Serenade

Chapter 9

I made my debut in Lucia right after New Year’s, sang standard repertoire for a month, began to work in. It felt good to be back with the wops. Then I got my real chance when they popped me on three days’ notice into Don Giovanni. I had a hell of a time getting them to let me do the serenade my way, with a real guitar, and play it myself, without the orchestra. The score calls for a prop mandolin, and that’s the way the music is written, but I hate all prop instruments on the stage, and hate to play any scene where I have to use one. There’s no way you can do it that it doesn’t look phoney. I made a gain when I told them that the guitar was tradition, that Garcia used to do it that way, but I lost all that ground when somebody in the Taste Department decided that a real guitar would look too much like the Roxy, and for a day it was all off again. Then I got Wurlitzer’s to help me out. They sent down an instrument that was a beauty. It was dark, dull spruce, without any pearl, nickel, or highlights on it of any kind, and it had a tone you could eat with a spoon. When I sounded off on that, that settled it.

I wanted to put it up a half tone, so I could get it in the key of three flats, but I didn’t. It’s in the key of two sharps, the worst key there is for a singer, especially the high F sharp at the end, that catches a baritone all wrong, and makes him sound coarse and ropy. The F sharp is not in the score, but it’s tradition and you have to sing it. God knows why Mozart ever put it in that key, unless it’s because two sharps is the best key there is for a mandolin, and he let his singer take the rap so he could bring the accompaniment to life.

But I tuned with the orchestra before the act started, and did it strictly in the original key. I made two moves while I was singing it. Between verses I took one step nearer the balcony. At the end, I turned my back on the audience, stepped under the balcony and played the finish, not to them, but to her. On the F sharp, instead of covering up and getting it over quick, I did a messa di voce, probably the toughest order a singer ever tries to deliver. You start it p, swell to ff, pull back to p again, and come off it. My tone wasn’t round, but it was pure, and I got away with it all right. They broke into a roar, the bravos yipped out all over the house, and that was the beginning of this stuff that you read, that I was the greatest since Bispham, the peer of Scotti, and all the rest of it. Well, I was the peer of Scotti, or hope I was. They’ve forgotten by now how bad Scotti really was. He could sing, and he was the greatest actor I ever saw, but his voice was just merely painful. What they paid no attention to at all, mentioned like it was nothing but a little added feature, was the guitar. You can talk about your fiddle, your piano, and your orchestra, and I’ve got nothing to say against them. But a guitar has moonlight in it.

Don Giovanni, the Marriage of Figaro, Thaïs, Rigoletto, Carmen, and Traviata, going bigger all the time, getting toward the middle of February, and still nothing from Gold. No notification to report, no phone calls, nothing. It was Ziskin’s picture I was supposed to do next. I saw by the papers he was in town and that night saw him in Lindy’s, but I saw him first and we ducked out and went somewhere else. He looked just as foolish as ever, and I began to tell myself he still didn’t have his script ready, and I might win by default.

The Hudson-to-Horn hook-up was something the radio people had been working on for a year, and God knows how many ministers, ambassadors, and contact men had to give them a hand, because most of those stations south of the Rio Grande are government-owned, and so are the Canadian. Then after they put it over, they had a hard job selling the time, because they were asking plenty for it, and every country had to get its cut. Finally they peddled it to Panamier. The car was being put out mainly for export, and the hook-up gave it what it needed. The next thing was: Who were they going to feature on the hour, now they had sold it? They had eight names on their list, the biggest in the business, starting with Grace Moore and ending with me. I moved up a couple of notches when I told them I could do spig songs in Spanish. I couldn’t, but I figured I was in bed with the right person to learn. Then Paul Bunyan opened, and I went up to the top. I can’t tell you what the picture had. Understand, for my money no picture is any good, really any good, but this one was gay and made you feel you wanted to see it over again. The story didn’t make any sense at all, but maybe it was because it was so cock-eyed you got to laughing. One place in there they cut in the Macy parade, the one they hold about a month before Christmas, with a lot of balloons coming down Broadway in the shape of animals. One of the balloons was a cow, and when they cut them loose, with prizes offered to whoever finds them, this one floats clear out over Saskatchewan and comes down on the trees near the lumber camp. Then the lumberjack that I was supposed to be, the one that has told them all he’s really Paul Bunyan, says it’s Babe, the Big Blue Ox that’s come down from heaven to pay him a Christmas visit. Then he climbs up in a tree and sings to it, and the lumberjacks sing to it, and believe it or not, it did things to you. Then when the sun comes up and they see what gender Babe really is, they go up the tree after the guy to lynch him, but somebody accidentally touches a cigar to the cow and she blows up with such a roar that all the trees they were supposed to cut down are lying flat on the ground, and they decide it was Mrs. Babe.

That clinched me for the broadcast, and they ate it up when I told them how to put the show together so it would sell cars. “We open up with the biggest, loudest, five-tone, multiple-action horn you can find, and if you think that’s not important, I tell you I’ve been down there, and I know what you’ve got to give them to sell cars. You’ve got to have a horn; first, last, and all the time you’ve got to have a horn. I take pitch from that and go into the Golondrina, for the spig trade, blended in with My Pal Babe, for the Canadian trade. I’ll write that little medley myself, and that’s our signature. Then we repeat it, you put your announcer in, and after he stops we go right on. We do light Mexican numbers, then we’ll turn right around and do some little French-Canadian numbers, then one light American number, when it’s time for the announcer again. Then we do a grand opera number and so on for as much time as we’ve got, and any comedy you want to put in, that’s O.K., too, but watch they can understand it. On your car, plug the horn, the lock on the gas tank, the paint job, the speed and the low gas consumption. That’s all. Leave out about the brakes, the knee-action, and all that. They never heard of it, and you’re just wasting your time. Better let me write those plugs, and you let your announcers translate them. And first, last, and again: Sound that horn.”

They struck together a program the way I said, and we made a record of it one morning with the studio orchestra, then went in an audition room and ran it off. It sounded like something. The advertising man liked it, and the Panamier man was tickled to death with it. “It’s got speed to it, you know what I mean? ‘Gangway for the Panamier Eight, she’s coming down the road!’—that’s what it says. And the theme song is a honey. Catches them north, south, and in the middle. Boys, we got something now. That’s set. No more if, as, and but about it.” I began to feel good. Why did I want that broadcast? Because it would pay me four thousand a week. Because they treated me good. Because I had had that flop, and I could get back at Mexico. Because it made me laugh. Because I could say hello to Captain Conners, wherever he was out there, listening to it. In other words, for no reason. I just wanted it.

That was around the first of March, and they would go on the air in three weeks, as soon as they could place ads in the newspapers all up and down the line, and get more cars freighted out, to make deliveries. By that time I had kidded myself that Ziskin would never have his script ready, and that I could forget about Hollywood the rest of my life. I woke up after I left them that day, and walked down to the opera house for the matinee Lucia. A messenger was there, with a registered letter from Gold, telling me to report March 10. I was a little off that day, and missed a cue.

What I did about it was nothing at all, except get the address of a lawyer in Radio City that made a specialty of big theatrical cases. Three days later I got a wire from the Screen Actors’ Guild, telling me that as I had made no acknowledgment of Gold’s notification to report, the case had been referred to them, that I was bound by a valid contract, and that unless I took steps to comply with it at once, they would be compelled to act under their by-laws, and their agreement with the producers. I paid no attention to that either.

Next morning while I was having a piano run-through of the Traviata duet with a new soprano they were bringing out, a secretary came up to the rehearsal room and told me to please go at once to a suite in the Empire State Building, that it was important. I asked the soprano if she minded doing the rest of it after lunch. When I got up to the Empire State Building, I was brought into a big office paneled in redwood, and marked “Mr. Luther, private.” Mr. Luther was an old man with a gray cutaway suit, a cheek as pink as a young girl’s, and an eye like blue agate. He got up, shook hands, told me how much he had enjoyed my singing, said my Marcello reminded him of Sammarco, and then got down to business. “Mr. Sharp, we have a communication here from a certain Mr. Gold, Rex Gold, informing us that he has a contract with you, and that any further employment of you on our part, after March 10, will be followed by legal action on his part. I don’t know what legal action he has in mind, but I thought it would be well if you came in and, if you can, inform me what he means, if you know.”

“You’re the attorney for the opera house?”

“Not regularly, of course. But sometimes when somebody is in Europe, they refer things to me.”

“Well — I have a contract with Gold.”

“For motion pictures, I judge?”

“Yes.”

I told him about it, and made it pretty plain I was through with pictures, contract or no contract. He listened and smiled, and seemed to get it all, why I wanted to sing in opera and all the rest of it. “Yes, I can understand that. I understand it very well. And of course, considering the success we’re having with you here, I should certainly hesitate to take any step, or give any advice, that would lose you to us at the height of the season. Of course, a telegram unsupported by any other documents is hardly ground for us to make a decision, and in fact we are not bound to take cognizance of contracts made by our singers until a court passes on them, or in some way compels us to. Just the same—”

“Yes?”

“Have you had any communication from Mr. Gold, aside from his letter of notification?”

“Nothing at all. I did have a wire from the Screen Actors’ Guild. But that’s all.”

“The — what was that again?”

I had the wire in my pocket, and showed it to him. He got up and began to walk around the office. “Ah — you’re a member of this Guild?”

“Well — everybody is that works in pictures.”

“It’s an affiliate of Equity, isn’t it?”

“I’m not sure. I think so.”

“... I don’t know what their procedure is. It’s recently organized, and I haven’t heard much about it. But I confess, Mr. Sharp, this makes things very awkward. Contracts, court cases — these things I don’t mind. After all, that’s what I’m here for, isn’t it? But I should be very loath to give any advice that would get the company into any mess with the Federation of Musicians. You realize what’s involved here, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t.”

“As I say, I don’t know the procedure of your Screen Actors’ Guild, but if they took the matter up with the musicians, and we had some kind of mess on our hands, over your singing here until you had adjudicated your troubles with your own union — Mr. Sharp, I simply have a horror of it. The musicians are one of the most intelligent, co-operative, and sensible unions we have, and yet, any dispute, coming at the height of the season—!”

“Meaning what?”

“I don’t know. I want to think about it.”

I went out, had a sandwich and some coffee, and went back to the rehearsal hall. We just about got started when the same secretary came up and said the radio people wanted me to come up right away, that it was terribly important, and would I please make it as soon as I could. The soprano went into an act that blistered the varnish off the piano. At plain and fancy cussing, the coloraturas, I think, are the best in the business. I got out on the street, tried to figure out which was uptown and which down. I thought about Jack Dempsey.

They were all up there, the advertising man, the Panamier man, the broadcasting men, all of them, and there was hell to pay. They had had a wire from Gold, forbidding them to use My Pal Babe, or any part of it, else be sued up to the hilt, and warning them not to use me. The Panamier man raved like an animal. I listened and began to get sore. “What the hell is he talking about? You can use that song. I don’t know much about law, but I know that much—”

“We can’t use it! We can’t use a note of it! It’s his! And those ads have gone out to two hundred key newspapers. We got to kill them by wire, we got to get up a whole new program — Christ, why didn’t you tell us about this thing? Why did you let us start all this knowing you had that contract?”

“Will you just hold your horses till tonight?”

“For what? Will you tell me that, for what?”

“Till I can see a lawyer?”

“Don’t you suppose I’ve seen a lawyer? Don’t you suppose I’ve had Gold on the phone three times today while I was trying to find where the hell you were? And I’ve advertised it! I’ve advertised the goddam theme song! Golondrina, My Babe — don’t that sound sick? And I’ve advertised you — John Howard Sharp, El Panamier Trovador — don’t that sound sicker! Get out, for Christ sake—”

“Will you wait? Just till tonight?”

“Yeah, I’ll wait. Why not?”

The lawyer was five floors down in the same building. He didn’t have redwood paneling in his office. It was just an office, and he was a brisk little guy named Sholto. I laid it out for him. He leaned back, took a couple of calls, and started to talk. ‘Sharp, you haven’t got a leg to stand on. You made a contract, a contract that any jury would regard as perfectly fair, and the only thing you can do is go through with it. It may reflect credit on your aesthetic conscience that you prefer opera to pictures, but it doesn’t reflect any credit on your moral conscience that you jump a contract just because you want to. As well as I can make out this picture company took you when you were a bum, put you on your feet, and now you want to hand them a cross. I don’t say you couldn’t lick them in court. Nobody can say what a jury is going to do. But you’ll be a bum before you ever get to court. Show business is all one gigantic hook-up, Gold knows it frontwards, backwards, crosswise, and on the bias, and you haven’t got a chance. You’re sewed. You’ve got to go back and make that picture.”

“Just give up everything, now it’s breaking for me, go back and make a picture just because that cluck has an idea that opera is through?”

“What the hell are you trying to tell me? One more picture like this Bunyan and you can walk into any opera house in the world, and the place is yours. You’re being built into a gallery draw that not one singer in a million can bring into the theatre with him. Haven’t you got any brains? These musicals are quota pictures. They go all over the world. They make you famous from Peru to China and from Norway to Capetown, and from Panama to Suez and back again. Don’t you suppose opera houses know that? Don’t you think the Metropolitan knows it? Do you suppose all this commotion you’ve caused is just a tribute to your A flat in Pagliacci? It is like hell.”

“I haven’t sung Pagliacci.”

“All right then, Trovatore.”

“And that’s all you’ve got to tell me?”

“Isn’t it enough?”

I felt so sick I didn’t even bother to go up to the broadcasting offices again. I went down, caught a cab, and went home. It was starting to snow. We had sublet a furnished apartment in a big apartment house on East Twenty-second Street, near Gramercy Park. She had liked it because there were Indian rugs around that looked a little like Mexico, and we had been happier there, for six weeks, than I had ever been in my life. She was in bed with a cold. She never could get it through her head what New York weather was like. I sat down and broke the news. “Well, it’s all off. We go back to Hollywood.”

“No, please. I like New York.”

“Money, Juana. And everything. Back we go.”

“But why? We have much money.”

“And no place to sing. By tomorrow not even a night club will hire me. Unions. Injunctions. Contracts.”

“No, we stay in New York. You take guitar, be a mariachi, just you, Hoaney. You sing for me.”

“We got to go back.”

I sat beside her, and she kept running her fingers through my hair. We didn’t say anything for a long time. The phone rang. She motioned to let it alone. If I hadn’t picked it up, our whole life would have been different.