It should surprise no one that the best book ever written about Bill Clinton is by a psychologist. Now, granted, I haven’t read every single book on Clinton, but I’ve read more than you’ll ever catch me admitting to in public. The only reason I didn’t read John D. Gartner’s In Search of Bill Clinton: A Psychological Biography when it first came out a few years ago is that I was blocked by my own prejudices. I assumed that, at just over 400 pages, it would be a superficially slick Freudian gloss on the received record. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

The reason the book is only 400 pages isn’t that Gartner has superficially skimmed the surface, but because he’s selectively applied deep analysis to certain key junctures of Clinton’s life. There’s much that Gartner has simply left alone as burdensome to his book’s focused analysis. This method of elimination is of course itself a product of sound research–the kind of elimination that can safely be accomplished only by someone who’s done his legwork. That’s certainly what’s been done here. Gartner really does seem to have read everything, and has interviewed dozens of people from Clinton’s life along the way. When he claims that he spent “over a year, twelve hours a day,” doing “nothing but research and write about Clinton,” you have no trouble believing him.

Clinton himself, unfortunately, is not among the people Gartner interviewed–unless you count the one shouted question Gartner got off when he went to witness the Clinton Foundation at work in Africa. The question Gartner shouted at him, in a press scrum after a City Year event, is incongruous with the occasion’s tone and intentions, but, damn it, it was his only chance. He asked him, “Mister President, when you were eight years old, you walked to church alone. You wrote about that, and it’s a memory etched in the minds of all your close friends from Hot Springs. Is the work you have done, and the work you are doing now, just a continuation of that journey?”

Gartner ends his book with this question, and with Clinton’s affirmative answer, but where he begins In Search, naturally enough, is also with Clinton’s childhood. He makes it clear that Clinton’s religious faith is quite genuine, and that it informed his morals much more positively and extensively than is commonly understood. This is all well enough, but where Gartner really distinguishes the childhood sections (always the slowest part of any biography, for me) is with the matter of paternity. He genuinely believes that Will Blythe is not Clinton’s biological father, and that he knows who is. And, indeed, when you finish reading what he’s written on the matter, you’ll probably be convinced too.

After presenting his evidence that Clinton was fathered by a Hot Springs doctor named George Wright, he sits at a table outside the house of George Wright, Jr., who needs no further convincing but whom Gartner presents with a proposition regardless: “I explained that there was a way to know for sure. It would involve a DNA test. A sample of his DNA could be cross-referenced with Clinton’s DNA, which I imagined might be available from the infamous blue Gap dress through the Freedom of Information Act.” To which George, Jr., replies: “I wouldn’t do anything like that, I mean, not behind Bill’s back. But if he were willing….”

The part of Clinton’s life that gets the shortest shrift in In Search are the college years, undergraduate and graduate both. There’s not much on Arkansas politics, either, but I don’t suspect this is a problem for many readers. Anyway, Gartner does include two excellent Arkansas chapters, on Clinton’s first political campaign, for the House in ‘74, and on his competence as governor. More than half the book is then given over to the presidency, as it should be.

He wants to give proper credit to Clinton as diplomat–as “Family Therapist to the World”–but in order to do so he has to choose one case-study of foreign-policy prowess to suggest the whole. Wisely, he chooses Ireland.

Clinton inserted himself into Ireland’s extended family feud by establishing warm, personal relationships over the course of his entire two terms (and beyond) with almost all of the leaders, winning them over with his combination of relentless charm and empathic concern, and his encyclopedic knowledge of their culture, history, and everything related to their conflict. And indeed, he manipulated them. Like a master family therapist, he repeatedly put warring parties in situations where they were virtually forced to interact in new, positive ways with people they despised.

Gartner has plenty of insightful things to say on Clinton’s psychology. On the liabilities of Clinton’s brilliance: “In the infinite regress of his thinking, no issue is ever really finally resolved, as new streams of thought and information are forever flowing in.” On Clinton as lover of women: “Like a chess grand master who can play twenty-five games at a time, he can love many women at one time (including Hillary). Such emotional multitasking would be beyond most people’s capacities, but Clinton is not most people.” On the example of Nelson Mandela and how it may have inspired Clinton’s focus on Africa: “Clinton was feeling persecuted by his Republican tormentors, and he identified with Mandela, who had endured and transcended a far worse twenty-seven-year prosecution in prison….Indeed, Clinton has said privately that without Mandela’s example, he might not have a survived psychologically.”

Gartner even brings fresh insight to Clinton’s favorite movie, High Noon (1952). Clinton has always claimed that he “loved this movie because from start to finish Gary Cooper is scared to death but does the right thing anyway.” Gartner doesn’t let Clinton skate by with so pious and self-serving an explanation. He takes his analysis fathoms deeper, recalling how at the time of Clinton’s impeachment, Hillary Clinton, appalled as she was at her husband’s behavior, was even more appalled by the behavior of those who would use that behavior as grounds for ending his presidency. Hillary worked as hard as she ever had, travelling the country during the ‘98 midterms and stumping on behalf of her husband. Her efforts helped save the Democratic Congress–and, hence, the presidency. At the end of High Noon, similarly, the Cooper character is saved at the last possible instant by his wife’s proactive aggression in his defense, coming out of nowhere when we thought she’d been gone from the picture for good. “Together,” Gartner writes, “the first couple would face down a gang of bad men who were both bent on their destruction and aiming to take over the town. Though wounded by her husband’s infidelity, Hillary would fight back, foiling the evil plot and saving her man.”

Gartner’s book does have an organizing thesis, which I’ve consciously neglected mentioning until now. He wants to make the case–and does, successfully–that a hypomanic temperament is the catalyst for much of Clinton’s worst and best behavior. Gartner is, after all, the author of a book called The Hypomanic Edge. But as this latest book of his demonstrates, Clinton is far too complex to be defined by hypomania or any other single psychological condition. To describe his complex psychology is as involved a process as describing his complex morality. Gartner does both those things, and he does them brilliantly, over and over in these pages. And at the end of it all he lays down some wisdom worth taking with you wherever you end up contemplating this singularly strange American figure: “Character is not revealed by your worst mistake. Nor is it revealed by your best intentions. Intentions expressed in actions over time are what make up character. By that criterion, since little Billy Clinton began carrying his big Bible down the hill to church, he has been walking in the footsteps of moral giants.”

The post Bill Clinton, Psychoanalyzed: John D. Gartner and the Triumph of Psychobiography appeared first on The Faster Times.

Photo by Joni Kabana.

The whole thing would have never even happened, in quite this way, if it hadn’t been for that snowstorm. Visiting South Dakota while trying to make sense of life—in the midst of her mother’s premature passing, from cancer, and her own marriage’s premature passing, from causes more nebulous—Cheryl Strayed went to the store to buy herself a shovel. Standing in line to pay for the shovel is when she “spotted a guidebook about something called the Pacific Crest Trail.” A couple days later, back home in Minnesota and out of the storm, she “remembered the guidebook I’d plucked from a shelf” at the store, whereupon “[t]he thought of the photograph of a boulder-strewn lake surrounded by rocky crags and blue sky on its cover seemed to break me open, frank as a fist to the face. I believed I’d only been killing time when I’d picked up the book while standing in line, but now it seemed like something more—a sign. Not only of what I could do, but of what I had to do.”

The book she’d picked up was something called The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1: California, in which the authors ruefully wonder, “How can a book describe the psychological factors a person must prepare for…the despair, the alienation, the anxiety and especially the pain, both physical and mental, which slices to the very heart of the hiker’s volition, which are the real things that must be planned for?” If their question is asked in earnest, then the answer can be found in the form of the memoir Strayed has just published, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, about the hike she took soon after her epiphany. This was 1995; in the 17 years since, she’s published a novel, Torch (2006), as well as numerous stories and essays (two of which have been anthologized in the annual Best American Essays omnibus; the 2000 and 2003 editions), and for two years has been regularly penning The Rumpus’s popular advice column, “Dear Sugar.” She recently answered some questions by e-mail about Wild.

One of the things I really liked about Wild, before having read a word, is that it’s not an example of what I’ve come to think of as “the Ponzi memoir”–that is, it’s not a memoir whose material was subsidized by the promise of its own future earnings. Not that there aren’t some very good books written this way: Eat, Pray, Love; Joe McGinniss’s Heroes; Michael Paterniti’s Driving Mr. Albert (maybe the single worst title ever given to a great book). But I think you’ll agree there’s a certain authenticity to a memoir whose material has had time to mature and settle, and whose origins are not necessarily the result of a book contract. Deb Unferth’s recent Revolution is the same way. So that even though you knew you’d be writing about it someday, it’s not this sort of instantly written memoir-on-demand. Did you intentionally put all those years–nearly two decades–between the living and the writing?

I didn’t ever think I’d write much about my PCT hike, actually. In 2008 I had an idea to try to publish a collection of my personal essays and I intended to round out the collection with an essay about my hike, since the other essays in the book (which never became a book) told the stories of other parts of my twenties. I started writing the essay and it went on and on until I finally realized I had a bigger story to tell. As you point out, there are great memoirs written by people who have an experience while knowing they will soon turn that experience into a book, but I’m glad I wasn’t thinking in those terms on my PCT hike. I imagine it would have altered the experience in negative ways. I’m also grateful for the years that have passed between my hike and the time I wrote the book. I always say memoir is not about what happened, but rather what meaning the memoirist takes from what happened. It took me years to gain the perspective I brought into writing Wild.

At one point pretty early on in Wild, you characterize the hike, without qualification, as impulsive. But it wasn’t entirely impulsive, was it? I mean, when you think of the research and preparation and financing, are you willing to see it as something that’s also kind of premeditated, in the best kind of ways–as something that was arrived at capriciously but carried out responsibly?

I don’t think the hike itself was impulsive, but rather my decision to hike it was. I had this feeling I had to do it, after having done nothing more than read the back cover of a PCT guidebook. It was that impulse that led me to do all the preparation I needed to do to get myself ready for the trip, which required a lot of planning. I like your way of putting it—arrived at capriciously, but carried out responsibly, though of course I had a lot to learn and I only realized that once I got out there. As I detail in Wild, I worked extra shifts at my waitressing job to save money, I researched and purchased the gear and supplies I’d need, planned out my trip and packed my resupply boxes, and so much else. In some ways it was all that planning that distracted me from the fact that I didn’t really know what the hell I was doing. In many ways, I couldn’t have. The trail teaches you what you are doing. My experience hiking the PCT reminds me of what it was like to have my first baby. I bought all this baby gear and outfitted my house and car with it, but until my son arrived, I hadn’t a clue.

Not much mention is made, in Wild, of other literature on hiking America’s great trails, the PCT or any other–not of the narrative literature or the instructional literature (although The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume I, of course, plays a significant role in the story). Is this a case of the iceberg being hidden beneath the surface, or were you really as innocent of the existing literature as your text would want us to believe?

I hadn’t read anything about the great trails or about long-distance backpacking other than my one guidebook—The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume I: California. I knew a bit about John Muir, but I hadn’t read anything he’d written. I heard of the Appalachian Trail only after I decided to hike the PCT and I didn’t read any books about it or talk to anyone who’d hiked on it. The iceberg, in this case, really wasn’t hidden beneath the surface! There was no iceberg. I just read my PCT guidebook over and over again. It seems dunderheaded now, but I think a combination of things were at play. One is that I was so focused on the logistical and practical aspects of my trip—getting all the things I needed for the journey—that I didn’t have time to spend hours and days researching. And it would have taken that. There weren’t many books about hiking the PCT available at the time and the handful that had been published were difficult to locate and some were out of print. I remember going to the public library in Minneapolis and making some effort in that direction, but I returned home empty handed. It was early 1995. Like most people, I wasn’t yet on the Internet. I didn’t even understand what the Internet was then. Information didn’t come as readily as it does now. It wasn’t three clicks away. I would say that’s the biggest difference between hiking the trail now and hiking it when I did. There is so much more information available now about hiking the PCT and other long trails than there was before. I’m not saying I couldn’t have done a better job preparing myself for the experience, but it was more complicated than it might seem.

You also mention that you kept a journal during the hike, and yet this journal rarely gets mentioned–I don’t think it’s ever quoted from, and you tell about writing in it only once or twice, I believe. And yet, the detail in this book is so elaborate, it’s obviously not pure memory you’re working from. To what extent did you in fact write in the journal; and to what extent did you rely on it in crafting this narrative?

I avoided mentioning it often because it was too boring to repeat: “I wrote in my journal again.” I do say at one point that I recorded pretty much everything I did that summer in my journal, so I thought that was enough. I don’t quote from it because the POV of the book isn’t explicitly retrospective. The narrator doesn’t appear to have that reflective distance from the story where she’d say, “In my journal that night I wrote…” But the fact is, I quote from my journal loosely throughout the whole book. If I handed you my PCT journal to read it would be a different experience than reading Wild, of course, but you’d recognize everything—conversations I recorded hours and sometimes minutes after having them, notes on the landscape, what it felt like in a particular moment. I relied on my journal a lot in writing Wild, but memory played a big part too.

Since we’re already talking about both your preparation for the hike and what you’ve chosen to include in the book, I guess I should also go ahead and ask about how you trained physically for the hike. You’d been working full-time as a waitress, so you were obviously accustomed to being on your feet for long stretches of time, but was there anything else you did to prepare physically?

No. I didn’t do anything to prepare myself physically. I was 26 and in generally good shape. I’d been a runner intermittently since I was a teenager, but I wasn’t running or exercising regularly in the months before I began my hike. I was waitressing and drinking a lot of gin at two in the morning. I got in shape on the trail.

As a purely physical endeavor, the hike is more arduous than I think most non-initiates, such as myself, presume. This is not a series of day-hike nature-walks. In fact, I often felt, when reading Wild, similar to how I feel when I read exploration narratives, because of all the hardships endured and limits transcended. Were you thinking of exploration narrative, too, as you wrote; do you even typically read books about exploration?

Before I hiked the PCT, I had the same idea that you have—that maybe my trip would be like taking a bunch of day hikes done back-to-back. But long-distance hiking isn’t like that. It’s more like trying to run a marathon every day for weeks on end while carrying a heavy pack, cooking your own food, finding water, and ascending and descending a series of mountains—some through which you have to bushwhack.

I haven’t read many books about exploration or hiking, but I didn’t need to in order to convey what it was like to hike the PCT. I needed only to write what happened to me on the trail. When I finished the first draft of Wild it occurred to me that I should read Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods—somehow, I’d missed it when it was a bestseller. I laughed so hard while reading that book because I knew he knew how hard it was to hike in the wilderness while carrying a backpack for days on end. He had experiences that I relate to deeply, even though we took our hikes for different reasons and had different experiences on the trails we hiked. The essential experience was the same. And the experience is that it’s a fucking crucible—physically, mentally, and emotionally. I get the same feedback from others who have read Wild and hiked long stretches of either the PCT or the Appalachian Trail. They all say, Oh yes. I know exactly what you mean.

One of the more impressive things about the book is its structure, because of how you were able to parcel out backstory at appropriate places without having to disrupt the narrative, and without waiting too long to do so, and without, of course, loading it all into the front of the narrative, where it may have blocked many readers’ access to the rest of the book. What kind of an outline did you work with in writing Wild?

I didn’t have an outline. I just had an idea that I trusted. Of course there was much revision and swapping things around as I wrote, but I tend to avoid outlines and instead work more intuitively. After I’d written the first 80 pages or so I realized that I had to adopt some methods to keep the story moving forward, lest I get bogged down in the back story. The trail provided the natural forward motion and my rule was that each chapter had to begin with me on the trail. It helped to have the trail as my touchstone. The advantage of writing a memoir about a journey is that it offers a chronological trajectory against which everything else can happen. By beginning each chapter on the trail, the story moved forward in both time and geography no matter how far I’d swirled into back story in the chapter before. In some chapters I stayed on the trail for the whole chapter, but in most I began on the trail and then moved back in time.

The back story is not told in chronological order, unlike the front story (aka: my hike). My decisions about what to tell about my past and when I should tell it developed organically. I felt sure that the story of my mother’s illness and death had to come very early in the book. Her death was the end of my life as I knew it and I was trying to find my way back to life by hiking the PCT, so I knew readers had to know that before I set foot on the trail. The rest of the back story spun out of me as I made my way along the story of my hike. Sometimes the back story was born out of what I was actually thinking about during that time. Like the scene where I’m walking through those clear cuts in northern California and I start to think about my family and I have that memory about the last time I saw my brother and we saw that our kitchen table had been carved into? I was really remembering that then, on that night. Other times, I simply put the back story scenes in the narrative where it felt necessary and right.

Yeah, and there are a lot of moments, of the kind you describe, when something appears that’s so serendipitous, it’s almost as if it were placed along the trail intentionally, divinely, as a sort of memento. And although I never for a second doubted your honesty, there are certain things that in fiction would have tested my credulity. Like you being offered James Michener’s The Novel at that family’s home, and how that allows a perfect segue for writing about your youthful arrogance toward your mother’s middle-brow tastes (as you essentially define them; she liked Michener), as well as your ambitions toward writing fiction (Michener’s book is about the entire circumstances of a particular novel). Elsewhere (and without giving too much away here), there’s the condom that sits like Chekov’s gun on the table waiting to go off, and the mystery of the missing twenty-dollar bill at the bottom of the resupply box (to give just two examples). You had the skill to properly exploit these serendipities, but you also had the luck (at least as a writer) that the opportunities were there to exploit. So if all this is leading up to a question (and it is, I promise), then I guess it’s: What, if any, notions about fiction-vs.-nonfiction did the writing of this book disabuse you of that all the personal essays you’d written had not?

Before I answer your question I want to say that that I don’t quite think of it as luck. I can see how it reads that way, but I really believe that those opportunities are always there in our lives and one’s work as a writer is to remember the crazy synchronicities and serendipities and coincidences and figure out how to exploit them on the page. The most important quality to have as a writer is the ability to pay attention. That’s true no matter what sort of writing you do. It’s the particular that matters in any genre—the telling detail, the gesture, the seemingly meaningless object that becomes emblematic of something of great significance—but I’d say in memoir it matters especially. In memoir what really happened is your material, so you have to know how to make use of it. Life is full of crazy magic if we’re willing to notice it. I think when a writer does that and writes about it there’s a sense that actual life has been heightened in ways that we both associate with and would not tolerate in fiction. I’ve often observed that a good half of the nonfiction I write could not be pulled off in fiction—or at least fiction written by me. It would simply be too hard to persuade the reader I was telling a credible story.

So, on to your question. Writing Wild was different from writing my personal essays, but not in the way your question suggests. It didn’t have much to do with genre, since they are both nonfiction forms. With Wild I had to keep the ball in the air a lot longer, to build a narrative over hundreds of pages rather than twenty-five. My first book was a novel called Torch and that experience was different than writing Wild because of course it was fiction and the parameters were different. I was building characters in Torch, not excavating a life.

You’ve been writing, for some time now, a popular advice column for The Rumpus called “Dear Sugar.” Were you doing the column at the time of this book’s primary composition? The column isn’t merely prescriptive, of course—it’s also descriptive and narrative and confessional in nature—and so is this book, to put it mildly. How did the column inform the book, and/or vice versa?

I began writing the “Dear Sugar” column in March 2010, the month after I’d finished the first polished draft of Wild. I’d sent the book to my editor at Knopf and was waiting for her notes when Steve Almond asked me to take over the Sugar column—he’d been writing it before me. I thought it would be this little thing I did on the side while I finished up Wild, but it became its own gigantic thing, so I found myself in this somewhat ridiculous situation where I was essentially writing what turned out to be two books at once. I was revising Wild while writing these long and intense columns, which will be collected in a book that will be published in July—it’s called Tiny Beautiful Things. I think they informed each other, but only indirectly. In both, I write from a personal place and I try to go all the way there, in terms of saying what I think must be said.

Have you been back to the PCT in any context or for any reason since the events described in Wild?

I have! I love the PCT. It’s only about an hour’s drive from my house in Portland. I’ve only gone on day hikes on the PCT since my long trek. When I’m on it I always feel nostalgic. It still feels to me a little bit like home.

Near the end of your hike, it’s suggested to you (by a non-hiker of the PCT) that you put on your résumé your hiking of the trail, because it shows potential employers that you have “character.” I don’t think many would dispute the wisdom of that; did you in fact put the experience on your résumé?

Your question makes me smile. I never did put it on my resume, but it came up once in a job interview and I’m quite sure it played a role in my being hired. I’d applied to be a youth advocate, working with teen girls on pregnancy prevention. Once I mentioned my PCT trek to the women who were interviewing me, it was all they wanted to talk about.

The post Self-Discovery in the Wild: An Interview with Cheryl Strayed appeared first on The Faster Times.

It reminds me of an ancient Zen saying that I just made up. You see, Steve Jobs was trying to rebound from his own self-generated Lisa disaster (the one about the computer, not the one about the daughter he abandoned, but we’ll get to that) by making a machine that would be the sleekest, slimmest, most elegant personal computer on the market. He had the whole thing dreamed up and prototyped and primed for production. But it didn’t have a fan in it. Jobs didn’t want one. A fan would render the machine too bulky, it would contribute to its heaviness, etc. Never mind that it also might, you know, keep it alive–that is, prolong whatever properties make it a machine in the first place. It reminds me of an ancient Zen saying that I just made up: He who creates functional elegance must also learn the ways of keeping it cool.

Well, what did you expect from a man who believed in the power to think different as something that could be bought in a box? We’re not in the habit of telling people how to live around here–we often have enough trouble with it ourselves–but Steve Jobs falls into the category of what I’ve come to call the Mailer Exception, after Norman: someone so obnoxiously prescriptive in his propensity to wax wise, someone so insistent in offering not just guidance, but in actively steering others according to his own sensibility, that he invites nothing but the harshest kind of scrutiny about how he follows his own instructions.

Walter Isaacson has given him that scrutiny, in Steve Jobs, the authorized biography that closely followed Jobs’ death earlier this year. It should be said that the biography, much to its credit, is authorized only in the sense that Jobs graciously gave Isaacson permission to talk to everyone alive who ever knew him, and gave plenty of his own time as well, but without insisting on any of the control over the final manuscript that typically accompanies such authorization. So it is that Isaacson is able to offer his own analysis of how Jobs lived up to his own Zen principles, and offers, in his epilogue, the same bluntly stated conclusion arrived at many pages ago by anyone who tries to live according to those very same principles.

Jobs was, infamously, a deadbeat dad for many years following the birth of his daughter, Lisa (after whom he eventually named the computer that failed). The Buddha was a deadbeat dad too, but since Jobs didn’t purport to practice the Buddhist branch of Zen thought, he gets no points for this. He also made a pilgrimage to the East, as a young man. This tells us precisely two things about Jobs: he had a passport, and he had some airfare. Basically, what Zen practice comes down to for Jobs is: eat a lot of fruit, and decorate sparsely.

The matters of fruit and decoration are crucial to understanding how he ran his life and how he ran his company–we really are talking apples and Apples here. The sleek minimalism of his machines’ design was an entirely conscious extension of his Zen intentions, and they’re no less Zen for that self-consciousness. Just as importantly, they have fans in them, which means they stayed cool, which means they stayed alive. And that’s important, because you can’t be Zen if you’re too busy being dead.

Which brings us to the matter of fruit. Jobs ate a lot of fruit, and he advised us to do the same. It kept him trim and healthy, as fruit often will–it kept him, that is, as trim and healthy as the machines that he made. But then the cancer came, and rather than following the best oncological advice his billions could buy, Jobs decide that he would fight cancer by eating a lot of fruit. The predictable occurred, but by then it was too late to stick a fan in the machine and make it cool, because the machine had ceased its existence, as a machine.

Jobs had, in a big way, died by the agency of a home-brewed zaniness that he called Zen. Zen, for Jobs, meant decorating sparsely and travelling due East. It meant staring into his employees’ souls, with what he actually called his “Zen stare,” and intimidating them with this stare–or, at least, with the monied power of he who stared it. It meant bullying those same employees as they strove their hardest to help Jobs create the best gadgets they could overprice and then sell to a public stupid enough to believe a gadget could ever bestow on its buyer the power to think different. It meant not only staying out of philanthropy altogether but maintaining more sweatshops overseas than Bill Gates’ own philanthropy could ever eliminate. (And, we come to learn just today, philanthropy was one subject that Jobs did in fact declare off-limits to Isaacson.) It meant insulting Bill Gates for that very same philanthropy, suggesting it was a suitable compensation for his inability to think different. It meant telling advisers that their ideas sucked and then, coming to his senses, bringing those same ideas back around, unattributed and with no acknowledgement made of his previous indictment. It meant engaging in this and similar behavior not just as a young man, in his 20s and 30s, but all the way into his 40s and then into his 50s, as well.

Being Zen, for Jobs, meant all of this. And it meant eating a lot of apples, too. Which reminds me of another ancient Zen saying that I just made up.

The post Just How Zen was Steve Jobs, Really? appeared first on The Faster Times.

There’s a way to write about athletes with sober elegance and evocative mood, respectful but not sycophantic, critical but not malicious. Jimmy Cannon and Red Smith knew how to do it, at mid-century, and so did Jim Murray and John Lardner, then Mark Kram and Frank Deford, soon followed by Gary Smith and Charles P. Pierce. There has also been, at various times throughout, Dick Young and W.C. Heinz and Frank Graham and Roger Angell and George Kimball and William Nack and Chris Jones and Wright Thompson.

If I’m forgetting anyone, it’s because I’m eager to get to the writer with perhaps the purest talent of them all, the closest thing to a genius among them. Making that case just became a whole lot easier, with the evidence sealed up in his newest collection, Sometimes They Even Shook Your Hand: Portraits of Champions Who Walked Among Us. John Schulian wrote the bulk of these pieces when he was doing deadline-daily poetry as a newspaper sports columnist, from the late 1970s to the late 1980s, in Chicago and Philadelphia (primarily at the Sun-Times and the Daily News). There are also assorted magazine pieces he wrote during that run, as well as pieces he wrote afterward, mostly for GQ and Sports Illustrated. By the time he wrote the most recent among them, well into this century, he was already established as a screenwriter for television, having written on the staffs of such shows as Miami Vice and Midnight Caller before creating his very own franchise, with Xena: Warrior Princess. (He also recently edited, with the late Kimball, At the Fights, the Library of America’s recent boxing anthology—a superb collection all the way through, even if one asshole with a propensity for nitpicking dwelled entirely too long on the imperfection of their Cannon selection.)

But no kind of money or success or disillusionment has been able to take Schulian completely away from telling the stories of eccentrics, underdogs, champions, and hard-luck cases. Athletes in all their varieties have always made for some of the most fascinating biographical character studies, their lives rich in the agonies of ego and striving that are endemic to humans. They’re probably not much more or less interesting now than they’ve ever been, but they’re certainly less accessible. That’s the premise under which Schulian has given these pen-portraits their collective title.

Recently, he agreed to be interviewed by The Faster Times. I came with the questions, while Schulian brought back the answers, carefully composed in the only language he’s fluent in: lapidary prose polished to poesy.

Your career, at least in its early stages, eerily mimicked the trajectory of one of your models, Mark Kram. You both played competitive baseball at the college and/or semi-pro level, before working on the Baltimore Sun and then breaking into Sports Illustrated with streetwise pieces about that very city. There are significant differences, too, of course, but those are the similarities. How conscious of them were you at the time?

When I was trying to get out of the starting blocks, I was more aware of Kram as a writer than I was of him as a person. Thanks to the editor’s letter in SI, I knew he’d played pro ball and worked at the Baltimore Sun, but I certainly wasn’t dwelling on any parallels between us. I landed at the Evening Sun in Baltimore — actually chose it over the Miami Herald — because the city was so funky and offered so many off-the-wall subjects to write about. I still wanted to write sports, obviously, but I spent five mostly wonderful years working as a cityside reporter there. The only time I thought about following in Kram’s footsteps was when I read something of his that stirred my soul, something that left me wondering how he created the mood that clung to his best stories like harbor fog. I’ve always loved his bittersweet homage to Baltimore, his hometown, on the eve of the 1966 World Series, and I’ll never forget what he wrote about the fighting Quarry brothers’ old man riding the rails from Oklahoma’s Dust Bowl to the golden promise of California. If I recall correctly, Jack Quarry had LOVE and HATE tattooed on his knuckles, and every time I think of that story, I picture him standing in the door of an open boxcar, staring out at the ravaged countryside. I read that piece something like 45 years ago, and just thinking about it still gives me chills. That’s how good Kram was at his best.

I’ve heard you mention, in several different phrasings and contexts, that your editors at the Baltimore Evening Sun didn’t want you to become a sportswriter, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard you articulate just why it was, exactly, that you had to go elsewhere to write about sports full-time.

Before I make the city editor I worked for at the Evening Sun sound like he held me back, you have to understand my great affection for him as a person and my undying respect for him as a newspaperman. His name is Ernie Imhoff and you wouldn’t be wrong if you called him St. Ernie. The tougher things got at the paper, especially after I left, the taller he stood. In my case, he and the editors beneath him almost always gave me my head as a writer. I had the freedom to pick my subjects and to write about them in what I guess you could say was my emerging style. As far as Ernie was concerned, it wasn’t that he hated sports or sports writers. He just didn’t think about them. In that same vein, I think he was puzzled by my fascination with becoming a sports writer and a sports columnist. He lived in a world where what mattered was the governor and the mayor and cops and robbers and crooked politicians. How could the Colts and the Orioles compete with that? There was probably a little of the old newspaper disdain for sports as the toy department, too. But eventually I came to peace with it. In fact I don’t think Ernie and I ever exchanged a harsh word. And when it came time for the Evening Sun to hire a new sports columnist and people on the city desk were wondering if I’d get the job, I didn’t blink when the paper’s baseball writer was promoted. I just worked that much harder to get my turn at bat at Sports Illustrated. When I sold my first story there, Ernie shook my hand and said, “Way to go, babe.”

About a decade or so later, when you finally became disillusioned with sports writing and arrived at something of a career crisis, did you consider in fact becoming a cityside columnist? Is that a move you would have made if things hadn’t worked out in television?

Writing a cityside column became less and less of a goal, or obsession or whatever you want to call it, once I left Baltimore. By the time I was burning out in Philadelphia, I never thought of it at all. Maybe that shows you just how far gone I was. When I was in Chicago and at the top of my game, [Mike] Royko mentioned in conversation a time or two that I might be his successor. Of course he might have just been being nice to a young sports columnist. Even if he was dead serious, though, I knew deep inside that I didn’t have the range and the knowledge that writing a good cityside column required. And when I read Pete Dexter and worked with him in Philly, I knew I couldn’t come within a million miles of what he was doing, either. So I never dwelled on it and I never thought of it as a safety net when I went to Hollywood. To be honest, I thought I was going to succeed there. But if I failed, I’d promised I’d go back back to the Philadelphia Daily News, which had given me a three-month leave of absence. I doubt I would have stayed there for long if that had happened, though. I might have gotten a deal at GQ or Sports Illustrated, or maybe I would have gone to The National [Sports Daily], which was the kind of grand experiment that might have stoked the fires again. I’m glad I never had to find out. There’s a time for everything, and that was my time for Hollywood.

You make the point, in your introduction, that athletes are less candid–less willing to reveal their true eccentricities, in the rare instances when they even have any–because of the greater sums of money now at stake, the greater control their handlers have over them, and the ever present threat, through instant media, that their worst slip-ups will be amplified and made viral. That’s a lot for a sportswriter to be up against, but isn’t it also true that the extra money sometimes allows for greater security, that the more-excessive use of drugs and alcohol sometimes makes for greater candor, and that a more-tolerant society (in some senses, anyway) encourages an eccentric athlete to more comfortably be his natural self?

If there are writers chasing women, doing drugs and drinking all night with athletes — and I assume there must be some — it certainly isn’t getting in the paper. That’s no different than when I was writing sports. We had a baseball writer at the Chicago Sun-Times who may have gotten laid more than the players he covered, which would have been no mean feat. He certainly got the best-smelling mail of anybody on the staff, not to mention lacy underthings and nude photos. But to the best of my knowledge, the fact that he swapped women with some of the guys he covered never got him a scoop. At the old Washington Daily News, there was a hell-raising columnist who used to smoke dope with Joe Foy of the Senators. My old friend George Kimball certainly spent a lot of time in the company of the Red Sox’s most devout drinkers and dope smokers. All this, however, was with the unwritten understanding that nothing would find its way into print unless someone got thrown in jail. And I’m guessing that’s the case today. But how many contemporary athletes are going to risk it, given the paranoia that runs rampant among them? And how many sports writers have the money to finance these walks on the wild side? And how many athletes are going to pay the writers’ way, given the athletes’ fear that they still might get stabbed in the back and, more important, the fact that athletes are notoriously cheap? So I guess I’m right back where I started on this one: the athletes live in their own world and it’s a rare writer who gets invited to visit.

One of the better pieces in the new collection is your deadline account of what you’ve recently referred to elsewhere as “the best fight I ever covered and maybe the most electric event I ever saw in any sport.” This was the Hearns-Hagler fight of 1985, and the very next day, as it happens, you were in L.A., where you were to meet with a Hollywood producer about what you might be doing next with your life. For perhaps the most electric sporting event you’d ever seen to occur in lockstep with your first big move in the other direction must have been a vertiginous experience. Did you have second thoughts about leaving sports writing at that point, and/or did you instantly recognize Hearns-Hagler as a rare spectacle that was not likely to repeat with any regularity? And can you give us a sense of what it was that made that fight so electric?

I remember the fight more than I do what was going on in my head that night. I’d never seen anything like it, two prime-of-life bulls charging out of their corners at each other and seemingly pulling the crowd to its feet along with them. There wasn’t anybody left sitting. Even the most jaded sports writer was on his tiptoes for fear he’d miss a single second of this spectacle. And it was a spectacle. Nobody had ever seen Hagler start a fight at this pace. He’d always been so cautious, spending the first three, four, even five rounds sticking and moving and sizing up his opponents. But not against Hearns. Hagler went after him with a fury. And then, in the first round, they butted heads and Hagler got gashed. Blood all over the place. You knew right away that Hearns was going to make the most of the wound, just keep hammering away at it until the blood blinded Hagler and either the ring physician stopped the fight or Hearns knocked him out. Hagler knew it, too. It could have made him tentative, could have started him backpedaling and counterpunching. Instead, the cut just threw gasoline on his fire. There was no way Hearns was going to beat him. This was a test of heart and Hagler had the biggest one by far. Poor Hearns, who had great talent but always seemed to be lacking something inside, didn’t have a chance. Hagler destroyed him.

I’m glad you like the column I wrote about that fight. I’ve always been proud of it myself. I don’t recall either fighter having much to say afterward beyond the obvious, but it really didn’t matter. They’d been eloquent in the ring, especially Hagler. And I was jazzed in a way I rarely got when I was writing off an event late at night. I wanted to capture the visceral feeling of the fight and to pay tribute to Hagler, who had always taken a back seat to fighters who were more appealing for one reason or another, fighters like Ali and Leonard and Duran. Hagler wasn’t particularly talkative, and when he spoke, there were no great insights, no humor, no clever turns of phrase. He was a fighter, period. And fighters fight. And no fighter I’d seen with my own eyes had ever fought quite as valiantly as he had.

Still, having witnessed such a great fight and written about it well did nothing to alter my thinking about Hollywood. I was still consumed by the idea of working there and forging a new life. Maybe there would be even greater fights (or ball games or races) that I wouldn’t cover, but it really didn’t matter. That was never how I thought even when I was loving life as a sports columnist. I just covered whatever had to be covered and tried my best to capture in print some aspect of what I saw. By this point I’d seen all of sports I needed to on an up-close basis and I’d read about all of my own prose that I could stand. It was time for a change.

Burn-out over the sound of one’s own prose is a very serious occupational hazard for the daily columnist, even more so, I believe, than for other writers who write every day, because other writers who write every day don’t have to obsessively re-read and polish what they’ve written that same day. They can let their final obsessing sit for later. Many of the pieces in this collection (though you’d never know it from the pieces themselves) were, like the Hagler-Hearns account, written under night-game deadlines, one eye on the clock, and even, up to a certain year, on a typewriter. How difficult was it to polish your prose both on deadline and on a typewriter? And how did the universal advent of computers, among newspaper reporters, change your psychological approach to columnizing?

That anything good gets written on deadline has always amazed me. That I wrote anything good on deadline absolutely stupefies me. In the typewriter days, there was never any time for revision. I’d write my column and hand it a page at a time to the guy who would send it to my paper on the telecopier. The telecopier, which sent an image of the page over the telephone line, was a step up from Western Union. A big step when you consider that the Western Union guy used to re-copy what a writer had written. If you got one who was a frustrated writer, God only knew what would happen to a writer’s prose. Mercifully, I missed Western Union. But the telecopier was bad enough. One night—I think it was at a World Series— part of my Chicago Sun-Times column got sent to the Chicago Tribune and my friend David Israel of the Tribune had part of his column sent to the Sun-Times. Ah, those were the days.

My Hagler-Hearns column was written on a computer, and much as I loathe computers and technology in general, the column was better for it. As I recall I did my revising on the fly. I’d be in the middle of, say, the fifth paragraph, and I’d jump back up to the lede because I’d thought of a better word or a more felicitous phrase. Amazing how the mind works like that and still stays on track for you to keep plowing ahead. I’m not sure I re-read the column when I finished. I don’t recall re-reading much of anything I wrote in those days. I was slow and methodical enough to have faith in what I’d written, so in the case of Hagler-Hearns, I probably just hit the send button and heaved a sigh of relief.

Computers entered my life when I was still at the Baltimore Evening Sun, probably around 1973 or ’74. They had to put in a false floor so all the wiring could be housed underneath it. Talk about primitive. When I moved to the Washington Post, typewriters were still the weapon of choice. Same with the Chicago Daily News, if I recall correctly. But the Sun-Times was strictly computer, as was the Philadelphia Daily News. They were faster and cleaner than typewriters, but they couldn’t turn a bad writer into a good one. They could, however, turn a good writer into a lazy one, simply because there was so much less physical effort involved in the act of writing.

Case in point: It’s the 1977 baseball all-star game at Yankee Stadium and I’ve got to write a column, a game story and a sidebar. And I’ve got to do it in relatively short order even though I’m working for the p.m. Chicago Daily News. No sooner do I start banging out my column than my typewriter ribbon gets twisted. I stop writing, remove the ribbon, and promptly drop it and watch it roll across the press room floor past sportswriters’ big feet and through puddles of coffee and Coca-Cola. What do I do? What can I do? I get down on my hands and knees and crawl after it. A tough way to maintain my dignity, but I got everything written even if my ribbon was a tad damp.

There was a charm to typewriters that computers will never have. Today at least I trust them. But at the dawn of the computer age, they drove me nuts, particularly the portables we took on the road. They were a far cry from the reliable ones we have now. Junk, I believe they’re known as in serious scientific circles. Systems were always crashing, prose was mysteriously disappearing into cyberspace—you get the picture. There was technological chaos in the press box. David Israel, done wrong by his computer one too many times, finally picked his up and threw it down the steps in Kansas City.

Myself, I didn’t go crackers until I was in Hollywood, working on a TV series called Midnight Caller. My favorite gig out here, by the way. But the computers the studio foisted on us weren’t fit for chimps. Mine crashed just as I was polishing a script that had been pushed up in the shooting schedule after another writer went in the tank. I called the studio for help again and again, until I said that I’d be bringing in my baseball bat the next day to tune the damn thing up myself if no help arrived. And no help arrived, so I reduced it to rubble. Tech services arrived just as the dust was settling. “Boys,” I told them, “all you need is a broom.”

Your sporting interests skew very conspicuously toward boxing and baseball. Yet some of the best writing in this collection is on football and basketball, and your piece on Wayne Gretzky, I believe, also deserves to be singled out. You also write about jockeys, tennis players, and assorted Olympians. When you were a columnist, how did you approach the task of covering sports you didn’t necessarily prefer? Was it just that–a task? Or did you consider it an opportunity for novelty? Or a little of both?

I always thought of myself as a meat-and-potatoes guy when it came to choosing column subjects. I wrote about the sports I cared for the most. Baseball was the game I’d loved from childhood and played for as long as it would have me and actually knew something about. Boxing was right there with it at the top of my list, even though Chicago was dead in the water as a fight town. Boxing still provided great raw material for a writer, and I wasn’t about to turn my back on it. If readers wanted to come along for the ride, I thought they were in for a treat. If not, it was their loss.

I wrote a lot of football, too, mostly the professional variety. It was far from my favorite sport, but Chicago was a Bears town even more than it was a Cubs town, and even a rockhead like me realized that you have to give the people what they want. (Michael Jordan didn’t arrive to put the Bulls in the race until I was on my way to Philadelphia.) Fortunately, the Bears had Walter Payton, who was a mesmerizing player. He was a non-starter as an interview subject, mostly because he had the attention span of a cabbage moth, but he was so brilliant on the field that his words were beside the point. I was the one with the words; it was up to me to capture his greatness in 1,000-word chunks. But Payton wasn’t the only Bear worth writing about. The Bears of the 1980s were, in fact, a wonderful collection of personalities, most of them with sizable IQs and a gift of gab. I’m talking about Dan Hampton, the defensive end they called “Danimal,” and Steve McMichael, the defensive tackle who became a professional wrestler, and two safeties who turned themselves into kamikazes every Sunday, Doug Plank, the head knocker from Ohio State, and Gary Fencik, a Yalie who spent his off-seasons dating Playboy Playmates and running with the bulls at Pamplona. There were others, too, but you get the idea: when you talked to a Bear back then, you walked away with a full notebook.

In truth, though, I had a much better feel for writing about basketball. There was a soulful quality to so many of the stories that came out of it, stories about failed talent and hard times and how so many players could never truly escape the streets that spawned them. And then there was the majesty of the game that showcased the world’s greatest athletes. When you saw Julius Erving play, you were watching poetry come to life. And when you saw Larry Bird and Magic Johnson take their rivalry from college to the NBA, you were watching history. And, wonder of wonders, both of them could and would talk about it, with wit and insight and intelligence. There had always been players like that, but after Bird and Johnson arrived, the trickle-down effect was palpable. Even the star-crossed Pete Maravich was an open book when he finally walked away from a professional career that was less than had been predicted and less than he deserved. I don’t use the word tragedy lightly, especially when games are involved, but when I think about Maravich now, he seems almost like a tragic figure out of Shakespeare.

College basketball was less enjoyable to write about than the NBA simply because the coaches were such dominant figures and the majority of the players were very tall fetuses. I had no truck with bullies like Bob Knight and John Thompson, who were and are horse’s asses. But I got lucky when I arrived in Chicago just as Al McGuire was wrapping up his coaching career up the road at Marquette. Marquette wins its Final Four game in 1977, for instance, and the first thing McGuire does at the press conference is apologize to Pete Axthelm, the Newsweek columnist and a devoted gambler, for not covering the spread. How could I not love McGuire after that? And then DePaul, a little school by an El-stop in Chicago, had a memorable run in the early ‘80s with players like Mark Aguirre and Terry Cummings, and they were coached by Ray Meyer, who had turned George Mikan into the game’s first great big man about 100 years before.

I can’t talk about basketball without mentioning Ben Wilson, a great high school player on the South Side of Chicago who was shot to death just as the world was opening up to him. I was at the Philadelphia Daily News when it happened, late in 1984, but I went back to Chicago to write about it. I sat with his coach and some faculty members for hours and they reconstructed the day of the murder for me, and the funeral, and the emptiness that closed in on them afterward. To this day, I’m touched by how much they loved that kid and by how trusting they were when they opened their hearts to me.

I never got the feeling I’d find anything resembling that kind of humanity in golf or tennis. They were the province of the wealthy and the privileged, and quite frankly I wanted nothing to do with them. It was a decision based on class and nothing more. The only thing I wanted to do with golf was to read what Dan Jenkins had to say about it in Sports Illustrated. In nearly 10 years as a columnist, I bet I didn’t write 10 columns about it, and at least one of them encouraged golfers to throw off their prissy ways and start dueling with putters every time they had a disagreement. In retrospect, I realize that I missed out on some great personalities and performances. At the very least I should have covered a Masters just to say I’d done it. But policy was policy, as Steve Carlton used to say, and my policy was to be narrow-minded to the end.

I was pretty much the same way about tennis. The only extended exposure I got to the sport was when the Philly News sent me to cover Wimbledon in 1985. All I remember is long days spent writing a column, a lead story and a sidebar, and greasy English breakfasts, and the inevitable search for a restaurant that was still serving at midnight. If it weren’t for Bud Collins, who was the soul of graciousness in addition to being a delightful tennis writer, it would have been the worst fortnight of my sports writing career. But Bud kept pointing me in the right direction, and I caught a big break when Jimmy Connors started comparing his playing style to the way Pete Rose played baseball and Joe Frazier fought. At last someone at Wimbledon was speaking my language.

Hockey left a lot of columnists cold, myself included, and yet every time I interviewed a hockey player, I came away thinking what a terrific guy he was. They were as honest and decent as the mining towns and farming communities they came from. And they were polite, too. I remember doing a column on a tough little Chicago Black Hawk named Terry Ruskowski, a brawler with no teeth and garbage cans for knees. Months pass before I show up at another Black Hawk practice, and as I’m interviewing whoever it was, I notice Ruskowski waiting by his locker. All the other players are gone. It’s just him and he’s watching me, which, in my experience, is not a good thing. So I finish my interview and turn to face him. And what does he do? He says, “Mr. Schulian, I just wanted to thank you for that nice story you wrote about me.” I’ll bet there aren’t a half dozen athletes in all the other sports combined who ever did that.

The night I wrote about Gretzky, I just wanted to see what the fuss was about. When I got a look at him in the locker room, I was struck by just how young he was, no matter what he had already accomplished. Right away I started to wonder how the world looked to him as it was opening up before his eyes. He was a colossus in the making, but did he really have any idea of what he was about to stand astride? It was probably too sophisticated an idea for the time I had to work with. But I tried, and he made an honest attempt to answer my questions. It was that old hockey decency again. I always like Gretzky after that.

I’ll tell you who else I liked before I wrap this up: I liked horse racing people. I liked the trainers and the jockeys and the exercise riders and the hot walkers and everybody else on the backstretch. They were as real as the dirt the horses ran on, and they’d look you in the eye and tell you exactly what was on their minds. Sometimes a trainer would strike it rich and start putting on airs, the way Wayne Lukas did. Some of the horse owners spent a lot of their time looking down their noses at the working press, but then an outsider would grab the spotlight the way Spectacular Bid’s owner did during the Triple Crown races in 1979. The guy’s wife had been a Baltimore barmaid, for God’s sake. She was perfect for shaking up the fat cats, and so was her old man.

Still, I didn’t know a lot about horse racing, so my fallback position was always to write about the people. When John Henry–that’s a horse, not a human being–won the first Arlington Million, in 1981, Bill Shoemaker was the rider, and the Shoe was the track’s equivalent of Babe Ruth. He proved it by maneuvering John Henry from way back in the pack to a photo-finish victory. When the other writers and I found Shoemaker after the race, he was being shielded by Whitney Tower, a fat cat who’d been writing unreadable horse racing stories for Sports Illustrated for years. I kept trying to get Shoemaker’s attention until Tower said, “Let’s go get a drink,” and started to drag him away. “Like hell,” I said. Tower looked like I’d slapped him in the face and Shoemaker’s jaws dropped. I guess he’d never heard a sports writer talk back before. To be honest, I was angry enough to knock Tower on the seat of his Brooks Brothers pants. But Shoemaker saved the old hack from the indignity by answering every question the press had. I wasn’t sure if the column I wrote was a success or a failure until Vic Ziegel, a dear friend and a uniquely funny New York sports columnist, called to say he’d read it and loved it. Vic died last year, and every time I look at my Shoemaker column or even think about it, I’m reminded of him.

Maybe the two strongest and most substantial pieces in this collection are a couple of lengthy profiles you wrote relatively recently for Sports Illustrated. Both are about these legendary folk-hero-type figures: the Negro-Leaguer Oscar Charleston, and Chuck Bednarik, an offensive-defensive roughneck from the 1950s Philadelphia Eagles. These pieces are favorites of mine because they engage the mystery of historical fog and folklore, and I want to know more about the circumstances of their composition. Can you tell us, first, how you arrived at them, as ideas for stories; and, then, what it was like to report these stories–what it was like to actually pursue these men in quest of their characters?

The pieces about Chuck Bednarik and Oscar Charleston traveled vastly different routes to get into SI, with Bednarik serving as the linchpin of the pro football issue in 1993 and Oscar surviving only on a piecemeal basis in 2005. I’ve never understood why their fates were so different. All I can tell you is that I’m immensely proud of both. I see them as proof that I became a better writer of prose after I got away from the grind of writing a daily newspaper column. I first sensed the change when the Writers Guild of America, of which I am a member, went through a five-month strike in 1988, and I, in an attempt to stave off boredom, wrote an essay for GQ about how the American male gets his first lesson in style from athletes. It’s hard to explain, but my thinking seemed clearer, my opinions more organic, my command of the language richer, my sense of myself as a writer more secure. The feeling stayed with me as I wrote book reviews for the L.A. Times and the occasional piece for GQ. And then, when I was coming off a miserable year on a TV series I had no feel for, I wrote a bonus piece for SI about the Los Angeles I had grown up in, a town with two minor league teams in the parallel universe of the Pacific Coast League. In the process, I discovered the new me.

Not that it did me any good in Hollywood. I had a movie deal at HBO blow up and I left an attempt to resurrect The Untouchables as a TV series after I said no thanks to the executive producer’s order to rip off a story from a Broadway play. For the next year, I was a non-person in show business. But that turned out to be my good fortune when Rob Fleder, one of SI‘s top editors, called and asked me to profile Bednarik. I knew Rob from Chicago, where he’d been an editor at Playboy, and we’d become great friends. I think he believed in me as a magazine writer before I believed in myself, and the Bednarik assignment proved it.

Before I headed to Pennsylvania to interview Bednarik, I read a biography of him by Jack McCallum, who was a masterful pro basketball writer at SI, and I interviewed as many of Bednarik’s old friends, teammates and victims as I could. I don’t think I’ve ever been better prepared to interview someone. But I knew I still had to come up with my own take on him, but I didn’t have an inkling of what it might be when it came time to meet him in person. On the phone, I told him just to give me his home address and I’d find it. But this was in the pre-GPS days and Bednarik wasn’t about to trust a sports writer to read a map. He said he’d meet me in the parking lot of a big shopping center not far from where he lived. Sure enough, when I pulled into it at 9 in the morning, there he was leaning against his van, wearing a Philadelphia Eagles jersey, with his big thick arms folded across his chest. He was in his late 60s, he was something like three pounds over his playing weight, and he looked like he could still give you 60 minutes at center and linebacker.

The wonderful thing about Bednarik as an interview subject was that he never had an unexpressed thought. If it popped into his head, it came out his mouth. He laughed, he choked up remembering World War II, he breathed heavy when we watched old game footage, he cried when he remembered his induction into pro football’s hall of fame. And that wasn’t all. We hadn’t been talking for more than 10 or 15 minutes when his three grandchildren started running around, laughing and screeching and generally raising hell. And Bednarik unloaded on them: Be quiet! Shut the door! Flush the toilet! The kids had undoubtedly heard it all before, but they were still properly scared. Bednarik must have looked like King Kong to them, and he had these gnarled fingers that were straight out of Grimm. So the kids skedaddled and Bednarik sat there fuming for a few minutes, muttering how it was his rotten luck to have a daughter living with him after her marriage broke up and how she brought these three sawed-off hellions with her. And there was the texture my story needed, the thing that no writer before me had seen about the toughest Eagle ever.

Chris Hunt, one of the editors at SI, told me later about an incredible postscript to the duel of wills between Bednarik and his grandchildren. When I turned in the piece and it had passed inspection, the magazine dispatched a terrific photographer named Dave Burnett to take pictures of Bednarik. Everything went great until Burnett told the kids it was time to pose with grandpa. “No,” said the eldest of them, the lone girl in the trio. Suddenly, Burnett found himself negotiating with this incredibly tough-minded 10-year-old. I don’t know how he got her to capitulate, but when she did, it was with this qualifier: “Okay, we’ll pose with him, but we won’t touch him.”

None of the above is what I remember most about my Bednarik story, however. That designation is reserved for the actual writing of it. I was one day into the process when my mother died in Minnesota. She’d been failing badly for three months, and when the hospital called me at 3 in the morning in L.A., she was down to her last three hours. I left my work on my desk and flew back that day, landing in the remnants of a rainstorm and driving the three hours from Minneapolis to the little town where she lived. Her funeral was four days later. Then, before I could do anything about her estate, I returned to L.A. and resumed writing about Bednarik. It was a blessing, I suppose, because it took my mind off my grief and my new status as an orphan: no mother, no father, no siblings. But the weight of my sadness still got the best of me now and then. There were stretches when I’d write a paragraph or two and then start crying. It was all I could do to get 600 words a day on paper. But they got written, and 10 days later I turned in the 6,000-word piece that would bear the headline “Concrete Charlie.” I’ve always thought of it as my tribute to my mother.

Death cast a shadow on my Oscar Charleston story, too. This time it was my old friend Eliot Wald, losing his battle with liver cancer. We’d worked together at the Chicago Sun-Times–he did pop culture features and TV criticism–and then he’d gone off to write for Saturday Night Live in the Eddie Murphy days. When he and his wife, Jane, moved to L.A. so he could work in movies, we were reunited. The man loved his food and his rock and roll and the house parties where he and Jane were like the reincarnation of Nick and Nora Chalres. He loved to talk, too, right to the end. If I recall correctly, when Jane called to say Eliot had died, I was midway through writing Charleston.

Once again, the idea came from an editor at SI. This time it was Greg Kelly, who admired the Josh Gibson story I’d written for the magazine in 1998 and had been at Inside Sports when I wrote an ode to the minor league sluggers of yore. I wish I didn’t have to make a confession like that, because I’ve always prided myself on having my own ideas. Josh was one of them, as were the minor league sluggers. But good editors understand what fits a writer best, and I had clearly proven myself as someone who could weave legend and reportage into a portrait of a hero who no longer walked the earth. So there I was in 2003 with an assignment to write 4,000 words about Charleston, a Negro leaguer who’d been dead nearly 50 years and who was also, in Bill James’ estimation, a better player than Ty Cobb. But I didn’t know that when Greg Kelly called. To me, Charleston was a name and nothing more. A name writ large in the history of black baseball, but still just a name. I had three weeks to steep myself in his story and pass it on to SI‘s readers. Remember that: three weeks.

So I called Negro leagues historians, who gave up what they knew about Charleston grudgingly, even resentfully, as if I were treading on their sacred territory. And I called Bill James not knowing that he didn’t like talking on the phone and communicated most comfortably by e-mail. And I called Lee Blessing, who had written a play about Cobb in which Charleston is graciously given his due. And I called some of the players whom Charleston had managed on the Philadelphia Stars, all of them old men themselves by now, but their memories were still good, and they provided the anecdotes that book-end the piece and underscore what a larger than life character he was. Then I visited the Negro Leagues Museum in Kansas City and talked with Buck O’Neil and Double Duty Radcliffe, legends themselves, who had played against Charleston and still marveled at the bull-chested power he exuded. I learned far more about Charleston, however, when I pored over the scrapbooks that he had left behind, wearing rubber gloves as I handled crumbling, yellowing clippings. In them, I came across a story about Charleston’s marriage to a school teacher who was a minister’s daughter, which is to say she was his opposite in every way. The marriage wasn’t built to last, obviously, but it still possessed a bittersweet quality that became clear when I tracked down his ex-wife’s niece by phone. She was as proper as Mrs. Charleston must have been, and propriety was just what the piece needed: a counterpoint to rough-and-tumble Oscar. Now he had the three-dimensional quality that is so difficult to find when you’re writing about someone who belongs to history.

Trying to capture Charleston on paper was a joy. He had the raffish quality that stirs my writerly instincts, and he was utterly fearless, a balls-out guy even in the Jim Crow era. Maybe the word I should have used to describe him was swashbuckler. Whatever, his story transcended the boundaries of mill-run journalism and became something else. A tone poem, maybe. An impressionist painting in words. No, that’s too self-congratulatory, too self-involved. But you get the picture, I think. Even though I didn’t have as much space for his story as I did for Bednarik’s, I had what I needed for a vivid portrait of the man beneath the legend that time had all but erased.

Like I said, I delivered the piece in three weeks, in July 2003, as requested. Then I waited until September 2005 for it to run. When it did, it appeared only in certain regions of the country. I don’t know which ones. I just know that the story was in the edition of SI that landed in my mailbox in Pasadena, California, but it was missing from the edition delivered to a friend of mine in Van Nuys, 20 minutes away. I haven’t the slightest idea why. I just know that every editor at the magazine signed off on it until it reached the head man, Terry McDonell, and then he held onto it for reasons I can only guess. Maybe he thought it was too similar to my Josh Gibson piece. Maybe he thought SI had run too many historical pieces. Maybe he just didn’t like the story I wrote. Whatever his reason, the piece was cursed to a half-life in those regional editions. But I never forgot it, and when I started putting Sometimes They Even Shook Your Hand together, it was one of the first stories I knew I wanted in the book. Of course I had to ask Terry McDonell for permission first. He gave it without a second’s hesitation, so I guess I can’t hold a grudge any longer.

The post Interview with John Schulian: A Legendary Sportswriter Tours His Very Own Portrait Gallery appeared first on The Faster Times.

Which only makes the already baffling use of an inferior version of Cannon’s valedictory piece on Archie Moore from the 1950s more baffling. There would be a rationale for using an inferior version, of course, if the reason were to cite a superior source–to cite the newspaper for which Cannon originally wrote it. There are many advocates for the authenticity, in general, of an original deadline-driven piece over a later draft re-crafted in repose. But not only did Schulian and his co-editor, George Kimball, use an inferior version and cite an inferior source; they also mis-cited their source, as being Cannon’s 1978 posthumous collection Nobody Asked Me, But…–which is like copping to a crime you didn’t commit, and without anyone even having interrogated you.

The difference between the two pieces is not subtle. I don’t mind admitting, at this late date, that when I was a junior in high school, the book version of Cannon’s piece became only the second piece of writing I had ever bothered to memorize. (The first, incidentally, was by Pierce.) I was writing sports stories for my local newspaper in southern New Hampshire at the time (the same newspaper, as it happens, that Mike Lupica, another Cannon disciple, had much earlier worked for at the same age, which, now that I mention it, doesn’t sound at all incestuous), and my adolescent attempts at trying to write like Cannon are one of the reasons I was soon fired from that paper. When you witness the way this piece suggests a means for slipping into the demotic-evocative mood and mode, it’s easy to understand how one could have been seduced by its music.

Music, appropriately enough, is the piece’s presiding leitmotif. The masterful first paragraph of the book’s version reads:

Someone should tell Archie Moore what he is in his kind of music. Most of that music is laid away with the ragtime professors in the slums of old graveyards where the weeds grow tall as rich people’s stones. The music just faded away, time-taken and echoless in the storm of rock ‘n’ roll, faint as the butt-strangled voices that spoke the hustlers’ stories in the sneak-joints in the bad parts of wide-open towns. The piano players were scufflers themselves and a lot had jail time behind them for weak men’s crimes.

This, meanwhile, is the first paragraph that appears in the new collection:

Someone should write a song about Archie Moore who in the Polo Grounds knocked out Bobo Olson in three rounds. I don’t mean big composers such as Harold Arlen or Duke Ellington. It should be a song that comes out of the backrooms of sloughed saloons on night-drowned streets in the morning-worried parts of bad towns.

You don’t need to be William Empson to see the superiority of the first version over the second. In the Cannon book, details of the fight against Olson that occasioned the column are briefly dropped in at the end, while, in At the Fights, details of the fight run on like pure reportage, albeit reportage by Jimmy Cannon. (The editors say the piece was written in 1955, while the editors of the Cannon collection, his brothers Jack and Tom, identify the piece as coming from 1959. It was likely re-written–with a slightly different title–not for the book but for another newspaper column, after a fight with Yvon Durelle, as we’ll later see.)

I could run the comparison down, paragraph by paragraph, but that would be both tedious (or half-tedious) and violative of copyright law. Suffice to say, the following paragraph, from the piece’s middle, does not appear in At the Fights:

I’m not the guy to tell it because this shouldn’t be played on a typewriter. The violins shouldn’t be in on it and it doesn’t need horns or a muggled-up drummer busting out with a solo until his sticks bust. It’s not a dance hall ballad either or one out of the pits of theaters and television would spoil it with tux-wearing sidemen cutting out for the suburbs in station wagons when the program’s over. The beat generation, let them get lost forever. They celebrate all the aimless roads men take and Archie followed the hard way to Montreal, through all the tough towns. It has to be an old professor, pawn-wise, or it will be no one at all.

Okay, one more graf, the one immediately following:

They’d get it in, all right, the whole package of it, all the misery, all the sickness of despair, all the short-money pain, all the dirty deuces in all the bottom-dealt decks. They didn’t fade anyone with epics about statesmen or world-bossers, or those Broadway jingles about tea for two and that rainbow that comes after every shower. They sang the blues as men alone knew them and how luck maimed them or the law tripped them or how they were hooked on junk or horses or dropped a duke to rum. They would get in Tasmania, too. They wouldn’t neglect Tasmania because odd names appealed to the historians of city nights who sang their concerts to guys who could understand the songs.

That one’s not in the new book either.

Cannon didn’t write like this every day. Nobody does. But to know how to do it on your best days requires a temperament and a training most people want nothing to do with. That I’ve found a way to breathe a similar atmosphere on some of my best days is the great satisfaction of my life so far, which is another way of saying that I owe my life, or a big part of it, to Cannon and this piece.

The intensity sampled above is the intensity maintained throughout, and then Cannon is able to finish by bringing the piece back home to the actual fight that occasioned it, without losing any of his intensity:

They’d sing the late-coming happiness in there, too, beating Joey Maxim and Bobo Olson, getting the shots in the senility of his athletic career. They wouldn’t miss the laughs then and the pictures in the newspapers and being represented by a lawyer who became the governor of Ohio. They would really dig in on that cold night’s work in Montreal a couple of weeks ago when he was down three times in the first round, again in the fifth and got up to knock out Yvon Durelle.

Does it matter, what the editors have done here? Well, yeah, it does matter, because the publisher has charged $35 for a book carelessly featuring a column by an American master who wrote a superior version of the very same piece. If they had cited the newspaper instead of the book, you could say they prefered the piece written in the immediacy of the fight’s aftermath. But instead they’ve cited the book they didn’t even pull from. That book, by the way, has been criminally out of print for many years, and this new boxing anthology would have been an opportunity to bring Cannon’s best writing back into circulation. Let’s hope that, in future editions, the publishers do not just the correct thing, but the right thing, too.

The post Of Jimmy Cannon and Boxing’s Canon appeared first on The Faster Times.

Born Christian Gerhartsreiter, he had moved in the U.S. under various “Christopher”s–under Mountbatten, Chichester, and Crowe–before finally settling on Clark Rockefeller for pulling his biggest scores. It’s amazing how many people fell for it, and entirely predictable how many of those people now claim they never really did. We thought he was just eccentric, they tell Mark Seal, over and over again in Seal’s fascinating new book chronicling the whole 27-year con, The Man in the Rockefeller Suit: The Astonishing Rise and Spectacular Fall of a Serial Impostor. They just took it for granted, they tell Seal, that rich people are funny that way–that they don’t always carry cash, or wear socks, or drive nice cars, and sometimes they live in rented rooms. As for his German accent, many of the 200-odd people Seal interviewed believed it was just upper-crust mid-Atlantic, Ivy by way of Eastern prep. Others are less honest, and say they knew all along it was fucking German.

But casual acquaintances, bosses, colleagues, social clubs, art dealers, and best friends aren’t the only people Christian fooled. Most impressively, appallingly, and bafflingly of all, he fooled his wife, Sandra Boss, and he did so for twelve years. She was smart enough to take her Harvard MBA to Wall St. and start making millions, as an economist and business consultant, but still she couldn’t see that the man she was supporting–a man who claimed to come from a wealthy dynasty but didn’t have a cent because, he explained, he was working to help developing nations restructure debt, a job that didn’t pay anything–was pulling the prank of the century, and that he was doing it at her expense.

As you’d imagine, the development of the Internet began to create some problems for Christian’s scheme, but it was in 1978 that he’d first come to America, and computers weren’t then what they are now. Neither was immigration policy. It wasn’t until decades later that authorities would be able to look at one of the social security numbers he’d used and see that it was identical to that of David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam, as if Christian were mocking them in code.

Although Christian wasn’t in fact a serial killer, there was a murder, a double-homicide that he probably, almost certainly, pulled when he left California–that was in fact responsible, it’s believed, for his leaving California (and for which extradition proceedings are currently being undertaken by state prosecutors there). That was 1985 to 1988, or ten years since he’d arrived in America, and for four years after that, Seal’s trail on Christian runs completely cold. In 1992, Christian pops back up again, in New York City, and there’s Seal again, back on the case.

This is the kind of story Seal specializes in, the sordid-unseemly, and he always works it expertly, on behalf of Vanity Fair–always another Sheen or Madoff or Letterman blackmailer, another “Prince Jefri: The Prince Who Blew Through Millions.” But this time he’s on to something special. And somebody at Christian’s kidnapping trial in Boston must have recognized him, because it was there that Seal was handed a mysterious dossier fat with files, everything from photos to financial statements to FBI reports. This, just as much as all the exhaustive and exhausting interviews Seal conducted, is the basis for the mesmerizing story he’s been able to weave from disparate strands.

At the trial for the kidnapping, Christian and his lawyers tried to plea insanity, truly the scoundrel’s last refuge. The DSM-IV was brought in as an expert witness for the defense; and then for the prosecution. Finally, it was determined that nobody who’s insane could have possibly pulled off a caper so methodical and prolonged as this.

And the damnedest thing about it is, he almost got away with it. If only he hadn’t abused his wife and become overly possessive of his daughter, there would have never been the divorce that led to the private investigator, that led to the kidnapping, that led to criminal investigation, that led to the murder charge. But then, if he hadn’t done those things, he wouldn’t have been Christian Gerhartsreiter, or whatever his name really is.

The moral of the story? The moral of the story is obvious: Plan, work hard, dream, and persevere, because this is America, where you can be anybody you want to be–but never forget that it takes constant vigilance not to revert to being who you truly are.

The post The Case of the Counterfeit Rockefeller appeared first on The Faster Times.

The obvious instance is Barry Lyndon (1975), with its period-piece pomposities processed through Kubrick’s dark-comic genius, not to mention all the technical innovations put to good use in Lyndon that had come to fruition only as Kubrick puzzled over just how “Napoleon” was to be shot: those sunlit scenes by day, candlelit by night, and the preciously obsolete lenses Kubrick was able to somehow score, “2 full stops faster than the fastest lens available for 65mm. cameras,” according to Kubrick’s production notes; these lenses, he wrote, “will allow shooting with the normal interior room light in all but the most darkened conditions, in which case, a small amount of supplementary lighting will be necessary.” The lenses are what allowed Lyndon its oil-painting feel, a look and mood and tone that only threw into sharper relief all the mischievous irreverence Kubrick had for that stuffy genre, its aridity and arthritis.

Even if you’re not among those of us who consider Barry Lyndon to be Kubrick’s masterpiece (a pitiful minority, to be sure), you probably don’t consider A Clockwork Orange (1971) to be a dispensable part of his oeuvre, or The Shining (1980). These two films–along with Lyndon–are the next three Kubrick made after 2001 (1969), in the period during which he was on the verge of–but, alas, failed at–receiving financing for the Napoleon project. How the project fell through, and exactly how much herculean labor Kubrick had put into its preparation, are meticulously documented in Stanley Kubrick’s “Napoleon”: The Greatest Film Never Made, a single-bound compendium of several texts testifying to the potential of a production never realized.

In addition to extensive production notes, there are location photos (even more extensive), costume designs, lengthy conversations between Kubrick and the Napoleon scholar Felix Markham, annotations Kubrick had made in Markham’s biography and interviews he had given on the project, a treatment of the script, not to mention the script itself, as well as a whole batch of essays, written by experts after the fact and assessing the merits of what Kubrick had been able to accomplish: his brother-in-law and co-producer Jan Harlan with an overview of the project, Eva-Maria Magel with a painstakingly virtuoso analysis of the production in each of its component parts, Geoffrey Ellis with “A Historian’s Critique of the Screenplay,” Jean Tulard with a survey of “Napoleon in Film” (both pre- and post-Kubrick), as well as a bibliography itemizing Kubrick’s roughly 500 books on Napoleon. When the author and filmmaker Jon Ronson, who eventually ended up making a documentary about Kubrick’s archives in toto, was first taken to the Napoleon room, after Kubrick’s death, he asked Kubrick’s assistant if this had been the library. “Look closer at the books,” he was told, and when he did, Ronson became neither the first nor the last in this context to recall The Shining and Jack Nicholson (whom Kubrick had seriously considered for the role of Napoleon) and those same lines batted out obsessively over and over again on the typewriter from inside the Overlook Hotel. After Ronson expressed his amazement that all the books were about Napoleon, the assistant then said to him, “Look in the drawers.”

In the drawers were the index cards, and those are reproduced here too, in part. They had been prepared by Oxford University graduate students whom Kubrick had hired, through Markham, to provide “[a] master biographical file,” cross-indexed, “on the principal 50 characters in the story.” The students, Kubrick wrote, “have taken the highlights of each person’s life, putting a single event and its date on a single 3 x 5 index card. These cards have all been integrated in a date order file with special signals indicating the names of the characters. The system allows you to instantly determine what any of the 50 people were doing on any given date.”

Kubrick’s ambitions for the project were not modest, and they were not subtle, either: “I expect to make the best movie ever made,” he said, on more than one occasion, and I guess that’s appropriate. But although there was nothing modest or subtle about his ambitions, there was plenty of subtlety in his preparations–and humility, too, because without humility, true greatness remains elusive. Kubrick was determined not to make this his own personal Waterloo. In some ways, that’s precisely what it became, but not because he had failed in his preparations. In the research phase, Kubrick seems to have had a persistent obsession with a particular kind of nail in Napoleon’s horses’ hooves, during the Russian campaign, and Magel shrewdly speculates that here “Kubrick is seeking to find excuses for the hero’s failings in circumstances that were beyond his control.” He obtained a specimen of precisely the kind of horseshoe frost nail that Napoleon, perhaps at the peril of his Grande Armée, had failed to procure for his horses. Although Markham “cautioned Kubrick that the theory should not be given too much weight,” according to Magel, “[w]e duly find this failure in cavalry preparation making its appearance in the screenplay….”

Kubrick’s “Napoleon”–like Kubrick’s Napoleon–was certainly imperiled by forces beyond its control. For one thing, the studios were losing money, and were otherwise loathe to continue subsidizing bloated costume epics. But there was another contribution to Kubrick’s Waterloo, and that was Waterloo, the Rod Steiger-starring stinkeroo that Sergei Bondarchuk had laid in 1970, as Kubrick was still trying to line up financing for “Napoleon.” Kubrick instantly anticipated troublesome implications for his own project but remained an optimist, writing to Markham, “‘Waterloo’ was such a silly film. It will not make things any easier but in the end I am sure we will get it done.”

When this was written, Kubrick was already in the midst of editing his next film, A Clockwork Orange, probably never allowing himself to believe that it was as close as he would ever come, in the seventies or any other decade, to a nihilistic Beethoven-inspired meditation on violence. (Beethoven was already in the Anthony Burgess source material, of course, but later, when the Napoleon project had fallen through and Kubrick was trying to convince Burgess to do a novel on Napoleon, based on the symphonic form, he did so by reasoning that Beethoven had already drawn up the blueprint with a literal symphony–which would seem to indicate that Beethoven was central to Kubrick’s thematic-aesthetic ideal for both “Napoleon” and Clockwork.)

Would he have ever made Clockwork if things had gotten rolling according to schedule on “Napoleon”? It’s not an idle question. Nor is it idle to ask if Kubrick would have had the resources for making such an idiosyncratic period piece as Barry Lyndon, or such an effectively astute movie as The Shining about what it’s like to be left with all possible resources, except one, for creating the grand masterpiece, and then the frustration that ensues from the subsequent failure. Stanley Kubrick didn’t turn into Jack Torrance, and the one resource he lacked–big studio money–was certainly different from the one that Torrance lacks–artistic inspiration–but that doesn’t mean Kubrick didn’t become, by all accounts, genuinely depressed by his inability to realize “Napoleon.”

But Clockwork, Lyndon, and The Shining are not the only great Kubrick films that “Napoleon”’s failure somehow facilitated. There’s also his last film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999), and its preoccupation with those Schnitzlerian themes of sexual-romantic obsession and jealousy. These are major preoccupations of “Napoleon,” too, and in fact Kubrick even noted the Schnitzlerian parallels in Napoleon’s story long before he had designs on adapting Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle, the book that became the basis for Eyes Wide Shut. “His sex life was worthy of Arthur Schnitzler,” Kubrick noted succinctly of Napoleon in a 1969 interview with the journalist Joseph Gelmis, referring to Napoleon’s distrustful, impassioned, and antagonistic relationship with his wife Josephine. And in his copy of a book called The Mind of Napoleon, Kubrick wrote “DIALOG TO SOMEONE” and “VERY SCHNITZLER” next to the following passage:

In Vienna, in 1805, Murat said to me, “I want you to meet a charming woman who is mad about you and wants nothing but you.” Although I had my misgivings, I told him to bring her along. She didn’t speak a word of French, and I not a word of German. I liked her so much that I spent the whole night with her. She was one of the most agreeable women I have ever met–no smell. In the morning, she waked me up, and I have never seen her since. I never knew who she was.

Kubrick’s legendary attention-to-detail and perfectionism are everywhere apparent in this volume. The two are not synonymous, as Kubrick himself understood better than anyone. In one of his recorded talks with Markham, Kubrick characterizes a rival general of Napoleon’s as being “someone who mistook busying himself with details as being a perfectionist. He apparently fancied himself as someone that…he says that he apparently didn’t busy himself in anything other than small details. His grand strategy was non-existent.” This was not a problem from which Kubrick suffered. He knew his small details, but he certainly had his grand strategy, too.

You can see here how the two would have been perfectly integrated. The photos are extensive, and comprise images of everything from battlefields, to uniforms and other costumes, to residential interiors, to historical personages, to city-streets and gardens (including a topiary maze strikingly similar to the one in The Shining), to battleships and great palaces and squat huts, the woods and the sea and the cobble-paved roads. There are more images than can conveniently fit into the book, and so there’s a coded key-card, tucked inside of plastic within the cover, with which one can access some 17,000 additional images online.

And then, at the end of it all, the finished screenplay is where the grand strategy is made manifest. Even to those of us disinclined to read literary forms intended to serve as guides for visual production, Kubrick’s screenplay reads smooth and vivid. If you let yourself relax into it, you can forget that you’re not watching a movie, the movie that Kubrick intended all along for you to watch. Because of the large font Kubrick used, there are 41 rather than the industry-standard 52 lines to an average page; what this ends up meaning is that the 186 pages reproduced here are really more like 148 pages, and can be counted on to have clocked a run-time of, according to Magel, “a good 200 minutes.”

Kubrick did not forsake poetry in his screenplays, least of all this one. It’s almost as if he knew we might be reading this movie instead of watching it. “The weather was so fine and the temperature so mild,” reads the narration of the Russian campaign, “that it seems as if even the season was conspiring to deceive Napoleon.” Even in mere scene direction, Kubrick can’t resist the poetical:

203. EXT – BATTLEFIELD – DAY

Massed columns of French horsemen riding up the slope at a slow canter, their helmets and breast-plates glittering like a stormy wave of the sea, when it catches the sunlight.

This wasn’t just some movie to Kubrick; this was, for more than a decade, the presiding obsession of his life. For someone as obsessive as Kubrick, that’s pretty much like saying it comprised the near-totality of his existence. That he didn’t get the opportunity to complete it is almost criminal, and only serves to remind us of what the case of P.T. Anderson and The Master has more recently demonstrated: no matter how esteemed and accomplished the filmmaker, without the support of a moneyed benefactor with scores of millions of dollars to gamble, even the best laid plans can die the death of a dog. Kubrick knew it–he knew it perfectly well–but if he’d allowed himself to constantly hold that knowledge at the forefront of his psyche, he would have barely been able to function. It’s like he told Gelmis, in the same interview in which he noted “Napoleon”’s Schnitzlerian parallels: “One has to be an optimist about these things.”

The post Stanley Kubrick’s “Napoleon” Dossier appeared first on The Faster Times.

Some of those histories are explained: “Our Epps appears to be a quiet child, born of modest means….Here’s something: he has a mentally deficient older brother who gets all the attention….” Of Claudette, Clowes writes, “From her adolescent homelife, clouded by the strange dynamic between father and mother, an overdeveloped fantasy life begins….”

Or look at Art School Confidential, the movie of five years ago that Clowes original-scripted for Terry Zwigoff. Before Jerome (Max Minghella) even makes it to art school, Clowes briskly, efficiently, sketches in both grammar and high school, in order to explain all the surfeit baggage Jerome carries with him off to college. And characters don’t just have pasts, either, in Clowes; they have presents, too, and futures. In Ghost World, both the graphic novel and the film (1997 and 2001, respectively), we see a friendship between two adolescent females that looks nothing so much as eternal; and then we see that friendship essentially end when one of those friends outgrows her past, largely because of what she learns from an older character who has plenty past of his own.

These are some of the things. Clowes is a graphic novelist who has pledged his allegiance just as ardently to the second half of that title as to the first. Which isn’t to say that he’s the only one putting the graphic in biographical, even if he does happen to be the best.

There’s also Chris Ware, of course, whose Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (2003) is regarded as a classic and witnesses its protagonist’s psychology in evolution. There’s David Mazzuchelli, whose years of producing Batman and Daredevil books somehow prepared him to write a psychobiographical masterpiece of his own, with Asterios Polyp (2009). And then, of course, there’s Chester Brown, who has gone biographical in a way more literal than all of them, by writing first a graphic autobiography, of his childhood (I Never Liked You; 1994), and then a proper biography, of a 19th-century Canadian revolutionary (Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography; 2004). Brown has just reverted to autobiography with his latest, Paying for It: A Comic Strip Memoir About Being a John, and if one doesn’t say any more about it now, then that’s only because space is being opened up for its exclusive occupation in a near-future column.

Even among all these riches–and even among the run of graphic novels devoted to historical figures, from Trotsky to Darwin to Malcolm X–Clowes’ work stands out for the richness of its character-study backstory and psychological insight. His latest, Mister Wonderful: A Love Story, you may have seen when it recently ran serially in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. There are only two significant characters, but they both, typically, have psyches and souls as well as selves. Often, the interior-monologue text physically obscures the dialogue text, as if to suggest that what occurs to us internally is much more significant than the empty words that come out of our mouths. Sometimes interior monologues merit their own panels, concurrent to the action, just about all of which occurs over the space of one blind date.

To better contextualize this action, Clowes employs a technique here that he employed in his last novel, in Wilson (2010), wherein the drawing style changes, often radically, from scene to scene, to correspond with each scene’s particular mood. Sometimes the drawing is sharp and angular, signifying melodrama, or it’s cutely rounded and simplified, almost Schultz-like, to suggest the innocence of childhood, while constantly it modulates to various places between these extremes. Color schemes change, too, often becoming monochromatic, or chiaroscuro for seeing deeper into a setting’s thematic dimensions.

In Wilson, we’re never told if it’s the character’s first or last name the book is titled after, and it doesn’t matter. Like the eponymous protagonists of previous Clowes books–like Pussey (last name), like David Boring–Wilson is someone who lives a life entire, and we get to see as much of that life as Clowes can artfully make matter. Near the end of it, Wilson’s saying to a stranger in the coffee shop (but really to himself, the only one listening), “We like our stories to end with a promise of hope–‘happily ever after’ and all that. Too bad real lives don’t have that structure.” But by the next panel, he’s already on to a different idea: “Or hell, maybe they do. Maybe it’s right there in front of us and we can’t see it.” We don’t feel sorry for Wilson–he’s not that kind of character–but that doesn’t mean we can’t feel sympathy for him.

That’s not the end of the story, though it’s close. And it comes as the culmination of Clowes’ next-to-latest complete project in not just acknowledging, but actually proving, that a human’s own history matters–that history is what separates a character from a caricature, and sends him on his way to being someone capable of living on the page, and then living off of it, too.

The post Daniel Clowes: Putting the ‘Graphic’ in ‘Biographical’ appeared first on The Faster Times.

You hear the movie before you see it: Bobby Womack blowing out that lone-note falsetto, long and longing, and then the persistence of those percussions and the chunky wah-wahs. That’s when Pam Grier enters the picture, conveyed on airport tread, the screen still holding on her when Womack launches into his lyric–“Across 110th Street” sung with all the desperate striving contained in its message’s meaning.

That’s the opening to Jackie Brown (1997), the film with which Quentin Tarantino sought to not only follow-up Pulp Fiction (1994) but to make Pam Grier a star again. How well he did the former is a matter that will always be debated, but about the latter we don’t have to argue. Tarantino gave Grier the role of a lifetime while at the same time paying homage to the blaxploitation roles Grier had held in the seventies, and which had done so much to shape Tarantino’s own aesthetic. When you consider all he had to overcome merely to have the opportunity, and then look at Grier up there on the screen actualizing the dream entire–accompanied by one of the signature blaxploitation soundtracks about survival and hard-won opportunity–it’s enough to put the freeze in your spine and make your arm-hairs stand.

Not just a neglected masterpiece, Jackie Brown has always been something of a maligned masterpiece, though it was still well enough received to make Grier’s a name on everyone’s mind again. There were some prestige roles for Grier that followed from that, and it was this late-career rebirth that largely comprises the third act in Foxy: My Life in Three Acts, Grier’s new memoir. Even for someone who was hoping to read more about that second career in Act Three, and more about the women-in-prison and blaxploitation flicks in Act Two, the book Grier has written never fails to fascinate.

In Foxy we read very little about what it was like to work for Roger Corman or Jack Hill, those schlocked-out B-picture directors of the absurd who, like all purveyors of trash, must bring a certain integrity to their task, to have such consistent success. In Jackie Brown there’s a scene in which Grier visits the apartment of Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson), and among the name-labels next to the array of buzzer-buttons is “J Hill,” a Tarantino-acknowledged homage to Grier’s old director, the man who practically discovered her as an actress. And according to Hill’s commentary track on Foxy Brown (1974), Tarantino also named the character Jackie Brown after him–a demonstrably false claim on Tarantino’s part, since in the source-material, Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch, the stewardess-protagonist is a Caucasian already named Jackie Burke.

So there isn’t, for one person’s tastes, all that much about her work in the seventies, or her work with Tarantino in the nineties, or her work on the The L Word in the new century. Nor is there much about her work in all the many other films and television series in all the spaces between those three major beacons of her career. What there is instead is a lot of talk about her love life. Granted, this is not typically something worth complaining about. If anything, it should be less worthy of complaint in the case of Grier, given some of the interesting people she was romantically involved with. But to those of us who came to this book for insights about her strange and fascinating career, the attention paid to romantic matters can’t help but seem frustratingly disproportionate.

Nevertheless, this is the story she has chosen to tell, and I don’t think anyone could reasonably claim that it’s not worth the telling, for all all its grimness. Molested twice by the time she was out of her teens (once when she was just six years old, and again in high school), those early experiences with sexual abuse both influenced and anticipated her many later troubles with men.

Grier, obviously, had a lot to run from, when she left Denver for L.A. so she could try and make it there. She’d been the runner-up in the Miss Colorado Universe beauty pageant, but Colorado wasn’t where the movies got made. One of the first jobs she had in Los Angeles was as a receptionist for a radio station; another was singing backup for Bobby Womack.

It was during these early days in L.A. that she met at a party and then began dating Lew Alcindor, still playing for UCLA, and who had just begun practicing the Muslim religion that would soon lead to him changing his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. The practice of this religion is not incidental to the end of his relationship with Grier. “The truth,” she writes, “was that Kareem didn’t want me to work or go to school….He really wanted me to just be a good Muslim wife, bear his children, walk behind him, and keep my hair covered with a head scarf.”

By then Abdul-Jabbar was in Milwaukee, playing for the Bucks in the NBA, and Grier was making the first of those exploitation flicks, the true nature of which (had Abdul-Jabbar known the details) would have been enough to seriously damage a relationship already compromised. Before any of those movies were released, the relationship came to a felicitous end when Grier, driving at top speed through the canyons after an argument, nearly went flying off into thin air when the Muslim scarf she wore became plastered to her face by the wind. “It felt like an omen,” she writes, “that my head scarf, meant to be sacred and protective, had nearly killed me.”

She took the omen and did what any sensible person would do with it. Soon, in addition to the women-in-prison films that had begun appearing with regularity, their own genre now and Grier its preeminent star (Women in Cages, The Big Doll House, The Big Bird Cage), there was a different kind of film, blaxploitation, and Grier was the most identifiable star of that one, too, and probably the first ever female action hero. She made Hit Man (1972) and, much more significantly, Black Mama, White Mama (also 1972), and then, most significant of all, those two iconic films with Jack Hill as director, Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown. Not only did Grier (as she remembers being told by one of Corman’s people) “look perfect with your natural afro and no makeup,” but she could even do her own stunts and sing when she had to. She sang a song called “Long Time Woman” for The Big Doll House, and years later Tarantino was shrewd enough to use it for an appropriate sequence in Jackie Brown.

Grier was acutely aware of the contempt blaxploitation films received, and from a whole array of disparate factions: “the mainstream, the black leftists, the religious right conservatives, and the lesbian community.” But Grier chose to see these films for what was positive in them: “women of color acting like heroes rather than depicting nannies or maids. We were redefining heroes as schoolteachers, nurses, mothers, and street-smart women who were proud of who they were. They were far more aggressive and progressive than the Hollywood stereotypes.” At least Gloria Steinem knew what it was about; she even had the good sense to put Grier on the cover of Ms.

Coffy was the first role for which Grier “made some real money.” Fellini could now be numbered among her many fans, but Grier had to promote the new movie and wasn’t free to work with him just yet. “And then,” she writes, “I would have even less time to myself than usual, as I was about to enter into a relationship with a man I adored and could easily call a great love of my life.”

When Grier first dated Freddie Prinze, he was still a struggling stand-up in L.A., rooming with “another struggling comedian named Jay Leno.” The relationship ended long before Prinze ended his own life with a gunshot to the head. “The day I pushed him away for good,” Grier writes, “was one of the saddest days of my life.” No longer rooming with Leno while he worked the local comedy clubs, Prinze had by then made his breakout appearance on The Tonight Show and was starring in Chico and the Man. “Everyone was fighting over him,” Grier writes, “while all he could do was withdraw and drug himself even more. There were so many people pulling at Freddie, I finally realized there was no place for me. Freddie insisted I was being dramatic, but I held my ground. When I finally ended it, he was inconsolable.”

Then she got involved with Richard Pryor.

It had actually been Prinze who introduced them. He took her over to Pryor’s house one night just because he needed to prove to his skeptical friend that he really did know Pam Grier. “Motherfucker,” Pryor said to Prinze when they showed up, “you do know the bitch.” She and Pryor had both been molested at the age of six, which isn’t the best thing for a couple to have in common. Sometimes, it seemed like that was the only thing: “He was part of a world that I really didn’t understand. And I had to wonder what it was about comedians that attracted me. Was it a hormone and estrogen cocktail that inexorably drew me to these men?”

There were many final straws with her and Pryor. One of the heaviest came when Grier’s gynecologist told her she had cocaine in her cervix. Doctor and patient had to puzzle over the matter together in figuring out how it got there. “Oh, my God,” the gynecologist told her. “We have a serious problem here. If he’s not putting it on his skin directly, then it’s worse because the coke is in his seminal fluid. I have to ask you something very personal, Pam, and you need to be one hundred percent honest with me or you’re going to have some serious cervical and uterine problems. You can become sterile, and you might have to have a hysterectomy. When you give him oral sex, do your gums and lips get numb?”

She was still dealing with the end of her relationship with Pryor when Prinze called asking for money. He needed it “to pay back some guys,” and offered to send a studio messenger to pick up the money. Grier declined the offer. Three days later Prinze was dead, and Grier was wise enough to know that “only he could help himself, and he hadn’t really wanted to.”

One person who really helped Grier through these times was the soul-singer Minnie Ripperton, who’d just scored her biggest hit with “Lovin’ You” (1975). That’s another one that made it onto the Jackie Brown soundtrack, and along with “110th Street” and “Long Time Woman” it comprises what can be thought of as a kind of short-play soundtrack not just to Jackie Brown but to Grier’s very own life. You don’t even need to know the lyrics, either, just the names of the songs and what they represent and the places in this story where they fit in.

Ripperton became a very dear friend of Grier’s, maybe her best friend, but she died of cancer, tragically young, and she wasn’t the only one. Grier’s adopted sister did, too (she was working as a flight attendant, just like Jackie Brown). Then they found a pre-cancerous growth on Grier herself, cervical dysplasia, which made her think back to Pryor. She ended up getting really sick, while at the same time keeping her career together in the eighties. She fought off the cancer and had it removed seemingly for good. The man she was seeing at the time and in love with actually stood her up at her hospital bed. When she ran into him on the street years later, he said he was getting married. “Good luck,” Grier said, “I hope she never gets sick.”

One day not long after that–the 1990s by now–she was jammed up in L.A. traffic when she saw this “strange-looking man” standing on the sidewalk, talking maniacally–or at least manically–to a beautiful blond babe. His hair was all messed up and he was wearing shorts and old sneakers. When he saw Grier in her car, he ran through traffic to get to her. “Pam Grier,” he said. “I’m writing a movie for you. It’s based on Rum Punch, the Elmore Leonard book.” When the script arrived in the mail, it was forty-four cents short on postage, but paying it was worth the money, because the part Tarantino had written for her was “my greatest role to date.”

There are two more heartbreaks Grier has to tell about before her story’s done–much more conventional than the others but no less painful, in some ways seemingly more so. By the time she’d made Jackie Brown, she had already stayed up through a long black night, only to find there was another one stretched out in front of her. That’s the way it is out here. And when you watch the end of Jackie Brown, when Womack’s song gets reprised as Jackie drives away from love–drives away from Max Cherry (Robert Forster), who had declined her offer of a new life lived off of the cash they’d scored, honestly if not legally, and Grier is singing along, subdued but soulful, to Womack’s lyric, as if the bittersweet blues were its own reward–you may have wondered before what she could have possibly been thinking, but you don’t have to wonder now.

The post The Soundtrack to Pam Grier’s Life appeared first on The Faster Times.

Jack Anderson was, in a way, the nastiest kind of villain, because he was a journalist and therefore could not really be defeated–except, of course, in the way the first two Kennedys were. There’s conclusive evidence that that’s precisely what Nixon’s men, if not Nixon himself, set out to do. G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt were plotting Anderson’s execution when the Watergate break-in, or its failure, forced them to divert their attention to matters of more immediate survival. And, like the Watergate burglary itself, there’s no undeniable proof the command actually came from Nixon per se, yet no one seems to doubt it, either.

Anderson was there at the beginning of Nixon’s career and he was there at the end, and he was there at many of the places in between. He was there at so many places, you could tell Nixon’s whole story and make it Anderson’s story, too–and that’s precisely what Mark Feldstein has done, with Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson, and the Rise of Washington’s Scandal Culture.

Feldstein has gone all the way back to when the two were born, thirty miles and less than a decade apart in California, one raised a Quaker and the other a Mormon, both serving at sea in the Pacific in World War II. They came to Washington the very same year, 1947, and their paths got crossed up almost immediately. Before Anderson gave Nixon such terrible fits as author of the “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column, he gave him terrible fits as one of the column’s researchers, in the days when Drew Pearson wrote the column. It was in the capacity of Pearson’s chief assistant that Anderson actually helped give Nixon his start in politics, in a way both oblique and undeniable. By exposing not only the sexual improprieties, but the much more serious financial improprieties, of J. Parnell Thomas–Nixon’s “chief competitor on,” and the chairman of, the House Un-American Activities Committee–Anderson paved a path for Nixon to run in taking control of the prosecution of Alger Hiss. It was the Hiss case that made Nixon’s name national, and that made Nixon himself an attractive choice as Eisenhower’s vice-presidential running mate. Feldstein is not unreasonable in suggesting that, “without this unintentional assistance from his future enemy Jack Anderson, Richard Nixon might never have come to national attention in the first place.”

No matter where Nixon went from there until the end, Anderson was right there with him. Every good hero needs a worthy villain, and Nixon, though never at a loss for villains, was never at a loss for Anderson particularly, either. Anderson was there during the fund crisis in 1952, when Nixon just barely salvaged his place on Ike’s ticket with the Checkers speech (Anderson had played a role in uncovering the existence of Nixon‘s campaign fund, though not quite as large a role as Feldstein would have us believe); he was there during the 1960 presidential run against Kennedy, digging up not just the existence and exact amount of a large loan Howard Hughes had made to Nixon’s brother, but also the nature of that loan–namely, that it was almost certainly made as a de facto gift to Nixon himself (Anderson had a ne’er-do-well brother, too, who would give him at least as much grief as Nixon’s brother gave him, another neat parallel for which Feldstein has mustered plenty of fascinating material); and, when Nixon became president, Anderson was there like he had never been before.

By then the “Washington Merry-Go-Round” was his–Pearson was gone and Jack Anderson’s was the name in the by-line. He published secret documents pertaining to the India-Pakistan War (kind of a proto-Pentagon Papers affair) and leaked the memo that ITT employee Dita Beard had dispersed within the company, and which implicated the Nixon administration in anti-trust corruption. During all this, Nixon was spying on Anderson at least as fervently as Anderson was spying on Nixon, and with superior resources. Anderson did not break much news on Watergate, and when you read Feldstein on how many leads and tips Anderson sat on, it’s easy to see how it is he got scooped, along with everyone else in town, by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post. That being said, he was still cited twice, for misdeeds he’d uncovered, in the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment report.

That’s one way to measure Anderson’s influence in bringing about Nixon’s ultimate impeachment. But Nixon’s end in a way brought about Anderson’s own, too, because as Brit Hume, who worked as an assistant for Anderson, tells Feldstein, “He had been one of a handful of investigative reporters in America and then Watergate made it all the rage. Every newspaper and television network began an investigative team. It took away Jack’s competitive advantage. He no longer had the field to himself.”

Although Nixon was gone from Washington after Watergate, Anderson was still around, and making a damned-fool parody of himself. Nixon may have still had his enemies, but Anderson was at a loss, and he went looking for them in some of the strangest places, even trying, in one case, to conjure them out of the nowhere of Jimmy Carter, claiming that “no two presidents were more alike” than Carter and Nixon, when of course the exact opposite was true. It wasn’t just his enemies he was finding in strange places. He asked President Reagan to start a “Young Astronauts” program, and then had two of his children on the program’s payroll even as he lobbied for donations from, among others, “old corporate benefactors [of Nixon’s] whom Anderson had investigated just a few years earlier. The obvious conflict of interest,” Feldstein notes wryly, “seemed to escape the newsman.”

But still Anderson never gave up. In his way, he was just as tenacious as Nixon (who in these years was still trying, in some ways successfully, to rehabilitate his credibility). He wrote for a supermarket tabloid, and did work for a television equivalent of the same, and even did this one show called Truth, wherein he interrogated guests hooked up to a polygraph on-air. He also did a much more courageous version of the sneaking-a-boxcutter-onto-an-airplane exposé by sneaking a handgun into the Capitol building. And he tried to get a greenlight for a movie and sitcom based on his life–a venture that was precisely as successful as his attempt to pitch Parker Brothers on a “Jack Anderson Board Game.”

Of all the chapters in Feldstein’s book, I found this chapter on Anderson’s “Final Years” the most fascinating, because it bothers to treat a phase in the Anderson legend we don’t often hear about. Like Nixon, Anderson had a lifelong devoted secretary, something of a surrogate wife, but unlike Rose Mary Woods, Opal Ginn did not see the marriage entirely through. She was fired after nearly forty years, and with little notice. “I wasn’t even given time to apply for Social Security,” she said. She had been always drunk and drinking, vulgar, irresponsible, unreliable. For that reason, the comparison to Woods lasts only as far as it goes, precisely there and no further, much like the comparison between their bosses.

It would have been a perfect ending, perfect in a way that history seldom is, if Anderson had been the one whose reporting had brought about Nixon’s resignation. But it was of course somebody else’s reporting, along with the testimony of Jim McCord and John Dean, and the work of Senate investigators. Even the story on the planned assassination of Jack Anderson was not broken by Jack Anderson. That one first got reported by Bob Woodward, in the Washington Post.

The post Spy vs. Spy: Richard Nixon and Jack Anderson appeared first on The Faster Times.