Dancing Outlaw's Wife - still loves him...
fes...@wvlc.wvnet.edu
Norma Jean is alive
Estranged wife of Dancing Outlaw makes best of love-hate relationship
Charleston Gazette Mail Sunday
April 12, 1998
By Sandy Wells
SUNDAY GAZETTE-MAIL
In her Charleston apartment, Norma Jean White chooses decorations that
pay homage to her estranged husband, Jesco White, the Boone County tap
dancer profiled in the Dancing Outlaw
public television film.
I want this story to start out that Norma Jean is alive, that Jesco
did not kill her. So it will start the way Norma Jean wants it. No,
Jesco did not kill her. Norma Jean White is not only alive, she s
living right here in Charleston. Alone.
Her on-again, off-again marriage to the notorious Dancing Outlaw is
off again. It s been rocky all the way, she said. I ve had two
nervous breakdowns over it. They married in 1975, divorced in 1988,
remarried in 1989. Nobody s counted the separations. A year ago, they
split again.
On April 1, 1997, Norma Jean left her beloved Jesse somewhere in the
Boone County backwoods and moved to Charleston. Social workers helped
her find a tiny apartment at Carroll Terrace.
Cups lined up on Norma Jean s TV (above) commemorate Jesco s brush
with the big time. I ve cried so many times, she said, wondering why
I don t get mail, why I don t get royalties, why I don t
get anything. I think I got cheated out of it.
He hasn t hit her since the night she went to the domestic violence
shelter, she said. But he s threatened to. I tell him, This is my
home now. If you want to come see me, you can spend the night, but I
won t be mistreated anymore.
She can t stop loving him. He s like a piece of my body. The thing
that keeps us apart is his verbal abuse. If he walked in that door
right now, you d think we were going to kill each other. She used to
enjoy the raucous parties in Boone County. Now she looks forward to
bingo on Tuesday and Saturday evenings. She lives quietly. Except when
Jesco comes to visit. I had open heart surgery in December, she
said, and they let me come home for a little while, and I had some
visitors - Jesco and some sisters. They had to call the paramedics. It
got rough in here. Using a wood-burning tool and slats cut from
Kroger grape crates, Jesco White draws likenesses of himself and Elvis
(at right) and brings them to his wife, Norma Jean, to hang in her
apartment. Norma Jean yearns to be back in the Third World hollow
immortalized in the public television documentary about
her sometime husband, the tap-dancing Elvis impersonator from Prenter.
I miss Boone County, she said. It s like one of my kids has died.
Even as she experiments with a new life, reminders of the old one
surround her. A color poster of Jesco dominates one wall, displayed
above vases of plastic flowers, like a shrine. Jesco coffee cups, a
Jesco statuette and photos of Jesco performing commemorate his brush
with the big time. Propped on a tabletop covered with trinkets, an
enlarged color photo shows a dark-haired Norma with 18-year-old Jesco
shortly after they met.
There was nothing in here when I moved in, she said. The social
worker helped me get civilized here. The churches gave me this and
that. And Jesse bought me that little rug, and a lamp, and a
microwave, which was $69. Tables and corners hold enough knicknacks
to stock a flea market - color statues of Jesus and Mary, a toy
merry-go-round, a macarena doll that performs if you clap your hands.
A blanket printed with a huge head of Elvis covers an easy chair facing
the door. An Elvis beach towel covers another chair. Mementos dot the
walls - an Elvis clock, a praying-hands plaque, mounted Indian dolls,
remarkable likenesses of Elvis created by Jesco with a wood-burning
tool.
A fire last summer at the Boone County house consumed the massive
collection of Elvis memorabilia featured in the Dancing Outlaw film,
including the Elvis lamp, the Elvis ashtrays and dishes, and photos and
velvet paintings. The fire even burned up the tap shoes worn by Jesco s
father, fabled mountain dancer D. Ray White, she said. Jesco lost
everything, and I m almost lost, too.
Devil in disguise
He begs her to come back, she said. He courts her with presents - a
giant stuffed bunny for Easter, the his n her bear dolls he
christened Elvis and Priscilla. He always bought me an Easter basket,
she said. I told him not to get me an Easter basket this year because
I can t have the candies in it. So we circled around Kmart to see what
I wanted, and he bought me this Easter bunny. He s always treating me
like a kid.
A cherished portrait shows Jesco and Norma Jean White as a younger,
happier couple. When they married in 1975, he was 19 and she was 35.
Well, not always. Jesco is one of the best men, a full man in every
way. Then, when he turns it over, he s the devil in disguise. It can
happen just like that. He can be sitting there having the best time
that ever was, and he will think about something somebody said or did
to him and take it out on me. It s like an evil spirit, she said.
Hopefully, God can take the bad things away from him.
If God could do that, if Jesco could find a house for them to live in,
if she could get to feeling better, then she could go back to him.
Nearly a dozen prescription vials sit close at hand on the coffee
table. She takes insulin for diabetes. Shortly after heart surgery,
she came down with pneumonia. He says he can take care of me, but he
doesn t realize how sick I am.
Jesco lives in a camper in the woods somewhere up on Drawdy Mountain,
she said. How could she live like that, sick as she is? He took me to
look at this big, beautiful trailer. That was the most
fine moment in my life. It cost something like $23,000. I even have a
picture of it. He said, If I get you that, will you come home? I
said, Jessie, you don t have to get me no trailer. Just get me a home
with hot and cold water. I would live with you under a rock cliff if I
could, but I m not able.
Paying the price she worries about Jesco. The fallout from fleeting
fame has affected him
in ways only his wife could understand, she said. He s so torn up,
because he s the most famous person in the world, considering the other
things going on, but he doesn t get nothin for it.
In 1991, Morgantown filmmaker Jacob Young turned Jesco into an
international cult figure with his award-winning profile for WNPB-TV,
part of the BBC s Different Drummer series. It totally changed my
life, and his, she said. When Young came to Boone County to put Jesco
in a movie, she dared to hope that it would bring them a better life.
I thought, Boy, he s really going to get something. We ain t going to
have to be on welfare and food stamps anymore.
After the video aired, after bootleg copies traveled from one coast to
the other and overseas, fans from all over came to Boone County to meet
the endearing hillbilly who huffed gasoline to get high and tap
danced with a boom box on his shoulder. Eventually, the attention
annoyed him, she said. He would say it was causing him too much
trouble. People were calling and knocking on the
door at all hours of the day and night. He d say to tell them he was
asleep. I d say, You can t talk to someone from Florida? And we d
have another fight.
Then, producers of Roseanne invited Jesco to Hollywood to film a
cameo appearance on the TV show. I was in heaven when Jesco was going
to Hollywood, she said. Both of us was never nothin , you know? But
the trip just made things worse. Jesco changed after he came back from
Hollywood, his whole deal, his whole attitude. There were two sides to
him. The very happy side said, Oh, look at me. I finally got to
Hollywood. The other side said, Look what people have done to me
now.
Nursing their notoriety
She loved the Dancing Outlaw movie. She loved it more before she
realized what made it so popular, that people saw them as sideshow
freaks. It s been made fun of all over the world.
She doesn t blame Jacob Young. Jacob Young is a beautiful person. I
think he did it to win a trophy. We didn t get anything, except each
time he came to see us, he would bring a bag of groceries.
Young followed up with a film on Jesco s adventures in Los Angeles.
Jesco didn t make a dime from that one, either, she said.
Like her husband, nearly seven years after the height of the Jesco
hoopla, Norma Jean nurses a love-hate relationship with notoriety.
People still recognize them wherever they go, she said. A guy asked me
one day if I had a pencil. I asked him what for. He said he wanted to
get Jesco to sign the head of his blank-blank. I don t say words like
that. I started crying when I came out of that store. People like to
hurt me.
To avoid recognition, she colored her hair, lighter and lighter, then
finally allowed it to go gray. But she still answers to Priscilla,
depending on who s doing the calling. One of the workers in the
building here calls me Priscilla, and I love it for him to do that,
because he s really into it. He said he calls me Priscilla because his
brother has both of Jesco s tapes and loves them and watches them all
the time. She doesn t tell him that she doesn t feel much like Elvis
wife anymore, that she d rather be Gladys, Elvis mother. If I could
be Gladys, if I could be Elvis mother, I could protect Jesco, she
said. Norma loved Elvis long before she loved Jesco. She pushed him
into the
Elvis role, she said. When I first met him, I bought him a real
beautiful pair of white bell-bottom pants and a fluffy purple shirt,
and I colored his hair and fixed him up until he looked like Elvis. She
entered him in Elvis lookalike contests.
He knows I made him Elvis. I was the one always pushing Jesco to do
this or that, and it didn t work. But I did manage to keep him off
drugs for eight years. Getting a life Life with Jesco hasn t been
rosy. But Norma Jean s life was never easy. Born 16 years before Jesco
in Orgas, near Whitesville, Norma Jean Wilson married at 16 and had
five children, the first three in consecutive
years. I was married in 1955, had Stevie in 56, Debbie in 57
andKathy in 58. Stevie died at 26. They said it was suicide. He
left a note in the carthat said, Thanks to the world for nothin . But
I could never believe it, because he was always packing his Bible and
talking to people on the
street.
Her first marriage ended in divorce when she found out her husband was
cheating on her. We d bought a home. He had a truck. I had a car.
Everything was OK until the day I saw him kiss her.
She loved Jesco almost from the minute she met him, she said. Jesco
described their meeting in an extended version of Dancing Outlaw, how
he was out drinking and hitched a ride with her and planned to rob her
until he realized he loved her. He told me he thought he was falling in
love, she said. We stopped at a motel and spent the night. She
didn t see him for three months. One day, she gave his sister a ride
home, hoping Jesco would be there. She arrived in time to see a police
car take off with Jesco in the back. Some trouble had developed over
food stamps and a toy pistol, she said. She chased the police car to
the Logan County Jail. I tried to bail him out, but he had to stay
because he was drunk.
They married on Sept. 5, 1975. She regrets that she wasn t able to
give him a child. He tells her it
doesn t matter. I feel I cheated him out of his manhood, out of having
his own family. But he says, You are my baby, and I m your baby, and
we don t need no baby to be brought up the way I was brought up.
We ve had good times and we ve had bad, she said. I think we d be
having a better life now if Jacob hadn t come.
Dancing Outlaw ended with Norma asking Jesco when she could expect to
have sex with him. The sex doesn t matter now, she said. I told him,
I m 59 and I don t need the things I needed when I was
younger. He turned around and said, Norma, if you think sex is all I m
looking for, you re wrong. I ve spent 23 years of my life with you and
I m not wanting to throw it away. I may go back with him in June, if
we can find a house, she said. But the people here, they say, Norma,
please don t go. If I miss bingo just one time, they say, Where s
Norma? In this building I am loved so much.
--
/// Ben \\\
HamBiscuit
I am trying to find out how to get in touch with Jacob Young who filmed the
series Different Drummer for WV public television...
of which Dancing Outlaw is the best known...
any clues as to how to reach via telephone or address would be helpful...
I have heard he's moved back to WV from Nashville...
thanks
julie
Yee-Haw industries
Yee-Haw Industries
ViciousJB
hamb...@aol.com writes:
>
>snip<
>thanks
>julie
>Yee-Haw industries
>Yee-Haw Industries
wasn't me.
...julie.