Word: mckuen
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CHARLIE BROWN AND CHARLES SCHULZ (CBS, 8:30-9 p.m.). Co-Stars Schulz and Brown, live and in animation, with friends and admirers Astronaut Walter Schirra, the Royal Guardsmen (singing excerpts from Snoopy and the Red Baron), Vince Guaraldi (playing his composition Linus and Lucy) and Rod McKuen (growling out his theme music from a forthcoming Charlie Brown feature movie...
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...
More than Tony. With his voice gone, McKuen concentrated more on his lonely poetry and song writing. Every time he sang, it sounded as if he needed to clear his throat-but the husky croak had a strange appeal for people who were sick of slick styling. The books and records came flooding out-and sold. McKuen is hardly modest about it, but why should he be? He is deliberately vague about how much money he made last year ("Two million? Three million? Four million? I don't know"), but he claims proudly that he sold...
...newfound success, McKuen has been called banal; he has also been called the best contemporary songwriter in the U.S. Some put him down as the greatest put-on since Tiny Tim; others insist that he is the only American chansonnier. If being a loner rules out success and commercialism, then McKuen is obviously a phony loner. If it means preferring solitude to stereotyped stardom, then he is at least a contented iconoclast. Or, as he says: "If I'm still alone by now it's by design/I only own myself, but all of me is mine...