The Comedy is Finished (5 page)

Which is almost the truth. When twenty-two-year-old Koo
married seventeen-year-old Lily Palk, back there in nineteen thirty-six, how could he know he was going to be bigtime any minute? Naturally he had his dreams, every kid has dreams, but there was no reason to believe
his
dreams were any less bullshit than anybody else’s.

If an insecure punk kid marries a practical girl, and if three years later the punk is a radio star in New York while the practical girl is a housewife and mother in Syosset, Long Island, the prognosis for the marriage is unlikely to be good: “I won’t be home tonight, honey, I’m staying here in town.” As he commented one time to a gagwriter pal named Mel Wolfe, “I got to put that on a record. Then somebody in the office can call the frau and play it at her. ‘Hi, honey, I won’t be home tonight, I’m staying in town.’ Then a little pause and I say, ‘Well, I wouldn’t if I didn’t have to. Everything okay there?’ Then another little pause and I say, ‘That’s fine.’ One more pause and I say, ‘You, too. Have a good night, honey.’ And meantime I’m in Sardi’s.”

“Hey, listen,” Mel Wolfe said. “I got a terrific—Feed it to me. Do the record.”

“Yeah?” Grinning in anticipation, Koo said, “Hi, honey, I won’t be home tonight, I’m staying in town.”

In a shrill angry falsetto, Mel Wolfe replied, “I went to the doctor today, you bastard, and
you
gave me the
clap
!
”

“Heh heh,” Koo said, and went on with his script: “Well, I wouldn’t if I didn’t have to. Everything okay there?”

“The
house
burned down this afternoon, you prick!”

“That’s fine.”

“You’ve got a
woman
there!”

“You, too,” Koo said, cracking up. “Have a good night, honey.” And eventually they used a cleaner version of the idea in the show.

For a while, Koo appended excuses to his calls home (“Meeting
with the sponsor.” “Script trouble, gotta stay up with the writers.”), but soon he gave up even that much pretense, as his evenings “in town” grew to outnumber his evenings “at home.” He stayed at the Warwick on Sixth Avenue below Central Park, he traveled with a funny, bright, invigorating crowd, and it became more and more difficult to force himself to make appearances in that other life. By 1940 he was solemnly vowing to spend at least one night a week with the family, and most weeks he wasn’t making it.

The finish came in February of 1941. Koo joined a bon voyage party seeing off some Miami-bound friends at Penn Station, and awakened next morning to find himself still on the train, which was highballing south. “By God, I’m having my ham and eggs in Carolina.” Once in Miami, he had to make several explanatory phone calls to friends and business people back in New York, and every one of those conversations was sprinkled with hilarity, except the call to Syosset. “I won’t be home tonight, honey,” Koo started, intending a gag line on his present whereabouts, but before he could deliver it Lily said, “I know you won’t. You haven’t been here for three weeks.”

What surprised Koo, even more than the words, was the voice. Maybe the long-distance wire had a distorting effect, or maybe he was actually
hearing
Lily for the first time in years. In any case, she sure as hell didn’t sound like the girl he’d married. This Lily sounded like a head nurse: flat, tough, dispassionate, uncaring. Sitting there in his warm hotel room in hot Miami, listening to that cold voice, Koo shivered. He tried to go on with his gag—“A funny thing happened, uh, on the way...”—but at that point he simply ran down. You can’t swap swifties with a zombie.

“I can’t talk long,” Lily said. “Frank just woke up from his nap.” At that time, Barry was three and Frank one. Koo had offered to pay for nurses, nannies, but Lily had refused, insisting she would
bring up her own children herself. What Koo didn’t understand at the time—what he still doesn’t entirely understand, though it doesn’t make any difference now—is that Lily was afraid of his life in New York. She was afraid of fame, afraid of glamour, afraid of the same bigtime that Koo reveled in.

But Koo couldn’t see that. All he saw was that Lily had turned herself into a drudge, and that she was unhappy, and that her unhappiness was dragging him down. Now, he couldn’t even mention Miami, not in the presence of that frigid misery. “I’ll call you later,” he said, all the fun gone from his voice. He sounded as bad as she did.

And that was the moment, when he heard his own voice pick up her flat deadness. His other phone calls had involved problems—a meeting rescheduled, a rehearsal cancelled, a newspaper interviewer given an apology—but they’d been solved, hadn’t they? And solved without spoiling the
fun
. Koo Davis was a free and happy man, so free and happy that he could suddenly be in Miami
by mistake
and the main result was only laughter. Koo loved laughter, not only audience laughter when he was performing but also his own laughter when something tickled him, laughter around him when he was with his pals. What did he
need
with this specter from the Grim Beyond?

The specter was saying, “Will you be home this weekend?” But she didn’t ask as though she cared about the answer. It was more as though he was another of the problems in her life, like Frank waking from his nap, or Barry’s bed-wetting.

“I don’t think so,” Koo said. Huddled on the edge of the bed in the Miami hotel room, phone pressed to the side of his face, free hand over his eyes, he looked like a clockwork toy waiting to be rewound.

“When will you be home?”

Koo could never resist a straight line. “Nineteen sixty-eight,” he said, and hung up.

And that was it. He was terrified, the instant the line was out of his mouth and the phone was out of his hand, but not for a second did he think of turning back. Once it was done, once he’d blurted out the words that made the change, he wanted nothing except to stay with the action already done. But still the change terrified him, so he promptly left that hotel room and got drunk with friends, stayed drunk until three days later, when the network sent people down to collect him and bring him back to New York for his next weekly show. He sobered up on the northbound train, but thought no more about his break with Lily until the next week, when she phoned him at the Warwick to ask if he wanted a divorce.

“A
what
?” He was palling around with one girl in particular at that time, a dancer named Denise (in fact, they’d just had an argument in this very room, about money), and at the word “divorce” an image came into his mind of Denise as a great hunting bird, an eagle or a hawk with talons, swooping down on him. If he were no longer safely tied by marriage, if he were a single man and available, what would not Denise do? “No divorce!” Koo said.

Lily said, “Koo, I want to know where I stand.”

“I’ll get back to you,” Koo promised, but in fact it was Koo’s lawyer who got back to her later that week, and by the time the legal details were worked out Koo himself was off on his first USO tour; the one with Honeydew Leontine. In the years since, there has never been any one woman with whom he’s wanted to spend the rest of his life, and what other reason for divorce is there except remarriage?

So Lily Palk Davis is still Koo’s wife, though the last time he saw her was 1965, when Frank was married. She was friendly enough then, the old rancor long since dead and buried, but what kind of
answer are these clowns likely to get if it’s Lily they hit up for the ransom?

Or
the boys. What Koo did wrong back there in 1941, and in the busy crowded events of his life it was easy not to notice the mistake at the time, when he split with Lily he also split with his sons. It was nearly three years before he saw either of them again, and that time was only because Barry got pneumonia and was in the hospital, maybe not to live. Koo was terrified during that crisis, moving into the hospital, cancelling all his work, gasping along with every struggling breath rattling through that skinny little body, and for the first time—almost the last time—really
feeling
that body as a part of himself; flesh of his flesh, bone of his bone, an extension of Koo Davis into the future, a part of him that walked and moved and lived when he wasn’t around.

But the feeling was too intense. There wasn’t any comedy in it, he couldn’t wrap himself around it. He wasn’t in charge of his emotions there, they were in charge of him. At night in the hospital, when sleep did come, it was accompanied by confused, roiling, blundering dreams, and by day he lived with nervousness and fear, a jittering clammy stumbling sense of his own helplessness. His stomach, never healthy, was in turmoil. When the crisis finally ended, when Barry at last came out of the hospital, followed by cartons of toys, comic books, stuffed animals and game sets, Koo hugged him and kissed him and put him away, and went right back to the world he knew, in which he could be comfortable and in control.

It wasn’t, in fact, until Barry was thirteen and Frank eleven that Koo made any intense effort to be a father. In his late thirties by then, successful in the movies and reaching out for his first success in television, secure at last in his long-term status as a star and becoming truly aware for the first time that he was aging, he
was no longer the fast-talking hotshot radio comic of a dozen years ago, he found himself finally conscious of those two boys he’d helped to create just before he’d become the real Koo Davis. They were both in boarding school, Lily at that time living in Washington, an unpaid consultant on various welfare projects, and when Koo phoned her to ask if he could have the boys on one of their vacations she was sardonically amused—she wasn’t afraid of his comedy anymore—but she did agree; he could have the boys for two weeks in April.

And it was a disaster. Koo didn’t know children, and more importantly he didn’t know
these
children. He had the use of a mountain ranch in Colorado, complete with horses to ride, streams to fish, hills to climb, real life cowboys as ranch-hands, and even some of Koo’s showbiz pals dropping in for a day or two. But the whole thing went to hell in a handbasket, and by the end of the two weeks Koo was drinking all day long and shooting zingers at his own kids.

The almost constant rain didn’t help much, of course, but the real problem lay deeper than that. Children, particularly when just entering their teens, tend to become absorbed in one or two special interests, and to ignore everything else that life has to offer. At eleven years of age, Frank was utterly wrapped up in music: swing music, that being the very end of the big band era. Ralph Flanagan, Sauter-Finegan, Billy May: those were Frank’s heroes, and his dream in life was to be a big band arranger. Cowboys and mountains had no place in Frank’s life, and he spent the entire two weeks fretfully hunkered over the ranch’s only radio, a huge pre-war monster that could barely bring in Albuquerque. He clearly saw himself as a prisoner—an innocent prisoner at that—with Koo as the evil jailer.

As for thirteen-year-old Barry, his passion was even farther
from trout streams and backpacking; he was a science-fiction fan, a voracious reader and a constant designer on graph paper of rockets and space stations, all prominently featuring the American Air Force star-in-a-circle. (This was before Sputnik dampened the science-fiction fans’ more chauvinistic sentiments.) Barry ran out of reading material the fourth day and graph paper the sixth. Also, Koo made the mistake of ordering him out of the house and onto a horse, during one break in the rain. It was probably sulky Barry’s fault that the normally placid horse eventually threw him into a rail fence and broke his arm. (“Two weeks from now,” a misguided pal told Koo, “you’ll think back on this and laugh.” Koo gave him a look: “Twenty
years
from now,” he said, “if anybody mentions this and laughs, I’ll kill him.”)

This disaster didn’t stop Koo from trying. He knew at last he’d made a mistake in shutting those kids out of his life, and he was determined to make up for it, so over the next several years he took the children from time to time on their vacations from school, and gradually learned to leave them alone with their enthusiasms. A kind of distant respect grew up on both sides, an aloof sort of tolerance. The boys were never warm toward Koo, but they liked him well enough, as though he were a long-term friend of the family; not of their generation, but basically all right. Koo, feeling the guilt of his earlier omission, circled cautiously around the boys, accepting whatever affection they could show him.

Did he love them? He never asked himself that question, wouldn’t have considered it in any way to the point. The point was to get them to love him; his own feelings didn’t matter. In truth he did love them, fiercely and with terror, but that love had only surfaced the once, during Barry’s pneumonia. He—and they—remained essentially unaware of it, and operated at a much cooler and less passionate level. The fact was, the missing years could not be
reclaimed. Koo was not their father any longer; he had waited too long.

With the children’s maturity, the pressure eased. It was permissible, after all, to leave grown children to their own devices. Koo helped where he could, stood ready to answer any call, but didn’t push himself forward. Barry wanted Yale, and Koo got it for him. Frank wanted UCLA, and Koo arranged that. Frank’s ardor for music gradually shifted to an interest in movie music, then to movies, and finally to television; with Koo’s help, he was taken on by a network affiliate station in Chicago after graduation from UCLA, and now he’s a middle-management executive in the network’s home office in New York. Barry’s interests having swung much more wildly between future and past, he is now a partner in a highly profitable antique dealership in London, selling chandeliers, sideboards and firescreens to Arabs and Texans.

Koo’s learning about Barry’s homosexuality was, in fact, the only real trauma in his relationship with either of his children once they’d grown up. Barry, visiting Koo in L.A. with his “friend,” announced the fact of his inversion with a kind of unblinking defiant vulnerability that touched Koo almost as deeply as the pneumonia-racked skinny body had one day almost twenty years before. He didn’t
want
the boy to be queer, he didn’t want Barry to face the complications and the suffering and the loneliness that Koo felt convinced were the inevitable complements of homosexuality, but he didn’t dare say aloud even one word of what he thought. His reaction was instinctive and immediate and based on his ingrained perception of the relationship between himself and his children. What he thought of them or about them didn’t matter; it didn’t even matter who in fact they were; all that mattered was that somehow he must, in a permanent and clear cut way, win their love—as he had long since won the affection and the (granted
much shallower) love of the American audience. “It’s up to you, Barry,” he said, at once, “but remember; if you and Len have any children, I want them brought up Catholic.”