by Jim Lehrer
“That’s like saying the Yankees would be nothing without DiMaggio. The Yankees have DiMaggio, Gable’s got his Gone with the Wind. Do television.”
“Never!”
Both became silent again until Rinehart, almost in a whisper, said, “Don’t ever leave me, Gene.”
“I won’t, Dar,” said Mathews. He spoke in his normal voice. “I’ve said it to you a million times. I’m tired of saying it.”
“When you leave me, that’s when I’ll know it’s really over.”
“For the last time—I won’t, Dar,” Mathews said.
“Everything’s for the last time,” Rinehart mumbled out toward Track 8, where the Texas Chief was also preparing for departure.
Ralph returned to Otto Wheeler’s drawing room. Charlie Sanders was still there.
“I see you’re traveling alone, is that right, Mr. Wheeler?” asked Ralph, as he and Sanders helped Wheeler from the wheelchair into the dark green parlor chair that faced the room’s large outside window.
Otto Wheeler nodded.
“What’s your Mr. Pollack up to?” asked Ralph, referring to the assistant who often traveled with Wheeler in the next compartment.
“He went ahead yesterday to take care of some business for me,” Wheeler said. “He’s going to meet me at the station in Bethel.”
Wheeler turned to stare out the window even though there was not much to see except the Texas Chief and railroad employees passing by on missions involving one of the two trains. The Texas Chief, also a streamliner of gleaming corrugated lightweight steel, had been scheduled to leave an hour before the Super, at 6:00 p.m., for Fort Worth, Houston, Galveston and other points south. But it was already almost 6:20.
“They better get a move on over there or it’ll slow us down—make us late even,” said Ralph to Sanders before Wheeler had a chance to raise the point. “The Texas Chief goes right along an hour ahead of us on the same track past Kansas City into Kansas.”
I know that! Sanders wanted to bark. But he remained silent. It seemed to Sanders that some porters, conductors and the other men who actually worked on the trains couldn’t resist trying to show up those they called Office People, who were not real railroaders. Ralph probably saw him in particular as not just Office People but a person of no age, no experience—a child who had no business holding down a position of any authority at the Santa Fe railroad. After beginning as a clerk in the passenger traffic office, he was actually thirty-two years old and had been with the railroad for ten years. His crew-cut blond hair and baby freckled face made him seem much younger.
“I guess you’ll be wanting dinner served here in the drawing room, is that right, Mr. Wheeler?” asked Ralph, as Sanders stepped back toward the door.
“That’s right, Ralph. Thank you. I’ll have the whitefish—grilled—and the jellied consommé. Cold, please. That ought to do it.”
“No blueberry pie tonight, sir?”
“No, no.”
“Wine, sir? We’re carrying a special red from France and two whites, one from—”
Wheeler’s wave stopped Ralph from finishing the sentence. “Iced tea, then?”
“Just a cup of Sanka coffee, thank you.”
Suddenly the Texas Chief began to move, finally showing the lighted blue circle drumhead at the rear of its observation car that had Texas Chief emblazoned on it along with an Indian chief wearing a headdress. The sign on the end of the Super Chief’s observation car was similar except that its basic color was yellow.
“That’s good, that’s good,” said Ralph. “It’ll be out of our way.”
Wheeler turned toward Sanders. “I hope the Santa Fe didn’t bring you on this train just to see about me, Mr. Sanders.”
“You and other important people aboard the Super, sir,” Sanders said. “That’s my wonderful job.”
Otto Wheeler was not at the top of the VIP list given to Sanders for this trip, but he was on it. Seven assistant general passenger agents worked out of the Santa Fe headquarters in the Railway Exchange Building on Michigan Avenue, only a short walk north from Dearborn Station. Assisting on various publicity and travel promotion projects was their principal duty but, on occasion, they were sent off on trains with important passengers. As the junior man, Sanders caught mostly slow-train travel assignments. This was only the second time he had been on the Super Chief, which he passionately believed was the finest streamliner in the world.
“Are you ready for dinner now, sir?” Ralph asked Wheeler. “Sooner you eat, sooner I can make up your berth and all.”
“Right, Ralph. I’ll be ready when it’s ready.”
Charlie Sanders opened the drawing room door and began to exit as Ralph backed out behind him. But Wheeler said, “Could I speak with you a moment privately, Ralph?”
With smiling efficiency, Ralph motioned for Sanders to complete his departure into the passageway, then he closed the door behind him.
“Yes, sir,” Ralph said to Wheeler. “What can I do for you, sir?”
“I am not able to go to the dining car, of course, but I would like to know if a particular person is there … a woman, dark reddish brown hair, magnificent white skin—stunningly attractive. Green eyes, a nose that is quite small. Her eyes flutter when she talks. Laughs like a … like she really means it. She would be traveling to Los Angeles.”
“We all know her, Mr. Wheeler, and we’ve watched for her before many times, haven’t we?”
“We have, Ralph, we surely have.”
“I will find her if she’s on this train tonight, Mr. Wheeler, I promise you that.”
“Thank you, Ralph.”
Ralph reached for the latch on the door again. “For your information, sir, there’s another Super Regular, a movie man named Mr. Darwin Rinehart, in the other drawing room and a connecting bedroom here in your car. I’m sure you’ve seen him here on the Super before.”
“Yes, yes, I have talked to him a time or two. Don’t tell him I said it but his movies are mostly very awful.”
Ralph smiled and said, “Here in the compartment on your other side is a Mr. Rockford, as in the town here in Illinois. Never seen him on the Super before this trip. He asked about you when he got on some thirty minutes ago or so. Wanted to know if you’d boarded yet. I thought you’d like to know who you’re traveling with, sir.”
“Yes, thank you, Ralph.”
Ralph smiled and nodded and Wheeler returned both the smile and the nod.
“Mr. Clark Gable’s with us again, too. Nobody’ll probably get to see him much but I thought you’d like to know.”
“Mr. Gable and I have spoken a few words back and forth here on the Super a time or two,” Wheeler said. “I thought he was wonderful in Red Hat. So were Joan Crawford and Miss Dodsworth. Too bad that Rinehart fellow can’t make movies like that.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Wheeler,” said Ralph.
He had not seen Red Hat but he had been with Grace Dodsworth in person many times, of course, back when she was a familiar Star on the Super.
Now Ralph felt the train—his train—moving. As always, there was no jerking, no banging, only a gentle, majestic gliding away with a slight sound of a bell and a whistle from the engine way up front.
“We’re off, Mr. Wheeler.”
That first minute or so of departure was always a special time for Ralph and, it seemed to him, most everyone who ever had the supreme pleasure of departing Chicago on the greatest train in the world.
Ralph shared that joy by exchanging knowing smiles with Otto Wheeler.
But then, in a reflexive act of privacy, Ralph looked away from the tears he saw in the sick man’s eyes and said farewell.
At five after nine, Ralph came to serve Clark Gable the dinner he had requested. The porter had to use his own passkey to enter the locked drawing room after getting no answer to his several knocks.
Once inside, he found Gable in a chair, sound asleep. Only one of the four bottles of scotch had been opened and it was still almost full. Ralph had k
nown The King to routinely finish a whole bottle before dinner without showing a sign of having had a drop.
Gable was slow to rouse but before too long he was not only awake, he was alert, cutting into his sirloin steak and sipping on a glass of red wine that Ralph had set before him on a small tray table.
“Are there indeed fair prospects for the evening?” the King of Hollywood asked Ralph the porter.
“Only two worth mentioning, it seems to me,” said the porter. “One a blond woman I saw first in the middle lounge below the dome car and then in the dining car. She found me and asked if I might introduce her to you, Mr. Gable. She said a couple of the others in the crew said I might be the one to help.”
“How old would you say she is?” asked Gable, as if asking the size of a sport coat he was considering.
“A good thirty, maybe thirty-five, Mr. Gable.”
“A looker?”
“Are there any other kind fit for The King?”
Gable, showing that smile that had helped make him famous, said, “What did you tell her?”
“Oh, the same as I tell every one of them when they ask. I told her that only The King knows where he will be and what he will do and where he will do it and what time. I assume you’ll be wanting to do it at the usual time.”
Clark Gable hesitated before saying, “Yes, you bet. The usual time.”
“A little after ten it will be, yes, sir,” said Ralph. “I will return to make up the berth in plenty of time.”
“Right,” said Gable. “A little after ten.”
He continued with his dinner while Ralph did his chores, placing starched white sheets and fluffed pillows on the pullout divan and doing what else was necessary to get things ready for The King.
“What was the second prospect?” Gable asked Ralph.
“A brunette, also a looker, maybe slightly younger. She’d also, as I said would happen, picked up the lightning report through the train that Mr. Clark Gable was aboard tonight.”
When Gable said nothing, Ralph said, “Say after eleven thirty or so for her, sir—as usual?”
“That’s right—always as usual,” Clark Gable said.
“Why didn’t you leave that book in the compartment?” Rinehart asked.
They had already passed into the darkened Illinois countryside, the twilit sights of the railroad yards, factories, a few slums and the suburbs of Chicago now behind them.
“Because I don’t want to spend my entire dinner listening to you whine about being washed up at forty because of Dark Days, Clark Gable’s snub and all the rest,” Mathews replied.
They had a large four-chair table by themselves, so arranged through Ralph by the dining car steward. There were smaller tables for two on one side of the middle aisle of the dining car, and for four on the other. Filling up the four-place tables with strangers was common practice in all railroad dining cars. It could be prevented only by eating late and/or heavily tipping all concerned. Rinehart knew and loved the ruling customs of luxury train travel.
Both he and Mathews ate the roast rib of prime beef, with the great combination salad that was a specialty of the Super Chief. It was made of ice-cold lettuce and huge slices of giant red tomatoes with a vinaigrette dressing and crumbles of blue cheese.
There was nothing to see through the windows except the flash of lights in houses and small buildings and cars and other vehicles moving along roads and highways. The moon was either not out or not bright. Rinehart, having finished his second martini and progressed well into a bottle of a nice French cabernet sauvignon, could not tell for sure where the moon was right now and was not much interested in finding out. But it triggered a thought—a very minor thought. It was based on a conversation he and Mathews had had in New York several days earlier about Death of a Salesman. Rinehart had been outbid five years earlier on trying to turn Arthur Miller’s play into a movie.
“Miller was right,” Rinehart said. “No wonder Marilyn married him.”
“She married him because she was high on pills,” Mathews mumbled, barely looking up from his book.
“Failure in America is too easy because success is too easy.”
Mathews set the book down in his lap and gave Rinehart his full attention. “Willy Loman wasn’t into stuff like that—”
“You got to make millions or win Oscars because we’re a free and open country. No limit to what you can do. Be a waitress one day, a movie star the next. Be a Kansas City haberdasher one day, president the next. Anything but being on top is considered a failure because being on top is possible.”
“Willy Loman never said or believed that—”
“In Russia, you finish the sixth grade, find a place to live with a bathroom, bring home a chicken, you’re considered a huge success. Being on top isn’t possible so not getting there isn’t failure.”
“So you and Willy are moving to Moscow with all the other Commies? Jesus, Dar. Before you know it, here’ll come McCarthy and the Red Police.” Mathews returned to his book.
Rinehart and Mathews had made this trip so many times and sat in the dining car so many evenings like this. They were somewhere in Illinois, for sure. They hadn’t crossed the Mississippi yet into Iowa. That happened at Fort Madison, where the train always made a brief stop. Rinehart looked at his watch. Barely an hour out of Chicago. Still in Illinois. But where in Illinois?
Rinehart saw STREATOR on a station sign as the Super picked up speed. That meant Joliet was coming a few minutes later. Many movies had been set in or were about the prison in Joliet. Just say the word Joliet, and people think of electric chairs and crying families of death row inmates.
“What about a television series set on death row in a prison?” Rinehart asked Mathews, who did a double take, grinned for the first time in weeks and then closed his book and set it down. Both of them had already finished their dessert, warm apple pie with a slice of cheddar cheese melted on top and a dollop of vanilla ice cream on the side.
“You serious, Dar? You really thinking about doing television? That is great. If I was still drinking I would set ’em up for the house.”
He had another sip of his Coke and Rinehart took a gulp of red wine.
Rinehart said, “Yeah, yeah. Let’s play it out, Gene. We’ll call it Joliet. Each week an inmate is electrocuted. That would be the pitch …”
“Right, right,” said Mathews. “Every Thursday night at nine, right here on NBC—or whatever—come watch a heinous criminal get executed!”
“There’d be the ongoing cast of a warden, a priest, some guards, reporters and the entire population on death row that always has new people coming in to take the places of those executed …”
“We could maybe get big-name guest stars to come on each week and take the juice. Some could get fried for murder, some for treason, some for rape …”
Here they were, like old times, playing it out.
Rinehart said, “There’d be flashbacks to their crimes, lots of tears from their victims and loved ones …”
Mathews said, “We’d ask Clark Gable, The King himself, to guest star. He’d make a spectacular electrocuted corpse, don’t you think?”
“I can smell him now …”
“Maybe one week we’d have an attempted prison breakout from death row. Maybe even one that was successful. An innocent man gets out to prove his innocence …”
Back and forth they went, the way they always did.
“Or a guilty one gets out to kill the prosecutor who sent him to death row …”
“One week, the warden could start sleeping with one of the death row inmates’ visiting wives. Maybe knock her up …”
“The baby could be brought up in the prison nursery by a convicted murderess with a heart of gold …”
“Every once in a while a convict would be proved innocent seconds before the switch was to be thrown. That would be where the reporter characters would come in. Heroes all, of course—”
“Of course. We’d go into detail about last m
eals, last requests, last statements, last-minute confessions, last sex, last fantasies …”
“Shoot the whole thing right there in the prison at Joliet. Think of the great publicity that’d be for the great State of Illinois …”
“I’m not sure we could get Loretta Young or one of her TV types to go for it but who knows?”
When they finished, she was the first to speak.
“You really are The King … Mr. Gable,” she said. Gable did not say thank you or anything else, expressing whatever he had to say with a pleasant grunt as he, in several quick moves, pushed away from her, swung his legs down from the bed, stood up and pulled up his dark red silk pajama bottoms.
“I remember that chest from It Happened One Night,” she said. “But it didn’t have any hair on it in the movie, like it does now.”
“I let it grow out,” he said. The subject clearly annoyed him.
She just laughed. Then she said, “I just have to know. One of those awful movie magazines wrote that Claudette Colbert is a … you know, a lady queer. That can’t be true, can it?”
Gable shrugged. He was now standing with his back to her, seemingly looking for something.
“I’ll bet you don’t even remember my name, do you?” she asked.
Turning to face her, he said, “Betty?”
“No. It’s Sarah.”
“Same thing,” he said.
She started to laugh but caught herself. It was clear he was not joking. He meant what he said.
Clark Gable had found what he was looking for. He held her two light nylon stockings in one hand and her bright pink panties in the other.
She paid no attention to that and made no move to get out of bed. She said, “I am Sarah Strother and I live in Jefferson City, Missouri. I’m going to get off in Kansas City and take an early-morning Missouri Pacific on home. My husband is a lawyer and I work for the lieutenant governor of Missouri as his legislative assistant. He’s a Democrat. What are you?”
“A Republican,” said Gable.
“Why?”
“I was in the war with Ike.”
