Tycoon (13 page)

“My God! I don't know these people. Except that they exist, I know nothing about them. But . . . of course there was nothing I could have done about it, even if I had known. There's nothing I can do now, about the ones who were arrested. Is there?”

Solomon Weisman shook his head. “There is nothing you can do about it. Except . . . except this, which is why I asked to meet with you. The more prominent Jewish businessmen affiliate with B'nai B'rith, the more effective we can be. All we can do now is try to make the world know what is going on in Germany, and seek help. You and your radio stations could do a lot. You've already done something by broadcasting the Hitler speech. You can do more.”

Jack wrapped his hands around his glass of Scotch and stared into it for a long moment. “Mr. Weisman,” he said quietly, “I have never denied I am a Jew. I am sympathetic with your cause—”

“Our
cause.”

Jack hesitated briefly, then nodded. “All right,
our
cause. I think I can do more to help it if I am not publicly identified with it.”

“You don't want to be known as a Jew.”

“I don't want to advertise that I am a Jew.”

Weisman nodded. “I understand. Many feel that way. It has always been so.”

Jack stared into Weisman's eyes. “If the Nazis had understood
that Lear Broadcasting is Jewish-owned, they would never have consented to our broadcasting one of Hitler's harangues.”

“I suppose you have a point.”

“I may find other opportunities to inform the American public of what is going on in Germany. In fact, you can bring information to my attention. But even in this country, if my company is identified as a Jewish broadcasting company, what we put on the air will be less effective.”

“The
New York Times
is known as a Jewish newspaper but nonetheless is quite effective.”

“Not everywhere,” said Jack. “In some parts of the country it is suspect.”

“Well . . . I believe my effort to recruit a member has been rejected.”

“Let's not put it so harshly. You put me on a hell of a spot. I'm serious when I tell you I'll broadcast information about Nazi persecutions. You hand me facts, and I'll broadcast those facts. Hand them to the other stations, too, and we'll see who uses more of them. Also, when I go back to my office I'll send you a check for a thousand dollars. I'll give B'nai B'rith at least a thousand a year from now on.”

“That's generous,” Weisman conceded. “I think we understand each other. You even arranged to meet me where none of your friends or associates would see us together. Didn't you?”

Jack flushed. “I . . . I wish I could deny it,” he said. “I'm deeply embarrassed. No. Make that ‘ashamed.' That's what I am: ashamed.”

“So,” said Solomon Weisman. “We really don't have to have lunch. If you can do more for us by not being identified with us, so be it.”

“Identification would be counterproductive,” Jack said quietly.

J
ACK FOUND IT DIFFICULT TO CARRY ON HIS LOVE AFFAIR WITH
Connie Horan. She could not—or would not—arrange to see him more than once a month or so. Because she was practicing the rhythm method in hope of avoiding conception, she could see him only on those days when she was infertile—or so she hoped. She knew for a certainty that rubbers were sinful. When he offered to slip one on to be sure she would not conceive, she recoiled in horror.

“I've really fought with myself over this one,” she told him one afternoon as she ran her tongue from the back of his scrotum to the tip of his cock. “I can't—I can't ask anyone for advice. Do you know what sophistry is? I've reached a conclusion that it's not a sin for me to lick you, so long as I don't take you inside my mouth. I mean, licking is affection, but—”

“Okay, baby. Okay.”

He understood by now that she was willing to lick him for up to an hour at a time, running her tongue also over his belly and hips and even his backside. Unless he misunderstood her sighs and murmuring, she had developed a fondness for it. She would lick until her mouth became dry, when she would moisten it by sipping tomato juice laced with gin. This she could do at any time of month, and after a while she came to prefer it over letting him enter her and risking pregnancy.

“We're not risking pregnancy, and we're not doing anything to prevent it, either,” she explained.

He decided to let her lick and not to point out the weaknesses in her rationalization. He was afraid that if she thought any more carefully about what they were doing, she might reach conclusions he would deplore.

“Connie honey, if I washed the old backside thoroughly with soap and water, would you run your tongue in there?”

“Well, I suppose I could try it. If it doesn't gag me. I do want to show you how much I care for you.”

When he returned from the bathroom, she took a big sip of tomato juice and gin. Tentatively at first, she experimented with running her tongue into the crack of his anus. He grunted. The sensations were exquisite but short of orgasmic.

“So . . .” she muttered. “Well—”

She pressed her face hard against his backside and ran her tongue as far as she could make it reach.

“Ohh . . .
baby!”

Connie pulled back and laughed. “You like, hmm. Okay. We can do
this
anytime you want.”

Jack realized he had a serious problem on his hands. He had begun to care for Connie Horan.

K
IMBERLY, AT THIRTY-ONE, WAS IF ANYTHING MORE ARDENT
than ever. Having decided, though, that two children were enough, she announced her intention to undergo a tubal ligation. Jack expressed his unhappiness with the plan, but she said it was her choice to make. She made it, and the surgery was performed in the autumn.

Maybe relief from her anxiety about getting pregnant released new energy and imagination in Kimberly. She began to suggest to Jack that they become more adventuresome and conduct experiments in eroticism.

She kept a small library in the sitting room off their bedroom, where her books would not be seen by guests. For the first six years of their marriage Jack had paid little attention to the books she kept there. But, after her operation, when Kimberly told him that these books had whetted her appetite for sexual experimentation, Jack took a look at them. Somehow she had managed to import from France the forbidden Henry Miller novel,
Tropic of Cancer.
It had to have arrived hidden in
someone's luggage; otherwise it would have been seized by Customs. Next there appeared on her shelves a scandalous eighteenth-century novel called
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
—the notorious
Fanny Hill
—by John Cleland, first published in 1749. Then appeared a multivolume erotic autobiography, published in the nineteenth century, called
My Secret Life.
Jack was astonished to learn that his wife was reading these books; and of course he read them himself, to find out what was in them.

Then came something more interesting and influential—the
Kama Sutra,
a Hindu sex manual that described the pleasures of activities Jack would never have imagined could be pleasurable, such as biting and scratching.

One evening early in December Kimberly invited him to go to bed early. She switched on the bedside lamps and sprinkled cologne on the sheets. It was apparent that she had no intention of going to sleep. Their lovemaking was nothing unusual at first; then suddenly it turned extremely unusual. He was straddling her, and she had wrapped her legs around his back—one of her favorite positions. With her eyes wide open, she stared at his face. He reached his orgasm. As the first violent paroxysm shot his fluid into her, she ran her fingernails down his back, scratching him painfully. As long as his spasms continued, she scratched him. He knew she was drawing blood. He might have protested. But he couldn't. The pain on his back intensified the rapture in his loins. He experienced more spasms than he had ever experienced before. They exhausted him.

“Hmm, lover?” she whispered when he lay flat on top of her.

“God, Kimberly!”
he exclaimed as he rolled off.

“The greatest you ever had, wasn't it?”

“Yes, but—”

“I know. We can't do it again. If you'd known what was going to happen, you couldn't have come. But aren't you glad you had it that way once?”

He lifted himself to kiss her breast. He sat up and looked at the sheet under him. It was stained with his blood. She rubbed his back with alcohol. It stung terribly, but somehow even that was vaguely stimulating and caused him to regain his erection.

Three nights later when he was on top of her and thrusting, she opened her mouth wide and whispered, “Slap me!”

Before, he would not have done it, but now he knew she meant it, and he slapped her cheek.

“Harder, for Christ's sake!”

He slapped hard. Her head jerked under the impact.

“Again!
And keep it up till I tell you to stop.”

Her head snapped from side to side as he hit her with the palm of his hand, first on one cheek and then on the other. She began to writhe and squirm and moan. Then suddenly she reached up and drew him down on herself, pinning his arms so he could not slap anymore. Her eyes were brittle with elation.

In the bathroom a little later she spit blood. Her teeth had cut the insides of her cheeks. Outside they glowed pink.

When he woke in the morning she was already out of bed. He found her in the bathroom, carefully applying makeup to cover the red marks on her cheeks. Her lips were a little swollen, but like an artist, she used lipstick to disguise the gleaming swelling.

He drew a deep breath. “Well, don't expect me to say I'm sorry. You wanted it. Harder and more.”

Her words were a little slurred by her swollen lips. “I can take more than this. And you better be able to give it!”

1939

I
N
1939,
WHEN
J
ACK WAS THIRTY-THREE YEARS OLD,
K
IM
berly arranged for him to be photographed in his office. She attended the photography session to make certain Jack Lear appeared as she wanted him to appear: as a distinguished young businessman on the rise, self-confident and handsomely dressed in a handsome office.

She chose the suit he would wear, a dark gray with a faint white pinstripe, double-breasted but tailored with narrower lapels and softer shoulders than the typical double-breasted suit of 1939. In some of the shots he held a cigarette between two fingers, not in a holder, which he insisted was an affectation.

She had refurnished his office not long before, in anticipation of these photographs. The yellow-oak desk that had suited him for years was gone, replaced by an ornately carved mahogany desk. All of the usual clutter had been removed. Sitting on the gleaming mahogany desktop were an onyx pen-and-pencil stand, a deep marble ashtray, and a microphone bearing the letters WCHS. On a credenza behind his desk stood three gleaming trophies he had won at bridge. For some of the photographs he did not sit at his desk but stood in front of green velvet drapes. In a few of those shots he was holding an Old-Fashioned glass filled with ice and what looked like whiskey but was actually tea.

Kimberly chose one of the color prints submitted by the photographer and turned it over to a painter from Maine, who produced a portrait that she hung in the library of the house on Louisburg Square.

The painting did not flatter Jack. It looked exactly like him. He had given up on trying to comb his thinning hair to cover his widow's peaks; they were there, and he could only hope his hair would recede no further. His eyelids had developed a tendency to droop, giving him a sleepy-eyed look. His mouth in repose still settled into a natural smile, but he had developed a small second chin.

A caricature of him in
Fortune
magazine provided a more insightful likeness. It portrayed him smiling as if at some private joke, with sly, shrewdly appraising eyes.

The caption identified him as “Radio mini-tycoon, Bostonbased owner of seven radio stations.” The brief profile identified him as “the elder son of Erich Lear, a man who has hugely augmented the family fortune by buying and breaking up for scrap some of the world's finest old liners. Jack is apparently something of a chip off the old block. Owners of small East Coast radio stations hope he will not take notice of them, for what he covets he seems invariably to get.”

When Jack decided he wanted an outlet in Washington, he sent Mickey Sullivan to scout the ground. Sullivan reported that WDIS, a Negro-owned station that broadcast chiefly to the Negro population of the city, had borrowed heavily to upgrade its power and studio facilities and was having difficulty making payments on its notes. The owners took great pride in the station, and it was not for sale. But its notes were. Jack bought them for eighty cents on the dollar from the D.C. bank that had made the loans. Then he sued the station to collect. Within five months after he'd identified the station, it was his. He kept its management, for the most part, but drastically changed its programming.