“What do you want to know?”
Kimberly half grinned and shook her head. “Well, what’s obvious. Does he? Do you?”
Betsy nodded. “Yes, Twice.”
“And he does it? I mean, does he like it?”
Betsy laughed. “Ha! I judge he likes it all right. I mean, can a man fake a hard-on?”
“Is he . . . well equipped?”
“I haven’t much basis for comparison, Kimberly. Compared to my ex-husband, he . . . compares very well.”
“Is he comfortable with things?”
“Yes. He does what a man is supposed to do. With enthusiasm. To put it crudely, once he’s in the saddle he’s a real cowboy.”
“Then you’d judge he’s not—”
“That’s right. I’d judge he’s not. The fourth time we went to dinner together, he asked me if I’d like to stop at his apartment for a nightcap. I knew what that meant, of course. But I thought, well, what the hell? If I was going to . . . resume that sort of thing, why not with Curt Frederick? What’s wrong with him? So I went to his apartment with him.”
“And he—”
“We had one drink, and then he very straightforwardly asked me if I’d go to bed with him.”
“Straightforwardly.”
Betsy smiled. “I’d guess he’d been thinking about, probably rehearsed in his mind, how he’d ask me, and then decided to just come out with it, bluntly. If he’d started groping at me, I think I’d have been offended. But he simply asked me. The way he put it was ‘Do you think you’d enjoy going to bed with me? Could you possibly enjoy it as much as I would?’”
“And you said yes.”
“I said I might. We went into his bedroom. He undressed me, then undressed himself. He suggested we take a shower together. He said that was a wonderful way for two people to get acquainted. And it was. He soaped me, and I soaped him. You can’t be shy about each other after you’ve run your hands all over each other that way. I played with him, and he climaxed. I said, ‘Uh-oh,’ and he said not to worry, he could do it again. And he could, too. Twice more. Then the next time we were together was at my house. I don’t have a shower, but we sat in the tub together.” Betsy grinned. “We got so excited we damn near drowned.”
“What’s developing here?” Kimberly asked, a bit taken aback.
“We’ll see, hmm?” Betsy mused before downing the rest of her gin.
Three
CURTIS FREDERICK BROADCAST LIVE INTERVIEWS AND REPORTS from the Republican National Convention in Cleveland and the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. The NBC network offered coverage too, but Frederick concentrated on the New England and New York delegations and offered politicians a chance to be heard on the radio back in their hometowns—an opportunity they eagerly grabbed. To win his attention, some of the politicians brought him useful information. An experienced journalist, he knew when to attribute and when not to attribute—when to say “Mr. So-and-so tells me” and when to say “A reliable source tells me.”
His deep voice, his vocabulary, his restrained cadence, and his selection of stories to cover made him a voice of calm authority in contrast to the near-hysterical jabbering of a broadcaster like Walter Winchell. Curtis Frederick was not the most popular broadcaster who reached his region, but he was the broadcaster educated people tuned to when they wanted information.
Betsy accompanied him to Philadelphia. When they returned, they announced that they intended to be married immediately after the election.
The Literary Digest took a mail-in poll and announced that Governor Alfred M. Landon would defeat President Franklin D. Roosevelt in a landslide. Curtis Frederick did not say so on the air, but he told Jack he remained confident that the result would be exactly the opposite of what the poll indicated. Jack respected his judgment and told Kimberly and her father, among others, to expect a second term for the New Deal President.
On the eve of the election, Jack stood at the bar of the Common Club with his father-in-law Harrison Wolcott. They had listened to the evening news broadcast by Curtis Frederick in the radio room, a private room on the third floor where the sounds of the radio would not disturb other members. When Frederick went off the air, they went to the bar. He would join them there as soon as he could.
“I have not entirely lost my optimism,” Wolcott said to Jack. “I simply have to believe that a man who has the support of probably seventy-five percent of the nation’s newspapers stands a good chance of being elected.”
“The problem is,” said Jack, “that newspapers are themselves big businesses. The men who own them are capitalists.”
Frederick arrived twenty minutes after the end of his broadcast. Jack and his father-in-law still wore white tie in the club, though most members now wore business suits at the bar, as did Frederick.
“This is an interesting bar,” he said. “I’ve been a guest here before—in 1928, I think it was. I wondered if the club wouldn’t move the bar downstairs again after the repeal of Prohibition.”
“We got used to having it on the second floor,” said Wolcott. “And you know how it is in Boston—if you get used to some thing it becomes a tradition. But tell me, Mr. Frederick, why are you so sure Mr. Roosevelt will be reelected? A lot of respected journalists don’t think so.”
Frederick asked the bartender for a gin on the rocks. “Well,” he said to Wolcott, “I think we would agree that William Allen White is about as respected a journalist as we have. The North American Newspaper Alliance wired him a request to write a story they could run if Landon is elected. White wired back, ‘You have a quaint sense of humor.’”
Two days after the election, Curtis Frederick married Mrs. Otis Emerson, who was happy to escape what she called “that odious appellation.” Frederick moved into her house in Boston. His brother Willard took over his apartment in Cambridge.
Four
1937
LEAR BROADCASTING WAS ON THE LOOKOUT FOR NEW STAtions. One became available in New Haven, as did another in Stamford, Connecticut; but Jack was not interested in them because his stations in Boston, Hartford, and White Plains already covered their broadcast area.
During his visit to Cleveland for the Republican Convention, Curtis Frederick had renewed his friendship with the editors and reporters for the Plain Dealer, and one of them told him that Cleveland station WOER might be available if someone offered the right price. Jack hurried to Cleveland, appraised the opportunity and liked it, then returned to Boston and borrowed part of the money he needed to buy the station. He experienced some difficulty leasing the telephone line he needed to introduce the Midwest to the newscasting of Curtis Frederick and to The Best Beauty Bar Show, Starring Betty and the Minstrels, but he ultimately succeeded in leasing it and then used it also to introduce the East Coast to the music of the Cleveland Symphony.
From this point on, Curtis Frederick reported no local news stories unless they were of national interest. His broadcasts had to be as interesting to listeners in Cleveland as they were to the audiences in Boston and New York.
Five
KIMBERLY BEGAN TO INSIST THAT JACK SMOKE HIS CAMELS IN holders, the way President Roosevelt did. Holding them between his fingers was staining his fingers yellow, which was boorish, she claimed. She scrubbed his fingers with a brush and Fels Naptha soap until she took off the yellowed skin, then presented him with a black cigarette holder trimmed with silver bands. He felt effete smoking with it but used it in her presence. When she was not around, he held his cigarette in his left hand or between his thumb and third finger, switching it around to avoid staining his fingers.
Connie Horan laughed at him.
“So she’s teaching you how to smoke! How long have you been smoking—fifteen years? I’m surprised she lets you smoke Camels. They are rather blue-collar, you know. I’m surprised she doesn’t demand you switch to Tareytons or Pall Malls.”
Curt’s brother had gone to New York for a week, so Jack and Connie were taking advantage of his absence to me
et in his apartment.
Sitting on a red plush couch, dressed this afternoon in a lime-green silk dress that clung to her voluptuous figure, and smoking her own cigarette, Connie looked, as usual, as if she were posing for a photographer.
Jack stood looking out the window. He had brought a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black, and both of them had glasses with two fingers of Scotch in the bottom.
Jack left the window and sat down beside Connie. He crushed his cigarette in the ashtray on the coffee table. “You’re just about the only woman I ever really wanted that”—He stopped and shook his head—“that I couldn’t—”
“Why, Mr. Lear, you have overcome my virtue already,” she said, batting her eyes and mimicking the accent used by the heroine of the novel everyone was reading, Gone With the Wind.
He put his arm around her and kissed her on the side of her neck. “Connie . . .”
“Jack . . .”
With his right hand he gently turned her face toward him and kissed her ardently on the mouth. Then he put his hand on her left breast.
“No, Jack. No.”
He sighed. “Connie, why do you come here with me if you won’t let me touch you?”
“I like you very much. But we can’t go as far as—As far as you want to go. I’m a married woman in love with my husband. I’m the mother of three children and may in fact be pregnant right now.”
“That would solve one problem,” he suggested quietly.
“What?”
“Well. If you’re pregnant already—”
“Jack!”
“Well?”
She lifted her chin high. “I think of myself as having some morals. I’m Catholic, you know. There are certain things that—Certain things that I don’t do.”
“Will it help if I tell you I love you?”
Connie shook her head. “No. That makes it worse. And what about Kimberly?”
“Kimberly makes life more and more difficult for me. You know. The way I smoke, the way I dress, the way I eat, the way I talk—”
“Even so, do you still love her?”
Jack hesitated, then nodded.
“You can’t love more than one person at a time,” said Connie.
“Who made that a rule? I can. And do.”
She took her cigarette case from her purse, but Jack reached out and restrained her hand. He kissed her again.
“My husband would kill us both. And God knows what Kimberly would do.”
“They don’t have to find out. I’ll never ask you to take risks.”
She sighed heavily. “I’ll have to think about it. We can come again Thursday. By then I will have made up my mind.”
Six
UNSURE OF WHAT CONNIE’S DECISION WOULD BE, JACK NEVertheless stopped by the Cambridge apartment the following Thursday morning and put a magnum of Piper-Heidsieck in the refrigerator. He returned at two that afternoon, not even certain she would come.
She did.
She was superbly beautiful. Today she was wearing an off-white knit dress trimmed with narrow blue and violet stripes at the neckline, the wrists, and the hemline. Her matching tiny hat sat on the back of her head like a yarmulke.
He seized her at the door and kissed her before she was inside. The way she yielded to his kiss told him what her decision was.
“I love you, Connie.”
“I love you too, Jack.”
She let him undress her before he poured the Piper-Heidsieck. He was surprised. The body beneath the corset that confined and shaped her was fleshier than he had imagined. Her flesh was lush. Her breasts, belly, hips, and tush were generously rounded. She sat on the red plush couch, naked, and drank champagne from a water glass.
They did not speak. They had nothing to say. He saluted her with his glass. He bent forward to kiss her breasts. She winced when his tongue caressed her nipples. He drew as much of one breast into his mouth as he could and sucked on it gently. She gasped.
With his hands he urged her to spread her legs. He wet his fingers on her juices and stroked her clitoris. Connie shrieked.
He discovered to his surprise that Connie was hesitant about touching his penis. When he led her hand to it, she pulled back. This twenty-seven-year-old woman, mother of three, was acting like a virgin. With calm, quiet insistence he brought her hand to his inner thigh and tried to guide it to touch his penis.
She resisted. “That’s a circumcised penis, isn’t it? Does that make them bigger, Jack? Dan’s is nothing like that. His is the only one I’ve ever seen, and it doesn’t look anything like yours. Don’t ask me to touch it.”
“For God’s sake, Connie. You must have—”
“No,” she whispered. “Why would I . . . touch it? He manipulates that.”
She was fascinated just the same. Finally she let him guide her hand to his cock, and she ran her fingers over his shaft from root to tip. She lifted his scrotum and discovered his testicles. Her eyes widened. She closed her hand around his penis and tightened her grip gently.
“Connie! Oh, God, Connie!”
He slipped his middle finger up and down inside her wet cleft, stimulating her clitoris.
She began to cry. “We’re not supposed to—”
“Connie!”
“Either I’m committing a great sin,” she said hoarsely, “or a greater one has been committed against me.”
“Are you telling me you’ve never enjoyed it?”
She shook her head. “I’m not supposed to.”
“Bullshit,” said Jack. “Feel this!” He ran his finger around her clitoris. “Feel it!”
“Oh . . . do it, Jack! Do it! Come inside me!”
He grabbed for a packaged condom and unwrapped it.
“No!” she blurted. “I’ll do it, but not with that! Not with that!”
He put the condom aside.
She turned over on her back, spread her legs, and whispered, “Trump my ace, partner.”
EIGHT
One
1938
ON MARCH 12 THE GERMAN ARMY MARCHED INTO AUSTRIA, and Hitler proclaimed Austria a new province of the German Reich. On March 14 he was driven on a triumphal progress through the streets of Vienna.
On March 19, Curtis Frederick arrived in Vienna, where he witnessed the persecution of Jews. He saw Jewish businessmen scrubbing sidewalks and sweeping the gutters, and he learned from reliable sources that many Jews had disappeared into what the world had learned to call concentration camps. Curt reported none of this in the wires he sent to Boston. He knew the Germans read every wire that left Vienna, and he kept silent about the atrocities, lest they decide he was an enemy of the Reich. Others were doing that. He had another idea in mind.
He traveled to Berlin. There he contacted Ernst Bauer, a journalist he had known in the past who was now an undersecretary in the Ministry of Propaganda. He suggested to Bauer that Americans were interested in the Reichskanzler but knew almost nothing about him. He proposed an interview with the Chancellor, to be broadcast live to the United States.
After a few days Curt got his answer. Because of difficulties in translation and in scheduling, the Führer could not possibly sit down for an interview with Herr Frederick. He would, however, consent to the broadcast to the United States of an interview he had recently given to a German journalist, for which the ministry would supply a translation.
Curt proposed that the interview be sent out over a powerful shortwave station operated by Norddeutsche Rundfunk. It would be picked up by a sophisticated shortwave receiving station on Cape Cod and sent by leased telephone lines to Boston and the other cities served by Lear Broadcasting.
The Ministry of Propaganda accepted that proposal, and Bauer delivered two big disks to the station. The broadcast began at two in the morning with a brief explanation by Curtis Frederick of how the event had been arranged. Then the interview began. At first the dialogue was in German, followed by the translation. After a while the translation became a voiceover, with the interpreter speaking in the for
eground and the voice of Hitler in the background.
Curt suspected that the whole performance had been specifically made for this broadcast. The shortwave transmission distorted the voices slightly, but that served only to lend the broadcast unique drama. Hitler spoke in a quiet, persuasive voice.
The German consulate in New York wired Berlin within minutes after the interview was aired, saying that the program had been clearly heard in America and was a complete success. Fifteen newspapers editorialized to the effect that “When Herr Hitler is heard in person, his comments unfiltered by journalistic prejudices, he makes a case in which Americans can generally believe, though we might not be ready to accept every element of his reasoning.”
Now Curtis Frederick went to Ernst Bauer with another proposition. Why not do a live broadcast of one of the Reichskanzler’s speeches? Most Americans would not be able to understand it until after it had been translated, but many Americans did understand German, and those who didn’t would catch the tone of the oratory. To Curt’s amazement, the Ministry of Propaganda agreed. Three weeks after the quiet-and-persuasive interview, Americans heard the German Führer haranguing a crowd in the Sportspalast. This was a very different Hitler, screaming into his microphones. Americans also heard thousands of his followers yelling “Heil!”
The Nazis seemed to have no idea they had been gulled. When Betsy arrived in Berlin to spend two weeks with Curt, Ernst Bauer invited the couple to a candlelight dinner in a private dining room at the Ministry of Propaganda. After the dinner, Bauer presented them with two autographed photographs of Adolf Hitler, one addressed to Curtis Frederick and one to Jack Lear. Apparently no one in Berlin guessed that Jack Lear was a Jew.
TWO
IN JULY JACK RECEIVED WORD THAT A LOS ANGELES RADIO station was for sale. He made his second flight to the West Coast, this time in a DC-3, and was so comfortable with the experience that he decided to fly back as well.
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