“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.”
CHAPTER 24
Friend of the Soderbjergs
So 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.
“Young Reed interpreted this to mean, Don’t read the bulletin. So the minutes passed and Reed did the station break and did the weather forecast and turned it back to Pop, who told a joke about a dog and brought in the Bellhops for a Bud’s Salve jingle. There they were, at one of the most important moments in American history, a day that you look back on and remember exactly where you were when you heard the news, but there was no news on WLT, just a quartet of goofy guys singing
No matter if it’s bunions, burns,
Or boils that you have,
Nothing else will
do the job
Like Bud’s Old-Fashioned Salve.
“The phone started to ring off the hook, irate people wondering how WLT could sit and fiddle and sell unguent while American boys were dying in Hawaii. I tried to call and couldn’t get through, but Dad Benson was downtown and heard the news and ran to the station and took over. He told Babe to bring him every scrap of wire copy, and Dad sat in Studio B, the old mausoleum, and told people what was happening and talked in his quiet way about how awful war is but we can only live in peace if our neighbors are willing. But if Hitler and the Emperor wanted war, then they would have it, and though it would be a long hard struggle and there would be sacrifices, we would come through on top because Americans always pull together. Pop and the Melody Hotel gang worked up a version of ‘There’s a Star-Spangled Banner Flying over Home Sweet Home’ and it was so tremendous and rousing that nobody remembered we were almost an hour late with the news. If Dad hadn’t been there, we might’ve been shut down for high treason. You care for coffee? No? Where is the waiter?”
That evening, as Patsy listened to Mr. Devereaux take a shower, she almost wrote him into Golden Years as a French-Canadian hockey player torn with self-loathing when his slap shot kills an innocent passer-by and in terror he plunges naked out the door of the shower room and through the snow seeking absolution and meets Miss Leff-well, she of the lonely nights, who gasps at his nakedness, but offers him her coat, and then he gasps, for she is naked under the coat—hmmm, perhaps, but does it make sense?
She thought of inviting him down for dinner.
Frank’s door banged the next morning, and he walked out the front of the Antwerp, no hat on his head, wild hair over the collar of his Navy peajacket, hands jammed in the pockets, and turned at the curb and stood and looked up at the roof. Maybe, she thought, he could be a young writer whose novel she might read, earthy and full of grunting and moaning, naked perspiring bodies writhing in the dark, and she would provide insights from the womanly point of view (“Here at the bottom of the page, where he cups her breasts, frankly don’t you think the metaphor of young golden apples is trite? And the ‘hard throbbing muscle of his manhood’—why don’t we just call it a cock and be done with it?”). He headed east, past the YWCA, leaning into the wind. Au revoir, mon Philippe. It was the next day before she learned his name. It was printed on a pale pink letter stuck under his door. Francis, it said, I can’t believe that our home is gone and other people live in it and we have nothing, our family is gone. It is a beautiful day today and I hope you will come visit me soon. They hate me here but I don’t care. Their hearts are full of hatred and mine is at peace. What a sad life it is. That evening, Patsy heard him whistling, over the sink as he washed his dishes, “Red River Valley,” the theme song of Golden Years. She rang Mr. Odom downstairs and asked, “Harold, who moved into 4-C?”
“Patsy, his name is Frank White. But the way he said it, it’s probably something else. He works for Roy Jr. Ethel Glen says he’s got Sloan’s job.”
“Sloan’s leaving? For where?”
“He doesn’t know it yet, but Sloan is bound for the big Out There. He got too smart-alecky. He had this way of every time he left Ray or Roy Jr.’s office, making a smart remark over his shoulder. I hope somebody takes this kid aside and tells him what the score,is. He’s Art’s nephew, by the way.”
“Harold, you are a doll.”
And then suddenly one day Frank came clattering down the stairs at WLT as she headed up to bring LaWella the script for tomorrow’s Adventures in Homemaking. He galloped past her and around the bend toward the studios. Vince was behind her. “Who’s that?” he said. “Frank White,” said Patsy, “and he’s a comer.”
A week later, Frank White finally had purchased a few kitchen utensils and was making himself breakfast and supper instead of running out to the luncheonette, but Patsy could hear that he was eating too much fried food. Perhaps a neighborly visit to 4-C: “Mr. White, I’m Patsy Konopka from downstairs, welcome, and here’s a free VegaRama—it peels, pares, slices, dices, minces, chops, hacks, and makes food preparation a pleasure—perfect cole slaw every time with no big hunks, no lumps, no snappers,” but his apartment was a mess with all the clothes she’d heard him drop on the floor, he’d surely be embarrassed to see her. Odd, that he took his pants and shorts off first, then his shirt. An interesting man.
CHAPTER 25
Hero
He did everything. He washed coffee cups and emptied ashtrays and gave his opinion when it was asked for. “What do you think of her?” Roy Jr. asked, after Faith Snelling left his office, upset that Dale was off Sunnyvale, hinting that her days on Friendly Neighbor might be numbered. “She’s Jo,” said Frank. “And Jo is what makes the show go. You couldn’t do it without her.” And so Roy Jr. smoothed things over with her.
When the annual “Little Becky Souvenir Scrapbook” came out, full of inspirational poems and songs and a dozen photos of a golden-haired child with unremitting smile (not Marjery Moore) in various lifelike poses (Little Becky Wakes Up, Little Becky’s Breakfast, Enjoying A Chat With School Chums, Little Becky Spells The Word Correctly, Little Becky And Miss Judy, Home For A Nourishing Lunch, Little Becky And Dad Say Grace Together, Climbing A Tree, Practicing The Piano), Frank had to address hundreds of them and mail them out. More than 40,000 copies were sold or given away. The child drew about a hundred letters a week, several of which were written by Frank, who made sure that Marjery saw them. “You disgust me, you little wretch, and I wish you’d get the hell off the air and leave performing to people with talent,” began one. They didn’t bother Marjery at all. She thought of them as the work of some creep with a hair up his ass.
He arrived at the office at seven-thirty, made coffee, wiped the excess polish off the executive desks, and sharpened six pencils each for Ray and Roy Jr. Ray liked a fresh pencil, liked to smell the shaved wood and lead. When Ray arrived, Frank helped him off with his coat. “Thanks, Stan,” said Ray. Frank. “Of course. Frank.” Then he got their mail from the mailroom, where the girls were barely awake at eight. He had to rummage through the sacks and yank the Soderbjergs’ letters and run them upstairs: the day didn’t start for Roy Jr. until he had opened a letter. Then Frank waited for Roy to call him from Moorhead.
Roy was an early riser and by eight he had saved up a large load of conversation. Frank got to hear everything; he was new, he hadn’t heard it before. “I don’t know. I’ve been thinking,” Roy’d start out. “Radio seems to me to be fading. What do you think?” Frank said he didn’t think so. Roy continued: “I used to listen to the Barn Dance when I lived in St. Paul, and then one night I quit listening to it. It was still on, and I could hear it, but I was listening to next door. A couple lived there who fought a lot, and in warm weather, they left their windows open, and I sat and listened.
“They’d fight over money—he was a carpenter, a journeyman, and she worked at The Emporium—or they’d fight about sex. They’d start slow and then get to yelling and running from room to room and then she’d smash something and then it got very quiet. She cried and he comforted her and in a few minutes, you’d hear that bed thumping the wall. It must’ve been on loose rollers. They’d go at it for fifteen, twenty minutes. Ka-bam, ka-bam, ka-bam. And then they lay and talked and smoked.
“In broad daylight, this was a couple you wouldn’t look at twice, but secretly, they were fascinating. She’d say, after they’d had sex, ‘I can’t figure us out.’ And he’d promise that everything’d be better. And then they remembered how they met. It was at her dad’s drainpipe warehouse, and she came in after school and around a corner and came face to face with a man’s crotch. It was his. He was standing on a stool, measuring a doorpost. She was going to ask her old man for money to go to Europe and suddenly there was a fly and a bundle inside it. She looked up and he held up the measuring tape. Three and a half feet. And she didn’t go to Europe.
“I thought to myself: this is what should be on radio.” He meant it.
> “Hank, the future of broadcasting is eavesdropping. We could use hypnotism. Ordinary people could be actors of the subconscious. Their dreams and all the night thoughts people think—put it on radio. Of course, it’d be obscene and against the law, but, you wouldn’t try to change the law, just change radio. Put out a signal so a person needs a decoding machine to receive it. Put it beyond the law. Radio’s fading fast, Hank.”
Frank.
“And you know what could save radio, Frank? If you put a microphone in my brother’s jacket pocket. My brother dogs around town like nobody’s business. But maybe you know that. My brother could save radio single-handed. Not that he would ever use his hand, of course.”
Frank did know that. He drove Ray one day to the Great Northern Depot to entrain him for New York and there was Erie Monroe, a young actress on The Hills of Home, a little green suitcase in hand. The old man beamed as he took her hand and kissed it. He turned to Frank. “Tell Vesta I took an extra berth for the Great Books,” he said.
Erie took Ray’s arm and Frank carried their bags down the stairs and up the platform alongside the Empire Builder to the Pullmans up front. “By the way, I am going to talk to a buyer and try to sell the station,” said Ray, stopping to catch his breath. “Bing Crosby. That’s between you and me. I’ve decided to sell. I’m not getting any younger. That’s what my brother says.” Erie squeezed Ray’s arm and smooched him on the side of his head.
“My brother is up in Moorhead pondering the imponderable. And I am going to go to New York and screw the inscrutable.” He squeezed Erie back. “Bye, kid.”
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