Tale 19

I Want That Book Stopped

‘The Shawnee Inn and Golf Resort’ in November 2018

(front side, which faces the Delaware River)

formerly called ‘Fred Waring’s Shawnee Inn and Golf Course’

Dr. Lorenzo over many years searched for ways to make the three Blackburn interviews – even though they were already published and had become widely read books – more digestible and appealing to readers, and more completely and perfectly descriptive of what had really happened, ways he could live with.

Tales of Waring, the first of these three interviews, was released underground through established Remaking pundit circles of distribution in 1981, a network of communication which already by then extended across the U.S. and around the globe; but he returned to work on it in the mid-eighties. He bought his second PC computer, an IBM, and typed the entire three works, as published, into it, then tried so hard to do something ‘better’ with them, it appeared to some observers (like Sammy Martinez, especially) during the 90s he might have broken his promise to himself and the Blackburns after all, that he would never fictionalize any of his books. Because in ’91 or ’92, while attending writing workshops at Naropa in Boulder, he put together some paragraphs that came out so much to his liking that he submitted them as ‘fiction’ and got to see them published in the Kenyon Review to kudos in ‘96.

He hinted often to his writer friend and confidant, Sammy Martinez, though, that this little published wrinkle in the Waring story ‘might have been true’, not fiction; and Sammy then complained – often in public to Dr.Lorenzo’s ardent pundit following and critics alike who demanded to know which it was, ‘truth or fiction’ – that all his years of friendship with the author, as yet, had ‘served as nought’ when it came to getting an answer to that question out of the Dr.

Interestingly, this Kenyon Review ‘fiction’ of mj’s nagged at people’s curiosity so much, that its special little new angle on the story actually became part of Tales of Waring in everyone’s mind, even though it had not been in the 1981 book. It especially rang true after the third book of the Waring trilogy, Exactly How Mrs. Nixon’s Legs Saved the White House Christmas Concert, was re-published by a major publishing house in a new and fancily illustrated 2000 edition. This second edition of ‘Legs’ emphasized U. S. government spy and security aspects of the Waring/Lorenzo story more than the original mainstream publication of ’85, and so did the (following) Kenyon Review ‘fiction’ that ‘might have been true’:

(June 12, 1974)

A white haired man in a white dinner jacket dashed off the bus, stumbled up the parking lot curb, crashed through the folding door of the phone booth and dialed ten numbers.

“Oval office,” answered a man’s voice.

“Straight through to the U.S. President from a truck stop in Harrisburg! Dick, is that you? Our trick still works after twenty years!–?”

“No, it's Chairman Mao! huh, how is my favorite musical moneymaker, Fred Waring?”

“I want that book stopped.”

“That will uh, have to be your job, Mr. Waring, I'm afraid.”

“My job; what's a president for?” Fred Waring pulled the phone into his body and wrapped his right arm as far as it would go to keep out early morning chill.

“A U.S. president is for kicking. A president is a football. Haven't you heard?”

Richard Nixon, thirty-seventh president of the United States, did not look kicked around. He leaned back as far as the chair would go and raised his feet to the top of the great dark desk in the oval office. Two shiny black shoes with shiny black soles stuck up like a victory sign and reflected downward as an upside down ‘V’, all of it together forming a shimmering black

X

.

“In China,” he said, “they respect their leaders.”

“You make yourself a damn football. I warned you about tapes when you wrote and asked for our ’72 Christmas Concert tape. Tapes are no joke, Mister President!”

“Don't sound like Dwight uh Ike Eisenhower, Mister Waring, please. I uh, you always make me feel like you think I should still be VICE uh,... vice-president or less.”

“IKE would never have played tiddlywinks with White House tapes. They’ll have your neck, Mister Bozo the Clown President!”

“Fred uh, Mr. Waring, the FBI, whom I have carefully consulted since you called yesterday – in such a dither from Toledo – agree that this book is a priority item, and uh, so do I.” He lowered his voice: “They won't let me talk about it now.”

Fred yelled, “Well how the hell do they think we should talk about it if we can't talk about it?! The interview’s in ten days!”

“Please, Mister Waring. The FBI has asked me: is there a room at your Inn that's ah, bug-proof?”

Fred jumped up and down, shivering and thinking. “The Cartoonists’ Room at the Inn is sound-proof!” he shouted as before: “I've kept everybody out of there since Capp and Dunn made it the National Gallery of Cartoon Art. Nothing's bug-proof, Mister President, you of all people should know that!”

The President took his feet down and sat up, rested his left elbow on the desk to keep the black office phone at his ear and raised his eyes. He scanned the walls. “Fred, they're flying me up, meet me in the... Cartoonists’ Room at... seven; for dinner.”

“Eight. Virginia’s doing soufflé.”

“Mister Waring, it has to be soufflé or the Greatest President of History’s Greatest Country at Its Finest Moment, the moment of that President’s opening up Communist China to the West, the United States; of America uh; you decide... seven fifteen.”

.......................................................

“What does the FBI have on Lorenzo and Blackburn?!” Fred asked loudly. The door of the Cartoonists’ Room was still open to his Shawnee Inn guests passing by to the restaurant and gift shop. He closed it and sat down at the boardroom table that filled the little room almost totally, opposite the 37^th U.S. President, Dick Nixon, his buddy –.

But hardly a friend, compared with likeable Ike. Republican President Ike Eisenhower was a good friend and buddy both. As good as Fred ever had until poor ole Ike died in ’69. Good enough to miss him all the more, sitting opposite this sorry Republican replacement.

Gracefully, in a spotless white dinner jacket, Fred sipped vintage French burgundy.

They said little for a few minutes while they ate hungrily.

Fred cut and chewed with the subtlety of decent breeding a piece of his own familiar Shawnee Inn prime rib in gravy, and chased it down with red wine from his own secret stash in the Inn’s remotest cellar. He took a second long sip for good measure and glanced at a drawing of Disney's Goofy. It stood behind Mr. Nixon's left shoulder. "Twin sisters!" he said aloud.

“Shhh.” President Nixon loosened a black tie with an awkward gesture so as to chew better and spoke in a low and deep voice. “No, they're birds of uh, different feathers. Bill Blackburn’s at least sane, maybe. But your Lorenzo character, they say, might be better off in an institution because he's ‘nuttier than Abbie Hoffman and Allen Ginsberg combined’."

The President dug up an FBI folder from a black brief case, opened it on the table to the left of his salad fork and used the deep, pompous tone of an octogenarian law professor, a trick he had learned from student acting, long before law school: "Born 1943, raised Florence, New Jersey, population maybe a couple thousand, back then uh, old river town, steeples above the Delaware River. Here's a picture." He handed it to Fred.

“Looks like Tyrone, Pa.”

Mr. Nixon read further with his deep, fake, studied law professor voice: “His father was a Methodist minister; booted out of his last church 'for preaching salvation and for altar-calls and pressuring church politics with TV evangelists who were family members’. The President grinned at Mr. Waring. “Just your type.”

“Wrong again, Mister President, I hated every one of our Methodist ministers.” Fred looked uncomfortable. “Dad invited them to stay at the house, and not a one could enjoy my kind of fun.”

“Well, Mortimer John Lorenzo went to the same conservative ‘evangelical’ college as our beloved Billy Graham, but unfortunately got radicalized during medical school in Philadelphia in the late sixties, and made it known to everyone that he had quit going to church: he graduated from the School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, founded by Benjamin Franklin, uh. That’s one better than you, Fred.”

The President looked at Fred, who kept his face in the plate.

So the President continued. “Penn is an Ivy League school, they tell me. You went to the state farming and engineering school and you didn’t even graduate from Penn State, they tell me, right?”

“Never knock a Party Supporter’s alma mater, Mister President. My Penn State did not have to be Ivy League or U. of Penn. to help create ‘The Pennsylvanians’. Those boys were a barrel of fun compared with Blackburn and Lorenzo. And don’t knock a fundraiser’s sacred education, Mister President. Penn State University amounts to something next to your puny little Whittier Whatever, in the great intellectual center of Southern California. And education aside,” Fred lowered his voice but kept up the bite, “we both know I’d have made a better president than Richard Mulehouse Nixon.”

“Now, uh now, just pay uh attention: young, uh, Lorenzo was tear-gassed in the capital while demonstrating against the Vietnam War. This happened at Dupont Circle uh,... during The, uh, so-called, “Mobilization’s Candlelight March against Death” in November, ’69.  Escaped arrest at Dupont on Friday night that weekend, November 14th. Next day, gave me the President, uh the White House uh, the finger, marching past, carrying a ‘Resistance’ banner with his friend, Joseph ‘Joey’ Rosenblatt. There's a picture here of the finger. All dots because they blew it up from a crowd shot.

“...Escaped arrest at Dupont on Friday night that weekend, November 14th.

Next day, gave me the President, uh the White House uh, the finger,

marching past, carrying a ‘Resistance’ banner

with his friend, Joseph ‘Joey’ Rosenblatt.

There's a picture here of the finger...”

the Dr.'s critical press mocked this crystal-clear image as
'Doctored, no, Dr.-Lorenzoed'
(when it appeared in People magazine)
(since the original FBI photo was 'all dots')

“Uh... your Lorenzo wrote a book he never published. His father spread it underground and it became a Bible for radicals during the last two years. He changes religions every six months, reads EVERY BOOK HE CAN FIND on every religion imaginable or historical. Smokes pot rarely after work, never before, mostly on weekends. They got us a color shot of your uh radical writer standing next to – and another shot hugging TWO – orange-gowned Hare Krishnas at the corner of uh, Broad St. and Chestnut St., uh in Philly; he's in blue jeans with long brown sideburns, the shortest of the four. Tallest one, curly-black-haired one in nothing but sandals and a gauze uh, loincloth like Mahatma Gandhi is the ‘Joey’ one again.” The President flipped Fred all three of these glossies.

“He'll ruin me,” said Fred, not even studying the president’s FBI shots.

They had been hard work for the FBI to track down and refurbish so presentably as authentic evidence, especially on such short notice, yet Fred Waring ignored them and kept staring at the inadequate, untrustable president of the United States.

“Uh... your Lorenzo wrote a book he never published.

His father spread it underground and it became a Bible for radicals

during the last two years.

He changes religions every six months,

reads EVERY BOOK HE CAN FIND on every religion imaginable or historical.

Smokes pot rarely after work, never before, mostly on weekends.

They got us a color shot of your uh radical writer standing next to –

and another shot hugging TWO –

orange-gowned Hare Krishnas at the corner of uh,

Broad St. and Chestnut St.,
uh in Philly;

he's in blue jeans with long brown sideburns,

the shortest of the four....”

“Now, Mister Waring,” the President smirked his jowly smirk again, “just try to relax. I uh told you uh, he's mixed up, he keeps changing.” He looked down again: “1949: father being a Waring and Pennsylvanians zealot, the Reverend canceled Sunday night church for years telling congregation to watch Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians instead, on CBS, and immediately after that, to watch the Reverend’s brother-in-law evangelist mentioned above, Percy Crawford, his program ‘Youth On The March’ on NBC’! instead of coming to Sunday night church!!"

“How do they dig these nifty tidbits up?!!” Fred looked at Mister Mulehouse with admiration for once. He spoke warmly for the first time: “Dick,... the evangelist Crawford’s wife, Ruth Lorenzo Crawford, has been a friend of mine for years. She attended my workshops more than once. She’s a musician’s musician, Dick, a goddess of music. Do you know who she is? If Lorenzo had one tenth of her talent, he’d be a better musician than Fred Waring, but he could never be as beautiful as his aunt, of course, because –.”

“Well, in fact, Mister Waring,” the President interrupted because Fred could go on forever about his favorite women, and women were irrelevant to the discussion. What’s more, there wasn’t time: “The FBI searched Mortimer John Lorenzo’s house uh – there could be complaints about it legally – but uh, while he was at work, and his wife was in Philadelphia at her obstetrician’s, found some papers with written notes about you... and some diaries.” Mr. Nixon looked at his long-time friend and financial supporter. "You did your number on him when he was six. The preacher father treated your show like a church service and that puts you in the same category with God, says the FBI. It makes Lorenzo ‘susceptible’ to you. They say he can’t possibly hurt you, he’s too ‘under your influence’.”

“Star chaser. Stealing a piece of Waring glory.”

“Now that's not very much to worry about, is it?” The President turned the page. “He says he's a psychiatrist but he's not, he never finished his training.”

“I'm going to be psychoanalyzed by a half-baked hippy-dippy acid shrink, and you say ‘don't worry’? What did they find on Blackburn?”

“Lots of stuff. Air Force in Korea, Communications, secret military intelligence versus Chinese and Korean communists and uh, all that. He’s clean.”

“CLEAN, my left Clark’s nut cracker, he's half REDskin fr’ heaven’s sake!”

“The FBI can't keep track of every, uh—, damn half-breed in the United States of America, Mister Waring. That's a large portion of the population and it’s against the law.” The U.S. President assumed a serious air that went well with his dark suit while he shoveled in more Shawnee Inn mashed potatoes and gravy and swallowed uncomfortably, making his Adam’s apple bob and strain against the still too-tight collar, all of which announced that he only broke the law when he really, really, really... wanted to.

“All the FBI has is uh, this.” He looked down at a different paper, processing mashed potatoes so that his jowls shook above his stiff and uncomfortable neck. “Uh, Bill Blackburn and his brand new wife Betty Ann came down with you and the Pennsylvanians to our Christmas Concert at the White House in ’72. Two Christmases back, right?

“Right, Your Mulehouse. Watch your neck, Mr. Secret White House.”

“And during uh, the concert he was up to something in the basement with the Secret Service, in the White House tape room, remember? Because you accidentally on purpose forgot his tux that day, so he wasn’t uh, allowed upstairs to the buffet, without any tux, to your concert and the dance, remember, and he got uh, ‘stuck’ downstairs?”

“Dick, this Blackburn character is a snoop. He knows everything about me, everything.”

“But that's not our problem, Fred.”

“It’s your problem now.”

“Your big annual contribution is a uh, godsend to the Republican Party, Mister Waring. Not to mention your genius for fundraising, which is even more astonishing. That's why I left my very busy schedule in Washington to come see you out here in the sticks uh, lovely woods of Pennsylvania uh, here at beautiful Boone-ee, uh, Shawnee on Delaware. Uh, tomorrow, by the way, I want you to show me how to hit a golf ball.” He leaned across the table. “What do you think of the First Amendment?”

“To hell with the first amendment!” Fred's face was red and his bushy black and white eyebrows twisted everywhere. “I've thrown out fat manuscripts about me. Nobody stopped ME. That's the way to run an outfit.”

“Sshhh,” Nixon hissed, “the FBI is outside!”

“Quit being a First Amendment pussy and stop this interview set for ten days!”

The President of the United States maintained the bearing befitting his office. He knew how to act – like an actor – and stayed in character. “The Blackburn interview is going to happen, Mister Waring, we're restricted by the First Amendment. The best we can do is help you in-fluence the interview.”

“How? Ask Betty Ann McCall Blackburn to put in a word? Her new man has soured her against me.”

“No, Fred, we'll play your music during the interview.”

“Judas H. Criminy, Dick!”

“It'll throw Lorenzo back to when he was six. That’s what the FBI says. He'll idolize you all night long like he did then. He ‘knows music’, they say.”

“I don't want him to hear Blackburn's stories about me!”

“There's a reason to do the interviews and get them on tape, uh, to have a tape player going in that Blackburn living room: I'd like to get hold of uh, certain uh tapes –; as you know, I've been suspecting Bill Blackburn and Pat Nixon, my wife –.”

“You're not still stuck on that cr- –.”

“The Secret Service makes secret recordings of everything audible in the White House, Mister Waring, as you've heard in the news.” The President stretched his neck nervously. They taped your Christmas Concert in ‘72. And your – and my – sweet little First Lady farm girl from Southern Cal, Pat, sweet-talked a Secret Service agent out of a copy to send to Bill and I'm convinced,” he leaned over and whispered to Fred, “she added a sweet-heart-ened message to him on that tape. The Secret Service won't tell me,” he growled, “and the bastards won't destroy tapes when I tell them to, either. Now the FBI –.”

“So you want that tape.”

“We've got to get Blackburn to pull out that tape during the interview, Fred. The agents couldn't find it when they searched his place this afternoon. He must have buried it on his property!”

Fred sat back in his seat. He relished another long sip of vintage French burgundy then smiled sincerely at last. It went back twenty years to when young Dick was vice president and a junior tagalong to Ike and Fred.

The President warmed, remembering the smile. “Listen, Fred, we're all set for the interview. The FBI is on top of it. They found those pictures just like that! And they say that from the way Lorenzo writes about you, he is the only U.S. hippy radical who thinks you're God the Father and Jesus Christ combined. As soon as he hears your music he won't hear anything uh Blackburn says about you. And if he does he won't remember it. If he tapes the interview, he’ll lose the tapes. We'll see to it. We'll slip him a Mickey if we have to. Just leave the worry to us.”

Fred knew his music changed people in deep ways. He also knew that this functionary of a half-man who had been Ike Eisenhower’s tagalong would botch the favor he wanted. The smile faded. “How are you going to have this hippy leftist freak,” he sneered, “‘hear my music during an interview for a book if I’m not there to make the music’?”

“The sound equipment at the Blackburn cottage is in a cluttered little sound room separated from the living room by a thick old door, because uh Betty Ann uh,” he checked the file, “McCall, they say, records her uh, cordovox instrument playing sometimes in that living room. The equipment is in the sound room. The speakers are in the living room. Or, if necessary, the FBI boys claim to have a gadget, they can wire Lorenzo’s chair so he feels the music through his body, ‘sub-LIMIN-ally’, or something, when no one else can hear it. Or they can do both at once! You can be there if you want! They’ll help you hide. That’s why they came. One way or the other, we’ll uh, see to it, Fred.” He got up. “We opened up China, didn’t we?”

The President walked grandly past Blondie and Dagwood and Ellie Mae and Archie to the door of the Cartoonists’ Room. “The FBI agent wants your input regarding this plan, Fred. Right now. Just as soon as I walk out this door. He’s right outside. When you’re through talking to him, I’ll be upstairs in the President’s Suite, if you want to talk about old times and women – and why you offered me no wine.”

“Yes sir, Your Sacred Mole House!”

Fred Waring sat frozen in black and white and as motionless as a cartoon character lampooned in the Sunday paper, his eyebrows all salt and pepper, his pompadour and dinner jacket so white, and his dimpled Englishman’s white chin thrusting slightly. He fit in so perfectly with the priceless rogues’ gallery of America’s favorite black and white cartoon characters covering every square inch of the Shawnee Inn’s Cartoonists’ Room, that the FBI agent thought the room was empty when he entered. Then Fred’s famous conductor’s right hand reached out for the red wine bottle ever so gracefully.

He poured deftly, filling the glass to the very brim, all in a single, suave, elegant gesture, losing not a dark vintage drop to tablecloth or bottle rim.

this personal gift from American cartoonist Steve Douglas to Fred Waring
though it shows him as white-haired

would appear to be a fantasy portrait of a younger, happier, even more innocent Fred
(as compared with most portraits of 1950s Fred by other cartoonists)