by John McPhee
Those are just a couple of reminiscences from one person who first knew Tom in college and later was his frequent tennis partner for ten or fifteen years, including a time when I most especially needed a friend, and in his quiet way, without a great deal actually said, he was right there. Comparable streams of remembrance surround each one of us at this time, all as different and particular as they would be analogous, all relating to this bright figure of quiet humor—this athlete, counselor, teacher—whose capacity for love and friendship were outsize.
ONE AFTERNOON IN 1961, a young actor named Louis Morelli walked into an office in Hollywood. When he walked out, his name was Trax Colton. No one had ever heard of him before, and no one has heard of him since. But he has at least taken his minor place in an ancient rite of Hollywood. Moreover, Morelli was restyled by one of the wizard name changers now practicing the craft—the agent Henry Willson, who turned Marilyn Louis into Rhonda Fleming, Francis McGowan into Rory Calhoun, Arthur Gelien into Tab Hunter, Robert Moseley into Guy Madison, and, his great mind wandering from the New Jersey Palisades to the Strait of Gibraltar, Roy Fitzgerald into Rock Hudson.
Since it is axiomatic in show business that the name is rewritten before the teeth are capped, hundreds of literary types like Willson have, over the years, flung into the air a confetti storm of phony names that have settled lightly but meaningfully on the American culture.
Greatest in number are the Readily Understandables. Issur Danielovitch lacks euphony, so the name was shortened to Kirk Douglas. It is also understandable why Tula Ellice Finklea would want to change her name to Cyd Charisse, Frances Gumm to Judy Garland, Bernie Schwartz to Tony Curtis, Sarah Jane Fulks to Jane Wyman, Emma Matzo to Lizabeth Scott, Judith Tuvim to Judy Holliday, Doris Kappelhoff to Doris Day, Aaron Chwatt to Red Buttons, Zelma Hedrick to Kathryn Grayson, Eunice Quedens to Eve Arden, Natasha Gurdin to Natalie Wood, Barney Zanville to Dane Clark, and William Beedle to William Holden. England’s James Stewart, eclipsed by Hollywood’s James Stewart, changed his name to Stewart Granger. Frederick Bickel—rhymes with pickle—changed his name to Fredric March. Frederick Austerlitz was just too hobnailed a surname to weight the light soles of Fred Astaire. Cary Grant, of course, would have been unstoppable with any name from Pinky Fauntleroy to Adolf Schicklgruber—even, for that matter, with his own name: Archie Leach.
But the whys start colliding with the wherefores. There is a group, for example, that could be called the Inexplicables. Why would someone with a graceful name like Harriette Lake want to change it to Ann Sothern? John F. Sullivan could have hardly been afraid of being mistaken for John L. when he changed his name to Fred Allen. The name Edythe Marrener is at least as interesting as Susan Hayward. Why change Thelma Ford to Shirley Booth, Jeanette Morrison to Janet Leigh, Edward Flanagan to Dennis O’Keefe, Patricia Beth Reid to Kim Stanley, Virginia McMath to Ginger Rogers, Julia Wells to Julie Andrews, Helen Beck to Sally Rand, Phylis Isley to Jennifer Jones?
Actors with plain, pronounceable, American Legion sort of names yearn for toning up. Ruby Stevens is Barbara Stanwyck; Margaret Middleton is Yvonne De Carlo; Norma Jeane Baker is Marilyn Monroe. Even Gladys Smith found a little more stature in the name Mary Pickford. On the other hand, embarrassed blue bloods shed their hyphens and thus declare their essential homogeneity with the masses. Reginald Truscott-Jones was too obviously soaked in tallyho. He became Ray Milland. Spangler Arlington Brugh denuded himself of all his nominal raiment and emerged as Robert Taylor.
Some real names are out of character. Roy Rogers was Leonard Slye. Boris Karloff could not have frightened a soul as William Henry Pratt. Gypsy Rose Lee has done things that Rose Louise Hovick would presumably never do. Other real names seem to be struggling to express themselves. Merry Mickey Rooney was once Joseph Yule Jr. Sam Goldwyn was Samuel Goldfish. Shelley Winters was Shirley Schrift; Lili St. Cyr was Willis Marie Van Schaack; Diana Dors was Diana Fluck.
Hollywood stars come from every sort of ethnic and national-origin minority group. Many of them are bitterly vocal about democracy’s failures. If enough of them had stuck by their original names, the resulting influence, through the vast popularity of the movies, would have done much to soften bias and reduce prejudice. No one would challenge their actions individually, but they could have served themselves better as a group.
Among actors of Italian and Spanish background, for example, Dino Crocetti opted to be Dean Martin, Margarita Cansino became Rita Hayworth, Anna Maria Louisa Italiano is now Anne Bancroft. Anglicizing their names, Anthony Benedetto became Tony Bennett and Giovanni de Simone became Johnny Desmond. Among Jews, Izzy Itzkowitz probably needed to sandpaper that a bit, yet he stayed with a Jewish name: Eddie Cantor. But most—from Jerry Levitch (Jerry Lewis) to Nathan Birnbaum (George Burns), Emanuel Goldenberg (Edward G. Robinson), Pauline Levy (Paulette Goddard), Rosetta Jacobs (Piper Laurie), and Melvyn Hesselberg (Melvyn Douglas)—have preferred the Anglo-Saxon angle.
Many actors sculpt their real names. Ethel Zimmerman clipped off the zim. Vivien Hartley lost her hart. James Baumgarner dropped the baum. Grace Stansfield is now Gracie Fields. Milton Berle was once Mendel Berlinger. One letter made the difference for Dorothy Lambour. First names have a habit of turning into surnames. Benny Kubelsky changed his name to Jack Benny, Muni Weisenfreund to Paul Muni.
Last names vanish: Arlene Francis Kazanjian, Eddie Albert Heimberger. Some stars can’t stand their first names—for example, Leslie Hope and Harry Crosby.
Lolita Dolores Martinez Asunsolo Lopez Negrette is now Dolores Del Rio. Marion Morrison probably thought his name sounded girlish so he changed it to John Wayne. Douglas Fairbanks was really Douglas Ulman. June Allyson was Ella Geisman. Estelle Merle O’Brien Thompson, of Tasmania, started her career as Queenie Thompson, outgrew that, and became Merle Oberon. Yul Brynner goes around saying that his original name was Taidje Khan Jr., and that it derives from northeast Asia, but he is probably Joseph Doaks or something close to that. No one has ever been able to pin him down about his background, not even his wives.
Meanwhile, Rip Torn, that bisyllabic symbol of absurdly phony Hollywood names, is really Rip Torn. His father was Rip Torn, too.
MANY OF THEM WERE KIDS, nineteen or twenty years old, often newly married, with a couple of yoke of oxen and no fear at all. On a good day, they could make fourteen miles, and after two months of walking or jolting along they still had fifteen hundred to go. When a baby was born, the wagon train would stop for a few hours. They were not the sort of people to die on the trail, and amazingly few did. In fact, the skeletons that are strewn all over the emigrants’ path in George R. Stewart’s The California Trail are almost entirely the remains of oxen, milch cows, and Hollywood scriptwriters. Indians, Stewart says, “were a minor nuisance, not a real hazard.” A wagon trail to California was first attempted in 1841, and new tries were made each year, but no white traveller was killed by an Indian until 1845.
Later, when the Indians did strike from time to time, there is no record anywhere that they galloped around in circles twanging arrows into the ring of wagons, an absolutely pointless maneuver since the Indians would have been exposing themselves to rifle fire from protected riflemen. Instead, they laid siege, taking command of any springs or streams, until the white men’s tongues turned black. But that was rare.
No one used Conestoga wagons: they were too ungainly. Smaller ones, with boxes about nine feet by four feet, were popular. They were not called prairie schooners. When deep rivers were encountered, the bottoms of the boxes could be covered with canvas or hides. Off came the wheels and the vehicle became a boat. On land, they were pulled by oxen or mules. An ox cost twenty-five dollars, a mule seventy-five. No horses. Too weak.
While they were still in the relative East, they ate three-star meals, with hot biscuits, fresh butter, honey, milk, cream, venison, wild peas, tea, and coffee all included in a single typical dinner. Toward the other end, they ate rancid bacon, mountain sheep, red fox, and sometimes boiled hides. When they were d
ying of thirst, they drank mule urine. While forty-seven of the eighty-seven members of the Donner Party were dying of hunger in 1846, there was some cannibalism. “What do you think I cooked this morning?” said Aunt Betsy Donner one day. “Shoemaker’s arm.”
SNOW. I WENT INTO THE CITY in the nineteen-forties to see Bud Palmer drop the long one-hander from the Ninth Avenue and Fiftieth corner of Madison Square Garden, and got up in the morning in a friend’s apartment to look down on white blisters of cars completely buried in snow. I remember snow in the city in the nineteen-fifties so deep that nothing but pedestrians moved. During another blizzard of the fifties—a storm so effective that it shut down every airport, railroad, and major highway in the Middle Atlantic and northeastern states—the sentinel blimps of the United States Navy were the only means of transportation able to move, and they were transporting nobody; they were out over the North Atlantic to alert us to surprise attacks.
At home in New Jersey, I have been snowed in for as much as three days, but that has less to do with record storms than it has to do with New Jersey’s record. In the eighties, my wife and I spent a night in New York and returned to find our car up to its headlights in snow in the Princeton Junction parking lot. Principal roads were plowed. We took a taxi to a sporting-goods store, where, as it happened, we had some days earlier put in an order for cross-country boots and skis. We picked them up while the taxi waited, and it took us to the head of our road, which, as we had imagined, was under three feet of snow, unplowed. Dressed for the theatre, we skied the mile home.
In the seventies, I spent a February and part of March near the Arctic Circle in Alaska, where winter lacks the savagery it can loose on New York. The dry cold of the Alaskan interior doesn’t bite as hard, even at low temperature, as a stiff bitter wind in Times Square. The air is so still for so long in Alaska that snow in light loaves on the spruce boughs can be destroyed completely with a smaller puff of breath than would blow out a candle.
Records are where you find them, and for me—now come up here by the stove, daughters, while I finish this story—my deepest snow was not in New York and not in Alaska but in Benson, Minnesota. In March, 1965, I was riding the Empire Builder, of the old Great Northern Railway, out of Chicago for Portland because in those days I was afraid to fly. Those days ended near Benson, where the train, which for a hundred miles had ground valiantly into deepening whiteness, was stopped—you guessed it—cold. The snow outside the windows was higher than the train. Eventually we would learn that this was one of the greatest snowstorms in the history of Minnesota. Some hours after the heating system failed, the train crew built fires on the steel plates between cars. It didn’t matter that the doors were open. The cold within had matched the cold without, and all along the train—like some sort of encampment—the fires burned above the couplings. We warmed ourselves there by turns, and went back to our frigid seats. We ate warm meals in the ice-cold dining car. Enough booze to build an empire was offered freely to all. Gradually, a snow remover worked its way south to rescue us, sucking up and blowing away its own small blizzard, its advance expressible in feet per hour. It reached us the next day, and at last we moved slowly forward, between high walls of snow that threatened to cave in on the train. The snow in Benson was deeper than roofs, and whole neighborhoods were all but hidden, the houses of Minnesota like the cars of New York—just rows of blisters under snow.
HE WAS A TALL MAN of swift humor whose generally instant responses reached far into memory and wide for analogy. Not much missed the attention of his remarkably luminous and steady eyes. He carried with him an education from the Boston Latin School, Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard College—and a full year under the sky with no shelter as an infantryman in France in the Second World War. Arriving there in a landing craft, he forgot his rifle and left it on the boat.
Gore Vidal, a friend of his since Exeter, once asked him why he had given up work as a reporter in order to become an editor.
Robert Bingham said, “I decided that I would rather be a first-rate editor than a second-rate writer.”
The novelist drew himself up indignantly, saying, “And what is the matter with a second-rate writer?”
Nothing, of course. But it is given to few people to be a Robert Bingham.
For nearly twenty years he was a part of The New Yorker, primarily as an editor of factual writing. In that time, he addressed millions of words with individual attention, giving each a whisk on the shoulders before sending it into print. He worked closely with many writers and, by their testimony, he may have been the most resonant sounding board any sounder ever had. Adroit as he was in reacting to sentences before him, most of his practice was a subtle form of catalysis done before he saw a manuscript.
Talking on the telephone with a writer in the slough of despond, he would say, “Come, now, it can’t be that bad. Nothing could be that bad. Why don’t you try it on me?”
“But you don’t have time to listen to it.”
“We’ll make time. I’ll call you back after I finish this proof.”
“Will you?”
“Certainly.”
In the winter and spring of 1970, I read sixty thousand words to him over the telephone.
If you were in his presence, he could edit with the corners of his mouth. Just by angling them down a bit, he could suggest deleting something. On and off, he had a mustache. When he had a mustache, he was a little less effective with that method of editing, but effective nonetheless.
As an editor, he wanted to keep his tabula rasa. He was mindful of his presence between writer and reader, and he wished to remain invisible while representing each. He deliberately made no move to join the journeys of research. His writers travelled to interesting places. He might have gone, too. But he never did, because he would not have been able to see the written story from a reader’s point of view.
Frequently, he wrote me the same note. The note said, “Mr. McPhee, my patience is not inexhaustible.” But his patience was inexhaustible. When a piece was going to press, he stayed long into the evening while I fumbled with prose under correction. He had pointed out some unarguable flaw. The fabric of the writing needed reweaving, and I was trying to do it in a way satisfactory to him and to the over-all story. He waited because he respected the fact that the writing had taken as much as five months, or even five years, and now he was giving this or that part of it just another five minutes.
Edmund Wilson once said that a writer can sometimes be made effective “only by the intervention of one who is guileless enough and human enough to treat him, not as a monster, nor yet as a mere magical property which is wanted for accomplishing some end, but simply as another man, whose sufferings elicit his sympathy and whose courage and pride he admires.” When writers are said to be gifted, possibly such intervention has been the foremost of the gifts.
I REMEMBER BEING SURPRISED by how green it was. When I first went up to Alaska in summer, I found T-shirt weather in the Brooks Range, beyond the Arctic Circle. If a cloud crossed the sun, of course, you reached for a sweater, but there was, with it all, an unexpected Alaska.
That fall, a bald young man with a handlebar mustache told me that when he had left Chicago to live in Alaska, someone had asked him why he was going. His response had been, “If you have to ask that question you wouldn’t understand the answer.” I was still near the beginnings of sensing what he meant. While going down a river in Arctic Alaska, I had come to feel what was for me the new perspective of being hundreds of miles from the nearest highway, and I was more than beginning to sense that this terrain could not even roughly be comprehended if it were looked upon as an extension of anything I had known before. Within the mind (as on the ground) I had a long way to go. The fifty-five-gallon steel drums, Blazo cans, old bedsprings, and assorted detritus lying around the cabins of bush villages were still as unappealing to me as they had been when I had first seen them. I was from the megalopolitan towns, where bulldozers bury that sort of thing. In some places i
n my part of the world, people are so numerous that if they were all to come out of the buildings at once they would not fit in the streets. As one result, and perhaps as a form of survival, they tend to close each other out. Conversation goes off at peculiar angles. Glances run perpendicular to the channel of the talk. No one is listening. In the small, high-latitude communities—towns of nineteen people, towns of nine, of ninety—a human being is an event. An individual is like a book arriving in the mail. Ask a hundred people why they came to Alaska. Aside from the general fact that for one reason or another they wanted to get away from what they call “the Lower Forty-eight,” a distillate answer is, “I wanted to be in a place where an individual counts.” After some more time there, the Blazo cans and the bunk springs begin to look positively attractive. With regard to the steel barrels, it is not just with irony that they are called the state flower. When you have been looking at them long enough, they bloom.
I once went down to Anchorage at the end of a long stay in various places in eastern interior Alaska, and almost immediately was drawn into a white-water canoe race on a creek that runs through the bowl of Anchorage after dropping from the Chugach Mountains. We raced six miles, dodging boulders and old earthmover tires, and came to the finish among a group of spectators who were drinking Coke and beer. By almost anyone’s standards, it was a small crowd—some dozens of people on a riverbank. What occurred to me, though, as we plowed into a gravel bar to end the race, was that there were more people by far in that small assemblage than the total number of people I had encountered—Indians, whites, itinerant miscellany—over the past several months in forty thousand square miles of the upper Yukon valley. A day or two later I was in New Jersey, walking around with such a sense of disorientation that I was bewildered and had an erratic impulse to cry out. Leaves on twigs looked like baseball gloves. The university, in the town where I live, made sense somehow, but almost nothing else made any sense at all here in the world’s premier corridor of transportation and commerce. I could feel myself turning from a three-dimensional picture back into the old two-dimensional negative. I got beyond it, of course, but not over it. A Brooks Range guide, who had come east to testify in Washington, stopped at my house one time and I told him I was not sure of what I was trying to express but I felt guilty, somehow, that I was not in Alaska. He said he knew just what I meant, because he felt guilty, too; and in the morning he went back to Alaska. I followed, and followed again. You go out to Chicago and get off the feeder line and start walking for Northwest 3. That is the airplane that lugs all the people from eastern America who want to go to Alaska. You walk a long way to get to it—up to half a mile and more, past every airline known to the mid-continent and on through long empty corridors; and after tens of hundreds of yards you notice that the people around you are thinning out. You press on, and eventually come into an oval bay of ticket counters below a frieze of the names of airlines—Lufthansa, Air France, Swiss Air, SAS, Aer Lingus—and you keep on going. You enter more corridors, void now of people, and you hike on to the remotest working face of O’Hare. There, at last, you find a small cluster of people in wool shirts and down vests. You have hiked your way out of the United States and into the nut of Alaska.