It was funny, she thought, how quickly Dell sought to erase the sensitive side of herself. She couldn’t say a nice word about a partial lyric without wiping it out with a bitter sarcastic comment in the next breath. What Madeline came to realize was that there were two Dells. The worldly cynical brassy Dell was onstage most of the time, but there was always the other Dell waiting in the wings.
The other Dell was quieter, less forceful. And this other Dell spoke so seldom, spoke so little, that you wanted to hear every word she said. She was dead, had been killed off, would never be alive, and you wanted to know as much about her as you could.
“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?”
“She lived it. ‘God bless the child who’s got his own.’ You can’t wait for other people to give it to you, you can’t live on crusts of bread from other people’s sandwiches. ‘God bless the child who’s got his own.’ If you don’t take care of yourself, you’re always going to be the kid outside the candy store, nose against the glass, looking in, wondering why everybody else has got the candy and all you’ve got is a cold nose and an appetite.”
Later, she asked Dell how her gentleman friend would feel if he knew she sold his gifts.
“Take it from me,” Dell said, “he doesn’t want to know. Because if he knew, he’d think he had to be upset about it, but why should he? He gives me diamonds because he can’t give me money because that would give our relationship a name neither of us wants it to have. But what’s a diamond beside money disguised as beauty? He could give me fake jewelry and it would look the same when I wore it. Diamonds are an acceptable way for him to give me money, and if I invest that money instead of wearing it, all I’m being is smart. But he wouldn’t like it if he knew, because it would mean looking at something he doesn’t want to see.”
“And God bless the child,” Madeline said.
“Amen to that. You know how to write a song? Start off with a feeling — your own feeling, not one you got secondhand from a song. Something you feel as deeply as Lady Day felt that song. Then write a lyric that’s so good it’s got the melody curled right up inside it.”
“I’d have a better chance,” Madeline said, “if I had a piano. That’s why my melodies are so bad. I’m trying to hear the notes in my head. If I had a piano, I could sound them out, write down the melodies that I hear instead of guessing at them.”
“So save your pennies and buy yourself a piano.”
“I haven’t got enough pennies. And even if I did, I don’t have room for a piano. I was thinking—”
“Oh?”
“There’s plenty of time when you’re not here,” she said. “If I could come here when you’re out, not all the time but whenever I’ve got something I want to work out on the piano all by myself. If I did that, I think I could come up with some lead sheets that wouldn’t look like the Morse code in Slovakian.”
“Was that what I called your song? Yeah, I guess it was.”
“And if I came up with something decent, you’d get first crack at it. Since you’d be helping me with it, you could even be coauthor, in case the song turned out to be a big hit and other singers covered it.”