Buddy Holly: Biography (56 page)

“I went and seen Paul McCartney in person in Birmingham, England,” Larry recalled in 1992. “I went in there with him and stayed a couple of hours, him and his wife. They had a big tub of beer there. Just as friendly as they could be.” That night Larry attended a Wings concert. “Except for ‘Mother Mary, Let It Be’ [sic], I have never heard any song I liked very much by his group,” said Larry, “but he did a song at that concert that I really liked. It’s never been put out in the States—something about some lake in Scotland, beautiful song. That’s whenever I realized that Paul had some talent. The way the Beatles made it, they had promoters that hyped them up. I guarantee you, Buddy didn’t have nothin’ but Buddy and his guitar. And determination. Rock ’n’ roll’s gone so rank now. Some guy gets out there with a feather in his cap and a jockey strap on and paints hisself all up and screams and the audience is goin’ crazy ’cause they’re all on dope but that’s not music.”

Larry does not regret having sold off Buddy’s songs. “I don’t hold no grudge against Mr. Eastman [McCartney’s father-in-law, lawyer, and manager],” he said in 1992. “Seems like a nice man. We did what we had to do. It’s been a long, hard, sordid, tough struggle. I’m the guy that had to tend to it all, because I’m Mother’s trustee.”

Nevertheless, the loss of the priceless Holly songbook seems to fit perfectly into the star-crossed saga of Buddy Holly. In a kind of karmic backlash, McCartney was divested of his own birthright—the songs he and John Lennon wrote—when Michael Jackson acquired the company owning the Beatles’ catalog. The sale resulted from Brian Epstein’s mishandling of the Lennon-McCartney songs back in the sixties. Epstein’s structuring of Northern Songs, the company that controlled the Lennon-McCartney copyrights, enabled one of his partners to sell off the company to ATV for 10 million pounds after Epstein’s death. Michael Jackson then snapped up the company from ATV. “The Beatles were angry at what they regarded as a betrayal,” wrote Ray Coleman in his biography of Brian Epstein. McCartney now has no more control of his early songs than the Holley family has over Buddy’s classics, such as “It’s So Easy,” which was shamelessly exploited on a daily basis in a 1994 television commercial hawking home video equipment. Though Norman Petty had died in 1984, it almost seemed as if he were still calling the shots.

*   *   *

Books and movies about Buddy started appearing in the seventies, beginning with Dave Laing’s analytical
Buddy Holly.
Then came Ralph and Elizabeth Peer’s
Buddy Holly: A Biography in Words, Photographs, and Music,
which was a loving songbook by devoted fans. John Goldrosen’s
Buddy Holly: His Life and Music
arranged Buddy’s life in coherent chronological form for the first time and included invaluable interviews. Less ambitious books included John Tobler’s
The Buddy Holly Story
and Alan Mann’s
A-Z of Buddy Holly,
both of British origin.

Movie producers had been interested in filming Buddy’s life ever since 1960. By the following decade several projects went into development. One,
The Buddy Holly Story,
starring Gary Busey, would finally reach the public, but it would bear little relation to the facts of Buddy’s life. The controversy surrounding it would eventually embroil Buddy’s family in litigation and outrage the Crickets and Norman Petty, all of whom were ignored by Hollywood as if they’d never existed. But the film, which proved to be a popular and critical success, was a powerful factor in the continuing growth and emergence of Buddy’s posthumous career and his influence on popular culture.

Chapter Seventeen

Buddy’s Legacy: Exploitation, Distortion, and an Enduring Love

Hollywood has yet to produce an authentic portrait of the rock ’n’ roll experience, though it is one of the most emblematic of the twentieth century. The moviemakers’ flirtation with Buddy Holly’s life is a classic example of distortion and exploitation, smoothing out the hard, jagged edges that make a life in rock ’n’ roll so engaging, perilous, tragic, and archetypically modern—torn between a yearning for acceptance and a compulsion to destroy all that is false and hypocritical in society. The real Buddy Holly is to be found nowhere in the various efforts to represent him on film.

The first was written by Mark Saha in California as an ABC “Movie of the Week” and was to feature a voice-over by Paul McCartney. Petty saw the script and pronounced it “very good.” The film was to include cameo appearances by all of the famous artists Buddy had worked with. As usual, producers ran into obstacles when they attempted to acquire character rights—legal releases from living persons who were to be portrayed in the film. According to Petty, Mark Saha secured releases from almost everyone except Maria Elena, but Goldrosen later wrote that Jerry, Joe B., the Holleys, and Petty himself all wanted more money and, perhaps, script approval. “We had favorite-nation clauses in all the releases so that if one person got paid, everyone got paid,” Petty later told Brooks and Malcolm. “So, rather than to get involved, MCA just shelved the whole idea and it never did become a movie at Universal.”

In the mid-1970s another movie about Buddy was put into the works by an outfit that called itself Innovisions. The producers, Steve Rash and Freddy Bauer, went to Florida to see Maria Elena, who had moved there from New York in 1968. Maria Elena and her husband, a Texas businessman, were raising their three children. Both of her sons, Buddy and Carlos, were named after Buddy, whose full name was Charles Hardin Buddy Holley (Carlos is Spanish for Charles). In 1975 both Maria Elena and Buddy’s parents okayed the Innovisions proposal and signed contracts in return for a share of the royalties. The original title was
The Day the Music Died.

Meanwhile, Jerry Allison was working on a Buddy Holly movie of his own, with Gary Busey playing Jerry. For all their talk during Buddy’s lifetime about wanting to stay in Texas, the Crickets were gravitating to Tennessee and buying farms next to each other. Jerry’s movie focused on the Crickets’ 1957 “black tour,” covering one month in Buddy’s life and showing how the Crickets helped eradicate racial prejudice. Allison and screenwriter Tom Drake sold the script, then entitled
Not Fade Away,
to Twentieth Century-Fox but encountered solid resistance from Buddy’s wife and family. The language was too racy for the Holleys, and Maria Elena didn’t care for the small fee Fox suggested.

Nonetheless filming began in September 1975 with Steve Davies playing Buddy, Gary Busey as Jerry, and Bruce Kirby playing Joe B. Stephen Davies later appeared in a well-received made-for-cable film,
Philip Marlowe, Private Eye: The Pencil,
and a horror movie about killer cockroaches,
The Nest.
Permission was acquired from MCA to use Buddy’s recordings. While filming on location in Mississippi, Jerry himself took a small role, playing a music-store owner. Bob Montgomery also got into the act, playing a tour promoter. Three weeks into shooting, Fox executives looked at the rushes and panicked. They were expecting
American Graffiti
but got
The Defiant Ones
instead—a story of whites and blacks chained together in uneasy alliance. Give us some laughs, Fox ordered, but the director, Jerry Friedman, refused. Fox shut the film down and shelved the footage when it was one-third completed, writing off a million dollars.

Innovisions, which had been moving ahead with
its
Buddy Holly movie, took out an intimidating full-page ad in
Variety
on October 28, 1975, warning of legal action if anyone else attempted to portray Buddy on screen. Two years later,
The Buddy Holly Story
was in the can, starring Gary Busey, who’d managed to promote himself from the role of Jerry Allison in
Not Fade Away
to the leading role of Buddy Holly in the Innovisions project. The movie, according to almost all serious critics, is a complete distortion of Buddy’s life, beginning with the mountains clearly visible in scenes supposedly representing Lubbock, a city that’s flatter than a pancake and light-years from the nearest hillock, and the skyscrapers in the background over the “Clear Lake Ballroom.” Evidently the producers, who chose to shoot the film around Los Angeles, were unaware of the topography of the South Plains. Surely someone must have told them, though, that Buddy was not backed by a symphony orchestra in Clear Lake but by a drummer and two pickers. Far more damaging was their negative portrayal of Buddy’s parents. In the movie, L.O. and Ella are depicted as wanting Buddy to give up rock ’n’ roll. In real life, they were supportive of Buddy and his music. Eventually the Holleys would sue the producers for such distortion.

Most extraordinary of all, the moviemakers decided to omit Petty, Jerry, and Joe B., Buddy’s closest associates, Billy Stull stated in an interview at the Norman Petty Recording Studio in Clovis in 1992. Petty was offered $5,000 to be music consultant, Stull added, but when Petty foolishly demanded script approval, he was completely deleted from the movie. “I felt like a nonenity, like some very important years of my life had just been wiped out,” Petty complained to
Rolling Stone
’s Chet Flippo.

Although there was no way Innovisions could similarly erase the Crickets from Buddy’s life, they did the next most expedient thing, changing Jerry and Joe B.’s names to Jesse and Ray Bob. It was a cruel blow, typical of Hollywood’s lack of respect for artists. Jesse, the Allison substitute, was played by Don Stroud, who’d portrayed one of Shelley Winters’s gangster sons in 1970’s
Bloody Mama.
Charles Martin Smith, who’d made a strong impression as Terry the Toad in
American Graffiti,
played Ray Bob, the Joe B. character. Smith knew how to play both piano and guitar, though he was unfamiliar with the bull fiddle. Although Goldrosen would later state that Don Stroud lacked professional musical experience, Stroud would be credited as the drummer on the film’s sound-track album. The LP also offered “Special thanks” to Ritchie Hayward, drummer for the “Eddie Cochran” Band. In bit roles were Gailard Sartain as the Bopper (he’d show up again in 1981, in
Hard Country,
with Jan-Michael Vincent, Kim Basinger, and Tanya Tucker) and comedian Fred Travalena as “Mad Man Mancuso,” a pseudonym for the DJ Tom Clay, who was instrumental in the success of “That’ll Be the Day.”

As Buddy, Gary Busey wanted to do his own singing, but Maria Elena was still under the impression the musical portion of the sound track would be taken directly from Buddy’s master tapes. She was in for a surprise. A strong personality, Busey was a daredevil who rode his motorcycle without a helmet—until an accident years later almost took his life. He was born in Texas and grew up in Oklahoma. Regarded in Hollywood as a supporting actor rather than a leading man, he’d appeared in
Dirty Little Billy
in 1972, followed by light roles in
The Last Picture Show, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, The Gumball Rally, A Star Is Born, Straight Time,
and
Big Wednesday,
as well as the television series
The Texas Wheelers
and the television movies
The Execution of Private Slovik
and
The Law.

To get in shape for the role of Buddy Holly, Busey, a large man, brought his weight down from 240 pounds to 180. He had his long blond hair dyed and cut to resemble Buddy’s. He was not dissuaded by some Holly aficionados who felt that Busey, at thirty-three, was a bit old to be playing Buddy from ages eighteen to twenty-two. Fans were shocked again when it was announced that Busey intended to do his own singing rather than lip-synch to Buddy’s records. To Maria Elena the idea of a Buddy Holly movie without Buddy himself singing his hits was unthinkable. “It wouldn’t be any good with anyone else doing the singing,” she told Griggs on June 25, 1977. Griggs echoed the widow’s sentiments, commenting in December 1977 that the film would lose its claim to authenticity “if Buddy isn’t singing the songs in it.”

Despite the liberties the moviemakers took with historical fact,
The Buddy Holly Story
turned out to be disarmingly lovable, thanks largely to Busey’s performance, a tour de force of acting and singing. Though vocally unimpressive (a fact that becomes painfully obvious when one listens to the sound-track album), Busey was not altogether inexperienced as a musician. As the pseudonymous Teddy Jack Eddy, he’d worked as a rock ’n’ roll drummer, at one point with Leon Russell, and he knew how to handle a guitar, although he’d require off-camera assistance from a more accomplished instrumentalist for Buddy’s virtuosic lead guitar parts when the sound-track was recorded live. More importantly, Busey knew how to act, turning in a performance of such sincerity and conviction that no one cared whether it resembled Buddy. No one, that is, except Buddy’s intimates. Says Sonny Curtis in a 1993 interview, “Gary Busey was a good Chuck Berry, but he wasn’t Buddy.” Just prior to the film’s release, Robert Gittler, the writer of the screenplay, committed suicide.

Lubbock, ever predictable, failed to lobby hard enough for the world premiere and lost out to Dallas, where the movie opened on May 18, 1978, at the Medallion Theater. Banners streamed from the marquee, a red carpet was laid out from the door to the street, and a line of policemen held back a throng of two thousand. A local band played Buddy’s hits, and Maria Elena addressed the crowd briefly. Though Niki Sullivan had not been portrayed in the movie, he attended with his wife Fran and Holly fan-club honchos Griggs and Beecher. Other notables included Jerry, Joe B., and Sonny Curtis, who’d flown in together from Tennessee, and Trini Lopez, who told Griggs that he and Buddy had been close friends. Actor-director Ron Howard, Holly super-fan Steve Bonner, and Goldrosen rounded out the list of VIPs. The weather was “hot and sticky,” Griggs later recalled.

During the viewing of the film, when Busey sings “True Love Ways,” Mary Elena became distraught. Later, according to Griggs, she said that she’d “started seeing Buddy on the screen.” Bursting into tears, she ran from the auditorium and into the women’s room. Despite her own subsequent marriage and her children, she was still, at that moment, the young woman married to the legend.