Fund-raising is often described as the second-oldest profession, after prostitution—though that last should be called the world’s oldest oppression. Karl Marx pawned the silverware and jewelry of his wife, Jenny, the daughter of a baron, and depended on handouts from the well-to-do Friedrich Engels. Harriet Tubman worked odd jobs and passed the hat in churches to support her underground railroad, which freed more than three hundred enslaved people. Isadora Duncan enlisted her lover, an heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune, to finance her dancing and her trips to a newly Communist Russia. Gandhi learned about fund-raising and accounting in South Africa and brought both skills to the independence movement in India. Emma Goldman, who started out with five dollars and a sewing machine, raised money from such well-to-do supporters as the art collector Peggy Guggenheim. Eva and Anne Morgan, one a niece and the other a daughter of J. P. Morgan, the most powerful financier in U.S. history, used their family’s money to finance women workers who were protesting before and after the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, even putting up a Fifth Avenue mansion as security for bail when those protesters were arrested. The suffrage movement might not have succeeded without the support of Alva Belmont and Mrs. Frank Leslie, two of the few women who gained control of fortunes through widowhood. Wealth next to poverty is surrealistic. Fund-raising is pointing that out.
· It’s the end of the 1980s, a time of corporate profits going up and the Berlin Wall coming down. I’m on a private plane to Palm Springs. I know only one of the ten people on board, the man I’m with. He’s one of only two rich men I’ve dated in my life. The first inherited his wealth and so was terminally insecure, though he headed his father’s book publishing business. Since in my East Toledo neighborhood reading books was a sign of rebellion, I didn’t realize that, for him, books meant conforming. The man on the plane is more secure because he made his own money, yet he has acquired limousine and private plane habits that have begun to isolate him. On the plus side, however, we both love dancing and laughing and have no time to argue about all the things we disagree on.
Together with four presidents of major corporations plus their wives or long-term girlfriends, we’re headed for a long Thanksgiving weekend. This is business for the man I’m with and, I hope, fund-raising from his colleagues for me. The executives on the plane respectively reign over a snack food empire, a pharmaceutical company, a cable channel, and a major credit card company. They just might support health and antiviolence projects for women and girls, who are as much as 80 percent of their consumers, yet receive only about 6 percent of corporate charitable dollars.
We land at a private airport near Palm Springs and are driven in air-conditioned limos through a scorching hot desert. We arrive at a compound with high stucco walls and double electronic gates. After a security check, we’re in the midst of emerald lawns, manicured gardens, and pools of water lilies, all drenched by twirling water sprays. In the desert, water is gold. This is Fort Knox.
Each couple is taken to a bungalow with its own garden. Men are changing for a fast game of golf, women for tennis. Since I learned neither growing up in East Toledo—a bowling and canasta kind of place—I stay in the air-conditioned bungalow to work on a seriously overdue article. I discover a pantry full of unhealthy snack foods made by one of the host corporations, and begin to eat my way through it.
Thus begins a time of sports and camaraderie for my companions, and writing, air-conditioning, and eating junk food for me. Evenings consist of banquets of flown-in food and wine, and amusing anecdotes that sound as if they’ve been told before.
For Thanksgiving Day, we’ve been invited to an afternoon buffet at the nearby desert home of Frank Sinatra and his fourth wife. Our connection is tenuous. It seems the late father of one of the women in our party knew this famous singer. When we arrive, three older men in pastel golf sweaters are watching a football game on television, one with a holstered gun in his belt. Servants bring us rounds of drinks, but our hosts are nowhere to be seen. We’re served Thanksgiving dinner from a massive buffet that has all the intimacy of a hotel.
Finally, Barbara Sinatra, a onetime Las Vegas showgirl and a former wife of one of the Marx brothers, arrives to greet us. She is a calm and queenly presence. My hope of fund-raising rises when she mentions chairing a Palm Springs hospital benefit for abused women and children, but it goes down when she chastises me and the women’s movement for not taking up this new-to-her issue.
I swallow my pride. I don’t have time to explain that the women’s movement named domestic violence in the first place, sought its prosecution by police and by new laws, created the first shelters, and has been working for thirty years to explain, for instance, that the moment of leaving is the time when a woman is most likely to be murdered, thus answering questions like “Why doesn’t she just leave?” Instead, I just describe effective survivor-run programs that are in need of support.
Still, I can feel her interest straying. For one thing, those programs aren’t linked to the charity ball she is chairing, and for another, Frank Sinatra is finally arriving with a drink in his hand. He looks very much like, well, Frank Sinatra. I watch as this queenly woman turns into a geisha serving him turkey.
After dessert, our group is ushered into a separate building that houses the largest collection of toy trains I’ve ever seen. Tracks stretch out on tables that are themselves miniature landscapes, with roads, trees, lakes, and tiny buildings. Passenger cars are lighted from within and have tiny people silhouetted in the windows. Sinatra puts on a conductor’s hat, presses buttons, and speeds trains through tunnels and over bridges. He looks happy and in his own world. I try not to think about how much all this cost.
The next day, back in our lush compound, I return to writing and junk food. Before we leave Palm Springs, there is one activity that I love: riding horses in the desert. However, I discover that the junk food has taken its toll. While I am riding, my jeans split up the back. I retreat to the bungalow for needle and thread.
On the plane going home, men talk about mergers and acquisitions, and women talk about weight loss. I know that one wife once had a high-level job in Washington, and another recently climbed Mount Everest, yet neither brings this up. Since we’re all in a small space, I try one last time to describe projects that individuals and corporations might well please women consumers by supporting—but I get polite disinterest. I am an isolated island around which an ocean of talk flows. I fantasize about parachuting out of the plane.
We land at a private airport in New Jersey. Each couple gets in a separate limousine, though one could have held us all. In three days of talk about how to make money, I haven’t been able to insert one idea about what to do with it. I’m angry—at myself. They are playing the game as it exists. I’m trying to change it—and I’ve failed. There is little more painful than surrealism when you yourself are the only contrast.
· I’ve passed by Laurel, Maryland, on trips to and from Washington, D.C., for years, but I haven’t a clue what goes on there. Then one day in 1982 when I’m enjoying being at my desk at Ms. magazine after a long stretch of road trips, I get a call from Connie Bowman, a brand-new marketing director at the Freestate Raceway in Laurel. Since harness racing is a national and global attraction for the subcultures of racing and betting—and since both subcultures are overwhelmingly male—Bowman wants to attract more women. Her idea is to invite me and Loretta Swit, star of one of the most-watched series in TV history, to race each other in an event to be called M*A*S*H vs. Ms. In return, each of us will get a percentage of the gate to give away.
This captures my attention. Ms. magazine has discovered that very few advertisers will support a women’s magazine that doesn’t devote its editorial pages to praising the products it advertises: fashion, beauty, home decoration, and the like. To make up for the lack of ads in Ms.—and to meet requests for subscriptions from battered women’s shelters, prisons, welfare programs, and just readers who can’t afford them—we have to raise contributions.
Officials walk us to our respective rigs. Mine is pulled by a beautiful chestnut mare and guided by a skinny, older black driver. He is unusual in this traditionally white world of southern horse racing. Loretta has a younger white driver and a dark-coated gelding. We each seat ourselves next to the driver on a plank no bigger than an ironing board that is attached to a superlight rig. The whole thing is more like a coat hanger than the Ben-Hur chariot I envisioned. As we trot out to the track where other teams are assembled, we already seem to be going very fast. After the starting signal, that speed is much faster. I realize I’m sitting only inches above a track that is whizzing underneath me in a blur. Nothing but the ironing board is between me and being trampled by the horses behind us.
Then suddenly horse, driver, and I are in a capsule by ourselves. A blur of light and wind surrounds us. We are isolated for what could be minutes or hours, as one with this powerful horse. I think: Racing a car may be about ego, but racing a horse is about trust.
As we begin to slow down, the blur sharpens back into trees, stadium, fence, people. My driver turns to me, smiles, and says, We won!
We parade in front of the huge, noisy stadium. An amplified male voice booms out, “Ms. beat M*A*S*H!” He doesn’t say that a mare beat a gelding, or that an old black driver beat a young white one, but I hear Loretta saying to a reporter with delight: The outs beat the ins!
Like Alice in Wonderland, I feel as if I’ve fallen into another universe. I was horse crazy as a child. Now I remember why I loved these smart, sleek creatures that deign to let us travel with them.
Our share of the gate turns out to be disappointing—under $5,000 each. We even forgot to bet on ourselves. Each of us could have raised more money in less time and with way less danger. However, now whenever I pass the Laurel sign on the way to and from Washington, I have a sense memory of speed and blur, a proud driver, a beautiful mare, a moment of altered reality.
V.
It’s 1967, and I’m sitting in a diner in rural Virginia, preparing for an interview nearby. Public schools have been ordered to integrate racially, and most white parents have put their kids into newly created, all-white “private” schools that are actually funded with tax dollars by a racist state legislature. My interview is with a sixth-grade white girl who is a prodigy of organizing. She is buzzing around the halls, welcoming black students into this newly desegregated public school. She has her parents’ permission, but this was her idea. If I write about her story, I think she might inspire more students to take the lead, but so far I can’t even get past editors. Newspapers say it’s apolitical “soft news” and women’s magazines say it’s political “hard news.”5
Next to me at the counter are three young white guys who are also talking about school integration or, in their words, “race mixing.” They seem oblivious to the older black waitress who is serving us, and her face is inscrutable. These guys start arguing about Vietnam, and whether black GIs will follow orders from white officers.
“I hope not,” says a solitary older white man sitting down at the counter. “We’re on the wrong side in this war.”
Silence. I wonder if combat will start right here. The older man has interrupted the younger ones, at a minimum, and at a maximum, he’s talking treason. But like Scheherazade, who evaded death by telling irresistible stories, the loner moves his coffee mug toward us and begins to talk:
In World War II, I was in Indochina—that’s what Vietnam was called then—and I didn’t just meet Ho Chi Minh, I knew him. We were fighting the Japanese, and so was he. We were allies. Plus he was our hero because his guerrilla fighters rescued American pilots shot down in the jungle by the Japanese. Ho spent so much time with Americans that sometimes his own men only recognized him by the pack of Camels in his shirt pocket. Also, he loved President Roosevelt for pissing off Churchill by saying that colonialism had to end after the war. Ho even knew our Declaration of Independence by heart—it was his model for sending the French colonists home.
But after FDR died, everything changed. Truman sold Ho Chi Minh down the river by supporting the French—otherwise France wouldn’t join NATO. But didn’t we also fight a revolution to get rid of the British? Didn’t we fight a civil war to keep our country from being split into north and south? Well, that’s what Ho Chi Minh is doing now—and we’re on the wrong side.
There is silence. I can’t tell whether the three young guys think this is truth or treason, but they slap money on the counter and drift away. I go over to talk to this man I now think of as the Prophet of the Diner. He’s the first American I’ve ever heard say what I was told as a student in India long ago: that Ho Chi Minh just wanted independence for his country and would make it a buffer against China—the very opposite of the American belief that Ho’s victory would have a “domino effect” of pushing other Asian countries toward China.
At the risk of sounding around the bend, I explain to the Prophet that I’ve read Ho Chi Minh’s poetry and he doesn’t sound power-mad to me. It’s part of the reason I keep a sign on my bulletin board:
ALIENATION IS WHEN YOUR COUNTRY IS AT WAR
AND YOU WANT THE OTHER SIDE TO WIN.
He laughs and says he himself went to the State Department to remind them that Ho Chi Minh was once an ally—and could be again. Other vets have done the same thing, including a former OSS doctor who treated Ho Chi Minh for malaria. Some have offered to be go-betweens and help bring the United States and Ho together to talk. But as far as the Prophet knows, everyone has been turned down.
When he learns that I’m a writer from New York, he says I should write about Ho Chi Minh, who once lived in and loved New York. It’s a personal note that might humanize him. I promise to try, but I don’t have much hope in the middle of a war.
I do some reading. Sure enough, Ho Chi Minh was once a cabin boy on a French freighter. Historians believe he left this job to stay for a while in Manhattan, Brooklyn, maybe also Boston. That was between 1912 and 1918, a time when Trotsky and many other revolutionaries came here. Though America was the home of racism and capitalism, it also had waged the biggest successful anticolonial revolution. Ho was said to have worked as a pastry chef, maybe a photographer as he later did in Paris, but most of all, he kept writing and agitating for his country’s independence.
By the end of World War I, Ho had become a recognized leader of independence for his country. That made him a criminal in the eyes of the French, who condemned him to death in absentia. He had so many aliases that when he finally became the leader of North Vietnam, the French recognized him in a photo only by his ears. Yet in 1919 he put on a rented suit and a bowler hat, went to the Versailles Peace Conference, and gave President Woodrow Wilson a petition for the independence of Indochina, based on our own Declaration of Independence. There was no reply. After World War II, he delivered yet another petition to President Truman. Still no reply.
For the first issue of New York magazine I write an article called “Ho Chi Minh in New York.” Clay Felker, its founding editor, accepts it on shock value alone. After all, Ho Chi Minh is the enemy leader in an ongoing war that is dividing our own country.
In an effort to check facts, I send Ho Chi Minh a telegram. This is surrealism itself. The Western Union operator asks, “Do you have a street address in Hanoi, honey?” Finally, she agrees that “Presidential Palace” is proba
bly enough, “what with the war and all.” I think we both envision this telegram in our FBI files.
I get no answer, but thanks to a kindhearted woman in the French consulate, I confirm that the French freighter on which Ho worked did indeed dock in New York. Despite his different revolutionary aliases, I find a reference to two years he spent living in New York around the time of World War I. I also talk to journalist David Schoenbrun, who interviewed Ho during World War II and heard him speak with knowledge and affection about New York City. Other American journalists who met him later in Hanoi say that he often ended their interviews by asking nostalgically, “Tell me, how is New York?”
I even find his photo in what is said to be Harlem, though the black neighborhood then would have been the Sugar Hill district above 145th Street. There, Marcus Garvey spoke about black pride and anticolonialism, and leaders from Asia, Africa, and Haiti came to listen. So many independence movements were active in the early 1900s that New York tabloids printed fearful articles about the “Yellow Peril” of Asia joining the “Black Peril” of Africa to encircle the globe. The young Ho Chi Minh of those days is described in Jean Lacouture’s classic biography as slender and beardless, wearing a dark suit, a high-collared shirt, and “a small hat perched on top of his head, looking delicate and unsure of himself, a bit lost, a bit battered, like Chaplin at his most affecting.” When I walk past old New York buildings he might have seen, I try to imagine him looking at them, too.
Due to the last-minute chaos and printing problems of the first issue of New York, my article is cut by two-thirds. It becomes so concentrated that readers will have to pour water on it.6 Still, I hope the Prophet of the Diner sees it.
Now as I write this almost four decades later, Ho Chi Minh, who owned nothing in his life but a typewriter, remains the only leader ever to defeat the United States in a war. We dropped more bombs on Vietnam than on all of Europe during World War II. About sixty thousand U.S. troops died; twice as many Vietnamese soldiers died; and nearly two million civilians in North and South Vietnam lost their lives. Both here and in a now-independent, unified, and prosperous Vietnam, where tourists travel, there are still broken families, traumatized veterans, chemicals in the soil—and much more. In South Korea when I visited in this new millennium, newspaper headlines were protesting Agent Orange, stored underground by the United States on its way to deforesting North Vietnam. Now it was leaking and poisoning the water table.
My Life on the Road Page 21