A selection from her poem, “Little Birdy” follows.
Little birdy, why doth thou sing
So sweet thy song of mirth?
The sunny morning smileth.
Is that not enough?
Thy song is gilding
to a lily white.
Little Birdy, banish night.
Morning come.
You maka me hum.
Sweeta little birdya.
Mrs. Dandle never explains why her narrator suddenly lapses into a harlequin Italian accent. Equally inexplicable is Dandle’s decision to illustrate the poems with pictures from the children’s book The Five Chinese Brothers.
25. “The Cossacks’ names were Douglas MacArthur, George Patton, and Dwight D. Eisenhower.” Luddy Greco’s Diary, 28 July1932. Jonathan had arrived at the Bonus Expeditionary Force’s encampment in Washington, D.C. only hours before the World War I veterans who had gathered there to demand early payment of the soldier’s bonus due them in 1945, were routed by forces led by General MacArthur under orders from President Hoover. Former doughboy-pals Jonathan, Greco, and Darrell Delehanty were in the midst of trading war stories when 700 troops, aided by tanks, cavalry and machine guns, drove the three, along with thousands of unemployed veteran protestors (and many of their families) from their nation’s capital.
Jonathan promptly returned to New York, writing in his own diary the next day only the words, “Dark day for America.”
Luddy, scarred by memory of that day, became a Communist, and eventually moved to the Soviet Union.
Delehanty remained silent.
MacArthur and his majors Patton and Eisenhower went on to serve their fellow citizens with distinction in the Second World War, their part in the brutal Bonus Army pogrom all but forgotten.
26. Caldwell wasn’t mathematically gifted Reinhold, The Story of Dandy-de-odor-o, 202–205. Dandy-D’s chief financial officer’s oft-repeated claim that he had “no head for numbers” was a constant source of frustration for Jonathan who worked hard to convince shareholders and the business press that Caldwell loved nothing more than pulling the public leg. My research has revealed that Caldwell’s lack of confidence in his own numerical abilities can be traced to an incident in the summer of 1934 during a family vacation trip to Atlantic City. As the C.F.O dozed on the beach, one Vivienne Falconi (a vacationer from Newark) accidentally dropped a copy of Anthony Adverse upon his head. Caldwell lay hospitalized and comatose for two days. (Hearing of the unfortunate occurrence, the 1,224-page best seller’s author Hervey Allen sent a get-well card that read, “Perhaps I should have written the thing in installments.”)
Regaining consciousness, Caldwell came to the horrible realization that he had forgotten the number between six and eight. Asked to count to ten by the attending physician, he would either leave out the number seven entirely, or replace it with one of many nonsense words, e.g.: “four, five, six, fish-twaddle, eight.” Eventually Caldwell and the number seven were reacquainted and he came to utilize it just as extensively as he had before the accident. But a happy ease and total comfort around numbers for one of Jonathan’s most trusted lieutenants was never to return. Jonathan didn’t seem to mind. The following exchange from 1937 is recounted by a window washer who happened to be conveniently stationed within earshot. Buddy Browar, Eavesdropping on the Captains of Industry: Thirty years of Soap and Corporate Dope (Cincinnati: Mayer Z. Oats Publishing, 1946), 129–132.
“Your mistakes notwithstanding, Caldy, we’re still in the black. That’s all that matters. Hey, maybe I ought to drop a few books on some other heads around here. Lately, Dougherty has been cruising for a big ol’ head-butt with Margaret Mitchell.”
To which Caldwell jocularly responded, “All one thousand thirty—”
“Seven,” Jonathan inserted, helpfully.
“Yes. Seven. Pages of it. You thought I was going to say ‘fish twaddle,’ didn’t you?”
A nod. A chuckle. An affectionate cuff under the chin for President Blashette’s odd little C.F.O.
It is here that my presence was detected and the blinds hastily drawn.
27. Dingleberry also proved to a problem. Reinhold, The Story of Dandy-de-odor-o, 218-19.
28. The antisocial behavior continued, then abated. Ibid., 219. However, on occasion, something would set off Dandy-de-odor-o’s director of personnel, and he would return to the periphery of his early sociopathic behavior. As late as March1975, Dingleberry was roughly escorted from a suburban multiplex theatre after hurling a boot at the screen upon which the critically panned film musical Mame was being projected. Although he quickly retrieved the boot and apologized to those nearby who felt threatened by it, Dingleberry’s continued mumbled imprecations against Gene Saks and Lucille Ball for ’this protracted cinematic fart,” clearly showed that the man continued to live on the narrow brink of rage.
29. There was little doubt that Jonathan was snubbing Nelson Rockefeller. Diary entries and correspondence detail the reason for Jonathan’s refusal to shake the young businessman’s hand at the gala. Jonathan, though no fan of Lenin, felt that Rockefeller’s “baby with the bathwater” approach to resolving the issue of whether Diego Rivera should be allowed to include the image of the Soviet dictator within the massive Rockefeller Center mural, was pure aestheticide. It set a dangerous precedent, opening the way for the destruction of any art with which those in positions of power did not agree, the end result being the loss of artistic freedom for all.
Winny had taught him well.
An important postscript to this story: The day the sledgehammers came out, Jonathan called Rivera and offered to commission the Mexican artist to paint a mural for the corporate offices of Dandy-de-odor-o. Rivera politely declined, but did eventually accept a financial contribution from Jonathan, which compensated him in part for work he did on another muraclass="underline" a brazen reaction in colorful fresco to the Rockefeller Center debacle. A small private library in Harlem had the honor of Rivera’s gifted services. “You Americans view all states outside your own Capitalist-strangled system as imperfect, while you blind yourselves to your own blemished history,” Rivera is said to have screeded (in Spanish) as he embarked upon this new commission. “Perhaps it is time to remind you how far your nation has to go in reaching that pinnacle of perfection to which you smugly think you have already ascended.”
I have found no visual record of Rivera’s anti-American library mural, which was inadvertently painted over in the seventies. (The wall now depicts a cavalcade of American presidents up to Gerald Ford as imagined with African-American features.) However, I have read descriptions of some of the images incorporated by Rivera into his mural in Geraldo Rivera’s controversial The Story of My Grandfather Diego. Together they form a frightening indictment of an America rejecting the very ideals upon which it was built:
American soldiers issuing Small Pox-infected blankets to Indians in the 1870s. (Interestingly, Rivera had touched upon one of the world’s first acts of bio-terrorism!)
The U.S. Supreme Court declaring unconstitutional in 1918 the nation’s first federal child labor law. (Rivera supposedly has the justices using the backs of young babies for footstools.)