Bruce

Peter Ames Carlin

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781439191842
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Biographies

Peter Ames Carlin's New York Times bestselling biography of one America's greatest musicians is the first in twenty-five years to be written with the cooperation of Bruce Springsteen himself; "Carlin gets across why Mr. Springsteen has meant so much, for so long, to so many people" ( The New York Times ). In Bruce, acclaimed music writer Peter Ames Carlin presents a startlingly intimate and vivid portrait of a rock icon. For more than four decades, Bruce Springsteen has reflected the heart and soul of America with a career that includes twenty Grammy Awards, more than 120 million albums sold, two Golden Globes, and an Academy Award. Peter Ames Carlin masterfully encompasses the breadth of Springsteen's astonishing career and explores the inner workings of a man who managed to redefine generations of music.A must read for fans, Bruce is a meticulously researched, compulsively readable biography of a man laden with family tragedy, a tremendous dedication to his artistry, and an all-consuming passion for fame and influence.

ONE

THE PLACE I LOVED THE MOST

THE TRUCK COULDN’T HAVE BEEN moving fast. Not down a sleepy residential street like McLean. If it had just turned in from Route 79—known in Freehold, New Jersey, as South Street—it would have been going even more slowly, since no seven-ton truck could round a 90-degree corner at a fast clip. But the truck had the height and breadth to all but fill the side road and sweep the other cars, bikes, and pedestrians to the side until it grumbled past. Assuming the other folks were paying attention to the road ahead.

The five-year-old girl on the tricycle had other things on her mind. She might have been racing her friend to the Lewis Oil gas station on the corner. Or maybe she was simply a child at play, feeling the spring in the air on a late afternoon in April 1927.

Either way, Virginia Springsteen didn’t see the truck coming. If she heard the driver’s panicked honk when she veered into the road, she didn’t have time to react. The driver stomped hard on the brakes, but by then it didn’t matter. He heard, and felt, a terrible thump. Alerted by the screams of the neighbors, the girl’s parents rushed outside and found their little daughter unconscious but still breathing, They rushed her first to the office of Dr. George G. Reynolds, then to Long Branch Hospital, more than thirty minutes east of Freehold. And that’s where Virginia Springsteen died.

The mourning began immediately. Family members, friends, and neighbors streamed to the little house on Randolph Street to comfort the girl’s parents. Fred Springsteen, a twenty-seven-year-old technician at the Freehold Electrical Shop downtown, kept his hands in his pockets and spoke quietly. But his twenty-eight-year-old wife, Alice, could not contain herself. Hair frazzled and eyes veined by grief, she sat helplessly as her body clutched with sobs. She could barely look at Virginia’s toddler brother, Douglas. The boy’s father couldn’t be much help either, given the pall of his own mourning and the overwhelming needs of his distraught wife. So in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy virtually all of the care and feeding of the twenty-month-old boy fell to Alice’s sisters, Anna and Jane. Eventually the others eased back into their ordinary lives. But the approach and passing of summer did nothing to ease Alice’s grief.

She could take no comfort in the clutching arms of her small son. Nearing his second birthday in August the boy grew dirty and scrawny enough to require an intervention. Alice’s sisters came to gather his clothes, crib, and toys and took the toddler to live with his aunt Jane Cashion and her family until his parents were well enough to care for him again. Two to three years passed before Alice and Fred asked to be reunited with their son. He went home soon afterward, but Virginia’s spirit continued to hover in Alice’s vision. When Alice gazed at her son, she always seemed to be seeing something else; the absence of the one thing she had loved the most and lost so heedlessly.

A semblance of family structure restored, the Springsteen home still ran according to its residents’ imprecise sense of reality. No longer employed by the Freehold Electrical Shop, Fred worked at home, sifting through mountains of abandoned electronics in order to repair or build radios he would later sell to the migrant farmworkers camped on the fringe of town. Alice, who never worked, moved according to her internal currents. If she didn’t feel like getting up in the morning, she didn’t. If Doug didn’t want to go to school in the morning, she let him stay in bed. Cleaning and home repair ceased to be priorities. The walls shed curls of paint. The plastered kitchen ceiling fell off in chunks. With a single kerosene burner to heat the entire house, winters inside were Siberian. For Douglas, whose DNA came richly entwined with darker threads, the peeling wallpaper and crumbling windowsills framed his growing sense of life and the world. No matter where he was, no matter what he was doing, he would always be looking out through the fractured windows of 87 Randolph Street.

• • •

Doug Springsteen grew to be a shy but spirited teenager matriculating at Freehold High School. He loved baseball, especially when he was with his first cousin and best friend, Dave “Dim” Cashion, an ace pitcher and first baseman. Cashion was already considered one of the best players to ever emerge from Freehold. Off the diamond, the cousins passed the hours shooting pool at the small game rooms tucked between the stores, barbershops, and news stores clustering Freehold’s central intersection at South and Main Streets. Cashion, who was seven years Doug’s senior, launched his baseball career just after leaving school in 1936. He spent the next five years working his way from the local amateur and semipro leagues all the way into the major league farm system. He got there just in time for World War II to shutter the leagues and redirect him into the US Army.

Raised by parents for whom education amounted to a long distraction from real life, Doug quit his studies at Freehold Regional after his freshman year ended in 1941, taking an entry-level job as a bottom-rung laborer (his official title was creel boy) in Freehold’s thriving Karagheusian rug mill. He kept that job until June 1943, when his eighteenth birthday made him eligible to join the army. Shipped to Europe in the midst of the war, Doug drove an equipment truck. Back in Freehold following the war’s conclusion in 1945, Doug took it easy and lived off the $20 in veteran’s pay he received from the government each month.

As Fred and Alice made clear, academic and professional ambition were not priorities, if only because of their absolute disinterest in achievement—to say nothing of books, culture, or anything that gestured beyond the here-and-now. So if Doug wanted to live in their house and slouch through his life, that suited them perfectly. He was, after all, his parents’ child.

Doug barely made a gesture toward adult life until his cousin Ann Cashion (Dim’s younger sister) came by offering a night out. She had a friend named Adele Zerilli he might like to meet. So how about a double date? Doug shrugged and said sure. A few nights later the foursome were sitting in a cafe together, making polite talk while Doug snuck glances at the bewitchingly talkative dark-haired girl sitting across the table. “I couldn’t get rid of him after that,” Adele says now. “Then he says he wants to marry me. I said, ‘You don’t have a job!’ He said ‘Well, if you marry me, I’ll get a job.’ ” She shakes her head and laughs.

“Oh, God. What I got into after that.”

Married on February 22, 1947, Douglas and Adele Springsteen rented a small apartment in the Jerseyville neighborhood on the eastern edge of Freehold and experienced the postwar boom along with much of America. True to his word, Doug had landed a job on the factory floor of the Ford auto plant in nearby Edison. Adele already had a full-time job as a secretary for a real estate lawyer. A baby was on the way by the start of 1949, and the boy emerged at 10:50 p.m. on the evening of September 23, taking his first breath in Long Branch Hospital (since renamed Monmouth Medical Center), where his father’s sister had breathed her last twenty-two years earlier. He had brown hair and brown eyes, weighed in at 6.6 pounds, and was declared healthy in every respect. His twenty-four-year-old parents named him Bruce Frederick Springsteen and though they had their own home, instructed the nurse to write into the birth certificate that their home address in Freehold was 87 Randolph Street.

When his wife and child were discharged from the hospital a week later, Doug took them to his parents’ house and handed little Bruce to his mother. She held him close, cooing gently at the first new life that had entered their home since the long ago death of Virginia. When Alice peered into his eyes, her own tired face came alight. Almost as if she were seeing the glimmer that had once glowed from inside her own lost daughter. She clutched the boy to herself and for the longest time would not let him go.

She must have loved you to pieces, Bruce heard someone say not long ago. He laughed darkly. “To pieces,” he said, “would be correct.”

• • •

Spending his first months in his parents’ small apartment, Bruce ate, slept, stirred, and cried like every other baby. And yet the blood in his veins carried traces of forebears whose lives describe American history going all the way back to the early seventeenth century, when Casper Springsteen and wife Geertje left Holland to build their future in the New World. Casper didn’t survive very long,¹ but a son who had remained in Holland followed in 1652, and Joosten Springsteen launched generations of Springsteens, including a branch that drifted to the farmlands of Monmouth County, New Jersey, at some point in the mid-eighteenth century. After the Revolutionary War broke out in 1775, John Springsteen left his farm to serve as a private in the Monmouth County militia, fighting multiple battles during a three-year hitch that ended in 1779. Alexander Springsteen, also of Monmouth County, joined the Union army in 1862, serving as a private with the New Jersey Infantry until the end of the Civil War in 1865. Throughout, and into the twentieth century, the Springsteens worked as farm laborers and, with the growth of industrialization in Freehold, factory workers.

Alice Springsteen’s family were Irish immigrants from Kildare who came to America in 1850, settling in the farmlands of Monmouth County, where they worked the fields and, in some cases, pushed their families up another rung or two on the economic ladder. Christopher Garrity, the patriarch of the family, sent for his wife and children in 1853. His daughter Ann met a neighbor, a laborer named John Fitzgibbon, soon after and married him in 1856. Two years later he invested the $127.50 it took to buy a family home at 87 Mulberry Street², a street in a growing neighborhood of working-class homes just south of Freehold’s center. Ann Garrity marked their place by planting a beech tree seedling she had brought to America from Kildare. The tree flourished, as did Ann and John Fitzgibbon, who had two children in the years before John went to serve in the Civil War. As a sergeant in the Union army, John earned a chest full of ribbons for his courage on the battlefields of Fredericksburg and Charlottesville, Virginia, then returned home to father another seven children before dying in 1872. Remarried to a shoemaker named Patrick Farrell, Ann delivered a set of twins, including a girl named Jennie, whose own daughter, Alice, eventually married a young electronics worker named Fred Springsteen.

If only every member of the family could have grown as straight and strong as Ann Garrity’s beech tree. But as fate and genetics must have it, both sides of Fred and Alice Springsteen’s lineage came with a shadow history of fractured souls. The drinkers and the failures, the wild-eyed, the ones who crumbled inside of themselves until they vanished altogether. These were the relatives who lived in rooms you didn’t enter. Their stories were the ones that mustn’t be told. They inspired the silence that both secreted and concentrated the poison in the family blood. Doug could already sense the venom creeping within himself. Which may have had something to do with why he had fallen so deeply for Adele Zerilli, whose indomitable spirit would protect and nurture him for the rest of his life.

The youngest of the three daughters born to Anthony and Adelina, Italian immigrants who had arrived as teenagers (separately) at Ellis Island during the first years of the twentieth century, Adele spent her childhood in the Bay Ridge neighborhood at the southern tip of Brooklyn. The family’s luxe home came courtesy of Anthony, who had learned English on the fly and quickly earned his American citizenship and a law school degree. Taking a job in a law firm his uncle had founded to specialize in real estate, investments, and the like, Anthony’s bluster grew along with the firm’s success in the 1920s. Short but broad chested, possessed of a big voice, stylish wardrobe, and charisma to match, the thriving attorney moved through the world like a weather front, altering the barometric pressure of any room he entered. Adelina, on the other hand, pursued the life of an old-fashioned Italian lady, wearing traditional dresses, surrounding herself with reminders of the Old World, and refusing to utter more than a small handful of English words even as her daughters grew to be modern American girls.

When the Depression hit in 1929, Anthony wished he could go back in time, too. Reduced to moving his family into an apartment, he borrowed some of his remaining clients’ cash to keep his own investments afloat. Then he borrowed more. Then he borrowed too much. Meanwhile, Anthony had other indulgences, too, including an affair with a secretary who eventually claimed his heart. Anthony’s marriage ended first, and then the federal agents came knocking. “I guess the word is embezzlement,” Adele says.

Then the word was convicted, then sentenced. And as Anthony prepared to spend a few years away, he bought an inexpensive old farmhouse on sixty acres near the edge of Freehold and had it fixed up so his family could live as comfortably, if inexpensively, as possible while he did his bit in the grim caverns of Sing Sing prison. Only by then, Adelina’s broken marriage and abrupt financial descent had unstrung the observant Catholic so thoroughly that she decided to let her daughters make their own household while she took refuge with relatives. Told to provide for her younger sisters, the recent high school grad Dora took a job as a waitress and kept her sisters on a short leash. Weekly visits from an aunt who always came bearing a suitcase full of spaghetti and tinned tuna helped make ends meet. The girls could also count on the help of the man their father had introduced as George Washington, an African-American day laborer he hired to serve as his daughters’ chauffeur and handyman. And though his name wasn’t really George Washington (that was apparently Anthony’s invention), and he was a grown man in his thirties, he became a regular presence in the home. “All we knew about him was that he could dance,” Adele says. According to middle sister Eda, the action heated up at seven o’clock when the nightly Your Hit Parade came on the radio. That’s when they turned up the volume, pulled aside the living room rug, and kicked up their heels. “That’s when we learned how to dance,” she continues. “It sounds crazy, I know, but that’s how it went.” The vision makes Adele’s son laugh out loud. “They used to go to the balls, and the soldiers were on leave, and they went to dance, dance, dance,” Bruce says. “They had it all going on.”

Dora and Eda had sided with their mother in the divorce, while Adele was officially neutral but sympathetic enough to heed her father’s request to accompany his girlfriend on the journey to Ossining, New York, so she would have the right to participate in Sing Sing’s family visiting hours. When Dora got wind of her sister’s jailhouse visits, she filed papers with the Monmouth County courts to bring it to a stop. And when Anthony convinced Adele to join his beloved secretary on another trip anyway, Dora had her sister put on probation. “It was stupid, because I was a baby!” Adele says. So she must have been terribly aggrieved, yes? “Nope. I just couldn’t go anymore, and that was that.” When daughter Ginny contradicts her—“She never got over it”—Adele admits it instantly: “I still have the letter!”

Either way, the dancing never stopped. And even when the Zerilli girls became adults and took on jobs, careers, and husbands, were made to confront hardship, and even face down tragedy, the sound of music always got their spirits up, always pulled them to their feet, swept aside the carpet, and carried them away. “To this day,” Bruce says. “You get the three of those girls, and they’ll still dance. It was a big part of their lives. Still is.”

• • •

Adele became pregnant again five months into Bruce’s life, and when the Springsteens’ second child—a girl they named Virginia in tribute to Doug’s lost sister—arrived in early 1951, it didn’t take long for Doug and Adele to realize that their apartment was no longer large enough to contain their growing family. Without the money to rent a larger place, they had no choice but to retreat to 87 Randolph Street, searching for space among the broken radio parts, the unsteady furniture, and the drafty corners of the living room. And then there was Alice, so joyous in having her beloved Bruce in the house she could barely contain her excitement. Virginia, on the other hand, barely registered in her vision. “They were sick people, but what do I know when I’m so young?” Adele says. “I thought I was doing the best thing calling her Virginia, but it wasn’t.” Besides, Alice and Fred had already settled on their favorite. “With Bruce, he could do no wrong.”

From the day the family moved in, Alice catered to her young grandson like a sun king. She washed and folded his clothes, then laid out each morning’s wardrobe on his freshly made bed. When Adele and Doug were out during the day, both Alice and Fred kept the toddler fed, warm, entertained, and always within reach. Ginny, on the other hand, was lucky to get much more than the occasional glance. Quickly frustrated by her grandparents’ disinterest, two-year-old Ginny demanded to be left with other adults during the day. Adele: “She didn’t want to stay with them, so she never did.”

“That was very caught up with the role I was intended to play,” Bruce says. “To replace the lost child. So that made it a very complicated sort of affection and one that wasn’t completely mine. We [Ginny and Bruce] were very symbolic, which is an enormous burden on a young child. And that became a problem for everybody.” Consumed by his grandparents’ unyielding attention, Bruce assumed that they, and not his parents, were his primary caregivers. “It was very emotionally incestuous, and a lot of parental roles got crossed. Who you answered to and the different kind of responsibilities you had were very confusing for a young kid. Your allegiances were being pulled in different ways. Then we were beyond the point of no return.”

Bruce remembers his grandparents’ house as a strange, austere place, its cracked walls adding to an atmosphere already clotted with loss, memory, and regret. “The dead daughter was a big presence,” he says. “Her portrait was on the wall, always front and center.” Fred and Alice trooped everyone to the St. Rose of Lima cemetery each week to touch her stone and pick weeds and errant grass from the little girl’s grave. “That graveyard,” Ginny says, “was like our playground. We were there all the time.” Death was a regular presence, particularly with so many older relatives on the block. “We went to a lot of wakes,” Bruce says. “You got used to seeing dead people lying around.”

Death was one thing. But for Alice, whose Old World Catholicism came larded with superstition and other terrors, eternal damnation was more difficult to confront. Grandma Alice sensed the presence of Satan in lightning and thunder, so the first flash would send her into the throes of panic. Within seconds she scooped up the children and sprinted the block to the home of her sister Jane, who kept bottles of holy water to protect her family against such attacks. “People would huddle together,” Bruce recalls. “You’d have near hysteria.”

When Fred lost the use of his left arm to a serious stroke in the late 1950s, he brought Bruce along to help troll for cast-off radios and electronic parts in the neighborhood trash cans. The time together deepened the bond between grandfather and grandson, and drew the young boy deeper into the eccentric rhythms of his grandparents’ home. So while Adele’s work as a secretary kept her on a normal schedule, the rest of the family—including Doug, already rid...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Prologue: The Gut Bomb King
• Chapter 1: The Place I Loved the Most
• Chapter 2: A New Kind of Man
• Chapter 3: As My Mind Bends Clouds into Dreams
• Chapter 4: Oh Geez, Let’s Make a Band
• Chapter 5: Break out the Guns and Ammo, Everything’s Gonna Be Just Fine
• Chapter 6: For Personal Reasons This Has to Be My Last Song
• Chapter 7: Somebody Else Who Was a Little Crazy in the Eyes
• Chapter 8: Now I Wanna See If You’ve Got Any Ears
• Chapter 9: I Am Finally, Finally, Where I’m Supposed to Be
• Chapter 10: Listen to Your Junk Man—He’s Singing
• Chapter 11: Hyperactivity Was Our Business
• Chapter 12: Then Again, Let’s Just Let It Ride
• Chapter 13: A Classic Case of Be Careful What You Wish For
• Chapter 14: It Was Me and You, Baby, I Remember the Night You Promised
• Chapter 15: There’s Always Room to Throw Something Out
• Chapter 16: Big Man! Are They Still Standing?
• Chapter 17: That’s Your Time Clock, My Friend
• Chapter 18: Deliver Me from Nowhere
• Chapter 19: The Blue-Collar Troubadour
• Chapter 20: Smilin’ Kind of Funny, Everybody Happy at Last
• Chapter 21: I Didn’t Even Know the Language of Partnership
• Chapter 22: Get the Hostility Out Now, I Can Take It
• Chapter 23: Holy Shit, I’m Back
• Chapter 24: Hope, Dreams, and Rededication
• Chapter 25: The Country We Carry in Our Hearts Is Waiting
• Chapter 26: That’s a Big Shark, Man
• Chapter 27: The Next Stand of Trees
• Photographs
• A Note on Sources
• Acknowledgments
• About Peter Ames Carlin
• Index
• Footnotes
• Copyright