On Tour: What Am I Asked Most Often?

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.

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

 
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

 

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

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 key source for my biography of Burt Lancaster that would be published in 2000. I’d been trying for months to get an interview with him. Here he was, suddenly, with no advance warning, calling from Los Angeles, gleefully playing for me his venal, hyper-eager press agent. The 1957 movie bombed at the box office – “This was a feel-bad movie,” exulted Curtis, still delighted with the film’s unrepentant cynicism that repelled that decade’s filmgoers. But Sweet Smell had the last laugh, giving us the enduring Manhattan archetypes of Falco and Lancaster’s Walter Winchell clone, J. J. Hunsecker. 

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

Curtis, born Bernie Schwartz in 1925, got so far out of that New York environment he was able to play a hilariously pitch-perfect Cary Grant knock-off in Some Like It Hot and an improbable circus aerialist flying through the air in Trapeze. There’s usually, however, a cost to such success, a stench, as Sweet Smell vividly shows. Curtis would go on to have the typical Hollywood problems of multiple marriages, substance abuse, a declining career.

But he never forgot who he started out as and the hunger to escape the accidental limitations of birth. His Bronx Jewish energy fueled his ambition, as it does Falco’s, forever, on film – and his survival. Curtis reinvented himself as a painter, a good one. To judge from my interview, at least, 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, while somehow managing to take good notes.

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

Oklahoma, Here I Come!

 
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

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.