The play was a ridiculous bore from six minutes after the first curtain. A grand old team, who were once fine performers, went through the motions and would continue to do so as long as smart New Yorkers plunked down fifteen bucks a ticket.
By the second act Clint had hypnotized himself into complete detachment. His mind was on airplanes flying and landing in rhythm, unloading, pouring life blood into a city of two million human beings. Clint had thought of little else since General Stonebraker had come and gone.
He thought of writing to the general to give him some ideas on the removal of long-range navigation equipment which wouldn’t be needed on the short hauls and the removal of other compartments which, with proper loading, could increase each pay load by a ton in a Skymaster.
What the hell, Clint thought, Stonebraker’s staff will think of these things. Goddam, they’d all be there ... Perry Sindlinger, Matt Beck, Sid Swing, Pancho, Lou Edmonds ... what a wild-assed bunch of reprobates.... The bubble burst with a merciful final curtain.
The narrow, dirty street was swarmed with a sudden outpour of humanity from other drafty, uncomfortable theaters. They wrestled with the usual indecision of how to round out the evening. Judy suggested a chanteuse and combo at one of those East Side cabarets, also constructed for human torture with postage-stamp-sized tables.
Laura Schuster thought maybe that clever, clever little review at the Side Alley. She knew Milt would like it because it ripped the hell out of the Truman family. Laura also suggested a screamingly funny singer down in the village who was on the brink of being closed because of obscene lyrics. “He’s so witty,” Laura explained.
Milt Schuster suggested they go to Sardi’s because Milt didn’t have much imagination and Sardi’s was the traditional place to go.
Clint envisioned further discomfort and mob scenes and preposterous tabs.
They joined the new flock of sheep converging on Sardi’s, waited for forty minutes, and after proper apologies from a profusely perspiring headwaiter they were seated against the wall.
“The play was utterly divine,” Laura Schuster said.
Milt thought it had its moments.
Judy said there was still a lot of magic in the team of Hunt and Martin.
“The play was unadultered crap,” Clint said. They tittered because Clint was in one of his cleverly candid moods. “This evening cost us a bill ... one hundred dollars to eat garbage and sit on planks to hear a crusty old fart mumble lines completely without conviction. Clara Martin has a grandson in Princeton. I resent a talentless playwright telling me she is a desirable mistress. And I am about ready to throw up listening to you three literate people justifying this crap.”
They grinned at him sickly.
“Tomorrow night we may debase ourselves by going to a comfortable neighborhood theater and for two bucks watch a great movie, but God almighty, we have to rip it apart because it was made in Hollywood. You know what we are. We’re not only phonies ... we’re suckers.”
Judy quickly patted Laura Schuster’s hand. “Clint will call you sweet people tomorrow and tell you how sorry he is. Good night, darlings.”
On the way home the cab driver said, “Why in hell should I be loyal to the goddam Dodgers, I ask you? In 1928 I had a good business, I had a house paid for, I had dough in the bank. Comes the crash, I’m wiped out. Lemme ask you somethin’ pal, did the Dodgers care about me? Hell no. So, why should I care about the Dodgers?”
Clint gave an exorbitant tip for his friendly philosophy; then resented the doorman because he always felt capable of opening his own door.
Judy knew there was a choice of two ways to handle him, either have a counterexplosion of her own, or give him overwhelming sex for a week to smother his discontent.
He loaded a glass with scotch and stared morosely out at the perpendicular cement prisons of Manhattan, again not watching Judy undress and this worried her. She scented herself, slipped beside him.
“Lover ... momma wants.”
“Who are we? My kids don’t even know what sunshine looks like. It’s rationed out here in cheap, grotesque snatches when their Nana parades them over to that hood-filled excuse for a park.”
“Clint, honey, I told you Pudge Whitcomb talked vice presidency at the last cocktail party. He means it, and when it comes through we can move to a wonderful penthouse with our own roof garden ...”
“Filled with false hedges because no self-respecting plant would grow here. Do you suppose we’ll ever see the moonlight again? Does it ever shine over this place or are we too damned busy elbowing our way into Sutton Place to look for it.”
She pressed her bosom close to him. Clint got up and left the chair. “We’re antiseptic. We don’t even get dirty on vacations any more. The white linens of Nassau for Mr. and Mrs. Clinton Germless. We don’t even draw ants on a picnic!”
“Clint, that’s enough.”
“You know what I once did, Judy? I helped that nasty old man lift a half-million tons of oil and rice and fly it over the highest mountains in the world. We did it through monsoons and low freezing levels and on muddy airstrips. We put more material into China by airplane than trucks did on the Burma Road ... more than the ships brought into their ports. We did it with airplanes. By God, I was somebody in those days.”
“You can’t live that for the rest of your life. You’re a big boy now. We’ve worked too damned hard to get what we have.”
“Have? We deserve this. This is why Judy Loveless was a hashslinger to put her husband through college. All for this ... phony, overpriced suckersville down there.” He belted the drink down and refilled his glass. “You’re right, Judy, that nasty old man shouldn’t have come. He shouldn’t have said ... Clint ... we need you ... he shouldn’t have said that.”
Chapter Ten
THE NEXT DAY CLINTON Loveless sported a fearsome purple hangover. His swivel-hipped secretary patched him up as best she could with a limited supply of drugs and coffee and followed him, pad in hand, to the sacred inner sanctum where J. Kenneth Whitcomb III was about to conduct a top-level think session.
As the brain trust gathered, the level of tension mounted. Pudge’s father inherited railroads, lumber acreage, and oil holdings from his own tycoon father, a robber baron at the end of the last century.
During the 1920s Pudge’s father was dissatisfied with the way many of his products were being sold and so created Whitcomb Associates as his own ad agency to sell a better corporate image. The advertising agency was never designed to be other than a minor holding. Pudge was the family black sheep; at will-reading time it was the perfect inheritance for a son held in low esteem.
Pudge proceeded to fool all of his contemptuous brothers and sisters by becoming a business phenomenon and the first of the clan to make the covers of both Time and Fortune. Whitcomb Associates took on the new accounts that made his father scream from the grave and turned losers into winners. He was an American success story.
The seat of Pudge Whitcomb’s genius lay in his ability to exploit other people’s brains. The inner sanctum proved this point. Counter-clockwise there was Dick Buckley, a lawyer who could be described only as brilliant and who, in his youth, dazzled as a court-room performer. His days were now spent weaving a maze of verbal gymnastics designed to keep Whitcomb Associates and some of their borderline accounts within the hair-split of the law. He was immersed in keeping the Pure Drug and Food people off their backs “because it was run by those Pinks in Washington.”
Next to Dick sat Jerry Church, who, in younger days, won fellowships for biochemical research. He was over his eyeballs in a home in West Hampton and all of his talents became vented in one direction, self-survival. The colors mixed for pre- and after-shave lotions dominated his research.