Life Itself: A Memoir

by Roger Ebert

  Bill was the writer who exposed the scandal of how owners and vets conspired to use cortisone in order to race horses who were not ready to be raced. “I started seeing horses breaking down all the time,” he said. “You hardly ever used to see that.” No one at the tracks would give him the time of day for a couple of years. It was a rotten business.

  Our friendship has endured despite the inescapable fact that I don’t care very much about horse racing and Bill doesn’t seem to go to many movies. Our bond is reading, and our subject is often not far removed from the Meaning of It All. We are puzzled that we are now nearly seventy. How did that happen? Our conversations all take place in the present tense. We are always meeting for the first time. When you’re young you don’t realize that at every age you are always in the present, and in that sense no older; when I look at Bill I see the same man I met at Illinois. He’s one of the lucky ones whose lifelong work didn’t change him but only confirmed the person he was all along.

  One night in Chicago he asked me to drive him past the Old Town Gardens, an apartment complex built in the 1930s where he lived as a boy with his family. I parked, he got out and walked up the front steps and then stepped out carefully onto a ledge and reached for something as far as he could. He climbed down and returned to the car.

  “It’s still there,” he said.

  “What?”

  “A quarter I wedged between the bricks when I was a kid. That was my bedroom window. I left it there.”

  We didn’t need to discuss the meaning of this. We send messages to ourselves in the future and receive them from the past. We’re both conscious of the passage of time, of its flow slipping through our fingers like a long silk scarf, until it runs out and flutters away in the wind. Every time I see Bill, I asked him to recite for me from memory the closing words of The Great Gatsby, and every time he does. He did it when Chaz and I were married, and at his own second marriage to Carolyne Starek, whom I love for many reasons, one of them that she has an infinite patience for listening to Gatsby. This recitation is not merely a ritual. It is an observance in defiance of time. In some way we are still sitting over coffee in the 1960s, and he is still reciting it to me for the first time.

  “I was talking with Jim Carey today,” he told me that first time. Carey was the young journalism professor we admired. “I told him I was going to start memorizing passages from books. He asked me what I was going to start with. I said, ‘The end of Gatsby.’ He said he thought that was an excellent place to start.”

  Bill told me his friend Hunter S. Thompson once warmed up by copying out every word of The Great Gatsby on his typewriter. Not that you can immediately see Fitzgerald’s influence in Hunter’s style, although perhaps Fitzgerald’s words “compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired” is the best possible description of Thompson’s life’s work.

  Bill and I conspired to meet a couple of times a year, at the Conference on World Affairs in Boulder and at Rancho La Puerta in Tecate, Mexico. I appointed myself as Bill’s impresario. I persuaded Rancho to schedule a program titled “A Concert in Words with William Nack.” The room was pretty full, because I’d been working the dining room at mealtimes, flogging the great event. Bill dimmed the lights a little and recited for an hour, standing in front of the lectern without a book.

  Bill devours books. When he finds something good he’s like a kid. Of all writers he loves Nabokov the most. He’ll give you the opening page of Lolita or passages from Speak, Memory. “There’s something I want you to hear,” he told me one morning during a hike at Rancho. “It’s from Nabokov’s Pnin. Have you read it? About a university professor. I think this might be the most profound metaphor I’ve ever found.”

  It may not seem to belong in a book of this sort, but it expresses a leap of thought that I find magnificent:

  With the help of the janitor he screwed onto the side of the desk a pencil sharpener—that highly satisfying, highly philosophical instrument that goes ticonderoga-ticonderoga, feeding on the yellow finish and sweet wood, and ends up in a kind of soundlessly spinning ethereal void as we all must.

  40 THE SWEETEST SET OF WHEELS IN TOWN

  IT IS THINKABLE that within a few years there may be no more new Chevys to drive to the levee. The manufacture of Postum has been discontinued. Meccano sets are made of plastic. Piece by piece, the American superstructure is being dismantled. Will the pulse of teenage boys quicken at the sight of the new Kia or Hyundai? Will they envy their pal because his dad drives a Camaro? That’s all over with. There will be a void in our national imagination. Let me tell you about how it used to be.

  In my opinion, the narrator of “American Pie” drove a Studebaker. It’s only that “Chevy” was an easier rhyme. Since the 1950s Chevy we think of first is the ’57 Bel Air, it is reasonable to conclude that the ride of Miss Pie’s friend on the day the music died was a 1957 Studebaker Golden Hawk—the sexiest American car ever manufactured, although there are those who praise the 1950s Thunderbirds and Corvettes, however slower than the Hawks they may have been.

  They say that when a man reaches forty and finds some spare change in his pocket, his thoughts turn to the car he desired with all his heart in the years before he got his driver’s license. In 1955, I took a part-time job at Johnston’s Sport Shop in Champaign-Urbana. I was not a stock boy. I was a salesclerk. I got an hour for lunch. I stopped first at the Shell station across the street, run by a man who operated jukeboxes and sold his old 45s for a nickel apiece. Marty Robbins. Elvis. Teresa Brewer. Then I’d walk a block down Neil Street to the Chuck Wagon Diner, one of the first restaurants to feature Colonel Harland Sanders’s chicken on its menu. This was before the colonel had his own restaurants. I met him in person the day they started serving his chicken, and he asked me how I liked his spices. At age six I was given a penny by old J. C. Penney, so now I had met two titans of marketing.

  Between the gas station and the Chuck Wagon was Maxey Motors, a Studebaker-Packard dealer. I didn’t pay it much heed. All I knew about Studebakers was that kids joked about how they looked like they were going in both directions at once. Many years later I discovered that Raymond Loewy’s design for the 1953 Starliner was proclaimed a work of art by the Museum of Modern Art. One winter day in 1956 as I bent into a chill wind on Neil Street, something caught the corner of my eye. I turned and stood transfixed. It was the new 1957 Golden Hawk. I forgot the rain. I forgot the chicken. I wanted that car. I walked inside the dealership and circled it. My eyes hungered. Before that day, cars were ordinary things like my dad’s boxy ’50 Plymouth or my mom’s ’55 Olds, designed along the lines that made a comparison to a loaf of bread seem inevitable. Now here was a Hawk that sprang from a lofty crag and circled the firmament with fierce beauty. It was supercharged and had a grille that breathed great gulps of air.

  That year I got my driver’s license and was able to buy a 1954 Ford. But I was not faithful in my heart. I lusted for the Golden Hawk. I became expert at sketching it from memory. In profile, the graceful fenders curving down to the headlights. The windshield raked back in harmonious counterbalance. The slant of the roof, leading down to the uprising of the bold fins. Musical. You could sing it.

  When I was forty and had a little change in my pocket, my thoughts turned again to the 1957 Golden Hawk. One day I was at Book Soup on Sunset in Los Angeles, paging through Hemmings Motor News, and found an ad for a ’57 Hawk being restored out in Santa Monica. I went to look at it, and the deal was sealed. Two months later it was dropped off six blocks from my home by an auto carrier. It was gold with white fins and its engine was mighty.

  The year was 1982. I was a syndicated columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times. I had won a Pulitzer Prize. I was co-host of a national TV show. These credits were pleasing, but there was something missing, a hollow in my ego waiting to be filled. I turned the key in the ignition, rolled down the window, turned the radio to rock ’n’ roll on an AM oldies station, hooked my elbow out the window, and pu
rred out of the parking lot. I was only six blocks from home, but somehow my route took me through Old Town, up and down Rush Street, and slowly through Lincoln Park. I was aware that every male I passed gave it a long look. Not so much the women. Evolution teaches us women are looking for a good provider, not an aesthete. A Volvo driver, not a Hawk man.

  Inside of me, intense joy rose. It had nothing do with what I had accomplished in life. It was entirely fueled by what I drove. This is a pure joy known to teenage boys from the golden age of hot rods, who had nothing else to excite envy except their ride. Even if they were all-staters on the football team, it didn’t mean much if they were driving their dad’s 1940s Olds. What pleasure that Hawk gave me. I kept it at our summer place in Michigan, off of Red Arrow Highway, the old hard road to Detroit. The road had been built in the 1920s and looked retro. There was a roadhouse used by Capone, with a secret gambling room in the basement. A classic brick Shell station. Fruit stands. A sign for the annual Milk Bottle Show. A Frank Lloyd Wright lookalike motel. Reader, on Red Arrow I was envied. I frequented Mikey’s in Bridgman because they had carhops and I could roll down my window to hold up a tray with a burger and a shake, and Chaz could roll down her window and have her own separate tray. Life was good.

  Searching my old movie reviews for the word “Studebaker,” I found these words from my review of Heavy Petting in 1989: There are a lot of adults around today who will tell you that their peak sexual experiences took place in cars, and that beds will never be the same. Not long ago, for example, I took a woman in her 40s for a drive in my 1957 Studebaker, and after sliding across the vinyl upholstery, inhaling the aroma of gasoline and oil, listening to tires spinning on the gravel and waiting for the radio tubes to warm up, she reported that all of these physical associations made her feel exactly as if someone was going to try to take her bra off.

  The following summer, we participated in the annual Ride of La Porte, Indiana. In its simplicity this is an auto event superior to any other in Indiana, including the Indy 500. What you do is, you park your pre-1960 automobile in a lot at the county fairgrounds, drink a Coke, eat a hot dog, and walk around looking at the other cars. I parked my Golden Hawk next to an immaculate 1949 Hudson of the sort Miss Daisy was driven in. Now there was a car. You could raise a family in the backseat. It had less horsepower, but with such a low center of gravity it would cream them on the turns. At 1:00 p.m., “The Stars and Stripes Forever” blared from the loudspeakers, and we pulled into line and paraded out of the fairgrounds. A state cop with a whistle was directing traffic onto the street. As we passed her, she said, “Sharp car!”

  “Did you hear that?” I asked Chaz.

  “Yeah. Sharp car.”

  “Sharp car!” I said. “She called it a sharp car! This is a sharp car!”

  “Sharp car, all right,” Chaz said. She later told this story about a thousand times, apparently because it meant something special to her.

  We drove up and down the streets of La Porte and people sat in lawn chairs and looked at us. No floats. No marching bands. No Sheriff Sid on his horse. Just cars. The citizens of La Porte sat and nodded pleasantly, waved a little, and poured their iced tea. The Golden Hawk was greeted with applause. Perhaps there was a sentimental connection. The Studebaker had been manufactured in South Bend, thirty miles away. Some of these people or their relatives may have worked there.

  One weekend we took the car on a pilgrimage to South Bend, where I expected to see Studebakers lining the streets and backed up at traffic lights, like in a Twilight Zone episode. I saw one rusted President up on blocks in a vacant lot. We drove down by the St. Joseph River, turned right, and there before us was the Studebaker National Museum. We pulled the Hawk into a parking space right next to the entrance, posted “Studebakers Only.” My license plate read FAUCON, French for “hawk.”

  The museum occupied what once had been the largest Studebaker dealership in the world. It was across the street from the original Studebaker plant, now standing forlorn. Inside were cars, fire engines, school buses, troop transports, armored cars. The station wagon with the roof that would slide back so you could bring home a totem pole standing upright. The nifty Lark. Taxis. Ambulances. Touring sedans from the 1930s. Classic Packards like Gatsby drove. Champion trucks. Conestoga wagons, because Studebaker was the only wagon maker that made the transition to cars; their wagons floated downstream to St. Louis and then journeyed overland toward John Wayne movies.

  The museum had the carriage built by Studebaker in which Abraham Lincoln drove to Ford’s Theatre. The last Packard ever made, a show car from the year the Packard died. And postcards, T-shirts, visors, books, scarves, hats, jackets, signs, sweatshirts, scale models, books, mugs, jigsaw puzzles, Studebaker medallions, belt buckles, cuff links, videos, key rings, and place mats. If there was one place in the nation that understands the Studebaker, it is South Bend, Indiana. They also have a university there.

  Our Michigan guests loved to drive to Mikey’s and get the super-thick shakes. One summer our good friends Gillian and Peter Catto and their children visited from London. He drove a Bentley. I took them for a spin in my Studebaker. I startled them by stepping on the gas.

  “Now this is something like it,” Peter said from the backseat.

  “Now tell the story,” Chaz said.

  “When these cars were new,” I said, “they were a lot faster than Corvettes or T-Birds. The salesmen would put a client on the backseat, put a hundred-dollar bill on the front seat, and tell the client he could keep the money if he could overcome the force of the acceleration and lean forward and pick it up while the Hawk was doing zero to sixty.”

  I treasured the Golden Hawk, but I could not give it the care it deserved. I knew nothing about auto mechanics. When it was built, everybody did. When a car stopped and you looked under the hood, you were actually looking for something, not simply performing a roadside pantomime with a car that required a computer programmer. I found the golden honey a good home with Dan Jedlicka, the automotive editor of the Sun-Times, who confessed that he must have driven half the cars in history and the ’57 Hawk was the only one he had ever wanted to own.

  41 GENE SISKEL

  GENE SISKEL AND I were like tuning forks. Strike one, and the other would vibrate at the same frequency. In a group together, we were always intensely aware of each other. Sometimes this took the form of camaraderie, sometimes mutual support, sometimes hostility. We were aware. If something happened that we both thought was funny but weren’t supposed to, God help us if one caught the other’s eye. We usually thought the same things were funny. That may be a sign of intellectual communion.

  Gene died on February 20, 1999. He’s in my mind almost every day. He became less like a friend than like a brother. In 1977 we were on a talk show with Buddy Rogers, once Mary Pickford’s husband, and he said, “You guys have a sibling rivalry. Your problem is, you both think you’re the older brother.” Our image was of a state of permanent feud, but our feelings had nothing to do with image. We knew the buttons to push on each other, and we both made little effort to hide our feelings, warm or cold.

  Once Gene and I were involved in a joint appearance with another Chicago media couple, Steve Dahl and Garry Meier. It was a tribute to them. They were pioneers of free-form radio, even influencing the young Howard Stern. Gene and I were known for our rages against each other, and Steve and Garry were known for their accord. They gave us advice about how to work together as a successful team. Soon afterward Steve and Garry had an angry public falling-out that has lasted until this day.

  Gene and I would never have had that happen to us. In our darkest brooding moments, when competitiveness, resentment, and indignation were at a roiling boil, we never considered it. We were linked in a bond beyond all disputing. “You may be an asshole,” Gene would say, “but you’re my asshole.” If we were fighting, get out of the room. But if we were teamed up against a common target, we were lethal. Our first time on his show, Howard Stern never knew what
hit him. He picked on one of us, and we were both at his throat.

  We both thought of ourselves as full-service, one-stop film critics. We didn’t see why the other one was necessary. We had been linked in a Faustian television format that brought us success at the price of autonomy. No sooner had I expressed a verdict on a movie, my verdict, then here came Siskel with the arrogance to say I was wrong, or, for that matter, the condescension to agree with me. It really felt like that. It was not an act. When we disagreed, there was incredulity; when we agreed, there was a kind of relief. In the television biz, they talk about “chemistry.” Not a thought was given to our chemistry. We just had it, because from the day the Chicago Tribune made Gene its film critic, we were professional enemies. We never had a single meaningful conversation before we started to work on our TV program. Alone together in an elevator, we would study the numbers changing above the door.

  Making this rivalry even worse was the tension of our early tapings. They were held together with baling wire by Thea Flaum, the PBS producer who created the original format. She dealt with us like children. Once when we got fresh coffee and were told we couldn’t take it into the studio, we ganged up and told her we wanted to drink it first. She had a mother’s diplomacy. “Start drinking it now and walk down to the studio slowly.” It would take eight hours to get one show in the can, with breaks for lunch, dinner, and fights. I would break down, or he would break down, or one of us would do something unexpected and throw the other off, or the accumulating angst would make our exchanges seem simply bizarre. There are many witnesses to the terror of those days. Only when we threw away our clipboards and three-by-five cards did we get anything done. We started ad-libbing and the show began to work. We found we could tape a show in under an hour.