You and Your Pussycat Lips: My Aunt Goes After Tom Jones

My aunt Norma is standing in the bathroom of room 315 on the twenty-fifth floor of the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, thinking that at this very moment the singer Tom Jones may be thirty feet above her. She had learned yesterday from grilling the bellhop that Jones stays in the hotel’s penthouse on the twenty-ninth floor. She has since been proposing an idea to my mother, who has accompanied her on this trip: that they steal some maids’ uniforms and go up to the penthouse in the service elevator the bellhop said Jones uses. Norma practices her line in the bathroom mirror: “Hello, Tom, can I come in and clean, and straighten your bed?” So far, however, she and my mom have stayed put, trying to feel Jones’ vibes drifting down through the four ceilings that separate him from them. Ultimately, Norma won’t act upon this particular idea, but if she did, it wouldn’t be the craziest thing she’s ever done in order to get close to Jones.

I am in Vegas with Norma and my mom because I want to see firsthand just what all the Tom Jones fuss is. Norma has been a big fan—some would say obsessed, using the word either with admiration or disdain— since both she and Jones were in their twenties, back in the late 1960s. Stories of her various pursuits of Jones have circulated through our family for decades. There is the one, for instance, in which she and her other sister, my aunt Nancy, went to a Jones concert in Chicago and afterwards chased Jones’ limo down the Dan Ryan Expressway at a hundred miles an hour, until Jones’ driver lost them at an exit on the south side of town. And there is the one in which Norma came home from a Tom Jones concert with a Kleenex that Jones had wiped across his glistening chest and that she examined under her son’s microscope for stray chest-hair fragments. I wasn’t sure how much these stories had expanded during the many tellings, how much they’d become myth rather than fact. I did know, because I’d seen it, that Norma still keeps the Kleenex in her top dresser drawer, in a plastic baggie, identified by a scrap of paper on which she scribbled “Tom Jones sweat napkin.” (On the hutch in her dining room is also a drinking glass, unwashed since she went up to the stage after a show in 1978 and asked a man unhooking equipment whether she could have it, because Jones had sipped from it between songs to keep his throat moistened.)

Both Jones and Norma are now in their early seventies. Jones is still playing two hundred shows a year and putting out well-reviewed albums, and the media has predictably celebrated his “exceptional staying power,” expressed awe that he still has the strong baritone that initially made him famous with such ancient pop classics as “It’s Not Unusual,” “Delilah,” and “What’s New Pussycat?” He’s let his hair go gray, but otherwise, according to all accounts, he still “has it.”

Norma still looks young herself. Her short white hair is feathered across her forehead, and her eyes are the blue of an ocean map. Her cheeks shine when she smiles, as they always have. On the other hand, she has had two open-heart surgeries—the last was only a year ago, though she’s recovered enough to be nostalgic for how it caused her to lose twenty-five pounds. She’s gained it back, however, and in the bathroom she’s been trying to decide whether to tuck her t-shirt into her black jeans or leave it out, in order best to hide the modest roll around her belly. “Out,” my mom advises her.

The shirt itself is white and has on it a black-and-white picture of Jones, microphone in hand, neck glistening with sweat, his own shirt open to reveal thick chest hair and a cross hanging from a...