The Loner

Nearly everyone has heard of Rod McKuen: he has written 900 songs that have been recorded by other people and sold more than 50 million records; his three books of poetry have sold more than a million copies. In his gritty wreck of a voice, he has recorded 35 albums of his own songs, and last year he wrote the scores for two movies. It was not until last week, though, that McKuen got that ultimate symbol of success: his own TV special, a one-man show on NBC, called "Rod McKuen: The Loner."

McKuen's absence from the TV screen until then was a matter of his own choice. He had turned down every offer to do a television special until he could do it on his own terms: a half-hour one-man show over which he had total control and no interference.

The show had impressive sparseness. Wearing a formless sweater, black pants and sneakers, McKuen kept the talk to a discreet minimum and spent his time singing his songs--The World I Used to Know, a medley of Stanyan Street, Lonesome Cities and Listen to the Warm --and reciting a poem about one of his few New York friends, A Cat Named Sloopy. He wandered through a set that seemed to have been plucked from a haunted harbor on San Francisco Bay. If the fog spewing out of the NBC special-effects machine looked at times as if it were going to swallow McKuen alive, at least the audience could rest assured that he would go down rasping out a song with lyrics that said something.

Rootless Childhood. The "Loner" title was corny but appropriate. McKuen has led his life mostly apart from others. He was born into the Depression in a Salvation Army hospital in Oakland, Calif., shortly after his father had deserted the family. His mother worked as a waitress, a telephone operator and a dime-a-dance hostess until her marriage to a "cat-skinner"--the operator of Caterpillar tractors on Government road projects. McKuen was hauled from one construction site to another throughout the West and Northwest until, at age eleven, he split from his family and spent four years drifting in and out of small Western towns. He took odd jobs: rod man on a survey crew, plowman, cowboy.

After serving during the Korean War, he appeared at the Purple Onion in San Francisco. Then he signed with Universal as a player in a few forgettable beach epics. "I never sat through one of my pictures," McKuen recalls. "It wasn't so much that they were bad. It's just that they were so terribly dull." Universal dropped him, and he headed East. "I was desperate. I lived off selling my blood. Or putting on my blue suit and going to hotels and crashing conventions for the canapes."

The times were hard, but McKuen had a sweet tenor voice. In 1961 he wrote the music for a song that became a hit, The Oliver Twist. Capitalizing on his success, he set off on the road, doing 80 cities in eight weeks and singing his heart out. He sang so hard that his vocal cords were irreparably damaged; he was told that he would never sing again. But McKuen kept on, even though the tenor voice was replaced by a hoarse croak.

More than Tony. With his voice gone, McKuen concentrated more on his lonely poetry and song writing. Every time he sang, it sounded as if he needed to clear his throat--but the husky croak had a strange appeal for people who were sick of slick styling. The books and records came flooding out--and sold. McKuen is hardly modest about it, but why should he be? He is deliberately vague about how much money he made last year ("Two million? Three million? Four million? I don't know"), but he claims proudly that he sold 2,000,000 albums in 1968. "That's more than Andy Williams, more than Tony Bennett." The set for his television special, he says, "was the biggest single set ever built for TV." As a result of the show, he "had offers from every single network for a series."

In his newfound success, McKuen has been called banal; he has also been called the best contemporary songwriter in the U.S. Some put him down as the greatest put-on since Tiny Tim; others insist that he is the only American chansonnier. If being a loner rules out success and commercialism, then McKuen is obviously a phony loner. If it means preferring solitude to stereotyped stardom, then he is at least a contented iconoclast. Or, as he says: "If I'm still alone by now it's by design/I only own myself, but all of me is mine."

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