Word: mckuen
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...McKuen's absence from the TV screen until then was a matter of his own choice. He had turned down every offer to do a television special until he could do it on his own terms: a half-hour one-man show over which he had total control and no interference...
...show had impressive sparseness. Wearing a formless sweater, black pants and sneakers, McKuen kept the talk to a discreet minimum and spent his time singing his songs-The World I Used to Know, a medley of Stanyan Street, Lonesome Cities and Listen to the Warm -and reciting a poem about one of his few New York friends, A Cat Named Sloopy. He wandered through a set that seemed to have been plucked from a haunted harbor on San Francisco Bay. If the fog spewing out of the NBC special-effects machine looked at times as if it were going...
Rootless Childhood. The "Loner" title was corny but appropriate. McKuen has led his life mostly apart from others. He was born into the Depression in a Salvation Army hospital in Oakland, Calif., shortly after his father had deserted the family. His mother worked as a waitress, a telephone operator and a dime-a-dance hostess until her marriage to a "cat-skinner"-the operator of Caterpillar tractors on Government road projects. McKuen was hauled from one construction site to another throughout the West and Northwest until, at age eleven, he split from his family and spent four years drifting...
After serving during the Korean War, he appeared at the Purple Onion in San Francisco. Then he signed with Universal as a player in a few forgettable beach epics. "I never sat through one of my pictures," McKuen recalls. "It wasn't so much that they were bad. It's just that they were so terribly dull." Universal dropped him, and he headed East. "I was desperate. I lived off selling my blood. Or putting on my blue suit and going to hotels and crashing conventions for the canap...
...times were hard, but McKuen had a sweet tenor voice. In 1961 he wrote the music for a song that became a hit, The Oliver Twist. Capitalizing on his success, he set off on the road, doing 80 cities in eight weeks and singing his heart out. He sang so hard that his vocal cords were irreparably damaged; he was told that he would never sing again. But McKuen kept on, even though the tenor voice was replaced by a hoarse croak...