ROAR by Bruce Wagner

Author:Bruce Wagner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781956763263
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

* * * * * *

New York Post headline, November 1980

“ROAR”

TO

“BIRD”:

HI, MOM!

Roger Orr finds out he was hatch-snatched;

Mother is down-and-out jazz singer

* * * * * *

CINDY ADAMS (gossip columnist) I was so angry. I was having a “disagreement” with the Post editor at that time—he’s long gone!—and the cloak-and-dagger operation was deliberately kept from me. I knew Roger; he would have talked to me. I was furious.

BETSY BLOOMINGDALE (socialite) That story was bigger than the Lindbergh kidnapping, but with a much happier ending. I thank God every day Bunny wasn’t alive for all the mishugas, as she’d say. She’d only have been seventy years old, rest her soul—she would have been painted the villain and gone through terrible suffering.

JIMMY BRESLIN (journalist) I was at the Daily News when we got scooped. They had more coverage than the Son of Sam. Something touched a nerve. At first, no one believed it—not anyone I knew. Everyone thought it was some kind of Hollywood publicity stunt. And nothing was real until it was in the New York Times. And then, of course, it was. Five pages of it. The Gray Lady kept it alive for weeks.

DICK GREGORY The Blacks that turned against him after Yes I Can. . . . Motherfuckers just turned harder. They called him “Roger Whorr”—a white whore. Ain’t that a bitch? Then they said, “You ain’t white. You ain’t black. You just wack.” I told ’em, “You know what? The man’s more nigger than y’all ever be.” [laughs]

JONNY “STAGE DOOR” ORR A week after the news broke about Bird being Roger’s mother—early December, 1980—John Lennon was shot. That pushed them out of the headlines. It’s shitty but I still associate Lennon’s murder with a sense of relief. Not to say Roger and Bird stopped being news, no way. But the heat got turned way down.

HENRY LOUIS GATES JR. (literary critic) All the high-, low-, and middlebrow rags did their tag-team thing . . . the Enquirer made out like Bird was Bigfoot—the Black Ness Monster! Both were on the cover of the Rolling Stone, which at least made sense because of their musical careers. Robert Frank took that picture. Folks couldn’t get enough; running those stories was like printing money. And there were some marvelous things as well. Jimmy Baldwin did a wonderful essay in the the Atlantic Monthly. I cried when I read that. And Joan Didion, in the New Yorker—one of those novella-length profiles like they used to do. She called it “Awake and Sing,” after the Odets play.

ED BRADLEY (journalist) A year after he and Bird did 60 Minutes, the French gave him the Commandeur de la Légion d’Honneur. He took his mom along for that. She was pretty well-known in France, which was probably why they gave it to him. Roger’s own merits stood him well, but she was the icing on the prize so to speak.

LENA HORNE (singer, actress) The public went wild. There was enormous curiosity and suddenly she was back on the charts—her whole catalog was part of the national conversation.

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