by Roger Ebert
What I expect to happen is that my body will fail, my mind will cease to function, and that will be that. My genes will not live on, because I have had no children. I am comforted by Richard Dawkins’s theory of memes. Those are mental units: thoughts, ideas, gestures, notions, songs, beliefs, rhymes, ideals, teachings, sayings, phrases, clichés that move from mind to mind as genes move from body to body. After a lifetime of writing, teaching, broadcasting, and telling too many jokes, I will leave behind more memes than many. They will all also eventually die, but so it goes.
O’Rourke’s had a photograph of Brendan Behan on the wall, and under it this quotation, which I memorized:
I respect kindness in human beings first of all, and kindness to animals. I don’t respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer.
That does a pretty good job of summing it up. “Kindness” covers all of my political beliefs. No need to spell them out. I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.
One of these days I will encounter what Henry James called on his deathbed “the distinguished thing.” I will not be conscious of the moment of passing. In this life I have already been declared dead. It wasn’t so bad. After the first ruptured artery, the doctors thought I was finished. Chaz said she sensed that I was still alive and was communicating to her that I wasn’t finished yet. She said our hearts were beating in unison, although my heartbeat couldn’t be discovered. She told the doctors I was alive, they did what doctors do, and here I am, alive.
Do I believe her? Absolutely. I believe her literally—not symbolically, figuratively, or spiritually. I believe she was actually aware of my call and that she sensed my heartbeat. I believe she did it in the real, physical world I have described, the one that I share with my wristwatch. I see no reason why such communication could not take place. I’m not talking about telepathy, psychic phenomenon, or a miracle. The only miracle is that she was there when it happened, as she was for many long days and nights. I’m talking about her standing there and knowing something. Haven’t many of us experienced that? Come on, haven’t you? What goes on happens at a level not accessible to scientists, theologians, mystics, physicists, philosophers, or psychiatrists. It’s a human kind of a thing.
Someday I will no longer call out, and there will be no heartbeat. I will be dead. What happens then? From my point of view, nothing. Absolutely nothing. All the same, as I wrote to Monica Eng, whom I have known since she was six, “You’d better cry at my memorial service.” I correspond with a dear friend, the wise and gentle Australian director Paul Cox. Our subject sometimes turns to death. In 2010 he came very close to dying before receiving a liver transplant. In 1988 he made a documentary named Vincent: The Life and Death of Vincent van Gogh. Paul wrote me that in his Arles days, van Gogh called himself “a simple worshiper of the external Buddha.” Paul told me that in those days, Vincent wrote:
Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map.
Why, I ask myself, shouldn’t the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France?
Just as we take a train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star. We cannot get to a star while we are alive any more than we can take the train when we are dead. So to me it seems possible that cholera, tuberculosis and cancer are the celestial means of locomotion. Just as steamboats, buses and railways are the terrestrial means.
To die quietly of old age would be to go there on foot.
That is a lovely thing to read, and a relief to find I will probably take the celestial locomotive. Or, as his little dog, Milou, says whenever Tintin proposes a journey, “Not by foot, I hope!”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THIS BOOK BEGAN to take shape in my head after I began writing a blog and found myself drawn to the autobiographical. In that process, at a low time in my life, I was greatly encouraged by Chaz. She was my angel.
Mitch Hoffman, my editor at Grand Central, was unfailingly encouraging and helpful at every stage of the editorial process. His suggestions showed a deep sympathy with the enterprise. Lindsey Rose of Grand Central, his associate, was tireless throughout the proofreading process and in assembling the photographs.
Carol Iwata, my invaluable assistant for more than twenty years, was heroic in tracking down sources and permissions for the photos. She performed wonders. My caregiver, Millie Salmon, was a daily encouragement.
My agents, Joel Gotler and Brian Lipson, were instrumental right from the start. I also received much help from my lawyers Eliot Ephraim and Anita First.
Some of these words passed under the scrutiny of Laura Emerick, my editor at the Sun-Times, Sue Roush and Dorothy O’Brien at Universal Press/Andrews & McMeel, and Jim Emerson, editor of rogerebert.com. They repaired countless errors.
CONTENTS
Front Cover Image
Welcome
Dedication
Memory
1 410 East Washington
2 My People
3 My Old Man
4 My Mother
5 St. Mary’s
6 Dan-Dan the Yo-Yo Man
7 Summer
8 Car, Table, Counter, or TakHomaSak
9 Blackie
10 My Vocation
11 Newspaper Days
12 High School
13 University
14 The Daily Illini
15 My Trip To Hollywood
16 Cape Town
17 London Perambulating
18 Eyrie Mansion
19 All by Myself Alone
20 Sun-Times
21 My New Job
22 Zonka
23 McHugh
24 O’Rourke’s
25 Leisure of the Theory Class
26 Alcoholism
27 Books Do Furnish a Room
28 Russ Meyer
29 The Interviewer
30 Lee Marvin
31 Robert Mitchum
32 Big John Wayne
33 “Irving! Brang ’em on!”
34 Ingmar Bergman
35 Martin Scorsese
36 “Fiddle on the corner where the quarters are”
37 “I wasn’t popular when people thought I was popular”
38 Werner Herzog
39 Bill Nack
40 The Sweetest Set of Wheels in Town
41 Gene Siskel
42 Jugular
43 The Talk Shows
44 When I Laughed in Study Hall
45 My Romances
46 Chaz
47 Good News and Bad News
48 Nil by Mouth
49 Musing My Mind
50 Putting a New Face on Things
51 High School Reunion
52 Studs
53 My Last Words
54 How I Believe in God
55 Go Gently
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Roger Ebert
Copyright
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ROGER EBERT HAS been reviewing films for the Chicago Sun-Times since 1967 and won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1975. He has appeared on television for four decades, including twenty-three years as co-host of Siskel & Ebert at the Movies, and is now managing editor and reviewer for Ebert Presents At the Movies.
His previous books include Scorsese by Ebert; Awake in the Dark; The Great Movies, volumes I, II, and III; twenty annual volum
es of Roger Ebert’s Movie Yearbook; Your Movie Sucks; Two Weeks in the Midday Sun: A Cannes Notebook; I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie; and the Norton anthology Roger Ebert’s Book of Film.
The only film critic with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Roger Ebert is also an honorary member of the Directors Guild of America. He received the Carl Sandburg Literary Award of the Chicago Public Library, and won the Webby Awards Person of the Year in 2010. His website, RogerEbert.com, receives 110 million visits a year.
He lives with his wife, Chaz Hammelsmith Ebert, in Chicago.
Also by Roger Ebert
An Illini Century
A Kiss Is Still a Kiss
The Perfect London Walk (with Daniel Curley)
Roger Ebert’s Movie Home Companion
Two Weeks in the Midday Sun: A Cannes Notebook
Future of the Movies (with Gene Siskel)
Behind the Phantom’s Mask
Ebert’s Little Movie Glossary
Ebert’s Bigger Little Movie Glossary
Roger Ebert’s Book of Film
Questions for the Movie Answer Man
I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie
The Great Movies
The Great Movies II
Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert
Your Movie Sucks
Roger Ebert’s Movie Yearbook
Roger Ebert’s Four-Star Reviews 1967–2007
Scorsese by Ebert
The Great Movies III
The Pot and How to Use It: The Mystery and Romance of the Rice Cooker
Copyright
Copyright © 2011 by Roger Ebert
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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First eBook Edition: September 2011
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ISBN: 978-0-446-58498-2