RIP Fess Parker

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OP-ED in NYT

After the Coonskin Cap

By BOB GREENE
Published: March 20, 2010

“WELL,” Fess Parker said, “it’s an interesting thing to live with.” He was talking about having been Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier. By the time we met, that was long gone. He was a real-estate man.

I was in Los Angeles and he had driven down from Santa Barbara. I was working on an interview on behalf of Esquire magazine, but the truth was, I just wanted to spend time with him. There were two figures who burst through America’s television screens in the 1950s and had an almost instantaneous chemical connection with the public: Elvis Presley and Davy Crockett. One of the two had been played by an actor.

By the early 1980s, Elvis was dead, and Mr. Parker was developing mobile-home parks. “Even after Davy Crockett,” he said, “when I would meet people — merchants, executives — I could tell that they thought what I did wasn’t worth much. They knew that what I had done was transitory, fading, momentary. They didn’t sense any accomplishment.”

They couldn’t have known what it had been like to be him: the sight of coonskin caps on every playground, the inability to walk down the street without being mobbed, the sound of “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” drifting out of radios in every city. National television was so new then that few fully recognized its power to transform a person’s life.

“There was a dinner in Washington honoring a retiring assistant secretary of defense,” Mr. Parker told me. “I was invited. I walked in wearing that coonskin cap and buckskin outfit.” That was a requirement of his employer, Walt Disney. Everyone else at the dinner was in formalwear. “I sat at that head table with that getup on,” he said, “and suddenly this line began to form in front of me. People just stood there staring.”

On a promotional visit to New Orleans, he said, “for 25 miles, the route was lined with cars, people waiting to see me — they said it was a bigger reception than Eisenhower got when he was there.” In Scotland, he said, “people pushed through the glass in a department store window.... There is nothing that prepares a man for something like that.”

He suffered physically from the frenzy: “When I started to do that job, I had never had a filling in any of my teeth. Within three years, I had 13. I think it must have been the tension. I was pulled off the set once, because there was some sort of Walt Disney night at the Hollywood Bowl. ... They put me onstage in my Davy Crockett cap and uniform, and they handed me a guitar. The Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra was behind me, and the Roger Wagner Chorale, and I was supposed to sing ‘Farewell to the Mountain.’”

His voice, as we spoke, was still that Davy Crockett voice; if there seemed to be a hint of wistfulness in it, that may have been mostly in the ear of the listener. The squint from the sides of lunchboxes and the fronts of trading cards, the squint that seemed to be forever gazing toward some elusive horizon, remained a part of him. He carried a briefcase, which sat by his feet.

He had hoped to have a long and serious film career. He went out and bought a copy of the play “Bus Stop”; he wanted to be considered for a role in the movie with Marilyn Monroe. “I asked Mr. Disney if I could do it. I think I still have my copy of the play in my library at home, with his note in it: ‘I don’t think this is a picture you ought to do. Walt.’”

Fess Parker died at age 85 last week. He was 57 at the time of our visit; with more than a touch of amusement, he told me there were days when “I’ll call some businessman, and I’ll try to leave a message with his 21-year-old secretary, and she’ll say, ‘Wes Parker? How do you spell that?’”

Bob Greene is the author of “Late Edition: A Love Story.”