Historical Meet-Ups

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.”

William Faulkner
Logorrheic Mississippi modernist

meets

Clark Gable
Moustachioed matinee idol

After experiencing his first blush of literary fame in the late 1930s, Faulkner spent part of the next decade working in Hollywood, writing scripts for such classic films as The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not (as well as clunkers like Submarine Patrol and God Is My Co-Pilot. One day he took a break from the backlot and went dove hunting with Gable and director Howard Hawks. They made for an odd threesome, Hawks later observed, since “I don’t think Gable ever read a book, and I don’t think Faulkner ever went to see a movie.” That premise was borne out by the subsequent conversation. As they were driving through Palm Springs on their way to the Imperial Valley, the lantern-jawed star kept silent while Faulkner and Hawks chitchatted about world literature. At long last, Gable asked Faulkner who he thought were the greatest living authors. “Thomas Mann, Willa Cather, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and myself,’’ Faulkner replied, with characteristic modesty. Gable was taken aback.  “Oh, do you write, Mr. Faulkner?’’ he asked. ‘‘Yeah,’’ said Faulkner. ‘‘What do you do, Mr. Gable?”

Virginia Woolf
Bipolar modernist genius

meets

Thomas Hardy
Eminent Edwardian fossil

Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? Not Thomas Hardy, apparently. In the summer of 1926, Woolf paid a visit to Hardy, one of her literary forebears, at his home near Dorchester. The meeting didn’t go as smoothly as she had planned. The blasé Hardy didn’t seem at all interested in discussing literary matters with her. He blew off her thoughtful queries about the nature of poetry with platitudinous non-answers and offered no insight into the tribulations of the literary life. He did sign a book for her, misspelling her last name as “Wolff.”  Woolf’s reaction to the meeting? She had a nervous breakdown a few days later.

James Joyce
Visionary Irish novelist

meets

William Butler Yeats
Visionary Irish poet

Joyce’s run-in with Proust may have been awkward, but his first encounter with another literary icon—William Butler Yeats—was completely disastrous. They met in 1902 at the instigation of their mutual friend George Russell. Yeats was 37 and just coming into his own as a poet and dramatist, while Joyce was an insolent youth of 20. The glowering Irish versifier tried hard to get his younger counterpart to like him, but it was a lost cause. Yeats even offered to read some of Joyce’s terrible poetry, which Joyce reluctantly forked over with the snippy retort: “I do so since you ask me, but I attach no more importance to your opinion than to anybody one meets in the street.” A general exchange on literature then ensued. When Yeats mentioned Honoré de Balzac, Joyce laughed at him. “Who reads Balzac today?” he cackled. Finally, the discussion turned to Yeats’ own work, which he described as entering a more experimental phase. “Ah,” Joyce replied, “That shows how rapidly you are deteriorating.” When the conversation ended, Joyce was pointedly dismissive. “We have met too late,” he told Yeats. “You are too old for me to have any effect on you.” All through this barrage of insults, Yeats bit his tongue. Later he was more candid, writing of Joyce: “Such a colossal self-conceit with such a Lilliputian literary genius I never saw combined in one person.”

James Joyce
Visionary Irish novelist/Vatican detractor

meets

Marcel Proust
Visionary French novelist/sponge cake aficionado

Sometimes a meeting between two literary legends doesn’t quite live up to our lofty expectations. Case in point was James Joyce’s 1922 encounter with his Gallic counterpart Marcel Proust. At the time, the two men were the most acclaimed novelists in the world. When both of them turned up at the same Paris dinner party, the entire room fell silent. People assumed the two geniuses would have a lot in common—and they were right. Like two alter cockers on a park bench in Brighton Beach, Joyce and Proust immediately started complaining to each other about their various ailments. “I’ve headaches every day. My eyes are terrible,” Joyce groused. “My poor stomach. What am I going to do? It’s killing me!” countered Proust. After some more awkward small talk about how much they both enjoyed eating truffles, each man admitted that he had not read the other’s work. With nothing left to chat about, the notoriously shy Proust made a beeline for the door. Joyce accompanied him home in his taxi, hoping to continue their conversation, but it was not to be. The author of Remembrance of Things Past vanished into his Paris flat, without so much as offering his guest a madeleine for the ride home.

Hans Christian Andersen
Delightful Danish children’s author

meets

Charles Dickens
Dour English novelist

Hans Christian Andersen got an up-close look at the Scroogelike side of Dickens during an ill-fated visit to the novelist’s home in 1857. They had first met a decade earlier, when an excited Dickens burst into the Danish fairy tale writer’s London book signing screaming: “I must see Andersen!” The two became fast friends. Dickens even presented Andersen with an autographed edition of his complete works as a parting gift.
 
For ten years, Andersen cherished the prospect of returning to England to stay with his dear friend Dickens. When he did come back, however, he found a very different person. Dickens was now a cold, bitter man on the brink of separation from his wife, about to set up housekeeping with his mistress, Ellen Ternan. A visit from an eccentric Dane who could barely hold a conversation in English was the last thing Dickens needed, but when Andersen invited himself over for a two-week stay Dickens couldn’t refuse. Still, the imposition put the already dyspeptic novelist in an even fouler mood. “Hans Christian Andersen may perhaps be with us,” he wrote to a friend who was also planning on dropping by,  “but you won’t mind him—especially as he knows no language but his own Danish, and is suspected of not even knowing that.”

Andersen suspected he was in for trouble the moment he arrived. Dickens himself was nowhere to be found. He had high-tailed it to London to attend to some personal business, leaving his guest in the care of his obnoxious, disrespectful children. They made fun of the Dane behind his back, refused to attend to his needs, and spoke ill of his novels to his face. Even five-year-old Edward Dickens got in on the act, at one point threatening to throw the beloved children’s author out the window. At last Andersen was reduced to flinging himself face forward on Dickens’ lawn, sobbing uncontrollably.

They may have worn him down, but they couldn’t get him to leave. Five weeks after the start of his two-week visit, Andersen was still hanging around. “We are suffering a good deal from Andersen,” wrote Dickens, who by this time had returned and quickly had his fill of his old “friend,” whom he now longed to be rid of. When the unwelcome guest finally left, the Dickens and family unloaded with both barrels. “He was a bony bore, and he stayed on an on,” daughter Kate Dickens observed. Charles himself left a nasty note in the room where Andersen had stayed. “Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks,” it read, “which seemed to the family ages.” He was never invited back again.

Sandra Day O’Connor
Trailblazing Supreme Court Justice

meets

John Riggins
Iconoclastic NFL running back

Bad things happen when you put a drunken football star and a judicial pioneer at the same table. Witness the kerfuffle that ensued at the Washington Press Club’s black-tie Salute to Congress dinner in 1985. Inexplicably, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was seated next to John Riggins, the hulking running back for the Washington Redskins. “Riggo,” or “The Diesel,” as he was popularly known, had a bit too much to drink that night and was soon sidling up to O’Connor with decidedly seamy intentions. “Come on, Sandy Baby, loosen up. You’re too tight,” he told her, and proceeded to pass out on the floor. According to newspaper reports, he lay there for several minutes while the wait staff served dessert to the mortified VIP diners.

To his credit, Riggins realized the error of his ways and sent roses to O’Connor the next morning by way of an apology. For her part, O’Connor was more amused than annoyed by the wasted pigskinner’s boorish come-on. She was soon outfitting her jazzercise classmates in t-shirts reading “Loosen up at the Supreme Court.” Several years later, after Riggins had retired from football and was trying to make a go of it as an actor on the D.C. theater circuit, O’Connor even showed up on opening night of one of his plays and gave him a dozen roses for his curtain call.

Orson Welles
Depression-era theatrical wunderkind

meets

H.G. Wells
Edwardian literary eminence grise

Their names will forever be linked—and not just because they sound the same. Orson Welles’ 1938 radio dramatization of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds sparked a nationwide panic and put the then-obscure theatrical director on the map. H.G. was reportedly less than pleased with both the adaptation and the ensuing controversy. However, he had mellowed considerably when he met Orson two years later on a visit to San Antonio, Texas. Wells was in town to address the United States Brewers Association. On his drive through town, he stopped to ask directions—of none other than Orson Welles. The two men spent the day together and later discussed the War of the Worlds broadcast in a joint interview on KTSA radio. The mismatched pair seemed to get along famously, and if Orson was offended by H.G.’s demeaning reference to him as “my little namesake,” he didn’t let on.

Oscar Wilde
Playwright, wit, and gay icon

meets

Jefferson Davis
Politician, traitor, and Confederate icon

While on his tour of the United States in 1882, there was one man Wilde wanted to meet above all others. No, not Walt Whitman (although the two did meet—and share a kiss—at Whitman’s New Jersey home that January). It was Jefferson Davis, former president of the Confederacy. Wilde finally got his chance on June 27, 1882, when he blew through Beauvoir, Mississippi on his way to Montgomery, Alabama to deliver a lecture on “Decorative Art” at the local opera house. The seemingly mismatched pair actually found they had a lot in common. Wilde remarked on the similarities between the American South and his native Ireland: both had fought to attain self-rule and both had lost. He went on to declare that “The principles for which Jefferson Davis and the South went to war cannot suffer defeat.”

As for the ensuing lecture, that proved to be something of a letdown. “An immense assemblage of the morbidly curious will greet him,” declared the Selma Times in an article previewing the event. The Montgomery Advertiser was also eager to hear what the famous wit had to offer.  “No lady has heard of Mr. Wilde that is not anxious to see and hear him; and, ‘tis said, he ‘adores the fair sex.’” But the Irishman’s observations on aesthetics, delivered in such a strange and exotic accent, were wasted on the Southern audience. “The lecture was one of the peculiar nature that should be heard to be appreciated,” the Advertiser summed up afterwards, “and a synopsis or even a brief sketch will not be attempted.