Free Little Casino by Gilbert Sorrentino

Duncan, Martha Graham, and Loie Fuller, that ballrooms had been named for him and luncheon dances under swirling colored lights suggested and popularized by him. The classic Savile Row suit? Designed by him. The Windsor knot? First tied by him and generously credited to the Duke, who, in actual fact, being something, he’d winked, of “a dim bulb,” couldn’t even tie his shoes. The silk scarf employed as a belt was one of his improvisatory whims. He had started all the major Hollywood studios, with Jack and Adolph and Harry and Louis as his assistants, but tired of their puerile minds, their lack of adventurous spirit, and their worship of the box office. She said that he’d opened a restaurant with Rudolph Valentino as a partner; that he’d been the first to wear a midnight-blue tuxedo; that before his arrival in Miami Beach, Lincoln and Collins Avenues had been not much more than skid rows; that he’d created whipped cream and the cheeseburger; that he’d not only bought, refurbished, and opened the Cotton Club, but that he’d booked into it Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Chick Webb, Sy Oliver, Benny Moten, Jay McShann, Fletcher Henderson, Jimmy Lunceford, Cab Calloway, and Andy Kirk and his Twelve Clouds of Joy; that he’d collaborated with Flo Ziegfeld on all the Follies, but grew restive at the successful but banal formula, and that, incidentally, he’d made love to each and every one of the famed Ziegfeld Girls; that he’d also had affairs with Pola Negri, Clara Bow, Gloria Swanson, Mae Marsh, Vilma Banky, Paulette Goddard, Claudette Colbert, Dorothy Day, Lydia E. Pinkham, and Castoria Fletcher, all this before, of course, he’d met her; that he’d bought a Chinese restaurant, the Jade Mountain, with cash, because she liked the egg foo yung there, a dish, by the way, that he’d created of necessity on a chicken farm in the Gobi; that he’d almost managed to save Bix Beiderbecke from drinking himself to death, but was too busy advising the Army Air Corps on the design of a low-altitude fighter that eventually became the P-51 Mustang; that he’d caught the biggest sailfish, tuna, swordfish, and blue marlin that had ever been caught off the Florida Keys; that he’d advised James Joyce to drop the possessive apostrophe in the title of his last work; that he’d suggested to Scott Fitzgerald that he read the work of the virtually unknown Ernest Hemingway. He invented the pneumatic scaling tool and devised a method of cleaning double-bottomed boilers that would save workers’ sanity; he consistently bid lowest on re-rigging jobs for the Navy and just as consistently did excellent work; he could shovel snow for hours and then dance all night; make a marinara sauce and a bolognese sauce and a white-clam sauce that were miracles of superb flavor and subtle balance; he could teach anybody to drive and had, as a matter of fact, given the great Nuvolari some invaluable tips. She remarked that it was well known that he was a descendant of an aristocratic Italian family, descended from the Emperor Galerius, whose roots were deep in Sicily; that he was a remarkably attentive, adoring, dutiful yet strict father; that he had renamed Yellow Hook, Bay Ridge, for which the Brooklyn Borough President gave him the key to the borough and the Order of Chevalier of Kings County Arts and Letters; that he’d been the one to first spot George Herriman’s genius; that he’d suggested to Magritte that the title of a simple painting should be “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” rather than the painter’s “Une pipe”; that he could sing like Russ Columbo, only with greater range and better breath control; that he met regularly with Aaron Copland, Charles Ives, George Gershwin, Erik Satie, Alban Berg, and Arnold Schoenberg to discuss what he called “serial music” and “atonal music”; that he wrote the first lengthy critique of the new medium of television, calling it “the coming boon—or curse—of the century.” He