, he was very good, and when he was bad, that is, when he was himself and raging under the influence of alcohol or perceived injustice, he was very bad.
So it was not much of a philosophical leap for Cliff to jump from the specific to the general as a judgment of human nature.
First to provoke him this afternoon were the cameras he saw out there from the three major networks, their lights and their scampering up and down the aisles distracting him and breaking his rhythm. Time and again he had warned Gloria MacKenzie and Nate Beloff that he’d never go on if the cameras showed up.
But here they were, no doubt because his “Thank You, Mr. President” album had shot to the top of the charts and thus Cliff Harris was no longer merely entertainment; he was news!
He had always been news but never more so than this moment and when the networks came calling, neither Nate or Gloria or a team of elephants could stop them – not TV. There was no stopping TV. TV was the elephant.
As if the cameras weren’t enough, out there mixed among Mr. and Mrs. America were the damned Soviets, the KGB, who tried to blend in but stuck out like corpses among the living for being so stiff and uncoordinated.
Cliff counted four of them monitoring him this after-noon and it did not take much to spot them.
They were the ones who did not laugh. Or laughed at the wrong times. As always, they were here for inside information, under the delusion that he, Cliff, had a pipeline to the White House.
So wherever Cliff went, they were sure to go. When first sighting them, after the Bay of Pigs, tensions high, Cliff was spooked. Then after Kennedy and Khrushchev had a flare-up in Vienna, Kennedy returning a chastened man, Cliff was merely indulgent.
Now he came to expect them and was almost glad to see them. It meant he was still hot, as was Kennedy, as was everything from the Berlin Wall, to the Soviet’s playing the China card (which concerned the United States), to America’s increasing involvement in Vietnam (which con-cerned the Soviet Union).
They followed Cliff from crisis to crisis and maybe, Cliff figured, they wanted to be recognized as a reminder to Cliff and to the president himself that Khrushchev was listening.
Khrushchev was listening all right and didn’t get the joke. What joke? The Cold War was at its height. Despite the East-West treaty banning atomic testing everywhere but underground, the world was a jittery place, fretful that the leaders of the two Great Powers might arrive at a misunderstanding that could wipe out the world.
So while gallows humor was partly acceptable, personal insults were seen as grave and dire affronts.
The KGB boys out there taking notes squirmed each time Cliff let out a zinger that touched their leader.
On being informed that jokes were being told in America at his expense, gags about his being corpulent and boorish, Khrushchev was livid. He sent letters not to Cliff but directly to the White House warning the president that such levity could come with a price. Such personal attacks were reckless. Especially wisecracks that involved his wife. These “jokes” were not only tasteless but an affront to Russian womanhood as a whole.
These jokes – coming from the president’s look-alike and sound-alike – could lead to war!
Letters were sent back to the effect that, to begin with, the jokes were not Kennedy’s. They came from an enter-tainer, a comedian who made his livelihood by impersonat-ing the president. Secondly, in the United States there was a thing called FREEDOM OF SPEECH, which prevented even the president from muzzling a citizen.
What’s more, Dear Mr. Khrushchev, contrary to the prevailing belief, here and abroad, this impersonator Cliff Harris does not speak for the president. His scripts are all his own and are not, Mr. Khrushchev, sanctioned by the White House.
Lies! said Khrushchev. Why in his country jokes had to be approved in advance. Never mind freedom of speech. We’re talking the bogus cry of fire in a crowded theater.
As an aside from one world leader to another, Khrushchev declared that never would he, Khrushchev, allow himself to be so caricatured by a so-called impersonator, and even if he relented concerning his own person, he would forbid any such performer from engaging in ridicule against the President of the United States, given these troubled times and the skittishness between the two Great Powers.
He certainly would forbid any such diatribes against the lovely First Lady of America. In the Soviet Union, Khrushchev continued, humor was the sugar-coated face of truth, therefore it stood to reason that this “humor” forthcoming from Cliff Harris was really a reflection of the president’s personal views – and this was insulting and very dangerous.
When the hotline was hooked up between Washington and Moscow, Khrushchev took to the phone 11 frenetic times within a period of eight months to complain about Cliff Harris’ ongoing insolence.
Kennedy laughed. He swore that he could do nothing to stop his copycat. Kennedy being Kennedy, he even hinted that he was amused by Cliff and did not mind being the ob-ject of harmless levity and sport.
But even the president did not have the final word – even in his own backyard there were spooks, which consisted of the FBI and the CIA, two organizations that were about as lighthearted as the KGB.
Agents from the FBI, and CIA, and the Secret Service were likewise on Cliff’s trail. They were also here today. On reading the briefs, Kennedy was said to howl at Cliff’s gags, and along the same reasoning he seldom missed a Cliff Harris performance on the Ed Sullivan show. There was a rumor that he planned to visit the Café Muse to catch a personal glimpse of his much-celebrated and much-maligned impersonator. That came close to happening the week before when Kennedy was in town and only blocks away from Greenwich Village.
That word had some validity, but another rumor, entirely implausible, had it that Kennedy had opted to postpone his visit to Dallas, since he had no appetite for Democratic infighting, and had instead proposed a visit to the Café Muse for this very Friday, November 22. That would all come out later as specious backtracking and second guessing, yet talk of conspiracies and prophesies of assassination were quite legitimate and real. A month earlier, in October, the esteemed Arthur Knock of The New York Times intimated that President Kennedy’s life was at risk and that if an assassination attempt were to take place, it would be the work of the CIA. Knock reported that he got that information from a high government source. Knock and Kennedy were close friends, often had lunch together, and it has been suggested that Knock’s unnamed source was the president himself.
Once in a while these spooks came out of the shadows and approached Cliff directly. Cordially, they represented themselves as members of the Administration and asked Cliff if he could tone down his remarks about leaders overseas.
Hey, we don’t care how you portray the president, they said.
The president can take a joke. He enjoys a good laugh. He thinks you’re a riot. But those guys, you know, like Khrushchev, hell, they take this stuff seriously.
So did Cliff, except that he objected to being the target of so much fantasy. He had every right to be paranoid and even gloomily remarked that one time at the Hip Bagel – “one false move and I start World War fucking Three!”
As if being hounded from both sides weren’t enough, he was once approached to turn traitor! Inferences – said this garlic-smelling character – can be drawn that you are critical of the United States and its president, Mr. Harris. If you would take your act to Moscow and speak out against capitalism and the undeniable rise of communism, you will be accorded the laurels of a hero. “Who the fuck sent you?” Cliff said, escorting the man by the collar. “Has to be Lenny!”
No it wasn’t Lenny, but on the business of being hound-ed by all manner of fuzz, Cliff and Lenny were partners.
Lenny Bruce had confided to Cliff that sometimes it got so bad that when he peered beyond the footlights of the Café Au Go Go he imagined nothing but fuzz out there in the audience. (This was not always his imagination.) Cliff knew the feeling, and he even knew the fact. During the night of a blizzard in 1962 nobody showed up at the Café Muse, nobody except the spooks, and that night he was indeed performing for an audience of fuzz.
So the spooks were here again this afternoon, but where was Lenny? Cliff eyed the tables one by one. No signs of his idol and that too was a distraction; yet another reason his delivery was going out so flat – so flat that he could hear his own voice, a sure sign, to him, that he was bombing. They were laughing, but he was bombing.
Lenny was an inspiration and only Lenny’s approval counted. Lenny had the guts to say “nigger, wop, spic” up there on stage as a means to diminish the power of those vulgarities. Say those words often enough, Lenny proclaimed, and they lose their wallop.
Only Lenny had such guts, and it was Lenny who had accused Cliff of being so “fakate mainstream,” doling out chewing gum for the brain to docile college students and Kennedy-starved burghers. While he, Cliff, kept cranking out the same harmless send-ups about the Peace Corps, Lenny was out there, like this:
“You know what a Jew is; one who killed our Lord. We did it two thousand years ago, and there should be a statute of limitations for that crime. Why should we Jews pay these dues? Granted we killed him and he was a nice guy; although there was even some talk that we didn’t kill Christ, we killed the one on the left. But I confess that we killed him, despite those who said that Roman soldiers did it.
“Yes we did. My family. I found a note in my basement: ‘We killed him – signed Morty.’”
Lenny Bruce was a Jew who asked that Christians and Jews for once act like Christ, and for that reason, he told Cliff, he was going to dedicate his autobiography to Christ (which he did) as follows: I dedicate this book to all the followers of Christ and his teaching; in particular to a true Christian – Jimmy Hoffa – because he hired ex-convicts as, I assume, Christ would have.
Lenny named his work-in-progress autobiography “How to Talk Dirty and Influence People,” and he refused Cliff’s help in providing a goyishe perspective on the grounds that Cliff had talent but no soul. That stung.
Soul! That’s what Cliff was preparing to give the people this afternoon soon after he satisfied their lust for Camelot, and it was only a matter of what to start with – the women who chased Cliff and demanded the golden shower so that they could say that the “president” had pissed on them? The women who asked to be whipped by the “president?”
Or what about the woman who claimed that she had had a longstanding adulterous affair with the president and was jilted not by Jack, but by the president’s father, Joe, who gave her half a million dollars to disappear. She took the money and where did she run? To Cliff Harris. On the rebound she wanted Cliff as the next best thing. He declined, of course. Not only was this perverse, but traitorous. But she was here for his every performance – even today – gazing at Cliff through eyes of hurtful longing. What did that say?
These were no whores who made those advances, but Main Street, middle American women, who proved that it wasn’t all Ozzie and Harriet out there from sea to shining sea! The people had a right to know that there was sickness in the land. There was also McNamara and his gang who were lusting for war and drawing maps of Vietnam. All was mostly quiet on the campus front but blacks and whites were at each other’s throats.
Cliff was determined to let go with all that in addition to his sick shtick about Kennedy and Khrushchev trading bombs – but first he wanted Lenny to be here and bear witness to a Cliff Harris with soul.
Ironically, out there in the audience Cliff thought he spotted Honey, Lenny’s blonde Venus. She seldom showed up for Lenny. Lenny was wild about her but there was always something going on between them and it drove Lenny nuts to be so unrequited.
Cliff likewise knew the meaning of unrequited, and even at this moment as he was shpritzing along he was haunted by the flashback. Melanie Atherton of Philadelphia’s Main Line had been the love of his life and she dumped him for a doctor. She was a socialite with beauty and brains who had spurned millionaires to see Cliff through thin and thin – as she put it with a smile. She was a headstrong girl but gave Cliff nothing but tenderness. She had been in love with Cliff throughout his struggles to the top and precisely when he made it to the top she said fame and show biz were not for her. Her defection shattered him and he kept searching for her as well beyond the footlights. One day, he thought, she’d show up, and on that day he’d quit drinking, even quit show biz. He had offered as much and it still wasn’t enough, or rather too late.
She had faithfully sat through all his Philadelphia audi-tions and she adored him most of all when he failed. She was always there to comfort and console him and he had counted on her to be there for the rest of his days. When he turned Kennedy – when success swamped him – she ducked and said goodbye.
Thus fate had given him Jack but not Jackie. Fate had also given him a bad back just like Jack’s only Cliff’s afflic-tion was not the result of heroics on PT-109, but came from a beating at the hands of Eddie “Fedora” Gallanter after Cliff declined to give up the Café Muse in favor of Gallanter’s uptown nightclub – at twice the pay.
Cliff was in constant pain.
He was having a miserable time up there on stage. Maybe it was the time of day that was at fault. He was a night person and had never performed when the sun was out. He did not like daylight, when everything was so real and so harshly exposed. Maybe that’s why he was now so open to an avalanche of troubled reverie. But despite all these demons distracting him throughout his performance, he had them in his pocket.
Now, adopting Shelley Berman’s shtick of using a phan-tom telephone as a prop, Cliff, still half-hearted, smoothed into the routine that always snagged them: “Dean? Dean Rusk! This is the ah-president. Listen, Dean. Yes it’s urgent. No it’s not about Cuber. No, it’s not about Castro. Jackie wants to know if you-ah can-ah babysit for-ah John-John.”
That sent them into convulsions. This was happening downtown at 1:40 p.m. Uptown at this same moment CBS-TV had interrupted the soap opera As the World Turns for Walter Cronkite’s report that the President of the United States had been shot and was “seriously wounded.”
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