To me, and probably to thousands, the story of the brilliant Varioni Bro-thers is one of the most tragic and unfinished of this century. Although the music these golden boys left us is still warm and alive in our hearts, perhaps their story is cold enough to be told to some of the younger readers and retold to the old ones.
I was there on the fatal night their music publisher and friend, Teddy Barto, gave them the handsomest, most ostentatious party of the crazy Twenties. It was in celebration of their fifth year of collaboration and success. The Varioni Brothers' mansion was stuffed with the best shirts of the day. And the most beautiful, most talked about or against, women. The most supercolossal blackest colored boy I have ever seen stood at the front door with a silver plate the size of a manhole cover into which dropped the invitation cards of our then favorite actors, actresses, writers, producers, dancers, men and ladies about town.
It seemed that with success Sonny Varioni had developed quite a taste for gambling. Not with just anybody, but with big shots like the late, little-lamented Buster Hankey. About two weeks before the party, Sonny had lost about forty thousand dollars to Buster in a poker game. Sonny had re-fused to pay, accusing the Buster of dirty- dealing him.
At about four A.M. on that festive, frightful morning there were about two hundred of us jammed fashionably in the crazy, boyish basement where the Varionis wrote all their hits. It was there that the thing happen-ed. If I must have a reason for retelling a tragic story, I shall say with con-viction that it is my right, because I honestly believe that I was the only sober individual in that basement.
Enter Rocco, Buster Hankey's newest, most-likely-to-succeed trigger- man. Rocco inquires sweetly of the dizziest blonde - poor thing - points wildly in the direction of the piano. 'Over there, handsome. But what's your hurry? Have a li'l' drink.'
Rocco doesn't have time for a li'l' drink. He elbows his way through the crowd, fires five shots, very fast, into the wrong man's back. Joe Varioni, whom no one had ever heard play piano before, because that was Sonny's affair, dropped dead to the floor. Joe, the lyricist, only played the piano when he was tight, and he only got tight once a year, at the great parties Teddy Barto threw for him and Sonny.
Sonny stayed in Chicago for a few weeks, walking around town without a hat, without a necktie, without a decent Christian night of sleep. Then suddenly he disappeared from the Windy City. There is no record of anyone having seen or heard of him since. Yes, I think I should ask my hypothetical genie: "Where is Sonny Varioni?"
Some remote little person somewhere must have the inside dope. As, un- fortunately, I am a little on genii, will he or she enlighten a sympathetic admirer, one of thousands?
My name is Sarah Daley Smith. I am one of the remotest little numbers I know. And I have the inside dope on Sonny Varioni. He is in Way-cross, Illinois. He's not very well and he's working day and night typing up the manuscript of a very lovely, wild and possibly great novel. It was written and thrown into a trunk by Joe Varioni. It was written longhand on yellow paper, on lined paper, on crumbled paper, on torn paper. The sheets were not numbered. Whole sentences and even paragraphs were marked out and rewritten on the back of enveloped, on the unused sides of college exam papers, in the margins of railroad timetables. The job of making head and tail, chapter and book, of this wild colossus is an im-measurably enervating one, requiring, one would think, youth and health and ego. Sonny Varioni has none of these. He has a hope for a kind of salvation.
I don't know Mr. Westmoreland, of the guest-columnist Westmore-lands, but I guess I approve of his curiosity. I think he must remember all his old girls by the Varioni Brothers' words and music.
So, if the gentlemen with the drums and bugles are ready, I shall pass among the Westmorelands with the inside dope.
Because the inside dope begins there, I must go back to the high, wide and rotten Twenties. I can offer no important lament or even a convincing shrug for the general bad taste of that era.
I happened to be a sophomore at Waycross College, and I actually wore a yellow slicker with riotously witty sayings pen-and-inked on the back, suggesting liberally that sex was the cat's pajamas, and that we all get behind the ole football team. There were no flies on me.
Joe Varioni taught English III-A, from Beowulf through Fielding, as the catalogue put it. He taught it beautifully. All little girls who take long walks in the rain and major in English have had Grendel's bloody arm dragged across their education at least three times, in this school or that. But somehow when Joe talked about Beowulf's silly doings they seemed to have undergone a rewrite job by one of the Brownings.
He was the tallest, thinnest, weariest boy I had ever seen in my life. He was brilliant. He had gorgeous brown eyes, and he had only two suits. He was completely unhappy, and I didn't know why.
If he called for volunteers to come to the blackboard and drop dead for him, I would have won a scholarship. He took me out several times, walking just ahead of my gun. He wasn't much interested in me, but he was terribly short on the right audiences. He sometimes talked about his writing, and he read me some of it. It was part of the novel. He'd been reading some crazy sheets of yellow paper; then all of a sudden he'd cut himself short. "Wait a minute," he'd say. "I changed that." Then he'd fish a couple of envelopes out of his pocket and read from the backs of them. He could cram more writing in less space than anybody I ever knew.
Suddenly one month he stopped reading to me. He avoided me after classes. I saw him from the library window one afternoon, and I leaned out and hollered to him to wait for me. Miss MacGregor campused me for a week for hollering out the library window. But I didn't care. Joe waited for me.
I asked him how the book was coming.
"I haven't been writing," he said.
"That's terrible. When are you gonna finish it?"
"As soon as I get the chance."
"Chance? What've you been doing nights?"
"I've been working with my brother, nights. He's a songwriter. I do the lyrics for him."
I looked at him with my mouth open. He had just told me that Robert Browning had been hired to play third base for the Cards.
"You're being ridiculous," I said.
"My brother writes wonderful music."
"That's great. That's peachy."
"I'm not going to write lyrics for him all my life," Joe explained. "Just till he clicks. When he clicks I'm through."
"Do you spend all your time nights doing that? Haven't you worked on the novel at all?"
Joe said coldly, "I told you I'm waiting till he clicks. When he clicks I'm through."
"What does he do for a living?" I asked.
"Well, right now he spends most of his time at the piano."
"I get it. Joe Artist doesn't work."
"Do you want to hear one of Sonny's numbers?" Joe asked.
I said no, but he took me in the rec room anyway. Joe sat down at the piano and played the number that was later to be called I Want to Hear the Music. It was tremendous, of course. It knocked you out. I dated the time and place, and filed both away for a future sweetness. Joe played it through twice. He played rather nicely. When he was finished, he ran a skinny hand through his black hair. "I'll wait till he clicks," he said. "When he clicks I'm through."
For the Inside Dope Department, Sonny Varioni was handsome, charming, insincere, and bored. He was also a brilliant creative techni-cian at the piano. His fingers were marvelous. I think they were the best of the old 1926 fingers. I think his fingers played with a keyboard so expertly that something new had to come out of the piano. He played hard, full-chord right hand and the fastest, most-satisfying bass I have ever heard, even from colored boys. When he was in the mood to show off for himself, he was the only man I have ever seen throw either arm over the back of his chair and play the bass and the treble with his re-maining hand alone, and you could hardly tell the difference. He was so congenitally conceited that he appeared to be modest. Sonny never asked you if you liked his music. He assumed
too confidently that you did.
I'm always willing to acknowledge one virtue in Sonny. While he knew there were Berlins, Carmichails, Kerns, Isham Joneses plugging out tunes comparable in quality with his own, he knew that Joe was in a class strictly by himself among the lyric writers. If Sonny ever took the trouble to brag at all in public, he bragged about Joe.
Sonny would never let me watch him and Joe work together. I don't know what their methods were, except what Joe once told me. Joe told me Sonny would play whatever he had composed through about fifteen times, while he, Joe, would follow his playing with a pad and pencil handy. I think it must have been a pretty cold business.
I went with them to Chicago the day they sold I Want to Hear the Music, Mary,Mary, and Dirty Peggy. My uncle was Teddy Barto's lawyer, and I got them in to see Teddy.
When Teddy announced dramatically that he wanted to buy all three of the numbers, Neither of the Varionis went into a soft-shoe routine.
"I want all three," Teddy said again, but more impressively. "I want all three of them songs. You guys got an agent?"
"No," Sonny said, still at the piano.
"You don't need one," Teddy informed.
"I'll publish your stuff and be your agent. Look happy. I'm a very smart man. What have you guys been doing for a living?"
"I teach," Joe said, looking out the window.
"I weave baskets," Sonny said, at the piano.
"You should move into town right away. You should be near the pulse of things. You're two very talented geniuses," Teddy said. "I'm going to give you check on account. You should both move into town right away."
"I don't want to move into Chicago," Joe told him. "It's hard enough to make my first class on time as it is."
Teddy turned to me. "Miss Daley, impress on the boy he should move in town by the pulse of the whole country."
"He's a novelist," I said. "He shouldn't be writing songs."
"So he can write a few novels in town," Teddy said, solving everything. "I like books. Everybody likes books. It improves the mind."
"I'm not moving into Chicago," Joe said, at the window.
Teddy started to say something, but Sonny put a finger to his lips, ordering silence. I hated Sonny for that.
"I'll leave it to you to work out for yourselves in the most advantage to yourselves personally," Teddy said beautifully. "I'm not worried. I'm confident, you might say. We're all adults."
On the train back to Waycross we had the porter put up a table and we played poker. We played for hours. Then all of a sudden I felt something terrible and certain. I put down my cards and walked back to the platform and lighted a cigarette. Sonny came back and bummed a cigarette. He stood over me easily, positively, frighteningly. He was so masterful. He couldn't even stand over you on a platform between cars without being the master of the platform.
"Let him go, Sonny," I begged him.
"You don't even let him play cards his own way."
He wasn't the sort to say "What do you mean?" He knew exactly what I meant, and didn't care if I knew he knew. He just waited easily for me to finish.
"Let him go, Sonny. What do you care? You've got your break. You can get somebody else to write lyrics for you. It's your music that's terrific."
"Joe does the best lyrics in the whole country. Nobody touches him or comes close to it."
"Sonny, he can write," I said. "He can really write. I spoke to Professor Voorhees at college - you've heard of him - and when I told him Joe wasn't writing any more, he just shook his head. He just shook his head, Sonny. That was all."
Sonny snapped his butt to the platform floor, ground it out with his shoe. "Joe's as bored as I am," he said. "We were born bored. Success is what both of us need. It'll at least demand our interest. It'll bring in money. Even if Joe does write this novel, it may take the public years to pat him on the ego."
"You're wrong. You're so wrong," I said. "Joe's not bored. Joe's just lonely for his own ideals. He has lots of them. You don't have any. You're the only one who's bored, Sonny."
"You certainly have it bad," Sonny said. "And you're wasting your time. Could I interest you in something on my type?"
"I hate you," I said. "All my life I'm going to try to hate your music."
He took my handbag away from me, opened it and took out my cigarettes.
"That," he said, "is impossible."
I went back into the car.
The Varioni Brothers followed up Dirty Peggy with Emmy-Jo, and before Emmy-Jo was cold that wonderful job, The Sheik of State Street was dropped on Teddy Barto's new, more expensive desk. After the Sheik they did Is It All Right if I Cry, Annie? and after Annie came Stay a While. Then came Frances Was There Too, then Weary Street Blues, then - Oh, I could name them all. I could sing them all. But what's the use?
Right after Mary, Mary they moved into Chicago, bought a big house and filled it with poor relations. They kept the basement to themselves. It had a piano, a pool table and a bar. Half the time they slept down there. Almost overnight they were financially able to do almost anything- chucking emeralds at blondes, or what have you. There just suddenly wasn't a grocery clerk in America who could climb a ladder for a can of asparagus without whistling or singing a Varioni Brothers' song, on or off key.
Just after Is It All Right if I Cry, Annie? my father became ill, and I had to go to California with him.
"I'm leaving tomorrow with daddy. We're going to California, after all," I told Joe. "Why don't you ride as far as California with me? I'll propose to you in Latvian."
He had taken me to lunch.
"I'll miss you, Sarah."
"Corinne Griffith is going to be on the train. She's pretty."
Joe smiled. He was always a good smiler. "I'll wait for you to come back, Sarah," he said. "I'll be a big boy then."
I reached for his hand across the table, his skinny, wonderful hand.
"Joe, Joe, sweetheart. Did you write Sunday? Did you, Joe? Did you go near the script?"
"I nodded at it very politely." He took his hand away from mine.
"You didn't write at all?"
"We worked. Leave me alone. Leave me alone, Sarah. Let's just eat our shrimp salads and leave each other alone."
"Joe, I love you. I want you to be happy. You're burning yourself out in that terrible basement. I want you to go away and do your novel."
"Sarah, please. Will you keep quiet, absolutely quiet, if I tell you something?"
"Yes."
"We're doing a new number. I've given Sonny my two weeks' notice. Lou Gangin is going to write lyrics for him from now on."
"Did you tell Sonny that?" I said.
"Of course I told him."
"He doesn't want Lou Gangin. He wants you."
"He wants Gangin," Joe said. "I'm sorry I told you."
"He'll trick you, Joe. He'll trick you into staying," I told him. "Come to California with me. Or just get on the train with me. You can get off where and when you like. You can - "
"Sarah, shut up, please."
While Joe came to the train with me and daddy, I made Professor Voorhees go to see Sonny. I couldn't have seen him myself. I couldn't have stood those cold, bored eyes of his, anticipating all my poor little strategies.
Sonny received Professor Voorhees in the basement. He played the piano the whole time the old man was there.
"Have a seat, professor."
"Thank you. You play well, sir."
"I can't give you too much time, professor. I've got an engagement at eight."
"Very well." The professor got right to the point. "I understand that Joseph is through writing lyrics for you, that a young man named Gangley is going to take his place."
"Gangin," corrected his host. "No. Somebody's been kidding you. Joe writes the best lyrics in the country. Gangin's just one of the boys."
Professor Voorhees said sharply, "Your brother is a poet, Mr. Varioni."
"I thought he was a novelist."
"Let us say he is a wri
ter. A very fine writer. I believe he has genius."
"Like Rudyard Kipling and that crowd, eh?"
"No. Like Joseph Varioni."
Sonny was playing with some minor chords in the bass, running them, striking them solid. The professor listened in spite if himself.
"What makes you so sure," Sonny said. "What makes you so sure he wouldn't plug out words for years and then have a bunch of guys tell him he was also-ran?"
"I think that Joseph is worthy of taking that chance, Mr. Varioni," Professor Voorhees said. "Have you ever read anything your brother has written?"
"He showed me a story once. About some kids coming out of school. I thought it was lousy. Nothing happened."
"Mr. Varioni," said the professor, "you've got to let him go. You have a tremendous influence on him. You must release him."
Sonny stood up suddenly and buttoned the coat of his hundred-and-fifty-dollar suit. "I have to go. I'm sorry, professor."
The professor followed Sonny upstairs. They put on their overcoats. A footman opened the door and they went out. Sonny hailed a cab and offered the professor a lift, which he declined politely.
One last attempt was made. "You're quite determined to burn out your brother's life?" Professor Voorhees asked.
For answer, Sonny dismissed the cab he had hailed. He turned and made his reply, scrupulously for him. "Professor, I want to hear the music. I'm a man who goes to night clubs. I can't stand going into a night club and hearing some little girl sing Lou Gangin's words to my music. I'm not Mozart. I don't write symphonies. I write songs. Joe's lyrics are the best- jazz, torch, or rhythm, his are the best. I've known that from the beginning."
Sonny lighted a cigarette, got rid of smoke through thinned lips.
"I'll tell you a secret," he said. "I'm a man who has an awful lot of trouble hearing the music. I need every little help I can get." He nodded good-by to the professor, stepped off the curb and got into another cab.
22 Out-of-print J. D. Salinger Stories Page 5