Tycoon (9 page)

The photograph showed conspicuously that all three men were wearing yarmulkes.

“Oh, shit,” Jack muttered.

“My reaction entirely,” said Kimberly.

1935

T
HE TODDLER,
J
OHN, WAS A HANDFUL FOR THE NANNY, WHO
felt so overwhelmed that she told to Kimberly she was not sure she could continue in the job. Her major complaint was that the boy's demands made it all but impossible for her to give much attention to the little girl, Joan Edith.

She had been born two months after Jack returned from his grandfather's funeral, and Jack and Kimberly had wanted to honor Johann Lehrer in naming this child. Johann's wife had been named Shulamith, but Jack did not even suggest that name be given to his daughter. Kimberly pointed out that Johann was the German equivalent of John and that Joan was the feminine form of John, so their baby daughter was named Joan for Johann and Edith for Kimberly's mother.

Kimberly persuaded the nanny to stay with the family by telling her she would personally take more responsibility for Joan.

Jack had moved his offices. He needed more space, especially since Mickey Sullivan had arrived from California and was installed as a vice president of WCHS, Incorporated. Herb Morrill was also a vice president.

Since the corporation now owned WHFD, Hartford, as well as WCHS, Boston, the corporate name was incongruous; and Jack changed it to Lear Broadcasting, Incorporated.

He upset a great many people in Hartford—as well as Kimberly—by changing the programming schedule for WHFD. Though it remained chiefly a classical-music station, he scheduled the piano playing of Wash Oliver for half an hour five evenings a week, the daytime drama
Our Little Family
five mornings a week, and Hartford's own medical quacks on the same terms he offered the Boston quacks—in other words, they paid for their airtime.

WHFD had lost money for years, which had enabled Jack to pick it up cheap, but within six months it was making a modest profit.

The Catholic Archdiocese of Boston asked for a Sunday morning hour to be filled with lectures and prayers. Jack gave them the hour, from nine till ten. Then the Council of Churches demanded an hour for Protestant services. Jack responded that he would be happy to sell them the hour from ten till eleven—and at a ministerial discount of 25 percent. The council was pleased and began to broadcast services live from various churches. Jack did not tell them the archdiocese got its time free. He did tell the suffragan it would be wise to keep their little secret.

With the settlement of the Johann Lehrer estate, Jack had another half million dollars to invest. He invested in two things. First, he applied for an amendment to the station license for WCHS, to authorize an increase in power that would make it one of the most powerful stations in New England. When he got the authority he bought the new transmitter. Next, he bought radio station WHPL in White Plains, New York.

As he'd done with the Hartford station, he made the White Plains station an outlet for the programming he developed for WCHS. With the two new stations, the piano playing of Wash Oliver was heard throughout New England and now in New York City, where it gained a devoted audience. Jack hired Oliver away from the whorehouse and made him a full-time musician for Lear Broadcasting. They recruited backup men: a guitar and drums, then also a banjo; and the Lear Broadcasting Quartet, starring Wash Oliver, played in roadhouses and dance pavilions all over New England. People came to hear the famous jazz pianist they had heard on the radio.

Similarly, housewives all over the region became addicted
to the dramatic doings and soapy optimism of
Our Little Family
When the original Mama had to be replaced, the change was made so seamlessly that audiences seemed not to notice that a new actress was reading lines like “A family's love overcomes everything.”

Regretting that he had renamed the Bronson Brothers the Mellow Fellows, Jack changed their names again, to the Minstrels. He dropped the Wisecrack Guys and built a new show around Betty, the malaprop comedienne, and the Minstrels. A professional staff supported Betty and fed her straight lines for her malaprops.

Some of Betty's lines—and she was still called simply Betty; no last name was ever suggested for her—became catchwords even beyond the area where she was heard. She pronounced the word breakfast “brake-fast,” pronouncing it to reflect what it meant, breaking the overnight fast before starting the day's labors. Shortly, people all over New England, young people especially, were laughing and saying they wanted ham and “aigs” for “brake-fast.”

Kimberly couldn't bear to listen. Jack couldn't either, but
The Betty and the Minstrels Show
was a moneymaker. Shortly it became
The Best Beauty Bar Show, Starring Betty and the Minstrels.

Betty, however, was the subject of a dark secret: she was a Negro. From Huntington, West Virginia, she spoke with the accent of the Ohio Valley, naturally, saying “feesh” for fish and “deesh” for dish. Nothing in her accent suggested her race. Her show was broadcast and recorded from a closed studio. Even the Minstrels had never seen their star. A white actress was employed to slip in and out of the studio, and Betty came and went in the uniform of a maid.

Jack was immensely sympathetic to Betty's situation, but there was nothing he could do. Amos'n Andy were successful as whites who pretended to be black, but America was not ready to listen to Negro comics.

Kimberly knew. She invited Betty and her husband Charles to dinner at the house on Louisburg Square. Betty's real name was Carolyn Blossom. Both she and her husband were the grandchildren of slaves. In the early 1920s they had come to Boston, thinking that the home of abolitionism could not be racist. They found it was.

Carolyn had made her way into radio by cutting records and submitting them by mail. A dozen times she had met broadcasters who were enthusiastic about her comedic talent—until they saw her. The maid uniforms she wore to slip in and out of WCHS were her own; she had worked in them for years.

Jack took the attitude that the money was more important than the principle. “Let's make a pisspot full of dough, kiddo,” he said to Carolyn. “When your bank account's healthy, then's the time to make a point.”

I
N
J
UNE,
J
ACK WENT TO
W
HITE
P
LAINS TO REVIEW THE PRO
gramming and management of WHPL. Since it was summertime, he had his chauffeur drive him there in the Duesenberg. It was something of an adventure, making their way down U.S. 1, the Boston Post Road, through Providence, New Haven, and the shoreline towns of the Connecticut Gold Coast.

Since he would be gone four days, Jack decided to take along a pleasant companion—the comely blond divorcée, Betsy Emerson.

A thick glass separated the driver's compartment from the passenger compartment, and during most of the trip Jack kept the blind lowered, so the chauffeur could neither see nor hear him and Betsy in the rear seat.

This made it possible for Jack to keep Betsy's skirt pulled up to the edge of her panties and to fondle her legs. The privacy made it possible, too, for her to fondle his crotch. They talked about many things, most of them funny, but after their lunch stop Betsy turned thoughtful.

“I thought about saying no to this invitation,” she said soberly without lifting her hand from the stiff cock she was stroking through the fabric of his pants.

“I can think of one or two reasons why you might have said no. Which one bothered you?”

She brushed his cheek with a light kiss. “Kimberly. What we're doing to Kimberly.”

Jack slipped his fingers inside her panties and ran them over her cunt. She was wet. “I thought seriously about not inviting you,” he said. “For the same reason.”

“And?”

He pulled his hand out of Betsy's panties. “What am I doing to Kimberly? Doesn't there come a time when I'm entitled to ask what's she doing to
me?”

“And that's why you—”

“No, that's not why I invited you, not why I arrange to be with you whenever I can. I'm not
using
you, Betsy. I need you. I need to be close to a woman who doesn't think I'm . . . Well, doesn't think I'm . . . You know what I mean.”

She ran her hand down his cheek and across his neck. “Is it that bad?”

“What do you think? You've seen . . .”

Betsy nodded emphatically. “I've seen. And heard. And it pisses me off!”

“It's worse when you can't see and hear. It's worse in private. I'm not a Wolcott. I'm not a Bayard. I'm the grandson of Johann Lehrer, who was a rabbi. Harrison Wolcott accepts that and doesn't scorn it. But Kimberly—”

Betsy interrupted. “The other evening she said to Connie and me that she guessed she never would be able to teach you to fold your pocket handkerchief right. ‘He's got a certain capacity for the crude,' she said. ‘No matter how hard I try, I can't entirely civilize him.' Connie agrees with me that she ought to be proud of you. You ought to fuck Connie, too. If Kimberly found out you were diddling both of us, that'd get to her.”

“Why did she marry me, Bets?”

“I can think of two reasons. In the first place, Kimberly was always obsessed with the idea that some guy would marry her for her money—her father's money. When you came along, she knew she didn't have to worry about that, because you had money of your own. She even knew how much, Jack. At least she said she did. She told me you had half a million, all your own, plus more coming.”

“She talked about that, huh?”

“But there's another reason, I think, why she married you. I don't know when she first got a look at, a feel of, the Jack Lear schlong; but I have to suspect it was before the wedding. I mean, Jack, she wasn't a virgin. You didn't think she was, did you?”

He shook his head.

“She used to talk about sex. Girls talk about those things, but she talked about it more frankly than most. She said she wanted a peter that would go all the way up to her belly button.”

“Well, she's got it,” he said bitterly. “That's the one way I satisfy her.”

“Jack. Why don't you get out of it?”

“Same reason as everybody else that's stuck with—I . . . Bets, I thought it was the
perfect
marriage. Kimberly's beautiful. She's smart. She's chic. Maybe a Jew from California did think he would move high in the world if he married Kimberly Bayard Wolcott. And, Christ—you should forgive the expression—I thought I was the cat who swallowed the canary. Trouble is, that's how she thinks of herself, too.”

“I'm
divorced, Jack.”

“Yeah. But I've got two kids. Old, old story, no? People shouldn't have children until they've been married five years.”

T
HEY HAD A ROOM, NOT A SUITE, IN A HOTEL IN
W
HITE
Plains. It had a radio speaker above the door, and the radio was tuned to the station the hotel management had chosen. The first time Betsy switched it on, it blared in a crackly tone:

Where, oh, where

Has my little dog gone?

Where, oh, where can he be?

With his tail cut short and his ears cut long,

Oh, where, oh, where can he be?

Jack called the front desk and ordered a radio brought up. They said they didn't have one, and he told them to go out and buy a radio and charge it to his bill. Within an hour the radio was in place.

For a while before they went down to dinner, Jack and Betsy listened to WHPL. Then, while he took a bath, she tried some other stations, wanting to hear what might be coming in from New York City. When Jack came out of the bathroom, she was listening to a newscast from New York.

Jack frowned. Then his attention was caught by the measured cadence and mellifluous voice of a newscaster.

“Mr. Anthony Eden . . . British minister for League of Nations Affairs . . . arrived in Rome today for a series of meetings with Signor Mussolini. They are expected to confer at length on the situation in . . . Ethiopia. It is well known that Signor Mussolini hopes to add the Kingdom of Ethiopia to the Italian empire he wishes to build in Africa.

“Meanwhile, in Washington, President Roosevelt renewed his plea to Congress to move more quickly to pass the Social Security Bill. Calling it the most important legislation before Congress in this decade, he—”

“My God, listen to the man!” Jack exclaimed. “Who is he?”

They had to wait through the rest of the broadcast and through its commercials before they finally heard the newscaster say, “This has been Curtis . . . Frederick, reporting from New York. Good . . . night.”