I sang at his funeral a few years later. His daughter Nancy had asked for the two songs he’d sung to his girls when they were little and he came home late from a long day at work and found them already in bed, the “Whiffenpoof Song” and “Toora-loora-loora,” so I did those at the church. It was a big Methodist church, downtown Washington, and his colleagues were there in their black robes, sequestered in a library with two glass walls, to protect them from fawning. I’d seen them in session, on a high dais in their magnificent Cass Gilbert courtroom, like the Nine Grand Masters of the Ancient Order of Woodmen, hearing candidates for apprenticeship, and now they trooped into the sanctuary and sat in the front pew. When the minister nodded to me, I walked up front and said that at the family’s request we were going to sing the lullabies Harry sang to his girls when they were little and launched into “Toora-loora-loora,” and the congregation joined in but not one of the Justices. Not even the liberals would so much as move their lips. (Had they taken a vote on this? Had they examined the text and found a loora that was inconsistent? Or lurid?) President and Mrs. Clinton sang, and so did Al Gore and numerous senators, Bill singing with a big grin:
We will serenade our Louie while heart and voice shall last
Then we’ll pass and be forgotten with the rest.
Maybe it was the “We are little black sheep who have gone astray, Baa-baa-baa” that made the Justices uneasy, fearing it would undermine their authority, but they sat mute, unmoved, resolute bad behavior in a crowd of singers. I thought about it all the way back to the train station. A hardworking jurist loved his little girls and wanted to have a few sweet minutes with them at the end of a long day. He’d stayed late at the office doing his duty, untangling the deliberate obfuscations of highly paid attorneys, and now he allowed himself to sing Toora-loora-loora toora-loora-li to his little Whiffenpoofs in recognition of his true purpose in life. Bill Clinton got that and sang, and the judiciary declined. A court that cannot comprehend a father’s love is weak on fundamentals, I say. Lord have mercy.
One night in New York, a guy in an NY baseball cap sidled up to me on 86th Street where I was waiting for the light to change and he said, “The writing on the show has been really good lately.” It was a very famous comedian, I forget his name but I knew it at the time and so did everyone else in America. This is a beauty of fame, the ability to bestow a blessing. I once sat in the NBC Green Room waiting to go on the Letter-man show and suddenly Al Franken was there, leaning down, to give me good advice. He said, “Just remember: this isn’t a conversation, it’s a performance, you can’t go out there and just sit back and get comfortable.” Of course, that’s exactly what I went out and did. Dave said, “So what’ve you been up to lately?” cueing me for a routine, which I hadn’t worked up, and I said, “Oh, not much. How about you?” I died a slow death. But Al had given me his blessing. He’s from Minnesota, some of his best friends are Protestants, he knows our problem: we do not want to be seen trying too hard to look good. We prefer to be casually offhandedly humorous, not determinedly funny.
I went to the 1996 Grammys in New York, expecting to win one for my recording of Huckleberry Finn, and I saw heavy security at the Garden and heard police helicopters and realized that Hillary Clinton was in attendance and the fix was in. The First Lady had not come all this way just to watch me accept the Spoken Word trophy. Mark Twain had lost to her warmed-over Unitarian sermonette on interdependence, It Takes a Village. So I turned around and got back on the C train and she got the prize and rode to the airport in a motorcade that tied up traffic for a couple hours. Huck Finn was a better piece of work but I’d already won a Grammy in 1987 for Lake Wobegon Days, which I listened to a few days later and decided was a phoned-in job. So you win with a piece of crap, you lose with a masterpiece. Anyway the subway is a better place for a writer than a motorcade, and when you’re wearing a tuxedo, as I was, you’re a person of interest. Your fellow passengers take long looks at you and see no instrument case so you must be a waiter but why is a waiter on the uptown train at 8 p.m., was he fired? But he’s so unperturbed. And then they get it: he quit, he was insulted and walked off the job. And you stand up at your stop and there is silent applause in the air. I felt admirable. A waiter who refuses to accept insult is the equal of a Grammy nominee. I’d been nominated sixteen times and so what? The real prize was the line in the dark from the famous guy in the NY cap.
The radio show was on cable TV for a while and I was camera-shy like my grandma—in every snapshot of her she looks irked, and so did I on TV. Self-deprecation is the Midwestern default mode. On the screen I look like somebody’s brother-in-law looking for his car keys. The TV director didn’t dare direct me but Jenny told me a dozen times: Do not turn your back on the audience. Do not try to be inconspicuous. It doesn’t look good. But I kept turning my back. In the act of concentration, talking or singing, I’d wheel around, stare at the floor, wander down to Dworsky at the piano, stare into the wings, the host of the show trying to avoid drawing attention to himself, which was absurd.
I was slightly famous in a transitory off-center way, but I saw the real thing back in 1989 when I had a small part in a 100th birthday salute to Irving Berlin at Carnegie Hall. He wasn’t there, but everyone else was. It was the Show Biz Hall of Fame, but the statues were living, breathing people. I shook hands backstage with Tony Bennett, Rosemary Clooney, Marilyn Horne, Shirley MacLaine, Willie Nelson, and Ray Charles, who reached for my hand before I could get up the nerve to reach for his. Tommy Tune walked over in tap shoes before his big number, “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” Walter Cronkite was there and a rather low-key Bob Hope. Isaac Stern. Joe Williams. One household name after another and also me. I got to see Leonard Bernstein walk up to Frank Sinatra and say hello, two men whose like will never be seen again. Bernstein wore a boa and was all bonhomie. Sinatra seemed uneasy. Bernstein said, “Love your stuff.” Sinatra sang “Always” on the show and muffed a few notes and the stage manager had to walk out onstage and say, “Mr. Sinatra, one camera was out of position, the director would like you to do it again.” Mr. Sinatra said, “Of course.” It was very comfortable. They were all phenomenally famous and very good at playing themselves. I was the walk-on. I got to stand on stage and recite “What’ll I Do?” as a poem, all eighty-eight words. From memory. It was good enough. But I could not bring myself to walk up to the gods and make small talk. Frank Sinatra— my one chance to say hello to Frank Sinatra and admire the toupee and the tan, and in the interest of being cool, I stood off to the side with my hands in my pockets and looked at the wall above his head, pretending to be unamazed.
The people at the Berlin tribute were world-famous. I was famous in downtown St Paul. I walked up Wabasha Street to Candyland for buttered popcorn one day and was stopped by a grizzled old guy who said, “You’re Garrison Keillor, aren’t you? I haven’t read your books, but I saw your picture in the paper. How about a few bucks for an old bum down on his luck?” And I reached into my pocket and pulled out a twenty. I handed it over. “You wouldn’t happen to have another one of those, would you? It’d sure help me out.” I gave him another. I felt that I was buying good luck. I wished him well and he walked away.
To me, fame was like having a bright pink convertible parked in your driveway that isn’t yours but people think it is. I enjoyed the silliness of it. One fall, the Minnesota North Stars invited me to drop the first puck and open their hockey season. I asked John Mariucci, a Stars exec, why I was chosen, and he put his hand on the back of my neck and squeezed it. “We’ve had our eye on you,” he said in his Lucky Luciano voice. “We’ve seen you drop quite a few things over the years, and we like your style. You have a good release.” So I went shuffle-sliding out to mid-ice, the two opposing centers posed, I dropped the puck, they feinted toward it, we shook hands, I shuffled off. A moment of public meaninglessness, but a pleasure still, and I got to keep the puck and stay for the whole game.
I used my platform to honor my heroes. I had the power to
do it so I did. Roger Miller came on the show, Wynton Marsalis, the jazz violinist Svend Asmussen, Victor Borge, Jim Jordan who played “Fibber McGee,” the great Paula Poundstone.
I did an eighteen-city tour one summer with Chet Atkins and his band, and in every show I recited James Wright’s poems “An Offering for Mr. Bluehart” and “A Blessing” (Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota, twilight bounds softly forth in the grass, and the eyes of those two Indian ponies darken with kindness) as my son Jason played a guitar underscore. James was a courageous man who wrote transcendent verse in the face of serious trouble and could be wildly funny at the same time. I was inspired one day to talk to the state Department of Transportation about putting James’s “A Blessing” on a plaque at a highway rest stop near Rochester— and an engineer named Kermit McRae got it done. It’s a great poem and the DOT can be justly proud of it—for years, “A Blessing” appeared in the State Fair crop art exhibit, the words spelled out in seeds glued to a sheet of plywood, a singular honor for a contemporary poet—and now it was written on stone. Celebrity is capable of good deeds. People asked me to do benefits, so I did, though the celeb aspect of it—my name in big letters on the poster associated with historic restoration or a cure for MS or a good woman’s run for Congress—felt unseemly and piggish. But how could I say no to a benefit in Rochester for a residence for transplant patients run by two Franciscan nuns? I sat with a ten-year-old girl named Chris, who had undergone months of chemo and now was waiting for a bone marrow transplant to try to cure a kidney tumor, a long shot, I was told. The will to live was palpable in that place. She wore a face mask. She sat next to me and leaned against me and we talked. She was a skater and she wrote poetry. So I wrote her:
GK and Jason Keillor, 1986.
My friend the ten-year-old Chris
Is a poet who writes about bliss
And as she waits
For a poem, she skates
And each LINE is a STRIDE just like THIS.
I was happy to meet her. What was hard was the much-too-extravagant gratitude of the sponsors. I wanted to tell them: “I’m not really a good person. I’m incredibly selfish. I drink very expensive whiskey and I fly first class. If only you knew.”
We honored Studs Terkel on his 86th birthday. I put him in a Guy Noir script, playing a gangster just as he’d done fifty years before on Ma Perkins and The Romance of Helen Trent. He wore a blue blazer, red checked shirt, red sweater, red socks, gray slacks, gray Hush Puppies. The audience sang, in honor of the old lefty, to the tune of the Battle Hymn:
It’s time for working people to rise up and defeat
The brokers and the bankers and the media elite
And all the educated bums in paneled office suites
And throw them in the street.
Let’s reverse the social order—oh wouldn’t it be cool?
Down with management and let the secretaries rule.
Let the cleaning ladies sit around the swimming pool,
Send the bosses back to school.
And a bathing beauty wheeled out a cake with eighty-six candles, the frosting melting from the heat. She wore a tiny top, her left breast bursting out of it, and when she adjusted herself for modesty’s sake, she almost popped out. The old man blushed. He reached over to assist her, then thought better of it.
I put together a committee to celebrate F. Scott’s centenary in St. Paul in 1996. Somebody else would’ve done it if I hadn’t, but I did a good job along with Page Cowles and Paul Verret and Patricia Hampl’s help.
Carol Bly considered FSF a “racist alcoholic social climber who stole his wife’s writing,” and she argued for a Thorstein Veblen celebration honoring the Wisconsin author of The Theory of the Leisure Class, a favorite of hers, published in 1899—I said we could hold a Veblen festival around my dining room table. Fitzgerald still had a large readership because he still sounded contemporary and he created a great narrator, Nick Carraway. The writers who pitied Scott and wrote his eulogies—Glenway Wescott, John Dos Passos, John Peale Bishop—all of them unread today except by a few graduate students, and Dorothy Parker, who looked down at his body in the coffin and said, “The poor son of a bitch”—Dorothy Parker is more quoted than read. The centenary was lovely, the University of Minnesota Marching Band and Fitzgerald’s granddaughters and great-grandchildren in an open car and Gene McCarthy and J. F. Powers in another, an Irish piper and a Bookmobile, the parade wending to the old World Theater, where Scott and Zelda’s descendants took buckets of Mississippi River water and threw it at the building and it was christened the Fitzgerald Theater. His old secretary Frances Kroll Ring was there, eighty, hearty and rambunctious, her memories of him vivid. He’d hired her via a Los Angeles employment agency when she was 22 and she typed up his last work and intervened with his friends and dealt with Zelda and daughter Scotty and disposed of the empty bottles, and then he arose from his chair, clutched his heart, and died, 44, a famous American failure, and she defended him as a conscientious gentleman and man of letters working hard in the face of addiction and financial distress. She was a peach. It was amazing to be in the same room with her, his last and best heroine.
The statue committee decided not to put Fitzgerald on a pedestal, so he stands on the ground, coat over his arm, as if waiting for his ride to come. He was 5'9" in real life, which seems shrimpy today, so the sculptor gave him two more inches. There was a reading of The Great Gatsby at the Fitzgerald Theater, a packed house, the entire novel, with one intermission. The book reads well, a tribute to the author who survived the small mean anecdotes told about him. Survival: who can explain it? Fitzgerald survives.
26
John and Grace
AFTER DAD FELL OFF THE barn roof and cracked his head and developed spinal meningitis, it affected his sense of balance and he had to give up sorting mail on the train and take a job in the post office. He also suffered sinus problems that made a Minnesota winter less and less bearable, so, much to Mother’s sorrow, they flew off to Florida when he retired and spent their twilight years in a double-wide near Orlando, returning every summer— family meant everything to Mother, her sisters, nieces, in-laws—and she was overjoyed when they came back for good in 1991, just in time for the Halloween blizzard. They settled back into our old house north of Minneapolis, the house Dad built in a cornfield in 1947, and they gently relaxed their grip on things. They forgave their children for leaving the Brethren. Dad gave up driving and Mother gave up cooking big meals and served up sandwich meats and potato salad from a deli. The days got lighter. They were cheerful and kept their worries to themselves.
I was on the road more or less constantly in the Nineties when one by one my beloved aunts went down the long road to the graveyard. Our noble Aunt Josephine died. Aunt Eleanor collapsed and died in her kitchen while preparing Thanksgiving dinner. She was a kindred spirit, and her death was a grievous loss. She often told me, “Your father loves you, you know,” trying to make up for his disapproval of me. I saw Uncle Lawrence at her funeral; he looked stricken. He said, “You won’t have me or your dad around much longer.” Elsie died at home, tended by Uncle Don. That generation passed into silence as I flew around the country telling stories about Lake Wobegon, the town where I tried to keep them alive. In the winter of 2001, my father took his leave of the world in a bedroom that had been mine when I was eighteen, where I looked at the red light of a distant water tower and read A Farewell to Arms while smoking a cigarette and blowing the smoke out of the window and seeing it blow back in. He had chronic pneumonia that antibiotics didn’t clear up and he’d made it clear that he didn’t wish to return to the hospital for more of the dreaded suctioning procedures, so he was brought home and put on hospice care. His morning nurse Ramona played her guitar and sang, “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” and he smiled.
Dying at home is labor-intensive, and it helps to have six children who can take turns on night duty, administering the nutrients and Tylenol, adjusting the oxygen. It is an up-a
nd-down business. At various times, he seemed to be at death’s door, and then one day he saw my three-year-old daughter standing at his bedside, poking his foot as it moved under the blanket, and this got his interest. He wriggled his toes. She tried to grab them. He wriggled, she giggled. She tossed a ball to him, and he threw it back. She kissed his hand.
The hospice people gave us a handbook on dying that advises you to forgive the dying person, and express your love, and your gratitude, and to say goodbye. It doesn’t explain how to do this with someone who, even when he could hear, never went in for such intimate declarations. And what about all those things you’re not sure whether to forgive or feel grateful for? When I was eighteen, he told me he wouldn’t pay a penny for my college education, and I was grateful for his disapproval: it meant I was on my own. I worked my way through school and never needed his permission. When my little daughter grabbed for his toes and kissed his hand and he grinned at her, that was the best gift I could give him. “All I do is nap all day,” he said to me. “They keeping you busy?”
I was keeping myself busy. It was February 2001. Shows in Berlin and Dublin, and off I went. Nobody suggested I not go.
From my diary:
Feb. 27. Flew Minneapolis to Amsterdam in a window seat on a 747, wrapped the blanket around me, swallowed the Dramamine, put on the sleep mask, inserted the earplugs, eased the seat back, visualized a beach and surf and birds and was gone. Woke briefly over the Atlantic, dozed off, then the flight attendant told me to raise my seat back and the wheels hit the pavement. I raised the shade and was blinded by sunlight.
Feb. 28. In Schiphol, ran into a choir from South Dakota heading for Venice, touring Italy with a program of Negro spirituals. White kids, whose director wanted them to sing in dialect. And a guy from Butte heading for Syria where he works in the oil business. Thirty days in Syria, thirty off in Montana. Norwegian ancestry, about my age. The beauty of being a minor celeb: people walk up and introduce themselves. Friends wherever you go. Met Charlie Cutter, Leeds’s sister, heading for Kathmandu. Why? I didn’t ask. She’s a French chef, lives on the West Coast. I wanted to tell her how much I admired him and just couldn’t find the words. There was a clarity to Leeds at eighteen that nobody else had. He knew where he was headed and what for.
That Time of Year Page 27