Chapter 26 - Down Beneath the Counter

(This is part of a book length piece on Chuck Berry.  You can find the prologue and early chapters to the right.  The later chapters are down below this one.)  

If Chuck Berry is your imaginary friend you might experience a certain degree of chagrined embarrassment.  Before I left for Africa, he went to prison for tax fraud.  I cringed a little.  A few years after I got back the tabloids published discretely masked Polaroids of him standing naked with various young women.  I cringed again.  I saw a couple of them.  They were not sexy.  They looked like American Gothic, without the pitchfork or the overalls, Chuck and his girls standing straight and staring at the camera.

In his book he says he makes a big mistake every 15 years.  He calls them his “naughty naughties.”  Add the occasional grumpiness, some personality quirks, a few urban legends and internet rumors, and you find yourself with a hero who makes you blush.  No one remembers John Lennon’s foibles but they know about Chuck Berry’s, both real and imaginary.  One night a charming and refined 70 year old woman had dinner at our house.  At some point I was forced to admit that “I am a big Chuck Berry fan.”  The woman lit up.  “I love Chuck Berry!” she said.  Then she leaned closer and whispered.  “I hear that he likes to watch women shit.”

Chuck Berry (and Jim Marsala!) perform at Lompoc Prison

I don’t know or care about that or his fetishes, real, imagined, or mythical.  I didn’t care about the taxes.  If they tried and convicted all of America’s tax cheats our prisons would burst with corporate giants.  I was vaguely pleased to know he owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes because it meant he was doing well.  As for the bizarre documentation of his life on the road, it made strange sense to me.  In the late 1950s he had been arrested twice, put on trial three times, convicted, and had served more than a year in prison for violating the Mann Act by consorting with young women.  I figured the Polaroids were just photographic evidence these women (1) looked old enough, and (2) were consenting participants.  

The Mann Act was originally called The White Slave Trade Act.  It made it a crime to transport women across state lines "for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose."  Convictions under the Mann Act are historically rare and were often politically or racially motivated.  The African American boxer Jack Johnson was convicted under the Act for travelling with a white prostitute.  Charles Chaplin, labeled a Bolshevik by J. Edgar Hoover, was arrested under the Act for having an affair with a young actress from another state.  And then there is Chuck Berry.  It’s clear that various powers in Missouri were irritated by the success of a young black man and wanted to teach him manners.  One of his arrests was for crossing from Kansas to Missouri with a white girl in his car.  At trial, the girl testified that she loved him, and Chuck was acquitted.  He wasn’t so lucky the next time.  He brought a girl from El Paso, Texas to work in his club.  The consensus was that she looked like an adult and claimed to be one.  Chuck said he wanted to help her out and learn Spanish for his songs.  Whatever.  He gave her a job as a hat check girl.  Later he tried to put her on a bus home to El Paso, but she jumped off and was arrested for working as a prostitute elsewhere.  Down went Chuck Berry.  The judge at his first trial was so openly racist that the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals reluctantly tossed the conviction, but they got him the second time and he went to prison for more than a year.

It wasn’t the first time he was incarcerated.  In his book he writes about a youthful crime spree.  Berry and his friends used a broken gun to rob stores in Kansas City, and then, when their car died, took someone else’s.  Being young and dumb they let their victim escape near a pay phone.  They were arrested a couple miles down the road. 

The teenaged Berry went to jail, became a trustee, did some painting work, formed a musical quartet, and tried amateur boxing.  When he went to prison in 1961 he studied business, typing, business law and enough general subjects to complete his high school degree.  He must have practiced, too.  He wrote a couple of great songs and came out bigger than ever.  When he went to prison in the late 1970s for tax evasion he used the time to finish his Autobiography, thus bringing to pass what had been written:

Blond haired, good lookin’

Tryin’ to get me hooked

Wants me to marry, get a home,

Settle down, write a book.

(The first sentence of his Autobiography acknowledges his gratitude to Francine Gillium, the blond haired, good looking secretary who was, at times, mistaken for his wife, and encouraged Berry’s efforts with the book.)

Although Berry has never relished talking about his criminal convictions, he wrote extensively and honestly about them in his Autobiography.  The author Bruce Pegg documented the trials in his book Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry.  Between the two books, you get a sense of what happened.  It’s clear that he “deserved” jail twice, for robbery and tax evasion, (whether he deserved the long sentence he got as a youthful first offender is a different story), and didn’t deserve to be prosecuted or convicted under The Mann Act.  

The crimes don’t particularly bother me.  He was a kid when he committed the only truly serious one.  He paid his taxes.  He did his time.  

More problematic, for me, is the story about his restaurant in Wentzville—the probable source of my elderly friend’s remark that he likes to watch women on the toilet.  I don’t know if it’s true or not true, but it’s disturbing.

It starts as a wonderful thing.  

Way back in 1944, on the way to his teenage crime spree in Kansas, Chuck and friends stop at the Southern Aire Restaurant in Wentzville.  They aren’t allowed inside.  They eat from paper plates at the back door.   Then, decades later, he buys the place.  I see him on the Johnny Carson show inviting the world to his restaurant.  He seems happy.  He promises to be there most nights.  I want to go.

But something awful happens.    There’s a confusing string of allegations from a couple of disgruntled former employees.  They say he’s a drug dealer.  Cops descend on Berry Park and tear it apart looking for drugs but find little of consequence, and certainly no signs of drug dealing.  No charges are filed against Berry, but a lawsuit emerges charging that Berry hid cameras in the women’s room of the Southern Aire Restaurant.  The principal plaintiff is a woman who used to work there.  There are no criminal charges, and the lawsuit is eventually settled. 

I’ve read Bruce Pegg’s account with as much attention as I could manage.  The affair is so tawdry I find it difficult to read.  I’ve never figured out whether or not the allegations have a basis in truth.  I don’t want to know.  In my heart of hearts, I assume the worst.

I don’t care much about the private life of my imaginary friend.  But I remember an old interview where he used Berry Park as the setting for a parable.  If you are alone in the Park, he said, you can do what you want, but if there are others there, you have to respect them.  They key, he said, is not to infringe on others.

If those hidden cameras in fact existed, they were obviously an infringement.  So who knows?  Without evidence, I go ahead and assume the worst.  It’s the worst I know of him, and it’s basically just pathetic.  

Once, not long ago, I picked up a biography of Elvis Presley for $3.  As a Chuck Berry fan I always resented the man people called “The King,” but I’m trying to get past it.  I never read the book, but I skimmed bits here and there at bedtime.  And that’s how I see it: 

“Few of the girls knew about the two-way mirror he had installed in the swimming pool cabana that served as a ladies’ dressing room.”  

See, there is the problem.  No one knows about the two way mirrors at Elvis’s place—it’s a short paragraph in a 700 page book—but a similar story about Chuck is all over the internet and was the subject of a major lawsuit.

Do I care?  If it’s true, I do.  

It fits.  He likes video.  He likes technical stuff.  He likes documentation. 

He’s a carpenter, a painter, and does his own work.  It might be true, so let’s assume the worst.  

Does it affect me?  Yes, more than the criminal convictions.

 Does it affect how I feel about him?  I guess it does.  It makes me sorry and uncomfortable—assuming it’s true.

But for me, as stupid as it sounds, he’s family.  I accept him as he is, with any faults and failures.  What else can I do?  He’s a second dad to me.

Which raises an interesting issue: my real father never did anything bizarre or unseemly— he just had a common addiction, and fell apart way too soon.  

So I’ve got work to do.



(This is part of a book length piece on Chuck Berry.  You can find the beginning to the right, or scroll down to find the next chapter.)

25