So there you are, shuttling your kids from soccer games to ballet lessons, with no time for yourself, and you look at your orthodontist husband or schoolteacher wife, and you think: is that all there is?   If you’re like me, you sigh and conjure up an image of an alternate life, perhaps as a pop star, where your first record was so good that it knocked the Beatles out of the #1 spot, won you a few Grammies, and led to a popular Vegas show that allowed you to hang out with Tom Jones and Elvis.  How cool would that have been?  Then your reverie dissipates, and you go back to your soccer-mom/dad-with-2.2 kids existence.

For a few select people, that reverie actually came true, but they could tell you about a second part that never appears in your dream, where the hits dry up, the studio contract expires, the crowds thin out.  If that had happened, could you have walked away and, like Lot, never looked back?  Or would you, like the gamblers who think the next hand or roll of the dice will bring a change in fortune, keep playing the Holiday Inn lounges in the Podunk towns, thinking the career revival is right around the corner?

I’m fascinated by those who walked away from success.  I don’t just mean head cases like the late Syd Barrett, who left Pink Floyd due to a combination of mental illness and drug abuse, and then lived with his mom in a boarded-up house for the last 35 years of his life.  I’m thinking of Greta Garbo, leaving Hollywood at age 35 and never setting foot on a film set for her final 50 years. I’m thinking of J.D. Salinger and Harper Lee writing classics that are beloved by readers everywhere, and then retreating to a silent, fiercely defended privacy.

Recently, I watched a where-are-they-now documentary about the 1980s porn film Debbie Does Dallas. The female lead, who used the stage name Bambi Woods, seemingly disappeared from the face of the earth shortly after the film. Rumors abounded that she had died from drug abuse.  The documentarians determined instead that she had more likely retreated to her small-town, Middle-American home and did not wish to be disturbed, and they decided to respect those wishes. 

However, most of the others involved with that film still work in the porn industry nearly 30 years later, even the male lead who’s now a single father and wonders how many of his neighbors have his old movies lying in their closets.  Sadly, they remind me of the old joke about the guy walking behind the circus elephants with a shovel.  When someone asks him why he doesn’t quit that disgusting job, he replies, “What, and give up show business?”

Roberta Lee Streeter walked away, and apparently never looked back.  If you’ve never heard of Bobbie Streeter, you might know her by her stage name, adapted from the title character of the 1952 film Ruby Gentry.  In August 1967, at age 23, Bobbie Gentry’s first single, “Ode to Billie Joe,” sold 700,000 copies in its first week, knocking (yes) the Beatles’ “All You Need is Love” out of the #1 spot and later earning her three Grammy Awards.  The arrangement (by Jimmie Haskell) was beautiful, from its first spare acoustic guitar notes, counterpointed by equally spare strings, all backing a sensual, surprisingly husky female vocal:

It was the 3^rd of June

Another sleepy, dusty Delta day

The lyrics really formed more of a short story, as a farm family, between bites of their biscuits and apple pie, matter-of-factly discusses young Billie Joe McAllister’s suicide leap off the Tallahatchie Bridge.  Contrasting the lurid event with the mundane details of farm life, the song gradually implies, but never confirms, the narrator’s romantic involvement with Billie Joe. In the penultimate verse, Mom relates what the preacher told her:

He said he saw a girl that looked a lot like you up on Choctaw Ridge

And she and Billie Joe was throwing something off the Tallahatchie Bridge

The unresolved lyrics made the song a phenomenon, and a national topic of conversation.  Everyone had an opinion about what was thrown from the bridge.  In fact, Capitol Records was initially reluctant to release the song, believing that it referred to an abortion.  The 1976 Hollywood movie portrays Billie Joe (Robby Benson) as torn between his love for Bobbie Lee and his homosexual impulses.   I’ve even read one analysis which links Gentry’s lyrics to the brutal 1955 racial murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till, whose battered body was also tossed into the Tallahatchie River.  Lucinda Williams, who sometimes performs “Billie Joe” in concert and cites Gentry as an influence, said the song “fit right into the Southern gothic tradition. It had that mystery, that darkness.” 

But to a 16-year-old Northern suburban boy who had never read William Faulkner or even heard of Flannery O’Connor, it was equally compelling.  It fueled his suspicion that, behind a family’s placid surface lay adult secrets, too raw to be discussed at the dinner table, but too powerful to be ignored.  And it didn’t hurt that it was sung by a pretty girl with dark hair as long as her skirt was short.

Gentry’s background was more complicated than you would expect.  Indeed, she was born in Mississippi, and spent much of her childhood with her grandparents, whose home had no electricity or indoor plumbing.  However, at 13, she joined her remarried mother in California, where she studied music at a conservatory and, atypically for a country performer, studied philosophy at UCLA.

As a result of her initial success, Gentry became a popular Vegas performer, which (yes) led to her sometimes hanging out with Tom Jones and Elvis.  She even had a summer variety series on CBS in 1974.  However, lightning rarely strikes twice in show business, and Gentry never again scored a Top 25 hit.  Shout!’s 2004 Chickasaw County Child: The Artistry of Bobbie Gentry, the most extensive of the Gentry compilations, verifies the public’s judgment.  There is a tendency toward overproduction in many of the tracks, while several more actually clone the opening notes of “Billie Joe.”  Still, there is good material here.  “Mississippi Delta,” originally intended as “Billie Joe”’s A-side, has a solid blues-rock energy;  “Bugs,” one of the “Billie Joe” clones, is a charming ditty about one of the humid South’s chief annoyances;  “Fancy” later became a #1 country hit for Reba McEntire.

Perfectly respectable performers have sustained careers on far thinner threads, but after a December 1978 appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, Gentry never again appeared on a stage.  And when, several months later, her divorce from Jim Stafford was finalized, for all intents and purposes, Bobbie Gentry ceased to exist, disappearing into the air like music from a distant stereo. Apparently, she returned to being just Bobbie Lee Streeter.

I say apparently, because, well, if you’re expecting me to tell you what she’s been doing for the last 30 years, I haven’t a clue.  Even the liner notes of Chickasaw County Child can’t account for her whereabouts.  There have been no desperation comeback attempts, no where-are-they-now interviews.  The consensus is that she still lives in the Los Angeles area - making her resistance to a show-biz comeback seem even more strong-willed – but little else is known.  It intrigues me that the determination and willpower she used to break into the music industry at a young age is now used to resist it.

For all I know, she could be running a Starbucks franchise, or living alone surrounded by a dozen cats, or she could have shunned the pop world by accepting Jesus as her Lord and Savior.  Or she could have gone back to UCLA to get that philosophy degree, became a teacher and married an orthodontist.  According to the liner notes (though not confirmed by any of the websites I checked), she had a child with Stafford - perhaps that was the motivation to leave show biz – and though it’s not known if she had others (they’d be grown by now – Gentry is now 65), I like to picture her shuttling her kids in a minivan from soccer games to ballet lessons, and like the former porn actor who wonders which of his neighbors has his films in their closet, she wonders which of the other parents at the soccer game have her old 45 stuffed in the back of their closet. 

In my vision, Gentry’s Grammies and gold records are gathering dust in the back of her closet, while the mantel is reserved for family pictures.  I also like to imagine that some of her friends don’t even know about her past life.

But I also like to imagine that every once in a while, when she’s alone or when she’s giving the house a good spring cleaning, she pulls the Grammies and the gold records out of the back of her closet, wipes the dust off them, and sighs.  Then she pulls her old guitar out of the back of the closet, begins strumming, and then quietly begins singing, in a rusty but still clear voice:

It was the 3^rd of June

Another sleepy, dusty Delta day

(Photo of Bobbie Gentry from Wikipedia)