Tycoon (33 page)

Joni sighed. “You'll find another girl.”

“And maybe you'll find a guy.”

“But I love you, and I always will. Nobody's ever going to compare to you.”

“Nobody's going to compare to you, Joni.”

He used his hands to spread her legs and pushed his face into her crotch. He had learned the special sensitivity of her clitoris and how to stimulate it with his tongue. He did it only for a minute before she writhed and shrieked.

“Nobody, John! Nobody!”
she cried as she fumbled for his penis and drew it in between her lips and deeper into her throat than he had believed she could do without gagging.

1950

J
ACK SAT IN THE BACK SEAT OF A CAR DRIVEN BY
C
AP
D
UREN
berger. They had flown to Tulsa. Billy Bob Cotton had been waiting at the airport and was sitting in the front beside Cap. Jack had thought to catch a little sleep on the drive to Okmulgee, but he'd found the countryside so interesting and the weather so threatening that he had remained awake.

The skies to the west were a purplish gray, the darkest he had ever seen while the sun still shone in the east. The contrast between the sunlit leaves on groves of trees to the west and the surly clouds behind them gave the trees a juicy green color. Jack wondered if he was going to witness a tornado, but he didn't ask.

As he stared in fascination, the dark finger of a tornado stretched toward the earth from the clouds; but after a minute it retreated and disappeared.

Billy Bob switched on the radio and found a station broadcasting a weather warning. A tornado watch was in effect for Okmulgee County. A tornado
warning
was in effect for Okfuskee, Seminole, and Hughes Counties.

“Storm's movin' south,” Billy Bob said casually, and he switched off the radio.

The countryside through which they were driving was rolling,
with low hills and shallow valleys. Herds of cattle grazed. A crop with pale green leaves grew in fenced-in fields. Billy Bob explained the crop was peanuts.

They stopped at a farm five miles from the town of Okmulgee. As they drove up the driveway toward the house, Jack appraised the place as a prosperous working farm. Standing behind the garage was what they had come to see—a fifty-foot steel tower topped by a wide-armed television antenna. Towers just like it stood on nearly every farm they had passed.

“The Martins are fine people,” said Billy Bob. “I've known Ed and Martha for many years. A bank I own part of, in Tulsa, lent them money for this place. They paid off their mortgage ahead of time.”

A huge black-and-brown German shepherd trotted out and stood a short distance from the car, alert and wagging his tail only tentatively.

Mrs. Martin came out of the house. “Well, hi there, Mr. Cotton! Nice to see you.” She had an accent and actually said, “Haa there, Mista Cotton! Nass t' see ya.” She was a pleasant woman, wearing a simple cotton dress that she had probably made herself.

Jack climbed out of the back seat and offered his hand to Mrs. Martin. “Hello, Mrs. Martin. My name is Jack Lear. It's nice of you to let us come see your television,” he said.

She shook his hand with a firm grip. “Well, it's not so much, really. Some get better reception than we do. That storm goin' down the west there may interfere some.”

Jack offered his hand to the dog to sniff. The dog checked him and seemed satisfied.

Mrs. Martin shook hands then with Cap and invited the men into the house, where she had coffee and homemade doughnuts waiting. “Ed'll be in right smart,” she said. “He'll have seen your car.”

The living room floor was covered with new linoleum and furnished with a couch and two chairs upholstered in maroon plush. The room, perhaps the whole house, was heated by a large cast-iron coal stove which stood on a piece of tin-plated steel that protected the linoleum from its heat. Their television was a seventeen-inch Sylvania set. Pictures of children sat on top.

Ed Martin came in. “Well, hi there, Billy Bob!” he said, reaching out to shake hands. “Long time no see.” He turned and extended his hand to Jack and then to Cap. “Welcome, gentlemen.”

Martin was no overalled farmer. He wore sturdy blue Levi's, almost new, and a khaki work shirt with a pack of cigarettes in one pocket and a yellow pencil in the other. He was a rawboned outdoorsman.

“Well, y' come to see the TV,” said Martin. “Let's see what we can pick up this mornin'.”

He switched on the set. It warmed up, and a picture appeared. It was a bit fuzzy and had some snow in it, but there it was: a black-and-white picture of some overexuberant master of ceremonies playing to a studio audience of women.

“That there comes from Dallas, and that's about as far as we can git it,” said Martin. “Lemme show ya Tulsa, which comes in a whole lot better.”

First he changed channels, and a different picture came in, not clear at all. Then he turned the dial on a box controller on top of the set, and the picture became much clearer, all but perfect. “See, what I did was turn the antenna toward Tulsa. Before there, it was turned toward Dallas. A TV antenna is what you call directional.”

“In other words,” said Jack, “you've got an electric motor on top of the tower, which turns the antenna.”

“That's exactly what we got.”

In the course of a few minutes he showed them he could tune in Kansas City, which like Dallas was at the far reach of their antenna, and Oklahoma City, though that signal was broken up by the storm between here and there.

“There's talk they're gonna start a station in Wichita, and that'd be nice. That'd give us five channels. Once in a while, if we're lucky, we can get St. Louis, but y' can't count on it.”

“I guess my question,” said Jack, “is how important is television to you?”

“Oh, it's
very
important,” said Mrs. Martin. “I tell you somethin'. Our oldest son lives in Dallas. And sometimes when we're watchin' something, I get to thinking, by golly our boy is watching the same show, ‘cause we got the same favorites, and it makes it seem like he's not so far away.”

On the way back to Tulsa, the three men talked in the car.

“I've done some numbers,” said Billy Bob. “If we set up a powerful station in Kansas City, we're going to cover a market with a minimum of five million people.”

“I've done the same numbers,” said Jack. “St. Louis doesn't work nearly as well. Neither does Dallas. The only other city that might reach a bigger market is Columbus, Ohio. But much of the terrain in Ohio is hilly, and you'd have to put up a hell of a tall tower to reach Pittsburgh, for example, and Detroit. In the East you've got another problem, which is that people aren't accustomed to the idea of putting up a fifty-foot tower to get their television. Many of them couldn't, anyway.

“I agree with Billy Bob,” said Jack. “Kansas City.”

“We can't live with one station,” Cap pointed out.

“Right,” Jack said. “I've done some looking. There's an independent station in Dallas. We can lease a wire from Kansas City to Dallas and broadcast simultaneously from these two. We may be able to reach an independent station in Minneapolis the same way. After those, we'll have to kinescope. I think we can slot
The Sally Allen Show
on independent stations in Atlanta and Indianapolis. The show won't come in as clearly, and it will be a day late, so we have to make
The Sally Allen Show
something people want to see.”

“K
ANSAS
C
ITY
?”

That was Sally Allen's reaction when she was told her show would originate in Kansas City. “You gotta be kiddin'! Somebody wants me to go live in—Out of the question!”

Jack himself explained to her why the initial shows had to originate in Kansas City. Sally told him she hated him, she hated the whole goddamned deal she'd made, and she'd walk out on it and let him sue her.

Ten days later she was in Kansas City, walking scornfully
around the dusty warehouse that LCI—Lear Communications, Incorporated—was converting into a television studio.

She was placated a little when Jack named the supporting actors who would be working with her. “You spent a lot of money,” she said.

He had, for salaries and perks, but everything else had cost far less than it would have in New York or Los Angeles. He leased an apartment for Sally. He leased a suite in the Muehle-bach Hotel for himself and the other members of the management team when they were in town.

Over dinner at an excellent French restaurant, Sally acknowledged that Kansas City was a very pleasant little city. “I like this place,” she said, glancing around the restaurant. “I figured I'd have to live on bar-bee-kew. And, hey, they got a nightclub you wouldn't believe. Female impersonators! Those guys are
good.
We ought to figure out a way to slot the best of them in on the show.”

They did. On the second show a young man named Burt Wilson, who called himself Gloria, appeared in a comedy sketch. At the end of the sketch he turned his back to the camera and pulled off a sweater, exposing his bare back. As he turned to face the camera, he jerked off his wig. Gloria was Burt.

With that episode alone,
The Sally Allen Show
achieved much of what Jack had hoped for it. It was, of course, denounced as indecent. A Texas congressman demanded that the FCC revoke the license of the LCI station in Kansas City. Churchmen condemned the show. Newspapers and newsmagazines reported the controversy. LCI provided photos of the bare-chested Burt.

Audiences all across the country demanded to see
The Sally Allen Show
Stations all over the country asked for the kinescope.

The recapitalized Lear company bought the independent stations in Minneapolis and Indianapolis.

S
ALLY
A
LLEN RARELY DISPLAYED TEMPERAMENT.
U
SUALLY
she was an easygoing, cooperative actress who accepted direction and caused few problems on the set. She did make some demands, though, and one of them was that her dressing room be something better than one of the plywood cubicles that had been built into the warehouse studio. Jack ordered the production manager to buy a house trailer and tow it into the warehouse.

He sat on a couch in the trailer and watched Sally being fitted for one of the costumes she would wear on the eighth show. It was a dance costume, a black satin corselet decorated with hundreds of glittery spangles. She would wear dark, sheer tights with it, but for the fitting her legs were bare.

Sally grabbed the corselet at her hips and tugged upward on it, drawing it higher and exposing more of her hips. She spoke to the seamstress. “What say, Bertha? Can I wear it pulled up like this?”

The seamstress nodded. “Lace it so it'll stay up like that.”

“Okay. But you'll have to trim it or fold it over and sew it down at the top. Gotta have cleavage. Audience expects it.”

Bertha laughed. “The director will want to stick a flower down in there.”

“To hell with that,” said Sally. “What are boobs for? The secret of my success, is what. Right, Jack?”

Jack lifted his Scotch. “They get a lot of comment,” he said.

“'Kay, Bertha. Let's take it off.”

The seamstress began to unlace and unhook the corselet.

“I've got a deep secret in my past,” Sally said to Jack. She let the seamstress take the corselet. She was wearing nothing under it. Naked, she reached for her own Scotch and took a sip before she reached for the red wrapper that lay on a chair. “Not bad for an old gal of thirty, huh?” she asked before she pulled on the wrapper and covered herself.

Bertha left the trailer.

Sally sat down facing Jack. “Deep secret,” she said. “I did an apprenticeship nobody seems to remember. People talk about my comic timing, about how I can mug with funny lines, and all that. How do they think I learned my business?”

“Tell me your secret,” said Jack.

“Burlesque. When I was seventeen years old I became a stripper or, as they liked to say, an ‘exotic dancer.' I worked on a circuit. Towns like Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh. Just in theaters, never in clubs. I took off as much as the cops would allow, which in some towns at some times was everything. But half of a burlesque show, you know, is the baggy-pants comics, and some of their sketches have a girl in them. Lots of times I was the girl. I watched their routines and techniques, saw the faults in them, and did my part better than they did theirs.”

“I bet you did.”

“I remember some of the lines. I'm playing like I'm hot for sex, and I say to the guy, ‘I want what I want when I want it!' Then I do a bump. And he says, ‘You'll get what I got when I got it!' Of course, they play language for all it's worth, and more. In one routine the straight man says, ‘She was coming across the street, and I
scrutinized
her!' The baggy-pants rolls his eyes and asks, ‘Y' mean you scrutinized her before she even got across the street?' ‘Why, of course. Sometimes I scrutinize them when they're clear on the other side of the street.' Now baggy-pants rolls his eyes some more, turns and leers at the audience, points at the straight man's crotch, and asks, ‘How you got it in there—rolled up like a hose?'”