Though Ozzie certainly wouldn’t have given his approval, at fourteen Ricky lost his virginity to a plump blond hooker in an alleyway on a trip to London, which led to further excursions with many ladies of the night. Teenage Ricky loved to speed around in fast cars and spend a lot of time steaming up the windows, but his main interest was rapidly becoming rock and roll. He wanted to sing like his rockabilly idol, Carl Perkins, but would keep his secret for two more years.
By the time Ricky was sixteen, he was a huge star with half a million dollars in the bank, but still received only a fifty-dollar weekly allowance from his parents. He never wanted for anything. It was all taken care of for him. He rarely dealt with his money, and it remained an abstract concept, which would become a ferocious problem for him later in life.
Ricky finally made up his mind to rock because of a girl. When his new crush, Arlene, cooed dreamily about Elvis Presley, Ricky found himself telling her that he was about to make a record himself and not long afterward did a campy Elvis portrayal on “Adventures.” When the response to the show was positive, Ricky told Ozzie that he wanted to cut his own rock-and-roll record. Having been a musician, Ozzie treated his son’s request with respect, but proceeded with caution, booking Ricky and his guitar into Knotts Berry Farm’s Birdcage Theater with no fanfare. When the reaction was good, Ozzie took a tape of Ricky singing a squeaky-clean version of the Fats Domino hit “I’m Walkin‘” to several record companies, who turned him down flat. Only Norman Granz at independent Verve Records was willing to take a chance on the sixteen-year-old TV star. Two weeks after he sang the song on an episode of “Adventures” called “Ricky the Drummer,” in which he snapped his fingers and shook his legs while the girls sighed, Verve released “I’m Walkin’.” By Ricky’s seventeenth birthday, the song had reached number four on the Billboard charts and sold over a million copies. Former crush Arlene called Ricky to gush, but he didn’t see her again until backstage at one of his concerts fifteen years later.
In his first year of recording, Ricky turned out half a dozen rockabilly hits, all performed on “Adventures” as girls got closer to the stage and swooned in black and white. While the show was on hiatus, Ricky toured with his new band to uproarious screams, fainting females, and damp panties hurled onstage. With a touch of mascara on his long lashes and his hair in a slight pompadour, just a hint of Ricky’s smile sent his ga-ga fans straight to sweetheart heaven. Though plenty of teenage jailbait could have been his for the plucking, he preferred prostitutes, sometimes three or four at a time, which were procured for him by road managers. Wow.
As a young girl, I was a devoted viewer of the “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.” If I had known that Mr. Angel Face Teen Idol was bonking a bunch of hookers, I would have fainted dead away. People just didn’t do that kind of thing then, did they? Ha-ha. But Ricky Nelson was a walking dichotomy, living two, maybe three lives at once.
Off the road, depression set in. Ricky would go through the same old motions on the show, but feeling that his family could never understand the strain of rock stardom, he began to spend his spare time with like-minded musicians—Johnny and Dorsey Burnette, Gene Vincent, the Everly Brothers, Eddie Cochran—playing music and gunning motorcycles on Mulholland Drive way past midnight. He even got close to Elvis Presley, playing football with the King and his cronies at Bel Air Park. It seems Elvis never missed an episode of “Adventures.”
Despite his harlot-filled road dates, Ricky was sheltered and tethered by his fame. Playing himself within the confines of an average American family, living his real life as anything but an average American teenager, must have done some serious damage. At eighteen he carried his family’s TV show—an unbelievable pressure. He was a millionaire with no checkbook of his own, uncertain if people liked him for any real reasons, increasingly remote and withdrawn yet at the same time naively trusting. His parents held the reins, allowing America’s Boy Next Door to rock only so far, and it hurt him deeply when critics questioned his “authenticity” and dedication to rock and roll.
In fact, Ricky almost quit his big feature film Rio Bravo because he had to sing a couple of corny Western ballads. Johnny Cash had given him a cool tune called “Restless Kid” for the movie, but Ozzie and musical director Dmitri Tiompkin ultimately prevailed and a forlorn Rick was forced to croon “My Rifle, My Pony and Me.” The Johnny Cash song eventually wound up on the album Ricky Sings Again. After another good role in The Wackiest Ship in the Army, Ricky was offered a meaty part in Lillian Hellman’s Toys in the Attic, but was forced to decline due to ABC’s threats to cancel “Adventures” if he temporarily left the series. How could he put his entire family out of work? He did showcase his records on the weekly show, but Ozzie also forced his son to sing schmaltzy clinkers and soggy-stringed ballads. Ricky Nelson was being stifled by playing Ricky Nelson when what he really wanted to do was cut loose, rock out, and sweat. In subconscious rebellion, Ricky took control with dangerous hobbies. He almost burned up in a racing car, he actually took up bullfighting, and he earned a black belt in karate. Following the fiery racing accident, Rick said he’d entered the demolition derby to show the crowd he wasn’t afraid. Afraid of what? Ozzie’s shadow?
At twenty-one Ricky became Rick and had the biggest double-sided hit of his career, “Travelin’ Man” backed by “Hello Mary Lou,” which reached number one in twenty-two countries and sold six million copies. The album Rick Is 21 spent nearly a year on the charts. Though his mom still shopped for his food, Rick was finally in his own bachelor digs, dating actresses culled from the Players Guide casting directory. The girls Rick dated all describe a romantic, respectful young man who brought flowers and gifts and kissed them for hours. A former Miss California fondly recalls Rick’s hair tonic all over her dress. He may have been innocently necking with beauty queens, but Rick was also involved in a hidden relationship with a wild young bohemian blonde addicted to heroin. She disappeared to New York after a horrifying illegal abortion, telling friends she was so in love with Rick that she didn’t want to destroy his life. He was devastated, and for years afterward tried to locate his “only true love.” He never found her.
Kris Harmon had dreamed of marrying Rick Nelson from the time she was eleven. She kept a photograph of the two of them taken at a celebrity basketball game on her wall with the inscription “Nothing Is Impossible.” The power of the mind is an amazing thing. The Harmons and the Nelsons had been friends for many years, so when Rick started dating Kris after encouragement from Harriet, the two sets of parents almost pushed the couple down the aisle.
Kris’s father, football great Tom Harmon, and her mother, Elyse, an artist and former actress, raised Kris to be an obedient Catholic girl, but she defiantly admits to being the family’s black sheep. Strong-willed and bold, she took over Rick’s life where Ozzie hadn’t even left off yet. On April 20, 1963, the glamorous young couple were married in a Catholic ceremony, after Rick, a nonpracticing Protestant, brushed up on Catholicism. A daughter, Tracy Christine, was born six months later and the press releases stated that she’d been delivered prematurely, Very prematurely. Apparently Rick told a friend, “If Rick Nelson got a girl pregnant, Rick Nelson got married.” Recently Tracy Nelson, now a successful actress, told me that she had not really been premature, but was hidden away “because Grandpa didn’t want people thinking that Mom and Dad had had sex before they were married.”
David had married a year earlier and, as always, Ozzie incorporated his sons’ lives/wives into the show. It must have been so weird. Six family members playing themselves—but not really. Even Ozzie’s grandchildren appeared in an episode. By 1965 the Nelson family seemed antiquated. The world outside was in color, and it had moved on. At twenty-five, Rick and his pals were still hanging out at the malt shop. Even though Ozzie attempted tragic hipness with shows like “Ozzie a Go Go,” “Adventures” was not renewed for the 1966 season. Having worked nonstop for eighteen of his twenty-six years, Rick must have felt nothing but relief.<
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Rick had stopped touring but continued to record, having signed a twenty-year contract with Decca Records, which enabled him to experiment and branch out musically. But British Invaders—the Beatles, the Stones, the Who—and profound prophet Bob Dylan were stomping all over the twenty-six-year-old former teen idol. It must have hurt so bad. Still he persevered, writing naked autobiographical songs like “You Just Can’t Quit”: “Don’t feel sorry for me /’Cause can’t you see/I’m still me/And I just can’t quit.” But nobody was listening, nobody was buying. Nobody cared if he quit or not.
But Rick didn’t quit. In 1969, heartily inspired by Dylan’s country-flavored “Nashville Skyline,” he rounded up a batch of excellent musicians, formed the Stone Canyon Band, and started playing live again. Despite vigorous protests, his fellow players convinced Rick to add a few of his oldies to the set, along with the new material, which included three Dylan tunes. Released in 1970, Rick Nelson in Concert met with respectful raves and the single, Dylan’s “She Belongs to Me,” reached number thirty-three on the charts, Rick’s highest-ranking single in over five years.
Rick looked different: He had let his hair grow long, he wore boots and bell-bottoms. Some of the audiences he faced wanted the Ricky Nelson black-and-white version. They wanted him to take them back to their tight, bright, unlined bobby-sox days. But he wanted to move on. Rick’s next album, Rick Sings Nelson, was languishing at the bottom of the charts, so he grudgingly agreed to take part in an “oldies” package show at Madison Square Garden. After going through the “Mary Lou” oldie motions, he launched into a raucous version of the Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women.” The crowd’s enthusiasm turned hostile and the audience of twenty thousand started booing. At least it seemed that way to Rick. Accounts vary—some say only a few people booed—but Rick got the point and it must have stung him like a hive of angry bees.
Rick went home and channeled his account of that hellish evening in one sitting on a single piece of paper, and the insightful result was “Garden Party,” in which he realizes “You can’t please everyone / So you got to please yourself.” After he penned the final killer lyric, “If memories are all I sang / I’d rather drive a truck,” Rick called his cousin / manager, Willy Nelson: “Willy, I wrote one! I think I just wrote a hit!”
Fifteen years after “I’m Walkin’” hit the Billboard Top Ten, Rick Nelson struck gold again with “Garden Party,” giving his waning career another jump start. He went on to write deeply heartfelt songs about his burgeoning belief in reincarnation and the sorrows of lost love, and took them on the road.
After life on “Adventures,” Kris found that she didn’t have a career and deeply resented Rick for spending so much time touring. They were close to separating when Kris found she was pregnant with twin boys—Matthew and Gunnar. Though they stayed together, the couple grew steadily apart and any real communication ceased, despite the birth of their fourth child, Sam, in 1974. Kris was so jealous of Rick’s music that she didn’t even allow his guitar in the house.
When Ozzie died in June 1975, Rick slowly fell apart. The spark created by “Garden Party” flickered and went out, the songwriting fizzled. He turned up late to sessions and rehearsals, keeping band members waiting around for hours. He rarely got dressed, preferring to stay in his robe all day long. The thirty-five-year-old star had never written a check, never used a credit card. He had entrusted all the financial decisions to Ozzie and then to Kris, and her outlandish spending had just about broken him. To escape his deeply troubled marriage and to pay for the endless heaps of bills, Rick went back on the road and stayed there for the rest of his life.
Rick believed that entertaining was his life’s calling. He felt comfortable on the road—the great escape from reality. He had to be at a certain place at a certain time and someone woke him up and took him there. When he was hungry, he called room service. When he wanted sex, there was always a pretty lady close by who knew all the words to “Travelin’ Man” by heart. He always stopped to sign autographs and had a ready smile for his fans. Sometimes the venues were less than desirable. Said a member of the Stone Canyon Band, “Rick played as hard for sixty people as he did for twelve thousand.”
Rick was in Monroe, Louisiana, where director Taylor Hackford was filming a TV documentary on the singer, when Kris made her perfectly timed call to announce that she had filed for divorce. He was devastated. When she picked him up at the airport, she drove him to his new house. “You live here now,” she informed him. Rick hadn’t been at his new pad for a month when Kris arrived to find her estranged husband cavorting in the Jacuzzi with two Rams cheerleaders. Kris promptly smacked the naked girls, screaming at them to leave while Rick hid in a closet. Rick has told friends that he bedded thousands of women. I’m sure it’s true. Against the advice of his business manager, in 1978 Rick bought salacious actor Errol Flynn’s former estate, complete with several unusual naughty features, one of which was a two-way mirror in the master bedroom.
Rick and Kris briefly reunited, but due to her flagrant buying sprees and their constant arguing, Rick was on the road 250 days a year, which Kris found intolerable. Kris started drinking heavily, insisting that Rick quit music and go back to acting, which he, of course, refused to do. They broke up for good in 1980, and although the relief must have been blessed, Rick couldn’t help but compare his embittered, messy marriage to his parents’ seemingly perfect forty-year union. As he mourned, Kris went on a hell-bent rampage to remove from Rick every cent he ever made. And then some.
To add to his grief, in 1981 Rick was slapped with a paternity suit. A blood test proved that a one-night stand in New Jersey had favored Rick with another son, Eric Crewe. Kris was wearing him down with depositions and money demands, and since Rick refused to be a fossil on the “oldies” circuit, he turned into a recluse, hanging around the house in his robe, playing the piano along with Carl Perkins’ forty-fives.
I talked with a petite brunette named Linda who visited Rick several times during this period, and got a pretty miserable story: “The first time I went up there, these fellows were sitting around, but he wasn’t there. He was watching us from a telescope in his closet. He was in the closet getting high on freebase and he finally asked me to come in. I think he had just gotten into it. I could tell by the way he handled it, he was really still enjoying it. It gets to the point where you hate it, but you do it. It’s instantly addicting. It took me to my knees. It’s like a cancer in this world that we’ve never seen the likes of. He was a total gentleman, sweet, kind, just precious. He had his new wardrobe all lined up in there and was looking at some new pictures through a loupe. He said, ‘Help me pick out the best of my head shots,’ but it seemed like something that would never get done. He was torn because he knew he had to work, but when you have that pipe in your hand, there’s nothing more important.”
Linda went to visit Rick again and found him in the closet watching pornographic movies. “He took me on a tour of the house,” she recalled. “He was real proud of the house but very angry because Kris had gone to Sears and bought all of these cheap aluminum fixtures and replaced all the original brass fixtures in the bathrooms. He was so embarrassed. ‘She spent eighty to a hundred thousand dollars on junk, she has no taste,’ he said. He was very resentful. He took me into his room and he had just gotten his father’s chair delivered from his mother. He said, ‘Sit in this chair. It’s the only thing left I have of that man: He started telling me about his father-he was a real overbearing, real tough guy. He said all he ever wanted to do was play professional tennis, he was extremely shy and never wanted to act, that he was forced to work, that his father was a tyrant. But he was so happy to have his father’s chair in the bedroom. He admired David because he went out and became a lawyer. He talked about how proud he was of his sons that they played tennis. Once I was up there and he apologized that he couldn’t cook me anything. He had these two guys up there taking care of him. He picked the lid up off a frying pan and said, ‘This is all I
get anymore, this chicken-fried steak. I’m sick of eating like this.’ He was lost. A lost soul. Rick was crippled.”
Rick signed his divorce papers in December 1982, but the legal warfare with his former wife was far from over. Plagued with debts, Rick finally made the decision to join his peers and hit the road with his classics. Friends laughingly nicknamed him “Ledge,” short for “legend,” and Rick Nelson finally seemed to accept that he really wouldn’t rather drive a truck. Just like another rock maestro, Pete Townshend, who really didn’t want to die before he got old.
When a fellow musician had one girl too many in his room at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas, he offered pretty, blond Helen Blair to Rick, and he accepted. Rick was very lonely and twenty-one-year-old Helen soon became his constant companion, happily bending to his topsy-turvy lifestyle, eventually moving into the Errol Flynn house with her two long-haired cats and Afghan hound. Rick seemed content, but his friends were concerned about Helen’s heavy drug abuse, in particular her addition to cocaine. She also had a penchant for shoplifting. When Harriet discovered that Rick and Helen were engaged, she threatened to write him out of her will, but Rick always explained away his fiancée’s troubles by saying she had had a horrible childhood.
Rick finally met his idol, Carl Perkins, after thirty years of emulating his style, and Perkins was taken by Rick’s sincerity: “One of the last things Ricky said to me was, ‘I would really like to open some shows for you next year, Carl.’ I said you’ve got the cart before the horse—/‘// open for you, but Ricky said, ‘No way.’ That was very special, and when I heard about the accident, it really tore me up.”
Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon Page 32