IF I’D HAD to entertain another “celebrity author” at the Masters like the one last year, I might have given up golf and reading altogether. In the first place, I wasn’t impressed that Barrett Saunders had won the National Book Award for his novel Gavin Seems Bored. And I wasn’t overwhelmed that his work was said to break new literary ground when he proved that an entire novel could be written in one paragraph.
I would never know.
But I do know that the struggle to educate Barrett Saunders about the game of golf, the Augusta National Golf Club, and the Masters tournament itself was beyond tiresome.
Yes, those flowers are real. Yes, those trees are very old. Yes, “a good many women” have always attended. No, the men in green jackets are not part of an orchestra. Who is that man carrying the other man’s “luggage”? He’s called a caddie.
I should explain that I’ve been doing this since Ben Hogan’s day. The magazine I work for invites a well-known person from the literary world to attend the Masters every year. The person stays with us, we writers and editors, in the well-appointed private home we rent during Masters Week every spring. What we ask of our special guest is that he or she cast a “fresh eye” on the Masters scene and write an article for next year’s preview issue.
I knew there’d be trouble with Barrett Saunders when I took him to the course for his first look around on Wednesday. As he stood on the clubhouse veranda and gazed about, he said, “Well, I can tell you this much. Your rather baroque sport seems to require an inordinate amount of space.”
The magazine never ran the story that Barrett Saunders submitted. I heard from the editors that it was excruciatingly long, experimented with punctuation, and “challenged” their sanity.
Over the years we’ve had various experiences at the tournament with high-profile authors. These stand out in my memory:
Marlowe Investigates
In 1953 we made the mistake of inviting Raymond Chandler, having been unaware that he hated golf and rich people. This was the year Ben Hogan set the Masters record and went on to capture the Triple Crown. Chandler ignored Ben Hogan’s performance and sent us a one-graf piece, which read:
Marlowe knew he was calling on five million dollars, but money never impressed him. Money couldn’t dodge a bullet or play the ukulele. He drove through the row of magnolias and parked at the entrance to the white mansion. He marched through the clubhouse and out onto the veranda and found the cabin where the man lived and conducted his business. Marlowe barged through the cabin door, pulled up a chair, torched a Chesterfield, propped his feet up on the dictator’s gilt-edged desk, and told Chairman Clifford Roberts exactly what he thought of his Banana Republic.
A Farewell to Hemingway
We were ecstatic in 1961 when Ernest Hemingway accepted our invitation. Just in time, I might add. He was only three months away from going to Idaho and scoring a hole in one on his head with a shotgun.
This was the April when everyone got so mad that Arnold Palmer double-bogeyed the last hole to give Gary Player the Masters. Hemingway had studied the 18th hole from a distance and said it reminded him of Kilimanjaro, except there were golfers on it instead of a leopard.
Hemingway said, “Palmer was good and true and strong. He did not win, but isn’t it pretty to think so?”
He grew angrier the more he thought about the result.
“I want to blow a bridge,” he said.
“Which one?” I said. “The Sarazen, the Hogan, or the Nelson?”
“I will let Anselmo choose. It will be good and true and strong. We will blow the bridge and I will come back to Maria.”
“What if you don’t come back?” I said.
He said, “A man can be destroyed but he can’t be defeated. If I don’t come back, Maria and I will always have what we had. Mostly short sentences.”
The Jolter and Marilyn
A year later, in 1962, we managed to lure Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe to the Masters. They had remained close friends after their famous nine-month marriage in 1954 had crumbled in divorce.
Joe, we were told, took up golf after he retired from the Yankees.
Two of our staff writers questioned how Joe and Marilyn qualified as “literary figures.” No problem, our editors said. Surely over the past eight years they had read three or four books between them.
Joe never went to the golf course. He stayed in our rental house and remained silent and sullen the entire week. When he wasn’t chipping in the yard he sat alone at the dining room table telling the housekeepers that when baseball stopped being fun, it was no longer a game. Marilyn went to the course every day but learned to dress differently after Friday. The breeze across the veranda kept blowing her white skirt up to her waist. Caused a bit of a commotion.
This was the year Arnold Palmer defeated Gary Player and Dow Finsterwald in an 18-hole playoff. Marilyn followed the drama.
When she came home that evening she found us lounging in the living room.
She rushed up to DiMaggio and said, “Joe, you’ve never heard such cheering!”
DiMaggio quietly said, “Yes, I have.”
Gay Talese, a young writer for the New York Times, had been invited to our house that night. He overheard the exchange. Said he could use it someday in a magazine piece.
Dottie’s Poem
Dorothy Parker was my favorite guest. The year was 1966. She was in her early seventies, but there was still a hint of the beauty she once was, and her mind was as sharp as if she were still sitting around the Algonquin Round Table with Woollcott, Kaufman, and the gang.
I sat with her at a table on the veranda the one day she spent with us in Augusta. What a quick learner she was about golf. She caught on right away that Arnold Palmer, Gary Player, and Jack Nicklaus were the giants of the era.
In an admiring moment, I said to her, “Why do I think you were the wittiest person at the Algonquin Round Table?”
“Because I was, darling,” she said.
She wrote a takeoff for us on her famous Byron, Shelley, and Keats poem.
Palmer and Player and Nicklaus
Were a Big Three that never tricked us.
Arnie’s Army continually roared,
Gary had moments adored,
And Jack’s victories, oh how they soared!
How wonderfully often they’d lift us,
This Palmer and Player,
This Palmer and Player and Nicklaus.
The timing couldn’t have been worse for John Steinbeck and his Dust Bowl friend, Tom Joad. They joined us in 1968, and that was the year Roberto De Vicenzo signed an incorrect scorecard and lost the Masters. Or at least a chance to win it in a playoff with Bob Goalby.
For those who may have forgotten the details of the incident, Roberto shot a brilliant 65 in the final round to tie Goalby at 277. But his playing companion, Tommy Aaron, who was keeping his card, somehow wrote down a par 4 instead of a birdie 3 on the 17th hole, and Roberto witlessly approved it. The error in arithmetic gave him a 66 and 278 for second place.
The Masters committeemen were sick about it, but they saw no way around the rules of golf. The rules of golf are sacred.
The likable Argentinean accepted the disappointment as best he could, saying to the press, “What a stupid I am.”
The unfortunate incident didn’t sit well with John Steinbeck, always a champion of the downtrodden.
“It’s tragic,” he said. “A man fights his way out of the tortilla flats and cannery rows to get here, and this happens to him.”
“I think he grew up caddying,” I said. “Anyhow, he’s played here four or five times. In fact, he finished tenth last year.”
Ignoring that, Steinbeck said, “It’s proof again of something I’ve observed in life. If you’re in trouble, or hurt, or in need, go to the poor people. They’re the ones that’ll help you.”
Then Steinbeck asked if there were any poor people nearby.
I said, “We might find one or two at a public course.”
When we returned to the house, having not come across any poor people, we found Tom Joad in his dirty shirt and ragged Grapes of Wrath cap on a rant about the injustice that had befallen Roberto De Vicenzo. He was saying he was going to fight it the rest of his life.
“I’ll be aroun’ in the dark,” Tom Joad said. “I’ll be everywhere—everywhere you look. Wherever there’s a golfer gettin’ beat up by a PGA rules official, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a golfer bein’ told he’s out of bounds when he ain’t, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a golfer bein’ told by a USGA guy he don’t deserve a free drop, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s …”
Tom Joad kept righting the wrongs of the world as Steinbeck nodded and listened intently. Soon enough, however, the rest of us retreated to the kitchen and dipped into the fried chicken and baked ham.