A Barbara Orbison story you won't get anywhere else...
(excerpted from "I've Never Heard Of You, Either", @2010, Blurb Publishing)
"...If there is any justice in this life, once before I die I will have one more opportunity to talk with Claudia Crochet.
She, alone on the planet Earth, would fully appreciate finding out that I got laid on Roy Orbison’s pool table.
1964. Suburban New Orleans. T. H. Harris Junior High School.
Claudia Crochet was the first girl I ever kissed.
Calling her my first love would be overstatement; saying that she was just a fling would be selling her short (not to mention the fact that at age thirteen, what we shared could hardly be defined as fling).
She lived just four or five houses down a side street adjacent to the school and, since she was the lady and I the gentleman, I would ride my blue Murray with the banana seat and spider handlebars to the school grounds on Saturdays, where we would walk together in the tall grass behind the main building, find a spot both private and comfortable and spend the afternoon necking, groping ever so tentatively and listening to the transistor radio I brought along to provide the proper adolescent ambiance.
“Our” song was “Oh, Pretty Woman”.
If the gods were on my side and that song happened along at the same time we were sharing the tall grass, there was inevitably a longer kiss and a little more time granted before the hand was moved tenderly back down from a young breast covered in bra, slip and dress.
Small wonder, somehow, that Roy was my hero.
By the time I entered the senior high school just two miles up the boulevard, Claudia Crochet had gone on to Catholic school, some new hand trying to caress undetected and, presumably, some new song.
And by 1981, she was very likely married, with children old enough to be sneaking off to sit in the tall grass behind their junior high school, necking and groping and listening to the boom box brought along to provide the perfect adolescent ambiance.
By that time, I was living in Roy Orbison’s house.
Cutting his grass, picking up his kids after school, running errands, driving any one of his nine collector automobiles, getting paid two hundred bucks a week....
...and getting laid on his pool table.
After divorcing and returning to Nashville, I had the good fortune of living with Danny and Ruby Hice, a married pair of songwriters who had had some minor success, Ruby with some mid level country artists, Danny as co-writer of a tune that appeared on Whitney Houston’s first album. Gracious and loving family people, they offered me bed and board when I first came back to town.
Danny, like so many writers who had had a taste of success, was trying to parlay it into a successful publishing company. The American dream was alive and well in the Hice household, the father trying to build a publishing empire from the living room of his three bedroom apartment, the wife writing songs in the kitchen, while maintaining the household, and raising an extended family of teenage son, twenty-ish daughter and the five year old son of twenty-ish daughter who, when offered the life choice of studying medicine or qualifying for a guest spot on the Jerry Springer show, opted for the latter. (“...on today’s show....sweet young girls who get knocked up by white trash rednecks and have to move back in with mom and dad to hide out from the psychotic wife beater....”)
It wasn’t too many weeks after moving in with Danny and Ruby that I realized I was not only living out my dream of writing country songs, I was now being offered the chance to live in one.
Living in that environment was interesting, but neither comfortable nor productive.
And soon, being broke all the time started to wear pretty thin.
Ruby, bless her heart, solved both problems at once.
While Danny made tapes and phone calls and walked that fine line between persistence and denial, Ruby spent thirty hours a week working on Music Row, managing the affairs of a fairly well known singer/songwriter, acclaimed and admired the world over who had, unbeknownst to him, been the inspiration, almost twenty years earlier, for some pretty serious necking and groping.
One day in 1982, Ruby came home with a special smile and an offer.
Roy Orbison and his second wife Barbara lived in a beautiful multi level home on several acres of lakefront north of Nashville, next-door neighbors, in fact, to Johnny and June Cash. Even then, Roy was still a very much in demand touring artist and spent weeks on end overseas playing and singing for adoring audiences. But that life left wife and two young sons home alone for those weeks on end. And Barbara, charming and gregarious, was of German royal ancestry and not particularly thrilled with the more mundane demands of the routine she faced.
Two million dollar home or split level suburban, housework is housework. And grass cutting is grass cutting. And Roy and Barbara were, quite frankly, in what could only be described as the “awkward stage”, wealthy enough to afford a home by the lake and a big screen TV. in the days when big screen TV’s cost as much as some small cars, but not so wealthy as to afford maids and gardeners and housekeepers.
What Barbara really needed was a houseboy...someone who could clean up, cut grass, run errands, pick up the kids from school...and be willing to do it for room, board, a couple of hundred bucks a week...and the chance to actually live in the home of a childhood idol.
“So,” Ruby said to me with a very excited smile, “what do you think?”
Gee, let me get back to you.
And so, it came to pass that a young man whose first Sears Silvertone guitar had clumsily sputtered the opening guitar lick to “Oh, Pretty Woman”, whose first kiss and feel was accompanied by that very lick, who had first picked up a guitar and started playing it in the frenzy of Beatlemania and then been delighted to find that the Fabs had actually opened in Europe for the amazing tenor voice dressed in black and wearing the ominous, but totally cool, black shades, now found himself standing in the kitchen of the house on the lake talking to the wife of the man who had written those very notes and who was, as we spoke, asleep two floors above us in the master suite.
“Zo,” Barbara spoke to me with just the perfect blend of friendliness and blue blood condescension, “do you zink zis is somezink you would like to dew?”
Gosh, let’s see...........live in the spacious lakefront home of a pop legend and get paid for it.........or go on living with two sweet people who have to schedule their lives around the regular police visits which follow the unexpected door pounding visits of the drunk redneck guy who knocked up their daughter?
Tell me, does the job come with a health plan?
“Vood you like to meet Roy?”
I could say nothing. Ruby smiled politely, “Oh, we don’t want to disturb him, Barbara, he must be exhausted after just getting home from the road.”
“Nunsense,” Barbara was already beckoning us to follow her up the stairs, “he’s not zleeping anyway, he’s just laying up zere vatching the tellyvision.”
“Well...”, Ruby took one last shot at gracious.
I know there are people who cannot understand the emotional impact of such an experience. We’re talking about a singer, for God sake, we’re not talking about meeting Gandhi or Teddy Roosevelt. It’s just a guy who sings and plays guitar and has had some hit records.
Yeah, right.
As we reached the second floor of the house, Barbara stopped and turned, “vait here, I vill go and make sure he’s not azleep.” She disappeared for a moment into the darkened room with the huge oaken doors.
Ruby turned and looked at me with an expression that needed no narration.
She knew exactly what this meant to me.
There were muffled, soft voices behind the doors and the faint, but clear, sound of “tellyvision”.
Then, the doors opened and, as so often happens in our lives, an entire video history of this man and his career played in my head in just a split second. The black clothes, the dark glasses, smiling in a pose with John, Paul, George and Ringo in the days that they opened for him, that magnificent operatic voice, that voice that inspired and moved and brought tears and laughter and sang in the tall grass behind the junior high school while two kids necked and groped, that sang in the tall grass behind a thousand junior high schools while thousands of kids necked and groped. And, then, fade to black, return to reality and walking toward me was the man who possessed that voice and that power. Walking toward me was the legend in flesh, the idol incarnate, this amazing huge powerful operatic dark glassed man in black.
“Hi,” he said, reaching out to shake my hand, ‘I’m Roy.”
He was wearing striped pajamas.
Standing, at full height, around five ten.
Clear eyeglasses about two inches thick.
And the words “I’m Roy” sounding just slightly deeper than Woody Allen.
Mercy.
I should have been disappointed.
Somehow, finding I could stand eye-to-eye with an idol was an enriching experience.
It made him just slightly less a legend.
But it made him infinitely, and delightfully, more human.
And it taught me my first, best lesson about the difference between myths and men.
I stayed with Roy and Barbara for only a few months, before moving on to the next adventure, but the time there is a cherished series of photos in that place in the heart where such things are stored. From picking up his young boys from school in the new Porsche to being awakened at six a.m via house phone and commanded lovingly to “come down and make ze peenya coladah so ve can vatch Vimbledon” the year that time differences brought the Connors-McEnroe finals and local rooster to life at about the same time, it was a wonderful couple of pages in the chapter.
And then there was that thing with the pool table.
After our meeting in the upstairs hallway that night, I saw Roy, himself, only once more, picking him up at the airport on one of his brief returns home.
Barbara, on the other hand, was home for the majority of that time, alternately bored and enthused, the perfect picture of the “princess” who gets away with it because the brat in her always wears just the right amount of charisma. She was, and is, a strikingly beautiful woman although I could tell from looking at the various photos and portraits of her around the house that she was struggling with a weight problem at the time, an effect of the loneliness she was feeling, no doubt, and we spent many a summer afternoon sitting in lawn chairs placed in the bottom of the Jacuzzi section of their pool, drinking champagne with peach slices, she, probably grateful to have someone to just talk with, and I, feeling the oddest sensation when I realized that I felt totally comfortable and right at home sitting in the Jacuzzi section of the pool and drinking champagne with peach slices.
If it sounds decadent, so be it. At the time, it seemed like the perfectly natural thing to do with someone like the wife of Roy Orbison.
What a letdown it would have been to relax by going for Slurpees at the local 7-11.
Toward the end of my time with them, Barbara, too, left to join Roy for the last leg of his current tour. While I actually found myself missing Barbara’s charming imperialism, it was certainly a magic time, finding myself sole resident of the home of a rock and roll legend.
And I would be a bold liar, not to mention a poor storyteller, if I were to say that I respected their privacy and merely kept the place safe and clean in their absence.
Okay, before you let that tsk, tsk come out, look me in the eye and tell me if you were in my shoes you wouldn’t have peeked into a drawer or closet or two.
All right, then, now shut up and let me tell you the rest of it.
Not wanting you to go away with the impression that I spent days rooting through the private possessions and looting their property, let me place confession into focus.
I didn’t steal any money, including any cash from the drawer in the kitchen where people like you and I keep coins, keys, pencils, old receipts, take out menus, etc.
In Barbara’s case, the drawer was filled with petty cash.....fives, tens and twentys..just in case of “oh, Scott, vill you go get some moh peach slices?....just grab zome cash from ze drawer.”
In a household like this, that happened more than you might imagine.
Nor did I root through drawers, cases, or boxes that were clearly private. I will confess, though, for purposes of cleansing the soul (not to mention increasing book sales) that one night, home alone, after one too many Jack and cokes, I did, after showering and changing clothes in the master bathroom, succumb to the temptation of opening one very small drawer in a wall of drawers inside the walk in closet bridging bath and bed and appropriated, for the souvenir hunter in all of us, one freshly laundered pair of the charming Mrs. Orbison’s panties.
So, come to think of it, I guess I misspoke when I said I didn’t root through drawers. Hey, I was young, drunk and how many times in your life does the opportunity arise to conduct a panty raid at the home of a legend?
The third floor of the house was actually a glorified attic, although in a huge chalet style home like this, attic does no justice. This room was carpeted and couched and chaired and unusually bright, since the backside of the house, the lake facing side was, from the second floor up, windows from floor to ceiling.
But the light of the sun was not the cause of the shine in this room.
That glow came from the walls.
Circling the room, on every wall and on every space that could be utilized without making it seem cluttered, were the gold records. Clearly framed and hung with care and love, these were the tangible documentation that this was, in fact, a home where rock and roll history resided.
“Oh, Pretty Woman”...”Crying”...”Running Scared”.........”Only The Lonely”...........they were all here, and more, many more. I wandered around for hours, reading, admiring, dreaming, a spellbound visitor to a museum closed to the public, a fan allowed to view the inner sanctum, to touch the hem of the garment, to...........
.... play the guitar?
Leaning in one corner of the room, between couch and wall was a Fender Stratocaster whose look and condition easily dated it early sixties. Could this, I asked myself, be the instrument where those killer licks came to life? I picked it up carefully but firmly, and brought it to my chest, in playing position. I struck the first few notes of the intro that had once brought Claudia Crochet lips a little closer to mine..........
da-da da-da-da
I gently put the guitar back down.
No further notes necessary.
Later that same evening, still buzzing from the attic trophy room experience, I sat in the main living room, sipping sour mash and luxuriating in the splendid opulence of it all. Resting comfortably on a huge sofa facing an equally roomy fireplace, I sipped and savored and let tired, but still wide, eyes wander about.
And there, on the mantle above the fireplace, placed discreetly among family photos, candleholders and other everyday people fireplace mantle kinds of things, my eyes came to rest on the penultimate symbol of musical achievement.
The Grammy.
For his performance with Emmylou Harris on the song, “That Lovin You Feelin Again” Roy, with Emmylou, was awarded the Grammy for Best Vocal Collaboration for the year 1978.
And here, right in front of a former grocery clerk turned songwriter, sat the Holy Grail itself.
I stood up and approached slowly, trying to simply savor the moment as much as youthful impatience would allow, and reached out tentatively, needing to make contact, but fearful of violating some reverence.
Supported by both the sheer joy of it all and the sour mash, I wrapped my hand around the sacred symbol and lifted, to bring it closer to my eye and heart and soul.
And the nameplate fell off, fluttering to the floor.
Nothing that had ever happened to me before, or after, that sent me a clearer message about the myth of fame and keeping things in perspective,
This coveted, revered grail of achievement was a simulated wood based high quality gold plate topped trophy with a plastic name plate, printed economically and attached to said base with what was obviously less than top of the line glue.
My best guess...about ten bucks in the local trophy shop.
Before inscription, of course.
Some days after that, in the course of putting away the stacks of cleaned laundry that had piled up on a table in the living room, I made another interesting discovery.
The laundry table, covered from edge to edge to edge to edge with folded, or needing to be folded, washed and dried was no laundry table at all.
It was a fairly new, regulation pool table.
How wonderfully perfect it was, being able to not only afford the finest in recreational equipment, but wealthy enough to stack towels and jockey shorts on it.
It actually was the companion piece to the table I had come across in the main foyer one day, draped with some heavy tablecloth and bearing stacks and stacks of old and new LP’s.
Feeling a surge of work ethic, I removed the LP’s and put them where they belonged (which probably wreaked havoc with the family after I left their employ, the last place they would look for records being, no doubt, the stereo cabinet...)
Then, pulling the tablecloth in order to launder it and determine what use to make of this table, I was taken aback (but only just a little, cause I had lived here awhile and knew the drill, by now) to discover this foyer table to be more than it seemed.
“Hey, Barbara,” I called to the lady of the house, who was sitting by the side of the pool, dipping toes, sipping champagne and reading Harlequins, “what do you want me to do with this television?”
The surprise factor was sufficient to get her on her feet and cutely waddling toward me.
“Vot tellyvision, Scaht?”
Kicking into the best game show prize girl impression I had ever done, I silently stepped aside, raising my arm and turning my hand in the celebrated “here it is” flip as I revealed what was behind door number two (or, in this case, tablecloth number one).
“Vell,” Barbara mused, “vot in de vorld have ve here?”
She seemed puzzled, then thoughtful, then reflective.......and then, the light.
“Oh, yes, zis is de set I had delivered zree months ago. I couldn’t figure out vot to do wit it, so I asked dem to just put it here till I could find a place for it.”
So, for three months, a brand new 25 inch mahogany console Curtis Mathis color television had sat in the foyer of their home being used as a table to stack old records.
Rich people....you got to love’em.
“Just put it anyvair, Scaht” and with that, Barbara was headed back to poolside and peaches.
Those last few weeks, alone in the house, with Barbara and the kids overseas with Roy, were probably the most fun I ever had with clothes on.
And, if I had set out to write fiction about the kinds of experiences one would expect living in the home of a superstar, they would have read nothing like the truth:
...leaving the house one afternoon on an errand and choosing the red Porsche as my chariot, I was driving up the long driveway to the always open gate when I spied one of the inevitable tour buses parked shoulder side. Though Roy’s gate was kept open, there was an understanding that buses could stop on the street and take pictures from there, but were not to enter the grounds themselves. As I approached the gate, evil imp whispered in my ear that there was a pair of sunglasses in the visor. Quickly, putting them on, and then adjusting my hair to suggest someone else, I pulled up in front of the bus, pausing only long enough to make sure the street was clear and then pulled out onto the street, passing along side the bus. As I looked back over my shoulder, two dozen faces and camera lenses were pressed against the windows of the bus and I swear that even over the roar of a finely tuned Porsche engine, I could hear the shutters clicking like castanets at a flamenco festival.
It still warms me to think that on a mantle somewhere in Des Moines, my picture is the center of conversation...
...one early afternoon, standing in the kitchen and fixing bologna and cheese, I was suddenly startled by a knock on the door, startled because the house itself was a good hundred and fifty yards from the street and the kitchen door was on the side of the house, not the first place any UPS driver or pizza guy would knock.
Opening the door, I was faced with a Norman Rockwell meets Andy Warhol portrait of the nuclear tourist family. Mother with wide brimmed straw hat, dark glasses and Polaroid draped around her neck, father with tastefully tacky tropical shirt, Bermuda shorts, black socks and wing tips and 2.3 children standing restlessly, but politely, at the side of either/or.
“Can I help you?” I asked in my imitation of the gatekeeper.
“Hi,” the dad barked cheerfully, “is this Roy Orbison’s house?”
“Yes,” I answered politely but evenly, “what can I do for you?”
“Is Roy home?”
By now I was fairly certain this was no stalker event or assassination attempt, but it was, still, my job to prevent incident and protect property (Barbara’s panties notwithstanding).
“Mr. Orbison isn’t at home right this second, what is it you wanted?”
“Well, we wanted to meet him and say how much we admire him and.....” and he blathered on for a good couple of minutes in the same sort of endearing babble that fans seem to speak from birth.
Finally he came up for air.
“Well, thanks, I’ll tell him you stopped by. Now, if you will excuse me....”. By now even I was impressed with my ability to sound official.
“Could we maybe take a picture of the house and pool?”
By the strict letter of the law, I should have showed them the door.
Or the gate, at least.
But, suddenly feeling the kindred spirit that had moved me to stare for hours at gold records on a wall, I thought what the hell.
“Sure. Look, I can’t let you in the house or let you touch anything, but if you’ll be careful, you can walk around back and take a couple of pictures.”
From the faces, you would have thought I had granted them eternal life.
“Thank you, God bless”, said Dad, leading the en masse’ turn toward the back yard and the pool area.
Ten feet or so later, Mom suddenly dropped back a step, turned and looked back at me, pulling her sunglasses down to make sure she saw whatever it was she thought she saw.
“Say, “ she said as if she had just thought of it, “...........are you anybody?”
My friends tell me I can’t resist the temptation to enlighten.
“Lady, “ I said in my best enlightening voice, “.........everybody is somebody.”
She looked disappointed.
Sorry.
Next time take the tour bus. I hear the chances of getting some great photos are really good...
...during that last couple of weeks, I invited a visit from a lady friend who lived in another state. Whatever pick up line I first used to make her acquaintance couldn’t hold a candle to the one she got on the phone call that started, “so...how would you like to come to Nashville and fuck my brains out in Roy Orbison’s king size bed?”
You can have your wine, candy, flowers and sentiment dripping couplets.
There is nothing quite so seductive or erotic as the chance to have sex dead square in the middle of rock and roll history.
Our time together was somewhat strained, as I think we were both beginning to realize that this was not to be the love of our lives, but we did manage to share some laughs, she got a chance to see gold records and cheap Grammys, swim in a pool with a beautiful view of the lake where Johnny Cash and Barbara Mandrell and their peers boated and frolicked.
She also, responding to the original invitation, fucked my brains out in Roy Orbison’s king size bed.
After she was, of course, bubble bathed and pampered in the oversized, mirrored, ornately decadent master bathroom.
Hey, I’m an animal, not a pig.
And then, in one of those once in a lifetime moments, we managed to drink, stumble and grope our way into the main living area where we took advantage of the small stack of freshly laundered and soft towels spread across the expanse of the regulation pool table.
Eight ball in the corner pocket, indeed...
I never saw her again after that visit as we both, as expected, moved on.
Five or six years later, I was sitting in my apartment, eating a bologna and cheese, listening to a good friend of Roy’s named George Harrison on my stereo when I got a phone call from my television reporter girlfriend.
“Did you hear that Roy Orbison died today?”
For the rest of that afternoon, I sat quietly, thinking about tall grass behind junior high schools, first kisses, champagne with peaches and giant walk in closets.
And even today, I get a warm feeling when I walk past a pool hall..."
Thanks, Roy and Barbara, for sharing your home and lives with me.
And, Barbara, though he had no way of knowing it at the time, Roy wrote, at least, the last two lyric lines of "Oh, Pretty Woman" with you in mind.
Godspeed, guys.
