Photoplay (Jul-Dec 1959)

JIMMIE RODGERS Continued from page 64 annoyed with myself for becoming suddenly so excited over just a simple date, I accepted instantly and then suggested maybe he’d like to come over to the house — about eight. I changed into a white angora sweater and pale blue skirt, and when he arrived he told my folks, “We’re going downtown for some coffee — just for a little while.” Well, that little while lasted until six o’clock the next morning! We drank dozens of cups of coffee at a little place Jimmie liked, and talked about everything from Camas to Korea. At midnight I called home and said, “I’m still with Jimmie. He’s singing now, and I just can’t leave.” I was seventeen then, and funny as it sounds, I was quite at ease sitting alone at our table while he sang to everybody in the club. But the thing that scared me — yes, really scared me — was that we got along so well together, as if we’d been going steady for years. This can’t happen, I told myself. Everything can’t be so perfect on our first night out. I kept waiting for something to go wrong. But nothing did. And when Jimmie brought me home in his secondhand car, he turned towards me, put his arm across the back of the seat and asked me for another coffee date the following Sunday. I accepted. “You know that on Monday I’m due back in Hollywood,” I said softly, realizing, even after our one date, how much I’d miss him. Jimmie smiled his slow easy smile, and I felt a chill run up my spine. “It’s wrong,” I told myself, “for me to feel so funny. I’ve known Jimmie for years.” I watched from the doorstep as he revved up the engine of the car and started off slowly down the road. And when I went inside the house and finally got to bed, I started twisting and turning, completely unable to sleep a wink. I must have thought about Jimmie for hours and hours and finally gave up trying to sleep, going downstairs for a cup of coffee. Everything in my mind seemed to pivot around our Sunday date. But that Sunday, May 10th, I had my accident. In one split-second my face was ripped apart as I crashed through the windshield of our car. A siren-screaming ambulance carried me to Longview Hospital while I pressed my torn lips together and tried to hold my broken nose in place. For months I didn’t know what I’d look like. And the doctors couldn’t pi’omise much, although they said they’d do everything they could, and Dr. Ray, the dental surgeon, sewed my lips together a number of times because the lip-line was uneven. He gave me such confidence. “We’re doing everything we can,” he’d say, “to make things just right!” It was Jimmie, though, who gave me the most confidence of all. Jimmie understood my feelings. He knew I didn’t want to see anybody during those first few days of agony. So he wrote me pencilled notes, always ending them with “. . . say, don’t forget, we have another coffee date . . .” Well, many months had to pass before I could leave the hospital, and, when I did, I wore a white surgical mask over my whole face because the doctors couldn’t begin the plastic surgery until my scars were completely healed. Jimmie came to visit me every day and sometimes, when my head throbbed with p pain and I couldn’t sleep, he would come over at two in the morning, after he finished singing at one of the nearby clubs, hiding my face under a mask — and Fd breathe the clean air and feel better. Throughout seven long months of painful plastic surgery, months of doctors sanding deep down into the nerve-tissue of my face to dig the scars away, I kept thinking I could never marry Jimmie. It wasn’t fair. Why should he spend his life with a disfigured person? Then, one morning, after months of waiting, I had my dentures fitted into my mouth. I felt strange and uncomfortable. I was convinced I looked ugly and no amount of glances in the mirror or reassurances from the doctor could convince me otherwise. I was afraid to go outside into the doctor’s anteroom where I knew Jimmie was waiting. “He’s going to hate me,” I found myself whispering over and over as I stared in the mirror at my puffy, blotchy face. “Of course he’s not,” said the doctor quietly. I gently ran the palm of my right hand over my cheeks. “No,” I said firmly. “I just can’t — not like this.” And I turned around and started looking for the white mask I’d been wearing now for these many months, I found it rolled up on a surgical table in a corner of the room. I picked it up and tied it across my face and then, with fists Buy U. S. Savings Bonds Insure your future by signing up on the Payroll Savings Plan where you work, or the Bond-A-Month Plan where you have a checking account. Remember, every $3 you invest now In U. S. Savings Bonds returns $4 to you in just ten short years. clenched and my heart beating a thousand times faster than usual, I opened the door that led to the waiting room. Jimmie stood up as I entered the room. There were just the two of us — alone. For some reason I felt rooted to the spot as I watched him walk slowly toward me. Then he stopped and looked at me, and I couldn’t even find the words to protest when he put his hands up to my face and began untying the mask. All I could do was close my eyes tight as though it would stop hhn from seeing. “Do you ... do you really . . . want to see it?” was all I could stammer. “Yes, I do,” he said quietly. It was off. I stood before him, my face as white as chalk — I could see it through the mirror at the far end of the room — and the splotchy-red scars seemed to scream out from my skin. And suddenly I found that he had put his arms around me and he was standing quite still for a moment. Then gently, for the first time since I’d known him, he kissed me on my lips. “You’re beautiful,” he said. And he held my arm as we left the room. We had a cup of coffee in a luncheonette around the corner and all the time I could feel people staring at me. It’s a small town; everyone knew us. I’m sure they were wondering how I’d been since the accident, and if my face would ever be completely normal. All I could do was to thank God for giving me Jimmie to stand by me through it all . . . through the most frightening moments of my life. It was on my birthday, August 22nd, that Jimmie called me up for a ride, and, in the midst of a traffic jam, gave me my engagement ring. He tossed it into my lap. “If you’re going to thi’ow it at me,” I teased, “then I don’t want it.” We went to tell his folks and mine. My mom, standing between us, her face bright with excitement, didn’t say anything at first. At last she spoke up, “Will you have her?” Jimmie nodded yes. Then she said, “Will you have him?” 1 nodded yes. It was almost like a wedding ceremony, and we all began to cry. On January 4, 1957, we eloped to Portland, Oregon, because so many folks kept saying we shouldn’t get married — that Jimmie should wait for me to be completely well. We spent our first “monthiversary” in Hollywood, where Jimmie was trying to find work. Reports came to us from back home that people thought something was wrong because we’d rushed off into marriage. But we were learning not to let small talk bother us. Of course, we had awful responsibilities facing us when we said our “I do’s.” Jimmie didn’t have a steady job; he picked up what he could at the clubs. There was a lot of surgery still ahead for me, and my parents had already mortgaged their home to pay hospital expenses. I was terribly anxious about Jimmie’s career. I wanted him to begin making records. It was only when we were down to our last dollar that he was first asked to audition for a record company in New York. After he told me the news, I just stood still and bawled. I cried so hard I almost — literally — broke my stitches. “We came to New York on a shoestring,” Jimmie often says, “and we had more guts than brains.” And in many ways it was true. We drove nonstop to Flagstaff, Arizona, then nonstop again to Nashville, where we slept for two days. We had three blowouts. When we got to New York, we lived on baked beans and sardines. Our money was running out, so we bought three cartons of Tootsie Rolls and lived on them for days. We knew some executives at the record company, but were ashamed to ask for money. Whenever Mother would write us, she’d always slip a dollar-bJl or two into the envelope, and it saved us more than once. Her letters always came on the days when we were down to our last cent. We kept waiting for the record people to make up their minds about Jimmie’s audition. Finally, I submitted his name to Arthur Godfrey’s program, and I got a hundred dollars for being a talent scout. We lived at a little hotel near Times Square because it was the cheapest place we could find. Sometimes we’d pass the hours counting cockroaches on the wall to forget how hungry we were. Honestly — whoever counted the most cockroaches on the wall nearest him got an extra bite of a Tootsie Roll. Finally, after days of starvation and prayer, when our hope was running out and we were already thinking of returning to the West Coast, Roulette Records signed Jimmie and advanced us some money on his recording of “Honeycomb.” It became a national hit, and our dark days ended. We were able to buy our own home in Granada, California. We love it, of course, but, as I’ve already told you, when two people live under one roof, they learn to expect the unexpected. One afternoon, soon after we’d moved in, Jimmie began hunting around for his music. He’d been away on tour and hadn’t had a chance to get it all together. “You must know where it is,” he accused. “You just don’t want to tell me.” He’s always particularly nervous after the strain of a tour. “I haven’t seen it — honestly,” I said, shaking my head. And I began helping him look for it. In the next room a gust of wind suddenly (Continued on page 84)