by Ann Wroe
to loggers and farmers. The subsequent Aquino and Ramos governments have retained the ban.
Yet doubts remain among some anthropologists about how complete has been the tribe’s isolation. A writer in the National Geographic Magazine in 1972 claimed that “as stone age cave dwellers [they] are unique: their like has not been found before in our time”. But later research suggests that the Tasaday may have once lived elsewhere in the Philippines, perhaps as fishermen, but fled into the jungle some hundreds of years ago after clashing with another tribe, or possibly to escape an outbreak of plague. Over a number of generations they then “reverted” to a primitive culture. Neither were they unbelievably peaceable. It turned out that they had knowledge of violence and had bows and arrows. Their “simple life” was a struggle for existence which had reduced their numbers to fewer than a hundred. Anyone seeking a break from civilisation would be better advised to take up something less arduous, like sailing alone around the world or doing up a cottage in Provence.The publicity given to the Tasaday has overshadowed Mr Elizalde’s work protecting other minorities, equally deserving, though less newsy. All over the world there are threatened “unreached peoples”, sought by anthropologists (and enthusiastic Christian missionaries). Mr Elizalde became interested in minorities in Latin America, and moved to Costa Rica in 1983 after falling out with the Marcos regime. He returned to the Philippines in 1988 and was in line to become ambassador to Mexico but withdrew after being attacked for his Marcos links. Most recently, he was educating some members of the Tasaday into the ways of the outside world. At least one Tasaday is learning fast: he is contemplating legal proceedings against an anthropologist who said the tribe was a fake.
Juan Fangio
Juan Manuel Fangio, racing driver, five times grand prix world champion, died on July 16th 1995, at the age of 84
One day Juan Fangio’s record of being five times the world champion racing driver may be beaten. But even if that happens many people will continue to regard him as the greatest grand prix driver of any generation. Better than the gifted Ayrton Senna, three times the world champion, who was killed in 1994? Better than Stirling Moss, who twice outraced Mr Fangio? Or was there something special about motor racing in the 1950s, when Mr Fangio gained his fame, that stays in the memory and adds to his lustre?
Nostalgia plays a strong part in distorting assessments of sporting heroes. That is also true of another sportsman, Harold Larwood, an English cricketer, who died on July 22nd at the age of 90. He was the most feared – and controversial – fast bowler of his time. He aimed at the batsman’s body in order to induce a catch. In 1926 the England team, with Mr Larwood its hero, beat the Australians, who were left whimpering that this was not cricket. This is a happy memory, especially these days when England mostly loses. People may argue about whether Mr Larwood was as great a bowler as, say, some of the recent West Indians, but the nostalgia for old cricket, before sponsorship, before body armour, will only grow with the story-telling.
The same sentiment may be felt for Mr Fangio. The drivers in his day were plainly visible to the crowd, riding their mounts like cavalry, their arms bare to the wind, their goggles streaked with oil if something had gone wrong, as often it did. The cars of Mr Fangio’s time were not really made to go as fast as they were driven. Once, Mr Fangio’s seat came adrift when the securing bolts broke. Somehow he clung to the cockpit with his knees.
If a car crashed it would probably explode. At least 30 top drivers were killed between 1951, when Mr Fangio first became world champion, and 1958, when he retired having driven the cars of four great marques, Alfa Romeo, Maserati, Mercedes-Benz and Ferrari. Motor racing sometimes seemed like a Roman blood sport, with Juan Fangio as a surviving gladiator, saluted by the chequered flag, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, acknowledging the cheers with a casual wave. In those days no one squirted champagne. It would have been considered vulgar.
Mr Fangio took care to cultivate a non-vulgar style. When taking a corner, most drivers would not be too bothered if they shaved the straw bales put there to protect the crowd. Mr Fangio would elegantly just miss them. Neither did he care for speed for its own sake. If he was going to win anyway he was content to cruise home. “A car is like a creature that lives, with its own emotions and its own heart,” he said. “You have to understand it and to live with it accordingly.” Such “understanding” seemed to enable Mr Fangio to cajole an extraordinary performance from his car when the need arose. One of his tricks was the “four-wheel drift”, a controlled skid for taking corners at high speed. It was used with effect in 1957, at the German grand prix at the Nurburgring, 500km (313 miles) round and round the Eifel mountains, with numerous bends. He started with a light load of fuel, reckoning that he would build up enough lead to refuel comfortably
during the race. But the refuelling was bungled. His lead of 28 seconds became a deficit of 51 seconds. In what was probably Mr Fangio’s finest race, he pushed on ferociously, passing the leaders with one lap to go.
Stirling Moss said Mr Fangio was a gentleman “not of birth, but of being”. He was an Argentine, born the fourth of six children in a family of Italian immigrants. At 13 he was a car mechanic. In his 20s he was winning long distance races, including one from Buenos Aires to Lima and back, about 6,000 miles. Stamina was one of hismany admired qualities, although he got tired like anyone else. Chewing coca leaves kept him awake. Later, in Europe, he used pep pills.
The Argentines acknowledged his growing fame by naming a new dance the “Fangio Tango”. He received the blessing of Juan Peron, then the dictator of Argentina. Publicists in the racing world sought to link him with pretty women. Gina Lollobrigida was one. But Mr Fangio was not one of the sports world’s lechers. For years he was greeted at the end of a race by a matronly woman who was assumed to be his wife. But she wasn’t. Their friendship apparently ended and Mr Fangio never married.
Rather than being a heart-throb Juan Fangio might be considered an inspiration to the elderly. He would have been happy with that encomium. At the time of his greatest successes he was in his 40s, a pensioner in motor-sport terms. Later, he attributed his great age to living simply – plenty of sleep, healthy food, and a special Fangio tip: don’t go faster than you have to.
Joey Faye
Joey Faye, among the greatest of second bananas, died on April 26th 1997, aged 87
In the art of making people laugh it was probably better to be the second banana than the top banana. The second banana was the clown taking the rise out of the straight man. Joey Faye was one of the greatest of all second bananas. Some people say he was one of the last. It is true that bananas of Mr Faye’s background are close to extinction, surviving mainly only in the memories of those in America old enough to have seen vaudeville or burlesque or, in England, music hall. But he showed during a career of nearly 70 years that comedy is immensely accommodating to whatever audience is out there waiting to be diverted.
Mr Faye himself became a banana when technology, in the form of radio, was starting to give people the excuse to take their entertainment at home rather than going out to a theatre. This was in the early 1930s, when Mr Faye was taken on as a comic at Minsky’s, a New York theatre that specialised in burlesque. “Those were depression days,” Mr Faye recalled. “But there was always room for burlesque comedians, because burlesque did business.”
Burlesque had a sexy reputation: that was part of its appeal. But in retrospect it seems an innocent sort of sexiness compared with the accepted prurience of today. Gypsy Rose Lee, a fellow star with Joey Faye, became famous for her striptease act. But she did not remove all of her clothes. The mayor of New York, Fiorello LaGuardia, would not allow such an exhibition. He feared that the sight of nude bodies would corrupt young people. Neither, observed Mr Faye, was “rough” language allowed on stage, such as “hell” or “damn”.
Whatever its reputation, burlesque was no more than the latest version of a popular entertainment that had its origin in the 19th century
in touring minstrel shows and which had expanded into permanent variety theatres to cater for the massive growth in America’s population. By the 1920s the urban population of America had grown to 55m, with thousands more pouring in on every tide eager to do well, and the country was already the world’s largest economy, with an expanding entertainment industry to match.
The cultural and racial mix of the new Americans was reflected in showbiz. Just as jazz was born in the seaport of New Orleans from a blend of African and European sounds, so New York humour was shaped by talented immigrants. Mr Faye’s parents were Italian immigrants called Pallandino. Signore Pallandino worked as a barber, and his clients, in the captivity of their chair, would be told stories of his ancestors in the commedia dell’arte, an improvised song and dance entertainment that is the basis of English pantomime.
One thing Mr Faye’s family folklore taught him was that there was no such thing as a new joke in showbiz, just new ways of pushing a joke for laughs. He admired Lupino Lane, probably Britain’s best-known comic of the time, whose book How to Be a Comedian is still a reliable guide to a perilous trade. “In the comedy world there is nothing new,” he wrote, “but it’s not impossible to put your own new coat on an old coathanger.”
The old coathangers for comics in vaudeville and burlesque were, Joey Faye recalled, “big shoes and a red nose”. He started wearing “straight clothes” on stage. And, he found, you did not have to throw yourself about to hold an audience. A critic wrote of Mr Faye’s “quiet misbehaviours”. It was the start of something new. Other second bananas took to wearing jackets and ties, with perhaps a funny hat as a reminder of their old costume.
Mr Faye’s pay at Minsky’s rose from $25 a week to $300, about $3,700 in today’s money. Even bigger bucks beckoned. Mr Faye had parts in 36 Broadway shows, one of them called Top Banana. He wasin Man of La Mancha, a musical version of Don Quixote, playing Sancho Panza, Cervantes’s second banana. But for all bananas the lure was Hollywood. Such performers as Laurel & Hardy and Abbott & Costello had shown how the skills learnt on the boards before a live audience could be made to look as funny on the movies.
In showbiz reference books Mr Faye lists a dozen films in which he supplied comic diversion to the likes of Gary Cooper, John Wayne and Cary Grant, and a dozen shows in which he starred on television. But curiously, or perhaps not so curiously, he notes that his favourite part was as Gogo in Waiting for Godot, played in a theatre in Los Angeles. In Beckett’s play Gogo and Didi speak about the futility of life while waiting for the elusive Mr Godot.
Gogo: Why don’t we hang ourselves?
Didi: With what?
Gogo: You haven’t got a bit of rope?
Didi: No.
Gogo: Then we can’t.
The passage usually gets a laugh, but it takes a great banana to put it over well.
Thomas Ferebee
Thomas Wilson Ferebee, the bomber of Hiroshima, died on March 16th 2000, aged 81
Many times Thomas Ferebee was asked if he felt guilty about dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Invariably, he said he did not. There was a certain logic in his reply. Assuming that someone was guilty – still a matter of unresolved argument – others would seem more culpable than Mr Ferebee and the 11 other airmen in the Enola Gay, the bomber that destroyed the Japanese city on the morning of August 6th 1945. What about Robert Oppenheimer, the leader of the team of scientists who designed the bomb? But he did not give the order for the bomb to be dropped. That responsibility fell to Harry Truman, the American president. Truman’s defenders, though, might shift the blame to Franklin Roosevelt, who set in motion the Manhattan Project, the name given to the making of the bomb. But Roosevelt took his momentous decision apparently as the result of a letter he received from Albert Einstein, pointing out that such a weapon was possible.
Einstein was troubled by moral questions posed by the bomb, and how much his work on theoretical physics had contributed to its creation. He was a pacifist. But as a Jew, forced to leave Germany, he was desperately worried that the Germans might build the bomb first. Thomas Ferebee’s thoughts on the bomb he dropped were not all that far from those that divided Einstein the pacifist from Einstein the fighter against the forces of tyranny. Like most people in democracies, he became a soldier only because he lived in a time of war. He was a farmer’s son from North Carolina. He fancied a career in baseball, and was good enough to be given a trial by the Boston Red Sox. After America entered the second world war in 1941, he chose to be an airman and became, in Shakespeare’s phrase, a warrior for the working day.
He was posted to England and took part in the first American bombing raid on German-occupied Europe. Despite its name, the Flying Fortress, the standard American long-range bomber, was vulnerable. Losses were high. In England Mr Ferebee survived an astonishing 63 missions. Not only was he lucky but on many occasions his pilot was Paul Tibbets, an outstandingly skilful airman who was to command the Enola Gay.
In 1944 Paul Tibbets was told about the Manhattan Project and ordered to pick a crew for what was called special bombing mission number 13. He chose Mr Ferebee as his bombardier. Striking an enemy target was then a hit and miss affair, as indeed it still is, despite claims to the contrary. Much depended on the experience and steadiness under fire of the bomb aimer. At Tinian Island, in the Pacific, where mission 13 was based, Mr Ferebee and the rest of the crew trained and re-trained. A team of psychologists checked that they were staying sane.
Mr Ferebee recalled that he, and presumably others in the crew, were given cyanide tablets in case they were captured. The Japanese often beheaded captured airmen. But the 13-hour flight went smoothly, if that is the word. Mr Ferebee slept for most of the journey. The bomb he released, sighted on a bridge, turned out to be accurately placed. At least 70,000 people are believed to have been killed in the explosion, and many others died later from radiation. This was not the largest number killed in a single raid: about 83,000 people died in a “conventional” raid on Tokyo in March that year. But no previous weapon had been so destructive. Three days later a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, and Japansurrendered unconditionally six days after that.
Mr Ferebee took the view that dropping the bomb that was foretold by Einstein shortened the war. Had it lasted, many more people would have been killed. “Everybody wanted the war to end, and that’s what I wanted,” he said. Morally, yes, Hiroshima was horrible. But had the enemy invented the bomb first, that too would have been horrible. In Europe, he had seen the new type of total warfare invented by the Germans and inflicted on London. What would they and the Japanese have done with the bomb?
Most people seem to agree with this argument, but many do not. They say the bomb should never have been used under any circumstances, and Japan was ready to surrender anyway. Millions of words have been written and spoken on the subject, without, perhaps, changing many minds. In 1995 the National Air and Space Museum in Washington planned to put on show the Enola Gay in connection with an exhibition about the second world war, but the plan was scrapped after it stirred up controversy over Hiroshima.
Thomas Ferebee did not leave the air force until 1970. He said he had become used to the comradeship. As he saw his former comrades in the Hiroshima expedition die one by one, he felt a duty to keep alive a defence of their actions. He was always willing to give interviews or speak from a public platform or answer letters from those interested in the weapon that changed the world. He and Einstein were accidents of history. Einstein said he would rather have been a watchmaker than a physicist. Thomas Ferebee regretted not making it in baseball.
Ibrahim Ferrer
Ibrahim Ferrer Planas, a Cuban musician, died on August 6th 2005, aged 78
NEGLECT is the essence of Cuba. Washing flaps from the balconies of what used to be thriving banks, and their once-grand elevators are caked with rust and grime. Colonial columns and cornices crumble along the back streets of Havana, and rubbish and waste water fill pits that span the roads. In elegant
abandoned villas damp stains the outside walls, and mildew rots the draperies still hanging in upstairs rooms.
For years, Ibrahim Ferrer’s music was treated with similar indifference. He was a band singer, fronting the orchestras that used to tour Cuba’s beach resorts and casinos in the years before the 1959 revolution. When Fidel Castro came to power, those orchestras – with their evocation of Palm Court ballrooms, American tourists and capitalist joie de vivre – suddenly seemed unsuitable fare for hard Communist times.
The music itself, however, had always been joyously eclectic. Cuba’s musicians borrowed everything, from Spanish flamenco to African drumming, from European dances to tribal litanies, to the work-songs of coffee-pickers and sugar-cane pounders. They made instruments of anything that came to hand: conch-shells, wooden boxes, metal cups. Mr Ferrer, when a child in the village of San Luis in Oriente province, played rumba with bottles and spoons at the corner of his street. He grew up to the rhythm of that, and to tango, mamba and son, as heard at the Social Club dances held at his grandfather’s house. At one such dance, his mother had gone into labour with him. The rhythm, he liked to say, had reached him in the womb and got into his blood.
Of all these different rhythms, none pleased him so much as the bolero. Orphaned at 12, struggling to make his way in the world by selling peanuts in the street and singing at parties, he would hear a tango or a son dance number and instinctively slow it down into the lilting, romantic bolero style. Yet, as he complained later, he was seldom allowed to sing boleros. When he worked with the Chepín-Chovén orchestra and with Benny Moré in the 1950s, he was told that his voice – soft, light and pure, and as caressing as a Caribbean breeze – was too small for them. He gained his reputation improvising faster dance numbers. And then “the revolution triumphed”, in his words, and the world moved past him anyway.