Эд Макбейн - Mothers and Daughters

The show was built entirely around Martin, who opened it every afternoon at one-thirty with the line, “Hello, girls,” and then he would wink and say, “And you too, fellers.” He would tell a few jokes and relate a few items of disinterest, which he had dug from the newspapers and national magazines, and he would tie the stories in with bits of little-known lore from his vast steamer-trunk memory. Then a girl singer would sing a song, and Martin would sell a product, and a boy singer would sing another song, and Martin would sell another product, and tell a few more jokes, and that’s the way it went. He was on the air for two solid hours every day. His viewing audience was estimated at close to fourteen million people, and he earned the network millions and millions of dollars in advertising revenue, and all because he had no talent.

The rumors about Sam Martin ran rife through the industry and in the columns of those devoted to scanning the home screen. The rumors maintained that Martin, genial and affable on the air, was really a tyrant in private life, a man who beat his faithful employees with a cat-o’-nine-tails, seduced thirteen-year-old girls, kicked blind men, howled at the moon, and used cocaine. The rumors were dead wrong; Sam Martin off the air was exactly the person he was on the air. Bumbling, smiling, corny, affable, harmless. He had come into television after a dozen years in radio, most of them spent with an early-morning show in Los Angeles where he played records, told jokes, and sold products. In those early radio days, Martin wore glasses and sat behind his microphone, and when it came time to sell the product, he would lean closer to the mike and begin reading from the prepared advertising copy and then suddenly reach up and pull off the glasses and soar into an inspired emotional ad-libbing eulogy which sounded sincere and earnest and utterly honest. One of his Los Angeles colleagues remarked that Sam Martin was the best damn salesman in radio, that every time he pulled off those glasses and began ad-libbing his pitch, it was as if he were making love to a broad. Well, Sam Martin had pulled off his glasses for good the moment he entered television, but he still pitched those products with an emotional fervor that was difficult to match anywhere else in the medium. Perhaps this was his one real talent. Perhaps the salesmen were taking over the world.

If they were, David didn’t seem to mind too much.

The fact remained that Martin sold the sponsor’s product, and it was the sponsor who hired David as a watchdog over the product’s appearance, the man who made certain the commodity put its best foot forward on the video tube. The importance of David’s job could not be underestimated. Memos originated live from New York each afternoon at one-thirty after approximately an hour and a half of so-called rehearsal. This was not a filmed show, which could be edited and spliced. If a spot remover failed to remove a spot when it was supposed to, the sequence could not be done over again. There it was for everyone to see, and it was David’s job to make sure they saw it right the first time around. He usually accomplished this in the midst of a pandemonium starting at noon and relaxing only a moment before the show was beamed. It seemed incredible to David that anyone could possibly know what was going on at those Memos rehearsals or that a show with any sense of continuity or form could emerge from that tangled mass of camera cables, monitor tubes, shouting directors, musical cues, patient guests, gag writers, hanging booms, grips, cameramen, frantic assistant directors, electricians, pacing producers, press agents, audio engineers, stage managers, and make-up men. But a show did somehow assemble itself out of the rubble in the Sixty-eighth Street loft, and the show was remarkably relaxed and professional, a tribute to Sam Martin’s intuitive grasp of his audience and a calmness that was genuine and soothing.

There was nothing soothing about the rehearsal on that Wednesday in the first week of June. There never had been a rehearsal, to David’s recollection, that went well, but this one seemed to be defying every law of probability in its efforts to become a full-scale riot. It started with Louisa, the girl singer, yelling at Martin about the suitability of her material, she could not sing a sexy song on the air, her stock in trade was the homespun stuff. She was the peaches-and-cream girl, so how could she sing a torrid song like this one? She wanted a replacement for it at once. Martin affably and genially told her she was correct, which necessitated a last-minute scramble for a new song, and several hurried calls to Music Clearance, who, it was surmised, put in their own frantic calls to ASCAP or BMI and possibly Local 802, and got back to the rehearsal with the word that it was all right for Louisa to sing the song she had chosen, but this brought up the problem of an arrangement for the tune. The band didn’t have an arrangement, and it was too late to do one, so it was decided they’d accompany Louisa with piano, drums, and guitar, and Louisa flipped once more at this and went screaming off to Martin, who calmed her and told her their piano player was the best in the business, and didn’t Marian Anderson sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” with only a piano accompaniment?

Along about this time, someone from Network Continuity came down and began protesting about an off-color joke that one of Martin’s writers had inserted into the script following a coffee commercial. The man from Continuity was an intense Presbyterian who kept insisting his taste in humor was catholic, but who felt that Martin’s viewers might take offense at the story and, following as closely as it did on the heels of the coffee commercial, might associate the joke with the product and not buy the product and cause the sponsor to cancel. The writer protested that he would not be ashamed to tell that joke to his own mother, and the man from Continuity said he didn’t know what kind of a mother the writer had but he certainly wouldn’t want to hear that joke told to his mother, whereupon they almost had a fist fight. Martin smoothed it all over by telling both the writer and the man from Continuity that they both undoubtedly had fine mothers, and fathers too, but that perhaps the joke might cause consternation in certain fringe fanatic groups, and he winked at both of them, and asked the writer to supply a new joke for the spot. The man from Continuity left mollified but righteously indignant, and the writer went back to Martin’s dressing room to prepare a nonoffensive joke.

Martin’s guest for that afternoon’s show arrived just about then. He was a noted theater personality who was starring in one of Broadway’s long-run smashes, a personable enough fellow when he was sober, but he arrived at the loft dead drunk. He began abusing everyone in sight, muttering that he was going to punch that square Martin right on the nose the minute the show went on the air. He resisted all efforts to pour a gallon of coffee down his throat, overturning a scalding-hot pot of the sponsor’s brew, and threatening to hit the make-up man, who he claimed was a faggot. Martin took him aside and gave him a fatherly talk about the traditions of the theater (“You call this crap theater? ” the star shouted) and about the responsibilities of performers, and the necessity of rising above petty personality differences, and he cited a forgotten 1925 theater incident involving John Barrymore, casually comparing his guest to Barrymore, and reminding his guest that fourteen million people would be watching him from coast to coast, and didn’t he think he should have a few cups of coffee and a cold shower before they went on the air? The guest star shook hands with Martin and kissed the faggot makeup man, who was married with four children and who thought a faggot was a bundle of sticks, and then went off to shower and to guzzle some very strong black coffee, not the sponsor’s.