The heart of Joseph Nye Welch, a man born in the nineteenth century, will pump for sixteen days short of seventy years before it stops its incessant beating on October 6, 1960. Joseph Nye Welch became a dead man in Hyannis, Massachusetts, inside a house that stood a mile from the Kennedy compound.
On that same day, October 6, Clark Gable sent a telegram to Huston saying he would come to the studio in Hollywood to shoot several necessary scenes, but would agree to no more changes to the script.
* * *
Washington, D.C. Back in February, the Italian company Società Generale Immobiliare had purchased ten acres on the old Chesapeake and Ohio Canal after ferreting out that the U.S. federal government planned to lay a major highway through the neighborhood known as Foggy Bottom. The land cost $10 million ($114 million in modern funds). When the highway plan went public that summer, it tripled the land’s value. Now on October 21, Società Generale Immobiliare makes a public announcement of their intentions to build a city within a city in Foggy Bottom, a massive complex that will combine office and residential space with shopping and entertainment facilities. More important, the structure is to be designed curvilinearly, that is, with rounded corners.
Pause from the twenty-first century for a moment. Architectural computers are so advanced that an architect can crumple a piece of paper and create the blueprints for a one-hundred-story building built in that exact chaotic shape. In 1960, buildings with curved corners are as wild as architecture can get. Still, Società Generale Immobiliare fully intends to construct one of the foremost modern buildings of the twentieth century in stodgy Washington, D.C.
Much of the funding for the project comes from the Vatican. Privately, Pope John XXIII referred to the project as Vatican West.
The Roman architect is fifty-three-year-old Luigi Moretti.
Società Generale Immobiliare is selling Moretti to the Americans as the ‘Frank Lloyd Wright of Italy.’ A more accurate description would be that Luigi Moretti was a cheap Italian knockoff of Albert Speer.1
Moretti was never Mussolini’s favorite architect, but Moretti had been declared the Fascist era’s most Roman architect. Moretti would brag, ‘I’m obstinately Roman, well beyond that of the registry office.’
So was Mussolini, aka Il Duce.
Around the cusp of 1940, Moretti designed Fascist government buildings as well as gymnasiums for Fascists in the City of Muscle (as Rome was called). Following the complete liberation of Italy in April ’45, Moretti was arrested by the Americans and charged with ‘trying to found a new fascist political party.’ Yet, Italian Fascist blood was thicker than olive oil. After the war, Moretti’s associates saw to it that he was freed.
Now steer back to Rome, 1959. See Willem de Kooning wearing what he believed to be a Leaning Tower of Pisa costume made of lightweight papier-mâché. The drunken Italian couple had insisted that de Kooning and Ruth take the ‘tower’ and attend an architectural costume party at the Casanova. When the American couple reached the party, they saw dozens wearing costumes of sleek-looking piazzas and towers. The pair of Americans also saw the partygoers in their costumes raise their right arms out of the armholes of their buildings to give and return the Roman Fascist salute. It turned out this was a party celebrating long-dead Mussolini and his still-living favorite architects. De Kooning was not wearing the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but rather the Cella (Chapel) Foro Mussolini. Luigi Moretti was also in attendance, wearing a scaled-down replica of a twirling staircase around the perimeter of his body, representing the scalinata that Moretti had designed for Mussolini to use to reach his private theater box at the Casa del Balilla. Somehow, it seems fitting that Moretti has designed an American project that after it is constructed will be given the simple name of:
Watergate.
* * *
Reno, Nevada. John Huston’s last trip to the casino. The gangster in the hat followed Huston’s every move. Huston himself was deep in thought considering the Gambler’s Fallacy—that one’s first roll of the dice can somehow influence the second roll of the dice. And so on.
In mathematics, there is no such thing as luck.
Huston would not partake of the Gambler’s Fallacy tonight. Huston would not look for signs. He would look for what we moderns would call anti-signs. Huston surveyed the players at the table. He saw three women with the same number of large baubles on their necklaces, five. Huston saw three separate men each wearing horn-rims. He saw a man with an eye patch smoking two cigarettes at once. Huston calculated the different numbers between 1 and 12 one could come up with by attaching a mystical value to baubles or eye patches.
There was a single figure that had nothing going for it: 5. Huston bet that numeral on the Hop.2 He won. He doubled his Hop. He knew what he was doing. He was not following a pattern. He had just put the Gambler’s Fallacy on its head.
We have all heard time and time again that a gambler has an equal chance of rolling seven sixes as of rolling six sixes and one five. Thus if it doesn’t matter what number one bets, why not bet the same number over and over? According to the mathematics of logic, if a pattern appears it is not actually a pattern.
It is not luck, as luck does not exist.
Huston gambled like a statistician. The moment he felt superstitious, he stepped away from the craps table for a few minutes. Then he went to the table and bet on 5 again. He played this way all night. He finished at six a.m. John Huston had made his money back, plus nearly a thousand in pocket cash. Before he left the Mapes, Huston walked up to the gangster in the hat and slipped a ten-dollar tip in the man’s pocket.
* * *
Montana. Leslie Fiedler and a buddy decided to drive to Ketchum, Idaho, to meet Ernest Hemingway. Fiedler knew Hemingway’s hunting partner Dr. Saviers. Fiedler figured that would be enough of an introduction. The two Montanans drove all night and reached Ketchum before nine o’clock in the morning. It was a small town surrounded by mountains. They drove out to Hemingway’s cabin and parked. They knocked on a door at the back porch. A voice called out, ‘Come on in.’ They walked into a kitchen. The first thing Fiedler saw was bags of leftover Halloween candy. The TV Guide was open on the kitchen table. And there was the old man, Hemingway. He was sixty-one. Back in 1960, you were old if you were sixty-one. It was like being seventy-five today. Fiedler prepared for a bone-crunching handshake with Papa, but the man’s grip was timid. He found Hemingway in shaky shape, but at one point Hemingway managed to smile at Fiedler, who would one day write: ‘[I saw] suddenly, beautifully, [Hemingway was] twelve years old. A tough, cocky, gentle boy still…’
* * *
The Misfits still did not have an ending. A month ago, Marilyn had told her husband, ‘Ros and Gay should just break up.’ Then Marilyn poked her husband in the chest and said, ‘When the Chinese commit suicide, they always hang themselves in the doorway of their offenders.’
The night she told her husband that, Arthur Miller hunched in his dingy little room in the Mapes Hotel and typed this letter to Saul Bellow:
The trope of the script is that Roslyn is such a life force that she can’t bear to see anything killed, not even a rabbit eating from Gay’s garden, a garden she civilized him into growing and nurturing. She loses it when she discovers the mustangs will be killed for dog food.
With sudden despair, I realize this trope doesn’t hold water.
Roslyn is no vegetarian. Where does Roslyn think meat comes from? She adores Gay’s dog [Peaches]. She never connects [Peaches] to horsemeat dog food.
The better masculine attribute expressing my theme would be a plot concerning Roslyn’s association with aristocratic Hemingway big game hunter types—pseudo he-men who fly to Africa to shoot beautiful elephants and tigers. These men kill not for financial need or some gourmet greed. They kill merely for the sport of the bloodshed.
Miller heard an abrupt thump at his door and jumped up. He opened it a crack and peeked out.
Marilyn was not hanging there Chinese style.
Miller had been told that the tongues of suicides turn bright blue. He had also been told that in Africa there was a poisonous snake whose inner mouth was colored bright blue. Miller’s typewriter was blue. Miller shut the door. He walked to his typewriter and whipped out the letter to Bellow and crumpled it up. Then he sat down and typed the new end to The Misfits.
* * *
Idaho.
‘Fiedler?’ Hemingway said, repeating Leslie Fiedler’s name. ‘Do you believe that sh-sh-sh-shit you wrote about Huck Finn?’
‘Yes.’
He glanced around the room. ‘I don’t believe what you say but I will defen-dish…’
He could not complete the sentence—but I will defend your right to say it.
Fiedler was grateful that Hemingway knew something of his work. To Fiedler, Hemingway seemed like a fictional character. It was as if Fiedler’s book of literary criticism, Love and Death in the American Novel, had been a novel itself.
He and Hemingway sat for long periods in silence. The conversation took place in dribs and drabs. ‘Tell Norman Mailer I never got his book,’ Hemingway said. ‘He complained about that in Advertisements for Myself. He’s like one of those students who telephone me in the middle of the night to get something they can hang me with and get their precious PhDs.’
Fiedler was uncomfortable. He was too proud to see Hemingway as the last living greatest writer of the twentieth century. He was too petty in an American highbrow way to forgive Hemingway for his crummy books while exalting him for The Sun Also Rises.
A Frenchman could do this.
And we all, even you who are female, must acknowledge Hemingway’s mastery of the clipped sentence. As mentioned previously, Joan Didion learned how to write by retyping The Sun Also Rises. And of course, Hemingway’s use of repetition and compression was what he sucked from Gertrude Stein after she befriended him in Paris. As for Hemingway’s macho posturing—the hunting and shooting of magnificent mammals—Fidel Castro could forgive him that. ‘It is true that Hemingway liked big game hunting,’ Castro would say in a speech. ‘His grandson presented me with a book about his grandfather and big game hunting in Africa. I asked him, How do the environmentalists feel about this? His grandson said to me, Well, these are new times, we cannot redesign Hemingway to fit into these times because in his day he criticized the hunting of men in the massacres of war. At that time there was no awareness about the need to protect nature, so many men were killing animals; there were no environmentalists.’
* * *
Idaho. It was nine thirty in the morning in Idaho when Hemingway broke out a bottle of wine imported from the Pyrenees. Hemingway said that he did not want to talk about literature or politics, but that was all he ended up talking about. ‘Norman Mailer is so articulate,’ Hemingway said. Hemingway also mentioned Vance Bourjaily, a writer like a young colt or a young middleweight whom everyone was talking about in 1960. Yet, by next year, there would be nothing more said about the man.
Then Fiedler squinted at the open TV Guide. It was turned to Saturday Night Fights. They talked boxing. Fiedler noted Hemingway’s teeth—yellow. Widely spaced. He smiled like a little boy. That was when Fiedler had his vision of Ernest Hemingway as a beautiful twelve-year-old boy. Fiedler had heard Gertrude Stein on the radio telling that when Hemingway was twenty-three he cried out, ‘I’m too young to be a father!’ Fiedler heard Hemingway now mentally crying out, ‘I’m too young to be an Old Man!’
* * *
John Huston sent Clark Gable the new end to the script. Gable changed his mind about acting in another change to the script. This end, this last scene of the movie, was number 269, and it was filmed inside a Hollywood studio.
* * *
Miller knew that he could not renounce the script of The Misfits.
The movie will end with Ros and Gay driving away from Reno.
Ros and Gay will not drive into any sunset. That would be corny. They drive off into the black desert night. The last lines in The Misfits are spoken by Gay:
How do you find your way back in the dark?
Just head for that big star straight on. The highway is under it. It will take us back home.
* * *
That scene was a wrap.
The Misfits was forty days over schedule, and cost $4 million, half a million over budget. The Misfits was the most expensive black-and-white picture ever made between The Great Train Robbery in 1903 and 1960.
* * *
Los Angeles. Clark saw a rough cut of The Misfits and thought it was the best work he had done in his life. The next day, Clark Gable was stricken by a heart attack. It did not immediately kill him like the heart attack that got Joseph Nye Welch. Gable did end up in critical condition, but he was awake. President Eisenhower even phoned the actor in the hospital to tell him, ‘Listen, I just had one. You’ll get through it. Just have a positive attitude.’
* * *
Election Day—November 8, 1960.
After Richard Nixon and Pat voted, Pat took the girls to Beverly Hills to have their hair done. A separate car—a black Cadillac—sped Nixon and his military attaché Major Don Hughes and his Secret Service agent back toward the Ambassador Hotel. Abruptly Nixon commanded, ‘Pull over.’ The driver was confused. ‘Pull over. Pull over.’ The driver pulled to the curb. A horn honked two cars up. A guy in an idling white convertible (the top down) had his arm raised. ‘Come on, boys,’ Nixon reportedly said, or something similar in faux masculine fashion, and the three men scrambled out, leaving their driver behind, the two men following Nixon to the convertible with the engine running. Nixon directed Hughes and the Secret Service agent into the back seat. He walked to the driver’s door. ‘Scoot over, John,’ Nixon said.
The Vice President of the United States of America got behind the wheel. The rest of the vice president’s motorcade entourage now sped down the street. Nixon whipped a U-turn with savoir faire and headed back the way they had come. The passengers asked where they were going. Nixon laughed and said, ‘For a drive.’
Nixon gripped the wheel with both hands at ten-past-ten position (or ten-to-two as a Communist would see it). His right fist was much larger than his left as he had slugged someone the day before. Nixon had a temper. Word was he beat Pat. Yet, he had not hit her the day before. Instead, Nixon had slugged a campaign worker. A man.
Nixon stopped the car in La Habra, at a little white house with an orange grove as its front yard. It was Nixon’s mother’s house. Hannah Nixon. ‘Just a minute, boys,’ Nixon said and jumped out of the car. The boys waited.
Ten minutes later, Nixon came back smiling at the remains of a joke. Don and the Secret Service agent assumed Nixon would now drive them back to the Ambassador. Instead, Nixon continued south. He introduced them to the fourth passenger. He was a Los Angeles cop named DiBetta. He worked the bunco squad. The two passengers in the back seat discussed the origin of bunco, which is a fake card game. ‘It’s probably a derivative of banca, the Tijuana term for three-card monte.’
‘I’ve never been to Tijuana,’ Hughes remarked.
‘That’s it, boys,’ Nixon declared. ‘We’re driving to Tee-wana.’
‘What?’
‘Boss, you serious?’
‘Tee-wana, Tee-wana, Tee-wana. Hey senior, you wanna buy my seester?’
It’s hard for us moderns to see Richard Nixon as anything other than a cartoon face. However, he looked handsome with intensity at eight thirty in the morning on November 8, 1960, after he made the decision to drive 141 miles south to the Mexican border town of Tijuana. Among the other passengers, Donald Hughes looked like an extra in a movie set in Washington, D.C. The Secret Service agent had a hatchet face. His name was Sherwood.
It was a long, often desolate, roll south.
In Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, Philip Marlowe’s drinking buddy Terry Lennox shows up at Marlowe’s pad in Los Angeles and asks the ‘shamus’ to drive him down to Tijuana where he can catch a plane. Marlowe says, ‘Sure.’ He also says that he cannot be privy to any information that Lennox has committed a crime or has ‘essential knowledge that such a crime has been committed.’
Marlowe drives Lennox down to Tijuana in five sentences.
I drove fast but not fast enough to get ragged. We hardly spoke on the way down. We didn’t stop to eat either. There wasn’t that much time.
The border people had nothing to say to us.
Nixon’s drive is just killing time, not melodrama. As in The Long Goodbye, there is nothing to describe about the drive from Los Angeles to Tijuana. The closer to the border one got, the more the landscape became nothing but Paleozoic boredom and arid nothingness.
‘How do you think we’ll do, Don?’ Nixon asked, the wind in the convertible blowing his hair like a movie star.
‘The Anderson story hurt,’ Don said—a reference to columnist Jack Anderson breaking a story about Howard Hughes’s loan to Donald Nixon.
‘I’d like to cut out Anderson’s heart and take a hammer and beat it into mush,’ Nixon said, yelling to be heard. ‘At least I didn’t make the campaign a battle against Catholics.’ He said that and bit his lip. ‘Being a Quaker,’ Nixon said, ‘I understand belonging to a minority religion.’
‘Are Quakers Protestants, Mr. Vice President?’ Sherwood hollered.
‘No, they’re Jews,’ Hughes yelled even louder.
Nixon whipped his head around and Hughes burst out laughing. Then Jack Sherwood started laughing. Sherwood identified himself as a papist. Hughes was Catholic too. Nixon yelled a monologue about how a priest had first alerted him to Alger Hiss. ‘His name was Father John Cronin. He did work with the unions, which were all run by Communists in the forties.’
‘So what faith do you follow, DiBetta?’ Nixon asked.
DiBetta identified himself as a Scientologist.
‘What’s that?’
DiBetta tried to explain. No one understood.
‘Give us an example of this El Ron Hubbard’s philosophy,’ Nixon commanded.
‘Well, okay. He has this to say about failure. He uses the example of driving an Edsel into a wall. He says, One does not intend to run his Edsel into the wall and yet runs it into the wall. That is a failure. Then he says, One intends to run his Edsel into the wall and does run the Edsel into the wall. That was a win. Then one intends not to run his Edsel into the wall and does not run it into the wall.’
‘That is a win,’ Nixon shouted.
DiBetta seemed very happy. ‘Yeah, yeah, right, Mr. Vice President. I mean, Mr. President.’
‘So what happens if you intend to run the Edsel into the wall but do not run your Edsel into the wall?’ Nixon asked.
‘Well, that is a failure.’
‘If it’s an Edsel, it certainly is.’ Nixon laughed.
Nixon stopped for gas in Oceanside. Hughes took this moment to walk beside Nixon as he headed toward the restroom. Hughes said, ‘We have to at least tell Cabot Lodge where we are.’
Nixon said, ‘Just a minute.’ He went into the one-room can and shut the door. It is very likely that he locked the door. He stayed in a while. The faucet was running. Nixon came out of the bathroom gingerly wiping his right hand with a towel. ‘It still hurts like the dickens,’ Nixon said.
‘I tell you we should have someone take a look at it.’
Nixon said no. ‘Then news vultures will find out that I slugged a cripple.’
Nixon put on a smile and asked his entourage if anyone wanted a Coca-Cola. Sherwood said, ‘No thank you, Mr. Vice President.’
Nixon then asked everyone to call him ‘Mr. President.’ He wanted to get familiar with the sound of it. Sherwood will remember that Nixon asked them, ‘Calling me Mr. President won’t give me bad luck?’ Hughes will remember Nixon saying the same thing, but as a statement, not a question. DiBetta then started a conversation about the Catholicism of Joe McCarthy and Joe Kennedy. Nixon confirmed that McCarthy got wheelbarrows full of support from JFK’s father. ‘McCarthy even dated two of Kennedy’s sisters.’
Everyone got into the convertible—Nixon behind the wheel—and continued south. The weather was fine. Hughes subsequently said that at that moment he understood Nixon’s motive for this drive. The campaign was finally over. He needed to clear his head to be ready to accept the result of the election.
This man could be the next president of the United States.
Hughes could not tell whether Nixon wanted to embrace the thrill of that as a possibility or just forget about the government of the United States of America for a while.
They yelled at each other about what they wanted to do down in Tijuana. A bullfight was on the agenda. DiBetta joked about girls. He knew a place where a girl picked up the spare change thrown to the stage with the lips of her vagina. Nixon did not believe that was anatomically possible. DiBetta turned and squinted at the two passengers in the back seat. Their eyes told him to let it go.
He turned. He saw the highway sign for La Jolla.
* * *
Dr. Seuss lived in La Jolla.
The writer Raymond Chandler had lived in La Jolla and had died the year before in 1959. Chandler’s first six Philip Marlowe novels were all set in Los Angeles. His last Philip Marlowe novel, Playback (1958), took place in a city a short drive north of San Diego named Esmeralda—La Jolla fictionalized. Howard Hunt had once sent Raymond Chandler a snide letter complaining that the writer had ‘cannibalized’ his Philip Marlowe short stories to write his Philip Marlowe novels. Chandler wrote Hunt back:
Dear Mr. Hunt… I am the copyright owner of my short stories and I can use my material in any way I see fit… There is no moral or ethical issue involved… You must pardon me if I find it a little ludicrous that you should object.
* * *
Inside Richard Nixon’s convertible heading for Mexico. Nixon raised his head at the highway signs and sang out, ‘Sandy egg oh!’
Nixon told his companions that at the border they would have to stop to get car insurance for Mexico, a scam against gringos that had been going on since the days of Pancho Villa. ‘Let me take care of it,’ DiBetta said. He walked to a guard booth. DiBetta was thirty-four years old. On the short side. But barrel-chested. He was Leslie Fiedler without Fiedler’s biblical whiskers. The Mexican knew DiBetta. The two talked. Then DiBetta walked back to the convertible. ‘Let’s go.’ Nixon drove them across the border, passing under a sign that said, TIJUANA—THE MOST VISITED CITY IN THE WORLD. They drove for about fifteen seconds and DiBetta said, ‘Stop for this man, Mr. President.’
A Mexican policeman was waving his arms. The car stopped and he climbed into the back seat.
‘This is Lieutenant Clamesto,’ DiBetta said. ‘He’s all the insurance we need.’
Clamesto was wearing a fat .45-caliber automatic pistol. He told them there were no bullfights today. He asked them if they wanted to meet the greatest bullfighter in Tijuana. The gringoniks said ‘Sure!’ with enthusiasm. They drove down the main street of Tijuana.
Tijuana was as far from the original Aztec gods Huitzilopochtli and Quetzalcoatl as it was from Minnesota or Sheboygan. It had the ambience of a small town. The architecture was more Grand Rapids than red tiles à la Under the Volcano. A writer would say, ‘The streets were filled with black blooded volcanic uncertain people.’ The streets were also filled with taxicabs. A sweet acrid dust layered everything. In the center of Tijuana was a Woolworth’s. Nixon was instructed to double-park in front of the Woolworth’s. In the crowd was another cop. He was not wearing a holster, but he gripped a long billy club ringed with the bent tops of carpenter’s nails.
‘I will watch your car,’ he said.
The four gringoniks followed Clamesto down a snaking alley. They came to a stucco wall with an iron door. Clamesto banged on it. Nothing happened. Then the door rattled and squeaked open. A woman with a scarf over her head like a gypsy stuck her head out. Clamesto spoke to her. They walked in.
They were inside a patio where every surface was piled with bougainvilleas. Bumblebees the size of gumballs buzzed everywhere. The woman led the men to a small man who sat in a wheelchair. Clamesto talked to him in Spanish. The crippled man listened and then wheeled himself into an archway of his hacienda. The gringos followed and saw a magnificent stucco room the size of a ballroom. The light was dim, but not too dim to eclipse the dozens of bullfight posters on the walls. The man in the wheelchair was Silverio Eloy Zotlouco, aka Amillita Soldado, the best bullfighter in Mexico thirty years ago. On the wall was a particular photograph of Silverio Eloy Zotlouco with Ernest Hemingway. The old bullfighter told the gringos in Spanish that Hemingway came all the way from Cuba to Tijuana to see him. Hemingway had proclaimed Silverio Eloy Zotlouco the only bullfighter of consequence outside of Spain. Silverio Eloy Zotlouco’s quaint stature had added to his appeal—that such a small man could master a bull!
Hughes excused himself and asked if there was a phone he could use. Hughes then told Nixon that he was going to call the FBI and tell them where they were.
‘Do you have to?’ Nixon asked.
‘For the good of the country—yes.’
Hughes was gone for ten minutes. When he returned, Silverio Eloy Zotlouco was still telling stories. After fifteen minutes more of this, the only one who wasn’t overcome by sleepy boredom was Nixon himself. The vice president patiently examined the dried ears of bulls Silverio Eloy Zotlouco had been given after each fight. Although thirty years had passed, Silverio Eloy Zotlouco remembered each bull he danced with. The sound of its snorting. How it smelled.
A woman came out with mescal and shot glasses. Hughes said, ‘Now boys. Let’s not get too carried away. Just a little medicine and we’ll be traveling.’
The gringos walked back to Main Street. Suddenly it seemed as if there were dozens of kids and adults trying to sell them things. Gum. Trinkets. Sherwood bought a small Tijuana Bible as a souvenir. They passed by the Woolworth’s. The windows were exactly like all the Woolworth’s with the exception of the torso mannequins, which were dressed in Spanish-cut blouses. The white convertible was still present. The cop with the billy club leaned against the passenger side. At that moment, there was confusion at the Tijuana Woolworth’s, a commotion. Police cars squealed up. The gringos were all confused.
A Mexican in a suit runs up to Nixon and begins jabbering in Spanish. This is Tijuana’s mayor, Xicoténcatl Leyva Alemán. It seems that J. Edgar Hoover called Tijuana and it is Mayor Xicoténcatl’s intention to take Nixon out to lunch. Then the cops all talk together. Nixon and the other gringos except Hughes are shooed into Nixon’s white convertible. Nixon wants to drive, but a Mexican cop already sits behind the wheel. He zips the car away. No one knows what is going on.
The Mexican drives them to a restaurant called Old Heidelberg. None of the gringos notices the incredulousness of supping in a German restaurant in Tijuana instead of a Mexican restaurant.
Everyone walks into Old Heidelberg and is seated at an elaborate table. The place is very fancy in a Germanic style, yet it is empty save for a few European-looking barflies. The gringos sit at the table for fifteen minutes. Then a Mexican in a suit runs in and ushers everyone up. Nixon’s crew all follows the Mexican to their convertible outside. Hughes tells DiBetta to drive. They have a police escort. Nixon asks Mayor Xicoténcatl, ‘What’s going on, senior?’ The mayor tells Nixon that his police have just stopped a del lejano oriente (an ‘Oriental’) with a gun. But it was all a big mistake. ‘He was waiting in an alley to shoot you because he thought you were someone else.’
‘Who else could I possibly be other than the vice president of the United States?’
‘The gunman is Cuban-Chinese,’ DiBetta says as if that answers everything. DiBetta must now talk with Nixon for fifteen goddamn minutes assuring him that there is no Cold War intrigue among Tijuana’s Cuban-Chinese. Finally Nixon gives up. ‘Let me tell a joke,’ Nixon says and then asks, ‘What’s the word for Chinese food in China?’
No one knows.
Nixon gives the answer, ‘Food.’
* * *
The American border guard was surprised to see Richard Nixon on the Tijuana side of the border, but he still Acted by the Book.
‘Are you all citizens of the United States?’
‘I am,’ Nixon said, ‘but I don’t know about the other sons-of-a-bitches.’
Hughes said, ‘We’re all Americans here.’
They headed north up the Pacific Coast Highway.
In The Long Goodbye, Chandler described Marlowe’s drive north out of Tijuana on the Pacific Coast Highway in greater detail than the gumshoe’s drive south. ‘It’s one of the dullest drives in [California].… The road north is as monotonous as a sailor’s chantey. You go through a town, down a hill, along a stretch of beach, through a town, down a hill, along a stretch of beach.’
For Nixon and the boys it was already three o’clock when they left Tijuana. When they reached the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, they stopped. Hughes rushed Nixon out of the car. A bunch of Marines who had been waiting were ushered over to pose with the possible next president. Nixon was handed a football to hold. Nixon expressed confusion.
‘We stopped to play touch football,’ Hughes said.
‘But we didn’t stop to play touch football,’ Nixon said.
‘We stopped to play touch football,’ Hughes repeated.
Nixon and his crew returned to the Pacific Coast Highway. Twenty minutes later, Nixon made the driver stop at the mission in San Juan Capistrano. Nixon told everyone to wait in the car a minute. No one waited. They all followed Nixon, keeping a discreet distance. They saw Nixon walk to the front of the church and suddenly disappear in front of the first pew. Everyone ran to the spot. They found Nixon on his knees praying. Everyone quickly hurried away. Nixon got up. They returned to the car. Before they entered the highway, Nixon commanded the car to stop. ‘Soon I’ll be the president of the United States.’ He left the car and walked to a roadside stand and bought a pineapple milk shake.
They drove all the way back to Los Angeles in silence. Nixon paged through the Tijuana Bible that Sherwood had bought. It was a pornographic comic book. There were pretty good drawings of Blondie and Dagwood. That is, drawings of Blondie and Dagwood humping like barnyard animals. There was something so sexy about Blondie that peering at her tits and bush was almost as exciting as seeing Ava Gardner’s tits and bush in a stag photograph.
As for Dagwood, think submarine sandwich.
The car reached the Ambassador Hotel at six o’clock. It was already nine o’clock on the East Coast. The polls were closed. There was a mob of reporters outside the Ambassador. They wanted to know where Nixon had been. Nixon has some ’splaining to do. Nixon told the party that the trip to Mexico was spontaneous. ‘We just started driving and Tijuana is where we wound up.’
* * *
After Clark Gable’s heart attack, the actor held on for ten more days. On Wednesday, November 16, the actor died.
How do you find your way back in the dark? Just head for that big star straight on. The highway is under it. It will take us back home.
* * *
Richard Pavlick was now seventy-three years old. Richard Pavlick was as enraged at American politics as a man can be. The election! Kennedy won!
Joe Kennedy, now seventy-two, bought the election for his son-of-a-bitch son Jack.
That is what Pavlick believed and history confirms Pavlick’s take. Jack would be reported bragging to Ben Bradlee that the election cost his father $13 million. In modern terms that means that the presidency can be bought for $500 million—small change in our modern billionaire’s world.
Pavlick began giving all his possessions away. He owned only crap utensils, threadbare linen, stuff that not even Goodwill would want, but the citizens of New Hampshire were like hillbillies and the townsfolk picked Pavlick’s shack clean.
‘Go on, Frankie Lee,’ Pavlick said. ‘Take that candelabra.’
‘What about your 1946 Woody station wagon?’
‘You keep the goddamn away from my Woody. I’m keeping that station wagon. I’m driving the hell out of here.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘I’m not going to tell you, Frankie Lee. But when I get there you’ll know.’