The Comedy is Finished

by Donald E. Westlake

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  The COMEDY Is FINISHED

  by Donald E. Westlake

  A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK

  (HCC-105)

  First Hard Case Crime edition: February 2012

  Published by

  Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street

  London

  SE1 0UP

  in collaboration with Winterfall LLC

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and

  incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination

  or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events

  or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by the Estate of Donald E. Westlake

  Cover painting copyright © 2012 by Gregory Manchess

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  Print Edition ISBN 978-0-85768-408-0

  E-book ISBN 978-0-85768-409-7

  Design direction by Max Phillips

  www.maxphillips.net

  Typeset by Swordsmith Productions

  The name “Hard Case Crime” and the Hard Case Crime logo

  are trademarks of Winterfall LLC. Hard Case Crime books are

  selected and edited by Charles Ardai.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Visit us on the web at www.HardCaseCrime.com

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  Donald Westlake began writing this book in the late 1970s. In the early 1980s, he sent a carbon copy of the finished manuscript to fellow crime writer Max Allan Collins, with whom he’d been corresponding for more than ten years. Shortly afterwards, Don decided not to publish the book, in part because Martin Scorsese had just released the movie The King of Comedy and Don thought some readers might feel the movie’s premise and the book’s were too similar. Max packed the manuscript away in a box in his basement, where it sat for the better part of the next three decades.

  When Hard Case Crime published Memory in 2010, describing it as “Donald Westlake’s final unpublished novel,” Max informed us of this one’s existence, unearthed the faded typescript, and sent it to us in the hope that the book would finally see print.

  That it has is thanks to Abby Westlake and to Larry Kirshbaum, agent for the Westlake Estate, who agreed to let us publish it—but all three of us owe special thanks to Max Allan Collins, without whom The Comedy Is Finished might never again have seen the light of day.

  This is for Brian Garfield, who knows what I’m doing better than I do.

  Sometimes people call me an idealist. Well, that is the way I know I am an American. America is the only idealistic nation in the world.

  PRESIDENT WOODROW WILSON

  SIOUX FALLS, SOUTH DAKOTA

  SEPTEMBER 8, 1919

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  The COMEDY Is FINISHED

  1

  “Welcome to television, folks. If you’re very very good, we’ll renew ya for next week.”

  Koo Davis is onstage, hand mike negligently held just below his round pink chin. He looks like that portrait of him done by Norman Rockwell over twenty years ago; everybody has that same warm pink latex face in Norman Rockwell portraits, but Koo Davis has it in real life. He’s the ultimate justification for the Norman Rockwell palette: “See? It is realistic!”

  “This thing here,” Koo Davis is telling his studio audience, “is called a camera, and that thing there is called a cameraman. If he’s a union cameraman he’s called ‘sir’.”

  The place is a television studio, with a wide shallow bleacher along one wall, on which sits a studio audience of two hundred fifty people. There isn’t any actual stage, simply the black-composition-floored work area, made into cubicles by muslin-walled sets, with three cameras in position: left, right, center. The center camera operates in a central break in the bleachers, so it isn’t in anybody’s view. The floor is here and there covered with neutral gray carpet, and everywhere strewn with cables, like strings of black and silver spaghetti. Three television sets hang from the ceiling, facing the audience; they are dark now, but during the taping they’ll show the progress to the audience as it’s being put together. Sitting on the rows of folding chairs on the bleachers are the first two hundred fifty people from the line that formed earlier this afternoon outside the studio. They all came in for free, and they’re looking forward to a good time.

  “Now,” Koo tells them, “we’re gonna be together the next hour or so, while we put this show on tape, and if you’re a student of television and you wanna just sit there and watch the camera angles, that’s okay. And if you wanna laugh so hard you get a stitch in your side and fall down on the floor and roll around helpless with laughter, that’s okay, too. And we’ll be watching you all with monitors, and after the show we’ll tell you which of you can go home.”

  Koo Davis does his own warm-ups. There are lesser comics who wait in their dressing rooms, talking with their agents and their accountants, while warm-up specialists (jolly-faced fiftyish failures with memorized repertoires) pep up the audience with semi-dirty jokes, get the audience already chuckling away, comfortable in its seats and ready to roar. But that isn’t Koo Davis’ style; his
style is to find them where they are, grab them by the lapel, hit ’em with some yocks, hit ’em with some more yocks, and between times grin at ’em and walk around. He does confidence, that’s what Koo Davis does, because an audience digs confidence.

  “We’re gonna have a couple special guests here on the show,” Koo Davis tells the people. “They’re actors, but you ought be nice to them anyway. I wanna tell ya, I’m always nice to actors. I learned my lesson. Last time I fired an actor, he got a job as Governor.” Little pause, grin at them while they laugh. “He wasn’t a very good actor, either.”

  This is a new line of territory for Koo, a new kind of politics in the jokes, and he’s easing into it very cautiously, like into a tub of too-hot water. Behind the confident grin, the faintly swaggering walk, he’s watching how that Governor gag goes down, he’s waiting to see if they’ll accept it. That is, if they’ll accept it from Koo Davis. He’s got some fence-mending to do, and he’s not exactly sure how to go about it.

  The trouble began with the goddamn Vietnam thing. That goddamn war cut the country in half, it put the white male middle class over on this side and every damn body else over on that side, and when it finally ended, for some damn reason Koo couldn’t let go. Others could, Duke Wayne and Shirley MacLaine right away kidding each other at the Academy Awards, but for Koo it was as though to admit the last step had been wrong meant admitting everything before it had also been wrong, and that he just couldn’t do.

  The bitch of it is, Koo always stayed out of politics. He started on radio back in ’39, and it was the normal road then to follow the Will Rogers recipe; a couple jokes about Congress not doing anything, some jokes about Roosevelt’s alphabet soup, every comic in the business was doing it. But not Koo. He had an instinct, it said times change, it said people don’t really want to laugh at their leaders, it said leave the messages to Western Union. So Koo told jokes about the railroads, about the army, about automobiles and radio and California weather. And when World War Two came along he told jokes about nylons and chocolates and V-girls and let the other comics tell their jokes about the Nips. (Nobody told jokes about the Nazis; they weren’t funny enough.)

  You always knew what year it was from Koo’s material, but never what the issues were. Housing shortage. Vets in college. Fins on cars. Men in space. Let Mort Sahl come onstage with a newspaper, Koo Davis walked on with a golf club. But then came the goddamn Vietnam thing, and the country was divided as it had never been before, and Koo just couldn’t help himself. Like everybody else, he had to come down on one side or the other:

  “I didn’t know if it was a boy or a girl, and it turned out to be a sheepdog.”

  “Of course, Canada’s a fine place for people with cold feet.”

  Nobody needs a majority more than a comic. You’re standing there in front of all those faces and you say your line, and you don’t want six jerks in the corner with a tee-hee, you want every face split open. If you don’t have the instinct for the majority, you don’t make it as a comic. Koo went over to politics because the audience wanted it. Inside himself he had two conflicting instincts—give them what they want; stay out of politics—and he had to choose.

  “Also with us tonight, a wonderful actress from Sweden, Birgit Söderman—that’s the way you pronounce it, folks. I said it wrong in a smorgasbord restaurant the other night and got pig’s knuckles. I used to make the same mistake with Juanita Izquerta, but then I got her knuckles.”

  Poor reaction, drop-off in audience response. Koo walks around, grinning—“But I wanna tell you, I love working TV”—and in fifteen seconds he’s got them back, and he’s forgotten the dead spot. Most mistakes he remembers, but gags like the Juanita Izquerta he keeps in no matter how bad the response. The trouble is, not enough people remember the name. She was never a big star, Juanita, she made a dozen pictures in the early fifties and that was it. But Koo had her along on some of his USO tours—the boys in Korea, that decade—and his female co-stars, the starlets and has-beens and almost-wases he trouped and shtupped on those tours, are always fresh in his mind, as though they’re still this minute young hard-breasted terrific chicks knocking them dead tonight in Vegas or Miami Beach just as Koo himself is knocking them dead here at this taping of The Koo Davis Special in beautiful downtown Burbank, California. It’s as though there’s a loyalty he owes those girls, to pretend they’re still hot stuff, still hot, that it could still be any one of them appearing on this show with him instead of the latest blonde, Jill Johnson, a laid-back girl comic of the new school, 26 and a sexual bearcat, with whom he would be cheerfully expending his post-tape hard-on. (Performing has always been good for his sex life.)

  Even the first of the blondes, Honeydew Leontine, on his premier tour—Hawaii, Australia, a few shitty islands, a couple aircraft carrier flight decks—even Honeydew, a girl whose movie career never got higher than stooge for the Ritz Brothers and was over even before the end of World War Two, even Honeydew still shows up from time to time in his monologues, and the last time he’d trouped and shtupped with Honeydew was—Christ on a crutch, it was over thirty years ago! The first time, in Hawaii, was thirty-six years ago! Jesus! Honeydew and her big tits and her collection of stones—stones from every goddamn beach she’d ever walked on, she carried them around in burlap bags, everywhere she went—Honeydew must be almost sixty fucking years old by now. And Koo himself, if he stops to think about it, which he never does, is sixty-three.

  “Of course, television is different from the movies. When I started in pictures—I won’t say how long ago that was, but I taught William S. Hart how to ride—and in the old days you’d shoot the same scene over and over until the director was satisfied. It got to be a habit to repeat things until you got them right. It got to be a habit to repeat things until you got them right. It got to be a habit to repeat things until you got them right. It got to be a—”

  Which is about par for that gag; the laugh starts at the beginning of the first repeat, a trickle that dwindles off, picks up again at the beginning of the second repeat, lulls, then picks itself up again before the finish of the second repeat (the audience anticipating the third), so Koo is pushing the third repeat into a growing laugh. Then he can stop and do his own laugh, and grin, and shake his head, and walk around, selecting the next gag while the audience works on the last one.

  It was the USO taught Koo how to be a comedian. He’d done vaudeville, he’d done radio, he was already what was then called a “headliner,” but it was the USO tours that taught him how to live with an audience, how to make it want to like him, how to make it feel afterward that he didn’t just make them laugh, he made them happy. In those early days he was just another radio comic, and the point of the touring shows was to give the troops a safe acceptable look at American tits and asses, so what he had to do when he stepped out on that temporary stage was give the GIs a reason to be happy to see him. Give them topical jokes (“Actually, I’m just here to buy cigarettes.”), give them local jokes (“General Floyd sent me a message not to fraternize with the natives. At least that’s what the mama-san told me, when she hung up the phone.”), then bring out Honeydew or Juanita or Laura or Linda or Karen or Lauren or Dolly or Fanny, run a couple dumb-blonde routines, leave the chick out there to sing a song, come back with the local commander (they were all hams at heart, every last one of them), do a little uplift, cut it with some mild sex gags, send the General or Admiral or Colonel or Commander off with Juanita or Linda or Lauren or Dolly, give their exit an innuendo the troops could enjoy, and by then they were his, because he was their link to special status. They were dogfaces, retreads, grunts, and he was hanging around with Generals and blonde chicks, but he was one of them. He could come on like the rawest of raw recruits (“Colonel O’Malley’s being terrific to us all. He’s gonna watch Honeydew for me while I go up all by myself to the rest camp at Bloody Nose Ridge.” Or Pork Chop Hill, or St. Lo, or wherever the most dangerous spot in the neighborhood might be.), and he could come on like the cool
wiseguy the troops all wished they were, and they learned to love him for it, and he learned to love them for loving him.

  He got a lot of good press for the USO work, and in truth he deserved it. He made no money out of it, not directly, beyond the expenses of the troupe. He’d started the tours in the first place because he was medically 4-F in 1940 (bad ear and bad stomach and bad knee), and he felt guilty about it, and this was something he could do to make up for not being “in it.” (He wound up “in it,” in fact, more than most guys in uniform, being under fire or otherwise in danger countless times while riding in jeeps or trucks or planes or helicopters or transport ships or—once, on Okinawa, when three kamikazes came plunging through the ack-ack—in a rickshaw. “We have some wild drivers in California,” he told the troops that afternoon, “but those three that came through this morning were ridiculous.”)

  And when the goddamn Vietnam thing came along, how was he supposed to know it was different? Why wasn’t it the Pacific Theater all over again, Korea all over again? It hadn’t been wrong to cheer our side ever before, and these were the same kids, weren’t they? Fighting the same slant-eyed son of a bitch gooks, weren’t they? So what the hell was the difference?

  Permissiveness, it seemed like. A lot of fat, soft college kids hanging around on their campuses, young snotnoses, didn’t know their ass from their elbow. You looked at the real kids marching along in the same uniforms as before, you knew you had to make a choice, and Jesus the choice seemed easy. It should have been Stage Door Canteen all over again, it should have been, but it wasn’t.

  Koo did the USO tours the same as ever, but when he was in the States the great National Debate was creeping into his comedy, and for the first time in his career he was coming out on stage and getting booed. Half the under-twenty-fives out there in America thought he was some sort of goddamn baby raper or something. He just couldn’t figure it out, and it made him mad, and the jokes got more and more political, and everything was just simply out of control.