This Old Man

by Roger Angell

  Summer movies aren’t classics and don’t always make money, but they make friends. Some of them are counter-classics, like “Remember the Night,” the 1940 Barbara Stanwyck–Fred MacMurray thing that isn’t “Double Indemnity.” This time, Fred is a young New York prosecutor who’s about to send Barbara away for a jewelry-store shoplifting rap when the trial goes into Christmas recess. Barbara has no place to stay for the holiday, and so Fred, what else, takes her along to his Indiana home, where Mom (Beulah Bondi) and the tree and popcorn and songs around the piano and love and tears are waiting; the script is by Preston Sturges, so not to worry. Other summer movies—I’m thinking of “Tremors,” that 1990 Kevin Bacon-vs.-underground-monster-worms battle—start off small and end up in multiple sequels and play all year round on back-channel TV. “Trees Lounge,” by contrast, opened and disappeared in a nanosecond in 1996, leaving only a handful of fanly conservators to recall Steve Buscemi (who wrote and directed it as well) as a shaky alcoholic slowly driving an ice-cream truck around Valley Stream, Long Island, and making out with the junior-teen Chloë Sevigny.

  Another summer movie that sneaks into mind—one of its devotees was the late Saul Steinberg—is pre-suburban by about eighty thousand years. Without access to Con Ed, members of the Ulam tribe have to carry their light and power around with them in a small basket containing smoldering coals. When a careless elder Ulam slips while crossing a swamp and drowns the spark, there’s a crisis. Three strong pithecan homeys are dispatched to find and grab off a fresh ember or burning branch from their nearest heat-keeping neighbors, hundreds or perhaps thousands of miles away, who will mash them with a boulder or have them for lunch if they fail. This, in a gourd-shell, is the story line of “Quest for Fire,” a captivating 1981 French-Canadian caveman movie, which was recently retrieved via Netflix and, by popular demand, played two nights in a row at my place. No subtitles are offered, since the film’s language, created by Anthony Burgess, comes largely in grunts, but different grunts, depending on tribe. The actors’ primitive lopings and body language and their styles in rock warfare were choreographed by the celebrity ethnologist Desmond Morris. This exhausts the film’s list of stars. Our heroine, Ika (the lithe Rae Dawn Chong), is talkative in a high-pitched-screamy sort of way, coming as she does from the more advanced Ivaka, and she dresses fetchingly in ashes and little—well, actually, nothing—else. Ika knows stuff, like how to make fire with a palm-whirred stick, and—scandalizing the Ulams—frontal sex.

  Being non-ironic, “Quest for Fire” will never remind you of those persistent Geico caveman commercials, but it takes on any built-in resistance to Neanderthal entertainment with suavity—my own disappearing about thirty minutes along, when our three fire hunters are treed by sabre-toothed lions in a bending, inadequate sapling. There’s a falling-nut joke a little later, though the director, Jean-Jacques Annaud, isn’t after laughs but emotions: long, sweeping shots of thickly vacant landscapes, dotted at one corner by a minute campfire (the movie was shot in Canada and Scotland and Kenya); an unexpectedly charming herd of woolly mammoths; and the prognathous Ron Perlman picking at a bone as he awaits the dawn of cogitation. There are wolves and bears but no dinosaurs, and Annaud has you holding your breath when the hairy Naoh (Everett McGill) nervously throws a stick at a low, menacing apparition he’s not seen before: a hut. “Quest for Fire,” it turned out, was never quite a box-office hit, and it wasn’t solemn or cheesy enough for a cult. Catching it again, you remember the terrific music (by Philippe Sarde) and the kick, back then, of finding friends of yours who had also just come upon this strange little flick for the first time and were dying to talk.

  Sidebar, June, 2007

  TWO EMMAS

  Late on February nights when my circling mind returns to our summer cottage in Maine, it often fastens on the books stuffed into two narrow but tall bookshelves that face each other there on opposite sides of our ill-lit living room. Paperbacks for the most part, they are survivors of a rigorous multi-summer select-and-toss procedure, which is to say that every one has been read or reread and then put back up there again for the second or third or fourth time, perhaps to be read again someday. “Good Behaviour,” “Endurance,” “Framley Parsonage,” “Get Shorty,” “Daisy Miller,” “Dracula,” “BUtterfield 8,” “Goodbye to All That,” “Why Did I Ever,” “Oblomov,” “The Heart of the Matter,” “Sailing Days on the Penobscot,” “The Moonstone,” “Possession,” “Morte d’Urban,” “Quartet,” “Emma”…there are many dozens more. I know these beauties so well that I can see the shelf and almost the slot where each one belongs. Our “Emma” is a slim little hardback, in the old pinkish-red Everyman’s Library edition. Three or four of the scattered Evelyn Waughs come in that crimson hardback edition, but “Scoop” was briefly left out in a shower one afternoon—I think by a daughter—and is thus thicker and paler than the others. Other fat books—“Martin Chuzzlewit,” “Orley Farm,” “The Forsyte Saga,” and the like—are in paperback, and wait to get taken down during one of those tedious weeks of Down East fog.

  (Credit 19.1)

  It’s a kick for me to think of these arrayed words and sentences and pages sitting in the dark at about nine degrees, with the wind battering at the closed-up shutters and our old house groaning and creaking in the night, and our library waiting there for us to come back again in summer. Then Carol and I and maybe a visiting niece will be sitting on our porch reading, and now and then raising our gaze to the glittering adjacent bay.

  There’s a sweet dab of guilt attached to rereading. Yes, we really should be into something new, for we need to know all about credit-default swaps and Darwin and steroids and the rest, but not just now, please. My first vacation book this year will be like my first swim, a venture into assured bliss. This summer, I mean, I could be starting with Margaret Drabble’s “The Garrick Year,” a 1964 novel preserved in a bendy, yellowing old paperback so popular at our place that it resembles a leftover picnic sandwich. It’s a short, romantic novel about actors and the theatre and marriage and sex and babies, written when Drabble was twenty-four years old—it’s her second novel—and married to an actor, Clive Swift, and both were members of the Royal Shakespeare Company. End of bibliography: this book belongs to Drabble’s heroine, Emma Evans, who is married to the dashing, muscular Welsh leading man David Evans, and the mother of their very young children, Flora and Joseph. At the book’s beginning, she is bitterly unwilling for him to take them all off, along with their French nanny, from London to Hereford for a festival season of repertory. She loses that battle but little else. Emma, the daughter of a theologian, is tall—taller than David—and sometimes works as a model, and she is extremely, extravagantly intelligent. The book is told in the first person, her first person, which means that there are many unsparingly critical and deliciously bitter views of the vanity of actors and the babyish needs of actors’ lives and, in many cases, their stupidity. David is not stupid but deeply entranced with himself; their squabbles, while entertainingly harsh and vigorous, are never hostile. They’re both still young, though ground down, as she puts it, and it’s nearly in relief that Emma begins an almost terminally delayed—they never have any time for each other—love affair with David’s boss and director, the successful and attractively grownup Wyndham Farrar.

  But never mind all this. What we’re here for and why we want to stay in “The Garrick Year” is Emma’s eccentric smarts and her egotism and punishing self-assessments. Speaking at one point of two-year-old Flora, she says, “I take her too seriously, my daughter, as I take all others.” She finds the tension between herself and Wyndham dismayingly adolescent—“I was shut up once more in an artificial world of waiting”—whereas he and we are rediscovering the terrific sexual power of brains. “You have your attractions, too,” he says to her. “The attraction of the difficult.”

  There are three convincing surprises in the late going (Flora turning on the gas while at play is one of them), but it’s the short, flashing bursts of
conversation that rush us along. Things keep happening, with people like this around, but never easily or without sadness or letdown. On the plus side also, nobody says, “I love you.” Margaret Drabble moved on to write deeper and more accomplished novels after this, but not one of them is quite so alive.

  Sidebar, June, 2009

  SIX FAREWELLS

  BOB FELLER

  I watched Bob Feller pitch plenty of times in my youth—there were only eight teams in each league then, and the same visitors turned up again at Yankee Stadium with something like the frequency of a persistent aunt at home. His Cleveland Indians were major rivals of the Yankees in my boyhood and early teens, and the Red Sox nowhere in sight. He’d glare in at the batter over his upraised left shoulder, kick his front leg straight across, and clump down in late delivery and at the same instant, it seemed, the catcher was straightening up with the ball in his mitt again. He threw hard from first to last, and visibly grew old on the mound (he pitched for eighteen seasons, with time out for service in the Navy in the Second World War), even while his fastball kept its shine and zing. He was dour in retirement, and—in my recollection, at least—ungenerous about the feats and fortunes of his star successors.

  Feller died yesterday, at ninety-two, but the dream about him, which we all held and shared at one time, had predeceased him by decades. In August, 1936, he came off his father’s farm in Van Meter, Iowa, at the age of seventeen and struck out fifteen St. Louis Browns batters in his very first start for the Indians. Three weeks later, he struck out seventeen Philadelphia Athletics, tying an all-time record set by Dizzy Dean. But for many of us the records were secondary to his journey. Fans then, young or old, had little knowledge of the enormous difficulties of baseball at its topmost level, and believed that the heroes on their favorite teams—midsized heroes, by today’s measurements—were pretty much like their fathers or older brothers. With a dab of luck, you thought, that could be me someday. Then, just as you were getting ready to throw the fantasy away, Feller arrived and made it come true, not just for a Manhattan schoolboy but for countless young rural Americans already stuck on the farm or down in the mines who envisaged baseball as their path of escape. In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, I heard dozens of players and coaches and managers talk about this—Jim Kaat, the dominating Michigan-born, farm-bred pitcher, and a later Yankee broadcaster, comes to mind—and they all mentioned Bullet Bob Feller, who never played a day in the minors.

  That time is gone or malled-over, and the dream perhaps lives on only in Ecuador or Hokkaido. We know everything about baseball now—and probably more stats than the players themselves—but none of it is about us. One of those stats concerns the Opening Day no-hitter that Feller threw against the Chicago White Sox, in 1940, an unmatched feat that I always used to bring up in the form of a terrific stumper: “Name the only major-league game in which the players on one side all ended up with the same averages they’d begun with.”

  The average is .000, and your average nine-year-old now knows the answer before you’ve finished asking. Thanks anyway, Bob.

  Post, December, 2010

  DUKE SNIDER

  Duke Snider, the old Dodger hero, died yesterday, and I still feel that I owe him. I saw him play plenty of times, but carry only a fragmented memory of him in action: rounded shoulders, and that thick face tilting while the finish of his big, left-side stroke starts him up the baseline, his gaze fixed on the rising (and often departing) ball. A first-class center fielder, who eagerly closed the angle on line drives. Great arm. Good guy, terrific smile. Hall of Famer. Something smug in me used to relish him, even while I rooted against him. Growing up in Manhattan, I was a Giants fan first of all, a huge Yankees booster in the other league, and caught the Dodgers pretty much only when they played at the Polo Grounds. Which is to say a Willie Mays fan first and always; an awestruck admirer of Mickey Mantle when he succeeded Joe DiMaggio in center for the Yankees, in 1952, and aware of Snider, of course, over there in Ebbets Field: the third-best, or—since he overlapped Joe D.’s tenure by three seasons—maybe the fourth-best fabulous center-field slugger in town but a guaranteed superstar as well. If Snider was great, how much better did that make my guys? I met the Duke once or twice, long after he’d left the game—he was gone before I started writing about baseball—and wanted to apologize for patronizing him in my fan’s heart. He didn’t mind; he was a self-punisher, not a self-aggrandizer, and I don’t think he worried about status.

  Younger fans than I, even those in their seventies, may not have grasped how assured and intimate the neighborhood of winning baseball seemed to anyone living here in the city in the nineteen-fifties. The Yankees beat the Dodgers in the World Series in 1949, and played them three more times in the Series over the next nine years, losing only in 1955; they also grabbed championships from the Phillies, the Giants, and the Milwaukee Braves, while losing to the same Braves in 1957. Unaccountably, they hadn’t made the World Series in 1954, but the Giants did, and swept the Indians. To put all this another way, sixteen of the twenty World Series participants from 1949 to 1958 were New York teams, as were nine of the ten champions. We took all this by course, and absorbed it by radio, picking up the late-afternoon scores from the newsstand guy’s little set while we plunked down a nickel to look at the early innings in their tiny boxes on the front page of the World Telly; a taxi radio on the corner filled us in for another half inning. Probably the Duke had just done something big. Ah, the Duke—how cool that sounded, if we’d known “cool” back then—but, hey, the Yanks would win again, put your money on it.

  This was the Golden Age of New York baseball—and so rich was the glow that you almost didn’t have to go to the games to feel it around you. Duke Snider’s fourth and final World Series—he batted .200 and hit the last of his eleven Series home runs—came in 1959, when his Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Chicago White Sox in six. Willie and my Giants had skipped town, too, for lack of attention, leaving us only with the Mick and that dopey song. So long, Duke.

  Post, February, 2011

  BOB SHEPPARD

  Bob Sheppard, the peerless Yankee public-address announcer, who died yesterday, at the age of ninety-nine, laid his perfect syllables on more than five decades of Yankee lineups, from Joe DiMaggio to Robinson Cano, before being sidelined by illness in 2007. Right to the end, he expected to come back to work almost any day, but he never quite did. He will always be connected with the old Yankee Stadium, from where his voice now eerily comes back to mind more clearly than the looks and shadows of the place itself. A tall, spare, elegant gent—a vertical line of perfect prose—he remained exactly the same, even while the palace around him was losing its profile and waistline, despite rehabs, and eventually had to be wheeled away. Baseball never changes is what we used to think, and Bob Sheppard almost made you believe it.

  We visited him at his old stand a few years ago, and on another occasion took time to notice the swift, precise path he took home after the last out:

  Up in the pressbox, every night ends the same way. Herb Steier, a retired Times sports copy editor, comes to every game and sits motionless in the third row, his hands in front of him on the long table. He doesn’t keep score but watches the action intently, with bright, dark eyes. When the ninth inning comes, he gets up and stands by the railing behind the last row of writers, near the exit, and after the potential final batter of the game has been announced, Bob Sheppard, the ancient and elegant Hall of Fame announcer, comes out of his booth and stands next to him, with a book under his arm. (He reads novels or works of history between announcements.) Eddie Layton, the Stadium organist, is there, too, wearing a little skipper’s cap. Eddie has a private yacht—well, it’s a mini-tug, called Impulse—that he keeps on the Hudson, up near Tarrytown. He gets a limo ride to the Stadium most days from his apartment in Queens—it’s in his contract—and a nice lift home with Bob Sheppard and Herb Steier at night. Eddie and Bob Sheppard make a bet on every single Yankees game—the time of the game, the total
number of base runners, number of pitches by bullpen pitchers, whatever—but won’t tell you which one of them is ahead. The stakes are steady: a penny a game.

  Steier is Sheppard’s neighbor, out in Baldwin, Long Island, and he drives him to work every day and home again at its end; they’re old friends. Sheppard, a stylish fellow, is wearing an Argyle sweater and espadrilles tonight. This is his fiftieth year on the job at Yankee Stadium, and once in a while I ask him to enunciate a player’s name for me, just for the thrill of it. “ ‘Shi-ge-to-shi Ha-se-ga-wa,’ ” he’ll respond, ringing the vowels. It sounds like an airport.

  The instant the last batter strikes out or pops up or grounds out Sheppard and Steier and Layton do an about-face and depart at a slow sprint. Out the door they go and turn right in the level corridor, still running. A few kids out there are already rocketing down the tilted runways. “Start spreadin’ the noooss…” comes blaring out from everywhere (the Yanks have won again), but Bob and Herb and Eddie have turned right again, into the quiet elevator lobby, where the nearer car awaits them, its door open. Down they go and out at street level, still at a careful run. Herb’s car, a beige 1995 Maxima, is in its regular slot in the team parking lot, just across the alley—the second car on the right. They’re in, they’re out, a left turn up the street, where they grab a right, jumping onto the Deegan, heading home. The cops there have the eastbound traffic stopped dead, waiting for Bob Sheppard: no one else in New York is allowed to make this turn. Two minutes, maybe two-twenty, after the game has ended and they’re gone, home free, the first of fifty thousand out of the building, every night.