by John Ridley
“Colored?” Fran mocked. “Is it nineteen forty-eight where you live? The word is Negro.”
Actually, according to Mo and the militant fringe, it was black. But I just kept my mouth shut and did some quiet hoping that things would get worked out.
“Whatever you call him—”
“I call him Jackie.” Fran turned away from Les like he was no longer worth conversing with and made her appeals to the network suit. “It took me this long to get you to let me have Jackie on the show, and now you're telling me I can't kiss him?”
All the suit had to say for himself was “Frances …”
“I kiss him all the time.” To prove it, Fran crossed the office, came low, and gave me a kiss. No cheek this time. Mouth to mouth. Very firm. Very intense. Long, not short. Her anger equaled passion. I'd never before realized what a good kisser Fran was. Breaking from me, to the room: “How's that? You like that?”
“Quite provocative,” Les said. “And what you do here in this office is your business. My business is selling Fatima cigarettes, and selling Fatima cigarettes is going to be difficult to do in a large part of the country if we are identified with race mixing.”
Fran snapped back with “Well, I'll tell you what: I'll put on a white hood and do a couple of ads for you. Think that'll move a few packs?”
Les's smile remained constant.
The CBS guy weaseled his way back into the conversation. “Frances …”
“Stop saying my name! ”
“Do you remember when Sammy Davis, Jr. was on the Eddie Cantor show? He shook his hand. That's all Eddie did was shake Sammy's hand. Do you know what kind of a hit Colgate sales took?”
“And that was how many years ago? It's almost nineteen sixty-one. Things are changing. Things have changed.”
“Not enough,” the suit said. “They'll never change that much. Fra—” He started to say her name but remembered Fran's edict. Getting right to his point: “Look, kiss Jackie, make babies with Jackie … I don't care what you do with Jackie as long as it's not Tuesday night at eight-thirty Eastern Standard Time on the Columbia Broadcasting System.”
Les turned his smile toward me. “Speaking of Jackie, we haven't even asked him how he feels. After all, he is part of this.”
He was sly bringing me into things. I'd tried to stay out of the discussion, and Les knew why. Like loaded dice, he knew which way I would tumble. And after I hesitated in answering, so did Frances.
Sid. If Sid were here, he could have found a way out of this for me.
There was a beat, one heartbreaking beat, then:
“Jackie …” Fran pleaded. “Oh, Jackie, don't. Is it that important to you?” Her voice was full with ache. Just having to ask me this question was causing her pain. “Is getting on TV more important than …” She crossed back over the room in a stride, took my arms in her hands, took them and squeezed them until her finger struck bone as if, by touch alone, she could give me an IV of inner strength. In a desperate beg she said: “Stand up for yourself! One time,just one time, would you please stand up for yourself!”
Was she saying that to me? Was she really saying …?
I had. I had.
I'd stood up for myself years back when Sid said he wanted to rep a comic but not a singer. I'd stood up for myself and told Sid if he didn't take on Frances Kligman, he couldn't take on me. So he took on Frances. And Sid got Fran the record deal that got her the CBS audition that got her the CBS pilot that got her her own show. What had standing up for myself gotten me? It'd bought me a window seat to someone else's skyrocketing career. It'd gotten me into a tight spot in a back office squeezed between a couple of suits and Fran Clark, who was telling me to stand up for myself. Just one time, stand up for myself.
“Fran it… it's just a kiss. … ” I looked away from her when I said it.
I shouldn't have said anything.
What I should have done was open up my hand, open it wide, and with the whole of it slap sweet Frances hard as I could across the face. The effect would have been the same. Maybe the hurt would have been a little less.
Fran moved away from me. She stood in the middle of the room, staring at me same as if she were trying, without success, to recognize someone she used to know. Her face was pure confusion. A thousand years of study wouldn't begin to help her understand the strange thing I'd become.
God, Sid, why aren't you … You could've handled this. You could've …
Fran turned to the other two men in the room.
Fran said: “It is my show, and if I want to, I will kiss him.”
Him, she said. Him, like I didn't have a name anymore. Like I was no longer a person, just a symbolic object that's only purpose was for Fran to rally her convictions around.
A new volley of arguing started up. I left the room, unnoticed by the others, so that the chips could fall. I left the room feeling like a snake slithering its way through weeded grass.
I DIDN'T DO THE SHOW. Sid told me, later—feeling better—he tried talking to Fran, tried working out a compromise, but that she wouldn't back down and neither would the sponsor. And even though the Fatima guy and the CBS suit were pretty sure I'd play along, they figured Fran would kiss me out of spite, and as the show was broadcast live, that meant a good chunk of the country would see some real-time race mixing. So I didn't do the show.
It was just a kiss. I know to Frances it was a sign of friendship, and friendship wasn't anything that you tossed away just because some guy is afraid he isn't going to be able to push as many smokes next week as he did last week. But to me it was just a kiss, just a touch of lip to cheek that was standing in the way of myself and twenty-two million people. I tried to tell Fran that, tried to explain my thinking: It was just a kiss.
She wouldn't take my call.
I wrote her a letter.
Sid hand-delivered it.
He told me Frances tore it up without reading it. She tore it up; then she cried.
Fran had been my best friend, and twice I'd done her wrong. My jealousy over her making it, getting Sullivan when I didn't, she could forgive. My betrayal she couldn't.
In that office, her clutching arms, telling me to stand up for myself: It was the last time Frances and I ever spoke.
CHICAGO. TWO weeks in St. Louis. Cleveland …
I was back on the road. I was paid well. I did well.
I was still just a club comic.
Maybe a little more well known than some others. Maybe I ran with a better crowd. But still nothing but a club comic.
Boston, Philly, Baltimore …
Los Angeles.
After Baltimore I had a hole in my schedule, so I headed back West. I planed it. A train was cheaper, but it was also slower. I was in a hurry to be there.
“Hello,Zhaqué.”
Liliah was waiting for me in the terminal. She was dressed down, trying to avoid attracting attention. Her version of dressed down would've put some royalty to shame. I would've figured, a woman like Liliah, whatever it was that she found amusing in me would have long since gone dull. It hadn't. She came to me as I greeted her. We kissed, heavy and deep—Liliah physically placid even as her mouth searched mine—and I knew that the dysfunction that formed the core of our relationship remained.
Together again, me and Liliah made the Hollywood scene: a show at the Pantages. Dinner at Mocambo or Crescendo. Just that quick, not a stride missed, I was back riding that pony like I'd never been off. Only, this time around I was more careful. Liliah and I were clandestine, as private as we could be in public. There were whispers and there was talk, but we did our best to avoid cameras, avoid documentation that a man couldn't lie his best girl into disbelieving.
There's a line of thought that asks: How could I do that; how could I have a girl like Tammi—how could I say I loved a girl like Tammi—and still sly around on the side?
Fair question.
The answer comes in being caught up between two competing emotions: love and desire. If I were in a plan
e and it was crashing and I knew that in an instant I would be dead to the world, my final thought—my only thought—would have been of Tammi.
I loved Tammi.
But I was not in a plane and I wasn't crashing. My thoughts were not terminal but were of the moment. And sometimes, in the moment, love's got to accommodate desire.
I wanted Liliah.
THE WILLIAM MORRIS AGENCY was the most powerful talent agency in the world. If you didn't know that walking in the door, the pictures of its clients that lined the walls of its Beverly Hills digs told you so. Superstars. One-name stars: Berle, Monroe, Presley, Thomas, Sinatra, Davis, McQueen.
I was seated at a big table, an oak monolith laid to its side that the room seemed to be built around. Seated with me was Chet Rosen, whom I knew, two other agents I'd just met, and Abe Last-fogel, whom I hadn't met previously but had heard plenty about. Abe was head of the William Morris Agency, and as head of the agency, it was a call from his office that did what, up till then, Chet had been unable to do—break down my loyalties enough for me to take a meet-and-greet with WMA.
Looking like a four-eyed bulldog with wavy hair, J. Edgar Hoover in a blue suit, Abe was older by a good couple of decades than the other agents who themselves varied in age, shape, and size. What they had in common besides the blue suits that were apparently their combat gear was a certain quality of beguile. It was not readily apparent. Subtle, understated, but very much a part of them. A quiet callus developed over time that had come from playing angles for so long that their sharp edges had been worn round. The men, the agents, were all so very, very smooth. Smooth to the point of being slick.
The meeting started with small talk, the agents clattering among themselves for my benefit:
“See the overnights on Berle's special?”
“Great. Absolutely great.”
“It's going to come up in the nationals.”
“You know what I was thinking, that new comic we just signed—”
“Stunt him on Danny's show?”
“Great exposure. Could land him a series.”
“I'll bring it up in the staff meeting.”
When they finished up with all their agent jazz, Chet got to things with: “I'm really glad you could sit down with us, Jackie. We're all really big fans of yours, and we just wanted to have a chance to talk.”
One of the other agents—Howie, I think his name was—said, not harsh, but with just a bit of barb attached: “We usually don't have this much trouble getting people to take meetings with us.”
“Well, Jackie has an agent. A good one,” Abe said. “And I don't want you to think for a second we're trying to poach you, Jackie. We don't do that. We don't take clients from small agents.”
He was trying to show he was a stand-up fellow, but the way he said “small agents” made me think otherwise.
“Say, what happened with The Fran Clark Snow?” Chet wanted to know. “Weren't you supposed do that a month or so ago?”
“That didn't… There was a problem.”
“Have they got you re-booked?”
“I don't think … ” I didn't much feel like explaining things, so I said again: “There was a problem,” and hoped to leave it at that.
Chet didn't seem to get my meaning. “A problem? What did Sid do about it?”
“Everything he could. He said he did.”
“Yes, however,” Abe tolling in, “what exactly did he do on your behalf?”
“I don't… Everything he could.”
The room got very still. It was as if there were a whole lot of lament going around and no one knew for sure how to put a stop to it.
“Jackie, we didn't ask you here to speak badly of your agent, but I think, for your own benefit, there are some things we should discuss.” Abe sounded grave as a doctor about to outline radical surgery for a near-terminal patient. “As comedians go, you are one of the most popular club comics working. But you are a club comic and, honestly, Sid is partly to blame for that.”
I started to protest.
Abe cut me off with “Yes, I know he's gotten you where you are, and I don't mean to imply that he's actively doing anything to hold you back. I just don't think he has the connections to move you any further ahead. And, being a Negro performer, you need special handling.”
The other agent, the fourth one in the room, nodded and threw in a few affirmatives.
“I guess the question is: Are you happy being just a club comic?”
Abe left that line out there dangling for me.
“No.”
“What are you looking for in your career?” Chet asked. “What is it you want?”
What did I want? Easy. Same thing I'd always wanted. Money, fame. Respect. And anyone who didn't give it to me? I wanted to be able to crush them Sinatra-style.
How did I get that?
“Sullivan,” I said. “I want to do the Sullivan show.”
Well, let me tell you: If I expected the heavens to open up and these four to hit the dirt before my grand plans, then I expected wrong. They just sort of sat and nodded same as if all I'd asked for was a stick of Wrigley's.
Chet wanted to know: “What else?”
I blank-faced.
“In terms of other television, your own show, getting some movie roles …”
“I don't know. I hadn't really—”
“You never talked it over with Sid?” Howie asked. “Never put together any long-term plans?”
“I figured … I thought, you know, once I got Sullivan …”
More quiet. More of that lament making its way around the room. The agent's non-responses saying: “Oh, Jackie, you poor, ignorant boy.”
Abe: “The Ed Sullivan Show is a good thing. A very good thing. Honestly, for an act such as yourself, the Sullivan show is the kind of exposure that can truly set you right. But you have to look at it not as a be-all and end-all but rather as the beginning of the rest of your ascent.”
Again the fourth agent nodded and yessed all that. A one-man, ten percent, Baptist congregation.
Chet: “Just curious. Why haven't you done Sullivan? The auditions didn't go well?”
“I haven't auditioned.”
“You haven't even auditioned?” Chet offered that up with equal parts shock and disbelief.
“Sid wanted to make sure I was ready. He said I should be ready before I auditioned.”
“How much more ready do you have to be than opening act for the Rat Pack?”
I gave a nervous sputter: “Actually, Frank doesn't like the term—”
“The Rat Pack at the Sands,” Howie tagged.
Like I'd thought first off, these boys were slick. They said they weren't going talk down Sid. They were good to their word. They were letting me badmouth him for myself.
Abe to Chet: “Don't you know Bob Precht?” Abe to me: “Bob is Sullivan's producer.”
Chet: “Sure. I see him almost every other week at Sardi's. Think he owes me a favor.”
Abe looked to me, opened his hands palms up as if to say: Well, there it is.
Yeah. There it was. Sullivan. Sullivan, and all that came with it. Sullivan just sitting there for me. All I had to do was reach out and take it.
That was all I had to do.
But I couldn't.
Every word these men were saying connected straight to the organ of aspiration that had driven me for the last half decade. The picture they had painted for me was sunlight bright, and clear as a Minnesota lake. And all they were offering—to simply get me where I most wanted to be—was only the shake of a hand away. But it was a gesture I could not make myself complete. Sid was in the way. I couldn't bring myself to shove aside all he'd done for me just for some guys who knew how to do alchemy with their tongues.
But all the loyalty I felt for Sid barely gave me the strength to say: “I really need to think about it.”
“You take your time,” Abe offered. Offered like it really didn't matter to him which way I jumped. “We want you to feel co
mfortable with whatever you decide.”
That wasn't what I wanted to hear. What I wanted to hear was a little browbeating, some verbal pushing and shoving that would've gotten me over the border between devotion and urge. But all I got was some “thank yous,” some “all the bests,” and a “keep in touch” as I was walked to the elevator that took me to the lobby, to the street, to the California sunshine, and back to life as I knew it.
“WHAT'S WRONG, JACKIE?”
Just hearing Tammi's voice, even over the phone, and all the craziness in my life seemed less so. It was as if her voice had a physicality, and its very touch was able to ease me calm.
She asked again: “What's wrong?”
“I met with some agents today. Some guys from William Morris.”
“You're leaving Sid?” She wasn't accusatory. She wasn't judgmental. She just asked.
“No. No, I couldn't do it. All that he's done for me, all the times he's been there for me, I couldn't just cut him off. I don't think I ever could.” I took a beat. “But sometimes I look at the way my life's gone: I do good at some club and get introduced to some guy who turns me on to some star who gets me somewhere … How much of that is Sid, and how much of that is luck? And if I'm just depending on luck, what happens when my luck runs out?”
“Then maybe you should leave Sid, sign with the Morris boys.”
I didn't expect that kind of talk. Not from Tammi I didn't.
“It's that, or you spend the rest of your life resenting Sid because you think he's holding you back, and that's no good either.”
“I could never … What would I—”
“You tell him the truth. He might hurt, but someone like Sid could never hate you for the truth.”
She was like a rock. In my world, that had become mixed up as some kind of wild Droodle, Tammi was like … I fell back on the bed. Looking over at the nightstand through tear-blurred eyes: the box. The jewelry box with the little ring that should've been on Tammi's finger. I traveled with it always. Why, I…
Because.
Because one day I would get over myself and get on a plane or a train, or I would walk if I had to, but I would get myself to Tammi. I would get that ring on her finger. I would make her forever mine.
