Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Prologue PROLOGUE THE TEN-BLOCK WALK
NEW YORK CITY, 1954
JULES SCHULBACK LEFT HIS THIRD-FLOOR apartment around midnight and stepped onto the sidewalk at Lexington and Sixty-First Street in Manhattan, carrying what looked like a black lunch box with chrome around the edges. He surveyed the familiar view, glancing at an upstairs window across the street that belonged, strangely, to a doll hospital. Its lights and red neon crosses had been turned off for the evening, hiding the buckets of miniature heads and arms and various doll parts that would spook visitors when they peeked from his apartment window in the daylight. But Jules found the doll hospital mildly amusing, as he did most things. He panned his gaze a few doors down and crossed the avenue to his fur shop.
Its treasures were locked up for the night. Jules inspected the darkened window, as he always did when passing by, partly to admire his display—frozen mannequins posed in the latest minks and fox stoles—but also to check that everything was all right in his absence. And it was.
Since it was a Tuesday night, the streets of Manhattan were mostly deserted, Jules’s shadow one of the only ones cast by dim streetlamps and a moon that was just past full. The Chrysler Building loomed in the distance, only a few of its offices lit, the bright moon reflecting off the spiked metal helmet of its tower.
The temperature was in the fifties, chilly for early fall. In Jules’s version of the story, a story he would retell again and again over the decades, a few Checker cabs flew by, a few crawled, looking for a fare, but Jules walked. Two blocks, then three, past shuttered drugstores and dry cleaners, past silent newsstands and grocery stores. Past a single bored cop on the beat, to whom he gave a respectful nod but didn’t stop to chat up. Jules loved to chat and loved to spin a good story. But tonight he was a man with a mission, not just an insomniac out on a late-night stroll in the greatest city in the world. He did not have an American dream; he was already living it, right now, right here on these streets.
As he grew closer to his destination—East Fifty-First Street—Jules sensed a strange charge in the atmosphere, as if the molecules were being rearranged somehow, and a distant hum, even before he saw the crowd. He passed the all-night coffee shop with its pink neon and the onion-shaped green copper domes of the Central Synagogue on the corner of Fifty-Fifth Street—so much like the one he had left behind in Berlin. And sure enough, three blocks away he could see it: a bright glow up ahead.
As he drew nearer, the lights were brighter than daylight, the crowd deeper than those on the Forty-Second Street subway platform during the evening rush. His heart beating faster with each step, Jules realized there was something strange about this crowd. He couldn’t identify it right away. It took a few beats. But then it hit him—there were only men here, their families and wives tucked safely into bed back in their apartments.
Like Yankee Stadium under the floodlights, men in hats and jackets and a smattering of ties stood around, excited for the game to begin. Some stood on fire escapes and the roofs of cars, perched on lampposts and atop traffic lights, all trying to find a good spot to glimpse the coming attraction—the American dream made flesh, with all its promises and curves. One of the Yankees was even here, Joe DiMaggio, shaking hands and working the growing crowd of photographers and cops, loiterers and fans.
Jules dove straight in. He’d never been a timid man; if he had been, he wouldn’t be here walking the Earth. Gently pushing his way through the crowd using his free hand and a few German-accented “Pardon mes” and “Excuse mes”—he was a gentleman after all—he got as close as he could to the commotion. There was the gaffer he had met yesterday, who tipped him off about tonight. They nodded in recognition.
Then the movie director flitted past in his fedora, nervously eyeing the growing throng. His name was Billy Wilder. They were both from Berlin, Jules knew, both escaped Jewish refugees. He caught Wilder’s eye and held it for a moment, long enough to think that maybe Billy, too, knew what they had in common. As if Jules was marked somehow with invisible ink that only the fellow wounded could detect. Billy walked past, and Jules was suddenly reminded of his purpose here tonight. He squeezed his black box between his legs, screwed around with a few knobs, wound a small crank, knelt down into a narrow free space between bodies, and then placed the box up to his right eye. His Bolex 16 mm camera.
It was September 15, 1954, and it was no accident he was here. Jules was a thoughtful man who had always planned everything very carefully. Befriending that gaffer was just one of many steps that brought this furrier and amateur filmmaker to the front row of one of the most iconic moments in twentieth-century film history, one that he—and he alone—would save for posterity in living, moving color.
Jules looked around the artificially lit New York City street corner. Always so much life, so much to capture. He had tasted the bitterness of life, but this, this was the sweet part. He peeked through the lens of his Bolex, focused on Billy Wilder and the crew in front of him.
And suddenly, as if she knew he was coming, out stepped Marilyn Monroe. And… Action.
For Jules, staring the glamour of Hollywood in the face took more than a ten-block walk. His long, complicated journey to New York City, like those of most immigrant Jews during World War II, had taken bravery and cunning. But, against all logic, here he was, front and center, smack in the middle of the waking dream that was America.
Jules had almost not made it there that night. Had almost not made it to America. The odds had been against him, really. On dark nights when he couldn’t keep the sorrow at bay, he would think of the family and friends he had left behind, many of them dead.
His story included not one but two escapes from Nazi Germany, of lies quickly imagined and creatively told, of ocean liners and fake identities and magic—the never-ending, never-tarnished magic of Hollywood. Some of those who came in and out of Jules’s story—Clark Gable, Billy Wilder, Joe DiMaggio, and Marilyn Monroe—were real, of human flesh, with flaws and imperfections. Like Jules, each had escaped something, wearing a mask to survive, creating an alternate identity, using the powers that they, and only they, possessed. Dreaming and remaking themselves in a country that not only allowed reinvention but demanded it.
Others in his story were not real, like Superman, a fellow refugee—from another dying planet—whose incredible powers helped shine a light on the very horror that Jules had escaped, a horror so many had willfully ignored. Superman, too, needed an alternate self, a stuffed-shirt newspaper man—a regular guy. Those who created Superman had their own journey, too, sons of survivors, riding the first wave of an art form—the comics—that would one day crash into the Hollywood that Jules so loved.
And finally there was the man who Jules never really spoke to, the man who gave him life—and gave life to Marilyn and Superman as well.
Harry.
He was just a few blocks away from here, living his own American dream, with all the complications and grit that entailed. The early Mob connections, the bootlegging, and the girlie magazines had all given way to respectability, fortune, and fame. But on this night, this very same chilly autumn night when Marilyn stepped into the camera lights, Harry’s life would start unraveling. A series of events was set in motion that would change Harry’s life, leaving him—for the few years he had left on Earth—a mere observer of a world he’d created.
So many strands. So many stories. All crisscrossing and colliding into one another. The starlet. The king of Hollywood. The superhero. The publisher. The ballplayer. The filmmaker. And Jules. All traveling together through this extraordinary time. This night beneath the klieg lights was like the tip of the needle stitching those intricate threads together, but to truly see it, you have to go back in time.
Rewind the film, turn back the colorful page of panels, and start at the beginning.
