by John Ridley
I listened without listening.
My thoughts were on Tammi Terrell, with new teeth and hair to go with the new name. Slowly, she was becoming different from me. I wondered if I—same name but with fancier clothes, pricey watches, and an ever-growing appetite for fame—was becoming different to her. And I wondered, too, if you took two people, two people who loved each other, if you took them and separated them so that they didn't grow together, was there no helping that they would eventually grow apart?
In a moment the radio show that I hadn't been minding made me pay attention.
SAMMY: I love Frank and he was the kindest man in the world to me when I lost my eye and wanted to kill myself. But there are many things that he does that there are no excuses for.
JACK: Well, I've heard stories, we've all heard stories about some of his behavior—slugging reporters, the “wrong door” raid—but I put myself in his place. A guy that talented—
SAMMY: Talent is not an excuse for bad manners. I don't care if you're the most talented person in the world. It does not give you the right to step on people and treat them rotten. This is what he does occasionally.
JACK: That's something right there; you talk about the most talented person in the world. Let me ask you this: In your opinion, who is the top singer in the country right now?
SAMMY: Without a doubt, and I say this humbly, but without a doubt, I think I am.
JACK: Really? Bigger than Sinatra?
SAMMY: Oh, yeah.
Well, that was … What was that? How could he say all those things? It was true. I knew it was true what he'd said about Frank and his occasional reigns of terror. And as far as who was the better act, anyone who'd ever seen Sammy onstage knew that pound for pound nobody could outperform him. But how—no, why? That's what I didn't get. Why go on the radio and throw a dart at Frank, especially when Frank was the kind of guy liable to pick it up and stab you with it.
Yeah, well. It was Sammy's business, not mine.
I started to go back to thinking on Tammi, but they called my plane. I put off my thoughts on her until I got in the air for New York.
CINCINNATI WAS THE PLACE. As good a place as any. Better than most. Just about right for what I did. I didn't arrive there with any ideas in my head, no grand scheme. It's not like I thought: Cincinnati, that's where I'll do it. Maybe what happened happened because of seeing Tammi, of being reminded what, to her, was important. Maybe what happened happened because of the gig itself. I was working the Wildwood. Headlining. Sid had made the trip with me, something he did more and more infrequently. I was beyond the hand-holding stage. Doing the road, for him, was just a change of pace, a break from dealing with the craziness that came from running interference for Fran against the weekly hoops CBS made her jump through despite the high ratings for her program.
Maybe it happened because Cincinnati was nothing. That's not a knock against the city. I mean that strictly in terms of the shows; they were nothing. Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing special. They contained very little sparkle in my post-Hollywood life. The opener would come out, do some numbers, I'd go on and fill an hour plus. Everyday as the sun chasing the moon. My first three nights I killed. Killing had become easy, same as drawing a shallow breath or falling asleep on a rainy afternoon. And maybe it was all those things jiggered together—the dull routine of performing, the non-importance of the shows themselves, Sid being there—that gave me the push I needed.
Maybe.
Whatever the reason, while I sat backstage that fourth night listening to the opener work his way through his set same as he'd done the night before and before and before, I took out of my coat pocket some dog-eared pages—stationery from the St. Regis hotel. It was an unnecessary gesture. I knew very well what was written on them. I'd read through them many times in the months since I'd been in San Francisco. But looking at the papers served a way of asking myself a question: You sure about this?
The opener went into his closing number.
The pages got folded and put back in my pocket.
Pretty soon I was onstage, the applause from my introduction trailing off. I let it die all the way out, and there I was one more time facing the quiet, familiar gulf between the audiences clapping and the telling of my first joke.
I paused for a second.
No. Not a pause. It was a hesitation. Nerves. Something I hadn't felt in a long while.
I hesitated, and then I said: “Thank you very much. I'm Jackie Mann, and I'm a Negro.”
Little bits of laughter.
“I have to tell you that because I wasn't always a Negro. I used to be colored. As I understand it, pretty soon we're going to be calling ourselves black. We keep changing what we call ourselves all the time. I think we're hoping we can confuse white people into liking us: ‘I hate them.’ ‘Who?’ ‘Those col … Ne … bla … never mind!’ You know, things are really getting tense with all this integration. Down in Alabama, Governor Wallace says the only way there's going to be integration is over his dead body. Well, Governor, if you insist. Don't get me wrong, folks. I'm not trying to scare you. I'm not antiwhite, I'm just pro-Negro. I'm so pro-Negro, I won't even pick the cotton out of a bottle of aspirin. I hand the bottle right to the drugstore man, tell him: You put it in there, you take it out!”
People just looked at me, some of them trying to figure out what in the hell I was yammering about. Some of them wanting to know why in the hell I was yammering about race nonsense when they'd paid for jokes. They looked, but they didn't laugh.
Some of them.
And some of them did laugh. Some of them couldn't stop laughing for the world. And not just straight laughter, not the same programmed yowls I'd gotten for years now. This time I got nervous laughter, excited laughter. I got some did-he-really-just-say-that laughter. With each setup I was walking those people to the edge of a cliff, then using a punch line to snatch them back at the very last second. It juiced them, shook them up. It kept them dancing to my tune. I hit a couple of dead spots, yeah, but I was doing this routine as fresh as the crowd was hearing it, and that very fact alone gave me a hot, hard buzz as well. My act was a roller coaster, wild and bone-shakin', and we were all riding it together.
The ride was sweet.
OLY HAUK SHOT spittle bullets from his mouth. They seemed to travel just above the speed of sound, hitting me in the face a split instant before his voice smacked into my ears.
“The fucking … kind of goddamn …” White-hot rage had short-circuited his communication skills.
Oly was the owner of the Wildwood and chief among the non-laughing bunch who'd caught my show. He didn't like what he'd seen and heard. Didn't like it at all. And the trouble he had talking didn't stop him from trying hard as he could to express his displeasure.
“… Paying you good goddamn money, and you stand up there and go on with some … some race-agitator shit! ”
We were in Oly's office. Basement of the club. Even at that I figured any minute we were going to get calls from people a county over complaining about the racket.
“He was good.” Sid, getting into things. Concerned about making Oly happy but backing me up. I could tell, in a fashion, he was glad an opportunity had come along for him to do something managerial. Something beside dealing with whatever new “problem” on Fran's show the network suits had imagined up so as to justify their existence. For him, going one-on-one with a club owner was like old times. “All I saw were people laughing.”
“You know what I saw?” Oly fired some spit bullets Sid's way. “I saw half of them laughing. Maybe half. I saw the rest of them stone-faced. You know what I heard? The sound of them getting up and walking out, or coming to me wanting their money back, and that's”—at me again—“ coming out of your pay!”
Sid started to say something, but Oly cut him off with “He wants to do that race shit, he can do it at an NAACP meeting. Tomorrow night I want jokes. Good jokes.”
Done with our scolding, sent walking, Sid and I found a d
iner and got ourselves a couple of sandwiches. I took mine with a Pabst.
Sid was quick with “He doesn't know what he's talking about,” trying to put the sound of Oly's voice out of my ears. “I've never seen you so good.”
Time, short as it was, had taken the edge off the high I'd felt onstage. My drink dulled it further. “I don't know …”
“Jackie, how many times have I seen your act? And you're good, you're funny, but tonight you were …” For a second, in his head, Sid relived my show. “You were sharp, you were smart, right on target. When'd you come up with that stuff?”
“San Francisco. Been kicking it around for a while. Maybe I should've kicked it around some more. A couple of years more.”
“The world's changing, Jackie. Comics, what they talk about, how they talk, that's changing, too. Tonight you were right where you needed to be.”
“Oly isn't wrong. There were as many people hating my stuff as liking it.” I caught Sid eyeing my beer. Shouldn't've been drinking in front of him. Shouldn't've been, but I took another sip.
“This time. Next time there could be twice as many loving it.”
“Or twice as many walking out. Sid, I've always been … I've always been likable onstage.” I was spouting the doctrine according to Chet Rosen. “And that's worked for me.”
“And maybe what you did tonight'll work better. Jackie, c'mon. You look me in the eye and tell me the laughs you were getting didn't feel good to you.”
Yeah, they felt good. A hot-shot straight-to-the-veins good, and my big scare was they were just as poisonous. I thought of Lenny Bruce, sharp and edgy. Sharp and edgy in a tiny basement coffeehouse for a handful of long-haireds. I thought of me, likable. Just likable, but likable in the best nightclubs in N.Y., L.A., and L.V. I was not the biggest comic around, not even close, but I had carved out a place for myself, done it against the odds and in fairly short order with room to climb higher. Was all that worth tossing away just to claim I had some edge to me?
Saying what I was feeling: “I just don't know.”
“You've got to forget about Oly, forget about… Yeah, people are going to give you grief over that kind of act, but you had—”
“That's what I'm saying; they're going to give me grief and they're going to stop giving me spots.”
“You had a voice tonight. That's what we've been talking about, having a voice.”
I finished off my beer as if some booze in my system might give me a little perspective.
The waitress gave us our tab, and I flipped out a twenty, told her to keep the change.
I liked that. I liked being able to toss around money without a thought to it.
I said: “Yeah, I had a voice, but that doesn't make it a good one.”
L.A. AGAIN.
Ciro's again, but different from before. Instead of me in the audience, it was me onstage with Louis Prima and Keely Smith. Opening, but opening at Ciro's. And opening at Ciro's was better than headlining most joints. It wasn't overflowing the way it was when Sammy played, but the house was full. It wasn't packed with celebrity flesh, but more than a few stars shone. Hollywood liked to go out at night. Hollywood liked to be seen.
The shows were outrageous, Louis shouting his way through a number as much as singing, Keely just about the only woman around with lungs enough to keep up with him and the band—big, brassy, and jive. Opening night was more like going to a party than to work, and there I was with a ringside seat for it all. As I sat and watched and listened, I believed I'd made the right decision post-Cincinnati, to just do what I did best: go up onstage and be likable, then sit back and drink down the nectar of the gods. Why blow it? I had worked hard. I had earned myself an unbelievably good life.
In short order it was going to be unbelievably better.
“LILIAH DAVI WANTS TO MEET YOU.”
My jaw just about hit the floor. I don't mean that as an expression. I mean my hole flapped open so wide, the only thing that kept my mouth bone from smacking tile was the flesh of my face.
Second night at Ciro's. After the show. Me in my dressing room and Herman Hover had just stepped through the door to deliver a haymaker.
I asked the only thing I could think to ask. “Liliah Davi? Are you sure?”
“Are you kidding?”
“Well …” Well what? As unlikely as it seemed, Liliah Davi wanted to do a drop-by. What was there to even consider? “Well, send her back.”
Herman started out, stopped, turned, and shared with me a smile that only men could understand.
Liliah Davi the European actress. The European actress, though her acting skills weren't the reason people—men in particular— flooded to her movies. Her breakthrough picture had been some kind of an art-house thing that nobody got. Liliah made it an international sensation just by standing onscreen and breathing. She did as much by doing as little for the celluloid junk that Hollywood put her in once they brought her stateside. But, good films, bad films; it didn't matter. Put a diamond in the dirt and even a blind man could see it.
As I was flipping through my mental dossier on her, Liliah walked through the door. It was like sex was walking into the room. She was five foot seven inches of curves and kisses with a smile for a kicker that was pure sin. Dark hair, dark eyes, Perm-A-Tan skin. She wore a beautiful black evening gown. Taffeta, maybe. Dior. Givenchy, probably. Strapless. It was seemingly held to her body by the same sexual attraction that gravitated everything else in the known universe her way. For a capper, a slit ran the garment from floor to thigh that gave reality a running start on imagination.
“Mr. Mann?” Her voice rode her accent the way a flute rides a tune. She held out a hand—gloved to above the elbow—the way you see royalty do it, wrist bent, back side up and finger diving for the floor.
All I knew about greeting chicks on her level was what I'd seen in the movies. “Miss Davi.” I took her hand, kissed it doing my best Cary Grant bits. “It's a pleasure.”
“The pleasure is mine.”
I waited for her to take her hand back.
She didn't.
I said to her: “I saw your last picture. You were fabulous.”
“Some people say that I cannot act.”
There was bait on that line. If she'd been just another movieland bimbo, I'd have distracted her with shiny words. But I was pretty sure this one was fishing around trying to find out if I'd blow her smoke or tell her true.
“I'm not sure it's strictly acting, but what you do you do better than anyone alive.”
Her lips made a gesture—they parted slightly. They bent upward—but what you'd call it, I don't know.
She said: “I enjoyed your performance this evening. You were quite sharming.”
“Really?”
“What I could understand I thought amusing.” A slight pause. “But truly I enjoyed watching you.”
I could feel beads of perspiration ripening on my forehead, and I willed them to stop. I didn't know for sure, but I was pretty certain that gorgeous stars weren't impressed by sweaty comics.
“Will you be long in Los Angeles?” she wanted to know.
“Just pretty much this week, with the show.”
“Oh.”
A beat.
Liliah said: “I won't keep you. I'm sure you are quite busy. I only wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed you.”
I don't recall Liliah taking her hand from mine as much as I remember my grasp never having felt quite as empty as when I no longer held it.
“I will see you,” she said as she floated for the door, the comment as inscrutable as the bat of her eyes that went with it.
And then she was gone.
I poured myself a glass of water and drank it down. I drank another.
I MADE A DISTRACTED WALK from Ciro's back to the Sunset Colonial. I was tired and I was preoccupied, my head rerunning the scene of me meeting Liliah over and over again. I sort of recall talking with Doary, who was cleaning, for a moment—her asking about the show and me telling her
something or other but not really paying her much attention. Then I was upstairs, in my bed, wanting desperately to sleep but unable to do so. Liliah kept me awake.
It wasn't that I was obsessing on her. I never thought for a moment I could mean anything to her other than a good night's laugh. It was more that I was thinking about how utterly incredible it was to even meet such a woman. It wasn't that long ago I was sitting and watching her movies or slowing down at the newsstand when I saw a fluff rag with her picture on the cover, same as every other man in America. Now, unlike most men in America, I'd actually looked her in the eye, held her hand, and traded quips. I pinned a medal on my chest, thinking: I bet Lenny Bruce has never done that.
The phone rang. I'm not sure if it rang me awake from sleep or a daydream. I jumped, anxious, not startled. For one quick moment, for whatever insane reason, I thought it might be Liliah calling me.
“Jackie … oh, my God, where have you …”
It was the most moan-ful sounding voice I'd ever heard, filled with so much despair, I almost didn't recognize it.
“Sammy?”
“Why didn't you call me?”
“Call you? I didn't know—”
“I left messages. You didn't get—”
“I was doing my show. I came back here, came right up to my—”
“You've got to come over. Will you come over? Please?”
“What time is it?”
“Jackie, please.” Some sobbing, then: “I've got to talk to you. I need your help.”
My help? He needed my help? The idea of it was crazy, but how could I say no? I got the address, hung up. I looked at the clock. Five forty-three.
Twenty minutes later and I was navigating my rental toward Sammy Davis, Jr.'s home.
SAMMY LIVED IN THE HILLS. The Hollywood Hills. The formerly all-white Hollywood Hills. Liberal Tinseltown talked a good game, was all for putting a better world up onscreen, but same as most uni-colored enclaves, they weren't about to do any handstands and tuba playing over a black guy moving in next door. Then Mr. Entertainment showed up. When Sammy Davis, Jr. decides to set up shop on your block, there isn't much stopping him. That was the kind of juice he had.
