Tale 39

A Little Tiny Man Seventy-Three

personal gift (slightly damaged) from American cartoonist Rube Goldberg to Fred Waring

which says, “Good Luck, Fred, You Deserve It All,”

referring to Fred’s 1955 Broadway musical review, “Hear! Hear!”

KNOW THE POWER THAT IS PEACE[1]

The older men, who were most knowledgeable about Huron beliefs, explained them to the Jesuits, and must have been offended when Brébeuf [the Jesuit priest trying to convert them] repeatedly used such occasions to censure and ridicule what they were saying.[2]

Dr. Lorenzo in later years insisted again and again that Bill Blackburn’s protracted tales, which when added together constituted one single long and calm, prosecuting court attorney’s story condemning Fred, were intended by Bill to be like sub-lethal flesh wounds meant to torture Fred mentally forever and a day. And the claim suggested he thought Bill had known that (1) Fred recognized in some form that he was being talked about and that (2) Fred even ‘knew’ in some form what was being said about him.

Bill said, "I couldn't sit and relate all the stories of Betty Ann on the bus and on the Tour."

Thank goodness.

"That's too cumbersome," Bill said. "A lot of the stories I have.

"I think I have the answer – let me put it this way: I won't say – ‘as much as she’; because she knows Fred in a different way; but I think I understand him – in a business sense – a hell of a lot better than she. And I think I know him better than his sons, Freddie Jr. or Paul would, because they are very emotionally involved.

"I know very few people up here who really know Fred, because they're afraid to face the fact of what Fred is, totally face what he is; because they would not simply face the way he thinks about them, I know. I try to think oddly, the way he thinks about it: and he's got a terrible way of thinking about people."

Moreover, for all the respect the Huron had for the [French Catholic Jesuit] priests' [seemingly magic or supernatural] shamanistic powers, many [Huron] probably still suspected them of being sorcerers and were annoyed by their persistent refusal to live with Huron families.[3]

"He seems,” said mj, “to look down on people who work for him."

Bill understood common sense observations. Two father theories and a mother theory had come into the world and flopped. Who knew what would work? Plain common sense maybe: it was worth a try, and it worked.

"Oh, he does. And that's another thing that bugs Fred about me." Bill saw it like the jack of all trades he was. "He finds a niche or pigeonhole for everybody, and that's what they're good for, and that's all they're good for, period. And he hasn't found that niche with me."

Bill Blackburn understood this phenomenon as common sense men did everywhere, as every man on the planet would have understood it, except those heavily influenced by the modern ways of the Western world or by advanced civilization, where you specialized in one narrow field your whole life, denying yourself broad exposure to the whole healthy mix of life, thereby diminishing your own humanity in yet one more way. All the other men of the world, the poor, ordinary, plain men, were not specialists so much as healthy-minded jacks of all trades like Bill; because that worked best when you were hungry and struggling to survive, and there was hardly any REGULAR work – as in Mexico, for example, where the men refused to use condoms and overpopulated the place, cheapening labor. In such places, or anywhere for that matter, a very wise, street-hip, highly intelligent man, like Bill Blackburn, for example, could even do better than most men at this: he could excel in several highly technical-knowledge-heavy fields at once, just as the brilliant founders of the Renaissance had done. Bill knew himself; and he read other people accurately; and he had nailed Fred. He understood the man correctly, and demonstrated his earthy wisdom once again thereby; for Fred Waring was not that easy for most people to understand.

Lalemant [a Jesuit priest] was determined to enforce punctiliousness and careful observance of routine and was unwilling to adapt these routines to the habits of the Huron....

Throughout his stay in the Huron country the Huron's houses appeared to his fastidious mind to be "a miniature picture of hell" filled with "fire and smoke, on every side naked bodies ... mingling pell-mell, with dogs sharing the beds, plates, and food of their masters."

In his opinion, merely to visit a longhouse was to befoul oneself with soot, filth, and dirt,... while to have to live and work amongst the Huron was to be a martyr without being killed....[4]

"When I came up here," said Bill, "I came up to produce records. And y'know I said I was 'Promotion Man of the Year'? And I went over to him. And I said, 'Y'know, we'd sell a hell of a lot more records, if you'd get on and give them TV'." Bill spoke as a headman approaching a Jesuit, seeking a deal for the next ten winters of beaver pelt.

Mj couldn't see Fred's hands, but the strings and piano did a soft intro, followed by a soprano solo:

One dream in my heart,...

One love to be liv-ing for,...

"Fred said, 'I hired a man, Glen Wallace’. As a matter of fact, that's the man who used to be head of Capitol Records. He said, 'I gave that man five hundred dollars a week for a whole year, to get me some TV spots on talk shows'." Bill's Fred spoke with the tone of a Jesuit priest in Huron days: a tone of patronizing Bill, a tone only slightly friendly while altogether above and superior to Bill, looking down on him, since, as Fred saw it, Bill had been assigned by God to a lesser status and a lesser level of being than Fred. "'He knew everybody in the TV industry’, Fred said, ‘and he talked with them a lot'."

...This near-ly was mine...

"I said, "It's ridiculous. How could they not want you? You knew Thomas Edison alone, that's good conversation right there. Al Capone."

A man like Bill, touched as he was by his mother’s people, believed a man’s worth increased with age, and with his increasing experience in the world, and with the length of time he spent living out his personal myth. While most U.S. Americans thought a person’s worth decreased with age. Energetic young and middle-aged Americans shunned and shelved their elderly, so as not to have to stare in the face the fact that they too would one day soon be elderly and shelved.

Bill's Fred said: "'They don't want me'."

The high priest of music wanted sympathy. Would the Huron headman, Bill Blackburn, fall for the spoiled white man’s trick of manipulating a Huron man who, though he might have had heart, was nothing but an inferior, a man who could not even clarify what his trade was?

"I said, 'Well, I don't think that could be’." He wrinkled his brow. "'I don't think that could be'!"

There were serious implications in the idea for all sides, after all. Both sides needed a deal, Fred AND Bill, or their relationship would no longer work.

"'Do you know somebody who can get me TV’?

"And I said, 'Yes, me’.

"He said, 'Who do you know’?

"I says, 'Nobody. I don't know anybody in TV, that I can think of offhand that can get it, but’, I said, 'those guys, one thing that I do know is that they need constant renewal of material and faces on television. They're desperate for it just as we're desperate to get it’.

"And he laughed. He says, 'Ha’!”

personal gift from American cartoonist Alex Raymond to Fred Waring

“To our friend and honored member, Fred Waring ------

Honey Dorian (a fictional cartoon creation of Raymond’s) and

Alex Raymond

President

National Cartoonists Society, 1950”[5]

The string and piano accompaniment continued:

One love for my dreams,...

One part-ner in par-a-dise,...

Mj wanted to go home and go to bed. Fred's mutilation and dismemberment, joint by joint, was not his cup of tea. But he had asked for it in his own stupid way, unfortunately, by disbelieving his friend when he’d said he’d had good reason to stop working for Fred. He should have trusted Bill to be right, but instead had forced him to take his case to court, and this was the result: this story.

"And one week later I called him up and said, 'I got a TV shot’.

Chief Huron was building his case even still, at this very moment.

"I started poppin' up with shows, 'It's Your Bet’!, which was a whole week of it. And I kept sayin' to 'im'," Bill used a polite, mothering tone, "'Now, you tell me nobody wants you'?"

...This prom-ise of par-a-dise,

This near-ly was mine.

"But STILL that man never gave me full rein, just let me go in the city and do nothing but get him TV shows, even after I showed him I could do it! 'Cause in his mind this was a fluke. Now if I were Glen Wallace, he would give me five hundred a week and let me go into New York, and pay for a hotel for me!"

"So you could rip him off," mj helped.

Fred Waring, in other words, was unable to recognize Bill as the veritable jack-of-all-trades he was; because Fred had never tried to understand or appreciate foreign, or different, cultures – cultures like, for instance, poor Mexico, where practically every single poor Mexican man, intelligent or not, educated or not, was a jack of all trades.

Close to my heart you came oo-oo-oo-oo-oo,...

The whole chorus went at it: Only to fly away oh-oh-oh-oh-oh,...

Then a soprano with the men oooing, Only to fly as day flies from moon-light oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh

Oooooooh, oooooooh!...

Even though Fred Waring himself was a jack of all trades!!! Inventor; publisher; conductor; educator; fundraiser; president-maker; art collector; innkeeper; philanthropist; He could do it, but no employee of his, such as Bill, could be so smart.

The young doctor was too tired to track the gist of the prosecution's argument carefully any longer, but he could not just sit there like a lump. "He could probably be full-time on TV now, couldn't he?" He tried to look interested in the prosecution’s beautiful, elaborately detailed case.

"No."

"Look at all the stuff that's on TV. He could probably have a weekly show!"

"No. Let me explain Fred. Let me explain. There's another thing: Fred is a master, a MASTER at playing on people's sympathies. I think some of those things he got in his life, if he can't buffalo you, he'll use your sympathies.

"Here's a little tiny man seventy-three years old. This was the way I saw him. And when he said to me, 'They don't want me'," Bill half-whined, "well, I felt sorry for him. How crushing this must be."

Seventy years old meant ‘venerable’ to a Huron like Bill. It meant an honored man by definition. Moreover, a man of Bill’s people, a Huron warrior, complained only when in extremely excruciating pain; so Bill would have naturally concluded before he got to know Fred any better, that Fred must have been in some kind of extremely excruciating pain from not feeling wanted, since Fred had complained and was an honorable, venerable elder statesman of his tribe, too honorable to complain about such a thing without reason. But no. He was just whining to get sympathy, according to Bill.

Ha.

"And I thought about it for days. It almost made me violently angree-hee, that these people would hurt this poor little man!"

The piano took off with orchestral accompaniment, and the soprano continued,

...Now, now I'm a-lone,

Still dream-ing of par-a-dise...

Fred and his hands were still not visible.

"Well," mj said, "he said he thought it was a fluke!" He was tired of thinking about the dying relationship, of course. But he could not just sit there and say nothing. Yet when he did speak, everything he said intensified and lengthened the pre-mortem autopsy, and the case grew ever more complicated.

"That I was getting it," Bill insisted. "It's impossible I'm getting these TV shows for him, because I'm not Glen Wallace." Bill looked fierce. "If Glen can't get them, then how can I get them?" Fred, in his mind, had demeaned Bill not even knowing him, and even after Bill had proven he could do it. Fred had pre-judged him from the restricted point of view of his own sick world. He let Bill produce his records and do Public Relations and Promotions and nothing else, simply because the powerful, filthy-rich Industry had credentialed Bill in these things, and nothing else. He did not acknowledge that Bill Blackburn was human, not just an Industry cog, and therefore might have had other talents not yet credentialed, such as getting him TV talk show interviews, or game shows; so that Fred could be remembered with respect, and concert attendance on the Road could be boosted.

And so that Fred Waring could look a little hipper in his old age.

The brass joined, and things got louder,

...Still say-ing that par-a-dise!...

Once near-ly was mine!...

Mj felt intimidated, oddly. "He probably hasn't known," he could barely think, "how to use your talents."

No: it was worse.

"Anybody that's worked for Fred in the Organization...," said Bill with anger.

"Yeh?"

"...he automatically –. At that point I was starting to work for him, and he automatically ah...," Bill searched.

"Belittles?"

"...belittles in his mind."

This startled mj. "Well, he's really belittling himself then. He must have very little respect for himself."

"Oh yeh, oh yeh, Fred very definitely doesn't respect himself, very definitely doesn't!"

Mj wanted to deflect Bill and his putrid council and go home. He tried confusing him. "And at the same time, you say he's an egomaniac!"

With blatant personality contradictions Bill quibbled not. He stayed with the facts. "Fred is an egomaniac. But he is also a very ex­TREMEly insecure person!"

The naked children, the scantily clad women, the bustle of domestic life, and the religious rituals of the Huron were all abhorrent to the priests who feared their influence and needed a cloister....[6]

"Mm," said the young Dr. He left the seeming contradiction alone, too tired to sort it out. "So, he probably could have been on television, instead of going on the road."

"I had a TV deal for him and he blew it!"

Mj missed this telling line altogether. It was many years before he noticed it on the page, because he was thinking of something else again: "I mean," mj said, "he could have had a weekly show probably."

Bill got louder and turned red. "Listen. He could've, Fred could have had a lifetime contract with General Electric. LIFE-time! That –! You know why you still see Perry Como on TV?"[7]

The loudness stirred mj up. "Yeh," he said, "I remember that one." He felt threatened personally by the unusual intensity of tone in a friend, especially this friend, and the intensity caught him off guard.

"NBC has to pay him seventy, eighty thousand dollars a year! And after awhile somebody setting there, some executive says, 'Hey, listen, we've gotta pay that money anyway, let's throw Waring on a Special, use him.' Same with Bing Crosby.

"Well, Fred said, 'Whuddya think I'm crazy'?"

It was the Moses of music, spurning the Pharaoh's best deal.

personal gift to Fred Waring from American cartoonist Bob Dunn[8]

Mj felt badgered. Personally. The only thing between Fred and infamy by now was the Waring music and mj lorenzo; so mj went to work. Softly he said, "He may have felt locked in, confined. A lifetime contract: that would scare me."

In the bowels of Huron hell, and in his own dimly lit longhouse, Hercules Huron raised his voice to wake the dead: "Wouldn't scare me at a hundred! a hundred fifty thousand a year! It wouldn't scare me one bit, mj!"

Fred Waring was marked for a grave in Huron country. Bill had it dug, but mj defended him regardless. Like some kind of tribal sage, like Bill Blackburn himself almost, mj lorenzo swept the territory with his hand. "That's like selling your soul," he said, "your whole life, to know that you have to work for these people'?" Some of Bill's dramatic style must have rubbed off on him in two years, it was clear. "You can't change your mind? You can't get out of it? Wouldn't that worry you?!"

This performance, his mimicking the professor, who was Bill, got him nowhere.

"Mj, you can only go so far on television. They can't lock him in a lifetime contract." He had felt mj’s attack, and he was collecting his forces:

"They can't stop him from doing motion pictures. They couldn't stop him from recording. And they couldn't stop him from going on the road. He was at the epitome on television, period. Where could he GO on TV but DOWN?"

Mj felt cornered.

"So when you're at the top, and they wanna renew your contract, you think, 'Well, what about the times I might be in trouble’? So you get security, a lifetime contract. Most people in this WORLD want lifetime contracts. They go to work for Boeing or, y'know, and right away they wanna know about retirement benefits. Well that's what Fred should have thought about."

War whoops and tomahawks split the air. Down to the last hair.

Bill was backing mj and his protege, Fred, into a scorched extremity. He wanted blood.

"If I were at the top like Fred was, and I were offered a hundred thousand a year, or as much or more than I'm makin' now, whatever he was makin', he was makin' a million, over a million on TV." Bill sighed heavily, disgusted by the rich, spoiled, irrational and intransigent high priest of music who wanted what he wanted and didn’t want what he didn’t, and didn’t want what he did, and all of it without reason that any ordinary man like Bill could comprehend. He sighed again, then went for it again. "And they're gonna offer me a million a year? For the rest of my life? You wouldn't sign that? You gotta be outa y'r bird!"

Mj was about to give up and turn over the prisoner. "Mm –."

"C'mon, mj, don't tell me he's got your sympathy!" Bill wanted Fred’s scalp and no defenders.

Mj was lost. "I'm not –," he stammered, "I think I'd be fearful of giving away my soul artistically, or just period. And I could see where Fred might have been too. I mean, it's not illogical from anything you've said that he would have reacted that way."

Bill was not a debater. He knew where he stood. "Well?" He waited for surrender.

Mj stuttered but didn't concede. Fred must have had some reason for not wanting those contracts, but how would he, little insignificant and uninformed mj lorenzo, possibly know what it had been? That meant he couldn’t give in to Bill’s pressure and agree.[9]

But Bill wanted a death sentence. He cajoled. He nettled. "There's no contract in the world the performer can't break! But, the performer can always hold NBC to that contract, there's a corporate thing. And immediately, you go into court with NBC, people'd say, 'Poor little Fred Waring, he's gonna fight the whole network? An unfair deal’!

"And Fred knew that. He was wise enough." Bill droned wearily. "I'm sure of it. He was in a wrong mood that day or whatever. He's made terrible blunders like that."

Sure of himself, he snapped, "The reason I say that, that it is a mistake, everybody else has made those deals, and everybody else is still there!"

Mj felt too beleaguered to defend the man any more, really. Instinct told him to deflect heat at this point and let it go. "You were telling me about the TV stars." He tried changing the subject. "Another time you were telling me, after the David Frost Show, you got in a cab –...”

Bill thought about this. He calmed. "No, 'It's Your Bet’. You mean when he jumped on me, in the car?"

"Yeh."

"Fred started to rant and rave. Virginia was there. Paul was there."

There was a recap, full orchestra alone:

...One dream in my heart,

One dream to be liv-ing for...

Fred was adolescent. "'I don't wanna talk about the Waring Blendor and all that stuff, that's all they wanna talk t'you –, let's talk about what I'm doin' now. I've told you time-and-again-Bill' –."

Bill was calm. "I said, 'Mr. Waring: they're not interested in what you're doing now. The only interest I can get is from these nostalgic things'!"

The full chorus joined,

...One love to be liv-ing for! This near-ly was mine!...

"And he said, 'Don't-be-ridicu­lous'!"

Fred was ravaged. Ruined. Cooked. And crippled.

Emasculated white brass, grilled to the wall.

"Virginia said, 'Papa, he's right.'

The orchestra went solo, leaving the words that everyone knew unsung, but understood:

(...Now, now I'm a-lone,...

Still dream-ing of par-a-dise...)

Bill pierced his friend, mj, with a stare. "He's done, see!"

Roasted white meat.

"And the way he's fighting it... it only makes it worse!"

Bill probed the meat to the marrow, proving it was done.

On behalf of his people, as it seemed, Bill Blackburn seized what little white meat was left of this filthily moneyed, spoiled brat of a paleface underminer of Huron ascendancy. He spoke with restraint. "And I said, 'Mister Waring. You told me a man worked for years, couldn't get you TV. I've given you TV. I think you oughta show at least enough respect to believe that I know what I'm doin'."

"'How do you know what you're doin'?" It was a loud, high-pitched adolescent. "You don't know the people.'

Respect? Forget it.

"I said, 'I've given you T. V.'!" Bill was a staunch, upright brave who respected himself: "'Re- sults  are  what  shows'!"  It was a cardinal rule in Bill’s world, the world of simple, ordinary but clever men, where credentials were awarded in-formally, by your community, for your humanity, your real human accomplishments, not formally, by huge, impersonal institutions, for your schooling, or experience as a cog. 

A soprano aimed higher and higher, backed by full chorus and orchestra:

Still say-ing that par-a-daaaaaaaaaaahise...

Bill saw things in warlike terms, just as mj had thought: "We almost got in a big hassle. Y'see, if it hadn't been for Virginia and Paul, we would've had it out. And to me, war scenes like that just aren't worth it. Not worth me going out there busting my behind to give him these TV shows, and then he turns around and pulls this."

...Waaaaaaaaah nceneeeeee- rlyeeeeee waaaah, zmaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaine!!!    (Once nearly was mine!)

They ended climactically, soprano high.

"On the Dinah Shore Show," said Bill, "he pulled a beaut!" He looked victorious. "But y'see, again, I'm ready!" One last witness for the prosecution, Dinah Shore; one last piece of evidence to nail the case and make Bill victorious.

"Yeh!" mj said. He had to sit through a live dismemberment of Fred as final act, just because Bill’s ritual required an audience. That's what friends were for, apparently. And besides, it was a required part of a Huron torture ritual.

Down to the last hair.

Wish you were there.

'We have been running up and down this country, but they follow us from one place to another,' said Sitting Bull, a leader of the seven bands of Lakota, or Western Sioux. He and other 'hostiles’, including Cheyenne, were on their Montana hunting grounds when ordered to report to the reservation by January 31, 1876, or face military action. Hunkpapa Sioux warriors Crow King, Gall, Sitting Bull, and other chiefs ignored the order. In June, the Moon of Making Fat, their numbers were strong and defiant. And in a vision Sitting Bull saw soldiers falling upside down into his camp.[10]

“What a crazy screw-up, that mj lorenzo dope,” cried some of his most vociferous pundit followers when they read the chapter entitled ‘A Little Tiny Man Seventy-Three’. “Mj defended General Custer when he should have defended Sitting Bull!!!” Since Tales of Waring was the first book he published after The Remaking, which they saw – mistakenly – as his ‘leftist manifesto’, they were bewildered and shocked by his defending Fred Waring ‘to such an insane extreme’.[11]