A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man (3 page)

Around 1930 Mary Evelyn left McComb to attend Mississippi State College for Women, which held the distinction of being the country’s first public college for women. Located in Columbus (the home of Tennessee Williams), near Starkville, the school is probably where Mary Evelyn met her future husband. Surely she was enticed by the young jazz musician, who played tenor sax at parties and concerts in a band with his brother. When Sidney transferred to Ole Miss, he made certain his engagements continued near Columbus so he could spend time with the raven-haired young woman, who also had a musical bent.

“
I learned later that she actually had studied a lot of piano and played a lot, but I never saw her touch it,” Alex once said of his mother. “She could probably read music but not play by ear. I don’t know how she got so arty. . . . She and her sister were striving, elegant types.”

Sidney continued to play saxophone in jazz bands with Jack, who graduated from Mississippi State with a degree in electrical engineering. A few years after their marriage, Sidney and Mary Evelyn were living in the Delta town of Greenville, Mississippi. Their first child, Reid Magruder Chilton (named for his maternal and paternal grandparents), was born there on October 25, 1939. With a family to support, Sidney took a job at Mississippi Power & Light in Jackson, where he became personnel director.

In 1930 a distant cousin, Ann Chilton McDonnell, wrote a letter to the
William and Mary Quarterly
about her family’s traits: “
I have traced each branch of the Chilton family which settled in these Southern and Western states and have corresponded with many of them. Am proud to state I found them all, without exception, educated, intelligent, and invariably proud of their name.”

Some folks considered Sidney Chilton one of the best musicians in Jackson, Mississippi. Armistad “Army” Brown, a guitarist and arranger with the touring big band Herbie Holmes and the Mississippians, became close friends with Sidney and Jack Chilton in Jackson. Army and Sidney had met earlier in the ’30s and played together in various combos before Army left town to tour for several years with Holmes’s band. When Army married his wife, Iris, in 1935, Sidney was their best man. “
I remember my dad talking about Sidney,” says Army’s daughter Adele Brown Tyler, “and of all the musicians my dad knew and worked with, he would say Sidney was the most talented.” When Army left Holmes’s employ in 1940, he returned to Jackson and opened a music store, eventually becoming the Steinway piano dealer for the region. Iris Brown worked at H.C. Speir, a store where such blues greats as Sonny Boy Williamson recorded for Paramount Records. The Browns grew ever closer to the Chiltons, who asked them to be their son Reid’s godparents.

The following year, on April 17, 1941, Mary Evelyn gave birth to Cecelia, the Chiltons’ only daughter. After the attack on Pearl Harbor in December, Sidney, a Naval Reservist, joined the war effort. As a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, he served on a
supply ship in the Mediterranean.

“If we asked, ‘What did you do in the war, Daddy?’” Cecelia Chilton recalls, “he said, ‘I delivered toilet paper and toothpaste to the guys who were fighting.’” Refusing to stay behind in Jackson, Mary Evelyn, with her two kids and Aunt Sally in tow, rented an apartment in upper Manhattan near Columbia University, where Sidney would visit while on leave. Mary Evelyn enjoyed exploring Manhattan. “My mother always loved New York City,” says Cecelia. “Maybe she thought this was her only opportunity to live [there]. . . . She had Aunt Sally
to take care of us, so she could go out and party. Her sister, Annelle, who later moved permanently to New York with her husband, came to visit.”

While in New York, Mary Evelyn also looked up a friend’s brother from Columbus, Mississippi, Peter Lindamood, a bon vivant and art critic who wrote for publications like
Harper’s Bazaar
and
View
, an avant-garde journal founded by his friend and fellow Mississippian Charles Henri Ford.
The gifted Lindamood served as an Italian-language interpreter during the war, earning the rank of corporal, but until his induction, his East Fifty-eighth Street apartment hosted the gay literati. Fellow Columbus native Tennessee Williams once described Lindamood as an “
elegant Auntie type,” while others compared his looks and manner to those of Truman Capote. Sidney and Mary Evelyn greatly admired modern art, and Lindamood educated them as he made his own artistic discoveries. The Chilton-Lindamood friendship lasted for decades, with Peter relocating to Memphis in the early 1960s.

After Sidney’s discharge from the Navy, the Chiltons returned home to Jackson, where he got a job as a manufacturer’s representative for Day-Brite Lighting, selling “architectural lighting equipment,” according to Cecelia. “He traveled a lot.” Cecelia would be the only family member to follow in her father’s footsteps in the lighting business.

The Chiltons’ second son, Howard Sidney Chilton III, was born in Jackson on November 27, 1945. Two years earlier, while Sidney was in the service, his father had died, and in 1946, the widowed “Daughter” Chilton, who’d been living in Jackson, moved to Colorado Springs to live with relatives. Sidney and Mary Evelyn also decided to leave Mississippi for Memphis—a hub of the postwar building boom, where Sidney could bid on the many new industrial-lighting contracts. In addition, Memphis made a good, central home base from which to travel between Arkansas, Tennessee, and Mississippi. For half a century Mississippians had been migrating to the Bluff City, which Alex once referred to as “
the town home for a lot of plantation-owner people.”

In 1947 the Chiltons settled into a brand-new subdivision in East Memphis called Sherwood Forest, filled with modest two- and three-bedroom redbrick houses built specifically for returning GIs. “There were lots of
veterans with families all about the same age,” according to Cecelia. “It was kind of the beginning of suburbia.” Right down the street a new elementary school had just been constructed.

The Chiltons’ compact, L-shaped brick house at 987 Robin Hood Lane had a small front yard, three bedrooms, living and dining rooms, and a kitchen
complete with breakfast nook. The backyard was perfect for a spacious garden, where Mary Evelyn spent time tending flower beds, earning her stripes in the Garden Club. Eventually the Chiltons would add on to the house, putting in a den, a small office for Sidney, and an additional bathroom and bedroom.

When Cecelia was nine, the third Chilton son was born at Memphis’s Baptist Hospital: William Alexander Chilton came into the world at the end of the first year of a new decade, on December 28, 1950. Thirty-nine-year-old Mary Evelyn named him for her paternal grandfather. Cecelia’s earliest memory of Alex coincides with that of a health scare of their father’s. After having had a heart attack in his early forties, Sidney was recuperating at home. One day after a barber arrived to cut Sidney’s hair, Alex vanished. “
Alex was about two, and he just rode off on his tricycle down the street,” Cecelia recalls. “He rode as far as the next corner, and the barber [who’d just left the Chiltons] recognized him and brought him back home.”

When Alex was three, something even more frightening occurred. Fourteen-year-old Reid climbed to the top of an oak tree in the backyard, slipped, and plummeted to the ground. Though he didn’t break any bones, he was knocked unconscious and remained in a coma for three days. “One of [our]
neighborhood friends was a neurosurgeon and happened to be the doctor taking care of him,” Cecelia remembers, “which I’m sure was very comforting to my parents, because they could get whatever information they wanted. When [Reid] finally woke up, he was fine, and there was no obvious sign of anything being wrong with him. My recollection is that [the doctor] told my parents that anytime anyone is unconscious for that length of time, there’s some brain damage that might show up at some future point.” But for the time being, all seemed fine.

The Browns, who frequently visited the Chiltons, had three children: a son and daughter near Reid and Cecelia’s age and a much younger daughter, Adele, who was born the same day as Alex. As the youngest children of parents whose eldest child was eleven years older, Alex and Adele shared some traits. “Alex and I were both kind of
shy, introverted children,” says Adele. “The two of us were almost awkward around each other at times. I remember him not wanting to talk much, and I didn’t want to, either. My mother’s take on Alex was that he was a little bit of a Dennis the Menace—mischievous. He could be kind of quiet, but he definitely had that little-devil thing. He had such a gleam in his eye. He loved to stir things up.”

To look after active preschooler Alex while his siblings were in school, the Chiltons hired a tall, statuesque woman named Nellie, who favored turbans. “
I
remember Alex talking about her years later,” recalls Adele Brown Tyler, “because we had a black lady who worked for us during my early childhood, too. Alex and I both felt like these women pretty much raised us.” Nellie was employed as the Chiltons’ maid over the next three decades, and Alex and his brother Howard remained close to her.

While Nellie took care of Alex, Mary Evelyn stayed busy with the Garden Club and a neighborhood bridge club that convened regularly. Not a doting mother, she enjoyed that kind of activity much more than domestic life, according to Cecelia Chilton: “
She didn’t join the PTA. She and the neighbors played bridge while we were at school. They’d get together at eleven in the morning and have lunch and play bridge until the kids would get home. They probably did that every day.” Copious cocktails accompanied the bridge parties.

Sidney frequently spent nights away on his many business trips. To ward off loneliness, Alex visited the next-door neighbors, a retired Army colonel and his wife. “
His name was Colonel Cray, and he was home all day, and Alex was good friends with him,” Cecelia recalls. “I think he liked to drink and watch TV, and Alex spent a lot of time over there. They were good buddies.”

When Sidney and Mary Evelyn were home, they sipped drinks and played their abundant jazz records. Sidney tried teaching Cecelia piano on the family’s Chickering, though “I didn’t practice very much,” she admits. It was Reid who was the first family member to introduce music to Alex. “My oldest brother was a rock & roll fan,” Alex told musician and music writer Cub Koda in 1992. “He liked things like the Coasters, and I listened to little bits of that ’50s stuff and saw Elvis on TV [in 1956].”

Music was bubbling over in Memphis in the 1950s. The year Alex was born Sam Phillips opened his Memphis Recording Service, where Elvis Presley would first record three years later. The Overton Park Bandshell in Midtown featured country artists, including Elvis, whose records started appearing on the C&W charts. Beale Street had been the cultural heart of black Memphis since the nineteenth century. And across the Mississippi River in West Memphis, Arkansas, places like the Plantation Inn featured R&B bands.

By 1955 Elvis had become a regional star, touring regularly but not so big that he didn’t perform at Reid and Cecelia’s high school, Messick, to help get Presley’s then-manager Bob Neal’s son elected to the student council. No black kids attended Messick; for the most part,
Memphis public schools remained segregated until federally ordered busing in 1973.

Reid Chilton played an active role in student government at Messick, as well
as on the football team. He was a handsome young man, with the aristocratic, fine features of his father—a bone structure that his baby brother, Alex, had also inherited. Of medium height, with brown hair, Reid had a beautiful smile that lit up his face. “He was really the
golden boy of the family,” Adele remembers. During his last month in high school, he brought home the Coasters’ double-sided hit 45 “Searchin’”/“Young Blood.” Decades later Alex recalled being somewhat embarrassed by the B-side’s lascivious lyrics when Reid and his girlfriend played the record over and over one night while Sidney and Mary Evelyn were out.

Since he was about fifteen, Reid had been sporadically experiencing seizures in which he’d suddenly go stiff, then lose consciousness. A result of the traumatic brain injury he’d suffered from falling out of the tree, the seizures struck with no warning. The Chiltons unsuccessfully sought medical treatment for their son. The episodes did not stop Reid from living a normal life, however, and he paid special attention to his young brother. “I idolized him,” Alex told Bruce Eaton in 2007. “
He was
everything
to me. He took me places.” Reid continued to participate in sports and student affairs at school and also became an acolyte at St. John’s Episcopal Church. “
We were raised going to Sunday school,” says Cecelia. “But for the most part, our parents would take us and come pick us up. It was not really a part of our lives. We were kind of the poor riffraff at the church.”

By the time seventeen-year-old Reid graduated from high school, in the spring of 1957, he’d served as senior vice president of the student council and played first-string center on the football team. He’d also been accepted at Mississippi State College, where he planned to study engineering in the fall, when Alex would be starting first grade at Sherwood Elementary. But on Thursday, June 27, 1957, just a month after his graduation, Reid suffered a powerful seizure while taking a bath. Losing consciousness, he slipped under the water and drowned. Six-year-old Alex was with his mother when she discovered Reid’s body around 7 p.m. The Mercy Ambulance Service raced to the scene, and medics, pushing Alex out of the way, worked to revive Reid with a respirator. But it was no use, and Reid was pronounced dead on arrival at Baptist Hospital. None of the Chiltons, particularly Alex, would ever fully recover from the tragedy.

“
That was a big thing in the family of course,” Alex told Bruce Eaton in a hushed tone fifty years later. “
You can only imagine how traumatic that would have been,” says Alex’s friend Adele, who remembers the aftermath of Reid’s
death. “I think that had a huge impact on the whole family and the drinking [by Sidney and Mary Evelyn, which escalated further] and all that. . . . I’m sure that was totally traumatizing to Alex. I always felt that he had become this stoic . . . [who built] this kind of hard shell, because he had gone through so many things [beginning with] that.”

Cecelia, who was sixteen and out of town visiting relatives when Reid died, believes “
the death had a big effect on all of us. I can’t imagine how my mother could have ever been the same.” Decades later Cecelia discovered a letter Sidney wrote to his mother in Colorado, conveying his grief. “It was just gripping,” she recalls, “because he described how he came home and the ambulance was at the house, and he described the trauma and the immediacy of it. I really just can’t imagine what it would have been like to be there at the time.”

An enduring pall fell over the family. Sidney mailed Army and Iris Brown an unfinished thank-you note Reid had started writing them, acknowledging their graduation gift. With his parents shut down by grief, his sister a senior in high school, and the introspective Howard in his own world, Alex was usually left on his own, just when he needed someone to help him through the trauma. Sidney continued to travel, and Mary Evelyn occupied her time with bridge and gardening, struggling to keep depression at bay.

Cecelia threw herself into religion. “
I was very much into Jesus,” she says. “There was a group called Young Life, and we had a piano at home, so every week fifty or so kids could come to my house for two hours and they would sing songs and have a great time. My father was an agnostic; Alex was young enough then that they felt like he was not impressionable, but Howard was at a very impressionable age. So my father would take Howard, and they would go to the library; [Sidney] wouldn’t let Howard be in the house when that was going on, because he didn’t want Howard to be exposed to that. But they would never have told me I couldn’t do that—though it was very much
not
their thing. They were wonderfully accepting parents—whatever we wanted to do, we could do.”