“Actually,” said Jack, “things are going quite well, I think. I’m learning the business, but strangely enough the principles I learned studying business administration at Harvard seem to apply.”
“Adding that little girl has made your Wheaterina Show more popular.”
“Yes. Betty’s an asset. She’s a natural comic. It was her own idea to use malaprops.”
“I really broke down laughing when she said, ‘Oh, no! Alice couldn’t be in the family way. She hasn’t even got a husband!’”
“We got a dozen letters and half a dozen calls complaining that was too risqué,” said Jack.
“I’m interested in your claim that WCHS has more loyal listeners than any other station in Boston. To get Langdon and Lebenthal to put their name on the survey that says so was a real coup. Your advertisers—”
“We fudged a little,” Jack said with a sly smile. “All we hired Langdon and Lebenthal to do was send out the canvassers. We didn’t ask them to tabulate the results. We did that ourselves.”
“But you’ve invited your advertisers to stop in and look at the cards.”
“We tabulated the results and came in third. So we took about half the cards that favored other stations and stuffed them in the furnace. What remained favored us—and they’re there to be inspected by anyone who wants to see them.”
“Langdon and Lebenthal . . . ?”
“Did what they were paid to do. Each canvasser was scrupulously honest and dumped a bag of cards on us at the end of the day. So far no one has thought to ask who tabulated the results.”
Wolcott frowned. “You’d better be careful, my boy. That sort of thing can ruin you.”
Jack smiled. “What’s the old saying: ‘faint heart ne’er won fair lady’? Well, faint heart never turned a profit in business, either. And neither did rigid rectitude. I did learn something from my father.”
“Be sure you keep the secret.”
“Only three people know,” said Jack. “You’re the third.”
Harrison Wolcott grinned and signaled the bartender to refill their glasses. “I have a feeling you’re going to be a successful businessman, Jack.”
“That’s what I’ve got in mind.”
Wolcott glanced up and down the bar. “Jack . . . I want to raise a very personal matter with you.”
Jack nodded.
“Uh . . . Kimberly is a wonderful girl, I believe. She’s also, as you have said, petite. I might say delicate. Her mother and I are concerned about her pregnancy. Petite girls sometimes—Well, you know what I mean. The two of you were married only a short while before she got pregnant. And that is fine. But I hope you realize a husband’s marital rights sometimes have to be put in abeyance for a time, lest the girl be harmed.”
“I understand.”
Wolcott put his hand in his pocket and palmed a business card. He slipped it across the bar to Jack. “That’s the telephone number of a girl you can count on to be discreet, should you want to engage her services. She has a very small clientele: a few businessmen. Expect to pay her generously.”
Jack put the card in his pocket without looking at it “I appreciate this,” he said. “But I doubt I’ll call her.”
TWO
JACK AND KIMBERLY WERE HOME FROM DINNER BY HALF PAST ten, having eaten rare roast beef in a speakeasy on the north bank of the Charles, where the proprietor had no qualms about serving his guests a genuine and excellent Burgundy. Kimberly had drunk a glass and a half of it, though she had generally given up alcohol until the baby was born. Before he joined her in bed, Jack turned the radio to WCHS, where music being played by the dance band at the Copley was being fed through a telephone line and onto the air.
He tossed his pajamas aside and lay down nude. Kimberly had not taken off her silk tap pants or her garter belt and stockings. They fondled and stimulated each other until she was flushed and her mouth was dry.
“Mmm . . . You want it, don’t you?” she whispered, smiling fondly at his pulsing erection.
He took seriously what his father-in-law had said at the bar early in the evening. He hadn’t told Harrison so, but for several weeks now he had not mounted Kimberly, had not penetrated her all the way. Her doctor said it was better not to. She was petite, and though it was unlikely they could injure the fetus, it was not impossible, if they were too vigorous. They had experimented with other ways, doggie-style for one, but had found less than complete satisfaction.
Jack nodded. He wanted it. “Baby. Would you be willing to commit the horrible and abominable crime against nature again? I suppose that doesn’t do much for you, but it does everything for me.”
“A second time in one day?” she asked with a faint smile.
“That one was a quickie.”
“And tasted like garlic,” she said. “If I’m going to suck the juices out of you, you’ve got to leave off the garlic.”
“I swear I’ll never touch garlic again. On the other hand, a little variation in flavor might—”
She shook her head petulantly. “Chocolate. Brandy. Beef and Burgundy. But not garlic!”
“It’s a deal, then.”
“All right.”
She lowered her face into his lap and began to lick him. She had learned that taking him into her mouth and working up and down with tight lips would bring him fast. She also knew he didn’t always like being brought fast.
“It’s going to take all night,” she whispered, opening her eyes wide and shaking her head.
Jack arched his back and closed his eyes. “I don’t have to go to the station in the morning,” he said.
She lowered her head more and began to lick his scrotum. “If somebody had told me two years ago that someday I’d put my face down in a man’s crotch and lick his balls, I’d have called them insane.”
“If somebody had told me two years ago that the most beautiful Boston debutante of 1929 would be licking my balls in 1931, I’d have called them insanely optimistic.”
“Mommy and Daddy didn’t bring me up to be a cocksucker.”
“I want an honest answer to an honest question, darling,” said Jack. “You do kind of like it, don’t you? At least a little bit?”
She looked up and smiled. “Well . . . it’s an acquired taste. When I first tried it, I thought I might throw up.”
“I remember.”
He remembered vividly. He had made the suggestion diffidently, apprehensive that he might offend her and even more apprehensive that she would think it was a suggestion that could be made only by a lubricous California Jew and never by the gentleman he was supposed to become.
At first she had kissed him tentatively, well down his shaft, then, more firmly, on his grayish-pink glans. She had looked up and smiled shyly, and he had whispered the suggestion that she lick. She did.
That first time she had clenched her lips tight against his ejaculate, certain its taste had to be nauseating. It had streamed over her mouth and chin and dripped on her breasts. Without his suggesting it, she had taken a drop on her finger and put it on her tongue. Then she had licked it off her lips and laughed.
She hadn’t thrown up. She had never thrown up. She had gagged once, when she lowered her head too much and took him too deep down her throat. After that she knew how much she could take and where to stop.
The loveliest debutante of 1929. Her parents had not brought her out at the annual Debutante Cotillion but at a party of her own, for one hundred guests, in the same ballroom where the cotillion was held, at the Copley—an event that fascinated Boston but was, even so, judged as verging on ostentatious. That her escort that evening had been not a Bostonian but an unknown young man from California named Lear had caused much comment, not all of it favorable. It had been mildly scandalous. That he was a Harvard senior and was going to continue to a master’s degree had suggested he might be the right sort, though.
That he had already taken Kimberly’s virginity would have been conclusive evidence that he was not the right sort.
> “Whatever are you thinking, husband?”
“I’m thinking about you,” he said. “Remembering when—”
“Well, you had better focus your mind on what I’m doing, or we will be at it all night.”
THREE
One
1932
THE STUDIOS AND TRANSMITTER OF WCHS WERE NOT ON THE Charles River as its call letters suggested but in Southie. Jack Lear was not willing to commute to Southie every day, so his executive offices were located in a suite of rooms above a theater southeast of the Common.
“Executive offices” was actually too grand a term for the rooms from which the radio station did business. Its executive staff consisted of just two men: Jack himself and Herb Morrill, whose job was to sell advertising. Jack had inherited Herb, who had been employed by WCHS since 1928 and was thus a veteran not only of the station but of radio broadcasting. He sold advertising, but he was also the source of ideas.
It had been Herb’s idea in fact, not Jack’s, to do the survey. When the results came in and were not favorable, Jack decided to fake them and then tout the faked results so often and for so long that it became gospel that WCHS was Boston’s favorite radio station, in spite of other stations’ frenzied efforts to set the record straight
One morning in February, Herb brought to the office a singing trio, and Jack reluctantly auditioned them.
Herb Morrill was a man of infectious enthusiasm. The story told of him was that he had been a successful bootlegger but had left that business because he foresaw the repeal of Prohibition. The truth was that, as a boy, he had developed a fascination with radio when he wiggled a wire whisker around on a quartz crystal and strained inside his earphones to hear the signal all the way from Pittsburgh—station KDKA. His father repaired shoes and apprenticed the boy to learn the trade. For a while, Herb re-soled and re-heeled shoes until he could hurry home, bolt down a meal, and don his earphones to hear stations as far west as Kansas City and Chicago. In 1928 he abandoned his trade to go to work for WCHS. He wanted to be an engineer but lacked the education for it. By default, he gravitated into selling advertising.
Herb was only two years older than Jack but had the look of a man ten years older. He shared with Jack the tendency to baldness, but his was far more advanced. He wore round, goldrimmed eyeglasses and looked pedantic and timid. His appearance was deceiving because he was aggressive and outspoken.
“Wait’ll ya hear these guys! Wait’ll ya hear these guys!”
Jack was accustomed to Herb’s exuberance. He lit a cigarette and regarded the trio—all dressed in identical double-breasted tan suits—with skepticism.
“Listen to this!”
The trio opened by striking a note: “Hmmmmmm.”
Jack covered his eyes. “Don’t do that. Just sing some thing.”
They did:
I’m Geraldo Cigarillo, and men all say,
I’m the finest cigarillo you can buy today.
With the choicest tobacco, I will please you,
You can’t find better, and that is true.
For the finest smoke that can’t be beat,
Buy a pack of Geraldos and enjoy the treat!
“Jesus Christ! Herb! What have I done to you to make you do this to me?”
“You don’t like it? I don’t like it. The audience that hears it won’t like it. But they’ll remember the message! Geraldo Cigarillos are best! They’ll remember the goddamned message. Merchandising by irritation, Jack!”
“Irri—Are you out of your mind? Make your potential customers mad at you?”
Herb grinned. “The Levy brothers like it. They see the point. Your potential customers may be irritated by the message, but they’ll goddamn well remember it. The Levys will sign a six-month contract to sponsor a Geraldo Cigarillo Hour. These guys sing the message, they sing another song or two on each show, and we fill in with a band and somebody like the Wisecrack Guys and Betty.”
“Six—Well . . . what do you call this kind of shit? I mean singing the message. What do you call it?”
Herb shrugged. “The musical message, say. Why just have some mellifluous announcer intone the message when you can have—”
“All right, all right! Have you signed these guys?”
“Fifty dollars a week.”
“Okay.”
“Apiece.”
“Apiece?”
“They sing for us. Messages. Songs. Whatever. Not just on The Geraldo Cigarillo Show.”
“What are they called?”
“The Bronson Brothers.”
“Jesus Christ!” Jack exclaimed. “From now on they’re . . . the Harmonics, the Tone Brothers, the Mellow Fellows. Something. Mellow Fellows. How you like that, guys?”
The Bronson Brothers nodded solemnly.
“Okay. And put the ‘hmmmm’ back in, at the beginning and the end. If we’re going to be memorable, we may as well be memorable.”
TWO
ABOUT SIX WEEKS BEFORE THE BABY WAS DUE, KIMBERLY’S belly grew and she began to look pregnant. Her mother started to spend a lot of time at the house. And they found a nanny, an English girl from Lambeth named Cecily Camden. She moved into a room the Lears prepared for her on the third floor of the house.
The house, unfortunately, had only one bathroom, on the second floor, plus a toilet and a basin in a closet off the kitchen. Cecily would use that closet except when she bathed, which she could do only in the second-floor bathroom. She had been in the house less than a week when Jack accidentally walked into the bathroom and saw her in the tub. She smiled and grabbed a towel to cover herself but didn’t shriek, and Jack apologized and backed out in no great hurry.
“I’ve got to go to New York this week,” he told Kimberly over dinner the same evening. “If you weren’t so far along, I’d take you with me.”
“What’s the occasion?”
“Well, you know how Herb’s a man of enthusiasms. His latest is for a vaudeville comic who’s playing in the Earl Carroll Vanities. He thinks we should try to book the guy to come up to Boston and do a weekly radio show, half an hour of his jokes and routines. He doesn’t work cheap, and I can’t even think of signing him until I see his act.”
Kimberly shrugged. “You’ve got the Wisecrack Guys. How many comics can you use?”
“Herb says they’re a pair of amateurs compared to this guy.”
“Why would he leave the Earl Carroll Vanities to come and work on a Boston radio station?”
“Being in the Vanities is great. But it’s not permanent. The guy’s bread and butter is vaudeville, but the movies and radio have all but killed vaudeville. Like a lot of vaudevillians, he’s been casting a nervous eye on radio.”
“You think it’s really worth your time to go all the way to New York to catch this act?” Kimberly asked skeptically.
“I promised Herb I would.”
“What’s this comic’s name?”
“Jack Benny.”
Three
KIMBERLY INSISTED HE PACK WHITE TIE AND TAILS, PLUS HIS collapsible top hat, to wear to the theater in New York. There, where she couldn’t see him, he went to the Vanities in a darkgray double-breasted suit.
Herb went with him. He’d reserved seats down front.
Benny was the lead comedian. He appeared in a number of sketches, then did a monologue.
“Herb,” Jack said quietly as they walked up the aisle to the exit, “that man is not funny.”
“I disagree with you, Jack. I think he’s the funniest man I’ve heard in a long time.”
“Is there any way to get out of this dinner?”
“I don’t see how. That’d be very awkward.”
Forty-five minutes later they sat down at a table in the Stork Club with Jack Benny.
Benny had just celebrated his thirty-seventh birthday. Jack saw a certain appeal in his innocent, open face and in the flat, hesitating manner in which he delivered his gags; but he simply could not see that the man was funny.
“Two Jacks,�
�� said Herb. “That makes conversation a little awkward, doesn’t it?”
“You can call me Ben,” said Jack Benny. “My real name is Benjamin Kubelsky.”
The Stork Club was a speakeasy. The proprietor, their host, was an ex-convict named Sherman Billingsley, who had served time in an Oklahoma prison before he came to New York and became the bootlegger to café society. He knew Jack Benny and came to the table to welcome him and his friends.
“Pleasure to see you here, Jack,” said Billingsley. “And to see you, too, Mr. Lear, Mr. Morrill.” He nodded toward the bottle of Johnnie Walker sitting on their table. “That’s on the house, gentlemen.”
“Thank you, Sherm,” said Jack Benny. “Anybody interesting in the joint tonight?”
“You might be interested in the gentleman over there,” said Billingsley, nodding discreetly at a table where a tall, distinguished-looking man sat smoking a cigarette and talking earnestly to a diminutive girl.
“Who’s he?” Benny asked.
“That’s General Douglas MacArthur, Chief of Staff, United States Army. The girl is his mistress. She’s a Filipina.”
Jack Benny shrugged. Apparently General MacArthur didn’t interest him.
“Don’t turn around and look, whatever you do,” said Billingsley, “but the swarthy fellow two tables back—the one with the eyes of a wolf—is Lucky Luciano.”
“Who’s Lucky Luciano?” asked Jack Lear.
Billingsley’s chin and brows rose, as if he could not believe anyone did not know the name of Lucky Luciano. “He’s the head man of all the mobs in the States. He and his guys took over everything not long ago. They just killed off their rivals.”
Jack Benny did not turn and look at Luciano. He didn’t seem any more interested in the gangster than he was in General MacArthur. His focus was on showbiz people, and nobody else made much difference to him.
“Tell ya what, Jack,” said Billingsley. “Look to your left. Lucille LeSueur, lately known as Joan Crawford.”
“Aha,” said Benny, and he turned and looked, catching her eye.
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