Into the Night

“There was Johnny Black. He wrote the biggest hit of its day, ‘Dardanella.’ They took it away from him. Or at least, moved in on it, cut in on it. To get it published, he had to let them tinker, rearrange a note or two. All to get their split. You know that long, mournful wail that starts up in the verse, and then dies down again? And then starts up, and then dies down again. Every time I hear it, I think it’s Johnny Black, moaning in his grave because they cut his heart out.

“There was Byron Gay. He died dead broke. Twenty years after he was gone, somebody dug up one of his numbers. It was called ‘Oh!’ Just ‘Oh!’ Probably the shortest song title on record. It made twenty-five thousand dollars in one season. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer corpse.

“It’s a tough business. A bitch of a tough business. Don’t let yourself be hooked into it. Marry, and have a school bus full of kids. You strike me as more that type.”

And then at another time, in self-contradiction, she would say: “It has its moments of sudden inspiration, too, that make all the rest of it worthwhile, I guess.

“Like the struggling young songwriter who got caught in a rainstorm on the streets of New York one day. He ducked into the nearest hotel lobby to get in out of the wet, and while he was sitting there waiting it out, he overheard a wife say to her husband, ‘Hasn’t it let up? Can’t we leave yet?’ The husband turned around from the window he was looking out of and said, ‘In just a few more minutes. Wait till the sun shines, Nellie.’

“Or the time Rodgers and Hart were in a near car collision in Paris, and one of the girls with them put her hand over her rib cage and gasped, ‘My heart stood still!’”

In all of us, Madeline thought broodingly, there are two. The one we might have been, the one we are.

There was a shrewd side to Dell, as there is to many women who appear at first sight to live by frivolity alone. It was more than just shrewdness, she had an excellent business head. Granting her original premise of getting something for nothing (and is that so foreign to business?), she took it the rest of the way from there with an acumen that would have met with the approval of any board of directors.

Showing off a solitaire one day, breathing on it lovingly, then frictioning it against her sleeve to polish it, she remarked idly, “This has about two weeks to go.”

“What d’you mean? You give them back?” Madeline asked in surprise.

Dell arched her eyebrows in rebuke. “Be sensible,” she admonished her. “Only the weak in the head do that.

“That old song Carol Channing used to sing,” she went on. “‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,’ that’s the bunk. Not so. You can hoard them for twenty years, and what have you got? Still diamonds. They’re beautiful, but they don’t work for you. And anything that doesn’t work for you isn’t really beautiful at all, is it? Put it this way: AT&T pays three point six a year. Diamonds pay exactly oh point oh a year. Diamonds don’t feed the kitty.

“So here’s what I do. I have a sort of special personal friend—” She interrupted herself to laugh at herself. “Well, he’d have to be a special personal friend, wouldn’t he? — who comes up with a piece of this stuff every now and then. On special occasions. Like Christmas, like a birthday. I give it a run of about two months, and then when he’s good and used to seeing it on me and doesn’t pay any more attention to it, I take it off display. I take it down to a diamond broker I know, he puts it up for sale, takes his commission, and I collect the balance. I take a beating every time, but I don’t mind that. For instance, a piece worth two thousand, I’m glad to take twelve hundred for. You never can get back the full price. Then I take my twelve hundred, which is now all clear, to another special friend I have, this one’s an investment broker, and he buys me a hunk of U.S. Steel or General Motors or some other blue chip with it. I put it away and forget about it, and it starts working for me from then on. So when I wind up someday with too much rust in my pipes to go on singing, and when the men don’t turn up anymore with the diamonds, I’ll have enough money coming in to keep body and soul together.”

“You’ve got it figured out,” Madeline said admiringly.

“You’ve got to, the way life is. You know that song Billie Holiday sang? ‘God Bless the Child Who’s Got His Own.’ God, it tears me up, the way she sang that song. She didn’t just sing it, you know. She wrote it. She wasn’t a songwriter, nobody who sings like that should have to do anything but sing, but she wrote that song. And before she wrote it, she did something else.”

“What?”