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Overview
Writers, singers, presidents, athletes, cartoonists, artists, activists, and many more are examined here—from Henry David Thoreau to Willa Cather to Albert Camus to Dwight D. Eisenhower to Winston Churchill to Beverly Sills—in this humorous, insightful memoir that speaks powerfully about the state of fame, celebrity culture, and honest admiration.
Wetherell skillfully reminds us of the magic and mystery that comes with slow discovery—of that first awareness of those figures who awoke something within us, that inspired us as children, teenagers, and adults—forever altering the landscape of ourselves. From visiting Herman Melville’s study where Melville wrote Moby Dick to being a Rangers fan living in NYC—Wetherell examines the meaning of the American cultural landscape—and its remnants—in a candid and personal memoir like no other before him. With this lively and exacting series of pop culture essays, Wetherell joins the ranks of David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and Chuck Klosterman.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781616080716 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Skyhorse |
| Publication date: | 09/21/2010 |
| Pages: | 208 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.96(w) x 11.30(h) x 0.77(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Pure Admiration
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Liked like? The boy loved him. Loved him with all the uncritical, nondiscriminatory zeal of an ardent six-year-old heart. Loved him like he loved his mother, father, and sister Christina. Loved him like he loved his grandparents, Aunt Addy, Aunt Lyd, and Uncle Joe. Loved him like he loved his Sunday school teacher, or Miss D'Amato, his kindergarten teacher. Loved him like he did Mr. Kelsey at the hardware store, who could scoop up a half-pound's worth of gray penny nails in one fist, weigh them on his metal cradle, and not be off by more than one or two nails. Loved him like Mr. Costa, the butcher who would always slice him off a piece of bologna when his mother took him there after the baker's. Loved him like he loved Taffy, the family cocker spaniel, which is saying quite a lot.
For Ike was almost certainly the first public face he had ever learned to recognize, one beaming down from a much-larger world than the cozy Long Island neighborhood that snugly bound him in. Subtract all the thousands of public faces he would eventually see in newspapers, movies, or on TV, and the face that was there at the start was Eisenhower's, the Big Bang of all faces, the one out of which, by some magic, all the other public faces seemed to be generated. Truman was president when he was born, true, but the only thing he remembered about Truman was his mother, who was no prude, making a bad-smell kind of expression and saying, "Such language! And from a president!"
Ike didn't swear or cuss. Ike spoke surprisingly fast, in a clipped military tone that to the boy seemed exotic, even exquisite, compared to the guttural New Yorkese all the adults he knew spoke. And that face! He was far from being the only one enchanted by it. There was God in Ike's smile, the New Testament God you prayed to for favors, but there was also something earthier — the smile of a beloved old family doctor dispensing reassuring advice. And there was even more magic than that, magic that perhaps was lost on the millions who voted for him, but was perfectly obvious to the boy. A baby's innocence lay behind Ike's smile, at least if you focused on his pinkish dimple and chin (even in black and white, they looked pink). Eisenhower, over sixty now, smiled like an eight-month-old — and what boy, so close to babyhood himself, could resist that fraternal appeal?
"Dear Ike in heaven, look down from above," he would sometimes begin his prayers at night. His parents, busy tucking in his blankets, never noticed the mistake.
This was 1954. Approbation was in the air and the boy quickly succumbed. Why shouldn't he? The human capacity for admiration grows even faster than a child's arms and legs, and very quickly needs something to fasten on to in order to strengthen. Parents will do for a time, older siblings, kindly aunts and uncles — but there comes the moment when you need someone distant, someone who is clean of all the little nicks and dents admiration suffers when its object is too close at hand, too human, too apt to scold. Admiration, in a six-year-old, is a surprisingly strong muscle, and it tends to grasp the most obvious hero the culture has on offer.
Ike filled the bill. He was the sun in an age that was all sunshine. ("He was elected largely as a symbol of what Americans admired," is how Samuel Eliot Morison puts it.) But did the boy really know much about him? He knew he had won the war, knew that he was somehow remotely involved with his parents meeting in England, his father an army captain, his mother an army nurse. He knew he had something to do with the army uniforms stored up in the attic — not in trunks yet, not mothballed, but folded fresh across the tops of the trunks. They made for marvelous fun, the times he and his sister dressed up in them. "Eisenhower jackets" they were called. The green-brown fabric, its rich cottony smell, the businesslike buttons, the pockets that still held little flecks of English grass. To him, green GI khaki was the woof and weave of the times. America was the greatest country in the world, and this wasn't just jingoism on his part, but something that was in the air, something those army uniforms exuded, and the boy, inhaling it, was merely being realistic.
When Taffy had her puppies, his parents named the plumpest male "Ike" and the plumpest female "Mamie." All that innocence! And yet in those days, innocence could protect you; it hadn't yet gone flabby or soured. He was startled, shaken even, when one day his father brought home a newspaper with a photo of a subdued, wan-looking Ike in a hospital bathrobe, the slogan JUST FINE, THANKS! embroidered over his heart — his heart that, according to the headlines, had had an "attack," which confused him greatly. Wasn't Ike a general? Wasn't he the one to do the attacking? How could your heart attack you, and did it mean that all the boy loved so much about him and the country and the times and his neighborhood and his family could come crashing down in a flash?
No — or rather, not yet. The newspapers soon showed Ike back at his desk in the Oval Office, and wearing a suit again, not a bathrobe. He ran again in 1956, and the boy was old enough to take an active role in his campaign. All that autumn, when he got home from school, he would don a straw hat, an old-fashioned boater, with a blue I LIKE IKE ribbon wound around the crown, and marched with it up and down the block. He had a campaign button, too, but this was a darker story. It was a huge button, the size of the plates his mother served crustless cream-cheese sandwiches on when she had her ladies group over — a button that was meant to be worn right over the heart. It read EISENHOWER-NIXON, and had pictures of both of them that shimmered when you tilted the button to the side. Neat — but the boy wouldn't wear it ... not with that dark, bitter visage glaring out from the right half of the button.
"Why aren't you wearing your button?" his father would ask, but the boy couldn't answer. Because if he loved Ike, then he hated Nixon, with no good reason other than that, when it came to judging faces, his childish intuition was never wrong. Was it because that evil, phony, hateful glare would soon spell doom for everything he loved about his country? He couldn't explain it, so, at his father's prodding, he put the button back on, but lower this time, well down toward his belly, never near his heart.
That eight-year-old boy knew nothing of Ike's politics, and if he had, he probably would have approved of them, every child being born a natural conservative, a strong supporter of the establishment status quo. (If he had been the adult he would eventually turn out to be, he would have voted for Stevenson, of course; it was Saul Bellow who said, "Voting for Eisenhower was like casting a vote against the English language.") There must be old people still alive who were born under the rule of history's worst tyrants, were persecuted by them, grew to despise everything they stood for, and yet somewhere in the deepest recesses of their being, when they hear that tyrant's name, can't help smiling in reflexive approbation, simply because that was the name that guided their world when their awareness was at its most impressionable and forgiving.
Ike was no tyrant. What he was (when the boy grew older and began trying to determine whether or not he was indeed worthy of being his first hero) is harder to judge. Certainly, there is much in the poor-boy-from-Abilene-who-grows-up-to-be-president story that is terrifically appealing. What seems to have happened is that while Ike did indeed grow as a man and a leader from those humble beginnings, by the time he became president, he was well past his moral and intellectual prime. ("Good man, wrong business," was House Speaker Sam Rayburn's curt appraisal.) A decent-enough fellow, but decency wasn't enough to overcome that passive Abilene racism he was born with, and decency wasn't enough to destroy Joseph McCarthy before McCarthy destroyed much of the America Ike had pledged to defend. "I won't get down in the gutter with that man," Ike famously growled to his advisors when they urged him to fight back. Under Ike's benevolent smile was a rather small-minded man, at least by this stage.
With Ike you always get the feeling he should have done more — should have gone down to Little Rock in person and taken those black students by the hand, led them past the jeering mob up those high school steps. If he was going to be so good at resembling the Great White Father, then he should have had the courage to act like one, too. Then, too, it's very disillusioning, for someone who vividly remembers being terrified by those duck-and-cover drills in school and all the talk of instant nuclear annihilation, to read that Eisenhower knew very well in 1958 that there wasn't a chance in hell the Russian missiles could have reached us, but that he went ahead and exaggerated the dangers for domestic political reasons. And as for warning us about the military-industrial complex during his famous farewell address — well, thanks, Ike! After you did so much to create it in the first place.
If you read the biographies, there is one place where Eisenhower the hero really comes to life: June 5, 1944, the day before D-Day. The invasion he has charge of has already been postponed once — low cloud cover over France and high winds in the Channel — and now the British meteorologist hands him a forecast that is "iffy" at best. A possible break in the clouds and slightly lower winds, but conditions far from perfect on the 6th. What to do? The moon and tides won't be right for another three weeks, and in the meantime, with a million men in motion on sea and in the air, the chance of the secret leaking out increases each day.
The decision is Ike's alone. Any parent in charge of taking his kids to the beach, any principal trying to decide whether to chance the forecast and have graduation outside, any camp counselor agonizing over whether to climb Mount Baldy in the rain, any fisherman cocking an appraising eye toward thunderheads, knows the complex agony of making weatherbased decisions, even on a small scale. It's hard to imagine having to make that decision ... having to anticipate what the gods would dish out in the next few hours ... on a scale that was literally the biggest in history.
Ike stares down at the weather report, tries to make sense of the squiggly lines. He looks around at his staff, all of whom suddenly seem to be busy elsewhere. He feels more alone than a boy from Abilene, Kansas, has ever felt — and then, staring into the future, like a hero with classic abilities, he reads that future aright.
"We go," he says — and it's hard in that moment not to like Ike all over again, after all these years. Memory, if stretched far enough, is generously forgiving. When I took my first baby steps of admiration, Ike was the one who held my hand.
Dave Garroway
The boy was there at the birth of television, all right. There, as in, he remembered when it wasn't on all day, and if you turned it on in the morning, all you would see were "test patterns" shaped like snowflake crystals. There, as in, he remembered when not everyone on the block owned a TV set yet, and neighbors would come over to watch Jackie Gleason on Saturday night. There, as in, he remembered the intense heat a TV screen would emit, so you couldn't sit too close, and how there were special lamps you could buy to create "TV light," without which you could easily go blind. He remembered, for that matter, when TV repair was the occupation with the brightest future, and a visit by the TV repairman, with the power to reconnect you, was a big event. "Tube blew on me" was the most frequently repeated phrase of 1953.
One morning he stayed home from school, having come down with what was still referred to as the "grippe." Bored, with nothing better to do, he turned on the Dumont, hoping to find a test pattern he hadn't seen before. Instead, there was a man, an earnest-looking man in glasses, talking very softly and calmly right into the camera. Behind him was a younger man with a warm, friendly smile, and, scampering around his legs, a chimpanzee — a chimp! J. Fred Muggs was his name, because he wore it stenciled on his argyle sweater. Jack Lescoulie turned out to be the name of the smiley-faced one, and Dave Garroway, the man wearing the glasses, was the earnest, sincere one who seemed in overall charge. Today, the program was called. The boy instantly felt the rightness of that. Today — how beautifully simple!
He called his mother to come and watch with him. (This was the purpose behind having a chimp; it would get kids to watch, and their parents would watch, too.) J. Fred scratched himself with pensive detachment and then jumped up on Jack Lescoulie's lap to give him a hug. Behind a broad desk was a plate-glass window, and people in overcoats and fedoras were staring in, holding up signs with the names of their hometowns. Dave Garroway walked over and smiled at them — and no one in the history of television ever had a softer, nicer smile. Sometimes it seemed like he was smiling just at the boy and no one else — and the boy shyly smiled back.
And the set was open; that was the other thing that fascinated him. You could see the cameramen dollying in for close-ups, the writers hammering away at their typewriters, the makeup women powdering noses and chins. The magic of TV was not hidden here, it was flaunted, and it gave the boy the feeling he was seeing behind all the magician's tricks.
Of the actual show or subsequent shows he remembered only snatches. Grainy film from Korea. Pompous old men being interviewed. The cast from a Broadway musical crowding the set to sing "I Love You a Bushel and a Peck," or "Politics and Poker." Once, a real treat: his favorite puppets, Kukla, Fran, and Ollie. A commercial that they played over and over again — a public service message, with cartoon versions of Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, Teddy Wilson, and Gene Krupa playing one of their big hits, and the voice-over explaining how four people from different races could combine to produce some beautiful, swinging harmony — was a radical-enough message for the early 1950s, and a healthy influence on the boy's sympathies.
That this show was live was a distinction even a six-year-old understood — it gave what he was watching a believability that the crude film used in, say, Lassie, never matched. And as much as he loved J. Fred Muggs and liked Jack Lescoulie, and loved the beautiful "Today Girl" (was it Betsy Palmer?), it was Dave Garroway himself he admired most — as unlikely an object of admiration as a boy that age could choose. He would have found this fascination difficult to explain, but it had a lot to do with Garroway's manner. He looked into the screen with a casual kind of earnestness that made it seem he was looking right into your eyes and heart, talking to you and you alone. There was nothing stagy or self-conscious about this; if he had an ego, it was totally hidden. In his manner, there was always "Look at you!" rather than the usual anchorman's "Look at me!" And those glasses! The boy had glasses himself by now, his precocious reading having already taken a toll on his eyes, and to see a man whose glasses seemed even thicker than his own made for a tremendous fellow-feeling right from the start — and fellow-feeling, as it turns out, is one of the key ingredients in admiration.
The TV sets of those years churned out the heat, yet Garroway's face cooled the temperature down. Watching one morning when he was once again home, sick, the entranced boy moved ever closer to the screen, leaned forward, braced himself with his hands on the rug, leaned closer, put his face right up against it, until his glasses touched Garroway's and their partnership was complete.
He always wore bow ties, Garroway did. When the boy went to church that Sunday, he startled his mother by asking to wear a bow tie, too.
The smiling affability, the intellectual flavor, that remarkably compelling earnestness camouflaged a sad-enough story. Garroway's producers, old men now, remember a badly flawed man:
Garroway was one of the best interviewers who has ever come along ... It was tragic what happened to him ... The hours were very difficult. He had to be up at three in the morning. The "Doctor" sustained him and brightened him up, but it also killed him eventually ... The "Doctor" was liquid codeine. Around two minutes to seven, out would come the little bottle, and he would take a slug. Then the sweep hand would hit seven and he would smile and sparkle and be Dave Garroway until nine o'clock, when he would go back to depressed Dave Garroway ... As the years went by, he took more and more of it, and it began to befuddle him ... He said ghosts were menacing him. He said machines had human antagonisms toward him. Sometimes he would grab a microphone in a rage and twist the wire back and forth, muttering, "I'll kill you! I'm strangling you!"
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "on admiration"
by .
Copyright © 2010 Skyhorse Publishing, Inc..
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Introduction,
PART ONE,
(1) Pure Admiration,
Dwight D. Eisenhower,
Dave Garroway,
Mary Martin,
Jim Thorpe,
(2) We Are Who We Admire,
Mickey Mantle,
Davy Crockett,
Sir Edmund Hillary,
T. H. White,
(3) Lost in Admiration,
Walt Kelly,
Jean Shepherd,
Patrick McGoohan,
Benedict Arnold,
(4) Lives of the Saints,
Henry David Thoreau,
Pete Seeger,
Rosa Parks,
(5) The Golden Age of Admiration,
Pierre Bezukhov,
Arthur Fiedler,
Robert Frost,
(6) Admiration,
Bertrand Russell,
Wayne Morse,
Bernie Geoffrion,
Willa Cather,
(7) Total Admiration,
Fredric March,
Joseph Conrad,
Tom Paxton,
Henry Beston,
(8) Man at Her Best,
Beverly Sills,
Maria Chekhova,
Winslow Homer,
Jussi Bjorling,
(9) Still Admirable After All These Years,
Herman Melville,
Parker Pillsbury,
Albert Camus,
Stan Rogers,
Epilogue,
Barack Obama,
Pete Seeger,