Jack ignored her question. “When am I going to see you, Connie?” he asked earnestly.
“We don’t dare!” she whispered. “Oh, no, we don’t dare!”
Four
IN A MEETING WITH MICKEY SULLIVAN AND HERB MORRILL, Jack decided the time had come to let the world know that Betty—Carolyn Blossom—was a Negro, provided she agreed.
She did not agree. That year, for the fourth time, she won an award from Broadcast magazine as the best radio comedienne in America—an award that Gracie Allen had won nine times. Jack wanted Carolyn and her husband to accompany the Lears and the Sullivans to the awards dinner and let the world see that Betty was Carolyn Blossom.
“No!” she declared when he proposed it. “No! Let that crowd call me a nigger? Even if they didn’t call me that, that’s what they’d think. A long time ago you and I decided we’d make a buck, not a point. The time for makin’ a point was a long time ago, Jack. We didn’t make it then. I’m not going to try to make it now.”
“It’s a matter of principle,” said Jack.
“If it wasn’t before, why is it now?” She shook her head. “You told me once that the big thing is to have a fat bank account. Well, I’ve got one. Me and my man gonna live in the south of France. We’ll be neighbors of Josephine Baker, which is who told us to come.”
“Well, I’m damned sorry. I should have stood up for what’s right a long time ago.”
“I’ve had a fun time for thirteen years, and you’ve paid me generously. I’m grateful to you.”
“I’m grateful to you. You’ve been a mainstay of our entertainment programming for a long time. I’m really sorry that—”
“Jack . . . neither one of us was big enough to stand up and be counted—you to do it, me to insist on it. We pocketed dollars out of our cowardice. We may have to account for that someday. But for now I’m going to take mine and go away and enjoy them.”
Five
THE WARTIME YEARS HAD NOT DAMPENED HERB MORRILL’S infectious enthusiasm. He had never managed to convince Jack Lear that Jack Benny was funny, but he had convinced his boss of a lot of other things.
“I swear to you, this thing is going to work,” he said to Jack, to Mickey Sullivan, and Emil Durenberger. Durenberger had obtained a discharge from the army and come to work for Lear Broadcasting. Jack had begun to call Durenberger “Cap,” after the rank he’d had when they met. They were together in Jack’s office late in January. “Not just technologically. I mean commercially.”
“Where do I have to go to see it?” Jack asked.
“Just out to Cambridge. They’ve got one set up in a lab at Harvard. A Professor Loewenstein is the expert who will demonstrate the thing to us.”
That afternoon Herb, Jack, and Cap stood in a darkened lab and stared at a curious little bottle with a faint and fuzzy image on its bottom. Oddly, the image was a moving picture of them. The camera that produced it was pointed at them.
Jack was fascinated. He gesticulated and watched himself gesticulate on the face of a cathode ray tube, which was the name the professor had given the bottle. The camera, he said, contained an image orthicon tube. The orthicon tube converted light to electrical impulses, and the cathode ray tube converted electrical impulses back into light.
Dr. Friedrich Loewenstein spoke with a heavy German accent. He was a young man, tall, blond, and intense.
“The point, Mr. Sear—”
“Lear.”
“Oh. Yes. Sorry. The point is that the picture signal can be transmitted on a radio frequency, the same way a sound signal can be transmitted.”
Jack smiled. “Fifty years from now.”
“No, sir,” said Dr. Loewenstein. “It has been done. Pictures from the World’s Fair in 1939 were transmitted from the fairgrounds to receivers in downtown Manhattan. It was done in England some years earlier. If not for the war, stations would be in operation today, sending pictures and sound. During the war we have given all our technological resources to things like radar and sonar. This technology was put aside for the time being. Everyone’s interested in getting back to it as soon as possible.”
“What’s it called?” Jack asked.
“No one knows for sure. Since sound transmission is called radio, maybe this is video.”
Jack pointed at the receiver. It was a tangle of wires and glowing tubes, not enclosed in any kind of case. “Suppose a family wanted to have one of those, like they want a radio. What would it cost?”
“This is a guess, Mr. Lear,” said Dr. Loewenstein, “but some of us think they can be manufactured for less than a thousand dollars.”
“It will cost more than a car” Cap Durenberger pointed out.
“And may be worth more,” said Jack. “A family could sit in front of that thing and see pictures of anything in the world—news events while they were happening. Think of one of Roosevelt’s fireside chats, with his face there as well as his voice.”
“That is very possible,” said Dr. Loewenstein.
Cap shook his head. “A long way down the road,” he said.
“This could put us out of business somewhere down that road,” said Jack. “Professor, let me ask you something. Would you be willing to accept a fee to become an adviser to my company, to keep us informed of the development of this technology—including the names of other companies who are taking an interest?”
“I should have to give that a great deal of thought,” said Dr. Loewenstein.
A week later Dr. Loewenstein phoned Jack and said he would sign a consulting contract with the broadcasting company. “You are a difficult man to say no to Mr. Lear.”
Jack had talked with Solomon Weisman about Dr. Loewenstein. Weisman, who had recruited Jack for B’nai B’rith, knew Dr. Loewenstein as a Jew whose family had fled Germany in 1934 when he was twenty. Weisman had told the professor of Jack’s services to the cause of American understanding of Nazism and America’s entry into the war.
“I am not ready to invest much in this video thing,” Jack told the professor. “But I want to be kept fully informed of its development.”
Six
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 1945
“THIS IS WHAT SHE DOES TO ME,” JACK SAID TO CONNIE. HE used his thumbs and index fingers to pinch little rolls of flesh at his middle. “Do you know what she’s done? She’s quit smoking. She’s quit drinking. She’s gone on a regimen to lose weight. She weighs almost as little as she did when we were married. I weigh twenty pounds more, and I’m supposed to be ashamed of it.”
They were in Connie’s bedroom. It was midmorning, and her children were in school.
“You are huskier than you used to be,” she said.
“You want to pinch me too?”
She rolled over against him. “You’re a comfortable man, though,” she said. She sighed. “And a persuasive man. Jack, do we dare have a sip of Scotch in the morning?”
“Why not? Why live by rules?”
She put on a robe, went downstairs, and came back with a bottle of Black & White, two glasses, and a bowl of ice.
He didn’t need to encourage her to put the robe aside. When she first undressed, she had said she wanted him to judge her body. She was thirty-four and had put on a little weight while he was away. Her legs were long and slender, as always, but her breasts were newly sumptuous and inviting. He judged her improved and told her so.
When she put her glass aside, she took his penis in her hands and explored it all over with her long, delicate fingers. It was as though she wanted to renew her acquaintance with it. She lifted his scrotum and gently massaged his testicles.
“I am going to sin with you, Jack,” she whispered. “May the good Lord forgive me!”
“Going to lick? That’s what you seemed to like best when—”
“Lick you? I said I’m going to sin!”
“I’m for it. But don’t forget there’s a certain risk.”
“Jack . . . Just lick you? I couldn’t be happy with just that. Not now. You taught me to
like having a man inside me. Before you, I didn’t know I could like it. You remember. I didn’t think I was supposed to. But now, Jack! I haven’t had a man in a year and a half!”
He reached for his jacket and took a condom from his pocket. “Well, we’d better—”
“No! Oh, no! To do it at all with you is sin enough. To do it with that on you—”
“Connie, you could get pregnant.”
“No. I’ve counted the days very carefully. Now is the time when I can enjoy it and not conceive. And I want to enjoy it.”
Seven
THAT FEBRUARY, JACK ACQUIRED ANOTHER STATION, IN ATlanta. This made eleven stations on the Lear network. Pointing out that “Lear Broadcasting” was not an appealing name, the ever-astute Cap Durenberger suggested they call the string of stations LNI, for Lear Network, Incorporated. Jack bought the idea, and Durenberger hired an artist to devise a logo for LNI.
It became apparent to Durenberger that the network needed more than a logo that could be used only in print advertising; what LNI needed was a catchy sound signature, something like NBC’s three notes—pumm-pumm-pumm.
Jack knew something about radio sound signatures. Government-sponsored shortwave stations all over the world opened their daily schedule of broadcasting by sending out repeatedly a phrase of music, usually the opening notes of their national anthem. The United States did not use the opening notes of “The Star-Spangled Banner” but those of “Columbia, Gem of the Ocean.” For LNI Jack chose the opening notes of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” tapped out on a xylophone: “Oh-oh, say, can you see?”
Eight
CAP DURENBERGER HATED TO FLY, SO IN MARCH HE TOOK A train to Los Angeles, where he signed the hot movie comic Sally Allen to a five-year contract with LNI. He committed LNI to pay her half a million dollars a year to do twenty half-hour shows. This left her time to do at least two pictures a year. It was an unheard-of amount of money for that number of radio shows on an eleven-station network. For her release, she was to pay LNI 10 percent of the salary she received from the pictures she made.
Only after Jack and others expressed outrage at the generous terms of the contract did someone find time to read the hundred clauses of the contract and discover that LNI had the right to accept or reject her film contracts. What was more, LNI had the right to sell its acceptance.
“Perfectly simple, mi jefe,” Durenberger told Jack with a devilish glint in his eye. “Her radio shows make her a bigger star than ever, film studios clamor for a picture contract, and we sell that contract to the highest bidder, thereby recovering a major part, if not all, of our half million.”
Nine
TUESDAY, APRIL 17, 1945
CONNIE’S DIGNITY NEVER FAILED HER. NEITHER DID HER style. She looked stunning when she met Jack for lunch in the ladies’ dining room at the Common Club. Jack still held the opinion that Connie was the only woman in Boston who could match Kimberly in beauty and elegance.
When their drinks were before them and he had saluted her with his glass, Connie made a calm, simple statement: “I’ve seen my doctor, Jack. I’m pregnant.”
SEVENTEEN
One
“IF YOU THINK YOU ARE GOING TO LIVE IN THIS HOUSE AND share a bedroom with me, you are out of your mind.”
Jack had expected that, just as he had expected that Connie would call Kimberly and tell her she was going to have his baby. What he had not expected was that she would call Kimberly immediately, probably from a telephone in the Common Club. He had wanted to be the one to break the news to Kimberly, but he did not have the chance. Now, he wasn’t confronting hysteria, only cold hard fury.
“Connie! Connie, for God’s sake—who was reared like a nun and had no idea ‘what evil lurks in the hearts of men.’ If you had to fuck somebody, why didn’t you fuck Betsy, who—Why do I ask that? You probably did!”
Jack poured two stiff Scotches. He handed her one, half expecting her to throw it at him. She didn’t. He sat down in the living room. She paced.
“Do you know what this town is going to think of you? Apart from the fact that you screwed Constance Horan, of all people? It’s going to know you as the cheap little California kike—”
“That’s enough, Kimberly!” he snapped.
She gritted her teeth. “As the crude, vulgar . . . son of his father, who came here and made himself a parasite on the Wolcotts and then spectacularly betrayed them!”
“It isn’t spectacular,” he muttered.
She twisted her mouth into an evil, mocking smile. “Oh, it’s going to be,” she threatened. “Everybody in Boston is going to know every detail of your treachery.”
“That can only hurt the children,” he said quietly.
“That’s going to hurt them? What about what you did?”
“It will hurt Connie, too.”
“Well, isn’t that too fuckin’ bad! Poor little Connie! Poor little innocent virginal Connie. One look at that cock of yours and she couldn’t wait to get it in her cunt.”
TWO
JACK LEAR AND HARRISON WOLCOTT SAT TOGETHER AT THE bar in the Common Club. Other members kept a distance from them, as many knew what the two men would be discussing.
“She’s retained lawyers. They will be filing for divorce,” Wolcott said. “She has the one ground that’s valid in Massachusetts, and she’s not in a forgiving mood. The worst of it is that she feels she’s been humiliated. Constance Horan is one of Kimberly’s closest friends. Kimberly thinks everyone in Boston is snickering.”
“Guffawing,” said Jack grimly
“If only you hadn’t gotten her pregnant!”
“Try having sex with a devout Catholic girl and not getting her pregnant.”
Wolcott smiled. “I know. A lot of us got Irish maids pregnant in the old days. It was a Boston thing, I suppose.”
Jack had moved into the Copley. He was allowed to see the children for two hours every other Saturday afternoon.
“Kimberly’s lawyers are advising her to ask for just about everything,” Wolcott informed him.
“I could be very nasty,” Jack said soberly. “I humped Connie a few times, true; but Kimberly had an ongoing relationship with Dodge Hallowell during most of the time I was away.”
“They’ll deny it.”
“I can prove it.”
“Really Jack? How could you prove it?”
Jack stared for a moment into the apparently innocent eyes of his father-in-law. “Maybe I shouldn’t tell you.”
“I am hoping you and I can talk things out in a friendly manner,” said Wolcott. He signaled the bartender to bring a fresh round of drinks. “I thought maybe I could act as an honest broker between you two.”
“All right I appreciate it. You won’t like what I’m going to tell you. You see, Harrison, in spite of the beautiful veneer Kimberly thought she put on me, I’m still my father’s son and my brother’s brother. Kimberly should have wondered why, within two weeks after I came home, the maid quit. She—”
“The maid, too?”
Jack chuckled. “No. The maid who worked in the house all through the war—during my absence, that is—was actually a private investigator I had hired. I doubt very much that you want the details of what she found out. She took photographs.”
“My God! What—”
“She took risks I would not have authorized her to take. The photographs are fuzzy, but you can tell who the subjects are and what they’re doing, Harrison. In three of the pictures Kimberly is wearing handcuffs.”
“Handcuffs?”
“Yes. I’m afraid so.”
“Kimberly . . .” Wolcott whispered.
“That element of it didn’t surprise me,” said Jack. “I knew she had all-embracing tastes. My detective reported to me by letter. All she said was ‘Things are as you suspected. Do you want details?’ No, I didn’t want details. I didn’t want the details entrusted to the mail. I didn’t even know who the man was until I got home and heard the detective’s report in person.”
“Not unless Kimberly is totally unreasonable.”
“May I tell her you have this evidence against her?” Wolcott asked gravely.
“Use your own judgment,” Jack advised.
“I’m going to urge Kimberly to be reasonable. I hope we can remain some kind of friends, Jack.”
“I hope so too. Very much. I am deeply indebted to you, Harrison—probably for acts of kindness I don’t even know about, as well as those I do.”
Three
DURING THE MONTHS SINCE HE HAD RETURNED HOME, JACK had exchanged weekly letters with Anne. They were filled with news. The lights were on again in London, but the nation suffered from shortages of everything. Jack wrote to Anne that he missed her, and she wrote that she missed him. That was all they could say.
The morning after his talk with Harrison Wolcott, Jack sent a wire to Anne:
KIMBERLY IS FILING FOR DIVORCE STOP I WOULD LIKE TO COME TO LONDON AT AN EARLY DATE TO EXPLORE IMPLICATIONS THIS MAY HAVE FOR US STOP PLEASE WIRE TO LNI BOSTON STOP
JACK
He received Anne’s return wire the next day:
WILL BE GLAD TO SEE YOU STOP ADVISE DATE STOP
ANNE
Jack wired her the same day, saying the divorce would take several months and that it would be unwise for him to come to London until it was final. He hoped everything would be concluded before the end of the year.
Kimberly demanded to see the photographs Rebecca Murphy had taken. Jack supplied copies to her father, who took them to the house on Louisburg Square.
Kimberly blanched at the sight of the photographs.
Her bitter comment to her father was “Well, obviously, no matter what you do, you can’t make a gentleman of a cheap little kike.”
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