Not That You Asked (9780307822215) (27 page)

Horowitz, the Heavyweight Champ

In one twelve-hour period, I watched three hours of television comprising the best and one of the worst broadcasts I ever saw.

I'd be curious to know how many people watched both the Michael Spinks–Larry Holmes heavyweight boxing match and the Vladimir Horowitz piano concert from Moscow.

If it were up to me, I'd outlaw boxing as a sport, and yet I confess it holds a certain fascination for my baser instincts. There's no question its brutality is part of the fascination it holds for people who watch it. Two men are put into a small, fenced-in area together for the purpose of trying to hurt each other. The great Sugar Ray Robinson once said that he urinated blood for a week after a fight from blows he'd taken to the kidneys. And he took fewer than most fighters. You can imagine the effect of those same blows to a man's head.

Boxing appeals to the worst in everyone who watches it. The crowd at a boxing match are distant relatives to the crowds of Romans who came to the Colosseum to watch the gladiators kill each other.

It was one o'clock Saturday night—Sunday morning, actually—before I got to bed. I was ashamed of myself for having stayed up to watch such a dismal spectacle. It was as if I'd sneaked in to see a dirty movie. The fight and its outcome made it clear that boxing wasn't much better than those phony wrestling matches. It seemed clear beyond a doubt that Larry Holmes won, but Michael Spinks was declared the winner.

In an interview after the fight and just before I turned off the television set, Larry Holmes ended it with a tasteless vulgarity that was a perfectly fitting conclusion to a terrible evening.

The following morning, Marge and I had a leisurely breakfast lasting more than an hour while we read the Sunday paper. The Sunday paper always makes me feel like part of civilization again.

Toward the end of breakfast, at nine o'clock, I turned on
Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt
. Charles had gone to Moscow with Vladimir Horowitz to broadcast the triumphant return to his homeland of one of the great pianists of all time. The broadcast was extended from its usual ninety minutes to two hours and it was simply the best television broadcast of all time. It was everything civilized, thoughtful and peaceful that the fight the previous evening was not. It was a miracle to me that I was watching it on the same little screen.

If you didn't see it, it's hard to tell you about it. Horowitz was magnificent and Charles Kuralt was very little less than that in writing and speaking the words that gave more clarity, shape and drama to the event than a mere piano recital would have had.

“Next comes one of the most powerful piano pieces Mozart ever wrote,” Kuralt said, “very hard to play. Most concert pianists frankly duck this sonata. Horowitz plays it as if Mozart wrote it for him.”

Then we watched and listened and appreciated how difficult it was.

Seeing one man play a piano for two hours doesn't sound like good television but it was better than good by a whole lot. It was smashing.

During the latter part of the concert, watching this eighty-one-year-old genius play, I found mist forming in my eyes for some mysterious reason I could not explain. I was not sad. I was exultant. It had something to do with my pride, at that very moment, in being part of the same civilization that this great and endearing man playing the piano was part of.

Almost at the same instant I felt the suggestion of tears in my eyes, the television camera left Horowitz's fingers on the keyboard and dissolved to the face of a Soviet citizen in the audience. He did not look like the enemy. His eyes were closed, his head tilted slightly backward so that his face was up … and one lone teardrop ran down his cheek.

It was the same teardrop running down mine.

Most of us find mathematics, physics and all the exact sciences too hard. We pretend our talent is more like that of the poet, the play-wright, or the painter of abstract art. That's what I pretend but I know I'm kidding myself.

After all these years, I'm ready to concede that most of the good things in life come from the progress made by the mathematicians, the physicists and the practitioners of all the other exact sciences. Books, television programs, plays, paintings and all things cultural are only possible because the sciences enable us to live with ease and comfort and considerable time off from the work of feeding ourselves.

The talent of the poet, on the other hand, is not of much help to the scientist. Einstein may have enjoyed Shakespeare but he could have worked out his theory of relativity without ever having read
Hamlet
.

It is unlikely that many of you ever heard of one of the greatest Americans of this century. He died in Los Angeles in 1988 at the age of sixty-nine and he may have been the smartest human alive. His name was Richard Feynman.

Richard Feynman was a physicist who worked, as a young man, as one of the leaders in the atom-bomb project that led to the end of World War II. He went on to do his most important work in fields of theoretical physics so impenetrable to a mind like mine that there's no way for me to mention what they were. Feynman was so smart he could have been anything he wanted to be. He was, in fact, an accomplished painter and writer, but he was a physicist first. His brilliance came from his ability to master and simplify complex mathematical formulas, and his greatness came from a personality that would not have anything to do with nonsense.

He became more widely known than he ever had been before as a member of the presidential commission studying the disastrous flight of the space shuttle
Challenger
.

Sitting at a table with other investigators in Washington, he surprised everyone, and probably saved several million dollars in the investigation, by calling for a glass of ice water. When it came, Richard Feynman took a piece of the infamous gasket called the O-ring and dunked it in the ice water. After a brief time, he took it out and pinched
it with a small clamp. The material from the O-ring did not bounce back to its original shape. In less than a minute Feynman had shown that the material was not suited for cold weather. That was Feynman's genius: making complex things simple enough for anyone to understand.

Much of the language of science, medicine, government and law is nonsense designed to exclude outsiders so they won't discover that, basically, the specialists' work is not so complex as it seems. Richard Feynman would have no part of that language. He spoke simply and directly of the most complex things.

“There were a lot of fools at the conference,” he once said after returning from a scientific symposium, “pompous fools—and pompous fools drive me up the wall. Ordinary fools are all right; you can talk to them and try to help them. But pompous fools—guys who are covering it all over and impressing people as to how wonderful they are with all this hocus-pocus—that I cannot stand.”

In spite of his impatience with people in his field he was much loved and respected by them.

“He's the most creative theoretical physicist of his time and a true genius,” said Sidney Drell, former president of the American Physical Society. “He has touched, with his unique creativity, just about every field of physics.”

Hans Bethe of Cornell University said Feynman performed magic.

“A magician does things that nobody else could ever do and that seem completely unexpected,” Dr. Bethe said, “and that's Feynman.”

Richard Feynman spent most of his life as a researcher and teacher.

“I don't believe I can really do without teaching,” he said. “The reason is, I have to have something so that when I don't have any ideas and I'm not getting anywhere I can say to myself, ‘At least I'm living; at least I'm doing something; I'm making some contribution.' ”

We should all make such a contribution as Richard Feynman made.

Bessie Reynolds was ninety. Bill Kramer was thirty-seven. Merle Miller was sixty-seven. They didn't know each other. No one but me knew all three. They had nothing in common, except me as a friend, until recently when each of them died.

Bessie must have had fewer enemies than anyone who ever lived. I say “fewer” but I can't imagine that she had any.

Bessie didn't have too good a life. Her left shoulder was noticeably smaller than her right so that she was slightly deformed. Her mother died when Bessie was two and her father left Bessie to be brought up by friends or relatives. She spent several years in the home of my mother's parents and that's how she got to be sort of an aunt of mine.

Bessie worked as a milliner in the days when women always wore hats. She had a little house of her own and she kept it the way we'd all like our houses to be kept. You could drop in on her unexpectedly and nothing was out of place. She made the bed when she got up, did the dishes as soon as she'd eaten, picked up the papers after she'd read them and then vacuumed.

Most of her last twenty-five years were spent in the sunny little back room behind the parlor she seldom used, with her sewing, her puzzles and the television set. It always seemed as if Bessie had lots of visitors, but twenty-four hours is a long day and I'm afraid Bessie was alone most of her life.

Bill Kramer was almost never alone. He filled his life with all the good things there are. When he and his wife, Angela, became parents seven months ago, they didn't have a baby, they had twins.

I spent just one month with Bill but it was an intense thirty days and I got to know him well. He and his friend Dave Wright were the pilots of a big Sikorsky helicopter in which we flew across the United States and back in May 1983.

When I read that a Sikorsky helicopter, provided to King Hussein during his visit here, had crashed, killing all four on board, I was worried. They didn't give out names, except to say Hussein was not on board, but I knew they would have given President Reagan's visitor the very best, and that was Bill Kramer.

Bill was one of those who knew all about everything. He didn't fake it; he knew. You could talk to him about ballet, Plato or how ethyl added to gasoline affects combustion in an engine. He must have been one of the Air Force Academy's prize students in 1971.

I'm not a nervous flier but you're always aware of how tenuous your position is when you're several thousand feet above the ground in a machine that weighs five tons and has no wings. The reason for the crash has not been determined but I can tell the investigators one thing. It was not Bill Kramer's fault. It must have been sabotage or mechanical failure. Bill didn't make mistakes in the air and he didn't take any chances. None. I'd often plead with him to get in a position
for a better camera angle but if he thought it was in any way unwise he just wouldn't do it. I came to realize my life was in the hands of one of the best helicopter pilots who ever lived. Now, one of the best who ever died.

You should have heard of my friend Merle Miller. He wrote books.

“I've written a classic,” he said with amused delight the last time I saw him. “My Truman book has been in print for ten years now and that's the definition of a classic!”

I first met Merle in London in 1942 when he was with
Yank
magazine and I was a reporter for
The Stars and Stripes
.

It was thirty years before I realized Merle was a homosexual. He distanced himself from the world and even from his friends, but when I was with him I always wondered how another human being could reach me with so many perceptive thoughts and yet have this hidden side I could not understand.

I don't know what my three friends would have thought of each other but I thought the world of all three.

For the past four years, I've been thinking of Cary Grant as my friend.

I was sitting at my desk one day, pushing pieces of paper around, pretending I was working, when the phone rang. No matter how good telephone connections get, you usually can tell a long-distance call. This was one.

“Mr. Rooney?” the voice inquired.

“Yes,” I said in a not-very-friendly tone. I'm initially gruff with calls from strangers because they're usually a waste of time and I'm seldom pleased to get one.

The next words the woman spoke abruptly changed my attitude toward the call.

“Cary Grant would like to speak to you. Will you speak to him?”

Will I speak to Cary Grant? Would I be too busy if Katharine Hepburn called? Could I spare a few minutes for Jimmy Stewart?

“Gosh, sure,” I said, because the woman spoke in a manner that
suggested the call was the real thing. She sounded more like a wife than a secretary, too.

“Mr. Rooney,” the familiar voice said, “this is Cary Grant.”

I'm not easily impressed with celebrities, but Cary Grant was a special person and I was mildly flabbergasted to actually be talking to him. He sounded more like himself than his best imitator.