“In other words,” said Jack, “you’ve got an electric motor on top of the tower, which turns the antenna.”
“That’s exactly what we got.”
In the course of a few minutes he showed them he could tune in Kansas City, which like Dallas was at the far reach of their antenna, and Oklahoma City, though that signal was broken up by the storm between here and there.
“There’s talk they’re gonna start a station in Wichita, and that’d be nice. That’d give us five channels. Once in a while, if we’re lucky, we can get St. Louis, but y’ can’t count on it.”
“I guess my question,” said Jack, “is how important is television to you?”
“Oh, it’s very important,” said Mrs. Martin. “I tell you somethin’. Our oldest son lives in Dallas. And sometimes when we’re watchin’ something, I get to thinking, by golly our boy is watching the same show, ‘cause we got the same favorites, and it makes it seem like he’s not so far away.”
On the way back to Tulsa, the three men talked in the car.
“I’ve done some numbers,” said Billy Bob. “If we set up a powerful station in Kansas City, we’re going to cover a market with a minimum of five million people.”
“I’ve done the same numbers,” said Jack. “St. Louis doesn’t work nearly as well. Neither does Dallas. The only other city that might reach a bigger market is Columbus, Ohio. But much of the terrain in Ohio is hilly, and you’d have to put up a hell of a tall tower to reach Pittsburgh, for example, and Detroit. In the East you’ve got another problem, which is that people aren’t accustomed to the idea of putting up a fifty-foot tower to get their television. Many of them couldn’t, anyway.
“I agree with Billy Bob,” said Jack. “Kansas City.”
“We can’t live with one station,” Cap pointed out.
“Right,” Jack said. “I’ve done some looking. There’s an independent station in Dallas. We can lease a wire from Kansas City to Dallas and broadcast simultaneously from these two. We may be able to reach an independent station in Minneapolis the same way. After those, we’ll have to kinescope. I think we can slot The Sally Allen Show on independent stations in Atlanta and Indianapolis. The show won’t come in as clearly, and it will be a day late, so we have to make The Sally Allen Show something people want to see.”
TWO
“KANSAS CITY?”
That was Sally Allen’s reaction when she was told her show would originate in Kansas City. “You gotta be kiddin’! Somebody wants me to go live in—Out of the question!”
Jack himself explained to her why the initial shows had to originate in Kansas City. Sally told him she hated him, she hated the whole goddamned deal she’d made, and she’d walk out on it and let him sue her.
Ten days later she was in Kansas City, walking scornfully around the dusty warehouse that LCI—Lear Communications, Incorporated—was converting into a television studio.
She was placated a little when Jack named the supporting actors who would be working with her. “You spent a lot of money,” she said.
He had, for salaries and perks, but everything else had cost far less than it would have in New York or Los Angeles. He leased an apartment for Sally. He leased a suite in the Muehle-bach Hotel for himself and the other members of the management team when they were in town.
Over dinner at an excellent French restaurant, Sally acknowledged that Kansas City was a very pleasant little city. “I like this place,” she said, glancing around the restaurant. “I figured I’d have to live on bar-bee-kew. And, hey, they got a nightclub you wouldn’t believe. Female impersonators! Those guys are good. We ought to figure out a way to slot the best of them in on the show.”
They did. On the second show a young man named Burt Wilson, who called himself Gloria, appeared in a comedy sketch. At the end of the sketch he turned his back to the camera and pulled off a sweater, exposing his bare back. As he turned to face the camera, he jerked off his wig. Gloria was Burt.
With that episode alone, The Sally Allen Show achieved much of what Jack had hoped for it. It was, of course, denounced as indecent. A Texas congressman demanded that the FCC revoke the license of the LCI station in Kansas City. Churchmen condemned the show. Newspapers and newsmagazines reported the controversy. LCI provided photos of the bare-chested Burt.
Audiences all across the country demanded to see The Sally Allen Show Stations all over the country asked for the kinescope.
The recapitalized Lear company bought the independent stations in Minneapolis and Indianapolis.
Three
SALLY ALLEN RARELY DISPLAYED TEMPERAMENT. USUALLY she was an easygoing, cooperative actress who accepted direction and caused few problems on the set. She did make some demands, though, and one of them was that her dressing room be something better than one of the plywood cubicles that had been built into the warehouse studio. Jack ordered the production manager to buy a house trailer and tow it into the warehouse.
He sat on a couch in the trailer and watched Sally being fitted for one of the costumes she would wear on the eighth show. It was a dance costume, a black satin corselet decorated with hundreds of glittery spangles. She would wear dark, sheer tights with it, but for the fitting her legs were bare.
Sally grabbed the corselet at her hips and tugged upward on it, drawing it higher and exposing more of her hips. She spoke to the seamstress. “What say, Bertha? Can I wear it pulled up like this?”
The seamstress nodded. “Lace it so it’ll stay up like that.”
“Okay. But you’ll have to trim it or fold it over and sew it down at the top. Gotta have cleavage. Audience expects it.”
Bertha laughed. “The director will want to stick a flower down in there.”
“To hell with that,” said Sally. “What are boobs for? The secret of my success, is what. Right, Jack?”
Jack lifted his Scotch. “They get a lot of comment,” he said.
“’Kay, Bertha. Let’s take it off.”
The seamstress began to unlace and unhook the corselet.
“I’ve got a deep secret in my past,” Sally said to Jack. She let the seamstress take the corselet. She was wearing nothing under it. Naked, she reached for her own Scotch and took a sip before she reached for the red wrapper that lay on a chair. “Not bad for an old gal of thirty, huh?” she asked before she pulled on the wrapper and covered herself.
Bertha left the trailer.
Sally sat down facing Jack. “Deep secret,” she said. “I did an apprenticeship nobody seems to remember. People talk about my comic timing, about how I can mug with funny lines, and all that. How do they think I learned my business?”
“Tell me your secret,” said Jack.
“Burlesque. When I was seventeen years old I became a stripper or, as they liked to say, an ‘exotic dancer.’ I worked on a circuit. Towns like Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh. Just in theaters, never in clubs. I took off as much as the cops would allow, which in some towns at some times was everything. But half of a burlesque show, you know, is the baggy-pants comics, and some of their sketches have a girl in them. Lots of times I was the girl. I watched their routines and techniques, saw the faults in them, and did my part better than they did theirs.”
“I bet you did.”
“I remember some of the lines. I’m playing like I’m hot for sex, and I say to the guy, ‘I want what I want when I want it!’ Then I do a bump. And he says, ‘You’ll get what I got when I got it!’ Of course, they play language for all it’s worth, and more. In one routine the straight man says, ‘She was coming across the street, and I scrutinized her!’ The baggy-pants rolls his eyes and asks, ‘Y’ mean you scrutinized her before she even got across the street?’ ‘Why, of course. Sometimes I scrutinize them when they’re clear on the other side of the street.’ Now baggy-pants rolls his eyes some more, turns and leers at the audience, points at the straight man’s crotch, and asks, ‘How you got it in there—rolled up like a hose?’”
Jack
laughed. “We couldn’t do it on television.”
“More’s the pity,” she said. “In those old routines the situation almost always managed to get my boobs out. I used to think it was sexier being bare-titted on the stage and doing a sketch under full lights than it was to strip down to a G-string.”
“I agree.”
“The reason I bring it up is, I got a letter. It’s from . . . well, I guess it’s from my husband, ‘cause I never divorced him, really, just left him. He saw me on TV and realized for the first time that Sally Allen was the girl he remembered as Flo.”
“Does he want money?” Jack asked.
“Just a little. A couple hundred. He says times are tough. The old burlesque houses are closing all over. He was a straight man, and his top banana died. He’s been working as a candy butcher. He’s also got a girl, a stripper named Marilyn, who works a comedy routine with him. She broke her leg and went on stripping and doing the routine with her leg in a cast. Can you believe humanity? The guys in the audiences liked her better! I mean, they liked seeing her strip with a cast on her leg.”
“Makes her seem more human,” said Jack.
“Anyway, his name is Len Leonard, and he’s asking for two hundred dollars. What do I do?”
“How’d you break up, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“I didn’t want to be a stripper my whole life, that’s all. I wanted to leave the theaters, and he didn’t; he didn’t know what else he could do. So one day I just packed my little suitcase and left.”
“And went on to fame and fortune,” Jack said with a smile.
Sally tossed back her Scotch. “I’ll tell ya what I never did. I never turned tricks. I had a lot of chances, from guys who offered a lot of money. Let some of your Hollywood queens make that statement.”
“You want me to take care of the problem for you?”
“By doing what?”
“By getting you a secret divorce. You send the two hundred to keep him quiet for a few weeks, and I’ll take care of the rest of it, if you want me to.”
She sighed. “I’d appreciate it, Jack.”
Four
ON A NOVEMBER EVENING JACK SAT DOWN IN WHAT HAD TO be the shabbiest theater he’d ever been in, a burlesque house in Toledo. The house was probably best characterized by the chicken-wire cage that enclosed the trio of musicians to protect them from whatever members of the audience might throw at them.
The performers were limp and devoid of talent. One of the strippers was a teenage girl who managed to look embarrassed. The others were women in their late twenties or their thirties, all long past being embarrassed by anything.
The top banana was a man of at least sixty who had left his dentures in the dressing room. His signature line, delivered with a smirk at the audience, was “Gotta eat!” His second banana was Len Leonard, who fed him his lines woodenly and waited for his responses, knowing the men who filled the seats in the front rows of the theater could not have cared less about what the two comics said.
The only comedy sketch that generated any reaction was the one done by Leonard and a woman Jack guessed was Marilyn, Leonard’s girlfriend who had performed with her leg in a cast. She played a female suspect being interrogated and searched by a detective played by Leonard.
“I understand you carry a forty-four,” Leonard said.
“No way! No way. Thirty-nine, maybe.”
“Thirty-nine?”
“Well, mebbe forty.”
“Show me.”
The woman pulled off her blouse and bared her breasts. “See? Thirty—”
“—two. Huh-uh. Where’s your big one?”
The woman did a bump and grind. “Where’s yours, baby?”
And so on.
The star of the show was a woman whose name Jack had heard before: a huge redhead with immense breasts. She stayed onstage longer than any of the other strippers. She had a better costume and showed a minor talent for dancing.
At intermission Leonard worked the crowd, trying to sell them boxes of candy for a dollar, making impossible claims. “A pound of this candy ordinarily sells for five or six dollars. Well, this box is not a pound, just enough good candy to eat and enjoy during the show. But this week, to introduce this special candy to Toledo, we have put a special gift in each box. In . . . two, three, four . . . boxes there is a Hamilton wristwatch! In others—”
The job was actually a little perilous. From time to time Leonard would yell breathlessly that one of the wristwatches had just gone. A shill would scream that he’d won a watch. By the time the lights went down for the second half of the show, a few drunks were ready to rush Leonard and demand their money back, having paid a dollar for three or four pieces of cheap taffy and realizing there were no watches or other gifts in the boxes. Leonard dashed backstage, and one or two menacing toughs kept the drunks at bay.
About midnight, Leonard and Marilyn sat down wearily in a booth in a bar next to the theater. They’d done three shows. He’d done three candy scams. They looked tired and depressed.
“Mr. Leonard?”
The man looked up at Jack. “My name is Jack Lear. I’m the president of Lear Communications. May I join you for a moment?”
Leonard pointed at a seat. He was an overweight man with oily hair slicked down against his head. He wore a shabby gray suit. Marilyn’s pupils were dilated. The needle tracks on her arms told the story.
“I have something for you, Mr. Leonard,” Jack said. He pulled out of his raincoat pocket and placed on the table a neat package wrapped in brown paper and tied with white string. “What’s in there is yours if you sign a paper I’m going to hand you.”
“What’s in there?” Leonard asked dully.
“One hundred one-hundred-dollar bills,” said Jack. “Ten thousand dollars.”
Leonard was not stupid. “From Flo,” he muttered.
“No. From me.”
“This paper I sign. Divorce?”
“That’s right.”
“Okay. I never asked her for anything like ten thousand.”
“I know. Just sign the paper. There are three copies. Sign three times.”
“Sure. Lend me your pen.”
Jack handed Leonard a Parker 51 fountain pen, and Leonard signed the documents without reading them. He pulled the package across the table toward him.
“Want to open it up and count it?” Jack asked.
Leonard shook his head. “You’re a gentleman, Mr. Lear—what I could never afford to be.”
Marilyn had stared dully throughout the conversation. Jack doubted she understood what had happened.
“One final thing, Mr. Leonard. Do you know the meaning of a major headache?”
Leonard nodded. “It’s what I get if Flo ever hears from me or about me again.”
Five
ON A SATURDAY MORNING SALLY ALLEN APPEARED IN A courtroom in a county in northern Alabama. Her head was covered by a scarf, and she wore dark sunglasses. A local lawyer stood up beside her.
In her papers Florence Stanwich Leonard swore she was a new resident of Alabama but intended to be a permanent resident. (She had been a resident for twelve hours, since she’d checked into a motel the evening before. She would remain a resident until almost noon, when she would drive out of the state forever.) Leonard’s sworn affidavit said he knew his wife was a bona fide resident of Alabama and that he consented to her obtaining a decree of divorce from him. The lawyer handed the papers to the judge, who signed the decree without reading it or any of the other papers in the file. The process took less than a whole minute and was one of fifty decrees entered in that court that morning.
TWENTY - FOUR
One
1951
ERICH LEAR PUT HIS STOGIE ASIDE IN THE ASHTRAY ON HIS desk. He lifted his glass and took a sip of gin. It was not his favorite drink, but it was what he had at the moment, and he didn’t want to interrupt this moment by sending out for anything else.
“Well?” the nude blond asked.
&
nbsp; Erich grinned. “Yeah. You’re everything anybody ever said you were. And more.”
The blond tossed her chin high and thrust her breasts forward. “I’m a first-class actress, Mr. Lear,” she said. “Hey! I’m playing a role right now. But I can play others. I’m not just—”
“A plaything.”
“No, I’m not. I can play around as well as any girl, but I have more to me than that. Help me get the right part. I can make you proud you know me. I really can.”
“I have a strong feeling you can at that,” said Erich.
“Hey, it’s not that I don’t have credits, you know. I got real good notices for Savage City.”
She was called Monica Dale, though her name was Phyllis Dugan or Phyllis Frederickson, depending on whom you asked. She had appeared briefly in one or two films, then got a lot of attention for her role as the kept girl in Savage City, and now was waiting around for another contract.
“What I’m not is a lady,” she said. She sat down in the chair opposite his, hooked her heels in the rungs of the chair, and spread her legs as wide as possible, displaying her shiny pink parts. “I’m willing to play the game.”
“I’ve actually heard you glory in the game.”
“Mr. Lear,” she said with a faintly mordant smile, “one of these days I’m going to be so big a star that I’ll never have to suck another cock.” She tipped her head. “Except yours.”
“Okay. Let’s see what you can do, kid.”
She knelt before his chair, unbuckled his belt and opened his pants, and pulled his underpants down so she could lift his penis and scrotum over the waistband. Then she set to work on him. She licked. She didn’t take him into her mouth yet; she just licked, stroking, then flicking, with her tongue.
Erich groaned.
Monica looked up and grinned.
“One hell of a girl,” he said. It was the famous line used about her in Savage City.
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