WLT (26 page)

“I thought you managed the Antwerp Apartments,” said Frank.

“I do it all, son,” said Mr. Odom. “I'm half janitor, half manager, and the rest of the time I do everything else. I hear you got the job. Congratulations.”

Mr. Odom asked how he liked his room. Frank liked it fine. “Oh,” said Laurel, “do you live at the Antwerp?”

“Yes,” said Frank, and wanted to say,
Alone. I live alone at the Antwerp, Laurel. I am older than I look, twenty-three in fact, and I am affectionate and congenial and generous to a fault and have fantasies from here to Chicago,
but then Roy Jr. came out of the elevator and Mr. Odom melted away and Roy Jr. said, “You have your lunch yet? Good. We'll go around to the Pot Pie, they have a good sauerkraut soup there. Hello, Miss Larpenteur.”

Roy Jr. talked all the way across the street and down to the lunchroom, about this, that, and the other thing, and ordered the soup and a plate of chipped beef and resumed talking. He said, “I've fired forty-one men in my life and six women and two children. Each one was memorable. Some of them begged for another chance and some of them cursed me with a passion and a resourcefulness they had never displayed before and one of them quietly went away and jumped off the Hennepin Avenue bridge. He hit the ice and it broke his back and he is somewhere today, a helpless cripple, working for a newspaper, I believe. I was his executioner.

“You're a young man and you don't know what it's like to take away someone's work, so I'll tell you. You have to do it quick. The moment his rear end touches the chair, in that exact instant you say it in one sentence: I'm sorry, Jack, but I have decided to let you go—your employment here is ended today. Then you say something for a minute—express sorrow, hope, reminiscence, commiseration—so he can recover, because no matter what kind of an idiot he was, he never thought it would come to this. Then you lean back and let him say his piece. Maybe it does him some good to cuss you out. Fine. Harvey Olson almost jumped over the desk and strangled me when I fired him. He said WLT was a dead end where his talents had gone unrecognized and in two days he'd have a job at twice the pay with people who knew something about radio.”

Harvey Olson had been fired.
The popular breakfast newscaster who said, “Hello and good morning, and may your day be filled with good news!”

“Harvey invested heavily in Honeywell when they were trying to sell this solar hat, and he lost his shirt, and shoes, and went downhill rapidly. For two years he'd come to work drunk every morning and now the police had found him passed out in his car on University Avenue with his pants loaded—and it was the
third time
—and when I told him the obvious, he leaned over and screamed at me. Fine. Harvey found another job a year later picking up dead branches for the Park Department, but at least he could look back and know he had had
one
proud moment in his life, when he called me a dirty bastard. When I fired Dusty Eustis he called me disloyal, a backstabber, a rat, a leech, and probably some other things. Here was a man who tried to get a sixteen-year-old usherette to go upstairs to a room with him and he was angry that his many years of service hadn't entitled him to this. There is no limit to self-deceit, Frank. I keep looking for the limit and there is none. Not among people in show business there isn't.

“The performer I admired the most, I think, was Uncle Albert, actually my dad's uncle. We hired him about 1927 and he stayed for twelve years until he died. We hired him because he broke his leg and couldn't be a street preacher anymore with the Salvation Army, which he had been for forty years. He was one of General William Booth's old stalwarts, and when Booth came over from London, he and Uncle Albert would go nightclubbing in Chicago. Neither of them touched a drop, of course, but General Booth loved to dance. He was wild about the turkey trot, the foxtrot, and the Buffalo, but of course he couldn't dance with young women, lest it lead to carnal desire, so he danced with Uncle Albert. After a hard day among the down-and-out and a long evening service, the General'd lean over and whisper, ‘How about a little hoofing?' and off they'd go. Around the hot spots of Chicago, two men dancing together was definitely eccentric. In fact, it was so eccentric that people who were as drunk as everybody in the clubs was didn't believe their eyes, and so the old gents, decked out in their somber Army regalia, flung themselves around the dance floor in happy abandon, and left refreshed, and woke up at dawn to resume the Lord's work.

“For us, Uncle Albert recited poems. By heart, of course. He recited on
Jubilee
and sometimes on
Friendly Neighbor
, whenever he happened to be around, and often on the
Afternoon Ballroom,
the announcer would say, ‘Uncle Albert is in the studio now and I wonder if we couldn't get him to recite a poem for us. Uncle Albert?' And the old man, who had tremendous eyebrows, great thorny overgrowths with trailing vines and creepers, approached the microphone. Slashed on his neck was an ugly scar from when a Memphis woman had tried to slit his throat, a close call that led to his conversion. He had a voice like a trombone—he was unable to lower it very much from a volume that would have carried across rivers and stopped lynch mobs—and he had such burning vitality and magnetism in his youth, he was always able to draw big crowds, but he could never win them for the Lord because nobody wanted to come within a hundred feet of him. Too loud. Even when he was old, people braced themselves whenever Uncle Albert walked in the room so they wouldn't jump and hit the chandelier when he said hello.

“He was at WLT because he was family. He understood this, and understood that he was not to preach. We had other people who did the preaching. Albert recited poetry. He was paid for this. He never read from a page, which he considered cheating, so his repertoire was limited. He never expanded it. He wasn't ambitious in any way. He only wanted to be useful.

“He knew fifty or so poems by heart, ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus' and ‘Curfew Shall Not Ring Tonight' and ‘Excelsior' and ‘Over the Hill to the Poorhouse,' and he appeared in the studio whenever the fancy struck, and the announcer had to work him in. Albert didn't like to sit and he would get to clearing his throat if made to wait too long, a powerful BRRAACH-HEM! like a lion letting other lions know he was here, a signal to announcers that he was ready to recite.

“When Albert recited, the engineer turned the volume gain down to a sliver, and his voice came through loud and clear.

“Every year on April 15th, the anniversary of Lincoln's death, he did ‘O Captain! My Captain!,' a poem that, in the hands of an amateur, can be rather flat, but, coming from Albert, was a clarion call, warning that the Republic is in constant danger, that any triumph is followed immediately by tragedy, heartbreak, treachery, and despair.

“This performance never failed to move and captivate. You might expect a grown person in the 20th century to be pretty much immune to the fevers of ‘O Captain! My Captain!,' but Uncle Albert was a powerhouse, and the radio stars dreaded him. His great moment was at the
WLT Barn Dance
Tenth Anniversary Show at Williams Arena where he preceded Bob Hope on the bill and gave the greatest recitation of ‘O Captain! My Captain!' of his life. The old man stood before an audience of seventeen-thousand, which was approximately his lifetime total audience as a preacher, and he flexed his eyebrows and said the poem and killed the captain and wept and cried out and knelt and whispered and saved the Republic, and at the end, the seventeen-thousand had no choice but to stand and cheer—he had closed off the alternatives, such as polite applause—so they stood and wept and shouted until he came out and did ‘Breathes there a man' and now the audience was beside itself, standing on the chairs, shouting themselves hoarse, throwing babies in the air, clapping till their hands bled, and Uncle Albert returned for a final selection, ‘The Charge of the First Minnesota at Gettysburg,' and the people collapsed into one damp quivering heap. The show was now over, though it still had an hour to go, including Mr. Hope's twenty-minute monologue. The great man stood in the wings, his famous grin a bit taut, his famous ski-jump nose glittering with sweat, and he whispered to Leo, the emcee, who signalled the orchestra, and they played ‘Columbia the Gem of the Ocean' and then Otto and His Trained Pig did the Leap From The Ladder Through A Flaming Hoop Into The Arms Of The Catcher and the Moonglows sang ‘A Guy Seldom Sees a Gal Like Louise,' but eventually Hope had to go on stage, which he did, and found that everybody was still thinking about Uncle Albert and was disappointed that he was not him. After the death of Lincoln and the battle of Gettysburg, the rapid-fire gags about golf and dames and Bing and booze seemed pretty small potatoes, and he soon sensed, though blinded by the spotlight, a slow but widespread movement of bodies toward the Exit signs.

“Well, like most of the disasters of the great, this one went unreported. The press is always afraid to stray too far from what the reader expects, so they wrote about the event that
should
have taken place—Ole Bob laying them out in the aisles, a few local performers also on the bill —but Ole Bob knew what happened. Up until that night, he had been a Fabian Socialist and one of the Paramount Seven, the elite core of the Hollywood left wing, but Uncle Albert showed him the power of the flag and Ole Bob has been wearing it ever since. He became a Republican that very night, Tailgunner Bob, the fighting man's favorite. You care for dessert? No? Good. Check, please.”

S
o Frank moved into a cubicle on the fourth floor, around the corner from Ethel Glen, next to Roy Jr.'s office, with a table and a chair. He spent his first day carefully drawing a chart of WLT employees and a map of the station, all three floors, and always carried a notebook in his pocket in which he wrote every fact about WLT the moment he learned it—new words, names of wives and children, who did what, where they went af- terward and with whom.

He learned the three Soderbjerg signatures and began sending out the cards for them, paid parking tickets, walked the dog, bought cakes on the birthdays of employees and assembled a choir to sing, took various clients and shirttail relatives on tours around the studio and brought them by Ray's or Roy's or Roy Jr.'s office and remembered to say the guest's name
loudly
and
clearly, twice,
because it was true, the Soderbjergs never remembered anybody. Frank was Fred for a few months, and then Frank, then Stan, or Young Man, sometimes resurfacing as Fred for awhile.

“Fred,” said Roy Jr., “go get me the last five weeks of
Sunnyvale
scripts. Do we keep those or throw them out, by the way?”

“We keep them, and my name is Frank, sir.”

“Frank! Of course. Frank.”

He returned with the scripts.

“I've got a feeling that Al has been working on brake linings for weeks and isn't Esther starting to repeat some jokes too?” So Frank sat down and read a pile of
Sunnyvales
and reported that, no, brake linings weren't the problem, worn clutches were: six of them in the past two weeks. The joke, about Ole and Knute getting drunk and walking home on the train tracks and Ole saying “This is the longest stairway I ever climbed” and Knute adding, “It wouldn't be so bad if they hadn't put the bannisters so low,” had been repeated twice in one month. And so had Wordsworth's lines,
When from our better selves we have too long / Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop, / Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired, / How gracious, how benign is solitude.

“Is Patsy Konopka writing this?”

No, Dale Snelling was. When Frank asked Dale if there was a problem with
Sunnyvale
these days, Dale blanched. “Who wants to know?” he said. He was working on a play, “Launcelot and Guenevere, A Drama in Verse,” for Vesta, who wanted to start a serious drama show, and he had farmed out
Sunnyvale
to a woman named Grace Marie Schein. “What's the problem?” he demanded. “Who sent you?” Frank said that the new writer didn't seem to have a broad knowledge of cars. Dale said, “You're snooping around for Roy Jr., aren't you?” He poked Frank in the chest. “Butt out, kid.”

But Ray liked him. “Fred,” he'd say, “where you going so fast? Sit down. Don't try to do it all at once, Fred. Make haste slowly.
There is luck in leisure.
My dad used to say that. My wife wakes up in the morning with a list as long as your arm. She's out the door and gone before I'm half awake. The woman is possessed. She's on ten boards of directors of ten godforsaken organizations and sits through more meetings in one week and listens to more nonsense than I could do in a year and survive, and she does it because she's out to save the world. Endless meetings and nothing ever comes of it because these people are all crackpots but they're all cracked in different ways and they never agree on anything. Well, she can't save the world, and neither can you or I. Don't concern yourself with things you can't change, I say. It's more
important
to make a very good cup of coffee in the morning and a very good piece of toast than it is to worry about Josef Stalin, because I can do something about breakfast and I can't do
anything
about Stalin, and I'm sure he's having a
wonderful
breakfast. You know that coffee you bought me? From Jamaica? It's the best. Ever. My wife eats more bad food at these meetings. Rubber chicken and sweeping-compound gravy. You know why I married her—it was because when we were fourteen I saw her eat one hundred cinnamon caramel rolls in one day. I was a friend of her brother's. She ate ten rolls for breakfast and her mother said, ‘Vesta, if you eat one more of those you'll get sick,' so she ate
ninety
more. About twenty of us were there to watch her at the end. She didn't look a bit sick, she was just out to show what sort of stuff she was made of, and she sure showed me. I said, that girl's for me. She never ate another one afterward. Now she eats burnt toast and cold hot dogs and spaghetti out of a can. Terrible. Have you had your lunch yet?” What made all the Soderbjergs happy was to have Frank sit and listen to them, which Frank was glad to do and Sloan was glad to be shut of: “Man oh man, that Roy Jr. can talk the ear off a barber. Lemme know if you hear any juicy gossip.” He was helping one of the girls find an apartment, Lucy, who was nineteen. Frank went up and sat in the hall outside Roy Jr.'s office at eleven-thirty and Roy Jr. stuck his head out the door and said, “Oh. Say, are you busy for lunch?” and they'd go to the coffeeshop or over to the Pot Pie for a plate of wieners and baked beans, and Roy Jr. would talk. He trusted Frank with inside information. He told him that Patsy Konopka was crazy, that Ray and LaWella were friends, and so were Ray and Alma, and that Dad Benson was talking about retiring and ending
Friendly Neighbor.
He said, “Dad saved the station after Pearl Harbor. We still get mail about it. It was Sunday, you know, and a young guy named Babe Roeder was on duty when the news came over the wire and he hesitated to put it on the air right away because he'd gotten burned by a practical joke a few months before—somebody had handed him a bulletin in the middle of a newscast, which seemed to be about a flood that had wiped out downtown St. Paul, but then, in the second paragraph, there was a big ark and a lot of animals—so Roeder didn't want to get burned again. He sat and thought about it. Then he tried to call up the
Journal
to see what they thought. Their phone line was busy. Meanwhile,
Melody Hotel
was coming toward the station break, and Reed Seymour the announcer came out and got the weather forecast and Babe handed him the bulletin and said, ‘We're at war. I think.' Reed didn't want to put something like that on the air without somebody's permission. It was December and Little Tommy and Pop and Betty and the Bellhops were singing Christmas songs in Studio A and I suppose Reed was reluctant to ruin their fun with a war against the Japs. So he called me at home, but he got my dad instead. My dad had just gotten up from a nap and was groggy. Now, my dad had soured on Roosevelt years before, considered him power-mad, a liar, a skirt-chaser, and a fraud who was in league with the Morgans and Rockefellers. My dad never got over the death of populism. He thought a world war was the worst disaster America could find for itself. So he gave young Reed Seymour a lecture on history. He told him that the only purpose of war is to give the goddamn government an even tighter grip on your nuts than it's got already and to make poor bastards die so the rich can get richer. He told him that war was a horrible nightmare that must never be repeated or it would mean the end of civilization.