“Hoo boy!” gasps Uncle Sam, ducking backstage for a second during the Battle of Gettysburg, “what I like mostes’ is showin off!” He mops his broad brow with a red-white-and-blue bandanna and conducts a hasty roll call. Some of the Senators and judges are by now too drunk to recognize their own names, but that’s hardly noticed. What does rile the old Superhero, though, is the continued absence of his Number Two Gun. “As I’m a cockeyed Christian,” he barks, “that craven, chickenbred, toad-hoppin’, duck-nosed mother’s son of a unbroke sea-horse is gonna make me slip my cable and unloose more than my matchless magnanimity around here!” He glances at his fob watch. Sundown’s at 8:31 tonight, still a couple of hours to go, but the Jewish Sabbath starts eighteen minutes before that, the period of “anticipation,” as they call it. It’ll take him five or six minutes each to fry the two thieves, so the most leeway he can allow the young maverick is, say, twelve minutes. “Awright, you bandy-shanked double-jawed desperaydos! Zero Hour is one minute after eight — he’s got better’n a hour to make it! So hustle up them epistolary numbers! We’ll stall till the last minnit with the contest, but if that monkey ain’t here by 20:01 we’re goin’ on without him!”
This epistolary-contest announcement stirs a fresh backstage jostle: Uncle Sam will be awarding silver-dollar jackpots and new top ratings to the funniest, saddest, most terrifying, etc., skits and readings from the Rosenbergs’ Death House Letters, and so all the actors in town are suddenly pressing excitedly into the wings, eager to go on for a crack at the winnings, not to mention a chance to play before this fantastic house. This audience is a dream!
Pretty dismal material, of course, these prison letters, but real professionals are never daunted by poor scripts. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, for example, are working up a dance routine around a single line from one letter of each of them…
JULIE: Honey, I sat so reserved and pent up looking at you through the screen, and all the time I wanted to take you in my arms, smother you with kisses and tell you in more than words of my consuming love for you!
ETHEL: How utterly shameless were my thoughts as gazed at your glowing face through the double barrier of screen and bar!
…in which they hold up a wire-mesh screen between them and fantasize a tender and loving future for themselves, even as they are dancing toward the chair. Bud Abbott and Lou Costello have a cruder act on roughly the same theme, building their gags around the argument of who goes first. Fibber McGee and Molly are incorporating the letters into one of their familiar domestic situations (when McGee’s closet is opened a whining cacophony of Rosenberg complaints will come clattering out, and Molly’s famous line—“‘Tain’t funny, McGee!”—will take on an unsuspected moral force), while Andy Devine and Marjorie Main are going for straight drama, focusing on the erotic bits. Archie of Duffy’s Tavern intends to solo with a telephone, as does Red Skelton with a handful of hats. Ozzie and Harriet, contrarily, are bringing the entire Nelson family into their act by picking up on the periodic visits of the Rosenberg boys to the prison, and One Man’s Family is even going them yet one better by pushing for a complex fragment of the disturbing Greenglass-Rosenberg family saga.
Standing waist-high among all these characters and looking very down in the mouth is the Boy Judge, Irving Kaufman: he and Irving Saypol have been asked to reenact, as a kind of curtain raiser to the contest, some of their routines from the trial, and although he and Saypol work well together, he seems unsure of himself. He’s taken a great risk in setting up tonight’s show and preventing it from falling through — maybe too much — and the strain is beginning to tell. Discovering him like that, his old friend and former client Milton Berle, backstage with the rest of the contestants, cautions him: “Be careful, Irving, or you’ll drop the world!”
Kaufman smiles foolishly, displaying the gap between his two front teeth, then sighs profoundly. “It’s such a terrible responsibility,” is what he says, but what’s really troubling his mind is that sometimes, like now (Supreme Court Justice William Douglas has just been dragged onstage for a “spontaneous” public spanking—“Only thing not Red about this rapscallion,” Uncle Sam has shouted, “is his bottom!” and there’s a great clamor: everyone, it seems, wants to get his hands or other weapons on Judge Douglas’s posteriors, and this, Irving supposes, under other circumstances could happen to him!), he gets the feeling he’s just being used, that he’s as much a victim as the Rosenbergs. Even if now he is a National Hero…
Congressman Don Wheeler, brushing past him, rushes out onstage to announce that he’s still pressing for Douglas’s impeachment and a one-way visa to Russia — then rears back like Babe Ruth going for the fences and lands such a blow on him that it seems he might be trying to belt him over into Phantom country single-handedly. Others come out and holler about the Judge’s “arrogance” and “treason” and “villainous ambition” as they whop him, and some even fulminate against his sex life. “Last May twenty-first at a meeting of the American Law Institute,” cries Walt Trohan of the Chicago Tribune, laying into him, “Douglas said America had lost its position of moral leadership—this from a man who went vacationing for some weeks with another man’s wife!” There’s a lot of hooting and whistling out in the crowd, a tremendous agitation building up. “And from a man who some years ago stooped from the High Court to string obscenities into verses which shocked a select group of Americans, which has numbered two Presidents, a Chief Justice, admirals of the fleet, generals of the Army, Senators, governors, and lesser characters including myself! I was there when this would-be liberal spouted his filth!”
Douglas, patiently taking his licking amid all the uproar, remarks to Uncle Sam, over whose knees he’s been turned, that as a Superhero he’s really degenerating fast. “Not my fault,” says Uncle Sam with a coy wink, “I gave you a chance to save me, Billy, but you turned me down!”
“Whew!” complains the Attorney General, out for a retributive barehanded whack at Justice Douglas’s nefarious backside, “hitting this guy is like slapping an old weathered board!”
“Presidential timber, Herb,” grins Uncle Sam.
Judge Kaufman understands, of course, that every judgment is a kind of marriage, that he and the Rosenbergs needed each other to fulfill themselves, need each other still — judge and judged: two sides of the same coin…but what coin was that? He remembers the great up feeling he’d had when they were drawn together — inexorably, it had seemed then — toward that classic Passover Trial of just two years ago, the sense of being Chosen (and he was, yes, he was a Great Man now) and of being ready, the magisterial power and artistry with which he’d conducted the trial, the seemingly inevitable convictions and the Maximum Penalty drama that hovered over them…and yet, he’d not imagined that it would end this way. And how inevitable had it been really? He felt deep in his heart he had done the right and necessary thing — but could he trust his heart? Had they not been Jews would he have done the same? There were those who thanked him for putting the heat on them — but who has put the heat on whom? he wonders now, as he watches Bob, Bing, and Dottie practicing a sketch called “The Road to Radiance.” In the sketch, apparently, Crosby plays a priest who, with a lighthearted wink, sings “Goin’ My Way?” as he leads Bob and Dottie to the electric chair, while Hope, trying frantically to hide in Dottie’s sarong, gets lost (Lamour loses Hope!), only to come popping out like a champagne cork when they pull the switch on Dottie and go bounding—boing! boing! boing! — around the stage, singing “Thanks for the Memory.” He thinks: maybe those old priests at Fordham were right about invincible ignorance, after all. At the time, Irving had argued fiercely with them, supposing they were only trying to excuse his Judaism for him (it needed no excuses!), but now it’s suddenly come to him, thinking about that indivisible two-sided coin, that the one thing you could never understand was the thing you were intimately a part of; identity, they’d taught him (tried to), made modal and virtual distinctions impossible. Something like that. If he weren’t who he was on the face of that coin, if he were just a common citizen out there in the faceless crowd, he might have a better overview of the whole, but—