by Jimmy Webb
I called up Terry Naylor and had him pick me back up in the Phantom V and take me to the Dorchester in London, accommodations with modern man-sized doorframes. Evie was still in town and in good spirits, hanging out with David Hemmings, who had played the villain Mordred in Camelot alongside Richard and Vanessa Redgrave. He was a perfectly charming hard drinker and relentless skirt jockey. The three of us went out on a Wagnerian pub crawl, laughing our way through three fashionable bars and almost as many bottles of Dom Pérignon. It was my send-off party for Dickie Harris. We wouldn’t speak again for almost twenty years.
1958
At school, along with the usual curricular fare, I was enrolled in Dale Storey’s drafting class. His grinning facade of a face comes to memory without effort.
On our first day in class he made things clear. “Now in this class”—he swaggered in his short-sleeved white shirt and thin black tie—“we don’t make mistakes. Girls make mistakes. You don’t see any girls, do ya?” We all looked around. He was right. No girls. “In particular, we don’t make smudges on our drawings.” He paused to fetch down a doublehanded paddle, over four feet long, that hung behind his desk. “For every smudge I see on an assignment paper you put on my desk, you’re gonna get a stroke on your rear end from Ol’ Betsy here.” He whipped her through a half circle with both hands, producing an ominous whistle. “Well, why don’t I just show you? Get up.” He pointed the weapon at a blond kid in the first row. The kid got up with a kind of half grin on his face. “Bend over and grab your ankles,” Dale said, smiling back.
“What? I haven’t done…”
“If you don’t want to fail the class, do it.”
Reluctantly the kid bent over and grabbed his ankles, raising his hindquarters high in the air. Storey rocked back and swung through, hitting his victim in the ass so hard it popped like a Christmas cracker. The kid staggered, white-faced.
“Class dismissed!” Storey smiled.
I was ever so careful not to put a single smudge on any of my drawings. Every once in a while some poor sod would drool on his paper and blur a letter in his title box. He would be invited up front, where he would dutifully clutch his ankles so Dale could take batting practice on his ass.
One day I was sitting at my desk, work done, daydreaming out the window. I was reading Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles in the evenings and couldn’t wait to get home and cocoon myself in another time and space.
“Mr. Webb!”
Startled into a conscious state I found myself staring at Dale Storey and his four-foot long paddle.
“Can you come up to the front please?
Oh no. It just couldn’t be. I was sure there was no smudge on my paper.
“Get on with it, Mr. Webb.”
From somewhere outside my body I observed myself getting to my feet and stumbling through the waiting class. A great weariness came over me as I bent over in front of his desk and took hold of my white socks. I had a rush of knowing all as Ol’ Betsy and my butt hurtled toward our inevitable intimacy. This is what Dale Storey had come to teach us: futility.
When the blow came it made my father’s flailings with his thin leather belt seem amateurish. My knees buckled slightly as the blush of shame spread over my neck and shoulders. My classmates couldn’t look me in the eye. Everybody in that room knew I was nothing if not the smallest, most inoffensive prey on the menu.
Storey’s class was the last of the day, thank God, as I was having trouble sitting in my chair. A cursory examination revealed welts and blisters forming with mathematical precision. Listlessly, I gingerly walked home without even a pencil, cheeks spread apart, down the old cracked and shifting plates of the sidewalk. It was twelve long prairie blocks back to my house and I went as though in a dream. “Hey Preach!” The terrorists were waiting at the first corner to rub it in. I strolled past them and they fell silent. I reached home and looked up from the backyard into my bedroom window, then turned and walked the twelve blocks back to school. I turned and walked back home again, exploring the dimensions of a completely futile and meaningless act. At the Dairy Queen, people stopped slurping their double malts and stared at me as I walked past for the second time. Eyes straight ahead, gait calm and measured.
The second time around I went inside my house, climbed the stairs, and closed my bedroom door. Plastic models hung from the ceiling, my pride and joy, unseen.
A week later my parents were concerned enough to bring in a psychiatrist. I refused conversation with him. He scratched his head and left. I remember watching the sun track through Mother’s handmade curtains and across the hardwood floors as more days passed.
Jimmy Webb and Suzy Horton. (Courtesy of Suzy Horton Ronstadt)
CHAPTER FOUR
With Sticky Fingers turned up real loud
We flirted with catastrophe
We were doin’ everything that’s not allowed
Life didn’t come with a warranty for you and me …
—JLW, “Too Young to Die,” 1993
1969
My stepbrother Garth had a full race Camaro that he built up from speed parts I’d given him for Christmas the year before. He was a genius with anything mechanical or electronic and he’d come up with a mill that would turn around five hundred horses on the dynamometer. He installed a four-speed Hurst shifter and 4:11 rear end.
Tommy, my younger sibling, was visiting from Oklahoma and we all went up to Topanga to Fred Tackett’s pad for New Year’s Eve. The house perched on the side of a hill in a quaintly bucolic section of the canyon where public thoroughfares had not yet received the benefits of paved roads. There were lots of people around, and joints of homegrown weed were passed, which were potent as hell. There was a lot of beer and a few drinks of hard liquor and of course wine. You cannot attend a party in California and not find barrels of the stuff.
Lowell George and Bill Payne of Little Feat were there. Fred was crazy for Little Feat and we were listening to their songs and talking about label stuff. The Feat were working on their first album for Warner Bros. We were labelmates at Warner Bros. (though technically I was on Reprise) with Randy Newman, Van Dyke Parks, Leon Russell, and other odds and ends. It was not a particularly crazy party and broke up early for California. Somehow Garth ended up riding in the Cobra, and since he was frequently with me I didn’t give too much thought to what had happened to his car. I suppose I assumed he was good and stoned and wanted to leave it at Fred’s for a while.
We started down the hill. Topanga Canyon Road writhes like a serpent crossing an asphalt road in August. It is a long series of S-bends with an occasional short straight.
Before too long I picked up the headlights of another vehicle behind us coming fast. I edged the throttle open a bit and started driving a little tighter in the turns. The stranger came on. Interesting, because most people didn’t go very fast on Topanga Canyon Road. It was a hazardous route at any speed. In the passing lane, a thoughtless error with the steering wheel and the driver would be unceremoniously launched off the side of the mountain. In the right lane, a sheer rock wall demarcated the road. Colliding with such a rough-hewn barrier would demolish the car and might well bounce a driver off into an abyss.
The mystery car made a run at my rear end and swung over to pass. We went into a short chute and ran side by side long enough for me to get my foot in it. I picked out the unmistakable silhouette of a Camaro. I pulled slightly away as we entered another series of S-bends, and I yelled at Garth, “Who the hell is that guy?” He shrugged. I was now in a street race.
Down the precarious mountain the two cars ran. My challenger got around me on the high side with a gutsy surge of speed. I couldn’t believe or tolerate that and at the next chance I showed him what seven hundred horses could do. The flames flared angrily out of the open headers of the Super Snake. All was forgotten except beating that uppity bastard to Ventura Boulevard. Down we plunged, dicing on the narrow road, first one and then the other gaining a temporary advantage. Going airborne
and then hitting the ground in the Cobra was not a viable option. We would burn alive. I concentrated fiercely on not making a mistake with the wheel or the throttle on the maddening road, braking into the turns, but not too much, accelerating like hell while judging the next bend. We flirted on the edge of an inky abyss. Toward the bottom it straightened out and we went down side by side and pedal to the metal. We were cowl to cowl even as the Mulholland Drive traffic signal at the bottom of the hill came into view. It glowed an ironic red.
Both cars entered the intersection with engines maxed out, neck and neck. I didn’t dare risk breaking my concentration to even look at the maniac next to me in the Camaro. We were entering a residential neighborhood with engines howling.
With houses on both sides of the street, the Cobra suddenly began to rotate through a series of 360s in a straight line as it hit standing water in the intersection. I could have taken my hands off the wheel for all the good it was doing me. I caught a glimpse of Garth’s tight white face as we hydroplaned, spinning smooth as a pinwheel. Once around, twice around, the third time we slammed ass first into a fat oak tree, with a resounding smash that echoed up the quiet street. Not another car in sight.
I sat there for maybe one second, surprised that we weren’t already on fire as gasoline was running all over the back of the car. The forty-gallon tank had ruptured. I yelled at Garth, “Get out of this motherfucker!” He was pulling and wrenching at the quick release on his harness.
“It’s stuck!” he yelled.
“Like hell!” I protested and started working on his treacherous quick release. It had chosen the worst moment in a lifetime of mechanical perfection to dysfunction. I had never before seen one fail. I heard something crackle under the car and opened the door and looked underneath. Little monsters with tongues of blue flame swarmed on the grass underneath the car, writhing and propagating like baby snakes on a sea of burnt grass and gasoline.
“I’m out!” Garth yelled, bursting through his door. I was glad because there was no way I would have left him there to burn alone.
What was next, wait for the cops? Suddenly, like some malevolent ghost, I saw the hated Camaro of my adversary idling to a stop at the curb across the street. Unbelieving, I saw what I took to be my brother Tommy’s wicked grin and big ears poking out of the window at me. It all came home: I had been racing my brother Tommy, who was driving Garth’s souped-up Camaro!
“Get in, get in, get in!” Tommy laughed as I slid into the backseat with Garth. Doors slammed and the Camaro slid quickly onto a backstreet.
“Get down!” Tommy yelled. “You guys stay down.” He drove slowly, never over forty, and stayed on backstreets all the way to Encino. We heard no explosion. We never once ventured onto Ventura Boulevard and arrived at Campo de Encino by many a stealthy twist and turn, all of us subdued by the insanity of the escapade, thinking of how much worse it could have been.
I walked straight into the house and called the Van Nuys Police. I informed them that my car had just been stolen by persons unknown. They took the report in that laconic “So what else is new?” monotone common to the overladen Valley police.
The next day they called me and told me that indeed my car had been found and they were afraid that “those bastards messed it up pretty good, Mr. Webb.” My insurance went up. The car went directly to Mike Fennell’s restoration shop out in Simi Valley because I didn’t want to see it again until it was stone-cold perfect. When Mike had it on hand, I called and told him I had a request that had to remain between the two of us: I wanted gold metal flake added into the paint color, to make the finish glitter and flash as though it were radioactive. And I wanted him to use real gold.
1970
The sixties went out like a supernova that reached its maximum expansion in just ten short years. Now, the seventies waited for the swift hand of fate to write what wonders or horrors?
Success was biting me right on the ass. I was loath to be pigeonholed yet unable to leave the old craft and traditions behind.
Peter Pan, the film, after much hoopla and a lot of grueling writing on my part, seemed to be bogging down in the inevitable morass of “development.” Producer Mel Ferrer, tall, urbane, and charming to a fault—he’d been married to Audrey Hepburn—clocked countless trips to London and other places, producing, casting, and scouting. The four-star hotel bills went straight onto the project’s tab, though to me it seemed we were mostly treading water. I had a couple of decidedly disturbing telephone conversations with Mia Farrow. She had begun to consider that we were on the wrong track with Pan. In spite of the eccentric English tradition, wherein women assumed the role, Mia wondered if the part shouldn’t be played by, well, a young boy. James Barrie would roll over in his grave, but she wasn’t dissuaded. She even had a casting idea. In December of ’69 she had seen a young boy performing on the Ed Sullivan Show with the Jackson Five. His name was Michael. He would make a perfect Pan. There was only one thing wrong with this line of thinking: it was going to derail the whole aerial ballet and put both of us out of a job.
Phil Kaufman’s television show with the world’s tallest hot air balloon started to seem more and more like a sixties idea as the seconds ticked by. Mr. Sinatra was reluctant to appear on such a show. Aretha Franklin had bluntly refused. The wild demands Satan and I had attached to our contract could rise up to haunt us. Like a pyramid scheme, tomorrow’s greater success must follow today’s success quickly at Universal—there was no middle ground.
My manager Sandy Gallin, a gentle person and second-generation Hollywood Super heir to an old Hollywood fortune, was becoming frustrated with my constant demands to do everything. I wanted to score a picture, I wanted to release an album, I wanted to write a Broadway show. He arranged for me to meet with David Geffen, a manager and entrepreneur who had a way of sorting odd people into profitable roles.
The Shelby Cobra showed up, fully restored, on a flatbed hydraulic truck. The paint job was so over the top it was blinding. Powder blue, deep gloss, hand-rubbed ocean of at least fifteen or twenty coats. Floating in the deep candied paint was a uniform level of tiny gold metal flake. I couldn’t wait to mount up and drive a maiden test lap.
On the corner of Sunset was the famous Schwab’s Drug Store, where countless actors and actresses had been discovered. I hung a left, and crowds of pedestrians gawked at the outrageous roadster, restored to perfection. I drove up Sunset, past the Cinerama Dome and Columbia Studios, where Simon and Garfunkel had launched hit after hit from Studio A. I passed the old Disney studio where, in 1966, I had watched Tony Martin record “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.”
I cruised on, past the hookers dotting both sides of the street, the Chateau Marmont, the Pink Pussycat, and the Whiskey a Go Go, birthplace of the Johnny Rivers legend. Finally I passed my office, Canopy Productions, and then reached my destination, the Cock’n Bull on Sunset and Doheny Drive. The hour was late, the parking lot virtually empty, and I found a dimly lit space to conceal my ostentatious transportation.
What a whizzer of a pub it was, several small rooms with a low, carved beam ceiling waiting to shelter a buffeted poetic soul. I stumbled into the cozy little hideaway, only realizing at the last possible second it was occupied. I wasn’t inclined to awkwardly back out; I could already see a pretty young woman with long, dark hair smiling at me as though I was an immensely entertaining and curious object. Her companion had his back to me. I slid into a small booth and looked at the back of his head, and was suddenly one hundred percent sure it was Johnny Rivers, who lived nearby in the Hollywood Hills.
“Hey, Johnny,” I said, crossing the room in one stride. He turned and looked up at me and he was another person entirely. I recognized him as a member of the currently popular group the Grass Roots. His dark-haired beauty laughed hysterically, squarely in my face, as I fumbled my apologies and introduced myself. I asked her name: Rosemarie.
Once she stifled her amusement at my clumsy entrance, I noticed her blue eyes shone with a secret and her
hair was mussed up. She was wearing slippers. Her companion was flushed, a just-finished-a-workout look. The truth of the situation dawned on me, and Rosemarie watched that ephiphany. They were fresh out of bed. She pursed her lips and guffawed into hoots of uncontrollable laughter. I fled into the night, blushing deeply and laughing.
I took my place in the wind and noise at the helm of the Cobra and decided to concentrate on something I could control. I could make a record. I could build the best concert sound system in the world. I could have my own band and hit the road. I could write songs and play tough and try to figure out how Elvis got such a grip on his audience.
I could see what might pan out with this fellow David Geffen.
1960
Dad had gotten the wanderlust again. Far from Oklahoma City, or anything else for that matter, lay a small petroleum boomtown called Laverne. On a clear day you could stand on Highway 149, look west, and see the horizon fifty miles away with the naked eye. Before we ripped it from them and lost our last shred of decency as a treaty nation, the land had belonged to the Cheyenne and other tribes of the Sioux Nation. A lot of people would stare off into the heat shimmer of the badlands and wonder why we hadn’t just let them keep it.
Laverne boasted one traffic signal at the main intersection. If you hung a left at the red light toward New Mexico and the badlands, the Baptist parsonage, a two-story Victorian surrounded by towering cottonwoods, would appear on the right. A few houses dotted both sides of the street in a more or less decaying section of town. If one continued west, Laverne High School, a one-story modern structure of yellow brick, sprawled to the left, with a football stadium and practice field to the right; and a mile out from that the refinery, the last sign of human habitation for a hundred miles.