Where he served with distinction. Korea proved to be a mixed psychological bag: Dick’s draft-trial notoriety won him friends, enemies, and a shitload of invitations to play the accordion. Duty with a Seoul-attached outfit, back to the States early in ’54. Richard Contino: honorably discharged as a staff sergeant; while overseas, the recipient of an unsolicited presidential pardon signed by Harry S Truman.
Dick Contino: back in the U.S.A.
Back to derailed career momentum, a long transit of day-to-day survival behind him.
The BIG-ROOM gigs were kaput. Momentum is at least 50 percent hype: It requires nurturing and frequent infusions of bullshit. Dick Contino couldn’t play the game from McNeil Island and Korea. A bum-publicity taint stuck to him: “coward” and “draft dodger” throbbing in Red Scare neon.
He worked smaller rooms and ignored catcalls; he cut records and learned to sing. A few journalists befriended him, but the basic show-biz take on Dick Contino was This guy is poison. Justifying yourself to the public gets old quick–“coward” may be the toughest American bullet to dodge.
Dick Contino learned to sing, but rock and roll cut him off at the pass. He learned to act, top-lined a few B-films, and faded in the wake of heartthrobs with underailed momentum. In 1 956, he married actress Leigh Snowden, had three kids with her, and settled down in Las Vegas–close to his hotel-lounge bread and butter. He continued to get small-room gigs and played Italian festas in Chicago, Milwaukee, Philly, and other paisano-packed venues.
Leigh Snowden Contino died of cancer in 1982. The Contino kids would now be 35, 32, and 30.
My researcher’s notes tapped out in ’89. He said an obituary check turned up negative–he was certain that Dick Contino was still alive. A week later, I got confirmation. “I found him. He’s still living in Las Vegas, and he says he’ll talk to you.”
Before making contact, I charted the arc of two lives. A specific design was becoming clear–I wanted to write a novella featuring Dick Contino and the filming of Daddy-O, but a symbiotic pull was blunting my urge to get down to, business, extract information, and get out. I felt a recognition of my own fears binding me to this man: fear of failure, specific in nature and surmountable through hard work, and the very large fear that induces claustrophobic suffocation and causes golden young men to run from army barracks–the terror that anything might happen, could happen, will happen.
A merging in fear; a divergence in action.
I joined the army just as the Vietnam War started to percolate. My father was dying; I didn’t want to stick around and watch. The army terrified me–I calculated plausible means of escape. James ElIroy, age i 7, fledgling dramatist: pulling off a frantic stuttering act designed to spotlight his unsuitability for military service.
It was a bravura performance. It got me a quick discharge and a return trip to L.A. and my passions: booze, dope, pantie-sniffing.
Nobody ever called me a coward or a draft dodger–the Vietnam War was reviled from close to the get-go, and extricating yourself from its clutches was held as laudable.
I calculated my way out–and of course my fears remained unacknowledged. And I wasn’t a golden young man sky-high on momentum and ripe for a public hanging.
I’ve led a colorful and media-exploitable life; my take on it has been picaresque–a stratagem that keeps my search for deeper meaning channeled solely into my books, which keeps my momentum building, which keeps my wolves of nothingness locked out of sight. Dick Contino didn’t use my methods: He was a man of music, not of words, and he embraced his fears from the start. And he continued: The musicianship on his post-army beef albums dwarfs the sides he cut pre-’51. He continued, and so far as I could tell, the only thing that diminished was his audience.
I called Contino and told him I wanted to write about him. We had an affable conversation; he said, “Come to Vegas.”
Contino met me at the airport. He looked great: lean and fit at 63. His Daddy-O grin remained intact; he confirmed that his Daddy-O biceps came from humping his accordion.