Nothing but a Smile Read online

  Regarding our recent publication on May 15 of a photograph on p. A8 by Mr. Winton S. Dutton accompanying an article about the reintroduction of service veterans to civilian home-life, we the Editors find the image, upon further consideration, potentially inflammatory and insensitive to a number of parties. The inclusion of this photograph within these pages in no way was meant to make specific allegations regarding, nor insult to, the Veterans Administration, city officials, landlords or the housing industry as a whole, the handicapped or anyone else.

  We submit that the happenstance location of certain words and phrases, appearing naturally on signage in the street, and juxtaposed within the image, may, in fact, inadvertently create a certain reading of intent. Any such “message” this may create lies within the culpability of the photographer, Mr. Dutton, and not the Chicago Tribune.

  Though there was no intention by the publisher or our editorial staff to imply a state of animosity, negligence, nor apathy on the part of any known parties—not the least of which being the actual anonymous disabled veteran at its center— we hereby apologize for any offense it may have given.

  The Editors

  “It's that head guy they got up there,” the news dealer said, breathing on her with the stink of chewed seegar. “What's-his-name—isolationist conservative guy. Never wanted us in the fight. Any opportunity, he loves to stick it to the Dems. This way, he sticks it to ‘em, then turns around, eats his cake, too.”

  The mention of cake only made her think of Chesty, lost in that blizzard of white, and it only made her sadder. Wink had done something wonderful—a great, thought-provoking picture, beautifully composed—and they were using it to poke, not provoke, then leave him holding the bag.

  Sons of bitches … It was a good thing they'd stopped calling her for tech work since the men came back. If they were letting her in the building late at night these days, who knew what she'd do?

  Despite this cold-footed second-guessing by the editors, readers, it turned out, appeared to feel differently. The letters to the editor regarding this—at least the ones they printed—ran in favor two to one, with the supportive readers writing that Wink's photo “perfectly illustrated the present plight of the GI lucky enough to make it home,” as opposed to the single dissenter who wrote, “Mr. Dutton's sick trick photography gives voice unnecessarily to the grousers and radicals who wouldn't know a bootstrap or how to pull themselves up by said strap, if their life depended on it.”

  Sal contacted a gal she knew who'd somehow hung on to her proofreader job at the paper even after V-J Day, despite being a gal, and her friend told her, “Fact is, we've apparently received sacks of letters and almost all of them loved your beau's cockeyed photo.”

  Sal explained that he was not her beau.

  But she was proud of him and concerned that the public not misinterpret his great picture or get the wrong idea about him, and all of this was to a degree that she couldn't imagine topping even for a guy who was her beau.

  59

  They shot the whole card deck in one weekend, starting with the shop closing at five on Saturday and working all Sunday.

  They did the queens first, with crowns they cut out of shirt cardboard. Four years of rationing now made the idea of using tinfoil for this feel wasteful and unpatriotic, so they settled for merely bejeweled by gluing on the contents of a box of Jujubes Reenie hadn't finished the last time they went to the pictures. Sal constructed a scepter out of an old curtain rod, and they were in business. The queens were Sal in her natural blonde hair, Sal in her black wig, Reenie in her natural black hair, and Reenie in her redhead wig. One was outfitted in Sal's late mother's fauxmink stole, another in her bathrobe, another in Reenie's high school prom dress, and another in something she had to wear as a bridesmaid at her brother's wedding. The queens struck hilariously regal poses, thrusting to the heavens with the scepter and allowing the costume to fall open slightly, revealing Her Majesty's surprisingly fine legs or deep cleavage. In one, which he was pretty sure they would have to use, Reenie appeared to be screaming in a way that had to have been inspired by the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland.

  For the jacks, they put their hair in ponytails and pigtails and posed on the floor, in short skirts, as if they were playing jacks. Wink had to admit, he never would have thought of this. The girls dreamed up this one on their own. In one shot, they might have their legs angled out before them, the toy jacks scattered on the floor in between. Another, they might be on all fours, hovering over the jacks and dropping the ball. He was pretty sure all other parties bidding for this job wouldn't have come up with anything quite like that, as simple as it seemed.

  As for the kings, he didn't have any good ideas himself, other than maybe something political, dressing them up like Stalin and Churchill and Truman and … who would be the fourth? The late FDR? Except, strictly speaking, dressing them up as unattractive men, let alone dragging tense postwar politics into it, hardly qualified as a good idea. He was afraid, too, that they might want to try something similar to the queen shots—maybe don the robe and crown and just add a beard … ? Not very sexy, either.

  But they didn't. They came up with something even better.

  “I'll set up the shots in these,” Sal said, motioning him away from behind the camera. “You just sit.”

  They had a chair for him and a velvet footstool they sometimes used for family photos, for the youngest one who always knelt in front. Reenie tugged at him, giggling. “You're the king.”

  “Oh, no!” This wasn't right. He wasn't having any of this. He could just see it, if he allowed himself to be a model for these things, the double takes of old war buddies—dressing up in a cardboard crown like some burlesque comedian; like those clownish oafs in the worst girlies, with their greasepaint mustaches and overblown leers—not to mention he might be a serious artist one day, somehow, or at least a news photographer, and he couldn't afford to risk his potentially professional reputation.

  Besides, the chair she was leading him to could hardly pass for a throne—nothing but a wooden straight-backed chair, the one from his room that he sat on every morning to tie his shoes and test the endurance of his ancient laces. “Nice throne,” he said. “No, we've got to do better than this! I mean, the king— now that's an important card.”

  But they promised they weren't going to show him in the shot—Sal had it framed so his upper torso was cropped away. All that would appear would be his legs, stretched out on the footstool, maybe an arm, and the girls, in various wigs. He was king by inference, only. It was brilliant.

  “Mr. Elvgren always says,” Reenie explained, “that the second most important subject in his pinups isn't in the painting. It's the guy looking at it.”

  It was true. Elvgren's stuff often drew you in because the girl looked back at the viewer, like she was in on the gag. It always felt participatory and entirely possible.

  In the king shots, Reenie straddled his legs, helping him on with his slippers, her skirt hiked up as she braced herself, and Wink remained unseen behind the newspaper he was reading. In another, a blonde Reenie, in a French maid's outfit, bent at the waist, lifted his feet off the ottoman, feather duster attending to his shoes. In another, Sal was lighting his pipe, but starting it herself, both elbows out in a tomboyish pose. And in the last, Sal, looking more like Sal than he'd ever seen in any of these photo sessions, decked out in a frilly hostess dress with a respectable expanse of cleavage and pearls, offered him a martini.

  Later, looking at these king shots in particular, he was amazed at how titillating they felt. Of the batch, they showed the least amount of skin, but the idea of them felt much more powerful than all the rest combined. These king shots felt a lot like a column in Esquire magazine come to life.

  Sal came up with the idea for the main shot, the one that would appear on the back of the entire deck. It was nicely simple—Weekend Sally, playing cards. They'd rustled up some poker chips and a bowl of pretzels, an ashtray with cigars, and, best of
all, a green eyeshade. Reenie thought it was great, too, and insisted Sal be the model.

  He shot it straight on, so the hand she held, fanned out, could cover her nipples. Reenie lit her cigar and got it going while she primped Sal, and he got the lights just right. They put a lacy bra on the pot in the center of the table, as if the game had devolved to strip poker. Reenie found a loose tress and pulled it down over Sal's cheek, just so, giving her that vampy tousled look, then stood behind her and squeezed her shoulders together a little, coaxing her into a more vulnerable attitude. Reenie was still puffing away on the cigar, coaching her. “You're in a tight spot, you've bet your last buck, but you know you've got the winning hand …” Sal adjusted her facial expression accordingly, and damn if she didn't get it. One eye narrowed, her lip curled with undisguised moxie. Reenie tipped the ashes on her stogie—it was considerably shorter now, the perfect, iconic seegar—and jammed it into the corner of Sal's curled lips.

  He had it framed tight so you saw the smoke and disorder of the game, but only needed to imagine her opponents seated at the table. You were right there, in the midst and heat of it.

  When he squeezed the bulb for the first shot, he knew they had a winner. He could see it finished, packaged, and practically selling itself once any normal guy got a gander. It was even easy to see what would ultimately be printed on these: Playin' Around with Weekend Sally…. Or Weekend Sally's Game. Yes, even better—making a pun with the apostrophe s.

  They thought they were all set until Sal went through the list and saw the two jokers hadn't been checked off. In what Wink read as a gesture of grace and diplomacy, Sal insisted her friend do the two jokers, since she'd done the back of the cards herself. Unfortunately, Reenie had forgotten to bring the Harlequin mask—the masquerade-style kind, with feathers and sequins and a stick handle to hold it up to her face. Her brother Jamie got it at Mardi Gras when he went through basic outside New Orleans, and she'd been claiming it made her look like a court jester. “Except,” Sal told her, “for all the rest of you which would not be in checkerboard but would be naked and female and offering nothing worthy of ridicule, believe me. The man who laughs at you in the altogether is a little too lacy to be buying these cards.”

  So when they learned that Reenie didn't have the mask with her, Sal came up with a solution on the spot. Wink suspected it had been brewing for a while, that Reenie's art director talents were beginning to rub off on her friend.

  Sal had Reenie—topless but turned and cropped, arms and such obstructing, so you still only partly saw her bazooms— grinning and winking that exaggerated trademark wink of hers (throwing her whole jaw into it, as if trying to dislodge a seed stuck in a back molar), and pulling a different practical joke in both of them: in one, she was lighting a match, about to hold it to a fan of Blue Tips jammed under the heel of a stiletto pump, worn by an otherwise unseen Sal, the imminent recipient of a hotfoot. In the other one, she was placing a tack on a wooden chair—again, crouched low to include her nude upper torso and wink and grin in the frame, and Sal posed as if about to sit, her can, in nothing but a lacy slip, roundly hovering over the thumbtack. “By rights,” Sal said, “you should be doing these leg shots, too,” but Reenie couldn't be in two places in one shot, unless they wanted to get into tricky darkroom work—double exposures and the like—and he did not feel up to that. This was hard enough, considering they might not even win the pitch. Mr. Price might not even be interested.

  Wink felt proud of them both, though, for their creativity and hard work, and their generosity toward each other. These jokers, he knew, would be thought of almost certainly as Winkin' Sally, as much as the backs would further establish Sal as Weekend Sally.

  Now if only they could get this Mr. Price to love it as much as he loved it.

  60

  “I love it,” Mr. Price said. “I love it a lot. Except it's … no good.” Mr. Jericho Price, Sal thought, looked an awful lot like Chesty's uncle Whitcomb. Maybe twenty years younger, less involved in banking, more involved in girlie pictures and the brown-paper-wrapper stuff sold behind the counter. But otherwise, very similar. Elegant and genteel.

  “The production cost,” he said, “doing all these separate face cards … I was expecting one girl, on the back. You've got—what? One, two, three—”

  “It's wigs,” Wink said. “Two girls with wigs.”

  Mr. Price looked a little more impressed. “Still, production costs—it's not like a boilerplate—boom, boom, boom, every card the same.”

  “Mr. Price,” Sal said, “how fast is this world changing? How many new things have popped up just since the war?”

  “Since Tuesday,” Reenie said. “Since breakfast …”

  “Do you want to buy a deck of girlie cards next month and find someone else beat you to this idea? Because you weren't sure it would make enough money? That's really your style, being cautious?”

  She felt his gaze lingering on her, studying her, and thought for a moment that the look was one of someone about to slap her. As cold as Uncle Whitcomb was, she'd never felt that possibility for an instant. But Mr. Price opted for smiling, not slapping. “We'll make it a larger run,” he announced. “Volume. More units, lower cost per unit, more potential sales. Gotta take a risk to make the big bucks. That's my philosophy, anyway.”

  He shook hands all around with them, stopping at Reenie because she didn't seem to want to let go till he agreed to “be sure to tell that rat Rollo Deininger who beat him when you tell him he lost the pitch.”

  “With pleasure, my dear, with pleasure.” He patted her cheek, mentioning again that soon “you two lovely ladies will be in the hands of men all over the globe.” Sal thought she saw Wink wince a little at this, but he held his tongue.

  On his way out, she noticed his coat was more of a cape than an overcoat, and he looked slightly Continental, swooping a silk scarf around his neck like a vanilla swirl. Clutching each of their hands a second time, he declared, “It's a pleasure doing business, and it's a business doing pleasure.”

  A little creepy, Sal thought, the way a phrase like that rolls off the guy's tongue. He might have just left it at thanks and a handshake.

  61

  The money from the card deck was just the nest egg they'd been needing to put Sal's plan into action. She wanted to start their own publishing company. Nothing big. They would operate pretty much the same as usual, even continue to sell photos to the existing girlies, but they would also put out their own. Specials, they were called—one-time titles under their own masthead. This meant contracting for print jobs and distribution, but the profit share would be higher.

  He would have been fine, himself, just putzing along as they always had, but for Sal, it seemed more like an emotional need, less a business decision. “I want to be in charge,” she said. “At least of some of it, some of the time. It's my fanny, after all.”

  He had an impulse to say, Well, it's not very often your fanny, actually. Fanny shots were more Reenie's domain. Sal's was nothing to cry about, but her top feature was definitely her top drawer.

  He didn't say this, obviously, not looking to have his teeth handed to him, not looking to be out wandering the streets with those ex-GIs who couldn't find a place to live.

  “First,” she told him, “we need a company name.”

  Wink thought S&W Publishing would pretty much cover it, but Sal thought it was “too bland; too forgettable.” Plus, she wasn't sure, but she felt as if there was already a publisher with, if not exactly that name, something close enough to be confusing. “And then there's the issue of Reenie, her feeling left out.”

  Reenie wouldn't be involved financially in this, just the modeling and art directing she already did, for her regular cut of the fee. But he saw her point. Reenie might still take it wrong. There was no accounting for Reenie.

  “Hey!” Sal said, “how about Left-Hand Publishing? On account of all your—well, both of our, really—personal setbacks we had to overcome and make do, not just your
hand, but …”

  Personally, he wasn't so keen on a name that made it sound like you maybe held the magazine with your left hand to free up your right.

  In the end, they settled on S&W. Reenie would just have to get over herself if she felt left out.

  They managed to put out two specials in the first month operating as S&W Publishing. In the interest of keeping things friendly, one was called Winkin' with Weekend Sally, starring Sal, and the other, A Weekend with Winkin Sally, featured Reenie. The latter was shot up at Reenie's brother's rustic cabin in Wisconsin; the former shot around the Loop—right in the alley next door and Grant Park for the harmless stuff, Sal walking around in the wind, turning actual, real-life nonmodel heads when her skirts got away from her. (The topless stuff was all done in the studio, on a park bench one of Reenie's brothers “borrowed” from the city a few years back that had been sitting in her mother's rose garden all this time. Reenie found a guy to help Wink borrow it once again.)

  She also brought in a couple friends for cheap temporary help on the pasteup, including her former partner from her brief stint in advertising, Cal from LD&M, whom she obviously was seeing now, at least on some level. Wink tried not to react when he caught a glimpse of her, late one night, goosing the guy as he bent over the layout table. The rest included a hatchet-faced young guy named Hef who had a day job as an intern over at Esquire and all variety of overeager notions about what they should do that went on and on and on.

  Sal confided in him the second night Hef was around that the kid made her anxious. “All that energy! He's like a Pepsi-drinking, pipe-smoking machine you can't shut off! We don't need to reinvent anything,” she said. “Let's just keep it simple and put this out at a profit.”

  “Okay,” Wink said. He'd come to find that, all in all, Sal's plans were generally always okay.