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Gary
Pig
Gold:
May, 2004
The Literary Boone
(Part II)
Gary Pig Gold returns from his clandestine
Nashville recording session with Pat, only to ponder anew.
Picking squarely up from last month's Fufkin,
a strange Yuletide package arrived in the mail from a hitherto
unknown address in Burbank, California. "Boone Productions,
Inc.," read the label. "Printed Matter Only,"
said the customs sticker.
I eagerly tore the box open, only to find
therein several colorful books neatly swaddled in clear, clean
bubblewrap. Well! Having not had the time or space to read
a book in a year or two, and unable to recall having ever
ordered such objects through the mail, I was both dazed and
sorely confused. Until, that is, I realized that this trio
of fine publications had been sent to my home by none other
than the author himself, a Mr. Charles Eugene "Pat"
Boone.
Huh! I guess I really did make somewhat of
an impression upon the man during our lightning forty-eight
hours together ten months earlier then. Yet upon delving closer
into the books, then re-reading same again just recently in
the interests of this here epistle, I can today only surmise
that Pat, and most likely his entire family, must truly have
been concerned about my well-being and had sent these uplifting
tomes in an attempt to curb somewhat Tylin Whaler's wayward
soul.
I think.
Or maybe he was just being nice, and sent
me a gift or three for Christmas ( Together: 23 Years With
The Boone Family I could appreciate, absolutely …but
why was it accompanied by copies of The Honeymoon Is Over,
a compendium of Boone-blessed marriage hints and, possibly
even stranger still, Shirley Boone's infamous own One
Woman's Liberation ?)
To make an attempt at appreciating these
gifts more fully, I dug out my dog-eared paperback of Pat's
very first venture into the printed word, the redoubtable
Twixt Twelve And Twenty,which I had discovered at a
garage sale many long moons ago. Originally published in 1958,
it begins with a cutely curt Open Letter from the brand new
author which bears repeating in its entirety here I believe:
Hi, __________ [yes, you are to write your
own name right here on the page, I guess]. In case we haven't
been formally introduced, I'm Pat Boone. I sing. Right here
I know you're wondering why, if I'm a singer, I don't stick
to music instead of writing a book. Good question Pat, and
one which I found myself repeating quite often throughout
Twixt Twelve And Twenty 's 180 successive pages. First,
while reading how, as a youngster growing up in Nashville,
he would sit alone every morning milking Rosemary the Cow,
pondering such mortal questions as "Am I ready to become
a Christain?" More fascinating still, a couple chapters
on, is a dissertation on how Pat successfully battled his
own fearful four "Teen-Age Symptoms: Insecurity, Restlessness,
Inconsistency and Indecision," followed by a wholly flabbergasting
six-step, do-it-yourself program (Pat calls it the Pilgrim's
Progress) involving "Objectives Towards Maturity: a Maturity
Check Sheet towards living a happy and fulfilling life twixt
twelve and twenty and even beyond." Those six steps?
Spiritual, Social, Mental, Physical, Work and Financial. "Get
these in order and, simple: The sum total is you! " Gotcha.
Confused yet? That's okay: It's all part
of growing up I guess. But once maturity has been safely acquired,
and maintained on a daily basis by rigidly adhering to the
six steps above, Pat promises the reader will then - and Only
then -- be ready and able to date, court, marry, and duly
become "President of the Corporation - Family Style."
No, really.
Once again, a handy six-point "Maxims
On Marriage" follows, signed by Pat Boone, "President
of The Charles Boone Happy Home Corporation" and endorsed
by his Board of Directors: namely wife - "I mean Executive
Vice President" Shirley Foley Boone along with their
four daughters. Then, by keeping close in mind (as the final
two chapters of Twixt Twelve And Twenty drive straight
home at every available opportunity) that God is Real, and
that Dreams Really Do Come True, President Pat promises that
the reader will surely end up plum atop "the teen-age
ladder in the world of," gulp, "Young Adults."
Sounds easy, doesn't it? Why, even by 1958
standards it does!
However, twixt twenty and thirty-six, our
hero actually didn't fare that well himself within that daunting
World of Young Adults, as his next book, A New Song,
more than plainly states across its very dust jacket: "His
marriage was on the rocks, financial ruin was near, and his
career almost shipwrecked." ** Until, that is, Pat discovered…
A New Song. A song that ultimately snapped Pat, his family,
and hopefully some of his eager readers safely from the perilous,
unforgiving jaws of lurid temptation that was (double-gulp)
The Swinging Sixties.
"When I wrote my first book Twixt
Twelve And Twenty," Pat reports in A New Song,
"I was addressing myself to the problems that kids had
then. The temptations in those days were to drink and smoke.
Today it's goof balls (??), marijuana, LSD, heroin. No longer
is it just the body that kids are gambling with, but the mind
as well."
Yep, you can kinda guess where this book's
headed, right? "Those who experiment with narcotics can
become hopelessly addicted for life; become mindless vegetables;
may even die. Some authorities claim that one "trip"
on LSD may affect four generations of children born afterwards!
And, of course, we know that some children born to LSD users
have had exposed spines, two heads, and other gruesome physical
deformities."
Nosiree, Pat didn't have an easy ride of
it during the Sixties, it sounds like. Sure, once his own
hits had dried up, he kept in the ring-a-ding of things by
merchandising, for example, the enormously successful 1964
set of Beatle "oil painting" posters. Nevertheless,
despite an occasional neon night spent lolling within the
sin dens of Vegas, the White Bucked One was hardly a match,
on or off the charts, when pitted against the likes of the
Dead, the Airplane, or even his new L.A. neighbor Jimbo Morrison.
Why, even a brief association with Bill Cosby's tax-dislodging
Tetragrammaton label in 1969 (when Pat's cooly country-rocking
Departure album briefly shared shelf space alongside
labelmate John & Yoko's Two Virgins ) failed to
jack the man's Hip Quotient sufficiently heavenward. Nevertheless,
Pat found room in A New Song to offer praise towards
such, um, contemporaries as Arlo Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Peter
Paul and Mary and even "the mysterious Scottish balladeer
Donovan" …though Zager & Evans' "In The
Year 2525" disturbed our main man greatly, as did Creedence
Clearwater, Blood Sweat and Tears, those shameful Cowsills
and even Peggy Lee's naughty little "Is That All There
Is."
Switching his radio off in dismay, one can
presume, not only cleared the pure Boone air of any more foul
Zager and Evaning, but allowed the faint sounds of Shirley's
hitherto-unnoticed voice (now speaking in tongues, by the
way) to penetrate otherwise still Bel Air nighttimes. Naturally
intrigued by his otherwise dutifully silent wife's nocturnal
emotings, Pat gathered the whole family round him in prayer
across the living room floor, and soon all were righteously
groovin' as one to "a New Song: to God." Lo, and
it wouldn't be much longer before their teenaged girls were
dragging home a steady stream of confused schoolchums to be
baptized deep within the cleansing waters of the Boone pool,
lest they too succumb to the evils of CCR and find themselves
giving birth to multiple-headed acid casualties.
Now, for those who at right about this juncture
are thinking "What da…," may I submit by way
of physical, photographic evidence of such Life at Chez Boone
circa "Bad Moon Rising" any of the dozens upon dozens
of pictures which comprise the astounding-and-then-some
Together: 25 Years With The Boone Family. Released hot
on the heels of daughter Debby's chart-topping slice of pre-Celine
bravado "You Light Up My Life," this lush coffee
table retrospective asked the rhetorical question "What
is it that America loves about the Pat Boone family? The family
started with its folk-hero ancestor Daniel Boone" (warning:
direct genetic lineage not yet established) "and continues
to this day with Dad and daughter Debby sharing stardom."
Yes indeed, 128 pages in living black and
white of the Boone brood posing alongside Billy Graham, Mike
Douglas, Shirley Jones, Kenny Rogers, Cher, Rick Nelson, Chuck
Woolery, Buddy Hackett, President Harry Truman, Jerry Lewis,
Jack Benny, Flip Wilson, Glen Campbell, a defiantly unimpressed
Elvis circa G.I. Blues and - now that's more like
it - Debby Boone's own godpaw Perry Como. Boones on stage
and backstage with the Osmonds in Japan, in the recording
studio, at prayer (on the living room floor) (again) plus
the weddings, the weddings, and more weddings! No less than
the original, the ultimate Family Values Scrapbook, Togetherflies
boldly, and quite possible blindly, in the face of all things
late-Seventies, where (quoting Pat again) "teen-age,
out-of-wedlock pregnancies are still growing in number, figures
on abortion and venereal disease tell us more than we want
to know about the breakdown of family life and traditional
morals, and good old television, the mirror of wholesome family
life just a few years ago" - I take it The Munsters weren't
required reviewing on the Boone tube - "is flooding our
living rooms with a terribly distorted view today: All kinds
of bizarre match-ups from threesomes to eightsomes, from two
girls to all girls …and no dads!" And remember:
This was before Pat's neighbors the Osbournes snared their
very own MTV mock-reality series.
The underlying theme of Together,
I can only surmise then, is how such an admittedly "square"
clan as Pat's have been able to not only survive, but actually
even thrive ever since relocating in 1959 from Teaneck, New
Jersey (by way of Nashville) to Hollywood, California, "the
most unnatural, unsettled, and unhappy place in the United
States." Hard to hold year-round poolside baptisms in
Jersey, you see. Still, through all the temptations and distractions
of pre-Reagan America, Pat continued to defiantly shout into
the wilderness: "Hey World! This Family Thing works!"
Why, even the long-suffering Shirley - yes, remember her?
the Executive Vice President of the Charles Boone Happy Home
Corporation - admits as much in her own often harrowing account
within The Honeymoon Is Over. This "intimate
look at the ups and downs of one of Hollywood's most successful
marriages" details the ravages of those previously-mentioned
1960's, when "electronic rock began to crowd out Pat
Boone's style of singing" to the point that even Debby's
bedroom walls briefly found themselves covered in "pictures
and psychedelic posters, until it almost looked like a "head
shop" catering to rock and pot-trippers." Further
evidence of their dear daughter's very own troublesome climb
up that ol' Teen-Age Ladder into the World of Young Adults
came when Debby was assigned to read not Beaver, but Eldridge
Cleaver's tres scary Soul On Ice at school: "My
daughter is not going to read that book," Pat scolded
her English teacher. "She's fifteen years old, and I
don't intend her to read the pornographic fantasies of a convicted
rapist." Worse still, Debby actually "experimented
with vegetarianism" around this same twixing time!
But good ol' fashioned love - not to mention
long tours of the Orient with Donny and Marie and Co. -- eventually
kept each and every Boone safely and squarely upon the right
and narrow track where, by all accounts (excepting possibly
Pat's recent infatuations with Metallica done Glenn Miller
style) the family remains safely and soundly Together to this
very day. Proving, I suppose, that faith, properly placed,
does indeed triumph in the end, and can certainly pry you
and yours out of every single jam imaginable (…and Pat's
had more than his fair share of such speed-bumps along the
Road of Life: remember that deadly acne cream he once hawked
on very-late-night television? That was a close one!)
In concluding then, despite all I have dutiful recounted these
last two columns - breakfasts with the mom and pop, high-profile
Nashville recording sessions, boxes full of Christmas literature
from Burbank - I still can't profess to having a secure "tag"
on the man, or is it the Myth? which is, and quite possibly
shall forever remain, Boone. He truly is an American enigma
no less intriguing (and no less inscrutable in the end) than
Marilyn, Nixon, and dare I say even Elvis Himself. John Lennon?
George Wallace? The House of Bush even? I think I have all
them folks pretty well figured out. Jerry Lee Lewis? Still
working on him, of course, but I doubt if I'll ever have Pat
truly down, uh, pat.
And I guess that's the simple if elusive
beauty of it all, at the end of the day and the bottom of
the page, isn't it?
Still, it sure would be nice if Tylin Whaler
gets the keynote call when that Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
finally does allow Charles Eugene Boone past its gold lame
gates. But until that momentous day does arrive, Gary Pig
Gold would just like to offer a heartfelt God Bless You, Pat.
Thanks for the breakfast and the books.
(This piece was originally published in Cosmik
Debris, June, 2002)
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