A Gift to New York

When Oscar Hammerstein died, in 1960, I remember reading that the lights of every Broadway theater would be dimmed at curtain time for one full minute, and thinking how wonderful that was—the ultimate curtain call—for one man to achieve such extraordinary recognition for a life in the theater and his contribution to the art of it. Since becoming a New Yorker, I’ve noted a number of such fitting testaments to men and women whose luster illuminated the theater world. But none moved me the way a tribute to a gift to New York did this past Tuesday evening, when Broadway’s lights were dimmed for Howard Kissel. Through the din of Times Square, I could hear his mellifluous speaking voice in his measured tones, rich with irony and warm with whimsy, as he audibly punctuated his graceful prose.

We’ve lost a cultural icon, an irreplaceable one. Broadway, New York, the world, can ill afford it. Howard knew opera and dance, theater for sure, music of all sorts, and a good film. He knew books and he knew art. And he spoke masterly in the language of all of these. He knew knowledge.

And he could tell a great Jewish joke. Sprinkled with Yiddish. Relishing one, from his lips or another’s, he could laugh quieter and more broadly—at the same time—than anyone I ever came across.

For years, Howard, dance critic Joe Mazo and I would join up and sit together at High Holiday services. Even in synagogue, Howard always seemed to have a better bead on things than we did. Perhaps it was a result of an early goal: you’re unlikely to find this in any theatrical who’s who, but Howard told me he initially wanted to be a Reform rabbi.

For many months over one of those years, we three met for dinner practically every Friday night. Initially, it was to discuss and dissect the topic beloved by us, the performing arts in New York, specifically everything we could cover (plus a few books). The evenings evolved into a notion that we could collaborate on the libretto of a musical, with one of us volunteering to do the primary research, another assigning himself to a working outline, and the third designated to start tracking down the rights. I don’t remember any of us ever producing anything we could even draw a pencil line through. After apologies and excuses as we pulled our chairs closer to the table each week, we plunged into what any three people in New York who love theater do best, “talking theater.”

Howard, whom I can’t imagine comfortable growing up in the Milwaukee of the 40s and 50s, told me he was looking through a book of Bettmann Archive photos when he came across one of a Lower East Side New York storefront shop (one of those entered by descending three stairsteps below the sidewalk), a sign above its store window bearing the proprietor’s name and the store’s merchandise—in Hebrew. “And I knew there was a place where I belonged,” he said.

More than Broadway lights have been dimmed by our loss of him. He’ll be missed. I'll miss him.

There Oughta Be A Law

When comic books were comic, a syndicated two-panel cartoon strip, There Oughta Be a Law, gave voice and vent to Americans’ frustrations with just about anything they thought was unfair and should be redressed by a law. Between the 1940s and the 80s, Broadway’s biggest musical, Oklahoma!—with its significant exclamation point—ran for an unprecedented five years; the Mad Ave-hyped Ford Edsel lasted for only three; but There Oughta Be a Law stayed popularly in print for four decades.

I wish “Oughta Be” were around today. I would write cartoonist-creator Harry Shorten to say there oughta be a law in New York City that states anything that isn’t good for the city is unlawful. What has me fuming right now is—brace yourself—a bedbug billboard in Times Square. That’s right, a bedbug. On a billboard. If you haven’t seen it, avert your eyes if you come to it… cover the eyes of your children (and pets)… and, by all means, do not let a visitor to New York see it. Detour, sidle past, walk backwards, but take that tourist dearest to you and to the New York economy and jay-walk the hell out of there.

A bedbug on Broadway! Mayor Bloomberg, where are you? A big, ugly, crawly bug is straddling skyscrapers half its size across a billboard sprawling above a pizza parlor! You eat pizza! The villain is an ad—a tawdry, tacky scare ad for a company called Protect-A-Bed, a crass merchant telling us, “Protect Yourself.” But who’s going to protect Broadway theaters and Manhattan hotels and city restaurants from Protect-A-Bed?

Protect-A-Bed claims its same mattress covers protect against bedwetting. Will people come from all over the world to be sobered by a display of a man pissing on a New York skyline? Above a salad bar?

I don’t believe in curtailing free speech, Mayor B., but this isn’t speech, this is visual assault. There oughta be a law! It isn’t free enterprise, it is economic depravity. Why not a bill-boarded illustration of a bedbug taking a juicy bite out of The Big Apple?!

You spent 69 million dollars—and changed a law a lot of New Yorkers thought oughta be—just to keep your job. Let your affluence do the talking. Why not buy the billboard and change it to something all New Yorkers inherently take pride in?

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Curious to know what you, the reader, think there oughta be a law about. That’s what the “Comments” section below is for.

A Wonderful Town, Installment Two

A man boarded an elevator in a Los Angeles building and chose the button for his floor. Even before the elevator had climbed to the second floor, he pushed the button three more times. A lady on the elevator said, “You must be from New York.”

New York, New York is “A Wonderful Town.” It’s a small town where Adolph Green, co-lyricist with Betty Comden of the song, “Wonderful Town” (not from the show “Wonderful Town” but from “On the Town”—got it?) became a wonderful New York chum. Adolph Green was a Jewish leprechaun to me, “spritely” and mentally mischievous. He was the best “drop-the-needle” player I ever encountered, meaning he could identify a piece of classical music faster (I suspected) than even the composer of “Wonderful Town” and “On the Town,” his collaborator on both shows, Leonard Bernstein. Adolph once sang a movement of Mahler for me (unsolicited) on the corner of 63rd and Central Park West. That’s not likely to happen at Hollywood and Vine.

A tourist from L.A. stops a New Yorker to ask, “Pardon me, could you tell me how to get to Times Square or should I just go fuck myself?”

My friend Herb Graff and I shared passions for New York quirks [see “A Wonderful Town” entry below], New York anecdotes and incomparable New York characters like Adolph Green. Profiled in The New Yorker for being one of the city’s great raconteurs, Herb could break up any room with his punchy, borscht-belt delivery, but when we dined with Adolph, it was Adolph who provided the often-suppressed laughter, often inadvertently. When Adolph typically couldn’t make up his mind—in this instance about what entrée to order—he looked at the next table to see what they were having. But he didn’t stop there. First he praised the way a certain dish looked, then asked what it was and was it good, and then, only faintly commended by the uncomfortable diner, he ordered it.

Herb dined out for years on this one: A man approached Adolph saying, “I’ll bet you don’t remember me.” Adolph screwed up his face and whined, “Don’t make me guess.” According to Herb, Robert Redford, on the town, when asked exactly the same question by a fellow who prefaced it with challenging remarks like “You’re a big man now” and “After all, you’re a star,” and the capper, “We went to school together,” replied, with initial feigned warmth, “I DO remember you! You were an asshole then and you’re an asshole now.”

It is a wonderful town. Herb had two California acquaintances who came to New York, excited because someone had given them, gratis, an unoccupied East Village pad to use. An un-air-conditioned pad. In the dead of August. On their first night here they tossed and turned until dawn in a one-hundred degree chamber until one of them suggested they put on the clothes they’d strewn, piece by piece, from beds to floor and go for a walk to get some air. Ninety degrees outside felt good to them when suddenly, at the crack of dawn, a man came charging down the street toward them… and past them… in a low-cut evening dress and stiletto shoes. These two Californians had never seen such a thing! They couldn’t wait to see Herb to tell him and couldn’t get the words out fast enough. Herb’s reaction? “He was probably late for work.”