Clear Springs (18 page)

The ride to Cincinnati took sixteen hours, overnight, on a bus that jolted around the curves along the Ohio River. I remember waking up at each stop and checking the town on the map, so I could say I had been there. I was so excited I couldn’t eat, even though the group performing was not entirely the original Hilltoppers. While two members of the group were in the Army (they’d been drafted; this was just after the Korean War), Jimmy Sacca hired a series of replacements. This version of the Hilltoppers was appearing with Barney Rapp’s orchestra at the Castle Farms Ballroom.

Castle Farms was a huge suburban dance hall that was packed with glamorous couples who drank liquor. Women smuggled in whiskey bottles under their wraps: I saw them do it. The Hilltoppers bounded onstage, wearing their red sweaters and beanies with “W” on them—the football sweaters and freshman beanies from their college. (I had ordered a beanie for myself from Western and had considered wearing
it that evening, but it didn’t go with my taffeta dress and borrowed rhinestone jewelry.) Their act was sensational. They sang all their hits, including “P.S. I Love You,” “From the Vine Came the Grape,” “I’d Rather Die Young,” and my favorite, “Poor Butterfly.” Their sound was principally Jimmy Sacca’s lead backed up with a simple “doowah” harmony. In their sweaters and baggy gray flannels, they swayed from side to side in unison, sort of like cheerleaders. At intermission, I was allowed to go backstage to meet my idols, and during their second show they introduced me proudly to the audience. This may have been my defining moment—my mothlike entry into the ethereal realm of stars. I was transported, as if I had just sprouted wings.

In the second show, the Hilltoppers wore tuxedos. Afterwards, they bought my mother and me Cokes and potato chips. The Hilltoppers didn’t drink, but they smoked and drove a Cadillac. They drove us back to the hotel in their sky-blue 1954 Fleetwood, and Jimmy Sacca gave me forty dollars to help operate the fan club. Mama was hooked. After that, we saved our berry money and took off to see the Hilltoppers whenever we got a chance. Mama drove our little yellow Nash Rambler or the Willys Jeep, and we sang Hilltoppers songs all the way.

The next time we saw the Hilltoppers was in Vincennes, Indiana. Mama and I were walking down the main street from Woolworth’s to our hotel there when we spotted the Cadillac. It was the Hilltoppers, arriving in town for their show. I waved at them, and the Cadillac pulled over. Jimmy was driving.

“It’s us again!” Mama cried.

Jimmy hopped out and hugged us. While the other members of the group—more replacements—checked into the hotel, Jimmy took us to eat at a grill down the street. We sat in a booth and ordered pork chops with applesauce and French fries.

“Well, what did you think when you heard the news?” Jimmy asked us worriedly.

“I was shocked,” I said lamely. I didn’t know what to say. I had seen the newspaper: one of the various substitute Hilltoppers had been arrested for possession of marijuana. My mother and I had never heard of marijuana, so the news didn’t really faze us.

“I was at the racetrack,” Jimmy said. “And the P.A. system called my name. I had no idea he was using the stuff. I fired him so fast he didn’t know what hit him.”

“He wasn’t one of the real Hilltoppers,” I said loyally. I longed for the day when Seymour and Don would rejoin the group. I knew I would like them, because they looked like such cutups in their pictures. Jimmy and Don and Seymour and Billy, the original group, were all family men, with wives and children.

After we finished eating, Jimmy lit up a Pall Mall, and Mama said, “If y’all come to Mayfield I’ll get you some free Tony Martin suits from the Merit.”

“How will you do that?” I asked, surprised.

“Willy Foster will let me have them,” Mama said confidently.

Mama was full of high regard for Willy Foster, the president of the company. He was a country person who had worked his way up from office boy. I remembered going to his farm for the employees’ picnic—fried chicken and roasting-ears and washtubs of cold drinks. His farm was like a plantation—a magnificent place with acres of pasture and horses and a little lake with rowboats.

“We’d love to come to Mayfield,” Jimmy said. “But you don’t have to get us any suits.”

“Well, you come, and I’ll cook you up a big supper and get you some suits,” Mama said. “I used to sew labels in coats, but the foreman told me to slow down because I was making more than the men. I could make a dollar an hour, I was so fast.” She laughed. “But with all the farm work I don’t have time to sew labels this summer.”

“But you don’t work there all the time, so they won’t let you have any free suits,” I argued.

“Oh, Willy’s good to his workers,” Mama said. “And if the Hilltoppers wore his suits, that would be good publicity.”

“Well, gee, Mrs. Mason,” Jimmy said. “That would be swell.”

He bought us strawberry sundaes and then we went to the show.

Mama and I traveled many places to see the Hilltoppers. We went to Centralia, Illinois; Princeton, Indiana; Herrin, Illinois; Blytheville, Arkansas; St. Louis and Cape Girardeau, Missouri. Mama loved the trips, and I knew it did her good to get away. She was always glad to throw a fishing pole in the car and go fishing, and these excursions were something like that. We plotted our getaways. Daddy didn’t object. I think he was somewhat wistful about our adventures, but he had to milk the cows and couldn’t go. Of course there was something unreal about our outings. We felt as though we were on
Queen for a Day
.

The Hilltoppers always welcomed us. Don and Seymour got out of the Army and took their rightful places in the group. They were boyish, modest, and funny. I adored them. Being a groupie in the fifties was as innocent as pie. The Hilltoppers never even swore around me, except once—the day Jimmy forgot the words to “My Cabin of Dreams,” which they lip-synched on a TV show. They took a protective attitude toward me, and they were crazy about my mother, who didn’t put on any airs just because she knew some stars. “I think it’s nice they’ve got that Cadillac and ain’t stuck-up,” Mama said. She kept talking about those Tony Martin suits and how good the Hilltoppers would look in them.

In a way, the Hilltoppers weren’t real to me. They were stars. If they walked into my house today, I’m sure Jimmy Sacca would give me one of his big bear hugs and we would fall easily into joking conversation. We were friends; but even though I spent a lot of time with the Hilltoppers during my high school years I knew very little about them. I didn’t ask about their backgrounds—their parents, brothers and sisters, schooling, and the rest. Background had no meaning to me, because I hadn’t been anywhere; where I was going was what counted.

I finally got to Detroit when the Hilltoppers played the Michigan State Fair. I went by myself, on the Brooks bus, because my mother had just given birth to my brother, Don. She named him after one of the Hilltoppers, Don McGuire. In Michigan, I was supposed to call Mama’s aunt Mary, in Pontiac. Her husband had died, and her brother Rudy was reported to have become a millionaire from working in a tire plant, saving his money, and living in a hut.

In Detroit that week, I stayed with a girl in my fan club whose father was a maintenance engineer at the Ford plant. They lived in a suburb in a gleaming new house with a guest room, and they fed me piles of tiny White Castle hamburgers and rich Hungarian cream cakes. I was so busy with the Hilltoppers, I kept putting off my telephone call to Aunt Mary. She did not know where I was staying or how to contact me. Pontiac was far away from where I was staying, and I didn’t want to miss the shows at the fair. I was living in another world now—where the tall buildings were. And I appeared with the Hilltoppers on Soupy Sales’s TV show. I remember answering questions about the fan club and someone throwing a pie. Eydie Gormé was also at the fair—before she married Steve Lawrence and they became Steve and Eydie. Eydie told me she admired my pixie haircut. Some weeks
later, I saw her on TV and she had had her hair pixied. But the head-liners at the fair were Bill Haley and the Comets and Billy Ward and the Dominoes. My life was astir with such sounds that were emerging from the familiar old Saturday night radio show Daddy and I had listened to for years; behind the roaring train of rock-and-roll, the Hilltoppers’ style began to seem slightly quaint, a caboose.

I never got around to calling Aunt Mary. After I reached Mayfield, on the all-night bus, I learned that Mary had telephoned my parents, worried about me. It shocked me that a relative, planted far away and seemingly disconnected, would be so concerned about me. As it happened, I never saw Mary again, and it was years before I gave any thought to her brother Robert, my lost grandfather.

The day my mother and I drove to a show in Blytheville, Arkansas, was the day the Russians sent up Sputnik. After the Hilltoppers’ show, Don drove back to Mayfield with us in our Nash Rambler; he planned to get the bus to his home in Owensboro. As we rode through the night, listening to Chuck Berry and Little Richard and Elvis Presley on an after-hours show from New Orleans, we were aware of Sputnik spying on us.

I noted the Sputnik launch in my 1957 diary:

That fall, when I was a senior, a girl named Janine Williams went with my mother and me to see the Hilltoppers at a ballroom in a little town in Tennessee. Janine made a great impression on the Hilltoppers with her teasing, flirtatious personality. All the crinolines she wore under her dress made her look ready for flight, for a trip into outer space. “My brother went to Louisville to the basketball tournament last year,” she told the Hilltoppers. “He won the tickets, and he flew up there in an airplane. And he stayed in the same hotel as the teams.”

This was an outright lie—I didn’t know why she told it—but the Hilltoppers didn’t know the difference, so I didn’t know what to say. I
was happy, though, showing off the Hilltoppers to my friend. Jimmy introduced both of us to the audience at a special moment in the show before the group sang “To Be Alone,” in which Don did an Ink Spots–style monologue in his surprising bass voice and caused girls to squeal. (He had cherubic looks.) The Hilltoppers had a new record, “Starry Eyes,” and I was disappointed when they didn’t sing it. I was afraid their new record wasn’t going to be a hit, and I was getting frustrated with the power of positive thinking. I hadn’t told the Hilltoppers about the ESP experiments I had been trying (they involved sending telepathic messages to d.j.s to play Hilltoppers tunes). I was afraid they would laugh.

“What do you think of Elvis Presley?” Janine asked the Hilltoppers later. Elvis Presley was singing “All Shook Up” on the radio of the Cadillac as Jimmy drove us out to a café for hamburgers.

“He’s great,” said Seymour. “He has a fine voice.”

“If I could wiggle like that, we’d make a million dollars,” Jimmy said.

Don laughed. “Our manager had a chance once to manage Elvis Presley, but he turned it down. He said nobody with a name like ‘Elvis’ would get anywhere.”

“I like Elvis,” Mama said. “He can really carry a tune.”

For me, there was something as familiar about Elvis as our farm, with the oak trees and the cows and the chickens. It was as though Elvis were me, listening to WLAC and then coming up with his own songs about the way he felt about the world. I tried not to think too hard about Elvis, but I couldn’t help it. Janine had said to me, “If I got Elvis in a dark corner, I’d tear his clothes off.”

With the arrival of rock-and-roll, the Hilltoppers had begun recording livelier imitations of black tunes—“The Door Is Still Open,” “Only You,” and Ruth Brown’s “Teardrops from My Eyes.” On some of the songs, you could hear a rock-and-roll saxophone or a boogie piano and even a bass vocal “bum-bum-bum” against the “do-do-do-do-do-do-do” background harmony. I was ready to embrace the new and outlandish, whether it was rock-and-roll or jazz or sack dresses—a hot style from France one year. (Mama made me one.) I was reading
The Search for Bridey Murphy
,
The Practical Way to a Better Memory
,
The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. Reincarnation: A Hope of the World
impressed me. I was filled with philosophical questions, and I
wrote a paper for English class on agnosticism. My teacher, Miss Florence, summoned me to her office and accused me of plagiarism. “Young lady, you have no business entertaining ideas like this,” she said. “Where did you get such an idea?”

I quaked. “I read about it. I read lots of philosophy,” I said, which was only partly a lie. Reincarnation was philosophy, sort of. I told her I had read John Locke, which
was
a lie. But I hadn’t plagiarized. I really believed it was possible that God did not exist, and furthermore it seemed likely that there was no way to know whether He did or not.

Miss Florence had lavender hair, and she kept a handkerchief tucked in her sleeve. Now and then she daintily plucked it out and snuffled into it. She was a terrifying woman, much admired by the whole town. Everyone since the thirties, including Daddy, had been in her senior English class. Her sister, Miss Emma, was the teacher who had flunked Daddy in algebra.

“Take my advice,” Miss Florence said, growing softer. “Give up these strange ideas of yours. Your field is mathematics. That’s what you’re good at. Stay away from these peculiar questions, because they’re destructive. And stick with the Bible. That’s all the philosophy you’ll ever need.”

I was silent, rigid with fury—too intimidated to speak.

“You have a lot of big ideas, but they will lead you astray,” Miss Florence said in dismissal.