A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music

“Spade Doesn’t Look Exactly Starved”: Country Music and the Negotiation of Women’s Domesticity in Cold War Los Angeles

24 “Spade Doesn’t Look Exactly Starved” Country Music and the Negotiation of Women’s Domesticity in Cold War Los Angeles PETER LA CHAPELLE Country musicians rarely made the society page, so when the Antelope Valley Press asked to interview Spade and Ella Mae Cooley at the couple’s massive new ranch home in 1960, the couple easily concurred. Newcomers to the Antelope Valley—an area that was quickly becoming the rural playground of the Hollywood jet set—the Cooleys showed off their 1200-acre ranch and talked about the television bandleader’s plans to build a fifteen-million-dollar Disneyland-style water theme park in the area. Although admiring of the surrounding chaparral, the family powerboat, and other toys Cooley and his sons paraded before the Press photographer, the newspaper’s reporter was most taken with the blissful domestic environment the family created. “Mrs. Spade,” the newspaper asserted, kept a “comfortable, attractive, spotlessly clean ranch home of Western simplicity.” Although Ella Mae handled the family pocketbook , the paper assured us that she had not abandoned her wifely duty of preparing meals for the family: “Spade,” the reporter noted with a nod to the bandleader’s once-svelte waistline, “doesn’t look exactly starved.”1 Despite the reporter’s efforts to offer readers a candid glimpse of a favorite performer at home, the Press story masked more than it revealed. Not four months after the article ran, the Cooley home was grabbing headlines again— this time as a grisly crime scene befitting the plot of a Hollywood film noir or a Raymond Chandler detective novel. According to newspaper and police accounts, Spade Cooley, a leading light on the Los Angeles country music scene for nearly two decades and one of the most recognizable faces in Southern California, had tortured, beaten, and stomped to death Ella Mae in the home—all in front of their fourteen-year-old daughter. The press lashed out at Cooley, proclaiming the easygoing broadcasting persona of the former Oklahoma farm laborer to be nothing more than a ruse, an effective device for hiding a private life of affairs, explosive tirades, threats, abuse and other skeletons . No longer a “ranch home of Western simplicity” in the public mind, the Cooleys’ picturesque canyon home seemed more like a purgatory than anything else.2 Today the Antelope Valley Press piece might be written off as a single instance of sloppy newsgathering or an overall indictment of lifestyle journalism. With its fusion of themes such as domesticity, family, celebrity, and consumerism, however, the article stands as more than a historical curiosity or a reporter’s glaring oversight. Home interviews of country music performers, in fact, filled thousands of inches of copy in Southern California fan magazines and regional newspapers during the 1950s and 1960s and, like the Cooley article, tended to focus on the homemaking capabilities of what one publication would later term “the women behind the men.” Although few portraits would prove as tragic or as misrepresentative as the Cooley article, coverage of the local scene in Country Music Report and Country Music Life and in national publications such as Country Song Roundup worked in conjunction with larger societal efforts to normalize the role of the suburban stay-at-home caretaker and to discourage women from pursuing outside employment by repeatedly portraying women’s homemaking abilities as the key to their star husbands’ successful careers. This is not to say that such notions were digested unquestioningly by women. Indeed, ignited by a strong working-class tradition of women’s employment and involvement in the local fan subculture during World War II, some female artists and fans contested constraints and pushed the boundaries of women’s accepted social, cultural, and political roles. Building on the debate that has emerged among women’s historians such as Elaine Tyler May and Joanne Meyerowitz about the degree of agency American women experienced during the 1950s, study of Southern California suggests that rather than a site that only reinforced social taboos or a site that only fomented rebellion, country music subculture served as a contested terrain in which a variety of voices—feminist and antifeminist as well as modernist and traditionalist—grappled over issues related to women’s role in the Country Music and Domesticity in Cold War Los Angeles 25 home and occupational outlook.3 Women who defied expectations were not always successful in their efforts and often had to contend...