With a seating capacity of 827, the Ray Jones Country Theater was about standard for the neighborhood, on a par with Roy Clark’s Celebrity Theatre on one side of him and Mickey Gilley’s Family Theatre on the other side and the Jim Stafford Theatre across the way. (You say theatre; I say theater.) Other theaters were bigger. Down the road, Cristy Lane filled two thousand seats twice a day in season, as did Andy Williams back the other way. And every one of those seats was occupied by someone who’d gotten there by car, along the Strip.
And this wasn’t even the worst. Summer family time was pretty bad, but wait till after Labor Day, when all the families have gone home to stick their sticky kids back in school, and the retirees in their RVs show up. The retirees hate kids, so they wait till September. Then they come to Branson, get out on the Strip, forget where they were going, and sllllooooowwwww dooooowwwwwnnnnn.
It wasn’t too bad this evening, though. The maroon Jag bopped along at speeds up to a mile an hour, inching by Roy Clark, and as Cal drove, his bony serious face as intent as though he were completing one of the trickier parts of Le Mans, they discussed the situation: “Reporters are starting to show up,” Ray said.
“Yeah, I heard,” Cal agreed, nodding his head while intently watching the overloaded station wagon from Mississippi in front of him. “You want me to pick one, huh?”
“But the right one,” Ray told him. “We got all these entertainment-beat people, calling in markers all over the place, agents and bookers. I’m getting calls from L.A. and New York and Nashville and every fucking place. Everybody wants an interview, and I’m not gonna give an interview.”
“Right,” Cal said.
“I’m keeping a tight asshole on this,” Ray said, “and you know why.”
“Uh-huh,” Cal said.
“You, and only you.”
“Right,” Cal said. It was part of the strength and the solidity (and the stupidity, too, if truth be told) of the man that it didn’t even occur to him to say, “You can trust me, Ray.” Of course, Ray could trust him. Otherwise, Cal wouldn’t have been permitted this little task.
“I don’t want any of those entertainment people,” Ray went on. “They’re no damn use to me on this thing.”
“Right,” Cal said. He kept watching that station wagon.
“And the tabloids, too,” Ray said. He’d thought long and hard about this, once the opportunity had come along. “The National Enquirer, the Weekly Galaxy, the Star — they can’t print a thing to do me any good.”
“They’re fun, though,” Cal said as the station wagon ahead turned off into the Roy Clark parking lot. Now they were behind a camper from Wisconsin. Intruder, the camper claimed was its brand name, and who could doubt it?
“Not this time,” Ray said. “Not even fun. And TV won’t do anything for me, either. I need print. The New York Times, maybe the Washington Post. Not USA Today.”
“Uh-uh.”
“A magazine’d be even better,” Ray said. “A serious one. Newsweek or Time. Not a monthly; they’d have me strapped in the death seat before the damn thing came out.”
“Weekly,” Cal said. He knew that much.
“Take your time,” Ray told him.
Looking surprised, Cal said, “Ray? I am takin my time, pokin along behind this camper here.”
“Finding the reporter,” Ray explained, with what only looked like patience. “We got a couple of weeks; we can wait and get just the right one.”
“Oh, sure,” Cal said. “I know what to do.”
Ray grinned at the earnest lumpy profile of his oldest friend. “I don’t know what I’d a done without you, Cal, over the years,” he said.
“Well, you didn’t have to, did you?” Cal said, making the right turn onto the precipitous parking lot around and behind the Ray Jones Country Theater.
This steeply sloped blacktop parking lot, not uncommon along this narrow ridge, gave the fast-fooded families and the sedentary retirees a little more heart exercise than they’d bargained for, but so far there was no objective evidence that the parking lot had actually killed anybody. And if there were any such evidence, Ray didn’t want to hear about it; he had trouble enough already.
Not including theater business. Forty-five minutes before showtime, and already his parking lot was half-full. All those polyester-wrapped tons of tourist lugged themselves upward toward the entrance at the front of the building, and those who recognized Ray Jones in what should have been the driver’s seat of the Jag, but was not, grinned and waved at him, offering him their silent solidarity — silent because his windows were firmly shut and the AC fully on. He grinned and waved back, friendly old Ray, showing them both hands and no steering wheel, and a lot of them peered more closely, realized it must be some kinda expensive foreign car with the steering wheel way over there, and grinned even bigger, happier than ever.
Country-music fans don’t envy or begrudge the material success of the performers, and that’s because they don’t see the country stars as being brilliant or innovative or otherwise exceptional people (which they are), but firmly believe the Willie Nelsons and Roy Clarks are shitkickers just like themselves, who happened to hit it lucky, and more power to them. It meant anybody could hit it lucky, including their own poor sorry selves, so these people, most of whom could lean down and rest their Coke cans on the poverty line, took sweet vicarious pleasure in the overt manifestations of their heroes’ lush rewards.
A reserved spot down at the back of the theater, a full eighteen feet below ground level at the front of the theater, was kept open for whichever car Ray chose to come to work in. (One of the great attractions of Branson for the country performers, who used to spend two to three hundred days a year on the road, is that they can now commute every day from home.) An exterior flight of stairs led from here up to the outside door to Ray’s dressing room; maybe not exactly the only dressing room in his career with a window but certainly the only one with a view: miles of Ozark mountains.
One of the other nice things about Branson for the country stars is how clean it is — no mobsters, no scuzzy high rollers from Detroit or Kuwait, no hard-eyed hookers. You didn’t have to go through life watching your back every damn minute. Mel Tillis once said Branson was a cross between Mayberry and Vegas, and that’s what he meant. When Andy Williams opened his Moon River Theater, his special guest was Henry Mancini, who happened to have written “Moon River,” and when Henry Mancini said onstage that Andy Williams had worked his ass off to get the theater ready on time, Andy Williams said to him, “We don’t use words like that in Branson.” To make the story better, he wasn’t kidding. To make the story better than that, he wasn’t wrong.
Waiting for Ray in his clean, well-lighted dressing room were musical director Lennie Elmore, already in his tux, plus Ray’s private secretary. Honey Franzen, a blonde in her mid-thirties who was still just as good-looking and almost as slender as she’d been a dozen years ago when she’d sung with the Jones Girls, the backup trio Ray used to have, which he’d given up when he’d moved to Branson. Branson doesn’t go for t&a, and why else have a girl trio backup? In any case. Honey Franzen, who was as smart as she was good-looking, had by then long switched from singing backup and waving it all around onstage behind Ray to being his private secretary and steady private comfort, the place where, when he had to go there, she had to let him in. She had, in fact, hired her Jones Girl replacement, and a few years later had fired the girl again, along with the other two final Jones Girls. That was just part of the sort of thing Honey took care of for Ray.