Education: The Old Oxonian Blues

The ancient seat of learning has seen far too much to be startled by the carryings-on of its scholars. Just the same, a 22-year-old Rhodes scholar from California’s Pomona College has aroused a certain mild wonder at Oxford University’s Merton College. Blond Kristoffer Kristofferson is a modest, husky (5 ft. 11 in., 165 lbs.) youth, and had he stuck quietly to his study of English literature, chances are that few of his Oxford friends would have discovered what an uncommon sort was swallowing their tea.

But as soon as he arrived last fall, Kristofferson began behaving exactly as he had done back at Pomona College, where he had earned a Phi Beta Kappa key, won conference recognition as a football end, commanded his R.O.T.C. battalion, won four out of 20 prizes in the Atlantic’s collegiate short-story writing contest, played a top-chop game of Rugby, and kayoed an opponent in a Golden Gloves elimination fight before getting iced himself. At Oxford, Kris immersed himself in the dark waters of Anglo-Saxon, spent a few ergs of his seemingly inexhaustible reserve of energy playing Rugger for Merton, winning his blue at boxing (although a Cambridge tiger defeated him recently), and writing the first 50 pages of a novel—”a sort of complicated thing, in which I look at the same episode through five different points of view.”

Dial Fame. But it was only recently that Kris, the widely traveled son of Aramco’s air-operations manager living in Dhahran, revealed an activity that is shockingly un-Oxonian: he is in a fair way to become wealthy as a teenagers’ guitar-thwonking singing idol. A few months ago he answered an ad in London’s Daily Mirror that invited young musicians to “Just Dial FAME.” FAME’s mortal form, it turned out, is the chunky person of Paul Lincoln, an ex-wrestler and Soho coffee-bar proprietor who runs a stable of rock-‘n’-roll yodelers, is the muse behind hugely successful Singer Tommy Steele (TIME, Dec. 30, 1957). Lincoln heard tapes of Kris singing and playing folk songs he had written himself, quickly signed up the young scholar. Sample of Kris’s pleasant, blues-tinged lyrics (his songs neither rock nor roll), suggested by the summers he spent working on Wake Island, laboring with railroad crews and fire-fighting gangs in Alaska:

Left my home when I was ten,

To see the world and learn

A little bit about the things I didn’t

know.

Labor crews and gandy dancers

Taught me questions without answers;

I learn less the further on I go.

Idol Apparent. Last week, peering at the world through the traces of an elegant shiner picked up in the Cambridge fight, Kris signed a contract with Top Rank, J. Arthur Rank’s British recording firm (he is also dickering with J. Arthur’s calamitously titled U.S. subsidiary, Rank Records), and set off with a earful of fellow Oxonians to tour Switzerland on the first proceeds. The young idol-apparent, renamed Kris Carson by Promoter Lincoln, is dead serious about making a success as a singer, chiefly because he wants enough money to be able to support himself while he writes. Merton College Tutor Hugo Dyson is not worried that Kris will abandon literature for the larynx, calls Kris “one of the most favorable specimens of Rhodes scholarship” and “the kind of man you can trust to pick his own career.” Stable Owner Lincoln finds his deep-thinking discovery “rather frightening.” In case plans gosour, he has figured out an alternate road to fame. “If this doesn’t work out,” he told the well-muscled singer-scholar last week, “I can always launch you in wrestling.”