Driving the King (11 page)

“I'd like to imagine they loved it.” That's what he told me when he got to the car. “They told me to wait for Nielsen.”

“Who?”

It never occurred to me how they counted viewers. No ticket stub, no cover charge, or no bar tab, so the old ways
to know the tally didn't apply. The ratings company had a list of people who would write down what they watched, and then the people of NBC would know if they had a hit or not. Nat's audience was a mystery until word came down from Nielsen. The pitfall of television was that everyone could see him at once, but he could see no one in return.

While we drove home, through the night-lit neighborhoods between Burbank and Hancock Park, I imagined the Nielsen families hunkered over coffee tables, gathering their thoughts and filling diaries. Whoever they were, they mattered, and they joined the growing ranks of those who could tell Nat King Cole how long this affair might last.

DAY OF THE SHOW
2:30 P.M.

I
had heard Nat sing at Capitol and at NBC, and now I was back in the building where I had heard his first show. The studios' walls were tailor-made for voices, but the Centennial's were not. Some of the sound would make it through the old windows and down the vents. In a place Nat Cole had outgrown, that extra sound would spill down onto the Hill corner. The folks on the street could say they heard it, too.

The Centennial Hotel had thirty-two rooms. Twenty rooms on the second floor and twelve on the third, including the four corner suites. The fourth floor had a rooftop garden on the south end, and the inside area was nothing but the ballroom, with a dance floor and double-sized rafters that
held up the roof without pillars that would block the view of the stage. Every seat was a good one.

The New Collegians' bandstand looked like city blocks, with row houses and storefronts stamped into sheets of tin. The roof tiles and windows, and even the wood grain on the front, had been etched onto the metal. The blocks had been quilted together, some looked like New York and others Chicago, a sideways totem to the cities they'd toured.

I walked to the back of the place, where the standing-room folks would hear the show.

“How does it sound from there?”

“Just like you're in the front row,” I said.

From the back corner, one could see every bit of the stage, from the piano in the left-hand corner to the row where the percussionists played. I had heard enough shows up there to know how the sound wrapped around the place. Every eye and ear got the same kind of sound.

A few modest steps led from the main floor up the back and the sides, and the elevation gave everyone a good line of sight. No one would crane his neck to get a good look at the stage. If people moved their heads, it would be because the music told them to.

“We hope the stage is big enough,” Miss Vee said.

Nat tapped his foot. “Surely. And more solid than most.”

“We'll shut down the elevator before the show begins.
People can walk up the stairwell if they want standing room. We run wires down the shaft to the lounge speakers. Everybody in the place will hear you. I know you're used to more with television and all, but we have a good space.”

“A studio's nothing but an empty room. They don't have anything on you, Mrs. Varner. How you fill the room is the thing. We have a good stage and a nice place to rest until the show starts. It doesn't take much more than that.”

Miss Vee seemed relieved when he said as much, even thankful.

The only sound just then came from the elevator. The two light tolls filled the space followed by the quick steps of the young lady carrying a tray around the corner. When she first saw Nat she changed her step, not quite freezing but taking a pause.

“Thank you, Sonya. You can bring it on down here. Mr. Weary, you come on back, too,” Miss Vee said.

Sonya had her eyes on Nat still. Maybe she didn't know about the show yet, or maybe it hadn't been real until she'd seen him. Even with that little bit of shock, she kept the tray steady, and not a drop of liquor wasted. What she carried in those glasses swirled a bit, and as I walked over with her, I got a good whiff of what she'd brought us, three whiskeys from the Majestic, before she set the tray on a table near the stage.

“I asked Mr. Weary what you drink, and I took the liberty and asked Sonya to bring something. I don't partake in the evenings during the show, but I like to raise a glass when I can. Welcome's not official until you toast with your company.”

Sonya had not moved. She stood rocking from her toes to her heels and back again, clinching her fingers the whole while. Mrs. Varner gave her a look.

“Well, it'll kill you if you don't ask him, Sonya, so go ahead.”

She rested her feet and breathed one good time.

“Mr. Cole, I figured you might want to check the sound in the room and all—”

I was thinking,
Lord, please don't let this girl start singing
.

“—most of the singers do when they come. Well—”

If she does start singing, please let her sound decent or at the very least sing something short.

“Well, my birthday's coming up, and if it doesn't really matter what you sing, you might as well sing ‘Happy Birthday' for me when the band comes.”

He swirled that little bit of scotch in his glass, and I knew what he was going to say before he said it.

“Why wait for sound check? I can go ahead and sing it right now.”

“I was hoping you'd say that.”

And Nat Cole did just that and filled the room with that
simple little song. Sonya listened and started rocking so, that I was afraid she might fall backward. She opened her eyes and closed them, almost as if she had taken that first eyeful of Nat Cole singing, stored it away, and come back for the rest of it.

I tried to remember the old birthday parties in Bel-Air, every one exactly the same. No matter the year or the child, we had sheet cake and a spoonful of neapolitan ice cream. Nat had surely been there. He'd sung that song live on television for President Eisenhower's birthday, and he sang that same rendition to the young lady who'd brought our drinks. With no cake and no candles, all Sonya could do was clap.

“What day is your birthday?”

“August tenth,” she said. I wouldn't call that look on her face sheepish, but it was honest. “You'll be long gone by then so it was now or never. I thank y'all.”

She collected our glasses and picked up her tray with a little bit of flair in her hands and step. “Can I bring you all anything else?”

“No, Sonya. But thank you,” Miss Vee said.

I handed Sonya a little of the tip money as she passed me, and she took it in stride and nodded me a thank-you.

“That child had been asking me since I told her you all were coming. I said she could come up and ask you herself. I guess it never hurts.”

“She was right. I needed to see how the room sounds so I might as well sing something useful. The echo is not bad, and once the room fills it'll be perfect.”

Miss Vee excused herself and left us with the sound of her shoes as she walked toward the elevator and the ring of those bells as the doors closed behind her.

“Sounds just like it did way back when,” he said.

Between the time when the doors opened and he walked onstage, four hundred people would fill those chairs, almost double the size of the colored section at the Empire. The number mattered. Nobody would ration him to his own folks. Nobody would have to wait until he came back across town for a second show. If the room filled up, then he was on the radio. The listeners could drink downstairs or drink at home and make a party of their own. No interruptions this time. I had given up everything for a show that had ended too quickly, so I had built this new life around making it so. If the marquee had room enough for another line beneath his name, I would have had them add one more.
NAT KING COLE. GUARANTEED
.

I
t was too early to see which way the sky would turn. Mornings in Los Angeles were all kinds of dingy until the sunlight and the wind did their cleaning. The quiet made up for it, though. I had the last of my coffee on the porch, where I could read my paper and get a handle on the day that waited for me. The paperboy was on his way down the block. At least I thought as much, until I saw that the rider of the orange bicycle was a woman. She threw papers on the other side of Seventy-Fourth Street before she made a U-turn at the Avalon corner.

I'd seen her a few times before in my weeks driving around Central Avenue. She sometimes rode with two children, a boy and a girl, whom I had seen rolling newspapers in front of that storefront next to the Dunbar. The bicycle the woman rode, orange with whitewall tires, was one of those I saw leaning on a telegraph pole in front of that newspaper office. The baskets had tin placards with
the same lettering as in the storefront window.
LOS ANGELES TRIBUNE, DELIVERED EVERY THURSDAY
.

Traffic got heavy at that hour of the morning with the sidewalks full of students and teachers headed to the grammar school up on Sixty-Sixth. As the woman on the bicycle slowed, she spoke to the crossing guard and tossed a paper to her. She rode toward me, throwing the paper to the neighbors' houses with an overhand that had enough arc to find the front walk. She wore those pants that I'd seen the women in. My sister called them pedal pushers, but how high-water pants came into fashion was beyond me.

“Good morning, Mr. Weary. When I saw your name on the subscription card, I decided to stop and say hello if I saw you. And here you are. I like to welcome newcomers. Especially somebody coming here from Alabama.”

I knew good and well that my subscription card didn't say a thing about where I'd come from, and her face was not familiar. Friendly, surely, but not familiar. Questions came to mind when a stranger knew my business. I said my good-morning while I walked to the gate.

“Almena Lomax.
Tribune
editor. On Thursday mornings, I'm director of circulation,” she told me. “We're the third Negro paper in this town. Small family operation. What we don't have in size, we try to make up for with customer service. Welcome to Los Angeles.”

She motioned to the bicycle she'd just rested against the gate.

“My son and daughter work Towne Avenue from here to Florence, and I cover Avalon to Central. My youngest is barely walking, so she's got some years before she'll be riding. She's with my husband. Likes to sleep in the back of the station wagon while he drives his route.”

She had the paper in her left hand and offered her right like the chancellors did at graduation, a diploma in one hand and a shake with the other.

“Thank you, but if we met years ago in Alabama and I don't remember, then I apologize, but ma'am, I have to ask—”

“We haven't met. Ten years ago, we got word on the newswire about a riot in Alabama. Can't always trust the wires, I've found. So I called some of my family around Eufaula, over on the Chattahoochee River. You might have heard of it.”

“Been in that river a few times.”

“Me and you both, Mr. Weary. Well, I called and they told me it wasn't a riot. My people said a soldier got between Nat Cole and a white man with a pipe. Of course, folks love to embellish a bit. No harm in it. One version of it had you jumping down from the third tier. Throwing chairs and music stands. Is that how it happened?”

“I was warned against correcting folks.”

“I wish the rest of it were false. The Kilby part and that time they gave you.”

“It's behind me now, Mrs. Lomax.”

She was a stranger to me, but a sincere one. Still, though, she was a journalist, and the last time I had been in the paper, my name was turned to scandal. So I didn't need to be anywhere close to a front page unless I was reading it at breakfast.

With Mrs. Lomax off that bicycle, she seemed ready to talk for a while. Getting into folks' business was her trade and craft. All the same, it was all kinds of wrong to leave a woman standing and me not offer her a seat, so I did.

“No, thank you. I ride thirty or so blocks on Thursdays, so standing's not a problem. I just want to let you know a few people out here remember your name. Nat Cole included, it seems. He was a smart man to hire you.”

She looked me over after saying as much, studying. Maybe she thought my face would answer her question before she asked it. But I had learned to put a little more stone in my face.

“Mr. Weary, you being hired by Nat Cole isn't exactly a secret. Just like Augustine Tate was a prizefighter. Half the drivers and bodyguards were boxers. The rest, the ones like you, have a fighter's sensibility. That look
on your face might make a troublesome man think twice before he jumps a stage.”

All I could say was maybe, because it was no telling what a man might do.

“In any case, I'm not looking for information on your employer. I'm more interested in what I've been hearing about the situation in Montgomery. The busses. Have you heard anything about the busses?”

She studied my face some more, trying to read what I hadn't said yet. I was careful about my hands giving me away. That newspaper was nothing more than something to twist or hold too tightly. It might as well have been a bell.

“It would be better if I kept my name out of anybody's paper.”

“It's not anybody's paper, Mr. Weary, it's mine. It's just that I only know a handful of folks in Montgomery. Great-aunts and distant cousins can only get me so far. I need a few more folks I can call. Just like I imagine you have to learn your way around Los Angeles.”

I nodded then.

“Claudette Colvin was the young lady arrested back in March. You know her?”

“Some of her people. Montgomery's only so big.”

“I was here trying to write about her from two thousand miles away. Posed some difficulties.”

“More like twenty-two hundred and some change.”

“All the more reason to make friends in Montgomery.”

She looked back and saw my neighbor on his front porch. He had been fighting a losing battle with the squirrels that emptied his bird feeder, and he'd tied all manner of wire to keep them off. He was trying wind chimes now, and Mrs. Lomax turned around when she heard the racket he was making with his pliers.

“Looks like an
Eagle
under his bushes. Good way to lose readers, putting a newspaper in the dirt. Excuse me for a second.”

Mrs. Lomax wiped her fingers on the rawhide flap of the news bag like a pitcher fingering the rosin. She threw the paper sidearm, splitting the telegraph pole and the apricot tree, planting the
Tribune
in the middle of the porch.

“What's his name?”

“Upshaw. Cyrus Upshaw.”

She raised her voice just short of yelling and gave him a nice wave while she said her hello. He waved back, but that look on his face had some confusion in it. He had no idea who she was. But he walked over and got his paper, settled onto his porch swing, and put his head in that front page I still held rolled in my hand.

“I'm also in charge of marketing. I have people in Louisiana, too. Down that way they have a word for what I gave Mr. Upshaw—”

“—a lagniappe. Something on the house.”

“Exactly. I hear that word more here than I heard it down south. Half the people here come from back home. I wrote a story last year about the black folks in Baton Rouge boycotting their busses. What happens back home happens here, so I need people in both places. Folks who I can trust, and ones who trust me right back.”

“Considering where I been, me and trust have been apart for quite a while. I learned to live without it.”

“I can't say I blame you. You don't know me after all.”

She looked down then, and her eyes and her hand searched through that bag.

“In any case, I wanted to give you something else.”

She checked her fingers for ink, and wiped them against the leather again. She pulled out another paper, yellowed, and handed it to me. The headline stretched across the top, as big as the name of the paper. “Soldier Saves Cole from White Mob.” The photograph of me beneath the headline was the same size as the one of Nat.

“Where'd you find this picture?”

“I called the yearbook office at Alabama State College. They gave me the number to that little portrait studio on Thurman Street that took the school pictures. I offered to buy a copy, but they gave it to me free. Said it was the least they could do for you.”

“The last time most people saw my face was when the white paper ran my mug shot.”

The college sophomore version of me in that picture was a long time gone. Driving a cab had put a little money in his pocket, enough to buy a decent tweed jacket and that tie.

“Police send the booking photos for free. I could have gotten that one, but when some people see you holding a number across your chest, they assume you did something wrong.”

The picture was only the half. The story ran onto the next page, underneath a cartoon drawing of a man, me, with outsized fists, a starburst where my knuckles had lifted the attacker's chin. Nat had his head back, singing with his eyes closed, and a small constellation of notes floated in the limelight. In that version of things at least, the show never stopped.

The paper wasn't shaking in my hands, so the trembling I felt was still on the inside. To see the truth in my hands, without having to say it, without having to plead my case or look at a judge, was a brand-new feeling. Something warm on my neck where all that weight had been.

“Do you have any more papers?”

“Which ones?”

“The last ten years.”

She looked at me, not searching my face anymore though, just watching me while I held the two papers she'd brought.

“I was on a road crew at Kilby. Every once in a while we'd find a piece of newspaper somebody threw out. I went ten years without reading a paper front to back. I got some catching up to do so I can know where I am.”

She had her arms folded, and breathed into a nod.

“We get each year's worth hardbound and keep them next door to our office. I call it a library, but it's a storeroom on the second floor of the Dunbar. You're welcome there any time.”

I nodded, and I believe I said thank you, but she had caught me off guard. It was hard to hear my own words in the middle of seeing that school picture. That day was too far gone to remember.

“That's why I'm asking, Mr. Weary. I don't want to be in your business, but it feels like the busses are everybody's business.”

I don't know why I looked around before I said it, but I'd never been one for loose-mouth talking and putting business in the street.

“I have a sister on the Women's Council. My brother helped to start the Taxi Guild. You give them a holler, and they might tell you something.”

Mrs. Lomax reached into that bag again and pulled out a notepad, flipped to the first clean page, and wrote down the names and numbers I gave her.

“Make sure you tell them I gave you their names. They'll trust you then.”

“I will indeed.”

Her son and daughter rode down Towne Avenue and stopped to talk to a man and woman, schoolteachers it seemed, walking among the children toward the school. They looked down the block to their mother, who pointed to her wrist, though she wore no watch. The first of the school bells, the ten-minute warning, came ringing out. Mrs. Lomax's son gave a boy a ride on his handlebars, and her daughter rode beside a group of girls with saddle oxfords on their feet and gym shoes around their shoulders.

“I hope I didn't hold you too long, Mr. Weary. Wouldn't want to keep you from Mr. Cole. Where are you all off to today?”

“I don't talk about my work.”

“Like I said, I'd be the last to dig for dirt on Nat Cole. I admit we've been hard on him, but we've been hard on all of the singers. He shouldn't have been singing in a Jim Crow theater in the first place. Don't sing to a crowd you can't sit in, it's as simple as that.”

“I guess television changes all that. Sing to everybody all at once. Jackie Robinson of television is what they're calling him.”

“Nothing wrong with Jackie, but a Willie Mays of
television is what we need. They say Mays could catch hell in his glove if he got a good jump on it.”

With that she was back on her bicycle and riding toward Avalon. I lost her behind the cars and the few scattered trees, but the flight of her papers marked her path along Seventy-Fourth Street, as a week's worth of headlines landed on those doorsteps. It was a mighty good notion, knowing that in the middle of her brand-new news she had brought me a little bit of my old time. And I didn't have to track through my mind to reach Montgomery. I could read about it on my front porch.