Jack was well aware that his management team was a minority of the board. Freeman might be a swing vote if a dispute arose. He was interested in money, not power. Actually, Jack was not sure Humphrey or I’Enfant would oppose him. It would depend on the issue. In any case, the composition of the board dramatically underscored that fact that he was no longer in control of the company.
At the first serious meeting of the board, Painter made a move he probably knew Jack wouldn’t like.
“What we have is a somewhat loosely organized partnership between Lear Network and Broadcasting Alliance,” Painter said. “I understand that Broadcasting Alliance is willing to tighten that relationship. I’m wondering if it wouldn’t be wise to reorganize into a parent corporation with subsidiaries. The Lear broadcasting operations and Broadcasters Alliance could become subsidiaries of the parent. As we grow and perhaps enter other enterprises, the parent could acquire other subsidiaries.”
“How do you feel about that, Jack?” asked Humphrey.
“It depends on how we own it,” Jack answered. “We worked out some rather careful arrangements about who owns what. It’s a little early to be changing them, isn’t it?”
“Absolutely,” Painter said. “My suggestion is that the parent company be Lear Network, Incorporated. Then we switch its radio broadcasting functions to a subsidiary we form for that very purpose.”
Jack looked toward Humphrey. “Doug?”
“Efficient arrangements. Efficient arrangements are important.”
“A rational corporate structure is certainly helpful when you set out to raise money,” said Freeman.
“My suggestion is that we convert Lear Network, Incorporated, into . . . let us say, Consolidated Communications, Incorporated,” Painter explained. “Its officers and board will remain in place. This board will be in a position to appoint the board and officers of the subsidiaries. We—”
“There’s one element of that that I don’t like, Dick,” Humphrey interrupted. “I don’t think we should take the Lear name off the basic corporation. After all, Jack built this whole thing. I’d rather see us call it Lear Communications, Incorporated.”
Painter frowned for an instant, then nodded. “Right. Sure. Lear Communications.”
“Jack?” asked Humphrey.
“Let’s see the details,” Jack replied.
Later, when the board assembled at 21 for lunch, Jack, Cap, and Curt went to the men’s room together.
“Well? What do you think?” Cap asked Jack.
“We’re in the presence of masters, gentlemen,” Jack said as he washed his hands. “They played white hat-black hat. And they threw me a bone. It was all rehearsed and orchestrated. That’s the way it’s going to be.”
Curt shrugged. “They’ve made us all rich, though. If things get shitty, I’m going to retire.”
Three
JACK SAT IN A MOTEL ROOM OUTSIDE BOSTON WITH REBECCA Murphy, the private investigator he had hired to watch Kimberly during the war.
He’d brought a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black to the room, and they were sipping it from bathroom water glasses. She was smoking a Camel; he had almost quit smoking.
Jack stared at a series of 8-by-10 black-and-white prints he had pulled from the envelope she’d brought him. His eyes were damp with tears. “She’s beautiful,” he whispered.
Rebecca Murphy nodded. “She really is.”
The pictures were of Kathleen, his daughter by Connie Horan. She was a towheaded five-year-old, romping happily in a park, photographed by Murphy with a big telephoto lens.
“How do they treat her?”
“Mr. Lear, I can’t find even a suggestion that they treat her as anything but their darling daughter. I’ll be frank with you: there’s no way you’re gonna get custody away from them. The Horans are—what would you call them?—prosaic people.”
“Where could I see her?”
“Except through a big lens, I don’t think you could. I mean, it’s like they expect you to show up someday.”
“I’m sure they do,” he muttered. “I expect they do. And I will, too, by God. Someday.”
Rebecca Murphy was in her early thirties, a solid-looking woman with tightly curled light brown hair and a craggy, acne-marked face.
Jack tossed back his Scotch and poured more. “You have any idea what it’s like to—”
“Yes, sir, I do. I lost custody of two children. I’m allowed to see them for an hour every two weeks. They keep a careful separation from Mommy. They’ve been told I won’t go to heaven. I know they wouldn’t see me at all if they didn’t have to.”
“Rebecca . . . May I call you—”
“Call me Becky.”
“Life shits, doesn’t it, Becky?”
She smiled. “Here sits a man with . . . how many million? Married to the most beautiful woman in America. Father of two fine children here in Boston, plus the one you can’t see. Father of two fine children in New York.” She shook her head. “Have you ever missed a meal, Jack? I went out on the street when I was fifteen and turned tricks to make the money for something to eat. The worst part was having some drunk decide to beat on me. And that happened more than once.”
“I’m sorry, Becky. That’s rotten.”
“Yeah. So I got married. And guess what? My husband, the wonderful father of my kids, used his fists on me too. When I went after a divorce, it was denied on the ground that he hadn’t committed adultery. Then he went for exclusive custody of the kids on the ground that I’d been a hooker, also on the ground that I wasn’t home all the time. I was working as a private investigator, but my husband’s lawyers suggested that what I was really doing was turning tricks again.” Becky Murphy would not sob. Her face turned harder as she spoke. “The court gave my husband custody and ordered me out of the house. There I was, still married to him and couldn’t live in the house or see the kids.”
Jack reached out and took her in his arms. “What I said. Life shits.”
“Finally I went to Reno and got a divorce, not so I could get married again, God forbid, but so that bastard couldn’t lay claim to my earnings.”
“Becky . . .”
She kissed him and asked, “You want something?”
He nodded.
“Me too. From a gentleman. You won’t use your fists, will you? Or bite? Don’t worry about anything. I got tied off years ago. But don’t hold back! I want all you got, as hard as you can do it!”
She undressed. Her body was spare and hard. Her belly was concave and rose from her prominently defined pelvis. He could count her ribs. A line from Gilbert and Sullivan came to Jack’s mind, the self-description of the Mikado’s daughter-in-law-elect: “tough as a bone, with a will of her own.”
She tuned him up with her tongue and then spread to take him in. He plunged and plunged, and no matter how hard he did she grunted, “More! More!”
He took her to dinner that night. “I doubt we’ll ever see each other again, Jack,” she said. “You should forget it. It’s not a part of your life. It was an incident, that’s all. That’s what it was for me, too. You’re damned good. I hope Mrs. ‘America’s-Ten-Best-Dressed’ appreciates you.”
Back in the motel room, Jack found on the sheets a strange mixture of odors: sweat, cigarette smoke, and some kind of perfume or cologne he hadn’t noticed before. He placed a call to Anne and talked to her for ten minutes. He told her he loved her, and she said she loved him.
Except for the time in New Orleans when he had stuck his penis through the hole in the curtain—an occasion he deeply regretted because he’d allowed four associates to see him do so stupid a thing—this incident with Becky Murphy was his only adventure outside his and Anne’s marriage bed. He resolved it would be the last. Married to a woman like her, he would be a fool to risk losing her.
Four
JOHN WOULD NOT COME TO GREENWICH THAT SUMMER. HE had won his appointment to Annapolis and would report there in June to begin his summer of orientation and to learn to sail bef
ore classes began.
Jack took Anne to Boston to attend the boy’s graduation from high school. Inevitably, they met Kimberly and Dodge. It was the first time the two women had met, and it was inevitable that they would size each other up very thoroughly.
Kimberly was now forty-three years old. She remained an elegantly beautiful woman with an impressive style. Though she was the very image of self-confidence, the truth was that she was no longer self-confident. Dodge badgered her constantly about keeping her weight down, as he had always done; but Kimberly found it impossible to do unless she dieted so strictly that it made her irritable. The result was that she was twenty pounds overweight, and she carried the weight where it showed. Confronting the exquisitely beautiful Anne, Kimberly was instantly envious of her gracefully slender figure.
Anne wore a dress of Shantung silk, draped so that it covered her left arm almost to the elbow but left her right shoulder bare. She wore a simple bracelet on either wrist, three strands of pearls on the left and a delicate gold chain on the right. She carried a crocodile handbag and a pair of black gloves, which Kimberly never saw her put on. Her makeup was subdued. She wore her hair in a smooth, careless style and let a wisp fall over her forehead.
Kimberly too was handsomely dressed in a cream-colored linen jacket over a black linen sheath, but she wondered if she looked frumpy in the presence of one of the ten best dressed.
At the beginning of her relationship with Jack Anne had been curious about Kimberly and had been anxious to meet her. But when she finally met her face-to-face, she found that Kimberly simply made no impression on her, good, bad, or indifferent. Kimberly was no longer a factor in Jack’s life, or in hers, and Anne had no sense that she was in competition with her.
Kimberly, on the other hand, was quick to make judgments. She detected that Anne regarded her with indifference, and that angered her.
But she remained under control. “I’ve looked forward to meeting you,” she said to Anne. “I’ve seen your picture in magazines, but the photographs don’t do you justice.”
“That’s very kind of you,” said Anne. “I’m glad to meet you too, at last.”
Later that afternoon, talking with Jack away from the crowd in the Louisburg Square house, where Kimberly and Dodge were giving a party for John, Harrison Wolcott rubbed his hands together and shook his head. “I can’t tell you I’m not surprised, because I am surprised. Jack, they’ll take the company away from you.”
“They already have. But they paid me handsomely for it. Besides, they’ve given me a big opportunity. Harrison, the glory days of radio broadcasting are over. Television is going to steal the audience.”
“I see The Sally Allen Show is going on this fall. Do you think she can compete with, say, Milton Berle?”
“She can’t. We won’t have enough stations to begin to compete with Berle. But she doesn’t have to. We won’t put her on opposite Berle.”
“How many stations will you have?” Harrison asked.
“Four, when the season begins. We’re going to get all the radio stations to talk constantly about what a funny woman Sally Allen is. We’ll have articles published about her. We’re going to create an intense curiosity about her. People will want to see her. Then we’ll get more stations.”
“You’re going to have a hell of a time competing against the networks,”
“Granted. We’ll never get ratings as high as theirs. But there’s something else down the road—way down the road. Someday we won’t broadcast television. The signal can be sent out over a wire. The day will come when you’ll look up at the utility poles on your street, and you’ll see electric wires, telephone wires, and television wires.”
Harrison Wolcott smiled. “In the year 2000.”
Jack shook his head. “A long time before that.”
Anne was approaching, and before she could reach them Wolcott lowered his voice and said, “Your wife is beautiful.”
Five
JONI SUCKED ON JOHN’S PENIS AND WEPT AT THE SAME TIME. “We’ll never—Why couldn’t you have just gone to Harvard?”
He ran his hand through her hair. “A lot of reasons.”
“One of the reasons is so that we can’t go on loving each other,” she sobbed.
“One of the reasons is that I have to escape from our mother. And so do you. She smothers us, Joni.”
“That lout Dodge encourages her.”
“Joni, have you read The Late George Apley?”
She shook her head. “I saw a copy of it downstairs.”
“Well, read it. It explains why we have to get out of Boston.”
“Boston?”
“Boston. Biloxi. Any confining place.”
She licked him, from scrotum to glans. “John . . .” she sobbed.
“Hey, it may be—Hey, I can’t promise you this. But suppose someday we meet someplace like San Francisco, Miami, Chicago, where nobody knows us. And we just introduce ourselves as mister and missus. Or one of us uses a different name and we do get married.”
Joni sighed. “You’ll find another girl.”
“And maybe you’ll find a guy.”
“But I love you, and I always will. Nobody’s ever going to compare to you.”
“Nobody’s going to compare to you, Joni.”
He used his hands to spread her legs and pushed his face into her crotch. He had learned the special sensitivity of her clitoris and how to stimulate it with his tongue. He did it only for a minute before she writhed and shrieked.
“Nobody, John! Nobody!” she cried as she fumbled for his penis and drew it in between her lips and deeper into her throat than he had believed she could do without gagging.
TWENTY - THREE
One
1950
JACK SAT IN THE BACK SEAT OF A CAR DRIVEN BY CAP DURENberger. They had flown to Tulsa. Billy Bob Cotton had been waiting at the airport and was sitting in the front beside Cap. Jack had thought to catch a little sleep on the drive to Okmulgee, but he’d found the countryside so interesting and the weather so threatening that he had remained awake.
The skies to the west were a purplish gray, the darkest he had ever seen while the sun still shone in the east. The contrast between the sunlit leaves on groves of trees to the west and the surly clouds behind them gave the trees a juicy green color. Jack wondered if he was going to witness a tornado, but he didn’t ask.
As he stared in fascination, the dark finger of a tornado stretched toward the earth from the clouds; but after a minute it retreated and disappeared.
Billy Bob switched on the radio and found a station broadcasting a weather warning. A tornado watch was in effect for Okmulgee County. A tornado warning was in effect for Okfuskee, Seminole, and Hughes Counties.
“Storm’s movin’ south,” Billy Bob said casually, and he switched off the radio.
The countryside through which they were driving was rolling, with low hills and shallow valleys. Herds of cattle grazed. A crop with pale green leaves grew in fenced-in fields. Billy Bob explained the crop was peanuts.
They stopped at a farm five miles from the town of Okmulgee. As they drove up the driveway toward the house, Jack appraised the place as a prosperous working farm. Standing behind the garage was what they had come to see—a fifty-foot steel tower topped by a wide-armed television antenna. Towers just like it stood on nearly every farm they had passed.
“The Martins are fine people,” said Billy Bob. “I’ve known Ed and Martha for many years. A bank I own part of, in Tulsa, lent them money for this place. They paid off their mortgage ahead of time.”
A huge black-and-brown German shepherd trotted out and stood a short distance from the car, alert and wagging his tail only tentatively.
Mrs. Martin came out of the house. “Well, hi there, Mr. Cotton! Nice to see you.” She had an accent and actually said, “Haa there, Mista Cotton! Nass t’ see ya.” She was a pleasant woman, wearing a simple cotton dress that she had probably made herself.
Jack climbed ou
t of the back seat and offered his hand to Mrs. Martin. “Hello, Mrs. Martin. My name is Jack Lear. It’s nice of you to let us come see your television,” he said.
She shook his hand with a firm grip. “Well, it’s not so much, really. Some get better reception than we do. That storm goin’ down the west there may interfere some.”
Jack offered his hand to the dog to sniff. The dog checked him and seemed satisfied.
Mrs. Martin shook hands then with Cap and invited the men into the house, where she had coffee and homemade doughnuts waiting. “Ed’ll be in right smart,” she said. “He’ll have seen your car.”
The living room floor was covered with new linoleum and furnished with a couch and two chairs upholstered in maroon plush. The room, perhaps the whole house, was heated by a large cast-iron coal stove which stood on a piece of tin-plated steel that protected the linoleum from its heat. Their television was a seventeen-inch Sylvania set. Pictures of children sat on top.
Ed Martin came in. “Well, hi there, Billy Bob!” he said, reaching out to shake hands. “Long time no see.” He turned and extended his hand to Jack and then to Cap. “Welcome, gentlemen.”
Martin was no overalled farmer. He wore sturdy blue Levi’s, almost new, and a khaki work shirt with a pack of cigarettes in one pocket and a yellow pencil in the other. He was a rawboned outdoorsman.
“Well, y’ come to see the TV,” said Martin. “Let’s see what we can pick up this mornin’.”
He switched on the set. It warmed up, and a picture appeared. It was a bit fuzzy and had some snow in it, but there it was: a black-and-white picture of some overexuberant master of ceremonies playing to a studio audience of women.
“That there comes from Dallas, and that’s about as far as we can git it,” said Martin. “Lemme show ya Tulsa, which comes in a whole lot better.”
First he changed channels, and a different picture came in, not clear at all. Then he turned the dial on a box controller on top of the set, and the picture became much clearer, all but perfect. “See, what I did was turn the antenna toward Tulsa. Before there, it was turned toward Dallas. A TV antenna is what you call directional.”
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