Fun & Inspiration at the National Press Club

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

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

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...

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

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

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?