Seeing Liz Taylor at JFK

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?

Jim Thorpe: The Greatest Ever?

The Good Old Days

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

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

 

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

"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

 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.