The Sunday Gentleman Page 3
One of the unhappiest aspects of magazine writing, a subtle but persistent dishonesty that was necessary for survival, was that of giving almost every article a strong angle. The necessity of having an angle in every article still survives in the magazine field. But it was more widely in demand, although less harshly used, during the time when I wrote for magazines. It was not enough to think of a likely subject to write about, and then write about it as one truly found it (since this might invite waste, dullness, lack of instant audience appeal). To secure an assignment, the writer had to find in advance something in a prospective subject’s life that was unusual or bizarre—a “narrative hook,” an “attention grabber”—and promise to prove it true and to build the story around it, as well as use an offbeat point of view or theme. Once the assignment was obtained, with this prefabricated angle pledged for delivery, the writer had to research and interview to prove the validity of the angle, to build it up, so that it could support all the remaining facts. If the writer then found that the angle really existed, and did have the importance he had claimed for it, he could use it in his prose creation and present it in full honesty. If the writer found that he had been misinformed about the truth or the importance of his angle, he could risk developing another angle (even though it did not conform to his assignment) and hope to get by with it, or as was more usually the case, he could weight the emphasis on certain facts, at the sacrifice of all his findings, to shore up his original angle. Worst of all, the magazine writer gave himself little room in which to move about during his search for truth. He had already settled upon a truth, and wearing his angle blinders, he obsessively sought it at the sacrifice of the more important facts. This partnership in sin between editor and writer usually did not produce a story that was outright dishonest, but rather one whose accuracy was distorted by reliance on predetermined opinion, by emphasis on what was desired rather than what existed.
I was, in my magazine-writing career, as guilty as my peers and colleagues of participating in this technique of angling. I offer no excuses, only apologies, and bring up one fact to mitigate my guilt. Like the majority of my colleagues, I never stayed with an angle or used it in my writing, if I found it to be utterly false. I angled my stories only when my researches proved the angles were true. But even though they were true, my angles, like those of my colleagues, were frequently distorted by editors suffering countless pressures of their own.
This happened when I wrote an article for a leading magazine about the Basques, an unusual and mysterious race. (“They are neither Spanish nor French nor anything known. No one has any firm idea where they came from. Archeologists can find no clues scratched on stones or monuments; historians can locate no written records; philologists can find out little about their ancient guttural language—a frog in the throat of Europe.”) This defiant people had an active underground in Spain, working out of France, battling to gain independence from Francisco Franco’s oppressive Fascism. My angle was that these Basques were Catholics, yet they had defied the Vatican when they joined left-wing groups in an effort to overthrow Franco’s Catholic regime. In Paris and San Sebastian, I found proof that this angle was true. I wrote about it, and submitted what I wrote, along with my proof of the angle, to the editors who had assigned the story.
The editors accepted my angle and evidence, even liked it, but appeared to be worried about international Catholic reaction. After much soul-searching, the editors began to cut and condense the material pertaining to my angle. What remained, after the article had been published, was not a story devoted mainly to a unique people who were a part of Spain and who were 99 percent Catholic, yet fought Catholic Franco, but a story concerned largely with the oddity and strangeness of the Basques as a race. The primary point of my story. Catholics in revolt against a Catholic leader, had been reduced to a passing mention in three paragraphs.
Actually, in fairness, I must add that the periodical had displayed considerable courage in publishing even that much. Still, commercial timidity had, by omission, sorely diminished the factual completeness of the Basque story. In this case, the sin, if sin it had been, was largely that of an editorial policy. But in permitting the bowdlerization, I suppose I was a minor partner to the vitiation of what had started out as balanced reporting.
But I was to learn that sometimes our compromises come home to roost. We who have sinned in even the smallest ways are occasionally made to realize the import of our transgressions when we, in turn, are sinned against. Recently, by chance, such a turnabout happened to me. With passing years, my life had changed. As I had once written stories about other men, I found others now writing stories about me. I had created controversial novels. They were being read and discussed, in different editions and many languages, by millions of people. I was fair game for the new magazine writers and editors—and their angles.
Late in 1963, my New York agent telephoned me that a leading magazine was interested in researching and publishing a biographical article about me. Would I cooperate? I agreed to cooperate because the request to be so publicized as an important personage or a zoo animal was flattering, and moreover might be valuable in acquainting many more people with my books. However, my agreement to receive the magazine’s writer, who was being flown from New York to Los Angeles, was tinged with apprehension. For the magazine in question, like so many similar ones, was noted for creating stories that were sometimes based on inner editorial prejudices and half-substantiated rumors. Yet the same magazine had featured many excellent biographies of contemporary authors, and I decided that a publication so devoted to the popular novelist could not be all bad. It was my wife, more realistic than I, who first spoke the unspeakable. “What’s their angle?” she said. “They must have an angle.”
The magazine’s young writer spent three days with me and my friends—a marathon of questions and answers—and after the first day, I could discern no angle. It was only after the second day, after he had begun to interview my friends, that the gleaming point of his angle became visible. His angle, or the magazine’s angle, was to show an example of the new writing phenomenon, product of, caterer to, the new commercial age: an unliterary pasha feasting on exotic peacock tongues, caviar, champagne, surrounded by unsheathed concubines, served by relays of uniformed attendants, occasionally consulting his indexed card file of best-seller formulas in order to dash off another book on his cash register. Yet, the visiting writer confessed to me, neither I nor my mode of living fitted his publication’s preconceived notions, derived from the contents of several of my novels and the publicity about my income in their files. The young writer faced the magazine writers’ classic dilemma. What to do? Drop the story? Stick to the original angle and write the lie? Strike a compromise between fact and wish?
I was in France when I received a copy of the magazine that contained the article about me. My friends regarded the article as generally favorable, even affectionate in tone. Despite this, the hard angle was obvious: A group of authors existed, of which I was one, who had found the means of making a fortune from novels by writing them after a commercial formula. While this made an eye-catching angle for the story, it was (and the magazine knew it was from what I had told them) the sheerest nonsense.
If successful novelists had a formula, they would not have failures, and I know of no novelist who has not had a failure at one time or another. If successful novelists had only the acquisition of money for their goal, if they were motivated by royalties instead of a need for honest self-expression, they would find it expedient to give less time, less care, less inner agony to a single work, and in that way be able to produce three novels in the period that it ordinarily takes them to suffer over one. Thus, if lucky, they would enjoy two or three times the amount of income they obtained from a single carefully created book. Yet I know of no instance where an author has been influenced by this economic theorem.
In short, the angle, based on preconceived opinion, manufactured to titillate its readers, was fanciful, with abso
lutely no basis in fact. As a result, when my next novel appeared, about one-third of the critics, influenced by the angle in the magazine biography of me, incorporated discussions of a so-called best-seller “formula” in their reviews. While not all of this minority of critics were gullible enough to be taken in by the angle, the fact that they had even repeated it in print did have the effect of putting off some serious readers.
Neither a largely favorable press, nor the enormous circulation that this novel of mine finally achieved in the United States and abroad, could fully undo the temporary harm committed by a popular periodical’s angle. As a magazine writer, I had always been uncomfortable with the demands of my employers for an angle. As a novelist, my resentment of it has been acutely intensified.
This persistent necessity for using an angle, then, as well as the lack of respect for and censorship of a writer’s words that came from both magazine publishers and story subjects, and above all, the almost constant lack of freedom to write as one wished, were reasons why I left the magazine field, and I have never regretted my decision, even for a day.
Still, it would be unfair, even dishonest, of me to say that I did not derive considerable pleasure and excitement from my two decades in the magazine field. Between 1931 and 1953, I published around five hundred articles and short stories, perhaps one piece of fiction for every nine pieces of nonfiction. I suppose I also wrote an equal number of articles and short stories that remained unpublished, although some of them represented my better Sunday writing. As a youngster, before 1940, I would write for whoever would publish me: Horse and Jockey Magazine, American Farm Youth Magazine, Catholic Digest, Current Psychology and Psychoanalysis, For Men Only, Ken, Modern Mechanics, Thrilling Sports, Modern Screen. Later, my markets, while still as diverse, improved in prestige and circulation: The Saturday Evening Post, American Mercury, Esquire, Liberty Magazine, Collier’s, Coronet, The Rotarian, Saturday Review of Literature, American Legion Magazine, Cosmopolitan, Literary Cavalcade, Pageant, Reader’s Digest, This Week, True.
In quest of stories for those publications and others, I traveled widely, collected adventures, knowledge, renowned and bizarre personalities, knew hours and days of thrills and experiences that would probably have been impossible to acquire in other fields of endeavor. I remember interviewing Huey Long while he, clad in silk pajamas in a New Orleans hotel suite, told me that his forebears had been blessed with great longevity, and that he expected to live until ninety-nine (this, a year before his assassination). I remember spending two grueling days climbing 17,000-foot Mount Ix-taccihuatl, outside Mexico City. I remember accompanying an expedition into the heat of the Honduran jungles to discover a freak of nature called the Fountain of Blood, and being received by the President of El Salvador for performing this feat.
I remember, the year before Pearl Harbor, secretly interviewing an American in Nanking, China, an authority on Japan’s vicious policy of drugging the population of occupied China with heroin and opium, and being interrogated by the Japanese Dangerous Thought police for my curiosity, I remember, also months before Pearl Harbor, a long meeting with Yosuke Matsuoka, the Foreign Minister of Japan who had signed the Axis Pact with Hitler, and his outburst which warned me that Japan was prepared to go to war with the United States—and the reactions of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, and United States Army G-2 (waiting for me when I returned to San Francisco).
I remember Alexander Kerensky, and our conversation in a Los Angeles hotel room, and his bitterness about his failure to thwart Lenin and Bolshevism in revolutionary Russia. I remember Leni Reifenstahl, who was amiable enough to lift her skirt to her navel to display a surgical scar, and who became angry only when I suggested that she had been Hitler’s mistress. I remember an afternoon with W. C. Fields at his home, and his showing me framed caricatures of celebrities he hated, several of them pornographic, each covered with chaste little curtains, and one being of Eleanor Roosevelt, and the comedian then passing out in mid-sentence from excessive drinking.
I remember the pugilist. Kid McCoy, a few weeks before he killed himself, telling me how he had put the term “the real McCoy” into the language. I remember Diego Rivera, resentful and brusque because I had interrupted his painting of a nude in his studio, later coming in the rain, sweet and cooperative, to submit to an interview in Mexico City’s Ritz Hotel. I remember a hushed conference with three members of the anti-Franco underground in a shaded restaurant in a suburb of Madrid, and the Resistance lookouts on the watch for headlights of the Falangist police cars. I remember Pablo Picasso’s guided tour through his attic studio at 7 Rue des Grands-Augustins in Paris, as he (“looking like a prosperous Italian shoemaker wearing a beret,” my notes remind me) explained his work in progress in an undertone, his eyes brimming because of the death of the wife of a friend in Switzerland that morning. I remember a Nobel judge in Stockholm, a special room inside Buckingham Palace in London, a croupier in the basement of the Casino in Monte Carlo, a monsignor in the editorial offices of L’Osservatore Romano in the Vatican, a legendary madam in a Montmartre bistro in Paris.
All of this is but a small portion of what I remember as the best of my two decades of magazine writing. And many of the other persons, and places, and institutions that I have not mentioned, but were a part of my magazine years, I have included in full detail in the pages of this book.
In this collection are those factual stories which I decided were the most interesting and durable of my Sunday Gentleman narratives. There are twenty of these stories in all. Of these, nine were previously published, but in abridged form. Here, they appear re-edited and in their full original length. The remaining eleven stories, which I have also re-edited, have not previously appeared in print. Of these, three were sold to magazines, but for one reason or another were never published in America.
To each of these chapters I have added an afterword or postscript which I call What Has Happened Since, and these vary in length from 750 words to 7,500 words. For when I began to reread these magazine articles, I became intensely curious to know what had happened to my subjects with the passage of years since I first wrote about them a decade or two ago. What had happened to the two old ladies who, in their youth, had managed the most spectacular house of ill fame in American history? What had happened to the young man who had undergone a prefrontal lobotomy? What had happened to the great sleuth who lived in Lyons? What had happened to the Nobel judge who worshiped Hitler? What had happened to the head of the geisha union? What had happened to the greatest art forger in modern times? to my favorite train, the Orient Express? to my favorite advertising column in The Times of London? And so from 1963 to 1965, I traced and tracked down the subjects of my articles, to find out how they had fared from the time I had originally written about them until today. This proved to be a fascinating detective job in itself. My findings, described in twenty postscripts, add up to approximately 40,000 words written to complete this book.
For the most, these stories are a miscellany of my personal adventures with, and topical soundings of, unusual people and places that aroused my curiosity in recent years. Since subjective writing is little desired in the articles that popular magazines publish, many of the short pieces in this book are factual and objective in style. These stories are interviews, reports, impressions, made at home and abroad, on subjects that intrigued me at the time and interest me still. Why did I select these subjects at the time I did? I do not know, exactly. Perhaps my choices were always based on instinct. Or perhaps I never quite forgot what the editor of a great weekly magazine once told me. I had asked him, in the office of my literary agent in New York, to tell me what measuring stick might be used to determine whether a subject might qualify for his august periodical. He replied: “We are interested in anything that is the biggest, the best, or the first.” I inquired, “Or the most unusual?” To which he replied, “Yes, or the most unusual.”
While I did apply these criteria to most of my work
aday articles, I did not apply them strictly to the Sunday ones in this book, unless I did so unconsciously. I wrote these stories because the subjects fascinated me and because it was fun to write about them, and now it is my hope that they will give the reader equal pleasure.
Here, then, two decades of Sundays, when one uncertain man walked “accoutred in the fashion of the times, with a flowing wig, lace ruffles, and a sword by his side,” from daybreak to dusk, so briefly his own man, so briefly speaking of what he pleased and what pleased him.
PART TWO
THE
SUNDAY GENTLEMAN
AT HOME
2
Two Nice Old Ladies
In late February of 1902, when Prince Henry of Prussia arrived in New York City to accept the yacht built for his brother, Kaiser Wilhelm II, then ruler of Germany, he was asked by members of the press what sight in America he would most like to visit. Bored reporters waited for the expected official reply: the White House, Niagara Falls, or the Grand Canyon. Instead, Prince Henry answered. “The sight in America I would most like to visit? I would like to visit the Everleigh Club in Chicago.”
The members of the press were stunned with disbelief, and then alive with delight. And thereafter, they took the prince to their bosoms. For as they knew, and the more sophisticated male population of the United States (and apparently Europe) knew, the Everleigh Club was neither an attraction ordinarily discussed openly nor was it a men’s club in the ordinary sense. It was, as one periodical kindly pointed out, a club that “no one ever joined…or resigned from” but it was “a Chicago ‘mustn’t’: a house of ill—but very great—fame.”