Once upon a time—in the much-abused ’70s—giants walked the earth, however unsteadily, and stayed out late, and for some reason they suffered certain intrepid reporters to do it with them and take notes. Robert Ward was very good at this. I did some of it myself, with some of the same giants…
Well, it wasn’t so much that they were giants. Tom Cruise is a giant, but he’s not a character. You don’t want to hang out with him and find out what he is like. The people Ward was so good at profiling were characters. And characters cry out, by nature, for writers. Capturing characters, back then, took not only an ability to hang, but also an ear for dialogue, a knack for words, and an ability to come off, honestly, as more than just a curiosity-seeker.
Ward’s standard statement, to the character in question, of what he was up to—“I want to set the record straight”—was inspired, since characters tend to feel that they have never met the right appreciator. Frequently the character was outraged by the writer’s version of him, in print, but I doubt that Reggie Jackson still wants to kill Robert Ward. Ward was too attentive an appreciator, and Jackson too receptive to appreciation. They were a good match, working together. Ward’s piece on Reggie didn’t just clear up some Jacksonian history, it made it. And not only did Ward get it right, so did Reggie: he was the straw that stirred the drink. He stirred it by saying he was, to Ward.
Sometimes, though, Ward was honorably at cross purposes with his subject. “I don’t think we’re getting at the real core of me,” Leroy Nieman tells him. Maybe not, but they got at his shuck, which was the pertinent layer. Larry Flynt, on the other hand, comes across as an integrated personality, sleazy through and through and no bones about it. Ward got “good stuff”—frequently great stuff—from characters, and he didn’t have to rip it off. They wanted him to know their stuff.
If there were an equivalent to Lee Marvin today, a magazine writer would be lucky to mine him for grooming tips, relayed by a press agent who had exacted a guarantee that his client would be on the cover. Ward got drunk with the actual Lee Marvin, and talked with him heart-to-heart. Ward also received from Pete Maravich a length-of-the-court behind-the-back pass. If that’s not enough to convince you that those were good days to be out and about, how about the fact that the “outlaw country” singer Jerry Jeff Walker lived, as Ward reports, “in a beautiful sixty-five thousand dollar… home outside of Austin, complete with modern kitchen, fireplace, sliding paneled doors, swimming pool, and basketball court”?
Granted, we had no Internet back then. So? Do you think you learn anything worthwhile from today’s celebrity-hating gotcha-
gossip websites? And do you think Robert Mitchum would tweet? With Ward’s accompaniment, Mitchum blew his own deep, distinctive horn.
~Roy Blount Jr.