Cary Grant has virtually every nickel he has ever earned. He was once seen handing a few coins to his wife and counting them first. After the Plaza Hotel sent him one and a half English muffins for breakfast, he called the head of room service and the manager and even threatened to call Conrad Hilton, the owner, claiming that the menu said “muffins” and a measly one and a half did not live up to the plural.
Lean, suave, incomparably tanned, he never wears makeup and, across time, has become steadily better-looking. More or less successfully, he spends his real life pretending he is Cary Grant. Open Paris Match, for example, and there, in all likelihood, will be a picture of him in an Italian car, zooming east of Nice on the Moyenne Corniche—the route he followed with Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief. He is the darling of the internationals, a janissary in Kelly’s Monegasque toy palace, a captive treasure among the potentates and popinjays of the Onassis floating salon.
Being Cary Grant is such a gilded role that all sorts of other people think they are Cary Grant, too. Tony Curtis, for example, seems to caricature Grant in everything he does. He dresses like Grant, but with tighter trousers; his accent seems to be an attempt to sound like Grant; and he imitates Grant on the screen. When Curtis bought a Rolls-Royce, he made sure he got a better one than Grant’s.
Grant has many apes but few friends. In Hollywood—he has a mansion in Beverly Hills—he runs with no pack and is rarely seen at parties or premieres. The director Billy Wilder recently said, “I don’t know anyone who has been to Grant’s house in the last ten years.” Grant steadfastly insists that he has as much right to privacy as a plumber or a municipal clerk. When people ask for his autograph, he gives them an incredulous look as if they are trying to crash a party, and if some jolly clod says, “Put your John Hancock right here, Cary,” he says, “My name is not John Hancock, and I have no intention of putting it anywhere.” On one occasion, a rebuffed fan snapped, “Who the hell do you think you are?” Cool as the north wind, Grant answered, “I know who I am. I haven’t the vaguest idea who you are, and furthermore I don’t care to know.”
Cary Grant, of course, is Archibald Alexander Leach (“My name will give you an idea what kind of family I came from”), son of a textile worker in provincial Britain. When Archie was twelve, his father deserted his mother, a tall and commanding woman who for a time went to pieces under the shock of rejection. Little Archie, essentially homeless, turned to show business and ran away to join a troupe of acrobats.
Perhaps reacting to his dark-haired, dark-eyed mother, he has had three blond, blue-eyed wives. The first was Virginia Cherrill, the flower girl in Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights; the second was the Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton (unlike her other husbands, Grant did not ask for alimony); the third was the actress Betsy Drake, whose grandfather built the Drake and Blackstone hotels in Chicago. An accomplished hypnotist, Drake put Grant to sleep at various times and helped him to stop smoking and drinking. Together they explored Asian religions, transcendentalism, mysticism, and yoga. Grant claims that through her he learned how to put one side of his jaw to sleep when a dentist happened to be drilling there. For years, they were intimately estranged, living apart, dating each other frequently, taking trips together. Once, at a Broadway show, Cary saw her come in with another man. “There’s my wife,” he said to his own companion. “Isn’t she beautiful?”
Grant and his psychiatrist tried using LSD to help uproot Cary’s deepest psychological problems. Often called instant analysis, LSD is said to clean out the subconscious like lye in a septic tank. Impressed by his own progress under its influence, Grant delivered a confessional lecture at U.C.L.A. “I was a self-centered boor,” he told the fascinated students. “I was masochistic and only thought I was happy. When I woke up and said, ‘There must be something wrong with me,’ I grew up.” In a subsequent interview, he went on to say, “Because I never understood myself, how could I have hoped to understand anyone else? That’s why I say that now I can truly give a woman love for the first time in my life, because I can understand her.” Last week, Betsy Drake filed for divorce.
On a set, he drives directors and fellow actors round the bend with his fussy attention to minutiae. He once went over the scalps of innumerable extras to see if their hair had been properly dyed. While filming That Touch of Mink, with Doris Day, he went shopping with her and supervised her purchase of shoes, skirts, and blouses to wear in the picture. On the movie lot, he was so disturbed when he saw the paintings on a set wall that he held up production while he went home and returned with better ones from his private collection. “A thousand details add up to one impression,” he explained.
In his studio office are very large photographs of all his wives, and numberless mementos of his long and lofty career. “The good old days are now,” he says, grinning amiably. An editor, checking facts, recently sent a telegram to him, asking, “HOW OLD CARY GRANT?” He wired back, “OLD CARY GRANT FINE. HOW YOU?”
IN THE SPORT AND CAMPING SHOW at the New York Coliseum, a former Ping-Pong champion of the United States, Great Britain, Canada, and South America played Ping-Pong with Mrs. John Lindsay, the First Lady of the City of New York, who bobbed gracefully about, hitting sweeping ground strokes in response to the champion’s steady game. “Hi, Mrs. Lindsay!” a voice called from the crowd outside the picket fence surrounding the playing area. “Call me Mary,” said Mary, without taking her eye off the ball. The professional sent up a high, dizzy lob that seemed to come down like a falling leaf. “Ooo!” said Mary. “Show me that one again. I want to try it on my children.” After offering another lob, the pro, with some insolence, began to answer her volleys by raising one leg and hitting the ball with the bottom of his foot. Mrs. Lindsay watched for her chance, and sent a baseline drive whistling past him while his leg waved absurdly in the air.
A professional pool player prepared to demonstrate trick shots. An announcer with a small, intimate loudspeaker told the crowd that the professional would begin by sinking three balls at once. The pro chalked up and tried the shot. The cue ball rocketed into the three setups, and the balls dispersed to various cushions, but not one dropped into a pocket. He tried again. He missed again. He tried again. He missed again. “I don’t think this table is quite right,” said the announcer, who was—at least until that moment—an employee of the manufacturer of the table.
Oscar Robertson, of basketball’s Cincinnati Royals, entered the hall and was immediately surrounded by at least two thousand people, more than half of them adults. To get near him, they climbed over booths, broke down barricades, and temporarily paralyzed most of the exhibits in the show. National Shoes had engaged Robertson to make an appearance and sign autographs. Soon, Robertson was standing in a small “basketball court”—ten feet wide by twenty feet long—between a pair of backboards made of thin composition board and equipped with attached hoops of the sort that are sold in dime stores. The crowd seemed to surge like a throng in Saint Peter’s Square. A little boy, perhaps ten years old, stood beside Robertson, and Robertson handed him a basketball. The boy took a shot, and missed. Robertson retrieved the ball and handed it to him again. The boy shot again, and missed. Robertson leaned down and talked to the boy. Not just a word or two. He spoke into the boy’s ear for half a minute. The boy shot again. Swish. Robertson himself seemed reluctant to try a shot. The baskets were terrible, and—even if they had not been—a basketball player makes only about half his shots anyway. A few misses, and this crowd really would not have understood. Moreover, Robertson was wearing an ordinary business suit, so his movements would be restricted. He signed a few autographs. “Shoot, Big O!” someone called out. Others took up the cry. “Shoot, Big O!” Robertson turned aside, and signed another autograph. “Shoot, Big O!” Robertson studied one of the baskets. This might have been a mistake, because there was no retreating now. Once a basketball player, with a ball in his hand, looks up at a basket, almost nothing can make him resist the temptation to take a shot. Robertson stepped back to a point about seventeen feet from the basket and lifted the ball high, and a long set shot rolled off his fingers and began to arc toward the basket with a slow backspin. The crowd was suddenly quiet. Everybody watched the ball except Robertson, whose eyes never left the basket until the ball had dropped in. He shot again. Swish. Again. Swish. Five, six, seven in a row. There was no one else in the Coliseum now. Robertson—making set shots, jump shots, even long, graceful hook shots—had retreated from the crowd into the refuge of his talent.
THE TILT of these essentially parallel faults is to the north. In each earthquake, the lower side slipped north, the upper side moved south. In each earthquake, the north-south dimension of the basin shortened somewhat, and its adjacent mountains went up a couple of feet. This local compression began in relatively recent time, when the Pacific Lithospheric Plate, moving essentially northward, sort of shouldered into the North American Plate where the San Andreas Fault presents an awkward curve that is known in geology as a prominent restraining bend. The mountains went up. People came, and Los Angeles went up. The mountains, hills, anticlines will continue to go up, the basin will continue to be compressed, as long as the Pacific Plate keeps pushing into the restraining bend. The Pacific Plate, sliding, weighs three hundred and forty-five quadrillion tons.
Like a city planner, the plate motions have created Los Angeles. The plate motions have shaped its setting and its setting’s exceptional beauty, raising its intimate mountains ten thousand feet. The mountains are such a phalanx that air flowing in from the west cannot get over them, and a result is the inversion layer that concentrates smog. Plate motions in Los Angeles folded the anticlines that trapped the oil that rained gold and silver into the streets. Plate motions have formed a basin so dry that water must be carried to it five hundred miles. Plate motions have built the topography that has induced the weather that has brought the fire that has prepared the topography for city-wrecking flows of rock debris. Plate motions are benign, fatal, eternal, causal, beneficial, ruinous, continual, and inevitable. It’s all in the luck of the cards. Plate motions are earthquakes.
IN AN OLD NEW ENGLAND HOUSE, Eric Sloane found a wood-backed, leather-bound diary written in 1805 by a fifteen-year-old boy. Its entries were terse: “June 3—Helped Father build rope hoist to move the water wheel,” or “June 26—Father and I sledded the oaks from the woodlot and put them down near the mill.” Sloane took the diary and dressed it out with verbal and graphic sketches, detailing the construction of a whole backwoods farm. Mere antiquity is not what interests him. Instead, he puts a shine and an edge on the tools of the pioneers, constantly admiring the care and skill of craftsmen who thought enough of themselves, their work, and the times they lived in to date and sign everything they made.
Sloane shows how to build a house without a nail in it that will go up and stay up for hundreds of years, how to make a bottle-glass window, a fieldstone grike, a folding ladder, a wooden tub, a cider press. Two ways to stack cordwood. A recipe for brown ink (“Boiled down walnut or butternut hulls that have been mashed first. Add vinegar and salt to boiling water to ‘set’”). From king posts to roofing, he details the construction of a covered bridge, which was an 1805 innovation. George Washington never saw one.
The mill wheel was the all-purpose appliance that could run saws, pump bellows, grind grain, keep trip hammers thumping, turn meat spits, and rock babies—all at once. Woods were selected according to capability, and when a wagon was built—oak frame, elm sides and floor, ash spokes and shafts, pine seat, hickory slats—it lasted about twelve times as long as a Cadillac does now.
Young boys, like the one whose diary Sloane follows, would get up on winter mornings, run across the road to the barn, push the cow or ox aside, then stand and dress in the warm area where the animal had been sleeping. If a house had more than ten panes of glass, the owner paid a glass tax—so most houses had ten and no more. Window glass, in fact, was so valuable that a family often took the panes with them when they moved from one house to another. If a woman died, the church bell tolled six times. A man was worth nine. Then, after a pause, the exact age of the late member of the congregation was tintinnabulated for all to note. If a family had a bridge on their land, they charged neighbors and strangers a toll to cross it. (This was a tradition that time would honor. Until 1955, for example, a suspension bridge more than a mile long, crossing part of Narragansett Bay, was the private property of Rudolf Haffenreffer, who gathered more than a million a year in tolls.)
In a time when two-car garages have phony haylofts and cocktails rest on cobblers’ benches, the ways of the early Americans are more often exploited than understood. Sloane understands them. When he closes his hand around the handle of an old wooden tool, he says, he can all but feel “the very hand that wore it smooth.” He hands the tool to his reader.
I PARKED MY FORD in lower Manhattan, locked it, went about some business, and returned to find that I had left the key inside. Damn. Every window was shut tight. The nearest duplicate key, as it happened, was a fifty-dollar cab ride away, in New Jersey. The parking space was under an elevated segment of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive, in a moted half-light that swiftly lost what little magic it had had, and turned to condensed gloom. Trash barrels were spaced among the steel supports of the highway. Refuse was all over the ground. I searched the area and rummaged through one barrel after another, looking for wire. Finally, in a mass of broken Gallo bottles, I found the classic tool of the car thief—a metal coat hanger. Unfortunately, I lacked the skill to use it. I knew, in a general way, the technique. Make the coat hanger into a straight piece of wire, then bend it so that it’s like a big hairpin, then twist one end to form a hook. Work the wire in past the rubber that rims a window. Now maneuver the hook down the inside and—most adroit move of all—get a grip on the lock button. Firmly, slowly, lift the wire. Sesame.
I poked around my nondescript car looking for a spot soft enough to penetrate, and did not meet with early success. I jabbed for a while at the windows on one side, then moved around the car. Finally, I got the wire in about two inches, but beyond that it was reluctant to move. While I was shoving at it, a car pulled up beside me, and I noticed from the corner of my eye the familiar green and black of a sedan of the police of the City of New York. Two policemen were inside. I pulled out the wire, waved it at them, and said, “Hello. Hi. The key is locked inside, you see, and…”
The policemen got out of the patrol car, and one of them asked for the wire. I handed it to him. He stuck it into the Ford like a baker testing a cake. In three seconds, perhaps less, he had the car door standing open. He returned the wire, and I thanked him.
The other policeman said to him, “Now give the lecture, Sam.”
Sam gave a recitation on the foolhardiness of locking a key in a car.
Then the two policemen got back into their own vehicle and prepared to drive away.
“Wait,” I said.
They had asked for no papers, no identification of any kind. They had found me trying to insert a wire into a Ford. Were they just going to assume that the car was mine?
Sam, hearing all this, looked at his partner, then back at me. He said, “Listen, mister, if you’re stealing that car, and you had the chutzpah to get us to help you, take it. It’s yours. You can have it.”
WITH HIS COLLABORATOR, Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein set a new standard for the modern musical play, integrating verse with dialogue, music with plot, in a theatrical form that once demanded little more than a loose collection of songs, skits, and dances. Hammerstein’s lyrics were almost always written first, often completed after weeks of agony, walking mile upon mile on the blacktop roads near his Pennsylvania farm, using dummy tunes of his own invention to coax his words along toward a completed lyric. Hearing some of these mock-up melodies, Richard Rodgers staggered backward in amused horror. Whether Hammerstein was writing about Austrian singers, New England factory workers, or a Siamese king, there was always a steady undertone of old-fashioned optimism in his lyrics. He said, “I just can’t write anything without hope in it.” In 1943, when wartime headlines were black with death on coral beaches, Oklahoma! opened on Broadway, and Hammerstein’s words carried across the world the picture of a beautiful morning, “a bright golden haze on the meadow.” Just then, many people everywhere were grateful for the reminder that such a thing existed.
To people who grew up in the forties and fifties, humming and dancing in the glow of Rodgers and Hammerstein, it sometimes came as a surprise that Hammerstein had an earlier, equally prodigious career in the operettas of the twenties. Before he turned thirty-five, he had written the lyrics of Rose-Marie, The Desert Song, The New Moon, and Show Boat. Introducing himself with such songs as “Indian Love Call” and “Stouthearted Men,” he secured his position with “Ol’ Man River.”
He had many collaborators, and from them learned his craft. Otto Harbach, with whom Hammerstein worked on The Desert Song, taught him the basics of writing for the musical stage. Sigmund Romberg, confining his highest praise to the words “It fits, it fits,” taught him the virtues of a sixteen-hour workday. Jerome Kern, who gave him the tall captain’s table on which Hammerstein thereafter wrote standing up, taught him—ordered him, rather—never to use the word “Cupid” in a lyric. After hearing Kern’s next melody for Show Boat (the music came first with Jerome Kern; words were filled in later), Hammerstein fired back lyrics that began:
Cupid knows the way,
He’s the naked boy
Who can make you sway …
When Kern recovered, he was given an alternative:
Why do I love you?
Why do you love me?
Why should there be two
Happy as we?
From his home in Bronxville, Kern would call up Hammerstein in Great Neck, Long Island; then he would set the phone on his piano and bang away at the keyboard while the greatest American operetta grew along the wires. Although the Kerns and the Hammersteins were close friends, Hammerstein’s wife, Dorothy, could not abide hearing people refer to “Jerome Kern’s ‘Ol’ Man River.’” She would say to them, “Oscar Hammerstein wrote ‘Ol’ Man River.’ Jerome Kern wrote Ta-ta dumdum, Ta ta-ta dumdum.”
I HAVE WORKED for twenty years in East Pyne Hall at Princeton, in a corridor dominated by the Department of Comparative Literature, where the Council of the Humanities has a small inholding. Comp Lit has had two chairmen in its history at Princeton: Robert Fagles, whose translation of Homer is a work still in progress, and Robert Hollander, a curator of Dante. As both are overly fond of saying, I am an interloper there, a fake professor, a portfolio without minister. For all that, the third floor of East Pyne is a superb place to work. By six-thirty in the evening, it is essentially vacant. Even the tenure track is quietly rusting. At seven-thirty in the morning, though, a lonely figure will be wandering the hall—the back arched, the head a little cocked, the lips in perpetual motion—mumbling about warriors armed in bronze. Fagles understands bronze. Anyone with that much brass would understand bronze. Long ago I learned that if you hear him coming and you step into the corridor and confront him with a question, he turns into an ambulatory checking department, a mine of antique material, the willing donor in an act of cerebral osmosis. For example, there came a time when my geological compositions became focused on a passage about the island of Cyprus. I heard him coming, stepped into the hall, and later went back to my machine and wrote: “In 2760 B.C., smelting began in Cyprus. Slag heaps developed in forty places. The Iliad is populated with warriors armed in bronze. Bronze is copper hardened by adding some tin, and the copper would have come from Cyprus. (Copper was mined on Cyprus for nearly two thousand years before Homer.) … The word ‘Cyprus’ means copper. Whether the island is named for the metal or the metal for the island is an etymology lost in time.”
When I bring Fagles fish from the Delaware River, as I sometimes do, he asks that they be gutted, finned, and scaled, and wrapped in my work.
I HAVE A FRIEND in Washington who knows the city from the inside in. H. M. Remeor is not his name, but it will do. He is of the category of people who have put in time feeding pens to Presidents and have long since melded into the panelling of D.C. law firms, where, although they have no specific connection with the government, they operate within a distinct aurora of clout. Remeor’s Washington is not the Washington of Capital City Tours. For example, he once showed me through the cassette library in the Washington telephone exchange. He lives in the hills of suburban Maryland. In that general area, one autumn day, I was riding with him in his car when he turned into what appeared to be someone’s long driveway. Wide lawns reached away from the drive, which ran between rows of deciduous trees and led to a large stone house. The day was cold but sunlit, and windy. Behind the house were a couple of dozen cars, parked in an ovate ring. Remeor drove into the middle of this circle, stopped, and said, “This is the parking lot at Burning Tree. That is the clubhouse. The golf course is over there. The course is hardly noticeable unless you get right on it. This place is so anonymous you’d never know it was here, but it precedes the Pentagon on Brezhnev’s list of pinpoint targets in the Washington area. There are big men here, with big handicaps. More power goes off the tees of Burning Tree—for less distance—than at any other golf club on earth. Look who’s here even on a day as cold as this.”
I looked around and saw no one.
Remeor said, “Take a good look at the cars.”
Directly in front of us was a Mercedes-Benz with an Arkansas license plate—MS 2.
“Member of the Senate, two,” explained Remeor. “James William Fulbright, the junior senator from Arkansas. Naturally, he has a foreign car. He’s the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.”
Our eyes began to move from automobile to automobile, plate to plate: Thunderbird. Missouri—8.
“Now, who do you suppose that is?” Mr. Remeor said. “Who would you say is the eighth-most-important person in Missouri?”
I counted down my own list—the chairman of the board of Ralston Purina, Harry Truman, Governor Hearnes, Warren Bradley, Busch, Anheuser … “Symington,” I said, finally. “Stuart Symington. Missouri 8.”
“You’ve got it,” Remeor said. “Now have a look at that one.” He nodded toward a big Chrysler with a Maine license plate that had no numerals at all—just the word “SENATE,” in large block letters.
“Muskie,” I said.
“There can be no doubt of it. One thing for dead certain is that Margaret Chase Smith is not out here on this golf course today. Women are forbidden at Burning Tree. No woman ever sets foot in that clubhouse. A long time ago, Joe Davies offered to build and pay for a swimming pool here, and the offer was indignantly refused, on the ground that a pool would increase pressure from women and children. The members take considerable pride in the fact that they can walk around nude in any part of the building.”
I wondered how well everyone was doing on the golf course on such a cold afternoon, and from my home in New Jersey some days later I would call up the cars’ owners to find out. Senator Symington, for example, said that the temperature had discouraged him, so he had just hit some balls from the practice tee. Senator Muskie’s office told me that Muskie had played and then had gone off to Moscow. “The Senator is very modest about his golf game, with good reason,” said a member of his staff, who went on to say that three years ago, in Kennebunk, Muskie had made a hole in one, and that he breaks 90 with about the same frequency.
Senator Fulbright described his golf game in a general way, and there was something in his manner that might have suggested—had I been less familiar with the probity of the source—the crafted self-deprecation of an organized hustler. “My game is pretty poor,” he said. “I don’t play enough. I’m getting old and decrepit. There’s nothing very exciting about my golf game or about the life I lead. As we get older, we get progressively duller and duller—you’ll find that out. I used to play more, but ever since I’ve been the chairman of the committee I haven’t been in the seventies. My golf is very poor. I played lacrosse at Oxford in 1926, and, before that, football at Arkansas. I injured my knees very badly. The cartilage is out. That hampers my golf. I didn’t have a scheduled match. I just went out that afternoon and picked up a game.”
The game he picked up was J. Lawn Thompson, M.D. (District of Columbia, Thunderbird—701), physician to Cabinets and Congresses, and former curator of Lyndon B. Johnson.
“Hello, Dr. Thompson. How did you fare on the golf course with Senator Fulbright the other day?”
“As usual, I was talked out of everything. Senator Fulbright is a very persuasive man, not only in national politics but on the first tee. He has a way of creating unjustified sympathy for himself. He tells you how hard he’s been working, you know, and how tired he is, and that he hasn’t played golf very much, and the next thing you know you’re giving him strokes when he should be giving you strokes. So that’s how I fared. I reached in my pocket and paid him all of my Medicare fees for the past month.”
“What was your score, Dr. Thompson?”
“Eighty-four.”
“What was the Senator’s score?”
“Three shots less—just enough, you know, to hang me up on the wall.”
I would also try a call to the office of Senator Smith, for it nagged me that Muskie’s license plate merely said “SENATE.” What, then, could hers possibly say? “It says ‘1,’” said her administrative assistant.
Moving slowly through the parking lot, Mr. Remeor next pointed out a Florida Lincoln Continental—MC 9.
“Member of Congress, Ninth District,” I said.
“You’re ready,” he said. “Paul Rogers, of West Palm Beach, is the Congressman from the Ninth District of Florida.”
Ohio, Continental—FMF. “That’s a tough one,” Remeor said. “Unless you happen to know that Congressman Michael A. Feighan, of Ohio, once married a girl named Florence Mathews.”
District of Columbia, Mercury—34l. “That’s Doug Mode,” Remeor said. “He’s a lawyer. Does the same sort of thing I do. Doug was a pallbearer at Walter Hagen’s funeral, and he has a set of Hagen’s clubs, but he’s not much of a golfer. He plays golf in the fall, when there are no gnats. Today, he’ll be in there playing gin. He was the advance man for Dewey in the ’44 campaign.”
I asked Mr. Remeor if he himself was a golfer.
“Oh, Lord, no,” he said. “I can’t stand the game.”
Passing by a Mercedes-Benz, DPL 2079 (D.C. plate), Remeor said, “Luis Machado. Note the diplomatic license. He was once the Cuban Ambassador to the United States. Before that, he was president of the Havana Country Club.”
Cadillac, D.C.—144. “You know Abe Fortas’s old law firm, Arnold, Fortas & Porter?” Remeor said. “Well, that’s Porter. Porter has a chauffeur named Henry Ford.”
One automobile at Burning Tree—a Continental, Texas, BKZ 922—attracted us not because of its license number but because of its size. There was something magnified about it. It seemed too big for a continent, let alone a Continental. Each of its fenders appeared to be large enough to garage a Volkswagen. Surely all this automobile could not be the carapace of a mere Senator. Mr. Remeor had no idea whose it was, so I later called a policeman friend and he radioed somewhere and word came quickly back that Texas BKZ 922 was the automobile of Lieutenant General John C. Meyer, Director of Operations, United States Air Force, two hundred combat missions over Europe, one of the top air aces of all time, Croix de Guerre from France and Belgium, Air Medal, Silver Star, D.F.C., and D.S.C., with thirteen (Did you say thirteen? Roger. Repeat, thirteen) oak-leaf clusters. I put in a call to the Pentagon, and soon sensed just how big a general General Meyer is, for in order to propose a talk with him I had to spend fifteen minutes talking with another general—Brigadier General H. L. Hogan III (five oak-leaf clusters)—who politely told me that he would see what he could do, and would call me back. A day or so later, he called to say that he was still having difficulty getting through to General Meyer on the matter of the golf game but that he would continue the effort and call me again. “I just didn’t want you to think we weren’t working on the problem,” said generous General Hogan. “Let’s see what we can whomp up.” Two days later, the Pentagon called again. “This is General Hogan,” said General Hogan. “Stand by for General Meyer!”
“This is General Meyer speaking. My game is generally pretty bad. I must have played a lousy game that afternoon, because if it was good I would remember the score. I played with two other generals. We didn’t find the weather particularly cold. I would guess I was somewhere around my usual game, which is like ninety-two or three or four. If I was worse than a hundred, I would remember that, too. If I’d played a good game, I could tell you every stroke.”
At Burning Tree, as we retreated down the long driveway, Mr. Remeor said, “You may recall that Burning Tree is where the Martian landed on the eighth green and went up to President Eisenhower and said, ‘Take me to your leader.’ This place has a rich history. The policy of the club has always been that it wants no publicity whatsoever, but sometimes it can’t help getting it. According to another story that went around, Ike was playing here one day and Secret Service men came running out of the woods and conferred with him, and then they rushed up the fairway to the next foursome and said, ‘Excuse us, gentlemen, but do you mind if the President plays through? We have just received word that New York has been bombed.’ … Yes, yes, Nixon is a member here. The President and the Vice President—Nixon and Agnew. They’ve even got the president of the P.G.A. in there, as their pro. Of all the American Presidents who have ever played the game, John Kennedy was by a country mile the best golfer. His back bothered him, and he played for only a short period each time he came out here. He would just show up, shoot a few pars, and leave. Think of this: Nixon sponsored John Kennedy for membership here. The club has a collection of drivers that have been used by Presidents. By and large, the members are an informal and unstuffy bunch of men. In the summertime, they play in short pants and wear no shirts. Some of them play in their undershorts. They put on long drawers and play all through the winter. I’ve been in clubs all over the world that have big mazumbos in their membership, and this one is the least pretentious, the most homey, the most humble. There is nothing burning here. Centuries ago, there was a tree here that glowed in the night, probably from phosphorus, so the Indians called this region Potomac, the Place of the Burning Tree.”
HER FEET ARE TOO BIG. Her nose is too long. Her teeth are uneven. She has the neck, as one of her rivals has put it, of “a Neapolitan giraffe.” Her waist seems to begin in the middle of her thighs, and she has big, half-bushel hips. She runs like a fullback. Her hands are huge. Her forehead is low. Her mouth is too large. And, mamma mia, she is absolutely gorgeous.
By her own description, Sophia Loren is “a unity of many irregularities.” She has rewritten the canons of beauty. A daughter of the Bay of Naples, she has within her the blood of the Saracens, Spanish, Normans, Byzantines, and Greeks. The East appears in her slanting eyes. Her dark brown hair is a bazaar of rare silk. Her legs talk. In her impish, ribald Neapolitan laughter, she epitomizes the Capriccio Italien that Tchaikovsky must have had in mind. Lord Byron, in her honor, probably sits up in his grave about once a week and rededicates his homage to “Italia! oh, Italia! thou who hast the fatal gift of beauty.” Vogue magazine once fell to its skinny knees and abjectly admitted: “After Loren, bones are boring.” Catherine de Medici decreed that women should strive for a waist measurement of 13 inches. Sophia Loren sets the template now: 38-24-38. She is what the Spanish call “much woman” and the French “une femme plantureuse.” Italians once called Gina Lollobrigida “La Gina Nazionale.” They now call Sophia Loren “La Sophia Seducente.” They prefer the seductress. Gina was, in their curious view, too refined. Sophia, they say, is a woman of the people, their donna popolana.
Her body is a mobile of miscellaneous fruits and melons, and her early career was largely a matter of putting them on display. But Sophia no longer leans forward for just any passing Leica. “Someday,” she says with the earnestness of a starlet, “I hope that everyone will say I am a great actress and I will be remembered for that.”
(She won the Academy Award for Best Actress, in 1962, for Two Women.)
Pozzuoli, on the Bay of Naples, where Sophia grew up, has been described in a travel book as “perhaps the most squalid city in Italy.” The most squalid city in Italy has music in its streets, cluttered pink-and-white buildings, seagulls screaming overhead, a bright blue waterfront, a Roman amphitheatre where Gennaro—the patron saint of Naples—achieved his exaltation simply because a pride of lions refused to eat him. It now has a municipal slogan: “What a woman we have exported.”
Little Sofia—the “ph” was inserted later because it seems more exotic to the Italian eye—was turned over to a hired wet nurse after her mother’s breasts went dry as a consequence of poor health. From a bed swarming with six grandchildren, the wet nurse last week reminisced: “Sophia was the ugliest child I ever saw in my life. She was so ugly that I am sure no one else would have wanted to give her milk. It was my milk that made Sophia beautiful, and now she doesn’t even remember me. I gave milk to hundreds of children, but none of them drank as much as Sophia. Her mother gave me fifty lire a month. Sophia drank at least a hundred lire worth of milk. Madonna mia!”
Schoolmates scrawled on the door of her house the word stecchetto (little stick), because she was as thin as one. At fourteen, the little stick suddenly blossomed. Gymnastics classes were held in the Roman amphitheatre, and the men of Pozzuoli began to show up to watch Sophia doing calisthenics. “It became a pleasure just to stroll down the street,” Sophia remembers. Mamma had thought that Sophia should try to become a teacher, but she took another look and put her in a beauty contest. In the spring of 1950, mother and daughter went off to Rome to seek work in films. “There I told my first big lie for Sophia,” her mother says. “Someone called out, ‘This way for girls who speak English.’ ‘Sure,’ I told the man, ‘my daughter speaks English. Don’t you speak English, Sophia?’
“‘Si, Mamma.’”
IN THE MOSCOW STATE CIRCUS there are no elephants. No tigers. No lions. No giraffes. No orangutans. Bears.
Big bears. Little bears. Black bears. Brown bears. Mamma bears. Great strong hammer-sickle thick-coated rocket-powered Soviet bears. Trained by Valentin Filatov on a third of a ton of lump sugar a day, they roller-skate, ride bicycles and scooters, and hang from whirling trapezes. Three of them draw a troika. Two of them fight, wearing boxing gloves. They hook and jab. They drive motorcycles in the dark, turning the headlights on and off and stopping for traffic lights along the way. They’re so intelligent they’re painful to watch, because they make an American think of all those snobbish, slobbish fat brown blubber-bottomed freeloading Yellowstone bears, who have yet to lift a claw for their country.
ONE SUMMER in the nineteen-fifties, the editorial staff of Time began to collect material for a cover story about Americans on holiday. Boris Chaliapin, who had produced more Time cover pictures than any other artist, was asked to create a work expressing the theme. The resulting picture was not used. It was consigned to darkness with the fatal term “NR” (“not running”). Chaliapin had painted the Statue of Liberty on water skis. Her robes had been shed on Bedloe’s Island and were draped there over her plinth. She now wore a bathing suit. Torch in hand, she scudded across the harbor.
I remembered that painting (who could ever forget it?), having seen it once, long ago in Time’s editorial offices in Rockefeller Center, when I worked there. It had been the star of a collection of analogous works, which had been commissioned and completed but, for one reason or another, had never seen the light of print—a gallery’s worth of NR Time covers under dust in an outsize closet. Wondering how the collection had evolved in the intervening years, I called up Henry Grunwald, my former editor, now Time’s managing editor, and asked him.
Unused cover paintings and cover sculptures had a tendency to disappear, he said, but there was no lack of them on hand. He happened to have one, by Larry Rivers, on his own wall. It showed God lying in a coffin.
“Whose idea was that?”
“Larry Rivers’s.”
“May I look at it?”
“You may.”
“And the others?”
“Why not?”
Grunwald is a courtly man, born and raised in Vienna, educated in New York, and he has an accent that lilts at all volumes. I found him sitting at his desk, twenty-five stories up. Framed by a window behind him, he himself might have been an NR cover of Henry Kissinger—the rippling hair, the middling height, the eyes that seemed to inflate behind glasses that had dark rims. The resemblance between the two men is considerable, and it is flattering to each to say that he looks like the other. Grunwald wore a striped tie and a brown-and-white striped shirt. He was managing his magazine through an intercom console that had many levers. As he went on speaking to genies all around the building, he waved hello and pointed to the wall where God lay dead.
The picture was a collage. God’s coffin was a foldout affair, as if from a children’s book, and an arrow that led away from the bier seemed to suggest a route by which He might escape. Subordinate themes surrounded the central image—sets of pictures and symbols having to do, apparently, with functions that in some way people had wrested from God. Medicine. Weather. Dishwashers. Rockets. Very, very subtle. Da Vinci’s God had been pasted in and then, with a red crayon, crossed out. Rivers’s God seemed in no hurry to get out of the coffin. All this had been too complex for the magazine, Grunwald told me. NR. Rivers had done the collage to accompany a cover story titled “Is God Dead?,” and those words alone ran on the cover of the magazine, in red letters on a solid black field—the first time ever that the magazine had not used some sort of picture.
Larry Rivers had another cover in the NR collection, Grunwald told me. It had been an attempt to paste together the essence of Norman Mailer. In two rooms nearby, several dozen NR’d pictures, collages, and sculptures had been set out for viewing, and in one corner was Rivers’s Mailer, coming apart in layers. Rivers had started with a photograph of his subject’s face and then—preserving little more than the eyes—had placed upon it numerous cutouts in cardboard and silver paper, and a Band-Aid, and a pair of large ears, and cardboard glasses, and a pushpin in the chin. Pencil squiggles served for hair. “It was Rivers’s conceit that Norman Mailer wears a false face,” Grunwald said. “That is, he saw Mailer’s face as a mask with Mailer’s own eyes in it.” As you stare at Rivers’s Mailer, the mask indeed seems to become the face, the face the mask—with eyes at the bottom of cardboard wells. “It seems quite lifelike,” I muttered. “One almost expects it to speak.”
I looked around the room from cover to cover, NR.
Spiro Agnew. Papier-mâché sculpture by Paul Davis. NR’d because it looked too much like Lyndon Johnson.
Jean-Paul Sartre. By Ben Shahn. Sartre in profile, with sheaves of manuscripts under his arm—Les Mots, La Nausée, Saint Genet. A background of mottled pastels. How could the magazine have rejected that?
It hadn’t, Grunwald said. Cover stories on such people had often been swept aside by unexpected developments in the news or lost in a fruitless quest for “the right moment.” And, of course, one never knew when a writer might implode. In Sartre’s case, the idea for the story had kicked around for years, but the magazine’s book-review staff had never pulled itself together enough to produce a story. Of Ben Shahn’s work for Time, only the Sartre had not run. Shahn had done cover portraits of Lenin, Alec Guinness, Sargent Shriver, Johann Sebastian Bach, Martin Luther King Jr. When Shahn came into the office, he would sit and chatter with Rosemary Frank, the cover researcher, and he would tell her about the Depression days, when he had been a painter for the W.P.A.
W. H. Auden. An oil by René Bouché. A study in wrinkles, a splendid face. The accompanying story had been written while Otto Fuerbringer, Grunwald’s predecessor as managing editor, was away on vacation. Apparently, Otto didn’t like Auden, Grunwald said, and Otto came back too soon.
Marilyn Monroe, by Aaron Bohrod. In a pale sky among wisps of cirrus, she stood in an oval picture frame, wearing a string-strap top with a scoop neck. It seemed demure by contemporary lights, an attractive and flattering portrait. One could hardly imagine a better treatment of Monroe. In 1956, Roy Alexander, Fuerbringer’s predecessor, had killed it because it was too sexy.
Claes Oldenburg. Self-portrait, on graph paper. His tongue hanging out. An ice bag on his head. “The news, alas, knocked it off the cover,” Grunwald said. “The story on Oldenburg ran without the picture.”
Time had once planned a cover story on the Establishment, and now here was all that was left of the idea—a painting by Edward Sorel of a turreted, moated medieval castle being defended by substantial, solid-looking University Club types against a horde of scruffy creatures who were carrying a battering ram. On the front end of the battering ram was the severed head of Spiro Agnew. The castle was full of Bundys, Galbraiths, Gardners, McCloys, Achesons, Schlesingers, Oakeses, and Rockefellers, with William F. Buckley Jr., in the form of a flying dragon, hovering in the air above. “It was a better idea than story,” Grunwald said, ruefully recalling the wreckage. “The story never worked. We could never quite figure out whether or not we were part of the Establishment, and, if so, how to deal with ourselves.”
Grunwald picked up a color transparency that showed a sheaf of wheat, a tragic mask, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil, with the apple partly eaten, so that it looked like a skull, all of which had been created by Salvatore Purpura, a baker, in his bakery, on 111th Street, in Corona, Queens. Purpura had been commissioned to do a Time cover on the subject of hunger, and bread was the medium. Purpura was asked at the time what sort of bread he would use, and he said, “Italian bread that you can a-eat.” The story was dropped. NR, and a pity, too. Purpura might have become the only baker who had ever baked a cover of Time.
Russell Baker, of the Times, once came very close to being on Time’s cover—close enough to wind up in the NR bin, too, and there he was, in a creation by Herblock, who had used a photograph of Baker’s face affixed to a drawing of Baker’s body astride a flying newspaper airplane. All through the sky around him were fat-cat senators, congressmen, generals, diplomats. One man’s shirtfront was literally exploding. Each of these figures had a toy-balloon valve in his back. Grunwald sighed. “Baker is still writing,” he said. “Maybe one day … Who knows?”
Norman Laliberte, a designer who uses fabrics and textured materials, had done a handsome tapestry of the Good Samaritan for Time’s cover, a grace to the Christmas season, but the tapestry was here in the NR collection, because it had lost out to a stained-glass window, the work of another artist. Grunwald explained that in recent years he had found it expedient to commission more than one artist per cover. Two was now the standard number—two artists competing. Sometimes three. As many as seven artists had been commissioned to do finished paintings for one subject and one issue. The magazine had once depended on a handful of proved regulars, Grunwald said—people like Chaliapin and Boris Artzybasheff. And when Fuerbringer came along, his predilection had been to commission artists of international celebrity. Grunwald thought some of that had been “a little square.” He and his art directors wanted Time covers to be “more modern and postery,” and they wanted to reach out more for artists who were “unknown.” That was risky, so you commissioned several at once. Moreover, if something was not quite right in a picture and it was late getting to the printer, the cost of the delay could run into tens of thousands of dollars. Artists came cheaper. The magazine pays two thousand dollars for a cover painting (more under special circumstances). For a mere six thousand dollars, Grunwald could have three covers among which to choose, thus reducing the possibility of wasting sums much larger.
Artists don’t think well of the system. As one has put it, “half my heart isn’t in the work.” But Grunwald sees no other way in which he can afford to be as experimental as he wants to be—afford, for example, to ask a Gerald Scarfe or a Frank Gallo, or, for that matter, almost anyone else, to try a Time cover of Richard Nixon. Nixon, as a face, was by far the most difficult subject that had ever come along. Notwithstanding what might be said in its interior pages, the magazine preferred not to be cruel on the cover. Yet it was difficult not to be. The face—well, the face was just an awkward problem technically. What else could one say? And, to make matters worse, Nixon had appeared on the cover of Time more than anyone else ever.
Here, then, was Frank Gallo’s Nixon—cast in epoxy resin—looking like the Carnauba Man done in used jaundice. Gallo had sculptured Raquel Welch for Time in the same materials. His Raquel figure had been more than life-size, and he had bought an airplane seat for her on his way east to Time from his home in Illinois. For his Nixon, he might have bought space in the hold. “It is so ugly we felt we couldn’t run it,” Grunwald said. “He looks like an embalmed corpse.”
And here was the Nixon of Gerald Scarfe, the British cartoonist and papier-mâché sculptor, who had once done the Beatles for Time, and had now done what appeared to be an oversize duckbill platypus in papier-mâché. NR.
Grunwald led the way into a room that was overwhelmingly filled with leftover Nixons. During the past year, he said, there was always at least one artist at work on a new try at Nixon. Here now were dozens of them, lining the walls, standing on tables—everywhere you looked, an unused Nixon. Nixon. Nixon. Nixon. Nixon. Nixon. Nixon. Nixon. Nixon. Nixon. Nixon. Nixon. Nixon. Nixon. Nixonixonixonixonixonixonixon. NR. Not running.
IN THE LONG DRY VALLEYS of eastern Nevada, where rain-hadow rain falls in desert rations and the silence is so deep it rings, water has been in storage for about ten thousand years. These are the waterlogged basins, as they are known to science—the saturated valleys—but if you were to look out upon them, that description is the last that would come to your mind. You would, in a glance, take in a million acres with nothing taller than the bunchgrass, the buffalo grass, the shad scale, the white and the black sage in tawny, desiccated boulevards between the high ranges. A daisy-wheel windmill, a cluster of cottonwoods—tens of miles apart—speak of settlement in some of the most austere and beautiful landscape between the oceans. It is a country held together by its concealed water, without which it would become exposed bedrock and dust. To the subsurface, the amount of fresh supply is essentially zero. What is down there is fossil water, resulting from a time when the climate was utterly different from the climate now, a time when alpine and continental ice to the north, east, and west caused so much rain that the Great Basin of Utah and Nevada held two freshwater lakes about the size of Lake Michigan and Lake Erie. Remains of that Pleistocene rainfall rest beneath the saturated valleys, prevent them from looking like Irq al-Subay, and emerge in small, sustaining quantities as spring creeks and seeps.
Las Vegas wants the water. Las Vegas is in Clark County, in southernmost Nevada, hundreds of miles from the saturated valleys. Distance is not a deterrent when you have the money. In Nevada, you can buy groundwater and, within the law, transport it from one basin to another, provided that the transfer does not impinge upon existing rights and is in the public interest. The public is in Las Vegas—marinopolis of pools and fountains. Las Vegas has less rain than some places in the Sahara, yet its areal population is more than two million. Around Las Vegas, well casings stand in the air like contemporary sculpture, and so much water has been mined from below that the surface of the earth has subsided six feet. While new wells are no longer permissible, Las Vegas desperately needs water for its lakes. They are not glacial lakes. If you want a lake in Las Vegas, you dig a hole and pour water into it. One subdivision has eight lakes. Las Vegas has twenty-two golf courses, at sixteen hundred gallons a divot. Green lawn runs down the median of the Strip. Here is the Wet’n’Wild park, there the M-G-M water rides. Outside the Mirage, a stratovolcano is in a state of perpetual eruption. It erupts water.
Las Vegas wants to drill the saturated valleys, remove the fossil water to a central place, and then pump it on to the south, in much the way that habitants in Quebec collect maple sap in tubes. Mountain sheep, antelope, deer, coyotes, eagles, badgers, bobcats will forever disappear as permanent springs go permanently dry. Las Vegas blandly claims that the resource is renewable, that Las Vegas will not be mining Nevada’s Pleistocene water. All they want to pump up is—annually—the equivalent of a one-acre pond eight hundred and sixty thousand feet deep.
POOLS AND POOLS AND POOLS of chocolate—fifty-thousand-pound, ninety-thousand-pound, Olympic-length pools of chocolate—in the conching rooms in the chocolate factory in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Big, aromatic rooms. Chocolate, as far as the eye can see. Viscous, undulating, lukewarm chocolate, viscidized, undulated by the slurping friction of granite rollers rolling through the chocolate over crenellated granite beds at the bottoms of the pools. The chocolate moves. It stands up in brown creamy dunes. Chocolate eddies. Chocolate currents. Gulfs of chocolate. Chocolate deeps. Mares’ tails on the deeps. The world record for the fifty-yard free-style would be two hours and ten minutes.
Slip a little spatula in there and see how it tastes. Waxy? Claggy? Gritty? Mild? Taste it soft. That is the way to get the flavor. Conching—granite on granite, deep in the chocolate—ordinarily continues for seventy-two hours, but if Bill Wagner thinks the flavor is not right, he will conch for hours extra, or even an extra day. Milky? Coarse? Astringent? Caramely? For forty-five years, Bill Wagner has been tasting the chocolate. His taste buds magnified a hundred times would probably look like Hershey’s kisses. He is aging now, and is bent slightly forward—a slender man, with gray hair and some white hair. His eyeglasses have metal rims and dark plastic brows. He wears thin white socks and brown shoes, black trousers, a white shirt with the company’s name on it in modest letters. Everyone wears a hat near the chocolate. Most are white paper caps. Wagner’s hat is dapper, white, visored: a chocolate-making supervisor’s linen hat.
A man in a paper hat comes up and asks Wagner, “Are we still running tests on that kiss paste?”
“Yes. You keep testing.”
Wagner began in cocoa, in 1924. The dust was too much for him. After a few weeks, he transferred to conching. He has been conching ever since, working out the taste and texture. Conching is the alchemy of the art, the transmutation of brown paste into liquid Hershey bars. Harsh? Smooth? Fine? Bland? There are viscosimeters and other scientific instruments to aid the pursuit of uniformity, but the ultimate instrument is Wagner. “You do it by feel, and by taste,” he says. “You taste for flavor and for fineness—whether it’s gritty. There’s one area of your tongue you’re more confident in than others. I use the front end of my tongue and the roof of my mouth.” He once ate some Nestlé’s; he can’t remember when. He lays some chocolate on the tip of his tongue and presses it upward. The statement that sends ninety thousand pounds on its way to be eaten is always the same. Wagner’s buds blossom, and he says, “That’s Hershey’s.”
Milton Hershey’s native town was originally called Derry Church, and it was surrounded, as it still is, by rolling milkland. Hershey could not have been born in a better place, for milk is twenty per cent of milk chocolate. Bill Wagner grew up on a farm just south of Derry Church. “It was a rented farm. We didn’t own a farm until 1915. I lived on the farm through the Second World War. I now live in town.” Wagner’s father, just after 1900, had helped Milton Hershey excavate the limestone bedrock under Derry Church to establish the foundations of the chocolate plant. Derry Church is Hershey now, and its main street, Chocolate Avenue, has streetlamps shaped like Hershey’s kisses—tinfoil, tassel, and all. The heart of town is the corner of Chocolate and Cocoa. Other streets (Lagos, Accra, Para) are named for the places the beans come from, arriving in quotidian trains full of beans that are roasted and, in studied ratios, mixed together—base beans, flavor beans, African beans, American beans—and crushed by granite millstones arranged in cascading tiers, from which flow falls of dark cordovan liquor. This thick chocolate liquor is squeezed mechanically in huge cylindrical accordion compressors. Clear cocoa butter rains down out of the compressors. When the butter has drained off, the compressors open, and out fall dry brown disks the size of manhole covers. The disks are broken into powder. The powder is put into cans and sold. It is Hershey’s Cocoa—straight out of the jungle and off to the supermarket, pure as the purest sunflower seed in a whole-earth boutique.
Concentrate fresh milk and make a paste with sugar. To two parts natural chocolate liquor add one part milk-and-sugar paste and one part pure cocoa butter. Conch for three days and three nights. That, more or less, is the recipe for a Hershey bar. (Baking chocolate consists of nothing but pure chocolate liquor allowed to stand and harden in molds. White chocolate is not really chocolate. It is made from milk, sugar, and cocoa butter, but without cocoa.) In the conching rooms, big American flags hang from beams above the chocolate. “Touch this,” Bill Wagner says. The cast-iron walls that hold in the chocolate are a hundred and thirty degrees Fahrenheit. “We have no heat under this. It’s only created heat—created by the friction that the granite rollers produce.”
“What if the rollers stop?”
“The chocolate will freeze.”
When that happens, the result is a brown ice cap, a chocolate-coated Nome. Sometimes fittings break or a worker forgets to shut off a valve and thousands of pounds of chocolate spill over, spread out, and solidify on the floor. Workers have to dig their way out, with adzes, crowbars, shovels, and picks.
“The trend today is people want to push buttons,” Wagner says. “They’ll try to find ways to shortcut. It’s a continual struggle to get people to do their share. There’s no shortcut to making Hershey’s. There have been times when I wished I’d stayed on the farm.” Every day, he works from six in the morning until four-thirty in the afternoon, so he can cover parts of all shifts. He walks to work in twelve minutes from his home, on Para Avenue. “Para is a bean, I think. It’s a bean or a country, I’m not sure which. We have another street called Ceylon. That’s not a bean. It’s a country.” In the conching rooms, Wagner can see subtleties of hue that escape the untrained eye; he can tell where the kiss paste is, and the semisweet, and the chocolate chips, and the bar milk chocolate. Kiss paste has to be a little more dense, so the kisses will sit up. Wagner has grandchildren in Hershey, Colebrook, and Mechanicsburg. When he goes to see them, he slips them kisses.
Within the connoisseurship, there are dearer chocolates, and, God knows, inferior ones, but undeniably there is no chocolate flavor quite like that of a Hershey bar. No one in Hershey can, or will, say exactly why. There is voodoo in the blending of beans, and even more voodoo in the making of the milk-and-sugar paste. There is magic in Bill Wagner when he decides that a batch is done. All this, however, does not seem to add up to a satisfactory explanation of the uniqueness of the product. Mystery lingers on. Notice, though, in the conching rooms, what is happening to the granite rollers rolling under the chocolate on the granite beds. Slowly, geologically, the granite is eroding. The granite beds last about thirty years. The granite rollers go somewhat sooner than that. Rolling back and forth, back and forth, they become flat on one side. Over the days, months, years, this wearing down of the granite is uniform, steady, consistent, a little at a time. There seems to be an ingredient that is not listed on the label. Infinitesimal granitic particles have nowhere to go but into the chocolate. A Hershey bar is part granite.
Ask management where the granite comes from. The official answer is “New England.”
“Where in New England?”
“New England. That is all we are saying. Nestlé’s won’t say anything about anything. Mars is the same way. So we don’t say anything, either.”
AT VASSAR COLLEGE, a few decades ago, I read to a gymful of people some passages from books I had written, and then received questions from the audience. The first person said, “Of all the educational institutions you went to when you were younger, which one had the greatest influence on the work you do now?” The question stopped me for a moment because I had previously thought about the topic only in terms of individual teachers and never in terms of institutions. Across my mind flashed the names of a public-school system K through 12, a New England private school (13), and two universities—one in the United States, one abroad—and in a split second I blurted out, “The children’s camp I went to when I was six years old.”
The response drew general laughter, but, funny or not, it was the simple truth. The camp, called Keewaydin, was at the north end of Lake Dunmore, about eight miles from Middlebury, Vermont. It was a canoeing camp, but in addition to ribs, planking, quarter-thwarts, and open gunwales you learned to identify rocks, ferns, and trees. You played tennis. You backpacked in the Green Mountains on the Long Trail. If I were to make a list of all the varied subjects that have come up in my articles and books, adding a check mark beside interests derived from Keewaydin, most of the entries would be checked. I spent all summer every summer at Keewaydin from age six through fifteen, and later was a counsellor there, leading canoe trips and teaching swimming, for three years while I was in college.
The Kicker was the name of the camp newspaper, and its editor was my first editor, a counsellor named Alfred G. Hare, whose surname translated to the Algonquian as Waboos, a nickname that had been with him from childhood and would ultimately stay with him through his many years as Keewaydin’s director. Waboos was a great editor. He laughed in the right places, cut nothing, and let you read your pieces aloud at campfires.
When I first arrived at Keewaydin as a child (my father was the camp’s physician), the name Eisner was all over the place—on silver trophies and on the year-by-year boards in the dining hall that listed things like Best Swimmer, Best Athlete, Best Singles Canoe. Michael Eisner was not one of those Eisners. When I first arrived at Keewaydin, he was still pushing zero. He had five years to wait before he was born. His father, Lester, was among the storied Eisners, and so were assorted uncles and cousins. Over time, multiple Eisners would follow. In 1949, when Lester Eisner brought Michael to the camp to see if he would like to enroll there, I was in the first of my three years as a counsellor in the oldest of the four age groups into which the camp was divided. In the two summers that followed (the last ones for me), he was in the youngest group and I didn’t know him from Mickey Mouse. I was aware only that another Eisner had come to Keewaydin.
Summer camps have varying specialties and levels of instruction. They differ considerably in character and mission. No one description, positive or negative, can come near fitting all of them or even very many. Keewaydin was not a great experience for just anybody. My beloved publisher—Roger W. Straus Jr., founder of Farrar, Straus and Giroux—went to Keewaydin when he was thirteen years old and hated every minute of it. That amounts to about eighty thousand minutes. Over the years, he has spent at least a hundred thousand minutes making fun of me for loving Keewaydin. The probable cause is Keewaydin’s educational rigor. Gently but firmly, you were led into a range of activity that left you, at the end of the summer, with enhanced physical skills and knowledge of the natural world. You wanted to go back, and back. Mike Eisner went back in 2000 (hardly for the first or last time). He was fifty-eight. Keewaydin was celebrating the career of its eighty-five-year-old emeritus director. Three people spoke at a Saturday-night campfire. Each was introduced only by name, with no mention of any business or profession or affiliation, just, in turn, Peter Hare, Russ MacDonald, Mike Eisner. In his blue jeans and ball cap, walking around the flames with his arms waving, Eisner told three hundred pre-teen and early-teen-aged kids escalating stories of his own days at Keewaydin. They listened closely and laughed often. Few, if any, knew who else he was.
[He was the chairman and C.E.O. of Hollywood’s Walt Disney Company.]
A PROFESSIONAL WRITER, by definition, is a person clothed in self-denial who each and almost every day will plead with eloquent lamentation that he has a brutal burden on his mind and soul, will summon deep reserves of “discipline” as seriatim antidotes to any domestic chore, and, drawing the long sad face of the pale poet, will rise above his dread of his dreaded working chamber, excuse himself from the idle crowd, go into his writing sanctum, shut the door, shoot the bolt, and in lonely sacrifice turn on the Mets game.
OVER A LONG SYNTHETIC BRUNCH at 521 West Fifty-seventh Street, Dr. Simpey Kuramoto, a microbiologist and food technologist, remarked that he had just about reached the end of his patience with people who seem to believe that nature cannot be artificially reproduced. “It gets you right here,” he said. “The consumer thinks anything artificial is bad. The consumer says, ‘Don’t monkey with Mother Nature.’ The consumer has been brainwashed. How do you like your soup?”
In color, texture, body, and flavor, it was not just tomato soup—it was extremely good tomato soup. And yet it was utterly untomatoed, completely artificial.
Even his daughter had been brainwashed, Dr. Kuramoto went on to say. And that had got him most of all, right there. His daughter had “learned” in school that natural vitamins are better than artificial vitamins. Absurd! All natural edibles are made up of chemicals and all artificial edibles are made up of chemicals. The molecules are the same. In good conscience, any health-food store could go totally artificial if it wanted to. How about that cheese?
The “cheese” tasted like Parmesan and had the same nubbly appearance. It had never been closer to Parma than West Fifty-seventh Street, and it contained no cheese.
A synthetic food could actually be an improvement on its natural counterpart, Dr. Kuramoto said. There was, for example, “a great opportunity” for improvement of the lemon. He just could not understand why people went on clinging to the myth of the superiority of nature. If anything, synthetic products were better than natural ones, because natural foods contained, in addition to their basic components, all sorts of little things that should be fed only to laboratory mice. Modern synthetic-food technology, while imitating the flavors of traditional foods with an exactitude not possible until recent times, was also “eliminating the contaminants from the natural product.”
The company Dr. Kuramoto works for is called International Flavors & Fragrances. It is traded on the big board and tries to keep everything else about its activities if not secret at least discreet, for its principal business is the ghosting of the “inventions” of its clients. When a major soap maker or confectioner or soft-drink bottler or world-class cosmetic house “creates” a new and exotic fragrance or flavor, the odds are good that the new creation was in fact developed in a laboratory on West Fifty-seventh Street. I.F.F. likes to call itself “a hidden supplier.”
Given appropriate incentive, the company will attempt to reproduce any taste or aroma known on the earth. Once, during a famine in India, a mountain of butter was rushed over from the United States to help save lives, but the Indians were suspicious of the butter’s unfamiliar flavor and would not touch it. I.F.F. was consulted, and its flavor-and-aroma chemists decided to reproduce the taste and scent of Indian ghee, which, in loose definition, is rancid-smelling water-buffalo butter. Soon, artificial essence of ghee was flown to India and sprayed on the American cow butter, ton after ton of which quickly went down the Indian gullet.
A restaurateur in California once came to I.F.F. with the complaint that his restaurant did not smell particularly enticing, because it lacked, in this age of microwaves, suffusive kitchen aromas. I.F.F. responded with a synthetic scent of baked ham, in aerosol cans, and, complementarily, a spray of chemically fabricated Dutch apple.
A marine museum in Florida, although situated close to the sea, felt that its interior lacked the inspiring smell of brine, kelp, and decaying porgies that is known as “salt air.” I.F.F. perfumers synthesized the smell and put it into cans labelled “The Ocean.”
Certain new and fast-growing rices, agronomically miraculous, were in some instances ignored by peoples of Southeast Asia because the taste was different from the taste of their old, slow-growing rice. I.F.F. broke down the flavor of the old rice, analyzed it, synthesized it, and sent the synthetic flavor off to be mixed with the new kind of rice, making its taste acceptable.
Such feats are assisted by technological devices like the gas-liquid chromatograph and an instrument that determines nuclear-magnetic resonances. Dr. Kuramoto, who is the director of technical support of I.F.F.’s United States Flavor Division, calls these devices, agglomerately, “the machine.” In various combinations, ground-up foods or the smokes and vapors from cooking can be sent through the machine, which “blips out peaks” on a small screen. Each peak represents a pure chemical. Analysis and the art of synthetic combination then begin.
Naturally, our own brunch—in I.F.F.’s Flavor Conference Room—had begun with synthetic orange juice. Dr. Kuramoto and his staff had been grinding up oranges and running them through the machine in an attempt to create artificially what the makers of frozen concentrates have never so much as approached with their wholly natural components: the taste of fresh orange juice. He was full of cautionary prefaces, to the effect that the juice was still developmental. “We still have things to learn,” he said. “We can’t reproduce—yet—the flavor of a freshly squeezed Valencia. It is frustrating. If we can send a man to the moon and back, my God, we can re-create an orange.” Joan Koesterer, a flavor chemist in a white coat, handed me a cup of orange fluid. I gave it a shake to bring out the nose. Dr. Kuramoto looked expectant. His sleeves were rolled up. He seemed on the verge of getting up and going to feed the machine another Valencia. A Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, he had behind him a long stint at General Mills, where he had helped develop meat “analogues” (ham, chicken, bacon—fabricated from machine-processed soybeans), and now he was going to capture citrus alive or know why not.
I upended my cup and confessed to Dr. Kuramoto that I had once written fifty thousand words about orange juice as a result of a compulsive orange-juice binge that went on for several months and thousands of miles of questing the subtropics. Nowhere had I tasted anything that came nearly as close to the flavor of freshly squeezed orange juice as the fluid there in his lab. Moments before, it had been a powdered mixture of laboratory chemicals.
With the soup course, we drank a form of “strawberry yogurt” that was a laboratory try not only to improve the flavor of a natural strawberry but also to invent a thinned (and artificial) yogurt. Together, they might become a novel beverage. It was a little too novel for me. We then had some terrific devilled ham that consisted wholly of textured soy protein, flavored with chemicals. We ate, as well, tuna and hamburgers that had been doubled in volume with I.F.F.-flavored soya, and washed them down with some “Coca-Cola” that might have caused a riot in Atlanta. “You have heard of the ‘secret formula’ of Coca-Cola and how it is kept locked away and is known only to a few people?” Dr. Kuramoto said. “Well, have a drink of this.”
I drank the “Coke.” It was flavor plagiarism, all right—I couldn’t tell it from the real thing. Dr. Kuramoto said, “That one was not particularly difficult. We could as easily do Pepsi, too.”
Dessert included a so-so milk chocolate, an excellent artificial-chocolate ice milk, and a clear beverage, brown and carbonated, that had the precise aroma of a richly concocted chocolate malted milk but looked like root beer. It had a fine, accurate chocolate-malt taste and contained neither chocolate nor malt. It was, Dr. Kuramoto explained, I.F.F.’s tilt at the windmill of chocolate soda pop—one of the few fields of potentiality in which chocolate has never caught on.
I left Dr. Kuramoto and went off to the office of Van Vechten Sayre, the firm’s public-relations expert, who had collected some seventeen artificial fragrances intended to put a finishing sniff to the day. “What’s that?” he said, spraying baked ham in my face. “And that?”
“Dutch apple.”
“That?”
“The ocean.”
“That?”
“Norway spruce, balsam fir.”
The spruce-balsam smell had been made for the American Museum of Natural History, where—in the Hall of the North American Forests—machines that contain timing devices press down periodically on the valves of aerosol cans full of instant wilderness. Other I.F.F. cans spray hay into the Hall of South Asiatic Mammals, grass into the Hall of Man in Africa, and a scent called South Pacific (a combination of frangipani and ocean air) into the Margaret Mead wing (Hall of Pacific Peoples). Sayre sprayed me with these things, too. I liked the hay and the grass, but South Pacific was overpowering, and would have overpowered Sadie Thompson.
Sayre brought out a collection of small bottles and a packet of perfumers’ blotters, long and thin, and he dipped a blotter into a bottle, then waved it in the air. Eggnog. Another blotter: Mince pie. Another: Apple.
Caramel. Tea. Fresh paint. Cedar. Butter pecan. Irish coffee. Each was as distinct as it was synthetic.
“What’s this?” he said now.
“Don’t know,” I said. “It smells like an entire floral shop.”
“It is a floral shop,” he said. “Now try this one. Think carefully. Where are you?”
I sniffed, and had an instant reaction—a wild, insane thought—and tried to put it aside. For who would want such a thing? Who would think of it, anyway, and how could chemists conceivably get it into a bottle, even if they did think of it? The lichen was there, though, and the moss, the drip, the dank, the chalky scent of the stalagmite, the faint essence of slumbering bear.
“Cave!” I burst out. “A cave!”
He handed me the bottle. The label said “Cave.”
BY THE TIME I met David Brower, in 1969, he was more indoors than out. He was only ten years younger than the twentieth century, and he had spent a large part of his life escaping interior scenes by getting himself up into the Sierra and away from confinements of both the natural and the figurative kind. He was shy, and that spurred him, too, to get away. He came to know the mountain country in such detail that it was said of him that he would know exactly where he was if, magically, a hand were to set him down anywhere at all from Sequoia National Forest to the Feather River. He took up technical climbing, and became the first person to touch thirty-seven Sierran peaks. By his account, he would have liked to choose one and stay there.
When incursions in various forms threatened his Sierra, though, he had to come down and fight. He fought in rooms, theatres, halls, and chambers, and in a way that Homer would best understand. His voyages through the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth and Earth Island Institute and other loci for defenders of his faith were punctuated with mutiny, fratricide, and triumph. He was feisty, heaven knew. And arrogant, possibly. And relentless, certainly. And above all, effective—for he began his mission when ecology connoted the root-and-shoot relationships of communal plants, and he, as much or more than anyone in the mid-century, expanded its reach and inherent power until it became the environmental movement. Others in time would learn more than he knew and advance the argument in a stabilizing way, but they would always be following him.
I spent a year with him, going from halls to chambers and from city to city, East and West. Blessedly, it was a year of rivers and redwoods and mountains, too. Among scenes and anecdotes that are now reassembling and crowding the mind, one minor and peripheral moment somehow lingers at the center. We were crossing the Mojave Desert. Not on foot. And after an hour or two of the Mojave, Dave Brower remarked that in the give and take of environmental politics—in the long wrestle with opposing forces lined up on countless vectors—he would be willing, if necessary, in the name of diplomacy and compromise, to surrender the Mojave.
I asked him if he would enumerate terrains of his choosing that might be put in the same category. His wife—his gyroscope, Anne—sitting beside him seemed to smile. His son Ken, hitherto somnolent in the back seat, sat up, and said, “It’s going to be a short list!”
It was something shorter than that, for Brower looked around a little more at the Mojave, and changed his mind.
A LITTLE BOY is going to come to New York someday, disappear, then eventually return to his hometown as a middle-aged man. When his mother says, “Where were you all this time?,” he will tell her: “In the line at the Radio City Music Hall.” He may even introduce her to the girl he met near the end of the queue, courted between Fifth Avenue and Rockefeller Plaza, and married at Sixth and Fiftieth.
Sometimes three-quarters of a mile long, forming as early as six-thirty A.M., doubling and redoubling upon itself through a maze of sawhorses set up by New York police, the line of people waiting to get into the Music Hall is one of the phenomena of modern show business. Extra long in the tourist summer (seventy per cent out-of-towners), it is something to see in winter as well, knee-deep in slush and ready for Donner Pass. The Music Hall somehow signifies to the rest of the nation the epicenter of Manhattan. Most of the standees agree with the one who said he was there because “everybody down home just knows about it,” and the chap six laps behind him who said, “It’s unavoidable, like the Grand Canyon.”
When they finally get inside, audiences see a three-hour program—roughly two-thirds movie and one-third stage show—that is anything but just another overpromoted metropolitan swindle. The customers are paying for spectacorn, and the Music Hall is equipped to give it to them. The organ can sound like everything from a Chinese gong to a glockenspiel, and vibrates so profoundly that it probably shows up on seismographs. The fixed lighting system is one of the most advanced in the world, making possible spectacular fireworks and the fondly remembered burning of Nome. Once every three hours, the Alaskan town collapsed onstage in a cold conflagration of light, silk, and air. Fountain displays have slopped more than a hundred and fifty tons of water onto the stage per day. Niagara Falls once poured out of the wings. A full-size train chugged uphill. One show used a helicopter, another a four-engine bomber, and a third shot satellites into the flies. Chariots have been drawn by live horses galloping on treadmills. Ships have been torpedoed and sunk, descending via the huge, tripartite stage elevator. The Christmas show always features a crèche program, and at Easter time the stage turns into a cathedral, and the women of the corps de ballet turn into nuns, forming a vast human cross, holding lilies in their hands.
WHEN NEIL SIMON was newly married, he and his wife, Joan, moved into an apartment in a brownstone on East Tenth Street in Manhattan. It was four flights up, plus the additional steps of the front stoop. When deliverymen arrived with the furniture, they collapsed on it and sat there for a quarter of an hour with their mouths open and only the whites of their eyes showing. One piece of furniture was a large single bed. In the Simons’ bedroom it reached from wall to wall. To get to the closet, they had to walk over the bed. It might have seemed more sensible to sleep in the living room, but a skylight there had a considerable hole in it, and, in winter, snow frequently came pouring through.
All this sounds more like the start of a successful theatrical comedy than a successful marriage, but it turned out to be both. The marriage has been running ten years. Neil Simon’s comedy Barefoot in the Park may run that long, too. With Robert Redford as a rough facsimile of himself and Elizabeth Ashley as his spritely wife, the play precisely duplicates the events, rents, and blizzards of the Simons’ golden past, with deliverymen reeling into view like sherpas out of shape, and the young couple fighting the plausible battles of youth:
He: Let’s discuss it.
She: Not with you in the room.
RICHARD HUBER IS THE DEAN of the School of General Studies at Hunter College. He is a leathery tennis competitor, toughest near the finish, calling his opponents “victims.” We play each other at least a dozen times a year. Huber is the author of, among other books, The American Idea of Success, which comes wrapped in a dust jacket that shows an apple pie in a blue sky. He may write about Norman Vincent Peale and Dale Carnegie, but Huber himself was invented by Stephen Potter, the author of The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship. In the middle of matches, Huber offers you lessons. He is a master of the premature congratulation. Once, after I beat him in the first set, he politely excused himself, went off and took a shower. It was all his after he came back.
In the great pyramid of tennis players—hundreds of thousands of tennis players—everyone up to the ninety-ninth percentile is a permanent and irreparable hack. Not everyone accepts this as axiomatic, for who in the world has never hit a crisp winning backhand down the line, a Wagnerian forehand beyond return, a drop volley that screws itself into the ground? My friend Jerry Goodman, for example, has made all these shots, and in his subconscious something has been telling him that he should be able to string them together like beads. As “Adam Smith,” he has, after all, written two consecutive best sellers. So why not two consecutive backhands? We have been playing each other for many years, and I have studied the development of his game. He has a quick eye and a fair mind, and he never calls a ball out until, coming toward him, it has crossed the net and begun its descent toward the ground.
Jim Miller’s early flaws were that he never bent his knees, always hit off his back foot, and chopped straight down on his return of serve. He has been proed over by the very best. Don Budge tried to teach him. So did Pancho Segura, Luis Ayala, Alex Olmedo. To get up the money to pay for their instructions, Miller wrote, among other things, Days of Wine and Roses. We play at the Mercer County Tennis Center, on the edge of Trenton, where he shows up with a bag of Band-Aids, salt pills, moleskin, rosin spray, headbands, wristbands, and various braces for his principal joints. Miller hasn’t had an inhibition in thirty years. Jokes, insults, and fragments of song come flying across the net from him in a direction somewhat firmer than the direction of his shots, which are hit stiff-kneed off his back foot and are frequently chopped straight down.
Bill Dwyer is my doubles partner in minor regional tournaments, and he says that he has carried me through more matches than he can remember. That may be. Dwyer also takes pride in saying that, many years ago, he worked his way through college. That may be, too—but he certainly didn’t do it hustling tennis players. Dwyer knows, though, the seminal secret of hackery: you do what you can do and never what you can’t do—you never try to overcome your flaws. If you have a net game and no ground strokes, you rush the net headlong no matter what the books say, what surface you are playing on, or where the last shot happened to go.
TENNIS ROSTER OF THE SEVENTIES for a charity event at Forest Hills:
ASHE.… Mind wanders. Does crossword puzzles in his head while hitting backhands down the line.
DELL.… Dell and Laver of an age. Dell defeated Laver once, in same week began to shave. Good underspin lob. Excellent bouncing overhead. Weakness: returning balls that come back. A lawyer. A major impresario in modern anarchic tennis. He manages the fiscal fates of Ashe, Smith, Roche, Ralston, Riessen, McManus, Pasarell, Lutz, Kodeš, Franulović. Even on a tennis court, he cannot stand to be away from a telephone. Has replaced his navel with a jack.
DRYSDALE.… Tall. Elegant. South African. Tough two-handed backhand—looks something like Ted Williams punching out a single. Consistent quarterfinalist. Rarely has a bad loss.
DÜRR.… French Algerian, called Frankie. Learned the game in Algiers. She is radiantly unorthodox. Ping-Pong-grip backhand. Quixote forehand. Impressive results. A teacher’s nightmare but never a linesman’s. Never complains.
GONZALES.… Known as Gorgo, diminutive of Gorgonzola. Chronological age: forty-four. Physical age: twenty-six. Grandfather. Recently beat Laver, Smith, and Ashe in consecutive matches in Las Vegas. Awesomely quick for six feet three, moves like a big cat. First won Forest Hills 1948. Southwest Open champion, 1971. Much between.
GORMAN.… Seattle. Best ever from Pacific Northwest. Regional hero. Rising. All-court player. Happy, carefree, funny, and subtle. Concentration occasionally splays. Biggest win was in straight sets over Laver at Wimbledon, 1971.
KODEŠ.… Law student. Married. Czech. The best since Drobný. French champion 1970, 1971. Described tennis on grass as “a joke,” then hit his way into the Forest Hills final. Has faculty for returning bullet serves as fresh bullets.
LAVER.… Last year in some ways his worst of recent times (82–18), when his prize money surpassed Nicklaus, the most golden of golfers, by nearly fifty thousand dollars. Grew up on a cattle farm in tropical Australia. Homemade tennis court. Had to wait his turn while his older brothers played. His turn would come. Record unique. Two Grand Slams (only three have ever been made). Four Wimbledons. He is the greatest player the game has so far seen.
LUTZ.… Halfback. Loved football so much he decided in 1965 to give up tennis if he did not win National Junior Championship. National Junior champion, 1965.
McKINLEY.… Reared in Saint Louis. Educated in Texas. Anointed in England. Enriched in New York. Won Wimbledon 1963, retired straightaway into brokerage business.
NEWCOMBE.… Writes with great lucidity about subtle points of tennis, practices what he writes. Grew up in Sydney, now lives on a ranch in New Braunfels, Texas—an exotic parabola, studded with Wimbledons (three). He is also a doubles player outstanding in all time, having won twice at Forest Hills and five times at Wimbledon (four with Roche).
OKKER.… High-strung. Nervous. Known as “The Twitch.” Twitched $120,465 off the pro tour last year. Five feet eight, 140 pounds, not much power. He intimidates with speed. He is Dutch. When he was born, his family was in hiding, hunted by Nazis.
PASARELL.… Tenacious. Unpredictable. Powerful. Textbook tennis player, picture serve. Tends to get involved in extraordinarily unusual matches. Two examples. Gonzales beat him 22–24, 1–6, 16–14, 6–3, 11–9 at Wimbledon in 1969, second-longest tennis match ever played. Pasarell defeated Santana at Wimbledon in 1967, only time in the history of Wimbledon that a defending champion has been beaten on opening day.
ROSEWALL.… Has resided on the highest level of the game for twenty years. No drink. No smoke. Bedtime: sunset. Grew up in Sydney, where his father, a grocer, owned three tennis courts and rented them to augment the family income. Developed strokes so graceful they are the canon of the game. Too small for serve-and-volley bludgeon tennis. Nickname: Muscles.
SMITH.… Basketball player. Good jump shot. Fair set shot. Moves well without the ball. Turned to tennis at advanced age (upper teens), five years later was in his first Wimbledon final. Current Forest Hills and Wimbledon champion. Way to beat him is to lift his wallet, which he keeps under umpire’s chair.
DURING THE RUN of the Ziegfeld Follies of 1917, a man in his mid-fifties kept reappearing in the audience night after night—always buying two tickets, one for himself, one for his hat—to stare at a blond chorine named Marion Davies. He already had a wife, five sons, a gold mine, seven magazines, ten newspapers, more than a million acres of land—and now he wanted the chorine. Getting her was as easy for William Randolph Hearst as hailing a taxicab. Remarkably, she remained his mistress for thirty-four years.
Hearst made plans to build Marion into the supreme star of American films. Born Marion Cecilia Douras, a daughter of a small-time New York politician, she was still in her teens; her convent education had stopped some years earlier. But Hearst bought a Harlem studio, established his own film company, hired tutors and drama coaches, the best scenarists, set designers, and directors, to help shape his Galatea. For the opening of her film Cecilia of the Pink Roses, in 1918, he had the theatre ventilating system loaded with attar of roses, bathing the audience in florid scent. His newspapers, of course, hailed the new star’s birth with eight-color superlatives in reviews that ran below eight-column headlines.
Marion stuttered and blinked simultaneously, but that hardly mattered to Hearst, who spent millions on prototype superspectacles—and happily lost money on most of them, always casting Marion as a kind of imperial virgin. Full of fun and laughter, with a clear eye for the absurd, Marion called him Pops, and liked to run her fingers through his sterling-silver hair. She would have become his wife as well, but Hearst’s wife, Millicent, herself a former chorine, steadily denied Hearst his request for a divorce.
When the film capital shifted from New York to Hollywood, Hearst arranged for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to pay Marion ten thousand dollars a week in return for her talented services. For Marion, Hearst constructed on the M-G-M lot a fourteen-room, seventy-five-thousand-dollar mansion, calling it the “Bungalow.” Good-hearted, free-spending Marion dispensed Hearst’s money with a generous hand, quickly becoming the most popular actress at the studio, paying doctor bills for office boys, distributing expensive gifts to grips and electricians, even paying a studio newsboy’s tuition at a private school.
Hearst haunted the sets of Davies pictures, giving two dozen orders a minute to hapless directors. After Norma Shearer managed to beat out his protégée for a part, Hearst told his editors from coast to coast never to mention Shearer’s name in print. With uncanny foresight, Hearst papers could be counted on for banner headlines such as “MARION DAVIES’ GREATEST FILM OPENS TONIGHT.”
As film fatales went, Marion was not a complete zero, and non-Hearst critics—including The New York Times—now and then gave her a line of modest praise. But her pictures continued to lose money, and, since it had been apparent for some time to both of them that she never would become another Mary Pickford, in 1937 Marion made her last picture. She and Pops more or less settled down to the life of Midas—at their fifty-five-bathroom, three-million-two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar beach palace in Santa Monica, and the twin-towered thirty-million-dollar Hearst castle at San Simeon.
At the fabled house parties, the aging Hearst persisted in limiting pre-dinner cocktails to one per person, but Marion Davies and Carole Lombard would remedy that in the ladies’ bathroom. After Calvin Coolidge spent a weekend with Hearst, Marion complained, “All they talked about was their g-g-g-goddamned circulation.”
Extreme old age had no effect on Hearst’s extreme jealousy. As they always had, his eyes followed Marion wherever she moved; her leading men were afraid to enter wholeheartedly into on-camera kisses, since Hearst’s newspapers had ruined other men’s careers for less cause. When Hearst’s own empire was facing ruin in the Depression thirties, Marion loaned Hearst back a million dollars, and won his lifetime gratitude. Still in her forties when Hearst was in his eighties, Marion remained loyal until Hearst died, reading to him, nursing him during the four years between his heart attack and his death, in 1951.
Twenty years earlier on the lot at M-G-M, after answering an interrupting phone call from Pops, she had turned smiling to a friend and stuttered out a line that could someday be her epitaph: “H-h-h-hearst come, H-h-h-hearst served.”
DO I REMEMBER when I had my first drink? Absolutely. We were playing football at the corner of Prospect Avenue and Murray Place. I was ten years old. We’re talking whiskey. I have no idea what kind. This was pickup, sandlot, no-pads, tackle football on a vacant lot that was owned by Princeton University. We played there often. One day somebody showed up late, carrying a bottle he had discovered in a building on the college campus.
He was one of us—our age, our pal, our teammate—but he had an advanced sense of the people up the street who were no longer in grade school. The bottle was three-quarters full. The football game went into a long time-out. There was a big tulip poplar at one end of the vacant lot (it is still there, spread above someone’s house), and we sat down in a circle under the tree for an experiment in precursive maturity. The sniff. The snort. The dilation of the nose. The glowing briquette in the throat. As the gastroentomologist Ian Frazier has reflected after munching brown-drake mayflies, it was hard to stop at just one. Across fifteen, twenty minutes, I took in several gulps of whatever it was. One thing it wasn’t was unpleasant.
What time is it? Omigod, I have a piano lesson with Miss Jackson and I’m already fifteen minutes late.
I got up, mounted my bicycle, and raced for home.
Randomly, we played our football games in various places around the town, one of which was the front lawn of the Institute for Advanced Study. The lawn was framed by a double row of sycamores, whose big unforgiving trunks marked our sidelines. We sometimes had an audience of one. Walking to work from his house on Mercer Street, Albert Einstein, leonine and sockless, would stop for a while to watch the action. He did not cheer. He never said anything. And before long he would move on. But he seemed interested, seemed to understand what he was looking at, even if we did not. He had been in Princeton six or seven years then, and would remain on Mercer Street for the rest of his life. Lots of kids growing up in Princeton at the time had stories to tell about him. He helped some of them with their math homework.
But those were other days and this was a bike sprint up Murray Place to Maple Street under pressured conditions. I skidded into our gravel driveway, jumped off the bicycle, and ran into the living room through the side door. Miss Laverne Jackson was there, long since there, at the piano, looking at sheet music, and pointedly sitting on half of the bench. Running past her, I went out of the living room, up the stairs, and down the hall to a bathroom, where I grabbed a tube of Colgate toothpaste. With both hands around it, I aimed it into my mouth and squeezed. My father was a teetotaler, never touched a drop, and I often heard him sneer about the scent of liquor on people’s breath. A ton of Colgate hit the roof of my mouth. Then I squished it so hard that it emerged between my teeth. I spit it out and ran downstairs to my side of the piano bench. Miss Jackson was impassive. She had nothing more to say than Einstein did. She was young and well trained. Her concerts ran from Debussy and Chopin to Beethoven and Bach, but giving lessons was still her livelihood.
I played “Country Gardens.” I think I played it well, because it is hard not to. It is the teething ring of pianism.
I was in my fourth year of piano lessons. Miss Jackson had scheduled me to play “Country Gardens” in a public recital.
Mi mi re do do
Ti ti la sol sol
La ti mi fa
La sol fa mi.
In preference to watching my hands on the keyboard, she seemed to be watching me as I did the repeat:
Mi mi re do do
Ti ti la sol sol
La ti mi fa
La sol fa mi.
Dah dah doo dah
Dah dah dah dah doo dah
Dah dum dum
Dah dum
Dum dee dum.
Out of my mouth came a large frosted bubble, dah doo, followed by another large frosted bubble.
WHEN MARTHA, my youngest daughter, was seventeen, her English teacher—Mrs. Thomas—wrote forty-seven vocabulary words on the blackboard and told the class to write a short composition using all forty-seven words: aspersion, audacious, avarice, blanch, blight, brusque, buffeted, caprice, cataclysm, charlatan, collude, concomitantly, condign, contiguous, cynosure, decorum, depreciatory, desultory, diaphanous, dilatory, discursive, dispersion, éclat, effulgence, elucidate, emollient, empyreal, enervated, equivocal, erudite, felicity, fiscal, flaccid, fortuitous, gamut, gazette, gregarious, habitat, haggard, homogeneous, innovative, nectarine, oscillate, procrastinate, progeny, prognosticate, and recalcitrant. Martha handed in five paragraphs—four hundred and fifty-two words in all. One out of ten words in her composition was a word from Mrs. Thomas’s blackboard:
It is with great felicity that I begin this profile of my father. He is an interesting man. When I say interesting, I do not mean to be equivocal. There are many adjectives that could elucidate his personality. He is certainly erudite and a kind man. He is at the same time spontaneous and inflexible. One could not call him a charlatan, but one could say he is changeable. There are days when there seems to be no end of cataclysms in his world. On those days he does not show decorum, nor does he blanch at confronting the crises. In fact, he does not allow himself to be buffeted by the caprices of the day. He does not oscillate between audacious and conciliatory behavior. He stands firm.
My father has certain problems about money. It is fortuitous that he is in excellent fiscal shape. His problem is not avarice, but it comes when he is faced with the dispersion of money. In other words, when he has to spend money he first procrastinates and then becomes brusque with any one asking for it. Eventually if the “asker” persists, especially if it is his progeny, he loses his gregarious personality. He appears to be enervated, almost flaccid. He loses any of his normal éclat and his face becomes haggard. When my three sisters and I collude in order to get some additional funds, we run the gamut of all possible means. We are innovative and at the same time we invoke all known ploys. In our habitat, otherwise known as our home, we are a homogeneous foursome. We are never dilatory or desultory; we go directly for the jugular. My father considers us his financial blight. As he becomes discursive, arguing for frugality, we become recalcitrant, arguing for luxury.
It is at this point my father may cast aspersions on the way in which we operate. It is then that we try another method. We become nectarine. Our very tongues act as an emollient to his sternness. We appear as empyreal, and concomitantly he appears as grasping and scroogelike. I can never prognosticate the ending of these encounters, but I can promise there is no effulgence of cash. My father, who writes for a gazette, has an office contiguous with his bedroom. If we come out of that fetid office with a few extra dollars, we consider ourselves fortunate. After we go shopping, I come home with a diaphanous gown. I am the cynosure of our small constellation of females. Could one call this a condign profile of my father? I am afraid I have been depreciatory. We are actually a heterogeneous group that on most occasions gets on quite well together.
EVERYONE KNOWS who Richard Burton is, or at least what he is at the moment. He is the demi-Atlas of this earth, the arm and burgonet of men, the fellow who is living with Elizabeth Taylor. Stevedores admire him. Movie idols envy him. He is a kind of folk hero out of nowhere, with an odd name like Richard instead of Tab, Rock, or Rip, who has out-Tabbed, out-Rocked, and out-Ripped the lot of them. If only he were indeed from nowhere, his dazzle would be unshadowed. But beyond the flaring headlines of the past year, few are aware of who Richard Burton really is, what he has done, and what he is throwing away by gulping down his past and then smashing the glass.
Not too long ago, Richard Burton was considered one of the half-dozen great actors in the English-speaking world. Other actors equally select—Paul Scofield, Sir Laurence Olivier—recognized this; so did critics like Kenneth Tynan; so did a growing public, aware that Burton was young and that most of his major work was still to be done. He has not done it, and there is more than a slight possibility that he never will. But no one can take from him, at least, the achievements that are already behind him. In Stratford-upon-Avon and the Old Vic, he has delivered some nine or ten major Shakespearean performances. Only four actors in history have played Prince Hamlet more than a hundred times in a single production—Sir Henry Irving, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Sir John Gielgud, and Richard Burton. Moreover, Burton was the longest-running Hamlet in the history of the Old Vic, where Hamlets were kept in the repertory only as long as the box office remained strong.
Today, his profession views Burton with melancholy. “When the movie career is finished,” sighs Gielgud, “he will have lost his romantic years, his vigorous years.” His friend and agent, Harvey Orkin, has said roughly, “This is a man who sold out. He’s trying to get recognition on a trick. He could have been the greatest actor on this planet.” It was Olivier who first warned Burton, “Make up your mind. Do you wish to be a household word or a great actor?” Paul Scofield gauges his language with care: “Richard professionally is the most interesting actor to have emerged since the war. I think his qualities of heroic presence are not seen to their fullest advantage in movies. He appears not to be attracted by the best that there is in the cinema. As for his future, he should return quietly to the theatre.”
Whether Burton ever does return to the theatre—in more than a token way—will be determined by something considerably deeper than the fate of the liaison he has recently formed. Two little gods within his frame are warring—one that builds with sureness and power, and another that impels him, like his late companion and countryman Dylan Thomas, recklessly toward self-destruction.
Either way, he is a man and a half. He has a wild mind with a living education in it. He is bright and perceptive to an alarming degree, a rare and dangerous thing in an actor. He laughs honestly. He lies winningly. He trusts absolutely. He can make anyone laugh. He can talk a person under the table about literature, displaying huge sophistication and no cant. He reads rapidly, but he gives a book its due—a novel like Anglo-Saxon Attitudes costs him only two hours, but Moby-Dick is worth four days, and Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy took him “just over three months.” He is a walking concordance to Shakespeare. His mind rings with English verse from all centuries and of all qualities, both great and frivolous. “Edward VII was ill,” he will say with a brooding smile, “and the poet laureate—this bloody fool—wrote:
Along the wires the electric message came:
‘He is no better, he is much the same.’”
Burton has pale blue-green eyes, finely textured brown hair, and a coarse complexion, which is said to contribute to his enormous appeal to women. But even more, women lose their balance over his look of essential melancholy. His face can light suddenly with a smile, but it always returns to its primal gloom.
He talks to everyone as if they matter. It is his special gift, seldom found in actors, or, for all that, in clergymen. Burton’s secret is simple. Everyone actually does matter to him. He tells more stories than Scheherazade, but between them, he listens. He really wants to hear about one man’s children or another’s Sunday football match. He can make people feel larger than life. Men appreciate him for it; but women write him letters, chase him around tables, and follow him overseas.
Life with Burton was never quiet. He sleeps five hours, no more, and he has the energy to skip sleep altogether and work steadily the following day. He can sit at a piano all night flogging Welsh songs or playing miscellaneous mood pieces, usually incongruous, while he recites poetry, now mocking the voice of Gielgud, now mimicking Olivier, slipping into the tongue of Richard Burton when he does something that holds particular gravity for him. He doesn’t swear like a trooper (he barks at Taylor for her vulgarisms), being too much in love with words to settle for slang.
He says he wants more than anything else to be alone, but his dressing-room door is always open to cronies of all ages and sexes. People not only like him, they come near to worshipping him, often for a good reason. Once, in Camelot, a young boy was put into the show green and frightened, and during his first rehearsal with Burton he froze. Burton purposely began to stutter, stumble, and quiver. It was one of his most adroit performances. The boy’s nerves receded; his voice coughed into life. He still writes to Burton once a month.
Once, after fluffing the same line repeatedly on a movie set, Burton lowered his head and rammed it into a wall. It is impossible to imagine an English actor doing that, but Burton of course is not English. He is Welsh. In fact, he is so thoroughly, defensively, and patriotically Welsh that it costs him some loss of perspective. His gallery of great Welshmen includes Louis XIV, Christopher Columbus, and Alexander the Great.
He remembers James Joyce’s belief that every man spends his life looking for the place he wants to belong to. “I think I grew up in the place I have dreamed of all my life,” he says. It is a village in a valley between high loaves of bald green mountains, split by a small river of rushing white water—called, oddly enough, the Avon—and spanned by a high, narrow stone bridge that was once an aqueduct. Poverty has seldom had a more graceful setting. The village even has a euphonically romantic name—Pontrhydyfen (pontra de venne)—and, particularly in Richard Burton’s view, it is a kind of Glamorganshire Brigadoon. “When I go home,” he says, “as I go around the lip of the mountain, my heart races.”
He was born in Pontrhydyfen on the tenth of November, 1925. His father—Richard Jenkins—was a miner with little more to his name than a No. 6 shovel and a massive gift for words. Richard was the twelfth of thirteen children. His mother died when he was not quite two, just after giving birth to Richard’s brother Graham. In Taibach, a suburb of the coastal town Port Talbot, at the foot of the Avon, Richard was devotedly raised by his eldest sister, Cecilia. He went to school in Port Talbot, but he spent his weekends in Pontrhydyfen. The town spoke English and the village spoke Welsh; hence Richard was raised bilingual. He was also raised with a powerful sense of belonging to a village where he could not live.
“My father was a self-taught man, demoniacal in debate, agnostic, with a divine gift of the tongue in both languages. He used hyperbole. He was not afraid of the octosyllabic word. He had a sort of maxim—‘Never use a short word where a long one will do.’ He was a Welsh Pushkin in conversation. He would go off on jags that would make John Barrymore look sedate. He never knew which son I was. He was fifty when I was born. We called him Daddy Ni, which means ‘our father.’ He sometimes frightened me. His mind was extraordinarily perverse. No one quite knew what he was going to do next, which can be quite frightening to a child, you know.”
Daddy Ni died in 1957, never having seen Richard in a play or movie. He tried once—setting out to see My Cousin Rachel when it was playing in a Port Talbot cinema. On the way down the valley, he stopped in seventeen pubs. Finally settled in the theatre, he watched the film begin. One of the first things Richard did on the screen was to pour himself a drink. “That’s it,” said Daddy Ni, and he was up and off to pub No. 18.
Daddy Ni cared more about education than anything else, even Rugby football, and from Richard’s earliest memory Daddy Ni and Richard’s brothers Ivor, Tom, Will, and Dai fixed their attention on Richard and said, “You shall go to Oxford.” All the brothers save Graham had worked the coal face (Richard himself never worked in the mines), and some of them went on to other positions in local government, the police, and the army. In Richard, however, the family planted its dream of something better beyond the valley. “The idea of a Welsh miner’s son going to Oxford University,” Richard Burton says, “was ridiculous beyond the realm of possibility.”
First, Richard was one of thirty who were admitted to grammar school out of some six hundred applicants. He was also an athlete and, of all things, a gifted soprano who took prizes in the eisteddfod, singing, as his sister put it, as if “he had a bell in every tooth.” In a sense, he outgrew his family, being something more than life-size even then. A teacher-writer named Philip Burton, drama coach and English master at the Port Talbot grammar school, offered him a room in his lodgings. Cecilia and her husband agreed.
Richard describes himself as “mock tough” when he first knew Philip Burton. Burton, for his part, was chiefly impressed, in Richard’s first awkward go on a stage, by the boy’s “astonishing audience control—he could do anything he wanted with the audience.” This is one talent that can only be found, never developed, and since Richard had it, Phil Burton trained him dramatically, put an English polish on his voice without obscuring the Welsh vitality, fed him a reading list of great books, prepared him for his try for Oxford, and directed him in all his early plays. In 1943, Richard officially became Phil Burton’s ward, taking his name. Years later, when Richard was told that his father was dead, he asked, “Which one?”
Phil Burton trained Richard with some novel devices. He made him talk on five telephones at once, doing a scene from a play about a busy bank manager who could hold five separate conversations, darting from phone to phone. The exercise was repeated a thousand times to teach the boy coordination and mathematical precision in speaking. Today, Richard understandably hates telephones, but he speaks with fantastic precision. Also, Phil Burton would take Richard to the summit of Mynydd Margam, the last high mountain between Pontrhydyfen and the sea, and have him loft arias from Shakespeare into the wind. As Phil Burton moved farther and farther from the spot on which Richard stood, he kept calling, “Make me hear you. Don’t shout, but make me hear you.” Ten years later, as Richard would all but whisper, “O! what a rogue and peasant slave am I,” every princely syllable went special delivery to the outermost rafters of the Old Vic.
The academic training succeeded as well. Richard was accepted by Exeter College, Oxford. The R.A.F. conveniently provided a scholarship, indenturing him to air service later on. He had to wait two terms before he would actually be in statu pupillari, so he answered an ad in Wales’s Western Mail, placed by the actor Emlyn Williams, seeking a young Welsh actor for a play called The Druid’s Rest. He got the part and spent five months in the West End, going up to Oxford as a slightly seasoned professional.
It was wartime Oxford, but no war to date has changed the ways of the university, and Burton was soon climbing into the college after late and beery forays. He boasts that he broke the Exeter sconce record, a complicated dining-hall punishment for bad etiquette, in which the offender was forced to drink nearly two pints of beer in thirty seconds or pay for it. He learned to drink without swallowing and could put down a sconce in ten seconds. “So far as I know,” he says, “no one has ever whacked that feat.”
He was ostensibly reading English literature and Italian, and he even went to lectures “with all those pustular, sweaty, hockey-playing, earnest, big-breasted girls”; but he found his real interest in the Oxford University Dramatic Society. Nevill Coghill—don, critic, and man of the theatre—was directing Measure for Measure. When Burton asked for a part, Coghill said he was sorry but the play was all cast. Burton’s native aggressiveness flashed to the surface. “Let me understudy the leading man,” he said wickedly. “Undermine” would have been a better word. When Measure for Measure opened—with people like John Gielgud and Terence Rattigan in the audience, for the O.U.D.S. was as important then as now—guess who was striding the boards as Angelo?
Well, heaven forgive him! and forgive us all!
Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall.
WHEN JENNY LIND entered New York Harbor on a paddle-wheel steamer in 1850, P. T. Barnum went out in a rowboat to greet her, carrying a spray of red roses in his arms. She was a plain young woman of twenty-nine, hair parted in the middle. Her nose was a Nordic spud. She had a wide mouth, and she wore no cosmetics. She was the most celebrated operatic soprano in the world.
Barnum was tone-deaf. But he had brought Jenny Lind to America because he hoped to change his image. When people thought of Barnum, they thought of sheer bazazz, while he wanted them to think of fine arts. This cost him a down payment of a hundred and eighty-seven thousand five hundred dollars before the Swedish singer would set foot on board ship. His investment paid off in cash if not in dignity, as Jenny Lind made a twelve-thousand-mile, hundred-and-sixty-five-concert sellout tour during which a single seat went for six hundred and fifty-three dollars. Another time, a thousand standing-room tickets were sold in fifteen minutes. The press went insane. Every other line might have been written by Barnum. Holden’s Dollar Magazine said, “Sell your old clothes, dispose of your antiquated boots, distribute your hats, hypothecate your jewelry, come on the canal, work your passage, walk, take up a collection to pay expenses, raise money on a mortgage, sell ‘Tom’ into perpetual slavery, dispose of ‘Mose’ to the highest bidder, stop smoking for a year, give up tea, coffee and sugar, dispense with bread, meat, garden sass and such like luxuries—and then come hear Jenny Lind.”
She sang Mozart, Weber, and Meyerbeer, offset by such additional items as “Comin’ Thro’ the Rye” and “The Last Rose of Summer.” Presenting a little-known song from an opera called Clari, she immortalized “Home, Sweet Home.” Her voice spanned nearly three octaves, topping out at G above high C. Her high F sharp was pure, and she had an incredible ability to sing very softly at that altitude. No one could match her messa di voce—the technique of holding a single note while increasing and diminishing its volume. She did it as if she were twirling a knob. It is possible that some of this was wasted on numbers like “Old Black Joe,” but she always sang parts from the operas in which she had won her fame, from Norma to Lucia di Lammermoor.
Washington Irving went down the Hudson to hear her, and was vastly impressed. So, in Boston, was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who declared, “She sings like the morning star.” Even Niagara Falls fell at her feet as she stood on a projecting boulder and sang an aria to the plunging cataract. Stephen Foster, of Pittsburgh, a young Northerner in love with the South, was forever grateful to her because she added his songs to her repertory, including the one she called “Mein Old Kentucky Home.” Nathaniel Hawthorne thought she was dull.
When Jenny Lind arrived in Washington, President and Mrs. Millard Fillmore hiked through the woods between the White House and the Willard Hotel to leave their calling card. She began her first Washington concert before an audience that included the Fillmores, Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, Henry Clay of Kentucky, and fourteen empty seats in the front row, reserved for the seven members of Fillmore’s Cabinet and their wives, who were at the Russian ministry soaking up vodka. Jenny Lind was singing “Hail, Columbia” when they swayed down the aisle and took their seats. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, Secretary of State, stood up potted and sang along with her, while his wife tugged furiously at his long black tails.
When Jenny stayed with friends in Denmark, Hans Christian Andersen would come around to tell stories to the children of the house, a pretext for seeing her. He fell in love with her. He wrote “The Nightingale” for her. When she was cold toward him, he wrote “The Snow Queen.” When he begged her to marry him, she silently handed him a mirror. That night, he wrote “The Ugly Duckling.” Gladys Denny Shultz, the author of Jenny Lind: The Swedish Nightingale, offers a modified version of this famous anecdote. She claims that Lind really meant to impugn her own appearance, arguing that it is beyond belief that Lind could be that cruel.
Jenny Lind’s circle included Berlioz, Meyerbeer, Schumann, and Brahms. Her great friend Felix Mendelssohn loved to sit at his piano and explore her upper register. Frédéric Chopin referred to her affectionately as “this Swede.” She often rode along the trails of Wimbledon with the seventy-eight-year-old Duke of Wellington, who decorated his dotage with bright young ladies of the stage. Crowned potentates of the Continent, from Prince Metternich of Austria to King Frederick William of Prussia, competed for her friendship. She was a favorite of Queen Victoria. After Jenny Lind died, in 1887, at the age of sixty-seven, a memorial was inscribed to her in the Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey—the first time in the Abbey’s history that a woman had been so honored.
The Athapaskans are not much impressed that a young Princeton graduate on a prospecting adventure in the Susitna Valley in 1896 happened to learn, on his way out of the wilderness, that William McKinley had become the Republican nominee for President of the United States.
This sentence and several that followed it in Coming into the Country unexpectedly provoked an angry and bitter letter from a woman in Oregon. The passage in the book continued:
In this haphazard way, the mountain got the name it would carry for at least the better part of a century, notwithstanding that it already had a name, for uncounted centuries had had a name, which in translation has been written, variously, as The Great One, The Mighty One, The High One. The Indians in their reverence had called it Denali. Toponymically, that is the mountain’s proper name.
The reader in Oregon railed vitriol at me and called me by names other than my own. She expressed thorough contempt toward anyone coarse enough even to hint at the thought of calling the mountain by a name other than McKinley. The mountain, she said, had been named by her late father.
What was I going to say to that?
I wrote to her on the stationery of the Council of the Humanities, Princeton University, and thanked her, and warmly congratulated her, and told her that I am the father of four daughters and it would be my fondest hope that someday, in some situation, after I am gone, one of them might rise up as nobly in defense of me.
(But I still think the mountain should be called Denali.)
BRIGHT AND NERVOUS, frenetic, full of quick smiles and dark moods, shouting “Onward, onward” between laughs, performing in a cashmere sweater, always tieless, Mort Sahl manages to suggest barbecue pits on the brink of doom. Holding a rolled newspaper in his right hand, with flashing blue eyes and a wolfish grin, he states his theme and takes off like a jazz musician on a flight of improvisation—or seeming improvisation. He does not tell jokes one by one, but carefully builds deceptively miscellaneous structures of jokes that are like verbal mobiles. He begins with the spine of a subject, then hooks thought onto thought, joke onto dangling joke, many of them totally unrelated to the main theme, until the whole structure is spinning but is nonetheless in balance. All the time he is building toward a final statement, which is too much a part of the whole to be called a punch line, but puts that particular theme away.
When Little Rock Central High School entered the news, Sahl approached the subject from various byways, one of which was his fondness for sniping at President Eisenhower. A critic had said that if the President were really a man he would take a little colored girl by the hand and lead her through that line of bigots into the high school. “That’s easy to say if you are not involved,” Sahl said. “But if you are in the Administration, you have a lot of problems of policy, like whether or not to use an overlapping grip.” Wild laughter always greeted that one, but—with a nod and a nervous chuckle and a characteristic “It’s true, it’s true”—he would slide off into a skein of digressions, usually with an aside for interested conservatives, telling them that they could get the Chicago Tribune anywhere in the United States “flown in packed in ice.” Then, circling back toward Arkansas, he would press on to the famous line that put Little Rock into absolute focus. “I like Governor Faubus,” he admitted. “But I wouldn’t want him to marry my sister.”
While politics is always the trunk line, his humor ranges everywhere. Crazes craze him. His piece on the hi-fi ends with a family living in their garage and using the house as a speaker. Psychoanalytic clichés are seldom spared. Once, he says, a bank robber slipped a teller a note saying “Give me your money and act normal.” The teller replied, “First, you must define your terms. After all, what is normal?” Some of Sahl’s jokes are even more rarefied. Once, he began talking about a student in a statistical-analysis course who would never use sigma but preferred his own initials instead. When someone laughed, Sahl looked up in surprise, and said, “If you understand that joke, you don’t belong here. You had better call the government at once; you are desperately needed.”
Mort Sahl was born on May 11, 1927, in Montreal, where his father kept a tobacco shop. Although that might suggest a solid burgher background, Canadian citizenship, and perhaps a fall on the ice, Mort had none of these. His father had come out of an immigrant family on New York City’s Lower East Side with a strong will to be a playwright. Broadway and Hollywood gave him just enough encouragement to make him sure that he had the art, but his failure to make a living in his field turned him into a dark cynic, whose philosophy functioned in the tight spectrum between “It’s all fixed” and “They don’t want anything good.” Mort’s mother, on the other hand, was an intractable optimist. On this trampoline Mort was raised, an only child, soaking up skepticism and idealism, respect for creativity and contempt for show business. The family moved to Los Angeles, where Mort’s father found a job as a clerk for the F.B.I. From the age of two and a half, little Mort liked to stand behind the radio and shout through it his own version of the news. At eight, he hung around radio stations, picked up discarded scripts from the floor or out of garbage cans, and read them into a dummy microphone he had made for himself at home.
Living in Berkeley, unemployed, he became the academic equivalent of a ski bum. Auditing classes off and on, he drank a ton of coffee a month in all-night campus snack bars, argued art, social science, and politics into the abstract hours. He slept mainly in the back seat of his moldering Chevy, and ate cold hamburgers provided by a Nietzsche-soaked friend who worked in a short-order restaurant. From the wooden microphone of his childhood to the hamburgers with Nietzsche relish, he accumulated experience, intelligence, and enmity, until just one more shattering blow was needed to complete his training. He got it after a pain developed in his lower right side and a doctor at a Berkeley hospital referred him elsewhere because he lacked the four hundred and fifty dollars for an emergency operation. The doctor ran after him demanding ten dollars as an examination fee. Sahl’s appendix ruptured. He recovered in a veterans’ hospital, and the American Medical Association joined his repertory. His mildest joke about the medical world suggests that “the A.M.A. opposes chiropractors and witch doctors and any other cure that is quick.”
Late that fall (1953) he arranged an audition before a live audience in San Francisco, at the lower-case, lower-depths hungry i (for intellectual). On stage, Sahl began talking about the McCarthy jacket, explained that it was like the Eisenhower jacket except that it had “an extra flap to go over the mouth,” and added that “Senator McCarthy does not question what you say so much as he questions your right to say it.” No one even smiled. Then up from the bar came a muscular laugh—from Enrico Banducci, the proprietor of the hungry i—and Mort was in, at seventy-five dollars a week.
He built his original audience of students who came in from the University of California and other regional campuses. Soon his following increased to multitudes with no such common denominator. He calls his followers “my people.” Many have peach fuzz on their cheeks, and many have it on top of their heads. What they share is a fondness for articulate irony and a sense of being “in.” Now and again, someone gets up and walks out muttering “Communist.” Others think him too brash and offensive, a nihilist, a hater of everything. His people see him as the black knight of the implied positive—an idealist whose darkly critical moods really imply a yearning for perfection. They will all understand the words of a college freshman who says, “He has a cool way of digging deep.”
FOR THE GENERAL ELECTRIC PAVILION, architects turned a huge dome inside out, revealing a supporting lining of intersticed steel, so that the building’s over-all look suggested tripes à la mode de G.E. In the tops of metal trees, I.B.M. set what appeared to be a fifty-ton egg in a nest of plastic. Johnson Wax suspended a huge gold clam over a blue pool inside six slender white pylons that rose high and flared in unearthly petals. The General Motors Futurama was built around the idea that the human population—two-thirds of the way through the twentieth century—had ample room in which to explode, and proved the thesis with models of future machines and future cities, to be built in trackless wastelands. A G.M. machine a couple of hundred yards long would soon subdue the rain forest. Out in front of it, smaller machines would run around felling trees with laser beams. Blink, blink. The red beams sliced the trees and they toppled. The great mother machine now took over, moving forward to eat the trees and all the understory, meanwhile extruding four-lane highways from its distant rear. Cities sprang up in the bush to either side.
HE ONCE DESCRIBED HIS LIFE as “a succession of fortunate circumstances.” He was in his twenties then. More than half of his life was behind him. His memory of his mother was confined to a single image: in a blue corduroy bathrobe she stood in a doorway looking out on the courts and playing fields surrounding their house, which stood in the center of a Richmond playground. Weak with heart disease, she was taken to a hospital that day, and died at the age of twenty-seven. He was six.
It was to be his tragedy, as the world knows, that he would leave his own child when she was six, that his life would be trapped in a medical irony, as a result of early heart disease, similar to his mother’s.
His mother was tall, with long soft hair and a face that was gentle and thin. She read a lot. She read a lot to him. His father said of her, “She was just like Arthur Junior. She never argued. She was quiet, easygoing, kindhearted.”
If her son, by legacy, never argued, he also was schooled, instructed, coached not to argue, and as he moved alone into alien country, he fashioned not-arguing into an enigma and turned the enigma into a weapon. When things got tough, he had control. Even in very tight moments, other players thought he was toying with them. They rarely knew what he was thinking. They could not tell if he was angry. It was maddening, sometimes, to play against him. Never less than candid, he said that what he liked best about himself on a tennis court was his demeanor: “What it is is controlled cool, in a way. Always have the situation under control, even if losing. Never betray an inward sense of defeat.”
And of course he never did—not in the height of his athletic power, not in the statesmanship of the years that followed, and not in the endgame of his existence. If you wished to choose a single image, you would see him standing there in his twenties, his lithe body a braid of cables, his energy without apparent limit, in a court situation indescribably bad, and all he does is put his index finger on the bridge of his glasses and push them back up to the bridge of his nose. In the shadow of disaster, he hits out. Faced with a choice between a conservative, percentage return or a one-in-ten flat-out blast, he chooses the blast. In a signature manner, he extends his left arm to point upward at lobs as they fall toward him. His overheads, in firebursts, put them away. His backhand is, if anything, stronger than his forehand and his shots from either side for the most part are explosions. In motions graceful and decisive, though, with reactions as fast as the imagination, he is a master of drop shots, of cat-and-mouse, of miscellaneous dinks and chips and (riskiest of all) the crosscourt half volley. Other tennis players might be wondering who in his right mind would attempt something like that, but that is how Ashe plays the game—at the tensest moment, he goes for the all but impossible. He is predictably unpredictable. He is unreadable. His ballistic serves move in odd patterns and come off the court in unexpected ways. Behind his impassive face—behind the enigmatic glasses, the lifted chin, the first-mate-on-the-bridge look—there seems to be a smile.
THE PUN ALSO RISES, even while maligned as the lowest form of humor. In good hands, words can be made to jump, molt, wiggle, shrink, flash, collide, fight, strut, and turn themselves inside out or upside down. Like many writers of light verse, Felicia Lamport is fond of creating new words by lopping off prefixes, but she does it better than most:
Many a new little life is begot
By the hibited man with the promptu plot.
Images glisten under her rhymes.
And what could be moister
Than tears from an oyster
Mocking the Age of Publicity in an essay which notes that where writers write has become almost as important as what they write (Thomas Wolfe scratched out his manuscripts on refrigerator tops; Jean Kerr worked in the front seat of her Chevrolet), Lamport tops them all with Elihu Linot, who always wrote on the backs of women, starting at the neck and working down. His editor eloped with a manuscript. There was no carbon.
NORTH AMERICAN MENSA, a club for people of superior intelligence, held its Annual Gathering the other weekend at the Biltmore. To join Mensa, candidates must prove, through tests, that they have higher I.Q.s than at least ninety-eight per cent of the rest of humanity. Mensa was founded in Britain in 1946. North American Mensa was not established until 1960, but it has become the largest subdivision of the organization, with more than ten thousand members in the United States and Canada. Mensa cannot be called leftist, rightist, uppist, downist, in, or out, for its constitution forbids any declaration of opinion on a Mensa-wide scale. Mensa’s aim is simply to bring together the brightest people in the world, so that their brains may interact to the benefit of themselves and humanity generally, and so that they may feel less lonely as they follow their otherwise separate paths.
Naturally, I felt complimented when I was invited to lunch with the Ms and FeMs at the Mensa A.G. Mensa people speak in a marvellously unbent, unfolded, unmutilated syntax that draws heavily on initials. An M is a Mensa member who is male. A FeM is a Mensa member who is female. There is a young-adult Mensa group called YaM. The A.G. is the Annual Gathering. And a sign at the entryway to the Palm Court of the Biltmore, under the clock, said, “This way if you have P.A.I.D.” I arrived at eleven-thirty, to find that a morning business meeting—closed to the press—was still in session in the Madison Room, next to the Palm Court. Explosive shouts were coming from inside. I learned later that S.I.G.R.I.M.—a Seriously Interested Group for Reform in Mensa—was in there hacking away at the parliamentary defenses of the Establishment. One of S.I.G.R.I.M.’s several grievances was that the leadership had denied S.I.G.R.I.M. the right to call itself a Special Interest Group, so S.I.G.R.I.M. had been forced to settle for Seriously Interested Group instead. I could not see into the room, but I heard one man bellow “Point of order!” five or six times and another propose a new faction, to be called S.I.E.G. H.E.I.L. A large man came out of the room looking exasperated and said, “Every nut in New York is in there. They voted on a resolution, and forty per cent of them don’t know what they voted for.”
Pretending not to notice, I began to look through a variety of Mensa publications that were set out on tables in the Palm Court. One fact sheet noted that there were ten thousand two hundred members, “of whom seven thousand five hundred and eight are male; two thousand six hundred and eighty-nine are female; and there is no information on the remaining three Ms.” In Charisma: The New York Mensa Literary Review, I read a poem called “Icelandia,” beginning “Iceland is a nice land to live in,” and a poem called “Interrupted Cliché,” which is here given in its entirety: “Of all the sorry works of men, the sadist.” A geographical breakdown of the Mensa membership listed Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island as the states of New England. Connecticut and northern Virginia were included in the Middle Atlantic category. (“Our statistical system is new,” an M later explained. “There are still a few bugs in it.”) I learned that fifty per cent of the Mensa members are college graduates. In the “Personals” column of the June, 1966, Mensa Bulletin, I read, “Avid Ray Walston fan seeks M support in all-out effort to save ‘My Favorite Martian,’” and an ad that said, “M—28, tall, lean, and considered handsome. Spent last few years travelling the world and I’m tired. College grad, athlete, loves all the beautiful things in life and is an incurable romantic. Is there a FeM somewhere in the vicinity who is good-looking, honestly sincere, and fed up with the average man?”
I wondered what was going to come out through that door when the business session ended and the group moved to the lunch, in another room. My first guess—angry, bearded, fistic geniuses—had given way to a vision of bleached poets. Then, suddenly, they came—something over two hundred and fifty Ms and FeMs, the assembled members of North American Mensa. There were men in cord jackets, women in pastel summer suits, pretty young girls with long, silky hair, people who looked to me like salesmen, engineers, students, housewives, schoolteachers. Unless one happened to know the truth, one would never have suspected that extraordinary reservoirs of intelligence underlay their familiar and reassuring appearance.
The lunch was served at large round tables—appropriately, for the name “Mensa” is meant to suggest that the group is a round-table society of equals. They came not only from New York but also from California, Wyoming, Virginia, Massachusetts, New Mexico. There was a carpet salesman from Louisiana, with his wife, and a woman who teaches English at Seton Hall University; an installer of computers; several computer programmers; two Canadian college students; several high-school students; an electrical engineer. On my left was a man who is the chief engineer of a rubber company in New Jersey; he is an M.I.T. graduate and recently moved east from Akron. On my right was a Yale sophomore, and next to him was a management consultant. The Yale student told me that there are Mensa activities going on in New York City almost every day—hikes around Manhattan, study groups in Esperanto and Chinese, a Mensa lunch in a different restaurant each day of the working week. On Thursdays, the restaurant is the Playboy Club. The consultant, who wore black-rimmed glasses and had a fine-line mustache, sensed the presence of a non-M. He turned to me and said, “Are you here in a reportorial capacity?”
“Yes,” I said, feeling my status plunge and go on plunging until it bottomed out at the twentieth percentile.
“This is a really heterogeneous group,” the consultant said. “The only thing we have in common is our intelligence level. You don’t meet anyone who’s weird. You don’t meet anyone who’s crazy. We are a giant conversational community. We talk about any idea, on any subject. We’re vociferous not only about internal Mensa problems but also about philosophy, mathematics, education, art, psychology, history, and religion. If you’re intelligent, your interests are not limited to one field. Mensa is the only organization that selects its members by a scientific process, but you wouldn’t know a Mensa member if you passed him on the street. We are like everyone else. Intelligence doesn’t show in the face or the personality. I saw a man this morning in Grand Central who looked lost and dishevelled, and I said to myself, ‘There’s a real idiot.’ I saw him an hour later here at the Mensa meeting. He’s an M.”
I asked the consultant what had attracted him to Mensa.
“I saw an ad in a newspaper,” he said. “I have always had an aversion to joining organizations, because it is possible to get into one and six months later find it migrating to Moscow. But, constitutionally, that can’t happen in Mensa. Curiosity brings most people into Mensa. They wonder what it would feel like to go into a room full of intelligent people and hear them talk. Mensa people are very discreet about their I.Q.s. They never compare them. I feel that I myself would have done better if there had not been mosquitoes in the room when I took the test. The intellectual doesn’t have a place in society. He’s homeless. He’s rootless. Mensa is about the only home base for intellectuals, excluding the university environment. Some people use universities for the same purpose, or professional colleagues, but these sources are very limited.”
The keynote speaker of the day was Isaac Asimov, the Boston University biochemistry professor who writes science-fiction novels, and he proved on this occasion to be a first-rate stand-up comedian. The keynote was a series of jokes, some of which he told twice. He said he imagined that all the people in the room—put together—were brighter than he was. He explained evolution to them in fresh terms; it was really survival of the weakest, for the fish left the ocean not because they were ambitious but because they were crowded out.
More speakers and much discussion followed, through the afternoon. “It’s a pleasure to talk to a group that is representative of the I.Q. elite,” one speaker said. “The structure of society discriminates against people of extraordinary intelligence. Society expects intelligent people to be strange, then creates the circumstances that guarantee this will be true.” There was some laughter, a bit of applause.
An M spoke up sharply from the floor. “Are you suggesting that we hide our light under a blanket?” he asked.
CLICK. THE NINE BALL plops into the side pocket, the cue ball hits one cushion and stops near the center spot. Big as a water tower but light on his feet, with a diamond ring on a pudgy finger, the fat man moves around the table. For thirty-one consecutive hours, with an almost incredible repertory of massé shots, bank shots, gather shots, and combinations, with just enough English and the right amount of draw, he has been defending his reputation as the best there is. He chalks up and shoots again. Click. The fifteen ball slams into the corner and disappears. Minnesota Fats is still the greatest pool shark in the world.
Jackie Gleason does his new job with remarkable ease. He memorizes at first sight. While Method actors search their souls and “live” their roles, Gleason riffles through a script and is ready to go. His fellow performers both amuse and irritate him with their warm-up exercises. While shooting The Hustler, Paul Newman was forever shaking his wrists like a swimmer before a race. Now, on the set of Requiem for a Heavyweight, Anthony Quinn shadowboxes and dances up and down—“marinating,” as Gleason puts it—for half an hour before a take. Gleason stands around cracking jokes and shouting, “Let’s go! Let’s go!” But his directors uniformly report that when they call for action, Gleason snaps instantly into the character he is playing.
HER VOICE WAS CLEAR, vibrant, strong, untrained. She wore no makeup, and her long black hair hung like drapery, parting around her long almond face. In performance, she came on, walked straight to the microphone, and began to sing. No patter. No remarks. She usually wore a sweater and skirt, or a simple dress. Occasionally, she affected something semi-Oriental that seemed to have been hand-sewn out of burlap. The purity of her voice suggested purity of approach. She was only twenty-one and palpably nubile, but there was little sex in that clear flow of sound. It was haunted and plaintive, a mother’s voice, and it had in it distant reminders of madrigal singers performing at court, and of saddened Gypsies trying to charm death into leaving their caves. “Barbara Allen” was one of the set pieces of folk singing, and no one sang it as achingly as she did. From “Lonesome Road” to “All My Trials,” her most typical selections were so mournful and quietly desperate that her early recordings would not have been out of place had they been played at a funeral. She added some lighter material to create a semblance of variety, but the force of sadness in her personality remained compelling.
Her mother was English-Scottish, her father was born in Mexico. His academic track as a physicist took him to Los Angeles, Buffalo, Baghdad, Boston, and Paris. Along the way, their three daughters learned some memorable lessons in bigotry. When Dr. Baez was doing military research in Buffalo, for example, the family thought it would be a pleasant experience to settle in a small and typical American town. They chose Clarence Center, New York, population nine hundred. Their next-door neighbor was a senile old man who scowled at Joan’s dark skin and said, “Niggers.” The Baezes called the neighbor Old Bogey. To keep Old Bogey confused, they sank a plug spout into a telephone pole outside the house and hung a bucket on it. Dr. Baez picks up the narrative. “We knew that he would be full of contempt for our supposed ignorance of maple tapping, but we knew that he could not resist peeping into the bucket. We were in stitches of laughter, peeping from our window when he would come by, look around furtively, and peek into the bucket. Then we began to put things in the bucket—water and so on. He was astonished. Poor Old Bogey.”
In Redlands, California, Joan found a situation that cut deeper than one old crank. The Hispanic schoolchildren there played in separate groups from the “whites.” Observably, the dominant tone of her personality changed from ebullience to melancholy. Her thirteenth birthday came, and she said something she would repeat often: “Mummy, I don’t want to grow up.”
She spent a month or so at Boston University studying theatre—the beginning and end of college for her—and she met several semipro folk singers who taught her songs and guitar techniques. She never studied voice or music, or even took the trouble to study folklore and pick up songs by herself. She just soaked them up from those around her. She sang in coffeehouses in and around Harvard Square that were populated by the Harvard underworld—drifters with Penguin Classics protruding from their blue jeans, and no official standing at Harvard or anywhere else. They pretended they were Harvard students, ate in the university dining halls, and sat in on some classes. Joan Baez—who would long be thought of as a sort of ethereal beatnik because of her remote manner, long hair, bare feet, and burlap wardrobe—actually felt distaste for these academic bums from the start. She said, “They just lie in their beds, smoke pot, and do stupid things.” They were her first audiences, with real Harvard students and general citizens, who grew in numbers until the bums were choked out. She was often rough on them all. When one patron lisped a request to her, she lisped in reply. When another singer turned sour in performance, Baez suddenly stood up in the back of the room and began to sing, vocally stabbing the hapless singer on the stage into silence. In the summer of 1959, another singer invited her to the first Newport Folk Festival. Her clear-lighted voice poured over the thirteen thousand people there and chilled them with surprise. Recording companies closed in. A representative of Columbia Records—dropping the magical name of Mitch Miller, the star-making artists-and-repertoire man—said to her, “Would you like to meet Mitch, baby?”
She said, “Who’s Mitch?”
THOMAS WOLFE WAS an undisciplined, ungovernable American Conrad whose sea was the land of his birth. His words, seeking “to find language again in its primitive sinews,” rioted onto paper in millions, growing out of him, over him, and sometimes beyond him. In the West a few years before he died, Wolfe saw a sequoia for the first time. He stared upward for a moment in unbelieving silence, then ran to the big tree, his long arms stretched wide. It was a boyish gesture, but this man of thirty-five still believed that he might draw into his embrace the biggest thing that lived.
He strode along in his size-thirteen shoes, embarrassed by his six-foot-six-inch, two-hundred-and-forty-pound frame, carrying his eccentricities with him until fame had transformed them into folklore. He seldom washed, changed his shirt, or had a haircut; he could live for hours, even days, on cigarettes and coal-black coffee, then swallow twelve eggs, two quarts of milk, and an entire loaf of bread in one breakfast. Wild-eyed and forever talking with all the intensity of his written prose, he sprayed everyone in range with reservoirs of spittle from the corners of his mouth. Some thought him ludicrous, but thousands worshipped the ground his feet never quite touched. Sooner or later he accused all his friends of tormenting him, but he needed them badly, and once, at a party in his new Manhattan apartment, he reached to the ceiling with a black crayon and wrote, “Merry Christmas to all my friends and love from Tom.”
GOVERNMENTS OF THE WORLD have long found it convenient to bury their gold in Manhattan. The site is five thousand three hundred and twenty paces due south of the Public Library, then two thousand two hundred and eighty paces due west, and it is betokened by the topographical configuration of an old and now obscured streambed in Maiden Lane, whence the route proceeds straight down into the earth until, fifty-five feet below sea level, one enters a grotto jackhammered out of solid metamorphic rock and there finds the gold. The hoard has become, as far as is known, the largest quantity of gold that has been accumulated in one place ever. It is a sixth of all the gold that has been mined during the history of the world. The limestone palazzo overhead is the Federal Reserve Bank, which serves as the custodian of the gold, although the United States’ share of the total is under a hundred million dollars’ worth—around half of one per cent. Just knowing all that gold is there produces a sensuous need to be in its presence, a certain stir in the lower coin.
The Fed resembles a men’s club with unusually high dues. Wood fires burn discreetly. Art from the Metropolitan Museum is hung in the galleried corridors. Washrooms are full of combs, brushes, clothes brushes, dental towels, doctor scales. One instinctively spruces up before being ushered into the presence of the gold. I stopped first in an upstairs office to see Thomas O. Waage, a senior vice-president, whose Cash Custody Department has physical responsibility for money of all kinds within the building, including bullion. He said that things would be very quiet down at bedrock, because gold was not, except in a more or less religious sense, backing anybody’s currency anymore. There might be more gold than ever down there, but it was doing less. As a base of currency, it no longer had any practical meaning. In the old days, when gold was gold, the gold deep under the Fed was literally moved about in support of the currencies of nations. Suppose Denmark owed a large sum of money to France. A coded cable would arrive from Copenhagen and another from Paris, with matching instructions from each country. Then, down in the gold bins, professional stackers—men with forefingers the size of bananas from the handling of bars of gold—would go into Denmark’s compartment and take out what was owed to France. They would wheel it to the French compartment and stack it inside. That sort of thing went on all the time. If, say, Argentina paid a debt to Britain, or Indonesia paid one to Kuwait, gold was lugged from one stack to another deep under Manhattan, which is why so many nations—about sixty in all—wanted to keep gold in one place. The work was so exhausting that the stackers functioned in units, like lacrosse midfielders or hockey lines, going in and out of action every few minutes. They wore magnesium covers over their shoes. A bar of gold was only seven inches long, but it weighed four hundred troy ounces.
The price of gold traded on the free market had long since come unstuck from the official price agreed upon in international monetary circles, and between the two prices a gap had grown that had widened beyond the point of absurdity. The official price now, the “official” value of gold as the underpinning of currencies, was forty-two dollars and twenty-two cents an ounce. The price of gold on the free market—jewelry gold, industrial gold, gold of private hoarders—was approaching two hundred dollars an ounce. This difference had paralyzed the great treasures below us. At the official price, no one, obviously, was going to use gold to pay a debt, nor were many nations psychologically prepared to fling their gold into the free market, receiving paper, even huge amounts of paper, in return. Forces of atavism, mysticism, primitivism still apparently combined in the human soul to give spiritual status to this metal. So now it sat in limbo—fourteen thousand tons of it, anyway—deep in a man-made cave.
The mouth of the cave, its only entrance, is plugged with a steel cylinder that weighs ninety tons. When the cylinder is turned, it presents an opening large enough to walk through. A whole team must go in if anyone goes at all. I, for example, after I left Mr. Waage, was taken down to the bedrock level by Richard Hoenig, an assistant vice-president of the bank, and we were met at the steel cylinder by Edward Hood, of Cash Custody; by Albert Nyland, of the Vault Division; and by Sam Ludman, an auditor. No one ever goes into the presence of the gold unaccompanied by a trio from the Auditing, Vault, and Cash Custody divisions, who, among other things, supervise the gold stackers. On any number of doors, including the hundred and twenty-two doors of the gold-storage compartments, there are three locks, the keys or combinations of which are separately held in the pockets or memories of people from the three divisions. To avoid collusion, assignments are rotated, so that no threesome works consistently together. “It’s my gold,” Hood said, by way of explanation. “I keep it in Al’s house, and Sam handles it.” Among them, these three had worked in the bank ninety-four years. “You eventually come down to this job,” said Sam.
“We go down the ladder instead of up,” said Al.
“The next step is to be buried,” said Ed.
We stepped through the steel and into the cavern. The predominant color in there was dull yellow. The architectural ambience was early cellblock. The place might have been a county jail. Visible through the steel mesh and the steel dowels in the doors of the cells were stacks and stacks of sullen, imprisoned gold. A thousand bars or so were lying around on pallets outside the cells, evidence that all activity had not stopped. Switzerland, for example, has a law that a certain ratio must be kept constant between amounts of paper money and amounts of gold on hand in Switzerland, so the Swiss occasionally call for gold from their bin in New York. I reached for a bar of gold and picked it up. It was a bit smaller than an ordinary construction brick. It weighed twenty-eight pounds. It lacked lustre—in fact, it appeared to be a lead brick borrowed from a radiation lab and painted with gold dope. Its markings indicated that it was 99.94 per cent pure. It was worth, officially, about seventeen thousand dollars and could bring perhaps seventy-five thousand in the free market. I felt a tendon preparing to snap in my shoulder, and I put the gold down.
“Be sure to call it a bar, not a brick,” Mr. Hoenig said. “Everyone who works down here is sensitive and touchy about having them called bricks.”
National identities were secret. I peered into various numbered cells, wondering whose gold was sulking there. I saw a bar that was marked with a hammer and sickle, but that could have been anyone’s by now; it had been cast in the Soviet Union in 1937. The value of the contents of each compartment was written on a tag on the door. No. 3, for example, contained fourteen thousand five hundred and sixty-eight bars, worth, officially, about two hundred and fifty million dollars—the hoard of a modest client. Accounts might range from under a hundred thousand dollars to five or six billion dollars, Hoenig said. Each compartment represented all or part of an individual account, for the gold of different customers was never commingled.
The stacks had been put together with both the care and the pattern that masons would employ in the making of a dry wall—level courses, shimmed (with wood), interlocking. In one large compartment was well over half as much gold as there is in Fort Knox. It was in three separate stacks. Two were about fifteen feet high and included a hundred thousand bars apiece, while the third had been built with fifty thousand bars. Stackers—sweating, working like the slaves of pharaohs—could handle a maximum of twelve hundred bars a day, so the construction of these three stacks alone had taken nearly a working year.
Suddenly, the composite foolishness of all this shivered through history and fell on me like a ton of gold. I thanked everybody and split for sunlight. Suffering from acute duodenal aurophobia, I staggered into the street.
THERE IS A CONVENTION in musical theatre called the Girl’s First Song—that first number in which the heroine states who she is, what she wants, and hints at the perils that might befall her, such as “A Cockeyed Optimist” from South Pacific and “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly” from My Fair Lady. In Funny Girl, Barbra Streisand stands under the marquee of a theatre and declares in her first song:
I’m the greatest star,
I am by far,
But no one knows it.
From that moment, no one has a chance not to know it. “I’m a great big clump of talent,” she sings with conviction. “I’ve got thirty-six expressions—sweet as pie to tough as leather—and that’s six expressions more than all the Barrymores put together. I’m the greatest star—an American Beauty rose, with an American beauty nose.”
This nose is a shrine. It starts at the summit of her hive-piled hair and ends where a trombone reaches pedal B flat. The face it divides is long and sad, and the look in repose is the essence of hound. But as she sings number after number and grows in the mind, she touches the heart with her awkwardness, her lunging humor, and a bravery that is all the more winning because she seems so vulnerable.
When the lights go up for intermission, people dive into the Playbill to find out about Barbra Streisand. They don’t learn much. In the biographical notes, Barbra remains onstage. She wrote them herself. Her young life’s work has been to elevate and sculpt her own archetypical personality, and no string of drab printed facts is going to get in her way. She reveals that she is an accomplished bead stringer and a collector of old shoes, born in Madagascar and reared in Rangoon. Her pharaonic profile and scarab eyes more nearly suggest Aswan. In truth, she was born and raised in Brooklyn, between Newtown Creek and the Gowanus Canal.
More than willing to forsake her anonymity, she nonetheless feels the pain of its loss. People who recognize her in the street and ask her for autographs make her uncomfortable. Some of these people wear their hair in the lofted way that she does, and attempt to replicate her glassy, communicant look, for she is a godhead of their private reveries. Others who stop her are just impious strangers. Seeing her tasseled yellow blouse showing through under a South American skunk coat, her white wool slacks and dirty sneakers, they will say, “Hey, you look like Barbra Streisand!”
THE AGE OF OARED SHIPS lasted three thousand years, and the largest of them were built closer to the beginning than to the end of that span of time. Ships with single banks of oars took the Greeks to Troy. Biremes transported the Phoenicians. Eventually, toward the end of the sixth century B.C., triremes developed. A hundred and twenty feet long and with a twenty-foot beam and three coordinated banks of oars, the trireme was the most sensible expression that this form of naval architecture would ever be given. With the Battle of Salamis, the brief, extraordinary era of the super-galleys began: quadriremes, quinqueremes, decaremes, dodecaremes—even tredecaremes, with eighteen hundred men at the oars. Huge, high-sided, millipede ships, they rammed one another out of existence. The largest oared ships in history were two trigintaremes, constructed in the third century B.C. by King Ptolemy II of Egypt. Soon after that, according to the historian Callixenos, Ptolemy IV built a quadragintareme, but scholars consider Callixenos untrustworthy and doubt whether such a ship ever existed. The trigintaremes were awkward enough. With thirty banks of oars sticking into the water like roots into the earth, they had the over-all mobility of banyan trees. The trend reversed. Before long, most Mediterranean navies were back at least to quinqueremes. The Romans, for the most part, used biremes and triremes, and one of Mark Antony’s many troubles at Actium may have been that he had with him a fleet of outmoded decaremes. A millennium passed. The nautical merchants of Venice were still using three-bank ships in the thirteenth century, and the Venetian vessels had almost exactly the same dimensions as the early Greek triremes.
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara has announced that the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation is going to build by far the biggest airplane ever designed. The C-5A, as it is called, weighs three hundred and fifty tons. In 1948, when the B-36 was introduced, newspapers printed scale drawings that showed Orville Wright’s plane taking off from one wing of the B-36 and landing on the other, a hundred and twenty feet away—a hundred and twenty feet being the distance of the first controlled flight. A flight the length of Orville Wright’s could occur inside the C-5A. The great nose of the plane swings up and open, on hinges, like the visor of a knight’s helmet. It allows more cargo room within the fuselage, which is two hundred and thirty-six feet long, and the plane can be taxied with its visor open. Large buses could drive into the plane two at a time. Six of them could fit inside with space to spare. Its engines are so big that one of the pods they fit into could easily be converted into a cottage. The plane itself is so big that when the pilot pulls on the control stick, there will be no immediate perceptible response. Many seconds later, the nose will start to rise.
THREE HUNDRED YEARS AGO, a notion was a thought. This meaning endures, but now the word also signifies all the miscellaneous objects on department-store notions counters. It is uncertain how this small fork in a minor etymological stream came to exist, but it is possible that John Locke created it all by himself when he wrote, in 1690, “Essences of the Species of mix’d Modes are by a more particular Name call’d Notions.” Locke was thus not only a father of modern democratic government but also a father of modern retailing, for Notions Departments are what make department stores go. The theory is that customers drawn in by the essences of the species of mixed modes on the main floor will proceed to higher floors and more ambitious purchases.
Notions, in the world of American retailing, were once pins, needles, ribbons, buttons, bows, and related products. Pins, in the United States, were first made in Rhode Island, and out from there went Yankee peddlers, who became known as notions peddlers, and who sold needles, pots, pins, and pans in villages across New England and, eventually, on the frontier. A standard opening used by a peddler was “Can I suit ye today, ma’am? I’ve all sorts of notions.” After 1849, “notions vessels”—bazaars afloat—began appearing in San Francisco and elsewhere on the California coast. In the nineteenth century, the notion to end all notions was the bustle. An 1888 issue of Fabrics, Fancy Goods and Notions described one bustle as being made of muslin-covered wires that “cross each other to form an excellent spring, allowing the bustle to close easily as the wearer is seated, and promptly resuming its shape upon arising.” By the eighteen-nineties, notions counters had become standard features of stores everywhere in the country. Some pins and needles can still be found on notions counters, but notions today are anything at all that will sell—preferably items with some sort of real or pretended novelty. Notions buyers have become the biggest barracudas in the department-store world. When something really good comes along in, say, Housewares, a Housewares buyer who tries to get near it will probably be chewed up by the superfish from Notions.
I WENT DOWN to Washington to observe the ritual distribution of fifty thousand dollars to six civil servants—tax-free, and with scarcely a string attached. The money was venerable, as money goes, not the sort that is tossed around in packets. It had once belonged to John D. Rockefeller III and had been further aged on the books of Princeton University. Rockefeller and Princeton have been doing this for twenty years. Rockefeller felt so sorry for civil servants during the era of the witch hunts that he sought a way to stimulate their morale, and since not even John D. Rockefeller can just hand cash to a public servant without setting off a sprinkler system somewhere, he gave Princeton stewardship of the money and asked the university to set up a program to select recipients. Virtually unknown outside the government, the awards carry more prestige (and far more money) than any other award given to members of the Civil Service. Departments nag for them, compete like football teams. Defense will call up Princeton, flash a little first-strike capability, and ask after the chances of this or that Defenseman. Commerce buzzes analogously. State skips diplomacy. Meanwhile, hundreds of letters have gone out from the university to people in and around the government, asking for detailed nominations. Anyone at all can write a nominating letter without being asked. The result is a list of about a hundred and twenty-five nominees a year—the best among the people Franklin Roosevelt described as having “a passion for anonymity.”
Luna Leopold, as a recipient, seems particularly to epitomize what the Rockefeller awards are about: the singling out of a government worker of no nonsense and stunning competence, the strong suggestion that he is not unique but one of a kind, the concomitant revelation that someone is noticing, even cheering, what he is doing. Leopold, of the United States Geological Survey, is a hydrologist, a world authority on river mechanics—a name from an inner page of a newspaper, if ever there at all. With a single report, though, he may have saved the Everglades. Dark, tall, a falcon, he appears to have been stolen from a wall in the Prado. He knew just why he was being honored. “It is a good thing Rockefeller is doing,” he said, over drinks. “No one in the middle echelon actually thinks that he himself will get the award, but the fact that someone gets it makes everyone feel his job is more important. The public has lost confidence in government and in people who work for the government. Rockefeller is saying that somebody thinks federal service is a good thing. There’s a hell of a lot of good work done in the government.”
A winner once went straight to the nearest dealer and bought a Cadillac. Rockefeller could not care less what happens to the money, as long as the winners keep working for the government. Before being confirmed by Princeton’s trustees, they are asked to declare that they have no immediate plans to retire. That is the one string attached.
I GUARDED HIM once in a while in the noon basketball game in Dillon Gym. He didn’t go to his left, and he didn’t go to his right, but he easily managed to get off shots. The cigar may have helped him, the blown smoke. The cigar crazed me on the tennis court as well. We played regularly through the summers, and he was better than I was eight times out of ten. As I struggled against him and went down to defeat, in the middle of his face there was always that stump—contemptuous, glowing. If the cigar disappeared, I felt a shiver in the bones, knowing I was playing over my head.
One very hot summer evening, near dusk, while Jadwin Gymnasium was under construction, I called his house, and asked for him, and his wife said, “He isn’t here. He’s down at the new gym.” The new gym was a large hole in the ground, girders rising. “The what?” I said. And she said, “The new gym. He goes there every night. He communes with the new gym. If he has to be away from town, he sends one of us.”
I dropped whatever I’d been doing, bought two sixteen-ounce cans, drove to what is now the Jadwin parking lot, and walked in the half-light toward the skeleton of steel. He was sitting on the retaining wall between Caldwell Field House and the construction site. As I approached him and sat down beside him, he neither looked at me nor said a word. I handed him a can and he opened it. He continued to say nothing. He just gazed into the interior of the future gym. I was not about to speak, I can tell you. If anybody broke his silence, he was going to do it, not me. For a very long time, he said nothing and he never glanced my way. It could have been half an hour. The sky was all but dark. Finally, without turning his head, he said, “Can you imagine putting a bad basketball team in there?”
I told that story to Dan White, who used it as the opening anecdote in his 1978 book, Play to Win: A Profile of Princeton Basketball Coach Pete Carril.
One year, a basketball player submitted an adroitly written and charming essay in application for my spring-semester writing course, which would begin on February 1st. I picked up the telephone and called Pete.
“One of your basketball players has applied to my course and I’d like to take him but it’s an all-afternoon seminar and I’m not going to take him if he has to get up and leave and go to the gym.”
In Pete’s only tone of voice—his gust-driven toad baritone—he broke in and said, “What’s his name? What’s his name?”
“Matthew Henshon.”
“He can do it. He can do it. What time does your class end?”
“Four-twenty.”
“He can do it. What’s more—let me tell you—if that fucking kid ever walks out early, if he ever misses so much as one minute of your class, he will never play another minute of basketball for Princeton.”
Henshon was a starter on a championship team.
Now that I no longer play tennis, I see Pete much less often, and therefore look forward all the more to talking with him and catching up with him on the long fast walks we sometimes do together from Jadwin. Evidently, he looks forward to these occasions, too. As we go down the towpath, he has earphones on his head and listens to bullfight music.
My editor Bob Bingham called me at home and said that a friend of his at Vogue had asked him to see if I would write a very short piece on birds for a very long sum of money. I said I knew nothing at all about birds, they had the wrong man. Bingham said, “We mustn’t let the money out of the family.” I reemphasized my lack of qualifications. Bingham said, “Just interview me.” I said, “O.K.,” and added, graspingly, “if you’ll accept half.” We talked for a time and I recorded what he said. I figured if I was going to take half the money, I had to contribute something, however briefly. Plumbing my memory for a personal lead, I began, as follows, to write.
SITTING IN A CANOE on a small, wild lake in the northernmost part of New Hampshire, I saw a bird leave the shore. I could not tell what it was, but from a distance it seemed to have the configuration of a gull. It was flying low over the water, and directly toward me, like a Grumman Avenger making a run. It had no more than two feet of altitude. Without swerving, it came steadily on, with an obvious sense of target. The distance closed to a hundred yards. Fifty. Twenty-five. God knows what the creature thought the boat was, or what I was, but a collision was now imminent, and I raised my arms in self-defense. Suddenly the bird lifted its head, spread its wings, and, with its body straight up, stopped dead in the air. A huge pair of eyes. In them, a look of miscalculation. An owl. We stared at each other, faces a foot apart. With a whip of wings, it was overhead and gone.
As soon as I could, I got to a telephone and called my bird-watcher. He said it was too bad that the owl had chosen someone who might not sufficiently appreciate the encounter. That was true enough, for I suffer from a kind of congenital opacity to birds. My wife knows and loves birds. I have many friends who know birds. I have long felt somewhat guilty that I lack not only knowledge but also understanding of birds, and of what draws people to them. My bird-watcher is a business associate of mine whose name is Robert Bingham. I have never understood him, either. I began, some time ago, to try to draw out of him the essence of what makes him watch.
Mr. Bingham is a tall, rufous man with unsuspicious eyes. He has the ample sort of mustache that all creation, even a bird, would trust; and he has thought deeply on the pleasures and advantages of bird-watching. “One might as well be blunt about it and concede that the entire enterprise is redolent of sexuality,” he said. “The voyeurism is embarrassingly obvious. I mean your stealth, your luck, and a couple of ground lenses can bring you into a secret intimacy with some of the most beautiful, graceful, and sensual beings in nature. The perspective is unreal—it’s as if you were up there on a branch among the leaves with them, and you cease to be your earthbound self entirely for a bright, timeless flight as you strain to catch one more glimpse of the golden-crowned kinglet darting through the conifers. Did I really see that crimson streak running through the yellow cap, or did I imagine it? The excitement can be compared only to that I experienced as a fourteen-year-old gulping my way through Lady Chatterley’s Lover, looking for the dirty parts. And yet the fantasy is of an exquisitely purer intensity—the eroticism of angels, not of thrashing animals on the ground. If I were to become a bird in some reincarnation, I would choose to be a cardinal. The cardinal is a rather common fellow, actually—a run-of-the-mill suburban-commuter type, despite the bright red suit. But have you ever looked closely at his wife? Damnably attractive, to my way of thinking. Just my type. A simple but superbly tailored dress in a kind of bronze color with a warmth that grows on you the more you look at it. A stylish long tail, with which she lets you know that, while she comes from an old family and went to the best schools, there’s plenty of spirit to her. And those lips! A luscious orange you can scarcely believe is natural. They have a nice pouting fullness to them, without the exaggerated clownishness of her cousins the grosbeaks. Cardinals are very uxorious, you know. Stay together all winter, not just in the breeding season. I can see why. A few weeks ago, I saw a couple giving each other pumpkin seeds at one of my feeders. Sexiest performance I’ve ever seen.”
Mr. Bingham insists that he is “a more or less average bird-watcher” and that a review of his motivations might go far toward explaining what makes people in general stand around in the woods with field glasses, trying to add to their life lists. There are more than six hundred bird species known on the North American continent. With “accidentals” and subspecies, seven hundred and two are listed in Roger Tory Peterson’s A Field Guide to the Birds—a standard text that, for many, has been supplanted by the Golden Press’s Birds of North America. Fanatics, the sort who go out at the height of the migration to do a “century run” (one hundred birds in a day), have been able to do six hundred or more in one year.
I once asked Mr. Bingham how long his life list was.
He said, “I will not say. I deplore competitiveness.”
“In what sense, then, are you an average bird-watcher?”
“Well, for example, with a field guide in hand, I can probably differentiate half a dozen of the warblers when they are in full breeding plumage in the spring. To me, they are the most glorious objects of the hunt. The black-and-white has a natty salt-and-pepper topcoat, for instance; the magnolia has black spots down a splendid yellow vest. But I am completely lost among what even the guidebooks call ‘confusing fall warblers,’ who have suited up and shed their mating plumage and look all alike.”
“How long have you been birding, Mr. Bingham?”
“I find the word ‘birding’ affected. It is used by new-style ecologically minded counterculture participants who, being ashamed of the prissiness of all the little old ladies in tennis shoes who preceded them, feel they have to talk tough about what they are doing. They make me uncomfortable. I’m as determined as the next nature lover that our rivers shall be pure, our air uncontaminated, and our primeval forests preserved from brutish developers. But, somehow, the romantic escapism of bird-watching has been driven out by all the new ecological zeal. The last time I went on a bird walk, it was led by a perfectly wonderful young man who spent most of his time talking about solid-waste disposal.”
“How long have you been bird-watching, Mr. Bingham?”
“I came to it fairly late—that is, in my thirties—after a lifetime of ridiculing bird-watchers. It was during a vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, where the Chilmark Community Center sponsored bird walks every Monday morning. I had heard that the leader of the walks, Edward Chalif, could lead his groups past no-trespassing signs to parts of the island a casual visitor would never see. That first Monday morning I was completely entranced. I mean, it was as if I had discovered that a whole other world—of beautiful, sentient beings—was superimposed on the familiar world I had been living in for thirty-some years. I could suddenly see it, almost get into it—into another dimension of experience that I might otherwise have missed entirely. I was shown three warblers that I hadn’t known existed. Chalif taught me the devices by which I attract birds to come to me, instead of footing it aimlessly through the woods after them. What I do is first make a noise like a hunting screech owl, then make a noise like a hurt baby robin. If done well and in a promising neighborhood, the act brings them flocking in by the dozens to find out what the hell is going on. The owl noise is made by getting a fair amount of spit collected in the mouth on top of the tongue, tilting the head back, and whistling low several times. The hurt-baby-robin noise is made by kissing the back of your own hand vigorously.”
“Have there been triumphs in your bird-watching career?”
“There is a large tree outside my kitchen windows in Dobbs Ferry. Into the bark, I press suet and other meat fat during the winter. One morning, as I walked into the kitchen to put the kettle on for coffee, an immense woodpecker—unmistakably the pileated—flapped its way across the yard and landed on the tree for breakfast. I did not dare cry out the news to my family for fear of scaring the bird away; but when I had quietly summoned my wife, three children, and a Newfoundland dog, the pileated woodpecker was still there. I once positively identified a razor-billed auk sporting in the waves off the inlet to Lake Tashmoo on Martha’s Vineyard, the day before I was to leave the island. I called Eddie Chalif to tell him about it. A year later, I heard Chalif tell a group that he had once been able to take thirty people to see a razor-billed auk off Lake Tashmoo—on the basis of a tip he had received the summer before from a man whose name he couldn’t remember.”
“What—if any—are your main handicaps as a bird-watcher, Mr. Bingham?”
“I can’t remember the names or the salient characteristics of the birds. I once had the difference between the least sandpiper and the semipalmated sandpiper down pat. The last least I saw I called a sanderling. The titmouse, which crawls downward on my tree eating suet, is a bird whose name I can never remember. ‘What’s the name of that upside-down bird?’ I will ask my wife, who is not a bird-watcher. ‘Nuthatch, dummy,’ is her reply.”
ALONG THE WAY we stopped at Geysir, where a great hole in the ground is the world’s eponymous geyser. The old geyser is no longer forthcoming. It is full of water but not of action. It had literally been roped off. Close at hand was a young geyser. At five- to seven-minute intervals—no more than that—it swelled tumescently, let forth a series of heavy grunts, and into the sky shot a plume of flying steam. Meanwhile, the old geyser just sat there, boiling. We learned how—on special occasions—Icelanders make the old geyser do its thing. They throw soap into it, and it erupts.
Moving on, we passed a waterfall of the size of the American Niagara, and then we drove for an hour or two on the gravels of an outwash plain that was covered with rounded boulders and no vegetation, not so much as a clump of grass. Eventually, the car could go no farther, so we left it behind and proceeded north on foot. There was a stream to ford. Laura had running shoes and I had boots. She got onto my back and I carried her across. We then walked a couple of miles, also on rounded rocks, and up onto a high moraine, where, coming over the crest, we looked down into a lake backdropped by cliffs of blue ice. This was the edge not of a valley glacier but of an ice cap covering nearly five hundred square miles. Above the lake, the ice wall rose about a hundred and fifty feet, and was sheer. There came sounds like high-powered-rifle shots, as huge bergs calved away from the ice cap and plunged into the water. There was no going farther. On the way down the moraine and back toward the river ford, I attempted to increase my credit line by mentioning that glacial rivers grow in the afternoon with the day’s melt from the sun, and this time we could expect a larger river when I carried her across it. But this time she was having none of me. Apparently, she had forded her last river on her father’s back. She took off her shoes and negotiated the stream.
THE LIBERTY SCIENCE CENTER’S declared purpose is to combat what it sees as a general scientific illiteracy, to strike a spark in children in obvious and subtle ways, and then to draw them back and keep the spark aglow—ultimately, to educate many and, with luck, to inspire a few. And how does a museum do that? In the words of the management: “First, don’t scare them off.”
Up a ramp I go, fearless, and into the four-level atrium, my youth camouflaged by a gray beard. The escalators have glass sides and visible working parts. They carry you up to the Insect Zoo—to colonial displays of carpenter ants, Kenyan millipedes, pink-toed tarantulas, and emperor scorpions. Close by, second graders are digging in a mound of dirt in search of weevils, pill bugs, springtails, scorpion-fly pupae, centipedes, and small local millipedes. Don’t scare them off.
The African millipedes are longer than hot dogs and call to mind segments of BX cable. Would I like to handle one? In this company, what choice do I have? Nina Zitani, of the museum staff, lays a Kenyan millipede on my open palm. Curled like an ammonite, it covers the palm. “In a minute,” says Nina, “she’ll begin to move.”
She begins to move. She uncurls, stretches from my wrist to beyond my fingertips—her touch as tentative as an art restorer’s brush. She seems self-conscious. Understandably. People say she is a millipede, but she has only two hundred and fifty legs. Leaving my hand, she crawls onto Nina’s.
Would I like to hold a Madagascar hissing cockroach?
My nod is meant to suggest that this has been a lifelong ambition.
Madagascar hissing cockroaches, with their inquisitive and wormlike antennae, are flat and hard and about three inches long. They hiss because they think you are going to eat them. As I fondle one’s chitin, the roach responds with the sound of a printer printing. The roach is covered with crawling mites. What the egret is to the Texas longhorn, the mite is to the Madagascar roach.
Central American cave cockroaches thrive behind glass on a walnut limb. The adults are three to four inches long. Their pronouncedly segmented babies are scattered about them like horseshoe crabs. Not by accident are cockroaches, in such taxonomic variety, the star attractions here. This is Greater New York—roach utopia.
Stand in front of the thermographic sensing camera. Your mottled image appears on a screen in colors relating to the surface temperatures of your body. That’s me! A perfect likeness: green beard, yellow mouth, pink nose, red head. The body’s surface-temperature range can vary through thirty degrees. As I stick out my tongue, it licks like a white-orange flame.
At the Bernoulli Bench, you can pick up an air hose, blow it over the top of a ball in a cylindrical cage, and make the ball rise. You toss Ping-Pong balls and they stick like burrs to the sides of air jets you cannot see. You blow a jet between two bowling balls. Instead of scattering, they slam together. Bernoulli’s principle shapes the airfoil and lies behind the breaking baseball. Daniel Bernoulli was the Swiss mathematician who discovered, in the eighteenth century, that pressure is inversely related to the speed of moving air. Since air pressure acts from all directions, air flowing rapidly across the top of an object will make the pressure there lower than the pressure that is acting on the bottom and the sides. Enjoy your flight.
At the Stream Table, across the way, water flowing over crushed walnut shells forms oxbow bends and braided rivers, making point bars and cut banks while you watch. The staffer at the spigots is not the Carl Sagan of the earth sciences. He says he has been given to understand that the subject he is presenting is known as geomorphology and mentions offhandedly that he is a member of the California bar. His knowledge of limnology is about what you would learn in a torts course.
In an aquarium of streaming water, you try to control various objects through the glass with magnets—page 1, line 1, fluid dynamics.
The idea behind the museum’s various discovery rooms is that if something especially arrests your interest, you can take it further. There are twenty-five staff members on each floor, ready to help you assemble bones, deconstruct a wasps’ nest, or work on a CPR doll. Equipment is here (the scanning electron microscope) that is not in most schools. In the discovery rooms, whether children are digging for weevils or disassembling computers, they are, in effect, making their own exhibits. They bring their toys or machines from home to the basement Swap Shop—things for taking apart. They bring their dichroic reflectors, their capacitors and reed relays, their pop pumps and solenoids, and exchange them for hard-drive air filters, pancake motors, electromechanical scissors, and portable throwing stars.
As for me—the over-all effect on me—if I were ten years old, not even the feathery caress of a six-inch Kenyan millipede could coax forth a scientist from within; it would, on the other hand, tickle the hell out of the writer there.
A PERSON WHO SPECIALIZES in handheld altimeters will always know how high he is but may have difficulty keeping his bearings. This I learned in Fort Tryon Park, near the north end of Manhattan Island, from William Peet, of Allenhurst, New Jersey, an engineer trained at M.I.T., who has pretty much cornered the American market in high-precision pocket machines that disclose one’s altitude with respect to sea level. If Peet has a mission, manifestly it is not to replace the magnetic compass but to offer a supplement—an additional bit of gear with a utility of its own—for those who walk in wild terrain.
Fort Tryon Park essentially consists of two conical hills, which range in elevation from about thirty feet to two hundred and fifty. They are steep and, in places, sheer. On one summit is the Cloisters, medieval outpost of the Metropolitan Museum, surrounded by descending woods. Peet dropped from sight there, among the trees. When he came back half an hour later, he handed me a topographic map that he had marked with an X. He said he had hidden a miniature Statue of Liberty at the X, and challenged me to find it. I had a compass, and spurned, for the moment, supplemental instruments of any kind. With map in hand, I departed.
From the northeastern corner of the Cloisters, Peet’s X was on a bearing of 44 true. Nothing to it, I thought. Just follow that bearing and look for the statuette. I followed the bearing and looked over an abyss. Large outcrops of Manhattan schist buttress the hill. Forty-four true involved suicide, and I wasn’t prepared to make a commitment. Deciding instead to approach the incline from below, I went down a circuitous path to the bottom of the park, where I emerged from the natural woods and entered a grove of plane trees protruding from the asphalt of a playground, where children were sliding and swinging and climbing on jungle gyms under small steepled roofs. The playground was in the acute angle formed by Riverside Drive and Broadway over the Dyckman Street Station of the A train. This intersection serves the Thirty-fourth Precinct as Times Square serves the Fourteenth. Inwood Liquors. The Cloisters Café. A McDonald’s with a large American flag reefed a few turns around a horizontal pole.
McDonald’s proved to be the best base point for a shot through the playground and back into the woods. Peet’s X was now on a heading of 272—close to due west of the Chicken McNuggets. Compass in hand, I followed the bearing back across Broadway, back across the playground from tree to target tree, then into the rising forest. There was much understory—bushes, thick vines—to break through. I broke into leafy, cavern-like spaces full of Smirnoff bottles of pint size, beer cans in brown bags, some coconut husks, and condoms. There were enough foam cups to suggest a football crowd. There were a couple of pillows almost as large as mattresses and in remarkably good condition. I found a doorless fireproof safe, so heavy I could not budge it. I found the door, forty feet away, uniformly dimpled in shapes of crowbar. When I came to a twelve-foot stone retaining wall, I left a Tropicana carton at the foot of the wall, went around the obstacle, returned on the uphill side, and followed the bearing to a height that made no sense. I found no statuette. I returned to the streets to choose another vector.
I walked down Payson toward Dyckman and turned around. On the topographic map, Payson happened to be lined up like an arrow pointing at Bill Peet’s X. I took the bearing—222—and retraced my steps. I climbed a five-foot wall and kept going, rising through the trees until I reached the crosshairs of the X. I leaned down to pick up the treasure, but none was there.
I bushwhacked to the summit, where an infinite number of Japanese men came out of a stretch limo and filed into the Cloisters. Sagging to a bench, I admitted frustration. Peet looked patient and pleased. Peet is a tall, quiet man who wears studious glasses. He was also wearing a short-sleeved print shirt. The print was a large-scale map of a small part of Maine. Spreading before me an array of altimeters, he said, “Try these.”
I chose one for each hand. I chose a Model 88, good to eighteen thousand feet, temperature compensated, with a sixteen-jewel shock-resistant movement, its face scarcely two inches in diameter but designed and calibrated to present with clarity any of nine hundred twenty-foot increments, at each of which it is accurate. I also chose an electronic altimeter, known in steep places as the Ultimeter, whose digital display, in a case 2.7 inches square, presents its elevation in ten-foot jumps.
Peet told me to go down the path until I was between sixty and fifty feet above sea level, then leave the path and go off to the right on a contour through the woods. Before long, I would come to a fallen tree, and then …
“To the right?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Peet.
With respect to the path, I had just spent an hour looking to the left, where the legs of his X crossed.
As if they were votive offerings, I bore the altimeters in upturned palms while making the descent. Steadily, the 88’s needle moved. Nervously, the Ultimeter jumped back and forth from level to level but generally took the plunge. This was not an airplane descending through five thousand feet on its final approach to Newark. This was cutting it fine. These altimeters were positioning a human being in distances not much greater than from a ceiling to a floor. A hundred and forty. A hundred and twenty. A hundred feet. I almost stumbled, tumbled down the hill. My eyes wouldn’t leave the machines.
Just below sixty, where the needle of the Model 88 rested confidently while the numbers in the Ultimeter kept jumping from fifty to sixty to seventy and back, I made my move. I left the path and headed off to the right through the steep woods, keeping the numbers steady, hewing to the contour. I came upon the fallen tree. I stayed on the contour and found the statuette.
“With an altimeter, each contour line is a position line,” Peet remarked after I staggered up the hill for the last time. “It is an extra dimension in land navigation.”
A person could go around, say, a ravine and reach a destination while walking on a level. To walk on a level requires a tenth as much energy and time as descending or ascending steep grades, Peet said. When you’re on a mapped trail somewhere, an altimeter will tell you what contour you’re on, and therefore where you are and how far you have to go. In steep country, dense foliage, fog, darkness, blinding snow, you do not need to see landmarks—as you do with a compass—to find your way. Traversing a mountainside, you follow a contour and avoid lateral drift, which can throw you off-line as you sight with a compass from tree to tree to boulder. You can use an altimeter to retrieve game. If you shoot a leopard, you can note its elevation, and go back and seek it at that altitude. Birders in Hawaii have found elusive species by learning the altitudes where they nest. Geologists looking for gold in Idaho last summer acknowledged that their altimeters were the most precious instruments they carried, and were indispensable in heavy timber. The exploration companies insisted that every rock sample be marked with an elevation. If a rock tested positive, they would need to return to the source. For want of an altimeter, they might repeat the legend of Lost Dutchman’s Mine.
My mind developed lateral drift. I saw myself using altimeters for purposes of which Peet may not have dreamed. What is the altitude of John McGillicuddy, the C.E.O. of Manufacturers Hanover Trust, at his desk at Forty-eighth and Park? (One hundred and thirty-five feet.) What is the altitude of John Reed, the chairman of Citicorp, Fifty-fourth and Park? (Seventy-five feet.) Where is the highest lawyer in New York? (Arnold Schickler, World Trade Center, twelve hundred and seventy feet.) Where is the lowest lawyer in New York? (In every precinct.) What is the altitude of Kathleen Battle, Sixty-fourth and Broadway? (A hundred feet and rising.) What is the altitude of Leona Helmsley, Federal Courthouse, Foley Square? (Fifty feet and falling.) How many buildings rise above the two-hundred-and-fifty-foot line? Two hundred and fifty feet—a calculated, data-based guess—is where the ocean will top out when the ice of Antarctica and Greenland melts. In the history of the earth, only three times has ice appeared in great sheets over the land: in a relatively brief episode six hundred million years ago, in another brief episode three hundred million years ago, and in the ice of the Pleistocene now. These anomalies aside, through forty-six hundred million years nearly all the water on the earth, which is a fixed amount, has been liquid. With an altimeter, we could go around and see who’s going to make it when things return to normal. At two hundred and fifty feet above the present sea are the nineteenth floor of the Empire State Building, the twenty-first floor of the Chrysler Building (which stands in a hollow), the nineteenth floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza. The Metropolitan Museum will not make it, the Metropolitan Opera will not make it, the Cloisters will not make it. The south hill in Fort Tryon Park will rise above the water as a tiny island three feet high.
Fort Tryon Park. “You were saying?” I said to Peet.
Peet was apologizing about his misplaced X. He had been so confident of his map reading in that small area that he took no bearings when he made the X.
It was a benign mistake, for in so doing he was able not only to demonstrate the utility of his small machines but to make another point, too: Never go into the trackless woods unless you have a compass.
• • •
[A 2018 amplification: For field geologists recording the elevations of outcrops, altimeters are superior to GPS if they are calibrated and the barometric pressure is not changing.]
AN UNKNOWN MOVIE ACTOR checked into an English hospital and took a couple of dozen scripts to bed with him. He is unknown because he has so far appeared in only three minor pictures. He had the scripts with him because producers all over the world are nonetheless begging him to work for them. He needed hospitalization because he is physically shot. During the past twenty months, he has suffered sand burns on his feet, sprained both ankles, cracked an anklebone, torn ligaments in his thigh and hip, dislocated his spine, broken his thumb, partially lost the use of two fingers, sprained his neck, and suffered two concussions. The survivor’s name is Peter O’Toole, and he is Sam Spiegel’s Lawrence of Arabia.
TO BECOME INTERNATIONAL FILM STARS, Europeans once had to learn English, and all the Marlene Dietrichs, Paul Munis, Charles Boyers, Ingrid Bergmans, Peter Lorres, and Maurice Chevaliers did so. But now it is different. As ruins go, Hollywood is smoking more and enjoying it less, while the most renowned motion pictures of the present are being made by Europeans and Asians. Hence there is a new phenomenon—the movie idol who is adored throughout the United States in much the same way that Clark Gable was once admired from Saipan to Tangier. The greatest of these is Marcello Mastroianni.
His handsome face, young in its outlines but creased with premature wrinkles, has a frightened look, as of a mantis who has lost faith in the efficacy of prayer. He suggests the antithesis of Renaissance man—painfully aware of nearly everything, truly able at nothing. His spine seems to be a stack of plastic napkin rings. But he has no false bravado, and he is relentlessly attractive. In nearly every woman there stirs the same silent response: “Marcello obviously needs professional help, but first he needs me.”
Marcello has so often been cast as himself—he was actually called Marcello in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita—that he went eagerly for his role as a Sicilian nobleman in Divorce Italian Style, which gave him a chance to grease down his hair, grow a mustache, and decay even more.
THE PHONE RINGS. The man who answers is lower middle-aged with a lower middle paunch. He looks something like a nearsighted kipper.
“Ell-ow,” he says in pure cockney.
“Is Peter Sellers there?”
“’E aynt eer. Ooze callin?”
Peter Sellers is there, of course, at his flat in London, and he is on the line. Contentedly, he clicks down the phone. Shy men like Sellers hate to talk to friends, let alone strangers. Sellers is the world’s best mimic, equipped with an enormous range of accents, inflections, and dialects—including five kinds of cockney, Mayfair pukka, stiff-upper BBC, Oxford, Cambridge, Yorkshire, Lancashire, West Country, Highland Scots, Edinburgh Scots, Glaswegian Scots, Tyneside Geordie, Northern Ireland, Southern Ireland, French, Mitteleuropa, American twang, American drawl, American snob, Canadian, Australian, and three kinds of Indian. He fools everybody. Everybody but his friends. They are wise to him. When they call him up and a sweet old German nanny answers, they say, “Come off it, you old bastard.” The trouble is that there really is a sweet old German nanny at Sellers’s place, and she often gets an earful when she answers, “Voss diss?”
Sellers is the son of vaudeville troupers. He has been a performer since the age of two, and he spent his youth acquiring every sort of face but one of his own. He became a brilliant actor by painful necessity, since he is by nature diffident, introspective, and not particularly articulate unless he is pretending to be someone else. He once said, “I’ve got so many inhibitions that I sometimes wonder if I exist at all. I have no desire to play Peter Sellers. I don’t know who Peter Sellers is, except that he’s the one who gets paid. Cary Grant is Cary Grant—that’s his stock-in-trade. If I tried to sell myself as Peter Sellers, I’d be penniless. Write any character you have in mind and I’ll shape myself to what you have written. But don’t write a part for me.”
Sellers builds characters out of people he knows or seeks out, getting ready for new roles by fastening himself to the real article—union leaders, neurotic Americans, old generals—and absorbing their personalities down to the last tic. The result is always funny, sometimes merciless. But when he reads a new script, Sellers usually panics. “Better ring up and say I can’t do it,” he tells his wife. He paces frantically for hours. “Then,” she says, “Peter buys a new car and he’s all right.” In the past fourteen years, he has owned sixty-two automobiles. One was a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud, but it made him uncomfortable. He put a classified ad in The Sunday Times: “Titled motor car wishes to dispose of owner.”
JOSEPH MARTIN, computer methodologist at The New York Times, has been pursuing for some years what he describes as “the ideal philosophy of creating a newspaper.” According to the ideal philosophy, you start by “capturing the keystroke at the origin.” Keystroke? The reporter, at the typewriter, hits the original keystrokes of a story. Martin aims to absorb them electronically, retain them in a computer, and eliminate all the laborious and manifold retypings that now occur as a piece of writing makes its way, typically, from reporters through bureaus to the home office to the desks of editors and eventually to linotype machines. The ideal philosophy also calls for the elimination of the typing paper that writers write on, which is regarded as an unnecessary and archaic encumbrance. Following suggestions of reporters and editors, and with the help of an electronics firm in Westchester, Martin has coaxed into being a device that can actually do all this.
The Times is just up Forty-third Street from The New Yorker. When I arrived to have a look at Martin’s device, the third-floor newsroom was in a state of routine cacophony: a large open space as aswarm with bodies as the floor of a stock exchange, copy paper in motion everywhere, copy editors looking like physicists with crooked cigarettes and feral eyes, reporters hugging telephones or already down in the trenches—sporadic bursts of typing. The machine that was going to tranquillize this scene was locked away in a quiet cubicle. I was led to it by Joe Martin, a slim and somewhat solemn man with a graying crew cut, and by Socrates Butsikares, an editor with decades of experience on various news and feature desks, who now coordinates editorial-staff interests with those of the rest of the company and is thus deeply involved in the electronic innovation. A big man, Butsikares wore a bright yellow shirt, and there were lemons on his tie. We were joined as well by Israel Shenker, who is an old friend of mine and is one of the Times’s bright-star reporters and most skillful writers. Shenker had not previously seen the machine that was designed to change his world.
At thirty-two pounds, it rested heavily on a table. Resembling a small blue suitcase, it was eighteen inches by thirteen by seven. It would fit under an airline seat. Its name was Teleram P-1800 Portable Terminal. Butsikares unpacked it. Its principal components were a TV-like cathode-ray tube and a freestanding keyboard that had the conventional “qwertyuiop” arrangement of a typewriter keyboard plus flanking sets of keys that had designations such as SCRL, HOME, DEL WORD, DEL CHAR, CLOSE, OPEN, and INSRT.
Butsikares plugged the keyboard unit into the TV-screen unit, sat down, and began to write. As his fingers fluttered, words instantly surfaced on the screen, up to forty-four characters per line:
Washington, D.C.—President Ford said today
that he would no longer ask the Congress to
soak the poor while his fat-cat rich friends
take away the wealth of the Republic.
“Now, suppose you want to get a little color into this,” Butsikares said, and he began tapping keys—marked with arrows pointing up, pointing down, pointing sideways—around the HOME key. A tiny square of light, known as the “cursor,” began to move up the face of the tube. It was something like the bouncing ball that used to hop from word to word in song lyrics on movie screens. It climbed to the first line, then moved left until Butsikares stopped it in the space between “Ford” and “said.” He tapped the INSRT key. He then wrote:
who was wearing his faborite blue suit and his soup-stained blue tie,
The new words came into the space after “Ford,” and to accommodate them the cursor kept shoving to the right all the other words in the sentence. They went around corners and down the screen. Butsikares moved the cursor until it rested upon and illuminated the “b” in “faborite.” He pressed the DEL CHAR (delete character) button, and the “b” vanished. He replaced it with a “v.” “Now, suppose you want to take a word out,” he said, and moved the cursor to the word “away.” “All the cursor has to do is touch any part of the word,” he went on. “Then you hit the DEL WORD key, and it’s gone.” Away went “away,” and the words to either side moved to within a space of each other. Similarly, the cursor could—if directed to—eat whole lines, whole paragraphs. “What you have written is not set in cement,” Butsikares said. “You can change anything easily. If I had my druthers, I’d rather write on this thing than on any typewriter I’ve ever seen.”
When the screen fills (it holds about a hundred and twenty-five words), the writer just keeps going. For every new line that comes on at the bottom, a line disappears at the top. To go back and look things over, just hit the SCRL key. The whole composition will roll backward or forward like a scroll. In blocks of some three hundred and thirty words (a little less than half a Times column), the developing story is transmogrified into sound frequencies and drawn off into a cassette. If the writer needs to see what is in the cassette, that, too, can be brought back to the screen. At the end, after the cursor has made its final tour through the text to help polish up the prose, the reporter goes to the nearest telephone. The P-1800 contains couplings that will fit over the telephone’s earpiece and speaker, and the reporter straps these into place, then dials 212-556-1330, the computer’s number. At three hundred words per minute, the P-1800 sends words as bleeps to Forty-third Street. If the story is, say, seven hundred and fifty words long, the computer has it all in a little over two minutes. An editor, sitting at an “editing terminal,” can then call for the story and see it instantly. The editor’s machine is much like the reporter’s—a rolling scroll, a dancing cursor. The editor can perform extensive changes, condensations, paragraph-shufflings, and meddle muddles, but the editor can never destroy one word of the writer’s copy, because deep in its tissues—Butsikares is now assuring Shenker—the computer will preserve the original version “until Hell freezes over.” While the temperature is dropping, though, the editor’s version goes into the newspaper, because the computer stores both, and it is the editor, in the course of things, who ultimately presses the button that causes the computer to set the type that readers will read. The story—written by a reporter and then fed through wires, transistors, and brains—has been fussed with along the way but never recopied.
“Try it, Shenk,” Martin said.
“It’s a new world, Shenk,” Butsikares said.
Shenker, wearing a dark, neatly tailored pinstriped suit, looked less like a reporter than like a banker being approached for a loan. He sat down, shot his cuffs, and addressed his fingers to the P-1800. Butsikares and Martin watched expectantly. Shenker wrote smoothly, swiftly, and without hesitation, his words lighting up on the screen. He wrote:
Israel Shenker doesn’t think that this is
the answer to gunpowder.
“It is easier to work with than paper,” Butsikares said. Shenker kept going, words leaping to the screen:
It may replace the electric train as a gift
to youngsters at Christmas.
“The machine saves half an hour on deadline,” Butsikares told him. Reporters would no longer have to call in stories and dictate them to tape recorders, as many do now, trusting transcribers to retype them correctly on paper.
Shenker went on writing:
The machine could be useful if it allows one
to sleep later or get to the office late.
But my considered judgment is that if we got
up a half hour earlier or worked a little
harder we wouldn’t have to strain our
muscles carrying around a large machine and
searching for a harder way to do a story.
“This is only a test model. They cost five thousand dollars apiece, and we are not placing our full order until the weight is down to around twenty-three pounds.”
Then again, this is an ideal machine for
editors. It will prolong their joy at the
spectacle of reporters struggling with
something that they don’t understand.
Squat and bull-shouldered, Butsikares had the appearance of a lineman some years retired from a defensive platoon. “If you take a device like this out with you and you find you don’t like it, Shenk, don’t use it,” he said. “You have to ask yourself, ‘What am I trying to do? What am I covering? Is time of the essence? Will the machine help?’ It is perfect for wars, riots, golf matches, conventions. Gordon White has already used it to cover three football games, including the Cotton Bowl, and he would have missed deadlines if he hadn’t had it.”
Shenker went on typing:
I suppose the only thing this machine won’t
do is eliminate editors. Let us have a
machine that gives the reporter his due.
Shenker at last sat back. “Have you tested this for radiation?” he said.
“Yes,” said Butsikares. “You can be a father.”
“You can write on it, but you can’t think on it,” Shenker commented. “It would be great for Mozart, who used to compose in his head and then write what he saw there, but not for me.” Struck with an afterthought, he went back to the keyboard:
Do not wire until you see the flights of
their whys.
Do not sire until you flee the plights of
their lies.
“Shenk, if someone had come to you once saying, ‘Listen, kid, I’ve got a great machine—it will do away with the quill and the inkwell,’ you wouldn’t have liked it.” Shenker’s fingers were still in motion:
What hath overwrought God?
On the way back to The New Yorker, I stopped at a phone booth, coupled my ear to the earpiece, and dialed 556-1330. After a moment came a clear, piercing response in high C sharp—the sort of thing only German shepherds are supposed to be able to hear. Since I was not a cassette, there was nothing I could say. The phone, held close to the ear, caused pain.
EYES STARE OUT of the darkness, green and narrow. They move closer. A young black cat, just full grown, steps out of a bit of sewer pipe and starts to move through the city. Its gait is stealthy, preying. It walks across curbs and over the cracks in sidewalks. It hunts and bristles and pads along, looking. The eyes again. Another cat. Snarl. Fangs. Battle. A fierce toss of bodies, fearsome screeches, victory. The black cat moves on. All the while, words are appearing above, below, beside the animal. And people’s names. Directed by Edward Dmytryk. Titles designed by Saul Bass. Charles K. Feldman presents Walk on the Wild Side.
“Titles designed by Saul Bass” is the arresting line. Movie audiences used to resent, with the same resentment that is provoked by a television commercial, the long parade of credits at the beginning of a film. Saul Bass has single-handedly changed that. More than half of New York’s film critics actually cited Bass’s black stalking malkin as far and away the best thing in Walk on the Wild Side. It was. Suggesting the story’s themes, it set a mood that the ensuing picture tried but failed to match.
Bass is imitated by just about everybody now, but no one has come near him. Sometimes his effects are relatively simple. Looking up from the hub of a wagon wheel, he stared out across a tan Pacific of endless real estate and then placed three small words on the threshold of infinity: The Big Country. To credit the cast and crew of The Seven Year Itch, he used a set of pastel panels opening like tessellated greeting cards. That was all. But the colors and layout were as visually delightful as a Mondrian in motion. And the “t” in Itch scratched itself.
TOM EGLIN’S SENSE OF HUMOR, sharp enough in the first place, seemed to rise—to become increasingly rich in perception and range—in response to his besetting illness. Wry, funny, anecdotal, he was an easy patient to visit. He cheered you up. He told you stories. There was a basketball backboard in his bedroom with a berserk little ball. He counted up, with amusement, the shots you missed.
Mindful of our common Scottish backgrounds—his even closer in time than mine—he told me a story about taking his sons on a voyage among the isles of Scotland. An educational cruise it was, professors aboard, a ship called Argonaut, a captain who was not called Jason. As the boys sailed into the very waters of their heritage, they were seasick. This, as they had read, was
the land of the bens and the glens, where not even
Sir Walter Scott could exaggerate the romantic
beauty of that lake and mountain country penetrated
by fjords that came in from seas that were starred
with islands. The weather changes so abruptly
there—closing in, lifting, closing in again—that all in
an hour wind-driven rain may be followed by calm and
hazy sunshine, which may then be lost in heavy mists
that soon disappear into open skies over dark-blue seas.
When the ocean is blue, the air is as pure as a lens, and
the islands seem imminent and almost encroaching,
although they are ten or fifteen miles away—Mull, for
example, Scarba, Islay, Jura, the Isles of the Sea.
With all that off the starboard rail, the boys were seasick; and when they were finished being seasick, they came down with flu and went into steerage in the hold. Telling the story with a slight blush and smile, Tom confessed annoyance. He said that he had been, in fact, profoundly irritated by his sons’ becoming sick, “because the trip, as you can imagine, was not inexpensive.” This was one Scottish father speaking to another directly from the heart.
When Bill Bradley came to Princeton, Tom was his freshman adviser, Tom’s mission being to guide this aimless youth toward some sort of utilitarian destiny. Evidently, Tom succeeded. It was the beginning of an enduring friendship, and Tom’s encouragement and generosity of counsel were prized by Bill from then to now. From time to time, our three paths crossed. When Bill was in college, and practicing by himself one summer in the Lawrenceville field house, he missed six jump shots in a row. He said to us, “You want to know something? That basket is about an inch and a half low.” Some days later, Tom got a stepladder, and he and I measured the basket. It was one and three-eighths inches too low. Any basketball player would know that the hoop was low, but not—within an eighth of an inch—how low.
When Bill was an N.B.A. basketball player, in the early nineteen-seventies, he occasionally went to Lawrenceville to practice alone. One day, feeding the ball back to him, I developed a grandiose fantasy. “Suppose I were somehow to get into a game with you in Madison Square Garden,” I said. “Could you get me a shot in the N.B.A.?” “Of course,” he said, and he sketched out a certain baseline move by which a person two feet tall could score on Abdul-Jabbar. At that moment, out of nowhere, Tom appeared. Bradley told him to guard me, and the play worked. Tom and I reversed roles, and the play worked—the play being so ambiguous that I couldn’t stop it even though I knew what was going to happen. Now two people whose height added up to a single basketball player’s would forever be grateful to Bill for their one and only shot in the N.B.A.
Those are just a couple of reminiscences from one person who first knew Tom in college and later was his frequent tennis partner for ten or fifteen years, including a time when I most especially needed a friend, and in his quiet way, without a great deal actually said, he was right there. Comparable streams of remembrance surround each one of us at this time, all as different and particular as they would be analogous, all relating to this bright figure of quiet humor—this athlete, counselor, teacher—whose capacity for love and friendship were outsize.
ONE AFTERNOON IN 1961, a young actor named Louis Morelli walked into an office in Hollywood. When he walked out, his name was Trax Colton. No one had ever heard of him before, and no one has heard of him since. But he has at least taken his minor place in an ancient rite of Hollywood. Moreover, Morelli was restyled by one of the wizard name changers now practicing the craft—the agent Henry Willson, who turned Marilyn Louis into Rhonda Fleming, Francis McGowan into Rory Calhoun, Arthur Gelien into Tab Hunter, Robert Moseley into Guy Madison, and, his great mind wandering from the New Jersey Palisades to the Strait of Gibraltar, Roy Fitzgerald into Rock Hudson.
Since it is axiomatic in show business that the name is rewritten before the teeth are capped, hundreds of literary types like Willson have, over the years, flung into the air a confetti storm of phony names that have settled lightly but meaningfully on the American culture.
Greatest in number are the Readily Understandables. Issur Danielovitch lacks euphony, so the name was shortened to Kirk Douglas. It is also understandable why Tula Ellice Finklea would want to change her name to Cyd Charisse, Frances Gumm to Judy Garland, Bernie Schwartz to Tony Curtis, Sarah Jane Fulks to Jane Wyman, Emma Matzo to Lizabeth Scott, Judith Tuvim to Judy Holliday, Doris Kappelhoff to Doris Day, Aaron Chwatt to Red Buttons, Zelma Hedrick to Kathryn Grayson, Eunice Quedens to Eve Arden, Natasha Gurdin to Natalie Wood, Barney Zanville to Dane Clark, and William Beedle to William Holden. England’s James Stewart, eclipsed by Hollywood’s James Stewart, changed his name to Stewart Granger. Frederick Bickel—rhymes with pickle—changed his name to Fredric March. Frederick Austerlitz was just too hobnailed a surname to weight the light soles of Fred Astaire. Cary Grant, of course, would have been unstoppable with any name from Pinky Fauntleroy to Adolf Schicklgruber—even, for that matter, with his own name: Archie Leach.
But the whys start colliding with the wherefores. There is a group, for example, that could be called the Inexplicables. Why would someone with a graceful name like Harriette Lake want to change it to Ann Sothern? John F. Sullivan could have hardly been afraid of being mistaken for John L. when he changed his name to Fred Allen. The name Edythe Marrener is at least as interesting as Susan Hayward. Why change Thelma Ford to Shirley Booth, Jeanette Morrison to Janet Leigh, Edward Flanagan to Dennis O’Keefe, Patricia Beth Reid to Kim Stanley, Virginia McMath to Ginger Rogers, Julia Wells to Julie Andrews, Helen Beck to Sally Rand, Phylis Isley to Jennifer Jones?
Actors with plain, pronounceable, American Legion sort of names yearn for toning up. Ruby Stevens is Barbara Stanwyck; Margaret Middleton is Yvonne De Carlo; Norma Jeane Baker is Marilyn Monroe. Even Gladys Smith found a little more stature in the name Mary Pickford. On the other hand, embarrassed blue bloods shed their hyphens and thus declare their essential homogeneity with the masses. Reginald Truscott-Jones was too obviously soaked in tallyho. He became Ray Milland. Spangler Arlington Brugh denuded himself of all his nominal raiment and emerged as Robert Taylor.
Some real names are out of character. Roy Rogers was Leonard Slye. Boris Karloff could not have frightened a soul as William Henry Pratt. Gypsy Rose Lee has done things that Rose Louise Hovick would presumably never do. Other real names seem to be struggling to express themselves. Merry Mickey Rooney was once Joseph Yule Jr. Sam Goldwyn was Samuel Goldfish. Shelley Winters was Shirley Schrift; Lili St. Cyr was Willis Marie Van Schaack; Diana Dors was Diana Fluck.
Hollywood stars come from every sort of ethnic and national-origin minority group. Many of them are bitterly vocal about democracy’s failures. If enough of them had stuck by their original names, the resulting influence, through the vast popularity of the movies, would have done much to soften bias and reduce prejudice. No one would challenge their actions individually, but they could have served themselves better as a group.
Among actors of Italian and Spanish background, for example, Dino Crocetti opted to be Dean Martin, Margarita Cansino became Rita Hayworth, Anna Maria Louisa Italiano is now Anne Bancroft. Anglicizing their names, Anthony Benedetto became Tony Bennett and Giovanni de Simone became Johnny Desmond. Among Jews, Izzy Itzkowitz probably needed to sandpaper that a bit, yet he stayed with a Jewish name: Eddie Cantor. But most—from Jerry Levitch (Jerry Lewis) to Nathan Birnbaum (George Burns), Emanuel Goldenberg (Edward G. Robinson), Pauline Levy (Paulette Goddard), Rosetta Jacobs (Piper Laurie), and Melvyn Hesselberg (Melvyn Douglas)—have preferred the Anglo-Saxon angle.
Many actors sculpt their real names. Ethel Zimmerman clipped off the zim. Vivien Hartley lost her hart. James Baumgarner dropped the baum. Grace Stansfield is now Gracie Fields. Milton Berle was once Mendel Berlinger. One letter made the difference for Dorothy Lambour. First names have a habit of turning into surnames. Benny Kubelsky changed his name to Jack Benny, Muni Weisenfreund to Paul Muni.
Last names vanish: Arlene Francis Kazanjian, Eddie Albert Heimberger. Some stars can’t stand their first names—for example, Leslie Hope and Harry Crosby.
Lolita Dolores Martinez Asunsolo Lopez Negrette is now Dolores Del Rio. Marion Morrison probably thought his name sounded girlish so he changed it to John Wayne. Douglas Fairbanks was really Douglas Ulman. June Allyson was Ella Geisman. Estelle Merle O’Brien Thompson, of Tasmania, started her career as Queenie Thompson, outgrew that, and became Merle Oberon. Yul Brynner goes around saying that his original name was Taidje Khan Jr., and that it derives from northeast Asia, but he is probably Joseph Doaks or something close to that. No one has ever been able to pin him down about his background, not even his wives.
Meanwhile, Rip Torn, that bisyllabic symbol of absurdly phony Hollywood names, is really Rip Torn. His father was Rip Torn, too.
MANY OF THEM WERE KIDS, nineteen or twenty years old, often newly married, with a couple of yoke of oxen and no fear at all. On a good day, they could make fourteen miles, and after two months of walking or jolting along they still had fifteen hundred to go. When a baby was born, the wagon train would stop for a few hours. They were not the sort of people to die on the trail, and amazingly few did. In fact, the skeletons that are strewn all over the emigrants’ path in George R. Stewart’s The California Trail are almost entirely the remains of oxen, milch cows, and Hollywood scriptwriters. Indians, Stewart says, “were a minor nuisance, not a real hazard.” A wagon trail to California was first attempted in 1841, and new tries were made each year, but no white traveller was killed by an Indian until 1845.
Later, when the Indians did strike from time to time, there is no record anywhere that they galloped around in circles twanging arrows into the ring of wagons, an absolutely pointless maneuver since the Indians would have been exposing themselves to rifle fire from protected riflemen. Instead, they laid siege, taking command of any springs or streams, until the white men’s tongues turned black. But that was rare.
No one used Conestoga wagons: they were too ungainly. Smaller ones, with boxes about nine feet by four feet, were popular. They were not called prairie schooners. When deep rivers were encountered, the bottoms of the boxes could be covered with canvas or hides. Off came the wheels and the vehicle became a boat. On land, they were pulled by oxen or mules. An ox cost twenty-five dollars, a mule seventy-five. No horses. Too weak.
While they were still in the relative East, they ate three-star meals, with hot biscuits, fresh butter, honey, milk, cream, venison, wild peas, tea, and coffee all included in a single typical dinner. Toward the other end, they ate rancid bacon, mountain sheep, red fox, and sometimes boiled hides. When they were dying of thirst, they drank mule urine. While forty-seven of the eighty-seven members of the Donner Party were dying of hunger in 1846, there was some cannibalism. “What do you think I cooked this morning?” said Aunt Betsy Donner one day. “Shoemaker’s arm.”
SNOW. I WENT INTO THE CITY in the nineteen-forties to see Bud Palmer drop the long one-hander from the Ninth Avenue and Fiftieth corner of Madison Square Garden, and got up in the morning in a friend’s apartment to look down on white blisters of cars completely buried in snow. I remember snow in the city in the nineteen-fifties so deep that nothing but pedestrians moved. During another blizzard of the fifties—a storm so effective that it shut down every airport, railroad, and major highway in the Middle Atlantic and northeastern states—the sentinel blimps of the United States Navy were the only means of transportation able to move, and they were transporting nobody; they were out over the North Atlantic to alert us to surprise attacks.
At home in New Jersey, I have been snowed in for as much as three days, but that has less to do with record storms than it has to do with New Jersey’s record. In the eighties, my wife and I spent a night in New York and returned to find our car up to its headlights in snow in the Princeton Junction parking lot. Principal roads were plowed. We took a taxi to a sporting-goods store, where, as it happened, we had some days earlier put in an order for cross-country boots and skis. We picked them up while the taxi waited, and it took us to the head of our road, which, as we had imagined, was under three feet of snow, unplowed. Dressed for the theatre, we skied the mile home.
In the seventies, I spent a February and part of March near the Arctic Circle in Alaska, where winter lacks the savagery it can loose on New York. The dry cold of the Alaskan interior doesn’t bite as hard, even at low temperature, as a stiff bitter wind in Times Square. The air is so still for so long in Alaska that snow in light loaves on the spruce boughs can be destroyed completely with a smaller puff of breath than would blow out a candle.
Records are where you find them, and for me—now come up here by the stove, daughters, while I finish this story—my deepest snow was not in New York and not in Alaska but in Benson, Minnesota. In March, 1965, I was riding the Empire Builder, of the old Great Northern Railway, out of Chicago for Portland because in those days I was afraid to fly. Those days ended near Benson, where the train, which for a hundred miles had ground valiantly into deepening whiteness, was stopped—you guessed it—cold. The snow outside the windows was higher than the train. Eventually we would learn that this was one of the greatest snowstorms in the history of Minnesota. Some hours after the heating system failed, the train crew built fires on the steel plates between cars. It didn’t matter that the doors were open. The cold within had matched the cold without, and all along the train—like some sort of encampment—the fires burned above the couplings. We warmed ourselves there by turns, and went back to our frigid seats. We ate warm meals in the ice-cold dining car. Enough booze to build an empire was offered freely to all. Gradually, a snow remover worked its way south to rescue us, sucking up and blowing away its own small blizzard, its advance expressible in feet per hour. It reached us the next day, and at last we moved slowly forward, between high walls of snow that threatened to cave in on the train. The snow in Benson was deeper than roofs, and whole neighborhoods were all but hidden, the houses of Minnesota like the cars of New York—just rows of blisters under snow.
HE WAS A TALL MAN of swift humor whose generally instant responses reached far into memory and wide for analogy. Not much missed the attention of his remarkably luminous and steady eyes. He carried with him an education from the Boston Latin School, Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard College—and a full year under the sky with no shelter as an infantryman in France in the Second World War. Arriving there in a landing craft, he forgot his rifle and left it on the boat.
Gore Vidal, a friend of his since Exeter, once asked him why he had given up work as a reporter in order to become an editor.
Robert Bingham said, “I decided that I would rather be a first-rate editor than a second-rate writer.”
The novelist drew himself up indignantly, saying, “And what is the matter with a second-rate writer?”
Nothing, of course. But it is given to few people to be a Robert Bingham.
For nearly twenty years he was a part of The New Yorker, primarily as an editor of factual writing. In that time, he addressed millions of words with individual attention, giving each a whisk on the shoulders before sending it into print. He worked closely with many writers and, by their testimony, he may have been the most resonant sounding board any sounder ever had. Adroit as he was in reacting to sentences before him, most of his practice was a subtle form of catalysis done before he saw a manuscript.
Talking on the telephone with a writer in the slough of despond, he would say, “Come, now, it can’t be that bad. Nothing could be that bad. Why don’t you try it on me?”
“But you don’t have time to listen to it.”
“We’ll make time. I’ll call you back after I finish this proof.”
“Will you?”
“Certainly.”
In the winter and spring of 1970, I read sixty thousand words to him over the telephone.
If you were in his presence, he could edit with the corners of his mouth. Just by angling them down a bit, he could suggest deleting something. On and off, he had a mustache. When he had a mustache, he was a little less effective with that method of editing, but effective nonetheless.
As an editor, he wanted to keep his tabula rasa. He was mindful of his presence between writer and reader, and he wished to remain invisible while representing each. He deliberately made no move to join the journeys of research. His writers travelled to interesting places. He might have gone, too. But he never did, because he would not have been able to see the written story from a reader’s point of view.
Frequently, he wrote me the same note. The note said, “Mr. McPhee, my patience is not inexhaustible.” But his patience was inexhaustible. When a piece was going to press, he stayed long into the evening while I fumbled with prose under correction. He had pointed out some unarguable flaw. The fabric of the writing needed reweaving, and I was trying to do it in a way satisfactory to him and to the over-all story. He waited because he respected the fact that the writing had taken as much as five months, or even five years, and now he was giving this or that part of it just another five minutes.
Edmund Wilson once said that a writer can sometimes be made effective “only by the intervention of one who is guileless enough and human enough to treat him, not as a monster, nor yet as a mere magical property which is wanted for accomplishing some end, but simply as another man, whose sufferings elicit his sympathy and whose courage and pride he admires.” When writers are said to be gifted, possibly such intervention has been the foremost of the gifts.
I REMEMBER BEING SURPRISED by how green it was. When I first went up to Alaska in summer, I found T-shirt weather in the Brooks Range, beyond the Arctic Circle. If a cloud crossed the sun, of course, you reached for a sweater, but there was, with it all, an unexpected Alaska.
That fall, a bald young man with a handlebar mustache told me that when he had left Chicago to live in Alaska, someone had asked him why he was going. His response had been, “If you have to ask that question you wouldn’t understand the answer.” I was still near the beginnings of sensing what he meant. While going down a river in Arctic Alaska, I had come to feel what was for me the new perspective of being hundreds of miles from the nearest highway, and I was more than beginning to sense that this terrain could not even roughly be comprehended if it were looked upon as an extension of anything I had known before. Within the mind (as on the ground) I had a long way to go. The fifty-five-gallon steel drums, Blazo cans, old bedsprings, and assorted detritus lying around the cabins of bush villages were still as unappealing to me as they had been when I had first seen them. I was from the megalopolitan towns, where bulldozers bury that sort of thing. In some places in my part of the world, people are so numerous that if they were all to come out of the buildings at once they would not fit in the streets. As one result, and perhaps as a form of survival, they tend to close each other out. Conversation goes off at peculiar angles. Glances run perpendicular to the channel of the talk. No one is listening. In the small, high-latitude communities—towns of nineteen people, towns of nine, of ninety—a human being is an event. An individual is like a book arriving in the mail. Ask a hundred people why they came to Alaska. Aside from the general fact that for one reason or another they wanted to get away from what they call “the Lower Forty-eight,” a distillate answer is, “I wanted to be in a place where an individual counts.” After some more time there, the Blazo cans and the bunk springs begin to look positively attractive. With regard to the steel barrels, it is not just with irony that they are called the state flower. When you have been looking at them long enough, they bloom.
I once went down to Anchorage at the end of a long stay in various places in eastern interior Alaska, and almost immediately was drawn into a white-water canoe race on a creek that runs through the bowl of Anchorage after dropping from the Chugach Mountains. We raced six miles, dodging boulders and old earthmover tires, and came to the finish among a group of spectators who were drinking Coke and beer. By almost anyone’s standards, it was a small crowd—some dozens of people on a riverbank. What occurred to me, though, as we plowed into a gravel bar to end the race, was that there were more people by far in that small assemblage than the total number of people I had encountered—Indians, whites, itinerant miscellany—over the past several months in forty thousand square miles of the upper Yukon valley. A day or two later I was in New Jersey, walking around with such a sense of disorientation that I was bewildered and had an erratic impulse to cry out. Leaves on twigs looked like baseball gloves. The university, in the town where I live, made sense somehow, but almost nothing else made any sense at all here in the world’s premier corridor of transportation and commerce. I could feel myself turning from a three-dimensional picture back into the old two-dimensional negative. I got beyond it, of course, but not over it. A Brooks Range guide, who had come east to testify in Washington, stopped at my house one time and I told him I was not sure of what I was trying to express but I felt guilty, somehow, that I was not in Alaska. He said he knew just what I meant, because he felt guilty, too; and in the morning he went back to Alaska. I followed, and followed again. You go out to Chicago and get off the feeder line and start walking for Northwest 3. That is the airplane that lugs all the people from eastern America who want to go to Alaska. You walk a long way to get to it—up to half a mile and more, past every airline known to the mid-continent and on through long empty corridors; and after tens of hundreds of yards you notice that the people around you are thinning out. You press on, and eventually come into an oval bay of ticket counters below a frieze of the names of airlines—Lufthansa, Air France, Swiss Air, SAS, Aer Lingus—and you keep on going. You enter more corridors, void now of people, and you hike on to the remotest working face of O’Hare. There, at last, you find a small cluster of people in wool shirts and down vests. You have hiked your way out of the United States and into the nut of Alaska.
Alaska seems to twang some atavistic American chord, offering remembrance of the earlier frontiers and, heaven knows, engendering in people of the Lower Forty-eight some admiring envy of the people up there. To become absorbed in an almost total way with a people and a place and then suddenly to be cut off from those people, except through the mail, is something that could be listed among the liabilities of the writing life. One February evening, I took a long walk on the frozen Yukon, knowing it was the last night that I would be there. The sun was disappearing, and there were pink bolts across a blue sky above the white river. The big stars came out quickly. And I said to myself, “So long. This is it. The mail plane comes tomorrow and you’ve had it now.”