"I have a ten-thirty conference with some movie moguls," he said when I
finished, "so I'll be right over."
He was there in less than a half hour.
David Abraham Lincoln Berne is the most interesting man I know--a
statement which covers quite a few interesting men.
A lawyer.
A lawyer, furthermore, whose principal employ is with the movie
companies.
He was not always a lawyer....
Dave was born over a delicatessen, in Madison, Wisconsin, of serious
minded, musically gifted, orthodox Jewish parents in the winter of
1906, the fourth child of eight, and no culls in the lot. As soon--he
says--as he could pound with his porringer, they gave him a violin.
But--again, according to him--he swiftly saw that he was going to
be only a semiprodigy, so he turned to other fields. He did well in
school. One of his playmates, a Milwaukee realtor nowadays, who liked
Dave in spite of his personal limitations, long ago told me about
that--and succinctly: "Some of those bastard Jews are born with a high
school education!"
Dave finished at fifteen--and took an extra year to grow in, working
nights at the delicatessen and reading, for entertainment, philosophy.
He has a remarkable memory. He might not be able to recall his laundry
mark when he was in Virginia. But no one who knows him well would bet
even on that.
A compact guy who--because he is loose-jointed--seems anything but
solid. Indeed, his flexibility is such that he could probably learn a
yogin's basic postures in one sitting.
Everybody liked him in Madison.
This was not true in Virginia.
He majored in psychology and went out for football. He'd played on his
high school team. The backfield coach was impressed equally by the
length of his accurate passes and the fact that he mastered the signals
in one night's concentrated study. Letter-perfect and reflex-fast. But
a pair of racially pure Nordic behemoths from Minnesota, sent proudly
to the team by scouting old grads, decided that, although they had
nothing personal against the yid, no yid would call their signals. In
Dave's first game they managed to break both his legs.
Dave got the idea. He let his uniform hang there, the next year--when
he'd got off crutches.
He made the newspaper--but not the fraternity he'd set his heart on.
He made _summa cum laude_.
He went next to Pennsylvania--tutoring, tending furnaces, minding
babies, mowing lawns, as usual--and took both an M.A. and a Ph.D. in
psychology. He got a job teaching it to pre-med students in Iowa. His
thesis on "Formulations of Subjective Sexuality in Man" almost landed
him the thing he wanted--a psycho-sociological research position with
a big foundation. They wrote him, however, that they felt certain
group attitudes (outrageous, but there they are!) would prejudice his
fact-gathering efforts.
A Gentile took over the project.
Several of America's brilliant young men in psychology, psychiatry, and
psychoanalysis are former students of Dave.
A Dr. Wiswell was put over him in Iowa.
That was when he began to read law.
He took the New York Bar exams in 1935 and went to work for
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer that year.
During the war, he was commissioned a captain in the Medical Corps and
sent (by a General Muller, a Regular Army doctor who thought Hitler a
great man and psychiatry bunk) to Alaska, to study the effects upon
mental stamina of cold, isolation, and monotony.
For the first time in his life, and after twenty months of Alaska, Dave
pulled strings in his own behalf.
He was assisting the OSS--a major, then--in figuring out methods of
hastening the deterioration of Nazi morale--when they came through
the Bulge. Dave stayed at a forward subheadquarters to manage the
tourniquet on his colonel's bomb-shattered leg.
Hurrying German troops took the colonel prisoner and shot Dave four
times, on sight.
Some of Patton's men found him, still alive, in a cellar, three days
later. Two of his toes had to be amputated because they'd frozen. He
limps when he's weary--but he's still a handball champ.
The Nazis didn't take care of his colonel's tourniquet and the colonel
died. Dave has a Purple Heart, plain--but nothing else to bespeak what,
in a Gentile, might possibly have been regarded as courage beyond the
line of duty.
He had, you will recall, reluctantly decided that there would always be
a Dr. Wiswell over him, in the field of psychology. He had also come to
the reluctant conclusion that a Jew without money in America was like
an unarmed man in a city of quick-draw experts. So he had studied law.
Problems to which he put the lever of his mind usually yielded. The
problem of money was one such. He is a completely honest man; he no
longer saw any objection to applying his honesty, and talents, in
places where money was abundant. He is worth, I should imagine, a
quarter of a million, and he has only started.
Dave is the ugliest man I know--or, at least, know well.
A huge but thin hooked nose divides his face vertically. Hitler's
trained anti-Semites needed only a look at that to shoot. His large,
round ears are set almost at right angles to his head. He has a
conspicuous Adam's apple which--in talk, or merely from emotion--rides
up and down with the acceleration and quick braking of a humming bird
before a hollyhock. His forehead bulges; his mouse-brown eyebrows look
as if they had been sprayed on as a random afterthought. He is almost
bald. His mouth takes a generous cut into his pale, gaunt cheeks and
his chin retreats. Only his eyes contrast with a face they cannot
redeem: they are an immortal blue--living proof of compassion, of
reflection, and of mirth.
He is a bachelor.
He was in love, once, with a stately girl from Boston--a quiet, brainy
brown-eyed girl who wore sensible shoes and braids but sometimes had
the look of wanting to lie in the grass with a man, or even of being
ready to pull a man down. I had hoped that Dave would be granted this
one exception by the unwilling gods. He wasn't. She married an opera
singer--and divorced him two years later--and went to live in Milan.
My Campfire Girl, Dave called her, after that.
He meant the part about Camps.
It was in Hollywood that I met Dave.
I was weaving down Sunset Boulevard one night, drunk, desultory, and
alone. Very much alone. My first wife had taken my kid back East--and
no blame for that. She was sick of the way it was.
I'd spent the afternoon at an address in Beverly Hills where you could
do what you pleased.
I'd spent the evening at a gambling place up on the hillside,
sprinkling my money around and my IOUs--with a bunch of other writers,
directors, junior producers, and picture girls. You'd know their names
if I told you and the hell with that.
Up on the hill above the canyon at the Casa Crap.
Up there among the carbolic mountains--the near knees--the far, white
peaks with snow on their nasty heads. Down below, the spot where God
sat on the seventh day, and--in the big, flat print of His behind--Los
Angeles. Ninety square miles of costume jewelry, Technicolor
starshine, neon and sodium and all other colored gases, signboards
with fifty-foot women in ten-foot brassières and men smoking four-foot
pipes, boulevards under the palms and cloverleaf intersections with
the billion paired headlights streaming and swirling, bungalow courts
and drugstores, pool halls and bingo parlors, buses and trolley cars,
acacias and roses and pepper trees, open markets with fruit piled in
metaphysical polyhedrons, and the fog rolling in on the thin, chilly,
sting-sinus air of California.
You can keep it.
I'd spent all my money and cashed a few IOUs to impress the girls.
The girls.
I'd played Mr. Bones with the bright young writers who go out there for
the girls--searching amongst the girls in skirts for the girl that's
their soul--Medea, Medusa and Circe, Sappho and daughter Eve, Calliope,
Clio, Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene, Polymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia,
Urania--and Aglaia and Euphrosyne, too--and Lilith--searching for her
on the wrong coast--all evening, a badminton of wisecracks, battledore
and shuttlecock with the soulless prizes going to the heads that stayed
clear the longest, the pocketbooks that were the deepest, the tallest
gold lettering on office doors, and never a Muse or a Grace in the
joint.