Three days later he planed in with his Mary-Mae. She was a trim little corn-fed blonde with a provocative little can, a syrupy purr and a way of being dumb that seemed almost calculated, it was so extreme. Mary-Mae became part of the folk program. She’d appear in tight-fitting rompers, doing her cakewalk and throwing her bottom and her baton around. She could also yodel. Lonesome had really found himself a hunk of talent in this Fleckum kid. He drooled over her on and off the program. He called her his little Arkansas sweet potato.
I went in and said it was about time I took a vacation and at the end of my vacation I thought I would resign. There were any number of good TV jobs open for me now, less money but also less Lonesome Rhodes.
Lonesome took me into his private study, which looked like a medium-sized arsenal, and said he had wanted to have a heart-to-heart talk ever since he got back. I said, “Let’s make it a heart talk because I can just barely make out one heart between the two of us.”
“Now Marshy, now Marshy honey,” he kept saying. He said it had been on his conscience to explain how he happened to marry Mary-Mae instead of me. He was afraid to marry me, he said. Last week he had been afraid not to, I reminded him. They were both true, he said, but I overawed him. I knew more than he did and I was terribly critical. I didn’t really approve of him. I made him feel small. Mary-Mae was just the opposite. Mary-Mae adored and worshipped him. For Mary-Mae being the wife of Lonesome Rhodes and living in this Waldorf penthouse with him was a Cinderella dream come true. I said, “Mary-Mae is your public in one cute little package. This is the logical culmination of the great twentieth-century love affair between Lonesome Rhodes and his mass audience.”
“She’s a little honey,” Lonesome said.
“Sweet potatoes and honey,” I said. “That’s a mighty rich diet.”
“I wish you weren’t so bitter,” Lonesome said. “You’re a darned good-looking girl and you can be a lot of fun but you’ve got a chip on your shoulder.”
“I didn’t come in here to discuss my personality,” I said. “That’s my problem. I came to tell you good-bye and I want out.”
“You can have the vacation,” he said, “but then you’ve got to come back and work with me on a regular business basis. This thing is too big for you to quit. Lonesome Rhodes, Inc., is good for over a million a year now. Not to mention Rhodes, de Palma and Coulihan.”
“It can be just Rhodes and de Palma,” I said. “You two barefoot boys can buy me out. I think I’ll take a job with ‘Author Meet’s the Critics’.”
“Books,” he said. Lonesome Rhodes the oracle felt he was well read when he got through the News and Mirror. “Who reads books?”
“Just a few of us,” I said. “Just a few hundred thousand die-hards.”
“Have fun, Marshy,” Lonesome said. “Blow your stack and come on back. But don’t get stuck on anybody or I’ll get jealous.”
Just then Mary-Mae burst in. She did a kind of jazzy military strut even when she wasn’t on. “Loancie,” she purred, snaking her firm golden arms around him, “I want you to take Mary-Mae down to Schrafft’s for a cherry ice-cream soda with oodles of whipped-cream on top.”
Lonesome patted her with distracted appreciation. “Tell Tommy to have them send you one up here right away, sweetie. Now beat it, sugar, this is business.”
“I’m leaving anyway,” I said. “I’m off for the Islands. So why don’t you do the big thing and take her to Schrafft’s? She probably never has had a chance to see life as it is lived dangerously and fatteningly on Fifth Avenue.”
Mary-Mae giggled. “I can never get enough cherry icecream sodas.”
“That’s how Lonesome is about drum-majorettes,” I said, wishing I could have resisted being a cat. “The two of you should be very happy.”
“Thank you very much I’m sure,” I heard Mrs. Rhodes say as I went out the door with my very best posture.
I went down to Cuba, to a nice informal Cuban hotel on the beach at Veradero. It was pleasure to be away from that madhouse in the Waldorf Towers and to be rid of Lonesome Rhodes. I even met a man who interested me for the first time in years. He was one of the editors of the New York Times Magazine and he was well read and I liked his mind and at the same time he could be fun. We both liked the same kind of vacation, going barefoot and wearing any old thing and we went fishing together and had good talks on the beach and in the thatch-roof bars. I wondered if I had had to get Lonesome out of my life before anything could happen to me with any other man. I wondered if an analyst would have told me that Lonesome had been a kind of father figure in my life. I was half in love with him and half driven to get rid of him. And kick him in the teeth for farewell. Anyway now that Lonesome wasn’t around like a giant sponge to suck me up into his life along with all the others, I was getting along nicely.
When we went up to Havana to make the rounds one evening I ran across a copy of Time and that’s how I saw the latest development on Lonesome. He had delivered one of his Open Letters To VIP’s—this one to Churchill, telling him Great Britain should get off our gravy train and warning him that Lonesome was ready to give up on the British and advise the American people to close them out just as we would any other bankrupt outfit. America would be better off, he had told his thirty million viewers and listeners, when she stood alone, “just as we stood in the days of the war against England when we first gained our independence.” If I had been around I never would have let that go through. I had been doing a fair job of x-ing out the most extreme of Lonesome’s antediluvian views. And in the second place I could have told him that we weren’t exactly alone in 1776. There was Lafayette, and the Polish boys Pulaski and Kosciusko. Not to mention France and Spain and half of Europe lined up against the Redcoats all over the world. It was amazing and frightening how Lonesome, this cigar-box gondolier, would sound off on global issues without the vaguest knowledge of factual or historical background. A bold know-nothing who, in the courage of his ignorance, hadn’t the slightest hesitation in getting up and telling his “neighbors”—which was just everybody in America—how to run their own and the nation’s business.
But what was startling about this down-with-England pitch was the official response it drew. A Labor leader in the British Parliament got up and demanded that Churchill ask Lonesome to apologize for his intemperate remarks. There was a full debate on the floor which aired Labor and Conservative views on American relations. Churchill said it was preposterous for the English even to consider interfering with American freedom of speech, although naturally he deplored Mr. Lonesome Rhodes’ rather uncharitable view of his British cousins. “Apparently he thinks us of an even lower order than his relations in Riddle,” said the Prime Minister, thereby spreading the fame of Grandpaw Bascom and Cousin Abernathy to the far side of the Atlantic. New York papers had it on their front pages for nearly a week. Lonesome had become the darling of the Chicago Trib, the New York Journal and the Daily News while the Times and the New York Trib were writing polite editorials suggesting that Lonesome go home to Riddle for a while and rest up from international affairs.
One night, it must have been around three in the morning, I was enjoying one of those deep Caribbean sleeps, with the fresh warm air blowing in from the sea, when I heard someone knocking on my door. “Telayphone, pleece, long deestance.” I jumped up and threw a robe around me and hurried down to the desk phone in the lobby. I was scared to death it was my old man. He hadn’t been very well. But it wasn’t my father. It was Lonesome Rhodes. “Lonesome, how did you know where I was staying?” That was easy, he had seen the card I had sent my assistant from Veradero and he had simply gone down the list of hotels. “Marshy,” he said, “how soon can you get back to New York? You’ve gotta come back right away.”
“Hah,” I said, “or should I say haw?”
“No kiddin’, I need ya bad, Marshy girl, I need ya real bad.”
“What’s happened, England declare war on you?”
“Those limey bastards. The hell wi
th them. You shoulda heard me tonight—I really gave Churchill a piece of my mind. If there’s any war declarin’ t’ do, I’m the one who’s gonna do it. But I’ll come to that in a minute. That’s not why I need ya, Marshy. I need ya to live with me.
“You and I and the drum-majorette—that will be cozy.”
“Mary-Mae, she’s no good, Marshy. She’s nuthin but a good-for-nuthin’ little tramp, Marshy. I just kicked her little ass right the hell out of here. The hell with her. It was you I wanted all the time, Marshy. I can’t live without you.”
“Then I’m afraid your days are numbered, Larry,” I said.
“Please, Marshmallow. I’m on my knees. Right here in front of the telephone. I’m on my knees.”
“If you had some white gloves you could sing ‘Mammy,’” I said.
“There’s a window right behind me. If you don’t promise you’ll come back on the next plane I’ll jump out the window tonight.”
“Oh, jump,” I said.
“You don’t believe me,” he said. “You think I haven’t got the guts. Well I’ve got the window open right now, what do you think of that? And I swear to God I am gonna use it if you don’t promise to catch the next plane back.”
“Lonesome,” I told him, “listen. I found someone down here. The first one who’s made sense to me since I got out of school. It’s serious. I have a feeling it’s going to work.”
“Oh Jesus,” Lonesome was blubbering, “what’ve I done that everybody should be against me? I won’t be able to live if some bastard takes you away from me. I’ll jump. I’ll jump. I wanna die.”
I thought of all the three A.M. alarms I had answered. I thought, This is a poker game and all the money is in the pot now and now is the time to call him. There was a terrible curiosity in me to see what would happen if I didn’t come running. If this time I stood my own ground. I had made it too easy for him. He was an extreme personality from his shoelaces to the careless lock of hair over his forehead, and I had cushioned it for him all the way. I had toned down the views that would have made him sound like a sweet-talking Father Coughlin, and I had provided a line of emotional continuity between ex-wives and models and new wives and assorted tramps. I had been home plate, or rather the locker room where you ease up after the game, win or lose. And I had been the little cog of efficiency without which the great streamlined express breaks down. Lonesome Rhodes had been my career, my Frankenstein, my crime.
“So jump, jump,” I said. “Get out of my life. Get out of everybody’s life.”
“Okey-doke,” he shouted. “If you tell me to do it, I’ll do it. It’ll be your fault.”
“Jump, jump, jump,” I couldn’t stop saying, in a broken rage. I would never forgive him if he did, and of course I could never forgive him if he didn’t.
“All right,” he said. “All right. You told me, Marshy. Never forget you were the one who told me. I can’t decide whether to do it tonight or wait until after my broadcast tomorrow. I have a very important broadcast tomorrow. I am going to declare war.”
“Just you? Without even bothering to inform Congress?”
“The people will inform Congress,” he explained. “I’ve had enough of these Russkies and Chinks and foreigners pushin’ us around. I say it’s better to get it over with now while we’re strong than wait for decay to set in. Like my Cousin Abernathy used t’ say …”
“Please,” I said, “on the great American public you get away with it, but don’t perpetrate that fake cousin on me.
He believed he had a Cousin Abernathy, that was the frightening part. And now he believed he could declare war, that was even more frightening. The screw that always had been loose in him had worked itself free and the motor was coming apart. He was saying, “If I tell the people to declare war they will flood the White House and their congressmen with letters and telegrams. The GI’s will insist on going into action. Volunteer militias will rise in every town and hamlet in America. The people listen to Lonesome Rhodes. The people act with Lonesome Rhodes.”
It frightened me. Maybe he was only bluffing. Trying to get a rise out of me. He knew how I felt about irresponsible amateurs with mass followings sounding off on international crises. He knew where I stood on these oracles who flunk the most elementary course in human relations but never hesitate to tell us how we could have saved those three hundred million Chinese from Communism or how to turn back the tides of Africa. So maybe this idea of declaring war was his idea of how to have fun with Marshy. But what if it was what he said it was? He had been able to bring the British to a boil. What was to stop him from bringing the whole world to the popping point? “In the Event of an Enemy Attack”—I saw those ominous billboards showing up among soft-drink and cigarette ads along American highways. I saw the fatal mushroom of atomic ruin rising above gutted, faceless cities. I saw Lonesome Rhodes as a gum-chewing Nero strumming his cigar-box git-tar and easing into the commercials while civilization burned.
“All right,” I said. “Don’t jump. I’ll come. On one condition. That you hold off your war until I get there.”
“Don’t think you can talk me out of it, Marshy baby,” he said. “I’m fed up. I’m loaded for bear.”
“You’re loaded, there’s not much doubt about that,” I said. “Now go to bed. Cool off. Sleep on the war.”
“I’m sick ’n tired o’ being stalled,” he said. “The night before last I tried to get Joe Stalin on the phone. I figgered if Joe and I could get out behind the old woodshed together we might be able to work something out. But the big bum thinks he’s too high ’n mighty to talk to me. Okay, sez I, I got an army of fifty million viewers back o’ me, ready to march when I blow the whistle. I’ll settle his hash.”
“Take a hot bath,” I said. “And then two empirin and a phenobarbital. And stay in bed and rest until I get in.”
I flew in early the next afternoon and went right to the Waldorf. Lonesome was in a terrible state. He hadn’t shaved in three or four days and there was so much Irish whiskey in him that he smelled like a branch of Jameson’s. Whiskey had stained his bathrobe and empty bottles made a slum of his penthouse suite.
“Marshy honey, bless you, baby,” he said when I came in. “Stay here and marry me and you’ll be the first lady of America. Lonesome Rhodes Clubs all over the country want me to run for President. But I’m not sure I want it. I can’t do everything myself.”
“Please,” I said. “Just no war today. I’m simply not ready for war today.”
“Marshy, honey, for you I’ll do anything. I should have had my head examined for marrying that little baton-twirler from North Little Rock. The kid sure could twirl, though. One in each hand and play the harmonica at the same time. She could even do it on her toes. But I need someone worthy of me. Someone with a brain who I c’n talk to.” He reached for the bottle and I could see how his hand was trembling. “Damn it, nobody hates war more’n I do. But they got me mad now. Why do I have to have all the responsibility? But if Washington is too lily-livered to act …”
He gulped the whiskey and staggered to his desk, pushing a jumble of papers, clippings and letters aside to find something he was looking for.
“I woulda jumped,” he said. “You didn’ believe me. Here—here’s the note I wrote to leave behind.” He picked it up and read it to me in a hoarse, maudlin voice. It told of his grief for the fine American boys having to sacrifice themselves in foreign lands. He said he was sorrowing for all his American neighbors threatened with extinction in another terrible war. “For me this whole great country of ours is just Riddle, Arkansas, multiplied,” he wound it up. “Every one of you is my Cousin Abernathy, my Aunt Lucybelle, my Grandpaw Bascom. God bless you and keep you all, my beloved kinfolk and neighbors.”
“But you told me you were going out the window for my sake,” I protested. “Why do you drag in this other routine?”
He gave me one of those slow, inebriated winks. “My public,” he said. “This is high-level BK stuff. The highest possible
level. They gotta believe I love ’em to the end. Get it?”
“Yes,” I said. “I think I get it.”
“Smart girl,” he said. “Why don’t we have one more drink and then you crawl into the sack with me? The hell with everybody.”
“That’s not what I came back for,” I said.
“Hell with everybody,” he shouted. “Hell with you too if you don’t be a good little girl and play house with Poppa.”
His face was flushed and his eyes were crazy.
I said, “Larry, get into bed and I’ll get you some sleeping pills. And for God’s sake, stop drinking. I’ll have the doctor come and give you a shot if you won’t stop.”
“Gotta put on a show at nine o’clock,” he said. “Gotta declare war. War!” he shouted. “This means war!”
“Shhhh,” I said, “you’ve got to lie down. You’ve got to be quiet for a while. I’ll get Bert Wheeler or someone to take your place tonight. You need some sleep. Rest. Peace. Shhhhh.”
He reached out his arm for me and almost lost his balance. I put my hand on his elbow to steady him. He grabbed me and we tottered together. He tried to force his mouth against mine. “Larry, for God’s sake, let me go,” I said. I broke away and ran down the hall. Lonesome came running heavily after me. “Hey Marshy, quit runnin’. Let’s roll in the hay together.” His big voice was right behind me. I had reached the marble steps leading down to the entrance hallway of the duplex suite. I ran down two steps at a time.
“Hey Marshy, let’s …”
Then an ugly sound of hopeless protest came out of him. The staggering bulk of him had lost its balance on the top step and was floundering, hurling, thudding down. I could feel the back of his head striking the marble ledge of each step as he lurched to the bottom landing.
He made a low, broken moan and lay still. I was afraid to move him. I ran to the phone and called Tommy de Palma. When I told him what had happened, Tommy took the name of our Lord in vain, but quite solemnly. Then he said, “Listen, Marcia. You get the hell out of there. I’ll be right over and take care of everything. And never tell anybody—I mean anybody—how it happened.”