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From Introduction

On an early spring day in 1998, I sat in a coach window seat of a descending American Airlines flight, panicking. Below me, the sun-bleached whiteness of the Los Angeles basin loomed closer and closer. I was due to land in twenty-eight minutes, yet I had no idea where I was going. I had no compass, no direction, no guidebook. My destination wasn't on any map; I wasn't even sure if it really existed. I had been to L.A. many times in the past, always with a purpose, always with my expenses paid. I had traveled as a journalist for newspapers and magazines, on assignment to write celebrity profiles and interview musicians. I always knew exactly where to go, and when. Publicists took care of everything. This was different. This time I was writing a book; I was on my own, flying under no prestigious banner, with no one to look out for me. It all seemed like a terrible mistake. I wanted to hit the call button and tell the flight attendant, Help me! I wanted to run up the aisle to the cockpit and instruct the pilots to turn the plane around and put me back on the ground in New York, where I would be safe. I pressed my nose against the window and breathed uneasily. It's not that I've never felt this scared before, I said to myself. It's that I've never felt this stupid.

For my work in L.A., I had a bunch of half-baked ideas. I could drive to Las Vegas and see Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme perform at Caesars Palace. Afterward I could head backstage and try to convince them to grant me an interview. Back in L.A., I had an interview tentatively scheduled with Pat Boone. I'd recently interviewed Paul Anka for a Newsweek story; Ifigured he might be willing to talk to me again for the book. I had packets stuffed with clips about each of these performers, and others; I had a travel bag weighted with vintage LPs that I'd picked up at thrift stores and flea markets. But these tools seemed depressingly meager to me. In my computer was a list of more than fifty pop singers, and for all I knew I needed to interview them all. How could I do it? What was my focus? Did I need to know complete biographical and critical histories of every single living fifties pop singer? What was I thinking -- that I would write, you know, forty-five words about each of them? I was overwhelmed, clueless. I was afraid I would sit down with these people, who had so generously given their time, and knock around the conversation like a pinball, hoping to bump into something that would light up an idea.

Of course, I did not act so pathetic and aimless when I finally faced these performers. (I don't think I did.) I learned as much as I could about their lives, their music, and the era in which they flourished. I asked questions; I had things I wanted to know. But I was always secretly fearful that someone would find me out. They'd look me in the eye and say, My God, you don't know what you're doing! The worst moments came when people patiently, curiously asked me to tell them a little about my book. I made up something different every time. "My book," I'd say, affecting pomposity, "is about the era between Elvis and the Beatles, when rock and roll was flourishing but old-fashioned pop still held commercial sway." Or I might try, "I'm writing about the teen pop of the fifties, because I feel like no one has ever taken it as seriously as it deserves." If I was feeling particularly uninspired, I'd say, "Nineteen-fifties pop music." I was afraid to tell people the real reasons I was there: that I thought them the most delightfully cheesy performers in pop history; that I saw them as brilliant failures and beautiful also-rans; that I believed that their cheery, Technicolor images covered up something dark and desperate in our cultural past, although I wasn't sure exactly what. I assumed that if I told them this, they would refuse to talk to me.

I had another reason for being there -- one that seemed so silly and personal it took me some time to acknowledge it myself. Through meeting these performers and learning about them, I was hoping to get to know my parents better. My mom and dad were both fifties kids. My mom was fifteen in 1956, the year rock and roll exploded onto the charts; I think of her as the archetypal Elvis Girl, the teenager who screamed when she saw him on TV and listened to his records in secret because her parents disapproved. My dad remembers driving around during the summer of 1957 with Paul Anka's "Diana" on the radio, his seventeen-year-old mind enthralled by the song's racy depiction of an older woman and a younger man. I'd chosen the late fifties as the main area of concentration for my book; this was the time my parents came of age. (In my mind, the late fifties spilled over into the early sixties, those three years leading up to the assassination of President Kennedy.) My parents met in the summer of 1958. They started dating a year or two later and married in July 1962, right after my mom finished college. I knew so little about my parents' marriage. I knew plenty about their divorce in 1981 when I was sixteen; I was intimately acquainted with the gruesome details that drove them apart. But the forces that drew them together were a mystery to me. What made them like each other? What did they have in common? In my mind I pasted their faces on those goofy retro postcards you see everywhere: teenagers twisting in front of jukeboxes, sitting with ankles crossed at soda fountain counters, laughing in convertibles as a roller-skated burgerhop wheels up with a tray. Were my parents like that? Were they that happy, that clichéd?

The funny thing was, I didn't feel like I could ask them about their early years together. Nearly twenty years after their divorce, my parents kept a hostile distance from one another, and my relationship with both of them seemed predicated on convincing each that I had as little interest in their former spouse as they did. Both were remarried, both had moved on, yet their mutual loathing persevered; like a lot of kids, I felt caught in the middle. I could remember an eight-year stretch when, living less than thirty miles apart, they went without any communication whatsoever, except alimony checks. It was as if they wanted to erase their past and all that went with it, except for my brother and me. Lately I'd begun to wonder: What is with these people? What expectation of their youth could have been so great that its disappointment left them so angry? Just what on earth happened back there in 1962?

Copyright ©2006 by Karen Schoemer