Tale 10
Bombed in New York and L.A.
and
Even Fred's Sister's Buffet
“Mj
had met beanpole Poley McClintock at the
He'd
shown
plenty of spunk for an old Presbyterian.”
country
church
in the tiny hamlet of Tusseyville
next
county
over from Tyrone in
where
Fred
and Poley were born three months apart
and
grew up side by side
then
formed
a banjo band together
'Great Golden
Tales of Waring' had a fighting chance, maybe, if mj
could somehow keep his friends telling more razzle-dazzle
stories like the last one a little bit longer, cute little
historically precious vignettes gracefully overflowing with
celebrity figures like Thomas Edison and Paul Whiteman. Maybe.
Now," said
Bill, "Paul Whiteman in those days had a group with him
called, ‘The –’; what was it?" Bill searched Betty Ann.
"'Rhythm Boys'?"
"Mm," she said.
"One of them
was Bing Crosby: 'The Rhythm Boys’. And that's how Poley and
Bing became very dear friends."
"Oh," mj said,
spying Waring gold. "Are they friends?" Bing Crosby’s
super-smooth baritone croon was a dearly beloved sound in the
history of
"Oh, they were
boozin' buddies!"
Bill laughed an ear-bending humdinger of an Olympian laugh
that showed as much true delight as uproar. He really was
tickled. "It got to the point was so bad that Paul Whiteman
and Fred Waring wouldn't book into the same town because when
they'd arrive, Bing and Poley would disappear for three days
drunk outa their skull in some hotel. And Poley told
me this story, and this is adorable: when Bing finally made it
and was a superstar, he had a weekly show on NBC in
Mj cackled.
Artists created their own rules sometimes. Everyone knew that.
Bill pulled his
little wife into the storytelling too now, and it changed
everything. "Didn't he tell us that?!"
"Yeh," Betty
Ann helped. "I heard him say that."
Mj heard the
chorus of satyrs let loose a cappella, barber-shop
style, a Prohibition ditty that the Pennsylvanians would never
have done in a normal concert setting, most likely:
...My wife and I lived all a-lohhhne,
She loved gin and I loved ruhhhm....[1]
A crooning
baritone grew too loud and held 'rum' too long.
"And Poley was
legendary. Fred used to get detectives and every-thing
to find out where Poley was hidin' it. Nobody ever found out,
right, Honey?"
Her face lit up
and Bill bit back a laugh. She was supposed to be catching up
on her sewing in half-rim glasses, until now anyway, thereby
remaining wifely back-seat to his blockbuster storyteller
performance. But now Bill’s proper little Waring star wife was
joining the high class brawl too, thanks to his wonderful
husbandly influence.
"Oh yeh," she
confirmed and added wryly: "they used to think he hid it
inside the drum or they even checked pipes."
Bill let go a
horrific belly laugh and the Blackburns took off like a
rehearsed act. She took the lead, in fact, probably responding
to the look on her friend, mj’s face: "They couldn't figure
out where the man hid the liquor,” she said to mj, as
if his expression had demanded the line: “Poley, the great Boy
Scout!" You’d have thought they practiced the trick
before he walked in the door. The act was so smooth and
convincing, mj assumed he must have requested her line with
some question he had asked, and now had to accept the subject
they were on.
And it worked.
Mj was duly bewildered. He said, "What made them think he hid
it anywhere?" The souvenir programs mj had seen had shown Fred
and Poley doing things together and doing them the American
way, the Boy Scout way, the right way. He was lost. Why would
Fred need detectives??
"Because he was
bombed!" Betty Ann rolled her eyes swooning, adding at the
very, very last split second a faint dimpled smile.
Bill laughed
wholeheartedly and shouted, "He was bombed out of his
mind!"
"All the
time?!" mj protested. No ten-dollar Fred Waring program had
ever mentioned it, and every single program was designed by
Bill Blackburn.
Betty Ann, the
very opposite of her hubby Bill, excelled at droll
understatement: "Yeh, they didn't know where he was putting
it!" First Bill would drive in the knife loudly, with uproar;
then Betty Ann would twist the blade ever so slightly, with
mock tragic irony and surprise. That dual approach drove the
point home so well and so all-at-once, leaving so little room
to doubt the fact, or misunderstand that the duck was, indeed,
done in, and done for, and thoroughly dead:... that the poor
boy kept sitting there as if he’d just been hit and left in
all his clothes by a twister.
Bill snorted a
laugh, "T-hah heh heh I saw Poley –."
"Well," mj
interrupted, moving quickly through the stages of what ‘grief
therapists’ called a full scale ‘grief reaction’, which always
started with a reaction of ‘shock’ and ‘denial’ and then moved on to
acceptance: "He wasn't a periodic drinker then, he was always
–."
"Oh no, NO."
Bill nodded decidedly, confirming young
Dr. Lorenzo’s, the
Mj had met
beanpole Poley McClintock at the
"Oh. Oh no.
No," Bill carried on.
"Oh no," said
Betty Ann, "he had to stop drinking a couple years ago."
"I saw Poley
pull the funniest bit," Bill said, "just to show you." He sat
forward flapping his bent left elbow, and held the martini
glass in his right hand as if it were Poley's booze glass. "We
were in
His beautiful,
demure blonde wife in her flatteringly snug 1950s high school
corduroy jumper of royal blue nodded her head, widening her
bright blue Swede eyes at mj. "Oh you wouldn't believe it!"
This wasn't
supposed to happen. Poley was Fred's right hand buddy, said
all the programs, and the two had done everything right,
like the all-American Boy Scouts they were
said to be. Poley McClintock was an important character in the
fairytale story, so he could stand some introducing, but not
THIS kind. Mj would have loved such a revelation of a drinking
problem in a clinical setting, of course, had it come from a
patient of his; but the three had agreed to do a book together, and
the story mj had dreamed about for the book was derailed
worse than ever
now, maybe forever.
He picked up a
program from the table, the 54th entertainment year program,
as it happened to be, from the 70-71 concert season.
‘Pole’-‘y’ was featured just like he was in every year’s
program, wide-eyed and silly in every shot, tall and
overweight, not skinny as a wooden ‘pole’ for string beans
like in his younger days. His hair was parted down the middle
and slicked back, greying, with two big ears sticking up and
out. He couldn’t have been drunk a day in his life. He was
‘One of the funniest and finest men in show business’, said a
corny caption, and Bill had designed the whole crazy lying
thing. He might at least have hinted at the truth with jokes
like ‘Soberingly comic entertainer’ or ‘The least polluted
frog in the percussion mudhole’, but instead he’d painted the
man as a clown of a
damn Boy Scout saint.
Bill said, "He
was walking through the lobby and had a newspaper rolled" –
with a bottle of booze
concealed inside it, he meant. Bill laughed near tears,
trying to collect himself, and finally jiggled the martini in
his right hand: "Right here," he pointed under his left elbow.
"Like he's lookin' around watchin' people; and periodically he
had a paper cup in his right hand like this, and he'd lean
forward like he was lookin' around the corner." Bill tried to
demonstrate but lost control: "He-haahh! he's pourin' more
booze into the cup!" he cried, trying to duplicate the bizarre
gymnastic-alcoholic hotel-lobby rolled-newspaper booze-hiding
contortion only to revert hopelessly apoplectic, and in
stitches, both at once.
"Oh yeh," Betty
Ann was much more low key. She wasn’t even smiling.
Bill shouted
very soberly: "That's when he was still drinkin'!"
"Well!" She had
an even better Poley drunk tale, if anybody in the world with
any heart wanted a ‘better’ Poley drunk joke. She was supposed
to be on mj’s side. What happened to the big thing they had
going between them?
"Oh, it must've
been about three or four years ago," she said. "On Tour; and
we stopped at Fred's sister's for a sort of lunch. She always
has, like, all the chicken – and this was when Poley was still
drinking – and she gets out all her liquor bottles and wants
to know what we'll have to drink. And everybody's goin' around
there, y'know. Poley pulls this. He goes up to where all –..."
"Heh-heh!" Bill
reacted.
Mj was numb,
anticipating the killer blow.
"...the bottles
are lined up, and this is like one giant room that's empty,
and it's very obvious what anybody does, and yet that man goes
over there and he pours," she swallowed, "a normal water glass
like this of vodka, y'know, up to the very top, just
like that much room left! Then: however he
does... that –." She went very quiet and squealed
little-girlishly: "Then-he-takes-the-Seven-Up, he-goes –." She
ditched girlish and assumed Poley's huge manly deportment
again. She contorted her face to a man's and flicked her wrist
like a man’s, over the water glass which was already filled to
the brim with straight vodka, letting fall one single drop of
Seven-Up.
Bill sputtered.
"Ahaaaghh!" He horse-laughed a veritable horse ball-buster and
gasped, finally.
She wailed her
line: "He really
started to get bombed, too, on the Seven-Up!!"
And now she clowned surprise!
Bill split six
horse ribs laughing at his star circus clown wife. She sure
was something to be proud of, this star child accordionist.
"And I mean he
had about three
of those ta-all," her voice cracked under pressure
from every kind of emotion, "water glasses of vodka!!"
She squeaked, "D'you
know how much vodka that IS?!"
Bill had a
story: "Fred used to –."
"And every one
he did the Seven-Up like…," she grew in stature again and
flicked her wrist in that manly way, "that!" One drop!
Now she was
done. Finally.
Mj hadn’t
laughed for quite some time. He was astonished to near
senselessness. "But it was never a problem," he said, "I take
it. He was –..."
"Oh: big
problem. Terrible problem," said Bill.
"...he still
worked." Mj stepped up as a volunteer to defend Fred Waring's
best buddy, Poley. Dr. Mortimer J. Lorenzo was the first of
the ‘enablers’, apparently, the biggest of the ‘codependents’
before most people knew those terms: "He never lost his job."
"Whuddya talkin'
about? Fred said that man –."
"He never lost
his wife!" young Dr. Lorenzo claimed, stupidly! He had met
Poley's wife, Yvette, at the recent Waring concert in
Betty Ann
glared: "Oh, she put up –."
"He probably spent money
on booze, but he survived!" the poor boy kept on interrupting,
having – way too late in the night – found a thrust that he
could assert with all his heart and might, and it was nothing
but a brand new fairy
tale, or no, something worse: the same old fairy tale
as before, actually,
his intensified need for which showed he was really still
deeply stuck in the typical second stage of a normal grief
reaction: ‘Denial’.
He was writing fiction, spinning a sorry yarn out of nowhere
faster than the dickens, faster than Charles Dickens, as a
matter of fact, just to keep up all the denial. And every
single line he sputtered, triggered a corresponding story in
Bill’s brain. A whole series of stories lined up and waited
silently, patiently and respectfully in Bill Blackburn’s very
white long-haired head now, every story pressingly necessary
to address a false claim made by this dizzy head-up-jackass
interviewer, lest the numbskull’s book about Fred Waring and
the Pennsylvanians end up coming out as a silly, senseless
whitewash.
"No. No –,"
said Bill.
"Yvette went
through an awful lot with
him," Betty Ann’s wincing expression showed sympathetic pain.
"Fred had fits
with this," said Bill, who had stopped laughing too now, just
like mj.
"And Poley
almost died," she felt compelled to add, "I don't know
how many times, really."
"And Fred sent
him home so many times," added Bill, "'cause he was gettin' so
bad, he wouldn't –." He stopped in order to make the point with a story instead.
But the story
was wrong. It
wasn’t the one he had told mj in the rowboat or in front of
their fireplaces, or in any of the official programs. Every
souvenir Waring program that the interviewer had seen,
redesigned anew each year by none other than Bill Blackburn –
for that was part of Bill’s job as Fred Waring’s promotions
guy and public relations manager – had shown a hometown pair
like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, side by side through nearly
sixty years of heavenly music- and mischief-making. Poley,
born down the street a few months after Fred, in their little
traditional country town of Tyrone, right on the Pennsy’s Main
(rail) Line to Chicago, right in the very heart of the big,
beautiful, pristine rolling green Appalachian state of
Pennsylvania; Fred at age ten waiting a few months longer to
join Boy Scouts, because both boys were dying to, and were
sworn to do it together; Fred at eighteen in
1918, forming a band with Poley as sidekick percussionist;
then a few years later, Tom and Huck sitting in a Porsche with
epic caption, ‘When
Poley is your friend from Tyrone, it's for good!’ Pages
and pages of classed-up, hokey, down-home hype in every
souvenir program, just perfect for ‘warming up an audience’,
bringing tears to the eyes of elderly Republicans, all those
Nordic-looking white Protestant Waring followers like mj’s
mother and father, let’s say, or like mj’s famed and classy
gospel-singer Aunt Ruth Lorenzo Crawford, all sitting in a
huge, slowly-filling high school auditorium, reading the
program while waiting for Fred to finally appear on stage and
talk to them intimately in his famous soothing, suave voice,
conduct them his concert of reminiscent songs and bring back
his and their cherished memories from the twenties and
thirties and forties and fifties so that they could all weep
even more with nostalgia. And the author of all that bull crap
had been Bill Blackburn, because Fred had paid him to
hype up such hokey nostalgic crap.
After years of
hard sell fairy tale, who was supposed to believe Huck was a
steady, ‘nine-to-five’, all day and all night, every
day of the decade drunk?
"Do you know
what kind of bits he pulled?" Bill asked, setting up his next
story. "Now ya gotta know Fred, but I think you've got an idea
what Fred's like by now –."
Apparently not;
or more emphatically: NO!
Mj lorenzo did not
have an idea what Fred Waring was like ‘by now’. He had never gotten it, and
was not getting it still.
The boy was in serious
shock.
"One time,"
Betty Ann interrupted, "he was in the hospital for six months,
'cause he didn't work for a couple years that time."
She might have
been at Poley’s deathbed now, she looked so sad remembering
it.
"Poley?!" mj
asked, as if he had just come in from the yard.
"Yeh, he was so
sick."
"Has he ever
been in treatment," mj asked, "for this?" He must have had a
huge stint of treatment if he truly had suffered a big
problem.
"Not that I
know of; I never heard –."
"He never went
to one of these ‘lodges’ or anything?" Mj had suspected so. He
was victorious after all. How could the man have a drinking
problem? That settled it.
"Nnooo-ooh,"
Betty Ann sang, weighing mj’s question one more time, with her
last, best, and sincerest, most studied thought, even though
her friend had really intended his question as a
rhetorical final statement.
She said, "Because most of the people who work for Fred are in
that condition!" And that damn answer of hers was
excruciatingly deadpan and summary.
"Ah hooo!!"
Bill exploded. "Wait!"
Betty Ann
laughed demurely; then, with a tellingly wry and tragic clown
twist, she added: "They just sur - vive!"
It was
masterfully dead-convincing when she came out with it. Her
sincerity was a given. She was renowned for nothing less:
Betty Ann McCall Blackburn did not bullshit, she did not fart
around with truth and mj knew it. EVERYONE knew it. Bill
Blackburn might exaggerate or distort to make a point, rarely; he might mix
up minor facts and say that Mrs. Nixon had lived as a girl on
a farm in
"Wait,"
said Bill, "I'll tell you!"
Several satyrs
and maenads in the far corner shuffled around restlessly.
Mj took a sip,
and a very long careful sip it was this time indeed. The big
golden catch of a story had gone and it had lit out straight
down the Delaware River toward the Bermuda Triangle and left
poor mj lorenzo sitting at the Blackburns’, landlocked and
reality-shocked: if Poley McClintock was a nine-to-five drunk, then ANYTHING in
the whole world was possible and that discovery was starting
to make him sick enough to almost throw up on the dizzy-whizzy
rag carpet. It hadn’t even sunk in through his rock-hard skull
yet that she’d just said practically ALL of them were as
bad off as Poley was.
Three or four
men's voices wavered off-key, and a soprano too:
...Little
Brown J-Jug, don't I love th-theeee!...
private
gift
to Waring from American cartoonist Dick Cavalli
saying
thanks for Waring’s hosting one more of many annual outings
of the National Cartoonist Society
at Fred's Shawnee Inn and Golf Course
[1] A drinking
song from Prohibition days, a 13-year period (1920-33)
when imbibing alcohol was prohibited not just by local law
but by the U.S. Constitution itself, as the express
majority will of the people themselves via the 18th
Amendment passed in 1919. Waring would hardly have
considered using this song for any of the St. Moses road
concerts of his sensationally crowd-drawing nationwide
annual Tours (designed to lead lost America out of its
spiritual and identity confusion) that started in the
fifties and lasted practically right up to his death in
1984; but he would have known the song like all his
Prohibition generation did, and conceivably might have
thought it appropriate at one time, back in the early
days, for a twenties college fraternity party gag or a
speakeasy gig. He was not above playing at Chicago
speakeasies in those early days, by the way, where his
audiences (and he too, probably, and Poley and the rest)
would have been violating the U.S. Constitution by
drinking illegally during Prohibition. In her biography
Virginia mentions only the nicer side of Fred’s
interaction with mafia bosses Al Capone, Bugs Malone and
Bugsy Siegel, pp. 100f; but during mj’s second interview
of the Blackburns, held not so long after the present one,
Bill revealed more intimate details of Fred’s friendships
with those Sicilian mafia giants which were then included
in mj lorenzo’s second book of the Waring trilogy, Tomahawk
Tales or Grandfather's Tomahawk and Other Tales from the Last Great Huron
Storyteller and the Last Great Swedish-American Big-Band
Blonde-Bomb Madonna-Orphan Storyteller (published
underground in 1983).
Dr Lorenzo’s
critical press questioned the ‘unlikely reality’ of the
'arrangement' and 'staging' of "Little Brown Jug", as
with the rest of the concert he experienced ‘in the
mirror on the wall’, as portrayed in this and subsequent
chapters. Many called him ‘crazy’. In
other words, just as had occurred with The Remaking, portions of the
public were convinced mj lorenzo had ‘made up’ certain
things, like the concert in the mirror on the wall, and
made up some of the other ‘too perfectly convenient to
believe’ aspects of Tales of Waring. The taped
interview with the Blackburns, of course, was presented
essentially verbatim in mj’s 1981 publication of the
work, just as it is here, and did occur in June of 1974,
on the night of the (mid-) summer solstice. The reality
of the interview was never doubted by any observer. As with The Remaking, many of these
same people were convinced that certain aspects of Tales of Waring, ‘HAD happened’.
Meanwhile, as with The Remaking, the Dr. claimed year after year that
everything had happened 100% as he had
portrayed it. And hearing this, a great number threw up
their hands in despair and dismissed mj lorenzo as
irrelevant because (1) 'he was crazily unable to admit
his writing was fiction' – or
because (2) 'he was lying, which was worse'.