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Tale 10

 

Bombed in New York and L.A.

and
Even Fred's Sister's Buffet

 

 

left to right: tall
              brick old country church, cemetery on a hill, red fall
              foliage on a tree

 

“Mj had met beanpole Poley McClintock at the Blackburn wedding.

He'd shown plenty of spunk for an old Presbyterian.”

 

country church in the tiny hamlet of Tusseyville, Pennsylvania

next county over from Tyrone in Blair County

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 U.S. popular music.

 

"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 New York; and NBC used to pay Poley to find Bing."

 

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 Monroe County booze-ahol chief’s, intuitive genius assessment: "Poley was a steady, nine-to-five, DRUNK."

 

Mj had met beanpole Poley McClintock at the Blackburn wedding. He'd shown plenty of spunk for an old Presbyterian. They’d hung out in Fred Waring’s living room, before and after Bill and Betty Ann’s wedding ceremony, and it had been easy for a shy person to be with him. He was quiet and clean-shaven and wasn't even drunk. He didn’t even drink at the wedding, as far as anyone could notice, anyway. "And this –;” mj stuttered, “was this down through the years he's been like this, not just recently?" Mj was floored, poor boy. He could turn out to be surprisingly innocent for his age sometimes, there was no hiding it.

 

"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 Los Angeles and Poley is a classic; clever; sly like a fox."

 

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 Washington, New Jersey. They had talked all of a minute and that made him an authority on Poley and Yvette’s marriage somehow.

 

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 South Dakota when it was really southern California, but not Fred Waring’s famous cordovox player, the sacred Madonna centerpiece of his holy stage show. If anything, Betty Ann under-stated a point. She was an ironist, a dry-humor-ist.

 

"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'.


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