Loud And Clear.(on Ronee Blakely)

Byline: Valerie Martin

As a fledgling author in New Orleans, Valerie Martin found inspiration--and her next novel's heroine--in the singer Ronee Blakely.

In June of 1975, I quit my job at the Louisiana Office of Public Welfare and settled down in the hammock on the louvered porch of our apartment in New Orleans to wait out the last month of my pregnancy. When the cockatiel, Louis, was safely in his cage, I turned on the ceiling fan. I had finished my first slender novel and sent it off to the few New York agents I knew anything about. In those last weeks before my daughter was born, I read Junichiro Tanizaki's epic family saga The Makioka Sisters, in which a young wife hesitates to eat "dancing sushi," a prawn that is still kicking. "Go ahead and eat it," the chef urges. "Are you afraid it will haunt you?" This was the first I'd heard of sushi.

It was brutally hot. Our apartment had one window unit in the bedroom. Theaters were air-conditioned, so in the evenings my husband and I went to the movies. That was a great summer for films--in a few weeks we saw Shampoo, Night Moves, Tommy, Jaws, and Robert Altman's quirky and prophetic odyssey into America's toxic obsession with celebrity, Nashville.

Though I was an Altman fan, I don't much like country music, so I wasn't expecting to be seriously engaged by Nashville. But Barbara Jean, the breakdown-prone Southern belle played by newcomer Ronee Blakely, fascinated me from the moment she emerged from her private plane. Dressed in flowing white, teetering on high heels, her hair trussed up in ribbons, she was frail as a butterfly. Her songs were gossamer concoctions, but her supple voice infused them with a tensile strength.

I was looking for inspiration, and Nashville worked on my imagination with a persistence that made me edgy. I admired the way Altman combined a documentary chilliness with an atmosphere of menace that gave off heat. The characters, while not complex, were engaging and dangerous. But the canvas was too large, the brushwork too loose for my taste and my talent. I wanted more psychology and less sociology, fewer characters and more intensity. Still, before the summer was out, I went to see the film again.

Richard Avedon's photo of Ronee Blakely in the June 1975 issue of VOGUE is nearly audible, the opposite of a glamour shot. Avedon's directive was, evidently, "Open wide," and Blakely obliged to the limit of her ability. Her shiny, stretched lips, teeth, and tongue occupy a third of her face. She's holding a microphone in one hand, fluttering what looks like a handkerchief with the other; presumably she is belting out one of the songs she wrote for the film. In the sidebar she is described as "a brown-eyed, resolute flower of a girl," and it is noted that her role as the doomed Barbara Jean in Nashville has made her a star who, "with luck, will go super, fast."