by Roger Ebert
I went back to sleep. The phone rang. It was Armando.
“Roger,” he said, “somebody has slipped a note under my door, reading Beware! You are a stranger in a strange land!”
“That’s undoubtedly from Jack Lane,” I told him.
“The husband! Aye, yie, yie!”
“He and his friend McCahill are probably downstairs in the lobby,” I said. “Here’s what you do. Get on the elevator and push the button for the concourse level. There’s a passage under State Parkway linking the Ambassador East and West. Walk over to the West, catch a taxi, and get out of Dodge.”
About that time the publicist for the film festival, who called herself the Blessed Virgin Mary Sweeney, was arriving at the East. She knew Lane and McCahill from Riccardo’s.
“What are you doing here?”
Even in his hour of turmoil, Lane was unable to resist: “Waiting for Godoy.”
Gil Cates has never forgotten that dinner. I’ve seen him many times over the years, on the sets of his movies and as the Academy president and frequent director of the Academy Awards. He invariably asks me if I remember that night. He would ask about Zonka. They sometimes chatted on the phone. They never met again, but he sent flowers to the funeral. “There was something about that man,” he would tell me. “I’ll always remember that night.”
Zonka wasn’t happy with life as a publicist. “I wasn’t cut out for stamping envelopes,” he told me. What went unsaid was that Connie was better at it. Our friends Herman and Marilou Kogan, in whose Old Town apartment I first met Studs Terkel, had by then retired to New Buffalo, Michigan, a small town just over the Indiana line on the shore of Lake Michigan. He told Bob the weekly New Buffalo Times was for sale. Zonka bought the paper, Connie took an apartment on Lake Shore Drive, and together they rented a big old house on a bluff over the lake.
Bob was the editor at last. Also the publisher and owner of the ancient press. He hired a secretary. An old guy came in once a week to operate the press. He had a high school kid deliver bundles of the paper in a pickup. He paid a member of the school’s photography club to take photos at a dollar a pop. A prominent citizen died, and Zonka told the kid to put on a tie and shoot a nice respectful photo at the funeral.
“Some of these kids, they just don’t have the instinct,” Zonka complained later. He showed me what his photographer had handed in. It showed the family lined up at the graveside, seen from behind.
Zonka wrote about local politics and schools, law enforcement and zoning, taxes and lawsuits. Those were subjects you expected in a newspaper. But he also wrote about going fishing with his and Connie’s son, Milo. And how sweet it was when spring finally came. About preserving the area’s parks and shorelines. About his priceless three-dollar dog named Spoons. About the day they chopped down the tree in front of Rosie’s Restaurant. And when he obtained the plans for an antique cider press and convinced local carpenters and metalsmiths and the kids in the high school shop class to build him a half-scale model to his design, in time for a pressing of the first Michigan apples.
When his father died on September 29, 1984, he wrote, “He was an anxious man, my dad, and anxious to do the right thing. When I told my father I wanted to be a newspaperman, he took me to the Sears at Western and 63rd. There he bought, on time, a Remington portable typewriter, a Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary and a Roget’s Thesaurus. ‘That’s the best I can do for you,’ he said.”
The paper was not making a lot of money. The first winter, before he and Connie rented the house, Bob slept on a deck chair in the press room. He traded ads for dentistry and veterinarian services. He got to know everyone in town. He bonded with Rosie, whose restaurant was the breakfast hangout. He made good friends with Nick and Sophie Fatsoulas, who had a little restaurant next to Jackson’s big fruit and vegetable stand at the red light on Red Arrow Highway. Zonka was Serbo-Croatian, drawn to Greeks. “Sophie’s Place,” as we called it, became his dinner club, and when Russ Meyer came out for the lake fishing, we took our catch there and Nick prepared the lake trout Greek style.
The house on the bluff became the scene for weekend gatherings of the Chicago crowd, and one by one friends began to settle in Berrien County, which was later renamed “Harbor Country” by Karen Connor, another friend of Zonka’s who had relocated and set up as a Realtor. In the early 1970s the area was far from being a fashionable location for second homes of Chicagoans and South Benders. It was blue collar, a little run down, with cheap housing left over from its previous boom in the 1920s. In those days it could be reached by interurban rail and ferry boat from Chicago, which is how Saul Bellow’s Augie March once crossed to Michigan. Ethnic and labor groups set up summer camps, and in Union Pier, once a terminus for the Underground Railroad, African Americans including Jesse Owens bought summer homes. The Capone mob owned an inn near there, and when it was being rehabbed around 1980 a hidden room was found in the basement that some people fancied had once held gambling devices. Jumpin’ Joe Savoldi, the Notre Dame football star, champion pro wrestler, bottler of Jumpin’ Joe’s Root Beer, and American spy who parachuted into Sicily, bought land near Carl Sandburg on the lake and brought his Sicilian brothers over to build a house with sixteen-inch fieldstone walls, and it is in that house that I am writing this sentence. One of the brothers, quite old, was driven over to see the house about fifteen years ago, and said it had held up well.
Everybody’s families gathered in New Buffalo. There were lots of kids, including Milo, who was a holy terror in fireworks season, which for him began on Memorial Day and ended on Labor Day and was sometimes celebrated in the middle of the night. May I speak for all of us from those days in saying we are proud and astonished that he is now a family man, investment counselor, and the city manager of a town in Florida.
Bob and Connie were divorced after about fifteen years of marriage but shared custody of Milo and remained good friends. Bob called me in 1980 and said he’d found a duplex in Union Pier with beach path access. This was a small two-bedroom country house from the 1920s, to which an A-frame addition with a sleeping loft had been added. He suggested we buy it together. Including the double lot, the price was $50,000. Jack Lane had given up his high-end business as an advertising photographer and he and his second wife, Sharl, had moved to New Buffalo, where he worked at his first love, country and contracting. Zonka said he wanted a deck built.
“How big?”
“As far as the eye can see. And a fire pit.”
“How big?”
“Big enough to roast a goat.”
By then many key members of the circle had moved into the area, and the fire pit was the focus of much anecdotage, punctuated by explosions from Milo somewhere in the woods. Announcing a gathering, Zonka always said, “I’ll light a candle in the window,” and he always did. Dan and Audrey Curley were frequent weekenders. Bob’s older brother Lou, a lifelong paraplegic and successful businessman, had died by then. His younger brother Tom and his wife bought a house not far away. It was the summer of 1987 that I got the advance for The Perfect London Walk. It was understood that Zonka, who had never been to Europe, would come along.
In London we took rooms at the Eyrie Mansion, and Bob bonded with Henry Togna Sr. He traveled the city hungrily, having imagined it all of his life. McHugh and I noticed something: Bob took a pass on the walk over Hampstead Heath and took taxis whenever possible, even when our destination was in sight. “I’m out of training,” he said. “In New Buffalo, you can park right outside of everywhere.” McHugh was sharing a room with him and was awakened one night by cigarette smoke. Bob was sitting up in bed. That morning he and I cornered Bob and badgered him that he had to give up smoking. “I’ve been smoking since I was thirteen,” he said. “That’s just the point,” John said.
Back home, Bob announced that he was lighting the candle in the window, and there was a gathering at his place. We began around the fire pit, watching the sparks fly up into the night sky. It was a chill evening, and everybody had sw
eaters on except Zonka, who wore one of his short-sleeved shirts and explained that he was a hot-blooded Slav who would not require a jacket until the snows fell.
We moved inside. The occasion for the party was the publication of my new Movie Home Companion, which was dedicated to Zonka. I sat between McHugh and our friend the best-selling priest Andy Greeley, who owned a lake home nearby in Grand Beach, home of his friends the Daleys. In his house Greeley held frequent salons, and celebrated Mass in the backyard every Saturday, never forgetting the sermon. Seated the other side of John were Grace and Norman Mark, both over six feet with loud merry laughter. Norman had been TV critic of the Daily News and a talk show host. Grace had been his big crush in high school, where their eyes must have met over the crowd, and they’d met again and made a second marriage.
Following the Zonka immigration, they’d bought a house in Lakeside and now were having serious problems with dampness in the basement. Grace murmured their troubles in John’s ear. She was fairly new to us then and had attracted attention, as tall, elegant blondes in black leather pants are likely to do. During a break, Andy leaned over and asked McHugh, “What is she talking to you about, John?” McHugh lowered his voice. “Female problems, Father. You know.”
Greeley nodded and we fell silent. Grace continued, “When they got a good look down there, they told us the walls had been completely softened by mold and would have to be entirely removed.” John and Andy exchanged a significant nod.
After the room had cleared, Zonka said, “Ebert, I think this was altogether the best party I’ve had here. The whole crowd was here.” And so they were: my girlfriend Ingrid Eng and her daughters Monica and Magan; Father Greeley, Al the Greek; Jack Lane, McHugh, the Marks; Dennis and Connie Brennan, who ran the bookstore; Terry Truesdell, who had a woodworking shop downtown and whose wife, Judy, would run for Congress; Sophie and Nick; Tom Zonka; Marilou Kogan, now a widow; and Ivan and Marge Bloom, who had another two-city marriage, Ivan owning a showroom in the Merchandise Mart and Marge owning a spa on Whittaker Street. With a few exceptions, all of them had come to the area following Bob.
The next morning Bob drove down to the Union Pier bakery and brought back apple strudel. We made coffee. We sat around and replayed the party. We told the story of the walls doomed by mold, which showed every sign of becoming a classic. Things had gone very late, and now it was time for Bob to drive Milo to the train station to be met by Connie in Chicago. I was sleepy and went over to my half of the house to have a nap. I vaguely heard Bob return to his half of the house.
I had a vivid dream in which I had awakened, walked over to his side of the house, and found Bob seated at the head of the table, dead. In my dream I wrote a memorial column for the New Buffalo Times, word by word, very specific. I didn’t like that dream, and it awakened me. I got out of bed, went next door, and called through the screen: “Bob?” At the foot of the lawn, the Engs were sitting in the sun. I walked inside, and Bob was seated at the head of the table, dead, a cigarette having fallen from his hand.
I called out to the yard for the Engs. The girls telephoned for an ambulance, made difficult because it was hard to describe the address of the house in the woods. It made no difference. Ingrid held a mirror to his lips and we felt for a pulse, but he was clearly dead. We called Andy Greeley, and he hurried over. Bob was a Catholic, long since lapsed. Father Greeley said the last rites and pronounced conditional absolution. The ambulance found the house. We called the family and friends.
I sat down and started to write the story exactly as I had worded it in my dream. It appeared in the next issue of the New Buffalo Times, which was edited by McHugh with the help of the secretary and the old guy who came in to run the press. These words had been dictated in my dream: “As I write these words, I am looking out the window at the lawn where Robert Zonka stood last autumn and sowed wildflower seeds into the wind. In the spring, the flowers pushed up through the snow, and Zonka stood on his deck and said that was the way it was supposed to be. No landscape gardener was going to get within a mile of his land, where he encouraged the natural grasses and flowers of the sandy dunes to grow.”
The family gathered. A decision had to be made about the newspaper. There’d been a change in management at the NBC 5 News in Chicago, and McHugh had been swept out with the old team. He moved into Bob’s house and edited and published the paper for a year, until a buyer was found. He liked the area and decided to stay, teaching himself programming and installing computer systems for small businesses. He and his girlfriend from Chicago, Mary Jo Broderick, bought a house in the village of Three Oaks and live there today.
In Skoob, a used bookstore in London, Bob had purchased a large volume of Don Quixote with the illustrations by Gustave Doré. It was on the table before him when he died. When I spoke at the memorial service, I quoted Cervantes’ words on the last page:
For if he like a mad man lived,
At least he like a wise one died.
There were more real tears at the funeral than any other I have ever attended. Sherman Wolf and I clung to each other and sobbed. Bob was buried in the New Buffalo cemetery. The next spring when I visited his grave, I saw the stone, on which his children had the words from Don Quixote engraved.
When Bob saw or parted with anyone, he invariably said, “God love ya.”
23 MCHUGH
I MET JOHN McHugh in the autumn of 1966, when I was a cub reporter on the Sun-Times and he was a rewrite man, two years my senior, on the Chicago Daily News. He worked the overnight shift, and among his duties was taking calls from readers. After midnight, they wanted to settle bets. “And what do you say?” McHugh would ask. He would listen, and then reply, “You’re one hundred percent correct. Put the other guy on.” Pause. “And what do you say?” Pause. “You’re one hundred percent correct.” If he was asked for his name, he said, “John T. Greatest, spelled with three T’s.” He explained, “They can never figure out what that means.”
John was one of ten brothers from Sligo, Yeats country, on the west coast of Ireland. His father, “Trooper,” had been a member of the IRA gang that held up the Ulster Bank of Sligo. “They were raising funds for the cause,” he explained. “All of the money was never accounted for. Trooper is the only man in Sligo who has a son who graduated from Indiana University.” He was entrusted to Indiana under the protection of a cousin in Indianapolis who was a nun. John himself had studied briefly for the priesthood under the Christian Brothers but was expelled at fifteen, charged with smoking.
Late one night at the Old Town Gate, we decided to pay a visit to his homeland. David Lean was filming Ryan’s Daughter on the Dingle Peninsula, and MGM was flying in film critics to visit the location. We traded one first-class ticket for a couple of cheap ones. Robert Mitchum, my favorite movie star, was living in a rented cottage on the edge of town, and he drank scotch with us one night while he fed peat to the fire and listened to Jim Reeves records with his man Harold, who had been a paramedic with the Coldstream Guards.
On that trip McHugh became the great friend of a lifetime. As young men we sowed wild oats. As middle-aged men we ripened. As old men we harvest, and always we laugh. We flew on to Venice, where McHugh bonded with Lino, the trattoria owner. Although they did not speak a word of each other’s language, McHugh was so successful at communicating that Lino gave him his apron and installed him behind the counter.
Sophia Loren was on the mainland, in Padua, filming The Priest’s Wife with Marcello Mastroianni. The studio laid on a car to take me over for an interview, and I took along McHugh, “from the Chicago Daily News.” In those days film critics flew everywhere on the studios’ money and with the approval of our papers. We had to rise early in the morning, and I was hungover. On the road, I gave McHugh his instructions: “I’ve interviewed a lot of these stars and I know the drill. Just keep quiet, let me do the talking, and they won’t know any the better.” But when Loren glided into the room, I was paralyzed by hangover, drenched with sweat, and speechless. Mc
Hugh whipped out his Reporter’s Notebook and came to the rescue.
“Miss Loren, is that a tiara you’re sportin’?”
“This? It is a hair clip.”
“I see.” McHugh took notes. “Miss Loren, I understand you recently gave birth. Can you confirm that?”
“Yes, it is true. I had my little Cheepee. When I was pregnant, I had to stay for weeks in a clinic in Switzerland. Now I feel like a true woman. Carlo visits from Rome on weekends. If I never make another film, it is all right with me. Now I am a mother!”
McHugh nodded and took more notes.
“And in addition to little Cheepee, have you any other hobbies?”
“You call my baby a hobby?”
“I meant… like poker, or something?”
In those years I was living in the attic of the house of Paul and Anna Dudak, at 2437 North Burling, and paying $110 a month. Pop was a retired window washer from the Ukraine, where he had been an anarchist playwright. Anna was an Okie from the Dust Bowl, who spent six weeks every winter in what Pop referred to as “Lost Wages.” She said it cost her less than at home: “Nine dollars for a motel, $1.95 for the buffet, and I never gamble.” When some friends from O’Rourke’s Pub came over one night, Jim Hoge looked around and said, “Jesus, Roger, I pay you too much to live in this dump.”
An apartment opened up on a floor below, and John moved in. Like me, he had to survive a severe grilling from Pop: “We have here only intellectual gentlemen, who enjoy the luxury of conversation.” The Dudaks did no drinking to speak of, but these interviews were always smoothed by Pop’s secret recipe cocktail, made of Pepsi and Green Chartreuse. The front yard of his house, never very popular with the neighbors, was populated by a zoo of colorful little animals, sunk in concrete to prevent theft. In the backyard was a pond with a showerhead to supply a fountain, and in this pond floated a plastic frog with an orange golf ball glued to its head.