When he was finished, he bowed low and removed his beret. Long wisps of yellow-gray hair barely covered a scalp dotted with liver spots. He stepped to the counter next to me and ordered a double espresso.
Blinking lights in the lobby signaled the end of intermission and the start of the second feature. We made our way back to our seats, but the conversation, and the old man, was not forgotten.
Birch, 1972
GIRL CRAZYHAD maybe the dippiest plotline of any movie Birch Tate had ever seen. This playboy from the East, Mickey Rooney, gets sent to a Western college so he’ll shape up. Judy Garland works there because her grandfather owns the place or something, and she falls in love with Mickey even though he’s the biggest goofball on the planet. Mickey and Judy decide they need to put on a big show to make money for the college, only Mickey has no idea that Judy loves him, so he’s always making out with some blonde or other. It was really stupid, and Mickey Rooney struck her as a guy even straight girls would have a hard time finding sexy, but Judy Garland-well, Scotty was right. Judy was amazing.
There was that incredible voice, for one thing, and the big brown eyes and the way her face changed to show exactly what she was thinking all the time. When she sang “They’re writing songs of love, but not for me,” Birch found tears on her cheeks. The plot, Mickey Rooney, none of it mattered when Judy sang. The song went clear out of the stupid movie and into a whole world of its own, a world of love and pain and compassion, a world of someone who’d longed for love and wondered if she’d ever find it.
Birch knew that feeling. Back in her freshman year, she and her dad agreed that it was no big deal that nobody asked her to the school dance. She was only fourteen, and there was plenty of time to outgrow her tomboy stage. They both kept saying it as dance after dance came and went without anyone asking Birch (which was not her name back then but the name she took for herself when she realized she had to bend or she would break).
The junior prom was the first one that hurt. Not only had nobody asked her, but the boys she asked turned her down flat. Boys she’d known for years, gone hiking with, played baseball with, told her they wanted to ask other girls instead of her.
Then she took the dainty little watch with the real diamond chips her dad gave her for her sweet sixteen and exchanged it for a waterproof sports watch. For the first time in his life, Sam Tate allowed himself to say what Birch guessed he’d been thinking for a long time: Did she want everyone in Woodstock to think she was a lesbian, for God’s sake?
She wasn’t exactly sure what a lesbian was, but she knew it wasn’t good and it meant no boys asked you to dances.
Then she met Enid and the truth dawned. They were writing songs of love, but not for her, because nobody wrote songs of love for two girls.
So that was why the tears were there, not because Judy couldn’t get a stupid twit like Mickey Rooney to look twice at her.
FRI-TUES
Golddiggers of 1933
12:30 PM, 5:00 PM, 9:30 PM
Remember your Forgotten Man at this Depression-era classic. Powell and Keeler, Blondell and McMahon-can musicals get better than this?
Golddiggers of 1935
2:45 PM, 7:15 PM, 11 PM
Lullaby of Broadway” makes this the only noir musical in Hollywood history. Do boo Adolphe Menjou, but not during the movie, please.
Birch, 1972
THEY DID BOO Adolphe Menjou, first when his name came up on the credits, and again when he appeared in the movie. The booing was loud, long, and enthusiastic, and Birch was determined not to ask why.
The little man in the wine-colored beret who looked like a garden gnome gave a Bronx cheer when the dapper actor came on the screen. “Right on, Pop,” someone else yelled.
Birch remembered his cheerful tap-dance in the coffee room the last time she was at Theatre 80 and wondered what would make a nice old man behave like that.
When the double feature was over and she and Scotty rejoined Patrick in the lobby, he and the little man were deep in conversation.
“Busby Berkley was a tightass little shit,” the old man said, spittle gathering at the ends of his lips. “Little tin god-the way he treated Judy was a sin and a disgrace. And no,” he added, turning to Patrick, “he wasn’t one a youse, boyo. He liked girls all right-except when they were dancing.”
Birch didn’t wonder how the old man knew Patrick was gay. Everything about Patrick, from the open way he laughed, to the theatrical gestures, to his graceful walk, to the color-coordinated scarf he so carefully arranged around his neck, to his candid, flirty blue eyes told the world who he was. Birch admired that about Patrick; he never seemed to pretend or to feel ashamed.
“Remember that number in Golddiggers of ’38?” Patrick turned toward Scotty with a nod, inviting her into the discussion.
“ ‘I didn’t raise my daughter to be a human harp!’ ” Scotty quoted and both broke up laughing, neither bothering to explain the joke to Birch.
“Which was the one where Ruby Keeler danced on the giant typewriter?”
“Ready, Willing, and Able. Ruby’s last Warner’s musical.”
Birch turned to the old man and asked, “Were you in the movies?”
“Girlie,” the old man replied, “I started at Metro when its mascot was a parrot. The lion came later, after Sam Goldfish took over.”
Patrick’s face lit up with a combination of awe and amusement. “That’s Samuel Goldwyn to you and me,” he explained to Birch. Scotty just nodded; of course, she’d already known that.
“So you were in the Freed Unit,” Patrick said in a breathy voice. “You knew Arthur Freed? And Gene Kelly? And Vincente Minelli?”
“Freed Unit.” The old man shook his head. “There was no goddamn Freed Unit. That’s all made up by a bunch a people want to think the musical was more than it really was. Freed was a producer like all the rest, nothing special.”
The man in the beret might as well have tried to convince Patrick that Cary Grant wasn’t gay.
“Can we buy you a coffee?” Patrick asked. “We usually go to Ratner’s after the movie, and we’d be delighted if you’d-“
“Sure,” the little man replied. “My name’s Mendy, by the way.” His accent was deepest Bronx and his breath smelled of pipe tobacco. “Short for Mendelson.” He laughed without humor. “Of course, it was changed for the movies. Too long for the marquee, they said. Too Jewish for the marquee, they meant.”
Once inside the steamy dairy restaurant, he ordered borscht and when it came, sipped it loudly, smacking his lips in obvious appreciation, dunking hard pumpernickel rolls into it until they softened into an orange-colored mass.
Now Birch, her mouth nicely puckered from juicy dill tomato, asked the question she’d been trying to avoid. “Why did they boo that man? I thought he was okay in the movie.”
The old man’s answering smile was as tart as the dill tomato. “He was a Friendly.”
“Yeah,” Patrick said, his lips white with powdered sugar from his blintz. “He ratted on people he thought were Communists.”
“Only most of them weren’t,” Scotty added. “And even the ones who were-I mean, being a Communist wasn’t illegal when they joined the party back in the thirties.”
Birch spent the next five minutes being lectured to about the House Un-American Activities Committee, the Hollywood Ten, the blacklist, the graylist, Red Channels, a man named Dalton Trumbo, another man named Walter Winchell, and a lot of other ancient history that meant absolutely nothing to her.