Caul nodded, smiling, and patted his arm. “ItVgood to have you with us, Teacher. We’ve, all got a lot to learn.”

Becoming The Teacher

Chapter Seven

(1)

Dorothy Sands recalled March of 1955, holding her one-month-old baby in her arms after giving him his medicine, suddenly seeing the infants bright-red face and the ring of white around his mouth.

“Johnny!” she screamed. “We got to get Billy to the hospital!”

Johnny Morrison rushed into the kitchen.

“Can’t get nothing down,” Dorothy said. “Keeps throwing up. And now look what this medicine is doing to him.”

Johnny shouted for Mimi, the housekeeper, to keep an eye on baby Jim, and he ran out to start the car. Dorothy met him with baby Billy, and they drove to the Mount Sinai Hospital in Miami Beach.

In the emergency room, a young intern glanced at the baby and said, “Lady, you’re too late.”

“He’s alive!” she shouted. “You son of a bitch, you do something for my baby!”

Jolted by the mothers words, the intern took the baby and stammered, “We—we’ll do what we can.”

The nurse at the reception desk filled out the admissions form.

“Child’s name and address?”

“William Stanley Morrison,” Johnny said. “1311 North East 154th Street. North Miami Beach.”

“Religion?”

He paused and looked at Dorothy. She knew he was about to say “Jewish,” but seeing the look on her face, he hesitated.

“Catholic,” she said.

Johnny Morrison turned away and walked to the waiting room. Dorothy followed, slumped into the plastic couch and watched him chain-smoke. She guessed he was still wondering if Billy was really his. Billy looked different from dark-haired, dark-complexioned Jim, who’d been born almost a year and a half earlier. Johnny had been so happy about Jimbo he’d talked of finding his wife and getting a divorce. But he never did. Still, he’d bought the pink stucco house with the palm tree in the backyard because, he said, it was important for people in show business to have a home life. It was a better home life than she’d had with her ex-husband, Dick Jonas, in Circleville, Ohio.

But Johnny was going through a bad time now, she realized. His jokes weren’t getting across. The younger comedians were getting the bookings, and Johnny was getting the dregs. He used to be a top-notch M.C. and musician, but now instead of working on his act he was gambling and drinking. It had reached the point where he would take one belt before the first nightclub performance, “for starters,” and then be unable to go on for the last show. Though he still publicized himself as “half music and half wit,” now he could add “and a fifth of bourbon.”

He was not the same Johnny Morrison who used to fix up her singing arrangements and saw her home safely, “to protect my twenty-year-old, rosy-cheeked Ohio farm girl.” Not the same Johnny Morrison she felt so secure about that she’d warn would-be mashers, “Hey, look out, I’m Johnny Morrison’s girl.”