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People Feature
Donn Pohren, flamenco's hero
Over a bottle of vino tinto, the first non-Spaniard ever awarded the title "flamencologist" talks about one of the world's most vibrant folk arts.
By Jon B. Rhine
[10/02/99]

People Feature
The flamenco man: Hampton Fancher
In another time, the director of "The Minus Man" ran off to Spain, renamed himself "Mario Montejo" and became immersed in the snakelike dance called flamenco.
By Jon B. Rhine
[10/02/99]

Nothing Personal
Cross my pecs
Minnesota governor yearns for a simpler life ... as an undergarment. Plus! Real life starlet tarnishes wholesome cartoon image! And, envelope please, the governorship goes to ...
By Amy Reiter
[10/01/99]

People Feature
Singin' in the pain
Life is beautiful for Jakob the liar ... and other heartwarming Hollywood tales of genocide.
By Carina Chocano
[10/01/99]

Nothing Personal
Meathead would be proud
The celeb-filled ceremony for recipients of the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal recalls the old Studio 54.
By Amy Reiter
[09/30/99]

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Hughes, it was said, lived on the top floor of a hotel he owned in Las Vegas, grew his hair and fingernails to Chinese Mandarin lengths and downed massive doses of codeine. However, when a fake autobiography was published, he and his lawyers let the world know that he was very much alive.

The Autobiography of Howard Hughes By Clifford Irving terrificbooks.com Fiction 403 pages Salinger: A Biography By Paul Alexander Renaissance Media Nonfiction 345 pages

Salinger apparently lives in a tiny town in New Hampshire and only comes out of his shell when he sees a picture of a sexy young girl on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, or when someone has the bad taste to dig up his old stories out of the Saturday Evening Post -- dreadful World War II short stories with names like "The Last Day of the Last Furlough." As in Hughes' case, at times like these Salinger's lawyers surface, letting us all know, at the very least, that he's still alive and kicking.

Many years ago, my mother read "The Catcher in the Rye." She was appalled by the school life that it depicted. She asked me what I thought of the book. "I thought it was very funny," I said. And it was. The horror of Pencey Prep was lost on me and on most of my friends, because we were right in the middle of it.

The story of how one of the students at Pencey was driven to suicide by his peers went over my head because at the school I went to, rough hazing was so commonplace that we didn't even feel the need to comment on it. It's like asking a very poor person what it feels like to be poor. Since they are dealing with it every day, the question becomes meaningless. "We were so poor that we didn't even think about being poor," is the way they react to such a question.

This torturing of students was very democratic. I remember one afternoon coming down the stairs of Hamill House and in the hallway Ed Lawson, the captain of the wrestling team, was beating up on Nicolas Kulukundis. For some reason I paused and told Lawson that he should stop doing whatever he was doing to Nicolas, a very shy and very awkward Greek. Lawson paused in his work, told me that if I didn't shut up, he was going to pound my head "into that wall over there." I shut up.

Kulukundis' father, I found out later, owned most of the shipping fleet in postwar Greece and, to this day, I often catch myself hoping that Nicholas will one day remember fondly how I had saved him from mayhem and reward me with a tanker or so.

Salinger was a writer who made many of us feel not-so-alone in the drear, dry '50s. We knew we had what he called "craziness" -- a bit juvenile, a bit Zen -- and, in our bleak post-pubescence, he was a writer who talked to us: talked our language, with characters like Holden, and Franny, and Zooey, and Esmé. A spare and very funny language it was, too.

Paul Alexander, the humbug who cranked out "Salinger: A Biography," reminds me of Ed Lawson -- a bully, one who's always trying to "get" someone -- but in this case, a word bully. Lawson just can't seem to figure out that Jerome David Salinger is a person who prefers being left alone. He isn't interested in appearing on "Oprah" or "The Tonight Show" to talk about his life and his loves. Many of us admire Salinger greatly for his writing, and -- since we despair at the current, noxious confusion between the artist and the art -- we admire him equally for his reticence. It is, truly, an unwillingness to exploit the self. It is, if you will, the reverse side of Norman Mailer.

In Alexander's first chapter, "A Sighting," we don't see Salinger. Rather, we get to see Alexander, the original Ivy League groupie, unable to leave a man alone -- to the point of skulking around Salinger's house in New Hampshire, poking through the garbage can, sneaking a peek in the mailbox. And not only is Alexander a noisome spy, he also has delusions of grandeur. "What I felt," he sighs, "was that as I was watching the house someone inside it was watching me." Yeah. Hoping like hell this twit would go away.

Next page | Irving's not Gertrude Stein, but then Hughes wasn't Alice B. Toklas