Buddy Holly: Biography (17 page)

Little Richard himself described the 1957 orgy with Buddy in somewhat more detail in
The Quasar of Rock.
His account differs significantly from Niki Sullivan’s, but it’s possible there was more than one such episode, so both Niki and Little Richard may be telling the truth. According to Richard, Buddy appeared in his dressing room while “I was jacking off,” said Little Richard, adding that a girl was “sucking my titty.” Instead of leaving, Buddy stayed and quickly became aroused. After watching Richard and the girl for a few minutes, Buddy unzipped his pants. “He was ready,” Richard remembered. “She opened up her legs and he put it in her.” While Buddy and the girl had intercourse, she “was sucking me,” Richard continued. Suddenly, with all of them at the height of passion, they heard Buddy’s name announced from the stage. Had Buddy been less determined, the tryst would have turned into a case of coitus interruptus, but Buddy went for a spectacular finish and “he made it, too,” Richard said. “He came and he went!” As Buddy greeted the audience he was still zipping up his fly. In Little Richard’s account, he identifies the girl, but the girl denies participating in such an orgy.

September 5, 1957, the final day of the Brooklyn Paramount run, was also publication day for Jack Kerouac’s beat generation novel
On the Road.
The
New York Times
hailed it as a “historic occasion.” The
Times
’s regular book reviewer, square, conservative Orville Prescott, had gone on vacation, so his replacement, Gilbert Millstein, who was excited by the emerging beat literature, got a chance. In this odd way, a legend was born. Shortly the book went onto the
Times
best-seller list and created a national sensation.

Though beatniks preferred jazz, their true musical counterpart was rock ’n’ roll, for both the beatniks and rock forced upon the world a convulsive new freedom in which outmoded moral and artistic constraints were smashed. Like Buddy Holly, Kerouac at heart wanted to be a Negro. In
On the Road
he wrote, “At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching amongst the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world has offered me was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night.” He could have been speaking as well for Buddy Holly.

One bright autumn day in 1957, the Crickets climbed to the roof of the Brooklyn Paramount to pose for the cover photograph of their first album,
The Chirping Crickets.
Their exultant smiles make it clear that the Crickets were intoxicated by recent triumphs. In the last few days they’d made their network television debut, performing on Freed’s
Rock ’n’ Roll Show
on ABC-TV and Dick Clark’s
American Bandstand,
an after-school rock danceathon. For the Clark show they went to Philadelphia on Monday, August 26, the same day the Ford Motor Company unveiled the Edsel, which retailed for $2,400.
American Bandstand
would soon become the major showcase for rock groups in the United States; its success turned Philadelphia into a busy recording center. “Everyone you met was raging and racing, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and existed for nothing but hype,” Phil Spector observed. “A real glee was involved.” Scheduled to go on the
Bandstand
at 2:30
P.M.
, the Crickets entered the studio carrying their garment bags and were cordially greeted by the twenty-seven-year-old Clark, who radiated a clean-cut Young Republican handsomeness. Rock was not a passion with him but a means to wealth and power; his own musical taste ran to easy-listening discount classics, the kind advertised on TV, like “Stranger in Paradise,” based on Borodin’s “Polovetsian Dances.” “There were no skeletons in his split-level closet, just a lot of two-button jackets and ties,” wrote Richard Goldstein. The Crickets hurried to their dressing room to get ready for the show.

The set for
American Bandstand,
a hot, brightly lit area, was smaller than it looked on TV. Just before showtime, two hundred teenagers filed in and sat on the bleachers, eager to hop up and dance at the first opportunity. A signboard listed the week’s top hits, headed by Debbie Reynolds’s “Tammy,” Elvis’s “(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear,” Paul Anka’s “Diana,” the Coasters’ “Searchin’,” and Pat Boone’s “Love Letters in the Sand.”

At the start of the telecast, Clark stepped onto a makeshift podium and introduced the Crickets. As soon as they struck up “That’ll Be the Day,” the bleachers emptied out and the teenagers started dancing. All across the United States, twenty million kids sat glued to their sets, as entranced by the sight of other teenagers dancing as they were by the lip-synched performance of the Crickets. One of the dancers, fourteen-year-old Kenny Rossi, had become a full-fledged celebrity in his own right, with 301 fan clubs, far more than the musicians had who appeared on the show. Rossi was a jet-haired, fair-skinned Philadelphia dreamboat, and when he took his favorite partner, a winsome blond named Justine Corelli, in his arms and started to dance, he upstaged everyone on
American Bandstand.

After their performance, the Crickets sat at an autograph table, signing their 45-rpm records, and then returned to New York. Immediately following the Brooklyn Paramount run, they were to leave on promoter Irving Feld’s eighty-day, seventy-city rock ’n’ roll package tour with many of the biggest stars of the day, including the Everly Brothers, Buddy Knox, Paul Anka, Chuck Berry, Frankie Lymon, and Fats Domino. One day before their departure, Petty came to the Crickets’ room at the Edison and discovered Buddy and Jerry sitting on the bed with all their money spread out around them. They were playing with it. Petty suggested that it would be a good idea if he opened a Crickets account and placed their money in it. Joe B. was curious to know exactly how the account would be set up and whether individual Crickets would be able to withdraw sums without getting approval from the other members of the band. The officious Petty immediately made it clear that
he
was the sole party who’d have access to the account, proposing that they each retain $100 from their $1,000 weekly pay and send the rest to him. He promised to bank it and pay their bills.

The arrangement proved unsatisfactory from the start. Anytime the Crickets inquired about their bank balance, Petty grew vague and evasive. When pressed, he said that if the Crickets had bothered to keep proper records, they’d know that they’d gone through everything. His secretary, Norma Jean Berry, backed him up, saying the Crickets wasted all their money on expensive baubles. Norma Jean served as an effective mouthpiece for all of Petty’s operations and even wrote fulsome stories about him in the
Clovis News-Journal,
crowing that “Norman Petty has put Clovis, New Mexico, right smack dab in the spotlight in the music world.” An obvious promotional piece for Petty’s studio, Norma Jean’s story stressed how difficult it was “to break [into] the big time” and claimed that Petty could “make the way easier for … rising stars in the entertainment world by aiding them in the climb to stardom.”

The Crickets were still very young—Joe B. was eighteen, Jerry was nineteen; and Niki and Buddy were twenty—and all too often they acted their age. Relinquishing their money to a man like Petty was but one example. Horseplay that sometimes seemed to careen out of control was another. Niki and Jerry had a water-squirting contest that turned into a fistfight. Niki punched Jerry in the eye. Though Jerry dismissed the altercation as jejune high jinks, a cut under his left cheek was bad enough to show up in the cover photo on
The Chirping Crickets.
They could also be very close and affectionate. There is a touching photo showing them celebrating Jerry’s birthday in their cramped hotel room: the Crickets are kneeling beside a bed on which a big birthday cake is surrounded by a sunburst arrangement of lollipops. Jerry’s middle name, Ivan, has been spelled out underneath the cake in what appears to be sugared candle holders. The display had obviously been created with great care and love. As the boys posed for the photographer, Joe B. grabbed Jerry in a close hug, pressing his cheek to Jerry’s temple. Buddy and Niki form the other close unit in the photo, and they appear to be very proud of their handiwork.

Norma Jean Berry’s charge that the Crickets wasted their money had little basis in fact. They did some shopping in New York, but many of their expenditures involved essentials such as stage clothes. Don and Phil Everly thought the Crickets looked atrocious, comparing them to gauche provincials. Don and Phil had been in Manhattan a few times more than the Crickets and were feeling very urbane when they arrived for the Irving Feld “Biggest Show of Stars” tour and started practicing in a basement rehearsal space. (In some interviews Don says they didn’t meet until Montreal, where the tour would play on September 15.) Eyeing the Crickets’ old-fogey clothes, Don chided them for wearing gray Texas business suits that looked weird in New York. Don recalled, “They saw what we were wearing and said, ‘Gee whiz!’ The only publicity picture they had then was of them all down in Lubbock, Texas, in T-shirts, settling tiles on the roof.” Don marched them over to Phil’s Men’s Shop, a Third Avenue emporium frequented mostly by gay males and hip musicians. The Crickets and the Everlys purchased sleek Ivy League single-breasted three-button suits and trousers with buckles in back. “We got to be very close friends with Buddy Holly and the Crickets,” Don told
Rolling Stone
’s Kurt Loder in 1986, “because we all had the same kind of country-blues background.”

The Everlys’ second single, “Wake Up Little Susie,” was on its way to the top of both the pop and C&W charts. The boys were so dashing that the groupies who chased them everywhere they went referred to them as “the Foreverlys.” Don and Phil advised Buddy to get rid of his “old-fashioned” clear-plastic-and-silver eyeglasses, showing him where to find thick horn-rim frames like the ones Steve Allen popularized on
The Tonight Show.
Phil says they became best friends, spending all their time together, and that he helped Buddy adjust to big-city ways.

As the other stars of the tour arrived in New York in September, their circle expanded to include Buddy Knox, Eddie Cochran, Chuck Berry, Gene Vincent, Dave Somerville, and Jimmy Bowen. Buddy Holly’s closest friends among the new arrivals were Cochran and Somerville. Like Holly, Cochran was a product of the Southwest, born in Oklahoma City in 1938. He grew up in Albert Lea, Minnesota, and got his start in Bell Gardens, California, singing in a C&W brother act with Hank Cochran (no relation), who went on to become a C&W star. Holly’s other new friend, Dave Somerville, was the handsome lead singer of the Diamonds, the group that had covered “Words of Love” and scored two more hits in 1957, “Silhouettes” and “The Stroll.” Buddy Knox christened the clique the Young Rockers. Frequently they’d all grab their guitars, take a cab down to Greenwich Village, and invade a nightclub called the Village Gate, located at the corner of Bleecker and Thompson streets. Holly, Knox, Cochran, and Vincent would pick with each other until last call at four
A.M.
Some of these singers would not join the forthcoming tour until it reached the West Coast.

One day Chuck Berry took them all to Lindy’s Restaurant at 51st Street and Broadway, just above Times Square, for their first taste of New York cheesecake. Times Square, where Seventh Avenue and Broadway meet between 42nd and 47th streets, is the place people mean when they say Broadway. In the evening it became the Great White Way, a jumble of flashing neon signs and a surge of restless people, moving beneath a fifty-eight-foot-tall cigarette billboard from which a smoker blew perfect smoke rings. The latest news dispatches circled the Motogram on the Times Tower. There were thirty theaters in the area, including the Palace, the Winter Garden, the Music Box, the Shubert, the Booth, the Mark Hellinger, and, of course, the Paramount, though it would shortly fall victim to the wrecking ball. Lindy’s would also pass from the scene, but in the fifties, the aroma of corned beef and kosher dills greeted customers as they entered. Tourists were shown to the left, regulars—an assortment of Damon Runyonesque characters—sat on the right. Holding forth almost daily at Table No. 1 were comics Milton Berle, Red Buttons, George Jessel, Henny Youngman, Jack E. Leonard, and Buddy Hackett, who specialized in cutting each other to pieces with gags like “If Moses saw you, he would have invented another commandment.”

Refering to the joys of dining out in Manhattan, Don Everly said, “We all got into that real quick.” None of the Young Rockers had ever traveled before, and suddenly they were at the crossroads of the world, their pockets full of money, surrounded by gifted friends. They all found it thrilling. “There was a real camaraderie there at the beginning of rock ’n’ roll,” Don said.

Buddy’s Knox’s room at the Edison became their headquarters as they waited to leave on the eighty-day Feld tour. There was always a poker game going on, usually involving Holly, Jerry, Joe B., Don Lanier, Jimmy Bowen, and Don Kirshner. Knox remembers Kirshner as an ambitious person who always trailed along in their wake, attempting to persuade them to record his tunes. Later Kirshner became a power in the music business, launching Neil Sedaka and the Monkees, and hosted the seventies TV show,
Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert,
a pioneering forerunner of MTV.

On occasion Eddie Cochran would pull up at the Edison in a long white limo and join the poker game in Knox’s room. Endowed with sultry bedroom eyes and deep dimples, Cochran rivaled Elvis as the best-looking of the first-generation rock stars. According to his sideman Dave Shriver, “drinking beer and playing with the girls” occupied Cochran’s offstage time. The “Okie chicks,” five groupies who’d latched on to Cochran in Tulsa, followed him like a sultan’s harem, servicing his every need. Says Niki Sullivan, “Everybody had a good time whenever Eddie Cochran was around.”

The Everlys considered Cochran the biggest make-out artist among them, someone who could pick up a girl just by looking at her. Phil Everly noted that Cochran didn’t even have to come up with a line when he approached a girl, didn’t have to utter a single word. Phil once saw Cochran seduce an airline stewardess in midflight. “Got her in the back of the plane,” Phil later told journalist Kurt Loder. Associating with good-looking teen idols like Cochran and the Everlys motivated Buddy to improve his physical appearance. During the following winter, beginning December 14, 1957, he would pay a dentist $600 to cap his front teeth, removing the unsightly brown stains left by Lubbock’s water. He consulted a dermatologist about his acne. Though Buddy had naturally wavy hair, he got a permanent from an overzealous Manhattan barber who “kinked” it, getting it too tight. Nevertheless, Buddy scored regularly with eastern girls. One day he and Niki were walking in midtown Manhattan when Buddy suddenly ducked into an apartment building, explaining that he had a date with a girl songwriter who’d promised him a “quickie.” Niki waited outside on the street for the assignation to run its course.