Driving the King by Ravi Howard

Author:Ravi Howard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2014-10-28T16:00:00+00:00

The National Broadcasting Company proudly presents. Then the drumroll took over and the crown began to spin. The Nat King Cole Show. And the applause loaded up on the reel-to-reel flowed out of a speaker and into a microphone. We had been told not to clap along, so the applause filled a room of silent gazers. The show started in the shadows, and then the lights came up and caught the edges of Nat’s suit first and then his face. Once his new city was alive with lights and stars falling all around his mountain, he started with his questions.

In the evenings may I come and sing to you?

All the songs that I would like to bring to you?

His first show played out like This Is Your Life in reverse. He started at the microphone, where he’d gotten famous, with the swell of his orchestra coming from the wings. When his singing was done, he ended where his career started, on the piano. The mirror did exactly what they hoped it would as the camera tightened on that flurry Nat made with his fingers.

The monitors showed us what anyone watching would see, and television could give the viewers what a live show could not. No front-row ticket in any theater could have gotten us that close. His hands filled the frame. Anybody watching saw those notes rising the very second they left his fingertips.

When his hands were finished it was our turn. We held our clapping until he was off the air and the mike was cold. Applause felt too simple an offering after a show like that. Two hands together over and over didn’t square with what his fingers had spun for us. Some whistled, and the seated folks rose, as all of us stretched that applause until Nat, with a bow and thank-you, brought it to a close.

With enough applause a show might keep going, but television had no encores. NBC had sales meetings that lasted longer than the show did. They had disappeared into the office suite, the lot of them, Carlos Gastel, Bob Henry, Nat, and all manner of NBC folks.

“I’d like to imagine they loved it.” That’s what he told me when he got to the car. “They told me to wait for Nielsen.”

“Who?”

It never occurred to me how they counted viewers. No ticket stub, no cover charge, or no bar tab, so the old ways to know the tally didn’t apply. The ratings company had a list of people who would write down what they watched, and then the people of NBC would know if they had a hit or not. Nat’s audience was a mystery until word came down from Nielsen. The pitfall of television was that everyone could see him at once, but he could see no one in return.

While we drove home, through the night-lit neighborhoods between Burbank and Hancock Park, I imagined the Nielsen families hunkered over coffee tables, gathering their thoughts and filling diaries. Whoever they were, they mattered,

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