Howard and I were in Rome when the papers revealed that Tennessee Williams, a recent convert to Catholicism, had come there to obtain the Pope’s blessing. The story sounded a bit crazy to me but the Bird was always highly dramatic in his effects. We did not see him on that trip but, later, we heard all about the visit from Jesuit friends. Father Navone was an Italo-American professor at Gregorian University. Although Navone had seriously failed to attract me to the Scarlet Woman of Rome (as WASPs still sometimes refer to the original Christian Church) we had remained amiable acquaintances and through him I met many interesting Jesuits—in fact, the most interesting ones were soon to leave the church in the later backlash to the liberalism of Pope John XXIII and the reformations of the Second Vatican Council.
The Glorious Bird and his shifty-eyed dog arrive in Rome to discuss spiritual matters with the Pope.
Navone offered to be of service to the Bird who repeated that he would indeed appreciate an audience with the Pope (could it have been the arid Montini?). Navone played the Bird like some golden pre-evolutionary fish. The Pope was not possible considering the Bird’s tight Roman schedule. But the Black Pope would be happy to receive him. Tennessee was delighted, visualizing a black Pope singing “Ole Man Tiber” and looking like Paul Robeson. Actually the “Black Pope” is the name given the head of the Jesuit order, an order usually at delicate odds with whomever occupies the See of Peter. A time was ordained for this historic meeting. There would be a cocktail party where the Bird could flap about amongst his new co-religionists. Navone, a resourceful well-organized man who had noted the Bird’s tendency to vagueness about time and place and, indeed, people, promised to pick up Tennessee in time to take him to the party. The time came. The Bird was napping. He’d just had his daily swim. Drowsily he begged off. He was too exhausted. Tell the Black Pope some other time. Navone rushed to the telephone and rang the Black Pope’s secretary, a formidable Englishwoman. She got the Bird on the phone and in a voice more commanding than that of even Edwina told him that Father Navone would presently deliver him, ready or not, to the cocktail party and that he was not allowed to be one minute late.
So it was that the grandson of the Episcopal Reverend Dakin was delivered into the lair of the Black Pope where a dozen or two fascinated Jesuits were waiting for him. The Bird, need I say by now, really hammed it up. As Jesuits crowded about him he intoned, “Ever since I became a Catholic, I feel this astonishing presence all about me.” (He’d been led into this by, I think, his brother Dakin.) Now the one thing that professionally religious people most hate is listening to laypeople go on about their religious experiences as Bernadette was to discover back in Old World Lourdes. Somewhat taken aback, a Jesuit politely asked, “Is this ‘presence’ a warm presence?”
The Bird fixed him with a beady gaze: “There is no temperature.”
“How,” asked a helpful Jesuit, “do you write a play?”
“I start,” said the Bird, “with a sentence.” Presumably, during this dialogue, the Holy Father fled to Avignon.
The last time I saw Tennessee we were on the Kupcinet TV interview program in Chicago. A lady author was discussing her book. The Bird leaned back in his chair to the right of Kupcinet and shut his eyes. He remained like this for quite a while. Finally, the host nudged him. No response. “Tennessee, are you asleep?” “No,” said the Bird, “but sometimes I shut my eyes when I am bored.”
We parted in the Chicago street below. I noticed he had a rosy butterfly across the bridge of his nose, known to the bibulous French as a papillon. We never met again.
THIRTY-ONE
Two days ago politics intruded as it has a habit of doing in this bad time. Yes, all times are bad but some times are worse than others. This is one for our country. A Michigan congressman, John Conyers, minority—that is, Democrat—leader of the House Judiciary Committee, went to Ohio with several other members of Congress and a number of staffers to determine whether or not in the late presidential election of 2004 the overexuberant local Republican Party had stolen the election for George W. Bush. The result was a report by Conyers which a Chicago firm published with a preface by me. Yes, Virginia, the election was well and truly stolen and the Conyers team spells it all out in considerable detail. Since the Republican Congress will not allow hearings on what went wrong, Conyers had no recourse other than a book describing in detail how the theft was effected with collusion among high officials and shadowy executives of electronic voting machine companies. Since my name as writer of the preface is on the cover, radio stations with call-in facilities have been ringing me from Arizona to Ohio to Illinois to Texas to—in a few hours from now—New York City. Most of the callers proved to be already suspicious of the election’s validity but as they have been given no information by our monolithic media, the Conyers report is the first hard news from the front. Thus far, the report has not been mentioned in the print media. The New York Times maintains a sibylline silence as it tends to do when proofs of electoral wrongdoing are nailed, as it were, to the church door. The general liberal (what a meaningless word in the American context!) line has been: no one likes sour grapes. So let’s just move on quietly as Gore did in 2000. So what happened next? A blizzard of official lies about Weapons of Mass Destruction. Of collusion between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, two well-known enemies. The wrecking by Rumsfeld of Iraq and Afghanistan, two countries that had not and could not have done us the slightest harm. Simultaneously as their cities were being knocked down at enormous expense to us, the taxpayers, contracts were being given to the vice president’s company, Halliburton, to rebuild those same cities that his colleague at the Defense Department had knocked down. This is a win-win situation for the higher corruption that governs us. Now we are creating air bases in Central Asia to seize Iranian oil reserves? Or, more dangerously, to take on China en route to North Korea or vice versa? Since these so-called neoconservative contingency plans for world conquest will end more soon than late in our destruction one wonders why our media, bought and obedient as they are, cannot see that they are on the wrong side of human history, now more than ever fragile and out of control as we nuclearize space itself and attack nation after nation while silencing those few of our citizens who see what is up ahead for us. Recently one radio caller asked me if it was true that I was the last republican—with a small r. I said I’d better not be since perpetual war for perpetual peace, which is replacing the Republic, will only end in the death of us all. Meanwhile, the glaciers are melting and the seas rise.
Our old original Republic does seem to be well and truly gone. A day or two ago I witnessed the Republican majority of the House Judiciary Committee trash the Democratic minority (which, ironically, actually represents many more millions of Americans than do the “majority” congressional members who represent what Secretary of State William Seward liked to call “the mosquito republics” whose departure in 1860 he quite welcomed, unlike Lincoln, the mystical Unitarian, who chose civil war to keep them attached).
THIRTY-TWO
Those who flew in the early years of the twentieth century were unlike, in many ways, those who did not. Of course most did not live to any great age—they crashed. My youth was filled with family friends wearing neck braces; there were also many premature funerals. My own father was one of the original Army Air Corps pilots trained in 1917. He married the daughter of Senator Gore of Oklahoma and became the first instructor in aeronautics at West Point where I was born in the Cadet Hospital. Bored with peacetime army life, he helped found two small airlines: TAT which metamorphosed into TWA, and the Ludington Line which became Eastern Airlines.