by Roger Ebert
After seventeen years she and Merle were divorced, but remained friends. By the time I met her, about six years after that, she was a government trial attorney specializing in civil rights cases. We like to tell people we were “introduced by Ann Landers,” which is technically true, although Eppie Lederer didn’t know her at the time. The night I took Eppie to an open AA meeting, we decided to go out to dinner together afterward; this was the first and only time we ever had dinner for two. In the restaurant, Chaz was at a nearby table that included a couple of people I knew. I didn’t know her, but I’d seen her before and was attracted. I liked her looks, her voluptuous figure, and the way she presented herself. She took a lot of care with her appearance and her clothes never looked quickly thrown together. She seemed to be holding the attention of her table. You never get anywhere with a woman you can’t talk intelligently with.
Something possessed me to pull off one of the oldest tricks in the book. “I have a couple of friends over there I’d love for you to meet,” I told Eppie, and got up to take her across. As the introductions went around, Chaz was included. When we went back to our own table, I had her card. She was an attorney with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. I studied the card and showed it to Eppie, who said, “You sly fox.”
I came back from the Toronto International Film Festival with the card on my mind. I called Chaz and invited her to attend the Lyric Opera, which I’d subscribed to a year earlier because Danny Newman, the Lyric’s press agent, had stood in my office door and said, “A man like you not going to the Lyric, you should be ashamed.” Chaz, who later told me she never expected to hear from me again, said, “Actually, I’m on the women’s board of the Chicago Symphony.” I said I loved the symphony, but I had, cough, subscription seats at the Lyric for Monday night. The opera was Tosca. She said it was her favorite. “Does that scare you?” “No,” I said, “why should it?” At the time I knew nothing about Tosca.
We went to dinner afterward at a restaurant in Greektown. Something happened. She had a particular quality. She didn’t seem to be a “date” but an equal. She knew where she stood, and I found that attractive. I was going out to Los Angeles a few days later, and I asked her to come along. She said she would, but only with her mother’s permission. We drove over to the near West Side to the senior center where Johnnie Mae Hammel lived.
To her family Chaz’s mother was known as Big Mama, a common title in African-American families. Johnnie Mae, tall and courtly, took my hand in both of hers and steered me to a chair across from a coffee table on which rested a well-worn Bible. Chaz made us tea. Big Mama told me about her children, Chaz’s four brothers and four sisters. “Charlie was the second youngest,” Big Mama said, “but she was the boss.” The next day Chaz said her mother’s blessing had been conferred, and we flew to Los Angeles, not having yet slept together. I got us adjoining rooms at the Sunset Marquis, as I had promised Big Mama. On the sofa we emerged from exploratory passion and I told her she was incredibly sexy. She replied with words that held an erotic charge: “You haven’t seen anything yet.”
We formed a serious bond rather quickly. It was an understood thing. I was in love, I was serious, I was ready for my life to change. I had been on hold too long. She lived on the eighty-second floor of the Hancock Center and started sending me daily e-mails, even after we’d seen each other earlier the same evening. Her love letters were poetic, idealistic, and sometimes passionate. I responded as a man and a lover. As a newspaperman, I observed that she never, ever, made a copy-reading error. I saved every one of her letters along with my own and have them encrypted on my computer, locked inside a file where I can’t reach them because the program and the operating system are now twenty years out of date. But they’re in there. I’m not about to entrust them to anyone at the Apple Genius Bar.
On Thanksgiving two months after our first date, Chaz held a dinner at her apartment in the Hancock. I’d already met her children, but now I met Ina New-Jones and Myrin New, her closest niece and nephew, Myrin announcing he was an expert in turkey carving before assaulting the bird so savagely that it was fit for turkey salad. At a later family gathering I met Chaz’s first husband, Merle Smith, an electrical engineer. I liked him then and like him today. I sensed no awkwardness. They’d been apart long enough that I hadn’t been poaching.
Josibiah, always called Jay, was tall and taciturn, starting to grow his dreadlocks, easy to talk to. I was pleased that he confided in me. Sonia, a poised beauty with an outgoing personality, was attending Texas Southern in Houston and brought home Marquette Evans, the son of a Chicago minister. They were married not long after, and one day in Evanston Hospital I held in my arms one-day-old Raven, our first grandchild. Mark and Sonia filled my unrealized need to be a grandfather. In due course Sonia and Mark also presented us with Emil and Mark Taylor, and Jay became the father of Joseph. He and Joseph’s mother never married, but I met Sheena soon after he did, and her Joseph is one of ours.
Our lives grew together. One day in May at the Cannes Film Festival we rented a car and drove over to San Remo in Italy to visit the grave of Edward Lear, and on the way back we stopped in Monte Carlo and in a café over coffee I proposed marriage. Why did I choose Monte Carlo, a place I have no desire ever to see again? I should have chosen London or Venice or for that matter Chicago. I wasn’t thinking in those terms. We were sitting there talking in a little café at the end of a happy day and I became overwhelmed with the desire to propose marriage. Chaz filled my mind. She excited me physically. She was funny. She made a reading of my life rather quickly, understood what I did and how I had to do it, and after I proposed marriage I asked if she would resign as a lawyer because I wanted her to travel more than she would otherwise be able to.
Chaz became the vice president of the Ebert Company. It wasn’t merely a title. She organized my contracts, protected my interests, negotiated, wheeled and dealed. I’ve never understood business and have no patience with business meetings or legal details. I had a weakness for signing things just to make them go away. She observed this and defended me. It was a partnership.
I’d been told that if I thought I knew about extended families, I didn’t know anything until I married into an African-American family. This was true. My downstate relatives extended only to my uncles, aunts, and first and second cousins, the only cousins still living. Grandma Stumm’s six grown children between them produced only three children. Chaz’s family was large and stayed in constant communication. At a birthday party for Big Mama soon after I met Chaz, every one of her children and most of their children attended, some from Minneapolis, Atlanta, and Washington, and I met cousins to the third degree. There was a ceremony at which each child presented Big Mama with a rose and made a speech about her importance in their lives. At the center of the ceremony was a photograph of Big Daddy, who had been dead for some years.
Chaz’s childhood wasn’t deprived. She didn’t feel poor. She remembers Big Daddy taking them for Sunday drives in the family car, a Chevy Corvette: “When I see one today I realize how small it is. All I remember from those days was that everyone seemed to fit inside.” Her family was a great stable center, and I have become especially close with her oldest brother, Johnnie, who is kind right down to his toes. She talks about growing up when everybody knew everybody and kids joked about the Nasty Man, who was always good for a lollipop but then you had to get outta there before he got you on his knee and started squeezing you. Big Mama was a precinct captain in the Daley machine. She was also a Spiritualist and healer and had the gift of the laying on of hands. I don’t believe in any such gift, but Chaz told me she knew what she knew.
Chaz’s family is in constant communication. She has a memory that retains the names of all children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, present and former spouses, any of their previous or subsequent spouses, the offspring from those marriages, former boyfriends and girlfriends, and neighbors who have been appointed honorary uncles and aunts. All of these people are in to
uch with one another. They seem to know who everybody is dating, how marriages are going, who got hired or fired, who might have a drinking or health problem, how grades are in school, and who is being invited to weddings. Her family can effortlessly fill a church for a funeral. Keeping track of everyone, which I have never been able to do, makes remembering all the characters in War and Peace seem like a breeze.
We had times together I will always remember. Right after our first Christmas, we flew to Venice, where I promised Chaz it would be rainy, cold, deserted, and we would have it all to ourselves. That was how I’d first seen Venice in 1966, and it was the same. It was romantic, sleeping late in the Royal Danieli and then waking up and making love and looking out across the Grand Canal. The hotel was half empty, the rooms a fraction of the summer cost. The city was shrouded in mist and always haunting. Romance in the winter in Venice is intimate and private, almost hushed. One night we went to the Municipal Casino, carefully taking only as much money we were ready to lose, and lost it. In a little restaurant we had enough left for spaghetti with two plates and afterward lacked even the fare for the canal bus. We walked the long way back through the night and cold, our arms around each other, figures appearing out of the fog, lights traced on the wet stones, pausing now and again to kiss and be solemn. It was one of those experiences that seals a marriage.
At Cannes we bought a chicken sandwich for Quentin Tarantino in a beach restaurant, after Reservoir Dogs had been a success but he was broke. The next time we saw him at Cannes was after Pulp Fiction, when Miramax had rented a ballroom in the Carlton for him. It was the first time we remembered. Another night, after seeing Boyz n the Hood and being awed by it, we drove out of town for dinner with John Singleton, so young and filled with plans. Chaz seemed to know everybody and to remember all the names.
We had fun together. In Salvador, the capital of Bahia in Brazil, we decided to go to a Macarena nightclub and practiced the dance in our hotel room. Wandering around the town, we saw a dress shop with local fashions and Chaz bought a low-cut white summer gown with lots of ruffles. She looked sexy as hell when we left the hotel. When we walked into the club, an odd silence fell. Something was wrong. People seemed to be smiling for the wrong reasons. An English-speaking waitress took mercy on us and explained the dress was a national costume intended for pageants and such. Wearing it to a nightclub was like me dressing as Uncle Sam.
In London, we stayed at 22 Jermyn Street, the former Eyrie Mansion. Chaz drew me into the contemporary art scene. I’d started collecting my Edward Lear watercolors in the 1980s, but after we moved into our town house with expanses of bare wall, we could think in terms of larger paintings. In the Purdy Hicks Gallery on the South Bank, where we’d gone to look at work by our friend David Hiscock, we saw a spacious canvas in a storeroom and found ourselves side by side just gazing at it. This was by Gillian Ayres, a formidable abstract expressionist who covered huge areas with bright impasto. It was a work inspired by a kite festival in India, and its energy flooded the room. Over a few years we obtained five works by Ayres and even had dinner with her one night at the Groucho Club, where the raffish atmosphere matched her roots in London’s 1950s.
The greatest pleasure came from annual trips we made with our grandchildren Raven, Emil, and Taylor, and their parents Sonia and Mark. Josibiah and his son Joseph came on one of those trips, where we made our way from Budapest to Prague, Vienna, and Venice. We went with the Evans family to Hawaii, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Venice twice, and Stockholm. We walked the ancient pathway from Cambridge to Grantchester. Emil announced that for him there was no such thing as getting up too early, and every morning the two of us would meet in the hotel lobby and go out for long walks together. I took my camera. One morning in Budapest he asked me to take a photo of two people walking ahead of us and holding hands.
“Why?”
“Because they look happy.”
At last I could show off my city secrets. I had been happy enough to drift for years lonely and solitary through strange cities, but it was more fun with the family. One quality the children had was the ability to feel at home anywhere, in restaurants, theaters, museums. They were attentive and absorbed. They had been well raised.
Those times seem more precious now that they’re in the past. I don’t walk easily anymore. When we were married I told Chaz that in 1987 I’d had a salivary tumor removed. Good Dr. Schlichter observed the surgery and told me, “They got it all. Every last speck.” But I was warned my cancer was slow growing and sneaky and might return years later. That’s what happened, and it set into motion all of my current troubles.
I mentioned how expert and exacting Chaz became in my care. Now I must tell you of her love. In the hospital, day after day, she was my staff of strength. In the rehabilitations she cheered me through every faltering step, and when I looked at a flight of three steps I was intended to climb, it was her will that helped me lift my feet. To visit a hospital is not pleasant. To do it hundreds of times is heroic.
The TV show was using “guest co-hosts,” and Richard Roeper held down the fort. But after the first surgery failed and I nearly died, Chaz had faith, she encouraged me, her presence gave me strength so I would return to TV. That’s why I had the two later surgeries—not to remove cancer, but to restore my speech and appearance. She brought my friends to see me. Studs came several times. Father Andrew Greeley was cheerful and optimistic. She brought McHugh and Mary Jo, Gregory Nava, Jon and Pamela Anderson, the mayor’s wife Maggie, the actress Bonnie Hunt (who had once been an oncology nurse at Northwestern). She had become friends with the healer Caroline Myss and brought her to my bedside to evoke positive thoughts. I did not and do not believe in that kind of healing, but I see only good in the feelings it can engender. I am no longer religious, but every single day Chaz took my hand before she left and recited the Twenty-third Psalm and the Lord’s Prayer, and from this I took great comfort.
After I was allowed to return home for the first time, Chaz decided I was ready for the Pritikin Longevity Center near Miami. We’d been going to Pritikin, first in Santa Monica and then Florida, since before we were married, and their theories about diet and exercise became gospel to me (sometimes more in the breach than the observance). I had for years been an enthusiastic walker, but now, after rehabilitation, I was using a walker and it was slow going.
I couldn’t eat the largely vegetarian diet at Pritikin, but Chaz knew the cooks would blend a liquid diet to supplement my cans of nutrition. She also informed me that I was going to walk, exercise, and get a lot of sunshine. Because it was painful to sit in most chairs, Pritikin found me a reclining chair that faced a big TV. I had brought along a pile of books. I cracked open the sliding doors and a fragrant breeze came in, and I would have been completely content to stay there just like that. It was not to be. Chaz ordered me on my feet for morning and afternoon walks, with my caregivers Sandi Lee or Millie Salmon trailing along. I’d go as far as I thought I could, and Chaz would unfailingly pick out another farther goal to aim for. She was relentless.
In the gym every day I cranked through twenty minutes on the treadmill and then worked out with weights and exercise bands. After the gym she took me outside to sit in the sun for half an hour. She explained how natural vitamin D would help strengthen my bones, which were weakened during the degeneration of weeks of postsurgical bed rest. I resented her unceasing encouragement. I was lazy. It was ever so much preferable to sit and read. But she was making me do the right thing.
She did it all over again after my next three tours through the Rehabilitation Institute. Four times I learned to walk again, and each time she took me to Pritikin or Rancho La Puerta in Tecate, Mexico, which I had grown to love. I parked the wheelchair for good, I was no longer using a walker. I was walking, not quickly or for miles, but walking. And getting vitamin D. At home, we took walks around the neighborhood and down to the Lily Pond in Lincoln Park. We began to go to all the screenings again. She found Dr. Mark Baker, an exercise ther
apist, to work regularly with me.
It must not have been the most pleasant thing in the world to trail along as I walked slowly. She must have wished we could still be taking our trips overseas. When she thought I was ready for it, she took me back to London and Cannes, and every autumn to the Toronto festival. I know that left on my own I would have stayed at home in my favorite Relax the Back chair. That I am still active, going places, moving, in good health, is directly because of her.
We planned all along to produce a show that would continue the Siskel & Ebert & Roeper tradition. Chaz did all the heavy lifting, the negotiations, the contracts. We were going to be the coproducers, but I told her she was born for the job. She repeatedly told me I needed to appear more on the show, even with my computer voice. My instinct was to guard myself; I can never again be on television as I once was. She said, “Yes, but people are interested in what you have to say, not in how you say it.” The point is not which of us is correct. The point is that she’s encouraging me. She has more faith in me than I do.
I sensed from the first that Chaz was the woman I would marry, and I know after twenty years that my feelings were true. She has been with me in sickness and in health, certainly far more sickness than we could have anticipated. I will be with her, strengthened by her example. She continues to make my life possible, and her presence fills me with love and a deep security. That’s what a marriage is for. Now I know.