Way Out

Jim

1

I don’t know when I stopped believing in innocence. At a guess, along about the time of the first martini. That was at the age of fifteen, which is for me half a lifetime ago. Till then I was ignorant about a lot of things other than the oiliness of too much vermouth, but I learned fast. I was a quick study. And I went to the best schools. Crandall, a private school. Korea, a police action. Stanford, a university. Bel Air, a playground. The last was where the old man built an air-conditioned English Tudor house, flanked by a swimming pool and a tennis court. There was a five-car garage, and I don’t believe it ever had more than one empty stall. Don’t let anyone kid you. It was a nice way to grow up. But any illusions I had were drowned at the bottom of a glass somewhere along with a forgotten olive.

Then, of course, I went into show biz.

I’m not an actor or a singer or anything like that. But the old man—maybe you heard of him, Paul Darrin—was successful in radio and later in television on the producing end, so I didn’t need talent. I was glib and inventive, and at one of my schools—Stanford, I think it was—a teacher found out that I had a facile way of stringing words together. He encouraged me. I even wrote short stories for a while. I remember sending one of them to the New Yorker. It was returned with a cute little rejection letter, a sheet of stationery with one word, ‘Sorry,’ written in the middle of the page with a ballpoint pen. It was a grimly comic story and didn’t belong in the New Yorker, but I have always felt that the ballpoint pen was wrong, somehow. Those people on the New Yorker ought to be sophisticated enough to use a quill, you’d think, or better yet a blunt pencil. Anyway, I did have this facility with words. The old man got me in at NBC writing continuity for a disc jockey. After a while I drifted into publicity work, where I fitted in a little better. I’d been around show people all my life. I knew how they operated and the games they played and the kind of performance they put on in private as well as public life. I was a natural press agent. Everyone has a niche if he can find it.

That’s how I happened to be working for United-American, the record company, when they discovered Donna Roberts.

United-American is one of the post-war companies that came into being when the record business turned into a scramble and anyone with a tape recorder in his garage had a chance to become a corporation. U-A did it on the strength of one home-made rock-and-roll record that sold over a million copies. That paid for the move from the garage to a brick one-storey off Cahuenga in Hollywood, a small but authentic studio. Shrewd selection and good management did the rest.

You’ve probably seen pictures of the later U-A building as it was when I was there. It rose through the haze in the centre of Hollywood, a monument to itself. The block-square mass of its roofed parking area squatted at street level, with open parking above. The circle of the turntable itself, one storey high, housed the wedge of the lobby, the Gold Record Museum, some offices and a public auditorium. At the centre, elevators rose through a giant spindle to the six levels of the main building, stacked like six enormous gold records on top of the spindle, looking for all the world as if they were poised to drop with a great thunk on to the turntable below. Here were the main offices, the executive suites, the complex of engineering facilities, the studios.

Architecturally the building ranked with those lunch counters designed like huge, ugly hot dogs. It was simply more spectacular, more outrageous. But to someone like Donna Roberts then, and to a hundred thousand others like her, whose family or friends or school chums told them they could sing, it was the fairy godmother’s palace.

The first time I saw her was in the midst of a teenage mob scene, an occupational hazard of show business which is usually on a smaller scale than a South American rebellion, but can be frightening enough in its way. I was on my way into the U-A building with Trudy Hart, one of the company’s best selling thrushes. Trudy wasn’t much beyond her teens herself. I was bringing her back from a plugging date on a local deejay’s show. We were crossing the upper level parking lot towards the lobby entrance. Ahead of us a young girl in the company of two older men was walking in the same direction from another lane. Our paths converged as we neared the lobby.

For one moment Trudy and the young girl were almost side by side. The contrast was startling—Trudy sleek and sophisticated and top-heavy, platinum hair piled high in a beehive style, five-inch heels sculpturing her ankles and calves; the younger girl looking like everyone’s kid sister, complete with high-collared dress, brown hair pulled tight at the nape of her neck and spilling down from there in a long pony tail, legs and arms brown and bare, eyes candid and innocent. In appearance Trudy and the girl were the ‘after’ and ‘before’ of a modern morality play. The thought made me smile.

Then the mob caught sight of us. There was almost always a collection of young fans gathered around the entrance, hoping to catch sight of one of the more popular stars. Sometimes they were quiet, even orderly, just crowding forward eagerly to clamour for autographs. Other times they became a mob. You could never be sure what would turn the controlled excitement into a frenzy, although certain singers, especially the young male vocalists, would often generate a kind of madness in their idolators. Sometimes it took only one screamer to set all the others off.

Trudy Hart wasn’t really a teenage singer, relying more on rhythm-and-blues than rock-and-roll. Most of her records sold a steady two hundred thousand or more, but she was probably played more on college campuses than in high school hangouts. The kids would recognise her but they usually didn’t jump out of their socks.

This day they did. It started off calmly enough, the group swarming around us, converging on Trudy. Like me, the young girl was caught in the closing circle. The two men with her were quickly pushed out towards the edge of the crowd. I grabbed Trudy’s arm and pulled her after me while I ran interference. The kids were yelling for autographs. Trudy had a pen out and was scribbling as she moved. All of a sudden I saw the girl with the pony tail being pushed and jostled. I tried to swing over in front of her so that she could follow me. A tall blond kid got in my way.

‘Where ya goin’, Pops?’ he said with a grin.

The words were ordinary and the grin was boyish and charming. But there was something wrong with the scene.

‘Let that kid through!’ I snapped at him.

‘What’s the matter? Scared she’ll get mussed up?’

I shoved past him. We were nearing the lobby entrance by then, carried forward with the mob, and I thought it would be over in a few seconds. I caught a glimpse of the young girl’s face flushed but not frightened. Abruptly the whole mood of the crowd changed. A girl’s plea for an autograph turned into a swooning scream. A hard shove in the middle of my back almost took me off my feet. Only the tight wall of flesh around me prevented a fall. There was a lot of shrill shouting going on then, and I heard Trudy, just behind me, say, ‘My God!’

Through the babble I heard a cry that was different from the others, a brief, involuntary gasp that expressed not excitement but pain. I turned in time to see the young girl’s long streamers of brown hair bob as she went down under the shoving, mauling crush of bodies. I was close enough to the lobby door to haul Trudy Hart forward and push her through. Then I plunged back through the tangle of arms and trunks and legs towards the girl. I saw her yellow dress and dove towards it. A knee caught me on the ear and I felt a hot tingling pain.

The girl was crouching on the pavement. She’d had the sense to cover her head with her hands and arms. I got my hands under her arms and pulled her to her feet. We almost went down again together when the mob shifted suddenly. One of my knees hit the ground, but I managed to hang on to the girl and stagger erect.

A voice spoke almost in my ear. ‘Play it cool, Dad! There’s dirt down there!’

I looked into the arrogant face of the blond youth. Now his grin was mocking. An undefined suspicion flared in my mind, but I didn’t have time to pin it down. I was still caught in the dangerous press of the mob with the girl on my hands. I jerked my gaze towards her.

‘You all right?’ I shouted.

She nodded. I turned to glare once more at the blond boy. He was gone.

Moments later I had reached the lobby door. The sudden frenzy of the crowd was already dying. I could see Trudy Hart safely inside through the tall glass windows of the lobby. I got the door open and eased through it with the brown-haired girl in front of me.

It was like coming out of a tunnel into the open air. I drew in a deep breath. Then I looked down into a shining, sun-brown face and a pair of wide, grateful brown eyes. I felt a kind of shock.

‘Thanks for saving my life!’ the girl said warmly.

‘That was a bad place to fall,’ I said.

Her eyes sobered. ‘I—I think I was pushed,’ she said slowly.

I thought instantly of the tall blond youth, but almost as quickly my mind tried to reject the suspicion. I guess most of us are so conditioned to civilisation and its codes that we don’t really like to believe in real brutality. We try to wish that kind of evil out of existence, not by prayer as our grandparents did, but by softening it into something else or by simply pretending that it doesn’t exist.

‘Hey, what about me?’ Trudy Hart asked with a trace of petulance.

I turned to her with a grin. Okay,’ I said. ‘How many of those kids did you hurt?’

She stayed mad all the way up to the studio.

2

I didn’t know then who the young girl was. I found out that afternoon in Bob Devlin’s office. Devlin was an A & R exec for United-American, a good one. He was about thirty-five, right at his peak, and any company in the business would have been glad to hire him. Yet you would have expected to find him on Madison Avenue or in a Boston investment house rather than in a recording studio. Princeton through and through, he wore discreetly tailored suits, very thin ties, English bootmaker shoes, and an air of impeccability. You would have figured him to be tuned in to a string quartet, but he had some kind of intuitive sense about pop gimmicks—an instinct for the commercial sound that would cause the junior high school set to buy anywhere from a quarter million to a million records.

Devlin gave me a buzz in the middle of that hot July afternoon. I was busy in my office doodling and wondering if I should take off for the beach. The deejay date with Trudy Hart had been the only thing on my schedule that was pressing. The only reason I remember doodling is that I took a look at my scribbles while Devlin was on the phone. I’d been drawing rough approximations of pony tails.

Devlin spoke with restrained urgency. ‘Jack, I’ve got something you should hear. Can you come down to my Office right away?’

‘Well, I’m in the middle of something,’ I said, adding a final swirl to the pony tail sketch.

‘This is important.’

With Devlin everything was important, but you had to play his game. ‘Be right down,’ I said.

On the way down I kept wishing that I’d left while I had the chance. The feeling sharpened when I found Jerry Janis hanging on to Devlin’s door when I got there. Janis was a big name even then, one of the biggest U-A had, a junior-grade Sinatra who not only sounded but acted like the original. He wasn’t old enough yet to keep a jetliner waiting while he had another slug of Jack Daniels in the bar, but the way he was going he would get there. At twenty-five Janis did three or four TV specials a year, had a gold record going for him almost every time out, and was a big draw in Las Vegas. He had even signed for a movie with Debbie Reynolds.

‘Hiya, Jackie, boy!’ Janis punched me in the arm to show his great affection. He was a little guy with a compulsion to be physical.

‘Hi, Jerry. How’s the movie business?’

‘Swingin’, man! I’m thinkin’ of givin’ up singin’.’

‘I’ve heard people say that would be a great thing for records.’

‘Crazy!’

He laughed loudly and hit me again. ‘Hey, I’m throwin’ a ball tonight at my pad. You gonna make the scene? Only the best people. We’re celebratin’.’

‘What are we celebrating?’

‘Like, who cares? By midnight we’ll think of somethin’!’

He laughed again, as if he’d said something funny.

‘See ya, Jackie. Hey!’ He poked his head back through the doorway towards Devlin. How about lettin’ this scribe do the typewriter bit with my life story? You know, like Somebody Up There Digs Me. It’d be a gas!’

‘They’d probably give you the gas chamber if I told the whole story,’ I said.

Janis doubled right over on that one. He staggered out, still laughing. A couple of his entourage, the hangers-on Who followed him everywhere and lit his cigarettes, were lingering in the hall. I heard him start to repeat my line. I didn’t wait to see the troupe double over. Even Devlin looked relieved when I shut the door.

‘Crazy,’ I said.

‘Yes.’

He didn’t really like my criticising the help, but it took him a minute to pull himself together. Devlin had the problems of a man whose talent had drawn him into a world which was not his natural element. It hurt him to play up to an over-age delinquent like Janis, but, as with some religious sects, he wouldn’t admit the pain was there.

‘I want you to hear something,’ he said.

‘Go ahead,’ I said. ‘You can tell me. I promise it won’t go any further.’

‘Listen, Jack. Just listen.’

He was putting a small reel of tape on the Ampex playback built into the wall behind his desk.

‘I’m thirsty,’ I said.

‘Help yourself.’

I retreated across the room to the bar and spilled some bourbon over ice. It was early for martinis, unless you’re an addict. What I was really doing was putting some distance between me and the big speakers mounted in the corners of the room behind Devlin’s desk. Everyone in the record business has this mania for playing everything at full volume. It’s a way of kidding themselves, mistaking noise for excitement.

The piece started with one lonely guitar—a good gimmick in its way even though it’s been done a lot. Then a voice picked up the lonely sound, a woman’s voice, rich and mellow and sad.

‘Oh, Billy boy, I love you,

‘Oh, I love you so much, Billy boy.

‘Oh, Billy boy, kiss me

‘And say that you’ll miss me …’

It was an old country ballad. I remembered it from somewhere—campfire songs at Crandall, perhaps, or a boy from Tennessee crooning to himself on a hill in Korea—but all of a sudden it was different. It was mournful and sweet and hungry because the woman who was singing it made you feel that it was fresh and new, that the words had never been used before. Her voice wasn’t frail or thin. It was full of cream. Billy boy was a bastard who wasn’t good enough for her, but she felt for Billy what any man wants a "woman to feel for him, and it didn’t matter what he was or what he’d done to her. When she built that melancholy cry up to a wail of despair at the climax, I was right up there with her. I didn’t want her to stop.

I remember that moment now. I remember how the guitar cut off in the middle of a chord and let her final note drift off by itself, not despairing at the last but sad with a woman’s resignation. And I remember staring down at my glass in the silence and being surprised that I hadn’t taken one sip of my drink.

I remedied that. Bob Devlin held the hush of silence. He liked drama.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘She’s good.’

‘She’s great.’

‘Who is she?’