James Cain - Serenade

I wanted to put it up a half tone, so I could get it in the key of three flats, but I didn’t. It’s in the key of two sharps, the worst key there is for a singer, especially the high F sharp at the end, that catches a baritone all wrong, and makes him sound coarse and ropy. The F sharp is not in the score, but it’s tradition and you have to sing it. God knows why Mozart ever put it in that key, unless it’s because two sharps is the best key there is for a mandolin, and he let his singer take the rap so he could bring the accompaniment to life.

But I tuned with the orchestra before the act started, and did it strictly in the original key. I made two moves while I was singing it. Between verses I took one step nearer the balcony. At the end, I turned my back on the audience, stepped under the balcony and played the finish, not to them, but to her. On the F sharp, instead of covering up and getting it over quick, I did a messa di voce , probably the toughest order a singer ever tries to deliver. You start it p , swell to ff , pull back to p again, and come off it. My tone wasn’t round, but it was pure, and I got away with it all right. They broke into a roar, the bravos yipped out all over the house, and that was the beginning of this stuff that you read, that I was the greatest since Bispham, the peer of Scotti, and all the rest of it. Well, I was the peer of Scotti, or hope I was. They’ve forgotten by now how bad Scotti really was. He could sing, and he was the greatest actor I ever saw, but his voice was just merely painful. What they paid no attention to at all, mentioned like it was nothing but a little added feature, was the guitar. You can talk about your fiddle, your piano, and your orchestra, and I’ve got nothing to say against them. But a guitar has moonlight in it.

Don Giovanni, the Marriage of Figaro, Thaïs, Rigoletto, Carmen, and Traviata, going bigger all the time, getting toward the middle of February, and still nothing from Gold. No notification to report, no phone calls, nothing. It was Ziskin’s picture I was supposed to do next. I saw by the papers he was in town and that night saw him in Lindy’s, but I saw him first and we ducked out and went somewhere else. He looked just as foolish as ever, and I began to tell myself he still didn’t have his script ready, and I might win by default.

The Hudson-to-Horn hook-up was something the radio people had been working on for a year, and God knows how many ministers, ambassadors, and contact men had to give them a hand, because most of those stations south of the Rio Grande are government-owned, and so are the Canadian. Then after they put it over, they had a hard job selling the time, because they were asking plenty for it, and every country had to get its cut. Finally they peddled it to Panamier. The car was being put out mainly for export, and the hook-up gave it what it needed. The next thing was: Who were they going to feature on the hour, now they had sold it? They had eight names on their list, the biggest in the business, starting with Grace Moore and ending with me. I moved up a couple of notches when I told them I could do spig songs in Spanish. I couldn’t, but I figured I was in bed with the right person to learn. Then Paul Bunyan opened, and I went up to the top. I can’t tell you what the picture had. Understand, for my money no picture is any good, really any good, but this one was gay and made you feel you wanted to see it over again. The story didn’t make any sense at all, but maybe it was because it was so cock-eyed you got to laughing. One place in there they cut in the Macy parade, the one they hold about a month before Christmas, with a lot of balloons coming down Broadway in the shape of animals. One of the balloons was a cow, and when they cut them loose, with prizes offered to whoever finds them, this one floats clear out over Saskatchewan and comes down on the trees near the lumber camp. Then the lumberjack that I was supposed to be, the one that has told them all he’s really Paul Bunyan, says it’s Babe, the Big Blue Ox that’s come down from heaven to pay him a Christmas visit. Then he climbs up in a tree and sings to it, and the lumberjacks sing to it, and believe it or not, it did things to you. Then when the sun comes up and they see what gender Babe really is, they go up the tree after the guy to lynch him, but somebody accidentally touches a cigar to the cow and she blows up with such a roar that all the trees they were supposed to cut down are lying flat on the ground, and they decide it was Mrs. Babe.

That clinched me for the broadcast, and they ate it up when I told them how to put the show together so it would sell cars. “We open up with the biggest, loudest, five-tone, multiple-action horn you can find, and if you think that’s not important, I tell you I’ve been down there, and I know what you’ve got to give them to sell cars. You’ve got to have a horn; first, last, and all the time you’ve got to have a horn. I take pitch from that and go into the Golondrina , for the spig trade, blended in with My Pal Babe, for the Canadian trade. I’ll write that little medley myself, and that’s our signature. Then we repeat it, you put your announcer in, and after he stops we go right on. We do light Mexican numbers, then we’ll turn right around and do some little French-Canadian numbers, then one light American number, when it’s time for the announcer again. Then we do a grand opera number and so on for as much time as we’ve got, and any comedy you want to put in, that’s O.K., too, but watch they can understand it. On your car, plug the horn, the lock on the gas tank, the paint job, the speed and the low gas consumption. That’s all. Leave out about the brakes, the knee-action, and all that. They never heard of it, and you’re just wasting your time. Better let me write those plugs, and you let your announcers translate them. And first, last, and again: Sound that horn.”

They struck together a program the way I said, and we made a record of it one morning with the studio orchestra, then went in an audition room and ran it off. It sounded like something. The advertising man liked it, and the Panamier man was tickled to death with it. “It’s got speed to it, you know what I mean? ‘Gangway for the Panamier Eight, she’s coming down the road!’—that’s what it says. And the theme song is a honey. Catches them north, south, and in the middle. Boys, we got something now. That’s set. No more if, as, and but about it.” I began to feel good. Why did I want that broadcast? Because it would pay me four thousand a week. Because they treated me good. Because I had had that flop, and I could get back at Mexico. Because it made me laugh. Because I could say hello to Captain Conners, wherever he was out there, listening to it. In other words, for no reason. I just wanted it.

That was around the first of March, and they would go on the air in three weeks, as soon as they could place ads in the newspapers all up and down the line, and get more cars freighted out, to make deliveries. By that time I had kidded myself that Ziskin would never have his script ready, and that I could forget about Hollywood the rest of my life. I woke up after I left them that day, and walked down to the opera house for the matinee Lucia. A messenger was there, with a registered letter from Gold, telling me to report March 10. I was a little off that day, and missed a cue.

What I did about it was nothing at all, except get the address of a lawyer in Radio City that made a specialty of big theatrical cases. Three days later I got a wire from the Screen Actors’ Guild, telling me that as I had made no acknowledgment of Gold’s notification to report, the case had been referred to them, that I was bound by a valid contract, and that unless I took steps to comply with it at once, they would be compelled to act under their by-laws, and their agreement with the producers. I paid no attention to that either.