Read Online Getting Garbo by Jerry Ludwig - Free Book Online

“ You tell Reva she’s gotta eat!” Mother didn’t understand why the cops were mad at her (instead of me). So when I was eight, I told her that I couldn’t take it anymore and I’m running away from home, figuring I’ll go hide out for a while around the corner at Pearl’s candy store, she likes me. And Mother, she says, “Okay by me if you want to leave—but those shoes. I paid for them so they’re mine.” I took off my shoes and gave ’em to her and she opened the front door, but there was snow on the ground, so she won. Again.
    What about my dad when all this stuff was going on? He’d either be out “trying to scrape together a living,” as Mother used to call it, or he’d be slouched in his chair in the living room with the Daily News in his lap and The Cisco Kid on TV, snoring away, because he was always exhausted by the time he came home from work. He was this warm-hearted guy who came from Russia when he was a teenager and was so proud to have married an American girl, even though she was ashamed of his accent and the fact that he was just an electrician. Once when I committed some major transgression, Mother told Daddy to spank me. He asked if I was guilty. I shrugged and said, “I dood it,” which was what Red Skelton said when he was the Mean Little Kid on TV. Daddy loved Red Skelton, and he started laughing and I got out of the spanking and Daddy would always say “I dood it” to me whenever I got in trouble. I sure miss him.
    Mother says I was born a rabid movie fan, but actually she weaned me on weekly matinees at the Biltmore Theater on New Lots Avenue in Brooklyn, where we never missed the Bette Davis and Joan Crawford and Barbara Stanwyck tearjerkers. I asked her once why she cried at all the simpy kissy-kissy pictures, and she said, “Reva, I’m sorry you don’t have those finer feelings, but maybe someday you’ll understand.” Of course, when I wept buckets after Bambi’s father got shot by the hunters in the forest, she got frosted and hollered at me, “Stop being so damn silly, it’s just a dumb cartoon.”
    Now I’m at the door to my room, snoring still coming nice and steady from her direction, and, final step, I ease the key into the padlock that guarantees me some privacy and you can imagine what a war it was to get her to agree to that one! But since I finished high school and started contributing to the household from my crappy little jobs, I insisted I was entitled to that much. There, the lock’s open, I’m inside, sliding the dead bolt, safe again, at least until morning.
    These days we live in an apartment house in Santa Monica that was built by Larry Parks, the guy who played Al Jolson in The Jolson Story, and he was a big star for a short while before he got blacklisted for being a communist or something. Anyway, he must not have been a very good communist, because he went into real estate and got rich constructing a bunch of apartment houses around L.A. Mother and I have the rear apartment on the first floor at this one and we get a big break on the rent because Mother is the resident manager. That means I get to schlep the garbage cans out to the curb once a week (I’m not too delicate for that chore), and Mother collects the rents for Larry Parks once a month. Imagine having a movie star—all right, an ex-movie star—for your landlord. I’ve never told him that I got his autograph years ago outside the Algonquin Hotel in New York when he and his wife, MGM musical star Betty Garrett, were in town for six hours en route to playing the London Palladium and that the Secret Six, me included, were the only collectors who got them. I mean, why complicate a business relationship?
    Coming West a few years ago from New York was a good move for both of us. Mother’s arthritis (the reason she drinks so much, she says, ha!) is much better in Southern