by John Ridley
“And you know that? You've been around Tommy, what, a hot minute, and you know—”
“Then tell me I'm wrong.” Back and forth, his thumb across his fingertips. A sip of his coffee.
Unfazeable.
Lamont was no longer speaking any known language; he was just making a shrill sound that I could only barely comprehend: Career. Success. Failure. Marriage. Don't. Understand.
Understand?
“You understand, don't you, Jackie? Don't you?”
At some point I think Lamont offered a few pleasantries and said good-bye to me—must've—then left for Grand Central to hop his train.
I don't remember that.
What I remember is sitting in that Horn and Hardart a good, Long time.
AT THE MOMENT The Village Vanguard was empty. Middle of the afternoon, dark in the daylight, the joint was closed for business. At night, when the shows were running, The Vanguard was as shoulder-to-shoulder happening as any cabaret in any piece of the city.
At the moment it was empty.
Empty except for Tommy and a piano player who accompanied her in “Speaking of Happiness,” as she worked the song out before chairs upended on tables and a guy who was pushing a broom around the floor paying more attention to Tommy than to whether or not he was collecting any dirt.
I slid myself into a corner of the house.
I listened. I'd heard Tommy sing maybe ten dozen times. But this time I listened.
There are people who sing. Besides just in the shower, there are people who get up onstage before an audience, sing, and get paid for their singing. Maybe their voice is decent. Maybe they've got some style. Whatever it is, they rate as a singer.
There are people who interpret. Same as if they're changing French into English, they tell you what the song means, translate lyrics and melodies into a language the listener can understand: Love. Joy Sadness.
Loneliness.
And there are people so gifted, they can make you feel those words, make them hack right through you like a surgeon's brand-new cutting tool. Those kinds of singers, they're not just giving you a tune for your money. They're injecting themselves into the song, making naked their emotions, slicing off some of their soul for your consumption. They are giving you a piece of them. And accordingly, whether you want to or not, you smile, you snap your fingers, you cry… . You do what their voice tells you to do. That powerful the gifted are. That special.
That's how I felt standing in the back of The Vanguard, listening to Tommy. I felt like when she was done with her number the empty chairs and the tables they rested on would jump up and start applauding the hell out of themselves.
But all that happened was—having heard her for the thousandth time, and for the very first time—without a word I slipped from the club same as I'd slipped in.
INSIDE HER APARTMENT, in the kitchen, across a table from each other, over coffee, me and Tommy sat. The conversation started a mile away from the subject. How was I? How was she? The weather. Been strange. Yeah, unseasonable. Hear what the Soviets did? Those Reds are crazy.
Then we got to what's what.
Tommy asked: “You talked to Lamont?”
I nodded to that. “Before he left town.”
“What did you think?”
Editing myself: “Seemed bright.”
“He is. He's got a lot of good ideas.” Tommy followed up a sizable pause with: “He wants me to go to Detroit, work on some music out there.”
I didn't say anything to that.
“I don't know how long I would be gone. A few months. Or more. Then I would have to, if I got a record out, I mean, I would have to, you know, go out. Support it.” That was mumbled.
Beneath the table, out of Tommy's view, I clutched my little box with the very big ring inside.
“And with you gone, you on the road, I don't know when we'd see each other… .” She was climbing a mountain. Tommy had to stop, take a rest before pushing on. It was as if she knew where she was heading the air would be thin and things would be dizzying for all involved. “You're always saying how important career is, how important it is to make it. But if there was, you know, some reason … if you didn't think I should go …”
I sat there. I sat where I was, and if I sat for one second, I sat for a year. That's what you do when you're at a crossroads, the map you've been carrying is suddenly no good, and your compass is just spinning around no matter somebody's telling you what direction to head.
I put my hand to my pocket. In my pocket I put the box with the ring. “Of course you should go. Like I said, that Lamont is a sharp cat. He can do things, do some serious things for you. And hey, just because you're gone and I'm … Nothing's going to change for us. What do they say? Absence and all that jazz. A little absence, and you and me are going to be so crazy for each other …” That was all the more talking I could do before the sound of my own voice made me ill.
I looked up. Through all I'd said I hadn't had the guts to look at Tommy while I lied. But then I looked up.
Tommy's eyes were near tears.
“You okay, baby?”
“I don't feel …” Pressing a hand to her head, Tommy fought up out of her chair. “Maybe you should go.”
“You want me to get you something?”
“I don't …” Clutching her head now, fingers trying to work their way inside. “Please, just go.”
Tommy went to her bedroom, closed the door, but not so tight that the sounds of sobs couldn't creep out from behind it. I'd given Tommy what she needed: the freedom to be the star she deserved to be.
But what Tommy wanted …
What Tommy wanted was tucked away in the pocket of my coat.
A COUPLE OF DAYS LATER. Maybe three. Tommy was taking a plane to Detroit. We said our “see-yas,” avoiding good-byes that would make the scene feel any more final than it needed to. Along those lines I put her in a cab but didn't head to the airport with her. She was just taking a little trip. No big deal. No need to turn it into some kind of a thing.
Tommy's flight was at two-thirty.
She left for LaGuardia at one. Lamont would be there, back from wherever he'd been, to get Tommy to Detroit. Personally.
When she was gone I did some walking around the city, window-shopping. I liked watches. Nice ones. I'd never owned one. A nice one. Didn't have the money. Not really. But they were good for looking at. Rolled by a tailor's and checked out some fronts. Suits I couldn't afford to go with the watches I didn't own. Stopped by a diner to grease myself. Basically I got back to the business of living my life.
I checked the time.
It was one-eighteen.
No good. It was no good me pretending there was any normal living to be done without Tommy, without at least seeing her off.
I hopped a cab. A twenty wagged in front of the driver got me to Queens in record-busting time. My legs busted a few more records getting me to Tommy's gate when I heard a call made for her flight to board.
I spotted her talking with Lamont. As I came up I caught a little of their conversation: “Demo … image … packaging …”
Lamont looked over, saw me. I heard: “Shit.”
Tommy was all light and smiles as she flew into my arms. “I knew you'd come.”
In an instant we were holding, hugging, kissing. Feeling good. Feeling all right. Feeling, at least, a lot of emotion. Some of Tommy's emotion, flowing from her eyes, soaked through my shirt and wet my chest. Tears so warm I felt them from one side of me through to the other.
“I don't want to go.”
“What are you talking?”
“I don't want to leave you.”
“You're not … It's just for a while.” I went into my cheer-up bits. “Why are you making a scene? You're going to Detroit, that's all. It's only a balloon ride away. You have to go.”
“Why? So I can be a big star? So I can make lots of money?” My own words spat back at me. They burned like acid.
I tried using reason to wear
Tommy down: “You've got a chance, a real chance at things. After all the time you put in trying to get your music heard, somebody hands you your first big break and you want to throw it all away?”
One more time her flight got called.
“What I want is something that's real, that means something.”
“I'm always going to be here for you. Doesn't get more real than that. We have time.”
“Do you know that, Jackie?”
I didn't know that. I didn't know what I was doing, what I was saying. I didn't know anything except that I loved Tommy enough that I wasn't about to let her throw her career away over … over me.
“What am I supposed to do?” I asked her.
“Tell me to stay.”
I hesitated. I said: “I love you.”
She said it again, she pleaded: “Tell me to stay.”
Tell her to stay? I could barely open my mouth to talk, and when I did all I could say, repeat: “We'll have time.”
After the shortest of minutes Tommy withdrew from me. She went to Lamont, exchanged words. She looked back to me, gave a quick wave—as if anything longer would have put her at risk of more breaking down—headed out a door and across the tarmac, up some stairs into her airliner.
Lamont came over to me.
“I know it must hurt—”
“Get on that plane.”
“But it's for the best.”
“Just get on the plane.”
Lamont did that. He got on the plane and pretty soon the stairs got taken away and the door was closed. The Super Connie got backed from where it was parked, it taxied, then sat up at the end of a runway, waiting there for me to do … something.
I did nothing.
The plane sprinted down the runway, flew for Detroit.
I went home.
part IV
Jackie Mason gave Ed Sullivan the finger. Live, onstage, on Ed's show—the show that he renamed after himself in 1955 just so there'd be no mistaking who was boss—Jackie Mason gave Ed Sullivan the finger.
Not really.
But Ed Sullivan thought Jackie gave him the finger. Jackie's set was running long. Ed, from offstage, was throwing Jackie hand signals to wrap up, get off. Jackie, nervous, started throwing hand signals back at Ed.
Jackie thought it was funny.
Ed thought Jackie zvas giving him. the finger.
Ed banned Jackie from his show.
That got Jackie blackballed from television.
That killed Jackie's career.
In the late 1950s, still in its adolescence, television was already that powerful. With a shot on Sullivan or Paar or God frey, a club act could be a household name before the night turned to day. Without that shot they could be same as they always were, nothing but somebody joking or crooning in a smoky room after dark.
And television didn't just change the lives of the people on the tube. Things got changed up for everyone. Once TV went coast-to-coast, the whole country was running on the same clock. We got entertainment live. We got sports live. We got news live.
We got the world live.
Civil rights protestors getting hit with water hoses and attack dogs live.
Mob bosses pleading the Fifth live.
Updates on Sputnik and Ike's bum ticker live.
And all of a sudden the whole wide world wasn't two or three steps removed anymore. All of a sudden a cathode-ray picture of every major event—glorious, gruesome, or graphic—was part of your living-room decor along with your pole lamp, cloverleaf coffee table, and BarcaLounger. And all of a sudden you couldn't plead no knowledge of what was happening dozen South or up North or out West. Like it or not, uninformed bliss went the way of hoop skirts and diicktails. Reality was checking in.
There are talking heads who'llyadder about how America lost its innocence when television started shining its blue light on us. But a country that was stolen from her natives and built on the backs of slaves and coolies was never innocent in the first place. All we did was shed our ignorance. TV was that powerful TV was that pervasive. But to take full advantage of it, you had to be part of it.
You couldn't be part of it if Ed Sullivan thought you gave him the finger.
March of 1958 to May of 1959
Frances Kligman was no longer Frances Kligman. Frances Kligman was Frances Clark.
CBS, who loved her so much when they caught her in the Village, loved her a little more after brow-beating the girl into de-ethnisizing her name.
I asked Sid about it.
He shrugged. “People don't mind watching Jews on TV, they just don't want to be reminded they're watching Jews on TV.”
Sid told me Fran went hellion when the suits tried to get her to go with Clark, said she didn't care who else had changed their names, she didn't care how big they'd gotten with their new names. She was Frances Kligman, end of story.
It took a fifty-three-minute phone call from Dinah Shore to convince her changing her name wasn't the same as selling her soul.
Other than that little blip, it was strictly good news for Fran. She had a new record on the way. With RCA this time. Chances were it would land big.
CBS didn't care to take chances. They had plans for their new starlet. The suits had Fran hold off a month or so in releasing the record. They wanted her to break it somewhere she'd get noticed. They wanted her to break it on the season premiere of the Sullivan show.
Fran was in Los Angeles when she got the news and was beside herself with excitement. Why shouldn't she be? A new record on the first show of a new season of Sullivan. Besides the fact she was a sensational talent, that kind of exposure guaranteed Fran would be a hit. And the Monday after the Sunday she went on, Frances Clark would be a household name.
After she got the word, the first call she made from the coast was to me insisting that I be there with her at the broadcast. Just like the old days. Just like back on Fourteenth Street.
I told her I wouldn't miss it for anything. Told her a bunch of times how happy I was for her.
We hung up.
From the other room my father yelled at me that he needed a fix.
ARTHUR MILLER HAD MARILYN MONROE. The army had Elvis. I had my father.
I hated my father. There was no other way, no gentler way of saying things. I hated him, but I stayed with him. It was a nutty kind of syndrome of abuse: It used to be his beatings, the fear of getting beat, that kept me close. Now that he was harmless and pathetic, it was guilt. An unspoken oath to my mother made me feel guilty about leaving him to himself. I would care for him for as long as he lived. And as long as he lived I would never be free.
How many ways are there for a drunk to die? How many ways are there for an addict to end his life? As many nights as I lulled myself to sleep counting the means. The mundane: Drunk falls down. Drunk bangs his head. Drunk is too drunk to do anything except lie there and bleed. The sensational: Dope fiend killed in hail of bullets as juice joint is raided by narcs. The simply ironic: Boozer, user, loser—his heart gives out trying to climb stairs and he ends up in a heap where my mother ended up in a heap years prior.
None of those things came to pass.
No matter how much the dope and liquor affected my father, it could not destroy him. He'd built himself a resistance. The smoke, the pills: hazardless. Alcohol to him was the same as a tall glass of cool water. There was nothing for me to do but sit and wait and wait and wait for him to no longer be.
How many ways are there for a drunk to die? How many ways are there for an addict to end his life?
As far as my pop was concerned, seemingly none.
Pulling myself from my rant, I apologized to Sid for having to sit through it. I'd come around his office to beat the chops, and here I was going off on my dad—that stinking lush. That lousy, drunken son of a …
Again to Sid: “Sorry.”
Sid sat wordless for a couple of ticks. He squirmed some in the chair behind his desk. “There's something you should know, Jackie. Something I should'v
e told you first off …” He paused, took a look around the room, out the window. He didn't look at me. “I had a, uh … There was a time when I drank a little too much. Little too much, little too often.”
I said: “Oh.” I said it with surprise, said it with curiosity. Mosdy I said it regretting I'd been talking about drunks dying in front of him.
“Forget little. I was an alcoholic. Still am. That's the thing about it: Once you've got it for booze, it stays with you.”
Sid waited for me to say something.
I said nothing.
Sid said: “After Amy was … died, I fell apart for a while. You don't know how it hurt when she … You feel that way for a couple of weeks, a few months, you get to where you don't want to feel anything. That's where the drink came in.” Absent of thought, he brushed fingers across the top of his desk. “When I hear you talk about your father …”
“You're different from my pop,” I veah, but-ed. “That guy, the way he treated me—”
“You don't think I abused my share of people?”
Right then I didn't know what to think.
“Never hit anybody. Was never violent.”
“Well, then, you didn't—”
“There are all kinds of abuse. My brother, his wife; you should ask them how good I was to be around when I was soused. My clients, the ones whose careers I was supposed to be handling when I was bent over a glass at noon.” His head dropped some. “It's no accident I've got no acts to my name, and the ones I do have are—”
“Are what, Sid? 'Cause, remember, me and Fran are two of them.”
That got a little smile out of him.
From me, cautiously: “But you're cleaned up now. I mean, that's the thing; my pop just wants to stay in his bottle. You got yourself clean … right?”
Sid nodded. “Had a relapse once. Other than that, I'm a good friend of Bill W's. I'm only telling you all this, Jackie, because you should know. You should know that people aren't perfect. That I'm not… I'm telling you this because, knowing how you feel about drunks …” For the first time since he started this run, Sid looked at me. “If you wanted to quit things …”
