The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived

by Tom Shroder

  I found it intriguing that even into his fifties, writing those annotations, Mack still clung to the clearly absurd conclusion that he was the hero of the story.

  Mack’s mythmaking didn’t do any harm this time, and in fact, it merged into a productive response to his prolonged disability. Effie noted in her letter that, during his layup in the hospital, he kept dismissing any concern that he might end up permanently hobbled by his injuries. He kept telling anyone who inquired, “Writing is my game; just think, it was only my leg. Isn’t that great?”

  And to prove it, he didn’t just sit around and mope. He wrote.

  SIX

  Early in 1925, a thirty-eight-year-old Kentucky spelunker named Floyd Collins entered an unexplored cave entrance, hoping to find a magnificent cavern that would become a tourist attraction. When his lantern began to sputter, he hurried back toward the surface, but got hung up in one of the narrow passages he’d barely been able to squeeze through on the way in. As he struggled, his lamp fell and guttered out, and the cave ceiling collapsed above him. Now he was in total darkness. A boulder pinned his foot against a rock wall, and mud and gravel from the cave-in buried him up to his hips. Friends found him the next day just 150 feet from the entrance, but they couldn’t get through the tight passage to dig him out. They handed him crackers and gave him water and promised to bring help. As rescuers began to dig a rescue shaft above him, even more rubble fell. A rookie reporter making $25 a week was sent down from the Louisville Courier-Journal to see what he could, ahem, dig up on the story. William Burke Miller had two valuable assets—a great byline, thanks to his nickname, Skeets, and a slight stature. At only five foot five and 117 pounds, Skeets, lowered by the heels into the eighty-foot-deep cave entrance, was able, with great difficulty, to crawl and snake his way through the cold, wet, increasingly obstructed passages until he was face-to-face with the pinned explorer.

  “My flashlight revealed a face on which is written suffering of many long hours, because Collins has been in agony every conscious moment since he was trapped,” Skeets wrote in his first dispatch. Miller continued to visit, talk to, and feed Collins over the next few days. Even as Collins weakened, he refused to give up hope. Miller’s dispatches from the cave became a national sensation. Crowds began to form outside the cave entrance and grew to the tens of thousands. Radio broadcasters did live reports from the site and vendors set up shop, hawking food and souvenirs. It was the original media circus, foreshadowing the Lindbergh baby kidnapping seven years later in the macabre hold it had on Americans’ imaginations from coast to coast. Miller would come out of this with a Pulitzer Prize, but attempts to dig a rescue shaft continued to cause cave-ins, so soon even Miller couldn’t get to Collins. Without food and water, the situation became hopeless. When a rescue shaft finally reached him seventeen days after he’d been trapped, Collins was dead, his leg still pinned to the wall. His father had to be asked for permission to sever the trapped limb so that the body could be removed.

  Collins died in his natural tomb as Mack was still recovering from his own crushed leg. It had been three years since Mack had won $50 in the fiction contest for “Purple,” which he would later say set him to writing for all he was worth, churning out stories as if he’d discovered a press that spit out greenbacks.

  I thought with quivering satisfaction that I had now arrived. I was a writer in a big way. If anyone had told me that nearly six years would pass before I ever got any money out of a story again, I simply would not have believed him. . . . In school and out, I wrote stories and sent them confidently to the big magazines in the East, but the manuscripts bounced back like tennis balls. These successive failures continued, to my rage and astonishment, until I decided that I might be a poet instead of a writer of prose.

  “The news about Floyd Collins, known previously only as a bumpkin who liked his moonshine, reached us on Tuesday, February 17th, 1925,” Mack wrote. “I was thirteen days past my twenty-first birthday, and still lame . . . from another profitless operation the previous month. I shut myself off in the living room, turned on a storied green-shaded lamp, and appointed myself poet laureate of Sand Cave.”

  Mack had already been in the habit of writing poems and sending them out, hopeful. He even had some encouragement. One letter I found from 1924 was addressed to Mack from the publisher of a small magazine, with both encouraging and discouraging news: “I have never paid for verse . . . but yours are so good I am enclosing merely enough to assure you that I appreciate your kindness, namely $1.50.”

  Still hoping for a bigger payoff, the budding poet wrote a ballad in faux dialect called “Floyd Collins’ Cave” and sent it off to the mighty Chicago Tribune. He was thrilled when it was printed in the paper’s popular, Talk of the Townish, “Line O’ Type or Two” column.

  FLOYD COLLINS’ CAVE

  (Written as the ancient song-ballads of Kentucky were written.)

  Oh, they say he is buried as deep as can be,

  And the shovels thud down on the oily clay

  Oh, Floyd Collins slid to a hole in the hill

  And he’s buried thar fur from the gold of the day.

  And thar’s moaning & moaning

  Back in the cave,

  Floyd Collins’ cavern is Floyd Collins’ grave!

  Floyd ruther crawl to the gateway of hell

  Than work with his Pa who loved him so well

  Down in the earth thar was fairies and elves

  And they tole him secrets that he wouldn’t tell . . .

  What’s jest beyond, in the turn of the slide

  Thar in the damp whar the cave crickets hide?

  Less’ go and see, Floyd, less’ go and see

  And they left him to sleep in the tomb whar he died.

  And thar’s moaning a moaning

  Back in the cave,

  Floyd Collins’ palace is Floyd Collins’ grave!

  Yay! And he found it a silver lit hall

  Further than Egypt and under a wall;

  Big di’mond boulders that dripped with gold,

  Fox-fire torches and that wasn’t all . . .

  Nobody ever saw Floyd’s cave afore,

  Nobody crawls in the hole anymore;

  Floyd in his deep palace rules thar alone

  Floyd in his last sleep guards the one door.

  And thar’s angels a-singing

  Fur in the cave

  Floyd Collins’ heaven is Floyd Collins’ grave!

  Today it may be difficult to see much appeal in this rustic bit of verse. But in the midst of a 1925 media feeding frenzy, Mack’s poetic telling of “Floyd Collins’ Cave” hit, and hit big.

  Mack felt the first tremors when the then legendary Richard Henry Little—a former war correspondent who edited the Line O’ Type column—placed a long-distance call. “I remember his deep rumble and the ardent words,” Mack wrote. “‘Well, well, well, you’re raising Ned all over the country!’”

  “Raising Ned.” Now there’s an expression you don’t hear much anymore. Still, I got the drift: The New York Daily News ran the poem as the editorial of the day. Papers across the country all jumped on the bandwagon, either printing the poem or making it the subject of weighty editorials on life and death. This, Mack wrote, was “the first great alteration brought about by my writing.”

  Little invited Mack to read the poem on the Trib’s powerful WGN radio—told him he’d put him up at a hotel, but that Mack needed to come up with the train fare, which he couldn’t do. Plucky Webster City was behind him: A clerk at a bank where the family was in arrears on several loans handed him a cash-stuffed envelope for the ticket, and off he went to the big city.

  I found a letter in one of the family correspondence folders—from Effie to her son—describing how, in March of 1925, all of Webster City frantically tuned in to WGN to catch the great moment:

  “My dearest son,” Effie began
. . .

  Words fail to describe my feelings of today or last night when I heard you. The whole town listened in, or tried to. And while it is one of the most difficult stations for this locality to get, many were successful. . . . Mr. King had Mr. Parkhurst working with his wireless for a while, then Mr. P ran home to see if he could get it with his while Mr. K worked with all his might. Wilbur, Dorothy and I were over at the King’s, and when presently Mr. P called over to tell us to come over at once, he had WGN, we jumped into the electric and went right over. There was quite a little gathering there, and though there was a lot of static, we heard everything fine. Kathryn almost had a paralytic stroke. She called grandpa and was shouting so he is laughing yet. She was never so excited in her life. The whole town was listening, all but poor Bill Corisis, whose candy pot caught on fire, and called out the department at 7:55 p.m.

  After the reading, Little encouraged Mack to stay on in the city: “He thought that the Tribune would want me,” Mack wrote. “That settled it for me. I was off to Chicago.”

  SEVEN

  In 1925, Richard Henry Little was fifty-six years old—closer to John Kantor’s age than Mack’s, and an instant mentor and even a father figure to a young man who sorely needed one. He was storied and colorful enough to capture any aspiring writer’s attention—and he lived in the fast lane, a mode of living Mack found increasingly attractive. An “eccentric round-shouldered giant . . . never truly sober,” Mack called him. When Little died in 1946 his old paper wrote of him, “He was an Abraham Lincoln type in appearance, tall, gangling, and stoop-shouldered; a homely humorist whose vein was characteristic of his native prairies. Ben Hecht, who knew him well, once wrote: ‘He might have become another Mark Twain.’”

  Before settling into the folksy sinecure of the Line O’ Type column, Little had covered the Spanish-American War, the uprising against American rule in the Philippines, the war between Russia and Japan, the Russian Revolution, and World War I. He was known for calmly remaining at the front lines when the shooting started and every other correspondent was sprinting for cover.

  Not surprisingly, that nonchalance led to injuries: He was seriously wounded by shrapnel when embedded with a White Russian army unit battling the Bolsheviks.

  “Life will have few charms for him until hell breaks loose again,” his hometown paper observed admiringly in 1920. But by that point Little was fifty-one, and still troubled by his injuries, so he became a theater critic, then took over the Line column—gathering around him a group of talented contributors who, given his preference for hell breaking loose, also became companions for wild, boozy nights of hard partying.

  In short, he had all the qualities that would move Mack to veneration.

  Except one: His prediction that the Trib would find a place for Mack widely missed the mark.

  “My virtues as a possible sensation were unappreciated by the powers there,” Mack would later write. “I found myself twenty-one years old, with no great skill at verse, and a newly completed and perfectly frightful novel. I worked at one job after another, and wrote endless dirges and ballads for RHL’s Line-O-Type column in the Chicago Tribune.”

  —

  Yes, Little allowed him into his circle, and continued publishing small bits of his verse, but that wouldn’t buy a hot dog on Michigan Avenue. Mack found lodging in a slum apartment and nursed his wounds, both emotional and physical. He’d discovered to his horror that no publication in Chicago was overly impressed with his career as a cub reporter in Webster City and his radio appearance as a poet. The short stories he sent out with such hope all came limping home without so much as an encouraging note. And his leg hurt as much as his pride. After several operations, the thigh injury from the auto accident had never properly healed, the shattered bone had developed a chronic infection called osteomyelitis, draining pus steadily through a wound that wouldn’t close into bandages he had to change several times a day. He needed a cane to get around.

  In one of the folders filled with clippings, I found a newspaper column in The Sarasota Herald-Tribune describing those early jobless days in Chicago. “The day came when young Kantor sat alone in his tiny, dingy room fearing immediate eviction, without money for food, with all job prospects exhausted . . . bandaging his ulcerating legs, trying to ignore his empty stomach and fearing the footsteps of the landlord. His only hope, at the moment, was that the mailman might bring some small check from a publisher. Finally, the mailman came and he did bring a letter [from his grandmother in Webster City]. Times were hard . . . , she wrote, and she was faced with imminent loss of her home . . . unless delinquent taxes in the sum of about $40 were paid. . . . ‘I believe this was the darkest day in my life,’ Kantor recalls now. ‘I believe it was the only time I ever thought seriously of destroying myself.’”

  Possibly drawing a lesson from his father about the power of making friends in Chicago’s political structure, Mack wrote a letter to Anton Cermak, the president of the Cook County Board who would follow Big Bill into Chicago’s mayor’s office in 1931, only to be assassinated two years into his term at a political rally in Miami by an unemployed Italian bricklayer who was trying to shoot FDR instead. No copy of Mack’s letter to Cermak was in the files, so I don’t know if he used his father’s name to make an impression. But why else would Cermak have pulled strings to find a job for a twenty-one-year-old unemployed writer from an Iowa farm town?

  The job wasn’t much—a surveyor’s helper at $35 a week—but it brought him back from the brink.

  Tromping around the county holding a surveying pole was not the best job for someone with pus oozing from the open wound in his thigh. In the annotations, Mack said he actually enjoyed having a job that took him out into the open air, but ultimately the physical requirements simply proved too much, given his condition. Plus, he found alternative employment that would at least make nominal use of his writing talent: creating ad copy for American Flyer, the toy-train company then based in Chicago.

  Employment of any kind, though he was still barely getting by, produced enough optimism for him to try to connect to life in the city. Looking to meet people his own age, he responded to an ad in the Tribune: “Wanted. Talented people to join drama group. Write Apartment O, 541 North Michigan Avenue.”

  And by people his own age, I mean women.

  Of his ensuing theatrical career, Mack said, “I pursued one babe after another.”

  Based on what I’d seen, this was more than believable. In his letters to friends as a teenager he was frequently gushing over his latest crush, one after the other. A typical passage: “You sure ought to see her. Blue eyes and a wonderful complexion. Exquisite brown hair. I never knew her until the beginning of second semester, but the moment I walked into history class, I knew.”

  I had to read the letter several times before I noticed the most telling point. The “brown” in “exquisite brown hair” was overstruck on his typewriter. Looking closely, I saw quite clearly that he had originally written “exquisite blonde hair” before he’d revisited his indelible impressions. Obviously, this great love wasn’t destined to last. In fact, in the annotations, Mack noted that when he left for Chicago in 1924, “I was in love again” with a different girl back in Webster City. Clearly, young Mack had an enthusiastic eye for ladies in the aggregate. Not an uncommon trait, but one that I shared and sometimes, when I found myself appreciating a passing feminine form fervidly to the point of rudeness, wished I shared to a lesser degree.

  I had my first crush, and girlfriend, in kindergarten: Karen Harvey. We made a clubhouse in a storage room in my basement, collected rocks, climbed up on the roof of the shed, and pretended we were flying to the moon. There was nothing physical between us, but my attachment to her was passionate, unlike any friendship I had with a boy. When her family announced they were moving out of town, heartbroken, I went into my toy closet and collected some of my favorite plastic cowboy and Indian figures to hand to her as
she left. After that came Eileen, then Erica, then Sherri, the physical impulse becoming more prominent as childhood bled into adolescence. I’d often assumed there was a spectrum of sexual drive and that I was on the high side, at times to my shame. In Mack’s unbridled enthusiasm for women, I realized I might be seeing my own, literally, as in a particular chain of twisting chromosomes passed through my mother that, in some unfathomably complex way, through the production or repression of proteins, resulted in that particular flame burning hot. I did some searching and discovered that, in 2006, Israeli researchers provided some scientific support for that idea: Test subjects who scored high on sexual interest questionnaires were more likely to have a particular gene sequence than those who did not. And this was just one of the hundreds (thousands?) of gene sequences that determine the brain chemistry involved in sexual desire. So clearly it would be possible to inherit an array of such genes, all tending in the same direction.

  In any case, there’s no avoiding the fact that the male brain is the product of two million years of evolving the ability to recognize, and respond to, the visual clues of female fertility. One hopes it’s also evolved to recognize that women are far more than the sum of their parts. I’ve always admired men who never let a voluptuous figure make them forget that essential reality for even the briefest moment—if there are any such men.

  Anyway, Mack wasn’t one of them.

  By Friday, April 2, 1926, Mack had become a member of the cozy theater group—named the Graeme Players for their grande dame and director, Sigrid Graeme, who Mack described as middle-aged even though she was only thirty. Producing plays was the least of what went on in Apartment O. On most nights, it was more like a social club than an acting studio, and this particular Friday was no different. After a modest communal dinner of bologna, macaroni, and cabbage salad, the stalwarts were helping Miss Graeme paint her bathroom when the buzzer rang.