PART V TALENT IN THE ROO
The fulfillment of talent is one of the enduring human mysteries. Nobody can truly explain why a mediocre baseball player can become a brilliant baseball manager. Nobody absolutely knows why a singer of enormous technique can’t move an audience or why so many gifted actors don’t become stars. At six, some children play the piano with the confidence of Mozart, and at twenty they are working as record store clerks. There were some splendid young painters in my art school classes; almost all have vanished. I’ve seen young writers arrive in New York, bursting with talent, full of swagger and hubris, and then witnessed their descent after a few seasons into permanent silence. In political clubs, I’ve met men and women with great political intelligence, wonderful gifts for oratory, and unusual clarity about issues; they didn’t make it out of the assembly district. For thousands of talented writers, painters, dancers, athletes, politicians, and actors, talent simply wasn’t enough.
Most of these pieces are about gifted people who lasted long enough to allow their talents to fully mature. They started with what Webster’s Third New International Dictionary describes among its definitions of talent as “the abilities, powers, and gifts” bestowed on certain human beings. At first, those abilities, powers, and gifts were crude and raw. But these people combined them with a vision of the future and then had time to refine them, strengthen them, push against their limitations. Such sustained growth is never easy, particularly in the arts. In my youth, self-destruction was a fashion. Whiskey and drugs carried too many girted people to early graves — Charlie Parker, Jackson Pollock, Fats Navarro, Montgomery Clift, and Billie Holiday to name only a few. Their aborted lives did not serve as useful guides to conduct for the generations that followed. Rock ’n’ roll heaven is jammed with everyone from Elvis Presley (we think) to Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Lowell George, and Jim Morrison, among hundreds of others; the latest young recruit is Kurt Cobain. The music didn’t kill them. The life did.
Now the plague of AIDS is slaughtering the talented young with the remorseless efficiency of the guns and drugs that destroy so many impoverished kids on the other side of town. On some mornings, the obituary page of the New York Times has a peculiar consistency; the dead are either eighty-five or thirty-five. The old have had their shot at life; we can only mourn the young dead. Those young people simply never had the time to go all the way down the road with their talents. We’ll never know what they might have added to our shaky civilization.
The talented human beings who do last are very rare. Each is an individual, but they share common characteristics. Most of them are very intelligent, including those without much formal education. Intelligence doesn’t guarantee a smooth ride; it certainly didn’t help Mike Tyson to sidestep trouble. But without intelligence, most raw talent has no chance at all to develop. The most intelligent people are never content to repeat what came before them; they constantly push against personal boundaries; they make their own discoveries, and are pleased to pass on the results to others.
To be sure, they are often self-absorbed, particularly when young, focusing their intelligence on the study of themselves. This is not empty, self-caressing narcissism; they often don’t like what they see in the mirror and struggle to change it, a process common to actors, novelists, and politicians. Most of them also grapple with personal emotions, particularly doubt, fear, and humiliation; that battle doesn’t always end with maturity. Most develop a mental toughness; instead of retreating from personal turbulence, they learn to control their emotions with their minds. The best of them obviously channel their emotions into the work. That’s why they can touch so many complicated emotions in strangers, emotions that range from hope to pity to absurd laughter.
In most of them, intelligence is annealed to will. Cus D’Amato would have called the latter quality “heart.” The word itself has an odor of the sentimental but when prizefighters use it they mean a peculiar kind of courage that accepts pain in order to reach a goal. That’s not always a simple victory over another human being; Floyd Patterson called his autobiography Victory Over Myself.
They also have a complex sense of time. They can surrender to the moment, forcing everything they know into one painting, one song, one dance. The moment is always charged by the lessons of the past. But they also seem capable of imagining a limitless future, full of things not tried, not even dreamed. The actor longs to play Lear, the politician wants to be president. They don’t talk about retiring. Not even the athletes. They have the World Series ring or the championship belt. They want more. To go on and on. To be remembered.
I’m aware that all but one of the subjects in this section are men. I wish that were not so. I wish I’d gone to see Rebecca West while she was alive, and had talked with Martina Navratilova while she was one of the greatest of all champions. I wish I’d somehow found my way to the doors of Katherine Anne Porter, Martha Gellhorn, Flannery O’Connor, or Dorothy Parker. In the early 1960s, before she became a star, I did a piece on Barbra Streisand for the Saturday Evening Post; we’ve remained friends and she, of all people, should be in this company. Over the years, I’ve written profiles of Jeanne Moreau, Sophia Loren, Brigitte Bardot, Linda Ronstadt, among other accomplished women; that they aren’t here is because of me, not them; my work just wasn’t worth preserving.
The pieces here are not briefs for the prosecution. In each case, I admired the subjects of my attention. In general, I wasn’t interested in showing that they also had feet of clay; every human being does. Besides, there is now an abundance of literary prosecutors abroad in the land to do that work. I’m glad I was around to see these gifted human beings exercise their talents. In the case of Bob Fosse, I was blessed by his friendship and will miss him all my days.
JFK
I.
That day I was in Ireland, in the dark, hard northern city of Belfast. I was there with my father, who had been away from the city where he was born for more than 30 years. He was an American now — survivor of the Depression and poverty, father of seven children, fanatic of baseball — but he was greeted as a returning Irishman by his brother Frank and his surviving Irish friends, and there were many Irish tears and much Irish laughter, waterfalls of beer, and all the old Irish songs of defiance and loss. Billy Hamill was home. And on the evening of November 22, I was in my cousin Frankie’s house in a section called Andersonstown, dressing to go down to see the old man in a place called the Rock Bar. The television was on in the parlor. Frankie’s youngest kids were playing on the floor. A frail rain was falling outside.
And then the program was interrupted and a BBC announcer came on, his face grave, to say that the president of the United States had been shot in Dallas. Everything in the room stopped. In his clipped, abrupt voice, the announcer said that the details were sketchy. Everyone turned to me, the visiting American, as if I would know if this were true. I mumbled, talked nonsense — maybe it was a mistake; sometimes these things are moved on the wires too fast — but my stomach was churning. The regular program resumed; the kids went back to playing. A few minutes later, the announcer returned, and this time his voice was unsteady. It was true. John F. Kennedy, the president of the United States, was dead.
I remember whirling in pain and fury, slamming the wall with my hand, and reeling out into the night. All over the city, thousands of human beings were doing the same thing. Doors slammed and sudden wails went up. Oh, sweet Jesus, they shot Jack! And They killed President Kennedy! And He’s been shot dead! At the foot of the Falls Road, I saw an enraged man punching a tree. Another man sat on the curb, sobbing into his hands. Trying to be a reporter, I wandered over to the Shankill Road, the main Protestant avenue in that city so long divided by religion. It was the same there. Holy God, they’ve killed President Kennedy: with men weeping and children running with the news and bawling women everywhere. It was a scale of grief Pd never seen before or since in any place on earth. John Fitzgerald Kennedy wasn’t “the Catholic president” to the people of the Shankill or the Falls; he was the young and shining prince of the Irish diaspora.
I ended up at the Rock Bar, climbing to the long, smoky upstairs room. The place was packed. At a corner table, my father was sitting with two old IRA men. They were trying to console him when he was beyond consolation. For the immigrants of his generation, Jack Kennedy was always special. After i960, they knew that their children truly could be anything in their new country, including president.
“They got him, they got him,” he said, embracing me and sobbing into my shoulder. “The dirty sons of bitches, they got him.”
And then “The Star-Spangled Banner” was playing on the television set, and everyone in the place, 100 of them at least, rose and saluted. They weren’t saluting the American flag, which was superimposed over Kennedy’s face. They were saluting the fallen president who in some special way was their president too. The anthem ended. We drank a lot of whiskey together. We watched bulletins from Dallas. We cursed the darkness. And then there was a film of Kennedy in life. Visiting Ireland for three days the previous June.
There he was, smiling in that curious way, at once genuine and detached, capable of fondness and irony. The wind was tossing his hair. He was playing with the top button of his jacket. He was standing next to Eamon De Valera, the president of Ireland. He was laughing with the mayor of New Ross in County Wexford. He was being engulfed by vast crowds in Dublin. He seemed to be having a very good time. And then he was at the airport to say his farewell, and in the Rock Bar, we heard him speak:
“Last night, somebody sang a song, the words of which I’m sure you know, of ‘Come back to Erin, mavourneen, mavourneen, come back aroun’ to the land of thy birth. Come with the shamrock in the springtime, mavourneen.…’ This is not the land of my birth, but it is the land for which I hold the greatest affection.” A pause and a smile. “And I certainly will come back in the springtime.”
II.
Twenty-five springtimes have come and gone, and for those of us who were young then, those days live on in vivid detail. We remember where we were and how we lived and who we were in love with. We remember the images on television screens, black-and-white and grainy: Lee Harvey Oswald dying over and over again as Jack Ruby steps out to blow him into eternity; Jacqueline Kennedy’s extraordinary wounded grace; Caroline’s baffled eyes and John-John saluting. We remember the drumrolls and the riderless horse.
But across the years, there have been alterations made in the reputation of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Those who hated him on November 21, 1963, continue to hate him now. Some who were once his partisans have turned upon him with the icy retrospective contempt that is the specialty of the neoconservative faith. And time itself has altered his once-glittering presence in the national consciousness. An entire generation has come to maturity with no memory at all of the Kennedy years; for them, Kennedy is the name of an airport or a boulevard or a high school.
Certainly, the psychic wound of his sudden death appears to have healed. The revisionists have come forward; Kennedy’s life and his presidency have been examined in detail, and for some, both have been found wanting. The presidency, we have been told, was incomplete, a sad perhaps; the man himself was deeply flawed. Some of this thinking was a reaction to the overwrought mythologizing of the first few years after Dallas. The selling of “Camelot” was too insistent, too fevered, accompanied by too much sentimentality and too little rigorous thought. The Camelot metaphor was never used during Kennedy’s 1,000 days (Jack himself might have dismissed the notion with a wry or obscene remark); it first appeared in an interview Theodore H. White did with Jacqueline after the assassination. But it pervaded many of the first memoirs about the man and his time.
Some of the altered vision of Kennedy comes from the coarsening of the collective memory by the endless stream of books about the assassination itself. We’ve had the 26 volumes of the Warren Commission report and dozens of analyses detailing its sloppiness and inadequacy. We’ve gone back again and again to Dealey Plaza and the Texas School Book Depository and the grassy knoll. In thousands of talk shows, magazine articles, newspaper columns, and books, we’ve heard the Cuban-exile theory, the Mafia theory, the Castro theory, the J. Edgar Hoover theory, the Jim Garrison theory, the CIA theory, the Texas-oil theory, the KGB theory, the E. Howard Hunt theory, the two-Oswalds theory.
We’ve seen documentaries and docudramas. We’ve watched the Zapruder film over and over again. We’ve heard sound experts tell us that the evidence proves that there was a fourth shot and therefore two gunmen. We’ve read cheap fiction about the assassination and superb fiction like Don DeLillo’s Libra. In the end, nothing has been resolved. If there was a conspiracy, the plotters got away with it. Twenty-five years have passed. Kennedy is still dead. And so is Oswald. And Ruby. And so many of the others. And in a peculiar way, the details of Kennedy’s death have obliterated both the accomplishments and failures of his life.
At the same time, other tales have helped to debase the metal of the man: the smarmy memoirs of women who certainly slept with him and others who certainly didn’t; the endless retailing of the gossip about his alleged affair with Marilyn Monroe, that other pole of American literary necrophilia; the detailed histories of the family and its sometimes arrogant ways. These days, with a renewed public hypocrisy in sexual matters, Kennedy has acquired the dreaded “womanizer” label, complete with half-baked theories about the origins of his supposed Don Juan complex. He was afraid of dying, say the theorizers. He was selfish and spoiled. He was revolting against his mother’s rigid Catholicism or imitating his father’s own philandering.
He was described in some gossip as a mere “wham, bam, thank you ma’am” character; other talk had him a hopeless romantic. By all accounts, he was attracted to beautiful and intelligent women, and many of them were attracted to him. And during the time he journeyed among us, this was hardly a secret. When I was a young reporter for the Post in late i960,1 was once assigned to cover Jack Kennedy during one of his stays at the Carlyle hotel. He had been elected but had not yet taken office. “We hear he brings the broads in two at a time,” the editor said. “See what you can see.”
There was nothing to see that night, perhaps because of my own naïve incompetence as a reporter, or because I was joined in my vigil by another dozen reporters and about 100 fans who wanted a glimpse of John F. Kennedy. Most likely, Kennedy was asleep in his suite while we camped outside the hotel’s doors. But I remember thinking this was the best news I’d ever heard about a president of the United States. A man who loved women would not blow up the world. Ah, youth.
Two other events helped eclipse the memory of Jack Kennedy. One was the rise of Robert Kennedy. In his own brief time on the public stage, Robert understood that Jack’s caution had prevented him from fully using the enormous powers of the presidency. If Jack was a man of the fifties, the later Robert Kennedy was a man of the sixties, that vehement and disturbed era that started with the assassination in Dallas and did not truly end until Richard Nixon’s departure from the White House in disgrace in 1974. The differences were often a matter of style: Jack was cool, detached, rational; Robert was passionate, wounded (by his brother’s death, among other things), emotional. Jack was an Anglophile, a product of Harvard and the London School of Economics; Robert came from some deeper Celtic root.
The murder of Robert Kennedy in 1968 played a part in the revision of the Kennedy legend. In a quite different way, the process was completed by Chappaquiddick. Some who had been drawn to politics by Jack Kennedy at last began to retreat from the glamour of the myth. A few turned away in revulsion, seeing after Chappaquiddick only the selfish arrogance of privilege. Others faded into indifference or exhaustion. At some undefined point about a decade ago, the country decided it wanted to be free of the endless tragedy of the Kennedys. Even the most fervent Kennedy partisans wanted release from doom and death. They left politics, worked in the media or the stock market or the academy. A few politicians continued to chase the surface of the myth, copping Jack Kennedy’s mannerisms, his haircut, the “Let us go forth” rhythms of his speeches. Gary Hart, who even played with his jacket buttons the way Jack did, was the most embarrassing specimen of the type; others were in the Bob Forehead mold. They helped cheapen Jack Kennedy’s image the way imitators often undercut the work of an original artist.
Out in the country, beyond the narrow parish of professional politics, the people began to look for other myths and settled for a counterfeit. It was no accident that if once they had been entranced by a president who looked like a movie star, then the next step would be to find a movie star who looked like a president.
III.
The mistakes and flaws of the Kennedy presidency are now obvious. Domestically, he often moved too slowly, afraid of challenging Congress, somewhat late to recognize the urgency of the civil-rights movement, which had matured on his watch. He understood the fragility of the New Deal coalition of northern liberals and southern conservatives; he had been schooled in the ways of compromise in the House and Senate and was always uneasy with the moral certainties of “professional liberals.” When faced with escalating hatred and violence in the South, Kennedy did respond; he showed a moral toughness that surprised his detractors and helped change the region. But he was often bored with life at home.
Foreign policy more easily captured his passions. He was one of the few American presidents to have traveled widely, to have experienced other cultures. His style was urban and cosmopolitan, and he understood that developments in technology were swiftly creating what Marshall McLuhan was to call the “global village.” But since Kennedy had come to political maturity in the fifties, he at first accepted the premises of the Cold War and the system of alliances and priorities that had been shaped by John Foster Dulles.
Even today, revisionists of the left seem unable to forgive the role that Kennedy the Cold Warrior played in setting the stage for the catastrophe of Vietnam. He had inherited from Eisenhower a commitment to the Diem regime, and as he honored that commitment, the number of U.S. “advisers” grew from 200 to 16,000. Kennedy encouraged the growth of the Special Forces, to fight “brushfire” wars. He instructed the Pentagon to study and prepare for counterin-surgency operations. In Vietnam, U.S. casualties slowly began to increase; the Vietcong grew in power and boldness; Diem concentrated his energies on squelching his political opposition in Saigon, and soon we were seeing those photographs of Buddhist monks incinerating themselves, while Madame Nhu and her husband (Diem’s brother) became lurid figures in the public imagination.
By most accounts, Kennedy intended to end the American commitment to Vietnam after the 1964 election. But since he’d won in i960 by only 118,000 votes, he didn’t feel he could risk charges by the American right that he had “lost” Vietnam. So the guerrilla war slowly escalated, and such writers as David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan reported from the field the truth that the official communiqués too often obscured: The war was being lost. Kennedy sent his old Massachusetts adversary Henry Cabot Lodge to Saigon as the new ambassador. But events were moving out of control. Diem was assassinated in November 1963 (not, as legend has it, on Kennedy’s orders). The quagmire beckoned, and at his death, Kennedy still hadn’t moved to prevent the United States from trudging onward into the disaster.
But for most of Kennedy’s two years and ten months as president, Vietnam was a distant problem, simmering away at the back of the stove. Kennedy’s obsession was Cuba. It remains unclear how much he knew about the various CIA plots to assassinate Fidel Castro. But the two major foreign-policy events of his presidency were the Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961, and the missile crisis of October 1962. One was a dreadful defeat, the other a triumph.
According to Richard Goodwin and others (I remember discussing this with Robert Kennedy), Jack Kennedy had begun the quiet process of normalizing relations with Castro before his death. Although this, too, was to be postponed until after the 1964 elections, Kennedy had come to believe that Cuba was not worth the destruction of the planet.
Today, Castro is the last player of the Kennedy era to remain on the stage, his regime hardened into Stalinist orthodoxy. In Miami, the exiles have become citizens; young Cuban-Americans think of the old anti-Castro fanatics as vaguely comic figures. If Castro died tomorrow and the regime collapsed a week later, an overwhelming majority of the Miami Cubans would stay in Florida. But there is still a hard belief among the old exiles (and some factions of the American right) that Kennedy was responsible for the defeat at the Bay of Pigs because he refused to supply air cover. But detailed studies of the operation (most notably by Peter Wyden) make clear that even with air cover, the force of 1,400 white middle-class Cubans could never have prevailed against Castro’s almost 200,000 militia and regular-army troops. Success had to depend upon a general uprising against Fidel and massive defections among his troops. Neither happened.
Today, it’s hard to recall the intensity of the Cuban fever that so often rose in those years. I remember being in Union Square when the Brigade was going ashore. A week earlier, I’d actually applied for press credentials for the invasion from some anti-Castro agent in midtown; with great silken confidence, he told me I could go into Cuba after the provisional government was set up, a matter of a few days after the invasion. But from the moment it landed, the quixotic Brigade was doomed. And in Union Square on the second night, when it still seemed possible that the Marines would hurry to the rescue, there was a demonstration against Kennedy, sponsored by a group that called itself the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Its members chanted slogans against the president. A year later, a much larger group demonstrated during the missile crisis. In a strange, muted way, these were the first tentative signals that the sixties were coming. And later, after Dallas, when the world was trying to learn something about Lee Harvey Oswald, we all saw film of him on a New Orleans street corner, handing out leaflets. They were, of course, from the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
IV.
And yet…
And yet, across the years, learning all of these things from the memoirs and biographies and histories, understanding that Camelot did not exist and that Jack Kennedy was not a perfect man, why do I remain moved almost to tears when a glimpse of him appears on television or I hear his voice coming from a radio?
I can’t explain in any rational way. I’ve tried. Hell, yes, I’ve tried. I’ve talked to my daughters about him, after they’ve seen me turning away from some televised image of Jack. They’ve seen me swallow, or take a sudden breath of air, or flick away a half-formed tear. They know me as an aging skeptic about the perfectibility of man, a cynic about most politicians. I bore them with preachments about the need for reason and lucidity in all things. And then, suddenly, Jack Kennedy is speaking from the past about how the torch has passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace — and I’m gone.
There is more operating here for me (and for so many millions of others) than simple nostalgia for the years when I was young. Nothing similar happens when I see images of Harry Truman or Dwight Eisenhower. Jack Kennedy was different. He was at once a role model, a brilliant son or an older brother, someone who made us all feel better about being Americans. All over the globe in those years, the great nations were led by old men, prisoners of history, slaves to orthodoxy. Not us (we thought, in our arrogance). Not now.
“Ask not what your country can do for you,” Kennedy said. “Ask what you can do for your country.” The line was immediately cherished by cartoonists and comedians, and Kennedy’s political opponents often threw it back at him with heavy sarcasm. But the truth was that thousands of young people responded to the call. The best and the brightest streamed into Washington, looking for places in this shiny new administration. They came to Kennedy’s Justice Department and began to transform it, using the power of law to accelerate social change, particularly in the South. They were all over the regulatory agencies. And after Kennedy started the Peace Corps, they signed up by the tens of thousands to go to the desperate places of the world to help strangers. It’s hard to explain to today’s young Americans that not so long ago, many people their age believed that the world could be transformed through politics. Yes, they were naïve. Yes, they were idealists. But we watched all this, and many of us thought, This is some goddamned country.
Out there in the wider world, people were responding to him as we were. It wasn’t just Ireland or Europe. I remember seeing the reports of his 1962 trip to Mexico City, where a million people came out to greet him, the women weeping, the men applauding him as fellow men and not inferiors. I’d lived in Mexico and knew the depths of resentment so many Mexicans felt toward the Colossus of the North. In one day, Kennedy seemed to erase a century of dreadful history. The same thing happened in Bogotá and Caracas, where four years earlier Richard Nixon had been spat upon and humiliated. This was after the Bay of Pigs. This was while the Alliance for Progress was still trying to get off the ground. I can’t be certain today what there was about him that triggered so much emotion; surely it must have been some combination of his youth, naturalness, machismo, and grace. I do know this: In those years, when we went abroad, we were not often forced to defend the president of the United States.
We didn’t have to defend him at home, either. He did a very good job of that himself. We hurried off to watch his televised press conferences because they were such splendid displays of intelligence, humor, and style. We might disagree with Kennedy’s policies, and often did; but he expressed them on such a high level that disagreement was itself part of an intelligent process instead of the more conventional exchange of iron certitudes. He held 64 press conferences in his brief time in office (Reagan has held 47) and obviously understood how important they were to the furthering of his policies. But he also enjoyed them as ritual and performance. He was a genuinely witty man, with a very Irish love of the English language, the play on words, the surprising twist. But there was an odd measure of shyness in the man, too, and that must have been at the heart of his sense of irony, along with his detachment, his fatalism, his understanding of the absurd. He was often more Harvard than Irish, but he was more Irish than even he ever thought.
I loved that part of him. Loved, too, the way he honored artists and writers and musicians, inviting them to the White House for splendid dinners, insisting that Robert Frost read a poem at the inauguration. He said he enjoyed Ian Fleming’s books about James Bond; but he also brought André Malraux to the White House, and James Baldwin, and Pablo Casals. Perhaps this was all a political ploy, a means of getting writers and artists on his side; if so, it worked. Not many writers have felt comfortable in the White House in all the years since.
Part of his appeal was based on another fact: He was that rare American politician, a genuine war hero. Not a general, not someone who had spent the war ordering other men to fight and die, but a man who had been out on the line himself. When he first surfaced as a national figure, at the 1956 Democratic Convention, reporters rushed to find copies of John Hersey’s New Yorker account of the PT-109 incident in the South Pacific. They read: “Kennedy took McMahon in tow again. He cut loose one end in his teeth. He swam breaststroke, pulling the helpless McMahon along on his back. It took over five hours to reach the island. …”
Reading the story years after the event, some of us were stunned. Kennedy was the real article. There had been so many fakers, so many pols who were tough with their mouths and avoided the consequences of their belligerence. Kennedy had been there, not simply as a victim but as a hero, a man who’d saved other men’s lives. When he was president, that experience gave his words about war and peace a special authority. We also knew that his back had been terribly injured in the Solomons and had tormented him ever since. He had almost died after a 1954 operation, and he wore a brace until the day he died. But he bore his pain well; he never used it as an excuse; he didn’t retail it in exchange for votes. Hemingway, another hero of that time, had defined courage as grace under pressure. By that definition, Jack Kennedy certainly had courage.
Grace, wit, irony, youth, courage: all combined to make us admire Kennedy. And there was one more thing: the speeches. Kennedy spoke too quickly; he often failed to pause for applause; his accent was strange to many Americans. But he made some of the greatest political speeches I’ve ever heard.
Most of them were written by Ted Sorensen (with occasional help from others, including Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Richard Goodwin). But Kennedy was not a mindless robot, reciting the words presented to him by his handlers. He was actively involved in the process of crafting each major speech, from sketching the broad outlines to changing (and often improving) specific language. Kennedy had written two books (Why England Slept and the best-selling Profiles in Courage) before becoming president. He originally wanted to be a newspaperman and sometimes mused about buying the Washington Post after he left office. He cared about words, and it showed in the speeches.
Looking again at the texts, I can hear his voice still coming to me across the decades, charged with urgency, insistent that the world must be challenged and life itself embraced. He never slobbered. He lifted no phrases out of cheap movies. All the revisionism cannot deny the quality of those words and the tough-minded decency of their message. Some excerpts:
To Baptist ministers in Houston, September 12, 1960:
“I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant, nor Jewish. Where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the pope, the National Council of Churches, or any other ecclesiastical source. Where no religious body seeks to impose its will, directly or indirectly, upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials.…For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew or a Quaker or a Unitarian or a Baptist.…Today I may be the victim, but tomorrow it may be you.”
To the American people, after returning from Europe, June 6, 1961:
“Mr. Khrushchev made one point which I want to pass on. He said there are many disorders throughout the world, and he should not be blamed for them all. He is quite right. It is easy to dismiss as Communist-inspired every anti-government or anti-American riot, every overthrow of a corrupt regime, or every mass protest against misery and despair. These are not all Communist-inspired. The Communists move in to exploit them, to infiltrate their leadership, to ride their crest to victory. But the Communists did not create the conditions which caused them.”
Reporting to the nation about the white mob violence attending James Meredith’s entrance into the University of Mississippi and the decision to protect him with the National Guard, September 30, 1962:
“Even among law-abiding men, few laws are universally loved, but they are uniformly respected and not resisted. Americans are free, in short, to disagree with the law but not to disobey it. For in a government of laws and not of men, no man, however prominent or powerful, and no mob, however unruly or boisterous, is entitled to defy a court of law. If this country should ever reach the point where any man or group of men by force or threat of force could long defy the commands of our court and our Constitution, then no law would stand free from doubt, no judge would be sure of his writ, and no citizen would be safe from his neighbors.”
In a commencement address at American University, about the need to negotiate with the Soviet Union, June 10, 1963:
“What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children — not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women — not merely peace for our time but peace for all time…
“So, let us not be blind to our differences — but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”
To the nation, on civil rights, June n, 1963:
“We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it, and we cherish our freedom here at home — but are we to say to the world and, much more importantly, to each other that this is a land of the free except for Negroes; that we have no second-class citizens except Negroes; that we have no class or caste system, no ghettos, no master race except with respect to Negroes?”
Receiving an honorary degree at Amherst, October 26, 1963:
“The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the nation’s greatness. But the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable, especially when that questioning is disinterested, for they determine whether we use power or power uses us.
“Our national strength matters. But the spirit which informs and controls our strength matters just as much. This was the special significance of Robert Frost. He brought an unsparing instinct for reality to bear on the platitudes and pieties of society. His sense of the human tragedy fortified him against self-deception and easy consolation. ’I have been,’ he wrote, ’one acquainted with the night.’ And because he knew the midnight as well as the high noon, because he understood the ordeal as well as the triumph of the human spirit, he gave his age strength with which to overcome despair. …”
V.
Years later, long after the murder in Dallas and after Vietnam had first escalated into tragedy and then disintegrated into defeat; long after a generation had taken to the streets before retreating into the Big Chill; long after the ghettos of Watts and Newark and Detroit and so many other cities had exploded into nihilistic violence; after Robert Kennedy had been killed and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X; after Woodstock and Watergate; after the Beatles had arrived, triumphed, and broken up, and after John Lennon had been murdered; after Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter had given way to Ronald Reagan; after passionate liberalism faded; after the horrors of Cambodia and the anarchy of Beirut; after cocaine and AIDS had become the new plagues — after all had changed from the world we knew in 1963,1 was driving alone in a rented car late one afternoon through the state of Guerrero in Mexico.
I was moving through vast, empty stretches of parched land when the right rear tire went flat. I pulled over — and quickly discovered that the rental car had neither a spare nor tools. I was alone in the emptiness of Mexico. Trucks roared by, and some cars, but nobody stopped. Off in the distance I saw a plume of smoke coming from a small house. I started walking to the house, feeling uneasy and vulnerable — Mexico can be a dangerous country. A rutted dirt road led to the front of the house. A dusty car was parked to the side. It was almost dark, and for a tense moment, I considered turning back.
And then the door opened. A beefy man stood there, looking at me in a blank way. I came closer, and he squinted and then asked me in Spanish what I wanted. I told him I had a flat tire and needed help. He considered that for a moment and then asked me if I first needed something to drink.
I glanced past him into the house. On the wall there were two pictures. One was of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The other was of Jack Kennedy. Yes, I said. Some water would be fine.
NEW YORK,
November 28, 1988
I.
That day I was in Ireland, in the dark, hard northern city of Belfast. I was there with my father, who had been away from the city where he was born for more than 30 years. He was an American now — survivor of the Depression and poverty, father of seven children, fanatic of baseball — but he was greeted as a returning Irishman by his brother Frank and his surviving Irish friends, and there were many Irish tears and much Irish laughter, waterfalls of beer, and all the old Irish songs of defiance and loss. Billy Hamill was home. And on the evening of November 22, I was in my cousin Frankie’s house in a section called Andersonstown, dressing to go down to see the old man in a place called the Rock Bar. The television was on in the parlor. Frankie’s youngest kids were playing on the floor. A frail rain was falling outside.
And then the program was interrupted and a BBC announcer came on, his face grave, to say that the president of the United States had been shot in Dallas. Everything in the room stopped. In his clipped, abrupt voice, the announcer said that the details were sketchy. Everyone turned to me, the visiting American, as if I would know if this were true. I mumbled, talked nonsense — maybe it was a mistake; sometimes these things are moved on the wires too fast — but my stomach was churning. The regular program resumed; the kids went back to playing. A few minutes later, the announcer returned, and this time his voice was unsteady. It was true. John F. Kennedy, the president of the United States, was dead.
I remember whirling in pain and fury, slamming the wall with my hand, and reeling out into the night. All over the city, thousands of human beings were doing the same thing. Doors slammed and sudden wails went up. Oh, sweet Jesus, they shot Jack! And They killed President Kennedy! And He’s been shot dead! At the foot of the Falls Road, I saw an enraged man punching a tree. Another man sat on the curb, sobbing into his hands. Trying to be a reporter, I wandered over to the Shankill Road, the main Protestant avenue in that city so long divided by religion. It was the same there. Holy God, they’ve killed President Kennedy: with men weeping and children running with the news and bawling women everywhere. It was a scale of grief Pd never seen before or since in any place on earth. John Fitzgerald Kennedy wasn’t “the Catholic president” to the people of the Shankill or the Falls; he was the young and shining prince of the Irish diaspora.
I ended up at the Rock Bar, climbing to the long, smoky upstairs room. The place was packed. At a corner table, my father was sitting with two old IRA men. They were trying to console him when he was beyond consolation. For the immigrants of his generation, Jack Kennedy was always special. After i960, they knew that their children truly could be anything in their new country, including president.
“They got him, they got him,” he said, embracing me and sobbing into my shoulder. “The dirty sons of bitches, they got him.”
And then “The Star-Spangled Banner” was playing on the television set, and everyone in the place, 100 of them at least, rose and saluted. They weren’t saluting the American flag, which was superimposed over Kennedy’s face. They were saluting the fallen president who in some special way was their president too. The anthem ended. We drank a lot of whiskey together. We watched bulletins from Dallas. We cursed the darkness. And then there was a film of Kennedy in life. Visiting Ireland for three days the previous June.
There he was, smiling in that curious way, at once genuine and detached, capable of fondness and irony. The wind was tossing his hair. He was playing with the top button of his jacket. He was standing next to Eamon De Valera, the president of Ireland. He was laughing with the mayor of New Ross in County Wexford. He was being engulfed by vast crowds in Dublin. He seemed to be having a very good time. And then he was at the airport to say his farewell, and in the Rock Bar, we heard him speak:
“Last night, somebody sang a song, the words of which I’m sure you know, of ‘Come back to Erin, mavourneen, mavourneen, come back aroun’ to the land of thy birth. Come with the shamrock in the springtime, mavourneen.…’ This is not the land of my birth, but it is the land for which I hold the greatest affection.” A pause and a smile. “And I certainly will come back in the springtime.”
II.
Twenty-five springtimes have come and gone, and for those of us who were young then, those days live on in vivid detail. We remember where we were and how we lived and who we were in love with. We remember the images on television screens, black-and-white and grainy: Lee Harvey Oswald dying over and over again as Jack Ruby steps out to blow him into eternity; Jacqueline Kennedy’s extraordinary wounded grace; Caroline’s baffled eyes and John-John saluting. We remember the drumrolls and the riderless horse.
But across the years, there have been alterations made in the reputation of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Those who hated him on November 21, 1963, continue to hate him now. Some who were once his partisans have turned upon him with the icy retrospective contempt that is the specialty of the neoconservative faith. And time itself has altered his once-glittering presence in the national consciousness. An entire generation has come to maturity with no memory at all of the Kennedy years; for them, Kennedy is the name of an airport or a boulevard or a high school.
Certainly, the psychic wound of his sudden death appears to have healed. The revisionists have come forward; Kennedy’s life and his presidency have been examined in detail, and for some, both have been found wanting. The presidency, we have been told, was incomplete, a sad perhaps; the man himself was deeply flawed. Some of this thinking was a reaction to the overwrought mythologizing of the first few years after Dallas. The selling of “Camelot” was too insistent, too fevered, accompanied by too much sentimentality and too little rigorous thought. The Camelot metaphor was never used during Kennedy’s 1,000 days (Jack himself might have dismissed the notion with a wry or obscene remark); it first appeared in an interview Theodore H. White did with Jacqueline after the assassination. But it pervaded many of the first memoirs about the man and his time.
Some of the altered vision of Kennedy comes from the coarsening of the collective memory by the endless stream of books about the assassination itself. We’ve had the 26 volumes of the Warren Commission report and dozens of analyses detailing its sloppiness and inadequacy. We’ve gone back again and again to Dealey Plaza and the Texas School Book Depository and the grassy knoll. In thousands of talk shows, magazine articles, newspaper columns, and books, we’ve heard the Cuban-exile theory, the Mafia theory, the Castro theory, the J. Edgar Hoover theory, the Jim Garrison theory, the CIA theory, the Texas-oil theory, the KGB theory, the E. Howard Hunt theory, the two-Oswalds theory.
We’ve seen documentaries and docudramas. We’ve watched the Zapruder film over and over again. We’ve heard sound experts tell us that the evidence proves that there was a fourth shot and therefore two gunmen. We’ve read cheap fiction about the assassination and superb fiction like Don DeLillo’s Libra. In the end, nothing has been resolved. If there was a conspiracy, the plotters got away with it. Twenty-five years have passed. Kennedy is still dead. And so is Oswald. And Ruby. And so many of the others. And in a peculiar way, the details of Kennedy’s death have obliterated both the accomplishments and failures of his life.
At the same time, other tales have helped to debase the metal of the man: the smarmy memoirs of women who certainly slept with him and others who certainly didn’t; the endless retailing of the gossip about his alleged affair with Marilyn Monroe, that other pole of American literary necrophilia; the detailed histories of the family and its sometimes arrogant ways. These days, with a renewed public hypocrisy in sexual matters, Kennedy has acquired the dreaded “womanizer” label, complete with half-baked theories about the origins of his supposed Don Juan complex. He was afraid of dying, say the theorizers. He was selfish and spoiled. He was revolting against his mother’s rigid Catholicism or imitating his father’s own philandering.
He was described in some gossip as a mere “wham, bam, thank you ma’am” character; other talk had him a hopeless romantic. By all accounts, he was attracted to beautiful and intelligent women, and many of them were attracted to him. And during the time he journeyed among us, this was hardly a secret. When I was a young reporter for the Post in late i960,1 was once assigned to cover Jack Kennedy during one of his stays at the Carlyle hotel. He had been elected but had not yet taken office. “We hear he brings the broads in two at a time,” the editor said. “See what you can see.”
There was nothing to see that night, perhaps because of my own naïve incompetence as a reporter, or because I was joined in my vigil by another dozen reporters and about 100 fans who wanted a glimpse of John F. Kennedy. Most likely, Kennedy was asleep in his suite while we camped outside the hotel’s doors. But I remember thinking this was the best news I’d ever heard about a president of the United States. A man who loved women would not blow up the world. Ah, youth.
Two other events helped eclipse the memory of Jack Kennedy. One was the rise of Robert Kennedy. In his own brief time on the public stage, Robert understood that Jack’s caution had prevented him from fully using the enormous powers of the presidency. If Jack was a man of the fifties, the later Robert Kennedy was a man of the sixties, that vehement and disturbed era that started with the assassination in Dallas and did not truly end until Richard Nixon’s departure from the White House in disgrace in 1974. The differences were often a matter of style: Jack was cool, detached, rational; Robert was passionate, wounded (by his brother’s death, among other things), emotional. Jack was an Anglophile, a product of Harvard and the London School of Economics; Robert came from some deeper Celtic root.
The murder of Robert Kennedy in 1968 played a part in the revision of the Kennedy legend. In a quite different way, the process was completed by Chappaquiddick. Some who had been drawn to politics by Jack Kennedy at last began to retreat from the glamour of the myth. A few turned away in revulsion, seeing after Chappaquiddick only the selfish arrogance of privilege. Others faded into indifference or exhaustion. At some undefined point about a decade ago, the country decided it wanted to be free of the endless tragedy of the Kennedys. Even the most fervent Kennedy partisans wanted release from doom and death. They left politics, worked in the media or the stock market or the academy. A few politicians continued to chase the surface of the myth, copping Jack Kennedy’s mannerisms, his haircut, the “Let us go forth” rhythms of his speeches. Gary Hart, who even played with his jacket buttons the way Jack did, was the most embarrassing specimen of the type; others were in the Bob Forehead mold. They helped cheapen Jack Kennedy’s image the way imitators often undercut the work of an original artist.
Out in the country, beyond the narrow parish of professional politics, the people began to look for other myths and settled for a counterfeit. It was no accident that if once they had been entranced by a president who looked like a movie star, then the next step would be to find a movie star who looked like a president.
III.
The mistakes and flaws of the Kennedy presidency are now obvious. Domestically, he often moved too slowly, afraid of challenging Congress, somewhat late to recognize the urgency of the civil-rights movement, which had matured on his watch. He understood the fragility of the New Deal coalition of northern liberals and southern conservatives; he had been schooled in the ways of compromise in the House and Senate and was always uneasy with the moral certainties of “professional liberals.” When faced with escalating hatred and violence in the South, Kennedy did respond; he showed a moral toughness that surprised his detractors and helped change the region. But he was often bored with life at home.
Foreign policy more easily captured his passions. He was one of the few American presidents to have traveled widely, to have experienced other cultures. His style was urban and cosmopolitan, and he understood that developments in technology were swiftly creating what Marshall McLuhan was to call the “global village.” But since Kennedy had come to political maturity in the fifties, he at first accepted the premises of the Cold War and the system of alliances and priorities that had been shaped by John Foster Dulles.
Even today, revisionists of the left seem unable to forgive the role that Kennedy the Cold Warrior played in setting the stage for the catastrophe of Vietnam. He had inherited from Eisenhower a commitment to the Diem regime, and as he honored that commitment, the number of U.S. “advisers” grew from 200 to 16,000. Kennedy encouraged the growth of the Special Forces, to fight “brushfire” wars. He instructed the Pentagon to study and prepare for counterin-surgency operations. In Vietnam, U.S. casualties slowly began to increase; the Vietcong grew in power and boldness; Diem concentrated his energies on squelching his political opposition in Saigon, and soon we were seeing those photographs of Buddhist monks incinerating themselves, while Madame Nhu and her husband (Diem’s brother) became lurid figures in the public imagination.
By most accounts, Kennedy intended to end the American commitment to Vietnam after the 1964 election. But since he’d won in i960 by only 118,000 votes, he didn’t feel he could risk charges by the American right that he had “lost” Vietnam. So the guerrilla war slowly escalated, and such writers as David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan reported from the field the truth that the official communiqués too often obscured: The war was being lost. Kennedy sent his old Massachusetts adversary Henry Cabot Lodge to Saigon as the new ambassador. But events were moving out of control. Diem was assassinated in November 1963 (not, as legend has it, on Kennedy’s orders). The quagmire beckoned, and at his death, Kennedy still hadn’t moved to prevent the United States from trudging onward into the disaster.
But for most of Kennedy’s two years and ten months as president, Vietnam was a distant problem, simmering away at the back of the stove. Kennedy’s obsession was Cuba. It remains unclear how much he knew about the various CIA plots to assassinate Fidel Castro. But the two major foreign-policy events of his presidency were the Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961, and the missile crisis of October 1962. One was a dreadful defeat, the other a triumph.
According to Richard Goodwin and others (I remember discussing this with Robert Kennedy), Jack Kennedy had begun the quiet process of normalizing relations with Castro before his death. Although this, too, was to be postponed until after the 1964 elections, Kennedy had come to believe that Cuba was not worth the destruction of the planet.
Today, Castro is the last player of the Kennedy era to remain on the stage, his regime hardened into Stalinist orthodoxy. In Miami, the exiles have become citizens; young Cuban-Americans think of the old anti-Castro fanatics as vaguely comic figures. If Castro died tomorrow and the regime collapsed a week later, an overwhelming majority of the Miami Cubans would stay in Florida. But there is still a hard belief among the old exiles (and some factions of the American right) that Kennedy was responsible for the defeat at the Bay of Pigs because he refused to supply air cover. But detailed studies of the operation (most notably by Peter Wyden) make clear that even with air cover, the force of 1,400 white middle-class Cubans could never have prevailed against Castro’s almost 200,000 militia and regular-army troops. Success had to depend upon a general uprising against Fidel and massive defections among his troops. Neither happened.
Today, it’s hard to recall the intensity of the Cuban fever that so often rose in those years. I remember being in Union Square when the Brigade was going ashore. A week earlier, I’d actually applied for press credentials for the invasion from some anti-Castro agent in midtown; with great silken confidence, he told me I could go into Cuba after the provisional government was set up, a matter of a few days after the invasion. But from the moment it landed, the quixotic Brigade was doomed. And in Union Square on the second night, when it still seemed possible that the Marines would hurry to the rescue, there was a demonstration against Kennedy, sponsored by a group that called itself the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Its members chanted slogans against the president. A year later, a much larger group demonstrated during the missile crisis. In a strange, muted way, these were the first tentative signals that the sixties were coming. And later, after Dallas, when the world was trying to learn something about Lee Harvey Oswald, we all saw film of him on a New Orleans street corner, handing out leaflets. They were, of course, from the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
IV.
And yet…
And yet, across the years, learning all of these things from the memoirs and biographies and histories, understanding that Camelot did not exist and that Jack Kennedy was not a perfect man, why do I remain moved almost to tears when a glimpse of him appears on television or I hear his voice coming from a radio?
I can’t explain in any rational way. I’ve tried. Hell, yes, I’ve tried. I’ve talked to my daughters about him, after they’ve seen me turning away from some televised image of Jack. They’ve seen me swallow, or take a sudden breath of air, or flick away a half-formed tear. They know me as an aging skeptic about the perfectibility of man, a cynic about most politicians. I bore them with preachments about the need for reason and lucidity in all things. And then, suddenly, Jack Kennedy is speaking from the past about how the torch has passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace — and I’m gone.
There is more operating here for me (and for so many millions of others) than simple nostalgia for the years when I was young. Nothing similar happens when I see images of Harry Truman or Dwight Eisenhower. Jack Kennedy was different. He was at once a role model, a brilliant son or an older brother, someone who made us all feel better about being Americans. All over the globe in those years, the great nations were led by old men, prisoners of history, slaves to orthodoxy. Not us (we thought, in our arrogance). Not now.
“Ask not what your country can do for you,” Kennedy said. “Ask what you can do for your country.” The line was immediately cherished by cartoonists and comedians, and Kennedy’s political opponents often threw it back at him with heavy sarcasm. But the truth was that thousands of young people responded to the call. The best and the brightest streamed into Washington, looking for places in this shiny new administration. They came to Kennedy’s Justice Department and began to transform it, using the power of law to accelerate social change, particularly in the South. They were all over the regulatory agencies. And after Kennedy started the Peace Corps, they signed up by the tens of thousands to go to the desperate places of the world to help strangers. It’s hard to explain to today’s young Americans that not so long ago, many people their age believed that the world could be transformed through politics. Yes, they were naïve. Yes, they were idealists. But we watched all this, and many of us thought, This is some goddamned country.
Out there in the wider world, people were responding to him as we were. It wasn’t just Ireland or Europe. I remember seeing the reports of his 1962 trip to Mexico City, where a million people came out to greet him, the women weeping, the men applauding him as fellow men and not inferiors. I’d lived in Mexico and knew the depths of resentment so many Mexicans felt toward the Colossus of the North. In one day, Kennedy seemed to erase a century of dreadful history. The same thing happened in Bogotá and Caracas, where four years earlier Richard Nixon had been spat upon and humiliated. This was after the Bay of Pigs. This was while the Alliance for Progress was still trying to get off the ground. I can’t be certain today what there was about him that triggered so much emotion; surely it must have been some combination of his youth, naturalness, machismo, and grace. I do know this: In those years, when we went abroad, we were not often forced to defend the president of the United States.
We didn’t have to defend him at home, either. He did a very good job of that himself. We hurried off to watch his televised press conferences because they were such splendid displays of intelligence, humor, and style. We might disagree with Kennedy’s policies, and often did; but he expressed them on such a high level that disagreement was itself part of an intelligent process instead of the more conventional exchange of iron certitudes. He held 64 press conferences in his brief time in office (Reagan has held 47) and obviously understood how important they were to the furthering of his policies. But he also enjoyed them as ritual and performance. He was a genuinely witty man, with a very Irish love of the English language, the play on words, the surprising twist. But there was an odd measure of shyness in the man, too, and that must have been at the heart of his sense of irony, along with his detachment, his fatalism, his understanding of the absurd. He was often more Harvard than Irish, but he was more Irish than even he ever thought.
I loved that part of him. Loved, too, the way he honored artists and writers and musicians, inviting them to the White House for splendid dinners, insisting that Robert Frost read a poem at the inauguration. He said he enjoyed Ian Fleming’s books about James Bond; but he also brought André Malraux to the White House, and James Baldwin, and Pablo Casals. Perhaps this was all a political ploy, a means of getting writers and artists on his side; if so, it worked. Not many writers have felt comfortable in the White House in all the years since.
Part of his appeal was based on another fact: He was that rare American politician, a genuine war hero. Not a general, not someone who had spent the war ordering other men to fight and die, but a man who had been out on the line himself. When he first surfaced as a national figure, at the 1956 Democratic Convention, reporters rushed to find copies of John Hersey’s New Yorker account of the PT-109 incident in the South Pacific. They read: “Kennedy took McMahon in tow again. He cut loose one end in his teeth. He swam breaststroke, pulling the helpless McMahon along on his back. It took over five hours to reach the island. …”
Reading the story years after the event, some of us were stunned. Kennedy was the real article. There had been so many fakers, so many pols who were tough with their mouths and avoided the consequences of their belligerence. Kennedy had been there, not simply as a victim but as a hero, a man who’d saved other men’s lives. When he was president, that experience gave his words about war and peace a special authority. We also knew that his back had been terribly injured in the Solomons and had tormented him ever since. He had almost died after a 1954 operation, and he wore a brace until the day he died. But he bore his pain well; he never used it as an excuse; he didn’t retail it in exchange for votes. Hemingway, another hero of that time, had defined courage as grace under pressure. By that definition, Jack Kennedy certainly had courage.
Grace, wit, irony, youth, courage: all combined to make us admire Kennedy. And there was one more thing: the speeches. Kennedy spoke too quickly; he often failed to pause for applause; his accent was strange to many Americans. But he made some of the greatest political speeches I’ve ever heard.
Most of them were written by Ted Sorensen (with occasional help from others, including Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Richard Goodwin). But Kennedy was not a mindless robot, reciting the words presented to him by his handlers. He was actively involved in the process of crafting each major speech, from sketching the broad outlines to changing (and often improving) specific language. Kennedy had written two books (Why England Slept and the best-selling Profiles in Courage) before becoming president. He originally wanted to be a newspaperman and sometimes mused about buying the Washington Post after he left office. He cared about words, and it showed in the speeches.
Looking again at the texts, I can hear his voice still coming to me across the decades, charged with urgency, insistent that the world must be challenged and life itself embraced. He never slobbered. He lifted no phrases out of cheap movies. All the revisionism cannot deny the quality of those words and the tough-minded decency of their message. Some excerpts:
To Baptist ministers in Houston, September 12, 1960:
“I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant, nor Jewish. Where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the pope, the National Council of Churches, or any other ecclesiastical source. Where no religious body seeks to impose its will, directly or indirectly, upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials.…For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew or a Quaker or a Unitarian or a Baptist.…Today I may be the victim, but tomorrow it may be you.”
To the American people, after returning from Europe, June 6, 1961:
“Mr. Khrushchev made one point which I want to pass on. He said there are many disorders throughout the world, and he should not be blamed for them all. He is quite right. It is easy to dismiss as Communist-inspired every anti-government or anti-American riot, every overthrow of a corrupt regime, or every mass protest against misery and despair. These are not all Communist-inspired. The Communists move in to exploit them, to infiltrate their leadership, to ride their crest to victory. But the Communists did not create the conditions which caused them.”
Reporting to the nation about the white mob violence attending James Meredith’s entrance into the University of Mississippi and the decision to protect him with the National Guard, September 30, 1962:
“Even among law-abiding men, few laws are universally loved, but they are uniformly respected and not resisted. Americans are free, in short, to disagree with the law but not to disobey it. For in a government of laws and not of men, no man, however prominent or powerful, and no mob, however unruly or boisterous, is entitled to defy a court of law. If this country should ever reach the point where any man or group of men by force or threat of force could long defy the commands of our court and our Constitution, then no law would stand free from doubt, no judge would be sure of his writ, and no citizen would be safe from his neighbors.”
In a commencement address at American University, about the need to negotiate with the Soviet Union, June 10, 1963:
“What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children — not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women — not merely peace for our time but peace for all time…
“So, let us not be blind to our differences — but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”
To the nation, on civil rights, June n, 1963:
“We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it, and we cherish our freedom here at home — but are we to say to the world and, much more importantly, to each other that this is a land of the free except for Negroes; that we have no second-class citizens except Negroes; that we have no class or caste system, no ghettos, no master race except with respect to Negroes?”
Receiving an honorary degree at Amherst, October 26, 1963:
“The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the nation’s greatness. But the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable, especially when that questioning is disinterested, for they determine whether we use power or power uses us.
“Our national strength matters. But the spirit which informs and controls our strength matters just as much. This was the special significance of Robert Frost. He brought an unsparing instinct for reality to bear on the platitudes and pieties of society. His sense of the human tragedy fortified him against self-deception and easy consolation. ’I have been,’ he wrote, ’one acquainted with the night.’ And because he knew the midnight as well as the high noon, because he understood the ordeal as well as the triumph of the human spirit, he gave his age strength with which to overcome despair. …”
V.
Years later, long after the murder in Dallas and after Vietnam had first escalated into tragedy and then disintegrated into defeat; long after a generation had taken to the streets before retreating into the Big Chill; long after the ghettos of Watts and Newark and Detroit and so many other cities had exploded into nihilistic violence; after Robert Kennedy had been killed and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X; after Woodstock and Watergate; after the Beatles had arrived, triumphed, and broken up, and after John Lennon had been murdered; after Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter had given way to Ronald Reagan; after passionate liberalism faded; after the horrors of Cambodia and the anarchy of Beirut; after cocaine and AIDS had become the new plagues — after all had changed from the world we knew in 1963,1 was driving alone in a rented car late one afternoon through the state of Guerrero in Mexico.
I was moving through vast, empty stretches of parched land when the right rear tire went flat. I pulled over — and quickly discovered that the rental car had neither a spare nor tools. I was alone in the emptiness of Mexico. Trucks roared by, and some cars, but nobody stopped. Off in the distance I saw a plume of smoke coming from a small house. I started walking to the house, feeling uneasy and vulnerable — Mexico can be a dangerous country. A rutted dirt road led to the front of the house. A dusty car was parked to the side. It was almost dark, and for a tense moment, I considered turning back.
And then the door opened. A beefy man stood there, looking at me in a blank way. I came closer, and he squinted and then asked me in Spanish what I wanted. I told him I had a flat tire and needed help. He considered that for a moment and then asked me if I first needed something to drink.
I glanced past him into the house. On the wall there were two pictures. One was of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The other was of Jack Kennedy. Yes, I said. Some water would be fine.
NEW YORK,
November 28, 1988
SINATRA
I.
One rainy evening in the winter of 1974, I was home alone when the telephone rang. I picked up the receiver, looking out at the wet street, and heard one of the most familiar voices of the century. It was Frank Sinatra.
“What are you doing?”
“Reading a book,” I said.
“Read it tomorrow. We’re at Jilly’s. Come on over.”
He hung up. I put the book down. I didn’t know Sinatra well, but despite all the rotten things I’d read about him, I liked him a lot and was sometimes touched by him. We’d met through Shirley MacLaine, who went back a long time with Sinatra. In 1958 Sinatra put her in Some Came Running, expanded her part to fit her talents, and made her a movie star. When they occasionally met, it was clear to me that Sinatra admired her relentless honesty, loved her in some complicated way, and was, like me, a little afraid of her.
I took a cab to Jilly’s, a seedy time warp of a saloon at the Eighth Avenue end of 52nd Street. The long, dark bar was packed with the junior varsity of the mob; of all the Sinatra groupies, they were the most laughable. They were planted at the bar like blue-haired statues, gulping Jack Daniel’s, occasionally glancing into the back room. A maitre d’ in a shiny tuxedo stood beside a red velvet rope that separated the back room from the Junior Apalachin conference at the bar.
“Yes, sir?” the maitre d’ said.
“Mr. Sinatra,” I said. “He’s expecting me.”
He turned nervously, his eyes moving past the empty tables at the booths in the left-hand corner against the wall. Jilly Rizzo looked up from a booth and nodded, and I was let through. “ ‘Ey, Petey babe,” Jilly said, coming around a table with his right hand out. Jilly has one glass eye, which gives him a perpetually blurry look. “Hey, Frank,” he said, “look who’s here.”
“Hey, Peter, grab a seat!” Sinatra said brightly, half rising from the booth and shaking hands. He moved clumsily, a newly heavy man who hadn’t learned yet to carry the extra weight with grace; he seemed swollen, rather than sleek. But the Sinatra face was — and is — an extraordinary assemblage. He has never been conventionally handsome: There are no clean planes, too many knobs of bone, scars from the forceps delivery he endured at birth. But the smile is open, easy, insouciant. And his blue eyes are the true focal point of the face. In the brief time I’d known him, I’d seen the eyes so disarmingly open that you felt you could peer all the way through them into every secret recess of the man; at other times they were cloudy with indifference, and when chilled by anger or resentment, they could become as opaque as cold-rolled steel.
“You eat yet?” he asked. “Well, then have a drink.”
As always, there was a group with him, squashed into the worn Leatherette booths or on chairs against tables. They had the back room to themselves and were eating chop suey and watching a Jets game on a TV set. Sinatra introduced Pat Henry, the comic who sometimes opens for him; Roone Arledge of ABC; Don Costa, one of Sinatra’s favorite arrangers; a few other men; and some young women. Sinatra was with a thin blond model in a black dress. He didn’t introduce her.
The conversation stopped for the introductions, then started again. Sinatra leaned over, his eyes shifting to the TV screen, where Joe Namath was being shoved around.
“I don’t get this team,” he said. “They got the best arm in football and they won’t give him any protection. Ah, shit!” Namath was on his back and getting up very slowly. “Oh, man. That ain’t right!”
They cut to a commercial, and Sinatra lit a Marlboro and sipped a vodka. His eyes drifted to the bar. “Jesus, there’s about 43 indictments right at the bar,” he said loudly.
“Present company excluded,” Pat Henry said, and everybody laughed.
“It better be,” Sinatra said, and they all laughed again. The blonde smiled in a chilly way. The game was back on again, and Sinatra stared at the TV set but wasn’t really watching the game. Then the game ended, and Jilly switched off the set. There was more talk and more drinking, and slowly the others began to leave.
“Hell, let’s go,” Sinatra said. He said something to Jilly, and then he and the blonde and I walked out. A photographer and a middle-aged autograph freak were waiting under the tattered awning.
“Do you mind, Mr. Sinatra?” the photographer asked.
“No, go ahead,” he said. The flashbulbs popped. The blonde smiled. So did Sinatra. “Thanks for asking.”
Then he signed the woman’s autograph book. She had skin like grimy ivory, and sad brown eyes. “Thanks, dear,” Sinatra said. We all got into the waiting limousine and drove down the rainy street, heading east.
“What do you think they do with those autographs?” he said. “Sell them? To who? Trade them? For what? How does it go? Two Elvis Presleys for one Frank Sinatra? Two Frank Sinatras for one Paul McCartney? I don’t get it. I never did.”
We drove awhile in silence. Then the chauffeur turned right on a street in the Sixties and pulled over to the curb. Sinatra and the blonde got out. He took her into the brightly lit vestibule. He waited for her to find a key, tapped her lightly on the elbow, and came back to the limo.
“You have to go home?”
“No.”
He leaned forward to the driver. “Just drive around awhile.”
“Yes sir.”
And so for more than an hour, on this rainy night in New York, we drove around the empty streets. Sinatra talked about Lennon and McCartney as songwriters (“That ‘Yesterday’ is the best song written in 30 years”) and George Harrison (“His ‘Something’ is a beauty”), prizefighters (“Sugar Ray was the best I ever saw”) and writers (“Murray Kempton is the best, isn’t he? And I always loved Jimmy Cannon”). It wasn’t an interview; Frank Sinatra just wanted to talk, in a city far from the bright scorched exile of Palm Springs.
“It’s sure changed, this town,” he said. “When I first came across that river, this was the greatest city in the whole goddamned world. It was like a big, beautiful lady. It’s like a busted-down hooker now.”
“Ah, well,” I said. “Babe Ruth doesn’t play for the Yankees anymore.”
“And the Paramount’s an office building,” he said. “Stop. I’m gonna cry.”
He laughed and settled back. We were crossing 86th Street now, heading for the park.
“You think some people are smart, and they turn out dumb,” Sinatra said. “You think they’re straight, they turn out crooked.” This was, of course, the Watergate winter; the year before, Sinatra sat in an honored place at the second inauguration of Richard Nixon. “You like people, and they die on you. I go to too many goddamned funerals these days. And women,” he said, exhaling, and chuckling again, “I don’t know what the hell to make of them. Do you?”
“Every day I know less,” I said.
“Maybe that’s what it’s all about,” he said. “Maybe all that happens is you get older and you know less.”
After a while, the limousine pulled up in front of the Waldorf, where Sinatra has an apartment. He told the driver to take me home.
“Stay in touch,” he said, and got out, walking fast, his head down, his step jaunty, his hands deep in the pockets of his coat. I remember thinking that it was a desperately lonely life for a man who was a legend.
II.
“I am a symmetrical man, almost to a fault.”
At 64, Francis Albert Sinatra is one of that handful of Americans whose deaths would certainly unleash a river of tearful prose and much genuine grief. He has worked at his trade for almost half a century and goes on as if nothing at all had changed. He is currently in New York making his first feature film in ten years, The First Deadly Sin. His first new studio album in five years is in the record stores, a three-record set called Trilogy, and despite one astonishing lapse in taste (a self-aggrandizing “musical fantasy” written by banality master Gordon Jenkins), it reveals that what Sinatra calls “my reed” is in better shape than it has been in since the 1960s. In concert halls and casinos he packs in the fans, and the intensity of their embrace remains scary. But his work and its public acceptance are now almost incidental to his stature. Frank Sinatra, from Hoboken, New Jersey, has forced his presence into American social history; when the story of how Americans in this century played, dreamed, hoped, and loved is told, Frank Sinatra cannot be left out. He is more than a mere singer or actor. He is a legend. And the legend lives.
The legend has its own symmetries. Sinatra can be unbelievably generous and brutally vicious. He can display the grace and manners of a cultured man and turn suddenly into a vulgar two-bit comic. He can offer George Raft a blank check “up to one million dollars” to pay taxes owed to the IRS; he can then rage against one of his most important boosters, WNEW disc jockey Jonathan Schwartz, and help force him off the air. In his time, he has been a loyal Democrat and a shill for Richard Nixon; a defender of underdogs everywhere and then a spokesman for the Establishment; a man who fought racism in the music business and then became capable of tasteless jokes (“The Polacks are deboning the colored people,” he said on the stage of Caesars Palace in 1974, “and using them for wet suits”). He has given magical performances and shoddy ones. He has treated women with elegance, sensitivity, and charm, and then, in Lauren Bacall’s phrase, “dropped the curtain” on them in the most callous way. He acts like royalty and is frequently treated that way, but he also comes on too often like a cheap hood. He is a good guy-bad guy, tough-tender, Jekyll-Hyde.
“Being an eighteen-karat manic-depressive,” Sinatra said once, “I have an over-acute capacity for sadness as well as elation.”
Over the years, those wildly fluctuating emotions became a basic component of the Sinatra legend — accepted, even demanded by his audience. That audience is now largely eastern, urban, and aging, with New York at the heart of the myth. The hard-core fans are Depression kids who matured in World War II, or part of the fifties generation, who saw him as a role model. In some critical way, Sinatra validates their lives — as individuals. He sings to them, and for them, one at a time. These Americans were transformed by the Depression and the war into unwilling members of groups — “the masses,” or “the poor,” or “the infantry” — and their popular music was dominated by the big bands. Sinatra was the first star to step out of the tightly controlled ensembles of the white swing bands to work on his own. Yes, he was 4-F (punctured eardrum), but the overwhelming majority of Americans experienced World War II at home, and the 1940s Sinatra was a reminder that Americans were single human beings, not just the masses, the poor, or the infantry. Later, in the 1960s, when crowds once again shoved individuals off the stage of history, he was submerged by musical groups like the Beatles and Rolling Stones and in 1971 even went into a brief retirement. He came back later in the decade, when individual values were again dominant.
“I’ve seen them come and go, but Frank is still the king,” a New Jersey grandmother said at one of Sinatra’s weekend performances at Resorts International in Atlantic City. “He just goes on and on, and he’s wonderful.”
Indeed, Sinatra’s endurance has become a rallying point for many people who feel that their sacrifices and hard work are no longer honored, their values demeaned, their musical tastes ignored and sneered at. They don’t care that Sinatra got fat; so did they. They don’t care that Sinatra moved from the New Deal to Ronald Reagan; many of them did the same thing, for the same basic reason: resentment at being ignored by the Democratic party. They had overcome poverty and survived two wars; they had educated their children and given them better lives; and sometimes even their children didn’t care. But it should never be forgotten that Frank Sinatra was the original working-class hero. Mick Jagger’s fans bought records with their allowances; Sinatra’s people bought them out of wages.
“There’s just not enough of Frank’s people around anymore to make him a monster record seller,” says one Warner Communications executive. “Sinatra is a star. But he’s not Fleetwood Mac. He’s not Pink Floyd.”
Sinatra has never been a big single seller (one gold record — more than a million sales — to twenty for the Beatles), but his albums continue to sell steadily. One reason: Most radio stations don’t play Sinatra, so that younger listeners never get to hear him and go on to buy his records. In New York, only WNEW-AM and WYNY-FM play Sinatra with any frequency. As a movie star, he had faded badly before vanishing completely with the lamentable Dirty Dingus Magee in 1970. Part of this could be blamed directly on Sinatra, because his insistence on one or two takes had led to careless, even shoddy productions. On his own, he was also not a strong TV performer; he needed Elvis Presley, or Bing Crosby, to get big ratings. Yet Sinatra remains a major star in the minds of most Americans, even those who despise him.
“What Sinatra has is beyond talent,” director Billy Wilder once said. “It’s some sort of magnetism that goes in higher revolutions than that of anybody else, anybody in the whole of show business. Wherever Frank is, there is a certain electricity permeating the air. It’s like Mack the Knife is in town and the action is starting.”
That electricity was in the air of Jilly’s that night in 1974. But its effect is not restricted to a platoon of gumbahs. The other night, Sinatra came into Elaine’s with his wife, Barbara, and another couple. It was after midnight, and Sinatra stayed for a couple of hours, drinking and talking and smoking cigarettes.
I was with some friends at another table. They were people who are good at their jobs and have seen much of the world. But their own natural styles were subtly altered by the addition of Sinatra to the room. They stole glances at him. They were aware that Sinatra’s blue eyes were also checking out the room, and unconsciously they began to gesture too much, playing too hard at being casual, or clarifying themselves in a theatrical way. Somewhere underneath all of this, I’m sure, was a desire for Frank Sinatra to like them.
I knew how that worked, because I’d felt those emotions myself. When I first met Sinatra, I was bumping up against one of the crucial legends of my youth, and sure, I wanted him to like me. Growing up in Brooklyn in the forties and fifties, it was impossible to avoid the figure of Frank Sinatra. He was armored with the tough-guy swagger of the streets, but in the songs he allowed room for tenderness, the sense of loss and abandonment, the acknowledgment of pain. Most of us felt that we had nothing to learn from cowboys or Cary Grant (we were wrong, of course). But thousands of us appropriated the pose of the Tender Tough Guy from Sinatra. We’ve outgrown a lot of things, but there are elements of that pose in all of us to this day, and when we see Sinatra perform, or listen to the records at night, the pose regains all of its old dangerous glamour.
And make no mistake: Danger is at the heart of the legend. At his best, Sinatra is an immensely gifted musical talent, admired by many jazz musicians. He is not a jazz singer, but he comes from the tradition. As a young band vocalist, he learned breath control from trombonist Tommy Dorsey; after work, he studied other singers, among them Louis Armstrong, Lee Wiley, Mabel Mercer, and another performer who became a legend.
“It is Billie Holiday, whom I first heard in 52nd Street clubs in the early ’30s, who was and still remains the greatest single musical influence on me,” he wrote once, later telling Daily News columnist Kay Gardella that Lady Day taught him “matters of shading, phrasing, dark tones, light tones and bending notes.” And in the saloons of the time, the young Sinatra learned a great secret of the trade: “The microphone is the singer’s basic instrument, not the voice. You have to learn to play it like it was a saxophone.” As he matured, Sinatra developed a unique white-blues style, supple enough to express the range of his own turbulent emotions. And like the great jazz artists, he took the banal tunes of Tin Pan Alley and transformed them into something personal by the sincerity of his performance; Sinatra actually seemed to believe the words he was singing. But Billy Wilder is correct: The Sinatra aura goes beyond talent and craft. He is not simply a fine popular singer. He emanates power and danger. And the reason is simple: You think he is tangled up with the mob.
“Some things I can’t ever talk about,” he said to me once, when we were discussing the mandatory contents of his book. He laughed and added, “Someone might come knockin’ at my f- door.”
Sinatra is now writing that autobiography and preparing a film about his own life. Alas, neither form seems adequate to the full story; autobiographies are by definition only part of the story, the instinct being to prepare a brief for the defense and give yourself the best lines. And a two-hour movie can only skim the surface of a life that has gone on for six decades. Faulkner says somewhere that the best stories are the ones we are most thoroughly ashamed of; it could be that the best movies are the ones that can’t be photographed. No, Sinatra deserves a novel.
The novelist, some combination of Balzac and Raymond Chandler, would recognize Sinatra as one of those rare public men who actually cast a shadow. The shadow is the mob, and who can tell what came first, the shadow or the act? A conventional autobiography will talk about the wives: Nancy Barbato, Ava Gardner, Mia Farrow, and Barbara Marx, one for each adult decade. It might mention, discreetly, all the other love affairs, passionate or glancing: Lana Turner, Juliet Prowse, Lauren Bacall, Kim Novak, Jill St. John, Lady Adele Beatty, Dorothy Provine, and the anonymous brigade of starlets, secretaries, models, stewardesses, and girls from the old neighborhood.
“I loved them all,” Sinatra says now, smiling ruefully, reminding you that he is now a grandfather and all of that was long ago. “I really did.”
But the novelist can come closer to the elusive truth than an autobiographer as courtly as Sinatra will ever allow himself to do. Both would deal with the public career, the rise, fall, rise again of Frank Sinatra. We can see the high school dropout watching Bing Crosby sing from the stage of Loew’s Journal Square in Jersey City in 1933, vowing to become a singer. We can follow him, one of Balzac’s provincial heroes, as he wins an amateur contest and crosses the river to appear for the first time on a New York stage at the Academy of Music (now the Palladium) on 14th Street the following year. The hero then sings with a group called the Hoboken Four on the Major Bowes Amateur Hour in 1935, plays local clubs, begs in the hallways of WNEW for the chance to sing for nothing on live remotes. And of course there will be the familiar story of the job at the Rustic Cabin on Route 9W in 1939, and how Harry James heard him late one night and gave him a job in the big time. And then how Sinatra went to work for Tommy Dorsey and played the Paramount and became a star.
And because this is a story with a hero, it must tell the story of The Fall. The hero hurtles into love with Ava Gardner, and his career becomes a shambles: He loses his voice, his wife, his children; he gets into public fights; he wins the love goddess; he loses her; he hits bottom. And then there is The Great Comeback: He pleads for the part of Maggio in From Here to Eternity, is paid $8,000, gives a stunning performance, wins the Academy Award, and comes all the way back. He leaves Columbia Records for Capitol, then starts his own company, Reprise, and makes his greatest records. At the same time he consolidates his power in Hollywood, investing his money brilliantly, producing his own films, using power with the instincts of a great politician. These are the years of the private jets, the meetings of the Clan on the stages of Las Vegas, the friendships with Jack Kennedy and other politicians, and the house at the top of Mulholland Drive, where the wounded hero heals his ruined heart with girls and whiskey and friends. It’s a good story. A sentimental education or a cautionary tale.
But as autobiography it is not enough. We must have some understanding of the shadows. In The Godfather Mario Puzo used some of the elements in the singer he called Johnny Fontane; other novels have used Sinatra-like figures in various ways; yet no fictional account has truly defined the man in all of his complexity. We only know that the mob runs through his story like an underground river. He is the most investigated American performer since John Wilkes Booth, and although he has never been indicted or convicted of any mob-connected crime, the connection is part of the legend. And to some extent, Sinatra exploits it. His opening acts feature comedians who tell jokes about Sinatra’s sinister friendships; if you cross Frank, the jokes say, you could end up on a meat hook in a garage. In some circumstances Sinatra laughs at the implications; other times, he explodes into dark furies, accusing his accusers of slander and ethnic racism.
“If my name didn’t end with a vowel,” he said to me once, “I wouldn’t have had all this trouble.”
But the facts indicate that he did know some shady people. He was friendly with Jersey hoodlum Willie Moretti until the syphilitic gangster was shot to death. He was friendly with Joseph “Joe Fisher” Fischetti, traveled with him to Havana in 1947, where he spent time with Lucky Luciano. A nineteen-page Justice Department memorandum prepared in 1962 said that its surveillance placed Sinatra in contact with about ten of the country’s top hoodlums. Some had Sinatra’s unlisted number. He did favors for others.
“I was brought up to shake a man’s hand when I am introduced to him, without first investigating his past,” Sinatra said huffily during the Luciano uproar. The same could be said about the scandal over the photograph taken a few years ago with mob boss Carlo Gambino, backstage at the Westchester Premier Theater. More serious questions have now been raised about Sinatra and that same theater.
A federal grand jury is investigating whether Sinatra, his lawyer Mickey Rudin, and Jilly Rizzo took $50,000 under the table during a May 1977 gig there. Court papers filed by prosecutor Nathaniel Akerman said that the possible Sinatra connection arose during the trial of one Louis “Lewie Dome” Pacella, supposedly a friend of Sinatra’s. The court papers state: “The grand jury’s investigation was based in part on evidence introduced at Pacella’s trial, which showed that in addition to Pacella, other individuals close to Frank Sinatra had received monies illegally…” Once again, Sinatra is afloat on that dark underground river.
“Did I know those guys?” he said to me once. “Sure, I knew some of those guys. I spent a lot of time working in saloons. And saloons are not run by the Christian Brothers. There were a lot of guys around, and they came out of Prohibition, and they ran pretty good saloons. I was a kid. I worked in the places that were open. They paid you, and the checks didn’t bounce. I didn’t meet any Nobel Prize winners in saloons. But if Francis of Assisi was a singer and worked in saloons, he would’ye met the same guys. That doesn’t make him part of something. They said hello, you said hello. They came backstage. They thanked you. You offered them a drink. That was it.”
He paused. “And it doesn’t matter anymore, does it? Most of the guys I knew, or met, are dead.”
One of them was Salvatore Giancana, sometimes known as Momo, or Mooney. A graduate of Joliet prison, he ducked World War II by doing a crazy act for the draft board, which labeled him “a constitutional psychopath.” He rose through the wartime rackets to the leadership of the Chicago mob in the 1950s. During that period he and Sinatra became friends and were seen in various places together. The star-struck Momo later began a long love affair with singer Phyllis McGuire, and the friendship deepened. In 1962 Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis played a special engagement at a Giancana joint called the Villa Venice, northwest of Chicago. When the FBI questioned the performers, Sinatra said he did it for a boyhood friend named Leo Olsen, who fronted the place for Momo. Sammy Davis was more to the point.
“Baby, let me say this,” he told an FBI man. “I got one eye, and that one eye sees a lot of things that my brain tells me I shouldn’t talk about. Because my brain says that if I do, my one eye might not be seeing anything after a while.”
Sinatra’s friendship with Sam Giancana was most severely tested in 1963, when the Nevada Gaming Control Board charged that the Chicago hoodlum had been a week-long guest at Sinatra’s Cal-Neva Lodge in Lake Tahoe. His mere presence was enough to revoke the casino’s gambling license, and Sinatra first said he would fight the charge. When Edward A. Olsen, then chairman of the gambling board, said that he didn’t want to talk to Sinatra until he subpoenaed him, Olsen claims Sinatra shouted over the phone, “You subpoena me and you’re going to get a big, fat, f surprise.”
But when the crunch came two weeks later, Sinatra chose not to fight the revocation order. Apparently his friendship with Giancana was more important than his investment in Nevada, and he sold his interests for $3.5 million. In 1975 Giancana was shot to death in the basement of his Chicago home. Phyllis McGuire went to the funeral, but Sinatra didn’t. Sinatra is again trying to get a gambling license in Nevada.
“It’s ridiculous to think Sinatra’s in the mob,” said one New Yorker who has watched gangsters collect around Sinatra for more than 30 years. “He’s too visible. He’s too hot. But he likes them. He thinks they’re funny. In some way he admires them. For him it’s like they were characters in some movie.”
That might be the key. Some people who know Sinatra believe that his attraction to gangsters — and their attraction to him — is sheer romanticism. The year that Sinatra was fifteen, Hollywood released W. R. Burnett’s Little Caesar; more than 50 gangster films followed in the next eighteen months. And their view of gangsters was decidedly romantic: The hoodlums weren’t cretins peddling heroin to children; they were Robin Hoods defying the unjust laws of Prohibition. Robert Warshow defined the type in his essay “The Gangster as Tragic Hero”:
The gangster is the man of the city, with the city’s language and knowledge, with its queer and dishonest skills and its terrible daring, carrying his life in his hands like a placard, like a club. For everyone else, there is at least the theoretical possibility of another world — in that happier American culture which the gangster denies, the city does not really exist; it is only a more crowded and more brightly lit country — but for the gangster there is only the city; he must inhabit it in order to personify it: the real city, but that dangerous and sad city of the imagination which is so much more important, which is the modern world.
That is almost a perfect description of Frank Sinatra, who still carries his life in his hands like a placard, or like a club. His novel might be a very simple one indeed: a symmetrical story about life imitating art.
III.
“My son is like me. You cross him, he never forgets.”
Somewhere deep within Frank Sinatra, there must still exist a scared little boy. He is standing alone on a street in Hoboken. His parents are nowhere to be seen. His father, Anthony Martin, is probably at the bar he runs when he is not working for the fire department; the father is a blue-eyed Sicilian, close-mouthed, passive, and, in his own way, tough. He once boxed as “Marty O’Brien” in the years when the Irish ran northern New Jersey. The boy’s mother, Natalie, is not around either. The neighbors call her Dolly, and she sometimes works at the bar, which was bought with a loan from her mother, Rosa Garaventi, who runs a grocery store. Dolly Sinatra is also a Democratic ward leader. She has places to go, duties to perform, favors to deny or dispense. She has little time for traditional maternal duties. And besides, she didn’t want a boy anyway.
“I wanted a girl and bought a lot of pink clothes,” she once said. “When Frank was born, I didn’t care. I dressed him in pink anyway. Later, I got my mother to make him Lord Fauntleroy suits.”
Did the other kids laugh at the boy in the Lord Fauntleroy suits? Probably. It was a tough, working-class neighborhood. Working-class. Not poor. His mother, born in Genoa, raised in Hoboken, believed in work and education. When she wasn’t around, the boy was taken care of by his grandmother Garaventi, or by Mrs. Goldberg, who lived on the block. “I’ll never forget that kid,” a neighbor said, “leaning against his grandmother’s front door, staring into space. …”
Later the press agents would try to pass him off as a slum kid. Perhaps the most important thing to know about him is that he was an only child. Of Italian parents. And they spoiled him. From the beginning, the only child had money. He had a charge account at a local department store and a wardrobe so fancy that his friends called him “Slacksey.” He had a secondhand car at fifteen. And in the depths of the Depression, after dropping out of high school, he had the ultimate luxury: a job unloading trucks at the Jersey Observer.
Such things were not enough; the boy also had fancy dreams. And the parents didn’t approve. When he told his mother that he wanted to be a singer, she threw a shoe at him. “In your teens,” he said later, “there’s always someone to spit on your dreams.” Still, the only child got what he wanted; eventually his mother bought him a $65 portable public-address system, complete with loudspeaker and microphone. She thus gave him his musical instrument and his life.
She also gave him some of her values. At home she dominated his father; in the streets she dominated the neighborhood through the uses of Democratic patronage. From adolescence on, Sinatra understood patronage. He could give his friends clothes, passes to Palisades Park, rides in his car, and they could give him friendship and loyalty. Power was all. And that insight lifted him above so many other talented performers of his generation. Vic Damone might have better pipes, Tony Bennett a more certain musical taste, but Sinatra had power.
Power attracts and repels; it functions as aphrodisiac and blackjack. Men of power recognize it in others; Sinatra has spent time with Franklin Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson, Jack Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, Walter Annenberg, Hugh Carey, Ronald Reagan; all wanted his approval, and he wanted, and obtained, theirs. He could raise millions for them at fund raisers; they would always take his calls. And the politicians had a lot of company. On the stage at Caesars Palace, or at an elegant East Side dinner party, Sinatra emanates power. Certainly the dark side of the legend accounts for some of that effect; the myth of the Mafia, after all, is not a myth of evil, but a myth of power.
But talent is essential, too. During the period of The Fall, when he had lost his voice, he panicked; he could accept anything except impotence. Without power he is returned to Monroe Street in Hobo-ken, a scared kid. That kid wants to be accepted by powerful men, so he shakes hands with the men of the mob. But the scared kid also understands loneliness, and he uses that knowledge as the engine of his talent. When he sings a ballad — listen again to “I’m a Fool to Want You,” recorded at the depths of his anguish over Ava Gardner — his voice haunts, explores, suffers. Then, in up-tempo songs, it celebrates, it says that the worst can be put behind you, there is always another woman and another bright morning. The scared kid, easy in the world of women and power, also carries the scars of rejection. His mother was too busy. His father sent him away.
“He told me, ‘Get out of the house and get a job,’ “ he said about his father in a rare TV interview with Bill Boggs a few years ago. “I was shocked. I didn’t know where the hell to go. I remember the moment. We were having breakfast.…This particular morning my father said to me, ‘Why don’t you get out of the house and go out on your own?’ What he really said was ‘Get out.’ And I think the egg was stuck in there about twenty minutes, and I couldn’t swallow it or get rid of it, in any way. My mother, of course, was nearly in tears, but we agreed that it might be a good thing, and then I packed up a small case that I had and came to New York.”
He came to New York, all right, and to all the great cities of the world. The scared kid, the only child, invented someone named Frank Sinatra and it was the greatest role he ever played. In some odd way he has become the role. There is a note of farewell in his recent performances. One gets the sense that he is now building his own mausoleum.
“Dyin’ is a pain in the ass,” he says.
Sinatra could be around for another twenty years, or he could be gone tomorrow, but the jagged symmetries of his legend would remain. For too many years the scared kid lashed out at enemies, real or imagined; he courted his inferiors, intoxicated by their power; he helped people and hurt people; he was willful, self-absorbed, and frivolous. But the talent survived everything, and so did the fear, and when I see him around, I always imagine him as a boy on that Hobo-ken street in his Fauntleroy suit and remember him wandering the streets of New York a half century later, trying to figure out what all of it meant.
NEW YORK,
April 28, 1980
I.
One rainy evening in the winter of 1974, I was home alone when the telephone rang. I picked up the receiver, looking out at the wet street, and heard one of the most familiar voices of the century. It was Frank Sinatra.
“What are you doing?”
“Reading a book,” I said.
“Read it tomorrow. We’re at Jilly’s. Come on over.”
He hung up. I put the book down. I didn’t know Sinatra well, but despite all the rotten things I’d read about him, I liked him a lot and was sometimes touched by him. We’d met through Shirley MacLaine, who went back a long time with Sinatra. In 1958 Sinatra put her in Some Came Running, expanded her part to fit her talents, and made her a movie star. When they occasionally met, it was clear to me that Sinatra admired her relentless honesty, loved her in some complicated way, and was, like me, a little afraid of her.
I took a cab to Jilly’s, a seedy time warp of a saloon at the Eighth Avenue end of 52nd Street. The long, dark bar was packed with the junior varsity of the mob; of all the Sinatra groupies, they were the most laughable. They were planted at the bar like blue-haired statues, gulping Jack Daniel’s, occasionally glancing into the back room. A maitre d’ in a shiny tuxedo stood beside a red velvet rope that separated the back room from the Junior Apalachin conference at the bar.
“Yes, sir?” the maitre d’ said.
“Mr. Sinatra,” I said. “He’s expecting me.”
He turned nervously, his eyes moving past the empty tables at the booths in the left-hand corner against the wall. Jilly Rizzo looked up from a booth and nodded, and I was let through. “ ‘Ey, Petey babe,” Jilly said, coming around a table with his right hand out. Jilly has one glass eye, which gives him a perpetually blurry look. “Hey, Frank,” he said, “look who’s here.”
“Hey, Peter, grab a seat!” Sinatra said brightly, half rising from the booth and shaking hands. He moved clumsily, a newly heavy man who hadn’t learned yet to carry the extra weight with grace; he seemed swollen, rather than sleek. But the Sinatra face was — and is — an extraordinary assemblage. He has never been conventionally handsome: There are no clean planes, too many knobs of bone, scars from the forceps delivery he endured at birth. But the smile is open, easy, insouciant. And his blue eyes are the true focal point of the face. In the brief time I’d known him, I’d seen the eyes so disarmingly open that you felt you could peer all the way through them into every secret recess of the man; at other times they were cloudy with indifference, and when chilled by anger or resentment, they could become as opaque as cold-rolled steel.
“You eat yet?” he asked. “Well, then have a drink.”
As always, there was a group with him, squashed into the worn Leatherette booths or on chairs against tables. They had the back room to themselves and were eating chop suey and watching a Jets game on a TV set. Sinatra introduced Pat Henry, the comic who sometimes opens for him; Roone Arledge of ABC; Don Costa, one of Sinatra’s favorite arrangers; a few other men; and some young women. Sinatra was with a thin blond model in a black dress. He didn’t introduce her.
The conversation stopped for the introductions, then started again. Sinatra leaned over, his eyes shifting to the TV screen, where Joe Namath was being shoved around.
“I don’t get this team,” he said. “They got the best arm in football and they won’t give him any protection. Ah, shit!” Namath was on his back and getting up very slowly. “Oh, man. That ain’t right!”
They cut to a commercial, and Sinatra lit a Marlboro and sipped a vodka. His eyes drifted to the bar. “Jesus, there’s about 43 indictments right at the bar,” he said loudly.
“Present company excluded,” Pat Henry said, and everybody laughed.
“It better be,” Sinatra said, and they all laughed again. The blonde smiled in a chilly way. The game was back on again, and Sinatra stared at the TV set but wasn’t really watching the game. Then the game ended, and Jilly switched off the set. There was more talk and more drinking, and slowly the others began to leave.
“Hell, let’s go,” Sinatra said. He said something to Jilly, and then he and the blonde and I walked out. A photographer and a middle-aged autograph freak were waiting under the tattered awning.
“Do you mind, Mr. Sinatra?” the photographer asked.
“No, go ahead,” he said. The flashbulbs popped. The blonde smiled. So did Sinatra. “Thanks for asking.”
Then he signed the woman’s autograph book. She had skin like grimy ivory, and sad brown eyes. “Thanks, dear,” Sinatra said. We all got into the waiting limousine and drove down the rainy street, heading east.
“What do you think they do with those autographs?” he said. “Sell them? To who? Trade them? For what? How does it go? Two Elvis Presleys for one Frank Sinatra? Two Frank Sinatras for one Paul McCartney? I don’t get it. I never did.”
We drove awhile in silence. Then the chauffeur turned right on a street in the Sixties and pulled over to the curb. Sinatra and the blonde got out. He took her into the brightly lit vestibule. He waited for her to find a key, tapped her lightly on the elbow, and came back to the limo.
“You have to go home?”
“No.”
He leaned forward to the driver. “Just drive around awhile.”
“Yes sir.”
And so for more than an hour, on this rainy night in New York, we drove around the empty streets. Sinatra talked about Lennon and McCartney as songwriters (“That ‘Yesterday’ is the best song written in 30 years”) and George Harrison (“His ‘Something’ is a beauty”), prizefighters (“Sugar Ray was the best I ever saw”) and writers (“Murray Kempton is the best, isn’t he? And I always loved Jimmy Cannon”). It wasn’t an interview; Frank Sinatra just wanted to talk, in a city far from the bright scorched exile of Palm Springs.
“It’s sure changed, this town,” he said. “When I first came across that river, this was the greatest city in the whole goddamned world. It was like a big, beautiful lady. It’s like a busted-down hooker now.”
“Ah, well,” I said. “Babe Ruth doesn’t play for the Yankees anymore.”
“And the Paramount’s an office building,” he said. “Stop. I’m gonna cry.”
He laughed and settled back. We were crossing 86th Street now, heading for the park.
“You think some people are smart, and they turn out dumb,” Sinatra said. “You think they’re straight, they turn out crooked.” This was, of course, the Watergate winter; the year before, Sinatra sat in an honored place at the second inauguration of Richard Nixon. “You like people, and they die on you. I go to too many goddamned funerals these days. And women,” he said, exhaling, and chuckling again, “I don’t know what the hell to make of them. Do you?”
“Every day I know less,” I said.
“Maybe that’s what it’s all about,” he said. “Maybe all that happens is you get older and you know less.”
After a while, the limousine pulled up in front of the Waldorf, where Sinatra has an apartment. He told the driver to take me home.
“Stay in touch,” he said, and got out, walking fast, his head down, his step jaunty, his hands deep in the pockets of his coat. I remember thinking that it was a desperately lonely life for a man who was a legend.
II.
“I am a symmetrical man, almost to a fault.”
At 64, Francis Albert Sinatra is one of that handful of Americans whose deaths would certainly unleash a river of tearful prose and much genuine grief. He has worked at his trade for almost half a century and goes on as if nothing at all had changed. He is currently in New York making his first feature film in ten years, The First Deadly Sin. His first new studio album in five years is in the record stores, a three-record set called Trilogy, and despite one astonishing lapse in taste (a self-aggrandizing “musical fantasy” written by banality master Gordon Jenkins), it reveals that what Sinatra calls “my reed” is in better shape than it has been in since the 1960s. In concert halls and casinos he packs in the fans, and the intensity of their embrace remains scary. But his work and its public acceptance are now almost incidental to his stature. Frank Sinatra, from Hoboken, New Jersey, has forced his presence into American social history; when the story of how Americans in this century played, dreamed, hoped, and loved is told, Frank Sinatra cannot be left out. He is more than a mere singer or actor. He is a legend. And the legend lives.
The legend has its own symmetries. Sinatra can be unbelievably generous and brutally vicious. He can display the grace and manners of a cultured man and turn suddenly into a vulgar two-bit comic. He can offer George Raft a blank check “up to one million dollars” to pay taxes owed to the IRS; he can then rage against one of his most important boosters, WNEW disc jockey Jonathan Schwartz, and help force him off the air. In his time, he has been a loyal Democrat and a shill for Richard Nixon; a defender of underdogs everywhere and then a spokesman for the Establishment; a man who fought racism in the music business and then became capable of tasteless jokes (“The Polacks are deboning the colored people,” he said on the stage of Caesars Palace in 1974, “and using them for wet suits”). He has given magical performances and shoddy ones. He has treated women with elegance, sensitivity, and charm, and then, in Lauren Bacall’s phrase, “dropped the curtain” on them in the most callous way. He acts like royalty and is frequently treated that way, but he also comes on too often like a cheap hood. He is a good guy-bad guy, tough-tender, Jekyll-Hyde.
“Being an eighteen-karat manic-depressive,” Sinatra said once, “I have an over-acute capacity for sadness as well as elation.”
Over the years, those wildly fluctuating emotions became a basic component of the Sinatra legend — accepted, even demanded by his audience. That audience is now largely eastern, urban, and aging, with New York at the heart of the myth. The hard-core fans are Depression kids who matured in World War II, or part of the fifties generation, who saw him as a role model. In some critical way, Sinatra validates their lives — as individuals. He sings to them, and for them, one at a time. These Americans were transformed by the Depression and the war into unwilling members of groups — “the masses,” or “the poor,” or “the infantry” — and their popular music was dominated by the big bands. Sinatra was the first star to step out of the tightly controlled ensembles of the white swing bands to work on his own. Yes, he was 4-F (punctured eardrum), but the overwhelming majority of Americans experienced World War II at home, and the 1940s Sinatra was a reminder that Americans were single human beings, not just the masses, the poor, or the infantry. Later, in the 1960s, when crowds once again shoved individuals off the stage of history, he was submerged by musical groups like the Beatles and Rolling Stones and in 1971 even went into a brief retirement. He came back later in the decade, when individual values were again dominant.
“I’ve seen them come and go, but Frank is still the king,” a New Jersey grandmother said at one of Sinatra’s weekend performances at Resorts International in Atlantic City. “He just goes on and on, and he’s wonderful.”
Indeed, Sinatra’s endurance has become a rallying point for many people who feel that their sacrifices and hard work are no longer honored, their values demeaned, their musical tastes ignored and sneered at. They don’t care that Sinatra got fat; so did they. They don’t care that Sinatra moved from the New Deal to Ronald Reagan; many of them did the same thing, for the same basic reason: resentment at being ignored by the Democratic party. They had overcome poverty and survived two wars; they had educated their children and given them better lives; and sometimes even their children didn’t care. But it should never be forgotten that Frank Sinatra was the original working-class hero. Mick Jagger’s fans bought records with their allowances; Sinatra’s people bought them out of wages.
“There’s just not enough of Frank’s people around anymore to make him a monster record seller,” says one Warner Communications executive. “Sinatra is a star. But he’s not Fleetwood Mac. He’s not Pink Floyd.”
Sinatra has never been a big single seller (one gold record — more than a million sales — to twenty for the Beatles), but his albums continue to sell steadily. One reason: Most radio stations don’t play Sinatra, so that younger listeners never get to hear him and go on to buy his records. In New York, only WNEW-AM and WYNY-FM play Sinatra with any frequency. As a movie star, he had faded badly before vanishing completely with the lamentable Dirty Dingus Magee in 1970. Part of this could be blamed directly on Sinatra, because his insistence on one or two takes had led to careless, even shoddy productions. On his own, he was also not a strong TV performer; he needed Elvis Presley, or Bing Crosby, to get big ratings. Yet Sinatra remains a major star in the minds of most Americans, even those who despise him.
“What Sinatra has is beyond talent,” director Billy Wilder once said. “It’s some sort of magnetism that goes in higher revolutions than that of anybody else, anybody in the whole of show business. Wherever Frank is, there is a certain electricity permeating the air. It’s like Mack the Knife is in town and the action is starting.”
That electricity was in the air of Jilly’s that night in 1974. But its effect is not restricted to a platoon of gumbahs. The other night, Sinatra came into Elaine’s with his wife, Barbara, and another couple. It was after midnight, and Sinatra stayed for a couple of hours, drinking and talking and smoking cigarettes.
I was with some friends at another table. They were people who are good at their jobs and have seen much of the world. But their own natural styles were subtly altered by the addition of Sinatra to the room. They stole glances at him. They were aware that Sinatra’s blue eyes were also checking out the room, and unconsciously they began to gesture too much, playing too hard at being casual, or clarifying themselves in a theatrical way. Somewhere underneath all of this, I’m sure, was a desire for Frank Sinatra to like them.
I knew how that worked, because I’d felt those emotions myself. When I first met Sinatra, I was bumping up against one of the crucial legends of my youth, and sure, I wanted him to like me. Growing up in Brooklyn in the forties and fifties, it was impossible to avoid the figure of Frank Sinatra. He was armored with the tough-guy swagger of the streets, but in the songs he allowed room for tenderness, the sense of loss and abandonment, the acknowledgment of pain. Most of us felt that we had nothing to learn from cowboys or Cary Grant (we were wrong, of course). But thousands of us appropriated the pose of the Tender Tough Guy from Sinatra. We’ve outgrown a lot of things, but there are elements of that pose in all of us to this day, and when we see Sinatra perform, or listen to the records at night, the pose regains all of its old dangerous glamour.
And make no mistake: Danger is at the heart of the legend. At his best, Sinatra is an immensely gifted musical talent, admired by many jazz musicians. He is not a jazz singer, but he comes from the tradition. As a young band vocalist, he learned breath control from trombonist Tommy Dorsey; after work, he studied other singers, among them Louis Armstrong, Lee Wiley, Mabel Mercer, and another performer who became a legend.
“It is Billie Holiday, whom I first heard in 52nd Street clubs in the early ’30s, who was and still remains the greatest single musical influence on me,” he wrote once, later telling Daily News columnist Kay Gardella that Lady Day taught him “matters of shading, phrasing, dark tones, light tones and bending notes.” And in the saloons of the time, the young Sinatra learned a great secret of the trade: “The microphone is the singer’s basic instrument, not the voice. You have to learn to play it like it was a saxophone.” As he matured, Sinatra developed a unique white-blues style, supple enough to express the range of his own turbulent emotions. And like the great jazz artists, he took the banal tunes of Tin Pan Alley and transformed them into something personal by the sincerity of his performance; Sinatra actually seemed to believe the words he was singing. But Billy Wilder is correct: The Sinatra aura goes beyond talent and craft. He is not simply a fine popular singer. He emanates power and danger. And the reason is simple: You think he is tangled up with the mob.
“Some things I can’t ever talk about,” he said to me once, when we were discussing the mandatory contents of his book. He laughed and added, “Someone might come knockin’ at my f- door.”
Sinatra is now writing that autobiography and preparing a film about his own life. Alas, neither form seems adequate to the full story; autobiographies are by definition only part of the story, the instinct being to prepare a brief for the defense and give yourself the best lines. And a two-hour movie can only skim the surface of a life that has gone on for six decades. Faulkner says somewhere that the best stories are the ones we are most thoroughly ashamed of; it could be that the best movies are the ones that can’t be photographed. No, Sinatra deserves a novel.
The novelist, some combination of Balzac and Raymond Chandler, would recognize Sinatra as one of those rare public men who actually cast a shadow. The shadow is the mob, and who can tell what came first, the shadow or the act? A conventional autobiography will talk about the wives: Nancy Barbato, Ava Gardner, Mia Farrow, and Barbara Marx, one for each adult decade. It might mention, discreetly, all the other love affairs, passionate or glancing: Lana Turner, Juliet Prowse, Lauren Bacall, Kim Novak, Jill St. John, Lady Adele Beatty, Dorothy Provine, and the anonymous brigade of starlets, secretaries, models, stewardesses, and girls from the old neighborhood.
“I loved them all,” Sinatra says now, smiling ruefully, reminding you that he is now a grandfather and all of that was long ago. “I really did.”
But the novelist can come closer to the elusive truth than an autobiographer as courtly as Sinatra will ever allow himself to do. Both would deal with the public career, the rise, fall, rise again of Frank Sinatra. We can see the high school dropout watching Bing Crosby sing from the stage of Loew’s Journal Square in Jersey City in 1933, vowing to become a singer. We can follow him, one of Balzac’s provincial heroes, as he wins an amateur contest and crosses the river to appear for the first time on a New York stage at the Academy of Music (now the Palladium) on 14th Street the following year. The hero then sings with a group called the Hoboken Four on the Major Bowes Amateur Hour in 1935, plays local clubs, begs in the hallways of WNEW for the chance to sing for nothing on live remotes. And of course there will be the familiar story of the job at the Rustic Cabin on Route 9W in 1939, and how Harry James heard him late one night and gave him a job in the big time. And then how Sinatra went to work for Tommy Dorsey and played the Paramount and became a star.
And because this is a story with a hero, it must tell the story of The Fall. The hero hurtles into love with Ava Gardner, and his career becomes a shambles: He loses his voice, his wife, his children; he gets into public fights; he wins the love goddess; he loses her; he hits bottom. And then there is The Great Comeback: He pleads for the part of Maggio in From Here to Eternity, is paid $8,000, gives a stunning performance, wins the Academy Award, and comes all the way back. He leaves Columbia Records for Capitol, then starts his own company, Reprise, and makes his greatest records. At the same time he consolidates his power in Hollywood, investing his money brilliantly, producing his own films, using power with the instincts of a great politician. These are the years of the private jets, the meetings of the Clan on the stages of Las Vegas, the friendships with Jack Kennedy and other politicians, and the house at the top of Mulholland Drive, where the wounded hero heals his ruined heart with girls and whiskey and friends. It’s a good story. A sentimental education or a cautionary tale.
But as autobiography it is not enough. We must have some understanding of the shadows. In The Godfather Mario Puzo used some of the elements in the singer he called Johnny Fontane; other novels have used Sinatra-like figures in various ways; yet no fictional account has truly defined the man in all of his complexity. We only know that the mob runs through his story like an underground river. He is the most investigated American performer since John Wilkes Booth, and although he has never been indicted or convicted of any mob-connected crime, the connection is part of the legend. And to some extent, Sinatra exploits it. His opening acts feature comedians who tell jokes about Sinatra’s sinister friendships; if you cross Frank, the jokes say, you could end up on a meat hook in a garage. In some circumstances Sinatra laughs at the implications; other times, he explodes into dark furies, accusing his accusers of slander and ethnic racism.
“If my name didn’t end with a vowel,” he said to me once, “I wouldn’t have had all this trouble.”
But the facts indicate that he did know some shady people. He was friendly with Jersey hoodlum Willie Moretti until the syphilitic gangster was shot to death. He was friendly with Joseph “Joe Fisher” Fischetti, traveled with him to Havana in 1947, where he spent time with Lucky Luciano. A nineteen-page Justice Department memorandum prepared in 1962 said that its surveillance placed Sinatra in contact with about ten of the country’s top hoodlums. Some had Sinatra’s unlisted number. He did favors for others.
“I was brought up to shake a man’s hand when I am introduced to him, without first investigating his past,” Sinatra said huffily during the Luciano uproar. The same could be said about the scandal over the photograph taken a few years ago with mob boss Carlo Gambino, backstage at the Westchester Premier Theater. More serious questions have now been raised about Sinatra and that same theater.
A federal grand jury is investigating whether Sinatra, his lawyer Mickey Rudin, and Jilly Rizzo took $50,000 under the table during a May 1977 gig there. Court papers filed by prosecutor Nathaniel Akerman said that the possible Sinatra connection arose during the trial of one Louis “Lewie Dome” Pacella, supposedly a friend of Sinatra’s. The court papers state: “The grand jury’s investigation was based in part on evidence introduced at Pacella’s trial, which showed that in addition to Pacella, other individuals close to Frank Sinatra had received monies illegally…” Once again, Sinatra is afloat on that dark underground river.
“Did I know those guys?” he said to me once. “Sure, I knew some of those guys. I spent a lot of time working in saloons. And saloons are not run by the Christian Brothers. There were a lot of guys around, and they came out of Prohibition, and they ran pretty good saloons. I was a kid. I worked in the places that were open. They paid you, and the checks didn’t bounce. I didn’t meet any Nobel Prize winners in saloons. But if Francis of Assisi was a singer and worked in saloons, he would’ye met the same guys. That doesn’t make him part of something. They said hello, you said hello. They came backstage. They thanked you. You offered them a drink. That was it.”
He paused. “And it doesn’t matter anymore, does it? Most of the guys I knew, or met, are dead.”
One of them was Salvatore Giancana, sometimes known as Momo, or Mooney. A graduate of Joliet prison, he ducked World War II by doing a crazy act for the draft board, which labeled him “a constitutional psychopath.” He rose through the wartime rackets to the leadership of the Chicago mob in the 1950s. During that period he and Sinatra became friends and were seen in various places together. The star-struck Momo later began a long love affair with singer Phyllis McGuire, and the friendship deepened. In 1962 Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis played a special engagement at a Giancana joint called the Villa Venice, northwest of Chicago. When the FBI questioned the performers, Sinatra said he did it for a boyhood friend named Leo Olsen, who fronted the place for Momo. Sammy Davis was more to the point.
“Baby, let me say this,” he told an FBI man. “I got one eye, and that one eye sees a lot of things that my brain tells me I shouldn’t talk about. Because my brain says that if I do, my one eye might not be seeing anything after a while.”
Sinatra’s friendship with Sam Giancana was most severely tested in 1963, when the Nevada Gaming Control Board charged that the Chicago hoodlum had been a week-long guest at Sinatra’s Cal-Neva Lodge in Lake Tahoe. His mere presence was enough to revoke the casino’s gambling license, and Sinatra first said he would fight the charge. When Edward A. Olsen, then chairman of the gambling board, said that he didn’t want to talk to Sinatra until he subpoenaed him, Olsen claims Sinatra shouted over the phone, “You subpoena me and you’re going to get a big, fat, f surprise.”
But when the crunch came two weeks later, Sinatra chose not to fight the revocation order. Apparently his friendship with Giancana was more important than his investment in Nevada, and he sold his interests for $3.5 million. In 1975 Giancana was shot to death in the basement of his Chicago home. Phyllis McGuire went to the funeral, but Sinatra didn’t. Sinatra is again trying to get a gambling license in Nevada.
“It’s ridiculous to think Sinatra’s in the mob,” said one New Yorker who has watched gangsters collect around Sinatra for more than 30 years. “He’s too visible. He’s too hot. But he likes them. He thinks they’re funny. In some way he admires them. For him it’s like they were characters in some movie.”
That might be the key. Some people who know Sinatra believe that his attraction to gangsters — and their attraction to him — is sheer romanticism. The year that Sinatra was fifteen, Hollywood released W. R. Burnett’s Little Caesar; more than 50 gangster films followed in the next eighteen months. And their view of gangsters was decidedly romantic: The hoodlums weren’t cretins peddling heroin to children; they were Robin Hoods defying the unjust laws of Prohibition. Robert Warshow defined the type in his essay “The Gangster as Tragic Hero”:
The gangster is the man of the city, with the city’s language and knowledge, with its queer and dishonest skills and its terrible daring, carrying his life in his hands like a placard, like a club. For everyone else, there is at least the theoretical possibility of another world — in that happier American culture which the gangster denies, the city does not really exist; it is only a more crowded and more brightly lit country — but for the gangster there is only the city; he must inhabit it in order to personify it: the real city, but that dangerous and sad city of the imagination which is so much more important, which is the modern world.
That is almost a perfect description of Frank Sinatra, who still carries his life in his hands like a placard, or like a club. His novel might be a very simple one indeed: a symmetrical story about life imitating art.
III.
“My son is like me. You cross him, he never forgets.”
Somewhere deep within Frank Sinatra, there must still exist a scared little boy. He is standing alone on a street in Hoboken. His parents are nowhere to be seen. His father, Anthony Martin, is probably at the bar he runs when he is not working for the fire department; the father is a blue-eyed Sicilian, close-mouthed, passive, and, in his own way, tough. He once boxed as “Marty O’Brien” in the years when the Irish ran northern New Jersey. The boy’s mother, Natalie, is not around either. The neighbors call her Dolly, and she sometimes works at the bar, which was bought with a loan from her mother, Rosa Garaventi, who runs a grocery store. Dolly Sinatra is also a Democratic ward leader. She has places to go, duties to perform, favors to deny or dispense. She has little time for traditional maternal duties. And besides, she didn’t want a boy anyway.
“I wanted a girl and bought a lot of pink clothes,” she once said. “When Frank was born, I didn’t care. I dressed him in pink anyway. Later, I got my mother to make him Lord Fauntleroy suits.”
Did the other kids laugh at the boy in the Lord Fauntleroy suits? Probably. It was a tough, working-class neighborhood. Working-class. Not poor. His mother, born in Genoa, raised in Hoboken, believed in work and education. When she wasn’t around, the boy was taken care of by his grandmother Garaventi, or by Mrs. Goldberg, who lived on the block. “I’ll never forget that kid,” a neighbor said, “leaning against his grandmother’s front door, staring into space. …”
Later the press agents would try to pass him off as a slum kid. Perhaps the most important thing to know about him is that he was an only child. Of Italian parents. And they spoiled him. From the beginning, the only child had money. He had a charge account at a local department store and a wardrobe so fancy that his friends called him “Slacksey.” He had a secondhand car at fifteen. And in the depths of the Depression, after dropping out of high school, he had the ultimate luxury: a job unloading trucks at the Jersey Observer.
Such things were not enough; the boy also had fancy dreams. And the parents didn’t approve. When he told his mother that he wanted to be a singer, she threw a shoe at him. “In your teens,” he said later, “there’s always someone to spit on your dreams.” Still, the only child got what he wanted; eventually his mother bought him a $65 portable public-address system, complete with loudspeaker and microphone. She thus gave him his musical instrument and his life.
She also gave him some of her values. At home she dominated his father; in the streets she dominated the neighborhood through the uses of Democratic patronage. From adolescence on, Sinatra understood patronage. He could give his friends clothes, passes to Palisades Park, rides in his car, and they could give him friendship and loyalty. Power was all. And that insight lifted him above so many other talented performers of his generation. Vic Damone might have better pipes, Tony Bennett a more certain musical taste, but Sinatra had power.
Power attracts and repels; it functions as aphrodisiac and blackjack. Men of power recognize it in others; Sinatra has spent time with Franklin Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson, Jack Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, Walter Annenberg, Hugh Carey, Ronald Reagan; all wanted his approval, and he wanted, and obtained, theirs. He could raise millions for them at fund raisers; they would always take his calls. And the politicians had a lot of company. On the stage at Caesars Palace, or at an elegant East Side dinner party, Sinatra emanates power. Certainly the dark side of the legend accounts for some of that effect; the myth of the Mafia, after all, is not a myth of evil, but a myth of power.
But talent is essential, too. During the period of The Fall, when he had lost his voice, he panicked; he could accept anything except impotence. Without power he is returned to Monroe Street in Hobo-ken, a scared kid. That kid wants to be accepted by powerful men, so he shakes hands with the men of the mob. But the scared kid also understands loneliness, and he uses that knowledge as the engine of his talent. When he sings a ballad — listen again to “I’m a Fool to Want You,” recorded at the depths of his anguish over Ava Gardner — his voice haunts, explores, suffers. Then, in up-tempo songs, it celebrates, it says that the worst can be put behind you, there is always another woman and another bright morning. The scared kid, easy in the world of women and power, also carries the scars of rejection. His mother was too busy. His father sent him away.
“He told me, ‘Get out of the house and get a job,’ “ he said about his father in a rare TV interview with Bill Boggs a few years ago. “I was shocked. I didn’t know where the hell to go. I remember the moment. We were having breakfast.…This particular morning my father said to me, ‘Why don’t you get out of the house and go out on your own?’ What he really said was ‘Get out.’ And I think the egg was stuck in there about twenty minutes, and I couldn’t swallow it or get rid of it, in any way. My mother, of course, was nearly in tears, but we agreed that it might be a good thing, and then I packed up a small case that I had and came to New York.”
He came to New York, all right, and to all the great cities of the world. The scared kid, the only child, invented someone named Frank Sinatra and it was the greatest role he ever played. In some odd way he has become the role. There is a note of farewell in his recent performances. One gets the sense that he is now building his own mausoleum.
“Dyin’ is a pain in the ass,” he says.
Sinatra could be around for another twenty years, or he could be gone tomorrow, but the jagged symmetries of his legend would remain. For too many years the scared kid lashed out at enemies, real or imagined; he courted his inferiors, intoxicated by their power; he helped people and hurt people; he was willful, self-absorbed, and frivolous. But the talent survived everything, and so did the fear, and when I see him around, I always imagine him as a boy on that Hobo-ken street in his Fauntleroy suit and remember him wandering the streets of New York a half century later, trying to figure out what all of it meant.
NEW YORK,
April 28, 1980
GLEASON
Here he comes, “the Great One,” in a maroon stretch limousine, its planes and curves glistening in the summer sun. The limousine moves in a stately way down a curving path and stops in front of a huge pile of stone, brick, and mortar that is the centerpiece of the Riverdale estate known as Wave Hill. The Great One steps out of the limousine, blinks in the bright sunshine, glances at the cables, massed trailers, busy extras, grips, and electricians who are part of every movie location. Then he steps into the huge Beaver 36 mobile home that is parked on the shoulder of the driveway.
“Come on in,” Jackie Gleason calls behind him. “Have a seat, I’ll be with you in a minute.”
He’s 69, and looks in good shape, given what he has done to the body over the years: the gorging and the pig-outs, the monumental drinking bouts, a broken arm in the forties, a broken leg in the fifties, the crash diets, careening horseplay, billions of cigarettes. He’s six feet tall, and large, but he doesn’t look fat. He goes to the back of the trailer with a valet, closes the door, and emerges in a black shirt and slacks. The face is now a draftsman’s delight: pouches, slashes, the large upper lip sliced by a thin mustache, eyes that alternately sparkle and grieve, a face made for expression. He lights a cigarette, sits back on a couch.
A production assistant leans in through the open door. “Can I get you anything, Mr. Gleason?”
“Yeah,” he says, “a couple of broads.”
Everybody laughs except Gleason. He blinks in a deadpan way and takes a drag on a cigarette.
Suddenly, it’s Gleason time again. The so-called lost episodes of The Honeymooners are appearing three nights a week on Showtime; they will go on for a year before joining the classic 39 pieces from 1955-56 already in syndication. Gleason is serving as creative consultant and co-producer of a Broadway musical based on The Honeymooners. Membership in R.A.L.P.H. (Royal Association for the Longevity and Preservation of The Honeymooners) is soaring as more and more young people discover the great comedies made 30 years ago by Gleason, Art Carney, Audrey Meadows, and Joyce Randolph within a 2o-by-3o-foot set in the Adelphi Theatre on West 54th Street. When four “lost” episodes of The Honeymooners were shown at the Museum of Broadcasting last year, the place was jammed with old fans and new.
“Who couldn’t be happy about it?” Gleason says. “To think that something you did 30 years ago can still give people laughs: I mean, that’s somethin’!”
But the Gleason surge is more than a nostalgia act; he’s working harder than he has in years. To begin with, there is the TV movie that brought him to Riverdale on this bright summer day. Producer Robert Halmi managed to bring Gleason together with Art Carney for the first time since 1978 in the only non-Honeymooners work they’ve done since the early fifties. The movie, to be on CBS September 23, is called Izzy and Moe; it’s about two failed vaudevillians (Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith) who became Prohibition agents in the 1920s and provided grand tabloid entertainment for the duration of the Volstead Act. Gleason worked hard with writer Robert Boris to remove any possible echoes of The Honeymooners from the script.
“We didn’t want to do Ralph and Norton again,” Gleason says. “And this is nothing like them. These are two different guys altogether.”
For Izzy and Moe, Gleason is supervising the music, most of it in a Dixieland style (he’s composed three tunes). After that, he will head out to Hollywood to work with Tom Hanks in a feature film called Nothing in Common.
“Yeah, I’m working,” Gleason says, and then waves the cigarette. “But what the hell, I always worked.”
But there is more to this latest Gleason moment than career notes; there’s a growing awareness that Gleason has been for many years one of this country’s great comic geniuses, on a level, perhaps, with Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton, and Chaplin. This doesn’t apply to his acting in the Smokey and the Bandit movies (although even that work has its own solidity and sense of surprise), or to the straight acting he did in such films as The Hustler (for which he received an Academy Award nomination in 1962), Requiem for a Heavyweight, or the much acclaimed TV version of The Time of Your Life. Gleason deserves the half-mocking title the Great One for his accomplishments on his own television shows — that is, for the work he created or controlled.
“Jackie Gleason is an artist of the first rank,” John O’Hara wrote years ago, with uncharacteristic generosity. “An artist puts his own personal stamp on all of his mature work, making his handling of his material uniquely his own. Millions of people who don’t give a damn about art have been quick to recognize a creation. Ralph Kramden is a character that we might be getting from Mr. Dickens if he were writing for TV.”
That gets close to the heart of Gleason’s enduring accomplishment. He was a creator of a vast Dickensian cast of characters: Reginald Van Gleason III, the Poor Soul, Joe the Bartender, Charlie “the Loudmouth” Bratton, Rudy the Repairman, Crazy Guggenheim, Stanley R. Sogg (the late-show pitchman who sold, among other things, a book called How to Slide Downhill on Your Little Brother).
And then, of course, there were Ralph and Alice, Norton and Trixie. I first saw them while I was a teenager in Brooklyn in the fifties, sitting in Catherine Rogan’s living room. I laughed at them then and laugh at them now. “This was nudge comedy,” Gleason says. “When you see Ralph or Ed, or any of the others, you nudge the guy next to you and say, ’Jeez> that’s just like Uncle Charlie,’ or some guy down the block.”
True, but there was more to the show than that. When Gleason first exploded on TV all those years ago, he wasn’t just a gifted comedian. He was ours. He wasn’t just New York; he was Brooklyn. When he swaggered onstage to open the show, flanked by gorgeous women, we swaggered with him; when we read about his all-night sessions at Toots Shor’s or Eddie Condon’s, his gigantic meals, his partying with show girls and prizefighters and Max Kaminsky’s band, we ate and drank and parried with him; when we picked up the News and Mirror in 1954 and read about his $n-million deal with CBS, it was as if we’d signed the deal, too.
So, in Brooklyn in the fifties, we watched The Honeymooners in a broader context; it was the continuing story of Ralph and Alice, Norton and Trixie, but it was also part of the Gleason legend. We didn’t imagine in those days that The Honeymooners would be with us the rest of our lives. And yet here they are, six nights a week, as constant as the stars (each of the 39 episodes has been played more than 200 times in the New York area). Some of us left Brooklyn, others stayed; we made our lives; but Ralph and Norton remain the same, and we know them better now than we did then.
“I guess it lasted for a couple of reasons,” Gleason says. “One, the show was funny. That usually helps. Two, you like the people. If the audience likes you, you’re home free.”
The show was also a triumph of show-business craft. Gleason, with his producer, Jack Philbin, and his crew of writers (Walter Stone, Marvin Marx, Herbert Finn, and others), evolved rules for The Honeymooners that contributed to the show’s durability. “First, it had to be believable,” Gleason says. “Whatever the deal was, you had to believe it could happen. Second, the audience had to know what’s really going on before Ralph does. That was the key to the comedy.”
In addition, each show was classically constructed, with a beginning, middle, and end (“I see stuff now that stops, but doesn’t really end”). The situations were quickly, carefully, and lucidly set up, the characters were clearly defined, and the relationships were held together by a rough kind of love. Ralph really did believe that Alice was the greatest (he would never ever really try to send her to the moon with a haymaker). Alice loved Ralph in the most confident way, unafraid to slam into him, completely aware of his flaws and faults, his insecurities, his boastfulness, his wild-eyed schemes, but equally clear about his strengths, the most important of which was a heart as big as Bensonhurst. They had no kids (except Ralph), a fact that made the relationship more modern than those in most of the kid-littered sitcoms that first showed up in the fifties. And, of course, Ralph and Norton loved each other, too, without ever stating what they felt. They were as dependent upon each other as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, whom Ralph, the dreamer, and Norton, the practical man, resemble in other ways.
In his 1956 biography of Gleason, The Golden Ham, Jim Bishop reconstructed the story conference that led to the invention of The Honeymooners:
One afternoon Joe Bigelow and Harry Crane were trying to write a sketch with the star, and Gleason said that he had an idea for a sketch that would revolve around a married couple — a quiet shrewd wife and a loudmouthed husband.
“You got a title for it?” asked Bigelow.
“Wait a minute,” said Crane. “How about The Beast’?”
Jackie got to his feet. “Just a second,” he said. “I always wanted to do this thing, and the man isn’t a beast. The guy really loves this broad. They fight, sure. But they always end in a clinch.”
Bigelow shrugged. “It could be a thing.”
“I come from a neighborhood full of that stuff. By the time I was fifteen, I knew every insult in the book.”
“Then let’s try it,” said Bigelow.
“But not The Beast,’ “ said Jackie. “That’s not the title.”
“Why not?”
“It sounds like the husband is doing all the fighting. We need something a little left-handed as a title. You know, this kind of thing can go and go and go.”
“How about The Lovers,’ “ said Harry Crane.
“That’s a little closer, Harry.” Gleason paced the floor. “A little closer, but it could mean that they’re not married. We need something that tells at once that they’re married.”
” The Couple Next Door’?”
“No. How about The Honeymooners’?”
That was it, and, like a great novelist, Gleason reached back into the early years of his life for his characters. They’re still with us; they’re still with Gleason.
“I knew a lot of guys like Ralph,” he says now, “back there, growing up.”
In William Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English Comic Writers, written in the winter of 1818, there’s a line that’s true of all of us but seems particularly appropriate to Gleason: “To understand or define the ludicrous, we must first know what the serious is.” The serious roots of Gleason’s talent go back to the Brooklyn of his childhood, specifically to Bushwick, which was then an Irish and Italian working-class district.
“Everything happened there,” Gleason says. “Everything.”
He was born Herbert John Gleason on February 26, 1916, the second child of Herbert Gleason and Mae Kelly. There was a brother eleven years older than Jackie; his name was Clemence, and he died when Jackie was three. Though Jackie has no memory of him, he took his dead brother’s name at confirmation. His father, slim, black-haired, a drinker, worked in the Death Claims Department of the Mutual Life Insurance Company at 20 Nassau Street.
“He had beautiful Spencerian handwriting,” Gleason remembers. “And he would fill in the policies with the names. I remember him sometimes doing the work at night at the kitchen table.”
Herbert Gleason was paid $35 a week; he sold candy bars on the side. The family moved all around Bushwick, living on Herkimer Street and Somers Street, Bedford Avenue and Marion Street. But young Jackie stayed in the same school, P.S. 73. And he went to the same church, Our Lady of Lourdes. The Gleasons settled at last in the third-floor-right apartment at 358 Chauncey Street, the street where, many years later, Ralph and Alice, Norton and Trixie were to establish permanent residence.
On Friday, December 15,1925, at ten minutes after noon, Herbert Gleason took his hat, his coat, and his paycheck, left the offices of the insurance company, and was never seen again. The night before, he had destroyed all the family pictures in which he appeared. When Mae Gleason realized that he was not coming back, she took a job as a change clerk in the Lorimer Street station of the BMT. And Jackie started his education on the streets. He was a member of a gang called the Nomads, hung around Schuman’s candy store and Freitag’s Delicatessen’s (as it was pronounced). He went dancing at the Arcadia when he had money, and he learned to shoot pool. About his father, years later, Gleason said, “He was as good a father as I’ve ever known.” But his father did leave him with something: a vision.
“My father took me to the Halsey Theatre, a real dump, a classic,” he says. The Halsey featured a daily movie and five acts of vaudeville. “We sat way down front, in the first row. I’d never seen this before, guys coming out and saying funny things, getting laughs. And for some reason, at some point, I stood up and looked out over the audience. That was the moment. I knew I wanted to be like that, facing an audience, the audience facing me. I knew I wanted to do that.”
It was a while before he faced an audience again. After his father left, Jackie started hanging out in Joe Corso’s Poolroom One Flight Up (“That was the whole name”). He went there with his friend Carmine Pucci, and when they won at pool, they’d buy cheap wine or “loosies” (individual cigarettes). “I was a rack boy when I was ten, and hustling guys already. Graduation day was always the best. On graduation day, everybody’d get these gold pins. And I’d play them for their gold pins. Then I’d take the pins to the hockshop and get maybe $20, and nobody ever asked what a ten-year-old kid was doing with all these gold pins.”
When he graduated from P.S. 73, he talked himself into the school play, doing a recital of “Little Red Riding Hood” in a Yiddish accent that tore up the place, and then went on to John Adams High School, supposedly for “vocational training.” He never finished the first year, and moved on to his true school: the streets.
“For a while, I worked as an exhibition diver for a guy named Chester Billy: He was the star and the rest of us did all the funny stuff. We had this portable tank that was six feet deep. They greased the bottom so when you dove in you slid right up. The bottom was terrible, disgusting; it stunk of grease. They would fold up the tank after the show with the grease still in it. And all the girls in the show had green hair from the chlorine.
“Anyway, we ended up in Bangor, in some kind of an armory. And Billy was supposed to dive into the tank from some girders. About 90 feet. But this day he was sick — he got loaded the night before or something — and he said to me, ‘You do it.’ I said, ‘Are you kidding?’ He said, ‘You do it, or you’re fired.’ So I climbed up in the girders and looked down, and said, ‘What the hell,’ and dove. Obviously, I lived. But when I pulled myself up on the side of that greasy tank, I said to myself, ‘That’s it, I quit.’ And I did.”
Still, it was show business. In Brooklyn, he went with his friends (and his first girlfriend, Julie Dennehy — pronounced Dunnahee, immortalized later by Joe the Bartender) to places called the Bijou, the Gem, the Diamond. “There was an outdoor theater, too, where they couldn’t start the picture until it was dark. I got the Poor Soul from the assistant manager in one of those places.” And finally he arrived at the Halsey again, where there was an amateur show on Wednesday nights “which was usually guys who played stomach pumps and things like that.”
Gleason thought he could do as well as most of the contestants, probably better (“Vanity is an actor’s courage; if he doesn’t have that, he’s finished”). He worked up an act with a friend named Charlie Cretter, who had a soprano voice. Cretter dressed as a girl; Gleason told jokes.
“All the guys from the Nomads, all the people from the neighborhood were all there, and when we came on, they started cheering and shouting. And we were a hit. I guess the guy that ran the Halsey realized we could sell tickets, so he offered me the master of ceremonies job. I took the place of a guy named Sammy Birch, who was a friend of mine. First prize was 50 cents, and second prize was a card that introduced you to the guy that booked the acts, the agent. I must’ve been a hit, because the guy from the Folly Theater, three stations away, he came and saw me and offered me a job at his theater too. So I worked Wednesday night at the Halsey and Monday and Friday at the Folly. That was the beginning.”
During this period, Gleason met a young dancer named Genevieve Halford; years later, he married her. But most of the time, he was going with Julie Dennehy. Sometimes he went to the Myrtle Burlesque, to watch the comics. He remembered seeing an act called Izzy Pickle and His Cucumbers. He was also a fan of Billy “Cheese and Crackers” Hagen. (“A beautiful broad would walk across the stage, and he’d say, ’Cheese and crackers.’ That’s as dirty as they got.”) Two of his friends were working as ushers at Loew’s Metropolitan in downtown Brooklyn, and they started writing down the jokes of visiting Manhattan comics for Gleason to use at the Halsey and the Folly. He hadn’t yet learned that he was a comedian, not a comic. (“I always like Ed Wynn’s distinction,’” Gleason says. “He said that a comic says funny things; a comedian does funny things.”) But every night, burlesque, vaudeville, saloon humor were working their way into the Gleason style.
Then in April 1935, his mother died of erysipelas. She was just short of 50; Gleason was 19.
“After the funeral, I had 36 cents to my name,” Gleason says. “And I was on the stoop, and Mr. Dennehy came along and said I could stay with them. I said, ‘No, I got 36 cents, I’m going to New York.’ So I went over there on the train. I bought an apple-butter waffle and some apple juice to eat. That left me about 11 cents. Then I ran into Sammy Birch, from the neighborhood, the guy who was before me at the Halsey. He was staying at the Hotel Markwell, and he let me sleep on the floor.”
Within weeks, Gleason had a gig at Tiny’s Chateau in Reading, Pennsylvania, for $25 a week. “Then Sammy got me a job at the Oasis in Budd Lake, New Jersey.” He stayed all summer. “The joint’s gone now, and Sammy’s gone, too. Maybe this is a ghost story. Maybe we’re dead.”
In September 1935, he moved into the Club Miami on Parkhurst Street in Newark; this was Gleason’s graduate school, and he stayed for two years. “It was a real bucket of blood,” Gleason remembers fondly. “My job was to introduce the acts and quell the fights. One night, I’m doing the last show and this fat guy is heckling me. I use the usual lines on him, but nothing works. Finally I say, ‘All right, you, come with meV I start out the side door, taking off my coat, everybody trying to stop me.” Gleason takes a drag on a cigarette. “Next thing I know, I’m in the furnace room and they’re waving fans over me, and slapping my cheeks, and laying the ice on me. And I say, ‘Who was that? And they tell me it’s a guy named Tony Galento.”
He married Genevieve Halford on September 20, 1936; she was then working as a dancer in a joint called the Half Moon, in Yorkville. Gleason moved her to the Club Miami as part of a four-girl chorus line; they lived in Mother Mutzenbacher’s rooming house. He bought the wedding and engagement rings for $60 “from a guy that just got out of the can.”
Genevieve expected something like a conventional home life; she was a good Catholic, gave him two daughters, but never got the home life. By 1937, Gleason was moving around, playing the Bally Club and the Rathskeller in Philly, a joint in Cranberry Lake; following Henny Youngman (still his favorite comedian) into the Adams-Paramount in Newark; working the Empire Burlesque; playing for a few weeks at Frank Donato’s Colonial Inn in Singac, New Jersey (where he met a young singer named Sinatra). He still made money hustling pool. And in other ways.
“Sometimes I made money ’busking’ at fights. I weighed ’75, ’85 at the time, and what you did busking, you filled in for some guy that didn’t show up, or if there were a bunch of quick knockouts and they wanted to fill out the card. You got paid $2 a round and $5 if you won. For that money, there was no sense in us killing each other, I figured, and before the fight, I’d go to the guy and say, ‘You know, let’s not end up in a hospital.’
“Then one night I was in Chicago. Actually, Cicero, where I was playing the 606 Club. I went over to the arena. Anyway, I was fighting some guy named O’Connor, and I go in and hug the guy, and he steps back and gives me a rap. I say, ‘What’s this? I thought we . . .’ And he says, CF- you!’ “ Gleason fingers a scar on his brow. “He gave me this. And that was the end of busking. I was cut, my teeth were loose, I’d had it.” He smiles. “Fighting’s not that hard. It’s going out the dressing-room door that’s murder.”
The goal was always Manhattan, and the village that was then called Broadway. By 1939, the closest he’d come was playing a place that was always called “the ever popular” Queens Terrace, under the el in Woodside. Gleason now had a personal manager named Willie Webber, and after much pleading, Webber talked Fred Lamb of the Club 18 (across the street from “21”) to come out to Queens and look at his new kid. Lamb was impressed, and brought Gleason into the Club 18 on January 20, 1940, for $75 a week. This was what is called a tough room, but after the free-for-all of the Club Miami, Gleason was ready, holding his own with Pat Harrington, Jack White, and Frankie Hyers, the mad comics who were the club’s regulars. One night, Jack Warner came in, saw Gleason, and signed him for Warner Bros, at $250 a week.
“I never expected anything from Hollywood,” Gleason remembers. “I had no idea of becoming a big star, having a big picture career. I was a kid, I was having a lot of fun, and they were paying me $250 a week in the Depression! Not bad.” His first movie was Navy Blues. “It had Jack Oakie, Jack Haley, Jack Carson, me, and Ann Sheridan, some of the worst drinkers in the history of show business. Now, across the street from Warners was a joint called My Blue Heaven. And every day when they wrapped, there was a stampede across the street. I mean, a stampede! I mean, these were drinkers!”
There were a few more now-forgotten movies, but Gleason kept busy working at Slapsie Maxie’s, then a wild club in Hollywood fronted by former light-heavyweight champion Maxie Rosenbloom. And he continued learning, studying the craft of making movies, discovering his strengths and limitations in front of an audience. Most of all, he learned to trust his own instincts.
“I never did a lot of analyzing,” he says now. “It was funny or it wasn’t. Once you start analyzing it, the mechanics and all that, you’re through. It’s instinctive. That’s why a comedian can be a serious actor, maybe a great actor, but I never heard of an actor becoming a great comedian.”
Gleason was turned down for army service (badly healed broken arm, ioo pounds overweight), shuttled back and forth between the coasts. He was separated from his wife, and in New York lived at the Astor or the Edison and did his drinking in Toots Shor’s. There were a lot of women. “They were all wonderful,” he says. “At one time, I was working at Billy Rose’s and there were 22 girls in the chorus and all you had to do was say, ‘Would you care to have dinner?’
“Gleason also started working in theater; there was a flop called Keep Off the Grass, with Jimmy Durante and Jane Froman; another turkey called The Duchess Misbehaves, in which Gleason played, of all things, the painter Goya. He worked awhile in Hellzapoppin, did a memorable Foreign Legion bit in Along Fifth Avenue, and then in 1945 was in a smash hit, Follow the Girls. I have a friend who was at this show on V-E Day, 1945, and s^esavs> “It was the most insane evening in the theater I’ve ever spent.”
In 1949, television called for the first time, and he took the role that eventually would go to William Bendix in The Life of Riley. It was the wrong part at the wrong time, and after one season the sponsors canceled. Gleason went back to the clubs. “Who the hell knew what television was?” he says. “Nobody.”
He was working in Slapsie Maxie’s in June 1950 when the call came from DuMont. This was the fourth television network, and the only one to go out of business. A man named Milton Douglas was producing a weekly variety show called Cavalcade of Stars, with rotating hosts, and he offered Gleason two weeks as host for $750 a week. Gleason, who doesn’t fly, refused to cross the country for two weeks at $750; he insisted on four weeks. Douglas sighed, and agreed. Gleason took the Super Chief back to New York. He was 34 years old, a bouncer, braggart, pool hustler, failed husband, loudmouth, boozer, squanderer of money and time, a failed movie actor, a middle-level nightclub act, a mediocre radio performer. He was all these things, and when he walked into the studios at DuMont, he was ready. The four weeks became twenty years. From DuMont, he went to CBS, and in one form or another, he was a regular performer on television until 1970.
“Four weeks after I started the DuMont show,” Gleason remembers, “I took a broad to Coney Island. We stop at Nathan’s for some dogs, and then we’re walking around. And I notice three, four people staring at me. Then ten, a dozen. Then, out on the boardwalk, there’s maybe 50 of them, and I knew then, the first time, what television was, how powerful it was.” He shakes his head, remembering the moment clearly half a lifetime later. “I also knew that I was never gonna be able to walk around Coney Island with a broad again, maybe the rest of my life.”
Gleason is sitting in the trailer in Riverdale talking and smoking. Art Carney comes in, dressed in the style of the 1920s. Gleason is asked about the young comedians. “Eddie Murphy is a very good comedian,” he says, “but his concert act is frightful. I can’t understand why he thinks he needs all the four-letter words. I don’t think you need it; it gives you easy laughs, a replacement for dropping your pants.” He lights another cigarette. “Murphy has a thing where I do it to Norton!”
Carney says, “I thought we kept that pretty quiet.”
“It was only three times,” Gleason says.
“Seven.”
Deadpan, they go into a riff about great actors they’ve worked with.
“Olivier was the best I ever saw,” Gleason says. “Working with him was a great experience.”
Carney says, “Don’t forget Hobart Bosworth.”
“Or Rex Reed,” says Gleason.
“And Monte Blue, one of the all-time greats.”
Carney says he first saw Gleason at the Roxy in the forties, “doing the pinball thing.” Gleason explains, “The guy comes onstage with a pinball machine, and he moves left, right, the hip, the arms, his back to the audience.” Gleason laughs, remembering the character. Both men say they’d prefer working with a live audience to making movies. “We always performed before a live audience on TV,” Gleason says. “And I think that’s one of the reasons for the show’s success. The audience directs you. There was no stopping, no retakes, no cards. We never stopped.” Why not do theater? Gleason shakes his head. “Nah. Somebody once asked me when I got tired of doing Take Me Along. I said, ‘About twenty minutes after eleven on opening night.’ But also it’s hard with three critics in town, three newspapers. You don’t have a shot. I remember seeing the show about Harrigan and Hart, and saying, ‘This is a hell of a good show.’ They bombed it right out of Broadway.”
Carney says, “They wanted us to do that years ago, remember?” “Yeah,” Gleason says. “That’s the only bullet we ever missed.”
Carney leaves for makeup. Gleason, who once had two floors at the Park Sheraton, an apartment on Fifth Avenue, the famous $650,000 round house in Peekskill (with its eight-foot round bed), now lives on the Inverrary golf course near Fort Lauderdale. He’s married to Marilyn Taylor, the younger sister of June Taylor, whose dancers were featured on the Gleason variety shows. In the fifties, they were together for a long time, until she became convinced that Gleason, the lapsed Catholic, would never divorce Genevieve, and she left him. When he finally did get a divorce in 1971, he married Beverly McKittrick; that lasted three years, and when he was free, he went looking for Marilyn and married her. She is a soft-spoken, sweet, funny woman; in New York with him during the shooting of Izzy and Moe, she is protective of Gleason, making certain he doesn’t stay out all night, that he eats properly, gets his sleep. She doesn’t have much to worry about; the New York nights of Gleason’s youth are far behind him. Except in memory.
“Memory is the only money you ever really have,” says the man who once told America that “the worst thing you can do with money is save it.”
The real trouble is that most of his friends are dead. Shor is gone, and Eddie Condon, and a lot of people from the television shows. He shakes his head, and then his face slowly brightens.
“I went to Condon’s once on Christmas Eve,” he says, “and we’re all drinking, and I suddenly realize the band is gone. I say to Condon, ‘Where in the hell is the band? So he takes me downstairs, through one door, into a boiler room, down through another subterranean passage — I mean subterranean! And then another door, and a tunnel, and then he opens the last door …and it’s Santa’s workshop! Here’s the whole goddamned band, stoned out of their brains, working on these little …trains.”
That led Gleason to another night at Condon’s. “Someone in the band took the strings off Condon’s banjo. Just cut them off. And there was Condon up on the stand, loaded to the gills, playing away, no strings.”
Gleason did more than drink with musicians; later, he was to sell millions of albums of his lush arrangements of standard love songs.
“Even the music goes back to Chauncey Street,” he says. “I always was sensitive to sounds. At night, lying there in the apartment, I’d hear these sounds: footsteps upstairs, or out on the street; the mice in the walls; the ticking of a clock. I was fascinated by sounds. And years later, I’m working with Tommy Dorsey, and I say, ’I’d like to make some records!’ He says, ‘Why?’ And I say, ’I hear things!’
“Gleason can’t read music; his own tunes are hummed or picked out a note at a time on a piano and written down by an arranger. He loves conducting. When he assembled more than 50 French musicians to record the score for a 1962 film called Gigot, he had to explain through an interpreter what he wanted. “I say to the interpreter, Tell them I want the first note to sound like someone pissing off a cliff into a Chinese teacup.’ “ A beat. “He tells them.” Another beat. “At first, a few of them smile. Then they start looking at each other, and then they start to nod. And I tell you, it was beautiful.”
Even the romantic music had something to do with Brooklyn.
“I saw Clark Gable in a picture,” Gleason remembers. “He’s on a couch with a broad. Nothing’s happening. Then the music starts, and Gable is the most romantic-looking son of a bitch you ever saw. And I say to myself, ‘If Gable needs strings, what about some poor schmuck from Brooklyn?’
“More than anyone else, the friend Gleason seems to miss is Toots Shor. “One night in Shor’s, the 52d Street joint, Toots was bragging about what a great athlete he was. One thing led to another, and I said, ‘You can’t play pool, you can’t fight — if you did, I’d knock you on your ass!’ But I said, ‘Maybe you can run!’ ‘Of course, I can r"",’ says Toots. So we organize a race. But I say to him, ‘Toots, if I go outside and the two of us start running, we’re gonna draw a crowd, and it’ll be terrible, we’ll never get it finished. So when we go out, you run towards Sixth Avenue and I’ll run towards Fifth, and we’ll go around the block — 51st Street — and whoever gets to the bar first wins a grand.’ Agreed! So we go out, and Toots starts huffing and puffing towards Sixth Avenue, and I stroll towards Fifth. In front of ’21,’ I jump in a cab and drive around the block. And when Toots finally gets there, I’m already at the bar with a drink. He says, ‘Aw, you son of a bitch.’ And he hands me the grand. We’re sitting there another twenty minutes, when suddenly Toots turns to me, the eyes popping out of his head, his veins all straining in his neck, and he yells: ‘Wait a minute!’ He roars, ’You never passed met’ ” Gleason is laughing now. “That was the greatest double take I ever saw.”
All of that was long ago. Gleason moved to Florida in the early sixties, and when I ask him why he doesn’t come to New York more often, he just shakes his head and says, “Everybody’s dead.”
In Florida, he plays a lot of golf and reads. For years, he read the literature of parapsychology, the occult, and books about the world’s religions. But now he also reads history. “I don’t read fiction,” he says. “You know, our lives in this business are devoted to fiction.”
Did he have any advice for young people who want to get into show business? “Work at everything — weddings, benefits, bar mitzvahs. Play for no money, if you have to. And find out everything. When I was working, I’d listen to the band, talk to the lighting guys, the stage manager, the carpenters, every branch of it. You have to like show business. That’s the main thing. And you have to know everything.”
Were there parts he’d wanted to play and didn’t, chances that he never got to take? “No,” Gleason says. “Almost everything I wanted to do, I’ve been able to do. And most of it turned out pretty good.” A pause. “Everybody’s been damned nice to me. I’ve been very lucky.”
And how would he like to be remembered?
“Ah, hell,” the Great One says, staring at the smoke from the cigarette. “I’d just like to be remembered.”
NEW YORK,
September 23, 1985
FRANZ
New York was full of swaggering energy in the spring of 1958, when I was living over a secondhand bookstore on Fourth Avenue and Twelfth Street, still trying to be a painter. It was a town where everyone was working, nobody cared about politics, and all things seemed possible. Even for the likes of me.
During the day I studied art at Pratt Institute, and in the chilly evenings I would wander to the Cedar Street Tavern on University Place to nurse a few beers on the thin leftovers of my G.I. Bill money. This was the great bar of the action painters, and of poets too, and visiting cowboys and a few stray seamen and too many rich girls from Bennington who lectured you about Selling Out. I went there because I wanted to see painters in the flesh, to see how they walked and moved and ordered their drinks. I was still something of a kid, unformed and green, and this information was much more important to me than theories of push-pull, color fields, plastic depth, the vital gesture, or the idea of the sublime.
Some insisted, of course, that the Cedar wasn’t what it had been; they always say that in Village bars. But about the Cedar they might have been right. In 1958, Jackson Pollock had been dead almost two years; de Kooning was not around much anymore; other regulars were moving uptown, never to return. But look: down past the end of the bar, in the first rough booth in the brightly lit back room: that elegant, beautiful girl is Joan Mitchell. Sitting with Alfred Leslie. And Philip Guston. And in that other booth, laughing raucously, that’s Grace Hartigan, looking like fifty miles of trouble out of a film noir. She’s talking to David Smith. And that huge fellow with the Zapata mustache: Harold Rosenberg. And over there, that’s Larry Rivers — he draws figures! — jittery-eyed, junkie-thin, fingers drumming on the table as if in time to a melody nobody else can hear. All were engulfed in a blue nicotine fog, drinking hard, laughing, having a great old time. And among them, every night, was the painter I admired most in the world: Franz Kline.
With Pollock and de Kooning, Kline was the third glittering star in the Big Three constellation. He sat in a booth facing the door, dressed in a camel’s-hair coat, with his rough, lumpy slab of a face made oddly elegant by a carefully trimmed mustache. A spear of hair fell across his brow like a brushstroke by that other Franz, Mr. Hals. When women came to the booth he always tried to rise and bow in greeting, like a boulevardier from the French films we saw around the corner at the Eighth Street or the Art. Franz was one of those bulky men who look taller sitting down. But when he rose to go to the John, he moved with an athlete’s grace, giving off the same muscular aura that emanated from the paintings. We all knew the legend: back home in the coal country of Pennsylvania, he’d played baseball and football, he’d been a boxer. In the age of Hemingway, such credentials were more important than they should have been. As he went by, through the door that Pollock had once torn off its hinges, he had a word and smile for everybody. Everybody called him Franz.
It was not in me, then or now, to fawn over famous men; by the tough code of the ’50s, that just wouldn’t be hip. But the Bennington girls had no such restraints, and they went for Franz the way sharks go for drowning sailors. So it was hard to be alone with Franz Kline; I suppose that’s why he went to the Cedar. But one night a painter friend named Haig Akmajian (he lived in my building) brought me over and introduced me. The great painter smiled and welcomed me to the booth and ordered the first of many beers; he treated me as if I were an established member of The Club. And we talked. And talked. Or rather, Franz talked and I listened. I wasn’t a reporter then, I made no notes; but I can hear him now. He had an elaborate, writerly way of speaking, with that rare tone that combines irony with affection. Nothing he said ever sounded bitter, except his references to Walter O’Malley, who had led the Dodgers out of Brooklyn with the Giants following timidly in their wake. “That s.o.b. will find a private place in hell,” Franz said of O’Malley. And then laughed, embarrassed by his own bitterness. It was difficult to believe that Franz Kline would send anyone on earth to hell.
He talked about Sugar Ray Robinson and Lester Young, Akira Kurosawa and Brigitte Bardot. He asked me about Pratt, where he had taught a few years earlier (as had Isamu Noguchi, George McNeil, Adolph Gottlieb, and Richard Lindner, among other stars of the New York art world). “You can help teach people how to draw,” he said, “but you can’t teach them to be painters. All you can do is let them know they better love it or get the hell out.”
At some point we started talking about cartoonists. His face brightened as he sipped his beer. “I wanted to be a cartoonist when I started out. I wanted that more than anything.” He loved the cartoons of Willard Mullin in the World-Telegram. (“I don’t know how he does it, day after day, on that level. The guy’s a genius.”) He was the first man to tell me he was a fan of the amazing Cliff Sterrett, whose surrealistic comic strip, “Polly and her Pals,” was usually overlooked by the solemn analysts of popular culture. And of course he paid homage to George Herriman, whose “Krazy Kat” was the highbrows’ favorite comic strip. “But you know,” he said, “I even like ‘Orphan Annie.’ The politics are neanderthal. But the man knows how to use blacks.”
I was astonished. This was years before pop art was proclaimed by critics as the successor to abstract expressionism. No painter’s vision seemed more distant from cartooning than the great bold abstractions of Franz Kline. But as he talked that night, I realized that it was comics that had made him want to be an artist. Born in 1910, he grew up in the ’20s with John Held Jr. as his hero. Held’s drawings in the old Life and Judge and Vanity Fair made him the most famous cartoonist of his time. In their way, Held’s short-skirted flappers and bell-bottomed college boys expressed the hedonism and silliness of the Roaring Twenties as powerfully as the stories of Scott Fitzgerald. But Kline saw form as well as content; he liked the way Held designed a page, placing a number of figures in the space but using blacks to establish a pattern that became the true structure of the drawing.
Kline also talked with affection of certain illustrators and figurative painters. He admired Jack Levine and praised John Sloan and Reginald Marsh, who in different ways had embraced the energy and tension of the city the way the New York School did with pure paint. (Kline once said to Irving Sandier, “Hell, half the world wants to be like Thoreau at Walden, worrying about the noise of traffic on the way to Boston; the other half use up their lives being part of that noise. I like the second half.”) As we talked, he was amused, perhaps even delighted, that I knew the work of the British pen-and-ink illustrators — men like John Leech, Donald Keene, and above all Phil May, who tried to turn the city into art.
“Phil May got me to go to England,” Kline said. “I wanted to draw like he did, that big open confident way.” Franz Kline in England? Yes: before the war. After two years at Boston University’s School of Fine and Applied Art, he moved to London in 1935 and enrolled in art school. He was apparently not much touched by the political fevers of the day: the Spanish Civil War, the threat of fascism, the romance of communism. Instead, he absorbed the look of architecture, trains, bridges, ships, theaters, music halls. He spent hundreds of hours drawing the figure and mastering the principles of composition. He walked the streets that once teemed with Phil May’s ragamuffins. He looked hard at the drawings of the Frenchmen: Daumier, Steinlen, and Forain. In London, the dream of a career as a cartoonist gave way to the desire to be an illustrator.
London also had a certain logic for the young man who became Franz Kline. With the grand exception of Turner, it had produced great draftsmen rather than colorists (Hogarth, Rowlandson, Tenniel, du Maurier, Gillray, Phiz). For Franz, London must have been a gloriously dark indoor city of black and white. I often wonder what his art would have been like if he’d gone instead to Venice or Mexico.
“I had a good time there,” he said of London. “I was never so hungry in my life. But I really did learn to draw.”
When I mentioned that I’d spent a year in art school in Mexico, his eyes brightened and he laughed. “When I came back from London, everybody around was trying to be Orozco or Siqueiros, except the guys who wanted to be Mondrian.” He and his wife (whom he’d met in England) moved to Manhattan in 1938, with Franz now determined to be a fine artist. He missed being part of the great brawling fraternity of New York artists who worked for the WPA, but he slowly got to know most of them in the bohemian bars of Greenwich Village. “Some of them liked the Mexicans because of the politics,” Kline said. “Some, like Jackson, for the size of the work.” He shrugged. “I didn’t care for all of them, but I liked the attempt, you know? They could all draw. They had power. They were trying to do something big.”
Listening to Kline talk at the height of his fame, in a voice whose confident baritone seemed to match the blacks of his paintings, I felt something else brewing under the polished, generous surface. I was too young to identify it, but I think now that he probably knew his own huge achievement was only provisional. He’d done Something Big too. But now there were dozens of kids at Pratt belting out “Klines” (or Pollocks or Rothkos or de Koonings) and talking in the opaque codes of the new art theorists. Rebellion was undergoing its familiar transformation into orthodoxy.
The young hadn’t struggled through the rigorous art schools of the ’30s, hadn’t been challenged by the Depression or the war, hadn’t been forced to support themselves by doing murals for bars (as Kline had done at Minetta’s and the Bleecker Street Tavern). Not one of them would have done a mural for an American Legion Post, as Kline had done in 1946 back home in Lehighton, Pennsylvania, four years before he broke through into the style that made him famous.
For Kline’s generation, the work of the artist could be defined not simply by what he did, but what he refused to do. They had struggled to make an art that was uniquely American: not pseudo-European, neo-Mexican, or some additional knockoff of Picasso. They wanted to be as American as the comic strip or jazz. The best of them certainly didn’t want to be rich or famous; if anything, they shared a romantic view of the clarifying power of poverty. They wouldn’t pander to an audience, or shape their work to please collectors or museum directors or even critics (although Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg did have an enormous influence on the artists who came right after the first generation). They hated glibness and facility; they thought the American artist had a special responsibility to be original (the worst epithet was “derivative”). They expected the artist to live or die in every brushstroke (they’d have hung the likes of Mark Kostabi from a lamppost on Eighth Street), to paint as if he or she might die before morning.
It was a heroic enterprise. Macho: yes. Self-destructive: sometimes. Safe, timid, conniving, calculated: never. And they’d accomplished much of what they’d set out to do, shifting the center of Western art from Paris to New York. But by 1958, other words were being spoken: exhaustion, repetition, mannerism. And Franz must have heard them too.
“It’s closing time, isn’t it?” he said one night, gazing around at the almost empty Cedar. And then he led a few of us up to Fourteenth Street for a nightcap at his studio. I’d never been in a real painter’s studio before. That dark loft was clearly a place of work. I could see rolls of canvas, buckets of paint, large house-painters’ brushes, cans of turpentine, baking pans caked with paint. The floor looked like a Pollock. There were small painted drawings scattered around, some of them on the floor, proof that Franz knew what he was going to paint when he approached the canvas. The public image of the action painters was, of course, a crude cartoon. In their work, they could express anger, serenity, anxiety, a contempt for the slick and the sentimental. But for men like Franz Kline, painting was never mere performance or raw therapy. They were making art.
Most of the sketches were on heavy paper, but about a half-dozen were done on classified pages of the Times. I was staring down at one, a shape like a machine gun, done in lavender paint, when Franz came over and handed me a beer. “I like the grayness, that texture,” he said of the Times. “It looks like a sidewalk. Besides, someday soon I might need a job.”
He laughed, handed out more beers, turned on a radio (in my beer-blurry memory, it was Symphony Sid on WEVD). I walked around the dark studio, the way I’ve since seen actors prowl on empty stages or young ballplayers walk into Yankee Stadium, imagining myself in this loft, struggling heroically with paint and canvas. Stacked against the walls were paintings tacked on frames. Someone asked to take a look. Franz smiled: “Sure, why not? But they’re not all finished.”
He switched on some lights. And then we saw them, all mauves and greens and yellows and blues, with great bold structures on this canvas, more delicate and lush coloring on that one. Some had matte surfaces, thinned with much turpentine, the color as layered and luminous as Tintoretto. Others were glossy, the voluptuous color pre-mixed before going on the canvas, scraped with palette knives or sticks. A few were bright, but most had a dark brooding power.
“The gallery doesn’t want me doing them,” he said. “They want the real Franz Kline. Black and white, black and white …”
He shook his head and smiled in a sad way and sipped a beer. He was pleased that we liked what we saw, but insisted that he wasn’t finished with many of them. He probably wouldn’t show them at the Sidney Janis Gallery show scheduled for May. “They’re not there yet,” he said. Then he turned off the lights and we went back to drinking beer and talked for a while about prizefighters before we all went home through the gray New York morning.
Some of the paintings in color were shown at the Janis show, but most people were impressed by the ferocious Crow Dancer, which was another version of the mounted machine gun, a picture that I think now was called Siegfried. In later years, I saw different versions of what I saw that night, the shapes altered or refined, the colors overpainted. Among them, I’m sure, were the great painting Shenandoah Wall, along with Horizontal Rust and Andrus. Franz certainly didn’t intend to move through the ’60s or ’70s repeating what he had done in the ’50s. He had added color to his artistic weaponry. Like Guston (and in different ways, Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud), he might have returned to the figure. Franz was a man who loved to draw.
But like the Cedar Tavern, Franz Kline didn’t make it very far into the ’60s. In the spring of 1962, Kline, along with Mark Rothko and Andrew Wyeth, was invited by President Kennedy to a dinner at the White House in honor of André Malraux. The date of the dinner was May 11, a Friday. Kline didn’t make it. A week before, he suffered a heart attack and was taken to New York Hospital. While he was there, Janis opened a group show that included Scudera, Kline’s last painting, all deep rich blues, with some red and a broken black square. On Sunday, May 13, Franz Kline died, just short of his fifty-second birthday.
That night, I was working at a newspaper when the word arrived on the AP wire. I was first shocked, then filled with a kind of remorse. In my few encounters with Franz, he’d offered the same hand of friendship that he’d given to so many others. But out of stubbornness or empty vanity, I’d never really taken it. He was too famous and accomplished for us to enter as equals that private conspiracy called friendship. And I was too proud to serve as anyone’s acolyte. By 1962, I’d put painting behind me, with sorrow but no regrets, and gone my own way, into the world of words.
But when the night shift was over, I didn’t go home. At eight in the morning I walked up Rector Street to a newspaper bar called Page One and starting drinking beer. Around eleven, I went to the pay phone and called the World-Telegram and asked for Willard Mullin. When the great sports cartoonist answered, I told him my name.
“I don’t know if you saw the paper yet,” I said, “but Franz Kline, you know? The painter? He died yesterday. And he was a fan of yours. I just wanted to tell you that.”
“No kidding?” A beat. “What was his name?”
“Kline,” I said. “Franz Kline.”
There was another pause, then: “Oh, yeah. Franz Kline. He did those big black and white things, right?”
“Yeah.”
“You know,” the cartoonist said, “I bet that guy could’ve learned how to draw.”
ART & ANTIQUES,
May 1990
KEITH
I.
It is morning in the clubhouse at Huggins-Stengel Field in St. Petersburg and Keith Hernandez is moving from locker to locker, handing out schedules. He is the player rep of the world champion New York Mets; this is one of his duties. Still dressed in street clothes and sneakers, he says little as he hands the sheets to each of the players. At 33, he is young in the world of ordinary men; in baseball, especially on this young ball club, he is middle-aged. Kids and veterans nod and study the mimeographed sheets, which tell them when the bus will leave for the afternoon game and how many tickets they can expect for wives and friends. Hernandez explains nothing; he was out late the night before with a woman down from New York. “Too much goddamned wine,” he says. And besides, he has been here before, through 13 major league seasons; this is a time for ease, the careful steady retrieval of the skills of the summer game.
“It’s all about getting back in a kind of groove,” Hernandez says. “Not about getting in shape. Most of the guys are in shape, or they get in shape before coming down. I worked out with weights all winter, the first time I ever did that, ’cause I’m getting old.” He smiles, shakes his head. “At the Vertical Club in New York. Jesus, don’t go there at five o’clock. It’s fucking insane, a social — No, this is about getting your stroke right. About getting back your concentration. I don’t worry about it much until the last 10 games before the season starts. If I’m having trouble then, then I worry.”
In the clubhouse, Hernandez wanders among those who have made it to The Show and those who desperately want to. They all move with that coiled and practiced indolence that is unique to baseball, the style of a game where the most exciting action seems to explode out of the greatest calm. A large table is spread with food; there are boxes of Dubble Bubble and sugarless gum. Some players nibble as they dress; others knead and work new gloves, bad-mouth each other, talk about women, read newspapers and sports magazines, all the while stripping off street clothes and pulling on jocks and T-shirts and uniforms.
Kevin McReynolds, new to the team after a winter trade from San Diego, stares into space. Darryl Strawberry isn’t here yet (two weeks before the great alarm clock rhubarb); neither is Dwight Gooden. Hernandez leaves the mimeographed sheets on the small benches in front of their lockers and moves on. When he’s finished, he dumps the leftovers in a trash can, sits down at his own locker, lights a Winston and reaches for the New York Times crossword puzzle.
“We’ll talk later,” he says, takes a drag, and stares at the puzzle while unbuttoning his shirt. Hernandez examines the words the way fans examine stats. His own stats are, of course, extraordinary. One of the most consistent hitters in the game, in three full seasons as a Met, he has averaged .311, .309, and .310. Against left-handed pitching last year, he hit .312; against right-handers, .309. He hit .310 at home and .311 on the road. Last year, he had 13 game-winning RBIs, and his career total of 107 is the most in National League history.
It seemed that every time you looked up last season, Hernandez was on base; this wasn’t an illusion; he tied with Tim Raines for the lead in on-base percentage (.413), with 94 walks added to 171 hits. Although he has never been much of a power hitter (his career high was 16 home runs for the Cardinals in 1980), when there are men on base there is nobody you’d rather have at bat. “I can’t stand leading off an inning,” he says. “It’s so goddamned boring.” Hernandez hit safely in 10 of the 13 postseason games. That’s what he’s paid to do.
“Keith is the kind of consistent clutch hitter who relies on ’big’ RBI production as compared with ’multi’ RBI production,” says the astute Mets announcer Tim McCarver in the new book he wrote with Ray Robinson, Oh, Baby, I Love It! “As an example, a lot of one-run games are won by key hits in the middle innings rather than by big three-run home runs late in the game. Keith is a spectacular middle-inning hitter.…You’ve heard the baseball adage, ‘Keep ’em close, I’ll think of something’? Well, the something the Mets think of is usually Keith Hernandez.”
The fielding stats are even more extraordinary. Last year, he won his ninth straight Gold Glove Award at first base — the most of any player in history — with only five errors in the season, for a .996 average. Those stats don’t even begin to tell the story of what Hernandez does on the field; like all great glove men, he makes difficult plays look easy.
But more important, Hernandez can still dazzle you with the play that follows no rule. In the 12th inning of a game with Cincinnati last July 22, the Reds had runners on first and second with none out. Carl Willis dropped a splendid bunt down the third base line, and suddenly, there was Keith, all the way over from first. He threw to Gary Carter, who was playing third, and Carter went back to first for the double play. The Mets won 6-3 in the 14th inning. McCarver, who calls Hernandez “the Baryshnikov of first basemen,” writes: “Baseball is a game where, if you do the routine things spectacularly, you win more games than doing the spectacular things routinely — because few athletes have the talent to do spectacular things routinely. Keith has that kind of talent.”
In spring training, of course, all players spend their mornings doing the routine things routinely. And on this day, after the cigarette and the crossword, Hernandez is suited up. He makes a quick visit to the John. And then he joins the other players as they move out onto the field. To a visitor who believes the phrase “spring training” is the loveliest in the American language, the view is suddenly beautiful, the bright blue and orange of the Mets’ uniforms instantly transforming the great sward of fresh green grass.
After more than 130 days without baseball, it’s beginning again. The wan sun abruptly breaks through the clouds and the young men jog out to the far reaches of the outfield and then back. They line up in rows, and then an instructor leads them through 15 minutes of stretching exercises. There is something wonderfully appealing about the clumsiness of the players during this drill; thrown out of their accustomed positions and stances, they don’t look like professional athletes at all. Instead, the field now looks like part of some peculiar kind of boot camp, stocked with raw recruits. Jesse Orosco glances at Doug Sisk to see if he’s doing the exercise correctly; Lenny Dykstra says something to Carter, who laughs; Backman does a push-up when the others are twisting through sit-ups. Hernandez leads with his left leg when everyone else is leading with the right. You can see more athletic workouts at the New York Health & C Racquet Club.
But then it’s over and they’re all up and reaching for gloves. The players pair off, playing catch, loosening up, while the sun begins to dry the wet grass. Hernandez is throwing with Roger McDowell. The ease and grace and economy of movement are obvious; it’s as if he is on a morning stroll. He chatters away with other players (as he does with opposing players who reach first base during the season, a tactical matter that is less about conviviality than it is about distracting the enemy). Dykstra slides a package of Red Man from his hip pocket and bites off a chunk and Hernandez says something we can’t hear and Dykstra tries to laugh with his mouth shut. On the sidelines, Davey Johnson has emerged to watch his charges. His coaches — Buddy Harrelson, Bill Robinson, Vern Hoscheit, Sam Perlozzo, and Mel Stottlemyre — are on the side, glancing indifferently at the players, talking about famous assholes they’ve known. The list is fairly long and each new name brings a guffaw and a story. Harrelson turns to a visitor and says, “That’s all off the record.” And laughs. On the field, Hernandez is working out of a pitcher’s windup. He throws a strike. “You think Mex can make this team?” Perlozzo says. Stottlemyre smiles. “He already did.”
Then the players amble over to the batting cage, where Perlozzo will be throwing. There’s a wire fence beside the cage and fans have assembled behind it, some wearing Mets jackets, caps, and T-shirts. A few are old, the stereotypical snowbirds of spring training; but more are young. They’ve arranged vacations to come down to see the ballplayers. A few are screaming for autographs. Hernandez waits to bat, says, “Jesus Christ, listen to them…” The kids among them seem in awe, and are not screaming. “These are supposed to be grown-ups.” Two of the middle-aged fans are waving baseballs to be signed. I mention to Hernandez what Warren Spahn had said at a banquet the night before in St. Petersburg: “Baseballs were never meant to be written on. Kids ought to play with ’em. They ought to throw ’em, hit ’em. I hope someday they develop a cover you can’t write on.” Hernandez says, “Ain’t that the truth.”
But the fans are persistent and I remember waiting outside Ebbets Field with my brother Tom one late afternoon long ago and seeing Carl Furillo come out, dressed in a sports shirt. His arms looked like the thickest, most powerful arms in the known universe. I wanted to ask him for an autograph but didn’t know how; a mob of other kids chased after him and he got in a car with Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella, and I wondered how he had ever been able to sign the petition at spring training in 1947 saying he couldn’t play with a black man. Years later, I learned that Leo Durocher told the protesting players (Dixie Walker, Hugh Casey, Kirby Higbe, Bobby Bragan, Furillo, among others) to go and “wipe your ass” with the petition. Durocher was the manager and Robinson was on the team and there was nothing else to say except play ball. Standing at the batting cage, while Hernandez took his swings and the fans demanded to be authenticated with signatures, I realized again how much of the adult response to baseball is about the accretion of memory and the passage of time.
“Christ, I hate spring training,” Hernandez said at one point. “It’s so goddamned boring.”
But for the rest of us, spring training is something else: the true beginning of the year, a kind of preliminary to the summer festival, another irreversible mark in time. On the field and in the clubhouse, kid players come over to Hernandez. “Hey, Mex, lemme ask you something…” They are talking to him about the present and the future. But we who don’t play also see the past; it helps us measure accomplishment, skill, potential. Don Mattingly is another Musial; Wally Backman is another Eddie Stanky. At spring training, somewhere in the Florida afternoons, we always hear the voice of Red Barber and know that in a few weeks we’ll be playing the Reds at Crosley Field and the Cardinals in Sportsman’s Park and we could lose one in the late innings if that goddamned Slaughter lifts one over the pavilion roof. This is not mere sentiment; it’s history and lore, part of the baggage of New York memory.
New Yorkers don’t easily accept ballplayers. They almost always come from somewhere else, itinerants and mercenaries, and most of them are rejected. We look at Darryl Strawberry and unfairly compare him to Snider, DiMaggio, Mays, Mantle. We question his desire, his heart, his willingness under pressure to risk everything in one joyful and explosive moment. Since he is young, we reserve judgment, but after four seasons, he still seems a stranger in the town. Those who are accepted seem to have been part of New York forever. Hernandez is one of them.
II.
He was born on October 20, 1953, in San Francisco. Although his teammates call him Mex, he isn’t Mexican at all. His grandparents on his father’s side immigrated from Spain in 1907; his mother’s side is Scotch-Irish. Keith’s father, John, was a fine high school player (hitting .650 in his senior year) and was signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers for a $1000 bonus in 1940. According to William Nack in Sports Illustrated, John Hernandez was badly beaned in a minor league night game just before the war; his eyesight was ruined, and though he played with Musial and others in some Navy games, when the war was over, John Hernandez knew he couldn’t play again. He became a San Francisco fireman, moved to suburban Pacifica, and started the process of turning his sons, Gary and Keith, into the ballplayers he could never be. They swung at a balled-up sock attached to a rope in the barn; both playing first base, they learned to field ground balls, thousands of ground balls, millions.
From the time Keith was eight, he and his brother were given baseball quizzes, questions about tactics and strategy, the fundamentals. His mother, Jackie, took home movies at Little League games, and they would be carefully studied, analyzed for flaws. John Hernandez was not the first American father to do such things; he will not be the last. But he did the job well. Perhaps too well.
“My father taught me how to hit,” Keith says. “He made us swing straight at the ball, not to undercut it, golf it. A straight swing, an even stroke. He really knew.”
But Nack, and other writers, have described the relationship of father and son as a mixed blessing. In brief, John Hernandez is said to be unable to leave his son alone; Keith is one of the finest players in the game, an acknowledged leader of a splendid world championship team, the father of three daughters of his own; but too often, his father still treats him as if he were the kid behind the barn, learning to hit the slider. When Keith goes into a slump (and he has one almost every year, usually in midseason), his father is on the phone with advice. As Nack wrote, “Keith knows that no one can help him out of a slump as quickly as his father can, and so, throughout his career, he has often turned to his father for help. At the same time, he has felt the compelling need to break away from his father and make it on his own, to be his own man.”
Obviously it would be a mistake to think that Keith Hernandez is the mere creation of his father. His brother, Gary, was trained the same way, went to Berkeley on an athletic scholarship, but didn’t make it to the majors. Keith had his own drive, his own vision. At Capuchino High (where he hit .500 one season), he also starred on the football and basketball teams, and says that football was particularly good training. “I was a quarterback, and I had to make choices all the time, to move guys around, read the other teams’ defenses. But I was 5-11, 175 pounds then and that was too small, even for college. I went down to Stanford for a tryout, saw the size of these guys, and decided baseball was for me.”
Major league scouts were watching him in high school, but in his senior year he quit the team after an argument with the manager. Most of the scouts vanished. Until then, it had been expected that Keith would be a first-round draft pick in the June 1971 free agent draft; instead, he was chosen by the Cardinals in the 40th round. He had always been a fairly good student, and was accepted at Berkeley, but when the Cardinals offered a $30,000 bonus, he decided to head for professional ball.
There are hundreds of stories about minor league phenoms who burn up the leagues and fizzle in the majors; Hernandez had the opposite experience. He has always hit better for average in the majors than he did starting out in A ball at St. Petersburg in 1972 (.256) or AAA ball at Tulsa in the same year (.241). He found his groove in Tulsa in ’73 and ’74? and was brought up for 14 games in St. Louis in 1974. He hit .294 in those games, was soon being described as the next Musial, started the 1975 season at first, couldn’t get going, was sent down again, and brought up again the following year, this time to stay.
That first full year with the Cardinals, he hit .289, the next year .291. Still, he didn’t feel secure. In 1978, the year he met and married Sue Broecker, he slumped to .255. “I didn’t feel I was really here until *79,” he says. That year, he hit .344, with a career-high 210 hits. He won the batting championship, and shared the Most Valuable Player award with Willie Stargell, who hit .281.
“Yeah, you get better,” he said one afternoon in St. Petersburg. “You know more. You watch, you see, you learn. You know something about pacing yourself too. One of the most important things about the minors is learning how to play every day. In high school, college ball, you play maybe twice a week. You don’t know what it’s like to do it day in and day out… In the majors, you’re seeing guys over and over. You look at a guy like Steve Carlton for 11 or 12 years. You know how hard he throws, you know how his breaking ball is, you know how he likes to pitch you. And you know the catchers too, how they see you, what kind of game they like to call.”
Hernandez is one of those players who seem totally involved in the game. On deck, his concentration is ferocious. After an at-bat, including those in which he fails (“a great hitter, a guy who hits .300, fails seven out of 10 times”), he is passing on information about pitchers.
“I look for patterns,” he says. “I usually only look at the way a pitcher pitches to left-handed hitters. I don’t pay much attention to the right-handed hitters. What does he like to do when he’s in trouble? Does he go to the breaking ball, or the fastball, does he like to come in or stay away? I look for what you can do to hurt him. There are very few pitchers that are patternless. Of course, there are a few guys — Seaver, Don Sutton — who don’t have a pattern. They pitch you different every time. That’s why they have 500 wins between them, why they’re future Hall of Famers.”
Hernandez is known as a generous player; he will talk about hitting with anyone on the team “except pitchers, ’cause they might get traded.” Pitchers themselves are a notoriously strange breed (a player once described his team as being made up of blacks, whites, and pitchers), and though Hernandez is friendly with all of them, and was amazingly valuable to the young Mets staff in the 1984 season (Gary Carter didn’t arrive until ’85), he still maintains a certain distance.
“Most pitchers … can’t relate to hitting because they can’t hit, they’ve never hit. They don’t know how. And there’s very few that know how to pitch. But it’s not so simple. Some guys you can hit off, some you can’t. I was always successful against Carlton, and he was a great pitcher. And then there’s some sub-.500 pitcher, and you can’t get a hit off him. It’s one of the inexplicable mysteries of baseball.”
Hernandez clearly loves talking about the craft of baseball. But there are some subjects he won’t discuss. One is his ruined marriage to Sue Broecker. There have been various blurry published reports about this messy soap opera. How Keith played around a lot after the marriage, particularly on the road. How they broke up after the All-Star game in 1980, then reconciled and had a baby. How Keith liked his booze after games, and later started dabbling with cocaine. She got fed up, one version goes, and then demanded most of his $1.7 million a year salary as reparations. In my experience, the truth about anybody else’s marriage is unknowable; thousands struggle to understand their own.
Hernandez, by all accounts, loves his children; he dotes on them when he is with them, even took a few days out of spring training to take them to Disney World. Marriages end; responsibility does not. Hernandez says that he would like to marry again someday and raise a family, but not until he’s finished with baseball. One sign of maturity is the realization that you can’t have everything.
He also won’t discuss cocaine anymore. At one point, he told writer Joe Klein what it was like around the major leagues in the late ’70s. “All of a sudden, it was everywhere. In the past, you might be in a bar and someone would say, ‘Hey, Keith, wanna smoke a joint?’ Now it was ‘Wanna do a line?’ People I’d never met before were offering; people I didn’t know. Everywhere you went. It was like a wave: it came, and then people began to realize that cocaine could really hurt you, and they stopped.”
Nobody has ever disputed Hernandez’s claim that his cocaine use was strictly recreational; he never had to go into treatment (as teammate Lonnie Smith did); his stats remained consistent. But when Hernandez was traded to the Mets in June 1983 for Neil Allen and Rick Ownbey, the whispering was all over baseball. Cards manager Whitey Herzog would not have traded Hernandez for such mediocre players if the first baseman didn’t have some monstrous drug problem. It didn’t matter that Hernandez almost immediately transformed the Mets into a contender, giving them a professional core, setting an example for younger players, inspiring some of the older men. The whispering went on.
Then, deep into the 1985 season, Hernandez joined the list of professional ballplayers who testified in the Curtis Strong case in Pittsburgh, and the whole thing blew open. In his testimony, Hernandez described cocaine as a demon that got into him, but that was now gone; he had stopped well before the trade to the Mets. He wasn’t the only player named in the Strong case, but he seemed to get most of the ink. When he rejoined the team the next day in Los Angeles, he did the only thing he knew how to do: he went five for five.
When the Mets finally came home to Shea Stadium, Hernandez was given a prolonged standing ovation during his first at-bat. It was as if the fans were telling him that all doubt was now removed: he was a New Yorker forever. Flawed. Imperfect. Capable of folly. But a man who had risen above his own mistakes to keep on doing what he does best. That standing ovation outraged some of the older writers and fans but it moved Hernandez almost to tears. He had to step out of the box to compose himself. Then he singled to left.
Last spring, as Hernandez was getting ready for the new season, baseball commissioner Peter Ueberroth made his decision about punishing the players who had testified in the Strong case. Hernandez was to pay a fine of 10 per cent of his salary (roughly $180,000, to be donated to charity), submit to periodic drug testing, and do 100 hours of community service in each of the next two years. Most of the affected players immediately agreed; Hernandez did not. He objected strongly to being placed in Group 1, those players who “in some fashion facilitated the distribution of drugs in baseball.” In the new afterword to his book If at First…, Hernandez insists: “I never sold drugs or dealt in drugs and didn’t want that incorrect label for the rest of my life.”
There were some obvious constitutional questions. (Hernandez and the other players were given grants of immunity, testified openly, and were punished anyway — by the baseball commissioner — even though they had the absolute right to plead the Fifth Amendment in the first place.) There was also something inherently unfair about punishing a man who came clean. Hernandez threatened to file a grievance, conferred with friends, lawyers, his brother. After a week of the resulting media shitstorm, Hernandez reluctantly agreed to comply, still saying firmly, “The only person I hurt was myself.”
Last year, he took a certain amount of abuse. A group of Chicago fans showed up with dollar bills shoved up their noses. Many Cardinal fans, stirred up by the local press, were unforgiving. And I remember being at one game at Shea Stadium, where a leather-lunged guy behind me kept yelling at Hernandez, “Hit it down da white line, Keith. Hit it down da white line.” Still, Hernandez refused to grovel, plead for forgiveness, appear on the Jimmy Swaggart show, or kiss anyone’s ass. He just played baseball. The Mets won the division, the playoffs, and the World Series, and they couldn’t have done it without him. When The New York Times did a roundup piece a few weeks ago about how the players in the Pittsburgh case had done their community service, Hernandez was the only ballplayer to refuse an interview. His attitude is clear: I did it, it’s over, let’s move on. He plays as hard as he can (slowed these days by bad ankles that get worse on Astroturf) and must know that the Drug Thing might prevent him from ever managing in the major leagues — and could even keep him out of the Hall of Fame.
“I like playing ball,” he says. “That’s where I’m almost always happy.”
III.
Now it’s the spring and everything lies before him. The sports pages are full of questions: what’s the matter with Gooden and why isn’t Dykstra hitting and will the loss of Ray Knight change everything and why does McReynolds look so out to lunch. Nobody writes much about Hernandez; his career and his style don’t provoke many questions. He will tell you that he thinks Don Mattingly is “the best player in the game today,” but admits that he seldom watches American League games and isn’t even interested in playing American League teams in spring. The next day, for example, the Mets are scheduled to play the Blue Jays in nearby Dunedin. “I’d rather not even go,” says Hernandez. “It’s a shit park and we’re never gonna play these guys, so why?”
In the clubhouse, nothing even vaguely resembles a headline; Hernandez does talk in an irritated way about Strawberry, as if the sight of such natural gifts being inadequately used causes him a kind of aesthetic anger. “Last year, he finally learned how to separate his offense from his defense and that’s a major improvement,” Hernandez says. “Before, if he wasn’t hitting, he’d let it affect his fielding. Not last year.”
His locker is at the opposite end of the clubhouse from that of Gary Carter, who is the other leader of the club. I’m told that some players are Carter men, some Hernandez men. There could not be a greater difference in style. Carter is Mister Good Guy America, right out of the wholesome Steve Garvey mold. You can imagine him as a Los Angeles Dodger — but not a Brooklyn Dodger. He smiles most of the time and even his teeth seem to have muscles; he radiates fair-haired good health; if a demon has ever entered him, he shows no signs of the visit.
You can see Carter on a horse, or kicking up dust with a Bronco on some western backcountry road or strolling toward you on the beach at Malibu. Hernandez is dark, reflective, analytical, urban. Through the winter, you see him around the saloons of the city, sometimes with friends like Phil McConkey of the Giants, other times with beautiful women. His clothes are carefully cut. He reads books, loves history, buys art for his apartment on the East Side. Carter is the king of the triumphant high-fives; Hernandez seems embarrassed by them. In a crisis, Carter might get down on a knee and have a prayer meeting; Hernandez advocates a good drunk. Between innings, Carter gives out with the rah-rah on the bench; Hernandez is in the runway smoking a cigarette.
They are friendly, of course, in the casual way that men on the same team are friendly. But it’s hard to imagine them wandering together through the night. Hernandez speaks about his personal loneliness and fear; Carter smiles through defeat and promises to be better tomorrow. Both are winners. In some odd way, they were forever joined, forever separated, during the Greatest Game Ever Played (well, one of them): the 6th playoff game against Houston. In the 14th inning, Billy Hatcher hit a home run off Jesse Orosco to tie the game. There was a hurried conference on the mound. Hernandez later said he told Carter, “If you call another fastball, I’ll fight you right here.” Carter insists that the words were never uttered, telling Mark Ribowsky of Inside Sports: “Keith never said that, he just told the press that he did out of the tension of the game. I call the pitches and / decided not to throw anything after that but Jesse’s slider, his best pitch. Let’s get that straight once and for all.”
That was last season. This is the new season, and in the cool mornings of the Florida spring, they are all still thousands of pitches away from the fierce tests of August, the terrors of September. There will be crises, dramas, fights, slumps, failures, disappointments, along with giddy joyous triumphs. There are perils up ahead. The Cardinals might get themselves together again; the Phillies had a great second half last year and could come on strong. When you’re a champion, you have to defend what you’ve won. But for now, they are all months away from discussions of such arcane phenomena as the All Important Loss Column. Up ahead lies the season of the summer game and it remains a mystery, a maybe, a perhaps.
On another morning, Hernandez was waiting to take his swings, 10 hits apiece, and two young women were standing behind the fence, chewing gum. “They’ve gotta be from New York,” Keith said. “Every girl in New York chews gum. Everywhere. All the time. In restaurants. In bed. Drives me crazy.” He laughs. He looks at a foam rubber pad he wears in BP to protect his left thumb, which was hurt when Vida Blue jammed him in a game years ago. Then he steps in and takes his swings, the straight level strokes his father taught him, always making contact, intense in his concentration. That day, he wasn’t playing in the team game, and the field was almost empty. When he was finished hitting, he and Backman helped pick up all the balls and handed them to Perlozzo. Dave Magadan was ready to hit. Hernandez leaned down and touched his toes. “Pd like to go back to bed,” he said. “But I can’t do that anymore. I’m getting old…”
With that he walked out onto the empty field, and then began to jog easily and gracefully through the lumpy grass, and then to run, out around the edges of the field, under the palm trees beside the fence, a lone small figure in a lush and verdant place.
VILLAGE VOICE,
April 7, 1987
I.
It is morning in the clubhouse at Huggins-Stengel Field in St. Petersburg and Keith Hernandez is moving from locker to locker, handing out schedules. He is the player rep of the world champion New York Mets; this is one of his duties. Still dressed in street clothes and sneakers, he says little as he hands the sheets to each of the players. At 33, he is young in the world of ordinary men; in baseball, especially on this young ball club, he is middle-aged. Kids and veterans nod and study the mimeographed sheets, which tell them when the bus will leave for the afternoon game and how many tickets they can expect for wives and friends. Hernandez explains nothing; he was out late the night before with a woman down from New York. “Too much goddamned wine,” he says. And besides, he has been here before, through 13 major league seasons; this is a time for ease, the careful steady retrieval of the skills of the summer game.
“It’s all about getting back in a kind of groove,” Hernandez says. “Not about getting in shape. Most of the guys are in shape, or they get in shape before coming down. I worked out with weights all winter, the first time I ever did that, ’cause I’m getting old.” He smiles, shakes his head. “At the Vertical Club in New York. Jesus, don’t go there at five o’clock. It’s fucking insane, a social — No, this is about getting your stroke right. About getting back your concentration. I don’t worry about it much until the last 10 games before the season starts. If I’m having trouble then, then I worry.”
In the clubhouse, Hernandez wanders among those who have made it to The Show and those who desperately want to. They all move with that coiled and practiced indolence that is unique to baseball, the style of a game where the most exciting action seems to explode out of the greatest calm. A large table is spread with food; there are boxes of Dubble Bubble and sugarless gum. Some players nibble as they dress; others knead and work new gloves, bad-mouth each other, talk about women, read newspapers and sports magazines, all the while stripping off street clothes and pulling on jocks and T-shirts and uniforms.
Kevin McReynolds, new to the team after a winter trade from San Diego, stares into space. Darryl Strawberry isn’t here yet (two weeks before the great alarm clock rhubarb); neither is Dwight Gooden. Hernandez leaves the mimeographed sheets on the small benches in front of their lockers and moves on. When he’s finished, he dumps the leftovers in a trash can, sits down at his own locker, lights a Winston and reaches for the New York Times crossword puzzle.
“We’ll talk later,” he says, takes a drag, and stares at the puzzle while unbuttoning his shirt. Hernandez examines the words the way fans examine stats. His own stats are, of course, extraordinary. One of the most consistent hitters in the game, in three full seasons as a Met, he has averaged .311, .309, and .310. Against left-handed pitching last year, he hit .312; against right-handers, .309. He hit .310 at home and .311 on the road. Last year, he had 13 game-winning RBIs, and his career total of 107 is the most in National League history.
It seemed that every time you looked up last season, Hernandez was on base; this wasn’t an illusion; he tied with Tim Raines for the lead in on-base percentage (.413), with 94 walks added to 171 hits. Although he has never been much of a power hitter (his career high was 16 home runs for the Cardinals in 1980), when there are men on base there is nobody you’d rather have at bat. “I can’t stand leading off an inning,” he says. “It’s so goddamned boring.” Hernandez hit safely in 10 of the 13 postseason games. That’s what he’s paid to do.
“Keith is the kind of consistent clutch hitter who relies on ’big’ RBI production as compared with ’multi’ RBI production,” says the astute Mets announcer Tim McCarver in the new book he wrote with Ray Robinson, Oh, Baby, I Love It! “As an example, a lot of one-run games are won by key hits in the middle innings rather than by big three-run home runs late in the game. Keith is a spectacular middle-inning hitter.…You’ve heard the baseball adage, ‘Keep ’em close, I’ll think of something’? Well, the something the Mets think of is usually Keith Hernandez.”
The fielding stats are even more extraordinary. Last year, he won his ninth straight Gold Glove Award at first base — the most of any player in history — with only five errors in the season, for a .996 average. Those stats don’t even begin to tell the story of what Hernandez does on the field; like all great glove men, he makes difficult plays look easy.
But more important, Hernandez can still dazzle you with the play that follows no rule. In the 12th inning of a game with Cincinnati last July 22, the Reds had runners on first and second with none out. Carl Willis dropped a splendid bunt down the third base line, and suddenly, there was Keith, all the way over from first. He threw to Gary Carter, who was playing third, and Carter went back to first for the double play. The Mets won 6-3 in the 14th inning. McCarver, who calls Hernandez “the Baryshnikov of first basemen,” writes: “Baseball is a game where, if you do the routine things spectacularly, you win more games than doing the spectacular things routinely — because few athletes have the talent to do spectacular things routinely. Keith has that kind of talent.”
In spring training, of course, all players spend their mornings doing the routine things routinely. And on this day, after the cigarette and the crossword, Hernandez is suited up. He makes a quick visit to the John. And then he joins the other players as they move out onto the field. To a visitor who believes the phrase “spring training” is the loveliest in the American language, the view is suddenly beautiful, the bright blue and orange of the Mets’ uniforms instantly transforming the great sward of fresh green grass.
After more than 130 days without baseball, it’s beginning again. The wan sun abruptly breaks through the clouds and the young men jog out to the far reaches of the outfield and then back. They line up in rows, and then an instructor leads them through 15 minutes of stretching exercises. There is something wonderfully appealing about the clumsiness of the players during this drill; thrown out of their accustomed positions and stances, they don’t look like professional athletes at all. Instead, the field now looks like part of some peculiar kind of boot camp, stocked with raw recruits. Jesse Orosco glances at Doug Sisk to see if he’s doing the exercise correctly; Lenny Dykstra says something to Carter, who laughs; Backman does a push-up when the others are twisting through sit-ups. Hernandez leads with his left leg when everyone else is leading with the right. You can see more athletic workouts at the New York Health & C Racquet Club.
But then it’s over and they’re all up and reaching for gloves. The players pair off, playing catch, loosening up, while the sun begins to dry the wet grass. Hernandez is throwing with Roger McDowell. The ease and grace and economy of movement are obvious; it’s as if he is on a morning stroll. He chatters away with other players (as he does with opposing players who reach first base during the season, a tactical matter that is less about conviviality than it is about distracting the enemy). Dykstra slides a package of Red Man from his hip pocket and bites off a chunk and Hernandez says something we can’t hear and Dykstra tries to laugh with his mouth shut. On the sidelines, Davey Johnson has emerged to watch his charges. His coaches — Buddy Harrelson, Bill Robinson, Vern Hoscheit, Sam Perlozzo, and Mel Stottlemyre — are on the side, glancing indifferently at the players, talking about famous assholes they’ve known. The list is fairly long and each new name brings a guffaw and a story. Harrelson turns to a visitor and says, “That’s all off the record.” And laughs. On the field, Hernandez is working out of a pitcher’s windup. He throws a strike. “You think Mex can make this team?” Perlozzo says. Stottlemyre smiles. “He already did.”
Then the players amble over to the batting cage, where Perlozzo will be throwing. There’s a wire fence beside the cage and fans have assembled behind it, some wearing Mets jackets, caps, and T-shirts. A few are old, the stereotypical snowbirds of spring training; but more are young. They’ve arranged vacations to come down to see the ballplayers. A few are screaming for autographs. Hernandez waits to bat, says, “Jesus Christ, listen to them…” The kids among them seem in awe, and are not screaming. “These are supposed to be grown-ups.” Two of the middle-aged fans are waving baseballs to be signed. I mention to Hernandez what Warren Spahn had said at a banquet the night before in St. Petersburg: “Baseballs were never meant to be written on. Kids ought to play with ’em. They ought to throw ’em, hit ’em. I hope someday they develop a cover you can’t write on.” Hernandez says, “Ain’t that the truth.”
But the fans are persistent and I remember waiting outside Ebbets Field with my brother Tom one late afternoon long ago and seeing Carl Furillo come out, dressed in a sports shirt. His arms looked like the thickest, most powerful arms in the known universe. I wanted to ask him for an autograph but didn’t know how; a mob of other kids chased after him and he got in a car with Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella, and I wondered how he had ever been able to sign the petition at spring training in 1947 saying he couldn’t play with a black man. Years later, I learned that Leo Durocher told the protesting players (Dixie Walker, Hugh Casey, Kirby Higbe, Bobby Bragan, Furillo, among others) to go and “wipe your ass” with the petition. Durocher was the manager and Robinson was on the team and there was nothing else to say except play ball. Standing at the batting cage, while Hernandez took his swings and the fans demanded to be authenticated with signatures, I realized again how much of the adult response to baseball is about the accretion of memory and the passage of time.
“Christ, I hate spring training,” Hernandez said at one point. “It’s so goddamned boring.”
But for the rest of us, spring training is something else: the true beginning of the year, a kind of preliminary to the summer festival, another irreversible mark in time. On the field and in the clubhouse, kid players come over to Hernandez. “Hey, Mex, lemme ask you something…” They are talking to him about the present and the future. But we who don’t play also see the past; it helps us measure accomplishment, skill, potential. Don Mattingly is another Musial; Wally Backman is another Eddie Stanky. At spring training, somewhere in the Florida afternoons, we always hear the voice of Red Barber and know that in a few weeks we’ll be playing the Reds at Crosley Field and the Cardinals in Sportsman’s Park and we could lose one in the late innings if that goddamned Slaughter lifts one over the pavilion roof. This is not mere sentiment; it’s history and lore, part of the baggage of New York memory.
New Yorkers don’t easily accept ballplayers. They almost always come from somewhere else, itinerants and mercenaries, and most of them are rejected. We look at Darryl Strawberry and unfairly compare him to Snider, DiMaggio, Mays, Mantle. We question his desire, his heart, his willingness under pressure to risk everything in one joyful and explosive moment. Since he is young, we reserve judgment, but after four seasons, he still seems a stranger in the town. Those who are accepted seem to have been part of New York forever. Hernandez is one of them.
II.
He was born on October 20, 1953, in San Francisco. Although his teammates call him Mex, he isn’t Mexican at all. His grandparents on his father’s side immigrated from Spain in 1907; his mother’s side is Scotch-Irish. Keith’s father, John, was a fine high school player (hitting .650 in his senior year) and was signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers for a $1000 bonus in 1940. According to William Nack in Sports Illustrated, John Hernandez was badly beaned in a minor league night game just before the war; his eyesight was ruined, and though he played with Musial and others in some Navy games, when the war was over, John Hernandez knew he couldn’t play again. He became a San Francisco fireman, moved to suburban Pacifica, and started the process of turning his sons, Gary and Keith, into the ballplayers he could never be. They swung at a balled-up sock attached to a rope in the barn; both playing first base, they learned to field ground balls, thousands of ground balls, millions.
From the time Keith was eight, he and his brother were given baseball quizzes, questions about tactics and strategy, the fundamentals. His mother, Jackie, took home movies at Little League games, and they would be carefully studied, analyzed for flaws. John Hernandez was not the first American father to do such things; he will not be the last. But he did the job well. Perhaps too well.
“My father taught me how to hit,” Keith says. “He made us swing straight at the ball, not to undercut it, golf it. A straight swing, an even stroke. He really knew.”
But Nack, and other writers, have described the relationship of father and son as a mixed blessing. In brief, John Hernandez is said to be unable to leave his son alone; Keith is one of the finest players in the game, an acknowledged leader of a splendid world championship team, the father of three daughters of his own; but too often, his father still treats him as if he were the kid behind the barn, learning to hit the slider. When Keith goes into a slump (and he has one almost every year, usually in midseason), his father is on the phone with advice. As Nack wrote, “Keith knows that no one can help him out of a slump as quickly as his father can, and so, throughout his career, he has often turned to his father for help. At the same time, he has felt the compelling need to break away from his father and make it on his own, to be his own man.”
Obviously it would be a mistake to think that Keith Hernandez is the mere creation of his father. His brother, Gary, was trained the same way, went to Berkeley on an athletic scholarship, but didn’t make it to the majors. Keith had his own drive, his own vision. At Capuchino High (where he hit .500 one season), he also starred on the football and basketball teams, and says that football was particularly good training. “I was a quarterback, and I had to make choices all the time, to move guys around, read the other teams’ defenses. But I was 5-11, 175 pounds then and that was too small, even for college. I went down to Stanford for a tryout, saw the size of these guys, and decided baseball was for me.”
Major league scouts were watching him in high school, but in his senior year he quit the team after an argument with the manager. Most of the scouts vanished. Until then, it had been expected that Keith would be a first-round draft pick in the June 1971 free agent draft; instead, he was chosen by the Cardinals in the 40th round. He had always been a fairly good student, and was accepted at Berkeley, but when the Cardinals offered a $30,000 bonus, he decided to head for professional ball.
There are hundreds of stories about minor league phenoms who burn up the leagues and fizzle in the majors; Hernandez had the opposite experience. He has always hit better for average in the majors than he did starting out in A ball at St. Petersburg in 1972 (.256) or AAA ball at Tulsa in the same year (.241). He found his groove in Tulsa in ’73 and ’74? and was brought up for 14 games in St. Louis in 1974. He hit .294 in those games, was soon being described as the next Musial, started the 1975 season at first, couldn’t get going, was sent down again, and brought up again the following year, this time to stay.
That first full year with the Cardinals, he hit .289, the next year .291. Still, he didn’t feel secure. In 1978, the year he met and married Sue Broecker, he slumped to .255. “I didn’t feel I was really here until *79,” he says. That year, he hit .344, with a career-high 210 hits. He won the batting championship, and shared the Most Valuable Player award with Willie Stargell, who hit .281.
“Yeah, you get better,” he said one afternoon in St. Petersburg. “You know more. You watch, you see, you learn. You know something about pacing yourself too. One of the most important things about the minors is learning how to play every day. In high school, college ball, you play maybe twice a week. You don’t know what it’s like to do it day in and day out… In the majors, you’re seeing guys over and over. You look at a guy like Steve Carlton for 11 or 12 years. You know how hard he throws, you know how his breaking ball is, you know how he likes to pitch you. And you know the catchers too, how they see you, what kind of game they like to call.”
Hernandez is one of those players who seem totally involved in the game. On deck, his concentration is ferocious. After an at-bat, including those in which he fails (“a great hitter, a guy who hits .300, fails seven out of 10 times”), he is passing on information about pitchers.
“I look for patterns,” he says. “I usually only look at the way a pitcher pitches to left-handed hitters. I don’t pay much attention to the right-handed hitters. What does he like to do when he’s in trouble? Does he go to the breaking ball, or the fastball, does he like to come in or stay away? I look for what you can do to hurt him. There are very few pitchers that are patternless. Of course, there are a few guys — Seaver, Don Sutton — who don’t have a pattern. They pitch you different every time. That’s why they have 500 wins between them, why they’re future Hall of Famers.”
Hernandez is known as a generous player; he will talk about hitting with anyone on the team “except pitchers, ’cause they might get traded.” Pitchers themselves are a notoriously strange breed (a player once described his team as being made up of blacks, whites, and pitchers), and though Hernandez is friendly with all of them, and was amazingly valuable to the young Mets staff in the 1984 season (Gary Carter didn’t arrive until ’85), he still maintains a certain distance.
“Most pitchers … can’t relate to hitting because they can’t hit, they’ve never hit. They don’t know how. And there’s very few that know how to pitch. But it’s not so simple. Some guys you can hit off, some you can’t. I was always successful against Carlton, and he was a great pitcher. And then there’s some sub-.500 pitcher, and you can’t get a hit off him. It’s one of the inexplicable mysteries of baseball.”
Hernandez clearly loves talking about the craft of baseball. But there are some subjects he won’t discuss. One is his ruined marriage to Sue Broecker. There have been various blurry published reports about this messy soap opera. How Keith played around a lot after the marriage, particularly on the road. How they broke up after the All-Star game in 1980, then reconciled and had a baby. How Keith liked his booze after games, and later started dabbling with cocaine. She got fed up, one version goes, and then demanded most of his $1.7 million a year salary as reparations. In my experience, the truth about anybody else’s marriage is unknowable; thousands struggle to understand their own.
Hernandez, by all accounts, loves his children; he dotes on them when he is with them, even took a few days out of spring training to take them to Disney World. Marriages end; responsibility does not. Hernandez says that he would like to marry again someday and raise a family, but not until he’s finished with baseball. One sign of maturity is the realization that you can’t have everything.
He also won’t discuss cocaine anymore. At one point, he told writer Joe Klein what it was like around the major leagues in the late ’70s. “All of a sudden, it was everywhere. In the past, you might be in a bar and someone would say, ‘Hey, Keith, wanna smoke a joint?’ Now it was ‘Wanna do a line?’ People I’d never met before were offering; people I didn’t know. Everywhere you went. It was like a wave: it came, and then people began to realize that cocaine could really hurt you, and they stopped.”
Nobody has ever disputed Hernandez’s claim that his cocaine use was strictly recreational; he never had to go into treatment (as teammate Lonnie Smith did); his stats remained consistent. But when Hernandez was traded to the Mets in June 1983 for Neil Allen and Rick Ownbey, the whispering was all over baseball. Cards manager Whitey Herzog would not have traded Hernandez for such mediocre players if the first baseman didn’t have some monstrous drug problem. It didn’t matter that Hernandez almost immediately transformed the Mets into a contender, giving them a professional core, setting an example for younger players, inspiring some of the older men. The whispering went on.
Then, deep into the 1985 season, Hernandez joined the list of professional ballplayers who testified in the Curtis Strong case in Pittsburgh, and the whole thing blew open. In his testimony, Hernandez described cocaine as a demon that got into him, but that was now gone; he had stopped well before the trade to the Mets. He wasn’t the only player named in the Strong case, but he seemed to get most of the ink. When he rejoined the team the next day in Los Angeles, he did the only thing he knew how to do: he went five for five.
When the Mets finally came home to Shea Stadium, Hernandez was given a prolonged standing ovation during his first at-bat. It was as if the fans were telling him that all doubt was now removed: he was a New Yorker forever. Flawed. Imperfect. Capable of folly. But a man who had risen above his own mistakes to keep on doing what he does best. That standing ovation outraged some of the older writers and fans but it moved Hernandez almost to tears. He had to step out of the box to compose himself. Then he singled to left.
Last spring, as Hernandez was getting ready for the new season, baseball commissioner Peter Ueberroth made his decision about punishing the players who had testified in the Strong case. Hernandez was to pay a fine of 10 per cent of his salary (roughly $180,000, to be donated to charity), submit to periodic drug testing, and do 100 hours of community service in each of the next two years. Most of the affected players immediately agreed; Hernandez did not. He objected strongly to being placed in Group 1, those players who “in some fashion facilitated the distribution of drugs in baseball.” In the new afterword to his book If at First…, Hernandez insists: “I never sold drugs or dealt in drugs and didn’t want that incorrect label for the rest of my life.”
There were some obvious constitutional questions. (Hernandez and the other players were given grants of immunity, testified openly, and were punished anyway — by the baseball commissioner — even though they had the absolute right to plead the Fifth Amendment in the first place.) There was also something inherently unfair about punishing a man who came clean. Hernandez threatened to file a grievance, conferred with friends, lawyers, his brother. After a week of the resulting media shitstorm, Hernandez reluctantly agreed to comply, still saying firmly, “The only person I hurt was myself.”
Last year, he took a certain amount of abuse. A group of Chicago fans showed up with dollar bills shoved up their noses. Many Cardinal fans, stirred up by the local press, were unforgiving. And I remember being at one game at Shea Stadium, where a leather-lunged guy behind me kept yelling at Hernandez, “Hit it down da white line, Keith. Hit it down da white line.” Still, Hernandez refused to grovel, plead for forgiveness, appear on the Jimmy Swaggart show, or kiss anyone’s ass. He just played baseball. The Mets won the division, the playoffs, and the World Series, and they couldn’t have done it without him. When The New York Times did a roundup piece a few weeks ago about how the players in the Pittsburgh case had done their community service, Hernandez was the only ballplayer to refuse an interview. His attitude is clear: I did it, it’s over, let’s move on. He plays as hard as he can (slowed these days by bad ankles that get worse on Astroturf) and must know that the Drug Thing might prevent him from ever managing in the major leagues — and could even keep him out of the Hall of Fame.
“I like playing ball,” he says. “That’s where I’m almost always happy.”
III.
Now it’s the spring and everything lies before him. The sports pages are full of questions: what’s the matter with Gooden and why isn’t Dykstra hitting and will the loss of Ray Knight change everything and why does McReynolds look so out to lunch. Nobody writes much about Hernandez; his career and his style don’t provoke many questions. He will tell you that he thinks Don Mattingly is “the best player in the game today,” but admits that he seldom watches American League games and isn’t even interested in playing American League teams in spring. The next day, for example, the Mets are scheduled to play the Blue Jays in nearby Dunedin. “I’d rather not even go,” says Hernandez. “It’s a shit park and we’re never gonna play these guys, so why?”
In the clubhouse, nothing even vaguely resembles a headline; Hernandez does talk in an irritated way about Strawberry, as if the sight of such natural gifts being inadequately used causes him a kind of aesthetic anger. “Last year, he finally learned how to separate his offense from his defense and that’s a major improvement,” Hernandez says. “Before, if he wasn’t hitting, he’d let it affect his fielding. Not last year.”
His locker is at the opposite end of the clubhouse from that of Gary Carter, who is the other leader of the club. I’m told that some players are Carter men, some Hernandez men. There could not be a greater difference in style. Carter is Mister Good Guy America, right out of the wholesome Steve Garvey mold. You can imagine him as a Los Angeles Dodger — but not a Brooklyn Dodger. He smiles most of the time and even his teeth seem to have muscles; he radiates fair-haired good health; if a demon has ever entered him, he shows no signs of the visit.
You can see Carter on a horse, or kicking up dust with a Bronco on some western backcountry road or strolling toward you on the beach at Malibu. Hernandez is dark, reflective, analytical, urban. Through the winter, you see him around the saloons of the city, sometimes with friends like Phil McConkey of the Giants, other times with beautiful women. His clothes are carefully cut. He reads books, loves history, buys art for his apartment on the East Side. Carter is the king of the triumphant high-fives; Hernandez seems embarrassed by them. In a crisis, Carter might get down on a knee and have a prayer meeting; Hernandez advocates a good drunk. Between innings, Carter gives out with the rah-rah on the bench; Hernandez is in the runway smoking a cigarette.
They are friendly, of course, in the casual way that men on the same team are friendly. But it’s hard to imagine them wandering together through the night. Hernandez speaks about his personal loneliness and fear; Carter smiles through defeat and promises to be better tomorrow. Both are winners. In some odd way, they were forever joined, forever separated, during the Greatest Game Ever Played (well, one of them): the 6th playoff game against Houston. In the 14th inning, Billy Hatcher hit a home run off Jesse Orosco to tie the game. There was a hurried conference on the mound. Hernandez later said he told Carter, “If you call another fastball, I’ll fight you right here.” Carter insists that the words were never uttered, telling Mark Ribowsky of Inside Sports: “Keith never said that, he just told the press that he did out of the tension of the game. I call the pitches and / decided not to throw anything after that but Jesse’s slider, his best pitch. Let’s get that straight once and for all.”
That was last season. This is the new season, and in the cool mornings of the Florida spring, they are all still thousands of pitches away from the fierce tests of August, the terrors of September. There will be crises, dramas, fights, slumps, failures, disappointments, along with giddy joyous triumphs. There are perils up ahead. The Cardinals might get themselves together again; the Phillies had a great second half last year and could come on strong. When you’re a champion, you have to defend what you’ve won. But for now, they are all months away from discussions of such arcane phenomena as the All Important Loss Column. Up ahead lies the season of the summer game and it remains a mystery, a maybe, a perhaps.
On another morning, Hernandez was waiting to take his swings, 10 hits apiece, and two young women were standing behind the fence, chewing gum. “They’ve gotta be from New York,” Keith said. “Every girl in New York chews gum. Everywhere. All the time. In restaurants. In bed. Drives me crazy.” He laughs. He looks at a foam rubber pad he wears in BP to protect his left thumb, which was hurt when Vida Blue jammed him in a game years ago. Then he steps in and takes his swings, the straight level strokes his father taught him, always making contact, intense in his concentration. That day, he wasn’t playing in the team game, and the field was almost empty. When he was finished hitting, he and Backman helped pick up all the balls and handed them to Perlozzo. Dave Magadan was ready to hit. Hernandez leaned down and touched his toes. “Pd like to go back to bed,” he said. “But I can’t do that anymore. I’m getting old…”
With that he walked out onto the empty field, and then began to jog easily and gracefully through the lumpy grass, and then to run, out around the edges of the field, under the palm trees beside the fence, a lone small figure in a lush and verdant place.
VILLAGE VOICE,
April 7, 1987
CUS
In those days, you had to pass a small candy stand to get to the door of the Gramercy Gym on East 14th Street. The door was heavy, with painted zinc nailed across its face and a misspelled sign saying “Gramacy Gym,” and when you opened the door, you saw a long badly lit stairway, climbing into darkness. There was another door on the landing, and a lot of tough New York kids would reach that landing and find themselves unable to open the second door. They’d go back down the stairs, try to look cool as they bought a soda at the candy stand, then hurry home. Many others opened the second door. And when they did, they entered the tough, hard, disciplined school of a man named Cus D’Amato.
“First thing I want to know about a kid,” Cus said to me once, on some lost night in the ’50s, “is whether he can open that door. Then when he walks in, I look at him, try to see what he’s seeing. Most of them stand at the door. They see guys skipping rope, shad-owboxing, hitting the bags. Most of all, they see guys in the ring. Fighting. And then they have to decide. Do they want this, or not? If they want it, they stay, they ask someone what they should do. Most of them are shy, for some reason. Almost all fighters. They whisper. You tell them to come back, and you’ll see what can be done. They have to spend at least one night dealing with fear. If they come back the second time, then maybe you have a fighter.”
I wasn’t a fighter, but I came up those stairs almost every day in the late ’50s and early ’60s, and in some important ways I learned as much from Cus D’Amato as the fighters did. I was living then on 9th Street and Second Avenue, working nights at the Post, and I’d wake up around three in the afternoon and walk to 14th Street and hang out with the fighters. My friend José Torres was then the hottest young middleweight in the city and one of Cus D’Amato’s fighters. He had lost by one point to Laszlo Papp in the finals of the ’56 Olympics in Melbourne, and when he came to New York from Puerto Rico he placed his career in the hands of Cus.
“I didn’t know anything about New York,” he said. “I didn’t know very much about boxing. Most of all, I didn’t know anything about life. So I learned about everything then from Cus.”
Cus, who died last week at JJ after a long struggle with pneumonia, was one of the best teachers I ever met. He was a tough, intelligent man who was almost Victorian in his beliefs in work and self-denial and fierce concentration. For years he’d lived alone in the office of the gym, accompanied only by a huge boxer dog named Champ; there were books on the shelves (he loved the Civil War and essays on strategy and tactics and almost never read novels, although he admired W. C. Heinz’s The Professional) and a gun somewhere and a small black-and-white TV set and a pay phone on the wall. After Floyd Patterson became champion in 1956, Cus took an apartment over a coffee shop on 53 rd Street and Broadway and bought some elegantly tailored clothes and a homburg; but, talking to him, I always sensed that his idea of paradise was that room and the cot in the office of the Gramercy Gym.
“You can’t want too many things,” he said to me one wintry evening, after the fighters had gone, the speed bags were stilled, and we stood at the large gym windows while snow fell into 14th Street. “The beginning of corruption is wanting things. You want a car or a fancy house or a piano, and the next thing you know, you’re doing things you didn’t want to do, just to get the things. I guess maybe that’s why I never got married. It wasn’t that I didn’t like women. They’re nice. It’s nice. It’s that women want things, and if I want the woman, then I have to want the things she wants. Hey, I don’t want a new refrigerator, or a big TV set, or a new couch. …”
Cus wanted his fighters to be champions, to have money and glory; but he truly didn’t seem to want much for himself. Once a bum made his way to the Gramercy from the White Rose bar across the street; Cus gave him a dollar; the next day, five bums showed up, and the day after that, almost 40. The fighters laughed, as Cus dispensed singles; and then Cus said, “That’s it, that’s all! You want to come back here, bring trunks!” He was a sucker for old fighters. Once when Cus had the shorts (he had to declare bankruptcy in 1971) Ezzard Charles came around to see him; the great light-heavyweight and former heavyweight champion was a broken man, confined to a wheelchair; he needed a thousand, and Cus borrowed the money, gave it to the old champion, and never heard from Charles again. When Patterson won the championship by knocking out Archie Moore on November 30, 1956, Cus used his share of the purse to make Floyd an elaborate $35,000 jewel-encrusted crown; a few years later, Patterson wouldn’t even talk to Cus. Cus once quoted Gene Fowler to me: “Money is something to throw off the back of trains.”
He loved style in fighters and in writers, too. His favorite sports writers were Jimmy Cannon, Dick Young, and Dan Parker, all of whom took shots at him in print from time to time (“I don’t mind, they gotta job to do and I’m not perfect”), but he also said that the sports writer who moved him most consistently was the elegant Frank Graham of the Journal-American. Later, when Torres became friends with Norman Mailer, Cus started to read his work, as if inspecting it for signs of moral decay. “The guy is really good, isn’t he? He’s like a Robinson, he can box, he can punch. …”
He cherished great fighters — Ray Robinson, Joe Louis, Muhammad Ali, Sandy Saddler, Willie Pep, Tommy Loughran — but sometimes, late at night, sitting over coffee, he’d talk about the fighter that didn’t exist: the perfect fighter, the masterpiece. “The ideal fighter has heart, skill, movement, intelligence, creativity. You can have everything, but if you can’t make it up while you’re in there, you can’t be great. A lot of guys have the mechanics and no heart; lots of guys have heart, no mechanics; the thing that puts it together, it’s mysterious, it’s like making a work of art, you bring everything to it, you make it up when you’re doing it.”
Toward the end, he thought perhaps that he had the perfect heavyweight at last in young Michael Tyson, who has now knocked out all nine of his professional opponents, six in the first round. “He’s strong, he’s brave, he’s in condition, and most of all, he’s got that other thing, the mysterious thing,” Cus said, the last time I saw him. “I have no doubt he’ll be a champion. But more than that, he might be a great fighter.”
There were a lot of good fighters at the Gramercy in the late ’50s: Joe Shaw, a fierce-punching 140-pounder; light-heavyweight Jim Boyd, who’d won the gold medal in Melbourne; two more light-heavyweights, named Sylvester Banks and Paul Wright; a wonderful southpaw featherweight named Floyd Smith; and some fine amateurs ranging from bantamweight Georgie Colon to light-heavyweight Simon Ramos. But as Cus became more involved managing Patterson and Torres, the day-to-day training was left to Joe Fariello (now educating Mark Breland). Cus was away at camp with Patterson; he was up at Stillman’s with Torres, to find experienced professionals for sparring partners. And during the same period, Cus was waging his wars with the International Boxing Club and Madison Square Garden. Some people thought he grew increasingly paranoid.
“If this goes down instead of up,” he said to me one day as we stepped into an elevator in a midtown office building, “we’re in trouble.”
He laughed, but Cus meant it, too. The Mob was all over boxing when Cus brought his first good fighters out of the Gramercy Gym. The hoodlums cut into fighters, arranged tank jobs, fixed judges. Frankie Carbo was called the underworld’s commissioner of boxing, a vicious punk who lived off other men’s sweat and controlled a number of managers. Carbo was friendly, sort of, with Jim Norris, a rich bum with a hoodlum complex who ran the IBC out of the old Garden on Eighth Avenue and 50th Street. There’s no room here to relate the details of Cus D’Amato’s sustained contest with Norris, Carbo, and the Garden. Certainly he was on the moral high ground, but the terrible thing was that his personal crusade also hurt his fighters.
We’ll never know how good Patterson and Torres might have become if they’d been fighting more often, battling those fighters who were controlled by the IBC and the Garden. Certainly Torres would have made more money. I remember one main event he had to take in Boston, when he was still a hot fighter in New York. The total purse came to $28.35. Joe Fariello said, “Joe, you take the $20, I’ll take the $8, and we’ll send the 35$ to Cus.” Patterson did get rich, and Torres did become champion years later than he should have, and in the wrong division (he was one of the greatest middleweights I ever saw, but had to settle for the light-heavyweight championship in 1965). But the competitive fire of Shaw withered from lack of action; the others drifted away.
“It breaks my heart sometimes, thinking about those kids not fighting,” he said to me once. “But I don’t see any other way.”
That was the problem. From 1959 on, Cus never worked a corner for any of his fighters; he didn’t even hold a manager’s license, as a result of the botched promotion of the 1959 Patterson-Johansson fight, when it appeared (but was never proved) that Cus helped bring Fat Tony Salerno in as a money man. The fighters did their best, and for some fights Cus would come to camp, work with them, talk strategy and tactics. But Patterson broke with him, and Torres was forced to go with another manager (Cain Young) to get his chance at a title. Around the time Torres retired, Cus moved upstate, far from the gyms of the city. “I like it up there,” he said once. “I like the clear skies, the lake, where I go fishing. It’s beautiful. Beautiful.” Did he miss the gym on 14th Street? “Yeah,” he said. “Sometimes…”
The last time I saw him was almost exactly a year ago, on the 57th floor of the World Trade Center. We were there to watch Torres be sworn in as chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission, the first professional fighter and the first Puerto Rican ever to hold the job. “I’m so proud of José, I can’t explain it,” Cus said. We talked about Tyson and other things. And then I asked him if he’d ever gone back to the Gramercy Gym since he sold it in the ’70s. “No,” he said, and looked up at José, who was standing with Mario Cuomo at the front of the room. “No, I don’t like to look back.”
And so I did the looking back, sitting in the packed, brightly lit conference room, remembering Cus talking to me when I was 20 about the uses of fear, the meaning of courage, the need to concentrate energy and purpose in all things, and how I’d tried and failed so often to follow his lessons. I’d modeled a character on Cus in one of my novels, and he’d liked the book but objected when he saw the TV movie; on the screen, John Cassavetes stood on a ring apron talking to a fighter and smoking a cigarette. “What manager would do that? What kind of example would he be showing to a kid?” I remembered that conversation, and after José was sworn in, I turned to Cus and said, “Listen, Cus, I want to thank you for everything.” He squinted suspiciously at me. “What do you mean?” he said, and I said, “For letting me climb the stairs.”
He nodded, turned away, and said, “You goddamned writers.”
I’m sorry I never got to explain.
VILLAGE VOICE,
November 19, 1985
TYSON
An artificial Christmas tree stands in a corner of the waiting room, with a bunched-up bedsheet at its base feigning snow. Unmatched pieces of cheap furniture, some wicker, some plastic, are arranged awkwardly around the edges of the room. It could be the antiseptic lobby of a second-class motel except for the view through the picture windows behind the Christmas tree: two parallel steel-mesh fences topped with barbed wire and a slope of sour lawn rising toward blank walls and tan-brick buildings. The complex is called the Indiana Youth Center. But it’s not a place where schoolkids play checkers or basketball on frigid afternoons. The barbed wire makes it clear that this is a jail.
So does the posted rule against bringing drugs or alcohol on visits; so does the order to place wallets and handbags in a locker in the far corner, along with all cash in excess of five dollars, any pens, notebooks, tape recorders, books, all hats and overcoats; and so does the stamping of your hand with invisible ink, the emptying of pockets into a plastic tray, the body search, the passage through a metal detector.
The rules of entrance obeyed, I walk down a long, wide ramp into the prison, pause at a sign forbidding weapons beyond this point, and wait for a steel-rimmed glass door to be opened. Up ahead there are other such doors, with guards and a few prisoners moving languidly along a corridor that is lit like an aquarium. The door in front of me pops open with a click. I turn right to a guard’s booth, where I hand over my pass and am told to thrust my right hand into a hole in a wooden box. An ultraviolet light certifies the stamp. I am then instructed to go through the door to the left, into the visitors’ lounge, and give the pass to the guard behind the high desk in the corner. I do what I am told and wait. In the lounge a dozen couples sit facing each other on thick plastic-covered chairs, maintaining space and privacy, drinking soda bought from machines, trying hard to be loose, glancing tensely at the clock, conscious of time. Behind them a wall of picture windows opens upon a vista of gray grass and blank, tan walls. The Indiana sky is the color of steel.
Then, suddenly, from another door, Mike Tyson appears. He smiles, gives me a hug, and says, “How are ya, buddy?”
Twenty-two months have passed since he vanished from the nightsides of cities, from the bubble of champagne and the musk of women, from the gyms where he prepared for his violent trade, from the arenas that roared when he came after an opponent in a ferocious rush, his eyes hooded, gleaming with bad intentions. Twenty-two months have passed since he was convicted of raping an eighteen-year-old beauty-pageant contestant who consented to leave her own Indianapolis hotel room at nearly 1:30 in the morning, who moved around the streets for a while with Tyson in his rented limousine, who then went to Tyson’s suite in the Canterbury Hotel, where she sat on the bed with him, went to the bathroom and removed her panty shield, on the way passing the door that led to the corridor and the possibility of flight. Twenty-two months since the jury believed Desiree Washington lay helpless while Tyson had sex with her. Twenty-two months since the jury believed that it was perfectly normal for a rape victim to spend two more days taking part in the Miss Black America pageant of 1991. Twenty-two months since Michael Gerard Tyson, twenty-five-year-old child of Amboy Street, Brownsville, Brooklyn, was led away — refusing to express remorse for a crime he insists he didn’t commit — deprived of his freedom, his ability to earn millions, his pride.
But if there is anger in him or a sense of humiliation, neither is visible on this gray morning. He is wearing jeans and a white T-shirt — with his prison number, 922335, hand-lettered over his heart — and to a visitor who first met him when he was sixteen, he looks taller somehow. In the TV-news clip that plays every time his name is mentioned, Tyson weighs about 250 pounds, swollen and suety in a tight-fitting suit as he smiles in an ironic way and holds up his cuffed hands on his way to a cell. Now, a few days before his second Christmas in prison, he is about 220, the belly as flat as a table, the arms as hard as stone. He looks capable of punching a hole in a prison wall.
“Yeah, I’m in good shape,” he says, “but not boxing shape.” He works out in the prison gym every day, a self-imposed regimen of calisthenics, weights, running. “No boxing,” he says, the familiar whispery voice darkened by a hint of regret. “They don’t allow boxing in prison in Indiana.” He smiles, nodding his head. “That’s the rules. Ya gotta obey the rules.”
We walk over to the chairs, and Tyson sits with his back to the picture windows. His hair is cropped tight, and he’s wearing a mustache and trimmed beard that emphasize the lean look. Then I notice the tattoos. On his left bicep, outlined ir blue against Tyson’s ocher-colored skin, is the bespectacled face of Arthur Ashe, and above it is the title of that splendid man’s book Days of Grace. On his right bicep is a tattooed portrait of Mao Tsetung, with the name MAO underneath it, in cartoony “Chinese” lettering. I tell Tyson that it’s unlikely that any other of the planet’s six billion inhabitants are adorned with that combination of tattoos. He laughs, the familiar gold-capped tooth gleaming. He rubs the tattoos fondly with his huge hands.
“I love reading about Mao,” he says. “Especially about the Long March and what they went through. I mean, they came into a village one time and all the trees were white, and Mao wanted to know what happened, and they told him the people were so hungry they ate the bark right off the trees! What they went through. I mean, that was adversity. This …”
He waves a hand airily around the visiting room but never finishes the sentence; he certainly feels that the Indiana Youth Center can’t be compared to the Long March. I don’t have to ask him about Arthur Ashe. For weeks Tyson and I have been talking by telephone, and he has spoken several times about Ashe’s book.
“I never knew him,” Tyson said one night. “I never liked him. He was a tennis player, know what I mean? And he looked like a black bourgeois, someone I couldn’t have nothin’ to do with. Just looking at him I said, ’Yaaagh, he’s weak.’ That was my way of thinking back then.” A pause. “But then Spike Lee sent me his book, and I started reading it, and in there I read this: ’AIDS isn’t the heaviest burden I have had to bear …being black is the greatest burden I’ve had to bear.…Race has always been my biggest burden.…Even now it continues to feel like an extra weight tied around me.’ It was like wham! An extra weight tied around me! I mean, wow, that really got me, and I kept reading, excited on every page.”
On the telephone, with the great metallic racket of prison in the background, or here in the visiting room of the Indiana Youth Center, Tyson makes it clear that he doesn’t want to talk much about the past. He doesn’t encourage sentimental evocations of the days when, as a raw teenager from a reform school, he learned his trade from the old trainer Cus D’Amato in the gym above the police station in Catskill, New York. He doesn’t want to talk about his relationship with Don King, the flamboyant promoter whose slithery influence many blamed for Tyson’s decline as a fighter and calamitous fall from grace. He is uncomfortable and embarrassed discussing his lost friends and squandered millions. He has no interest in retailing the details of the case, like another Lenny Bruce, endlessly rehashing what happened on July 19, 1991, in room 606 of the Canterbury Hotel or the astonishingly feeble defense offered by his high-priced lawyers or his chances for a new trial. He wants to talk about what he is doing now, and what he is doing is time.
History is filled with tales of men who used prison to educate themselves. Cervantes began Don Quixote in a Spanish prison, and Pancho Villa read that book, slowly and painfully, while caged in the Santiago Tlatelolco prison in Mexico City more than three hundred years later. In this dreadful century, thousands have discovered that nobody can imprison the mind. In the end, Solzhenitsyn triumphed over Stalin’s gulags, Antonio Gramsci over Mussolini’s jails, Malcolm X over the joints of Massachusetts. From Primo Levi to Václav Havel, books, the mind, the imagination, have offered consolation, insight, even hope to men cast into dungeons. I don’t mean to compare Mike Tyson to such men or the Indiana Youth Center to the gulags; Tyson is not serving his six-year sentence for his ideas. But he understands the opportunity offered by doing time and has chosen to seize the day.
“Sometime in that first month here,” he said one night, “I met an old con, and.he pointed at all the guys playing ball or exercising, and he said to me, ‘You see them guys? If that’s all they do when they’re in here, they’ll go out and mess up and come right back.’ He said to me, ‘You want to make this worth something? Go to the library. Read books. Work your mind. Start with the Constitution.’ And I knew he was right.”
And so Tyson embarked on an astonishing campaign of exuberant and eclectic self-education. Early on he read George Jackson’s prison classic, Soledad Brother, “and the guy knocked me out. It was like any good book: The guy sounded like he was talking directly to me. I could hear him, I can hear him now. He made me understand a lot about the way black men end up in prison, but he didn’t feel sorry for himself. That’s what I liked. I got so caught up with this guy, he became a part of my life.”
Tyson has been reading black history too. He is fascinated by the revolution in Haiti in the early nineteenth century, “the only really successful slave revolt, because blacks took power” He can quote from John Quincy Adams’s defense of the slaves who mutinied on the Spanish ship Amistad in 1839 off the coast of Cuba and sailed for fifty-five days all the way to New York. “They landed in Long Island,” he says. “Imagine! Long Island.”
The process of self-education did not begin smoothly. In his first weeks in jail, Tyson enrolled in a school program, then quickly dropped out. “You know, I’m out on the streets, I’m out there, or I’m training, or I’m in the bars, I’m chasing these women. Then I come to this place after not going to school since I was what? Sixteen? Seventeen? They hit me with this thing, they said, ‘Bang! Do this, do this work…’ It was like putting a preliminary fighter in with a world champion.”
Dispirited, angry at the teachers and himself, he dropped out for a while. “Then I started very gradually studying on my own, preparing for these things. Then I took that literacy test — and blew it out of the water.”
He went back to classes, studying to take a high school equivalency examination, and met a visiting teacher from Indianapolis named Muhammad Siddeeq.
“He was just talking to the other kids one day and said, ‘Does anybody need any help? If so, I’ll help you in the school process.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I need help.’ So he showed me things, in a simple way. …”
One thing Tyson learned quickly was the use of percentages and decimals. “I never learned that before,” he says, still excited. “It’s a small thing, maybe, something I shoulda learned in grammar school. But you come from a scrambled family, you’re running between the streets and school, missing days, fucking up, and you end up with these holes. One thing never connects to another, and you don’t know why. You don’t know what you didn’t learn. Like percentages. I just never learned it, it was one of the holes. I mean, later on I knew what a percentage was, you know, from a $10 million purse, but I didn’t know how to do it myself. That was always the job of someone else.” He laughs. “One thing now, I can figure out how to leave a tip. There’s restaurants out there where I should eat for free for a couple of years.”
He isn’t simply filling those gaping holes in his education that should have been bricked up in grammar school. He reads constantly, hungrily, voraciously. One day it could be a book on pigeons, which he raised with great knowledge and affection in the Victorian house where he lived with D’Amato and D’Amato’s longtime companion, Camille Ewald, whom Tyson calls “my mother.” But on other days he could be reading into the history of organized crime, thrilled to discover that the old Jewish gangsters of Murder Inc. hung out near Georgia and Livonia avenues in Brownsville, walking distance from his own childhood turf. He discovered that Al Capone was from Brooklyn and went west to Chicago. And there were black gangsters too.
He talks about Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Frank Costello — some of the Founding Fathers of the Mob — with the same intensity and passion he gave as a teenage fighter to Ray Robinson, Mickey Walker, and Roberto Duran. The old gangster he’s most impressed by is the gambler Arnold Rothstein. “He was smart — Damon Runyon called him the Brain — and figured out everything without ever picking up a gun. He helped teach these younger guys, like Lansky and Luciano, you know, how to act, how to dress, how to behave. In The Great Gatsby — you know, by this guy F. Scott Fitzgerald? — the gambler called Meyer Wolfshiem, he’s based on Arnold Rothstein. I mean, this guy was big.”
In one way, of course, studying such histories is a consolation; in a country where the percentage of young black males in prisons is way out of proportion to their numbers in the general population, it must be a relief to learn that the Irish, Italians, and Jews once filled similar cells. But Tyson’s study of organized crime is part of a larger project.
“I want to find out how things really work. Not everything is in the history books, you know.” A pause. “Some of those guys didn’t like blacks. They sold drugs to blacks. They poisoned black history. They didn’t respect us as human beings. But most of them couldn’t read and write. The first ones came to this country ignorant, out of school, making money. They didn’t have any kind of morals. They wanted to be big shots and they wanted to be respected by decent people. They tried to be gentlemen, and that was their downfall. When you try to be more than what you really are you always get screwed up.”
He emphasizes that gangsters are not heroes. “You can read about people without wanting to be like them,” he says. “I can read about Hitler, for example, and not want to be like him, right? But you gotta know about him. You gotta know what you’re talking about. You gotta know what other people are talking about before you can have any kind of intelligent discussion or argument.”
So it isn’t just gangsters or pigeons that are crowding Tyson’s mind. He has been poring over Niccolò Machiavelli. “He wrote about the world we live in. The way it really is, without all the bullshit. Not just in The Prince, but in The Art of War, Discourses. … He saw how important it was to find out what someone’s motivation was. ‘What do they want?’ he says. What do they want, man?”
And Voltaire. “I loved Candide. That was also about the world and how you start out one thing and end up another, ’cause the world don’t let you do the right thing most of the time. And Voltaire himself, he was something, man. He wasn’t afraid. They kept putting him in jail, and he kept writing the truth.”
He has recently read The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, aware that the grandmother of the French writer was a black woman from Haiti. “I identify with that book,” he says. “With Edmond Dantes in the Chateau d’If. He was unjustly imprisoned, too. And he gets educated in prison by this Italian priest.” He laughs out loud. “And he gets his revenge too. I understand that; I feel that. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want revenge against any person. I don’t mean that. I mean against fate, bad luck, whatever you want to call it.”
He is familiar with the Hemingway myth that so exhilarated earlier generations of Americans: Hemingway the warrior, Hemingway the hard drinker, Hemingway the boxer. But he talks most passionately about Hemingway the writer. “He uses those short, hard words, just like hooks and uppercuts inside. You always know what he’s saying, ’cause he says it very clearly. But a guy like Francis Bacon, hey, the sentences just go on and on and on. …”
Obviously, Tyson is not reading literature for simple entertainment, as a diversion from the tedium of prison routine. He is making connections between books and writers, noting distinctions about style and ideas, measuring the content of books against his life as he knows it. But he is not taking a formal course in literature, so I asked him one night how he made the choices about what he reads.
“Sometimes it’s just the books that come to me. People send them and I read them. But sometimes, most of the time, I’m looking. For example, I’m reading this thing about Hemingway and he says he doesn’t ever want to fight ten rounds with Tolstoy. So I say, ‘Hey, I better check out this guy Tolstoy!’ I did, too. It was hard. I sat there with the dictionary beside me, looking up words. But I like him. I don’t like his writing that much because it’s so complicated, but I just like the guy’s way of thinking.”
Along with literature, Tyson has been reading biographies: Mao, Karl Marx, Genghis Khan, Hernán Cortés. In casual talk, he scatters references to Hannibal, Alexander the Great, Oliver Cromwell. “When you read about these individuals, regardless of whether they’re good or bad, they contribute to us a different way of thinking. But no one can really label them good or bad. Who actually knows the definition of good or bad? Good and bad might have a different definition to me than it may have in Webster’s Dictionary, than it may have to you.”
He knows that for his life, the models in books might not always apply. But in all such books, he insists that he finds something of value.
“I was reading Maya Angelou,” he said one evening, “and she said something that equates with me so much. People always say how great a writer she is, and people used to say to me, ‘Mike, you’re great, you could beat anybody, you don’t even have to train.’ But you know how hard it is for me to do that? To win in ninety-one seconds? Do you know what it takes away from me? And Maya Angelou said about herself it takes so much from me to write, takes a lot out of me. In order for me to do that, she says, to perform at that level, it takes everything. It takes my personality. It takes my creativity as an individual. It takes away my social life. It takes away so much. And when she said that, I said, ‘Holy moley, this person understands me.’ They don’t understand why a person can go crazy, when you’re totally normal and you’re involved in a situation that takes all of your normal qualities away. It takes away all your sane qualities.”
In prison Mike Tyson is discovering the many roads back to sanity.
One of those roads is called Islam. Tyson was raised a Catholic by his mother, Lorna, and during the upheaval in that time before he went to jail, he was baptized as a favor to Don King in a much-photographed ceremony presided over by Jesse Jackson. But water, prayer, and photographs didn’t make him a born-again Christian. “That wasn’t real,” he says now. “As soon as I got baptized, I got one of the girls in the choir and went to a hotel room or my place or something.”
Now he has embraced Islam. In a vague way, he’d known about Islam for years; you could not grow up in the era of Muhammad Ali and know nothing about it. “But I was avoiding it because people would press it on me. I always avoided what people pressed on me. They wanted me to do the right thing — and Islam, I believe, is the right thing — but all these people wanted me to do the right thing for the wrong reason.”
In prison, through his teacher, Muhammad Siddeeq, Tyson started more slowly, reading on his own about the religion, asking questions. He insists that Siddeeq is not a newer version of Cus D’Amato. “He’s just a good man,” he says, “and a good teacher.” Nor does Tyson sound like a man who is making a convenient choice as a means of surviving in jail. He admits that “there are guys who become Muslims in jail to feel safe — and give it up the day they hit the streets again.” Tyson might do the same. But in repeated conversations, he sounded as if he’d found in Islam another means of filling some of those holes.
“I believe in Islam,” he told me one night. “That’s true. It’s given me a great deal of understanding. And the Koran gives me insight into the world, and the belief of a man who believes that God has given him the right to speak his word, the prophet Muhammad, peace be unto him. I look at Islam from different perspectives, just as I look at everything else. I find it so beautiful because in Islam you have to tolerate every religion, you know what I mean? ‘Cause everyone has different beliefs. Most so-called religious leaders are bullshit. Voltaire knew that, knew organized religion was a scam. Their object is power. They want power.”
Tyson’s skepticism about organized religion includes some of the sects and factions within Islam. He pledges his allegiance to none of them.
“One guy says, ’I believe in Islam, I live out of the Koran.’ Well, I believe in that but other than that, please.…They got a sect here and a sect there. Unbelievable. I just don’t understand that. How can / be a Muslim and you be a Muslim, but we have two different beliefs?”
Tyson thinks of Islam as not simply a religion but a kind of discipline. He says he prays five times a day. The Koran is a daily part of his reading (but obviously not the only reading he does). “And you know, I got a sailor’s mouth,” he laughed. “But I’ve cut down my cursing at least 50 percent.” He clearly needs to believe in something larger than himself, but his choice of Islam is entwined with a revulsion against certain aspects of Christianity.
“If you’re a Christian,” he says, “and somebody’s a Christian longer than you, they can dictate to you about your life. You know, this is what you should do, and if you don’t do this, you’re excommunicated. I just found that bizarre … in conflict with human qualities, you know what I mean? I couldn’t understand why a person couldn’t be a human and have problems and just be dealt with and helped. In Islam there’s nobody who can put you in your place. They can let you know this is wrong, you need help on this. But the only one that can judge you is Allah.”
I asked Tyson how he could reconcile his embrace of Islam with the fact that many of the slave traders were Muslims. The horrors of the Middle Passage often began with men who said they accepted Allah. Tyson answered in a cool way.
“Look, everyone in Arabia was a slave, know what I mean? They had white slaves, black slaves, Arab slaves, Muslim slaves. Everybody there was a slave. But the slave traders were contradicting Islam and the beliefs of Islam. The prophet Muhammad, he wasn’t a slave trader or a slave. As a matter of fact, the Arabs were trying to kill him, to enslave him. People were people. But Europeans took slavery to a totally different level. Brutalized, submissive, abhorrent. But you can’t condemn all the Jews or all the Romans because they crucified Christ, can you?”
Tyson emphasizes one thing: He’s a neophyte in his understanding of Islam and has much to learn.
“Being a Muslim,” Tyson says, “is probably not going to make me an angel in heaven, but it’s going to make me a better person. In Islam we’re not supposed to compete. Muslims only compete for righteousness. I know I’m probably at the back of the line. But I know I’ll be a better person when I get out than I was when I came in.”
For the moment, jail is the great reality of Tyson’s life. Unless a court orders a new trial or overturns his conviction, he will remain in prison until the spring of 1995. The Indiana Youth Center is a medium- to high-security facility and looks relatively tame compared with some of the others I’ve seen in New York and California. Boredom is the great enemy. “I get up and eat and go to class,” he says, explaining that he doesn’t eat in the prison dining room, because “the food is aaaccch” but goes to a commissary where he can buy packaged milk, cereals, and other food, paying from a drawing account called the Book. He works out in the gym every day, shadowboxing, doing push-ups, running laps to keep his legs strong and lithe. “There’s nothing else to do,” he says. “You gotta keep busy so you don’t go crazy.”
But it’s still prison. For now it’s the place where Mike Tyson is doing time, using all of his self-discipline to get through it alive.
“I’m never on nobody’s bad side,” he says. “Even though there’s guys in here just don’t like the way you walk, the way you look, or whatever, I just — I’m never on nobody’s bad side. I don’t like to be judgmental, because we’re all in the same boat. I have to remember to be humble. But sometimes I get caught up with who I was at one time, and I must remind myself my circumstances have changed.”
There are still a lot of hard cases on the premises, including Klansmen and members of the Aryan Brotherhood. Tyson laughs about their swastikas, shaved heads, white-power tattoos. “They talk back and forth,” he said. “But they realize once they’re in prison, no one gives a fuck about them.”
More dangerous are people who seem to crack under the stress of doing time. “A couple of days ago, this guy who never bothered nobody just cracked a guy on the head with a lock in his sock,” he said in an amazed tone. “And there are other guys — they’ll do something disrespectful to some guy, and they’ll walk around with their headphones on, acting like they didn’t do anything, jamming, dancing, then, next thing you know — ka-pow! — they get clocked.”
In the bad old days, Tyson might have empathized with such people; he is, after all, the man who as champion once socked an off-duty heavyweight named Mitch Green in Harlem at 4:00 in the morning. But in prison, he is at once part of the general population and detached from it because of his celebrity. “When I get out, I have a future,” he says. “A lot of these guys don’t.” Sometimes he even volunteers for a form of solitary confinement (“to be alone, to focus, to meditate, to read, to get some fucking sleep”). But he also looks with compassion on his fellow prisoners.
“They send some guys to prison that don’t necessarily have bad records,” he says. “Instead of rehabilitating him, they Rehabilitate him by sending him to prison. Without him even being attacked or molested, just from what he witnesses, some things that are so taboo to his humanity. It could totally drive him insane.”
Among the scarier aspects of prison these days is AIDS. “They are falling like flies in here,” Tyson said. “And some of these guys keep boning each other over in the dorms.” There are other people for whom prison is life itself. “There’s one guy here who’s been inside for thirty-one years. Not in here but in other prisons. There are other guys with so much time… I watch them adapt. This is their home. You don’t go in their door without knocking.”
Tyson said that much of what he has seen is sad and comic at the same time.
“You see a guy, he’s doing all the time in a lifetime, he’s talking to a girl on a phone. I mean, he’s doing ninety years. And what’s he saying? ‘Don’t go out tonight, baby. Don’t go out tonight, baby. Don’t go out tonight, baby.’”
Tyson laughed in a sad, rueful way.
“Most guys that are in here, they got a lot of time, so they lose hope. They get caught up in the sideshows, like homosexuality, drugs, you know what I mean? It’s very difficult for me to think about participating in the things these guys do. You talk to the guys, and to me they seem rather sane. But to see their conduct, some of them, they’re in a totally insane frame of mind. The fact is, prison is like a slave plantation. We have no rights which the authorities respect. I wasn’t a criminal when I got put in here. I didn’t commit no crime. But we become the problem out there, because we’re not aware. We become the problem because out there we’re robbing, we’re stealing, we’re selling drugs, we’re killing. I hear people talk about revolution. They mention Castro, Mao, Lenin, the Black Panthers. But how can you have a revolution when you have crime, when you have people selling drugs, you have people murdering? There’s no collective ideas there.”
I asked Tyson if the young prisoners from Indiana resembled the young men from his Brooklyn neighborhood. He said that many of them did. When he was champion, Tyson refused to offer himself as a role model; he certainly doesn’t see himself as one now. But he does understand the Brownsvilles of America.
“At the age of ten or fifteen, you become very influenced by what you see,” he said. “You see these guys looking good, with fly cars, nice girls on their arms. You think this is what you want to be. But any kind of proper success has to do with education, unless you’re an athlete, and everyone’s not going to be Michael Jordan or Muhammad Ali. You fall in bad company. You see drug dealers and gangsters with all their bullshit. You know they didn’t go to school. So you don’t fill the holes. You go after the wrong shit. The thing I’ve noticed in here, with the white kids and the black kids and the Latin kids and the Asian kids — the only thing they have in common is poverty.”
I asked him if drugs were another common factor. Tyson himself was never a druggie in the conventional sense; his drugs were liquor and celebrity. He whispered, “Of course.
“Drugs and women,” he said. “You know, we all run through the same complexities in life.”
Among those many complexities in American life is racism.
“It’s very difficult being black,” he said one evening. “These reporters came to interview me from South Africa, and one of them asked me was I racist. And I said, ‘Yes, I am a racist — to people who are racist toward me.’ I never liked to believe that I’m a racist because of the way I was brought up, both from my mother and from Cus and Camille. But, you know what I mean, sometimes things are in the air and people say or do things detrimental or hurtful towards you. You strike back at them. That’s what I meant in that interview. Not all white people. Shit, no. Those people. Those specific people. I just want to be treated the way I treat people.”
Behind many of these feelings are jagged memories of that Brownsville childhood. “Too many guys, too many black people, men and women, hate themselves. They see the shit around them and they give up before they ever start. They get one or two little tastes of power — sticking a gun in somebody’s face — and then it’s over.”
He was in jail when the riots erupted in Los Angeles, and he hated what he saw on CNN.
“It could have all been prevented if people believed in fairness and equality. But you have to understand: The things that people do and what they should do are totally different. We should live like every man is equal, every woman is equal. But how we do live is, You get yours, I get mine, fuck you.” He talked about Rodney King. “Some guys in here, they heard Rodney King and they laughed. But what he said was powerful, man. Why can’t we live together? Why the fuck can’t we all live together?”
In jail Mike Tyson is engaged in an admirable attempt to find out who he is, to discover and shape the man who exists behind the surface of fame and notoriety. There is no Cus to explain the world, to tell him what to do. In the end, there’s only himself. And because he is in prison, this is no easy process.
“You have good days, and you have bad days, but you just think to yourself, This isn’t the end. You say, i was kind of wild out there; maybe I was heading for something more drastic’ Which is all a part of playing head games so you won’t get insane.”
Like anyone in prison, Tyson misses life on the outside. He misses certain people, and in most of our talks he circles back to Cus D’Amato. “A lot of things Cus told me, they are happening now,” he says. “But at that time, I didn’t keep them in mind, because I was just a kid. Cus tried to store everything in my mind so fast. He didn’t think that he was gonna be around. He tried to pack everything in at one moment, you know what I mean? I’m trying to be a fighter, I’m trying to have some fun on the side, and I’m just running crazy. Now I think about him all the time. Like, damn! Cus told me that. And God! He told me this too. And, oh! He told me that.
“He was always saying to me, before I was anything: ‘What are you gonna do? Look how you talk to me now, J he said. ‘Look how you act. How you gonna act when you’re a big-time fighter? You’re just gonna dump me.’ I said, ’I’m not gonna do that, Cus. I’m not gonna do it.’ And I didn’t.” He laughs. “I used to say, ‘Cus, I’ll sell my soul to be a great fighter.’ And he said, ‘Be careful what you wish for, ’cause you might get it.’
“I miss him still. I miss him. I think about him. No, I don’t dream about him; I don’t dream much in this place. But I miss Cus. I still take care of him, make sure nothing bad happens, ’cause I promised Cus before he died to take care of Camille. I was young, I was, like, eighteen, and I said, ’I can’t fight if you’re not around, Cus.’ And he said, ‘You better fight, ’cause if you don’t fight, I’m gonna come back and haunt you.’
“The ghost of Cus D’Amato doesn’t haunt Tyson; if anything, the old manager instilled in the young man a respect for knowledge and a demand for discipline that are only now being fully developed. “Cus had flaws, like any man,” Tyson says. “But he was right most of the time. One thing I remember most clearly that he said: ‘Your brain is a muscle like any other; if you don’t use it, it gets soft and flabby.’”
Other things do haunt Tyson. One of them is that fatal trip to Indianapolis. “I had a dick problem,” he admits. “I didn’t even want to go to Indianapolis. But I went. I’m in town with the best girl [rapper B Angie BJ that everybody wants. And I had to get this — why’d I have to do that, huh, man? Why’d I have to do that? I had a girl with me. Why’d I have to make that call? Why’d I have to let her come to my room?”
He has his regrets too, and says that he is trying hard to acquire some measure of humility, leaning on the Koran.
“Remember, when I accomplished all that I did, I was just a kid,” he says quietly. “I was just a kid doing all that crazy stuff. I wanted to be like the old-time fighters, like Harry Greb or Mickey Walker, who would drink and fight. But a lot of the things I did I’m so embarrassed about,” he says. “It was very wrong and disrespectful for me to dehumanize my opponents by saying the things I said. If you could quote me, say that anything I ever said to any fighters that they remember- like making Tyrell Biggs cry like a girl, like putting a guy’s nose into his brain, like making Razor Ruddock my girlfriend — I’m deeply sorry. I will appreciate their forgiveness.”
He isn’t just embarrassed by the words he said to fighters. “I have girls that wrote to me and said they met me in a club,” he says. “And I said something crazy to them. And I know I said that, you know, ’cause that was my style. And I say, wow, what was going through my mind to say that? I don’t dwell on it too much. But I just think: What the hell was I thinking* To say this to another human being?”
Tyson tries to live in the present tense of jail, containing his longing for freedom through a sustained act of will. But when I pressed him one evening, he admitted that he does yearn for certain aspects of the outside world.
“I miss the very simple things,” he says. “I miss a woman sexually. But more important, I miss the pleasure of being in a woman’s presence. To speak to a woman in private and discuss things. Not just Oh! Oh! Oh! More subtle than that. I just want to be able to have privacy, where no one can say, ‘Time, Tyson! Let’s go!’ You miss being with people. I miss flying my birds. They’re not gonna know me, I’m not gonna know them, ’cause there’re so many new ones now ’cause of the babies. I miss being able to hang out. Talk to Camille. Laugh. I miss long drives. Sometimes I used to just get in the car and drive to Washington. I miss that a lot. I miss, sometimes, going to Brooklyn in the middle of the night, pulling up in front of the projects and one of my friends will be there, shooting baskets. I’ll get out of the car, and we’ll talk there, like from 4:00 in the morning until 9:00 or 10:00. People are going to work, and we’re just talking.” A pause. “I miss that.”
He insists that he doesn’t miss what he calls the craziness. “It was all unreal. Want to go to Paris? Want to fly to Russia? Sure. Why not? Let me have two of those and three of them and five of those. Nobody knows what it’s like — fame, millions — unless they went through it. It was unreal, unreal. I had a thousand women, the best champagne, the fanciest hotels, the fanciest cars, the greatest meals — and it got me here.”
He does have some specific plans for the future. “I want to visit all the great cities, I want to see the great libraries,” he says. “One of the few things I did that impressed me was going to Paris that time and visiting the Louvre. I was devastated by that place, man. I want to see all of that, everywhere.”
Yes, he said, he will box again. He will be twenty-eight when he returns, the same age as Ali when he made his comeback and certainly younger than George Foreman when he made his. He asks repeatedly about active fighters and how they looked in their latest bouts, because he only sees brief clips on CNN. “I’m a fighter,” he says. “That’s what I do. I was born to do that.”
He wants to make money; nobody knows how much Tyson has left, not even Tyson, but his return to boxing could be the most lucrative campaign in the history of sport. “I want to have money for a family,” he says. “In the end, that’s how you can decide what kind of man I was. Not by how many guys I knocked out. But by the way I took care of my kids, how I made sure they went to college, that they had good lives and never wanted for nothing. And what I taught them. About the world. About character.”
Tyson would even like to try college himself. “I’d like to go to a black college that’s not well-known,” he says, “to study and learn. But also to have some kind of exhibitions, too, fights to benefit the college. 1 don’t have to fight benefits for a church or a mosque. But the black colleges, that I want to do. …”
In the end, of course, all education is self-education, and Tyson is clearly deep into the process. The faculty of Tyson’s university includes Cus D’Amato and Alexandre Dumas, Machiavelli and the prophet Muhammad, Dutch Schultz and Ernest Hemingway, and dozens of others. Part of the curriculum includes what some academics call life experience. There are millions of college graduates who don’t know what Tyson knows. About writers and thinkers. About life itself.
“A lot of people get the misconception that by being free that you’re free” he says. “That’s not necessarily true. There’s people on the outside who are more in prison than I’ll ever be in here.” He chuckles. “You know, it’s human to fall. But it’s a crime to stay down and not get up after you fall. You must get up.”
In the visitor’s lounge at the Indiana Youth Center, he smiles when a woman offers to buy him a soda. “Sorry, thank you, but I don’t drink soda.” He looks at his hands. Twenty-two months earlier, he’d come to this elaborate cage like a man knocked down. When he started school, he got to one knee. Now he’s standing up.
“I know this,” he says. “When I get out, I’m gonna be in charge of my own life. I used to leave it to others. I’d say, ‘Hey, I’m the boss.’ But then I’d leave it to people, to Cus, to Don King, whatever. But that’s what you do when you’re a kid. You can’t do that when you’re a man.”
I utter some banality about the dangers that might still confront him on the outside, how powerful the pull of the ghetto spirit might be when the bad guys from the neighborhood come calling on him again.
“Well, that’s no problem anymore,” he says and laughs. “They’re all dead.”
He turns and glances at the picture window. Fat white snowflakes are now falling from the steel-colored sky, out there in the world of highways, car washes, diners, and motels. Another prisoner’s name is called, and a black man rises and touches his woman’s face. Time is running out.
“Sometimes I get so frustrated in here, I just want to cry,” says the fighter who once described himself as the baddest man on the planet. “But I don’t. I can’t. Because years from now, when this is long behind me, I want to know I went through it like a man. Not to impress anyone else. But to know it myself, know what I mean?”
A departing visitor nods, recognizing Tyson, and he nods back, a look granted like an autograph. He turns to me again, his hands kneading each other, his right leg bouncing like a timepiece.
“When you die, nothing matters but the dash,” Tyson says abruptly. “On your tombstone, it says 1933-2025, or something like that. The only thing that matters is that dash. That dash is your life. How you live is your life. And were you happy with the way you lived it.”
A guard calls Tyson’s name now. Time is up. Tyson rises slowly. He tells me to send his best to friends in New York. He promises to stay in touch. We embrace awkwardly. He looks as if he wants to freeze the moment, freeze time itself. Then he turns and nods politely to the guard and flashes a final goodbye grin to his visitor.
“Take care,” number 922335 says, and returns to the world of rules, to sleep another night where the snow never falls.
ESQUIRE,
March 1994
MADONNA
Of this we can be certain: Madonna is the greatest artistic force of the AIDS generation. As a sex symbol, she is all we have, but she is a lot more than that. It doesn’t matter that she can’t sing very well, that she’s an ordinary dancer, that there are many women of more refined beauty. She is the triumphant mistress of her medium: the sexual imagination. In an age when real sex can lead to horror and death, here is Madonna — reckless, bawdy, laughing and offering us all the consolation of outrageous illusions.
In almost every version of her public self, Madonna appears as a fearless sexual adventurer, sharing sex with strangers, colliding with rough trade, risking pain or humiliation to break through to pleasure beyond all conventional frontiers. With music, dance and, above all, image, she challenges organized religion, the middle class that spawned her, political hypocrisies and what George Orwell called “the smelly little orthodoxies.” Follow me, ye weak of heart, she says. Up ahead lies the big O! Nirvana! Fearless fucking! Just roll the dice.
What saves this performance from preposterous narcissism is a simple corrective: There’s a wink in the act. While Madonna presents her latest illusion, a hint of a smile tells us that we shouldn’t take any of it too seriously. She always hedges her bet with camp, elegant caricature and a style appropriated from the gay underworld on the eve of AIDS.
That style was part of the exuberant rush that accompanied gay liberation, when the doors of many closets flew open and out came leather and chains and whips, every variety of mask, anonymous multiple couplings and a self-conscious insistence on sex as performance. Before she became a star, Madonna moved through that world in New York. Today she presents it as a glossy nostalgia, tempered with irony and served up to everyone from suburban teenagers to aging baby boomers. They all seem to love it.
Without that ironic wink, of course, she would be as square as Jesse Helms. But Madonna is hip to something huge: AIDS made sexual freedom a ghastly joke. At the point where the sexual revolution had triumphed for everyone, the most ferocious sexually transmitted disease of the century arrived, wearing a death’s-head from some medieval woodcut. Every artist was forced to confront it, just as 19th century artists were hammered into dealing with syphilis. Some artistic responses to AIDS were moving and tragic; too many were runny with self-pity. But Madonna came roaring into the room in a spirit of defiance. She would not go gentle into that good night.
But she also knew that the only completely safe sex is the sex you can imagine — that is, an illusion. If you can’t have something you desire with every atom of your flesh and blood, you must be content with a gorgeous counterfeit. That insight became the armature of her work. And she elaborated on it with a shrewd understanding of sexual psychology: The most reliable erogenous zone is the human mind, and the libido feeds on images, not ideas.
Like Michael Jackson, Madonna vaulted to stardom with videos, a form thick with imagery that sometimes triumphs over the banality of lyrics. Jackson’s images were charged with rage, Madonna’s with frank and open carnality. But as the Eighties went on, as the graves filled with the young dead, as AIDS defied a cure, Madonna’s images became more obviously infused with a dark comic spirit. It was as if she were saying: I know this is a lie and you know this is a lie, but it’s all we have.
This surrender to illusion is at once daring and sad. Most American performers spend their careers trying to convince us that their lies are the truth. Madonna is braver than most and more original: She says openly that her lies are lies. She asks you only to admire the form of the lies. This was itself a breakthrough for a pop artist. Until Madonna, the basic task of any performer was to persuade the audience to suspend its disbelief. Frank Sinatra or Billie Holiday wanted us to believe that their grieving lyrics and aching tones expressed the pain and hurt of the performers themselves. A millionaire such as Mick Jagger wanted us to believe he was a working-class hero or a street fighting man. But Madonna says something else. Don’t suspend your disbelief, she implies. Disbelief is the basic point.
I went to the publication party for her book, Sex, and, like the book, the party was a celebration of the counterfeit. Scattered around Industria, the city’s hottest photo studio, were many extraliterary diversions: actresses dressed as nuns pretending to offer blasphemous pleasures; peroxide blond androids languidly flogging each other with strips of licorice; black dancers in chains and leather; writhing gym-toned bodies; many undulating bellies; much bumping and grinding. Everything, in short, except actual fucking. And that, of course, was the point: This wasn’t real and the audience knew it wasn’t real.
Madonna’s video Erotica was playing continually, shot in the grainy black-and-white style of Forties porno films. But it wasn’t a real porno film. It was fake porno. Ah, yes: I remember Paris. The Germans wore gray and you wore nothing. Nostalgia remains the most powerful of all American emotions.
Sex went on to become the number-one best-seller in the nation, assisted by the hype but also driven by the genius of Madonna. And that might tell us something about America.
Books have taught us that lpve is an illusion but sex is real. For millions of Americans, that old formulation appears to have been reversed. You can experience love, but anything more than the illusion of sex is too dangerous. The possibility of death is always a marvelous corrective to human behavior. But if such an immense change is, in fact, under way, its poster girl is Madonna. Sometimes life really does imitate art.
PLAYBOY,
April 1993
FOSSE
Fosse was dead and after the urgent calls and the logistics of death, there seemed nothing really to do about it except go for a walk along Broadway in the midnight rain.
This was the square mile of the earth Bob Fosse cared for more than any other. Up there on the second floor at 56th Street was the rehearsal hall where I’d met him years ago. Around the corner was the Carnegie Deli, where he’d have lunch with Paddy Chayefsky and Herb Gardner, trading lines, drinking coffee, smoking all those goddamned cigarettes. On the nth floor of 850 Seventh Avenue, he and Chayefsky and Gardner had their separate offices, and from Paddy’s they would often gaze in wonder across the back courtyard of the Hotel Woodward, at the man in underwear who was always shaving, no matter what the hour. A few blocks away was the building where Fosse lived the last decade of his life.
And down the rain-drowned avenue was the sleazy hamlet I always thought of as Fosseville: all glitter and neon and dangerous shadows. This wasn’t Runyon’s fairy-tale Broadway; it was harder, meaner, as reliable in its ruthlessness as a switchblade. Yet even in his most cynical years, Fosse insisted on seeing its citizens as human, observing their felonies and betrayals not as a journalist or a sociologist but as the fine artist he was. “I see a hooker on a corner,” he said to me once, “and I can only think: there’s some kinda story there. I mean, she was once six years old…” On this late night, I could see Fosse in black shirt and trousers, standing in some grimy doorway, looking out at his lurid parish; he had been young here and almost died here and sometimes fled from the place and always came back. In Fosseville the gaudiest dreams existed side by side with the most vicious betrayals; everything was real but nothing was true. And, of course, he believed in some dark way that all could be redeemed by love.
Nobody loved harder. He loved his wives: Mary Ann Niles, who danced with him in the last years of the nightclub era (and who died a year after Fosse), Joan McCracken, who died on him when they were both young, and Gwen Verdon, who was with him when he lay down for the final time on the grass of a small park in Washington. But Fosse wasn’t one of those men who can be married; the emotional core of his masterpiece, All That Jazz, is not so much the romantic attraction of death, but the impossibility of fidelity. There were simply too many beautiful women in this world, with their grace and style and intelligence and mystery; the demand of monogamy was like ordering a man to love only one Vermeer.
And so he loved many women; most were dancers and actresses, because in the world where he worked they were the women he met. He treated all of them with the same grace. I saw him most often when he was between women; he was then usually engulfed by a bleakly romantic sense of loss (although the only remorse he ever expressed was about Gwen). When he met a new woman, when he was swept away, he would vanish from his usual precincts; no male friends were as important as a woman or the possibility of love.
It was no accident that he always celebrated women in his work, although he was hardly an illustrator of feminist dogma. In the ’50s and ’60s, half the men I knew were in love with Gwen Verdon, who on stage combined humor, vulnerability, toughness, and sensuality in shows designed, choreographed, directed by Fosse. She always moved the tough guys most of all. “Every time I see her,” the sports-writer Jimmy Cannon said of Gwen, “I want to run away with her.” When Damn Yankees was in its long run, Paul Sann, the greatest newspaperman I ever knew, said of Gwen one night: “You better go see her now, kid, ’cause you ain’t gonna see anything like her again on Broadway for the rest of your fucking life.” About Gwen Verdon, as about so many things, Sann was absolutely right.
But if it’s forever impossible to separate Fosse from Gwen, he was also a fine director of other women. Liza Minnelli, Valerie Perrine, and Anne Reinking did their best work with Fosse. He was one of the few directors to see King Kong and recognize that Jessica Lange could be a superb actress; later they would become lovers, and he would cast her as the Angel of Death in All That Jazz. It was entirely appropriate, of course, that Fosse would imagine death as a woman, thus merging his two most passionate obsessions.
But he loved other things too: almost all forms of music; nightclub comics; cheap vaudeville jokes (Q. “Do you file your nails?” A. “No, I throw them away…”); the New York Mets; good food (he spent hours cooking in the huge kitchen of the house in Quogue, bringing his perfectionism to the details of the simplest meal); Fred Astaire (there were no pictures of himself in the Quogue house and two of Astaire); air hockey; children; New York Post headlines; boxing and football; his daughter Nicole; good wine, margaritas, and brandy; his cat, Macho, a stray discovered beaten-up and bloodied in the Quogue grasslands and nursed to plump domesticity; and, of course, those goddamned cigarettes.
After family and lovers, he admired writers more than anyone else. Among his friends were Gardner and Chayefsky, E. L. Doctorow, Peter Maas, and Budd Schulberg. Although he liked to affect the Fm-only-a-song-and-dance-man pose, Fosse was a careful, intelligent reader. His writer friends knew how high Fosse’s own standards were (whether he failed or succeeded, he never set out to manufacture crap) and they often responded to his subtle urgings that they do better. Some writers who worked with him were angry at the end, as he demanded from them what he could more easily demand from a dancer; those who didn’t work with him had easier friendships.
Yes, Fosse was competitive, and cared (perhaps too much) about the way he stood in relation to other directors. In 1974, after he had his first ferocious heart attack, Gardner and Chayefsky were summoned to Fosse’s hospital room to serve as witnesses to his will. There were two lawyers waiting. Fosse was in critical condition in his bed, silent and trapped in a ganglia of tubes and wires. The lawyers asked the two writers to sign the will; Gardner did so immediately. But Chayefsky insisted on reading the text. He discovered that Fosse hadn’t left him anything, so he turned to the silent Fosse and said: “Fuck you, live!” Fosse started to laugh; all measuring devices began to go wild; the lawyers blanched; a platoon of nurses arrived to save Fosse’s life. Finally, all was calmed down again. Chayefsky resumed reading the will, while Fosse lay silent. Then Paddy came to a provision that reserved $20,000 for a party for Fosse’s friends. Hey, that’s great, Chayefsky said, it’s just what Josh Logan did. For the first time, Fosse spoke.
“How much did Logan leave for the party?” he said, in a thin weak voice.
“Twenty thousand,” said Chayefsky.
“Make mine twenty-five,” said Fosse, falling back, as Chayefsky and Gardner dissolved into laughter. That visit probably saved his life.
Quite simply, Fosse wanted to be the best at what he did. In that impossibly romantic quest, he drove dancers hard (although never harder than he drove himself) and kept demanding more from his stars. He worked hard at understanding actors, studying with Sanford Meisner, reading the basic texts from Stanislavski to Harold Clurman. And he developed his own ways to get his actors to do their best work.
“He could act incredibly humble when he wanted something from you,” said Roy Scheider, who believes his own best work was in All That Jazz. “When he met someone he wanted for the first time, he knew everything about you. He’d done research, he’d seen your movies or plays. He’d say, ‘You know, you were very good in that part, hey, wait, you got a nomination, didn’t you? You won.9 And there’d be a pause, after he did all this praising. And then he’d say how that was nothing compared to what lies ahead in your work with me. And he made you believe it. And then he did it… After three, four meetings you’d be thoroughly convinced that you were not capable of giving him what he wanted. And then he would begin to build your confidence, making you feel that your reflowering would take place in his show.” Scheider laughed. “You see, for him, it was always being done for posterity. Every time out of the chute, it was for history.”
Because he worked so hard, and because he knew how much pain was involved in the making of a show or a movie, Fosse generally despised critics. He thought they saw too much and, as a result, their sensibilities were blunted, making them unable to respond to amazing theatrical moments in the way an audience might. They were all too glib, dismissing (or praising) two years of another’s work in a review dashed off in an hour. He thought critics were primarily responsible for the failure of Star 80 (based on Teresa Carpenter’s brilliant article for the Voice); when Big Deal opened to lukewarm reviews last year and then closed after 100-odd performances, he was disheartened.
“Maybe all they want are Eddie Murphy movies or sets that sing,” he said. “Maybe all they want is shit. Maybe it’s over for people like me.”
But he was still working at the end; trying to choose between a movie about Walter Winchell, a movie version of Chicago, probably with Madonna, or something completely new. During the summer, we talked a few times about his experiences during the Second World War, when he was a 17-year-old sailor working in an entertainment unit in the South Pacific; he was with the first Americans to enter Japan at the end of the war and was still horrified at the scale of the destruction in Tokyo and the stupidly brutal way so many American soldiers treated the Japanese, particularly the women. “It still makes me sick,” he said. “That was the first time I was really ashamed to be an American.” The contrast between the idealism of fighting the war and the morally corrosive realities of victory was a splendid setup for a Fosse movie, but Fosse was uneasy about it. “That world is gone, that music, the way people were.…Most of the country wouldn’t know what I was talking about.”
Now we’ll never know. The night after we all got the news, there was a small gathering at Gardner’s apartment, a kind of secular wake. Some wept; others told the old stories, with examples of Fosse’s dark humor; all were in shock, because Fosse had been looking better than at any time in years. Later, wandering through Broadway in the rain, I thought that for Fosse, who so perfectly expressed a certain vision of New York, the worst thing about dying in Washington might have been that he closed out of town.
VILLAGE VOICE,
November 3, 1987
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