Life Itself: A Memoir

by Roger Ebert

  One year McHugh and I returned from another trip to Ireland. John entered his apartment, fell in bed without turning on the lights, and awoke at dawn to see snakes crawling all over the walls. He called me and I hurried downstairs. He’d not been imagining things. The snakes were there. Pop had painted them in florescent greens and yellows. “I am working in my capacity as a room decorator,” he explained. “For trendy young gentleman, I have created psychedelic wall paintings.”

  He had also improved my attic apartment, where the roof leaned at low angles over the rooms.

  “Ebert!” he said, greeting me in front of the house. “Does your mirror steam up when you shave after a shower?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Working in my capacity as an inventor, I have solved the problem!”

  He led me upstairs and proudly showed me that he had cut a square hole through the roof and installed a sliding pane of glass in it, directly above the bathtub.

  “Prop open the window when you shower,” he explained, “and steam escapes to outer atmosphere, leaving mirror ready for shaving!”

  This innovation proved flawed. Even on summer days, the outside breeze blew chilly into the shower. On rainy days, twigs and leaves would wash past the sliding glass into the bathtub. When I lay soaking, I would find myself being regarded by squirrels’ beady little eyes. They found the glass warm in wintertime, and my tub began to collect squirrel shit.

  John was popular with the ladies, although his girlfriend in the 1970s, Mary Ulrich, who was a banker, once told me: “John’s idea of being charming on a date is to look up from the bar, notice me sitting next to him, and say, Mary, me old flower! How long have you been sittin’ there?” Miss Mary, for so she was known, was a perfect lady. Skirts instead of pants. Nylons. Heels. Business suits. Every hair in place. She loved the guy. Nobody could figure it out. She cooked for him, mended his shirts, took naughty Polaroids that no one was allowed to see. She hardly drank.

  Mary eventually fell in love with a lawyer, but thanks to John’s influence, he was a colorful one. John, in the meantime, had left the Daily News to become a feature writer for Chicago Today, the former Chicago’s American. “The best job in town,” he told me. “It’s what I dreamed of when I was down in Bloomington that last summer. I had just graduated and had my degree in my pocket. I got a job with the Arab Pest Control, crawling under houses and spraying around bug poison. One day it was about ninety-eight degrees, and a trap door opened above my head. It was the lady of the house.

  “ ‘It must be hot down there,’ she says. ‘Wouldn’t you like some nice cold lemonade?’

  “I tell her I would. I stand up through the trap door but don’t climb into the kitchen because I’m all covered with sweat, dust, and cobwebs. She pours me out a nice big glass from a pitcher from the icebox. Then she calls her little boy into the room.

  “ ‘Junior,’ she says, ‘you take a good look at that man. If you don’t study hard and go to college, that’s what will happen to you.’ ”

  After Chicago Today folded, John went to work for the news division of NBC Chicago as the assignment manager. At one time his two principal anchors were Maury Povich and the legendary Ron Hunter, who was possibly the model for every character in the movie Anchorman. John liked Maury but found Ron unendurable: “He’s so vain that instead of wearing glasses, he has a prescription windshield on his Jaguar.” Anchormen value stories when they can go on the street and be seen in the midst of the action. One day McHugh came up with a juicy assignment for Povich. “The next day,” he told me, “Ron Hunter comes into my office, puts his feet up on my desk, and says, ‘John, that was a good story you had for Maury yesterday. What do you have for me today?’ I tell him, ‘Contempt.’ ”

  At NBC, John met the sunny Mary Jo Broderick, with whom he has lived happily now for many years. Our friend Zonka died a few years after buying the New Buffalo Times across the lake in southwest Michigan. John took over editing and publishing the paper for a year. By then he had come to like the area, and he and Mary Jo purchased a little white frame two-story in Three Oaks, the home of a dandy Fourth of July parade where Shriners circle in formation on their power lawnmowers. Three Oaks, with barely three thousand souls, has an excellent downtown art theater, the Vickers, which Mary Jo faithfully attends every week. McHugh never goes. When he was a child, once a year he was delegated to take all of his brothers to the movies. “It was always the same show: How Green Was My Valley. Every time I saw it, nine months later I’d have another brother.”

  I lived at 2437 North Burling for most of the years between 1967 and 1977. Then I bought a coach house behind the Four Farthings Tavern on Lincoln Avenue. I held a housewarming, at which one of the guests was my friend the press agent Sherman Wolf, a really nice man, which helps explain this story. Sherman found me in the kitchen and said, “Congratulations on your new house! You’ve worked hard and you deserve it. It’s a real step up from that pigpen you used to live in.”

  “Sherman,” I said, “I don’t believe you’ve met my landlady from Burling Street, Mrs. Dudak.”

  Sherman turned red. “Oh my God!” he said. “Oh, Mrs. Dudak, actually it was a very nice place on Burling, the rent was low, Roger was happy there, I was just trying to think of something nice to say to Roger.”

  “Now, Sherman, don’t you apologize for a thing. It was time Roger found something better, and we’re happy for him.”

  Sherman fled to the deck outside the kitchen door. McHugh was sitting out there.

  “How are you, Sherman?”

  “God, John, I’m so embarrassed I could crawl into a hole. I just told Roger this place was a lot better than that pigpen he used to live in, and who was standing right there but Mrs. Dudak!”

  “I’ll bet that made you feel awful,” John said.

  “It’s one of those things you can never take back,” Sherman said.

  “Sherman,” John said, “I don’t believe you’ve ever met Mr. Dudak, who is sitting right here next to me.”

  “Good… lord!”

  “And Sherman? When Roger moved out of the pigpen, I moved in.”

  24 O’ROURKE’S

  O’ROURKE’S WAS OUR stage, and we displayed our personas there nightly. It was a shabby street-corner tavern on a dicey stretch of North Avenue, a block after Chicago’s Old Town stopped being a tourist haven. In its early days it was heated by a wood-burning potbellied stove, and ice formed on the insides of the windows. One night a kid from the street barged in, whacked a customer in the front booth with a baseball bat, and ran out again. When a roomer who lived upstairs died, his body was discovered when maggots started to drop through the ceiling. A man nobody knew was shot dead one night out back. From the day it opened on December 30, 1966, until the day I stopped drinking in 1979, I drank there more or less every night when I was in town. So did a lot of people.

  The Front Page era had a halfway rebirth in the 1970s, centering on O’Rourke’s and the two other nightly stops in the “Bermuda Triangle,” Riccardo’s and the Old Town Ale House. The triangle got its name, it was said, because newspaper reporters crashed there and were never seen again. Riccardo’s, equidistant from the daily newspapers, was for after work. The Ale House had a late-night license and was for after O’Rourke’s. Few lasted through the whole ten hours. People would ride awhile and jump off. Billy Goat’s was for when you wanted to drink with Royko, who had been eighty-sixed from Riccardo’s after calling Bruno, the maître d’, a Nazi.

  The regulars mostly knew one another. There were maybe a hundred members of the “O’Rourke’s crowd,” perhaps fifty or sixty of them lasting the whole duration at that address and many following the bar when it moved to Halsted Street, across from the Steppenwolf Theatre. It was driven west by rising real estate prices, the victim of the gentrification it introduced. Jay Kovar, the manager from day one, the co-owner in later years, received a loan from the actor Brian Dennehy to finance the move. Actors had always been part of the mix, many of them fr
om the nearby Second City. And folk singers from the Earl of Old Town: Larry Rand, John Prine, Ed and Fred Holstein, not so much Steve Goodman. I was invited for opening night in 1966 by Nan Lundberg, an editor of the Daily Illini, who’d married Will Kilkeary, its owner. Will was a friendly little guy who sometimes late on St. Patrick’s Day would climb onto the shelf above the door for a nap. A call from McHugh woke me one March 17: “Ebert, I think Willie is in the slammer. On the news they said a man in a leprechaun costume was arrested while trying to paint a green stripe down North Avenue.”

  On a good night you might see Mike Royko, Studs Terkel, Nelson Algren, and such visiting firemen as Robert Novak, Pat Conroy, and Tom Wolfe. Nelson had an unrequited crush on Jeanette Sullivan, the Japanese-American co-owner, and was friendly enough but didn’t come primarily to hang out with the crowd. During a disagreement with Tom Fitzpatrick, he and Fitz pelted each other with shot glasses. Royko appeared one night after midnight, supported by two volunteers, his trench coat a shambles. He was scheduled to appear the following morning on the Phil Donahue Show. I made it a point to watch. He was lucid and didn’t seem hungover.

  Few of the regulars often seemed hungover, although many must have been on some mornings. Michaela Tuohy, “Mike,” accounted for that by the practice of “recovery drinking,” which was how you got your act together enough to be taken onstage at O’Rourke’s. As a general rule, most of the people in the bar were having a good time. There was a lot of laughter. Groups formed and shifted.

  The bar’s Sydney Greenstreet was Alcibiades Oikonomides (Al the Greek), a mountainous man who would head-butt friends as a gesture of solidarity, chanting, “To the ten thousand years we will drink together.” Hank Oettinger, the most-published letter-to-the-editor writer in Chicago, would turn up night after night with his pockets stuffed with letters that either had just been published or were about to be published. These he would read to us. Hank was a retired Linotype operator, then in his seventies, a fervent leftist, a regular at every protest march, a confidant of Dick Gregory’s. His black hair slicked back over his big German-American head, he always wore a jacket and tie and ordered a beer. One beer. He had been making his rounds, sometimes composing his letters on a bar, since midday stops in the Loop. But only sipping beer. Making his way nightly through the mean streets.

  Years prior to his present position as a professor of antiquities at Loyola University, Al the Greek said, he had been an aide-de-camp for Haile Selassie in the Ethiopian-Somalian border wars, and he had a much-creased photograph of himself in uniform, standing next to a horse, to prove it. He claimed to be a member of an ancient Greco-Venetian trading family that still owned a palazzo on the Grand Canal and also a partner in a bookshop on Shaftesbury Avenue. About Selassie I was not sure, but I met the cousin in the palazzo and stood under a Tiepolo ceiling, and when he took me to the bookshop his name was on the door.

  What brought Al the Greek night after night to this obscure corner of Chicago? O’Rourke’s was not boring and embraced eccentricity. Ordinary yuppies, those who frequented the bars on Rush Street and in Old Town, did not blend in. For one thing, they were unimpressed by the booths and tables, knocked together from plywood, shellacked, caked by smoke and sweat. For years the bar no more had air-conditioning than central heating. O’Rourke’s was the ultimate singles bar, it was said. You went there with a date and came home alone. Cabaret could break out at any moment. Bagpipers drank free. Everybody knew the words to all of the songs on the jukebox, some of which had been on the machine when it was new. When Jerry Lewis would sing “Come Rain or Come Shine,” it was not unknown for a customer to climb up on the bar and sing along. The songs of the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem played again and again, and customers would sing with them: And always remember the longer you live, the sooner you bloody well die. Press agents would bring visiting movie stars to view the local color, and they were good sports, Charlton Heston one night autographing Natalie Nudlemann’s bra while she was wearing it.

  Many of us at O’Rourke’s became fake Irishmen, swayed by the Clancy Brothers and the big blown-up photographs of Behan, O’Casey, Shaw, and Joyce. I was one-quarter Irish but submerged the other three-quarters and assured strangers, “Your blood’s worth bottling.” Fund-raisers allegedly from the IRA would visit and we would naïvely give five bucks to the cause, probably not funding any terrorism because they were con artists preying on boozing Irish wannabes. Above all we drank. It is not advisable, perhaps not possible, to spend very many evenings in a place like O’Rourke’s while drinking Cokes and club soda. Sometimes I attempted to cut back by adopting drinks whose taste I hated (Fernet-Branca) or those with low alcohol content (white wine and soda). Night after night I found these substitutes relaxed me enough to switch to scotch and soda. For a time I experimented with vodka and tonic. I asked Jay Kovar what he knew about vodka as a drink. He told me, “Sooner or later, all the heavy hitters get to vodka.”

  I studied Jay as he worked behind the bar, trying to figure out how he did it. A saturnine, compact man, fit, looking a little like Jason Patric, he steadily drank half shots of whiskey and smoked Pall Malls. I never saw him clearly appear to be drunk. Indeed I saw relatively few of the regulars when they were drunk, although that could happen after hours at the Ale House. Some people, like Al the Greek, could drink terrifying mixtures of drinks to little apparent effect. Others were more reasonable drinkers, but steady.

  We had our own Sun-Times delivery truck. Red Connolly would make O’Rourke’s his last stop of the night. Red, whose brother was the Hollywood columnist Mike Connelly, would deliver bundles of the early editions for us to study. The day’s Royko column might be read aloud. Editors were libeled and publishers despised. Red sometimes used the Sun-Times truck to ferry us from one bar to another. One night Cliff Robertson was in the bar and had fallen under its spell. Red offered to give us all a lift to the Oxford Pub on Lincoln Avenue, which was a late-night joint. We piled into the back of his big red Sun-Times truck: Robertson, McHugh, a bagpipe player, assorted other regulars, and Good Sydney Harris. Good Sydney Harris was a Spanish Civil War veteran, not to be confused with the Bad Sydney Harris, the Daily News columnist. Good Sydney had fallen into conversation with a dominatrix named Jake, who joined us.

  We tied the canvas flaps closed on the back of the truck, because of Red’s theory that what we were doing was not technically legal. Jake took off her belt and began to flog Good Sydney. We passed around the Dew. The bagpipe player began “My Bonnie Lassie.” We heard the whoop! whoop! of a police prowler, and Red pulled over to the curb.

  “Top o’ the mornin’, Sergeant!” he said, and handed down copies of the Sun-Times and the Wall Street Journal. The prowler pulled away.

  “My last delivery,” Red said.

  “Chicago,” said Cliff Robertson.

  A few of the regulars, I suspect, had little identity other than the one conferred by O’Rourke’s. John the Garbage Man was a regular, displaying his sculptures made from objects discovered in the garbage. He would take discarded silverware and melt it down into jewelry that looked like blobs of melted silverware. These were sold to be worn around the neck. Jon Anderson wrote a column about him and he enjoyed a little run on business. I bought a chess set from him, but it was not a success because the pieces looked interchangeable. These I tried to use only once, while playing in an O’Rourke’s chess tournament that sprang up during the Bobby Fischer fever in Iceland. The winner, who played chess for money at the North Avenue Beach Chess Pavilion, was Andre, a stringy hippie, tie dyed and ponytailed, who explained he had been the armorer of the Luxembourg army before fleeing to America as a political refugee.

  We regulars knew one another. We dated one another. We slept with one another. We went to Greektown together, with Al presiding at the head of a long table. We met on Saturday mornings at Oxford’s for “recovery drunch,” named by Mike Tuohy, who believed peppermint schnapps and Coke would snap you out of it. Tom Butkovich would pull up behind O
’Rourke’s in his old Volvo station wagon and unload the equipment to barbeque a lamb. His mother, from the far Southwest Side, would bring in covered dishes of macaroni and cheese and potato salad, while his stepdad, a steelworker, would dance with his T-shirt pulled above his belly, singing It must be jelly, ’cause jam don’t shake like that. We went to one another’s weddings and funerals and observed holidays together. We took collections for bail money, or helped the Jim and Mike Tuohy family to move, which they did frequently, Mike once complaining to McHugh that he had failed to move her kitchen garbage.

  The 1968 Days of Rage demonstrations passed through Old Town, and Jimmy Breslin and Norman Mailer came in. We watched the moon landing and the fires after Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. We watched after Nixon resigned. We sang, laughed, and cried. We rehearsed the same stories over and over. I said we knew one another. We knew who we said we were, who we wanted to appear to be, and who O’Rourke’s thought we were, and that was knowing one another well enough.

  Now Studs Terkel, Mike Royko, and Nelson Algren are dead, and so are John Belushi, Steve Goodman, Tom Fitzpatrick, Mike Tuohy, Hank Oettinger, Al the Greek, and John the Garbage Man. Will Kilkeary sobered up and became a poet. Jeannette Sullivan married a nice guy she met in O’Rourke’s, who became a police officer. Jay Kovar sold the location across the street from Steppenwolf and walks his dogs.

  25 LEISURE OF THE THEORY CLASS

  I LIVED MORE than nine months of my life in Boulder, Colorado, one week at a time. There more than anywhere else I heard for the first time about more new things, met more fascinating people who have nothing to do with the movies, learned more about debate, and trained under fire to think on my feet. It all happened at the sleep-inducingly named “Conference on World Affairs.”

  For sixty-six years, this annual meeting at the University of Colorado has persuaded a very mixed bag of people to travel to Boulder at their own expense, appear with one another on panels not of their choosing, lodge with local hosts who volunteer their spare rooms, speak spontaneously on topics they learn about only after they arrive, be driven around town by volunteers, be fed at lunch by the university and in the evening by such as the chairman, Jane Butcher, in her own home. For years the conference founder Howard Higman personally cooked roast beef on Tuesday night. The hundreds of panels, demonstrations, concerts, polemics, poetry readings, political discussions, and performances are and always have been free and open to the public.