The Way I Heard It

by Mike Rowe

  Maybe this was what Alex was talking about? Maybe here the book was talking back—and what it was telling me sounded a lot like “Keep digging.”

  And so I did, and late last night, I learned that Hedy Lamarr sued Mel Brooks when Blazing Saddles came out. She was upset that her name—or something close to it—was being used without her permission.

  I guess I can’t really blame her. Hedy’s first husband treated her like an object. The studios treated her like horseflesh. The US government treated her like a punk. Maybe she’d had enough. Maybe the thought of people laughing at the mention of her name—or something close to it—was too much to bear.

  Here’s the kicker, though: Mel Brooks would have prevailed in court. In fact, he could have countersued Hedy and won. But guess what he did instead? He paid her. The funniest man in the world wrote a check to the most beautiful woman in the world because, as he put it, “She’s given us so much.”

  “Pay her whatever she needs,” Brooks said. “Send her my love, and tell her where I live.”

  The interview’s out there, online. You can see it for yourself. Go ahead, google it.

  I’ll wait.

  HOW THE GAME WAS PLAYED

  Saul Venzor had pitched himself into a jam. After eight scoreless innings, he’d begun the ninth by giving up two hits and a walk. Now the bases were loaded with no outs, and Saul was cursing the umpire over a ball that should have been a strike:

  “Puta ciega!”

  In those days, you could call the umpire a blind whore. That’s how the game was played.

  Saul stepped off the mound, grabbed a handful of dirt, and twisted the baseball between his giant hands. In the stands, his handicapped nephew watched his every move. Saul caught his nephew’s eye and gave him a wink. No problemo. Then he turned his attention to the visitors’ dugout, where the members of the opposing team were shouting encouragements at their batter: “Wait for your pitch, Alejandro. He’s got nothing! Little man, little arm.”

  But there was nothing little about the six-foot-five pitcher. Everything about Saul was big, including his ego.

  “Hora!” Saul yelled. The umpire raised both arms and called, “Time!”

  Saul’s nephew watched his uncle stroll toward the opposing dugout and address the now silent players.

  “Five dollars says I end this game without giving up a single run. Any takers?”

  In those days, in the minor leagues, you could make friendly wagers. That’s how the game was played.

  The men on the opposing team weren’t flush with cash. Like Saul, they were all migrant workers. But the odds were too good to resist. They pooled their money. They made their wager. Then they watched in horror as Saul struck out the side. Final score: Santa Barbara Merchants, 1; Oxnard Aces, 0.

  It was one of many moments that Saul’s nephew would never forget. Maybe not as dramatic as the exhibition game in which his uncle had struck out Babe Ruth or the time he’d pitched nineteen consecutive innings in a legendary duel against the minor-league team from Los Angeles. But memorable nonetheless, because the events of that day gave the boy a close look at the very qualities he’d need to shape his own career: a potent mix of raw talent, supreme confidence, and boundless machismo.

  Many years later, after setting records that remain unbroken to this day, Saul’s nephew would recall the long driveway on Chino Street where his uncle had shown him his ninety-mile-an-hour fastball—up close and personal. Saul was not the kind of uncle who’d let you win just to build up your confidence. Nor was he inclined to cut you any slack just because you were born with certain… disadvantages. No: Saul Venzor was the uncle who teased and taunted. The uncle who sent you home in tears and dared you to come back for more, if you had the cojones.

  In those days, there were no participation trophies. That’s how the game was played.

  Saul’s nephew liked to come to Chino Street because there, no one cared about his handicap. There, a kid like him could learn to hit a major-league fastball. There, a kid like him could learn how to be a man. Thanks to the things that his uncle had taught him, Saul’s nephew was drafted to a minor-league team straight out of high school. By the time he was twenty-one, he was playing in the majors. By the end of his rookie year, everyone was talking about the Latin Legend: a baseball prodigy who’d hit .327, with 31 home runs and a league-leading 145 RBIs.

  Well—sort of. The stats are correct. The chatter was exceedingly complimentary. But no one was talking about “the Latin Legend”—because no one knew that Saul’s nephew was Hispanic. You see, the boy’s mother had married a gringo. The boy had inherited his father’s complexion, along with his distinctly American name. And in 1939—eight years before Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier—that was a very handy thing. Handy because guys like Saul and his nephew were handicapped by their ethnicity. The Negro League was a thing in those days, and the Mexicans—they had a league of their own, as well.

  In those days, that’s how the game was played.

  Make no mistake, Saul’s nephew knew how to play that game. He concealed his handicap for his entire career, and when he was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1966, he acknowledged all of his coaches, from high school on up to the majors. He acknowledged his manager, along with the owner of the Red Sox, his teammates, and all the sportswriters who’d voted for him. The only name he didn’t mention was the name of the man whose ethnicity would have revealed his own. That of his Mexican uncle. The man who had taught him how to play the game.

  It’s hard to know how to feel about that. Some people say that if Saul’s nephew had embraced his “handicap,” he might have paved the way for other Mexican-American players. Others say that doing so would have kept him out of the majors, dooming him to a career as obscure as his uncle’s had been. I guess we’ll never know. But this much we do know: thirty-six years after his election to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, the eighty-three-year-old left fielder who’d kept his Mexican heritage a secret became the first inductee into the Hispanic Heritage Baseball Museum Hall of Fame. A seventeen-time All-Star, the last man to bat over .400—the greatest hitter of all time, in fact. That was Saul Venzor’s nephew. A devastating athlete with Mexican roots who’d concealed his true heritage throughout his career.

  The great baseball player you know as… Ted Williams.

  * * *

  I got to meet Ted Williams once, the night before QVC fired me for the third and final time. I didn’t actually interview him; Dan Wheeler was the go-to host for anything baseball related. Celebrities didn’t appear on the graveyard shift. But I came in early that night to watch from the greenroom and, hopefully, shake the man’s hand after the show.

  It was a good show. Wheeler asked Williams how he’d do batting against modern-day pitching greats.

  “I don’t know,” Williams said. “Pitchers today are throwing at a whole other level. I guess maybe I’d hit .270. Maybe .275.”

  Dan was aghast. “.270? No way! You? The greatest hitter who ever lived?”

  “Well,” Williams said, “you gotta remember—I’m seventy-three years old!”

  Mickey Mantle called in. Just to chat. Ted talked to him as though they were on opposite sides of a crowded bar.

  “HEY MICK, HOW THEY HANGIN’? I STOPPED BY YOUR RESTAURANT A FEW MONTHS AGO! YOU WEREN’T THERE!! HAD A PRETTY GOOD STEAK, THOUGH!!!”

  I could hear screams from the audio booth, Dan Wheeler fell off his chair, as baseball fans across the nation lurched for the volume buttons on their remotes.

  Afterward, Ted came up to the greenroom. He looked tired, a bit pale.

  “Nice job, Mr. Williams,” I said. “You’re a natural.”

  Ted Williams smiled, sort of. Then he glanced at the monitor, where Dan Wheeler was segueing into his upcoming hour of plus-sized fashions: “Hey, ladies, let’s say you’re going on a cruise…”

  “Thanks,” Williams said. “But there’s nothing natural about any of this.”

  “You want to see
something unnatural? Stick around until three in the morning. I’ve got an hour of collectible dolls coming up.”

  “You’re shitting me,” Williams said.

  “No, sir. I don’t joke about collectible dolls.”

  Williams looked at me like I was an umpire who’d just blown a call.

  “Seriously?” he said. “People really collect dolls?”

  “People collect everything, Mr. Williams.”

  “Maybe I’ll watch from my hotel room,” he said.

  “Nothing unnatural about that,” I told him.

  Williams laughed and, in that instant, I saw the great athlete for who he was: a mortal man who’d come to QVC for the same reason that I had.

  He had come for the money.

  This was back in 1993. I thought about money a lot in those days. Specifically, about how nice it was to finally have some. I’d always sensed that the ice at QVC was thin beneath my feet, so I had saved every penny, knowing my next paycheck could be my last. Living rent free at Georgia Farm had been a big help. My father’s parsimony, which I had inherited, had instilled in me a pathological fear of debt—neither a borrower nor a lender be, and all that. And so, with the help of my trusted financial adviser—a man I’d come to think of as my friend—I had managed to accumulate a tidy nest egg. But meeting Ted Williams made me wonder how big a nest egg I’d need. If the greatest hitter of all time had to drag his ass to West Chester, Pennsylvania, to hawk autographed baseballs on a home shopping network, what would I be doing when I was his age?

  That troubling question became more acute the next day, when I learned that QVC no longer required my services. Apparently, my interactions the night before with a shapely Victorian lady named “Rebecca” had crossed a line. When I got the news, I didn’t panic or think about my future. I thought about Ted Williams.

  Had he watched my final moments on air from the comfort of his hotel room? Had he been sipping a brandy as I spilled my guts to that collectible doll—sharing with her my disappointment with past girlfriends, along with the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to?

  Had he laughed when I wondered aloud if “a guy like me would have a shot with a doll” like her?

  I sure hope so. I hope Ted Williams doubled over when I held Rebecca like a microphone and sang “I Won’t Send Roses” into her pretty, pinched porcelain face. I like to picture him laughing and snorting and wondering out loud, to no one in particular—“Are you shitting me?”—before settling back in bed to sleep and, perchance, to dream.

  Now, that would be a consummation devoutly to be wished.

  THE MYSTERY OF THE VANISHING WOMAN

  The woman checked into the resort alone. She arrived without reservations or luggage. She signed the guest book as Miss Neele and said she was visiting from Cape Town, South Africa, 8,500 miles to the south.

  For the next twenty-four hours, Miss Neele kept a low profile. Then a sharp-eyed banjo player recognized her from a photo in the paper. The banjo player knew that there was a reward for her apprehension. He called the authorities immediately. Moments later, detectives were on their way from London, hoping Miss Neele might help resolve a missing persons case unlike any other.

  The investigation had started two weeks earlier, when a car was found on a steep incline near a former rock quarry called the Silent Pool. The car’s windshield was cracked. The headlights were still on. Inside the police found a suitcase, a fur coat, and a driver’s license belonging to one of the most recognizable women in England. Given the woman’s wealth, detectives had feared a possible kidnapping—but there was no ransom note. They had questioned dozens of people, including the woman’s husband. He feared that his wife might have killed herself.

  “She’s been in a terrible state,” Archie said. “Ever since her mother’s death, she’s been deeply depressed. It’s been quite terrible.”

  The police tossed pronged hooks on ropes into the Silent Pool and dragged for a body. Bloodhounds were deployed. Fifteen thousand volunteers swept the countryside from Guildford to London. For the first time ever, airplanes were employed to search for a missing person. Arthur Conan Doyle—the creator of Sherlock Holmes—paid for the services of a medium. But no luck.

  England’s newspapers couldn’t get enough of the mystery.

  “A Suicide with No Corpse!” the headlines blared.

  “A Murder with No Suspects!”

  “A Kidnapping with No Ransom!”

  Across the pond in New York, the Times covered the mystery on its front page with a headline that read simply, “Who Done It?” But “Who done it?” wasn’t the question—not really. The real question was “What happened?”

  How could a woman as famous as that just vanish from the face of the Earth?

  Then Scotland Yard started to crack the case. Detectives there learned that Archie had asked for a divorce a month earlier—a request his missing wife had refused. Interesting. They also learned that Archie stood to inherit a great deal of money if his wife never returned. That was interesting, too. It gave them a motive, but, alas—Archie had an alibi. On the night of his wife’s vanishing he’d been at a dinner party with several people, all of whom vouched for his presence. Then there was another break in the case: one of the witnesses turned out to be Archie’s young secretary—a young secretary who, it turned out, was having an affair with Archie. A young secretary named—that’s right—Miss Neele.

  Archie admitted the affair immediately, but even after prolonged questioning, he insisted that he had no knowledge regarding the whereabouts of his missing wife. At which point the detectives turned their attention to Miss Neele. What did the young secretary have to say to the detectives about the mysterious disappearance of the woman whose husband she loved? Clearly, this was a woman who needed to be interrogated. And so, she was.

  Detectives converged on the quiet resort in North Yorkshire. Inside, the band played as guests danced and dined. The banjo player saw them and nodded in the direction of the dining room—and that’s where they found “Miss Neele,” chatting with a few other guests over a game of bridge. Only the Miss Neele they found was not Archie’s mistress. Nor was she Archie’s secretary. Nor was she from South Africa. This Miss Neele had no ID, no memory of how she had gotten to the hotel, and no idea why she had identified herself as Miss Neele. But even though this Miss Neele didn’t know who she was, the detectives most assuredly did. She was the woman on the front page of every newspaper in Great Britain. She was the elusive subject of what had been the largest manhunt in English history. Now she had finally been found, safe and sound and happy as a lark, 240 miles from her home, at a hotel where she had checked in under the name of her husband’s lover. But why? Thus began the real Mystery of the Vanishing Woman.

  “For twenty-four hours,” the woman said, “I wandered in a dream, and then found myself in Harrogate as a well-contented and perfectly happy woman who believed she had just come from South Africa.”

  Doctors said that she had entered a “fugue state” brought on by stress. In such a condition, they said, a person could black out while remaining fully conscious. But when the story hit the papers, it begged more questions than it answered: How could the woman have gone unrecognized for so long when the entire country had been looking for her? She must have known about Archie’s affair with the real Miss Neele. Was her disappearance an attempt to shame the philandering husband? Had the husband drugged her, perhaps to declare her insane and steal all of her money? Or was it all a publicity stunt—a promotion for her latest book?

  Everyone had a theory, but no one had a clue.

  Once she had been brought back home, Archie’s soon-to-be ex-wife quickly regained her senses. She divorced the husband, who immediately married his secretary—the real Miss Neele. Then she left her home once again. This time she left the car in her garage, hopped a train to Baghdad, and had an exotic journey she’d never forget: a trip where she found adventure, inspiration, and new love. By the time she died, many years later, at the r
ipe old age of eighty-five, the woman who’d been at the center of England’s largest manhunt was happily married, more famous than ever, and the best-selling author of all time.

  But here’s an odd thing: of all the mysteries that surrounded this remarkable woman, the true tale of her strange vanishing is largely forgotten. It might be because, after returning from her trip to Baghdad, she refused to discuss the matter again. Even her autobiography makes no mention of the incident. In fact, her bizarre disappearance in 1926 is the only unsolved mystery in her compendium of tantalizing whodunits—sixty-six in all, written by a heartbroken wife who found a fresh start on the Orient Express, bound for Baghdad. A woman known, very briefly, as Miss Neele, who is best known today as a Dame named… Agatha Christie.

  * * *

  Twenty-one mysteries of Georgia Farm revealed themselves to me all at once in 1991, while I was snowbound and trying to stay sane. I stumbled across them in Morris Stroud’s study: a stack of dog-eared paperbacks by John D. MacDonald. Each one had a color in its title: Bright Orange for the Shroud, A Deadly Shade of Gold, Pale Gray for Guilt, The Quick Red Fox, and so forth. The first in the series—The Deep Blue Good-by—was the best pulp fiction I’d ever read. More importantly, it was the book that introduced me to Travis McGee.

  McGee is a combat veteran turned salvage expert—a man who specializes in recovering that which has been conned or swindled from people who can’t turn to the police for help. He’s a modern-day knight-errant who lives in Florida on a houseboat called the Busted Flush. McGee works when he wants to, takes only the cases that interest him, and answers to no one. He isn’t cheap—half of all he recovers he keeps for himself—but he always delivers. He always gets the girl. He always does something admirable along the way. To this day, I talk about McGee in the present tense; I like to believe he’s still down there in Bahia Mar, sleeping on the Busted Flush, sipping Boodles gin, waiting for the next damaged soul in need of assistance to come knocking.