miraculously sealed as in a magic tank; all we have to do is to look and to listen and to listen and to look and soon the little figures—for they are rather under life size—will begin to move and to speak, and as they move we shall arrange them in all sorts of patterns of which they were ignorant, for they thought when they were alive that they could go where they liked; and as they speak we shall read into their sayings all kinds of meanings which never struck them, for they believed when they were alive that they said straight off whatever came into their heads. But once you are in a biography all is different.
I made a note to send the passage to Maria.
* * *
—
That night the mansion was full of drama. Emotions were running high. It started on the group date, in a pool on the rooftop of an L.A. hotel, where the Bachelor wasn’t paying enough attention to Michelle. All she wanted was to feel special on her thirtieth birthday, and here she was on a date with fourteen other girls! Your thirtieth birthday is supposed to mean something. Not to mention Keltie was wearing the worst outfit ever. But the Bachelor’s the type of guy where if there’s a problem, he’s going to address it, so a few nights later he gave Michelle the first rose. That sent a signal to the rest of the girls that you have to put yourself out there if you want to fall in love. Not in the way Melissa put herself out there, though. Melissa just popped up out of nowhere and was like, “I’m so, like, dadadadada, and I’m not normally like this,” and it’s like, “Well what are you normally like?” “Basically I’m very spontaneous,” explained Melissa. Raichel definitely felt like Melissa should go home. And here’s why. Because she wasn’t being authentic and she wasn’t being real. She was nothing like Raichel and she never would be. As if Melissa wanted to be anything like Raichel! From the day they got there, Raichel had been literally pulling the positive energy out of Melissa. But that was only because Melissa was like a toxic disease to Raichel on this journey. “It absolutely breaks my heart to see any woman cry,” said the Bachelor. All the girls agreed: he was smokin’ hot. “He’s perfect. I love his suit. His face,” said Raichel. He was a brand-new man from the last time he was the Bachelor. “I never thought I’d fall so quickly for someone,” said Other Ashley, who’d been chosen for one of the one-on-one dates. She and the Bachelor spent the whole night just laughing, connecting, being themselves, just letting go and having fun and living in the moment. Other Ashley made it easy for the Bachelor to open up: her father hadn’t been around much either, and it definitely didn’t hurt that she looked amazing. She felt amazing. She felt like a princess. It was a perfect night. A few nights later the Bachelor went on a date with Jackie. “I feel like a princess,” she said. She looked amazing. But the Bachelor worried she might not ever really let someone in. “Because at the end of the day this is very real,” he said. “I know,” said Jackie. “I’m here and I see it.” And she knew she had trouble making herself vulnerable. That was part of what made Jackie Jackie, unfortunately. The Bachelor wondered if she’d ever be able to throw caution to the wind. Still, they had the time of their lives. Jackie seriously was living in a dream. She was on cloud nine. It was a perfect night.
The bachelorettes were bringing it, and the Bachelor was well on his way to finding a wife. Whoever it would be, though, it wouldn’t be Keltie, who walked away from the Rose Ceremony empty-handed. If they gave out an Oscar for Worst Dater Ever, it would go to Keltie. “I’m just so awkward,” she told America. “Honestly, I don’t know if love is in the cards for me. I think I’m maybe meant to be alone. This was kind of”—wiping tears from her eyes—“kind of my last-ditch effort.” She laughed and cried. “ ’Cause I’ve done, like, the regular dating. I’ve done the dating people at work—that never works out well. And I’ve done the being set up by people I don’t know. And then I did the online dating. So I’ve kind of exhausted all the avenues.” I wanted to put an arm around her, tell her everything would be okay, but how could I know if everything would be okay, plus we were separated by a TV screen. I didn’t have a new favorite bachelorette yet, but it was only the third episode and anything could happen. Emily, a poised blond coal miner’s daughter from West Virginia, seemed in good position. “I feel like an idiot when I talk to you,” the Bachelor told her. “You make me lose words.”
4
Joseph Riddick Hendrick III, who all his life has gone by Rick, came into this world on July 12, 1949, on his family’s tobacco farm in southern Virginia, according to my research. Rick’s father, Papa Joe, was good with his hands, and Rick used to follow him around the farm, watching as he made repairs and tinkered with equipment. Saturday nights Papa Joe would take Rick to car races in nearby towns—Hillsborough, Charlottesville, Martinsville, Richmond. When Rick was fourteen he fixed up a ’31 Chevy and set speed records with it at the local drag strip. Two years later he won the Virginia division of the Chrysler-Plymouth Troubleshooting Contest. He wanted to take a shot at professional racing, but his mother wouldn’t allow it—too dangerous—so instead he went into the used car business, where he proved to have a talent for selling cars even greater than his talent for racing them. He climbed the ranks to general sales manager, and then risked selling his assets to buy a franchise, becoming the youngest Chevrolet dealer in the country. It was 1976 and business boomed. He opened more dealerships across the South, then all across the country. As I write these words, the Hendrick Automotive Group, headquartered in Charlotte and chaired by Rick Hendrick, employs over ten thousand people at more than one hundred franchises in fourteen states.
Hendrick’s extraordinary success as an automobile dealer allowed him to invest in his first love, racing. In the late seventies he founded a drag-boat racing team that would go on to win three consecutive national championships. His boat Nitro Fever set a world speed record of 222 mph. In 1982, at a race in Litchfield, Illinois, Jimmy Wright slammed one of Hendrick’s boats into a bank. Wright, a close friend of Hendrick’s, died on impact. Hendrick lost his passion for the sport that day. He gave up his boats and started a NASCAR team. He had five employees and a boat shed for a garage and didn’t think the team had much of a chance to make it. But in 1984, its first year, the team won three races. It started attracting major sponsors. It won more races. Today, Hendrick Motorsports has won more than two hundred races; it’s one of the largest and most successful teams in the history of stock car racing. Hendrick served as a technical adviser for the 1990 movie Days of Thunder starring Tom Cruise, and it’s Cruise who narrates the 2009 documentary Together: The Hendrick Motorsports Story. “The Hendrick Motorsports story is about victory,” intones Cruise—“and loss.”
Rick and Linda Hendrick’s only son, Joseph Riddick Hendrick IV—they called him Ricky—was born in Charlotte in 1980. He inherited from his father a strong work ethic, faith in God, and a passion for moving at unnatural speeds along the surface of Earth. At first Rick and Linda discouraged Ricky from racing, but when he decided that’s what he wanted to do with his life, they gave him their full support. By the time he was eighteen he was driving for his father’s team. An interviewer asked him: “With your dad so renowned both in NASCAR and corporate America, is it hard to find your own identity?” “No,” answered Ricky, “not really. I’m a lot like my father and I’m nothing like my father. The way he grew up—on a farm—he made his own identity when he was young in his love for cars. Well, I grew up in the city, and was this punk kid that snowboarded and all this stuff, so I made my own identity but I also love cars a lot. So we don’t dress alike, nothing like that. It’s different, his identity and mine. That’s a really good question, because I’ve never really thought about it like that. I feel like I just kind of formed it on my own. I’m kind of the new generation, Next, X, whatever it is.”
Ricky was laid-back and sweet, with a quiet intensity. He called his elders “sir” and said “I love you” at the ends of conversations with family members. His sleepy brown eyes shone out of a soft face;
his chin was round, his hair was blond and floppy. In 2001 he had nineteen top-ten finishes, with one win, in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series, and was runner-up for Rookie of the Year. In 2002 he switched from trucks to cars. Later that year, at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, driving somewhere close to 200 mph, he lost control of his Chevy Impala and crashed into a wall. He walked away with a separated shoulder. He was alive, but when he returned to the track two months later, he wasn’t the same driver. Every turn, he pictured his car hurtling into the wall, the shredded metal, the flames. He worried he’d mess up his shoulder again or worse. So, with his parents’ support, which was unwavering, he opened a motorcycle dealership and became a partial owner of Hendrick Motorsports. Now that he wasn’t racing anymore he could think more seriously about women. He fell in love with a beautiful young blonde and soon they were engaged.
This is where the loss part of the story starts.
In 1996, Rick Hendrick III had been diagnosed with chronic myelogenous leukemia. The year after that he pled guilty to fraud, having for years given houses and BMWs to Honda execs in exchange for more Hondas to sell at his dealerships. He paid a $250,000 fine, served three years of probation, and started the Hendrick Marrow Program, a nonprofit that helps find bone marrow matches for patients and gives money to uninsured marrow transplant recipients.
Not long after that, his father died. Papa Joe was eighty-four. He was born in the era of the Model T. He was a gunner for the air force in World War II. He grew up on a tobacco farm and died a rich man, thanks to the acumen and generosity of his son. When Rick’s time came, Ricky would take over his empire; adjacent offices for father and son were in the works at the company’s headquarters.
On a Sunday morning in October 2004, just fourteen weeks after Papa Joe’s death, Rick went out for brunch with his wife at one of their favorite restaurants in Charlotte, then headed across town to see his mother, who was still mourning the loss of her husband. Earlier that morning, at nearby Concord Regional Airport, Ricky had boarded a small plane, a Beechcraft Super King Air 200 twin propeller, to fly to a race in Martinsville. Rick was driving when his cellphone rang. It was Ken Howes, Hendrick Motorsports’ director of competition. He told Rick to pull over right away. The plane was missing, Ken told him—that was all they knew. Later all the bodies were recovered.
The plane had crashed, in heavy fog, into the side of Bull Mountain in the Appalachians. Nine people besides Ricky were dead: John Hendrick, Rick’s brother; Kimberly and Jennifer Hendrick, John’s twenty-two-year-old twin daughters; Jeff Turner, general manager of Hendrick Motorsports; Randy Dorton, the teams’ chief engine builder; Scott Lathram, a pilot for NASCAR driver Tony Stewart; Joe Jackson, a DuPont executive; and pilots Richard Tracy and Elizabeth Morrison. Saint Paul, 2 Timothy 4:6–7: “For I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought the good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.” Linda Hendrick, Ricky’s mother: “It’s not natural for a child you carry in your body to leave you. When am I going to stop hurting so much? I thought you were supposed to go before your children.”
The morning of the day Ricky died, his fiancée, Emily, wasn’t feeling well. Normally she traveled everywhere with him, but today he suggested she stay home and rest. Probably she had the flu. “I absolutely wished more than anything that I was on that plane, too,” she’d say later. “I didn’t want to live without him. I didn’t. It was the worst time in my whole life.” This is an important part of Emily’s story: she includes it each of the three times she tells it on The Bachelor—to an interviewer in episode one, to a group of sympathetic bachelorettes in episode three, and to the Bachelor later that same episode, at a crucial point in their one-on-one date, just when he was starting to wonder if she’d ever open up. They were having dinner in a repurposed barn at Cambria Winery and Vineyards in Santa Maria. Candles in glass vases sat on haystacks behind them. Emily must have intuitively understood that by emphasizing the extent of her despair she’d heighten the dramatic impact of what came next: “That Friday afterwards, I learned that I was pregnant with our daughter, and I could not have been happier. I knew there was a reason I wasn’t on the plane that day. Right then I knew: I wasn’t supposed to be, because we have this perfect daughter that makes me the happiest person in the world.” Rick Hendrick, too, saw a higher intelligence at work: “At the lowest time of our life, it was like a miracle that happened for us, because we got a chance to have a piece of Ricky left. It was like God had given us back something. We had lost so much.”
Two years after Ricky died, Rick and Linda Hendrick donated $3 million to Charlotte’s Levine Children’s Hospital, which put the money toward the Ricky Hendrick Centers for Intensive Care, where Emily was able to find work as an event planner. People had always told her everything happened for a reason; now she saw that this was true. Josephine Riddick “Ricki” Hendrick, proof of God’s divine plan, has her mother’s bright blond hair and big brown eyes, her father’s soft face and shy, crooked smile.
“Trust me when I say this,” said the Bachelor with impossible earnestness after Emily had finally put herself out there for him: “every single thing you’ve told me makes me like you even more.” I understood what he meant. I liked Emily, too. She came across as guileless and smart and a loving mother, qualities only heightened by being at odds with her Barbie-doll looks. Plus she’d waited longer to open up to the Bachelor than a lot of the other bachelorettes, which made her seem prudent and full of integrity. “What makes you you?” he’d asked, not for the first time. It was a good question. What makes you you?
On the face of it, it may seem like an awful idea to reveal deeply personal things about yourself on a TV show like The Bachelor, since to do so is to risk trivializing not only your own life but the lives of the people closest to you, to cede primary control of your identity to People and Us Weekly and the Internet comment monster. But if you want to make it past the first few episodes, sooner or later you’re going to have to tell the saddest story you know about yourself. It will be about something terrible that’s happened to someone you’ve loved, or about the terrible pain someone you’ve loved has inflicted on you. It will make you cry. As you wipe away the tears, the Bachelor will put his arm around you, maybe run his hand through your hair, maybe even kiss your forehead. You’ll laugh and say, “I can’t believe I’m crying.” The Bachelor will tell you it’s okay to cry. He’ll be so grateful you finally made yourself vulnerable for him. He really will. He knows it’s not easy for you to open up. Those tears will tell him you’re here for the right reasons.
And if nothing terrible has ever happened to you, nor to someone you’ve loved? If your father didn’t kill himself or abandon or abuse you? If all of your grandparents, even, are still alive? If you grew up on a quiet, dead-end street in a city renowned for the decency of its residents and the quality of its public school system? If accident of birth has protected you from hunger and displacement and prejudice and violence? If the most traumatic event of your life so far has been the death of a childhood cat? Can a self be carved out of minor disappointments, periods of boredom, and occasional low-level suffering? Intermittently, I felt significant. Could I love? What made me me?
* * *
—
“At times,” I read, “he regarded the wounded soldiers in an envious way. He conceived persons with torn bodies to be peculiarly happy. He wished that he, too, had a wound, a red badge of courage.” Somehow I had made it almost three decades without picking up Stephen Crane’s great Civil War novel, with its relentless piercing irony and the bracing compression and lucidity and loveliness of its sentences, and now I was reading it in conjunction with Stephen Crane: A Critical Biography, by John Berryman. What immediately struck me about this biography, in contrast to the one I’d just read about Berryman, was the extent to which the author seemed to have given himself permission to let his personality come through the writing. Ber
ryman’s tone was one of swashbuckling authority, the tone of a young man forming opinions. His criticism of Crane’s work was magisterial and sharp, full of fine and helpful distinctions; his narration of Crane’s life was close, bold, verging at times on novelistic: “He held dead cigarettes and listened. He was the author of a book; he was waiting. Privation gained.” Berryman presumed as much about Crane as Berryman’s biographer did about Berryman, but Berryman’s presumptuousness felt not only permissible but, mysteriously, almost just: maybe because he seemed almost aware that his true subject wasn’t Stephen Crane but John Berryman.
I remembered reading that Berryman had felt a deep identification with Crane—he even experienced, as he was finishing Crane’s biography, a brief, hallucinatory sensation of total merging—and now I encountered several passages in which Berryman might as well have been writing about himself. “After all,” Berryman quoted Crane (though of course there is no after all, I thought), “I cannot help vanishing and disappearing and dissolving. It is my foremost trait.” Berryman’s, too. Meanwhile, his lively discussion of Crane’s poems drew attention to their inscrutable, “dreamlike” quality, as though the young biographer-poet were discovering or highlighting the qualities he wanted his own work to exhibit.
The biography’s final, fevered section, moreover, was full of Freudian overreaching that only made sense, if it made sense at all, as oblique, semiconscious self-analysis. Crane’s father, like Berryman’s, died when he was a boy, and Berryman interprets all of Crane’s many romances in light of the theories he’d recently encountered in the Manhattan offices of Dr. Shea. Every man is a father figure to be killed. Every woman is a mother surrogate to fuck. “She alone when home combed Stephen’s fair hair and nursed him through recurrent colds.” Clearly, Berryman is trying in these pages to make sense of his own traumatic past. But you get the sense that he has a second aim, equally important, equally submerged: to rescue Crane from the pain and confusion and suffering of actual life. In this respect, I thought, his biography served a function directly opposite to most. What’s more, his writing had a tenderness, and an intimacy, and a deference that was missing from his own biographer’s.
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