Pat Boone Fan Club (19 page)

“You were wonderful,” Marc and I assure him.

Pat Boone points to the velvet flower embroidered on my lavender jacket. “At home, hanging on my wall, I have a photograph of a flower growing up through concrete,” he says. “Like you. Your childhood.
You
are like a flower growing up through concrete.”

This
is Pat Boone, too. Not just the religious conservative. But the
April-love-love-letters-in-the-sand
Pat Boone. The Pat Boone offering innocence. Redemption. Answers. Even in this
crazy world we’re living in, huh?

“You teach, don’t you,” he continues, more a statement than a question. “
I
wanted to teach. I graduated from Columbia University with a degree in English literature. I wanted to teach young people.”

He is as I always envision: perfect hair, smile, teeth, wife, daughters, career, life. But I struggle to pay attention as he talks. I’m weak, dizzy. I’m just hoping not to pass out. Even as I lean toward him, smiling, an enormous sadness wells up inside me. I want to tell Pat Boone I’ve been ill. I want him to know I was worried I’d miss the concert. I’m equally sad that I look thin and frail. I’d wanted to be perfect for him, match his own seeming perfection. Instead, my skirt hangs loose. I notice a small rip in the flower on my jacket. My hair is limp, my face wan. My only hope is that he won’t notice how sick I appear. I don’t want to spoil this meeting after anticipating it for so long.

“On the day I graduated,” Pat Boone continues, “I’d just left Gina Lollobrigida at the studio. I got out of a taxi in Central Park and lay back on the grass looking at the clouds, trying to decide what to do with my life. I already had the television show, hit records. Four daughters. But I still wasn’t sure about a career. My father was in construction, but I knew I didn’t want to do that. My mother was a nurse, but I hate the sight of blood.”

Pat Boone laughs, adding, “Since I still had to fulfill contractual obligations, I stayed with the singing. But as a teacher, I’d have been a role model, setting an example for all those young lives.”

“You do that with your singing,” I say. “You set an example for
me
.”

Pat Boone: an example of an ideal, or an idealized father? An ideal, or an idealized Christian? Entertainer?

Pat Boone has sold forty-five million records, or units, has had thirty-eight Top 40 hits over the course of his career. Right now,
Billboard Magazine
lists him as the number-ten rock recording artist in history. But more than success as an entertainer, he also started a volunteer organization for Cambodian refugees. He wrote the lyrics to the song “Exodus.” The Israeli government appointed him Christian Ambassador of Tourism and gave him the Israel Cultural Award. He made it possible for more than two hundred thousand Jews to make
aliyah
to Israel.

Pat Boone sang “April Love” for Queen Elizabeth. Sang “Ain’t That a Shame” to President Eisenhower. Sang “It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie” to President Nixon.

Milked a cow on the
Tonight Show
with Johnny Carson.

In
Together
, Pat Boone writes, “[I] call [myself an] ‘adopted Jew’ because of the deep realization that everything we hold sacred as Christians has come directly out of biblical Judaism. I really feel that no Jew can feel more identification with Israel and all the historical biblical sites than a devout Christian; in fact, I’ve told . . . rabbis that I see Judaism as divided into four main branches—Orthodox, Conservative, Reformed, and Christian!”

Pat Boone: Christian? Jew? Who?

On the jacket of his newer, heavy-metal
CD
,
In a Metal Mood: No More Mr. Nice Guy
, Pat Boone sits astride a motorcycle in black leather and chains. Albeit he’s a seventy-year-old man in black leather and chains—and
not
a chain strung with a cross.

Yet Pat Boone, either in black leather
or
his trademark white bucks, is still, well,
Pat Boone
. Isn’t he?

“Oh, but I made some mistakes with my daughters,” Pat Boone
is now saying. “I didn’t mean to, of course. I love them very much. They always knew how much I loved them.”

“You
always
loved them.” I nod, confirming.

“Cherry wrote her book on her anorexia.”

Cherry Boone is his eldest daughter. “It’s a moving story,” I say. “I read it.”

“All the pressures of show business. It’s difficult. Fifty years in the business.”

I imagine Pat Boone gazing up at that blue sky in Central Park. Early spring. Fifty years ago
he
was early spring, a golden sheen in that one moment . . . alone by himself in the park, already a star, yes, but maybe not yet fully committed to
the
Pat Boone.
That
image. Maybe a trace of Charles Eugene Boone (his real name) remained, on that day he makes this decision about the rest of his life, this last moment
before
he’s intrinsically, incontrovertibly
Pat Boone
.

Forever.

Whoever you are, I always loved
you.

I wore my own pair of white bucks back in junior high school. No, I bought a pair of white bucks, but I only wore them inside my house. No. Only in my bedroom. I sat on my bed, legs straight, admiring the neatly tied shoes. The pristine leather. Spotless soles. Crisp laces. Perfect stitching. No one else ever touched them. Even I rarely brushed my fingers across them, not wanting to mar or stain the surface. The scent of new leather was sweeter than any gardenia corsage I ever received from a boyfriend. Before going outside, I rewrapped the shoes in tissue paper. In my closet was a locked drawer meant for valuables. I placed the shoes inside it. And turned the key.

Pat Boone’s road manager enters the room after fifteen minutes.

The audience is over.

“Can I kiss you good-bye?” Pat Boone asks. “On the cheek.”

I nod.

Marc snaps photos with his camera. In one, Pat Boone wraps his arm around my shoulders. In another, which the road manager shoots, Pat Boone drapes one arm around Marc, the other, me. We all stare at the camera. Marc appears determined: He
will
get through this. I seem dazed.
Pat Boone just kissed me.
But is it a kiss I only wanted back in junior high school? Who did he hug, kiss? Me, or a small, younger ghost of me?

And Pat Boone? Even now, months later, I’m not quite sure whom I see in the photograph. That smile. Yellow and orange clothes. The color of morning or sunset? Or maybe the photo is of only a face, that famous face, that dazzling young hopeful smile refusing to age, to fade. Still full of Pat Boonedom.

Or maybe
I
am the one full of Pat Boonedom. I was first riveted by him while watching
The Pat Boone Chevy Show
on our black-and-white Zenith television . . . before the Cuban Missile Crisis, before I donned love beads and bell-bottoms and demonstrated against the war in Vietnam, before the first man walked on the moon, before picking apricots on a kibbutz in Israel. Before marrying.

Pat Boone is innocent, all-American teenage summers at Palisades Park, Bermuda shorts and girls in shirtwaist dresses, corner drugstores, pearly nail polish, prom corsages, rain-scented lilacs, chenille bedspreads and chiffon scarves, jukebox rock and roll spilling across humid evenings, back when linoleum was better, more real, than wood. He is Ivory soap, grape popsicles, screened porches at the Jersey shore, bathing suits hung to dry, the smell of must and mildew tempered by sun and salt. He is a boardwalk Ferris wheel, its spinning lights filling dark spaces between stars. He remains all the things that, as you age, you miss—the memory of this past smelling sweeter than honeysuckle on the Fourth of July.

Did those Pat Boone summers really exist—or only in mem
ory? Memory, its own accurate reality, still leaves you sick with longing for Pat Boonedom: a hopeful antidote for time spooling forward into the present, into the future—nostalgia more real, more intense than the past itself.

If only Pat Boone could make the past like he used to. If only . . . since they don’t make the future like they used too, either. All you have is one snapshot moment, when all of time coalesces.

Like this: You stare at photographs of Pat Boone’s family in his book
Together
. You trace a finger across indelible family portraits of them on their bicycle built for six. Photographs of four generations of Boones, a family all together . . . whereas you, yourself, have no children, two divorced husbands, two dead cats, estranged relatives. Whereas you still feel as if you’ve never been anyone’s daughter. Pat Boone who, in his books about God and religion, in his teachings, provides answers to existence. Whereas you have no answers. None.

And no white bucks any longer either. You now realize you don’t know what happened to the pair you bought in junior high. Just lost—like so much else along the way.

Except for this longing, a pale throb of memory, a hum just below the surface of all the years since you first saw his image, first heard him sing.

Pat Boone and his manager leave the green room. By the time Marc and I collect our coats and enter the corridor, they’re gone. Vanished. Without a trace. Perhaps taken up in the Rapture, Marc might joke. I glance around. Which hallway back to the lobby? No one to ask. No Pat Boone. No sign from God pointing the way.

Huh?

Pat Boone hugged me. Yet my ailing body feels no different. So, no, not a laying on of hands, after all. Yet,
yet
—he noticed the embroidered flower on my jacket. Decades after my teenage crush, he
touched me. Talked to me. It
is
a crazy world in which I’ve finally met Pat Boone after all these years. And crazy that I’m ill when the dream comes true. Or ironic, huh?

It is this
almost
-ironic,
almost
-earnest,
almost
-heartfelt “huh?” that saves Pat Boone. He sings the soulful “Moody River,” after all. He sings the jazzy “Tutti Frutti.” But Pat Boone’s river is never too moody. His
tutti frutti
isn’t too down and dirty. Pat Boone is neither too tutti nor too frutti. He’s not too “au rutti,” either, as if I know what “au rutti” even means.

Pat Boone
is
pure “huh?” with a question mark.

Huh?

Once Pat Boone’s music, his lyrics, his voice, his smile offered hope, the promise of a safe, bleached suburbia for all those bobby-soxer Christian girls. Wannabe Christian girls, too.

Pat Boone is hopeful
for
me. It is his own never-ending hope that I love.

And if Pat Boone considers himself a Christian Jew, then I can be an unbelieving believer, right? For here I am backstage in a green room with the father I always wanted, for the very first time.

Boone
ex machina
.

It
is
a crazy world, huh?

Oh, Jesus,
yes
.

My Sorted Past

My parents and I stroll across shaved lawns at Grossinger’s, a resort in the Catskill Mountains’ Borscht Belt. Warmth from the tennis courts, the golf course, and the post–Labor Day blank hotel windows rises and shimmers before dispersing into autumn. I notice a lone couple on chaise lounges as we approach the silent swimming pool. “Look,” I whisper to my parents. “Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher.”

My mother scrounges in her bag for a piece of paper. All she finds is a square white card, a reminder for my upcoming orthodontist’s appointment. I flip it over. The back is blank. Perfect.

My parents stand behind me as I hand the card and a blue ballpoint pen to Elizabeth Taylor. Her perfume, in my unimaginative teenage mind, must be Chanel No. 5. A pastel chiffon scarf cups her black hair. Her eyes
are
violet . . . or maybe simply deep with loss and desire. Pink lipstick. Although she doesn’t quite smile, she doesn’t seem annoyed at the intrusion. She props the card on her tortoiseshell purse with a silver clasp. She clicks open the pen and scrawls her name, the “E” in Elizabeth and the “y” in Taylor fancy flourishes in her well-rehearsed autograph. Her diamond ring reflects her starry life. She passes purse, card, and pen to Eddie Fisher, who signs below her. His smile is broader, more eager, though his autograph is smaller than hers, humbler.

I recall from reading movie magazines that Eddie Fisher’s first job at Grossinger’s was as a boat boy on the lake. He later returned as a singing sensation. He married Debbie Reynolds here at Grossinger’s. Only recently Eddie Fisher married Elizabeth Taylor (Michael Todd, her third husband, died in a plane
crash), after their sordid affair, after he abandoned Debbie Reynolds, after Elizabeth Taylor converted to Judaism.

My mother once worked as a secretary for Michael Todd, but she doesn’t mention this tenuous connection.

Other than to ask for the autograph, I say nothing further. Yet I wish I could recline in the empty lounge beside her, pretend to be her child, a famous Hollywood daughter. I slip the card in my pocket so I won’t lose or smudge it. I envision bringing it to school. My friends will
ooh
and
aah
as if Elizabeth Taylor sprinkled stardust on me. As if fame can be conferred upon all who, even momentarily, enter its secret violet circle.

My parents and I continue across the stone patio, heading toward the parking lot. I glance back. Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher haven’t moved. They pose in their lounges, not speaking, not holding hands. Perhaps she pauses on this still autumn day to sort out her past as she learns the new role of sedate widow . . . or recently converted Jewish wife.

In this silence, you would never suspect her swirling life. She seems almost lonely. Based on the movie magazines, surely I know the
real
her, the real woman’s moods and thoughts.

How can she be lonely?

Soon she will wing back to Hollywood, whereas I will remain a whisper in the presence of fame, ebbing as quickly as the sound of the click of a ballpoint pen.

Years later, now an adult, I receive a phone call one evening out of the blue (or perhaps violet) from an independent Hollywood producer. She says she discovered me—well, not the
actual
me sitting at a drugstore lunch counter at Hollywood and Vine, but at least my memoir—in the Beverly Hills public library. She wants to purchase the movie rights.

To prepare for the interview with the screenwriter, I search through boxes stuffed with old photographs. She wants to see photos from the years when I acted out a sexual addiction—my
misguided search for love—the focus of the movie. Photos capture time.
Look: this is the lonely and confused girl I once was, right here. Look: here’s a wedding photo, back when I wanted to believe I could be an ordinary, normal wife.
Here I am, in all these photos, as if I’m holding many variations of “me” in my hand.

In the midst of sorting photographs, I discover the square white card in a leather keepsake album. I trace a fingertip across those familiar autographs. I easily lift the card off the page, the old glue cracking. On the flip side is the appointment for the orthodontist.

A nurse scrawled my name in a blank space, along with the date of the appointment: “Oct. 3, 11 o’clock.”

MErcury: Those old, evocative telephone exchanges.

In the movie
Butterfield 8
, Elizabeth Taylor plays the role of Gloria, who, according to the movie’s promotion, is
“part model, part call-girl, and all man-trap.

“This is Danny . . . who knew that no one man owned Gloria!

“This is Liggett . . . who called Gloria whenever his wife was away!

“The glamour girl who wakes up ashamed! The most desirable woman in town and the easiest to find . . . just call BUtterfield 8.

“She must hold many men in her arms to find the one man she could
LOVE
!”

These could (almost) be advertisements for my own movie, my own life—minus the exclamation marks, minus the “glamour”—but full of the shame.

The screenplay is completed. The actors are cast. A date is set to begin production. I fly to Vancouver, British Columbia, to visit the set.

“A photograph!” I say, on cue, holding up a small, digital camera.

I recite my two words of dialogue as I emerge from a group of extras, partygoers. In the scene, the actors playing my father, mother, husband, and me gather together, smiling, as I snap the picture.

The scene depicts my parents’ anniversary party, and Grant, the director, asked if I’d like a cameo. The action takes place not on a sound stage, but in the dining room of a real family’s home, rented by the production company, to represent my parents’ house. This McMansion, though, is nothing like any place my family ever lived.

This photograph that I, playing the role of photographer, snap, portrays how my family always appeared perfect and loving in public. It was a façade, however, masking the
real
family, one in which my father misloved me in private, when I was a child.

The actress playing my mother flubs her line.

I step forward and, again, say, “A photograph!” I press the shutter.

This time, the actor playing my father forgets to smile. Also, one of the extras, perhaps wanting to be noticed in the crowd, gyrates her arms. “No dancing,” Grant instructs. The actors and I, as well as the
real
cameraman filming the scene, set up for take three.

Earlier I sat in the hair-and-makeup trailer beside Sally Pressman, the actress portraying me. Eye shadow, liner, mascara, lip gloss, powder, blush. Staring into the mirror, I watched my transformation. Yet there’s only so much that makeup can fix. I momentarily imagined I was Sally, a television star, with people waiting on me, enhancing my appearance, always surrounded, as we are now, by trailers for the cast, the crew, the production office, as well as trucks carrying cameras, lighting, sound equipment, props, and a catering service.

In my real life
, I sit for hours in a room in my house with messy hair, wrinkled sweats, alone with a laptop computer.

Now I’m almost afraid to breathe. I don’t want to muss my hair or smudge my makeup. At least I haven’t flubbed my line. Even though my dialogue consists of only two words, I’m nervous I won’t speak with the correct inflection. Is it “a photograph?” or “a photograph!”? I decide the latter, though no one coaches me. I’m equally fearful that I’ll appear too serious. I’m supposed to smile, which is difficult, having dreaded my real parents’
real
anniversary party years ago, where I also pretended we were a happy family.

Or suppose my smile looks like a grin, since those braces I once wore didn’t correct my overbite. I want a smile as dainty as Elizabeth Taylor’s.

My previous acting experience consists of the time in second grade when I was supposed to star as Little Red Riding Hood. On opening night I stepped from the wings to walk through the dark, cardboard-cutout forest. I wore a cape with matching hood sewn by my mother and carried a wicker basket with food for my sick grandmother. In reality (whatever that is), the basket must have been empty. Then, too, I pretended to be a happy little girl, just as instructed during rehearsals.

I
was
happy, at first. The starched cotton hood felt like a helmet, protection. I skipped from tree to cutout tree, believing that my magical cape was sewn with lightning and fire. Maybe, despite the script, I even believed it would protect me from the big, bad wolf.

Suddenly, a rustle.

Is that what I heard? What disturbed me?

Perhaps I sensed the wolf prowling the path behind me, gaining on me. Perhaps I glimpsed him from the corner of my eye—or maybe he appeared only in my mind’s eye—a furry, humid beast. I reached for the bow under my chin to tighten it, to assure myself nothing had slipped out of place, that my otherwise bare throat was protected. I was supposed to pretend not to even anticipate the wolf before he approached me.

I couldn’t.

In a breath, I forgot all the stage directions as well as my lines. Instead of waiting for the wolf, I crouched behind a tree, hiding. The wolf, cunning enough not to eat Little Red Riding Hood in public, was simply supposed to ask where my grandmother lived, was supposed to rush to her house before my arrival, eat the grandmother, don her clothes, wait for Little Red Riding Hood, then eat her, too.

I pulled the hood low over my face. I tugged the cloak around my body as if it could confer safety, invisibility, invincibility. The scent of glue and paste and waxy crayons rose from the floorboards of the makeshift stage, but it was as if I inhaled dank leaves and tangled vines.

I ran from the stage, crying.

I ruined the play, of course. Mortified, I refused to return to school for six months . . . even though the real wolf lived inside my own house.

“A photograph!” I say.

I wish real life had retakes.

I wish I could rewind my life back to the second-grade stage of
Little Red Riding Hood
. Then I could redo not just that scene, but the whole story. Instead of hiding from the wolf, I could lie in wait.

It takes less than an hour to read the entire script for the
TV
movie—105 double-spaced pages with wide margins, including stage directions. Before filming began, I wondered how the whole story could be conveyed so quickly. Even the shoot will last just three weeks, while the movie itself will run only two hours, including commercials. Now, watching the anniversary scene, I understand how, as with the snap of a camera (“A photograph!”), the movie condenses long paragraphs I wrote in the book into a moment of action.

Sally, then, will recover from my childhood and sort out my past in either three weeks or two hours, depending . . . whereas in the book it takes several hundred pages and, in reality, took years.

Cast and crew move to a new location, another house rented by the production company. It represents my home. I sit on a black canvas director’s chair, my name inserted into a plastic sleeve on its back. I scan the salmon-colored schedule sheet. This sheet lists each scene location as well as a one-line description of the action. The scene currently being shot bears the notation “the camera follows Sue’s cheating path.”

Sally prepares to leave the house to meet a man, an illicit lover, scant minutes after her husband departs for work. She applies perfume to her wrists, gloss to her lips, and walks downstairs. After she picks up the car keys to walk out the door, the camera, situated behind her, follows the back of her head before panning down to her legs.

Except, in the mirage of movies, they’re
not
Sally’s legs. A body double is used in order to give Sally time to rest.

In the monitor I watch the feet that resemble Sally’s, in high heels, walking toward the door. . . .
My own real feet once, in midnight-blue velvet slippers with metallic stars sprinkled across the toes, charmed shoes to cast a spell on those illicit men, to conjure sex into love. . . .

The camera, in the second half of the scene, tracks the real Sally—not her body double—hair messy, now sneaking back home from the motel. . . .
Kicking off those starry shoes, I stepped back inside
my
real house. I carried them, as if the shoes had lost their sorcery . . . or my cheating feet had lost their way.

Except in real life
, testing the waters of recovery, I also wore those midnight-blue shoes to my first meeting of Sex Addicts Anonymous. It was as if, while
I
wanted to recover, my feet did not. The shoes themselves seemed to hold out hope they could
lead me along an enchanted path—wandering toward some impossible love—or at least one last fling. I slithered onto a metal folding chair in a church basement. I crossed my legs, swinging a foot back and forth to attract the attention of the guy sitting beside me. My shoe sparkled starshine.

Love the shoes
, he said, inviting me out for coffee after the meeting.

Ashamed, I never wore them again.

The director calls out, “Sue’s on the set. Sally’s on the set.”

I am not, in fact, on the set. I am outside the range of the camera, watching. At times, they call Sally “Sue”; more than once I respond.

It is Sally who emerges from a dressing room in the lower level of the house. She climbs the stairs past the living room up to the bedroom. She wears a bodysuit, a terrycloth bathrobe over it. The upcoming sex scene will be a closed set to protect the actors’ privacy. A few minutes later, the male actor (a robe also covering his bodysuit), with whom I have an affair, appears.

I watch him follow Sally (or me?) up the stairs.

I imagine the bodysuits to be constructed of thin rubber, though I never see them. They must be molded tight against the skin—both disguise and protection.

In real life
, when I met men, I climbed stairs—to apartments or motel rooms—without protection or body double. When I was a college student in Boston, a lover, old enough to be my father, gave me a maroon cashmere scarf—armor as flimsy as a red cotton hood. For years after the affair ended, I hid the scarf in a lavender box, a jumble of mementos from men. The souvenirs lasted longer than those random lovers: all that remained of the affairs, of the men.