The Dakota Winters, page 16
“Okay, ready?” Buddy said, setting the magazine aside.
I nodded, and closed my incredibly good book, The Day of the Locust, which Buddy bought me for this L.A. trip. Books, he believed, should be your second consciousness when you traveled.
“They lived in separate cities. So there must have been a little long-distance pillow talk.”
“A given,” I said.
“The headmistress calls the good doctor at midnight,” he said in a bodice-ripper voice.
“Cue the music, a little Barry White.”
“The doctor is in bed above the covers in his blue-tartan pajamas drinking sherry and watching Columbo. He mutes the sound, and after a few pleasantries the headmistress asks for the good stuff and the doctor as always obliges. ‘Lobster à la Nage with asparagus . . . ,’ he says lustily. ‘Hmmmm, yes,’ she coos in response, ‘you nasty crustacean you.’”
The two men in front of us and the couple behind stopped their conversations to listen.
“‘One cup cooked lobster meat,’ the doctor whispers, ‘one half cup chicken broth brought to a boil, add a quarter cup chopped parsley mixed with a tablespoon of dry dill . . .’ The headmistress begins moaning, so the doctor skips to the side dish. ‘Season your asparagus with lemon juice instead of butter and cut 300 calories just like that,’ he says, which drives her wild, her breathing growing louder, until she moans, ‘What about olives?’ and he answers, ‘No more than four small ones or three jumbo ones of any type, but otherwise, yes, Yes, YES!’”
The men in front of us were folded over laughing, and the couple behind us had big smiles.
Buddy waited for my response.
“Not bad,” I said, “now keep going. You’ve got three hours before we land.”
Buddy liked to say he got high writing jokes, that when the signals were strong they poured in from everywhere, hot and cold running jokes. And for years he could get there most times he wanted.
He appeared, as he sat next to me then, buzzed again in his own brain. His pen darted up and back across the page. Then he’d look over what he’d written and chuckle before moving on. I read from a stack of manila folders with articles about and preliminary interviews with the guests for the week.
AFTER BUDDY IMPLODED, HE AND JOHNNY NEVER SPOKE ABOUT IT. I think in some sense Johnny, who gave Buddy his big break, took his quitting as a personal betrayal; that and I don’t think he understood anyone so habitually poised doing something so strange.
When The Tonight Show filmed in New York, they talked daily by phone and played tennis once a week at the Vanderbilt Club before grabbing lunch. At night Buddy occasionally met up with Johnny’s posse at Toots Shor’s or the 21 Club, mostly preferring to head home to be with my mother. By contrast, Johnny’s marital struggles were tabloid fodder.
Johnny once broke in to a secret apartment his second wife, Joanne, kept for an affair, his agent Henry told Buddy, and found along with men’s clothing and some unfamiliar lingerie framed photos of his wife with ex–New York Giants receiver and Monday Night Football announcer Frank Gifford.
“Brutal,” Buddy said, when he told me about it. “Johnny was supposed to steal the girl from the football star, and he got the script backward.”
Buddy joked that my mother’s acceptance of his marriage proposal was a youthful mistake, like a misspelled tattoo.
“In the morning,” he said once in his monologue, “she saw that ring on her finger and screamed, ‘Hell’s bells, what in the world was in those drinks last night?’”
They got engaged at a party on a barge on the East River, and they had indeed been buzzed on champagne and negronis. My mother escaped from the dance floor to get some air and Buddy followed after her. There was no one else out there but the moon, he said, and the strains of Billy Eckstine from the barge dance floor. My father had been carrying the ring for two weeks waiting for the right moment, and now he dropped to one knee, and then to his surprise my mother did too. She’d sensed he’d soon propose and had the idea that they both should, one after the other. They were teary-eyed and blissful after and floated back into the party and ordered new champagnes.
The observant bartender asked them, “Did something just happen out there?”
“You’re the first to know,” Buddy said.
“May I see the ring?” the bartender asked.
My mother showed him.
“Truth is, he’s pregnant,” my mother said.
“Knocked me up a month ago,” my father supposedly said.
“Thought it was time to make him an honest man.”
“Pregnancy makes a man beautiful,” the bartender said.
And Buddy curtsied.
BUDDY SLEPT FITFULLY BEFORE HIS FIRST SHOW BACK. HIS MIND RAN through failure scenarios: that his brain would go blank, his eye twitch, or he’d break into a sweat.
He had a dream in which he started speaking and gibberish came out.
“Martian,” I said. “An untapped audience.”
“They’ll complain my jokes are too earthy.”
Rather than smile, he seemed to believe it, that anything he did would be panned.
“It’s what you do,” I said. “You’re paid to be you.”
“I just have to figure out who that is.”
Aw fuck, I thought. Be strong, for chrissakes. I thought of Rachel’s line: Parents are meant to be fixed objects, not abstract paintings.
On one of our walks a week back, Buddy told me he couldn’t be himself without me, as though I’d become the custodian of his charisma and wit. By recalling his best self, I could feed him aspects of it so that he could return to form. I needed to be him to help him, he believed, and it had me recalling why it was I’d wanted to leave New York and hide out for a while. I forgot this on the good days when we were simply knocking around together.
“You’re Buddy Winter,” I said, impatiently.
When you’re a kid, it’s a defining experience to see your father nightly on TV, especially if he plays himself. It always looked like he’d invited friends over to a second apartment where he entertained, and for some reason the world watched. I imagined other rooms behind the stage, guest bedrooms and a game room with a Ping-Pong table and a kitchen where in the middle of the night guests met for hot chocolates or coffee, or a smoke, or a drink.
My dad was paid to be my dad, I thought, which seemed like an improbably good deal, better than being a doctor or a businessman, selling something you didn’t believe in. It seemed like an inexhaustible resource, not something you could lose.
“All right then,” he said. “Tell me what you know.”
And so I took him through the notes I’d put together on four nights of guests.
Buddy worried now about little things, how he looked, what he’d wear. He was two years older, after all. When he went on hiatus he was forty-seven; now he was almost fifty. Did it show? he asked.
“You look better now than the night you left,” I said, which certainly was true.
IN THE HOURS BEFORE SHOWTIME, HE WAS A BIT MANIC AND PORED OVER my suggestions like an honor student’s crib sheets for a final. I had sketched out the plan for each show, and each guest, in a notebook. And I gave him a few concepts to think about for his monologue. He spent an hour or two digesting it and practicing, and then we worked a while longer on the opening before he pronounced, “Done. I’m ready.”
We sent the monologue over to the production staff so they could write up the cue cards.
AND THEN JUST LIKE THAT, IT WAS TWO YEARS AGO.
Buddy slid into hosting The Tonight Show like a beloved dinner jacket that after years of neglect still fit. He stumbled on the first two jokes, but then he settled in. The subsequent jokes connected, and the interviews were lively and offbeat, signature Buddy.
The first night he had on Bob Newhart, and Alan Lomax, the ethnomusicologist, who’d chosen the music for an album sent off to space. He got Newhart talking about his time on the set of Catch-22, where he played Major Major, one of my favorite characters in a movie that no one saw. Sarah Sands came last. She starred in a show called Sunnyside Up, about a father and his midtwenties daughters who take over a diner on Venice Beach—one daughter is a bookish English major at UCLA, the other ditzy and naïve, played by Sands, who posed over the summer for Playboy and was the type of guest Johnny liked to book. As it happened, Sands was a reader, and a bit of an activist, and pretty funny. She did commendable imitations of Goldie Hawn and of Cher singing “Dark Lady.”
BUDDY WAS UP EARLY EACH DAY MEDITATING, LOOKING BEDRAGGLED and bohemian, and then he’d swim twenty or so laps, and we’d meet either on the poolside deck chairs or later at breakfast, like in the old days, and go over the lineup and whatever news items we needed to work into the monologue. The pool reminded me of being a kid when he’d headline the resorts in the Catskills, and we’d play sharks and minnows and Marco Polo until late at night when our lips were blue and our fingertips wrinkled like raisins.
The big story for the last week had been the president’s bungled rescue attempt in Iran, Operation Eagle Claw. The plan was straight out of a Hollywood script. Eight helicopters and six C-130 transport planes would fly into the eastern Iranian salt desert, where they’d refuel then fly to the mountains near Tehran to meet vehicles transported by American operatives. Delta Force soldiers would then storm the embassy, scale the walls, rescue the hostages, and fly them to Egypt or Western Europe.
It would be Raid on Entebbe II, the hostages would come home, American pride would be restored.
But it didn’t go that way. Two of the helicopters broke down en route, and a third malfunctioned during refueling. The president canceled the mission, and then on their way out of the desert, a helicopter and one of the transport planes collided in a ball of flame, killing eight men.
“Too much death to build a joke around,” I said.
He wrote down, “Don’t let President Carter plan your wedding.”
A story I’d pushed for and prevailed on was the father and son who came on the show the second night, the James and the Giant Peach Story, Buddy called it, a book he read a dozen times to us as kids.
The father, an impassioned hot air balloonist named Maxie Anderson, set out to be the first to cross North America, alongside his twenty-three-year-old son, Kristian. The story was harrowing and exciting, beginning when storms in the Rocky Mountains sent them spiraling north; later, at night in the Midwest, when the gas cooled they had to hurl weight off the side and empty oxygen tanks and batteries, to keep from descending too fast, and then in the day when the sun heated the helium, they rose like Icarus into air so thin—nearly the height of Everest—that they needed to wear oxygen masks and got so airsick they couldn’t eat for two full days.
The two of them took turns describing all this to Buddy, and then the son talked about them finally landing their tiny gondola of steel tubing in a forest just south of the St. Lawrence River.
“What did you do then?”
“We doused each other in champagne,” Kristian said.
I thought of me and Buddy up in the heavens, no one around but birds and a few planes. The sky ours, like a boat on an empty sea.
Katharine Hepburn graced the stage after the balloonists. This was the one Buddy was most excited and nervous about. She’d done Buddy’s show once before, and Buddy said it was hard to keep his thoughts straight he was so taken by her.
Remembering his great Misfits show, I told him to get her talking about The African Queen, which we’d seen at the Thalia a few weeks back. I had the sense she’d have a good story or two of her own about John Huston, and the challenge of filming on the Congo River.
I was right it turned out.
On the Tonight Show couch, she wore a dark blue turtleneck under a lighter blue shirt, and khakis, like she’d stepped out to the front porch after dinner with a cup of tea.
At its best, a talk show made you feel as though friends smarter, funnier, and better looking than you had decided to stop by for a nightcap. It wasn’t the illusion of company. It was company.
They’d given her a ghastly room on the first floor of the hotel in Stanleyville, she said, and the Bogarts a lovely suite with a balcony. She complained to the manager. Eventually Hepburn moved John Huston’s accountant and his wife’s bags from the suite next to the Bogarts and moved herself in.
“Not very sporting of you. How did they take it?” Buddy said.
“They were lovely, and so I felt guilty, but not enough to give them their suite back.”
Ed McMahon laughed heartily, Buddy too.
She described Stanleyville then in glorious detail, the curving river surrounded by jungle scrub and palm trees, the barges and tugs and native canoes cut out of a single tree, called pirogues, which carried bananas, timber, and bricks.
“The water was spectacular,” she said.
“You mean the river?”
“No, the water that comes from your pipes. It’s like honey. Most water when it comes from the tap dries on you, or peels the skin off as you scrub away dirt. Not in the Congo. You can’t drink it, mind you. But on your skin it’s sheer heaven, angel’s fingers stroking you.”
“But you can’t drink it.”
“It’s poison.”
They talked about how Huston pushed his actors to their breaking point, Buddy recalling Clark Gable and the wild horses in the desert heat, Hepburn with several stories of her own.
“He’s a bit of a sadist, isn’t he. Did you see that side of him?”
She straightened in her seat, then nodded.
“There’s a scene at the start of the movie where my character’s brother, Reverend Sayer, dies. John prepared me by telling me to do ‘whatever comes into your head’ when he dies, and so I wandered and I stood and I wept. I tricked myself into grief, I went on and on long after the scene should have ended, and I began to think, Is this old bastard ever going to cut? And then they were all laughing,” she said, and she was enraged remembering this. “A practical joke on poor old Katie. Now is that funny?”
“No,” Buddy said. “It’s like no one ringing the bell at round’s end in a prizefight, and the boxers are pounding each other’s skulls waiting for it to sound.”
Her face broke then into a smile.
“Only I was both of the boxers.”
I thought of the pricks from the networks, including two who worked for NBC, and then the ones who wouldn’t even meet with us. What happened when they turned on The Tonight Show and saw this? They’d gag on their vodka gimlets.
I got a call later that night from Elliot.
“You’re not with him, are you.”
“No, they splurged and gave us separate rooms.”
“How’s it going?”
“Well, I think,” I said.
“I’d say so. I think it’s gone extremely well. Katharine Hepburn. Everyone’s going to be talking about that interview.”
“Really?”
“Going particular, so it’s not the whole career, it’s a few sweaty weeks in the African bush with a crazy genius. That’s the beauty of your dad. And the Andersons and their balloon? What a story, and I loved how Buddy teased every frightening detail out of them. I half thought they were going to die before the segment was over.”
IN THE DAY OF THE LOCUST, FAYE, THE UNSCRUPULOUS STARLET, DESCRIBES assembling stories in her head like a pack of cards from which to choose an identity, which had me, when I went out in Hollywood the following night, seeing the lost souls around us—the punks, the rockers, and the gigolos, the platinum blonde Deborah Harrys, the pasty Joey Ramones, the cross-dressing David Bowies—as cards plucked carelessly from a deck. I was out with a friend from college, Will, who had been a surfer in high school, and was now reading scripts for a famous director and trying to peddle his own.
We went to the bars John Lennon went to when he lived out here with May Pang, the Roxy, the Whiskey, and the Troubadour, where he went bananas and yelled at the Smothers Brothers and punched a bodyguard.
“Everyone here wants to be looked at,” I said.
“Worshipped,” Will said. “You know that quote from Warhol, ‘In L.A. everybody’s beautiful. They’re plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.’”
“You agree with that?”
“Fuck no. I hate it here. It’s just a good place to work. And the girls are hotter.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I know so. It’s insane here. My dick needs a vacation.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
It was around 80 degrees at ten at night. A shirtless green-haired guy on the corner was swallowing fire.
“What’s it like having your dad back on TV?”
“It’s great. Feels in some way like he never left and in other ways like all that was a long time ago.”
“Right off it seemed like it was his show, like Johnny didn’t exist. You know?”
In the Troubadour we sat in a booth drinking gin and tonics, talking about L.A. and New York. The difference, Will said, was that L.A. was more oriented around youth, and New York around older rich people. The older rich people in L.A. didn’t go out to clubs, they stayed home and fucked each other’s wives.
“He should do his new show out here.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because everything’s happening out here. The music scene’s better, the film world’s close by, and the comedy clubs are insane. Much better than New York. It’s younger, cooler. And it’s perfect for you guys.”
As we spoke three girls were clearly checking out Will and he motioned over one of them, a girl with pale blue eyes with permed black hair and a T-shirt that said Die Young Stay Pretty.
“You look so familiar,” she said. “Who are you?”
“Did you see the movie Breaking Away?”
“Of course,” she said.
“I was one of the frat brothers of the guy who loses the race at the end.”
“That’s so cool,” she said. Her name was Linay, and she sold men’s suits at a store in Beverly Hills.
“I’ve been in other things too,” he said.
