The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup

by Susan Orlean

  “My dog, Sally, costs seventy-two dollars. That sounds like a lot of money but it’s a really good price because you get a flea bath with your dog.”

  “The best magazines are Nintendo Power, because they tell you how to do the secret moves in the video games, and also Mad magazine and Money Guide—I really like that one.”

  “The best artist in the world is Jim Davis.”

  “The most beautiful woman in the world is not Madonna! Only Wayne and Garth think that! She looks like maybe a . . . a . . . slut or something. Cindy Crawford looks like she would look good, but if you see her on an awards program on TV she doesn’t look that good. I think the most beautiful woman in the world probably is my mom.”

  COLIN THINKS A LOT about money. This started when he was about nine and a half, which is when a lot of other things started—a new way of walking that has a little macho hitch and swagger, a decision about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (con) and Eurythmics (pro), and a persistent curiosity about a certain girl whose name he will not reveal. He knows the price of everything he encounters. He knows how much college costs and what someone might earn performing different jobs. Once, he asked me what my husband did; when I answered that he was a lawyer, he snapped, “You must be a rich family. Lawyers make $400,000 a year.” His preoccupation with money baffles his family. They are not struggling, so this is not the anxiety of deprivation; they are not rich, so he is not responding to an elegant, advantaged world. His allowance is five dollars a week. It seems sufficient for his needs, which consist chiefly of quarters for Nintendo and candy money. The remainder is put into his Wyoming fund. His fascination is not just specific to needing money or having plans for money: It is as if money itself, and the way it makes the world work, and the realization that almost everything in the world can be assigned a price, has possessed him. “I just pay attention to things like that,” Colin says. “It’s really very interesting.”

  He is looking for a windfall. He tells me his mother has been notified that she is in the fourth and final round of the Publisher’s Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. This is not an ironic observation. He plays the New Jersey lottery every Thursday night. He knows the weekly jackpot; he knows the number to call to find out if he has won. I do not think this presages a future for Colin as a high-stakes gambler; I think it says more about the powerful grasp that money has on imagination and what a large percentage of a ten-year-old’s mind is made up of imaginings. One Friday, we were at school together, and one of his friends was asking him about the lottery, and he said, “This week it was $4 million. That would be I forget how much every year for the rest of your life. It’s a lot, I think. You should play. All it takes is a dollar and a dream.”

  UNTIL THE LOTTERY comes through and he starts putting together the Wyoming land deal, Colin can be found most of the time in the backyard. Often, he will have friends come over. Regularly, children from the neighborhood will gravitate to the backyard, too. As a technical matter of real-property law, title to the house and yard belongs to Jim and Elaine Duffy, but Colin adversely possesses the backyard, at least from 4:00 each afternoon until it gets dark. As yet, the fixtures of teenage life—malls, video arcades, friends’ basements, automobiles—either hold little interest for him or are not his to have.

  He is, at the moment, very content with his backyard. For most intents and purposes, it is as big as Wyoming. One day, certainly, he will grow and it will shrink, and it will become simply a suburban backyard and it won’t be big enough for him anymore. This will happen so fast that one night he will be in the backyard, believing it a perfect place, and by the next night he will have changed and the yard as he imagined it will be gone, and this era of his life will be behind him forever.

  Most days, he spends his hours in the backyard building an Evil Spider-Web Trap. This entails running a spool of Jim’s fishing line from every surface in the yard until it forms a huge web. Once a garbageman picking up the Duffys’ trash got caught in the trap. Otherwise, the Evil Spider-Web Trap mostly has a deterrent effect, because the kids in the neighborhood who might roam over know that Colin builds it back there. “I do it all the time,” he says. “First I plan who I’d like to catch in it, and then we get started. Trespassers have to beware.”

  One afternoon when I came over, after a few rounds of Street Fighter at Danny’s, Colin started building a trap. He selected a victim for inspiration—a boy in his class who had been pestering him—and began wrapping. He was entirely absorbed. He moved from tree to tree, wrapping; he laced fishing line through the railing of the deck and then back to the shed; he circled an old jungle gym, something he’d outgrown and abandoned a few years ago, and then crossed over to a bush at the back of the yard. Briefly, he contemplated making his dog, Sally, part of the web. Dusk fell. He kept wrapping, paying out fishing line an inch at a time. We could hear mothers up and down the block hooting for their kids; two tiny children from next door stood transfixed at the edge of the yard, uncertain whether they would end up inside or outside the web. After a while, the spool spun around in Colin’s hands one more time and then stopped; he was out of line.

  It was almost too dark to see much of anything, although now and again the light from the deck would glance off a length of line, and it would glint and sparkle. “That’s the point,” he said. “You could do it with thread, but the fishing line is invisible. Now I have this perfect thing and the only one who knows about it is me.” With that, he dropped the spool, skipped up the stairs of the deck, threw open the screen door, and then bounded into the house, leaving me and Sally the dog trapped in his web.

  MEET THE SHAGGS

  Things I Wonder (2:12)

  DEPENDING ON WHOM YOU ASK, THE SHAGGS were either the best band of all time or the worst. Frank Zappa is said to have proclaimed that the Shaggs were “better than the Beatles.” More recently, though, a music fan who claimed to be in “the fetal position, writhing in pain,” declared on the Internet that the Shaggs were “hauntingly bad,” and added, “I would walk across the desert while eating charcoal briquettes soaked in Tabasco for forty days and forty nights not to ever have to listen to anything Shagg-related ever again.” Such a divergence of opinion confuses the mind. Listening to the Shaggs’ album Philosophy of the World will further confound. The music is winsome but raggedly discordant pop. Something is sort of wrong with the tempo, and the melodies are squashed and bent, nasal, deadpan. Are the Shaggs referencing the heptatonic, angular microtones of Chinese ya-yueh court music and the atonal note clusters of Ornette Coleman, or are they just a bunch of kids playing badly on cheap, out-of-tune guitars? And what about their homely, blunt lyrics? Consider the song “Things I Wonder”:

  There are many things I wonder

  There are many things I don’t

  It seems as though the things I wonder most

  Are the things I never find out

  Is this the colloquial ease and dislocated syntax of a James Schuyler poem or the awkward innermost thoughts of a speechless teenager?

  The Shaggs were three sisters, Helen, Betty, and Dorothy (Dot) Wiggin, from Fremont, New Hampshire. They were managed by their father, Austin Wiggin, Jr., and were sometimes accompanied by another sister, Rachel. They performed almost exclusively at the Fremont town hall and at a local nursing home, beginning in 1968 and ending in 1973. Many people in Fremont thought the band stank. Austin Wiggin did not. He believed his girls were going to be big stars, and in 1969 he took most of his savings and paid to record an album of their music. Nine hundred of the original thousand copies of Philosophy of the World vanished right after being pressed, along with the record’s shady producer. Even so, the album has endured for thirty years. Music collectors got hold of the remaining copies of Philosophy of the World and started a small Shaggs cult. In the mid-seventies, WBCN-FM, in Boston, began playing a few cuts from the record. In 1988, the songs were repackaged and rereleased on compact disk and became celebrated by outsider-music mavens, who were taken with the Shaggs’ artless styl
e. Now the Shaggs are entering their third life: Philosophy of the World was reissued last spring by RCA Victor and will be released in Germany this winter. The new CD of Philosophy of the World has the same cover as the original 1969 album—a photograph of the Wiggin girls posed in front of a dark green curtain. In the picture, Helen is twenty-two, Dot is twenty-one, and Betty is eighteen. They have long blond hair and long blond bangs and stiff, quizzical half-smiles. Helen, sitting behind her drum set, is wearing flowered trousers and a white Nehru shirt; Betty and Dot, clutching their guitars, are wearing matching floral tunics, pleated plaid skirts, and square-heeled white pumps. There is nothing playful about the picture; it is melancholy, foreboding, with black shadows and the queer, depthless quality of an aquarium. Which leaves you with even more things to wonder about the Shaggs.

  Shaggs’ Own Thing (3:54)

  Fremont, New Hampshire, is a town that has missed out on most everything. Route 125, the main highway bisecting New Hampshire, just misses the east side of Fremont; Route 101 just misses the north; the town is neither in the mountains nor on the ocean; it is not quite in the thick of Boston’s outskirts, nor is it quite cosseted in the woods. Fremont is a drowsy, trim, unfancy place, rimmed by the Exeter River. Ostentation is expressed only in a few man-size gravestones in the Fremont cemetery; bragging rights are limited to Fremont’s being the hometown of the eminent but obscure 1920s meteorologist Herbert Browne and its being the first place a B-52 ever crashed without killing anyone.

  In the 1960s, when the Wiggin sisters formed the Shaggs, many people in Fremont raised dairy cows or made handkerchiefs at the Exeter textile mill or built barrels at Spaulding & Frost Cooperage, went to church, tended their families, kept quiet lives. Sometimes the summer light bounces off the black-glass surface of the Exeter River and glazes the big stands of blue pine, and sometimes the pastures are full and lustrous, but ordinary days in southern New Hampshire towns can be mingy and dismal. “Loneliness contributed to severe depression, illness and drunkenness for countless rural families,” Matthew Thomas wrote, in his book History of Fremont, N.H. Olde Poplin: An Independent New England Republic 1764–1997, which came out last year. “There may have been some nice, pleasant times . . . but for the most part, death, sickness, disease, accidents, bad weather, loneliness, strenuous hard work, insect-infested foods, prowling predatory animals, and countless inconveniences marked day-to-day existence.”

  When I was in Fremont recently, I asked Matthew Thomas, who is forty-three and the town historian, what it had been like growing up there. He said it was nice but that he had been bored stiff. For entertainment, there were square dances, sledding, an annual carnival with a Beano tent, Vic Marcotte’s Barber Shop and Poolroom. (These days, there are weekend grass drags out near Phil Peterson’s farm, where the pasture is flat and firm enough to race snowmobiles in the summer.) When the Shaggs were growing up, the Fremont town hall hosted ham-and-bean suppers, boxing matches, dog shows, and spelling bees. The hall is an unadorned box of a building, but its performance theater is actually quite grand. It isn’t used anymore, and someone has made off with the red velvet curtain, but it still has a somber dark stage and high-backed chairs, and the gravid air of a place where things might happen. In a quiet community like Fremont, in the dull hours between barn dances, a stage like that might give you big ideas.

  Who Are Parents? (2:58)

  Where else would Austin Wiggin have got the idea that his daughters should form a rock band? Neither he nor his wife, Annie, was musical; she much preferred television to music, and he, at most, fooled around with a Jew’s harp. He wasn’t a show-off, dying to be noticed—by all accounts he was an ornery loner who had little to do with other people in town. He was strict and old-fashioned, not a hippie manqué, not a rebel, very disapproving of long hair and short skirts. He was from a poor family and was raising a poor family—seven kids on a mill hand’s salary—and music lessons and instruments for the girls were a daunting expense.

  And yet the Shaggs were definitely his idea—or, more exactly, his mother’s idea. Austin was terribly superstitious. His mother liked to tell fortunes. When he was young, she studied his palm and told him that in the future he would marry a strawberry blonde and would have two sons whom she would not live to see, and that his daughters would play in a band. Her auguries were borne out. Annie was a strawberry blonde, and she and Austin did have two sons after his mother died. It was left to Austin to fulfill the last of his mother’s predictions, and when his daughters were old enough he told them they would be taking voice and music lessons and forming a band. There was no debate: His word was law, and his mother’s prophecies were gospel. Besides, he chafed at his place in the Fremont social system. It wasn’t so much that his girls would make him rich and raise him out of a mill hand’s dreary métier; it was that they would prove that the Wiggin kids were not only different from but better than the folks in town.

  The girls liked music—particularly Herman’s Hermits, Ricky Nelson, and Dino, Desi & Billy—but until Austin foretold their futures they had not planned to become rock stars. They were shy, small-town teenagers who dreamed of growing up and getting married, having children, maybe becoming secretaries someday. Even now, they don’t remember ever having dreamed of fame or of making music. But Austin pushed the girls into a new life. He named them the Shaggs, and told them that they were not going to attend the local high school, because he didn’t want them traveling by bus and mixing with outsiders, and, more important, he wanted them to practice their music all day. He enrolled them in a Chicago mail-order outfit called American Home School, but he designed their schedule himself: Practice in the morning and afternoon, rehearse songs for him after dinner, and then do calisthenics and jumping jacks and leg lifts or practice for another hour before going to bed. The girls couldn’t decide which was worse, the days when he made them do calisthenics or the days when he’d make them practice again before bed. In either case, their days seemed endless. The rehearsals were solemn, and Austin could be cutting. One song in particular, “Philosophy of the World,” he claimed they never played right, and he would insist on hearing it again and again.

  The Shaggs were not leading rock-and-roll lives. Austin forbade the girls to date before they were eighteen and discouraged most other friendships. They hadn’t been popular kids, anyway—they didn’t have the looks or the money or the savvy for it—but being in the band, and being home-schooled, set them apart even more. Friday nights, the family went out together to do grocery shopping. Sundays they went to church, and the girls practiced when they got home. Their world was even smaller than the small town of Fremont.

  This was 1965. The Beatles had recently debuted on American television. The harmony between generations—at least, the harmony between the popular cultures of those generations—was busting. And yet the sweet, lumpish Wiggin sisters of Fremont, New Hampshire, were playing pop music at their father’s insistence, in a band that he directed. Rebellion might have been driving most rock and roll, but in Fremont, Dot Wiggin was writing tributes to her mom and dad, with songs like “Who Are Parents?”:

  Parents are the ones who really care

  Who are parents?

  Parents are the ones who are always there

  Some kids think their parents are cruel

  Just because they want them to obey certain rules. . . .

  Parents do understand

  Parents do care

  Their first public performance was at a talent show in nearby Exeter, in 1968. The girls could barely play their instruments. They didn’t think they were ready to appear in public, but Austin thought otherwise. When they opened, with a cover of a loping country song called “Wheels,” people in the audience threw soda cans at them and jeered. The girls were mortified; Austin told them they just had to go home and practice more. If they thought about quitting, they thought about it very privately, because Austin would have had no truck with the idea; he was the kind of father who didn’t tolerate debate. They pra
cticed more, did their calisthenics, practiced more. Dot wrote the songs and the basic melodies, and she and Betty worked together on the chords and rhythms. Helen made up her drum parts on her own. The songs were misshapen pop tunes, full of shifting time signatures and odd meters and abrupt key changes, with lyrics about Dot’s lost cat, Foot Foot, and her yearning for a sports car and how much she liked to listen to the radio.

  On Halloween, the Shaggs played at a local nursing home—featuring Dot’s song “It’s Halloween” in their set—and got a polite response from the residents. Soon afterward, Austin arranged for them to play at the Fremont town hall on Saturday nights. The girls worried about embarrassing themselves, but at the same time they liked the fact that the shows allowed them to escape the house and their bounded world, even if it was just for a night. At that point, the girls had never even been to Boston, which was only fifty miles away.

  The whole family took part in the town hall shows. Austin III, the older of the two sons who had been seen in Austin’s future, played the maracas; the other son, Robert, played the tambourine and did a drum solo during intermission; Annie sold tickets and ran the refreshment stand. A Pepsi truck would drop off the cases of soda at their green ranch house, on Beede Road, every Friday night. Even though, according to one town hall regular, most people found the Shaggs’ music “painful and torturous,” sometimes as many as a hundred kids showed up at the dances—practically the whole adolescent population of Fremont. Then again, there really wasn’t much else to do in Fremont on a Saturday night. The audience danced and chatted, heckled the band, pelted the girls with junk, ignored them, grudgingly appreciated them, mocked them.

  The rumor around town was that Austin forced his daughters to be in the band. There was even talk that he was inappropriately intimate with them. When asked about it years later, Betty said that the talk wasn’t true, but Helen said that Austin once was intimate with her. Certainly, the family was folded in on itself; even Austin’s father and Annie’s mother, after they were both widowed, became romantically involved and lived together in a small house on the Wiggin property. The gossip and criticism only made Austin more determined to continue with the band. It was, after all, his destiny.