Miss Tasso Polk at ten-ten alighted from the elevator onto the olive tiles of the nineteenth floor only lightly nagged by a sense of something wrong. The Magazine’s crest, that great black M, the thing masculine that had most profoundly penetrated her life, echoed from its inlaid security the thoughtful humming in her mind: “m.”

Dr. Seuss:

Then Miss Tasso Polk without further ado,
Went in to her boss, Miss Jane Watt-Wehr-Hu.
“Good morning Miss Polk,” Jane began with a smirk.
“If it’s not too much trouble, let’s get down to work.
Now first, I need donuts, ’bout six hundred million,
And coffee, two sugars, no, make that twelve billion.
I want a new wardrobe! In silks, wools and leathers;
I want to grow taller, I want to grow feathers!
And finally,” she sighed, “As soon as you’re able,
Call up Four Seasons and book me a table.”
Now tend to your duties, I’m ‘fraid I must fly.
I’ve got an appointment with John Wenn-Howe-Wye.
We’re meeting, you see, to decide if it’s best,
To move the whole office to a large eagle’s nest.”
As Tasso prepared to go start her day,
Jane opened her window and flew right away.
“That’s that, job well done,” Tasso said to herself
While she dusted the Chum-Chum tree up on the shelf.
And waving good-bye, Tasso swept out the door,
Heading up to her office on the two-thousandth floor.

Jacqueline Susann:

Tasso just managed to catch the elevator as the doors were closing. “You must be new here,” she heard a voice behind her, as smooth as single malt scotch. It could only be the managing editor, Lyman Braithwaite, ne’er-do-well wastrel son of the magazine’s owner and founder, Brixton Braithwaite — now, tragically, confined to an iron lung.

“Actually, Mr. Braithwaite, I’ve been at the magazine for 12 years.” He stepped toward her in the car. He was no fag, that was for sure. Weak-kneed, she stepped back until the pert melons of her backside brushed up against the rich mahogany veneer of the elevator.

“I see …” he said. “You know, the magazine needs a girl on the cover. A girl people can look at and say, ‘That’s the magazine I need to read, by God!’”

“But this is a financial magazine.”

“Never mind that. Have you ever modeled for a great deal of money before, and are you free for dinner tonight Miss, uh …”

“Polk. Tasso Polk.”

“Tasso? Rhymes with ‘lasso.’” He fixed her with his cerulean gaze, giving Tasso the distinct feeling of a roped calf waiting for a red-hot metal branding iron.

Isaac Bashevis Singer:

She took lunch every day at a dairy restaurant near the office. The people here argued, spitting ancient and potent curses, they wept tears of joy while they danced with their feet several inches off the floor, they rent their clothing in unspeakable agonies. On nights after eating there, Tasso was invariably tormented by dreams in which she found herself sporting the horns of a devil, the genitals of a man and her own woman’s breasts. She would awaken, heaving and terrified, vowing to never return.

Once, there came into the cafeteria a man in a dark greatcoat. He sat down and pulled from his mouth three black plums and a silver spoon. From a hole in his chest he produced a loaf of black bread and a golden-skinned herring. When he had eaten his lunch — augmented with a boiled potato and a plate of sour cream from the restaurant — he closed up his coat and flew away, leaving behind the smell of sulfur and fresh dung.

“A dybbuk.” spat the waitress, clearing his dishes. “And a bad tipper.” He had left behind him on the table a damp and faded note. “The man to whom you are mistress is not a good man,” it read. “You must forget him.”

J.D. Salinger:

If you ask me, there’s nothing more depressing than some old guy with dirty cigarette-stained fingers handing you some goddamn note in some cafeteria somewhere, as if he was letting you in on some big secret. It could just about break your heart if you thought about it for even a second. A goddamn note telling you that the guy you were going with was nothing but a phony who said nice things to you, and maybe took you for dinner at the Yale Club every so often. Like you didn’t already know that he was just some show-off from Groton or Philips who thought it was so damn original to ask the waiter his name and then call him by his name for the whole damn meal.

Tasso just couldn’t face the thought of going back to the magazine just then, having to pretend like everyone was her best goddamn friend, so she headed off to the Museum of Natural History. Maybe in the Blue Whale Room she could look at the kids. That always cheered her up; the kids running around like they were drunk, so happy ’cause they hadn’t found out yet that everyone would end up disappointing you and it was all a big bunch of phony crap and lies.

Joan Didion:

There had been a time in Tasso’s life when such a note, with its glaring eccentricity and specificity, would have brought on the thrumming aura of impending migraine and sent her to bed. A time when she had dated interesting boys in broadcloth shirts from Rogers-Peet who took her to parties where they would collectively engage in what was known back then, indeed what was a key metaphor of the Age, as “having fun,” as in “You should call up Trudy. She’s a lot of fun,” said, perhaps, about a girl, perhaps, who was amusing to be with (the particulars are what fade over time). A time in Tasso Polk’s life long before she could have imagined herself one day standing in an A-line dress on the tarmac of a jungle airport in an unnamed country.

Often, in lieu of pondering such things, Miss Tasso Polk took herself off to buy a pair of shoes or to have her teeth cleaned. But today, it was the Blue Whale Room at the Museum of Natural History, lying on the Western edge of Central Park, Frederick Law Olmsted’s highly designed expanse of sylvan contrivance that had nothing to do with, indeed was in no way affected by, the Space Program, the advent of highways — and consequently movie making — in California, nor the kidnapping of Patricia Hearst.

Woody Allen:

Restaurants featuring smoking areas with cute, retro names like the Havana Room — I’m still waiting for the Missiles of October Lounge — are springing up like mushrooms, or rather, metastatic tumors. Even my formerly staid neighborhood, once the elegant home to Washington Irving, New York’s only private park and the charmingly prim National Arts Club, is rank with the smell of the Death of Restraint: prime rib, Bombay Sapphire, Ketel One, tobacco and, of course, the unfortunate result of all of these at the end of a long evening, vomit.

I hate the Nouveau Swingerati. I will freely admit it. I quite enjoy a good martini, and will occasionally still take one in the privacy of my own home, although I’d sooner eat glass than be seen drinking one in public. I am also fairly obsessed with Frank Sinatra. I know the words to most of his songs and can emulate the phrasing on the important recordings more than passably well, not to mention sing both the Betty Garrett and Frankie parts of “Let’s Go to My Place” from “On the Town,” thank you very much. But you won’t catch me out in public singing “Angel Eyes” while swirling an olive through my gin.

Swingers have ruined my life. The martini is now tied with the cell phone as the leading semaphore for “Hello, I’m a schmuck.” (The cigar, it should be noted, is something entirely more direct than a mere semaphore). And my beloved Frank has been co-opted as the god of Cool by precisely the kind of thick-necked douche bags I’ve spent my entire life assiduously avoiding. Not yet even dead, Frank hovers, shimmering perpetually above us all, like a beacon, like Noah’s Dove.

So, it was with a mixture of trepidation and the anticipatory bloodlust of a hatchet job that I went to the Museum of Television and Radio to see “The Rat Pack Captured,” a 90-minute version of a recently discovered 1965 kinescope of a benefit concert by Frank, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr., hosted by Johnny Carson — allegedly the only known video recording of an entire Rat Pack performance.

the audience at the museum on the rainy Saturday turns out not, however, to be made up of the Date Rape-oisie at all. For the most part, we are men and women of a certain age who have come to see the boys sing. The evening is opened by a startlingly young Johnny, at that time only three years on the air, who explains a bit about the Dismas House of St. Louis, a facility for ex-offenders for which this event is a benefit. And then comes Dean Martin. I brace myself, having never liked his boozy persona. He is a caricature of dissipation; shiny-faced, eyes lowered to half-mast, beatifically stoned. But boy, is he adorable. Imagine my surprise that I come to you now as a prophet of the Church of Dino.

Dean Martin sings like an angel. And this came upon me in a blinding flash of light: In the same way that, despite the seemingly extemporaneous ease with which Fred Astaire danced, we all know he rehearsed doggedly, I realized Dean isn’t really a drunk asshole! Actually, there’s nothing assoholic at all about his drunk act.

Unlike with his former partner and icon of the French, Jerry Lewis, you’re not waiting for the vicious undercurrent. Dino smiles in a vaguely surprised, ain’t-this-nifty way throughout his set, as if the music pouring out of him was not of his doing at all. Something else he shares with Astaire is a vocabulary of the tiniest physical gestures. While singing “King of the Road,” that pre-hippie ’60s anthem to barefoot, boho insouciance, he gives it a nice little gender-fuck by punctuating a riff with a lock of the torso, a cant of the head, his wrist a relaxed teapot handle, and singing, “Queen of the Road.” At a time when gay-baiting humor relied on the wide swish and the hostile mince with the unspoken promise of ultimately kicking someone’s faggot ass, Dean, for just an instant, makes a surprisingly sympathetic and counterintuitively convincing bottom. I sit there, homo that I am, charmed and unoffended.

By the time he finishes his set and brings home “You’re Nobody ‘Til Somebody Loves You,” he does so with such a touching sincerity that I am thinking to myself, “Yes, Dean. So true, so true. I am nobody.”

Sammy, on the other hand, is a wraith of pure energy, a pipe cleaner man in a tuxedo, with his hair plastered against his head like an LP. He is also so immediately sweet and unctuous, so afflicted with the inability to refer to anyone without the Homeric moniker “My dear friend,” that I almost sank into a diabetic coma. This is pure telethon Sammy — the sycophancy ripe for parody. But it’s just opening artifice. Who knows, perhaps in 1965, in front of an entirely white audience, this ritual self-declawing was required of any black entertainer. It is when he sings that the façade drops away. He is being played as surely as any other instrument up on stage. It is a miraculous, intimate, personal act. He is still, for want of a better expression, Mr. Entertainment, but the music moves through him.

It had been so long since I’d actually heard Sammy that I’d forgotten the depths of his talent, and it is profound. His version of “One For My Baby” alone, which contains uncanny imitations of Billy Eckstine, Mel Torme and Nat King Cole — all dead on and not remotely obsequious — would almost be enough to justify an entire career. When he demonstrates the latest dances — the Mashed Potato, the Frug, the Pony — for the glaringly unhip crowd, he is not unaware of their innate campiness, the dopey names, the prescribed, vaguely bogus looseness. But he does them so beautifully and with such graceful abandon that you’re reminded of how marvelously sexy and free it must have seemed to be able to dance like that alone. If partnered dancing was a metaphor for love, watching Sammy shake his little can while doing the Swim must have seemed like a national exhortation to go jack off.

And, finally, the Chairman of the Board, who is, at least as far as “The Rat Pack Captured” is concerned, the least compelling of the three. “Your hoodlum singer,” says Johnny. True indeed. Sinatra is no longer the beauty he was and his face has taken on a leathern, thuggish quality, which is not relieved by a surfeit of smiling for the audience. There is a Great Star Reserve in evidence, however justified, that I find simply threatening. Dino and Sammy, as it turns out, had not yet done enough to soften me toward Vegas-Heyday-Frank. Even his own goofiness — miming shooting craps way too many times on “Luck Be a Lady,” substituting “St. Louis” for “Chicago” on “My Kind of Town” to the point where even a St. Louis native would scream “enough” — merely make him seem more unimaginative than human.

And yet, as my sister says, “They don’t call him Beethoven for nothing.” He is still Frank Sinatra. Even if he phoned it in, it would be worth it.

But none of the three do phone it in. These guys are all about talent. Transcendent talent. The ancient Greeks got it right; talent this prodigious becomes a moral virtue. So that by the time they spend the last half-hour of the concert breaking themselves up in their not terribly funny, mildly punch-drunk, highly exclusionary frat-boy way, it seems entirely earned and materially different from the annoying rough-housing that goes on of a Saturday night on Park Avenue South.

It is only this last part of “The Rat Pack Captured” that I associate with the new Swinger culture. The unrelenting irony with which Rat Pack culture has been adopted entirely ignores precisely why these guys were allowed to behave the way they did. Because they were some of the greatest interpreters of the American Popular Song that have ever lived.

Moreover, they only behaved that way some of the time. There has been an effacement of the historical record. “The Rat Pack Captured” is, in the end, a benefit for a halfway house for ex-cons, as they used to affectionately be called. What mainstream white entertainer today, other than Susan Sarandon, say, would take up such a cause? Sinatra was a progressive long before he became a Reagan Regular. Even the original founder of the Rat Pack, Humphrey Bogart, was a vocal opponent to McCarthy and a supporter of the Hollywood Ten.

Facts all lost in the Rat Pack Revival. The recuperated aspects of that time, the drinking, the smoking, the wardrobe, are not only the least important as regards the Sinatra signature style, but they are also the very attributes that resonate of a time and a world that was far less hospitable, kind or gentle. It’s all a bit like going to Beyreuth and coming out an anti-Semite instead of an opera queen.

The Swingerati have ignored the gallery entirely and gone straight for the gift shop. They don’t even know from Frank Sinatra that much, beyond the swagger. When the hi-fi gets fired up, likely as not it is the strains of Esquivel, or the camp-right-out-of-the-box lounge music of groups like Combustible Edison that one hears. I said earlier that I wouldn’t be caught dead singing a Sinatra song out in public. But I’ve changed my mind. I could make it all the way through to the end of “Come Fly With Me” and nobody would even recognize the tune, let alone the words. And that’s the saddest part.

In that vein, have you read “The Kiss” by Kathryn Harrison? Amazing memoir of her long-time incestuous affair with her father. Talk about lemons into lemonade; the advanced reading copy is gorgeous with a fabulous quote from Toby Wolff. Saw her eating at Michael’s the other day. This is going to be very, very big for her.

Anyway, think of what I’ve said and take it in the spirit in which it’s offered. Call me with any and all thoughts. I am your agent, after all.

Dorothy

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March 6th

Dear Dorothy:

i must say, your letter seemed out of left field, but I’m at least glad for the honesty. Personally, I find lots that’s universal in the Camp Young Israel of the Poconos stories, but that’s neither here nor there. You can’t sell what you don’t really want to get behind, right? I am a little confused, however, about “mining deeper.” Is a well-adjusted, relatively tragedy-free childhood now a literary liability? What ever happened to a voice and keen observation? Does anybody remember whether the Brönte sisters were abused or in recovery? What would you have me do? Make things up, recover false memories, undergo something traumatic? Actually, Dorothy, I guess I am a bit angry about all this talk of marketing and advances, but I value our relationship and your opinion, so I will think seriously about what you’ve said.

Greg

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14 March

Greg:

i‘m very sorry my letter upset you, I merely meant to encourage you realistically, but I will also admit that I am thrilled by your anger! It’s exciting and raw and I hope you can channel it. While we’re on the subject, re: your suggestion of undergoing something traumatic that pushes you out of your “comfort zone,” I can only say yes yes YES! Why not? You have an artist’s sensibility and I’m sure you’d make beautiful hay out of it, plus you’re a trooper and I dare say could suffer some of life’s slings and arrows with real style.

Love,

Dottie

P.S. Sat a table away from Kathryn H. at Aquavit, couldn’t make out what she was saying. She was only picking at her gravlax. The buzz is Winona and Mel for the movie (although folks are joking about a comeback for Ryan and Tatum, ho, ho.)

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March 19th

Dorothy:

been doing lots of thinking. Some things maybe coming to light, others still hazy.

Let me run this by you. Did you know that some Jewish mothers — mine, for instance — call their male children “tateleh”? It means “Little Father” in Yiddish, begging the question, of course, about the presence of the Big Father. Ditto the old Catskills joke, “Oedipus, Schmoedipus, a boy should love his mother.”
Pursue?

Greg

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21 March

Oh, Greg!

pursue! Absolutely! Potentially really rich terrain. So gratifying to have my faith in you corroborated. Spoke to Sonny about it. Very interested. Dinner at Independent — vaguely lousy steak fries — and saw K.H. at a table for five, including — I think — John John. Almost went over to say congrats but saw she was also sitting with Seth, to whom I’m not talking.

Baci,

Dot

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April 4th

Dottie:

saw the parents on the weekend. Tried planting the seed by telling them how much I needed to break out with the next book, etc., even mentioned “The Kiss” and its success, but no suggestions or offers forthcoming.

Remaining hopeful,

G.

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12 April

Greg, my own:

things speeding up here. Talked to legal at Knopf today. They need something to read by Memorial Day without fail, so I hope plans are proceeding apace. Went up there for a preliminary marketing brainstorm. There’s talk of you attending Sales Conference and meeting the Reps.

Mwaahh!

Dorothy

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April 14th

Dorothy:

beachhead established! Weekend out at the parents … again! They’re thrilled with all the attention. Told Dad I was thinking of writing about having a relationship with Mom, but I don’t think he got it entirely. He will soon enough, I suppose.

Finally, Sat. nite dinner, I put my hand on my mother’s ass in the butler’s pantry when we were getting the dessert plates. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she screamed, but there was that all-important catch of ambivalence in her tone.

Greg

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16 April

G:

a quick note. Did some wheedling, Yaddo has a room for you in two weeks. They bumped Oscar Hijuelos! Word is getting around in a very big way. Mentioned your hair quandary to Nina at the Harper’s party the other night. Apparently there’s some Fred Fekkai Leave-in Hair Balm that will work. I’ll pick some up and send it along.
Now, get down to work and write (you star, you!).

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April 19th

Dorothy:

really pleased to hear about the British sale, and the Elle Decor contract arrived yesterday. I know you already talked to them about it, but there’s still no mention of the Mondrian under the accommodations clause. Home for “the big weekend,” sending Dad off to the auto show. I’ll probably be in touch some time later next week. I’m as nervous as a bar mitzvah boy.

Thank you for all of this, Dorothy; your faith, persistence and support. I finally know now why I got that M.F.A. It’s really a dream come true.

Much much love,

Greg