A Conversation with the Mann (56 page)

Chet gave me a “for what?” look.

“For getting me Sullivan.”

“You got the show. You're the one who was in there doing the bits.”

“For getting me the audition, then, thanks.”

“We told you we'd get you the audition. When we say something we … Unless, you thought maybe we weren't going to get it for
you.” Chet made a playful show of being offended. “Did you really think we weren't going to come through for you?”

Those days I was back on the road, those days I couldn't so much as get Chet anywhere near a telephone. Yes, that's what I
thought. But all I said was, again: “Thank you.”

Chet asked if maybe I wanted to go out and have a drink in celebration, but I declined. I just wanted to go home. I just wanted
to walk home.

So I walked.

And let me tell you: As I walked, I felt real good. Real calm no matter that I was right up on the edge of everything I'd
spent most of my life working toward. I'd heard about those fellows who'd flown supersonic test jets, how right before they
hit the speed of sound the planes got kicked around and kicked around and then … nothing, They broke the sound barrier, and
everything was lounge-act mellow. That's how I felt. I felt like all the head-banging and heartbreaking was in my past. I
felt as if some cosmic court had handed down a vindication that every choice I'd ever made, no matter how it'd turned out,
had been the right choice. For the first time I could ever recall, I felt that for the rest of my life the sailing was going
to be nothing but smooth.

I
REMEMBER IT BEING A
W
EDNESDAY
. I remember it being a good day. I remember feeling rested, the five nights since my Sullivan audition being filled with
deep sleep. I had the security of my television debut without being overly anxious about it. Things were happening as they
should. When things happen as they should, what's there to be anxious about? I remember it being nice outside, the weather
pleasant—sunny and warm without being too hot. I headed from my apartment over to a corner diner for a late break fast, and
I don't recall the normal crush of people packing the New York streets or the usual hectivity. All around, things were shaping
up to make for a real good day. Maybe that's the way it was.

Or maybe it was a day like any other, but what the day revealed made the first part of the morning, in retrospect, seem so
much better.

I got to the diner, a couple of guys in a booth trying to figure out Andy Warhol, and ordered food—French toast, two eggs
scrambled. That was my favorite breakfast. French toast and eggs scrambled. The waitress wrote it up on a green ticket and
put the order in the carousel at the kitchen counter for the cook.

Odd, I guess. Odd all of that commonplace stuff should stay so sharp in my mind. But all of that was part of the moment: what
I ordered, the waitress taking it down and passing it off to the cook. Her going for coffee, and my eyes following her for
no good reason but lack of anything else to do. As she crossed under a TV hung in the corner, I looked up at it and caught
a face I'd only seen once, years before. There was no hesitation in my recognition. No matter how long it had been, I knew
the face in an instant. Miami. That back road. The black man who saved my life was on television. His picture, anyway. His
picture was on a news bulletin.

“What'd he do?” I asked for anyone to answer.

“What, hon?” the waitress asked back.

“That fellow, what did he—”

The waitress looked up at the television; the picture of the man was gone. Film was being shown of a house, the driveway with
paint poured over part of it.

“I think they're talking about that man that got killed.” She was as detached about the information as a phone operator dispensing
a number.

I tried to say to her “What?” but could not generate the word.

“Last night or this morning. In front of his house. They shot him, I think. Well, here …” She went over to the TV, reached
up, and, fingers tweezering the knob, gave it some volume.

The newsman droned about what was, apparently, the latest civil rights assassination. Mississippi. Long after dark. Medgar
Evers was walking up the drive of his house, when he took a bullet to the back.

Just one.

But just one bullet from a rifle is all that's needed to punch a fist of a hole in one side of you and tear out the other,
taking with it all the meat and bone it can gather. Taking all that, and not stopping until it passed through a window and
a kitchen wall to end up resting on a counter like some kind of dark souvenir. All that, and still not enough to kill this
man. Not kill him right off. The bullet had put Medgar down, but he managed, blood pumping from him, to crawl up the drive
to his front porch …

Unaware of myself, my fingers bit at the counter, dragged me along it closer to the TV.

… Crawl to his wife and children, who rushed from the house to hold their dying man. He held on long enough to get loaded
into a station wagon by friends and get raced to University of Mississippi Hospital, and just long enough to make it into
the emergency room, where white doctors didn't exactly snap to operating on a shot black man. He held on that long, but no
longer.

On the TV: another picture of the house. What I thought was paint on the drive was a slick of blood.

Medgar Evers. Husband. Father. My savior. Dead. Dead, because he thought black people should have the radical, unheard of,
uninfringeable right to be able to sit where they wanted at lunch counters, ride where they wanted on a bus. Maybe even vote.

The news bulletin over, the broadcast went back to a soap.

Murmurs from the diner: The mayor's out of his mind, out of his damn mind if he thinks … The Yankees are nothing but bums,
and what they need to do is … A guy telling another guy about some skirt at work—a looker, divorced—who was ready for a little
…

Murmurers. Nothing about Medgar. No one was murmuring about him. For me, until that moment, he'd been a face without a name.
For most of the rest of the world, he wouldn't even be a memory.

“Order up.” Down the counter, the waitress with my food. “Your order's up.”

I got up, went for the door, stopped, went back, and tossed over some money. I left.

T
HIS IS HOW IT WAS GOING TO BE:
It was going to be the Moscow circus … actually, first it was going to be Ed. Ed would come out, do his “hello-we've-got-a-great
shew” bits, then give hellos to any stars in the house. There were always stars in the house, because stars loved getting
their mugs flashed coast-to-coast just for all the non-effort of showing up and sitting in Ed's audience. So it would be Ed
and his hellos, and then the circus, and then me. It was all standard procedure. The gospel according to the man himself.
Bob told me Ed's rule was “Open big, have a good comedy act, put in something for the children, keep the show clean,” Kill,
be entertaining, have a great set, but be clean. Clean, safe, pleasing to the people was what Ed Sullivan was all about.

As we walked through the rehearsal, I had an experience of déjá vu times déjá vu. I'd lived the moment so many times in my
head, it was as familiar to me as any real-life event from my past. Despite the frenzied moil going on around me—the growing
panic of the crew who, no matter how many times they'd done this before, were moving closer and closer to having to go out
live to America—I was as I'd been since Bob shook my hand and told me I had the show, very calm. It was as if I were ghosting
through a moment already completed, watching it specter-style. All there was for me was to play my part as scripted.

Except, the script didn't exactly read the way I always thought it would. It had changed severely in the days since Medgar
Evers caught a bullet.

The stage manager called me over to what would be my mark, wanted me to run through my set right quick for the cameras. Like
a gambler's ritual, one more time I pulled some papers from my pocket—yellowed, torn, but never thrown away. Stationery from
the St. Regis in San Francisco. I looked quickly at a routine long dormant but never forgotten. I took my mark, looked into
the camera, said: “Hello, my name is Jackie Mann. I'm a Negro.”

I
T WAS ME AND
C
HET AND
B
OB
in Bob's office. Bob was being sympathetic—as sympathetic as he could be, considering—but his compassion was being drowned
under apprehension that, moment by moment, he was taking on through the hole I'd just blown in him. Chet was red-hot-volcano-style,
but he held it in. Let Bob do the talking. Probably for fear of what would happen should he let his fury flow.

Bob said, delicate but to the point: “He's furious. Ed is absolutely … Your set was—”

“It was tunny,” I said.

“It was—”

“Funny. You heard those people at the rehearsal laughing. And the crew, they've heard, what, a thousand comics? Heard every
possible joke? They were—”

“Nervous laughter.”

“Laughter.”

“Let him talk!” Chet barked at me. “Just let the man talk.”

I didn't look at Chet. I didn't look at him or Bob. I didn't want to be hypnotized by whatever emotion came pouring out of
their eyes. I just kept up a blank stare at a nonexistent spot somewhere in front of me.

Bob took a second, let everybody get calm. “You see the problem here, Jackie? You did a set for us at the Delmonico, a set
we approved, then not only do you change it at the last minute, you do all that … going on about race, and Vietnam, for crying
out loud.”

“I'm talking about what's going on in the world.”

“Half the people in the country couldn't point to Vietnam on a map. I mean, who in the heck cares what's go—”

“I'm talking about what's going on with Negroes. I'm telling jokes from my point of view. What's wrong with that?”

“… Nothing. Nothing in particular—”

“It's not like I'm cursing. It's not like I'm going blue. I'm just talki—”

“In its place, nothing's wrong with any of that. But on national television on a Sunday night? That's not what we do. That's
not what America wants to hear.”

“How do you know if no one's ever talked about it before?”

“Jesus Christ,” Chet spat.

Bob just looked exasperated. Still, he tried to get me to understand things. “Jackie, Ed Sullivan and this show are as committed
to supporting Negro entertainers, Negroes period, as any television program on the air. Lincoln-Mercury gave Ed big trouble
for hugging Ella Fitzgerald and Pearl Bailey. He didn't care. Ed has never once shied away from … Do you remember the heat
he gave Winchell for snubbing Josephine Baker at the Stork Club? But regardless of how Ed personally feels about Negroes,
or civil rights, that doesn't mean you get to turn the eight P.M. time slot into a soapbox.”

Bob stopped trying to sell me, and got very plain about the situation, “I think I can square things with Ed. I'll tell him
… I'll tell him something, but I can keep you on the show only if you do the set you showed us at the Delmonico. I've got
to have your word on that, Jackie. I've got to have your word you'll do the set we agreed on. Yes or no?”