Tale 18

How to Write a Book about Fred Waring

"Now," said Bill: "I often thought about writing this. If you get the rough character of each one, and show what they're really like, each one is such a strong individual and yet so weak."

Mj was being advised on how to write a book, the one Bill had refused to write and had talked his friend into writing instead. But the county drug and alcohol chief was waiting for a response to the question he had asked a while back, and was tired of waiting: Why, why were so many of Fred’s devoted camp followers such problem drinkers?

Bill poked two chunky fingers in the glass and drew up an olive, aware his interviewer was looking at him.

Mj put his glass on the table: "But there's no story line," he said.

"You got the story in line," said Bill.

"You may," said mj. "But I don't. What holds it together? I hear all these vignettes, the anecdotes are beautiful, but it doesn't make a story. If you told the story about falling in love with Betty Ann, all the hurtles and obstacles, finally marrying in Fred’s house, Poley and Fred hovering over her like they’re both her father, both of them wanting to give her away, and finally the honeymoon at the White House, now that would be a story. But this: if I were writing a book like this, about them drinking, I'd send the whole damn tribe into treatment."

The interviewer was kidding for some reason, and he was a little irritated besides. He had never had any intention of writing fiction based on Fred Waring. His plan had been to write about Fred, the man they knew, who had created a fairy tale of a life which Fred and his people and even people connected to those people, like mj and Dlune, had enjoyed falling into for a while, as Alice fell into Wonderland. But now that the Blackburns were suggesting there never had been a fairytale Wonderland, what should he do? He needed a ‘theme’, a  thread, a ‘story line’ that would tie these crazy new wrinkles he’d never imagined to the humdinger of a fairy tale he had known and lived.

A few gleemen in the corner chorused the first AA step in response to mj’s treatment idea, however. They preferred his treatment theme apparently.

We admitted we were powerless over alcohol,

That our lives had become unmanageable!

"No," said Bill; "because it isn't everybody, by any means, in all truth."

"You don’t have to be boozin',” teased mj, aiming at Betty Ann mostly, though he was too shy to eye her, “to end up in a residential treatment center. In some programs they want ‘the whole family’. You two would have to go along," in this fictional book mj envisioned, which he was proposing as a joke.

She tittered.

He felt like getting her going. Who could guess why? Did he seem to care if Bill, the big cheese Huron storyteller in charge of the night’s proceedings, was offering him right now, finally, a chance to express himself at length in any way he chose, THE chance he had wanted all night? Did he seem to care that he could steer things his way, finally, maybe, but instead was playing silly games again with the big chief’s wife of the ranchito????!!

And boy, would he hear from his most devoted pundits about this and everything, once the book was published underground in ’81: how 'embarrassingly' and 'uncharacteristically' UN-heroic he had been, not just in this moment, but all night long.

"A whole month of residential treatment,” he went on: “I'd go too, study the Waring musical family, and publish the results." He must have just wanted to 'relax' and 'show off his doctorly know-how for a minute', some of his quieter pundit defenders said later (in a Jungian journal published in Switzerland); he ‘just’ wanted to take a break from all the disconcerting thrusts at his fairy tale.

And Earth-Goddess Orphan loved everything to do with ‘family’. So it got her attention. She ate it up, you could tell from the way she looked at mj now.

But Huron Bill was serious. "No. I think a better way to write it is to develop this thing how they all rely upon this man for something that's almost spiritual. And when he goes, they're finished."

The sober gleemen were delighted that a Fred Waring nonbeliever like Bill appreciated the fact that their Fred might at times seem to his lifelong devotees virtually arguably ‘divine’ or effectively ‘a Higher Power’; and that insight of Bill’s into their character they applauded in the mirror by chorusing the second AA step loudly.

We came to be-lieve

that a Power greater than our-selves

could re-store us

to sa-ni-ty!

Bill chewed on rancid olive: "You've got to be around them, to see what I mean."

The storyteller wanted a unifying thread for the night too, mj noticed. And the thoughts of Fred’s ‘spiritual power’ over others and also of Fred’s inevitable death reminded mj of something.

"You told me once,” he said, “about the tension of growing old. The old Pennsylvanians were about to fall apart. Fred was trying to get the old-timers to stay home so he could have 'The Young Pennsylvanians'. Maybe that's the story line."

"Yeh," Bill said. "But the old ones are still around and they're better now, y'see." He swallowed. "The tension on TV, I think, the big days, that's what almost ruined the old ones. I'll tell you why they're off booze. I think Fred has mellowed." Bill looked at mj. "And they're all finding meaning, too. That's the funny thing."

"Separate from Fred?" asked mj.

"Yeh."

"Before he goes?" mj’s stomach turned.

"Kind of. Tommy Cullen, I mean Fred could call him up tomorrow; Tommy Cullen would play for him any time, anywhere; the way he filled in on clarinet for the White House Christmas concert. But Tommy is retired; he owns his own bar."

"He's doing better," mj understood, and picked up his empty glass looking at Betty Ann.

But she reached for her sewing on the floor, and didn’t notice.

"I think why they've all gotten off the sauce, mellowed," Bill said, "is Fred has mellowed. In the fifties when Fred was in his heyday, Sunday night television, this is what drove them to the sauce. This man was the  most  tyrannical  thing  that  ever  walked  the  face  of  the  earth,” Bill emphasized every word without laughing, very unusual for him. “He had God-awful control over their lives!" His face was pink again.

Betty Ann sewed gravely on those words.

Fred Waring was more tyrannical than Hitler or Stalin or Mussolini, more than Tyrannosaurus rex? Mj didn’t buy the extreme claim.

But Bill had unearthed a theme that clicked suddenly with what he, Bill, had been feeling about his boss for a while, maybe years, and he followed where it led: "The Dorseys, for instance: a lot of musicians are plain boozers, that's a fact, but with the Dorseys, they didn't give a damn what you did on the bus. You could smoke pot anything you wanted. Fred demands that he's a part of their life, even to the point of talkin' to 'im, if you want to marry Betty Ann!" As Bill had to do, apparently.

Betty Ann McCall Blackburn shifted and sipped on those emphasized words. Fred did things that upset people sometimes very much, it was true. She couldn’t deny it so she kept quiet, even though Bill was talking about their romance and marriage.

But Bill had never told mj he’d had to ask Fred’s permission to marry Betty Ann. How could the great Fred Waring have come up with such a thing, the man that played golf with Jackie Gleason and hung out with twentieth century greats from George M. Cohan to Bing Crosby? It made Fred sound crazy. Maybe even ‘tyrannical’, as Bill said. Betty Ann was an adult woman. They had both been married before. Bill left a lot of the story out until now, apparently, critical events like this.

A pall descended, despite the little wife’s seeming composure. The night felt like it was over, the party over, and the book too. And there was a bladder that was about to overflow and explode, moreover.

"There's the difference,” Bill went on, “between Fred Waring and the other band leaders. Tommy Dorsey didn't give a damn. You could be five hundred pounds as long as you played your horn, showed up at the gig on time. But Fred badgers poor Poley about his weight, y'know."

Bill looked at mj as if he should be interested; he should know how to agree with him by this point; as if, on this night so important to them, their friendship – or something – called for mj’s respecting the storyteller’s feelings, more than the storyteller his. Mj had just objected indirectly to his friend’s constant drift, of attacking Fred all night long; yet Bill had not lightened up a bit. Instead, he was attacking again.

"Poley's at an age, nobody should badger'm 'bout anything. He'd be eating dinner, Fred would come in and condemn him because he had too much gravy, too much this." Bill got loud. "It would get Poley so upset, he and Yvette, they'd wanna come home!"

"This year?" mj asked, needing a clinical timeline to get on top of the anger while he could, before it got out of hand in the doctor’s office. The anger was leaking around Bill’s edges. Who knew where it could go? And doctors needed timelines. If Bill was going to look like an angry patient close to losing it, then young Dr. mj would have to be his shrink, trying to stop him from losing it.

"Last year every year,” he said dismissively, wearying of mj’s psychotherapy in ten seconds flat. He had recovered from whatever malady had made him suffer rage at Fred Waring for a second. He had recovered completely, one had to presume based on the way he acted: “So you see the whole point of the thing is, the real ‘study’, is the fact that Fred has mellowed and a lot of them have slowed down their drinking, or stopped."

Bill – that fast – had proudly recovered from what had ailed him for a second. He was back to normal again because he could not give in to angry fits and act like a psychiatric patient, or he would give young mj some kind of doctorly power over his life. He was not about to behave like that. He was staying in charge. Never did he like to give away power, almost never. It was a rule he had learned from Huron uncles, presumably; or his 100% Huron mother; or his father’s father who had been right hand man to Old Man Harriman, the railroad magnate.[1] Bill would probably not have learned it from his father, because in the second interview he would deny he had ever admired his father at all. Mj’s hunch, starting a number of years after the three Blackburn interviews and developed over several decades, was that Bill’s self-control of anger came from his Huron people; and this was supported by Bruce Trigger’s book, his psychological study of the Huron tribe which Dr. Lorenzo would devour in later years.[2] But tonight he was thinking of none of this.

"Hmph," mj responded. What ‘study’? What were they ‘studying’? For two years in the rowboat, Fred had been a buffoon at worst. Now he was Tyrannosaurus rex, year in and year out without letup, right up to ‘this year’; yet at the same time he had ‘mellowed’ since TV days in the 50’s. How could anybody be the worst tyrant in history ‘every single year’ and at the same time ‘mellow’? Mj turned up the glass he had been clutching. Wet olives pushed at his lips. One went in.

"And another thing," said Bill. "A lot of them are frightened to death of it. Tommy Cullen was in the hospital. What stopped Tommy from drinkin' is, they told him, 'One more drink and you're dead’. I don't know whether he had slurrosus –."

"Cirrhosis," mj said, "of the liver."

"I don't know. But I know they told Tommy Cullen, 'You're dead’. And they gave him last rites." Bill stared at his friend, as if waiting for comment.

"That should get it across," said mj, chewing on Tommy's rancid, gin-and-vermouth rites.

In the cherry-frame mirror Tommy and Poley looked anxious to chorus more AA steps.

"But:" said Bill, "Poley McClintock was damn near on his death bed. And the ones that have quit, it's been a physical thing. They didn't quit because of other reasons, I don't believe, do you, Bett?"

"All except for Ray: he turned Christian Scientist."

A single satyr half-sang and half-declaimed the AA third step:

We made a de-ci-sion

to turn our will and our lives

over to the care of God

A S  W E  UN-DER-STOOD   H I M.

"Well," mj said, frustrated. "That's one way to stop boozin'." Maybe they hadn’t quit drinking because Fred had mellowed, then, but because it had almost killed them. Maybe Fred hadn’t mellowed that much after all. Who knew? Who even wanted to know? He didn't know what to say, or where to go. He chewed every molecule of booze out of the darn sour alcoholic olive, though, because it was something he could be sure of. And he remembered again that he was not in the driver’s seat; obviously. He was hardly even copilot. And he was as sure of that as of anything the whole night long.

"No, mj," said Bill: "the more we talk about this like we're talkin' about these characters in this light – and I think it's the first time we've ever sat down and really thought about it in one light, like the drinking, y'know,..."

Mj waited for the crazy punchline that was about to come. He felt it coming.

"…and: if you took this and just wrote something about a character like Fred Waring as a band leader, and wove these characters in and out of the story and never even mentioned the name 'Waring' –."

"No," said mj with quiet assurance. "This is about Fred Waring."

The same Fred Waring he had hero-worshiped as a kid, the one whose fairytale of a life, recently, as mj had imagined Fred’s life, anyway, had gotten the young Dr. mj lorenzo so caught up in it he’d hardly been able to think sensibly for the whole last two years, apparently, ever since he met Bill and started hearing the stories.

That much he knew. It had to be about the real Fred Waring. Bill could go on and control the interview if he had to; he would let him have that much power; but Bill could not and would not control the book.

And mj would just have to figure out a way later to pull the stories together into a package that made sense.

A pack of self-examining satyrs chorused AA steps they had learned somewhere by heart, in a unison so penetrating it flew out the kitchen screen door, straight across the creek a mile, to Fred's Gatehouse and the Inn at Shawnee:

We made a SEARCH-ing

and FEAR-less

moral INn-ven-to-ry

of our-selves.

They stopped for a Grand Pause.

We ad-MIT-ted to GOD, to our-SELVES,

and to a-no-ther hu-man BE-ing

The ex-ACT NA-ture of our WRONGS.

Another Grand Pause.

Poor mj by this point just wished he could go home and crawl into bed with Dlune, and make sure the baby was coming along okay.

We were en-TIRE-ly REA-dy to have God

re-MOVE All these DE-fects of CHA-rac-ter!

Grand Pause.

It felt like church suddenly. Church basement Wednesday night AA, in the naked, grey-walled cinderblock church basement; people hanging on to life and health by a thread. No room to goof. He wanted more celebration! Intoxication! What happened to fun?

We HUM-bly ASKED Him to re-MOVE our SHORT-com-ings!

The ever-so-serious songsters wrapped up four-part; a cappella; and pianissimo, with intensity:

...The

SONGofthe

TEM  peh  rance

UUUUUUUU-

niOHHHHHHHHnnnn!

In the mirror Fred's hands closed, and his shoulders tightened. He was mouthing it: ‘Cut!’

He turned around at last, frowning.

His ‘shortcomings’ were not removed. Mj could tell. Fred had made his band members change and ‘remove their defects of character’.

But God Himself did not have to change, ever.

He could choose to change if he wanted, or he could choose never to change at all. For, regardless of all the crazy baloney that man had invented about ‘God’ that had gotten turned into big important religious ideas somehow, the fact was, all of it was just theology and speculation, meaning man’s imagination and invention. Dreams; visions; intuitive guessing mixed with intellectual acrobatics; and the sometimes intelligent interpretation of same. Unless you believed it to be literally God-invented, God-delivered-to-man, and God-written in holy text, as so many Christians believed, for example; but even that was a human interpretation open to corruption, and humans were imperfect by definition. If a person was going to go so far out on a limb as to actually ‘believe’ in or imagine a ‘God’, then the only really sensible way to understand ‘God’, was to accept the utterly and unavoidably logical reality that such a ‘God’, because by definition ‘omnipotent’, could manifest on earth as did the Vishnu of India’s Hindus, meaning: in any form he wanted, wherever and whenever he liked. He could show up as Dionysus in a seamless white robe in Minisink Hills, Pennsylvania, if he wanted, then change to a U.S. choral conductor or Jesus or Moses as he chose, one after the other, and even, if he wanted, all in the same damn human body all at once, even Fred Waring’s body, all in the very same night, right in Minisink, there was no denying the theoretical possibility. He could be the whole universe for a few billion trillion years if he wanted, by definition, or just a day, simply because he was ‘omnipotent’, anything ‘he’ or ‘she’ wanted.

But God, if indeed there was such a thinking and purposeful entity as ‘God’, never had to do anything he/she/it didn’t damn well want to. And neither, therefore, did God’s copy-cat, omega-faced and alpha-assed Fred Waring.

portion of a tabletop cartoon given Waring by American cartoonist Harry Devlin[3]