Lisa Rogak - A Boy Named Shel: The Life and Times of Shel Silverstein

Also by Lisa Rogak

The Man Behind the Da Vinci Code:
An Unauthorized Biography of Dan Brown

The Life & Times of
Shel Silverstein

Lisa Rogak

Thomas Dunne Books
St. Martins Press New York

THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

An imprint of St. Martins Press.

A BOY NAMED SHEL . Copyright 2007 by Lisa Rogak. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martins Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.thomasdunnebooks.com

www.stmartins.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rogak, Lisa, 1962

A boy named Shel : the life and times of Shel Silverstein / Lisa Rogak.1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN-13: 978-0-312-35359-9

ISBN-10: 0-312-35359-6

1. Silverstein, Shel. 2. Authors, American20th centuryBiography. 3. ArtistsUnited StatesBiography. 4. Humorists, American20th centuryBiography. I. Title.

PS3569.I47224Z85 2007

818.5409dc22

2007028110

First Edition: November 2007

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A Boy
Named
Shel

A Boy
Named
Shel

For Don McKibbin, aka the Don
You cut the rug better than guys one-tenth your age

When I was growing up in the suburban New Jersey of the 60s, going to diners with my father was my favorite thing in the world. Once we settled into the red Naugahyde banquette, Id order a cheeseburgerregardless of the time of dayand hed sit across from me, one hand around a cup of Sanka, the other holding a Kent cigarette.

For other kids, the highlight of the diner meal came with the chance to stand slack-jawed in front of a brightly lit glass carousel that displayed a variety of colossal desserts. But for me it was the moment my father would slide a quarter across the greasy Formica and say I could pick any song Id like from the chrome jukebox at the end of the booth. Id grab the coin, spin it into the slot, and stand up on the banquette in my Buster Browns, reaching for the wheel that flipped each page of selections with a metallic click.

After years of camping out in establishments along Routes 4 and 17, we had the ritual down pat. We went through the motions at every diner, even though we both knew there was only one song I wanted to hear: The Unicorn by the Irish Rovers. At five plays for a quarter, Id punch in the same letter-number combinationE-2 or D-4, just like bingofive times in a row. My job done, Id settle back down into my seat and wait for the song to begin, my pulse racing until Id heard my favorite line from the song: humpty-backed camels and some chimpanzees.

A few of the patrons would inevitably start grumbling around the third or fourth time the song played, but I didnt care. Id sit with a big grin on my face, my heels kicking the booth to keep time while my half-eaten burger grew cold. All the while, my father sat drinking and puffing, gray tendrils of smoke gathering in patchy clouds above his head.

When I discovered that Shel Silverstein had written The Unicorn back in 1962the year of my birthI knew I had found the subject of my next biography.

To a majority of the English-speaking world, the man they knew as Shel Silverstein was a childrens book author with a special gift for conveying both the frustrations of childhood and the fantasy power trips of ten-year-olds in quirky verse that would have both parent and child laughing out loud. His rhymes were accompanied by squiggly-lined cartoons that always seemed to be drawn by a slightly trembling hand.

But few fans of A Light in the Attic and The Giving Tree realize that Shel was truly a Renaissance man. Indeed, he created twangy country-and-western tunes, experimental theater productions, drug- and sex-infused pop songs, and semiautobiographical travelogues for Playboy, sometimes all in the same week. Regardless of what he did, he never much cared about what other people thought of him, his work, or his unconventional, footloose lifestyle.

Shel was a very private person, which as a biographer, I found to be a real challenge at times and heartening at others. Some of his friends spoke intimately and openly about the times they spent with Shel. Others, knowing his penchant for privacyhe stopped giving media interviews in 1975, making only rare exceptions through the end of his lifedeclined to speak with me, perhaps thinking that they would incur Shels great wrath when they met up with him again in the afterlife. He was ultrasensitive about being used for his celebrity, which he always maintained was a figment of other peoples imaginations, though he was never beneath using his influence to further the career of a friend who was as much a purist about her art as he was about his.

When it came to his friends, he was fiercely loyal. And he rewarded fidelity in others by giving himself to themhis stories, his attention, his uniqueness. As more than one person told me, When Shel talked to you, he made you feel like you were the only person in the world.

Then again, his voice just might have had something to do with it. When you hear Shels voice for the first time, you immediately begin to wonder if the record label executives who rubber-stamped his albums in the 1950s and 60s were partially deaf. One friend compared his voice to that of a creaking door or a rusty gate. He does sound a little like hed been chainsmoking for six straight weeks, but he doesnt smoke at all, said his friend William Cole in the liner notes for Shels 1962 album, Inside Folk Songs. The closest approach I could make to his tonal quality is that it resembles the noisethe yelpmade by a dog whose tail has been stepped on.

The thing that I like is something else, Shel once said.

His attention span ran from nil to nonexistent. If Ritalin existed when Shel was growing up in the 1930s and 40s, its doubtful his body of work would have become as rich as it is.

He was determined to cram as much into each day as possible, and every new person he met, every encounter he had with a friend or a stranger, and everything he inadvertently heard come out of someones mouth was a potential song, cartoon, play, or story. Upon witnessing something that struck him, hed have to sit down wherever he was, whip out his pad and pen, and start work at that very second. And even if he didnt know what the material would eventually turn out to be, it was at least important enough for him to write down a few notes. If he ran out of paper, hed start in on the napkins in a fancy restaurant, then move on to the tablecloth. When he had that completely covered, or if he was walking down the street, hed start doodling on his hands, his shirtsleeves.

He created for the sheer joy of it and couldnt understand people who drew, wrote, painted, or sang for anything but their own pleasure. He did have his doubts and insecurities, like any artist, but his flow was rarely curtailed, and he lacked the internal censors that cause other creative types to sweat over each line, word, or note before sending it through the pen and onto paper, if indeed, they ever did. In fact, Shel was evocative of another artist who was likewise prolific in his own day: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. (In the 1984 movie Amadeus, Salieri, Mozarts nemesis, describes the wunderkind as composing with such ease and speed, it was as if he were taking dictation from God. More than a few times in conversation, Ive described Shels creative process in identical terms.)