Buddy Holly: Biography (57 page)

In the lobby after the premiere, Griggs unofficially bestowed the imprimatur of the Buddy Holly Memorial Society on the film by congratulating director Steve Rash, producer Freddy Bauer, and executive producer Edward H. Cohen, comparing the film with
American Graffiti,
the ultimate fifties movie. Contradicting his statement just six months before that the film could hardly be considered a Buddy Holly movie without Buddy’s voice, Griggs recanted, telling Rash, Cohen, and Bauer “that I loved the movie and was on cloud nine with the job that they did,” he later wrote in
Reminiscing.
Busey mingled with the crowd and chatted with Holly fan Don Larson at the popcorn machine. They were discussing rare Holly memorabilia, Larson revealed in a 1993 interview. Busey had visited Buddy’s parents in Lubbock and seen one of the photographs that Joanie Svenson had taken of Buddy, Waylon, and Tommy during the “Winter Dance Party” with her Brownie Hawkeye camera. Svenson later became Larson’s girlfriend and gave him the photos. Busey asked Larson for copies.

A few feet away from the movie star, the Crickets—Niki, Sonny, Jerry, and Joe B.—observed their first reunion since January 1958. Jerry and Joe B. had been rendered nonpersons by the movie, which portrayed them but changed their names. Exploited again, the Crickets must have found it a bittersweet reunion indeed. “That movie just really rubbed me the wrong way,” Allison later told Jeremy Powers. To Griggs he added, “I’ve got to be irritated when they say, ‘Here’s a guy named Jesse, and it’s not me.’” Moreover, Allison and Mauldin felt that the aborted Holly film,
Not Fade Away,
had been ripped off, that information Allison had imparted to Busey on the set later turned up in
The Buddy Holly Story,
Allison confided to Goldrosen. These objections notwithstanding, the Crickets posed with Gary Busey when he strolled over to them at the premiere, and shutterbugs Don Larson and Mary Griggs captured the moment for posterity.

Following the premiere, the producers hosted a party at the Longhorn Ballroom. A C&W band played, Busey sat in with them, and Don Stroud played the bongo drums. The bandleader was Busey’s brother. Joe B. disliked “the whole movie, period,” he later told Griggs. The objections he mentioned seemed singularly trivial—Buddy never wore white socks, and his trousers were not as short as Busey’s—until Joe B. confessed what was really bothering him: he wasn’t given credit for winning his fight with Buddy over the stinky cigar in London! “J.I. and Buddy didn’t get in a fight, and J.I. didn’t knock Buddy’s teeth out. I did,” said Joe. B. He admitted that he’d wanted to produce the Holly biography himself and was glad that someone had at last figured out how to get it on the screen. “For some reason,” he said, he’d never been able to start “the wheels turning.”

Jerry was furious over the sullen, slovenly “a _ _ _ _ _ _” the movie made him out to be, he later told Griggs, especially in the scene where Stroud, playing Jerry, makes sexist and racist cracks about Maria Elena, which “
really
irritated the s _ _ _” out of him, fumed Jerry. The insult had actually come from an engineer rather than one of Buddy’s friends, Allison told Powers in 1989.
The Buddy Holly Story,
Allison added in a 1993 interview, “was all bullshit. Don’t base anything on that movie. Wasn’t anybody involved in it that knew what went on for real. They loosely took it from John Goldrosen. They spelled Buddy’s name right was about the only thing they had right.”

The day following the Dallas premiere, several of the VIPs who’d attended, including Goldrosen, Beecher, and Griggs, drove to Lubbock to see Buddy’s birthplace. All they found at 1911 Sixth Street was an empty lot. After the house had fallen into disrepair, the city contracted with a private firm to demolish it. Later it was discovered that the house was still standing, somewhere outside the city limits. Fans started a collection to buy it back and turn it into a museum, but Ella Holley objected to the project. The effort and expense that would be required to retrieve the old house, which probably embarrassed her, would not be “worthwhile,” she told Griggs. Buddy’s mother convinced his fans to “drop the idea,” Griggs revealed in 1978. Though the Holley house was modest, to be sure, with the proper vision it could have become the center of a thriving tourist complex or theme park. Buddy’s fans were understandably disappointed, reacting pretty much as Elvis’s would if Memphis announced it was razing Graceland. Griggs denounced Lubbock’s insensitivity. “It was Buddy and nothing else that had put Lubbock on the map,” he wrote in
Reminiscing.

Though Lubbock had lost the premiere to Dallas, the producers decided to make a special event out of the opening of
The Buddy Holly Story
when they got around to showing it in Buddy’s hometown, two days following the Dallas premiere. They were disappointed to learn from Lubbock officials that the city had erected no memorials to Buddy. The city hastily tacked up a sign on an undeveloped patch of property in north Lubbock proclaiming it to be the Buddy Holly Memorial Park. Located on a hill by a lake, it was a lovely setting but hardly a park or “recreation area,” as they called it. Nonetheless, Mayor Dirk West hosted a ceremony, and Busey made a brief speech.

The sound-track album from the film was available on the Epic label, but it didn’t make the U.S.
Billboard Book of Top 40 Albums.
Evidently it fared no better abroad, where British author Alan Mann wrote that the “soundtrack album died the death” and attributed its “modest” sales to the fact that the “superb twenty Golden Greats of Holly/Crickets material had rocketed to No. 1 on the album charts for three consecutive weeks and—thankfully—creamed off the main sales.” John Tobler wrote that on March 25, 1978, “nineteen years after his death Buddy Holly topped the U.K. album charts for the first time. Before the compilation album
20 Golden Greats
finally achieved this feat, the closest he and his backing group, the Crickets, had been was with 1963’s
Reminiscing.
”

Gold and platinum records reached Lubbock from abroad in time for the May movie premiere. While in Lubbock for the occasion, Griggs and a contingent of Holly fans visited with Buddy’s parents, Norman Petty, Hi Pockets Duncan, Larry Corbin of KLLL, and Larry Holley. Beecher presented gold records to Ella and L.O. Holley and to Maria Elena, representing 500,000 sales of the British LP, which had the long and cumbersome title,
Buddy Holly Lives—Buddy Holly & the Crickets 20 Golden Greats.
Shortly thereafter Maria Elena told Griggs that she received a platinum record from England, representing 1 million sales.

Members of Buddy’s family viewed the Busey “biopic” for the first time at the Lubbock opening on May 20, 1978. Initially they seemed pleased, even thrilled. As usual, Buddy’s parents were astonished that anyone remembered Buddy at all. Though the family appreciated Buddy’s talent, they never expected him to become a world figure, Mrs. Holley had told Griggs the previous year. At the screening, an emotional L.O. stood up as Busey sang “Not Fade Away,” pointed to the screen, and informed the entire audience that the person being portrayed in the film was his son, according to Ed Cohen, the movie’s executive producer. Buddy’s mother was “proud” that a movie had been made about her son, she told Griggs on July 1, 1978. “We think it’s just great,” she said, adding that Busey had caught Buddy’s “mannerisms … attitudes, and the way he stood.” Mindful of Buddy’s loyal British fans, Mrs. Holley expressed dismay over the film’s omission of Buddy’s 1958 tour of the United Kingdom. She hoped the British wouldn’t be “upset.” Altogether she’d seen the movie four times. She explained that on the first viewing, she “didn’t even see it” because she “was expecting one thing and another came on the screen.”

At first Larry Holley was “real pleased” with the movie, despite its realistic use of profanity, which clashed with his Baptist principles. Busey’s portrayal “showed Buddy as the go-getter that he was,” capturing the essential Buddy, which Larry summed up as “drive and determination,” he told Griggs in 1978.
The Buddy Holly Story
played to standing-room-only crowds throughout Texas and to full houses when it opened simultaneously in New York on July 21, 1978, at the Criterion Theater, a sixteen-hundred-seat venue in Times Square, and at the Gemini I and II, and the Cinerama Dome in Los Angeles.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nominated Busey for the 1978 Best Actor Oscar. The competition that year was Warren Beatty for
Heaven Can Wait;
Jon Voight for
Coming Home;
Robert De Niro for
The Deer Hunter;
and Laurence Olivier for
The Boys From Brazil.
“Cunning tactics by one publicist won an unlikely nomination for Gary Busey in the title role of
The Buddy Holly Story,
” Anthony Holden later wrote in
Behind the Oscars: The Secret History of the Academy Awards.
Others, like Rona Barrett, the powerful television personality, vigorously championed Busey’s performance. At the awards presentation at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, Johnny Carson greeted a glittering audience and introduced John Wayne, whose emaciated appearance shocked many. Having survived a long struggle with cancer, he gratefully acknowledged the audience’s standing ovation, saying, “That’s just about the only medicine a fella’d ever really need.” It was now twenty years since he’d muttered the lines in
The Searchers
that inspired “That’ll Be the Day.” “Believe me when I tell you I’m mighty pleased that I can amble down here tonight,” Wayne told the Oscar audience. “I plan to be around for a whole lot longer.” He died less than two months later.

Although Busey lost out to Jon Voight,
The Buddy Holly Story
won in another category: “Original Song Score and Its Adaptation or Adaptation Score.” Although adapter Joe Renzetti took home the Oscar, it belonged, in a sense, to Buddy Holly, composer of the film’s songs, but the Academy Awards are intended to reward movie-industry personnel.

After the picture had been in release for a while, most of the people connected to Buddy’s estate turned against it. Paul McCartney complained that the
The Buddy Holly Story
“was hardly the true story” and started filming
The Real Buddy Holly Story,
which opened with Sonny Curtis singing his song of the same title. Larry and Travis Holley, Ben Hall, Jerry, Joe B., Sonny, Tommy Allsup, and Vi Petty talked directly into the camera, recalling old times with Buddy. At the end, Keith Richards delivered a ringing coda, saying that Buddy’s influence could be heard in virtually every new rock song played on the radio. Working with producer Anthony Wall and director Richard Spence, McCartney crafted an adulatory documentary film, the best part of which is McCartney singing “Words of Love,” accompanying himself on an acoustic guitar. It was shown on BBC-TV’s
Arena
program in 1987.

Another TV documentary on Buddy was produced by Iowa PBS-TV and broadcast nationally on the PBS network. The one-hour show was entitled
Reminiscing
and featured appearances by the Crickets. Maria Elena was shown at a press conference but “she’s not talking,” said the narrator, “not by choice but by legal necessity.” He explained that her attorney had advised her that any participation in the documentary
Reminiscing
could jeopardize the Buddy Holly estate’s contract with Innovisions, which had agreed to pay the estate “a tidy sum” for portrayal rights. The narrator characterized the arrangement as “one more example of the complexities that have evolved from a man of such simple beginnings.”

Relations between Buddy’s parents and the producers of
The Buddy Holly Story
got even more complex in October 1979 when they sued for $300,000. Though they’d previously told Griggs they loved the movie, Ella and L. O. Holley now charged that the film inaccurately portrayed their relationship to Buddy. The suit was settled out of court for an undisclosed amount. Of all Buddy’s intimates, only Maria Elena failed to criticize the movie’s content publicly. Actress Maria Richwine, an elegant Audrey Hepburn type, played Maria Elena in the film.

That
The Buddy Holly Story
manipulated and exploited the Holly legend was finally discovered and exposed by
Rolling Stone,
which ran companion articles on September 21, 1978, entitled “The Gary Busey Story” and “The Buddy Holly Story.” Rock journalist Chet Flippo concluded, “The movie does not seem to be about the real Buddy Holly.” Compounding Hollywood’s culpability was the revelation, made by producer Freddy Bauer to John Goldrosen, that the distortions were not committed accidentally or out of ignorance but with willful deliberation. Bauer told Goldrosen that he was not interested in a “true-to-life movie” but in a film that would be “
bigger
than life.” Perhaps the movie should have been called
Buddy Hollywood.

The saddest development in the aftermath of the film was the 1995 cocaine overdose of its star, Gary Busey, in Los Angeles, who in recent years had been playing villains in high-budget action movies. After his release from the hospital, the actor, now fifty years old, was served with a felony cocaine-possession and three misdemeanor charges. He checked himself into California’s famous drug-rehabilitation facility, the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, but the district attorney’s office stated that arrangements were being made for Busey to surrender. If convicted, he could be imprisoned for three years on the felony and six months to a year on the misdemeanors.

In 1979, after its fleeting moment in the limelight as a result of
The Buddy Holly Story,
Lubbock decided it would be a good idea to erect a statue of Buddy. To raise money for the project, Waylon Jennings and his band, the Waylors, gave a concert in Lubbock. Waylon had come a long way from the cotton patch. He was getting $15,000 to $25,000 per appearance on the road, a far cry from the $800-a-month he’d received in Buddy’s band, and his convoy of two Silver Eagle buses led by a chrome-plated eighteen-wheel Mack truck was a considerable improvement over the converted school buses of the “Winter Dance Party.” In 1961, Waylon and his wife, Maxine, had named their new baby son, Buddy Dean, after Buddy Holly and James Dean. Their marriage ended shortly thereafter.