The Godfather returns

by Mark Winegardner

  “Got that right.” Phil put out his cigarette. “We thought you were driving down here after your midnight show. There’s a room at the Ambassador Hotel we paid for and you never checked into.”

  The cop took off his helmet. “You’re Johnny Fontane,” he said, “aren’t you?”

  Without breaking stride, Johnny turned, flashed a million-dollar grin, made his fingers into six-shooters, winked, and fired off a few imaginary shots.

  Phil, on his way to talk to the cop, stopped, sighed, and ran his fingers through his hair.

  “The wife and I loved your last picture,” the cop said.

  It had been a Western, a real piece of shit. As if anyone would believe a guy like him on a horse, saving decent folk from desperados. Johnny gave the cop the autograph he wanted, right on the back of his ticket pad.

  “Making records again, huh?” the cop asked.

  “Trying to,” Johnny said.

  “My wife always used to love your records.”

  That’s why none of the record companies in New York would give him a contract-no singer who’d ever been more popular with women than men (said some pezzonovante at Worldwide Artists) had ever managed to change that. But what Johnny hated even more was the past tense: not loves but used to love. Movies were fine, though even now, with his own production company and an Academy Award (currently swaddled in his daughter’s toy crib at his ex’s house), the people who ran things out here still made him feel like some dumb Guinea who’d crashed the party. The long waits on the set bored him silly, and he’d had about enough of smart-asses calling him One-Take Johnny. From here on, if he could get the right part, swell, but he was moving on. It just wasn’t where his heart was. He wasn’t really an actor, not really a hoofer, not really a teenster idol or even a crooner. He was Johnny Fontane, saloon singer-a good one and, if he gave it his all, which this contract with National gave him the chance to do, maybe one of the best who’d ever lived. Maybe the best. Why not? It’s hell when the person you know you are isn’t the person people see when they look at you. Not that he was going to say anything. You don’t say anything bad to or about anyone who’s been loyal to you. “What’s your wife’s name?” Johnny asked.

  “Irene.”

  “You and Irene ever get over to Vegas?”

  The cop shook his head. “We’ve talked about it.”

  “You got to see it to believe it. Look, I’m at the Castle in the Sand all month. Classy joint. You want to come, I’ll get you in.”

  The cop thanked him.

  “Fucking guy,” he said to Phil in the elevator up to the studio. “Bet he pulls over all your talent, eh? Bet he’s got an autograph collection that’d fill a garage.”

  “You’re a cynical man, Mr. Fontane.”

  “Loosen up, Philly, you’re too serious.” Though Johnny caught sight of his own mug in the shiny steel walls of the elevator, and he looked nothing if not serious. He took off his hat, ran his fingers through his hair, and replaced it. “Everything all set?”

  “For over an hour now,” Phil said. “There’s just one thing. Hear me out, okay?”

  Johnny poker-faced him and said nothing, but he’d listen. It was Phil Ornstein who-after every other major label had passed-had given Johnny a seven-year contract (for lousy dough, but so what? dough wasn’t an issue). It was Phil Ornstein who had insisted that Johnny Fontane’s voice was back and that his public image as a boozing, brawling thug was both unwarranted and would only enhance sales.

  “I know you wanted Eddie Neils for musical director, and if that’s what you really want, fine, we’ll try it.”

  Johnny hit the stop button on the elevator. Eddie Neils had arranged and recorded Johnny the last time he’d had any hits. Johnny went to his house and wouldn’t leave until the old man gave him an audition right in his marble-floored hallway, among statues of eagles and naked people, and, when Johnny overcame the shitty acoustics and sounded like a little bit of something, Eddie had finally agreed to work with him again.

  “You’re telling me Eddie’s not here?”

  “That’s what I’m telling you,” Phil said, tapping his gut. “Bleeding ulcer. Had to go to the hospital last night. He’ll be fine. But-”

  “He’s not here.”

  “He’s not. Right. Here’s the thing, though. He was never our choice for you anyhow.”

  That Phil was classy enough to say for you instead of for your comeback wasn’t lost on Johnny. “You always wanted the other guy,” Johnny said. “The kid. Trombone man.”

  “Yes. Cy Milner. He’s not a kid. He’s forty, forty-five years old. We took the liberty of hiring him to write a couple new charts.”

  Milner had been a ’bone man with Les Halley, but after Johnny had left the band. They’d never met. “Since when? Since yesterday?”

  “Since yesterday. He works fast. He’s a legend for the fast-working.”

  The kid’s a legend, and I’m One-Take Johnny. “What about the charts Eddie already did?”

  “We can use those, too. Either way.”

  Phil ran his hands through the hair he mostly didn’t have. He was the sort of man who unconsciously took on other people’s mannerisms.

  “What do you think I am, difficult?” Johnny yanked the stop button. “C’mon, Philly. I’m a pro. We’ll give old Cy a whirl, try some things, see if we can kick up a little magic, eh?”

  “Thank you, Johnny.”

  “I always liked a Jew with manners.”

  “Fuck you, Johnny.”

  “And guts.”

  Johnny got off the elevator and strode down the hall toward 1A, the only studio big enough for the string setup he wanted. He burst through the doors and made a beeline to the gray-blond man across the room. He had on a British tweed suit and horn-rimmed glasses, one lens so thick it made the eye look funny. Broad-shouldered, like someone who’d played football, not what you expected from a man with a baton. He looked like a kindly headmaster from some movie. Johnny and Cy Milner made each other’s acquaintance with the bare minimum exchange of words. Johnny jerked a thumb toward the microphone, and Milner nodded.

  Milner mumbled directions to his engineer and then took the podium. The musicians reached for their instruments. Milner took off his coat, raised his brawny arms, and flicked his baton. Johnny was in front of the mike and ready to go.

  “C’mon, gents,” he said. But that was all he said.

  Johnny hit the song hard from the first note, and the orchestra-Eddie Neils’s people every one-surged lushly behind him. It was like old times. He felt himself riding over the top of the song. He could still do this. Just like riding a bicycle.

  When they finished, the people in the booth clapped soundlessly.

  Milner sat down at a stool. Johnny asked him what he thought. Milner said he was thinking. Johnny asked if he thought they should do it again. Milner said nothing. He just stood and raised his arms. They did it again. Milner sat back down and started making notes.

  “What are you doing?”

  Milner shook his head but said nothing else. Johnny looked at Phil, who got the message and brought them all into the booth together.

  “We’re getting rid of two thirds of the orchestra,” Milner said.

  Not “we should” or “maybe we should”; just the flat statement. Johnny snapped. This was exactly the kind of orchestra he’d used on his biggest hits, exactly the sound people yearned for.

  Milner stood his ground, expressionless, absorbing Johnny’s tirade.

  Finally Milner handed Phil a slip of paper. On it was the list of people to take off the clock and send home. Phil arched an eyebrow, then pointed at himself. Milner said he didn’t care who did it.

  “Hell,” Johnny said. “Do what you need to do.” He sat down heavily on a leather chair.

  Milner was the one who sent the men packing. Johnny sat and looked over the list of songs he’d chosen, compared the charts Neils had done and the ones Milner had done. Milner’s were written fast, dotted with slop
pily filled notes. There was nothing like the old days about this.

  Moments later, Johnny was back behind the microphone, staring down at the sheet music on the stand in front of him. Milner’s this time. An old Cole Porter number that he’d recorded once before, way back when. He wanted to both kill this Milner and hug him. He’d love to prove the man wrong. He prayed that the man was right.

  People who’d seen Johnny Fontane in clubs, or even those who’d seen him record ten years ago, wouldn’t have recognized the coiled, brooding man now breathing evenly behind the microphone. The remaining musicians took their places. The engineer wanted a mike check. Just as they were getting ready, some kid came in and asked where he should put Mr. Fontane’s tea. Johnny pointed but did not talk, rocked slowly in place but did not otherwise move, kept his eyes fixed on the music but did not really look at it. This all took only a few moments, but to Johnny it felt like hours and also like no time at all. He closed his eyes. The last time he’d sung this song, his voice had been as clear as rainwater and, as far as he was concerned, about as interesting.

  Johnny was hardly aware of the song starting. His breath control was so built up from all that time in the pool, he was barely aware he was singing. The arrangement was everywhere and nowhere, kicking in when he wanted it, staying out of his way without needing to learn how. One verse in, and all Johnny was aware of was that bum in the song, trying to use pretty words and jokes to convince himself he could survive without the woman who’d left him. By the time Johnny hit the first chorus, he was that bum. He wasn’t singing to the other people who might be hearing him, in the studio, on the radio, in the privacy of their living room with a bottle of whiskey emptying out far faster than it should. He was singing to and for himself, telling truths so private they could burn holes through stone. There was nothing that anyone who really heard the music could do except look upon all the pretty words and false fronts lost love inspired, upon all the blame lavished on everyone who did the right thing and left you, and despair.

  The song finished.

  Milner lowered the baton and looked to the engineer, who nodded. The people in the studio-even the diminished band-burst into applause. Milner headed toward the booth.

  Johnny stood back from the microphone. He looked around at the smiling faces of all these yes-men. Milner returned from the booth and started repositioning microphones. He said nothing. You’d swear the guy was Sicilian, for how little he said, and how much.

  “No,” Johnny said. “Thank you all very much, but no. You fellas were great, but I can do better. Let’s give it a shot, okay?”

  Milner repositioned another mike.

  “That eighth bar, Cy,” Johnny said. “Can you do that up like Puccini?”

  Milner fished a wrinkled piece of paper from his shirt pocket, a dry- cleaning receipt it looked like, and sat down at the piano bench, noodled around a bit, scribbled a few notes, gave a few brief directions to various men in the band.

  Johnny wouldn’t be working with Eddie Neils anytime soon.

  He’d been somewhere, gone somewhere, singing that song, and he could go there again, he was absolutely sure of it, and go deeper, and then do it a dozen more times. He could fill a whole long-playing record with songs that took people out of their lives, and deeper into them, and-it came to him, in a flash-sequence the songs the way Les Halley did back when Johnny was his singer, only all together on a record, so that everything plays off of everything else, in a way and to an extent that nobody, not even the best jazz cats, had ever quite done before.

  Phil Ornstein kept congratulating everyone. Philly wasn’t going to be happy to have them spend the whole session on just this one song, but too bad. Johnny Fontane would defy you to show him a record shop where people walked in asking about the new releases from National Records. It was the songs they wanted. It was the singers.

  Milner climbed to the podium. His glasses made it look like his regular eye was on the orchestra and his huge eye was on Johnny. Johnny looked down, and again they began.

  Eight bars in, Puccini’s ghost somehow cracked the song open even farther, and Johnny filled his lungs with air and swam right in.

  Michael and Kay spent the first hour of the flight in relative silence. Once Kay marveled about the startling beauty of the desert, comparing it to the work of abstract painters Michael knew he should know. He pretended to, and she talked about art for a while, and he sat there wondering why, about something so trivial, he hadn’t just been honest.

  Michael asked about the move. Kay considered telling him about the day last week when the Clemenzas had shown up at his parents’ old house, which they’d already bought, and found Carmela Corleone standing at the window of her late husband’s office, a room she’d hardly set foot in over the years. She was drunk and mumbling prayers in Latin. This is my home, she’d announced. I’m not moving to no desert. He’d hear about that soon enough. Who was she kidding? He must already know. “It’s going fine,” Kay said. “Connie’s been a big help.”

  Even that neutral comment was loaded. Michael didn’t react to the mention of his sister, but he knew Connie still blamed him for the death of her husband, Carlo, even though an assistant D.A. he knew from Guadalcanal had charged a Barzini button man with the murder.

  “Strange,” Kay said after another long silence. “Flying over the desert in a seaplane.”

  In every direction, desolate, unpopulated sand and scrub stretched to the horizon. Eventually shapes that turned out to be mountains emerged from the haze to the north.

  “How are the kids getting along?” Michael finally asked.

  “You saw them this morning,” Kay said. Mary, who was two, had cried and chanted, “Daddy, Daddy,” as they’d left. Anthony, who this time next year would start kindergarten, was sitting under a box on the floor, watching television through a hole. It was a program in which clay figures confront life’s problems: the temptation not to share one’s red wagon or the virtues of admitting one’s role in the shattering of Mom’s sewing lamp. Safe to say the little clay boy would never have to contend with two of his uncles being murdered. His cardigan-sweatered clay daddy would never be called an “alleged underworld figure” in The New York Times. His svelte clay grandfather was unlikely to drop dead at his feet. “How did you think they were?”

  “They seemed to be making out fine. Do they have friends yet? In the neighborhood?”

  “I’m still unpacking, Michael. I haven’t had time-”

  “Right,” he said. “I’m not being critical.”

  He was close enough to Reno airspace to check in.

  “Your parents had a nice trip?” he said.

  “They did.” Her father had taught theology at Dartmouth long enough to have a small pension from that, too, augmenting the one he’d been drawing since he’d retired as a pastor five years before. He and Kay’s mother had bought a travel trailer and planned to see America. They’d arrived yesterday, to help Kay get the house together and see their grandkids. “They said the trailer park was so nice they might never leave.” The Castle in the Sand had its own trailer park.

  “They’re welcome to stay there as long as they like.”

  “That was a joke,” she said. “So what do you have planned? What’s to do in Tahoe?”

  “What would you say to dinner and a movie?”

  “It’s not even eleven o’clock.”

  “Lunch and a movie. A matinee. There’s got to be a matinee we can catch.”

  “Okay. Oh, God, Michael, look! It’s beautiful!”

  The lake, much bigger than Kay had imagined, was dotted with fishing boats and ringed by mountains. Around most of it, thick dark pine forest extended to the banks. The surface of the water looked as smooth as a lacquered table.

  “It is,” he said. “I’ve never seen a more beautiful place.”

  He glanced at her. She was swiveling around in her seat, craning her neck to see the splendor into which they were descending. She seemed happy.

 
Michael came in low, near the shore, and landed the plane not far from a dock and boathouse. There seemed to be nothing else around but woods and a clearing nearby, where a point of land jutted into the lake.

  “This is pretty far from the town part,” Kay said.

  “I know a great place for lunch,” he said, “right near here.”

  As the plane approached the dock, three men in dark suits emerged from the woods.

  Kay drew in a breath and pulled back in her seat. The men came out on the dock, and she called her husband’s name.

  Michael shook his head. The implication was clear: Don’t worry. They work for me.

  The men climbed out onto the floats and tethered the plane to the dock. The one in charge was Tommy Neri, Al’s nephew. Al-who, in his old NYPD uniform, had emptied a service revolver into Don Emilio Barzini’s chest, and who, with a steak knife taken right from the man’s kitchen, had disemboweled Phillip Tattaglia’s top button man and urinated into the man’s steaming body cavity-was in charge of security for all of the Family-controlled hotels. Like Al, Tommy had been a New York cop. All three looked to be barely out of high school. They said almost nothing and headed back into the woods.

  As they did, Kay faced Michael at the foot of the dock. There was both a world of things to say about that and nothing whatsoever.

  “Wait right here,” Michael said. He touched the side of his face where it had once been crushed, which he did, probably unconsciously, when he was nervous. For years after that cop had punched him, he’d done nothing, blowing his nose constantly and talking about his ruined looks until finally, for Kay’s sake, he’d had it fixed, after which he’d looked better, but not exactly like before, never again exactly like himself. She had never once told him this.

  He walked to the door of the boathouse, reached up onto a ledge, found a key, and went in.

  Kay both did and didn’t want to ask whose boathouse this was. What stopped her wasn’t fear of the answer. It was fear of Michael not wanting to be asked.