The Cake and the Rain: A Memoir

by Jimmy Webb

  Simultaneously, I was visited occasionally by a young director named Philip Kaufman, a soft-spoken gentleman about my age who had been chosen to create the shooting script for a new television special starring me and just about everybody I was recording with at the time. He had some fine ideas about suspending a magical pipe organ from a giant balloon and flying all over a psychedelic landscape populated by various recording artists who would sing my songs while I played along. In the props department at Universal, special effects craftsmen were already constructing sets and special equipment. This included a balloon more than four stories high in consultation with balloonist Don Piccard for the “Up, Up and Away” flying sequence. It was, at the time, the largest hot air balloon ever constructed.

  Rarely did anything intrude on my dreamlike reveries of Peter Pan’s hijinks or my giant hot air balloon. Ergo, I paid little or no attention to business matters or practicalities or even the news. The world outside my citadel in Encino or my bungalow at Universal began to shrink. My largest worry at the time was whether or not I could persuade Mr. Frank Sinatra or Aretha Franklin to appear on the proposed TV special, because that’s what the ties in the tower wanted.

  Phil Kaufman and I were lounging on couches at Campo de Encino, talking about the incongruity of me dangling underneath a huge balloon playing upon my magical organ when in fact the instrument I performed upon was a piano. But he had a good argument with the elaborate organ because it could do phantasmagorical things such as whisking the balloon to far-off distant lands or other dimensions. I was smiling at bearded, brilliant Phil as my stepbrother Garth walked in through the kitchen entrance with a grim face, teeth tightly clenched.

  “Turn on the TV,” Garth barked as the birds sang sweetly, flitting from windowsill to branch around the sunny old house.

  I walked past my rock ’n’ roll heaven stained glass windows over to the entertainment center. I flipped on a screen that came alive with a shot of Cielo Drive in Beverly Hills and an announcer speaking in low, shocked tones about the murder of Jay Sebring, Sharon Tate and her unborn child, as well as Abigail Folger, Steve Parent, and Wojciech Frykowski.

  Phil and I looked at each other aghast, all thoughts of transcendental journeys to fairy-tale kingdoms blotted out in a split second. Sad-eyed and tongue-tied journalists managed to blurt out that all those at the horror house had been stabbed and mutilated before death. An image of Sharon flashed in front of my eyes as we trained at the Beverly Hills Fencing Academy, her forehead wrinkled with concentration as she thrust and parried, deftly manipulating her foil and oblivious to my admiring gaze. Then another vision of her dancing with Roman Polanski at a party at Victor Lownes’s in London; happy and at ease, clowning around with Bill Cosby, who had been wearing only a towel.

  I remembered Jay Sebring with his screen-star handsome face, hands quick and expert as he sculpted my hair, simultaneously offering shrewd and compact advice about making a smooth passage through the wilds of Hollywood. I thought of the night I blew up his 427 Cobra and smiled in spite of myself, remembering his aplomb as he inspected the smoking collection of charred parts in his engine compartment. He had never raised his voice or displayed the slightest annoyance or anger that night. In fact, he and Sharon were seemingly two of the gentlest souls.

  The Flower Children died that day, irrevocably and forever. The stereotypical long-haired hippie in tattered jeans and tie-dyed T-shirt, thumbing a ride on the freeway with a guitar case over his shoulder, became suddenly an object of suspicion and dread.

  The primary subject of most conjecture was: Why? Why these celebrities? Later it would become apparent that Charles Manson’s objective went far beyond such a limited agenda as celebrity. Yet it remains ironic that such a horror had at its ground zero issues as prosaic as the frustrated dreams of an inept and ignored songwriter.

  In the aftermath, flying keyboards and magical mystery tours seemed strange fare for adult conversation. All of Hollywood, especially the celebrated and famous sector, seemed to be shifting into a new gear as panicked phone calls were made in shocked tones, meetings canceled, children rushed home from expensive schools, and business in the bodyguard ranks and gun stores skyrocketed.

  An early version of a black-and-white security camera was installed at my gate in order to see callers before they were admitted. In our neighborhood lived Sergio Mendes, David Cassidy, Billy and Marilyn Davis, Aretha Franklin (who would soon sell her house to Michael Jackson), and many other persons who thought they had cause to worry. The Spahn Ranch, Den of Assassins, lay only a twenty-minute drive west of Campo de Encino.

  Years later I would be sitting in a quiet London bar with Cass Elliot, a cherished friend who was always seeking a special song I seemed unable to write. She confessed, in a whisper, that unknown to Vincent Bugliosi and the judicial world at large, or for that matter anyone else except her sister and the two of us, she had been the first witness to arrive on that bloody one-sided battlefield in the early hours of Sunday morning, a party in the offing and looking forward to seeing her friends Sharon and Jay. She had walked like an automaton past the slain pizza boy in his car, up to the desecrated body of Abigail Folger and stopped, knowing she did not want to see what lay in the house beyond. Suffering from paroxysm and shock, she had retreated home to her bedroom and stayed there for days.

  She had told me, as we both smoked and consumed shots of tequila, that she felt to have told the story would only have further validated its bizarre reality, making it more indelible. She was still, five years later, crazy from it and having recurring nightmares. It had become to her a vivid, yet unreal, silent vignette; a scene clipped from a horror movie and left by the cleaner, curled on the cutting room floor.

  1949

  Robert Webb brooded and worked as a farm laborer, disappointed with the economic opportunities afforded returned heroes.

  One day, while driving a tractor out on the north forty of the Killingsworth farm, God paid him a visit. According to my father’s testimony, God appeared in front of his tractor and said, “Robert! Get down off that tractor!” My father complied and fell to his knees in the furrow. “Robert, I want you to be my preacher!” God said. “Get yourself out of this place and into a place of learning. You will not be a farmer!” There was a bright light and a crash of thunder. Dad had been called. This was classic New Testament stuff.

  Dad packed up his little family, grown to four with the arrival of baby Janice, and moved to Wichita Falls, Texas, where he enrolled in J. Frank Norris’s Bible Baptist Seminary. Eschewing the rigorous discipline of Grandma Myrtle’s Nazarene sect, which tolerated no movies, dancing, makeup, or hair cutting, he opted for the promising field of evangelical oratory. J. Frank Norris was one of the country’s first radio preachers and a role model for my dad. He broadcast nightly from Dallas, Texas, shivering the rafters in a hundred thousand houses with reverberant promises of death and destruction in an eternal burning lake of fire for the ungodly. These threats paid well. Norris lived the high life in a mansion as president of the seminary and all-around religious big wheel. We lived in a trailer the size of a rowboat, situated at the end of the runway at Sheppard Air Force Base. When the B-36 Peacemakers would rotate and climb reluctantly skyward with all six pusher props and four jets screaming, the noise would rearrange the knives and forks in the flatware drawer. I remember the plane’s primeval throb somewhere deep in my chest even though I was only four years old.

  Mother must have sweated out the hot, humid nights trapped in that sausage can of a trailer with two growing, demanding kids, wondering where were we going, what were we doing. But Dad’s answer was that God always knew where we were going even if we didn’t, and she was enough in love with him to go along.

  While researching a paper, my father discovered a yellowing news item from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, dated July 17, 1926. It seems J. Frank Norris had put three .38 caliber kill shots right through parishioner D. E. Chipps’s chest. The result was a trial in Austin, Texas, on a sca
le with the O. J. Simpson circus. He was found not guilty. I think my father felt like an idiot in his ignorance of this gargantuan scandal even though it had happened about the same time he was born.

  When the sun came up the next morning my father was on the road north towing his tiny trailer and busted dream back to Red Man’s Land. My father’s vision of being a preacher was momentarily shattered. But not his will to make himself one. That trait I inherited from him. He would figure it out. He would ordain himself.

  1969

  In September a peaceful missile from abroad descended on Campo de Encino with an airburst of possibility and excitement in the form of a letter from the Festival Internacional da Canção Popular in Brazil. Though not well known in the hippie culture, this was a popular and globally televised songwriting and performing competition.

  Songwriting was something I had most often done for no audience in a barren practice room or garage. But I was cocky about my abilities and appreciative of a solid excuse to get out of Los Angeles and the onslaught of the Tate murders news coverage.

  As I dallied over the idea, the committee from down south became more insistent on an answer. Who would go? The event called for a composer as well as a starring performer, and I couldn’t think of a suitable choice immediately. I would take my guitarist Freddy Tackett; that was a given. So that meant his flower-child bride, Patricia, and their brand-new son, Miles, would need passage. When I decided to go, my father and Howard Golden volunteered to go as well. And, oh yes, His Dark Eminence would want to go, too. I was informed that I would be officially representing the United States. My father was duly impressed with the gravitas of my having a chance to represent my country.

  The real problem was I needed a song. It was not permitted to go down to Brazil with a warhorse or used hit. “The Girl from Ipanema” was one of the most-played records of the decade in the United States and had been a hit twice, once as an instrumental with saxophonist Stan Getz. American interest waxed in all things Brazilian. I didn’t have the salt to take a bossa nova to Brazil, but I knew it must be something new, chord intensive, and melodic, possibly even sad. Enter “Evie.”

  It was a two-verse form, too brief in hindsight, and abysmally morose. No sing-along here, but the real problem would prove to be the subject matter. I had written the song during my entanglement with Evie Bricusse, wife of Leslie, a lyricist well known in Hollywood. A slight hint of judgment or good taste would have told me to leave it in the locker, but who had any?

  I decided I would debut “Evie” at the Canção Popular with Righteous Brothers superstar Bill Medley. I had auditioned many a song for Bill and had followed his career with Bobby Hatfield in a jealous fervor through a series of the greatest hits the country had ever seen. They had recorded possibly the greatest rock ’n’ roll milestone of all time, “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” produced by Phil Spector (w. Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil, and Spector). Nothing like “Evie,” but never mind. Bill’s voice was a smoldering baritone and unforgettable on record. He was unflappable, rail thin, and movie-star handsome. He signed on.

  Meanwhile, unknown to me, sprawling, continent-sized Brazil, awaiting titans of music and bevies of movie stars, sweltered in the iron grip of a despotic military triumvirate. For five years its population had struggled and writhed under a constitution that could have been written by an ex-Nazi. The fascist regime tortured, imprisoned, and jackbooted their way toward “economic opportunity,” crushing journalistic freedom by deporting anyone who dared to dissent. The populace grumbled darkly about the United States and its laissez-faire stance, if not outright support, of anticommunist thugs, while soldiers stood on every public street corner brandishing machine guns. In response, the death squads kicked in favela doors at midnight to take potential mutineers up the road of no return. As a typical American with “International Attention Deficit Disorder,” this sordid state of affairs had missed my review. Our audience was waiting for us.

  1952

  I was six years old and standing in front of our house in Lutie, Texas, which was little more than a four-way stop with a blacksmith shop on one corner and a Baptist church directly across. The church was a double shotgun shack that had once been a derelict supported only by rotting two-by-fours. My father climbed up on it wearing a leather nail belt, wielding a hammer, and put it back together. Some of his parishioners came by and helped him roof it with tar paper and cheap green asphalt tiles.

  It was his first pastorate and he was making a hundred dollars a week. Little brother Tommy had arrived somewhere along the way, a charming tyke with ears like car doors. That salary was now split between Mother and Daddy, little Tommy, Janice, and me. Mother managed to put aside a couple of dollars a month for piano lessons. Out in the middle of the parched prairie, surrounded by rattlesnakes, tarantulas, and jackrabbits, somehow she had a thought for my future.

  In spite of a paucity of income, the family was growing and trying to better itself. Daily I stood waiting for the school bus on the road and must have presented an absolutely forlorn object to my mother, who watched from the windows of the little parsonage. The West Texas wind continually blew across the sandy, featureless landscape and carried dust under the door and into every crack and crevice of that long-neglected one-room house.

  I would remember our teacher all my life. She was a sadist named Mrs. Sakker. On the first day she called me to the blackboard two times and twice she got a refusal. The first time I demurred, she grabbed my elbow, twisted it behind my back, and turkey-walked me to the front. The second time I declined to recite, she grabbed me by the lobe of the ear and dragged me the length of the classroom. Next she called on a sweet little girl I had looked at admiringly more than once. The girl stood up but couldn’t manage a response, merely chewing on her thumb as she stared at her feet. Mrs. Sakker doubled up her fat fist and punched the girl square in the stomach. The first-grader sat down on the floor, white and leaning against her desk. I arrived home in a near catatonic state and haltingly described what I’d been through to my folks. Nothing happened.

  In a couple years, Dad moved us down the road thirty miles to Wellington, a proper little town. He was coming up in the world. Wellington had a cinder block church house, though for the life of me I can’t remember the inside of that building or anything about it. I remember the piano lessons, a different teacher, and a new upright piano that was bought and moved into the house. Other than that, not a song, not a picture, nor even a conversation. I was eight years old.

  1969

  When we landed in Rio, we were met by representatives of the Canção Popular, U.S. Consulate officials, police, reporters, photographers, and our handlers, who were exceptionally pretty young girls in red uniforms and berets, who would be interpreting and helping us enjoy our stay in Brazil.

  “My name is Monica!” our girl said with a good deal of pride in her excellent English. She went into the limousine with us. It was an old, scratched, black bastard with flags flying from the fenders, preceded by a noisy escort of carelessly groomed cops on Harley- Davidson shovelheads.

  We rode the modern-looking highway into the Ipanema district of Rio, where a series of grande siècle hotels fronted the famous beach, glistening in the moonlight and rising like elaborately carved monuments by the ocean. Jeeps with fat radios, whip antennas, and .30 caliber machine-gun mounts were stationed on street corners. Wary guards stood in nearly every public square with Uzis on shoulder straps.

  “Uh, did we forget to bring our guns?” Fred drily inquired in his Arkansas patois.

  As we pulled up in front of the magnificent Hotel Glória Praia do Flamengo, we saw candles and bits of food laid out on huge green palmetto leaves that illuminated the center divider of the boulevard for the length of the street.

  “Oh, look,” said Patricia. “They are welcoming us!”

  “That’s Macumba,” said Satan at my shoulder. “Voodoo. They’ve put a curse on us. These people don’t like the U.S., get it?”

  Ou
r keeper was suddenly overly attentive and busy opening doors, hailing porters, and hustling us out of the limo and into a “Photo Phrenzy” of paparazzi shouting in Portuguese.

  Upstairs, after a chaotic check-in, the Walkin’ Dude and I sat in our grand apartments and for once did not smoke a joint. We had not dared to bring marijuana through.

  The next morning our contingent gathered in the lobby at eleven sharp, as ordered.

  “Good morning!” Monica bubbled to the group. “We will now go to the Tour Internacional for our famous welcome luncheon with…” She reeled off a slew of foreign names I did not recognize, including some English guy named Malcolm Somebody, who I knew was representing Great Britain, but I wasn’t listening. I yawned. I looked around at my crew. Patricia was beaming and pretty, in her element, on the edge of a great discovery. She held baby Miles, who was toddling and had a pacifier for the duration. Fred stood beside her, his hair profuse and his beard sprouting like a giant garden plant out and down and past his sternum. He was a sensation with the paparazzi. They had themselves a hippie.

  Bill Medley stood there in a dark blue suit looking for all the world like a Baptist preacher in his white shirt and black boots. He was a devout Christian and a teetotaler, his hair dressed back in the manner of a young Billy Graham. My dad was there, putting on a little weight, wearing a diamond ring the size of a carbuncle and not looking much like a Baptist preacher anymore. The Devil stood in our circle. He was carefully tailored, in his usual gear: sparkling brown, stitched cowboy boots, light-colored scalloped cowboy shirt with pearl buttons tucked into a pair of crotch-tight, faded Levi’s cinched up with a silver rodeo belt buckle. I looked at them wondering how big of a mess we were in.