The Cake and the Rain: A Memoir

by Jimmy Webb

  We went back to the garage and noticed with satisfaction that the bonnet was closed on the Cobra. Leon charged a thousand dollars for his work. I grudgingly handed it over, anxious for the bellow of unfettered power moving ahead. Moving ahead was all.

  By the time we got into Vegas, we were beaten down. Ears ringing, hair greasy, a slight film of oil covering our faces, not looking or feeling our best. I drove to Caesars Palace, where I was a regular, and the parking guys gawked at the Cobra and parked it out front where everybody could see it. They asked us if we wanted broads and we stared dumbly into each other’s glazed eyes and shook our heads in negative unison. We went up to a big suite that was furnished like the best little whorehouse in Herculaneum, and we crashed.

  When the shadows grew long and the towering hotel blotted out the descent of the merciless sun through the unadorned sky, we donned expensive Italian suits with silk shirts and Gucci loafers for the Elvis Presley show. Our hair was shoulder length, however, and we got looks from some of the casino bosses as we exited the elevator and walked through the lobby. Hippies were objects of suspicion at the big hotels back when “The Family” was running things.

  Out front under the huge arching canopy, under a thousand glistening spotlights and exuding a silent belligerence, sat the Cobra. Without discussing it, we opted for a cab. It was a short hop from our hotel to the International, barely time to smoke a ready roll and split a couple of caps of mescaline.

  Reality was already morphing when we exited the cab into a mass of celebrity and journalistic chaos. Outside and inside the huge lobby of the International were sensational billboards announcing the “Elvis Presley Summer Festival” to an elbow-knocking crowd of DJs, high-rollers, hookers, greats, near-greats, not-even- greats, ingrates, would-bes, hustlers, hucksters, hoodlums, honchos, and some fans. In the faces of the middle-aged women who had worshipped Elvis in their teens, there was a holy light. Not on any other evening of their lives, be it unbearably long or tragically short, would they experience the transcendent ecstasy that was visible all around their persons. No mean thought marred their beauty in this hour, however sordid or plain their lives may have been, as they moved in a hushed mass toward their Source, their Fountain and High Priest of Youth.

  I was carried along with the current of unmitigated enthusiasm, into a showroom that glowed like the interior of some impossibly vast spaceship, emblazoned high up on the walls with idols: unforgettable, gigantic golden angels. Why angels? I did not know, nor did I know for a certainty they were really there. And then I had it. It was Elvis! Elvis was the angel. And around me the world swirled in joyous pilgrimage to see a real angel.

  Security persons blocked the way but the Devil whispered in their ears, money changed hands, and ropes and barriers parted magically as the elite were filtered onward, down the seemingly endless platforms of the indoor amphitheater, past the leather upholstered divans and booths, all the way down, until I thought there must be some mistake. Down to the linen-covered long tables situated in parallel rows right in front of the stage and then, unbelievably, further still, to the first seats at the very front of the crowd, the stage looming a couple of feet above our heads.

  I stared across the table right into the face of All-Pro fullback Jim Brown.

  “Howdy,” I said.

  He acknowledged me with a curt nod. Still, I was impressed. Even a cursory glance around us revealed an essentially all-celebrity crowd. Hollywood had come to Las Vegas.

  Softly at first, but with increasing urgency, the Thus Spake Zarathustra theme of Richard Strauss began to play on huge speakers overhead as the lights dimmed. The throbbing engine of the rhythm section was engaged and the metaphor of space travel was evoked again as the floor trembled under the influence of some vast psychic motor. Then, to put it simply—though it was not a simple thing—Elvis Aaron Presley walked onto the stage.

  Putting all criteria regarding tessitura, style, presentation, and all the other boxes on the scoring checklist of the professional reviewer aside for the moment, Elvis had a superhuman, metaphysical presence on stage that bowled me over completely. I felt as though he knew I was there and was singing to me, talking to me. I looked around me and could see that everyone else felt exactly the same way. He was wearing a black, close-fitting costume with a long piratical red sash around his midsection. His hair was loose and styled much like a Beatles cut, not sprayed into a pompadour as I had expected. His physical condition was superb as he gyrated through “Train” and “All Shook Up,” stopping to indulge in some questionable comedy, such as bending over too far and allowing his guitar neck to get “stuck” on the toe of his boot. He goofed around with a little foot-long Fender guitar: “When I was a baby I played this little bitty guitar!” Dumb joke. But nobody cared. I felt the electricity lancing through the room in great jolting bolts. It wasn’t a performance as much as a special effect or an induced epiphany. He possessed the audience and made it his.

  He looked up at the gigantic figures on the walls and stared thoughtfully before saying: “Boy, those are some pretty funky-looking angels up there!”

  Everybody laughed hysterically. It became obvious to me, somehow I knew in the way trippers always know, that he was high as a kite on something.

  Looking back into the room I could see the beginnings of mayhem. Hundreds of women were leaving their seats and migrating toward the front as the show progressed. Quickly they penetrated the A-list conclave and were all around us, tears streaming down their cheeks, faces filled with a ghostly light and tranquil reverence as though they were witnessing a miracle: a perfect outline of Christ appearing on the wall of a grain silo.

  “Wise men say, only fools rush in…”

  Like the invitational at the end of a revival service, the hymnlike tune of “Can’t Help Falling in Love” (w. Peretti, Creatore, and Weiss) caused many to cry openly.

  Elvis was now working his way from stage right to stage left along the footlights, fifteen or twenty silk scarves draped around his neck. He was stopping to kiss the girls and drape a souvenir scarf around them. He took his time and the kisses were real. A beautiful supplicant near me sighed and dropped like a stone, while others tried to support and comfort her.

  Eventually I looked up and saw he was standing over me looking down. If he had wanted to kiss me and give me a scarf it would have been okay. Instead he reached out with a little scrap of paper torn from an envelope and dropped it on my table. I was looking straight in his eyes and they smiled as he moved on. There was much more kissing and scarfing to be done!

  I squinted at the little torn out square of paper and saw scrawled there in a rough hand: “Dear Jimmy, come backstage.”

  Suddenly the house lights were up. The show was over. The audience stood applauding, all of them, waiting for an encore that would never come.

  The famous epithet “Elvis has left the building, ladies and gentlemen. Elvis has left the building!” sounded through the P.A. in an attempt to dissipate the crowd, which was stubbornly holding its ground, reluctant to consign such a moment to history.

  Two burly security guards appeared out of nowhere and I had a momentary notion that they were there to throw us out of the place.

  Instead one of them growled, “Are you Webb?”

  I nodded.

  “Let’s go!” they both said, and bracing us on either side as we penetrated that mass of humanity, stubborn as a hedgerow, they half escorted, half dragged us to the side of the stage and through a double door that led into the labyrinth of hidden passages that honeycombed the inside of the hotel.

  Eventually we came to an unprepossessing doorway that led into a smallish dressing room full of Elvis costumes on racks, glittering suits with big collars. Then the guards stopped at another door and beckoned us inside. A short, fat man chewing on a cigar was glad-handing us from the moment we stepped inside.

  “I’m Tom Parker,” he chewed in a Southern accent. “I s’pose y’all here to meet Elvis.”

  We nodd
ed dumbly, the mescaline wearing off now, the neon lighting harsh as we went through yet another door, and suddenly there he stood. It was Elvis, already changed into tight faded jeans and a loose coat of many colors. The customary sunglasses were forgone. Surrounding him, in a flying wedge, as though they possessed him in some way, was the Memphis Mafia: Red, Charlie, a half-dozen of ’em. The tableau had a psychological effect. We shrunk; he expanded.

  I approached and shook his hand, the Devil and I mumbling words that I don’t recall except I do recall Beelzebub saying “Howdy, El!” which seemed a little familiar, but the Devil had a pair and he wasn’t going to kowtow to nobody. In close proximity to Elvis his animus, his mana, became almost suffocating. I forgot what I had planned to say. It didn’t seem to matter. Only he mattered. He was saying something about Glen Campbell, and they were saying he had to pick out another outfit for his next show, and we stood there in La-La Land just staring like tourists from another planet. Elvis must have endured millions of such stares.

  Phone numbers were exchanged through intermediaries as though he was going to be calling me or vice versa. What a laugh. The last thing I remember before I left, hustled out by the officious and ever congenial Tom Parker, was gazing in awe at the diamond-studded belt that marked Elvis’s physical and spiritual center. It lanced, glittered, and sparkled with the only word that needed to be said: ELVIS.

  1945

  After thirty-seven months in the combat zone my father de-shipped in Long Beach from the USS Maryland and walked down the long gangway with his duffel bag over his brawny shoulders into a milling crowd of brother Marines and sailors, and civilians—mostly women—intent on finding that one special person, to remake a pairing in a ritual as old as warfare and waiting. The crowd was thinning before they found each other, it having taken them a long time to recognize each other after all the years and the physical changes on both sides. He was twenty pounds of hard muscle heavier and two inches taller. She had always been a pretty girl but had flowered into a curvaceous pinup in his absence, a fact she had not been shy to advertise in an occasional black-and-white photo posed demurely in a one-piece bathing suit and sent like a promise into the maelstrom of war. Finally, they came hesitantly face-to-face.

  “Bob?” she asked uncertainly, looking up into his hard, browned features.

  “Ann?” he replied unsteadily as he dropped the duffel bag and swept her up into his mighty arms.

  My father, a man of considerable wit, says I was born “nine months and forty-five minutes later.”

  1969

  I soon returned to Las Vegas. It was the end of August and the Presley show was closing for the year. I couldn’t miss that. I was alone, the Prince of Darkness having gone off on some nefarious mission.

  I was in the lobby of the International Hotel, which had been closed for a huge private party. A corridor had been roped off through which the regular guests could travel from the front door to the registration desk and then to the massive elevator banks. The rest of the stadium-sized lobby was reserved for Miss Nancy Sinatra’s opening night party, commingled with Elvis’s closing night party. Elvis and Nancy had just appeared in 1968’s Speedway together. Mr. Sinatra was hosting for his suddenly famous daughter, riding high with Lee Hazlewood’s production of her hit “These Boots Are Made for Walking.” In attendance was every singer on the Strip who wasn’t working, the celeb contingent up from Hollywoodland, hundreds of record company brass and high rollers, and cadres of undercover security guys packing iron, which made them so conspicuous it was laughable.

  There was so much glad-handing, bullshitting, ass-kissing, ego-schmoozing, and showbiz circle-jerking going on that you could have easily mistaken it for a political fund-raiser, but it was just the usual Vegas Vamp. I had neither the will nor the skill to play this kind of chess. I was only learning insincerity, slowly but surely.

  I drifted from the center of the room, where I greeted Nancy Sinatra, a sweet, straightforward kid my age, and her father, who wasn’t really known for long frivolous conversations. Nobody knew who the hell I was unless they were telepathic, which made it easier to slide through the seekers and sounders and find a friendly barstool in the corner. I ordered a beer and swiveled to face the crowd, which had reached maximum spatial saturation, a point at which literally no person in the room can move in any direction for any distance. Networking shuts down. Now people just want to get out alive.

  I laughed and wheeled around to devote my attention to the gold veins in the black mirror behind the bar. “These Boots Are Made for Walking” was just short of deafening on the sound system as I felt rather than sensed, a person immediately to my right.

  A familiar baritone bourbon voice reverberated in my ear: “Jimma!”

  The guy had bent over and put his elbow right down on the bar to talk to me. I eased my head around cautiously, not sure who had managed to move in so close.

  “Jimma!” he said again, and I found myself nose-to-nose and eyebrow-to-eyebrow with Elvis Presley.

  “Hey!” I shouted involuntarily, as all my ass-kissing solenoids kicked in at the same time. I skewed the barstool around to face him. He was wearing dark glasses, a white shirt open at the throat, jeans, and a black velvet jacket.

  “Don’ geddup, Jimma,” Elvis said. “I jus wonna talk to ya fo a minute.”

  I mumbled something about that being an honor and asked him if he wanted a beer.

  “Nah, I don’ drink.” He laughed and I laughed, too, as if I knew the joke but I fuckin’ didn’t.

  “Jimma, I jus wanna ask you how many French horns you use in your orchester.” I didn’t think of myself as someone who “had an orchestra” like Harry James or Nelson Riddle, but so earnest was his expression and tone of voice that I let that slide.

  “Well, I tell you, Elvis,” I said, “when I first started out I used three because there’s basically three notes in a chord.”

  He snorted. “Yeh, I know that!” His lip really did curve up on one side, like a friendly snarl.

  “Well,” I continued, “when I started writing more complicated chords I found out three French horns just didn’t always get a full, rich sound.”

  Now, I was talking to the guy about something I cared about. He thought about it as I studied his reflection in the bar mirror.

  “Okay, Jimma, that seems about right to me, too.”

  So the Big E lies in his giant white bed and thinks about orchestration? Mind-blowing.

  “You know,” I added, as I nodded toward Mr. Sinatra across the room, “Nelson Riddle uses four French horns.”

  Elvis slipped off the black glasses and reached over to shake my hand.

  “Hey, Jimma, thank ya vermuch. Just wait’ll yuh hear ma new orchester.”

  He smiled and I said, “Hey, anytime!”

  And then like a wraith he was gone. I mean gone. I did a 360-degree scan of the gigantic lobby and there was no sign of him. All my life I’ve felt a moment passed, a chance to say: “I mean anytime, or anything! Any of those monsters you’re wrestling with, ’cause I have monsters in my closet, too! I like you. I would like to tell you every goddamn thing I know about music! I think I could turn you on to stuff.…” But he was gone, and like Melville’s Moby-Dick I would only see him again once more.

  Jimmy Webb with Robert and Ann Webb, 1946. (Courtesy of Janice Linnens)

  CHAPTER TWO

  There’s something happening here

  What it is ain’t exactly clear …

  —Stephen Stills, “For What It’s Worth,” 1966

  1969

  I was one of a rarified few who had offices in one of the old-fashioned star system–era bungalows clustered in a grove of palm trees on the Universal Film Studios lot in Universal City. Only well-known production companies had them, or high-budget pictures in progress for the duration of their stay, or individuals bound directly to the studio by exclusive contracts. I was one of these.

  My attorneys, among them some fine men like Howard Golden, had
labored long and hard to negotiate a filmed musical project and a television special among other things, including the private bungalow, a substantial sum of money up front, and at the last minute, well, Beelzebub insisted on everyone getting a Cadillac. A brand-new El Dorado for me, one for the Prince of Evil, one for my father, and one for Howard. This was one of those asinine last-minute conceits almost guaranteed to spoil a deal, and Howard turned white when Patch and I told him about the Caddies.

  “You’re fucked” were his exact words.

  All in, I guess it was $150,000 or so worth of Cadillacs, but in Hollywood when you’re hot, you’re hot, and like the Leigh Harline and Ned Washington song says, “No request is too extreme.” Everybody got a Cadillac. We could have said, “And an airplane!”

  Civilized restraint prevailed and we settled for our own personal secretary, new rugs, and a custom letterhead. Oh yes, and a fresh paint job for our bungalow, handily located right next door to the Universal recording facility. I could look out the window at my Cobra parked in my private parking space with a neat black-on-white lettered sign that said WEBB. Parking space on the Universal lot was not so much a place to put your car as it was a symbol of exalted social status, a subtle badge trumping the mojo of the hoi polloi of producers and mere stars who crowded the cafeteria and shooting stages and walked out to the parking lots to get their cars. Revered film director Abraham Polonsky didn’t have a parking place, but I had three.

  It was the first week of August and I was just settling in. I was working in the back room of the ranchette, which was my territory, replete with a big desk, a couch, and a skinny spinet of an upright piano that sounded like a Tin Pan Alley reject. I had a plum of a project. Universal had asked me to write the score for a new Herb Ross–directed musical based on James Barrie’s Peter Pan and starring Mia Farrow. Mel Ferrer, an affable B-list actor from the 1950s with a tall and dignified mien, would take the helm as producer. Mia and I exchanged phone calls frequently about Pan and the underlying philosophy and deeper meanings of James Barrie’s warhorse. I was in there chopping away constantly on pirates and crocodiles and flying pixies. Truly, I was having at it and writing a goddamn fine score, enquiries welcomed.