The Nuances of Near-Forgotten Phone Numbers Tough and Easy Stages


By John McCabe

The great poet, T.S. Eliot, in one of his most memorable phrases, captures the mediocrity of existence for so many as thus: “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” My sequence of days, both memorable and mediocre, seem to have been measured out in old phone-and-address books.

I keep them, battered and ancient, in a drawer of my desk, and about once every four years or so I take them out for a recharging of my sentimental batteries. For these timeworn little books are infallible guides not only to where I have lived through the years -- Detroit, Manhattan, Stratford-upon-Avon, Brooklyn, Milford, Pennsylvania, Interlochen, Sault Ste. Marie, and here -- but they are also a vital index to old friends, acquaintances, jerks, and other admirable if not admiring folk who have helped set the tone of my world. What a revealing, exhilarating, occasionally sad and depressing experience rereading those entries provides.

I have just gone through them again, and in them I find the following people, typically memorable, in my sampling of these more than 300 entries:

1 - The four different phone numbers of my best friend’s places and progresses through life, all in Michigan. John Carroll started life as a wise-guy Jesuit high school student (like me), and (unlike me) became a war hero, a radio announcer of brilliance, the father of seven, and one of this State’s best business men. He had wit and charm in overflowing abundance and did the world a vast disservice by leaving it last year. John Carroll could make me laugh when I didn’t want to, the only person able to do that. “Hi!” I’d lead off in phone conversation. “Don’t threaten me,” he would reply. (O.K., you had to be there.)

2 - The number of an old classmate of John’s and mine who was the most talkative guy we knew. A voluble and fascinating conversationalist who said more in one minute than the average person did in five. The last time John and I visited him, he was the victim of a debilitating stroke, totally robbed of his powers of speech. Astoundingly, we had a full chat, and he said as much as he ever did - by means of facial expression, pantomime, and, at one point, with a few tears.

3 - The Manhattan phone number of a prominent Hollywood star, a handsome man much favored by the ladies. He lived in both New York and Hollywood. I was introduced to him -- let’s call him B -- by Les Gruber, owner of Detroit’s best restaurant at the time, The London Chop House. I was teaching at Wayne State University then, and Les always had me over for a great meal when prominent show biz types came to Detroit. B was a fancy food fancier, and he was bright and witty. “He’s a regular guy,” Les said, and so he proved to be. B also loved Shakespeare and since it was my specialty, we loved talking about the Bard. In time I moved to Manhattan, and B said we really must get together some time when he was in town away from Hollywood, which he professed to deplore.

We actually did get together at his apartment once, and during an animated discussion on something or other, he insistently kept squeezing my knee to emphasize his conversational points. He did this once too often, and I found a valid excuse to leave. The odd thing is that at the time he was married to one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood. I could never quite figure that one out.

4 - My theatre instructor’s number at the University of Detroit, the man who cast me in my first Shakespearean play. A beguiling person, he had a cheery--really an over-cheery-- wife who costumed all of our plays he directed. I kept in touch with the couple for years after I was graduated, and when I moved to New York, I shall never forget the morning when I opened the letter my mother sent me enclosing a clipping from The Detroit News. What I read was almost too much to bear, incredible, shocking. The heading of the article was U of D INSTRUCTOR KILLS WIFE. My former professor had, one fine spring morning, hammered his wife to death. Then he took a long length of twine, wound it around her neck, and pulled it tight. Not content with that, he filled their bathtub with water and put her in it. He then calmly called the police to tell what he had done. As I read this horror of a clipping, I sat and wept. I wrote him at once at the Wayne County jail, saying little, but with the letter I sent a new theatre book I knew he’d like. It never reached him. He died in jail, the victim of concussion after a fall in the shower.

5 - The number of the lady teacher from New Jersey, a graduate student of mine at NYU, who asked me as a special favor to evaluate a play she was directing at her high school. She went to the trouble of hiring a car and chauffeur to get me there and back to Brooklyn. Really a very sweet person and a good student. “Now, I want you to be absolutely candid with me,” she said. I promised. As I watched the play, I realized I was watching absolutely the worst-directed play I had ever seen, and I have seen many. It was text-book illustration of how not to direct a play. Afterwards, on my way backstage, I realized I could not possibly tell this dear lady the truth. Instead, as I approached her, smiling my best smile, and holding her hands in mine, I nodded enthusiastically and spoke the truth: “There are no words. There just are no words!” She glowed. I went on, again in full truth: “I have never seen anything like it. Never.” “Oh, thank you,” she said, her eyes sparkling.

6 - The backstage public phone number of the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in New York. It was in that theatre that I made my one and only Broadway appearance. This was toward the end of the run of BEST FOOT FORWARD, a lively musical (later made into a film with Lucille Ball) concerning a boys’ military academy. It starred many young unknowns (only one of whom went on to be known, Junie Allyson). Of all those unknowns, I was the most unknown. I was a replacement for one of the cadets, just for three weeks. But at last I could call myself a Broadway actor. My role was, to understate an understatement, miniscule. That role, in its entirety, was “Oh, no!”

7 - The number of the superintendent of my West 82nd Street apartment in Manhattan. He was a bad-tempered little German refugee named Fritz, who had much to be bad-tempered about. The responsibilities of a New York “super,” as they then and now are called, are multifold and burdensome. “Supers” have to cater to the domestic needs of scores of people, all of whom have apartments that seem to be in constant need of repair and maintenance of some kind. Our super, additionally, felt the job was demeaning because he had been at one time (he assured me) a top-ranked vaudevillian, the best juggler in all of Berlin. I smiled politely at that, but was entranced when on a lonely (for me) Thanksgiving Day, he knocked on my door.

I was dispirited -- feeling sorry for myself, a lorn bachelor far from home. Fritz came in and said, -- nay, announced: “ I have come to entertain you.” He went to my tiny kitchen, gathered up a number of items, and actually thrilled me by keeping in perilous, circuitous balance a round robin of dinner plates, knives, and one toaster. It was juggling of such brilliance that I could only gape at it. I was not only entertained, I was much moved, almost beyond words, that this much-put-upon man would take the time to comfort a lonely tenant.

I thanked him and said, “Fritz, I can quite believe that you were -- are -- Berlin’s greatest juggler.” He looked at me and said, “What I told you was wrong. I am the greatest juggler in the world.” I believed him.

So in the miscellany of my days, these phone numbers and many more stand forth strikingly in my memory. Some of these people, some of these events, I’d like not to meet or experience again. But of one thing, I am sure. One sentence describes them all. It’s a sentence uttered by an old actor friend of mine at The Lambs Club when he was for a time the manager of a flea circus -- yes, a genuine flea circus -- on West 43rd Street just off Times Square. Billy described his job to me in these words, and they appertain to the emotions those phone numbers stir in me: “Mac, I don’t think I could do it all again, but I’m here to tell you that it was all as interesting as hell.”

Dr. John McCabe, year-around resident of Mackinac Island, has for decades been professional actor, drama professor, and show business biographer. The Town Crier has asked him to share, from time to time, some of his memories.