Authors: David Halberstam
Of the Nelson sons, David was the good, steady, reliable older son, and Ricky was the younger son, more likely to get into trouble and to challenge, albeit lightly, the authority of the house. The Nelsons, were, of course, wonderfully attractive; the parents were handsome without being too sexy. Ozzie, after all, had been a star quarterback at Rutgers and later he and Harriet had been performers—theirs was an entertainment marriage. The boys seemed to embody pleasant American good looks. They looked as if they had been bred to be on a show about a typical American family: They were handsome, likable, seemingly virtuous and normal. They were the
kids that ordinary American kids wanted to emulate. Popularity seemed to come easily to them, just as popularity came easily to their parents. Ricky was, if anything, better-looking and more natural than his older brother on air; it was toward his talents that the show was soon to be directed.
One reason that Americans as a people became nostalgic about the fifties more than twenty-five years later was not so much that life was better in the fifties (though in some ways it was), but because at the time it had been portrayed so idyllically on television. It was the television images of the era that remained so remarkably sharp in people’s memories, often fresher than memories of real life. Television reflected a world of warm-hearted, sensitive, tolerant Americans, a world devoid of anger and meanness of spirit and, of course, failure. If Ozzie spawned imitators with the success of his rather bland family, then eventually the different families all seemed interchangeable, as if one could pluck a dad or a mom or even a child from one show and transplant him or her to another.
In February 1979
Saturday Night Live,
reflecting the more cynical edge of a new era, did exactly that on the occasion of an appearance by Ricky Nelson. The skit turned the suburban world into a Twilight Zone, with Dan Aykroyd playing Rod Serling. Serling/Aykroyd began as the narrator: “Meet Ricky Nelson, age sixteen. A typical American kid, in a typical American kitchen in a typical American black-and-white-TV family home. But what’s about to happen to Ricky is far from typical unless you happen to live in the Twilight Zone.” At which point Ricky, on his way home from school, wanders into the home of the
Cleavers.
But he is treated warmly there. June offers him a brownie but warns him against spoiling his appetite. Ricky tells June his name. “Nelson,” she says. “What a lovely name.” But surrounded by all this warmth, he remains lost and cannot find his home. Again we hear Serling/Aykroyd: “Submitted for your approval. A sixteen-year-old teenager walking through Anytown, USA, past endless Elm Streets, Oak Streets, and Maple Streets, unable to distinguish one house from the other ...” The next house he enters is that of the Andersons, of
Father Knows Best.
The Andersons immediately decide he is Betty’s blind date. He tells them his name. Bill Anderson, the resident dad, says, “Nelson? What a nice name. Presbyterian?” Ricky answers: “My father is, sir. My mother is Episcopal.” Bill says: “Well, I certainly hope you’ll stay for dinner.” And Jane chimes in, “You’ll want to wash up and have a brownie first.” On he continues through the family of
Make Room For Daddy,
and then on to the Ricardos’,
where he arrives just in time to see Lucy burn the turkey in the oven.
The world of the Nelsons was not, in reality, art imitating life. The low-key Ozzie Nelson of the sitcoms had little in common with the real-life Ozzie, who was a workaholic. He wrote, produced, and directed the shows and was an authoritarian, almost dictatorial presence on the set who monitored every aspect of his children’s lives. He placed both of them in the television series when they were quite young, and constantly reminded them of their obligation to the family and to all the people who worked on the show. The incomes of all these people, he kept pointing out, depended on the success of the show, and he demanded that both boys not only perform well but that they live up to their squeaky-clean images off camera. If they got in trouble, he reminded them, they might not only damage their own personal reputations but undermine the show as well. That was no small burden to place on teenagers growing up in the late fifties. Ricky, said his friend Jimmie Haskell, “had been raised to know that there were certain rules that applied to his family. They were on television. They represented the wonderful, sweet, kind, good family that lived next door, and that Ricky could not do anything that would upset that image. He knew those were the rules.”
Ozzie Nelson was not merely a man who put great pressure on his children, but in contrast to the readily available Ozzie of the show, who always seemed to be around, he was gone much of the time—albeit at home, but gone. He would retire after dinner to his office and work all night writing the scripts and the directorial notes for the coming episode, sleeping late and coming downstairs around noon. The Nelsons were, therefore, for all their professional success, very different from the family depicted on the show, they lived with an immense amount of pressure and unreconciled issues. Chief among those issues was the fact that Ozzie Nelson had in effect stolen the childhood of both of his sons and used it for commercial purposes; he had taken what was most private and made it terribly public. After all, the children cast in the other family sitcoms of the era, despite the pressure of being teenage stars and celebrities, at least had a chance to get back to their own normal lives under their own different names; but in the case of the Nelsons, the show merged the identities of the children in real life with those portrayed on television.
If Ozzie Nelson was by no means a talented writer, he was nonetheless shrewd and intuitive, with a fine instinct for how the rest of the country wanted to see itself in terms of a middle-class family portrait; if he did not like and did not understand the increasingly
sharp divisions beginning to separate the young from their parents in America, then he understood how to offer a comforting alternative to it. American families, he understood, did not want at that moment a weekly program to reflect (and, worse, encourage) teenage rebellion. There was too much of that already. Americans did not want to come home and watch a warring family. People were just beginning to worry about juvenile delinquency in inner cities, and the disturbing phenomenon of rock musicians like Elvis Presley was growing ever larger.
On the show, David was good and obedient, the classic firstborn, and Ricky, if written as the more contentious younger brother, was not defiant, or openly rebellious. This was a home where there was still plenty of respect for parents and Dad and Mom knew best. “Ozzie,” wrote Joel Selvin in his biography of Ricky, “knew he had a gold mine in his cottage industry, fashioning a mythic American family out of a real one. If the two young boys ever felt the pressure of living up to roles created for them by an omniscient father, there was no escape. Anything the boys did could wind up on the show.”
Ricky Nelson, whose identity was being shaped by scripts written by his father, found the search for his identity far more difficult than an ordinary child would. What part of him was real? What part of him was the person in the script? Did he dare be the person he thought he was, or did that go too far outside the parameters of Ozzie’s scripts? The Nelsons were no more an all-American family than any other family; the generational tensions that ran through so many others ran through theirs as well, albeit they remained largely unrecognized. Moreover, the kind of mistakes that were normal, indeed mandatory, for most boys stumbling through adolescence were unacceptable in this tightly run family. The boys were always to be well groomed, they were always to be polite; they were to make no mistakes. A mishap that was minor for another child might land on the front pages of newspapers if it happened to a Nelson.
Ricky started on the television show when he was twelve, and by thirteen he was giving interviews to the
Los Angeles Times
on the role of the child actor (“I think the first requirement for a young actor, or any actor for that matter, is to lose his self-consciousness and be himself. People who are ill at ease and self-conscious are people who are thinking too much of themselves and worrying about the impression they are making on others. The best actors lose themselves in their parts and read their dialogue as naturally as possibly ...”). What any adolescent needs is the chance to be himself, to have a childhood and stumble into adolescence; what Ricky and David had
were scripts portraying them and their lives as they were supposed to be.
Ozzie Nelson had always ruled the real home with an unbending authority, one that was not to be questioned. When one of his sons displeased him, he did not exactly raise his voice, but his tone changed. Ricky might be in the room with some of his friends only to hear Ozzie’s voice of displeasure: “... Rick ...
son!
... could you come in here for a minute.” Although there was no anger yet showing in his voice, there was no mistaking the measured tone, that it was a command and that something had gone wrong. Ricky seemed to change almost instantly when Ozzie’s voice showed irritation, his friends thought. As Ricky moved into his middle teens, the contradictions in his life were becoming greater and greater. He was supposed to be a normal teenager, a fantasy model for millions of other teenagers, but even his mistakes had to be invented by his father and written into the script. He was making as much as $150,000 a year, but he was existing on a $5-a-week allowance. And when he took a girlfriend to a drive-in movie, he sometimes had to back in, to save the cost of the ticket. It was, thought one friend, as if Ricky longed to be his own person with his own life but Ozzie would not let him. In effect, because Ricky could not make his mistakes when he was young, he had to make them when he was an adult.
Gradually, the tensions between Ricky and Ozzie began to grow. Ricky was a naturally gifted tennis player, and Ozzie wanted him to play tennis; his way of rebelling was to give up tennis. He cruised the neighborhood in his car, a mandatory rite of California adolescence, but his parents were uneasy with it. (“I was,” he later noted, “a nice greaser.”) There were as he hit his mid-teens, as the first signs of the coming of a new youth culture were surfacing, frequent arguments between father and son about hair length and about smoking. “Goddamnit,” Ozzie would say, “I told you to cut your hair,” and Ricky would answer that he had cut it. It was a struggle for identity, and in the beginning Ozzie Nelson always won, for the obligations to the family and to the show always came first. But Ozzie and Harriet were uneasy—such tensions had never been experienced with David.
Friends who were believed to be a bad influence on him were banished. It was never done overtly—no one was ever ordered out of the house—but if Ozzie did not like someone, if he thought a friend was a bad influence, that his hair was a little long, he deftly put obstacles in the way of the friendship. As such, noted one friend, Ozzie was extremely skillful at whittling down Ricky’s list of friends.
Eventually, Ozzie made what may have been his critical mistake. He decided to seize on Ricky’s genuine love of rock music and annex it for the show. In a way it was a success, and one could not at the time argue with the choice, for overnight he turned a young man who longed to be like Elvis Presley into a sanitized middle-class version of him. Ricky Nelson as a rock star—combining so naturally the two most powerful forces affecting the young in those days, television and rock—was an instant entertainment success.
At age sixteen, Ricky loved rock and wanted to cut a record for his girlfriend. Ozzie, understanding the commercial possibilities—after all, Ricky was good-looking, the right age, and was clean and therefore acceptable in millions of homes where parents loathed the idea of the more sinister Elvis—shrewdly arranged for him to do a song on the show. Ricky was reluctant. He did not think he was ready yet—and musically, he was right. His singing and guitar-playing abilities were limited. Ozzie disagreed and simply went ahead and did it. The show was about the family going by ship on a vacation to Europe; near the end of it, Ozzie says to the bandleader, quite casually, “How about Ricky singing a rhythm and blues tune and the rest of us will give him a little moral support?” Ricky thereupon picked up an old Fats Domino song, “I’m Walkin’.” The show aired on April 10, 1957.
The results were phenomenal. He was an instant sensation. He was a rock star before he was any good. Elvis Presley’s success had been genuine: The young had understood that he was theirs, and television had been forced in the person of Ed Sullivan to capitulate, however reluctantly, and to accept him. In effect, the establishment had fought the coming of Elvis and fought his success; in the case of Ricky, it was the reverse. He was the artificial invention of conventional middle-class taste makers in a show that conventional Americans loved; his success therefore threatened no one. If anything, it seemed to sanitize rock. Yet music was important to Ricky in a way that his television career was not. The television show represented duty and obligation, something he did for his family because he had to and about which he had no choice. The show belonged to Ozzie, not to him; the person on the show, he felt, was not him, and he longed to escape from the shadow of cute little Ricky. But in the line dividing the generations in America, rock was the critical issue with which the young could define themselves and show that they were different from their parents. Now here was his father taking what was truly his and incorporating it into the show, giving it, in effect, an
Ozzie and Harriet
parental seal of approval. Ricky wanted to be
Carl Perkins, noted Selvin, his biographer, but because his father had pushed him so quickly and made him play on the show before he was ready, he was a joke to real musicians—whose approval he desperately sought. A few years later Elvis Presley, having been away from live performances for a while, was planning his return to the stage but was worried about how he would look and how he should handle his hair. At that point, Priscilla, his wife, mentioned a billboard featuring Ricky Nelson, who looked particularly attractive. Perhaps, she suggested, Elvis could take a look at it. “Are you goddamn crazy,” he told her. “After all these years Ricky Nelson and Fabian and that whole group have more or less followed in my footsteps and now I’m supposed to copy them. You gotta be out of your mind, woman.”