Shockaholic

Waiting for the Shoe (Tycoon) to Drop

If my memories are indeed destined to fade, then let the ones herein contained be among the first to go.

Karl’s Shoe Stores was America’s largest privately held retail shoe chain when Harry Karl took it over from his father in 1952. He was a multimillionaire (a phrase that used to carry the cachet that billionaire does today) when he married my mother, and, over the course of their thirteen-year marriage, managed to lose not just all of his money, but also all of hers, leaving her massively in debt for good measure.

Prior to making her Debbie Reynolds Karl, Harry had been married twice to the singer/actress Marie McDonald, whose nickname was “The Body.” You might conclude from this biographical nugget that he was in possession of some incredible sexual allure. If so, as you’ll soon see, you would be very, very wrong.

I was three when my mother married him. She was never in love with him. The whole point of Harry Karl was that, post–Eddie Fisher, my mother wanted to provide my brother and me with a father who would stay, rather than the kind that would, say, leave and create one of the craziest scandals in Hollywood history. Somehow this translated to her as having to find not just someone who valued faithfulness over infidelity—not that Harry turned out to be such a husband—but someone who was the complete opposite of Eddie in every way.

Eddie Fisher was a quite handsome man. Harry Karl… wasn’t. Eddie Fisher was insanely charming. Harry Karl was so lacking in charm that my guess is this is probably the first sentence ever composed that contains both his name and that word. Eddie was young and did everything with boyish energy and glee. Harry was fairly old (as it happens, the same age I am now) and spent most of his time in bed sleeping. Eddie spent most of his time in bed not sleeping.

Eddie spoke with delight, and when he wasn’t talking passionately, he was singing—the world was his shower, and he used women for soap. Harry neither spoke nor sang—he snored in one end and I don’t know how else to say it other than just say it—farted out the other. Eddie lived in a faux Asian house in Benedict Canyon. Harry—and therefore we—lived at 813 Greenway Drive, a house poised hesitantly on the edge of a golf course, just below Sunset on the western edge of Beverly Hills. It was a massive, embassy-like marble-floored box, possessing all the comforting warmth of a plant that manufactured disinfectant. The dominant color, if it even qualifies as a color, was white.

I’m sure my mom just wanted to live in a nice house—a house that rich people could live in—but coming from the poorest part of the Texas/Mexico border town of El Paso, it was difficult to know exactly what that ought to look like. Not that Harry was to the manner born—he was, as it happens, to the manner boring. However, he’d inherited the business his father had built coming out of World War II, but because he hadn’t taken part in making something out of nothing, he turned out to be better suited to making nothing out of something.

But destroying, really destroying, something (like, for example, your wife’s life), if you want to do it properly, it can take a while. About twelve years in this case, a deceptively comfortable time during which the four of us holed up in our lavish digs unknowingly waiting for the money to run out so we could pack up and then chase after it.

There were bookshelves filled with books that no one read. There was a piano room with a piano that no one played. There was a lanai with a table and chairs and lots of plants and big indoor palm trees that no one went out to sit under, ever, ever, ever. There was a dining room with a huge table and very large seats that resembled electric chairs without the electricity. There was a living room where no one lived, with white couches and chairs, and lots of crystal objects—ashtrays, boxes containing cigarettes, a lighter, figurines of shy nude women—and coffee-table books of great works of art that no one ever perused.

There was a chauffeur, a chef, a nanny, a butler, a laundress, and a guard—all decked out in the appropriate uniforms, just like in the movies. In the breakfast room there was a buzzer under the rug, so my mother could use her foot to call for people who were standing five feet away. That way she didn’t have to strain her vocal cords shouting “MARY!” or “LETHA!” or “YANG!” or “MRS. YANG!” She could just buzz.

My brother and I had our own rooms, but for many years we slept in the master bedroom with Harry and my mother because it was one of the few times we could spend time with our mom, who worked almost all the time. These were the early prehistoric days of Hollywood, when people were under contract to studios, casting couches were still in use, and there were no twelve-hour turnaround union rules, so she was home usually on weekends during which time she needed a lot of rest so she could start all over again at dawn Monday morning. If you think of the house as a big letter, we all slept in the little postage stamp up in the corner. Harry and my mother in the bed, Todd on a lavender silk couch by the window under his blue blanket, while I slept on the white carpet on my mother’s side of the bed, huddled under my pink blanket. It was a multimillion-dollar mansion, but we lived in it as though it was a shack in the Appalachians.

Here are a few other recollections I have about Harry:

Before he drove Karl Shoes into the ground, he named a shoe after me (the Lady Carrie) and one for my brother (the Lord Todd).

He smoked about five packs of cigarettes a day. His head was always surrounded by a cloud of smoke, under which he was constantly coughing.

He walked very, very slowly, as befitted a man who did so much smoking and coughing.

He had a diamond pocket watch with a chain attached to his belt loop and a diamond clasp in the shape of the letter H. Harry was very big on monograms, possessing HK shirts, HK jackets, and HK shoes.

He drove a deep green Bentley that had a phone in it. There were little wooden trays on the back of the front seats that you could pull down—you know, to play solitaire and build wooden airplanes and boxes out of Popsicle sticks. And there was a TV. This was in the mid-1960s to late ’60s, so neither the phone nor the TV actually worked, but still… no one else had them, and that’s really what counted.

He was among the victims of a famous fixed card game—I think George Burns was another—at the Friars Club in Beverly Hills. Apparently during this game there were people hidden in the ceiling looking down at the cards. He lost three million dollars in this card game, so if you’ve ever wondered what kind of person stays in a card game after losing a million dollars, let alone more than two million dollars, now you know.

He watched a lot of television. So much so that at some point he had a second set put in the bedroom. After that we used to say, “Harry’s upstairs watching TVs.”

Over the television in his den there was a picture of him and my mother standing on either side of Richard Nixon taken at some fund-raiser a few years prior. Todd and I were not big Nixon fans, and we took endless childhood joy in taking that picture down and hiding it under the sofa. This was a game that, unlike Nixon himself, never got old.

After a hard day at the golf course (drinking more than golfing), Harry liked to plop himself down in his chair in the den and read the newspaper. Behind it, he’d be picking his nose, which we couldn’t see, but then we would see him doing that thing with his fingers to… please, don’t make me say it.

Harry was always well dressed and groomed. He ought to have been, since a barber came to see him at the house every day. Nighttime was another story. As Harry slept sans pajama bottoms, causing his privates to be anything but, his horrible flaccid elephant trunk of a penis was regularly on display, actually looking more like a long ball than anything else. Ah, the fabulous waltzing we did at Harry’s Long Ball!

Naturally he had hemorrhoids, which was probably partly why he eschewed pajama bottoms, leaving him to sleep bare bottomed on a towel. (Yes, with an HK monogram.) He also had a special toilet so he didn’t have to exacerbate the tissue down there with any undue wiping. I apologize for these descriptions. Horrific, I know. But, having shared this, I hope you’ll someday be able to find a way to forgive me. I know I won’t be able to forgive myself. Harry would push this little lever on the side of the toilet and it would spray water on him, after which he’d push the lever the other way and a tiny door would open and blast warm air to dry his now shiny clean parts. This was my favorite thing in the house to demonstrate to my fellow teenage classmates.

Given what I’ve told you so far, you won’t be surprised to learn that, in addition to Harry’s previously catalogued attributes, he was also a lifetime member of the Frequent Farter Club. He rarely spoke, apparently preferring to converse flatulently. He communicated in Morse code from his ass.

He was almost twenty years older than my mother, and had informed her of his impotence early on. I doubt that this was much of a heartbreak for her, for a host of reasons, but—as it turned out, this “impotence” turned out to be more that he just preferred to have sex with hookers who came to the house pretending to be manicurists.

After my mother found out about the “manicurists,” a gossip columnist named Joyce Haber wrote that the marriage was on the rocks. That night my mother came to my room (because by now you’ll perhaps be happy to hear that all four of us were finally sleeping in separate bedrooms), and, shutting the door discreetly behind her, she held out this article, held tight in her right hand. “Don’t show this to Harry,” she instructed me solemnly. The chances of my doing this were quite slim, as Harry and I rarely spoke—but I assured her I had no plans to do so. Later the same evening Harry uncharacteristically also came to my room, saying and doing almost the exact same thing my mother had done moments before. Clutching another copy of the same paper he said, “Don’t show this to your mother.” As if, in either case, this was something I would have done.

Then, in part as an effort to keep the family together, we all went to Europe. Todd and my first trip there. My most vivid memory of the trip occurred one evening when we were in Venice. As we floated along in a gondola, Harry’s hand drifting beside him in the water, while the gondolier singing his passionate song—la, la, la—and with the singing in our ears and the Italian twilight glowing around us, Harry’s hand slowly came out of the water holding a wet lump of excrement. Are you beginning to see a recurring theme in Harry’s overall presentation?

Later back at the hotel, my brother and I were giggling about the feces that Harry had just been scrubbing off of his hand when he suddenly yet casually appeared in the doorway (I don’t recall where my mother was) and announced that he had a joke to tell us. Todd and I were stunned. In more than a decade with Harry Karl, nothing like this had ever happened. Harry simply never spoke, except when he got on the intercom to call out for assistance.

It was a miracle! Maybe there was magic in the shit Harry had pulled from the dark water in the canal!

“There’s an orchestra,” he began, frowning, “and the first violinist is standing in front of the conductor.” Not only was he telling us this joke and speaking in fully punctuated if somewhat simple sentences—“And the conductor is conducting and conducting…”—but he was also acting it out, grandly performing the conducting with his arms. “And all of a sudden he smells something that smells really bad”—he made an unpleasant smell face—“but the conductor keeps conducting and conducting, until after a while he can’t stand the stench any longer. So he turns to the first violinist and asks…” Harry mouthed as he continued to conduct. “‘Did you fart?’” Then Harry acted out the part of the violinist, waving his arms in enormous violin-playing movements. “And the violinist looks at him with a big smile on his face”—and one on Harry’s—“and shaking his head he whispers, No, he didn’t. He definitely did not fart.” And Harry kept playing the violin. This was an unprecedented spasm of personality from Harry. This joke that had apparently remained pent up inside of him for over thirteen years now came flowing out as if he’d had a comedic boil that had now been lanced.

“So the conductor”—now he went back to acting like the conductor—“he continues to conduct, but the smell is also continuing, so he turns yet again to the first violinist and mouths, ‘Are you sure you didn’t fart?’ And the first violinist has a huge grin on his face”—as did Harry, a massive, yellowed-toothed grin, accompanied by more big violin-playing movements—“and shakes his head. No! No, he most certainly had not. He absolutely, positively did not fart. So the conductor continues to conduct, but this unbelievably terrible smell stiil permeates the air around them. So now he finally looks back down at the first violinist and mouths, ‘Did you shit?’ And now the first violinist, still grinning madly”—as was Harry, with more pleasure than we’d ever seen him evidence—“nodded yes.” And the crescendo, with the most enormous, joyous head nodding from Harry: “Yes! He did! He most certainly had shit!” The violinist actually shit! Right there in the orchestra! From the looks of Harry’s pantomime he was playing nothing less than Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata!

That, I promise you, was the longest conversation Harry ever had with either of us. Not that it really was a conversation, but it was close. Someone talked, others listened, an understanding of sorts was achieved. The idea of him telling us this joke after having just washed the shit from the canals off of his hand will never cease to amaze me. Well… almost never.

Sadly, the European excursion did not save their marriage. I sometimes think that perhaps it would have if my mother had been there to hear about the first violinist and his unruly intestines.