That did it. All she could think of was the old
RCA emblem depicting "His Master's
Voice," a spotted dog listening to a
gramophone, head cocked exactly as was
Bucky Lee's cowboy-hatted head. Deanie
didn't just giggle, she didn't just laugh.
Wilma Dean Bailey, in that gentle English
backdrop, howled. Once she began she was
incapable of stopping, and the laughter tumbled from her,
speeding beyond her control.
She looked down at her feet, trying to curb
her hilarity, taking deep breaths, but her feet
reminded her of his cowboy boots and the five-inch
lifts he tucked into the soles. So she tried
to concentrate on her fingers, but that merely caused
her to recall Bucky Lee's one attempt
to play the guitar and the sour chords that rang from his
prop instrument between takes.
Through her tears she could see the horrified
glances of the crew members Ping-Ponging between
Deanie and Bucky Lee. Then she heard a
terrible, now-familiar sound: the slamming of a
trailer door. This time it left the aluminum
steps rattling, and a potted mum spilled off the
top landing. Everyone knew exactly what that
meant: Bucky Lee Denton would not make
another appearance until the next day. If at
all.
Suddenly it wasn't so funny anymore.
She wiped under her eyes, where tears had dampened
her mascara to the consistency of molten asphalt,
and assumed the most contrite expression she could
manage.
"Goddammit, Deanie!" bellowed the
director. "How the hell could you do that?"
All eyes were now fixed on Deanie in her
rayon Tudor gown with Velcro
fastenings and plastic-seed pearls and birdhouse
headdress. She swallowed. "I'm sorry,"
she whispered, her voice raspy with laughter and
guilt.
No one responded. As the cast wandered off
to collect their paychecks and the crew went through the
motions of striking the set for the day, Deanie knew
she was once again the victim of her lifelong
curse.
Bad timing.
Wilma Dean Bailey's very existence was a
virtual synonym for rotten timing. For instance,
the name "Wilma Dean" was a bit of quixotic
whimsey on her mother's part. As groping
teenagers, Lorna Dune and Dickie
Bailey made an early exit from the film
Splendor in the Grass to get married. By the
standards of Winslow, Kentucky, they had
demonstrated tremendous restraint.
Ten months later their daughter was born, and
Lorna named the dark-haired infant "Wilma
Dean," after the character portrayed by Natalie
Wood in the movie.
It wasn't until several years later, when
the film was finally aired on television, that
Lorna saw the entire movie. Much to her
openmouthed shock, the Wilma Dean in the movie
suffers a nervous breakdown and ends up in a
mental institution.
But it was too late to change Deanie's name.
The precocious tot was already scribbling it on every
wall and overdue bill she could get a crayon
on. Lorna was, of course, concerned about the
eventual psychological ramifications of naming
a child after a suicidal heroine, so she kept her
daughter away from any and all Natalie Wood
films, including Miracle on 34th
Street and Scu.a Hoo! Scu.a Hay!
Besides, Lorna rationalized, the Deanie in
Splendor in the Grass ends up okay.
Warren Beatty marries another woman. So
what?
About this time Lorna made another unfortunate
discovery. Her husband, Dickie Bailey, whose
all-night revels with fellow good ol' boys had
earned him a slew of randy nicknames, finally
decided he was not cut out for marriage and
fatherhood. Within a week he was gone. Lorna
never did find out what had happened to her
ex-husband. Their contact ceased with the signing of the
final divorce papers.
Years later she saw an "Oprah" show on
bigamists. One guest, an overweight shoe
salesman sporting a limp string tie and
exaggerated sideburns, looked suspiciously
like Dickie Bailey, but Lorna could never be
sure.
With steel determination and hard work, Lorna
managed to scrape together enough money to leave their
rural Kentucky home for Nashville. All
she wanted was a chance to begin afresh, to raise her
daughter away from the back-handed whispers of
Winslow. Even worse were the pitying stares of other
women, the mutters of "Poor Lorna, can't
hold on to a man." She'd had enough.
In Nashville she found a job as a
truck-stop waitress. The hours were grueling but
the tips were usually good, and Lorna found
happiness in the anonymity of the place. Even the
regulars only passed through twice a month. It
was well worth the occasional painful pinch from an
amorous trucker.
Little Wilma Dean, meanwhile, grew from a
giggling child to a woman of startling beauty. By the time
her daughter reached high school, Lorna,
alarmed by the way the customers would grin at her
daughter while dripping grits in the lap of their
jeans, had banished her from the truckstop.
The irony that her daughter bore an uncanny
resemblance to Natalie Wood was not lost on
Lorna.
"Why, ain't she the spitting image of that gal
from Rebel Without a Cause?" gasped a
beefy trucker with a paper napkin tucked into his
red flannel shirt.
"Who?" inquired a doe-eyed Deanie as her
mother shoved her through the restaurant door.
"Never mind," spat Lorna, glaring at the
customer.
No one was really surprised when Deanie was
elected homecoming queen her senior year in
high school. Although she was, in the buffered words
of a guidance counselor, "no student," Deanie
was easily the most popular girl in her class.
Not only was she the best cheerleader for the state's
worst football team, she was also the president
of the choral society and had the lead part in the
school's production of Annie Get Your
Gun.
What did surprise folks was the freak
hailstorm that hit Nashville the day of the
homecoming parade, tearing the corrugated roof
off the gym and ending all hopes of Deanie receiving
the ceremonial five-and-dime crown. Graduation
came and went with all the pomp and celebration of a
used-tire sale. Once again, bad timing and
Wilma Dean Bailey were inexorably linked.
With her diploma in hand, Deanie began
searching for a job, only to discover that businesses were
less than thrilled at the prospect of hiring
an uncrowned homecoming queen who could carry a
tune. By the end
of the summer, Deanie had finally
found a job. Like her mother, Deanie became a
waitress. Only Deanie, as if to prove her
independence, worked at a Krispy Kream
doughnut shop.
A crucial revelation hit Deanie that first
fall after high school. She felt something vital
was missing from her life, an emptiness that left
her feeling incomplete. After ticking off the
possibilities on her fingers, she realized that
what was lacking was music.
For as long as she could remember, she had been
involved in chorus classes or school-based
musicals. As her interest in music grew, her
voice, always pleasant, mellowed into a rich
instrument of unexpected depth. When she sang,
she wasn't just Deanie Bailey; she could
imagine being anyone in the world. For her, music was
magic. Her voice alone had never let her
down; it was the one thing she could always count on.
Lorna, noticing her daughter's interest yet
not quite understanding it, even gave her a guitar from the
Sears catalog for her sixteenth birthday, and
Deanie became good enough to accompany the chorus and
strum along at school assemblies.
Deanie, who had lived a life free from the
shackles of ambition, suddenly knew what she
wanted to become. With the tenacity of a spawning
salmon, Deanie set about becoming the next
Patsy Cline.
She told no one at the Krispy Kream about
her aspiration, only her mother and a friend from high
school who had become a receptionist at a new
company, Era Records. Her mother treated her
announcement as seriously as she had taken
previous proclaimations from her daughter.
When Deanie was eight, she decided she
wanted to be a princess. "Fine,
dear," a weary Lorna mumbled.
When she was eleven, she wanted to become an
Olympic figure skater. "Very good, honey,"
Lorna replied.
Now Deanie wanted to become a country singer,
and Lorna patted her daughter's head and asked
her to bring home two dozen assorted doughnuts
as a treat for the other truck-stop waitresses.
About that time, Deanie realized that just mouthing other
people's songs was no longer enough. Although she could put
tremulous emotion behind most tunes, it was really
just musical play-acting. It didn't feel
absolutely right.
Most country songs didn't fit her
personality, as she couldn't identify with the raw
emotions. Sure, she had faced rough times with her
mom, but they had faced them together. Never had she
been truly frightened or threatened or depressed.
Since she'd never had a dog, she had never even
experienced a dog's death, nor his running away
or chewing a favorite slipper. She'd never
once owned a pickup truck.
Above all, she had never been in love. As a
whole, the life experiences of Wilma Dean
Bailey were not the stuff of great songs.
But that didn't stop Deanie. Her first efforts
were laughably awful, about wayward men and forgiving
women. She borrowed from her mother's life, but it
didn't ring true. Then she tried lyrics about
Paris and grand romances, two more adventures she
had yet to experience, although "gay Paree" did
rhyme rather nicely with "his dungarees."
One evening, while soaking her throbbing feet in
a tub of Epsom salts, she heard a radio
interview with a country songwriter.
"You have to write what you know, what you're
familiar with, what touches your heart," the writer
stated. "Otherwise you won't believe it and, more
important, other people won't believe it."
Without bothering to dry her feet, Deanie
hopped out of the tub and grabbed her guitar. In about
an hour she had written a song about a former
beauty queen working in a doughnut shop. Even after
playing and replaying the song into a tape
recorder, she felt an unfamiliar thrill
rush through her.
"This is it," she marveled aloud. "This is how
it's done."
After that, songs came easily and quickly,
usually when she was at work, cleaning the
coffee machine or waiting for a customer to decide
between the chocolate frosteds or the sugar-coated
bismarks. Although she still had to experience the fodder
of most country songs, Deanie had discovered she
possessed a unique ability to convey lyrics.
Phrases would come to her, snatches of offhanded
comments. The speaker would leave, toting the white
pastry bag, forgetting all about the conversation
overheard by the eager young woman behind the counter.
By keeping her mouth shut and her ears open at
work, she heard enough from the customers and the other
waitresses to fill a dozen lifetimes of
country songs. Everyone had a story to tell, and
Deanie added her own words and imagination to spin their
tales.
She became a voracious reader of country
music publications, and for the first time she regretted
not taking her school years more seriously. There was
so much she didn't understand about the business,
phrases that meant nothing to her but seemed to be of
great importance to those in the music industry.
She never came to work without a tape of her
latest composition in the pocket of her apron,
on the off chance that someone might want to hear her
songs. One afternoon two long-haired men came
to her counter discussing a recording session.
Deanie was awestruck by their easy music
banter.
"I write songs," she blurted.
The other waitresses rolled their eyes at
Deanie, and she felt a furious blush creep
up from the neckline of her starched gingham uniform.
One of the men raised a graying eyebrow. "Oh
yeah?" He crooked a finger, and she leaned over
the counter. "I'll give you some advice,
doll," he whispered.
He then offered a suggestion that was nothing more than
a very Southern variation of the age-old casting couch.
Deanie was stunned, certain that she had not heard the
man correctly.
In a voice loud enough to be heard across the shop,
he repeated his lewd proposition. Her eyes
held his as she reached behind for a fresh pot of
coffee, smiled at him, and poured the scalding
brew over his hand that rested on the counter.
The man howled in pain, but Deanie maintained
an expression of serenity and informed him that
refills were on the house.
As he ran to the bathroom, muttering oaths and
shaking his hand in the air--a futile
attempt to cool it off--his companion
grimaced apologetically and took one of her
tapes. He promised to get back to her within a
week with an honest appraisal of her work.
A
s the first week stretched on into the second and
third and still she'd had no word, she realized it was
useless. She had no way to contact him anyway,
since she didn't even know his name. She chalked
it up to experience, but the exquisitely close
brush with the music world had made her more determined
than ever.
Then her friend, the record-company
receptionist, convinced a low-rung executive
to grant Deanie a five-minute interview.
She called in sick at the Krispy Kream,
terrified at the prospect of crossing the
threshold of Era Records smelling like a
glazed doughnut.
Dazzled by the feel of plush, unstained carpet
under her feet, awed by the glossy photographs
of stars and near-stars lining the hallway, Deanie
followed her friend to the executive's tiny,
windowless office.
He was young but prematurely bald, which gave
him an aura of intelligence he did not
deserve. He listened politely to her tape,
cutting each song off after fifteen seconds.
Finally he leaned back in his vinyl swivel
chair, his fingertips steepled together in a
practiced gesture.
"Well well, Jeanie ..." he began.
"Deanie," she corrected, with the most
submissive smile she could manage.
"Deanie? Oh, well," he frowned before
clearing his throat. "Where are you presently
employed?"
She swallowed before answering. "At the
Krispy Kream."
"Ah. I see. Well, Jeanie, I
suggest you hold onto that job and keep on
working--" He was interrupted by the bleep of his
telephone and gave her a dismissive nod. She
snatched up her tape and left as quickly as
possible, her cheeks burning with anger and
humiliation.
Three weeks later, as she was closing up the
shop, she heard a car radio blaring from the parking
lot. It was the new single from Vic Jenkens, the
country crooner with matinee-idol looks and a
smooth-as-molasses voice. Deanie
paused, a wet, coffee-stained rag clutched in
her hand as she wiped down the counter.
Vic Jenkens was singing her song.
The rag flopped to the linoleum floor. She
blinked, dumbfounded at hearing the words she'd
penned while sitting on her own bed coming from a car
radio. From Vic Jenkens's voice--her words
set to her tune created on her Sears
guitar.
The car either closed its door or left the
parking lot, she never knew. All she was sure
of was that her song had faded, leaving her under the
humming fluorescent lights of the empty
Krispy Kream.
How did it happen? Her mind whirled as she
stumbled into the parking lot, her sweater askew, her
white-soled shoes crunching the gravel. Her
hands trembled as she fumbled for her car keys,
numbly recalling that they were in her apron
pocket.
Her apron pocket. Then it came back
to her: The song Vic Jenkens had recorded was
on the tape she had given those Music Row
guys, the friend of the man she had spilled coffee
on. They had stolen her song.
Her first thought was to call up a radio station--
any radio station--and proclaim herself to be the
composer of the new Vic Jenkens hit. Clearly
someone had laid claim to the song, or she would have
heard from his manager or the record company. She
had devoured enough fan magazines to have a vague
idea how those things worked.
But it would have been absurd, a ranting
Krispy Kream waitress calling a radio
station at midnight announcing that Vic Jenkens
had stolen her song. Unwelcome images
flooded into her mind, of people who claimed to have been
kidnapped by aliens or of diehard Elvis
sighters. She suddenly envisioned herself being
interviewed on television, in her Krispy
Kream gingham and ruffled apron, the mandatory
hairnet glimmering under the TV lights, trays
of doughnuts stacked behind her. She would look like a
crazy woman.
With no proof to offer, no evidence other than
her word against theirs, Deanie would be better off
claiming to be Bigfoot's love child. By the time
she climbed into her bed, she was convinced she had
best let the whole thing go. This was an important
lesson, she muttered to the foam pillow.
Never again would she be so stupid. Never again would she
be so trusting.
By the next morning she was feeling better, even
a little pleased. The song had been good enough for those
guys to steal. Deanie decided she must be on the
right track.
Within three weeks, the song was hailed as the
most brilliant of Vic Jenkens's career. It
was everywhere, not only blasting from car windows, but at
the mall and in the Krispy Kream and on
television. Everyone seemed to be humming
Deanie's tune. Even at the Piggly
Wiggly, the damn song wafted over the poultry
case.
Just when Deanie thought she would explode, the
impossible happened: Vic Jenkens himself
strolled into the Krispy Kream.