A Conversation with the Mann (40 page)

F
ROM
D
ETROIT TO
N
EW
Y
ORK
I had to do a stopover in Chicago, change planes. I grabbed some coffee, a sandwich. Waited. While I was doing my waiting,
Sammy was doing the Jack Eigen show—a radio talk guy popular around town—plugging his stand at the St. Claire. The show played
over a box near my gate. Jack and Sammy went back and forth with the same old showbiz gibble-gabble: what a sensation Sammy
was, what it was like to be such a sensation. A little on this bit of gossip, or that—was it true, wasn't it?

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.

S
AMMY
: 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.

J
ACK
: 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—

S
AMMY
: 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.

J
ACK
: 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?

S
AMMY
: Without a doubt, and I say this humbly, but without a doubt, I think I am.

J
ACK
: Really? Bigger than Sinatra?

S
AMMY
: 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.

C
INCINNATI 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.

O
LY
H
AUK 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 diner 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.