James Cain - Serenade

Next morning while I was having a piano run-through of the Traviata duet with a new soprano they were bringing out, a secretary came up to the rehearsal room and told me to please go at once to a suite in the Empire State Building, that it was important. I asked the soprano if she minded doing the rest of it after lunch. When I got up to the Empire State Building, I was brought into a big office paneled in redwood, and marked “Mr. Luther, private.” Mr. Luther was an old man with a gray cutaway suit, a cheek as pink as a young girl’s, and an eye like blue agate. He got up, shook hands, told me how much he had enjoyed my singing, said my Marcello reminded him of Sammarco, and then got down to business. “Mr. Sharp, we have a communication here from a certain Mr. Gold, Rex Gold, informing us that he has a contract with you, and that any further employment of you on our part, after March 10, will be followed by legal action on his part. I don’t know what legal action he has in mind, but I thought it would be well if you came in and, if you can, inform me what he means, if you know.”

“You’re the attorney for the opera house?”

“Not regularly, of course. But sometimes when somebody is in Europe, they refer things to me.”

“Well — I have a contract with Gold.”

“For motion pictures, I judge?”

“Yes.”

I told him about it, and made it pretty plain I was through with pictures, contract or no contract. He listened and smiled, and seemed to get it all, why I wanted to sing in opera and all the rest of it. “Yes, I can understand that. I understand it very well. And of course, considering the success we’re having with you here, I should certainly hesitate to take any step, or give any advice, that would lose you to us at the height of the season. Of course, a telegram unsupported by any other documents is hardly ground for us to make a decision, and in fact we are not bound to take cognizance of contracts made by our singers until a court passes on them, or in some way compels us to. Just the same—”

“Yes?”

“Have you had any communication from Mr. Gold, aside from his letter of notification?”

“Nothing at all. I did have a wire from the Screen Actors’ Guild. But that’s all.”

“The — what was that again?”

I had the wire in my pocket, and showed it to him. He got up and began to walk around the office. “Ah — you’re a member of this Guild?”

“Well — everybody is that works in pictures.”

“It’s an affiliate of Equity, isn’t it?”

“I’m not sure. I think so.”

“... I don’t know what their procedure is. It’s recently organized, and I haven’t heard much about it. But I confess, Mr. Sharp, this makes things very awkward. Contracts, court cases — these things I don’t mind. After all, that’s what I’m here for, isn’t it? But I should be very loath to give any advice that would get the company into any mess with the Federation of Musicians. You realize what’s involved here, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t.”

“As I say, I don’t know the procedure of your Screen Actors’ Guild, but if they took the matter up with the musicians, and we had some kind of mess on our hands, over your singing here until you had adjudicated your troubles with your own union — Mr. Sharp, I simply have a horror of it. The musicians are one of the most intelligent, co-operative, and sensible unions we have, and yet, any dispute, coming at the height of the season—!”

“Meaning what?”

“I don’t know. I want to think about it.”

I went out, had a sandwich and some coffee, and went back to the rehearsal hall. We just about got started when the same secretary came up and said the radio people wanted me to come up right away, that it was terribly important, and would I please make it as soon as I could. The soprano went into an act that blistered the varnish off the piano. At plain and fancy cussing, the coloraturas, I think, are the best in the business. I got out on the street, tried to figure out which was uptown and which down. I thought about Jack Dempsey.

They were all up there, the advertising man, the Panamier man, the broadcasting men, all of them, and there was hell to pay. They had had a wire from Gold, forbidding them to use My Pal Babe, or any part of it, else be sued up to the hilt, and warning them not to use me. The Panamier man raved like an animal. I listened and began to get sore. “What the hell is he talking about? You can use that song. I don’t know much about law, but I know that much—”

“We can’t use it! We can’t use a note of it! It’s his! And those ads have gone out to two hundred key newspapers. We got to kill them by wire, we got to get up a whole new program — Christ, why didn’t you tell us about this thing? Why did you let us start all this knowing you had that contract?”

“Will you just hold your horses till tonight?”

“For what? Will you tell me that, for what?”

“Till I can see a lawyer?”

“Don’t you suppose I’ve seen a lawyer? Don’t you suppose I’ve had Gold on the phone three times today while I was trying to find where the hell you were? And I’ve advertised it! I’ve advertised the goddam theme song! Golondrina, My Babe — don’t that sound sick? And I’ve advertised you — John Howard Sharp, El Panamier Trovador — don’t that sound sicker! Get out, for Christ sake—”

“Will you wait? Just till tonight?”

“Yeah, I’ll wait. Why not?”

The lawyer was five floors down in the same building. He didn’t have redwood paneling in his office. It was just an office, and he was a brisk little guy named Sholto. I laid it out for him. He leaned back, took a couple of calls, and started to talk. ‘Sharp, you haven’t got a leg to stand on. You made a contract, a contract that any jury would regard as perfectly fair, and the only thing you can do is go through with it. It may reflect credit on your aesthetic conscience that you prefer opera to pictures, but it doesn’t reflect any credit on your moral conscience that you jump a contract just because you want to. As well as I can make out this picture company took you when you were a bum, put you on your feet, and now you want to hand them a cross. I don’t say you couldn’t lick them in court. Nobody can say what a jury is going to do. But you’ll be a bum before you ever get to court. Show business is all one gigantic hook-up, Gold knows it frontwards, backwards, crosswise, and on the bias, and you haven’t got a chance. You’re sewed. You’ve got to go back and make that picture.”

“Just give up everything, now it’s breaking for me, go back and make a picture just because that cluck has an idea that opera is through?”

“What the hell are you trying to tell me? One more picture like this Bunyan and you can walk into any opera house in the world, and the place is yours. You’re being built into a gallery draw that not one singer in a million can bring into the theatre with him. Haven’t you got any brains? These musicals are quota pictures. They go all over the world. They make you famous from Peru to China and from Norway to Capetown, and from Panama to Suez and back again. Don’t you suppose opera houses know that? Don’t you think the Metropolitan knows it? Do you suppose all this commotion you’ve caused is just a tribute to your A flat in Pagliacci? It is like hell.”

“I haven’t sung Pagliacci.”

“All right then, Trovatore.”

“And that’s all you’ve got to tell me?”

“Isn’t it enough?”

I felt so sick I didn’t even bother to go up to the broadcasting offices again. I went down, caught a cab, and went home. It was starting to snow. We had sublet a furnished apartment in a big apartment house on East Twenty-second Street, near Gramercy Park. She had liked it because there were Indian rugs around that looked a little like Mexico, and we had been happier there, for six weeks, than I had ever been in my life. She was in bed with a cold. She never could get it through her head what New York weather was like. I sat down and broke the news. “Well, it’s all off. We go back to Hollywood.”