I look forward to reading your books. Thank you for all the gifts. I feel blessed. And please let me know if you return to Michigan. I’d love to attend another concert . . . and maybe have the wonderful opportunity to meet you again.
Sue to Pat Boone
The only words I am able to read right now are Pat Boone’s, the autographed copy of The Miracle of Prayer, which he sent me. And even though they also don’t make religion like they used to—back when Christ was Christ and not Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson or Mel Gibson or even, well, Pat Boone—I figure: What the hell? It’s a way for time, for the illness, to pass more quickly while I wait to see Pat Boone. So I read page after page, chapter after chapter. I also pray—just in case—in order to be on the safe side. I follow Pat Boone’s instructions, wanting to believe in miracles, the miracle of prayer: sudden wealth, cure from disease, a job promotion—you name it. “I’m telling you—and I’ll amply prove it—that the power of genuine prayer can result in incredible, miraculous happenings that can only be explained in supernatural terms,” Pat Boone writes in his book. “I just want you to understand that approaching an interested and loving Creator/God can be your best option, not your last resort.”
God makes all good things happen, if you believe.
Yes, if I believe I’m getting well—if only I believe God will make me well—I will get better. I will. I will.
About a year after I handed Pat Boone that letter backstage, he responded. We’ve since exchanged several e-mails and letters. In one, he quotes from the Bible: “God works everything together for our good, to those who love Him and are called according to His purpose.” The letter goes on to reassure me: “He picks up the pieces and fashions something good out of . . . horrific occurrences.” I know Pat Boone refers to my childhood, but I want to believe that God (or Pat Boone) knows I need help now to recover from this illness.
In this weakened state, I want prayer, God, icons . . . the touch of Pat Boone’s hand to make me better.
I grasp a marble in my atheistic fist while reading The Miracle of Prayer. It will anchor me to the ground so I won’t float away, given my thinness, given the slenderness of my new, tender (unbelieving) beliefs. Or perhaps I hold the marble as a totem: a rosary bead, a sign of existence, a medallion powerful enough to keep me alive until I see Pat Boone. Please, God, let me get better. Please let me see Pat Boone after the concert. The marble will help me! Its bluish-green surface resembles the earth in photographs from outer space. Where God lives!
Or is it all voodoo? Superstition? If I hold the marble in my left fist, I’ll get better; if I hold it in my right, I’ll be switched at birth and be Pat Boone’s daughter.
“We’ll get there soon,” a woman nicknamed Mom says to Marc and me.
The last note of the “Pat Boone Christmas Concert” fades into the frigid Michigan night. Mom, in a blue sweat suit, slowly taps her three-pronged cane along a sterile linoleum floor backstage at the Macomb Center. Her cropped gray hair frames her wizened face, her moist mouth. Despite her name, I more envision her with crystals and tarot cards (or even shopping a blue-light special at K-Mart) than in a kitchen baking an apple pie. She glances up at me sideways, a glimpse from the corner of her eye. She knows I’m rushing her along, trying to hurry her, my footsteps almost in front of hers, even though I don’t know the way to the green room. My main objective is simply to see Pat Boone before I collapse.
And while I wish I could say the weakness in my limbs is from the thought of seeing him, this is only partially true. Today, after all, is virtually the first time in five weeks I’ve been out of bed. So, alternatively, I want to grab Mom’s cane for me to lean upon, as much as I want to kick the cane out from under her, take her down, trample her as I race along the passageways to find Pat Boone on my own. Now. I am anxious to see him. And even though he invited me backstage (via his assistant, via e-mail) after the concert, still, I worry he might slip from the theater before I find him.
We wander down one seemingly endless corridor after another. Photographs of entertainers who performed here over the years hang from walls, but no echo of past shows remains. No stomping feet. No clapping. No whistles. The photographed smiles are glassy, static, still. I pass rows of faces—some familiar, most not—following the white noise of fluorescent light, the dull tapping of Mom’s rubber-tipped cane, lost in a maze of hallways through the underworld, much like the ones in the hospital.
Marc lags behind. He probably hopes to be lost in this maze, make a wrong turn, and end up, say, at a John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers concert, a group that recently performed here. Earlier this evening, during the show, Marc cringed as Pat Boone chided members of the audience to use the Christian greeting “Merry Christmas,” as opposed to the religiously neutral “Happy Holidays.” Later, when Pat Boone sang “Santa Claus Is Praying to Jesus,” Marc slid down in his seat. Marc, a liberal Democrat like myself, would rather be almost anywhere else than here. Yet, while Marc is nominally here only to accompany me, surely even he knows that, although Pat Boone is a right-wing Christian, he’s also, well, Pat Boone . . . and they don’t make pop stars like they used to, either.
“‘What a crazy world we’re living in . . . ’” Marc whispered during the concert, quoting Pat Boone’s e-mail greeting to me.
“Huh?” I whispered back, adding the last word of Pat Boone’s sentence—a tag line that’s now a running gag between us. Well, it’s a joke to Marc, but I myself am uncertain whether to take it ironically or not. Huh? Huh! Yes, the word that seemingly sums it all up, though I’m not altogether sure why. What exactly does the “huh?” reveal about Pat Boone?
Hi Sue!
What a crazy world we’re living in, huh?
These lines begin Pat Boone’s first e-mail to me. Literally, he must mean it is a crazy world in that, after all these years, I finally meet him only twenty minutes away from my house. He also invites me to write back to him, asks me to stay in touch. He signs his e-mail, “Warmly, Pat Boone.”
But what is the subtext to the “crazy world”? What is the subtext to the “huh”?
Pat Boone sang his oldies during tonight’s concert, even though it’s a Christmas show: “Bernadine,” “Moody River,” “Love Letters in the Sand.” He reprised “April Love,” accompanied by his routine of finding a young girl to join him onstage. Just as during his concert in Holland, Michigan, he asked her for a kiss (a peck) on the cheek. Pat Boone also handed the girl a bouquet of flowers. She awkwardly held them, unsure what to do, caught with a stranger in the spotlight.
“I hope you understand why I checked to make sure you were really invited backstage,” Mom says as we continue our trek. “We can’t just take anyone’s word.”
Earlier, in the lobby, I underwent an elaborate screening process, asked by the lobby manager, in her red jacket, to produce a copy of the e-mail from Pat Boone’s assistant inviting me backstage. But because the lobby manager thought, perhaps, I faked the e-mail, she double-checked by cell phone with Pat Boone’s travel manager. Marc and I finally got the “go ahead.” Word came back via walkie-talkie informing us which door off the lobby Mom would unlock. This door—granting backstage access to heaven—or at least Pat Boone.
“You know,” our guide to the green room adds, “if we didn’t check credentials, everyone would try to get backstage to meet him.”
In reality, Marc and I hovered by the backstage door alone. The sedate crowd peacefully filed from the auditorium out to the parking lots. So when Mom finally unlocked the door, Marc and I didn’t push through crowds. Mom didn’t shake her cane at throngs of fans. Only Marc and I waited, me squinting through the hairline crack between the double doors. So before Mom unlocked it, I spied her shuffling toward us.
“Have you met him yet?” I ask Mom.
She nods, her head hunched over her curved shoulders. “He’s very nice. You’ll like him.”
Then, just as we round another corner, I catch a glimpse of him. He still wears his white-fring
ed sequined jacket, white pants, white boots, white silky shirt. White: Pat Boone’s signature color. Back in junior high school, I found this unambiguous, good-guy white reassuring. Now, before I call a greeting, Marc and I are quickly ushered into the green room. “He’ll be in to see you shortly,” Mom says, shutting the door behind her, leaving Marc and me alone. I collapse on the couch.
Marc and I ate dinner at Ernie’s Restaurant, about a mile away, before the concert. I, however, only tentatively forked a few mouthfuls of salmon, three swallows of baked potato. An elderly couple, in a booth behind us, settled in for dinner as well. We eavesdropped on their conversation with the waitress.
“We just came from the Pat Boone concert,” the man says, referring to the matinee.
“Who’s Pat Boone?” the teenage waitress asks.
“He was a singer before you were born,” the man explains.
Marc leans forward in the booth. “‘What a crazy world . . . ’”
“Huh?” I say on cue.
Pat Boone enters the green room, aglow in yellow corduroy slacks, a yellow shirt, an orange cashmere sweater. He wears a gold pinkie ring, a wedding band, a gold necklace. During the concert I was overwhelmed—after being in isolation for a month—by his white-white image, as well as by the scent of so many people, the band, the music, the applause. I closed my eyes. Leaned my head in my palm. Had trouble breathing. And now, as Pat Boone glides through the door, I am once again breathless. This is the most color I’ve absorbed all month. Gold. Yellow. Orange. A sunrise.
Marc and I stand up from the couch.
“Can I hug you?” Pat Boone asks, smiling.
When he enfolds my frail, ailing body, it feels like a laying on of hands.
Pat Boone will cure me.
“Would you like to sit here?” Marc nods toward the couch, beside me, where he’d been sitting.
Pat Boone shakes his head, pulling a chair directly in front of me. “This way I can see her better.” Meaning me. As he settles onto the chair, he adds, “I hope you liked the concert.” He explains he arrived in Michigan late last night from a previous show in North Carolina. “I was tired.”
“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 thi
s. 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 memory? 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.
Pat Boone Fan Club Page 19