20. “The painting held me, riveted.” Jonathan’s Diary, 2 July 1960. In fact, so taken was Jonathan with Wyeth’s haunting Christina’s World that later in the summer on a trip to Brookline, Massachusetts to meet with inventors of a talking toaster, he made a special side trip to Cushing, Maine, to visit the Olson farm where Christina lived with her brother Alvaro.
It was the brother who met Jonathan at the door and who eagerly took him to the very spot behind the house where Wyeth painted the portrait of the backside of the indomitable Christina, disabled by a disease that no doctor could successfully diagnose. To Jonathan’s surprise, a somewhat older Christina greeted him from that very spot, prone and looking much as she did in the painting except that she was now wearing a bikini and her skin was sunburned to the color of clown noses. Jonathan and Christina chatted for a while, Christina eventually becoming so comfortable with her new friend that she asked jokingly for one of his good legs. “I grow so tired of crawling about, as you can imagine.” Although weary of this only form of mobility left to her, Christina Olson confessed to Jonathan a secret desire for world travel. “I want to see all the foreign capitals before I die. I intend to crawl and slide myself with a slow, methodical caterpillar-like inching along the entire length of the Great Wall of China!”
Later the three had tea. Refusing to be carried, Christina took a good thirty minutes to belly- and side-slither her way back up to the house. Jonathan and Alvaro waited on the porch. The three later discussed blast furnaces and various tropical fruits each had yet to taste.
21. It was like taking hose to Hickory. Hickory, North Carolina, has had a strong hosiery industry for years. In 1960, two years before Jonathan’s death, the city inaugurated its hosiery expo, the only exposition and market devoted entirely to the hosiery business in the U.S. Simone Perry, The History of Hickory (Hickory, North Carolina: Hickory Chamber of Commerce Publications, 1999).
22. Yet Jonathan refused to allow the gentleman to retire. Uriah’s nearly total blindness was evident to all but Jonathan, who apparently could not accept the prospect of losing the services of his faithful manservant. Tarara Masdick in her privately published society memoir Feasting with the Famous, comments on one of Jonathan’s last dinner parties:
“It was a lovely evening, marred only by the bumbling of the bat-blind butler Uriah, who took my fox stole and deposited it in a place of oblivion, substituted shoe mitts for dinner napkins, and ladled terrapin soup directly from the tureen and onto my barter salad. I feigned inattention when the old man walked a serving platter of Duck Bourgeois right into the kitchen door jamb.”
23. He enjoyed his coterie of business associates cum friends. Glover, Three Legs, One Heart, 256-59. Among others in the business community with whom Jonathan maintained close ties in his later years was McDonalds Hamburger mogul Ray Kroc. Jonathan had met Kroc several years prior to his formation of the partnership with Richard and Maurice McDonald that would eventually result in majority ownership of the McDonalds fast food enterprise. Over milk shakes whipped up in the five-spindled milkshake “multimixer” which Kroc distributed early in his career, the two discussed Kroc’s dream of corporate success in defiance of a host of medical problems including diabetes, arthritis, and conditions that ultimately resulted in the removal of his gall bladder and most of his thyroid gland. Jonathan, commendatory of Kroc’s pluck and drive, held some sway with his friend, later contending that he was the one who had talked Kroc out of renaming his sandwiches Krocburgers. “I told him,” Jonathan wrote in his diary, “that nobody would buy a hamburger with that name. The entry continues:
“They would either associate it with crocks filled with Heaven knows what kind of unpalatable imaginings, or assume that the burgers were made from crocodile meat. After I left him, I recalled that in Britain the word has an even more negative denotation. Kroc didn’t always take my advice, though. I recommended early on that he come up with some kind of advertising mascot. Remembering my days with the circus and this one fellow in particular — a Scots kid who made me laugh every time I saw him — I suggested a clown named Ronald. Ronald McDonald. Ray said, ‘What does a clown have to do with hamburgers and French fries? What else you got?’”
A year after Jonathan’s death, Ray Kroc introduced the world to Ronald McDonald.
24. “You’re giving money to everyone you meet!” Addicus Andrew Blashette to Jonathan Blashette, 13 August 1960. Young Addy Andy was clearly upset with his father, but there wasn’t much that anyone, including A.A., could do to dissuade him. Incidentally, during those brief moments Jonathan’s son allowed me to interview him, I asked if he might wish to address in more detail his feelings about his father’s late-life benevolence-run-amuck. Blashette declined, stating that everything he wanted to say on the subject had already been told to Glover just moments before the author’s painful gluteal encounter with Blashette’s Tiffany desk-top fountain pen holder.
25. Jonathan’s entrepreneurial spirit, coupled with a virtually non-existent screening process, brought all manner of investor-hungry schemers to his doorstep.
Others included:
Theatre impresario Darrell Platt, who sought $75,000 to mount a new Broadway production of Streetcar Named Desire featuring Don Knotts as Stanley Kowalski and Irene Ryan as Blanche DuBois.
Environmental artist George Dellums, in negotiation with Buckminster Fuller to top the architect’s famous geodesic domes with nipples. (The word “negotiation,” Jonathan quickly learned, involved little more than pleading with Fuller’s secretary to allow him into the architect’s office.)
26. The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Philadelphians. The publication (Racine: Alternative Voices, 1960) created, as might have been expected, an ecumenical firestorm — one that singed Jonathan as well. Assuming that his financing of Umberger’s trip to the Wadi Qumran would remain unpublicized, Jonathan was surprised and dismayed to find his name prominent upon the book’s acknowledgments page. The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Philadelphians, allegedly translated from the “other” Dead Sea Scrolls, “the ones they don’t want you to know about” was discredited by a multitude of Biblical scholars. Most regarded the book as a blasphemous hoax. Both Umberger and Jonathan were blasted in both the religious and mainstream press for attempting through this proposed addendum to the Bible to alter the “Holy Word of God.” On the religious television program Life is Worth Living Bishop Fulton Sheen became so exercised over the publication that his speech lost all coherence and the producer was forced to cut away to a rerun of December Bride.
The religious community was up in arms over the book for several reasons. Umberger contended that not only was it written by the Apostle Paul, but that it had every right to be added to the Pauline canon. More audaciously, Umberger defended the validity of its content, which, if accepted, upended 2,000 years of doctrine and tradition addressing the role of women in the Christian church. Anticipating this reaction, Umberger pushes his case full-throttle in his introduction, excerpted below:
“The Apostle Paul was no dummy. He knew that his advice to the early Christian Church would not be regarded lightly. He took seriously this opportunity to guide and shepherd the growing Christian flock, even if it meant back-pedaling on some of his previous positions on important issues facing members of the Church. It was in this spirit that he wrote to the congregation at Philadelphia. Paul began by making passing references to his early pronouncements on hair braiding and the wearing of gold and pearls: ’Perhaps I was a little too unyielding in my opinions proffered to good Timothy on this matter. Women have always braided their hair and they will continue to braid their hair and who am I to make them feel guilty about it? Say to the ladies, ‘Braid if you must, but not excessively so.” As to the matter of accessories, perhaps I was a bit too severe here as well. Gold and pearls if worn with decorum and a certain modesty of presentation, should not impede one’s ability to worship.’