Kathy Little Bird (18 page)

Catastrophe.

I never get colds. But I woke up unable to swallow. Total panic. I put on my bathrobe and went into the middle section of the trailer, where the kitchen was. Tea with lemon, that’s what Mum had given us kids when we had sore throats. I filled the kettle and sat disconsolately waiting for it to boil.

Maybe it wasn’t a cold. More likely I’d strained my voice singing in all these smoke-filled bars. And Mac was always urging me to do more belting, get that earthy tone into it. That was hard on the voice, but the audience loved it and I kept doing it. What if I’d damaged my vocal cords? It happened.

Had it happened to me? The kettle began to whistle. I took it off the coils and poured it over a tea bag. I stirred a while, then sipped the tea from a spoon. At first it hurt awfully, but gradually my throat opened and felt better. What should I do about tonight, and the people coming from Decca?

Mac’s advice, when he got over being exasperated, was to give me a Smith Bros. cough drop and tell me to sing through it.

That’s what I did. As I heard those muffled, grainy notes fall like wounded soldiers, I wanted to break off—stop, run and hide somewhere. But you don’t do that. You finish. You pretend it’s all right. The Decca exec who listened with his eyes closed, pretended too. But he left before my next set.

So my big chance came and went.

Mac was worried now. He canceled right and left and, instead of reproaching me, tried to buck me up. But in the
depths of me, trussed up in sargasso weed, were my dreams of singing. I wouldn’t allow myself to think past it; there was nothing past it.

At the end of the week I was able to coax a few of my sounds back. I did it cautiously, my heart leaping with a tentative joy at each note.

“We lost Decca,” Mac said, “but there are other labels out there.”

To prepare Chicago for us he ran an ad in the
Tribune
in the form of a songwriting contest, the winning song to be sung by me. With that as payment, we hoped no money would be required.

“We’ve got to find a name for you,” Mac said. “Something out of the ordinary. McCartney, Lennon, Harrison were going nowhere. They name themselves the Beatles, and bang! They own the world.”

“I had another name,” I said, thinking back. “Little Bird.”

“Little Bird…” He rolled it around. “Cree?”

“Yes.”

“Well, we’ll keep that part under our hat. Besides, you don’t look Indian…So that’s what they called you? Kathy Little Bird?”

“My friend on the res did, when I was eight.”

“I like it.”

So did I.

It brought Elk Woman and Mum and a little girl standing outside the church in the snow singing.

C
HICAGO!

Mac sold the trailer and purchased a fourth-hand Buick. It looked impressive, but we had all sorts of trouble with it. However, we drove through the Loop, past the zoo, and came out on Michigan Avenue. Broad, beautiful, with trees planted in the cement of the sidewalk. Magnificent, stately hotels with doormen, awnings, and facades of fieldstone, brick, and glass.

Of course we didn’t stay in any of them, just looked. We looked at the lake, dancing with yachts and sailboats riding at anchor, bouncing over choppy little waves. Mac, who was embarked on a progam of educating me, recited a poem by Carl Sandburg. “Hog Butcher to the World.” It had the smell of stockyards in it, and the sweat of men and animals. It wasn’t the Chicago I saw.

We wound up in a shabby apartment in an Italian neighborhood on the city’s west side. “You won’t be here much,” Mac said apologetically, and it was true. We were on the go from the moment we got up in the morning.

Running around Chicago in August isn’t the most comfortable thing in the world. Half the population were trying for a little air by getting out of sweltering apartments onto the fire escapes. We saw them as we passed on the El, lounging on mattresses and beach chairs. One enterprising guy had dragged out a sofa. The rest of Chicago was fighting for a spot on the beach. Mac, the optimist, said it was off-season, our best chance to get in to see people.

Much to my surprise, several songwriters entered Mac’s contest, and the first thing I knew I had material to look over. With a nip here and a tuck there, they fit my style pretty well.

Meanwhile the Decca scout we thought we’d lost showed up with a Decca producer. Apparently there were some things he’d liked well enough to give it a second try. This time it went smoothly and an audition was arranged.

From that moment my world began spinning.

“From the top!” came the directive from the glass booth. “From the top,” because the balance was wrong.

Like the record I cut, it was all part of the Chicago Loop. The Loop spun round and round, Michigan Avenue, the Blackstone. We moved in to have a good address. It was awesome. The lobby was out of an MGM spectacular, enormous sprays of flowers in what Mac told me were Ming dynasty vases, and a fountain to throw pennies in. My room reflected none of this luxury; it was small, ordinary, and the view was the brick wall of the hotel next door. But I was just an elevator ride away from glamour. Studio technicians sat behind glass, twiddling dials, mixing my sound on a Gates board. I was getting close.

I’d never sung with a real band, just pickup musicians or me and my guitar. But, hey, this was big time. There were five instrumentalists backing me. I loved the beat of the drum and the unexpected cry you get out of amplified guitars and a slap bass. I had my mike, they had theirs, and in the booth they mixed and matched.

That first session they didn’t get what they wanted in their cans. “Cans” was
the name for the earphones we were all plugged into. They sent everybody home with an early-morning call.

I’d sung my heart out and it hadn’t been right. They’d drowned me out, the drums that I’d jived to, and the electrified stuff. “What do they expect?” I stormed at Mac. “Five to one, and I’m up against drums. It’s impossible. I can’t do it. I’m not going back. Tell them that. Tell them no singer on God’s earth can compete with drums. Do you want me to tear my throat out again? No good to anyone, washed up, through?”

“It’s tough with house musicians,” Mac soothed. “You’ll get the hang of it. It will go better tomorrow.”

“There isn’t going to be a tomorrow. Don’t you listen when I talk to you? If I belt the way they want, I won’t have a voice. Don’t you remember what it was like? I couldn’t even whisper. I won’t wreck my voice—to please you or them or anybody.”

We both knew I was letting off steam, that I wasn’t about to tell off a booth full of Decca executives. No way was I going to spoil my big chance. Still, I was frightened. Most other musicians wrapped their instruments in silk scarves and warm flannels, kept them safe in cases, while a singer exposes her voice to all manner of hazards. No matter how vulnerable and fragile, it goes where she goes and is not shielded from weather, illness, pollution, or accident.

In the morning when I walked onto the soundstage, not only was the band there, but they were affable and friendly, as though they had not drowned me out. The guy on steel
who had dragged the tempo and thrown me off offered me a Styrofoam cup of coffee. But I was still leery. I had my eye on half a dozen female singers. Were they here to replace me?

“Your backup,” Mac whispered.

I was utterly panicked; probably most of them were better than I was. One of the Decca officials confirmed this by telling me they were from the Chicago Lyric Opera chorus.

That was it, that was the last straw. They were out to show me up, to make me look ridiculous, to scuttle me before I started.

I took an unobtrusive breath from the waist, from the diaphragm, a singer’s breath. I took another. And another. It was the best way to fight nerves. I knew I had to psych myself up.

Don’t let them get to you, I told myself. They may be from the Lyric Opera, but they’re here to
back you up.
They are just backup sound—to
you.

Having talked myself into the Kathy Little Bird persona, I went over to my mike and tapped it with my finger to see if it was live. I’d been waiting for a chance to do that.

The QUIET sign flashed. The bandleader, who looked like an animated blowup of a fly—small, hairy, and ugly—lifted his stick, and we started to make music. The backup singers produced an echo effect. It sounded good.

In fact it was great, really compelling. Once again I sang my heart out. Let them sit behind glass, let them twiddle the dials. I didn’t care what they did. I was doing what I did, and I was doing it well.

Decca records signed me, and Mac said we could stay on at the Blackstone. I still hadn’t time to explore the lobby, stand before Ming vases, sink into plush divans, gawk in front of shops and elegant boutiques, toss pennies in the fountain. “Loop the loop,” I murmured, singing it all under my breath. I was evolving a plan. A great and wonderful plan.

Now that money was coming in I wanted to set aside enough for Kathy to go to college. I wanted her to have things, advantages like piano lessons, whatever she wanted. After all, she was almost three years old. She’d need nice things, clothes, a good warm coat. Stuff like insurance to cover medical and dental bills.

That was the plan. I was dead, and it was best that way. I didn’t want to upset anything, but how precisely did one give money anonymously?

Mac had just brought an entertainment lawyer aboard, someone called Harriman, whose main job was to tinker with Mac’s income tax return, on which Jack, who was in Vietnam, was listed as a dependent. Several long-distance phone calls and a deal was struck. Jack agreed to keep his mouth shut. It cost us, but the money was well worth the peace of mind.

When it came to Kathy, I was afraid to go through Harriman; I didn’t want him or Mac to know my plans for her. So I had recourse to the Yellow Pages. Wanamaker, Adams and Markham, sixteenth floor, sounded impressive. When I got there it appeared much too grand. There was a samovar in the waiting room. I was preparing to back out when a vigilant
secretary caught me and brought me to Jonathan Markham’s office.

Young, bright, and hawk-faced, he listened intently to my problem and asked a few questions about the Masons. His solution was to take advantage of Mrs. Mason’s Swedish ancestry. “An inheritance,” he decided, “to be disbursed periodically by a firm in Stockholm or Uppsala. I’ll do some research. It should prove out at a casual glance, and that’s all one gives, a casual glance at a stroke of luck like this.”

“You mean, it supposedly comes from a distant relative?”

“Exactly. Having no immediate family…You deposit the requisite amount with us, we forward it to Stockholm, they invest it and send quarterly payments to St. Paul.”

And so it was arranged. That part of it anyhow. But how to account for my monthly expenditure in a manner that wouldn’t alert Mac? He approved of expensive clothes, of getting my teeth straightened. In fact he insisted on it. But he’d be dead set against sending money to my kid. Mostly because he’d be afraid it would somehow leak out. “Rising young singer abandons child.” That kind of publicity would be fatal. I had just completed my first single, and a big promo was scheduled to hype it onto the charts. Simultaneously, Mac was angling for a guest spot on a national radio show. But it was all tentative; it hadn’t happened yet.

Mornings I memorized leadsheets and sang them in the bathroom so people in the next room wouldn’t bang on the wall. Afternoons I shopped for and bought a watch and a tennis bracelet. Buying top of the line, I had paste copies
made, pawning the originals and sending the cash to the Wanamaker, Adams and Markham office. I was reminded of my early days with Jack, all the subterfuges I’d practiced so we could stay afloat. Why was life so complicated? It was my money. Anyone would think I was stealing it.