Touch and Go (28 page)

Word somehow came to P.K. Wrigley that Riccardo was letting blacks in. Ric was still Wrigley's tenant at the time. Wrigley called Riccardo: “I understand you have a certain element at your place. I think it's demeaning, the property will drop in value, and I suggest you be more careful about your guests.”

Riccardo wrote a note to Wrigley: “I'll have whoever I want as a guest as long as they don't hurt anybody.” He put up a sign in the corridor: ALL MEN OF GOOD WILL WELCOME. He said to Wrigley, “All are welcome, I don't care who they are. What do you propose to do about it?” Wrigley did nothing. Knowing Ric, today the sign would read: ALL MEN AND WOMEN OF GOOD WILL WELCOME.

T
here was a gala gathering of patrons—including the mayor and his missus—on the eve of the Lookingglass Theatre's adaptation of my book
Race
. It was front-page news; something
spess-i-al,
the Welsh would say; a tribute to two Chicago icons: the historic Chicago Water Tower, chosen as the new locale of the respected theater—and me.

David Schwimmer, the theater's founder, was director as well as co-adapter of this 2003 production. He was a national celebrity, a star of
Friends,
the most popular TV show at the time. His was a face familiar to millions.

He and I were the show horses of the evening. There was only one problem. I love martinis, dry. Two martinis, I doubly love. After three such martinis, I am a runaway slave seeing heaven's Milky Way as the drinking gourd—the sign of liberation. But in this instance the hosts, in the fashion of the day, were serving designer martinis. “
Designer
martini”! I had never heard the phrase before, let alone faced one. It was the equivalent of finding a bottle of Dom Perignon in the desert and spitting into it first. Nevertheless, I did manage to get smashed the old-fashioned way. David Schimmer graciously ushered me into a cab.

The cabbie, a black man, whose accent was foreign, stared at him for a moment and drove off. I am clinically deaf. I barely make out what the driver, no more than five feet away, is mumbling. His
speech, to my drunken, defeated ears, sounds something like talking in tongues. “Name?” He appears to be addressing me.

I say, “Oh, my name?” My lowly spirits are somewhat lifted (
Studs' Place
is still remembered. In my stupor, I had somehow forgotten that it was au courant about fifty years earlier).

“No, no, no!” The cabbie sounds a touch querulous, but loud enough for me to hear every word. “No, no, not you—the man who put you in the cab. He looks familiar.” Somewhat phlegmatically, I tell him of
Friends
and David Schwimmer. “Ah, yes,” says he. “Of course I know him.”

I lean back against the leather. Am I a faceless old man, a zero, caught in a moment of truth by Cartier-Bresson? Desperate, I'll play my ace in the hole. It usually opens doors and on occasion works wonders.

“How are things in Lagos these days?” It is not so wild a shot as you may think. Nigeria has a fairly large community in Chicago. Many are exchange students and drive cabs for the critically necessary fast buck. Here's one, a black African, non-American. He turns slightly, his eyes still on the prize, the road ahead.

“How do you know that?”

Much, much better. I sail on; the wind is with me. “Wole Soyinka, one of your countrymen, just won the Nobel Prize for Literature.”

Once more, he turns: “You know that, too?”

I'm on my way to Canaanland with this guy now. I fire away, my words are as bullets from a Thompson submachine gun. “Oh,” I murmur casually, “I've interviewed Soyinka several times.” I'm fingering a fiver in my pocket as a tip to the good man, though the bill is no more than ten. He slows down momentarily and turns to really look at me.

As we near our destination, I apply the coup de grace, guessing which college in Chicago he has been attending. I hit it on the button: Truman College. As I'm about to hand him fifteen, I sense a touch of awe in his question. “Name again?”

“It's a crazy sort of name. Possibly you've heard of it. It is Studs.”

He interrupts, this time completely out of patience: “No, no, no! The man who put you in the cab.”

“Garroway. Dave Garroway,” I say.

Why do I, for no ostensible reason, bring up an old acquaintance's name? As I hit the leather of the back seat, why am I humming “Auld Lang Syne”? It has in a zany way haunted me during the conversation with the cabbie. As he is referring to the current kid of our time, I am thinking of another kid of another time. I am thinking of the other Dave. I realize anew how quickly an icon becomes a face in the crowd.

 

 

LET'S BEGIN AT THE BEGINNING. Shortly after World War II had ended, a good five years before television came along, Garroway created a jazz program that began at midnight and ran for a couple of hours. The time was right, the circumstances were right, the show was a huge success. When Dave plugged an artist, lines formed for blocks around. He helped, say, Sarah Vaughan, immeasurably in this respect.

I was, in the meantime, conducting an eclectic sort of disc jockey hour. We often met on the nineteenth floor of the Merchandise Mart, where our studios were located. He was NBC's bright-eyed boy and I was with the ABC adjunct.

Remember now, this was 1949, 1950. There was talk of a new means of communication on the air, television. For some reason, it was Chicago that became the frontier city. It was in Chicago that three seminal programs had hit the air. This creative outburst was by the very nature of sudden circumstance spontaneous. It had no forebears.

There was
Studs' Place,
for however brief a time. And
Garroway at Large
, which with considerable advice from Charlie Andrews, scored in a mighty flash. Nothing could go wrong. If a stool or chair fell in view on screen, fine. There was no canned laughter or canned anything.

The third program, syndicated nationally, that caught the attention of John Crosby, the pre-eminent TV critic, was
Kukla, Fran and Ollie
. There was our one genius, Burr Tillstrom. Behind a little stage, the man himself was invisible, but his other selves—puppets who were really his hands and fingers, and his voices—were delightfully apparent. The only human face was that of Fran Allison, a thoughtful and endearing performer, who accepted Burr's creatures: Kukla, the ever-worried impresario; Ollie, the elfin, bad-boy, one-toothed dragon; Beulah Witch, the feminist on a broomstick; Madame Ophelia Oglepuss, the Kuklapolitans' matron of the arts; and the other wonders. It was a world of tenderness and gentle laughter. Its audience was more adult than child.

The hours for TV in those pioneer days were limited from 6:00 P.M. to 10:00 P.M. There was nothing on during the daytime. Out of the blue, Pat Weaver of NBC conceived the idea of daytime television, beginning early in the morning. Others thought it was an outrageous idea, people awakening in the morning to a strange face in the kitchen or bedroom. A test was made. Would people watch? NBC was overwhelmed with bushels of mail. So it was that a program called
Today
came into being.

It was obvious to all that Dave Garroway was a natural as a host. He already had an enthusiastic audience, as well as the personal attributes of ease and grace; and, in a strange way, with his specs, an FDR touch.
Today
was an immediate smash. And so it was that TV came into full growth; its performers became, for better or for worse, family familiars.

Dave of course became king of the hill; his face was familiar to more viewers than anyone else's in the world. Dave's offering of a Peace Salute as his daily morning adieu was an international ritual. I imagine his presence became as familiar as Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp.

This was my earliest recognition of how a celebrity comes into being. In the electronic world, where technology had leaped exponentially, front and center, it was awe-inspiring. Perhaps a trifle disturbing.

How well I recall our Merchandise Mart encounters, when it was obvious that Dave was up, up to higher ground. He was euphoric. In describing General Sarnoff's
⁵²
phone call to him, he was deeply moved. “Never has any boss been so kind and thoughtful as he informed me of the new program,
day time.
And why they chose me.” (In his exhilarated moments, he became somewhat formal in speech.) I suggested that he was a pretty valuable property to them, that they were not engaged in philanthropy. Dave chuckled; he knew all about my political crotchets.

For several years, Dave was TV royalty and then, bit by bit, there came some kind of decline. Charlie Andrews mentioned health as a problem; or perhaps he had irritated the network with a throwaway line about Southern Bell and its touch of racism. But, no, that wasn't it.

True, he had an eccentricity or two. The suicide death of his wife rattled him. That wasn't only it. Charlie was right: his health. Aging. I think Dave was touching sixty and, who knows, a wrinkle or two was showing. It was one thing and another. He disappeared. (Recently, when I touched ninety-three, Ted Koppel of
Nightline
had me on for an interview. He was remarkably gracious and hospitable, allowing me to say anything that came to mind. He wistfully pointed out that he was sixty-three, thirty years younger than I, yet it was obvious that Ted was nearing the end of his long and eventful course as a nightly fixture. And that it may not have been his decision to pull up stakes. The touch was more reflective than biting—and yet . . . )

A few years after Garroway left
Today,
I was on tour for my first book and being interviewed in Hollywood by a local young hotshot. “You're lucky. This is my first day back from vacation. My pinch hitter was someone named Dave Garroway. Oh, he was from Chicago. Did you know him?”

“Yeah.”

Edwin Arlington Robinson was not only an esteemed American poet; he was as prescient as Nostradamus. I've a hunch he had someone such as Dave in mind when he, years before, wrote “Richard Corey.”

So, too, did Dave.

Sic transit gloria celebratum
.

 

 

IN THINKING of Dave Garroway, Richard Corey, and all the touched and gone of celebrityhood, is there any enthralling memory worth it all? Oh, sure, I can name some remarkably rich souls, the great many anonymous I have encountered and commemorated on tape, but the one that came to mind in the backseat of that cab was a throwback to a key memory of my childhood: Bulldog's recounting of Wamby and his triple play. Remember, my mentor told me of the player's immortal moment in 1920.

Yet, back in that cab in 2003, some eighty-three years later, I recalled a letter I had received in 1951. Oh, God, how it all comes back. When
Studs' Place
was given the heave-ho by NBC, among the grieving notes was one scrawled on a piece of wrinkled, lined paper. Of course I lost it, but oh, baby, do I remember it.

It was obviously the scribbling of an elderly person. The note was from Cleveland.

“I feel so bad that
Studs' Place
is losing its lease. I have been watching it every week. There is an old Dutch word that tells you how I feel. It is
heimweh.
It means homesickness. It was just like my own neighborhood diner. I once played baseball. They called me Wamby.” It was signed: “Bill Wambsganss.”

Never mind my failing to impress the cab driver with “Lagos” and “Soyinka.” I, at that moment, impressed myself with the memory of a wondrous note reminding me of a wondrous baseball play of eighty-three some years ago; an old man's scrawl written thirty-one years after it happened; that boosted my ego as well as morale some fifty-two years after the letter was written. You can't beat that. Oh, to be remembered—isn't that what this is all about?

 

 

THERE WAS A VARIATION on this theme several times, during my salt-mine years as a radio soap-opera gangster. From time to time, a strange elderly actor would appear for one or two stints at, say,
Ma Perkins
or
Woman in White
or
Kitty Keene.
During the tour of a play hitting Chicago at that moment, this actor would pick up a precious C-note or whatever was the fee before the American Federation of Radio Artists (AFRA), the union, was formed.

(I remember Tony Ross, while in town during the world premiere of
The Glass Menagerie
. He was the original Gentleman Caller. The play was being rehearsed in Chicago for several weeks. Laurette Taylor, who turned out to be magnificent as Amanda, was having a bottle problem, still grieving over the death of her husband, Hartley Manners. It was during those weeks that Tony Ross picked up a few checks in the soap opera
Woman in White
. He was playing a diamond in the rough. When they left Chicago, having made theatrical history by introducing us to a new young playwright, Tennessee Williams, I replaced Tony in the soap opera.)

The first instance I recall of my remembrance of an old-timey actor and its effect on him occurred during frequent runs in
Ma Perkins
. One day there appeared in the studios of CBS, Chicago,
for a three-shot role as a lumberyard owner in Ma's trials, a distinguished-looking old boy. I approached him. “I know who you are. You're McKay Morris. I saw you as Pastor Manders in Ibsen's
Ghosts
. You were great.” He stared at me as though he had indeed seen a ghost: a ghost of so many Christmases past.