The Comedy is Finished (2 page)

Poor reaction, drop-off in audience response. Koo walks around, grinning—“But I wanna tell you, I
love
working TV”—and in fifteen seconds he’s got them back, and he’s forgotten the dead spot. Most mistakes he remembers, but gags like the Juanita Izquerta he keeps in no matter how bad the response. The trouble is, not enough people remember the name. She was never a big star, Juanita, she made a dozen pictures in the early fifties and that was it. But Koo had her along on some of his USO tours—the boys in Korea, that decade—and his female co-stars, the starlets and has-beens and almost-wases he trouped and shtupped on those tours, are always fresh in his mind, as though they’re still this minute young hard-breasted terrific chicks knocking them dead tonight in Vegas or Miami Beach just as Koo himself is knocking them dead here at this taping of
The Koo Davis Special
in beautiful downtown Burbank, California. It’s as though there’s a loyalty he owes those girls, to pretend they’re still hot stuff, still hot, that it could still be any one of them appearing on this show with him
instead of the latest blonde, Jill Johnson, a laid-back girl comic of the new school, 26 and a sexual bearcat, with whom he would be cheerfully expending his post-tape hard-on. (Performing has always been good for his sex life.)

Even the first of the blondes, Honeydew Leontine, on his premier tour—Hawaii, Australia, a few shitty islands, a couple aircraft carrier flight decks—even Honeydew, a girl whose movie career never got higher than stooge for the Ritz Brothers and was over even before the end of World War Two, even Honeydew still shows up from time to time in his monologues, and the last time he’d trouped and shtupped with Honeydew was—Christ on a crutch, it was over thirty years ago! The
first
time, in Hawaii, was
thirty-six years ago!
Jesus! Honeydew and her big tits and her collection of stones—stones from every goddamn beach she’d ever walked on, she carried them around in burlap bags, everywhere she went—Honeydew must be almost sixty fucking years old by now. And Koo himself, if he stops to think about it, which he never does, is sixty-three.

“Of course, television is different from the movies. When I started in pictures—I won’t say how long ago that was, but I taught William S. Hart how to ride—and in the old days you’d shoot the same scene over and over until the director was satisfied. It got to be a habit to repeat things until you got them right. It got to be a habit to repeat things until you got them right. It got to be a habit to repeat things until you got them right. It got to be a—”

Which is about par for that gag; the laugh starts at the beginning of the first repeat, a trickle that dwindles off, picks up again at the beginning of the second repeat, lulls, then picks itself up again
before
the finish of the second repeat (the audience anticipating the third), so Koo is pushing the third repeat into a growing laugh. Then he can stop and do his own laugh, and grin, and shake
his head, and walk around, selecting the next gag while the audience works on the last one.

It was the USO taught Koo how to be a comedian. He’d done vaudeville, he’d done radio, he was already what was then called a “headliner,” but it was the USO tours that taught him how to live with an audience, how to make it want to like him, how to make it feel afterward that he didn’t just make them laugh, he made them happy. In those early days he was just another radio comic, and the point of the touring shows was to give the troops a safe acceptable look at American tits and asses, so what he had to do when he stepped out on that temporary stage was give the GIs a reason to be happy to see him. Give them topical jokes (“Actually, I’m just here to buy cigarettes.”), give them local jokes (“General Floyd sent me a message not to fraternize with the natives. At least that’s what the mama-san told me, when she hung up the phone.”), then bring out Honeydew or Juanita or Laura or Linda or Karen or Lauren or Dolly or Fanny, run a couple dumb-blonde routines, leave the chick out there to sing a song, come back with the local commander (they were
all
hams at heart, every last one of them), do a little uplift, cut it with some mild sex gags, send the General or Admiral or Colonel or Commander off with Juanita or Linda or Lauren or Dolly, give their exit an innuendo the troops could enjoy, and by then they were his, because
he was their link to special status
. They were dogfaces, retreads, grunts, and he was hanging around with Generals and blonde chicks, but he was one of them. He could come on like the rawest of raw recruits (“Colonel O’Malley’s being terrific to us all. He’s gonna watch Honeydew for me while I go up all by myself to the rest camp at Bloody Nose Ridge.” Or Pork Chop Hill, or St. Lo, or wherever the most dangerous spot in the neighborhood might be.), and he could come on like the cool wiseguy the troops all wished they were, and they
learned to love him for it, and he learned to love them for loving him.

He got a lot of good press for the USO work, and in truth he deserved it. He made no money out of it, not directly, beyond the expenses of the troupe. He’d started the tours in the first place because he was medically 4-F in 1940 (bad ear
and
bad stomach
and
bad knee), and he felt guilty about it, and this was something he could do to make up for not being “in it.” (He wound up “in it,” in fact, more than most guys in uniform, being under fire or otherwise in danger countless times while riding in jeeps or trucks or planes or helicopters or transport ships or—once, on Okinawa, when three kamikazes came plunging through the ack-ack—in a rickshaw. “We have some wild drivers in California,” he told the troops that afternoon, “but those three that came through this morning were ridiculous.”)

And when the goddamn Vietnam thing came along, how was he supposed to know it was
different
? Why wasn’t it the Pacific Theater all over again, Korea all over again? It hadn’t been wrong to cheer our side ever before, and these were the same kids, weren’t they? Fighting the same slant-eyed son of a bitch gooks, weren’t they? So what the hell was the difference?

Permissiveness, it seemed like. A lot of fat, soft college kids hanging around on their campuses, young snotnoses, didn’t know their ass from their elbow. You looked at the real kids marching along in the same uniforms as before, you knew you had to make a choice, and Jesus the choice seemed easy. It should have been Stage Door Canteen all over again, it
should
have been, but it wasn’t.

Koo did the USO tours the same as ever, but when he was in the States the great National Debate was creeping into his comedy, and for the first time in his career he was coming out on stage and getting
booed
. Half the under-twenty-fives out there in America
thought he was some sort of goddamn baby raper or something. He just couldn’t figure it out, and it made him mad, and the jokes got more and more political, and everything was just simply out of control.

He still doesn’t know why the goddamn Vietnam thing was different, but fairly early on he understood it
was
different. Maybe the slant-eyed gooks were the same (he wasn’t even sure about that anymore), and maybe the American uniforms were the same, but the kids inside that olive drab were something else. They laughed at the space-shot jokes and the bureaucracy jokes and the sex jokes (“I was supposed to do a nude centerfold for
Cosmopolitan
but it didn’t work out. They said all the interesting parts were behind the staple.”), but there were tried-and-true lines they
didn’t
laugh at. “The General’s being terrific to us all. He’s gonna watch Dolly for me while I go up all by myself to the rest camp at Khe Sanh.” They gave him a polite chuckle. They didn’t want to embarrass him, the sons of bitches, and they were
polite
to him!

You’re polite to a comedian, you’re killing him.

Then, when Vietnam ended, you couldn’t throw an asparagus spear without hitting six hypocrites. But not Koo; he wasn’t sure why he even
had
these convictions, but he’d stick by them. The career was thinning out, TV sponsors weren’t picking up their options, it was getting tougher to find writers whose material Koo could even
understand
, and he began to think long thoughts about retirement. He remained steadfast through the Nixon resignation and the Ford pardon, he even stuck when nobody invited him on that goddamn aircraft carrier in New York on Bicentennial Day; July 4, 1976, the Tall Ships, and Koo watched it on
television
. He’d offered to work for the Ford campaign, and they’d gently let him down, and it wasn’t till later he figured it out; Koo Davis had become a reminder of too much bad history.
Koo Davis!

But what did it for him at last was the investigations into the CIA, where it was made public that for several years in the sixties they’d had a phone tap and a mail check on
him
! On
Koo
! And when the asshole involved was asked by the Senate Committee why Koo Davis, the answer was that Koo had a lot of liberal friends. Did have.

Right after that came the revelations about the CIA experiments on human beings in hospitals, and that just put the icing on the cake. Maybe nobody else remembered what the Second World War had been all about, but Koo did, and he got mad: “The purpose of the experiments was to see if a human being could live without a brain. It turns out he can, if he’s in the CIA.” And when it occurred to him he was now telling
anti
-government jokes, he realized the time had come to end his own long war. Back to civilian life, back to the home front, back to the world he’d left behind.

“And if you don’t like the show, folks, you’ll get a full refund at the door. But I know you’re gonna love it, and now I gotta go get ready, we’re in kind of a hurry today, the manufacturer is recalling my pacemaker.”

With a grin, with a wave, Koo tosses the mike to a waiting stage-hand and trots off. “It’s a good audience,” he tells somebody on the way by, but that’s just words, he doesn’t even know who he’s talking to. They’re all good audiences for Koo Davis, they’ve been good audiences again for a year now. The split is over, the trouble’s over, everybody’s a good guy after all, and Koo is happy to relax once more into who he really is; a funny man, a funnyman, a good comic, an honest uncomplicated human being, living like every comic in the eternal Now, the Present, the Hereheisfolks, the Nowappearing. It’s a good life, safe at last, and it’s always happening right Now.

Koo has three minutes to drink a little ice water, get the makeup
adjusted, have a quick last look at the script, play a little grabass with Jill, and then come out stage center into a group of eight tall lean dancing girls and his opening line of the show: “I can remember when legs like that were illegal.” Now, he moves briskly along a cable-strewn alley created by the false walls of stacked sets, toward the door to a corridor leading to his dressing room, and as he reaches that first door somebody on his left says, “Mr. Davis?”

Koo turns his head. It’s one of the scruffy bearded young crew members; these hairy sloppy styles never will look to Koo like anything but shit. Behind the kid is a side exit from the studio, the red
Taping
light agleam above it. Koo is in a hurry, and he wants no problems. “What’s up?”

“Look at this, Mr. Davis,” the kid says, and brings his hand up from his side, and when Koo looks down he is absolutely incredibly dumbfounded to see the kid is holding a pistol, a little black stubby-nosed revolver, and it’s pointed right at Koo’s head.
Assassination!
he thinks, though why anyone would want to assassinate him he has no idea, but on the other hand he has in his time played golf with one or two politicians who were later assassinated, and in his astonishment he opens his mouth to holler, and the kid uses his free hand to slap Koo very hard across the face.

And now a bag gets pulled down over his head from behind, a burlap bag smelling of moist earth and potatoes, and cable-like arms are grabbing him hard around the upper arms and chest, imprisoning him, lifting him, lifting his feet off the floor. He’s being carried, there’s a sudden rush of cooler air on the backs of his hands, they’re taking him outside. “Hey!” he yells, and somebody punches him very very hard on the nose.
Jesus Christ
, he thinks, not hollering anymore.
Now they’re punching me on the nose
.

Peter Dinely watched the blue van with Joyce at the wheel jounce slowly over the speed bumps at the studio exit and turn right toward Barham Boulevard. Were Mark and Larry in the back, out of sight? Did they have Koo Davis back there? Peter gnawed the insides of his cheeks, willing Joyce to look this way, give him some sort of sign, but the van turned and drove unsteadily away, an enigmatic blue box on small wheels, its rear windows dark and dusty. Peter followed, in the green rented Impala, the ache in his cheeks a kind of distraction from uncertainty.

The habit of gnawing his cheeks was an acquired one, chosen deliberately a long long time ago and now so ingrained he could no longer stop it, though the inside of his mouth was ragged and even occasionally bleeding. If he ever could stop chewing on himself he’d be glad of it; but then would the blinking come back?

Peter was thirty-four. To break an early habit of blinking when under pressure, he’d been chewing his cheeks in moments of tension for fifteen years. Eleven years ago a dentist had reacted with horror, telling him the interior of his mouth was one great raw wound, since when he had stopped going to dentists.

Now, Peter followed the blue van west on Barham Boulevard, and it wasn’t until the turn onto Hollywood Freeway northbound that he could angle into the middle lane, run up next to the van, look over at Joyce’s tense profile, and tap the horn. She looked at him almost with terror, not seeming to understand what he wanted—or possibly even who he was—until he gave her an angry questioning
glare while pointing with jabbing fingers at the back part of the van. Then she gave a sudden jerk of understanding, and an exaggerated nod. Yes? he asked, demanding with head and face and arm, and she nodded again, with a small tense smile and a quick jerky wave of the hand.