Tycoon (23 page)

It is precisely because they have been so successful that the decision has now been made to discontinue them.

Within a few days you will receive from the War Department orders to disassemble your operation. That done, your orders will be to return to the United States, where you will be discharged from the armed forces.

I know you must be eager to return to civilian life, to your family, and to the management of your business, so your new orders will be good news to you.

Once again, my personal thanks for your sacrifice and service.

 

It was signed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

“I've dreaded this,” said Jack.

“Something else the war has done to us,” Anne said sadly. “And you know there's nothing we can do about it.”

“I dreaded having to go home and leave Cecily. And now . . .”

“We never had a chance, Jack. We deceived ourselves if we thought we did.”

“So what do we do now? The noble thing?”

“Name the alternative,” Anne murmured sadly.

He bent over and kissed her. “I'll be going home without one wonderful memory I had hoped to take.”

She sighed. “Not . . . necessarily, I suppose.” She glanced toward the bedroom door. “I am not unwilling to give you that memory. So . . . not necessarily.”

Jack shook his head decisively. “Necessarily,” he said.

S
EPTEMBER
1944

K
IMBERLY RAISED HER HEAD AND SMILED LAZILY AT
D
ODGE
Hallowell. He put his foot against her chin and gave her a gentle shove. She had no balance, no control of herself whatsoever, and fell over on her side. She was wearing two pairs of handcuffs, one pair attaching her right wrist to her left ankle, the other chaining her left wrist to her right ankle—behind her back. It bound her in a painful and awkward posture, and she had just struggled up on her knees when he shoved her and she toppled over.

“Don't kick me, you bastard!”

“That was no kick.”

“Okay. Kick me and let me see the difference.”

He stood up and gave her a sharp kick on the hip.
“Oww!”
she cried as she rolled over. The sole of his shoe left a smudge on her hip but not a bruise. “You
hurt
me, dammit!”

“I gave you what you said you wanted.”

“Well . . .”

“You want loose from those?”

“I want you to hook me up in front, so I can get my butt up in the air and you can give it to me doggie-style.”

He took a tiny key from his pocket and unlocked the handcuffs from her ankles. “Uh-oh,” he said. “Bruises. Jesus Christ! They'll be there when Jack gets back.”

“Put the cuffs on a little looser.”

“They don't
go
on looser around your ankles. They weren't made for ankles.”

“Well, I'll take care of Jack. But—Okay. Cuff me to the rafter.”

“Then what?”

“Then anything you want!”

As she stood with her hands fastened above her head, he took her from behind. She wailed in ecstasy.

After he let her down, he put both pairs of handcuffs in his briefcase, along with some lengths of chain and half a dozen little padlocks. On top of those he put two pairs of crotchless panties, a brassiere with holes cut to expose her nipples, and a strip set: a transparent bra and a G-string.

Kimberly sat nude on the couch and watched him sadly. “I don't intend to give up these times,” she said simply. “We just have to find someplace else.”

“I don't know where,” he said resignedly.

“Rent a place, for Christ's sake! Is it unheard of for a couple to have a love nest? We just can't have ours in the attic of this house anymore.”

“What would Jack do if he found out?” Dodge asked.

“What will I do if I find out what he's been doing in London the past two and a half years?”

T
HE NIGHT OF HIS HOMECOMING WAS ALL THAT
J
ACK COULD
have imagined. The family sat down to a dinner that Kimberly and Joan served, having sent the cook and maid home. Jack put the children's presents on the table. For John he had brought a set of authentic USAF identification models, painted black and made to aid American pilots in identifying German aircraft, an assortment of shoulder patches and other insignia from the USAF, the RAF, and the Luftwaffe, and an Iron Cross taken
from a shot-down German pilot. For Joan he had brought a gold bracelet hung with miniature medallions of the Victoria Cross and other British decorations, also a white silk scarf taken from a downed German fighter pilot.

The two children sipped champagne and later a distinguished Bordeaux that Kimberly had bought and saved for the homecoming dinner. They dined on caviar, then slices of roast beef with Yorkshire pudding.

The only sad note of the evening was sounded when John said, “Tell us about Cecily, Father.”

Jack glanced at Kimberly. He frowned and said, “All I can tell you is that what happened to Cecily happened instantly. She suffered no pain. One second she was alive, and the next second she was . . . gone. And there was nothing anyone could have done to prevent it. The same thing could have happened to me that afternoon.”

In their bedroom an hour later, Kimberly lit a cigarette—the first she had smoked in weeks—and said, “You may as well admit it. You loved Cecily. You had her, even when she worked here; and in London she became very, very convenient. But you're not the kind of man who humps women he doesn't care about. You cared about Cecily.”

Jack hung up the Savile Row suit he'd worn for dinner and turned to face Kimberly. “All right. I cared about her.”

“You
loved
her.”

He nodded.

“I'm prepared to forget it. Circumstances—”

“Fate took care of it, right?” he asked crisply.

“I
didn't suggest any such thing.”

“You didn't. That's right, you didn't. But I'm not going to kid you. I cried. I shed a lot of tears.”

“War . . .” said Kimberly. “What we have to do now is forget it. No, not forget it. But live with what it did to us.”

Jack gave Kimberly the presents he'd brought back for her: an emerald bracelet and a personally autographed photo of King George VI and the Queen.

The night was everything he could have expected.

K
IMBERLY INSISTED THAT
J
ACK APPEAR IN UNIFORM AT THE
welcome-home party she gave for him in the house on Louisburg Square. She seemed much more pleased with the uniforms he'd had tailored on Savile Row than she'd been with the hastily made uniforms he had worn before he left for London—apart from the fact that he now had stars instead of captain's bars on his shoulders.

She was in fact eager to show him off. He had attained a higher rank than any of their friends or acquaintances. As she prepared for the party, Kimberly found herself wishing he'd won some kind of decoration. He'd had the President's letter to him framed, and it would hang in his office, but he couldn't wear it on his uniform. All he had was the modest ribbon that indicated he had served in the European Theater of Operations. But even that, she conceded, was a distinction some men they knew had not achieved, because they had spent the entire war in Boston or Washington.

“Jack did see something up front and personal of the war,” she told a friend at the party. “He
was
in Belgium, you remember, and witnessed the strafing of Belgian civilians, plus the German attack across the Meuse at Sedan. Besides, his personal driver was killed in a buzz-bomb attack on London.”

Dodge Hallowell shook Jack's hand firmly and declared himself overjoyed to see that Jack had returned safely. “You know, it's been a source of considerable embarrassment to me that I was too young for the old war and too old for this one.”

“War is a young man's game, Dodge,” Jack said. “I was too old for any real part in it, too, except for the kind of office job I did.”

“But you were
there.
You saw something of it,
experienced
some of the tragedy, I understand. I can't say I envy you, but I have a sense that I have lived my life on the periphery.”

“I'm glad to be back on the periphery, Dodge,” Jack assured him, clapping him on the back and then moving on. He had just laid eyes on an irresistible sight.

Connie Horan extended both her hands and clasped his warmly. ‘I've been so worried! About Dan and about you. They've shut down the buzz-bomb sites, haven't they? I mean we've overrun the places where they came from.”

Jack ignored her question. “When am I going to see you, Connie?” he asked earnestly.

“We don't dare!” she whispered. “Oh, no, we don't dare!”

I
N A MEETING WITH
M
ICKEY
S
ULLIVAN AND
H
ERB
M
ORRILL,
Jack decided the time had come to let the world know that Betty—Carolyn Blossom—was a Negro, provided she agreed.

She did
not
agree. That year, for the fourth time, she won an award from
Broadcast
magazine as the best radio comedienne in America—an award that Gracie Allen had won nine times. Jack wanted Carolyn and her husband to accompany the Lears and the Sullivans to the awards dinner and let the world see that Betty was Carolyn Blossom.

“
No!
” she declared when he proposed it. “No! Let that crowd call me a nigger? Even if they didn't call me that, that's what they'd think. A long time ago you and I decided we'd make a buck, not a point. The time for makin' a point was a long time ago, Jack. We didn't make it then. I'm not going to try to make it now.”

“It's a matter of principle,” said Jack.

“If it wasn't before, why is it now?” She shook her head. “You told me once that the big thing is to have a fat bank account. Well, I've got one. Me and my man gonna live in the south of France. We'll be neighbors of Josephine Baker, which is who told us to come.”

“Well, I'm damned sorry. I should have stood up for what's right a long time ago.”

“I've had a fun time for thirteen years, and you've paid me generously. I'm grateful to you.”

“I'm grateful to
you.
You've been a mainstay of our entertainment programming for a long time. I'm really sorry that—”

“Jack . . . neither one of us was big enough to stand up and be counted—you to do it, me to insist on it. We pocketed dollars out of our cowardice. We may have to account for that someday. But for now I'm going to take mine and go away and enjoy them.”

T
HE WARTIME YEARS HAD NOT DAMPENED
H
ERB
M
ORRILL'S
infectious enthusiasm. He had never managed to convince Jack Lear that Jack Benny was funny, but he had convinced his boss of a lot of other things.

“I swear to you, this thing is going to work,” he said to Jack, to Mickey Sullivan, and Emil Durenberger. Durenberger had obtained a discharge from the army and come to work for Lear Broadcasting. Jack had begun to call Durenberger “Cap,” after the rank he'd had when they met. They were together in Jack's office late in January. “Not just technologically. I mean commercially.”

“Where do I have to go to see it?” Jack asked.

“Just out to Cambridge. They've got one set up in a lab at Harvard. A Professor Loewenstein is the expert who will demonstrate the thing to us.”

That afternoon Herb, Jack, and Cap stood in a darkened lab and stared at a curious little bottle with a faint and fuzzy image on its bottom. Oddly, the image was a moving picture of
them.
The camera that produced it was pointed at them.

Jack was fascinated. He gesticulated and watched himself gesticulate on the face of a cathode ray tube, which was the name the professor had given the bottle. The camera, he said,
contained an image orthicon tube. The orthicon tube converted light to electrical impulses, and the cathode ray tube converted electrical impulses back into light.

Dr. Friedrich Loewenstein spoke with a heavy German accent. He was a young man, tall, blond, and intense.

“The point, Mr. Sear—”

“Lear.”

“Oh. Yes. Sorry. The point is that the picture signal can be transmitted on a radio frequency, the same way a sound signal can be transmitted.”

Jack smiled. “Fifty years from now.”

“No, sir,” said Dr. Loewenstein. “It has been done. Pictures from the World's Fair in 1939 were transmitted from the fairgrounds to receivers in downtown Manhattan. It was done in England some years earlier. If not for the war, stations would be in operation today, sending pictures and sound. During the war we have given all our technological resources to things like radar and sonar. This technology was put aside for the time being. Everyone's interested in getting back to it as soon as possible.”