Serenade

  "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.

  Chapter 10

  Winston Hawes, the papers said, was one of the outstanding musicians of his time, the conductor that could really read a score, the man that had done more for modern music than anybody since Muck. He was all of that, but don't get the idea he was ever one of the boys. There was something wrong about the way he thought about music, something unhealthy, like the crowds you always saw at his concerts, and what it was I can only half tell you. In the first place I don't know enough about the kind of people he came from, and in the second place I don't know enough about music. He was rich, and there's something about rich people that's different from the rest of us. They come into the world with an inflated idea of their relation to it, and everything they find in it. I got a little flash into that
side of him once, in Paris, when I strolled into an art store to look at some pictures that caught my eye. A guy came in, an American, and began a palaver about prices. And the way that guy talked gave me a whole new slant at his kind. He didn't care about art, the way you do or I do, as something to look at and feel. He wanted to own it. Winston was that way about music. He made a whore out of it. You went to his concerts, but you didn't sit out there at his rehearsals, and see him hold men for an hour overtime, at full pay, just because there was some French horn passage that he liked, and wanted it played over and over again--not to rehearse it, but because of what it did to him. And you didn't walk out with him afterwards, and see him all atremble, and hear him tell how he felt after playing it. He was like some woman that goes to concerts because they give her the right vibrations, or make her feel better, or have some other effect on her nitwit insides. All right, you may think it's cock-eyed to compare him with somebody like that, but I'm telling you that in spite of all his technical skill, he was a hell of a sight nearer to that fat poop than he ever was to Muck. That woman was in him, poodle dog, diamonds, limousine, conceit, cruelty and all, and don't let his public reputation fool you. She has a public reputation too, if she hands out enough money. The day the story broke, they compared him with Stanford White, but I'm telling you that to put Winston Hawes in the same class with Stanford White was a desecration.

  You can't own music, the way you can own a picture, but you can own a big hunk of it. You can own a composer, that you put on a subsidy while he's writing a piece for you. You can own an audience that has to come to you to hear that piece if it's going to hear it at all. You can own the orchestra that plays it, and you can own the singer that sings it. I first met him in Paris. I hadn't known him in Chicago. He came from a packing family so rich I never even got within a mile of where they lived. And I didn't look him up, even in Paris. He showed up at my apartment one day, sat down at the piano, played off a couple of songs that were there, and said they were lousy, which they were. Then he got up and asked me how I'd like to sing with his band. I was pretty excited. He had started his Petite Orchestra about a year before, and I had gone to plenty of the concerts, and don't you think they weren't good. He started with thirty men, but by now he was up to forty. He raided everywhere, from the opera orchestras, from the chamber music outfits, and he took anybody he wanted, because he paid about twice what any other band paid. He footed the deficit himself, and he didn't have a man that couldn't have played quartets with Heifetz. What they could do to music, especially modern music, was just make it sound about twice as good as even the composer thought it was. He had some stuff with him he wanted me to do, all of it in manuscript. Part of it was old Italian songs he had dug up, where I would have to do baritone coloratura that had been out of date for a hundred years, and how he knew I could do it I don't know. Part of it was a suite by his first viola, that had never been performed yet. It was tough stuff, music that wouldn't come to life at all without the most exact tone shading. But he gave me six rehearsals--count them, six, something you couldn't believe. Cost didn't mean anything to him. When we went on with it I was with those woodwinds like I was one of the bassoons, and the response was terrific. I took out Picquot, the viola, before I took a call myself, and the whole thing was like something you read about.

  That part of it, I wouldn't be telling the truth if I didn't admit it was an adventure in music I'll never forget. I sang for him four times, and each time it was something new, something fresh, and a performance better than you even knew you could give. He had a live stick all right. From some of them you get a beat as dead as an undertaker's handshake, but not from him. He threw it on you like a hypnotist, and you began to roll it out, and yet it was all under perfect control. That's the word to remember, perfect. Perfection is something no singer ever got yet, but under him you came as near to it as you're ever going to get.

  That was the beginning of it, and it was quite a while before it dawned on me what he really wanted. As to what he wanted, and what he got, you'll find out soon enough, and I'm not going to tell any more than I have to. But I'd like to make this much clear now: that wasn't what I wanted. What I meant to him and what he meant to me were two different things, but once again, I wouldn't be telling the truth if I didn't admit that what he meant to me was plenty. He took to dropping into my dressing room at the Comique while I was washing up, and he'd tell me some little thing I had done, something he had liked, or sometimes, something he hadn't liked. If he had been giving a concert, maybe he had heard only part of the last act, but there would always be something. You think that didn't mean anything to me? Singing is a funny job. You go out there and take those calls, and it's so exciting that when you get back to your dressing room you want to sing, to cut it loose till the windows rattle, just to let off the steam that excitement makes. You go back there and you'll hear them, especially the tenors, so you'd think they had gone crazy. But that excitement is all from out front, from a mob you only half see and never know, and you get so you'd give anything for somebody, for just one guy, that knew what you were trying to do, that spotted your idea without your telling him, that could appreciate you with his head and not with the palms of his hands. And mind you, it couldn't be just anybody. It has to be somebody you respect, somebody that knows.

  I began to wait for that visit. Then pretty soon I was singing to him and to nobody else. We'd walk out, go to a café while I ate, then drop over to his apartment off the Place Vendóme, and have a post-mortem on my performance. Then, little by little, he began making suggestions. Then I began dropping in on him in the morning, and he'd take me through some things I had been doing wrong. He was the best coach in the world, bar none. Then he began to take my acting apart, and put it together again. It was he that cured me of all those operatic gestures I got in Italy. He showed me that good operatic acting consists in as few motions as possible, every one of them calculated for an effect, and every one made to count. He told me about Scotti and how he used to sing the Pagliacci Prologue before he got so bad they couldn't use him in Pagliacci. He made one gesture. At the end of the andante, he held out his hand, and then turned it over, palm up. That was all. It said it. He made me learn a whole new set of gestures, done naturally, and he made me practice for hours singing sotto voce without using any gestures at all. That's a tough order, just to stand up there, on a cold stage, and shoot it. But I got so I could do it. And I got so I could take my time, give it to them when I was ready, not before. I began to do better in comedy roles, like Sharpless and Marcello. Taking out all that gingerbread, I could watch timing, and get laughs I never got before. I got so I was with him morning, noon and night, and depended on him like a hophead depends on dope.

  Then came my crack-up, and when my money was all gone I had to leave Paris. He stormed about that, wanted to support me, showed me his books to prove that an allowance for me wouldn't even make a dent in his income. But it was that storming that showed me where things had got between him and me, and that I had to break away from him. I went to New York. I tried to find something to do, but there was nothing I could do except sing, and I couldn't sing. That was when this agent kidded me that no matter what shape I was in I was good enough for Mexico, and I went down there.

  I had read in some paper that he had disbanded his orchestra in Paris, but I didn't know he was starting his Little Orchestra in New York until I got there. It made me nervous. I dropped in, alone, at his first concert, just so I could say I had, in case I ran into him somewhere. It was the same mob he had had in Paris, clothes more expensive than you would see even at a Hollywood opening, gray-haired women with straight haircuts and men's dinner jackets, young girls looking each other straight in the eye and not caring what you thought, boys following men around, loud, feverish talk out in the foyer, everybody coming out in the open with something they wouldn't dare show anywhere else. His first number was something for strings by Lalo I had heard him play before, and I left right after it. Next day, when
I saw the review in the paper I turned the page quick. I didn't want to read it. I had a note from him after Don Giovanni, and shot it right back, and one word written on it, "Thanks," with my initials. I didn't want to write on my own stationery, or he'd know where I was living. I felt funny about asking for opera house stationery. I was afraid not to answer, for fear he'd be around to know why.

  ***

  So that's how things stood when I was sitting beside Juana and the phone rang. She motioned to let it ring, and I did for a while, but I still hadn't called Panamier, and I knew I had them to talk to, even if I had nothing to say. I answered. But it wasn't Panamier. It was Winston. "Jack! You old scalawag! Where have you been hiding?"

  "Why--I've been busy."

  "So have I, so busy I'm ashamed of it. I hate to be busy. I like time for my friends. But at the moment I'm free as a bird, I've got a fine fire burning, and you can hop in a cab, wherever you are--all I've got is your phone number, and I had a frightful time even getting that--and come up here. I just can't wait to see you."

  "Well--that sounds swell, but I've got to go back to Hollywood, right away, probably tomorrow, and that means I'll be tied up every minute, trying to get out of town. I don't see how I could fit it in."