What a sweet story. Thank you for sharing it and for conjuring up memories of my own grandfather. He was, like your grandmother, a lifelong chainsmoker and died well into his 90s of something not tobacco related :)
Thank you Bertie for the memories. We too spent many smoke-filled days and nights with Grandma Cele. Also remember the cocktails that accompanied them.
You've probably heard this story about George Burns, but just in case:
When he was 99, an interviewer talked to him during lunch. Afterwards he lit up a big cigar. To the reporter's question, he said he smoked 2 a day, the other after dinner. When the reporter asked, "What does your doctor say?" He said "My doctor's dead!"
Shortly after my wife told me that unless I stopped drinking I would die alone, I climbed the stairs of John Leonard’s brownstone in the East 70s. He handed me a cup of strong coffee as we sat down at a table in the kitchen, perhaps the only room in the house not sagging under the weight of books. He knew something was up, and that it was serious. I’d been his friend and editor at New York magazine for eight years but had never been to his home. The magazine had just been sold. He assumed I was coming to tell him he’d been fired.
When I told him I sometimes drank a fifth of vodka before I started my real drinking on any given day, he was impressed, and I was impressed that he was impressed. John’s adventures with alcohol and cigarettes were well-known and self-documented (the latter had cost him a major chunk of lung, the cancer finishing its work last Wednesday, when he died at Mount Sinai Medical Center, just 69 years old), but he hadn’t shared a lot in the way of details, at least not with me, and we always had been pretty open with each other.
I’d stopped drinking and I needed to know how to stay stopped. How had he done it? That January morning, nearly five years ago, John said he’d been sober for 19 years. I told him I’d been sober going on 48 hours.
I’m hardly the only person who, confronting a demon – alcohol, writer’s block, block-headed editor – turned to John for wisdom and solace. New York and beyond is crawling with his apostles and acolytes; there may well be more of them than there are Paulettes, prolix wannabe Johns stringing together titles, nouns, quotes and clauses in imitation of his breathless cataloguing, trying, vainly, to emulate his expansive, small-c catholicity. Those of course were tics and tricks he’d picked up from the moderns he loved, from Melville to Gaddis and Barthelme. Like them, John was blessed with a capacious intellect that in his case urged him not only to celebrate the new weekly TV police procedural and literary voices as distinct as Toni Morrison’s, Mary Gordon’s and Thomas Pynchon’s, but to make juddering connections among all of them without breaking a sweat. With those verbal arpeggios piling on, monster waves of them, he was like Danny Gatton on the Telecaster, playing so furiously fast your only possible release was to laugh with pleasure, and awe.
Here he is, in 1996, on Gia, an early HBO movie wherein a virtually unknown Angelina Jolie played innocent-turned-wacked-out fashion model Gia Carangi:
“Gia Carangi came and went—a disposable delectation of the late seventies and the early eighties, a hood ornament on the glossy grilles of the British, French, and American editions of Vogue, the domestic and Italian Cosmopolitans, in and out of Versaces unto pills, spoons, needles, Studio 54, and Kaposi’s sarcoma—without my noticing. Which is nothing to be proud of; to leave space for what we want to pay attention to, all of us ignore whole categories of the human comedy. In my case, in order to read books and box scores, go to movies and AA meetings, watch grandchildren and VH1’s Pop-Up Video, I have abandoned any interest whatsoever in cars, real estate, stock quotations, ice hockey, crossword puzzles, haute cuisine, and fashion. So I can’t tell you if Angelina Jolie actually resembles the doomed supermodel she plays in Gia. But I can tell you that she’s more than incendiary. Like Ava Gardner or a plutonium isotope, she’s radioactive. She glows in her own dark.”
And here he is, a decade later, on Pynchon’s Against the Day:
“[I]n Vineland, just as the People's Republic of Rock and Roll failed to survive government repression in the '60s, so Zoyd Wheeler's ‘harbor of refuge’ in the California redwoods fell in the '80s to narcs, RICOs, Reaganauts, tree-killers, earth-rapers, television anchorfaces, yuppie greedheads and the death-loving Wasteland thought police, in spite of the best efforts of kickass woman warrior DL Chastain, whose martial artistry included the Vibrating Palm, the Hidden Foot, the Enraged Sparrow and the ‘truly unspeakable’ Gojira no Chimopira. And in our own brave new twenty-first century it's not only hard to find a spare Wobbly, but where did all the liberals go? If the gringos in their villas dream at all, it's of sugar-plum stock options. Never mind social justice, what happened to habeas corpus? Faith-based globocops police the words in our mouths and the behaviors in our bed while sorehead cable blabbercasters rant them on. Blood lust, wet dreams, collateral damage and extraordinary rendition; Halliburton and Abu Ghraib; an erotics of property, a theology of greed and a holy war on the poor, the old, the sick, the odd and the other—when oh when will the Tatzelwurm turn? None of this, of course, is news to Pynchon, which is why we're left with brilliant patter, fancy footwork, wishful thinking and a plaintive ukulele.”
In addition to our love of certain writers, John and I shared a love-hate relationship with the New York Times, where we’d both worked, along with the inevitable shrinking of the print sandboxes he got to play in. He complained to me when The Nation would only give him 3,500 words to review the Pynchon, which was more than a thousand pages long, but I just laughed. The critic who was reviewing it for me got 800 words and 48 hours to read the book and write his notice.
Every Tuesday around noon (until he finally got the hang of writing on a computer), John would come into my office at New York, a short subway ride from home. If it was cool, he’d be wearing his faded green pea coat, fisherman’s cap and muffler, and always there was a rucksack filled with too many books and manuscripts due to editors at the Times Book Review, to which he’d been repatriated after years in exile, or the Nation or Harper’s or the New York Review of Books.
He would hand me his copy and then tell me the latest horror stories from CBS Sunday Morning, where he’d done a luminous culture segment for years but with which he’d grown increasingly disenchanted as his bosses egged him along the path to greater mush and could he please, just please stop pushing what was so great on the other networks? Inevitably he would say, “Thank God I’ve paid off my mortgage and I don’t need their money.” He was deeply proud of the fact that, if they had to, Sue and he could get by in their paid-off Upper East Side brownstone, CBS be damned.
We talked a lot about books, of course, and argued spiritedly about TV. I was old enough to remember his columns as Cyclops, when TV reviewing was considered slumming. We waxed incorrect over Dana Delaney and Marg Helgenberger, and I endorsed his firmly held conviction that Archie Bunker was not good for the country. A fine editor himself, he was ambivalent about those of us entrusted with his reviews, knowing that, given free fingers, they’d fuck with his copy even while knowing that some of us were in the game just to protect a voice like his.
He always had a good, specific word for my own writing. Or not so good words for me: When he read something he particularly liked, he would holler at me, demanding to know why I was wasting my time as an editor. I would say, “Well, John, you know I haven’t paid off my mortgage yet.” But the truth was, I enjoyed the thrust-and-parry, never more so than during those precious exchanges with him.
At his house that morning, which quickly turned into afternoon, John gave me the blow by blow of his drinking days, of the near-death experiences that had landed him in the hospital twice and nearly cost him his second marriage. When I told him I really didn’t want to go to AA, he made me fear it less, talking about how, at first, he’d gone many times a week before slowly tapering off after surveying most of the city’s meeting places in search of the most theatrical penitents. He understood my aversion to the Higher Power business; a non-believer himself, he said he just substituted “Books” for “God” whenever He came up.
John said that even after his cancer surgery, quitting smoking was infinitely tougher than getting off the sauce. And he said that if I didn’t need AA and just wanted to talk, that was fine, too, call any time, friend, which I did. John was unambivalent about his love of writing, less so about the world, a tension he exploited to brilliant effect, cherry-bombing complacency. Leaving for home after that unexpectedly exhilarating day, I felt the same way I often did after reading an essay of his: Connected, as E. M. Forster might say.
“If I ran the world, or even public television,” he wrote of a catch-up documentary about ex-guru Richard Alpert in one of the last pieces of his I edited at New York, “I would have mentioned somewhere in these 90 minutes that while war raged and cities burned, Ram Dass led thousands of young people away from the rigors of politics into the self-aggrandizement of spiritual grooming. On the other hand, I am an only child because my younger brother turned on and dropped out permanently. I still hold a grudge against the Merry Prankster bus that conveyed Ken Kesey, Neal Cassidy, Stark Naked, Zonker, and the Slime Queen from Berkeley to Millbrook, where Leary, Alpert, and Allen Ginsberg were waiting with their pharmaceuticals. Along the way, of course, one Prankster flipped out, ran naked into the goatherds, raving in thorny despair, and got dumped in a Houston loony bin by her very own tribe of groovy pilgrims lacking the common sense or the common decency that God gave a tractor. At least Ram Dass seems to have signed his own version of the Hippocratic Oath; we could do a lot worse than requiring all citizens to pledge: First, do no harm.”
John’s oath, on the other hand, come by through a brilliant career and a sometimes brutal life, was nobler: First, do good.
What a sweet story. Thank you for sharing it and for conjuring up memories of my own grandfather. He was, like your grandmother, a lifelong chainsmoker and died well into his 90s of something not tobacco related :)
Thank you Bertie for the memories. We too spent many smoke-filled days and nights with Grandma Cele. Also remember the cocktails that accompanied them.
Love, the oldest cousin, Laurie
That's such a sweet story.
You've probably heard this story about George Burns, but just in case:
When he was 99, an interviewer talked to him during lunch. Afterwards he lit up a big cigar. To the reporter's question, he said he smoked 2 a day, the other after dinner. When the reporter asked, "What does your doctor say?" He said "My doctor's dead!"
Kindness and good judgment reside in knowing which is which—to tell or not.
I loved this. The image seems to suggest another story as well.
10 November 2008
Spirit Guide
Shortly after my wife told me that unless I stopped drinking I would die alone, I climbed the stairs of John Leonard’s brownstone in the East 70s. He handed me a cup of strong coffee as we sat down at a table in the kitchen, perhaps the only room in the house not sagging under the weight of books. He knew something was up, and that it was serious. I’d been his friend and editor at New York magazine for eight years but had never been to his home. The magazine had just been sold. He assumed I was coming to tell him he’d been fired.
When I told him I sometimes drank a fifth of vodka before I started my real drinking on any given day, he was impressed, and I was impressed that he was impressed. John’s adventures with alcohol and cigarettes were well-known and self-documented (the latter had cost him a major chunk of lung, the cancer finishing its work last Wednesday, when he died at Mount Sinai Medical Center, just 69 years old), but he hadn’t shared a lot in the way of details, at least not with me, and we always had been pretty open with each other.
I’d stopped drinking and I needed to know how to stay stopped. How had he done it? That January morning, nearly five years ago, John said he’d been sober for 19 years. I told him I’d been sober going on 48 hours.
I’m hardly the only person who, confronting a demon – alcohol, writer’s block, block-headed editor – turned to John for wisdom and solace. New York and beyond is crawling with his apostles and acolytes; there may well be more of them than there are Paulettes, prolix wannabe Johns stringing together titles, nouns, quotes and clauses in imitation of his breathless cataloguing, trying, vainly, to emulate his expansive, small-c catholicity. Those of course were tics and tricks he’d picked up from the moderns he loved, from Melville to Gaddis and Barthelme. Like them, John was blessed with a capacious intellect that in his case urged him not only to celebrate the new weekly TV police procedural and literary voices as distinct as Toni Morrison’s, Mary Gordon’s and Thomas Pynchon’s, but to make juddering connections among all of them without breaking a sweat. With those verbal arpeggios piling on, monster waves of them, he was like Danny Gatton on the Telecaster, playing so furiously fast your only possible release was to laugh with pleasure, and awe.
Here he is, in 1996, on Gia, an early HBO movie wherein a virtually unknown Angelina Jolie played innocent-turned-wacked-out fashion model Gia Carangi:
“Gia Carangi came and went—a disposable delectation of the late seventies and the early eighties, a hood ornament on the glossy grilles of the British, French, and American editions of Vogue, the domestic and Italian Cosmopolitans, in and out of Versaces unto pills, spoons, needles, Studio 54, and Kaposi’s sarcoma—without my noticing. Which is nothing to be proud of; to leave space for what we want to pay attention to, all of us ignore whole categories of the human comedy. In my case, in order to read books and box scores, go to movies and AA meetings, watch grandchildren and VH1’s Pop-Up Video, I have abandoned any interest whatsoever in cars, real estate, stock quotations, ice hockey, crossword puzzles, haute cuisine, and fashion. So I can’t tell you if Angelina Jolie actually resembles the doomed supermodel she plays in Gia. But I can tell you that she’s more than incendiary. Like Ava Gardner or a plutonium isotope, she’s radioactive. She glows in her own dark.”
And here he is, a decade later, on Pynchon’s Against the Day:
“[I]n Vineland, just as the People's Republic of Rock and Roll failed to survive government repression in the '60s, so Zoyd Wheeler's ‘harbor of refuge’ in the California redwoods fell in the '80s to narcs, RICOs, Reaganauts, tree-killers, earth-rapers, television anchorfaces, yuppie greedheads and the death-loving Wasteland thought police, in spite of the best efforts of kickass woman warrior DL Chastain, whose martial artistry included the Vibrating Palm, the Hidden Foot, the Enraged Sparrow and the ‘truly unspeakable’ Gojira no Chimopira. And in our own brave new twenty-first century it's not only hard to find a spare Wobbly, but where did all the liberals go? If the gringos in their villas dream at all, it's of sugar-plum stock options. Never mind social justice, what happened to habeas corpus? Faith-based globocops police the words in our mouths and the behaviors in our bed while sorehead cable blabbercasters rant them on. Blood lust, wet dreams, collateral damage and extraordinary rendition; Halliburton and Abu Ghraib; an erotics of property, a theology of greed and a holy war on the poor, the old, the sick, the odd and the other—when oh when will the Tatzelwurm turn? None of this, of course, is news to Pynchon, which is why we're left with brilliant patter, fancy footwork, wishful thinking and a plaintive ukulele.”
In addition to our love of certain writers, John and I shared a love-hate relationship with the New York Times, where we’d both worked, along with the inevitable shrinking of the print sandboxes he got to play in. He complained to me when The Nation would only give him 3,500 words to review the Pynchon, which was more than a thousand pages long, but I just laughed. The critic who was reviewing it for me got 800 words and 48 hours to read the book and write his notice.
Every Tuesday around noon (until he finally got the hang of writing on a computer), John would come into my office at New York, a short subway ride from home. If it was cool, he’d be wearing his faded green pea coat, fisherman’s cap and muffler, and always there was a rucksack filled with too many books and manuscripts due to editors at the Times Book Review, to which he’d been repatriated after years in exile, or the Nation or Harper’s or the New York Review of Books.
He would hand me his copy and then tell me the latest horror stories from CBS Sunday Morning, where he’d done a luminous culture segment for years but with which he’d grown increasingly disenchanted as his bosses egged him along the path to greater mush and could he please, just please stop pushing what was so great on the other networks? Inevitably he would say, “Thank God I’ve paid off my mortgage and I don’t need their money.” He was deeply proud of the fact that, if they had to, Sue and he could get by in their paid-off Upper East Side brownstone, CBS be damned.
We talked a lot about books, of course, and argued spiritedly about TV. I was old enough to remember his columns as Cyclops, when TV reviewing was considered slumming. We waxed incorrect over Dana Delaney and Marg Helgenberger, and I endorsed his firmly held conviction that Archie Bunker was not good for the country. A fine editor himself, he was ambivalent about those of us entrusted with his reviews, knowing that, given free fingers, they’d fuck with his copy even while knowing that some of us were in the game just to protect a voice like his.
He always had a good, specific word for my own writing. Or not so good words for me: When he read something he particularly liked, he would holler at me, demanding to know why I was wasting my time as an editor. I would say, “Well, John, you know I haven’t paid off my mortgage yet.” But the truth was, I enjoyed the thrust-and-parry, never more so than during those precious exchanges with him.
At his house that morning, which quickly turned into afternoon, John gave me the blow by blow of his drinking days, of the near-death experiences that had landed him in the hospital twice and nearly cost him his second marriage. When I told him I really didn’t want to go to AA, he made me fear it less, talking about how, at first, he’d gone many times a week before slowly tapering off after surveying most of the city’s meeting places in search of the most theatrical penitents. He understood my aversion to the Higher Power business; a non-believer himself, he said he just substituted “Books” for “God” whenever He came up.
John said that even after his cancer surgery, quitting smoking was infinitely tougher than getting off the sauce. And he said that if I didn’t need AA and just wanted to talk, that was fine, too, call any time, friend, which I did. John was unambivalent about his love of writing, less so about the world, a tension he exploited to brilliant effect, cherry-bombing complacency. Leaving for home after that unexpectedly exhilarating day, I felt the same way I often did after reading an essay of his: Connected, as E. M. Forster might say.
“If I ran the world, or even public television,” he wrote of a catch-up documentary about ex-guru Richard Alpert in one of the last pieces of his I edited at New York, “I would have mentioned somewhere in these 90 minutes that while war raged and cities burned, Ram Dass led thousands of young people away from the rigors of politics into the self-aggrandizement of spiritual grooming. On the other hand, I am an only child because my younger brother turned on and dropped out permanently. I still hold a grudge against the Merry Prankster bus that conveyed Ken Kesey, Neal Cassidy, Stark Naked, Zonker, and the Slime Queen from Berkeley to Millbrook, where Leary, Alpert, and Allen Ginsberg were waiting with their pharmaceuticals. Along the way, of course, one Prankster flipped out, ran naked into the goatherds, raving in thorny despair, and got dumped in a Houston loony bin by her very own tribe of groovy pilgrims lacking the common sense or the common decency that God gave a tractor. At least Ram Dass seems to have signed his own version of the Hippocratic Oath; we could do a lot worse than requiring all citizens to pledge: First, do no harm.”
John’s oath, on the other hand, come by through a brilliant career and a sometimes brutal life, was nobler: First, do good.
Love this.