THE THORPEBLOG

That Famous Letter to the AAU

2012-01-27T09:46:00.000-08:00

On January 27, 1913, 101 years ago today, Glenn S. "Pop" Warner delivered a letter from Jim Thorpe to James E. Sullivan, the secretary-treasurer of the American Amateur Union (AAU) at his office in New York. In the letter Thorpe admitted to having played professional baseball in the minor leagues during the summers of 1909 and 1910. "Professional" meant that he had been paid to play.
This was explosive information. Six months before, at the Fifth Olympiad in Stockholm, Thorpe had won gold medals by huge margins in both the pentathlon and decathlon, astonishing the world as the first super-athlete as the modern Olympic movement was struggling to survive. In order to qualify to compete, he had had to sign a form that stated he was an "amateur" -- meaning that he had never accepted money for any kind of athletic endeavor.
So, when a newspaper headline on January 22, 1913, six months later, revealed that Thorpe was no amateur, the result was what is still considered the biggest sports scandal ever. After congratulating itself for the American team's generally spectacular performance in Stockholm, the American sports establishment, humiliated, rushed to find its scapegoat.
Actually, Warner wrote the letter to Sullivan and persuaded his star athlete at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania to sign it. Warner also insisted he had no idea that Thorpe had played baseball those two summers. In fact, he knew exactly where Thorpe had been and what he'd been doing. But Warner, ambitious, often unscrupulous, was not going to take the fall for his athlete in the scandal that had quickly assumed international proportions.
Here is the full text of what soon became a famous letter, scrutinized and debated about for the rest of the century -- and beyond:

Carlisle, Pa. Jan. 26, 1913
James E. Sullivan
Dear Sir:
When the interview with Mr. Clancy stating that I had played baseball on the Winston-Salem team was shown to me I told Mr. Warner that it was not true and in fact I did not play on that team. But so much as been said in the papers since then that I went to the school authorities this morning and told them just what there was in the stories.
I played baseball at Rocky Mount and at Fayetteville, N.C. in the summer ofd 1909 and 1910 under my own name. On the same teams I played with were several college men from the north who were earning money by ball playing during their vacations and who were regarded as amateurs at home. IO did not play for the money there was in it because my property brings me in enough money to live on, but because I liked to play ball. I was not wise inthe ways of theworls and did not realize this was wrong, and that it would make me a professional in track sports, although I learned from the other payers that it would be better for me not to let anyone know that I was playing and for that reason I never told anyone at the school about it until today.
In the fall of 1911 I applied for readmission to this school and came back to continue muy studies and take par tin the school sports and of course I wanted to get on the Olympic team and take that trip to Stockholm. I had Mr. Warner send in my application for registering in the A.A>U., after I had answered the questions and signed it and I received my card allowing me to compete on the winter meets and other track sports. I never realized until now what a big mistake I made by keeping it a secret about my ball playing and I am sorry I did so. I hope I would be partly excused because of the fact that I was simply as Indian school boy [Thorpe would turn 26 in 1913] and did not know all about such things. In fact, I did not know that I was doing wrong because I was doing what I knew several other college men had one, except that they did not use their own names.
I have always liked sports and only played or run races for the fun of the things and never to earn money. I have received offers amounting to thousands of dollars since my victories last summer, but I have turned them all down because I did not care to makes money from my athletic skill. I am very sorry, Mr. Sullivan, to have it all spoiled in this way and I hop the Amateur Athletic Union and the people will not be too hard in judging me.
Yours truly,
James Thorpe

Same Old., Same Old ...

2012-01-01T16:24:00.000-08:00

Joe Nocera wrote a terrific piece in today's Sunday New York Times Magazine on college athletes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/magazine/lets-start-paying-college-athletes.html?_r=1&hpw.
They should be paid, he says, and thereby end "the hypocrisy that permeates big-money college sports."

He is totally right and the only thing missing from the piece, at least to me, was a paragraph that traced the current mess right back to the beginnings of college football about a century ago. For some of that backstory, read my biography of Jim Thorpe, NATIVE AMERICAN SON: THE LIFE AND SPORTING LEGEND OF JIM THORPE (Knopf, 2010).

Thorpe stepped onto the gridiron just as the rules of football finally settled into the form we would recognize as the modern game. His coach, Glenn S. "Pop" Warner, was a master manipulator of those rules. He also set up a football machine at Thorpe's Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania that is a precursor of today's collegiate football enterprise.

Not that he was the only one. The coaches at Yale, Harvard and other top-level football schools turned a blind eye to alumni payments "under the table," not to mention to other perks that made the financial situation of top collegiate athletes very comfortable indeed.

Fascinating stuff. Let's see if Nocera's tough thinking produces concrete results in the NCAA...

My Best of 2011

2011-12-22T22:01:00.000-08:00

A handful of my very favorite personal highlights of a great year --
Professional: Taking NATIVE AMERICAN SON on the road

Charlottesville, VA: Speaking at the terrific Ragged Mountain Running Shop during the Virginia Festival of the Book
Los Angeles, CA: Appearing on the "Beyond the Icon" panel with Richard Schickel, Yunte Huang and Leslie Brody at the Los Angeles Times Festival of the Book at USC
Oklahoma City, OK: Being keynote speaker at the Jim Thorpe Association's Leadership Luncheon -- and selling LOTS of books
New York City: Speaking to the Actors' Fund in the venerable Milton Berle Room of the Friar's Club
Atlantic City, NJ: Speaking at the annual Pop Lloyd Negro League Celebration and having the privilege of meeting several former Negro League players and hearing their wonderful stories
Feedback: Hearing, all year, from discerning readers such as Douglas Brinkley, how much they enjoyed NATIVE AMERICAN SON.
Awards: Winning the annual research awards from both SABR (baseball) and PFRA (pro football) - the stat guys who know EVERYTHING about their respective sports.

Personal: Friends, Family and Community

Deepening old friendships
Making many new ones
Being with my son, my daughter, and my two-year-old grandson
Living in and loving NYC, Westchester County, NY and Rockbridge County, VA = perfect trio.

On to 2012...

50 Years Ago Today - Disastrous Berlin Premiere of JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG

2011-12-14T17:48:00.000-08:00

Within sight of the Reichstag ruins and 700 yards from the brand-new Berlin Wall dividing the city, Stanley Kramer’s JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG had its world premiere a half-century ago on December 14, 1961 before a stunned, silent audience of prominent Germans – and 300 reporters from 26 countries. “No applause, no sobs, no tentative laughs to relieve the tension,” reported the New York Herald Tribune. Few showed up for the lavish post-party.

In a century marked with unprecedented conflict and a year, 1961, that often felt like the edge of Armageddon, JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG marks an important pivot after which popular feeling, at least in this country, began to face seriously the horrors of what would soon come to be generally called “the Holocaust.”

The sensational trial of Adolf Eichmann on 15 counts, including crimes against humanity, had concluded in Jerusalem a week before with a guilty verdict. The death sentence was read out the day after the movie’s premiere, December 15. By Christmas commentators were suggesting that the Nuremburg trials were the legal and moral precedent that “authorized brave little Israel” to hunt down and prosecute Eichmann. Hannah Arendt had reported on the trial for The New Yorker and the last four words of the subtitle of her subsequent book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, would become a catch phrase of history.

Preceding the film’s premiere had been a year of stunning Cold War brinksmanship. In April the Bay of Pigs debacle kicked off John Kennedy’s first year as U.S. president. Encouraged by this apparent incompetence of the American leader, Soviet leader Khrushchev bullied and harangued Kennedy at their June meeting in Vienna, threatening war if his demands to alter the status of Berlin were not met. All summer the world tensed itself for war. By August 17 the Berlin Wall was done, built in five days. September 1 U.S. seismographs discovered that the Soviets had resumed testing of major nuclear devices.

Meanwhile, director Kramer, screenwriter Abby Mann and United Artists were working on JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG. Shooting took place after two weeks in February of rehearsals at the Revue Studio in Hollywood and then moved to the site of the original trials in the Palace of Justice in Nuremburg and to the still-rubble-strewn streets of Berlin.

The meticulous Kramer was known for “message” pictures (THE DEFIANT ONES, ON THE BEACH, INHERIT THE WIND), but JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG was made with a particular passion and purpose. Since the end of World War II in 1945, a former U.S ally, the USSR, had become an enemy. And a former enemy, Germany – at least the Western part of the divided country -- was an essential Cold War ally in the fight against communism. As a result, it was considered "a breach of good manners in polite society,” as the film’s screenwriter Abby Mann recalled, to bring up the Nazi extermination of the Jews for fear of offending Germany.

The Nuremburg war crime trails had been a first in international jurisprudence, establishing the legal concept of crimes against humanity. The first and best known was the trial of key Nazi leaders, including Rudolf Hess and Albert Speer, from 1945 to 1946. JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG was based on the third trial, in 1947, that prosecuted 16 functionaries in the German judicial system (the script condensed the number down to four). When Mann discovered in the late 1950s that none of the jurists convicted (most of them were found guilty, some given life sentences) were still in prison, he wondered if the same attitude that allowed the Nazis to come to power was somehow related to their release (Arendt would speculate along similar lines during the Eichmann trial). That question inspired Mann’s original 1959 Playhouse 90 teleplay.

The show was a sensation. Mann claimed to be the first, both in the TV and film versions, to show documentary footage of concentration camps to a broad audience. “Nobody wanted to remember the camps,” he recalled at the time. The American Gas Company, a sponsor of the teleplay, insisted that the word “gas” be deleted from the script with the result, cracked one reviewer, that “Six million Jews died in . . . chambers.”

Kramer figured the only way the movie version would fly at the box office was to load it up with stars. The New Yorker would call it “a judicial GRAND HOTEL.” Marlene Dietrich was the “good German,” Spencer Tracy the crusty American judge, Maximilian Schell would win an Oscar for his portrayal of the defense attorney. Judy Garland, fragile, was in her first film in five years (on April 23, 1962, she would give her great Carnegie Hall concert). Montgomery Clift, drinking heavily, worked for free, his face wrecked by a car crash. Other stars: Richard Widmark, a very young William Shatner, and Burt Lancaster as Emil Janning, the Nazi judge who gives the final indictment of his own culture (‘Where were we? ... Were we deaf, dumb and blind?”).

The movie “opened and closed” that night in Berlin and would not be released in Germany until after the mini-series HOLOCAUST was a hit on German television 20 years later. Former United Artists executive and biographer Steven Bach would call JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG “one of the last of its sort before the movie industry’s capitulation to television made such subject matter impossible except on television.”

It wasn't a great movie, but it was an effective one. It was made to remind the world, as The New Yorker summed it up at the time, “of nothing less than the degree of our accountability as members of the human race, for the life and well-being of every other member of the race.”

11-11-11: "Crippled Jimmy Thorpe" v. Harvard

2011-11-11T09:47:00.000-08:00

One hundred years ago today Jim Thorpe was the star of one of collegiate football's most spectacular games: Carlisle Indian Industrial School v. Harvard. For the full story read my NATIVE AMERICAN SON: THE LIFE AND SPORTING LEGEND OF JIM THORPE (paperback due out in March 2012).

For a teaser, click on http://www.amazon.com/Native-American-Son-Sporting-Legend/dp/0375413243 and plug "Harvard" into the search box to read the section of the book that starts on page 101:

The stage was now set, public interest “smoking hot,” for “the battle of the year," Carlisle versus Harvard. Harvard's coach, the tall, patrician, snobbish and belligerent Percy Haughton, wrote to Pop Warner [Carlisle's coach] before the game warning him that if Carlisle used a Warner trick -- sewing half-football patches on the front of the jerseys of the backs -- Harvard would cancel the game. Haughton told his second-string to suit up to start the game, conserving his varsity's strength for their next games against Dartmouth and Yale, and left for New Haven to scout the Yale-Brown game. As one Carlisle player said, “We pointed to this game because it meant more prestige than any other. On the other hand Harvard didn’t consider us much.”

At game time “Crippled Jimmy Thorpe,” as The Boston Sunday Globe described him, had his still-injured right leg heavily wrapped with “a basketweave of strapping adhesive plaster running almost from his toe to his knee.” The game would set him up as the enduring, punishing model of the iron man who plays on regardless of physical handicap. Injuries -- Jim suffered few of them -- only made him more focused. Revealing a superstitious side to his character, he pointed out that this was the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the eleventh year of the new century and eleven was his lucky number.

The game was epic. “Probably,” claimed the Kansas Star, “the most spectacular playing ever witnessed.”

The World's "Most Wonderful Athlete" Goes Around the World

2011-09-17T11:02:00.000-07:00

The Brits have an acute sense of history that we Americans can only envy. A year in advance of the 2012 Olympic Games in London, the busy BBC has been all over the story of Jim Thorpe's incredible performance 100 years ago (almost) at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm. I've done two lengthy interviews, one in person (see my previous blog post on that) for a BBC Radio 2 series that will air next spring, the other by phone from London for BBC World Service. Impressive, both of them.

1912 was the Fifth Olympiad of the modern Games. The Olympic movement was barely off the ground and plagued with controversy and in-fighting. Read my NATIVE AMERICAN SON to get a nice summary of the whole thing.

Here is the first of the two Thorpe-related radio shows to air, so far, from across the pond: BBC World Service is the 24/7 show that broadcasts in 27 languages to 180 million people around the planet. It's a fitting audience size -- and recognition -- for the finest multi-sport athlete the world has ever seen or ever will see. You'll hear me talking about Thorpe. More importantly, you'll hear the pleasant, relaxed Thorpe himself, from a rare radio broadcast.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p00jy6bw/Sporting_Witness_Jim_Thorpe_American_Indian_legend/

Oh, to be in Long Beach now that SABR's there...

2011-07-09T07:57:00.000-07:00

Lawrence Ritter, standing, looks on as Lee Lowenfish, left, interviews Red Barber, circa 1985

This Thursday, July 7, my biography of Jim Thorpe --Native American Son: The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe (Knopf) -- was officially awarded the 2011 Larry Ritter Award for the best book about the Deadball Era by the Deadball Era Committee at the annual convention of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) in Long Beach, California.

I was unable to cross the continent to attend, but I sure wish I could have. This is a great honor, given by total experts in the history and statistics of our great American pastime. And, though I never met him, I understand that Larry Ritter was not only deeply respected for his knowledge of the game, but loved for his generous nature.

So, here are the remarks I prepared to be read out at the Deadball Era Committee meeting this week:

It is an honor to be the recipient of this year’s Larry Ritter Award from the SABR Deadball Era Committee. When I called my editor at Knopf, Jonathan Segal, to tell him about the award he was delighted. Jon knew Larry, thought the world of him and was thrilled at this wonderful connection. I wish I could be there to accept the award and to thank the Committee in person.

Of course I also immediately thought of THE GLORY OF THEIR TIMES: THE STORY OF BASEBALL TOLD BY THE MEN WHO PLAYED IT. Fred Snodgrass, Sam Crawford, Hans Lobert, Chief Meyers, Rube Marquard – each of those names figures in Jim Thorpe’s story when he was with the New York Giants and in the major – and high minor – leagues.

Part of the pleasure in researching and writing NATIVE AMERICAN SON was going back in time to those days when organized sports were new and fresh. Though baseball was the most organized of the team sports – football had a very long way to go, as Thorpe knew well – the sport was still in its comparative childhood, if not infancy.

One of the most satisfying discoveries about Thorpe – and there were many – was coming across 1919 newspaper coverage that demolished the old John McGraw taunt that Thorpe couldn’t hit a curve ball. As you can read in the book, Thorpe’s relationship with the redoubtable Muggsy was complicated. The root of the problem in my opinion? Thorpe was already a star when he started with the Giants in 1913. The greatest athlete in the world. He didn’t need McGraw to make him one.

However, he did need the manager to make him into a great baseball player. Thorpe had played mediocre, at best, baseball with the Eastern Carolina League in 1909 and 1910. An operation for trachoma, a debilitating eye condition rampant in Indian boarding schools such as the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, may have left him with impaired eyesight. As Frank Deford told me, no matter how good an athlete is in basketball, football, track and field – baseball is just different. It requires different skills, a different mindset. Thorpe’s strategic appetite was best satisfied on the football field.

What is important for Thorpe’s Deadball Era baseball career is that he had to learn how to hit that curve ball. Baseball did not, as other sports did, come easily to him. It took him six years, but he did it. By 1919, sold to the Boston Braves by McGraw, he retaliated by leading the National League throughout most of the summer in batting. On July 16 the Los Angeles Times reported that Thorpe was hitting .411 in 22 games. Before a leg injury took him out of the running in early August, he was hitting .375 to the American League’s Ty Cobb’s .350. He ended the season at .327 and would always point to that statistic and say, with typical dry humor, “I must have hit a few curves.”

To this group of SABR experts I feel duty bound to point out that, contrary to what is printed on page 180 of NATIVE AMERICAN SON, Jim Thorpe did NOT play in the 1913 World Series. McGraw barely let him leave the bench that rookie season. When asked which position he was playing that year, Thorpe replied, “Sitting hen.” I pointed out that editing error to SABR when I was told the book was under consideration for the Ritter award and I thank them for their understanding.

Sports statistics are otherwise unforgiving and rigorous. That is both the creative control and the challenge of writing about sports. One of the big ironies of Jim Thorpe’s stellar athletic career is that, except for baseball, there are no official statistics for his performances in football or track and field. He was just too early.

Painstaking research by an NCAA archivist that can be appreciated by everybody listening to these remarks established that, even with no record at all of some of his 1912 football yardage for Carlisle, Thorpe was probably the game’s first 2,000-yard rusher. His remarkable records in the 1912 Olympic decathlon and pentathlon were annulled in 1913 and have never been re-instated, in spite of the popular perception. Too bad, because his Olympic decathlon time in the 1500-meter race stood until 1972.

And that’s one of the statistics I bring up when people ask: Was Jim Thorpe really that great? The other one is the 1919 batting record.

Thank you all very much. And I hope you’re all having a great time out there in Long Beach!

Thorpe's Big Centennial & London 2012

2011-06-19T14:29:00.000-07:00

Opening Day: July 27, 2012. The Brits are getting pumped for the 2012 Olympic Games. It's the third London Olympiad after 1908 and 1948 and they've built a brand-new stadium (see photo above), of course. And, with a sense of history more acute than most of us, they've got the largest BBC radio network, Radio 2, already busy at work on an ambitious series of six Olympic-themed documentaries called Radio Ballads, to be broadcast during the Games a year from now.

The segments will, according to Manchester-based interviewer Vince Hunt, tell the story of the Olympics, ancient and modern, from 776 B.C. through to London 2012, via the 1936 Berlin Olympics, 1972 Munich tragedy and the 1976, '80 and '84 boycotts as well as the 1908 marathon fiasco. They will also, by the way, coincide with the centennial of Jim Thorpe's 1912 triumph in Stockholm when he won the pentathlon and decathlon by huge margins. When the King of Sweden lauded him as "the most wonderful athlete in the world" -- the first international celebrity athlete super-star.

The project strikes this American as a (good) throwback to FDR's 1930s Works Progress Administration (WPA), when artists, acrobats, writers, and more were sent out (by the government) across the U.S. to create new work, everything from plays to national park structures. Hunt was dispatched (by his government-funded BBC) to the U.S. to talk to and record -- phone call audio not good enough -- Olympic athletes and me.

A pretty remarkable musician himself, Hunt is a deceptively low-key interviewer. By the time we got to the symbiotic link between the early modern Olympics (1912) and nationalism, we were deep into the Big Muddy of World War I, fame, and the end of the American frontier.

Back in the U.K., said Hunt, "for our programmes to become Ballads, we play our interviews to songwriters who are then inspired by the stories they hear to write songs. We have revived a technique from the 1950s devised by the songwriter and theatre producer Ewan MacColl [and our own Peggy Seeger, MacColl's wife at the time] Our first series for the BBC in 2006 can be found here: www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/radioballads." The end result will be what one reviewer has called a "radio kaleidoscope" of interview clips, sound effects, and the ballads.

Original songs commissioned to mark an important event? What a concept! Alan Lomax in reverse. I'll be interested to see what the Brits make of Thorpe's story. His life is an American opera: high peaks of ecstatic triumph alternating with abrupt plunges into despair and sorrow. Rich material for a song marking the centennial of the first sports performance to thrill the entire world.

Fun & Inspiration at the National Press Club

2011-05-27T09:29:00.000-07:00

7 p.m. Saturday, May 21, 2011: Leaving BIO conference

Last weekend the little org that could -- Biographers International Organization (BIO) -- held its second annual convention at the National Press Club in the downtown heart of our nation's capital.

I went to the first annual meeting last year at UMass-Boston and thought the unusually good vibe was just start-up euphoria. Couldn't last. Competition, hierarchy, and back-biting would take over soon enough.

I was wrong. This year the ambience was, if anything, even better. Amicable, productive, generous, energetic. FUN. One attendee said it felt more like a reunion than a conference.

Somebody else wondered if writing about people's lives for a living made biographers nicer people. More empathetic. That might be a stretch, but he had a point. If you're any good as the chronicler of a life, you have to put yourself in your subject's shoes and walk. And walk. And walk.

Who better, then, to be the BIO keynote speaker than Robert Caro? The Manhattan-born man who went to the Texas hill country to live for three years so as to understand where Lyndon Johnson came from. The theme of his address was the importance to a biographer of a sense of place Robert Caro: Power of Place. I was reminded of Iris Origo's statement that for a biographer to see the places her subject has lived is like running a hand over a dead man's face.

Caro began by suggesting that the descriptive tool of fiction -- as with the deck of the Pequod, Napoleon on the battlefield at Borodino, Miss Havisham's room -- can be used by the writer of nonfiction to engage the reader in the dynamic process of discovery. With wit, passion, and elegant chronology he brought us along from LBJ's dirt-poor Texas to the triumphant architecture of Washington.

In a bravura conclusion that stunned the audience Caro showed (not told) how a meticulous understanding of a place can expose a real, historical person's essential motivation: Why he does what he does. Why LBJ was running early every morning as he approached the gleaming marble of the capitol building.

The concrete visual details, if acutely observed, reveal the human story.

Jim Thorpe Goes to Hollywood

2011-04-21T11:28:00.000-07:00

The so-called Golden Age of American Sports? The 1920s. The new media of radio and movie newsreels pumped up the reputations of sports stars such as Big Bill Tilden (tennis), Jack Dempsey (boxing), Babe Ruth (baseball), Red Grange (football), and many more.

When they grew too old for sports where did many of these athletes go? West, to Hollywood. The climate was great and their names were useful publicity, even if they only appeared in a movie as an extra. By 1935 it was suggested that there were more former athletes in Los Angeles than in any other American city.

Jim Thorpe also made his way out to California when his game playing days were over and made a second career of bit parts, largely in westerns and adventure movies. Read more in my piece in Random House's WORD AND FILM website (and check out the YouTube video on the right of this blog page):

Jim Thorpe Goes to Hollywood 1931 - 1950

Going to the dogs

2011-04-15T13:55:00.000-07:00

My Yorkie, Bubba, was one of the stars at "Pet Tales," a recent Marmaduke Writing Factory author event.

The Book Promotion That Keeps on Promoting, Forever...

2011-04-13T08:54:00.000-07:00

Charlottesville, Downtown Mall

C-SPAN Book TV interview Mar. 18, 2011 VA Festival of the Book

Sunny, early spring day in the Southland. C-SPAN sets up a command post in the Charlottesville-Albemarle Visitor Center at the far eastern end of the Downtown Mall. Hand-held camera, interviewer, producer, author. Visitors strolling back and forth in the background. The antithesis of the studio cave.
It's a wrap, and these 15 minutes will get plugged into time gaps on C-SPAN again and again, forever.

Chatting with Jeremy Schaap

2011-03-28T14:32:00.000-07:00

Just before Super Bowl Sunday, ESPN contacted Knopf to set up an interview of me by Jeremy Schaap. He wanted to talk about NATIVE AMERICAN SON for his radio show, This Sporting Life. We met at the Knopf offices on Broadway, between W. 55th and W. 56th streets. They are in the Random House building, the one with the lobby lined floor to very high ceiling with just about every great American book you've ever heard of. Sacred ground.
Jesse is a self-described track and field guy. His fine book Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler's Olympics is dutifully listed in the bibliography of my biography of Jim Thorpe. His father, Dick Schaap, endeared himself to me not least because he wondered in 2000 just what Babe Ruth had done in the previous 50 years to put him ahead of Thorpe in some of those end-of-century Greatest Ever polls.

Knopf set us up in a conference room, with the ESPN producer, Jesse Baker, holding the mic between us. Jeremy was direct, thorough, persistent, and thoughtful. A great interviewer who knew his Thorpe. We talked about Carlisle, about the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, the West Point-Carlisle football game several months later. About track and field today.
It struck me that he is just about the best example of Thorpe's legacy. Like so many other American kids in the 20th century, he learned about Thorpe from his father. Of course, not every kid can claim the likes of Dick Schaap, someone who wrote so well about the Olympics and so much else.
But the essential transmission is there. The father, who probably heard the story from his father, recounts the story of the great American Indian athlete to his son. The circle continues unbroken.

Listen to the interview: here, on the right column of my blog page >>>>

Seeing Liz Taylor at JFK

2011-03-23T10:26:00.000-07:00

Late afternoon, TWA Terminal, JFK airport, sometime in the late 1980s: I am wandering around this amazing Eero Saarinen-designed landmark, waiting for someone to arrive from somewhere.

As I stroll along the mezzanine (see photo below), taking in the light, angles, vertiginous ramps, there is a sudden change in the atmosphere. Maybe it is a noise, a rumble. Or an electric charge. Something is traveling through the air, a kind of communication. Something is happening down on the floor of the terminal. It is a phenomenon I have never experienced before or will ever again.

I go to the edge of the mezzanine and look down. People are moving in one direction, to my left. They aren't running, just being drawn as if to something magnetic. I can hear gasps, little cries. It's not a disaster, exactly. These are not noises of fear or horror.

Suddenly I see the source of the reaction. It's a passenger cart, coming from the left, zipping through the terminal to a gate. The thrill in the air is now beyond intense. It is alive. It is hot. It is focused on the dark-haired woman sitting in the cart, waving to the crowd like a queen.

"Who is it?" I call down to the crowd below.

"It's Elizabeth Taylor!" they shout back.

Stars in the sky generate heat. That's why they twinkle from so far away. That crowd in the TWA terminal has just seen one of the greatest movie stars of all and ever. A shooting star that won't come our way again.

Jim Thorpe: The Greatest Ever?

2011-02-04T06:37:00.000-08:00

Jim Thorpe: The Greatest Ever?

The Good Old Days

2011-02-01T12:13:00.000-08:00


1924: Thorpe, second from left, with NFL Rock Island Independents

Looks like a Saturday afternoon high school game, right? The NFL is only four years old here. Thorpe is four years away from his last football game.

It's 14 years since football was opened up in 1910, with running plays and the forward pass taking the place of deadly, scrum-like mass momentum attacks that, in 1909, had caused 24 fatalities -- fatalities -- in prep school and collegiate football.

Back then there wasn't any professional football to speak of. The Canton Bulldogs and the Massillon Tigers, teams from towns about ten miles apart in Stark County, Ohio, fought each other for what we can think of as the first Super Bowl championship games. Nobody outside of Ohio, if even, paid much attention.

Until Thorpe joined the Bulldogs in 1915. The greatest athlete in the world brought desperately-needed attention to the struggling pro game. In recognition of that service and with profound gratitude, Thorpe was unanimously chosen as the first president of the new league in 1920. Ever wonder why the Professional Football Hall of Fame is in Canton? Or why a statue of Thorpe is the only one in the entry hall there?

The Canton Bulldogs and the Rock Island Independents did not survive the 1920s. By the end of that decade the pro game had moved to big cities -- and fan bases -- like Chicago (Bears) and New York (Giants). The Green Bay Packers remain, of course, the exception that proves the rule.

Today professional football is America's most popular spectator sport by far. This Sunday, when the Green Bay Packers face the Pittsburgh Steelers, just remember that there is no Super Bowl without the NFL. And there would be no NFL without Jim Thorpe.

Controlled Tangents

2011-01-25T10:43:00.000-08:00

Editing. The art that separates the kids from the grownups. The skill a writer never feels she's mastered. The task that finds you in your pjs at 5 in the afternoon because you haven't left your desk since you got out of bed at 6 am.

My high school English teacher in California, a Berkeley grad, compared a piece of expository writing to a piece of string. She drew a vertical line on the blackboard and said, " You see: there is a beginning and an end. A finite line."

My editor at Knopf takes it one step further. If he drew that line, he would then add another one, curving around the first, that would end up looking like the rod of Asclepius. The second line, the snake, as it were, represents what he calls "controlled tangents." (I tried to explain this once to another writer and he mis-heard me and thought I said, "Controlled tantrums." We laughed 'til we cried.)

My editor is making a couple of important points. One: he does not want, as he put it, a narrative "clothesline" -- a string of facts hung along in a row to dry. That's boring for the reader. Two: especially in non-fiction, the writer has periodically to take little trips -- tangents -- off that narrative line to provide background and context.

But -- and this is the controlled part -- each tangent has also never to lose sight of the subject AND to return in due time to my high school teacher's finite line.

It's a tricky momentum, as hard to capture as a slithery snake. And you can bet that when the editor says cut, he means trim those tangents in tight and hard.

Prime Real Estate

2011-01-24T12:46:00.000-08:00

Barnes & Noble. Not-so-fondly known as the gorilla on the bus by New York publishers. "Very, very frustrating" is how one top non-fiction editor put it as recently as December. Way back when everybody was wondering how big the Kindle and ebook would be this Christmas.

In the fuzzy Blackberry photo here is my niece, Jamie Lee, in the Downtown Brooklyn B&N last Friday night, killing time before a movie. The first thing she saw coming in through the front door was my book. Front and center on the prime display table of new biographies. Yay!

An accident? Nope. B&N has to approve the book jacket before they even let the publisher bid for that space, maybe. The coveted curb appeal and placement is negotiated and paid for. It's not the personal whim of the store's manager.

So what happens now that Borders may go under and B&N just laid off some of its most respected buyers? In a matter of months the ebook may vaporize the enormous clout B&N has wielded over publishers and, by extension, authors.

What will take its place? Anything?

Learning From Mistakes

2011-01-21T09:01:00.000-08:00

"Grandstand managers": Polo Grounds, NYC, 1913 World Series: NY Gaints v. Philadelphia Athletics

This is what they used to call an erratum, that little slip of paper with a correction, added to a book after it came back from the printer. The second printing of NATIVE AMERICAN SON came too quickly to get this in, but it will make it into the third!

Page 180, second paragraph, corrected, will now read like this:
Three days before the [1913] World Series began between the Giants and the [Philadelphia] Athletics, in the second of a two-game series against the Phillies, McGraw started Jim in center field and put him at the top of the batting order. "The minute [Jim] stepped from the dugout," said one reporter, the infamous New York "grandstand managers" started their jeers: "Pick a bat that hasn't a hole in it!" Jim struck out twice and hit two weak grounders at Grover Cleveland Alexander, a great pitcher. "Each time Thorpe came to bat," the reporter continued, "there was a repetition if the grim humor in the grandstand, and each time he started back for the bench, there followed the jeers, and by the facial expression and actions, Thorpe showed how keenly it hurt him."

My error? From a tattered, old 1913 news clip headlined "Thorpe Tragic Figure in Series," I'd conflated the two-game "series" described above with the World Series. Tip off: Grover Cleveland Alexander never pitched for the Athletics, nor did Thorpe play in the 1913 World Series. Giants manager McGraw barely let him hit at all during this, Thorpe's first, season.

I knew all that stuff, but in a last-minute edit, after all my kind, patient baseball pals had reviewed the text, I slipped it in. It seemed too sad to be true that Thorpe was jeered at a World Series. And, it was.

Life lesson: triple-check everything and then triple-check it again. Especially when you're writing about sports, where there are scores, statistics, and passionate fans. Thank you, an alert reader in Rhode Island!

My Recent Morning Show Appearance

2011-01-19T13:03:00.000-08:00

I had a great time chatting about Thorpe on VIRGINIA THIS MORNING in Richmond, Virginia. Hosts Greg McQuade and Cheryl Miller were fun to talk to. They had each read the book, liked it a lot, wanted me to sign their copies, and asked great questions.

Couldn't Hit A Curve Ball

2011-01-08T10:21:00.000-08:00

Jim Thorpe, 1916 NY Giants

"He couldn't hit a curve ball." So said John McGraw, Jim's domineering and pennant-winning manager at the New York Giants baseball team. The judgment stuck, clinging to Jim's story and reputation like a sharp old barnacle.

Jim came to the Manhattan team in the wake of one of the biggest sports scandals of the century (The 2011 World Almanac, almost 100 years after the fact, still puts it at the top of the list of worst sports scandals): Seven months after winning, with huge margins, both the pentathlon and decathlon at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, and playing a 1912 football season for the Carlisle Indian Industrial School team that would have won him, Sports Illustrated would later suggest, the Heisman Trophy had it existed back then, Jim was summarily stripped by the AAU of his two gold medals and his amateur status.

Why? He had played professional baseball with minor league teams in 1909 and 1910. So? "Simon pure" amateurism was the sports ideal of an elite determined to exclude, in effect, the lower classes. Anyone who had ever accepted payment of any kind for playing sports was deemed a pariah and demoted to the grubby rank of professional.

Pre-Babe Ruth, the Giants were the Yankees of their day. Jim accepted McGraw's lucrative offer in January 1913. Baseball was his weakest sport, but that didn't matter. He was a huge gate attraction.

You can read in detail about the fraught McGraw - Jim relationship in NATIVE AMERICAN SON. What is important here is that Jim had to learn to play baseball, the sport that can frustrate even the finest athletes in other sports.

By the summer of 1919, sold by McGraw to the Boston Braves because "he couldn't hit a curve ball," Jim was the leading batter of the National League. At one point that summer, he was hitting better (.375) than Ty Cobb in the American League (.350). He could now hit anything, from left- (.333) and right-handed (.316) pitchers.

An injury took him out of the running in August, but for the rest of his life he would say of that 1919 season, when he batted .327: "I must have hit a few curves."

Bye Bye Old Year, Hello New

2011-01-01T13:22:00.000-08:00

Well, that was 2010.

The last night of it was spent at a party at the neighbor's house down the road here in rural Virginia. The clock was set two hours back so that we could celebrate midnight at 10 p.m. (the tradition started when the children in the group were small; now they're in high school, but we still do it.) Stouffer's lasagne cooking away in the oven. Tons of corn chips. A sausage dip in the slow cooker that, we all agreed, looked bad but tasted good. Cheap red wine. Beer.

This year I went to the Dollar Store and bought out their selection of Mardi Gras-style beads. Everybody, even the dogs, got slung with green, red, and blue strands. The cats were upstairs, as usual, under the beds.

The day before, the few other nearby neighbors, who are either not invited or choose, always, not to come, are warned that there will be fireworks at 10 on New Year's Eve. "The cheesiest fireworks display ever," as it's fondly called, by us, anyway. The guys are really into the fireworks and look forward to them all year. The usual supplier was sick, so a new source had to be found -- a process meticulously recounted to a rapt audience of us.

A scaffold is set up in the road (it's a cul de sac) with Roman candles, sparklers, tubes, mines, shells -- the works -- lined up in a row on the wooden platform. One year the Roman candles got out of hand and the men had to run for cover -- the incident now a beloved part of our oral history. The women and children gather several feet away, ready to scream with feigned fear and real delight as the crackles, pops, and sizzles begin and the men jump around waving their barbecue lighters.

Last night the sky was crystal clear -- Orion is big right now -- and the air not too cold. At the stroke of "midnight," the first round of firecrackers was lighted. Wow! Ooooh! Wow, again! Yay! Then, like big professional fireworks, just when we spectators thought it was all over, came the grande finale. OMG! Fabulous.

Welcome, 2011.

Signing Books, Getting in the Christmas Spirit

2010-12-24T14:05:00.000-08:00

Me at Books and Company, Lexington, VA 12-19-10

What is more Christmassy for a writer than hanging out days before December 25 in a cool small-town independent bookstore, signing your own book? Not much. Surrounded by happy, laughing book-people shopping local by buying books? Perfect.

You can't help but think of all those years of getting books for Christmas: now people are giving your book to friends and family. It warms the heart, just as reading A Christmas Carol does, every year, without fail.

You, the author, are now part of that great chain of holiday book giving, going back to Gutenberg (well, maybe starting a few years after his printing press; it took awhile, after all, for non-manuscript books to catch on, not to mention literacy). Going back, anyway, to when you were ten and a favorite aunt gave you a leather-bound copy of Little Women for Christmas and you never looked back.

This Christmas, 2010, at the end of months of Gutenberg-like revolutions in the book business, I couldn't help but think, as I signed my book near home this week in Lexington and Richmond, that all the indies I came across in my recent book tour, from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., might not only survive but thrive once the New Book Order comes to pass.

Independent booksellers have made it this far and now nobody knows what's coming next in the book business -- except that the race may go to the small and the nimble. Social marketing is changing the game by the day. Independent booksellers are getting a cut of e-book sales. Their superb customer service and ambiance are winning hearts and minds. A passionate reaction is emerging, insisting that the bound book shall not disappear.

Anthony Powell, the English author of the 12-volume masterpiece, A Dance to the Music of Time, wrote that books do furnish a room. Let's expand on that and say that bound books do furnish a life.

So, while we still have them and hope we always will: God bless us -- writers, publishers, editors, booksellers, book buyers -- every one.

A Totally Subjective List of the Best Books of 2010

2010-12-23T17:44:00.000-08:00

Aren't all such lists subjective?

So why not make such a list totally subjective: "I chose these books because they were written by my friends (and me)." You have a problem with that?

It's hard enough getting a slice of media attention. Let's all pitch in and spin our friends, the people we can vouch for as hard workers, brilliant thinkers, and consummate professionals.

As we come to the end of yet another challenging year, I offer these 2010 books as worthy of your attention and wallet. Buy and read any and all of them. You will be glad you did.

A Totally Subjective List of the Best Books of 2010

A Writer's Heaven

2010-12-16T18:51:00.000-08:00

Me reading from Native American Son: The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe at the launch of the Marmauke Writing Factory, Pleasantville, NY, Dec. 15, 2010.

Spending several years writing non-fiction narrative is kind of like being a spy. No one knows where you are for weeks at a time. You float from archive to archive, a parasite sucking information from sources (archivists) deeply undercover in the bowels of historical societies and Special Collections in places like Canton, Oklahoma City, Cooperstown, and downtown Los Angeles. If you're into it, it's irresistible.

You have to have the instincts -- and passion -- of a sleuth. Or a bloodhound, nose to the ground, following the scent to the source.

Then you have to write up into persuasive narrative written form all the information you've found. Hole up in an office somewhere -- like upstairs in your home -- and turn straw into gold. It's lonely, or at least other people tell you it must be. You aren't aware of feeling that way. If you were, you'd be doing something else with your life. However, when you start feeling agoraphobic, it's time to reach out.

Which is where a writers group comes in. I've been in such a group before. We met every week at a wonderfully welcoming restaurant in Chappaqua, NY (Le Jardin du Roi - great lobster salad) and read our stuff, shared war stories. But recently this idea got taken to a whole 'nother level. In September the Marmaduke Writing Factory Marmaduke was formed in Pleasantville, NY, just east of Chappaqua in Westchester County. Not only is there a group of about 10 writers, there is a designated space -- a craggy, rocky, edgy basement cave -- for established authors to go and write, think, and help each other.

It's warm (there's a gas fire), there are desks, tables, armchairs, and copies of all our books on shelves to distract us. Very cozy and reassuring to literary spies coming in out of the cold of lonely endeavor.

My Favorite Sports Books

2010-12-14T20:22:00.000-08:00

I just wrote a sports book -- well, it's a history book, too -- so people assume I've read sports books all my life and know all about them. I don't.

Up until about age 22 I hadn't read much of anything published before 1900. I was the only one in my high school honors English class in California to read and really like Tom Jones (1749). I lived in my own private time machine filled with afternoon tea, crumpets, crazy Russians, dissolute French people, and Anglo-Irish aristos hanging on to eccentric elegance in crumbling Georgian mansions beyond the Pale. Sports? That was what my father, brothers, sister, uncles, cousins did. That was time away from reading. Time spent out of the time machine, blinking in the bright sunshine of the present.

At some point my brother Buck turned me on to sports books. Buck is the natural athlete of an athletic family. We like to say he could ski beautifully on two-by-fours. Buck has the instinct for a good story. He also haunts the mailbox every week, waiting for Sports Illustrated to arrive. The family often hides it, just to see his reaction: "Anybody seen the new SI?" "Gee, no, Dad." Buck told me about Stolen Season (see below) and that started it all. I liked the immediacy of sports stories, their apparent simplicity. But of course, behind the game, the life, there was so much more. A good sports book was like a transparent three-dimensional structure (cubic tic tac toe?) that you played as you read. Dynamic.

So, below are 1) my idiosyncratic list of my favorite sports books; and 2) Sports Illustrated's Dick Friedman's gaming of the system of putting sports books into such lists. Add in your favorites. Tell me what I haven't read and should! And, thanks, Dick!

1) My Turn at Bat: The Story of My Life (Fireside Sports Classics) by Ted Williams
2)

The Enlightened Bracketologist

books.google.com

"Introducing the ingenious, addictive tool for judging everything under the sun: ENLIGHTENED BRACKETOLOGY, the new science that makes opinion a sport." And Dick Friedman has applied it to sports books. Click on THE ENLIGHTENED BRACKETOLOGIST title above and be sure to turn the page to see which book Dick ended up with as The Best (it wasn't on my list, but I'm going to read it right now).

On Tour: What Am I Asked Most Often?

2010-12-05T14:13:00.000-08:00


Jim Thorpe at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, c. 1907

The usual book tour FAQs: Why did you write this book? What specifically led you to this subject? Did you like him? Was it true Thorpe couldn't hit a curve ball? How long did the book take to write?

I answer that it took me, give or take, about 7 years to write NATIVE AMERICAN SON. After some gasps and raised eyebrows I get this question: HOW DID YOU KEEP GOING FOR SO LONG?

On the subject of the writers -- and process -- of narrative nonfiction, Garrison Keillor said in early May 2007: "They are at work at computers, with books stacked on the floor, around them and on tables, and notes, legal pads, scribbles, index cards and Post-it notes and a whole great, beautiful chaos of material, and they are just trying to get the job done."

Amen. I kept that quote stuck on the cork board above my desk during the last couple of years of work on Thorpe. Next to it was the May 21, 2007 cover of The New Yorker, which shows a mathematician in a studio apartment, his back to an intricately messy blackboard, paper-littered floor, and desk, as he boils an egg for his breakfast (I only now realize, as I sequence these May 2007 dates, that the cover artist Sempé may have been inspired by Keillor's comment. Chronology rules).

But that doesn't answer the question of how (and, implicitly, why) I -- or anybody -- could keep sitting down at that desk day after day. The answer is the subject himself: Jim Thorpe. Several authors had covered his glory years from 1907 - 1920, but no one had finished the life, told the whole story, right up to the current burial controversy. "The mother lode of subjects," said Ben Cheever of Thorpe. And the excavation of his life indeed felt like digging for something precious to our culture. Enough and more to keep me going.

The young man in the photograph above shaped modern sports. A century later, sports are the common, global passion of our time for boys and girls, men and women, young and old. How we got there is, in large part, the story of Jim Thorpe.

Book Tour: Politics & Prose Bookstore, Washington, D.C.

2010-11-21T18:49:00.000-08:00

Me and grandson Kevin, signing books

Politics & Prose - what a great, fabled independent bookstore! I had heard about it for years, but had never been to 5015 Connecticut Avenue in our nation's capital before my Native American Son book signing date on November 8.

Every detail seemed to be perfect in this quintessential book haven. The children's section downstairs was like a time travel dream -- all the favorites I remembered + new titles that looked terrific. My grandson diligently pulled all the squishy books off the shelf and then re-shelved them, over and over. Who says books are a doomed artifact?

It was a good group of grownups upstairs for the reading. Some passionate Thorpe fans, some women, and one man who came all the way down from Harrisburg, PA, ready with his questions and enthusiasm. It's interesting: there is always at least a handful of true fans among the audience who have been waiting for a chance to express their devotion to Thorpe.

Maybe they learned it from their father or grandfather, but it's always the same questions:

was it true Jim couldn't hit a curve ball? (no)
did be beat Army in 1912 all by himself? (just about)
was he as good as my grandfather said he was? (yes)

On the Road: The Book Tour

2010-11-16T09:57:00.000-08:00

Los Angeles, LA84 Foundation, Book signing: Sunday, October 24, 2010

Book tours are grueling. Adversarial people show up. Nobody shows up (well, not really). Your hand gets cramped signing lots of books. You wish your hand got cramped signing more books. Back and forth. The usual, except that the national book tour -- maybe like bookstores -- is now pretty rare, soon to be extinct, they say.

So, it has been a wonderful and a little sad but sweet privilege to be sent out by Knopf on a proper book tour for NATIVE AMERICAN SON. I am acutely aware that even having a hardcover, beautifully designed and edited non-fiction book to my credit is, in 2010, rather like owning the last Model T to roll off the Ford assembly line.

This Christmas, so the news feed says, will be the "tipping point" when e-readers may overtake books themselves as holiday gifts. Last weekend, at the Kingston, NY Barnes & Noble, as I headed to the back of the store for my scheduled book signing, I passed a booth right inside the front door with an employee demonstrating the Nook. Hedging their book bets.

In my next blog I'll list the highlights of this official, publisher-sponsored, book tour. As it might be the last I'll ever do, I'll try to bury it with honors -- while I enjoy every single minute.

A Mission Band Potawatomi Book Blessing Ceremony

2010-10-22T09:20:00.000-07:00

Now that the Jim Thorpe biography is done, I'm convinced, in retrospect, that it got done because it was blessed early on by a Mission Band Potawatomi blessing ceremony. Whenever I got discouraged, which was often, Jack Thorpe, Jim's youngest child, would smile and say, "It's going to be fine. We blessed it."

Jack was the one of Thorpe's eight children who became the most connected with the spiritual dimension of his American Indian heritage. He was the chief of the Sac & Fox Nation and has also worked for many years as a dedicated, even dogged, administrator and organizer for Potawatomi and Kickapoo tribal projects. He lives in Shawnee, not far from where Jim was born in 1887.

Jack took as his mission to expose me to some essentials of Indian life in Oklahoma. For several days I drove him around Lincoln and Pottawatomie counties as he pointed out his father's birthplace, the Sac & Fox headquarters on the former reservation land near Stroud, and the locations of Jim's mother's allotment. He introduced me to Ruth Sanderson, a full-blooded Kickapoo who builds the tribe's Woodland-origin bent-branch wikiup ceremonial structure each year in the same place on her mother's original allotment where is has been situated for over 100 years.

Jack also brought me to a Potawatomi funeral -- a private, very small, intensely spiritual and emotional ceremony it was a privilege to attend. Jack asked that I wear a long skirt (which meant a quick trip to the local WalMart). The Indian rite was followed by a Catholic burial in the little graveyard at the Benedictine Sacred Heart Mission church founded in 1876 in Konawa by Jim Thorpe's grandfather after the tribe's removal from Kansas.Charlotte Vieux Thorpe, Jim's mother, is buried in the same graveyard. The Potawatomi have been linked to the Catholic church.since their exposure n the 17th century to French trappers, Catholic priests and monks in their Great Lakes place of origin.

The only Sacred Heart Mission structures that survived the fire of 1901.

The blessing of the book took place at sunset in a wooden ceremonial structure behind the house of Leon Bruno, the former chairman of the Oklahoma Potawatomi Mission Band. A small group of us entered, stepping clockwise to make a circle around the fire in the center that had been lit at dawn. The purpose of the ceremony was not for personal gain, as Jack explained, but to ask for "help for good, to come out right, that no evil happens." He told me later that implied in that request is a wish for patience, to let the goal run its course on "Indian Time."

The details of the ceremony are private and I will honor that here. However I can say that at the end I was given a deerskin tobacco pouch; I was to sprinkle tobacco at the base of a tree whenever I felt threatened or frightened. I was also given a medicine bag containing the four sacred elements of sage, cedar, tobacco, and sweet grass.

The tobacco pouch and medicine bag were on my writing desk every day for the seven years it took to write NATIVE AMERICAN SON.

Farewell, Bernie Schwartz

2010-09-30T14:10:00.000-07:00

A break from Jim Thorpe to mark the death yesterday of Tony Curtis.

“ ‘The cat’s in the bag and the bag’s in the river.’This is Sidney Falco speaking.”

The year was 1997. The voice on the phone was indeed "Falco," speaking that famous line from Sweet Smell of Success. Tony Curtis was a keysource for my biography of Burt Lancaster that would be published in 2000. I’dbeen trying for months to get an interview with him. Here he was, suddenly, with no advancewarning, calling from Los Angeles, gleefully playingfor me his venal, hyper-eager press agent. The 1957 movie bombed at the box office – “Thiswas a feel-bad movie,” exultedCurtis, still delighted with the film’s unrepentant cynicism that repelled thatdecade’s filmgoers. But Sweet Smell had the last laugh, giving us the enduring Manhattan archetypes of Falco and Lancaster’s Walter Winchellclone, J. J. Hunsecker.

Both Hollywood stars – and they were huge in 1957 –were New Yorkers first and foremost. Curtis from the Bronx, Lancaster from EastHarlem. As Curtis told me, they knew the script in their bones and wereessentially playing Big Apple aspects of themselves. “Look at the way Sidneylooked,” said Curtis. “So… perfect. Good-looking,lean, silk shirts, tapered trousers. Couldn’t get out of that environment. He’sthere forever.”

Curtis, born Bernie Schwartz in 1925, got so farout of that New York environment he was able to play a hilariouslypitch-perfect Cary Grant knock-off in SomeLike It Hot and an improbable circus aerialist flying through the air in Trapeze. There’s usually, however, acost to such success, a stench, as SweetSmell vividly shows. Curtis would go on to have the typical Hollywoodproblems of multiple marriages, substance abuse, a declining career.

But he never forgot who he started out as and thehunger to escape the accidental limitations of birth. His Bronx Jewish energyfueled his ambition, as it does Falco’s, forever, on film – and his survival. Curtisreinvented himself as a painter, a good one. To judge from my interview, atleast, he never lost a sharp, observant, highly intelligent New York humor.From that first Falco line to the last good-bye, I pretty much laughed, hard, whilesomehow managing to take good notes.

“I’d like to take a bite out of you,” says Hunseckerto Falco. “You’re a cookie full of arsenic.” Curtis gives Lancaster a knowingsmirk. Sidney Falco was Bernie Schwartz ifhe’d never escaped to Hollywood.

Oklahoma, Here I Come!

2010-09-29T10:48:00.000-07:00

Prague, Oklahoma, about 1903

Oklahoma was never on my list of places to see before I die. Which goes to show how prejudices we don't even know we have limit our view of the world.

Jim Thorpe was born in Oklahoma in 1887 (not 1888, as most sources claim) near where this rough western town of Prague would be created about twelve years later by immigrants from Bohemia. His Sac & Fox and Potawatomi people had been "removed" (forcibly relocated) to Oklahoma after the Civil War from Kansas (to which they had been removed from Iowa, to which they had been removed from Illinois). Towns like this were laid out overnight on Indian lands that opened up for white settlement with the famous Oklahoma land runs, like the one pictured below, that began in 1889.

When I first arrived in Oklahoma City (OKC to locals) in 2002 to start research on Thorpe the city and surrounding country looked flat, dry, and plain. There didn't seem to be much for the eye to linger on. The wind blew constantly because there was nothing to stop it.

Then I noticed the sense of humor -- flat, dry ("dusty!" laughed one Oklahoman), plain, and very funny. Will Rogers wit. The punch line came at you like a cowboy seen far away on the horizon: Wait for it. "Why is Oklahoma so windy? It's all that hot air blowing up from Texas." It's an intimate state, a monk told me, a man so handsome he was referred to, affectionately, as "Brother What A Waste" and "Father Hunk-a-Monk." When the state finally got around, 80-some years later, to adding a dome to the capitol building, there was a constituency that argued it was more distinctive to be the only state in the union without a dome.

Any biography worth its name should expand the sympathies and understanding of the biographer. Now I love the state I had to learn so much about in order to write NATIVE AMERICAN SON. One new friend recently dubbed me "an honorary Okie." It's a title I'm delighted to accept.

Frank Deford and me in Jim Thorpe, PA

2010-09-08T09:23:00.000-07:00

Native American Son is not out yet but, thanks to the controversy surrounding the burial of Jim Thorpe in the town named for him in Pennsylvania (see previous blogpost, "No Rest for the Dead," the book tour has effectively begun.

Jim Thorpe, PA

Which is how I found myself sitting across from the great sportswriter and author Frank Deford, in a room above the stage at the Jim Thorpe Opera House. HBO's Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel, thanks to a pitch from the Knopf publicist Lena Khidritskaya, had decided to do a 12-minute segment on the lawsuit filed by Jim's son, Jack Thorpe, against the town of Jim Thorpe. As Thorpe's most recent biographer, I was chosen as the "expert."

It's always a bit daunting to come out of the dark cave of writing a book -- and the grueling editing and proof stage before the book goes to press -- into the bright light of media scrutiny. Deford's questions were, not surprisingly, both acute and broad. Is Jim Thorpe remembered today? he asked. I remember the 1950 Associated Press sportswriter and radio announcer poll (no TV yet) that voted him the greatest athlete of the half century, way ahead of Babe Ruth, he said. Today, everybody lauds only the most recent star, he lamented. What surprises did you discover? he asked (the passion with which he was and is remembered as the outsider robbed of his due, I answered, his unexamined "iron man" sports career in the 1920s after he exited the "greatest athlete in the world" limelight, and his equally unexamined career in Hollywood in the 1930s).

What did I think Jim Thorpe would say about the current burial controversy and a town he never saw named for him? was Deford's last question. I answered that he might say: Remember what I did when I was alive. I earned the name.

It was a terrific way to start the book tour, with the best in the business. Catch the show on September 21 on HBO.

No Rest for the Dead

2010-08-10T13:56:00.000-07:00

Jim Thorpe Grave Site: Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania

Who has the final say where a human body will be buried? From the day Jim Thorpe died, March 28, 1953, in Lomita, California, until 1957, when he was interred in the red marble mausoleum above in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, his body had "rested" in six different mortuaries or cemeteries.

The story of how and why his body ended up in a place he had never been is hardly credible (and you can read all about it in NATIVE AMERICAN SON after Oct. 19). At the suggestion of Thorpe's widow Patsy, two tiny, struggling towns that had faced each other across the Lehigh River since the heyday of the anthracite coal boom consolidated and took the one name: Jim Thorpe. In exchange, they got the body of the greatest all-around athlete this country has ever seen.

The hoped-for tourist boom didn't happen. But, like an off-beat fairy tale, while the town remained doggedly faithful to the memory of Thorpe, the source of its revival was right there all along, in the hearts, minds, and energy of its own citizens. By the 1990s Jim Thorpe, PA had resurrected itself as a charming, Victorian gateway to the Poconos. The isolated, dignified grave site had little or nothing to do with it.

In February 2010 Thorpe's surviving sons filed a lawsuit in a Pennsylvania federal court under the 1990 Native American Graves Protections and Repatriation Act to have their father's remains returned to Oklahoma, where he was born. http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10177/1068434-139.stm. They want him to be buried in the Garden Grove cemetery, east of Oklahoma City, next to his father, Hiram. According to Jack Thorpe, the youngest son, the town of Jim Thorpe can keep the name. The family is grateful to it for taking such good care of their father for so long. But, he argues, the family never agreed with Patsy about Thorpe's burial place. The widow's right trumped theirs.

But now Patsy is dead. Times have changed, as have attitudes toward minority rights and traditions. One body, two claimants. As New York Times reporter John Branch said to me, "It's the strangest story I ever heard." And one of the saddest.

New York Times: A Legal Battle Over Jim Thorpe's Remains

Sports Illustrated: Who Owns a Legend?

Wall Street Journal: Is There a Life After Jim Thorpe for Jim Thorpe, PA?

Angie Debo: Oklahoma Historian Extraordinaire

2010-07-17T11:45:00.000-07:00

Angie Debo, Oklahoma Historian Extraordinaire 1890 - 1988.

Jim Thorpe was born in Oklahoma Indian Territory in 1887. More than a hundred years later I started researching his life in the old, dusty Oklahoma Historical Society in the Wiley Post building across from the (then-domeless) state capitol in Oklahoma City. The creaky central wooden staircase and the warren-like rooms looked, felt, and smelled as if they hadn't changed a bit since the structure was built in 1930. At desks guarding the stacks of books and files were devoted archivists with an Oklahoma humor so dry one of them called it "dusty." ("Why do we need a capitol dome, anyway? It's better being maybe the only state without one.")

My first day at the Society one of the archivists sat me down for an introductory chat. It was important to understand from the start of my work, he said, that the early history of Oklahoma was, as he put it, corrupt and venal. It was not Oklahoma! And the person we had to thank for having the courage to write the true history of her state, against concerted opposition from major political figures who wished to preserve the Boomer/Sooner myths, was Angie Debo.

Read this brief summary of her life -- http://www.unl.edu/plains/publications/resource/debo.shtml. Imagine what it must have been like for this remarkable woman, working tirelessly for years in the same dusty archive, piecing together the heartbreaking story of the Indian nations and individuals of Oklahoma and beyond.

The scrupulous and disciplined passion of her self-imposed calling animates every word she wrote in such books as And Still the Waters Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes, A History of the Indians of the United States, Geronimo: The Man, His Time, His Place, and more. Her work is accurately called the cornerstone of American Indian scholarship.

p.s. The Oklahoma State Capitol got its dome in 2002. A portrait of Debo hangs in the rotunda area. The Historical Society moved to brand-new quarters in the Oklahoma History Center in 2005.

Who Was Jim Thorpe?

2010-06-03T12:55:00.000-07:00

OK. I'm deep into the last day of the so-called first pass of the Thorpe manuscript (it's actually the next-to-last proof). So, here's a really quickie summary of why Thorpe was so great in sports:

An American Indian (Potawatomi; Sac and Fox) from Oklahoma who was arguably the greatest American athlete of modern times.

He played sports in the early decades of the twentieth century, just as they were emerging as the activities that would become passions for millions. Thorpe was so good at so many games and athletic activities, he became the the gold standard of athletic achievement.

In those early days, there was no emphasis on specializing in one sport, which freed Thorpe to excel in several.

A remarkable All-America running back for the Carlisle Indian Industrial School football team who -- playing before official statistics and against teams such as Harvard, Penn, and Army -- may have been the game's first 2,000-yard rusher. Sports Illustrated said he would have won the Heisman in 1911 and 1912, if the award had existed back then.

The first international celebrity athlete: the winner, by huge margins, of gold medals for both the pentathlon and decathlon at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm -- the only athlete to ever win both events.

A major and minor league baseball player for twelve seasons who, by 1919 for the Boston Braves, hit as well (.327) as Ty Cobb and Shoeless Joe Jackson.

The professional football icon who put the pro sport on the map -- and whose statue is the first thing you see today when you enter the Professional Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio.

Old Pieces of Paper

2010-05-11T10:46:00.000-07:00

Just after 9/11 I was sitting on a dusty ladder deep in the stacks of the National Archives in Washington. Sirens wailed outside, non-stop. Anthrax dust was floating everywhere, it seemed. I had just started the research for Native American Son.

Surrounded by boxes of documents filling shelves from floor to ceiling, I had a chilling thought. If the terrorists had slammed a plane into this building, they would have wiped out the primary sources of our recorded history. Destroyed the records of millions of the already dead.

Like this one: the U.S. Army Enlistments of 1837. The name Hiram G. Thorp (Jim added the "e" later) is fourth from the bottom, indicated by the arrow in the left margin. He was Jim's paternal grandfather, white, born in Connecticut of English descent going back to the founding of New Haven. He enlisted in the Eighth Infantry, Company A at the age of 24. He had blue eyes, brown hair, fair skin, and was five feet, eight inches tall.

We only know all that information about his physical person because of this old piece of paper preserved on microfilm. For me, starting work on this biography way back in those dark scary days, to find such concrete, evocative details from the past was oddly reassuring. Hiram's record had survived, so far. Maybe mine would too.

Inspiration

2010-05-04T07:46:00.000-07:00

"How did you come to write a book about ________? It's the question a biographer is asked more than any other.

So why Thorpe? The answer begins on a hot day in 1996 in the cool archives of the University of Southern California's Cinema/Television Library in Los Angeles. I was working through the extensive Warner Brothers production file for their 1951 bio-pic.(In the 1950 photo above you see, left to right, Lancaster, Thorpe, and director Michael Curtiz on the set.)

Lancaster had played Thorpe, and Lancaster was the subject of the Lancaster biography I was researching and writing.

Though I come from a family of California athletes, I didn't know much if anything about Thorpe. But I did know that for many people sports were more than games, athletes sometimes more than human. So I was struck, hard, by the tone and passion of the letters and postcards in the production file that had come in from all over the country to studio head Jack Warner as shooting started in 1950. The most passionate letter came from a very young Bobby Kennedy. Their gist: Don't mess up the story of our hero. Get it exactly right.

A writer of biographies looks or waits for such messages from the past. At least I do. Maybe it's a romantic notion, but it feels as if the ghosts are transmitting a plea: Remember what was important to us. Thorpe turned sixty-three in 1950. He hadn't played any sport since a disastrous football game in 1928. Why was he so vividly remembered?

Approaching the finish line

2010-05-03T07:37:00.000-07:00

Jim Thorpe (1887-1953) was perhaps the greatest all-around athlete of modern times. For a biographer, me, he was an irresistible subject.

He preceded radio and television, yet remains in the collective memory, however hazy, as the definitive athlete. When I would mention I was thinking of doing a book about him to just about any man, or group of men, the reaction was always the same. A couple of beats of silence and then, with a particular tone of awe, his name spoken slowly, emphatically, "Jim Thorpe!"

The reaction was the same whether it was at a tony cocktail party on Fishers Island or from a postal worker in the Appalachian town of Lexington, Virginia or a contractor in Southern California.

As you can guess from the stacks of corrected proof pages on my work tables pictured here in March 2010, figuring out why Thorpe's story had lingered for so long was not a short -- seven years -- or easy task.

Unexpected discoveries emerged and will emerge. They always do.