James Cain - Serenade

We got out at the bus stop, and shook hands, and then she put her arms around him and kissed him. He was shaken up as I stepped over to help him into the cab. “And you’ll mind what I’ve been telling you, lad? — about her, and Mexico, and all the rest of it?”

“I’ll mind. For the rest of my life.”

“See that you do. For the rest of your life.”

We found a little hotel, a two-dollar joint on Spring Street, and didn’t have any trouble. It was about what you would expect, but after Mexico it was like a palace, and they gave us a room with a shower, so she was happy. After she had splashed enough water to suit her, she came and lay in my arms, and I lay there thinking about how we were starting our life together in my own country, and wanted to say something about it, but next thing I knew she was asleep. We got up early the next morning, and as soon as the stores were open, went out to get that hat. Then we got a dress and a light coat. The hat was $1.95, the dress $3.79, and the coat $6. That left us $38 out of her 500 pesos. We stopped by a little restaurant, had a little breakfast, and then I took her back to the hotel and went out to find work.

First thing I did was wire my agent in New York, the one that had sent me down to Mexico. I told her I was all right again, and to see what she could do, as I wanted to get going. Then I bought a Variety, the Hollywood edition, and looked in there to see if any agents carried ads. Quite a few of them did, and the one that seemed to be what I wanted was named Stoessel, and had offices in Hollywood, so I got on a bus and went out there. It took me an hour to get in to see him, and he never even bothered to look at me. “Brother, out here singers are a drug on the market, and they’ve quit fooling with them. They’ve had them all, and how many come through? Eddy, MacDonald, Pons, Martini, and Moore — and even Pons and Martini ain’t so hot. The rest of them, flops, nothing but flops. And it ain’t only that they flop, they have a hell of a time getting stories for them. They’re through with singers. When they want a singer, little production number maybe, they know where to get him. Outside of that — out. I’m sorry, but you’re in the wrong place.”

“I didn’t mean pictures. How about theatres?”

“I could book you twelve weeks straight, right up the coast, book you in a minute, if you was a name. Without a name for the marquee, you ain’t worth a dime.”

“I’m fairly well known.”

“I never heard of no John Howard Sharp.”

“I sang mainly in Europe.”

“This ain’t Europe.”

“How about night clubs?”

“I don’t fool with that small stuff. You want to go on in a night club, there’s plenty of them around. If that interests you, you might pick up quite a little time here and there, this and that. Try Fanchon and Marco. Maybe they got a spot for you.”

I walked down on Sunset, to Fanchon and Marco. They were putting up a dance act, and a singer didn’t seem to fit. I went in a radio station. They gave me an audition, and said they’d let me have some sustaining time in the afternoon, but they wouldn’t pay for it, and I’d have to bring my own accompanist. I said I’d be back.

Around four o’clock I went in a night club on La Brea, and they let me sing for them, and then said they’d put me on, $7.50 a night, tips and meals, report in evening clothes at nine o’clock. I said I’d let them know. I found a costume place to go in and rent an evening outfit. The price was $3 a night, $10 by the week, and that would leave a little profit, but they had nothing in there that would fit. I’m six feet, and weighed nearly two hundred, and that’s an out size for a costume place. I went back to Spring Street. There was a little place still open, and I went in and bought a second-hand guitar for $5. I wasn’t going to pay an accompanist to get me on the air. With that guitar, I could do my own accompanying.

I kept that up three or four days. I parked the guitar in the radio station, and went in there every day at two thirty. I was to get fifteen minutes, and be announced under my name, but when I cut myself up into two pieces, John Howard Sharp, baritone, and Signor Giuseppe Bondo, the eminent Italian guitar player, they gave me a half hour. I’d sing a couple of numbers, and then I’d introduce the Signor, and the Signor would announce his selections in a high voice, in Italian. Then I’d try to translate, and get it all wrong, so if I said it was to be Hearts and Flowers, the Signor would play Liebestraum, or something like that. The station manager thought that was a pretty good gag, and made us a regular feature, and put our names in the paper. After the second day he got twenty or thirty letters about me, and two or three hundred about the Signor, and he got all excited and said he was going to find a sponsor for us. A sponsor, it turned out, was an advertiser that would pay us.

One of those days, after the broadcast, I took the guitar out with me and went to Griffith Park, where the Iowa Society was having a picnic, forty or fifty thousand of them. I thought if I went singing around, there might be some tips. I had never taken a tip, and I wondered how I was going to feel about it. I needn’t have worried. The Iowa Society liked me fine, but none of them dug into their pocket. But next day I went in the Biltmore, where the Rotary Club was having lunch. I marched right in with the guitar, just like I was supposed to be there, and when I got into the dining-room I went to the center of the U table that they were all sitting around, hit a chord and started to sing. I picked the Trumpeter, because you can rip into it right from the start without any waiting around for a chorus to get started on. A captain and three waiters hustled over to throw me out, but two or three of them yelled, “Let him alone! Let him alone!”

I got a hand, and piled a couple of numbers on top of it. I remember one of them was the Speaks Mandalay. Then some egg up in the corner began to yell, “Pollyochy! Pollyochy!” I didn’t think it was a Pagliacci crowd, so I didn’t pay any attention to him, but he kept it up, and then some of the others yelled “Pollyochy!” too, mostly to shut him up. So I whammed into the introduction, and began singing the Prologue. It’s not my favorite piece of music, but I do it all right, and at the end of the andante I gave them plenty of A flat. By rights, you sing A flats for dough, and for nothing else, but it had been a long time since anybody wanted to hear mine. I swelled it and cut, and then on the E flat that follows it I shook the windows. When I finished I got a big hand, and gave them some Trovatore and Traviata.

When it was time for the speeches the president, or chairman, or whatever he was, called me up, and told me to wait, and they began making up a pot for me. They borrowed a tray from a waiter and passed it around and when it came back it was full of silver. He handed it to me, and I thanked him, and dumped it in my pocket. I had taken a tip, but I didn’t feel anything. I went out in the washroom to count it.

It was $6.75, but we were getting low, getting low. Even with that, we were down to $22, and nobody showing the least interest in John Howard Sharp. Still, there was an outdoor performance of Carmen that night at the Hollywood Bowl, at a dollar and a half top but with some seats at seventy-five cents, so of course we had to go. If you want to know where to find an opera singer the night some opera is being given you’ll find him right there, and no other place. A baseball player, for some reason, prefers a ball game.

So I told her to get dressed, so we could eat early, and try to get out there in time to get some kind of decent seat. By that time she had quit playing with the shower bath to play with the hat. She’d put it on, and take it off, and put it on again, and look at herself in the mirror, and ask if she had it on right, then take it off and start all over again. I generally said it looked swell, but it was funny how dumb she was, catching on to how it worked. Up to then, I had always thought of a woman’s hat as something that she put on, and forgot about, and that was that. But the way she did it, was the funniest-looking thing you ever saw in your life. Half the time she would get it on backwards, and even when she didn’t, she would pull it down on her head some way that made it look like it didn’t even belong to her. I tried the best I could and it was better than her way, but it always looked like a man’s necktie would if somebody else tied it for him.