Pete Hamill - Piecework

“Even the music goes back to Chauncey Street,” he says. “I always was sensitive to sounds. At night, lying there in the apartment, I’d hear these sounds: footsteps upstairs, or out on the street; the mice in the walls; the ticking of a clock. I was fascinated by sounds. And years later, I’m working with Tommy Dorsey, and I say, ’I’d like to make some records!’ He says, ‘Why?’ And I say, ’I hear things!’

“Gleason can’t read music; his own tunes are hummed or picked out a note at a time on a piano and written down by an arranger. He loves conducting. When he assembled more than 50 French musicians to record the score for a 1962 film called Gigot, he had to explain through an interpreter what he wanted. “I say to the interpreter, Tell them I want the first note to sound like someone pissing off a cliff into a Chinese teacup.’ “ A beat. “He tells them.” Another beat. “At first, a few of them smile. Then they start looking at each other, and then they start to nod. And I tell you, it was beautiful.”

Even the romantic music had something to do with Brooklyn.

“I saw Clark Gable in a picture,” Gleason remembers. “He’s on a couch with a broad. Nothing’s happening. Then the music starts, and Gable is the most romantic-looking son of a bitch you ever saw. And I say to myself, ‘If Gable needs strings, what about some poor schmuck from Brooklyn?’

“More than anyone else, the friend Gleason seems to miss is Toots Shor. “One night in Shor’s, the 52d Street joint, Toots was bragging about what a great athlete he was. One thing led to another, and I said, ‘You can’t play pool, you can’t fight — if you did, I’d knock you on your ass!’ But I said, ‘Maybe you can run!’ ‘Of course, I can r"",’ says Toots. So we organize a race. But I say to him, ‘Toots, if I go outside and the two of us start running, we’re gonna draw a crowd, and it’ll be terrible, we’ll never get it finished. So when we go out, you run towards Sixth Avenue and I’ll run towards Fifth, and we’ll go around the block — 51st Street — and whoever gets to the bar first wins a grand.’ Agreed! So we go out, and Toots starts huffing and puffing towards Sixth Avenue, and I stroll towards Fifth. In front of ’21,’ I jump in a cab and drive around the block. And when Toots finally gets there, I’m already at the bar with a drink. He says, ‘Aw, you son of a bitch.’ And he hands me the grand. We’re sitting there another twenty minutes, when suddenly Toots turns to me, the eyes popping out of his head, his veins all straining in his neck, and he yells: ‘Wait a minute!’ He roars, ’You never passed met’ ” Gleason is laughing now. “That was the greatest double take I ever saw.”

All of that was long ago. Gleason moved to Florida in the early sixties, and when I ask him why he doesn’t come to New York more often, he just shakes his head and says, “Everybody’s dead.”

In Florida, he plays a lot of golf and reads. For years, he read the literature of parapsychology, the occult, and books about the world’s religions. But now he also reads history. “I don’t read fiction,” he says. “You know, our lives in this business are devoted to fiction.”

Did he have any advice for young people who want to get into show business? “Work at everything — weddings, benefits, bar mitzvahs. Play for no money, if you have to. And find out everything. When I was working, I’d listen to the band, talk to the lighting guys, the stage manager, the carpenters, every branch of it. You have to like show business. That’s the main thing. And you have to know everything.”

Were there parts he’d wanted to play and didn’t, chances that he never got to take? “No,” Gleason says. “Almost everything I wanted to do, I’ve been able to do. And most of it turned out pretty good.” A pause. “Everybody’s been damned nice to me. I’ve been very lucky.”

And how would he like to be remembered?

“Ah, hell,” the Great One says, staring at the smoke from the cigarette. “I’d just like to be remembered.”

NEW YORK,

September 23, 1985

New York was full of swaggering energy in the spring of 1958, when I was living over a secondhand bookstore on Fourth Avenue and Twelfth Street, still trying to be a painter. It was a town where everyone was working, nobody cared about politics, and all things seemed possible. Even for the likes of me.

During the day I studied art at Pratt Institute, and in the chilly evenings I would wander to the Cedar Street Tavern on University Place to nurse a few beers on the thin leftovers of my G.I. Bill money. This was the great bar of the action painters, and of poets too, and visiting cowboys and a few stray seamen and too many rich girls from Bennington who lectured you about Selling Out. I went there because I wanted to see painters in the flesh, to see how they walked and moved and ordered their drinks. I was still something of a kid, unformed and green, and this information was much more important to me than theories of push-pull, color fields, plastic depth, the vital gesture, or the idea of the sublime.

Some insisted, of course, that the Cedar wasn’t what it had been; they always say that in Village bars. But about the Cedar they might have been right. In 1958, Jackson Pollock had been dead almost two years; de Kooning was not around much anymore; other regulars were moving uptown, never to return. But look: down past the end of the bar, in the first rough booth in the brightly lit back room: that elegant, beautiful girl is Joan Mitchell. Sitting with Alfred Leslie. And Philip Guston. And in that other booth, laughing raucously, that’s Grace Hartigan, looking like fifty miles of trouble out of a film noir. She’s talking to David Smith. And that huge fellow with the Zapata mustache: Harold Rosenberg. And over there, that’s Larry Rivers — he draws figures! — jittery-eyed, junkie-thin, fingers drumming on the table as if in time to a melody nobody else can hear. All were engulfed in a blue nicotine fog, drinking hard, laughing, having a great old time. And among them, every night, was the painter I admired most in the world: Franz Kline.

With Pollock and de Kooning, Kline was the third glittering star in the Big Three constellation. He sat in a booth facing the door, dressed in a camel’s-hair coat, with his rough, lumpy slab of a face made oddly elegant by a carefully trimmed mustache. A spear of hair fell across his brow like a brushstroke by that other Franz, Mr. Hals. When women came to the booth he always tried to rise and bow in greeting, like a boulevardier from the French films we saw around the corner at the Eighth Street or the Art. Franz was one of those bulky men who look taller sitting down. But when he rose to go to the John, he moved with an athlete’s grace, giving off the same muscular aura that emanated from the paintings. We all knew the legend: back home in the coal country of Pennsylvania, he’d played baseball and football, he’d been a boxer. In the age of Hemingway, such credentials were more important than they should have been. As he went by, through the door that Pollock had once torn off its hinges, he had a word and smile for everybody. Everybody called him Franz.

It was not in me, then or now, to fawn over famous men; by the tough code of the ’50s, that just wouldn’t be hip. But the Bennington girls had no such restraints, and they went for Franz the way sharks go for drowning sailors. So it was hard to be alone with Franz Kline; I suppose that’s why he went to the Cedar. But one night a painter friend named Haig Akmajian (he lived in my building) brought me over and introduced me. The great painter smiled and welcomed me to the booth and ordered the first of many beers; he treated me as if I were an established member of The Club. And we talked. And talked. Or rather, Franz talked and I listened. I wasn’t a reporter then, I made no notes; but I can hear him now. He had an elaborate, writerly way of speaking, with that rare tone that combines irony with affection. Nothing he said ever sounded bitter, except his references to Walter O’Malley, who had led the Dodgers out of Brooklyn with the Giants following timidly in their wake. “That s.o.b. will find a private place in hell,” Franz said of O’Malley. And then laughed, embarrassed by his own bitterness. It was difficult to believe that Franz Kline would send anyone on earth to hell.