Escape Velocity by Charles Portis
REED: Was that the one you had the arm-wrestling contest with?
PORTIS: Oh no, that—how did you know about that? That was down in the Village.
REED: You want to tell about that?
PORTIS: There wasn’t much to it. It was late one night in some joint down in Greenwich Village. The guy was from The Times, I believe.
REED: As I heard it, yes.
PORTIS: We were sitting at the table, a few of us from the Tribune. Dennis Duggan, me, Warren Berry, I think. Maybe Penny Brown. And this fellow from The Times, who was a stranger to me. He wanted to arm-wrestle, and as I recall, he kept challenging me. So we went at it, and there was a pop. His arm broke. Very strange. He went into a kind of swoon, and it was Dennis, I think, who took him off to a hospital, somewhere down there near Sheridan Square.
REED: I heard he was a big husky guy.
PORTIS: No, no, nothing like that. Just average size.
REED: Well, the story’s been improved.
PORTIS: It certainly has. I didn’t know it was a story.
REED: Not twice as big as you and that kind of thing?
PORTIS: No, that would have made it a story, but no. It was just a freakish thing. A weak bone or something.
REED: All right. This is the second tape if I can get it to stand up. We were talking about life at the Arkansas Gazette. I just thought of something that Tom Wolfe said about you in print one time, having to do with Malcolm X. Do you remember that interview?
PORTIS: Yes, in a studio at some radio station in New York. I can’t imagine what I was doing there. Malcolm X and two or three reporters, including me. I was asking him about the “X” business. About why he would abandon the hated Anglo name of—“Little,” was it? “Malcolm Little?”—and yet keep the “Malcolm” part, not a very African name. He said the difference was that some slave-owners had imposed the surname on his family, but his mother had given him the name of Malcolm. Good point. A sharp fellow. He treated me with a little less contempt because I said something about Marcus Garvey and the back-to-Africa movement. How it went nowhere. He treated the other reporters with slightly more contempt, I mean, because they were just asking topical questions that he was used to dealing with. I think he later changed his name again, to something Arabic. He had a presence.
REED: Tom Wolfe, in this essay, said you addressed him throughout the interview as “Mr. X.”
PORTIS: Yes, I probably did. But what can you do? To call him “Malcolm” would have been a little familiar, wouldn’t it? And, yes, Tom came to us from the Washington Post. He was polite enough not to roll his eyes when I asked if he might be related to the other Thomas Wolfe. He said he wasn’t, but it must have been a tiresome question for him then. I wonder if it comes up at all now. Speaking of the other Wolfe, I remember that an old brig rat from Phenix City, Alabama, gave me a copy of Look Homeward, Angel at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, in 1954. An old corporal who had been promoted and busted a lot. More ribbons and hash marks than stripes. He said his girlfriend had read this entire book to him, and it wasn’t bad stuff to listen to. Do barmaids still do that? It must have taken weeks. She worked in a bar in Jacksonville. Or maybe she was the only one who ever did it. I had never heard of Thomas Wolfe. It was a revelation. Chesty Puller, by the way, the legendary Chesty, was our commanding officer. Anyway, Tom, yes, he and Lewis Lapham were our better writers. Good writers are not always good newspaper reporters, but they were. Lewis came from the San Francisco Chronicle. Or was the Express? I said, “San Francisco must be a good town for reporters,” and he said, yes, it was okay, but out there you were always dealing with the branch managers of things. New York was the place. We were in the right place. Tom was a quiet and easy going fellow, one of the crew. The white suit was the only flamboyant thing about him. He raised the tone of things in the newsroom a bit. Probably not enough. We were general assignment reporters, and we sat there in a clump—Lewis, me, Edward Silberfarb, Tom. And Terry Smith, Jim Clarity, Phil Carter, Phil Cook.
REED: You remember Breslin?
PORTIS: Jimmy Breslin, yes. He came later. Wrote a very popular column. I met him but didn’t really know him. I think I must have gone to London not long after he came.
REED: I had to cover a story opposite him one time in Hayneville, Alabama, one of those Ku Klux trials down there, and Claude Sitton, my national editor, was on me because Breslin, you know, was a colorful writer, and Sitton wanted more of that in my copy. I treasure the day when I was able to call Sitton and say, “Did you see that long quote in Breslin’s column today? Leroy Moton saying so and so?” I said, “It’s all made up.” Son of a bitch didn’t say it. Even had it wrong. I mean he had been trying to badger—
PORTIS: Not well fabricated?
REED: No, not well fabricated. So I took great joy in being able to point that out. That was the last I heard from Sitton on that subject.
PORTIS: Well, you know, Claude and I worked together on all that civil rights turmoil in the South. The early sixties. Or rather we worked against each other. He with the Times and me with the Tribune.
REED: Did you spend much time down there?
PORTIS: Quite a bit, yes. I didn’t care much for beat reporting, covering the same thing day after day—short attention span—but I went where I was sent. First to Albany, Georgia, where Dr. King was in jail for—I think it was “parading without a permit.” Then to Birmingham and that all-night riot there. Then to Mississippi and then back to Alabama, with Governor Wallace “standing in the schoolhouse door.” I may have the sequence wrong. Those things have all run together in my head.
REED: Oh, you were at Tuscaloosa for that?
PORTIS: Yes, I was there. It was a staged event, more or less. The outcome wasn’t in doubt. Those black students were going to be admitted to the University of Alabama. Wallace had been meeting with Robert Kennedy and Nicholas Katzenbach, and he wanted a big show of federal force there, a lot of marshals, when he made his defiant speech—which reminds me of Leander Perez, that segregationist boss down in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana. Earl Long said to him, “What you gonna do now, Leander? Da Feds have got da H-bomb.” Some of it was the Civil War being replayed as farce.
REED: Inky Blackmon. Wasn’t he an old Gazette man?
PORTIS: Yes, in the 1930s. He must have gone to the Herald Tribune in the early 1940s. Maybe the first Arkie there, unless you count Henry Stanley in the 1870s. The reporter who found Dr. Livingstone in Africa. Stanley grew up on a plantation down around Pine Bluff. Something Bayou. Plum Bayou? He worked for the old Herald, which merged with the Tribune in the 1920s.
REED: I forget Inky’s first name.
PORTIS: Marion, I think. M. C. Blackmon. He wrote some stories for The New Yorker, and I think that’s how he gave his name. I probably shouldn’t call him an Arkie. He set me straight on that point. “I’m from Louisiana, not Arkansas,” he said to me. “I only worked in Arkansas for a time.” But he retired to Little Rock, not Louisiana. He stood apart from everybody at the bar in Bleeck’s and drank spritzers—those white wine and soda things. Not much of a talker. He did tell me once that he was proud of the work he had done at the Gazette in putting together a historical supplement in 1936. A big statehood centennial thing. Mostly a one-man project, I gathered.
REED: One of Mr. Heiskell’s ideas.
PORTIS: I’m sure it was. And a good one. Inky, I believe, was the very last of the old veterans on the Herald Tribune rewrite bank. Much celebrated in its day.
REED: Those old rewrite men—they were under-appreciated heroes.
PORTIS: Yes, they were. And we still had a version of that system—of “leg men” and “rewrite men.” The leg men were these mystery voices from out there in the police stations and courts and boroughs. You never saw those people. They would get the stuff and call it in. The rewrite men would type it all up, very fast, into coherent accounts. All neatly tailored to fit the exact space available—two paragraphs, five, a dozen. Great short-order cooks. They were facil
REED: You said you and Tom Wolfe worked on rewrite.
PORTIS: Yes, and Lewis, too. Inky didn’t approve of our banter and laughing during the lulls—unseemly conduct on the rewrite bank. We were all pressed into that duty at one time or another, particularly in the summers, when people were on vacation. Shanghaied into it. I could do it, after a fashion, but I wasn’t comfortable working with a pile of facts gathered by someone else. They weren’t quite real to me. And every reporter, no matter how senior, had to write obituaries now and then. A good policy. They were regarded as news stories and were to be written, not just dashed off. Of course, we didn’t have to report every death in the city either. I’m forgetting Sanche here. He was working rewrite one night and won a Pulitzer Prize. Sanche De Gramont. It was in that category of reporting under deadline pressure. Some Metropolitan Opera star had collapsed and died during a performance. I think it was Leonard Warren. The Met was nearby and Sanche raced over there on foot and got the stuff. Then he ran back and knocked out a full account of it in just a few minutes, right on deadline.
REED: De Gramont?
PORTIS: Sanche De Gramont, yes. A French count. Ancient family. Not that he traded on that. In fact, Sanche later became an American citizen and changed his name to Ted Morgan.
REED: That’s Ted Morgan?
PORTIS: Yes. He wrote a good book on Africa, about the Niger River, and a biography of Somerset Maugham. Among others.
REED: It seems to me that Homer Bigart was on the rewrite desk at the Times after the Trib folded. Did you know Bigart?
PORTIS: I knew who he was, certainly, his reputation, and I think I did meet him once somewhere. But I didn’t know him.
REED: He might have been off covering some war.
PORTIS: He could have been. Like Marguerite Higgins. She wasn’t working for the Tribune then, but she came through the newsroom now and then. Our celebrity people were mostly in sports: Red Smith, Terry’s father, and Stanley Woodward—“Coach,” we called him. But then later, Jimmy Breslin and Tom Wolfe. When Tom began doing those pieces for the Sunday magazine.
REED: Do you know if that story is true about Bigart or Marguerite Higgins? I guess it was well known that they despised each other, and when she got pregnant and Homer found out about it, he stuttered, “Oh, oh, oh, oh, really? Who, who, who, who’s the mother?”
PORTIS: Tough old gal, yes.
REED: The University of Arkansas Press reprinted a bunch of his foreign correspondence, war coverage, five or six years ago. Pretty good reading, even now.
PORTIS: Holds up, does it?
REED: Yes. You were at the Trib how long?
PORTIS: Let’s see. Four years–1960 through 1964. Three years in New York and one in London.
REED: How did you like London?
PORTIS: I liked it, but it was hard staying on top of the job. It was a juggling act. I was bureau chief, meaning administrative duties, and I was also the only reporter. So I wasn’t chief of much. One reporter, down from, I don’t know, a dozen or more, during World War II. In New York they had told me not to bother duplicating the wire service stuff. I was to do longer, leisurely things. But, of course, they wanted both, the breaking news and the longer pieces.
REED: That’s a familiar story.
PORTIS: Yes, and then running the office, too. We had other people there—John Crosby, who wrote a culture column, and Seymour Freidin, our Cold War man, who was usually off in the Balkans somewhere, but I was the only day-by-day reporter. Joseph Alsop would come through town, and I would have to send someone to his hotel to pick up his copy. He expected a lot of service and deference.
REED: Another familiar story.
PORTIS: Yes, and we had Telex operators and a secretary and an advertising office. Stringers calling in from Scotland, book reviewers. There were cranks and complaints to deal with. Here’s one. There were a lot of freeloaders in London who claimed to work for the Herald Tribune. The paper was known there from the international edition published in Paris. These scammers would wangle free airline tickets and free meals at expensive restaurants, saying they were travel writers, critics, whatever. I finally nabbed one. The manager of a theater up around Piccadilly called to ask if so-and-so, who wanted some free tickets to the opening of a play, was a reviewer for the paper. I said, “No, but tell him to come pick up the tickets at a certain time.” I would be there to deal with him. He showed, and we had some words there in the theater lobby. He insisted that he had done some reviewing for the Tribune. I took him back to the office and called New York. Someone in the arts section said, well, yes, he had written a single review for them, some years back, but wasn’t authorized now to say he represented the paper. My one pitiful bust. I had to let him go on a technicality, with a warning not to try this again. All pretty silly, but we were getting a lot complaints from angry PR people and businessmen. They were flying the scammers, gratis, to Majorca, feeding them, entertaining them, but never saw anything in the paper about it. No reviews, no mentions, nothing. What was going on? The point being that I kept getting dragged away from reporting into these management comedies.
REED: Where were you?
PORTIS: Not on Fleet Street. Our offices were in the Adelphi Building, just off the Strand, near the Savoy Hotel. It was a big fixed expense, that bureau, and probably should have been shut down at that stage of things. Hard to do, I suppose, for prestige reasons, but it really was a white elephant by that time. The Tribune should have just kept a couple of correspondents in London, working unencumbered, out of their apartments. Or in some little cubicle on Fleet Street with a desk and a telephone. Sending the stuff back by commercial cable. We could have called it a bureau. This was the time, you remember, of “Swinging London.” Not that all that many swingers were doing all that much actual swinging. Or no more than usual. Some journalist professes to see a pattern, and he gives it a name that catches on. Others take it up and inflate it. Then your editor wants a “Swinging London” story, so you go out and find some swingers. Tom Lambert told me what I was in for. A good man. I replaced Tom there, and he stayed on for a couple of weeks to show me the ropes and introduce me around. David Bruce was the U.S. Ambassador. Archie Roosevelt was the CIA station chief, though, of course, he wasn’t called that. It was a busy station then. A grandson of Theodore. I bought Camel cigarettes through a Marine gunnery sergeant at the embassy. The prime minister was Sir Alec Douglas-Home. He gave us—a handful of American correspondents—one or two off-the-record interviews and spoke of Lyndon Johnson as, “your, uh, rather racy president.” Referring, I suppose, to Johnson’s barnyard humor. I had Karl Marx’s old job there, you know. He was the London correspondent for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune in the 1850s. Dick Wald was my New York boss, and I told him once that the Tribune might have saved us all a lot of grief if it had only paid Marx a little better. Dick didn’t take the hint. Well, a small joke. I was paid well enough.
REED: Did you have trouble, too, with the telephones in London?
PORTIS: Oh, yes, all the time. Those strange clicks and wrong numbers. Broken connections. Tom said some of the clicks were taps, the crude wiretaps of the day. He said the British intelligence services had taps on all the phones in foreign news bureaus. But sometimes it was worse when the phones did work. Randolph Churchill called one day, drunk and rambling on. Something about his son’s forthcoming wedding. It was around four in the afternoon, our early deadline, a bad time. I was knocking out a last-minute piece, so I was a little impatient with him, trying to keep him to the point, whatever it was. Impossible—he wouldn’t listen. Our chief Telex operator was a little, round old fellow, a cockney worrywart named Frankie Williams, and he was hovering and checking his watch and chirping away at me. “Oh, Charlie,
REED: And how long were you in London?
PORTIS: A year. As I say, the Tribune people had always treated me very well, but I wanted to try my hand at fiction, so I gave notice and went home. On a ship this time, the Mauretania, a Cunard liner. I went second class, which was called “cabin class.” Meant to sound less offensive. But I did have a cabin to myself, and there were so few passengers, as it turned out, that we were all lumped together with the first-class group for dining and such things. Everyone was solicitous—the stewards, the officers. Was I quite comfortable? Would I like another cabin? A tour of the ship? A complimentary drink or two? I was assigned to the purser’s table for meals. One afternoon I was out on deck alone, enjoying the bleak North Atlantic. This was November of 1964. It was a cold crossing and a fairly rough one. The purser joined me there at the rail for a chat. Then he began hemming and hawing, trying to ask me something that was embarrassing to him. Finally I got the drift of it. Put bluntly, his questions would have been: Just who are you? Should we know you? If you are so important, why are you traveling cabin class? The Cunard office, he said, had marked me down on the passenger list as one of the notables, to be shown special attention. I laughed and said, well, I couldn’t explain it. Some mix up there. I was no VIP and no mystery figure, only a newspaper reporter, and an unemployed one at that. I said they had obviously mixed me up with some very distinguished passenger, who was now being snubbed by everybody and shut out of all the shipboard fun. But it was okay with me if they would like to continue these courtesies. Later that day it came to me, what must have happened. This had to be the work of Frankie Williams. He must have called the Cunard people about my passage, telling them Lord knows what. Or more likely he wrote them in some very formal way on a Herald Tribune letterhead. Frankie was still taking care of me and the dignity of the bureau. This was one of the Mauretania’s last runs—if not the last—on that regular service from Southampton to New York. Too bad. The apple green Mauretania. Big jet planes had taken away the business.