Eric Sevareid

The Man Who Knew Too Much ... to be on television

Dan Rather is capable of great generosity, and one of the more notable instances of this, in my case, was his inviting me to spend a few minutes with Eric Sevareid. It was my first meeting with the sage of CBS News, and Dan’s last: a short time later, on July 9, 1992, just as the Democratic National Convention began, Sevareid died.

Though CBS showed him the door the minute he turned 65, Sevareid had come out of retirement, briefly, to assist in our coverage of the Democratic Convention four years earlier. I was already in awe of the guy, and I pressed myself against the back wall of the anchor booth, afraid to step forward. I had yet to read any of Sevareid’s books, which sealed my admiration for him, but I knew enough of his broadcast work to be intimidated. I knew, too, that Dan admired Sevareid as I admired Dan, and therefore Sevareid was too high above me to contemplate.

But Sevareid’s era was long past. If he ever had a broadcast sense of time, with its urgent need for concision, he’d lost it now. His observations were fascinating; his ability to relate the present Convention to those from decades before was unmatched. But he was old, slow, rambling. Already when he started in television, the hotheads behind the cameras complained that he was dull. In 1988, they were complaining again — quietly, behind his stooping back. "He's killing us," they whispered. Sevareid would hardly begin speaking, in informal interview segments opposite Dan at the anchor desk, before the whiz kids wanted to cut away to something quicker, brighter, shinier, sexier. But Dan wouldn’t let them. His loyalty was too fierce.

Theirs was a long and sometimes contentious friendship. They had both worked out of the Saigon bureau during the Vietnam War, and from some of Dan’s descriptions, it sounded much as if he’d been sent into a combat zone with his college history professor. Although Sevareid had plenty of experience as a war correspondent, during World War II, he was older by the time he got to Saigon, and his trademark dignity and intellectual seriousness were more deeply entrenched and out of place in that setting. Dan had anecdotes — snapshot images, more precisely — of Sevareid in his dressing gown, Sevareid reading books, Sevareid filing reports and drinking cocktails on the hotel rooftop, always incongruous to his surroundings, sometimes comically so. We never quite figured out a way to apply these images of the old man to any better purpose. When we incorporated one such image — which I found hilarious — in Dan’s funerary tribute, the reaction of the assembled was awkward and uncomprehending. What was Dan trying to do? Well, he was trying to help the rest of us see Sevareid as he did: human and lovable.

I believe that Dan wanted to inherit the mantle of Sevareid as ardently as he yearned for the mantle of Murrow. Dan wanted to bring gravitas, historical perspective and intellectual seriousness, to his broadcasts. That’s why he wanted me around: to help him find these qualities and translate them to the microphone. That’s also why Dan reads so much and so deeply.

He was always eager to improve himself, and when they were in Saigon, he made a point of reading everything Sevareid recommended. But Sevareid was uncomfortable with the role of mentor, and he lashed out at Dan — publicly, no less — when he thought Dan had gone too far in depicting them as pupil and teacher. He denied having recommended books to Dan; he disavowed his influence. I could see that Dan was wounded by this: he’d meant nothing more than a compliment. But many people at CBS had difficulty accepting Dan’s most gracious gestures in the sincere spirit intended. They mocked his courtly manners and questioned the motives behind his flowers and gifts and effusions.

Sevareid must not have understood Dan very well, I think. Perhaps he saw too many differences between Dan and himself to see the similarities — or to see Dan’s desire to become more like him. Perhaps, too, Sevareid was so ill at ease with himself that he couldn’t bear the younger man’s admiration, or anyone else’s. He had an ego, and a pretty big one, from what I can tell, but he was a very shy man, raised in the forbidding Norwegian immigrant communities of the north, and he’d sooner not talk at all than make small talk, sooner listen to silence than listen to praise.

They didn’t have many opportunities to make up, yet Dan invited me to tag along that spring afternoon in Georgetown. I was aware that the invitation was a precious gift to me, not merely because it meant meeting my hero, but because Dan might never have another opportunity to see Sevareid. My presence would prevent them both from speaking freely.

Maybe Dan wanted it that way. Maybe he thought Sevareid would be more comfortable if a stranger attended their conversation. They would both be on their best behavior.

Sevareid had bought a tidy townhouse from its previous owner: Dan Rather. We were greeted at the door by Sevareid’s third wife, a sometime CBS producer named Suzanne St Pierre, younger than her husband and strikingly handsome. While we waited for Eric, Dan pointed out the brick-lined patio behind the house. Jean Rather had done all the landscaping with her fair fine hands, he told me, setting every brick and planting every stem. “The summer she was reading Proust,” he remembered, “she sat out there all day. We weren’t allowed to go near her until she finished.”

At last Eric was ready to see us, and we went into the sunny front room. I was introduced to him as an admirer, and although I’d brought one of his books (In One Ear, a collection of the kind of radio essays I strove to match with my own), I didn’t ask him to sign it. I knew that he didn’t suffer praise lightly, and already I felt too much an intruder in what was supposed to be a reunion of old friends, and not an autograph session. I made the right decision, yet I’ve always regretted it.

The two men talked quietly, and I sat on the sofa opposite them and said not one word. Dan talked of the outside world, of politics and of people they knew, but Eric seemed a bit distant. Maybe he knew already that the outside world was shut off for him forever. Suzanne St Pierre served us iced tea, as I recall, but mostly she stayed discreetly out of sight. Now I wonder if she meant to set an example for me. Should I have excused myself, too? But there was no way to tear myself away from the presence of the master, and besides the conversation passed quickly.

Years later, the head of CBS would declare that the era of “the voice of God” anchor was over, and he meant the paternalistic, authoritative approach of people like Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather. But the nearest “voice of God” the news business ever knew was Eric Sevareid, reading his stern little essays to the camera.

Sevareid wasn’t always right — often enough, he was dead wrong, as he was about Vietnam. But he applied a formidable mind to the pronouncements he made. He eschewed the term “commentary,” because, as he said, “Anybody can comment. I analyze.” When some corporate suit or other, knuckling under to right-wing pressure, insisted that Dan describe his radio program, Dan Rather Reporting, as commentary, Dan remembered what Sevareid had said, and he resisted by elaborating: “News, commentary, and analysis.”

But, although I disdain some of the tactics contemplated (including — perhaps even seriously — nude anchors and an emphasis on “happy” news) by people like Les Moonves, he’s not wrong when he says that electronic journalism has moved on. If you want commentary, and even analysis, you have only to log onto the Internet and find hundreds of would-be Rathers and Sevareids, representing every possible perspective. My brother is one such.

Few of these people, however, will bring the credentials of a Dan Rather to their work: they won’t have rolled up their sleeves and dug deeply into the mess of the world, year after year, for a lifetime. And they won’t think or write as well as Eric Sevareid. Their words may have democratic value, but little else.

Sevareid wrote with precision and balance, clean rhetoric and cool detachment. It was a generation of good writers, weaned both on Hemingway and on Henry James, and Sevareid’s prose stands comfortably beside that of his contemporaries on the staff of The New Yorker, for instance. The difference is that he wasn’t writing for the page.

Writing for the ear is a tricky assignment, and often what reads well sounds terrible. The opposite is also true: Charles Kuralt used to deliver what sounded like poetry on the air, but what looked flat and pedestrian on the page. (This didn’t hurt his book sales in the slightest, but I think by then people were so accustomed to the sound of Kuralt that they filled it in for themselves when they read.) Not least with the use of his somber, quiet voice, Sevareid managed to write for both the ear and the eye, and to pick up one of his books — especially his early memoir, Not So Wild a Dream — is to be caught and held by the English language.

I kept his picture in a silver frame on the wall in my office at CBS, to remind us to write better. Although I’m certain that Sevareid would have approved of the goal, I’m also certain that he’d have squirmed to see that picture there.

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Cathy Moriarty

A scene from Soap Dish: "I was in that picture!"

At a CBS dinner for affiliates in Los Angeles, many years ago, I met the actress Cathy Moriarty. I was there with Dan; she was there with Andrew “Dice” Clay. She was his partner on a new sitcom that was supposed to resurrect his career. The show didn’t last long, but the dinner threatened to last forever.

An affiliate dinner is the culmination of a week of glad-handing and back-stabbing, and it’s an unnerving undertaking at best. The network hosts resent their affiliate guests, the affiliate guests despise their network hosts, and everybody is kissing up to the TV stars, all of whom, without exception, sit with waxwork grins and road-kill eyes while they wait, silently but desperately pleading with God to let them get the hell out of the ballroom and go home. But alas, the TV stars are contractually obligated to see the dinner through, acting sociable from the “Parade of Stars” that starts the evening (in alphabetical order, so that Dan entered just after Rhea Perlman and just before Della Reese) right to the increasingly bitter, wine-drenched end.

So there was Cathy Moriarty, and there was I. Both of us were bored by the dinner, and each of us had stolen out to the lobby. She mistook me for a waiter and asked if I would get her a glass of wine. Already, romance must have been in the air: I didn’t tell her right away who I really was; I wanted to play chivalrous knight to this fair dame. I told her I’d be glad to help, and when I came back with her drink, we sat and talked a good long while.

She may still be as beautiful as she was that night, as beautiful as she was in Raging Bull, and the contrast between her blonde radiance and her raucous, street-tough voice was even more startling and seductive in person than it was onscreen. She was not a TV star, she was a movie star, the genuine article. Though she’s made relatively few films, she’s got the charisma, the allure, the mystery. TV is too small a screen for her, and maybe the movie screen was too small, as well, because only in person could she demonstrate that all those magical qualities were hers by right, and not tricks of the camera. Suddenly I was kin to Fitzgerald and Faulkner, to every writer who’d come to Hollywood and knocked back a drink, and run smack into purely mortal divinity.

We had a marvelous time, and there was something fluid and dream-like about it, not only because it wasn’t the first glass of wine for either of us. We were sexy and flirtatious, and there was absolutely no chance of our having sex; we laughed and we mouthed off about everything and everybody, and although I don’t remember much of what we said, we were in complete agreement about all of it. It was a true meeting of minds between two people who'd never met and who would never meet again, a perfect romance between strangers, and exactly what you want a conversation with a screen goddess to be.

At one point I mentioned the movie Soap Dish, because my friend Nate Goodman worked on it. “I was in that movie!” Cathy Moriarty exclaimed, almost triumphantly.

“I know,” I replied. “You’d be surprised to know how seldom that picture comes up in conversation, except among people who worked on it.”

At last she was summoned back to the ballroom; the dinner was nearing its end. There was a fleeting hesitation on her part. I suspect she was debating whether to give me her phone number. But what good would it do? It wasn’t as though we could call each other up for a cup of coffee or a movie date. We lived on different coasts, and though I was Dan Rather’s assistant, I might be a psychopath anyway. (Plenty of people thought Dan was nuts; why not his staff, too?) She did suggest that I drop by the pizza restaurant she and her husband ran, because she spent a lot of time there, and I urged her to call Dan’s office the next time she was in New York. But, with a handshake, the spell was broken, and she was gone.

I’ve never seen her again, onscreen or off, since then. It’s not for lack of interest in her work, so much as it’s a desire to preserve for as long as possible the delicate perfection of the moment we shared.

She forgot all about it the next day.

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Nelson Mandela

The former yearbook staffer (can you tell?) with Mandela,
Dan Rather, producer George Osterkamp (far right),
and our CBS News crew in Cape Town, 1994.

My meeting with Nelson Mandela, one grey morning in Cape Town, consisted of little more than a handshake, after which I fell back to the shadows, listening to his interview with Dan Rather. We’d come to South Africa to cover the first multiracial presidential elections in South Africa’s history, in 1994, and Mandela was the last of our interviews with each major candidate. His rivals included F. W. De Klerk, the man who’d freed him from prison, four years earlier, and a few others who’d be delighted to see him return to Robben Island.

Surrounded by staff people and a security team, Mandela entered the room with something like the burst of excitement that accompanies the arrival of any big-shot politician for an interview with an American television crew. But the resemblance between Mandela and any other politician ended right there. The excitement didn’t come from him, it came from the rest of us. I’ve seldom met anybody less prepossessing, and apart from his height and his good looks, he might have walked into any room and never have been noticed.

Excepting that he was already a legend. By the time I was in college, his myth was fully developed and ardently subscribed to by everyone I knew: there were boycotts and rallies in his name on campus, his picture hung on dorm walls, his imprisonment (which was to last 28 years) understood as a universal symbol of injustice.

The son of a tribal chief, Mandela had a distinguished career as an attorney and activist. Given that background, it’s only reasonable to assume that he must have possessed some facility, at some time, for glad-handing and grandstanding. But during his captivity, he’d lost the politico’s art, or else he realized that he didn’t need it. Indeed, he had a kind of reverse charisma.

Most charisma emanates outward. It’s an energy that comes from a person who wants to be liked, that draws you in. Yet you were drawn to Mandela not because of anything he put out, but because of what you brought to him, your own awareness of his history and his beliefs. You liked him already; he didn’t have to win you over. He spoke softly, thoughtfully, and if he’d been anybody other than Nelson Mandela, you might not have listened. However, because you knew he was Nelson Mandela, you hung on his every word.

Other politicians don’t trust themselves, or their listeners: they turn on the charm. I thought about this a few years later, when I met Fidel Castro and spent a week with him in Cuba. Castro was the opposite of Mandela, with an electrifying, actorish presence and a mesmerizing rhetorical style. His charisma was more powerful than any other I’ve experienced — and it needs to be, because he can’t afford to let you remember what a bad character he is, how many people have died and suffered because of him, how far he’s strayed from his ideals, or why he needs the AK-47 strapped to the back of the driver’s seat in his limo. When Castro walks into a room, you don’t think about any of that. Instantly he becomes every man’s beloved brother, father, grandfather, and every woman’s next lay. Castro’s charisma doesn’t seem forced or studied (unlike that of Bill Clinton, for example, who seems to have read a book on How to Win Friends at an early age and taken it a bit too much to heart): Castro’s charisma is a natural force, and it brings to mind Bertrand Russell’s observation that bad philosophy should be accorded the same negative respect we grant to tigers and lightning storms.

By the time we met, Mandela was a man of peace, with a Nobel Prize to prove it (shared with De Klerk), and he went on to preside over South Africa not as a dictator, not even as a philosopher king, but as a statesman. In his younger days he’d been accused and convicted of violence and terrorism; given the circumstances, those charges can’t be accepted at face value, though it’s true that plenty of his associates, including his ex-wife, Winnie, were tempted to use violent means to achieve their goals. Maybe if Mandela hadn’t been in prison all those years, he might have resorted to violence, too: he wouldn’t be the first revolutionary to do so. Even George Washington did it. But by now his gentleness and wisdom prevailed, and he spoke convincingly (and later acted accordingly) of his desire to make of South Africa a place where blacks and whites could live in harmony. Not for him the punitive, vengeful politics that others promoted, and unlike Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe (whom we also interviewed, on that same trip), the power of the presidency didn’t corrupt Mandela.

During the week before the interview, I’d already experienced the unnerving contrasts of South Africa. The white population lived as if in Southern California, with glittering shopping malls and gated homes. The black population, for the most part, lived in shantytowns, and there was no way to mistake these for anything other than Africa — especially when I attended, shortly after my arrival, a pro-Mandela rally in the form of a toy-toy, a kind of dancing march by thousands of supporters brandishing sticks. (Maybe guns, too: we were advised to wear bullet-proof vests, though we did without them, and in fact we encountered no violence at all.) I’d heard and read about the disparities, I’d seen movies and television reports, but I was unprepared, emotionally as well as intellectually, for what I found when we went into one of the villages and met the beautiful, friendly, thoroughly impoverished children there. I treasure a photo, taken by the great Louise Gubb, of our crew surrounded by these kids. They were too young to vote, of course, but they’d made their choice. Nelson Mandela was a hero to them, and he was bringing them hope.

It takes more than hope, or one man of peace, to change the world. Within a few years of that trip, our local “fixer,” a white man of insightful intelligence and love for the new South Africa, was murdered by a carjacker.

At the end of the interview, Mandela asked for Dan’s business card. A common enough exchange, except that Dan didn’t have any, and CBS management had refused to give me any of my own. (Indeed, Eric Ober, then-president of the News Division, threatened to fire me when I asked for cards.) I had to scribble out our office address and phone number on a piece of spiral-notebook paper, which Mandela accepted with amused graciousness.

Within a few more hours, we were on our way back to the United States. The direct flight seemed even longer because the food was so bad on the South African airliner: inert, greasy masses of ground beef, cheese and potato made one appreciate just how much Julia Child did for American cooking, because it was the sort of meal one might have expected to eat in the 1950s. But soon enough I was in Manhattan, where penthouses abut housing projects, where the disparities between black and white (and brown and…) seemed only slightly less pronounced than those I’d just seen in South Africa. How long before America produces a Mandela of its own? And will he be able to do any good?

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Lady Bird Johnson

I couldn’t wait to call my parents to tell them about my visit to the Johnson Ranch, in the spring of 1999, shortly before I left CBS News. Mom seemed to enjoy the story, but Dad was silent. I couldn’t be sure if silence didn’t signify disapproval — of Democratic idolatry or somesuch. I’ve been given to understand that nobody in the family was particularly enamored of LBJ or his politics, yet the sense of kinship was inescapable.

The whole time I was on the Ranch, I kept thinking of my maternal grandfather: how tickled he would be to see me there, how gratified to learn that the Johnsons’ private library included so many of the books he collected, too. Really the place was much like Goliad, and going to visit Lady Bird was like going to visit Louise Donoghue or some other Goliad doyenne who isn’t my kin but to whom my family has old connections and who conducts her life in similar ways.

We were escorted into the dining room, with its tranquil view of the Johnson Ranch, and served lunch, a hospitable gesture that I surely didn’t expect: home-made tamales and King Ranch chicken (“We just had King Ranch chicken for supper!” my mother cried excitedly), and herbal iced tea and cookies, the handiwork of a strikingly bohemian housekeeper/cook named (I think) Susan.

Two Mexican-American servants assisted her, and we all sat at a long dining table where Liz Carpenter commanded the conversation. Liz was Lady Bird’s press secretary during the Johnson Administration; she wrote a bestselling memoir of her years at the White House (Ruffles and Flourishes), and she continues to take a lively interest in the First Lady’s public image and personal welfare. And Liz is a whirlwind, from whom every other press rep ought to take notes.

Liz might have consulted her notes before she spoke to me, or she might not, but somehow she remembered my name and my (inherited) small-town Texan background, and she made sure she included me in every part of the discussion. (Since in so many other interview situations I never emerged from Dan Rather's shadow, this was gratifying.) When she introduced me to Lady Bird, it was as “Bill Madison from Goliad,” giving me the perfect opening for a line I’d prepared: “My grandfather was chairman of the Democratic Party in Goliad, and wherever he is right now, I’m sure he’s just bustin’.”

“Good, you can stay,” said Liz.

Throughout the interview, Liz must have been a bundle of nerves, worried about what kind of impression Lady Bird was making, generally fretting the way a press secretary does (or I do), although Lady Bird hasn’t officially been her charge for something near 30 years. She took me aside and asked if Lady Bird’s vision trouble were too obvious, and appeared relieved when I said I’d never have guessed. It seems Lady Bird is legally blind, and I guess they were all fearful she’d look pathetic.

In the event, however, Lady Bird looked pretty, lively, and always charming. Hers is a wonderful sort of charm because she seems only to be herself, and by happy accident that self is what other people consider charming. She seems so natural and unaffected, like one of her wildflowers, simple and genuine. And yet because she is a Southern lady and because she is a political wife, you are suspicious — because very few of either breed are ever genuine.

Her accent is of a thick, Deep-South strain, the way Texan accents aren’t supposed to be, and although I grew up hearing such accents, I seldom do anymore. (Few among the newer generations of Texans speak that way at all.) It was good to hear the music of that accent again, and it helped to make me feel I was listening to someone I’d known all my life. She can be quite eloquent, with a gift for word choice; she got a journalism degree at the University of Texas, and she’s among the best-educated First Ladies. (The history of women’s education being what it is, she didn’t have much competition until recently.) And it is striking to realize that so many of my first ideas of what a First Lady was, must have been formed around my impressions of Lady Bird, the first First Lady of whom I was conscious.

She was never a beauty, but hers is a good, strong, handsome face, with a radiant sweetness and a lingering sparkle in her failing eyes; she’d had her hair done for this occasion, and she submitted gently to the attentions of the makeup artist and camera crew. She sat on a big, comfortable sofa in the library, which, but for its Texana collection, would be among the least intimidating rooms in the house, filled with papers, files, and books; venetian blinds kept the room dark, not least to avoid straining Lady Bird’s eyes.

It’s a big house, yet beyond its size it doesn’t boast its wealth. The furniture is simple, the rooms very much lived-in. It’s a peaceful place, a refuge, and you can’t help wondering: would history have been different if this house were less comfortable, less gracious and forgiving? Would Lyndon Johnson have behaved differently if Lady Bird been less patient and enabling?

Dan had visited the Ranch before, long before LBJ was vice-president. He tells a story of being summoned to the Ranch for a press conference, only to learn that LBJ had decided to say nothing after all. Dan needed to phone his bosses in Houston, to warn them there’d be no scoop that day, and before it became the Texas White House, the only phones on the Ranch were private, family lines. Dan managed to find a phone — and within seconds LBJ burst into the room, furious to find a reporter taking such liberties. He threw Dan out of the house, and Dan hightailed it for the highway. But he hadn’t reached the front gate before Lady Bird pulled up in her own car and asked him gently to return. “Don’t mind Lyndon,” she said, and brought him back. This afternoon, Lady Bird claimed to remember the incident: but was this because Dan had written about it (in The Camera Never Blinks), because it was memorable in itself, or because it was one among many similar incidents?

A lot of couples have a Johnsonian dynamic, if on a smaller scale: one spouse provokes, the other placates and mediates. By the time Dan met the Johnsons, their “good cop, bad cop” act must have been practiced, refined, and routine. But I don’t think it was entirely an act, and in this house especially, with LBJ’s larger-than-life personality long gone but never forgotten, their relationship lingers in the rooms. You can almost hear him. Yet though she’s sitting in front of you, you can’t hear her reply to him.

Sure, she was an ideal political wife, but she was smart and restless, eager to find useful work in an era when political wives weren’t supposed to do much of anything. How did she endure LBJ’s epic temper tantrums, strategic vulgarity, and skirt-chasing? How did she respond to the grandiosity of his ambitions? How did she reconcile the good (his efforts to combat poverty and racism) with the bad (Vietnam)? How did she console him when he failed? What did she say to him? In a sense, every American has to come to grips with the slippery riddle of LBJ, to find some balance between his extremes, exactly the way Lady Bird must have done on a daily basis. But we don’t know how she did it, and the discretion that made her so useful in politics then, now frustrates our understanding of them both.

She lived with him so long. She has lived so long without him.

It seems that, early in their marriage, Lyndon gave her a little movie camera, and she took home movies throughout their life together; now she was willing to share them with us, and officially that was the excuse for this interview. Mary Mapes was producing the segment, and she prepared a list of questions, mostly trying to get Lady Bird to tell stories pertaining to specific films.

But in such cases Lady Bird struggled so hard to be precise, fought so bravely against a balky memory in pauses so long, that I realized she needed to be turned away from dates and names and toward more general impressions, emotional memories. If Lady Bird couldn’t see anymore, it stood to reason that she hadn’t seen these old movies in many years. And so I began searching my pockets for scraps of paper to write other questions, which I handed to Dan during the breaks. I was delighted with the results — Lady Bird responded with energy and pleasure to such questions.

The only failure can be blamed on context: “What would you say to the young couple in those old movies?” I asked, meaning her and LBJ, but in the context of the conversation she must have thought Dan meant Nellie Connally and John, or Nellie and herself — it was confusing to her and she never gave the answer I expected, despite Dan’s attempts to steer her.

Surprisingly, Mary had asked no question about the “beautification” campaign, but that is still a subject to which Lady Bird warms, so I proposed a couple. Lady Bird never did like the word “beautification,” and is quick to point out that hers was one of the first successful ecological conservation programs in the country.

Well, I am bound to like my own questions and Lady Bird’s answers to them, but with whatever objectivity I can muster I do believe my efforts made some difference.

After the interview Liz Carpenter and I chatted in a living room — there are at least two such rooms on the ground floor — and Dan and Lady Bird joined us after they’d finished a little “walk and talk” segment (during which of course I must hide out of camera range). Then Liz’s sister-in-law, Mrs. Sutherland, joined us, too. Liz was preparing for a talk at UT, her alma mater, too (and my parents', too), where she and David Broder would discuss the press, and so she wanted to pick our brains — mine as well as Dan’s, thank you. Lady Bird listened with great interest to this, and to Dan’s assessment of Dan Quayle (she seemed surprised and revolted that he could have any chance at the Republican nomination in 2000), and to our tales of our trip to China.

While Wayne Nelson and Mary Mapes helped the crew strike, LuAnn Mancini, the makeup artist, had been appointed our official CBS photographer for the day, and when it was time to go she nudged me and I asked Lady Bird to pose with us — “something we never ask, but it’s important because you’re a Texan.”

Somehow, LuAnn misplaced the roll of film those pictures were taken on, and I never got a copy.

It was a perfectly lovely day, and when Lady Bird said she hoped she’d see me again very soon, as if I might simply drop by some other afternoon, I found myself hoping the same thing. Yet I hardly know how this afternoon could be improved upon, and I’m sure I wouldn’t have the presumption to approach her except in exactly this fashion.

A few days after I posted this Portrait, Mrs. Johnson passed away, at the age of 94. I hope I do see her again, just as she said, and though I don't know where we'll be when the day arrives, I do know there will be wildflowers, and maybe some home-made tamales, too.

Photo credit: LBJ Library Photo by Frank Wolfe

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Urban Planning 2007: Remaking les Halles

No, seriously: This is the real design approved by the city of Paris.
(Image from the Mayor's Office)

The newly-approved proposal for the eastern edge of the Halles is so monumentally ugly and badly thought-out, that it makes you wonder what proposals got rejected. I made it my business to find out.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Emile Zola wrote a novel, Le ventre de Paris (The Belly of Paris), about the city’s central marketplace, les Halles. Le ventre's protagonist is a revolutionary, leading an insurrection against Napoléon III, and in its day, les Halles were revolutionary, too. Contemplating its lofty, graceful pavilions of steel and glass, and its tiled stalls burgeoning with colorful fruits and vegetables, gleaming fish and squawking poultry, Zola declared les Halles the equivalent of a Gothic cathedral, so inspiring was the ultra-modern marriage of technology and art. (There happens to be an unfinished cathedral, Saint-Eustache, just to the northwest of the old market.) Roughly a century later, most of those pavilions had decayed, and the city’s wholesale food business decamped to the town of Rungis. The city fathers opted to scrap the market entirely, salvaging only a couple of pavilions to be resurrected at Rungis, and in its place they put up … an eyesore.

Today the Forum des Halles is dominated by an ugly, mirrored-glass shopping mall and a tatty, mostly inaccessible park above ground, with an even bigger shopping mall and bustling rail and Métro station plunging several stories below. It’s the worst kind of soulless, graceless, committee-approved 1970s architecture. It started falling apart almost as soon as then-Mayor Jacques Chirac cut the ribbon on opening day, in 1981. One of the city’s red-light districts extends along the eastern boundary of les Halles, dotting the Rue Saint-Denis with sex shops, hip-hop stores, mendicancy, public drunkenness and urine-drenched pavement. Nearly a million commuters, pimps, mall rats and real rats swarm and pass through here every day. But why would you want to be one of them?

I never go there if I can help it, and I’m not alone in this aversion: mention the place to a Parisian, even one who traverses it daily, and he’ll start complaining. For years the city government has kicked around ideas to renovate les Halles, though the best possible solution — tearing the whole thing down and starting over from scratch, maybe even rebuilding the old pavilions and pretending nothing happened — has been rejected as impractical.

A proposal to remake the park was approved in 2004, and it’s bound to be an improvement. At least this time trees are part of the plan. Most of the underground mall and station won’t be touched, but the rest of the above-ground structures face (at last) the wrecking ball. Hopeful though this may sound, the newly-approved proposal for the eastern edge of the Halles is monumentally ugly and badly thought-out.

Though the canopy is transparent, and presumably will protect Parisians from the rain (and snow, if we ever have any again), it will permanently deprive us of the one thing that makes a pleasure of sitting in a sidewalk café or park in this city: direct sunlight. It's a beautiful thing, when it happens. But the canopy will leave us mercilessly exposed to another of Paris' elemental trademarks, the frigid winds of autumn, winter, spring, and (this year, at least) summer. The canopy promises to be a kind of roach motel for pigeons: they’ll fly in, but will they fly out? Sure, the sight lines will be excellent for targeting suspected hoodlums, a consideration similar to that which led to Baron Haussmann's sweeping redesign of Paris under Napoléon III, but law-enforcement in this neighborhood already has a well-documented reputation for harassment and excessive force. The fact that they dress like Imperial Storm Troopers out of Star Wars doesn't help matters.

Moreover, on a purely aesthetic level, did I mention that it’s ugly? Set aside its shape, like the tent of a traveling circus too poor to afford poles. Because, as if there weren’t enough people pissing all over the neighborhood (and there are, there are), the damn thing is piss-yellow. Which of course will make us all look so healthy. I mean, did the glass factory run out of blue?

It’s all so badly conceived that it makes you wonder what proposals got rejected. I made it my business to find out. Here are a few of the other candidates:

1. Architect: Noé Zéabond, Paris
Proposal:
Recalling the enormous quantities of waste formerly generated by the city’s central market, the new design calls for the dumping of several tons of garbage all over the neighborhood each day. And in a nod to the area's more recent past, a central alley will feature a gigantic trough, some 500 meters long, 200 meters wide, and 3 meters deep, into which Parisians can urinate.
Response:
The neighborhood is already full of garbage. The pissoir, however, has potential.

2. Architect: Rémy A. L’Expéditeur, Paris
Proposal:
The old pavilions of Les Halles were known for their grace. Since the word grâce is so close to the word graisse, the architect proposes wrecking all existing above-ground structures and installing a gigantic grease pit covering several city blocks. Visitors will be able to congregate around the pit, smell it, and dip things into it. And since “grace” and “grease” are so close in English, even tourists will understand! How cool is that?
Response:
The neighborhood is already a grease pit.

3. Architect: Consolidated American Amalgamations, Inc., Los Angeles, CA
Proposal:
Since les Halles already boast an American-style shopping center, why not add the next-best thing — an American-style amusement park? EuroParis™ proposes fake medieval castles, fake Baroque palaces, and fake little half-timbered cottages. Colorfully costumed characters from favorite fairy tales scamper about the cobbled streets, greeting tourists and selling overpriced snacks and trinkets. Among the featured rides and attractions, “Monsieur le Taxi’s Wild Ride” takes visitors on a harum-scarum spin through urban congestion, reaching a top speed of 1 kilometer per hour while the meter continues to run. "Snow White's Adventure" takes visitors through a Parisian banlieue; at the end of the ride, each gondola is turned on its side and burned.
Response:
You see, we’ve already got one.

4. Architect: Mr. Wiggins, of Ironside & Malone, London
Proposal:
A twelve-storey block combining classical neo-Georgian features with the efficiency of modern techniques. The tenants arrive in the entrance hall here, and are carried along the corridor on a conveyor belt in extreme comfort and past murals depicting Mediterranean scenes, towards the rotating knives. The last twenty feet of the corridor are heavily soundproofed. The blood pours down these chutes and the mangled flesh slurps into these….
Response:
Very seriously considered, with many ardent defenders, this proposal was rejected at the last minute. An abbatoir wasn’t really what we had in mind. Nice though the abbatoir is.

Footnote for students of French: The h in Halles is aspirated, meaning there's no liaison: one doesn't say "Lay Zall," one says "Lay All." Make a mistake here, and the French will take you for a tourist. Which is the last thing you want.

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Beverly Sills

When Beverly Sills was a girl, her parents’ plan was for her to become a teacher, if the whole opera thing didn’t work out. Such was her drive to succeed that, of course, the opera thing worked out just fine. I think she’d have invented opera, if it hadn’t existed already, just so that she could be an opera star. But for me, she was a teacher, too.

It wasn’t all educational, at least not in the cultural or intellectual sense; the greatest element of her work, for me, doubtless was the sentimental education. From the first time I heard her — on tour with the Met, in Rossini’s Siege of Corinth — I felt I’d found a voice that sang the things I couldn’t speak. Siege is precisely what a thirteen-year-old wants to hear: “My father doesn’t like my boyfriend; I’m going to kill myself” is perfect adolescent psychology, and it’s also the plot of this opera. Moreover, Sills’ triumph over the technical demands of the score was dazzlingly athletic, exciting just as an evening’s worth of perfectly executed home runs might be. After that performance, my godmother took me backstage to meet Miss Sills and to get her autograph. We were abetted by a friend named Robert Merrill — not the baritone, but a tenor in the chorus at Fort Worth Opera, where Sills had sung several times.

She was the most famous person I’d ever met, and one of the tallest, with her heels and her hair and her eyelashes and her bosom, more glamorous than anyone a kid from the suburbs could ever imagine. I was speechless. Sills had to ask me whether she could autograph my program; I think I managed to say, “Thank you.” I had to skip school the next day; I was too excited to say anything but “I met Beverly Sills.” And I went right out and bought two of her albums, the highlights of Julius Caesar and La Traviata. (Lucky choices, because they’re two of her best-sung recordings.)

Her music became the soundtrack of my life. I played the mad scene from Lucia every morning before school, firm in the belief that listening to Sills go crazy prevented me from going crazy. When my aunt and uncle died in a plane crash, I played “Addio del passato” all night. Pining for my girlfriend, I played “Ruhe sanft, mein holdes Leben” and “Breit über mein Haupt,” and when she spurned me, I played “Ah! Fuyez, douce image” and the last scene of The Ballad of Baby Doe. At night, “V’adoro, pupille” sent me gliding into sleep.

But while I was listening, Sills was teaching. She introduced me to a huge chunk of Western culture, which in turn served to introduce me to even more Western culture. There was something in her performances that made me want to find out more, to read the novel that one opera was based on, to hear other works by the same composer, to explore the history and art behind the music. We’ll never know how much I owe her, how many wonderful things I’d never have discovered if not for her inspiration. Because I was an intellectual oddball already, it’s possible that I’d have studied French, maybe even German, but inconceivable that I’d have taught myself Italian without her. (I listened to her records ceaselessly, and read the librettos all the while, until I developed a perfectly useless command of nineteenth-century poetic Italian: I couldn’t order a gelato, but I could tell you the sky was red with the blood of virgins.)

Her repertory pointed me toward more challenging music, easing me from bel canto toward Weill and Berg. Without her, I wouldn’t have discovered other singers whose work has been meaningful to me: I’d never have heard Marilyn Horne except on The Odd Couple, I wouldn’t have heard Eileen Farrell or Leontyne Price. I wouldn’t have met Teresa Stratas or Susan Graham or Joyce DiDonato. In short, I’d have been a mess.

Even my career as a journalist would have been different without Beverly Sills, because she was my very first interview. At the age of fifteen, I had been writing for school newspapers for a couple of years, but I’d never conducted an interview — not one. But one day, looking forward to Sills’ appearance in La Traviata with the Dallas Civic Opera, I decided to request an interview with the diva. (Why the article would be of any remote interest to my fellow students, not one of whom liked opera, I don’t know, but my journalism teacher, Melinda Smith, indulged me.) I contacted the man who handled the opera company’s publicity, and he told me he’d have to clear the request with Miss Sills’ representative, Edgar Vincent. It didn’t take me long to get the reply I wanted: I was to meet Miss Sills in her dressing room prior to one of her performances.

I now know more about Beverly Sills’ abiding interest in her own publicity, and about Edgar’s unparalleled mastery of its art. It was Edgar, after all, who made sure that her Met debut made the front page of The New York Times at the same time Saigon was falling; years later, Edgar’s soothing voice would announce whether I’d gotten other interviews, whether with Dolora Zajick or Samuel Ramey (yes) or Cecilia Bartoli (no). Publicity was (and, I daresay, is) very much a part of Sills’ overall approach to her career, to be, as Time Magazine once put it, not just an opera singer but an opera star. Other people found this hard to take: notably Marilyn Horne, who was so put off by Sills’ elbows-out behavior at La Scala that a kind of feud resulted. (Those of us who love both ladies are left feeling like children caught in a divorce.) And thus some people might characterize Sills’ consenting to an interview with a high-school newspaper reporter as mere greedy publicity-hounding, doing anything to see herself in print.

I see it as something else, and I begin by looking at Sills’ relationship with her mother. Mrs. Silverman may not have intended to cultivate her daughter, to bring her up to be a glamorous, multilingual artist who could hobnob with movie stars and Muppets, presidents and kings: Mrs. Silverman was just playing her opera records, and her daughter liked them, too. Little Belle started to mimic the opera singers, and the response was gratifying enough that she pursued singing, with increasing seriousness and success. But Mrs. Silverman was, in effect, her daughter’s first teacher, and the course she taught was music appreciation.

Birth defects made it impossible for Beverly Sills to pass on these lessons to her own children. But Sills did pass on her mother’s lessons to other people’s children, and she always made an effort to reach out to young audiences: I am merely one product of that outreach, one satisfied alumnus of the Silverman School of Culture. I even had the benefit of a graduate education, because when I first moved to New York, I’d see Mrs. Silverman at almost every opera, ballet, concert, and play I attended. It was as if she were overseeing my mastery of the studies her daughter had launched.

It may not have been pure altruism that led Sills to grant me an interview, but it wasn’t pure selfishness, either, and it was the beginning of my career as a journalist. Wearing my cousin Paul’s navy blazer and carrying a heavy tape-recorder, I drove to the Fair Park Music Hall with Chris Burnley, the classmate who was to photograph Miss Sills for our article. She arrived in a white limousine and met us at the stage door, then led us to her dressing room. There, she applied her makeup while we went about our business.

My first question was a doozy, I thought: “What is the place of youth in opera?” The trouble was that there were so few questions to follow. Earlier in the semester, Melinda Smith had advised our class that one needs a minimum of ten questions for an interview. Now I began to realize that ten would be sufficient if one were asking an English teacher about the school literary magazine, or the varsity coach about a big game, but ten would not be sufficient for a half-hour interview with the country’s most famous opera singer, nor indeed for any subject of a personality profile. I ran out of questions in fifteen minutes.

Sills had the good grace to laugh when I confessed, and we continued to talk for the rest of the half hour. Some bits went better than others. Best, if hardly a professional achievement: I noted, with satisfaction, that the growth spurt I’d seen in the interval between Siege and Traviata had rendered me taller, at last, than she. Worst: I clumsily asked whether her husband, a financial-news columnist, was content to be considered “Mr. Beverly Sills”; Mrs. Peter B. Greenough replied firmly that the question was unfounded. But when it came time to leave, my feet hardly touched the ground. Other interviews might go well or badly, still others might be conducted by Dan Rather or Connie Chung and not by me, but no interview would ever be more thrilling or more memorable than my first.

The next Sunday, seeking an autograph at the stage door after the matinée of La Traviata, Sills recognized me, which could hardly have done more to make me feel like a real swell in front of my girlfriend, Karen. A few years later, following Sills’ final performance in Dallas (as Norina in Don Pasquale), I went to the stage door again and got her to autograph a copy of the school paper in which our interview appeared — signing off on the finished product, as it were. This time, she didn’t recognize me.

Yet how to account in later years for the looks she used to give me? At intermissions at City Opera, where she was the company's director, I used to see her on the promenade of the State Theater. (This is one of the most wondrous public spaces in New York because it is actually a space. Easier to spend one’s time in a Habitrail than in the Met’s claustrophobic concourses during intermission.) I’d realize she was looking directly at me — not answering my gaze, because I hadn’t been looking at her. This happened several times. She’d be talking to other people, I’d be across the room, usually by myself, and her eyes would be fixed on me. Surely she didn’t remember me from her dressing room in Dallas; surely there was nothing really remarkable in a slender, solitary young man standing around at the opera house. (We're not uncommon.) She may not even have been aware of looking, yet there seemed to be something unguarded and sad in her gaze.

I’ve wondered whether I reminded her of her son. We’re the same age, Bucky and I, and we both had dark hair, but I don’t know whether we resembled each other physically at all. Maybe it was more a spiritual resemblance: I was the sort of young man who Bucky might have become, coming to hear the music that had been passed on by his mother, and her mother before her.

I can't be certain, but I do know this: nobody ever had a better teacher.

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Wikipediopera!

American opera singers are Americans who sing opera.

Contents:
1. History of American opera singing
2. Americans who used to sing opera
3. Americans who still sing opera
4. External Links

1. History of American opera singing
American opera singing began in 1694, when any woman in Salem, Massachusetts, who could hit an E was convicted of witchcraft and burned like a steak. By 1776, however, the European art form of opera had gained in popular acceptance, and Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin often regaled the Continental Congress with Mozart duets. [edit]
The legendary showman P.T. Barnham helped bring operatic music to the American heartland when he engaged Paul Lynde, “the Swedish nightingale,” on a national tour. Also during the nineteenth century, farmers would sing opera to their livestock to stun them prior to slaughter. When a tribe of Lakotah Sioux couldn’t get tickets to a sold-out recital in 1876, they started the famous Battle of the Little Big Horne. [edit]
In 1890, David Caruso founded the Metropolitan Opera; performances were given in the Metropolitan Museum, in New York City, until 1963, when the company moved to the newly built Lincoln Tunnel, its permanent home. The popularity of opera on radio and early television made household names of such singers as Mario Lancer, Roberta Merrill and Margaret Dumont, who had her own network. One singer, Risqué Stevens, even co-starred opposite Frank Sinatra in the hit movie I Did It Going My Way in 1943.[edit]
Today, opera is listened to only by old farts like my dad. [citation needed]

2. Americans who used to sing opera:

Maria Callas (1925–77) was an international spy who possessed superhuman powers following an accident in her nuclear laboratory. Despite her promise to use these powers only for good, she made a series of late-career concert tours and starred in a Broadway play, Master Clams, about her love affair with John F. Kennedy. The opera Greatest Hits, which she recorded many times, was written for her.

Marilyn Horne (born 1953) is frequently credited with the Bella Canto revival, in which she administered mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to an elderly Italian woman. A frequent co-star was Kiefer Sutherland. She later portrayed Felix Unger’s wife, Gloria, on TV’s The Odd Couple.

Leonine Price (born 1951) enjoys fishing and caught a record-breaking number of porgie and bass while touring the former Soviet Union. She sang the role of Aida 802,367 times without stopping. In the 1960s, she was romantically linked with William Shatner.

Beverly Sills (born 1992), a child star of the popular Our Gang comedies, frequently played queens, though she did sing heterosexual roles, as well. She has the same dentist as my aunt. The city of Beverly Hills is named after her.

Richard Tucker (1915–73) is remembered for singing “No More Rice Krispies.”

3. Americans who still sing opera:

Bugs Bunny (born 1939), an American tenor, performs works by Rossini and Wagner.

David Daniel (born 1946) sings like a girl. He specializes in operas by Fettucini, Tortellini and Pennerigate. His Social Security number is 078-05-1120, his bank-account number is 0038503458498, and his chat-room alias is “He-Man.”

Tenor Placido Domingo (born 1492) is not American. Over a career lasting 40 decades, his repertory includes Braniscelti d’Oro, Grosse Querschnitten and Airs Célèbres. In 1978, he sold his soul to the devil (Sam Ewell-Ramey) in exchange for eternal youth.

Renée Fleming was born in a manger in 1986. She discovered penicillin in 1928. Her best-selling autobiography tells the harrowing true story of her captivity in the tiny Latin American nation of Belcanto. Only dogs can hear her top range. She speaks fluent Elvish (both Quenya and Sindarin).

Susan Graham (born 1973), an American mezzanine, turned down the lead on the TV series Roswell to portray the Borg princess Six of Twelve on Star Trek: Voyager. She is totally telepathic and has green, copper-based blood.

Bare, toned Thomas Handsome (born 1776) is celebrated for his work in pornographic operas such as Dong Iovanni, I Docked Her Faust and Thighs. He also sings Des Knabenwunderhorn, which sounds dirty but isn’t.

Tiffany Amber Klopstock (born 1980) is America’s very best soprano. The New York Times hailed “Miss Klopstock, a soprano”; while Opera News raves, “Others in the cast included.” Call Tiffany for your next wedding reception, garden party or memorial service at (976) 555-4397.

Cheryl Milne (born 1959) is an American singer and author, best known for the Winnie-the-Pooh books and her portrayal of Eeyago.

Deborah Voight (born 1992) is the half-sister of actress Angelina Jolie. A talented gymnast as well as soprano, she is best known for her dramatic rolls.

4. External links
Twelve-step program for recovering opera fans: www.turndownthatinfernalracket.org
Madonna fansite: www.express-myself.com
Anna Moffo Shrine: www.moffoismypersonalsavior.com

Related: People Who Were Born / Stuff That Happens / Things in the World / Unnatural Practices / Hugh Jackman Movies / Articles Needing Sources

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