A star can make a movie open.
Open.
The classic, revered Hollywood verb defined as: “to make enough people plunk down their hard-earned bucks on opening weekend so film company execs don’t have to spend all Monday thinking up excuses for their wives, mistresses, bosses and Daily Variety reporters to explain why they’ve just spent millions of other people’s dollars to make a flop.”
Bankable stars can make a movie open.
So can a drop-dead story line.
Nowadays even special effects can do it, particularly if they involve explosions.
But nothing in the universe can make a documentary open. Documentaries might be enlightening or touching or inspiring. They can represent the highest form of movie-making art. But they don’t do what people go to feature films for.
To escape from their lives, to enjoy themselves for a few hours.
Walking through downtown Manhattan, toward the sooty carnival of the courts and prisons, Pellam was reflecting: He had directed four independent films, all of them cult classics, two of them ward winners. He had degrees in film making from NYU and UCLA. He’d written dozens of articles for Cineaste and Independent Film Monthly and he could recite the dialog from most of Hitchcock’s films. His credentials were impeccable.
Of the eighteen studios and production companies he’d approached with the idea for this documentary all had rejected him.
Oh, everyone had been full of praise and enthusiasm for West of Eighth: An Oral History of Hell’s Kitchen. But not a single dollar from big studio was forthcoming to back it.
As he’d pitched the idea he explained that the neighborhood offered a wonderful mix of crime, heroism, corruption, beauty.
“Those are all capitalized words, Pellam,” a friend, a VP for development at Warner Brothers, had told him. “Capitalized words do not good movies make.”
Only Alan Lefkowitz had expressed any interest and he didn’t have the foggiest notion what the film was about.
Still, Pellam had great hopes for the flick and believed it had a shot at an Oscar – confidence founded largely on an encounter that had occurred on West Thirty-Sixth Street last June.
“Excuse me,” he’d asked, “you live in this building?”
“Yes, I do, young man,” the elderly black woman had answered, eyes confident, amused. Not wary.
He’d looked up and down the street. “This is the last tenement on this block.”
“Used to be nothing but tenements. Place I lived in for forty years was right there, see that vacant lot? There? I lived here for, lessee, five years or so. How about that? Almost half a century on the same block. Goddamn, that’s a scary thought.”
“Your family lived in the neighborhood all your life?”
The woman had set down the thin plastic grocery bag, containing two cans, two oranges and a half gallon jug of wine.
“You bet I have. My Grandpa Ledbetter came up from Raleigh in 1862. His train, it came in at ten at night and he walked out of the station and saw these boys, dozens of ’em, in a alley and said, ‘Lord, why ain’t you home?’ and they said, ‘What’re you talking? This is our home. Go on with you, old man.’ He felt so bad for those boys. Sleeping outside was called ‘carrying the banner,’ and thousands of children had to do it. They had no home otherwise.”
She’d spoken without a trace of accent, a deep, melodious voice – a singer’s voice as he would later learn.
“Was it a nice building?” Pellam had asked, gazing at the vacant lot, overgrown with weeds, where apparently the woman’s old tenement had once stood.
“Where I lived? That old thing?” She’d laughed. “Falling down ug-ly! You know something interesting though. I thought it was interesting, anyway. When they tore it down there was a big crowd of people came to complain. You know, protestor sorts. ‘Don’t take our homes,’ they were yelling. ‘Don’t take our homes.’ Course I didn’t recognize most of ’em from the neighborhood. I think they were students come down from Morningside Heights or the Village ’cause they smelled a good protest. Get the picture? Those sorts.
“Anyway, who’d I meet but a woman I knew long, long time ago. Many years. She was close to ninety then, been married to a man much older run a livery stable and sold horses to the army. Hell’s Kitchen used to be the stable of New York. Still have the hansom cab stables here. Anyway, this woman, she’d been born in that very building they were tearing down. Ineeda Jones. Not Anita, like you’re thinking. Ineeda. Like I need a. That was a southern name, a Carolina name. She was up in Harlem for years then she came back to the Kitchen and was poor as me. Cradle to grave, cradle to grave. Say, mister, I don’t take any offense but what exactly’re you smiling at?”
“Can I ask your name?”
“I’m Ettie Washington.”
“Well, Ms. Washington, my name’s John Pellam. How’d you like to be in a movie?”
“A movie? Hell. Say, why don’t you come on upstairs? Have some wine.”
The interviews had begun the next week. Pellam would climb the six flights to her apartment and turn on the recorder and let Ettie Washington talk.
And talk she did. About her family, her childhood, her life.
Age six, sitting on a scrap of purloined Sears Roebuck carpet beside a window, listening to her mother and grandmother swap stories about turn-of-the-century Hell’s Kitchen, Owney Madden, the Gophers – the most notorious gang in the city.
“… My Grandpa Ledbetter, he used a lot of slang he heard on the street when he was a young man. He’d say ‘booly dog’ for a policeman. A ‘flat’ was a man you could fool, like at a card game. ‘Blue ruin’ was gin. And ‘chips’ was money. My brother Ben’d laugh and say, ‘Grandpa, don’t nobody use those words no more.’ But he was wrong. Grandpa always said ‘crib’ for where you live, your home, you know? And people’re saying that again nowadays.”
Ettie at age ten, working her first job, sweeping sawdust and wrapping meat in a butcher store.
Age twelve, in school, numbers easy and words hard, but getting mostly As. Stealing scraps from restaurant bins for lunch. Classmates vanishing as the need for money edged out the need for learning.
Age fourteen, her beloved and feared Grandma Ledbetter dying as she sat on the couch at Ettie’s side one hot Sunday afternoon a week before her 99th birthday.
Age fifteen, Ettie herself finally leaving school, working for twenty cents an hour, sharpening knives and chisels in a paperboard factory, stropping blades on long, speeding bands of leather. Some of the men gave her extra pennies because she worked hard. Some would call her back into the stock room and touch her chest and say don’t tell. One touched her between her legs and before he could say don’t tell he received his own knife deep in his thigh. He was bandaged up and given the day off with pay. Ettie was fired.
Age seventeen, sneaking into clubs to hear Bessie Smith on Fifty-second Street.
“… Wasn’t much in the way of entertainment in the Kitchen. But if Mama and Papa had an extra dollar or two, they’d go down to the Bowery on the East Side, where they had what they called ‘museums,’ which weren’t what you think. They were arcades – freak shows and varieties and dancers. Vaudeville. For a really good time Mama and Papa’d go to Marshall’s on Fifty-third. You never heard of that but it was a hotel and nightclub for blacks. That was the big time, none better. Ada Overton Walker sung there. Will Dixon too.”
Age thirty eight, a decade of cabaret jobs behind her, the singing work drying up. Ettie, falling for a handsome Irishman. Billy Doyle, a charmer, a man with, apparently, a criminal record (Pellam was still waiting to hear the end of that story).
Age forty-two, the marriage not working. She was restless, still wanting to sing. Billy was restless too. Wanting to succeed, looking for his own niche. Finally he told her he was going off to find a better job and would send for her. Of course he never returned and that broke her heart. All she ever heard from him was a short note that accompanied the Nevada divorce decree.
At forty-four, marrying Harold Washington, who died drunk in the Hudson River some years later. A good man in many ways, a hard worker, he still left more debt than seemed fair for a man who never played the horses.
Tape after tape of these stories. Five hours, ten, twenty.
“You can’t really be interested in all of this, can you?” Ettie had asked Pellam.
“Keep going, Ettie. You’re on a roll.” Pellam had told himself to get outside and interview other residents of the infamous neighborhood. And he had – some of them. But Ettie Washington remained the heart of West of Eighth. Billie Doyle, the Ledbetters, the Wilkeses, the Washingtons, Prohibition, the unions, gangs, epidemics, the Depression, World War Two, the stockyards, the ocean liners, apartments, landlords.
Ettie was on a roll. And the roll never stopped.
Until her arrest for murder and arson.
Now, a blistering afternoon, a uniformed guard handed John Pellam pass and ushered him through the dank halls, where the scent of Lysol ran neck and neck with that of urine. He passed through the metal detector then stepped into the visiting room to wait.
The Detention Center was chaotic today. Shouts in the distance. A wailing voice or two.
“Me duele la garganta!”
“Yo, bitch-”
“Estoy enferma!”
“Yo, bitch, I’ma come over there and shut you up fo’ good.”
Five minutes later the green metal door opened, with a two-note creak. A guard came in, glanced at him. “You here for Washington? She’s not here.”
Pellam asked where she was.
“You better go to the second floor.”
“Is she all right?”
“Second floor.”
“You didn’t answer me.”
But the guard was gone.
He walked through the bleak corridors until he came to the dark alcove where he’d been directed. It was no less dirty but it was cooler and quieter. A guard glanced at his pass and let him through another door. He pushed inside and was surprised to see Ettie sitting at a table, hands clasped together. There was a bandage on her face.
“Ettie, what happened? Why’re you up here?”
“Isolation,” she whispered. “They were going to kill me.”
“Who?”
“Some girls. In the cell downstairs. They heard about the Torres boy dying. They fooled me pretty good. I thought they were my friends but they were planning all along to kill me. Louis got some court order or another to move me. The guards came just as those girls were about to burn me. They sprayed stuff on me and were gonna burn my face, John. The stuff, it hurt my skin.”
“How’re you feeling now?”
She didn’t answer. She said, “Oh, I never thought that boy’d die. That gave me a turn. Oh, the poor thing. He was such a sweet little one. If he’d been at his grandmother’s like he was supposed to be he’d still be live… I prayed for him. I did! And you know me – I don’t waste any time on religion.”
Pellam put his hand on Ettie’s good arm. He thought about saying, ‘He wasn’t in any pain,’ or ‘He went quickly,’ but of course he had no idea how much pain the boy had experienced or how quickly he’d died.
Finally she glanced at his unsmiling face. “I saw you in court. When you heard ’bout that time I got myself arrested… You want to know about that, I’ll bet.”
“What happened?”
“Remember the time Priscilla Cabot and me were working at that factory? The clothing place?”
“They fired you. A few years ago.”
“It was a desperate time for me, John. My sister’d been sick. And I didn’t have any money at all. I was beside myself. Anyway, this man Priscilla and I worked with, we all got laid off together and he had this idea to scare the company so they’d pay us money. We figured we were owed it, you know. Hell, I went along with ’em. Shouldn’t’ve. Didn’t really want to. But the long and short of it was they called up the owner and said his trucks were going to get wrecked if he didn’t pay us. We weren’t really going to do anything. At least, I wasn’t. And I didn’t know they threatened to burn them. I didn’t call; they did, Priscilla and this man.
“Anyway, the boss, he agreed but he called the police and we all got arrested and the other two said it was my idea. Well, the police didn’t believe I was the ringleader but I did get arrested and I spent some time in jail. I’m not proud of it. I’m pretty ashamed… I’m sorry, John. I didn’t tell you the truth ’bout that. I should’ve.”
“There’s no reason for you to tell me everything about yourself.”
“No, John. We were friends too. I shouldn’ta lied. Shoulda told Louis too. Didn’t help in court any.”
Near them someone laughed hysterically, the sound rising higher and higher until it became a faint scream. Then silence.
“You’ve got your secrets; I do too,” Pellam said. “I’ve kept some things from you.”
She looked at him closely. City life gives you a quick eye. “What is it, John?”
He was debating.
“Something you want to tell me, isn’t there?” she asked.
Finally he said, “Manslaughter.”
“What?”
“I did time for manslaughter.”
Her eyes grew still. It was a story that he had no interest to tell, no desire to relive. But he thought it was important to share it with her. And tell it he did – the story about the star of Pellam’s last feature film – the one never completed (the four canisters of film were sitting at the moment in his attic back in California). Central Standard Time. Tommy Bernstein, lovable, crazy, out of control. Only six setups left to shoot, four second-unit stunt gags. A week. Only a week. “Just give me a little, John. Just to get me through wrap.”
But Pellam hadn’t given him a little. Pellam had given him lot and the man had stayed up in his cokeinduced frenzy for two days straight. Railing, laughing, drinking, puking. He died of a heart attack on the set. And the City of Angels’ District Attorney chose to go after Pellam in a big way for supplying the cocaine that caused it. He was the guilty party, the D.A. claimed, and the jury agreed, bestowing on Pellam conviction and some time in San Quentin.
“I am sorry, John.” She laughed. “Isn’t that a stitch? You, me and Billy Doyle. We’re all three of us jailbirds.” She squinted again. “You know who you remind me of? My son James.”
Pellam had seen pictures of the young man. Ettie’s oldest son, her only child by Doyle. Photographed in his early twenties, he was light-skinned – Doyle had been very pale – and handsome. Lean. James had dropped out of school several years ago and gone out west to make money. The last word from him was a card saying the young man was going to work in the “environmental field.”
That had been over a decade ago.
The guard glanced at her watch and Pellam whispered, “We don’t have much time. I’ve got to ask you a few questions. Now, that insurance policy they claim you bought had your checking account number on it and your signature on it. How’d somebody get them?”
“My checking account? Well, I don’t know. Nobody’s got my account number that I know ’bout.”
“Have you lost any checks lately?”
“No.”
“Who do you write checks to?”
“I don’t know… I pay my bills like everybody. Mama put that in me. Never let ’em get the edge on you, she always said. Pay on time. If you’ve got the money.”
“You written any checks to somebody you wouldn’t ordinarily?”
“No, not that I can think. Oh, wait. I had to pay some money to the government few months ago. They gave me too much social security by mistake. One check had three hundred more’n I ought to get. I knew about it but I kept it anyway. They found out and wanted it back. That’s what I hired Louis for. He handled it for me. All I had to pay was half what they wanted. I gave him check and he sent it to ’em with this form. See, the government, maybe they’re out to get me, John. Maybe the social security people and the police’re working together.”
This manic talk of conspiracies unsettled him. But Pellam cut her some slack. Under the circumstances she was entitled to be a little paranoid.
“How ’bout samples of your handwriting? How could somebody get them?”
“I don’t know.”
“Have you written any letters lately to somebody you don’t normally write?”
“Letters? I can’t think of any. I write to Elizabeth and send cards sometimes to my sister’s daughter in Fresno. Send ’em few dollars on their birthdays. That’s about it.”
“Anybody broken into your apartment?”
“No. I always lock my windows and door. I’m good about that. In the Kitchen you got to be careful. That’s the first thing you learn.” She played with her cast, traced Pellam’s signature. The answers made sense but they weren’t compelling. To a jury they might be true, might be fishy. As with so much else about Hell’s Kitchen he wasn’t sure what to believe.
Pellam slipped his notebook into his pocket and said, “Will you do something for me?”
“Anything, John.”
“Tell me the end of the Billy Doyle story.”
“Which story? About his doing time?”
“That one, yeah.”
“Okay. My poor Billy. Here’s what happened. I told you all along that his goal in life was to own land. For a man with wanderlust he couldn’t go past a lot or a building with a for-sale sign on it without looking it over and calling up the owner and asking questions about it.”
Ettie’s eyes glowed. This was where she belonged, Pellam thought, weighing memories and using them to spin her stories. He knew the seductive lure of storytelling too; he was after all a film director. Except that her stories were true and she expected nothing in return for them. No critical acclaim. No percentage of gross.
“You remember I told you about my brother, Ben. He was about Billy’s age, a year or two younger. Ben came to Billy and said he had this idea how to get some money for a down payment for some land, only he needed a partner to help him. Well, it wasn’t an idea at all. It was just a scam. Ben knew some people at a union headquarters and he did some fake contracts and got them slipped in when the bosses weren’t there. Ben listened too much to Grandpa Ledbetter’s stories about the Gophers and the gangs. He wanted to be in one real bad – even though there weren’t any black gangs in the Kitchen, then or now. But he was real proud of this scam of his.
“But Ben didn’t tell my Billy about the scam part. He thought they were just real contracts for hauling and stuff, they were taking a broker’s fee on. He lived on the edge, Billy did, but he wasn’t stupid. There might’ve been people he’d scam but the union wasn’t one of them. Then Lemmy Collins, the longshoremen’s vice-president, found out there was money missing. He thought Ben’d done it. He knew Billy was tight with Ben but he knew an Irishman wouldn’t steal from his own but a black man’d steal from Irish without thinking twice. So Lemmy came to see my brother with two other men from the union and a baseball bat.
“Just as they were about to beat him to death they got a call from union headquarters. The police had called. It seemed that my Billy’d confessed to the whole thing. It was all his idea. Since the police were involved then Lemmy couldn’t kill Ben even thought he wanted to. The union got the money back and Billy did a year in jail. See, he knew being Irish and white he could get away with his life. If Ben had gone down he would’ve died. If not in the Kitchen then in Sing Sing.”
“He took a rap for somebody,” Pellam said.
“For my own brother,” Ettie said.
Pellam added softly, “He did that for you, you know.”
“I know he did.” Ettie was wistful. “But I think that year changed him. I got my brother saved but I think I might’ve lost my husband because of it. It was a year after he got out that I came home one night and found the note.”
“Excuse me, sir,” the guard said pleasantly. “I’m afraid time’s up.”
Pellam nodded to the guard. “Just one more thing. Hey, Mrs. Washington, look up.”
There was a snap and the soft buzz of a small motor.
She blinked at the flash as Pellam took the Polaroid.
“What’re you doing there, John? You don’t want to remember me this way. Lemme fix my hair, at least.”
“It’s not for me, Ettie. And don’t you worry. Your hair looks just fine.”