by John Dunning
He had had enough. He came across the soundstage and got up close to the glass. “I’d like a word with you, please.”
“Oh, by all means, you can see we’ve got nothing but time. But Becky’s fretting over the clock, so maybe you’d better catch me after the show.”
“I’d really rather catch you now. Out in the hall.”
They locked eyes through the glass and Barnet wavered. Jordan thought, Your ass is mine, cowboy, and Barnet’s face withered slightly. Long seconds passed before Barnet leaned into the microphone and spoke. “Cast, we seem to have another problem. Let’s take five.”
He was aware of Barnet’s footsteps behind him as he walked out. He heard Becky say, “It’s twenty to eight, guys!” and something dropped, clattering to the floor. In the hall he turned, Barnet came past him, and Jordan pushed the door shut.
He didn’t know what he was going to say until suddenly he was saying it. “If you keep this up we’re going to lose this show. I can’t stand still and let that happen.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? Who the hell are you to make decisions like that?”
“These kids have been working like hell for no money. The old man’s been waiting for this chance for eight years.”
“Oh, you’re breaking my heart.”
“So we’re gonna give ’em their chance. Unencumbered by you.”
“You must be crazy.”
Barnet made a move toward the door. Jordan stepped in his way and cut him off. This is how Captain Bligh must have looked—shock, denial, outrage, and fear, all in one face. He can’t believe his ship’s been taken away from him.
“It’s not you, it’s the cast,” Jordan said. “Look at it that way. This cast isn’t ready yet for a director of your . . . abilities. You’re used to working with professionals who can handle it. It’s good that you came to realize that, just before airtime. A wise decision on your part. That’s what I’ll tell people, if they ask me.”
“You’ll tell them nothing. You won’t be here to tell anyone anything. Just you dare try to go on without me. I’ll cut you off the air.”
“Then you’d better get ready to sing for half an hour.”
Barnet was trembling now. “You’re finished here. You can kiss your ass good-bye at this radio station.”
“I’m really sorry about that. It was fun while it lasted.”
Barnet stepped away and moved backward to the double doors. He stood for a moment, a silhouette, motionless against the pale gray lobby.
“Go ahead, do your show. You’ll die out there.”
He turned and walked out.
Back in the studio no one had moved. The clock on the wall was down to seven forty-five and Becky stood to one side, her stopwatch suspended, thumb poised on the button. He gave them the news from the edge of the soundstage. “Mr. Barnet decided we’d be better off without a director. We’re on our own.”
He motioned to Becky and drew her aside. “Listen, you’ve been great and I won’t forget it. But you need to leave now.”
“Jesus, Jordan, what’ve you done?”
“I don’t know. I guess I finally reached my limit with him.”
“Oh my God.”
“Anyway, it’s done now. But for the record, I think you need to be out of here.”
“I’m not afraid of him. I want to stay.”
“I’d feel better if you didn’t.”
There was no time to argue about it. He hugged her tight and said, “Talk to you later,” and shoved her gently into the hall.
The clock said twelve minutes to air. He walked up on the soundstage. “All right, folks, here we are. Obviously we don’t have time for the dress. But you know these parts, you’ve been up reading them half the night.”
He looked at the piano man. “Leland, put the original music back in.”
Back to the cast. “Let’s go with the ending and make the cuts on page eight. And take those lines out of page ten, just to be safe.”
Back to the piano man. “If that puts us short, improvise us up to the break.”
He looked at the booth. Behind the glass, Joe Carella nodded.
“Livia?”
“I’m fine.”
“I guess we’re ready, then.” He walked around the stage, looking at the microphones, coming back to the center to face his cast. “One last thing. You guys are all great. Eli, you are very good in this . . . very rich and strong, you make my words sing. Emily, Ali, Rudo, you’re all fine. Watch me with your side brain and keep your focus on your characters. Don’t look at the booth, I’ll be right here on the floor with you.”
We’ll all die together, he thought.
He looked around and tried to remember all the things he had seen Maitland do. “Two minutes. Cast, take your places.”
Rudo took the center-stage mike and held his script out, ready to go. Ali Marek stood on her toes and whispered something in Eli’s ear. Suddenly everything got quiet. Only the clock moved.
“Ten seconds,” Jordan said. “Coming up now.”
The red hand moved past the hour, the light flashed ON THE AIR, and the song began. The organ swelled and the theme was magnificent, a powerful bed for the announcer’s opening words.
Fade to night. Carella opened Livia’s mike and the room became a country road in another century, alive with crickets and frogs and the bumping, turning wheels of a hay wagon. Jordan looked across at Ali Marek and threw his first cue, and Charity Wiggins came to life.
She was tight for only a moment: then the muscles in her arms and hips went slack and she began to relax. Her eyes searched for Eli but there was no time: she’d be on again in a minute.
Jordan felt the play unfolding in his mind, the cotton fields stretching across most of the known world. He moved his hand: the sun went down. He raised a finger: the new day dawned in an explosion of sound, of horses and rowdies and the unmistakable din of a railroad yard. He stood like God and the universe rolled out at his feet. If he pointed left, Livia gave him London, a different kind of clatter with steel rims on cobblestones and a British flavor to the babble. He swept that away with a thrust of his arm, and in the cross fade sat Charity, three thousand miles away.
They reached the midway point in half a heartbeat and none of them knew how they’d gotten there or how well they were doing. The short piano interlude brought them into the second half, and Jordan felt his heart going like mad.
Emily read her four lines to open the new scene. Rudo was good as old Bethune—maybe the first time anywhere that a black man has played a white man, Jordan had thought when he’d written it. Son of a bitch, he thought now: it’s going too well, it’s going too well. Haven’t heard a bobble yet.
It all seemed so fast. Surely we’ll run very short, he thought. Leland will have his hands full.
But then Ali Marek was there, full of fire and rage for her uncut finale. Leland brought the music up and out, and the clock on the wall showed them right on the button. Rudo read a flawless closing signature and the music rose again to trail away in a board fade. The clock said 29:30. Rudo caught Carella’s thumb-and-finger signal for a station break and he talked them down to the half hour.
The red light flashed off. The room was eerily still. Only their eyes moved, searching their own faces for the answer to a question none of them wanted to ask. The answer came from a single pair of hands applauding and a soft voice somewhere in the darkness offstage. “Y’all can relax now. That wasn’t nuthin’ but nice.”
Waldo Brown, the forgotten man.
Then the door slammed open and Becky shrieked, “It was great!” and suddenly they all knew they had survived. Ali Marek collapsed in a chair. Eli let out the breath he’d been holding forever. Joe Carella stood wearily in the open booth and even Livia looked shaken in her place among the gadgets. Only Leland Jewell, the old pro, had taken it in stride.
Jordan shook hands with everyone and thanked them all, and he felt a surge of pure joy.
Hours later the feeling ha
dn’t diminished. He couldn’t remember a greater moment as it grew into the evening. This was it. Live radio. What he’d been born for. It was everything he had ever wanted to do. He had spent a lifetime reading and writing and getting himself ready for something, and now here it was. This was it. If it had come too late, at least he hadn’t gone through life without knowing of its existence.
( ( ( 21 ) ) )
THAT night he wrote what he now thought of as the Georgie Schroeder script. By midnight he had a polished piece, which he read aloud and timed to the second at 28:45. Allowing for music and signatures, it should be just right. It had a gripping, often touching story line, with the evils of Nazism shot throughout. He had given his hero an American-sounding name, Rudy Adams. His real name had been Rudolph Adler, but that was disclosed only at the end of the play, and by then he should have the sympathy of even the hardest-hearted haters of all things German.
On Monday morning he went to work as if nothing had happened. He put his new script under Kidd’s door and sat with his coffee and Eli’s newspaper. Up in the bullpen, he heard Barnet talking to a salesman a row away, but the confrontation he expected never came. Livia called at ten and invited him to lunch. Becky called from downstairs and told him he was the talk of the building. At some point he noticed that his telephone was beginning to malfunction, as a strange humming noise clicked in about ten seconds into each conversation. He screwed off the steel cap that covered the switching box but found nothing visibly wrong. The wire went down from his desk and disappeared into the floor.
Just before noon the phone rang again. It was Kidd’s secretary, asking him to stop by the office. The shoe falleth, he thought.
But when he arrived Kidd was in good spirits. “I heard your show yesterday. I liked it. Heard you directed it as well.”
“Barnet was there. You know, to make sure we didn’t get off base.”
“Really? That’s not what I heard.”
“He left just before we went on the air. I think he could see that the cast was too tense with him, so he left it to us. Waldo and me. And we had Livia and Joe and Leland. They’re all solid.”
Kidd said nothing for a moment. Then he leaned back in his chair. “You and Barnet don’t like each other much, do you?”
“I can’t speak for his part of it. Me, I’ve met guys I’d rather be around. But I can get along with him.”
“All right. What about this Sunday?”
“We planned to do the black cowboy.”
“That’s fine. What about a director?”
“That’s up to you.”
“Dedrick would be available. If you want him.”
“He’s a good man. I like him. I’m sure he’d be great with the cast.”
“Or,” Kidd said, “you could do it again yourself. See how it goes.”
“I’m willing to try that.”
Kidd shuffled through some papers. “I got a call a while ago from the radio critic at the New York Times. He’s already heard about your little adventure yesterday.”
“News travels fast in radio.”
“Well, it’s a public medium. When people hear something that’s so different from anything they’ve heard before, they tend to react. The Times had a dozen calls this morning. That’s a lot, considering the source. We’re not exactly NBC, and that makes the press curious. Sunday morning isn’t what he usually writes about, but he wants to see the script of what we did yesterday. I’m going to send it to him.”
“Okay.”
“I think he’ll be listening next Sunday. You still want to go it alone?”
“Whatever you want. I’m sure willing to try it.”
Kidd found what he was looking for—the new Rudy Adams script. The pages were already marked for mimeo. “When did you write this?”
“Last night.”
“You wrote this from scratch? In one sitting?”
“It just came together. Sometimes a piece of writing does that.”
Kidd looked down at the pages. When he looked up again his face was flushed, and for the first time Jordan saw excitement in his eyes.
“I seem to be at a loss for words. It’s an extraordinary piece.”
“It was Stoner’s idea. Maitland had some good input. And Miss Nicholas wants to play the wife. If it ever gets to air.”
“Well, she’ll get her chance. I want to do it next Saturday, as part of the war bond show. Expand that to ninety minutes and put this in just as it stands. Have Miss O’Hara sing just before and after. I understand you’ve been working on that war bond hour as well.”
“I’m doing some of the continuity.”
“I want Maitland to direct this. He’s already handling the musical segments, and that’ll fill up the big studio. But we’ll need the dramatic cast nearby so they can be moved quickly in and out when the time comes. We’ll take Barnet out of Studio B and have him broadcast the bond appeals from upstairs. With all this going on, Maitland will need an assistant director. I’d like that to be you.”
Jordan nodded, and felt a quickening in his heart.
“There’s a lot to be done. The orchestra won’t get here till Friday. The conductor thinks he’s doing a musical show, he doesn’t know yet that we’ll be asking him for an entire dramatic score as well. I’m going to send him a script today and we’ll see what he comes up with.”
“What can I do?”
“Get Miss Nicholas over here and see what she sounds like. Try any of the others that you think might work out. Then give Maitland your recommendations and we’ll hear them all tomorrow. I want it nailed down by Thursday, who plays what, so we can start rehearsing them that afternoon. I want this to come off without a hitch on the air.”
“It’s going to be one hell of an expensive show.”
“Tell me about it. It’ll cost us as much to do it as we’ll make for the cause. But what a way to start.”
Oh yes. Jordan nodded. What a way to start.
( ( ( 22 ) ) )
HE sat with Livia at a rooftop table under a flapping umbrella and they talked about Carnahan. Barnet had hired him last summer as the station’s handyman, and she had been drawn to him at once. “I was amazed at how much he knew about the world and everything in it. To me that’s what defines a man. Not how old he is or how he looks. What he knows.”
She smiled faintly. “Talk about chemistry! I thought it was wonderful. If you’re asking me what happened, don’t expect any easy answers, because I just don’t know. He was much older than me but you know that. I’m sure he was old enough to be my father, but I never thought of him that way. I didn’t think the age thing was any kind of factor.”
She shrugged. “Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it did bother him, how it looked going around with me. Maybe it bothered him about my kids. When a man gets in his fifties it’s probably hard keeping company with a woman years younger who has two children. Most men his age are happy to be done with that. But he loved my kids, no one could fool me about that. And they loved him. They still ask about him, about when he’s coming back.”
The waitress came. They gave their orders and she sat for a moment, lost in thought, staring at the sea.
“You said the other day it reminded you of Kendall. But there wasn’t any mystery with Carnahan. He left some notes that pretty well settled things. One to his landlord, saying he was vacating. A strange note to Barnet, quitting his job. Nothing for me. Not a damned thing.”
She leaned into the table. “He was a good man. I’ll always think that, even if I can’t quite forgive him for the way he left. That’s always the first thing I think about when I think about him. He was very decent.
“And he was great to talk to. We liked the same books, the same films, all kinds of music. He was full of surprises. When you first met him you saw a handyman. But then you talked to him, and my God, his general knowledge just went on and on. His opinions were always so well reasoned, so full of common sense.
“Rue discovered him; she got to know him before I did.
He was like you, he came here totally cold, with no idea what radio was about. Then he began to see it. The whole world of it began opening up to him, and it was a very serious discovery. He was going to sign up for some radio classes at NYU, that’s how serious he was about it. He was part of our little group almost at once; he brought in stories that none of us had ever heard of, things he’d read in Scribner’s Magazine when he was a young man, long before there was such a thing as radio, but they worked so well on the air today. Gus thought he’d make a natural director. His voice was quiet but when he talked, everyone listened. He just soaked up life.
“We had a lot of fun for a few months. It probably wasn’t his fault that I thought it was more than it was. That’s an old story—girl gets too serious, guy moves on. Happens all the time. It’s not the first time it’s happened to me, if you want to know the truth.”
Jordan said, “Still, the man you’re describing and the man I knew doesn’t just pull up and leave like that.”
“Well, he did. Facts are facts.”
“Maybe he meant to leave you something and you never got it.”
She frowned. “Nice try, Jordan.”
The food came and they ate quietly, enjoying the breeze. At last she said, “Nope, I think it’s got to be the age thing. I’ve gone over it a hundred times and I think I miscalculated from the start how affected he was by that. If I’d been more sensitive it might have turned out different.”
“Did you ever come right out and ask him?”
“Not in so many words. Why plant something that’s not already there, right? But I guess it was there. Inevitably people mistook him for my father and he knew how annoyed that made me. And what must’ve made it worse, he does have a daughter almost my age. But I don’t even know for sure where she lives, so I couldn’t get in touch through her if I wanted to.”
She sighed. “Somewhere in Pennsylvania. That’s a big state.”
The waitress returned and Jordan reached for his wallet but Livia wouldn’t hear of it.
“Tell me about the last time you saw him,” he said.
