Squeeze player

"I knew everybody," Contino continues.
"I don't want to drop names, but Sinatra did me a couple favors. He got me into the Mocambo. He says, 'You want to play this place, dago?' I said yeah. I got a call the next day."

And when TV spots were few, Ed Sullivan always gave Contino a break--"Sullivan, he had balls, baby!" Contino appeared on the show 48 times, and Sullivan even took him on tour to Russia, where he wowed a Moscow audience of 15,000. A week later he was gigging in Elko, Nevada.

It's this kind of fodder that Ellroy wanted from Contino and what drew the author to Daddy-O.

"What Dog writes--he likes to be called Dog--is what L.A. was like to me," he says. "He calls me up, we get together, and we sit around talking. No tape, no notes, but he's got a phenomenal mind. He shoots espresso, like triples--pow-pow-pow! I don't know how he ever comes down."

But where does Ellroy's Contino start and the real Contino end?
"It's a weird thing," explains the accordion player. "But if I didn't really say this particular thing that he writes, I came close to saying it or thinking it. For example, I played the Crescendo, and business was so bad the guy asked me to leave. No problem. In the story, the place is packed. A guy calls me a draft-dodger, and I walk up and say, 'Fuck you, fuck your mother, and fuck your dog.' That's close to what I thought many times."

Contino says he's received about $15,000 from Ellroy, all on a handshake deal. He's flattered, he's happy with his depiction, and that's about as much as it has done for him.

"I don't know, a lot of people come up and say they read the story, but it hasn't brought in any phenomenal offers. But that's OK."

That last sentence--along with a shrug--pretty much sums up Dick Contino's philosophy of life. Bolstered by Ellroy's patronage, the career might be headed somewhere yet, out of the four-sets-a-night lounge gigs, maybe to audiences who barely remember Grenada, let alone Korea. After all, the man still puts on a hell of a show, and he's still at one with the accordion that broke him out in '47.

"All I've got to do is take care of my mind and body, my attitude, and my appearance, and just wait," he explains. "I'm a receiving station. I don't go after things. I don't know what's good for me, man. Something that seems like a nightmare might be a blessing in disguise. Luck favors the well-prepared, that's it. I'll keep my dick working, keep my attitude, and enjoy the simple things. By the grace of God, give me a little martini at the end of the night. That's it.