Although William was arrested many times for suspicion of racketeering, he always eluded conviction. In his later years, William even entertained his grandchildren by referring to Capone as “Uncle Al” and telling them the infamous mob leader had actually been “a really nice guy.”
It was while running the Fresno store that William first met the young woman who would become his unlikely bride and mother to his only son.
Beverly Simmons was exactly half William’s age when their courtship began, but being willingly romanced by a fast-talking, forty-two-year-old New York Jewish bachelor was precisely the sort of rebellious act that had been brewing within her. Born on May 30, 1919, she was the product of a strict Mormon upbringing, complete with all its dogmatic tradition. Her parents, Ellsworth Blythe Simmons and Helen Nicholson Cope, were not pleased upon meeting “Stumpy” Zevon, who was easily the most colorful character ever to sit at their kitchen table.
Unlike Jewish immigrant William, Beverly could trace her heritage back decades—a fact that the Simmons family took great pride in acknowledging. All of her great-great-grandparents had either been first-generation American citizens, or were a mere step away from their Anglo-English roots. As practicing Mormons, the Cope-Simmons family tree could even be authenticated to Joseph Smith’s initial founding of the Latter-day Saints movement.
Beverly’s mother, Helen, was a woman who took her spiritual responsibilities and religious practices very seriously, viewing both as cultural moral codes. Like her own parents, her husband, and her daughter, Helen had been born in Salt Lake City. She married Ellsworth the day after Valentine’s Day in 1916. Their first child, Warren, was born the following year. When Beverly was born two years following Warren, it was discovered that she suffered from a crippling congenital heart condition, a fact that fueled her parents’ overprotective natures.
In 1946, while the Simmons family was living in Fresno, Beverly met William Zevon at one of his carpet stores. She was quickly drawn to the smooth-talking older man. To the chagrin of her parents, the blushing Anglo-Saxon Mormon girl quickly agreed to marry the wise-cracking Jewish salesman with rumored ties to the mob. At the groom’s urging—and against the vehement wishes of Ellsworth and Helen Simmons—the newlyweds relocated to Chicago. The honeymoon was short-lived. Beverly had abandoned her parents’ wishes for a traditional Mormon family life, yet the young bride still yearned for a semblance of normalcy to which William never quite related. Years of hard living on the road—drinking, gambling, and fending for himself—had shaped her new husband into a stubborn lone wolf. His personality and unorthodox lifestyle blurred the fine line between self-reliance and selfish bachelorhood. It was the latter which kept him out all night, playing marathon poker games and carousing until the wee small hours of the morning. None of that had changed by the time Beverly gave birth to Warren the following year.
William may have made it a point to instill in his son a self-awareness of his Judaic heritage, but the reverent tradition associated with it never seemed to factor into his roles as husband and father. Instead, young Warren was often subject to the fruits of his mother’s own strict childhood. The theological aspects, however, never truly sank in. “I was brought up with religious beliefs, Christian religious beliefs,” Warren later remembered. “But it’s one of life’s great searches and I don’t like talking about it. And I don’t like talking about it more than I do in my songs.”
In later years, he would be significantly more candid discussing the internal conflicts and personal demons that plagued his adulthood, attributing them to his ancestral namesake: Beverly’s older brother, Warren Cope Simmons, who had been born on the Fourth of July and later gave his life for his country as a member of the 30th Infantry Regiment—killed in action on November 10, 1943, while on a tour in Italy. The elder Warren’s legacy had been immortalized in a painting that hung in Ellsworth and Helen’s home. Like a specter, it had haunted the younger Warren throughout his youth. “Uncle Warren was sort of the dead figurehead of the family, and I was brought up to follow in his footsteps,” he later claimed. “My ideal was supposed to be a dead man—with my name, looks and career intentions. A dead warrior who’d been waylaid by his heroism. I guess that kind of background gave me the idea that destroying myself was the only way to live up to expectations.”
During Warren’s adolescence, his parents separated and reconciled nearly as often as they changed their place of residence. Although born in Chicago, Warren was primarily raised by Beverly in Fresno, where she eventually returned to live on the same street as her parents. Ellsworth and Helen Simmons refused to let their daughter live down the strange life that she had chosen for herself, making Warren witness to the verbal venom often directed toward his mother and absentee father. As Warren later claimed, “They treated him like a vagabond and a roustabout. It must have been terribly uncomfortable for him, so he wasn’t there a lot of the time. I wouldn’t have been either, if I’d had a choice.”
Having already weathered a long string of fights and separations from her husband, Beverly saw the darkest side of William Zevon one Christmas morning when Warren was nine years old. The couple was in the midst of one of their frequent separations and William arrived at the house unannounced to see his son. He had been up all night playing poker and had won Warren a Christmas present—an upright Chickering piano. Reluctant for Warren to be influenced by his father in any way, Beverly was adamant that the piano had to go. But for the child, the piano was a special gift that his father had specifically won just for him. It was the first musical instrument the boy had ever gotten his hands on and he was instantly fascinated by it. As Warren watched, his father ran to the kitchen and, like a circus performer, hurled a carving knife across the room. Missing Beverly’s head by barely an inch, the blade impaled the wall behind her. More terrified than angry, she fled to her parents’ house down the street.
William, however, calmed himself and sat Warren down on the piano bench. “Son, you know I gotta go,” he told the boy. “She’s your mother, so I guess you gotta stay.”
Warren was left behind to be raised in the forced regimentation and cold tradition of his mother and her parents. As irresponsible as he was, William had been Warren’s greatest champion, the parent who envisioned big things for his son’s future. The gift of a piano had proven the faith he had in the boy.
The Christmas episode would always hold a lasting impression on Warren. Not only had that morning ushered in an era of fatherless adolescence, but it had provided him a ringside seat to a first glimpse at real violence. And it had all been over a piano, no less. His piano—the first one he had ever touched.
For Warren Zevon, music and danger would forever be entwined.
Although William wasn’t present during much of his son’s youth, his intuition regarding Warren’s potential rang true. Throughout his elementary school years, Warren sat at the piano every chance he had, displaying a prodigious gift for recognizing and replicating melodies. An imaginative and intelligent child, he was soon using music as an escape from the turmoil of his home life. His passion for the instrument was to the apparent resentment of Beverly, who saw much of her husband’s personality in their young son. Begrudgingly, she slowly learned to accept it. When Warren was old enough to purchase his first guitar, she watched as he mastered that instrument, as well. By the time William could charm his way back into her life a few years later, their son had become an accomplished musician.
Granting William one more chance, Beverly moved into his oceanfront house in San Pedro and enrolled Warren in the local junior high school. There, Warren threw himself into the musical program. Although the piano and guitar were his true extracurricular passions, Warren’s ambition for a well-rounded education in music theory was quickly established; in a group high school yearbook photo of the program’s “Wind and Percussion Section,” a young Warren is posed clutching a clarinet, although his interest in mastering that particular instrument soon waned.
Quickly r
ecognizing the young man’s talent, the school’s band teacher pulled some professional strings and arranged for Warren to visit the West Hollywood home of famed Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. Now thirteen years old, Warren found himself discussing music theory with Stravinsky and his protégé, Robert Craft. In later years, Warren was often asked about this influential encounter by numerous journalists. “[I was brought to a session] by the band teacher at Dana Junior High School,” he claimed. “He was a classical session player, a trumpet player. He took me to a Stravinsky–Robert Craft session, and after that, I corresponded with Robert Craft and he invited me to come and visit them—which I did. So, I met Stravinsky, but I was in no way friends with him or anything.”
Craft, a renowned composer in his own right, also enjoyed young Warren’s precocious nature and maturity. “Though [Warren] seemed much younger than I anticipated,” he later recalled, “he was self-possessed and articulate beyond his years. After some conversation, I played recordings of contemporary pieces, not available commercially and unknown to him. He was keenly attentive and his responses were unambiguous; very young people are always judgmental, of course, but he supported his judgments with acute arguments… Mr. Zevon, on that first visit, reminded me of my own first meeting with Stravinsky, though I was ten years older and much less intelligent.”
Stravinsky and Craft had lasting impressions on Warren. At the time, he had been tempted to drop the piano to devote himself fully to the electric guitar. But the two composers successfully instilled in Warren a new love of classical music equal to his ongoing passion for rock and roll. He dedicated himself to studying advanced music theory, poring over original Stockhausen scores and listening to obscure German radio performances alone in his bedroom. He soon began working on an ambitious symphony of his own, titled simply Symphony No. 1—a project that he would tinker with for decades. Much to his disappointment, however, the visits with Stravinsky abruptly ended when Beverly left William for the final time and dragged him back to Fresno.
As Warren later remembered, “Nobody ever told me anything, and my parents’ marriage has been a mystery to me all my life. They didn’t even let me know that they’d gotten a divorce until long after the fact.”
Ties to his father’s lineage weren’t completely severed. Just prior to the return to Fresno, Warren had finally met his Uncle Murray’s son, Sandford. Then undergoing a medical school residency in nearby San Francisco, Sandford wanted to introduce his new wife, Madeline, to his notorious gangster uncle. He had also heard much about his talented younger cousin. The newlyweds took a daytrip to William’s Fresno home for what would be a memorable visit. “My Uncle Willie, who was pretty well-off financially at the time, had a beautiful home on the cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean,” Sandford remembered. “I knew of Warren, but I didn’t meet him until then, when he was about twelve years old and I was about twenty-eight, or something like that. Uncle Willie was very proud of him and he thought he was a genius and had him play the piano for us. To my ears, it sounded crazy—Warren banging away at the piano—but I remember my uncle yelling, ‘He’s great!’”
The cousins didn’t see each other again until Warren was in his late teens, then only bumping into each other at a family bar mitzvah. At that point, Warren was already a recording artist and laying the groundwork for his first solo album. Years later, however, Sandford would become a crucial emotional resource to Warren and the two would remain close for decades.
Against Warren’s wishes, Beverly enrolled him in McLane High School the following year. He hadn’t taken the move back from San Pedro well, feeling the sting of losing his father for the second time. Adding insult to injury, Beverly now had a new man in her life, a local handyman named Elmer Reinhardt who had been hired to fix their roof. The decision to enter into a new relationship not only severed any chance of her reconciling with William again, but also created a rivalry for her affection between son and suitor. Once Elmer moved in, it was accepted that Warren would be treated like an unwanted stepchild, and the new man of the house had no bones about making the boy feel like an intruder. Desperate to make this new relationship last, Beverly allowed Elmer to constantly demonstrate his indifference toward Warren and was soon enacting a form of it herself.
Now in his teens, Warren began to show signs of becoming a rebellious loner like his father. Pockmarked and inherently shy, he used both his musical skills and sarcasm as tools to win friends and attention from girls. He donned faded jeans and T-shirts and coupled his new image with a bad attitude and growing affection for rock music. Although his love of classical music was strong as ever, he downplayed it for the sake of popularity among his peers. He could often be seen around the schoolyard with his guitar, showing off his ability to play popular rock-and-roll tunes by ear. Claiming to hold one of the highest IQs ever recorded in the Fresno school system as a badge of honor, Warren proudly toed the line between class clown and stifled intellectual. When he wasn’t out goofing off with his buddies, he was usually alone in his bedroom, poring over books. A vivacious reader since childhood, Warren now devoured everything from great literature to dime-store pulp novels—all of which would have lasting impacts on his lyrics and musical themes.
When word eventually got home that his behavior had grown disruptive in the classroom, the beatings from Elmer began. Ever resilient, Warren took the blows that his stepfather doled out and began spending as little time at home as possible—usually just long enough to swipe booze from Elmer’s private stash. At fifteen years old, he was drinking regularly. His nights were spent carousing with friends, attempting to pick up girls, and jamming with the few other students who shared his love of music. Coming into young adulthood, Warren was honing his skills in two areas—songwriting and smooth-talking his way out of trouble. He was soon a master of both.
William Zevon eventually adhered to Warren’s pleas to get him as far away from Beverly and Elmer as possible. He reappeared in his son’s life just long enough to put him in touch with a business acquaintance in San Francisco—an aspiring music producer named Ben Shapiro. As a favor to William, Shapiro agreed to act as benefactor to Warren and his bandmates, staking them with new instruments and an apartment of their own. In exchange, the boys were to grind out quick, commercial fare that could be presented to various record companies. Warren leapt at the chance to record original material and quickly gathered his neighborhood crew—David Cardosa on drums, John Cates on bass, and Glenn Crocker on keyboards. Early the next day, the boys loaded up the car and headed south.
After only a few weeks, the boys concluded that Shapiro had fewer contacts within the music industry than they’d believed. When the boys’ demos failed to yield a quick buck, he immediately cut off their funding. It made little difference to Warren. The relationship with Shapiro had, at least, earned the band new gear and a few precious weeks in a five-bedroom loft on Thirty-Fifth Avenue—a far cry from living under Elmer’s roof. Warren was determined never to return to that situation. Weeks before, as he and his friends had loaded up the car for San Francisco, Beverly had made it perfectly clear that there was no love lost between them. She had not seen them off, or uttered a word of goodbye.
He started telling new friends and acquaintances that his mother was dead.
Needing a place to stay, Warren again contacted his father. William Zevon had since moved to Culver City, and viewed his son’s request as an opportunity for the two to make up on lost time. He obliged, and was soon indulging Warren the best ways he knew how—doling out wads of his poker winnings and buying him a yellow Corvette Stingray. William’s chain of carpet stores—coupled with his full-time gambling and part-time bookmaking—had grown successful enough for father and son to then relocate to Los Angeles. There, Warren planned to focus on a real future in the music industry.
Believing in his son’s talents completely, William would often drive him to San Francisco, enabling the young troubadour to bum around Haight-Ashbury and play in local folk clubs. Warren was
in his element. But while his aptitude for devouring books, culture, and classical music was one thing, putting that intelligence to use in the classroom was quite another. His capability to excel musically, while still partying all night, had proven just that. Ever since getting his first piano, the one consistency in Warren’s life had been a passion for music. But mastery required time. While far from lazy, he was slowly displaying the first signs that his creative process required a benefactor—financially or emotionally, or both. He had no problem if someone else could keep the lights on, thus clearing his schedule for rehearsal time and musical woodshedding.
Warren’s tendency to allow someone else to foot the bills and responsibilities, leaving him free to focus his creative energies, would become a trend throughout his life. As he approached adulthood and his seriousness toward a career in music grew deeper, who better to provide that support than the one person who had always believed in him—his gangster father?
Leaving Fresno may have liberated Warren from Beverly and Elmer, but it had also meant abandoning his neighborhood friends and bandmates. When he entered Fairfax High School as a sophomore in the fall of 1964, he became a loner once again. Without an audience to play to, the class clown routine largely subsided. It was replaced by a brooding, pensive demeanor and a growing maturity toward his musical ambitions. As William spent most of his nights carousing and gambling, he’d be at home sleeping throughout the day. In order to focus on new songs and avoid his father’s hangover, Warren hung around the school after classes let out. Most afternoons, he could be found alone in the courtyard, strumming his acoustic guitar and working out song ideas.
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