The Only Game in Town

by David Remnick

  Franklin gets along well with Mexicans and Spaniards. “On the streets of Seville, everybody talks to him,” a friend who has seen a good deal of him there says. “He knows all the taxi drivers and lottery vendors, and even the mayor bows to him.” Franklin claims that he has made himself over into an entirely Spanish bullfighter. “I know Spain like I know the palm of my hand,” he says. “I happen to be much more lucid in Spanish than in English. I even think in Spanish.” Franklin’s lucidity in Spanish has been a help to other Americans. Rex Smith, former chief of the Associated Press bureau in Madrid, occasionally used him as a reporter. During a rebellion in 1932, he commissioned Franklin to look into a riot near his office. “Suddenly, I heard a great hullabaloo outside my window,” Smith says in describing the incident. “I looked out, and there was Sidney telling the crowd, in Spanish, where to get off.” “Sidney is fabulous on language,” Hemingway has said. “He speaks Spanish so grammatically good and so classically perfect and so complete, with all the slang and damn accents and twenty-seven dialects, nobody would believe he is an American. He is as good in Spanish as T. E. Lawrence was in Arabic.” Franklin speaks Castilian, caló (or gypsy talk), and Andalusian. The favorite conversational medium of bullfighters in Spain is a mixture of caló and Andalusian. Instead of saying “nada” for “nothing” to other bullfighters, he says “na’, na’, na’,” and he says “leña,” which is bullfight slang, instead of the classical “cuerno,” in talking of an especially large horn of a bull. In conversing with a lisping Spanish duke, Franklin assumes a lisp that is far better than his companion’s, and he is equally at home in the earthy language of the cafés frequented by bullfighters. The Spanish maintain that Franklin never makes a mistake in their tongue. One day, he went sailing in a two-masted schooner. A Spanish companion called a sail yard a palo. “You ought to know better than that,” Franklin told him, and went on to explain that the sail yard he had spoken of was a verga, that palo meant mast, and that there were three terms for mast—one used by fishermen, another by yachtsmen, and the third by landlubbers.

  When Franklin first went to Mexico, in 1922, he did not know any Spanish. A few years later, while he was training for bullfighting on a ranch north of Mexico City, he started a class in reading and writing for forty illiterate peons, of all ages. After three months, sixteen of Franklin’s pupils could read and write. “They idolized me for it,” he says. In any restaurant—even a Schrafft’s, back home—he follows the Spanish custom of calling a waiter by saying “Psst!” or clapping the hands. His Christmas cards say, “Feliz Navidad y Próspero Año Nuevo.” Conversation with bulls being customary during a fight, he speaks to them in Spanish. “Toma, toro! Toma, toro!” he says, when urging a bull to charge. “Ah-ah, toro! Ah-ah-ah, toro!” he mutters, telling a bull to come closer.

  In putting on his coat, Franklin handles it as though it were a bullfighter’s cape, and his entire wardrobe is designed to express his idea of a bullfighter’s personality. “Sidney always took a long time to dress in the morning,” says Hemingway, who often sleeps in his underwear and takes a half minute to put on his trousers and shirt. “I always had to wait for him. I don’t like a man who takes a long time to dress in the morning.” Most of Franklin’s suits were tailored in Seville. “Genuine English stuff—nothing but the best,” he tells people. His wardrobe includes a transparent white raincoat, several turtleneck sweaters, some Basque berets, a number of sombreros, and a purple gabardine jacket without lapels. His bullfighting costumes are more elegant and more expensive than those of any other matador in the business. He has three wigs—two parted on the left side, one parted on the right—which are the envy of bald bullfighters who have never been to Hollywood or heard of Max Factor. A bullfighter’s looks have a lot to do with his popularity, especially in Mexico, where a bald bullfighter is not esteemed. A Spanish matador named Cayetano Ordóñez, professionally called Niño de la Palma, who was the prototype of Hemingway’s young bullfighter in The Sun Also Rises, lost a good part of his Mexican public when he lost his hair. In 1927, when he appeared in Mexico City and dedicated one of the bulls he was about to kill to Charles A. Lindbergh, he was young, slender, and graceful, with dark, curly hair. “An Adonis,” Franklin says. “Niño had a marvellous figure. All the sexes were wild about him.” Eight years later, Niño, who had been fighting in Spain, returned to Mexico heavier and partially bald. The moment he took off his matador’s hat in the ring, the ladies in the audience transferred their affections to a slimmer and handsomer matador, and the men turned to the bulls. One day, Franklin showed his wigs to Niño. “Poor Niño was flabbergasted,” says a witness. “He put on a wig and stood in front of the mirror for an hour, tears in his eyes. My God, what a scene when Sidney tried to take the wig away from him!” Franklin used to wear his wigs whenever he appeared in public, but lately he has worn them only in the bull ring, at the theater, and when having his picture taken. He says that someday, if the action in the ring gets dull, he is going to hang his wig on the horn of a bull.

  In accordance with his belief in noblesse oblige, Franklin feels that he can afford to be generous toward his fellow man. “Sidney doesn’t envy his neighbors a thing,” says a friend. “He is the extreme of what most men like to think of themselves, so much so that he never thinks about it. He doesn’t want things. He thinks he has everything.” Although Franklin does not carry noblesse oblige so far as to forgive enemies, he is tolerant of those whose friendship for him has cooled. He has rarely seen Hemingway, whom he had come to know in 1929, since leaving him in Madrid in 1937, in the middle of the civil war. Franklin had been doing odd jobs for Hemingway, then a war correspondent.

  “I weighed Ernest in the balance and found him wanting,” Franklin remarks. “When he began coloring his dispatches about the war, I felt it was time for me to back out on the deal.”

  “Obscenity!” says Hemingway in reply.

  “Ernest got to the point where I knew his mind better than he did himself. It began to annoy him,” Franklin says.

  “Obscenity!” says Hemingway.

  “I may disagree with Ernest, but I’ll always give him the benefit of the doubt, because he is a genius,” Franklin says.

  “Obscenity obscenity!” says Hemingway.

  Franklin is highly critical of most of his confreres, but there are a few he praises when he feels they deserve it. After a bullfight in Mexico City a year ago, a friend commented to him that one of the matadors looked good only because he had been given a good bull to kill—a good bull being one that has perfect vision and is aggressive, high-spirited, and, from a human point of view, brave. Franklin said no—that the bull was a bad bull. “The fellow had the guts to stand there and take it and make a good bull out of a lemon,” he said. “You can’t understand that, because you have no grasp of noblesse oblige.” Because of his own grasp of noblesse oblige, Franklin is determined to go on fighting bulls as long as his legs hold out, and he would like to see Brooklyn continue to be represented in the bull ring after he retires. To this end, he took under his wing for a while a twenty-six-year-old Brooklyn neighbor of his named Julian Faria, nicknamed Chaval, meaning “the Kid.” Chaval, whose parents are of English, Spanish, and Portuguese descent and whose face resembles a gentle, sad-eyed calf’s, made his début as a matador in Mexico in the fall of 1947, fighting with Franklin in some of the smaller rings. On the posters announcing the fights, Chaval’s name appeared in letters an inch high, beneath Franklin’s name in letters two inches high, along with the proclamation that Franklin was “El Único Matador Norteamericano.”

  When Franklin is visiting in New York, he lives with his mother, an unmarried brother, and a sister and her husband in a one-family house on East Twenty-ninth Street in Flatbush. It is a point of noblesse oblige with him to help his neighbors during his visits. “They depend on me,” he says. “They’re always running in and out when I’m home. It’s a regular merry-go-round fixing their stoves and radiators and answering to ‘Hey, Sid, the faucet
in my house don’t work!’ I feel duty-bound to lend a helping hand.” Some years ago, the Broad Street Hospital invited Franklin to clock the rodeo events at a Madison Square Garden benefit, and he helped it out, too. He turned up in a matador costume of apple-green silk embroidered in gold. “I was obligated to let the audience know who and what I was,” he said. During the postwar shortage of men’s shirts, a casual New York acquaintance remarked that he needed one. Franklin spent three days looking for what he thought was a proper shirt. “He came back from Fourteenth Street with this goddam pongee silk thing and gave me a bill for fourteen dollars,” the beneficiary has since said. “He thought he was doing me a goddam favor.” When Franklin meets Americans in Spain or Mexico, he always volunteers to take them shopping. A lady who with his help bought some silver plates in Madrid several years ago claims that he argued the shopkeeper into letting them go for one-fifth of the original price. “He just reduced the man to pulp,” she says.

  In his efforts to help his fellow-men, Franklin occasionally offers to make bullfighters out of them. He gave Hemingway’s eldest son, John, known as Bumby, who recently returned to the Army with his wartime rank of captain, a cape cut to his size and a small sword, when Bumby was ten, and taught him how to execute passes with the cape. He once thought he had succeeded in making a bullfighter out of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr. In 1933, young Roosevelt, then nineteen, visited Spain and told Ambassador Bowers that he’d like to learn something about the country’s favorite sport. Franklin was invited to dine at the Embassy. “He hadn’t been there more than ten minutes when I found myself agreeing to go off with him on a two-week tour of Spain,” Roosevelt recalls. They attended bullfights all over Spain, and after each fight Franklin introduced Roosevelt to the matadors. Then he sent Roosevelt to a friend’s ranch to learn bullfighting. “He had a high old time fooling around with calves,” Franklin says. “He got a wire from Washington, D.C., saying, ‘What your father is doing isn’t bad enough, you’ve got to associate with bullfighters.’ He didn’t pay any attention to it. I had pulled up the shade for Frankie and the sun was streaming in.”

  “There are two kinds of people,” Franklin repeatedly says. “Those who live for themselves and those who live for others. I’m the kind that likes to serve mankind.” He believes that he would have made a wonderful doctor, and he acts as a general practitioner whenever he gets a chance. One afternoon, a bull ripped open one of his ankles. “I took a tea saucer and put some sand in it and mixed it up with tea leaves and manure and applied it to the injured member,” Franklin says, with a look of sublime satisfaction. “I was then ready to get right back in the ring, functioning perfectly to a T.” Once, when he was working on the ranch in Mexico, a peon accidentally chopped off two of his, the peon’s, toes. Franklin claims that he sewed them back on with an ordinary needle and thread. “I put a splint underneath the foot, bandaged it, and told him to stay off it for a few days,” he says. “In no time at all, the man was as good as new.” In Mexico a few years ago, Franklin stood by as an appendectomy was performed upon his protégé, Chaval, advising Chaval, who had been given a local anesthetic, not to show any fear or sign of pain, not even to grunt, because other bullfighters would hear about it. Chaval didn’t make a sound. “I saw to it that the appendectomy was performed according to Hoyle,” Franklin says.

  Franklin considers himself an expert on mental as well as physical health. At a bullfight in Mexico City, last winter, he sat next to a British psychiatrist, a mannerly fellow who was attending the Unesco conference. While a dead bull was being dragged out of the ring, Franklin turned to the psychiatrist. “Say, Doc, did you ever go into the immortality of the crab?” he asked. The psychiatrist admitted that he had not, and Franklin said that nobody knew the answer to that one. He then asked the psychiatrist what kind of doctor he was. Mental and physiological, the psychiatrist said.

  “I say the brain directs everything in the body,” Franklin said. “It’s all a matter of what’s in your mind.”

  “You’re something of a psychosomaticist,” said the psychiatrist.

  “Nah, all I say is if you control your brain, your brain controls the whole works,” said Franklin.

  The psychiatrist asked if the theory applied to bullfighting.

  “You’ve got something there, Doc,” said Franklin. “Bullfighting is basic. It’s a matter of life and death. People come to see you take long chances. It’s life’s biggest gambling game. Tragedy and comedy are so close together they’re part of each other. It’s all a matter of noblesse oblige.”

  The psychiatrist looked solemn. Another bull came into the ring, and a matador executed a verónica. It was not a good one. The matador should hold the cape directly before the bull’s face, one hand close to his own body, the other away from his body, stretching the cape, then pull it away from the bull’s face in such a manner that when the animal follows it, he passes directly in front of him. This matador held both hands far away from his body, and the bull passed at some distance from him. The crowd whistled and shouted insults. “Look at that, Doc,” said Franklin. “There’s a guy who doesn’t have the faintest grasp of noblesse oblige.”

  The psychiatrist cleared his throat. The bullfight, he said, might be looked upon as a plastic model of Freud’s concept of the mind and its three divisions: the id, the uncivilized brute in man; the ego, a combination of environment, which has tamed the id, and of the id itself; and the super-ego, the conscience, often represented by the father or the mother, who approves or disapproves. He suggested that the id might be represented by the bull, the ego by the bullfighter, and the super-ego by the whistling and hooting crowd. “Many things you do in life,” he added, “are a projection, or model, of what is going on in your mind. For instance, you might be fighting bulls because internally you have a conflict between your id and ego, id and super-ego, or ego and super-ego, or possibly a conflict between your combined id and ego and your super-ego. The bullfight, then, might be a good model of your state of mind.”

  “Nah,” said Franklin. “If I had my life to live all over again, I’d do exactly the same thing. Do you grasp my point?”

  The psychiatrist thought it over for a while, then said yes, he believed he did.

  After the bullfight, Franklin, in saying goodbye to the British psychiatrist, advised him to take care of himself. “If you can’t be good, be careful, Doc,” he said.

  Franklin maintains that he learned a lot about life from Hemingway. “Ernest taught me how to put people into two categories,” he says. “One, the good guys, and, two, the bastards. If you’re a good guy, anything goes. If not, I don’t want to be around you. At first, I used to think, How can this person help me further my career? Now I think, How can this person help me to enjoy life? I’ve had my pick of the select of all the professions. I’ve picked those who could help me to enjoy life. It’s this never being able to sit down, never knowing what I’ll be doing next, that gives me my greatest enjoyment. When I take a trip down a highway anyplace in the world, I can drop in on this one or that one. Not everybody can do that.”

  One night in Charlottesville, after Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., had elected to go to law school in Virginia instead of becoming a bullfighter, he received an unexpected visit. “This guy just knocks on the door and says, ‘Remember me?’” Roosevelt has recalled. “It was Sidney. He insisted on spending the rest of the night chewing the fat. He wanted to give me a lot of advice, kind of like an older brother checking up on me.” In Paris, some years before that, Sidney dropped in on Roosevelt, then just out of Groton, and asked why he didn’t get married. “He told me he knew this Ethel du Pont but was afraid to ask her,” Sidney has said. “I got on my high horse and gave him a good talking to. ‘Frankie, you’re the son of the President, and you can have your choice of any girl in the world,’ I told him. I insisted that he ask for Ethel’s hand in marriage.” Roosevelt says that he doesn’t remember ever taking any of Franklin’s advice. “After all, I had a father who was pretty go
od at it,” he adds.

  The reason he himself has never married, Franklin says, is that he has never found a woman who understood noblesse oblige. “Also, I’ve been around animal breeding too much, and that has affected my viewpoint,” he explains. “Anyway, there’s no real love other than a mother’s love for her child.”