Part 59 (1/2)

”Tell me!” Shecky pounded the empty barber chair with his b.l.o.o.d.y fists.

”Please be careful of the leather,” the old man said.

”I'm a success!” Shecky yelled. ”I qualify! Tell him, George! Tell him about last night!”

”What do you care what this crummy--”

”_Tell him!_”

I walked over and pulled the newspaper out of the old man's hands. ”Last night Shecky King was voted the most popular show business personality of all time,” I said.

”Tell him who voted!”

”The newspaper and magazine critics,” I said.

”And who else?”

”Thirty million people throughout the world.”

”You hear that? Everybody. Eddie, don't you hear what he's saying? Everybody! I'm Number One!”

Shecky climbed onto the chair and sat down.

”Haircut,” he said. ”Easy on the sides. Just a light trim. You know.” He sat there breathing hard for a couple of seconds, then he twisted around and screamed at the old man. ”Eddie! For G.o.d's sake, cut my hair!”

”I'm sorry,” the old man said. ”I don't have an opening at the moment.”

You know what happened to Shecky King. You read about it. I knew, and I read about it, too, six months before the papers came out. In his eyes. I could see the headline there. But I thought I could keep it from coming true.

I took him home in a cab and put him to bed. He didn't talk. He didn't even cry. He just laidthere, between the Hong Kong silk sheets, staring up at the ceiling, and for some crazy reason that made me think of the legless guy and the sign that said WALK. I was pretty tired.

The doctors ordered him to a hospital, but they couldn't find anything wrong, not physically anyway, so they called in the shrinks. A breakdown, the shrinks said. Nervous exhaustion. Emotional depletion. It happens.

It happens, all right, but I wasn't sold. Shecky was like a racing car, he operated best at high revs. That's the way some people are engineered. A nice long rest is a nice long death to them, because it gives them a chance to think, and for a performer that's the end. He sees what a stupid waste his life had been, working 24 hours a day so that people can laugh at him, or cry at him, running all the time--for what? Money. Praise. But he's got the money (if he didn't he wouldn't be able to afford the rest) and he's had the praise, and he hasn't really enjoyed what he's been doing for years--is it intellectual? does it contribute to the world? does it help anybody?--so he figures, why go on running? Why bother? Who cares? And he stops running. He gives it all up. And they let him out of the hospital, because now he's cured.

A lot of reasons why I didn't want this to happen to Shecky. He wasn't my friend--who can be friends with a mult.i.tude?--but he was an artist, and that meant he brought a lot of happiness to a lot of people. Of course he brought some unhappiness, too, maybe more than most, but that's the business.

Talent never was enough. It is if you're a painter, or a book writer, maybe, but even there chutzpah counts. Shecky had it. Like the old story, he could have murdered both his parents and then thrown himself on the mercy of the court on the grounds that he was an orphan. And he could have gotten away with it.

The fact is, the truth is, he didn't have anything _except_ _chutzpah_. His routines were written by other people. His singing was dubbed. His alb.u.ms were turned out by the best conductors around.

His movies and TV plays were put together like jigsaw puzzles out of a million blown takes. His books were ghosted.

But I say, anybody who can make out the way Shecky King made out, on the basis of nothing but personality and drive, that person is an artist.

Also, I was making close to a hundred grand a year off him.

What's the difference? I wanted him to pull out of it. The shrinks weren't worried. They said the barber was only ”a manifestation of the problem”. Not a cause. An effect. It meant that Shecky felt guilty about his success and was trying to re-establish contact with the common people.

I didn't ask them to explain why, if that was true, the barber refused to cut Shecky's hair. It would only have confused them.

Anyway, I knew they were wrong. Shecky was in the hospital because of that old son of a b.i.t.c.h on Third Avenue and not because of anything else.

All the next day I tried to piece it together, to make sense out of it, but I couldn't. So I started asking around. I didn't really expect an answer, and I didn't get one, until the next night. I was working on a double scotch on the rocks, thinking about the money we would be making if Shecky was at the Winter Garden right now, when a guy came in. You'd know him--a skinny Italian singer, very big. He walked over and put a hand on my neck. ”I heard about Sheck,” he said. ”Tough break.” Then, not because he gave a d.a.m.n about Shecky but because I'd done him a few favors when he needed them, he asked me to join his party, and I did. Another double scotch on the rocks and I asked if he'd ever heard of Eddie the barber. It was like asking him if he'd ever heard of girls.

”Tell me about it,” I said.

He did. Eddie had been around, he said, forever. He was a fair barber, no better and no worse than any other, and he smelled bad, and he was creepy; but he was The End. I shouldn't feel bad about not knowing this, because I was one of the Out people. There were In people and Out people and the In people didn't talk about Eddie. They didn't talk about a lot of things.

”Why is he The End?” I asked.

Because he only takes certain people, my friend said. Because he's selective. Because he's exclusive.”I was in his shop. He had a lousy wino b.u.m in the chair!”

With that lousy wino b.u.m, I was told, three-fourths of the big names in show business would trade places. Money didn't matter to Eddie, he would never accept more than a dollar. Clothes didn't matter, or reputation, or influence.

”Then what _does_ matter?”

He didn't know. n.o.body knew. Eddie never said what his standards were, in fact, he never said he _had_ any standards. Either he had an opening or he didn't, that was all you got.

I finished off the scotch. Then I turned to my friend. ”Has he ever cut your hair?”

”Don't ask,” he said.

I had a tough time swallowing it until I talked to a half-dozen other Names. Never mind who they were. They verified the story. A haircut from Eddie meant Success. Until you sat in that chair, no matter what else had happened to you, you were nothing. Your life was nothing. Your future was nothing.

”And you go for this jazz?” I asked all of them the same question. They all laughed and said, ”h.e.l.l, no! It's those other nuts!” But their eyes said something different.

It was fantastic. Everybody who was anybody in the business knew about Eddie, and everybody was surprised that I did. As though, I'd mentioned the name of the crazy uncle they kept locked in the bas.e.m.e.nt, or something. A lot of them got sore, a few even broke down and cried. One of them said that if I doubted Eddie's pull I should think about the Names who had knocked themselves off at the top of their success, no reason ever given, except the standard one. I should think about those Names real hard.

And I did, remembering that headline in Shecky's eyes.

It fit together, finally, when I got to a guy who used to know Shecky in the old days, when he was a 20th mail boy named Sheldon Hochstra.s.ser. He wanted to be In more than he wanted anything else, but he didn't know where In was. So he stuck close to the actors and the directors and he heard them talking about Eddie. One of them had just got an appointment and he saw that now he could die happy because he knew he had made it. Shecky was impressed. It gave him something to work towards, something to hang onto. From that point on, his greatest ambition was to get an appointment with Eddie.

He was smart about it, though. At least he thought he was. You don't get a good table at Chasen's, or Romanoff's, he said to himself, and to his buddy, unless you're somebody. For Eddie, he went on, you've got to be more. You've got to be a _success_. So the thing to do was to succeed.

He gave himself fifteen years.

Fifteen years later, to the day I'll bet, I met him at that bar on Third Avenue. Either he'd been thinking about Eddie all that time or he hadn't thought about him at all. I don't know which.

I turned the tap up, then, because he wasn't getting any better. I found out the ones who had made it and talked to them, but they weren't any help. They didn't know why they were In or even how long they'd stay. That was the lousy part of it: you could get cancelled. And putting in a word for Shecky wouldn't do any good, they said, because Eddie made his own decisions.

I still had a hard time getting it down. I'd been around for fifty-four years and I hadn't met anything like this, or even clost to it. A Status Symbol makes a little sense if it's the n.o.bel Prize or a Rolls Royce, but a _barber!_ Insanity, even for show business people.

I started out with money and didn't make it, but that didn't mean he didn't have a price. I figured everybody could be bought. Maybe not with dollars, but with something.

I thought of the calendars on the wall. They're supposed to be for the customers, but I wondered, are they? You never knew about these old guys.