The Dick Gibson Show

by Elkin, Stanley

  BERNIE PERK: This is the darndest program.

  PEPPER STEEP: You have to understand something. I had been a model. A model—a glamour girl. You’ve seen our outlandish postures in the ads, our arrogance of shoulders and our hips off plumb. You’ve seen us standing on the public monuments and barefoot in cathedrals and lying in our spread gold hair on beds. Have you been so cool in jungles or had such bearing among the bearers? You’ve seen our faces, the mouths we make, like people photographed speaking French. Our eyes those of queens and courtesans. What persuades has never been your innocence or virginity. Contempt and scorn, disdain and contumely, and experience in the hatbag with the cosmetics and conditioners. But in bed less than waitresses, less than office girls or schoolteachers, so virgins of a sort still, drivers of harder bargains than those others. And anyway there are just not that many bigshots to go around.

  So, I had been a glamour girl. I forgot to tell you—at one point I was a Goldwyn Girl. Do you know what it cost to feed and liquor me in those days? Four hundred dollars a week, and often more. I’m talking about glamour, I’m talking about being waved in ahead of the people in nightclubs behind those velvet ropes like a plush corral, about the high cost of living at Trocadero and Bill Miller’s Riviera and 21. Nothing’s a quarter at the Latin Quarter.

  So, I’ll be frank, I had had men. Do you know something? Most of the men one sleeps with are called Jimmy, or Coco, or Johnny, or Chuck: glamour boys with yellow hair, big spenders on a first name basis not just with the maître d’, but with the kid in the parking lot as well. The tall and the fit—good crawlers, every mother’s son of them. To the victors belong the spoiled. But never an Arnold, not one, not once. Even at the end, at the time of his triumph on my staircase, Arnold might have played in nightclubs but couldn’t have gotten a good table in one. He was doomed to wait for his car in parking lots, to be seated behind the pillars in theaters, to read in barber shops while men without appointments took the chair ahead of him. And it wasn’t as if Arnold didn’t mind. He minded. Often, perhaps, there was murder in his heart, but what could he do? If you’re not born with prerogative you never have it. What could he do? Recite by heart the New York Times, or call off, down to the last item in column four, a thousand menus from a thousand Chinese restaurants?

  We won’t talk of what I felt now, but of what I meant to Arnold. Imagine what it must have been like for him to have me, a Goldwyn Girl! Never mind that he was served last again, or that I was already a decade past my prime. He loved and desired me more than any man had ever loved and desired me even when I was still really something.

  BERNIE PERK: I never knew she was a Goldwyn Girl. I remember those girls from the musicals. They were terrific.

  PEPPER STEEP: So … two things had happened. We were in love, and Arnold was ready to go into show business. I still had one or two contacts in New York and we agreed that I should go down and see what could be done about getting Arnold work. Of course we both knew that once he started getting some dates we wouldn’t be seeing each other as much as before. I couldn’t leave the Charm School, and naturally Arnold would have to go where his bookings took him.

  I allowed myself a week to get him some engagements. I was very lucky. Inside of four days I had him booked in three spots—one of them a two-week run in an important lounge in Las Vegas. When I came back and told Arnold of our good fortune I expected him to be overjoyed, but instead he seemed worried, and I noticed that he avoided looking at me.

  “That’s just butterflies, Arnold. All performers have them. You’ll be fine … You do understand why I won’t be able to go with you?”

  “I guess so,” he said.

  “Well, then. I think we’d better get started. We’ve got a lot of rehearsing to do. Your first date is just three weeks off.”

  “Would you mind, Pepper, if I worked the routines out on my own in Springfield?”

  “No, Arnold, of course not.”

  “If you’re not going to be there with me, maybe it’s a good idea to get used to performing by myself.”

  “Certainly, Arnold. If that’s what you want.” I sounded wounded, I suppose, but frankly I saw his point, and besides, I’d been neglecting the Charm School since I started working with Arnold.

  His first booking was a club date at a convention in Atlantic City. At the last minute I decided to take time off and go down with him, but when I told him he said I’d just make him more nervous than he already was. He had to do it on his own, he said. I made him promise to call me just as soon as he got offstage, and I sent him a good-luck telegram at the hotel where he was to appear.

  I knew he was supposed to go on at about ten o’clock, and so when I still hadn’t heard from him at midnight I called him.

  “How did it go, sweetheart? Were you marvelous?”

  “It was all right.” He didn’t sound as if it really was. He’s probably tired, I thought. I asked him for details, but he didn’t seem to want to talk about it. Indeed, I could almost see him frowning into the phone—a funny little squint which I had seen often in the past few weeks, the sign of his tension, I’d felt.

  When he returned to Springfield the next day, again it was I who called him.

  “What’s wrong, Arnold?”

  “Nothing. Nothing is, Pepper.”

  “Well, it doesn’t sound that way. It’s almost as if you’re avoiding me.”

  “I love you, Pepper.”

  “Well,” I said, “glad to hear it. You had me worried there. I thought that now you’ve made it into the big time—”

  “I haven’t made it into the big time, Pepper.”

  “You will, darling. Do you know what I thought?”

  “What?”

  “That maybe … maybe you’d fallen onstage.”

  “No,” he said, “I moved very well.”

  What I really thought was what I’d started to tell Arnold: that he was just another bastard who uses people. Why, he hadn’t even paid me, I remembered. We’d fallen in love before that became a point. But it was so absurd to think of Arnold in this light that I was ashamed of myself. I reminded him that his next performance was in two weeks. We saw each other in the interval almost as much as we had when we were still working together, though Arnold still insisted on working on his act alone. And though he was just as sweet as he had ever been, sometimes when he didn’t think I was looking I would catch him frowning. Was it possible that having achieved his goal it was no longer attractive to him? I didn’t ask, but I decided to wait until after his next engagement before making any additional dates for him.

  There was no question about my seeing him work that booking. It was for a week at the Fox Theater in St. Louis, one of the last motion picture houses in America where they still had a variety show between features. This time I waited three days for him to call. Finally he did.

  “How is it, Arnold? Are the audiences responsive?”

  “They’re very kind.”

  “How do they like the part where you have the houselights turned up and you memorize the first fifteen rows of the audience? Did they go wild for that?”

  “I don’t do that part.”

  “Arnold, it’s the most exciting thing in the act.”

  “I don’t do that part.”

  When he came back from St. Louis he was as gloomy as ever. Now he always wore that odd squinting frown of his, even when he knew I was watching. It was very strange because he had never looked so good. Evidently he had bought a whole new wardrobe in St. Louis—everything in the latest fashion, the best taste. A couple of his suits looked as if they’d been custom-made. Nor had he ever been so ardent, so clever a lover. But he continued to rehearse alone, and each day he seemed more despondent. By the time he went to Vegas anyone could see that he was miserable.

  I had to know what was going on, so without telling Arnold I flew out to Las Vegas on a different plane and dropped into the lounge where he was performing. I took a table in the back, as far from the small stage as possibl
e. When he was introduced and the spotlight hit him, I gasped. He took my breath away—I had never seen him during an actual performance before—so beautiful was he. He seemed magnificent in the new tuxedo he had bought for the engagement. I was reassured at once, but then, when he began his act, it was all I could do to keep from fleeing from the room. He was terrible! He moved splendidly, better than I had ever seen him, but when it came time to give them what he had memorized he seemed confused. He stammered and hesitated, he faltered, he stuttered and sputtered. One didn’t know if his memory or his speech had given out. He did only a few of the routines we had worked out together, and these badly. For the rest he substituted halting recitations of poems he had memorized in his childhood, violating the first principle of such acts—audience participation. And with his constant frown he seemed almost angry at the audience. It was awful. It was dull. It was so bad that the audience took a sort of pity on him and were more patient and attentive than they might have been with an act two or three times better than his. When he was finished they generously applauded.

  I hadn’t wanted him to know I was there; he would have guessed that I’d come to spy and not to surprise him. But he looked so miserable when he was through that I had to go to his dressing room.

  He didn’t seem surprised to see me. “Did you see it, Pepper?”

  “Oh, Arnold, I’m so sorry.”

  “I didn’t want you to know,” he said. “I’m so ashamed.”

  “That’s silly,” I said. “So you’ve got a little stage fright. We can lick that. Remember how frightened you were when you were clumsy? We worked on that and today you’re one of the most graceful men in show business.”

  “But I don’t have stage fright. I was cool as a cucumber up there.”

  “But, Arnold, the way you stammered, your confusion—”

  “It wasn’t stage fright. It’s my damn eyes.”

  Arnold told me that ever since he had become graceful his vision had begun to deteriorate. For two months, he said, he had been becoming increasingly far-sighted; each day what he could see moved a little farther off. Since he had an eidetic imagination and could remember only what he saw, and most of what he saw was a blur, his photographic memory had inevitably been affected—even the beloved poems from his childhood. When he closed his eyes the print was indistinct. That’s why he squinted; he was trying to make things out.

  “But surely you’ve been to an eye doctor,” I said.

  “Yes. It’s severe astigmatism.”

  “Well, then, he can prescribe glasses.”

  “He made a pair up for me. They’re thick, Pepper. They’re awful.”

  “Well, so what about it?”

  “If I wore them, anybody could tell I’m far-sighted. Since you taught me to move so well I just couldn’t; they’d detract from my appearance. I’d only be clumsy Arnold again. I even tried contact lenses, but they hurt my eyes and made them water. Onstage I looked like I was crying.”

  So he was vain. That was what had been underneath the clumsiness we’d rubbed off. I’d taught him to move and now he couldn’t stand not to be graceful, glassless Arnold.

  I’ll say this much: he didn’t give up. He was determined to stay in show business. That must have been part of his vanity too, even in the beginning. I mean, maybe the idea of show business didn’t even have anything to do with his talent. Maybe his memory was just a lucky excuse he could use to justify being on a stage. By now, he was terribly far-sighted but he decided to make a strength of his weakness, and he conceived a plan to move his act outdoors. He went into the desert around Las Vegas and started to memorize larger and larger objects further and further off. He began with cactuses a hundred yards away and ended with a mountain range twenty miles in the distance. Arnold had become a living map!

  BERNIE PERK: Incredible!

  PEPPER STEEP: It was impractical, of course. He couldn’t get a good crowd to come with him into the desert, and even if he had only someone as far-sighted as himself could have appreciated his accomplishments. We gave it every chance. While in the West we went to Arizona, and Arnold committed to memory the entire south rim of the Grand Canyon, and every bend and twist of the Colorado River for two hundred miles. The Forest Ranger was very impressed and offered him a job. He might have taken it, but the Park Service wouldn’t let him wear his tuxedo.

  It was all absurd, of course, but Arnold was as determined to work up his new act as he had been to learn how to move well. It was all he could think of. He had an idea that he needed to be in a dependable climate, one where it was always clear, and so he chose Palm Springs. He asked me to come with him, but I told him I couldn’t. It broke my heart to have to leave him, but I had my career in Hartford—and frankly, I couldn’t see abandoning it in order to chase a will-o’-the-wisp. I tried to talk him into coming back with me, but he was obsessed with his act. I tried to persuade him to sacrifice a little of his appearance, but he was convinced he could still have both.

  I saw Arnold only once more. About a year after Las Vegas he sent me a wire saying that he was returning to Hartford and asking me to meet his plane. For old time’s sake I did.

  When he appeared in the doorway of the big jet he looked like a movie star. He was wearing one of those cream trenchcoats and a smart little cap. Though it was winter and already past nine o’clock in the evening, he had on huge green sunglasses and carried a chic airline suitcase of olive green leather—one of those things with enormous bulging zippered pockets. Somehow I knew that his sunglasses were not prescription lenses.

  We went back to my studio.

  “I’ve given up the idea for the act, Pepper,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “It was silly. I’ve enormous land masses in my head, but it could never come to anything as an act.”

  “It was too ambitious, Arnold.”

  “Yeah. When I was still in California I took a plane up to Seattle. I’ve got the shoreline of practically the entire West Coast memorized—except for cloud cover and fog banks.”

  “I see.”

  “There’s no way to use it.”

  “You still won’t wear glasses?”

  “No.”

  “What happened to the things you used to know? What happened to the carpet on my staircase?”

  “Gone. All gone, kid. I can’t see it. The light that failed.”

  “Oh, Arnold.”

  “What the hell? Let’s not be so gloomy. How d’ya like my shirt? I had about a dozen of them made up in Springs. In pastels, stripes. No breast pocket, did you notice? That’s one of the latest wrinkles.”

  “Oh, Arnold.”

  “The shoes are reindeer suede. Handmade, of course. The heels are meerschaum.”

  “What’s the lettering on my card index file?”

  He closed his eyes and opened them again. “Can’t make it out, Pep.”

  “Oh, Arnold.”

  “That’s all over. I’ve given up the act. I’ve come back, sweetie. We’re together again.”

  “No, Arnold. We’re not. I met your plane, but it’s over between us. You’d better leave now. My friend is terribly jealous.”

  “Oh, Pepper.”

  “Please go, Arnold. I’d prefer there were no scene.”

  At the door Arnold turned once and shrugged. He tipped his funny little hat forward on his head and shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his raincoat. He was the elegant lonely man, like Frank Sinatra on an album cover.

  There wasn’t anyone else, of course … There isn’t anyone else. And all Arnold had meant to do in the doorway was make me love him. He thought I would love him if he was handsome and graceful, but I’d loved him for what was in his mind, for what he could remember. He was a peacock now, the world as much a blur to him as it is to the rest of us.

  I’m sorry. Forgive me. I’m sorry I’m crying. I don’t mean to cry. Please. I’m sorry.

  BERNIE PERK: Oh, Pepper.

  DICK GIBSON: Ladies and gentlemen, we pause now for s
tation identification.

  Among the guests in the studio all hell broke loose during the station break. They talked excitedly to one another, and called back and forth along the row of theater seats like picnickers across their tables. Though they had nothing to say themselves, Behr-Bleibtreau’s people turned back and forth trying to follow the conversation of the others. Indeed, there was a sort of lunatic joy in the room, a sense of free-for-all that was not so much an exercise of liberty as of respite— as if someone had temporarily released them from vows. School was out in Studio A, and Dick had an impression of its also being out throughout the two or three New England states that could pick up the show. He saw people raiding refrigerators, gulping beers, grabbing tangerines, slashing margarine on slices of bread, ravenously tearing chicken wings, jellied handfuls of leftover stews.