Tony Orlando and Dawn Tie One On
In its dark recesses, where no one watches, he permits himself a single long weary growl; then, with curious bright urgency, he explains about Bobby Darin. He’d idolized him as a kid, got introduced to him; Darin gave him a gold necktie which he wore in his first publicity picture for his first record, “Halfway to Paradise.” His first employer, Donny Kirshner, was Darin’s partner and best friend. His first album happened to include the song “Splish Splash” and the album happened to be given its first push by Murray the K, who’d written “Splish Splash” with Darin. Tony’s present musical conductor, Bobby Rozario, was Darin’s. Tony closed the old Copacabana in New York, which was Darin’s home base, and was singing “Yellow Ribbon,” which Darin was going to record, at the Fairmont Hotel in New Orleans, another Darin base, the night Darin died.
There’s more, and he recites the whole, odd litany, which seems without significance or point except to him. Entertainers are fond of tracing these parallels to the lives of other entertainers; they lend a sense of continuity to progression through a schizophrenic professional maze.
Like the one at the Beverly Hilton. Inside the hotel, at the Golden Globes, he’ll be seated, significantly, with Lucille Ball, Peter Falk, John Cassavetes, Carol Channing, Merle Oberon, Richard Chamberlain; when it’s time to honor Valerie Harper, he’ll do so with smiling grace, introducing himself with, “First, I am not Freddie Prinze.” The award given, he’ll hurry out, back to the recording session, commenting in the car, “I never saw all those people together in person before, blew my mind. My real name’s Michael Anthony Orlando Cassivitis, with an ‘i,’ but I think my grandfather changed it from ‘e’ when he came from Greece. I told John Cassavetes just now, blew his mind.”
He repeats this absently, his mind still on our chilling entrance into the Hilton, where mobs of celebrity watchers, frenzied in klieg lights behind police barriers, resemble the extras John Schlesinger hired for The Day of the Locust. As Tony steps from his limo, Burt Reynolds steps self-cherishingly from his, and Valerie Perrine, stoned, from hers, and the overwhelmed crowd chews away the wooden police-line sawhorses, splintering them to touch Tony, Burt, Valerie; and down topples a big Hilton foyer lamp, its splintered glass shredding one fan’s eyes.
No one heeds this but a Hilton employee, apprehensive of a lawsuit, and one waits outside a moment to see if an ambulance comes — a mistake, for one’s been observed by the mob in Tony’s car and is instantly surrounded. “You know him! Let us take your picture! Sign my autograph book! Take it inside and make him sign it, please, please!” One’s sleeve is torn by a hunchbacked, effeminate boy as the screaming ambulance arrives.
He’s good at staying sane,” Dick Broder says when this is described to him. “I think Tony works at it. I think a lot of guys become good performers before they become good people, and with Tony it didn’t happen in that order. My opinion, anyway.”
We’re in the dressing room again, the next day; shortly, Television City’s gates will open to the locust swarm, the taping audience. Dick has remarked that he’s been living in a Hollywood apartment but has got to find something out of town, in the mountains, the desert, anywhere breathable. It tells on him, the highly concentrated, totally enclosed tensions of weekly taping, the Dante-esque sealed sound stage where time is measured only in prime minutes used and there is no exit to reality or daylight. Clearly he’s not accustomed to it, bafflement passes behind his eyes by week’s end, and like others connected with Tony who’ve been with him awhile, Dick likes to reminisce about the old loose road days; as when Tony bounds in from the stage for a break, accompanied by Kevin Davies, his drummer since 1971.
“When we’d all get on a bus, even a new bus, it’d instantly break down,” he explains. “Tony, remember, in Mississippi?”
“Right, Greenville, Mississippi, on the way to it from Memphis, the bus stops dead in a cotton field, we start walking …”
“Mosquitoes big enough to fuck turkeys!”
“Finally, one gas station with one diner in it; for five hours, 16 long-haired music freaks, all white except for the two black gals with ’em, drink coffee waiting for the repair truck. The locals could not cope with this, if there’d been less of us, it’d have been Easy Rider. And state fairs, where you cannot see the audience for the mosquitoes …”
Tony especially hates to be drawn from these recollections but he’s needed again without. “Tom, you’ve been around movies, I haven’t — is making movies as crazy as TV?” Infinitely worse. “But isn’t there less dialog?” He means less script shot in a day; yes, good directors don’t shoot more than two or three pages in nine hours. “Three pages? All day? God, that sounds easy.”
When he’s gone, Kevin adds, “Once I saw Tony do something I never saw another artist do: At a state fair there were 30,000 kids in the audience and, when we got there, about that many state troopers lined across the front of the stage with clubs in their hands. Tony was amazed, but he quietly told these guys that in crowds he draws, we never had problems. They weren’t impressed. ‘You can’t intimidate my audience this way,’ Tony told ’em — he can get very tough — and he went out onstage and said through the mike, ‘Please, tell these officers there’ll be no problems,’ and thousands of kids yell, ‘There ain’t gonna be no problems!‘ The cops moved back a bit, until the end of our show, when everybody always comes down front.
“The troopers freaked, the kids start yelling, we’re close to a riot; and Tony calmly takes the mike and says, ‘Usually, you hear me sing the last song, say goodnight and watch me leave the stage, but tonight we’re gonna reverse it, I’d like you to sing the last song, say goodnight, and I’ll stand here and watch you guys leave.’ They stopped in their tracks. ‘Right on,’ they yelled, and they sang ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon’ to him and walked out still singing, happy as hell! And I’ve watched the biggest stars, Harrison, for instance, handle crowds horribly when they were really trying to handle ’em well. A crowd always becomes one person to Tony, a mob becomes one individual personality, very real and serious to him, and he’s got respect for that individual’s rights and needs.”
Naturally you wonder, about here, if anybody ever says anything negative about Tony, anything at least satirical. Later, you make industrious inquiries in TV and music — nobody ever does. A totally genuine and liked performer is, after all, hypothetically possible; just improbable if you’ve closely studied lots of them. As watchful as you’ve become of him, you’ve so far not made one critical note, and you don’t make one talking to Telma and Joyce either, though you’re alert for armor chinks.
Down the hall, in Telma’s dressing room, they’re eating Colonel Sanders suppers, and for openers you confront them with Newsweek‘s charges. They consider this politely a moment, then the couch they share shakes with their laughter.