The Dick Gibson Show

by Elkin, Stanley

  “For the most part, though, I’m above tricks. Instead, I pour myself into these demo’s. (But demonstration records are expensive. I pay for the sessions myself, and press up to a hundred at a time. Something had better happen soon, no kidding. Networks and affiliates please note.) What programs these would make! Honeys! I could change America. But what do you need me for to do that, hey you big shots? You do it yourself every thirteen weeks. There are always stars. We breathe in the sky, for God’s sake. (Give me a crack at the yahoos one time. I’ll make their tabletalk for them, I’ll be their household word, my taste as high or low as anyone’s in the industry.) But don’t contact me unless you’ve really got something to offer. You’ve got to put me on a clear channel station and give me a show of my own. The last demo got me this job at WLAF, and here I am doing another demo. Oh yes, big deal—NBC invited me to take their Page exam. Forget it. (See? See how vulgar?) Look, forget the part about doing my own show. I’m willing to start further down if the station’s important enough. I’ll do continuity for you, commercials. I won’t even insist on a talent fee. Consider my voice. Listen: ‘This is WPTA, Hometown, America. Now back to the Baton Twirling Contest.’ How do you like that? The voice is young, strong as an ox, flawless, no hoarseness, no crack, educated but not what you could call cultured—four years at the state university, say, or three years in the army as an ROTC lieutenant. I’ve been blessed, you guys, with my God-given gift of a voice, my voice that’s been thirty-one years old for the past decade and won’t be thirty-two for another ten years. And where did I grow to manhood? I defy you to say. Regionless my placeless vowels, my sourceless consonants. Twangless and drawl-less and nasal-less. And my name: Dick Gibson. (Though thus far I’ve used it only a few times on the air; I’m still saving it.) Dick Gibson of Nowhere, of Thin Air and the United States of America sky.

  “I’ll tell you how I came by my interest in radio. It’s an interesting story. I’m not just another of your star-struck kids turned artist and sissy from childhood’s isolation. You could say, I suppose, that it’s actually in my blood. My father was in the point-to-point dot-dash news and private-message market back in the late teens and early twenties during the fabulous wireless/cable wars. He was a personal friend of Dr. Frank Conrad in East Pittsburgh, where KDKA started. My earliest memory is of being with Dad and a bunch of other men crowded around a receiving set to hear the Harding-Cox election returns. November 2, 1920. I was an infant, but I remember everything about it.

  “‘Listen to this, son,’ my father said, ‘and remember all your life that you heard the birth of modern radio.’ And I have. I was so impressed that I have.

  “‘Gentlemen,’ Dr. Conrad said, ‘this day wireless has come of age.’ There were tears in the old man’s eyes. He must have suffered plenty to make his dream come true.

  “‘It’s grand, Dr. Conrad,’ my father said. ‘Let me say that I feel privileged to participate in this historic moment. Congratulations, Doctor.’

  “‘Thank you,’ the great visionary said, ‘but any thanks there are must be shared with others, with those workers in the vineyards who are no longer with us, men without whose contributions this great moment would have been achieved—oh yes, it would have come anyway; sometime it would have come; there is no withstanding the siege of destiny; it would have been achieved, but delayed, the world made to wait. I mean men like Edinburgh University’s James Clark Maxwell, who was the first to encounter ether waves as long ago as 1867; forgotten men like Hertz and the naïve Righi who gave us the phrase “magic blue sparks”; men like Onesti and Lodge and the Russian Popoff. To say nothing of the giants—the Marconis and De Forests and Lieutenant Sarnoff.’

  “‘And Dr. Conrad,’ my father said.

  “‘Thank …’ Dr. Conrad began sweetly. But perhaps something caught in his throat at this moment, or it may be that he was too tired after his heroic efforts to bring this night to pass; or even, simply, that by one of fate’s tragic twists and ironies Dr. Conrad had voted for Cox—whatever it was he couldn’t finish, and the rest of us, the men with him and my father with me in his arms, feeling the old man should be by himself just then, tiptoed softly from the room. I remember as if it were yesterday.

  “There you have it. I am marked, historically attached to radio. Thank you for your time. Dick Gibson, WLAF, Somerset, Pennsylvania.”

  In the first years following his departure from the station in Butte, Montana, he did not again have occasion to use the name. For three months, with WMAR in Marshall, Maine, he was Ellery Loyola. Then, for an even briefer season with KCGN, Butler, Kansas, he was Marshall Maine. He replaced an announcer who had been hired by KCMO, Kansas City, to MC a program of dance music originating in the Buhler Hotel there, but the hotel burned down—the program was on the air at the time and the announcer had been instrumental in guiding the dancers to safety—and the man was given his old job back, and Dick became Bud Kanz of KWYL, 1450 on your dial, Hodge, Iowa. By the fall of that same year he had become I. O. Quill, WWD, La Crosse, Wisconsin. He worked for the La Crosse station for a little over a year; then in the next two years he had jobs with five more radio stations.

  That he moved about so often in those early years was no proof of his restlessness; rather, it was his way of learning the business. He was your true apprentice—eager, willing, a boy who would chip in for any chore—but all the while he kept a careful accounting and worked with a special sense of his own destiny that converted the difficult into the necessary and created in himself metaphorical notions of money in the bank and bread cast upon the waters—a priggish, squirrelly sense of provision. Even his rooms in those days, those below-stairs cubicles in the homes of widows for whom he shoveled snow and stoked furnaces whose heat never seemed to reach his room, and which were all he could afford on the fifteen- and twenty-dollar-a-week salaries he made, or his rooms in the towns’ single hotels, near the railroad stations, bargained for, a rate granted not simply in deference to his extended stay but in recognition of some built-in inferiority, the bed always in a vulnerable position, the room itself in a vulnerable position, over a boiler perhaps, or machinery, or behind the thin wall of the common washroom, or too far from it, or his window just behind the vertical of the hotel’s blazing electric sign—there was a room in Kansas where owing to some obscure fire law the bulb in the high ceiling could never be turned off—even these rooms left him (despite the indifferent luke warmth that came from ancient, prototypical radiators) with an impression not of poverty or straitened circumstance, so much as of guaranteeing his life later, discomfit comforting, assuring him of his mythic turn, patience not just a virtue but a concomitant of future fame, hard times every success’s a priori grist.

  The American Dream, he thought, the historic path of all younger sons, unheired and unprovided. The old-time test of princes. “One two three testing,” he had said into countless microphones on hundreds of cold winter mornings, sleep still in his eyes, he and the engineer the only ones at the station, and he there first, his key to the place not a privilege but a burden. “One two three testing.” And even as he spoke the announcer’s ritual words, he suspected the deeper ritual that lay beneath them, confident that a test was indeed being conducted, his entire young manhood one. There were so many jobs—then; later he had different reasons—because he insisted on these tests. He built a reputation as a utility man, an all-rounder, and he was never really sure that this didn’t harm rather than help him because he was, for many of the 500- and 1000-watt stations for which he worked, a luxury, primed for emergency and special events which rarely, in those uneventful places he served his apprenticeship, occurred. But so set was he on sacrifice, so convinced in his bones of some necessary pay-as-you-go principle, that even an absolute knowledge that his special talents worked against his career would not have altered him. He continued to work in whatever he could of the unusual and by consistently putting himself in the way of opportunity, managed to do everything, discovering in the infinite resources
of his voice, in the disparate uses to which it could be put, the various alter egos of human sound.

  He was forced by radio to seem always to speak from the frontiers of commitment, always to say his piece as if his piece were all. Emphasis disappeared, for everything, the merest community-service announcement of a church supper and the most thunderous news bulletin, received ultimately the same treatment. With the necessity it imposed to be always talking, singing, selling, to be always speaking at the top of its voice, radio itself became a vessel for collateral truths. He had come to think of the sounds radio made as occurring on a line, picturing speech as a series of evenly sequenced, perfectly matched knots on a string, chatter raised by the complicated equipment to the level of prophecy. Pressured by the collateral quality of the noises he made, it would have been easy to have turned against the noises themselves. Others did. Most announcers he knew were men with an astonishing facility for disengaging themselves from their copy. Many actually made it a point to have their faces laugh while their voices continued to speak seriously. They horsed around—and those who had been in the business longest horsed around the most. He had noted—in New York City he took the same Radio City tour that everyone else did—that even the network people loved to clown, to shock their studio audiences with their studied superiority to the material, creating an anecdote for them to take back to Duluth, giving them all they could of the insider’s contemptuously lowered guard.

  He eschewed their wiseguy character and scorned to duplicate their vicious winks for a deft professional reason of his own. He felt these acrobatics, these defections of the face, took away—however minutely—from the effectiveness of one’s delivery, that even such muscular stunts as a mere wink pulled, too, at the vocal chords, puppeteered them. He could hear this. Monitoring his radio in the signal-fortified nights, omnisciently tuning in America, transporting himself with just his fingers five hundred miles north or a thousand east, these lapses were as clear to him as lisps, and he could see in his mind the smug double-dealing of a hundred announcers through their voices in the dark, as if he sat in the control booths watching them. The faculty for belief in the things he was required to say was no greater in him than in the biggest star or the oldest studio hack on the most important network station in America, but he used sincerity to body-build his voice. It would no sooner occur to him to insist on his personality when he was on the air (with the others, he knew, it was a last ditch shriek of their integrity, an effort to write off their disgust) than it would occur to an actor on a stage to answer for himself instead of for the character he played. So, striving for conviction, he became something of a boomer, a hearty herald. (Briefly he was Harold Hearty, WLU, Waverly, Georgia.)

  For a time—and he never completely rid himself of this habit—he carried over into his outside life the tones he used on radio, sometimes actually frightening people with his larger-than-life salutations: “Good morning there, Mrs. Cubbins! Lou George, WBSF, Kingdom City, Mo., here to see about the room you advertised!” Or embarrassing them with the breathy intimacy of his ten-to-midnight “Music for Lovers”: “Haie there, Miss. Bud Kanz. I’ve got a three o’clock appointment. The doc said he’d—sqaeeeeeze me in.”

  Bluffness and sensuousness were not all his range, nor even a significant part of it. If he had to single out a tone which best characterized him in those early years it would have been rather a flat one. And why not? He was chiefly a man speaking to farmers, reading them the weather, telling them the hog and sheep and cattle prices, a harbinger of grain and vegetable conditions— “soybeans” and “rye” and “oats” words in every other sentence out of his mouth. He had learned almost from the outset to avoid folksiness, vaudevillizing their ways. The single time he had tried to appropriate what he took to be their vocabulary, he himself had had to answer the telephone to listen to their offended complaints: “You tell that damn Jew you got down there he’d best not make sport of us. That town bastard don’t know piss from cowplop.” From then on he spoke to them in flat accents as unnatural to him as dialect, his neutral reading of the daily markets as much a performance as any he had ever attempted.

  But it was precisely on stations such as these that he got his best experience and was permitted to exercise his widest range. As soon as it became light—it was as if he could hear the farmers leaving their houses—he was left with their wives. These took, if their husbands didn’t, a certain amount of kidding. Not that he tried any more than with the men to pass himself off as a country boy. Instead he went the other way entirely. He felt himself some traveling salesman among them, come to life from a joke. Emphasizing his alienness, his dazed slicker-in-the-sticks incarnation, as if he had just been set down there from Paris or New York, he made all he could of their funny ways. He flattered them with their homespun notion of themselves, never letting them forget their ailing-neighbor-fetched soups and astonishing pies of vegetable and wild fruit, finding his theme in the idea of appetite, exaggerating their capacities, bunyanizing the hunger of their men and selves: “Ladies, I’ve got a recipe here for a Kansas farm omelet. First, take eight dozen eggs. All right, we’ll need some butter in this. Four pounds should do it.” Or zeroing in on the quilts he pretended they were always making: “An Easterner came by yesterday, saw one and went blind. What I want to know is how you get any sleep under one of those things. One lady I heard of hung hers to dry out in the henhouse. Those hens laid eggs all night. The rooster came in about midnight, saw it and started to crow. He thought the darn sun had come up.”

  But he tickled them hardest with his allusions to the wily sex in them, inventing this appetite as he had built on the other, taking his biggest risks here, openly blue, barnyardy, pretending a kind of slicker exhaustion at the thought of their lusty bouts, frankly animalizing them, claiming awe and a ferocious physical respect in the face of their enormous sexual reserves, careful only to specify the essential domesticity of their ardor, its vaguely biblical franchise. (But even this sop shrewdly dispensed with when it came to their daughters, those—as he had it—one-hundred-sixty-two-pound, big-boned killers of traveling men, singing their raucous muliebrity and celebrating their quicksand bodies in which whole male populations had gone down, entire sales forces.) The opportunities were limitless—their alleged flour- sack underthings another source of his feigned astonishment, imagining for them beneath the hypothetical homespun and supposed calico, hypothetical bodies, heavy toonervaudevillian tons of robust flesh, imperial gallons of breast, the thick, fictive restraining chest bands helpless against such soft erosion. And this was as aboveboard as their concupiscence, for it was all in reference to an exercise-and-reducing show he had talked the station manager into letting him do.

  “What? A skinny kid like you? Don’t make me laugh.”

  “What difference does it make how I look? I’ve got a voice like Tarzan. Let me try.”

  And the man did—on the condition that he stay off the streets and that his audience never be permitted to see him.

  He became “Doctor Torso.” The voice he created for his new role was extraordinary. Deliberately aged, carefully made to seem just senior to the oldest lady doing the exercises, he sounded like some professional, not a gym teacher but a coach, with all the coach’s indifference to the bodily distinctions between male and female—the body, ulteriorly, one big muscle he crooned over in his faintly theatrical telephone operator’s diction. Himself sitting perfectly still at the table with the microphone, and, for the sake of the slight strain it gave to his voice, leaning on his elbows, his forehead forward and clamped into the heels of his hands. “With a one and a two and three and a fower. A fiuv and a six and a seven and an eight.” Then, blowing out his breath to clear the poisons, “All right, ladies. This next exercise is for your sitters. Get right down on the floor, now. Palms spread and about four inches to the side of those thighs we just firmed up so nicely for your hubbies. All right, now those precious legs straight and shut tight. Just like the vaults in the Bank of En
gland.” Interrupting himself. “Mrs. Frangnadler”—his imaginary scapegoat, his one-hundred- sixty-two-pound common denominator— “I said tight. No cheating on me. Tight together. You don’t still have that rash. Tight now, tight. Squeeze. Pretend they’re the two halves of your purse, and you’re in town on a Saturday night, and you’ve got your egg money in there. Come on, Mrs. Frangnadler, I said tight.” Slyly. “Why, if I was a thief I could reach right down in that purse of yours and steal something really valuable. Then what would your husband say? There, that’s better. Why, I could hardly get the edge of my knife down there now. Could I, ladies?” Then, pretending that he had turned back to the rest of them, “All right, then, when I start counting I want you to bring up the left thigh high as you can. I want to be able to slip my hand under there. Then down on the even number and bring up the right on the odd. We’ll do this ten or twelve times together and then you practice it by yourselves at home. You’ll soon feel the difference it makes. And if I know those husbands of yours, they’ll feel the difference too. Incidentally, you mothers, start getting your young daughter to do this exercise with you. I pity the traveling man that tries to pinch her! All right, that’s enough rest period. Ready, begin!”