Buddy Holly: Biography (27 page)

It was Buddy’s look as much as his music that inspired the Beatles, who’d previously been drawn, McCartney later revealed, to “really good-looking” performers such as Cliff Richards and Elvis. Buddy’s glasses intrigued them. Like the bespectacled Roy Orbison, who’d feared he’d never succeed as a performer until he saw Buddy Holly, the Beatles assumed that singers who wore glasses could never expect stardom. Said McCartney in 1986, “Until Buddy came along, any fellow with glasses always took them off to play.” Suddenly Buddy’s bold, unashamed appearance before the British public in thick horn-rims gave them hope, especially John Lennon, who was legally blind but stumbled around onstage without his glasses, afraid he’d be ridiculed. After seeing Buddy, Lennon adopted “the Buddy Holly Look,” McCartney later told Lennon’s half-sister Julia Baird, wearing “big thick black glasses” onstage and off; he could “see the world for once,” said McCartney, adding, “anyone who really needed to wear glasses could then come out of the closet.” John and Paul soon started cutting classes at school and hiding out at Paul’s house, where they’d take out their guitars and compose songs for hours on end, attempting “to figure out how Buddy did it.”

Lennon became such a Crickets fan after their two Liverpool shows that he wrote to Jerry Allison’s mother in Lubbock, inquiring how Jerry and Buddy had formed the Crickets, how they’d broken through to success, and how John and his band could launch themselves. Years later Lennon explained to California Buddy Holly fan Jim Dawson how he selected the name the Beatles for the band. Mindful of the Crickets, Lennon started casting about for another insect name and finally came up with the Beatles. He intended for the name to be taken as a double entendre, signifying insects as well as music with a distinctive beat. Still another factor, according to Mark Hertsgaard’s 1995 book
A Day in the Life: The Music and Artistry of the Beatles,
was the motorcycle gang in Marlon Brando’s movie
The Wild One,
which was called the Beetles.

After Liverpool the Crickets returned to London, traversing 175 miles on March 21 and staging two shows the same day in Walthamstow’s Granada Theater. Afterward they continued south, driving eighty miles to Salisbury, where they played the Gaumont on the twenty-second and then repaired to the Old George Hotel for a warm, cozy night. Petty and Jerry lounged in front of a roaring fireplace, analyzing a dream of Petty’s in which all his teeth had fallen out. Overhearing them as he sat nearby, composing a letter to his mother which was later published in Griggs’s magazine
Reminiscing,
Buddy wrote, perhaps only half jokingly, that Petty seemed to be getting decrepit. In the same letter he complimented his parents for making improvements on their house and signed off with love, promising to call them when he arrived in New York at the end of the month. The amenities at the Old George delighted them. “The ladies fixed us hot chocolate at night,” Vi Petty later recalled. Such respites were rare. None of them got a really good look at England, according to Vi, who said that the Crickets were awake all night or trying to grab an hour’s sleep, “just piled all over each other in the bus.”

After playing Colston Hall in Bristol and the Capitol Cinema in Cardiff, they concluded the tour in London with two shows at the Hammersmith Gaumont on March 25. It was a dreadful day for the Crickets. The same horseplay that had driven Niki from the group erupted again in Hammersmith, threatening to destroy the band. Buddy was relaxing in the dressing room after the first of their two shows when Joe B. walked in, chomping on a stogy, which he threatened to light up. Joe B. later told Griggs, “Jokingly, both J.I. and Buddy said that I was
not
going to smoke that cigar in the dressing room.” Buddy was beginning to get ready for the final performance and probably feared that Joe B.’s cigar smoke would damage his vocal cords.

But Joe B. was adamant. He struck a match, lit the cigar, and began to puff on it furiously, deliberately attempting to turn the room into a smoke box. Buddy and Jerry lunged at him and tried to wrest the cigar from his mouth. Buddy secured Joe B.’s left arm while Jerry pinned down his right, hoping to keep Joe B. still long enough to grab the cigar. Joe B. struggled violently, swinging his head and trying to hit Buddy in the stomach. Later Joe B. told Goldrosen that he wanted to strike Buddy hard enough to knock the breath out of him. Then he intended to “take care of J.I.,” he added in a 1980 interview with Griggs. In the upshot, Joe B.’s forehead slammed into Buddy’s mouth instead of his stomach, and the caps on Buddy’s two front teeth broke off and went flying. Reeling from the blow, Buddy immediately called off the show and said they’d forgo their fee; he could hardly go onstage in snaggle-toothed disarray. Professionally, it was a potential wipeout. As Joe B. himself later said in
Reminiscing
magazine, the cancellation would jeopardize the Crickets’ career; he described it as a “very traumatic incident.”

Petty, who never seemed to appear in time to prevent trouble, promptly materialized the minute his meal ticket was threatened. He persuaded Buddy to go on after all. A wad of chewing gum concealed his exposed stumps. The show they put on was “hideous,” according to Joe B., whose forehead had sustained an injury serious enough to scar him for the rest of his life. When they returned to the dressing room, Petty, with his usual lack of finesse, told them that they had just put on the “worst” performance of their career.

Such was the end of the Crickets’ historic British tour. Despite the career strides they had made in England, it was clear by the time they boarded the plane to return to the United States that nothing short of a miracle could save rock ’n’ roll’s premier band. Buddy must have been disgusted by the debacle at the Hammersmith Gaumont. Back in New York, he became absorbed in personal matters that monopolized all his attention, especially his courtship of a pert, petite girl behind the receptionist’s desk at Peer-Southern. He met her one day when he dropped in to see Murray Deutch and immediately started flirting with her. She was not altogether unresponsive.

Her name was Maria Elena Santiago. Slightly older than Buddy, she was a Puerto Rican young woman who had come to New York to live with her aunt, Provi Garcia, in the 1940s. Hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans had gone north to New York in the following decade, forever altering the cultural face of the city and bringing a new vitality. The most distinguished musical of the 1950s,
West Side Story,
epitomized, if not stereotyped, the character of this historic migration, and the musical was currently playing at the Winter Garden, featuring a chorus of Puerto Rican girls, including one named Maria, singing an impudent, spirited song about the wretchedness of San Juan and the dubious advantages of America.

“He came in with the other two Crickets, Jerry and Joe B.,” Maria Elena said in our 1993 interview. “He introduced himself and said he was going to see Murray Deutch—he had an appointment. I said, ‘All right.’ I called in and Murray said for him to wait a few minutes; he had another client in there. In the meantime, while Buddy was waiting, he started a conversation, just to get my attention, I guess. That was when he asked me if I wanted to go out to dinner with him.”

Maria Elena regarded him with interest, not only because he was a rock star, but because his forward behavior struck a responsive chord in her. She was already then a tempestuous, passionate woman. Buddy appeared to be sinewy and vigorous, and women were often quick to sense that a veritable “Superman” lurked beneath his “Clark Kentish” exterior. Recalling the moment in 1993, Maria Elena’s voice waxes warm and intimate. “I liked him. I liked him right away,” she confides. “As quiet and shy as he appeared to be, when he made up his mind,
that was it.
”

Though she seemed hesitant, Buddy grew even bolder. Her luminous eyes contradicting every word, she explained that she “was not allowed to go out with anybody that was a client here. My aunt is one of the executives here. I live with my aunt. She doesn’t want me to go out with musicians. She feels that they are not ‘all there,’ that they’re mostly crazy people.” She was charmed when Buddy attempted to speak Spanish with her. Later, she told Griggs that Buddy said, “How are you, Señorita?”

Murray Deutch summoned Buddy into his office. Having had a significant hand in launching Buddy’s career, Deutch remained a close adviser. They greeted each other fondly and rehashed Buddy’s profitable tours of Australia and England. Everywhere Buddy had appeared in the United Kingdom, fans had flocked to the stores, sending his records up the charts. In March 1958 “Maybe Baby” was No. 4 in England, No. 15 in Australia, and No. 17 in the U.S. “Listen to Me” was No. 14 in England, where Paul McCartney would later tell John Tobler that it was his favorite Holly tune, “a really great track.” Though
Rolling Stone
’s David McGee would one day hail “Listen to Me” as a brilliant tender-tough ballad, one of Buddy’s “best-conceived efforts,” in 1958 the single was hopelessly lost in a U.S. record market glutted with Holly hits.

Also disappointing were sales on Buddy’s new solo album,
Buddy Holly,
which Coral released in March. Though the LP included the immortal “Rave On,” later hailed by
Rolling Stone
as “one of the great rock-’n’-roll songs,” “Rave On” bombed in the United States on release.
Cash Box
didn’t even mention it as one of the cuts on the LP in its March 15 review. When Decca released “Rave On” as a single in April, it at last hit the Top 40, despite flak from easy-listening radio stations, whose DJs identified “Rave On” as the cause of juvenile delinquency. Still, it crested at No. 37 in America, faring far better in the United Kingdom, where it soared to No. 5 in England and No. 29 in Australia.

Neither of Buddy’s LPs—
The Chirping Crickets
and
Buddy Holly
—made the
Billboard
Top 40 in America, where rock ’n’ roll had peaked and was beginning to decline. Years later, rock critics would place both albums near the top of their all-time best LP lists. In England, in the wake of Buddy’s tour, his LPs sold briskly from the beginning.
The Chirping Crickets
shot to No. 5 and
Buddy Holly
went to No. 8. “The British were certainly warming to rock ’n’ roll,” Ed Ward later wrote in
Rock of Ages: The
Rolling Stone
History of Rock ’n’ Roll.
“When
Billboard
noted that fifteen of the top twenty records in Britain were American, they were talking about rock-’n’-roll records, for the most part, and about Buddy Holly and the Crickets.”

While Buddy and Murray were talking at Peer-Southern that day in March 1958, Maria Elena Santiago was plotting her way around her aunt, Provi. Despite Provi’s strictures, Maria Elena had no intention of missing a date with Buddy Holly. Too smart to defy Provi openly, Maria Elena enlisted the support of an important Peer-Southern associate her aunt could scarcely afford to ignore—Jo Harper, Murray Deutch’s secretary. After Jo Harper’s intercession, Murray Deutch himself rang Provi in Buddy’s behalf, explaining that “Buddy is a very nice boy and it will be okay for you to let Maria Elena go out with him.”

Recalls Maria Elena today, “That still didn’t sit very well with my aunt.”

Maria Elena, who was born in Puerto Rico, had lost her mother when she was eight. At that point her father had sent her to live with Provi in Manhattan, where Provi had moved years before. Since 1898, when the United States had seized the colony of Puerto Rico from Spain in the Spanish-American War, two million Puerto Ricans had already immigrated to America, fleeing an overpopulated and undernourished island. Between 1950 and 1956, the Puerto Rican population of New York alone escalated from 245,880 to 577,000, alarming some New Yorkers, including blacks, who foresaw a drain on the already scarce job market. The new immigrants—“PR’s,” New Yorkers derisively called them—were scorned as the lowest of the low. “I like
los Estados Unidos,
but is sometimes a cold place to live,” says a character in Piri Thomas’s
Down These Mean Streets,
“not because of the winter and the landlord not giving heat but because of the snow in the hearts of the people.”

Most Puerto Ricans settled in the squalid tenements of what would become Spanish Harlem between Fifth Avenue and the East River. The smoldering Latino temperament lent an aura of romance to the ghetto, which Puerto Ricans called
el barrio
(the place). Songwriters soon celebrated it in sumptuous wall-of-sound recordings such as “A Rose in Spanish Harlem,” “Up on the Roof,” and “In the Ghetto.” The teeming
barrio
was a world away from the high-rent district in Greenwich Village that Maria Elena Santiago and her well-heeled aunt called home. Even before Provi paved the way for her to work at Peer-Southern, Maria Elena had held a variety of jobs in New York. Her breezy air of friendliness and efficiency enchanted Buddy, as did her Hispanic lineage, which would have kept most Caucasian boys at a distance in the fifties. Perhaps like Marlon Brando, who was romantically involved with Rita Moreno for nine years, Buddy must have sensed that a Latin woman would understand him better and be a more unrepressed lover.

By midafternoon, following Murray Deutch’s call to Provi about Buddy Holly, Provi reached Maria Elena on the phone at Peer-Southern. “Buddy’s very nice,” Maria Elena assured her. “I like him.”

“You know, I really don’t believe you should get involved,” Provi said. “I don’t think you will be very safe with those people.”

Maria Elena was a smart, tenacious girl. Half an hour later, Provi agreed to let her go out with Buddy and said, “There’s just one condition. I want you to come home early, at least by twelve, not later than that.”

Buddy took Maria to dinner at P. J. Clarke’s, the popular and even then fashionable pub on Third Avenue that had been used in the filming of
The Lost Weekend
in the 1940s. “That happened the same day,” Maria Elena remembers. “That evening we got to the place and he sat down and ordered drinks.” Clarke’s was, and remains, one of the most lively bistros in the world. You enter a long, narrow bar with an antique, white-tiled floor, walk past a crowd of noisy ad men and models unwinding after a day’s work, pass through a small, cozy dining room, and finally arrive at the main room in back, which has an open kitchen with a blazing grill. This is where Buddy Holly and Maria Elena Santiago fell in love.