Kathy Little Bird (19 page)

I
WAS
Cree dreaming again, a habit that had kept me going these last twelve years.

Having breakfast in Central Park and dreaming…Had I been hasty in not accepting Mac’s proposal of marriage? He would provide what they call “a stable home.” A home I could bring a teenager to. Or perhaps, watching the riders come by on beautifully groomed horses, bobbing up and down in elegant English style, holding the reins with careless wrist…perhaps I could do it without Mac, do it on my own.

Mac thought I wanted to live at the Beresford because of its address, because of its three towers, and because it was supersharp and meant I had arrived. No, I wanted it for Kathy because it looked out over the park and I could picture her riding on this bridle path, or sitting with me in this
little outdoor cafe I’d found. I’d be studying my music, and she’d be doing homework—she was in high school now—studying algebra? Or maybe poetry? We were comfortable together, we could talk or not talk, the way it is with a friend.

This was the day of the evening of the Carson show. Johnny Carson was in New York to oblige a big star who was promoting the opening of his current blockbuster. That was the chance Mac had been waiting for. He shoehorned me in.

Rehearsal was called for two o’clock. I thought it would relax me to sit here, have a latte and bagel, and enjoy the sun.

A nearby clock struck two. But that was wrong; it was only one. I looked at my watch to verify this, then shook it. The watch had stopped.

Already on my feet, I threw money on the table as I ran. Rehearsal for the biggest step in my career and I was sitting in Central Park munching a bagel.

Mac was gearing up for success. Autographed glossies were piled on his desk, and he’d hired someone to answer the anticipated ton of fan mail. He’d worked out a standard reply, customizing it to fit the age and sex of the writer. In it I thanked all those who had helped me—especially Johnny Carson, who had plucked me out of nowhere. We didn’t mention the arm twisting of the show’s producers, the lunches with agents hinting at a double commission, and a promised kickback to one of the expediters. Probably more went into it that I didn’t know about. And here I was about to blow it.

I ran till my side hurt and hailed a cab. It didn’t stop. I practically stepped in front of another. “It’s an emergency,” I
shouted, “Can you take me to Fifty-sixth and Avenue of the Americas?”

I climbed in beside the driver, a very surprised young man. I sized him up as being impoverished. The hack was on its last legs, but I didn’t care as long as it got us there. He told me his name was Freddy, and that he was only driving a cab until he could find something better.

“It’s your lucky day,” I said. “You can work for me, if you get me there before my number. But you’ve got to hurry.”

He’d never heard of me, but was galvanized by the name Johnny Carson.

“I’m just starting out, when it comes to a national show like this, so I can’t pay much.”

That was all right with him. His career behind the wheel had so far netted him two deadbeat fares and one mugging. He was delighted at the thought of chucking it.

While he’d never heard of me, he remembered my single, “I Thought It Couldn’t Happen to Me,” and when I told him that was me singing, he didn’t believe it. I took Freddy into the studio with me and, in the break, talked to Mac, who took him on as a gofer. His first job was to find the coffee machine.

It turned out I hadn’t held anything up. They were fixing some glitch in the lighting equipment.

That night I psyched myself up, saying, “Just do what you’ve been doing for years—sing!” The difference was, there were forty million people in the audience. And a latte in the park, even hiring my cabdriver, plus a session with makeup fussing over me, didn’t fill the chinks completely. It only took
an instant for panic to mount, my throat to tighten, and the song to get stuck. I battled this attack of nerves with vocal exercises and deep singer’s breaths, walked out on stage, and sang.

I was a hit; the anticipated fan mail arrived, along with dozens of offers. I let Mac sort it out and we settled into the Gotham. The Beresford condo was out of my league; I’d need a long-term contract or my own show to afford that.

All sorts of people entered my life. Al Lennox was hired to arrange and facilitate. Everything mechanical was coordinated by him. He leased a van, which he drove on short hops, and hired a cab to hang around in front of the hotel when we were in town. He booked flights when it was necessary, and battled desk clerks and headwaiters for the sheer joy of it. Wrestling luggage was beneath him; he employed local talent for that.

Anabel Trimble was suggested by MCA and brought on board as my handler, responsible for clothes, shade of hair, color of nails, deodorant, and moisturizer. She had the final say on how I appeared on stage, TV, or album covers.

Mac, of course, ran the whole show. This was what he called “making it.” He no longer thought of himself as a manager but as an impresario. His contracts became famous for their escalation clauses.

I almost forgot Freddy. As a mark of special esteem he was assigned my guitar, which he carried in a reinforced case. Mac wanted to get me a decent guitar, as he put it. They didn’t know that Mum travelled with me in that old beat-up instrument.

My press agent, Danny, planted a story about how the guitar and I had grown up together. We insured it with Lloyds of London for three million dollars, and got a squib in
Variety.
The guitar got a new bass E string out of it. What do you think of your guitar now, Mum? It was half prayer, half mantra, because I didn’t dare ask what she thought of me. There wasn’t much left of the Kathy she’d taught me to be.

I’d brought up ethnic several times over the years, but Mac acted as though I hadn’t any idea how I sounded or what was best for me to sing.

Last time he didn’t reply verbally, but waved a check for a thousand dollars under my nose. In short—you don’t meddle with success.

There was no dearth of songwriters now. Lyricists and composers flocked around, pushing songs and special material. The agency people working on my new album wanted me to do a little patter between numbers, “project personality,” in the hope Hollywood might beckon. I turned down the idea. They had an all-day conference, sending out for sandwiches and beer, but I wouldn’t change my mind. They picked apart every syllable I sang, croaking out melodies in whiskey voices to second-guess possible movie moguls. A dozen Svengalis pulled my strings. I capitulated.

Once in a while their choice of material was good; mostly it was bad. It wasn’t that they didn’t know their business. It was the committee system. A committee always plays it safe. They opt for the standard stuff. So the new, the daring, the controversial, the interesting, gets passed up.

The audience I wanted to sing to were young people, who
were falling in love or falling out of it, who were alone and lonely, or in a crowd and lonely. They wanted excitement, passion, they wanted to laugh and cry and make things happen. And my singing had to give that to them.

The material I was getting didn’t.

I
BROACHED
the problem from a different angle. I suggested that I do some songwriting, thinking maybe I could slip in just a suggestion of Cree music in the tonalities and syncopation. Mac cut me off: “We have a sweet setup.” He ended with the admonition about rocking the boat. So I shut up. But that didn’t mean I stopped thinking about it. I bought a music notebook, and delved seriously into Cree music from the old days and played what I remembered by ear, concentrating on the Wind Song. Like many Cree themes, it was about being lonely and talking to the trees and hearing them answer, talking to water currents and listening to their murmured reply. The original ended on a low G; I took it up an octave.

I wished I knew how to get it down on paper. I hungered to know not just the melody line but the orchestration.

Words came second. All my life I have been happier without the words. No matter how clever, they didn’t seem to add to the music. The emotion was in the notes, the longing. The sorrow, the joy, the bitterness, hold a depth and subtlety words can never express.

Jim Gentle came by and looked over my shoulder. I was
embarrassed and tried to shield my elementary effort with my arm. Of course, the notation gave me away.

“Let’s see what you’ve got there.” He lifted the pad from my lap.

“I was just fooling around,” I said defensively.

“Come over to the piano, and I’ll show you some interesting chord progressions.”

I followed Jim across the rehearsal room. He’d only been with us a couple of weeks. He was a special-material writer: lyrics, patter, jokes, intros. He really dug music and could pinch-hit for any instrument in the band. He’d sold stuff to Bob Dylan, but the rumor was they had a fight over politics. Mac thought he was good and was buying from him pretty consistently.

Jim was a big guy, six foot four or five, and Mac called him the Gentle Giant, a switch on the Jolly Green Giant. Although I thought of him more as a fairy-tale giant. Anyway, the name took. Everybody liked him. I did too. I had the feeling he didn’t belong in a rehearsal hall. He didn’t belong indoors at all. I kept seeing him against the high prairie background I’d grown up in. His gestures were broad and large as he was. He was always running into things, tripping over extension cords, knocking into music stands. “They made the world a size too small for you, Jim,” Mac kept telling him.

As I followed him to the piano, I couldn’t help turning him into music. He was an easy person to sing; just go up the scale, pause on the leading tone, and hit the tonic with all you had, honest and clear. I thought I was doing this in
my mind, but humming must have escaped me, for he turned around and looked down on me with a quirky smile.

He made me sit beside him at the piano and took me through the basics, beginning with the diatonic scale. He showed me the two-three pattern of black keys on the piano that helps locate the octaves. “The whole idea behind harmony is that the harmonics are hidden in the original note, so if I sing an octave above you, my sound sounds inside your sound. The octave is the first overtone. The next is the twelfth, after that the double octave, and then the third above that. All these harmonics are inside the original note, but in different mixes. That’s what timbre is. For instance, the way a sax mixes the harmonics is different from how the fiddle does it.”

For the first time I had a glimpse of what was happening when music took hold of me. It was like my soul was pouring out through all these notes and their combinations. No wonder I liked it better without words. Pure sound is pure emotion. Octaves,
cool.
Twelfths and fifths,
lonely.
Thirds and sixths,
sexy.
Seconds,
trouble.
Sevenths,
freaked out.
Ninths and elevenths,
fury.
Diminished sevenths,
tears.
The unison,
death.

Jim played “Three Blind Mice” in octaves, then thirds, then triads, and finally chords with added sixths and chromatic changes. I leaned across him, trying to imitate the pattern of his fingers on the ivories. I definitely liked this big gentle man, and I forgot to be self-conscious about my lack of formal musical training.

“With your sense of musicianship you’ll make huge strides,” he told me. Fifteen minutes and eight bars later he stood up. “Well, I’m off to jail.”

“What?”

“Just visiting.”

“Who?”

“Nobody in particular. I pick a little guitar, try some of my vocals out. The guys seem to like it, you know, it’s contact with the outside.”

I was intrigued. “But why do you do it?”

“I’ll tell you about it sometime. Right now I’m late.”

During the mixing when I had a breather I asked Freddy about him. “Jim Gentle? Stay away from him. Don’t be fooled by his name, he’s trouble.”

“What do you mean, trouble?”

“He hangs with the wrong crowd.” Before he could clarify this, Fitzpatrick was calling, “From the top,” and I was up again.

But when I like somebody, my antenna is out, and I knew the minute I came on the soundstage whether or not Jim was sitting in on the rehearsal.

Several days later there he was again. I went up to him at the coffee machine, and without a word he dropped change in for another cup and handed it to me. We gravitated to a quiet corner and picked up where we’d left off. “About prisoners…,” he said, “I don’t place special emphasis on them. It’s wherever there’s a need, that’s where music should be.”

I frowned slightly, trying to understand.

“When the war was being protested back in the sixties, when they raised money for Montgomery, Selma, the civil rights movement. Wherever people struggle,” he reiterated, “that’s where music should be.”

“That isn’t music, that’s politics. What has music to do with it?”

He looked at me in surprise. “You ask that? You? Music unifies, it gives courage. The Christians sang when they faced the lions. War protesters sang when fire hoses were turned on them. Prisoners sing to forget they’re caged.”