I learned many things in those evenings with Sammy. I learned that there was more than just tricks of the trade to what he did onstage. It came from something deep inside the man. He didn’t just sing a song, he lived it. When he sang “Mr. Bojangles,” he transformed himself into Bojangles Robinson onstage. He completely inhabited the character. I learned that a song was more than just notes and words that rhyme. It was a story, a play with all the elements of a great script—characters and plot and drama. All the great songwriters, from Cole Porter to Bob Dylan, had this gift. They were more than just musicians, they were storytellers. I learned that being a performer was not just something you did, it was who you are, and if you didn’t have that kind of commitment the audience would see through you instantly.
Years later Sammy was dying of cancer and was making a last personal appearance in Toronto at a private charity event. He was still giving of himself right up until the end. I caught up to him at the airport the next morning, before his flight left for Los Angeles. Murphy Bennett and George Rhodes took me to the first-class lounge to see Sammy. The cancer had ravaged him, and his diminutive body looked even smaller than ever. I wanted to thank him for everything he had done for me, but my eyes welled up once again. He put a thin, wasted hand on my arm, smiled that lopsided Sammy Davis Jr. grin and said, “I know, David, I know.” A few days later he was gone. I often wondered why he gave so much of his time to a young singer, and something he told me has always stayed with me. Once I showed him a glowing review where the writer talked about me like I was the second coming. Sammy wasn’t impressed. He had seen a lifetime of great reviews. He said, “David, there’ll always be people to tell you how good you are. It’s the ones who tell you how you can be better that you should listen to.” Much later in life I would learn how rewarding it was to mentor young talent, to pass on the traditions and the knowledge that had been passed to me. If ever again I hear some young smartass know-it-all tell me Sammy Davis Jr. wasn’t cool, he’ll have to answer to me.
Fifteen Minutes
Must be wild in LA, well, TO’s pretty much the same
I seen your face in the paper, seems like everybody knows your name
And your friends are all famous, just for what I’ll never know
Ah but everyone loves them, on the late late late late show
There’ll be stars in your eyes and a star on your door
There’ll be guards round your mansion, but you won’t live there anymore
Now you can sell your life story, reinvent yourself again
Spend the rest of your life just lookin’ for fifteen minutes of fame
Now you can smile till it hurts and you can laugh away a tear
Make sure all your friends tell you what you want to hear
And they will all call you Baby and they will play games with your mind
And there’ll be no time for thinkin’ about the ones you left behind
There’ll be stars in your eyes and a star on your door
There’ll be guards round your mansion, but you won’t live there anymore
Now you can sell your life story, reinvent yourself again
Spend the rest of your life just lookin’ for fifteen minutes of fame
Lyrics by David Clayton-Thomas. Copyright © Clayton-Thomas Music Publishing Inc., 2007.
16
ELVIS AND EARTHQUAKES
I met Portland Mason that week in Las Vegas. She was the daughter of actor James Mason, and she was Hollywood royalty. I was introduced to her after a show midway through the week, and that first night we sat up until dawn holding hands and talking in the coffee shop. I had never met anyone like her—beautiful, smart, well-educated, with an easy laugh and eyes you could drown in. From our first meeting this elegant Hollywood princess with her Beverly Hills mansion and her Rodeo Drive clothes and this rock & roll hoodlum with his leather pants and reform-school education were head-over-heels hopelessly in love.
Portland lived with her mother, Pamela, and her younger brother, Morgan, in Los Angeles, while I was living in northern California, so I spent the next several months driving the Mercedes up and down the Pacific Coast Highway, Route 1, easily one of the most beautiful drives in the world. South out of San Francisco, through the redwoods to the rugged Big Sur coastline, with the Pacific Ocean crashing against the rocks, the seals barking hoarsely and the gulls wheeling against the incredibly blue California sky. The two-lane highway twists along the shoreline, sometimes hundreds of feet above the jagged rocks. The gnarled pines of Monterey give way to the fertile flatlands of the San Joaquin Valley and towns with exotic Spanish names like San Luis Obispo. Down through the rolling hills and the palomino ranches of central California, the parched yellow hills gradually softening into the lush tropical growth and the palm trees of Santa Barbara. Then along the beaches of Malibu with their bikinis and sun-bleached surfers and on into LA with its freeways and its madness. This small-town boy from Canada had never seen anything like it.
Portland’s parents were divorced and her father, James, was living in Switzerland. Nearly a year would pass before I would meet the legendary actor. My first meeting with him was both embarrassing and unforgettable. He was in LA for a few days and Portland and I arranged to have lunch with him at a seafood place in Malibu. Having grown up in a family of Brits, I was somewhat in awe of meeting the great James Mason and I was understandably nervous. All went well until I had to excuse myself to visit the men’s room. I was attempting to wash my hands when the faucet came on full force, splashing water all over the front of my chinos. There I was with a large wet stain on the front of my pants and I had to walk back to the table. I looked around the washroom desperately for a solution and then I had it. On the wall was one of those hot-air hand dryers, but it was too high to reach with my soaking wet crotch. I didn’t want to take my pants off in case someone came in, so I improvised. I pulled a trash can over to the dryer, turned it upside down and clambered up on it, frantically fluffing my pants in the hot-air blast. It was working. The pants were slowly drying. Then I heard the door open behind me. I didn’t even have to look—I just knew. It was James Mason. He walked slowly past me to the urinals and as he unzipped his pants he looked at me teetering on the trash can apparently humping a hand dryer. With typical British reserve and in that trademark James Mason accent, he said one word: “Riilly.” I lost my footing on the trash can and fell on my ass on the bathroom floor. James burst out laughing and helped me to my feet. We returned to the table and, class gentleman that he was, he never mentioned the incident in the bathroom. We visited him later in Switzerland and James and I had a private laugh about my debacle in Malibu, but to the best of my knowledge he never told Portland about my pratfall. Like I said, a class gentleman.
When Blood Sweat & Tears played the Hollywood Bowl, Portland’s mother, Pamela, the Grand Dame of Beverly Hills society, threw an after-party that was the talk of the town. I danced with Elizabeth Taylor, shot pool with Milton Berle, traded stories with Sammy Davis Jr. and received words of wisdom from Groucho Marx. I believe he told me, waggling his ever-present cigar, “Remember, son, money can’t buy you love, but it can sure buy you a bunch of good-lookin’ broads.”
I took Portland on tour to Europe and we were mobbed everywhere by paparazzi. They tried to scale the balcony of our hotel in London. The daughter of James Mason and her rock-star boyfriend were big news in England. In the frenetic whirl of concert tours and travelling with Portland to Europe, Hawaii and New York, the house in Marin County was sometimes empty for weeks on end. Mostly I flew in and out of LA and stayed at the Masons’ home in Beverly Hills. Finally, in late 1971, I decided to sell the place in San Francisco and move to LA.
I bought a beautiful home in Brentwood, a sprawling ranchstyle bungalow in Mandeville Canyon. The house wrapped around a large kidney-shaped pool and sat on a lushly wooded hillside with orange and lemon trees and flowering gardens. The property was at the end of a short cul-de-sac and was very private. Visitors ha
d to be announced from the front gate, and the grounds were completely fenced. A red brick walkway wound around the pool and up to the lovely stucco-and-glass house. In San Francisco I had filled my house with Mexican-style furniture. I loved the solid rough-hewn look of the Spanish-oak pieces, and they fit perfectly into the house in southern California.
Having grown up with a kennel in the backyard, I always wanted to have my own dogs, but my nomadic lifestyle had made that impossible. Now that I was settled in a nice home I began searching for a couple of dogs to share the property in Brentwood. As a boy I had read a wonderful novel about an Irish setter called Big Red. I had always loved the handsome breed, so I bought two purebred setters, Lady and Casey. They were magnificent animals from championship stock, and I paid a small fortune for them. I brought them home as pups and they would share my life for years to come. Lady was an elegant, fine-boned female with a beautifully feathered copper-coloured coat and a gentle, obedient personality. Casey was a large raw-boned male close to eighty-five pounds with a big, bony head and a rambunctious nature, always getting into trouble. I called him “Knucklehead.” I loved them both and took them everywhere with me. I bought a Ford surfer van with a fridge and a bed in the back. I’d stock up the fridge, throw some dog food and water dishes in the van and take off for days at a time, camping out with my two beautiful, high-spirited dogs, exploring the Big Sur coastline, the mountains of Yosemite, Baja and the inland deserts. I loved buzzing around Hollywood in the 300SL roadster, top down, with both dogs in the passenger seat, noses in the air, their ears flapping in the breeze. I purchased the dogs with an agreement that the breeder would be allowed to show them. They were from a long line of championship show dogs, and soon my home in Brentwood was filled with blue ribbons and “Best of Show” trophies from all over California.
Brentwood was a small slice of paradise and I should have been in heaven out there. I had all the trappings of stardom. Several flashy cars, including an SS Camaro and a Jensen Interceptor, had joined the 300SL and the camper van in my garage. I had a beautiful home furnished in Spanish oak, complete with a billiard room, a studio and a home office, the walls covered with gold records and awards. I should’ve been happy but I wasn’t. The entire music industry had relocated from New York to Los Angeles in the early seventies, and the idyllic landscape of lush vegetation and palm trees disguised a seamy underbelly of ruthless show-business politics. Returning home to LA after high-pressure concert tours gave no respite from the business. It was like jumping from the frying pan into the fire. It’s one thing to visit LA, but living there for the rest of your life is something else entirely. All the clichés are true. It’s a meat market, a town full of users and phonies attracted to the money and glamour of the stars. The super-famous are so isolated by their fame that they surround themselves with an entourage of ass-kissers. There is a virtual industry of ass-kissers in Hollywood. They determine your position on the “A” party list (“Oh, you weren’t at Elton’s party, but darling, everybody who is anybody was there”). It’s an unreal town, and at this point in my life, although I didn’t realize it at the time, I had a tenuous hold on reality.
One sad, funny story stands out as a microcosm of how fame can corrupt absolutely and how far from reality you can get when you are surrounded by people who tell you only what you want to hear. It was 1972 and the band was in town to tape the Andy Williams Show at the CBS sound stage on Beverly Boulevard.Word was all over the studio that Elvis Presley was in the building, and everybody was trying to catch a look at the legend. He was surrounded by heavy security and the floor he was working on was off limits to everyone. Even the elevator was fixed to not stop at that floor without a special key. At the coffee machine I ran into a musician I knew from Memphis. His name was Ronnie Tutt, and he was Elvis’s drummer. I asked him what it was like to work and travel with “the King.” He said it was a totally unreal world—there were no words to describe it. He looked at his watch and said, “You want to know what it’s like? C’mon, I want to show you something.” Ronnie led me down to the loading docks where the heavy equipment was brought into the studio. It was an enormous room with twenty-foot doors that could roll up to accommodate tour buses and tractor-trailers. We stood in a dimly lit stairwell where we couldn’t be seen and Ronnie said, “Shhh, now watch this.” There were two black Cadillac stretch limos parked in the garage with uniformed drivers by the doors. A door at the back of the dock opened, and there was Elvis, with the trademark sideburns, the “Elvis” sunglasses, the white jumpsuit with the turned-up collar, surrounded by bodyguards, who hustled him into the back of one limo. About four of the bodyguards jumped into the car, the huge doors rolled up and the limo screeched out the building and hung a right onto Beverly Boulevard. “Wow,” I said to Ronnie. “That’s impressive.” Ronnie said, “No, you don’t get it. That wasn’t him. That was the decoy.” A moment later Elvis himself appeared, surrounded by the familiar faces of the “Memphis Mafia,” with Colonel Tom Parker at his side. He got into the second limo and hunkered down. A blanket was drawn over him to protect him from the prying eyes of the paparazzi and hysterical fans. The bodyguards got in the back with Elvis, the Colonel got in the front seat, and again the doors rolled up and the limo peeled out of the building, this time taking a hard left, and Elvis was gone. I said to Ronnie Tutt, “The poor guy can’t go anywhere.” Ronnie laughed. “David, you still don’t get it. There’s nobody out there.” We walked out into the parking lot, and sure enough it was deserted except for a couple of little old ladies waiting for Carol Burnett’s autograph. They had staged this elaborate security charade for so long that it had become a way of life. I wonder how long the King stayed huddled under that blanket before Colonel Tom told him, “It’s all right, son, it’s safe now.”
That’s just how it is in Hollywood, a complete fantasyland. I wonder today why there wasn’t one person in Michael Jackson’s entourage, one person he could trust, who could tell him, “That’s enough, Mike, the nose looks fine.” My heart goes out to the young girl singers who go from the Mickey Mouse Club directly into that meat grinder called Hollywood, and then people wonder why, with all their money and success, their lives go spinning out of control. When your whole worth is measured on the Richter scale of fame and publicity, who can you trust to keep your feet on solid ground?
In 1972 I experienced my first earthquake and it scared the hell out of me. I woke up one morning and immediately sensed that something was different. My dogs, who usually slept at the foot of my bed, were nervously pacing the room, the hair on their backs standing on end, their ears laid back. Casey was growling, a low rumble deep in his chest. Something was wrong and the dogs knew it first. The usual early-morning cacophony of birds and insects was absent. The sky outside my bedroom window was a strange mustard colour and the leaves on the trees were etched against the sky, motionless. The air was heavy and everything was deathly still.
Then BOOM! The first shock hit. Dishes crashed off the shelves in the kitchen and pictures flew off the walls. My bed jumped a foot off the floor and heavy oak furniture shuddered across the room. I jumped out of bed and ran into the front yard, the earth shaking under my feet. The water in the pool sloshed over the deck, the water level dropping instantly by a foot. I fell to my knees on the lawn and gathered the dogs in my arms, looking frantically for something to hang on to, but everything was shaking and moving. Nothing was stable. It was like trying to stay balanced on a bowl of Jell-O. There were several aftershocks and then it was over. I walked back into the house. It was a mess. Broken glass and dishes were everywhere, pieces of furniture had been thrown clear across the room, my heavy slatebedded pool table had moved six feet across the room and was jammed against the wall. There were cracks in the walls and ceilings and several windows were broken. A large armoire containing my TV and stereo equipment had toppled over and smashed a couple of my guitars. The phones were dead and the power was out, so I sat in the yard and hugged my dogs. They were shaking and whining,
and soon the sirens and flashing lights of the rescue services appeared on my street. It took months to repair the damage to the house and some precious memorabilia was lost forever. One of the guitars had been with me since my Yorkville days and now was reduced to kindling.
To me the ’72 California earthquake was symbolic of how far from home I really was. In Canada the solid granite rocks of Muskoka and the hundred-year-old pines hadn’t changed since my grandfather had settled that country. In California nothing was solid—my life, my relationships, my home. Even the ground under my feet couldn’t be depended on to remain stable. I think I knew, from that moment on, that I wouldn’t be spending the rest of my life in LA. I needed the stability of the east coast. I missed the changing of the seasons, the buds blooming in the spring, the warm summers on the Muskoka lakes, the leaves turning in the fall. I even missed the crisp, cold Canadian winters, the hockey games, the evenings by a crackling fire, the snow heavy on the pines outside my window. I missed New York, with its gruff no-bullshit people, the pizza joints, the Broadway shows and the jazz clubs in the Village. The perfect unchanging California climate was beginning to depress me. Every day was just like the next. My body was tuned to the changing seasons and I missed them. Most of all, I missed the people I had known all my life. They weren’t impressed by fame and gold records. I was still just Dave from Willowdale. Their advice was solid and dependable, untainted by show-biz politics and the A-list party scene. The California quake shook me to my core, and I knew beyond a doubt that I wouldn’t last out there.
Blood, Sweat and Tears Page 14