Driving the King (16 page)

W
e opened Nat's mailbags every Tuesday evening. All of the house staff, “the cohort,” as the Coles called us, gathered on the second floor of the carriage house and waited for what I had brought over from the NBC mailroom on Monday after the show. Lottie would leave the kitchen to help us. Elizabeth steamed the rugs on Tuesdays, so while the floors dried she would come over, too. Her husband, Walter, would have finished mowing and edging the front yard by then, and would have set the sprinklers. After a night of watching and walking the grounds, Skip would have had slept for a few hours and have returned to the sorting table as well.

The Coles received more letter openers than one family could use in a lifetime, so we put the surplus to good use. Some were sterling and a few were gold, the same as the records on the wall. Some plain and some initialed. We kept the letter openers in a piece of butcher block that ran
the length of the tabletop. Skip stood next to Lottie, rubbing together two of the openers, a matching sterling set with wood on the handles.

“I bet this is how Saint Peter does it. Standing at the pearly gates separating the wheat from the chaff.”

“Your priest must get tired of you confessing the same blasphemy week after week,” Lottie said.

“It's only blasphemy if it's insincere,” he told her. “Wheat from chaff. Sheep from goats.”

“Why don't you stop all that talking and give Mr. Weary a hand.”

Skip put the letter openers down and took hold of the chain connected to the middle rafter and looped it through the bottom handles of the mailbag. With it hanging upside down over the table, Skip loosened the ties and a foothill of mail rose in front of us.

Nat would answer them when he could, and sometimes we simply pulled an autographed picture from the stacks that never ran out. We kept boxes of 45s to send along as well. If somebody took the time to write a letter, then he might get to listen to a brand-new song before it hit the radio, a little music to go along with a kind word from the man. Congratulations, from Nat King Cole. With thanks, from Nat King Cole. All the best and more, Nat King Cole. The greetings were short but complete. A smile and a thank-you, and that's all most people wanted
really. Plus, anyone who would take the time to write a letter would tune in to see the show each week.

Skip and Lottie took the first handfuls, grabbing from the top of the pile only. Letters, I had learned, were just like green groceries, liable to tumble if you disturbed the bottom of the stack. I was five months into it by then, and I had gotten the feel. The rest of them had enough practice behind them to make quick work of it all.

I learned the rules. Never stick your hands into an envelope, they told me. Shake the letters and pictures free. We would hear any piece of metal when it hit the copper tabletop. A consequence of stardom was that the world knew where to find you. The black stars of Hollywood had found all manner of letters from adoring folk, but they had also found straight razors and barbed needles nestled between parchments. Fingers had gone into envelopes and come out bloody.

Those without weapons made up for it with threats. Skip told me that he could spot a bad letter without opening it. A plump letter was a good one from a fan with lots to say. Hate mail was bone-thin. When we opened them, they always had big bold letters and language straight out of somebody's gutter.

The mail was brought home to conceal the ugliness of it. Word about threats and the like made Nat Cole look controversial, and the sponsors were skittish enough as
it was. After Alabama, some venues didn't want him, because a man beaten onstage was an insurance liability.

One of the carriage house desks belonged to me and the other to Skip. His chair was rarely underneath it. Instead it was near one of the windows that filled the place with all-day light. It was as good as a watchtower, sitting on top of a three-car garage as it did. Between his walking rounds at night, Skip could stand in those windows and watch the property with clear sight lines to the Muirfield corner and the Fourth Street side.

The window carried that old handmade glass, full of ripples, like somebody had blown on it until it cooled. One pane was a new, machine-made replacement installed after someone had fired three bullets at the property a few years before. The first bullet shattered a guest room window in the main house, hitting glass a second time when it broke a mirror. A second ripped the wood paneling off the station wagon Nat and Maria took the girls to the beach in. A third broke the middle window of the carriage house.

Skip showed me where it had hit, and the bullet was still above our heads, deep in the crown molding. Wood putty hid the hole underneath the gloss of the trim paint. I wouldn't have known if Skip hadn't told me about it. It was our job to be mindful of such things, whether they'd been hidden or not.

Perhaps the one who burned
NIGGER
in the patch of lawn along Fourth Street was the same as the shooter, but most likely not. Walter told me he went out and turned the charred letters under with a spade and planted a camellia bush before the neighbors and gawkers passed. He worked hard on that yard, and every so often during our sort, Walter looked out the windows, looking for the trash people threw into the bushes and anything else that might be out of place.

“Yard looks good,” I said. And he agreed. He wasn't one for false modesty, because he knew it was true as much as I did. Telling a yardman his work looked good was in some cases merciful, lifting his spirits while that sun beat him down. But calling the Cole grounds immaculate was gospel truth. It had to be the best yard on the block. If the people who gazed at the Coles' house, especially those who didn't want them around, looked hard for anything that was out of place, they'd be disappointed.

At the end of March, Walter had dug up a patch a foot deep and filled it with a truckload of limestone. On top of that he added gravel, crushed sand dollars, clamshells, and some bedrock the city had scooped out of the Los Angeles River after they'd dredged the bottom and poured down a new stretch of concrete. Walter finished the yard off with topsoil and a patch of grass as smooth as the living room carpet.

Walter missed a couple of mail sorts getting the yard
ready, but by April he was with us again, watching out the window while Nat practiced his short game. The putts he hit just then were breaking just right, and rattling the tin when they fell.

“Knocked two strokes off his handicap since January,” Walter said. “Might be scratch by the fall.”

Nat stood on his green with his golf coach, Jimmie DeVoe. They had called Jimmie the Jackie Robinson of golf, and he was teaching the Jackie Robinson of television. Everything had a Jackie then, but it stood to reason, because Jackie had won a Series and retired. It was hard being Jackie, though, and he had a head full of gray hair before he was forty.

After every round, they replayed the putts he had missed. He was meticulous about such things. Treat a detail like a small thing, and it'll get big in a hurry. Maybe that was what Jimmy was saying while he held the flagstick and looked at Nat's line to the cup, reading and reading. But all of his golf was with the sponsors, potential sponsors, so the score didn't matter as much as the deal that they never saw fit to make.

The mail table had taken on a new order, and the copper top was visible again. The stacks from the fans and well-wishers sat next to the signed photographs that would go back to them. We were finishing the last of it when Nat came up the stairs.

“You outdid yourself,” Nat told Walter. “Jimmie says your little green is better than most.”

“Might move the roses, get a load of sand and make a little bunker.”

“You hear that, Lottie?” Elizabeth said. “Giving up roses for golf.”

“Think Mrs. Cole might have a word to say about it first,” Lottie said.

“I think her short game is better than mine, so she wouldn't mind one bit,” Nat said.

Though the neat stack of the good mail was waiting for him, he passed it by and reached into the unsorted stack, and pulled one at random. The envelope that Nat opened and read was brightly colored with the deliberate letters of a child.

“There's a young girl in Cleveland who's lost a tooth, her first it seems. She doesn't love to smile like she once did, and school day pictures are coming.”

He took one of the autographed pictures and added a note to the little girl in Cleveland. The 45 single of “Imagination” was coming out the next Tuesday, but we had a stack already. I would drop them in the air mail, so she'd get it before it came on the radio. Be the first in Cleveland to hear the brand-new song. Surely, snaggletooth and all, she couldn't help but smile like she used to.

Nat placed the girl's letter on the good stack and
reached for the other. After he read it, he returned it to the envelope and placed it on the pile. He didn't speak a word about what it said. He kept his hate mail a secret from the world, and he would take it all in, but he never showed it on his face. He couldn't afford to. Instead he wore the smile of a gambler, a smile that could mean anything or nothing at all.

“I need to know who I'm singing to. All of them.”

With that smile he said good evening, and he was gone. It was about time for the rest of us to leave as well. I offered Lottie a ride home, but she said she'd work awhile. The Coles had put a television in the laundry room, and Lottie said she'd watch Dinah Shore while she folded the wash.

My landlords, Elizabeth and Walter, lived on the third floor of the Coles' house, so home was a short walk for them. Walter had lost his light for the day, so any yard work would wait until the morning. Elizabeth had dinner to fix for the Coles before her day was done. I saw them both standing over the little garden near the kitchen door, Walter with sheers and Elizabeth looking and pointing out the ripest peppers. He cut a few and a bit of the rosemary they stood in front of.

Skip had taken up his post in one of the wrought iron chairs, in the shadow of the carriage house and away from the light above the middle garage door. People had tried to get Nat to put up a fence or build a house way out of
town. But part of being a star and staying a star was being seen. I had watched how people's faces changed when they saw him on the street. I couldn't imagine him hiding behind a gate. The Coles had done the opposite. A house on a corner with big windows, standing in the middle of everything where they could see and be seen. During the daylight hours the curtains were pulled back, because as Elizabeth and Walter might have said, the rooms needed daylight just like the lawn did.

Skip started his evening watch just a few feet away, and I finished my evening work, getting the car ready for the morning before I drove my own back across town to my place. Across the way in the main house, Elizabeth cooked dinner with the window open, and that rosemary was in a pot, and the smell of it had circled back through the open window and carried through the garden and toward the carriage house. No matter the past of sniper shots and angry neighbors, the Coles had made Hancock Park home, and we had been trusted to make sure that didn't change. The rest of the cohort looked out for the home front, and I made sure nothing came between him and his shows but the few miles of road we traveled to get there.

I
t was a sure sign that she loved that job when Lucinda took me to Ivie's on her day off. The weekly specials on the chalkboard were in her handwriting. The dinner plate prices looked just like the phone number she'd given me at John Dolphin's place. That bit of leaning in her one. That lift in her eight, stretching up like an hourglass. Our waitress came to say hello, and so did half the others, giving me a good once-over to make sure I was decent enough for their friend.

Lucinda was dead set on me trying the chicken and waffles, a concoction that I had always found peculiar.

“I've seen people put cream and sugar on their grits. It can't be stranger than that,” she said.

“The same kind of strange.”

She pushed the plate across the table, parted the things between us—ketchup, butter, her coffee and mine—and offered me a portion cut and set aside. The table wasn't
quite level, so the syrup had drifted toward the chicken, which was my main concern about having them on the same plate in the first place. Then I tasted a bite, and it all made sense for reasons I couldn't quite describe.

“I told you. I think the part of the brain that says ‘delicious' is the same place that tells you something sounds good. That paprika and the maple syrup mixing together is like a nice little duet.”

She pulled the plate back, and returned the coffees to where they had been. I offered her some of my eggs and chicken livers, but she said she was fine.

“This makes sense though, chicken livers and eggs pretty much started at the same exact place, so they go together,” I said.

“No mystery on that plate. None whatsoever.”

Ivie's was like all the Central Avenue breakfast spots that used to be more club than restaurant. Lucinda said it changed after Ivie died. That was around the time when Negro bands started to play the Sunset Strip. The old stage was demolished to make room for more booths, so the only music played now came from the jukeboxes. Each table had a small tabletop model, no bigger than those milkshake blenders behind the counter. The music came through the ceiling speakers between the air ducts and the ceiling fans, each song dropping along with the cool air and the light.

“Ivie was always sweet to me. She was touring with Duke until she got sick, but she'd saved enough money to open this spot. Gave singers jobs when we needed one. If one of us made a record, she'd keep it in the jukebox whether it hit or not.”

Lucinda flipped through the pages of songs, some handwritten and some typed, their titles shortened to fit the space.

“Billy Strayhorn used to write songs at the counter. If Stray did something, everybody in town wanted to do the same. We kept pencils in our aprons so they could sit here and write. Ivie got tired of them using her menus for scratch paper, so she kept notebooks in the menu racks.”

Everybody at the counter seemed too young to write a song. The counter jukeboxes fed the same speakers, so we heard what the young ears craved. That Los Angeles sound was something like a junction. Some Detroit and New Orleans, Memphis coming in. Some homegrown Angelenos.

When she found the page that listed her song, Lucinda paid a dime and dialed the number. 832. Before too long, it was our turn. I had thought I would have to pick her voice from a chorus, but she sang solo, a tune I had never heard about a city I had never seen.

When “Calhoun Street” came through the speakers, that swing of the horns started it off, and that piano came
in, and she put space among the lyrics, playing a little hopscotch with that easy Saint Louis stride.

“They had two train stations across the river in Memphis, on both ends of the same street. Last thing I saw before I left. Wrote a song and got myself a deal, not much but enough for me to know I needed to stay here.”

That piano had a little Down South and a lot of Midwest in the chords, city around the edges and country at its heart. Lucinda took her time but she got someplace, patient but with one eye on the time. And then it was over, much too soon.

“Number nine on the Harlem Hit Parade chart. Top-ten record. My high point. Got to love your high point. Of course, I want to get a little higher next time, but still.”

“Maybe I want to hear it again.”

“The music goes around to every booth and the lunch counter, so everybody gets to hear their money's worth. Besides, I can't have my old song becoming your favorite, because you haven't heard the new ones. When I finish and record someplace. Seems like you're patient like me, Weary, so it'll be worth it when I'm done.”

We started the afternoon with her work, and we finished with me doing mine. Driving. Though I spent my working days doing as much, I was fine carrying Lucinda anywhere she wanted to go. We took the road up to Griffith Observatory, and we could see everything while the
sun came on down and covered Los Angeles in that early-evening light.

We got up to Griffith and found space along the overlook, where a guidepost on the railing listed the constellations. Proper stargazing required a trip up the mountain, because the streetlights did to the black sky what the smoky air did to the daylight blue. It was too early for stars, but that in-between color brought people out. The people who ended their daytime sightseeing left the place as the night crowd started to gather.

“I come up here quite a bit when Nat needs a little time at Capitol and I want to stay close.”

“Nat Cole's a good man, getting you and Willie gigs like he did. Glad he stood up for you, considering.”

“I guess Willie told you what happened.”

“I knew about his jaw. And I'd heard about you even before he mentioned. I just didn't know your name. When I toured, I'd hear all kinds of stories on the bus, and who knows what's true. They used to talk about a soldier that jumped a stage. Some said Georgia and some Mississippi, but when I met Willie and Evelyn I heard it right. I had imagined what that fellow looked like. You're the spitting image of the man I pictured.”

“You heard the rest of it. Kilby.”

“I never heard that name, but just the way you say it, I know what that place is. I didn't want to ask. Why people
come out here is heavy sometimes. They'll tell it when they want to. If they want to.”

“Can't act like I'm ashamed. People might think I'm sorry for what I did.”

“You're here now though.”

“Sometimes, but not always. Forgetting what you left is as much work as anything else.”

“Stories I heard dwell on that fight, you being a hero and all, but they don't talk about the rest of it. They told me you were at that show with your girl. I imagine that takes some time to get over.”

“That's why I came out here. Get some miles behind me.”

“Takes time. When I got that call from Clora Bryant, that job, I was married. He begged me not to go on tour and told me he didn't know if he could wait. He told me Paris wasn't going anywhere. I said neither is the bottom, and I was tired of being there. If that's where I was meant to be I'd end up back there eventually. But that day I packed for Paris.”

“I know you're glad you did.”

“Just like I know you know you did right coming out here. That old feeling dies. Slow, but it goes. Plus I had a time over there. A few solos. Good choruses. That's my career, Weary. All that and a number nine record. Made
enough money to put down on my house to make this home. You got to make it home, too.”

Lucinda took a nickel from her pocketbook. I didn't intend for her to pay for anything but she was set on looking out at the city. While the telescopes inside were for nighttime viewing, the outside viewers were the daytime kind, and the dusk light was still enough to make it worthwhile. Five cents for five minutes so that we could see where we had already been and marvel at how small it seemed from the mountain. Lucinda kept one hand on the swivel and one on my shoulder, guiding me.

“You ever see Montgomery like this?”

“Got a little rooftop at the old hotel where our cabstand is. See a mile or two but not much to see.”

The click of the telescope's timer got faster, that nickel's worth of view running out as the eyepiece slammed closed. When it did, I dropped another coin, and the city was back for a little encore. Lucinda moved the lens.

“Take a look at Paramount.”

A backdrop, a city skyline of New York or some likewise place, moved slowly along one of the back lot walls. For a moment I saw a little sliver of the red tractor that pulled it, with men out front directing the path.

“If we were on the other side of the mountain, I could pay to see NBC, and watch you and Nat driving onto the
lot. Doing what we all come out here to do. Make shows and sing.”

“Not for much longer, though. You know it's not going well. With the sponsors.”

“People talk. Even if they didn't talk, I suspected as much. Watching the show and not a single commercial as good as that man is. I don't mind more singing, but I know how things work.”

“I try not to dwell on it when he's around, but something good needs to happen soon.”

“You need to be ready if things don't work. He's the most famous Negro out here. That puts him first in line for the good and the bad. I heard the station back home won't even show him. They'll dance to him, but they don't want to see his face.”

Our viewfinder was still tilted toward the soundstages, but our change was gone. The sun was getting too low, and most of the valley was shadow-covered except for the lights that marked the streets.

“He steered clear of the nonsense, at least. Stepin Fetchit used to come into Ivie's sometimes, and he never wore the same suit twice. Nat Cole never cut the fool to make his money. I can say that, too. I've never sung anything I'm ashamed of. That's why Ivie hired us all, so we could pour coffee and make a living until a new gig worked out. If I never get another one, I never shamed myself trying.”

“I still want to hear you sing again.”

“I told you, once I get something down.”

“No, I mean later this evening. Maybe in the morning. Maybe every so often. Whenever you feel like having me over to listen.”

“I tell you what. Let me think about it while we drive.”

And with that we were gone. Back down the mountain into the nighttime that was just then in the midst of falling.