Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader® (79 page)

9 OTHER NAMES FOR A MULLET

Ape drape

Hockey hair

Business in front, party in back

Neck warmer

Camaro hair

Beaver paddle

Mud flap

Kentucky waterfall

Long Island iced tease

Southernmost point in the United States: Ka Lae, on Hawaii’s Big Island.

DON’T TELL THE KIDS!

Think writers of magical tales that enchant children are all sweetness and light? Margaret Wise Brown hunted rabbits and collected their severed feet while writing
The Runaway Bunny
, Ian Fleming wrote
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
between James Bond thrillers, and Maurice Sendak modeled the monsters in
Where the Wild Things Are
on his Brooklyn relatives whose bad teeth and hairy noses he detested. Here’s the dark side of other famous kid-lit authors
.

A
UTHOR:
Kay Thompson
CLAIM TO FAME:
In 1955 Thompson wrote
Eloise
, a tale about a pampered, mischievous little girl who lives with her British nanny, her dog Weenie, and her turtle Skipperdee in the penthouse of New York City’s elegant Plaza Hotel.
Eloise
and its three sequels (along with a lucrative line of dolls, records, toys, luggage, and clothing) made Thompson a media star.

THE DARK SIDE:
Thompson, who’d had a meager career as a singer, actress and songwriter, finally achieved stardom with
Eloise
and she had no intention of sharing the spotlight with anyone. From the beginning, she insisted that her name be on
every
Eloise book, above the title, as on a marquee. When she heard a rumor circulating that Eloise was based on her goddaughter, Liza Minnelli, Thompson snapped, “
I
am Eloise!” She was equally put off by the attention her collaborator, Hilary Knight, was receiving for his illustrations. She responded by cancelling the nearly finished fifth book in the series and blocking further printing of the Eloise sequels, putting Knight in dire financial straits. (After Thompson died in 1998, the books were re-released, and Knight started receiving royalties once again.)

AUTHOR:
Shel Silverstein

CLAIM TO FAME:
Silverstein wrote several books that became children’s classics, including
The Giving Tree
, a bittersweet fable about the relationship between a boy and a tree. Since its publication in 1964, the book has sold more than five million copies and has been translated into 30 languages.

THE DARK SIDE:
Before he started writing kids’ books, Silverstein was a full-time cartoonist for
Playboy
magazine. His work had a decidedly adult—even raunchy—air to it. So when his friend, illustrator Tomi Ungerer, suggested he write for children, Silverstein brushed him off. But Ungerer was persistent and pointed to his own career: In addition to children’s books, his output included political, antiwar, and even erotic works.

First government-owned presidential automobile: Teddy Roosevelt’s 1909 Stanley Steamer.

Ungerer introduced Silverstein to his editor, Ursula Nordstrom. She liked to publish “good books for bad children,” and thought Silverstein would be a perfect fit. So in 1963, she published his first effort:
Lafcadio, the Lion Who Shot Back—
the story of a lion who ate a hunter, learned to shoot the dead hunter’s gun, joined a circus, and then returned to Africa with a group of humans to hunt lions. The next year, Silverstein came out with
The Giving Tree
, an equally morbid, but (literally) sappier tale of a tree that loves a boy so much, it sacrifices itself down to its stump to keep him happy. The book caused quite a stir. Some saw it as a story of a beautiful relationship; others, as a worst-case example of self-destructive love. At a
Giving Tree
symposium in 1995, Mary Ann Glendon of Harvard opined, “Tree’s qualities would make her a terrible mother—a masochist who, quite predictably, has raised a sociopath.”

AUTHOR:
Laura Ingalls Wilder

THE STORY:
In 1932 Wilder published
Little House in the Big Woods
, the first in a series of books based on her pioneer childhood. The
Little House
books spawned a multimillion-dollar franchise of spinoff books, mass merchandising, and a long-running television show.

THE DARK SIDE:
Wilder is listed as the author of the
Little House
books that made her famous, but it appears that she had a lot of help from her daughter, Rose Ingalls Lane. Lane was an accomplished writer whose work appeared in
Harper’s, Saturday Evening Post
, and
Ladies’ Home Journal
, and her short stories were nominated for O. Henry Prizes. Though Lane suffered bipolar bouts that resulted in her losing confidence in her work, she discovered that she could still perform as an editor and ghostwriter during those times. She ghosted several bestselling books by celebrity “authors” who either credited her for “editorial assistance” (Charlie Chaplin) or with the line “As told to Rose Wilder Lane” (Henry Ford). Lane’s formidable skills have kept generations of literary detectives trying to figure out how much she actually contributed to her mother’s books. Laura Ingalls Wilder was a treasure trove of stories about early prairie living, but her first attempt to write them down, an autobiography titled
Pioneer Girl
, never found a publisher. So, in 1930, Lane began a collaboration that would turn her 65-year-old mother into a household name, and leave her in the shadows. Scholars have found substantial evidence that Lane read, edited, and revised her mother’s work on every one of the
Little House
books. But if she acted as her mom’s ghostwriter, it’s a secret mother and daughter took to their graves.

Oldest government building in the US: the Palace of the Governors, Santa Fe, NM (1610).

AUTHOR:
Roald Dahl

THE STORY:
With sales of more than 100 million books, Dahl ranks as one of the world’s bestselling fiction authors. Many of his works have been turned into major motion pictures, including
Matilda
,
The Witches
,
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
, and
James and the Giant Peach
, the story of a boy whose parents are eaten by a runaway rhinoceros, leaving him stuck living with his horrible aunts, Sponge and Spiker.

THE DARK SIDE:
When Roald Dahl was nine years old, his parents sent him from their home in Wales to St. Peter’s, a boarding school in Somerset, England. The school offered an excellent education, along with regular canings by the headmaster for such minor infractions as eating or talking during class. His teachers graded him harshly, including one who wrote that Dahl “persistently writes words meaning the exact opposite of what is intended.” Homesick for his family back in Wales, Dahl felt abandoned, alone, and at the complete mercy of cruel adults. Given this history, it’s no surprise that horrid grown-ups and abandoned kids appear in almost all of his children’s books. But—as it it turns out—Dahl could have given Sponge and Spiker a few lessons in how to be nasty. Sometime in the 1970s, he reportedly advised novelist Kingsley Amis to start writing children’s books. “That’s where the money is,” he told Amis.

“I don’t think I enjoyed children’s books much when I was a child,” Amis replied. “I’ve got no feeling for that kind of thing.”

“Never mind,” said Dahl. “The little bastards’d swallow it anyway.”

Octopuses have no bones.

ADIDAS VS. PUMA,
PART III

Adidas and Puma created the modern athletic-shoe industry in the late 1940s and dominated it into the 1980s. Then everything went “swoosh.” Here’s Part III of our story. (Part II is on
page 352
.)

T
HE LIGHT STUFF
The constant battles between Adidas and Puma, and the battles within both companies, distracted them from a larger threat posed by a onetime University of Oregon track-and-field coach named Bill Bowerman and his former athlete Phil Knight.

Bowerman was a lot like Adi Dassler: He liked to tinker with shoe designs. He thought ordinary athletic shoes, like the ones made by Adidas and Puma, were too heavy. He believed that if shoes were lighter, his athletes would be able to run faster. So in the early 1970s he invented a shoe he called the Waffle (so-named because he made the shoe’s revolutionary urethane sole in his wife’s waffle iron).

Phil Knight’s company, Blue Ribbon Sports, imported Tiger brand athletic shoes from Japan. But he wanted his own line of shoes, and he thought Bowerman’s Waffle design had promise. He arranged for some of his Japanese suppliers to manufacture Waffles in their factories. Knight considered naming the new brand Dimension Six, but an employee suggested naming it after the winged goddess of victory in Greek mythology, Nike. That sounded better. In time Knight would rename the entire company Nike...but only after he’d paid a graphic design student named Carolyn Davidson $35 to come up with a logo—the Nike “Swoosh.”

MEANWHILE, BACK IN GERMANY

Nike Waffles hit the market in 1974, the same year that Armin Dassler took the helm at Puma. It wasn’t long before some Waffles found their way to Herzogenaurach, along with warnings from alarmed Puma and Adidas distributors in America that the Nikes were a serious problem that needed to be dealt with immediately.

Joan R. Ginther has won Texas Lottery jackpots 4 times. Odds: 1 in 18 septillion.

Neither Horst Dassler at Adidas nor his cousin Armin at Puma saw the Waffle as much of a threat. It went against everything the companies understood about good athletic shoe design: They were too light, weighing little more than bedroom slippers; they were too flimsy; and the soles were made in a
waffle iron
. Both Horst and Armin gave Nikes a quick once-over, had a good laugh, and went back to fighting each other.

LOSING GROUND

Puma was the first company to feel the full impact of Nike’s rise. Armin waited five years before responding to the threat and then, in 1979, he replaced his U.S. distributor in an attempt to boost the company’s flagging American sales. When that failed he spent millions of dollars buying out the new distributors. That didn’t work, either, and when he tried to sell Pumas through mass-market discounters like Kmart, all it did was tarnish Puma’s image, which got even worse when Foot Locker and other athletic shoe retailers retaliated by dumping the brand.

In 1986 Armin took Puma public, hoping that listing shares on the Frankfurt stock exchange would bring in money from outside investors. But as soon as outsiders realized how much money Puma was losing, thanks to crashing sales in the U.S., the company’s stock price collapsed. In September 1987, Deutsche Bank seized control of the company to prevent it from going under. Then it fired Armin Dassler and his sons Frank and Jörg. Puma was a Dassler company no more.

DOUBLE TROUBLE

By the time Adidas finally came up with a lightweight running shoe to compete against the Waffle in the late 1970s, Nike dominated the market. When Nike introduced the Air Jordan basketball shoe in 1985, it pushed Adidas off American basketball courts as well, racking up $100 million in Air Jordan sales the first year alone.

When Reebok, a British shoe company with just $300,000 in sales in 1980, introduced a shoe designed especially for the aerobics craze, Adidas declined to offer a competing product, because aerobics was not a “sport.” By 1987 Reebok had grown into a $1.4 billion-a-year business. Two years later it was the largest athletic shoe company in the world.

When General George S. Patton’s troops reached the Rhine River in WWII, he peed in it.

AUF WIEDERSEHEN

Horst Dassler didn’t live to see Adidas’s day of reckoning; he died of cancer in 1987 at the age 51. His death sparked another family battle for control of the company, this time between his two children (Adi Jr. and Suzanne), who owned 20 percent of Adidas shares, and his four sisters, who controlled the other 80 percent.

Through 1988 Adidas was still the largest sporting goods company in the world, just slightly ahead of Reebok and Nike. But by the end of 1989 it had fallen behind both companies and even behind the Converse shoe company, and sales continued to fall. A plunge from first place to fourth in one year was more than Horst Dassler’s sisters could stomach. Mindful of what had happened to their cousins over at Puma, they decided to unload Adidas while they still had something to sell. On July 4, 1990, they sold their shares to a French industrialist for $273 million. By then Adi Jr. and his sister Suzanne had already sold most of their shares to pay their inheritance taxes. The Dassler era was over.

LIFE AFTER DASSLERS

Reebok’s reign at the top did not last. By the late 1990s, it had slipped to a distant third behind Nike and Adidas, and it never caught up again. In 2005 it was acquired by Adidas, but as of 2011 Nike is still larger than its two rivals combined. In 2007 Puma was acquired by the French conglomerate Pinault-Printemps-Redoute (PPR), which also owns Gucci, the Italian luxury-goods label.

Both Adidas and Puma are still headquartered in Herzogenaurach, though shoes are no longer made in the village. Now that the factory jobs are gone, the rivalry that divided the town for decades has largely disappeared. Today Rudi’s grandson Frank Dassler, fired from Puma in 1987, works for Adidas.

About the only time the rivalry resurfaces is when tradespeople hired to work in the Adidas or Puma headquarters show up wearing the wrong kind of shoes. That’s a tradition that dates back more than 60 years, when laborers deliberately wore the wrong shoes when working in Adi or Rudi’s homes—they knew that if Adi saw Pumas in his house or Rudi saw Adidas in his, they’d give the workers free pairs of the right kind of shoes. “Rudolf simply couldn’t stand the fact that someone was wearing an Adidas shoe in his private home,” Frank Dassler says.