a down-and-out tale of the dakota

      “None of us can help the things life has done to us. They're done before you realize it, and once they're done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you'd like to be, and you've lost your true self forever.”

—Mary Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night

      Eros first floods over young me in the luminescent, black- and-white film image of Lauren Bacall. Until then I fidget during any movie’s “stupid, mushy parts”—so unnecessary, so annoyingly interruptive of the sock-‘em, shoot-‘em up scenes—you know, the good stuff. And then, in an inconceivable scene shift, this celluloid siren slinks into my consciousness, sparking unfamiliar flames of desire.

      If you want me, just whistle, she says. You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.

      I whistle all the way home.

*

      Now it’s the early 1960s and I’m working a night taxi line in hopes of snagging a lavish tip from Toots Shor’s, an in-crowd watering hole of the rich and famous.

      I feel lost and at sea. Driven by self-doubt, I’ve fled: first college, then a promising start as a newspaperman at a small-town daily. These days I anguish, read, write, take acting classes and search out elusive roles in theater, TV and film. Some nights I drive a cab to pay the bills. I’m closer to 20 than 25 and already a sad failure in the eyes of family and their friends.

      New York statute says no booze sold after 2 a.m. It’s 2:15 and my buddy Greg, the club’s doorman, is giving the high sign to pull up to the club canopy. There, weaving in the shadows, is actor Jason Robards, Jr.

      “Have a good night, Mr. Robards,” says Greg, emphasizing the name so I’ll be sure to catch it—two working stiffs collaborating toward a possibly extravagant payday.

      I’m excited. Beside any tip, there’s a chance that a big-time somebody will be “the break.” And I admire Robards’ talent and his work in O’Neill’s stuff, a playwright that speaks to me.

      And… and …

      AND … I know Robards is married to Lauren Bacall.

      We’re pulling away and Robards is leaning over the back seat to read my name on the oversized taxi hack license.

      “Hey, Mike! You know any after-hour joints?” He’s obviously well into his cups, which, as I will come to know, makes him Mr. Geniality, a voluble fount of hayseed charm.

      After-hour joints? Yeah, I know some. My favorite is up in east Harlem. There’s a young woman in their service who has taken a shine to me, and the feeling is mutual—Betty.

      Not Betty Joan Persky, the unlikely Jewish girl from the Bronx who has transformed into Hollywood goddess Lauren Bacall. This woman is Betty Jones—more girl, really, than woman, maybe 19, the same age as was Lauren Bacall in 1941, the year of my birth. The same year Lauren Bacall met Humphrey Bogart on the film set of To Have and Have Not. And, uncoincidentally, the same year an already married Bogart is struck with a new passion for whistling.

      I love slow dancing with Betty Jones. She has a sweet innocence that springs from her rural South Carolina childhood. She may be a working girl, I don’t know. We just like each other and money has never been an issue.

      As I pull to the curb outside the covert club, Robards invites me to join him for a drink. I feign reluctance.

      “Would really love to, “Mr. Robards—

      “—Jason!” he says.

      “But I can’t afford to lose the time.”

      “Shit, Mike, I’ll take care of you.”

      “Well, gee, Jason, thanks!”

      Inside, I limit myself to one drink. I’m driving and driving commercially. Plus, I’m not a drinker these days, having moved on to the “pot” ubiquitous in most of my social circles.

      But Jason is a drinker. In spades. And he is putting them away regularly, dancing some himself, while Betty and I are fitted spoons on the dance floor. From time to time, I link eyes with Jason, who winks and nods.

      And so begins our friendship—a living comedic sketch worthy of the great Chaplin who, in fact, plotted and acted out just such a friendship in City Lights.

      In the silent film, Chaplin’s Little Tramp stumbles upon a drunken, eccentric millionaire, despondent over his wife’s leaving him and bent on suicide. The Tramp convinces him he should face life and enjoy its solaces.

      Grateful, the millionaire declares them “friends for life;” he goes on to wine, dine and clothe the tramp and insists he sleep beside him. With morning’s dawning sobriety the host is outraged to find the tramp in his bed and throws him out. From then on the millionaire recognizes and loves the tramp only when drunk and is repelled and rejects him when sober.

      I remember that Chaplin plot, a favorite of my father’s, who told it to me as a bedtime story. And now I particularly remember it in the subsequent weeks and months, as my friendship with Jason manifests it in real life.

      Whenever in town, Jason—who famously lives at the famous Dakota apartments—often caps off his nights at Shor’s club. And upon exit, he always asks for me and my cab. We spend the rest of the night together, drinking and swapping tales. Sometimes, he phones me from one club or another to join him. But never during the day and never when sober.

      One day I spot him eating lunch at a deli in my neighborhood, where he’s involved in a picture shoot. Both happy to see him and thinking this may be my chance for a role, I go inside and glad-hand him. He looks at me unknowingly, shakes my hand formally and, turning away, conveys the encounter is over. I soon learn that, when sober, he either is ashamed of our friendship or does not remember me.

      When he is drinking, he is warm, affectionate and generous. I am his best pal. He tells me so.

      During a wee hour drinking session at my dingy, lower east side pad, Jason suggests we fly to San Francisco, after daylight, to catch a Giants’ baseball game. I’m on a Little Tramp, boot-string budget and the prospect is luxurious beyond my experience or fantasy. At Jason’s direction, I call a particular airline and book the flights. Within the hour Jason either falls asleep or passes out in my armchair. It’s almost dawn, and I force myself to stay awake, lest we miss our departure time.

      When that time comes, Jason is unresponsive to calls and shakes. Surrendering to the futility and unsure about reservation protocols, I phone back the airline and haltingly explain that Mr. Robards is unavoidably detained, asking, “Is it possible to cancel the reservations?”

      I can almost hear a smile through the phone, as a gentle, polished female voice says, “It’s quite all right. We’re familiar with Mr. Robards’ travel scheduling.” I leave Jason asleep in the chair and flop onto my floor mattress, quickly falling into my own coma-like sleep.

      A knocking sound and flashing light brings me to. My first-floor apartment door is rhythmically banging against the jam from a wafting breeze in the outside corridor; each outward swing admits a shaft of daylight from the building’s wide open front door. My stomach turns when I see my sturdiest security lock has been ripped from the door face.

      I study the scene and reconstruct it: Jason awakens and, seeing sleeping me and the shabby, forlorn surroundings, has no idea who I am and where he is. He cannot get out the door, key-locked from inside, so he finds a kitchen knife, claws into the wood, pries off the lock and “escapes.”

      Later, door repair and lock replacement break my non-existent budget.

      Eventually, on one forever etched night, it finally happens. I no longer remember why, but there are three of us: Jason, me and a limousine driver, incongruously nicknamed “Sultan,” a tall, fat, streetwise hustler with slicked-back hair, black thick-rimmed glasses and oily, sallow skin.

      We are somewhere drinking when Jason brings up singer Russ Columbo, an early adopter of the Crosby crooning style. Columbo, a romantic heart throb, was shot dead at age 26 in 1934, under “peculiar circumstances.” There were unsubstantiated rumors of mob involvement.

      Jason, considerably our senior, would have been 12 when Columbo died, seven years before I was born. Shocked that neither of us knew of Columbo and eager to share him, Jason says ...

      “Let’s go to my place.”

      MY PLACE!? A first! The Dakota! The Dakota where … where… SHE might be. (Never mind that it’s 3:30 a.m.)

      At night, the Dakota presents a formidable, forbidding mass. Its great stone bulk hunkers stolidly off the west side of Central Park. For me, it invokes things gothic and eerie.

      I don’t remember how we enter, only the small living room we sit in. Jason squats on a stool facing us, in front of a record player. He puts on Columbo, who sings in the stodgy manner of his era. I am unimpressed but respond politely to Jason’s inquiries.

      After every song, and sometimes during, he slurs the same thing: “Isn’t he a creamer?”

      I nod behind a fake smile of appreciation. I’m not sure what a creamer is, but I can deduce it. I’m bored, restless and disappointed. No Lauren.

      An hour passes before I hear a door opening down a hall to our left, then footsteps and … will it be ... will it BE?

      Framed in the opening between our room and a hall, it is! It IS! SHE! HER! Or … wait … WAIT! It’s some transmogrified-into-demon-apparition of her.

      She is without makeup, in night clothes, a sleeping cap drawn over nesting curlers. Those celebrated lidded eyes are dark glinting slits. Her sensuous mouth is a grisly gash; words spewing from it are nothing I’ve ever heard from a woman, rarely from a man.

      The words are cutting, bludgeoning, the foulest the language closets. Their import is that Jason is a degenerate, low-life denizen of filth and that Sultan and I have been disinterred from several hellish circles below his. She calls Sultan and me “pigs,” preceded by the most vulgar, deprecating, serrating qualifiers. Later, after I’ve fled almost everything for life on tramp cargo ships, no hard-pickled old salt ever tops her. This is verbal abuse of most brutal utterance.

      She orders Jason to get us pigs out of her house. His naturally hang-dog face collapses into a panicked, anguished, beaten-down caricature. He looks at us pleadingly, and Sultan and I rush out with the clumsy alacrity of Keystone Kops.

      In a few churning, chaotic weeks, my outer life reflects the lost quality of my inner one. I am literally at sea.