Buddy Holly: Biography (37 page)

“He said, ‘No, he cannot have his money. You have to wait until I get all the accounting done.’ Of course I knew that he was doing that on purpose. Jerry and Buddy got upset and Norman said, ‘Well, to be honest with you, I don’t have to pay anything until I’m ready.’ Buddy said, ‘Well, you know, give me my money or you’re going to be in some kind of a problem.’ Buddy was really very upset. ‘Oh,’ Norman said, ‘I’ll tell you what. I’d rather see you dead first before I give you any money now.’ That was said in front of me. So I said, ‘Buddy, let’s go.’ Buddy was going to sock him. I said, ‘Let’s go. Let’s get a lawyer when we get back.’ And that’s exactly what we were doing. We put the things in the hands of a lawyer. But of course we needed some money and my aunt was taking care of us.”

They left the studio, and Buddy and the Crickets went out to the car. Buddy was disappointed and wished the Crickets would reconsider and stay with him, Jerry revealed in
Remembering Buddy.
When they declined, he warned them, according to Jerry, that they were going to regret their decision. They were welcome to the Crickets’ name, he said. Buddy had long ago established a separate identity and had less need of it than they.

Once he was alone with Maria Elena, he broke down. Searching her memory over three decades later, Maria Elena says, “Buddy got real hurt when they did this. He cried, thinking that the boys had betrayed him, staying with Norman.” Back in Lubbock, he was so distraught that he told his parents and Maria Elena that he might give up his singing career. “Listen, Buddy,” Maria Elena said, “they were the ones that left you and you have a lot of talent of your own and you’ll do well.” Though Maria Elena found him to be “real perturbed and real upset,” she revealed in 1993, by dawn he regained his confidence and knew that he could get along without the Crickets. “Of course, everybody knew that he still missed the guys, you know,” says Maria Elena. “That was obvious. He really cared for those two boys. They made good music together.”

Jerry is brief and to the point when asked in 1993 to explain the Crickets’ breakup. “Really the reason we split was because we decided to stay in Texas,” he says. “We wouldn’t have decided to stay in Texas, but Norman Petty talked us into staying there and working as the Crickets.”

The disastrous consequences of the breakup were felt at once. Buddy’s life, never in the best fiscal shape, became totally unmanageable. Without money, it was impossible for him and his wife to remain in Lubbock; they could count on Aunt Provi to support them in New York and made plans to move east. But even if they’d been able to support themselves in Lubbock, Maria Elena could never have endured the Texas attitude toward “blacks and Mexicans,” she told Goldrosen and Beecher. Though Maria Elena was fearless and quite beyond being intimidated by anyone, Buddy loathed Lubbock’s bigoted thinking; he still couldn’t fathom how supposedly religious, churchgoing, Bible-thumping people could flout Jesus’s admonitions to love everyone, judge no one, and treat others exactly as one wished to be treated one’s self.

When they said good-bye to Buddy’s family, Buddy gave his brother Travis his Guild F-50 Navarre acoustic. DJ Snuff Garrett later told Bill Griggs that Buddy stopped in Wichita Falls to visit him while Snuff was in the middle of a stay-awake marathon at radio station KSYD. Outside the building, a crowd had gathered to watch Snuff, whose stunt to publicize his sponsor, Fred Jones’s Lincoln Mercury dealership, had already lasted five days. Buddy remained with Snuff throughout the night, chatting, spinning records, and playing “4-5-6 Dice.” While Buddy was in the station, Maria Elena tried to get some rest in the Cadillac, which was more comfortable than the studio. Buddy told Snuff that he was changing the name of his recording company from Prism to Taupe Records and his publishing company would be known as Taupe Music. Taupe was the color of his Cadillac, which he adored so fervently that from now on he was going to name
everything
after it (
Webster’s II
defines taupe as “brownish-gray to a dark yellowish brown”). Before Buddy left, he took the mike and announced a station break for KSYD, “the station that other stations listen to.”

A few days later, following another long drive in the Cadillac, they arrived in Manhattan, glad to have the Southwest behind them but wondering how they’d cope and where they’d live in New York. The most urgent priority, however, was to obtain legal counsel for the financial chaos that the Clovis fiasco with Petty and the Crickets had plunged them into. As they were destitute, Aunt Provi again came to their aid. Buddy’s new single was not a money-maker. The Latino-styled “Heartbeat” was released on November 5 but stalled at No. 82 in the United States; it went to No. 30 in England, evidence of the United Kingdom’s continuing love affair with Buddy Holly. The B-side, the hard-edged “Well All Right,” one of Buddy’s best tender-tough records, failed to chart significantly in either America or England, though Australians responded to its power and urgency and sent it up the chart to No. 24.

Buddy and Maria Elena found an apartment in New York in Provi’s neighborhood, Greenwich Village, on Fifth Avenue. On their first visit to Apartment 4H, No. 11 Fifth Avenue, they stood in a spacious high-ceilinged room, then walked out onto a terrace, gazing down at the teeming life of the Village. This was the age of bohemians and Kerouac; the Village was crawling with hipsters, beatniks, pale actresses in black leotards and heavy eye makeup, and drunken abstract-expressionist painters. Tatterdemalion folk singers were just then beginning to congregate a few blocks away, around the fountain in Washington Square, just beyond the majestic Arch designed by Stanford White, honoring the first president of the United States. The center of American bohemianism since the 1890s, Greenwich Village was the very antithesis of the provincialism of Lubbock and Clovis that had proved so inhospitable to them both. Villagers were characterized by tolerance and defiance of middle-class standards, including those that prohibited crossing ethnic barriers as Buddy and Maria Elena had done. The Village “stood for a fresh start … for liberty,” wrote Emily Hahn in
Romantic Rebels: An Informal History of Bohemianism in America.
“It stood for fun … Those who stayed … were usually people who would have felt chilly and displaced anywhere else.” Buddy and Maria Elena looked at each other and knew they’d found their home.

Chapter Twelve

Sunset and Evening Star

Mark Twain was seventy years old when he moved to what would become modern Greenwich Village. Despite personal and financial problems, he experienced a great creative flowering, spilling out a five-hundred-thousand-word autobiography that made him rich again. Five decades later, on the same spot on lower Fifth Avenue, in similar financial straits, Buddy Holly wrote “Peggy Sue Got Married” and other classic songs that rivaled his stunning roll of Clovis hits in 1957. From our vantage, knowing the tragedy that was about to befall him, the winter of 1958 seems full of foreboding, but for Buddy, the few months he still had to live were a time of ferocious creativity, producing the last outpouring of great Holly songs, the apartment tapes. December 1958 through January 1959 was an incredible, yet short-lived period of fecundity few artists have since matched in so brief a period. These new songs reflected a new depth and maturity, especially “That Makes It Tough,” “Learning the Game,” and “Crying, Waiting, Hoping.” But the most famous of the apartment tapes was “Peggy Sue Got Married,” which he recorded on his Ampex tape machine on December 5, 1958. Years later,
Rolling Stone
critic Jonathan Cott eloquently singled it out as a “masterpiece”:

With Peggy Sue he created the first rock-’n’-roll folk heroine.… In “Peggy Sue Got Married,” he continues his complicit arrangement with his listeners, half-pleading with them, and with himself, not to reveal something which he himself must hesitatingly disclose.… He has become one of his own listeners as Peggy Sue vanishes, like Humbert Humbert’s Lolita, into the mythology of American Romance.

L. O. Holley had suggested the song. Since the original “Peggy Sue” was doing so well—eventually it sold ten million—L.O. advised Buddy to write a sequel. Though “Peggy Sue Got Married” is one of Buddy’s best performances, the demo remained in a Scotch Magnetic Tape box in his apartment long after he cut it. Obviously no one at Decca was pushing for a new recording session. Buddy could certainly have used the money. Without Provi’s help, they couldn’t even meet the rent. “We were paying nine hundred dollars a month,” recalls Maria Elena, which was an astronomically high rent, even in New York, in 1958. Buddy still did not have “a red cent,” she adds. “It was very expensive at that time. Carmine De Sapio lived there in the upper floors. You pay as you go up.”

Carmine De Sapio was the boss of Tammany Hall, the County Democratic Executive Committee, which had its headquarters in Greenwich Village. At the time, De Sapio was one of the most powerful men in U.S. politics. Occasionally they would see him in the elevator: an imposing figure in tinted eyeglasses and a pompadour. Another Village neighbor, then a community organizer named Edward I. Koch, the future mayor of New York, called De Sapio “the boss of bosses,” a man who “had controlled Village politics since before anyone could remember.”

Once Buddy and Maria Elena settled in, Buddy immediately started making improvements. “It was a corner apartment with a wraparound terrace,” Maria Elena recalls. “It was a very prestigious address because the apartment complex had been built on the site of Mark Twain’s house.” Maria Elena recalled that Buddy Holly had read Mark Twain, “the basic stories that we read in school. There was a big hoop-te-do there in Greenwich Village because at that time Twain’s house wasn’t a landmark and I don’t know what happened to it. I think somebody transported the house somewhere. Where Mark Twain used to sit and write, this apartment building went up and a lot of big wheels lived in that complex. It was very exclusive.”

During our interview in 1993, when Maria Elena mentions that the number of their apartment was 4H, I ask, “
H
as in Helen?”

“No,
H
as in Holly,” she ripostes.

Buddy designed cabinets for the kitchen as well as a bar that opened out onto the terrace. If he couldn’t make it as a singer, he told his wife, he could always earn a living as a draftsman or engineer. His mother had always been proud of how skilled and resourceful Buddy was, how he could fix anything that went wrong around the house, how he could draw professional blueprints and excel at any task he tried.

As winter came on, Buddy and Maria Elena bundled in warm sweaters and began to explore the bohemian neighborhood that surrounded their luxury building, a neighborhood that was one of the most colorful in the world. They took walks “late at night or early in the morning,” Maria Elena remembers. “Buddy and I were like night owls. We couldn’t sleep. Both of us were hyper. We just felt like walking. We kept on the move. We went to coffeehouses and listened to poetry readings. He
loved
the poetry readings and the folk singers in Greenwich Village. I remember one coffeehouse we went to that had beers from every country in the world.”

That was the winter that New York was full of poets, who were flocking to the Village from San Francisco, Paris, and Morocco, many of them with Allen Ginsberg’s
Howl,
the beat generation manifesto, sticking out of their jeans pockets. Ginsberg and fellow poet Frank O’Hara sat squeezed into a tiny booth at the Cedar Tavern on University Place and Eighth Street, where, O’Hara later wrote in “Larry Rivers: A Memoir,” “we often wrote poems while listening to the painters argue and gossip.” Kerouac, who’d just published
The Dharma Bums,
was reading poetry around the coffeehouses and reciting it, to saxophone accompaniment, on Dot Records. Often drunk, he was bashed by Village punks outside the Kettle of Fish bar on MacDougal Street and sought refuge in the apartment of novelist Joyce Glassman. Allen Ginsberg, like most of the future counterculture leaders converging on the Village at this time, looked on his tiny apartment at 170 East Second Street as “a silent castle for sleeping, balling, cooking and writing” and made it available to all his friends as a crash pad. Buddy and Maria Elena’s apartment would also become a home away from home for Waylon Jennings and other rockers passing through New York.

Folk music had become dominant in 1958, emanating from the coffeehouses off Sixth Avenue like the Gaslight, Phase 2, Café Wha?, the Bitter End, and the Café Bizarre. Earlier that fall, the Kingston Trio’s “Tom Dooley” had sold 3.5 million records and launched the folk movement, paving the way for sixties singers such as Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary, John Denver, and Gordon Lightfoot.

Among the many reasons Buddy loved New York was its musical and artistic ambiance. Ginsberg once wrote that the floodlit skyscrapers looked “as if they were manufacturing cosmic jazz.” Like Paris, which nurtured the creative renaissance of the 1920s, New York in the fifties spawned half a dozen artistic movements, from abstract expressionism to the New York School of Poets and avant-garde breakthroughs like
The Connection
at Julian Beck’s Living Theater. Musically, New York was the cradle of formidable achievements ranging from fifties Broadway musicals (
Guys and Dolls, My Fair Lady, West Side Story
), to the folk movement, to Buddy Holly’s apartment tapes, to Brill Building rock ’n’ roll (spearheaded by Neal Sedaka, Carole King, Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and Phil Spector’s “wall of sound”). It was one of the city’s most romantic and glamorous eras, unforgettably evoked by Truman Capote in his 1958 bestseller
Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

The Greenwich Village alleys and byways that Buddy and Maria Elena haunted that winter are very different from the rest of Manhattan’s ledger-book grid. Originally a farm in colonial times, later a thriving town known simply as Greenwich, and by the mid-nineteenth century the fashionable residential area of Henry James’s
Washington Square,
Greenwich Village was settled long before the checkerboard pattern of Manhattan was designed in 1811. Positioned often diagonally to the rest of the city, Village streets, which have names like Gay, Jane, and Washington Mews, are like a maze; they contain numerous surprises, such as the completely illogical intersection of West Tenth and West Fourth streets near Sheridan Square.