The Birth Of Loud

by Ian Port

  One night, after a fight with Les in a Chicago hotel room, Mary snuck out and boarded a flight to Los Angeles, seeking the warm embrace of her family. It took three weeks for Les to coax her back to New Jersey, where she found only the same misery she’d tried to leave behind. “I just don’t understand him at all,” Mary wrote in a letter to her parents. According to Les’s biographer Mary Shaughnessy, he told Mary that if she tried to divorce him, he’d seize custody of the children and leave her without a cent.

  But eventually Mary felt she had no other choice. On June 19, 1963, she escaped Mahwah and flew to California, where her oldest sister greeted her in the airport, aghast at her sibling’s look of despondency. The next month, Mary filed for legal separation from her husband of nearly fourteen years, accusing Les Paul of cruelty and a failure to support her.

  Les was deeply wounded at this rejection and responded by having Mary trailed by private detectives, according to Shaughnessy. That fall, he countersued her, alleging in a widely reported-on complaint that Mary had “openly, publicly, and notoriously consorted with . . . other men,” even committed adultery with two she’d known before him. Les further accused her of abandoning their professional engagements, humiliating him in public, and boasting of her affections for other men.

  Reporters penned their breakup as a tale of juicy, illusion-puncturing gossip. Many adults could fondly recall the flush days of Les Paul and Mary Ford after the war but before rock ’n’ roll, the sweet couple and their Gibson solid-bodies appearing on tiny TV screens all over America. The two performers had embodied domestic bliss, inspiring optimism and a faith in technology. It seemed that a couple could work in showbiz, hit the highest echelons of stardom, and still live a wholesome life. But if the easygoing, creative domesticity of The Les Paul and Mary Ford Show had ever really existed, it was now gone for good.

  Two weeks after Les filed his countersuit, President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed while riding next to his wife in a Dallas motorcade, shocking the country out of any lingering postwar innocence. By the end of the next year, Mr. and Mrs. Guitar were also no more, the details of their divorce painfully public. Les won custody of their son, Robert, and planned to adopt Mary Colleen. Mary Ford got a settlement worth more than half a million dollars over a period of years, a sum that likely represented only a fraction of the couple’s wealth, though she’d been the voice and the face of their act. Though, undeniably, Les contributed numerous technical achievements and a knack for knowing what would sell, few would contest that much of what the couple actually sold was Mary’s warmth and charm, and the interplay that resulted from it. Les had talked and tinkered, but Mary had sung and smiled and swooped around her guitar with skill and grace. Without her, Les Paul would have been a brilliant sideman and a revolutionary guitarist with a host of creations to his name. But he never would have been a pop star.

  The only thing Mary Ford had wanted in her divorce from Les—custody of the children—she failed to get. The mischievous pastor’s daughter from Pasadena had long been sliding into alcoholism and depression as she fought with her husband over the future of their career. Legally separating from Les would end the stalemate that had caused her so much pain, but it would do nothing to halt her bouts of self-destruction.

  Les was now losing his longtime guitar maker as well as his wife and costar. He decided not to renew his Gibson endorsement, in part out of fear that Mary might try to claim some of his future income from the deal, but also because he just didn’t like the new model on which the company had slapped his name. After his contract expired, Gibson renamed that skinny guitar the SG. The thick, single-cutaway shape of the original Kalamazoo solid-body soon disappeared from the display windows of music stores and retreated to the racks of pawnshops. Everything about Les Paul—his music, his instrument, his stage act—at that moment seemed to be headed for obscurity. Les himself would shortly withdraw to his mountainside house in New Jersey, unaware that on the other side of the ocean, further unimaginable changes in music were taking shape.

  27.

  “WHERE YOU GOING, LEO?”

  ORANGE COUNTY, 1960–1962

  The village of Avalon sits on the southern end of Santa Catalina Island, some twenty-six nautical miles from Newport Beach. It’s a resort, a little hamlet of tourist shops and a casino encircling a gorgeous azure bay. A good place to get away from life on the mainland. Leo’s boat could make the trip in about two hours.

  It didn’t even feel like it took much effort that day. The summer sun peered down with seemingly infinite warmth, a glow that made the coastal waters of California look downright tropical—as crystal clear and blue-green as the waves on Hawaii, which Leo was coming to know well. He stood up on the bridge of his yacht, scanning the waters ahead for any sign of disturbance, watching the two-humped outline of Santa Catalina grow larger in front of him. Esther gazed out behind him, smiling in a dress, her hands gloved, her hair bundled under a neat scarf, as usual.

  On the bow, old friend and steel guitarist Noel Boggs, his wife, and their three teenage children were lying out on the deck, bodies soaking up the sun. Besides the sons of Leo’s sister, Wilda, Noel’s kids were the closest Leo and Esther had to their own. They gave Leo new screwdrivers and pliers for Christmas, swung by “the plant,” as everyone called it, with their father, and came out on the boat almost every long weekend. Though a first-rate country sideman, Noel Boggs was almost like a Fender employee, one of Leo’s closest advisers. Leo gave him a company car, a Ford station wagon, to help him transport the fifty-pound amplifier and forty-pound steel guitar that were his professional burden. And because Boggs was stricken with chronic road rage—and enjoyed a good gag—Leo wired up an ultra-loud “ahooga” horn so that Boggs could vent his frustration at other drivers.

  There was no frustration now. The Boggs family was lying on the bow of the boat, listening to the churn of the waves and the hum of the engine. From far back, they heard Esther’s voice, a chime in the breeze: “Where you going, Leo?”

  They looked and saw that he’d left the bridge and was scurrying forward through the cabin. A moment later, his skinny arm shot up through the deck and reached to close the hatch nearest them. But as Leo tried to pull the hatch closed, his little mustache crinkled in frustration. His tool pouch had gotten stuck, trapping him in the open space in the deck. The Boggs family watched amusedly as Leo fiddled and cursed to himself. Suddenly, they all felt the boat plunge downward. Then—splash: a wall of chilly salt water crashed over the bow, washing all the warmth off the sunbathers’ skin, smacking Leo in the face, and pouring into the stateroom where he was standing.

  Boggs and his kids rubbed their eyes and tried to figure out what had happened. Then they saw Leo, sopping wet, still in the hatch, and heard the high-pitched whine of his laughter. It was like a storm had come over him; he was laughing so hard that he’d started to cry. What the hell was so funny, Boggs asked. His wife was furious: They could have been washed away! Drowned!

  Between howls, Leo tried to explain. He’d seen the wave coming long ago from up on the bridge. He’d concocted a little plan to sneak up and close the hatch without warning Boggs and the kids, so they’d get a good smack from the swell. But the plan had hit a snag. As he reached for the handle to pull the hatch closed, his tool pouch had hooked him in place right as the boat hit the wave.

  Boggs was now guffawing just as hard as Leo. The two friends thought it was the funniest thing: Silly Leo had tried to pull a fast one on the family, tried to give them a good splash without getting his boat all wet inside. But he’d gotten caught right in the middle of his own plot.

  Leo had bought his first yacht in 1955. Over the next thirteen years, he’d purchase eight more, each time trading in his current model—usually just a year or two out of the boatyard—for a new one, and each time changing the Roman numeral after Aquafen on the stern. Just as with radios and then guitars and amplifiers, Leo became obsessed by the mechanical details of these vessels. Later years
would find him writing letters to the elite Stephens Brothers boatyard in Stockton, California, in which he discussed the minutiae of propeller shapes and battery alignment. Leo once wrote the boatyard saying that on plans it had sent, one bulkhead was shown three-eighths of an inch too high, and another was off by a half inch. A builder soon wrote back, “You were correct, they were a bit off.”

  His other hobby was photography. Leo had loved taking pictures since he was a boy, but he was now acquiring photographic equipment at a furious pace—first Leica cameras, later Nikons. He learned to process the thousands of rolls of film he shot both at work and on the increasingly lavish vacations he and Esther were able to take, to places like Hawaii and Alaska. In one sense, photography was a visual analogue to what Leo did in music: like the amplification of music, photography extended the aesthetic experience, made it accessible in a way the original never could be. It was a way to participate in a moment while remaining removed from it. There was also a deep appeal for him in simply capturing the physical world: many of Leo’s photographs weren’t of idyllic vacation scenes or his family, but of construction sites or technical objects like the gadgets on his boats.

  Even amid their newfound wealth, Leo and Esther lived in well-matched harmony, each spouse’s idiosyncrasies helping those of the other seem less unusual. In their quiet way, husband and wife adored each other. To most eyes, they would have seemed hopelessly stodgy, the total opposite of rock ’n’ roll: Leo with his perpetual tool pouch and pocket protector, and plain, dusty work clothes; Esther with her matching gloves, a leather handbag that sat upright on her lap, and her habit of pulling her hair under a scarf during the windy crossings to Catalina. The couple didn’t drink, or smoke, or get out of control; nothing seemed to penetrate their veneer of privacy and reserve. Still, they radiated a kindness and an odd sense of humor that inspired loyalty from their inner circle.

  Fender researcher Geoff Fullerton, George’s son, remembers being at Leo and Esther’s house—the second house they owned, a spacious ranch built in 1960—for a dinner party. After the meal, Esther rolled out a new tea cart, which she was obviously proud of. It was elegant and practical, enabling her to serve her guests efficiently. Leo had never seen the cart, so he immediately leaned over and started inspecting its mechanical parts. After a moment, he bolted upright. This tea cart was absolutely terrible, he announced to his wife and their guests. The wheels on it were shoddy, the whole contraption poorly built, and why would they bother owning something so inferior?

  Esther turned to her husband. “Well, hell, Leo,” she retorted. “I’m not going to ride it.”

  Everyone—everyone but him—erupted in laughter.

  Esther had been promoted from an operator to a manager at the phone company but found that her new position didn’t allow much time off. The Fender factory shut down for two weeks every year around the Fourth of July, and she and Leo could finally afford to travel. “Leo said there’s not much point in being married if you can’t ever find your wife to go anywhere,” his nephew Gary Gray recalled. So Esther went back to being an operator and left when she wanted for their cruises and trips.

  Having Esther present helped Leo feel more comfortable in social gatherings. The company’s growing success, and his and Esther’s tight circle of friends, had only somewhat eased his social awkwardness. “He didn’t know how to have polite conversation,” remembered Noel Boggs’s daughter, Sandy. “You would ask him a question and then he’d respond and then he would think about it, and twenty minutes later he would make a comment that would drop you dead it was so funny. Because he had thought about it, had processed it.”

  His quietness seemed to reflect confidence, and his talents attracted total loyalty from factory hands like George Fullerton, Forrest White, and Freddie Tavares. Sandy Boggs remembers watching him at the plant, working on a technical problem with a few employees. “He would be listening to the conversation the whole time, everyone would be yabbering about, ‘Well, this is the problem, this is this, and this is that.’ And it would be like he’d just lift up something and fix it. All of a sudden it would be perfect, and people would stand there with their mouths open. He didn’t do it to show off or show them. It [was] like, ‘Oh I just figured it out, thank you. You were saying all these words, and I heard them all, and here it is.’ ”

  To most employees, though, Leo Fender was the solitary genius whose research-and-development lab occupied all of the Fender factory’s Building Six. He was a legend, a specter. One day, a new arrival named Babe Simoni was asked to take some boxes over to Building One on a handcart. A sturdy seventeen-year-old with a quick temper, Simoni stacked up the cart and started pushing the swaying load at high speed toward its destination. On the way he nearly crashed into an older employee, who jumped back about three steps to avoid getting run over.

  “Don’t you think you could probably handle that a little bit better if you didn’t take quite as much?” the older man asked.

  “If you think you can do better than me, why don’t you just take it down to Building One,” Simoni shot back.

  The man just scratched his head and walked away. When Simoni got to Building One, the stock clerk there glared at him. “What the heck did you do?”

  “What?” Simoni said.

  “Don’t you know that guy you’re talking nasty to out there, that’s Leo Fender!”

  Simoni had no idea. Many Fender employees would have similar experiences, realizing with a start that the quiet figure who hovered behind them was born with the name they emblazoned on every product. Abigail Ybarra, a young lady of Mexican heritage, had been hired by George Fullerton at first to grind frets for guitars. Later she moved to winding pickups, a skill for which she’d eventually acquire an international reputation. Working at Fender wasn’t really like a job, she thought. There were hardly any rules as long as you got your work done. You could talk to your coworkers, walk around barefoot on hot days, adjust your hours if you needed to. At first, she figured the older guy in khakis with all the keys must be a maintenance man. But at Christmas, he rolled around a wheelbarrow filled with candy bars and gum and cigarettes, letting everyone take anything they wanted. A few Christmases later, Leo Fender was handing out whole hams and three-pound boxes of See’s Candies to every employee.

  Success had arrived; by the early sixties, that was unquestionable. But people like Noel Boggs and George Fullerton worried that Leo had never given much thought to what success would mean—for him. With Forrest White managing the factory, Leo had won the freedom to largely disappear into his lab and design new products. Yet he still bore ultimate responsibility for the organization, and the burden wore on him in ways that a new boat or a trip to Hawaii couldn’t ease. Even with his hobbies and his huge Chrysler and his comfortable house, Leo struggled to sleep at night, his mind consumed by problems at the factory. His ulcers worsened. His strep infection, the one he’d picked up back in 1955, still hadn’t gone away. At fifty-three years old, Leo Fender could have anything he wanted—anything, it seemed, except peace of mind.

  28.

  “PRONE TO LOOSE TALK”

  FULLERTON, 1962–1963

  In 1963, none of Fender’s handful of salesmen earned less than $35,000, the equivalent of more than $270,000 today. One had earned $100,000 for more than three years straight, nearly all of it on commission. The company hadn’t hired a new salesman since 1957, and in that time sales had grown by about 600 percent. If the sales reps were doing a good job, Don Randall was happy to let them keep their territory. Mike Cole, who handled the East Coast, owned a sportfishing yacht that he kept down in Florida.

  Nine rectangular buildings stretched across the Fender factory’s three-and-a-half-acre plot, but all of that space—some seventy thousand square feet inside—still wasn’t enough. With no room indoors, finished amplifiers in their cardboard shipping crates were stacked outside the factory buildings in the dry Fullerton sunlight to wait for a truck to take them away. The perpetual struggle betwe
en the Fender factory and sales office was approaching a crisis, as the plant struggled to keep up with orders. By the following year, the company backlog was pegged at fourteen to sixteen weeks for many products, estimated at $1.5 million. Randall had to tell the salesmen not to take orders for more amps and guitars than they thought the factory could produce.

  Leo rented other buildings around Fullerton to get more space, but things just kept growing. Fender started an acoustic division, with instruments designed by a German luthier named Roger Rossmeisl, who’d built hollow-body electric guitars for Rickenbacker. That needed a plant. For some years, Leo had been intrigued by the experiments of a fellow tinkerer named Harold Rhodes, who was trying to build an electric piano. The technology was enormously complex, and most everyone but Leo and Harold thought it would go nowhere, but Leo invested anyway. That project needed space.

  George Fullerton would now wake up in the middle of the night, terrified he’d forgotten to lock one of the factory doors. There was a chain-link fence around the parking lot these days for security, but that didn’t help him sleep. He’d replay Leo’s admonition in his mind. “Are you sure everything’s locked? You’re really sure?” It took an hour every morning and every night to unlock and lock up, with two men doing it: George Fullerton and Forrest White, who had other projects aplenty, and hated each other besides.