The Entertainer

by Margaret Talbot

  On these trips, Mary Talbot accompanied Lyle to the mineral hot springs for which Thermopolis was named, and showed him how to dip coins and spoons that tarnished instantly and came out black. When Lyle was a young teenager, she took him out to California two or three times to visit other far-flung relatives. Mary and her grandson were among the tourists to California who were becoming a stereotype, who’d head back to the cold Midwest with wilting poppies in their lapels and their suitcases stuffed with lemons and figs.

  • • •

  WHEN LYLE DELIVERED THE NEWSPAPER to hotel guests in Brainard, he’d often dawdle on the stairs, reading. Even to scan the headlines was to know that worse things than his grandmother’s whippings happened to children all the time right in his own little corner of Nebraska—and perhaps to resent those whippings less than another, less informed, less constitutionally hopeful boy, might have. Infectious diseases had not yet been subdued by vaccines and antibiotics, and children died of scarlet fever, typhoid, measles, tetanus, and minor wounds gone septic. Flash floods swept families from the gullies where they’d set up tents getting ready to homestead. Accidents were frequent and ghastly at a time when horses and buggies were now suddenly sharing the countryside with trains and motorized vehicles, when kerosene was the basic fuel lighting homes, and when the idea of systematically protecting workers from harm on the job was still decades away from becoming the norm. The newspapers described the accidents they reported on with a distinctive mixture of grisly detail and incuriosity about why such things might happen so often, or how they might be prevented from happening in the future. In February 1902, the Brainard paper reported on a young married woman who was badly burned when a kerosene lamp spilled its contents over her while she sat up late at night working at her sewing machine. “The lamp was sitting on the machine, when it tipped and broke. She ran to an outside door and threw herself down the stairs, a blazing mass. She screamed, ‘The baby is in there!’” The sleeping infant was rescued; the young woman died.

  Rural papers of the day often carried reports of suicides. There were immigrants and pioneers who, like Ántonia’s gentle, cultured, town-loving father in Willa Cather’s novel, must have realized they were fundamentally unsuited to a harsh, lonely life on the plains. There were farmers who couldn’t make a go of it and despaired; young wives who couldn’t face lives yoked to taciturn or cruel husbands; people who suffered from mental illnesses that would not have been diagnosed as such, let alone treated, and for whom the leaden gray of a prairie winter was one order of desolation too much.

  The word “incorrigible” comes up a lot to describe young people who were—what, exactly? Difficult in ways we would call difficult now—hyperactive, aggressive, prone to criminal behavior? Maybe, but it was also applied to boys who ran away from home, girls who slept with boys, adolescents of both sexes who bridled at the lives laid out for them: farmer, farm wife. Accounts of such behavior emphasized its paroxysmal suddenness, as though people were machines that could wind down or spin out of control without warning. In 1902, for instance, the Brainard paper reported that “Miss Katie Bluechel, a popular young woman of West Point, has become mentally unbalanced and was taken before the insanity commission for inspection. She was judged insane and taken to the hospital at Lincoln.” When newspaper accounts ventured theories for aberrant behavior, they kept them brief and telegraphic, and favored physical rather than emotional explanations, as the Brainard paper did in 1897, with an item about a seventeen-year-old Bohemian boy named Frank. He had been “overcome by heat while threshing, since which time he has been a raving maniac.”

  Contemporary newspapers did not seek to fill out a story of personal tragedy with psychological commentary from experts or interviews with friends. The horrible thing had happened; it was graphically described and it was over. In September 1904, when a Mrs. Cole committed suicide at her home, The Brainard Clipper ran the item under the blunt headline “Woman Blows Her Head Off,” and described what happened this way: “She loaded and cocked both barrels of a shotgun, put the muzzle under her chin, and discharged one barrel. It is thought she was deranged. The corpse was discovered lying on the kitchen floor by two little girls, who notified the men in the field. Mrs. Cole was the mother of a daughter, 3 years old, and of a baby, 2 months old.”

  • • •

  THE LOCAL NEBRASKA NEWSPAPERS GAVE an airing to the wider anxieties in turn-of-the-century America, too. Writers fretted about the surplus of unmarried men because of immigration, the rise in divorce rates, the threat of “race suicide” when white native-born Americans had fewer children, the sissification of modern boys and the neurasthenia of overeducated, underexercised modern men, and the fact that “women today had invaded at least 30 percent of the employments” and were busily exchanging “the birthright of womanhood, wifehood, and motherhood for the mess of pottage known as a business career.”

  But small-town newspapers like The Brainard Clipper could also excite wanderlust and a sense of adventure, especially for a boy like Lyle, who loved his little town all the more the farther he got away from it. The paper was always reprinting thrilling yarns of blackguards on the loose and rugged men in extremis (Jack London was a favorite author), intermixed with articles about the peculiar ways of foreigners. When Lyle was growing up, the Brainard paper ran long articles about the high life in Paris, the adventures of Captain Scott in Antarctica, the quest for El Dorado, and the lives of pearl divers in Japan. The new century carried a sense of possibility both reckless and exhilarating, and the Brainard paper reported breathlessly on bold inventions of the future—a spineless cactus, a car that would carry its own track to lay down where roads were impassable, a means of sending photographs by wireless. It noted, too, the “craze to do something new,” and cited “some of the latest and most extraordinary ways of performing strange feats,” including a couple who got married in a hot-air balloon.

  Closer to home, there were more realistic glimpses of the world to come. In 1902, Carrie Nation turned up in Beatrice, Nebraska, where she visited “three of the leading saloons of the city, under escort of Sheriff Washington,” the Clipper reported. At each of them, the six-foot-tall hatchet-wielding temperance crusader “informed the bartenders of their probable destination in the other world, and remarked that she had smashed finer places than these.” When even a small-town Nebraska paper could strike such a sarcastic note about Nation, who would have thought that in less than two decades her radical approach to the alcohol problem would be enshrined in the Constitution as the Eighteenth Amendment? In 1908, Brainard got its first automobile. It was owned by one Anton Sobota, who, the Clipper noted, “has not yet become experienced in its management, or else it is an unusually unruly machine, as it seems to prefer to run anywhere else rather than in the middle of the road, and on at least one occasion, it even attempted to climb a tree.” And in 1912, a gang of bank robbers shot its way out of the penitentiary in Lincoln during a late-winter blizzard. The convicts had to hijack a milk wagon driven by a young farm boy to get out of Lincoln. But, like the tommy gun–equipped gangsters who would dominate crime and its depiction in the 1920s and 1930s, they were “well-armed with modern weapons,” and ruthless enough to kill not only the warden and two guards but also the farmer who fed them breakfast.

  Sometimes, when Lyle brought the papers, one or two of the traveling men would invite him to stay awhile, and he’d sit on the floor, knees drawn up to his chest, and listen while they puffed on their cigars and read headlines aloud. They were a loud, teasing lot, big and bluff as circus bears in his grandmother’s doily-draped rooms. The traveling man, Henry James wrote in 1907, held “completely unchallenged possession” of dining cars and hotels with his “primal rawness of speech” and “air of commercial truculence.” For Arthur Miller, such men “lived like artists, like actors whose product is first of all themselves.”

  Lyle learned from them to show off a little, to put himself forward. He
wasn’t an athlete, not one of the many boys around Brainard who would play baseball from dawn till dusk, if they could. He wasn’t much of a student, either. But his memory for names and faces was impressive, and he could recite sentimental poetry by heart. At ten, he was also a flirt, with a keen longing to be admired—a playboy, one of his friends at the time would later call him. I think he must have had, even then, the makings of the man who would be my father—a man who was vain and even narcissistic, but who had the grace, as some vain people do, to use his self-regard for love’s sake; who could make you feel that his love for you was a more wonderful thing for the very reason that it came from such a handsome and charming man. At twelve, he wrote a letter to President Wilson, whose daughter Nellie had been married that year in a much-publicized ceremony at the White House and who had been preoccupied by the revolution in Mexico, where he had just sent troops for a brief skirmish. Lyle had evidently been told about both of these developments, but he couldn’t have been paying terribly close attention.

  “Dear Mr. President,” he wrote, first apologizing for not having come to his daughter’s wedding. He would have, only he had to stay in Brainard and watch the office while the hotel clerk “went to K.C. to have a time of his life.” (You can hear the young clerk crowing to Lyle, “Hey, little buddy, I’m going to have the time of my life in K.C.!”) “How are you getting along with those Mexicans down in Mexico,” Lyle inquired without benefit of punctuation. “If I was you I’d shoot the whole bunch. Appoint me Captain and I’ll do it for you.” There was a lot worth noticing about Lyle, Lyle strongly, if rather confusedly, felt.

  The Post Office was on fire down here in Brainard and if it wasn’t for me it would burn down the whole town I’ve got a little hatchet and I chopped one of your cherry trees down. I would tell you what Ma done to me then I guess you now I never told a lie so don’t you think I’ll be a president when I get big. Say do you need a messenger boy or a broom sweeper if you do I’ll take the job . . . Say do you smoke if you do I found a cigar and I’ll give it to you. My teacher’s name is Mabel Bentley. I married Emma Sypal yesterday. I caught some fish yesterday they were minoes. I’ll send you a few of them. You had better come to Brainard and stay for a vacation you wouldn’t want to go back to D.C. You would see such pretty girls. Your Friend, Lyel Talbot, Hotel Manager.

  In all this time, Lyle scarcely knew he had a father. He would have liked one, no doubt, and maybe thought someone along the lines of President Wilson could step into the job. His grandmother didn’t have much time for him. In addition to the responsibilities of running the hotel, she had charge not only of Lyle but also of two nieces, girls she had taken in after their mother, one of Mary’s much younger sisters, was killed in an automobile accident. Yet if Mary felt overwhelmed, that didn’t mean she wanted Lyle’s father around to help. She still blamed Ed for her daughter’s death, and found it easier to love Lyle if she thought of him as Florence’s alone, the product of some sort of virgin birth. It helped that with his blue eyes and strong profile he looked more like his mother than his father.

  Ed, however, had not relinquished the hope that he might have a relationship with the son he had known only as an infant, when he himself had been newly widowed and sunk in grief. He had stayed in Brainard, but when Mrs. Talbot saw him, she crossed the street to avoid him. Sometimes Ed would stand across from the hotel till Mrs. Talbot sent one of the hired girls over to chase him off or, worse, did so herself. In 1904, when Ed was twenty-four, and Florence had been dead two years, he remarried. Ed’s new, Danish-born wife, Anna Nielsen, was only nineteen, but she was already a gentle, forbearing woman who had a motherly way about her, though she was never to have children of her own. Ed and Anna were married in Grand Island, where her parents lived. The newlyweds hosted a dance and party at a hall in Brainard, inviting everyone in town, and hoping perhaps that the intransigent Mrs. Talbot would come and bring Lyle. She did not. Lyle was fifteen when he finally persuaded his grandmother to tell him who and where his father was, and to let him meet Ed. “She wouldn’t let me, as a child, see my father—of course I didn’t know what she was doing,” Lyle told an interviewer in 1989. “It was when we moved to Omaha and my dad was living there that I actually knew I had a father I could see and talk with.” Maybe she was worn down with trying to keep Ed at bay, or maybe she thought that Lyle, at fifteen, had a right, finally, to know his father.

  Lyle, at age eleven.

  Ed and Lyle’s reunion was an affectionate one from the start. Ed was not one to hold grudges, and neither he nor his teenage son was the sort of ruminative, introspective type who might have dwelt darkly on the time he had lost. Anna, Ed’s new wife, did everything she could to promote their relationship. Still, it might not have been the success it turned out to be if it hadn’t been for the unlikely bond these two men from rural Nebraska shared: an itch to entertain, a jones for the spotlight.

  Chapter 2

  THE HYPNOTIST’S BOY

  On the grassy midway of a carnival in Valentine, Nebraska, Lyle leaned against the Kewpie doll stand. He was nervous and couldn’t quite get the stance right. He had dressed carefully for his first day on the job at the Walter Savidge Amusement Co.—a straw boater, a wide tie with bold circus stripes, a crisp white shirt—and he thought he looked pretty good. But what was he supposed to be doing, exactly? It was noon, and the day was hot; the air gave off a scorched, dusty smell. Families filed by—mothers who looked like his grandmother, tired and dignified in their ankle-length best dresses; fathers intently surveying the sideshow signs (“Baby May, America’s Fat Girl,” “Man-ho, Man-Ape Alive”); crying kids already sticky with lemonade and taffy; pretty teenage girls with cloche hats and bare arms tinged pink. The girls looked at him curiously but not unkindly. He was seventeen, lean and handsome, even if he seemed somewhat at a loss. He cleared his throat. “Kewpie dolls,” he tried experimentally, barely audible. Then louder: “Win your girl a Kewpie doll!” Kewpies were new and wildly popular. They had been designed by a beautiful artist named Rose O’Neill, who was known as the “Queen of Bohemian Society,” and who became so wealthy from the marketing of the little dolls that she could afford to maintain both a handsome brownstone on New York’s Washington Square and a villa on the island of Capri. Valentine, Nebraska, was a long way from either Washington Square or Capri, and Lyle had never heard of the beautiful Rose O’Neill, but he did think the Kewpies were cute, with their saucer eyes and naked tummies like mounds of marzipan, and he knew girls liked them, so after a while, the shouting got kind of fun. Especially when the girls loitered and laughed encouragingly. “They’re flirts, these Kewpies,” Lyle called out. “You can’t resist ’em!”

  By early afternoon, though he was sweating under the brim of his hat and could hear his voice going hoarse, he had found himself as a barker. It was okay; he could do this. But the truth was that Lyle would have done anything to work at the carnival—swept up stale popcorn and filthy sawdust, brought Baby May all her meals, hammered tent stakes into hard-baked soil. This was where he wanted to be—the world where dressing to look sharp counted as work, where it took no deep thinking to figure out how to make people happy. A couple of years earlier, his grandmother and he had moved to Omaha, where she had gone to work for the two Princeton men who loved her simple, starchy cooking. Lyle and his grandmother each had a room on the first floor of a rambling frame house, and the bachelors each had a room upstairs, with matching black-and-orange pennants hanging in both rooms. Mary Talbot had enrolled Lyle at the Omaha High School of Commerce, which offered classes like stenography, telegraphy, and salesmanship, along with the standard academic subjects.

  At some level the instruction must have taken hold, because all his life my father had admirable penmanship, a fondness for stationery, and excellent record-keeping habits. While he was on the road with a play, as he often was for months at a time when I was a little girl, there were two places I went to feel nearer to him, two places
that seemed especially redolent of him. One was the closet where he stored his shoes, each with its own polished wooden shoe form, and his pipes, wrapped in their own soft swatches of fabric. The other was the desk in my parents’ bedroom, one of those French provincial replicas made of shiny mahogany, where the accoutrements included a blotter, a chunky glass pen stand, and a filigreed letter opener that I admired greatly and was occasionally permitted to use. He was the sort of person who used a label maker to fix names and dates to mementos and owned personalized bookplates (his were adorned with the masks of comedy and tragedy). And he kept elaborate scrapbooks, with the names of every town he ever played in, along with clippings, reviews, studio publicity stills, and snapshots of him and his friends, from the time he was seventeen and working for the Walter Savidge Amusement Co. to his last TV appearances when he was in his eighties. Some of that self-chronicling impulse stemmed from the fact that he was an actor, and in his own understated midwestern way, kind of thrilled with himself, and some of it stemmed from the fact that he loved print and paper. He was a haunter of L.A.’s outdoor newsstands, a subscriber to every new, hot-sounding magazine of the moment, from Life and Look in the 1930s to Tina Brown’s revived Vanity Fair of the 1980s, a collector of cartoons, a clipper of coupons, an assiduous worker of crossword puzzles. He was the parent who took me to buy my school supplies every year at the Sav-On drugstore, and I’m not sure which of us enjoyed that errand more.