Victor Bockris - Transformer - The Complete Lou Reed Story

The most important thing about Lincoln and Shelley was their understanding and embracing of Lou’s talent and personality. If Lincoln was a flat mirror for Lou, Shelley was multidimensional, reflecting Lou’s many sides. Perceptive and intuitive, she understood that Lou appreciated events on many different levels and often saw things others didn’t. For the first time in his life Lou found two people to whom he could actually open up without fear of being ridiculed or taken for a ride. For a person who depended so much on others to complete him, they were irreplaceable allies.

Initially, Lou’s first love affair was idyllic. Lou rarely arose before noon, since he stayed up all night. He and Shelley would sometimes meet in the snow at 6 a.m. at the bottom of the steps leading to the women’s dorm. Or else in the early afternoon she would take the twenty-minute hike from the women’s dorm to Lou and Lincoln’s quarters. Like all coeds on campus, she was forbidden to enter a men’s dorm on threat of expulsion, so she would merely tap on their basement window and wait for Lou to appear. When he did, he would gaze up at one of his favorite views of his lover’s face smiling down at him with her long hair and a scarf hanging down. “I liked looking in on their pit,” she recalled. “It was truly a netherworld. I liked being outside. I liked my freedom. And Lou liked that I had to go back to the dorm every night.” From there, the threesome would repair to a booth at the Savoy where they would be joined by art student Karl Stoecker—a close friend of Shelley’s—and English major Peter Locke, a friend of Lou’s to this day, along with Jim Tucker, Sterling Morrison, and a host of others, to commence an all-day session of writing, talking, making out, guitar playing, and drawing. Lou was concentrating on playing his acoustic guitar and writing folk songs. The rest of the time was spent napping, with an occasional sortie to a class. When the threesome got restless at the Savoy, they might repair to the quaint Corner Bookstore, just half a block away, or the Orange Bar. But they always came back to home base at the Savoy, and to the avuncular owner, Gus Joseph, who saw kids come and go for fifty years, but remembered Lou as being special.

***

Lou was so enamored of Shelley that in the fall of 1961 he decided to bring her home to Freeport for the Christmas/Hanukkah holidays. Considering the extent to which Lou based his rebellious posture on the theme of his difficult childhood, Shelley was fully aware of how hard it would be for Lou to take her to his parents’ home. She remembered him thinking that he would score points with his parents: “It was sort of subtle. He was going to show his father that he was okay. He knew that they would like me. And I suspect in some ways he still wanted to please his parents and he wanted to bring home somebody that he could bring home.”

Much to her surprise, Lou’s parents welcomed her to their Freeport home with open arms, making her feel comfortable and accepted. Lou had given her the definite impression that his mother did not love him, but to Shelley, Toby Reed was a warm and wonderful woman, anything but selfish. And Sidney Reed, described by Lou as a stern disciplinarian, seemed equally loving. They appeared to be the exact opposite of the way Lou had portrayed them. In her impression, Mr. Reed “would have walked over the coals for Lou.”

At the same time Shelley realized that Lou was just like them. He not only looked like them, but possessed all their best qualities. However, when she made the mistake of communicating her positive reaction, commenting on the wonderful twinkle in Mr. Reed’s eyes and noting how similar his dry sense of humor was to Lou’s, her boyfriend snapped, “Don’t you know they’re killers?!”

Given their kind, gracious, outgoing manner, the Reeds were sitting ducks for Lou’s brand of torture. He would usually begin by embracing the rogue cousin in the Reed family called Judy. As soon he got home, Lou would enthusiastically inquire after her activities and prattle on about how he wanted to emulate her more than anyone else in the family, often reducing his mother to tears. Next, Lou would make a bid to monopolize the attentions of thirteen-year-old Elizabeth. Confiding to her his innermost thoughts, he would make a big point of excluding his parents from the powwow. “She was cute,” thought Shelley, “she looked just like Lou. So did his mother and father. They all looked exactly like him. It was hysterical. Lou was very protective of her. And she was so sweet. She didn’t have that much of a personality, but she was not unanimated.” Every action aimed to cut his parents out of his life, while keeping them prisoners in it. Meanwhile, like every college kid home on vacation, Lou managed to extract from them all the money he could, and the freedom to come and go as if the house were a hotel. As soon as everybody at 35 Oakfield Avenue was in position ready to do exactly as he wanted, Lou began to enjoy himself.

In fact, so extreme was the situation that, on this first visit, Toby Reed, looking upon her as the perfect daughter-in-law, took Shelley into her confidence. “They were very nervous about what was he bringing home,” she remembered. “So they really took it as a sign that, ‘Oh, God, maybe he was okay.’ We recognized with each other, she and I, that we both really liked him and we both loved him.” Mrs. Reed filled her in on Lou’s troublesome side and tried to find out what Lou was saying about his parents. Shelley got the impression that the Reeds bore no malice toward Lou, but just wanted the best for him. Mrs. Reed seemed completely puzzled as to how Lou had gotten on the track of hating and blaming them. Pondering the strange state of affairs unfolding behind the facade of the Reeds’ attractive home, Shelley drew two conclusions. On the one hand, since his family seemed quite normal and had no apparent problems, Lou was moved to create psychodrama in order to fuel his writing. On the other hand, Lou really did crave his parents’ approval. He was immensely troubled by their refusal to recognize his talent and needed to break away from their restricted life. One point of Lou’s frustration was the feeling that his father was a wimp who gave over control of his life to his wife. This both horrified and fascinated Lou, who was a dyed-in-the-wool male supremacist. Lou was secretly proud of his father and wanted more than anything else for the old man to stand up for himself. But Lou simply could not stand the thought of sharing the former beauty queen’s attention with his father.

After spending a wonderful, if at times tense, week in the Reed household, Shelley put together the puzzle. In a war of wits that had been going on for years, Lou went on the offensive as soon as he stepped through the portals of his home. Attempting by any means necessary to horrify and paralyze his loving parents, Lou had learned to control them by threatening to explode at any moment with some vicious remark or irrational act that would shatter their carefully developed harmony. For example, one night Mr. Reed gave Lou the keys to the family car, a Ford Fairlane, and some money to take Shelley out to dinner in New York. However, such an exchange between father and son could not pass without conflict straight out of a cartoon. As Lou was heading for the door with Shelley, Sid had to observe that if he were going to the city, he might, under the circumstances, put on a clean shirt. Instantly spinning into a vortex of anger that made Sid feel like a cockroach, Lou threw an acerbic verbal dart at his mother before slamming out the door.

On the way into New York he almost killed himself and Shelley by driving carelessly and with little awareness of his surroundings. “I remember him taking this little flower from the Midwest to the big city,” Shelley said. “Chinatown. We drove in a hair-raising ride I’ll never forget in my whole life. Lou showed me how to hang out on the heating grate of the Village Gate so you could hear the music and stay warm.”