Suspects

by David Thomson

  He went down to the city in 1940 and tried to hang out with musicians, but he wasn’t relaxed enough. So he went into the army, and in 1942 he heard about a vacancy in the Glenn Miller band which he got for two months before Miller told him he had to go because he was a disruptive influence. “It’s this sweet shit you play,” said Jimmy on his way out.

  So he went back to the infantry and he went to France in 1944, where he got a medal for taking a German machine-gun post outside Caen, all on his own. Still, the army sent him home later that year because he was against taking orders and got into a lot of fights. They sent him back to Fort Benning and he worked there on the camp radio station. He had a two-hour show in the early hours of the morning and he played a lot of jazz records. He got fired when he played Charlie Parker’s “Tiny’s Tempo” over and over for two hours.

  He got out of the army in January 1945 and went back to New York, to Monroe’s and Minton’s, to listen to Parker, Monk and Gillespie in person. He tried to sit in with them but they wouldn’t have anything to do with him. Some said it was because Jimmy seemed so hostile, but he thought it was because he was white. Still, his head was full of the spilling phrases played by Parker and the abrupt harmonic leaps. Once, just once, Parker sat back and listened to ten minutes or so of Jimmy saying why he should be allowed to play. “So?” said Jimmy, exhausted. “I just heard you, man,” said Parker. “You can’t be better on that horn.”

  On VJ day, Jimmy dropped by the Moonlight Terrace, where the Dorsey band was playing. He slid in and out of conversations, trying to pick up women. That’s how he met Francine Evans, the singer. She thought he was crazy, but she couldn’t stop him or stop listening to his tirades of wooing. The storm rushed past her ears, frightening and entrancing. She never got rid of him and next day he took her along to his audition at the Palm Club. He played so hard and fast, the manager there was ready to turn him off. But then Francine got up and started to sing and Jimmy fell in behind her, just like Lester Young’s velvet cushion for Billie to loll on. The guy hired them both.

  But Francine had to leave town with the Frankie Harte band, her real job. So when Jimmy finds out about this he follows her all the way to Asheville, North Carolina. They got married down there: she knew she’d never escape him. And Harte hired Jimmy so long as he’d keep it down a little.

  They toured for a year until Harte decided to give it up and asked Jimmy if he wanted to take over the band. For a while it was a hit, but when Francine knew she was pregnant she decided to go back to New York. She had had an offer to do cover records and the traveling was too much for her. So Jimmy stayed on with the band for a while, just to prove it was his. But without Francine they soon lost their following.

  Jimmy got back to the city furious. He laughed at Francine’s records and dragged her out to Harlem every night when he sat in with Cecil Powell, the one black musician who took him seriously, even if Cecil had turned him on to marijuana. Also, Jimmy had the hots for this black girl singer, Lucy Wiley. The baby was born Jimmy, Jr., in 1948, but the marriage was coming apart to the sound of Jimmy’s frenzied talk.

  In the next few years, Francine took Jimmy, Jr. to California, where she was getting into pictures. Jimmy stuck it out in New York and he got some notice fronting a group with Miles Davis for a year until they had a fistfight on the stand. Jimmy was doing heroin by 1951, and he talked less. But his stuff was popular with college kids, and in 1953 he was set up in his own club, the Major Chord. People said they’d heard there was gang money in the club.

  He lived alone, more reclusive. He didn’t see his son for years at a time, but stayed in a room at the Carlyle Hotel, a room he had painted black. By 1960, he was in bad shape from the heroin, and he went into a clinic for a cure. It worked, but he was dead in 1966. There was a memorial concert where a lot of good players came out for him. When Thelonious Monk played the finale—Jimmy’s “Taxi Cab Blues”—he shouted out into the hall, “Fuck you, Jimmy!”

  I might kill a man if the right music was playing, or carry Mary Frances over a snow capped mountain, to happiness, sure thing. But stealthy strings hold sway in these narrow, italic passages, dark corridors where the storyteller lurks.

  FRANCINE EVANS

  Liza Minnelli in New York, New York, 1977,

  directed by Martin Scorsese

  If not quite born in a trunk, Francine Evans had a childhood in which it was her responsibility to keep her parents’ dancing shoes bright and shiny. She was the daughter of the Mendozas, one of the best-known Latin dance couples in the West. Felipe was Mexican, and he had a brief career in movies around 1920 before he married Wilma Schuyler, a young dancer he met at Universal. They moved away from Los Angeles and went into business together as teachers of Latin dance. They had studios up and down the California coast, and they boosted their trade by winning several national contests. Wilma, of Dutch extraction, dyed her creamy hair black in order to enhance the image of Latin synchronicity. Francine (born Frances) came into the world in Santa Barbara (where the Mendozas had their home) in 1923. She had magnificent black hair of her own.

  Always close to music, the young Frances began to sing as she watched her parents gliding or stamping their way across all the polished floors. She played the leads in several high-school shows—The Pirates of Penzance, The Merry Widow, The Girl from Tijuana. Her parents encouraged her musical aspirations, ensured that she had good technical training, and had the foresight to provide for proper orthodontry when she was still in her teens. It was in 1942 that Frances went to New York, with several letters of introduction to friends and colleagues of the Mendozas. One of these was Tony Harwell, who became her agent, and came up with the new name Francine Evans. As such she made her first impact, winning a Carmen Miranda impersonation contest on the radio.

  She was for a year one of the Peters Sisters, a backup group with a lot of studio work. In 1944, she toured with the Jimmy Dorsey band, and in 1945 she got a position as featured vocalist with Frankie Harte—it was then she had an affair with the band saxophonist, Georgie Auld, and made her first hit record, a song they wrote together, “Got a Thing for the Sax Man,” a torch classic.

  Then on VJ-night, not long after she and Auld had broken up, Francine was at the Moonlight Terrace when Jimmy Doyle approached her and started talking her to death. She knew inside the first hour everything that was going to happen. He had a nagging energy that was going to free her own repressed need to be a star. But he couldn’t stand competition; he wouldn’t want to see anyone else’s fame. And while she knew that everyone had always liked her, she guessed that the streak of self-destructiveness in Doyle would keep him a minor figure. She would be transformed by him; he would barely notice her. But they fell in love like people going over a cliff hand-in-hand. It was the first time in her happy life Francine had felt the drive of compulsion. The new note of desperation in her singing voice came from Jimmy.

  Touring with Jimmy was a nightmare. He lived only to be on the stand, and once there he would cut anyone, steal solos and scold the other players for any mistake. Francine tried to make every passing hotel room a version of home. But Jimmy regarded such rooms as anonymous, transitory bases. He passed through them, unaware and chaotic. But they married, she got pregnant and their music improved. For both of them, uneasy as it was, so full of arguments and silence, this period came to stand for “what it could have been like.”

  Francine knew the marriage wouldn’t survive when she went back to New York to have Jimmy, Jr. She guessed that Jimmy had had an affair with Bernice Kay in her absence. When Jimmy saw his son, he looked at him with the amused superiority he put on when sitting through a drum solo. In two months, he moved out and was living in Harlem.

  In 1949, they got a divorce and Francine moved with Jimmy, Jr. back to California. There had been movie offers. Her father had done a lot of talking with her and, together with Tony Harwell, he had been working for a year on Arthur Freed to consider Francine. She tested better than anyone suspected; the
rather forceful nose photographed cute. Francine had only one song and fifteen minutes in Would You Believe It? (1950, Charles Walters), but it was enough. Metro put her straight into The Girl from Hot Coffee (1951, Stanley Donen) as a replacement for Garland.

  Her movie career was established. She made Shore Leave (1952, Donen); Vaudeville Family (1953, George Sidney); and then the enormously successful Happy Endings (1954, George Cukor). Francine took Jimmy, Jr., east for the New York opening, and she met Jimmy again. He talked about seeing her another time, and they made an appointment. She was all ready to go when a premonition fell on her. She actually saw the tense figure of Jimmy waiting for her on a street corner, and she remembered the grinning scorn with which he’d warded off all her new success. She decided not to see him.

  But ever afterward, she got calls in the night. Sometimes he said nothing; sometimes he blew a breathing tone on a mouthpiece; sometimes he started a huge speech, imploring yet blaming her. Jimmy, Jr., was troubled by the strange irregularity of his father’s presence, and Francine sent him away to a private school. She made Lady Love (1956, Rouben Mamoulian), and then that adventurous failure, A Virtuoso Personality (1957, Vincente Minnelli).

  In 1957, she married her longtime accompanist, Paul Wilson. It was a comfortable, unexciting marriage for two years, until the mutilated body of Wilson was found in their Holmby Hills mansion pool when Francine was on location in New England for Labor Day Picnic (1959, Nicholas Ray), her last film.

  Francine was terrified by the murder. She refused to consider any more pictures; she sold the house without ever setting eyes on it again; and she moved to Santa Barbara.

  She lives there still, in her early sixties now, seldom seen, one of the true reclusives of showbiz. Until his death in 1966, she was pestered by Jimmy, and she often gave him money to support his heroin addiction. All offers of a comeback were refused, though she did make one TV spectacular, “Francine,” in 1963, remarkable for her undimmed vitality and the promise of Bob Fosse.

  So optimistic in her films, so settled in her early life, Francine Evans has accepted tragedy. Still adored by the masses—her films are played more now than in the 1950s—she exists in a state of torment, unable to stop or deter the drive of her son to remind her of his father.

  JOHN CONVERSE

  Michael Moriarty in Who’ll Stop the Rain, 1978,

  directed by Karel Reisz

  Would it have occurred to me to pursue Converse if I had not been at the dentist’s with one old copy of Time to help me wait? It was Mo’s teeth that proved she had been burned down to the bone, and now mine guided me to a sleeping clue. The eyes, the mouth—our histories are stored there.

  In a Time silky with use I found a review of a book, Wounded Soldiers by John Converse. It was a 1975 issue, and the book was an account of Vietnam veterans disabled by the war. It was based on interviews, and the review picked out one with “Alex Cutter, intent on finding an incident in his American milieu that will answer for his injury.” I remembered Converse as Mo’s half-hearted lover. But I had not imagined he would have seen her again, not after her marriage to Cutter.

  Wounded Soldiers was in the library. It had been borrowed many times, yet it seemed to me meretricious. The material was full of pain, but the writing was artfully noncommittal: horror built up while the book assured itself that there was nothing else to do but recount these lurid events as meticulously as possible. A photographer who recorded them would have been called cold, but Converse was praised for what Time termed “cool lucidity.” He could make his emptiness seem like helpless wisdom. Sometimes the book was mere unsentenced lists: “… Gangrene. Stench. Flowers by the roadside. Maggots in the flesh… .” In shedding grammar he had taken on the role of a torturer. The acid words dripped in my head; it was not reading, but being beaten, quietly, so that one would not cry out.

  So I learned about Converse: born in 1941, the only child of a surgeon who moved every three or four years to a richer hospital, taking his son with him. The mother died when the boy was four—I could find no cause of death. “Oh, quite simply, she detested my father. She was worn out by him,” Converse told me. His casual hands turned over in the air, like a life rolling aside. He had majored in communications at UCLA, and gone into the Marine Corps with a commission. Somewhere he must have taken a wrong turn, a dead end. You cannot always tell from brief biographies. They do not include unhappiness or error. Everyone seems so confident and straight ahead in Current Biography.

  He had married the daughter of a Berkeley radical, Marge Bender. He worked for her father, writing for his magazines and editing a little. It didn’t seem enough for someone with his ambition. Perhaps he loved Marge: they had a daughter. But he wrote a play, Under the Christmas Tree, about a marine on furlough who rampages in his old home and kills his unavailing parents. It was successful off-Broadway; it was done often in the sixties, bought for the movies, but never heard of. When I read it, I could not credit its thrill at dreadful cruelty. You understand, I do not say such things cannot happen. We all know of massacres. But how can anyone treat them lightly?

  I wrote to Converse’s publisher; the letter never came back and never produced an answer. I would have let him go out of sheer inability: I do not know how one becomes an indefatigable inquirer. I grow tired waiting for chance’s lead. No Marlowe.

  Then three months after my day at the dentist’s, I saw in the paper that John Converse would be lecturing at the university in Lincoln on “Conscience and Reporting.” It was open and free to the public.

  He was a tall man, thin and slack. As he lectured, the light fell on the bald peak of his head. His voice was languid and inexpressive, except when it tensed against giggling as he made a sarcastic remark. He talked about his “crisis” in Vietnam, and the call he had heard to write “not from the several, bogusly intelligent points of view of war’s leaders, but in the impacted fear and degradation of those in the way of a war.” As if real writing could be so bereft.

  He spoke for an hour, with desultory questions for another fifteen minutes, and then there was cheese and wine in the Faculty Lounge. I sipped a cold claret, looking at the heartbreaking Wilson Keyes of a wild garden in Laurel Canyon. I waited for Converse to autograph his book, and to satisfy fawning, hushed questions. One young woman was possessively attentive, but he slid her aside when he realized I was waiting and would not go away.

  “I wondered if we might have dinner,” I asked him.

  “Oh, dinner.” His gaze drifted away to the young woman.

  “I am Mo Cutter’s uncle,” I told him.

  “Really?” Surprise made him stupid, until he grinned, and it was insolent. “Well, I never.”

  “I would like a chance to talk with you.”

  “Would you? Why?”

  “I am so much in the dark over her death.”

  “I could do breakfast, I suppose.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “I have a ten a.m. flight. Can you come to the Holiday Inn?”

  “Eight?”

  “Eight-thirty, say.”

  I stayed in Lincoln, in a motel. Those places have not changed. I wondered if it might be the last time I ever tried to sleep in a motel. I cannot have many motel chronicles left, I trust. Yet I would linger on in the drab cubes a year if it meant another day of life.

  He was late the next day and he had cut himself shaving. A year later he was made editor of Newsweek, but that morning he was soiled and hungover from the girl in his room.

  “Old Mo then,” he sighed, as he drank coffee with Tylenol.

  “I know about your friendship,” I said, to save time, I thought.

  “You do? You think you do?”

  “She wrote to me. She sent your picture. I don’t mean to blame you.”

  “You’re old Uncle George, aren’t you? The sly one.”

  “Sly?”

  “Took her to the movies.”

  “Yes, sometimes.”

  He looked at me and he forked hot cak
e in syrup. “Felt her up in the dark.”

  “I did not.” I hated myself for blushing.

  “She said so.”

  “It’s not true.” He had made me disavow her.

  “Ah… . Well, Mo wasn’t always too straight, was she? She did make things up. And then, once she’d started on heroin—”

  “She took drugs?”

  “An addict. Scag addict.”

  “When did you see her last?”

  “What?” He began laughing, as if my ignorance had only just dawned on him. “That night!”

  “The night she died?”

  “Of course. I … fucked her. Excuse me. You know.”

  “I thought Richard Bone…”

  “After him. I saw him leave. But it wasn’t either of us.”

  “Wasn’t what?”

  He searched for a way of saying something he normally left unsaid.

  “That made her do it—if she did it. Or maybe Cord had the house burned down. Cutter was after him. Had this crackpot theory that Cord had murdered some girl he was involved with. Nonsense, of course. People don’t do that.”

  At everything he said I felt the ground around me less certain. I wanted to be utterly deaf. He was so familiar with such black subtleties between people, and so indifferent.

  There was a silence. “I made that up about you in the dark.”

  “Why?”

  “She never said that. She said something about you—something pleasant, I think—but I don’t remember. Why do you care?”

  “I think about her. Isn’t that enough?”

  “No, not really. At least, I shouldn’t think so. Look, I have to go. But supposing I was the last to see her alive—I may have been. There was nothing I noticed. Nothing. She didn’t need other people, or wrongs, to do a thing like that. It was in her, that’s all.”