January 2011

SAMMY—Hip, Sensitive, Careful

On the night JFK partied with the Rat Pack at the Summit: “I was also told there were four wild girls scheduled to entertain him and I didn’t want to hear about that either and I got out of there.Some things you don’t want to know.”

Booed at the Democratic National Convention: “I focused on a flag in the back of the hall and clung to it, standing there, torn to shreds inside, hurt and naked in front of thousands of people, in front of the world.”

The Kennedy Inauguration: “I wondered what the people would be thinking looking at me onstage in Camden, knowing that the rest of the Rat Pack was in Washington. It hurt like a motherf——.”

In the fall of 1960 Davis called his best man, Sinatra, to announce the postponement of his wedding to May Britt, citing problems with the banquet room and the rabbi’s schedule:

Sinatra: “You’re lying, Charlie.”

Davis: “Look, what the hell, it’s best that we postpone it ‘til after the election.”

On January 19, 1961, at a gala in Washington’s National Armory on the eve of his Inauguration, President-elect John Kennedy made a remarkable gesture. He rose to tell the crowd, “We’re all indebted to a great Frank Sinatra.”

It was an act of legitimation, Camelot’s first knighting: it marked the official ascendancy of Sinatra and, through him, of the rakish group of confederates known as the Rat Pack. For a few brief years, the Rat Pack would be the swinging minstrels of Camelot, and the values and aspirations they embodied would have the imprimatur of presidential authority and enormous cultural cachet.

Samuel Johnson said that no subject is too insignificant for so insignificant an animal as man, Likewise, those who embrace the trivial often try to place their obsessions in the largest possible context. I know something about this, having gone through the exercise with various infatuations of my own.

For many years, I chased after occupational shaving mugs. Porcelain cylinders about the size of a diner coffee cup, each with its owner’s name emblazoned on it in gold along with a bright little painting of his occupation, they bloomed on racks in turn-of-the-century barbershops. One can scarcely imagine a humbler tradition, but I promoted them as folk art of the Industrial Revolution, as emblems of the hard and eager work with which the nineteenth century built the twentieth. (This proselytizing was not universally effective: When I proudly showed my colleague Ellen my latest acquisition—it depicted a steam shovel—she peered into the mug, envisioned the semi-liquid soap it spent its career containing, and said, “I think it’s like collecting dead people’s underwear.”)

Before President Clinton went to Africa in March of this year, his press secretary, Mike McCurry, made a double announcement. The president would discuss American slavery while visiting the continent from which America’s slaves had come. But he would not apologize for it. “He certainly is going to talk about the legacy of slavery and the scar that it represents on America,” McCurry said. But an apology would be “extraneous and off-the-point.”

The president fulfilled both promises in Uganda, in a talk to students in a rural village. “Going back to the time before we were even a nation, European Americans received the fruits of the slave trade. And we were wrong in that.” Clinton walked the line McCurry had drawn with the care of a motorist taking a sobriety test. He said “we were wrong,” but he put that wrong deep in the past (slavery lasted almost 90 years after the United States became a nation). He also put the wrong in the passive voice: That we “received the fruits of the slave trade” made the slaves sound like a hospitality basket left on the nation’s doorstep.

During the fall of 1973, when my wife, Jane, and I were undergraduates at the University of Texas at El Paso, we had dinner with what we will always consider the oddest couple ever to dine at one table: Angela Davis and Francis Gary Powers. This occurred at a symposium sponsored by New Mexico State University and held at the Inn of the Mountain Gods in Mescalero.

Jane and I drove two and a half hours from the searing desert of El Paso to the cool pines of the Lincoln National Forest, and were seated just in time to hear Angela Davis speak about her Communist leanings and her political troubles in California. She was followed by Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 pilot who had been shot down over the Soviet Union, imprisoned for a few years, and later traded for a Russian spy on a bridge in Berlin. At the time of the symposium, Powers was working as a helicopter pilot for the Los Angeles Police Department.

When the speeches were over, the two sat together on a sofa to answer questions, Davis with her long black hair and colorful dress and Powers in a suit, white shirt, and tie.

In June of 1953 a friend and I, both eleven years old, were cliff climbing in a park in Cleveland when I tumbled down the slip- pery shale and broke a wrist. After inching our way down to the roadside, we hitched a ride in a garbage truck to the park police station. By the time my parents learned what had happened I was sitting in the emergency room of Bay View Osteopathie Hospital in suburban Bay Village, quite a distance from my west-side Cleveland home. I never did find out why I was taken there and not to the nearby hospital in Fairview Park.

An intern set my wrist, plastered on a cast, and released me to my relieved father. On the following day, however, we received a call from the hospital. One of its more experienced orthopedic surgeons had reviewed the X rays and was dissatisfied with the way my wrist had been set. So back we went, my father and I, to the hospital. The surgeon, a tall, nice-looking fellow with thinning hair and an easy smile, told us he would have to break my wrist again and reset it. When I woke up from the anesthesia, I had a new cast, and six weeks of healing lay ahead.

In December of 1968 I was assigned to the 9th Infantry Division stationed in the Mekong Delta in the southern part of South Vietnam. On this day, which was either December 26 or 27, my troop, Troop D, 3d Squadron, 5th Cavalry, was to see the Bob Hope Christmas show. It was a morning performance, starting at around ten. My friends and I arrived early, about eight. The morning was very hot and humid, like most mornings in the delta. The show was to be held in an open area where a stage with a large bunker had been constructed. My friend Driver looked at me and said, “Hutch, don’t think for one second that bunker’s for us.” We all had a good laugh as we waited in the heat.

Wherever I went on a visit to Miami’s South Beach, people wanted to tell me what it used to be like. From the 1960s into the 1980s, I heard, the one-and-a-half-square-mile strip of island on the Atlantic Ocean was little more than a warehouse for the near-poverty- level elderly, a forgotten, crime-ridden neighborhood of menace and drugs. But at the same time, thanks to the televised glamour of “Miami Vice,” and the efforts of a vocal group of preservationists, the place was becoming the greatest outdoor Art Deco museum anywhere in the world.

Today, when South Beach is hotter than ever in the minds of a particular type of trend spotter, it is once again threatened, this time by the predictable accessories of success: mall-like chain stores and massive apartment complexes. Moreover, the epicenter of “hot” or “cool” (the terms appear to be interchangeable) has moved a half-mile north of low-rise South Beach to the newly refurbished taller hotels that line Collins Avenue to form a wall, architecturally charming but implacable nonetheless, between the street and the beach.