“It was raining all the way down,” he said. “Put that in the book.”
3
ON A TYPICALLY WARM KENTUCKY MORNING, Julian headed over from his house to the Buffalo Trace distillery. I parked in the lot down below the rickhouses and headed into the gift shop, where I found him signing decanters for a man who had brought his three grandsons with him. The man’s son was getting into the bourbon business up the road, he said—Three Boys Farm Distillery, it’s called—and he was clearly in awe of Julian, who posed for pictures. When the man started espousing his political theories, Julian disengaged and we walked back through the museum and gift shop, where the ladies who manage the place keep a running stack of stuff left by people for Julian to sign. His kids think it’s hilarious that anyone might want his autograph; this late-in-life third act still seems like some elaborate prank pulled on all of them, and eventually the ruse will be revealed.
It smelled like whiskey outside, at least to me. Julian always jokes that it smells like money. Buffalo Trace has been his home since he made the deal to escape the collapsing bottling line we were going to see. The distillery sits in a little valley, and the road winds down into a canyon of brick smokestacks and hulking rickhouses full of barrels. There’s a café in nearby Frankfort where he likes to go—the owner makes good moonshine, he tells me—so we headed into town. That’s where the state government is located, which always prompts him to go on a roll about taxes. It had been a few months since the Kentucky Derby and I still wasn’t entirely clear on how the family went from owning a beautiful, sprawling distillery on the outskirts of Louisville to Julian fighting to survive in a back-road bottling plant. Julian explained the vote again, how his dad’s sister sided with the minority shareholders to force the sale. But he also told me something new. “We couldn’t have hung on to it,” he said. “There’s no way. The whiskey business wasn’t good, way before its time, so to speak.”
There were several interconnected reasons why the bourbon market cratered in the 1960s. First of all, the vodka lobby finally changed the laws to give itself a designation. Before, vodka had been called “neutral grain spirit,” which sounded like something the town drunk keeps in a flask before pissing himself on a bench. Vodka, however, sounded like something James Bond drank. In fact he did, and bourbon historians actually point to the Bond effect. The industry panicked to the initial wavering of the market, which made it all worse: raising the barrel entry proof to make more product, which forever reduced the quality of the whiskey, and then making light bourbon that went better in cocktail mixes, or so the advertising department thought. But most of all, the historians say that the same conflict playing out between Julian and his father was actually driving the collapse of bourbon. This was a time of rebellion. Bourbon was what your father drank. Nobody wanted to be like their fathers. People looked for new things to drink in this new age. This is the market Julian Proctor Van Winkle Jr. inherited from his father, Pappy. The old tank commander didn’t understand why the world had suddenly changed on him.
4
SONIA DIDN’T WANT TO TELL PEOPLE she was pregnant. She didn’t want the attention or the sympathy if something went wrong again. I worried about that, of course, and about everything else. I worried about what this child would need from me. I set up a college fund. My own parents served as such a great example. Both loved me unconditionally and showed that love every day, as well as an unshakable belief in me and my dreams, no matter how unlikely they seemed. That’s what I wanted to provide, more than anything else: a safe harbor of encouragement.
I wanted her to have my dad’s sense of wonder and fairness. He always celebrated other people’s success and believed that greatness wasn’t a zero-sum game. You were only ever competing against yourself and your own limitations. Someone else’s joy was never your sadness, he always taught us. I wanted her to have my mother’s sense of unconditional love and her toughness. Nobody is better in a crisis than my mom; she possesses a fire and love and strength that words alone can’t describe. I wanted our daughter to carry the best of them, and of me and us, while leaving the worst behind. I wished I could swallow all our faults so that those things could die with me and leave her unencumbered. The scary part, I realized, was that she would learn little from anything I said and more from the things I did, the things she’d be intently watching me do.
Talking to Julian’s kids helped me start to keep notes about the kind of father I wanted to be. They tell funny stories about going back and watching the thousands of home videos he took of them. Once the triplets had a funeral for their baby dolls and, as they wail about burying dead babies, you can hear Julian on the camera’s microphone trying and failing not to laugh. “When we were kids, his love language was spending time with us,” his daughter Chenault said. “He is a family man and was always around. He is easygoing and doesn’t do well with confrontation and was not the disciplinarian. That naturally fell on Mom, which I know got old for her to have to be the bad guy all the time. When she had had enough he would be the enforcer of whatever needed enforcing at her request, and I could tell she had put him up to it and I just couldn’t take it seriously. I remember holding back laughing when he was disciplining me for something, knowing it had come straight from Mom.”
5
JULIAN SHAPED HIMSELF into a different kind of father than the one he had growing up. He was more patient, involved, easy, but he also deeply admired his dad, and how he lived, worked, and shouldered the burden of Pappy’s shadow. Julian’s dad worked hard; a bull of a man. Once when the distillery workers went on strike, he rode through the picket lines on the running boards of a truck, carrying his shotgun. Nobody dared fuck with him. Alas, that spirit couldn’t make people want to drink bourbon. Finally, unable to fend off his relatives, he made the decision that he’d rather stop fighting than alienate his family. He faced an impossible choice. Would he destroy the family in order to defend it? For the only time in his life, the tank captain surrendered. He regretted it for the rest of his life.
“We didn’t get cash,” Julian explained to me. “We got Norton Simon stock. You ever heard of that company? They were a conglomerate. They owned Tanqueray, Johnny Walker, Canada Dry, I guess the soft drinks. McCall’s magazine, Avis, all kinds of different shit, and they wanted a distillery so they ended up with it. So we got Norton Simon stock and it went down to like two dollars a share one year and we’re all going, ‘Oh my God, what the fuck is about to happen now?’ and that probably helped my father get prostate cancer I’m sure. But then it bounced back and everyone ended up selling it, getting rid of it, which was okay, it finally worked out.”
When Julian’s dad moved out of his office—Tommy Bulleit’s office now—he wanted to work but didn’t have a place to go. He wasn’t the kind to go find a beach. So he got an office in a building on Brownsboro Road in Louisville, a block or so from Patrick’s Bar, one of the world’s great dives, and he hired a secretary and started to buy whiskey from his old distillery and others to bottle a private label. He called it Old Rip Van Winkle. Julian remains in that office today and now his son, Preston, is in there, too. For nine years, Julian’s dad bought whiskey from Stitzel-Weller, which then bottled it for him as a favor and a sign of respect for the family. In 1981, he died after his short fight against prostate cancer. He rarely if ever talked about the great shame of losing Stitzel-Weller. The pain was worse to him than getting shot during the war.
“It killed him,” his daughter Sally flatly told me one night at dinner. The stress and the cancer were merely complications from the mortal wound of losing the most important part of himself.
6
JULIAN AND HIS DAD were men of different times. That’s how it is with fathers and sons. The act of spanning a generational divide is the single most important thing either person will do in their lifetime; the relationship depends on making that leap successfully.
With my own father, I remember so clearly a moment in 198
6, when he called me into the master bedroom where the final round of the Masters played on the television. It was the day before his fortieth birthday, I realized years later. I didn’t know then what that meant, but I do now—how a man is forced to examine his life and make an accounting of everything he wanted to be and everything he has actually become, to sort out dreams from failures, and to realize for the first time that the road he is on is the only road he’ll ever travel. At forty, reinvention is pretty much dead. You are the man you were always going to be. Except . . . “Jack Nicklaus is going to win the Masters, son, and you’ve got to watch this,” he told me. “You will remember this for the rest of your life.”
Together we watched a forty-six-year-old man find a lost piece of his younger self. My father cried that afternoon. I don’t remember ever seeing him cry before.
For the first few years after his death, my defining memory of my father’s passing was of landing at the Memphis airport. My family hadn’t told me the news so I thought I was flying home to sit vigil. On the escalator down into baggage claim, I saw my mother step out from behind a pillar. My brother stood next to her. The escalator seemed to slow down as he just shook his head. When I got to the bottom, my mother said, “Your sweet daddy died.”
My father dreamed of attending the Masters. When I started working as a sportswriter, I’d go every year, and I promised to take him. I never did. That regret ate away at me, and so I dealt with it the only way I knew how: I wrote a story. Called “Holy Ground,” it was about our relationship with that golf tournament and how it was a proxy for something much larger. It was written when the wound of Daddy’s passing was still fresh, and so it soothed me, but I also hoped that it might keep some of his spirit alive. I’ve gotten hundreds of messages about it. I’ve had strangers at the airport stop me to tell me what it meant to them and their father. I love it when people talk to me about this story, because that means it has done its work. My mother wrote me a few years ago and said, “Just reread holy ground. always do this time of year. It continues to be a gift beyond measure. ilu! xooxoxoxox mama.”
7
MOST EVERY MAN COMPETES WITH HIS FATHER and imitates his father, lives in fear of disappointing, and craves approval, and on the extreme ends of this potentially fraught relationship, a man often spends his entire adult life trying to be exactly like his father or nothing like him. I loved the book Julian’s sister Sally wrote, for its comprehensive history, sure, but mostly because I got to see their father through her eyes. The lens of a daughter and the lens of a son will never be the same. It’s helpful to get to know the man she knew before seeing the man his son worked alongside.
I enjoyed spending time with Sally. She’s smart, beautiful, and passionate about preserving the history of Kentucky. She wrote another book called Saving Kentucky, and she devotes a lot of energy to helping me remember their past. That passion started with her book about the distillery. Seeing her family’s second home under the control and care of others leaves her in distress. A friend of mine went with her on a tour once, and as she walked the grounds, she wept so noticeably that he asked if she was okay. It’s all still raw for the Van Winkles. Her book, But Always Fine Bourbon, in a lot of ways, was about reclaiming her own memories. She wanted a record for others, yes, but also for herself, as proof that any of it happened. Her father comes alive on the page. She describes his athletic build and his “gorgeous” legs and his bald head and olive skin. You can hear him laugh when she describes it. An Ivy League man, he wanted his salesmen to be up on all the current events and gave them free subscriptions to all the magazines in which Old Fitz advertised. As I read, I could only hope that one day I’d have a daughter who looked at me with the admiration Sally felt for the man the Stitzel-Weller staff called Mr. Julian. At bedtime, reading stories aloud, he could do all the voices. He could be found in cashmere jackets or hunting pants “full of bird blood and holes,” she wrote, and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t be quiet. Their mother often said, “Shhhhhh, Van!”
They never knew how bad the whiskey business had gotten. Mr. Julian never complained, an army officer to his core. He stayed at the office late. His plate almost always waited for him in the warmer. He never complained. One of his favorite sayings about hard times was, “Blossom, bring on the beans.”
He and his only son could not have been more different.
“Night and day,” his sister Sally said, laughing. “Dad was really gregarious and a bull in a china shop and just out there.”
I’d heard a lot of stories about Mr. Julian, read a lot about him, too, and it seemed pretty clear that Sally made a conscious decision in her book to write about the best side of a complicated man. I understood completely. I’ve written about my father a lot, too, and while I am not ashamed of his flaws, I did think it was my right to focus on the parts that rang most true to me. It was my job as a firstborn son to protect him in death as I had been unable to do in life.
8
MY FATHER DRANK—A LOT.
I’ve never written that before in all the thousands of words I’ve written about him, although I’ve hinted at it. But I’ve concluded not mentioning it makes no sense, since the omertà that is so important in my family also strips from him the courage it took to find his hard-won freedom. His dad, Frazier, my grandfather, drank a lot, too. A brilliant man forced to drop out of college to run the family farm after his own dad died, he never got over the gulf between the life he wanted and the life he ended up living. I’m wondering right now, for the first time, how much my dad internalized those fears and the demons that quieted them. Big Frazier liked Canadian Club and lived in shame at his inability to stop drinking it. He begged his boys to be stronger than him. My dad made good on his father’s unrealized dreams of sobriety. He admitted he had a problem, he attended meetings and did his most vital work, in terms of both helping people and big paydays. And while I won’t bare any more of his soul here, because he’s not alive to give his blessing, I do think my dad had real greatness in him that he never fully tapped.
When I thought about the child who would join our family, I was often overcome with grief that she would never get to meet the amazing and totally original man who was my father. He was magnetic and kind and generous and taught me so many lessons, like to never feel jealous of other people’s success, and to try to see the best in people and to have empathy for whatever might be causing or fueling their worst behaviors. There wasn’t a strange roadside diner specializing in stewed rabbit that he ever passed without stopping. He played air drums to Motown classics when he drove. I cannot count the number of times we listened to the soundtrack from The Big Chill. He loved to go to the beach and buy a cooler of seafood and spend his vacation in the kitchen, cooking up big dinners that we would all share. The sound of the ocean makes me picture his smile. I’ve got a photo of him as a young man in my office, and I’m looking at it right now, and it’s crazy how the smile he’s wearing in that photo is the same one I knew so well as his son. He was a lifelong Democrat mainly because he thought Republicans were “mean,” and he was able to go into the most country, good-old-boy places and raise money for people like Michael Dukakis. He wore seersucker with style. He loved old war movies. He loved bologna and hoop cheese sandwiches from old country stores. He loved my mother deeply and unconditionally. In the years after he died, she would find flashlight after flashlight stashed around the house. He’d gone and bought dozens of them and hidden them, where they might be discovered one by one, as a reminder that he would always be there, shining. That story sums him up best to me. He thought of the grand gesture and then did it.
When my dad’s cancer got him at age fifty-eight, he ran out of time. He needed more time. I’m biased but I believe with his brain and charisma he could have been governor of Mississippi. He brought that kind of energy with him into a room. I cannot remember what his voice sounded like, but I will never forget how the atmosphere in a room changed when tha
t voice entered it. His unfulfilled potential has been my greatest fear and motivator. For the past two decades, I’ve worked like a maniac at the expense of so many other things in my life, trying on some level to be successful enough for the both of us. That was my mission and along with it came my greatest fear: What if I self-destructed on the road to success? Might I be so focused on redeeming my father that I wouldn’t slow down enough to really understand the warnings of his life, that I’d build something great and then, chased by the same old demons, watch it crumble—or, even worse, tear it down myself? Meeting Julian and making him talk about his family made me ask myself the same question I’d been asking him: What did I owe my late father? What did I owe a grandfather I never met? What is demanded of a son or a daughter? What was demanded of me?
9
JULIAN OFTEN DESCRIBES HIS OWN FATHER with the same simple phrase: he was a tank captain in World War II. We all develop one-line descriptions that use one biographical detail to say everything. Julian didn’t say his father was a legend in the whiskey business, although he was. He doesn’t say he was distant from his namesake son but doting with his grandchildren. No, his description goes back to his dad’s time in the Pacific. He was a tank commander. He rolled over anything in his way. Julian sometimes felt rolled over. The outsized nature of his father’s strength and heroism kept Julian from seeing that he himself was more like Pappy than his old man was, and that he didn’t need to be anything other than himself.
Our fathers are often mysteries to us and therefore we are often mysteries to ourselves. Self-awareness only comes with time if it comes at all. Julian was so busy dealing with the man he wasn’t that he didn’t really spend time to get to know the man he was. My dad didn’t roll over me, but he did cast a big enough shadow that I knew I’d have to eclipse or else grow stagnant in the shade. I wanted to be able to stand confidently next to the idea of him. Julian also contended with the expansive idea of his father, a man who would rather die than let his men go into battle without him, not because he wanted medals but because they counted on him. He was not an easy man. Every morning he did his old military exercises: bicycles, jumping jacks, and sit-ups. When he needed to silence his mind, he’d get a buddy and go and chop down trees, hollering war cries the whole time.
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