Buddy Holly: Biography (36 page)

Petty is not without his defenders. “I’m not championing Norman but I feel he’s been treated unfairly,” says Peggy Sue, who was engaged in 1995 in writing a book about Petty and Nor Va Jak, according to Bill Griggs. “Doing business in Clovis, New Mexico, when rock ’n’ roll had just started, they were all learning, including Norman Petty,” adds Peggy Sue. “He was paid for what he did, it’s true. If Buddy had been in L.A. or New York he could have walked into a studio and paid scale to musicians and an A&R director and had them do the same thing, but none of them was there. And no one in Clovis was that sophisticated at that moment in business. If Mr. Petty had a fault, it was that he cared and loved too much, like a father. He had a very protective attitude toward Buddy, Jerry, and Joe B.” The only hole in the father-figure theory is that Petty was only nine years Buddy’s senior; even Peggy Sue concedes that “Mr. Petty wasn’t that much older.” Petty was more like an envious sibling than a protective parent. Perhaps their relationship had more in common with the Old Testament story of Cain and Abel, in which Cain murders his brother, out of jealousy, when Abel’s offering proves more attractive to God.

It was with little joy in her voice that Peggy Sue recalled, in a 1994 interview, those late autumn days in 1958 that she and Jerry spent with Buddy and Maria. “They say husbands and children are your karmic lessons, and I have to truly say that one was,” says Peggy Sue, referring to her marriage to Jerry Allison, which was wrong from the start. In New York in 1958, Peggy Sue, then only eighteen years old, felt out of her depth among the savvy, fast-talking Brill Building pros, so different from the gang at the Hi-D-Ho. The Crickets were now surrounded by celebrities. Peggy Sue had been a fan of Phil Everly’s and when she found herself rubbing elbows with him in Manhattan, it was somewhat disconcerting. The insecure young girl from the provinces needed someone to lean on and no one was there.

When Peggy Sue was asked shortly after arriving in Manhattan what she wanted to see in the big city, everyone expected her to say the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building. Instead, she asked to be shown Carnegie Hall. Still proud of the standing she’d achieved in the Lubbock High School Band as its first-chair alto sax player, Peggy Sue knew that Carnegie Hall was the world’s top musical venue. Jerry and Joe B. took her to Fifty-seventh Street for a look at the imposing tan-brick concert hall, which has several flights of perilously steep steps leading up from the crowded sidewalk. In 1958, posters advertised concerts by the New York Philharmonic, Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, and the great operatic soprano Vittoria de los Angeles. A few doors down from Carnegie Hall is the red-plush-and-brass Russian Tea Room, which keeps Christmas decorations up all year. Across Fifty-seventh stands the stately flagship showroom of Steinway Pianos, with a gleaming black concert grand behind a plate-glass window. Art galleries, auction houses, a Horn and Hardart automat, a Chinese restaurant, an art cinema, and a huge Schrafft’s restaurant completed the lineup of establishments along the elegant and bustling thoroughfare of West Fifty-seventh Street.

When she returned from her midtown jaunt, Buddy asked her why on earth she’d chosen to go to Carnegie Hall. Peggy Sue later told Bill Griggs that she replied, “That’s where we’re gonna play. Buddy Holly and the Crickets are going to be in Carnegie Hall someday.” Buddy laughed and told her that Carnegie was far too distinguished a venue ever to “accept” him. Indeed, Tchaikovsky himself had conducted there shortly after its opening more than sixty years before. They’d never welcome Buddy Holly. Oh, yes, they would, Peggy Sue insisted, because the Pythian Temple session proved that he was taking rock ’n’ roll in the right direction. Her observation was prophetic. A few years later, when rock ’n’ roll had gained a semblance of respectability, the Beatles played a doubleheader at Carnegie, making their American debut.

One evening, Buddy, Maria Elena, Jerry, and Peggy Sue all went out on the town, beginning with dinner at Mama Leone’s, a tourist mecca in Times Square, and going on to a glamorous movie premiere. Among the chic, understated New York women, Peggy Sue struck Jerry as painfully conspicuous, she later told Griggs; her clothes were as inappropriate as her conversation, Jerry complained. She ought to get some fashion tips from Maria Elena, he said, and instructed Peggy Sue to round up Maria Elena and buy some New York clothes.

To Peggy Sue, Maria Elena was “attractive” and “very polished,” but she “was not a girl,” she later told Griggs. Maria Elena was “five years older than Buddy,” said Peggy Sue, and she’d been brought up in Manhattan, the polar opposite of Lubbock. Moreover, Peggy Sue pointed out, “Buddy only knew her about a month.” On their shopping spree, Peggy Sue selected a skirt that was too tight and spike heels that made her teeter precariously when she attempted to walk in them. Later, her idol Phil Everly and his girlfriend Jackie joined the two couples at Mama Leone’s. Peggy Sue was upset when her pocketbook strap, a solid one, struck a cabinet in the powder room and broke. After dinner, struggling with the unfamiliar tight skirt and high heels, she stumbled as she emerged from their car at the film premiere. One of her heels got stuck in a subway grate and broke off. She fell on the street in front of a glitzy New York crowd. She was mortified. All the signs were there that this Texas girl just did not belong in New York.

She looked to Jerry, but he seemed as embarrassed as she. Peggy Sue lay there chastising herself, wondering why her life was just one awkward impasse after another. Her friends seemed to have matured faster and left her behind. Sometimes she thought she was the only one in the group still searching for her identity. When Buddy saw her predicament, he rushed to her side to help. The solution he proposed was clever and expedient: She should remove her slippers and walk into the theater barefooted. Peggy Sue scanned the dressy gathering under the marquee and protested that she couldn’t possibly do such a thing. She was ready to creep back to the hotel alone when Buddy picked her up and told her she was “going to the movie and that’s all there is to it.” She made it through the evening, thanks to Buddy’s kindness and resolve. Recalling the incident in 1994, Peggy Sue says, “Buddy was gifted with the white light of Christianity.”

Had Buddy lived beyond 1959 he might have written a sequel to “Peggy Sue Got Married” and called it “Peggy Sue Got Divorced,” for that’s what happened almost eight years later. In a 1994 interview Peggy Sue sums the marriage up as a mistake but adds, “There’s always a reason. My first marriage was a karmic lesson, let’s put it that way.” She and Jerry had no children and eventually divorced. Later she married a man named Lynn Rackham and lived in an opulent house overlooking the American River in Sacramento. She and her husband owned the Rapid Rooter plumbing company until their divorce in 1993, after which Peggy Sue returned to her home in Slaton, Texas, to care for her ailing mother and work on her book. Today she is an attractive, gracious, soft-spoken woman, and after talking with her for only a few minutes, it’s clear why Buddy Holly was moved to write two of the best love songs of the rock era to her, “Peggy Sue” and “Peggy Sue Got Married.”

In late 1958, while Petty was in Clovis plotting their downfall, the Crickets continued their East Coast swing, making two appearances on national television in October. On the first,
The Dick Clark Saturday Night Beechnut Show,
Buddy sang “It’s So Easy.” The telecast was taped in Manhattan’s Little Theater in Times Square on October 25 with an all-star lineup including Buddy, Frankie Avalon, Don Gibson, Bobby Day, and Robin Luke. Buddy was getting along better with the new friends he met in New York, especially Robin Luke, than he was with his fellow Texans, which helps explain why he was being drawn more and more to the city.

Luke, a young Los Angeles–born singer who’d scored a million-seller on Dot with “Susie Darlin’,” later told Holly fan Steve Vitek how he treasured his brief, intense encounter with Buddy on the Dick Clark show. They spent hours together in Buddy’s dressing room, where Buddy gave Luke a marathon, hour-and-a-half guitar lesson, demonstrating how he blocked the strings with his right hand to get the muted guitar sound on “Peggy Sue.”

On Tuesday, October 28, this time accompanied by the Crickets, Buddy went to Philadelphia to appear on Clark’s
American Bandstand,
performing before an audience of 8.4 million viewers. In a kinescope that survives of the show, Clark introduces Buddy first as a solo act, heralding him as a wunderkind who writes and performs his own songs. When he asked Buddy how many tunes he’d composed, Buddy replied “fifteen, twenty songs.” Affable and relaxed, he said, “Okey dokey,” when Clark announced that he was ready to bring on the Crickets.

They lip-synched their way through “It’s So Easy,” which has a sudden, abrupt ending that caught Clark completely off guard. Muttering, Clark complained that the Crickets did him “a lot of dirt” every time they sang “It’s So Easy.” Before they left the stage, Clark asked Jerry if he was returning to Lubbock. Jerry replied that they were “eager” to go home “just as soon as we can fly out of New York.”

Buddy told Clark that he was “taking a three-day journey back in the car,” adding that the Crickets had “to fly in because I won’t let them ride with me.” He meant it as a joke, but the separate travel arrangements remained a sore point between him and the band. Jerry and Joe B. were not pleased when Buddy told them he was moving to Manhattan “where I can be close to record companies and publishers. I hope you guys will go along.” Joe B. seemed confused and uncertain but Jerry agreed to move to Manhattan and “start our own publishing company.” Jerry and Joe B. then left to catch their plane, while Buddy and Maria Elena started driving to Texas. Buddy was under the impression that they would all reunite in Lubbock and go together to Clovis to fire Petty jointly. But something went wrong with the plan. Joe B. began to feel that Buddy was being “headstrong” in insisting on moving to New York, he stated later in McCartney’s
The Real Buddy Holly Story.
Moreover, as Joe B. would confide to Goldrosen, Petty still had him convinced that the record executives in New York would rob him if he didn’t have Petty around for protection.

Despite their agreement to wait for Buddy, Jerry and Joe B. went to Clovis without him. “The boys went to see Norman to get some money as soon as they got back,” Larry Holley says in a 1992 interview. The Crickets’ Clovis bank account contained $50,000, but only Petty was authorized to draw on it, and he refused to release any money until he knew where he stood. He extracted the information he needed from Jerry and Joe B., who revealed that they were leaving Petty and moving to New York with Buddy. In a later conversation with Larry Holley, Buddy said that Petty tried to turn the Crickets against him. According to Larry, Petty said: “Buddy ain’t ever’thing. He’s just hoggin’ the show. Ya’ll don’t need Buddy Holly. He’s never been fair to ya’ll. You can make it on your own. Stay in Texas and work as the Crickets. When he don’t have ya’ll, well, ya’ll see how far he goes. You stay with me and we’ll get another singer and … let him do what Buddy’s doin.’”

Implying that he could make recording stars out of them, Petty offered to produce Jerry and Joe B., assuring them that they could continue calling themselves the Crickets, even without Buddy. In reality, they had about as much chance of stardom as the Wink Westerners without Roy Orbison, but they fell for Petty’s blandishments. Petty said he had Buddy’s money locked in the bank, Joe B. later told Goldrosen. In a 1983 interview with Skip Brooks and Bill Malcolm, Petty disclosed that he told the Crickets that Buddy “would produce himself in New York as Buddy Holly.” Petty’s next words, which Joe B. quoted to Goldrosen with chilling exactitude, show that Petty had Buddy Holly’s blood on his hands. “We’ll starve him to death,” Petty said.

Buddy and Maria Elena pulled into Lubbock a few days later and attempted to round up the Crickets for the prearranged trip to Clovis. When Buddy called Jerry’s house, according to Goldrosen, he discovered that Jerry and Joe B. had not waited for him but had gone on to Clovis without him. Unable to believe that the Crickets would confer with Petty behind his back at such a sensitive time, he turned to his mother, Larry Holley revealed in 1992, and asked, “Where’s Jerry and Joe B.?”

“They went over to Clovis,” his mother said. “Buddy just got livid mad,” Larry added. Buddy immediately drove to Clovis with Maria Elena, who confronted Petty in front of the Crickets, Vi, and Norman Jean. Maria Elena described the scene in a 1993 interview. “We went to Clovis one day to get our money,” says Maria Elena “Norman definitely said, ‘No. I am not ready. I’ve got to get to the facts and account to the other two boys. I cannot let you have the money.” Petty later alleged to Goldrosen that Maria Elena announced she and Buddy could “do better” and felt Petty was “not fit” to manage the Crickets. In 1993, Maria Elena revealed that Vi and Norman Jean started making fun of her accent. Buddy leaped into the fray. “He got mad and told Vi and Norma Jean where to get off,” Maria Elena says in 1993. In an earlier interview with Goldrosen, Maria Elena said she told Vi to try communicating with her “in Spanish.” When the monolingual plainswoman remained speechless, Maria Elena pointed out that she could speak Vi’s language, “but you don’t know a word of mine. You think you’re so sophisticated, but I know more than you ever will.”

Petty demanded an explanation—what had he done that was so bad that he deserved to be fired? In Petty’s recollection, Maria Elena asserted that it wasn’t what he’d
done
so much as what he
hadn’t
done that was the source of all the trouble. Petty then turned to Buddy and asked him if he’d definitely made up his mind to terminate their association.

Buddy continued to press for their money and assured Petty that he would give the Crickets their share. At that point, Petty dropped his bombshell. The Crickets were leaving Buddy and staying with him;
he
would pay Jerry and Joe B., as their manager. Buddy felt “betrayed,” stabbed in the back, Maria Elena later told Goldrosen. Once again she confronted Petty. In a 1993 interview she recalled, “I said, ‘Well, Norman, you need to let him have at least part of his money. We need to live on something.’