The Little Creep and The Big Blonde Broad

There must be 17 or 39 different varieties and subspecies of publicity people—if you know the actual number don't tell me, I really don't want it, all anybody needs to know are the two main categories: the arm-grabbers and the other kind. Bernie Hoven was an arm-grabber. That's him at the banquette table by the window, that good-looking little creep, that's Bernie Hoven. That broad he's with, that big blonde, that's Helga Carlsson, as if you didn't know. You would never guess, seeing her sitting down like that, the girl is six foot one, would you? When she stands up those jokers at the next table will duck: they'll figure she'll fall off her stilts into their brandy. Bernie? Oh, five seven, five seven and a half or so. And that's with his shoes on, I don't guarantee a thing for him barefoot.

You think they make an odd couple? I think maybe even Bernie figures they're an odd couple, but there isn't anything he can do about it. Helga Carlsson owns him. She owns him like you own that Audemars Piguet on your wrist, and by the way, congratulations, you must be doing good.

No, I mean she really owns him. She bought him and paid for him and she owns him. See the little bum staring over here? It's five to one he knows I'm talking about him. He's very bright, Bernie, and a lip-reader, too, for all I know.

Anyway, I started to say, he was an arm-grabber. But don't get me wrong, Bernie was a top-level arm-grabber. He didn't hit you at the end of every third sentence, like so many of them, he had more confidence in himself than that. When Bernie was setting you up for a story, all right, he'd grab your arm between your wrist and your elbow, or anywhere else he could get hold of it, just for a second, and when he was working up to the punch line he'd grab you again, but that was all. You can see that he was a high-level operator. Bernie (Continued on page 136)Little Creep(continued from page 111) was almost not an arm-grabber at all.

He hated the business he was in, I'll say that for him. One time some of us were cutting up Charlie Slagg, that creep who used to be Southern editor at Life, and Bernie said, "Nobody who hates press agents the way Slagg does can be all bad."

I had Bernie figured for one of those wild-eyed ambitious little killers who spend the first 18 years of their lives inside the woodwork of some dump on West 119th Street and then come busting out full of plans and gimmicks and hatred and by the time they're 25 they're boy wonders of something or other. I think I was right. One reason I think so is that he didn't just fall into the publicity business, he picked it, I know that, and what's more he gave himself a specialty: Bernie made himself the old-fashioned kind of press agent, a gagman really, a stunt operator, none of this public relations nonsense, and obviously he did that because he wanted to call attention to himself as much as to whoever he was working for.

Work? Sure it worked. The little bum started as a mail-room kid for somebody you probably never heard of, Terry Fosduth, he's dead now, and a couple years later he was a kind of third-line assistant to Petey Slattery's partner, and so on and so on, you know the pattern, don't make me bore myself telling you how a creep like Bernie Hoven does it, he does it the way they all do it: a lot of hustle, a little hatchet, lay the right dame and for God's sake don't lay the wrong one, some more hustle—anyway about five years ago Bernie asked Petey Slattery to come over to The Drum for a drink one night and gave him the bulletin: he was sorrier than he could say, but he had to cut out, he was going to be big and brave and start his own firm. Petey congratulated him and said how glad he was for him, and how he'd known all along that Bernie would pull out someday, and he was sure he'd tear the town apart, and that crap, naturally all the time he's talking he's wondering how much it's going to hurt when the other shoe drops, when Bernie tells him which account he's stealing that makes it possible for him to bust out.

Slattery himself told me he nearly went on his face off the barstool when Bernie told him he was taking Bertrand Brothers. It was like somebody goes up to Kennedy and says, all right, Jack, you can keep the job and you can still live in the White House, but we're cutting you off from the Treasury. Nobody will deny that Barry and Arkie Bertrand—Barry is dead now and let's drink to that—they were probably the only true cannibals of the 20th Century. They were monsters in the great old Hollywood tradition, they went back a long way, they probably bought Cecil B. De Mille his first pair of puttees, and they were smarter than Einstein.

So, the Bertrand account was worth let's say $50,000 a year and as soon as the word was out that Slattery had lost it he lost three more, and that sank him. But Bernie Hoven, who is all heart, you must be able to see that just by looking at the little creep, Bernie gave him a job in Hoven Ltd. and I for one will never believe that Dotty and Irv and Lolly and the rest of the folks got those items about it from him. Somebody leaked it, because it just isn't like Bernie to want to publicize a generous, good-hearted act of his own. Anyway, he did find a spot for Petey, and after a little while he even gave him a promotion: he had him go out to St. Louis to investigate the possibility of setting up a branch office. It turned out it wasn't such a good idea, but by that time Petey's spot in the New York shop had sort of filled in, you know how that happens, and Bernie let him see that he was going to be an embarrassment. He didn't fire the guy, I want to make that clear, he waited until the man quit. Slattery never did get back in the business. He had a rough time for a while, but he had a reserve commission in the Navy, they called him back and he stayed in.

Meanwhile, back at World Headquarters, Bernie Hoven was flying. The Bertrands operated on the theory, and it's no theory, that in order to get a fat account, a new outfit is willing to knock itself out to be 25 percent better than the people who already have the business. Therefore, to keep the Bertrand Brothers business, you had to top yourself by 25 percent every year. Hoven did it, I'll give him that. I understand that Arkie Bertrand, that was the nice one, thought so much of Bernie that one day he said to him, "You know, you miserable little son of a bitch, you're not altogether stupid!"

I think you could say that Bernie deserved the compliment. Remember the delegate from the new African country they wouldn't let into the UN because he insisted on bringing his 14 wives with him? That was no delegate, that was no country, and those broads weren't his wife, even. That was a little Bernie Hoven promotion for MAU-MAU!, a Bertrand Brothers production. Did you know he made all three TV networks with that bit? Hell, it was worth it just as entertainment, never mind the plug, those three Rolls-Royces loaded with dames, four harem-guards screaming and waving swords as long as their arms. It was even good the next day, remember, because some young cop had tried to pinch one of them under the Sullivan law, for carrying a knife with a blade over six inches long or something.

Oh, no, Bernie had it, look, don't ever let anybody tell you the little crumb didn't know the trade, I personally will swear or affirm at any time that he's a moral and ethical throwback to the Borgias, but he knew the publicity racket like he invented it. You remember when the Bertrands had a little trouble with Tony Barker? What was going on was that Publix Pix was floating the story that Barker was light on his feet. Actually he was about as queer as Rin-Tin-Tin, but the Publix people weren't allowing themselves to be hampered by mere truth. Barker's first picture had scared them half to death, the kid looked so hot. Remember? Too Long a Journey? When he came running down that Swiss Alp wearing lederhosen and no shirt, you could hear dames gasp all over the house. So they were putting out the tale, and Bernie had to do something. So he got the guy married right away. Sure, I know, his office boy could have thought that one up. You could have thought it up. But wait. Just six weeks later she files for divorce. Remember her? Marcia Butterly? Looked Latin? Gorgeous broad. So we cut to a crowded courtroom, it's crowded because the word is out that something will be doing and all these reporters are sitting there and some of them standing, it's that packed, wondering what the hell, a straight cut-and-dried Nevada divorce, and then her lawyer asks this black-haired, browneyed, stacked, wild-looking tomato just what her husband did to her that constituted mental and physical cruelty and she takes a deep breath and belts out the line: "I think I am a normally passionate woman"—beat—"but I consider that sexual intercourse 11 times in one day is excessive." Curtain.

Was that a stroke of sheer genius? I want to know. Tell me. Oh, no, any time anybody knocks Bernie Hoven as a professional, the guy's just knocking himself, he's just making it clear he's never been in touch, that's all. Look at the little bum over there, sitting next to that blonde thing from outer space, would you think that was a genius? He sure was.

Sure, that's right. That part was true enough, she really is Swedish. The rest of it, no, but she's a Swede right out of Göteborg, that's a fact. Well, she had that fantastic shape, even now, she's got to be 28 or 29, when she stands up, you won't believe it, you never saw anything so gorgeous, she speaks almost perfect English, like so many Swedes do, and besides, Arkie Bertrand somewhere got the idea she could act. Or that at least she could act enough so that she could be taught to act, if you follow me. He decided he would rear back and create a combination Anita Ekberg and Greta Garbo and on the seventh day he would rest. So they put a rope on her and led her into Bernie Hoven's office and she said, in her piping treble, "Arkie Bertrand trand sent me" and Bernie said, "OK, doll, go into the other room, that door over there, slip off your clothes and I'll be with you in a minute" and somebody said, "No! No! Bernie, this is Helga Carlsson!" and Bernie said, "Well, Christ, why didn't somebody tell me, after all, it is my birthday, you remember what he sent me last year" and that was how they met.

Of course, you get a thing like that, six foot one, with a shape that's not for real and hair the color of light ivory bark, even if she isn't quite as pretty as, let's say, Claudia Cardinale, you don't even need a genius to exploit her, right? So with Bernie Hoven going for her, under direct orders from Arkie Bertrand, you can imagine that Helga Carlsson got in the papers a few times. That must have been when you were in Italy. Yeah, I'm sure you remember, listen, he had her in the paper in Addis Ababa, never mind Rome.

She even made two-three pictures, and the funny thing was, each one was a little better than the one before it, which is a pretty unusual proposition. Also she turned out to be a reasonably level-headed kind of dame, she didn't believe more than 50 percent of the stuff she read about herself. She knew she had been created out of whole cloth, made up practically like a bedtime story, but instead of being grateful to Arkie Bertrand who after all had had the idea first, and had put up the scratch, she gave all the credit to Bernie Hoven. She thought Bernie was the greatest thing since smorgasbord. She could hardly keep her hands off him, and I understand Cartier's had a delivery man assigned just to him, because Helga couldn't bear the idea of Bairnee, as she made it, using the same cigarette case two days in succession. I've always heard that the Swedes liked silver, but Helga didn't know what silver was, to her a present was 24-carat solid gold or it was nothing. Bernie was sweet to her, too. She'd be in his office, maybe, mooning over him, and he'd say to one of his stooges, "Hey, Marty, get me my alpenstock and my crampons, will you, I'm going to climb Mount Carlsson here right after lunch."

Sure they fought, and one time before he got around to making up with her she ran into Maxie Kramer and married him about 7 hours and 10 minutes later. He was probably the first man she'd ever seen who'd been tall enough to look her in the eye, standing up. Did you ever meet Maxie? I'll tell you, you missed something. A sweeter fella never threw a fifth of Scotch through a bar mirror. No, I'm serious. When he was sober, which was practically all the time, Maxie was great, he was considerate and funny and fast with a buck, and he was probably the brightest heavyweight champ since Gene Tunney or Jack Johnson, as the case may be. No, I'm serious. You just been reading the wrong columns. Hell, Bert Manley, used to be on the Mirror, he told me one time that Maxie took his seven-year-old daughter and a couple of her friends to the Central Park Zoo one afternoon and three years later they were still talking about it. Oh, well, I'll give you that, when he was loaded it was suicide to go anywhere near him, listen, I was in town the night he threw every stick of furniture in a Waldorf suite out into the middle of Park Avenue, and the rugs after it. There were two cops in the hall and they wouldn't even knock on the door until two more had showed up. They were right, too.

But Helga always swore he never laid a finger on her, and I believe it, I guess it was a happy marriage as those things go but it didn't do her a lot of good professionally. She had the one kid, the little girl, she didn't make a picture for over a year and a half, they should have had a couple in the can to tide her over but for some reason they didn't, I suppose she didn't tell anybody she was going to get pregnant, maybe she didn't know. Then Maxie got knocked off in that plane crash, and there she was, hung up. Arkie Bertrand was a little sore at her for marrying Maxie—he liked to pick people for his stars to marry, you know—and of course good old Bernie felt she had a hell of a lot of nerve getting married to anybody. It was the old story: they wanted her back on the lot and all, but she wasn't queen of the May anymore.

So she made Tomorrow Never Comes and it wasn't much. The Bertrands got Bernie Hoven on the tube and told him, all right, do something. So he started in on her, and thÈs time it was all business. Bernie had changed his style a little, anyway. He was getting to be an image-molder like the rest of them, he'd rather get a client on page 47 of Harper's than page 3 of The Daily News. He put a couple of his top Dichter-trained flack-balls on her, but nothing much happened. So one day she got off a jet at Idlewild, without even sending a wire, and showed up in Bernie's office.

"Bairnee," she said, "you know something? I still love you."

"What else is new, Helga?" the little creep says to her.

"What is new, lover," she said, "is that people are forgetting how to spell my name."

He gave her all the nonsense, time passes, can't stay up there forever, doll, new faces crowding in all the time, and so on and so on. She listened. She's a very patient dame. She can wait. When he ran out of what to say she was ready.

"All true, Bairnee," she said, "but if you would get the lead out of your ass, none of it would matter."

He looked at her across that nine-foot-wide zebrawood desk of his. He didn't really like being talked to like that.

"It's just that I know when I'm beat, doll," he told her. "You can't make a sow's ear out of a Swedish tramp sort of thing, you know what I mean?"

"The trouble with you, Bairnee," she said, "is that about love you don't really understand much. That I love you, no doubt because I'm a masochist and like to have pins stuck in me, does not mean that I would not cheerfully see you cut up into dogmeat and fed to the animals. You couldn't dig such a complicated idea. I hate to be so corny, but you just don't understand about love. I'm surprised. You take a much older man like Arkie—he understands about love."

Can you imagine the bells that went off in that little monster's head when he heard that? Clang, clang, bong, bong!

"He does?" he said.

"He certainly does," Helga said. "When I first met Arkie I thought he was just another American businessman, selling movies as some others sell stoves. But, since Maxie's death, I've learned that isn't true. He's very understanding. He is most kind."

Bongo, brang, brang! "He is?" Bernie said.

"Yes," Helga said.

The phone rang. The red one. The hot line direct to Celluloid City. Bernie grabbed it.

"Yes, Arkie," he said. "Yes. She's right here with me. Well, but she just got here, 10 minutes ago. But I didn't know, we none of us knew..."

Let me draw the curtain over this painful picture. Bernie Hoven knew where Helga Carlsson was, when Arkie Bertrand didn't. Therefore, Bernie Hoven was a slimy, stupid, inefficient bastard who would steal money from the hand that fed him. Further, Bernie Hoven's mother, if he had had a mother, had been ... well, I shouldn't try to reproduce it, because I never had the privilege of hearing it, but it's a recorded fact that Arkie Bertrand, in a fight with Harry Cohn of Columbia, called him something so foul and so novel that Cohn turned to the guy with him and said, Write that down, he had never even heard of it. And also I know a reputable producer out there who swears that Arkie Bertrand once made Humphrey Bogart cry. So you can understand that when Bernie Hoven handed the red phone over to Helga he was shook. It was all he could do to keep himself from diving into the Scotch right then and there. He listened, numbed, while Helga cooled the man-eating monster down with revolting sham-Swedish baby talk. She finally hung up.

"He wants me to come right back to the Coast," she said. "He's such a dear. Isn't it remarkable, such jealousy, in a man who is after all not really young? But then, Arkie is remarkable in every way."

I can see her standing up and walking to the window and turning to look back, and down, at Bernie Hoven, boy creep.

"Bairnee," she said, "get me a seat on the first plane I can make. All of a sudden, I'm in a hurry to get back home. And Bairnee—think of something?ÈI mean something big, something like you used to think of—when we were friends."

Friends? The word must have dropped on him like a brick off a building. Friends? Was he being awarded Helga Carlsson for an enemy? He was. He could find no other reading for it. He caused a ticket to be got for her, but instantly; he had summoned for her a Carey Cadillac; he took her to the elevator, and into it, and down in it and out of it; and he personally shut the door on her limousine, you bet he did, the creep. And then he went back upstairs and got hysterical because his far-flung intelligence network had goofed and had let Arkie Bertrand bring Helga Carlsson to bed, or vice versa as the case may be, without his knowing of it. And after that tantrum was over he locked the door of his office and had one short shot and then sat down to think. And what he came up with was Kuo-waike.

Before Bernie Hoven, only geography nuts and maybe spies knew that Kuowaike was an island in the Pacific, and not an alternative spelling for Soo Gung Far, or minced fried pork w. Chinese vegetables. Bernie looked it up. He must have looked up a lot of islands before he found that one, because it was ideal for his nefarious purpose. It was about three miles long by two wide, a beautiful white sand crescent beach, a hill, a spring, some bushes and trees. There was no other land within 50 miles of it. Nobody lived on it. And it was not too near any steamship track or any airline course.

You know the story, like everybody else over the age of six presently living in the Western world, or the Eastern, if it comes to that; I understand the coverage was very big in Communist China. Bernie was working an ancient gag, the lost-on-a-desert-island pitch, but like a composer who uses an old theme only as a framework for his own original stuff. You remember that Maxie Kramer had fought that Australian what's-his-face in Brisbane, and he was flying home when his plane crashed. OK. So the first thin reedy notes of Bernie's orchestration were a few lines here and there suggesting that maybe Maxie Kramer still lived, down on a Pacific island, swinging from tree to tree with a coconut in his mouth.

Next, from the violins, we hear that Helga Carlsson is, perhaps, again great with child. Perhaps this time the son that Maxie Kramer always wanted. A lie, naturally, but now things begin to get noisy. The airline speaks. Noted authorities on survival at sea are heard. A ham radio operator in Hawaii reports that he has picked up weak, very weak, signals that he reads as dash-dash, dash-dot-dash repeated, or M.K. Has the noted heavyweight, bon vivant and saloon-wrecker made a radio sending set out of old palm fronds and cigarette tinfoil? Authorities on radio transmission are consulted and their opinions widely quoted.

Everything is going now, and finally, fortissimo, it is announced from the summit, that is to say Arkie Bertrand's office, that Helga Carlsson's new film, A Day and a Night, is being rushed to completion so that she can fly to the Pacific. She has every reason to believe that Maxie Kramer is alive. The full resources of Bertrand Brothers International Films are behind her and Arkie Bertrand's personal pilot will go with her to lead the search. In Romanoff's they're saying that the fellow has sealed orders from Arkie: If you find Kramer, shoot him.

The expedition is mounted. Bernie has thought of everything, and I must say Arkie Bertrand is sending it in in coarse denominations only. A party of eight climbs into the jet: Helga, Bernie, Tom Bally, the pilot, a helicopter jockey, a doctor, an aircraft mechanic and Helga's maid. And they were strictly on the level, too, every one of them could be checked out. That's where that little monster across the room, look at him, he knows damned well we're talking about him and he loves it, that's where he showed real class. Nothing was faked but the idea itself. The checkable details were all solid gold. Every editor in the world knew the whole thÈng had to be a fakeski, but the details checked out 100 percent, so everybody went for it, they didn't dare not to, suppose they did find Maxie Kramer? So everybody covered it, like it was Admiral Byrd at the South Pole.

They flew Pan-Am to Hawaii and picked up the charter there, and the transport carrying the helicopter. From there they went to Papeete. That was GHQ for the press and the guys did their drinking there and laughed it up. Nobody believed Maxie Kramer was any more alive than Judge Crater. From Papeete, which was a nice handy 50 miles from Kuo-waike, the Search of the Century fanned out. For two days, nothing, not a trace. But at dawn of the third day the helicopter found an aircraft-type life preserver. It turned out to be German, but it kept things going, so to speak.

On the fourth day it was announced that mirror flashes had been seen from an unidentified island. On the fifth day Helga Carlsson and the doctor sailed in a beat-up island schooner with a crew of three Marquesans, and Bernie Hoven took off with the helicopter pilot. The older and wiser heads among the assembled reporters weren't really surprised when Helga didn't show back by nightfall, as scheduled. But Bernie didn't show, either, and the helicopter he was in had a three-hour range.

What happened? Helga Carlsson went to Kuo-waike, strictly as planned. She and the medic went ashore in the dinghy and the crew sank the schooner, already bought and paid for by Bernie Hoven, and then came ashore themselves. So far, so good, a nice standard shipwreck. The script called for three days and three nights of indescribable hardship, one of the world's most glamorous women living on raw fish and turtle eggs with four men, and then the big rescue scene. Unfortunately, Bernie Hoven, and you can't knock him for it, not a bit, it was the right thing to do, Bernie had told nobody, aside from Helga and the doctor, and, for insurance, the helicopter pilot, that Kuo-waike was the spot. The schooner crew weren't told until they'd cast off. So there couldn't be a leak. Bernie had thought of everything except what happened: the helicopter is stooging around 30 miles out to sea, faking the desperate search, when the engine quits and the thing flops down to the blue Pacific.

Well, they had a raft and a couple cans of water and stuff. They got a nice deep tan, like right down to the bone, and about midnight they saw lights and fired their one flare and a destroyer comes by, American, what else, and they get hauled aboard. The sailors are trying to give them hot tea or rum or something, but of course Bernie is screaming take me to your leader and finally they do, a sailor takes him up to the bridge or whatever and says Commander Slattery will see you now, and the little creep thought nothing of it until he hears this old familiar voice say, "Well, Bernie, what's new?"

Can you imagine such a slaughter? It's almost more than even he deserved. Naturally Bernie expects that Petey Slattery will make him walk the plank, but whatever else is his problem Bernie never had any shortage of guts and pretty soon he has the arm on Slattery to take him to Kuo-waike—naturally, just because it's handy. This would work out great, you see: the announcement that Helga Carlsson, lost at sea in her desperate search for her missing husband, was alive after all, would come from the United States Navy. With anybody but Slattery he might have pulled it off, at that, the little stinker can be very persuasive, but Slattery just laughed hollowly and told Bernie he not only wasn't going to steam 175 nautical miles or whatever out of his way, but he wasn't allowed, under the Constitution, to carry passengers, and so now that he had assured himself that Bernie and the chopper pilot were OK, he was dropping them at another little island he happened to know about, just down the line, and that was exactly what he did. Of course he told them he'd radio for somebody to come for them. I can imagine the dialog, can't you? TheÈcommander is stamping back and forth on the bridge, peering into the night, and the radio operator comes up and salutes and says, "Sir, shall I send the message asking for help for them civilians?"

And Slattery says, "Not right away, my good man. I have to think about it for a while. Remind me, in a week or so."

Helga Carlsson and her little group did exactly nine days on Kuo-waike. They really were eating raw fish and turtle eggs by the fifth day, having run through the canned goodies they'd stowed in the schooner, and the three sailors had started looking at the Swede in a way that reminded her of her earliest days in Hollywood. Actually they could have been there long enough to start a little colony of blue-eyed Marquesans if a fishing boat hadn't drifted past one morning. Helga was ragged, sunburned and in a screaming rage, but by this time the Navy really was looking, on the level, and as you know, the picture of that incredible dame, wearing next to nothing, wading through the surf off Kuo-waike, made every paper in the world.

Bernie? Oh, sure, they went looking for him, and they found him finally. They sent a float plane in for him and Helga went along first in the boat with the photographers. Bernie and the helicopter jockey were all right, they were living with a bunch of beat-up Kanakas. When the head man of this crew saw the expedition that had showed up, he got a little gummy. He took the position that the two of them had been cast up on the island like flotsam or salvage or whatever, and that he owned them out-right and wasn't about to give them away. So Helga said OK, if he was running a private slave market, she'd buy a couple, and she gave him $50 apiece for them. She made this smelly old bum sign separate receipts. She gave the helicopter pilot his for a souvenir, but the one that said she owned Bernie Hoven complete, body and soul, hat and pants, that one she kept. And she took him the hell out of there. On the one hand she wanted to boil him in oil for hanging her up on Kuo-waike, but on the other hand he'd made her the most famous Swede in the world, so she wound up doing nothing, and they all flew back to LA and the warm welcome of a grateful nation.

What goes now? Who knows? There they are, sitting side by side at the same table. Maybe it's like she said, she loves him but she'd also like to feed him to the lions. She's very big in pictures now, and getting better all the time. She's still Arkie Bertrand's girl, and everybody knows he's already signed 25 percent of the common stock over to her, and he's not even dead yet. Still, when she comes East, junior creepie there is always with her, or at least when she's not with her, or at least when she's not with that football player, thimgumbob with the Giants, can't remember his name, or that real estate joker. Actually she's a great broad and if she was three inches shorter I'd take a shot at it myself. Watch her stand up, now, don't miss that, it's one of the great sights, Helga Carlsson standing up, like sunrise in the Grand Canyon or something. When they come by I'll introduce you to her. Be sure to dig the gold bracelet on Bernie's left wrist, the thing must weigh half a pound. There's no clasp, it was soldered on to him. It just says, "Property of Helga Carlsson, Los Angeles, California. Reward." Sure he could take it off, if he wanted to blow the Bertrand Brothers account. It would cost him maybe $100,000 a year to take it off, but that's all that's stopping him. You ever see anything like the way that dame moves? Man, if she was only even two inches shorter...!