But he didn’t get excited. He answered: “She was here a moment ago, as a matter of fact; but then she changed her mind and left. My wife doesn’t like cameras. They make her break out in a rash.”
“Mr. Garrett,” the woman said, “I know Mrs. Garrett quite well, and I’ve never noticed any allergy to cameras on her part. I would say she’s not only photogenic but photogenerous.”
“Then that’s what you would say.”
By this time three or four men were in front of us, sitting, standing, and kneeling, their cameras to their eyes, taking pictures of him. Instead of smiling, though, all he did was look peeved. There are times when a stuck-out jaw is the one thing that wins the ball game, but a press conference isn’t one of them. The woman smelled something peculiar about it, and she meant to get some answers. Suddenly she turned to me. “Mr. Palmer,” she began.
“Dr. Palmer,” Mr. Garrett corrected her.
“Dr. Palmer, in my paper’s bio morgue I find eight envelopes on you, all in connection with football, but none that mentions biography. May I ask why you were picked to direct this institute?”
“Mr. Garrett picked me. Ask him.”
“Mr. Garrett?”
“I picked him because he knows more about biography than anyone else,” Mr. Garrett said. “He knows so much that it makes my head swim.”
“Do you have a degree in biography?” she said to me.
“No, I haven’t.”
“Have you taken courses in biography?”
“There are no courses in biography.”
“I beg your pardon?”
She was obviously caught by surprise. Some of the other reporters suddenly began writing furiously.
“There is no course in biography, or discipline, as they call it, in any American university that I know of,” I said, “in spite of the fact that biography is the one literary field that Americans excel in. It was partly to fill this lacuna that I persuaded Mr. Garrett to endow the Hortense Garrett Institute of Biography.”
“She persuaded him, you mean.”
“I know what I mean, if you don’t mind.”
“You’ve seen a lot of her, then?”
“Naturally. It was necessary in setting up the Institute.”
“At her apartment, we would assume?”
“If you would disconnect your assumer and stop telling me what I mean, we’d get along a lot better.” That got a laugh, and I added: “I’ve never been to Mrs. Garrett’s apartment. We’ve met for lunch and once or twice for dinner.”
“How about your apartment?”
Well, how about my apartment? How much homework had this woman done before today? Hortense was practically living at my apartment. Had she been seen even once coming or going from there?
I had to take a chance. “She has never been there.”
“But I have!” Teddy chimed in.
“That’s right,” I said. “She’s my weakness now.”
“And mine, too,” Mr. Garrett said.
“I’m Dr. Palmer’s packhorse,” she explained, “because I’m as strong as a bull. I also do back handsprings.”
She did a back handspring in the space between the folding chairs and the door. There was a stampede by those with cameras to get a shot of her doing it. But as she straightened up, she shied off.
“Hey, wait a minute,” she called; “not so fast with them pop-ups. You take a picture of me, I must have my patches showing. It’s my sorority rule. Okay, on my face, if you want it — but the patches have to be in.”
“Darling,” said the woman who had been badgering me, “one earthshaking gadget has not been invented yet — one permitting the camera to take your front end, where your face is positioned, and your hind end, where your patches are, at one and the same time. Do—”
“Aw? Then earth, stand by to get shook.”
She turned to the table, moved piles of stuff to one side, then climbed on and did a hand stand, facing the cameras. But, of course, that put her shapely bottom just above her face.
“Okay,” she said calmly, “shoot!”
They shot.
She hopped down, telling them: “That’ll be fifty cents, please. Four bits from one and all.”
Nobody moved to pay her. “Well, there’s their trouble right there,” she announced with an airy wave of her hand. “The media, I’m talking about. They’re mean, they’re chincy, they’re cheap. Making cracks about a wife right in front of her husband, and on top of that, not paying the human packhorse who’s posing for her picture. I do a handstand and what do I get? Nothing!”
“Teddy.”
“Yes, Mr. Garrett?”
“Have a Kennedy half-dollar.”
“You mean, shut up?”
“I’m too polite to say it.”
“O.K.”
She was quite meek about it. She pulled his face down and kissed him. They seemed to get on very well.
When Mr. Garrett had returned to his chair and Teddy was tucked away at the end of the table, the same woman reporter resumed with me.
“Dr. Palmer,” she asked, “have you actually written a biography?”
“It so happens that I haven’t.”
“Aw!” Teddy yelped once more. “Dr. Palmer, why don’t you tell her? Why do you let her run over you?” Then to the reporter: “You’re damn right, he’s written a biography — William Shakespeare’s! He wrote his dissertation on Shakespeare for the Ph.D. he has. He gave us a free copy — some of us, anyway — in his English poetry class, and it’s wonderful to read! All about the sonnets! And the Dark Woman; he indemnifies her! It’s like a detective story, only real.”
That doesn’t sound like much of a time bomb, but it caused me more trouble than any other thing that happened that day. I had intentionally not mentioned Shakespeare, because that’s one thing you learn: Lay off him. Don’t bring up the subject unless, for some reason like teaching a poetry class, you have to. Because you’re just opening a can of worms. There’s an expert on every block who knows more about it than God, all ready to show you up, and no matter how sharp your research is or how silly the previous research, you’ll get a drumming out of town that will make the Lion and the Unicorn sound like a moment of silence.
I ignored Teddy, but Mr. Garrett called her name. When she answered, he said it this time: “Shut up.”
“Yes sir.”
“Who was the Dark Woman?” another reporter asked.
“For that,” I told him, “send three dollars and fifty cents, plus postage, to the Lord Baltimore Press and ask them to send you Shakespeare and the Sonnets, A New Look at an Old Subject, by Lloyd Palmer.
“Who’s the outstanding American biographer?” asked one of the women reporters, at last bringing the discussion back to the reason for our being there. And on that, I decided to talk.
“The list is so long,” I told her, “you’d be helpless to pick out one name. For my money, James Parton’s Life of Andrew Jackson has had a greater effect on biographical writing than anything else I know of. He got away from the literary style of Prescott, Parkman, Sparks, and the other early writers and introduced the simple, easy, intimate, colloquial way of writing that later writers followed, such as H. H. Bancroft, Sandburg, Leech, Tuchman, The New Yorker “Profile” writers, and a host of others. You have to remember, when you’re talking about American biographers, that the roster runs into the thousands. Then there are the wholesale biographers — Sparks with his Library of American Biography; Bancroft, with his Chronicles of Builders; Marquis with his Who’s Who in America, and Sammons and Martindell who followed Marquis as publishers; and very importantly, Adolph Ochs, of the New York Times, who bore the expense of the Dictionary of American Biography, that prodigious trove of biographical information in twenty volumes. We should also honor Dumas Malone, the Jefferson scholar and dean of our biographers. But let us never overlook the first American biographer, Mason Lock Weems, whose preposterous Life of George Washington, the one with the cherry tree in it, went through seventy-one editions and is kept in print by the Belknap Press of Harvard University.”