WLT (38 page)

It was one thing after another. Sex was on the premises, and there was no way to get it out.

“What is that naked woman doing on the wall in Studio B?” Ray asked Roy Jr.

“
You never saw that before?
” Roy Jr. clapped his hands to his head. “That's been there since I was a child!”

Ray said meekly, “It must have slipped my mind.”

Roy Jr. was not in a kidding mood when he found out that Wendell Shepherd of the Shepherd Boys, stars of
The Rise and Shine Show
, was seeing a secretary in Continuity named Hazel Park. He got so mad he changed the show from seven a.m. to six.

“She was a valuable employee, and you used her like you'd use a couch, and you broke her heart, you jerk,” he told Wendell. “Yes, you. You're nothing but a gold-plated gospel jerk. So all right. Set your alarm an hour earlier.”

Wendell pleaded for mercy. “The guys'll kill me,” he moaned. Roy Jr. looked at him in disgust, splayed out on the sofa. Wendell was a tall slope-shouldered fellow with long hair oiled down and swept up high on his head in swoops, and he wore white shoes and pink socks and a glittery green suit that shone like seaweed in the moonlight. All the Shepherds were bold of dress and favored rare items such as checkered vests and brilliant ties with rural landscape scenes, but Wendell, the lead singer and the youngest, was the showboat. Wendell wore diamonds, a stickpin in the lapel and a tietack and diamond studs, and Wendell dyed his hair black. It had been mouse brown.

The Shepherds were four brothers, Elmer, Al, Rudy, and Wendell, and they had been a big crowd-pleaser on the
Barn Dance
since 1937, when they came down from North Dakota, winners of a gospel quartet contest. The gospel contest was the bright idea of a Program Director named Milford Scudder, and it was his last; Ray fired him. “I didn't get into radio to be in with a bunch of holy Joes with fancy clothes and brilliantined hair—gospel quartets! Holy cow, don't you know what these people are like?”

Scudder did not know. He was a Congregationalist. He imagined that gospel singers were like choir members, stolid, hearty, well-meaning folks, except fewer in number. He had no idea. Ray had to yell at him for awhile.

“Gospel singers are
nothing
like choir members. Nothing. This is the grass-eater element you're inviting in here, the Bible pounders, the snake handlers, the holy rollers. These are the people who run around church and howl like dogs and speak in tongues and faint in a heap and lie there and twitch like spastics, with foam dripping off their mouths. These people are faith healers, Scudder. And I will not allow that—I am not going to
tolerate
any faith healing around here. None! Nobody is going to write in to WLT for the holy hankies or the light-up crucifixes or the tiny New Testaments. Nobody is going to take a WLT microphone and speak in tongues into it. Never. We are not going to have snake handling here.”

It was the grass-eater element that brought William Jennings Bryan down, those crazy fundamentalists who grabbed the old giant and flattered him and hoisted him up on their shoulders and hauled him down to Dayton, Tennessee, for the Monkey Trial. One of the most brilliant minds that ever graced the nation, one of the truest sons of the Middle West and a good heart and a great American, and the grass-eaters got him to shill for them against that cagey, money-grubbing appleknocker Clarence Darrow, a man who knew which way the wind blew and who blew with it, and Bryan was made the fool, the bear in the circus, and died, and all the greatness of his life would be forgotten, and his last dumb moments remembered, because he fell for the fundamentalists. Well, Ray would not.

“I'm sorry,” said Scudder.

“You're exactly right you're sorry. You're fired,” said Ray.

But the contest must go on, of course, and as winners, the Shepherd Boys had to sing on the
Barn Dance
and then, when they tore down the house with “My Lord Calls Me” and the crowd wouldn't let them go until they did it
three more times
, the only way Leo LaValley could restore order was to invite them back for next week. And then it happened again. The Shepherds were powerful. They were young and dark and when they got into the Spirit, they moaned and whooped in a way that Minnesotans do not generally do in public. When Wendell sang, “Please, Jesus, please—don't leave me here—the night so dark and cold—please Jesus, put your hand in mine—just like the Bible told,” women in the audience leaned forward and put their hands to their faces and shuddered and whispered his name,
Wendell
.

So, on Monday morning, Ray called the Shepherds in, and the four boys sat politely, in dark plain slacks and black sweaters, as he told them he was offering them their own show,
The Rise and Shine Show
, five days a week at 7 a.m., to sing five songs, three of them requests, and to do birthday and anniversary greetings, the weather forecast, and a few jokes. Clean jokes. “You wouldn't happen to do an occasional non-sacred song, would you?” he inquired. Rudy said they did lots of them, like “Red River Valley” and “Long Long Ago,” but that people preferred the gospel ones. Variety goes a long way, said Ray. Then he paused. “Boys?” he said. They smiled.
Yes?

“Boys, if there's ever even so much as one tiny bit of faith healing on that show, one little smidgen of tongues, or one mention of snakes or hankies, I'll kick your ass out of here so fast, your heads'll spin. You hear me?” They heard.

“You are going to sing your songs, give the weather, sell the seed corn or whatever, and you're not going to cut loose and start whooping and crying and asking people to send their love offerings, right?”

Oh yes, they understood. But even with no healing, no praying, no tongues, no snakes or hankies, there was plenty to put up with. The loud clothes, the clouds of cologne, the pinky rings, Rudy's violet Pontiac ensconced in the parking lot like an ugly welt, the trail of empty vodka bottles, and the women, a constant parade of frowsy women.

But it was Hazel Park's fall that burned Roy Jr. She was a stocky girl with piano legs and a big cheerful grin and a ponytail that came out of the top of her head, and she sat by a radio and logged commercials in a big black ledger that she called Henry. She named other things around her desk. The typewriter was Vivian, for example. She kept four photographs on her desk and a great many little souvenirs, such as rocks she had garnered from her trips to the North Shore, and pine cones, a brass buffalohead coin bank, a cowgirl figurine, and a little plastic piano from Rapid City, S.D. Open the lid and there were souvenir matchbooks. The memorabilia came to form a sort of windbreak across the front of the desk, which faced the door to Studio B, where
The Rise and Shine Show
aired from.

Wendell had spotted Hazel one morning when he came rushing back from the Antwerp, having forgotten the little spiral notebook where he wrote down ideas for new songs, and she helped him look for it. The two of them rummaged around, and “then she crawled on the floor looking under the record cabinets, and he got to look down the front of her blouse. She was awfully sorry about him losing all that hard work, she was terribly sorry, and so she went to dinner with him at The Forum. When he suggested that they get together at the hotel and try writing songs, she trotted right over the next day after work. They wrote a tearjerker called “Little Dan” (“When his daddy went away in a car crash one dark day, he became his mama's man, Little Dan”) and then a gospel number, “One More Sinner,” during which Wendell collapsed from the strain of creation. “Lie next to me,” he moaned. She did. He told her that he had never met anyone with her raw songwriting talent. He would teach her everything he knew, and she would go on to write the songs he never could, not having her talent. She admitted that, yes, she did have quite a few creative ideas and notions—such as her idea of writing a tribute song to her mother, just to name one—and now that he had given her self-confidence, she could see that these ideas would make wonderful songs. She had been an odd duck in Mankato, never fitting in, always lonely, terribly shy—“a typical story for a creative person,” Wendell noted. Nobody in Mankato had ever seen this talent in her because she had not seen it herself. It took Wendell, a fellow creator, to notice it and to bring it out. She kissed him in gratitude. He smiled. “You're going to be rich and famous and live in Chicago someday,” he said, “and you'll forget all about your Wendell, but I'll understand, and I'll just enjoy reading about you.” She protested his assessment of her character. She would
never
forget him. He put his arms around her. He apologized. “Of course, you won't forget me,” he said, “but I do know that the currents of life will sweep us apart. We are but islands in the sea of life, and seldom do our peripheries. touch. I want to touch you.” He unbuttoned her blouse and unclasped her brassiere and her perfect generous breasts spilled out and lay beside him, magnificent twins breathing, sighing, happy, wanting only to he cradled in his hands. ”This is a moment we'll remember for the remainder of our lives,” he said, as he whipped off his pants. “Let's make it the most memorable moment it can be.” They had sex every business day for two weeks, plunging in the percale like white whales, and when he got tired of her and her passive manner, he told her he couldn't anymore, on account of his conscience. The Lord was telling him that this adultery would not go unpunished, and Wendell was afraid that Miss Park might have to pay the price—he had had a terrible dream in which he saw her body, decapitated, lying beside the road—and so, for her own protection, he had to stop their love-making, and because he was so filled with desire for her, he could not bear to ever see her or speak to her for awhile.

Thus it was that Hazel, a valued employee of WLT despite her clutter of memorabilia (to which Wendell added a photo of himself signed, “Best Wishes to a Real Big Talent”), collapsed, emotionally shattered, and went home to Mankato to walk around and weep for a month. When she returned, she was a shadow of herself, a faint, tremulous, apologetic lady instead of the hearty office girl of yore. One day she sobbed out the whole awful story to Winifred Winter, the boss of Continuity, and Winifred went to Roy Jr., and Roy Jr. hit the roof. He was still angry after he changed the time of the show and sent Wendell off to buy an extra alarm clock.

Roy Jr. paced around his office for a minute or two, kicking chairs and balling up paper and hurling it at the walls, and when Frank didn't hear any more kicking, he poked his head in.

Roy Jr. peered at him through narrowed slits. “I'm going to put him in your charge.”

Frank eased into the room. “What do you want me to do?”

“Take him and his sorry brothers and their wretched band and take them out of here. Out of our lives. And take Slim Graves too. And take Barney, that whiny engineer. And that drummer, Red, the one who goes around here always tapping on things. Run the whole damn bunch out the door and take them on a three-week tour of Minnesota and let's get them out of the radio business once and for all. Except you. You come back.”