When the University of Chicago Press asked me to write a book about Chicago, my first thought was: "But I live in Northbrook ... and I was born in Cleveland!" Which sort of dictated how the book was written, from an outsider's perspective, about newcomers who arrive at Chicago and try to make their way. The result was my seventh book, "You Were Never in Chicago." One essential quality is that, no matter when you arrive at the city, you are always made to feel you just missed the Big Moment. Trying to explore and, perhaps, debunk this notion, I took what were considered essential moments in Chicago history and began leaping back to see what they actually thought about the place. Guess what: they tended to look backward toward some mythical better time, too.
The carnation-wearers, the bamboo-cane leaners, the nudge-and-winkers, the organ-grinders, the First Ward Ball revelers, in grand procession headed by Bathhouse John Coughlin, proudly leading his “harlots and hopheads, his coneroos and fancy-men, his dips and hipsters and heavy-hipted madams” to use Nelson Algren’s piquant description, “coneroo” being slang for a con man.
That city, that world, is gone—or so the common wisdom goes—replaced by the dull, packaged, homogenized present, our tepid moment of compromised mediocrity. The funny thing is, people always feel that way—pick whatever era in history seems most exciting, most distinctive, real and alive, then examine that period closely; you will find that Chicagoans of the time were also nostalgic, also troubled by what they considered society’s decline, also confronting a problematic present while mourning some imagined superior past. Take 1927—a giddy whirl of bathtub gin and tommy guns and flappers in sheer silk dresses doing the Charleston. Chicagoans back then were aghast at their city’s criminality.
“We are known abroad as a crude, ill governed city. We are known for our ugliness,” Chicago treasurer Charles S. Peterson bemoaned in December 1927, when forming a committee to bring another world’s fair to Chicago—1933’s Century of Progress—in an attempt to dilute the city’s gangland reputation by recapturing the lost promise and excitement of the 1893 Columbian Exposition, a grab at the fading memory of innocent joys: the White City, the Ferris Wheel, and Cracker Jack.
Leap back to the 1893 world’s fair, however, and Chicagoans, while certainly basking in the glow of their renewal, also despaired whether the city would prove worthy of all the attention. They worried about disease, about being up to the task of hosting multitudes, and they steeled their resolve by remembering the city’s courageous, unified, and tireless response to the Great Chicago Fire.
“Our first duty, gentlemen of the City Council of Chicago, is to keep the city in a healthy condition, so that when the world comes here it will not enter upon a charnel house,” said mayor Carter Harrison Sr., in his inaugural address on April 17, 1893, a month before the fair opened, calling it, “the most trying period of Chicago’s history, except when the besom of destruction passed over it at its mighty conflagration.”
Yet at the time of the Great Fire, in October 1871, Chicagoans saw not only heroism, but also a sinful city scourged. “Fleeing before it was a crowd of blear-eyed, drunken and diseased wretches, male and female, half naked, ghastly, with painted cheeks, cursing and uttering ribald jests as they drifted along,” the editor of the Chicago Tribune wrote to the editor of the Cincinnati Commercial, describing the fire. For strength, beleaguered Chicagoans recalled the difficulties of the city’s founding. “The rain that helped put out the flames created pools of mud, reminding survivors of the city’s swampy foundation,” wrote historian Ross Miller.
But at the city’s swampy foundation . . .
Charles Fenno Hoffman approached Chicago on a frigid New Year’s Eve 1833, five months after Chicago had incorporated as a town, at a meeting where 12 residents voted yes and one voted no. The night before Hoffman’s arrival was spent twenty miles away, east along the lakefront in “a rude cabin built of stems of the scrub pine, standing behind a sandy swell about 200 yards from shore.”
The twenty-seven-year-old New Yorker lay huddled in a buffalo skin, with his saddle for a pillow, listening to experienced Chicago hands trade stories of the money to be made, of the “meanness, rapacity, and highway robbery (in cheating, stealing, and forcibly taking away) from the Indians.” Hoffman felt “indignation and disgust” at the practices described, but also a certain regret.
“I should like to have been at Chicago a year ago,” he told his cabin mates.
You get the picture. Hoffman hadn’t even gotten to Chicago yet and was already wishing he had arrived sooner—a common sentiment in an era when real estate prices could soar by the hour. There is a tendency to denigrate the present, whatever it is, because we know so much about it, while romanticizing the past, whatever it was, because its less pleasant details grow fuzzier with each passing year, accentuating the cherished highlights even more. This impulse can be particularly acute for newcomers, who missed the great era of the day before yesterday, arriving, as they must, in the confusing, compromised swirl of today, and so can be left with a permanent sense that the party is always ending just as they show up. The party is never now.
I'd never have thought to write a recovery book. Then again, I'd never have thought to go into recovery. But circumstances forced my hand — 10 years ago last week — and landed me in the middle of it. If I've learned one thing from reading Dante, it's that if you find yourself in hell, take notes.
So I did, and wrote "Drunkard"—originally titled "Death of the Drunkard," based on a line I spied on the vaulted ceiling of a Vilnius tavern. But the geniuses at Dutton didn't want to have "death" in the book's title, not that it mattered. Not a best-seller. Though I still hear from people who were touched by the book, and that is enough. I've also heard that it's one of the few recovery books that makes a person want to drink, due to passages such as the following:
I don't drink right away. No, no, no. That would be wrong. Overeager. As frantic as I sometimes am, staring intently at other, lesser bartenders, who often lag, too slow to notice me, too slow to get off the phone, too slow to find the Jack—there, you idiot, right there!—so slow I want to slap the bar and snarl, "Hurry the hell up!" As eager as I sometimes am, moving down the bar and dipping my head to catch their attention. As carefully as I track the composition of the drink—the glass, the ice, the booze—once it has arrived, I always pause to gaze for a rapt moment at the filled glass, the ice, the Jack, the square napkin, the dark linoleum bar. The twirling universe stops dead, the Jack its motionless epicenter. I pick up the glass and take a long draw.
You probably do not drink whiskey. You might not drink at all—a third of the country doesn't, a statistic that astounds me, the way I am astounded by the fact that one-third of all Americans believe in UFOs and two-thirds believe in angels.
But whiskey tastes wonderful—sweet and smoky, cold and comforting. The first sip doesn't do much but reassure you: the overture, the fugue, the opening beat of the orchestra saying, "Just wait; you're in the right place." Soon—two sips, three—the glass is half empty and the grating clank of the day begins to soften and fade. I've made it. I am rescued, plucked from the icy chop and flopped gratefully into the lifeboat, covered with a wool blanket and heading for home.
I loved writing "Hatless Jack," my exploration of the history of men's hats, using John F. Kennedy's life as a narrative arc. I felt like I was exploring a lost world, and it helped me understand the general societal trend toward individual freedom, an era of shucking of rules, including the need to wear hats. Granta brought out an edition in England that was well-received, with a full page in the Times of London Book Review. Though the book is about men's hats, not all the characters in it are men:
Hatcheck girls came to occupy a particular niche in American culture in the 1920s and 1930s. They were both helpful and alluring—halfway between a sister and a slut—and their toehold on the bottom rung of the nightlife world of fancy clubs and restaurants made them perfect grist for all sorts of modern Cinderella stories in books, movies, and, occasionally, in real life. A number of society matrons, such as candy heiress Helen Brach, started life as hatcheck girls....
If checking hats was an art form, its prima donna was Renee Carroll, the "hat check queen" at Sardi's, the famed theater district restaurant in New York City. Carroll was a brash redhead with a sharp tongue and an easy manner with the rich and famous, and her methods explain why it was estimated that 99 percent of men tipped their hatcheck girls. Though not particularly good-looking, the "snap-eyed, voluble" Carroll kept her clientele in line with a careful mix of flattery and bullying. For tippers, there was the carrot of being recognized.
"When I accept a coat," she wrote in her 1932 memoir, In Your Hat, "I look at the label immediately and read the man's name that his tailor usually writes just inside the inner coat pocket. I call the gentleman by his name and remember it afterward, refusing to give a check for his coat and insisting on knowing faces and garments every time. This, of course, flattered the gentleman who, in turn, tips better."
For nontippers, Carroll had a ready arsenal of sarcastic lines and gestures. She would hand quarters to steady nontippers (although this did not necessarily shame them. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright William Saroyan would wordlessly pocket the quarter, so she stopped giving it to him).
She slathered on guilt. Hatlessness was no excuse. When French star Maurice Chevalier showed up at Sardi's without a hat, Carroll told him that she had just paid to see him in the movies the night before, and was it fair that he was now refusing to pay her the "customary fee"? Chevalier meekly went back to his car, got his hat, and checked it, tipping a dollar.
Words were not even necessary for a hatcheck girl to make her feelings known. This is how fellow hatchecker Blanche Hollard described the reception given a nickel tip in the 1940s.
"Some girls, however, extend the palm of their hand with the offending coin in it, and then look incredulously up at the man's face," she writes, in her own published confessions. "It most cases he immediately says, 'I get your pardon I thought I gave you a quarter.' Then, an exchange is hastily transacted."
"If you give a hat check girl less than a quarter, she'll give you a look that you will carry around with you for the rest of your night-clubbing days," Dorothy Kilgallen wrote in 1942. "Brother, it's a dirty one!"
Carroll had Sardi's customers so spooked that men would routinely tip her, even if they din't have hats to check. Playwright Ward Morehouse forgot to tip Carroll in his rush to make a steamship, so he sent her a five-franc note from Paris and a letter of apology.
"Don't Give Up the Ship" (Ballantine, 2002) was my biggest bomb. Nobody reviewed it, to my memory, or if they did, it was with a shrug. It wasn't excerpted anywhere. My parents despised it. Which seemed fitting after the difficult voyage with my father on his old ship, where he had been a radio operator in the 1950s. Writing it, I figured: "I'm 40 years old. At some point I get to just say what happened." Still, with the passage of time, I'm proud of the book, and glad I went on the trip. Or as I tell myself whenever I am tempted to bemoan the whole thing: "How bad could an experience really be where someone pays you $50,000 and you end up in Venice?"
The pier was hectic with a festive, summer camp sort of commotion, busy with families, girlfriends, boyfriends, and cadets—trim teens in bright white shirts and dark navy pants, their "salt-and-pepper" uniforms. They towered over their parents. Mothers held bunches of balloons. Fathers lugged big portable coolers, cases of soda, cases of juice. I worried that we were unprepared—we had no juice—and puzzled over the balloons. At least a dozen families had brought bunches of them. They seemed an odd, child's birthday party touch.
My father stopped short and I ran thud into him, like a vaudeville act. Disentangling ourselves and our rolling luggage, I wondered, Is this how it's going to be? Frick and Frack? I looked around to see if anybody had noticed.
Turning onto Dock 19, where the ship was tied up, I saw that the pier was named for A.F. Olivet, the no-nonsense captain during my father's cruises. I paused to make note of that, and of the dinghies moored under a protective wooden roof leading to the ship. They had bold, forward-straining names: Courageous, Freedom, America, Magic.
Looking up, I saw that my father, the good New Yorker, had kept walking. I called to him—"Dad! Wait!"—and he turned, "I'll go slow," he shouted back. But he didn't go slow. He strode toward the ship. I hurried after him, the luggage wheels humming against the concrete.
I got alongside the ship, almost to the gangway, just in time to see him go up without me, lugging his suitcase, a wide smile spread across his face. He said something pleasant to the officer at the top of the gangway, and disappeared inside the Empire State. I stood on the pier a moment, shocked, then raced after him, hefting my suitcase in both hands and clattering up the awkward low metal steps. After months of arranging—the conversation, the phone calls, the formal letters, the visits—I had figured that our boarding the ship would be an obvious moment of high drama: an exchange of loving glances, a pat on the back, a shy filial smile, a fatherly ruffled of the hair, a deep breath and up we go together, arms linked. Ta-daaaaaah!
Not in this life.
"What's your hurry, sailor? I hissed, out of breath, catching up to him at the cabin, C1, marked by a note card reading MR. STIENBURG SR. and MR. STIENBURG JR.
He offered this explanation: he wanted to get his suitcase aboard before the tide came in, raising the angle of the gangway, making it more difficult to walk up. He actually said this. Stunned, I turned away, puzzling whether his excuse was a mountainous lie or, worse, a sincere delusion.
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| Bold adventurers |
I stood in the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror: how was I going to do this? Six weeks with my father. A month at sea, then ten days in Italy. We'd kill each other. Or I'd kill him. Or myself. Or he'd kill me. One way or another, somebody was going to be killed.
Then the anger, a hot fluid at the back of my brain, drained away, and I almost laughed — the tide, so ridiculous — and I remembered that, up to this moment, I had been genuinely worried my father wouldn't get on the ship at all. That despite his promise, when the moment finally came, he would freeze up in the gangway. Many times I had imagined, not entirely without pleasure, him grasping the handrails, white knuckled, rigid, me behind him, ramming the heel of my hand into the small of his back, forcing him forward, "get on the goddamn ship, Dad!"
That had been the preconception. The reality was 180 degrees opposite. Instead of hanging back, fearful, needing a shove, he had raced ahead, excited, forgetting all about me. Realizing this shocked away the anger. It struck me that, all all these years, I didn't know my father at all. Not a bit.
"The Alphabet of Modern Annoyances," true to its name, was a pain in the ass. My long-time editor and, I imagined, friend, went our separate ways because of it. The 1996 collection of 26 essays about the frustrations of life only received a few, largely dismissive reviews. It didn't sell that well, though "F is for Fat" was excerpted in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, which was a consolation prize. The chapters I most enjoyed were those panning Disney, Elvis and UFO fanatics, but the beginning of the "J is for Journalism" chapter resonates, particularly given my post last week on trying to do a story about the Chicago Public Schools. It never ends.
Maya Angelou is filled with joie de vivre. She strides onto the podium of the Hyatt Regency Hotel and begins to sing. "I shall not be moved. I shall not be moved. Just like the tree that's planted by the water, I shall not be moved."
Her voice is deep and strong. She then begins to talk, telling stories, reciting her poetry. You are powerful, she tells her audience. You are beautiful.
The crowd eats it up. They roar, these two thousand women attending a national women's conference. They applaud.
Sitting in the back, hunched in a dark corner of the huge ballroom, I scribble a few of Angelou's more succinct comments onto a narrow pad. I didn't want to come here—had felt that sinking sensation I get when given an assignment I consider to be a dog. But now that she's up there, singing, reading, speaking, laughing, the whole process is so skilled, so entertaining and, yes, so uplifting, that I am having a good time.
Maya Angelou is finished. She is escorted from the stage. The two thousand women finish clapping and make for the exists. I have one more task. Journalism has conventions as strict as kabuki, and a story of this sort, the "Famous poet speaks here" story, must end with a blurt of audience reaction: "It was great," said Jane Doe, dabbing a tear form her eye. "I greatly enjoyed the greatness of the great Maya Angelou."
I pick a women at random—somebody pausing, a straggler from the herd. "Hi, I'm Neil Steinberg," I say. "I'm a reporter from the Sun-Times. I'm writing a story about Maya Angelou's speech and I wonder what you thought of it?"
She flees without a word, just turns and rushes away, as if I'm a panhandler. So does the second woman I ask. This leaves me frustrated and a little angry. There is an inverse law in reporting—the more benign the information you are seeking, the more difficult it will be to get. When I stopped hookers on Cicero Avenue, every single one, without exception, told me anything I wanted to know—about their neglected kids, their raging drug habits, how much money they charge for sex.
But these professional women at the Hyatt don't want to talk. I have no idea why. Overeducation? They know what happened to outspoken people during McCarthyism. Prudence? They see the villains who unwisely consent to be grilled like burgers by Mike Wallace on "60 Minutes" every Sunday, indicting themselves, babbling, ruined. Professionalism? They are trained not to speak to the media—"Call public affairs, they'll answer your questions."
Or maybe they're just struck dumb by Maya Angelou's eloquence. The third woman I approach and ask about the speech doesn't run away, but she doesn't answer either. She just stares at me, with the startled expression a frog must give a swooping raptor. So much for Angelou's brave words about romance and beauty and power.
There is a pause, the woman and I looking at each other. Then I do something I haven't done before or since in my entire professional career. I raise my hand into the gap between us and snap my fingers three times in front of her face.
"Hel-lo!" I say, and she unfreezes, utters a syllable or two, then runs away.
That's it. I figure, I'll do without the quote, or use the woman's monosyllable. I tried, which is the important thing in journalism.
Outside, a lovely autumn day. I stroll west on Wacker Drive, toward the newspaper. On a corner I encounter a knot of three women, talking to each other, still holding programs from the conference. Okay, I decide, the full Boy Scout try I whip out my notebook, uncap a pen, present myself to the group and utter my burning question. There is a pause.
"Do you have any identification?" one of the women asks.
I'm on vacation this week. So, hoping to keep you occupied, I'm running brief excerpts from my seven published books and, on the last day, a glimpse at my upcoming book. This is from "Complete & Utter Failure," published by Doubleday in 1994, from the chapter on bad timing.
The most unambiguous cases of bad timing are those people brushed aside by what English pundit Clive James has called "the Fonck Factor." Rene Fonck was a French aviator pushing hard int he mid-1920s to be the first person to fly from New York to Paris nonstop, thus claiming a $25,000 prize offered by businessman Raymond Orteig.
Fonck was confident the prize was his. He convinced aviation pioneer Igor Sikorsky to provide a S-35 triple-engine airplane—the most advanced plane at the time and, at $105,000, also the most expensive. Since such an epic flight deserved a certain degree of magnificence, the interior of the plane was beautified by an interior decorator, who added panels of Spanish leather and mahogany walls so that it resembled "a tastefully furnished drawing room." Fonck ignored Sikorsky's plea that the aircraft first be thoroughly stress-tested. With a takeoff weight of 28,000 pounds due to the extra fuel, 10,000 pounds past its design maximum, a stress test might have been a good idea. To make matters worse, the plane was loaded down with all sorts of optimistic tokens, from a bouquet of orchids for the French President's wife to a full-course celebration dinner for six, prepared at a New York hotel and packed in vacuum containers so it would still be hot when consumed at the Crillon in Paris. Moments before the departure from Roosevelt Field, on the cold, gray dawn on September 21, 1926, Fonck was handed yet another gift from a well-wisher. He "lifted it in his hand to test the weight, and with a rueful look placed it aboard the already overloaded plane," according to the New York Times report the next day.....
Literally burdened with the expectations of success, the plane never became airborne. Its landing gear collapses during take-off, and the plane cartwheeled into a gully at the end of the field and burst into flames. The plane's mechanic and radio operator were killed. Fonck and his navigator survived. Later, Fonck summed up the rash by uttering this wrenching expression of Gallic grief, "It is the fortune of the air," and immediately vowed to make the attempt again.
Alas for the gallant Fonck, the following spring, on May 20-21, 1927, a 25-year-old former airmail pilot named Charles Lindbergh, flying a stripped-down single-engine plane (pilots preferred those two- and three-engine planes in case one of the engines died in the middle of the Atlantic; Lindbergh was thinking of saving fuel), alone without a crew, crossed the Atlantic in 33 hours, 30 minutes. At times holding his eyes open with his thumbs, or hanging his head out the window to be revived by the icy air, Lindbergh also reported that he kept himself awake by repeating "There's no alternative but death and failure" over and over again.
Lindbergh got the fame and fortune. Fonck got, well, Foncked.
Writers, like people in general, inflate their own significance, so I try to emphasize my complete lack of impact on the culture around me, since it happens to be true. The closest thing I ever did to being an innovator of anything was the "Shiver like rhesus monkeys" chapter of Complete & Utter Failure, which followed a girl through a year of the National Spelling Bee. Myna Goldberg was inspired by it to write "Bee Season," so she says in the book's acknowledgments, which kicked off the whole bee-as-literature genre, with the movies and plays and such that followed, all of which did better than my book, although it was reviewed, well, in the Washington Post, and landed me on "Oprah," so I shouldn't complain either.
My plan was to pick someone who had competed in the nationals the previous year, on the assumption that she had to be good to have gotten that far once and, having whiffed victory, would redouble her efforts this year.
I settled on a twelve-year old girl named Sruti Nadimpalli, basically because she lived close to Chicago and her last name did not present the phone book problems implicit in finding Gary Lee, the other local speller who had made it to the nationals the year before.
Even as I was leaving a message at the Nadimpalli house, I was nervous about explaining precisely what I had in mind. I couldn't lie and say I wanted to track Sruti's triumphant return to the nationals, culminating in victory this time.
But I couldn't say I wanted to document her second failure on the national stage either, to observe her humiliation and dissect it for my own particular purposes. "Hi! I'm a stranger writing a book on failure, and thought that I'd devote seventy-five pages to your young daughter, provided you give me access to her...."
What then to tell the mom? In my mind, I had conjured up a wildly protective, fictional mother for Sruti, someone who would share her daughter's bee compulsion. A fearsome image who would probably turn me down cold. And then what?
Even at the moment we were on the phone together—up to the point when Sruti's mother, in her charming, lilting accent, asked "And what is this book about?"— I wasn't sure what to say. Naturally, I fudged. I said that the book was about "success and failure," then slowly peeled away the success part.
As always, the reality was more interesting than what I had imagined before the fact. Dr. Nadimpalli didn't need me to soft-pedal at all—she quickly grasped, and even seemed to embrace, the idea of the spelling bee as a failure metaphor, and cheerfully agreed to present my proposal to her daughter. A week later I was at their home.
Photo atop blog: Tom Mansfield, a guard at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, standing before "Homage to Uccello #5" by Boston artist Anna Hepler.
