by John Ridley
It was nutty. We were not more than five, six feet apart, but it might as well have been a mile. The two of us were traveling in different directions in life and picking up speed, and all the glad-handing in the world couldn't cover that in a short span of time we'd become not much more than just two guys who used to know each other. Strangers with familiar faces.
I thanked Li'l Mo for the sympathy arrangement he'd sent.
“I was sorry when I heard,” he said. “Your old man was a—”
“Bastard?”
He smiled a little, genuine this time. “Still, ain't never nothing easy about losing folk.”
I shrugged to that, not wanting to get into my complicated and double-minded feelings concerning my father.
Instead: “So, what's going on with you?”
“Got a job at the Times.”
“The Times? That's terrific.” I dialed up my enthusiasm. “That's perfect for you. You've always been a sharp brother, always had a head on you. That's sure to be the kind of gig where you could—”
“I load papers onto the trucks.” Li'l Mo was flat and even about it. He didn't say it like what he did was a bad thing. He most certainly didn't say it like the job was any good.
I didn't much know how to respond, if I should modify my compliments or wish him luck getting the hell out of that spot fast as he could.
“But you doing all right, Jackie.”
Underplaying: “Guess I am.”
“Sure you are. See your name in the paper and whatnot. See you working at this club or that.”
“Wish you'd come down sometime,” I offered. “Catch a show.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I'd like that. 'Cept, I don't suppose they'd let me catch a show at the Copacabana. Guess I could see you at the Apollo. Guess I could. If you ever played the Apollo.” He slipped me that no different than if he was slipping me a knife.
I tried to get things going in a different direction with: “Well, I'll tell you, Li'l Mo”
“Morris. I don't go for Li'l Mo. Not no more.”
A half a mile got added to the gap between us.
Morris looked around at my collection of packed boxes. He said as much as asked: “Moving, huh?”
“Just taking it downtown some.”
“We'll miss you up here.”
“Midtown ain't China. And you know you can—”
“That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is we can't afford to be losing good brothers. Doesn't look right.”
“What doesn't look right? That Negroes are making it, that they're moving up?”
“Moving up means moving out, leaving the rest of your people behind? It's saying you're not really a successful black until you don't have to live with blacks anymore. So, you—brothers like you leaving—it doesn't look right.”
“So I should stay here just 'cause that'll look good to some other Negroes—”
“The word is black.”
“And you don't think it looks good to other Negroes”—used in spite—“ that I've worked hard enough I can live in a good neighborhood.”
“Harlem's no good?”
“I didn't say …” Just then I realized how hard I was breathing. The effort this conversation took was the same as running uphill with lead in your pockets. “There's nothing here for me anymore.”
“And how's there ever going to be anything here for anybody, when soon as they can the blacks who get over get out?”
“Come on with that. I can't help what other people do. I'm talking about me. If I go, if I stay; one person isn't going to matter one way or the other.”
Morris nodded like he understood. Nodded, but said: “Not one person. One more person.”
After that we were done talking. Done truly talking with each other. We pretended to go on a bit about sports, music. Subjects that were conversable but not combustible. But it was plain we were talking just so neither of us would feel like we didn't do all we could do to keep up our false-front friendship.
With “Guess I need to be getting on my way,” Morris indicated the game was over.
“It was real good seeing you Li … Morris.”
We hugged again, awkwardly again, and Morris left.
I closed the door.
“IS THERE SOMETHING WRONG, JACKIE?”
Tommy was on the phone.
“No,” I lied. “Everything's … everything is—”
“You seem so quiet.”
“I'm just … you know, just…”
“If there's something you want to tell me …”
“Just a little tired.”
I couldn't say for sure why I was lying. It wasn't as if my father passing was some particularly traumatic event Tommy needed shielding from, that sooner or later she wasn't going to find out he'd died. But my reasons for doing what I was doing were many, just not good. I didn't want to burden Tommy with my grief while she was putting together her record. I didn't want her worrying about me when her career gave her worry enough. The recording was coming slowly but well, she said. The song was sounding good, she said. She said she was thinking of going with a stage name. Tammy felt more girlish, sweeter, than Tommy, she said. So let her concern herself with all that and let me leave my pop out of things.
Truth was, at the minute, I didn't want anybody's worry. I didn't want any more sympathy, or people asking how I was holding up. I didn't want to have to try to explain my jumbled-up feelings over Pop's death. Most of all I didn't want to be reminded of or have to deal with those feelings myself. Denial was better all around. Better, especially, for Tommy. That's what I told myself anyway, told myself that what I was doing—lying—I was doing for her.
Tommy didn't get any of that.
All Tommy got from my quiet voice, from my distant and dodgy nature, was that she was being pushed away when, in reality, I wanted nothing more than to hold her close.
She told me in a week's time she would be playing at the Riv in Atlantic City. She told me how badly she wanted me to come down. Even if she couldn't see me from the stage, just wanted to know that I was in the audience. She told me how much she wanted nothing more than to be with me.
I told her the week she would be in A.C. was the week I would be working Slapsie Maxie's in Los Angeles.
Her opening night I sent Tommy flowers and a “break a leg” card.
part V
Hollywood was hurting. Hollywood was getting knocked around. A little wood box with a cathode tube was doing the knocking. Television, still mostly a New York thing, was snapping up Hollywood jobs and snatching away movie audiences. Hollywood hated television. Hollywood couldn't do anything about television.
The studios were having a rough go of things those years of wandering between their golden age and the time when they finally threw up their hands and started supplying the box with programming. So, with nothing else to do, Hollywood went on doing what it did best—putting up a fake front of glamour and significance. It kept sipping cocktails on the deck of a slow-sinking ship.
Hollywood, more an idea than an actual location, was still one big fat Roman orgy of liquor, pills, and passion. Price of admission: starhood. It was still a place where studio fat cats the size of Louis Mayer could keep out of jail and out of the tabloid rags one of his drunk stars who'd hit-and-run some poor Harvey stepping off the wrong curb. It was a place where every day at four o'clock all business at the Fox lot came to a standstill while Darryl Zanuck was getting serviced down low by wannabe starlet #32. It was a place where Harry Cohn could take a chick like Margarita Cansino, pluck her eyebrows, electrolysis her hairline, give her a dye job, diet her into a sexpot, bury her Latina heritage, and wa-la—Rita Hay-worth.
Hollywood did a lot of that, a lot of wa-la-ing, star manufacturing. Constance Ockleman got wa-la-ed into Veronica Lake. Issur Danielovitch into Kirk Douglas. Betty Joan Perske became Lauren Bacall. Bernard Schwartz? Wa-la. Tony Curtis. Sometimes, because it was Hollywood and Hollywood did what it wanted, it performed its little magic act in reverse. Ava
Gardner was born Ava Gardner, but studio PR flaks told the world her real name was Lucy Ann Johnson just so Tinseltown would get the credit for inventing the girl.
And when the dream factory wasn't constructing its own talent, it was overseas Shanghaiing stars and dragging them stateside: Brigitte Bardot. Gina Lollobrigida. Liliah Davi. Sophia Loren.
Hollywood, U.S.A. If they don't have it, they make it. If they can't make it, they steal it. If they can't steal it, they get the press boys to convince you you didn't want it in the first place. Its only true concern was generating fame, money, and power by any and all means.
In the whole of the world, was there any more perfect place?
June of 1959 to January of 1960
The Noon Balloon took me West. I hadn't been in Los Angeles since, years ago, a change of trains on the way to Washington State gave me a couple of minutes to try to spot the Hollywood sign. I couldn't see it.
Now, not too many years later, driving a rental from Union Station to my hotel, the sign—giant white letters that looked to me a mile high each—was plainly visible from where it sat on the hills that separated L.A. from its valley neighborhoods. The city was as I'd left it: sunshine and open spaces. In reality a bunch of suburbs— Boyle Heights and Silver Lake and Echo Park and Los Feliz and Inglewood and Brentwood and Westwood. And Hollywood—pearl-strung together by endless stretches of dirt roads, urban streets, and superhighways that would take you wherever you wanted to go: city or beaches or mountains or rugged countryside. There was all that in one place. There was so much. There was so very, very much. Everything about Los Angeles cried growth and opportunity. It was Outpost America, the far edge of our nation. It resembled the rest of the country but refused to adopt her cultures and customs, opting instead for a carefree existence. Because, maybe, of the heat from the always-present sun, because, maybe, of the weak scattering of trades other than the entertainment business, there was a particular ease and dreamlike manner overlaying the constant hubbub of its one true industry: getting famous and staying famous and grabbing back fame once lost. After the crush and crowds, the cold shoulder, get tough or get lost bump that New York continuously tossed you, the casual flow of life in the pueblo was a warm and friendly embrace that told you to slow down, relax. All things would come to you in their time. In their time. But somewhere, in some manner, it was there for me. It—eveiything Hollywood had to offer—was there, a hidden gift that only had to be found to be enjoyed.
For my two weeks in Los Angeles I made the Sunset Colonial my pad. The hotel was ground zero for a bushel of fresh-off-the-bus actor and actress types. It sloshed beefcake boys and bottle blondes. They'd headed west with a lot of ideas on becoming stars. Ideas, but not a single plan on how to reach their destination. With nothing better to do, they made looking good their business. Poolside became their office. They idled there sunup to sundown, plying their trade, waiting to get over.
Waiting.
They would wait as long as it took, or wait until the waiting broke them and sent them limping back to whatever life they used to live before hitting L.A.
I hit the Colonial. The cat at the desk checked me in in a very businesslike fashion. Businesslike right up until I let it slip accidentally on purpose I was working Maxie's, that I'd worked the Copa and the Sands, that I was a legitimate talent. Then the kid couldn't “Mr. Mann” me enough.
That was the nutty thing about Los Angeles, about Hollywood: different from the rest of America that was caught up in its race problem—either trying to beat people of color down, or lift them up to stroke their liberal guilt—the only color Hollywood cared about was green: You make money for somebody, you turn a profit and return a dividend, there isn't anybody who doesn't love you no matter what you are. The guy behind the counter was obvious in his hoping that I'd introduce him around, get him an “in” someplace where people with real juice congregated, so I got treated decent.
I got the same warm hand from the rest of the staff. Hector the valet; Rick the bell captain; and Doary White, a sweet young black girl, a maid at the hotel with a perpetual smile—similar in fashion to the smiles the starlets-in-training tossed me as they floated around the pool wearing something next to nothing. But their smiles were just show. I was hep enough to know the real goods they saved for the moguls and producers, the big-box-office actors who could tra-ject their careers upward. All a guy my size would ever get was ivory from a distance. I didn't take it personal. In Hollywood, if you had nothing to offer, you were nothing; and people wanting things from people, that was just business. Truth of it was those poolside girls, women who in any other city would be hanging on street corners whistling at the cars that slow-rolled by, made me thank God I had a girl like Tommy.
Unlike the headline clubs I'd been working—me opening for some name talent—Slapsie Maxie's was a showcase room, a bunch of acts who filled a bill that ran on into the night. A good place for scouts, agents, and studio suits to catch a string of performers live. Deals—TV deals, movie deals, record deals—got made over drinks at the bar. Your career, your life; all you needed was one solid set to alter them forever. A truth reflected in the eyes of the acts who x-rayed the mingling suits desperate to find the one who would elevate them to a place just short of immortality.
I had three solid sets. My first three nights at Maxie's were strictly killers. People nearly choked, they were laughing so hard.
No one offered me any deals.
TV, movies—neither was ready for the next black sensation. They barely knew what to do with the colored acts they had. I waited at the bar alone. A fast girl waiting for a trick who never showed. I was just like that. I would have pimped myself easy, said anything, done anything to please any John with juice. There were no takers.
On the fourth night, the fourth night of killing again, the fourth night of again watching lesser acts take sit-downs with suits, I decided I needed to do something with myself. Something besides go back to the Colonial and look at my reflection in a dozen phony smiles.
Outside. I hopped in my rental, drove for the Sunset Strip—a tease of bright-light nightspots for drinking or dancing or just being seen at a scene. I got myself to Ciro's. Besides that it wasn't far from the Colonial, Ciro's was a cinch to find. All you had to do was look for the line of people waiting to get in. There was always a line when the top acts played the top nightclub in the West. That night the line was around the block. They'd come to see Sammy Davis, Jr.
Officially, the sign on the marquee read: THE WILL MASTIN TRIO FEATURING SAMMY DAVIS, JR., the other two of the three being Sammy's father and uncle. But the sign might as well have read: SAMMY DAVIS, JR. AND A COUPLE OF OTHER NEGROES. Sammy was a one-man show. He could sing, he could dance, he could do impressions, tell jokes, play instruments, do gun tricks … He could and would do all that. He would do it, and do it, and do it some more, then for an encore give you another hour's worth of dazzle. The show only ended not because Sammy got tired but because you were so worn out from watching, you couldn't take any more entertainment.
Mr. Entertainment, they called him. Like his B'way show, they called him Mr. Wonderful. That was no lie. But he should've been called Mr. You-Can-Line-up-to-See-Him-and-Wait-for-a-Bunch-of-Hours-but-That-Don't-Mean-You're-Going-to-Get-In. He drew a crowd that made even the audience Sinatra pulled look barely big enough to fill a Hoboken whiskey joint. Jesus couldn't sell out his water/wine shtick if Sammy was booked next door. All I could hope for was to maybe, maybe, get past the front door. But I felt like sucking up some Hollywood. Felt like trying. There were about two hundred other people cooling their heels outside making the same try. I walked for the club entrance, passing a bunch of recognizable faces. Stars. Mosdy TV personalities. No one too big, but they were three times my size at least. If they couldn't get in …
At the door was a humorless guy, young, suited, hands folded before him, standing behind a velvet rope. Might as well have been a brick wall.
I said: “I'm Jackie Mann. I'm here to
see the show.”
“You and everybody else,” the fellow said, nodding at everybody else in case I hadn't noticed them.
“ I was told a ticket would be left for me.”
“Yeah. A ticket. We got lots of tickets sitting around for jokers who show up last minute. You want one, or you want fifty?” The guy was good with sarcasm. He must've worked at it daily.
“Is there any way—”
“The way is for you to stand in line with the rest, and wait for whatever empty seats we've got.”
I looked over at “the rest.” Ten more people and they could've petitioned to become a state.
I walked away from the guy behind the velvet rope. I was replaced instantly by an older man complemented with a busty redhead who looked like he knew getting any play from her depended critically on getting the girl on the other side of that velvet border.
The good thing at least was Ciro's wasn't too far off from the Sunset Colonial. I could make the short drive back to my room, maybe read. Maybe watch some television. Maybe I could just sit around and watch night become day. Time was cheap to me.
“Mr. Mann! ”
I turned. It was the fellow behind the velvet rope. Only he wasn't behind the velvet rope. He was running for me, sporting a sweat sheen that came from something other than the couple of yards he had to cover to chase me down.
Flustery: “Mr. Mann, I'm so sorry. I didn't… I was on vacation last week and no one told me that… We have your table, sir, if you'd just please come with me. Please.”
Well, can I tell you: That last “please” wasn't asking, it was begging. The boy looked on the verge of tears, about to bust out crying for the job he'd lose if he didn't manage to get me back to the club. I hadn't wanted to, didn't even know if I should've used Frank's name first off. But it was plainly obvious it was the shadow of Sinatra that was putting the fear into him, not me.
I just rolled with it. “Sure, kid,” I showbizzed. “Lead the way.”
