The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks)

by Lillian Ross

  We asked Pollock for a peep at his work. He shrugged, rose, and led us into a twenty-five-by-fifty-foot living room furnished with massive Italianate tables and chairs and hung with spacious pictures, all of which bore an offhand resemblance to tangles of multicolored ribbon. “Help yourself,” he said, halting at a safe distance from an abstraction that occupied most of an end wall. It was a handsome, arresting job—a rust-red background laced with skeins of white, black, and yellow—and we said so. “What’s it called?” we asked. “I’ve forgotten,” he said, and glanced inquiringly at his wife, who had followed us in. “ ‘Number Two, 1949,’ I think,” she said. “Jackson used to give his pictures conventional titles—‘Eyes in the Heat’ and ‘The Blue Unconscious’ and so on— but now he simply numbers them. Numbers are neutral. They make people look at a picture for what it is—pure painting.” “I decided to stop adding to the confusion,” Pollock said. “Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn’t have any beginning or any end. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but it was. It was a fine compliment. Only he didn’t know it.” “That’s exactly what Jackson’s work is,” Mrs. Pollock said. “Sort of unframed space.”

  1950

  SLOW — Rex Lardner

  LEROY PAIGE, or Satchel Paige, a tall, slender man with a thin face, impassive features, and a relaxed manner, who has been called Joe Louis’s favorite pitcher and whom Joe DiMaggio once characterized as the best pitcher he ever batted against, is far and away the oldest person ever to play major-league baseball. His age has been estimated, in the press, at anything up to fifty-two, and he himself gives it as forty-four. After being hired by the Cleveland Indians in 1948, Mr. Paige, the first Negro pitcher to enter the American League and a man whose suppleness, guile, and vast repertory of pitches are almost mythical, was extremely successful his first year and not so successful his second. He stayed away from organized baseball in 1950. When William Veeck, the former Cleveland owner, assumed control of the St. Louis Browns in 1951, he engaged Mr. Paige for a second time. In 1951, Mr. Paige’s record was only fair, but in this season, his twenty-eighth year of pitching, he is coming into his own. Up to now, he has won as many games for the Browns—ten—as any other pitcher; his repertory was never larger. We finally caught up with the august gentleman one recent afternoon just before game time at Yankee Stadium, in the visiting team’s locker room. It was an area full of preoccupied movement and noise. A young man in a St. Louis uniform was hurling a baseball at the wall and fielding it on one hop. Another player was whacking the lid of a trash can with a large mitt. A tall man with light hair was practicing a slow, deliberate windup. Around the room, several other players, seated on trunks, were pounding their fists into their gloves. A stocky player was asking the locker-room attendant, a large man wearing a white suit and called Tiny, where his glove was. “What kind of a ball was that you hit yesterday?” one player asked his neighbor. “A high ball,” replied the other. “High and outside.” A huge, cheerful man directed us to Mr. Paige, who was seated quietly in one corner, putting on his spikes. The cheerful man, whose name turned out to be Bill Durney and who is road secretary for the Browns, informed us, over the slamming and banging of the trash-can lid, that Mr. Paige had pitched in twenty-five hundred games in his career—more than anybody else in the world. “Satchel can throw a ball at least twelve different ways and he has at least four ways of winding up,” Mr. Durney added, in a hearty voice.

  Mr. Paige straightened, stood up, stamped on his spikes, shook hands with us, and sat down again.

  “He is the slowest pitcher in the major leagues,” Mr. Durney went on spiritedly. “A man with a stopwatch timed him recently on one pitch, and it took him a minute and nineteen seconds to deliver it. The major-league rule says all a pitcher is allowed is twenty seconds, but you can’t hurry Satchel.”

  “Too many pitchers got the hurry-ups,” Satchel observed with dignity. “When I talk to the young pitchers, I tell them to slow down. You last longer.”

  “Satchel’s fast ball has been compared with Walter Johnson’s, but now he depends mostly on his curve and control,” Durney said. “Control! The batters dig in against Satchel; they know he won’t bean them. ‘Let them dig in,’ says Satchel. He doesn’t approve of the duster. ‘I’ll outfox them,’ he says. Foxy! Sometimes he winds up fast and throws slow and sometimes he winds up slow and throws fast. Sidearm, underhand, overhand. His hesitation pitch is the most unusual pitch in baseball; he winds up with agonizing deliberation and then, as he nears the end of his throwing motion, stops the forward movement of his arm so that the ball just trickles toward the plate. It’s the only pitch with sound accompaniment. He slaps his left foot down hard just before unclasping the ball.” Durney strode away to talk with the manager, Marty Marion.

  Mr. Paige’s long, wiry fingers wrapped themselves around the seams of a baseball. “This is how I throw a jump ball,” he told us pleasantly.

  We thanked him for letting us in on it, and pressed him for details about his career. He said that he started pitching in 1924, for a semi-professional team in Birmingham, after a short trick as a redcap in Mobile, where he was born, and has since pitched for over thirty different teams. These included the Chattanooga Black Lookouts, the New Orleans Black Pelicans, the Pittsburgh Craw-fords, the Kansas City Monarchs, and numerous barnstorming teams that played, mostly during the winter, in Central and South American countries and in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Trinidad, as well as in rural sections of this country. Mr. Paige, whose father was a landscape gardener and who was the third-youngest of eight children, informed us he used to be billed as “Satchel Paige—Guaranteed to Strike Out the First Nine Men,” which he generally did, and that when he was with the Monarchs, he was given an airplane as part of his salary, and the owner’s son, an ex–Army pilot, used to fly him to games and, before landing, buzz the team’s opponents during infield practice. “It gave us a psychological advantage,” Mr. Paige remarked. “Like an eagle. When I was with the House of David team, which was managed by Grover Cleveland Alexander, we won a hundred and four out of a hundred and five games one year. For the House of David, I grew a mustache.”

  Durney, returning, told us that Paige had once beaten Dizzy Dean, 1–0, in a thirteen-inning exhibition game; that when he was with a team in Bismarck, North Dakota, he had pitched twenty-nine games in thirty days; that in 1935, during a baseball tournament in Wichita, he had struck out sixty men while winning four games; that he had struck out Rogers Hornsby five times in one afternoon; that Joe DiMaggio had got only one hit off him in five games; and that Satchel had pitched a no-hit game in Pittsburgh, had driven that night to Chicago, and had there pitched a twelve-inning shutout. He thrives, Durney said, on long bus rides and quick meals. A poor hitter, he is a great fielding pitcher, and a great strategist.

  “I developed control from throwing rocks at cans on tree stumps,” said Mr. Paige, who owns a farm in Kansas City, and has three daughters, and a wife named LaHoma. “My hobbies are photography, collecting antique silverware, and, you might say, hunting. I have five shotguns and twenty hunting dogs. When barnstorming is over, I like to hunt—in North Dakota, mostly.”

  We asked him if he is a good shot. “I get better all the time,” he said.

  1952

  NO BULLIES OR TOADIES — E. J. Kahn

  HEARING of the existence of a local group called the Friends of Frank Merriwell, whose members have banded together out of nostalgic devotion to that famous apostle of Fair Play, we looked up its president, a man named Joseph M. Graham, who works for Equitable Life. The other night, Mr. Graham invited us to attend one of the Friends’ monthly meetings, which are held in a private dining room of the Press Box Restaurant, on East Forty-fifth Street, and before the proceedings got under way, he told us a bit about the outfit. It began slightly over a year ago, when he and a handful of other Merriwell addicts got to reminiscing about their boyhood idol. “It surprised us that
no one had ever become a Friend of Merriwell before,” Graham said. “Frank Merriwell, I mean. We hate his brother Dick. Anyway, we’ve been an awfully informal outfit. We chugged along very quietly and nicely until someone said, ‘Let’s have membership cards.’ So we got cards, and now we have fifty members, and I don’t even know them all. I’m afraid we’re going to get even more organized tonight. Somebody’s bringing a lawyer.”

  Mr. Graham showed us a sampling of the mail the Friends had lately received—largely as a result of a mention of the organization in the Times, there being several Times men among the members. A man in Springfield, Massachusetts, expressing the hope that Burt L. Standish’s Frank Merriwell books—out of print since 1934—would soon make a comeback, said, “It would be a great thing for our country. Maybe decency and honor would once again count for something in American life.” A lady in Winchester, Virginia, wanted the Friends to know that she had learned to read by borrowing her brother’s Frank Merriwells, and, having mastered them, had swiftly gone on to Shakespeare.

  Presently, the meeting began, with fourteen Friends on hand, all of them well past boyhood. Mr. Graham, seated beside us, rapped for attention. “We meet in the name of Frank Merriwell,” he intoned solemnly. “Hear! Hear!” murmured the assemblage. A waiter brought a round of drinks. We asked Mr. Graham, in a whisper, if Frank himself ever touched the stuff. “He gambled,” said Graham. “His hands trembled with excitement just at the thought of poker. He must have drunk.” The Friend on our other side, a Times man, confided to us that as a youth he often had lumps on his head, inflicted by his mother in an effort, obviously vain, to wean him away from Frank Merriwell. “Frank had a friend who could suspend the law of gravity,” he told us gravely. Mr. Graham asked for a report from the book-finding committee, which turned out to be another Times man. The committee observed glumly that the Friends possessed not a single copy of a Merriwell book. (Over a hundred million copies have been published.) “Yale University is lousy with Merriwells,” the committee said. “I understand somebody left Yale a set of two hundred and seventy in his will. Maybe we could get those, because I don’t think Yale much likes the idea of being associated with Frank.” “Snobs!” cried a voice downtable. Mr. Graham was instructed to write a polite letter of inquiry to Yale.

  “Now, about the question of being properly organized,” broke in a man at the end of the table, who we quickly gathered was the lawyer. “First of all, we’ll need a person of permanent address to give summonses to.”

  “If we could get people to return to Frank Merriwell,” said Graham nervously, “maybe we could lick the comic books.”

  “I’m a bachelor. I don’t give a hoot what the kids read,” said the lawyer. “Now, it will cost you sixty dollars to incorporate. Unless maybe you’d prefer something along the lines of a joint-venture setup.”

  “Let’s have a quiz,” said Graham hastily. He read off ten questions from a paper, including “As a baseball pitcher, what puzzling delivery did Frank have?” (Ans.: Double shoot), and “Who was old Joe Crowfoot?” (Ans.: Indian who reared Frank). The replies were hurled back confidently from all sides.

  “I would suggest that there have to be certain provisions made whether you incorporate or not,” the lawyer was saying. “You have to protect yourselves. There are a lot of ramifications.”

  “I sure would like to get us some turtleneck sweaters and bulldogs,” said Graham.

  “It would be advisable, all things considered, for the incorporation papers to be sent at the earliest possible opportunity to the Secretary of State of New York,” said the lawyer. “It occurs to me that if no stock issue is involved, perhaps it could be done for forty dollars.”

  “I would like to have a letterhead with ‘No Bullies or Toadies Allowed’ on it,” said Graham.

  “Now, if any of you gentlemen happens to know a Supreme Court justice who is a Frank Merriwell fan . . .” said the lawyer.

  “Gee, we’re getting organized,” said Graham. “I feel terrible.”

  1953

  ANNA IN HARLEM — Lillian Ross

  WE happened to be backstage at the Ziegfeld one evening last week when Anna Magnani, the Italian actress, happened along to give her regards to Leontyne Price and Cab Calloway, who figure conspicuously in “Porgy and Bess.” These happenings of Miss Magnani’s and ours had been arranged by a gnome called Irving Drutman, who is serving as shepherd for the eminent lady during her stay in this country. While Miss Magnani and Mr. Calloway were beaming at each other, with as fine a display of ivories as we’ve seen in our time, Mr. Drutman advised us that a couple of limousines were available to take Miss Magnani, an assortment of Italian moviemakers, and us to Harlem. “She’s mad for this jitterbug stuff,” said Mr. Drutman.

  Presently, we found ourself installed in a car with the actress (she was done up funereally in black), a duenna named Mrs. Natalia Murray, and a pair of Italian gentlemen, who kept exclaiming “Ha, Harlem!” and slapping themselves on the knees. It developed that Miss Magnani’s English is even sparser than our Italian, but on our ride northward that didn’t matter much, since her only remark was “Madre mia!”

  “Anna would like to see this ‘Porgy and Bess’ company in La Scala,” Mrs. Murray informed us.

  “Harlem—bene!” said the two Italian gentlemen, whose minds were evidently in tune.

  “Your first stop,” announced the driver of the limousine, “will be Sugar Ray Robinson’s.”

  Miss Magnani rocked back and forth and hummed a mournful song.

  “Anna has been tired by New York,” said Mrs. Murray.

  “I have been in Harlem five years ago,” one of the Italian gentlemen announced to us. “Three days I have spent jitterbugging.”

  The limousine pulled up at Sugar Ray’s, a saloon on Seventh Avenue decorated for the most part with photographic murals of the proprietor knocking people’s brains out. On arrival, we were joined by Mr. Drutman and another parcel of Italians, and welcomed to the place by Mr. Robinson himself, who was arrayed in a gray-and-beige outfit of extremely sharp cut.

  After Mr. Robinson had had enough tables pulled together to get the party established, he sat down beside Miss Magnani. “I go for you,” he said simply.

  Miss Magnani gazed at him thoughtfully.

  “She don’t talk no English, I guess,” said Mr. Robinson. He put some gum in his mouth and began to chew vigorously.

  “Boom, boom,” said Miss Magnani.

  “She thinks chewing gum makes a funny noise,” Mrs. Murray told us.

  Mr. Robinson once again addressed himself to Miss Magnani, this time as if he were talking to somebody hard of hearing. “Who—tell—you—come— here?” he said.

  “Mangiare, mangiare,” said Miss Magnani.

  “I—will—come—to—Rome—in—July,” said Mr. Robinson.

  “Mangiare,” said Miss Magnani.

  “How you say July in Italian?” Mr. Robinson inquired of one of the Italians.

  “Luglio,” he was informed.

  “I—come—Rome—in—Nulio,” said Mr. Robinson.

  “I am first time in America,” said Miss Magnani, in English.

  “See!” said Mr. Robinson. “You’re getting on to the language already.”

  Mr. Robinson then ordered a round of chicken-in-a-basket, a house specialty, and disappeared for a few minutes. He returned with several autographed photographs of himself, which he presented to Miss Magnani. “Pass them around among your friends,” he suggested cordially.

  After the chicken, we took off in the limousines again, this time heading for the Savoy Ballroom. As we tooled along, Miss Magnani murmured, “My God, my God.”

  “The second time she’s spoken English since she came to this country,” said Mrs. Murray.

  At the Savoy, one of the Italian Harlem enthusiasts declared, “Now I shall do the jitterbug.”

  “Two weeks in America will kill me,” said Miss Magnani, in Italian.

  1953

  OUTSIDE THE P
ROFESSION — Brendan Gill

  WE’VE just had one of our annual talks with that merry, bitter, lively, ambitious, and beguiling man, Frank Lloyd Wright, who at eighty-four has more work under construction than ever before in his life. Wright is in town to get his plans for the Guggenheim Museum of Non-Objective Painting approved by our local building department—the museum has been about to be built for many a long year now, and Wright says patiently that he hopes ground will be broken for it next spring—and to oversee the erection of a temporary pavilion of his design on the site of the museum-to-be, which is the greater part of Fifth Avenue between Eighty-eighth and Eighty-ninth Streets. The pavilion, a rakish affair of red brick, canvas, and steel poles, will hold an exhibit of sixty years of Wright’s work (after several years as head draftsman for Adler & Sullivan, in Chicago, he went into practice for himself in 1893) and is scheduled to open in a week or so, though last week it was still mostly poles, piles of hollow brick, and air. The exhibit, which has been touring Europe for three years and, after two months here, will proceed to the Orient, is called “Sixty Years of Living Architecture,” and we got the impression, listening to Wright, that he wouldn’t consider the insertion of “the Only” before “Living” a misstatement of historical fact.

  We visited Mr. Wright in his suite high up in the Plaza. “I’ve stayed here on my visits for forty years,” he said. “A beautiful hotel. They started to remodel it downstairs a few years back, but thank God I got here in time to stop them. The little devils had already wrecked the Palm Court, but I saved the Oak Room and the dining room.” On a table between Wright and us were stout pots of tea, a plate of stout sandwiches, and a scattering of magazines and papers. As we talked, the tablecloth was slowly darkened by an assortment of Wright graffiti, ranging from floor plans and elevations of houses, churches, and factories to a sketch of his Jaguar, which is currently his favorite car and is, he said, capable of reaching ninety without a tremor. Wright himself is so plainly capable of reaching ninety without a tremor that we couldn’t help asking how he had managed to outwit age. At that moment, the telephone rang, and he bounded to his feet to answer it. “Damned thing rings all day!” he said with pleasure. Over the telephone, he made an appointment for nine the next morning, and then he returned to his tea. “I have seven children and ten grandchildren and three great-grandchildren, so I must be old, but I don’t feel old, I feel young,” he said. “I draw and build and teach my apprentices and send them out into the world, not to be like me but to be themselves. At last count, a hundred and sixty-eight practicing architects had been trained by me at Taliesin, in Wisconsin. When can I ever have been readier to do good work? When can I ever have been fitter to be alive, to help build an American culture? Not a civilization, because we already have a civilization, but a culture. And you can’t have a culture without an architecture.”