Mothers and Daughters

There was nothing soothing about the rehearsal on that Wednesday in the first week of June. There never had been a rehearsal, to David’s recollection, that went well, but this one seemed to be defying every law of probability in its efforts to become a full-scale riot. It started with Louisa, the girl singer, yelling at Martin about the suitability of her material, she could not sing a sexy song on the air, her stock in trade was the homespun stuff. She was the peaches-and-cream girl, so how could she sing a torrid song like this one? She wanted a replacement for it at once. Martin affably and genially told her she was correct, which necessitated a last-minute scramble for a new song, and several hurried calls to Music Clearance, who, it was surmised, put in their own frantic calls to ASCAP or BMI and possibly Local 802, and got back to the rehearsal with the word that it was all right for Louisa to sing the song she had chosen, but this brought up the problem of an arrangement for the tune. The band didn’t have an arrangement, and it was too late to do one, so it was decided they’d accompany Louisa with piano, drums, and guitar, and Louisa flipped once more at this and went screaming off to Martin, who calmed her and told her their piano player was the best in the business, and didn’t Marian Anderson sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” with only a piano accompaniment?

Along about this time, someone from Network Continuity came down and began protesting about an off-color joke that one of Martin’s writers had inserted into the script following a coffee commercial. The man from Continuity was an intense Presbyterian who kept insisting his taste in humor was catholic, but who felt that Martin’s viewers might take offense at the story and, following as closely as it did on the heels of the coffee commercial, might associate the joke with the product and not buy the product and cause the sponsor to cancel. The writer protested that he would not be ashamed to tell that joke to his own mother, and the man from Continuity said he didn’t know what kind of a mother the writer had but he certainly wouldn’t want to hear that joke told to his mother, whereupon they almost had a fist fight. Martin smoothed it all over by telling both the writer and the man from Continuity that they both undoubtedly had fine mothers, and fathers too, but that perhaps the joke might cause consternation in certain fringe fanatic groups, and he winked at both of them, and asked the writer to supply a new joke for the spot. The man from Continuity left mollified but righteously indignant, and the writer went back to Martin’s dressing room to prepare a nonoffensive joke.

Martin’s guest for that afternoon’s show arrived just about then. He was a noted theater personality who was starring in one of Broadway’s long-run smashes, a personable enough fellow when he was sober, but he arrived at the loft dead drunk. He began abusing everyone in sight, muttering that he was going to punch that square Martin right on the nose the minute the show went on the air. He resisted all efforts to pour a gallon of coffee down his throat, overturning a scalding-hot pot of the sponsor’s brew, and threatening to hit the make-up man, who he claimed was a faggot. Martin took him aside and gave him a fatherly talk about the traditions of the theater (“You call this crap theater?” the star shouted) and about the responsibilities of performers, and the necessity of rising above petty personality differences, and he cited a forgotten 1925 theater incident involving John Barrymore, casually comparing his guest to Barrymore, and reminding his guest that fourteen million people would be watching him from coast to coast, and didn’t he think he should have a few cups of coffee and a cold shower before they went on the air? The guest star shook hands with Martin and kissed the faggot makeup man, who was married with four children and who thought a faggot was a bundle of sticks, and then went off to shower and to guzzle some very strong black coffee, not the sponsor’s.