Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right

by Michael A Smerconish

  “I think he thought I was a big shot,” Kane recalled with a laugh. “Truth is, I was only looking for one interview.”

  Instead, Epstein invited Kane to accompany the Beatles at every stop. Believe it or not, he was slow to accept. Kane explained to me:

  Muhammad Ali was training just around the corner from me in Miami. Vietnam was escalating. There was an enormous Cuban influx into Florida. We were living post–JFK assassination amid escalating racial tensions. And the Ford Mustang was all the rage. I didn’t want to miss any of it.

  As I say in the movie, “Why would I want to travel with a band that will be here in October and gone in December?”

  There was added reason for Kane’s reluctance. Just before the tour began, his mother, Mildred, passed at age 40 from multiple sclerosis.

  “She was my inspiration,” he said. “When I was going into a radio station till midnight during high school, she would leave notes on my pillow telling me how my newscasts sounded.”

  Meanwhile his father, a World War II veteran, expressed misgivings: “Larry, watch your back. These guys are a menace to society.”

  In the end, his radio station forced him to tour with the Beatles, an edict he appreciated.

  “I quickly sensed that the band represented the biggest cultural shift in generations, and maybe ever,” Kane told me.

  He attended every Beatles concert in America in 1964 and 1965, and a few in 1966—46 in all. And he watched three performances on The Ed Sullivan Show in person. Which is why Eight Days a Week relies so heavily on his narration.

  “This is Larry Kane with the Beatles flying over America,” he intones in archival audio used in the movie.

  The special rapport he enjoyed with the Fab Four is plainly evident in the film. Kane attributes a certain level of bonding with Paul McCartney and John Lennon to the fact that both had also lost their mothers at an early age, a point underscored by Howard’s inclusion of a home movie showing Mildred Kane blowing a kiss. And, Kane says, the Beatles shared his nose for news.

  We got along well. They were very intellectually curious. I didn’t ask them the questions most asked, like what they had for breakfast, how they styled their hair, or what they liked in women’s hemlines. I asked about war in Vietnam, racial division, immigration in Europe, the royal family, Cuban refugees to Miami, and life after President Kennedy.

  Larry Kane aboard the Beatles’ chartered airliner with Paul and John on the 1964 tour of North America. Photo courtesy of Larry Kane.

  As detailed in the movie, it was Kane who, inside a Las Vegas hotel room, told the band that a concert at the Gator Bowl in Jacksonville, Florida, would be before a segregated audience, which McCartney immediately derided as “stupid.” When the Beatles refused to play, jeopardizing $50,000, the seating was changed.

  But the interplay between the burgeoning newsman and international sensations was not all serious.

  “They goofed on me,” Kane told me.

  “Only kidding, Larry,” Lennon says jovially in the movie.

  In 1965, while filming Help! in the Bahamas, Kane discovered the Fab Four were high from smoking marijuana. “I’d never seen that before,” he says in the movie.

  Kane’s work on the Beatles caught the ear of Philly’s WFIL-AM (560), his first stop in a rapid rise through the local media market. In 1970, at age 27, he became the first Action News anchor, and one year later, the station was No. 1.

  Kane kept in touch with the band, even calling in a favor from Lennon. In 1975, Kane was raising money for MS, a passion that began with his mother’s passing and that continues today. Lennon agreed to come to Philadelphia to help.

  “The station management never believed he’d show up,” Kane told me. “But he got on a train alone in New York City and got off at 30th Street.”

  During a weekend spent in town, Lennon delivered a now-legendary, impromptu weathercast, live on Channel 6, while thousands of fans waited outside in a parking lot on City Avenue.

  “Frank Rizzo sent a stakeout squad,” Kane remembered. “And when I asked him why, he was prescient. He said, ‘A man like Lennon could get shot.’”

  Kane’s involvement with Eight Days a Week began several years ago when he was contacted by Jonathan Clyde, the director of production and marketing for Apple. He said:

  When I first went to Los Angeles to meet with the crew, I took with me a list I’d prepared of the seminal moments of the Beatles’ tours of America. So began many interviews, but my more recent contributions were recorded here in Philadelphia, with engineer Matt Teacher at Sine Studios.

  Kane said that working with Ron Howard was a wonderful experience and that he was “as approachable and nice as you would expect.”

  Howard responded in kind:

  Larry is such a valuable eyewitness to an aspect of the Beatles’ story I wanted to focus on, which was the brief intense period when Beatlemania morphed from “novel and fun” to “seismic, political, and polarizing.”

  Larry’s brilliant coverage then, and his ability to articulately analyze it all over again from his perspective today, meant so much to our documentary. He was and remains a very impressive guy.

  Eight Days a Week will premiere in London on September 15, and Kane will be in attendance. That day is also the 50th anniversary of his arrival in Philadelphia. The veteran of 23 political conventions enjoyed an anchoring career that spanned 39 years, and included stints at all three Philadelphia network affiliates. He’s not finished. He can still be heard offering political analysis for KYW Newsradio. And now his role as the only broadcast journalist to travel to every stop on the Beatles’ 1964 and 1965 tours is the stuff of celluloid fame.

  Stick around for the rolling of the credits at the end of this spellbinding concert movie. In a list acknowledging on-screen performances that include Whoopi Goldberg, Elvis Costello, Malcolm Gladwell, and Sigourney Weaver, you will see the name of the onetime 21-year-old who had to be ordered to travel with the Beatles.

  AFTERWORD

  It gave me great pleasure to write this tribute to Larry Kane for several reasons, mainly because he deserves the recognition. That he accompanied the Beatles on their initial tours of the United States—and didn’t want to go!—is an amazing story. But also because Larry has been a broadcast mentor to me, and I always love telling the story of how we first met.

  I grew up at 24 Mercer Avenue in Doylestown. Solidly middle class. Son of a public school guidance counselor and stay-at-home mom turned secretary turned Realtor. A few doors down, at 42 Mercer Avenue, lived the Stachel family: Arlene and Mike and their two children, Kelly and Mike Jr. The Stachels are wonderful people. Hard working. Good neighbors. Generous to a fault. Mike Sr. once sold my brother and me two go-karts for $25—$12.50 each because he thought it was important we believed we were paying for them rather than being given them (which he was doing). They had the only in-ground pool on Mercer Avenue, hence our nickname for their house: Stachel Valley Country Club. Mike Stachel built pools for Sylvan and then started building them on his own. With Arlene he opened a family business that not only built and serviced pools but also furnished their surroundings. Mt. Lake Pool and Patio was initially located at the end of Mercer Avenue, and the Stachels quickly became an employment center for any kid in the neighborhood who wanted to work. That certainly included me.

  Photo op rescue: “We can’t leave the chemicals unless Mr. Kane signs the bill of lading.” It worked. Photo courtesy of Mike Stachel Jr.

  When I turned 16, Mike Sr. had me delivering patio furniture and pool supplies to customers in a panel truck, often accompanied by Mike Jr., who was a contemporary and friend of mine. One day, Mike Sr. asked us to take a bucket of chlorine to Larry Kane’s house in Rydal, Pennsylvania. This was a big deal. Larry was an A-list celebrity in the Philadelphia area, although as I recall, he was then doing the late news for WABC in New York City. With a 3x5 card bearing Larry’s address, we ventured out from Doylestown for the 40-minute drive. Upon arrival at the Kane
residence mid-morning, we were disappointed when a woman working in a domestic capacity answered the door. This would not stand. After all, we’d left Doylestown with a Polaroid Instamatic, one of those cameras that you’d take a picture with and then you’d shake the image for 10 to15 seconds while it came into focus. We wanted our pictures with Larry Kane! So we told the woman that Mr. Kane needed to sign the “bill of lading.” We had no idea what that meant. All we had was the 3x5 card. But she bought it. After a few minutes, a disheveled Larry Kane, no doubt having been up late after delivering the news, approached the door. He was wearing a pair of shorts with the fly down, no shirt, hair disheveled. Before he knew what hit him, the two punks from Doylestown had swapped positions and each taken a picture with him. It’s a photograph I treasure.

  BIRTHS TO ILLNESSES,

  OUR LIFE WITH GRACE

  Philadelphia Inquirer, Sunday, October 9, 2016

  “HOW DID I get so lucky?”

  Those words from anyone else in Grace Snaggs’s situation would probably be offered with sarcasm. But she means it.

  She’s sitting opposite me in a dimly lit living room in West Philadelphia on a Sunday afternoon. Oprah is saying something on a nearly muted television in the background. Bespeckled and with shoulder-length gray hair, Grace is outfitted in a navy print dress with a sweater draped over her shoulders. She has yellow hospital socks on her feet and a cane nearby.

  I’m visiting to deliver lentil soup made by my wife and am struck by the incredibly appreciative attitude of a 72-year-old woman who is scheduled for chemotherapy the following morning, “one bus stop away” as she puts it, at Penn. Unprompted, she continues to voice her thanks.

  I’m so grateful.

  I’m so blessed.

  So many good things have happened to me.

  As we talk, it occurs to me that Grace knows me better than I know her. That’s my fault. She’s been in our employ for a quarter-century, but she’s family. She likes to joke that she “came with the house,” a reference to having worked for Kenny Gamble 28 years ago when my wife acquired his home.

  Grace is the mother of three, two daughters plus Rudyard, the apple of her eye, whom she raised in a second-floor walk-up on the Main Line. She was born in Tobago and went to school in Castara, a fishing village. She’s the oldest of nine siblings. A brother died at age 36, but all others are living and still on the island. She came to the States at age 29, attracted by the presence of her cousins, and has worked in various domestic capacities ever since.

  Our dear family friend Grace Snaggs, 2016.

  She first worked for a family in New Jersey, then for Flossie and Richard; Jolly; Diane; Kenny; Frank and Jane; and us. Many of them, and her large circle of family and friends, came to our house when we celebrated her 65th birthday with steel drums in the backyard

  We haven’t celebrated many family milestones without her. She was one of my wife’s bridesmaids—the only one not related, and the first asked by my wife. There for the boys’ births. And all of the kids’ confirmations. Several holidays. She was there for my father-in-law’s battle with cancer (the only one he would let in his room when he was really sick), and bedside for the passing of my mother-in-law: “I called [your brother-in-law], but I knew better than to say she’d passed. Instead I told him, ‘I can’t wake up your mother.’”

  That sense of decorum and discretion has always been her hallmark. I’ve seen Grace get overwhelmed, but never angry, which is more than she can say—but never would—about me. Helping a family that once consisted of two parents, four kids, and four dogs can cause the former.

  When she thinks I’m too involved in affairs on the home front, which is often, she’ll call me an “auntie man,” but as pronounced by Grace, it’s “a-h-n-t-i mon.” Grace also has a head full of island sayings, like, “You don’t know if the roof leaks until you live inside.”

  Our daughter remembers once locking her in a closet while Grace was babysitting for her at age 4. And Grace teaching her to dance in the laundry room.

  “But mostly I think about how, on her way home from finding out she became a citizen, she told me it was the proudest day of her life,” my daughter said, “and then proceeded to chastise me on my lack of immediate knowledge of American history.”

  The three boys have sometimes been less hospitable. After tiring of her talking to herself or hearing one too many versions of her singing “Red Red Wine,” they’ve called her under the laundry chute with the ruse of “needing to tell her something,” only to pelt her with socks—which she knew were coming, but would still oblige their high jinks.

  “Don’t you remember when you brought home Michael Jr. from the hospital and Winston [our cocker spaniel] came out of the house to sniff the car seat with him still in it? I took that picture,” she reminds me, about a snapshot that I prize in a family photo album. I didn’t recall that she was the one who captured the image, but I’m not surprised.

  I ask which of our four dogs has been her favorite. Grace doesn’t take the bait, but does make a point of telling me that she was never able to get mad at Checkers, our white Lab.

  “She had that habit of putting her head on my lap,” she remembers with a smile. “Winston never liked to be alone. So I’d make him a bed while I did laundry and he’d lay nearby.”

  Thankfully she’s supported in her current fight by many cousins: Audrey, Angela, Peola, Lennox, and Ancil, in whose house we are seated.

  “Ancil told me, ‘Grace, you’ve cared for everyone, so now we are caring for you,’” she says, beaming.

  Another of her sayings pops into my head: “Thank God for nothin’; there ain’t no trouble with it.”

  That outlook from a septuagenarian who has worked her entire life in service to others reminds me of a story I once read recounted by Jack Bogle, the legendary founder and former CEO of the Vanguard Group Inc. In a book called Enough: True Measures of Money, Business, and Life, Bogle shares a conversation between writers Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller during a billionaire’s party on Shelter Island.

  At one point, Vonnegut pointed to the host and asked Heller: “Joe, how does it make you feel to know that our host only yesterday may have made more money than your novel Catch-22 has earned in its entire history?”

  “Yes,” Heller responded, “but I have something he will never have: Enough.”

  Grace has enough. I’m hoping she can teach me.

  AFTERWORD

  I called Grace on the afternoon that this column was published. She was back in the hospital for a chemo treatment, but she was pleased to hear from friends locally and as far away as Tobago who had read what I’d written. Grace was her usual humble self and very appreciative of the attention. We spoke for a few minutes, which was long enough for her to offer me more island wisdom. “Prophet doesn’t have honor in the old country,” she said. I asked what she meant and she told me:

  Sometimes those who know you so well don’t take you seriously. You can be around people and they don’t notice your good points, but in another place, among those who don’t know you so well, they recognize what you do.

  Sadly, Grace left us on October 8, 2017, but I was pleased to read this column at her funeral service.

  TRUMP NOT MY FAN, BUT

  QUITE A LOYAL FOLLOWER

  Philadelphia Inquirer, Sunday, November 27, 2016

  I LIKE TO JOKE that during the campaign, Donald Trump single-handedly boosted my television program ratings among billionaires. He seems to have never missed my Saturday CNN show, even though he never accepted one of my many invitations to personally appear.

  As best I can reconstruct, I must have got his goat by interviewing McKay Coppins from BuzzFeed on my SiriusXM radio program after Coppins wrote “36 Hours on the Fake Campaign Trail with Donald Trump.” The 2014 story recapped 25 years of Trump engaging in charade by threatening to run for president. The story was well written and very funny.

  Thereafter, I too continued to poke fun at the idea of Trump running
for president, both on radio and on television. And he took notice.

  One month after the launch of my CNN program, Trump weighed in with his review: “I can’t believe that @CNN would waste time and money with @smerconish—he has got nothing going. Jeff Zucker must be losing his touch!”

  Then again, on May 5, 2014, Trump took a shot at me while doing a telephone interview on Fox and Friends: “You have some guy named Smerconish, who I’ve never even heard of. . . . [H]e goes on the air and says, ‘Trump is defending [LA Clippers owner Donald] Sterling.’ Reporters are really dishonest, especially political reporters,” he said, before commenting on the need to reinstitute libel laws.

  But here’s the funny thing. Despite his view that CNN was wasting time and money on me, or that I am dishonest (all the while pronouncing my name impeccably), Trump proved himself to be a very loyal viewer of my program. On several occasions he tweeted about my segments, although he was usually careful not to specifically reference that it was my program. Here are a few:

  January 19: “Pat Buchanan gave a fantastic interview this morning on @ CNN—way to go Pat, way ahead of your time!”

  February 13: “A very big thank you to Bill Donohue, head of The Catholic League, for the wonderful interview on @CNN and article in Newsmax! Great insight.”

  The only time I had any direct interaction with him came on February 25, at a CNN debate at the University of Houston. My plane was late and I arrived in the hall just as the debate was to begin. Serendipitously, my path backstage crossed with the gaggle of candidates as they were getting ready to walk on-stage. Just a few feet from me were Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, John Kasich, Marco Rubio—and Donald Trump. When our eyes met, he waved—but with his fingers not a full hand. Then he motioned for me to come nearer. We shook hands. And he said, dripping with sarcasm, “L-O-O-O-O-V-E your show.”