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Story No. 10 |
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 "He experienced a great euphoric rush of emotion and all of a sudden everything around him fragmented and went away..." |
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...AGAIN? |
Could a superstar of the past do it again today?
That's what the bet was all about...finding out!
of TheColumnists.com
"Wait a minute, wait a minute!" Jolson shouted
at the crowd when the first great wave of applause finally began
to subside. "You ain't heard nothin' yet!"
And he certainly was right about that. He had at least another
hour of material saved up for the endless encores he had come
to expect at the Winter Garden every Sunday night, the night
when he performed all by himself on the Schuberts' showcase stage.
But this time something strange happened: He vanished into thin
air.
He had skipped back into the wings to let the cheering reach another crescendo. He stood there for about 30 seconds, hopping up and down, slapping his white gloves together with excitement, when two young men in their late teens were pushed over to him by Henry Wiseman from the Schuberts' head office.
"Al," Henry said, "I'd like you to meet two fellas we're thinking of putting in our next show."
Jolson smiled politely and hastily shook hands with the boys while somebody took a picture with a big flash of powder, then he waved Henry off just as the agency man was about to introduce the young men.
"Boys, boys, you gotta 'scuse me," he said. "Can't you hear that crowd out there? They want their Jolie!"
And so he turned and started to skip back onstage, which is just about when he disappeared without a trace.
The first thing he noticed was a kind of wavy light around his bright white gloves and then his hands sort of disintegrated before his very eyes. He experienced a great euphoric rush of emotion and all of a sudden everything around him fragmented and went away and he was sitting on the polished floor of a bare, dimly-lighted room with the two bewildered-looking teenage boys seated beside him.
"What happened??" one of the boys stammered in a high-pitched voice that echoed in the empty room. "Did we do something wrong?"
Jolson didn't answer. For one of the few times in his young life, he was totally speechless. The other teenage boy, a homely lad with a very unpleasant-looking big nose, looked as if a bomb had just exploded next to him. The first teenager started to whimper.
"Gentlemen, gentlemen," came a heavily-magnified voice that filled the room and bounced off the walls. "You are in a mild state of shock, but if you'll just bear with us a few more minutes, you'll all be back to normal in no time."
A moment later, a door in one of the four perfectly smooth walls opened with a loud hissing sound and two rather obese men in white laboratory coats entered the room together. One had a short beard. He began to examine each of the three, taking their blood pressure and peering into their eyes with a tiny light. The other stood before them with a clipboard and pen.
"Now which one of you is the performer?" he asked, frowning when all three raised their hands. He grumbled, "Nuisance, nuisance," then ascertained that the homely boy was a ragtime piano player and the other a juvenile singer of novelty tunes, but that the older fellow was the one performing earlier that evening at The Winter Garden.
"I know nothing about these boys," Jolson spoke up, "but I'm Al Jolson!"
He said it as if you might hear a fanfare of trumpets about then. The clipboard man looked unimpressed.
"You must have seen
my ad in Variety, the one that said, 'Watch Me. I'm a
Wow!" Jolson added. "I'm the one that's setting the
town all aflame!"
"Not right now you're not," said the clipboard man.
"What year do you think this is anyway?"
"Huh?" said Jolson. "Whadda ya mean what year is it? Why, it's 1912! Where have you been, Rip Van Winkle?"
The clipboard man laughed
quietly. "Rip Van Winkle!" he said. "That's rich.
You're the Rip Van Winkles, gentlemen. Welcome to the year 2002!"
By the following day, Jolson and the teenagers had heard the craziest story they'd ever heard. They had become the unwilling focus of a diabolical bet between Dr. Schuster, the clipboard man, and Dr. Ferngrove, his partner in crime. Ferngrove believed that entertainers of great talent and ambition could make it to the pinnacle of success in any era. Schuster booed that idea. He believed every epoch has its great stars, but that the passage of time eventually makes every performer extinct because tastes change and so must each era's performers.
"We are now about to find out which of us is right," Dr. Ferngrove explained. 'That's why we picked you, Mr. Jolson, and extracted you from your own time quite early in your career and brought you to our time--some 90 years later. You must have been a real superstar in your heyday, Mr. Jolson. Now we'll see if you can do it again."
Since their discussion was taking place over the dinner table, served in a modern kitchen with electronic appliances the three men from 1912 couldn't have even imagined before, they were beginning to believe the business about being in 2002. But they were still incredulous.
"Why do you say 'must have been,'" Jolson asked. "If I was a whadda-ya-call-it-star, wouldn't everybody know it? How big did I get anyway?"
"I'm afraid we don't know, Mr. Jolson," said Dr. Ferngrove. "You see, we snatched you from your time when you were only 25 years old. That means anything you did after that age couldn't have happened, so there is no memory of it--and no record of it in show business history. We only assume that we picked a performer who had become very, very famous in his time."
That's when Dr. Schuster chimed in: "And don't waste your time trying to sue us, buster. You can't prove you suffered any loss because you can't prove you ever amounted to anything."
"What about us?" the teenagers asked almost in chorus.
"Well, we're awfully sorry about you boys," said Dr. Ferngrove. "We didn't mean to lift you out of 1912. We used a photograph of Mr. Jolson taken backstage at the Winter Garden theater to calibrate our time extractor. I guess you just got caught in the extraction field. But we'll get you both rooms in the Village and see about jobs for you right away."
For Al Jolson's "comeback" attempt, Schuster and Ferngrove had retained the services of Abe Dimvogel, a Broadway booking agent of modest success. Their "time-snatching" enterprise was strictly illegal because it used equipment they had purloined from their former employer, the U.S. Dept. of Defense, so Schuster and Ferngrove had to hire an agent who would be discreet and not pry into Mr. Jolson's background too deeply.
"He had a drinking problem and spent some time in a sanitarium," they told Dimvogel, "so he doesn't want any of his old credits mentioned. He's afraid somebody will remember him working under the old name he used to use. You'll have to try booking him as a new act."
"Have you heard this guy sing?" Dimvogel asked two days into his placement effort for Jolson. "He's a human bullhorn! I got him into an audition for a revival of 'Carousel' out in Long Island and he blew out the p.a. system. He claims he's never been miked before. Where'd you find him? Outer Slobovia?"
Dimvogel tried to give Jolson a few pointers, but Jolie wasn't having any. He refused to look at any new material, but none of the Manhattan musicians knew any of the stuff Jolson wanted to sing.
"You yokels don't know 'Rum Tum Tiddle'?" Jolson told one lounge bandleader. "How can that be?"
Finally, Dimvogel persuaded Jolson to rehearse some standards with a black piano player named Pinto Reems and together they worked out a nice arrangement of "You Go to My Head," which Dimvogel thought was appropriate for the egotistical Jolson. The boy had a nice baritone voice once Pinto got him to stop bouncing around, clapping his hands together and trying to whistle a chorus or two. When they got half a dozen other numbers worked out, Pinto told Dimvogel he'd like to try breaking Jolson in with a few songs during a gig he and the boys had up in Harlem that week.
On the way over to Harlem, Pinto and Jolson passed a movie theater playing a revival of "The Jazz Singer," the first talking picture, starring the immortal George Jessel. Jolson seemed fascinated and asked to stop the cab so he could get out and look at the poster.
"Whadda ya know about that!" he said. "I remember that little guy Jessel. What a break to get a history-making picture like that! They'll certainly never forget his name!"
Jolson's eyes really lit up a little later when he walked into the Tan Delight Club with Pinto and the boys. He looked around and saw the crowd was almost completely made up of black customers.
"Oh boy, oh boy," he said, rubbing his hands together with glee. "Dis is my kind of place!"
Pinto later claimed he had no idea Jolson was going to do what he did. Dimvogel believed him. Only a lunatic white man would come onstage in a black nightclub in Harlem in 2002 wearing blackface, especially to sing "Down Among the Sheltering Palms" as if he were doing a 1950s TV commercial for Uncle Ben's Converted Rice.
"Wait a minute!" Jolson shouted as the crowd erupted in boos and catcalls and started throwing things. "You ain't heard nothin' yet. Do any you boys know 'Paris is A Paradise for Coons'?"
They got Jolson out of the place alive, but barely. Dimvogel wanted to wash his hands of the man at that point. He concentrated on the teenagers, who were much more flexible, and got them a gig in the Village, singing duets, while Jolson hung around his hotel room, watching daytime television and moaning the blues.
At that point, Dr. Schuster wanted to collect on his bet with Dr. Ferngrove, but Ferngrove insisted three months was too little time for a man from 1912 to jump start his career in the new world of 2002.
"I'm sorry to let you down, Ferny," Jolson told Dr. Ferngrove one afternoon. "It's awful to get up in front of a crowd and know right away they don't like ya. That's never happened to me before."
But things started to change for Jolson after he was booked on Howard Stern's radio show. Stern had heard about Jolson's "blackface moment" at the Tan Delight and couldn't wait to exploit the man he assumed was just another Manhattan madman. Just for laughs, the Stern crew asked Jolson to prepare a song to perform on the show a cappella. They sent him over a big sheaf of sheet music from old standards and out of the pile Jolson picked an obscure tune he'd never sung before--one that had been a minor hit for some forgotten artist of the past, but one that seemed hauntingly familiar to Jolson for some peculiar reason. It was called "April Showers."
That first appearance on the Stern show turned out to be riveting radio. Jolson had no idea he was there to be made fun of on the air. He explained rather sadly that he sometimes felt like a man from another century, from a time long gone in America. He told the surprised Stern that he had hoped to sing his old song with deep conviction at the Tan Delight, that he hoped the patrons would know he was trying to become one with them, not make fun of them.
When Stern's producers realized Jolson was eliciting pity, not laughs, with his remarks, they urged Howard to get Jolson into his "way out of it" song, which ought to be a riot without any kind of musical accompaniment. But Jolson had another surprise for the Stern audience.
"April Showers" had always been sung as a wistfully romantic song, but Jolson didn't feel romantic that day. He slowed the pace down and made it a sad, heart-rending song of broken dreams and unrequited love. He sang with a newfound humility and as his voice drifted out over the airwaves, it was filled with all the pain and longing of a man who had left behind his friends, his family and his legacy as a performer in a long ago time. Without any musical background to interfere, his rich, deep, magnificent voice resonated like it never had before.
"That...that was awesome, Mr. Jolson," Stern said when the song was over.
Within a year, the Stern appearance had led to several newspaper articles about "the voice with hair on its chest" and the thoughtful man behind it. Jolson recorded his first CD and his elegiac "April Showers" became a Top 40 hit. HBO did an Al Jolson special and PBS teamed him with Celine Dion for a holiday concert special. When Abe Dimvogel signed him for a Carnegie Hall one-man concert for Christmas 2003, Dr. Schuster figured it was time to pay off his bet to Dr. Ferngrove.
"I guess we'll never
know if he's as big as he was the first time," Schuster
said as he counted out 10 hundred dollar bills. "But he's
big enough for me."
Jolson never really forgave the "time
snatchers" for taking him away from his own time, but he
lived to a ripe old age and was not only gloriously successful
in his career, but also was a man at peace with himself. He remembered
enough of his first 25 years to know he had learned a great lesson
in humility by being transported to 2002 and having to start
all over again.
As for the teenagers who were "snatched" from the Winter Garden backstage along with Al Jolson, 19-year-old Eddie Cantor had a long and successful career as the host of "Eddie's Playhouse," a Saturday morning kiddie show on CBS where his rolling eyes and playful manner made him the darling of toddlers all over America, while 18-year-old Jimmy Durante became one of the most successful jazz pianists of the "2020s" and a popular television personality, once Schuster and Ferngrove agreed to put up the money Abe Dimvogel insisted be used for Durante's nose job.
Of course, everyone knows that the authorities finally caught up to Schuster and Ferngrove and sent them away to the federal penitentiary for theft of government property. Nobody ever found out about what they did to American show business history just to settle a bet.
Maybe someday they'll talk about the time they "snatched" William Shakespeare from history and got him a job writing for "General Hospital," but that's another story for another day, isn't it?
© 2002 by Ron Miller. The Ron Miller caricature is © 2001 by Jim Hummel.
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