Edith Piaf was in one of her many, absolutely last concerts at the Paris Olympia. She was singing “Je ne suis pas folle.” She ended the song, as always, with maniac laughter. On this particular evening, someone way back in the theater echoed that laughter. At first, it was thought to be a prankster, or at least a heckler. Then it was thought to be part of the performance. But when that insane laugh continued, bitter, chilling, on Edith Piaf’s precise note, like one tuning fork of madness responding to another, three ushers and six members of the audience escorted the laughing lady, with infinite courtesy, to the street.
Joel was the only man I ever knew whose car had a seat belt on only one side, his. There was something about him that made it unthinkable to laugh, or even to dislike him after all. In my first year of graduate school, I found myself, for instance, in Joel’s car, for what he called a rallye at his motor club. Whatever I thought he meant, it never occurred to me that Joel was going to drive in it. The race turned out to be as much for mileage as for speed. Fifteen points on the map were to be driven to in any order. The car that reached all fifteen points the fastest was to be one sort of winner. The other winner would be the car that reached them all by travelling the fewest miles. At the end, the judges would decide between these winners for the trophy. I did not understand what other standards would apply. Also, I cannot read maps; my sense of direction is so poor and unstable that maps somehow make it worse. They bring on confusions not only of east-west, north-south, but also of left and right. Joel, who had no way of knowing that, explained the race to me, told me to navigate, handed me the map, fastened his seat belt, and drove. We never saw any of the other cars again. We reached the first point in three hours, the second never. All through the afternoon and into the evening, Joel, pale, would say to me, from time to time, in a flat, strained voice, which had its gallantry, “It’s all right. I’m not competitive.”
We went skiing. We had not gone in years. We drove for hours through a blizzard, in the car of the natural athletes — jumpers on trampolines on Mondays, squash players and ice skaters on other week nights, and just to top the note of general health, players of string quartets on Thursday afternoons. The athletes were impatient with the snow that slowed the driving. They approached a cliff en route and climbed it, in an interim show of fitness. We barely followed. It was ice. Then the athletes whooped, dived and slid headfirst down the cliff. It was steep. The athletes seemed invigorated. They drove on. When they reached the ski hut, everybody put on snowshoes. After ten steps, I thought I might not make it. Skiing was worse. With great effort, I maintained a slow and trembling snowplow recalled from childhood, side to side, graceless, across the mountain, worried by passing schussers, cold. “It won’t hurt you, you know,” one of the athletes said, as though he were imparting useful information, “to point your skis downhill.”
Downhill. One of the President’s closest friends was interviewed, at length, on television. He repeatedly spoke of the President as a witty man. He stressed the wonderful sense of humor of this President. The interviewer asked him for an example. The President’s friend demurred. The interviewer suggested that the friend could surely think of one instance of it. The friend, beginning to smile, declined. The interviewer pressed for just a single example, just one remembered time. The President’s friend was beginning to suppress what was obviously great mirth, as he started on this anecdote:
The President, and this friend, and another friend were on an island. “And we had,” the friend said, “this pair of rubber legs, you know?” He said this as though everyone had a pair of rubber legs. “This pair of woman’s rubber legs. And a wig, you know.” His amusement and anticipation were such by now that he could hardly hold his laughter back. “And the President, the President suggested that we put them”—here a laugh—“in the bed. So we put the wig on the pillow, and a blanket, you know, with just the rubber legs sticking out”—from here on, the laughter began to escape control—“and he told me to hide behind the curtain, so when Bob came in”—by now, he was laughing so hard he had to pause—“I was hiding behind the curtain. And he showed Bob the bedroom, and the bed had the wig and those rubber legs, you know. The President didn’t say anything about it. And Bob, well, I thought Bob was going to…” That was it. It was not just his laughter that indicated the anecdote was over. It was clear that, whatever he had thought Bob was going to, the President’s friend’s account of the President’s sense of humor seemed to him complete. Well, I voted for him. Not twice, but once. I did vote for him. I don’t see any reason why a President should be a witty man, or a man responsible for the assumptions of his closest friends about his wit. He’s out, as Manuel said, “Mr. Nixon has go out.” He’s not at his desk. He’s in a meeting. We worked for that, too. And that sort of anecdote doesn’t come into it at all. It was just the exoticism I was not prepared for. The most natural thing in the world, a pair of rubber legs.
A tall man was beginning a Tiny Tim sort of grateful frenzy — covering his ears, and shaking his head and saying, shrilly, often, how wonderful to him everybody was, how wonderful. Once, at a Christmas party on Park Avenue, when somebody was reading, beautifully, aloud from Dickens, I began to giggle, uncontrollably. It was that classic Tiny Tim and his damn crutch. I have always thought of the other, singing Tiny Tim as serious. Elva Miller, Frances Foster Jenkins, but Tiny Tim especially — being somehow bent to play out the American freak triumphant, to sing in falsetto about tulips, when what he longs to do, knows how to do, does seriously, is sing in exact imitation of 78 r.p.m. records, complete with scratches, old forgotten songs, in exact imitation of the voices of the dead. There he was, then, Tiny Tim, on the talk shows, in no sense a comedian but a loser meant to win it for the losers. The underside, a fifties person. Or rather, contra-fifties, in his peculiar way. For years now, there have been other, sounder contra-fifties people. Against all that modesty, domestication, niceness — Joe Namath, Bobby Fischer, Mark Spitz, Jimmy Connors, Bobby Riggs, Muhammad Ali. For the ladies, well, for the ladies, Marilyn Monroe, Sylvia Plath, Diane Arbus, Janis Joplin, Anne Sexton, and, after all on another racetrack, Ruffian.
All those unendearing braggarts and, on the distaff side, the suicides. Books about Ali. Ten years earlier, the preoccupation with Monroe. But there was a day, or there came, as Sam Dash would say, a time, when an actual Evel Knievel metaphor appeared — in an event that was inconsequential, small. The proposition was deep. It virtually spun. People were invited to see somebody ride his motorcycle over a canyon gap. That was what it was said they had been invited to pay to see. An early truth of the matter was this: it could not be done. The performer and his sponsors knew what he was going to do. The people who paid their admission knew what they were coming to see. By the end, the morally spinning proposition was this: when, by some miscalculation, the motorcyclist was actually exposed to a danger which he had not foreseen, when his parachutes almost failed so that he nearly did get killed (not, it is true, in a manner that had anything to do with the alleged hazards of his ride, but rather by being slammed by his parachutes into the sides of cliffs), when, in short, the escape procedure became the menace, were the members of the audience entitled to feel cheated in any way. They had paid to see him die. He had arranged to escape unharmed. There was nothing of the old-style prestidigitator-understanding in this thing. In their separate ways, neither party ever seriously entertained any notion that the motorcycle could rocket successfully over that canyon gap. What did, then, occur; what was the event? A performer and an audience conspired that someone should be misled. The performer intended a motorized parachute jump. The audience paid to see a suicide. No fifties teamwork or nice-guy qualities in it anywhere. Nothing went according to plan. The question was who was misled, whom were they conspiring to mislead? Why, history. For a perfect moment it was like almost every other event in public life.