by Jim Lehrer
“Carl Sandburg did.”
“My point exactly. Put him in Kansas City.”
“Done. Yes, sir. The surgeon’s in Kansas City. We get there in less than three hours, in fact—you know, tonight here on the Super Chief.”
Rinehart said, “Yes, I know. That’s why I thought of it. Of course, nothing ever happens in Kansas City either except in Oklahoma!—the movie—when that dancer did a song about it being up-to-date.”
“Wasn’t that Gene Nelson?”
“Right, right. Lee Dixon played the part on Broadway. Rod Steiger stole the movie playing Jud Fry. Nobody ever dreamed he could sing. You wake him up in the middle of the night and I’ll bet he’s still Jud Fry. Actors are the characters they play forever.”
Rinehart must have seen a look of disbelief on Sanders’s face because he quickly added:
“Hey, kid, I was at a dinner party one night in Beverly Hills. A guy had a heart attack sitting right there at the table. Lew Ayres, without saying a word, got down on the floor with the man, did a lot of doctor things and saved his life. He did it on reflex—instinct. Back in the thirties and forties he’d played Dr. Jimmy Kildare in nine pictures for MGM. Once a doctor in a movie, always a doctor. Once a pig man in Oklahoma!, always a pig man. That’s it.”
Then he looked at his wristwatch, nodded, signaling to the kid to return to The Talk—and make it snappy.
“Well … the surgeon’s afraid to fly,” said Sanders. “He’s been on one airplane and he almost died of a nervous breakdown. He vomited and cried like a baby—”
“I don’t do vomit pictures.”
“Yes, sir. The important thing is that he won’t fly anymore and that means he has to take the Super Chief to the sick woman in Albuquerque, who he saves and then falls in love with and then marries—”
“The surgeon’s the hero of the picture?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Heroes can’t be afraid. Not in the movies. Got to be another reason he won’t fly and why he’s on the Super Chief. You also got to have things happen on the train—a little murder, romance, maybe have a spy like they did in the first Silver Streak. Nothing much ever happens on trains in real life anymore except eating, drinking and sex so you’d have to make it up. This train, the best in the world, is half empty right now on this trip. Nothing’s happening on it. Right now I’m going to bed.”
Sanders stood with Darwin Rinehart. “I have to remain on duty, sir.”
Rinehart blinked, frowned. “What’s there to do in the middle of the night for an assistant whatever kind of agent you said you were?”
“We have a really special passenger coming aboard in Kansas City,” said Sanders with a tone of pride. “I must be ready.”
Rinehart knew the world of the Super Chief. It would not stop at Kansas City until two thirty in the morning. There, some of the cars would be temporarily separated from the rest of the train so another sleeper coach could be inserted. Passengers could board that car in Kansas City after nine o’clock the night before, bed down in their compartment and be fast asleep by the time the Super Chief itself actually arrived at Kansas City’s Union Station.
“Who is the special passenger—a surgeon with special hands?” said Rinehart.
“Can’t say, sir,” Charlie Sanders said, stiffly. This was no joking matter. “All I can say is that I will be assisted in my duties by a special agent of the Santa Fe Railway Police.”
Darwin Rinehart gave a halfhearted mocking whistle. Big deal!
“He’ll be in plainclothes—like me,” Sanders added. “So you might not know when he’s there.”
Rinehart gave a second whistle.
Jack Pryor was that Santa Fe police detective. He still had the build and moves of the six-foot/205-pound fullback he had been in high school.
“Mr. Truman told me he’s a light sleeper,” Pryor said to Charlie Sanders, who at five nine/160 pounds had played only second-string baseball in high school. “I hope all this noise of the switching didn’t wake him up. He was here right at nine o’clock as soon as the Kansas City sleeper was ready for passengers.”
The two Santa Fe men, having met and joined forces, were talking at trainside there at the Union Station platform, where the outside clocks now showed the time to be two thirty-five in the morning.
“What’ll we do if he gets up and starts walking around the train?” Sanders asked.
“I’ll protect him, you entertain him—isn’t that what we’re here to do?”
“Did you like Truman—you know, as president?” asked Sanders.
“You bet. He dropped the bomb and stopped the war. I was only an MP in San Francisco,” said Pryor, a tall, stocky, black-haired man in his fifties. “But what he did kept me from getting any closer to the hot stuff. You’re a Korea vet, aren’t you?”
“Kind of,” said Sanders. “I joined the Air Force to be a pilot but washed out of flight school and ended up teaching communications at an air base in San Antonio.”
“We were both lucky.”
Pryor and Sanders had worked together a couple of times and mostly liked each other, but their difference in age kept them from being really close. There was also a touch of a class problem. Pryor had only a high school education; Sanders was a business administration graduate of the University of Indiana at Bloomington. That aside, Pryor, with body language as well as words, always let it be known in a friendly manner that, whatever they were doing, he was the senior man present.
“What about Mrs. Truman?” Sanders asked.
“She’s not with him. He said she came down with a cold at the last minute and stayed home.”
“Good, good. Only one of them to worry about.”
“Anybody else special who is already on the train that I should know about?” Pryor asked.
“Only Clark Gable. Is everything they say about him true?”
“If your question has to do with women and drinking on the Super Chief, it is,” Pryor said.
That was exactly what Sanders had in mind with his question.
“There’s also a movie producer named Rinehart aboard. He’s in one of the observation car drawing rooms. He’s a Regular. I talked to him about making a movie aboard the Super. That’s the kind of work I do for the good of the railroad. Mr. Wheeler’s in the other drawing room. You know him?”
“Everybody who knows the Super knows him,” Pryor said. “I’ll bet he spends more time on this train than most of the crew.”
“He’s really ill …”
Then it happened. Charlie Sanders grabbed Pryor’s right arm and pointed him toward the front of the train. “My God, look who’s coming.”
Pryor immediately recognized the man walking toward them. It was Clark Gable. Who wouldn’t know that look—that presence? He was in dark gray suit pants and an unbuttoned white dress shirt with a big collar but no tie. His black shoes shined like mirrors.
“Good morning, Mr. Gable,” Pryor said when Gable got to them. “Welcome to Kansas City.”
“Morning,” said Gable, smiling. He was puffing on a cigarette. “Couldn’t sleep. Thought I’d stretch my legs a bit.”
“That’s great, Mr. Gable,” said Sanders nervously. “I’m an assistant general passenger agent with the Santa Fe. Are you getting everything you need here on the Super Chief, sir? If there’s anything you need I will be available on the train. Just ask your porter or one of the conductors to find me.”
Clark Gable’s smile broadened. “I’m getting more than everything I need. Thanks.”
“I’m Jack Pryor, a special agent of the Santa Fe police, Mr. Gable.”
“Nice to meet you both,” said Gable. “I guess I’d better start back toward my car. Wouldn’t want to be left in Kansas City.”
He laughed. Sanders and Pryor laughed.
Clark Gable raised his hand in the form of a salute as he walked away.
Sanders and Pryor watched him from the rear in silence.
“Wow,” said Sanders. “Thank you, Mr. San
ta Fe Railway, for making that possible in my life.”
Pryor said, “He seemed smaller than I expected. Shorter, thinner.”
“Movies make everything and everybody look bigger than they really are, I guess,” Sanders said.
They started moving toward the train.
Sanders said, “They told me in Chicago that we’re making a quick, off-the-books stop in Strong for somebody else who’s important—important to our railroad, at least.”
A conductor yelled “All aboard!” And then so did another farther up.
Sanders jumped on the train after Pryor and within a minute the Super Chief was moving again.
Darwin Rinehart, after so many trips, still saw his drawing room as being exquisite, ideally fit for kings, particularly when the connecting bedroom was added into the mix. Gene Mathews was in the bedroom, no doubt fast asleep.
It was so much more than the space.
Small lamps on the walls between the windows in Rinehart’s drawing room were lit just enough to show the soft pastel colors of light blue, green and sandy brown on the window shades, carpet, chairs, wood paneling and ceiling.
The bed was made up and ready for him, its crisp white sheets and blue blanket turned down and gleaming.
There was a smell of soap, varnish, chrome—cleanliness, spic, span, class.
Rinehart leaned down, pulled a blind and looked out the large window into the darkness. It was after midnight; the Super Chief was zipping through another small town. He yanked the blind back down and quickly removed his clothes, hung them in a small closet, dressed in a pair of light blue silk pajamas and lay down.
The Super Chief. He was on the Super Chief. He was lying down in a drawing room on the Super Chief, the greatest train in America, on its way to Los Angeles, California, and the Pacific Ocean. The Super Chief. Thirty-nine and one-quarter hours was all it took for its streak across the American heartland. Yes, a silver streak. A nine-car streak of silver luxury behind a magnificent diesel engine painted in the Santa Fe’s famous red and yellow “Warbonnet” colors.
Rinehart heard and felt the clicking of the wheels on the track. And there was an occasional Whaaa! blast from the train’s horn as it zipped through the dark Missouri countryside. It had the sound of a howl—more like an animal than a machine.
That’s because this train is alive, thought Rinehart. Maybe the Santa Fe kid’s right about making a movie that takes place on this wonderful train.
He felt a moment’s curiosity about who the special passenger might be who was boarding there and stayed wide awake with his own thoughts about what this particular trip on the Super might mean for his own failed life.
And then he felt the train slowing down and he listened and tossed with it as it came to a full stop at Kansas City’s Union Station. There came the banging as the cars were switched around.
And he wondered again about the famous person who was joining the Super Chief now.
He couldn’t resist raising the window blind.
There was nothing to see except a well-lit platform and one or two porters and conductors walking around, talking.
Then he saw two men, dressed in regular civilian suits with ties and felt hats, standing off to the right. One of them was that Santa Fe kid. Maybe the other was the railroad cop he was talking about?
A third man came up to them. He was smoking a cigarette. There was something familiar about the guy. Heavy black hair, neatly combed straight back, graying sideburns, a slight mustache …
Oh, sure. It was just Clark Gable.
Rinehart wanted to yell through the window at Gable. Tell him how he shouldn’t have treated him, Darwin Rinehart, like he was a loser. You’d be nowhere without Gone with the Wind!
But he just watched as Gable, after exchanging a few words with the other two men, disappeared up toward the rear end of the train.
Rinehart pulled the blind back down and closed his eyes. He still had no idea about who the special passenger was in a compartment in the Kansas City sleeping car.
Or what he was going to do with the rest of his life.
He finally dozed off after going through several possible titles for a movie that takes place entirely on the Super Chief.
As the Super glided away from Kansas City, Dale Lawrence, the disheveled Private, sat staring out the window at the dark, his bleary eyes popped opened, his cough erupting.
For a few precious minutes he had violated the porter’s orders not to leave the roomette. That was when he went across the passageway to the other side of the train so he could see the Kansas City station’s platform.
He moved finally into the vestibule between his car and the one behind where he could also hear.
He watched carefully as the two men in suits and hats talked and then greeted another man, who seemed familiar. Lawrence thought he resembled Clark Gable.
But that was of no serious interest. What he overheard in a conversation between a porter and a conductor, about Harry S Truman now being on the train, was what was important.
That was all that mattered to Dale L. Lawrence.
Gene Mathews considered himself the champion train sleeper. He had yet to meet anyone who claimed the ability to doze off as quickly as he could to the sounds and swings of a sleeping car berth. Over the many years and trips with Darwin Rinehart, he had developed an almost hypnotic heavy-lid response to putting his head down on a pillow and closing his eyes on a moving train.
He was asleep but he was also aware of what was happening. The click-click-click of the wheels passing over the tracks reminded him of the gadget, called a metronome, his little sister used when practicing the piano. She’d wind it up and a skinny metal stem would tick side to side, side to side. Gene could also hear the ding-ding of the downed barriers at railroad crossings and even, faintly, the occasional blast of the Super Chief’s horn from the engine far ahead of him, here in the observation car at the end of the train.
He heard it all and yet he heard nothing that roused him completely. The commotion of Kansas City had barely stirred him because it, too, was built into his unconscious expectation of the first night out on the Super from Chicago.
But now, suddenly, he was awake. Sitting up.
There had been an abrupt, noticeable change in the click-click rhythm.
Mathews was certain they couldn’t have been much more than an hour out of Kansas City. It was too early for Bethel …
The train came to a full stop.
He raised his window blind.
There was a small red brick train station. Only a few lights were on inside and out. A rectacular black and white sign on the building showed the word S-T-R-O-N-G. Strong, Kansas? Gene knew the entire timetable of the Super Chief. It definitely did not have a scheduled stop in Strong.
Strong, Kansas. There was something familiar about it, though. Didn’t somebody famous live here? Not a movie person. There actually were a few famous people who weren’t in the movies.
Yes! It was an editor. A writer. Albert Roland Browne. Gene had read a couple of his short stories. And was it him or his brother or a son who wrote the book that the movie My Son Greg was based on?
But it didn’t matter.
The Super Chief was moving again. Whatever the reason for stopping in Albert Roland Browne’s hometown, it wasn’t for more than a couple of minutes.
And soon Mathews was back to sleep.
He might peer out again at Bethel. There was never much to see there but it was a scheduled crew change stop, and new passengers were permitted to board if they were going to Albuquerque or beyond.
Gene Mathews knew the Super.
And he knew he was going to miss it almost as much as Darwin Rinehart would.
A portly man in his fifties wearing a French-cuffed white shirt with large silver and pearl cuff links and a dark green tie entered the unlit interior of the empty observation car lounge. Under his right arm was a black portable Royal typewriter; in his left hand, a jumble of papers.
He went directly to the writing table just inside the car, made his writing equipment and himself comfortable, placed a monocle in his right eye, switched on a lamp and started typing.
In less than five minutes, the door opened again and three men, walking single file, came in. All three were in suits, ties. The last, the oldest, wore wire-rimmed glasses and walked with a stick.
The man at the desk stopped typing, glanced up and then leapt to his feet. To the elderly man, he said, “Are you who I think you are … sir?”
“I don’t know who you had in mind but I’m Harry Truman of Independence, Missouri,” said Truman, extending his right hand.
“That’s exactly who I had in mind. I’m A. C. Browne of the Strong, Kansas, Pantagraph,” said Browne as he shook hands. He did so with a manner that he hoped showed he was somewhat at ease in the company of a former president of the United States.
“You any kin to that famous Albert Roland Browne … what did they call him?”
“The Sage of Strong,” said Browne. “He was my father. I took over the paper from him. I’m Albert Carlton Browne. Everybody calls me A.C.”
Truman peered hard through the semidarkness. “That fancy tie and shirt and that accent of yours look and sound more Britain and London than Kansas and Strong.”
A. C. Browne was flustered. But the lack of good light helped him cover it. “I guess I picked up some habits while in Britain with NBC during the war,” he said, still sounding non-Kansan.
“Well, like they say,” said Truman, “You can take the man out of NBC but you can’t take NBC out of the man.”
Browne laughed. He could think of no other reaction.
Truman said, moving on, “These are Santa Fe people.” He motioned toward the men who had preceded him into the car and were now standing poised a few feet away.
“This one’s a detective. His name is Pryor. He was put here by the railroad to make sure nobody harms this tired old body of mine.”
Then with a nod to the other man, the youngest of the three, Truman added, “This is Charlie. He’s from the Chicago head office. He was put here by the mighty Santa Fe to make sure my every need is met, including that for a glass of whiskey in the middle of the night, even if we’re in a dry state.”