Buddy Holly: Biography (28 page)

She wanted to be an actress. “José Quintero …
The Iceman Cometh
 … I saw that,” she recalls in 1993. “I used to be in that circle because I wanted to be a singer-actress-dancer. I was always around there. They really had something going.” Quintero, a fellow Puerto Rican, was the most highly regarded theatrical director in New York. Almost single-handedly he’d launched the off-Broadway movement, reviving modern classics such as Tennessee Williams’s
Summer and Smoke
and Eugene O’Neill’s
The Iceman Cometh
at a Greenwich Village theater, Circle in the Square. He’d discovered some of the major dramatic stars of the day, notably Geraldine Page, George C. Scott, Colleen Dewhurst, Peter Falk, and Jason Robards, Jr.

Buddy told her that he wanted to be an actor, too, “exactly like Tony Perkins,” he said, Maria Elena recalls. Perkins was then a leading matinee idol of the fifties, both in movies such as
Friendly Persuasion
and on Broadway, where he was currently starring in the Pulitzer Prize–winning hit,
Look Homeward, Angel.
“How do you learn about acting?” Buddy asked, and she told him that she’d heard Lee Strasberg was a good teacher. Buddy wanted to know all about Strasberg, the renowned exponent of the Stanislavsky Method acting technique and head of the Actors’ Studio, where Shelley Winters, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Paul Newman, and Marlon Brando all studied. Though the studio was for working thespians, Maria Elena felt sure that she and Buddy could get into Strasberg’s private school.

It was all very stimulating. Buddy had never known a girl who was so simpatico. She was worldly, self-possessed, and evidently not the slightest bit domestic. That was okay: He wasn’t looking for his mother or another Echo McGuire. “My aunt and I—we always ate out,” Maria Elena says in the 1993 interview. “We never cooked! Aunt Provi was always busy, so we went out to all these places for dinner. We loved Luchow’s, a German restaurant on 14th Street. And O’Henry’s had sawdust on the floor. I told Buddy about the time my aunt and I went to the Café Luna; that was in Little Italy. ‘About five minutes after my aunt and I walked out, the Mafia killed everybody there,’ I said.

“‘You just missed it!’ Buddy said.

“‘Yeah. We never went back there again.’” She loved living in the Village and had even been to the notorious Club 82 over by Second Avenue, where female impersonators cavorted nightly. The more she chatted, the more Buddy must have adored this surprising, vivacious girl. Years later she still recalls how he suddenly rose from the table and said, “Excuse me a minute, Maria Elena. I’ll be right back.” When they’d entered the restaurant they’d noticed a flower vendor standing on Third Avenue, just outside the door. Buddy now went to the vendor, selected a red rose, and hurried back inside.

“This is for you,” he said, “and would you marry me?”

Though Norman Petty would later contest Maria Elena’s claim that Buddy proposed to her on the first day they met, it would not have been uncharacteristic of Buddy, considering his impetuous, sometimes reckless nature, especially at this time. The gap in his life since the loss of Echo, and the fact that he did not ultimately respect groupies, had left him lost and adrift emotionally. Maria Elena knew none of this and burst out laughing at his rash proposal. “Oooh, sure!” she said. “When do you want me, now or later?” Over three decades later, she muses, “Of course, you know, I had just met this guy, and this is our first time out. I thought he was just kind of kidding around. I sort of took it as a joke. I said to myself,
My aunt is right. These people are crazy.
For him to come out, you know, right away.…
This is not really happening,
I thought. I just took it as a joke.”

“I’m serious about this,” Buddy said.

Suddenly she stopped laughing. “Well, I guess you are,” she murmured, gazing at him pensively. “I’ll tell you what you need to do. Tomorrow morning you come over to my aunt’s apartment, and you tell her that you want to marry me.”

After they said good night, part of her mind remained skeptical. “I was still taking it as a joke,” she recalls. “I thought,
This guy is not going to come.
” But for Buddy it was anything but a joke. He’d found, in his typically impulsive way, the girl he wanted to marry, someone with whom he could share what he called true love ways—dining out, exchanging hopes and dreams, laughing, and being romantic and intimate together. No doubt he went to sleep that night happier than he’d been in years. “The next day, Saturday, at nine o’clock sharp he was there to see my aunt, to my surprise,” says Maria Elena.

Purposefully striding into the stately building at 33 Fifth Avenue, at the corner of Tenth Street and Fifth, Buddy instructed the doorman to ring Maria Elena’s apartment. Upstairs, as she received the announcement, Maria Elena thought,
My goodness! Ummm, this can’t be
—but sure enough, the doorman brought Buddy up.

“My aunt is still in bed,” Maria Elena explained. After a while, Provi joined them. Maria Elena made the introductions. “Of course, she knew of him,” Maria Elena says in our 1993 interview. “She asked questions, who he was, what he was, what he did. I guess he told her, but she knew quite a bit about him.” After filling in a few personal details about himself and his family, Buddy came directly to the point.

“We want to get married,” he said.

“He asked her, told her, not asked,
told
her that we wanted to get married,” Maria Elena recalls in my interview with her. “My aunt almost went through the floor. Because I didn’t tell her anything. I’d just said, ‘He’s a nice guy, a nice person. I like him a lot.’ When he came in and said ‘We want to get married,’ she said, ‘Well, uh, don’t you think you should wait a little bit longer? Make sure that this is what you want?’

“‘No, no, no,’ he said. ‘I don’t have time for this courting. I know that I want to marry Maria Elena. I know she wants to marry me.’ Buddy was very decisive. Nothing stood in his way. That’s the way he was. My aunt said, ‘Well, if that’s what you people want, I couldn’t say no, because no matter what I say, it would be worse if I say no and you just go right ahead and do it.’”

They immediately proceeded to discuss Maria Elena’s trousseau and the wedding. “My aunt traveled quite a bit for the company,” Maria Elena recalls. “She had a trip coming up and she could not be around to help me get ready so she said, ‘Okay, here’s my credit card. Go out and get whatever you need.’

“‘No,’ Buddy said. ‘Maria Elena doesn’t have to have your card. I’ll give her some checks and she can buy—’… After he proposed he spoke to his mother on the phone.”

According to Larry Holley, Buddy didn’t break the news to his mother until he’d first consulted with Larry. Interracial marriages were repugnant to proletarian WASP Texans. To make matters worse, Maria Elena was four years older than Buddy (five, according to Peggy Sue). In the fifties, women who went with younger men were accused of “robbing the cradle.” Larry backed Buddy up, but Ella Holley opposed the union on religious and racial grounds. L.O. would easily be won over by the pretty Maria Elena when they met later on.

Petty was aghast. He opposed the marriage from the start, not so much, as he claimed, because it would cost Buddy his fans, but because he regarded Maria Elena as a rival in the music business and a threat to his position as Buddy’s manager. Years later, in a 1983 interview, Petty was still trying to undermine her, stating that she and Buddy had known each other before they started dating. Indeed, Maria Elena herself would state in an early 1959 issue of
16
magazine that they’d initially met in January 1958, according to Alan Mann’s
A–Z of Buddy Holly.
Archivist Alan Clark reprinted the
16
article in 1989 in his booklet,
Buddy Holly.
Entitled “A Farewell to Buddy Holly: The Young Bride of a Favorite Young Star Bids Him a Last Goodbye,” the story is presented as a first-person narrative by Maria Elena, who says that she and Buddy had often seen each other around Peer-Southern and she’d begun to think that he was so shy they’d “never get beyond the point” of greeting each other and kidding around.

The article goes on to state, in Maria Elena’s voice, that they finally connected when she and a friend encountered him at Howard Johnson’s one day. He was dining with Petty and the Crickets and invited them to sit down. After she’d left, Buddy turned to Petty and bragged, “You see that girl? I’m going to marry her.” Some months later, after a tour, Buddy took her to a record session, followed by “a quiet dinner.” Later, as he dropped her off in a taxi, the car made a sharp turn and threw them together. “Before either of us realized it, we were sharing our first kiss,” Maria Elena said. They continued to stay in touch by phone while Buddy was on the road. Not until June 1958, the
16
account continues, did Buddy and Maria Elena decide that they wanted to get married, after talking with each other on the phone “two or three times a day” over a period of months.

Whatever the truth, it was typical of the vengeful Petty that he was determined, twenty-five years after the fact, to discredit her account of their courtship as a “whirlwing [sic] thing,” which he dismissed as a sentimental myth. He was categorically right about one thing only—she was a rival, and she was a threat.

Chapter Ten

The Decline of Early Rock

Escorted by Sonny Curtis, who was visiting New York, Maria Elena Santiago attended Buddy’s opening when Alan Freed launched his new forty-four-day “Big Beat” package tour in Brooklyn in March 1958. No one in the audience was aware of the tense maneuvering that had been going on backstage at the Brooklyn Paramount as the performers vied for top position on the bill. Once again it was clear that Buddy needed a better manager; he was not even a serious contender in the billing war that raged among members of the starry cast. The principal combatants for the closing spot on the show were Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis. When Jerry Lee stated his case for top billing, Alan Freed refused, reminding him that Berry had seniority. Jerry Lee reluctantly agreed but vowed to upstage Berry on opening day.

The issue was still unresolved at one
P.M.
, March 28, when they began the first of their five daily shows. As Chuck Berry later recalled in his memoirs, most of the performances were attended by seven thousand kids screaming at the tops of their voices. “Never before had I confronted more than a thousand people watching me perform,” Berry wrote, “and I had never seen the inside of a theater as enormous as the Brooklyn Paramount.” Though Buddy and the Crickets were seasoned veterans of stadium rock and should by rights have closed the show, Petty failed to provide the aggressive representation they required. Buddy was at the peak of a fame that would, like high barometric pressure, soon wane, largely due to Petty’s managerial incompetence and passivity as well as the decline of rock ’n’ roll’s first, pioneering phase, which would soon be coming to an end. The notorious events that occurred during this Freed tour, culminating in a melee in Boston, would change forever the way that rock ’n’ roll was perceived, and the establishment would set out to destroy the rock movement.

At the opening performance in Brooklyn Jerry Lee, having lost out to Chuck Berry in the billing imbroglio, stormed onstage and threw a Coke bottleful of gasoline on his piano and set it afire. After driving the audience to an orgiastic ecstasy, he sauntered backstage and told Berry, “Follow
that,
nigger,” according to Nick Tosches, author of
Hellfire,
a biography of Lewis. As Berry would note about Lewis on another occasion, “He wouldn’t have known where he was if the Bells of St. Mary had rung in his ear.… He was bombed.” No one could top Berry with his duck walk and his scoots and splits. Years later, the two men became friendly enough to jam together at a music festival in Schelsen, Germany.

Those who saw the Crickets at the Brooklyn Paramount testify that Buddy and his band more than held their own, rocking the SRO crowd with “Rave On” and “Not Fade Away.” Buddy was such a personal sensation that ambitious young singers throughout the metropolitan area began to seek him out for advice and help. Though a star, Buddy made himself accessible to newcomers, adopting a policy that was unusually generous and nurturing. Indeed, it would prove to be mutually beneficial and mark the beginning of a new direction in his career, one that would eventually lead to record producing.

His first protégé was a young New York Italian, Lou Giordano, who could croon like Sinatra but had never made a record and was desperate for a break. He came to Buddy’s attention through Joe Villa, who’d had a 1956 hit entitled “Blanche,” singing with a group called the Three Friends. Joe Villa switched to the Royal Teens and scored a No. 3 smash, “Short Shorts,” which was recorded at Bell Sound Studios in New York with two teenage girls their manager found hanging around in the lobby. The Royal Teens promoted the song on Dick Clark’s
Saturday Night Beechnut Show,
wearing short shorts, the fifties version of hot pants, although it was a cold, snowy night. Buddy had shared a bill with them during his Florida tour earlier in 1958.

Joe Villa invited Buddy, Lou Giordano, and Don and Phil Everly to his home in Brooklyn one day during the Paramount run, promising them a dinner cooked by his mother. Sitting at Mrs. Villa’s table that night with some of the most powerful and popular rock stars in the world, young Giordano suddenly burst out with a touching plea for help. “I can make a record,” he said, according to Joe Villa, who recalled the scene in 1981. Buddy must have been touched, remembering how eager he’d been for the same kind of break not long ago. The likable Giordano managed to attach himself to Buddy, Don and Phil Everly, and Joe Villa despite his amateur status, largely on the basis of his considerable personal charm. He somewhat resembled the tough, lovable Dead End Kids. Soon Giordano was tagging along everywhere they went, and they all grew fond of him. Finally, both Buddy and the Everly Brothers assured Giordano that they’d help him make a recording. Buddy explained that he couldn’t do it immediately, since he was touring until May; he’d return to New York and help him later. They could use the Beltone Studios and Buddy would be his producer. It was Buddy’s first deal as a record producer, a career that would shortly gain momentum when he introduced Waylon Jennings to the world as a recording artist.