by John Dunning
“Maybe Harford’s trying to take those first steps,” Becky said. “It’s pretty clear something’s going on.”
“We shall see.”
“Come on, you old bastard,” Stoner said. “You know way more than you’re telling.”
Maitland remained deadpan. “Let’s just say I know enough to bring me here, at a time in my life when I’m getting damned selective. I could’ve had a job at CBS in New York but I’m here instead. That should tell you something, if you put any stock in what I do. There’s not a network job anywhere that could pull me away from here, and that’s all I’m going to say about it. If you want to know more, ask Jethro.”
“Oh yeah, I can see us doing that,” Becky said. “Most of us are afraid to ask him the time of day.”
“Oh, come now, Kidd isn’t that fierce.”
“He does seem interested in us, I’ll give him that. About a week after I got here he called me in for an interview. I was sure I was going to be fired but we just sat and talked. He wanted to know what I think, what I want to do, how I’d define an exciting half hour.”
“Good for Jethro. What did you tell him?”
“Told him what I think. A great half hour is a piece of shining truth, told in the most powerful way possible.”
“That’s a perfect answer! You couldn’t have said it better if you’d taken two weeks to think it over. I’ll bet that was the highlight of his day.”
She blushed under his praise but her eyes were wary. “How can you tell? Who knows what he thinks?”
“That’s why he’s such a good manager, his expression never changes. But you can tell you’ve pleased him by what he does later. What did you tell him you wanted to do?”
“Said I’d like to produce.” She blushed again.
“And what beyond that?”
“I don’t know. There’s no way a girl could ever direct.”
“Why not? . . . just because it’s never been done?”
“The guys won’t take direction from a girl.”
“Then you get some guys who will.”
A long tremor went through her. “God, I couldn’t tell him that!”
“Actually you could. Maybe you’ll realize that, and sooner than you’d believe. Don’t be surprised if he starts letting you try your wings.”
“Maybe he already has. He’s got me reading scripts now. We still get things from freelancers, and he’s got me doing follow-ups on old scripts in the files that were never produced for one reason or another. You wouldn’t believe what’s in there—stuff from six and seven years ago, and some of it’s very good. Kidd says he wants me to separate the wheat from the chaff.”
“Then take him at his word.”
“Mmm-hmm. But I don’t want to send him something that can’t be done.”
“Why couldn’t it be, if it’s good enough?”
“I’m thinking of a particular piece. It’s been there since nineteen thirty-six. I can’t imagine why they didn’t do it then. It’s just . . . devastating . . . I can’t get it out of my mind. Like it sets up a ringing in your brain and you think about it all the time.”
“Then why do I sense a ‘however’ coming?”
“Yeah, there’s a problem. A big one.” She sighed. “It was probably doable in nineteen thirty-six. Today it’s political dynamite. It scares me to think about it.”
“What’s it about?”
“It’s a war story. A lot of it is set in a prison camp.”
Jordan stirred. “I think he already knows about that play.”
“How could he? He just got here and those files haven’t been disturbed in years.”
“All I can tell you is, that’s one of the first questions he asked me— how would I get a prison camp story on the air?”
Maitland smiled. “You see, Rebecca? He’s waiting for you to discover it. Show him how smart you are.”
“I don’t know. I’d like to find the author first so I can give it to Kidd as a whole package. Apparently the writer was a visitor from overseas somewhere. Have any of you ever heard of a writer named Paul Kruger?”
“There was a statesman named Paul Kruger,” Maitland said. “A famous man, oh, forty years ago.”
“No, this was a writer. I just thought maybe he had come to something, his play is so good.”
“Did he accept Harford’s check?”
“Oh yeah, apparently it was cashed.”
“Then what are you worried about? For the purpose of onetime radio adaptation, we own the script.”
She took a deep breath. “All right, I’ll confide in you guys, but on your word of honor nothing gets said till I decide what I want to do. I’d like to find this guy, see what he’s been doing all these years, mainly to see if he’s got any more where that came from, like maybe he’s sitting on a hundred of these things and I’m on the verge of a major discovery. Does that sound silly?”
“Not at all,” Maitland said. “It sounds exciting.”
“And it may be just a matter of going up to New York and knocking on a door. I’ve got a street address but it’s six years old, and getting away has been damn near impossible. And if that’s not enough, I think Paul Kruger may have been a—what do they call it?—a nom de plume? The check was signed over to a third party. Someone named Riordan.”
Jordan felt shaken. At once it occurred to him that Kruger sounded German and Riordan was definitely Irish.
“Maybe I can help,” he said.
“Yeah, like you’ve got so much time on your hands, what with Barnet on your back twelve hours a day.”
“I’d like to read it, though. When you’re ready.”
“Okay, I’ll make you a deal. You read my script, I get to read your book.”
Stoner said, “Sounds like she’s got you there, champ.”
“Meanwhile,” Maitland said, “how would you like to help produce something for me?”
Becky touched her heart. “You’re kidding.”
“Do I look like I’m kidding? Now, I’ll tell you a secret. We’re going to do a big war bond show a week from Saturday. Kidd wants to see if a little station like this can sell bonds. An hour of music and prose, lush inspirational stuff. He’s going to bring in an orchestra and chorus—really pulling out all the stops. We’ll have to use both studios, so we’ll need two directors. Barnet and I have both been assigned to it.”
“Barnet won’t be happy unless he’s running it.”
Maitland smiled, the soul of patience. “We’ll survive each other. He’s got his ideas and I’ve got mine. I know he wants an opera singer for the national anthem, but I’d like a voice closer to common people. I like that girl who sings for us on Saturday nights, that incredible girl with the big voice. I talked to her yesterday but she turned me down. She says she’s just a band singer. Thinks this is beyond her.”
“She’s crazy. She can sing anything.”
“That’s what I told her. I want her to sing other songs as well, stuff from the heartland. She could really carry this show, Rebecca, so there’s your first job as producer. Produce Holly O’Hara and get her to sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ on my show two weeks from tonight.”
“I’ll get her.” She was visibly thrilled. “By God, that’s a promise.”
( ( ( 10 ) ))
THAT night he stood in the back row and watched the band show, and in the crushing void of her departure he made a decision. He had hung back long enough; he would find a way to approach her. Now he faced another endless night, full of evil spirits, and he drifted upstairs to the bullpen. Perhaps he could write something, and in work find the release to go home for a few hours’ sleep.
He began with raw notes, and soon he had a beachfront town with glitter and noise, the crush of crowds and the frantic pace of wartime, a lonely sailor on his last weekend home, and of course, the enigmatic woman. Soon a kind of white heat arose in his chest, and in a while the keys on the old Royal outran three teletypes in the room across the hall.
It was th
e age-old story of animal magnetism. The sailor, brash and full of immature posturing, turns out to be the frightened virgin; the girl, on the face of it elusive and shy, is a woman of the world. Shyness is just one of the masks she wears, and at the end her character remains dark and full of mystery. The sailor is forever touched: he loses the girl, she disappears into a ladies’ room on the pier and never returns, and the boy squanders his leave searching faces on the boardwalk.
Who are these people? The girl leaves few clues and we never hear her voice again. The boy reminds me of myself, Jordan thought: me at eighteen with Tom’s bravado. In the rewrite I will make him part of my racetracker clan, complete as he stands but part of a larger story for anyone who has heard the others. It has nothing to do with horses: only that the kid has come from the horseman’s world and that’s his back story. He’s the horse trainer’s son caught up in the war. This war and that girl might happen to anyone his age. That’s what I want the listener to know.
He sat quiet, his fingers momentarily stilled. But as soon as he quit working his own loneliness invaded the cubicle and attacked his momentum. Suddenly his story was in grave danger. The spirit of the girl had occupied his workplace, and she was no longer fiction but someone he knew only too well. He held his pages over the wastebasket, poised to tear: a telling moment, perhaps the watershed of his writing life. But the change that had begun against his will had finally come true. His concept of the reader had been fading and had finally vanished.
He was writing for the listener.
Now he saw that what he had was the rough draft of a half-hour radio play. He felt a surge of inexplicable excitement as he took the next logical step, prose into script in the middle of a page, and again his fingers were flying and all his new awareness was there in his words. He understood demands and restrictions that had never given him a conscious thought, and he saw the story anew. The opening could not linger. Leisure was fine for depth in prose but a story for the ear must begin with the first spoken word of the encounter that will drive it.
He was not so much writing his play now as hearing it. The characters floated above his head and directed his fingers, and all he had to do was follow them along the boardwalk and tell what they did by what they said.
He knew it was too carnal for radio. He actually laughed when his characters closed the door in the shabby seaside hotel and the girl tugged hotly at the young man’s bell-bottoms. He’d never get that on anybody’s air. But he went on gamely to the end and finished sometime before two.
It felt good, a solid little lightning strike, done in a sitting. The impossibility of the subject matter meant nothing compared with what doing it had taught him, and a flood of new ideas came swirling through the enclosure. Every image was pure radio, each a compact slash of life that could be done nowhere better than on the air. For twenty minutes he took rough notes, as fast as he could type. The walls disappeared and he was ready to start again, take up a new idea and work it through the night. But the writer in him said it was time to stop, to leave something in the tank for the next sitting. He had a show to do tomorrow, a new cast to meet, but now as he gathered his pages and put them in a file folder, the act of quitting brought down his defenses and the ghosts of the night invaded his cell.
He tucked his folder under his arm and turned off the lamp, went down the fire stairs and over the dunes toward the glow in the south.
Slowly as he walked his faith returned.
He didn’t know why. Something about the healing virtues of work was the likeliest answer.
Or maybe this: nothing could turn away the fact that she had seen him. Their eyes had met, she had been unable to look beyond him, and never again could she go back and hide alone in the shadows.
The dismal day was charged with new hope. He reached the road, bright under the moon. The ghosts had vanished, leaving him with one of life’s smallest truths. Sometimes you’ve got to hurt before you can heal. That’s why the trainer puts the hot iron to his colt’s sore ankles. If you fire the horse, nature sends its healing properties rushing to the spot, to make him well again.
( ( ( 11 ) ) )
SUNDAY morning. Eli met him at the door but there was a difference to the day and both could feel it. “Coffee’s ready,” Eli said, but this morning Jordan drank his coffee alone.
A few minutes later he backtracked up the hall to Studio B and stood watching them through the glass. There were five of them on the soundstage. The old man with the gray hair would be the uncle; the others, including Eli, were all in their twenties. He opened the door and slipped quietly into the studio, and their concentration remained unbroken; they had not seen him come in, and he had a few moments to watch them when they didn’t know they were being watched.
A young woman stood at the center-stage mike reading something. Then he saw that she had no pages, she was not reading at all but was acting out a piece she had committed to memory. The words struck his ear with an eloquent, easy familiarity, and then he had it—one of Richard Wright’s stories from Uncle Tom’s Children. But what really struck him was her style. She had a natural way about her that touched him across barriers of race and sex.
She saw him suddenly and broke off her monologue. The others followed her distraction, and the gray-haired man came out to meet him.
“You would be Mista Jordan.”
“Just Jordan’s fine. And you’re Waldo.”
“Waldo Brown. You know Eli. That child over there is his sister Emily. The fella behind her is Rudo Ohlson. And this is Ali Marek.”
He shook hands all around and looked into the very dark face of Ali Marek. “I hated to bust up your soliloquy like that. Is that what you’re doing this morning?”
“Oh God no,” she said.
“That’s way too strong for this show,” Waldo said.
“We just messin’ around,” Eli said. “Doing play radio like it’s real.”
“I thought it was great,” Jordan said. “Any of those Richard Wright stories would make good radio.”
They seemed surprised that he knew the material and considered it suitable and even possible for the air. For his part, Waldo was relaxed and easy. “So, what’s up?” he said. “What’s goin’ on?”
“They still haven’t told you yet?”
“Nobody’s told me a thing, except what I got from you, through Eli.”
“That’s all I know too.”
“Eli said you’re gonna do what? . . . write it?”
Jordan thought he had to watch what he said; he couldn’t come in here like a boss man taking them over. But the news was good, at least he could tell them that.
“I think they’re expanding it. They sent me over to see if you need a writer.”
There was now a moment of such deep silence that he felt the need to put his thoughts into words. “Nobody intends to take you over.”
“No, no . . . I never thought that. It’s just been a long time coming.” Waldo smiled warily. “Six years ago they were talking about expanding it. Putting in music and writing and sound.”
“Do you know why that never happened?”
Waldo shrugged. “Miz Harford died. She’s the one wanted to do it, but after she died this place went into . . . what do they call it in Buck Rogers? . . . suspended animation.”
“Did you know Harford?”
“Sure. He’s the one that put me on the air to start with.”
“Tell me about it. If you don’t mind.”
“I wanted to do a radio program about the struggles of the Negro. I tried getting it on in New York but nothing ever came of it. One of the fellas I met made a call, and Mr. Harford invited me to come down.”
“When was that?”
“Long time ago. Summer of nineteen thirty-four.”
“I’m sorry I’m so ignorant. I’ve never heard it.”
“We keep it real simple. We just tell stories, stuff I dig up.”
“True stories, you mean.”
“As true as I can make ’
em. Some of it’s . . . you know . . . folklore. But I try to stick with the truth as I know it.”
Jordan looked at the cast, none of them old enough to have been here in 1934. Waldo caught his drift. “I’ve gone through twenty or thirty people over the years. It’s a lot to ask ’em to drive down here from Harlem just for a fifteen-minute show, to speak a few lines. So they don’t stick. Heck, I don’t blame ’em, but I still think the show’s important. Maybe I’m kidding myself, but I don’t think you’ll find anything like what we do at any other radio station in the country. Even if we are stuck away on Sunday morning.”
“Well, then,” Jordan said. “I’ll just watch, if it’s okay with you.”
Today they were telling the story of Mary Ann Shadd, the Negro abolitionist who moved to Canada in the 1850s, established a newspaper there, and pushed for the rights of fugitive slaves. At quarter to eight Waldo gave a few last-minute suggestions. The cast made notes and that was their script. In the booth Waldo lowered a microphone. He does everything, Jordan thought: runs his own board, gives what direction he gives, and speaks his own lines from there. At thirty seconds Waldo fitted a pair of worn earphones over his head.
Upstairs in the second-floor studio, Eastman would be finishing an hour of gospel records. Waldo waited with his finger up, listening for the station break. Then he gave the simple announcement: “You are listening to Freedom Road, the oral history of the Negro people.” Eli sang “The Freedom Song” and the story began.
There wasn’t time for much, only the highlights of that long-dead woman’s life. It was simple and crude, without music or sound, like watching a stage play without costumes or scenery. But it had warmth and a certain appeal, the five of them creating variety in shades of voice. Now they’d have to be more structured. Now they’d have to learn to read a script and follow real direction.
