Wallflower at the Orgy (13 page)

There was a time when Rod McKuen might modestly have agreed with Shapiro. Ten years or so ago, when he was scrounging in New York, living on West Fifty-fifth Street with Sloopy the cat and trying to make ends meet, McKuen might gladly have admitted to being just a songwriter. Even recently, after only two of his books had appeared, he told a reporter, “I’m not a poet—I’m a stringer of words.” But then it happened: the early success mushroomed. “I don’t think it’s irrelevant to speak of me as a poet,” McKuen says today. “If I can sell five million books of poetry, I must be a poet.” Three million, Rod. “If my poetry can be taught in more than twenty-five hundred colleges, seminaries and high schools throughout the United States, if it can be hailed in countries throughout the world as something important, I must be a poet. In France, one newspaper wrote, ‘Rod
McKuen is the best poet America has to offer and we should listen to him and mark him well.’ ”

The saga of Rod McKuen and his rise to the top is a story so full of bad times and hard knocks that it almost serves as a parody of such tales. Rodney Marvin John Michael James McKuen was born in 1933 in a Salvation Army Hospital in Oakland, California. His mother was a dime-a-dance girl; his father deserted her just before their son was born and McKuen has never met him.
“I remember hearing children/ in the street outside.…/ They had their world/ I had my room/ I envied them only/ for the day long sunshine/ of their lives/ and their fathers./ Mine I never knew.”

McKuen’s mother, Clarice, worked as a barmaid, scrubbed floors and operated a switchboard to pay bills. Then she married his stepfather, who drove tractors to level dirt for highways; the family moved from one construction site to the next in California and Nevada. “My stepfather used to get drunk and come home in the middle of the night and yank me out of bed and beat me up,” McKuen recalled. “That was kind of traumatic.”

At eleven, McKuen dropped out of school and went to work as a lumberjack, ditchdigger, ranch hand, shoe salesman and cookie puncher. At fifteen, he received his first serious rejection from a young lady. At eighteen, he became a disc jockey with San Francisco’s station KROW, dispensing advice to the lovelorn. After a stint in Korea writing psychological-warfare material for radio, he returned to San Francisco and was booked into the Purple Onion. A screen test followed and in the mid-Fifties he worked at Universal on such films as
Rock, Pretty Baby
and
Summer Love
. In what must have been a move of some distinction, he walked out on the filming of
The Haunted House on Hot Rod Hill
. For his
film career, McKuen had a dermabrasian, which partially removed his adolescent acne scars; he also has a long scar across his chin, the result of an automobile accident.

In 1959 McKuen moved to New York and before beginning to compose music for the CBS Television Workshop, he sold blood for money and crashed parties for food. Then in 1961, after the CBS job folded, he helped compose a rock song called
Oliver Twist
, which was noteworthy mainly in that it rhymed “chickens” with “Dickens.” When no one famous could be found to record it, Rod did it himself; when the record took off, he began touring the country with a back-up group (he does not play a musical instrument and has only recently learned formal composition). As Mr. Oliver Twist he played Trude Heller’s, the Copacabana lounge, and did a twelve-week tour of bowling alleys around the country. “He was a pretty big act,” said his then-manager Ron Gittman. “He wasn’t your Ricky Nelson or your Everly Brothers, but he pulled people.” The constant performing six nights a week proved too much for McKuen’s voice: his vocal cords swelled, he could not speak, and after six weeks in bed the old tenor voice was gone and a new froggy one had emerged.

McKuen moved back to Los Angeles, played the Troubadour, and continued to set his lyrics to the simple music he composed in his head. In 1965 he opened at The Bitter End and was praised by The New York
Times
and compared to Charles Aznavour and Jacques Brel. Eddy Arnold, Johnny Cash and Glenn Yarbrough began to record his songs of love and loneliness. The market had changed. “In the Fifties and early Sixties there were formulas,” said rock publicist Connie de Nave, who handled Rod when he was doing the
Oliver Twist
. “Your group wore certain colors, sweaters over
pants, their hair had to be well-groomed, no smoking or drinking onstage. In the mid-Sixties suddenly the individual could wear what he wanted. He didn’t have to spend $18,000 on arrangements for nightclub acts. All the outlets where Rod had to do the
Oliver Twist
died. The college market began. The change made things ripe for Rod. Before lyrics had been simple and uncomplicated. Now they wanted depth. No one could come out and go, ‘Oo, wa, oo wa.’ You came out with your stool and you sang, and you didn’t even have to sing that great. You just had to feel. And as Rod was growing, the market came around.”

Stanyan Street and Other Sorrows
, McKuen’s first book of poetry and songs, was an accidental by-product of a Glenn Yarbrough recording. When requests about the song began to pour into the record company, McKuen decided to publish a book containing it. With his own money, he paid for the printing, stored the books in his garage, and put the covers on and mailed them out in Jiffy bags. “I was very unsophisticated about it,” McKuen recalled. “I didn’t know what sort of discount you gave bookstores. I made them all pay cash and pay in advance. We had no salesmen, so I called the telephone company and got the yellow pages of all the major cities. We sent mailers to every bookstore. I knew people were asking for it and it wasn’t listed in
Publishers’ Weekly
or the guide to books. No one knew where it was from or how to get it.” In a year,
Stanyan Street
sold 60,000 copies—about 120 times what the average book of poetry sells in a lifetime. Random House took over the distribution, signed McKuen to his next book, and gave him a Mercedes-Benz.

Today Rod McKuen lives in a thirty-room house on a hill facing Beverly Hills, which has a pool, orange trees, four in
help, several sheepdogs and cats, and a barbershop for Rod and his streaky blond hair. He spends about half the year on the road and in Europe; he has an illegitimate son in France whom he sees frequently. When he is in Los Angeles, he rarely leaves his house except for a recording session or a trip to his office on Sunset Boulevard. “I have about fifteen people who work for me there,” said McKuen. “I don’t like to think they work
for
me. They work
with
me.”

McKuen is sitting now in the music room of his house. He is wearing a yellow pullover sweater and the ever-present sneakers and Levi’s and he is talking about the return to romance he feels the country is in the midst of. “I paved the way for Erich Segal,” he says. “It’s been my strange lot to have preceded all sorts of things for some time now. I told everybody that folk music was going to come in very big three years before it happened and nobody believed me and of course it did happen. And I went around telling people there was going to be a romantic revival and nobody believed that either. I think it’s a reaction people are having against so much insanity in the world. I mean, people are really all we’ve got. You know it sounds kind of corny and I suppose it’s a cliché, but it’s really true, that’s just the way it is.”

It is not entirely easy to interview McKuen, you see. Not that he isn’t open and garrulous—but for one thing, most of his thoughts seem to end up in statements he supposes are clichés; and for another he tends to ramble. Ask him about his childhood and within seconds he will be off on a ramble about prejudice and the Army. Ask him whether his poetry paints too sanguine a picture of the world and before you know it he will be telling you about capital punishment. Ask him about his new book:

“My new book has its roots in my childhood and in how
I feel now, about getting back to basics. You notice in this house, I like lumber. I like wood. Frank Lloyd Wright was my favorite architect because everything he did sprang out of the ground. And even though you see a lot of gadgets and stuff like that I like them because they are gadgets. They don’t try to be anything else. I don’t like artificial flowers, for instance.…” Like that.

In any case, it really doesn’t matter to Rod McKuen how the interview goes, because he is sick and tired of being written about and criticized for what he is doing. Rod McKuen, who in the old days would talk to
Stamp World Magazine
if they wanted to profile him, has now become what he calls “gun-shy.” Writers describe him as a guru and he hates it. Critics confuse his songs with his poetry and criticize him unfairly and he hates it. Everyone is out to get him. “You know, it’s pretty fashionable to knock me down,” he says. “There’s something criminal, apparently, about being a successful poet. Too many writers take umbrage at that. It’s not fair. I don’t think poets should starve. I don’t think anyone should starve. That’s another problem we have in this country that should be changed.…” And off he goes on a ramble about poverty in America, leaving the reporter to wonder about it all.

What does it mean?

What does it signify?

What is McKuen trying to say?

And the answer is probably best put in a poem McKuen himself wrote: “
If you had listened hard enough/you might have heard/what I meant to say
/Nothing.”

One day not long ago, Bill Blass, who is tall, slender, and tawny and speaks with a cigarette dangling from his lower
lip, was standing in his brown plaid Bill Blass suit ($175), his brown Bill Blass shirt ($22.50), his brown Bill Blass silk tie ($15) and brown Bill Blass buckled shoes ($50) in the center of the Bill Blass men’s
boutique
at Bonwit Teller’s. A sign just outside the chrome-and-mirrored alcove announced that it was
A DAY TO MEET BILL BLASS
, and a few people came and did just that. Including:

A pharmacist
from Cincinnati, who wandered in to say that he had found happiness in his maxi overcoat by Blass—“I was sick of getting my pants wet in the rain,” he said—and that no one, not even the folks back in Ohio, thought he looked like a nut in it.

The dean
of a Colorado business school, who said he was “tired of being in tired-looking clothes” and thereupon bought his fourteenth Bill Blass suit—a red plaid number with a snappy red checked tie to match.

A Sacramento real-estate man
, who managed to drop twelve hundred dollars in less than an hour in the shop, some of it for two perfectly color-coordinated outfits recommended by the salesman, to be delivered with each item tagged with instructions as to what to wear it with.

The men’s clothing business is currently undergoing its first substantial change in twenty years—since the World War Two veterans emerged from military uniform into the civilian uniform of the Ivy League suit. It is a change that has meant incredible revenues for manufacturers: in the last year alone, the number of suits cut is up seventeen per cent. It is a change that can count, among its virtues, the demise of the man in the gray flannel suit, white button-down shirt, and rep tie, and among its excesses, the Nehru jacket, the formal white turtleneck, the overuse of the word “peacock,”
and—yes, folks, it really happened—the manufacture of a pair of dotted Swiss see-through pants.

Two years ago, when the Hollywood hipsters and New York creative types zipped themselves up snug into Pierre Cardin’s cosmonaut look, it might have been premature to call what was happening a revolution. But today, when the behavior of Cincinnati pharmacists, Sacramento realtors, and Denver educators is being affected, it is clear that the revolution has not only come—it is here for good, and settled firmly into a mellow period of consolidation.

The entry of women’s-wear designers like Blass into the men’s field is part of the industry’s attempt to cope with demands of an affluent country for more clothes and fashion in clothes, a demand the men’s-wear industry, a notoriously sluggish one, had nothing whatsoever to do with and seems somewhat puzzled by. Fashion, the expression goes, begins on the street (in this case, on Carnaby Street and St. Mark’s Place), and most of the big men’s-wear manufacturers seem to wish the new look had stayed there.

“They’re hoping it will all go away,” said Bill Blass, “and they can go back to making blue serge suits.”

Blass first tried to get into men’s wear ten years ago, and he was assured at that time that it was hopeless to change the way men dressed. “I spoke to a group of manufacturers,” he recalled, “and they told me there were two minority groups that doomed every fashion development—the homosexuals and the Negroes. Acceptance by these groups supposedly made fashion unacceptable to the rest of the population. But things have changed. Another minority group—the young—changed everything. The young could wear the most effeminate clothes without being suspect in
the least. And the other minority groups have suddenly become acceptable.”

Cardin was the first women’s designer to plunge into men’s wear; he was soon followed by John Weitz, Hardy Amies, Oleg Cassini, and, eighteen months ago, Blass. In that short time, Blass clothes have become available in forty department stores; this year Blass labels will probably double the 2.5 million dollars they grossed last year. “By now,” said Blass, “everyone’s trying to get in and make a killing.” Designers are rushing in—among them Donald Brooks, Jacques Tiffeau, Oscar de la Renta and Geoffrey Beene—and manufacturers are frantically signing them up. A few weeks ago Mike Daroff, president of the 140-million-dollar men’s wear conglomerate, Botany Industries, told a reporter he thought the whole women’s-designer-in-men’s-wear movement was just “a big fad and a lot of noise.” Days later he announced that he was hiring Dior’s Marc Bohan to design a collection.