Kate was standing in front of the full-length mirror. She was wearing a pair of Amanda’s high-heeled pumps and one of Amanda’s floppy hats. She stood with one hand on her hip and smiled at her reflection in the mirror.
“You’re so pretty, Amanda,” she said to the glass. “You’re so pretty, Mommy.”
Amanda backed away from the door silently.
She had suddenly remembered a day in the upstairs bedroom of the house in Otter Falls when a nine-year-old girl named Amanda had put on a dress and shoes belonging to a woman named Priscilla Soames.
The television program originated from a loft on West Sixty-eighth Street, just off Central Park West. The building was set among several apartment houses, and it had almost no windows in its brick face. Walking up the quiet residential street, one suddenly came upon the featureless brick wall with its six windows in a vertical line illuminating the stair well, and with two metal fire doors on the street level set some twenty-five feet apart. The building looked menacing, but all they were doing inside was putting on a television show.
The show was a popular item called Memos, which Curt Sonderman as producer had built around a genial raconteur and quasi-comic named Sam Martin. Martin was one of the forerunners of a school of television performers whose stock in trade was a lack of talent, a bumbling sort of oafish man who looked like the man next door and dressed like the man next door and even talked like him. In fact, looking at Sam Martin, the man next door had the distinct impression that this was exactly the way he would behave if someone suddenly dragged him into a television studio and told him to start talking. Martin said whatever came into his mind whenever it came into his mind. His opinions were based on a retentive memory for the trivia of life; his mind was an attic cluttered with unimportant knowledge. He was like the man who wore two wrist watches, one set with New York time, the other set with London time. When asked why he wore the second watch, he replied, “In case anyone wants to know what time it is in London.” Sam Martin could not, perhaps, tell you what time it was in London, but he could tell you who pitched for the Red Sox in 1939, which movie won the Academy Award in 1932, how many eggs to use in a pineapple upside-down cake, the best way to repair a hole in a screen, and how to remove ticks from golden retrievers. He could also tell a dirty joke without offending the ladies, and he could describe the latest fashion trends without disgusting the men. He was good-looking enough to provide a low-key sex appeal for the women — and yet not handsome enough to provide any real competition for the man in the house. He could not sing, and he could not dance, and he had a terrible speaking voice, and a plebeian sense of humor; he was, in short, untalented. But television in those early days was breeding a new race of untalented supermen who would pyramid their very lack of talent into a talent that appealed to those anxious viewers out there, those dial-happy fickle folk.
In a time when television dramas were trying their best to convince the man in the street that it was perfectly all right, in fact decent and honorable and praiseworthy, to be a slob, Sam Martin came on the air as visual proof of the theory. The television of that day was concerned primarily with the number of cockroaches in the kitchen sink. A new art school was being hammered into existence in the small inadequate studios scattered throughout the city’s more undesirable slums, the premise of the school being that no drama was real drama unless it dealt with small people, a premise Aristotle might have challenged had he been alive and involved in the medium. These small people fought to find themselves on the small screen while they simultaneously stepped on small cockroaches every time they snapped on the kitchen light. For a while there, some of the more perceptive viewers began wishing the cockroaches would march through Georgia to the sea, taking all the damn small people with them. It got a little boring, week after week, watching shows that posed such earth-shaking problems as whether or not a Borscht Belt summer romance would survive the winter, or whether a man who rescued a rich man’s son from a sewer would have his life ruined by this act of heroism, or whether a man who found himself unemployed in his fiftieth year could find a new job before the roaches carried him off. But the small people triumphed. Viewers began talking about “ears for dialogue” and “clinical verity” and “the minutiae of life” and “neorealistic objectivity” and “representational integrity,” and into this era of the contemplation of the involuting curves of one’s own navel came Sam Martin with his midday drivel, his storehouse of worthless observations, his rumpled suit, his featureless face. The viewers could look at him and know with certainty that he, too, was a man plagued by cockroaches.
David Regan worked for the sponsors who employed Sam Martin.
The show was built entirely around Martin, who opened it every afternoon at one-thirty with the line, “Hello, girls,” and then he would wink and say, “And you too, fellers.” He would tell a few jokes and relate a few items of disinterest, which he had dug from the newspapers and national magazines, and he would tie the stories in with bits of little-known lore from his vast steamer-trunk memory. Then a girl singer would sing a song, and Martin would sell a product, and a boy singer would sing another song, and Martin would sell another product, and tell a few more jokes, and that’s the way it went. He was on the air for two solid hours every day. His viewing audience was estimated at close to fourteen million people, and he earned the network millions and millions of dollars in advertising revenue, and all because he had no talent.
The rumors about Sam Martin ran rife through the industry and in the columns of those devoted to scanning the home screen. The rumors maintained that Martin, genial and affable on the air, was really a tyrant in private life, a man who beat his faithful employees with a cat-o’-nine-tails, seduced thirteen-year-old girls, kicked blind men, howled at the moon, and used cocaine. The rumors were dead wrong; Sam Martin off the air was exactly the person he was on the air. Bumbling, smiling, corny, affable, harmless. He had come into television after a dozen years in radio, most of them spent with an early-morning show in Los Angeles where he played records, told jokes, and sold products. In those early radio days, Martin wore glasses and sat behind his microphone, and when it came time to sell the product, he would lean closer to the mike and begin reading from the prepared advertising copy and then suddenly reach up and pull off the glasses and soar into an inspired emotional ad-libbing eulogy which sounded sincere and earnest and utterly honest. One of his Los Angeles colleagues remarked that Sam Martin was the best damn salesman in radio, that every time he pulled off those glasses and began ad-libbing his pitch, it was as if he were making love to a broad. Well, Sam Martin had pulled off his glasses for good the moment he entered television, but he still pitched those products with an emotional fervor that was difficult to match anywhere else in the medium. Perhaps this was his one real talent. Perhaps the salesmen were taking over the world.
If they were, David didn’t seem to mind too much.
The fact remained that Martin sold the sponsor’s product, and it was the sponsor who hired David as a watchdog over the product’s appearance, the man who made certain the commodity put its best foot forward on the video tube. The importance of David’s job could not be underestimated. Memos originated live from New York each afternoon at one-thirty after approximately an hour and a half of so-called rehearsal. This was not a filmed show, which could be edited and spliced. If a spot remover failed to remove a spot when it was supposed to, the sequence could not be done over again. There it was for everyone to see, and it was David’s job to make sure they saw it right the first time around. He usually accomplished this in the midst of a pandemonium starting at noon and relaxing only a moment before the show was beamed. It seemed incredible to David that anyone could possibly know what was going on at those Memos rehearsals or that a show with any sense of continuity or form could emerge from that tangled mass of camera cables, monitor tubes, shouting directors, musical cues, patient guests, gag writers, hanging booms, grips, cameramen, frantic assistant directors, electricians, pacing producers, press agents, audio engineers, stage managers, and make-up men. But a show did somehow assemble itself out of the rubble in the Sixty-eighth Street loft, and the show was remarkably relaxed and professional, a tribute to Sam Martin’s intuitive grasp of his audience and a calmness that was genuine and soothing.