On April 29, 1969, Carnegie Hall was sold out. The artist who filled the fabled performance hall wasn’t a symphony orchestra, or a Broadway belter, or a jazz star. It wasn’t a rock band or a folk singer or any hero of the counterculture taking the stage just a few months before Woodstock. On that night, more than 3,000 fans filled the Main Hall on 57th Street to see a placid blond man wearing a sweatshirt and sneakers. He stood before a microphone on his 36th birthday and performed a poem about a lost cat named Sloopy.
But once upon a time
In New York’s jungle, in a tree
Before I went into the world in search of other kinds of love
Nobody owned me but a cat named Sloopy.
His name was Rod McKuen. He was the most popular poet in American publishing history.
Rod McKuen sold millions of poetry books in the 1960s and 1970s. He was a regular on late-night TV. He released dozens of albums, wrote songs for Sinatra, and was nominated for two Oscars. He was a flashpoint in the battle between highbrow and lowbrow, with devotees revering his plain-spoken honesty and Dick Cavett mockingly calling him “the most understood poet in America.” Every year on his birthday, he sold out Carnegie Hall.
But by the time I was a teenager, he had completely vanished from the cultural landscape. I only know of him because I spent the entire 1990s in thrift stores and used bookshops, and everywhere I went, I saw Rod McKuen’s name. His chiseled face stared out at me from abandoned hardcovers, torn paperbacks, and dusty record albums, all adorned with the most ’70s fonts you ever saw. He wore a turtleneck and luxurious blond hair on the cover of Come to Me in Silence. He reclined on a sandy beach on the front of Seasons in the Sun. On one paperback he stared out to sea and the title of the book told me just how he felt: Alone…
I wanted to know who this incredibly famous poet was, and who his fans were, and how he was forgotten. I went searching for Rod McKuen, and I found a young man so hungry for fame that he wrote his own fan letters, a singer of novelty tunes whose early hit got plagiarized into a punk anthem, a gay celebrity who winked about his sexuality but had to lie about the man he loved. I learned that it takes a lot of dedication and hard work and luck to attain fame, but it takes something more than that to retain it. And along the way I met a man who, like me, was bewildered by this forgotten star—until he became an accidental fan, and then even more accidentally became the only person keeping Rod McKuen’s flame alive.