The family was tight-knit, Catholic. Dick grew up shy, beset by 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 squeeze box. Dick Contino, age i ready for a hot date with history; a strapping six-foot gavonne with his fears held in check by a smile.
Horace Heidt was passing through Fresno looking for amateur talent. His Youth 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 had heard about Dick and had arranged an audition; Dick wowed him with a keyboard-zipping/bellows-shaking/mikestand–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,” “Tico-Tico,” and “Bumble Boogie” and burned the house down. He won $250; horny bobby-soxers 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.
He now had 500 fan clubs nationwide–and averaged 5,000 fan letters a week.
Teenage girls thronged his appearances, chanting “Dick-kie Cont-ino, we love you” to the tune of “Lady of Spain.”
Horace Heidt said 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, seven-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 19, 20, 21: 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.
Nineteen fifty-one: the Korean War heating up. Dick Contino goes from “Valentino of the Accordion” to draft bait. A selectiveservice 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 baaad juju that could happen to you, might happen to you, will happen to you–shit like blindness, cancer, passing out onstage, your dog getting dognapped by vivisectionists. The army looms–claustrophobia coming on like a steam-heated shroud. Fear–BIG-ROOM fear–crazy stuff, bigtime diffuse. 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.
Three army psychiatrists examined him at the induction center and declared him psychologically unfit. The assessment letter was “lost”; Richard Contino was processed in anyway.
April 195 i–Fort Ord, California. Dick’s fear becomes panic– he bolts the reception-station barracks and catches a bus to San Francisco. Now AWOL and a federal fugitive, he trains down to his parents’ new house outside L.A. He confers with friends and a lawyer, gets up some guts, and turns himself in to the Feds.
The incident got front-page publicity. The papers harped 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 judge hit Dick Contino with a $10,000 fine and 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.