Historical Meet-Ups

Jerry GarciaAquarian rocker meets Strom ThurmondNonagenarian...

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 07:58:25 -0500

Jerry Garcia
Aquarian rocker

meets

Strom Thurmond
Nonagenarian senator

Not since Elvis visited Richard Nixon at the White House had Washington D.C. rocked quite so hard as on July 18, 1994, when Vermont senator and Grateful Dead superfan Patrick Leahy introduced his 91-year-old colleague Strom Thurmond to the psychedelic jam band’s hirsute frontman, Jerry Garcia.

Two days prior, Leahy and his wife Marcelle had attended a Dead concert at Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium. As one of the D.C. establishment’s most prominent Deadheads, Leahy got to sit on stage with the band as it plowed through chestnuts like “Loose Lucy,” “Crazy Fingers,” and “One More Saturday Night.” After the show, a blissed-out Leahy approached Garcia and invited him and the band to join him for lunch on Capitol Hill that coming Monday. “Great idea!” Garcia enthused, although he balked at having to wear a tie for the occasion.

On Monday, Dead mainstays Garcia, guitarist Bob Weir, bass player Phil Lesh, and drummer Mickey Hart gathered around a large round lunch table in the Senate Dining Room. Joining them were Leahy, Senator Barbara Boxer of California, and actor Woody Harrelson, a friend of the band. The unusual assemblage quickly attracted a crowd of gawkers. “Senate staff members don’t always recognize foreign dignitaries, but they certainly recognized the Dead,” noted Joe Jamele, Leahy’s press secretary. Senator David Pryor of Arkansas dropped by to shake hands with Garcia. But it was the unexpected apparition of Thurmond, the one-time bastion of segregation, that would have tongues clucking all over the nation’s capital. “Strom must’ve thought we were a death cult or something,” Hart later remembered. “’Grateful Dead’ wasn’t on the tip of his tongue.” Neither was Garcia’s name, apparently. The ancient South Carolinian sidled up to the “Uncle John’s Band” composer and greeted him in grandiose Dixie style.

“I understand you’re the leadah of this heah organization!” Thurmond bellowed, while Leahy looked on and cackled maniacally. That’s depending on whose account you believe. Others reported the salutation as “Boy, I understand you’re a rock star!”

According to Leahy’s own recollection of the encounter, which he related to an interviewer in 2007, Thurmond then repeatedly buffeted Garcia about the shoulders with good-natured blows while regaling him with boasts about his institutional longevity.

“I’m the oldest member of the United States Senate, you hear me, boy?” Thurmond bragged. “Now when you go back to Texas—”

“California, sir,” Garcia interrupted.

“Wherever!” Thurmond thundered. “When you git home, you tell ‘em you met the oldest member of the United States Senate, you hear me, boy! Because they’ll want to know that, see? Oldest member of the U.S. Senate, see? You git me, boy?”

After what seemed like an eternity, Thurmond at last let go of Garcia’s person long enough for the stunned rock god to recover.

“Jerry! Do you know who that was?” Hart asked.

“Oh yeah, I do,” Garcia replied. After a pause, he summed up the encounter with Thurmond: “You know, I never had an experience anywhere like that, even when I used to drop acid.”

Lana Turner Sultry big-screen siren meets Joseph A....

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:19:00 -0500

Lana Turner
Sultry big-screen siren

meets

Joseph A. Wapner
Cranky small-screen jurist

The dyspeptic presiding officer of The People’s Court, Joseph Wapner, didn’t always want to be a judge. As a student at Hollywood High in the 1930’s, he dreamed of becoming an actor. Then one of his theater teachers told him he had no talent. Jettisoned from the senior play, Wapner put aside his dreams of stardom and pursued a legal career instead.

Long before he started arbitrating picayune disputes on television, however, Wapner did get a taste of Old Hollywood glamor in the form of two dates with a young classmate named Julia “Judy” Turner—better known to the world as Lana. In true Hollywood fashion, the two “met cute.” Wapner was knocking about the school library with one of his buddies one Friday afternoon when the beautiful sixteen-year-old Turner—the future star of such classics as The Bad and the Beautiful and The Postman Always Rings Twice—walked in. Immediately appraising her as “the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen,” Wapner was too timid to ask her out himself, so his wingman handled the approach.

“That’s Joe Wapner over there and he’d like to meet you,” the friend told Turner, using a line that one imagines became a pick-up staple for the curmudgeonly TV judge in decades to come.

“My name is Judy Turner,” replied the aspiring starlet. And with that, a flimsy urban legend that the pair had once been “lovers” was born.

In truth, Wapner and Turner would go on only two dates. They reconnected again a few days later, when Turner blew off a gaggle of leering schoolboys to renew her acquaintance with Wapner. He asked her out, and when class let out that afternoon, they headed across the street to the Top Hat Café on Sunset Boulevard—the same café where Turner would be discovered by a Hollywood talent scout just a few months later. They drank some Cokes and got to know each other, but when the bill came Wapner found himself strapped for cash. Turner was forced to pick up the tab. The following Saturday, she gave him another chance, agreeing to a double date at a school dance. But their love was not to be and Turner—perhaps still stung by the café check debacle—pulled the plug on their budding romance.

“She dropped me,” Wapner later told the New Yorker. They never saw each other again.

Raymond ChandlerCreator of Philip Marlowe meets Dashiell...

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 20:13:00 -0500

Raymond Chandler
Creator of Philip Marlowe

meets

Dashiell Hammett
Creator of Sam Spade

On January 11, 1936, a banquet was held in Los Angeles for writers connected with Black Mask, a pulp crime magazine specializing in hard-boiled detective fiction. It was the first-ever west coast gathering for the group, whose leading lights Hammett and Chandler were the acknowledged masters of the genre. Oddly enough, although they both lived and worked in Hollywood at the time, Chandler and Hammett had never met before that night. By all accounts, they never met again.

Joining them for the festivities were authors Raymond Jae Moffatt, Herbert Stinson, Dwight Babcock, Eric Taylor, Arthur Barnes, John K. Butler, Todhunter Ballard, Norbert Davis, and Horace McCoy. After dinner, a group photograph was taken, which the ten writers then signed and had mounted on the linen tablecloth for presentation to Captain Joseph T. Shaw, the longtime editor of Black Mask. The original is currently housed with Shaw’s personal papers at the UCLA Library.

Judging from the photograph, Chandler and Hammett don’t appear to have bonded over the turtle soup, Veal Prince Orloff, and sand dabs that in all likelihood were served. They stand on opposite sides of the grouping, sullen and unsmiling. The pipe-puffing Chandler glowers at nothing in particular, looking every inch the “volcanically tortured snob” a biographer once dubbed him. A haggard-looking Hammett appears to be trying to keep himself upright long enough for the picture to be snapped.

No one knows whether the two mean talked, or what they thought of each other. Writing to a friend years after the encounter, Chandler did speak fondly of Hammett’s distinguished mien. “Very nice-looking, tall, quiet, gray-haired,” he remarked. “Seemed quite unspoiled to me.” Unspoiled, or perhaps just pickled. Chandler also recalled that The Maltese Falcon author possessed a “fearful capacity for Scotch.”

Shaquille O’Neal Freakishly tall rim rocker meetsMarilyn Manson...

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 15:06:42 -0500

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 BennettConservative icon, U.S. drug czar meets Janis...

Sun, 06 Feb 2011 07:56:33 -0500

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...

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 11:09:48 -0500

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 EinsteinReluctant father of the atomic age meets Wavy...

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 18:27:57 -0500

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 LennonEx-Beatle and erstwhile 1960s icon meets Ronald...

Tue, 07 Dec 2010 21:26:01 -0500

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 KerenskySuccessor to the Russian Czar meets Ted...

Sat, 04 Dec 2010 16:07:00 -0500

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 ...

Tue, 09 Nov 2010 07:00:00 -0500

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 GrazianoFuture Boxing Legend meets Lou GehrigRetired...

Sat, 30 Oct 2010 18:18:28 -0400

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...

Fri, 15 Oct 2010 07:35:07 -0400

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 FaulknerLogorrheic Mississippi modernist meets Clark...

Sat, 09 Oct 2010 14:37:00 -0400

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 WoolfBipolar modernist genius meets Thomas...

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 07:50:00 -0400

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 JoyceVisionary Irish novelist meets William Butler...

Sun, 22 Aug 2010 07:43:08 -0400

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 JoyceVisionary Irish novelist/Vatican...

Sun, 15 Aug 2010 08:07:20 -0400

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 AndersenDelightful Danish children’s...

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 07:34:34 -0400

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’ConnorTrailblazing Supreme Court...

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 19:39:07 -0400

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 WellesDepression-era theatrical wunderkind meets H.G....

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 08:54:19 -0400

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 WildePlaywright, wit, and gay iconmeets Jefferson...

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 13:02:05 -0400

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.

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