Fifties (85 page)

Later in his life, as his early fame as a singer and television star began to fade and, ironically, as his music became far more interesting, Ricky Nelson never received proper credit for it. Indeed, even those who showed up at his later concerts at the Palomino, in which he was playing an interesting and original version of California white rock-a-billy, seemed to want him to be Ricky from the television show. When he would play his latest songs, the audience would yell out for their favorites from his early days, such as “Poor Little Fool.” When they did, said his friend Sharon Sheeley, he would wince. It was as if the public would not let him grow up and wanted him forever to be as he was cast as a boy.

He had gone, he once noted, from singing in the bathroom to the recording studio, with nothing in between. All the ingredients to make a star were there: He already had a huge ready-made constituency because of the television show; he was uncommonly attractive; he had a nice, if untrained voice. His first record sold 60,000 copies in three weeks, shot up the charts, and stayed there for five months. Eventually, it sold 700,000 copies. It was to be the start of a remarkable but unhappy career, in which his success outstripped his talent and his place in the pecking order of rock cast a shadow that always hung over him professionally. In 1958 he was the top-selling rock-and-roll artist in the country. He went on tours that summer, and the crowds were enormous. In those early years of rock, only Elvis Presley was selling more records and had more consistent hits. Yet his father was still masterminding the entire operation, serving as his manager, arranging better record contracts for him, bringing in Barney Kessel, the famed jazz guitarist, to help him with his sound, making sure his backup group was worthy of him and thereby using the Jordanaires, Elvis’s backup, with him. Rock, his friends thought,
was his one source of freedom, his way of escaping the public image forced on him by the television show. Ironically, his success as a teen musical idol lent additional vitality to the show; it should have been slowing down by the late fifties, but because of his new success as a rocker, the show was renewed in 1959 for five more years. He, who had wanted to escape it, had carried it forward with his means of escape.

He became rich (he made a lot of money from the television show, and now he was making much more from records and appearances—all of which was put aside for him), successful, attractive, and incomplete. As such he grew up in a kind of covert rebellion; he and Ozzie worked out an unacknowledged quid pro quo, Ozzie indulged him, offered him extra privileges, and limited Ricky’s rebellion; Ricky in turn stayed on the show and remained dependent on Ozzie. He had grown up as a teen idol, but he had not had a real boyhood and now he was passing through adolescence still unsure of himself, his professional career with almost all of his major decisions still dominated by his father.

His adult life was, not surprisingly, unhappy—a marriage that seemed perfect on paper soon went sour; excessive drug use followed. Finally, the harshest truth could not be suppressed: Ricky Nelson, the charming, handsome all-American boy was, to all intents and purposes, the unhappy product of a dysfunctional family.

THIRTY-FIVE

A
MONG THOSE WHO WERE
extremely ambivalent about their pursuit of the American dream were Tom and Betsy Rath. In 1955, when they first appeared on the scene, they should have been, by all rights, the quintessential upwardly mobile modern American family. But in this society of consumption, they were always in debt—not heavily, but consistently so; every month there was a stack of unpaid bills, which Betsy had to juggle skillfully in order not to have their credit cut off. Worse still, the house in which they had lived for seven years was too small and seemed to be disintegrating beneath them. The front door had been badly scratched by a dog; the hot-water faucet in the bathroom dripped. One of their three children had gotten ink all over a wall. Almost all of the furniture needed to be refinished, reupholstered, or cleaned. The neighbors who monitored such things whispered about
the poorly kept yard and that the Raths could not afford a gardener.

For the Raths the house had come to symbolize all their frustrations and tensions. In the living room, a dent on a wall marked a bitter argument that had occurred when Betsy spent $40 on a cut-glass vase on the same day that, by chance, Tom spent $70 on a new suit he badly needed for business. Tom had dented the wall by throwing the vase against it. Even their 1939 Ford, a car they had driven for too long, marked them, if not exactly as failures, then as people who were not keeping up with the neighbors.

Tom and Betsy Rath were not real people, although there were plenty of young men and women who could readily identify with them. They were fictional characters, the heroes, or antiheroes, of Sloan Wilson’s novel
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,
one of the most influential American novels of the fifties. Its theme was the struggle of young Americans against the pressures of conformity and imprisonment in suburban life. “Without talking about it much they both began to think of the house as a trap, and they no more enjoyed refurbishing it than a prisoner would delight in shining up the bars of his cell,” Wilson wrote. For the Raths were victims of this modern malaise: What should have made them happy did not. “I don’t know what’s the matter with us,” Betsy Rath said to Tom one night. “Your job is plenty good enough. We’ve got three nice kids and lots of people would be glad to have a house like this. We shouldn’t be so
discontented
all the time.”

They lived in a community of people very much like themselves; their neighbors, though pleasant and friendly, were, truth to tell, strangers, bonded by status and ambition rather than true friendship. “Few people considered Greentree Avenue a permanent stop—the place was just a crossroads where families waited until they could afford to move on to something better. The finances of almost every household were an open book. Budgets were frankly discussed, and the public celebration of increases in salary was common. The biggest parties of all were moving out parties, given by those who finally were able to buy a bigger house.... On Greentree Avenue contentment was an object of contempt,” Wilson wrote.

It was not a bad world, Betsy Rath thought when she pondered their situation—the people around them were good and decent but they were dreamers and most of their dreams seemed to be about material progress. Sometimes she thought their lives were too dull and then she would ponder their condition a bit more and decide that it was not so much a dull world as a frantic one. But there was, she knew, a narrowness to it. Nor were they the only ones restless with
their lives. When the neighbors gathered for one of their instant parties, late in the night, the dreams for the future were revealed: “usually the men and the women just sat talking about the modern houses they would like to build, or the old barns they would like to convert into dwellings. The price the small houses on Greentree Avenue were currently bringing and the question of how big a mortgage the local banks were offering on larger places were constantly discussed. As the evening wore on, the men generally fell to divulging dreams of escaping to an entirely different sort of life—to a dairy farm in Vermont, or to the management of a motel in Florida.”

Tom Rath, whose biography was strikingly similar to that of Sloan Wilson, was thirty-three years old and made $7,000 a year, a seemingly substantial salary for a young man in those days, one that placed him squarely in the new middle class. He worked in Manhattan for a foundation that had been established by a millionaire for scientific research. He seemed neither satisfied nor dissatisfied with his job; to the degree that he was discontented, it was with his salary, not with what he did. His restlessness was revealed one day at lunch with some of his friends when he heard of an opening in public relations at the United Broadcasting Corporation. It paid between $8,000 and $12,000. Try for $15,000, one of his friends who worked there said: “I’d like to see somebody stick the bastards good.” Ten thousand, he thought, might get them a new house. It was not a job he particularly wanted, nor was it a company he admired. When he mentioned to Betsy the possibilities of a life in public relations, she told him that she had never thought of him as a public relations man. “Would you like it?” she asked. “I’d like the money,” he answered. Then she sighed. “It would be wonderful to get out of this house.”

“When you come right down to it a man with three children has no damn right to say that money doesn’t matter,” Tom thought to himself. Naturally, he applied for the job. The last question on the application was intriguing: “The most significant thing about me is ...” For a moment he thought of writing about his wartime stint as a paratrooper, during which time he killed seventeen men. “For four and a half years my profession was jumping out of airplanes with a gun, and now I want to go into public relations,” he wanted to write. He pondered it, though. He could also have written: “The most significant fact about me is that I detest the United Broadcasting Corporation, with all its soap operas, commercials and yammering studio audiences, and the only reason I’m willing to spend my life in such a ridiculous enterprise is that I want to buy a more expensive house and a better brand of gin.”

Whatever frustrations he felt with his current life were minor compared with those harbored by Betsy. She wanted a more civilized life, one where they would eat a real breakfast in the morning and talk to each other like real people, and eat, instead of hot dogs and hamburgers for dinner, something more substantial, a roast or a casserole. And above all there would be no more television. Instead, the family would read more, and perhaps they would read aloud to each other.

Eventually, in Wilson’s novel, all the Raths’ problems were resolved. Tom took the new job, and despite the treacherous politics of the organization, he discovered that his boss (a character based on Roy Larsen, one of the founders of Time-Life) was a superior man seriously pledged to a better world. In time Tom Rath confronted his demons (including fathering a child during World War Two with an Italian mother), simplified his life, and found that despite his earlier cynicism he could achieve both honor and a better salary in his new job (in addition, his grandmother left him a large tract of extremely valuable land, which could be developed). He and Betsy were able to hold on to their beliefs and their marriage while becoming part of the best of the new suburban world.

The novel was almost completely autobiographical. The book reflected, Sloan Wilson later said, his own frustrations with civilian life after serving as a young officer with the Coast Guard in World War Two. His wartime job had been rich, full of challenge and responsibility. He had commanded his own ship at twenty-three and dealt daily with the great danger involved in running high-octane fuel into combat areas. Every day in that exciting time of his life he had a feeling that what he did mattered. Civilian life, to his surprise, was infinitely more difficult. He had always wanted to be a reporter, and he had worked for a time on the
Providence Journal
at a job he loved. But with a wife and two children, the fifty-dollar-a-week salary was woefully inadequate.

“What we all talked about in those days was selling out,” he said years later. “Selling out was doing something you did not want to do for a good deal more money than you got for doing what you loved to do.” Though he wanted to write fiction, he took a job at Time-Life. Even as he joined the Luce publications, Wilson was appalled by his own decision because he hated everything Time-Life stood for—he viewed it as an institution that offered talented, liberal young men handsome salaries to dress up its own conservative politics. At first he had worked for
FYI,
the Time house organ, but that seemed beneath his dignity and he decided to quit. Somehow, his
personnel file was sent to Roy Larsen, one of the company’s founders and the top person on the business side. Larsen was about to head a major campaign on behalf of the nation’s public schools and decided to hire Wilson as a special assistant to do publicity. The pay was good, and he would soon make $10,000 a year.

If Wilson did not like the political slant of Time-Life, he liked the internal politics among the managerial ranks even less. Another bright young man, who was his immediate superior, threw his first article on the floor with contempt. Later, the young man confessed that he always operated this way, believing that new employees did not work well unless they were frightened. But to Wilson’s surprise, he had immediately liked Roy Larsen, a graceful, kind, and intelligent man, albeit a world-class workaholic. Best of all, he found that he could write short stories for
The New Yorker
on the side. But if there were advantages to the job, they still paled when compared with his exhilarating experiences during the war. He was somehow, for all of Roy Larsen’s personal kindness and the handsome paycheck, something of a glorified flunky. He decided to quit the day that he accompanied Larsen to have his photo taken along with the head of the outdoor advertising council. Their photo was to be part of the announcement at the beginning of a billboard campaign to promote the nation’s public schools.

It was a rainy day, and both executives arrived wearing handsome overcoats and bowler hats. Each was respectfully accompanied by his bright, up-and-coming young assistant. No executive was worth his salt unless he had his own up-and-coming young man, Wilson thought. Wilson looked at his opposite number from the outdoor advertising council and saw how eager and sycophantish he was—and wondered if he looked that way to other people. Because of the rain, both men had kept their bowler hats on, but since the photographer could not see their faces, he asked that the hats come off. Unlike Wilson, the other bright young man seemed to have anticipated the photographer’s request, and in a second he not only had his own boss’s hat but Roy Larsen’s as well. Sloan Wilson realized he had been outhustled, in a competition he wanted no part of in the first place.