by John McPhee
Jim Miller’s early flaws were that he never bent his knees, always hit off his back foot, and chopped straight down on his return of serve. He has been proed over by the very best. Don Budge tried to teach him. So did Pancho Segura, Luis Ayala, Alex Olmedo. To get up the money to pay for their instructions, Miller wrote, among other things, Days of Wine and Roses. We play at the Mercer County Tennis Center, on the edge of Trenton, where he shows up with a bag of Band-Aids, salt pills, moleskin, rosin spray, headbands, wristbands, and various braces for his principal joints. Miller hasn’t had an inhibition in thirty years. Jokes, insults, and fragments of song come flying across the net from him in a direction somewhat firmer than the direction of his shots, which are hit stiff-kneed off his back foot and are frequently chopped straight down.
Bill Dwyer is my doubles partner in minor regional tournaments, and he says that he has carried me through more matches than he can remember. That may be. Dwyer also takes pride in saying that, many years ago, he worked his way through college. That may be, too—but he certainly didn’t do it hustling tennis players. Dwyer knows, though, the seminal secret of hackery: you do what you can do and never what you can’t do—you never try to overcome your flaws. If you have a net game and no ground strokes, you rush the net headlong no matter what the books say, what surface you are playing on, or where the last shot happened to go.
TENNIS ROSTER OF THE SEVENTIES for a charity event at Forest Hills:
ASHE.… Mind wanders. Does crossword puzzles in his head while hitting backhands down the line.
DELL.… Dell and Laver of an age. Dell defeated Laver once, in same week began to shave. Good underspin lob. Excellent bouncing overhead. Weakness: returning balls that come back. A lawyer. A major impresario in modern anarchic tennis. He manages the fiscal fates of Ashe, Smith, Roche, Ralston, Riessen, McManus, Pasarell, Lutz, Kodeš, Franulović. Even on a tennis court, he cannot stand to be away from a telephone. Has replaced his navel with a jack.
DRYSDALE.… Tall. Elegant. South African. Tough two-handed backhand—looks something like Ted Williams punching out a single. Consistent quarterfinalist. Rarely has a bad loss.
DÜRR.… French Algerian, called Frankie. Learned the game in Algiers. She is radiantly unorthodox. Ping-Pong-grip backhand. Quixote forehand. Impressive results. A teacher’s nightmare but never a linesman’s. Never complains.
GONZALES.… Known as Gorgo, diminutive of Gorgonzola. Chronological age: forty-four. Physical age: twenty-six. Grandfather. Recently beat Laver, Smith, and Ashe in consecutive matches in Las Vegas. Awesomely quick for six feet three, moves like a big cat. First won Forest Hills 1948. Southwest Open champion, 1971. Much between.
GORMAN.… Seattle. Best ever from Pacific Northwest. Regional hero. Rising. All-court player. Happy, carefree, funny, and subtle. Concentration occasionally splays. Biggest win was in straight sets over Laver at Wimbledon, 1971.
KODEŠ.… Law student. Married. Czech. The best since Drobný. French champion 1970, 1971. Described tennis on grass as “a joke,” then hit his way into the Forest Hills final. Has faculty for returning bullet serves as fresh bullets.
LAVER.… Last year in some ways his worst of recent times (82–18), when his prize money surpassed Nicklaus, the most golden of golfers, by nearly fifty thousand dollars. Grew up on a cattle farm in tropical Australia. Homemade tennis court. Had to wait his turn while his older brothers played. His turn would come. Record unique. Two Grand Slams (only three have ever been made). Four Wimbledons. He is the greatest player the game has so far seen.
LUTZ.… Halfback. Loved football so much he decided in 1965 to give up tennis if he did not win National Junior Championship. National Junior champion, 1965.
McKINLEY.… Reared in Saint Louis. Educated in Texas. Anointed in England. Enriched in New York. Won Wimbledon 1963, retired straightaway into brokerage business.
NEWCOMBE.… Writes with great lucidity about subtle points of tennis, practices what he writes. Grew up in Sydney, now lives on a ranch in New Braunfels, Texas—an exotic parabola, studded with Wimbledons (three). He is also a doubles player outstanding in all time, having won twice at Forest Hills and five times at Wimbledon (four with Roche).
OKKER.… High-strung. Nervous. Known as “The Twitch.” Twitched $120,465 off the pro tour last year. Five feet eight, 140 pounds, not much power. He intimidates with speed. He is Dutch. When he was born, his family was in hiding, hunted by Nazis.
PASARELL.… Tenacious. Unpredictable. Powerful. Textbook tennis player, picture serve. Tends to get involved in extraordinarily unusual matches. Two examples. Gonzales beat him 22–24, 1–6, 16–14, 6–3, 11–9 at Wimbledon in 1969, second-longest tennis match ever played. Pasarell defeated Santana at Wimbledon in 1967, only time in the history of Wimbledon that a defending champion has been beaten on opening day.
ROSEWALL.… Has resided on the highest level of the game for twenty years. No drink. No smoke. Bedtime: sunset. Grew up in Sydney, where his father, a grocer, owned three tennis courts and rented them to augment the family income. Developed strokes so graceful they are the canon of the game. Too small for serve-and-volley bludgeon tennis. Nickname: Muscles.
SMITH.… Basketball player. Good jump shot. Fair set shot. Moves well without the ball. Turned to tennis at advanced age (upper teens), five years later was in his first Wimbledon final. Current Forest Hills and Wimbledon champion. Way to beat him is to lift his wallet, which he keeps under umpire’s chair.
DURING THE RUN of the Ziegfeld Follies of 1917, a man in his mid-fifties kept reappearing in the audience night after night—always buying two tickets, one for himself, one for his hat—to stare at a blond chorine named Marion Davies. He already had a wife, five sons, a gold mine, seven magazines, ten newspapers, more than a million acres of land—and now he wanted the chorine. Getting her was as easy for William Randolph Hearst as hailing a taxicab. Remarkably, she remained his mistress for thirty-four years.
Hearst made plans to build Marion into the supreme star of American films. Born Marion Cecilia Douras, a daughter of a small-time New York politician, she was still in her teens; her convent education had stopped some years earlier. But Hearst bought a Harlem studio, established his own film company, hired tutors and drama coaches, the best scenarists, set designers, and directors, to help shape his Galatea. For the opening of her film Cecilia of the Pink Roses, in 1918, he had the theatre ventilating system loaded with attar of roses, bathing the audience in florid scent. His newspapers, of course, hailed the new star’s birth with eight-color superlatives in reviews that ran below eight-column headlines.
Marion stuttered and blinked simultaneously, but that hardly mattered to Hearst, who spent millions on prototype superspectacles—and happily lost money on most of them, always casting Marion as a kind of imperial virgin. Full of fun and laughter, with a clear eye for the absurd, Marion called him Pops, and liked to run her fingers through his sterling-silver hair. She would have become his wife as well, but Hearst’s wife, Millicent, herself a former chorine, steadily denied Hearst his request for a divorce.
When the film capital shifted from New York to Hollywood, Hearst arranged for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to pay Marion ten thousand dollars a week in return for her talented services. For Marion, Hearst constructed on the M-G-M lot a fourteen-room, seventy-five-thousand-dollar mansion, calling it the “Bungalow.” Good-hearted, free-spending Marion dispensed Hearst’s money with a generous hand, quickly becoming the most popular actress at the studio, paying doctor bills for office boys, distributing expensive gifts to grips and electricians, even paying a studio newsboy’s tuition at a private school.
Hearst haunted the sets of Davies pictures, giving two dozen orders a minute to hapless directors. After Norma Shearer managed to beat out his protégée for a part, Hearst told his editors from coast to coast never to mention Shearer’s name in print. With uncanny foresight, Hearst papers could be counted on for banner headlines such as “MARION DAVIES’ GREATEST FILM OPENS TONIGHT.”
At the fabled house parties, the aging Hearst persisted in limiting pre-dinner cocktails to one per person, but Marion Davies and Carole Lombard would remedy that in the ladies’ bathroom. After Calvin Coolidge spent a weekend with Hearst, Marion complained, “All they talked about was their g-g-g-goddamned circulation.”
Extreme old age had no effect on Hearst’s extreme jealousy. As they always had, his eyes followed Marion wherever she moved; her leading men were afraid to enter wholeheartedly into on-camera kisses, since Hearst’s newspapers had ruined other men’s careers for less cause. When Hearst’s own empire was facing ruin in the Depression thirties, Marion loaned Hearst back a million dollars, and won his lifetime gratitude. Still in her forties when Hearst was in his eighties, Marion remained loyal until Hearst died, reading to him, nursing him during the four years between his heart attack and his death, in 1951.
Twenty years earlier on the lot at M-G-M, after answering an interrupting phone call from Pops, she had turned smiling to a friend and stuttered out a line that could someday be her epitaph: “H-h-h-hearst come, H-h-h-hearst served.”
DO I REMEMBER when I had my first drink? Absolutely. We were playing football at the corner of Prospect Avenue and Murray Place. I was ten years old. We’re talking whiskey. I have no idea what kind. This was pickup, sandlot, no-pads, tackle football on a vacant lot that was owned by Princeton University. We played there often. One day somebody showed up late, carrying a bottle he had discovered in a building on the college campus.
He was one of us—our age, our pal, our teammate—but he had an advanced sense of the people up the street who were no longer in grade school. The bottle was three-quarters full. The football game went into a long time-out. There was a big tulip poplar at one end of the vacant lot (it is still there, spread above someone’s house), and we sat down in a circle under the tree for an experiment in precursive maturity. The sniff. The snort. The dilation of the nose. The glowing briquette in the throat. As the gastroentomologist Ian Frazier has reflected after munching brown-drake mayflies, it was hard to stop at just one. Across fifteen, twenty minutes, I took in several gulps of whatever it was. One thing it wasn’t was unpleasant.
What time is it? Omigod, I have a piano lesson with Miss Jackson and I’m already fifteen minutes late.
I got up, mounted my bicycle, and raced for home.
Randomly, we played our football games in various places around the town, one of which was the front lawn of the Institute for Advanced Study. The lawn was framed by a double row of sycamores, whose big unforgiving trunks marked our sidelines. We sometimes had an audience of one. Walking to work from his house on Mercer Street, Albert Einstein, leonine and sockless, would stop for a while to watch the action. He did not cheer. He never said anything. And before long he would move on. But he seemed interested, seemed to understand what he was looking at, even if we did not. He had been in Princeton six or seven years then, and would remain on Mercer Street for the rest of his life. Lots of kids growing up in Princeton at the time had stories to tell about him. He helped some of them with their math homework.
But those were other days and this was a bike sprint up Murray Place to Maple Street under pressured conditions. I skidded into our gravel driveway, jumped off the bicycle, and ran into the living room through the side door. Miss Laverne Jackson was there, long since there, at the piano, looking at sheet music, and pointedly sitting on half of the bench. Running past her, I went out of the living room, up the stairs, and down the hall to a bathroom, where I grabbed a tube of Colgate toothpaste. With both hands around it, I aimed it into my mouth and squeezed. My father was a teetotaler, never touched a drop, and I often heard him sneer about the scent of liquor on people’s breath. A ton of Colgate hit the roof of my mouth. Then I squished it so hard that it emerged between my teeth. I spit it out and ran downstairs to my side of the piano bench. Miss Jackson was impassive. She had nothing more to say than Einstein did. She was young and well trained. Her concerts ran from Debussy and Chopin to Beethoven and Bach, but giving lessons was still her livelihood.
I played “Country Gardens.” I think I played it well, because it is hard not to. It is the teething ring of pianism.
I was in my fourth year of piano lessons. Miss Jackson had scheduled me to play “Country Gardens” in a public recital.
Mi mi re do do
Ti ti la sol sol
La ti mi fa
La sol fa mi.
In preference to watching my hands on the keyboard, she seemed to be watching me as I did the repeat:
Mi mi re do do
Ti ti la sol sol
La ti mi fa
La sol fa mi.
Dah dah doo dah
Dah dah dah dah doo dah
Dah dum dum
Dah dum
Dum dee dum.
Out of my mouth came a large frosted bubble, dah doo, followed by another large frosted bubble.
WHEN MARTHA, my youngest daughter, was seventeen, her English teacher—Mrs. Thomas—wrote forty-seven vocabulary words on the blackboard and told the class to write a short composition using all forty-seven words: aspersion, audacious, avarice, blanch, blight, brusque, buffeted, caprice, cataclysm, charlatan, collude, concomitantly, condign, contiguous, cynosure, decorum, depreciatory, desultory, diaphanous, dilatory, discursive, dispersion, éclat, effulgence, elucidate, emollient, empyreal, enervated, equivocal, erudite, felicity, fiscal, flaccid, fortuitous, gamut, gazette, gregarious, habitat, haggard, homogeneous, innovative, nectarine, oscillate, procrastinate, progeny, prognosticate, and recalcitrant. Martha handed in five paragraphs—four hundred and fifty-two words in all. One out of ten words in her composition was a word from Mrs. Thomas’s blackboard:
It is with great felicity that I begin this profile of my father. He is an interesting man. When I say interesting, I do not mean to be equivocal. There are many adjectives that could elucidate his personality. He is certainly erudite and a kind man. He is at the same time spontaneous and inflexible. One could not call him a charlatan, but one could say he is changeable. There are days when there seems to be no end of cataclysms in his world. On those days he does not show decorum, nor does he blanch at confronting the crises. In fact, he does not allow himself to be buffeted by the caprices of the day. He does not oscillate between audacious and conciliatory behavior. He stands firm.
My father has certain problems about money. It is fortuitous that he is in excellent fiscal shape. His problem is not avarice, but it comes when he is faced with the dispersion of money. In other words, when he has to spend money he first procrastinates and then becomes brusque with any one asking for it. Eventually if the “asker” persists, especially if it is his progeny, he loses his gregarious personality. He appears to be enervated, almost flaccid. He loses any of his normal éclat and his face becomes haggard. When my three sisters and I collude in order to get some additional funds, we run the gamut of all possible means. We are innovative and at the same time we invoke all known ploys. In our habitat, otherwise known as our home, we are a homogeneous foursome. We are never dilatory or desultory; we go directly for the jugular. My father considers us his financial blight. As he becomes discursive, arguing for frugality, we become recalcitrant, arguing for luxury.
It is at this point my father may cast aspersions on the way in which we operate. It is then that we try another method. We become nectarine. Our very tongues act as an emollient to his sternness. We appear as empy
real, and concomitantly he appears as grasping and scroogelike. I can never prognosticate the ending of these encounters, but I can promise there is no effulgence of cash. My father, who writes for a gazette, has an office contiguous with his bedroom. If we come out of that fetid office with a few extra dollars, we consider ourselves fortunate. After we go shopping, I come home with a diaphanous gown. I am the cynosure of our small constellation of females. Could one call this a condign profile of my father? I am afraid I have been depreciatory. We are actually a heterogeneous group that on most occasions gets on quite well together.
EVERYONE KNOWS who Richard Burton is, or at least what he is at the moment. He is the demi-Atlas of this earth, the arm and burgonet of men, the fellow who is living with Elizabeth Taylor. Stevedores admire him. Movie idols envy him. He is a kind of folk hero out of nowhere, with an odd name like Richard instead of Tab, Rock, or Rip, who has out-Tabbed, out-Rocked, and out-Ripped the lot of them. If only he were indeed from nowhere, his dazzle would be unshadowed. But beyond the flaring headlines of the past year, few are aware of who Richard Burton really is, what he has done, and what he is throwing away by gulping down his past and then smashing the glass.
Not too long ago, Richard Burton was considered one of the half-dozen great actors in the English-speaking world. Other actors equally select—Paul Scofield, Sir Laurence Olivier—recognized this; so did critics like Kenneth Tynan; so did a growing public, aware that Burton was young and that most of his major work was still to be done. He has not done it, and there is more than a slight possibility that he never will. But no one can take from him, at least, the achievements that are already behind him. In Stratford-upon-Avon and the Old Vic, he has delivered some nine or ten major Shakespearean performances. Only four actors in history have played Prince Hamlet more than a hundred times in a single production—Sir Henry Irving, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Sir John Gielgud, and Richard Burton. Moreover, Burton was the longest-running Hamlet in the history of the Old Vic, where Hamlets were kept in the repertory only as long as the box office remained strong.