by Roy Blount
If she’s barefooted. (“Barefoot” is cute, but “barefooted” is more down-to-earth.) It may be objected that this was covered by point 17, above, “naked as a jaybird,” but it wasn’t. “Barefooted” focuses on the whole matter of padding around. Ever listen to a woman’s bare feet padding around upstairs? (Not slapping, not stomping, not dragging, but padding. Around.)
A sweetly robust way of laughing. And of sneezing.
I am going to skip over some more obvious ones here.
If she can have a good rowdy time engaging in dialectic. Doesn’t want to be thesis continually nor indefatigably antithesis, but likes to mix it up with you and come out with something fresh.
There’s a lot in how she pets a dog.
Good hands, generally.
When she’s wet. Ideally with sweat, or with something else (gravy, for instance) involving an element of slickum. Swimming-pool or saltwater wetness is not fluid enough: the hand catches on it.
If she’d like to go run out into any available body of water right now, though.
If she looks like she is built for dancing but would just as soon kid around.
If there is nothing on God’s green earth that would convince her to become a Republican. If she’s already Republican, if she was raised that way, well, I don’t have to know everything. I guess.
If she is slightly cross-eyed. Maybe I’m kinky. Maybe I don’t like to be focused on too intensely. I don’t know. But you know how Karen Black’s eyes, and Lauren Hutton’s, and to a lesser extent Ellen Barkin’s, seem just out of true?
If she looks like she could go like Valerie Brisco-Hooks if she weren’t so languorous.
If she’s just naturally got coloring all over.
Or, on the other hand, if she’s so pellucid beneath her clothes that it’s like the beginning of time under there.
If she responds with informed warmth to at least ten of the following names: Dwight Gooden, Robert Montgomery, Patsy Cline, Earl Long, Christopher Smart, Willis Reed, Candy Barr, Les Paul, Judy Holliday, Dock Ellis, Cole Younger, Oliver St. John Gogarty, Mr. Kitzel, Grace Paley, Maynard G. Krebs, Nellie Fox, Myles Na Gopaleen, Mary Worth, Claudette Colbert, Grundoon, Zora Neale Hurston, Butch Thompson, Jeanette MacDonald, Keela the Outcast Indian Maiden, L. C. Greenwood, and Joel McCrea.
One of those T-shirts with the big, big armholes. You know what I mean? You keep hoping the flag will come along and she’ll salute? Of course I realize that from a respect-for-women point of view those shirts are worn only for purposes of mobility and air-conditioning. Uh-huh.
If her slip is showing. Remember slips? Whatever happened to slips? It’s such a great term: slip. Not too froufrou, not too stern.
Heart. My friend Jane Bell (see point 10, above), her husband, several other congenial people, and I were out lurching around happily one night in Nashville, having breakfast in a place with a greasy floor at 3:00 A.M. I mention the floor because Jane slipped on it and fell flat on her face. Jane has elegant, delicate features. One of her front teeth broke right half in two on a diagonal line. All of a sudden Jane was snaggletoothed. It was a revelation! She looked wonderful! Not that there were any flies on her before, by any means; she always looked lovely; but, I don’t know, now she looked exotic, in a very down-home kind of way. A little bit evil, somehow; certainly a little bit trashy; all because of that slantwise gap in the middle of her mouth, which illumined the refinement of her features thereabout. We kept telling her how great she looked. But the admirable thing was how well she took it. Many women — and Jane is admittedly not the most absolutely laid-back person in America, even when her teeth are even — would have cried, or fumed, or pouted, or blamed someone, or insisted on going home. Jane just went right along with the course of the evening. Accepted compliments, did not demand commiseration, looked louche on request, and even joined in the discussion of topics quite unrelated to her mouth. We were back at her house around six, and when I got up a few hours later I found, with some regret, that she had already been to a dentist (rustled up by her husband on a Sunday morning) who had restored her to simple elegance. And she was ready for brunch. Incidentally, I want to say something now that for some reason I have never told Jane to her face: pound for pound, she can hold more gin without getting bleary than anybody else I know.
If you’ve been together through a lot of ups and downs. And there was always a firm bounce on the bottom.
If she eats all, every bit, of the meat off her chicken bones.
Okay? Are you satisfied? Now I got to get these bulldogs off my leg. I get no rest.
The Phantom Jukebox
(A Recitation)
I entered that small Texas bar
For I had a mouthful of dust.
But I was so happy otherwise
I thought my heart would bust.
The public relations firm I owned
Had added two new clients.
And one sold plastic fishing worms,
The other a household appliance.
And I’d received a large bequest
From my old aunt, who’d died.
And though her passing touched us all;
I felt enhanced inside.
So I was in the mood to hear
Some easy-listening — a
Taste I shared with my new Swedish
Girl, whose name was Inge —
And other kinds of cheerful tunes,
And have some Scotch-and-waters.
So I approached the jukebox there
And jingled all my quarters.
I punched E-4, for “Loving You
Is Easy ’Cause You’re Beautiful.”
But what I heard was a country man’s
Lament, sung through a snootful.
I tried to play a disco tune,
Then Tijuana Brass.
But what that jukebox played instead
Was “There Stands the Glass.”
“Bartender!” I loudly cried,
“Your jukebox took my quarter,
But won’t play what I want it to.
It must be out of order.”
A look of sadness swept the face
Of that drink-serving man.
“Stranger,” he said, “I think that you
Had better look again.”
And when I turned my eyes back ’round,
Sad songs still filled the air.
My quarter, though, lay on the floor.
There was no jukebox there.
“Ten years ago tonight, you see,”
The genial barman sighed,
“The jukebox that we did have there
Played ‘Faded Love’ and died.
“The jukebox,” he informed me then,
In a voice that came near choking,
“Loved our cigarette machine
That must have frowned on smoking.
“For it would not sell cigarettes.
We had to send it back.
As it was dollied out the door,
We heard that jukebox crack.
“And every year about this time,
The old jukebox appears.
The only songs that it will play
Fill all our hearts with tears.
“And late at night ’round closing time
Comes echoing the sound
Of falling packs of cigarettes
That never touch the ground.”
The barman’s face, I noticed then,
Was careworn and bizarre
And so were all the faces of
The patrons at the bar.
Three long years ago that was,
In fact this very night.
And since then things have changed for me,
Just as for you they might.
I’ve lost my p.r. comp’ny now,
And seen the last of Inge.
My money’s gone, and old George Jones
Is now my favorite singer.
And all that I have left these days
&n
bsp; Is country songs and woe —
Which I prefer to ecstasy
And Barry Manilow.
And when, at night, alone, I need
That old jukebox to hear,
All I have to do is drop
A quarter and a tear.
The Simple Life
Observe the protozoan swim.
It’s not a her, it’s not a him.
Its income, outgo both are slim.
It has no school or home or gym,
Or tears or blood or bile or phlegm.
A long way down from seraphim —
And yet it fills the interim
Between prelude and closing hymn
More gainfully than you do, Jim.
For when it dies it’s two of them.
Real People, So to Speak
What’s So Hot about Celebs?
“It is true,” a great man once said, “that I also have to pee, but for quite different reasons.”
— Tommaso Landolfi
A CELEBRITY IS SOMEONE distinguished for having been heard of by a whole lot of people. Wherever a whole lot of people get together, there have to be plenty of conspicuous, plainly lettered signs posted to keep them all from wetting their pants and falling over one another. That’s what a celebrity is: a sign saying I HAVE BEEN TELEVISED. YOU WANT MY AUTOGRAPH. The only difference is that a celebrity causes people to wet their pants and fall over one another. Even if he is Charles Nelson Reilly.
Fair enough, I guess. Only I remember a time when celebrities, like major-league baseball players, were fewer in number and you knew them. Maybe they weren’t particularly accomplished, but they had done something more than garble their lines on purpose and grin more or less engagingly so as to appear on “Foul-ups, Bleeps, and Blunders.” Maybe they were press agents’ creations, but at least they felt obliged to display a measure of personality, however trumped up. They worked at fame — disrobed at openings, threw drinks on other celebrities, wore trademark toupees, stole wives.
But over the past decade or so, a celebrity has become someone whose name and/or face you have seen more than twice while flipping through magazines in the checkout-counter line or switching from channel to channel, searching in vain for intrinsic interest. You don’t really care who they are, but — like certain French verbs when you are trying to satisfy your foreign-language requirement — they have popped up often enough that you feel vaguely as if you probably ought to know them.
Take the case of Julio Iglesias. I could not pick Julio Iglesias — by his face or by his voice — from a boatload of soccer players, and yet his name is lodged in my consciousness. Because he paid to have it lodged there.
Two years ago, Iglesias — a megastar Spanish crooner with a huge following in South America — regretted deeply that North America did not know him from a bale of hay. So he paid Rogers and Cowan, a p.r. megafirm, something like two million dollars to make him mega above the Rio Grande. America’s Next Lover was what he wanted to be.
I don’t love him. But I do know, and so do major numbers of other gringos, that he sang a duet with Willie Nelson on the Country Music Association awards show last year. (Andy Warhol’s prophecy that eventually everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes may never pan out, but it does appear that everyone will in time sing a duet with Willie Nelson.) I don’t know whether or not Rogers and Cowan arranged that performance, but I have heard the record that resulted when Willie and Julio went into the studio to do the song they sang on TV that night.
And when I heard it, I cried, “No, Willie! Sing a duet with Rosemary Clooney! Sing a duet with Freddy Fender! Sing a duet with any number of persons who, while working as many tough rooms as you have, became more good than celebrated! Do not sing a duet with this road-show Engelbert Humperdinck!”
But the thing had been done. Julio Iglesias was a giant in the industry.
It is no new development that fame is more lucrative than workmanship. But there used to be more of a connection between the two. It also used to be that when a President looked at the nation from the television screen, part of his expression said, “Well, hell, I’m doing the best I can. But being President is hard, goddamn it.” Presidents strove to be real. Now we have a President whose forte is a knack for simplified celebrity.
In its tenth-anniversary issue, People magazine picked the top celebrity of each year from 1974 through 1983. The first was Richard Nixon. The last was Ronald Reagan. I would not choose either man as America’s Sweetheart, but Nixon achieved his apotheosis through dedicated scrabbling, hard-earned governmental expertise, and profound character flaws. Reagan is a kind of logo, who knows as much about how the nation or the world functions as Betty Crocker knows about baking.
And yet Reagan works, in the thespian sense. He communicates serenity, because he isn’t thoughtful enough to have any shame. He believes in his good-guy role, so why should he question himself? He was not ruffled when he called his own dog by the wrong name in front of the dog and reporters. That is what I call your definitive tinsel figure: a person who feels that he can afford, psychologically, not to know his own dog. Eventually such a person reveals greater gaps in his knowledge. He feels safe in assuming, for instance, that the Nazi Holocaust has pretty much blown over.
Yet Ronald Reagan represents abiding values to millions of people. He shrugs and grins and doesn’t put himself out, and he is the most powerful man in the world. He must have paid his dues, because there he is. I would call it voodoo ascendancy, except that voodoo gets down. Celebrities today just loom large, like parade floats.
And yet I think more and more people are asking, “Who do celebrities think they are, anyway?” Celebrities today seem monumentally richer and more familiar. You’d think that a celebrity would feel obliged to be amazing, or at least colorful, but too many of them are content with being sufficiently famous that they don’t have to be interesting. So who needs them?
“What I want to know,” says my friend Jim Seay, the poet, “is how come every day it says in the paper that today is Bill Bixby’s birthday. Or Tom Jones’s. Or Loni Anderson’s. How come it never says today is my mother’s birthday? Or one of my uncles’? Or — I’ve got sisters, too. How come it never says it’s one of their birthdays? That’s what I’m interested in. I don’t care if it’s Tom Jones’s birthday.”
Seay comes from a county in Mississippi where the paper will have a picture of Mrs. Rainie Hazelrigs, who has grown a particularly large vegetable, and another one of Newland Fobes, who has killed three great big snakes. Mrs. Hazelrigs and Newland will be pointing to what they have grown or killed: the reasons for the pictures. Celebrities, to get their pictures in the paper, don’t have to have done anything. They can just be standing there.
Today’s celebrity is someone who has never allowed TV cameras into his home before, but he is making an exception this time, for “PM Magazine.” Here’s some good footage of him fixing himself a salad, just like a normal individual. Today’s celebrity is someone who is a very private person, really, who is uncomfortable with all the glamour and acclaim. Prefers simple pleasures, like ironing. Any normal person who said he or she liked ironing would seem crazy. But celebrities get credit for liking to iron. I want you to read this from a recent story about Jackie Onassis in People:
She eschews bodyguards and entourages and sometimes travels alone on Doubleday business. “I walk fast,” Jackie explained. On a trip to Paris, she registered at the Hotel Crillon as “Mrs. Lancaster.” She met photographer Deborah Turbeville for a tour of the dusty back rooms at Versailles, which Turbeville later photographed for the 1981 book Unseen Versailles. “One time she leaned out of the limo window to ask directions,” says Turbeville. “She didn’t cringe in the car, making a big deal about it, like ‘No one should see me, I’m Jacqueline Onassis.’”
Well, hell, most people would feel unreasonably privileged to be able to afford to register at the Hotel Crillon as anybody. Most people eschew bodyguards and entourages without even
thinking about it, and not because bodyguards and entourages don’t walk fast enough for them, either. Personally, if I had an entourage, I’d say, “Listen, y’all, I’m going to pick up the pace now,” and if they couldn’t keep up, I’d find me an entourage that could.
Now, I will say this: the way People puts it, it sounds as if Jackie Onassis toured through the palace of Versailles in a limousine. If she did, well, okay, that is interesting. My hat is off to anybody who would ride in an automobile of any kind right up the steps into a palace. My friends Slick Lawson, Susan Scott, and Greg Jaynes and I never did that, but we did close the castle of Versailles one night. We lurked around, hoping we’d get locked in, so we could sleep over in Marie Antoinette’s bed. That wouldn’t have been as interesting as tooling down the back halls in a big old long black car, but it would have been worth telling about if we’d managed to do it. But some Frenchmen made a sweep through the castle before locking up, and they made us leave.
I don’t think Mrs. Onassis actually got limoed from room to room at Versailles, though (saying, “Driver, that looks like an interesting torture chamber; pull over there”). I think what People means is that Jackie Onassis stuck her head out of a limo and asked how to get to Versailles. Actually, as I remember, the roads are pretty well marked. In fact, the way the franc is now, it’s a surprisingly cheap cab ride from Paris to Versailles. I know because Slick, Susan, Greg, and I missed the tour bus that night and took a cab back. I think it was just about twenty dollars, which split four ways is not bad at all. But nobody saw fit to write us up for getting a good deal like that. I have mentioned it myself a number of times, because I welcome the opportunity to let people know that I’ve been to France. Because it gives me a feeling of being snazzy. And people realize that I am trying to get them to help me feel snazzy, so they don’t look impressed. A celebrity, though, can stick her head out of a limo in France and people will rush to regard it as just-an-ordinary-Joe behavior, which is to say, another star in her crown.
Incidentally, according to People, Jackie Onassis recently “scored a major publishing coup by signing up Michael Jackson to write his memoirs.”