The Dick Gibson Show (3 page)

That he moved about so often in those early years was no proof of his restlessness; rather, it was his way of learning the business. He was your true apprentice—eager, willing, a boy who would chip in for any chore—but all the while he kept a careful accounting and worked with a special sense of his own destiny that converted the difficult into the necessary and created in himself metaphorical notions of money in the bank and bread cast upon the waters—a priggish, squirrelly sense of provision. Even his rooms in those days, those below-stairs cubicles in the homes of widows for whom he shoveled snow and stoked furnaces whose heat never seemed to reach his room, and which were all he could afford on the fifteen- and twenty-dollar-a-week salaries he made, or his rooms in the towns’ single hotels, near the railroad stations, bargained for, a rate granted not simply in deference to his extended stay but in recognition of some built-in inferiority, the bed always in a vulnerable position, the room itself in a vulnerable position, over a boiler perhaps, or machinery, or behind the thin wall of the common washroom, or too far from it, or his window just behind the vertical of the hotel’s blazing electric sign—there was a room in Kansas where owing to some obscure fire law the bulb in the high ceiling could never be turned off—even these rooms left him (despite the indifferent luke warmth that came from ancient, prototypical radiators) with an impression not of poverty or straitened circumstance, so much as of guaranteeing his life later, discomfit comforting, assuring him of
his
mythic turn, patience not just a virtue but a concomitant of future fame, hard times every success’s a priori grist.

The American Dream, he thought, the historic path of all younger sons, unheired and unprovided. The old-time test of princes. “One two three testing,” he had said into countless microphones on hundreds of cold winter mornings, sleep still in his eyes, he and the engineer the only ones at the station, and he there first, his key to the place not a privilege but a burden. “One two three testing.” And even as he spoke the announcer’s ritual words, he suspected the deeper ritual that lay beneath them, confident that a test was indeed being conducted, his entire young manhood one. There were so many jobs—
then;
later he had different reasons—because he insisted on these tests. He built a reputation as a utility man, an all-rounder, and he was never really sure that this didn’t harm rather than help him because he was, for many of the 500- and 1000-watt stations for which he worked, a luxury, primed for emergency and special events which rarely, in those uneventful places he served his apprenticeship, occurred. But so set was he on sacrifice, so convinced in his bones of some necessary pay-as-you-go principle, that even an absolute knowledge that his special talents worked against his career would not have altered him. He continued to work in whatever he could of the unusual and by consistently putting himself in the way of opportunity, managed to do everything, discovering in the infinite resources of his voice, in the disparate uses to which it could be put, the various alter egos of human sound.

He was forced by radio to seem always to speak from the frontiers of commitment, always to say his piece as if his piece were all. Emphasis disappeared, for everything, the merest community-service announcement of a church supper and the most thunderous news bulletin, received ultimately the same treatment. With the necessity it imposed to be always talking, singing, selling, to be always speaking at the top of its voice, radio itself became a vessel for collateral truths. He had come to think of the sounds radio made as occurring on a line, picturing speech as a series of evenly sequenced, perfectly matched knots on a string, chatter raised by the complicated equipment to the level of prophecy. Pressured by the collateral quality of the noises he made, it would have been easy to have turned against the noises themselves. Others did. Most announcers he knew were men with an astonishing facility for disengaging themselves from their copy. Many actually made it a point to have their faces laugh while their voices continued to speak seriously. They horsed around—and those who had been in the business longest horsed around the most. He had noted—in New York City he took the same Radio City tour that everyone else did—that even the network people loved to clown, to shock their studio audiences with their studied superiority to the material, creating an anecdote for them to take back to Duluth, giving them all they could of the insider’s contemptuously lowered guard.

He eschewed their wiseguy character and scorned to duplicate their vicious winks for a deft professional reason of his own. He felt these acrobatics, these defections of the face, took away—however minutely—from the effectiveness of one’s delivery, that even such muscular stunts as a mere wink pulled, too, at the vocal chords, puppeteered them. He could hear this. Monitoring his radio in the signal-fortified nights, omnisciently tuning in America, transporting himself with just his fingers five hundred miles north or a thousand east, these lapses were as clear to him as lisps, and he could see in his mind the smug double-dealing of a hundred announcers through their voices in the dark, as if he sat in the control booths watching them. The faculty for belief in the things he was required to say was no greater in him than in the biggest star or the oldest studio hack on the most important network station in America, but he used sincerity to body-build his voice. It would no sooner occur to him to insist on his personality when he was on the air (with the others, he knew, it was a last ditch shriek of their integrity, an effort to write off their disgust) than it would occur to an actor on a stage to answer for himself instead of for the character he played. So, striving for conviction, he became something of a boomer, a hearty herald. (Briefly he was Harold Hearty, WLU, Waverly, Georgia.)

For a time—and he never completely rid himself of this habit—he carried over into his outside life the tones he used on radio, sometimes actually frightening people with his larger-than-life salutations:
“Good
morning there, Mrs. Cubbins! Lou George, WBSF, Kingdom City, Mo., here to see about the
room
you advertised!” Or embarrassing them with the breathy intimacy of his ten-to-midnight “Music for Lovers”: “Haie there, Miss. Bud Kanz. I’ve got a three o’clock appointment. The doc said he’d—sqa
eeeee
ze me in.”

Bluffness and sensuousness were not all his range, nor even a significant part of it. If he had to single out a tone which best characterized him in those early years it would have been rather a flat one. And why not? He was chiefly a man speaking to farmers, reading them the weather, telling them the hog and sheep and cattle prices, a harbinger of grain and vegetable conditions— “soybeans” and “rye” and “oats” words in every other sentence out of his mouth. He had learned almost from the outset to avoid folksiness, vaudevillizing their ways. The single time he had tried to appropriate what he took to be their vocabulary, he himself had had to answer the telephone to listen to their offended complaints: “You tell that damn Jew you got down there he’d best not make sport of us. That town bastard don’t know piss from cowplop.” From then on he spoke to them in flat accents as unnatural to him as dialect, his neutral reading of the daily markets as much a performance as any he had ever attempted.

But it was precisely on stations such as these that he got his best experience and was permitted to exercise his widest range. As soon as it became light—it was as if he could hear the farmers leaving their houses—he was left with their wives. These took, if their husbands didn’t, a certain amount of kidding. Not that he tried any more than with the men to pass himself off as a country boy. Instead he went the other way entirely. He felt himself some traveling salesman among them, come to life from a joke. Emphasizing his alienness, his dazed slicker-in-the-sticks incarnation, as if he had just been set down there from Paris or New York, he made all he could of their funny ways. He flattered them with their homespun notion of themselves, never letting them forget their ailing-neighbor-fetched soups and astonishing pies of vegetable and wild fruit, finding his theme in the idea of appetite, exaggerating their capacities, bunyanizing the hunger of their men and selves: “Ladies, I’ve got a recipe here for a Kansas farm omelet. First, take eight dozen eggs. All right, we’ll need some butter in this. Four pounds should do it.” Or zeroing in on the quilts he pretended they were always making: “An Easterner came by yesterday, saw one and went blind. What I want to know is how you get any sleep under one of those things. One lady I heard of hung hers to dry out in the henhouse. Those hens laid eggs all night. The rooster came in about midnight, saw it and started to crow. He thought the darn sun had come up.”

But he tickled them hardest with his allusions to the wily sex in them, inventing this appetite as he had built on the other, taking his biggest risks here, openly blue, barnyardy, pretending a kind of slicker exhaustion at the thought of their lusty bouts, frankly animalizing them, claiming awe and a ferocious physical respect in the face of their enormous sexual reserves, careful only to specify the essential domesticity of their ardor, its vaguely biblical franchise. (But even this sop shrewdly dispensed with when it came to their daughters, those—as he had it—one-hundred-sixty-two-pound, big-boned killers of traveling men, singing their raucous muliebrity and celebrating their quicksand bodies in which whole male populations had gone down, entire sales forces.) The opportunities were limitless—their alleged flour- sack underthings another source of his feigned astonishment, imagining for them beneath the hypothetical homespun and supposed calico, hypothetical bodies, heavy toonervaudevillian tons of robust flesh, imperial gallons of breast, the thick, fictive restraining chest bands helpless against such soft erosion. And this was as aboveboard as their concupiscence, for it was all in reference to an exercise-and-reducing show he had talked the station manager into letting him do.

“What? A skinny kid like you? Don’t make me laugh.”

“What difference does it make how I
look?
I’ve got a voice like Tarzan. Let me try.”

And the man did—on the condition that he stay off the streets and that his audience never be permitted to see him.

He became “Doctor Torso.” The voice he created for his new role was extraordinary. Deliberately aged, carefully made to seem just senior to the oldest lady doing the exercises, he sounded like some professional, not a gym teacher but a coach, with all the coach’s indifference to the bodily distinctions between male and female—the body, ulteriorly, one big muscle he crooned over in his faintly theatrical telephone operator’s diction. Himself sitting perfectly still at the table with the microphone, and, for the sake of the slight strain it gave to his voice, leaning on his elbows, his forehead forward and clamped into the heels of his hands. “With a
one
and a
two
and
three
and a
fower.
A
fi
uv and a
six
and a
seven
and an
eight.”
Then, blowing out his breath to clear the poisons, “All right, ladies. This next exercise is for your sitters. Get right down on the floor, now. Palms spread and about four inches to the side of those thighs we just firmed up so nicely for your hubbies. All right, now those precious legs straight and shut tight. Just like the vaults in the Bank of England.” Interrupting himself. “Mrs. Frangnadler”—his imaginary scapegoat, his one-hundred- sixty-two-pound common denominator— “I said
tight.
No cheating on me. Tight together. You don’t still have that rash. Tight now, tight.
Squeeze.
Pretend they’re the two halves of your purse, and you’re in town on a Saturday night, and you’ve got your egg money in there. Come on, Mrs. Frangnadler, I said tight.” Slyly. “Why, if I was a thief I could reach right down in that purse of yours and steal something really valuable. Then what would your husband say? There, that’s better. Why, I could hardly get the edge of my knife down there now. Could I, ladies?” Then, pretending that he had turned back to the rest of them, “All right, then, when I start counting I want you to bring up the left thigh high as you can. I want to be able to slip my hand under there. Then down on the even number and bring up the right on the odd. We’ll do this ten or twelve times together and then you practice it by yourselves at home. You’ll soon feel the difference it makes. And if I know those husbands of yours, they’ll feel the difference too. Incidentally, you mothers, start getting your young daughter to do this exercise with you. I pity the traveling man that tries to pinch
her!
All right, that’s enough rest period. Ready, begin!”

But the rest periods, of course, were the point of the program; it was what they listened for. All of them relaxing together and him giving them all any of them would ever know of the locker room. They must have thought longingly of the easy sensuality of the city.

Just before he left that station and went on to the next, he announced the official tally—he had had them send in cards—of the weight they had collectively lost. It came to exactly one hundred sixty-two pounds. He always felt as if he had taken one of their women from them.

In lieu of a raise. For though he was a member of AFRA, the small stations he worked for in those days were not required to pay union scale. There were too many graduates of radio schools waiting for jobs. And though the big-city stations wouldn’t touch them—back-of-the- matchbook dreamers, bad-complected, imperfectly pitched tenors and forced basses you had to hear just once to know all you ever needed to, not just of the condition of their lungs but of their glamour-caught souls too, their striven-for resonances accusing as fingerprints—small stations depended upon them. With his experience he might already have moved up to any number of stations cuts above the ones he worked. The NBC affiliate in Columbus, Ohio, was looking for someone exactly like himself, and would have paid him twenty-five dollars a week to start and jumped him to thirty dollars at the end of three months. Had he taken such a job, however, he would never have been allowed the liberties he took on the small stations. He was grateful for the temptation, but threw it into the pot with all the rest of the sacrifices he had made—more bread cast upon the waters, further frog years.