She said: I don’t mind one bit. He’s been better to me than any of the rest of them.
I said: I don’t know any of the rest of them.
She said: And trust me you don’t want to.
I laughed. It was a joke I would make.
I said: Are you truly done now?
She said: I believe so. I can’t think of anything else I feel like I have to do. This might be the problem though. I can’t think of anything I even want to do.
I said: You haven’t sat still yet. You oughtta try that on for size.
I told her she could come and work for me whenever she liked. I told her not to worry, she’d find a way to survive on her own. And I would help her.
George Flicker
So we move in to the Knickerbocker Village in 1934. We didn’t have much, me and Al. We had our beds, some clothes, all of Uncle Al’s books. Those ladies showed up with an army of Russian movers carrying steamer trunks of clothes, boxes and boxes of tchotchkes, beds, lamps, desks, bookshelves, rugs, paintings, and that goddamn table I hit my head on when I was a kid. And there’s Rosie barking at all of them, move this here, move that there. Al and I are standing there watching all this. He probably hadn’t seen her in five years, ten, I don’t know how long. I mean maybe he had but he wasn’t acting like it. He’s watching her boss all these people around and then he just lets out this whistle. Not a wolf whistle but something like it. You could not have mistaken that sound for something innocent. I said, “Al, calm yourself down, man, these are our new neighbors.” He said, “I must have done something right to deserve this.” I said, “Al, it’s Rosie Gordon! You remember her. She used to live upstairs. What are you doing here? You can’t hassle this lady.” He said, “How did I miss that? How did I ever miss this woman before.”
Mazie’s Diary, March 1, 1934
I dug you out of this box just to write this down so that I never forget this moment. I came home last night to find Rosie sitting on Al Flicker’s lap at our kitchen table.
I said: Well.
She said: Well.
I said: What have we here?
She said: Mazie, you remember Al Flicker, don’t you?
I am cackling as I write this. Cackling at how dainty and ladylike she acted all the while she was sitting on his lap, her bottom on who knows what although I know what. And I am cackling at the two loons who are now singing little songs to each other in the next room. Every once in a while they clink glasses and toast each other and I just start laughing all over again. I am cackling at life. You’re funny, life. Real funny.
George Flicker
And then the thing we could never have predicted in a million years happened almost immediately after we moved in. Rosie and Al fell in love. Can you believe it? The two craziest people we knew fell for each other. Like someone knocked them over the head with it. Like someone knocked them over the head with love.
9. Excerpt from the unpublished autobiography of Mazie Phillips-Gordon
What kills me about these bums is that they die, they’re gone, and it’s like they never even existed on God’s green earth. Someone knew them once. A mother, a father, a doctor, a pal, somebody knew their name. But now they’re only known by each other, and then bit by bit, they’re forgotten. Quicker than they’d like, probably. And everybody wants to be remembered, don’t they? Everybody wants one little piece of them to be left behind. Well, I remember them. I remember them all. They were nobody to nearly everybody, but they were somebody to me. I knew all their names. Everyone’s names. I knew them.
Phillip Tekverk, publisher emeritus, Tekverk Books
I was twenty-one years old, and an editorial assistant at Knopf. It was 1939. I had heard about Mazie Phillips from a few sources, but Fannie Hurst was the first. I had been invited to a dinner party at her house by an older gentleman who I believe was endeavoring to make me one of his fancy lads, though he wasn’t quite sure if I would be amenable to that sort of thing. People have always wondered about my sexual proclivities, and I had just approached the moment where I recognized that the mystery surrounding that area of my life could be of benefit to me. That, in fact, I could and should cultivate that mystery even further. And it has certainly helped me in my life. There is power in elusiveness. Even just to be charming is, of course, great assistance to one. But to leave people guessing about you, that adds a whole new layer of memorability.
Fannie Hurst was charming also, professionally so. I felt like I could sit at her elbow for hours, days, weeks, and never tire of her. She was quite famous then, for her books, which were wildly popular, bestsellers always, though obviously quite mainstream, and not particularly literary. She was also famous for having famous friends. The Roosevelts, for example, adored her. I never met them, but we all knew. Anyway, she was extremely well known, even though barely anyone has heard of her these days. Her name pops up and then disappears again. If only the writing had been better.
But she was a delight! Dry as the day, funny, funny, funny. She was an activist, albeit sometimes a misguided one. For example she was supportive of the African-American literary community even if her books weren’t viewed as such necessarily, and she liked to slum downtown on occasion. She was fascinated with the lower class. Also the young. People of color, poor people, young people, anyone who didn’t have what she had, or had something she didn’t. The only people she didn’t really care that much for were the Jews — because of course she was a Jew herself.
So at dinner that night, I was a target for her because I was young and pretty and, as I said, indeterminate. Also I was rather handsome. I had inherited my mother’s looks — she was a fabulous, glamorous, well-crafted woman — and by then Fannie was on the southward slope of middle age and, to be honest, she had never been known for her great beauty. So there, I had something else she didn’t have, too. And I was certainly eager to please her. So she invited me to sit next to her at the table, even going so far as to switch cards at the last moment, sending an editor from Harper’s to the other end of the table. What did she care? She was Fannie Hurst.
It was a very long table. And you know, there were chandeliers dripping from the ceiling, a dozen uniformed maids dishing out the food, endless bottles of wine. Another young man might have felt intimidated, but I came from money, early Dutch settlers on my father’s side, and then my mother was a Spanish heiress. So I felt right at ease there. I had a trust fund that would secure me for many years. I had been waiting to meet these people for a while. I came from California and had only a few introductions. We were rich but my father marrying the Spaniard had turned him into a bit of an outcast in the family. My mother had wanted to be an actress, that’s how we had ended up in Hollywood. Oh, you don’t need to know all of this. It’s going in my memoirs right now, anyway. You can’t have it, it’s mine. What you do need to know is that many of the other assistants in publishing were struggling, and I had felt like I had to hide where I came from. And that night I had this sense that at last I was where I belonged.
Over dessert, everyone was arguing about the politics. At the time Fiorello LaGuardia was mayor, and it was his second round at bat. And he was a pretty good mayor, he had installed a lot of good programs, but we were still mocking him for some reason. He was very short. It might have even just been his height. God, who knows. We were very drunk. And Fannie was amused by all of our jokes. but then she very suddenly stopped herself and said, “You cynical bastards. For once I’d like to hear people talk about a New Yorker doing something right instead of wrong.” She was right of course. We were a very cynical lot.