Some Faces in the Crowd, Page 2

  I found the great American just where I expected to find him, in the sack in his room with a half-empty jug of blended by the bed. I said, “Get up, you slob, destiny is calling.”

  “Collect?” he said.

  “Chicago,” I said. “J & W. Five hundred cash money a week. One hour every morning. Week-ends free. And all you have to do is be your own irresistible self.”

  He looked at me with those big, bloodshot, roly-poly eyes. “What do you think we oughta do, Marshy?”

  “You,” I said. “You can find yourself a new slave in Chicago.”

  “I’m gonna marry you in Chicago,” he said. “I’m a-gonna make a honest woman of you in the Windy City, little gal.”

  Among his many bad habits was his way of creating the impression, through careful innuendo, that we were a team, biologically speaking. This was a figment of his imagination and designs, but since when have people ever accepted truth when nasty rumors are so much more fun? “Why talk of marriage when your heart is wrapped up in somebody else?” I said. “How could I ever replace Lonesome Rhodes in your affection?”

  “Marshy, I’ve known some pretty good-looking broads in my get-arounds, but they always took me apart. You’re not going to win any beauty contests, but you put me together. You get me up in time to go to work. You get me on and off. You keep in touch with my public. You cue me when I start repeatin’ myself. You always tell me when I’m gettin’ close to the line. I lean on you. So you say yes and we’ll go to Chicago and make it hand over fist and you’ll be the rich Mrs. Rhodes. I can’t afford to lose you. You’re the smartest good-lookin’ gal I ever got hold of.”

  “Take your hand away,” I said. “This is business. Shall I tell them yes?”

  “If you’re in it.”

  “Well, only as a job,” I said, “a job I can quit when I’ve had enough. You understand?”

  “Okay,” he said, “I’ll take my chances.”

  “So I’ll tell them yes.”

  “Only not for five hundred. Lonesome Rhodes is not a three-figure man.”

  He had started at seventy-five like me and was getting a fast century now.

  I called back J & W in Chicago and gave them Mr. Rhodes’ estimate of his own value and they said even with that publicity from Time a four-figure bill was too big for a starter. I ran back to tell Lonesome (in his bathrobe drinking beer now) and he said, “I better get on the phone and talk to ’em myself.” It took him an hour to pull himself into his clothes and get down to the station where he had me get on the other phone and take down what they said so he could hold them to it. Where he got that adding-machine mind I don’t know, but he was never a cowhand when it came to finance. This is what Lonesome Rhodes, that simple know-nothing troubadour, suggested: That he work gratis for nothing for two weeks. At the end of that period if they want him to continue they pay him his thousand a week including back pay for the trial period. And at the end of twenty-six weeks an option for fifteen hundred for the next twenty-six weeks. “A-course I’m not tryin’ t’ run your busyness, gents,” he Arkansighed, “a’m jest tryin’ t’ give ya an idea what a fella figures he’s worth. Oh yes, an’ transportation. Transportation fer my li’l o pardner Marshy Coulihan and yours truly.”

  So we flew in to Chicago and now Lonesome was on coast-to-coast. The show was called “Your Arkansas Traveler.” It was pretty much the same routine that had made him the idol of Fox, Wyoming. With one important exception. That sheriff election had gone to his head. He wasn’t content just to sing his old songs and tell funny stories about his family in Riddle, Arkansas, any more. He had to hold forth. It is one of the plagues our age is heir to. No longer do disc jockeys play the music. Now they lecture you on how to solve the traffic problems of New York and improve the United Nations. That’s the bug that was biting Lonesome. He was rushing in where not only angels but a majority of fools would fear to tread. I did my small best to talk him out of it and get him to know his place. But he was male-stubborn and he knew so little that any meager idea he had came to him as a world-shaking revelation that had to be shared with his public. I suppose the doctors would call it delusions of grandeur. It seems to be one of the main symptoms of the dread disease of success.

  He had only been going a few days, for instance, when he interrupted the singing of “Barbara Allen” with the announcement that he was pretty sick of that song anyway and he would rather talk about the street-cleaning problem in Chicago. He said that Chicago reminded him of Riddle except that Riddle was a one-horse town and Chicago was a ten-thousand horse town and the difference between one horse and ten thousand horses ain’t hay. The next day a Citizens’ Clean-Up Committee was formed with Lonesome as honorary chairman. On his program next day Lonesome sang “Sweet Violets” in honor of the clean-up campaign and he said it gave him a funny feeling to be connected with “sech a projeck” because his Grandpaw Bascom used to call his paw a sissy for insisting on changing his clothes every year.

  It was only a matter of weeks before Grandpaw Bascom and Cousin Abernathy and Great Great Uncle Wilbraham and the rest of Lonesome’s so-called family had become public property. The famous comic-strip artist Hal Katz came to Lonesome with a deal to do a daily and Sunday strip around the Riddle characters, featuring a Lonesome-like folk singer to be called Hill-Bilious Harry. What was in it for Lonesome was a thousand a week and a percentage of subsidiary loot. So by the time the option was taken up, Lonesome, our overgrown Huck, wasn’t exactly going barefoot. He was pulling down twenty-five hundred a week, not a bad living for a country boy. Lonesome was not impervious to money, either. Au contraire, he was decidedly pervious. He began spending it as if he had had it all his life, only more so. He lined up a pretty fancy flop at the Ambassador East and bought himself a powder-blue Cadillac that just said “Lonesome” on it. A monogram would have been too ritzy, he said. Right away he had one of those Swiss 18K calendar watches and a closet full of suits all a little baggy and country-cut but good goods. He was a folk singer, remember?

  He went in for me, too. He never kept his promise about my being strictly business. He always figured the natural charm would finally overcome me. I was his one-’n-only, his indispensable can’t-live-without. One night the phone woke me up and it was Lonesome getting ready to jump out the window if I didn’t marry him. He said he felt confused about all the success and that I was his anchor. His anchor to reality is what I think he said. That is not exactly a compliment but I said I would think it over. I don’t know if I was in love with him. Call it 90 per cent disgust and 10 per cent maternal. Oh yes, I’m the maternal type as well as the professional woman. To tell the solid truth, I was always ready to give up the high rank and all the loot whenever I found the right man. At first a girl thinks kids would be too much trouble, and then that maybe there’s something to it even if it is trouble, and later that her life will not be complete without them, and finally that it is the one thing in the world she really wants. I was hovering around stage C the morning that Lonesome called. I told him to ask me at a more reasonable hour and when he was stone sober. And not to muck it up with suicide threats. What was a down-to-earth simple-grained one-hundred-and-ten-per cent Amurican doing with that psycho out-the-window talk? He said, “Bless you, Marshy, you do me good. Even when I’m the greatest, you’ll be right alongside me.”

  “Lie back and get some sleep and do yourself some good,” I told him.

  The sponsors were awfully happy with Lonesome. He was the hottest salesman on radio-TV. He’d open with “Look down, look down that lonesome road,” and then he’d slide into “Hiya, neighbors, this is yer Arkansas Traveler,” and he’d have the people eating out of his big and sometimes trembling hand. He’d say, “Shucks, folks, I don’t know if you’ll like the stuff, maybe you got funny taste, but I love it, it’s what makes my cheeks so rosy,” and the assistant geniuses of the advertising companies would shake their heads and acknowledge Lonesome as a full-blown number-one genius. A dry cereal called Shucks came out w
ith his picture on it. He got the idea of forming Lonesome Rhodes, Inc., so he could keep some of the gravy. It turned out he was nuts for cars—he was on a vehicular kick—so he bought a Jaguar to keep his Cadillac company. His Nielsen kept climbing until he was almost as popular as Jackie Gleason and Bishop Sheen. And when it came to getting his stuff across he could more than hold his own with both those boys. “He’s got it.” That was the only way the advertising brains could explain it. “He got it,” they’d say, and they would all nod their heads with a sense of accomplishment and go out to a long lunch of martinis.

  Lonesome branched out from sanitation problems to advice on rent controls and diplomatic appointments. And became not only a political pundit but a good Samaritan. He built up a little department for himself called “My Brother’s Keeper.” During the four and one-half minutes for BK, as we called it, he would appeal for some personal cause. For instance, a little boy was dying in Meridian, Wisconsin, and his blood wasn’t one of the two usual types. Lonesome told the story with all the stops out and asked for blood. Half an hour after the broadcast there had been nearly a thousand calls from all over the United States. That’s what they call penetration. Lonesome was just lousy with penetration. A widow in New Jersey with nine kids had her house burn down and Lonesome asked for the dough to rebuild it. “Nobody send more’n a buck,” he said. “It’s us ordinary folks got to do this thing.” Us ordinary folks threw in about twice as much as they needed to replace the house. Lonesome thought up a gimmick for that, too. He organized the Lonesome Rhodes Foundation. Anything over the amount he asked for specific cases went into the pot. It was a tax-exempt setup and some big names kicked in, some out of pure generosity, I suppose, and maybe some for the publicity value of having Lonesome say, “Thank you Oscar Zilch, you’re good people,” over the air. The foundation became kind of an obsession with Lonesome. To listen to him you would have thought that no other charities and no other humanitarianism was being perpetrated in America. Celebrities who, for one reason or another, failed to come through for the foundation became the targets of public and private abuse from Lonesome Rhodes. He would do everything from questioning the legitimacy of their birth to hinting at their involvement in the latest Communist spy ring. BK and the foundation did some good, I will admit, but at no small cost to those of us around him who had to put up with the emotional wear and tear of his playing God in a hair shirt.

  It was about this time, near the end of his second twenty-six weeks, that Lonesome took his first fling into international politics. Until now he had contented himself with just telling us how to solve our domestic problems. But suddenly—I think it was from getting indigestion after eating some tainted shrimps in a Chinese restaurant—he went global. He warned the Chinese that if they didn’t stop messing around with us in Korea he’d stop sending his shirts out to a Chinese laundry. Back in Riddle there was a Chinaboy who aimed to marry into Grandpaw Bascom’s side of the family, he said. Grandpaw told the Chinese he couldn’t marry in until he went ’n cut off his pigtail. The Chinaboy said Hokay and went out to the barn and cut off the tail of Grandpaw’s favorite hawg. “That’s why I sez even when ya think ya got an agreement, never trust a Chinaman,” Lonesome said.

  I tried to tell Lonesome I thought the story was pretty irresponsible, when we were still trying to work out a truce that would save American lives. But darned if a couple of senators didn’t write in and congratulate Lonesome for his brilliantly witty analysis of “our naive if not criminally mistaken foreign policy.” Lonesome was invited to address Veterans United and the Daughters of the Constitution and to write a daily column of political jokes for a national syndicate. I don’t know how many thousands wrote in after that Riddle Chinaboy joke telling Lonesome he was right and that we should break off negotiations in Korea and that this country would be a sight better off if we had a level-headed, plain-talkin’ fella like Lonesome Rhodes as Secretary of State.

  I tried to tell him, “Lonesome, you’re fine as long as you gag your way through Old Smoky and tell your jokes about Cousin Abernathy in Riddle. But don’t you think before you go handing out pronouncements on China that you should know just a little bit about what you’re talking about?”

  In the voice of the people, Lonesome said, “The people never know. The people is as mule-stupid as I am. We jest feel what’s right.”

  I made a futile effort to explain: he was no more the voice of the people than I was, with my corrupted Vassar accent. In the sheep’s clothing of rural Americana, he was a shrewd businessman with a sharp eye on the main chance. He was a complicated human being, an intensely self-centered one, who chose to wear the mask of the stumbling, bumbling, good-natured, “Shucks-folks-you-know-more-about-this-stuff-’n-I-do” oaf.

  Like the time Lonesome made a really fine, moving talk about the noble institution of marriage. He had been singing “The Weaver’s Song” and he cut into that tender ballad to ask everyone who might be contemplating divorce to try just a little harder to see the other side of the argument. “Never leave a first love just to have the last word,” he murmured to the accompaniment of a few soft chords on that makeshift guitar. The response was fantastic. Some five thousand couples wrote in to tell Lonesome they were “reconsidering” and he promised the reconciled couple who wrote the best letter on why they made up that he would have them on his program and blow them to a whirlwind week-end in Chicago (“Second Honeymoon”) at his own expense (tax deductible). Easy for him to say. I had to read, sort out and grade the darn letters. Such drool you never heard. Lonesome was described as a cross between the Lord Jesus and Santa Claus with the better features of both. Lonesome was getting so benevolent it was coming out his ears.

  Forty-eight hours after Lonesome had come out unequivocally for marital bliss I was in my apartment working through the pile-up of letters when the phone rang. It was a woman I had never heard of before who said her name was Mrs. Rhodes. “Lonesome’s mother?” I asked in my sweetest maybe-daughter-in-law-to-beish voice. “No, his wife,” was the answer. “I wanna see you.”

  I must admit I was a little curious to see her, too.

  She was about forty, in the process of getting fat, but you could see that she had been attractive once in a showy, third-rate way. Being a snob by instinct and a democrat by conviction, I tried to reject the word “coarse.” But it hung over us like a low fog dampening our conversation.

  “So you’re Lonesome’s new tootsie,” she opened. “Well I hope you have more luck keeping him home than I did.”

  “I am simply a business associate and personal friend of Mr. Rhodes,” I said, cool, collected and unconvincing.

  “Come off it, miss,” she said. “The floor manager on your program is my brother-in-law’s first cousin. He writes me what’s been going on.”

  “I must say that it is gracious of you to inform me that Mr. Rhodes is married,” I said. “I think he might have done me the courtesy of telling me himself.”

  “Mr. Rhodes never did nobody no courtesies,” said Mrs. Rhodes. “If you want my opinion, Mr. Rhodes is a no-good bastard.”

  “I have no doubt your opinion is based on considerable experience,” I said.

  “Not only is Mr. Rhodes a bastard,” Mrs. Rhodes went on, “Mr. Rhodes is a crazy bastard. A psycho-something or other. His skull thumper told me.”

  “Skull thumper?”

  “His mind doctor,” she explained. With her index finger she described a series of sympathetic circles against her temple. “Bells in the batfry.”

  “I see. And may I ask just exactly what is the purpose of your visit?”

  “Get Larry to shell out three thousand a month and I’ll divorce him. Otherwise I not only won’t divorce him, I’ll make it plenty hot for the both of you.”

  “I am not engaged to your husband,” I said. “I mean I—I suggest you discuss this matter between yourselves.”

  “Larry thinks he has to have every broad he sees,” said Mrs. Rhodes. “And as soon as he has �
�em he calls ’em tramps and leaves ’em for something new. It’s part of his psycho-something or other.”

  “A very interesting diagnosis,” I said, thanking my little stars I had never succumbed to the jovial, overgrown lap-dog passes of Lonesome Larry. “But I still suggest this is a matter between you and Mr. Rhodes.”

  “He’s a two-timing no-goodnick,” she said. “I caught him red-handed with my best girl friend. He broke my jaw.”

  “It seems to be working quite effectively now,” I said, and showed the lady to the door.

  I don’t know why, it didn’t really concern me except that Mrs. Rhodes’ husband had proposed to me and I was curious, which Mr. Webster defines as habitually inquisitive. I called him at the Ambassador and told him I had something on my mind. “Marshy, come on over,” he boomed. “Come over an’ have a drink an’ hear the good news. You’ll be proud of me.”

  “You,” I said. “You hypocrite. You pious bigmouth. You oracle, you.”

  “Marshy,” he said, and he tried to laugh it away. He could commit murder with that haw-haw-haw and everybody would think he was being a laugh riot. “You just need a drink, Marshy honey.”

  “Something is cockeyed wrong with the world,” I said.

  “Why for? Why for, my lovely marshmallow?”

  “The way people listen to you,” I said. “The way they believe you. It’s fake, it’s mirrors, it’s false bottoms. You and your Cadillacs and your Grandpaw Bascom. A man of the people. My derrière.”

  “Marshy,” he said, “you’re tired, you’ve been working too hard. You need a vacation. We’ll go to Sea Island.”

  “Damn it, we’re not a we,” I said. “I hate you, hate what you stand for.”

  “What do you stand for?” he said, and the easy laughter was gone from his voice now.

  “I—I don’t know. Something better. Something true somewhere. I can’t explain it very well. All I know is I hate phonies, sham is for the birds.”