THAT WAS A NICE little summer job on KFOX until he came along. I’d spin the platters and dead-pan the commercials, I’d read the news off the AP wire—I was a kind of transmission belt between Fox, Wyoming, and the outside world. For seventy-five a week. Just making enough to keep me in nylons and pay my way at the local beauty parlor. And doing enough to satisfy a nagging conscience.
But this isn’t getting us to Lonesome Rhodes. The time is one quiet weekday morning when I have the shop pretty much to myself. There’s just me and Farrell who sits there with all the little knobs and gets us on the air, hangover and all. The boss is off somewhere taking his ease. Joe Aarons, our staff-of-lifer, is out telling tradesmen their businesses will cave in if they don’t hurry up advertise on KFOX. OK? Ready? Blow the trumpets. Sound the cymbals. Enter Mister Rhodes.
He’s big and he’s Western, but he isn’t stringbean like Gary. He’s kind of big all over, like a husky fullback three years after he broke training. He’s got a ruddy, laughing face, the haw-haw kind. He must be well into his thirties, but he’s boyish. He stands there in an un-pressed brown suit and cowboy boots, shifting from one foot to another, shy-like, though something tells me deep down he is about as shy as a bulldozer. I spin one—one of my old faves, Berrigan’s “Can’t Get Started” and I duck to find out what brings to our wireless castle this happy big one I see through the glass.
“Ma’am,” he says, “my name is Rhodes, Larry Rhodes. They call me Lonesome.”
“Who calls you lonesome?” I say.
He grinned a nice warm grin. Too nice. Too warm.
“Lonesome, that’s my professional name, ma’am.”
“Oh, a professional. What are you a professional at?”
“Singin’, ma’am. Folk singin’.”
Now I know that these days you are supposed to love folk singin’. If you don’t drool over “Barbara Allen,” if you don’t swoon to the “Blue-Tail Fly” or “The E-ri-e Canal” you are considered un-hep, unwholesome and perhaps a trifle unpatriotic. Well, I plead guilty.
I look at the big clock in the broadcasting room and I see the impatient second hand sweeping on to my next cue. So I run in to tell the waiting world of Fox, Wyoming, and environs that if they want the finest dinner they ever had for one dollar thirty-five what are they waiting for, hurry their lassies down to the Little Bluebird Grill. Then I spin Fats on his own “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and I come out for another peek at Western man on the hoof.
He beams on me. “You must be a mighty smart little gal to be handlin’ this here raddio station all by yourself.”
“My good man,” I said, “I am able to read without laughing out loud any commercial that is placed before me. I am able to pick out a group of records and point to the guy in the control room each time I want him to play one. And that is how you run a rural radio station.”
“Haw,” observed Lonesome Rhodes.
“I might add,” I said, “that we are not in the market for live entertainment. Assuming that is what you represent. Except for the news, and once in a while an interview with a celebrity who wanders into our corral, we live on wax. We spin for our suppers.”
He chuckled. Yes, warmly and nicely. He shook all over when he chuckled. He looked like Santa Claus rolled back to his middle thirties.
“You’re a real five-gaited talkin’ gal,” he said. “Now you jest set yerself down an’ try to keep still and give old Lonesome five minutes of yer invaluable time.”
The way he said it and the size of him grinning down at me were not unpersuasive. What he offered was limitless confidence in his own charm. Now that you’ve seen him thousands of times you know what I mean.
“I brought along my git-tar,” he said. “How can you send away from your door a fella who goes to all that trouble jest to entertain you?” As a matter of fact we were hooked into a national soap opera called “John’s Office Wife,” so I was on my own for the next half-hour. “All right,” I said, “entertain me.”
He opened the guitar case and a Racing Form fell out.
“How did you do yesterday?” I said.
He shook his head and shrugged and then he grinned. “I had a tough break. Shy Lady was ready to make her move, but she couldn’t find racing room.”
“All right, sing,” I said. “Let’s have ‘Home on the Range.’”
The guitar case was a large one and it also held a change of clothes and his toilet articles. “I made this myself with an old cigar box, a piece of piano wire I found in a junkyard and a little spit,” he said, caressing the instrument. “Back in my home town, Riddle, Arkansas, they call me the Stradivarius of the cigar-box git-tar. Them folks got a heap o’ culture in Riddle.” He put his ear down to that god-awful-looking thing and began to tune it elaborately.
“This isn’t Carnegie Hall,” I said, “and I only have twenty minutes.”
I hate guitars. I used to hate banjos, but I think I hate guitars more. Except for Segovia or Vincente Gomez.
“I will first sing that old folk song ‘We’ll Have Tea for Two if You’ll Bring the Tea.’”
A Western clown, I thought to myself.
He poised his fingers over the strings and announced, “I should say at this point that I do not know how to play the git-tar. I sent for a home-study course, but not having a home the lessons never seem to catch up to me. A folk singer without a git-tar is like soft-boiled eggs without a spoon, kind of embarrassin’, so I carry the git-tar along t’ keep up appearances.”
I made a fairly good job of not laughing. But he had something. To look at his big hearty puss and the way he enjoyed himself, it made you want to smile.
He started to sing one of my favorite hates, “Little Red Wing.” It was only slightly awful, but it was rapidly getting worse. He broke off after a few bars and said, “If you think this is good I wish you could hear my Cousin Abernathy sing it. He does it through his nose and on a nice damp day he gets an effect that’s darn near as good as playin’ a comb through toilet paper.”
He talked that way all through the number. He kept reminding himself of funny stories from that outrageous home town, Riddle, Arkansas. He said the riddle was how it could call itself a town when it had so few people in it. He said there was only one family in the town, his own kin, the Rhodeses. Population 372 and one half. He said the extra half was for his Great Uncle Bloomer who had two heads. “But he only had two hands and one mouth so we figured he was only entitled to one vote and one jug of corn a day. But believe me that fella’s got two good heads on his shoulders. It took two of ’em to get the last word with my Aunt Lucybelle.” He said there was so much intermarriage in Riddle, Arkansas, that he figured out one time his mother-in-law’s kid brother was actually his step-daddy. How he, Lonesome, ever came out so normal and intelligent he would never know, he said. He said in Riddle they called him The Perfessor because he was the only fella in town who ever got through the third grade. “And I was only fourteen at the time,” he said. “The only other member of my family to be associated with an educational institution was my Great Great Uncle Wilbraham. He’s been at Harvard for years. My daddy says he occupies one of the most important bottles in the medical lab, but I wouldn’t swear to it because Daddy is always boasting about his kin.”
And all this time in bits and snatches he’s singing “Little Red Wing.”
I didn’t know whether it was wonderful or ghastly but I’ll admit I didn’t dial out. He finished with a great throbbing chord. “That is the lost chord,” he said. “I picked it up in a saloon in Jackson Hole one night and I never have been able to find anybody who would own up to it. … Haw haw haw,” he chuckled from deep in his belly. “You bring the money, Mama, I’ll bring the fun.”
Well, I don’t know. He was outrageous. He was boisterous and effective and he had a certain animal charm that made me feel uneasy.
He was just winding up when our boss came in. He’s a rich man who owns a chain of rural newspapers and affects cowboy boots and a white ten-gallon hat like Gene Autry. He is just as crazy about folk singin’ as I loathe, despise and abominate it. He takes one good look at Lonesome and what he sees appeals to his Amuricanism.
Now I happen to feel strongly about America, from General George to General Ike, but our boss, Jay Macdonald, loves America as if it were his own private potato patch. In his mind, he and America are practically interchangeable. You know the type. Well, he wants to know if Lonesome can sing “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie.” Mr. Macdonald says he can always tell when it is sung right because the last line trailing off into the mournful silence invariably makes him reach for his handkerchief. Well, Lonesome gives it to him, with all the stops out. Right down to the last phrase of gooey self-pity on the Lo-an Pray-reeee. … Old Macdonald reaches for his hanky. I see this Lonesome Rhodes is no fool. He has played it very straight. Macdonald stifles a sob and says, “Dammy, I love that old song. A real true-blue Amurican song.” Lonesome whips out a coarse red handkerchief and sheds a tear or two of his own.
“A-course I don’ know too much about this here raddio busyness,” Lonesome concedes, in what has now become a household phrase, “but it seems to me a raddio station in a hunert-per cent Amurican community like Fox could do with a bit of its own old-fashioned Amurican singin’ an’ talkin’.”
With eyes still damp with patriotic emotion, Macdonald allowed as to how that was so. And next thing you knew, he was allowing as to how a half-hour spot must be made in the daytime schedule for my new fellow-staffer Lonesome Rhodes.
Well, I can’t build any fake suspense about a name that has become as world famous as Lonesome Rhodes’. Most of you have read Life and that Time cover story and a dozen other articles on how it all happened. Lonesome got on there for half an hour singing “Little Mohee”—just that one song for the whole program because he kept interrupting himself with funny stories, family anecdotes, homilies, recipes for pineapple upside-down cake the way his Maw made it in Riddle, Arkansas, and anything else that popped into his cagey, folksy, screwball mind.
The next day I have a new job. I am answering Lonesome Rhodes’ fan mail. Seems as if half the population of Fox, Wyoming, is in his pocket. More letters in one day, says our boss, than we had been getting in three months. And I had to answer them in Lonesome’s lingo. “I sure am tickled yer out there a-listenin’.”
The boss ups him to three times a day for an hour. Lonesome just gets on there and drools. Anything that comes into his head, that’s what the people want to hear. He’s got the popular touch. A man of the people. The way he wraps himself around that mike you’d think it was his best girl or his favorite horse. He says, “Top o’ the mornin’ to ya, Ma—mmmm, that coffee smells good!—wish I had time to come over an’ give ya a hand with them dishes,” and at least three dozen housewives plunk themselves right down at their kitchen tables and write him letters about how well he understands them. Sometimes he kids the commercials and sometimes he reads them as if he were on his knees proposing. Rarely the same way twice. He’s smart. That’s what’s wrong about him. I’m seeing quite a lot of him on the air and off, and he isn’t at all the simple, fun-loving oaf he pretends. He drinks too much, and he’s indiscriminate with women. I see the way he eyes all the girls when we go out together. He’s not a wolf, he’s King Kong. He has to prove what a helluva fella he is every five minutes. And he seems madly in love with Lonesome Rhodes. The little success he’s had in Fox doesn’t surprise him at all. “It’s my natural magnetism,” he explained, “my God-given magnetism.”
“That magnetism wasn’t even keeping you in beans a few weeks ago,” I reminded him.
“That’s because I didn’t have you, Marshy,” he said.
“You haven’t got me now.”
Not that he hadn’t tried.
“But you’re what’s keeping me here,” he said. “I was always a wanderer. My feet get itchy after a few weeks. With the singin’ an’ the talkin’ I’m always good for a few bucks wherever I go. I play the fair grounds and the barrel-houses. All I need to kill the people is to stay in one place. I never knew a woman good enough to stand still for. Until I found you, Marshy.”
So it seems I had the love of Lonesome Rhodes. I was also responsible, in an indirect way, for elevating him from folk singer to political sage. It happened at the bar of El Rancho Gusto. The local sheriff, who was running for re-election, had had a snootful and in the dim light of the lounge he mistook me for Yvonne de Garbo or somebody. A pass took place. Lonesome Rhodes rose to defend my honor. Lonesome had had not one drink but one bottle too many and his aim was inaccurate. I sometimes wonder if his fist had ever connected with the jaw of the candidate, would he have gone on to his fabulous career. Missing the would-be sheriff left him with a king-sized frustration.
Next morning he worked it out of his system on the air. He said this fella who wanted to keep on being sheriff of a great, thriving, forward-looking community like Fox, Wyoming, didn’t even deserve to be sheriff of Lonesome’s home town, Riddle, Arkansas. Or maybe, he said, that’s exactly what he did deserve. In Riddle, he said, the way they picked their sheriffs was they figured out which fella could best be spared from useful labor. In some places, he said, the village halfwit has to be put on town relief. But in Riddle, as an economy measure, they made a sheriff out of him. He said that is pretty much what Fox would be doing if they re-elected this poor fella of theirs.
The following day I had to answer fifty letters from listeners suggesting that Lonesome himself run for sheriff.
He answered some of them on the air. He said he would have to decline the honor as he had never gotten around to learning how to read and write and he had heard that this sort of erudition came in handy if you were going to be a sheriff. He said the only difference between him and the other fella was that he, Lonesome, admitted he didn’t know nuthin’.
He kept this up day after day all in good clean fun until he had that poor man crazy. And the people loved it. In fact he could just stand there picking his teeth over the microphone and the fans ate it up. For instance, one day he said into the live mike—and he wasn’t kidding either: “Marshy, I’m tired today, didn’t get my beauty sleep last night, hold the mike while I caulk off for a minute or two.” And he handed me the mike and closed his eyes. I could have killed him. I got out a couple of letters I was answering and read them to take up the slack. But when I was half through, he mumbled, “Shhhh, Marshy, yer disturbin’ my sleep, le’s keep it absolutely quiet.” So thirty seconds of dead time went out over KFOX. Anybody else would have been fired. But when Lonesome Rhodes did it he got fan mail.
On election night the sheriff, whose margin last time had been 362 to 7, found himself licked for the first time in sixteen years. The fellow who won, an undertaker named Gorlick, got more votes this time than he had in the last four campaigns combined. (His seven votes in the last election had come from members of his family.) Lonesome introduced the new sheriff on his program next day by saying that Gorlick obviously was an unselfish public servant, for the better sheriff he was the less business he’d have for his undertakin’ parlor.
That and some more of the same was how Lonesome got his first break in Time. I could hardly believe it when a local photographer phoned the station to tell us Time had called him to come up and get a picture of us. I say us because Lonesome was making a kind of assistant celebrity out of me. If he couldn’t find something—in a playful mood he might pretend he had mislaid the commercial—he would call into the mike: “Marshy, Marshy—where is that forgetful girl? Neighbors, if there’s anything you don’t like on this here program I want you to remember it is Marshy’s fault, so send your letters of complaint to her.” I was always the patsy, the fall girl. So Time said they wanted me in the act too. The still man came up to the studio on time, but Lonesome wasn’t around. That had become one of my headaches. Getting Lonesome to the studio on time. He was just a small-town star, but he was developing a talent for big-time ways. Twenty minutes before the morning show I’d find him in his room. The only way I could wake him was with a cold wet washrag right over the big, lovable, exasperating face. Lonesome Rhodes. My life work.
The Time piece had it pretty accurate. They called Lonesome Rhodes a younger, fatter, coarser Will Rogers in the American grain of tobacco-chewing, cracker-barrel, comic philosophers, a caricature of the folk hero who has always been able to make Americans nod their heads and grin and say, “Yep, that fella ain’t so dumb as he looks!” It was hard to tell whether Time was putting the laurel wreath or the knock on him. You know the style. But it didn’t matter. Lonesome was in. The next day I got a call from Chicago. It was the J & W Agency and they wanted Lonesome. Right away. Five hundred a week. There was nothing like him on big-time radio, the man said. A simple, lovable, plain-talking, down-to-earth American. I said Mr. Simple-Lovable would call them back.
I found the great American just where I expected to find him, in the sack in his room with a half-empty jug of blended by the bed. I said, “Get up, you slob, destiny is calling.”
“Collect?” he said.
“Chicago,” I said. “J & W. Five hundred cash money a week. One hour every morning. Week-ends free. And all you have to do is be your own irresistible self.”
He looked at me with those big, bloodshot, roly-poly eyes. “What do you think we oughta do, Marshy?”
“You,” I said. “You can find yourself a new slave in Chicago.”
“I’m gonna marry you in Chicago,” he said. “I’m a-gonna make a honest woman of you in the Windy City, little gal.”
Among his many bad habits was his way of creating the impression, through careful innuendo, that we were a team, biologically speaking. This was a figment of his imagination and designs, but since when have people ever accepted truth when nasty rumors are so much more fun? “Why talk of marriage when your heart is wrapped up in somebody else?” I said. “How could I ever replace Lonesome Rhodes in your affection?”
“Marshy, I’ve known some pretty good-looking broads in my get-arounds, but they always took me apart. You’re not going to win any beauty contests, but you put me together. You get me up in time to go to work. You get me on and off. You keep in touch with my public. You cue me when I start repeatin’ myself. You always tell me when I’m gettin’ close to the line. I lean on you. So you say yes and we’ll go to Chicago and make it hand over fist and you’ll be the rich Mrs. Rhodes. I can’t afford to lose you. You’re the smartest good-lookin’ gal I ever got hold of.”
“Take your hand away,” I said. “This is business. Shall I tell them yes?”
“If you’re in it.”
“Well, only as a job,” I said, “a job I can quit when I’ve had enough. You understand?”
“Okay,” he said, “I’ll take my chances.”
“So I’ll tell them yes.”
“Only not for five hundred. Lonesome Rhodes is not a three-figure man.”
He had started at seventy-five like me and was getting a fast century now.
I called back J & W in Chicago and gave them Mr. Rhodes’ estimate of his own value and they said even with that publicity from Time a four-figure bill was too big for a starter. I ran back to tell Lonesome (in his bathrobe drinking beer now) and he said, “I better get on the phone and talk to ’em myself.” It took him an hour to pull himself into his clothes and get down to the station where he had me get on the other phone and take down what they said so he could hold them to it. Where he got that adding-machine mind I don’t know, but he was never a cowhand when it came to finance. This is what Lonesome Rhodes, that simple know-nothing troubadour, suggested: That he work gratis for nothing for two weeks. At the end of that period if they want him to continue they pay him his thousand a week including back pay for the trial period. And at the end of twenty-six weeks an option for fifteen hundred for the next twenty-six weeks. “A-course I’m not tryin’ t’ run your busyness, gents,” he Arkansighed, “a’m jest tryin’ t’ give ya an idea what a fella figures he’s worth. Oh yes, an’ transportation. Transportation fer my li’l o pardner Marshy Coulihan and yours truly.”
So we flew in to Chicago and now Lonesome was on coast-to-coast. The show was called “Your Arkansas Traveler.” It was pretty much the same routine that had made him the idol of Fox, Wyoming. With one important exception. That sheriff election had gone to his head. He wasn’t content just to sing his old songs and tell funny stories about his family in Riddle, Arkansas, any more. He had to hold forth. It is one of the plagues our age is heir to. No longer do disc jockeys play the music. Now they lecture you on how to solve the traffic problems of New York and improve the United Nations. That’s the bug that was biting Lonesome. He was rushing in where not only angels but a majority of fools would fear to tread. I did my small best to talk him out of it and get him to know his place. But he was male-stubborn and he knew so little that any meager idea he had came to him as a world-shaking revelation that had to be shared with his public. I suppose the doctors would call it delusions of grandeur. It seems to be one of the main symptoms of the dread disease of success.
He had only been going a few days, for instance, when he interrupted the singing of “Barbara Allen” with the announcement that he was pretty sick of that song anyway and he would rather talk about the street-cleaning problem in Chicago. He said that Chicago reminded him of Riddle except that Riddle was a one-horse town and Chicago was a ten-thousand horse town and the difference between one horse and ten thousand horses ain’t hay. The next day a Citizens’ Clean-Up Committee was formed with Lonesome as honorary chairman. On his program next day Lonesome sang “Sweet Violets” in honor of the clean-up campaign and he said it gave him a funny feeling to be connected with “sech a projeck” because his Grandpaw Bascom used to call his paw a sissy for insisting on changing his clothes every year.
It was only a matter of weeks before Grandpaw Bascom and Cousin Abernathy and Great Great Uncle Wilbraham and the rest of Lonesome’s so-called family had become public property. The famous comic-strip artist Hal Katz came to Lonesome with a deal to do a daily and Sunday strip around the Riddle characters, featuring a Lonesome-like folk singer to be called Hill-Bilious Harry. What was in it for Lonesome was a thousand a week and a percentage of subsidiary loot. So by the time the option was taken up, Lonesome, our overgrown Huck, wasn’t exactly going barefoot. He was pulling down twenty-five hundred a week, not a bad living for a country boy. Lonesome was not impervious to money, either. Au contraire, he was decidedly pervious. He began spending it as if he had had it all his life, only more so. He lined up a pretty fancy flop at the Ambassador East and bought himself a powder-blue Cadillac that just said “Lonesome” on it. A monogram would have been too ritzy, he said. Right away he had one of those Swiss 18K calendar watches and a closet full of suits all a little baggy and country-cut but good goods. He was a folk singer, remember?
He went in for me, too. He never kept his promise about my being strictly business. He always figured the natural charm would finally overcome me. I was his one-’n-only, his indispensable can’t-live-without. One night the phone woke me up and it was Lonesome getting ready to jump out the window if I didn’t marry him. He said he felt confused about all the success and that I was his anchor. His anchor to reality is what I think he said. That is not exactly a compliment but I said I would think it over. I don’t know if I was in love with him. Call it 90 per cent disgust and 10 per cent maternal. Oh yes, I’m the maternal type as well as the professional woman. To tell the solid truth, I was always ready to give up the high rank and all the loot whenever I found the right man. At first a girl thinks kids would be too much trouble, and then that maybe there’s something to it even if it is trouble, and later that her life will not be complete without them, and finally that it is the one thing in the world she really wants. I was hovering around stage C the morning that Lonesome called. I told him to ask me at a more reasonable hour and when he was stone sober. And not to muck it up with suicide threats. What was a down-to-earth simple-grained one-hundred-and-ten-per cent Amurican doing with that psycho out-the-window talk? He said, “Bless you, Marshy, you do me good. Even when I’m the greatest, you’ll be right alongside me.”
“Lie back and get some sleep and do yourself some good,” I told him.
The sponsors were awfully happy with Lonesome. He was the hottest salesman on radio-TV. He’d open with “Look down, look down that lonesome road,” and then he’d slide into “Hiya, neighbors, this is yer Arkansas Traveler,” and he’d have the people eating out of his big and sometimes trembling hand. He’d say, “Shucks, folks, I don’t know if you’ll like the stuff, maybe you got funny taste, but I love it, it’s what makes my cheeks so rosy,” and the assistant geniuses of the advertising companies would shake their heads and acknowledge Lonesome as a full-blown number-one genius. A dry cereal called Shucks came out with his picture on it. He got the idea of forming Lonesome Rhodes, Inc., so he could keep some of the gravy. It turned out he was nuts for cars—he was on a vehicular kick—so he bought a Jaguar to keep his Cadillac company. His Nielsen kept climbing until he was almost as popular as Jackie Gleason and Bishop Sheen. And when it came to getting his stuff across he could more than hold his own with both those boys. “He’s got it.” That was the only way the advertising brains could explain it. “He got it,” they’d say, and they would all nod their heads with a sense of accomplishment and go out to a long lunch of martinis.
Lonesome branched out from sanitation problems to advice on rent controls and diplomatic appointments. And became not only a political pundit but a good Samaritan. He built up a little department for himself called “My Brother’s Keeper.” During the four and one-half minutes for BK, as we called it, he would appeal for some personal cause. For instance, a little boy was dying in Meridian, Wisconsin, and his blood wasn’t one of the two usual types. Lonesome told the story with all the stops out and asked for blood. Half an hour after the broadcast there had been nearly a thousand calls from all over the United States. That’s what they call penetration. Lonesome was just lousy with penetration. A widow in New Jersey with nine kids had her house burn down and Lonesome asked for the dough to rebuild it. “Nobody send more’n a buck,” he said. “It’s us ordinary folks got to do this thing.” Us ordinary folks threw in about twice as much as they needed to replace the house. Lonesome thought up a gimmick for that, too. He organized the Lonesome Rhodes Foundation. Anything over the amount he asked for specific cases went into the pot. It was a tax-exempt setup and some big names kicked in, some out of pure generosity, I suppose, and maybe some for the publicity value of having Lonesome say, “Thank you Oscar Zilch, you’re good people,” over the air. The foundation became kind of an obsession with Lonesome. To listen to him you would have thought that no other charities and no other humanitarianism was being perpetrated in America. Celebrities who, for one reason or another, failed to come through for the foundation became the targets of public and private abuse from Lonesome Rhodes. He would do everything from questioning the legitimacy of their birth to hinting at their involvement in the latest Communist spy ring. BK and the foundation did some good, I will admit, but at no small cost to those of us around him who had to put up with the emotional wear and tear of his playing God in a hair shirt.
It was about this time, near the end of his second twenty-six weeks, that Lonesome took his first fling into international politics. Until now he had contented himself with just telling us how to solve our domestic problems. But suddenly—I think it was from getting indigestion after eating some tainted shrimps in a Chinese restaurant—he went global. He warned the Chinese that if they didn’t stop messing around with us in Korea he’d stop sending his shirts out to a Chinese laundry. Back in Riddle there was a Chinaboy who aimed to marry into Grandpaw Bascom’s side of the family, he said. Grandpaw told the Chinese he couldn’t marry in until he went ’n cut off his pigtail. The Chinaboy said Hokay and went out to the barn and cut off the tail of Grandpaw’s favorite hawg. “That’s why I sez even when ya think ya got an agreement, never trust a Chinaman,” Lonesome said.
I tried to tell Lonesome I thought the story was pretty irresponsible, when we were still trying to work out a truce that would save American lives. But darned if a couple of senators didn’t write in and congratulate Lonesome for his brilliantly witty analysis of “our naive if not criminally mistaken foreign policy.” Lonesome was invited to address Veterans United and the Daughters of the Constitution and to write a daily column of political jokes for a national syndicate. I don’t know how many thousands wrote in after that Riddle Chinaboy joke telling Lonesome he was right and that we should break off negotiations in Korea and that this country would be a sight better off if we had a level-headed, plain-talkin’ fella like Lonesome Rhodes as Secretary of State.
I tried to tell him, “Lonesome, you’re fine as long as you gag your way through Old Smoky and tell your jokes about Cousin Abernathy in Riddle. But don’t you think before you go handing out pronouncements on China that you should know just a little bit about what you’re talking about?”
In the voice of the people, Lonesome said, “The people never know. The people is as mule-stupid as I am. We jest feel what’s right.”
I made a futile effort to explain: he was no more the voice of the people than I was, with my corrupted Vassar accent. In the sheep’s clothing of rural Americana, he was a shrewd businessman with a sharp eye on the main chance. He was a complicated human being, an intensely self-centered one, who chose to wear the mask of the stumbling, bumbling, good-natured, “Shucks-folks-you-know-more-about-this-stuff-’n-I-do” oaf.
Like the time Lonesome made a really fine, moving talk about the noble institution of marriage. He had been singing “The Weaver’s Song” and he cut into that tender ballad to ask everyone who might be contemplating divorce to try just a little harder to see the other side of the argument. “Never leave a first love just to have the last word,” he murmured to the accompaniment of a few soft chords on that makeshift guitar. The response was fantastic. Some five thousand couples wrote in to tell Lonesome they were “reconsidering” and he promised the reconciled couple who wrote the best letter on why they made up that he would have them on his program and blow them to a whirlwind week-end in Chicago (“Second Honeymoon”) at his own expense (tax deductible). Easy for him to say. I had to read, sort out and grade the darn letters. Such drool you never heard. Lonesome was described as a cross between the Lord Jesus and Santa Claus with the better features of both. Lonesome was getting so benevolent it was coming out his ears.
Forty-eight hours after Lonesome had come out unequivocally for marital bliss I was in my apartment working through the pile-up of letters when the phone rang. It was a woman I had never heard of before who said her name was Mrs. Rhodes. “Lonesome’s mother?” I asked in my sweetest maybe-daughter-in-law-to-beish voice. “No, his wife,” was the answer. “I wanna see you.”
I must admit I was a little curious to see her, too.
She was about forty, in the process of getting fat, but you could see that she had been attractive once in a showy, third-rate way. Being a snob by instinct and a democrat by conviction, I tried to reject the word “coarse.” But it hung over us like a low fog dampening our conversation.
“So you’re Lonesome’s new tootsie,” she opened. “Well I hope you have more luck keeping him home than I did.”
“I am simply a business associate and personal friend of Mr. Rhodes,” I said, cool, collected and unconvincing.
“Come off it, miss,” she said. “The floor manager on your program is my brother-in-law’s first cousin. He writes me what’s been going on.”
“I must say that it is gracious of you to inform me that Mr. Rhodes is married,” I said. “I think he might have done me the courtesy of telling me himself.”
“Mr. Rhodes never did nobody no courtesies,” said Mrs. Rhodes. “If you want my opinion, Mr. Rhodes is a no-good bastard.”
“I have no doubt your opinion is based on considerable experience,” I said.
“Not only is Mr. Rhodes a bastard,” Mrs. Rhodes went on, “Mr. Rhodes is a crazy bastard. A psycho-something or other. His skull thumper told me.”
“Skull thumper?”
“His mind doctor,” she explained. With her index finger she described a series of sympathetic circles against her temple. “Bells in the batfry.”
“I see. And may I ask just exactly what is the purpose of your visit?”
“Get Larry to shell out three thousand a month and I’ll divorce him. Otherwise I not only won’t divorce him, I’ll make it plenty hot for the both of you.”
“I am not engaged to your husband,” I said. “I mean I—I suggest you discuss this matter between yourselves.”
“Larry thinks he has to have every broad he sees,” said Mrs. Rhodes. “And as soon as he has ’em he calls ’em tramps and leaves ’em for something new. It’s part of his psycho-something or other.”
“A very interesting diagnosis,” I said, thanking my little stars I had never succumbed to the jovial, overgrown lap-dog passes of Lonesome Larry. “But I still suggest this is a matter between you and Mr. Rhodes.”
“He’s a two-timing no-goodnick,” she said. “I caught him red-handed with my best girl friend. He broke my jaw.”
“It seems to be working quite effectively now,” I said, and showed the lady to the door.
I don’t know why, it didn’t really concern me except that Mrs. Rhodes’ husband had proposed to me and I was curious, which Mr. Webster defines as habitually inquisitive. I called him at the Ambassador and told him I had something on my mind. “Marshy, come on over,” he boomed. “Come over an’ have a drink an’ hear the good news. You’ll be proud of me.”
“You,” I said. “You hypocrite. You pious bigmouth. You oracle, you.”
“Marshy,” he said, and he tried to laugh it away. He could commit murder with that haw-haw-haw and everybody would think he was being a laugh riot. “You just need a drink, Marshy honey.”
“Something is cockeyed wrong with the world,” I said.
“Why for? Why for, my lovely marshmallow?”
“The way people listen to you,” I said. “The way they believe you. It’s fake, it’s mirrors, it’s false bottoms. You and your Cadillacs and your Grandpaw Bascom. A man of the people. My derrière.”
“Marshy,” he said, “you’re tired, you’ve been working too hard. You need a vacation. We’ll go to Sea Island.”
“Damn it, we’re not a we,” I said. “I hate you, hate what you stand for.”
“What do you stand for?” he said, and the easy laughter was gone from his voice now.
“I—I don’t know. Something better. Something true somewhere. I can’t explain it very well. All I know is I hate phonies, sham is for the birds.”
“Take it easy, Marshy. You’re the boss. I carry the ball but you call the signals, you know that. Now just come over and relax with some of this good Irish drinking whiskey. Let Uncle Lonesome put a friendly arm around you and tell you how rich an’ pretty you’re gonna be.”
Well, I went over. I tell you I wasn’t in love with the man, just involved with him in some perverse professional way. He wasn’t alone, he was with Tommy de Palma. De Palma was one of those advertising-agency boys. Bright. Quick. Immaculate. In the next life he’ll make a good pilot fish for sharks. I don’t mean to go into de Palma but I can’t resist one short take: he’s the kind of fellow who attaches himself to a celebrity, acts the part of the responsible friend, solemnly warns he is going to tell the truth even if it hurts, and then plays back in slightly off-beat fashion all the things the great one wants to hear. Essentially it’s a business relationship, but it poses as rather an intense personal friendship. Tommy de Palma, the account executive who handled the Lonesome Rhodes-Peerless account, was now Lonesome’s best friend.
Tidings of great commercial joy were being toasted with that bottle of Jameson’s.
“Marshy, the busher days are over, we’re moving in on the big stuff. New York! New York! Big frog in big pond department.”
The plan had size, all right. Lonesome was going to do two different big shows, the ballad-singing “Arkansas Traveler” thing, and a biweekly news commentary to be called “The Cracker Barrel,” Lonesome Rhodes the hayseed philosopher jest talkin’ things over with his Cousin Abernathy, his Grandpaw Bascom and his Aunt Lucy-belle. “We’ll chew up everything from the UN to tax evasion and back to Riddle,” Lonesome said. “And we’ll make a lousy fortune, Marshy girl. We ain’t a-goin’ t’ work through no advertisin’ agency, neither. Why give them 15 per cent of five G’s a week? We’ll be our own advertising agency. Tommy here’ll head it up for me. It’s gonna be Rhodes, de Palma and Coulihan. We’re partners, Marshy. Put ’er there, pardner. You’ll be drawing five hundred a week for openers.”
“What have you boys been smoking?” I said.
“It’s a shoo-in, Marcia.” De Palma took over in that sure, slick, black-knit-tie, bright-young-senior way he had. You could see him being the most enterprising prexy the Psi U’s ever had. “Lonesome is the biggest thing in home entertainment today. His Nielsen is seventeen point nine. His penetration is …”
“Marshy,” Lonesome said. “In three years I’m going to be a lousy millionaire. I’m going to have half a dozen cars. I’ll have two hundred suits. I’ll have a private railroad car and a yacht, maybe a plane and a big place in the country. And I’ll tell the people what to eat and who to help and what to think.”
“The most authentic voice of the people since Will Rogers,” said Tommy de Palma.
“Bigger’n Rogers,” Lonesome said. “I got more mediums to be big on. The biggest.”
“The greatest,” said Tommy de Palma.
“And without you, Marshy,” Lonesome said, “—and that’s the reason I wanted you to come over—without you, why kid myself?—I’d still be a bum.”
“Let’s face it,” I said. “With me you’re still a bum. A bum with a corny magic touch. A bum with money.”
“I do a lot of good,” Lonesome said. “The charities. The BK. I’m gonna start plugging a Lonesome Rhodes Summer Camp for poor city kids. Before I’m through with ’em every sucker in the country is gonna love me.”
“Mrs. Rhodes doesn’t love you,” I said.
“That bag,” he said. “That bad dream. My nemesis. She just called me.”
“Some simple soul,” I said. “Some spokesman for the good family life. Next time you propose to anybody you might consider getting unmarried first.”
“Marshy, so help me God, I got a divorce in Mexico, but the judge got indicted for fraud, so my ex claims it didn’t take. Now she thinks she’s got a gun at my head. Well, OK, I’ll give ’er her stinkin’ three thousand a month—anything to get her off my neck. I’m nuts about you, Marshy. I can’t live without you.”
“On the cigar-box guitar it might sound good,” I said.
De Palma rose, straightened his creases and said, “Gotta run, kiddies. Early-morning golf game with Mr. Peerless himself. Here’s a good-night drink to Rhodes, de Palma and Coulihan. Dat’s how dynasties are born.”
Lonesome and I did a little Indian wrestling on the couch. It’s a good thing I have muscles from my tennis days.
“Larry,” I said, “the marriage department is one of the things I never fool with. Next thing you know we’re all in one great mess. Bad for us, and not too healthy for Rhodes, de Palma and Coulihan, either.”
“Then you’re comin’ along?”
Well, I suppose I was. If a girl is going in for careers she might as well make it a good one. It looked as if I had found a home with Lonesome Rhodes, Inc.
“Thanks, Marshy,” Lonesome said. “I wouldn’t tell this to anybody else, but sometimes early in the morning I get kind of scared, Marsh. Sure, I wanna be a success. I got the gimmees just about as bad as anybody, but, shucks, I never figgered on anything like this. The number-one rating and the column and the comic strip and the Grand-paw Bascom dolls and Lonesome Rhodes drinks this and smokes that and everybody hangin’ on my opinion of how t’ bring back the good ol’ hundred-cent dollar. It’s enough t’ scare a fella.”
Poor Lonesome. Of course these moments of self-doubt and humility were few and far between, early morning bottom-of-the-bottle lapses, but they were genuine enough while he was having them. Then they would lift like a bad headache and he’d be his old braggy, egocentric, happy St. Bernard self again. Lonesome just had a severe case of American success, that’s all. I doubt if there was ever anything like it in the history of the world. For one thing it takes a free (and free-wheeling) society for a success like his, and for another it takes a particular hopped-up kind of free society. Our kind, God bless it. This is a real screwball country, if you stop to think about it. Where else would the girls be tearing the clothes off skinny, pasty-faced boys with neurotic voices like Frank Sinatra and Johnny Ray? Or making Lonesome Rhodes, an obvious concoction if ever there was one, their favorite lover-boy and social philosopher?
I tried to explain it to Lonesome, and to myself, that night. I came on with some of that stuff I had learned in school about the frontier. This country has a terrible hankering for its lost frontier, the way a mother forever mourns for a son run down by a truck when he was seven years old. The frontier song is ended, but oh how the melody lingers on. That’s why we don’t trust brain-trusters and professors. Lonesome said it perfectly on the air one day. “My Grandpaw Bascom never went to no school an’ he was the smartest fella in the county. Everything I know I owe t’ my Granddaddy Bascom who didn’ know nuthin’ either. But Grandpap Bascom, the ol’ rascal, did say one thing …” And then Lonesome would sound off on some crackpot scheme and next thing I’d know there would be a bushel basket of letters to answer, saying as how it was a shame Lonesome wasn’t in Washington teaching those fancy-talkin’ politicians a little common sense. Once you get on that kind of a cracker-barrel American kick, you can only go up. Where it would all end I both dreaded and was fascinated to wonder.
I told him how it would be with us if I went on with him to New York. Strictly career, strictly the girl assistant, associate producer, maid of all work or whatever I was.
“I’ve gotta have you with me one way or another, Marshy,” he said. “I know I’m great and America needs me, but without you I’d be back in Nowhereville where I came from. You’re my …”
“Anchor,” I said. “Nursemaid. Ballast. The salt in your stew.”
“You can laugh,” he said. “When you get way out in front like I am you need a friendly face. Without you, I’m up there all by my lonesome. I’m all alone.”
“You can’t sing it on the air,” I said, “until I clear the rights with Berlin.”
“Marshy, stay all night,” he pleaded. “Twin beds. I promise I won’t lay a finger on you. Brother ’n sister.”
“I wouldn’t trust you,” I told him, “if we were lying side by side in twin coffins.”
“I’m a baad boy,” he said, with all his heavy charm.
“You’re Huck Finn with a psychoneurosis,” I scolded. “God, if your public only knew what a slender reed they were leaning on.”
“That’s our little secret, Marshy,” he said, and gave it the deep-belly haw-haw.
I finally got away and he said, “Good night, pardner,” and went back to suck on his bottle. America’s Uncle Lonesome, Big Brother to all the world.