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Nashville
Tennessean - Interview with journalist and
book reviewer Jonathan Marx. Sunday, June 1,
2008
The
eldest son of singer Tennessee Ernie Ford,
Nashvillian Jeffrey Buckner Ford, is the author
of River of No Return: Tennessee Ernie Ford and
the Woman He Loved. Published by local imprint
Cumberland House, the book chronicles Ford's
astounding popular success in the 1950s and '60s
while also conveying the often painful realities
of life in a family touched by celebrity. More
than a biography, the book offers a firsthand
view from someone who was there to experience
many of the highs and lows.
What do you hope readers
will remember about Ernie Ford after reading
this book?
That he was a simple man,
an ordinary man who, along with the woman he
loved, was caught up in and changed forever by
an extraordinary life.
River of No Return seeks
to strike a balance between biography and
memoir. Did you struggle with figuring out how
much of yourself to put in the book?
Yes. I began this book in
1979, just after the birth of our first child.
Both my parents were still alive then. When I
pitched it to an agent in New York, the concept
initially was a great deal more based in my own
life as it related to theirs. But as I matured
as a man, a father, a husband and a writer, I
realized the story that needed to be told was
not my own. Because what it is, really, is a
love story between these two people — but I was
there for part of it. I'd love to be able to
coin a genre — memoigraphy — but that
sounds like a medical procedure.
Your book begins with
your father's death, and it closes with your
mother's death. Was writing a way of coming to
terms with their loss?
When you face crises in
your life with your eyes fully open, it is a
growth and learning and humbling experience. I
was forced to chronicle incidents in my life
that I remembered with great pain, but I needed
to record them in such a way that it was correct
on the page, and that made the process doubly
difficult.
"Darkness Visible", William
Styron's own memoir of his passage through
depression was a case study for me in how
someone could take something that was traumatic,
and make moving through those incidents almost
like an exorcism.
Could you talk about the
ways your mother, Betty Jean Ford, occupied such
a singular role in your father's life?
They were molecularly tied
to each other. Like a yin and yang symbol, where
one is balanced with the other, the truth is
also that the two are completely opposite, and
yet they must coexist. Everything that Ernie
Ford was, from Sept. 18, 1942, until the day he
passed away was in great part because of who
Betty Ford was. The influence she had on him was
undeniable; the division and rancor between them
was as pronounced as it was in their later years
because of how integrally connected they were. I
couldn't tell the story of any part of Ernie
Ford's life without telling the story of Betty
Ford.
In one passage, you
meditate on the word "intoxicated," and the
various ways that played out in your family's
life. Do you see this book as a substance abuse
narrative?
There's a common thread of
substance that passes through much of the story,
and occasionally in the thread there's a little
knot of abuse in there. It's a narrative of a
number of lives that were dramatically affected
by the abuse of alcohol and pharmaceuticals. But
it's not a narrative about that — it's a
narrative about lives affected by that.
Your father was born and
raised in Bristol, Tenn. Can you talk about how
the state of Tennessee figured into his life?
Dad for all practical
purposes stopped being a Tennessean the day his
bus arrived in San Diego at the beginning of
World War II. He returned on an occasional
basis, and those occasions increased in
frequency in the later years of his life, but
for most of his life, he didn't come back often.
The impact that the state and its people had in
his life made him culturally and probably
socially more of a Tennessean than a
Californian, but there is great truth to the
legend that if you place your feet in the waters
of the Pacific, those waters will replace your
blood, and you will forever return there.
Tennessee gave him a sense of identity as a
person. Here was this man who could speak as
lovingly about sugar-cured ham as he could about
performing at the Hollywood Bowl. When he did
come back to Tennessee more in his later years,
I think he did so primarily because he felt a
responsibility to ensure that he not forget
where he came from.
—INTERVIEW BY JONATHAN
MARX, STAFF WRITER
Thanks, Jonathan...
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