The Onion Ring Summit

If the truth hurts, you ought to go scrabbling for the Demerol after reading this.  Every word of it, so help me, is true.  The players in this drama – all save the narrator – will be familiar to you.  You will have to rely on my assurances that the events described herein really happened.

No one who was alive during the decade of the 1960’s will ever forget Bob Dylan, or Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns, or the television show, My Favorite Martian.  But none of those things figure in what I’m about to tell you.  They were inserted for reasons that, as I proofread this, now escape me.

Who does figure in my story?  I guess Audrey Hepburn, for one.  She figures right from the beginning.  She and a handful of others I will tell you about.

I was only fifteen at the time.  It was a wintry afternoon late in November, 1964.  Barry Goldwater had just lost election to the White House to a crude, loudmouthed incumbent Texan.  Krushchev had been deposed in October and sat forlornly on a bench feeding pigeons in a Moscow public park.  And I was running away from home.  To join the circus.

Now, let’s see if I can remember this straight.  I was thumbing a ride on I-25, north of Denver – I believe it was called “The Valley Highway” at the time; it may have been before the Interstate highway system was instituted.  But that’s not important.  What is important is that a very attractive woman pulled over in a very expensive car and gave me, a very pimply fifteen year old geek, a ride.  It was, of course, Ms. Hepburn, who was traveling through  Colorado on her way from Santa Fe to Jackson Hole, and on a whim, she’d decided to see something of the countryside in between.  It was about four o’clock in the afternoon, the time when the sun starts to descend behind the front range at that time of year, and it was bitterly cold out with a good twenty-mile-an-hour wind blowing.  My ears were already half frozen as I scrabbled, a little too eagerly, perhaps,  into the warmth of Ms. Hepburn’s luxurious leather-upholstered front passenger seat.

I didn’t know who she was.  I didn’t see a lot of movies back then.  But she started asking questions, and it turned out she was really into philosophy and knew all sorts of stuff about Nietzsche and Kant.  I knew a little bit about Nietzsche and a lot more about science, so I bored her with a big monologue on what the latest issue of Scientific American had in it.  But she was very nice, very attentive.  I think I was developing a crush on her.  But up at about the Brighton exit, she pulled over for another hitchhiker.  Little guy, with round wire rimmed glasses and shaggy hair.  Him I recognized.  At least it looked like him.

John Lennon was slumming it.  The Beatles had just wrapped up one of their big early concert tours, and Lennon, disguised in grubby blue jeans and a black leather jacket over a white T-shirt, had hitchhiked all the way from New York, trying to reach the west coast.  He had been greatly impressed as a teenager by Jack Keroac’s “On the Road”,  and he was determined to retrace, as closely as possible, his idol’s marathon cross-country adventure.  At least that’s what poured out of him as Ms. Hepburn and I politely listened.

“Got to do your own thing, man,” he was now telling me.  “It’s really not important, you know, what they say about you, it’s what you do with your life, what kinds of people you can piss off, traditions and customs you can flaunt, things like that that’re really important.  After all, look at me.  Who’d have thought?”

“Thought what?”  I was wondering, but Lennon had pulled out a joint and was lighting it up.  I’d never seen one before.  He took a long drag on it and passed it up to Audrey.  He was in the back seat, right behind her, and I was in the front passenger seat.  Audrey looked down just long enough to see what it was that he was trying to hand her, and shook her head.  He pushed it under my nose.  “Go ahead, get stoned.  It’ll clear the cobwebs out.  And even if it doesn’t at least it’s illegal.”  I shook my head, too.

“Some party,” he mumbled to himself.  It came out like “Soom party” in his thick Liverpool accent.

“I’m running away,” I blurted out.

Audrey looked over at me with a concerned look and said, “I thought you said you needed a lift to visit your cousin in Fort Collins.”

“I lied.”

“Knew you couldn’t be all that bad,” Lennon muttered.  “So you make up stories?  I used to make up stories all the time when I was your age and even younger.  I used to sit in me room and write them down.  I didn’t have many friends.”

“Neither do I,” I confessed.

There was a long silence, and then Audrey said, almost in a whisper, “I never got asked to the prom.  I spent the night alone, at home, crying.”

But there was a car stalled on the shoulder up ahead, and we slowed down.  The hood was up, and a big shambling guy was standing beside the open driver’s side door, trying to flag us to stop.  It was starting to spit snow.  I rolled down the window on my side and he squinted in.  I could hardly believe it.  It was Jonathan Winters, funniest guy on T.V., next to Wally Cox.

In he crawled, and made himself comfortable next to Mr. Lennon.  It seems Jonathan had a little problem controlling his moods.  He blurted out whatever entered his head, no matter how outrageous it was.  Years later, I read that periodically, his family had him committed to mental institutions for observation.  Like a lot of excellent later comedians, he was probably bipolar.  Anyway, he’d been in a “hospital” in California, he told us, had “borrowed” the car that was now broken down, and had gotten this far.  He had an absolutely idiotic grin on his face, and didn’t say another word for about three miles.

And then the stillness was shattered by the sound of a siren.  It was Jonathan, making siren sounds in the back seat.  He pretended he was a traffic cop, sidling up to Ms. Hepburn’s window.  “Let’s see y’all’s drivah’s license,” he drawled, and before any of us knew what was coming, he switched personas and was Audrey.  “Do you know who I am?”  He squeaked.  “Do you have any idea who I am?”  Cop again.  “Lady, don’t make no difference.  Kin I have your autograph?”  Audrey looked around at him over her shoulder, a little astonished.  “Aw, hell,” Jonathan blurted out, “jus’ marry me!”  And he flung his arms around her neck, his big body sprawled across John Lennon’s knees.  She almost wrecked the car before Lennon got him pulled off.

The mood in the car was subdued as we drove on.  Near Fort Lupton, I glimpsed an old sign nailed to a fencepost, flapping in the wind.  It was apparently left over from the previous summer, where it had signaled the presence of a roadside fruit and vegetable stand that had long since been shut down for the season.  Peaches.  Cherries.  Apples.  Strawberries.

Audrey turned to Jonathan, who was sulking, staring at his hands.  “Have you ever been to Washington state, Jonathan?” she asked.  “They have the most marvelous strawberry fields there.”

Jonathan’s face lit up.  “I know,” he beamed.  “They go on forever.”

Lennon poked my shoulder.  “You’re an awfully quiet little sod,” he noted.  I didn’t turn, but I was getting a little depressed myself, and I said, “I just sometimes get this feeling, like nothing is real …”

“That’s it.  That’s good,” he pronounced.  And as I turned to look back at him, he was scribbling something on an envelope he’d pulled from his pocket.  “Nothing is real, strawberry fields … forever,” he muttered.  He stuck the envelope back in his pocket and stared at me.  “Absolutely right,” he agreed.  “Nothing is real.”

We pulled into Johnson’s corners to get burgers.  We wanted to get some coffee into Mr. Winters.  But we were distracted by the two gentlemen in the booth opposite ours, across the aisle.  The one, wearing a pearl-buttoned western shirt, colored aviator glasses, a big Stetson and expensive shit-kickers, was laying it on thick.  “Now you Com’nists gotta know one thing.  Nobody, and I mean nobody, puts one over on Lyndon Baines Johnson.  One funny trick on this treaty and we’d kick your asses outa eastern Europe for good!”  The other man scowled.  He had big bushy eyebrows.  He learned over his shoulder and a man in the booth behind him jabbered things at him in Russian.  His translator.  All over the restaurant, men in black suits and wing-tip shoes and colored glasses were staring at our table.

The Russian jabbered some things at the President, accenting his speech with loud pounding on the table.  A longneck bottle of Budweiser tipped over.  Then a salt shaker rattled off the table.

“Have another cheeseburger, Leonid,” Johnson drawled.  “An’ for chrissakes, don’t try to order Stolichee, stolichnik, er, vodka again.  This is an Uhmericuhn restaurant.”

And so it came to be that John Lennon, Audrey Hepburn, Jonathan Winters and I were the only civilian witnesses to the ultra top secret “Onion Ring Summit,” as it came to be called in hush-hush State Department circles.  Lennon, I don’t think, ever caught on what had happened.  He was too far gone licking some kind of little pieces of blotter paper.  Jonathan Winters was despondent, complaining in a variety of funny voices that the whole evening had been too much like a comedy routine anyway, saying that there was nothing he could do with it.  Ms. Hepburn bought me three cheeseburgers before accompanying me to the pay phone to see to it that I called my parents.  By the time they showed up to get me, Lennon had disappeared into the night, warbling about strawberries as the snow swirled around him,  and Jonathan Winters was doing impressions of first, General Curtis LeMay, and later, a B-52 bomber, much to the delight of Mr. Brezhnev.  President Johnson, not liking to be upstaged, asked me if he could give me his autograph, and I shook my head.  He banged his fists on the table and swore.  The Secret Service fretted about the weather as the limousines outside were getting gassed up.

Ms. Hepburn accompanied me to the parking lot when my folks arrived and she pecked me on the forehead.  Nobody’s gonna believe this,” I complained.

“But you’ll know it’s true, won’t you?” she added, staring mischievously into my eyes.  “And someday, you’ll find a way to tell it.  Honest.  Besides, it makes for an awfully nice story, whether it’s true or not.  And for me, it’s been delightful.  No fans, no cameras, no hassle just getting a burger.  You’ve got it lucky.  If you’re smart, you’ll never get famous.”

And with that,  she waved me off and I went back with my parents, reconciled to another couple of years of life at home.  But I was smart.  To this day, I’m still not famous.