Tycoon (6 page)

The first night they spent in the new house, Jack and Kimberly showered in the shower room. After that, they decided to forgo tub baths and instead took showers, most of the time together.

Two weeks after they moved in, Jack invited Cecily to join him in the shower. She oohed and aahed to the sting of the needle shower and offered no resistance when he embraced her from behind and entered her. When it was over, he helped her use the bidet to wash herself out and hoped it would prove sufficient.

Cecily looked like a typical English girl. She had a fair complexion with apple cheeks, large blue eyes, and sandy-red hair. She was built like a wet nurse, Kimberly had joked: her breasts were enormous. Her belly was prominent, and she had broad hips with a pelvis like a great bowl.

Having spent a year or so at a red-brick university near London, Cecily was well educated and spoke with an Oxonian, not an East End, accent. Coming to the States represented an opportunity for her, and she said she wanted to stay and become an American citizen. She told the Lears that she was grateful for her job as a nanny but that she hoped in time to find better employment.

After that first time in the shower, Jack took her from time to time, maybe once a week, thereafter always using a rubber. She was casual about it, seeming to accept having sex with her employer, as though it were a part of her job. He could not take her to her bedroom or often have her in his. Typically she came into the library when Kimberly was away, and sometimes she just pulled down her panties, pulled up her skirt and slip, and sat facing him on his lap.

It was simple and good. All that troubled Jack was that she smothered him with great wet kisses while he was inside her, and he wasn't quite sure what that implied.

J
ACK'S ABILITY TO BUY THE LARGER HOUSE ON
L
OUISBURG
Square said a lot about how his business was performing.

WCHS hadn't lost money after its first year on the air. Jack Lear and Harrison Wolcott had bought a station that was making a modest profit. Shortly after Jack began to run it, it was making more than a modest profit because—although he could be wrong, as he had been about Jack Benny—he created programming and if it didn't work, he destroyed it with never a backward glance. He gained a reputation for being savvy and tough.

Wash Oliver was a piano player who sang a bit as he played. Someone said he sounded like a whorehouse pianist, which was an astute remark because he
was
a whorehouse pianist. He continued to play in a bawdy house in East Boston even after he had made a deal to play half an hour five evenings a week on WCHS. Jack Lear wasn't troubled by this; he liked Oliver and his music, and that was all that mattered.

In the neighborhoods of Southie, Herb Morrill found the personnel for
The Shamrock Hour
—Paddy McClanahan, a comedian who did broad Irish-ethnic jokes; an Irish tenor named Dennis Curran; Colleen, a female singer whose last name was
never used; and a quartet that played and sang rollicking Irish ballads.

Jack affiliated WCHS with UBS, the Universal Broadcasting System. It was not a network but a recording company. Affiliated stations subscribed to programs, which were recorded in various cities and the records mailed to the stations. Briefly, before it became an NBC network program,
Amos 'n Andy
was distributed this way, and Jack took a chance and subscribed to it for his Boston station. It was wildly popular, and when it left WCHS to be broadcast on the NBC station, its absence left a gaping hole in the WCHS schedule.

Mostly with actors hired from university drama clubs, Jack initiated a morning drama series he called
Our Little Family.
The show had only two permanent cast members, Mama and Daddy. The real-life Mama was an alcoholic who endured in her private life dramas as real as those written for the show; but listeners, who knew nothing of that, envisioned her as the good-hearted, beleaguered mother of a family that didn't appreciate her. She confronted every situation with the perfect cliché—“A stitch in time saves nine,” “A rolling stone gathers no moss,” “Marry in haste, repent at leisure,” “A cheerful countenance turns away wrath”—and at the end of every adventure she offered a heartfelt “All's well that ends well.”

Jack developed the idea of what he called the hypochondriac hour, a daytime show on which a succession of quack doctors dispensed medical advice. Sufferers would write letters describing their symptoms, and an allopath, homeopath, hydropath, naturopath, chiropractor, or some other “specialist” would read the letters on the air and recommend a cure—usually “Just call at my office on Such-and-such Street.”

The medical quacks were not sponsored, implying that their valuable advice was broadcast as a public service. The fact was that Jack took a substantial fee from each quack; they were glad to pay for the privilege of touting their quackery and soliciting patients.

Advertisers gravitated toward the station and its popular offerings. By the end of 1932 WCHS was drawing significant revenues from the manufacturers of motorcars, breakfast foods, soaps (“Only Lifebuoy kills Bee-ee-ee-ee-Ohhhh!”), hair dressings, deodorants, and a wide variety of patent medicines.

Jack Lear and Herb Morrill had found the formula for turning a profit from radio. Although the Wolcotts, father and daughter, deplored it, the station made money by doing what Kimberly scorned as ‘downscaling'—that is, by dropping a lot of its classical music programming and broadcasting to a more popular taste. Kimberly liked Jack's success, but she was embarrassed by the way he won it.

1934

H
ARRISON
W
OLCOTT SPENT HALF HIS WEEK IN
C
ONNECTICUT,
in his office at Kettering Arms, and the other half in his Boston office, where he attended to other business. His Boston office was a huge walnut-paneled room with furniture upholstered in black leather.

His desk was made of wood from the hull of the frigate
Constitution
—Old Ironsides—taken from her during one of her several restorations. Wolcott sat behind it proudly, in a black wool suit. He rose when Jack entered the room.

“It's good to see you, young man,” he said. “You're so dedicated to your business that I don't see you as often as I'd like.”

Jack shook hands with his father-in-law and sat down. “I'd thought of business more in terms of making something work than in terms of overcoming the opposition of people who don't want to see it work.”

The older man smiled. “Two sides of the same coin,” he said. “Scotch?”

Jack nodded. Wolcott put his cigar aside in an ashtray and took a bottle of Scotch from a drawer. He poured two drinks: straight, without water or ice. They saluted each other with their glasses and drank.

“Has Kimberly told you,” Wolcott asked, “that there is a station available for purchase in Hartford? Has she mentioned that she'd like to see WCHS, Incorporated, buy it?”

“It loses money,” Jack said bluntly.

Wolcott picked up his cigar. “Does that conclude the discussion?” he asked.

“Not at all. But I'd want to be persuaded that there's some potential before I agreed to buy a station that loses money.”

“She likes its broadcasting.”

“I know. She's told me. Classical music and information. She goes so far as to say she's embarrassed to be married to the president of WCHS. She says my tastes are too much like my father's.”

“She's said
that?
Well, I wouldn't take that seriously. Women, young women especially—”

“I know. I don't let it bother me. I suppose you know she's pregnant again.”

“Congratulations. The two of you are building a fine family.”

“Yes. John is quite a boy. He's a pleasure. I, uh . . . I had a purpose in coming by.”

“I imagined you did. What can I do for you, Jack?”

Jack reached inside his jacket and took out his billfold. From it he took a certified check for $300,000 and handed it to his father-in-law. It represented all but a little of what was left of the money his grandfather had given him.

“What's this?”

“I want to exercise my option and buy three thousand more shares of WCHS, Incorporated.”

Harrison Wolcott stared at the check for a long moment.

He had formed WCHS, Incorporated in 1931 to buy the radio station and had given Jack and Kimberly two thousand of the ten thousand shares as their wedding present. He had given them an option to buy the remaining shares at 1931 book value. In March of 1932 Jack had exercised the option and bought another thousand shares. Now he was buying three thousand more, which would give him 60 percent and clear control. Harrison Wolcott, who had not been told of the money bestowed upon Jack by his grandfather, had supposed it would take Jack a minimum of ten years, maybe even fifteen or twenty, to gain control of the corporation.

“You didn't borrow this?”

“No, sir. My grandfather gave it to me. He wanted me to have a business of my own.”

The older man grinned, though not without some irony in his expression. “Well, you now have a business of your own.”

“I hope this in no way offends you,” said Jack.

“Not at all. I think I've refrained from interfering in your management of the business.”

“Of course you have. I've been aware, though, that you've had a lot of capital tied up in WCHS, and I've felt an obligation to release you from that.”

Jack said that before he realized he shouldn't have. It would take Harrison Wolcott less than five minutes to figure out that he'd had the money to exercise the option for a long time and was exercising it now only because he had become satisfied that the business was a success.

He essayed a repair: “Of course, I was reluctant to invest all my grandfather gave me until I could feel reasonably sure I wouldn't lose it.”

“Do you want to make changes in the membership of the board of directors?” Wolcott asked.

Jack shook his head. “I want you to remain as chairman of the board, if you will consent.”

“Very well. I congratulate you. There is, uh, only one element of this to which I could possibly take exception. I—”

“What is that?” Jack interrupted nervously.

The older man turned the check over and over in his hands. “When you and I do business, Jack, don't give me certified checks and don't expect certified checks from me. I will accept your personal check for any amount, and I expect you to accept mine.”

T
HE HOUSE ON
L
OUISBURG
S
QUARE WAS NOT READY FOR ANY
elaborate entertaining until the spring of 1934.

Although Jack had made a liberal budget available to Kimberly for redecorating the house, the money was not enough,
and she accepted generous gifts from her mother and father. Mrs. Wolcott accompanied her when she shopped for rugs and furniture and often paid for her purchases.

Kimberly was determined to turn the house into a showplace. She had the floors in all the principal rooms sanded and refinished. Then she bought Oriental carpets and placed them so as to expose and display the rich pegged oak. For the living room she bought a thirty-year-old Bakhtiari Persian rug, woven in a bold geometric pattern of bright colors. In the dining room she laid a Laver Kerman rug of darker colors and more elaborate pattern. In the center of the library she placed a smaller Indian rug. Since this one had not been woven by Muslims, it featured prowling tigers, running elephants, and chariot-borne hunters, all in a stylized landscape of fantastic foliage.

Most of the furniture from the smaller house was moved to Louisburg Square, but some of it was banished to the bedrooms. For the living and dining rooms, Kimberly needed a few extra pieces. She selected Queen Anne chairs and a William and Mary highboy, none of which actually dated from those reigns but were fine antiques made during the long period when those styles were popular.

Kimberly was particularly pleased with a japanned highboy whose drawer fronts were adorned with chinoiserie depicting men and women, camels and birds.

She took down the chandelier and had the entry hall lit with torchères.

On an evening early in April the house was open and lighted for the arrival of fifty guests. Since the dining room could not seat that many, the party was a housewarming, with drinks and hors d'oeuvres.

As before, in the early months of her second pregnancy Kimberly showed no sign of her condition. She was as lithe and slender as she had been as a girl of twenty. For her party she wore her hair behind her ears, showing off her diamond earrings. She had applied all her makeup with care and precision, and she wore a pearl choker and a bracelet of three strands of pearls.

As yet she had not put on her dress. She wanted Jack's help with it. The pink silk brocade dress was tight-fitting and
showed cleavage. Because she did not want to risk a strap straying and showing, she was not going to wear a brassiere. She didn't need one. Similarly, because she did not want the outline of a garter belt and its clasps making lines and lumps on her skirt, she was using garters of black silk ribbon to hold up her sleek dark stockings. As she waited for Jack to come out of the bathroom she sat at her dressing table checking her hair and makeup, wearing only silk panties and the stockings.

“You look like a queen tonight,” Jack said when he came out of the bathroom.

Kimberly turned and looked at him, then sighed. “Let me fix your necktie. You never will get them straight, will you?”

The party was black tie. He wore a double-breasted tuxedo.

“Remember,” she said, “do not pluck hors d'oeuvres off the tables or trays. They must be served to you on a plate. You must have a plate.”

“Yes, ma'am,” he said jovially.