Me & Mrs. Jones

For those of you who saw Tom Jones on the “American Idol” finale and are new to the blog and my story, have a renewed interest in the singer, (known as The Voice long before the British or American version of that TV show with the same name), I encourage you to check out his two latest original CDs, 24 Hours and Praise and Blame.  You will be amazed at the range, tone, and texture of his big, rich voice.  On June 7, Jones will hit the age of 71, and he has, indeed, raised the bar for “aging pop stars” in terms of the quality of vocals and the desire to keep working purely for the love of singing.  

Let’s go back to the 70s, when as a super-tall young woman, I felt like the Jolly Green Giant, a frequent misnomer given to me – huge, visible, and vulnerable to the world.  Sometimes, I felt like a flea – a small speck, burrowing into whatever safe host I could find, such as my house, my room, and my car.  At all of these “safe” places, The Voice was with me, singing my heart full and occupying my mind.   

Tom Jones Florida 1972

That was the thing about Tom Jones.  Because he was on TV, on the radio, and on my stereo, I could listen to him in the comfort of all of my safety zones.  For the most part, I could live my life comfortably in the safety of my own home with Tom Jones.  And then, because he was so accessible, (I’ve looked through a thesaurus and this is the only word that really describes it), I could somehow muster up the courage to leave my safety zone and venture out to the man, or should I say, superstar I put all of my hopes and dreams upon.   

I didn’t understand this need to disappear from the world.  I just knew that unfamiliar places and unfamiliar faces were not “safe” and caused me to feel such anxiety that I would have panic attacks.  But, if I was going to make Tom Jones fall in love with me, I knew I had to learn how to be around a lot of people and learn to talk with people.  So I had to work harder be more comfortable with my peers; do something as simple as accept a piece of gum from a fellow student, instead of keeping my distance and saying “No, thank you” to everything.  I was very good at saying “No, thank you” to everything, including living life.  You can’t really live life if you hide. 

I remember one day reading one of my mother’s ladies’ magazines, like Redbook or Good Housekeeping.  There was an article about something I had never heard of before called agoraphobia.  Say what?  Agoraphobia?  I wasn’t even sure how to pronounce it, let alone understand what it was and determine if it related to my life.  I got the phobia part – fear, my constant companion.  It was defined as a fear of being in open or public places.  It also included fear of unknown people, fear of traveling to unfamiliar places, fear of separation from certain close relationships, as well as fear of having a panic attack in a situation from which there is no perceived escape.  Uh oh.   

That pretty much lumped all of my fears and social anxiety with panic attacks into one big category and left me feeling a bit bereft.  At first, I thought I was a huge hot mess with a label.  But then, I felt relief.  For years, I thought that because I had all of these strange and awkward feelings that no one else I knew had, it meant I was crazy.  This little article I just happened to come across gave me freedom from that crazy label, and let me know that there were others who felt like I felt… and survived and thrived.  So there was hope!    

It did seem to explain why I couldn’t go to Tom Jones venues as an independent young woman, like when he taped “The Midnight Special.”  I got a call saying that he would be taping the show at NBC studios in Burbank.  Perfect.  It would give me an opportunity to try to spread my wings.  Or not.  Nope.  I couldn’t drive the freeways.  Remember, this was in the Dark Ages of the 70s with no cell phone or GPS to provide assistance or aide.  The mere thought of driving to Alameda Avenue, not far from Hollywood, a not-so-easy drive for anxious me made me start to shiver and shake.  Gratefully, I didn’t have to work too hard to twist my sisters’ arms to join (and drive) me.   

“The Midnight Special” stage was just a simple box stage close to the ground and the audience.  The audience, small and mostly women, actually sat on the floor – thank heavens we three sisters wore pants.  There were lots of lights and multiple cameras on wheels, with one cameraman who kneeled with and walked through the audience with a huge, hand-held camera.  There were lots of professionals on the sidelines, and a non-famous “host” who introduced the real host, Tom Jones, and his guest, Chuck Berry. 

The first part of the taping was Chuck Berry’s solo.  He was, well, wild.  He was fun and funny and wild.  He really worked at pumping up the audience to get them to engage in Chuck Berryville, even though it was a big Tom Jones audience.  And he could play that guitar like no man’s business!  I remember being totally impressed how he won over that TJ fan base during his musical moments.  It was fun, too, when Jones came out and did his duet with Berry.  There was no separation between age, race, or style – they were soul singers. 

Chuck Berry disappeared, and Tom Jones appeared to tape his voice introductions, segues, and voiceovers.  It was fun to be part of this show business side, with the non-famous host telling us when to be quiet, when to laugh, and when to applaud.  Tom was, as usual, very cute and polite to women who would try to speak to him during the taping, but this gig was serious and down-to-business.  I imagine they felt they had to run a tight ship due to the small, intimate quarters in which audience members could potentially get out of control.  As usual, Jones delivered pitch-perfect performances.   

Sitting Indian-style on the floor I looked like everyone else, but standing up, I stood out like a sore thumb.  I discovered that when anything related to Tom Jones, I did not want to disappear like camouflage; I liked being six-foot-two and heads above the rest.  I wanted him to see me.  How else was I going to get him to fall in love with me and take me from feeling less smart, less beautiful, less normal than others to feeling special and worthy of the love of a superstar?  How else would I be vindicated from the bullies?  How else would I find value and worth if not through someone whose voice gave me permission to feel every emotion I had experienced and could imagine.  And so, whenever he was taping and the audience could stand up, I was up, up, up, heads above all. 

I don’t know if Jones noticed me that night of “The Midnight Special.”  I put on my best Snow White, AKA Long Tall Sally, smile, as if he might.  But, I began to notice something around this time frame.  It had to do with Mrs. Jones and how she had virtually disappeared.  At the beginning of Tom Jones’ career, there were pictures and taped pieces, and she was a definite presence in the media.  And then, like a Marilyn Monroe whisper, Mrs. Jones quietly disappeared.  There were no more photographs and rare sightings.  She just disappeared.   

Mrs. Jones and Mr. Jones in Bermuda 1970s

I was young and I didn’t know much about Mrs. Jones, except what Jones reported about his wife not liking the limelight.  I could, however, recognize the signs of someone who disappears.  Because of my own challenges, I could sense the presence of something more than not liking the public life.  I cannot say I know what went on in Mrs. Jones world, but I have the utmost compassion for anyone who hides.  It is not easy.  It is lonely.  Family and friends who love you the most don’t understand.  What seems so easy for them becomes a death-grip conflict for you.  Your struggle becomes a family struggle. 

The fame and fortune that was a blessing to Tom Jones and his family may have driven his beautiful, loving, and beloved wife inward.  How could a young Welsh mother who didn’t finish high school but worked to help support the family, while her husband pursued his passion keep up with a husband who transcended his Welsh coal-mining destiny to travel the world and eventually meet with presidents and queens? How does that wife and mother, whose only child eventually travels full-time with his father, and then essentially focuses his own career on his father, cope?   

Only decades later has the media swirled around the word “agoraphobia” and linked it to Mrs. Jones.  Even when he was knighted Sir Tom Jones by Queen Elizabeth II in 2006, Mrs. Jones was missing.  Simon Hattenstone  interviewed Jones and wrote, “They’ve been apart a lot, he says.  ‘But we are still in love with each other… we are still in tune with each other, we can still have fun, we still talk.  She’s still the Welsh girl I married.’  He says Linda is shy, agoraphobic.  When he has well-known friends around, she hides.” (Mail Online 11/08)  I can imagine the myriad reasons Mrs. Jones began to disappear, and understand how difficult it would be, as a spouse of a public figure, to identify something that would help transition her out of a private, self-made prison and out into the world again. 

Ironically, for me, Mrs. Jones’ husband was one pathway out of my fears, anxiety, and hiding.  I later realized that a lot of my fears were based on lack of ego strength, and my quest to get Tom Jones to fall madly in love with me was all about building up that ego.  How on earth did a shy, scared, skinny girl unwittingly pick Tom Jones to help her build a sense of self?  Because The Voice and his music were there to comfort me 24/7; because he was the epitome of manly self-confidence; because as big as he was at the height of his career, he was still accessible.   

Tom Jones was that special someone who had that special something that was important enough to draw me out of my private, self-made prison and out into the world.  Although prayer was my main source of hope, listening to Tom Jones’ recordings, seeing him sing live at concerts, and visiting him backstage or elsewhere, was as close to therapy as I got in the therapy-was-not-so-acceptable 70s.  Tom Jones was the catalyst in which my desire to become stronger, less fearful, and more mature was made possible, in part, by my strong attachment to him.  And all of the “baby steps” I took in order to become the type of person I hoped he would fall in love with, allowed me to ever so slowly begin the ego-building process.  It was singer-saved-me therapy made possible by… the singer who saved me.

 

“Hello. Is that Snow White?”

The Tom Jones fire was alive, but the next trip Mommio and I took to Vegas was not  exactly the trip we planned.  We flew in on a Hughes Air bright banana yellow jet, (what was Howard Hughes thinking?), and went back to Caesar’s Palace.  Mother wasn’t  feeling well, so we went straight to the hotel room so she could lie down before we went to the Friday night dinner show.  As we dressed, I was nervous, because my mother was my rock, my right hand, my wing-woman so-to-speak.  Even though I was now a grown, mature-looking 20-year-old, I depended on her like I depended on Tom Jones – only lots, lots more.

All performance photos – Ceaser’s Palace, Las Vegas

In my family we kept all of our physical ailments private, so no one really knew that both Mom and I suffered from chronic, “sick” headaches.  Mom was determined to make it to the first show, so we put on our make-up and our evening gowns and headed downstairs for the dinner show.  In the elevator, we ran in to some of Jones’ musicians.  This was in the old days when he traveled with bandleader, Johnnie Spence, guitarist “Big” Jim Sullivan, well known from Jones’ TV show, other key players, and a rather large orchestra.

Mother, being extremely friendly and sociable, asked the musicians if they played for Tom, and struck up a light and friendly conversation with them.  “Where are you boys from?”  “How long have you been playing?”  The trumpet-player took an interest in me, and said, “I’ll look for you after the sets this weekend.”  Mom and I giggled after he left, both of us knowing full well without having to say it, that she would never, ever, for a moment, consider letting her underage daughter go out with a musician in “Sin City.”  Remember, Vegas in the 70s was not the family friendly Vegas of today.

What the trumpet player didn’t know, and what Mother didn’t know, (or did she?), was that I only had eyes for Tom Jones.  I mean, come on, when Tom Jones is the first man you have ever kissed, and you meet him when you are a teenager, why wouldn’t you think that maybe you had just an itty-bitty, eensy-teensy, tiny-winy little chance?   Helloooo, silly girl, because he was Tom Jones?  Because he was a superstar?  Because he was married?  Because I wasn’t in his league?  Because I was so young, so tall, so shy, so sensitive, so anxious, so…  Oh, puhleeze!  That didn’t stop me.

Onward, to the pre-show routine of slipping Jesse the maitre d’ a few “dollahs” to get close to the stage.  We ate the preliminary meal, and Mother chatted the preliminary Tom-chat with our table-mates, such as “Have you seen him perform before?”  I sat quietly.  Getting to the foot of the stage at Caesar’s Palace was the culmination of another year’s worth of motivating mantras that pushed me beyond my comfort zone.  My goal was to look and act “normal,” rather than like the girl who hides in her house, and only crawls out in order to go to college and church and a few other designated “safe places.”  My goal was to get to this time and this place where I could believe, even if for a moment, that when Tom Jones sang “She’s a Lady,” he was looking at and singing that song to me.  (Weren’t many of us smitten fans thinking that?) 

Mother and I were equally enthralled when Jones jumped onto the stage.  Jones and The Voice were like the Pied Piper to me, at once hypnotizing and energizing, and I found myself standing and asking him to autograph the blank page of my photo album (currently seen on my blog home page).  Where did that courage come from?  He teased me a bit, in a good way – a kind of a playful, flirtatious way.  No bullying from Tom Jones.  He made me want to say to all of the bullies, “See, this man finds me attractive.”  Hmmm… a recurring theme of finding self-worth through attachment to someone considered special.

This first show was the perfect way to start our TJ Vegas trip, but as soon as we got back to the hotel room, Mother went to bed for the rest of the weekend.  Uh oh.  This was big trouble for me, because I was petrified to do anything independently.  We kept the curtains drawn, the lights low, and had room service for the rest of our stay.

Mommio encouraged me to go out to the huge Caesar’s Palace pool the following day.  What was a normal activity for everyone was a challenge for me.  There was a lot of anxiety around leaving the safety of the hotel room; fear of going in the elevator by myself; fear of getting lost in the huge hotel (and it’s even bigger and better today).  Once I found the pool, there was fear of getting a towel from the pool boy.

Then came the ultimate nerve-wracking experience of taking off the cover-up to reveal the endless skinny girl legs. This was decades before Bethenny Frankel coined the Skinnygirl brand name and being a skinny girl became a good thing.  I tried to act normal and relaxed while sitting in a chaise lounge in a bikini.  But, I’m sorry, I wasn’t relaxed in my body when it was covered from head to toe, let alone, sitting in a bikini by myself poolside.  I don’t think there are too many people who feel relaxed in a little bikini.  Well, maybe Tom Jones.  But he was exceptionally fit and trim – and a bit of an exhibitionist.

The not so shy, Mr. Jones

I was not going to go to the second night’s shows in Vegas because Mommio was still sick, and I was too timid to go to a show by myself.  She kept encouraging me to get dressed “just to see.”  Mothers.  That’s how they lure you in to doing things you think you can’t do.  So I got dressed in my kelly-green “hot-pants,” a little one-piece jersey jumpsuit, (it was the 70s and short-shorts, as they are now called, were “in”), and black patent boots, that had to be “taken in.” That’s right, my legs were so thin that Anthony the cobbler had to take out inches on each side of both boots.

I was so nervous and self-conscious that much of the night seemed like an out-of-body experience.  Throughout the evening I had mini-panic attacks, but I was getting better at not letting anyone see what was going on in my body or my mind.  I managed to pay the “toll” to sit down front. People probably thought I was aloof, even though I was actually nauseous with fear and probably would have started crying if anyone had tried to engage me in real conversation.  There was anxiety due to not having my designated “safe” person with me.  Anxiety due to all of the attention I was getting wearing the very “hot” hot-pants.  And anxiety related to being completely out of my element; the outside didn’t really match the inside.  I was a faint-hearted young lady, and not the sexpot I had dressed to portray.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is… Tom Jones!”  The moment he began to sing, all of my fears melted.  I didn’t know it at the time, but the sound of his voice was my “relaxation response” that Herbert Benson describes in his book, The Relaxation Response.  All of the tension in my body dissipated.  His power on stage seemed to act as a defibrillator on my weakness; a magnetic force that allowed me to breathe in Tom Jones, breathe out Tom Jones, and feel stronger.  I felt a degree of confidence I normally didn’t feel.

After Jones’ hello to the audience and a corny joke, (I think all of his fans love his cute, corny jokes), about how Las Vegas reminds him of his youth in Wales because, “When you work in the coal mine you don’t get to see much daylight, (pregnant pause), and it’s the same thing here.”  Then, from out of the blue, while he was hydrating his throat with his own drink, Tom Jones asked the table, my table, “Everything alright?”  How’s Snow White treating you?  She okay?”  I got the impression he was talking about me, and as shocked as I was, I gave out a vibe in a whatever Lola wants, Lola gets manner that told him I knew what I wanted, and it was him.  Then he raised his glass, looked directly at me, and said, “Cheers,” with a twinkle in his eye.

After he sang “She’s A Lady,” Jones again drank from his own glass, again looked at me and said, “Hello.  Is that Snow White?”  Now I knew he was talking about me.  “That she is that,” he continued.  Could he hear the Disney song waltzing through my brain?  Did he know he was my Prince Charming?  What would have happened if I had burst into singing “Someday My Prince Will Come”? (Song by Larry Morey and Frank Churchill.)  Forget my previous nickname – Long Tall Sally – I became Tom Jones’ Snow White during this Vegas sojourn and thereafter.  The dwarves asked their lady if she was a princess, and when Jones called me Snow White, I felt like a Princess with a capital “P.”

As I stood up to continue the conversation, he said, “It’s you again.”  This time I pulled out my photograph from the Greek Theater (seen in the post “Be Careful What You Wish  For”).  “I remember,” he said.  “I remember everything.  Well, (pregnant pause), nearly everything (audience laughter).”  As I handed him a pen, he asked, “What are you shaking for?  You were shaking last night, as well (more laughter).”  I was in Seventh Heaven before the kiss, which brought the house down with roars and cheers.  Despite a little shaking, I  realized I had made an impression on Tom Jones, the man whose voice had been my comfort and joy for years.

Now that Jones has been forthright about his less than perfect ways, and documented them in his song called “The Road,” from his CD, 24 Hours, I will, for the first time, admit that I had “heard” from the more groupie-side of his fan base, that sometimes someone was invited backstage on behalf of Jones.  A trusted Jones employee, whom I will call The Getter, would deliver the invitation.  As I left, still in the thrill of what my youthful mind saw as on-stage flirting, I saw him – The Getter – and he was looking at me, heading my way.

I panicked.  I started shaking.  I could barely breathe.  My chest was pounding – this was a full-blown, gale-force panic attack.  My endless legs, barely covered by my little hot pants and knee-high boots, automatically bolted, while my waist-length blonde hair fluttered in the wake of the speed at which I moved.  Forget Tom Jones, forget all of my hopes and dreams – I could not get up to the safety of the hotel room and my mother fast enough.

Of course, Mommio immediately wanted to know everything, and in my breathlessness I shared everything that went on.  Everything, except the come-hither-I-am-woman vibe I put out, and the incident with The Getter.  I knew that if I told anyone about those things, especially my mother, my Tom Jones concerts, future backstage visits, and the mere possibility for me to somehow get him to fall madly in love with me would have been immediately shut down.  Kaput.  Over.

As I lay in my hotel bed that night at Caesar’s Palace, I was so disappointed in myself.  I spent the dawn hours chastising myself for my childishness.  I couldn’t believe I ran.   But, I wasn’t ready.  I had enough insight to know that while the outside appeared to be sexy and sophisticated, I was far from being that Cosmo girl I was trying to depict.  I was still extremely immature, very naïve, and dare I say, innocent?  In fact, if I wanted to  hang with Tom Jones, I needed to get an education by reading Cosmopolitan magazine, or maybe even Sex and the Single Girl by Helen Gurley Brown.  Unfortunately Sex and the City author  Candace Bushnell was still a blink in her parents’ eyes.

I wondered how could I yearn for something so much, yet literally run from it?  Then it dawned on me.  Maybe the Getter wasn’t coming for me.  Oh no.  What was I thinking?  Tom Jones flirts with every female from age 5 to 95.  Maybe The Getter was going toward a celebrity or a business acquaintance that Jones was inviting backstage.  Oh no.  Alone in my bed I felt foolish and embarrassed.

There I was, a flesh and blood, 6-foot-two-inch blonde Snow White, muddling through a humdrum world surrounded by dwarves and dreaming about Prince Charming.  The Disney-animated, short brunette Snow White got her Prince Charming.  Even though I ran like the wind at twenty-years-old in Vegas, I still wanted my prince to be… the singer who saved me.