B005S8O7YE EBOK (3 page)

A
t age five I loved the radio not only because it was the center of a pleasurable activity that drew my family together, but because it was the source of a wealth of words, sounds, stories, and music. When I was ill enough to stay home from school, I curled up under the covers and listened to the daytime soaps, for which the musical scores were usually composed live on the spot.

“
The Romance of Helen Trent
!”
the announcer would say dramatically, immediately followed by the swell of an organ. The sense of continuity that I began to acquire after a few days of following the adventures of Lorenzo Jones, Ma Perkins, and Our Gal Sunday was lost as soon as I was well enough to go back to school. I might have been more motivated to malinger, but I knew my mother would know I was faking it, and anyway, I liked school.

After school I did arithmetic and sang along with Tony Pastor and His Orchestra to
“Dance with a Dolly (with a Hole in Her Stocking).”
Even without the music, the rhythm of the hook was catchier than Roy Campanella’s baseball mitt.

The first radio I remember was a polished brown wooden box with knobs, push buttons, and evenly spaced horizontal ridges that
I now know were typical of art deco design. The radio sat on a painted white shelf in the kitchen that my dad had installed above our Formica table with its chrome frame. The crinkly pattern on the Formica looked as if someone had crumpled a big sheet of red paper and then flattened it out.

When my father came home from his shift at night he often found my mother cutting up celery and carrots to add to the pot of chicken soup simmering on our Welbilt stove. After tossing in vegetables and tasting the broth with an oversized soup spoon, my mother added salt, peppercorns, and a bay laurel leaf while my father emptied the pockets of the pants he had been wearing at the firehouse, leaving his wallet, keys, assorted coins, notes on scraps of paper in his handwriting, and a sooty handkerchief all a-tumble on the tabletop. When my mom reminded him that the soup was almost ready and that she and I were waiting to set the table, he moved his things to a small table in the foyer and went to wash his hands.

As we ate, my dad got all worked up listening to the news delivered by Edward R. Murrow or Lowell Thomas. Then he laughed at Baby Snooks and Jack Benny and was soothed by the music of Glenn Miller and His Orchestra, Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra, and Jimmy Dorsey and His Orchestra. (Kudos to those bandleaders for acknowledging their musicians.)

My dad and I shared a liking for the mysteries on WOR, a Mutual Broadcasting Company radio station. We were avid fans of
The Shadow
,
The Lone Ranger
,
Inner Sanctum
,
The Green Hornet
,
Suspense
, and
Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons
.

Sometimes we went to movies and ball games, but radio was our preferred form of entertainment before TV took over our household and everyone else’s. The large quantity and quality of radio programming in my formative years brought my parents and me into a world in which the aural cues we were given forced us to
use our imagination to create our own visual reality. This would continue to be the case for many years until MTV took the imagination out of music by providing a definitive visual for each song.

But specific visuals were already being transmitted in 1948, when I was six. The networks were using Nielsen ratings to report who was watching what. I didn’t need ratings to tell me who was watching what on East 24th Street. In those days, if a neighborhood was lucky, one family on the block owned a television. Though we had no more money or prescience than anyone else on our block, somehow we turned out to be that family.

On weeknights, after rushing through an early supper at home, up to six families from our block would squeeze into our living room and try to fit around our brand-new blond-wood console with a seven-inch black-and-white TV screen. During commercials the other kids and I munched noisily on handfuls of potato chips grabbed from large white plastic bowls. We slurped Pepsi-Cola from straws in paper cups and listened to the adults’ comments about the show until the entertainment came back on. We were so absorbed that we never noticed how tinny the sound quality was.

After my little brother was born on December 4, 1948, other women emptied ashtrays and refilled bowls of potato chips while my mother changed Richard’s diaper and fed him in the relative quiet of her sewing room. I helped when she asked me to, but when I had to choose between volunteering and watching television, the choice was clear.

On Monday nights we watched
I Love Lucy
. If you didn’t see it you’d be left out of the conversation at school or work the next day. On Tuesday nights it was the
Texaco Star Theater
. Texaco would probably not have been pleased to know that we called the program “Milton Berle.” Not
“The Milton Berle Show.”
Just “Milton Berle.”

“What are you doing Tuesday night?”

“Whattaya think we’re doin’, stupid? Watchin’ Milton Berle!”

A nation united.

I don’t remember whether the idea for me to move from a watcher to a performer was mine or my mother’s. I do remember that in 1950 my mother took me to audition for
The Horn and Hardart Children’s Hour
as part of a duo with a friend from school. Loretta Stone was ten and I was eight when we decided to perform together. Our act consisted of Loretta singing the high harmony to
“If I Knew You Were Comin’ I’d’ve Baked a Cake”
while I sang the melody and accompanied us both on a ukulele. I didn’t mind performing when I had someone onstage with me to share the attention, and I was eager to see if we could get on the show. I thought the audition went well, but the typical protocol for people conducting an audition was to reveal absolutely nothing until they were ready to tell you either, “You’re hired,” or “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

With no reaction on which to hang hope or disappointment, I put it out of my mind until the afternoon I came home from school and found my mother looking exceptionally pleased. She could barely contain her delight as she blurted out that she had received a call from
The Children’s Hour
saying that Loretta and I had been chosen to perform on the show.

“Mama, really? They want us??”

“Yes!” she said, holding out her arms for a hug. As I went to her I could see the tears of joy in her eyes. It was as if I had just given my mother the moon. I was happier for her than I was for myself until I told Loretta the news and heard her screaming over the phone. By the time she and her mother came over to hear the details in person, I, too, was in possession of the moon.

Our upcoming television appearance prompted me to adopt a professional name. “Carol Klein” didn’t sound like a name that
people would be excited to read out loud to each other as they perused
Hit Parader
. Though my name was alliterative, it didn’t have the zing of, say, Patti Page. I decided upon Carol Kane, a name I used only once, for that show. (I hadn’t yet heard of the comedic actress born with that name.)

The Children’s Hour
performance was broadcast live in front of an audience. I experienced some nervousness, but having Loretta with me to share the experience gave me enough confidence to get through the performance with joy. The audience’s applause told us that we had connected, and I’m pretty sure we left the studio on a big puffy white cloud. We did another professional show called
The Amateur Hour
, hosted by Ted Mack, but it takes a lot of time and energy for the parents of a would-be child star to pursue that child’s career. After that Loretta and I performed occasionally at school, but that was it.

In the early 1950s I had no idea of the impact television would have on society. I was simply enchanted. I watched devotedly as some of my favorite radio shows successfully crossed over to television. The characters of
The Jack Benny Program
looked exactly as I had imagined them. Another successful favorite was
You Bet Your Life
, starring Groucho Marx, with sidekicks George Fenneman and a toy duck modeled after Groucho with glasses and a mustache. Whenever a contestant said the secret word—as one of the contestants inevitably did—the duck would drop down from the rafters on a string with a cigar and a hundred dollars in its bill. Hearing them describe the duck drop on the radio when I was eight, I found the concept hilarious. Seeing the duck drop down on television when I was nine made me laugh so hard my stomach hurt.

In 1952, when junior high school comprised grades seven through nine, I entered seventh grade. I was ten. Most of my classmates were eleven or twelve. At ten, a disparity of two years can
be a chasm. Not only was I smaller than other seventh graders, the physical changes of puberty weren’t even in my thoughts, let alone my body. Every day at school I piped up with all the correct answers in class, which made me appear confident. But it wasn’t cool for a girl to be smart, and I was intimidated by the apparent popularity of the older kids. I would have felt even more socially inferior had it not been for the entertainment and inspiration I drew from TV and radio. As those media outlets were growing up, so was I. Rather than supplanting radio, TV supplemented it. While TV lent itself more to variety shows, sports, and situation comedies, popular music was thriving on the radio. The top songs on the hit parade sailed out over the airwaves like sonic ships over a fair-weather sea, bringing cultural commonality to delighted listeners across America. Among the popular songs that year were Jo Stafford’s
“You Belong to Me,”
the Mills Brothers’
“The Glow Worm,”
and Kay Starr’s
“Wheel of Fortune.”

These and other songs on the hit parade were a lot more interesting to me than events of world importance that were unfolding at the periphery of my carefree innocence. Among them was an increasing awareness by white Americans of the separate and unequal status of Americans of color.

A
t twelve I wasn’t aware that the decade in which I was about to become a teenager was the Eisenhower fifties,
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
fifties, the postwar celebration-of-material-things fifties in which “swell” meant excellent and “gay” meant merry. I had no idea of the limited control people had of their destiny if they were anything other than a wealthy male white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. And the way women were depicted on television gave me the idea that society expected little more from a young girl than being attractive and helping men accomplish great things. If she got good grades in school and helped her mom around the house, so much the better.

From my father’s comments as he listened to the news I inferred that politically there were two sides: “them” and “us.” “We” were proud, patriotic Americans, but if you questioned anything the government did, you were “them.” “We” stood for capitalism, freedom, and democracy. “They” stood for communism. The prevailing message was that America’s enemy was the Soviet Union, whose goal it was to take over the world, country by country, until everyone in the entire world was a communist. I learned about the
domino theory: if one country fell to communism, the rest would follow. As a Jewish child I had heard over and over how Hitler had annihilated six million Jews and nearly taken over the world in the forties until patriotic Americans and our allies in Europe defeated him. By the early fifties, communism had become the new enemy of patriotic Americans.

At twelve, I had trouble identifying the enemy. Hadn’t the United States fought against Hitler on the same side as Soviet Russia? And what about the other “they”—Communist China? Which country was the worse bad guy? And why, if the Soviet Union and China were both communist, were they not getting along with each other? As my generation entered adolescence it was natural for us to see the adults in our lives as “them,” but there was more going on than just a generational separation.

At first we didn’t see any indication of revolution brewing under the blanket of conformity that lay across America, but seeds of racial integration were already taking root in film, theater, dance, and the visual arts. A momentous change occurred in major-league sports with the addition of a man of color—Jackie Robinson—to the lineup of the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. But the field with the most fertile soil for radical transformation and the greatest ability to capture the attention of young people was popular music.

Before the fifties, music written and performed by black Americans was listened to mostly by black Americans. The popularity of such recordings was tracked on rhythm and blues charts. Such music was largely absent from the popular music charts that typically reflected the taste of white mainstream listeners. A sampling of pop charts over the first half of the decade shows the first signs of black music crossing over. This crossover was a tangible measure of the increasing influence of R&B music on white teenagers—a trend that would continue into the twenty-first century with rural white teenagers rapping urban rhetoric over boombox beats.

In 1950, Teresa Brewer’s
“Music! Music! Music!”
topped the charts. As were most artists on the pop charts that year, Miss Brewer was white.

In 1951,
“Rocket 88,”
a paean to an Oldsmobile, reflected the enthusiasm of young people for cars. Written and performed by black Americans, the Jackie Brenston version shot to the top of the R&B charts, but it was the recording of “Rocket 88” by Bill Haley and the Saddlemen that connected with white audiences.

In 1952, Ruth Brown’s
“5-10-15 Hours”
hit #1 on the R&B charts, but Miss Brown didn’t break onto the pop charts until the following year with
“(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean.”

In 1953, a young white man recorded his first demo in Memphis. With his good looks, shockingly sexy presentation, and parents’ fears that their children would be incited by his pelvic movements to participate in wild orgies, Elvis Presley was uniquely positioned to make black music and dance popular with white teenagers.