C Hribal - The Company Car

“Not married at all,” said Billy Ray King, which caused our mother to gasp audibly. How could you back out once you’d decided? It was something altogether understandable if you’d been asked and you simply said no. Our mother had done that several times already—the Italian was persistent and greedy. But to say yes and then change your mind—unthinkable!

“We need you to be the first couple on today’s show.”

“But we just got here.”

“I know, I know, it’s a headache. My assistants even as we speak are scouring the list of upcoming couples seeing if somebody wants to make a move up. It’s not easy. People have plans, it’s a Thursday evening, who’s going to come downtown at a moment’s notice?” Billy Ray King, when the pressure was on, was at his unctuous best. He eyed our father’s accordion case. One of the program assistants had attended one of the Cicero Velvetones’ concerts to ascertain that the singing/accordion-playing groom was on the level when he listed himself as a professional musician and lieutenant JG. “Listen,” said Billy Ray King. “There’s even the possibility that your hubby-to-be here is going to dazzle us all with his singing for half the show if we can’t locate another couple. What do you say?”

Our mother turned to our father. “Wally?”

“Wally, I love that, Wally,” said Billy Ray King. “You kids are gonna do great. The audience is gonna eat you up. I could eat you up.” He kissed our mother’s forehead, then started pumping our father’s hand.

The next thing our parents knew, the elevator doors had opened and they were being led away in opposite directions, somebody was slapping makeup on them, their attendants were ushered away from them again—only Louie and Helen would stand up for this wedding, the rest were seated in the audience, not needed till the next day’s ceremony, though Billy Ray King promised a camera would show them to the home audience at some point—“So be ready to wave, dammit, and look happy”—and told our father “there might be a possibility” that his band could sit in with the studio band when he played during the talent segment.

I’m not sure when during the production of this broadcast our parents realized they were being had, or when they realized that Billy Ray King, a proud fat man about to lose his empire to the sleek and brainless, was truly desperate. Our father knew any number of club owners who could be shysters, so perhaps he wasn’t surprised. Then again, it was his wedding, his call to have it on TV, he’d been the one to deal with Billy Ray King in setting this up, and he wanted to trust the man. No, more than that. He wanted to believe in the man and what he stood for—marrying couples and sending them on their way, off into the world (with a little cash) to reproduce and make the world safe for democracy.

That our parents ended up being married first on the show that day is important. It shouldn’t have mattered—it was the show’s seventy-third episode—but it did. For a season and a half It’s Your Wedding ran one wedding a show. Then they switched to two. Our parents were to be that second couple, but they got bumped up a spot on account of the couple that supposedly decided against getting married. But this seems unlikely. America in 1952 was in a marrying mood, and the idea of a couple backing out of a TV marriage at the last second seems downright churlish. Our parents were not churlish, our parents were good soldiers, which was something on which Billy Ray King counted. In fact there were only two things about which our mother, who didn’t much care whether she was married on TV or not, put her foot down. The first was her insistence that our father become a Catholic. Years later, when her children were marrying, this was less of an issue for our mother, but not then. Technically, our father was an agnostic, which to our mother’s way of thinking was both the worst thing you could be and the easiest to correct. He’d been raised in a godless household by people who simply didn’t think much about religion. He was a clean slate, ready to be written on with the finger of our mother’s faith. On the morning of his wedding he was baptized, by noon he’d had his First Communion, and by late afternoon he was confirmed in his new faith. He was willing to accommodate her on all this if she was willing to accommodate him on the TV wedding. From agnostic to Catholic, what did it mean? asked his friends. “It means,” said our father, “I’ll eat perch on Fridays.”

Our parents were also in a bit of a hurry. Our father was scheduled to report to the San Diego Naval Air Station in a week, it being the Korean War and all, and he had his orders to ship out just a few days after that. Plus there was the matter of the honeymoon. Our parents wanted one. They were planning on a couple of days in Madison, Wisconsin, which at the time qualified as bucolic wilderness, and they’d then stop at various wayside motels on the drive from Chicago to San Diego, being of modest means and a semipractical bent. Practical because it was Lent, and the only way they could have a honeymoon and a party afterward was if they got married on a Friday, and getting married on a Friday in Lent in the Catholic Church required not only a special dispensation but also a quiet and somber ceremony. The church wedding would be small, the reception—featuring tea cakes, coffee, and a few delicately iced cookies—would be held in the church basement. A wedding more like a penance than a celebration. Compared to that, a TV wedding with a party afterward was like having their cake and eating it, too.

Practical but only semipractical. How else do you explain them being on It’s Your Wedding at all if there weren’t something of the romantic infused in them, too?

Practical and romantic, our parents were almost always guided by these antithetical impulses, and it was invariably to the wrong pole that they gravitated when decisions had to be made. This did not make them in any way unique, and it was probably their desire to get married on TV that confirmed how much a part of the great wave of America they were, young and hopeful and not even conscious that if they were part of the wave, they were also subject to its undertow.

The second thing our mother insisted on was that church wedding. They were going to have it the very next day, but according to our mother, unless a priest officiated for the TV ceremony, it wasn’t official. And if it wasn’t an official wedding—a JP marrying them didn’t count—then our mother would not be participating in Thursday night’s honeymoon, for which our father had booked a room at the Sheridan Hotel.

Billy Ray King knew that, too, our father having pressed the point upon him. It had to be a priest, it had to be a priest, goddammit! But of course it couldn’t be a priest. Billy Ray King had already been over all that with our father. And no JP was going to agree to impersonate a priest just to salve this one couple’s conscience. So Billy Ray King did what he thought was the right, honorable, and expedient thing, knowing, as he did, that the couple was getting married for real the next day anyway. He told our father he’d located a priest willing to do the ceremony. This was what Billy Ray King called a necessary fabrication or, as Alan Pickett would have it, “utilitarian make-believe.” A lapsed Catholic himself, Pickett concurred with Billy Ray—Catholicism made good theater. On one set cellophane “stained-glass” windows and a plywood altar decorated with candles and daylilies served as a backdrop to the couple’s earnestness.

Earnest, accommodating, practical, romantic. Our father terrified of being a day late and a dollar short. If our parents ever knew they were being snookered right at the moment of their snookering, their own character would have prevented them from saying anything. Still, they had to suspect something when, just before airtime, Alan Pickett and Billy Ray King engaged in a furious, sotto voce argument. It was about the couple Billy Ray King had “found” at the last minute to get married on TV. It was glaringly obvious that the other bride to be was pregnant. Alan Pickett, who usually didn’t care what went on during the show as long as he looked good doing it, was beside himself. “Knocked up! I know for a fact she’s knocked up!”