by Pete Hamill
That taste for the draconian certainly hasn’t perished from the earth, as we saw in December in Romania and Panama. In the hardest of the old Stalinist states, the end came in blood and destruction, with the ruling family joining that of the czar on the casualty lists of the century’s revolutions. In Panama, an American soldier was killed, another soldier’s wife was insulted, and the great might of the United States was unleashed on the regime of Manuel Noriega. According to polls, most Americans loved this fierce spectacle. And while such peaceful and historic events as the collapse of the Berlin Wall drew poor television ratings, many cheered the brutality of the Romanian revolution. Apparently, nothing makes American blood quicken faster than the spirit of revenge. If it’s history, most of us yawn; if it resembles a movie, we snap to attention.
That was what was so special about the events in Prague. Over and over, Havel and the others sent out the message: We are not going to do to them what they’ve done to us. “That would be the worst corruption of this revolution’s ideals,” said a filmmaker named Antonin Masa, who had spent twenty years directing his movies only in his imagination. “We want a country that is generous and decent. And where every man can speak his piece. That’s all. Revenge is a debasing emotion.” Another quoted Albert Camus, saying how it should be possible to love one’s country and justice too.
There are lessons here for all of us. The American Right, after an initial period of bafflement, is claiming a triumph of capitalism over communism. “But that’s not what is going on here,” said Rita Klimova, who lived in New York as a child from 1939 to 1946, returned to Prague, became an economics professor, was blacklisted after the fall of Dubcek, and earned a marginal living as a free-lance translator. “If people here had to choose a model, it would probably be Sweden. A democratic socialist society, with freedom for the individual. This is a struggle for choice.” Others noted that in the places where the United States did use physical force in the crusade against communism (Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam), Stalinism was still in power, its authority reinforced by the need (real or imaginary) to resist an outside threat. In Eastern Europe, the more pacific techniques of trade, cultural exchanges, and communications helped bring about the great change. Stalinism eventually fell of its own dumb weight. One Czech friend said to me: “There were two specific factors. One was Gorbachev, who made it clear that he wouldn’t send the tanks. The other was the decision to stop jamming Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America. That allowed us to get hard news. We didn’t care about the propaganda or the oratory. Just the news. That was very important.”
He and the others were too modest to mention the one final factor: courage. Men like Havel, who began their lonely fight more than a decade ago, believed enough in their cause to place their bodies before the might of the state. They had no guns. They had no money. And in the end they won. They won for themselves and their families and their friends, for their country, for memory and history. But they also won for those lonely men and women who stood for so many years in the hard rain of strange cities. I wish I could find some of them and say that I am sorry for not listening to them in their separation and solitude. But they’re gone now. And that might be the happiest ending of all.
ESQUIRE,
March 1990
PART V
TALENT IN THE ROO
The fulfillment of talent is one of the enduring human mysteries. Nobody can truly explain why a mediocre baseball player can become a brilliant baseball manager. Nobody absolutely knows why a singer of enormous technique can’t move an audience or why so many gifted actors don’t become stars. At six, some children play the piano with the confidence of Mozart, and at twenty they are working as record store clerks. There were some splendid young painters in my art school classes; almost all have vanished. I’ve seen young writers arrive in New York, bursting with talent, full of swagger and hubris, and then witnessed their descent after a few seasons into permanent silence. In political clubs, I’ve met men and women with great political intelligence, wonderful gifts for oratory, and unusual clarity about issues; they didn’t make it out of the assembly district. For thousands of talented writers, painters, dancers, athletes, politicians, and actors, talent simply wasn’t enough.
Most of these pieces are about gifted people who lasted long enough to allow their talents to fully mature. They started with what Webster’s Third New International Dictionary describes among its definitions of talent as “the abilities, powers, and gifts” bestowed on certain human beings. At first, those abilities, powers, and gifts were crude and raw. But these people combined them with a vision of the future and then had time to refine them, strengthen them, push against their limitations. Such sustained growth is never easy, particularly in the arts. In my youth, self-destruction was a fashion. Whiskey and drugs carried too many girted people to early graves — Charlie Parker, Jackson Pollock, Fats Navarro, Montgomery Clift, and Billie Holiday to name only a few. Their aborted lives did not serve as useful guides to conduct for the generations that followed. Rock ’n’ roll heaven is jammed with everyone from Elvis Presley (we think) to Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Lowell George, and Jim Morrison, among hundreds of others; the latest young recruit is Kurt Cobain. The music didn’t kill them. The life did.
Now the plague of AIDS is slaughtering the talented young with the remorseless efficiency of the guns and drugs that destroy so many impoverished kids on the other side of town. On some mornings, the obituary page of the New York Times has a peculiar consistency; the dead are either eighty-five or thirty-five. The old have had their shot at life; we can only mourn the young dead. Those young people simply never had the time to go all the way down the road with their talents. We’ll never know what they might have added to our shaky civilization.
The talented human beings who do last are very rare. Each is an individual, but they share common characteristics. Most of them are very intelligent, including those without much formal education. Intelligence doesn’t guarantee a smooth ride; it certainly didn’t help Mike Tyson to sidestep trouble. But without intelligence, most raw talent has no chance at all to develop. The most intelligent people are never content to repeat what came before them; they constantly push against personal boundaries; they make their own discoveries, and are pleased to pass on the results to others.
To be sure, they are often self-absorbed, particularly when young, focusing their intelligence on the study of themselves. This is not empty, self-caressing narcissism; they often don’t like what they see in the mirror and struggle to change it, a process common to actors, novelists, and politicians. Most of them also grapple with personal emotions, particularly doubt, fear, and humiliation; that battle doesn’t always end with maturity. Most develop a mental toughness; instead of retreating from personal turbulence, they learn to control their emotions with their minds. The best of them obviously channel their emotions into the work. That’s why they can touch so many complicated emotions in strangers, emotions that range from hope to pity to absurd laughter.
In most of them, intelligence is annealed to will. Cus D’Amato would have called the latter quality “heart.” The word itself has an odor of the sentimental but when prizefighters use it they mean a peculiar kind of courage that accepts pain in order to reach a goal. That’s not always a simple victory over another human being; Floyd Patterson called his autobiography Victory Over Myself.
They also have a complex sense of time. They can surrender to the moment, forcing everything they know into one painting, one song, one dance. The moment is always charged by the lessons of the past. But they also seem capable of imagining a limitless future, full of things not tried, not even dreamed. The actor longs to play Lear, the politician wants to be president. They don’t talk about retiring. Not even the athletes. They have the World Series ring or the championship belt. They want more. To go on and on. To be remembered.
I’m aware that all but one of the subjects in this section are men. I wish that were not so. I wish I�
��d gone to see Rebecca West while she was alive, and had talked with Martina Navratilova while she was one of the greatest of all champions. I wish I’d somehow found my way to the doors of Katherine Anne Porter, Martha Gellhorn, Flannery O’Connor, or Dorothy Parker. In the early 1960s, before she became a star, I did a piece on Barbra Streisand for the Saturday Evening Post; we’ve remained friends and she, of all people, should be in this company. Over the years, I’ve written profiles of Jeanne Moreau, Sophia Loren, Brigitte Bardot, Linda Ronstadt, among other accomplished women; that they aren’t here is because of me, not them; my work just wasn’t worth preserving.
The pieces here are not briefs for the prosecution. In each case, I admired the subjects of my attention. In general, I wasn’t interested in showing that they also had feet of clay; every human being does. Besides, there is now an abundance of literary prosecutors abroad in the land to do that work. I’m glad I was around to see these gifted human beings exercise their talents. In the case of Bob Fosse, I was blessed by his friendship and will miss him all my days.
JFK
I.
That day I was in Ireland, in the dark, hard northern city of Belfast. I was there with my father, who had been away from the city where he was born for more than 30 years. He was an American now — survivor of the Depression and poverty, father of seven children, fanatic of baseball — but he was greeted as a returning Irishman by his brother Frank and his surviving Irish friends, and there were many Irish tears and much Irish laughter, waterfalls of beer, and all the old Irish songs of defiance and loss. Billy Hamill was home. And on the evening of November 22, I was in my cousin Frankie’s house in a section called Andersonstown, dressing to go down to see the old man in a place called the Rock Bar. The television was on in the parlor. Frankie’s youngest kids were playing on the floor. A frail rain was falling outside.
And then the program was interrupted and a BBC announcer came on, his face grave, to say that the president of the United States had been shot in Dallas. Everything in the room stopped. In his clipped, abrupt voice, the announcer said that the details were sketchy. Everyone turned to me, the visiting American, as if I would know if this were true. I mumbled, talked nonsense — maybe it was a mistake; sometimes these things are moved on the wires too fast — but my stomach was churning. The regular program resumed; the kids went back to playing. A few minutes later, the announcer returned, and this time his voice was unsteady. It was true. John F. Kennedy, the president of the United States, was dead.
I remember whirling in pain and fury, slamming the wall with my hand, and reeling out into the night. All over the city, thousands of human beings were doing the same thing. Doors slammed and sudden wails went up. Oh, sweet Jesus, they shot Jack! And They killed President Kennedy! And He’s been shot dead! At the foot of the Falls Road, I saw an enraged man punching a tree. Another man sat on the curb, sobbing into his hands. Trying to be a reporter, I wandered over to the Shankill Road, the main Protestant avenue in that city so long divided by religion. It was the same there. Holy God, they’ve killed President Kennedy: with men weeping and children running with the news and bawling women everywhere. It was a scale of grief Pd never seen before or since in any place on earth. John Fitzgerald Kennedy wasn’t “the Catholic president” to the people of the Shankill or the Falls; he was the young and shining prince of the Irish diaspora.
I ended up at the Rock Bar, climbing to the long, smoky upstairs room. The place was packed. At a corner table, my father was sitting with two old IRA men. They were trying to console him when he was beyond consolation. For the immigrants of his generation, Jack Kennedy was always special. After i960, they knew that their children truly could be anything in their new country, including president.
“They got him, they got him,” he said, embracing me and sobbing into my shoulder. “The dirty sons of bitches, they got him.”
And then “The Star-Spangled Banner” was playing on the television set, and everyone in the place, 100 of them at least, rose and saluted. They weren’t saluting the American flag, which was superimposed over Kennedy’s face. They were saluting the fallen president who in some special way was their president too. The anthem ended. We drank a lot of whiskey together. We watched bulletins from Dallas. We cursed the darkness. And then there was a film of Kennedy in life. Visiting Ireland for three days the previous June.
There he was, smiling in that curious way, at once genuine and detached, capable of fondness and irony. The wind was tossing his hair. He was playing with the top button of his jacket. He was standing next to Eamon De Valera, the president of Ireland. He was laughing with the mayor of New Ross in County Wexford. He was being engulfed by vast crowds in Dublin. He seemed to be having a very good time. And then he was at the airport to say his farewell, and in the Rock Bar, we heard him speak:
“Last night, somebody sang a song, the words of which I’m sure you know, of ‘Come back to Erin, mavourneen, mavourneen, come back aroun’ to the land of thy birth. Come with the shamrock in the springtime, mavourneen.…’ This is not the land of my birth, but it is the land for which I hold the greatest affection.” A pause and a smile. “And I certainly will come back in the springtime.”
II.
Twenty-five springtimes have come and gone, and for those of us who were young then, those days live on in vivid detail. We remember where we were and how we lived and who we were in love with. We remember the images on television screens, black-and-white and grainy: Lee Harvey Oswald dying over and over again as Jack Ruby steps out to blow him into eternity; Jacqueline Kennedy’s extraordinary wounded grace; Caroline’s baffled eyes and John-John saluting. We remember the drumrolls and the riderless horse.
But across the years, there have been alterations made in the reputation of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Those who hated him on November 21, 1963, continue to hate him now. Some who were once his partisans have turned upon him with the icy retrospective contempt that is the specialty of the neoconservative faith. And time itself has altered his once-glittering presence in the national consciousness. An entire generation has come to maturity with no memory at all of the Kennedy years; for them, Kennedy is the name of an airport or a boulevard or a high school.
Certainly, the psychic wound of his sudden death appears to have healed. The revisionists have come forward; Kennedy’s life and his presidency have been examined in detail, and for some, both have been found wanting. The presidency, we have been told, was incomplete, a sad perhaps; the man himself was deeply flawed. Some of this thinking was a reaction to the overwrought mythologizing of the first few years after Dallas. The selling of “Camelot” was too insistent, too fevered, accompanied by too much sentimentality and too little rigorous thought. The Camelot metaphor was never used during Kennedy’s 1,000 days (Jack himself might have dismissed the notion with a wry or obscene remark); it first appeared in an interview Theodore H. White did with Jacqueline after the assassination. But it pervaded many of the first memoirs about the man and his time.
Some of the altered vision of Kennedy comes from the coarsening of the collective memory by the endless stream of books about the assassination itself. We’ve had the 26 volumes of the Warren Commission report and dozens of analyses detailing its sloppiness and inadequacy. We’ve gone back again and again to Dealey Plaza and the Texas School Book Depository and the grassy knoll. In thousands of talk shows, magazine articles, newspaper columns, and books, we’ve heard the Cuban-exile theory, the Mafia theory, the Castro theory, the J. Edgar Hoover theory, the Jim Garrison theory, the CIA theory, the Texas-oil theory, the KGB theory, the E. Howard Hunt theory, the two-Oswalds theory.
We’ve seen documentaries and docudramas. We’ve watched the Zapruder film over and over again. We’ve heard sound experts tell us that the evidence proves that there was a fourth shot and therefore two gunmen. We’ve read cheap fiction about the assassination and superb fiction like Don DeLillo’s Libra. In the end, nothing has been resolved. If there was a conspiracy, the plotters got
away with it. Twenty-five years have passed. Kennedy is still dead. And so is Oswald. And Ruby. And so many of the others. And in a peculiar way, the details of Kennedy’s death have obliterated both the accomplishments and failures of his life.
At the same time, other tales have helped to debase the metal of the man: the smarmy memoirs of women who certainly slept with him and others who certainly didn’t; the endless retailing of the gossip about his alleged affair with Marilyn Monroe, that other pole of American literary necrophilia; the detailed histories of the family and its sometimes arrogant ways. These days, with a renewed public hypocrisy in sexual matters, Kennedy has acquired the dreaded “womanizer” label, complete with half-baked theories about the origins of his supposed Don Juan complex. He was afraid of dying, say the theorizers. He was selfish and spoiled. He was revolting against his mother’s rigid Catholicism or imitating his father’s own philandering.
He was described in some gossip as a mere “wham, bam, thank you ma’am” character; other talk had him a hopeless romantic. By all accounts, he was attracted to beautiful and intelligent women, and many of them were attracted to him. And during the time he journeyed among us, this was hardly a secret. When I was a young reporter for the Post in late i960,1 was once assigned to cover Jack Kennedy during one of his stays at the Carlyle hotel. He had been elected but had not yet taken office. “We hear he brings the broads in two at a time,” the editor said. “See what you can see.”