Life Itself: A Memoir

by Roger Ebert

  Love? Romance? I’m not so sure. I don’t much care for movies that get all serious about their love affairs, because I think the actors tend to take it too solemnly and end up silly. I like it better when love simply makes the characters very happy, as when Doris Day first falls for Frank Sinatra in Young at Heart, or when Lili Taylor thinks River Phoenix really likes her in Dogfight.

  Many of the greatest directors in the history of the movies were already well known when I started 1967. There was once a time when young people made it their business to catch up on the best works by the best directors, but the death of film societies and repertory theaters has put an end to that, and for today’s younger filmgoers, these are not well-known names: Buñuel, Fellini, Bergman, Ford, Kurosawa, Ray, Renoir, Lean, Bresson, Wilder, Welles. Most people still know who Hitchcock was, I guess.

  Compared to the great movie stars of the past, modern actors are handicapped by the fact that their films are shot in color. In the long run, that will rob most of them of the immortality that was obtained even by second-tier stars of the black-and-white era. Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet are, and will remain, more memorable than most of today’s superstars with their multimillion-dollar paychecks.

  Color is sometimes too realistic and distracting. It projects superfluous emotional cues. It reduces actors to inhabitants of the mere world. Black and white (or, more accurately, silver and white) creates a mysterious dream state, a world of form and gesture. Most people do not agree with me. They like color and think a black-and-white film is missing something. Try this. If you have wedding photographs of your parents and grandparents, chances are your parents are in color and your grandparents are in black and white. Put the two photographs side by side and consider them honestly. Your grandparents look timeless. Your parents look goofy.

  Go outside at dusk, when the daylight is diffused. Stand on the side of the house away from the sunset. Shoot some natural-light portraits of a friend in black and white. Ask yourself if this friend, who has always looked ordinary in every color photograph you’ve ever taken, does not, in black and white, take on an aura of mystery. The same thing happens in the movies.

  On the other hand, I am not one of those purists who believe the talkies were perfect and sound ruined everything. To believe that, I would have to be willing to do without Marilyn Monroe singing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” and Groucho Marx saying, “This bill is outrageous! I wouldn’t pay it if I were you!” Sound and music are essential, but dialogue is not always so. The big difference between today’s dialogue and the dialogue of years ago is that the characters have grown stupid. They say what is needed to advance the plot and get their laughs by their delivery of four-letter words. Hollywood dialogue was once witty, intelligent, ironic, poetic, musical. Today it is flat. So flat that when a movie allows its characters to think fast and talk the same way, the result is invigorating, as in My Dinner with André, or the first thirty minutes of White Men Can’t Jump.

  Home video is both the best and the worst thing that has happened on the movie beat since I’ve been a critic. It is good because it allows us to see the movies we want to see, when we want to see them. It provides an economic incentive for the prints of old movies to be preserved and restored. It brings good movies to people seeking them. Viewing via video has destroyed the campus film societies, which were like little shrines to the cinema. If the film society was showing Kurosawa’s Ikiru for a dollar and there was nothing else playing except the new releases at first-run prices, you went to Ikiru and then it was forever inside of you, a great film. Today, students rent videos, stream them online, or watch them on TV, and even if they watch a great movie, they do it alone or with a few friends. There is no sense of audience, and yet an important factor in learning to be literate about movies is to be part of an audience that is sophisticated about them. On the other hand, today every medium-size city has a film festival, where if you are lucky you will see a wonderful film you have never heard of before. And a lot of museums have excellent film centers.

  What I miss, though, is the wonder. People my age can remember walking into a movie palace where the ceiling was far overhead, and balconies and mezzanines reached away into the shadows. We remember the sound of a thousand people laughing all at once. And screens the size of billboards, so every seat in the house was a good seat. “I lost it at the movies,” Pauline Kael said, and we all knew just what she meant.

  When you go to the movies every day, it sometimes seems as if the movies are more mediocre than ever, more craven and cowardly, more skillfully manufactured to pander to the lowest tastes instead of educating them. Then you see something absolutely miraculous, and on your way out you look distracted, as if you had just experienced some kind of a vision.

  22 ZONKA

  I BOUGHT MY Smith-Corona ball-bearing typewriter for twenty-five dollars from the Daily Illini, loaded my books and clothes into the family Dodge, and drove up Route 45 to Chicago on September 3, 1966, a Saturday. I would be sharing a flat with a law student, Howie Abrams, on the ground floor of a two-flat on Seventy-Second Place in South Shore, close to the University of Chicago. On Monday, I went to work at the Sun-Times. On the Friday of that week, there was a staff party at the home of Ken Towers, the young city editor, who also lived in South Shore. That’s where I met Bob Zonka, whom I would love more than any other man since my father died.

  People felt a particular quality in Zonka. They gravitated toward him. You sensed he noticed you—you, particularly you—and was in league with you, and had your back. He had a conspiratorial quality; he and you were in league against the world, and were getting away with it. A little more than twenty years later at his funeral, our friend Jon Anderson stood beside the coffin, looked around the room of mourners, and said, “Most of us here were probably sure we were Zonka’s best friend.”

  Bob was the last editor of the Sun-Times who began at the paper as a copyboy and worked his way up. Bob must have gone to college, but he never mentioned it and I never thought to ask. Zonka seemed to have been formed fully educated. The party at Ken Towers’s house was to celebrate his promotion to features editor. I stood to one side feeling joy and uncertainty as a new member of this group, the fraternity of Chicago newspapermen, the most desirable club in the world. Zonka materialized next to me. “You’re the kid Jim Hoge hired,” he said.

  He was a large man, balding, not a good complexion, kind of a Karl Malden face. Not lovely, but men and women loved him, and the women I knew him with were beautiful and proud to be at his side. He chain-smoked and drank too much. I was also starting to drink too much and found this quality attractive. I studied him to learn how it was done. According to my definition, I never saw him drunk, and many nights we drank until long after the chimes at midnight. He said he had never had hangovers. I find that impossible to believe. He became my friend, mentor, father figure, accomplice, and the center of a universe of what seemed to me altogether the most privileged people in Chicago. He loved that word, “altogether.” “Ebert, this is altogether the best story you’ve written today.”

  Zonka was married and had three children and a home in the suburbs that I never saw. I met his wife Mary Lou and liked her instantly, but something was happening in his marriage that he never discussed and it ended fairly soon after we met. His wife and children told me at various times that he simply pulled out one day and moved into Chicago, and they didn’t know why. It was something he wouldn’t discuss. It remained an area of silence in our friendship, a Don’t Go zone. I often met his children, Lark, Marco, and Laura (“Package”), at his apartment on Belmont in Chicago, and after his death had a brief but heartfelt romance with Lark, which was founded at least in part by our sadness. All three children felt wounded and betrayed; Lark kept the most distance, but all were in frequent communication, and so was Mary Lou, who struck me as nicer than she should have been about the way she and her children had been treated. I was his close friend, his best friend according to the Anderson defi
nition, but I never knew the story of that marriage. It is often that way. How a marriage appears from the outside is not how it seems within a family. Not long before his death Zonka had planned a trip to San Francisco to meet Marco’s child, his first grandchild. Marco, a hippie idealist, was involved obscurely in the tofu business. Zonka postponed that trip when I got the advance on my Perfect London Walk book that allowed me to buy him a ticket to London. Marco told me, not with anger but with sadness, that he was bitter Zonka put friends above family. I said Zonka had never been to Europe, would otherwise never have the money to go, and had no idea he was soon to die.

  Zonka was the center of a wide circle, and his homes were often filled with confidants, strays, and visiting firemen. He was a scout. He collected the brilliant, the charismatic, the characters, the raconteurs. In his company we felt we had admission to a crowd altogether more fascinating than ordinary people were likely to meet.

  It was because of Zonka that I met Harry and Irene Bouras, who lived in an Evanston home that contained as many books and works of art as physically possible. Harry was a man of effortless gifts. He was above all a painter, but he commanded literature, history, drama, architecture, and politics, and once a week he delivered a talk on WFMT, the fine arts station that was our sound track in those days. That station was also the home for decades of Studs Terkel, who told me about Harry, “He comes in, sits down, and talks for thirty minutes. Not even a note. I’ve never seen anything like it.” This coming from Studs, who could do the same thing.

  Zonka also introduced me to Jacob Burck, who was teamed with Bill Mauldin as one of our two editorial cartoonists. Jake always seemed unimaginably ancient, another chain-smoker, formal in a twinkling European manner. He lived in a house he and his wife had filled with his inexhaustible outpouring of art. He couldn’t pick up a stone without sketching a few lines on it that turned it into the head of a man or an animal. Through Zonka I met the Chicago novelist Harry Mark Petrakis, in whose company Bob seemed to become Greek, and the novelist Father Andrew Greeley, in whose company Bob became Irish. And where and how did Bob find Alcibiades (Al the Greek) Oikonomides, the cheerful giant who towered over our gatherings in those days? Al presided over our regular Friday night dinners at the Parthenon in Greektown on Halsted and seemed to know everyone Zonka knew, and (here is the curious part) no one Zonka didn’t know, except for the Jesuits at Loyola, where he was a professor of antiquity. Did Zonka supply him with a circle of friends?

  I came to the Sun-Times with a lot of experience from the News-Gazette and the Daily Illini, but Zonka taught me his newspaper code, which he liked to express as, “When you have to march, march.” This included writing a story you lacked all enthusiasm for, meeting a deadline no matter what hours were necessary, getting an interview after you’d been decisively turned down, not falling in love with your deathless prose, remembering you were there to write a story and not have a good time. These were not rules he enforced. They were standards he exuded.

  Zonka’s desk was in the far southwest corner of the city room, where he propped his feet and observed goings-on. He did not much like the boy editor Jim Hoge, “Baby James.” He built a little fiefdom of loyalists back there in the corner and entertained people such as John McMeel, a young Notre Dame graduate who was trying to sell a new comic strip named Doonesbury. Zonka and McMeel agreed over an extended period of negotiations in several bars that the Sun-Times should buy the strip, but it ended up at the Tribune. I never heard the full story, but I’m sure there was one.

  Zonka lived as newspapermen did in the Front Page era, and indeed in those days the city room still had writers like Ray Brennan and Jack McPhaul, who dated from those days. Zonka was both on the job and off the job every waking hour. If he was having a long lunch in the upstairs room at Hobson’s Oyster Bar he was “making friends for the paper,” and that often resulted in good stories. He kept in touch by calling his own desk. One day Jon Anderson picked up the phone. “The Zonker asked if there was any activity around his desk,” Anderson told me, “and I said, ‘Only Hoge directing the movers.’ ”

  Zonka resigned from the Sun-Times. The paper wasn’t large enough to accommodate two men who thought they should be its editor, and although Hoge was manifestly better suited to the job, Bob remained in constant rebellion. He had by then married Connie Zonka, a publicist whose clients included Columbia College Chicago in its early days under the educational showman Mike Alexandroff. Connie and Bob established an office and Bob bonded with Mike, another larger than life character, who was then running the school out of a single building on Lake Shore Drive with a combination of promotion and willpower. Both Harry Bouras and I ended up teaching there. That was how it worked. Columbia is now a considerable institution whose buildings, theaters, and dorms sprawl across the South Loop, but in the early days it was held together with smoke and mirrors. Connie’s sister was the famous Broadway costume designer Patricia Zipprodt, who helped her find Columbia people upon whom to confer honorary degrees, which is how Bob Fosse one year found himself being honored by a school he had never heard of, and having lunch with Zonka and me in the Greek Taberna in the basement of the Time-Life Building.

  Connie had fallen under Zonka’s spell while she was married to Richard Harding, owner of the Quiet Knight folk club on North Wells. In the kind of synergy that seemed to unfold naturally in those days, when the Quiet Knight was planning to move from Old Town to New Town, we turned its closing night into a benefit to buy a ticket for John McHugh to fly to Los Angeles for a bit part as the bartender in a bar named O’Rourke’s in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Admission was five dollars and since no booze in open bottles could be moved, the deal was we’d drink the bar dry. Richard lined up some of his acts, including Malvina “Little Boxes” Reynolds and the Chad Mitchell Trio, and McHugh took advantage of Connie’s connections with a costume company to appear, for reasons unclear, as Henry VIII.

  I believe it might have been that night that Connie and Bob locked eyes, and history was made. I was also present in another bar when Richard Harding discovered by mischance the two of them smooching. This was handled by all three in a fairly civil manner. Bob was then living in a two-bedroom apartment on Belmont, a block in from the lake, and Connie and Richard on the ground floor of a three-flat a few doors down the street. Richard moved out, Bob moved in, and Alcibiades Oikonomides took over Bob’s old flat. That inspired a memorable housewarming to which Al the Greek invited Jesuits from the faculty of Loyola and a crowd of Zonka followers. Al at that time had a mattress on the floor, a kitchen table, and some lamps. He invariably appeared in a dark business suit, a white shirt and tie, and slightly smoked glasses, which for a friendly man with a bullet head made him seem somehow shady.

  “I have here everything I need, man!” he told me. “I sleep on the mattress, I eat on the table, I buy new white shirts at Walgreens, and when my collar gets dirty”—he opened the door to his second bedroom—“I throw it in here.” He slammed the door before I could get a good look. Al had laid in a good supply of Roditis Greek wine and Johnnie Walker Black Label. There was no music, and the rooms were illuminated by table lamps sitting on the floor. Talk filled the rooms, and later in the evening several earnest conversations developed between Jesuits and sinful newspapermen. I believe the sacrament of penance was performed at least once.

  “By all the gods, man!” Al cried at one point. “These Jesuits have had all the whiskey!” He thought he had another half gallon of Johnnie Walker around somewhere, but new supplies had to be ordered in from the corner package store.

  At least six weeks later, Al was presiding as usual on a Friday night at the head of a long table at the Parthenon in Greektown.

  “By all the gods, I have had an explosion at my apartment,” he announced. “I decided for the first time to use my kitchen, and I turned on the oven to heat it for a pizza. I am reading in the other room, and suddenly there is a great explosion and a blast of flame comes out of the kitchen!”
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br />   He roared with laughter.

  “What do you think had happened? Somebody had hidden that missing bottle of scotch in the oven, and it exploded!”

  Across the table from me, John McHugh looked thoughtful.

  Connie and Bob’s apartment became the scene of one gathering after another. They often invited their clients to dinners with their friends. They represented the suburban Lake Forest Playhouse, the enterprise of a creative producer named Marshall Migatz, and that led to a long evening with Jason Robards Jr. after the premiere of O’Neill’s Hughie. One Thanksgiving the Zonkas pushed together two tables and a slab on sawhorses to improvise a dinner table reaching from one room to the next, and Colleen Dewhurst was guest of honor. Clair Huffaker, the author of Western novels, was represented by Bob on a book tour for One Time, I Saw Morning Come Home and became a friend after the two of them filled a taxi with helium balloons and set them free over Lake Michigan.

  One night there was a historic dinner at Bob and Connie’s with the directors Gil Cates and Armando Robles Godoy, who was in Chicago from Peru as the guest of honor of the film festival. Gil, later to serve as president of the Motion Picture Academy, was relaxed and benevolent. Armando was another of the tall, mustached romantics who seemed to fall into Bob’s orbit. That night he was seated next to the first wife of our friend Jack Lane, the photographer. The next morning I was awaked in my apartment on West Burton Place by Jack and his friend Ed McCahill, a Sun-Times reporter.

  “Roger, I need to find Armando,” he said. “He has stolen my wife.”

  “All the festival guests stay at the Ambassador East,” I said. “He’s probably under his own name.”