Changing the Past (12 page)

Jackie remained Tony's protégé for some five years, during which time he was able to establish his identity with the public, or rather several of the various publics for show business, for there are many such, some overlapping with others, like that of television, and one that was distinct and limited though with a great influence peculiar to itself, namely, Broadway, which was yet to come for him, but he was by now long since a star in his own right in Vegas, Tahoe, and Miami Beach, with lesser performers opening for him now, and had done hygienic though no less outrageous versions of his act many times on the leading television variety programs. TV people had talked with him about possible shows of his own, and at any given moment there was at least one movie project under discussion. His career was in good shape by the time that Tony cooled towards him—a change that he had learned was inevitable.

A
s
IT
turned out, Jackie moved away from Tony at just the right time. Another philosophy of popular music than Tony's was gaining ground everywhere, one which furthermore had Leftist connotations, whereas Tony was, when not entire apolitical, of the old-fashioned school of sentimental patriotism, singing the national anthem at World Series openers and occasionally visiting army bases, sometimes at nearby overseas installations. And his drug was alcohol, not herbs or powders, nor was he unbarbered and dirty and epicene and publicly foulmouthed, and he made no bones about preferring leaders who were stuffed shirts to those who were terrorists (besides, having served as their pimp, he had seen the former with their hair down, and they were regular guys).

Television at last came up with the right part for Jackie: the tyrannical mess sergeant in a situation comedy that derided the U.S. Army. The kitchen of the character played by Jackie prepared shit-on-a-shingle for every meal (called “Ess-Oh-Ess” in the dialogue, causing the laugh track to respond with hilarity), but now and again his Negro assistant, who in contrast to Jackie spoke an impeccable English, distracted him by some ruse and served thick sirloins to the troops, followed by apple pie à la mode rather than the canned fruit that was the orthodox dessert. This unit was on peacetime duty in Germany, where wicked but comic Fascists were still plentiful, and while the Jackie character would seem superficially to operate on their principles, his basic American decency would manifest itself sooner or later, and it was sometimes he who frustrated the neo-Nazis or anyway did not obstruct his black helper from so doing.

After becoming famous, Jackie was invited to appear at the White House by a series of presidents of various persuasions, he remained pure entertainer and, if called upon to perform, would jovially insult the reigning Chief Executive, along with the rest of the First Family and cabinet, though of course not as raunchily as when in a show-biz venue: no sex stuff ever, and no booze material unless the target was virtually a teetotaller, and very little of an ethnic nature. So deprived of the resources on which he drew for his nightclub act, Jackie was however not at the least disadvantage: one president had cracked a tooth on a fragment of shell in his maple-walnut ice cream; another had stepped in dog poop while exercising a pet at Camp David. That sort of thing: minor human frailties, which we all find amusing. To laugh at these was to share in the ultimate state of democracy and classlessness. Nothing could have been more appropriate under that roof.

When his sitcom came to an end after four seasons, Jackie made three movies, of which two were bombs and one a feeble success, enough to prove that when performing someone else's material, your fate was in the writer's hands. Therefore when he subsequently received a startling invitation to come to Broadway, he had the courage to accept, for the dialogue anyway would be tops: W. Shakespeare had written it.

Cartwright Law, the noted director, had asked Jackie Kellog to play Falstaff in a new production of
The Merry Wives of Windsor
. Law made a specialty of offbeat casting, along with innovations in many another area. He had staged a
Lear
with an entire cast of midgets; had done an
Othello
in which the Moor was a white actor in blackface and lago a black actor in a white ski mask. His Hamlet was a Lesbian, while the remainder of the roles were cast and performed in the orthodox mode—and, as a powerful critic said,
it made perfect sense!

The reviewers adored Jackie's Falstaff, which he was by now sufficiently fat to perform with little padding. During the previews and throughout the first night, he adhered to the letter of Shakespeare's dialogue insofar as he had memorized it from the script as edited by Cartwright Law, which deleted a good deal of the language in favor of clownish stage business by the stout Knight, including obscene self-gropings as he spoke of being ogled lasciviously by Mistress Page: “O! she did so course o'er my exteriors with such a greedy intention, that the appetite of her eye did seem to scorch me up like a burning-glass.” He did bumps and grinds whenever he addressed a female character, and belches, farts, and crotch-scratching at any time. “An idiosyncratic interpretation, perhaps,” said one critic in a Sunday supplement thinkpiece, “but well justified.”

Years of performing in smoke-filled rooms, in a style of comedy that, despite the more than adequate sound systems of the day, seemed to require sustained shouting, plus the liquor of which his daily intake now was copious, along with the huge cigars that he had first used as props but finally began to smoke incessantly on- and offstage, had roughened Jackie's voice until its timbre was that of a Hollywood version of a gangster, and as any attempt on his part to simulate an English accent would have been pathetic, he used his own unrefined Standard American—and was praised for that too by reviewers scornful of the now outmoded Broadway-British voices of the pretentious local thespians who usually essayed the Bard.

Jackie was now at the summit of a phase of show business of which he had no prior experience. Indeed, he had never seen anything on a stage that was not a musical. He was getting highbrow praise while being paid for doing what came naturally. He understood that most of those people to whom the show was sold out for a solid six months were coming to see
him
and not Shakespeare, and gradually Falstaff became a Catskill-Vegas-Miami comic, updating his lines to include “Bullshit!” and adding “-hole” to the terminal word in “I do begin to perceive that I am made an ass.” His bawdy gestures became more extreme. Leering at a female character, he would fuck his fist with an index finger. Next he began to go to the footlights and perform a similar gesture while winking at attractive women in the first few rows of the audience, regardless of their escorts.

He was usually drunk nowadays, coming to the theater with a buzz on and then, onstage as Falstaff, drinking the prop grape juice that he laced with vodka. Between the acts he drank more, and he sometimes had a girl, a pro, blow him in the dressing room, a form of midshow tension-reliever much used, and urged on his friends, by Tony Gamble. Once, while waiting to make his entrance and having urgently to piss, Jackie did so in the wings. He had regularly been rude and at times even abusive to the other members of the cast, who, though many were respected American Shakespeareans and all were Broadway professionals, were of course not known to Jackie Kellog's vast share of the public, but he had remained at least civil to the crew, for no show, however successful, could survive without their cooperation. By the distribution of hundred-dollar bills, his personal manager, Harold Opel, was able to put the lid on the pissing incident, but hardly had that been done when Jackie, stumbling drunkenly backstage, tripped on a cable and swore at an electrician, who said, “Listen, I don't have to take that,” to which Jackie responded, “You have to take anything I hand out, because you're a piece of shit, and I'm a star.”

The crew thereupon walked out. The theater was dark for two evenings and one matinee thereafter, and no sooner had this dispute been settled (by more bribes, the featherbed hiring of several more crew members who had no duties whatever, and a maudlin apology by Jackie to the man he had insulted: “I love people, Richie, I think I've proved that in everything I've ever done…”) than the husband of a woman to whom Jackie had made especially obscene gestures from the stage waylaid the star as Jackie left the theater that night, bruised his face and broke his nose. (The publicists represented this attack as an attempted mugging, and obviously Jackie could not sue his assailant.) Trouper that he was, he missed not a single performance, going on with a bandaged skull and extra-heavy makeup, drunker than ever owing to the pain.

But next the actress who played Mistress Quickly, an arrogant bitch who had in the past won two Tonys, made a formal complaint to Equity, accusing Jackie of taking liberties with her onstage and off, ignoring her protests. Jackie's response was to write an abusive, semiliterate letter to the board attacking not only the offending colleague but all highbrow Broadway snobs who thought they were better than the combat troops of show business, namely, those who had served their time out where a lush could hit you with a bottle for not making him laugh, and concluding with kiss-my-ass-you-no-talent-bums.

All persons and institutions concerned, except the fearful producers of the play, leaked this communication to the press. Jackie did so because he was proud of himself, speaking as he thought he had for the Common Man of entertainment, but in fact not even his fellow standup comics were in sympathy with him in the case at hand: he had willfully ruined what at first had been seen as a victory for their craft, a demonstration that he who could do standup, the most demanding job in show biz, could outdo the snobs at their own game. But now he had played into the hands of the disdainful and also probably destroyed forever any chance that the experiment would be tried again.

His best friends in the business and previously generous media people publicly turned against him: e.g., Roz Wilshire, the gossip columnist and an old pal, called him “a disgusting slob” on TV, and Tony Gamble, who now let his hair grow shoulder-length, sang protest songs, and embraced Leftist causes in a desperate effort to regain popularity with American youth, said, when asked about his old protégé, “I love the cat's talent, but it was this hangup of his about abusing the ladies. I just couldn't dig it and told him so, and he told me to stuff it. Hey, what can you do?”

When militant women's groups picketed the theater, Jackie walked out of the show. Who needed that shit? He could make five times the money, back in the big hotel rooms of which he was now reigning king, for in an age when rock-and-roll and country-and-western were successfully invading every medium, and the take-my-wife one-liner comics were becoming superannuated, when Tony Gamble, once the favorite entertainer of the American Legion, performed at counterculture rallies, Jackie Kellog could be relied on to maintain the old standards.

His private style vis-à-vis the opposite sex had not changed since high school. He certainly was not queer. He had no sexual taste for his fellow man, but he had no other use for women. He was bored by anything a woman said unless it was dirty. To suffer a woman's company when engaged in recreational pursuits, such as the racetrack, the fights, crap tables, and drinking to insensibility, tended to ruin these sources of the only pleasure Jackie knew in his offstage time, and sex was never fun for him but rather a necessity of nature like moving his bowels. He fucked showgirls but as always preferred whores, who did what they were paid for and left promptly thereafter.

At one point in his early forties, however, after a physical examination at which the doctor had warned him about an ever-rising blood pressure, Jackie suddenly became aware that he was in effect all alone in the world. Since leaving home he had never communicated in any way with the members of his family, who had not appreciated him when he lived amidst them and nowadays would surely want to borrow money, and in fact his brother did try twice to reach him by phone, and his mother wrote once, on the occasion of his father's death, with her hand out, she who had always conspicuously favored his brother, now bankrupted by a small-business flop. “Never but
never
take any calls from any cock-suckers pretending to be my relatives!” Jackie told his people. “They're all phonies. I was an orphan from birth on.”

Becoming aware of his mortality with the news of the high blood pressure, Jackie decided he would be less vulnerable under the aspect of eternity if he produced offspring, and he therefore chose as a potential mother one of the robust Vegas showgirls, at five-eleven taller than he by almost half a foot, and underneath her thick makeup a prime piece of Swedish flesh. Their marriage was a show-biz event, held in the main room of the casino-hotel, and attended by a U.S. senator and other political notables, most of the big-name performers then appearing elsewhere in town (not Tony Gamble, who shared the bill at an outdoor rock concert that weekend with a roster of bisexual, junky degenerates, two of whom were to overdose and die before the gig was over), and even a representation of the mobsters who owned most of the Strip but were rarely seen on such an occasion: Joey “the Jockey” Marino, Fat Sal Testarossa, and Mel Lapidus, called “the Hebe” but not to his face.

Sandy was two months pregnant at the time of the ceremony. Half a year later a dead child was produced by cesarean section. The mother thereafter went into a melancholy from which she never emerged till she and Jackie were divorced a few months later, soon after which she married a Texas high-roller, went to live with him in Houston, and bore a series of healthy blond offspring.

Jackie's second wife was an almost plain-looking girl from the cashier's department of the hotel at which he often appeared in Miami Beach. By now he was sick of elaborate hairdos, heavy makeup, and showgirl flesh. Cecilia wore neat white blouses and black string ties. Though she had lived in southern Florida all her life, she rarely exposed any part of herself to the sunshine, and her skin remained almost blue-white. She went to confession every Saturday and on Sunday morning to the eight o'clock mass. She drank nothing that contained alcohol. At the age of twenty-seven she lived with her widowed mother. She was genuinely offended by Jackie's sexual overtures and soon stated that unless he desisted from them—though she liked him a lot otherwise—she would not date him again.