The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [37]
Morty and Hy agree that the Count had a rare gift of making women feel sorry for him because he looked so small and fragile. “He made many a beautiful head,” Morty concedes with envy. “If I had met a refined, educated girl like you when I was still young, my whole life would have been different,” the Count would tell a head who might be a minor burlesque stripper. He would invite her to his tiny office in the Jollity Building to plan her Hollywood career. This office, he would assure her, was just a hideout where he could get away from the crowds of people who besieged him for bookings at his regular place of business. The Count always made a point of stopping at the switchboard which then served the furnishedoffice tenants, collectively known to Morty Ormont as the heels. “Did that girl from the Paradise Restaurant call me this afternoon?” he would ask the operator. “You know, the one I got a job for last week? And by the way, if Monte Proser calls up in the next halfhour, tell him I'm out. I'm going to be busy.” The mainsprings of feminine character, the Count used to tell his friends, were avarice and mother love. He would make extravagant promises of contracts in shows or moving pictures which he would tell every girl he was on the point of closing for her. Then he would say sadly, “Your success is assured, but I will never be happy. I am a Broadway roue, and no decent girl would look at me.” “Oh, don't say that, Mr. Bimberg,” a girl might beg, remembering she had not yet signed the contract. (The Count used to say, “You would be surprised how sorry a girl can feel for a man that is going to make a lot of money for her.”) “Oh yes, I cannot fool myself,” the Count would sob to the girl, and tears would flow from his large, protruding eyes as he grabbed for his protege's hand. If the girl put an arm around his narrow shoulders to steady him, he would work into a clinch. If she pulled away from the lead, the Count would sometimes fall to his knees and sniffle. “Why should I live another day?” he would wail. “Tomorrow your contract is coming through. If I lived through tonight, I could collect my tenpercent commission, which would amount to perhaps a couple of thousand bucks. Is that a reason to live?” Usually the girl would think it was a pretty good reason. The Count did not always succeed. “When a bosko wouldn't have nothing to do with him,” Hy Sky says, “Maxwell C. Bimberg became very emotional.” He once offered a female boxer forty dollars to let him hold her hand. The boxer declined, saying, “I would rather wake up in a hole with a snake than in a room with Count de Pennies.” The Count was very discouraged by her remark and hated to hear it quoted.
An enterprise which the Count's admirers remember with considerable pleasure was the Public Ballyhoo Corporation, Ltd. To launch this concern, the Count spent a couple of weeks promoting a bookmaker known as Boatrace Harry. The Count kept on telling Boatrace Harry about the great incomes that he said were earned by publicity men like Steve Hannagan, Benjamin Sonnenberg, and Richard Maney. Then he allowed Harry to invest a couple of thousand dollars in Public Ballyhoo, Ltd. He had letterheads printed saying that Public Ballyhoo, Ltd., would supply “anything from an actress to an alligator” for publicity stunts. The Count became so interested in his idea that he forgot to duck with Boatrace Harry's money. The manager of a theater showing the first run of a picture called Eskimo asked the Count to secure a genuine Eskimo to pose on top of the marquee with a team of huskies. The Count made a good try. He found in the telephone directory some kind of society for the preservation of the American Indian and obtained from it the addresses of two alleged Eskimos. One turned out to be a Jewish tailor in Greenpoint; this was obviously a wrong listing. The other, who lived in Bay Ridge, was a real Eskimo who had a job in a foundry. He turned down the