“Take it easy, Marshy. You’re the boss. I carry the ball but you call the signals, you know that. Now just come over and relax with some of this good Irish drinking whiskey. Let Uncle Lonesome put a friendly arm around you and tell you how rich an’ pretty you’re gonna be.”
Well, I went over. I tell you I wasn’t in love with the man, just involved with him in some perverse professional way. He wasn’t alone, he was with Tommy de Palma. De Palma was one of those advertising-agency boys. Bright. Quick. Immaculate. In the next life he’ll make a good pilot fish for sharks. I don’t mean to go into de Palma but I can’t resist one short take: he’s the kind of fellow who attaches himself to a celebrity, acts the part of the responsible friend, solemnly warns he is going to tell the truth even if it hurts, and then plays back in slightly off-beat fashion all the things the great one wants to hear. Essentially it’s a business relationship, but it poses as rather an intense personal friendship. Tommy de Palma, the account executive who handled the Lonesome Rhodes-Peerless account, was now Lonesome’s best friend.
Tidings of great commercial joy were being toasted with that bottle of Jameson’s.
“Marshy, the busher days are over, we’re moving in on the big stuff. New York! New York! Big frog in big pond department.”
The plan had size, all right. Lonesome was going to do two different big shows, the ballad-singing “Arkansas Traveler” thing, and a biweekly news commentary to be called “The Cracker Barrel,” Lonesome Rhodes the hayseed philosopher jest talkin’ things over with his Cousin Abernathy, his Grandpaw Bascom and his Aunt Lucy-belle. “We’ll chew up everything from the UN to tax evasion and back to Riddle,” Lonesome said. “And we’ll make a lousy fortune, Marshy girl. We ain’t a-goin’ t’ work through no advertisin’ agency, neither. Why give them 15 per cent of five G’s a week? We’ll be our own advertising agency. Tommy here’ll head it up for me. It’s gonna be Rhodes, de Palma and Coulihan. We’re partners, Marshy. Put ’er there, pardner. You’ll be drawing five hundred a week for openers.”
“What have you boys been smoking?” I said.
“It’s a shoo-in, Marcia.” De Palma took over in that sure, slick, black-knit-tie, bright-young-senior way he had. You could see him being the most enterprising prexy the Psi U’s ever had. “Lonesome is the biggest thing in home entertainment today. His Nielsen is seventeen point nine. His penetration is …”
“Marshy,” Lonesome said. “In three years I’m going to be a lousy millionaire. I’m going to have half a dozen cars. I’ll have two hundred suits. I’ll have a private railroad car and a yacht, maybe a plane and a big place in the country. And I’ll tell the people what to eat and who to help and what to think.”
“The most authentic voice of the people since Will Rogers,” said Tommy de Palma.
“Bigger’n Rogers,” Lonesome said. “I got more mediums to be big on. The biggest.”
“The greatest,” said Tommy de Palma.
“And without you, Marshy,” Lonesome said, “—and that’s the reason I wanted you to come over—without you, why kid myself?—I’d still be a bum.”
“Let’s face it,” I said. “With me you’re still a bum. A bum with a corny magic touch. A bum with money.”
“I do a lot of good,” Lonesome said. “The charities. The BK. I’m gonna start plugging a Lonesome Rhodes Summer Camp for poor city kids. Before I’m through with ’em every sucker in the country is gonna love me.”
“Mrs. Rhodes doesn’t love you,” I said.
“That bag,” he said. “That bad dream. My nemesis. She just called me.”
“Some simple soul,” I said. “Some spokesman for the good family life. Next time you propose to anybody you might consider getting unmarried first.”
“Marshy, so help me God, I got a divorce in Mexico, but the judge got indicted for fraud, so my ex claims it didn’t take. Now she thinks she’s got a gun at my head. Well, OK, I’ll give ’er her stinkin’ three thousand a month—anything to get her off my neck. I’m nuts about you, Marshy. I can’t live without you.”
“On the cigar-box guitar it might sound good,” I said.
De Palma rose, straightened his creases and said, “Gotta run, kiddies. Early-morning golf game with Mr. Peerless himself. Here’s a good-night drink to Rhodes, de Palma and Coulihan. Dat’s how dynasties are born.”
Lonesome and I did a little Indian wrestling on the couch. It’s a good thing I have muscles from my tennis days.
“Larry,” I said, “the marriage department is one of the things I never fool with. Next thing you know we’re all in one great mess. Bad for us, and not too healthy for Rhodes, de Palma and Coulihan, either.”
“Then you’re comin’ along?”
Well, I suppose I was. If a girl is going in for careers she might as well make it a good one. It looked as if I had found a home with Lonesome Rhodes, Inc.
“Thanks, Marshy,” Lonesome said. “I wouldn’t tell this to anybody else, but sometimes early in the morning I get kind of scared, Marsh. Sure, I wanna be a success. I got the gimmees just about as bad as anybody, but, shucks, I never figgered on anything like this. The number-one rating and the column and the comic strip and the Grand-paw Bascom dolls and Lonesome Rhodes drinks this and smokes that and everybody hangin’ on my opinion of how t’ bring back the good ol’ hundred-cent dollar. It’s enough t’ scare a fella.”
Poor Lonesome. Of course these moments of self-doubt and humility were few and far between, early morning bottom-of-the-bottle lapses, but they were genuine enough while he was having them. Then they would lift like a bad headache and he’d be his old braggy, egocentric, happy St. Bernard self again. Lonesome just had a severe case of American success, that’s all. I doubt if there was ever anything like it in the history of the world. For one thing it takes a free (and free-wheeling) society for a success like his, and for another it takes a particular hopped-up kind of free society. Our kind, God bless it. This is a real screwball country, if you stop to think about it. Where else would the girls be tearing the clothes off skinny, pasty-faced boys with neurotic voices like Frank Sinatra and Johnny Ray? Or making Lonesome Rhodes, an obvious concoction if ever there was one, their favorite lover-boy and social philosopher?
I tried to explain it to Lonesome, and to myself, that night. I came on with some of that stuff I had learned in school about the frontier. This country has a terrible hankering for its lost frontier, the way a mother forever mourns for a son run down by a truck when he was seven years old. The frontier song is ended, but oh how the melody lingers on. That’s why we don’t trust brain-trusters and professors. Lonesome said it perfectly on the air one day. “My Grandpaw Bascom never went to no school an’ he was the smartest fella in the county. Everything I know I owe t’ my Granddaddy Bascom who didn’ know nuthin’ either. But Grandpap Bascom, the ol’ rascal, did say one thing …” And then Lonesome would sound off on some crackpot scheme and next thing I’d know there would be a bushel basket of letters to answer, saying as how it was a shame Lonesome wasn’t in Washington teaching those fancy-talkin’ politicians a little common sense. Once you get on that kind of a cracker-barrel American kick, you can only go up. Where it would all end I both dreaded and was fascinated to wonder.
I told him how it would be with us if I went on with him to New York. Strictly career, strictly the girl assistant, associate producer, maid of all work or whatever I was.
“I’ve gotta have you with me one way or another, Marshy,” he said. “I know I’m great and America needs me, but without you I’d be back in Nowhereville where I came from. You’re my …”
“Anchor,” I said. “Nursemaid. Ballast. The salt in your stew.”
“You can laugh,” he said. “When you get way out in front like I am you need a friendly face. Without you, I’m up there all by my lonesome. I’m all alone.”
“You can’t sing it on the air,” I said, “until I clear the rights with Berlin.”
“Marshy, stay all night,” he pleaded. “Twi
n beds. I promise I won’t lay a finger on you. Brother ’n sister.”
“I wouldn’t trust you,” I told him, “if we were lying side by side in twin coffins.”
“I’m a baad boy,” he said, with all his heavy charm.
“You’re Huck Finn with a psychoneurosis,” I scolded. “God, if your public only knew what a slender reed they were leaning on.”
“That’s our little secret, Marshy,” he said, and gave it the deep-belly haw-haw.
I finally got away and he said, “Good night, pardner,” and went back to suck on his bottle. America’s Uncle Lonesome, Big Brother to all the world.
II
WE MOVED ON TO New York, into a humble seven-room suite in the Waldorf Towers. There was so much work to do that I had to hire an assistant, and pretty soon she had to have an assistant. Lonesome made the cover of Life, with a two-page spread on Riddle, Arkansas, and one of those Luce think-pieces on “The Meaning of Lonesome Rhodes.” America, in this complex age of supergovernment, overtaxation and atomic anxieties, was harking back to the simple wisdoms that had made her great, said Life. The mass swing to Lonesome was a sign of this harking.
Lonesome was the indisputable king of television now and his daily column, written by two of his abler press agents, was syndicated in three hundred papers. There were Lonesome Rhodes hand puppets for the kiddies and the cigar-box guitar was rapidly becoming our national instrument. The Waldorf Towers layout made Bedlam seem like Arcadia. We had a staff of writers now to devise the folksy anecdotes that Lonesome delivered so spontaneously. And there were TV and radio executives under foot all the time. And the sponsors’ people, and the advertising supernumeraries, and job seekers, and the theatrical reporters, and of course the press agents. They formed their own not-so-little group of court favorites around Lonesome. They laughed at his witticisms and marveled at the way he could hold his liquor and wondered out loud if show business had ever had such a philanthropical, sagacious and all-around-helluva-fella. Lonesome’s ego expanded like a giant melon. It became very difficult and rare for him to stop talking about Lonesome Rhodes. He would hold the press agents spellbound with tales of Lonesome Rhodes Foundation benevolences: how he helped a whole village of Maine fishermen starving from seasonal unemployment by setting up a cigar-box guitar factory—the fishermen were using their surplus gut and wire leaders for strings—and how he had saved the land of a sixty-year-old farmer with arthritis who was being dispossessed.
“Shucks, neighbors,” he’d run off at the mouth, forgetting that these were just the hangers-on and not his great American public, “if us plain ordinary simple folks ‘d just help each other a little more—think about a good-neighbor policy at home instead of way down there in those banana republics that hate our guts, anyway—why heck we wouldn’t need all this alphabet soup we got in Washington. As Grandpaw Bascom used t’ put it, what we need is a little more good old-fashioned Christianity and a whole lot less of this new fangled bee-you-rock-racy.” Lonesome never went to church himself—Sunday mornings were always spent in what he called Hangovertown—but he was a great one for telling everybody else to get up out of bed and “show the Fellow Upstairs you haven’t forgotten Him.” It was as on the level as a nine-dollar bill, but at least half a dozen sects made him an Honorary Elder, and Interdenominational Faith Conferences were always presenting him with plaques and diplomas. We’ve got one whole closet full of the stuff. It was all done for a purpose, Lonesome’s purpose, but even though behind the scenes I could see what it really was, I had to admit that he did a lot of good in his own egotistical way. The Lonesome Rhodes Summer Camp for underprivileged kids of mixed races and faiths became quite a thing. Lonesome Rhodes was far from an unmixed evil or an unmixed blessing. He had a kind of mixed-up evil genius for doing good, along with a warm-hearted gift for working evil. Even if he had been a lot more stable than he was, it would have been superhuman for him to keep his balance with Tommy de Palma and the rest of the Towers coterie constantly at his elbow inflating his already dangerously stretched self-esteem. Lonesome only had to mention something casually into the mike, or hold it in his hand as if by accident, and the product was made. One night he happened to mention that he liked to play acey-deucey to relax from the pressure of TV rehearsals, and presto, acey-deucey started replacing canasta as the latest civilian fad. He happened to toss off the phrase “as cocky as a teenager driving a Jaguar” and next morning there was a brand-new Mark 7 Jag at the door, free and clear. Every gadget company in the Republic had their scouts roaming the corridors of the Waldorf hoping to inveigle Lonesome into giving them a little accidental or accidentallike publicity on the air. Everything in the world he wanted in the way of wine, women, fast cars and firearms (he had become a big gun collector with a wall full of Kentucky rifles at $400 a throw) was ponied up for him by grateful or hopeful anglers. There were always half a dozen models loping around. They used to make me feel pretty dowdy, sometimes, those numbers. Our suite with money and wine and women and worried executives and slave writers and stooges was just about as close as you can get in this country and this century to the ancient splendors of the Persian kings. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry every time I heard Lonesome (with his Cadillac and his Jaguar and his Waldorf Towers and his advertising company and his stocks and bonds and his complexes) telling his credulous listeners, “A-course I may not know what I’m a-talkin’ about, I’m just one of these Arkansas farm boys with the dirt still on me. …” That wasn’t dirt, that was money sticking to him.
The only thing the press agents and the sponsors couldn’t give him was me. Not that he needed me, God knows, with all those good-looking dolls floating around, but he had got it into his greedy little head that he did. Because I was the only one who didn’t come crawling and scraping, I suppose. Because I was just as sassy with him as the first day he shuffled in way back there in Fox, Wyoming, with holes in his shoes. Because I was the only one who would tell him off when he got out of line. He had fallen into the habit of going around half-crocked all the time and after one performance when he had held forth on the homespun American virtues in a voice that was unmistakably thick-tongued, I chewed him out for being a sloppy unprofessional, and threatened to walk off the job if he didn’t pull himself together. We played one of those late, feverish, “I’d straighten up and fly right if only you married me” scenes. He said it looked like his agreement with the first Mrs. Rhodes was going through. She was down in the Virgin Islands having a divorce.
I said maybe. I said wait and see. I said he was a handful and there were troubles enough being his business associate without taking on the personal responsibility, too. He said he wanted a farm to get his sense of values back, to get away from the squirrel cage of television. He said he thought if he was married and settled down and had a farm, raised Black Angus and some kids, he wouldn’t drink so much and be such a bastard. He said he knew I was ready to write him off as a slob but it was just this crazy pace and the fame coming down on him before he knew what hit him. He told me how he suffered from insomnia and how he talked about himself too much because deep down he knew he wasn’t as great as Tommy de Palma and the rest of them talked him up. Nobody was. Deep down, he said, he was really a shy and sensitive guy. He said the brag act and the Great-I-Am bit was just a cover-up for the real Larry Rhodes. I was the only one he could admit that to, he said, and that’s why he needed me and had to marry me. He’d take a high dive off the window ledge if I said no. Early hour hairdowns like this, I could almost be persuaded; there was that nice, warm St. Bernard side to him, even if it was a pretty neurotic St. Bernard. I told him I didn’t warm to this high dive into no water idea. I didn’t like the responsibility. I told him anybody who kept making those threats and meant them ought to have his brains examined. I even gave him the name of an analyst friend of mine.
He walked me to the door and kissed me fondly. “Marshy,” he said, “if you marry me I may even soften up in my old age and get kinda liberal.”
r /> That had become a running gag with us. My common man with his two-hundred-dollar suits and his twelve-dollar neckties was about as liberal as William Howard Taft. He was all for scrapping the UN and for going back to the open shop. I used to kid him that one of these days he’d run for President, Arkansas accent, cigar-box git-tar and all, on a platform of child labor and the sixteen-hour day. “Shucks, back in Riddle, my Uncle Bloomer went to work in the distillery when he was seven and it sure made a man of him in a hurry. By the time he was nine his daddy made him take the pledge. Yessir, nothin’ like child labor, folks, t’ build self-reliance.” That’s my boy.
On Lonesome’s next show he made a pitch about the Amurican home that was really a beaut. He sang “Home Sweet Home” and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. Nobody had done so much for the marriage business since Edward VIII tossed a kingdom away for “the woman I love.” Lonesome even had Lonesome weeping. Of course if anyone had analyzed the tears he would have found them high in alcohol content. Still, Lonesome could cry with the best of them. He was one of those magnificent fakes who could overwhelm himself with his own sincerity.
The night of this telecast he flew out to Arkansas to see a football game and to judge the State drum-majorette contest. I should have mentioned—and you might have guessed—that among Lonesome’s cultural hobbies was a passionate enthusiasm for drum-majoring and drum-majoretting. He was rather an accomplished amateur baton twirler himself and he had announced that he would bring the lucky winner back to appear on his program with him.
Monday morning I went out to meet the incoming plane, but Lonesome wasn’t on it. I tried to phone him at his Little Rock hotel, but he had checked out. And of course he was due for a program rehearsal at three. He never showed. I could have killed him. I had to scurry around and hurry up a substitute. About fifteen minutes before we went on I got a wire from Lonesome. He was in Juarez, Mexico. He said Mary-Mae Fleckum, the winning drum-majorette, had just done him the honor of becoming Mrs. Rhodes. He added something about holding the fort.