“Would make us paupers for life, and our children,” said Ray. “We’d be sitting in doorways on Skid Row in our old overcoats, and people’d drive by and say, Look. It’s the Soderbjergs. They started with a restaurant and went into radio and then they tried to clean up in real estate. Old men sleeping on broken glass. No, sir. No thank you.”
“Think about it. Take your time. It’s a good idea.”
“If that’s a good idea, then I’m a full-blooded Chippewa Indian.” They argued for a few days, and then Roy’s attention wavered—that was his way—the flame flickered and he drifted along to something else—the windmill, the lithograph, the ball-float toilet. Perfecting the arm-action ball-type reciprocating flexer. The search for the y-joint grouter. He drifted back to his workshop.
The “Air Castle of the North” was wrapped in tissue paper and packed away in a box, and one day Ray shot billiards at the Athletic Club with John S. Pillsbury’s brother-in-law Bud. “If you’re looking for quarters, Jack’s got two floors to rent in his hotel,” he said. And that night, Ray signed a ten-year lease on the second and third floors of the Hotel Ogden on 12th and LaSalle, across the street from the MacPhail School of Music. It was a narrow, six-story, two-toned building, tan on the bottom floors and the top floor, red brick in the middle, like a Soderberg sandwich. He spread the papers in front of Roy, as if showing a winning hand. “Right close to the source of supply. Tuba players, trombonists, violins, you name it. Singers by the hundred. We can audition them in July when the windows are open. You want a park with a pond? Loring Park is a stone’s throw away. They even have horseshoe pits. The Auditorium is walking distance, and the Physicians & Surgeons Building. The Foshay Tower is right there.”
“You can’t go off and sign a lease without talking to me about it,” said Roy. “I’m your partner.”
“We discussed it last week. You talked about buying a potato farm, you made a little toy town out of balsa wood, you wanted to build a church. It was crazy talk. Somebody has to take care of business here. So I took care of it. Nice building, the Ogden. Fireproof. And I found a buyer for the restaurant. He takes over on Tuesday.”
And that was that. Roy was deeply wounded, of course, but then he often was. He retreated to Moorhead and didn’t come back until spring. A cartage company hauled WLT out of the Court in one truckload and Roy Jr. wired up the studios and a control room in rooms 215, 217, and 219 of the Ogden, and they were in business. Ray hired a woman named Ethel Glen to manage the place. She was six feet tall, a bookkeeper, and she could play the piano and the marimba, which might come in handy. Ethel brought in The Bergen Brothers, Carpenters, and they tore out walls and installed a waiting room, two big studios, a practice room, dressing rooms, a Green Room. Fresh pine, fresh paint, new carpets, and the waiting room was lined with seven rose-petal wing chairs and sofas and walnut side tables with tall brass lamps with lavender linen shades and a bookcase with leatherbound sets of Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, the Brontes. Upstairs, on the third floor, six offices, including two big ones for Roy and Ray, adjoining, identical, except Ray’s looked toward Nicollet Avenue and the Foshay and City Hall, and Roy’s looked at MacPhail and he got to hear the sopranos. Ray’s was six feet shorter, due to the stairwell being on his side.
“You take the big one,” he told Roy. “You’re the brains of the outfit, you need more room to pace up and down and think up your great ideas.”
Roy didn’t notice, until years later, that Ray had an extra office for himself, a bedroom actually, up the stairs, on the fourth floor. Ray told Miss Glen it was for naps, and she almost believed him until she noticed one day that when Alma Melting arrived for The Excelsior Bakery Show, the elevator was coming down, not up.
He couldn’t help himself. There was Alma and there was a lady from the paper and for awhile there was a Nordic goddess from the Ice Follies who was willing to hang up her skates if he wanted to marry her. No thanks. A schoolteacher lady who brought her class in for a tour and wound up sending them home unaccompanied on the streetcar and she ended up in room 434 with Ray.
“I somehow knew she was going to go to bed with me the moment I looked in her eyes,” said Ray over lunch the next day. “Of course I’ve been wrong sometimes in the past, and here she was with thirty twelve-year-old kids, but still, I had a notion. On the tour, I kept touching her on the back, on the shoulder, and she didn’t jump, and then we posed for a photograph and she put her arm around me and pulled me closer and turned toward me so that her breast was halfway into my shirt pocket. That was when I asked her to dinner. She said yes with only a moment’s hesitation. We had wine at dinner and the wine made her frisky. I told her that we might never meet again, that tonight was our night, and that I would like to make it beautiful for her, and we got right on the elevator. She was so lovely. She stood on a chair and I undressed her in full light and I believe nobody had ever looked at her before. She was voluptuous in that Swedish way, those mild eyes and that pale golden hair, and breasts like ripe pears.”
Dad Benson, sitting at the coffeeshop counter, held a spoonful of split-pea soup in midair. The voice sounded just like Ray’s.
“She smelled of chalk dust and laundry starch, like all those teachers, but she smelled a lot better when I got the clothes off her, and then when we’d worked up a little sweat, she smelled the best of all,” Ray said. “There is nothing smells so sweet as a sweaty woman, especially if some of the sweat on her is your own.”
The third-floor quarters spread to include the fourth, and Ray’s bedroom moved to the sixth, the top floor. On the third floor were the executive offices, Accounting, Continuity, and Sales. Ray had hired another Sons of Knute brother, Art Finn, to run Sales, and Art kept hiring new men every month, sales were so good, phenomenal in fact. Art said, “Ray, we’ve got so many people on the waiting list, we could start charging them rent.” Accounting started as a man named Loran Groner, and the next time Ray stuck his head in, three men in green eyeshades looked up, blinking, from the balance sheets.
On the second floor, the two studios became four, behind a double-door marked ABSOLUTELY NO ADMITTANCE , and beyond was another, marked Keep This Door Closed At All Times. Ray avoided the circus in the studios, but once, lost, looking for Roy Jr., Ray blundered into the Green Room and there were the Dakota Gypsy Yodellers tuning up for the Jubilee and arguing about who was in key. Leo was trying to keep them from socking each other.
“Please settle this somewhere else,” said Leo.
“Well, there’s no point telling me that,” said a Yodeller. “Go talk to him. He’s the one who’s mad. He’s mad because he can’t tune his damn mandolin. I’m not mad. Anytime he wants to apologize to me, I’d be more than happy to hear it.”
Elsie and Johnny stood to the side unstrapping their big blonde Bueno Vox piano accordions, a big red-headed bruiser and her forlorn husband—she had had him on a strict potato diet and he lost sixty pounds (because he didn’t like potatoes) and his skin hung on him like waxed bags. “You keep jumping the beat,” she muttered. She rolled her eyes: he was a lousy musician but she was married to him so what could she do? A scraggly guitar player sat noodling, a burning cigarette tucked under the strings, looked up at Ray, and said, “Clint?” Ray knew of no Clint at WLT. Out in the hall, the Norsk Nightingale was huddled with his Norsky Orchestra over a bottle of Rock’n Rye, and Sister Nell and Brother Reuben slouched by in full hillbilly regalia, sunflower bonnet and bib overalls and all—Why do they bother? it’s only radio—and script girls, engineers, the children of sponsors, the cleaning ladies, and The Shepherd Boys Quartet. He could tell they were gospel singers by their deadly cologne and their fatuous smiles. “Morning, Mr. Soderberg,” said Wendell —or was it Elmer? or Rudy? He almost genuflected as Ray hurried past, looking for the exit. That was the problem with paying your employees so little—the dreadful bootlicking and brown-nosing, the ingratiating smiles, the cringing and groveling.
“Where The Door Is Always Op
en,” the motto of WLT, appeared on the elevator doors, with the smiling face tipping the hat, and the point was not lost on the employees: no matter what, you were always welcome to leave.
The tenth anniversary came, April, 1936, and when Roy Jr. proposed a celebration, Ray said, “Celebrate what?” He didn’t intend to hobnob with the help and pat their backs and make a speech about how wonderful it all was, because it wasn’t. So Roy Jr. bought a big chocolate cake and set it out in the Green Room, and by noon it was all eaten.
CHAPTER 8
Patsy
WLT kept growing and growing, and one day Ray spotted a door marked “Artists Bureau.” He had never heard of such a thing. He opened the door and there were six women around a table typing like blazes and a man in a green silk vest jabbering on the phone. “What do you do?” asked Ray. The man told him the Bureau had been in operation for six months, booking WLT artists on tours of the Midwest. “Last month, we did more than $8,000 worth of business,” he said. Slim Jim and His Bunkhouse Gang with Miss Ginny and Her Radio Cowgirls were the No. 1 draw. “They’re packing them in like sliced bread,” he said. Ray had never heard of Slim or the Cowgirls. “Oh, yes,” the man said, “they’re hotter than biscuits.”
WLT’s quarters were so spacious that Ray heard rumors that musicians lived on the premises undetected, sleeping on couches, bathing in the men’s room, cooking their meals on hot plates they kept in desk drawers, hanging their damp undies on radiators to dry, and Ethel told Ray that one of the Radio Cowgirls and the fiddle player in the Rise and Shine Band had moved into Studio B and lived there for six weeks, conducting wild parties where gospel singers high on benzedrine played strip poker and naked ladies waltzed through Accounting at midnight. The Radio Cowgirls, she said, wore short skirts and a lot of fringe and tassels, telltale signs of prostitution, but they couldn’t hold a candle to the gospel singers. The Shepherd Boys could kill a quart like it was lemonade and then they would jump in the sack with anything in high heels, hop out and sing “The Old Rugged Cross,” and feel so good, they’d jump right back in.
“I don’t want you to lose a moment’s sleep over this,” Ray told Ethel. “I will handle it.”
So Ray got to know the Cowgirls, Patsy Konopka in particular. She was slender and lovely and sang alto and favored silk blouses and wore her hair tossed in a short bob. In the Cowgirl photographs, it was her face that your eyes rested on, her vibrancy, the light in her face—he asked her to dinner and invited her up to the sixth floor for a drink.
“You have a look in your eyes that no woman I ever knew ever had,” he observed, edging closer to her on the couch, and she explained that the light in her eyes was due to theosophy and positivism. She had been a theosophist for more than eight months and studied with a Gnostic master in Sioux Falls who could telepathically open a can of coffee. She had learned there the secret of The Oval of Life and the Four Powers (Ability, Capacity, Facility, Vitality) and the Seven Doorways of Celestial Selection. These are brief openings in the cosmos, when a great leap of spiritual knowledge is attainable. Now she was turning her attention more toward ethereology and the science of electivism with its vast lore on the determining power of radiation. Radiation was Patsy’s true passion, the study of the nimbus of light around the body. The practiced eye could read it like a book.
“What do you see in me?” he whispered.
She studied his nimbus and frowned and read his palm and then she asked him to take his shoes off so she could read the lifeline on his soles.
She held his bare foot and thought long and hard. “You are a man of a generous soul but starved for truth. You lie to yourself. You are swift of intuition, but you lack depth. But you are seeking to improve. You know your time is not long. You try to penetrate the darkness. And you are trying to get me to take my clothes off.”
He agreed that this was true and inquired if it were possible.
She said that there is a hand of inevitability that guides these matters and it can only be perceived with time.
They shared a glass of sherry, and then he drank another. They sat cheek to cheek and he told her about New York, how majestic it was in the fall, the rattle of the trains and the deep-carpeted hush of the big hotels and the golden light at dusk on the avenues and the happy throngs pouring into the theaters and afterward the cafes, and he kissed her. He told her that for all her knowledge of electivism, he knew something about pleasure, pure simple enjoyment, which is the main advantage of adulthood: the freedom to amuse ourselves as we like. He kissed all her fingers, then her lips and her ears, and along her neck, and then he opened her blouse. The buttons were like butter.
“I need to know your sense of the emanations of this moment,” she said, softly. “Do you sense the fields of light?” Yes, he did. Her shoulders were so young. He slipped off her blouse—how lightly it slid on her skin— and opened the straps of her light blue chemise. It fell like a leaf to her waist, revealing the two dazzling white emanations of her brassiere.
She said the pulsation of energies was very strong, he should almost be able to feel it. He did. He reached behind her, his left cheek touching her little ear and a delicious wisp of her black hair brushing by, and unclasped the Three Hooks of Advancement and gently removed the garment. He set it on the couch and lightly touched her dark nipples, big as half dollars.
“Now,” she said. “Turn out the light and tell me what color is the nimbus. Around my body you may see a spectrum of shades, shadows tinged with color, called the antinodes and antipodes, but one light is strongest, the parhelion, do you see it?”
“I see so many colors—”
“Which color is strongest to you?”
“White.”
She grimaced. “I thought you might be my true opposite, but I don’t think you see any pulsations at all,” she said. She put her blouse on. “You weren’t even close,” she said.
“Let me try again.”
She smiled. “I am psychic, I know what’s on your mind.”
“I want to know more. You’ve shown me so much I was not aware of and I want to go farther.”
“All you want is to get on top of me and shove it in,” she said. “I want to have sexual concord with your totality.”
He said he was not only interested in that, that he was interested in her, that sex was his way of getting to know her, that he admired her as an artist, that he could get the Cowgirls their own radio show, perhaps a Saturday night spot.
“I’m so sick of yodelling, I could spit,” she said. She told him she wanted to be a writer. Her dream was to write plays and movies and stories that would help people understand the principles of theosophy—not the tangled thickets of exegesis that emerged from the disputes and polemics of the recent past but the simple beautiful spirit of the Theosophist Golden Age in Baltimore in the late 18th century, writers such as Carleton Phipps and Jane Delton Phipps, his daughter. The Phippses were able to say great things in a few words that seemed to have a nimbus of their own.
“Jane Phipps was the one who said, It is always too late for grief. That is a sentence that I keep coming back to and keep finding something new in. Or Patience expects joy. Or First content, then wisdom. Or Fate smiles on the one it fools. Most people think of theosophy as reams of dusty tomes, and some of it is, but so much of it is so simple and pure.”
Ray wished he had guessed blue instead of white. Blue might’ve gotten him a long way. But he couldn’t help himself. He told Patsy that maybe he couldn’t read a nimbus as fast as some people but he could see talent and intelligence, and he offered her a job as a writer at forty dollars a week. She accepted with pleasure.
Patsy Konopka got a desk in the Women’s Bureau, run by Miss Hatch, where two home economists sat and wrote answers to all the questions listeners wrote in, such as how to remove stains from spills on carpets and couches. Service. It was Vesta’s idea. Patsy sat at a big Royal upright and banged away at scripts, practicing the discipline she had learned from the positivists, wh
o believed in automatic writing, allowing one’s innate sense and intelligence free flow and then trusting what you write and not editing it. That was the hard part.
She created Golden Years (1937), about Elmer and Edna Hubbard, who, dissatisfied with the frenzied pace of life in the big city and the emptiness of material success, move to the little town of Nowthen and open a coffee shop and do big favors with an unseen hand. They also become vegetarians and devotees of sunshine. But behind the counter of The Golden Rule Cafe, they seem like an ordinary old couple, patiently attending to customers, especially the blowhards who park on a stool and squawk all afternoon, and only the listener knows that the Hubbards are multi-millionaires who regularly bestow anonymous gifts through the mail. A squawker would enter and plant himself at a corner table and squawk (“Whatsa matter widdis java here? You people clean yer pot widda grease rag or what? Nobody cares ennamore. That’s da problim. Nob’dy cares.”) and then a good person would come in and perch on a stool and bless his lucky stars (“Oh my but life is good! Doggone it! My crop failed and the cow went dry and I need a back operation, but praise the Lord, I’m a lucky guy”), and then maybe you’d get a discouraged good person who sees a world of suffering and wonders why God doesn’t do something about it. Then there was a commercial for DeFlore’s Florists (“Hi, I’m Betty and I’m a DeFlore florist trained to come up with exactly the right floral gift for that special person you want to please”) and then back to Nowthen, the next day: the bewildered and grateful recipient drops in to tell the Hubbards—“A trip to Florida! And another check to cover the cost of Sheila’s teeth! Who in the world could’ve done this?” And Elmer murmurs, “More coffee?”
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