Buddy Holly: Biography (60 page)

Though Maria Elena once swore never to visit Clear Lake, she told the six hundred fans assembled in front of the Surf, “Now that I am here, I am seeing just how much the people here loved Buddy and the others and how they are so sad that this was the last place he ever performed.” Then, smiling, she held aloft a new street sign,
BUDDY HOLLY PL.

Jay P. Richardson, Jr., born eighty-four days after his father had died, was presented with the Bopper’s watch, which had turned up at the Cerro Gordo County Courthouse. “It’s heartwarming to take this back home with me where it belongs,” he said, adding that a film biography of his father was in the works. (The film has not yet materialized.) He also spoke of his mother’s reaction to the February 3, 1959, crash, revealing that she refused to talk about it for twenty-eight years. She was so hurt, he said, that “she tried to put it behind her.”

Ritchie’s half-brother, Bob Morales, was also present. In the 1987 movie
La Bamba,
starring Lou Diamond Phillips as Ritchie, Bob Morales was played by actor Esai Morales. Portraying Buddy was singer Marshall Crenshaw, who’d had a Top 40 hit, “Someday, Someway,” in 1982. Former Stray Cat Brian Setzer played Eddie Cochran, and the East L.A. band Los Lobos re-created Ritchie’s music. Like Gary Busey’s Buddy Holly,
La Bamba
bore little relation to its subject’s life and was yet another example of the continuing exploitation of the early legends of rock. Instead of concentrating on Ritchie, the producers focused on the relationship between Ritchie and Bob Morales until it became the film’s central conflict. Yielding to ethnic clichés, the film presented Ritchie as a migrant laborer and a farmworker, which was far from the truth. The Tijuana episode in which a mysterious
curandero
gives Ritchie an amulet made of snakeskin was purely fictitious.

Appallingly, when
La Bamba
’s sound track was released on cassette tape, Ritchie’s name was mentioned nowhere on the package. Hollywood people and singers got all the credit. The film
La Bamba
demonstrated once again that Hollywood seems incapable of portraying rock ’n’ roll authentically. In the United States, the exploitation of legend and history and its distortion to make money seems to be almost an ingrained habit. With the advent of the nineties, the British theater would come closer to the truth, offering the best dramatization yet of Buddy Holly’s life.

Perhaps only in England, where respect and support for Buddy had often been more consistent than in his native country, could an artistically serious work about Buddy come into being. The spectacular British musical
Buddy
originated in 1989 in London and was in another class altogether from misguided U.S. efforts to portray Buddy. The creative team included Laurie Mansfield, who was responsible for the original idea, and designer Adam Walmsley, whose ingenious set for
Buddy
could switch from KDAV to Nor Va Jak to Decca to Clear Lake with remarkable dexterity and speed. When
Buddy
opened in the West End, the
Sunday Times
critic called it “an unashamed, rabble-rousing fiesta. It’s got everything.” The
London Telegraph-Mirror
reviewer saluted the “big cast … big sound, and big entertainment.”

On November 4, 1990, the show moved to New York, opening at the Shubert Theater, starring Paul Hipp, whose scintillating Buddy Holly left Busey’s interpretation miles behind. To celebrate the U.S. premiere, Paul McCartney moved Buddy Holly Week to America and threw a party at the Lone Star Café in Greenwich Village, not far from Buddy and Maria Elena’s old address. During the party, Paul Hipp sang with the Crickets. Among the 140 guests, who stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the Lone Star, were Ahmet Ertegun and Tommy Allsup. McCartney and his wife, Linda, and Ricky Van Sheldon jumped up at the finale for an all-star jam.

Though the venerable Shubert Theater had housed some rousing shows since its opening in 1913, including Mae West’s
Catherine Was Great
and Joe Papp’s
A Chorus Line,
it had never experienced anything like
Buddy,
which stirred the audience to frenzies not seen in Times Square since the heyday of Alan Freed’s holiday rock concerts. “Buddy has them dancin’ in the aisles,” wrote the
New York Post
’s critic. “The audience is elevated to joyful chaos.” Hipp’s portrayal won him a Laurence Olivier Award nomination for the Outstanding Performance of the Year by an Actor in a Musical. Despite its excellence and the precedence of a long run in London, the show lasted only a few months on Broadway, a reflection, perhaps, of New York’s disdain for the pioneering artists of America’s most popular native art form.

The show did better in the hinterlands. In 1991,
Buddy
went on a triumphant U.S. tour, including performances in Lubbock, where Buddy was played by Joe Warren Davis, and the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, where Christopher Eudy, guitarist and vocalist in the alternative band the Nubile Thangs, assumed the title role. “The Lubbock audience stood and cheered to an extent I have never seen before in this ultraconservative town,” wrote Bill Griggs. In the audience were the Holley family, Snuff Garrett, and the Fireballs’ George Tomsco.

Five different productions of
Buddy
went on to enrapture foreign audiences throughout the world. It had all started in England, and it came as no surprise that Britain’s love affair with Buddy extended all the way to No. 10 Downing Street. When Prime Minister John Major was asked by a
London Daily Mail
reporter to name the record he’d most like to have if he were stranded on a desert island, he promptly replied, “Peggy Sue.”

In the 1990s, Buddy’s family decided to sell off his keepsakes that they’d been storing for decades. The disposition of these artifacts revealed much about the nature of pop culture in America. Though the American public tends to trivialize the artistic achievements of the founders of rock ’n’ roll, they revere the trappings of stardom with a hysteria that can extend to the stars’ underwear. Ideally Buddy’s memorabilia should have been preserved in a coherent collection, but much of it has been sold to the highest bidder, scattered and lost forever. In contrast, what makes Graceland such an amusing place to while away an afternoon in Memphis is the impressive number of Elvis’s effects that are on display—everything from his kitschy jungle den to his gold records, jewelry, cars, and airplanes. Elvis’s ex-wife Priscilla deserves credit for turning Graceland into a mecca for fans as well as connoisseurs of camp. Less known is the House of Cash in Hendersonville, Tennessee, a splendid repository of Johnny Cash’s memorabilia. No similar shrine exists for Buddy, though enough material still remained in the family in the early nineties to furnish a small museum. Ample opportunity existed for someone to establish a Buddy Holly library or center, but no one did, despite all the people who had benefited from Buddy’s legacy, such as the Holley estate, the city of Lubbock, the state of Texas, the Rock-’n’-Roll Hall of Fame, Paul McCartney, Waylon Jennings, Linda Ronstadt, Don McLean, the U.S. government, and the United Kingdom.

Imagine how serendipitous it would be for drivers crossing the monotonous Texas plains to come across Holly Land, a fifties theme park, a sort of rock ’n’ roll Nashville or Branson. Cabarets and theaters could offer a panoply of rock ’n’ roll, from the latest grunge and gangsta to golden oldies. The centerpiece and raison d’etre of Holly Land would, of course, be the Buddy Holly Museum, exhibiting hundreds of items of Holly memorabilia—guitars, clothes, manuscripts, furniture, homework, eyeglasses, records, vehicles, and documents. Among other things, it would be a boon for Lubbock, a city that has grown to its present population of 230,000 without developing a single tourist attraction.

Eventually the Holley estate decided, according to Larry, to “take everything we’ve got, inventory it, put it in the pile, and sell it at auction and split the money. And that’s what we did.” It seems unbelievable in retrospect that Lubbock and the state of Texas let Buddy Holly’s possessions sit moldering for over three decades without making any use of them, evincing a total lack of pride in the region’s central role in the origins of rock ’n’ roll. Now, over three decades after Buddy’s death, they were going to lose the most extensive Holly collection in the world. What was worse, it was going to be split up and the individual items auctioned off to the highest bidder, destroying forever the integrity of the collection. Certain important items were already gone. In November 1988 Emmylou Harris’s husband Paul Kennerley bought Buddy’s Magnatone Custom 280 amplifier from the family. Buddy’s Ariel Cyclone motorcycle had been sold to W. Sanders of Dumas, Texas, in 1970; Sanders kept it until 1975, when an Austin man named Joe Waggoner bought it and, after a few years, put it up for sale for $10,000. Jerry, Joe B., and Sonny Curtis acquired it in 1979, for considerably less than the asking price, and presented it to Waylon Jennings on his birthday. In mint condition, the bike still had its original paint job and very low mileage. It would have been a perfect item for a Holly museum.

“Mother was losing her mind and didn’t know what was going on,” Larry explains in 1992. Mrs. Holley was admitted to the West Texas Hospital in 1988 after suffering a heart attack. She spent five days there, constantly assuring her family that she felt fine and was ready to go home. After her release, she lived two more years in her home in Lubbock before dying in 1990 at the age of eighty-eight. Mrs. Holley was buried next to her husband and near to the son she had supported so valiantly, despite her religion’s disapproval of rock ’n’ roll. “I knew her for so many years that finally I thought of her no longer as the mother of Buddy Holly but as my dear friend,” says Bill Griggs, who was a pallbearer at her funeral. “Really, she was one of the sweetest and nicest ladies ever.”

Referring to Buddy’s possessions, Larry says, “I boxed them up and carried them down there to the lawyers and everybody who was taking care of it and made a deal with Sotheby’s to sell at auction. Sotheby’s just took a portion of the stuff and then they decided they’d have another sale a year later and they took another portion.”

In Manhattan, Sotheby’s announced the Buddy Holly auction for Saturday, June 22, 1991, as part of a massive clearance of rock ’n’ roll “collectibles.” There was no dignity to the occasion. Most of the pre-auction publicity centered, facetiously, on articles such as Elvis Presley’s cape and John Lennon’s autographed acoustic guitar. Both the
New York Daily News
and the
New York Times
considered the auction a joke. The
New Yorker,
though characteristically tongue-in-cheek, took a more affectionate attitude, terming the auction an event of interest to “ardent followers of the history of American culture.” In its charmingly esoteric way, the
New Yorker
focused on Buddy’s school assignments, which he and his family had assiduously saved; they were contributions to “the history of American homework,” wrote the
New Yorker.

Before the Holly items went on the block, Eddie Murphy arrived at Sotheby’s and held his bidding paddle in the air throughout the entire Jimi Hendrix portion, buying everything offered for $45,000. Bidding was spirited for Buddy’s guitars, his Fender Stratocaster fetching $110,000 and his Gibson J-45 $242,000. Bill Griggs explains why the Gibson was so high. “A Lubbock man was there, and he bought the Fender. When the Gibson was auctioned, Gary Busey, who was on the telephone, had to bid against the Lubbock man, and the price kept going up. The winning bid was Busey’s.” On the Gibson, Buddy’s custom-stitched, personally crafted leather cover was still in mint condition, but Busey had to take the well-used guitar to Rick Turner in Los Angeles for repairs. It was refretted, and Turner repaired some cracks as well as the cracked braces.

The Lubbock man continued to bid throughout the auction, ultimately spending $182,000 and walking away with a significant Holly collection, including, in addition to the Fender, articles of clothing and the notebook in which Buddy had doodled Peggy Sue’s initials and listed the Scoundrels as a possible name for his band. “It was a well-rounded collection,” says Griggs.

Craig Inciardi, a cataloger in Sotheby’s Collectibles Department, disclosed that the items in the 1991 auction had been released by the Holleys, whom he praised for retaining so many items not because Buddy was a celebrity, but “just because it was Buddy’s.”

The
New Yorker
’s “Talk of the Town” reporter found it “sad” that such “relatively insignificant stuff” as Buddy’s gray wool stage jacket and Arrow French-cuff shirt went for $5,225 while his homework “proved a drug on the market.” Buddy’s Robert Frost book report, which the
New Yorker
praised for its “smooth and engaging narrative,” drew a top bid of $650 and had to be “brought back in,” meaning that the auctioneer returned it to the Holleys, who had expected $800 to $1,200. The bids for the rest of Buddy’s homework were equally mediocre, such as the $1,650 offer for lot No. 649, which included forty-five pages of homework, a signed two-page school report, and Buddy’s school notebook with two signatures, which Sotheby’s had expected to sell for $2,000.

Shara Shinn, the auctioneer, later explained that rock ’n’ roll keepsakes were not comparable to “a Tiffany flatware service, with stable bidders and a predictable price.” Moreover, their value increases the more directly they’re related to music. Guitars and stage clothes are of immense appeal to restaurant and bar owners. “I noticed the Hard Rock Café people here today,” noted one Sotheby official. He complained that there was altogether too much of Buddy’s homework in circulation. The Holley family, he said, had started “flooding the market” the previous year and were continuing to release new batches of homework. Until someone could establish how much more of it was to come, it was difficult to place a price tag on it.

Unlike the homework, other Buddy Holly collectibles fetched far more than Sotheby’s had anticipated. One lot of clothes that Sotheby’s was prepared to sell for $1,800 to $2,200 brought in $5,225. His two-page handwritten letter to Terry Noland dated December 14, 1958, went for $4,950, exceeding the estimated value by $3,750. Buddy’s 1956 harmonica went for $3,850, but Sotheby’s had only valued it at $1,500. His birth certificate fetched $1,100; his high-school diploma, $3,300; and a lot that included his high-school ring went for $2,420. It was still a long way from what Elvis’s remnants sold for in a 1994 auction in Las Vegas, where Elvis’s wedding band sold for $68,000 and a jumpsuit that looked like something Bea Arthur might have worn in
Golden Girls
went for $68,500. On the auction block as everywhere else, Elvis was king.