Buddy Holly: Biography (49 page)

In Lubbock, Sonny Curtis tried to shake Jerry Allison out of a deep sleep. “Hey, man, I’ve got something real bad to tell you,” Sonny said, according to Jerry Allison. It was ten
A.M.
on February 3. Sonny had slept on the living-room couch at Jerry and Peggy Sue’s place after their return from Clovis the previous night. A woman who lived across the street had broken the news to Sonny. Jerry refused to accept it. “I thought that there might have been a plane crash, and that Buddy might have been around it, but he couldn’t be dead, he couldn’t possibly be,” Jerry later told Griggs. Joe B. convinced himself it was all a publicity stunt. His sister kept trying to convince him that the news was real and finally said, in exasperation, “No, no, go out and get the newspaper and look at the headlines.”

It was Jerry who told Norman Petty. In a 1978 interview, Griggs asked Petty for his reaction and Petty uttered a single word: “Catastrophic.” Robert Linville, one of Buddy’s backup singers, describing the scene in Clovis that morning, said he rushed to the Pettys’ upstairs apartment and found both Norman and Vi weeping. All three of their telephones were ringing and the callers were saying, pleadingly, “It’s not true,” but Norman, Vi, and Linville kept telling everyone, “Yes, it is. New York just called.” Linville remembers remaining at the Pettys all day “and the phones never stopped ringing.”

DJ Snuff Garrett hastily rounded up the Crickets and Petty for telephone interviews on KSYD in Wichita Falls. Petty was characteristically evasive and defensive when Garrett asked if Buddy Holly fans could look forward to any unreleased tapes. “It depends,” said Petty. He mentioned the possibility of litigation and refused to discuss the matter further.

At Decca Records in New York, Dick Jacobs sat at his desk planning Buddy’s next Coral session. He hadn’t yet seen the Associated Press account in the
New York Daily News,
which was replete with photographs of Buddy, Ritchie, and the Bopper as well as a staff artist’s map detailing the projected flight from Mason City to Fargo. The
Daily News
ran the story inside the paper, but the editor did at least assign it three columns and a thirty-six-point bold headline, 3
STARS OF ROCK ’N’ ROLL KILLED.
The page-one significance of Holly’s death would only be realized over time.

“Did you hear the news?” one of Dick Jacobs’s colleagues inquired, advising him to sit down. Buddy had been Jacobs’s favorite artist on the label. Now he found himself unable to speak. He sat at his desk and burst into sobs. Later he closed his office for the day and went home. “It wasn’t a question of losing an artist,” he later told Wayne Jones. “I had lost a friend.”

Over at Alan Freed’s
Big Beat
television show, Freed observed before he went on camera, “Crazy, isn’t it, that his new hit is called ‘It Doesn’t Matter Anymore’? I know it matters to me and to all those kids who loved him … and to his wife, Maria Elena.” Then Freed walked into the studio and requested a minute of silent prayer. Roy Hamilton, the powerful Georgia baritone whose “Unchained Melody” was the best-selling R&B record of 1955, sang “You’ll Never Walk Alone.”

GAC’s reaction was characteristic of its behavior toward the performers throughout the tour. “We always fought against the idea of any of them chartering their own planes,” said Tim Gale. Mindful of the bottom line, Gale decided that the decimated “Winter Dance Party” “would be continued to its conclusion.” On Tuesday morning, February 3, Waylon, Tommy, Dion, the Belmonts, and Frankie Sardo were still en route to Moorhead, unware that they’d lost their headliners and that GAC would expect them to go on as if nothing had happened.

In Los Angeles, at James Monroe High School, kids were standing in groups around the playground between the second and third period classes. Rock ’n’ roll was blaring from several transistor radios but suddenly there was an announcement and then all the radios were turned off. Everyone looked over toward Donna Ludwig, who was sitting on a bench apart from the others. When one of her friends approached, she glanced up and smiled. Then she noticed that the girl had tears in her eyes. Donna stood up and asked her what was the matter.

“You’d better sit down, Donna,” she said, according to an article in
16.
“Ritchie is dead. We just heard it on the radio.” Donna couldn’t believe it and rushed to a pay phone to call Concepcion Valenzuela. Ernestine Reyes answered the phone. “Pray for us, Donna,” she said. “Pray for Ritchie.” Then Concepcion came on the line and said, “Will you come over after school, Donna? I want to see you.”

*   *   *

Back in Clear Lake, at roughly the same time that morning, the cornfield was finally abuzz with activity both around the bodies and in the air overhead. “The macabre fascination that surrounds violent death in general and that of celebrities in particular descended on Clear Lake,” Douglas Hines later wrote in the
Globe-Gazette.
A half mile from where the bodies lay, Wallace Johnson, a farmer, was rattled by buzzing airplanes. “It was like a war zone,” he told Hines. At first he couldn’t figure why “fifty or sixty airplanes” were circling the area, and then he heard the news on the radio.

Cerro Gordo County Sheriff Jerry Allen was away in St. Louis on a criminal investigation, but Allen’s deputy Duane Mayfield took charge and set up roadblocks. Deputy Sheriff Bill McGill pulled up to the wreckage, accompanied by patrol cars carrying reporters, photographers, and television cameramen.
Life
magazine had already requested photos. By 9:45
A.M.
, curiosity seekers were getting out of hand. Souvenir hunters wanted to dismantle the plane and carry it away in pieces, Mayfield later told Tecklenburg.

At 11:15
A.M.
—ten hours and fifteen minutes after the crash—black Cadillac hearses advanced across the field, bumping over the cornrows covered by the previous night’s snowfall and finally nosing up to the corpses. It could have been a scene from an early Robert Altman film. Carroll Anderson arrived to assist with identifications, but even with his help it was impossible. The boys were disfigured beyond recognition. Further confusion developed when five billfolds were found—and only four bodies. Buddy had been carrying Tommy Allsup’s wallet in his pocket. Anderson later told Wayne Jones that one of the patrolmen brought the wallet to him and asked if Tommy Allsup was Buddy Holly’s real name? “As far as I know, Buddy Holly is a real name,” Anderson replied. Throughout the morning the key issue was “Buddy Holly and whether he was Tommy Allsup,” Anderson said. The first UPI release listed Tommy Douglas Allsup as one of the dead.

Photographer Elwin L. Musser’s wide-angle photo of the crash site is as stark as an Ingmar Bergman winterscape. In the foreground, Stetson-hatted Deputy Sheriff Lowell Sandquist squats before a wheel that had come loose and gone wobbling across the pasture. In the background, a dozen figures hunch in the cold, staring at debris and dead bodies. They include Eugene Anderson, crash investigator; Coroner Smiley; Deputy Sheriff McGill; Walt Schreader, Dwyer’s attorney; Jim Collison of the
Globe-Gazette;
Andy Anderson of the
Clear Lake Mirror-Reporter;
funeral-home directors Dick Van Slyker and Wendell Wilcox; and Carroll Anderson. To cub reporter Collison the scene was heartbreaking. “It was my first assignment,” he later told Kevin Terry, “and I’d just rather forget the whole ordeal.”

Elwin Musser, who had been a U.S. Navy combat photographer during World War II, remembers picking his way between the corpses and the wreckage, snapping pictures with his Speed Graphic. “The wire services were clamoring for photos,” he says, but mainly he was concerned with the deadline for the
Globe-Gazette
’s early afternoon edition. Altogether he shot eight photographs, which in the coming years would prove to be the most requested prints from the
Globe-Gazette
’s morgue. Buddy and Ritchie “were lying face-down,” Musser remembers, but the Bopper “was terribly broken and twisted.” Buddy’s coat, he recalls, was light, almost shiny. After a while, Musser left the scene, walking back to the road with Deputy Sheriff Lowell Sandquist.

Morticians Van Slyker and Wilcox stood consulting with Coroner Smiley. Carroll Anderson joined them and then they “gathered Buddy up” and took his body to the morgue. “We have two morgues here and two bodies went to each,” Anderson later told Wayne Jones.

The police were hesitant to touch the instruments that enfolded Roger Peterson. They decided to wait until government officials arrived that evening to conduct their investigations. Guards were posted. Hours later, according to Smiley, a crew of field representatives headed by C. E. Stillwagon of the CAB and A. J. Prokop of the FAA poked around in the debris, taking notes. Then, Smiley added, Deputy Sheriffs McGill and Sandquist, using metal cutting tools, opened a space in the wreckage and extricated Roger Peterson. It was the point where fact and legend exchanged places, and neither, like the bodies themselves, could ever be fully extricated clearly anymore.

Smiley took money from their pockets and paid himself, according to the coroner’s report. From the $193 Dr. Smiley found on Buddy’s body, he kept $10 for “Inquest or investigation”; 65 cents for “mileage, 7 cents per mile”; and $1 for “docket case”—a total of $11.65. He extracted the same amount from each of the bodies. Ritchie had been carrying $22.15 in cash; two $50 Hollywood, California, bank checks; a religious medal; and a bracelet with a “Donna” charm. The Bopper had been carrying $202 and a guitar pick. Peterson had $20 in cash and a check from Dwyer for $130.55.

The remains of Buddy and Roger Peterson were arterially embalmed at the G. W. Wilcox Funeral Home in Clear Lake Tuesday night, February 3–4. Ritchie and the Bopper were taken to the Ward Funeral Home. Again Carroll Anderson attempted to identify the bodies. They were unable to recognize Ritchie until they saw his tattoo, “RV.,” on the underside of his right forearm. They still weren’t sure about Buddy, Carroll Anderson later told Wayne Jones. Larry Holley reveals in a 1992 interview that he immediately made plans to fly to Clear Lake on Wednesday, February 4.

According to Bill Griggs, Peterson was the only one of the four victims autopsied. That the other bodies were not autopsied would later lead to various controversies, including allegations of drug use and violence and gunfire aboard the doomed plane in its final minutes. Jerry Dwyer allegedly told Kevin Terry that four autopsies were done and later reportedly implied that the autopsy reports were “‘missing,’ or covered up,” Bill Griggs reported in 1989. No proof of irregularities of this nature has yet come to light.

Smiley and Dr. George T. Joyce carried out the autopsy on Roger Peterson at Mercy Hospital in Mason City. Smiley’s report reveals the amount of crushing that a human being undergoes in a plane crash. When slight pressure was applied to certain areas of Peterson’s skin, “multiple small fragments of bone” came through. When moved, his wrist crackled and rattled. Comminuted fractures had turned some bones into powder. The jagged ends of sixteen broken ribs had virtually minced his internal organs. Peterson’s family was charged a $100 autopsy fee.

*   *   *

In Los Angeles, after school on that Tuesday, Donna Ludwig tried to make her way through the large crowd that was gathering in Ritchie’s neighborhood. Finally she arrived at the pink stucco house at 13428 Remmington that Ritchie had bought for his mother. Hundreds of students throughout the northern part of the San Fernando Valley stood in hushed groups, many of them crying, and were admitted to the house a dozen at a time to express their sympathy to Ritchie’s family. The press was there in force, and flashbulbs were popping. As Donna pushed her way through the throng, she became impatient. “We finally got in with all those assholes around,” she later said, according to Mendheim.

Inside the house at last, Donna found Concepcion sitting beside a small shrine she’d made to Ritchie—a table with his picture, some flowers, and his guitars: a Gibson and the turquoise green one he’d first played on. Maintaining an expression of pride and self-respect, Concepcion rocked back and forth as Ritchie’s classmates and fans passed before her, sharing their love and concern. Donna was clinging to her. “I was so proud of him,” Concepcion said. She spoke of the days when Ritchie was still a toddler and how, even then, he used to sing and wag his toy guitar around on the floor. “He had the music in him,” she said. “There hasn’t been enough time,” she added, explaining that Ritchie had once rung her from Hawaii and invited her to vacation there with him some day. “We had so many places to go.” She sighed.

*   *   *

Finally, the terrible day of February 3, 1959, ended. But a grim aftermath was just beginning. In the darkness of midnight, around one
A.M.
, Wednesday, February 4, the police gained admittance to Wilcox Funeral Home and asked to see Buddy’s body, which had already been embalmed and placed in a coffin. Duane Mayfield revealed to Tecklenburg in 1989 that they fingerprinted the bodies “while they were in the caskets.” It was a “tough” job, especially at that hour of the morning, said Mayfield.

Later that morning, according to the
Mirror-Reporter,
Ritchie’s body was shipped to California. Ritchie’s half-brother Bob Morales and Bob Keene identified him, Mendheim later disclosed. The body was then taken to the Noble Chapel Funeral Home in San Fernando. In Donna’s home at 10861 Paso Robles Avenue, she prepared to go to school, dressing in a black sweater and black skirt. Before she left the house, she placed a gold-framed photograph of Ritchie in a black tote bag and proceeded to James Monroe High School in Sepulveda. The entire school was in mourning—the flag was at half mast and a boy from the school band played taps. After school, a group of girls went to St. John de la Salle Catholic Church to pray and light candles.

The rosary ceremony took place at ten
A.M.
on Friday, February 6, at St. Ferdinand Catholic Church, where Ritchie had been baptized. Bob Keene said he paid for Ritchie’s $7,000 funeral. Requiem Mass was celebrated the following day at ten
A.M.
at St. Ferdinand’s. Though the day was dismal and damp, a thousand mourners attended. Several policemen stood guard, expecting the largely Chicano crowd to riot. Donna Ludwig knocked a photographer’s camera from his hands when he attempted to take her picture. Though Ritchie and Donna had broken up, Donna would soon make a record called “Lost Without You”/“Now That You’re Gone.” She did so, according to Mendheim, only because “my silly father went and got me an agent.… I seem to have been hoodwinked into that song.” At the funeral, Donna comforted Concepcion, who wore a black scarf over her graying hair, a black dress, and a full, lighter colored coat. She was surrounded by her children, Bobbie, Connie, Irma, and Mario, ranging in age from seventeen to two. As fans crowded around, she described Ritchie as “a good boy … a praying boy” who always came to St. Ferdinand’s “to light his candles.”