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By David Foster Wallace — The Atlantic, 2005

About this story: Readers of the April 2005 Atlantic were treated to a cover story unlike anything the magazine had published before—David Foster Wallace’s profile of John Ziegler, who was then a talk radio host in Los Angeles. In print, Wallace’s signature multilayered footnotes appeared in colored annotations adjacent to the primary text. Web design has advanced quite a bit in the decade since “Host” was published, so we’ve taken the opportunity to recreate this story online with restyled annotations; to read them, merely click or tap on the highlighted text. For example, we asked John Ziegler, the subject of the profile, for some remarks on the story; you can read those by clicking on these words. As that example demonstrates, several annotations include their own annotations,According to Martha Spaulding, who copyedited the original story,Read Martha Spaulding’s remarks about what was involved in editing this piece. the colors of the annotations don’t have any particular meaning, but the colors did help clarify in print the link between a highlighted passage of text and the corresponding annotation. which work the same way.

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Mr. John Ziegler, thirty-seven, late of Louisville’s WHAS, is now on the air, “Live and Local,” from 10:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. every weeknight on southern California’s KFI, a 50,000-watt megastation whose hourly ID and Sweeper, designed by the station’s Imaging department and featuring a gravelly basso whisper against licks from Ratt’s 1984 metal classic “Round and Round,” is “KFI AM-640, Los Angeles—More Stimulating Talk Radio.” This is either the eighth or ninth host job that Mr. Ziegler’s had in his talk-radio career, and far and away the biggest. He moved out here to LA over Christmas—alone, towing a U-Haul—and found an apartment not far from KFI’s studios, which are in an old part of the Koreatown district, near Wilshire Center.

The John Ziegler Show is the first local, nonsyndicated late-night program that KFI has aired in a long time. It’s something of a gamble for everyone involved. Ten o’clock to one qualifies as late at night in southern California, where hardly anything reputable’s open after nine.

It is currently right near the end of the program’s second segment on the evening of May 11, 2004, shortly after Nicholas Berg’s taped beheading by an al-Qaeda splinter in Iraq. Dressed, as is his custom, for golf, and wearing a white-billed cap w/ corporate logo, Mr. Ziegler is seated by himself in the on-air studio, surrounded by monitors and sheaves of Internet downloads. He is trim, clean-shaven, and handsome in the somewhat bland way that top golfers and local TV newsmen tend to be. His eyes, which off-air are usually flat and unhappy, are alight now with passionate conviction. Only some of the studio’s monitors concern Mr. Z.’s own program; the ones up near the ceiling take muted, closed-caption feeds from Fox News, MSNBC, and what might be C-SPAN. To his big desk’s upper left is a wall-mounted digital clock that counts down seconds. His computer monitors’ displays also show the exact time.

Across the soundproof glass of the opposite wall, another monitor in the Airmix room is running an episode of The Simpsons, also muted, which both the board op and the call screener are watching with half an eye.

Pendent in front of John Ziegler’s face, attached to the same type of hinged, flexible stand as certain student desk lamps, is a Shure-brand broadcast microphone that is sheathed in a gray foam filtration sock to soften popped p’s and hissed sibilants. It is into this microphone that the host speaks:

“And I’ll tell you why—it’s because we’re better than they are.”

A Georgetown B.A. in government and philosophy, scratch golfer, former TV sportscaster, possible world-class authority on the O.J. Simpson trial, and sometime contributor to MSNBC’s Scarborough Country, Mr. Ziegler is referring here to America versus what he terms “the Arab world.” It’s near the end of his “churn,” which is the industry term for a host’s opening monologue, whose purpose is both to introduce a show’s nightly topics and to get listeners emotionally stimulated enough that they’re drawn into the program and don’t switch away. More than any other mass medium, radio enjoys a captive audience—if only because so many of the listeners are driving—but in a major market there are dozens of AM stations to listen to, plus of course FM and satellite radio, and even a very seductive and successful station rarely gets more than a five or six percent audience share.

“We’re not perfect, we suck a lot of the time, but we are better as a people, as a culture, and as a society than they are, and we need to recognize that, so that we can possibly even begin to deal with the evil that we are facing.”

When Mr. Z.’s impassioned, his voice rises and his arms wave around (which obviously only those in the Airmix room can see). He also fidgets, bobs slightly up and down in his executive desk chair, and weaves. Although he must stay seated and can’t pace around the room, the host does not have to keep his mouth any set distance from the microphone, since the board op, ‘Mondo Hernandez, can adjust his levels on the mixing board’s channel 7 so that Mr. Z.’s volume always stays in range and never peaks or fades. ‘Mondo, whose price for letting outside parties hang around Airmix is one large bag of cool-ranch Doritos per evening, is an immense twenty-one-year-old man with a ponytail, stony Mesoamerican features, and the placid, grandmotherly eyes common to giant mammals everywhere. Keeping the studio signal from peaking is one of ‘Mondo’s prime directives, along with making sure that each of the program’s scheduled commercial spots is loaded into Prophet and run at just the right time, whereupon he must confirm that the ad has run as scheduled in the special Airmix log he signs each page of, so that the station can bill advertisers for their spots. ‘Mondo, who started out two years ago as an unpaid intern and now earns ten dollars an hour, works 7:00—1:00 on weeknights and also board-ops KFI’s special cooking show on Sundays. As long as he’s kept under forty hours a week, which he somehow always just barely is, the station is not obliged to provide ‘Mondo with employee benefits.

The Nick Berg beheading and its Internet video compose what is known around KFI as a “Monster,” meaning a story that has both high news value and tremendous emotional voltage. As is SOP in political talk radio, the emotions most readily accessed are anger, outrage, indignation, fear, despair, disgust, contempt, and a certain kind of apocalyptic glee, all of which the Nick Berg thing’s got in spades. Mr. Ziegler, whose program is in only its fourth month at KFI, has been fortunate in that 2004 has already been chock-full of Monsters—Saddam’s detention, the Abu Ghraib scandal, the Scott Peterson murder trial, the Greg Haidl gang-rape trial, and preliminary hearings in the rape trial of Kobe Bryant. But tonight is the most angry, indignant, disgusted, and impassioned that Mr. Z.’s gotten on-air so far, and the consensus in Airmix is that it’s resulting in some absolutely first-rate talk radio.

John Ziegler, who is a talk-radio host of unflagging industry, broad general knowledge, mordant wit, and extreme conviction, makes a particular specialty of media criticism. One object of his disgust and contempt in the churn so far has been the U.S. networks’ spineless, patronizing decision not to air the Berg videotape and thus to deny Americans “a true and accurate view of the barbarity, the utter depravity, of these people.” Even more outrageous, to Mr. Z., is the mainstream media’s lack of outrage about Berg’s taped murder versus all that same media’s hand-wringing and invective over the recent photos of alleged prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, which he views as a clear indication of the deluded, blame-America-first mentality of the U.S. press. It is an associated contrast between Americans’ mortified response to the Abu Ghraib photos and reports of the Arab world’s phlegmatic reaction to the Berg video that leads to his churn’s climax, which is that we are plainly, unambiguously better than the Arab world—whereupon John Ziegler invites listeners to respond if they are so moved, repeats the special mnemonic KFI call-in number, and breaks for the :30 news and ads, on time to the second, as ‘Mondo takes ISDN feed from Airwatch and the program’s associate producer and call screener, Vince Nicholas—twenty-six and hiply bald—pushes back from his console and raises both arms in congratulation, through the glass.

It goes without saying that there are all different kinds of stimulation. Depending on one’s politics, sensitivities, and tastes in argumentation, it is not hard to think of objections to John Ziegler’s climactic claim, or at least of some urgent requests for clarification. Like: Exactly what and whom does “the Arab world” refer to? And why are a few editorials and man-on-the-street interviews sufficient to represent the attitude and character of a whole diverse region? And why is al-Jazeera’s showing of the Berg video so awful if Mr. Z. has just castigated the U.S. networks for not showing it? Plus, of course, what is “better” supposed to mean here? More moral? More diffident about our immorality? Is it not, in our own history, pretty easy to name some Berg-level atrocities committed by U.S. nationals, or agencies, or even governments, and approved by much of our populace? Or perhaps this: Leaving aside whether John Ziegler’s assertions are true or coherent, is it even remotely helpful or productive to make huge, sweeping claims about some other region’s/culture’s inferiority to us? What possible effect can such remarks have except to incite hatred? Aren’t they sort of irresponsible?

It is true that no one on either side of the studio’s thick window expresses or even alludes to any of these objections. But this is not because Mr. Z.’s support staff is stupid, or hateful, or even necessarily on board with sweeping jingoistic claims. It is because they understand the particular codes and imperatives of large-market talk radio. The fact of the matter is that it is not John Ziegler’s job to be responsible, or nuanced, or to think about whether his on-air comments are productive or dangerous, or cogent, or even defensible. That is not to say that the host would not defend his “we’re better”—strenuously—or that he does not believe it’s true. It is to say that he has exactly one on-air job, and that is to be stimulating. An obvious point, but it’s one that’s often overlooked by people who complain about propaganda, misinformation, and irresponsibility in commercial talk radio. Whatever else they are, the above-type objections to “We’re better than the Arab world” are calls to accountability. They are the sort of criticisms one might make of, say, a journalist, someone whose job description includes being responsible about what he says in public. And KFI’s John Ziegler is not a journalist—he is an entertainer. Or maybe it’s better to say that he is part of a peculiar, modern, and very popular type of news industry, one that manages to enjoy the authority and influence of journalism without the stodgy constraints of fairness, objectivity, and responsibility that make trying to tell the truth such a drag for everyone involved. It is a frightening industry, though not for any of the simple reasons most critics give.

Distributed over two walls of KFI’s broadcast studio, behind the monitors and clocks, are a dozen promotional KFI posters, all in the station’s eye-catching Halloween colors against the Sweeper’s bright white. On each poster, the word “stimulating” is both italicized and underscored. Except for the door and soundproof window, the entire studio is lined in acoustic tile with strange Pollockian patterns of tiny holes. Much of the tile is grayed and decaying, and the carpet’s no color at all; KFI has been in this facility for nearly thirty years and will soon be moving out. Both the studio and Airmix are kept chilly because of all the electronics. The overhead lights are old inset fluorescents, the kind with the slight flutter to them; nothing casts any sort of shadow. On one of the studio walls is also pinned the special set of playing cards distributed for the invasion of Iraq, these with hand-drawn Xs over the faces of those Baathists captured or killed so far. The great L-shaped table that Mr. Z. sits at nearly fills the little room; it’s got so many coats of brown paint on it that the tabletop looks slightly humped. At the L’s base is another Shure microphone, used by Ken Chiampou of 3:00—7:00’s John & Ken, its hinged stand now partly folded up so that the mike hangs like a wilted flower. The oddest thing about the studio is a strong scent of decaying bananas, as if many peels or even whole bananas were rotting in the room’s wastebaskets, none of which look to have been emptied anytime recently. Mr. Ziegler, who has his ascetic side, drinks only bottled water in the studio, and certainly never snacks, so there is no way he is the source of the banana smell.

“Editing David Foster Wallace’s ‘Host’” The process behind our unusual April 2005 cover story. By Martha Spaulding

It is worth considering the strange media landscape in which political talk radio is a salient. Never before have there been so many different national news sources—different now in terms of both medium and ideology. Major newspapers from anywhere are available online; there are the broadcast networks plus public TV, cable’s CNN, Fox News, CNBC, et al., print and Web magazines, Internet bulletin boards, The Daily Show, e-mail newsletters, blogs. All this is well known; it’s part of the Media Environment we live in. But there are prices and ironies here. One is that the increasing control of U.S. mass media by a mere handful of corporations has—rather counterintuitively—created a situation of extreme fragmentation, a kaleidoscope of information options. Another is that the ever increasing number of ideological news outlets creates precisely the kind of relativism that cultural conservatives decry, a kind of epistemic free-for-all in which “the truth” is wholly a matter of perspective and agenda. In some respects all this variety is probably good, productive of difference and dialogue and so on. But it can also be confusing and stressful for the average citizen. Short of signing on to a particular mass ideology and patronizing only those partisan news sources that ratify what you want to believe, it is increasingly hard to determine which sources to pay attention to and how exactly to distinguish real information from spin.

This fragmentation and confusion have helped give rise to what’s variously called the “meta-media” or “explaining industry.” Under most classifications, this category includes media critics for news dailies, certain high-end magazines, panel shows like CNN’s Reliable Sources, media-watch blogs like instapundit.com and talkingpointsmemo.com, and a large percentage of political talk radio. It is no accident that one of the signature lines Mr. Ziegler likes to deliver over his opening bumper music at :06 is “… the show where we take a look at the news of the day, we provide you the facts, and then we give you the truth.” For this is how much of contemporary political talk radio understands its function: to explore the day’s news in a depth and detail that other media do not, and to interpret, analyze, and explain that news.

Which all sounds great, except of course “explaining” the news really means editorializing, infusing the actual events of the day with the host’s own opinions. And here is where the real controversy starts, because these opinions are, as just one person’s opinions, exempt from strict journalistic standards of truthfulness, probity, etc., and yet they are often delivered by the talk-radio host not as opinions but as revealed truths, truths intentionally ignored or suppressed by a “mainstream press” that’s “biased” in favor of liberal interests. This is, at any rate, the rhetorical template for Rush Limbaugh’s program, on which most syndicated and large-market political talk radio is modeled, from ABC’s Sean Hannity and Talk Radio Network’s Laura Ingraham to G. G. Liddy, Rusty Humphries, Michael Medved, Mike Gallagher, Neal Boortz, Dennis Prager, and, in many respects, Mr. John Ziegler.

“Do As I Say” (January 2004)

Dr. Laura’s counsel is caustic and oftentimes hypocritical, but it is also persuasive. By Caitlin Flanagan

KFI AM-640 carries Rush Limbaugh every weekday, 9:00 a.m. to noon, via live ISDN feed from Premiere Radio Networks, which is one of the dozen syndication networks that own talk-radio shows so popular that it’s worth it for local stations to air them even though it costs the stations a portion of their spot load. The same goes for Dr. Laura Schlessinger, who’s based in southern California and used to broadcast her syndicated show from KFI until the mid-nineties, when Premiere built its own LA facility and was able to offer Schlessinger more-sumptuous digs. Dr. Laura airs M-F from noon to 3:00 on KFI, though her shows are canned and there’s no live feed. Besides 7:00—10:00 p.m.’s Phil Hendrie (another KFI host whose show went into national syndication, and who now has his own private dressing room and studio over at Premiere), the only other weekday syndication KFI uses is Coast to Coast With George Noory, which covers and analyzes news of the paranormal throughout the wee hours.

Whatever the social effects of talk radio or the partisan agendas of certain hosts, it is a fallacy that political talk radio is motivated by ideology. It is not. Political talk radio is a business, and it is motivated by revenue. The conservatism that dominates today’s AM airwaves does so because it generates high Arbitron ratings, high ad rates, and maximum profits.

Radio has become a more lucrative business than most people know. Throughout most of the past decade, the industry’s revenues have increased by more than 10 percent a year. The average cash-flow margin for major radio companies is 40 percent, compared with more like 15 percent for large TV networks; and the mean price paid for a radio station has gone from eight to more than thirteen times cash flow. Some of this extreme profitability, and thus the structure of the industry, is due to the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which allows radio companies to acquire up to eight stations in a given market and to control as much as 35 percent of a market’s total ad revenues. The emergence of huge, dominant radio conglomerates like Clear Channel and Infinity is a direct consequence of the ’96 Act (which the FCC, aided by the very conservative D.C. Court of Appeals, has lately tried to make even more permissive). And these radio conglomerates enjoy not just substantial economies of scale but almost unprecedented degrees of business integration.

Example: Clear Channel Communications Inc. now owns KFI AM-640, plus two other AM stations and five FMs in the Los Angeles market. It also owns Premiere Radio Networks. It also owns the Airwatch subscription news/traffic service. And it designs and manufactures Prophet, KFI’s operating system, which is state-of-the-art and much too expensive for most independent stations. All told, Clear Channel currently owns some 1,200 radio stations nationwide, one of which happens to be Louisville, Kentucky’s WHAS, the AM talk station from which John Ziegler was fired, amid spectacular gossip and controversy, in August of 2003. Which means that Mr. Ziegler now works in Los Angeles for the same company that just fired him in Louisville, such that his firing now appears—in retrospect, and considering the relative sizes of the Louisville and LA markets—to have been a promotion. All of which turns out to be a strange and revealing story about what a talk-radio host’s life is like.

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For obvious reasons, critics of political talk radio concern themselves mainly with the programs’ content. Talk station management, on the other hand, tends to think of content as a subset of personality, of how stimulating a given host is. As for the hosts—ask Mr. Ziegler off-air what makes him good at his job, and he’ll shrug glumly and say, “I’m not really all that talented. I’ve got passion, and I work really hard.” Taken so for granted that nobody in the business seems aware of it is something that an outsider, sitting in Airmix and watching John Ziegler at the microphone, will notice right away. Hosting talk radio is an exotic, high-pressure gig that not many people are fit for, and being truly good at it requires skills so specialized that many of them don’t have names.

To appreciate these skills and some of the difficulties involved, you might wish to do an experiment. Try sitting alone in a room with a clock, turning on a tape recorder, and starting to speak into it. Speak about anything you want—with the proviso that your topic, and your opinions on it, must be of interest to some group of strangers who you imagine will be listening to the tape. Naturally, in order to be even minimally interesting, your remarks should be intelligible and their reasoning sequential—a listener will have to be able to follow the logic of what you’re saying—which means that you will have to know enough about your topic to organize your statements in a coherent way. (But you cannot do much of this organizing beforehand; it has to occur at the same time you’re speaking.) Plus, ideally, what you’re saying should be not just comprehensible and interesting but compelling, stimulating, which means that your remarks have to provoke and sustain some kind of emotional reaction in the listeners, which in turn will require you to construct some kind of identifiable persona for yourself—your comments will need to strike the listener as coming from an actual human being, someone with a real personality and real feelings about whatever it is you’re discussing. And it gets even trickier: You’re trying to communicate in real time with someone you cannot see or hear responses from; and though you’re communicating in speech, your remarks cannot have any of the fragmentary, repetitive, garbled qualities of real interhuman speech, or speech’s ticcy unconscious “umm”s or “you know”s, or false starts or stutters or long pauses while you try to think of how to phrase what you want to say next. You’re also, of course, denied the physical inflections that are so much a part of spoken English—the facial expressions, changes in posture, and symphony of little gestures that accompany and buttress real talking. Everything unspoken about you, your topic, and how you feel about it has to be conveyed through pitch, volume, tone, and pacing. The pacing is especially important: it can’t be too slow, since that’s low-energy and dull, but it can’t be too rushed or it will sound like babbling. And so you have somehow to keep all these different imperatives and structures in mind at the same time, while also filling exactly, say, eleven minutes, with no dead air and no going over, such that at 10:46 you have wound things up neatly and are in a position to say, “KFI is the station with the most frequent traffic reports. Alan LaGreen is in the KFI Traffic Center” (which, to be honest, Mr. Z. sometimes leaves himself only three or even two seconds for and has to say extremely fast, which he can always do without a flub). So then, ready: go.

It’s no joke. See for example the John Ziegler Show’s producer, Emiliano Limon, who broke in at KFI as a weekend overnight host before moving across the glass:

“What’s amazing is that when you get new people who think that they can do a talk-radio program, you watch them for the first time. By three minutes into it, they have that look on their face like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got ten minutes left. What am I going to say?’ And that’s what happened to me a lot. So you end up talking about yourself [which, for complex philosophical reasons, the producer disapproves of], or you end up yammering.” Emiliano is a large, very calm and competent man in his mid-thirties who either wears the same black LA Times T-shirt every day or owns a whole closetful of them. He was pulled off other duties to help launch KFI’s experimental Live and Local evening show, an assignment that obviously involves working closely with Mr. Z., which Emiliano seems to accept as his karmic punishment for being so unflappable and easy to get along with. He laughs more than everyone else at KFI put together.

“I remember one time, I just broke after five minutes, I was just done, and they were going, ‘Hey, what are you doing, you have another ten minutes!’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know what else to say!’ And that’s what happens. For those people who think ‘Oh, I could do talk radio,’ well, there’s more to it. A lot of people can’t take it once they get that taste of, you know, ‘Geez, I gotta fill all this time and sound interesting?’

“Then, as you keep on doing it over the days, there’s something that becomes absolutely clear to you. You’re not really acting on the radio. It’s you. If no one really responds and the ratings aren’t good, it means they don’t like you.” Which is worth keeping very much in mind.

An abiding question: Who exactly listens to political talk radio? Arbitron Inc. and some of its satellites can help measure how many are listening for how long and when, and they provide some rough age data and demographic specs. A lot of the rest is guesswork, and Program Directors don’t like to talk about it.

From outside, though, one of the best clues to how a radio station understands its audience is spots. Which commercials it runs, and when, indicate how the station is pitching its listeners’ tastes and receptivities to sponsors. In how often particular spots are repeated lie clues to the length of time the station thinks people are listening, how attentive it thinks they are, etc. Specific example: Just from its spot load, we can deduce that KFI trusts its audience to sit still for an extraordinary amount of advertising. An average hour of the John Ziegler Show consists of four program segments: :06–:17, :23–:30, :37–:46, and :53–:00, or thirty-four minutes of Mr. Z. actually talking. Since KFI’s newscasts are never more than ninety seconds, and since quarterly traffic reports are always bracketed by “live-read” spots for Traffic Center sponsors, that makes each hour at least 40 percent ads; the percentage is higher if you count Sweepers for the station and promos for other KFI shows. And this is the load just on a local program, one for which the Clock doesn’t have to be split with a syndicator.

It’s not that KFI’s unaware of the dangers here. Station management reads its mail, and as Emiliano Limon puts it, “If there’s one complaint listeners always have, it’s the spot load.” But the only important issue is whether all the complaints translate into actual listener behavior. KFI’s spot load is an instance of the kind of multivariable maximization problem that M.B.A. programs thrive on. It is obviously in the station’s financial interest to carry just as high a volume of ads as it can without hurting ratings—the moment listeners begin turning away from KFI because of too many commercials, the Arbitron numbers go down, the rates charged for ads have to be reduced, and profitability suffers. But anything more specific is, again, guesswork. When asked about management’s thinking here, or whether there’s any particular formula KFI uses to figure out how high a spot load the market will bear, Ms. Bertolucci will only smile and shrug as if pleasantly stumped: “We have more commercials than we’ve ever had, and our ratings are the best they’ve ever been.”

How often a particular spot can run over and over before listeners just can’t stand it anymore is something else no one will talk about, but the evidence suggests that KFI sees its audience as either very patient and tolerant or almost catatonically inattentive. Canned ads for local sponsors like Robbins Bros. Jewelers, Sit ‘n Sleep Mattress, and the Power Auto Group play every couple hours, 24/7, until one knows every hitch and nuance. National saturation campaigns for products like Cortislim vary things somewhat by using both endorsements and canned spots. Pitches for caveat emptor—type nostrums like Avacor (for hair loss), Enzyte (“For natural male enhancement!”), and Altovis (“Helps fight daily fatigue!”) often repeat once an hour through the night. As of spring ’04, though, the most frequent and concussive ads on KFI are for mortgage and home-refi companies—Green Light Financial, HMS Capital, Home Field Financial, Benchmark Lending. Over and over. Pacific Home Financial, U.S. Mortgage Capital, Crestline Funding, Advantix Lending. Reverse mortgages, negative amortization, adjustable rates, APR, FICO … where did all these firms come from? What were these guys doing five years ago? Why is KFI’s audience seen as so especially ripe and ready for refi? Betterloans.com, lendingtree.com, Union Bank of California, on and on and on.

Emiliano Limon’s “It’s you” seems true to an extent. But there is also the issue of persona, meaning the on-air personality that a host adopts in order to heighten the sense of a real person behind the mike. It is, after all, unlikely that Rush Limbaugh always feels as jaunty and confident as he seems on the air, or that Howard Stern really is deeply fascinated by porn starlets every waking minute of the day. But a host’s persona is not the same as outright acting. For the most part, it’s probably more like the way we are all slightly different with some people than we are with others.

In some cases, though, the personas are more contrived and extreme. In the slot preceding Mr. Z.’s on KFI, for instance, is the Phil Hendrie Show, which is actually a cruel and complicated kind of meta—talk radio. What happens every night on this program is that Phil Hendrie brings on some wildly offensive guest—a man who’s leaving his wife because she’s had a mastectomy, a Little League coach who advocates corporal punishment of players, a retired colonel who claims that females’ only proper place in the military is as domestics and concubines for the officers—and first-time or casual listeners will call in and argue with the guests and (not surprisingly) get very angry and upset. Except the whole thing’s a put-on. The guests are fake, their different voices done by Hendrie with the aid of mike processing and a first-rate board op, and the show’s real entertainment is the callers, who don’t know it’s all a gag—Hendrie’s real audience, which is in on the joke, enjoys hearing these callers get more and more outraged and sputtery as the “guests” yank their chain. It’s all a bit like the old Candid Camera if the joke perpetrated over and over on that show were convincing somebody that a loved one had just died. So obviously Hendrie—whose show now draws an estimated one million listeners a week—lies on the outer frontier of radio persona.

A big part of John Ziegler’s on-air persona, on the other hand, is that he doesn’t have one. This may be just a function of all the time he’s spent in the abattoir of small-market radio, but in Los Angeles it plays as a canny and sophisticated meta-radio move. Part of his January introduction to himself and his program is “The key to the John Ziegler Show is that I am almost completely real. Nearly every show begins with the credo ‘This is the show where the host says what he believes and believes what he says.’ I do not make up my opinions or exaggerate my stories simply to stir the best debate on that particular broadcast.”

Though Mr. Z. won’t ever quite say so directly, his explicit I-have-no-persona persona helps to establish a contrast with weekday afternoons’ John Kobylt, whose on-air voice is similar to Ziegler’s in pitch and timbre. Kobylt and his sidekick Ken Chiampou have a hugely popular show based around finding stories and causes that will make white, middle-class Californians feel angry and disgusted, and then hammering away at these stories/causes day after day. Their personas are what the LA Times calls “brash” and Chiampou himself calls “rabid dogs,” which latter KFI has developed into the promo line “The Junkyard Dogs of Talk Radio.” What John & Ken really are is professional oiks. Their show is credited with helping jump-start the ’03 campaign to recall Governor Gray Davis, although they were equally disgusted by most of the candidates who wanted to replace him (q.v. Kobylt: “If there’s anything I don’t like more than politicians, it’s those wormy little nerds who act as campaign handlers and staff … We just happened to on our own decide that Davis was a rotting stool that ought to be flushed”). In ’02, they organized a parade of SUVs in Sacramento to protest stricter vehicle-emissions laws; this year they spend at least an hour a day attacking various government officials and their spokesholes for failing to enforce immigration laws and trying to bullshit the citizens about it; and so on. But the John & Ken Show’s real specialty is gruesome, high-profile California trials, which they often cover on-site, Kobylt eschewing all PC pussyfooting and legal niceties to speak his mind about defendants like 2002’s David Westerfield and the current Scott Peterson, both “scumbags that are guilty as sin.” The point is that John Kobylt broadcasts in an almost perpetual state of affronted rage; and, as more than one KFI staffer has ventured to observe off the record, it’s unlikely that any middle-aged man could really go around this upset all the time and not drop dead. It’s a persona, in other words, not exactly fabricated but certainly exaggerated … and of course it’s also demagoguery of the most classic and unabashed sort.

But it makes for stimulating and profitable talk radio. As of Arbitron’s winter ’04 Book, KFI AM-640 has become the No. 1 talk station in the country, beating out New York’s WABC in both Cume and AQH for the coveted 25—54 audience. KFI also now has the second highest market share of any radio station in Los Angeles, trailing only hip-hop giant KPWR. In just one year, KFI has gone from being the eighteenth to the seventh top-billing station in the country, which is part of why it received the 2003 News/Talk Station of the Year Award from Radio and Records magazine. Much of this recent success is attributed to Ms. Robin Bertolucci, the Program Director brought in from Denver shortly after Clear Channel acquired KFI, whom Mr. Z. describes as “a real superstar in the business right now.” From all reports, Ms. Bertolucci has done everything from redesigning the station’s ID and Sweeper and sound and overall in-your-face vibe to helping established hosts fine-tune their personas and create a distinctively KFI-ish style and ‘tude for their shows.

Every Wednesday afternoon, Ms. Bertolucci meets with John Ziegler to review the previous week and chat about how the show’s going. The Program Director’s large private office is located just off the KFI prep room (where Mr. Z.’s own office is a small computer table with a homemade THIS AREA RESERVED FOR JOHN ZIEGLER taped to it). Ms. B. is soft-spoken, polite, unpretentious, and almost completely devoid of moving parts. Here is her on-record explanation of the Program Director’s role w/r/t the John Ziegler Show:

“It’s John’s show. He’s flying the airplane, a big 747. What I am, I’m the little person in the control tower. I have a different perspective—”

“I have no perspective!” Mr. Z. interrupts, with a loud laugh, from his seat before her desk.

“—which might be of value. Like, ‘You may want to pull up because you’re heading for a mountain.’” They both laugh. It’s an outrageous bit of understatement: nine months ago John Ziegler’s career was rubble, and Ms. B. is the only reason he’s here, and she’s every inch his boss, and he’s nervous around her—which you can tell by the way he puts his long legs out and leans back in his chair with his hands in his slacks’ pockets and yawns a lot and tries to look exaggeratedly relaxed.

The use of some esoteric technical slang occasions a brief Q & A on how exactly Arbitron works, while Mr. Z. joggles his sneaker impatiently. Then they go over the past week. Ms. B. gently chides the new host for not hitting the Greg Haidl trial harder, and for usually discussing the case in his show’s second hour instead of the first. Her thrust: “It’s a big story for us. It’s got sex, it’s got police, class issues, kids running amok, video, the courts, and who gets away with what. And it’s in Orange County.” When Mr. Ziegler (whose off-air method of showing annoyance or frustration is to sort of hang his head way over to one side) protests that both Bill Handel and John & Ken have already covered the story six ways from Sunday every day and there is no way for him to do anything fresh or stimulating with it, Ms. B. nods slowly and responds: “If we were KIIS-FM, and we had a new Christina Aguilera song, and they played it heavy on the morning show and the afternoon show, wouldn’t you still play it on the evening show?” At which Mr. Z. sort of lolls his head from side to side several times—”All right. I see your point. All right”—and on tonight’s (i.e., May 19’s) program he does lead with and spend much of the first hour on the latest Haidl developments.

By way of post-meeting analysis, it is worth noting that a certain assumption behind Ms. B.’s Christina Aguilera analogy—namely, that a criminal trial is every bit as much an entertainment product as a Top 40 song—was not questioned or even blinked at by either participant. This is doubtless one reason for KFI’s ratings éclat—the near total conflation of news and entertainment. It also explains why KFI’s twice-hourly newscasts (which are always extremely short, and densely interwoven with station promos and live-read ads) concentrate so heavily on lurid, tabloidish stories. Post—Nick Berg, the station’s newscasts in May and early June tend to lead with child-molestation charges against local clerics and teachers, revelations in the Peterson and Haidl trials, and developments in the Kobe Bryant and Michael Jackson cases. With respect to Ms. Bertolucci’s on-record description of KFI’s typical listener—”An information-seeking person that wants to know what’s going on in the world and wants to be communicated to in an interesting, entertaining, stimulating sort of way”—it seems fair to observe that KFI provides a peculiar and very selective view of what’s going on in the world.

Ms. B.’s description turns out to be loaded in a number of ways. The role of news and information versus personal and persona-driven stuff on the John Ziegler Show, for example, is a matter that Mr. Z. and his producer see very differently. Emiliano Limon, who’s worked at the station for over a decade and believes he knows its audience, sees “two distinct eras at KFI. The first was the opinion-driven, personal, here’s-my-take-on-things era. The second is the era we’re in right now, putting the information first.” Emiliano refers to polls he’s seen indicating that most people in southern California get their news from local TV newscasts and Jay Leno’s monologue on the Tonight show. “We go on the presumption that the average driver, average listener, isn’t reading the news the way we are. We read everything.” In fact, this voracious news-reading is a big part of Emiliano’s job. He is, like most talk-radio producers, a virtuoso on the Internet, and he combs through a daily list of sixty national papers, ‘zines, and blogs, and he believes that his and KFI’s main function is to provide “a kind of executive news summary” for busy listeners. In a separate Q & A, though, Mr. Ziegler’s take on the idea of his show’s providing news is wholly different: “We’re trying to get away from that, actually. The original thought was that this would be mostly an informational show, and now we’re trying to get a little more toward personality” … which, since Mr. Z. makes a point of not having a special on-air persona, means more stuff about himself, John Ziegler—his experiences, his résumé, his political and cultural outlook and overall philosophy of life.

(3)

If we’re willing to disregard the complicating precedents of Joe Pyne and Alan Burke, then the origins of contemporary political talk radio can be traced to three phenomena of the 1980s. The first of these involved AM music stations’ getting absolutely murdered by FM, which could broadcast music in stereo and allowed for much better fidelity on high and low notes. The human voice, on the other hand, is mid-range and doesn’t require high fidelity. The eighties’ proliferation of talk formats on the AM band also provided new careers for some music deejays—e.g., Don Imus, Morton Downey Jr.—whose chatty personas didn’t fit well with FM’s all-about-the-music ethos.

The second big factor was the repeal, late in Ronald Reagan’s second term, of what was known as the Fairness Doctrine. This was a 1949 FCC rule designed to minimize any possible restrictions on free speech caused by limited access to broadcasting outlets. The idea was that, as one of the conditions for receiving an FCC broadcast license, a station had to “devote reasonable attention to the coverage of controversial issues of public importance,” and consequently had to provide “reasonable, although not necessarily equal” opportunities for opposing sides to express their views. Because of the Fairness Doctrine, talk stations had to hire and program symmetrically: if you had a three-hour program whose host’s politics were on one side of the ideological spectrum, you had to have another long-form program whose host more or less spoke for the other side. Weirdly enough, up through the mid-eighties it was usually the U.S. right that benefited most from the Doctrine. Pioneer talk syndicator Ed McLaughlin, who managed San Francisco’s KGO in the 1960s, recalls that “I had more liberals on the air than I had conservatives or even moderates for that matter, and I had a hell of a time finding the other voice.”

The Fairness Doctrine’s repeal was part of the sweeping deregulations of the Reagan era, which aimed to liberate all sorts of industries from government interference and allow them to compete freely in the marketplace. The old, Rooseveltian logic of the Doctrine had been that since the airwaves belonged to everyone, a license to profit from those airwaves conferred on the broadcast industry some special obligation to serve the public interest. Commercial radio broadcasting was not, in other words, originally conceived as just another for-profit industry; it was supposed to meet a higher standard of social responsibility. After 1987, though, just another industry is pretty much what radio became, and its only real responsibility now is to attract and retain listeners in order to generate revenue. In other words, the sort of distinction explicitly drawn by FCC Chairman Newton Minow in the 1960s—namely, that between “the public interest” and “merely what interests the public”—no longer exists.

More or less on the heels of the Fairness Doctrine’s repeal came the West Coast and then national syndication of The Rush Limbaugh Show through Mr. McLaughlin’s EFM Media. Limbaugh is the third great progenitor of today’s political talk radio partly because he’s a host of extraordinary, once-in-a-generation talent and charisma—bright, loquacious, witty, complexly authoritative—whose show’s blend of news, entertainment, and partisan analysis became the model for legions of imitators. But he was also the first great promulgator of the Mainstream Media’s Liberal Bias idea. This turned out to be a brilliantly effective rhetorical move, since the MMLB concept functioned simultaneously as a standard around which Rush’s audience could rally, as an articulation of the need for right-wing (i.e., unbiased) media, and as a mechanism by which any criticism or refutation of conservative ideas could be dismissed (either as biased or as the product of indoctrination by biased media). Boiled way down, the MMLB thesis is able both to exploit and to perpetuate many conservatives’ dissatisfaction with extant media sources—and it’s this dissatisfaction that cements political talk radio’s large and loyal audience.

In the best Rush Limbaugh tradition, Mr. Ziegler takes pride in his on-air sense of humor. His media criticism is often laced with wisecracks, and he likes to leaven his show’s political and cultural analyses with timely ad-lib gags, such as “It’s maybe a good thing that Catholics and Muslims don’t tend to marry. If they had a kid, he’d grow up and then, what, abuse some child and then blow him up?” And he has a penchant for comic maxims (“Fifty percent of all marriages are confirmed failures, while the other fifty percent end in divorce”; “The female figure is the greatest known evidence that there might be a God, but the female psyche is an indication that this God has a very sick sense of humor”) that he uses on the air and then catalogues as “Zieglerisms” on his KFI Web site.

Mr. Z. can also, when time and the demands of prep permit, go long-form. In his program’s final hour for May 22, he delivers a mock commencement address to the Class of 2004, a piece of prepared sit-down comedy that is worth excerpting, verbatim, as a sort of keyhole into the professional psyche of Mr. John Ziegler:

Class of 2004, congratulations on graduation … I wish to let you in on a few secrets that those of you who are not completely brain-dead will eventually figure out on your own, but, if you listen to me, will save a lot of time and frustration. First of all, most of what you have been taught in your academic career is not true. I am not just talking about the details of history that have been distorted to promote the liberal agenda of academia. I am also referring to the big-picture lessons of life as well. The sad truth is that, contrary to what most of you have been told, you cannot do or be anything you want. The vast majority of you … will be absolutely miserable in whatever career you choose or are forced to endure. You will most likely hate your boss because they will most likely be dumber than you think you are, and they will inevitably screw you at every chance they get … The boss will not be the only stupid person you encounter in life. The vast majority of people are much, much dumber than you have ever been led to believe. Never forget this. And just like people are far dumber than you have been led to believe, they are also far more dishonest than anyone is seemingly willing to admit to you. If you have any doubt as to whether someone is telling you the truth, it is a safe bet to assume that they are lying to you … Do not trust anyone unless you have some sort of significant leverage over him or her and they know that you have that leverage over them. Unless this condition exists, anyone—and I mean anyone—can and probably will stab you in the back.

That is about one sixth of the address, and for the most part it speaks for itself.

One of many intriguing things about Mr. Ziegler, though, is the contrast between his deep cynicism about backstabbing and the naked, seemingly self-destructive candor with which he’ll discuss his life and career. This candor becomes almost paradoxical in Q & As with an outside correspondent, a stranger whom Mr. Z. has no particular reason to trust at those times when he winces after saying something and asks that it be struck from the record. As it happens, however, nearly all of what follows is from an autobiographical time-line volunteered by John Ziegler in late May ’04 over a very large medium-rare steak. Especially interesting is the time-line’s mixture of raw historical fact and passionate editorial opinion, which Mr. Z. blends so seamlessly that one really can believe he discerns no difference between them.

1967–1989: Mr. John Ziegler grows up in suburban Philadelphia, the elder son of a financial manager and a homemaker. All kinds of unsummarizable evidence indicates that Mr. Z. and his mother are very close. In 1984, he is named High School Golfer of the Year by the Bucks County Courier Times. He’s also a three-year golf letterman at Georgetown, where his liberal arts studies turn out to be “a great way to prepare for a life of being unemployed, which I’ve done quite a bit of.”

1989–1995: Mr. Z.’s original career is in local TV sports. He works for stations in and around Washington DC, in Steubenville OH, and finally in Raleigh NC. Though sports news is what he’s wanted to do ever since he was a little boy, he hates the jobs: “The whole world of sports and local news is so disgusting … local TV news is half a step above prostitution.”

1994–1995: Both personally and professionally, this period constitutes a dark night of the soul for John Ziegler. Summer ’94: O.J. Simpson’s ex-wife is brutally murdered. Fall ’94: Mr. Ziegler’s mother is killed in a car crash. Winter ’95: During his sportscast, Mr. Z. makes “an incredibly tame joke about O.J. Simpson’s lack of innocence” w/r/t his wife’s murder, which draws some protest from Raleigh’s black community. John Ziegler is eventually fired from WLFL because the station “caved in to Political Correctness.” The whole nasty incident marks the start of (a) Mr. Z.’s deep, complex hatred for all things PC, and (b) “my history with O.J.” He falls into a deep funk, decides to give up sports broadcasting, “pretty much gave up on life, actually.” Mr. Z. spends his days watching the O.J. Simpson trial on cable television, often sitting through repeat broadcasts of the coverage late at night; and when O.J. is finally acquitted, “I was nearly suicidal.” Two psychiatrist golf buddies talk him into going on antidepressants, but much of the time O.J. is still all Mr. Ziegler can think and talk about. “It got so bad—you’ll find this funny—at one point I was so depressed that it was my goal, assuming that he’d be acquitted and that [O.J.’s] Riviera Country Club wouldn’t have the guts to kick him out, that I was going to become a caddy at Riviera, knock him off, and see whether or not [a certain lawyer Mr. Z. also played golf with, whose name is here omitted] could get me off on jury nullification. That’s how obsessed I was.” The lawyer/golfer/friend’s reaction to this plan is not described.

Late 1995: Mr. Z. decides to give life and broadcasting another shot. Figuring that “maybe my controversial nature would work better on talk radio,” he takes a job as a weekend fill-in host for a station in Fuquay-Varina NC—”the worst talk-radio station on the planet … to call the station owner a redneck was insulting to rednecks”—only to be abruptly fired when the station switches to an automated Christian-music format.

Early 1996: “I bought, actually bought, time on a Raleigh talk-radio station” in order to start “putting together a Tape,” although Mr. Z. is good enough on the air that they soon put him on as a paid host. What happens, though, is that this station uses a certain programming consultant, whose name is being omitted—”a pretty big name in the industry, who [however] is a snake, and, I believe, extremely overrated—and he at first really took a shine to me, and then told me, told me, to do a show on how I got fired from the TV job, and I did the show,” which evidently involves retelling the original tame O.J. joke, after which the herpetic consultant stands idly by as the station informs Mr. Z. that “‘We’re done with you, no thank you,’ which was another blow.”

1996–1997: Another radio consultant recommends Mr. Z. for a job at WWTN, a Nashville talk station, where he hosts an evening show that makes good Book and is largely hassle-free for several months. Of his brief career at WWTN, the host now feels that “I kind of self-destructed there, actually, in retrospect. I got frustrated with management. I was right, but I was stupid as well.” The trouble starts when Tiger Woods wins the 1997 Masters. As part of his commentary on the tournament, Mr. Z. posits on-air that Tiger constitutes living proof of the fact that “not all white people are racists.” His supporting argument is that “no white person would ever think of Tiger as a nigger,” because whites draw a mental distinction “between people who just happen to be black and people who act like niggers.” His reason for broadcasting the actual word “nigger”? “This all goes back to O.J. I hated the fact that the media treated viewers and listeners like children by saying ‘Mark Fuhrman used the N-word.’ I despised that, and I think it gives the word too much power. Plus there’s the whole hypocrisy of how black people can use it and white people can’t. I was young and naive and thought I could stand on principle.” As part of that principled stand, Mr. Z. soon redeploys the argument and the word in a discussion of boxer Mike Tyson, whereupon he is fired, “even though there was very little listener reaction.” As Mr. Z. understands it, the reason for his dismissal is that “a single black employee complained,” and WWTN’s parent, “a lily-white company,” feared that it was “very vulnerable” to a discrimination lawsuit.

1998–1999: Mr. Z. works briefly as a morning fill-in at Nashville’s WLAC, whose studios are right across the street from the station that just fired him. From there, he is hired to do overnights at WWDB, an FM talk station in Philadelphia, his home town. There are again auspicious beginnings … “except my boss, [the P.D. who hired him], is completely unstable and ends up punching out a consultant, and gets fired. At that point I’m totally screwed—I have nobody who’s got my back, and everybody’s out to get me.” Mr. Z. is suddenly fired to make room for syndicated raunchmeister Tom Leykis, then is quickly rehired when listener complaints get Leykis’s program taken off the air … then is refired a week later when the station juggles its schedule again. Mr. Z. on his time at WWDB: “I should have sued those bastards.”

Q: So what exactly is the point of a host’s having a contract if the station can evidently just up and fire you whenever they feel like it?

A: “The only thing a contract’s worth in radio is how much they’re going to pay you when they fire you. And if they fire you ‘For Cause,’ then they don’t have to pay you anything.”

2000: John Ziegler moves over to WIP, a famous Philadelphia sports-talk station. “I hated it, but I did pretty well. I can do sports, obviously, and it was also a big political year.” But there is both a general problem and a specific problem. The general problem is that “The boss there, [name omitted], is an evil, evil, evil, evil man. If God said, ‘John, you get one person to kill for free,’ this would be the man I would kill. And I would make it brutally painful.” The specific problem arises when “Mike Tyson holds a press conference, and calls himself a nigger. And I can’t resist—I mean, here I’ve gotten fired in the past for using the word in relation to a person who calls himself that now. I mean, my God. So I tell the story [of having used the word and gotten fired for it] on the air, but I do not use the N-word—I spell the N-word, every single time, to cover my ass, and to also make a point of the absurdity of the whole thing. And we get one, one, postcard, from a total lunatic black person—misspellings, just clearly a lunatic. And [Mr. Z.’s boss at WIP] calls me in and says, ‘John, I think you’re a racist.’ Now, first of all, this guy is a racist, I mean he is a real racist. I am anything but a racist, but to be called that by him just made my blood boil. I mean, life’s too short to be working overnights for this fucking bastard.” A day or two later Mr. Z. is fired, For Cause, for spelling the N-word on-air.

Q: It sounds like you’ve got serious personal reasons for disliking Political Correctness.

A: “Oh my God, yes. My whole life has been ruined by it. I’ve lost relationships, I can’t get married, I can’t have kids, all because of Political Correctness. I can’t put anybody else through the crap I’ve been through. I can’t do it.”

2001: While writing freelance columns for the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News, Mr. Ziegler also gets work at a small twenty-four-hour Comcast cable-TV network in Philly, where he’s a writer and commentator on a prime-time issues-related talk show. Although Comcast is “an evil, evil, evil company, [which] created that network for the sole purpose of giving blowjobs to politicians who vote on Comcast legislation,” Mr. Z. discovers that “I’m actually really good at talk TV. I was the best thing that ever happened to this show. I actually ended up winning an Emmy, which is ironic.” There are, however, serious and irresolvable problems with a female producer on the show, the full story of which you are going to be spared (mainly because of legal worries).

2002: John Ziegler is hired as the mid-morning host at Clear Channel’s WHAS in Louisville, which Arbitron lists as the fifty-fifth largest radio market in the U.S. According to a local paper, the host’s “stormy, thirteen-month tenure in Louisville was punctuated by intrigue, outrage, controversy and litigation.” According to John Ziegler, “The whole story would make a great movie—in fact, my whole life would make a great movie, but this in particular would make a great movie.” Densely compressed synopsis: For several quarters, Mr. Z.’s program is a great success in Louisville. “I’m doing huge numbers—in one Book I got a fifteen share, which is ridiculous.” He is also involved in a very public romance with one Darcie Divita, a former LA Lakers cheerleader who is part of a morning news show on the local Fox TV affiliate. The relationship is apparently Louisville’s version of Ben & J.Lo, and its end is not amicable. In August ’03, prompted by callers’ questions on his regular “Ask John Anything” feature, Mr. Z. makes certain on-air comments about Ms. Divita’s breasts, underwear, genital grooming, and libido. Part of the enduring controversy over John Ziegler’s firing, which occurs a few days later, is exactly how much those comments and/or subsequent complaints from listeners and the Louisville media had to do with it. Mr. Z. has a long list of reasons for believing that his P.D. was really just looking for an excuse to can him. As for all the complaints, Mr. Z. remains bitter and perplexed: (1) “The comments I made about Darcie’s physical attributes were extremely positive in nature”; (2) “Darcie had, in the past, volunteered information about her cleavage on my program”; (3) “I’ve gone much further with other public figures without incident … I mocked [Kentucky Governor] Paul Patton for his inability to bring Tina Conner to orgasm, [and] no one from management ever even mentioned it to me.”

John Ziegler on why he thinks he was hired for the Live and Local job by KFI: “They needed somebody ‘available.’” And on the corporate logic behind his hiring: “It’s among the most bizarre things I’ve ever been involved in. To simultaneously be fired by Clear Channel and negotiate termination in a market where I had immense value and be courted by the same company in a market where I had no current value is beyond explicable.”

Mr. Z. on talk radio as a career: “This is a terrible business. I’d love to quit this business.” On why, then, he accepted KFI’s offer: “My current contract would be by far the toughest for them to fire me of anyplace I’ve been.”

Compared with many talk-radio hosts, John Ziegler is unusually polite to on-air callers. Which is to say that he doesn’t yell at them, call them names, or hang up while they’re speaking, although he does get frustrated with some calls. But there are good and bad kinds of frustration, stimulation-wise. Hence the delicate art of call screening. The screener’s little switchboard and computer console are here in the Airmix room, right up next to the studio window.

JZS Producer Emiliano Limon: “There are two types of callers. You’ve got your hard-core talk-radio callers, who just like hearing themselves on-air”—these listeners will sometimes vary the first names and home cities they give the screener, trying to disguise the fact that they’ve been calling in night after night—”and then there are the ones who just, for whatever reason, respond to the topic.” Of these latter a certain percentage are wackos, but some wackos actually make good on-air callers. Assoc. prod. and screener Vince Nicholas: “The trick is knowing what kooks to get rid of and what to let through. People that are kooky on a particular issue—some of these Zig likes; he can bust on them and have fun with them. He likes it.”

Vince isn’t rude or brusque with the callers he screens out; he simply becomes more and more laconic and stoned-sounding over the headset as the person rants on, and finally says, “Whoa, gotta go.” Especially obnoxious and persistent callers can be placed on Hold at the screener’s switchboard, locking up their phones until Vince decides to let them go. Those whom the screener lets through enter a different, computerized Hold system in which eight callers at a time can be kept queued up and waiting, each designated on Mr. Z.’s monitor by a different colored box displaying a first name, city, one-sentence summary of the caller’s thesis, and the total time waiting. The host chooses, cafeteria-style, from this array.

In his selections, Mr. Z. has an observable preference for female callers. Emiliano’s explanation: “Since political talk radio is so white male—driven, it’s good to get female voices in there.” It turns out that this is an industry convention; the roughly 50-50 gender mix of callers one hears on most talk radio is because screeners admit a much higher percentage of female callers to the system.

One of the last things that Emiliano Limon always does before airtime is to use the station’s NexGen Audio Editing System to load various recorded sound bites from the day’s broadcast news onto a Prophet file that goes with the Cut Sheet. This is a numbered list of bites available for tonight’s John Ziegler Show, of which both Mr. Z. and ‘Mondo get a copy. Each bite must be precisely timed. It is an intricate, exacting process of editing and compilation, during which Mr. Z. often drums his fingers and looks pointedly at his watch as the producer ignores him and always very slowly and placidly edits and compresses and loads and has the Cut Sheet ready at the very last second. Emiliano is the sort of extremely chilled-out person who can seem to be leaning back at his station with his feet up on the Airmix table even when he isn’t leaning back at all. He’s wearing the LA Times shirt again. His own view on listener calls is that they are “overrated in talk radio,” that they’re rarely all that cogent or stimulating, but that hosts tend to be “overconcerned with taking calls and whether people are calling. Consider: This is the only type of live performance with absolutely no feedback from the audience. It’s natural for the host to key in on the only real-time response he can get, which is the calls. It takes a long time with a host to get him to forget about the calls, to realize the calls have very little to do with the wider audience.”

Vince, meanwhile, is busy at the screener’s station. A lady with a heavy accent keeps calling in to say that she has vital information: a Czech newspaper has revealed that John Kerry is actually a Jew, that his grandfather changed his distinctively Jewish surname, and that this fact is being suppressed in the U.S. media and must be exposed. Vince finally tries putting her on punitive Hold, but her line’s light goes out, which signifies that the lady has a cell phone and has disengaged by simply turning it off. Meaning that she can call back again as much as she likes, and that Vince is going to have to get actively rude. ‘Mondo’s great mild eyes rise from the board: “Puto, man, what’s that about?” Vince, very flat and bored: “Kerry’s a Jew.” Emiliano: “Another big advent is the cell phone. Before cells you got mostly homebound invalids calling in. [Laughs] Now you get the driving invalid.”

(4)

Historically, the two greatest ratings periods ever for KFI AM-640 have been the Gray Davis gubernatorial recall and the O.J. Simpson trial. Now, in early June ’04, the tenth anniversary of the Ron Goldman/Nicole Brown Simpson murders is approaching, and O.J. starts to pop up once again on the cultural radar. And Mr. John Ziegler happens to be more passionate about the O.J. Simpson thing than maybe any other single issue, and feels that he “know[s] more about the case than anyone not directly involved,” and is able to be almost unbearably stimulating about O.J. Simpson and the utter indubitability of his guilt. And the confluence of the murders’ anniversary, the case’s tabloid importance to the nation and business importance to KFI, and its deep personal resonance for Mr. Z. helps produce what at first looks like the absolute Monster talk-radio story of the month.

On June 3, in the third segment of the John Ziegler Show’s second hour, after lengthy discussions of the O.J. anniversary and the Michael Jackson case, Mr. Z. takes a phone call from one “Daryl in Temecula,” an African-American gentleman who is “absolutely astounded they let a Klansman on the radio this time of night.” The call, which lasts seven minutes and eighteen seconds and runs well over the :46 break, ends with John Ziegler’s telling the audience, “That’s as angry as I’ve ever gotten in the history of my career.” And Vince Nicholas, looking awed and spent at his screener’s station, pronounces the whole thing “some of the best talk radio I ever heard.”

Some portions of the call are untranscribable because they consist mainly of Daryl and Mr. Z. trying to talk over each other. Daryl’s core points appear to be (1) that Mr. Z. seems to spend all his time talking about black men like Kobe and O.J. and Michael Jackson—”Don’t white people commit crimes?”—and (2) that O.J. was, after all, found innocent in a court of law, and yet Mr. Z. keeps “going on about ‘He’s guilty, he’s guilty—’”

“He is,” the host inserts.

Daryl: “He was acquitted, wasn’t he?”

“That makes no difference as to whether or not he did it.”

“O.J., Kobe: You just thrive on these black guys.”

It is here that Mr. Z. begins to pick up steam. “Oh yeah, Daryl, right, I’m a racist. As a matter of fact, I often say, ‘You know what? I just wish another black guy would commit a crime, because I hate black people so much.’”

Daryl: “I think you do have more to talk about on black guys. I think that’s more ‘news’” … which actually would be kind of an interesting point to explore, or at least address; but Mr. Z. is now stimulated.

“As a matter of fact, Daryl, oftentimes when we go through who’s committed the crimes, there are times when the white people who control the media, we get together and go, ‘Oh, we can’t talk about that one, because that was a white guy.’ This is all a big conspiracy, Daryl. Except, to be serious for a second, Daryl, what really upsets me, assuming you’re a black guy, is that you ought to be ten times more pissed off at O.J. Simpson than I am, because you know why?”

Daryl: “You can’t tell me how I should feel. As a forty-year-old black man, I’ve seen racism for forty years.”

Mr. Z. is starting to move his upper body back and forth excitedly in his chair. “I bet you have. I bet you have. And here’s why you ought to be pissed off: Because, out of all the black guys who deserved to get a benefit of the doubt because of the history of racism which is real in this country, and which is insidious, the one guy—the one guy—who gets the benefit of all of that pain and suffering over a hundred years of history in this country is the one guy who deserves it less than anybody else, who sold his race out, who tried to talk white, who only had white friends, who had his ass kissed all over the place because he decided he wasn’t really a black guy, who was the first person in the history of this country ever accepted by white America, who was actually able to do commercial endorsements because he pretended to be white, and that’s the guy? That’s the guy? That’s the guy who gets the benefit of that history, and that doesn’t piss you off, that doesn’t piss you off?” And then an abrupt decrescendo: “Daryl, I can assure you that the last thing I am is racist on this. This is the last guy who should benefit.”

“The Massless Media” (January/February 2005)

With the mass media losing their audience to smaller, more targeted outlets, we may be headed for an era of noisy, contentious press reminiscent of the 1800s. By William Powers

And then June 4, the night following the Daryl interchange, turns out to be a climactic whirlwind of production challenges, logistical brinksmanship, meta-media outrage, Simpsonian minutiae, and Monster-grade stimulation. As is SOP, it starts around 7:00 p.m. in KFI’s large central prep room, which is where all the local hosts and their producers come in to prepare for their shows.

The prep room, which station management sometimes refers to as the production office, is more or less the nerve center of KFI, a large, complexly shaped space perimetered with battered little canted desks and hutches and two-drawer file cabinets supporting tabletops of composite planking. There are beat-up computers and pieces of sound equipment and funny Scotch-taped bits of office humor (e.g., pictures with staffers’ heads Photoshopped onto tabloid celebrities’ bodies). Like the studio and Airmix, the prep room is also a D.P.H.-grade mess: half the overhead fluorescents are either out or flickering nauseously, and the gray carpet crunches underfoot, and the wastebaskets are all towering fire hazards, and many of the tabletops are piled with old books and newspapers. One window, which is hot to the touch, overlooks KFI’s gated parking lot and security booth and the office of a Korean podiatrist across the street.

Overall, the layout and myriad tactical functions of the prep room are too complicated to try to describe this late in the game. At one end, it gives on to the KFI newsroom, which is a whole galaxy unto itself. At the other, comparatively uncluttered end is a set of thick, distinguished-looking doors leading off into the offices of the Station Manager, Director of Marketing & Promotions, Program Director, and so on, with also a semi-attached former closet for the P.D.’s assistant, a very kindly and eccentric lady who’s been at KFI for over twenty years and wears a high-tech headset that one begins, only over time, to suspect isn’t really connected to anything.

There are three main challenges facing tonight’s John Ziegler Show. One is that Emiliano Limon is off on certain personal business that he doesn’t want described, and therefore Mr. Vince Nicholas is soloing as producer for the very first time. Another is that last night’s on-air exchange with Daryl of Temecula is the type of intensely stimulating talk-radio event that cries out for repetition and commentary; Mr. Z. wants to rerun certain snippets of the call in a very precise order so that he can use them as jumping-off points for detailing his own “history with O.J.” and explaining why he’s so incandescently passionate about the case.

The third difficulty is that Simpson’s big anniversary Q & A with Ms. Katie Couric is airing tonight on NBC’s Dateline, and the cuts and discussions of the Daryl call are going to have to be interwoven with excerpts from what Mr. Z. refers to several times as “Katie’s blowjob interview.” An additional complication is that Dateline airs in Los Angeles from 8:00 to 10:00 p.m., and it has also now run teases for stories on the health hazards of the Atkins diet and the dangerously lax security in U.S. hotels. Assuming that Dateline waits and does the O.J. interview last (which it is clearly in the program’s interests to do), then the interview’s highlights will have to be recorded off TiVo, edited on NexGen, loaded onto Prophet, and queued up for the Cut Sheet all very quickly, since Mr. Z.’s opening segment starts at 10:06 and it’s hard to fiddle with logistics once his show’s under way.

Thus Vince spends 7:00—8:00 working two side-by-side computers, trying simultaneously to assemble the cuts from last night’s call, load an MSNBC interview with Nicole Brown Simpson’s sister directly into NexGen, and track down a Web transcript of tonight’s Dateline (which on the East Coast has already aired) so that he and Mr. Z. can choose and record bites from the Couric thing in real time. ‘Mondo, who is back board-opping the ISDN feed of 7:00—10:00’s Phil Hendrie Show, nevertheless comes in from Airmix several times to stand behind Vince at the terminals, ostensibly to see what’s going on but really to lend moral support. ‘Mondo’s shadow takes up almost half the room’s east wall.

John Ziegler, who is understandably quite keyed up, spends some of the pre-Dateline time standing around with an extremely pretty News-department intern named Kyra, watching the MSNBC exchange with half an eye while doing his trademark stress-relieving thing of holding two golf balls and trying to align the dimples so that one ball stays balanced atop the other. He is wearing a horizontally striped green-and-white golf shirt, neatly pressed black shorts, and gleaming New Balance sneakers. He keeps saying that he cannot believe they’re even giving Simpson air time. No one points out that his shock seems a bit naive given the business realities of network TV news, realities about which John Ziegler is normally very savvy and cynical. Kyra does venture to observe, quietly, that the Simpson thing draws even bigger ratings than today’s Scott Peterson, who—

“Don’t even compare the two,” Mr. Z. cuts her off. “O.J.’s just in his own world in terms of arrogance.”

The designated JZS intern, meanwhile, is at the prep room’s John & Ken Show computer, working (in Vince’s stead) on a comic review feature called “What Have We Learned This Week?,” which is normally a Friday standard but which there may or may not be time for tonight. At 7:45 p.m. it is still 90° out, and smoggy. The windows’ light makes peoplelook greenish in the areas where the room’s fluorescents are low. A large spread of takeout chicken sits uneaten and expensively congealing. Mr. Z.’s intern spends nearly an hour composing a mock poem to Ms. Amber Frey, the mistress to whom Scott Peterson evidently read romantic verse over the phone. The poem’s final version, which is “Roses are red / Violets are blue / If I find out you’re pregnant / I’ll drown your ass too,” takes such a long time because of confusions about the right conjugation of “to drown.”

“And to top it off,” Mr. Z. is telling Kyra as her smile becomes brittle and she starts trying to edge away, “to top it off, he leaves Nicole’s body in a place where the most likely people to find it are his children. It’s just a fluke that couple found her. I don’t know if you’ve ever walked by there, but it’s really dark at night, and they were in a, like [gesturing, one golf ball in each hand], cave formation out at the front.”

Sure enough, Dateline runs the anti-Atkins story first. For reasons involving laser printers and a special editing room off the on-air news cubicle, there’s suddenly a lot of running back and forth.

In Airmix, ‘Mondo is eating Koo Koo Roo’s chicken while watching Punk’d, an MTV show where friends of young celebrities collude with the producers to make the celebrities think they’re in terrible legal trouble. ‘Mondo is very careful about eating anywhere near the mixing board. It’s always around 60° in this room. On the board’s channel 6 and the overhead speakers, Phil Hendrie is pretending to mediate between apoplectic callers and a man who’s filing sexual-harassment charges against female co-workers who’ve gotten breast implants. For unknown reasons, a waist-high pile of disconnected computer keyboards has appeared in the Airmix room’s north corner, just across the wall from KFI’s Imaging studio, whose door is always double-locked.

It is only right that John Ziegler gets the spot directly in front of the prep room’s TV, with everyone else’s office chairs sort of fanned out to either side behind him. Seated back on his tailbone with his legs out and ankles crossed, Mr. Z. is able simultaneously to watch Dateline’s are-you-in-danger-at-luxury-hotels segment, to hear and help rearrange Vince’s cuts from the MSNBC exchange, and to highlight those parts of the O.J.–Katie Couric transcript that he wants to make absolutely sure to have Vince load from TiVo into Prophet when the greedy bastards at Dateline finally air the interview. It must be said, too, that Vince is an impressive surprise as a producer. He’s a veritable blur of all-business competence and technical savvy. There are none of Emiliano’s stoic shrugs, sotto wisecracks, or passive-aggressive languor. Nor, tonight, is Vince’s own slackerish stoner persona anywhere in view. It is the same type of change as when you put a fish back in the water and it seems to turn electric in your hand. Watching Vince and the host work so well as a team induces the night’s first strange premonitory jolt: Emiliano’s days are numbered.

The broadcast studio is strange when no one’s in here. Through the soundproof window, ‘Mondo’s head looks small and far away as he inclines over the spot log. It seems like a lonely, cloistered place in which to be passionate about the world. Mr. Z.’s padded host chair is old and lists slightly to port; it’s the same chair that John Kobylt sits in, and morning drive’s Bill Handel, and maybe even Dr. Laura back in the day. The studio wastebaskets have been emptied, but the banana scent still lingers. It might simply be that John and/or Ken eats a lot of bananas during afternoon drive. All the studio’s monitors are on, though none is tuned to NBC. On the Fox News monitor up over the digital clock, Sean Hannity and Susan Estrich are rerunning the Iowa Caucuses clip of Howard Dean screaming at the start of his concession speech. They play the scream over and over. Ms. Estrich is evidently filling in on Hannity and Colmes. “They have hatred for George W. Bush, but they don’t have ideas,” Sean Hannity says. “Where are the ideas on the left? Where is the thinking liberal?” Susan Estrich says, “I don’t know. I don’t have a full-time job on TV, so I can’t tell you.”

All multi-tasking ends when Dateline, after two teases and an extra-long spot break, finally commences the interview segment. It is Katie Couric and O.J. Simpson and Simpson’s attorney in a living room that may or may not be real. One tends to forget how unusually, screen-fillingly large O.J.’s head is. Mr. Ziegler is now angled forward with his elbows on his knees and his fingers steepled just under his nose. Although he does, every so often, let loose with a “Katie Couric sucks!” or “Katie Couric should be fucking shot!,” for the most part a person seated on the host’s far flank has to watch his upper face—his right eye’s and nostril’s dilations—to discern when Mr. Z.’s reacting strongly or thinking about how he’ll respond to some specific bit of Simpson’s “sociopathic BS” when it’s his turn to talk.

It’s odd: if you’ve spent some time watching Mr. Z. perform in the studio, you can predict just what he’ll look like, how his head and arms will move and eyes fill with life as he says certain things that it’s all but sure he’ll say on-air tonight, such as “I have some very, very strong opinions about how this interview was conducted,” and “Katie Couric is a disgrace to journalism everywhere,” and that O.J.’s self-presentation was “delusional and arrogant beyond all belief,” and that the original trial jury was “a collection of absolute nimrods,” and that to believe in Simpson’s innocence, as Ms. Couric says a poll shows some 70 percent of African-Americans still do, “you have to be either crazy, deluded, or stupid—there are no other explanations.”

To be fair, though, there truly are some dubious, unsettling things about the Dateline interview, such as for instance that NBC has acceded to O.J. Simpson’s “no editing” condition for appearing, which used to be an utter taboo for serious news organizations. Or that O.J. gets to sit there looking cheery and unguarded even though he has his lawyer almost in his lap; or that most of Katie Couric’s questions turn out to be Larry King—size fluffballs; or that O.J. Simpson responds to one of her few substantive questions—about 1994’s eerie, slow-motion Bronco chase and its bearing on how O.J.’s case is still perceived—by harping on the fact that the chase “never ever, in three trials that I had, it never came up,” as if that had anything to do with whatever his behavior in the Bronco really signified (and at which non-answer, and Ms. Couric’s failure to press or follow up, Mr. Z. moans and smears his hand up and down over his face). Or that O.J.’s cheerful expression never changes when Katie Couric, leaning forward and speaking with a delicacy that’s either decent or obscene, inquires whether his children ever ask him about the crime. And when someone in the arc of chairs around John Ziegler says, almost to himself, that the one pure thing to hope for here is that Simpson’s kids believe he’s innocent, Mr. Z. gives a snort of reply and states, very flatly, “They know, and he knows they know, that he did it.” To which, in KFI’s prep room, the best response would probably be compassion, empathy. Because one can almost feel it: what a bleak and merciless world this host lives in—believes, nay, knows for an absolute fact he lives in. I’ll take doubt.

By Gene Weingarten — The Washington Post, 2009

The defendant was an immense man, well over 300 pounds, but in the gravity of his sorrow and shame he seemed larger still. He hunched forward in the sturdy wooden armchair that barely contained him, sobbing softly into tissue after tissue, a leg bouncing nervously under the table. In the first pew of spectators sat his wife, looking stricken, absently twisting her wedding band. The room was a sepulcher. Witnesses spoke softly of events so painful that many lost their composure. When a hospital emergency room nurse described how the defendant had behaved after the police first brought him in, she wept. He was virtually catatonic, she remembered, his eyes shut tight, rocking back and forth, locked away in some unfathomable private torment. He would not speak at all for the longest time, not until the nurse sank down beside him and held his hand. It was only then that the patient began to open up, and what he said was that he didn’t want any sedation, that he didn’t deserve a respite from pain, that he wanted to feel it all, and then to die.

The charge in the courtroom was manslaughter, brought by the Commonwealth of Virginia. No significant facts were in dispute. Miles Harrison, 49, was an amiable person, a diligent businessman and a doting, conscientious father until the day last summer — beset by problems at work, making call after call on his cellphone — he forgot to drop his son, Chase, at day care. The toddler slowly sweltered to death, strapped into a car seat for nearly nine hours in an office parking lot in Herndon in the blistering heat of July.

It was an inexplicable, inexcusable mistake, but was it a crime? That was the question for a judge to decide.

At one point, during a recess, Harrison rose unsteadily to his feet, turned to leave the courtroom and saw, as if for the first time, that there were people witnessing his disgrace. The big man’s eyes lowered. He swayed a little until someone steadied him, and then he gasped out in a keening falsetto: “My poor baby!”

A group of middle-schoolers filed into the room for a scheduled class trip to the courthouse. The teacher clearly hadn’t expected this; within a few minutes, the wide-eyed kids were hustled back out.

The trial would last three days. Sitting through it, side by side in the rear of the courtroom, were two women who had traveled hours to get there. Unlike almost everyone else on the spectator benches, they were not relatives or co-workers or close friends of the accused.

“. . . the lower portion of the body was red to red-purple. . .”

As the most excruciating of the evidence came out, from the medical examiner, the women in the back drew closer together, leaning in to each other.

“ . . . a green discoloration of the abdomen . . . autolysis of the organs . . . what we call skin slippage . . . the core body temperature reaches 108 degrees when death ensues.”

Mary — the older, shorter one — trembled. Lyn — the younger, taller one with the long, strawberry-blond hair — gathered her in, one arm around the shoulder, the other across their bodies, holding hands.

When the trial ended, Lyn Balfour and Mary Parks left quietly, drawing no attention to themselves. They hadn’t wanted to be there, but they’d felt a duty, both to the defendant and, in a much more complicated way, to themselves.

It was unusual, to say the least: three people together in one place, sharing the same heartbreaking history. All three had accidentally killed their babies in the identical, incomprehensible, modern way.

***

“Death by hyperthermia” is the official designation. When it happens to young children, the facts are often the same: An otherwise loving and attentive parent one day gets busy, or distracted, or upset, or confused by a change in his or her daily routine, and just… forgets a child is in the car. It happens that way somewhere in the United States 15 to 25 times a year, parceled out through the spring, summer and early fall. The season is almost upon us.

Two decades ago, this was relatively rare. But in the early 1990s, car-safety experts declared that passenger-side front airbags could kill children, and they recommended that child seats be moved to the back of the car; then, for even more safety for the very young, that the baby seats be pivoted to face the rear. If few foresaw the tragic consequence of the lessened visibility of the child . . . well, who can blame them? What kind of person forgets a baby?

The wealthy do, it turns out. And the poor, and the middle class. Parents of all ages and ethnicities do it. Mothers are just as likely to do it as fathers. It happens to the chronically absent-minded and to the fanatically organized, to the college-educated and to the marginally literate. In the last 10 years, it has happened to a dentist. A postal clerk. A social worker. A police officer. An accountant. A soldier. A paralegal. An electrician. A Protestant clergyman. A rabbinical student. A nurse. A construction worker. An assistant principal. It happened to a mental health counselor, a college professor and a pizza chef. It happened to a pediatrician. It happened to a rocket scientist.

Last year it happened three times in one day, the worst day so far in the worst year so far in a phenomenon that gives no sign of abating.

The facts in each case differ a little, but always there is the terrible moment when the parent realizes what he or she has done, often through a phone call from a spouse or caregiver. This is followed by a frantic sprint to the car. What awaits there is the worst thing in the world.

Each instance has its own macabre signature. One father had parked his car next to the grounds of a county fair; as he discovered his son’s body, a calliope tootled merrily beside him. Another man, wanting to end things quickly, tried to wrestle a gun from a police officer at the scene. Several people — including Mary Parks of Blacksburg — have driven from their workplace to the day-care center to pick up the child they’d thought they’d dropped off, never noticing the corpse in the back seat.

Then there is the Chattanooga, Tenn., business executive who must live with this: His motion-detector car alarm went off, three separate times, out there in the broiling sun. But when he looked out, he couldn’t see anyone tampering with the car. So he remotely deactivated the alarm and went calmly back to work.

***

There may be no act of human failing that more fundamentally challenges our society’s views about crime, punishment, justice and mercy. According to statistics compiled by a national childs’ safety advocacy group, in about 40 percent of cases authorities examine the evidence, determine that the child’s death was a terrible accident — a mistake of memory that delivers a lifelong sentence of guilt far greater than any a judge or jury could mete out — and file no charges. In the other 60 percent of the cases, parsing essentially identical facts and applying them to essentially identical laws, authorities decide that the negligence was so great and the injury so grievous that it must be called a felony, and it must be aggressively pursued.

As it happens, just five days before Miles Harrison forgot his toddler son in the parking lot of the Herndon corporate-relocation business where he worked, a similar event had occurred a few hundred miles southeast. After a long shift at work, a Portsmouth, Va., sanitation department electrician named Andrew Culpepper picked up his toddler son from his parents, drove home, went into the house and then fell asleep, forgetting he’d had the boy in the car, leaving him to bake to death outside his home.

Harrison was charged with a crime. Culpepper was not. In each case, the decision fell to one person.

With Harrison, it was Ray Morrogh, the Fairfax commonwealth’s attorney. In an interview a few days after he brought the charge of involuntary manslaughter, Morrogh explained why.

“There is a lot to be said for reaffirming people’s obligations to protect their children,” he said. “When you have children, you have responsibilities. I am very strong in the defense of children’s safety.”

Morrogh has two kids himself, ages 12 and 14. He was asked if he could imagine this ever having happened to him. The question seemed to take him aback. He went on to another subject, and then, 10 minutes later, made up his mind:

“I have to say no, it couldn’t have happened to me. I am a watchful father.”

In Portsmouth, the decision not to charge Culpepper, 40, was made by Commonwealth’s Attorney Earle Mobley. As tragic as the child’s death was, Mobley says, a police investigation showed that there was no crime because there was no intent; Culpepper wasn’t callously gambling with the child’s life — he had forgotten the child was there.

“The easy thing in a case like this is to dump it on a jury, but that is not the right thing to do,” Mobley says. A prosecutor’s responsibility, he says, is to achieve justice, not to settle some sort of score.

“I’m not pretty sure I made the right decision,” he says. “I’m positive I made the right decision.”

There may be no clear right or wrong in deciding how to handle cases such as these; in each case, a public servant is trying to do his best with a Solomonic dilemma. But public servants are also human beings, and they will inevitably bring to their judgment the full weight of that complicated fact.

“You know, it’s interesting we’re talking today,” Mobley says.

He has five children. Today, he says, is the birthday of his sixth.

“She died of leukemia in 1993. She was almost 3.”

Mobley pauses. He doesn’t want to create the wrong impression.

He made the decision on the law, he says, “but I also have some idea what it feels like, what it does to you, when you lose a child.”

So, after his son’s death, Andrew Culpepper was sent home to try to live the remainder of his life with what he had done. After his son’s death, Miles Harrison was charged with a felony. His mug shot was in the newspapers and on TV, with the haunted, hunted, naked-eyed look these parents always have, up against the wall. He hired an expensive lawyer. Over months, both sides developed their cases. Witnesses were assembled and interviewed. Efforts at a plea bargain failed. The trial began.

The court heard how Harrison and his wife had been a late-40s childless couple desperately wanting to become parents, and how they’d made three visits to Moscow, setting out each time on a grueling 10-hour railroad trip to the Russian hinterlands to find and adopt their 18-month-old son from an orphanage bed he’d seldom been allowed to leave. Harrison’s next-door neighbor testified how she’d watched the new father giddily frolic on the lawn with his son. Harrison’s sister testified how she had worked with her brother and sister-in-law for weeks to find the ideal day-care situation for the boy, who would need special attention to recover from the effects of his painfully austere beginnings.

From the witness stand, Harrison’s mother defiantly declared that Miles had been a fine son and a perfect, loving father. Distraught but composed, Harrison’s wife, Carol, described the phone call that her husband had made to her right after he’d discovered what he’d done, the phone call she’d fielded on a bus coming home from work. It was, she said, unintelligible screaming.

In the end, Fairfax County Circuit Court Judge R. Terence Ney found Miles Harrison not guilty. There was no crime, he said, citing the identical legal reasons Earle Mobley had cited for not charging Andrew Culpepper in the first place.

At the verdict, Harrison gasped, sobbed, then tried to stand, but the man had nothing left. His legs buckled, and he crashed pathetically to his knees.

***

So, if it’s not manslaughter, what is it? An accident?

“No, that’s an imperfect word.”

This is Mark Warschauer, an internationally acclaimed expert in language learning and technology, professor of education at the University of California at Irvine.

“The word ‘accident’ makes it sound like it can’t be prevented,” Warschauer says, “but ‘incident’ makes it sound trivial. And it is not trivial.”

Warschauer is a Fulbright scholar, specializing in the use of laptops to spread literacy to children. In the summer of 2003, he returned to his office from lunch to find a crowd surrounding a car in the parking lot. Police had smashed the window open with a crowbar. Only as he got closer did Warschauer realize it was his car. That was his first clue that he’d forgotten to drop his 10-month-old son, Mikey, at day care that morning. Mikey was dead.

Warschauer wasn’t charged with a crime, but for months afterward he contemplated suicide. Gradually, he says, the urge subsided, if not the grief and guilt.

“We lack a term for what this is,” Warschauer says. And also, he says, we need an understanding of why it happens to the people it happens to.

***

David Diamond is picking at his breakfast at a Washington hotel, trying to explain.

“Memory is a machine,” he says, “and it is not flawless. Our conscious mind prioritizes things by importance, but on a cellular level, our memory does not. If you’re capable of forgetting your cellphone, you are potentially capable of forgetting your child.”

Diamond is a professor of molecular physiology at the University of South Florida and a consultant to the veterans hospital in Tampa. He’s here for a national science conference to give a speech about his research, which involves the intersection of emotion, stress and memory. What he’s found is that under some circumstances, the most sophisticated part of our thought-processing center can be held hostage to a competing memory system, a primitive portion of the brain that is — by a design as old as the dinosaur’s — inattentive, pigheaded, nonanalytical, stupid.

Diamond is the memory expert with a lousy memory, the one who recently realized, while driving to the mall, that his infant granddaughter was asleep in the back of the car. He remembered only because his wife, sitting beside him, mentioned the baby. He understands what could have happened had he been alone with the child. Almost worse, he understands exactly why.

The human brain, he says, is a magnificent but jury-rigged device in which newer and more sophisticated structures sit atop a junk heap of prototype brains still used by lower species. At the top of the device are the smartest and most nimble parts: the prefrontal cortex, which thinks and analyzes, and the hippocampus, which makes and holds on to our immediate memories. At the bottom is the basal ganglia, nearly identical to the brains of lizards, controlling voluntary but barely conscious actions.

Diamond says that in situations involving familiar, routine motor skills, the human animal presses the basal ganglia into service as a sort of auxiliary autopilot. When our prefrontal cortex and hippocampus are planning our day on the way to work, the ignorant but efficient basal ganglia is operating the car; that’s why you’ll sometimes find yourself having driven from point A to point B without a clear recollection of the route you took, the turns you made or the scenery you saw.

Ordinarily, says Diamond, this delegation of duty “works beautifully, like a symphony. But sometimes, it turns into the ‘1812 Overture.’ The cannons take over and overwhelm.”

By experimentally exposing rats to the presence of cats, and then recording electrochemical changes in the rodents’ brains, Diamond has found that stress — either sudden or chronic — can weaken the brain’s higher-functioning centers, making them more susceptible to bullying from the basal ganglia. He’s seen the same sort of thing play out in cases he’s followed involving infant deaths in cars.

“The quality of prior parental care seems to be irrelevant,” he said. “The important factors that keep showing up involve a combination of stress, emotion, lack of sleep and change in routine, where the basal ganglia is trying to do what it’s supposed to do, and the conscious mind is too weakened to resist. What happens is that the memory circuits in a vulnerable hippocampus literally get overwritten, like with a computer program. Unless the memory circuit is rebooted — such as if the child cries, or, you know, if the wife mentions the child in the back — it can entirely disappear.”

Diamond stops.

“There is a case in Virginia where this is exactly what happened, the whole set of stress factors. I was consulted on it a couple of years ago. It was a woman named, ah . . .”

He puts down his fork, searches the ceiling, the wall, the floor, then shakes his head. He’s been stressing over his conference speech, he says, and his memory retrieval is shot. He can’t summon the name.

Lyn Balfour?

“Yeah, Lyn Balfour! The perfect storm.”

***

It’s mid-October. Lyn Balfour is on her cellphone, ordering a replacement strap for a bouncy seat for the new baby and simultaneously trying to arrange for an emergency sitter, because she has to get to the fertility clinic, pronto, because she just got lab results back, and she’s ovulating, and her husband’s in Iraq, and she wants to get artificially inseminated with his sperm, like right now, but, crap, the sitter is busy, so she grabs the kid and the keys and the diaper bag and is out the door and in the car and gone. But now the baby is fussing, so she’s reaching back to give him a bottle of juice, one eye on him and the other on a seemingly endless series of hairpin turns that she negotiates adroitly.

“Actually,” she laughs, “I’m getting better about not doing too much at once. I’ve been simplifying my life a lot.”

Raelyn Balfour is what is commonly called a type-A personality. She is the first to admit that her temperament contributed to the death of her son, Bryce, two years ago. It happened on March 30, 2007, the day she accidentally left the 9-month-old in the parking lot of the Charlottesville judge advocate general’s office, where she worked as a transportation administrator. The high temperature that day was only in the 60s, but the biometrics and thermodynamics of babies and cars combine mercilessly: Young children have lousy thermostats, and heat builds quickly in a closed vehicle in the sun. The temperature in Balfour’s car that day topped 110 degrees.

There’s a dismayingly cartoonish expression for what happened to Lyn Balfour on March 30, 2007. British psychologist James Reason coined the term the “Swiss Cheese Model” in 1990 to explain through analogy why catastrophic failures can occur in organizations despite multiple layers of defense. Reason likens the layers to slices of Swiss cheese, piled upon each other, five or six deep. The holes represent small, potentially insignificant weaknesses. Things will totally collapse only rarely, he says, but when they do, it is by coincidence — when all the holes happen to align so that there is a breach through the entire system.

On the day Balfour forgot Bryce in the car, she had been up much of the night, first babysitting for a friend who had to take her dog to an emergency vet clinic, then caring for Bryce, who was cranky with a cold. Because the baby was also tired, he uncharacteristically dozed in the car, so he made no noise. Because Balfour was planning to bring Bryce’s usual car seat to the fire station to be professionally installed, Bryce was positioned in a different car seat that day, not behind the passenger but behind the driver, and was thus not visible in the rear-view mirror. Because the family’s second car was on loan to a relative, Balfour drove her husband to work that day, meaning the diaper bag was in the back, not on the passenger seat, as usual, where she could see it. Because of a phone conversation with a young relative in trouble, and another with her boss about a crisis at work, Balfour spent most of the trip on her cell, stressed, solving other people’s problems. Because the babysitter had a new phone, it didn’t yet contain Balfour’s office phone number, only her cell number, meaning that when the sitter phoned to wonder why Balfour hadn’t dropped Bryce off that morning, it rang unheard in Balfour’s pocketbook.

The holes, all of them, aligned.

There is no consistent character profile of the parent who does this to his or her child. The 13 who were interviewed for this story include the introverted and extroverted; the sweet, the sullen, the stoic and the terribly fragile. None of those descriptions exactly fits Lyn Balfour, a 37-year-old Army reservist who has served in combat zones and who seems to remain — at least on the subject of the death of her son — in battle.

“I don’t feel I need to forgive myself,” she says plainly, “because what I did was not intentional.”

Balfour is tall and stands taller, moving with a purposeful, swinging stride. She’s got a weak chin but a strong mouth that she uses without much editing. She’s funny and brassy and in your face, the sort of person you either like or don’t like, right away.

It had been Balfour’s idea to go to the trial of Miles Harrison, and it was she who walked up to Harrison in the hallway during a break, pushed past a crowd and threw her arms around his neck, pulling him close. For almost a full minute, she whispered in his ear. His eyes grew wider, and then he sobbed into her shoulder like a baby. What she had told him was who she was and that she knows he’d been a good, loving father, and he must not be ashamed.

Balfour grew up medium-poor in Michigan. There was a man she’d been told was her father and a close family friend who, she later learned, was actually her father. Her two sets of grandparents wound up divorcing each other, then switching partners. There was alcoholism, divorce, a battle for custody. When Balfour turned 18, she was ready for the discipline of the Army.

She served in Bosnia and twice in Iraq, where she specialized in intelligence analysis and construction management, and where she discovered a skill at juggling a dozen things at once. She won a Bronze Star for managing $47 million in projects without mislaying a penny. She got married, had a son, divorced, met Jarrett Balfour and within a month decided this handsome, younger man would be her husband. Eighteen months later, he was. Bryce was their first child together. Braiden, conceived with Jarrett’s sperm when he was in Iraq, is their second. Today, in the same way, they’re trying for a third.

Balfour has stopped at the fertility clinic for her procedure, and she’s now driving to the JAG school, to demonstrate where and how her son’s death happened. Down the road to the right is where she dropped Jarrett off at work, which was not customary, and which she theorizes put a subconscious check mark in her brain: Delivery made. Now she’s pointing out the house of the babysitter she’d driven obliviously past as she talked to her boss about a scheduling snafu and to her nephew about helping to pay his gambling debts. And here is the parking lot of the JAG school, on the University of Virginia campus. She’s pulling into the same spot she was parked in that day, the place where Bryce died.

“It was like this, except these two spots next to us were empty,” she notes blandly as she gets out of the car, gathers her keys and leans in to get the diaper bag.

There is an almost pugnacious matter-of-factness about Lyn Balfour that can seem disconcerting, particularly if you have a preconception about how a person in her circumstances is supposed to face the world.

You might expect, for example, that she has gotten another car. But this black Honda Pilot with the pink Tinkerbell steering wheel cover is the same car Bryce died in, just inches from where Balfour is bending over Braiden to unstrap him.

“It didn’t make financial sense to get a new car,” she says.

Balfour’s eyes are impassive. Her attitude is clear:

You got a problem with that?

***

Not all cases of infant hyperthermia in cars are like the ones this article is about: simple if bewildering lapses of memory by an otherwise apparently good parent. In other types of cases, there is a history of prior neglect, or evidence of substance abuse. Sometimes, the parent knowingly left the child in the car, despite the obvious peril. In one particularly egregious instance, a mother used her locked car as an inexpensive substitute for day care. When hyperthermia deaths are treated as crimes, these are the ones that tend to result in prison sentences.

Cases like Lyn Balfour’s, when prosecuted, typically end in some sort of compromise: a plea to a reduced charge, sometimes with probation and a suspended sentence, sometimes with community service. Going all the way to trial is a relative rarity.

What happened to Balfour was even rarer. She was charged not with manslaughter, but with second-degree murder, carrying a possible prison sentence of up to 40 years. And as a condition of remaining free on bond, the court prohibited her from being alone with any minors, including her own teenage son.

So Balfour hired John Zwerling, a top-gun criminal defense lawyer from Alexandria. That meant that Jarrett Balfour, an employee of a civilian military contractor, had no choice but to take an assignment in Iraq. The extra combat pay would be needed for legal expenses. Lyn Balfour would have to face this alone.

That is when she began to move past grief and guilt and paralyzing self-doubt to a very specific, very focused anger.

***

John Zwerling presents a passable version of Nero Wolfe, Rex Stout’s portly, eccentric genius hero of detective fiction. Zwerling’s law offices are in a handsome Old Town townhouse with dark walnut molding and dark wooden shutters. The boss is the guy with the Santa beard sitting in the chair with a hole in the leather, in jeans and a shirt with a big stain, the front buttons laboring mightily to do their job.

Zwerling’s first task, he says, was to make the case that second-degree murder was a preposterous charge in a case lacking even the faintest whisper of intent. That, he did. After a preliminary hearing, the charge was reduced to involuntary manslaughter. Zwerling’s second and more daunting job was to craft a defense for a case that was being prosecuted with what at times seemed like theatrical zeal.

Here is how Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Elizabeth Killeen would sum it up before the jury: “This little boy’s life did not have to end this way, on a hospital gurney. Deceased. Dead. His life squandered, and gone forever.”

In the end, Zwerling had one key decision to make. In criminal cases, jurors want to hear from the defendant. Zwerling liked and respected Balfour, but should he put her on the stand?

“Have you met her?” he asks.

Yes.

“Then you’ve seen that mental girdle she puts on, the protective armor against the world, how she closes up and becomes a soldier. It helps her survive, but it can seem off-putting if you’re someone who wants to see how crushed she is.” Zwerling decided not to risk it.

“I wound up putting her on the stand in a different way,” he says, “so people could see the real Lyn — vulnerable, with no guile, no posturing.”

What Zwerling did was play two audiotapes for the jury. One was Balfour’s interrogation by police in the hospital about an hour after Bryce’s death; her answers are immeasurably sad, almost unintelligible, half sob, half whisper: “I killed my baby,” she says tremulously. “Oh, God, I’m so sorry.”

The second tape was a call to 911 made by a passerby, in those first few seconds after Balfour discovered the body and beseeched a stranger to summon help.

Zwerling swivels to his computer, punches up an audio file.

“Want to hear it?”

***

Balfour is reenacting her movements from that day after work. She walks from her cubicle in room 153A of the JAG school, out to the front of the building. By mid-afternoon she had finally checked her cell and discovered she’d missed an early morning call from her babysitter. She called back, but got only voice mail. It didn’t worry her. She and the babysitter were friends, and they talked often about all sorts of things. Balfour left a message asking for a callback.

It came when she was standing where she is now, on a spacious stone patio in front of the JAG school, heading toward the parking lot. As it happens, there is a Civil War-era cannon that is aimed, with unsettling irony, exactly where she stands.

The babysitter asked Balfour where Bryce was. Balfour said: “What do you mean? He’s with you.”

It is 60 feet to the end of the patio, then a stairwell with 11 steps down, then two steps across, then a second stairwell, 12 steps down, one more off the curb and then a 30-foot sprint to the car. Balfour estimates the whole thing took half a minute or less. She knew it was too late when, through the window, she saw Bryce’s limp hand, and then his face, unmarked but lifeless and shiny, Balfour says, “like a porcelain doll.”

It was seconds later that the passerby called 911.

***

The tape is unendurable. Mostly, you hear a woman’s voice, tense but precise, explaining to a police dispatcher what she is seeing. Initially, there’s nothing in the background. Then Balfour howls at the top of her lungs, “OH, MY GOD, NOOOO!”

Then, for a few seconds, nothing.

Then a deafening shriek: “NO, NO, PLEASE, NO!!!”

Three more seconds, then:

“PLEASE, GOD, NO, PLEASE!!!”

What is happening is that Balfour is administering CPR. At that moment, she recalls, she felt like two people occupying one body: Lyn, the crisply efficient certified combat lifesaver, and Lyn, the incompetent mother who would never again know happiness. Breathe, compress, breathe, compress. Each time that she came up for air, she lost it. Then, back to the patient.

After hearing this tape, the jury deliberated for all of 90 minutes, including time for lunch. The not-guilty verdict was unanimous.

***

“I didn’t feel this case should ever have been brought,” says juror Colin Rosse, a retired radio executive. “It may have been negligence, but it was an honest mistake.”

Jury foreman James Schlothauer, an inspections official for the county government, doesn’t fault the prosecution; Balfour’s case was complex, he says, and the facts needed an airing. But the facts, he says, also made the verdict a slam dunk. It was “a big doggone accident,” he says, that might have happened to anyone.

To anyone?

Schlothauer hesitates.

“Well, it happened to me.”

The results were not catastrophic, Schlothauer says, but the underlying malfunction was similar: Busy and stressed, he and his wife once got their responsibilities confused, and neither stopped at day care for their daughter at the end of the day.

“We both got home, and it was, ‘Wait, where’s Lily?’ ‘I thought you got her!’ ‘I thought you got her!’ “

What if that mix-up had happened at the beginning of the day?

“To anyone,” Schlothauer says.

***

There is no national clearinghouse for cases of infant hyperthermia, no government agency charged with data collection and oversight. The closest thing is in the basement office of a comfortable home in suburban Kansas City, Kan., where a former sales and marketing executive named Janette Fennell runs a nonprofit organization called Kids and Cars. Kids and Cars lobbies for increased car safety for children, and as such maintains one of the saddest databases in America.

Fennell is on a sofa, her bare feet tucked under her, leafing through files. Amber, her college intern, walks up and plops a fax of a new wire service story on the table. “Frontover,” Amber says. “Parking lot, North Carolina.”

There’s a grisly terminology to this business. “Backovers” happen when you look in the rearview mirror and fail to see the child behind the car, or never look at all. “Frontovers” occur almost exclusively with pickups and SUVs, where the driver sits high off the ground. There are “power window strangulations” and “cars put in motion by child” and, finally, “hyperthermia.”

In a collage on Fennell’s wall are snapshots of dozens of infants and toddlers, some proudly holding up fingers, as if saying, “I’m 2!” Or “I’m 3!” The photos, typically, are from their final birthdays.

Fennell has met or talked with many of the parents in the hyperthermia cases, and some now work with her organization. She doesn’t seek them out. They find her name, often late at night, sleeplessly searching the Web for some sign that there are others who have lived in the same hell and survived. There is a general misconception, Fennell says, about who these people are: “They tend to be the doting parents, the kind who buy baby locks and safety gates.” These cases, she says, are failures of memory, not of love.

Fennell has an expression that’s half smile, half wince. She uses it often.

“Some people think, ‘Okay, I can see forgetting a child for two minutes, but not eight hours.’ What they don’t understand is that the parent in his or her mind has dropped off the baby at day care and thinks the baby is happy and well taken care of. Once that’s in your brain, there is no reason to worry or check on the baby for the rest of the day.”

Fennell believes that prosecuting parents in this type of case is both cruel and pointless: It’s not as though the fear of a prison sentence is what will keep a parent from doing this.

The answer to the problem, Fennell believes, lies in improved car safety features and in increased public awareness that this can happen, that the results of a momentary lapse of memory can be horrifying.

What is the worst case she knows of?

“I don’t really like to . . .” she says.

She looks away. She won’t hold eye contact for this.

“The child pulled all her hair out before she died.”

For years, Fennell has been lobbying for a law requiring back-seat sensors in new cars, sensors that would sound an alarm if a child’s weight remained in the seat after the ignition is turned off. Last year, she almost succeeded. The 2008 Cameron Gulbransen Kids’ Transportation Safety Act — which requires safety improvements in power windows and in rear visibility, and protections against a child accidentally setting a car in motion — originally had a rear seat-sensor requirement, too. It never made the final bill; sponsors withdrew it, fearing they couldn’t get it past a powerful auto manufacturers’ lobby.

There are a few aftermarket products that alert a parent if a child remains in a car that has been turned off. These products are not huge sellers. They have likely run up against the same marketing problem that confronted three NASA engineers a few years ago.

In 2000, Chris Edwards, Terry Mack and Edward Modlin began to work on just such a product after one of their colleagues, Kevin Shelton, accidentally left his 9-month-old son to die in the parking lot of NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. The inventors patented a device with weight sensors and a keychain alarm. Based on aerospace technology, it was easy to use; it was relatively cheap, and it worked.

Janette Fennell had high hopes for this product: The dramatic narrative behind it, she felt, and the fact that it came from NASA, created a likelihood of widespread publicity and public acceptance.

That was five years ago. The device still isn’t on the shelves. The inventors could not find a commercial partner willing to manufacture it. One big problem was liability. If you made it, you could face enormous lawsuits if it malfunctioned and a child died. But another big problem was psychological: Marketing studies suggested it wouldn’t sell well.

The problem is this simple: People think this could never happen to them.

***

“I was that guy, before. I’d read the stories, and I’d go, ‘What were those parents thinking?’ “

Mikey Terry is a contractor from Maypearl, Tex., a big man with soft eyes. At the moment he realized what he’d done, he was in the cab of a truck and his 6-month-old daughter, Mika, was in a closed vehicle in the broiling Texas sun in a parking lot 40 miles away. So his frantic sprint to the car was conducted at 100 miles an hour in a 30-foot gooseneck trailer hauling thousands of pounds of lumber the size of telephone poles.

On that day in June 2005, Terry had been recently laid off, and he’d taken a day job building a wall in the auditorium of a Catholic church just outside of town. He’d remembered to drop his older daughter at day care, but as he was driving the baby to a different day care location, he got a call about a new permanent job. This really caught his attention. It was a fatal distraction.

Terry, 35, wasn’t charged with a crime. His punishment has been more subtle.

The Terrys are Southern Baptists. Before Mika’s death, Mikey Terry says, church used to be every Sunday, all day Sunday, morning Bible study through evening meal. He and his wife, Michele, don’t go much anymore. It’s too confusing, he says.

“I feel guilty about everyone in church talking about how blessed we all are. I don’t feel blessed anymore. I feel I have been wronged by God. And that I have wronged God. And I don’t know how to deal with that.”

Four years have passed, but he still won’t go near the Catholic church he’d been working at that day. As his daughter died outside, he was inside, building a wall on which would hang an enormous crucifix.

***

“This is a case of pure evil negligence of the worse kind . . . He deserves the death sentence.”

“I wonder if this was his way of telling his wife that he didn’t really want a kid.”

“He was too busy chasing after real estate commissions. This shows how morally corrupt people in real estate-related professions are.”

These were readers’ online comments to The Washington Post news article of July 10, 2008, reporting the circumstances of the death of Miles Harrison’s son. These comments were typical of many others, and they are typical of what happens again and again, year after year in community after community, when these cases arise. A substantial proportion of the public reacts not merely with anger, but with frothing vitriol.

Ed Hickling believes he knows why. Hickling is a clinical psychologist from Albany, N.Y., who has studied the effects of fatal auto accidents on the drivers who survive them. He says these people are often judged with disproportionate harshness by the public, even when it was clearly an accident, and even when it was indisputably not their fault.

Humans, Hickling said, have a fundamental need to create and maintain a narrative for their lives in which the universe is not implacable and heartless, that terrible things do not happen at random, and that catastrophe can be avoided if you are vigilant and responsible.

In hyperthermia cases, he believes, the parents are demonized for much the same reasons. “We are vulnerable, but we don’t want to be reminded of that. We want to believe that the world is understandable and controllable and unthreatening, that if we follow the rules, we’ll be okay. So, when this kind of thing happens to other people, we need to put them in a different category from us. We don’t want to resemble them, and the fact that we might is too terrifying to deal with. So, they have to be monsters.”

After Lyn Balfour’s acquittal, this comment appeared on the Charlottesville News Web site:

“If she had too many things on her mind then she should have kept her legs closed and not had any kids. They should lock her in a car during a hot day and see what happens.”

***

Lyn Balfour’s Ruckersville home is fragrant with spice candles and the faintly sweet feel of kitsch. Braiden boings happily in a baby bouncer, the same one Bryce had, and crawls on a patchwork comforter that had been Bryce’s, too. As Balfour is text-messaging Jarrett in Iraq, she’s checking out Braiden’s diaper, multitasking as always.

“People say I’m a strong woman,” Balfour says, “but I’m not. It’s just that when I grieve, I grieve alone . . .”

The pacifier pops out of Braiden’s mouth. Balfour rinses it, pops it back in.

“ . . . because deep down I feel I don’t have the right to grieve in front of others.”

Balfour says she has carefully crafted the face she shows the world.

“I would like to disappear, to move someplace where no one knows who I am and what I did. I would do that in a heartbeat, but I can’t. I have to say my name. I’m the lady who killed her child, and I have to be that lady because I promised Bryce.”

The promise, she says, came as she held her son’s body in the hospital. “I kissed him for the last time, and I told him how sorry I was, and I said I would do everything in my power to make sure this will never happen to another child.”

Balfour has done this in a way suited to her personality; she has become a modern, maternal version of the Ancient Mariner, from time to time brazenly bellying up to strangers in places such as Sam’s Club and starting a conversation about children, so she can tell them what she did to one of hers. An in-your-face cautionary tale.

Unlike most parents to whom this has happened, Balfour will talk to the media, anytime. She works with Kids and Cars, telling her story repeatedly. Her point is always consistent, always resolute, always tinged with a little anger, always a little self-serving, sometimes a bit abrasive: This can happen to anyone. This is a mistake, not a crime, and should not be prosecuted. Cars need safety devices to prevent this. She seldom seems in doubt or in particular anguish. No one sees her cry.

“The truth is,” she says, “the pain never gets less. It’s never dulled. I just put it away for a while, until I’m in private. “

Balfour doesn’t like to think about Bryce’s final ordeal. A kindly doctor once told her that her son probably didn’t suffer a great deal, and she clings to this resolutely. In her mind, Bryce died unafraid, surrounded by consoling angels. The deity Balfour believes in loves us unconditionally and takes a direct hand in our lives; this delivers comfort, but also doubt.

“When I was 16 in high school,” she says, “I was date-raped. I had an abortion. I never told anyone, not my friends and not my mother. As the abortion was happening, I prayed to God and asked Him to take the baby back, and give him back to me when I could take care of him.”

So . . .?

“So, I do wonder, sometimes . . .

Balfour wipes a tear.

“ . . . It’s there in the back of my mind, that what happened to me is punishment from God. I killed a child, and then I had one ripped away from me at the peak of my happiness.”

On the floor, Braiden is entranced by an Elmo doll.

“Sometimes,” Balfour says, “I wish I had died in childbirth with him . . .”

She’s weeping now. For the moment, there’s no soldier left.

“ . . . that way, Jarrett could have Braiden, and I could be with Bryce.”

***

Miles Harrison is in a Leesburg Starbucks, seated next to the condiment station, pulling napkin after napkin to dry his eyes.

“I hurt my wife so much,” he says, “and by the grace of whatever wonderful quality is within her, she has forgiven me. And that makes me feel even worse. Because I can’t forgive me.”

In the months after he was acquitted in the death of his son, Harrison’s public agony continued. His mug shot was back in the newspapers after the Russian Foreign Ministry officially protested his acquittal and threatened to halt the country’s adoption program with Americans. It was something of an international incident.

For months, Harrison declined to speak for this article, but in early February, he said he was ready.

“I pray for forgiveness from the Russian people,” he said. “There are good people in this country who deserve children, and there are children in Russia who need parents. Please don’t punish everyone for my mistake.”

Harrison is a Roman Catholic. Weeks after Chase’s death, he returned to his local church, where priest and parishioners left him to grieve in solitude. Afterward, the priest embraced him and whispered in his ear: “I will always be here for you.”

The church is St. Francis de Sales in Purcellville. The priest was Father Michael Kelly. On New Year’s Eve, on a windswept road after a heavy rain, as Father Michael stopped to move a tree that had fallen across the road, he was struck by another falling tree and killed.

Harrison doesn’t know what to make of this; nothing entirely holds together anymore, except, to his astonishment, his marriage.

In their home, Carol and Miles Harrison have kept Chase’s nursery exactly as it was, and the child’s photos are all over. “Sometimes we’ll look at a picture together,” Harrison says, “and I will see Carol cry. She tries not to let me see, but I see, and I feel such guilt and hurt.”

Harrison says he knows it is unlikely he and Carol will be allowed to adopt again.

He leans forward, his voice breaking into a sobbing falsetto, as it did in the courtroom at his worse moment of shame.

“I have cheated her out of being a mother.”

In Starbucks, heads turn.

“She would be the best mother in the world.”

***

The first time, someone answers the phone but doesn’t say anything. There is just the sound of a TV turned up way too loud, and after a little while, the phone clicks dead. A few days later, he answers, but the TV is not lowered. Call back later, he says. On the third day, he takes the call.

Are you doing okay?

“I don’t even know. Tryin’ to take it day by day.”

Andrew Culpepper’s voice is a flat monotone, like a man in a trance. His sentences are short and truncated. This is the sanitation department electrician in Portsmouth, the lucky one. He was the man who wasn’t criminally charged when Miles Harrison was. He never had to legally defend himself.

Are you alone now?

“Yeah. “

She left you?

“Yeah. She’s hurt and stuff. Dealing with it her way, I guess.”

Are you thankful you weren’t prosecuted?

No answer.

Andrew?

“Not for myself, for my parents. Doesn’t matter what they do to me. Nothing I don’t do to myself every day.”

Are you sure you’re okay?

“I try to take my mind off it. When I start thinking about it, I get like . . .”

Like what?

Silence for the longest time.

“Like this.”

***

As part of her plan to simplify her life, Lyn Balfour has quit her job. It’s going to get a little more complicated soon, because she’s pregnant again: The insemination that she had on that day in October was successful. The baby is due in July.

Balfour’s laywers petitioned the court to get the record of her prosecution expunged. Such a request is usually unopposed after an acquittal, in recognition that a legally innocent person has a right to start again with a legally clean slate. But in this case, Commonwealth’s Attorney Dave Chapman challenged it and, unusually, argued the relatively small legal battle himself.

Outside the courthouse, Chapman ex-plained: “It’s very rare to oppose expungement. But we are, because of the enormity of this case, because it is the sole public record of the death of a completely defenseless and helpless infant.”

After a half-day hearing, the judge ruled for the commonwealth, saying Balfour had failed to prove that she would suffer a “manifest injustice” if the court records remained unsealed.

Afterward, Balfour calmly answered questions from the news media, as always. She was unemotional, unapologetic, on message. She will consider an appeal. She will continue to speak out for greater public awareness of the dangers of leaving children alone in cars. She sounded, as always, just a little bit cold.

Jarrett Balfour finally made it home, after 18 months in Iraq, where his job was to analyze seized explosive devices made by insurgents and try to identify their technology and trace their origin. He extended his tour of duty twice, as the legal bills kept mounting. Jarrett is 30. He’s tall, lanky and strikingly handsome, with sandy hair brushed straight back. He looks like a man leaning into a strong wind.

Initially after he got home, Jarrett says, things were awkward, with “hiccups” in communication. He would make an innocuous statement about something Braiden was doing, and Lyn would overreact, as if he were second-guessing her parenting skills. It’s getting better, he says.

Braiden is 91/2 months old, exactly the age Bryce was when he died. Lyn has been having nightmares again.

Just before the tragedy, she had two dreams that seem to her, in retrospect, like foreboding. In one, she accidentally drowned Bryce; in the other, it was death by fire. Balfour believes these dreams were sent by God to help prepare her for what she was about to endure.

Recently she dreamed she lost control of Braiden’s stroller, and it rolled out into traffic. No, she doesn’t think it’s the same thing, happening again.

“I couldn’t take it again,” Jarrett says quietly.

So, there are tensions. They are working it out. Both of them say they are confident this marriage will last.

After Jarrett leaves for work, Lyn talks about how much the presence of Braiden has helped them heal. She considers her family blessed because they’ve been able to have other children:

“Can you imagine losing your only child and not having a hope of having another? Can you imagine that despair?”

That’s why, she says, she’s made a decision. She’s checked it out, and it would be legal. There would be no way for any authority to stop it because it would fall into the class of a private adoption. She’d need a sperm donor and an egg donor, because she wouldn’t want to use her own egg. That would make it too personal.

What is she saying, exactly?

Miles and Carol Harrison deserve another child, Balfour explains measuredly. They would be wonderful parents.

This is the woman you either like or don’t like, right away. She is brassy and strong-willed and, depending on your viewpoint, refreshingly open or abrasively forward. Above all, she is decisive.

Balfour says she’s made up her mind. If Miles and Carol Harrison are denied another adoption, if they exhaust all their options and are still without a baby, she will offer to carry one for them, as a gift.

Gene Weingarten is a staff writer for the Magazine. He can be reached at weingarten@washpost.com. Staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this article.

Ways to Help Prevent a Tragedy

Discussion: Fatal Distraction — Kids, Cars and Hyperthermia

By Albert Einstein — Albert Einstein, 1939/1941

Note

This text is from an address at Princeton Theological Seminary on May 19, 1939.

It presents with extreme clarity what are the different realms of religion (values) and science (facts) and also their connections. This cross-fertilization becomes problematic only when each realm wants to impose itself on the other or when a religion with an anthropomorphized God is meant to be behind any happening. This would eliminate personal responsibility and would install the priests of that religion as those more capable of deciding between truth and falsehood and so to guide the actions of everybody. The result would be to deprive religion of any value and to limit science in its search for truth.

During the last century, and part of the one before, it was widely held that there was an unreconcilable conflict between knowledge and belief. The opinion prevailed among advanced minds that it was time that belief should be replaced increasingly by knowledge; belief that did not itself rest on knowledge was superstition, and as such had to be opposed. According to this conception, the sole function of education was to open the way to thinking and knowing, and the school, as the outstanding organ for the people’s education, must serve that end exclusively.

One will probably find but rarely, if at all, the rationalistic standpoint expressed in such crass form; for any sensible man would see at once how one-sided is such a statement of the position. But it is just as well to state a thesis starkly and nakedly if one wants to clear up one’s mind as to its nature.

It is true that convictions can best be supported with experience and clear thinking. On this point one must agree unreservedly with the extreme rationalist. The weak point of his conception is, however, this, that those convictions which are necessary and determinant for our conduct and judgments cannot be found solely along this solid scientific way.

For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capable, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One, can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provide us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence.

But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgements. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly.

The highest principles for our aspirations and judgments are given to us in the Jewish-Christian religious tradition. It is a very high goal which, with our weak powers, we can reach only very inadequately, but which gives a sure foundation to our aspirations and valuations. If one were to take that goal out of its religious form and look merely at its purely human side, one might state it perhaps thus: free and responsible development of the individual, so that he may place his powers freely and gladly in the service of all mankind.

There is no room in this for the divinization of a nation, of a class, let alone of an individual. Are we not all children of one father, as it is said in religious language? Indeed, even the divinization of humanity, as an abstract totality, would be not in the spirit of that ideal. It is only to the individual that a soul is given. And the high destiny of the individual is to serve rather than to rule, or to impose himself in any other way.

If one looks at the substance rather than at the form, then one can take these words as expressing also the fundamental democratic position. The true democrat can worship his nation as little as can the man who is religious, in our sense of the term.

What, then, in all this, is the function of education and the school? They should help the young person to grow up such a spirit that these fundamental principles should be to him as the air which he breathes. Teaching alone cannot do that.

If one holds these high principles clearly before one’s eyes, and compares them with the life and spirit of our times, then it appears glaringly that civilized mankind finds itself at present in grave danger. In the totalitarian states it is the rulers themselves who strive actually to destroy that spirit of humanity. In less threatened parts it is nationalism and intolerance, as well as the oppression of the individuals by economic means, which threaten to choke these most precious traditions.

A realization of how great is the danger is spreading, however, among thinking people, and there is much search for means with which to meet the danger – means in the field of national and international politics, of legislation, or organization in general. Such efforts are, no doubt, greatly needed. Yet the ancients knew something which we seem to have forgotten. All means prove but a blunt instrument, if they have not behind them a living spirit. But if the longing for the achievement of the goal is powerfully alive within us, then shall we not lack the strength to find the means for reaching the goal and for translating it into deeds.

It would not be difficult to come to an agreement as to what we understand by science. Science is the century old endeavour to bring together by means of systematic thought the perceptible phenomena of this world into a through going an association as possible. To put if boldly, it is the attempt at the posterior reconstruction of existence by the process of conceptualization. But when asking myself what religion is I cannot think of the answer so easily. And even after finding an answer which may satisfy me at this particular moment, I still remain convinced that I can never under any circumstances bring together, even to a slight extent, the thoughts of all those who have given this question serious consideration.

At first, then, instead of asking what religion is I should prefer to ask what characterizes the aspirations of a person who gives me the impression of being religious: a person who is religiously enlightened appears to me to be one who has, to the best of his ability, liberated himself from the fetters of’ his selfish desires and ‘is preoccupied with thoughts, feelings, and aspirations, to which he clings because of their superpersonal value. It seems to me that what is important is the force of this superpersonal content and the depth of the conviction concerning its overpowering meaningfulness, regardless of whether any attempt is made to unite this content with a divine Being, for otherwise it would not be possible to count Buddha and Spinoza as religious personalities. Accordingly, a religious person is devout in the sense that he has no doubt of the significance and loftiness of those superpersonal objects and goals which neither require nor are capable of rational foundation. They exist with the same necessity and matter-of-factness as he himself. In this sense religion is the age-old endeavor of mankind, to become clearly and completely conscious of these values and goals and constantly to strengthen and extend their effect. If one conceives of religion and science according to these definitions then a conflict between them appears impossible. For science can only ascertain what is but not what should be, and outside of its domain value judgments of all kinds remain necessary. Religion, on the other hand, deals only with evaluations of human thought and action: it cannot justifiably speak of facts and relationships between facts. According to this interpretation the well-known conflicts between religion and science in the past must be ascribed to a misapprehension of the situation which has been described.

For example, a conflict arises when a religious community insists on the absolute truthfulness of all statements recorded in the Bible. This means an intervention on the part of religion into the sphere of science; this is where the struggle of the Church against the doctrines of Galileo and Darwin belongs. On the other hand, representatives of science have often made an attempt to arrive at fundamental judgments with respect to values and ends on the basis of scientific method, and in this way have set themselves in opposition to religion. These conflicts have all sprung from fatal errors.

Now, even though the realms of religion and science in themselves are clearly marked off from each other, nevertheless there exist between the two strong reciprocal relationships and dependencies. Though religion may be that which determines the goal, it has, nevertheless, learned from science, in the broadest sense, what means will contribute to the attainment of the goals it has set up. But science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

Though I have asserted above that in truth a legitimate conflict between religion and science cannot exist, I must nevertheless qualify this assertion once again on an essential point, with reference to the actual content of historical religions. This qualification has to do with the concept of God. During the youthful period of mankind’s spiritual evolution human fantasy created gods in man’s own image, who, by the operations of their will were supposed to determine, or at any rate to influence, the phenomenal world. Man sought to alter the disposition of these gods in his own favor by means of magic and prayer. The idea of God in the religions taught at present is a sublimation of that old concept of the gods. Its anthropomorphic character is shown, for instance, by the fact that men appeal to the Divine Being in prayers and plead for the fulfillment of their wishes.

Nobody, certainly, will deny that the idea of the existence of an omnipotent, just, and omnibeneficent personal God is able to accord man solace, help, and guidance; also, by virtue of its simplicity it is accessible to the most undeveloped mind. But, on the other hand, there are decisive weaknesses attached to this idea in itself, which have been painfully felt since the beginning of history. That is, if this being is omnipotent, then every occurrence, including every human action, every human thought, and every human feeling and aspiration is also His work; how is it possible to think of holding men responsible for their deeds and thoughts before such an almighty Being? In giving out punishment and rewards He would to a certain extent be passing judgment on Himself. How can this be combined with the goodness and righteousness ascribed to Him?

The main source of the present-day conflicts between the spheres of religion and of science lies in this concept of a personal God. It is the aim of science to establish general rules which determine the reciprocal connection of objects and events in time and space. For these rules, or laws of nature, absolutely general validity is required – not proven. It is mainly a program, and faith in the possibility of its accomplishment in principle is only founded on partial successes. But hardly anyone could be found who would deny these partial successes and ascribe them to human self-deception. The fact that on the basis of such laws we are able to predict the temporal behavior of phenomena in certain domains with great precision and certainty is deeply embedded in the consciousness of the modern man, even though he may have grasped very little of the contents of those laws. He need only consider that planetary courses within the solar system may be calculated in advance with great exactitude on the basis of a limited number of simple laws. In a similar way, though not with the same precision, it is possible to calculate in advance the mode of operation of an electric motor, a transmission system, or of a wireless apparatus, even when dealing with a novel development.

To be sure, when the number of factors coming into play in a phenomenological complex is too large, scientific method in most cases fails us. One need only think of the weather, in which case prediction even for a few days ahead is impossible. Nevertheless no one doubts that we are confronted with a causal connection whose causal components are in the main known to us. Occurrences in this domain are beyond the reach of exact prediction because of the variety of factors in operation, not because of any lack of order in nature.

We have penetrated far less deeply into the regularities obtaining within the realm of living things, but deeply enough nevertheless to sense at least the rule of fixed necessity. One need only think of the systematic order in heredity, and in the effect of poisons, as for instance alcohol, on the behavior of organic beings. What is still lacking here is a grasp of connections of profound generality, but not a knowledge of order in itself.

The more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events the firmer becomes his conviction that there is no room left by the side of this ordered regularity for causes of a different nature. For him neither the rule of human nor the rule of divine will exists as an independent cause of natural events. To be sure, the doctrine of a personal God interfering with natural events could never be refuted in the real sense, by science, for this doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge has not yet been able to set foot.

But I am persuaded that such behavior on the part of the representatives of religion would not only be unworthy but also fatal. For a doctrine which is able to maintain itself not in clear light but only in the dark, will of necessity lose its effect on mankind, with incalculable harm to human progress. In their struggle for the ethical good, teachers of religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal God, that is, give up that source of fear and hope which in the past placed such vast power in the hands of priests. In their labors they will have to avail themselves of those forces which are capable of cultivating the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in humanity itself. This is, to be sure, a more difficult but an incomparably more worthy task. After religious teachers accomplish the refining process indicated they will surely recognize with joy that true religion has been ennobled and made more profound by scientific knowledge.

If it is one of the goals of religion to liberate mankind as far as possible from the bondage of egocentric cravings, desires, and fears, scientific reasoning can aid religion in yet another sense. Although it is true that it is the goal of science to discover rules which permit the association and foretelling of facts, this is not its only aim. It also seeks to reduce the connections discovered to the smallest possible number of mutually independent conceptual elements. It is in this striving after the rational unification of the manifold that it encounters its greatest successes, even though it is precisely this attempt which causes it to run the greatest risk of falling a prey to illusions. But whoever has undergone the intense experience of successful advances made in this domain is moved by profound reverence for the rationality made manifest in existence. By way of the understanding he achieves a far-reaching emancipation from the shackles of personal hopes and desires, and thereby attains that humble attitude of mind toward the grandeur of reason incarnate in existence, and which, in its profoundest depths, is inaccessible to man. This attitude, however, appears to me to be religious, in the highest sense of the word. And so it seems to me that science not only purifies the religious impulse of the dross of its anthropomorphism but also contributes to a religious spiritualization of our understanding of life.

The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge. In this sense I believe that the priest must become a teacher if he wishes to do justice to his lofty educational mission.

By R. A. Radford — Economica, 1945

INTRODUCTION AFTER allowance has been made for abnormal circumstances, the social institutions, ideas and habits of groups in the outside world are to be found reflected in a Prisoner of War Camp. It is an unusual but a vital society. Camp organisation and politics are matters of real concern to the inmates, as affecting their present and perhaps their future existences. Nor does this indicate any loss of proportion. No one pretends that camp matters are of any but local importance or of more than transient interest, but their importance there is great. They bulk large in a world of narrow horizons and it is suggested that any distortion of values lies rather in the minimisation than in the exaggeration of their importance. Human affairs are essentially practical matters and the measure of immediate effect on the lives of those directly concerned in them is to a large extent the criterion of their importance at that time and place. A prisoner can hold strong views on such subjects as whether or not all tinned meats shall be issued to individuals cold or be centrally cooked, without losing sight of the significance of the Atlantic Charter. One aspect of social organisation is to be found in economic activity, and this, along with other manifestations of a group existence, is to be found in any P.O.W. camp. True, a prisoner is not dependent on his exertions for the provision of the necessaries, or even the luxuries of life, but through his economic activity, the exchange of goods and services, his standard of material comfort is considerably enhanced. And this is a serious matter to the prisoner: he is not ” playing at shops ” even though the small scale of the transactions and the simple expression of comfort and wants in terms of cigarettes and jam, razor blades and writing paper, make the urgency of those needs difficult to appreciate, even by an ex-prisoner of some three months’ standing. Nevertheless, it cannot be too strongly emphasised that economic activities do not bulk so large in prison society as they do in the larger world. There can be little production; as has been said the prisoner is independent of his exertions for the provision of the necessities and luxuries of life; the emphasis lies in exchange and the media of exchange. A prison camp is not to be compared with the seething crowd of higglers in a street market, any more than it is to be com- pared with the economic inertia of a family dinner table. Naturally then, entertainment, academic and literary interests, games and discussions of the ” other world ” bulk larger in everyday Life than they do in the life of more normal societies. But it would be 189 This content downloaded from 137.99.31.134 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 02:30:13 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

I wrong to underestimate the importance of economic activity. Every- one receives a roughly equal share of essentials; it is by trade that individual preferences are given expression and comfort increased. All at some time, and most people regularly, make exchanges of one sort or another. Although a P.O.W. camp provides a living example of a simple economy which might be used as an alternative to the Robinson Crusoe economy beloved by the text-books, and its simplicity renders the demonstration of certain economic hypotheses both amusing and instructive, it is suggested that the principal significance is sociological. True, there is interest in observing the growth of economic institutions and customs in a brand new society, small and simple enough to pre- vent detail from obscuring the basic pattern and disequilibrium from obscuring the working of the system. But the essential interest lies in -the universality and the spontaneity of this economic life; it came into existence not by conscious imitation but as a response to the immediate needs and circumstances. Any similarity between prison organisation and outside organisation arises from similar stimuli evoking similar responses. The following is as brief an account of the essential data as may render the narrative intelligible. The camps of which the writer had experience were Oflags and consequently the economy was not com- plicated by payments for work by the detaining power. They consisted normally of between I,200 and 2,500 people, housed in a number of separate but intercommunicating bungalows, one company of 2oo or so to a building. Each company formed a group within the main organisation and inside the company the room and the messing syndicate, a voluntary and spontaneous group who fed together, formed the constituent units. Between individuals there was active trading in all consumer goods and in some services. Most trading was for food against cigarettes or other foodstuffs, but cigarettes rose from the status of a normal com- modity to that of currency. RMk.s existed but had no circulation save for gambling debts, as few articles could be purchased with them from the canteen. Our supplies consisted of rations provided by the detaining power and (principally) the contents of Red Cross food parcels-tinned milk, jam, butter, biscuits, bully, chocolate, sugar, etc., and cigarettes. So far the supplies to each person were equal and regular. Private parcels of clothing, toilet requisites and cigarettes were also received, and here equality ceased owing to the different numbers despatched and the vagaries of the post. All these articles were the subject of trade and exchange. THE DEVELOPMENT AND ORGANISATION OF THE MARKET Very soon after capture people realised that it was both undesirable and unnecessary, in view of the limited size and the equality of supplies, This content downloaded from 137.99.31.134 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 02:30:13 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

I9I to give away or to accept gifts of cigarettes or food. ” Goodwill” developed into trading as a more equitable means of maximising indi vdual satisfaction. We reached a transit camp in Italy about a fortnight after capture and recei’ved i of a Red Cross food parcel each a week later. At .once exchanges, already established, multiplied in volume. Starting with simple direct barter, such as a non-smoker giving a smoker friend his cigarette issue in exchange for a chocolate ration, more complex exchanges soon became an accepted custom. Stories circulated of a padre who started off round the camp with a tin of cheese and, five cigarettes and returned to his bed with a complete parcel in addition to his original cheese and cigarettes; the market was not yet perfect. Within a week or two, as the volume of trade grew, rough scales of exchange values came into existence. Sikhs, who had at first exchanged tinned beef for practically any other foodstuff, began to insist on jam and margarine. It was realised that a tin of jam was worth I lb. of margarine plus something else; that a cigarette issue was worth several chocolate issues. and a tin of diced carrots was worth practically nothing. In this camp we did not visit other bungalows very much and prices varied from place to place; hence the germ of truth in the story of the itinerant priest. By the end of a month, when we reached our permanent camp, there was a lively trade in all commodities and their relative values were well known, and expressed not in terms of one another-one didn’t quote bully in terms of sugar-but in terms of cigarettes. The cigarette became the standard of value. In the permanent camp people started by wandering through the bungalows calling their offers-” cheese for seven ” (cigarettes)-and the hours after parcel issue were Bedlam. The inconveniences of this system soon led to its replacement by an Exchange and Mart notice board in every bungalow, where under the headings ” name “, ” room number “, ” wanted ” and ” offered ” sales and wants were advertised. When a deal went through, it was crossed off the board. The public and semi- permanent records of transactions led to cigarette prices being well known and thus tending to equality throughout the camp, although there were always opportunities for an astute trader to make a profit from arbitrage. With this development everyone, including non- smokers, was willing to sell for cigarettes, using them to buy at another time and place. Cigarettes became the normal currency, though, of course, barter was never extinguished. The unity of the market and the prevalence of a single price varied directly with the general level of organisation and comfort in the camp. A transit camp was always chaotic and uncomfortable: people were overcrowded, no one knew where anyone else was living, and few took the trouble to find out. Organisation was too slender to include an Exchange and Mart board, and private advertisements were the most that appeared. Consequently a transit camp was not one This content downloaded from 137.99.31.134 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 02:30:13 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

market but many. The price of a tin of salmon is known to have varied by two cigarettes in zo between one end of a hut -and the other. Despite a high level of organisation in Italy, tht market was morcellated in this manner at the first transit camp we reached after our removal to Germany in. the autumn of 1943. In this camp- Stalag VIIA at Moosburg in.Bavaria-there were up to 50,000 prsoners of all nationalities. French, Russians, Italians and Jugo-Slavs were free to move about within the camp: British and. Americans were confined to their compounds, although a few cigarettes given to a sentry would always procure permission for one or two men to visit other compounds. The people who first visited the highly organised French trading centre, with its stalls and known prices, found coffee extract-relatively cheap among the tea-drinking English-commanding a fancy price in biscuits or cigarettes, and some. enterprising people made small fortunes that way. (Incidentally we found out later that much of the coffee went ” over the wire ” and sold for phenomenal prices at black market caf6s in Munich: some of the French prisoners were said to have made substantial sums in RMk.s. This was one of the few occasions on which our normally closed economy came into contact with other economic worlds.) Eventually public opinion grew hostile to these monopoly profits- not everyone could make contact with the Ftench-and trading w’ith them was put on a regulated basis. Each group of beds was given a quota of articles to offer and, the transaction was carried out by accredited representatives from the British compound, with monopoly rights. The same method was used for trading with sentries elsewhere, as in this trade secrecy and reasonable prices had a peculiar importance, but as is ever the case with regulated companies, the interloper proved too strong. The permanent camps in Germany saw the highest level of coiI- mercial organisation. In addition to the Exchange and Mart notice. boards, a shop was organised as a public utility, controlled by repre- sentatives of the Senior British Officer, on a no profit basis. People left their surplus clothing, toilet requisites and food there until they were sold at a fixed price in cigarettes.. Only sales in cigarettes were accepted-there was no barter- and there was no higgling. For food at least there were standard prices: clothing is less homogeneous and the price was decided around a norm by the seller and the shop manager in agreement; shirts would average say 8o, ranging from 6o to 120 according to quality and age. Of food, the shop carried small stocks for convenience; the capital was provided by a loan from the bulk store of Red Cross cigarettes and repaid by a small commission taken on the first transactions. Thus the cigarette attained its fullest currency status, and the market was almost completely unified. It is thus to be seen that a market came into existence without labour or production. The B.R.C.S. may be considered as ” Nature ” of the This content downloaded from 137.99.31.134 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 02:30:13 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

text-book, and the articles of trade-food, clothing and cigarettes- as free gifts-,land or manna. Despite this, and despite a roughly equal distribution of resources, a market came into spontaneous operation, -and prices were fixed by the operation of supply and demand. It is difficult to reconcile this fact with the labour theory of value. Actually there was ail embryo labour market. Even when cigarettes were not scarce, there was usually some unlucky person willing to per- form services for them. Laundrymen advertised at two cigarettes a garment. Battle-dress was scrubbed and pressed and a pair of trousers lent for the interim period for twelve. A good pastel portrait cost thirty or a tin of ” Kam “. Odd tailoring and other jobs similarly had their prices. There were also entrepreneurial services. There was a coffee stall owner who sold tea, coffee or cocoa at two cigarettes a cup, buying his raw materials at market prices and hiring labotir to gather fuel and to stoke; he actually enjoyed the services of a chartered accountant at one stage. After a period of great prosperity he overreached him- self and failed disastrously for several hundred cigarettes. Such large- scale private enterprise was rare but several middlemen or professional traders existed. The padre in Italy, or the men at Moosburg who opened trading relations with the French, are examples: the more subdivided the market, the less perfect the advertisement of prices, and the less stable the prices, the greater was the scope for these operators. One man capitalised his knowledge of Urdu by buying meat from the Sikhs and selling butter and jam in return: as his operations became better known more and more people entered this trade, prices in the Indian Wing approximated more nearly to those elsewhere, though to the end a ” contact ” among the Indians was valuable, as linguistic difficulties prevented the trade from being quite free. Some were specialists in the Indian trade, the food, clothing or even the watch trade. Middlemen traded on their own account or on commission. Price rings and agreements were suspected and the traders certainly co-operated. Nor did they welcome newcomers. Unfortun- ately the writer knows little of the workings of these people: public opinion was hostile and the professionals were usually of a retiring disposition. One trader in food and cigarettes, operating in a period of dearth, enjoyed a high reputation. His capital, carefully saved, was originally about 50 cigarettes, with which he bought rations on issue days and held them until the price rose just before the next issue. He also picked up a little by arbitrage; several times a day he visited every Exchange or Mart notice board and took advantage of every dis- crepancy between prices of goods offered and wanted. His knowledge of prices, markets and names of those who had received cigarette parcels was phenomenal. By these means he kept himself smoking steadily- lis proits-while his capital remained intact. This content downloaded from 137.99.31.134 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 02:30:13 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Sugar was issued on Saturday. about Tuesday two of us used to visit Sam and make a deal; as old customers he would advance as much of the price as he could spare then, and entered the transaction in a book. On Saturday morning he left cocoa tins on our beds for the ration, and picked them up on Saturday afternoon. We were hoping for a calendar at Christmas, but Sam failed too. He was left holding a big black treacle issue when the price fell, and in this weakened state was unable to withstand an unexpected arrival of parcels and the consequent price fluctuations. He paid in full, but from his capital. The next Tuesday, when I paid my usual visit he was out of business. Credit entered into many, perhaps into most, transactions, in one form or another. Sam paid in advance as a rule for his purchases of future deliveries of sugar, but many buyers asked for credit, whether the commodity was sold spot or future. Naturally prices varied according to the terms of sale. A treacle ration might be advertised for four cigarettes now or five next week. And in the future market “bread now ” was a vastly different thing from ” bread Thursday ” Bread was issued on Thursday and Monday, four and three days’ rations respectively, and by Wednesday and Sunday night it had risen at least one cigarette per ration, from seven to eight, by supper time. One man always saved a ration to sell then at the peak price: his offer of ” bread now ” stood out on the board among a number of ” bread Monday’s ” fetching one or two less, or not selling at all- and he always smoked on Sunday night. THE CIGARETTE CURRENCY Although cigarettes as currency exhibited certain peculiarities, they performed all the functions of a metallic currency as a unit of account, as a measure of value and as a store of value, and shared most of its characteristics. They were homogeneous, reasonably durable, and of convenient size for the smallest or, in packets, for the largest trans- actions. Incidentally, they could be clipped or sweated by rolling .them between the fingers so that tobacco fell out. Cigarettes were also subject to the working of Gresham’s Law. Certain brands were more popular than others as smokes, but for currency purposes a cigarette was a cigarette. Consequently buyers used the poorer qualities and the Shop rarely saw the more popular brands: cigarettes such as Churchman’s No. I were rarely used for trading. At one time cigarettes hand-rolled from pipe tobaccc began to circulate. Pipe tobacco was issued in lieu of cigarettes by the Red Cross at a rate of 25 cigarettes to the ounce and this rate was standard in exchanges, but an ounce would produce 30 home-made cigarettes. Naturally, people with machine.,made cigarettes broke them down and re-rolled the tobacco, and the real cigarette virtually disappeared from the market. Hand-rolled cigarettes were not homogeneous and prices could no longer be quoted in them with safety: each cigarette was examined before it was accepted and thin This content downloaded from 137.99.31.134 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 02:30:13 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

ones were rejected, or extra demanded as a make-weight. For a time we suffered all the inconveniences of a debased currency. Machine-made cigare-ttes were always universally acceptable, both for what they would buy and for themselves. It was this intrinsic value which gave rise to their principal disadvantage as currency, a dis- advantage which exists, but to a far smaller extent, in the case of me- tallic currency ;-that is, a strong demand for non-monetary purposes. Consequently our economy was repeatedly subject to deflation and to periods of monetary stringency. While the Red Cross issue of 50 or 25 cigarettes per man per week came in regularly, and while there were fair stocks held, the cigarette currency suited its purpose admirably. But when the issue was interrupted, stocks soon ran out, prices fell, trading declined in volume and became increasingly a matter of barter. This deflationary tendency was periodically offset by the sudden injection of new currency. Private cigarette parcels arrived in a trickle throughout the year, but the big numbers came in quarterly when the Red Cross received its allocation of transport. Several hundred thousand cigarettes might arrive in the space of a fortnight. Prices soared, and then began to fall, slowly at first but with increasing rapidity as stocks ran out, until the next big delivery. Most of our economic troubles could be attributed to this fundamental instability. PRICE MOVEMENTS Many factors affected prices, the strongest and most noticeable being the periodical currency inflation and deflation described in the last paragraphs. The periodicity of this price cycle depended on cigarette and, to a far lesser extent, on food deliveries. At one time in the early days, before any private parcels had arrived and when there were no individual stocks, the weekly issue of cigarettes and food parcels occurred on a Monday. The non-monetary demand for cigarettes was great, and less elastic than the demand for food: con- sequently prices fluctuated weekly, falling towards Sunday night and rising sharply on Monday morning. Later, when many people held reserves, the weekly issue had no such effect, being too small a pro- pQrtion of the total available. Credit allowed people with no reserves to meet their non-monetary demand over the week-end. The general price level was affected by other factors. An influx of new prisoners, proverbially hungry, raised it. Heavy air raids in the vicinity of the camp probably increased the non-monetary demand for cigarettes and accentuated deflation. Good and bad war news certainly had its effect, and the general waves of optimism and pessimism which swept the camp were reflected in prices. Before breakfast one morning in March of this year, a rumour of the arrival of parcels and cigarettes was circulated. Within ten minutes I sold a treacle ration, for four cigarettes (hitherto offered in vain for three), and many similar deals went- through. By IO o’clock the rumour was denied, and treacle that day found no more buyers even at two cigarettes. This content downloaded from 137.99.31.134 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 02:30:13 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

I More interesting than changes in the general price level were changes in the price structure. Changes in the supply of a commodity, in the German ration scale or in the make-up of Red Cross parcels, would raise the price of one commodity relative to others. Tins of oatmeal, once a rare and much sought after luxury in the parcels, became a commonplace in 1943, and the price fell. In hot weather the demand for cocoa fell, and that for soap rose. A new recipe would be reflected in the price level: the discovery that raisins and sugar could be turned into an alcoholic liquor of remarkable potency reacted per- manently on the dried fruit market. The invention of electric immer- sion heaters run off the power points made tea, a drug on the market in Italy, a certain seller in Germany. In August, I944, the supplies of parcels and cigarettes were both halved. Since both sides of the equation were changed in the same degree, changes in prices were not anticipated. But this was not the case: the non-monetary demand for cigarettes was less elastic than the demand for food, and food prices fell a little. More important however were the changes in the price structure. German margarine and jam, hitherto valueless owing to adequate supplies of Canadian butter and marmalade, acquired a new value. Chocolate, popular and a certain seller, and sugar, fell. Bread rose; several standing contracts of bread for cigarettes were broken, especially when the bread ration was reduced a few weeks later. In February, 1945, the German soldier who drove the ration waggon was found to be willing to exchange loaves of bread at the rate of one loaf for a bar of chocolate. Those in the know began selling bread and buying chocolate, by then almost unsaleable in a period of serious deflation. Bread, at about 40, fell slightly; chocolate rose from IS; the supply of bread was not enough for the two commodities to reach parity, but the tendency was unmistakable. The substitution of German margarine for Canadian butter when parcels were halved naturally affected their relative values, margarine appreciating at the expense of butter. Similarly, two brands of dried milk, hitherto differing in quality and therefore in price by five cigarettes a tin, came together in price as the wider substitution of the cheaper raised its relative value. Enough has been cited to show that any change in conditions affected both the general price level and the price structure. It was this latter phenomenon which wrecked our planned economy. PAPER CURRENCY-Bully Marks Around D-Day, food and cigarettes were plentiful, business was brisk and the camp in an optimistic mood. Consequently the Enter- tainments Committee felt the moment opportune to launch a restaurant, where food and hot drinks were sold while a band and variety turns performed. Earlier experiments, both public and private, had pointed the way, and the scheme was a great success, Food was bought at This content downloaded from 137.99.31.134 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 02:30:13 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

market prices to provide the meals and the small profits were devoted to a reserve fund and used to bribe Germans to provide grease-paints and other necessities for the camp theatre. Originally meals were sold for cigarettes but this meant that the whole scheme was vulnerable to the periodic deflationary waves, and furthermore heavy smokers were unlikely to attend much. The whole success of the scheme depended on an adequate amount of food being offered for sale in the normal manner. To increase and facilitate trade, and to stimulate supplies and customers therefore, and secondarily to avoid the worst effects of defla- tion when it should come, a paper currency was organised by the Restaurant and the Shop. The Shop bought food on behalf of the Restaurant with paper notes and the paper was accepted equally with the cigarettes in the Restaurant or Shop, and passed back to the Shop to purchase more food. The Shop acted as a bank of issue. The paper money was backed IOO per cent. by food; hence its name, the Bully Mark. The BMk. was backed iOO per cent. by food: there could be no over-issues, as is permissible with a normal bank of issue, since the eventual dispersal of the camp and consequent redemption of all BMk.s was anticipated in the near future. Originally one BMk. was worth one cigarette and for a short time both circulated f-reely inside and outside the Restaurant. Prices were quoted in BMk.s and cigarettes with equal freedom-and for a short time the BMk. showed signs of replacing the cigarette as currency. The BMk. was tied to food, but not to cigarettes: as it was issued against food, say 45 for a tin of milk and so on, any reduction in the BMk. prices of food would have meant that there were un- backed BMk.s in circulation. But the price of both food and BMk.s could and did fluctuate with the supply of cigarettes. While the Restaurant flourished, the scheme was a success: the Restaurant bought heavily, all foods were saleable and prices were stable. In August parcels and cigarettes were halved and the Camp was bombed. The Restaurant closed for a short while and sales of food became difficult. Even when the Restaurant reopened, the food and cigarette shortage became increasingly acute and people were unwilling to convert such valuable goods into paper and to hold them for luxuries like snacks and tea. Less of the right kinds of food for the Restaurant were sold, and the Shop became’ glutted with dried fruit, chocolate, sugar, etc., which the Restaurant could not buy. The price level and the price structure changed. The BMk. fell to four-fifths of a cigarette and eventually farther still, and it became unacceptable save in the Restaurant. There was a flight from the BMk., no longer convertible into cigarettes or popular foods. The cigarette re-established itself. But the BMk. was sound! The Restaurant closed in the New Year with a progressive food shortage and the long evenings without lights due to intensified Allied air raids, and BMk,s could only be spent in This content downloaded from 137.99.31.134 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 02:30:13 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

the Coffee Bar-relict of the Restaurant-or on the few unpopular foods in the Shop, the owners of which were prepared to accept them. In the end all holders of BMk.s were paid in full, in cups of coffee or in prunes. People who had bought BMk.s for cigarettes or valuable jam or biscuits in their heyday were aggrieved that they should have stood the loss involved by their restricted choice, but they suffered no actual loss of market value. PRICE FIXING Along with this scheme came a determined attempt at a planned economy, at price fixing. The Medical Officer had long been anxious to control food sales, for fear of some people selling too much, to the detriment of their health. The deflationary waves and their effects on prices were inconvenient to all and would be dangerous to the Restaurant which had to carry stocks. Furthermore, unless the BMk. was convertible into cigarettes at about par it had little chance of gaining confidence and of succeeding as a currency. As has been explained, the BMk. was tied to food but could not be tied to cigarettes, which fluctuated in value. Hence, while BMk. prices of food were fixed for all time, cigarette prices of food and BMk.s varied. The Shop, backed by the Senior British Officer, was now in a position to enforce price control both inside and outside its walls. Hitherto a standard price had been fixed for food left for sale in the shop, and prices outside were roughly in conformity with this scale, which wat recommended as a ” guide “‘to sellers, but fluctuated a good deal around it. Sales in the Shop at recommended prices were apt to be slow though a good price might be obtained: sales outside could be made more quickly at lower prices. (If sales outside were to be at higher prices, goods were withdrawn from the Shop until the recommended price rose: but the recommended price was sluggish and could not follow the market closely by reason of its very purpose, which was stability.) The Exchange and Mart notice boards came under the control of the Shop: advertisements which exceeded a 5 per cent. departure from the recommended scale were liable to be crossed out by authority: unauthorised sales were discouraged by authority and also by public opinion, strongly in favour of a just and stable price. (Recom- mended prices were fixed partly from market data, partly on the advice of the M.O.) At fitst the recommended scale was a success: the Restaurant, a big buyer, kept prices stable around this level: opinion and the 5 per cent. tolerance helped. But when the price level fell with the August cuts and the price structure changed, the recommended scale was too rigid. Unchanged at first, as no deflation was expected, the scale was tardily lowered, but the prices of goods on the new scale remained in the same relation to one another, owing to the BMk., while on the market the price structure had changed. And the modi- fying influence of the Restaurant had gone. The scale Was tnoved This content downloaded from 137.99.31.134 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 02:30:13 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

up and down several times, slowly following the inflationary and deflationary waves, but it was rarely adjusted to changes in the price structure. More and more advertisements were crossed off the board, and black market sales at unauthorised prices increased: eventually public opinion turned against the recommended scale and authority gave up the struggle. In the last few weeks, with unparalleled deflation, prices fell with alarming rapidity, no scales existed, and supply and demand, alone and unmellowed, determined prices. PUBLIC OPINION Public opinion on the subject of trading was vocal if confused and changeable, and generalisations as to its direction are difficult and dangerous. A tiny minority held that all trading was undesirable as it engendered an unsavoury atmosphere; occasional frauds -and sharp practices were cited as proof. Certain forms of trading were more generally condemned; trade with the Germans was criticised by many. Red Cross toilet articles, which were in short supply and only issued in cases of actual need, were excluded from trade by law and opinion working in unshakable harmony. At one time, when there had been several cases of malnutrition reported among the more devoted smokers, no trade in German rations was permitted, as the victims became an additional burden on the depleted food reserves of the Hospital. But while certain activities were condemned as anti- social, trade itself was practised, and its utility appreciated, by almost everyone in the camp. More interesting was opinion on middlemen and prices. Taken as a whole, opinion was hostile to the middleman. His function, and his hard work in bringing buyer and seller together, were ignored; profits were not regarded as a reward for labour, but as the result of sharp practices. Despite the fact that his very existence was proof to the contrary, the middleman was held to be redundant in view of the existence of an official Shop and the Exchange and Mart. Apprecia- tion only came his way when he was -willing to advance the price of a sugar ration, or to buy goods spot and carry them against a future sale. In these cases the element of risk was obvious to all, and the convenience of the service was felt to merit some reward. Particularly unpopular was the middleman with an element of monopoly, the man who contacted the ration wagon driver, or the man who utilised his knowledge of Urdu. And middlemen as a group were blamed for reducing prices. Opinion notwithstanding, most people dealt with a middleman, whether consciously or unconsciously, at some time or another. There was a strong feeling that everything had its ” just price ” in cigarettes. While the assessment of the just price, which incidentally varied between camps, was impossible of explanation, this price was nevertheless pretty closely known. It cati best be defined as the price usually fetched by an article in good times when cigarettes were This content downloaded from 137.99.31.134 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 02:30:13 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

plentiful. The “just price ” changed slowly; it was unaffected by short-term variations in supply, and while opinion might be resigned to departures from the ” just price “, a strong feeling of resentment persisted. A more satisfactory definition of the ” just price ” is impossible. Everyone knew what it was, though no one could explain why it should be so. As soon as prices began to fall with a cigarette shortage, a clamour arose, particularly against those who held reserves and who bought at reduced prices. Sellers at cut prices were criticised and their activities referred to as the black market. In every period of dearth the explosive question of ” should non-smokers receive a cigarette ration ? ” was discussed to profitless length. Unfortunately, it was the non-smoker, or the light smoker with his reserves, along with the hated middleman, who weathered the storm most easily. The popularity of the price-fixing scheme, and such success as it enjoyed, were -undoubtedly the result of this body of opinion. On several occasions the fall of prices was delayed by the general support given to the recommended scale. The onset of deflation was. marked by a period of sluggish trade; prices stayed up but no one bought. Then prices fell on the black market, and the volume of trade revived in that quarter. Even when the recommended scale was revised, the volume of trade in the Shop would remain low. Opinion was always overruled by the hard facts of the market. Curious arguments were advanced to justify prlce fixing. The recommended prices were in some way related to the calorific values of the foods offered: hence some were overvalued and never sold at these prices. One argument ran as follows :-not everyone has private cigarette parcels: thus, when prices were high and trade good in the summer of I944, only the lucky rich could buy. This was unfair to the man with few cigarettes. When prices fell in the following winter, prices should be pegged high so that the rich, who had enjoyed life in the summer, should put many cigarettes into circulation. The fact that those who sold to the rich in the summer had also enjoyed life then, and the fact that in the winter there was always someone willing to sell at low prices were ignored. Such arguments were hotly debated each night after the approach of Allied aircraft extinguished all lights at 8 p.m. But prices moved with the supply of cigarettes, and refused to stay fixed in accordance with a theory of ethics. CONCLUSION The economic organisation described was both elaborate and smooth-working in the summer of I944. Then came the August cuts and deflation. Prices fell, rallied with- deliveries of cigarette parcels in September and December, and fell again. In January, I945, supplies of Red Cross cigarettes ran out: and prices slumped still further: in February the supplies of food parcels were exhausted and the depres- sion became a blizzard. Food, itself scarce, was almost given away in This content downloaded from 137.99.31.134 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 02:30:13 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

order to meet the non-monetary demand for cigarettes. Laundries ceased to operate, or worked for is or RMk.s: food and cigarettes sold for fancy prices in is, hitherto unheard of. The Restaurant was a memory and the BMk. a joke. The Shop was empty and the Exchange and Mart notices were full of unaccepted offers for cigarettes. Barter increased in volume, becoming a larger proportion of a smaller volume of trade. This, the first serious and prolonged food shortage in the writer’s experience, caused the price structure to change again, partly because German rations were not easily divisible. A margarine ration gradually sank in value until it exchanged directly for a treacle ration. Sugar slumped sadly. Only bread retained its value. Several thousand cigarettes, the capital of the Shop, were distributed without any noticeable effect. A few fractional parcel and cigarette issues, such as one-sixth of a parcel and twelve cigarettes each, led to momentary price recoveries and feverish trade, especially when they coincided with good news from the Western Front, but the general position remained unaltered. By April, 1945, chaos had replaced order in the economic sphere: sales were difficult, prices lacked stability. Economics has been defined as the science of distributing limited means among unlimited and competing ends. On i2th April, with the arrival of elements of the 30th U.S. Infantry Division, the ushering in of an age of plenty demonstrated the hypothesis that with infinite means economic organ- isation and activity would be redundant, as every want could be satisfied without effort. This content downloaded from 137.99.31.134 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 02:30:13 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

By Gay Talese — Esquire, 1966

In the winter of 1965, writer Gay Talese arrived in Los Angeles with an assignment from Esquire to profile Frank Sinatra. The legendary singer was approaching fifty, under the weather, out of sorts, and unwilling to be interviewed. So Talese remained in L.A., hoping Sinatra might recover and reconsider, and he began talking to many of the people around Sinatra—his friends, his associates, his family, his countless hangers-on—and observing the man himself wherever he could. The result, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” ran in April 1966 and became one of the most celebrated magazine stories ever published, a pioneering example of what came to be called New Journalism—a work of rigorously faithful fact enlivened with the kind of vivid storytelling that had previously been reserved for fiction. The piece conjures a deeply rich portrait of one of the era’s most guarded figures and tells a larger story about entertainment, celebrity, and America itself.

Frank Sinatra, holding a glass of bourbon in one hand and a cigarette in the other, stood in a dark corner of the bar between two attractive but fading blondes who sat waiting for him to say something. But he said nothing; he had been silent during much of the evening, except now in this private club in Beverly Hills he seemed even more distant, staring out through the smoke and semidarkness into a large room beyond the bar where dozens of young couples sat huddled around small tables or twisted in the center of the floor to the clamorous clang of folk-rock music blaring from the stereo. The two blondes knew, as did Sinatra’s four male friends who stood nearby, that it was a bad idea to force conversation upon him when he was in this mood of sullen silence, a mood that had hardly been uncommon during this first week of November, a month before his fiftieth birthday.

Sinatra had been working in a film that he now disliked, could not wait to finish; he was tired of all the publicity attached to his dating the twenty-year-old Mia Farrow, who was not in sight tonight; he was angry that a CBS television documentary of his life, to be shown in two weeks, was reportedly prying into his privacy, even speculating on his possible friendship with Mafia leaders; he was worried about his starring role in an hour-long NBC show entitled Sinatra—A Man and His Music, which would require that he sing eighteen songs with a voice that at this particular moment, just a few nights before the taping was to begin, was weak and sore and uncertain. Sinatra was ill. He was the victim of an ailment so common that most people would consider it trivial. But when it gets to Sinatra it can plunge him into a state of anguish, deep depression, panic, even rage. Frank Sinatra had a cold.

Sinatra with a cold is Picasso without paint, Ferrari without fuel—only worse. For the common cold robs Sinatra of that uninsurable jewel, his voice, cutting into the core of his confidence, and it affects not only his own psyche but also seems to cause a kind of psychosomatic nasal drip within dozens of people who work for him, drink with him, love him, depend on him for their own welfare and stability. A Sinatra with a cold can, in a small way, send vibrations through the entertainment industry and beyond as surely as a President of the United States, suddenly sick, can shake the national economy.

For Frank Sinatra was now involved with many things involving many people—his own film company, his record company, his private airline, his missile-parts firm, his real-estate holdings across the nation, his personal staff of seventy-five—which are only a portion of the power he is and has come to represent. He seemed now to be also the embodiment of the fully emancipated male, perhaps the only one in America, the man who can do anything he wants, anything, can do it because he has money, the energy, and no apparent guilt. In an age when the very young seem to be taking over, protesting and picketing and demanding change, Frank Sinatra survives as a national phenomenon, one of the few prewar products to withstand the test of time. He is the champ who made the big comeback, the man who had everything, lost it, then got it back, letting nothing stand in his way, doing what few men can do: he uprooted his life, left his family, broke with everything that was familiar, learning in the process that one way to hold a woman is not to hold her. Now he has the affection of Nancy and Ava and Mia, the fine female produce of three generations, and still has the adoration of his children, the freedom of a bachelor, he does not feel old, he makes old men feel young, makes them think that if Frank Sinatra can do it, it can be done; not that they could do it, but it is still nice for other men to know, at fifty, that it can be done.

But now, standing at this bar in Beverly Hills, Sinatra had a cold, and he continued to drink quietly and he seemed miles away in his private world, not even reacting when suddenly the stereo in the other room switched to a Sinatra song, “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning.”

It is a lovely ballad that he first recorded ten years ago, and it now inspired many young couples who had been sitting, tired of twisting, to get up and move slowly around the dance floor, holding one another very close. Sinatra’s intonation, precisely clipped, yet full and flowing, gave a deeper meaning to the simple lyrics—”In the wee small hours of the morning/while the whole wide world is fast asleep/you lie awake, and think about the girl….”—it was like so many of his classics, a song that evoked loneliness and sensuality, and when blended with the dim light and the alcohol and nicotine and late-night needs, it became a kind of airy aphrodisiac. Undoubtedly the words from this song, and others like it, had put millions in the mood, it was music to make love by, and doubtless much love had been made by it all over America at night in cars, while the batteries burned down, in cottages by the lake, on beaches during balmy summer evenings, in secluded parks and exclusive penthouses and furnished rooms, in cabin cruisers and cabs and cabanas—in all places where Sinatra’s songs could be heard were these words that warmed women, wooed and won them, snipped the final thread of inhibition and gratified the male egos of ungrateful lovers; two generations of men had been the beneficiaries of such ballads, for which they were eternally in his debt, for which they may eternally hate him. Nevertheless here he was, the man himself, in the early hours of the morning in Beverly Hills, out of range.

The two blondes, who seemed to be in their middle thirties, were preened and polished, their matured bodies softly molded within tight dark suits. They sat, legs crossed, perched on the high bar stools. They listened to the music. Then one of them pulled out a Kent and Sinatra quickly placed his gold lighter under it and she held his hand, looked at his fingers: they were nubby and raw, and the pinkies protruded, being so stiff from arthritis that he could barely bend them. He was, as usual, immaculately dressed. He wore an oxford-grey suit with a vest, a suit conservatively cut on the outside but trimmed with flamboyant silk within; his shoes, British, seemed to be shined even on the bottom of the soles. He also wore, as everybody seemed to know, a remarkably convincing black hairpiece, one of sixty that he owns, most of them under the care of an inconspicuous little grey-haired lady who, holding his hair in a tiny satchel, follows him around whenever he performs. She earns $400 a week. The most distinguishing thing about Sinatra’s face are his eyes, clear blue and alert, eyes that within seconds can go cold with anger, or glow with affection, or, as now, reflect a vague detachment that keeps his friends silent and distant.

Leo Durocher, one of Sinatra’s closest friends, was now shooting pool in the small room behind the bar. Standing near the door was Jim Mahoney, Sinatra’s press agent, a somewhat chunky young man with a square jaw and narrow eyes who would resemble a tough Irish plainclothesman if it were not for the expensive continental suits he wears and his exquisite shoes often adorned with polished buckles. Also nearby was a big, broad-shouldered two-hundred-pound actor named Brad Dexter who seemed always to be thrusting out his chest so that his gut would not show.

Brad Dexter has appeared in several films and television shows, displaying fine talent as a character actor, but in Beverly Hills he is equally known for the role he played in Hawaii two years ago when he swam a few hundred yards and risked his life to save Sinatra from drowning in a riptide. Since then Dexter has been one of Sinatra’s constant companions and has been made a producer in Sinatra’s film company. He occupies a plush office near Sinatra’s executive suite. He is endlessly searching for literary properties that might be converted into new starring roles for Sinatra. Whenever he is among strangers with Sinatra he worries because he knows that Sinatra brings out the best and worst in people—some men will become aggressive, some women will become seductive, others will stand around skeptically appraising him, the scene will be somehow intoxicated by his mere presence, and maybe Sinatra himself, if feeling as badly as he was tonight, might become intolerant or tense, and then: headlines. So Brad Dexter tries to anticipate danger and warn Sinatra in advance. He confesses to feeling very protective of Sinatra, admitting in a recent moment of self-revelation: “I’d kill for him.”

While this statement may seem outlandishly dramatic, particularly when taken out of context, it nonetheless expresses a fierce fidelity that is quite common within Sinatra’s special circle. It is a characteristic that Sinatra, without admission, seems to prefer: All the Way; All or Nothing at All. This is the Sicilian in Sinatra; he permits his friends, if they wish to remain that, none of the easy Anglo-Saxon outs. But if they remain loyal, then there is nothing Sinatra will not do in turn—fabulous gifts, personal kindnesses, encouragement when they’re down, adulation when they’re up. They are wise to remember, however, one thing. He is Sinatra. The boss. Il Padrone.

I had seen something of this Sicilian side of Sinatra last summer at Jilly’s saloon in New York, which was the only other time I’d gotten a close view of him prior to this night in this California club. Jilly’s, which is on West Fifty-second Street in Manhattan, is where Sinatra drinks whenever he is in New York, and there is a special chair reserved for him in the back room against the wall that nobody else may use. When he is occupying it, seated behind a long table flanked by his closest New York friends—who include the saloonkeeper, Jilly Rizzo, and Jilly’s azure-haired wife, Honey, who is known as the “Blue Jew”—a rather strange ritualistic scene develops. That night dozens of people, some of them casual friends of Sinatra’s, some mere acquaintances, some neither, appeared outside of Jilly’s saloon. They approached it like a shrine. They had come to pay respect. They were from New York, Brooklyn, Atlantic City, Hoboken. They were old actors, young actors, former prizefighters, tired trumpet players, politicians, a boy with a cane. There was a fat lady who said she remembered Sinatra when he used to throw the Jersey Observer onto her front porch in 1933. There were middle-aged couples who said they had heard Sinatra sing at the Rustic Cabin in 1938 and “We knew then that he really had it!” Or they had heard him when he was with Harry James’s band in 1939, or with Tommy Dorsey in 1941 (“Yeah, that’s the song, ‘I’ll Never Smile Again’—he sang it one night in this dump near Newark and we danced…”); or they remembered that time at the Paramount with the swooners, and him with those bow ties, The Voice; and one woman remembered that awful boy she knew then—Alexander Dorogokupetz, an eighteen-year-old heckler who had thrown a tomato at Sinatra and the bobby-soxers in the balcony had tried to flail him to death. Whatever became of Alexander Dorogokupetz? The lady did not know.

And they remembered when Sinatra was a failure and sang trash like “Mairzy Doats,” and they remembered his comeback and on this night they were all standing outside Jilly’s saloon, dozens of them, but they could not get in. So some of them left. But most of them stayed, hoping that soon they might be able to push or wedge their way into Jilly’s between the elbows and backsides of the men drinking three-deep at the bar, and they might be able to peek through and see him sitting back there. This is all they really wanted; they wanted to see him. And for a few moments they gazed in silence through the smoke and they stared. Then they turned, fought their way out of the bar, went home.

Some of Sinatra’s close friends, all of whom are known to the men guarding Jilly’s door, do manage to get an escort into the back room. But once they are there they, too, must fend for themselves. On the particular evening, Frank Gifford, the former football player, got only seven yards in three tries. Others who had somehow been close enough to shake Sinatra’s hand did not shake it; instead they just touched him on the shoulder or sleeve, or they merely stood close enough for him to see them and, after he’d given them a wink of recognition or a wave or a nod or called out their names (he had a fantastic memory for first names), they would then turn and leave. They had checked in. They had paid their respects. And as I watched this ritualistic scene, I got the impression that Frank Sinatra was dwelling simultaneously in two worlds that were not contemporary.

On the one hand he is the swinger—as he is when talking and joking with Sammy Davis, Jr., Richard Conte, Liza Minelli, Bernie Massi, or any of the other show-business people who get to sit at the table; on the other, as when he is nodding or waving to his paisanos who are close to him (Al Silvani, a boxing manager who works with Sinatra’s film company; Dominic Di Bona, his wardrobe man; Ed Pucci, a 300-pound former football lineman who is his aide-de-camp), Frank Sinatra is Il Padrone. Or better still, he is what in traditional Sicily have long been called uomini rispettati—men of respect: men who are both majestic and humble, men who are loved by all and are very generous by nature, men whose hands are kissed as they walk from village to village, men who would personally go out of their way to redress a wrong.

Frank Sinatra does things personally. At Christmas time, he will personally pick dozens of presents for his close friends and family, remembering the type of jewelry they like, their favorite colors, the sizes of their shirts and dresses. When a musician friend’s house was destroyed and his wife was killed in a Los Angeles mud slide a little more than a year ago, Sinatra personally came to his aid, finding the musician a new home, paying whatever hospital bills were left unpaid by the insurance, then personally supervising the furnishing of the new home down to the replacing of the silverware, the linen, the purchase of new clothing.

The same Sinatra who did this can, within the same hour, explode in a towering rage of intolerance should a small thing be incorrectly done for him by one of his paisanos. For example, when one of his men brought him a frankfurter with catsup on it, which Sinatra apparently abhors, he angrily threw the bottle at the man, splattering catsup all over him. Most of the men who work around Sinatra are big. But this never seems to intimidate Sinatra nor curb his impetuous behavior with them when he is mad. They will never take a swing back at him. He is Il Padrone.

At other times, aiming to please, his men will overreact to his desires: when he casually observed that his big orange desert jeep in Palm Springs seemed in need of a new painting, the word was swiftly passed down through the channels, becoming ever more urgent as it went, until finally it was a command that the jeep be painted now, immediately, yesterday. To accomplish this would require the hiring of a special crew of painters to work all night, at overtime rates; which, in turn, meant that the order had to be bucked back up the line for further approval. When it finally got back to Sinatra’s desk, he did not know what it was all about; after he had figured it out he confessed, with a tired look on his face, that he did not care when the hell they painted the jeep.

Yet it would have been unwise for anyone to anticipate his reaction, for he is a wholly unpredictable man of many moods and great dimension, a man who responds instantaneously to instinct—suddenly, dramatically, wildly he responds, and nobody can predict what will follow. A young lady named Jane Hoag, a reporter at Life’s Los Angeles bureau who had attended the same school as Sinatra’s daughter, Nancy, had once been invited to a party at Mrs. Sinatra’s California home at which Frank Sinatra, who maintains very cordial relations with his former wife, acted as host. Early in the party Miss Hoag, while leaning against a table, accidentally with her elbow knocked over one of a pair of alabaster birds to the floor, smashing it to pieces. Suddenly, Miss Hoag recalled, Sinatra’s daughter cried, “Oh, that was one of my mother’s favorite…”—but before she could complete the sentence, Sinatra glared at her, cutting her off, and while forty other guests in the room all stared in silence, Sinatra walked over, quickly with his finger flicked the other alabaster bird off the table, smashing it to pieces, and then put an arm gently around Jane Hoag and said, in a way that put her completely at ease, “That’s okay, kid.”

NOW SINATRA SAID A FEW words to the blondes. Then he turned from the bar and began to walk toward the poolroom. One of Sinatra’s other men friends moved in to keep the girls company. Brad Dexter, who had been standing in the corner talking to some other people, now followed Sinatra.

The room cracked with the clack of billiard balls. There were about a dozen spectators in the room, most of them young men who were watching Leo Durocher shoot against two other aspiring hustlers who were not very good. This private drinking club has among its membership many actors, directors, writers, models, nearly all of them a good deal younger than Sinatra or Durocher and much more casual in the way they dress for the evening. Many of the young women, their long hair flowing loosely below their shoulders, wore tight, fanny-fitting Jax pants and very expensive sweaters; and a few of the young men wore blue or green velour shirts with high collars and narrow tight pants, and Italian loafers.

It was obvious from the way Sinatra looked at these people in the poolroom that they were not his style, but he leaned back against a high stool that was against the wall, holding his drink in his right hand, and said nothing, just watched Durocher slam the billiard balls back and forth. The younger men in the room, accustomed to seeing Sinatra at this club, treated him without deference, although they said nothing offensive. They were a cool young group, very California-cool and casual, and one of the coolest seemed to be a little guy, very quick of movement, who had a sharp profile, pale blue eyes, blondish hair, and squared eyeglasses. He wore a pair of brown corduroy slacks, a green shaggy-dog Shetland sweater, a tan suede jacket, and Game Warden boots, for which he had recently paid $60.

Frank Sinatra, leaning against the stool, sniffling a bit from his cold, could not take his eyes off the Game Warden boots. Once, after gazing at them for a few moments, he turned away; but now he was focused on them again. The owner of the boots, who was just standing in them watching the pool game, was named Harlan Ellison, a writer who had just completed work on a screenplay, The Oscar.

Finally Sinatra could not contain himself.

“Hey,” he yelled in his slightly harsh voice that still had a soft, sharp edge. “Those Italian boots?”

“No,” Ellison said.

“Spanish?”

“No.”

“Are they English boots?”

“Look, I donno, man,” Ellison shot back, frowning at Sinatra, then turning away again.

Now the poolroom was suddenly silent. Leo Durocher who had been poised behind his cue stick and was bent low just froze in that position for a second. Nobody moved. Then Sinatra moved away from the stool and walked with that slow, arrogant swagger of his toward Ellison, the hard tap of Sinatra’s shoes the only sound in the room. Then, looking down at Ellison with a slightly raised eyebrow and a tricky little smile, Sinatra asked: “You expecting a storm?”

Harlan Ellison moved a step to the side. “Look, is there any reason why you’re talking to me?”

“I don’t like the way you’re dressed,” Sinatra said.

“Hate to shake you up,” Ellison said, “but I dress to suit myself.”

Now there was some rumbling in the room, and somebody said, “Com’on, Harlan, let’s get out of here,” and Leo Durocher made his pool shot and said, “Yeah, com’on.”

But Ellison stood his ground.

Sinatra said, “What do you do?”

“I’m a plumber,” Ellison said.

“No, no, he’s not,” another young man quickly yelled from across the table. “He wrote The Oscar.”

“Oh, yeah,” Sinatra said, “well I’ve seen it, and it’s a piece of crap.”

“That’s strange,” Ellison said, “because they haven’t even released it yet.”

“Well, I’ve seen it,” Sinatra repeated, “and it’s a piece of crap.”

Now Brad Dexter, very anxious, very big opposite the small figure of Ellison, said, “Com’on, kid, I don’t want you in this room.”

“Hey,” Sinatra interrupted Dexter, “can’t you see I’m talking to this guy?”

Dexter was confused. Then his whole attitude changed, and his voice went soft and he said to Ellison, almost with a plea, “Why do you persist in tormenting me?”

The whole scene was becoming ridiculous, and it seemed that Sinatra was only half-serious, perhaps just reacting out of sheer boredom or inner despair; at any rate, after a few more exchanges Harlan Ellison left the room. By this time the word had gotten out to those on the dance floor about the Sinatra-Ellison exchange, and somebody went to look for the manager of the club. But somebody else said that the manager had already heard about it—and had quickly gone out the door, hopped in his car and drove home. So the assistant manager went into the poolroom.

“I don’t want anybody in here without coats and ties,” Sinatra snapped.

The assistant manager nodded, and walked back to his office.

IT WAS THE MORNING AFTER. It was the beginning of another nervous day for Sinatra’s press agent, Jim Mahoney. Mahoney had a headache, and he was worried but not over the Sinatra-Ellison incident of the night before. At the time Mahoney had been with his wife at a table in the other room, and possibly he had not even been aware of the little drama. The whole thing had lasted only about three minutes. And three minutes after it was over, Frank Sinatra had probably forgotten about it for the rest of his life—as Ellison will probably remember it for the rest of his life: he had had, as hundreds of others before him, at an unexpected moment between darkness and dawn, a scene with Sinatra.

It was just as well that Mahoney had not been in the poolroom; he had enough on his mind today. He was worried about Sinatra’s cold and worried about the controversial CBS documentary that, despite Sinatra’s protests and withdrawal of permission, would be shown on television in less than two weeks. The newspapers this morning were full of hints that Sinatra might sue the network, and Mahoney’s phones were ringing without pause, and now he was plugged into New York talking to the Daily News’s Kay Gardella, saying: “…that’s right, Kay…they made a gentleman’s agreement to not ask certain questions about Frank’s private life, and then Cronkite went right ahead: ‘Frank, tell me about those associations.’ That question, Kay—out! That question should never have been asked….”

As he spoke, Mahoney leaned back in his leather chair, his head shaking slowly. He is a powerfully built man of thirty-seven; he has a round, ruddy face, a heavy jaw, and narrow pale eyes, and he might appear pugnacious if he did not speak with such clear, soft sincerity and if he were not so meticulous about his clothes. His suits and shoes are superbly tailored, which was one of the first things Sinatra noticed about him, and in his spacious office opposite the bar is a red-muff electrical shoe polisher and a pair of brown wooden shoulders on a stand over which Mahoney can drape his jackets. Near the bar is an autographed photograph of President Kennedy and a few pictures of Frank Sinatra, but there are none of Sinatra in any other rooms in Mahoney’s public-relations agency; there once was a large photograph of him hanging in the reception room but this apparently bruised the egos of some of Mahoney’s other movie-star clients and, since Sinatra never shows up at the agency anyway, the photograph was removed.

Still, Sinatra seems ever present, and if Mahoney did not have legitimate worries about Sinatra, as he did today, he could invent them—and, as worry aids, he surrounds himself with little mementos of moments in the past when he did worry. In his shaving kit there is a two-year-old box of sleeping tablets dispensed by a Reno druggist—the date on the bottle marks the kidnapping of Frank Sinatra, Jr. There is on a table in Mahoney’s office a mounted wood reproduction of Frank Sinatra’s ransom note written on the aforementioned occasion. One of Mahoney’s mannerisms, when he is sitting at his desk worrying, is to tinker with the tiny toy train he keeps in front of him—the train is a souvenir from the Sinatra film, Von Ryan’s Express; it is to men who are close to Sinatra what the PT-109 tie clasps are to men who were close to Kennedy—and Mahoney then proceeds to roll the little train back and forth on the six inches of track; back and forth, back and forth, click-clack-click-clack. It is his Queeg-thing.

Now Mahoney quickly put aside the little train. His secretary told him there was a very important call on the line. Mahoney picked it up, and his voice was even softer and more sincere than before. “Yes, Frank,” he said. “Right…right…yes, Frank….”

When Mahoney put down the phone, quietly, he announced that Frank Sinatra had left in his private jet to spend the weekend at his home in Palm Springs, which is a sixteen-minute flight from his home in Los Angeles. Mahoney was now worried again. The Lear jet that Sinatra’s pilot would be flying was identical, Mahoney said, to the one that had just crashed in another part of California.

ON THE FOLLOWING Monday, a cloudy and unseasonably cool California day, more than one hundred people gathered inside a white television studio, an enormous room dominated by a white stage, white walls, and with dozens of lights and lamps dangling: it rather resembled a gigantic operating room. In this room, within an hour or so, NBC was scheduled to begin taping a one-hour show that would be televised in color on the night of November 24 and would highlight, as much as it could in the limited time, the twenty-five-year career of Frank Sinatra as a public entertainer. It would not attempt to probe, as the forthcoming CBS Sinatra documentary allegedly would, that area of Sinatra’s life that he regards as private. The NBC show would be mainly an hour of Sinatra singing some of the hits that carried him from Hoboken to Hollywood, a show that would be interrupted only now and then by a few film clips and commercials for Budweiser beer. Prior to his cold, Sinatra had been very excited about this show; he saw here an opportunity to appeal not only to those nostalgic, but also to communicate his talent to some rock-and-rollers—in a sense, he was battling The Beatles. The press releases being prepared by Mahoney’s agency stressed this, reading: “If you happen to be tired of kid singers wearing mops of hair thick enough to hide a crate of melons…it should be refreshing, to consider the entertainment value of a video special titled Sinatra—A Man and His Music….”

But now in this NBC studio in Los Angeles, there was an atmosphere of anticipation and tension because of the uncertainty of the Sinatra voice. The forty-three musicians in Nelson Riddle’s orchestra had already arrived and some were up on the white platform warming up. Dwight Hemion, a youthful sandy-haired director who had won praise for his television special on Barbra Streisand, was seated in the glass-enclosed control booth that overlooked the orchestra and stage. The camera crews, technical teams, security guards, Budweiser ad men were also standing between the floor lamps and cameras, waiting, as were a dozen or so ladies who worked as secretaries in other parts of the building but had sneaked away so they could watch this.

A few minutes before eleven o’clock, word spread quickly through the long corridor into the big studio that Sinatra was spotted walking through the parking lot and was on his way, and was looking fine. There seemed great relief among the group that was gathered; but when the lean, sharply dressed figure of the man got closer, and closer, they saw to their dismay that it was not Frank Sinatra. It was his double. Johnny Delgado.

Delgado walks like Sinatra, has Sinatra’s build, and from certain facial angles does resemble Sinatra. But he seems a rather shy individual. Fifteen years ago, early in his acting career, Delgado applied for a role in From Here to Eternity. He was hired, finding out later that he was to be Sinatra’s double. In Sinatra’s latest film, Assault on a Queen, a story in which Sinatra and some fellow conspirators attempt to hijack the Queen Mary, Johnny Delgado doubles for Sinatra in some water scenes; and now, in this NBC studio, his job was to stand under the hot television lights marking Sinatra’s spots on the stage for the camera crews.

Five minutes later, the real Frank Sinatra walked in. His face was pale, his blue eyes seemed a bit watery. He had been unable to rid himself of the cold, but he was going to try to sing anyway because the schedule was tight and thousands of dollars were involved at this moment in the assembling of the orchestra and crews and the rental of the studio. But when Sinatra, on his way to his small rehearsal room to warm up his voice, looked into the studio and saw that the stage and orchestra’s platform were not close together, as he had specifically requested, his lips tightened and he was obviously very upset. A few moments later, from his rehearsal room, could be heard the pounding of his fist against the top of the piano and the voice of his accompanist, Bill Miller, saying, softly, “Try not to upset yourself, Frank.”

Later Jim Mahoney and another man walked in, and there was talk of Dorothy Kilgallen’s death in New York earlier that morning. She had been an ardent foe of Sinatra for years, and he became equally uncomplimentary about her in his nightclub act, and now, though she was dead, he did not compromise his feelings. “Dorothy Kilgallen’s dead,” he repeated, walking out of the room toward the studio. “Well, guess I got to change my whole act.”

When he strolled into the studio the musicians all picked up their instruments and stiffened in their seats. Sinatra cleared his throat a few times and then, after rehearsing a few ballads with the orchestra, he sang “Don’t Worry About Me” to his satisfaction and, being uncertain of how long his voice could last, suddenly became impatient.

“Why don’t we tape this mother?” he called out, looking up toward the glass booth where the director, Dwight Hemion, and his staff were sitting. Their heads seemed to be down, focusing on the control board.

“Why don’t we tape this mother?” Sinatra repeated.

The production stage manager, who stands near the camera wearing a headset, repeated Sinatra’s words exactly into his line to the control room: “Why don’t we tape this mother?”

Hemion did not answer. Possibly his switch was off. It was hard to know because of the obscuring reflections the lights made against the glass booth.

“Why don’t we put on a coat and tie,” said Sinatra, then wearing a high-necked yellow pullover, “and tape this….”

Suddenly Hemion’s voice came over the sound amplifier, very calmly: “Okay, Frank, would you mind going back over….”

“Yes, I would mind going back,” Sinatra snapped.

The silence from Hemion’s end, which lasted a second or two, was then again interrupted by Sinatra saying, “When we stop doing things around here the way we did them in 1950, maybe we…” and Sinatra continued to tear into Hemion, condemning as well the lack of modern techniques in putting such shows together; then, possibly not wanting to use his voice unnecessarily, he stopped. And Dwight Hemion, very patient, so patient and calm that one would assume he had not heard anything that Sinatra had just said, outlined the opening part of the show. And Sinatra a few minutes later was reading his opening remarks, words that would follow “Without a Song,” off the large idiot-cards being held near the camera. Then, this done, he prepared to do the same thing on camera.

“Frank Sinatra Show, Act I, Page 10, Take 1,” called a man with a clapboard, jumping in front of the camera—clap—then jumping away again.

“Did you ever stop to think,” Sinatra began, “what the world would be like without a song?… It would be a pretty dreary place…. Gives you something to think about, doesn’t it?…”

Sinatra stopped.

“Excuse me,” he said, adding, “Boy, I need a drink.”

They tried it again.

“Frank Sinatra Show, Act I, Page 10, Take 2,” yelled the jumping guy with the clapboard.

“Did you ever stop to think what the world would be like without a song?…” Frank Sinatra read it through this time without stopping. Then he rehearsed a few more songs, once or twice interrupting the orchestra when a certain instrumental sound was not quite what he wanted. It was hard to tell how well his voice was going to hold up, for this was early in the show; up to this point, however, everybody in the room seemed pleased, particularly when he sang an old sentimental favorite written more than twenty years ago by Jimmy Van Heusen and Phil Silvers—”Nancy,” inspired by the first of Sinatra’s three children when she was just a few years old.

If I don’t see her each day

I miss her….

Gee what a thrill

Each time I kiss her….

As Sinatra sang these words, though he has sung them hundreds and hundreds of times in the past, it was suddenly obvious to everybody in the studio that something quite special must be going on inside the man, because something quite special was coming out. He was singing now, cold or no cold, with power and warmth, he was letting himself go, the public arrogance was gone, the private side was in this song about the girl who, it is said, understands him better than anybody else, and is the only person in front of whom he can be unashamedly himself.

Nancy is twenty-five. She lives alone, her marriage to singer Tommy Sands having ended in divorce. Her home is in a Los Angeles suburb and she is now making her third film and is recording for her father’s record company. She sees him every day; or, if not, he telephones, no matter if it be from Europe or Asia. When Sinatra’s singing first became popular on radio, stimulating the swooners, Nancy would listen at home and cry. When Sinatra’s first marriage broke up in 1951 and he left home, Nancy was the only child old enough to remember him as a father. She also saw him with Ava Gardner, Juliet Prowse, Mia Farrow, many others, has gone on double dates with him….

She takes the winter

And makes it summer….

Summer could take

Some lessons from her….

Nancy now also sees him visiting at home with his first wife, the former Nancy Barbato, a plasterer’s daughter from Jersey City whom he married in 1939 when he was earning $25 a week singing at the Rustic Cabin near Hoboken.

The first Mrs. Sinatra, a striking woman who has never remarried (“When you’ve been married to Frank Sinatra…” she once explained to a friend), lives in a magnificent home in Los Angeles with her younger daughter, Tina, who is seventeen. There is no bitterness, only great respect and affection between Sinatra and his first wife, and he has long been welcome in her home and has even been known to wander in at odd hours, stoke the fire, lie on the sofa, and fall asleep. Frank Sinatra can fall asleep anywhere, something he learned when he used to ride bumpy roads with band buses; he also learned at that time, when sitting in a tuxedo, how to pinch the trouser creases in the back and tuck the jacket under and out, and fall asleep perfectly pressed. But he does not ride buses anymore, and his daughter Nancy, who in her younger days felt rejected when he slept on the sofa instead of giving attention to her, later realized that the sofa was one of the few places left in the world where Frank Sinatra could get any privacy, where his famous face would neither be stared at nor cause an abnormal reaction in others. She realized, too, that things normal have always eluded her father: his childhood was one of loneliness and a drive toward attention, and since attaining it he has never again been certain of solitude. Upon looking out the window of a home he once owned in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, he would occasionally see the faces of teen-agers peeking in; and in 1944, after moving to California and buying a home behind a ten-foot fence on Lake Toluca, he discovered that the only way to escape the telephone and other intrusions was to board his paddle boat with a few friends, a card table and a case of beer, and stay afloat all afternoon. But he has tried, insofar as it has been possible, to be like everyone else, Nancy says. He wept on her wedding day, he is very sentimental and sensitive….

WHAT THE HELL are you doing up there, Dwight?”

Silence from the control booth.

“Got a party or something going on up there, Dwight?”

Sinatra stood on the stage, arms folded, glaring up across the cameras toward Hemion. Sinatra had sung Nancy with probably all he had in his voice on this day. The next few numbers contained raspy notes, and twice his voice completely cracked. But now Hemion was in the control booth out of communication; then he was down in the studio walking over to where Sinatra stood. A few minutes later they both left the studio and were on the way up to the control booth. The tape was replayed for Sinatra. He watched only about five minutes of it before he started to shake his head. Then he said to Hemion: “Forget it, just forget it. You’re wasting your time. What you got there,” Sinatra said, nodding to the singing image of himself on the television screen, “is a man with a cold.” Then he left the control booth, ordering that the whole day’s performance be scrubbed and future taping postponed until he had recovered.

SOON THE WORD SPREAD like an emotional epidemic down through Sinatra’s staff, then fanned out through Hollywood, then was heard across the nation in Jilly’s saloon, and also on the other side of the Hudson River in the homes of Frank Sinatra’s parents and his other relatives and friends in New Jersey.

When Frank Sinatra spoke with his father on the telephone and said he was feeling awful, the elder Sinatra reported that he was also feeling awful: that his left arm and fist were so stiff with a circulatory condition he could barely use them, adding that the ailment might be the result of having thrown too many left hooks during his days as a bantamweight almost fifty years ago.

Martin Sinatra, a ruddy and tattooed little blue-eyed Sicilian born in Catania, boxed under the name of “Marty O’Brien.” In those days, in those places, with the Irish running the lower reaches of city life, it was not uncommon for Italians to wind up with such names. Most of the Italians and Sicilians who migrated to America just prior to the 1900’s were poor and uneducated, were excluded from the building-trades unions dominated by the Irish, and were somewhat intimidated by the Irish police, Irish priests, Irish politicians.

One notable exception was Frank Sinatra’s mother, Dolly, a large and very ambitious woman who was brought to this country at two months of age by her mother and father, a lithographer from Genoa. In later years Dolly Sinatra, possessing a round red face and blue eyes, was often mistaken for being Irish, and surprised many at the speed with which she swung her heavy handbag at anyone uttering “Wop.”

By playing skillful politics with North Jersey’s Democratic machine, Dolly Sinatra was to become, in her heyday, a kind of Catherine de Medici of Hoboken’s third ward. She could always be counted upon to deliver six hundred votes at election time from her Italian neighborhood, and this was her base of power. When she told one of the politicians that she wanted her husband to be appointed to the Hoboken Fire Department, and was told, “But, Dolly, we don’t have an opening,” she snapped, “Make an opening.”

They did. Years later she requested that her husband be made a captain, and one day she got a call from one of the political bosses that began, “Dolly, congratulations!”

“For what?”

“Captain Sinatra.”

“Oh, you finally made him one—thank you very much.”

Then she called the Hoboken Fire Department.

“Let me speak to Captain Sinatra,” she said. The fireman called Martin Sinatra to the phone, saying, “Marty, I think your wife has gone nuts.” When he got on the line, Dolly greeted him:

“Congratulations, Captain Sinatra!”

Dolly’s only child, christened Francis Albert Sinatra, was born and nearly died on December 12, 1915. It was a difficult birth, and during his first moment on earth he received marks he will carry till death—the scars on the left side of his neck being the result of a doctor’s clumsy forceps, and Sinatra has chosen not to obscure them with surgery.

After he was six months old, he was reared mainly by his grandmother. His mother had a full-time job as a chocolate dipper with a large firm and was so proficient at it that the firm once offered to send her to the Paris office to train others. While some people in Hoboken remember Frank Sinatra as a lonely child, one who spent many hours on the porch gazing into space, Sinatra was never a slum kid, never in jail, always well-dressed. He had so many pants that some people in Hoboken called him “Slacksey O’Brien.”

Dolly Sinatra was not the sort of Italian mother who could be appeased merely by a child’s obedience and good appetite. She made many demands on her son, was always very strict. She dreamed of his becoming an aviation engineer. When she discovered Bing Crosby pictures hanging on his bedroom walls one evening, and learned that her son wished to become a singer too, she became infuriated and threw a shoe at him. Later, finding she could not talk him out of it—”he takes after me”—she encouraged his singing.

Many Italo-American boys of his generation were then shooting for the same star—they were strong with song, weak with words, not a big novelist among them: no O’Hara, no Bellow, no Cheever, nor Shaw; yet they could communicate bel canto. This was more in their tradition, no need for a diploma; they could, with a song, someday see their names in lights…Perry Como…Frankie Laine…Tony Bennett…Vic Damone…but none could see it better than Frank Sinatra.

Though he sang through much of the night at the Rustic Cabin, he was up the next day singing without a fee on New York radio to get more attention. Later he got a job singing with Harry James’s band, and it was there in August of 1939 that Sinatra had his first recording hit— “All or Nothing at All.” He became very fond of Harry James and the men in the band, but when he received an offer from Tommy Dorsey, who in those days had probably the best band in the country, Sinatra took it; the job paid $125 a week, and Dorsey knew how to feature a vocalist. Yet Sinatra was very depressed at leaving James’s band, and the final night with them was so memorable that, twenty years later, Sinatra could recall the details to a friend: “…the bus pulled out with the rest of the boys at about half-past midnight. I’d said good-bye to them all, and it was snowing, I remember. There was nobody around and I stood alone with my suitcase in the snow and watched the taillights disappear. Then the tears started and I tried to run after the bus. There was such spirit and enthusiasm in that band, I hated leaving it….”

But he did—as he would leave other warm places, too, in search of something more, never wasting time, trying to do it all in one generation, fighting under his own name, defending underdogs, terrorizing top dogs. He threw a punch at a musician who said something anti-Semitic, espoused the Negro cause two decades before it became fashionable. He also threw a tray of glasses at Buddy Rich when he played the drums too loud.

Sinatra gave away $50,000 worth of gold cigarette lighters before he was thirty, was living an immigrant’s wildest dream of America. He arrived suddenly on the scene when DiMaggio was silent, when paisanos were mournful, were quietly defensive about Hitler in their homeland. Sinatra became, in time, a kind of one-man Anti-Defamation League for Italians in America, the sort of organization that would be unlikely for them because, as the theory goes, they rarely agreed on anything, being extreme individualists: fine as soloists, but not so good in a choir; fine as heroes, but not so good in a parade.

When many Italian names were used in describing gangsters on a television show, The Untouchables, Sinatra was loud in his disapproval. Sinatra and many thousands of other Italo-Americans were resentful as well when a small-time hoodlum, Joseph Valachi, was brought by Bobby Kennedy into prominence as a Mafia expert, when indeed, from Valachi’s testimony on television, he seemed to know less than most waiters on Mulberry Street. Many Italians in Sinatra’s circle also regard Bobby Kennedy as something of an Irish cop, more dignified than those in Dolly’s day, but no less intimidating. Together with Peter Lawford, Bobby Kennedy is said to have suddenly gotten “cocky” with Sinatra after John Kennedy’s election, forgetting the contribution Sinatra had made in both fundraising and in influencing many anti-Irish Italian votes. Lawford and Bobby Kennedy are both suspected of having influenced the late President’s decision to stay as a house guest with Bing Crosby instead of Sinatra, as originally planned, a social setback Sinatra may never forget. Peter Lawford has since been drummed out of Sinatra’s “summit” in Las Vegas.

“Yes, my son is like me,” Dolly Sinatra says, proudly. “You cross him, he never forgets.” And while she concedes his power, she quickly points out, “He can’t make his mother do anything she doesn’t want to do,” adding, “Even today, he wears the same brand of underwear I used to buy him.”

Today Dolly Sinatra is seventy-one years old, a year or two younger than Martin, and all day long people are knocking on the back door of her large home asking her advice, seeking her influence. When she is not seeing people and not cooking in the kitchen, she is looking after her husband, a silent but stubborn man, and telling him to keep his sore left arm resting on the sponge she has placed on the armrest of a soft chair. “Oh, he went to some terrific fires, this guy did,” Dolly said to a visitor, nodding with admiration toward her husband in the chair.

Though Dolly Sinatra has eighty-seven godchildren in Hoboken, and still goes to that city during political campaigns, she now lives with her husband in a beautiful sixteen-room house in Fort Lee, New Jersey. This home was a gift from their son on their fiftieth wedding anniversary three years ago. The home is tastefully furnished and is filled with a remarkable juxtaposition of the pious and the worldly—photographs of Pope John and Ava Gardner, of Pope Paul and Dean Martin; several statues of saints and holy water, a chair autographed by Sammy Davis, Jr. and bottles of bourbon. In Mrs. Sinatra’s jewelry box is a magnificent strand of pearls she had just received from Ava Gardner, whom she liked tremendously as a daughter-in-law and still keeps in touch with and talks about; and hung on the wall is a letter addressed to Dolly and Martin: “The sands of time have turned to gold, yet love continues to unfold like the petals of a rose, in God’s garden of life…may God love you thru all eternity. I thank Him, I thank you for the being of one. Your loving son, Francis….”

Mrs. Sinatra talks to her son on the telephone about once a week, and recently he suggested that, when visiting Manhattan, she make use of his apartment on East Seventy-second Street on the East River. This is an expensive neighborhood of New York even though there is a small factory on the block, but this latter fact was seized upon by Dolly Sinatra as a means of getting back at her son for some unflattering descriptions of his childhood in Hoboken.

“What—you want me to stay in your apartment, in that dump?” she asked. “You think I’m going to spend the night in that awful neighborhood?”

Frank Sinatra got the point, and said, “Excuse me, Mrs. Fort Lee.”

After spending the week in Palm Springs, his cold much better, Frank Sinatra returned to Los Angeles, a lovely city of sun and sex, a Spanish discovery of Mexican misery, a star land of little men and little women sliding in and out of convertibles in tense tight pants.

Sinatra returned in time to see the long-awaited CBS documentary with his family. At about nine p.m. he drove to the home of his former wife, Nancy, and had dinner with her and their two daughters. Their son, whom they rarely see these days, was out of town.

Frank, Jr., who is twenty-two, was touring with a band and moving cross country toward a New York engagement at Basin Street East with The Pied Pipers, with whom Frank Sinatra sang when he was with Dorsey’s band in the 1940’s. Today Frank Sinatra, Jr., whom his father says he named after Franklin D. Roosevelt, lives mostly in hotels, dines each evening in his nightclub dressing room, and sings until two a.m., accepting graciously, because he has no choice, the inevitable comparisons. His voice is smooth and pleasant, and improving with work, and while he is very respectful of his father, he discusses him with objectivity and in an occasional tone of subdued cockiness.

Concurrent with his father’s early fame, Frank, Jr. said, was the creation of a “press-release Sinatra” designed to “set him apart from the common man, separate him from the realities: it was suddenly Sinatra, the electric magnate, Sinatra who is supernormal, not superhuman but supernormal. And here,” Frank, Jr. continued, “is the great fallacy, the great bullshit, for Frank Sinatra is normal, is the guy whom you’d meet on a street corner. But this other thing, the supernormal guise, has affected Frank Sinatra as much as anybody who watches one of his television shows, or reads a magazine article about him….

“Frank Sinatra’s life in the beginning was so normal,” he said, “that nobody would have guessed in 1934 that this little Italian kid with the curly hair would become the giant, the monster, the great living legend…. He met my mother one summer on the beach. She was Nancy Barbato, daughter of Mike Barbato, a Jersey City plasterer. And she meets the fireman’s son, Frank, one summer day on the beach at Long Branch, New Jersey. Both are Italian, both Roman Catholic, both lower-middle-class summer sweethearts—it is like a million bad movies starring Frankie Avalon. . . .

“They have three children. The first child, Nancy, was the most normal of Frank Sinatra’s children. Nancy was a cheerleader, went to summer camp, drove a Chevrolet, had the easiest kind of development centered around the home and family. Next is me. My life with the family is very, very normal up until September of 1958 when, in complete contrast to the rearing of both girls, I am put into a college-preparatory school. I am now away from the inner family circle, and my position within has never been remade to this day…. The third child, Tina. And to be dead honest, I really couldn’t say what her life is like….”

The CBS show, narrated by Walter Cronkite, began at ten p.m. A minute before that, the Sinatra family, having finished dinner, turned their chairs around and faced the camera, united for whatever disaster might follow. Sinatra’s men in other parts of town, in other parts of the nation, were doing the same thing. Sinatra’s lawyer, Milton A. Rudin, smoking a cigar, was watching with a keen eye, an alert legal mind. Other sets were watched by Brad Dexter, Jim Mahoney, Ed Pucci; Sinatra’s makeup man, “Shotgun” Britton; his New York representative, Henri Gine; his haberdasher, Richard Carroll; his insurance broker, John Lillie; his valet, George Jacobs, a handsome Negro who, when entertaining girls in his apartment, plays records by Ray Charles.

And like so much of Hollywood’s fear, the apprehension about the CBS show all proved to be without foundation. It was a highly flattering hour that did not deeply probe, as rumors suggested it would, into Sinatra’s love life, or the Mafia, or other areas of his private province. While the documentary was not authorized, wrote Jack Gould in the next day’s New York Times, “it could have been.”

Immediately after the show, the telephones began to ring throughout the Sinatra system conveying words of joy and relief—and from New York came Jilly’s telegram: “WE RULE THE WORLD!”

THE NEXT DAY, STANDING in the corridor of the NBC building where he was about to resume taping his show, Sinatra was discussing the CBS show with several of his friends, and he said, “Oh, it was a gas.”

“Yeah, Frank, a helluva show.”

“But I think Jack Gould was right in The Times today,” Sinatra said. “There should have been more on the man, not so much on the music….”

They nodded, nobody mentioning the past hysteria in the Sinatra world when it seemed CBS was zeroing in on the man; they just nodded and two of them laughed about Sinatra’s apparently having gotten the word “bird” on the show—this being a favorite Sinatra word. He often inquires of his cronies, “How’s your bird?”; and when he nearly drowned in Hawaii, he later explained, “Just got a little water on my bird”; and under a large photograph of him holding a whisky bottle, a photo that hangs in the home of an actor friend named Dick Bakalyan, the inscription reads: “Drink, Dickie! It’s good for your bird.” In the song, “Come Fly with Me,” Sinatra sometimes alters the lyrics—”…just say the words and we’ll take our birds down to Acapulco Bay….”

Ten minutes later Sinatra, following the orchestra, walked into the NBC studio, which did not resemble in the slightest the scene here of eight days ago. On this occasion Sinatra was in fine voice, he cracked jokes between numbers, nothing could upset him. Once, while he was singing “How Can I Ignore the Girl Next Door,” standing on the stage next to a tree, a television camera mounted on a vehicle came rolling in too close and plowed against the tree.

“Kee-rist!” yelled one of the technical assistants.

But Sinatra seemed hardly to notice it.

“We’ve had a slight accident,” he said, calmly. Then he began the song all over from the beginning.

When the show was over, Sinatra watched the rerun on the monitor in the control room. He was very pleased, shaking hands with Dwight Hemion and his assistants. Then the whisky bottles were opened in Sinatra’s dressing room. Pat Lawford was there, and so were Andy Williams and a dozen others. The telegrams and telephone calls continued to be received from all over the country with praise for the CBS show. There was even a call, Mahoney said, from the CBS producer, Don Hewitt, with whom Sinatra had been so angry a few days before. And Sinatra was still angry, feeling that CBS had betrayed him, though the show itself was not objectionable.

“Shall I drop a line to Hewitt?” Mahoney asked.

“Can you send a fist through the mail?” Sinatra asked.

He has everything, he cannot sleep, he gives nice gifts, he is not happy, but he would not trade, even for happiness, what he is….

He is a piece of our past—but only we have aged, he hasn’t…we are dogged by domesticity, he isn’t…we have compunctions, he doesn’t…it is our fault, not his….

He controls the menus of every Italian restaurant in Los Angeles; if you want North Italian cooking, fly to Milan….

Men follow him, imitate him, fight to be near him…there is something of the locker room, the barracks about him…bird…bird….

He believes you must play it big, wide, expansively— the more open you are, the more you take in, your dimensions deepen, you grow, you become more what you are—bigger, richer….

“He is better than anybody else, or at least they think he is, and he has to live up to it.” —Nancy Sinatra, Jr.

“He is calm on the outside—inwardly a million things are happening to him.” —Dick Bakalyan

“He has an insatiable desire to live every moment to its fullest because, I guess, he feels that right around the corner is extinction.” —Brad Dexter

“All I ever got out of any of my marriages was the two years Artie Shaw financed on an analyst’s couch.” —Ava Gardner

“We weren’t mother and son—we were buddies.” —Dolly Sinatra

“I’m for anything that gets you through the night, be it prayer, tranquilizers or a bottle of Jack Daniel.” —Frank Sinatra

FRANK SINATRA WAS TIRED of all the talk, the gossip, the theory—tired of reading quotes about himself, of hearing what people were saying about him all over town. It had been a tedious three weeks, he said, and now he just wanted to get away, go to Las Vegas, let off some steam. So he hopped in his jet, soared over the California hills across the Nevada flats, then over miles and miles of desert to The Sands and the Clay-Patterson fight.

On the eve of the fight he stayed up all night and slept through most of the afternoon, though his recorded voice could be heard singing in the lobby of The Sands, in the gambling casino, even in the toilets, being interrupted every few bars however by the paging public address: “…Telephone call for Mr. Ron Fish, Mr. Ron Fish…with a ribbon of gold in her hair…. Telephone call for Mr. Herbert Rothstein, Mr. Herbert Rothstein…memories of a time so bright, keep me sleepless through dark endless nights….”

Standing around in the lobby of The Sands and other hotels up and down the strip on this afternoon before the fight were the usual prefight prophets: the gamblers, the old champs, the little cigar butts from Eighth Avenue, the sportswriters who knock the big fights all year but would never miss one, the novelists who seem always to be identifying with one boxer or another, the local prostitutes assisted by some talent in from Los Angeles, and also a young brunette in a wrinkled black cocktail dress who was at the bell captain’s desk crying, “But I want to speak to Mr. Sinatra.”

“He’s not here,” the bell captain said.

“Won’t you put me through to his room?”

“There are no messages going through, Miss,” he said, and then she turned, unsteadily, seeming close to tears, and walked through the lobby into the big noisy casino crowded with men interested only in money.

Shortly before seven p.m., Jack Entratter, a big grey-haired man who operates The Sands, walked into the gambling room to tell some men around the blackjack table that Sinatra was getting dressed. He also said that he’d been unable to get front-row seats for everybody, and so some of the men—including Leo Durocher, who had a date, and Joey Bishop, who was accompanied by his wife—would not be able to fit in Frank Sinatra’s row but would have to take seats in the third row. When Entratter walked over to tell this to Joey Bishop, Bishop’s face fell. He did not seem angry; he merely looked at Entratter with an empty silence, seeming somewhat stunned.

“Joey, I’m sorry,” Entratter said when the silence persisted, “but we couldn’t get more than six together in the front row.”

Bishop still said nothing. But when they all appeared at the fight, Joey Bishop was in the front row, his wife in the third.

The fight, called a holy war between Muslims and Christians, was preceded by the introduction of three balding ex-champions, Rocky Marciano, Joe Louis, Sonny Liston—and then there was “The Star-Spangled Banner” sung by another man from out of the past, Eddie Fisher. It had been more than fourteen years ago, but Sinatra could still remember every detail: Eddie Fisher was then the new king of the baritones, with Billy Eckstine and Guy Mitchell right with him, and Sinatra had been long counted out. One day he remembered walking into a broadcasting studio past dozens of Eddie Fisher fans waiting outside the hall, and when they saw Sinatra they began to jeer, “Frankie, Frankie, I’m swooning, I’m swooning.” This was also the time when he was selling only about 30,000 records a year, when he was dreadfully miscast as a funny man on his television show, and when he recorded such disasters as “Mama Will Bark,” with Dagmar.

“I growled and barked on the record,” Sinatra said, still horrified by the thought. “The only good it did me was with the dogs.”

His voice and his artistic judgment were incredibly bad in 1952, but even more responsible for his decline, say his friends, was his pursuit of Ava Gardner. She was the big movie queen then, one of the most beautiful women in the world. Sinatra’s daughter Nancy recalls seeing Ava swimming one day in her father’s pool, then climbing out of the water with that fabulous body, walking slowly to the fire, leaning over it for a few moments, and then it suddenly seemed that her long dark hair was all dry, miraculously and effortlessly back in place.

With most women Sinatra dates, his friends say, he never knows whether they want him for what he can do for them now—or will do for them later. With Ava Gardner, it was different. He could do nothing for her later. She was on top. If Sinatra learned anything from his experience with her, he possibly learned that when a proud man is down a woman cannot help. Particularly a woman on top.

Nevertheless, despite a tired voice, some deep emotion seeped into his singing during this time. One particular song that is well remembered even now is “I’m a Fool to Want You,” and a friend who was in the studio when Sinatra recorded it recalled: “Frank was really worked up that night. He did the song in one take, then turned around and walked out of the studio and that was that….”

Sinatra’s manager at that time, a former song plugger named Hank Sanicola, said, “Ava loved Frank, but not the way he loved her. He needs a great deal of love. He wants it twenty-four hours a day, he must have people around—Frank is that kind of guy.” Ava Gardner, Sanicola said, “was very insecure. She feared she could not really hold a man…twice he went chasing her to Africa, wasting his own career….”

“Ava didn’t want Frank’s men hanging around all the time,” another friend said, “and this got him mad. With Nancy he used to be able to bring the whole band home with him, and Nancy, the good Italian wife, would never complain—she’d just make everybody a plate of spaghetti.”

In 1953, after almost two years of marriage, Sinatra and Ava Gardner were divorced. Sinatra’s mother reportedly arranged a reconciliation, but if Ava was willing, Frank Sinatra was not. He was seen with other women. The balance had shifted. Somewhere during this period Sinatra seemed to change from the kid singer, the boy actor in the sailor suit, to a man. Even before he had won the Oscar in 1953 for his role in From Here to Eternity, some flashes of his old talent were coming through—in his recording of “The Birth of the Blues,” in his Riviera-nightclub appearance that jazz critics enthusiastically praised; and there was also a trend now toward L.P.’s and away from the quick three-minute deal, and Sinatra’s concert style would have capitalized on this with or without an Oscar.

In 1954, totally committed to his talent once more, Frank Sinatra was selected Metronome’s “Singer of the Year,” and later he won the U.P.I. disc-jockey poll, unseating Eddie Fisher—who now, in Las Vegas, having sung “The Star-Spangled Banner,” climbed out of the ring, and the fight began.

Floyd Patterson chased Clay around the ring in the first round, but was unable to reach him, and from then on he was Clay’s toy, the bout ending in a technical knockout in the twelfth round. A half hour later, nearly everybody had forgotten about the fight and was back at the gambling tables or lining up to buy tickets for the Dean Martin-Sinatra-Bishop nightclub routine on the stage of The Sands. This routine, which includes Sammy Davis, Jr. when he is in town, consists of a few songs and much cutting up, all of it very informal, very special, and rather ethnic—Martin, a drink in hand, asking Bishop: “Did you ever see a Jew jitsu?”; and Bishop, playing a Jewish waiter, warning the two Italians to watch out “because I got my own group—the Matzia.”

Then after the last show at The Sands, the Sinatra crowd, which now numbered about twenty—and included Jilly, who had flown in from New York; Jimmy Cannon, Sinatra’s favorite sports columnist; Harold Gibbons, a Teamster official expected to take over if Hoffa goes to jail—all got into a line of cars and headed for another club. It was three o’clock. The night was young.

They stopped at The Sahara, taking a long table near the back, and listened to a baldheaded little comedian named Don Rickles, who is probably more caustic than any comic in the country. His humor is so rude, in such bad taste, that it offends no one—it is too offensive to be offensive. Spotting Eddie Fisher among the audience, Rickles proceeded to ridicule him as a lover, saying it was no wonder that he could not handle Elizabeth Taylor; and when two businessmen in the audience acknowledged that they were Egyptian, Rickles cut into them for their country’s policy toward Israel; and he strongly suggested that the woman seated at one table with her husband was actually a hooker.

When the Sinatra crowd walked in, Don Rickles could not be more delighted. Pointing to Jilly, Rickles yelled: “How’s it feel to be Frank’s tractor?… Yeah, Jilly keeps walking in front of Frank clearing the way.” Then, nodding to Durocher, Rickles said, “Stand up Leo, show Frank how you slide.” Then he focused on Sinatra, not failing to mention Mia Farrow, nor that he was wearing a toupee, nor to say that Sinatra was washed up as a singer, and when Sinatra laughed, everybody laughed, and Rickles pointed toward Bishop: “Joey Bishop keeps checking with Frank to see what’s funny.”

Then, after Rickles told some Jewish jokes, Dean Martin stood up and yelled, “Hey, you’re always talking about the Jews, never about the Italians,” and Rickles cut him off with, “What do we need the Italians for—all they do is keep the flies off our fish.”

Sinatra laughed, they all laughed, and Rickles went on this way for nearly an hour until Sinatra, standing up, said, “All right, com’on, get this thing over with. I gotta go.”

“Shaddup and sit down!” Rickles snapped. “I’ve had to listen to you sing….”

“Who do you think you’re talking to?” Sinatra yelled back.

“Dick Haymes,” Rickles replied, and Sinatra laughed again, and then Dean Martin, pouring a bottle of whisky over his head, entirely drenching his tuxedo, pounded the table.

“Who would ever believe that staggering would make a star?” Rickles said, but Martin called out, “Hey, I wanna make a speech.”

“Shaddup.”

“No, Don, I wanna tell ya,” Dean Martin persisted, “that I think you’re a great performer.”

“Well, thank you, Dean,” Rickles said, seeming pleased.

“But don’t go by me,” Martin said, plopping down into his seat, “I’m drunk.”

“I’ll buy that,” Rickles said.

BY FOUR A.M. FRANK SINATRA led the group out of The Sahara, some of them carrying their glasses of whisky with them, sipping it along the sidewalk and in the cars; then, returning to The Sands, they walked into the gambling casino. It was still packed with people, the roulette wheels spinning, the crapshooters screaming in the far corner.

Frank Sinatra, holding a shot glass of bourbon in his left hand, walked through the crowd. He, unlike some of his friends, was perfectly pressed, his tuxedo tie precisely pointed, his shoes unsmudged. He never seems to lose his dignity, never lets his guard completely down no matter how much he has drunk, nor how long he has been up. He never sways when he walks, like Dean Martin, nor does he ever dance in the aisles or jump up on tables, like Sammy Davis.

A part of Sinatra, no matter where he is, is never there. There is always a part of him, though sometimes a small part, that remains Il Padrone. Even now, resting his shot glass on the blackjack table, facing the dealer, Sinatra stood a bit back from the table, not leaning against it. He reached under his tuxedo jacket into his trouser pocket and came up with a thick but clean wad of bills. Gently he peeled off a one-hundred-dollar bill and placed it on the green-felt table. The dealer dealt him two cards. Sinatra called for a third card, overbid, lost the hundred.

Without a change of expression, Sinatra put down a second hundred-dollar bill. He lost that. Then he put down a third, and lost that. Then he placed two one-hundred-dollar bills on the table and lost those. Finally, putting his sixth hundred-dollar bill on the table, and losing it, Sinatra moved away from the table, nodding to the man, and announcing, “Good dealer.”

The crowd that had gathered around him now opened up to let him through. But a woman stepped in front of him, handing him a piece of paper to autograph. He signed it and then he said, “Thank you.”

In the rear of The Sands’ large dining room was a long table reserved for Sinatra. The dining room was fairly empty at this hour, with perhaps two dozen other people in the room, including a table of four unescorted young ladies sitting near Sinatra. On the other side of the room, at another long table, sat seven men shoulder-to-shoulder against the wall, two of them wearing dark glasses, all of them eating quietly, speaking hardly a word, just sitting and eating and missing nothing.

The Sinatra party, after getting settled and having a few more drinks, ordered something to eat. The table was about the same size as the one reserved for Sinatra whenever he is at Jilly’s in New York; and the people seated around this table in Las Vegas were many of the same people who are often seen with Sinatra at Jilly’s or at a restaurant in California, or in Italy, or in New Jersey, or wherever Sinatra happens to be. When Sinatra sits to dine, his trusted friends are close; and no matter where he is, no matter how elegant the place may be, there is something of the neighborhood showing because Sinatra, no matter how far he has come, is still something of the boy from the neighborhood—only now he can take his neighborhood with him.

In some ways, this quasi-family affair at a reserved table in a public place is the closest thing Sinatra now has to home life. Perhaps, having had a home and left it, this approximation is as close as he cares to come; although this does not seem precisely so because he speaks with such warmth about his family, keeps in close touch with his first wife, and insists that she make no decision without first consulting him. He is always eager to place his furniture or other mementos of himself in her home or his daughter Nancy’s, and he also is on amiable terms with Ava Gardner. When he was in Italy making Von Ryan’s Express, they spent some time together, being pursued wherever they went by the paparazzi. It was reported then that the paparazzi had made Sinatra a collective offer of $16,000 if he would pose with Ava Gardner; Sinatra was said to have made a counter offer of $32,000 if he could break one paparazzi arm and leg.

While Sinatra is often delighted that he can be in his home completely without people, enabling him to read and think without interruption, there are occasions when he finds himself alone at night, and not by choice. He may have dialed a half-dozen women, and for one reason or another they are all unavailable. So he will call his valet, George Jacobs.

“I’ll be coming home for dinner tonight, George.”

“How many will there be?”

“Just myself,” Sinatra will say. “I want something light, I’m not very hungry.”

George Jacobs is a twice-divorced man of thirty-six who resembles Billy Eckstine. He has traveled all over the world with Sinatra and is devoted to him. Jacobs lives in a comfortable bachelor’s apartment off Sunset Boulevard around the corner from Whiskey à Go Go, and he is known around town for the assortment of frisky California girls he has as friends—a few of whom, he concedes, were possibly drawn to him initially because of his closeness to Frank Sinatra.

When Sinatra arrives, Jacobs will serve him dinner in the dining room. Then Sinatra will tell Jacobs that he is free to go home. If Sinatra, on such evenings, should ask Jacobs to stay longer, or to play a few hands of poker, he would be happy to do so. But Sinatra never does.

THIS WAS HIS SECOND night in Las Vegas, and Frank Sinatra sat with friends in The Sands’ dining room until nearly eight a.m. He slept through much of the day, then flew back to Los Angeles, and on the following morning he was driving his little golf cart through the Paramount Pictures movie lot. He was scheduled to complete two final scenes with the sultry blonde actress, Virna Lisi, in the film Assault on a Queen. As he maneuvered the little vehicle up the road between the big studio buildings, he spotted Steve Rossi who, with his comedy partner Marty Allen, was making a film in an adjoining studio with Nancy Sinatra.

“Hey, Dag,” he yelled to Rossi, “stop kissing Nancy.”

“It’s part of the film, Frank,” Rossi said, turning as he walked.

“In the garage?”

“It’s my Dago blood, Frank.”

“Well, cool it,” Sinatra said, winking, then cutting his golf cart around a corner and parking it outside a big drab building within which the scenes for Assault would be filmed.

“Where’s the fat director?” Sinatra called out, striding into the studio that was crowded with dozens of technical assistants and actors all gathered around cameras. The director, Jack Donohue, a large man who has worked with Sinatra through twenty-two years on one production or other, has had headaches with this film. The script had been chopped, the actors seemed restless, and Sinatra had become bored. But now there were only two scenes left—a short one to be filmed in the pool, and a longer and passionate one featuring Sinatra and Virna Lisi to be shot on a simulated beach.

The pool scene, which dramatizes a situation where Sinatra and his hijackers fail in their attempt to sack the Queen Mary, went quickly and well. After Sinatra had been kept in the water shoulder-high for a few minutes, he said, “Let’s move it, fellows—it’s cold in this water, and I’ve just gotten over one cold.”

So the camera crews moved in closer, Virna Lisi splashed next to Sinatra in the water, and Jack Donohue yelled to his assistants operating the fans, “Get the waves going,” and another man gave the command, “Agitate!” and Sinatra broke out in song. “Agitate in rhythm,” then quieted down just before the cameras started to roll.

Frank Sinatra was on the beach in the next situation, supposedly gazing up at the stars, and Virna Lisi was to approach him, toss one of her shoes near him to announce her presence, then sit near him and prepare for a passionate session. Just before beginning, Miss Lisi made a practice toss of her shoe toward the prone figure of Sinatra sprawled on the beach. As she tossed her shoe, Sinatra called out, “Hit me in my bird and I’m going home.”

Virna Lisi, who understands little English and certainly none of Sinatra’s special vocabulary, looked confused, but everybody behind the camera laughed. She threw the shoe toward him. It twirled in the air, landed on his stomach.

“Well, that’s about three inches too high,” he announced. She again was puzzled by the laughter behind the camera.

Then Jack Donohue had them rehearse their lines, and Sinatra, still very charged from the Las Vegas trip, and anxious to get the cameras rolling, said, “Let’s try one.” Donohue, not certain that Sinatra and Lisi knew their lines well enough, nevertheless said okay, and an assistant with a clapboard called, “419, Take 1,” and Virna Lisi approached with the shoe, tossed it at Frank lying on the beach. It fell short of his thigh, and Sinatra’s right eye raised almost imperceptibly, but the crew got the message, smiled.

“What do the stars tell you tonight?” Miss Lisi said, delivering her first line, and sitting next to Sinatra on the beach.

“The stars tell me tonight I’m an idiot,” Sinatra said, “a gold-plated idiot to get mixed up in this thing….”

“Cut,” Donohue said. There were some microphone shadows on the sand, and Virna Lisi was not sitting in the proper place near Sinatra.

“419, Take 2,” the clapboard man called.

Miss Lisi again approached, threw the shoe at him, this time falling short—Sinatra exhaling only slightly—and she said, “What do the stars tell you tonight?”

“The stars tell me I’m an idiot, a gold-plated idiot to get mixed up in this thing….” Then, according to the script, Sinatra was to continue, “…do you know what we’re getting into? The minute we step on the deck of the Queen Mary, we’ve just tattooed ourselves,” but Sinatra, who often improvises on lines, recited them: “…do you know what we’re getting into? The minute we step on the deck of that mother’s-ass ship….”

“No, no,” Donohue interrupted, shaking his head, “I don’t think that’s right.”

The cameras stopped, some people laughed, and Sinatra looked up from his position in the sand as if he had been unfairly interrupted.

“I don’t see why that can’t work…” he began, but Richard Conte, standing behind the camera, yelled, “It won’t play in London.”

Donohue pushed his hand through his thinning grey hair and said, but not really in anger, “You know, that scene was pretty good until somebody blew the line….”

“Yeah,” agreed the cameraman, Billy Daniels, his head popping out from around the camera, “it was a pretty good piece….”

“Watch your language,” Sinatra cut in. Then Sinatra, who has a genius for figuring out ways of not reshooting scenes, suggested a way in which the film could be used and the “mother” line could be recorded later. This met with approval. Then the cameras were rolling again, Virna Lisi was leaning toward Sinatra in the sand, and then he pulled her down close to him. The camera now moved in for a close-up of their faces, ticking away for a few long seconds, but Sinatra and Lisi did not stop kissing, they just lay together in the sand wrapped in one another’s arms, and then Virna Lisi’s left leg just slightly began to rise a bit, and everybody in the studio now watched in silence, not saying anything until Donohue finally called out:

“If you ever get through, let me know. I’m running out of film.”

Then Miss Lisi got up, straightened out her white dress, brushed back her blonde hair and touched her lipstick, which was smeared. Sinatra got up, a little smile on his lips, and headed for his dressing room.

Passing an older man who stood near a camera, Sinatra asked, “How’s your Bell & Howell?”

The older man smiled.

“It’s fine, Frank.”

“Good.”

In his dressing room Sinatra was met by an automobile designer who had the plans for Sinatra’s new custom-built model to replace the $25,000 Ghia he has been driving for the last few years. He also was awaited by his secretary, Tom Conroy, who had a bag full of fan mail, including a letter from New York’s Mayor John Lindsay; and by Bill Miller, Sinatra’s pianist, who would rehearse some of the songs that would be recorded later in the evening for Sinatra’s newest album, Moonlight Sinatra.

While Sinatra does not mind hamming it up a bit on a movie set, he is extremely serious about his recording sessions; as he explained to a British writer, Robin Douglas-Home: “Once you’re on that record singing, it’s you and you alone. If it’s bad and gets you criticized, it’s you who’s to blame—no one else. If it’s good, it’s also you. With a film it’s never like that; there are producers and scriptwriters, and hundreds of men in offices and the thing is taken right out of your hands. With a record, you’re it….”

But now the days are short

I’m in the autumn of the year

And now I think of my life

As vintage wine

From fine old kegs….

It no longer matters what song he is singing, or who wrote the words—they are all his words, his sentiments, they are chapters from the lyrical novel of his life.

Life is a beautiful thing

As long as I hold the string….

When Frank Sinatra drives to the studio, he seems to dance out of the car across the sidewalk into the front door; then, snapping his fingers, he is standing in front of the orchestra in an intimate, airtight room, and soon he is dominating every man, every instrument, every sound wave. Some of the musicians have accompanied him for twenty-five years, have gotten old hearing him sing “You Make Me Feel So Young.”

When his voice is on, as it was tonight, Sinatra is in ecstasy, the room becomes electric, there is an excitement that spreads through the orchestra and is felt in the control booth where a dozen men, Sinatra’s friends, wave at him from behind the glass. One of the men is the Dodgers’ pitcher, Don Drysdale (“Hey, Big D,” Sinatra calls out, “hey, baby!”); another is the professional golfer Bo Wininger; there are also numbers of pretty women standing in the booth behind the engineers, women who smile at Sinatra and softly move their bodies to the mellow mood of his music:

Will this be moon love

Nothing but moon love

Will you be gone when the dawn

Comes stealing through….

After he is finished, the record is played back on tape, and Nancy Sinatra, who has just walked in, joins her father near the front of the orchestra to hear the playback. They listen silently, all eyes on them, the king, the princess; and when the music ends there is applause from the control booth, Nancy smiles, and her father snaps his fingers and says, kicking a foot, “Ooba-deeba-boobe-do!”

Then Sinatra calls to one of his men. “Hey, Sarge, think I can have a half-a-cup of coffee?”

Sarge Weiss, who had been listening to the music, slowly gets up.

“Didn’t mean to wake ya, Sarge,” Sinatra says, smiling.

Then Weiss brings the coffee, and Sinatra looks at it, smells it, then announces, “I thought he’d be nice to me, but it’s really coffee….”

There are more smiles, and then the orchestra prepares for the next number. And one hour later, it is over.

The musicians put their instruments into their cases, grab their coats, and begin to file out, saying good-night to Sinatra. He knows them all by name, knows much about them personally, from their bachelor days, through their divorces, through their ups and downs, as they know him. When a French-horn player, a short Italian named Vincent DeRosa, who has played with Sinatra since The Lucky Strike “Hit Parade” days on radio, strolled by, Sinatra reached out to hold him for a second.

“Vicenzo,” Sinatra said, “how’s your little girl?”

“She’s fine, Frank.”

“Oh, she’s not a little girl anymore,” Sinatra corrected himself, “she’s a big girl now.”

“Yes, she goes to college now. U.S.C.”

“That’s great.”

“She’s also got a little talent, I think, Frank, as a singer.”

Sinatra was silent for a moment, then said, “Yes, but it’s very good for her to get her education first, Vicenzo.”

Vincent DeRosa nodded.

“Yes, Frank,” he said, and then he said, “Well, good-night, Frank.”

“Good-night, Vicenzo.”

After the musicians had all gone, Sinatra left the recording room and joined his friends in the corridor. He was going to go out and do some drinking with Drysdale, Wininger, and a few other friends, but first he walked to the other end of the corridor to say good-night to Nancy, who was getting her coat and was planning to drive home in her own car.

After Sinatra had kissed her on the cheek, he hurried to join his friends at the door. But before Nancy could leave the studio, one of Sinatra’s men, Al Silvani, a former prizefight manager, joined her.

“Are you ready to leave yet, Nancy?”

“Oh, thanks, Al,” she said, “but I’ll be all right.”

“Pope’s orders,” Silvani said, holding his hands up, palms out.

Only after Nancy had pointed to two of her friends who would escort her home, and only after Silvani recognized them as friends, would he leave.

THE REST OF THE MONTH was bright and balmy. The record session had gone magnificently, the film was finished, the television shows were out of the way, and now Sinatra was in his Ghia driving out to his office to begin coordinating his latest projects. He had an engagement at The Sands, a new spy film called The Naked Runner to be shot in England, and a couple more albums to do in the immediate months ahead. And within a week he would be fifty years old….

Life is a beautiful thing

As long as I hold the string

I’d be a silly so-and-so

If I should ever let go…

Frank Sinatra stopped his car. The light was red. Pedestrians passed quickly across his windshield but, as usual, one did not. It was a girl in her twenties. She remained at the curb staring at him. Through the corner of his left eye he could see her, and he knew, because it happens almost every day, that she was thinking, It looks like him, but is it?

Just before the light turned green, Sinatra turned toward her, looked directly into her eyes waiting for the reaction he knew would come. It came and he smiled. She smiled and he was gone.

Read more of the greatest Esquire stories ever published—in their entirety.

By George W. S. Trow — The New Yorker, 1984

The Harvard Black Rock Forest

IT is my plan to begin in the middle of things, with a man alone on a tract of land. It is 1892. The man is young and healthy; the land has been damaged. The young man is a forester, hired to work on this land. Now he is joined by a second young man, the owner of the land—a young man who is enormously rich. Together they look around at the tract of damaged land, which could have been damaged by anyone; then they look up at a house that is being built. It is an astonishing house: only a rich person could build it.

All the rest of this essay takes place within the set of circumstances I have just described: two friends, one a forester, one an enormously rich young man, looking first at a large tract of damaged land and then at an astonishing limestone palace.

The young man alone on the tract of land is Gifford Pinchot, the first American to be trained as a forester, and, I think, one of the important men in the history of the United States. The young man who joins him is George Washington Vanderbilt, of that rich family. As an old man, Gifford Pinchot wrote a description of George Washington Vanderbilt as he was at the time of the building of the limestone house, called Biltmore:

Pinchot described the tract of land, near Asheville, North Carolina:

Pinchot described the limestone house:

The rich young man who had the palace built, however, also put his forest under management. Pinchot wrote:

When I said that I thought that Gifford Pinchot was one of the important men in the history of the United States, I was thinking not only of his importance in the history of forestry and conservation but, even more, of his quality of mind. He was an amateur. At all moments in his career, he was fond of wearing a wide-brimmed slouch hat that made him look like a Westerner and an Easterner both. At all moments in his career, he failed to please one professional or another who was in possession of: the facts—political, scientific, or practical. Now we are living with a hunger for certainty. We want to be certain. Or, rather, we are hungry for certainty, but, despairing of attaining it ourselves, we want to know that someone else is certain. If this should change—that is, if we allow ourselves to doubt consciously whether we can be certain—we may need to try to regain an understanding of how men like Gifford Pinchot looked at American life.

One thing Gifford Pinchot understood was that in America an effective man must not blame farmers who damage their land or very rich young men who want to build (and sometimes do build) limestone palaces. He may have learned some part of this from Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect, who also worked at Biltmore, and who guided and encouraged him. “It was Mr. Olmsted who was responsible for the plan to make Biltmore Estate the nest egg for practical Forestry in America,” Pin-chot wrote, and he explained:

EVERYONE lives somewhere, but not everyone feels that he is living in one particular place. The man on the street with an earphone-connected-to-music in his ear—where is he living? Even ambitious people have, in recent times, wanted to overcome the limitations implicit in living in one place. Already, I need a distinction: between the person who is thoughtlessly impelled to place a popular-culture webbing over the place where he is and the person who sees that his work, when it is most successful, is everywhere and nowhere. Both persons have noticed that when an event is merely somewhere it has failed.

To be successful now, one would want to be a person whose work was dispersed throughout the world but who lived (nevertheless) in a collegial atmosphere. Scientists and entertainers do this. It is the work of scientists and entertainers which has been most thoroughly dispersed throughout the modern world, and yet scientists and entertainers live in a collegial atmosphere, within which the work of an ambitious man is likely to be known to another ambitious man. Thus, history survives within the history of science and the history of entertainment— especially the history of entertainment on film. Silent films, vaudeville turns, and the work of B-picture directors are studied by men who do not intend to do vaudeville or direct B pictures or make pictures without sound. In the same way, scientists know and make use of the work of men whose theories have been overthrown.

A collegial situation in which a sense of history leads men to respect work a layman would ignore is rare now. The collegial atmosphere around the work of lawyers is thinner than it used to be, and around the work of literary men it is very thin; this is a measure of the loss of vitality in these two spheres. Traditions are maintained by collegial bodies that retain vitality and direct part of their vital energy to the protection of parts of themselves which would be ignored by a layman. Americans are not, as is sometimes said, a people without traditions; our traditions are being formed within science and entertainment.

The vast majority of people do not see evidence of a collegial enterprise in what they encounter either on the surface of life (where the history of science is to be seen) or in their dreams (formed by entertainment). The world is not familiar from the point of view of knowledge; nor does its mystery give birth to healthy aspirations. Rather, the lives of most people are characterized by attempts to make the world familiar through the application of affection, and by nonsensical aspirations: attempts to reach images in the air and to take part in events in the sky.

But scientists and entertainers do see evidence of sense and of a collegial spirit in what is around them, and this convinces them that there is more structure in the lives of people than there really is. Consider the example of a filmmaker whose film about gangsters is being shown on television. He knows the film, of course, and he knows other films of the genre, and he knows how television works; that is, he could explain how his film came to be shown on television and what people were involved. He may not know anything about gangsters; that doesn’t matter. He himself may be capable of being fooled by some of his own work (he may be imitating the work of other, greater men, whose work he is incapable of understanding), but a partial delusion does not make the experience of watching the film a crazy one for him: he may even transform what does not make sense into a sensiFor him, the explicable and the mysterious are in contact, as they are for all men who are involved in a ritual and are taking it seriously.

watching this film is completely different. The explicable and the mysterious are not in contact. The mystery that the filmmaker consciously refers to in his film and the mystery of which he is not conscious (his delusion: the result of not understanding his own work)— these mysteries are not important, or even perceptible, to the child, who is under the weight of the questions “What is television?” and “How does something get on television?” One definition of a ritual would be: a circumstance in which images fall into an order that makes an order that makes deep sense. One definition of television would be: an unsuccessful ritual; or a ritual that works only for the priests.

Science, like entertainment, is found in layers, in a hierarchy, throughout the world. From a scientific point of view, there are important connections between the most repellent application of a degraded technology and the most sublime speculation. This being true, the consequences of the degraded technology are, perhaps, slightly less repellent to a scientist than they would be to a sensitive nonscientist. What joins the scientist and the entertainer is this: they create the modern world but do not live in it, while other people live in it without knowing much about how it has been made.

IN the back seat of an automobile travelling south on Route 9W in the small, decayed city of Newburgh, on the west bank of the Hudson, Hamilton Fish, of that distinguished New York family, Harvard Class of 1910, former member of Congress, said to the air in front of him, “I have too much money now. I’m embarrassed.” It is the habit of some people whose final reference is to certainty to speak to the air in front of them. “It’s true,” Mr. Fish said. “I’m embarrassed.” It was not true.

Mr. Fish was refering to his third wife, who is rich and with whom he was at this moment living in a nineteenth-century house overlooking the Hudson near Newburgh. This was a change for Mr. Fish, whose family has had strong connections in Garrison, over on the east bank of the river. The Newburgh house is handsome on the outside. Inside, it is opulent. The house is surrounded by specimen trees. Each tree carries a small tag giving its proper name, or is meant to carry one. “Still,” Mr. Fish said, into the air, “charity can be very dangerous. My first wife’s father gave a great deal of money to Williams College and then had very little left for himself.” Mr. Fish opened his eyes wide, and so opened wide his big face. This he did to add emphasis to the words “had very little left for himself.” Mr. Fish, in his nineties, is extremely handsome—tall, with a famous nose and famous eyes. His late sister Rosalind Fish Cutler had eyes even bigger, the wonder of her friends and family, but Mr. Fish’s career has been public, so his eyes are better known.

Travelling south on 9W, the automobile crossed the principal thoroughfare of the small, decayed city of Newburgh. There was silence in the automobile as it crossed this strong street, which is called Broadway. Broadway is a boulevard, eighty-two feet wide. After crossing Broadway, the automobile followed the dispersal of the small city of New-burgh.

After a time, a man in the front seat said, “Do you think New-burgh will come back, Uncle Ham?”

“No,” Mr. Fish said.

Route 9W proceeds south of New-burgh through the old town of New Windsor and into the Hudson Highlands. When one is travelling south, Storm King Mountain off to the left. To the right is the Harvard Black Rock Forest, a tract of thirty-eight hundred acres which was developed as scientific, or demonstration, forest by Dr. Ernest G. Stillman, a benefactor of Harvard; he endowed the forest and left it to Harvard at his death, in 1949. Farther south, a trav-eller may turn off to the United States Military Academy, at West Point. The Hudson Highlands are merely fifty miles from New York City, but there are large tracts of undeveloped land here: within the West Point Military Reservation; within Storm King State Park, which is a part of the Palisades Interstate Park; and within the Harvard Black Rock Forest.

Of Harvard and its relationship to the Black Rock Forest, to the Stillman family of benefactors, to the science of silviculture (within a demonstration forest), it should be said that, in response to the new, tough reality in American life, Harvard University has been looking closely, ruthlessly at its assets. Where an asset does not per- form, it is suspect. Recently, Harvard University decided that the Black Rock Forest, the tract of thirty-eight hundred acres within the Hudson Highlands given to it by Dr. Ernest Stillman (a benefactor from a family of benefactors), had not performed and should be sold. There were difficulties. It was not possible to say that the forest was a burden, for instance. The expenses of upkeep were light; there were no large buildings in the forest; runaway fuel costs and other such aspects of the new, tough reality were absent. Expenses had not outstripped income. Most emphatically, they had not. Income rose and rose and rose. At moments, it must have been embarrassing how much money Harvard had available to be spent within the forest. This money derived from a fund established by Dr. Ernest Stillman primarily to support the expenses of maintaining the forest and the expenses of conducting scientific work within the forest; the fund amounted to about a million dollars at the time of Dr. Stillman’s death, in 1949. It amounts to more than that now. Harvard has said that although it is not possible for Harvard to keep the forest it is possible for it to keep the money.

Hamilton Fish (Harvard ‘10) and his companions were on their way to a meeting of Harvard men. Their trip took them through the old, decayed city of Newburgh and through the Hudson Highlands— where the Black Rock Forest is. The meeting was a fund-raiser, connected to an effort by the President and Fellows of Harvard College to raise (at first; they asked for a hundred million more later) the sum of two hundred and fifty million dollars. It was held at a hotel on the grounds of the United States Military Academy. There was a view of the Hudson River (very narrow here). There were talks by three men, and there was a film.

THE collegial atmosphere around the men of Harvard is thin now. It is thinner than the atmosphere around lawyers, not so thin as the atmosphere around literary people. It becomes thick, richer in oxygen, more nearly capable of sustaining life, during fund-raising periods. Men are injected into buildings; their money is mortar. Buildings reveal that they were built by men and have always housed people. Everything is named. “The Names of Harvard” is a booklet issued at this fund-raising period to set out the details of the process by which money becomes mortar and mortar is trained to speak the name of some person.

AT the meeting attended by Mr. Fish and his companions, there were three kinds of talk:

(1) Talk in imitation of a backwater patois, from one speaker.

(2) Tough, simple talk, neutral in coloration, from a second speaker.

(3) New talk, based on the new relationship that is evolving between images and words, from a third speaker.

A discussion of the second kind of talk will reveal something about all three:

After the Second World War, there came into power at Harvard University, an old backwater near to the center of national life, a New Man. He was represented as having a point of view, but what he had in fact was a function and a tone of voice. His function was to make a new arrangement between the old backwater and national life. His tone of voice was neutral. This neutral tone of voice was his point of view. He was never asked to explain himself; his voice explained him. His effectiveness depended in some degree, however, on the presence at Harvard of certain old men, with whom he was juxtaposed. In the absence of these men, with whom he was in contrast, he looked very much like other strong, neutral men of his generation; that is, he seemed not particular but general. He had toughness and integrity. Here were two wirelike threads that linked him to his institution and to the old men who were his mentors. One decision he made demonstrated both his toughness and his integrity: he refused to adopt the manners of the old men, which were beguiling.

This man, where he continues to serve his institution, now represents the Old Guard of his institution. He is an important figure in that he does understand the ways of his backwater even though he has not adopted them himself. It must be difficult for him, in some cases, to welcome the newer sort of New Man, who knows the ways of the backwater very superficially and puts them on and casts them off as he pleases.

We may think of continuity within Harvard University as having three strands: toughness; manners; spirit. Wound together, they would have one destiny. They are not wound together; they are separate. After the Second World War, it was decided that toughness would continue into the next generation and manners would not. What of spirit?

It may be that the old men tried to pass on their spiritual inheritance to the new, tough man and failed. It may be that they did not try to pass on their spiritual inheritance. Or it may be, as it seems to me, that their spiritual inheritance had shrunk over time until it was no longer able to compete on equal terms with toughness or man-It seems to me ners. seems to me likely that by the time of the Second World War the spiritual inheritance of Harvard University was able to do very light work only; that the work it took on to do was to enliven manners; that it had become embedded within manners, so that when it was decided that manners would not continue, spirit (now known only as a form of energy within manners) died, too.

Not died—was not passed on. The spirit would not really die until the last self-confident old man died; and many self-confident old men lived on, more cheerful than ever.

WHAT happened was that the work of running the university was separated from the work of maintaining its particular character. This explains the three kinds of talk. We have discussed the neutral tone of the second speaker. Now let us consider the two other kinds of talk.

A person attending Harvard after the, Second World War might have decided to make a study of the inheritance of Harvard. In time, he would understand that his study was narrow; it was not, as he had thought, the study that embraced all the others. From that time, although his syntax would reflect his study of self-confidence, his reference would be to uncertainty. This was the first speaker.

Another person would find in the inheritance a kind of motif to be used to decorate, or to frame, whatever sort of excellence he wanted to promote. This was the third speaker, and also the film.

IT will be the purpose of this essay to consider aspects of an inheritance; I will try to determine what it was that came to Harvard with the Black Rock Forest.

When I described Harvard as “an old backwater near to the center of national life,” I was speaking of a former condition; Harvard is now a part of national life, and life there is not distinguishable from life anywhere else. When I used the phrase “old backwater near to the center of national life,” there was nothing insulting in the use of the word “backwater;” I was thinking of the truck gardens that used to exist quite close to New York City and from which the city constantly drew refreshment.

I WOULD like to begin to introduce particular men into this story. My idea is that even the most difficult story (“Atomic Energy in the Modern World,” “New Frontiers in MicroBiology,” “Our Colleges in Crisis”) can be told as the history of the work of particular men and should be told that way.

The reader will accept this device. He is used to the idea that men, at their daily tasks, are occupying a certain space in the foreground. I want to address the question of the background against which these men appear, and to try to suggest that this background should be understood as the accumulated result of knowable stories.

This is important, because it is important to set right a deformation in modern discourse, a twofold mistake: the first part of the mistake is to think of the background against which the work of modern persons is juxtaposed as unknowable; the second part of the mistake is to accept it—whatever it is.

Now I want to introduce the idea of social embarrassment. One reason most people ignore—actually ignore— the question of the background against which their own lives are juxtaposed is that they imagine that some persons do understand this background (are in charge of it) and that these people-in-charge are their social betters. I would like to make the point in this regard that the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the college composed of living Harvard men and women do not understand the background against which modern lives are juxtaposed. It is only at fund-raising moments that they remember that they did, once, understand it.

A SMALL beginning may be to tell the story of the Black Rock Forest in terms of the histories of particular men who were connected to it. Then places can be indicated at which this story may be said to join larger histories: of Harvard University, of the conservation policies of the government of the United States, of the history of optimistic thought within the conservation policies of the government, and of the history of science as it encloses the remarkable work done in physics and biology in this century.

F IRST, a father.

James Stillman was a banker; he was thought by some people to be a ruthless one. He was associated with William Rockefeller, the brother of John D. Rockefeller, and operated with Rockefeller and a small group of other men as a capitalist, which is to say that he was interested in the power of money within an enterprise, quite apart from any particular thing the enterprise was set up to do. The Stillman-Rockefeller group was described (by Henry Clews, a contemporary on Wall Street) as having resources so vast “that they need only concentrate on any given property in order to do with it what they please.” As soon as this was known, they became unbearably attractive to investors. In the Amalgamated Copper manipulation, it was the reputation (for ruthlessness and vast resources) of the Rockefeller-Stillman manipulators that was attractive, more than the reputation of copper. The formula was, in some ways, the same as for older frenzies, like the South Sea Bubble, but the distant place where there was wealth beyond counting was in the Rockefeller-Stillman circle, as far as most investors were concerned, rather than in Montana.

T HEN a son.

Ernest Stillman, the youngest son of James Stillman, was a medical doctor. His impulse in all his activities seems to have been toward healing. He had an enthusiasm for firefighting, which seeks to remedy a spreading trouble. Also, we should note here that the land that was to constitute the Black Rock Forest was in a deplorable condition at the time Dr. Stillman inherited it from his father: these acres had been cut over for timber to be used (once reduced to charcoal) as fuel for the brickmaking factories along the Hudson. The land was the ruined remainder of the economic processes embraced and mastered by his father. Ernest Stillman wanted to bring this particular tract of land back to health, perhaps. More than that, he wanted to bring it back to health for good. His idea was that this protected forest, at least, should be constantly useful and also constantly flourishing.

NOW I need to consider Gifford Pinchot, whose ideal the constantly useful, constantly flourishing forest was (he said that one of his goals for a forest was “sustained yield,” and that the ideal against which conservation policies ought to be tested was “the greatest good of the greatest number for the longest time”), but first I want to mention one other man: Richard Thornton Fisher, of Harvard. Fisher was for many years (in the first half of this century) the head of the Harvard Forest, in Peter-sham, Massachusetts—a demonstration forest acquired in 1907. It was he who suggested to Dr. Ernest Stillman that the land he owned in the Hudson Highlands might be set up as a second demonstration forest. Richard Fisher seems to have acted in a fatherly way toward Dr. Stillman. Dr. Stillman’s son Calvin Stillman has said that the death of Richard Fisher, in 1934, was the greatest blow Ernest Stillman suffered in his life. At Richard Fisher’s death, a committee of Harvard alumni published a small book in his honor. The book was printed at the Cornwall Press, which was owned by Dr. Ernest Stillman. The book included this biographical note:

James Stillman was one of a small number of men who discovered the life that money might have as money, apart from any particular work in the world—apart, even, from “rates of interest” and the ordinary terminology of the banker. He was one of a small number of men who saw that money might be free; that it might have a life of its own.

Ernest Stillman, his youngest son, was drawn to healing work; he took particular interest in a particular tract of ravaged land, which he hoped to bring to health in such a way that it would stay useful and healthy for the longest time he could foresee.

Richard Fisher acted in a fatherly way to Ernest Stillman, and was embraced, perhaps, as a father by him. Richard Fisher had been, in his youth, “one of the enthusiastic and ‘closely knit group of men who helped Mr. [Gifford] Pinchot get the practice of forestry under way.’ “

Gifford Pinchot was born on August 11, 1865, in Simsbury, Connecticut. His father had made a fortune in drygoods in New York City. His maternal grandfather, Amos Eno, was a successful investor in real estate and was the owner of the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Pinchot went to Exeter and Yale. Just before he enrolled at Yale, his father suggested to him that he make forestry his career. This was a most interesting intuition, since there was no forestry school at Yale, or anywhere in the country, at that mo-ment. Pinchot wrote in his autobiography:

He left America for Europe. When he returned, in 1890, he had studied the systematized forests of Europe. At that time, in America, the condition of the forests was very striking: vast forests had been thoroughly lumbered over and had been left in pitiable condition. Pinchot felt he had a role to play. His first work was for great magnates, however: he worked for W. Seward Webb in the Adirondacks and for Webb’s connection George Washing-ton Vanderbilt near Asheville, North Carolina.

THE Vanderbilt family in America may be discussed in terms of the history of railroading, the history of social life, the history of architecture. In the history of architecture, they are secure in their place as promoters of gorgeous European styles. The family possessed almost a dozen large houses on Fifth Avenue in New York, the most remarkable of which was the “château” of Cornelius Vanderbilt III, at Fifty-seventh Street. Among their country houses were the house of Frederick Vanderbilt in Hyde Park, New York; the Breakers and Marble House, at Newport; Florham, in New Jersey, the house of Hamilton Twombly and Florence Vanderbilt Twombly; and Biltmore, near Asheville, North Carolina, the house of George Washington Vanderbilt.

This last house has been known since the time of its building as “the largest private house in America.” It was modelled on the château of Blois, but the work is not so finely done as it is at Blois. The interior is furnished with old European pieces and with imitations of such pieces. The house, which if it were in Europe would be beneath anyone’s notice, is heavily visited by the public. The house is viewed by the public, I think, as a symbol of success, and it is that. It is representative of the failure of success to take hold in America. Some moment of success left this thing. People look at it, but they don’t understand it.

Biltmore has shrunk. There was a forest; an arboretum was envisioned. What remains is the artifact-house. Frederick Law Olmsted was particularly interested in developing an arboretum at Biltmore. Gifford Pinchot (working as the “consulting forester” at Biltmore) wrote this enthusiastic prospectus, in 1893:

We may, for purposes of this essay, establish the arboretum as a symbol for one kind of activity undertaken in America with reference to a European model and Biltmore House as another. We see that the arboretum takes notice of the well-established gardens at Kew and means to outdo them—not as a result of an urgent interest in outdoing them but in consequence of certain natural advantages (here meteorological) to be found on this new continent. Biltmore House, on the other hand, has been built in an atmosphere of urgent need, and no natural advantages exist in North Carolina to support it. A third symbol is to be found in Biltmore Forest. The forest was that extensive portion of the Biltmore property given over to scientific forest management. It was described by Gifford Pinchot as follows:

The forest, Pinchot said, “derives an additional interest from the fact that it is the first piece of woodland in the United States to be subjected to a regular system of management, the prime object of which is to pay the owner while improving the forest.”

Of the condition of the forest at the time the “regular system of management” was instituted, Pinchot said,

Pinchot did not stay long at Biltmore. In 1898, he went to work for the United States Department of Agriculture as the head of its Forestry Division. There he was called the Chief Forester; he was the first man to hold this version of the title, and it appealed to him, as he was the first American-born man to be a professional forester.

Pinchot’s idea of what forestry might be can be thought of as having three parts. There was a scientific component, encompassing the study of the various factors that affect the growth and thrift of trees; a practical component, taking into consideration what goal was looked for in the culture and harvest of trees; and a conservative component, which sought to balance questions of usefulness in the short term and usefulness in the longer term. These three parts were not arcs of a circle but cups that fitted one inside another. The conservative part was the large cup into which scientific study and practical use were meant to fit.

There were objections to this point of view. To many men, Pinchot’s arrangement seemed to use one cup too many. A simpler plan was to remove the scientific and the practical from the conservative-ethical context—to free them. We should take note of the opinions of two men who were at work in forestry at this time: Bernhard E. Fernow, who was Pinchot’s predecessor at the Department of Agriculture; and Dr. Carl Alwin Schenck, a German forester, who succeeded Pinchot at Biltmore and was head of the Biltmore Forest School there.

Of methods of forestry which sought to assure a “sustained yield” over a long period, Fernow wrote in 1899:

Of the Biltmore Forest School (which had been established in 1898 by Dr. Schenck and existed in one form or another until 1913), Dr. Schenck wrote, “I thought of it as a practical and technical school, the teachings of which, notably in lumbering and in financing, would be capable of immediate application in American woods.”

We see that for Fernow and Schenck (as for later generations of lumbermen and graduates of forestry schools) the issue of forest management was not symbolic of some larger American issue. For Pinchot, it was. It is also true that his eye, more than the eyes of his contemporaries (Fernow and Schenck, for instance), was on the distant future. In America, the man who is reputed to be forward- looking wants only to see into the moment that is just beyond his grasp. The far distance has no interest for him. It may be the backward-looking man who thinks most clearly about the future. Pinchot wrote, in his book “The Fight for Conservation,” in 1910:

An enthusiastic man himself, he concerned himself with the question of what enthusiasm might do, and denied that it must inevitably apply itself to the stale job of increasing the momentum of whatever forces were already at work. He imagined, I think, that he had found an instant in time in which American enthusiasm might be redirected. His understanding of his country was unusual, and he was justified, perhaps, in thinking that he might shape it. He wrote:

This is an unusual and interesting set of remarks. “We have gained out of the vast destruction of our natural resources a degree of vigor and power and efficiency of which every man of us ought to be proud.” This is an unusual statement. An image comes to life here: a man on a piece of land. The land is damaged; the man has damaged it. But look: the man is powerful, strong, and happy. We recall that Frederick Law Olmsted saw a murderer (a man responsible for the death of many people) perform an act of high courage. This is what American history is like, but it is hard for us to accept: that a vigorous and splendid country could have been built by really guilty people. Nearly all statements in support of American enthusiasm describe only the nourishing power of enthusiasm, its ability to transform experience. Our attention is drawn, again and again, to the vigorous condition of the man with the axe. People who think that American enthusiasm ought to be curbed ignore this strong man and look only at the damage he has caused. Pinchot is one of a small number of powerful American men (Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt are others) who allow themselves to see both the glory of the vigorous man and the damage he has done. Pinchot takes note of the wonderful force that has been used to do the damage and asks that it be allowed to continue—but doing different work.

Men like Pinchot must ordinarily fail. Many Americans feel that it is in the contemplation of the possibility of uncontrolled recklessness that the nourishing power of enthusiasm actually resides; many other people have cultivated an interest in damage, and even in inventories of damaged things. Enthusiastic restraint is a difficult idea to grasp, and it is rarely put forward as a practical policy. But there were certain circumstances working in Pin-chot’s favor at the turn of the century. The forests of the country had been lumbered in such a reckless way that the result was obvious to the public. The near-total destruction of the pre-Colonial forest was as striking to people as the final depletion of American oil reserves will be. Moreover, Pinchot found that he had the ear of Theodore Roosevelt, who was unexpectedly elevated to the Presidency by the assassination of William McKinley in 1901.

IN 1926, Richard Thornton Fisher, the director of the Harvard Forest, in. Petersham, Massachusetts, walked over a tract of land in Cornwall, New York, owned by his friend Dr. Ernest Stillman. Like the land that had been formed into the Biltmore Estate, this was damaged land that had been purchased from many smallholders by a rich man—in this case, Dr. Stillman’s father, the banker James Stillman. Richard Fisher urged Dr. Stillman to establish this tract as a demonstration forest. It was so established, and was called the Black Rock Forest; the name derived from Black Rock Mountain, one of a number of high hills within the tract. A system of publications (Bulletins and Papers) describing the work being done within the forest was established as well.

Richard Fisher contributed an introduction to the first Black Rock Forest Bulletin, in 1930. He wrote:

When Richard Fisher wrote the introduction to the first Bulletin, he was fifty-four. Thirty-seven years had passed since Gifford Pinchot issued his description of the work to be undertaken within Biltmore Forest. Thirty-two years had passed since Fisher encountered Gifford Pinchot on Mount Shasta.

WE might return for a moment to Pinchot’s description of the work he was doing (and planned to do) at Biltmore. This description is contained in a booklet entitled “Biltmore Forest,” which was written in connection with an exhibit taken by the Biltmore Estate to the Columbian Exposition of 1893. The following quotation is from “Planting,” a section in which Pinchot laid out his plans for planting trees in certain patches of wasteland at Biltmore:

This quotation introduces the idea of planting trees, which Pinchot did not in general favor; he preferred to concern himself with natural reproduction within the forest. And it contains the interesting remark “Of the silvicultural character of American trees we are almost equally ignorant.”

This is a true statement to this day, and it is clear why: it is hard to get to know the silvicultural character of trees (there are countless elements that affect the growth of trees in situ over their long life), and, given the way we prefer to live in America, there is no very good reason for trying. The situation might be compared with one in which people neglect to pay attention to the specific things that make one particular town healthy, because these specific things are very complex and hard to pin down, because mastery of these things promises success only in one particular place, and because people have become habituated to towns of standardized manufacture. We know about trees what we think we need to know, and what is exciting to know. That is, we know what men at work in basic science tell us is true for very many trees or all trees; we know from experience which species, growing under what conditions, harvested in which way, fit best into the framework of our economic life as it exists now. Nearly all else is still hidden.

We might return again to the symbols within the Biltmore Estate. Bilt- more House represents an attempt to establish a place within national life. It is everywhere and nowhere. It has little to do with North Carolina. The arboretum has roots in the specific conditions to be found near Asheville, North Carolina, but with reference to other arboretums, elsewhere. Within the forest there is a promise of information that may, over time, be found to be useful in other places, but first of all it is what it is: a forest in North Carolina, tending to good health or poor.

Everywhere and nowhere is the way of national life and is also the place where basic scientific research is to be found. It may be of interest to some few persons that the first work was done in this or that place, but the success of the work is in proportion to the degree to which the work is diffused throughout the world.

Here and there is the manner of the museum, where the location of the collection is only part of the issue.

Mostly here is the way of silviculture, and also of human settlements, which must necessarily be affected by specific local conditions.

In recent times, the first two ways of being in a place have been much more important to the American people than the third—this despite the fact that everyone does live in some particular place. As a result, very little is known about how this or that particular place might be brought into a healthy condition.

IN 1940, Dr. Ernest Stillman wrote a letter to Dr. James B. Conant, the president of Harvard University, and enclosed a memorandum he had written on the subject of the Harvard Forest and the Black Rock Forest. Dr. Stillman urged Harvard to give a greater attention to the Harvard Forest, which he felt was being neglected. He also urged Harvard to agree to accept the Black Rock Forest at his death. I do not know exactly what position Harvard was taking at this time about the Harvard Forest (of which Dr. Stillman was the principal benefactor) and the Black Rock Forest (of which Dr. Stillman was the sole proprietor); the relevant documents are protected by a “fifty-year rule”— under which documents are withheld from public scrutiny for fifty years. The university seems to have been reluctant to commit itself to taking on the Black Rock Forest. “As long as the late Professor Fisher approved . . . the idea of Black Rock Forest becoming a part of the forestry plant of the University, naturally I erroneously assumed that the necessary arrangements had been made,” Dr. Stillman wrote in 1940 in his letter to Conant. Apparently, the necessary arrangements had not been made.

In the memorandum that accompanied his letter to President Conant, Dr. Stillman discussed several plans (to be financed in large part by Dr. Stillman himself) that he felt would bring the Harvard Forest into greater prominence. He referred to the Harvard Forest as “a barely explored academic gold mine.” He advanced the opinion that a set of forest models, financed by him, would interest not only distinguished visitors but also the general public. He wrote that “the members of the biological staffs have not made use of [the forest’s] resources because of lack of proper housing facilities.” To that sentence Professor Hugh Raup, of the Arnold Arboretum, at Harvard, appended this note:

Of the Black Rock Forest property Dr. Stillman wrote:

Harvard accepted the gift. I imagine this conversation:

SOON after the Harvard fund-raising event at the United States Military Academy, I went to see Mr. Esty Stowell. Mr. Stowell is a graduate of Harvard College, Class of 1934. He maintains a house in Cornwall, New York, near the Black Rock Forest. He said, “We have known for some time that Harvard had lost interest in the forest. John Stillman, a son of Dr. Stillman’s, who lives here, wrote to Harvard sometime in the nineteen-fifties, and someone there wrote back saying, Oh, we are doing this and that. But nothing has really gone on in the forest for years and years—although Harvard does keep the roads up. In any case, after the Storm King issue came up—in the early nineteen-sixties, if you remember, Con Edison wanted to build a pumped-storage plant here—Harvard appointed a committee to see what its response should be to Con Edison’s proposal, because some acres of the forest would have been taken. Somewhere in the report of that committee, it says that Harvard should think about getting rid of the forest, because no real work was being done in it. Rather like the railroads, you see. It runs down, and then people say, ‘Impossible to go on, it’s so run down.’ In any case, some few of us went on the alert after that. Over the whole period, Harvard has been very elusive. There was a period in the middle seventies when it pursued a deal with the Palisades Interstate Park Commission, but the Park Commission was not able after all to get the funds it would have needed to buy the forest, so that fell through. And then, you see, we began to worry that Harvard, having begun this process, might consider any buyer, and a few of us began to ask, and ask again, what Harvard’s intentions were. I began a correspondence with Daniel Steiner, Harvard’s general counsel, and what I got back in most instances was a total mouthful of feathers. ‘No decision has been reached; we’re not talking to anyone at this moment.’ It was ‘Harvard will do the right thing’ kind of talk. He won’t say much except that Harvard feels secure in its legal position, because Dr. Stillman did not put any language in his will saying that the forest must revert to his heirs if Harvard didn’t follow a given course of action. That’s what makes John Stillman so angry: he says—quite rightly, I think—that of course his father didn’t use that language, because he trusted Harvard. Besides, you know, I think Harvard doesn’t like accepting gifts with that kind of restriction, and it probably asked him to make the bequest as simple as possible, but that’s a guess.

“There are so many issues here. First of all, the forest is very interesting, you know. It was set up to look into various practical problems: woodlot management and so forth—just the sort of thing people are interested in now. Wouldn’t you think Harvard would think about that? Well, it doesn’t. And, of course, the forest is beautiful. My wife and I walk in it all the time; the roads and trails are mar-vellous. We have been just about everywhere, I would say, except down to Glycerine Hollow. It’s all terribly well done. I mean, it has been laid out with care, and, of course, there are experimental plots all through it, testing whether this sort of tree grows best here or there. I wish I could tell you more about that, but I can’t. You would have liked Henry Tryon, who was the forester here. He was what I call a rough diamond. Always wore red suspenders. His attitude toward the forest was almost the attitude of a poet. There was a sign that Hal Tryon had erected which no longer stands. It was a yard square, I would say. And on it—very neat—was a description of a cycle in silviculture. And it concluded with this: ‘The trees were cut; their work was done.’ There was an amateur poet shining through. He had that spirit—an amateur, in the old sense. He was a big, burly, red-haired Harvard guy. Ex-football player.

“I would say the important issue is: Harvard gave its word.

“You must walk around the forest. It’s laid out so well; you can take short walks or quite long ones. We’ll go on a short one today. On another day, I suggest you make a circuit. I will give you a map. You might go south as far as Spy Rock and Eagle Cliff. That’s a good day’s walk.

“And go and talk to Steiner. We can’t get much out of him. Just that Harvard feels secure in its legal position.”

IF a person were to walk through the Black Rock Forest today, starting from the entrance to the forest, at the Upper Reservoir, he might climb the Hill of Pines to the top, where there is a fine view all around. He might look at pitch pine and scrub oak (Henry Tryon assumed that they constituted one of the few scraps of the pre-Colonial pattern remaining within the Forest), then descend to Carpenter Road (an ample, well-maintained dirt road), head west on Carpenter Road, then southwest on Bog Meadow Road to the white-blazed trail called the Scenic Trail, then walk on the Scenic Trail to Eagle Cliff, elevation 1,443 feet. This is about as far south as a person can go in the forest. From this spot, there is a wonderful view south in the direction of New York City. It is the sort of view that no one thinks can exist close to New York City—the sort of thing that a person heads west for. From here, a route back to the entrance to the forest might be: the Scenic Trail again until the turnoff to the Chatfield Trail; the Chatfield Trail to Chatfield Road; east on Chat-field Road to the White Oak Trail, passing the Tamarack Pond and the Chatfield farmhouse (a splendid stone building of 1834), and passing a tract reforested in red pine by Henry Tryon; west on the White Oak Trail to Sutherland Road; northeast on Sutherland Road to the Schunemunk— Storm King Trail; up Black Rock, elevation 1,410; down to the Aleck Meadow Reservoir and White Oak Road. This would take most of one day.

On another day, a person might go to Glycerine Hollow. This would be a short trip: south from the entrance to the forest to Carpenter Road by the Hill of Pines Trail and then to Go-Down Road. No route could be finer than Go-Down Road. It is broader than a trail but narrower now than a road. It is a road gone gentle. It is grassy most of its length and descends at a good rate. It does not twist and turn. It goes straight to where it is going.

This is what Henry Tryon said in 1939 in his Ten Year Progress Report about Glycerine Hollow and his work there:

Much important information is implicit in these paragraphs. Notice all the room for judgment: not now, later; this much, no more. Notice the room for the adjustment of judgment: we may be wrong, of course. And the acknowledgment of the possibility of grace: we may be in for a pleasant surprise. Notice these recorded facts:

(1) The forest is not a magnificent stand of virgin timber. It is a magnificent place, with a history of abuse. In the whole of the forest, Glycerine Hollow has the best stand of timber, and in 1928 that was merely seventy years old.

(2) The timber is meant to be harvested in the end, as part of the natural rhythm of the work of men. There is a trust in the possibilities of work. A man who had come to distrust the work of men might have said, “See here, this is good. Let’s at least keep our hands off this.” A devilish man who had come to despise the work of men might have said, “This is good. What of it?” Tryon’s opinion is one never heard in our day: “This is good. Let us put our good hands on it.”

IN July, 1898, James Wilson, Secretary of Agriculture to President McKinley, appointed Gifford Pinchot to be Chief Forester of the United States in the Department of Agriculture. Here Pinchot had a tiny staff, and no forests to manage, because the forest reserves superintended by the federal government were under the jurisdiction of the Secretary of the Interior. In the absence of federal land to look into, Pinchot turned to questions relating to the management of private land. On October 15, 1898, his division issued Circular 21, which announced a management-assistance program for large tracts of timberland and small woodlots. Small owners could apply for free assistance; large holders of land were expected to share the cost. Numbers of landholders, small and large, sought help. The expansion of his work load justified the expansion of his operation, and in 1899 Pinchot reported, “The Division has been thoroughly equipped with instruments for field work, in which it was wholly lacking at the beginning of the year.” It was also drawing to it the services of enthusiastic men, many of them recent college graduates, who worked for little money and came to be known as “Pinchot’s young men.” And the liveliness of this operation, in turn, generated more work, and inquiries from the Department of the Interior.

Then Theodore Roosevelt became President of the United States. While he was governor of New York State, he had consulted with Pinchot. “Like other men who had thought about the national future at all, I had been growing more and more concerned over the destruction of the forests,” Roosevelt wrote in his “Autobiography.” When Roosevelt came to Washington after the assassination of President McKinley, he did not go immediately to the White House but stopped at the house of a sister. Gifford Pinchot and his colleague Frederick H. Newell came to call on him there. “The first work I took up when I became President was the work of reclamation,” Roosevelt wrote.

It might be well to describe here Roosevelt’s attitude toward conservation. It was influenced by Pinchot, but it was in keeping with other beliefs of his. Proper use might describe it. His faith in himself was abundant, and also his faith in the idea of individual persons making judgments. He was apt to endorse Pinchot’s idea of silviculture, since he took the view that the nation itself was like a forest, in which good thrift and healthy reproduction could be encouraged. A striking and, to modern minds, an extreme instance of his belief in distinction-making is to be found in his attitude toward large business combinations. He wrote:

As we discuss the inheritance present within the Black Rock Forest, in Cornwall, New York, this quality of optimism should be remembered, and distinguished from the idea, now coming to prevail in America, that impersonal forces rule the world, and that clever men ally themselves with these forces, while idealistic men struggle to move certain valued things out of their way.

In 1905, the forest lands managed by the Interior Department were transferred to the Department of Agriculture, where Gifford Pinchot was Chief Forester. In 1907, more than forty-three million acres of land were added by Presidential proclamation to the area of the National Forests. “By this time, also,” Roosevelt wrote in his “Autobiography,” “the opposition of the servants of the special interests in Congress to the Forest Service had become strongly developed, and more time appeared to be spent in the yearly attacks upon it during the passage of the appropriation bills than on all other Government Bureaus put together. Every year the Forest Service had to fight for its life.”

He continued:

The ethic of restraint put forward by Pinchot and Roosevelt proved to be too small a vessel to hold the enthusiastic ambition of many independent men, who called it “Pinchotism.” Nonetheless, during Theodore Roosevelt’s Administration the area of the National Forests increased from forty-three million acres to a hundred and ninety-four million.

By the end of Roosevelt’s time in office, Pinchot and Roosevelt had begun to think of conservation as a worldwide movement. A North American Conservation Conference was held at the White House on February 18, 1909. “It is evident that natural resources are not limited by the boundary lines which separate nations,” Roosevelt wrote in his invitation (delivered in person by Gifford Pinchot) to the Prime Minister of Canada and the President of Mexico. The North American Conservation Conference met for five days and, in its communique to Roosevelt, suggested that “all nations should be invited to join together in conference on the subject of world resources, and their inventory, conservation, and wise utilization.” Soon afterward, Roosevelt left office. The worldwide conservation conference envisioned by Pinchot and Roosevelt did not take place.

Pinchot was removed from office by Roosevelt’s successor, William Howard Taft—a fact that Roosevelt noted bitterly in his “Autobiography.” “Gifford Pinchot is the man to whom the nation owes most for what has been accomplished as regards the preservation of the natural resources of our country,” he wrote. “I believe it is but just to say that among the many, many public officials who under my administration rendered literally invaluable service to the people of the United States, he, on the whole, stood first.”

In looking again at the phrase “what has been accomplished as re-gards the preservation of the natural resources of our country,” we must admit that while Pinchot had succeeded in bringing a vast amount of land under public stewardship he had not succeeded in bringing his idea of conservation into a synthesis with the national enthusiasm for work. Pinchot has described a moment early in a December, 1908, governors’ meeting when he began to understand what President-elect Taft’s position would be:

Ever faithfully your friend,

Theodore Roosevelt

Other Letters of 1909

Theodore Roosevelt, on the ‘Nzor River, to his daughter Ethel:

Edward. H. Harriman, from Aiken, South Carolina, to James Stillman, in Cannes:

Sincerely yours,

E.H.H.

James Stillman, from Cannes, to his mother, in America:

Your affectionate son,

JAMES STILLMAN

James Stillman, from London, to his mother:

Your affectionate son,

JAMES S.

Robert W. Sayles, assistant in charge of the geological collection at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, in Cambridge, to Jerome D. Greene, Secretary to the Corporation, Harvard University:

Yours very truly,

ROBERT W. SAYLES

WE are now in a position, perhaps, to put down a chronology:

(1) In 1893, Gifford Pinchot, twenty-eight years old, prepared a booklet that described the work he was undertaking and planned to undertake near Asheville, North Carolina, at Biltmore Forest—a tract of land owned by George Washington Vanderbilt, who was engaged also in the building of a large country house, Biltmore, modelled in large part on the chateau of Blois.

(2) In July, 1898, James Wilson, Secretary of Agriculture under President McKinley, appointed Pinchot to be Chief Forester in the Department of Agriculture. Pinchot had a tiny staff and no forests to manage.

(3) In the summer -of 1898, Pinchot encountered Richard Thornton Fisher, who had just graduated from Harvard College, on Mount Shasta, in California. Pinchot offered Fisher a job for the next summer, and Fisher became one of the “closely knit group of men who helped Mr. Pinchot get the practice of forestry under way.,

(4) On September 14, 1901, President McKinley died from wounds suffered from an assassin’s bullets, and Theodore Roosevelt assumed the Presidency. When Roosevelt arrived in Washington, he went to the house of a sister. Pinchot and his colleague Frederick Newell called on him there. Pinchot was then thirty-six years old. Theodore Roosevelt later wrote, “The first work I took up when I became President was the work of reclamation.” By “reclamation” he meant in particular forest work and the irrigation of arid lands. In general, he meant a policy that would encourage the proper use of all the nation’s natural resources.

(5) In 1909, Theodore Roosevelt left office. Gifford Pinchot was dismissed by President Taft the following year.

IN any event, the chronology is a short one. If we put the beginning at 1892, when Pinchot began his work at Biltmore, the first native-born American trained to be a forester, it encompasses less than twenty years. It must end at 1909. More than twenty years passed before the government took an active role in conservation again, and then it was an obvious catastrophe that gave rise to action: the “dust bowl,” in the plains region. In this case, soil and agriculture were the focus of action. There was among some people an interest in finding a generative symbol in the government’s attempt to conserve the soil, but soon the ethical aspect of soil conservation was forgotten, while the practical lessons were reduced to simple formulas related to immediate yield. The conservation movement of our own day has little to do with either the soil-conserving activity of the nineteen-thirties or the conservative-forestry ethic of the turn of the century. The modern conservationist must attempt to modify pathological symptoms unimagined by the men we have been discussing; or he will seek to preserve this or that piece of nature by getting it out of the way of the world’s work. He is, typically, either a scientist experienced in toxicology or a lawyer—not a farmer or a forester.

Pinchot’s idea of conservative forestry, we have said, resembled a nest of cups: practicality and science resting one within the other, and both resting within a conservative ethic that he articulated as “the greatest good of the greatest number for the longest time”—a dictum he later attributed to William J. McGee, an ethnologist he described as “the scientific brains of the Conservation Movement.” This ethic had no consistent advocate within the federal government after 1909, but it did continue to hold the interest of certain men, whose history we are able to trace. Here is a minor chronology (to append to the important one above), which will lead us to the Black Rock Forest:

(1) In 1898, Richard Thornton Fisher met Gifford Pinchot on Mount Shasta and became one of “the closely knit group of men who helped Mr. Pinchot get the practice of forestry under way.”

(2) In 1926, Richard Thornton Fisher walked over a tract of land in Cornwall, New York, with Dr. Ernest Stillman, a son of James Stillman, and urged him to establish a demonstration forest on it.

(3) In 1928, the Black Rock Forest was established by Dr. Ernest Stillman.

(4) In 1949, the Black Rock Forest came, with a generous endowment, into the possession of the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Now we may describe some important aspects of the inheritance that Harvard received when the Black Rock Forest came into its possession:

(1) The ability to do, within the forest, scientific work that had the potential of wide application. For instance, Professor Hugh Raup, of the Arnold Arboretum, wrote (at the time when Dr. Stillman was approaching Harvard on the subject of the forest):

But we would have to take note of Professor Raup’s caveat that dyed-in-the-wool laboratory men were “often afraid to work ‘in the open field.’ “

(2) The ability to do scientific work of narrow application. Here the case is clear that by 1949 the Black Rock Forest was yielding useful information about the condition of the forests of the Hudson Highlands.

(3) A tradition of optimism. The Black Rock Forest had, in 1949, a better claim than any other organized work of man, not excepting the Department of Agriculture, the Department of the Interior, or the Harvard Forest, in Petersham, to be continuing in an unbroken tradition, from honorable man to honorable man, the idea of conservation which Gifford Pinchot and others brought into American life in the first years of this century; which Pinchot articulated as an attempt to procure “the greatest good of the greatest number for the longest time;” and which did not exclude from the work of conservation either practicality or science or morality or art or a sense of the spirit within a landscape but conceived of these aspects of human work and perception as constituting a part of a whole, which was life, viewed optimistically.

IN 1940, Dr. Ernest Stillman wrote to President Conant, of Harvard, and sent with his letter a small essay entitled “Random Thoughts on the Harvard Forest,” which included his thoughts on the Black Rock Forest and its future. He wrote:

Two things must strike the reader. The first is how modest the goals set by Dr. Stillman were from a national or a global point of view. He proposes “an intensive study of how to grow most rapidly the most valuable local species of trees,” a study that must have compelling relevance for a very few people—that is, if we are thinking in national or global terms. The second is his prediction that more people will be moving to the country and that “the question of the ‘Farmer’s Wood Lot’ will become increasingly important.” Would this prediction have been accepted by many men active in the world of 1940? I don’t think so. Ernest Stillman was looking beyond the active world of 1940. And wasn’t there a war in Europe going on at that time which absorbed most of the attention of many serious men? Was he looking beyond that, too? It is in the nature of the conservative forester to qualify every description of events powerful-in-the-moment, perhaps using the phrase “but even so . . .”

IN 1949, Dr. Stillman died. In that year, the Black Rock Forest passed to Harvard University. An interesting artifact of that year is Black Rock Forest Paper No. 23 (Papers were shorter than Bulletins), which was written by Dr. Stillman’s son Calvin Stillman. It is entitled “Economic Re-lations of the Black Rock Forest.” Calvin Stillman wrote:

I now want to return to a sentence of Henry Tryon’s, used by him in reference to the silvicultural work he was doing in the section of the Black Rock Forest called Glycerine Hollow. He wrote, “We may learn that we are wide of the mark or perhaps we shall be agreeably surprised.” I want to put this sentence in contrast to Calvin Stillman’s statement “We can be sure of almost nothing.” I submit that the very different way in which uncertainty is handled in the two sentences holds the key to understanding the ingrained pessimism of the modern era. In Calvin Stillman’s view, the enormous uncertainties of the modern world lead one to reject all plans the profits of which cannot be realized in a very short time—before the world changes again. Henry Tryon’s work, on the other hand, seeks to understand (and to change for the better, if that may be) a particular situation in the real world—apart from whatever enormously powerful forces are at work (momentarily) in the world of men—and his sentence reflects this. Calvin Stillman seeks certainty, and finds that the idea that there is profit (or safety) in anything other than the certain (“the one factor most surely fixed”) is delusion. Henry Tryon seems at home in uncertainty and finds that in uncertainty one may be “agreeably surprised.” If we look at the mental events behind what Mr. Tryon and Mr. Stillman have said, we find that behind what Calvin Stillman has said is a fight for certainty: for certain safety, for certain profit. Behind what Henry Tryon has said is an admission that the battle has been lost: certain knowledge is not (at this moment) available to us; but work can continue.

Notice how the positions reverse: at first, it would seem optimistic to think that one could know for sure, and pessimistic to deny it; and yet if one finds that in one’s fight for certainty everything in the real world has become unknowable or unfriendly to thinking-beyond-the-moment, where is optimism in that? And if, admitting uncertainty, one continues to do work and to plan for the future (a more healthy future, if that may be), isn’t that optimism in fact?

THERE was no strong interest in silviculture at Harvard at the time Harvard acquired the Black Rock Forest. The amount of money retained from the Black Rock Forest endowment for use within the forest was sufficient to keep the roads in good shape and to pay for the services of a part-time forester, a full-time forest technician, and a part-time crew. The forest was patrolled by a private club, which, in return for its services, was permitted to hunt and fish within the forest.

In 1960, Dr. Ernest Gould, an economist at the Harvard Forest, published an essay (Harvard Forest Bulletin No. 29) entitled “Fifty Years of Management at the Harvard Forest.” In many ways, it follows Calvin Stillman’s argument in “Economic Relations of the Black Rock Forest.” Dr. Gould explores alternatives to a sustained-yield system. One theoretical course of action he describes would have had the managers of the Harvard Forest (headed by Richard Fisher at that time) sell off all the best-quality saw timber within it “during the high prices of World War I.” In this case, he says, the surplus return over current spending could have been added to the endowment. He wrote:

In 1972, when it appeared that a pumped-storage generating plant that Consolidated Edison proposed to build at Storm King Mountain, in the Hudson Highlands, would take land from the Black Rock Forest, Derek Bok, the president of Harvard University, appointed a three-member committee to judge what Harvard’s position should be. The committee said that Harvard should take no position concerning the building of the plant. The committee recommended that another committee be formed to decide what to do with the Black Rock Forest and with its endowment. The committee itself noted possibilities. The committee noted that a private owner of the forest would find that he had a very valuable piece of real estate. The committee said that “selling the Forest in lots (small estates) of a few acres could raise a lot of money.” The committee said that “Harvard should not think of doing this.” The committee noted that if Consolidated Edison were to build its pumped-storage plant one good result might be that it could acquire the forest and give most of it to the Palisades Interstate Park. The committee noted that there was nothing in Dr. Stillman’s will specifying how Harvard should use the Black Rock Forest. The committee said:

The committee reviewed the work that had been done at the forest (the Bulletins and the Papers). The committee said:

NOW we shall look at the two chronologies we have set down, observing closely what success was achieved.

Looking at the major chronology (1892-1909), we find a record of success and failure mixed. Pinchot and Roosevelt succeeded in creating a system of national forests which was of wide extent. They did not succeed in their effort to create within these forests a system of work that would inspire a change in the country’s attitude toward natural resources. Pinchot did not succeed in gathering science, practicality, and a sense of the spirit within a landscape into a conservative ethic capable of attracting or withstanding American enthusiasm. Science and practicality went out into the world alone; his conservative formula, “the greatest good of the greatest number for the longest time,” was largely forgotten, and the national forests came to be seen as land that had been set aside. By the time a new conservation movement arose, the country had drifted so far into a pessimistic idea of human work that Pinchot’s idea of using a forest was seen as suspect—a ploy, a compromise. Conservationists of recent times have perceived the flow as going the other way: not healthy modes of work from the managed forest out into the world of work but pollution from the world of work into the forest.

We now look at the minor chronology. Here we see the history of an attempt to keep an optimistic idea of work alive in one place: the Black Rock Forest, in Cornwall, New York. Here we must acknowledge failure. Dr. Ernest Stillman and Henry Try-on, working under the inspiration of Richard Thornton Fisher (one of the “closely knit group of men who helped Mr. Pinchot get the practice of forestry under way”), did not succeed in keeping Pinchot’s idea alive on their tract of land.

We should note two small exceptions to the statement that the effort of Dr. Stillman and Henry Tryon failed. First, we should note that the money given to Harvard by Dr. Stillman with the forest did not fail. We may now look at a chronology of which money will be the subject.

Dr. Stillman established the endowment of the Black Rock Forest Trust Fund in 1940. During the period from 1940 to 1949, the income from this endowment was added to the principal each year. At the end of fiscal 1948-49, the principal of the endowment stood at $135,003.69. To this amount were added the sum realized from the sale of the Cornwall Press, which came to Harvard in 1949, when Dr. Stillman died, and the proceeds of three life-insurance policies that Dr. Stillman had made payable to Harvard. At the end of fiscal 1949-50, the endowment of the Black Rock Forest Trust Fund stood at $1,154,861.57. During the years that followed, the endowment of the Black Rock Forest Trust Fund was part of the “commingled funds” that formed the General Investment Account at Harvard. The General Investment Account was operated according to principles that have been described as “prudent” and which seemed almost to shield old endowment funds from the increase in market value of the overall commingled portfolio. A special intermediate device, a Gain and Loss Account, was employed. A capital gain, when realized, was not credited immediately to the various endowment funds; rather, it was credited to. the Gain and Loss Account, which periodically (not every year by any means) disbursed money to the endowment funds. Thus, the funds did not immediately reflect any market gain in stocks or other investment instruments that continued to be held, nor did they reflect any realized gains that had not yet been disbursed from the Gain and Loss Account. Distribution from the Gain and Loss Account was at the discretion of the Harvard Corporation. From 1950 to 1970, there were four such distributions to the Black Rock Forest Trust Fund: in fiscal 1956-57, $121,329.36; in. fiscal 1959-60, $133,462.30; in fiscal 1962-63, $146,808.53; in fiscal 1964-65, $161,469.38. There were recorded as well two “capital gains” that reached the fund without going through the Gain and Loss Account: in fiscal 1951-52, $12,476.81; in fiscal 195253, $48,733.44. One effect of this system was to keep the stated value of the various funds constant over a number of years. The Black Rock Forest fund, for instance, was constant in the amount of $1,776,163.19 from the end of fiscal 1964-65 through fiscal 196869. During fiscal 1969-70, $45,785 was transferred to the fund from income. This was the only time during the twenty years from fiscal 1950-51 to fiscal 1969-70 that there was a transfer of income to capital. On June 30, 1970, the principal of the Black Rock Forest Trust Fund amounted to $1,821,948.57. Thus, during the twenty years from the end of fiscal 1949-50 to the end of fiscal 1969-70 the fund had shown an increase in principal of $667,087. Or, to show this figure as a percentage of the June, 1950, figure, the fund had grown in twenty years by just under fifty-eight per cent.

On July 1, 1970, Harvard adopted the market-value method of accounting. By this method, Harvard’s endowment was transformed into something resembling a mutual fund, in which each endowment held a number of shares, or units. The crucial point, of course, was how many units would be issued to each existing fund. The Financial Report to the Board of Overseers for fiscal 1979-80 said:

The difficulty was that it was not obvious how the “proportional share of the market value” of the over-all portfolio should be determined for the old endowment funds, since during the years of the Gain and Loss Account system the various endowment funds had not been allowed to reflect market value. For instance, the figure of $1,821,948.57, which was the stated value of the Black Rock Forest fund as of June 30, 1970, could not be used as the sole means of determining the Black Rock Forest fund’s “proportional share of the market value” of the over-all portfolio, since the system that generated the figure produced a book-value figure that reflected capital gains actually realized and distributed only, and was not allowed to reflect the increase in the “market value” of the whole endowment.

On July 1, 1970, the Harvard Black Rock Forest fund was assigned Participating Units in the number of 21,712.1019. This figure, as a result of gifts and other changes, had risen to 23,907.3505 as of June 30, 1983, when the principal of the fund was listed as having a worth of $2,490,964. This amount Harvard proposes to keep when it disposes of the forest.

EACH year, the Corporation arrived at a figure, given as a percentage, that, when it was applied to the stated value of the principal of the various endowment funds, yielded the “investment income” credited to each of the funds. The Black Rock Forest Trust Fund “earned” income at a rate of around five per cent during most years. Over all, about thirty per cent of this income was spent at the Black Rock Forest and seventy per cent at the Harvard Forest, in Petersham. In establishing the Black Rock Forest fund, Dr. Stillman required that the income be “used to defray the cost of operating, first, the Black Rock Forest, and, then, the Harvard Forest.”

I SET out for Cambridge. On the I way, I stayed the night in a dead small city in central Massachusetts, and the next day I went to Cambridge. At the center of the dead small city were large buildings around a square that contained certain official buildings symbolic of the life of the city. The official buildings were intact. Then, around the square: what had been a large hotel had shifted uses; what had been a large store had shut up. What was alive? Embassies: branches of institutions that collected this or that dollar from people all around the state, all around the country, all around the world, and had decided for this or that reason to continue a physical presence in the old heart of the dead small city. Banks. What was dead? The forest.

I WANT to return one last time to the symbols established within Biltmore Estate.

First, to Biltmore House, the imitation of the château of Blois. It seems to me that a great mainstream of American thought and action washes around Biltmore House. Biltmore House is everywhere and nowhere.

Within Biltmore House we may place Calvin Stillman’s statement “We can be sure of almost nothing. . . . We don’t know what cost and price relationships will be in the future. . . . We don’t know what will happen to taxes, labor costs, and costs of forest protection. . . . I submit that . . . the Forest should adjust to these uncertainties as data of its problem, and devote its energies to the one factor most surely fixed—pure science.”

Within Biltmore House we may place James Stillman’s description of his daughter’s Presentation gown, E. H. Harriman’s assessment of the incoming Taft Administration, and President-elect Taft’s remark “There is one difficulty about the conservation of natural resources. It is that the imagination of those who are pressing it may outrun the practical facts.” That is, we may place within Biltmore House, on the one hand, the science and the technology that underlie the economic life of this country and the practical facts that are consequences of that economic life and, on the other hand, the unconvincing and dreamlike visions of national life which the national economic life has encouraged, and which decorate the national economic life and intertwine with it.

We may wish, for a moment, to take apart the everywhere-and-nowhere construction; that is, to separate the one from the other. The everywhere, we now see, is where the money is raised; the nowhere is where it is spent.

And now we are in a position to see the relationship between everywhere and nowhere. If one is living nowhere (in an imitation of the château of Blois?), the only pleasure is to be reminded that one is a part of something (even something as abstract as an economic system) that is going on every- where. Nowhere monuments (like Biltmore House) are a rarity, and hold a fascination, since in our day the connections between everywhere and nowhere have been evanescent images. The idea that people once lived (or tried to live) in houses that were ev- erywhere and nowhere must necessarily be very interesting to us—as interesting as the idea that a person might actually live in television.

Men and women who are content to live in Biltmore House are content not because they have found a way to live there happily but because they know something about how it was constructed; that is, they know something about what rules are in operation ev- erywhere. Nowhere is nowhere for these people, too, but the contemplation of the rules at work is satisfying to them. Within Biltmore House, there is a sense of satisfaction that one is not, at any rate, bucking the tide. And if, by some chance, a person has been held back by circumstances from living in Biltmore House, there is a pleasant sensation of joining when that person enters at last. Some of this sensation is implicit, I think, in Dr. Ernest Gould’s remark that the fifty-year experiment with sustained-yield management at the Harvard Forest “has cost the Forest nearly $500,000 of additional financial gain;” and also, of course, in President-elect Taft’s statement “There is one difficulty about the conservation of natural resources. It is that the imagination of those who are pressing it may outrun the practical facts.”

In recent times, to be somewhere has meant not to be everywhere; it is annoying to ambitious people now to be somewhere. The forest is inevitably somewhere, and we have neglected it.

Finally, a word about the arboretum. I have said that it is here and there. The balance of here is there—a place that is here to somebody else. The artifacts in a museum are, or have been, evocative of other particular places in the world in time. One important aspect of education involves the collision, in the mind of a person who has a sense of the place where he is, between his understanding of his own experience and his understanding of the experiences of other men and women, living and dead. Such a collision sends a person back to his here with a renewed interest in it. Such a collision is, among other things, a cure for loneliness.

The collision between everywhere and nowhere is no such benign thing. Nowhere threatens to obliterate everywhere in the mind of a person. When the sense of connectedness to everywhere is broken, even momentarily, the sense of loss to a person living everywhere and nowhere is overwhelming. Either a person’s small space within Biltmore House is a vantage point from which he can see— everything; or it is nothing at all. Within Biltmore House, an interest in the way the rules work everywhere usually becomes obsessive, since there is no other source of nourishment.

IN Cambridge, Massachusetts, I met with Mr. Daniel Steiner, general counsel to Harvard University, and Dean Richard Leahy, who has as one of his special responsibilities the administration of those research properties appended to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University which are not near Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Dean Leahy said, “Various enterprises that don’t admit students are my responsibility.”

Mr. Steiner said, “It is that from our point of view, from the point of view of our scientific community in biology, it does not offer anything unique in comparison to a forest much closer and where we have a large facility. As a consequence, the amount of research at the Black Rock Forest is limited.”

Dean Leahy said, “It is a division of the Harvard Forest, at Petersham. It isn’t called that, but that’s the way it is operated.”

Dean Leahy said, “There is no School of Forestry at Harvard. Our work in forestry is limited. It is fully contained within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. There are four men— two full professors, one assistant professor, and a senior professional, Dr. Ernest Gould, at Petersham. You really must go to Petersham. In addition to the kinds of facilities you’d expect, there is a museum, a dormitory, married-student housing.”

I said, “If it has come to seem that, from the point of view of your scientific community in biology, the Black Rock Forest does not offer anything unique in comparison to the Harvard Forest, in Petersham, there must have been a moment when that became clear. Can you tell me how it was in that moment?”

Dean Leahy said, “It is hard to say.”

I said, “But there must have been a moment of disappointment. That is to say, at one moment you thought the forest would be useful, and you accepted it. At another moment, then, the forest proved to be a disappointment, leaving you with a belief that it would be better to part with the forest.”

Dean Leahy said, “Over time. It would be hard to pick a moment.” I said, “But men at Harvard found that the forest was disappointing to them?”

Dean Leahy said, “Now, I am not an expert in this aspect. My impression is that the soil condition is not very good. I think there was heavy glaciation in the area.”

Mr. Steiner said, “Remember, we are a teaching and research institution. We are obligated to use funds for teaching and research.”

Mr. Steiner said, “We do not consider that Black Rock Forest is essential.”

Mr. Steiner said, “Consequently, we have been considering alternative ownership of the forest.”

Mr. Steiner said, “But we have no intention of disposing of the forest for development.”

Mr. Steiner said, “We have a passive, or neutral, stand, and respond to inquiries.”

Dean Leahy said, “Bits of it that were acquired afterward might be sold separately. Where the forest manager lives . . . What we are talking about perhaps selling separately is thirty, forty acres, not integral to the forest. We are not talking about any kind of development. At the same time, there is a question whether we ought to give the forest away. It represents, perhaps, the endowment of a professorship.”

Mr. Steiner said, “If it can be preserved, and funds can be realized to support teaching and research . . .”

Dean Leahy said, “We would add it to the endowment of the Harvard Forest.”

Mr. Steiner said, “Perhaps a professorship in Dr. Stillman’s name . . .”

Mr. Steiner said, “One of the questions the law deals with is intent. I feel a little awkward here, as though I were being asked to be a seer.”

Mr. Steiner said, “Who knows most about this? I think it might be Calvin Stillman, Dr. Stillman’s son. Our records indicate that Calvin Stillman was very closely involved . . . at the time of the transfer.”

Mr. Steiner said, “Another thing is Calvin Stillman’s professional training.”

Dean Leahy said, “He’s at Rutgers.”

Mr. Steiner said, “In biology.”

Dean Leahy said, “No, it’s economics, I think.”

Mr. Steiner said, “It was Calvin Stillman who dealt with Harvard on the occasion of transfer.”

Mr. Steiner said, “It is clear to us that Harvard is not a conservation organization. Dr. Stillman understood that. The bequest of the forest is absolute. To Harvard, without restriction. There is well-known language to be used in wills if you want to restrict a bequest: alternative dispositions of property if the university does not carry out his wishes. He did not use any language of this kind. It is a simple and outright bequest. No restriction. That says an awful lot to me, as a lawyer. I think it would be wrong to make an assumption that Dr. Stillman had required, or even expected, that Harvard would hold on to it. If I were interested in preserving a forest, I wouldn’t give it to a university. At the same time, we’ve looked at the land, looked at the area, and it seems inappropriate to sell it for development. Although, under the terms of the will, flat out, we legally could. I will send you a copy of the will. My conscience is clear.”

I Acknowledged that Dr. Ernest Stillman and Henry Tryon had failed in their effort to keep the idea of conservative work alive within the Black Rock Forest, in Cornwall, New York, but we proposed to make two exceptions to the verdict of failure; that is, we proposed to note two successful aspects of their effort. We did note that the money given by Dr. Stillman to Harvard to support the forest and the work he was doing in it, commingled, as it was, with other endowment money of the university, quickly worked its way into the life of the university; and although its rate of growth has always been modest, and almost humble, certainly it has not been forgotten, nor has anyone proposed to do away with it.

There is another aspect of work in the Black Rock Forest which was successful. This is found within the Bulletins. They are octavo volumes, bound in green paper. They have on the cover the device of the forest: concentric circles enclosing the words “The Black Rock Forest Cornwall-on-the-Hudson, New York” and then, at the center, a depiction of Black Rock Mountain. They are well made and well printed. Henry Tryon, who wrote many of them, had a clear, unaffected prose style, well matched to the conservative work he was doing.

Bulletin No. 4, “A Portable Charcoal Kiln,” was published in 1933. It was written by Henry Tryon. The work it describes is, from a global point of view, rather pedestrian in na- ture, competent but with little that is novel or imaginative.

Aspects of local history are mentioned:

A local condition is discussed; a tool is designed to fit into the local condition; the operation of the tool is described:

The failure of the Black Rock Forest was on a small scale; it was more to be compared to the withering away of a limb on the body of an endowment than to a bank failure or the failure of an enormous enterprise in which vast amounts of borrowed money have been sunk. One remembers that Harvard is now entangled in an enormous enterprise. Harvard has pledged its full faith and credit in the amount of some three hundred and fifty million dollars (an amount equal to the final goal of Harvard’s recent fund drive) as security for bonds issued to finance an experiment (very novel and imaginative) whose purpose is to supply the power needs of a complex of buildings it runs in Boston. Here we may find the reverse of the coin: money withering on the body of an outlying project.

And success within the Black Rock Forest was small, too. And yet any effort that meets a certain standard of clarity and sense participates in the continuity of clarity and sense which runs like a small channel throughout history.

The writing of Henry Tryon, for instance—what can we say about it? It is competent and pedestrian—let’s begin with that. As we admit that we look in vain for the novel and the imaginative, let us try to remember that the novel and the imaginative may take us in more than one direction.

THERE is now a publication called Harvard Magazine. The issue of May-June, 1981, had on its cover a striking picture of an old Asian man. His face was full of dignity. Half of his face was in shadow, lending a sombre tone to this dignity. There were lines of type in the lower left-hand corner of the cover. The upper lines referred to this picture. They read:

The other lines of type were descriptive of other articles to be found in the magazine. They read:

The first page of this issue of Harvard Magazine was devoted to a commercial evocation of Harvard. There were illustrations of dinner plates decorated with Harvard scenes. It was remarkable that all the scenes were in the past. A scene of Harvard Yard in 1858 was the closest in time to our own day. Others were much earlier. The place of emphasis was given to the plate enclosing the most distant scene of all: a “Westerly view of Harvard College 1767.”

President Bok’s article, “Business and the Academy,” dealt with a very interesting issue. The issue was: Should Harvard University, for the sake of money, participate in business ventures designed to exploit research done at Harvard in recombinant DNA? The article was written shortly after Harvard decided not to participate in such activities. The decision was not entirely a happy one. When Harvard is asked “Engage in business ventures?” Harvard answers “No.” But Harvard looked at the suitor. Harvard noticed that the suitor was rich. Harvard heaved a sigh.

President Bok’s article begins with this account:

It may be important to follow the progress of these two paragraphs.

The pivot is in the crisp autumn morning. In that phrase is all Harvard to people who have been at Harvard.

We have moved, quite efficiently, from the crisp autumn of all Harvards to the crisp autumn of President Bok’s Harvard and to the newspaper that President Bok is reading. Notice that Harvard has been established in a certain way, President Bok at Harvard has been established in a certain way. Whatever happens now in the newspaper will appear in juxtaposition with the scene as it has been established: Harvard, autumn, President Bok serenely going about his business.

What has been established is: Harvard as a backwater; Harvard as a backwater with its own pretty ways; the world interested in Harvard; the world eager (and sometimes overeager) to report on events going on at Harvard ; the world a little apt to intrude where it doesn’t really belong.

Let us go on. For amusement’s sake, let us make up a story (to compare with President Bok’s) in which the great world will intrude on Harvard— with amusing results.

Notice that in this story the world makes a silly mistake about what is going on at Harvard. My story describes a certain Harvard context, well known to its graduates. It introduces into this context a flap. It introduces people who do not understand Harvard and who may, through their clumsiness, cause trouble to Harvard.

Now we will spend some time with President Bok’s paragraphs.

If one reads this sentence marking especially the text and subtext of the phrase “the story went on to declare” and the fact that the article is quoted directly, and not paraphrased, to what conclusion does one find that it moves? I think it is to the conclusion that the university was about to do no such thing. President Bok quotes the Times as though the Times were in error. And yet the newspaper was not in error. The newspaper had accurately reported important events taking place at Harvard.

Please see how the story is being abused. Which story? The story of Harvard in juxtaposition with the outside world, which I have epitomized in a story in which the outside world makes a silly error. How abused? My sort of story, a story of the old Harvard, is being used as a trench from which to fight a battle. The story of old Harvard has been wrenched out of shape to accommodate very serious business. Its essence has been removed, and it has been supplied with a new substance, which must pollute it.

At each turn in the story (for stories, however carefully controlled, reveal truth always, in the same way that posed photographs do, which show the aspirations within the pose), President Bok returns to my story, the story of Harvard in the age of airs and graces, and he does it for shelter. We watch as we would watch a military exercise—for this is what it is, within the context of public relations.

He begins in the sector of airs and graces. It is autumn, he is reading a newspaper. To his surprise, he sees his own picture. Now he is exposed for a moment. He must deal with the fact that a newspaper has printed an accurate story about an important development taking place at Harvard. He must proceed cautiously here. He may not say that the newspaper is in error, but he may put a distance between himself and the story. He does this by quoting the newspaper article so that the issue of Harvard’s experiments with DNA, Harvard’s interest in exploiting its research in DNA for profit, is emplaced within another issue, the issue of Harvard stirred up by the press, which, in turn, may be em-placed within still another, older issue —of Harvard and the outside world. The no man’s land is the quotation of the newspaper article. If a reader is attentive, he will say, “Stop, stop. Was it correct, the article? Were you—are you—considering such a thing?” If, however, the reader is inattentive or if he is lost in the crisp autumn morning of his own Harvard, President Bok will succeed in transporting him over the dangerous patch into the flap. Here President Bok is on safe ground and may pivot back into the safe Harvard sector from which he began. Note that President Bok’s treatment of the flap resembles the treatment of the flap in my story. He says that “articles appeared in dozens of newspapers and magazines describing the merits and demerits of entering into commercial ventures of this kind,” and he seems bemused. He says, “Scientists and editorial writers quickly volunteered their own opinions on the issue,” and he makes them sound like ladies in flowered hats.

The real story is the reverse of the Harvard – against – the – outside – world story. The real story is: There is no distance now between Harvard and the outside world; you could not find the boundary. The context of Harvard is the same as the context of the Times, which is the large context of the whole country of two hundred million people. The Times has understood the story perfectly.

President Bok moves from his discussion of the stir caused by the Times to a laying out of the issues:

Follow the movement of this paragraph. First, again, the flap, which has subsided. The agitation has ceased. Still, there is deep concern in many quarters. Here President Bok makes room for what must already be in the minds of many readers. Yes, of course, people would be concerned about Harvard’s going into business. He minimizes this existing impression by placing it “in many quarters”— which is to say, not in any place you and I know or want to name—and then he pivots away from the existing impression to an entirely different concern, which no one has voiced, which is: How should Harvard now approach business? The first “concern” he mentions is:

This, I’m afraid, is propaganda writing. A person who is upset that Harvard might plan to go into business feels in reading it that his concern is being addressed. And yet his concern has been placed in a context he would not have foreseen. Let us say that the uppermost edge of his concern has been placed within President Bok’s sentence, so that President Bok may say, “Yes, here it is,” and yet one cannot help noticing that this concern is at the very bottom of the new context that President Bok is creating. Such is the ambiguity of the sentence that it would be possible for a person to derive from it the sense that people in some quarters were upset that Harvard had failed to be sufficiently aggressive in marketing the results of its scientific research and now the president of the university was being called upon to defend his backwardness. The next sentence does nothing to undo this impression; in fact, in introducing “the financial pressures facing research institutions” it makes a person think, Yes, really, President Bok must be urged to be more forceful in this matter. Finally, we come to what might be a concern of a certain group of people: “Could universities enter the marketplace without subverting their commitment to learning and discovery?” But that group of people is here a group that has decided “Yes, of course, do consider an alliance with the world of commerce, but make sure you don’t subvert your commitment to learning and discovery.” Anyone saying “No, don’t do it” has to find a home in this group.

“No, don’t do it!” people shout from some quarters.

“I know just what you mean,” President Bok says.

“No, don’t ever do it.”

“Quite right. Without the proper safeguards . . .”

“No, I mean you shouldn’t even consider . . .”

“Doing it without the proper safeguards, certainly not,” President Bok says, and he walks to his conclusion, which is that he finds he has an “intriguing opportunity to discuss the state of academic science,” and that he now finds, after this good, healthy, frank exchange, that he wants to “explore the proper role of the university in translating scientific discoveries into useful products and innovations.”

I WANT to mention the Morgan 1 Guaranty Trust Company here. Recently, advertisements for Morgan Guaranty have begun to identify the company as “The Morgan Bank.” This used to be a private name for the company, employed by people who identified it with the financial patriarchy of New York. I think the name is being used magically. That is, I think that as institutions bearing old names go out into the world now they hope that by speaking their old names they will be safer. I don’t think that President Bok of Harvard wants, any more than the officers of the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company want, actually to transform the world of impersonal forces and trends into a world of men (whose stories we may know); I think he only wants the forces to halt on command, to stop still at the mention of a certain name. The power of the impersonal world can be seen in President Bok’s prose. When the world of men-whose-stories-we-may-know is not being specifically invoked, it vanishes from around him. His article “Business and the Academy” is peopled with men and women, but sparsely.

I want to discuss now a reference he makes to Pyotr Kapitsa, the eminent Soviet physicist. President Bok knows Kapitsa through an article in Science which gave a brief account, in 1966, of an address that Kapitsa made to the Royal Society. Kapitsa spoke, on that occasion, about his friend Lord Rutherford, the great British physicist, and about his association with him. Science quoted a little of his speech in an article just over two pages long. One of the paragraphs of direct quotation is quoted, in turn, by President Bok, as relevant to his own concern that the morale of scientists may be damaged if “the ideal of the disinterested scientist begins to be replaced by that of the wealthy professor-entrepreneur.” Notice that Kapitsa’s statements are as clear as glass but that to President Bok they are puzzling.

President Bok says:

Notice. Notice. Kapitsa says, “She has become rich but she has become enslaved.”

Bok says, “Perhaps scientists fear that there is no longer enough time for referees to read papers with sufficient care.”

IT is possible to understand events taking place now by getting to know the history of the work of which they are a result. The large impersonal forces that rule the world now were set in motion by persons-at-work. But it is hard. It is as though at a certain point records ceased to be kept. But that is not true. Records were kept, and in most cases we can get at them. The history of recent work has somehow failed to stick in people’s minds. This has to do, I think, with the fact that the results of successful work are now dispersed throughout the world in such a way that they disappear; that is, they are not linked to any place. What will happen, for instance, when the financial life of the nation is no longer associated with Wall Street is very hard to predict. When the financial life of the nation is a matter of events taking place in the air (retrieved for a moment on this or that screen), will it be possible to raise a child to believe in it? It is difficult to tell the story of any particular event now because the old backgrounds against which a particular event would have meaning (Harvard and Wall Street, for example) are unreliable, and yet they are all we have. That is why entertainment stories are set in the past, or are absurd and not meant to be taken seriously, or deal with some person’s personal problems. To construct, through diligent thought, a true background against which events of this moment might be juxtaposed is the work of art now.

Since this short history of the Harvard Black Rock Forest has been difficult to construct (because the foreground and the background were being constructed at the same time), I should, perhaps, include a summary of what I think is important in what I have written.

First in importance is the image I put forward at the beginning. Two men, one a forester, the other a very rich man, stand on a tract of land. They first look at the land, which has been damaged and exploited. Then they look at an incomplete limestone palace.

Second in importance is the history of the men in the image: Gifford Pinchot and George Washington Vanderbilt. I mention George Washington Vanderbilt here especially because his idea—to build a palace in America—will always be a part of American life and should be accepted by Americans. But: he needs Gifford Pinchot at his side. In my image, he has him.

Thirdly, the various symbols within the Biltmore Estate: corresponding to what is everywhere and nowhere; here and there; and mostly here. I particularly want to direct the reader’s attention to the difference between the qualities of the science of silviculture, which is embedded in a context (the forest), and the qualities of what Calvin Stillman called “pure science,” and to suggest that “pure science” must learn from silviculture how to behave as though it were embedded in a context. The job, it seems to me, is to transform “the scientific method,” which is free in a way that human beings never can be free, into “science,” a collegial system that would recognize, as silviculture does, that life goes on in particular places and that “the longest time” is in fact the span of time we want to consider.

At last, the history of the Black Rock Forest, ending in the history of Harvard’s unsatisfactory stewardship. Here, first of all, I would like to pay my respects to Ernest Stillman. In America, it is very often out of the work of men like Dr. Stillman that good developments are allowed to take place. Dr. Stillman held to the ideal of the constantly flourishing forest long after its vogue had ended. A specific proposal of mine would be that Harvard be asked to transfer the forest and its endowment to an independent foundation that would continue to pursue the silvicultural work begun by Ernest Stillman and Henry Tryon. No hasty action will do justice to what Dr. Stillman began—we remember that he rejected the idea of a private foundation because its plan of work would be “too narrow”—but I am convinced that the integrity of his ideal will be better protected now by a dedicated private group than by any large institution.

As to the usefulness of the forest: this is of two kinds—usefulness that was foreseen by Dr. Stillman and usefulness that was not foreseen by him. Dr. Stillman was right: the farmer’s woodlot is important now. He was right: large numbers of people have moved to the country. What he did not foresee was that the scientific data collected within the forest might be useful as a base against which to measure levels of toxicity (in measuring acidity due to acid rain, for instance). And yet he did foresee it; that is, he foresaw that patient work within the forest would produce benefits he could not foresee.

As to Harvard’s unsatisfactory stewardship of the forest: the weight of all evidence I have seen is against Daniel Steiner’s statement that “it would be wrong to make an assumption that Dr. Stillman had required, or even expected, that Harvard would hold on to” the forest. There is a concept in conservative forestry called the Permanent Association. The Permanent Association for a given piece of forest land is that mixture of trees toward which all the various successions of dominance are tending. It is also called the climax forest. Such a forest, when handled with respect, will yield a handsome profit, and will return to health of itself: it is the constantly useful, constantly flourishing forest. In human affairs, it would be: a stable civilization. In America, this would be: a stable American civilization. It is my conviction that Ernest Stillman was one of those American men (Gifford Pinchot was another; Theodore Roosevelt was another) who believed that it was important to work toward that ideal however much the (so-called) “practical facts” spoke of its impracticability, however much promises of vast wealth spoke of its irrelevance, however much cataclysmic world events spoke of its smallness. Dr. Stillman, I know, thought of Harvard University as the strong home in American life of those persons who were working toward a discovery of what a Permanent Association for America might be. And, of course, it has been that (Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and John Kennedy are among its graduates), and it might be again.

FINALLY, I would like to return to some of the questions to which President Bok of Harvard said he had no very good answers. Why is there “unease” in “many scientific circles”? What is the proper relationship between a scientist working at a university and the world of business? We turn to Pyotr Kapitsa’s address to the Royal Society—to which President Bok has himself referred. Let this be symbolic of what I want to say to President Bok: You have good information close to hand, and you may still decide to use it. Kapitsa’s address to the Royal Society, briefly reported in Science, appears in his “Collected Papers,” under the title “Recollections of Lord Rutherford.”

It is an affectionate work—we notice that. We notice that a man is speaking to other men, simply. It has great force. Events are not shapeless. It is a question of men at work. Notice the pencil of Lord Rutherford—how it has stayed in the mind of the great Russian physicist—and notice how the words of a Ukrainian philosopher have stayed in the mind of the great Soviet physicist, and how simplicity is not ignored. Mr. Kapitsa says: ♦

By Jessica Pressler — New York Magazine, 2018

It started with money, as it so often does in New York. A crisp $100 bill slipped across the smooth surface of the mid-century-inspired concierge desk at 11 Howard, the sleek new boutique hotel in Soho. Looking up, Neffatari Davis, the 25-year-old concierge, who goes by “Neff,” was surprised to see the cash had come from a young woman who seemed to be around her age. She had a heart-shaped face and pouty lips surrounded by a wild tangle of red hair, her eyes framed by incongruously chunky black glasses that Neff, an aspiring cinematographer with an eye for detail, identified as Céline. She was looking, she said in an accent that sounded European, for “the best food in Soho.”

“What’s your name?” Neff asked, after the girl waved off her suggestions of Carbone and the Mercer Kitchen and settled on the Butcher’s Daughter.

“Anna Delvey,” said the young woman. She’d be staying at the hotel for a month, she went on, which Neff also found surprising: Usually it was only celebrities who came for such long stretches. But Neff checked the system, and there it was. Delvey was booked into a Howard Deluxe, one of the hotel’s midrange options, about $400 a night, with ceramic sculptures on the walls and oversize windows looking onto the bustling streets of Soho. It was February 18, 2017.

“Thanks,” said Delvey. “See you around.”

That turned out to be a promise. Over the next few weeks, Delvey stopped by often to ask Neff’s advice, slipping her $100 each time. Neff would wax on about how Mr. Purple was totally washed and Vandal was for hipsters, while Delvey’s eyes would flit around behind her glasses. Eventually, Neff realized: Delvey already knew all the cool places to go — not only that, she knew the names of the bartenders and waiters and owners. “This is not a guest that needs my help,” it dawned on her. “This is a guest that wants my time.”

This was not out of the ordinary. Since she’d started working there, Neff, a Washington, D.C., native with a wedge of natural hair, giant Margaret Keane eyes, and a gap-toothed smile, had found herself playing therapist to all manner of hotel guests: husbands cheating on their wives, wives getting away from their husbands. “You just sit there and listen, because that’s your concierge life,” she recalled recently, at a coffee shop near her apartment in Crown Heights.

Usually, these guests went back to their own lives, leaving Neff to hers. But February became March, and Delvey kept showing up. She’d bring food down, or a glass of extra-dry white wine, and settle near Neff’s desk to chat. Some of the other hotel employees found Anna deeply annoying. She could be oddly ill-mannered for a rich person: Please and thank you were not in her vocabulary, and she would sometimes say things that were “Not racist,” Neff said, “but classist.” (“What are you bitches, broke?” Anna asked her and another hotel employee.) But to Neff, it didn’t come across as mean-spirited. More like she was some kind of old-fashioned princess who’d been plucked from an ancient European castle and deposited in the modern world, although according to Anna she came from modern-day Germany and her father ran a business producing solar panels. And despite her unassuming figure — “a sort of Sound of Music Fräulein,” one acquaintance later put it — Anna quickly established herself as one of 11 Howard’s most generous guests. “People would fight to take her packages upstairs,” said Neff. “Fight, because you knew you were getting $100.” Over time, Delvey got more and more comfortable in the hotel, swanning around in sheer Alexander Wang leggings or, occasionally, a hotel robe. “She ran that place,” said Neff. “You know how Rihanna walks out with wineglasses? That was Anna. And they let her. Bye, Ms. Delvey …”

Anna was preparing to launch a business, a Soho House–ish type club, she told Neff, focused on art, with locations in L.A., London, Hong Kong, and Dubai, and Neff became her de facto secretary, organizing business lunches and dinners at restaurants like Seamore’s and the hotel’s own Le Coucou. (“That’s what they do in the rich culture, is meals,” said Neff.) On occasion, when Delvey showed up while the concierge desk was busy, she would stand at the counter, coolly counting out bills until she got Neff’s attention. “I’d be like, ‘Anna, there’s a line of eight people.’ But she’d keep putting money down.” And even though Neff had begun to think of Anna as not just a hotel guest but a friend, a real friend, she didn’t hesitate to take it. “A little selfish of me,” she admitted later. “But … yeah.”

Who can blame her? This was Manhattan in the 21st century, and money is more powerful than ever. Rare is the city dweller who, when presented with an opportunity for a sudden and unexpected influx of cash, doesn’t grasp for it. Of course, this money almost always comes with strings attached. Sometimes you can barely see them, like that vaudeville bit in which the pawn dives for a loose bill only to find it pulled just ahead. Still, everyone makes the reach. Because here, money is the one thing that no one can ever have enough of.

For a stretch of time in New York, no small amount of the cash in circulation was coming from Anna Delvey. “She gave to everyone,” said Neff. “Uber drivers, $100 cash. Meals — listen. You know how you reach for your credit card? She wouldn’t let me.”

The way Anna spent money, it was like she couldn’t get rid of it fast enough. Her room was overflowing with shopping bags from Acne and Supreme, and in between meetings, she’d invite Neff to foot massages, cryotherapy, manicures (Anna favored “a light Wes Anderson pink,” according to Neff). One day, she brought Neff to a session with a personal trainer–slash–life coach she’d found online, a svelte, ageless Oprah-esque figure who works with celebrities like Dakota Johnson.

“Stop sinking into your body,” the trainer commanded Anna. “Shoulders back, navel to spine. You are a bright woman; you want to be a businesswoman. You gotta be staying strong on your own power.”

Afterward, as Neff panted on the sidelines, Anna bought a package of sessions. “It was, I’m not lying, $4,500,” said Neff.

Anna paid cash.

Neff’s boyfriend didn’t understand why she was spending so much time with this weird girl from work. Anna didn’t understand why Neff had a boyfriend. But he was rich, Neff protested. He’d promised to finance her first movie. “Dump him,” Anna advised. “I have more money.” She would finance the movie.

Neff did dump the guy. Not because of what Anna had said, although she had no reason to doubt it. Her new friend, she discovered, belonged to a vast and glittering social circle. “Anna knew everyone,” said Neff. At night, she’d taken to hosting large dinners at Le Coucou, attended by CEOs, artists, athletes, even celebrities. One night, Neff found herself seated next to her childhood idol, Macaulay Culkin. “Which was awkward,” she said. “Because I had so many questions. And he was right there. But they were talking about, like, friend stuff. So I never got the chance to be like, ‘So, you the godfather to Michael Jackson’s kids?’ ”

Despite her seemingly nomadic living situation, Anna had long been a figure on the New York social scene. “She was at all the best parties,” said marketing director Tommy Saleh, who met her in 2013 at Le Baron in Paris during Fashion Week. Delvey had been an intern at European scenester magazine Purple and appeared to be tight with the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Olivier Zahm, and its man-about-town, André Saraiva, an owner of Le Baron — two of “the 200 or so people you see everywhere,” as Saleh put it: Chilterns and Loulou’s in London; the Crow’s Nest in Montauk; Paul’s Baby Grand and the Bowery Hotel; Frieze, Coachella, Art Basel. “She introduced herself, and she was a sweet girl, very polite,” said Saleh. “Then we’re just hanging with my friends all of a sudden.”

Soon, Anna was everywhere too. “She managed to be in all the sort of right places,” recalled one acquaintance who met Anna in 2015 at a party thrown by a start-up mogul in Berlin. “She was wearing really fancy clothing” — Balenciaga, or maybe Alaïa — “and someone mentioned that she flew in on a private jet.” It was unclear where exactly Anna came from — she told people she was from Cologne, but her German wasn’t very good — or what the source of her wealth was. But that wasn’t unusual. “There are so many trust-fund kids running around,” said Saleh. “Everyone is your best friend, and you don’t know a thing about anyone.”

After a gallerist at Pace introduced her to Michael Xufu Huang, the extremely young, extremely dapper collector and founder of Beijing’s M Woods museum, Anna proposed they go together to the Venice Biennale. Huang thought it was “a little weird” when Anna asked him to book the plane tickets and hotel on his credit card. “But I was like, Okay, whatever,” he said. It was also strange, he noticed during their time there, that Anna only ever paid with cash, and after they got back, she seemed to forget she’d said she’d pay him back. “It was not a lot of money,” he said. “Like two or three thousand dollars.” After a while, Huang kind of forgot about it too.

When you’re superrich, you can be forgetful in this way. Which is maybe why no one thought much of the instances in which Anna did things that seemed odd for a wealthy person: calling a friend to have her put a taxi from the airport on her credit card, or asking to sleep on someone’s couch, or moving into someone’s apartment with the tacit agreement to pay rent, and then … not doing it. Maybe she had so much money she just lost track of it.

The following January, Anna hired a PR firm to put together a birthday party at one of her favorite restaurants, Sadelle’s in Soho. “It was a lot of very cool, very successful people,” said Huang, who, while aware Anna owed him money for their Venice trip, remained mostly unconcerned about it, at least until the restaurant, having seen Polaroids of Huang and Anna at the party on Instagram, messaged him a few days later. “They were like, ‘Do you have her contact info?’ ” he says now. “ ‘Because she didn’t pay her bill.’ Then I realized, Oh my God, she is not legit.”

As Anna bounced around the globe, there was some speculation as to where her means to do this came from, though no one seemed to care that much so long as the bills got paid.

“I thought she had family money,” said Jayma Cardoso, one of the owners of the Surf Lodge in Montauk. Delvey’s father was a diplomat to Russia, one friend was sure. No, another insisted, he was an oil-industry titan. “As far as I knew, her family was the Delvey family that is big in antiques in Germany,” said another acquaintance, a millionaire tech CEO. (It is unclear what family he was referring to.) The CEO met Anna through the boyfriend she was running around with for a while, a futurist on the TED-Talks circuit who’d been profiled in The New Yorker.For about two years, they’d been kind of like a team, showing up in places frequented by the itinerant wealthy, living out of fancy hotels and hosting sceney dinners where the Futurist talked up his app and Delvey spoke of the private club she wanted to open once she turned 25 and came into her trust fund.

Then it was 2016. The Futurist, whose app never materialized, moved to the Emirates, and Anna came to New York on her own, determined to make her arts club a reality, although she worried to Marc Kremers, the London creative director helping her with branding, that the name she’d come up with — the Anna Delvey Foundation, or ADF — was “too narcissistic.”

Early on, Anna and architect Ron Castellano, a friend of her Purple cohort, had scouted a building on the Lower East Side, but it turned out to be too close to a school to get a liquor license, and soon Anna had shifted her aspirations uptown. Through her connections, she’d befriended Gabriel Calatrava, one of the sons of famed architect Santiago. His family’s real-estate advisory company, Calatrava Grace, had helped her “secure the lease,” she informed people, on the perfect space: 45,000 square feet occupying six floors of the historic Church Missions House, a landmarked building on the corner of Park Avenue and 22nd. The heart of the club would be, she said, a “dynamic visual-arts center,” with a rotating array of pop-up shops curated by artist Daniel Arsham, whom she knew from her Purpledays, and exhibitions and installations from blue-chip artists like Urs Fischer, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, and Tracey Emin. For the inaugural event, Anna told people, the artist Christo had agreed to wrap the building. Some people raised their eyebrows at the grandiosity of this plan, but to others it made sense, in a New York kind of way. The building’s owner, developer Aby Rosen, was no stranger to the private-club genre; a few years earlier, he’d bought a midtown building and opened the Core Club, which housed an art collection. He also happened to own 11 Howard.

With the help of Calatrava executive Michael Jaffe, a former employee of Rosen’s RFR realty firm, Anna soon began meeting with big names in the food-and-beverage world to discuss possibilities in the space. One was André Balazs, who, according to Anna, suggested they add two floors of hotel rooms. Another was Richie Notar, one of the founders of Nobu, who did a walk-through of the building with Anna as she described her vision, which included three restaurants, a juice bar, and a German bakery. “Apparently her family was prominent in Germany,” Notar said, “and funding this big project for her.”

But a project of this size required more capital than even someone of Anna’s apparently considerable resources could manage: approximately $25 million, “in addition to $25m existing,” Anna wrote in an email to a prominent Silicon Valley publicist in 2016. “If you think this is something you could help us with and have anyone in mind who would be a good cultural fit for this project.” But by fall, Anna had turned on the idea of private investors, in part because she didn’t want anyone telling her what to do. “If we were to bring in investors, they would say, ‘Oh, she’s 25; she doesn’t know what she’s doing,’ ” Anna explained later. “I wanted to build the first one myself.”

To help secure a loan, one of Anna’s “finance friends” had told her to get in touch with Joel Cohen, best known as the prosecutor of Jordan Belfort, a.k.a. the Wolf of Wall Street. Cohen now worked at Gibson Dunn, a large firm known for its real-estate practice. He put her in touch with Andy Lance, a partner who happened to have the exact kind of expertise that Anna was looking for. In the past, she’d complained to friends about feeling condescended to by older male lawyers because of her age and gender. But Lance was different. “He knows how to talk to women,” she said. “And he would explain to me the right amount, without being patronizing.” According to Anna, she and Lance spoke every day. “He was there all the time. He would answer in the middle of the night, or when he was in Turks and Caicos for Christmas.”

After filling out Gibson Dunn’s new-client-intake form, which included checking boxes that confirmed the client had the resources to pay and would not embarrass the firm, Lance put Anna in touch with several large financial institutions, including Los Angeles–based City National Bank and Fortress Investment Group. “Our client Anna Delvey is undertaking a very exciting redevelopment of 281 Park Avenue South, backed by a marquee team for this type of venue and space,” Lance wrote in one email, in which he explained that Anna needed the loan because “her personal assets, which are quite substantial, are located outside the US, some of them in trust with UBS outside the US.” The monies she received, he added, would be “fully secured” by a letter of credit from the Swiss bank. (Lance did not respond to requests for comment.)

When the banker at City National asked to see the UBS statements, he received a list of figures from a man named Peter W. Hennecke. “Please use these for your projections for now,” Hennecke wrote in an email. “I’ll send the physical statements on Monday.”

“Question: Are you from UBS?” the banker replied, puzzled by Hennecke’s AOL address.

No, Anna explained. “Peter is head of my family office.”

With Anna in fund-raising mode, the artists and celebrity friends at her dinners were gradually supplanted by men with “Goyard briefcases and Rolexes, and Hublot, like that Jay-Z lyric,” according to Neff, who at one point looked across the table at Le Coucou and recognized the face of infamous “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli, who would later be convicted of securities fraud. Anna introduced Shkreli as a “dear friend,” although it was really the only time they’d met, Shkreli told New York in a letter from the penitentiary; Anna was close with one of his executives. “Anna did seem to be a popular ‘woman about town’ who knew everyone,” he wrote. “Even though I was nationally known, I felt like a computer geek next to her.”

As for Neff, she was not as discreet as she had been with Macaulay Culkin, tweeting after the fact that Shkreli had played her and Anna the leaked tracks from Tha Carter V, the delayed Lil Wayne album he’d acquired. Anna was furious, but Neff refused to delete the tweet. “I wanted everybody to know that I heard this album that the world is waiting on! But Anna was pretty mad. She didn’t come down to my desk for maybe three days.”

In the meantime, though, Neff said she had another visitor: Charlie Rosen. Aby Rosen’s sons were generally regarded as pretty-boy trust-fund kids — a few years back, they made headlines for reportedly racing ATVs over piping-plover nests in the Hamptons — but Neff liked them, and when Charlie stopped by one evening, she dropped that she’d recently been to visit the Park Avenue building that one of the guests, a young woman, was leasing from their father for an arts club.

Rosen looked confused. He didn’t appear to have ever heard of Anna or her project. “What room is she staying in?” he asked. When Neff told him, he looked skeptical. “If my dad has someone buying property from him staying here,” he said, “would she be in a Deluxe or would she be in a suite?”

He had a point. A few days later, Neff broached the subject. “Why did you tell me you’re buying property from Aby but you’re not staying in a suite?” she asked.

Anna looked surprised but answered immediately. “She said, ‘You ever have someone do so many favors for you, you kind of just want to pay them back in silence?’ ”

“Genius,” Neff said.

Soon it was April. Spring was poking its head through the gray New York City sidewalks, and the weather was getting warm enough to sip rosé on rooftops, one of Anna’s favorite activities, although the circle she was doing this with, Neff noticed, was smaller than it had been in the past and mainly consisted of herself; Rachel Williams, a photo editor at Vanity Fair; and the trainer, who, although she was notably older, had taken a motherly interest in her client. “I know a lot of trust-fund babies, and I was impressed that Anna had something that she wanted to do, instead of, you know, living like a Kardashian,” said the trainer. Plus, she said, Anna seemed lonely. Neff noticed the same thing. “What happened to your friends?” she asked Anna after one night out. “Oh,” Anna said vaguely. “They’re all mad I left Purple.” She was too busy for parties, anyway, she said, what with building her business.

It was true that Anna was spending a lot of time working, frowning at her in-box and huffing into the phone. “She was always on the phone with lawyers,” said Neff, who would sort of listen in from the concierge desk. “They were always toning her down. Like, ‘Anna, you’re trying to make something that’s worth this much be worth that much, and that’s just not how it works.’ ”

Back in December, City National had turned down her loan request — a management decision is how Anna framed it — and while the ever-loyal Andy Lance was reaching out to hedge funds and banks for alternate financing, executives at RFR were pressuring her to come up with the money fast, Anna said. If she didn’t, they were going to give it to another party, rumored to be the Swedish museum Fotografiska. “How do they even pay for that?” Anna fumed. “It’s like two old guys.”

In the meantime, Anna was having cash-flow issues of her own. One night, Anna asked Neff to dinner at Sant Ambroeus in Soho. They were by themselves, which was unusual. Even more unusually, at the end of the meal, Anna’s card was declined. “Here,” she told the waiter, handing him a list of credit-card numbers. In Neff’s admittedly foggy memory, they were in a small book, though it may have been the Notes app on her phone. But she’s clear on what happened next. “The waiter went back to his station and began entering the numbers. There were like 12, and I know the guy tried them all,” she said. “He was trying it and then shaking his head. And then I started to sweat, because I knew the bill was mine.” While the amount — $286 — was a fraction of what Anna usually spent, it was a lot for Neff, who quietly transferred money from her savings to cover the bill. Doing so made her feel sick, but after all the money Anna had spent on her, she understood it was her turn.

Not long after, Neff’s manager called and asked her to address a delicate issue: It seemed 11 Howard didn’t have a credit card on file for Anna Delvey. Because the hotel had been so new when she arrived, and because she was staying for such an unusually long time, and because she was a client of Aby Rosen’s and a very valued guest, it had agreed to accept a wire transfer. But a month and a half later, no such transfer had arrived, and now Delvey owed the hotel some $30,000, including charges from Le Coucou that she’d been billing to her room.

Neff wasn’t sure what to think. She was sure Anna was good for the money. The day after the Sant Ambroeus debacle, she’d paid her back triple. In cash.

When Anna came by her desk the next day, Neff took her aside and told her that management had said Anna needed to pay her bill. Anna nodded, her eyes inscrutable behind her sunglasses. There was a wire transfer on the way, she said. It should arrive soon. Then, about midway into her shift, Anna came by the desk again and, with a mischievous smile on her face, told Neff to expect a package. When it arrived, Neff opened it to find a case of 1975 Dom Pérignon, with Anna’s instructions to distribute it among the staff. Neff hesitated. Gifts, especially of the liquid variety, needed to be approved by management. “They were like, ‘How do we look approving this if she hasn’t paid us?’ So they went after her. ‘We need the money or we’re locking you out.’ ”

One morning, Anna showed up to her morning session with the trainer looking visibly upset. “Can we do a life-coaching session?” she pleaded. She was trying to build something, to do something, she went on, and no one was taking her seriously. “They think because I am young, they think I have all this money,” she sobbed. “I told them the money would be there soon. I’m having it transferred.”

The trainer told her to breathe. “I feel like you are in a little over your head,” she offered. “Maybe you just need a break.”

Then something miraculous happened. Citibank sent 11 Howard a wire transfer on behalf of Ms. Anna Delvey for $30,000. Neff called Anna on her cell phone. “Where you at?” she asked. Across the street at Rick Owens, Anna replied. Neff checked the clock: It was her lunch break. When she came through the door of the store, Anna was holding up a T-shirt. “Look what I found,” she said, beaming. “It’s perfect for you.” She was right: The shirt was the exact orangey red of the creepy bathroom scene in The Shining, one of Neff’s favorite movies, and the signature color of the brand Neff was trying to launch, FilmColours. It was also $400. “I’d love to buy it for you,” Anna said.

A few weeks later, Anna told Neff she was going to Omaha. “I’m going to see Warren Buffett,” she announced, grandly. One of her bankers had gotten her on the list to Berkshire Hathaway’s annual investment conference, and she’d decided to bring the executive from Martin Shkreli’s hedge fund, who was fun and a friend of his, on the private jet she’d rented to take them there. “I’ll be back,” she promised Neff.

But there was still a problem with her account at 11 Howard. Despite being repeatedly asked by hotel management, she still hadn’t given the hotel a working credit card, and her charges continued to mount. Following through on their warning, hotel employees changed the code on the lock of Anna’s room and put her things in storage. Neff texted Anna in Omaha to deliver the bad news.

“How can they do that?” Anna asked indignantly, although if she was truly shocked, it didn’t last long. The conference had been great, she said. The best part had happened the very last day, when, having exhausted all the opportunities for luxury Omaha had to offer, Anna and her party had taken a cab driver’s suggestion to check out the zoo. They hadn’t expected much, but then, while they were riding around on their golf carts, they’d stumbled on a private dinner hosted by Buffett for a slew of VIPs. “Everyone was there,” she said. “Like, Bill Gates was there.”

For a little while, they’d watched through the glass, then they’d slipped in and mingled among them.

When Anna got back to 11 Howard, she made her fury known. She was going to purchase web domains in all of the managers’ names, she told Neff, a trick she’d learned from Shkreli: “They’re going to pay me one day,” she said. Also, she was moving out — as soon as she got back from Morocco. Inspired by Khloé Kardashian, she’d reserved a $7,000-a-night riad with a private butler at La Mamounia, an opulent resort in Marrakech, and asked Neff if she wanted to join herself, the trainer, Rachel Williams, and a videographer, who she was hoping would make “a behind-the-scenes documentary” about the process of creating her arts foundation on a vacation. They’d wake up to massages, she said, and spend their days exploring the souk, lounging by the pool. Neff wanted to go, badly. But there was no way the hotel would let her take off eight days. “Just quit,” Anna said airily.

For a day or two, Neff considered it. But her mom told her she had a bad feeling about it. “Nothing in life is free,” she said. So Neff stayed behind, morosely following her friend’s journey on Instagram. “I was pretty jealous,” she said.

As she would find out, the pictures didn’t exactly tell the whole story. Two days in, after coming down with a nasty case of food poisoning, the trainer had gone back to New York early.

About a week later, the trainer got a call from Anna, who was alone at the Four Seasons in Casablanca and hysterical. There was, she sobbed, a problem with her bank. Her credit cards weren’t going through, and the hotel was threatening to call the police. After calming Anna down, the trainer asked to speak to management. “They were like, ‘She is going to be arrested,’ ” she said.

The trainer was torn: On the one hand, this was not her problem. On the other, Anna was her client, her friend, and someone’s daughter. Offering a prayer to the universe, the trainer gave the hotel her credit-card number and, when it failed to go through, made the requisite calls to her bank. When it still failed to go through, she went the extra mile: She called a friend and had her give her credit-card information. When that failed to work, the hotel conceded the problem might be on their end.

Later, the trainer would recognize this as a substantial gift from the Universe. At the time, she promised the hotel in Casablanca that Anna would make them whole. “Trust me,” she told them. “I know she’s good for it. I just spent two days with her in Marrakech.” When Anna came back on the phone, the trainer told her she was booking her a ticket back to New York. Anna snuffled her thanks. Then she asked for one last favor: “Can you get me first class?” she asked.

A few days later, a silvery Tesla pulled up in front of 11 Howard. Neff, at the concierge desk, felt her cell phone buzz. “Look out the window,” said a familiar German accent. The car’s futuristic doors slowly raised up to reveal Anna. “I’m here to get my stuff,” she said.

Anna was making good on her promise to leave 11 Howard. She was moving downtown to the Beekman Hotel, she told Neff, who watched her drive away in a car that she only later realized someone must have rented to her. Moving didn’t stem Anna’s mounting troubles. Not only did she owe the hotel, but, over in London, Marc Kremers, the designer she’d hired to do her branding work, was getting antsy: The £16,800 fee Anna had promised would arrive by wire almost a year before had yet to materialize, and now emails to Anna’s financial adviser, Peter W. Hennecke, were bouncing back. “Peter passed away last month,” Anna replied. “Please refrain from contacting or mentioning any communication with him going forward.”

In retrospect, her terseness was understandable. Things were rapidly deteriorating for Anna Delvey in New York. Twenty days into her stay, the Beekman Hotel, having realized it did not have a working credit card on file and having not received the promised wire transfer for her balance of $11,518.59, locked Anna out of her room and confiscated her belongings. A subsequent two-day stay at the W Hoteldowntown ended in a similar fashion, and by July 5, Anna was effectively homeless, wandering the streets in threadbare Alexander Wang sportswear.

Late one night, she made her way to the trainer’s apartment and dialed her from outside. “I’m right near your building,” she said. “Do you think we could talk?”

The trainer hesitated: She was in the middle of a date. But there was a desperate note in Anna’s voice. She made her way to her lobby, where she found Anna with tears streaming down her face. “I’m trying to do this thing,” she sobbed. “And it’s so hard.”

Maybe she should call her family, the trainer suggested. She would, Anna replied, but her parents were in Africa. “Do you mind if I crash at your place tonight?” No, the trainer said, she had a date.

“I really just don’t want be alone,” Anna sniffled. “I might do something.”

The date hid in the bedroom while the trainer made a bed for her unexpected houseguest and offered her a glass of water.

“Do you have any Pellegrino?” Anna asked. There was one large bottle left. Anna ignored the two glasses placed on the counter and began swilling from the bottle. “I’m so tired,” she yawned.

As Anna slept, the trainer’s spidey sense began to tingle. “I mean, I’m born and raised in New York,” she told me later. “I’m not stupid.” She texted Rachel Williams, who told her about what had happened at La Mamounia: Apparently, after the trainer returned to New York, the credit card Anna had used to book the hotel was found to be nonfunctional, and when Anna was unable to produce a new form of payment and a pair of threatening goons appeared in the doorway, the photo editor was forced to put the balance — $62,000, more than she was paid in a year — on the Amex she sometimes used for work expenses. Anna had promised her a wire transfer, but a month later, all Rachel received was $5,000, and her excuses had turned “Kafkaesque.”

The following morning, the trainer resolved to draw a clear boundary. After lending Anna a clean (and flattering) dress, she sent her on her way with a gratis motivational speech. But when Anna walked out the door, she left her laptop behind. The trainer was having none of it. She deposited the computer at the front desk and texted Anna that she could pick it up there.

That evening, the trainer got a call from her doorman. Anna was in the lobby. He’d told her that the trainer was out, at which point she’d asked for access to her suite. When he refused, Anna had resolved to wait for the trainer to return home.

“Let me know when she goes,” the trainer told the doorman.

But hours passed and Anna didn’t budge. “They were like, She’s still here. She’s texting,” the trainer recalls. “I was like, Oh my God, I’m a prisoner of my own house.” It wasn’t until after midnight that Anna finally left the building.

The relief the trainer felt soon turned into worry. “I started calling the hotels to see where she was staying, and each hotel was like, ‘This girl,’ she said.

She found out why later that month, when both the Beekman and the W Hotel filed charges against Anna for theft of services. WANNABE SOCIALITE BUSTED FOR SKIPPING OUT ON PRICEY HOTEL BILLS, blared the headline in the Post, which referenced an incident in which Anna attempted to leave the restaurant at Le Parker without paying. “Why are you making a big deal about this?” she’d protested to police. “Give me five minutes and I can get a friend to pay.”

But no friends arrived. Maybe it was all a misunderstanding, as Anna told Todd Spodek, the criminal attorney she hired to fight the misdemeanor charges. Maybe the poised young woman in the Audrey Hepburn dress who’d cold-called him on his cell phone repeatedly, insisting it was an emergency until he’d agreed to come into his office on a Saturday, really was a wealthy German heiress, he thought, as his 4-year-old pasted Paw Patrol stickers up one of Anna’s bare arms, and her credit cards had gotten jammed up, or someone had taken away her trust fund. Just in case, Spodek, whose everyday clientele includes grifters, dog-murderers, femme fatales, rapists, and cybercriminals, among other miscreants, had her sign a lien on all of her assets, one that would ensure he got paid. On her way out, Anna asked a favor. “I kind of need a place to stay,” she said. Spodek demurred. The last thing his wife wanted was for him to bring his work home with him.

Anna again got in touch with the trainer, who did not invite her to stay but instead organized an intervention at a nearby restaurant, during which she and Rachel Williams attempted to get answers: about why Anna had done what she’d done, who she really was, if she’d ever planned on paying anyone back. Anna hemmed and hawed and dissembled and prevaricated and, as the women got increasingly angry, allowed two fat tears to roll down her cheeks. “I’ll have enough to pay everyone,” she sniffled. “Once I get the lease signed …”

“Anna,” the trainer said, summoning her last shred of patience. “The building has been rented.”

She held up her iPhone and showed her the headline: FOTOGRAFISKA SIGNS A LEASE FOR ENTIRE 45K SF AT ABY ROSEN’S BUILDING.

“That’s fake news,” Anna said.

Is “Fotografiska really get the building?” sighed the tiny, accented voice after the recording identifying the call as coming from Rikers Island, where Anna Delvey, a.k.a. Anna Sorokin, has been remanded without bail since October 2017.

As it turned out, Anna’s hotel bills were merely the first loose threads in a web of fraudulent activity, one that began to unravel in November 2016, after she submitted documents claiming a net worth of €60 million in Swiss accounts to City National Bank in pursuit of a $22 million dollar loan. The following month, she submitted the same documents to Fortress in an attempt to secure a $25 million to $35 million loan. After that bank asked her for $100,000 to perform due diligence, she convinced a representative at City National to extend her a $100,000 line of credit, which she then wired to Fortress. Then, apparently spooked by Fortress’s decision to send representatives to Switzerland to personally check her assets, she withdrew herself from the process halfway through, wiring the remaining $55,000 to a Citibank account that she used for “personal expenses … shopping at Forward by Elyse Walker, Apple, and Net-a-Porter,” according to the New York District Attorney’s office. Then, in April, she deposited $160,000 worth of bad checks into the same account, managing to withdraw $70,000 before they were returned, which is how she managed to pay off 11 Howard and, ostensibly, buy Neff’s T-shirt and the domain names of the managers of the hotel. (“They called me down to the office. They said, ‘Neff, did you know about this?’ And I started dying laughing. I thought it was a boss move.”) In May, Anna convinced the company Blade to charter her a $35,000 jet to Omaha by sending them a forged confirmation for a wire transfer from Deutsche Bank. It might have helped that she had the business card of the CEO, whom she’d met in passing at Soho House but who says he didn’t actually know her at all. Not wanting to leave Anna homeless after their intervention last summer, the trainer and a friend agreed to put Anna up at a hotel for one night, after having the hotel remove the mini-bar and giving strict instructions not to allow her any room service. She subsequently checked in to the Bowery Hotel for two nights, sending the hotel a receipt for a wire transfer from Deutsche Bank that never came. Rachel Williams, City National, and others also received phony wire-transfer receipts, which a representative of the bank identified as forged. Anna’s “family adviser,” the late Peter W. Hennecke, seems to have been a fictional character; his cell-phone number belonged to a now-defunct burner phone from a supermarket, New York found. (A living Peter Hennecke did not return calls for comment.) Later in the summer, with her misdemeanor charges pending, Anna deposited two bad checks into an account at Signature Bank, netting her $8,200, which is how she managed to take what she said was a “planned trip” to California, where she was arrested outside of Passages in Malibu and brought back to New York to face six counts of grand larceny and attempted grand larceny, in addition to theft of services, according to the indictment. “I like L.A.,” she giggled when I visited her at Rikers this past March. “L.A. in the winter, New York in spring and autumn, and Europe in summer.”

People looked over curiously. “She’s like a unicorn in there,” Todd Spodek, Anna’s lawyer, had told me. “Everyone else is in there for like, stabbing their baby daddy.” He had mentioned that his client was taking incarceration unusually in stride, and indeed, this appeared to be the case.

“This place is not that bad at all actually,” Anna told me, eyes sparkling behind her Céline glasses. “People seem to think it’s horrible, but I see it as like, this sociological experiment.”

She’d made friends, of course. The murderers were the most interesting to her. “There are couple of girls who are here for financial crimes as well,” she told me. “This one girl, she’s been stealing other people’s identities. I didn’t realize it was so easy.”

Over the course of three months, I spoke to Anna over the phone and visited her several times, occasionally bringing her copies of Forbes, Fast Company, and The Wall Street Journal at her request. Clad in a beige jumpsuit, her $800 highlights faded and her $400 eyelash extensions long fallen away, she looked like a normal 27-year-old girl, which is what she is.

Anna Sorokin was born in Russia in 1991, and moved to Germany in 2007, when she was 16, with her younger brother and her parents, who, after being independently tracked down by and speaking with New York, asked to remain anonymous, as news of their daughters arrest has not yet reached the small rural community where they live.

Anna attended high school in Eschweiler, a small working-class town 60 kilometers outside Cologne, near the Belgian and Dutch border. Her classmates remember her as quiet, with an unwieldy command of German. Her father had worked as a truck driver and later as an executive at a transport company until it became insolvent in 2013, whereupon he opened a heating-and-cooling business specializing in energy-efficient devices. Anna’s father was circumspect about the family’s finances, possibly out of a not-unreasonable fear of being held responsible for his daughter’s debts, which it was suggested to New York multiple times are larger and more wide-ranging than officially documented. “She screwed basically everyone,” said the acquaintance in Berlin, who passed on the names of several individuals who were said to have had amounts large and small borrowed or stolen but were too embarrassed to come forward. (Also paranoid: “I heard she commissions these stories,” I was told more than once, after I reached out to alleged victims. “They’re strategic leaks.”)

In any case, according to Anna’s father: “Until now, we have never heard of any trust fund.”

That said, he went on, the family did support her to an extent after Anna graduated from high school in 2011. She moved first to London, where she attended Central Saint Martins College, then she dropped out and returned to Berlin, where she interned in the fashion department of a public-relations firm before relocating to Paris, where she landed a coveted internship at Purple magazine and became Anna Delvey. Her parents, who say they do not recognize the surname, told New York: “We always paid for her accommodations, her rent, and other matters. She assured us these costs were the best investment. If ever she needed something more at one point or another, it didn’t matter. The future was always bright.”

Anna, in jail, told me: “My parents had high expectations. They always trusted me with my decision-making. I guess they regret it now.”

Over the course of our conversations, Anna never admitted any guilt, although she did say she felt bad about what happened with Rachel Williams. “I am very upset that things went that way and I didn’t mean for it to happen,” she said. “But I really can’t do anything about it, being in here.”

She expressed frustration about not being able to bail herself out. “If they were doubting — ‘Oh, she can’t pay for anything’— why not give me bail and see?” she challenged. “If I was such a fraud, it would be such an easy resolution. Will she bail herself out?”

She was frustrated with the New York Post’s characterization of her as a “wannabe socialite” — “I was never trying to be a socialite,” she pointed out. “I had dinners, but they were work dinners. I wanted to be taken seriously” — and the District Attorney’s portrayal of her as, as Anna put it, “a greedy idiot” who had committed a kind of harebrained Ponzi scheme in order to go shopping. “If I really wanted the money, I would have better and faster ways to get some,” she groused. “Resilience is hard to come by, but not capital.”

She seemed most interested in expressing that her plans to create the Anna Delvey Foundation were real. She’d had all of those conversations and meetings and sent all of those emails and commissioned those materials because she thought it was actually going to happen. “I had what I thought was a great team around me, and I was having fun,” she said. Sure, she said, she might have done a few things wrong. “But that doesn’t diminish the hundred things I did right.”

Maybe it could have happened. In this city, where enormous amounts of invisible money trade hands every day, where glass towers are built on paperwork promises, why not? If Aby Rosen, the son of Holocaust survivors, could come to New York and fill skyscrapers full of art, if the Kardashians could build a billion-dollar empire out of literally nothing, if a movie star like Dakota Johnson could sculpt her ass so that it becomes the anchor of a major franchise, why couldn’t Anna Delvey? During the course of my reporting, people kept asking: Why this girl? She wasn’t superhot, they pointed out, or super-charming; she wasn’t even very nice. How did she manage to convince an enormous amount of cool, successful people that she was something she clearly was not? Watching the Rikers guard shove Fast Companyinto a manila envelope, I realized what Anna had in common with the people she’d been studying in the pages of that magazine: She saw something others didn’t. Anna looked at the soul of New York and recognized that if you distract people with shiny objects, with large wads of cash, with the indicia of wealth, if you show them the money, they will be virtually unable to see anything else. And the thing was: It was so easy.

“Money, like, there’s an unlimited amount of capital in the world, you know?” Anna said to me at one point. “But there’s limited amounts of people who are talented.”

Additional reporting by Austin Davis and Naima Wolfsperger in Germany.

*This article appears in the May 28, 2018, issue of New York Magazine.

By Kenneth Li — Vibe, 1998

At dusk, they take over the road. Roaring and buzzing like locusts, the swarm of asphalt-scraping Japanese cars — with swooping rear wings and brightly colored logos — merges from the side streets of Uptown Manhattan onto the traffic-congested Henry Hudson Parkway. Zigzagging back and forth like jet-fueled go-carts, they slow to a stop, blocking off three lanes of oncoming cars in preparation for the infamous mile-long run.

A black Nissan 300ZX and a white Mitsubishi Starion pull out of the pack and creep up to the starting line. As the sun dances on the nearby river, the sound of honking horns and screaming drivers is drowned out by the sonic blast of the two engines revving for takeoff. A stocky Latino dude in a blinding yellow shirt stands in the middle of the highway and raises his hands. Both cars lurch and halt like chained pit bulls, their wheels spitting out black smoke. The hands drop.

10 mph: Off the starting line, the Nissan pulls ahead by one car length.

40 mph: Still in first gear, the driver jams the stick into second, and his head snaps back. The tires let out a brief squeal.

100 mph: The Starion pulls closer. There’s a halting moment when it looks like the Nissan might lose. It lasts about one hundredth of a second.

160 mph: Gritting his teeth, the man behind the wheel of the Nissan begins to shake from the speed; his vision is a blur. He doesn’t see the Starion closing in.

“The excitement of going fast is like nothing else. Another group gets excitement from doing drugs or whatever. Speed excites us.”

Crossing the finish line, the Nissan driver, Rafael Estevez, wins by one car length. In less than a minute, the guy in the Mitsubishi has lost $7,500. Glowing with confidence, Estevez immediately challenges him for $2,500 and offers an 18-car lead and beats him again.

Estevez, a 30-year-old Dominican drag racer from Washington Heights, is considered an OG among a growing legion of young speed junkies terrorizing the back alleys, highways, and legal racetracks around New York City. The urban dragracing frenzy was started in the early ‘90s by a tightly-knit crew of Asian-American boys in Southern California and is now hitting hard on the East Coast. The hundreds of kids who line New York hot spots like Francis Lewis Boulevard in Queens or the Fountain Avenue strip in Brooklyn every weekend are an urban polyglot of Puerto Rican, Dominican, Chinese, Filipino, Jamaican, Italian and other ethnicities who have one thing in common: They love hurtling metal, meat and rubber through the concrete jungle at dangerous velocities.

Young men have been fascinated with tweaking and tuning big block Chevys and Mustangs since the days of Rebel Without a Cause. But the new guys wouldn’t be caught dead driving the gaudy muscular beasts of yesteryear. Instead, they’re tricking out low-buck Japanese imports like Honda Civics and Acura Integras and tattooing them like skateboards with Neuspeed and Greddy car parts stickers. By stroking the engine, adding a supercharger, and hitting the “juice” (nitrous oxide: a gaseous liquid once used to boost bomber planes in WWII), they can smoke the herb in the Iroc at the stoplight. And to do it with a puny four-cylinder rice burner that your moms would drive is downright arrogant.

“It’s about power. It’s about the control of power,” philosophizes Shawn Rousseau, a chunky West Indian racer in baggy jeans and Timberland boots. He’s hanging out at the packed Eastern Autosports store in Queens, New York, where kids in the scene go to chill and tune their cars.

“The excitement of going fast is like nothing else,” says Javier Ortega, a Columbian-American who screeches his blue Honda Civic to a halt in front of the store. “Another group gets excitement from doing drugs or whatever. Speed excites us.”

Few know that excitement like Estevez. Six feet tall with stooped shoulders and a healthy gut, he writes his own rules. Forget about valor, compassion, honor; in his book, that’s all synonymous with second place.

“People say I cheat all the time,” explains Estevez, a Huck Finn grin spreading across his face. “They say I jump the line, I do this, I do that. Drag racing is war. If you bring a knife, and I bring a machine gun, you’re dead. That’s it.”

Street rule No. 1: Gun it before the hands drop.

“Whenever someone is about to go, they always do something with their body,” says Estevez. “Right before they drop the clutch, they usually pitch forward. I don’t watch the guy [in between the cars] to say go. I just wait for the other guy to move, and then I go before he does.”

Juan J. Sanchez, Estevez’s road dawg of 16 years, describes him as an unbeatable foe. “Half of the race is psychology, and mentally he’s set,” says Sanchez. “One way or another, he’ll find a way to beat you even if he’s driving the slower car.”

As a kid growing up in Washington heights, Estevez remembers being transfixed every week by TV’s The Dukes of Hazzard. “The Dukes pulled a lot of stunts, soared through the air, and were always getting chased by cops,” he recalls.

“The best part was they would always get away.”

Estevez’s own fantasies of jetting from the potbellied law came together when he first discovered “the Strip” along 190th and Amsterdam Avenue, in Upper Manhattan. Over many humid summer nights amid the caramel-colored bodega lights and din of merengue and hip-hop, a younger Estevez came to study the form of the best oldtimers. “The guy Carlito, forget it,” says Estevez, both arms going up in mock defeat. “We always used to want to race him.”

Estevez stood there for hours every weekend evening, taking mental notes: how Carlito’s body shifted moments before take off, his deadlocked gaze, the catlike smirk. It became a to-do checklist for later. Carlito quit racing before Estevez ever got to challenge him. Instead, Estevez raced his boys on a strip behind Shea Stadium. His first car was a 1972 orange Datsun 510 grocery getter that he pulled apart and reassembled hundreds of times to eke out extra juice.

“Half of the race is psychology, and mentally he’s set. One way or another, he’ll find a way to beat you even if he’s driving the slower car.”

By the time he was 16, Estevez dropped out of school to devote all his time to cars. He worked at several garages, honing his skills on other people’s autos. All the money went right back into his own machine. He constantly remade his car, forging his reputation every time he smoked another friend.

That was the heyday of street racing, when wagers soared and reputations rose and fell in the blink of an eye. But then the cops started cracking down. “It’s a real problem,” says NYPD Chief Michael Ansbro, who’s witnessed racers cutting up traffic along the mile-long strip on the Henry Hudson freeway.

“I couldn’t believe how many people were weaving in and out of traffic. I’d be doing sixty, and the next thing you know, they’re flying right by.”

Last summer, a joint operation between Highway One police and the local 24th Precinct targeted illegal racing on 190th and Amsterdam. Between July and December 1997, the police issued 310 speeding tickets and 150 summonses for various violations. Now, a marked squad car works in tandem with an unmarked car during prime weekend hours to apprehend speed demons on the Henry Hudson.

Estevez and crew are forever playing cat and mouse with the police. “I do anything I have to do to get away from the cops,” says Estevez, who’s been chased on more than one occasion. “I’m not trying to go to jail.”

In the past year or so, the street racers have found a few “new drag spots,” but they’ve also begin to turn to the legal racetracks in new Jersey and Long Island to test their mettle. To gun it against the towering digital time boards, among the heavy metal-heads in domestic Mustangs and Camaros, no special license is needed at the entry gate, run through tech inspection, and you’re ready to race.

Tacked onto Estevez’s yellowing fridge door, the flier reads in bold: DRAG WARS: THE TRISTATES FIRST IMPORT STREET DRAG. The stakes are high. Big money sponsors like Penzoil and HKS U.S.A., car magazines Turbo and Super Street, and thousands of spectators from the streets will be keeping score at the Atco Raceway in New Jersey.

Two months before the big race, the boys at Speed and Sound, a tuner shop in Yonkers, relentlessly hammer away at Estevez’s civilianissue ’92 Civic. The transformation is sick. The stock engine has been replaced with a graniteblack motor borrowed from the Acura Integra GSR. Enlarged tubes of matte silver metal called headers loop around the top of the engine bay. They are intended, along with the softball-size turbochargers affixed to the front of the GSR, to dramatically boost output.

Just three days before the event, everything starts to go wrong. Estevez is rushed to the hospital and has to be operated on for an infected appendix. That same evening, he’s back at the shop massaging his bandages as he slowly limps around the car to check everything out.

On the big day, the flatbed tow truck they ordered never shows. The car is also acting up. The turbo computer mounted on the dashboard jumps out of its saddle every time the Civic lunges forward.

“I just hope I don’t break anything,” Estevez says with fingers crossed, not sure if he means himself or the car. He drives it to the track in New Jersey.

It’s an overcast morning, with temperatures hovering near the 70s — a perfect day for racing. On the first run of the day, Estevez scores 12.02 seconds on the quarter mile. Respectable for an amateur, but no big shakes. On Estevez’s second run, it happens.

The Christmas tree lights drop down: Yellow, yellow, yellow….His wheels are squealing in their disc-brake bear traps. Green! He stuffs the accelerator. The car lurches out of the gate and disappears across the horizon.

Eleven-point-three-six seconds later, Estevez makes history, becoming the East Coast’s fastest Honda car racer. The five thousand sitting on the bleachers jump to their feet, roaring in the day’s first standing ovation. Estevez didn’t break the California Honda record of 10.61 seconds; but unlike the stripped-down trailer-towed compacts in the West, his car was driven to the track in heavy stock trim, with full glass and interior.

Back at Estevez’s tent, auto industry reps and reporters line up to shakes his hand. Lucrative endorsement deals will pay for the pricey car parts he needs to follow the race circuits up and down the eastern seaboard; and maybe, if Estevez is lucky, he’ll head to Cali, where the big boys will be waiting to take a crack at him. It’s the first glimmer of a legal career in the growing, adrenaline-charged sport of import drag racing. And it’s making him misty-eyed today. “I said I would do it, and then I did it,” Estevez says proudly.

A few days later, Estevez is streaking down Henry Hudson Parkway in the Civic, past the sparkling tiara of the New Jersey nightscape. As he floors the now record-setting ride, the cockpit rumbles with Gatling gun intensity. Over the roar, whistle, and hiss of the engine, he screams, “Do you hear that fluttering?” He checks off a list of problems. “That’s just one thing. The headers are leaking. We need to weld a differential to put more power to the ground; remap the computer.

“Every time I find another problem with the car, it makes me even happier,” he adds. “When I fix it, it means I’ll go even faster.” His eyes are lowered half-mast, nodding occasionally like he’s studying what the car has to tell him. For Estevez, it’s not the contest between racers that really matters but the abstract dialogue between the soul of a racer and his machine.

Oddly, the makeshift dash cluttered with gauges — telling him everything from water pressure to fuel mixture — is missing one key thing: a speedometer. There’s a good reason. “When you know how fast you’re going,” says Estevez, punching the throttle again, “you’ll slow down.” — By Kenneth Li (May 1998)

By Richard Behar — Time, 1991

Scientology: The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power.

Even as the cult of Scientology tries to destroy the truth, the truth shall be loosed over the planet forever.

Time Magazine May 6, 1991 page 50.

Special Report (cover story)

Copyright © 1991 Time Magazine

This young Russian-studies scholar had jumped from a 10th-floor window of the Milford Plaza Hotel and bounced off the hood of a stretch limousine. When the police arrived, his fingers were still clutching $171 in cash, virtually the only money he hadn’t turned over to the Church of Scientology, the self-help “philosophy” group he had discovered just seven months earlier.

His death inspired his father Edward, a physician, to start his own investigation of the church. “We thought Scientology was something like Dale Carnegie,” Lottick says. “I now believe it’s a school for psychopaths.” Their so-called therapies are manipulations. They take the best and the brightest people and destroy them.” The Lotticks want to sue the church for contributing to their son’s death, but the prospect has them frightened. For nearly 40 years, the big business of Scientology has shielded itself exquisitely behind the First Amendment as well as a battery of high-priced criminal lawyers and shady private detectives.

The Church of Scientology, started by science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard to “clear” people of unhappiness, portrays itself as a religion. In reality the church is a hugely profitable global racket that survives by intimidating members and critics in a Mafia-like manner. At times during the past decade, prosecutions against Scientology seemed to be curbing its menace. Eleven top Scientologists, including Hubbard’s wife, were sent to prison in the early 1980s for infiltrating, burglarizing and wiretapping more than 100 private and government agencies in attempts to block their investigations. In recent years hundreds of longtime Scientology adherents — many charging that they were mentally of physically abused — have quit the church and criticized it at their own risk. Some have sued the church and won; others have settled for amounts in excess of $500,000. In various cases judges have labeled the church “schizophrenic and paranoid” and “corrupt, sinister and dangerous.”

Yet the outrage and litigation have failed to squelch Scientology. The group, which boasts 700 centers in 65 countries, threatens to become more insidious and pervasive than ever. Scientology is trying to go mainstream, a strategy that has sparked a renewed law- enforcement campaign against the church. Many of the group’s followers have been accused of committing financial scams, while the church is busy attracting the unwary through a wide array of front groups in such businesses as publishing, consulting, health care and even remedial education.

In Hollywood, Scientology has assembled a star-studded roster of followers by aggressively recruiting and regally pampering them at the church’s “Celebrity Centers,” a chain of clubhouses that offer expensive counseling and career guidance. Adherents include screen idols Tom Cruise and John Travolta, actresses Kirstie Alley, Mimi Rogers, and Anne Archer, Palm Springs mayor and performer Sonny Bono, jazzman Chick Corea and even Nancy Cartwright, the voice of cartoon star Bart Simpson. Rank-and-file members, however, are dealt a less glamorous Scientology.

According to the Cult Awareness Network, whose 23 chapters monitor more than 200 “mind control” cults, no group prompts more telephone pleas for help than does Scientology. Says Cynthia Kisser, the network’s Chicago-based executive director: “Scientology is quite likely the most ruthless, the most classically terroristic, the most litigious and the most lucrative cult the country has ever seen. No cult extracts more money from its members.” [Note: since publication of this article, the Cult Awareness Network has been taken over by Scientology. Do not contact them!] Agrees Vicki Aznaran, who was one of Scientology’s six key leaders until she bolted from the church in 1987: “This is a criminal organization, day in and day out. It makes Jim and Tammy [Bakker] look like kindergarten.” To explore Scientology’s reach, TIME conducted more than 150 interviews and reviewed hundreds of court records and internal Scientology documents. Church officials refused to be interviewed. The investigation paints a picture of a depraved yet thriving enterprise. Most cults fail to outlast their founder, but Scientology has prospered since Hubbard’s death in 1986. In a court filing, one of the cult’s many entities — the Church of Spiritual Technology — listed $503 million in income just for 1987. High-level defectors say the parent organization has squirreled away an estimated $400 million in bank accounts in Liechtenstein, Switzerland and Cyprus. Scientology probably has about 50,000 active members, far fewer than the 8 million the group claims. But in one sense, that inflated figure rings true: millions of people have been affected in one way or another by Hubbard’s bizarre creation.

Scientology is now run by David Miscavige, 31, a high school dropout and second-generation church member. Defectors describe him as cunning, ruthless and so paranoid about perceived enemies that he kept plastic wrap over his glass of water. His obsession is to obtain credibility for Scientology in the 1990s. Among other tactics, the group:

– Retains public relation powerhouse Hill and Knowlton to help

shed the church’s fringe-group image.

– Joined such household names as Sony and Pepsi as a main sponsor

of Ted Turner’s Goodwill Games.

– Buys massive quantities of its own books from retail stores to

propel the titles onto best-seller lists.

– Runs full-page ads in such publications as Newsweek and

Business Week that call Scientology a “philosophy,” along with a

plethora of TV ads touting the group’s books.

– Recruits wealthy and respectable professionals through a web of consulting groups that typically hide their ties to Scientology.

The founder of this enterprise was part storyteller, part flimflam man. Born In Nebraska in 1911, Hubbard served in the Navy during World War II and soon afterward complained to the Veterans Administration about his “suicidal inclinations” and his “seriously affected” mind. Nevertheless, Hubbard was a moderately successful writer of pulp science fiction. Years later, church brochures described him falsely as an “extensively decorated” World War II hero who was crippled and blinded in action, twice pronounced dead and miraculously cured through Scientology. Hubbard’s “doctorate” from “Sequoia University” was a fake mall-order degree. In a I984 case in which the church sued a Hubbard biographical researcher, a California judge concluded that its founder was “a pathological liar.”

Hubbard wrote one of Scientology’s sacred texts, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, in 1950. In it he introduced a crude psychotherapeutic technique he called “auditing.” He also created a simplified lie detector (called an “E-meter”) that was designed to measure electrical changes In the skin while subjects discussed intimate details of their past. Hubbard argued that unhappiness sprang from mental aberrations (or “engrams”) caused by early traumas. Counseling sessions with the E-meter, he claimed, could knock out the engrams, cure blindness and even improve a person’s intelligence and appearance.

Hubbard kept adding steps, each more costly, for his followers to climb. In the 1960s the guru decreed that humans are made of clusters of spirits (or “thetans”) who were banished to earth some 75 million years ago by a cruel galactic ruler named Xenu. Naturally, those thetans had to be audited.

An Internal Revenue Service ruling in 1967 stripped Scientology’s mother church of its tax-exempt status. A federal court ruled in 1971 that Hubbard’s medical claims were bogus and that E-meter auditing could no longer be called a scientific treatment. Hubbard responded by going fully religious, seeking First Amendment protection for Scien- tology’s strange rites. His counselors started sporting clerical collars. Chapels were built, franchises became “missions,” fees became “fixed donations,” and Hubbard’s comic-book cosmology became “sacred scriptures.’

During the early 1970s, the IRS conducted its own auditing sessions and proved that Hubbard was skimming millions of dollars from the church, laundering the money through dummy corporations in Panama and stashing it in Swiss bank accounts. Moreover, church members stole IRS documents, filed false tax returns and harassed the agency’s employees. By late 1985, with high-level defectors accusing Hubbard of having stolen as much as S200 million from the church, the IRS was seeking an indictment of Hubbard for tax fraud. Scientology members “worked day and night” shredding documents the IRS sought, according to defector Aznaran, who took part in the scheme. Hubbard, who had been in hiding for five years, died before the criminal case could be prosecuted.

Today the church invents costly new services with all the zeal of its founder. Scientology doctrine warns that even adherents who are “cleared” of engrams face grave spiritual dangers unless they are pushed to higher and more expensive levels. According to the church’s latest price list, recruits — “raw meat,” as Hubbard called them — take auditing sessions that cost as much as $1,000 an hour, or $12,500 for a 12 1/2-hour “intensive.”

Psychiatrists say these sessions can produce a drugged-like, mind-controlled euphoria that keeps customers coming back for more. To pay their fees, newcomers can earn commissions by recruiting new mem- bers, become auditors themselves (Miscavige did so at age 12), or join the church staff and receive free counseling in exchange for what their written contracts describe as a “billion years” of labor. “Make sure that lots of bodies move through the shop,” implored Hubbard in one of his bulletins to officials. “Make money. Make more money. Make others produce so as to make money . . . However you get them in or why, just do it.”

Harriet Baker learned the hard way about Scientology’s business of

selling religion. When Baker, 73, lost her husband to cancer, a

Scientologist turned up at her Los Angeles home peddling a $1,300

auditing package to cure her grief. Some $15,000 later, the

Scientologists discovered that her house was debt free. They arranged

a $45,000 mortgage, which they pressured her to tap for more auditing

until Baker’s children helped their mother snap out of her daze. Last

June, Baker demanded a $27,000 refund for unused services, prompting

two cult members to show up at her door unannounced with an E-meter to

interrogate her. Baker never got the money and, financially strapped,

was forced to sell her house in September.

Before Noah Lottick killed himself, he had paid more than $5,000 for church counseling. His behavior had also become strange. He once remarked to his parents that his Scientology mentors could actually read minds. When his father suffered a major heart attack, Noah insisted that it was purely psychosomatic. Five days before he jumped, Noah burst into his parents’ home and demanded to know why they were spreading “false rumors” about him — a delusion that finally prompted his father to call a psychiatrist.

It was too late. “From Noah’s friends at Dianetics” read the card

that accompanied a bouquet of flowers at Lottick’s funeral. Yet no

Scientology staff members bothered to show up. A week earlier, local

church officials had given Lottick’s parents a red-carpet tour of

their center. A cult leader told Noah’s parents that their son had

been at the church just hours before he disappeared — but the church

denied this story as soon as the body was identified. True to form,

the cult even haggled with the Lotticks over $3,000 their son had paid

for services he never used, insisting that Noah had intended it as a

“donation.”

The church has invented hundreds of goods and services for which members are urged to give “donations.” Are you having trouble “moving swiftly up the Bridge” — that is, advancing up the stepladder of en- lightenment? Then you can have your case reviewed for a mere $1,250 “donation.” Want to know “why a thetan hangs on to the physical universe?” Try 52 of Hubbard’s tape-recorded speeches from 1952, titled “Ron’s Philadelphia Doctorate Course Lectures,” for $2,525. Next: nine other series of the same sort. For the collector, gold-and-leather-bound editions of 22 of Hubbard’s books (and bookends) on subjects ranging from Scientology ethics to radiation can be had for just $1,900.

To gain influence and lure richer, more sophisticated followers, Scientology has lately resorted to a wide array of front groups and financial scams. Among them:

CONSULTING. Sterling Management Systems, formed in 1983, has been

ranked in recent years by Inc. magazine as one of America’s

fastest-growing private companies (estimated 1988 revenues: $20 mil-

lion). Sterling regularly mails a free newsletter to more than 300,000

health-care professionals, mostly dentists, promising to increase

their incomes dramatically. The firm offers seminars and courses that

typically cost $10,OOO. But Sterling’s true aim is to hook customers

for Scientology. “The church has a rotten product, so they package it

as something else,” says Peter Georgiades, a Pittsburgh attorney who

represents Sterling victims. “It’s a kind of bait and switch.”

Sterling’s founder, dentist Gregory Hughes is now under investigation

by California’s Board of Dental Examiners for incompetence. Nine

lawsuits are pending against him for malpractice (seven others have

been settled), mostly for orthodontic work on children.Many dentists who have unwittingly been drawn into the cult are filing or threatening lawsuits as well. Dentist Robert Geary of Medina, Ohio, who entered a Sterling seminar in 1988, endured “the most extreme high-pressure sales tactics I have ever faced.” Sterling officials told Geary, 45, that their firm was not linked to Scientology, he says. but Geary claims they eventually convinced him that he and his wife Dorothy had personal problems that required auditing. Over five months, the Gearys say, they spent $130,000 for services, plus $50,000 for “gold-embossed, investment-grade” books signed by Hubbard. Geary contends that Scientologists not only called his bank to increase his credit card limit but also forged his signature on a $20,000 loan application. “It was insane,” he recalls. “I couldn’t even get an accounting from them of what I was paying for.” At one point, the Gearys claim, Scientologists held Dorothy hostage for two weeks in a mountain cabin, after which she was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown. Last October, Sterling broke some bad news to another dentist, Glover Rowe of Gadsden, Ala., and his wife Dee. Tests showed that unless they signed up for auditing Glover’s practice would fail, and Dee would someday abuse their child. The next month the Rowes flew to Glendale, Calif., where they shuttled daily from a local hotel to a Dianetics center. “We thought they were brilliant people because they seemed to know so much about us,” recalls Dee. “Then we realized our hotel room must have been bugged.” After bolting from the center, $23,000 poorer, the Rowes say, they were chased repeatedly by Scientologists on foot and in cars. Dentists aren’t the only once at risk. Scientology also makes pitches to chiropractors, podiatrists and veterinarians.

PUBLIC INFLUENCE. One front, the Way to Happiness Foundation, has

distributed to children in thousands of the nation’s public schools

more than 3.5 million copies of a booklet Hubbard wrote on morality.

The church calls the scheme “the largest dissemination project in

Scientology history.” Applied Scholastics is the name of still another

front, which is attempting to install a Hubbard tutorial program in

public schools, primarily those populated by minorities. The group

also plans a 1,000 acre campus, where it will train educators to teach

various Hubbard methods. The disingenuously named Citizens Commission

on Human Rights is a Scientology group at war with psychiatry, its

primary competitor. The commission typically issues reports aimed at

discrediting particular psychiatrists and the field in general. The

CCHR is also behind an all-out war against Eli Lilly, the maker of

Prozac, the nation’s top-selling antidepression drug. Despite scant

evidence, the group’s members — who call themselves “psychbusters” —

claim that Prozac drives people to murder or suicide. Through mass

mailings, appearances on talk shows and heavy lobbying, CCHR has hurt

drug sales and helped spark dozens of lawsuits against Lilly.Another Scientology linked group, the Concerned Businessmen’s Association of America, holds antidrug contests and awards $5,000 grants to schools as a way to recruit students and curry favor with education officials. West Virginia Senator John D. Rockefeller IV unwittingly commended the CBAA in 1987 on the Senate floor. Last August author Alex Haley was the keynote speaker at its annual awards banquet in Los Angeles. Says Haley: “I didn’t know much about that group going in. I’m a Methodist.” Ignorance about Scientology can be embarrassing: two months ago, Illinois Governor Jim Edgar, noting that Scientology’s founder “has solved the aberrations of the human mind,” proclaimed March 13 “L. Ron Hubbard Day.” He rescinded the proclamation in late March, once he Iearned who Hubbard really was.

HEALTH CARE. HealthMed, a chain of clinics run by Scientologists,

promotes a grueling and excessive system of saunas, exercise and

vitamins designed by Hubbard to purify the body. Experts denounce the

regime as quackery and potentially harmful, yet HealthMed solicits

unions and public agencies for contracts. The chain is plugged heavily

in a new book, Diet for a Poisoned Planet, by journalist David

Steinman, who concludes that scores of common foods (among them:

peanuts, bluefish, peaches and cottage cheese) are dangerous.Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop labeled the book “trash,” and the Food and Drug Administration issued a paper in October that claims Steinman distorts his facts. “HealthMed is a gateway to Scientology, and Steinman’s book is a sorting mechanism,” says physician William Jarvis, who is head of the National Council Against Health Fraud. Steinman, who describes Hubbard favorably as a “researcher,” denies any ties to the church and contends, “HealthMed has no affiliation that I know of with Scientology.”

DRUG TREATMENT. Hubbard’s purification treatments are the mainstay

of Narconon, a Scientology-run chain of 33 alcohol and drug

rehabilitation centers — some in prisons under the name “Criminon” —

in 12 countries. Narconon, a classic vehicle for drawing addicts into

the cult, now plans to open what it calls the world’s largest

treatment center, a 1,400-bed facility on an Indian reservation near

Newkirk, Okla. (pop. 2,400. At a 1989 ceremony in Newkirk, the As-

sociation for Better Living and Education presented Narconon a check

for $200,000 and a study praising its work. The association turned out

to be part of Scientology itself. Today the town is battling to keep

out the cult, which has fought back through such tactics as sending

private detectives to snoop on the mayor and the local newspaper

publisher.

FINANCIAL SCAMS. Three Florida Scientologists, including Ronald

Bernstein, a big contributor to the church’s international “war

chest,” pleaded guilty in March to using their rare-coin dealership as

a money laundry. Other notorious activities by Scientologists include

making the shady Vancouver stock exchange even shadier (see box) and

plotting to plant operatives in the World Bank, International Monetary

Fund and Export-Import Bank of the U.S. The alleged purpose of this

scheme: to gain inside information on which countries are going to be

denied credit so that Scientology-linked traders can make illicit

profits by taking “short” positions in those countries’ currencies.In the stock market the practice of “shorting” involves borrowing shares of publicly traded companies in the hope that the price will go down before the stocks must be bought on the market and returned to the lender. The Feshbach brothers of Palo Alto, Calif. — Kurt, Joseph and Matthew – have become the leading short sellers in the U.S., with more than $500 million under management. The Feshbachs command a staff of about 60 employees and claim to have earned better returns than the Dow Jones industrial average for most of the 1980s. And, they say, they owe it all to the teachings of Scientology, whose “war chest” has received more than $1 million from the family. The Feshbachs also embrace the church’s tactics; the brothers are the terrors of the stock exchanges. In congressional hearings in 1989, the heads of several companies claimed that Feshbach operatives have spread false information to government agencies and posed in various guises — such as a Securities and Exchange Commission official — in an effort to discredit their companies and drive the stocks down. Michael Russell, who ran a chain of business journals, testified that a Feshbach employee called his bankers and interfered with his loans. Sometimes the Feshbachs send private detectives to dig up dirt on firms, which is then shared with business reporters, brokers and fund managers. The Feshbachs, who wear jackets bearing the slogan “stock busters,” insist they run a clean shop. But as part of a current probe into possible insider stock trading, federal officials are reportedly investigating whether the Feshbachs received confidential information from FDA employees. The brothers seem aligned with Scientology’s war on psychiatry and medicine: many of their targets are health and bio- technology firms. “”Legitimate short selling performs a public service by deflating hyped stocks,” says Robert Flaherty, the editor of Equities magazine and a harsh critic of the brothers. “But the Feshbachs have damaged scores of good start-ups.” Occasionally a Scientologist’s business antics land him in jail. Last August a former devotee named Steven Fishman began serving a five-year prison term in Florida. His crime: stealing blank stock-confirmation slips from his employer, a major brokerage house, to use as proof that he owned stock entitling him to join dozens of successful class-action lawsuits. Fishman made roughly $1 million this way from 1983 to 1988 and spent as much as 30% of the loot on Scientology books and tapes. Scientology denies any tie to the Fishman scam, a claim strongly disputed by both Fishman and his longtime psychiatrist, Uwe Geertz, a prominent Florida hypnotist. Both men claim that when arrested, Fishman was ordered by the church to kill Geertz and then do an “EOC,” or end of cycle, which is church jargon for suicide.

BOOK PUBLISHING. Scientology mischiefmaking has even moved to the

book industry. Since 1985 at least a dozen Hubbard books, printed by a

church company, have made best-seller lists. They range from a

5,000-page sci-fi decology (Black Genesis, The Enemy Within, An Alien

Affair) to the 40-year-old Dianetics. In 1988 the trade publication

Publishers Weekly awarded the dead author a plaque commemorating the

appearance of Dianetics on its best-seller list for 100 consecutive

weeks.Critics pan most of Hubbard’s books as unreadable, while defectors claim that church insiders are sometimes the real authors. Even so, Scientology has sent out armies of its followers to buy the group’s books at such major chains as B. Dalton’s and Waldenbooks to sustain the illusion of a best-selling author. A former Dalton’s manager says that some books arrived in his store with the chain’s price stickers already on them, suggesting that copies are being recycled. Scientology claims that sales of Hubbard books now top 90 million worldwide. The scheme, set up to gain converts and credibility, is coupled with a radio and TV advertising campaign virtually un- paralleled in the book industry.

Scientology devotes vast resources to squelching its critics. Since 1986 Hubbard and his church have been the subject of four unfriendly books, all released by small yet courageous publishers. In each case, the writers have been badgered and heavily sued. One of Hubbard’s policies was that all perceived enemies are “fair game” and subject to being “tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed.” Those who criticize the church journalists, doctors, lawyers and even judges often find themselves engulfed in litigation, stalked by private eyes, framed for fictional crimes, beaten up or threatened with death. Psychologist Margaret Singer, 69, an outspoken Scientology critic and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, now travels regularly under an assumed name to avoid harassment.

After the Los Angeles Times published a negative series on the church last summer, Scientologists spent an estimated $1 million to plaster the reporters’ names on hundreds of billboards and bus placards across the city. Above their names were quotations taken out of context to portray the church in a positive light.

The church’s most fearsome advocates are its lawyers. Hubbard warned his followers in writing to “beware of attorneys who tell you not to sue . . . the purpose of the suit is to harass and discourage rather than to win.” Result: Scientology has brought hundreds of suits against its perceived enemies and today pays an estimated $20 million annually to more than 100 lawyers.

One legal goal of Scientology is to bankrupt the opposition or bury it under paper. The church has 71 active lawsuits against the IRS alone. One of them, Miscavige vs. IRS, has required the U.S. to pro- duce an index of 52,000 pages of documents. Boston attorney Michael Flynn, who helped Scientology victims from 1979 to 1987, personally endured 14 frivolous lawsuits, all of them dismissed. Another lawyer, Joseph Yanny, believes the church “has so subverted justice and the judicial system that it should be barred from seeking equity in any court.” He should know: Yanny represented the cult until 1987, when, he says, he was asked to help church officials steal medical records to blackmail an opposing attorney (who was allegedly beaten up instead). Since Yanny quit representing the church, he has been the target of death threats, burglaries, lawsuits and other harassment.

Scientology’s critics contend that the U.S. needs to crack down on the church in a major, organized way. “I want to know, Where is our government?” demands Toby Plevin, a Los Angeles attorney who handles victims. “It shouldn’t be left to private litigators, because God knows most of us are afraid to get involved.” But law-enforcement agents are also wary. “Every investigator is very cautious, walking on eggshells when it comes to the church,” says a Florida police detective who has tracked the cult since 1988. “It will take a federal effort with lots of money and manpower.”

So far the agency giving Scientology the most grief is the IRS, whose officials have implied that Hubbard’s successors may be looting the church’s coffers. Since 1988, when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the revocation of the cult’s tax-exempt status, a massive IRS probe of church centers across the country has been under way. An IRS agent, Marcus Owens, has estimated that thousands of IRS employees have been involved. Another agent, in an internal IRS memorandum, spoke hopefully of the “ultimate disintegration” of the church. A small but helpful beacon shone last June when a federal appeals court ruled that two cassette tapes featuring conversations between church officials and their lawyers are evidence of a plan to commit “future frauds” against the IRS.

The IRS and FBI have been debriefing Scientology defectors for the past three years, in part to gain evidence for a major racketeering case that appears to have stalled last summer. Federal agents complain that the Justice Department is unwilling to spend the money needed to endure a drawn-out war with Scientology or to fend off the cult’s notorious jihads against individual agents. “In my opinion the church has one of the most effective intelligence operations in the U.S., rivaling even that of the FBI,” says Ted Gunderson, a former head of the FBI’s Los Angeles office.

Foreign governments have been moving even more vigorously against the organization. In Canada the church and nine of its members will be tried in June on charges of stealing government documents (many of them retrieved in an enormous police raid of the church’s Toronto headquarters). Scientology proposed to give $1 million to the needy if the case was dropped, but Canada spurned the offer. Since 1986 authorities in France, Spain and Italy have raided more than 50 Scien- tology centers. Pending charges against more than 100 of its overseas church members include fraud, extortion, capital flight, coercion, illegally practicing medicine and taking advantage of mentally incapacitated people. In Germany last month, leading politicians accused the cult of trying to infiltrate a major party as well as launching an immense recruitment drive in the east.

Sometimes even the church’s biggest zealots can use a little protection. Screen star Travolta, 37, has long served as an unofficial Scientology spokesman, even though he told a magazine in 1983 that he was opposed to the church’s management. High-level defectors claim that Travolta has long feared that if he defected, details of his sexual life would be made public. “He felt pretty intimidated about this getting out and told me so,” recalls William Franks, the church’s former chairman of the board. “There were no outright threats made, but it was implicit. If you leave, they immediately start digging up everything.” Franks was driven out in 1981 after attempting to reform the church.

The church’s former head of security, Richard Aznaran, recalls Scientology ringleader Miscavige repeatedly joking to staffers about Travolta’s allegedly promiscuous homosexual behavior. At this point any threat to expose Travolta seems superfluous: last May a male porn star collected $100,000 from a tabloid for an account of his alleged two-year liaison with the celebrity. Travolta refuses to comment, and in December his lawyer dismissed questions about the subject as “bizarre.” Two weeks later, Travolta announced that he was getting married to actress Kelly Preston, a fellow Scientologist.

Shortly after Hubbard’s death the church retained Trout & Ries, a respected, Connecticut-based firm of marketing consultants, to help boost its public image. “We were brutally honest,” says Jack Trout. “We advised them to clean up their act, stop with the controversy and even to stop being a church. They didn’t want to hear that.” Instead, Scientology hired one of the country’s largest p.r. outfits, Hill and Knowlton, whose executives refuse to discuss the lucrative relationship. “Hill and Knowlton must feel that these guys are not totally off the wall,” says Trout. “Unless it’s just for the money.” One of Scientology’s main strategies is to keep advancing the tired argument that the church is being “persecuted” by antireligionists. It is supported in that position by the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Council of Churches. But in the end, money is what Scientology is all about. As long as the organization’s opponents and victims are successfully squelched, Scientology’s managers and lawyers will keep pocketing millions of dollars by helping it achieve its ends.

One source of funds for the Los Angeles-based church is the notorious, self-regulated stock exchange in Vancouver, British Columbia, often called the scam capital of the world. The exchange’s 2,300 penny-stock listings account for $4 billion in annual trading. Local journalists and insiders claim the vast majority range from total washouts to outright frauds.

Two Scientologists who operate there are Kenneth Gerbino and Michael Baybak, 20-year church veterans from Beverly Hills who are major donors to the cult. Gerbino, 45, is a money manager, marketmaker and publisher of a national financial newsletter. He has boasted in Scientology journals that he owes all his stock-picking success to L. Ron Hubbard. That’s not saying much: Gerbino’s newsletter picks since 1985 have cumulatively returned 24%, while the Dow Jones industrial average has more than doubled. Nevertheless Gerbino’s short-term gains can be stupendous. A survey last October found Gerbino to be the only manager who made money in the third quarter of 1990, thanks to gold and other resource stocks. For the first quarter of 1991, Gerbino was dead last. Baybak, 49, who runs a public relations company staffed with Scientologists, apparently has no ethics problem with engineering a hostile takeover of a firm he is hired to promote.

Neither man agreed to be interviewed for this story, yet both threatened legal action through attorneys. “What these guys do is take over companies, hype the stock, sell their shares, and then there’s nothing left,” says John Campbell, a former securities lawyer who was a director of mining company Athena Gold until Baybak and Gerbino took it over.

The pattern has become familiar. The pair promoted a mining venture called Skylark Resources, whose stock traded at nearly $4 a share in 1987. The outfit soon crashed, and the stock is around 2 cents. NETI Technologies, a software company, was trumpeted in the press as “the next Xerox” and in 1984 rose to a market value of $120 million with Baybak’s help. The company, which later collapsed, was delisted two months ago by the Vancouver exchange.

Baybak appeared in 1989 at the helm of Wall Street Ventures, a start-up that announced it owned 35 tons of rare Middle Eastern postage stamps — worth $100 million — and was buying the world’s largest collection of southern Arabian stamps (worth $350 million). Steven C. Rockefeller Jr. of the oil family and former hockey star Denis Potvin joined the company in top posts, but both say they quit when they realized the stamps were virtually worthless. “The stamps were created by sand-dune nations to exploit collectors,” says Michael Laurence, editor of Linn’s Stamp News, America’s largest stamp journal. After the stock topped $6, it began a steady descent, with Baybak unloading his shares along the way. Today it trades at 18 cents.

Athena Gold, the current object of Baybak’s and Gerbino’s attentions, was founded by entrepreneur William Jordan. He turned to an established Vancouver broker in 1987 to help finance the company, a 4,500-acre mining property near Reno. The broker promised to raise more than $3 million and soon brought Baybak and Gerbino into the deal. Jordan never got most of the money, but the cult members ended up with a good deal of cheap stock and options. Next they elected directors who were friendly to them and set in motion a series of complex maneuvers to block Jordan from voting stock he controlled and to run him out of the company. “I’ve been an honest policeman all my life and I’ve seen the worst kinds of crimes, and this ranks high,” says former Athena shareholder Thomas Clark, a 20-year veteran of Reno’s police force who has teamed up with Jordan to try to get the gold mine back. “They stole this man’s property.”

With Baybak as chairman, the two Scientologists and their staffs are promoting Athena, not always accurately. A letter to shareholders with the 1990 annual report claims Placer Dome, one of America’s largest gold-mining firms, has committed at least $25.5 million to develop the mine. That’s news to Placer Dome. “There is no pre-commitment,” says Placer executive Cole McFarland. “We’re not going to spend that money unless survey results justify the expenditure.”

Baybak’s firm represented Western Resource Technologies, a Houston oil-and-gas company, but got the boot in October. Laughs Steven McGuire, president of Western Resource: “His is a p.r. firm in need of a p.r. firm.” But McGuire cannot laugh too freely. Baybak and other Scientologists, including the estate of L. Ron Hubbard, still control huge blocks of his company’s stock.

[ Caption: ATHENA GOLD’S WILLIAM JORDAN. Cult members got cheap stock, then ran him out of the company ]

[The following part was only in the international version of TIME]

Today Hubbard’s minions continue to wreak global havoc, costing governments considerable effort and money to try to stop them. In Italy a two-year trial of 76 Scientologists, among them the former leader of the church’s Italian operations, is nearing completion in Milan. Two weeks ago, prosecutor Pietro Forno requested jail terms for all the defendants who are accused of extortion, cheating “mentally incapacitated” people and evading as much as $50 million in taxes. “All of the trial’s victims went to Scientology in search of a cure or a better life,” said Forno, “But the Scientologists were amateur psychiatrists who practiced psychological terrorism”. For some victims, he added, “the intervention of the Scientologists was devastating.”

The Milan case was triggered by parents complaining to officials that Scientology had a financial stranglehold on their children, who had joined the church or entered Narconon, its drug rehabilitation unit. In 1986 Treasury and paramilitary police conducted raids in 20 cities across Italy shutting down 27 Scientology centers and seizing 100,000 documents. To defend itself in the trial, the cult has retained some of Italy’s most famous lawyers.

In Canada, Scientology is using a legal team that includes Clayton Ruby, one of the country’s foremost civil rights lawyers, to defend itself and nine of its members who are to stand trial in June in Toronto. The charges: stealing documents concerning Scientology from the Ministry of the Attorney General, the Canadian Mental Health Association, two police forces and other institutions. The case stems from a 1983 surprise raid of the church’s Toronto headquarters by more than 100 policemen, who had arrived in three chartered buses; some 2 million pages of documents were seized over a two-day period. Ruby, whose legal maneuvers delayed the case for years, is trying to get it dismissed because of “unreasonable delay.”

Spain’s Justice Ministry has twice denied Scientology status as a religion, but that has not slowed the church’ s expansion. In 1989 the Ministry of Health issued a report calling the sect “totalitarian” and “pure and simple charlatanism.” The year before, the authorities had raided 26 church centers, with the result that 11 Scientologists stand accused of falsification of records, coercion and capital flight. “The real god of this organization is money,” said Madrid examining magistrate Jose Maria Vasquez Honrnbia, before referring the case to a higher court because it was too complex for his jurisdiction. Eugene Ingram, a private investigator working for Scientology claims he helped get Honrubia removed from the case for leaking nonpublic documents to the press.

In France it took a death to spur the government into action: 16 Scientologists were indicted last year for fraud and “complicity in the practice of illegal medicine” following the suicide of an industrial designer in Lyon. In the victim’s house investigators found medication allegeally provided to him by the church without doctor’s prescription. Among those charged in the case is the president of Scientology’s French operations and the head of the Paris-based Celebrity Centre, which caters to famous members.

Outside the U.S., Scientology appears to be most active in Germany where the attorney general of the state of Bavaria has branded the cult “distinctly totalitarian” and aimed at “the economic exploitation of customers who are in bondage to it.” In 1984 nearly 100 police raided the church in Munich. At the time, city officials were reportedly collaborating with U.S. tax inspectors and trying to prove that the cult was actually a profitmaking business. More recently, Hamburg state authorities moved to rescind Scientology’s tax reduced status, while members of parliament are seeking criminal proceedings. In another domain, church linked management consulting firms have infiltrated small and middle sized companies throughout Germany, according to an expose published this month in the newsmagazine DER SPIEGEL; the consultants, who typically hide their ties to Scientology, indoctrinate employees by using Hubbard’s methods. A German anticult organization estimates that Scientology has at least 60 fronts or splinter groups operating in the country. German politics appears as well to attract Hubbard’s zealots. In March the Free Democrats, partners in Chancellor Helmut Kohl’ s ruling coalition in Bonn, accused Scientology of trying to infiltrate their Hamburg branch. Meanwhile the main opposition party, the Social Democrats, has been warning its members in the formerly com- munist eastern part of the country against exploitation by the church. Even federal officials are being used by the church: one Scientology front group sent copies of a Hubbard written pamphlet on moral values to members of the Bundestag. The Office of Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher unwittingly endorsed the Scientologists’ message: “Indeed, the world would be a more beautiful place if the principles formulated in the pamphlet, a life characterized by reason and responsibility, would find wider attention.”

[end of Internationl Edition-only section]

For the TIME story, at least 10 attorneys and six private detectives were unleashed by Scientology and its followers in an effort to threaten, harass and discredit me. Last Oct. 12, not long after I began this assignment, I planned to lunch with Eugene Ingram, the church’s leading private eye and a former cop. Ingram, who was tossed off the Los Angeles police force In 1981 for alleged ties to prostitutes and drug dealers, had told me that he might be able to arrange a meeting with church boss David Miscavige. Just hours before the lunch, the church’s “national trial counsel,” Earle Cooley, called to inform me that I would be eating alone.

Alone, perhaps, but not forgotten. By day’s end, I later learned, a copy of my personal credit report — with detailed information about my bank accounts, home mortgage, credit-card payments, home address and Social Security number — had been illegally retrieved from a national credit bureau called Trans Union. The sham company that received it, “Educational Funding Services” of Los Angeles, gave as its address a mail drop a few blocks from Scientology’s headquarters. The owner of the mail drop is a private eye named Fred Wolfson, who admits that an Ingram associate retained him to retrieve credit reports on several individuals. Wolfson says he was told that Scientology’s attorneys “had judgments against these people and were trying to collect on them.” He says now, “These are vicious people. These are vipers.” Ingram, through a lawyer, denies any involvement in the scam.

During the past five months, private investigators have been contacting acquaintances of mine, ranging from neighbors to a former colleague, to inquire about subjects such as my health (like my credit rating, it’s excellent) and whether I’ve ever had trouble with the IRS (unlike Scientology, I haven’t). One neighbor was greeted at dawn outside my Manhattan apartment building by two men who wanted to know whether I lived there. I finally called Cooley to demand that Scientology stop the nonsense. He promised to look into it.

After that, however, an attorney subpoenaed me, while another falsely suggested that I might own shares in a company I was reporting about that had been taken over by Scientologists (he also threatened to contact the Securities and Exchange Commission). A close friend in Los Angeles received a disturbing telephone call from a Scientology staff member seeking data about me — an indication that the cult may have illegally obtained my personal phone records. Two detectives contacted me, posing as a friend and a relative of a so-called cult victim, to elicit negative statements from me about Scientology. Some of my conversations with them were taped, transcribed and presented by the church in affidavits to TIME’s lawyers as “proof” of my bias against Scientology.

Among the comments I made to one of the detectives, who represented himself as “Harry Baxter,” a friend of the victim’s family, was that “the church trains people to lie.” Baxter and his colleagues are hardly in a position to dispute that observation. His real name is Barry Silvers, and he is a former investigator for the Justice Department’s Organized Crime Strike Force. (RB)

[Photograph, page 51]

The Lotticks lost their son

[photograph of the couple standing beside the grave of their son.]

[Photograph, page 53]

Harriet Baker, 73, lost her house

[photograph of Harriet Baker on front of her old home.]

[Chart, page 52-53]

The Bridge to enlightenment

[shows costs of various “courses” ranging from a

free Personality Test to more than $1,000 an hour for

“finding and releasing” “body thetans” (BTs).]

By Vernor Vinge — VISION-21 Symposium, 1993

Department of Mathematical Sciences

San Diego State University

(c) 1993 by Vernor Vinge

(This article may be reproduced for noncommercial

purposes if it is copied in its entirety,

including this notice.)

The original version of this article was presented at the VISION-21 Symposium sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, March 30-31, 1993. A slightly changed version appeared in the Winter 1993 issue of Whole Earth Review.

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.

Is such progress avoidable? If not to be avoided, can events be guided so that we may survive? These questions are investigated. Some possible answers (and some further dangers) are presented.

The acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of this century. I argue in this paper that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence. There are several means by which science may achieve this breakthrough (and this is another reason for having confidence that the event will occur):

– There may be developed computers that are “awake” and superhumanly intelligent. (To date, there has been much controversy as to whether we can create human equivalence in a machine. But if the answer is “yes, we can”, then there is little doubt that beings more intelligent can be constructed shortly thereafter.)

– Large computer networks (and their associated users) may “wake up” as a superhumanly intelligent entity.

– Computer/human interfaces may become so intimate that users may reasonably be considered superhumanly intelligent.

– Biological science may provide means to improve natural human intellect.

The first three possibilities depend in large part on improvements in computer hardware. Progress in computer hardware has followed an amazingly steady curve in the last few decades [17]. Based largely on this trend, I believe that the creation of greater than human intelligence will occur during the next thirty years. (Charles Platt [20] has pointed out that AI enthusiasts have been making claims like this for the last thirty years. Just so I’m not guilty of a relative-time ambiguity, let me more specific: I’ll be surprised if this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030.)

What are the consequences of this event? When greater-than-human intelligence drives progress, that progress will be much more rapid. In fact, there seems no reason why progress itself would not involve the creation of still more intelligent entities — on a still-shorter time scale. The best analogy that I see is with the evolutionary past: Animals can adapt to problems and make inventions, but often no faster than natural selection can do its work — the world acts as its own simulator in the case of natural selection. We humans have the ability to internalize the world and conduct “what if’s” in our heads; we can solve many problems thousands of times faster than natural selection. Now, by creating the means to execute those simulations at much higher speeds, we are entering a regime as radically different from our human past as we humans are from the lower animals.

From the human point of view this change will be a throwing away of all the previous rules, perhaps in the blink of an eye, an exponential runaway beyond any hope of control. Developments that before were thought might only happen in “a million years” (if ever) will likely happen in the next century. (In [5], Greg Bear paints a picture of the major changes happening in a matter of hours.)

I think it’s fair to call this event a singularity (“the Singularity” for the purposes of this paper). It is a point where our old models must be discarded and a new reality rules. As we move closer to this point, it will loom vaster and vaster over human affairs till the notion becomes a commonplace. Yet when it finally happens it may still be a great surprise and a greater unknown. In the 1950s there were very few who saw it: Stan Ulam [28] paraphrased John von Neumann as saying:

One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.

Von Neumann even uses the term singularity, though it appears he is thinking of normal progress, not the creation of superhuman intellect. (For me, the superhumanity is the essence of the Singularity. Without that we would get a glut of technical riches, never properly absorbed (see [25]).)

In the 1960s there was recognition of some of the implications of superhuman intelligence. I. J. Good wrote [11]:

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion,” and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the _last_ invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control. … It is more probable than not that, within the twentieth century, an ultraintelligent machine will be built and that it will be the last invention that man need make.

Good has captured the essence of the runaway, but does not pursue its most disturbing consequences. Any intelligent machine of the sort he describes would not be humankind’s “tool” — any more than humans are the tools of rabbits or robins or chimpanzees.

Through the ’60s and ’70s and ’80s, recognition of the cataclysm spread [29] [1] [31] [5]. Perhaps it was the science-fiction writers who felt the first concrete impact. After all, the “hard” science-fiction writers are the ones who try to write specific stories about all that technology may do for us. More and more, these writers felt an opaque wall across the future. Once, they could put such fantasies millions of years in the future [24]. Now they saw that their most diligent extrapolations resulted in the unknowable … soon. Once, galactic empires might have seemed a Post-Human domain. Now, sadly, even interplanetary ones are.

What about the ’90s and the ’00s and the ’10s, as we slide toward the edge? How will the approach of the Singularity spread across the human world view? For a while yet, the general critics of machine sapience will have good press. After all, till we have hardware as powerful as a human brain it is probably foolish to think we’ll be able to create human equivalent (or greater) intelligence. (There is the far-fetched possibility that we could make a human equivalent out of less powerful hardware, if we were willing to give up speed, if we were willing to settle for an artificial being who was literally slow [30]. But it’s much more likely that devising the software will be a tricky process, involving lots of false starts and experimentation. If so, then the arrival of self-aware machines will not happen till after the development of hardware that is substantially more powerful than humans’ natural equipment.)

But as time passes, we should see more symptoms. The dilemma felt by science fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors. (I have heard thoughtful comic book writers worry about how to have spectacular effects when everything visible can be produced by the technologically commonplace.) We will see automation replacing higher and higher level jobs. We have tools right now (symbolic math programs, cad/cam) that release us from most low-level drudgery. Or put another way: The work that is truly productive is the domain of a steadily smaller and more elite fraction of humanity. In the coming of the Singularity, we are seeing the predictions of _true_ technological unemployment finally come true.

Another symptom of progress toward the Singularity: ideas themselves should spread ever faster, and even the most radical will quickly become commonplace. When I began writing science fiction in the middle ’60s, it seemed very easy to find ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural consciousness; now the lead time seems more like eighteen months. (Of course, this could just be me losing my imagination as I get old, but I see the effect in others too.) Like the shock in a compressible flow, the Singularity moves closer as we accelerate through the critical speed.

And what of the arrival of the Singularity itself? What can be said of its actual appearance? Since it involves an intellectual runaway, it will probably occur faster than any technical revolution seen so far. The precipitating event will likely be unexpected — perhaps even to the researchers involved. (“But all our previous models were catatonic! We were just tweaking some parameters….”) If networking is widespread enough (into ubiquitous embedded systems), it may seem as if our artifacts as a whole had suddenly wakened.

And what happens a month or two (or a day or two) after that? I have only analogies to point to: The rise of humankind. We will be in the Post-Human era. And for all my rampant technological optimism, sometimes I think I’d be more comfortable if I were regarding these transcendental events from one thousand years remove … instead of twenty.

Well, maybe it won’t happen at all: Sometimes I try to imagine the symptoms that we should expect to see if the Singularity is not to develop. There are the widely respected arguments of Penrose [19] and Searle [22] against the practicality of machine sapience. In August of 1992, Thinking Machines Corporation held a workshop to investigate the question “How We Will Build a Machine that Thinks” [27]. As you might guess from the workshop’s title, the participants were not especially supportive of the arguments against machine intelligence. In fact, there was general agreement that minds can exist on nonbiological substrates and that algorithms are of central importance to the existence of minds. However, there was much debate about the raw hardware power that is present in organic brains. A minority felt that the largest 1992 computers were within three orders of magnitude of the power of the human brain. The majority of the participants agreed with Moravec’s estimate [17] that we are ten to forty years away from hardware parity. And yet there was another minority who pointed to [7] [21], and conjectured that the computational competence of single neurons may be far higher than generally believed. If so, our present computer hardware might be as much as _ten_ orders of magnitude short of the equipment we carry around in our heads. If this is true (or for that matter, if the Penrose or Searle critique is valid), we might never see a Singularity. Instead, in the early ’00s we would find our hardware performance curves beginning to level off — this because of our inability to automate the design work needed to support further hardware improvements. We’d end up with some _very_ powerful hardware, but without the ability to push it further. Commercial digital signal processing might be awesome, giving an analog appearance even to digital operations, but nothing would ever “wake up” and there would never be the intellectual runaway which is the essence of the Singularity. It would likely be seen as a golden age … and it would also be an end of progress. This is very like the future predicted by Gunther Stent. In fact, on page 137 of [25], Stent explicitly cites the development of transhuman intelligence as a sufficient condition to break his projections.

But if the technological Singularity can happen, it will. Even if all the governments of the world were to understand the “threat” and be in deadly fear of it, progress toward the goal would continue. In fiction, there have been stories of laws passed forbidding the construction of “a machine in the likeness of the human mind” [13]. In fact, the competitive advantage — economic, military, even artistic — of every advance in automation is so compelling that passing laws, or having customs, that forbid such things merely assures that someone else will get them first.

Eric Drexler [8] has provided spectacular insights about how far technical improvement may go. He agrees that superhuman intelligences will be available in the near future — and that such entities pose a threat to the human status quo. But Drexler argues that we can confine such transhuman devices so that their results can be examined and used safely. This is I. J. Good’s ultraintelligent machine, with a dose of caution. I argue that confinement is intrinsically impractical. For the case of physical confinement: Imagine yourself locked in your home with only limited data access to the outside, to your masters. If those masters thought at a rate — say — one million times slower than you, there is little doubt that over a period of years (your time) you could come up with “helpful advice” that would incidentally set you free. (I call this “fast thinking” form of superintelligence “weak superhumanity”. Such a “weakly superhuman” entity would probably burn out in a few weeks of outside time. “Strong superhumanity” would be more than cranking up the clock speed on a human-equivalent mind. It’s hard to say precisely what “strong superhumanity” would be like, but the difference appears to be profound. Imagine running a dog mind at very high speed. Would a thousand years of doggy living add up to any human insight? (Now if the dog mind were cleverly rewired and _then_ run at high speed, we might see something different….) Many speculations about superintelligence seem to be based on the weakly superhuman model. I believe that our best guesses about the post-Singularity world can be obtained by thinking on the nature of strong superhumanity. I will return to this point later in the paper.)

Another approach to confinement is to build _rules_ into the mind of the created superhuman entity (for example, Asimov’s Laws [3]). I think that any rules strict enough to be effective would also produce a device whose ability was clearly inferior to the unfettered versions (and so human competition would favor the development of the those more dangerous models). Still, the Asimov dream is a wonderful one: Imagine a willing slave, who has 1000 times your capabilities in every way. Imagine a creature who could satisfy your every safe wish (whatever that means) and still have 99.9% of its time free for other activities. There would be a new universe we never really understood, but filled with benevolent gods (though one of _my_ wishes might be to become one of them).

If the Singularity can not be prevented or confined, just how bad could the Post-Human era be? Well … pretty bad. The physical extinction of the human race is one possibility. (Or as Eric Drexler put it of nanotechnology: Given all that such technology can do, perhaps governments would simply decide that they no longer need citizens!). Yet physical extinction may not be the scariest possibility. Again, analogies: Think of the different ways we relate to animals. Some of the crude physical abuses are implausible, yet…. In a Post-Human world there would still be plenty of niches where human equivalent automation would be desirable: embedded systems in autonomous devices, self-aware daemons in the lower functioning of larger sentients. (A strongly superhuman intelligence would likely be a Society of Mind [16] with some very competent components.) Some of these human equivalents might be used for nothing more than digital signal processing. They would be more like whales than humans. Others might be very human-like, yet with a one-sidedness, a _dedication_ that would put them in a mental hospital in our era. Though none of these creatures might be flesh-and-blood humans, they might be the closest things in the new enviroment to what we call human now. (I. J. Good had something to say about this, though at this late date the advice may be moot: Good [12] proposed a “Meta-Golden Rule”, which might be paraphrased as “Treat your inferiors as you would be treated by your superiors.” It’s a wonderful, paradoxical idea (and most of my friends don’t believe it) since the game-theoretic payoff is so hard to articulate. Yet if we were able to follow it, in some sense that might say something about the plausibility of such kindness in this universe.)

I have argued above that we cannot prevent the Singularity, that its coming is an inevitable consequence of the humans’ natural competitiveness and the possibilities inherent in technology. And yet … we are the initiators. Even the largest avalanche is triggered by small things. We have the freedom to establish initial conditions, make things happen in ways that are less inimical than others. Of course (as with starting avalanches), it may not be clear what the right guiding nudge really is:

And it’s very likely that IA is a much easier road to the achievement of superhumanity than pure AI. In humans, the hardest development problems have already been solved. Building up from within ourselves ought to be easier than figuring out first what we really are and then building machines that are all of that. And there is at least conjectural precedent for this approach. Cairns-Smith [6] has speculated that biological life may have begun as an adjunct to still more primitive life based on crystalline growth. Lynn Margulis (in [15] and elsewhere) has made strong arguments that mutualism is a great driving force in evolution.

Note that I am not proposing that AI research be ignored or less funded. What goes on with AI will often have applications in IA, and vice versa. I am suggesting that we recognize that in network and interface research there is something as profound (and potential wild) as Artificial Intelligence. With that insight, we may see projects that are not as directly applicable as conventional interface and network design work, but which serve to advance us toward the Singularity along the IA path.

Here are some possible projects that take on special significance, given the IA point of view:

– Human/computer team automation: Take problems that are normally considered for purely machine solution (like hill-climbing problems), and design programs and interfaces that take a advantage of humans’ intuition and available computer hardware. Considering all the bizarreness of higher dimensional hill-climbing problems (and the neat algorithms that have been devised for their solution), there could be some very interesting displays and control tools provided to the human team member.

– Develop human/computer symbiosis in art: Combine the graphic generation capability of modern machines and the esthetic sensibility of humans. Of course, there has been an enormous amount of research in designing computer aids for artists, as labor saving tools. I’m suggesting that we explicitly aim for a greater merging of competence, that we explicitly recognize the cooperative approach that is possible. Karl Sims [23] has done wonderful work in this direction.

– Allow human/computer teams at chess tournaments. We already have programs that can play better than almost all humans. But how much work has been done on how this power could be used by a human, to get something even better? If such teams were allowed in at least some chess tournaments, it could have the positive effect on IA research that allowing computers in tournaments had for the corresponding niche in AI.

– Develop interfaces that allow computer and network access without requiring the human to be tied to one spot, sitting in front of a computer. (This is an aspect of IA that fits so well with known economic advantages that lots of effort is already being spent on it.)

– Develop more symmetrical decision support systems. A popular research/product area in recent years has been decision support systems. This is a form of IA, but may be too focussed on systems that are oracular. As much as the program giving the user information, there must be the idea of the user giving the program guidance.

– Use local area nets to make human teams that really work (ie, are more effective than their component members). This is generally the area of “groupware”, already a very popular commercial pursuit. The change in viewpoint here would be to regard the group activity as a combination organism. In one sense, this suggestion might be regarded as the goal of inventing a “Rules of Order” for such combination operations. For instance, group focus might be more easily maintained than in classical meetings. Expertise of individual human members could be isolated from ego issues such that the contribution of different members is focussed on the team project. And of course shared data bases could be used much more conveniently than in conventional committee operations. (Note that this suggestion is aimed at team operations rather than political meetings. In a political setting, the automation described above would simply enforce the power of the persons making the rules!)

– Exploit the worldwide Internet as a combination human/machine tool. Of all the items on the list, progress in this is proceeding the fastest and may run us into the Singularity before anything else. The power and influence of even the present-day Internet is vastly underestimated. For instance, I think our contemporary computer systems would break under the weight of their own complexity if it weren’t for the edge that the USENET “group mind” gives the system administration and support people! The very anarchy of the worldwide net development is evidence of its potential. As connectivity and bandwidth and archive size and computer speed all increase, we are seeing something like Lynn Margulis’ [15] vision of the biosphere as data processor recapitulated, but at a million times greater speed and with millions of humanly intelligent agents (ourselves).

– Limb prosthetics is a topic of direct commercial applicability. Nerve to silicon transducers can be made [14]. This is an exciting, near-term step toward direct communication.

– Direct links into brains seem feasible, if the bit rate is low: given human learning flexibility, the actual brain neuron targets might not have to be precisely selected. Even 100 bits per second would be of great use to stroke victims who would otherwise be confined to menu-driven interfaces.

– Plugging in to the optic trunk has the potential for bandwidths of 1 Mbit/second or so. But for this, we need to know the fine-scale architecture of vision, and we need to place an enormous web of electrodes with exquisite precision. If we want our high bandwidth connection to be _in addition_ to what paths are already present in the brain, the problem becomes vastly more intractable. Just sticking a grid of high-bandwidth receivers into a brain certainly won’t do it. But suppose that the high-bandwidth grid were present while the brain structure was actually setting up, as the embryo develops. That suggests:

– Animal embryo experiments. I wouldn’t expect any IA success in the first years of such research, but giving developing brains access to complex simulated neural structures might be very interesting to the people who study how the embryonic brain develops. In the long run, such experiments might produce animals with additional sense paths and interesting intellectual abilities.

The problem is not simply that the Singularity represents the passing of humankind from center stage, but that it contradicts our most deeply held notions of being. I think a closer look at the notion of strong superhumanity can show why that is.

But in this brightest and kindest world, the philosophical problems themselves become intimidating. A mind that stays at the same capacity cannot live forever; after a few thousand years it would look more like a repeating tape loop than a person. (The most chilling picture I have seen of this is in [18].) To live indefinitely long, the mind itself must grow … and when it becomes great enough, and looks back … what fellow-feeling can it have with the soul that it was originally? Certainly the later being would be everything the original was, but so much vastly more. And so even for the individual, the Cairns-Smith or Lynn Margulis notion of new life growing incrementally out of the old must still be valid.

This “problem” about immortality comes up in much more direct ways. The notion of ego and self-awareness has been the bedrock of the hardheaded rationalism of the last few centuries. Yet now the notion of self-awareness is under attack from the Artificial Intelligence people (“self-awareness and other delusions”). Intelligence Amplification undercuts our concept of ego from another direction. The post-Singularity world will involve extremely high-bandwidth networking. A central feature of strongly superhuman entities will likely be their ability to communicate at variable bandwidths, including ones far higher than speech or written messages. What happens when pieces of ego can be copied and merged, when the size of a selfawareness can grow or shrink to fit the nature of the problems under consideration? These are essential features of strong superhumanity and the Singularity. Thinking about them, one begins to feel how essentially strange and different the Post-Human era will be — _no matter how cleverly and benignly it is brought to be_.

From one angle, the vision fits many of our happiest dreams: a time unending, where we can truly know one another and understand the deepest mysteries. From another angle, it’s a lot like the worst- case scenario I imagined earlier in this paper.

Which is the valid viewpoint? In fact, I think the new era is simply too different to fit into the classical frame of good and evil. That frame is based on the idea of isolated, immutable minds connected by tenuous, low-bandwith links. But the post-Singularity world _does_ fit with the larger tradition of change and cooperation that started long ago (perhaps even before the rise of biological life). I think there _are_ notions of ethics that would apply in such an era. Research into IA and high-bandwidth communications should improve this understanding. I see just the glimmerings of this now [32]. There is Good’s Meta-Golden Rule; perhaps there are rules for distinguishing self from others on the basis of bandwidth of connection. And while mind and self will be vastly more labile than in the past, much of what we value (knowledge, memory, thought) need never be lost. I think Freeman Dyson has it right when he says [9]: “God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension.”

[I wish to thank John Carroll of San Diego State University and Howard Davidson of Sun Microsystems for discussing the draft version of this paper with me.]

[2] Anderson, Poul, “Kings Who Die”, _If_, March 1962, p8-36. Reprinted in _Seven Conquests_, Poul Anderson, MacMillan Co., 1969.

[3] Asimov, Isaac, “Runaround”, _Astounding Science Fiction_, March 1942, p94. Reprinted in _Robot Visions_, Isaac Asimov, ROC, 1990. Asimov describes the development of his robotics stories in this book.

[4] Barrow, John D. and Frank J. Tipler, _The Anthropic Cosmological Principle_, Oxford University Press, 1986.

[5] Bear, Greg, “Blood Music”, _Analog Science Fiction-Science Fact_, June, 1983. Expanded into the novel _Blood Music_, Morrow, 1985.

[6] Cairns-Smith, A. G., _Seven Clues to the Origin of Life_, Cambridge University Press, 1985.

[7] Conrad, Michael _et al._, “Towards an Artificial Brain”, _BioSystems_, vol 23, pp175-218, 1989.

[8] Drexler, K. Eric, _Engines of Creation_, Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1986.

[9] Dyson, Freeman, _Infinite in All Directions_, Harper && Row, 1988.

[10] Dyson, Freeman, “Physics and Biology in an Open Universe”, _Review of Modern Physics_, vol 51, pp447-460, 1979.

[11] Good, I. J., “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine”, in _Advances in Computers_, vol 6, Franz L. Alt and Morris Rubinoff, eds, pp31-88, 1965, Academic Press.

[12] Good, I. J., [Help! I can’t find the source of Good’s Meta-Golden Rule, though I have the clear recollection of hearing about it sometime in the 1960s. Through the help of the net, I have found pointers to a number of related items. G. Harry Stine and Andrew Haley have written about metalaw as it might relate to extraterrestrials: G. Harry Stine, “How to Get along with Extraterrestrials … or Your Neighbor”, _Analog Science Fact- Science Fiction_, February, 1980, p39-47.] [13] Herbert, Frank, _Dune_, Berkley Books, 1985. However, this novel was serialized in _Analog Science Fiction-Science Fact_ in the 1960s.

[14] Kovacs, G. T. A. _et al._, “Regeneration Microelectrode Array for Peripheral Nerve Recording and Stimulation”, _IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering_, v 39, n 9, pp 893-902.

[15] Margulis, Lynn and Dorion Sagan, _Microcosmos, Four Billion Years of Evolution from Our Microbial Ancestors_, Summit Books, 1986.

[16] Minsky, Marvin, _Society of Mind_, Simon and Schuster, 1985.

[17] Moravec, Hans, _Mind Children_, Harvard University Press, 1988.

[18] Niven, Larry, “The Ethics of Madness”, _If_, April 1967, pp82-108. Reprinted in _Neutron Star_, Larry Niven, Ballantine Books, 1968.

[19] Penrose, Roger, _The Emperor’s New Mind_, Oxford University Press, 1989.

[20] Platt, Charles, Private Communication.

[21] Rasmussen, S. _et al._, “Computational Connectionism within Neurons: a Model of Cytoskeletal Automata Subserving Neural Networks”, in _Emergent Computation_, Stephanie Forrest, ed., pp428-449, MIT Press, 1991.

[22] Searle, John R., “Minds, Brains, and Programs”, in _The Behavioral and Brain Sciences_, vol 3, Cambridge University Press, 1980. The essay is reprinted in _The Mind’s I_, edited by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, Basic Books, 1981 (my source for this reference). This reprinting contains an excellent critique of the Searle essay.

[23] Sims, Karl, “Interactive Evolution of Dynamical Systems”, Thinking Machines Corporation, Technical Report Series (published in _Toward a Practice of Autonomous Systems: Proceedings of the First European Conference on Artificial Life_, Paris, MIT Press, December 1991.

[24] Stapledon, Olaf, _The Starmaker_, Berkley Books, 1961 (but from the date on forward, probably written before 1937).

[25] Stent, Gunther S., _The Coming of the Golden Age: A View of the End of Progress_, The Natural History Press, 1969.

[26] Swanwick Michael, _Vacuum Flowers_, serialized in _Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine_, December(?) 1986 – February 1987. Republished by Ace Books, 1988.

[27] Thearling, Kurt, “How We Will Build a Machine that Thinks”, a workshop at Thinking Machines Corporation, August 24-26, 1992. Personal Communication.

[28] Ulam, S., Tribute to John von Neumann, _Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society_, vol 64, nr 3, part 2, May 1958, pp1-49.

[29] Vinge, Vernor, “Bookworm, Run!”, _Analog_, March 1966, pp8-40. Reprinted in _True Names and Other Dangers_, Vernor Vinge, Baen Books, 1987.

[30] Vinge, Vernor, “True Names”, _Binary Star Number 5_, Dell, 1981. Reprinted in _True Names and Other Dangers_, Vernor Vinge, Baen Books, 1987.

[31] Vinge, Vernor, First Word, _Omni_, January 1983, p10.

[32] Vinge, Vernor, To Appear [ 🙂 ].

Local Vinge page. My argument against the incomprehensibility of the Singularity. Me.