WLT

by Garrison Keillor

  The old bastard looked remarkably well-preserved. In fact, he looked younger than he had the year before in Us. There was a suspicious smoothness under the eyes, a slight ridge below the mouth that might, Shell thought, be a scar from cosmetic surgery. Why not? He had always wondered if cosmetic surgery wasn’t the secret reason for White’s move to Paris, a city where a famous American could walk around unnoticed and let his face heal up. A facelift would certainly tie in with the theme of White’s self-revulsion that ran through the book, the famous self-hatred of the famous. Shell made a photocopy on the office machine, enlarged it, examined it closely. Now the ridge looked more like a scratch, a wound that one might get from an enraged woman. “You miserable bastard, Frank!” she cried, and he ducked as she swung and her long lacquered nails raked the Paris night air and left a thin red gash across his chin. But who was she? Probably not White’s wife, Maria. After forty years, does a wife take a swing at her husband? Shell, though unmarried, thought not. Probably it was a mistress. A Parisian mistress. Or a male lover—impossible? Hardly. AIDS? He did not rule it out. In a year, the man could be dead from it.

  It was only a hunch, of course, but Shell took a few days’ leave from his classes and drove down to New York and staked out the Sherry Netherland Hotel. Probably there wasn’t time to check out the facelift, the mistress, the AIDS, but at least he could lay eyes on the bastard and cop a description of him in real life. Weary, stooped, shivering, the naked newscaster trudged down the street—something like that. The People story, “Frank White’s Moveable Feast,” didn’t specify the Sherry, only “a suite on the fourth floor of a gracious old hotel overlooking Central Park,” but the Sherry was where the Whites always stayed in New York, according to Wendell Shepherd, a good source. Shepherd was remarkably unbitter toward White, though White had stolen a chunk of money from him to bankroll his jump to TV. “I’d’ve done the same if it was me,” said the old gospel star.

  The biographer parked his old green Rambler on Fifth Avenue, about fifty feet north of the entrance, and loaded his camera and sat and waited. The Sherry had no lobby, which was why big stars liked to stay there: the doormen could keep out the curious. He spread his lunch on the seat, a Big Mac and a carton of fries and a vanilla shake, and waited for a lean white-haired man with a famous face to emerge.

  The book was mostly finished: White’s grim North Dakota childhood, his early years in Minneapolis at WLT, the move to Chicago and then, his lucky jump into television—imagine somebody walking into a station looking for a job and ten minutes later he is in front of the cameras!—and then, of course, New York and the News Tonight and the famous part of his life. Now Shell was hurrying to finish the manuscript before June and collect the second half of the $50,000 advance. It had been grinding hard work, poring through newspaper clippings, hunting down White’s children, interviewing the veterans of radio’s Golden Days—what a bunch of tiresome old windbags they were!

  He tracked down Marjery Moore in Orlando, working as a hostess at a Toddle House restaurant, a big red-faced lady in a muu-muu. She showed him to a table but when he asked about White, she walked away. He got some things from Marjery’s neighbors at the trailer court though—information about her love for White, and his punching her in the mouth—and snapped a photo of her looking stunned, like a load of dirt had been dumped on her.

  He found Roy Soderbjerg, Jr., in San Diego, wheeling around on a bicycle, lean and cheery at 92. White was a thief, he said, but he, Roy Jr., bore him no ill will. “Calm as they come, that Frank. Got the nerves of a burglar.” He would say no more. “Live for today. That’s my philosophy. Leave history to the losers.” And pedalled away. Reverend Odom was dead. Ditto Roy Soderbjerg Sr. and Lottie Soderbjerg. Vesta was dead, the victim of a hit-and-run driver who clipped her in St. Paul one evening as she walked to a lecture by Harold Stassen. Slim Graves was dead, shot in a robbery, a clerk in a convenience store, gunned down for $14 and a loaf of Wonder bread—but Buddy Graves lived in Shreveport, an engineer at a TV station. He had not opened his mouth to sing in forty years. He barely remembered Frank at all or anybody else. Buddy seemed to be deeply involved in bourbon. Jodie With, Frank’s sister, lived in Sausalito and was pleasant but vague. “Francis and I were birthed in one family, but we weren’t spiritually related,” she explained. “A coincidence of incarnation doesn’t mean a lot, frankly.” She gave Shell a picture of Francis, taken in Mindren. A skinny kid, his billowy mom draped around him, but the kid looking straight ahead, intense, not smiling, watching. She didn’t want it back.

  The Shepherds were in Minneapolis, doing various things unconnected to music or the church, but were unwilling to talk for publication without a cash advance and a contract. Al hinted that they knew quite a bit and that the right offer would shake loose a wealth of stories with rich details, conversations, names and places. Wendell said he had the lowdown on White’s violent temper—how White had almost killed a man in a cafe in Baudette in 1950.

  Dad Benson was dead, after many years at the Ebenezer Home, eight of them almost unconscious, but Patsy Konopka was still in Minneapolis, 89, a poet now and a grand exalted feminist poobah, a mountain of a woman, her white mane pulled back and tied with a turquoise clasp, a red Mexican serape over her voluminous blue Chilean dress. She remembered Frank only faintly as “very ambitious, looking for his chance, but not particularly aware. I had great hopes for him and then he turned out to have a mindset more or less like every other man at that time.” She had attended the big WLT Old-Timers dinner in 1984 and stood up and denounced the Soderbjergs as “boring, treacherous men” and said, “I would rather have known one woman than all the men of WLT,” and that was the big story in the Tribune the next morning, the old-timers were a footnote. Roy Jr. was still steamed about it five years afterward, though he had donated sixty-five file drawers of Patsy’s scripts to the Minnesota Women’s Circle. It tickled him to think of feminist scholars poring over the stuff, page after deadly page, trying to find its importance as women’s literature, and that their eyeballs must be getting pretty tired.

  White’s children, two boys and a girl, were a dead end, even the son who was on the outs with White, Marco, who ran a canoe resort on the Gunflint Trail in northern Minnesota. None of the children answered Shell’s letters, and the daughter, Sally, who was an editor of interactive computer fiction in Santa Monica, went so far as to sic her lawyer on him. She had had an affair with a violinist, Shell found out, while the oldest son, Benjamin, had been treated for alcohol abuse, but there did not appear to be major tragedy glittering in their lives. Benjamin was a counselor at a college in California. He told Shell on the telephone that White had been an absentee father, but that he, Benjamin, had always known that his father loved him, and he told about long hikes through the Met to look at the Cézannes and going to Knicks games and ice-skating in Central Park and family boat trips up the coast of Maine and roasting clams on the shore and the birthday poems his father wrote for them all and how he made them learn five new words a day and Christmases in their vast, decrepit apartment on Riverside Drive with the high-ceilinged rooms that Maria sprayed white every year and the commanding view of the Hudson from the ancient dining table where they did their homework, and Shell set down his pencil and let the man wind down. “I hate to bring it up but there are ugly rumors that your father has a closetful of black cocktail dresses,” said Shell. The man hung up.

  Shell had talked to everyone he could find, and now all he needed was an opening for the book, a preface, a thousand words or so with Frank White in it: “The familiar white-haired figure who hurried across Fifth Avenue into the Sherry Netherland Hotel one raw day last spring was a face that passers-by recognized instantly but how well did they know the man behind that face and the heartbreak and ruin he had brought to his children and old colleagues and all who had loved him? Did the man himself, as he paused at the newsstand and picked up a copy of Women’s Wear Daily, feel any remorse for the lives he had ruined or was he only th
inking about the $175 lunch he had enjoyed minutes before at Le Cirque?” That sort of thing.

  He had written to White a year before, asking for an interview, and White declined, a typewritten note from Paris. “I appreciate your request but I have to say no, for many reasons, one being that I don’t talk very well about myself. And the other is, too much knowledge is an awful burden for journalists like us. That was the genius of the News Tonight: we were fresh and enthusiastic because we never knew too much. Your book will be better without my help. Good luck.”

  Easy for him to say, “Good luck,” but okay, the book was almost done now, and just a glimpse of White was all he needed, to trail him for a few blocks, pick up some color (“As he stood on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 59th, White unknowingly stood at the center of a world he once dominated. Not a mile away was the old Palladium Theater where, in a makeshift studio, White pioneered the early morning news-and-interview show. To the west stood the old 68th Street Studios where his News Tonight was the cornerstone of a broadcasting empire for two decades. So on, so on, so on. Yowsa yowsa yowsa.” But as he sat around that day, and the next, studying the processions of tourists, the Plaza, the gold statue of Sherman on his horse, the carriages parked along the boulevard, waiting for White, Shell started to think that what the book really needed was an ending.

  When you pick up a biography, he thought, you always flip to the last chapter first and enjoy the great man’s demise. That’s what he always did. The last ride, the Big Drop—He smiled his big toothy smile, waved gaily, turned away, and then, as she watched in horror, sank to his knees and collapsed on the sidewalk. A dentist who was on his way to lunch in the Acme Building tried to give artificial respiration, but it was too late. Wilfred Burris was gone—people like to have a death at the end, though if the great man lingers on too long, senile, speechless—In 1972, when his heart finally stopped beating, nobody was present, not Gwen, nor Rick, nor Mr. Bibb, nor even the faithful Bubbles, and when Simone got the phone call from Blessed Shepherd and heard the news, she felt nothing, no sorrow, no remorse, only a dim thought that she must now buy a new pair of shoes—it’s hard for the biographer to make it vivid. And some subjects simply refuse to expire at the end—As of this writing, Phelps is still alive somewhere in southern California. But so many others—actors, writers, painters, musicians—make terrific deaths, violent or abject, and there, Shell thought, is where the money is made in biography.

  The hours passed. Death, he thought: death is what gives a biography real weight.

  Having suffered through almost five-hundred pages of Bunny Bigelow’s messy life, his lying to friends, his endless self-pity and raging narcissism, his infantile sexuality, his relentless search for punishment, the reader savors the approach of the logical conclusion. Alone in room 1421, the livid wallpaper of the Hotel Seymour swarming at him like a phalanx of carnivorous fish, tanked up on gin and barbiturates and the Big Reds he had come to love in the months since Alice left and the Yellowstone property was repossessed and O Youth! O Golden Days! had been greeted with shrieks of derision, his head down in the sink, his small puffy yellowish hand grasping the dime-store journal filled with dismal little revelations including the admission of his latent Republicanism, his filthy clothing strewn across the gray vomit-stained carpet, he choked to death on the cold pork chop. His body was not found until Wednesday, when the rent was due. Or perhaps he dies in a car crash, at the age of 28, two weeks after his stunning triumph, his desk piled high with ecstatic reviews, letters begging him to come and speak and be interviewed, his body lying in a ditch, burned beyond recognition, decapitated in the red Ferrari, the beautiful calf’s-leather seats smeared with blood. Unfortunate, in a way, to write about a distinguished old broadcasting fart, Shell thought. Maybe he would be stabbed to death late one night by an inept burglar, or he could drink himself to death, of course, but chances were he was not going to go down in flames. The People story made it sound like White was in good shape and eating his bran flakes.

  “Ensconced in the red drawing-room in a suite on the fourth floor of a gracious old hotel overlooking Central Park, a chipper, clear-eyed Frank White sat, at sixty-two, in jeans, moccasins, and a tan suede shirt, and talked glowingly about his move last year to Paris. ‘We live near the Bois de Malene, in a building that Czar Nicholas owned and where tattered remnants of the Russian aristocracy lived in faded splendor and supported themselves by teaching ballroom dancing to teenage boys and lonely old ladies. It tells you something about the fragility of things. Maria and I live there with our two dogs and our books and our paintings and that’s all we need.’ White, a serious art collector since 1954, has six rooms of American paintings, including a Hassam, two Hoppers, a Sloan, and three Levines, that any museum in the world would feel lucky to own. Art, however, is a subject White shies away from. ‘I love to look at them and the moment I open my mouth to say something about them, I remember to close it,’ he says.”

  Shell sat in his car and read the story again.

  “The Whites came to Paris en route to Norway to spend a month at a mountain spa where you sit in a warm plankton gel on the edge of the fjord and absorb pure life through your pores, and they stopped in the city to see a journalist friend from the old days in New York, and the grandeur and good humor and the calm of the French seemed to him a purer bath than plankton, and they stayed.

  “ ‘We Americans worry about the big things, like the future of civilization, and the French don’t. They figure they can’t do anything about it, so they concentrate on having a very good life today. They want the next loaf of bread to be the best, the wine to be good, the conversation good. They love good things: a perfect fish stew is a joy to them, but so is a fresh pear, or an old book. They fashion a civilized life out of what’s at hand. Civilization doesn’t come easy for an American. For one thing, we want to tear it all down and start over all the time. We’re fatally ambitious people. And we work far too much. This is the American tragedy today: we work harder than our pioneer ancestors did and see less return for our labor and have to work even harder to stay even. Somehow, a hundred years after the slaves were freed, the American corporation has managed to bring it all back. The bottom line has become everything, the unions that spoke up for the employees are broken, corporate life is in a vicious frenzy, work is everything, and the victim is the American family and the American child. Family life in America, compared to Europe, is starved and frantic and laced with injury and bitterness. We’re pushing, pushing, pushing to make our kids happy and we don’t have time to show them how to live. In France, I see grownups enjoying their life, and children watching and learning, and in America, I see parents too exhausted from work to do much with their kids except give them expensive toys and sit and study them and feel guilty. That wasn’t so true thirty years ago, and you could change it by introducing a National Vacation Law, like they have in Europe: five paid weeks a year, for everybody, even the unemployed, as a tribute to the family.’

  “But White said he went to France, not for the culture but for the freedom.

  “ ‘A face like mine is a pain in the ass to haul around the United States. After a thousand people have told you that television hasn’t been the same since you left, you are ready to either ship out or buy a new face. When I strolled down the Rue Saint-Honoré and into the Place Vendôme one afternoon and realized that nobody had the faintest idea who I was and didn’t care, I felt like breaking into a song and dance, but nobody ever wrote a song about that feeling. It’s like a paraplegic who goes to a paraplegic convention and, voilà, becomes a man among men, suddenly free of the obligation of receiving other people’s pity.’ The Whites sublet an apartment and a year later they bought it. ‘We both feel tremendously lucky and full of health,’ he said. ‘And my wife is dancing again.’ ”

  The rest was about Maria. Shell shoved the magazine back in his briefcase. He was a little dazed by the traffic, the boredom—two days and no sight of the bastard—and he was also stunned by
what he was thinking. He climbed out of the car and crossed the street and looked at the used-book stalls along the stone wall beside Central Park. He picked through the stacks.

  The timely death of a famous man can mean a million dollars to his lucky biographer, Shell thought. The famous man conks out in his relative prime, while his name is fresh and his admirers and the people who hate him are still in their prime book-purchasing years, and the biographer, who has gotten the Life in order, wakes up one morning, picks up the newspaper, and sees he has won the jackpot. He pens the final chapter, and the book is in the stores two months after the body is in the ground. But the violent death of a famous man can mean vastly more, mucho millions, depending on movie deals, television rights, so on. It could mean three million dollars. Maybe more. If Frank White were to put a shotgun in his mouth and pull the trigger, Shell was all ready to go to press. He had months of work locked up, ready to go. If White killed himself, it would multiply the value of the book fifty times, a hundred times, who knows?

  This is only a wild idea, he thought to himself. This is not a plan. But—he could offer White a ride—pretend to be a young TV reporter and corner the man on the street and fawn over him (“I know all about your life, I’ve read everything you ever wrote or said, you are—there’s no other way to say this—you are my hero”) and then: “Mr. White, I’m going to ask you a fantastic favor. I have my car right here. I’d like you to hop in and point out to me where you walked when you left the Palladium Theater that night in—what was it? 1953? when Roy Cohn had threatened your sponsor, Sport-Tex, and they told you to cool it and you took that long walk about 2 a.m. and finally decided to take a stand? I would like to know where that took place. It’s the only thing I want to know. Then I’ll bring you right back here or wherever you want to go.”