DICK CONTINO’S BLUES
and Other Stories

A MAN GYRATING with an accordion – pumping his ‘Stomach Steinway’ for all its worth.

My father pointing to the TV. ‘That guy’s no good. He’s a draft dodger.’

The accordion man in a grade Z movie: clinching with the blonde from the Mark C. Bloome tire ads.

Half-buried memories speak to me. Their origin remains fixed: L.A., my hometown, in the ’50s. Most are just brief synaptic blips, soon mentally discarded. A few transmogrify into fiction: I sense their dramatic potential and exploit it in my novels, memory to moonshine in a hot second.

Memory: that place where personal recollections collide with history.

Memory: a symbiotic melding of THEN and NOW. For me, the spark point of harrowing curiosities.

The accordion man is named Dick Contino.

‘Draft Dodger’ is a bum rap – he served honorably during the Korean War.

The grade Z flick is Daddy-0 – a music/hot-rod/romance stinkeroo.

Memory is contextual: the juxtaposition of large events and snappy minutiae.

In June of 1958 my mother was murdered. The killing went unsolved; I went to live with my father. I saw Dick Contino belt ‘Bumble Boogie’ on TV, noted my father’s opinion of him and caught Daddy-O at the Admiral Theater a year or so later. Synapses snapped, crackled, popped: a memory was formed and placed in context. Its historical perspective loomed dark: women were strangled and spent eternity unavenged.

I was ten and eleven years old then; literary instincts simmered inchoately in me. My curiosities centered on crime: I wanted to know the WHY? behind hellish events. As time passed, contemporaneous malfeasance left me bored – the sanguinary ’60s and ’70s passed in a blur. My imagination zoomed back to the decade preceding them, accompanied by a period soundtrack: golden oldies, Dick Contino slamming the accordion on the Ed Sullivan Show.

In 1965 I got kicked out of high school and joined the army. Everything about the army scared me shitless – I faked a nervous breakdown and glommed an unsuitability discharge.

In 1980 I wrote Clandestine – a thinly disguised, chronologically altered account of my mother’s murder. The novel is set in 1951; the hero is a young cop – and draft dodger – whose life is derailed by the Red Scare.

In 1987 I wrote The Big Nowhere. Set in 1950, the book details an anti-Communist pogrom levelled at the entertainment biz.

In 1990 I wrote White Jazz. A major subplot features a grade Z movie being filmed in the same Griffith Park locales as Daddy-O.

Jung wrote: ‘What is not brought to consciousness comes to us as fate.’

I should have seen Dick Contino coming a long time ago.

I didn’t. Fate intervened, via photograph and video cassette.

A friend shot me the photo. Dig: it’s me, age ten, on June 22, 1958. An L.A. Times photographer snapped the pic five minutes after a police detective told me that my mother had been murdered. I’m in minor-league shock: my eyes are wide, but my gaze is blank. My fly is at half-mast; my hands look shaky. The day was hot: the melting Brylcreem in my hair picks up flashbulb light.

The photo held me transfixed; its force transcended my many attempts to exploit my past for book sales. An underlying truth zapped me: my bereavement, even in that moment, was ambiguous. I’m already calculating potential advantages, regrouping as the officious men surrounding me defer to the perceived grief of a little boy.

I had the photograph framed, and spent a good deal of time staring at it. Spark point: late ’50s memories reignited. I saw Daddy-O listed in a video catalog and ordered it. It arrived a week later; I popped it in the VCR.

Fuel-injected zoooom—

The story revolves around truck driver/drag racer/singer Phil ‘Daddy-O’ Sandifer’s attempts to solve the murder of his best friend, while laboring under the weight of a suspended driver’s license. Phil’s pals ‘Peg’ and ‘Duke’ want to help, but they’re ineffectual – addled by too many late nights at the Rainbow Gardens, a post-teenage doo-wop spot where Phil croons for gratis on request. No matter: Daddy-O meets slinky Jana Ryan, a rich girl with a valid driver’s license and a ’57 T-Bird ragtop. Mutual resentment segues into a sex vibe; Phil and Jana team up and infiltrate a nightclub owned by sinister fat man Sidney Chillis. Singer Daddy-O, cigarette girl Jana: a comely and unstoppable duo. They quickly surmise that Chillis is pushing Big ‘H’, entrap him and nail the ectomorph for the murder of Phil’s best friend. A hot-rod finale; a burning question left unanswered: will Daddy-O’s derring-do get him his driver’s license back?

Who knows?

Who cares?

It took me three viewings to get the plot down anyway.

Because Dick Contino held me spellbound.

Because I knew – instinctively – that he held important answers.

Because I knew that he hovered elliptically in my ‘L.A. Quartet’ novels, a phantom waiting to speak.

Because I sensed that he could powerfully spritz narrative detail and fill up holes in my memory, bringing Los Angeles in the late ’50s into some sort of hyperfocus.

Because I thought I detected a significant mingling of his circa ’57 on-and-off-screen personas, a brew that thirty-odd intervening years would forcefully embellish.

Contino on-screen: a handsome Italian guy, late twenties, big biceps from weights or making love to his accordion. Dreamboat attributes: shiny teeth, dark curly hair, engaging smile. It’s the ’50s, so he’s working at a sartorial deficit: pegger slacks hiked up to his pecs, horizontal-striped Ban-Lon shirts. He looks good and he can sing; he’s straining on ‘Rock Candy Baby’ – the lyrics suck and you can tell this up-tempo rebop isn’t his style – but he croons the wah-wah ballad ‘Angel Act’ achingly, full of baritone tremolos, quintessentially the pussy-whipped loser in lust with the ‘noir’ goddess who’s out to trash his life.

And he can act: he’s an obvious natural, at ease with the camera. Dig: atrocious lines get upgraded to mediocre every time he opens his mouth.

And he’s grateful to be top-lining Daddy-O – he doesn’t condescend to the script, his fellow performers or lyrics like, ‘Rock candy baby, that’s what I call my chick. Rock candy baby, sweeter than a licorice stick!’ – even though my threadbare knowledge of his life tells me that he’s already been to much higher places.

I decided to find Dick Contino.

I prayed for him to be alive and well.

I located a half-dozen of his albums and listened to them, reveling in pure Entertainment.

‘Live at the Fabulous Flamingo,’ ‘Squeeze Me,’ ‘Something for the Girls’ – old standards arranged to spotlight accordion virtuosity. Main-theme bombardments; sentiment so pure and timeless that it could soundtrack every moment of transcendent schmaltz that Hollywood has ever produced. Dick Contino, show-stopper on wax: zapping two keyboards, improvising cadenzas, shaking thunderstorms from bellows compression. Going from whisper to sigh to roar and back again in the length of time it takes to think: tell me what this man’s life means and how it connects to my life.

I called my researcher friend Alan Marks. He caught my pitch on the first bounce. ‘The accordion guy? I think he used to play Vegas.’

‘Find out everything you can about him. Find out if he’s still alive, and if he is, locate him.’

‘What’s this about?’

‘Narrative detail.’

I should have said containable narrative detail – because I wanted Dick Contino to be a pad-prowling/car-crashing/moon-howling/womanizing quasi-psychopath akin to the heroes of my books. I should have said, ‘Bring me information that I can control and exploit.’ I should have said, ‘Bring me a life that can be compartmentalized into the pitch-dark vision of my first ten novels.’

‘What is not brought to consciousness comes to us as fate.’

I should have seen the real Dick Contino coming.

Richard Joseph Contino was born in Fresno, California on January 17, 1930. His father was a Sicilian immigrant who owned a successful butcher shop; his mother was first-generation Italian-American. Dick had two younger brothers and a sister; a maternal uncle – Ralph Giordano, aka Young Corbett – was briefly welterweight champion of the world.

The family was tight-knit, Catholic, only moderately tight-ass. Dick grey up shy, beset by fears of claustrophobic suffocation and separation from his loved ones. Wicked bad fears: the kind you recognize as irrational even as they rip you up.

Athletics and music allowed him to front a fearless persona. High-school fullback, five years of accordion study – good with the pigskin, superb with the squeezebox. Dick Contino, age seventeen, ready for a hot date with history: a strapping six-foot gavonne with his fears held in check by a smile.

Horace Heidt, late of Horace Heidt and his Musical Knights, was passing through Fresno looking for amateur talent. His Door of Opportunity radio program was about to debut – yet another studio audience/applause meter show – three contestants competing for weekly prize money and the chance to sing, play, dance or clown their way through to the grand finals, a five thou payoff and a dubious shot at fame. One of Heidt’s flunkies heard about Dick and arranged an audition; Dick wowed him with a keyboard-zipping/bellows-shaking/mike-stand-bumping medley. The flunky told Horace Heidt: ‘You’ve got to see this kid. I know the accordion’s from squaresville, but you’ve got to see this kid.’

December 7, 1947: Horace Heidt slotted Dick Contino on his first radio contest. Dick played ‘Lady of Spain’ and ‘Tico-Tico’ and burned the house down. He won $250; horny bobbysoxers swarmed him backstage.

Horace Heidt hit first-strike pay dirt.

Dick Contino continued to win: week after week, traveling with the Heidt show, defeating singers, dancers, trombone players, comics and a blind vibraphonist. He won straight through to the grand finals in December ’48; he became a national celebrity while still technically an amateur contestant. The Horace Heidt Door of Opportunity program soared on his coattails, zooming to #2 in the national radio ratings, sparking a 28 percent sales growth for their sponsor’s product: Phillip Morris cigarettes.

The Fresno butcher’s son now had four hundred fan clubs nationwide.

He averaged five thousand fan letters a week.

Teenage girls thronged his appearances, changing ‘Dick-kie Cont-ino, we love you’ to the tune of ‘Lady of Spain’.

Horace Heidt was to say years later: ‘You should have seen Dick play. If my show had been on television, Dick Contino would have been bigger than Elvis Presley.’

A Heidt tour followed the grand-finals victory. Other performers appeared with Contino – crypto-lounge acts backstopping the newly anointed ‘Mr. Accordion’. Heidt had his cash cow yoked to a punk twenty-five-grand-a-year contract; Dick sued him and cut himself loose. Mr. Accordion flying high: record contracts, screen tests, top-liner status at the BIG ROOMS: Ciro’s and the Mocambo in L.A.; the El Rancho Vegas; the Chez Paree in Chicago. Dick Contino, age nineteen, twenty, twenty-one: soaking up the spoils of momentum, making the squaresville accordion hip, unaware that public love is ephemeral. Too callow to know that idols who admit their fear will fall.

1951: the Korean War heating up. A vintage year for professional witch hunters, right-wing loonies and anti-Communist paranoics. Dick Contino goes from ‘Valentino of the Accordion’ to draft bait. A Selective Service notice arrives; he begs off his army induction, citing minor physical maladies. He’s scared – but not of losing his BIG ROOM status, big paydays, and big poontang potential.

He’s scared of all the baaaaad juju that could happen to you, might happen to you, will happen to you – shit like blindness, cancer, passing out on stage, your dog getting dognapped by vivisectionists, your mother getting raped, going punchy like your Uncle Ralph. The army looms – claustrophobia coming on like a steam-heated shroud. Fear – BIG-ROOM FEAR – crazy stuff so diffuse that you can’t tell if it’s outside you or inside you. Crazy stuff he might have outgrown if he hadn’t been too busy on the Heartthrob Tour, jump-starting adolescent libidos.

Fear owned him now; it grew more vivid by the day. Dick went to the Mayo Clinic; three psychiatrists examined him and declared him psychologically unfit for army service. Dick’s draft board wanted yet another opinion and shot him to their preferred headshrinker. The shrink conducted a cursory exam, contradicted the Mayo triumvirate and tagged Richard Contino 1-A.

Dick was inducted in April of 1951 and sent to Fort Ord, California. His fear became panic – he bolted the reception-station barracks and caught a bus to San Francisco. Now AWOL and a Federal fugitive, he trained down to his parents’ new house outside L.A. He conferred with friends, a lawyer and a priest, got up some guts and turned himself in to the Feds.

The incident got front-page publicity. The papers played up a resentment number, harping on the BIG ROOM pay Dick Contino would be giving up if forced to serve as an army private. Dick’s response: then take away my accordion for five years.

The Feds didn’t buy it. Dick Contino went to trial for desertion; he fought his case with psychiatric testimony. Fear on trial, fear convicted – the U.S. Attorney liked Dick, considered him courageous and petitioned the judge to release him straight into the army. The judge refused – and hit Dick Contino with six months in the Federal joint at McNeil Island, Washington.

He did five months of the sentence, shaving four weeks off for good behavior. It could have been worse: he hauled pipes, did gardening work and put on a prisoners’ Christmas show. Inside, the big fears seemed to subside: the business of day-to-day survival kiboshed that part of his imagination where terror flourished. Five months in, out, the ironic kicker: he got drafted and sent to Korea.

Where he served with distinction. Korea proved to be a mixed psychological bag: Dick’s draft-trial notoriety won him friends, enemies and a shitload of invitations to play the accordion. Duty with a Seoul-attached outfit, back to the States early in ’54. Richard Contino: honorably discharged as a staff sergeant; while overseas the recipient of an unsolicited presidential pardon signed by Harry S. Truman.

Dick Contino: back in the U.S.A.

Back to derailed career momentum, a long transit of day-to-day survival behind him.

The Big Room gigs were kaput. Momentum is at least 50 percent hype: it requires nurturing and frequent infusions of bullshit. Dick Contino couldn’t play the game from McNeil Island and Korea. A bum publicity taint stuck to him: ‘Coward’ and ‘Draft Dodger’ throbbing in Red Scare neon.

He worked smaller rooms and dodged catcalls; he cut records and learned to sing as a hedge against dwindling interest in the accordion. A few journalists befriended him, but the basic show-biz take on Dick Contino was this guy is poison. Justifying yourself to the public gets old quick; ‘Coward’ may be the toughest American bullet to dodge. Liquor-store heisters/animal molesters/shyster lawyers – Americans prefer all of them to cowards.

Dick Contino learned to sing – Rock & Roll cut him off at the pass. He learned to act, top-lined a few ‘B’ films and faded in the wake of heartthrobs with un-derailed momentum. In 1956 he married actress Leigh Snowden, had three kids with her and settled down in Las Vegas – close to his hotel-lounge bread and butter. He continues to get small-room gigs and plays Italian fiestas in Chicago, Milwaukee, Philly and other paisano-packed venues.

Leigh Snowdon Contino died of cancer in 1982. The Contino kids would now be thirty-five, thirty-two and thirty.

My researcher’s notes tapped out in ’89. He said an obituary check turned up negative – he was certain that Dick Contino was still alive. A week later I got confirmation. ‘I found him. He’s still living in Las Vegas, and he says he’ll talk to you.’

Before making contact, I charted the arc of two lives. A specific design was becoming clear – I wanted to write a novella featuring Dick Contino and the filming of Daddy-O – but a symbiotic pull was blunting my urge to get down to business, extract information and get out. I felt a recognition of my own fears binding me to this man: fear of failure, specific in nature and surmountable through hard work, and the very large fear that induces claustrophobic suffocation and causes golden young men to run from army barracks: the terror that anything might happen, could happen, will happen.

A merging in fear; a divergence in action.

I joined the army just as the Vietnam War started to percolate. My father was dying: I didn’t want to stick around and watch. The army terrified me – I calculated plausible means of escape. James Ellroy, age seventeen, fledgling dramatist: pulling off a frantic stuttering act designed to spotlight his unsuitability for military service.

It was a bravura performance. It got me a quick discharge and a return trip to L.A. and my passions: booze, dope, reading crime novels and breaking into houses to sniff women’s undergarments.

Nobody ever called me a coward or a draft dodger – the Vietnam War was reviled from close to the get-go, and extricating yourself from its clutches was held laudable.

I calculated my way out – and of course my fears remained unacknowledged. And I wasn’t a golden young man sky-high on momentum and ripe for a public hanging.

I’ve led a colorful and media-exploitable life; my take on it has been picaresque – a stratagem that keeps my search for deeper meaning channeled solely into my books, which keeps my momentum building, which keeps my wolves of nothingness locked out of sight. Dick Contino didn’t utilize my methods: he was a man of music, not of words, and he embraced his fears from the start. And he continued: the musicianship on his post-army-beef albums dwarfs the sides he cut pre-’51. He continued, and so far as I could tell, the only thing that diminished was his audience.

I called Contino and told him I wanted to write about him. We had an affable conversation; he said, ‘Come to Vegas.’

Contino met me at the airport. He looked great: lean and fit at sixty-three. His Daddy-O grin remained intact; he confirmed that his Daddy-O biceps came from humping his accordion.

We went to a restaurant and shot the shit. Our conversation was full of jump cuts – Dick’s recollections triggered frequent digressions and circuitous returns to his original anecdotal points. We discussed Las Vegas, the Mob, serving jail time, lounge acts, Howard Hughes, Korea, Vietnam, Daddy-O, L.A. in the ’50s, fear and what you do when the audience dwindles.

I told him that the best novels were often not the best-selling novels; that complex styles and ambiguous stories perplexed many readers. I said that while my own books sold quite well, they were considered too dark, densely plotted and relentlessly violent to be chart toppers.

Dick asked me if I would change the type of book I write to achieve greater sales – I said, ‘No.’ He asked me if I’d change the type of book I write if I knew that I’d taken a given style or theme as far as it could go – I said, ‘Yes.’ He asked me if the real-life characters in my books ever surprise me – I said, ‘No, because my relationship to them is exploitative.’

I asked him if he consciously changed musical directions after his career got diverted post-Korea. He said, yes and no – he kept trying to cash in on trends until he realized that at best he’d be performing music that he didn’t love, and at worst he’d be playing to an audience he didn’t respect.

I said, ‘The work is the thing.’ He said, yes, but you can’t cop an attitude behind some self-limiting vision of your own integrity. You can’t cut the audience out of its essential enjoyment – you have to give them some schmaltz to hold on to.

I asked Dick how he arrived at that. He said his old fears taught him to like people more. He said fear thrives on isolation, and when you cut down the wall between you and the audience, your whole vision goes wide.

I checked in at my hotel and shadowboxed with the day’s revelations. It felt like my world had tilted toward a new understanding of my past. I kept picturing myself in front of an expanding audience, armed with new literary ammunition: the knowledge that Dick Contino would be the hero of the sequel to the book I’m writing now.

Dick and I met for dinner the next night. It was my forty-fifth birthday; I felt like I was standing at the bedrock center of my life.

Dick played me a bebop ‘Happy Birthday’ on his accordion. The old chops were still there – he zipped on and off the main theme rapidamente.

We split for the restaurant. I asked Dick if he would consent to appear as the hero of my next novel.

He said yes, and asked what the book would be about. I said, ‘Fear, courage and heavily compromised redemptions.’

He said, ‘Good, I think I’ve been there.’

The night was cold; Las Vegas neon eclipsed every star overhead. The sky seemed to expand as I wondered what this time and place meant.

Dick Contino’s Blues

I’M ENJOYING A half-assed renaissance these days.

Some dago fiesta gigs, some lounge work. A gooood spot on an AIDS telethon – my ‘Lady of Spain’ reprise goosed ten grand in contributions and got me a surreptitious blow job from a college girl working the phone lines. Daddy-O was released on video, and film critics hooked on ’50s kitsch have been bugging me for interviews.

Their questions have my memory turning cartwheels. It’s ’58 again – I’m an accordionist/singer top-lining a ‘B’ flick for chump change. Did you write ‘Rock Candy Baby’ and ‘Angel Act’ yourself? Did you pour the pork to your costar, that blonde from the Mark C. Bloome tire ads? Who did your wardrobe, who did your stunts – how’d you get that ’51 Ford airborne, the fuzz in hot pursuit – the footage looked real, but hastily spliced in.

I always try to answer truthfully.

I always write off the leaping car as movie magic.

In all candor, I made that supercharged/dual-quad/cheater-slicked motherfucker FLY. There’s a story behind it – my loving farewell to L.A. back then.

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