Historical Meet-Ups

Shaquille O’Neal
Freakishly tall rim rocker

meets

Marilyn Manson
Freakishly pale shock rocker

On Saturday, January 6, 1996, a massive blizzard struck the east coast of the United States, stranding airline travelers up and down the Atlantic seaboard. Among those rerouted were Shaquille O’Neal, Penny Hardaway, and the other members of the NBA’s Orlando Magic, who were en route to a game in Philadelphia but instead found themselves marooned in a hotel in Allentown, Pennsylvania for the duration of the weekend. As fate would have it, fright-wigged industrial rock frontman Marilyn Manson and his eponymous band were stuck in the same hotel, having wrapped up a gig in an Allentown club just hours before the storm hit. Also stranded were a Polish wedding party, NFL Hall of Famer Johnny Unitas’ niece, and the traveling cast of Sesame Street Live. The entire motley assemblage soon convened in the hotel sports bar, Trophies—a scene that O’Neal’s backup Jon Koncak likened to the cantina sequence in Star Wars. “It was the Twilight Zone, man,” marveled Koncak, who somehow mistook Manson and his crew for the much more interesting band Nine Inch Nails. “A bunch of basketball players, Sesame Street, and some guy with green hair dressed like the grim reaper, chain-smoking. You needed a video camera to believe it. I’m still trying to deal with it.” Not everyone was quite so captivated. “I’m pretty sure this is Hell,” Magic assistant coach Richie Adubato declared of the sojourn, upon sighting one of the Goth-attired Manson bandmates in a hotel hallway. While his Magic teammates whiled away the hours eating cheeseburgers, playing darts, and shooting pool, the 7’2” O’Neal quickly became the life of the party, signing autographs for a steady parade of local gawkers and astonished hotel guests. At one point, egged on by the Sesame Street Live cast, Shaq began singing the show’s theme song over and over again. Only the wintry weather seemed to harsh Shaq’s mellow. “The people are nice,” he remarked of Pennsylvania’s industrial heartland. “But I’m a tropical black man.”

Of all the bonds he forged that weekend, however, none was more meaningful than the one he shared with Marilyn Manson. “He was a nice guy,” the budding NBA superstar later recalled, and surprisingly “normal” in polite conversation. While the details of their colloquy weren’t revealed, O’Neal did promise to tell all one day in the form of a book-length reminiscence entitled Trapped in Allentown. Manson has never spoken publicly about the encounter, which took place just nine months before the release of the band’s breakthrough album Antichrist Superstar. But he evidently had a premonition of future success. When it came time to part company, Manson sidled up to Shaq with a prescient exhortation. “Remember my name,” he told The Diesel. “I’m gonna be famous.”

William Bennett
Conservative icon, U.S. drug czar

meets

Janis Joplin
Hippie icon, U.S. drug casualty

It was the summer of love, 1967. Bill Bennett was a swingin’, Vietnam War-protesting graduate student in philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin—a far cry from the moralizing Reagan Administration Secretary of Education he would become. Known to his frat brothers as “Ram” (after a legendary incident in which he battered down a locked door with his head to get at an angry girlfriend), the future author of The Book of Virtues played electric guitar in a garage band called Plato and the Guardians. It was that outlaw rock ‘n’ roll rep that convinced mutual friends to set him up on a blind date with an up-and-coming blues wailer from Port Arthur, Texas named Janis Joplin. After enjoying some barbecue, the pair spent the rest of their evening together staring up at the Texas sky, talking, and drinking beer. Alas, the couple lacked a certain chemistry. Afterwards, Bennett’s brother Bob asked him how it went. “Let me put it this way,” Bennett replied. “We were both disappointed.” In subsequent interviews, Bill Bennett was even more dismissive of his brush with rock royalty. “That date lasted two hours, and I’ve spent 200 hours talking about it,” he groused. 

Rosalynn Carter
Demure First Lady

meets

John Wayne Gacy
Deranged serial killer

History remembers John Wayne Gacy as the demented “Killer Clown” who lured 33 young men and boys to their deaths, burying many of them in a crawlspace underneath his Chicago home. He was executed for his crimes in 1994.
 
Prior to his arrest, however, John Wayne Gacy was known as a beloved children’s party entertainer, respected businessman, three-time Jaycee Man of the Year, and Democratic Party precinct captain. It was in this latter capacity that he finagled a meeting with First Lady Rosalynn Carter on May 6, 1978.
 
The First Lady was in Chicago attending the Polish Constitution Day Parade, an annual event celebrating the advent of democratic government in Poland. Gacy was serving as its director for the third straight year. Just two months earlier, a 27-year-old man had complained to police that Gacy had invited him into his car to smoke pot, chloroformed him senseless, raped and tortured him repeatedly. No charges were filed due to lack of evidence. Nevertheless, Gacy, wearing an “S” lapel pin—indicating he had been vetted by the Secret Service and was cleared to interact with the First Lady—made his way to the reviewing stand for the traditional VIP “grip-and-grin” photo op.
 
Mrs. Carter was even kind enough to sign the photo for him:
 
To John Gacy
Best Wishes
Rosalynn Carter
 
Gacy later proudly displayed the photograph on the wall of his home, where it was discovered by police searching the premises for corpses. At the time of the Carter assignation, Gacy already had several bodies interred beneath his house. In a surreal coda, Gacy’s attorneys later included the First Lady on a list of character witnesses at his 1980 trial. To the immense relief of the beleaguered Carter White House, she was never called to testify.

Albert Einstein
Reluctant father of the atomic age

meets

Wavy Gravy
Unofficial president of Woodstock Nation 

Born Hugh Nanton Romney, the tie-dyed jackanapes who would rechristen himself Wavy Gravy (at the suggestion of B.B. King, of all people) spent his formative years in Princeton, New Jersey. There one of his neighbors was an eccentric professor at the Institute for Advanced Study named Albert Einstein. Five-year-old Hugh was playing in the yard one day when the 62-year-old Einstein asked the boy’s mother if he could take him for a walk around the block. It soon became a daily ritual. Together they would head out in the early mornings for a fortifying constitutional around their leafy suburban neighborhood. If there was conversation, it has vanished into the mists of memory. Einstein¹s distinctive odor, on the other hand, left more of an impression. “He had a peculiar smell,” Gravy recalled years later. “I can¹t wait for the day when I can tell someone, ‘Hey, you smell like Albert Einstein.’”

John Lennon
Ex-Beatle and erstwhile 1960s icon

meets

Ronald Reagan
Ex-actor and future 1980s icon

The outgoing former Mop Top met the outgoing California governor on December 9, 1974 during halftime of a Monday Night Football game between the Washington Redskins and the Los Angeles Rams at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Lennon was in town to promote his recently released album, Walls and Bridges, while Reagan was about to turn over the keys to the mansion to Governor-elect Jerry Brown after eight years in Sacramento. Play-by-play man Frank Gifford invited Reagan—an old friend from his movie days—to drop by the Monday Night Football booth, and was pleasantly surprised when Lennon accepted an invitation for the same night. Both men were slated for halftime interviews. “Gifford, you take the governor and I’ll take the Beatle,” acerbic commentator Howard Cosell informed Gifford shortly before the end of the second quarter. While the two guests waited to go on the air, Reagan put an arm around Lennon and attempted to explain the rules of American football. Lennon must have been a quick study, because in the ensuing on-air exchange with Cosell he showed a keen grasp of the differences between the U.S. game and English rugby. The evening’s only loser—besides the Rams, who were throttled by the Redskins 23-17—was color commentator Alex Karras, who complained to Cosell that he had been pushed out of the booth and into the men’s room to make room for Lennon and Reagan. Eerily enough, it was six years later—almost to the day—that Cosell would report Lennon’s murder to the nation live on another Monday Night Football telecast. Ronald Regan went on to become president of the United States and survive his own assassination attempt in March of 1981.

Alexander Kerensky
Successor to the Russian Czar

meets

Ted Danson
Tender of a sitcom bar

In November of 1917, Bolshevik forces led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin overthrew the provisional government of liberal socialist Alexander Kerensky. In November of 1999, former Cheers star Ted Danson received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. At some point in the intervening 82 years, their paths crossed. Danson and Kerensky first bumped into each other on the campus at Stanford University in the late 1960s. Danson was a young student just beginning to cultivate a passion for theater. Kerensky was a seventysomething visiting professor, living in exile and teaching a weekly seminar on the Russian Revolution. They would come together in the cafeteria, or on one of the benches that dotted the tree-lined campus, where Kerensky would feed the pigeons and opine in his thick Yiddish accent about space exploration and his distaste for hippies. At the time, Danson had no idea who the old man was—or why he seemed curiously unwilling to talk about his past life. Only later did he learn that the genial altercocker who chewed his ear off every day on the quad was in fact the man who had deposed the Czar.

Samuel Beckett

Playwright, novelist, and Nobel laureate

meets

André the Giant
Gargantuan professional wrestling legend

In 1953, fresh off the success of Waiting for Godot, Beckett bought a plot of land near the hamlet of Molien, in the commune of Ussy-sur-Marne, about forty miles northeast of Paris. There he built a cottage for himself with some help from a group of locals, including a Bulgarian-born farmer named Boris Rousimoff. Over the years, Beckett and Rousimoff became friends and would occasionally get together for card games. Rousimoff had a son, André, known as Dédé, who was something of a physical marvel. By the age of 12, André was over six feet tall and weighed 240 pounds. No school bus could hold him, and his family lacked the means to buy a car big enough to schlep him back and forth to school in Ussy-sur-Marne. Enter Boris’ old card-playing buddy Beckett, who owned a truck and was more than willing to pay his friend back for his help with the cottage by giving a lift to his enormous pituitary case of a son on his drives into town. Years later, when recounting his conversations with Beckett (which he did often), André the Giant revealed that they rarely talked about anything besides cricket.

Rocky Graziano
Future Boxing Legend 

meets

Lou Gehrig
Retired Baseball Legend

In January of 1940, Rocky Graziano was a 21-year-old thug (or “hoodlum” in the parlance of the times) with a lengthy rap sheet that included a conviction for statutory rape. Lou Gehrig was retired from baseball and still reeling from his diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis the previous summer. As it happened, New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia had appointed the ailing Iron Horse to a sinecure job on the Municipal Parole Commission—and Graziano (then known by his birth name of Thomas Rocco Barbella) was being incarcerated for violating his parole. Summoned to appear before Gehrig, the sneering Graziano tried to win the ex-Yankee’s favor by telling him baseball was his favorite sport. But Gehrig, who had staggered into the hearing room in agony on crutches, would have none of it. “I’ve been over your record, and it’s pretty bad,” he told the unrepentant youth. “You’ve caused a lot of grief.” He then ordered Graziano returned to Riker’s Island and prepared for reform school. The sentence sent the future middleweight champion into a sputtering rage. He spewed curses at Gehrig and had to be hauled out of the hearing room by guards.

Bram Stoker
Future vampire chronicler

meets

Winston Churchill
Future Nazi vanquisher

The soon-to-be author of Dracula first encountered the prospective savior of the British Empire in 1887, when Churchill was 13 years old. Stoker was in London working as a gofer for his close friend, the actor Henry Irving, and the business manager of Irving’s Lyceum Theater. The position put Stoker in good position to mingle with the leading lights of London high society. One night Lord Randolph Churchill, an acquaintance of Stoker’s from his days in Ireland, dropped by the theater to introduce Stoker to his teenaged son. Stoker would remember Churchill later as a “strongly built boy with red hair and very red cheeks.”  “He’s not much yet,” gushed proud Papa Churchill about his stout progeny. “But he’s a good ‘un. He’s a good ‘un!” Some years later, after travelling the globe on Irving’s dime, and having seen Dracula published to critical praise but middling sales, Stoker was back in London scraping by as a freelance journalist. In 1908, he asked approached the now 34-year-old Churchill, then Undersecretary for the Colonies and a rising star in British politics, to request an interview. “I would very much rather not,” Churchill replied. “I hate being interviewed, and I have refused altogether to allow it. But I have to break the rule for you, for you were a friend of my father. And because you are the author of Dracula.” The two men sat down for a wide-ranging Q&A that covered Churchill’s military career, his ascent through the ranks of British government, and the secret of true happiness, which Churchill defined as “life when a man’s work is also his pleasure and vice versa.”