Tycoon (11 page)

Betsy, not as beautiful but a handsome woman in everyone's estimation, was wearing black and was visibly uneasy. She was unsure as to why she had been invited to tea with Kimberly Lear.

“How long have we been friends, Betsy?”

“Years,” said Betsy.

“Good friends,” said Kimberly. “Such good friends that I'm going to ask you to do something I would never ask any other woman to do.”

“Kimberly . . . ?”

“A confidence.”

“Yes . . .”

Kimberly handed Betsy a cup of tea. She offered tongs to use in selecting tiny squares of bread with butter or little cookies. “Curtis Frederick,” she said. “I want you to tell me something about Curtis Frederick.”

Betsy tried to conceal the relief she felt. “What do you want to know about him?” she asked.

“I am going to take you completely into my confidence,” Kimberly explained, “and then ask you to take me completely into yours. And whatever we say will never be repeated. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Well, as you know, my husband has hired Curtis Frederick to be news director of the Lear stations. But there may be a damaging scandal in his background. You remember Brit Taylor? Brit Lowery? She married Walter Lowery.”

“I remember her. She lives in New York now, I think.”

“Exactly. Her husband was at Yale when Curtis Frederick was there. And her husband says Curtis was . . . well, you know. Queer.”

“Queer? Meaning exactly . . . ?”

“A fairy. A homosexual. Since Jack trusts the man a great deal, I'm hoping it's not true. And that's why I'm intruding into your personal life. Ever since I introduced you to him, you've been seeing him. And not just occasionally. I thought you might know by now. Forgive my asking, but it's important to Jack, and it's important to me.”

Betsy sipped tea and nibbled at bread and butter to gain a moment to compose herself. “There's only one way I could know, isn't there?”

Kimberly nodded. “Yes. And that's why you have to forgive me for asking.”

“How could I tell?” Betsy asked. “Even one of those men can—”

“I think you could tell,” said Kimberly firmly.

Betsy put down her teacup. “Okay, kiddo,” she said. “If you want a personal confession, get me a gin; I'm not going to talk about my intimate life over a cup of tea.”

Kimberly poured gin for Betsy and Scotch for herself. Each of them took a swallow. Then they faced each other.

“What do you want to know?”

Kimberly half grinned and shook her head. “Well, what's obvious. Does he? Do you?”

Betsy nodded. “Yes, Twice.”

“And he
does it?
I mean, does he like it?”

Betsy laughed. “Ha! I judge he likes it all right. I mean, can a man fake a hard-on?”

“Is he . . . well equipped?”

“I haven't much basis for comparison, Kimberly. Compared to my ex-husband, he . . . compares very well.”

“Is he comfortable with things?”

“Yes. He does what a man is supposed to do. With enthusiasm. To put it crudely, once he's in the saddle he's a real cowboy.”

“Then you'd judge he's not—”

“That's right. I'd judge he's not. The fourth time we went to dinner together, he asked me if I'd like to stop at his apartment for a nightcap. I knew what that meant, of course. But I thought, well, what the hell? If I was going to . . . resume that sort of thing, why not with Curt Frederick? What's wrong with him? So I went to his apartment with him.”

“And he—”

“We had one drink, and then he very straightforwardly asked me if I'd go to bed with him.”

“Straightforwardly.”

Betsy smiled. “I'd guess he'd been thinking about, probably rehearsed in his mind, how he'd ask me, and then decided to
just come out with it, bluntly. If he'd started groping at me, I think I'd have been offended. But he simply asked me. The way he put it was ‘Do you think you'd enjoy going to bed with me? Could you possibly enjoy it as much as I would?'”

“And you said yes.”

“I said I might. We went into his bedroom. He undressed me, then undressed himself. He suggested we take a shower together. He said that was a wonderful way for two people to get acquainted. And it was. He soaped me, and I soaped him. You can't be shy about each other after you've run your hands all over each other that way. I played with him, and he climaxed. I said, ‘Uh-oh,' and he said not to worry, he could do it again. And he could, too. Twice more. Then the next time we were together was at my house. I don't have a shower, but we sat in the tub together.” Betsy grinned. “We got so excited we damn near drowned.”

“What's developing here?” Kimberly asked, a bit taken aback.

“We'll see, hmm?” Betsy mused before downing the rest of her gin.

C
URTIS
F
REDERICK BROADCAST LIVE INTERVIEWS AND REPORTS
from the Republican National Convention in Cleveland and the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. The NBC network offered coverage too, but Frederick concentrated on the New England and New York delegations and offered politicians a chance to be heard on the radio back in their hometowns—an opportunity they eagerly grabbed. To win his attention, some of the politicians brought him useful information. An experienced journalist, he knew when to attribute and when not to attribute—when to say “Mr. So-and-so tells me” and when to say “A reliable source tells me.”

His deep voice, his vocabulary, his restrained cadence, and
his selection of stories to cover made him a voice of calm authority in contrast to the near-hysterical jabbering of a broadcaster like Walter Winchell. Curtis Frederick was not the most popular broadcaster who reached his region, but he was the broadcaster educated people tuned to when they wanted information.

Betsy accompanied him to Philadelphia. When they returned, they announced that they intended to be married immediately after the election.

The
Literary Digest
took a mail-in poll and announced that Governor Alfred M. Landon would defeat President Franklin D. Roosevelt in a landslide. Curtis Frederick did not say so on the air, but he told Jack he remained confident that the result would be exactly the opposite of what the poll indicated. Jack respected his judgment and told Kimberly and her father, among others, to expect a second term for the New Deal President.

On the eve of the election, Jack stood at the bar of the Common Club with his father-in-law Harrison Wolcott. They had listened to the evening news broadcast by Curtis Frederick in the radio room, a private room on the third floor where the sounds of the radio would not disturb other members. When Frederick went off the air, they went to the bar. He would join them there as soon as he could.

“I have not entirely lost my optimism,” Wolcott said to Jack. “I simply have to believe that a man who has the support of probably seventy-five percent of the nation's newspapers stands a good chance of being elected.”

“The problem is,” said Jack, “that newspapers are themselves big businesses. The men who own them are capitalists.”

Frederick arrived twenty minutes after the end of his broadcast. Jack and his father-in-law still wore white tie in the club, though most members now wore business suits at the bar, as did Frederick.

“This is an interesting bar,” he said. “I've been a guest here before—in 1928, I think it was. I wondered if the club wouldn't move the bar downstairs again after the repeal of Prohibition.”

“We got used to having it on the second floor,” said Wolcott. “And you know how it is in Boston—if you get used to some
thing it becomes a tradition. But tell me, Mr. Frederick, why are you so sure Mr. Roosevelt will be reelected? A lot of respected journalists don't think so.”

Frederick asked the bartender for a gin on the rocks. “Well,” he said to Wolcott, “I think we would agree that William Allen White is about as respected a journalist as we have. The North American Newspaper Alliance wired him a request to write a story they could run if Landon is elected. White wired back, ‘You have a quaint sense of humor.'”

Two days after the election, Curtis Frederick married Mrs. Otis Emerson, who was happy to escape what she called “that odious appellation.” Frederick moved into her house in Boston. His brother Willard took over his apartment in Cambridge.

1937

L
EAR
B
ROADCASTING WAS ON THE LOOKOUT FOR NEW STA
tions. One became available in New Haven, as did another in Stamford, Connecticut; but Jack was not interested in them because his stations in Boston, Hartford, and White Plains already covered their broadcast area.

During his visit to Cleveland for the Republican Convention, Curtis Frederick had renewed his friendship with the editors and reporters for the
Plain Dealer,
and one of them told him that Cleveland station WOER might be available if someone offered the right price. Jack hurried to Cleveland, appraised the opportunity and liked it, then returned to Boston and borrowed part of the money he needed to buy the station. He experienced some difficulty leasing the telephone line he needed to introduce the Midwest to the newscasting of Curtis Frederick and to
The Best Beauty Bar Show, Starring Betty and the Minstrels,
but he ultimately succeeded in leasing it and then used it also to introduce the East Coast to the music of the Cleveland Symphony.

From this point on, Curtis Frederick reported no local news stories unless they were of national interest. His broadcasts had to be as interesting to listeners in Cleveland as they were to the audiences in Boston and New York.

K
IMBERLY BEGAN TO INSIST THAT
J
ACK SMOKE HIS
C
AMELS IN
holders, the way President Roosevelt did. Holding them between his fingers was staining his fingers yellow, which was boorish, she claimed. She scrubbed his fingers with a brush and Fels Naptha soap until she took off the yellowed skin, then presented him with a black cigarette holder trimmed with silver bands. He felt effete smoking with it but used it in her presence. When she was not around, he held his cigarette in his left hand or between his thumb and third finger, switching it around to avoid staining his fingers.

Connie Horan laughed at him.

“So she's teaching you how to smoke! How long have you been smoking—fifteen years? I'm surprised she lets you smoke Camels. They are rather blue-collar, you know. I'm surprised she doesn't demand you switch to Tareytons or Pall Malls.”

Curt's brother had gone to New York for a week, so Jack and Connie were taking advantage of his absence to meet in his apartment.

Sitting on a red plush couch, dressed this afternoon in a lime-green silk dress that clung to her voluptuous figure, and smoking her own cigarette, Connie looked, as usual, as if she were posing for a photographer.

Jack stood looking out the window. He had brought a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black, and both of them had glasses with two fingers of Scotch in the bottom.

Jack left the window and sat down beside Connie. He crushed his cigarette in the ashtray on the coffee table. “You're just about the only woman I ever really wanted that”—He stopped and shook his head—“that I couldn't—”

“Why, Mr. Lear, you have overcome my virtue already,” she said, batting her eyes and mimicking the accent used by the heroine of the novel everyone was reading,
Gone With the Wind.

He put his arm around her and kissed her on the side of her neck. “Connie . . .”

“Jack . . .”

With his right hand he gently turned her face toward him and kissed her ardently on the mouth. Then he put his hand on her left breast.

“No, Jack. No.”

He sighed. “Connie, why do you come here with me if you won't let me touch you?”

“I like you very much. But we can't go as far as—As far as you want to go. I'm a married woman in love with my husband. I'm the mother of three children and may in fact be pregnant right now.”

“That would solve one problem,” he suggested quietly.

“What?”

“Well. If you're pregnant already—”

“Jack!”

“Well?”

She lifted her chin high. “I think of myself as having
some
morals. I'm Catholic, you know. There are certain things that—Certain things that I don't do.”

“Will it help if I tell you I love you?”

Connie shook her head. “No. That makes it worse. And what about Kimberly?”

“Kimberly makes life more and more difficult for me. You know. The way I smoke, the way I dress, the way I eat, the way I talk—”

“Even so, do you still love her?”

Jack hesitated, then nodded.

“You can't love more than one person at a time,” said Connie.

“Who made
that
a rule? I can. And do.”

She took her cigarette case from her purse, but Jack reached out and restrained her hand. He kissed her again.

“My husband would kill us both. And God knows what Kimberly would do.”

“They don't have to find out. I'll never ask you to take risks.”

She sighed heavily. “I'll have to think about it. We can come again Thursday. By then I will have made up my mind.”

U
NSURE OF WHAT
C
ONNIE'S DECISION WOULD BE
, J
ACK NEV
ertheless stopped by the Cambridge apartment the following Thursday morning and put a magnum of Piper-Heidsieck in the refrigerator. He returned at two that afternoon, not even certain she would come.

She did.

She was superbly beautiful. Today she was wearing an off-white knit dress trimmed with narrow blue and violet stripes at the neckline, the wrists, and the hemline. Her matching tiny hat sat on the back of her head like a yarmulke.