Life Itself: A Memoir

by Roger Ebert

  51 HIGH SCHOOL REUNION

  AT OUR FIFTIETH Urbana High School class reunion in the summer of 2010, I watched as every class member walked to the microphone and said a few words. I saw a double image: the same person in 1960 and 2010. The same smile, the same gait, the same body language, the same eyes. I was witnessing a truth. Within our bodies of sixty-seven or sixty-eight years lived all the people we had ever been or seemed to be.

  That spring of 1960, when we graduated, John F. Kennedy was running for president, and there was change in the air. It was the beginning of something—a new decade, a new kind of freedom vaguely predicted by rock and roll. Many of our hopes were delusions. One of our class members would die as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam. Another would die mysteriously fighting with the rebels in Nicaragua. At least one was lost to Alzheimer’s. Others to accidents and disease. Most got married, had children and grandchildren, and now those still alive were gathered at a new hotel located more or less where we used to pick strawberries for ten cents a quart on the university’s South Farms, passing around family photos on their cell phones.

  This would probably be my last reunion. At our tenth reunion, held at the now-disappeared Moose Lodge in Champaign, there was still a little unfinished romantic business in the air. Twinges of old jealousies and heartbreaks. We noticed those who had once gone steady, the boy’s class ring worn on a chain around the girl’s neck, resting between her breasts in a gloat of possession. Now they had married others, but that night they took the dance floor together.

  There had been little drinking in high school—none, in fact, that I ever saw. Or much smoking. At the Moose Lodge in 1970 a lot of us were smoking or drinking, and one classmate wanted to ride back to Urbana on top of my car. Here he was in 2010, one of the most respected men in Champaign County. But still—this is the point—still absolutely the same man, sober now but with the same sardonic grin, the same sideways amusement at life. Here were girls I dated and parked with in the moonlight to quote Thomas Wolfe on his trembling romantic destiny—his, and of course, ours. Then we kissed not so much in a sexual way as with the tender solemnity we thought of at the time as love. In 2010 that is all so long ago, but the same persons live inside, and while we live we have memories. Most of our memories are still in there somewhere, needing only a nudge to awaken. Here was Pegeen Linn, a girl who appeared with me in a class play. I hadn’t thought about that play once in all these years, but now into my mind came the memorized monologue. From where? From where everything still is.

  I went to school with these people for four years. With those who attended St. Mary’s, for twelve. They evoke associations more fully than most of those I experienced later. One of the most noble undertakings in the history of the cinema is Michael Apted’s Up Series of documentaries, which begins with a group of British seven-year-olds, and revisits them every seven years, most recently in 2005 when they were forty-nine. The films are the proof of Wordsworth’s belief that “the child is father of the man.” Looking at my classmates, I wondered if perhaps the person we are in school is the person we will always be, despite everything else that comes our way. All that changes is that slowly we become more aware of what matters in life.

  On the Saturday morning we took a bus tour around the twin cities. Down the leafy old streets we remembered as children, past our old houses, past Lorado Taft’s statue Lincoln the Lawyer, which faces the high school. We saw ghost buildings on every street and called out what used to be but was no more: the Elbow Room, the Urbana Lincoln Hotel, Mel Root’s all-night restaurant, the old Steak ’n Shake, Hood’s Drugs with its chocolate and marshmallow sundaes. We drove out into vast new “developments” rising from the farmland southeast of town, $500,000 homes surrounding a golf course, looking exactly like similar “developments” all over the nation and not at all like our Urbana neighborhoods.

  We drove around the enormous campus, half the buildings new since our time, most of the old buildings still there. Past Memorial Stadium with ungainly sky boxes now surmounting the grandstands where rich and poor once froze alike. Past the Morrow Plots, the nation’s oldest agricultural research field; the Undergraduate Library next to it was buried five levels into the ground to avoid casting shade on it. Past the Assembly Hall, now threatened with obsolescence because it wasn’t large enough to accommodate the new scoreboards. The new scoreboards!

  We passed the Taylor Thomas subdivision, named in honor of our history teacher, possibly the first African American to teach at Urbana High. In his civics class he taught me much of what I believe about politics. When he attempted to buy a house in a neighborhood mostly populated by professors at the university, the house was snatched up by a neighbor to keep him from moving in. He bought a lot just outside the city limits and built the home he and his wife occupied until he died. He never mentioned that in class.

  Our sightseeing trip took us down a road through the university farms, where we once parked to make out. There in a cornfield, the university is building the new Blue Waters supercomputer. Our hometown, the birthplace of HAL 9000, would now give birth to a computer more powerful than the next five hundred largest supercomputers combined, operating at a quadrillion instructions per second.

  Incredibly, four of our teachers were at the reunion. Here was Dan Perrino, our bandmaster and music teacher. Paul Smith, who told me I was one of his best physics students, although that’s not how I recall it. Carolyn Conrad, who inspired me in English and drama. The poetic Carolyn Leseur, who turned me on to Charles Dickens for a lifetime, and who told Chaz I was always reading a book during class. Here was John Rasmussen, whose house I stopped at many mornings before grade school, so we and his sister Jeanne and brother Jerry could ride there together on our bikes. Here was this year’s emcee, Dick James, the best-selling psychologist, who has probably forgotten he once threw a hard-packed snowball that gave me a black eye, but I haven’t.

  There were many women in the room I’d dated in that naïve time. I noticed all evening classmates smiled at one another in a subtly different way if they had reason to remember private tenderness. Marty McCloy wasn’t there because she was Class of 1961, but somehow high school romance for me is evoked by the two of us on a hot summer night on the dance floor of the Tigers’ Den, holding each other closely, very serious and inward of mind, while the Everly Brothers played “Dream.” Under our armpits, sweat formed dark circles, and our cheeks were moist as they touched. Many years later Marty posted a comment on my blog saying I was the best kisser in school. Why don’t we ever learn these things when they could do us some good?

  52 STUDS

  THE GREATEST MAN I knew well was Studs Terkel. I met him very soon after I moved to Chicago. It was in the Old Town apartment of Herman and Marilou Kogan; Herman was the Chicago Daily News editor responsible for getting me hired at the Sun-Times. The evening was all conversation, nonstop, and all consequential: no small talk or idle chat for these people. I felt as if I’d been put at the same table with the grown-ups. Not long after, the Nobel Prize–winning novelist Doris Lessing visited Chicago. Studs knew I had read all her books while studying at the University of Cape Town, and he also knew, more importantly, that I had a car and knew how to drive. Studs never learned how to drive; he enlisted me as chauffeur and I spent two days observing Studs showing Lessing his own Chicago. We drove past the Jackson Park lagoon and Studs made us stop and sit on a park bench where, he said, his namesake Studs Lonigan had first kissed Lucy Scanlon.

  I ran across Studs countless times over the years. He was an old man and couldn’t drive and he was everywhere at everything. The opening nights of Second City. A bartender’s birthday. A political rally. A picnic in somebody’s backyard. Riccardo’s every Friday night. Looking up from a page at Stuart Brent’s bookshop. Handing in an article at the paper. The emcee standing on third base at Wrigley Field for Mike Royko’s funeral. Three seats ahead on the No. 36 bus. Visiting friends in Michigan. I saw that man intentionally or by accident more than anyone
else I wasn’t related to, involved with, or employed by. So did many others. Two people meeting with Studs standing between them would hear from him how extraordinary they both were. He knew no one but invaluable people. He never forgot a thing. Even at the end, it was all there, present in his mind. It is melancholy fact that after my first illness Studs visited me in the hospital more times than I had visited him. When we visited Studs three days after he had open-heart surgery, I expected to find a sick man. I found Studs sitting up in bed, surrounded by books and papers, receiving friends. The author Garry Wills appeared at his door. Studs had just finished reading his new book. He was filled with questions.

  The lesson Studs taught me is that your life is over when you stop living it. If you can truly “retire,” you only had a job, but not an occupation. Among his books is one about this very subject: Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. It became a Broadway musical. One reason Terkel got people to talk so openly with him is that he came across as this guy sitting down with you to have a good, long talk. Pick up one of his books, and now you’re sitting next to the guy. You can’t stop reading. Studs had an interviewing technique I admired: He combined astonishment with curiosity. He couldn’t believe his ears. He repeated with enthusiasm what his subject had just said, and the subject invariably continued and expanded and wanted to make his own story better.

  It’s curious how only two of Studs’s books are technically about himself, but in a way they’re all about himself. Reading a novel, we may identify with one of the characters. Reading Studs, we identify with him—with the questions. Through his example, we become inquiring minds. And his subjects range widely. Look at his book Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith. He provides not New Age malarkey, but real people having real thoughts about their real lives and the inevitability of their own real deaths. He started writing the book after the death of his wife, Ida, a beautiful woman who stood by him in the good times (he starred on one of the first sitcoms in network history) and the bad (he lost that job because of the blacklist). He was envious that her FBI file was thicker than his own.

  When Ida grew older, she refused to use a cane, she told me, “because I fall so gracefully.” He told his friends her last words to him, as she was wheeled into the OR for heart surgery, were: “Louis, what have you gotten me into now?” Some weeks after her death, Chaz and I talked Studs into sailing along with us on Dusty Cohl’s Floating Film Festival. One afternoon, over coffee in the cafeteria, he interviewed Chaz on her thoughts about death for the book. Never a lost moment.

  Studs died on October 31, 2008, at ninety-six, just missing the election of Barack Obama, which he had promised to witness. Was Studs the greatest Chicagoan? I cannot think of another. For me, he represented the generous, scrappy, liberal, wisecracking heart of the city. If you met him, he was your friend. That happened to the hundreds and hundreds of people he interviewed for his radio show and twenty best-selling books. He wrote down the oral histories of those of his time who did not have a voice. In conversation he could draw up every single one of their names.

  Studs said many times in the final years, “I’m ready to check out.” Around the time of his ninety-third birthday, Chaz and I had dinner with him, a few days before he was having a heart bypass. He was looking forward to it. “The docs say the odds are four to one in my favor,” he told us, with the voice of a guy who studied the angles. “At age ninety-three, those are pretty good odds. I’m gonna have a whack at it. Otherwise, I’m Dead Man Walking. If I don’t have the operation, how long do I have? Six months, maybe. That’s no way to live, waiting to die. I’ve had ninety-three years—tumultuous years. That’s a pretty good run.”

  It was a run during which his great mind never let him down. “This is ironic,” he told me. “I’m not the one was has Alzheimer’s. It’s the country that has Alzheimer’s. There was a survey the other day showing that most people think our best president was Reagan. Not Abraham Lincoln. FDR came in tenth. People don’t pay attention anymore. They don’t read the news.” Studs read the news. He sang with Pete Seeger: I sell the morning papers sir, my name is Jimmy Brown. / Everybody knows that I’m the newsboy of the town. / You can hear me yellin’ “Morning Star,” runnin’ along the street. / Got no hat upon my head no shoes upon my feet.

  Studs knew jazz inside out, gospel by heart, the blues as he learned them after being raised in the transient hotel run by his mother on Wells Street. He wasn’t the only man who had a going-away party when he left to fight in World War II. He might have been the only one to have Billie Holiday sing at his party. He was never a communist. He was a proud man of the Left. J. Edgar Hoover thought he was a subversive. “That guy Hoover,” he said, “had a lifelong suspicion of those who thought the Constitution actually meant something.” Almost every single day of his life he wore a red-checked shirt and bright red socks. Of course he smoked cigars. He liked a drink and loved to hang out in newspaper bars and in ethnic neighborhoods with his pals. I never saw him drunk, and believe me, I had plenty of opportunities to.

  During his final illness, we received bulletins from those who loved him and cared for him. This was the stunner, in an e-mail from his dear friend Sydney Lewis, on September 11, 2008: “After hearing his very clear wishes, his son Dan called hospice. The admissions nurse, a lovely woman, said in her many years of doing this work she’d never seen a person more at peace over the decision. Really, all he wants is for J.R. [his caregiver J. R. Millares] and Dan to be around and never again to have to leave his house.”

  He had been in touch through the summer, by e-mail. He wasn’t receiving a lot of visitors. He never mentioned his health. He was online encouraging me. That was so typical of him. After I broke my hip, he e-mailed me but never mentioned the hip. He said: “You have added a NEW VOICE, a new sound, to your natural one. This—what you write now—is a richer one—a new dimension. It’s more than about movies. Yes, it’s about movies but there is something added: A REFLECTION on life itself.” I thought twice about whether I should quote that. I did it because it is the voice of Studs Terkel’s love. Studs reaching outside his failing body and giving encouragement, as he always did for me and countless others. He couldn’t have written a shelf of books after listening to hundreds of people and writing down their words if his heart had not been unconditionally open to the world.

  An e-mail on September 15, from Sydney: “When I got here today he was gloomy and hadn’t eaten. He said he’s half interested in leaving, half in staying. After I printed out the great Booklist review his new book P.S. got, he perked up, we talked about the election, and before I knew it he’d polished off some meat loaf and grapes and was demanding more grapes! So it goes. I suggested he hang around for at least a few things: book publication, World Series, election, and Garry Wills’s Terkel retrospective for NY Review of Books. He’s agreed to try.” On October 23, his friend Andrew Patner e-mailed: “The man with the greatest spirit known to man is sitting up and taking nourishment. Swallow coaching, even some (cut-up) meat. Gained back a few pounds. Opining on the election (surprise!), the World Series (surprise!), how lousy his new book is being marketed (surprise!). He’s looking now to New Year’s Eve (‘Why not?’), but pulling at least for Election Day (‘I can’t miss it!’).”

  He was the most widely and deeply loved man I ever hope to know. “When I go,” he told us, “my ashes will be mixed with Ida’s and scattered in Bughouse Square.” There would be no stone, although being Studs he had written his epitaph: “Curiosity didn’t kill this cat.”

  53 MY LAST WORDS

  IT WAS AN inexplicable instinct that led me to agree when Chris Jones contacted me requesting an interview. The idea of Esquire appealed to me. I wrote a bunch of interviews for them in the 1970s, when it was the crucible of the New Journalism. What goes around, comes around. I’d read some of Chris’s stuff. He’s a good writer. You sense the person there. He’s not holding his s
ubjects at arm’s length. I knew I’d have to play fair. I’ve done interviews for years. This was no time to get sensitive and ask for photo approval, or an advance look at the piece. I’d been the goose, and now it was my turn to be the gander. I’ve never known what that means, geese-wise.

  Chaz is always my protector. She had her doubts. She worries that I’m too impulsive and trusting. She is correct. Left entirely to my own devices, God knows what I might be capable of. She would follow me into the mouth of a cannon, but first she’d say, “Do you really think it’s a good idea to crawl into that cannon?” Then I would explain that it was my duty as a journalist, a film critic, a liberal, or a human being, etc., to crawl into the cannon. And she’d suggest I sleep on it and crawl into the cannon fresh and early in the morning.

  Chaz wondered if I really thought it was a good idea to invite Chris Jones or anyone else to do an interview that would involve being followed around and observed informally. I said I believed he wasn’t looking for a kill but just wanted to write a good article. He was a real writer. We talked about it. I knew he was coming when Chaz started in with the housecleaning.

  Chris Jones was a very nice man. He told us he lives in Ottawa, was teaching journalism at the University of Montana, and is married with two kids. So that tells you something. If the same man is also a senior writer for Esquire, he’s my man. He arrived at the appointed hour, and he did an excellent job of describing everything that happened subsequently.