Driving the King

by Ravi Howard

  Our first real television experience wasn’t much better. On colored night at the Alabama State Fair, half of the carnies had the night off, so the television in the Future World booth wasn’t even on. With no picture and no power, the television was only a piece of furniture, half wood and half glass. The line moved quickly with nothing there to see. The world seemed better off with our radios and speculation.

  Television had always been a small thing. I could find a better picture at the movie house, and the music sounded better on a 45 or the radio. Watching music on a small screen had been a young idea before I went away. Ten years later every house I’d been in had chairs gathered around a television like they once did fireplaces. And on that first evening of The Nat King Cole Show, I couldn’t imagine any seat empty. Showtime was close, so the viewers were surely gathering to see him just as I walked toward the dressing room.

  NBC covered the walls with posters of the stars. Milton Berle and Steve Allen. Next to him, the host of General Electric Theater, Ronald Reagan. A framed picture of Nat hung between Steve Allen and Loretta Young, just outside his dressing room. Beneath the star his placard filled the slot, his name spelled out in those thick, glossy letters.

  The lights continued to make me sweat. When I opened his dressing room door, he saw a few beads still on my forehead and the bit that darkened my shirt. He handed me a cloth from the stack on the makeup table.

  “Lights are something else, aren’t they?”

  “Like that kind they put on a brisket,” I told him. “I did your sweating for you, so you’ll be fine.”

  After Nat lit a cigarette, he almost put the lighter in his jacket pocket, then remembered, and placed it on the counter. The shape of anything in his pocket would show on camera and the lights would pick up a bad line. His suit was shinier than the ones he usually wore, and his lapels caught a little more of the light. That way the cut of his shoulder wouldn’t get lost against the backdrop. He wrapped his pocket square around a piece of cardboard, because they couldn’t have it falling in the middle of a song. Nothing could be out of place in front of a live camera.

  Nat was on edge. He didn’t look nervous, but he didn’t quite know what to do with his hands, and the fingers gave him away, shuffling something nobody could see.

  “Tell me something, Weary.”

  “Tell you what?”

  He shrugged. “Anything at all. Just tell me something.”

  I stole a mirror glance, making sure I looked as relaxed as we both were supposed to be. Skip talked about this part of things, keeping him cool on the way to the show. Keep as much of the worry in my pocket and out of his. I didn’t say a word, only remembered the ones that Skip had put in my ear. Keep him cool, Weary. That’s as much a part of your job as anything else.

  “Heard a rumor going around that your Dodgers might leave Brooklyn, head out this way. You won’t have to watch the Hollywood Stars and pretend like it’s real baseball.”

  “That’ll be a sight. Los Angeles Dodgers.”

  “You can sing the national anthem. Maybe they’ll have an organ like your team back in Chicago.”

  “I’ll leave that to a youngster. I’ll be on the third-base line somewhere watching.”

  His hands started to get quiet, and that was a good thing. They’d be on that piano soon enough.

  “They keep saying I’m making history, Weary. Strange thing to call it when it’s still in front of me.”

  “The kind you make for yourself, though. The best kind.”

  People kept telling him he was the first of us, and that he made them proud. I think he’d heard “the Jackie Robinson of television” one time too many. People meant well, but that was a lot of weight to carry, especially for a showman who needed to have some bounce in his step.

  “Come a long way from Montgomery, say friend?” he said.

  “You and me both.”

  He did that last bit of humming then, and the sound came through warm vocal cords, neither tight nor nervous. He looked at that clock one last time, aware of how close he was, so that when the knock came he was good and ready to go.

  The National Broadcasting Company proudly presents. Then the drumroll took over and the crown began to spin. The Nat King Cole Show. And the applause loaded up on the reel-to-reel flowed out of a speaker and into a microphone. We had been told not to clap along, so the applause filled a room of silent gazers. The show started in the shadows, and then the lights came up and caught the edges of Nat’s suit first and then his face. Once his new city was alive with lights and stars falling all around his mountain, he started with his questions.

  In the evenings may I come and sing to you?

  All the songs that I would like to bring to you?

  His first show played out like This Is Your Life in reverse. He started at the microphone, where he’d gotten famous, with the swell of his orchestra coming from the wings. When his singing was done, he ended where his career started, on the piano. The mirror did exactly what they hoped it would as the camera tightened on that flurry Nat made with his fingers.

  The monitors showed us what anyone watching would see, and television could give the viewers what a live show could not. No front-row ticket in any theater could have gotten us that close. His hands filled the frame. Anybody watching saw those notes rising the very second they left his fingertips.

  When his hands were finished it was our turn. We held our clapping until he was off the air and the mike was cold. Applause felt too simple an offering after a show like that. Two hands together over and over didn’t square with what his fingers had spun for us. Some whistled, and the seated folks rose, as all of us stretched that applause until Nat, with a bow and thank-you, brought it to a close.

  With enough applause a show might keep going, but television had no encores. NBC had sales meetings that lasted longer than the show did. They had disappeared into the office suite, the lot of them, Carlos Gastel, Bob Henry, Nat, and all manner of NBC folks.

  “I’d like to imagine they loved it.” That’s what he told me when he got to the car. “They told me to wait for Nielsen.”

  “Who?”

  It never occurred to me how they counted viewers. No ticket stub, no cover charge, or no bar tab, so the old ways to know the tally didn’t apply. The ratings company had a list of people who would write down what they watched, and then the people of NBC would know if they had a hit or not. Nat’s audience was a mystery until word came down from Nielsen. The pitfall of television was that everyone could see him at once, but he could see no one in return.

  While we drove home, through the night-lit neighborhoods between Burbank and Hancock Park, I imagined the Nielsen families hunkered over coffee tables, gathering their thoughts and filling diaries. Whoever they were, they mattered, and they joined the growing ranks of those who could tell Nat King Cole how long this affair might last.

  Chapter 14

  Montgomery

  DAY OF THE SHOW

  2:30 P.M.

  I had heard Nat sing at Capitol and at NBC, and now I was back in the building where I had heard his first show. The studios’ walls were tailor-made for voices, but the Centennial’s were not. Some of the sound would make it through the old windows and down the vents. In a place Nat Cole had outgrown, that extra sound would spill down onto the Hill corner. The folks on the street could say they heard it, too.

  The Centennial Hotel had thirty-two rooms. Twenty rooms on the second floor and twelve on the third, including the four corner suites. The fourth floor had a rooftop garden on the south end, and the inside area was nothing but the ballroom, with a dance floor and double-sized rafters that held up the roof without pillars that would block the view of the stage. Every seat was a good one.

  The New Collegians’ bandstand looked like city blocks, with row houses and storefronts stamped into sheets of tin. The roof tiles and windows, and even the wood grain on the front, had been etched onto the metal. The blocks had been quilted together, some looked like Ne
w York and others Chicago, a sideways totem to the cities they’d toured.

  I walked to the back of the place, where the standing-room folks would hear the show.

  “How does it sound from there?”

  “Just like you’re in the front row,” I said.

  From the back corner, one could see every bit of the stage, from the piano in the left-hand corner to the row where the percussionists played. I had heard enough shows up there to know how the sound wrapped around the place. Every eye and ear got the same kind of sound.

  A few modest steps led from the main floor up the back and the sides, and the elevation gave everyone a good line of sight. No one would crane his neck to get a good look at the stage. If people moved their heads, it would be because the music told them to.

  “We hope the stage is big enough,” Miss Vee said.

  Nat tapped his foot. “Surely. And more solid than most.”

  “We’ll shut down the elevator before the show begins. People can walk up the stairwell if they want standing room. We run wires down the shaft to the lounge speakers. Everybody in the place will hear you. I know you’re used to more with television and all, but we have a good space.”

  “A studio’s nothing but an empty room. They don’t have anything on you, Mrs. Varner. How you fill the room is the thing. We have a good stage and a nice place to rest until the show starts. It doesn’t take much more than that.”

  Miss Vee seemed relieved when he said as much, even thankful.

  The only sound just then came from the elevator. The two light tolls filled the space followed by the quick steps of the young lady carrying a tray around the corner. When she first saw Nat she changed her step, not quite freezing but taking a pause.

  “Thank you, Sonya. You can bring it on down here. Mr. Weary, you come on back, too,” Miss Vee said.

  Sonya had her eyes on Nat still. Maybe she didn’t know about the show yet, or maybe it hadn’t been real until she’d seen him. Even with that little bit of shock, she kept the tray steady, and not a drop of liquor wasted. What she carried in those glasses swirled a bit, and as I walked over with her, I got a good whiff of what she’d brought us, three whiskeys from the Majestic, before she set the tray on a table near the stage.

  “I asked Mr. Weary what you drink, and I took the liberty and asked Sonya to bring something. I don’t partake in the evenings during the show, but I like to raise a glass when I can. Welcome’s not official until you toast with your company.”

  Sonya had not moved. She stood rocking from her toes to her heels and back again, clinching her fingers the whole while. Mrs. Varner gave her a look.

  “Well, it’ll kill you if you don’t ask him, Sonya, so go ahead.”

  She rested her feet and breathed one good time.

  “Mr. Cole, I figured you might want to check the sound in the room and all—”

  I was thinking, Lord, please don’t let this girl start singing.

  “—most of the singers do when they come. Well—”

  If she does start singing, please let her sound decent or at the very least sing something short.

  “Well, my birthday’s coming up, and if it doesn’t really matter what you sing, you might as well sing ‘Happy Birthday’ for me when the band comes.”

  He swirled that little bit of scotch in his glass, and I knew what he was going to say before he said it.

  “Why wait for sound check? I can go ahead and sing it right now.”

  “I was hoping you’d say that.”

  And Nat Cole did just that and filled the room with that simple little song. Sonya listened and started rocking so, that I was afraid she might fall backward. She opened her eyes and closed them, almost as if she had taken that first eyeful of Nat Cole singing, stored it away, and come back for the rest of it.

  I tried to remember the old birthday parties in Bel-Air, every one exactly the same. No matter the year or the child, we had sheet cake and a spoonful of neapolitan ice cream. Nat had surely been there. He’d sung that song live on television for President Eisenhower’s birthday, and he sang that same rendition to the young lady who’d brought our drinks. With no cake and no candles, all Sonya could do was clap.

  “What day is your birthday?”

  “August tenth,” she said. I wouldn’t call that look on her face sheepish, but it was honest. “You’ll be long gone by then so it was now or never. I thank y’all.”

  She collected our glasses and picked up her tray with a little bit of flair in her hands and step. “Can I bring you all anything else?”

  “No, Sonya. But thank you,” Miss Vee said.

  I handed Sonya a little of the tip money as she passed me, and she took it in stride and nodded me a thank-you.

  “That child had been asking me since I told her you all were coming. I said she could come up and ask you herself. I guess it never hurts.”

  “She was right. I needed to see how the room sounds so I might as well sing something useful. The echo is not bad, and once the room fills it’ll be perfect.”

  Miss Vee excused herself and left us with the sound of her shoes as she walked toward the elevator and the ring of those bells as the doors closed behind her.

  “Sounds just like it did way back when,” he said.

  Between the time when the doors opened and he walked onstage, four hundred people would fill those chairs, almost double the size of the colored section at the Empire. The number mattered. Nobody would ration him to his own folks. Nobody would have to wait until he came back across town for a second show. If the room filled up, then he was on the radio. The listeners could drink downstairs or drink at home and make a party of their own. No interruptions this time. I had given up everything for a show that had ended too quickly, so I had built this new life around making it so. If the marquee had room enough for another line beneath his name, I would have had them add one more. NAT KING COLE. GUARANTEED.

  Chapter 15

  It was too early to see which way the sky would turn. Mornings in Los Angeles were all kinds of dingy until the sunlight and the wind did their cleaning. The quiet made up for it, though. I had the last of my coffee on the porch, where I could read my paper and get a handle on the day that waited for me. The paperboy was on his way down the block. At least I thought as much, until I saw that the rider of the orange bicycle was a woman. She threw papers on the other side of Seventy-Fourth Street before she made a U-turn at the Avalon corner.

  I’d seen her a few times before in my weeks driving around Central Avenue. She sometimes rode with two children, a boy and a girl, whom I had seen rolling newspapers in front of that storefront next to the Dunbar. The bicycle the woman rode, orange with whitewall tires, was one of those I saw leaning on a telegraph pole in front of that newspaper office. The baskets had tin placards with the same lettering as in the storefront window. LOS ANGELES TRIBUNE, DELIVERED EVERY THURSDAY.

  Traffic got heavy at that hour of the morning with the sidewalks full of students and teachers headed to the grammar school up on Sixty-Sixth. As the woman on the bicycle slowed, she spoke to the crossing guard and tossed a paper to her. She rode toward me, throwing the paper to the neighbors’ houses with an overhand that had enough arc to find the front walk. She wore those pants that I’d seen the women in. My sister called them pedal pushers, but how high-water pants came into fashion was beyond me.

  “Good morning, Mr. Weary. When I saw your name on the subscription card, I decided to stop and say hello if I saw you. And here you are. I like to welcome newcomers. Especially somebody coming here from Alabama.”

  I knew good and well that my subscription card didn’t say a thing about where I’d come from, and her face was not familiar. Friendly, surely, but not familiar. Questions came to mind when a stranger knew my business. I said my good-morning while I walked to the gate.

  “Almena Lomax. Tribune editor. On Thursday mornings, I’m director of circulation,” she told me. “We’re the third Negro paper in this town. Small family operatio
n. What we don’t have in size, we try to make up for with customer service. Welcome to Los Angeles.”

  She motioned to the bicycle she’d just rested against the gate.

  “My son and daughter work Towne Avenue from here to Florence, and I cover Avalon to Central. My youngest is barely walking, so she’s got some years before she’ll be riding. She’s with my husband. Likes to sleep in the back of the station wagon while he drives his route.”

  She had the paper in her left hand and offered her right like the chancellors did at graduation, a diploma in one hand and a shake with the other.

  “Thank you, but if we met years ago in Alabama and I don’t remember, then I apologize, but ma’am, I have to ask—”

  “We haven’t met. Ten years ago, we got word on the newswire about a riot in Alabama. Can’t always trust the wires, I’ve found. So I called some of my family around Eufaula, over on the Chattahoochee River. You might have heard of it.”

  “Been in that river a few times.”

  “Me and you both, Mr. Weary. Well, I called and they told me it wasn’t a riot. My people said a soldier got between Nat Cole and a white man with a pipe. Of course, folks love to embellish a bit. No harm in it. One version of it had you jumping down from the third tier. Throwing chairs and music stands. Is that how it happened?”

  “I was warned against correcting folks.”

  “I wish the rest of it were false. The Kilby part and that time they gave you.”