by Roger Ebert
In springtime in the Rockies, which some years didn’t preclude two feet of snow, the birds were singing in the trees, and I strolled beside the bubbling brook and looked upon the bridge where Jimmy Stewart kissed June Allyson in The Glenn Miller Story. In every place like this I have sacred places where I touch base in order to preserve the illusion of continuity. In April 2009, I paid what turned out to be a final ritual visit to Daddy Bruce’s Bar-B-Que, where I was greeted by Daddy Bruce Junior and purchased the Three Meats Platter to take away for Chaz. After untold decades in business, Daddy Bruce’s still lacks a refrigerator. All meats are fresh today, hickory smoked over real logs. Cold drinks are kept in a big picnic cooler filled with ice. The interior is large enough for a few counter stools, two tables for two, and Daddy Bruce Junior’s piano, on which he claims he can teach you to play in one day. I go back so far I remember Daddy Bruce Senior, famous in Denver for his free Thanksgiving feeds. Bruce Junior is eighty-two years old. At least Daddy Bruce’s is still here. These touchstones reassure me that I am, too.
“You know Tom passed?” Bruce asked me. “You always liked Tom’s.” Yes, I did. Tom’s Tavern is no more, replaced by—I can’t bear to tell you. There Howie Movshovitz the film critic and I would make an annual pilgrimage without fail, to talk about how we had been eating Tom’s hamburgers since 1969 and our “real” lives were a Platonic illusion separated by visits to Tom’s Tavern. Maybe that was more my theory than Howie’s.
Two doors down, the Stage House II is also no more. I walked into this vast used bookstore and art gallery when a thirtysomething man was unpacking cardboard cartons to open up shop. This was Richard Schwartz, an example of the sort of person a college town will attract: well read, intellectual, funny, setting down roots and making a difference, because a college town without good used bookstores is not worthy of the name. It was Dick who sold me my first Edward Lear watercolor. Let me tell you how engaging he could be. Telephoning me in Chicago, he started chatting with Diane Doe, my secretary at the Sun-Times, and something traveled through the phone wires and into their hearts. They were married for twenty-five years before Dick passed away. Now the site of the Stage House II is occupied by—I can’t bear to tell you.
Boulder is my hometown in an alternate universe. I have walked its streets by day and night, in rain, snow, and sunshine. I have made lifelong friends there. I grew up there. I was in my twenties when I first came to the Conference on World Affairs. I returned the next year and was greeted by Howard Higman, its choleric founder, with “Who invited you back?” Since then I have appeared on countless panels where I have learned and rehearsed debatemanship, the art of talking to anybody about anything. “Ask questions,” advised Studs Terkel, who gave the keynote one year. “If you don’t know anything, just respond by asking questions. It’s not how much you know.”
There are world-famous scientists there, filmmakers, senators, astronauts, poets, nuns, surgeons, addicts, yogis, Indian chiefs. One year Chief Fortunate Eagle, who led the sit-in at Alcatraz, was astonished to be picketed by a cadre of topless lesbians, who objected to—I dunno, the exploitation of Pocahontas, maybe. At Boulder I discussed masturbation with the Greek ambassador to the United Nations. I analyzed dirty jokes with Molly Ivins, the cabaret artist David Finkle, and the London parliamentary correspondent Simon Hoggart. I heard the one about the four-hundred-pound budgie from Andrew Neil, later editor of the Sunday Times. I found that the poet laureate, Howard Nemerov, had no interest at all in discussing his sister, Diane Arbus. I was on a panel about the Establishment with Henry Fairlie, who coined the term. Fairlie boarded at Higman’s house and eventually holed up in Boulder for a time; he was famous and successful but always out of pocket and held his eyeglasses together with Scotch tape. There Margot Adler, the famed Wiccan, drew down the moon for me. There I met Betty Dodson, the sexual adventurer, who arrived one year wearing a sculpted brass belt buckle in the form of a vagina. There I asked Ted Turner how he got so much else right, and colorization wrong. There Patch Adams turned up wearing a psychedelic suit and floppy red clown shoes. I rather avoided him until he chased me across a room and announced, “I agreed with every word of your review of that loathsome film about me.” From the basement of Macky Auditorium, I participated in Colorado’s first live webcast, although I’m fairly certain no one was watching. It was in Boulder that I bought my first real computer, the DEC Rainbow 100. And in Boulder that I fell quickly in love or lust several times, as is the way with conferences.
The local people fed and feted the guests. The opening-night party was held for many years in a home downhill from the campus on Boulder Creek by Betty Weems, a much-married rich liberal with the manner of a southern belle. One year she introduced a new husband, a Texas oil man named Manro Oberwetter, who was a good sport but unused to Boulder. One night he interrupted a hootenanny in the living room by striking a large gong and announcing, “I don’t care if you all smoke weed. I don’t care if you all go skinny dipping with your dirty dingus magee flapping in the wind. But which one is the son of a bitch who left a turd floating in my pool?”
I stayed for many years in the home of Betty Brandenburg, Howard’s long-suffering assistant, and got a private glimpse behind the scenes. “Take your shower tonight,” she told me. “In the morning we need the bathtub to wash the romaine.”
I wrote about such events in a diary one year for Slate. “You give the wrong impression!” Chaz told me. “It’s not all witches and topless lesbians. It’s mostly serious.” Quite true, and improvisational, and surprising. In this lockstep world of sound bites, how refreshing to witness intelligent people actually in spontaneous conversation. It is unusual to listen to people in the act of having new ideas occur to them.
I could tell you about the Irish storyteller. The blind New Orleans pianist. The fire-walking astrophysicist. The SETI guy. But I want to be impressionistic. I want to describe a week when bright, articulate people think on their feet. No, not all pointy-headed elites. Over the years, Temple Grandin, who is autistic and the designer of most of the world’s livestock-handling chutes. Buckminster Fuller, who, when I said, “Hello,” responded, “I see you.” Dave Grusin, the Oscar-winning composer. A bricklayer. A monk. Designers of solar energy systems.
Ramin Bahrani, who won a Guggenheim while he was there, joined me for a week in 2009 to discuss his Chop Shop in minute detail. It was astonishing. The smallest details of the film reflected the vision of Bahrani and his cinematographer, Michael Simmonds. He explained why each shot was chosen. How each was choreographed. How the plot, which seems to some to unfold in a documentary fashion, has a three-act structure, a character arc, and deliberate turning points. Why there was a soccer sticker on the back of a pickup truck. How every visual detail, including the placement and colorization of junk in the far background, was consciously planned. How certain shots were influenced by Bresson, Antonioni, Alexander Mackendrick, Godard. How the colors were controlled. How he worked in real situations by backing off and using long shots. How he worked with nonactors for months. How twenty-five takes of a shot were not uncommon. How he had prepared on the location for six months. How the film was anything but improvised.
“I’d do anything to meet Werner Herzog,” he told me. We conspired to lure Werner to Boulder in 2010, where he joined Ramin in a shot-by shot analysis of Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Herzog’s famous accent is a work of art. It could make E. E. Cummings sound like the wrath of God.
I’d been doing the shot-by-shot approach at the CWA every year since about 1970. After watching Herzog and Bahrani do it together, I decided to call it a day. I won’t return to the conference. It is fueled by speech, and I’m out of gas. Why go to Daddy Bruce’s if I can’t eat? But I went there for my adult lifetime and had a hell of a good time.
Every year there is a jazz concert featuring world-class professional musicians, performing for free, convened by the Grusin brothers, Dave and Don. I heard a set of bongo drums played by Rony Barrak more rapidly and
with more precision than I have ever heard before. I heard the flautist Nestor Torres playing Bach with all his heart and then segueing into Latin jazz, with songs he composed especially for the conference.
During one song, the charismatic jazz vocalist Lillian Boutté, from Germany out of New Orleans, was so happy that people started dancing in the aisles. People, to my knowledge, ranging from sixteen to eighty. You know these days how people when they’re dancing sometimes look intensely serious about how cool they are? Their arm movements look inspired by seizures and the hammering of sheet metal. These aisle dancers weren’t like that. They were feeling elevation. They weren’t smiling. They were grinning like kids. On the stage, the musicians were grinning, too. There was a happiness storm in old Macky Auditorium. After all their paid gigs in studio recording sessions, how often do fourteen gifted improvisational jazz and Latin artists get to jam together just for fun? All free, all open to the public. And a few blocks away, Daddy Bruce Junior ready to teach me the piano.
26 ALCOHOLISM
IN AUGUST 1979, I took my last drink. It was about four o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, the hot sun streaming through the windows of my little carriage house behind the Four Farthings on Dickens. I put a glass of scotch and soda down on the living room table, went to bed, and pulled the blankets over my head. I couldn’t take it anymore. I visited old Dr. Jakub Schlichter, recommended by Zonka, because when I discussed drinking with my previous doctor he said unhelpfully, “I know what you mean. With me, it’s martinis.” Schlichter, a refugee from Nazism, advised me to go to “AAA,” which is what he called it. I said I didn’t need to go to any meetings. I would stop drinking on my own. He told me, “Go right ahead. Check in with me every month.”
The problem with using willpower was that it lasted only until my will persuaded me I could take another drink. At about this time I was reading The Art of Eating by M. F. K. Fisher, who wrote: “One martini is just right. Two martinis are too many. Three martinis are never enough.” The problem with making resolutions is that you’re sober when you take the first drink, have had a drink when you take the second one, and so on. I found it almost impossible, once I started, to stop after one or two. If I could, I would continue until I decided I was finished. The next day I paid a price in hangovers. I’ve known a couple of heavy drinkers who claimed they never had hangovers. I didn’t believe them. Without hangovers, it is possible that I would still be drinking. I would also be unemployed, unmarried, and probably dead. Most alcoholics continue to drink as long as they can. Unlike most drugs, alcohol allows you to continue for what remains of your life, barring an accident. The lucky ones find their bottom and surrender.
That afternoon after I pulled the covers over my head, I stayed in bed for thirteen hours. On the Sunday I poured out the rest of the drink, which at the time I had no idea would be my last. I sat around the house not making any vows to myself but somehow just waiting. On Monday, I went to see Dr. Schlichter. He nodded as if he had been expecting this and said, “I want you to talk to a man at Grant Hospital. They have an excellent program.” He picked up his phone and an hour later I was in the man’s office. He asked me the usual questions, said the important thing was that I thought I had a problem, and asked me if I had packed and was ready to move into their rehab program.
“Hold on a second,” I said. “I didn’t come here to check into anything. I just came to talk to you.”
He said they were strictly inpatient.
“I have a job,” I said. “I can’t leave it.” He doubted that, but asked me to meet with one of their counselors.
This woman, I will call her Susan, had an office on Lincoln Avenue in a medical building across the street from Somebody Else’s Troubles, which was well known to me. She said few people stayed sober for long without AA. I said the meetings didn’t fit with my schedule and I didn’t know where any were. She looked in a booklet. “Here’s one at 401 North Wabash,” she said. “Do you know where that is?” I confessed it was the Chicago Sun-Times building. “They have a meeting in the fourth-floor auditorium,” she said. It was ten steps from my desk. “There’s one today, starting in an hour. Can you be there?”
She had me.
Once in the building, I was very nervous. I stopped in the men’s room across the hall to splash water on my face and walked into the room. Maybe thirty people were seated around a table. I knew one of them. I sat and listened. The guy next to me got applause when he said he’d been sober for a month. Another guy said five years. I believed the guy next to me. They gave me the same list of meetings Susan had consulted. Two day later I flew to Toronto for the film festival. At least here no one knew me. I looked up AA in the phone book and they told me there was a meeting in a church hall across Bloor Street from my hotel. I went to so many Toronto meetings in the next week that when I returned to Chicago, I considered myself a member.
Susan was unconvinced that I was fully a member, however, and told me she’d seen too many relapses after an early glow of victory. I’d never before stopped for long. She required me to begin taking a daily dose of Antabuse, a drug said to cause great distress when combined with drinking. Perhaps it was a similar drug that my mother slipped to my father before I was born, when Aunt Martha remembered him being too sick to move. Whatever it was, he never drank again. There were rules involving Antabuse. I was not allowed to take it myself. I had to find a Helping Person to hold the bottle of pills, give me one every day, and call Susan the first day I missed one. Part of this policy, she said, was designed to help me admit my alcoholism to another person and be willing to ask for help.
It was no use asking drinking friends. They’re a lot friendlier late at night than after awaking in the morning. I went to see Sue Gin, the Chinese-American woman who owned the Four Farthings and had sold me the coach house. Sue had been born above a Chinese restaurant in Aurora, became one of the first Playboy bunnies at eighteen, used the money to put herself through college, got a real estate license, and at the time I met her owned and managed a lot of rental properties in the Lincoln Park area, as well as the bar, Café Bernard on Halsted, and a bakery. These she managed more or less by herself.
When she started buying real estate along Halsted, it was a no-go area plagued by gangs and drug dealers. She was a barely drinking honorary member of the O’Rourke’s crowd, and we all went to the opening of the French bistro she opened with a chef named Bernard LeCoq. This was the first outpost of gentrification on a rough stretch of Halsted, Tom Fitzpatrick distinguishing himself by getting into a fight. A lesser woman would have been furious that her opening had been disrupted. Sue had an instinctive feel for people. She told me, “I filled it with a freebie for newspaper people and a few radio and TV. Not the food critics, not the straight arrows, but you guys who all hang out together. So Fitz got in a fight. I didn’t like it, but tomorrow that will be all over town. How else will anybody hear about a French restaurant in the middle of nowhere?” This was true enough, and although I can no longer eat, Café Bernard is still there, almost forty years later. Sue has an instinct for synergy.
One day she took me along to buy a tuckpointing company a few doors down from Bernard. We entered the shabby old building with its garage opening onto the galley, and she heard the elderly owner’s story about his life in tuckpointing. She cross-examined him, saying she thought there was a future in tuckpointing. He sold her his building and business for what must have been close to its market value. “Are you really going into tuckpointing?” I asked her. “I sure am. I’m starting Monday.” On Monday, the Four Farthings building, a four-floor structure containing eight large flats, was surrounded by the tuckpointers of her new company. Within a year the former garage was a storefront for one of the early stores of the Gap. When she bought the old bakery on Armitage, however, she kept it in business, supplied restaurants, and used it as the base for a company she named Flying Food Fare, which supplied in-flight meals to Midwest Airlines. She met one of its owners, Bill McGowan, who was to fou
nd MCI, one of the first competitors to AT&T. They fell in love. Sue had never been married, and I knew her well enough to see this was the real thing. They began to shuttle between Chicago and Washington. A few times she brought him along to dinner with some of her newspaper pals, who’d started favoring the Farthings as a fourth angle in the Bermuda Triangle. They invited a planeload of friends on a trip to Ireland, and at a dinner there McGowan’s brother, a priest, announced that a year earlier he had married them. Some years later McGowan became an early recipient of a heart transplant, and Sue Gin became an expert on the procedure and its leading practitioners. All this time running her little empire, as nearly as anyone could tell, out of her head. She rehabilitated a few white-collar drinkers from the Farthings and put them back to work for her as architects or accountants.
All of this was still ahead on the morning I walked across my yard to the Farthings building and climbed four flights to Sue’s sunny kitchen to receive my first Antabuse pill. She had coffee waiting, and pastries from her bakery. Every morning we repeated this ritual. If I overslept she woke me on the phone: “Rog! Time for your medicine!” She reported back to my counselor at the end of every week. Sue was brash and direct, analytical, always networking. She quizzed me on alcoholism, went to a meeting with me, and started working on some of her rescue cases in the bar downstairs. She drank, but very sparingly. She was comfortable in bars. When she looked at a customer and told him he was drunk, the customer believed her. Eventually I told Susan the counselor I wanted to get off Antabuse because I was in love with AA and it made me feel like a fraud at meetings. I have a feeling Sue kept an eye on me for my counselor.