Reporting Always

Writings from The New Yorker

Lillian Ross

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781501116025
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Ensayos en sociología

From the inimitable New Yorker journalist Lillian Ross—"a collection of her most luminous New Yorker pieces" ( Entertainment Weekly, grade: A). A staff writer for The New Yorker since 1945, Lillian Ross is one of the few journalists who worked for both the magazine's founding editor, Harold Ross, and its current editor, David Remnick. She "made journalistic history by pioneering the kind of novelistic nonfiction that inspired later work" ( The New York Times). R eporting Always is a collection of Ross's iconic New Yorker profiles and "Talk of the Town" pieces that spans forty years. "This glorious collection by a master of the form" (Susan Orlean) brings the reader into the hotel rooms of Ernest Hemingway, John Huston, and Charlie Chaplin; Robin Williams's living room and movie set; Harry Winston's office; the tennis court with John McEnroe; Ellen Barkin's New York City home, the crosstown bus with upper east side school children; and into the lives of other famous, and not so famous, individuals. "Millennials would do well to study Ross and to study her closely, " says Lena Dunham. Whether reading for pleasure or to learn about the craft, Reporting Always is a joy for readers of all ages.

IV

NEW YORKERS

Lillian and William Shawn on the streets of New York in the nineteen sixties.

From

El Único Matador

The best bullfighters in the world have come, traditionally, from Spain or Mexico. The old Spanish province of Andalusia has contributed more bulls and more bullfighters to the bullring than all the rest of Spain. Manolete, probably history’s top-ranking matador, who, at the age of thirty, was fatally gored in the summer of 1947, was an Andalusian. Carlos Arruza, who retired last year, at twenty-eight, with a two-million-dollar fortune and the reputation of fighting closer to the bull than any other matador had ever done, was born in Mexico, of Spanish-born parents. Belmonte, an Andalusian, and Joselito, a Spanish gypsy, were the leading figures in what is known in bullfight countries as the Golden Age of Bullfighting, which ended with Belmonte’s retirement to breed bulls, in 1921, a year after Joselito’s death in the arena. The only Mexican who ranked close to Belmonte and Joselito in their time was Rodolfo Gaona, an Indian, who, in 1925, retired a millionaire with large real-estate interests in Mexico City. Some years ago a Chinese bullfighter named Wong, who wore a natural pigtail, turned up in Mexico as El Torero Chino, and a Peruvian lady bullfighter, Conchita Cintrón, is active today. Only one citizen of the United States has ever been recognized as a full-fledged matador. He is Sidney Franklin, who was born and raised in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn.

Franklin, who is now forty-five, estimates that he has killed two thousand bulls so far. Last winter, in Mexico, he killed thirteen. He is planning to go to Spain this summer to kill as many bulls as he can get contracts to fight, although he is much older than the usual bullfighter is at his peak. “Age has nothing to do with art,” he says. “It’s all a matter of what’s in your mind.” He hopes someday to introduce bullfighting to this country, and, if he succeeds, expects it to become more popular than baseball. Ernest Hemingway, who became an authority on bullfighting, as well as on Franklin, while preparing to write Death in the Afternoon, maintains that to take to bullfighting, a country must have an interest in the breeding of fighting bulls and an interest in death, both of which Hemingway feels are lacking in the United States. “Death, shmeath, so long as I keep healthy,” Franklin says. When aficionados, or bullfight fans, charge that Americans born north of the border are incapable of the passion necessary for bullfighting, Franklin replies passionately that coldness in the presence of danger is the loftiest aspect of his art. “If you’ve got guts, you can do anything,” he says. “Anglo-Saxons can become the greatest bullfighters, the greatest ballet dancers, the greatest anything.” When, in 1929, Franklin made his Spanish début, in Seville, the aficionados were impressed by the coldness of his art. “Franklin is neither an improviser nor an accident nor a joker,” wrote the bullfight critic for La Unión, a Seville newspaper. “He is a born bullfighter, with plenty of ambition, which he has had since birth, and for the bulls he has an ultimate quality—serene valor. Coldness, borrowed from the English, if you please. . . . He parries and holds back with a serene magnificence that grandly masks the danger, and he doesn’t lose his head before the fierce onslaughts of the enemy.” “Franklin fought as though born in Spain; the others fought as though born in Chicago,” another critic observed a year later, in comparing Franklin’s manner of dispatching two bulls with the work of the Spanish matadors who appeared on the same bill in a Madrid bullring. One day early in his career, Franklin killed the two bulls that had been allotted to him, then, taking the place of two other matadors, who had been gored, killed four more. This set off such an emotional chain reaction in the ring that another bullfighter dropped dead of excitement. Today, many aficionados, both Spanish and Mexican, disparage Franklin’s artistry. “Manolete made you feel inside like crying, but Franklin does not engrave anything on your soul,” a Spanish aficionado of thirty years’ standing complained not long ago. “Franklin has no class,” another Spaniard has said. “He is to a matador of Spanish blood what a Mexican baseball player is to Ba-bee Ruth.” “I am A Number One,” Franklin says. “I am the best in the business, bar none.”

Franklin was nineteen when he saw his first bullfight. He was in Mexico, having recently run away from home after a quarrel with his father. As he recalls this particular bullfight, he was bored. In Brooklyn, he had belonged, as a charter member, to the Eagle’s Aunt Jean’s Humane Club and to the old New York Globe’s Bedtime Stories Club, which devoted itself to the glorification of Peter Rabbit. “At that time, the life to me of both man and beast was the most precious thing on this planet,” he says. “I failed to grasp the point.” The following year, he fought his first bull—a twelve-hundred-pound, four-year-old beast with horns a foot and a half long—and was on his way to becoming a professional. In the quarter of a century since then, Franklin has come to feel that the act of dominating and killing a bull is the most important and satisfying act a human being can perform. “It gives me a feeling of sensual well-being,” he has said. “It’s so deep it catches my breath. It fills me so completely I tingle all over. It’s something I want to do morning, noon, and night. It’s something food can’t give me. It’s something rest can’t give me. It’s something money can’t buy.” He is certain that bullfighting is the noblest and most rewarding of all pursuits. He often delivers eloquent discourses on his art to men who are more interested in power, money, love, sex, marriage, dollar diplomacy, atomic energy, animal breeding, religion, Marxism, capitalism, or the Marshall Plan. When his listener has been reduced to acquiescence, or at least bewilderment, Franklin will smile tolerantly and give him a pat on the back. “It’s all a matter of first thing first,” he will say. “I was destined to taste the first, and the best, on the list of walks of life.” The triumph of man over bull is not just the first walk on Franklin’s own list; it is the only one. There are no other walks to clutter him up. “I was destined to shine,” he adds. “It was a matter of noblesse oblige.”

The expression “noblesse oblige” is one Franklin is fond of using to describe his attitude toward most of his activities in and out of the bullring, including the giving of advice to people. He is an unbridled advice giver. He likes to counsel friends, acquaintances, and even strangers to live in a sensible, homespun, conventional, well-tested manner, in line with the principles of saving nine by a stitch in time, of finding life great if one does not weaken, of gathering moss by not rolling, of trying and trying again if success is slow in arriving, and of distinguishing between what is gold and what merely glitters. He is convinced that he thought up all these adages himself. In order to show how seriously he takes them, he often pitches in and helps a friend follow them. He takes credit for having helped at least a half-dozen other bullfighters make hay while the sun shone; for having proved to habitués of saloons and nightclubs that there is no place like home; for having taught a number of ladies how to drive automobiles, after telling them emphatically that anything a man can do, a woman can do; for having encouraged young lovers to get married, because the longer they waited, the more difficult their adjustment to each other would be; and for having persuaded couples to have babies while they were still young, so that they might be pals with their children while they were growing up. “I was destined to lead,” Franklin states. “It was always noblesse oblige with me.” Some Americans who have watched Franklin dispose of bulls on hot Sunday afternoons in Spain believe that he is right. “Sidney is part of a race of strange, fated men,” says Gerald Murphy, head of Mark Cross and a lover of the arts. Franklin has a special category of advice for himself. “I never let myself get obese or slow,” he says. “I make it a point never to imbibe before a fight. I never take more than a snifter, even when socializing with the select of all the professions. I am always able to explain to myself the whys and wherefores. I believe in earning a penny by saving it. By following the straight and narrow path, I became the toast of two continents. My horizon is my own creation.”

• • •

Franklin, who has never married, is tall—five feet, eleven and a half inches—thin, fair-skinned, and bald except for a few wavy bits of sandy-colored hair at the base of his skull. The backs of his hands and the top of his head are spotted with large tan freckles. His eyebrows are heavy and the color of straw. His ears are long. His eyes are brown, narrow, and lacking in depth, and there are a good many lines around them. There is a small scar at the tip of his nose. His build is considered good for bullfighting, because a tall bullfighter can more easily reach over a bull’s horns with his sword for the kill. Franklin’s only physical handicap is his posterior, which sticks out. “Sidney has no grace because he has a terrific behind,” Hemingway says. “I used to make him do special exercises to reduce his behind.” When Franklin walks down a street, he seems to dance along on his toes, and he has a harsh, fast way of talking. He sounds like a boxing promoter or a cop, but he has many of the gestures and mannerisms of the Spanish bullfighter. “Americans are taught to speak with their mouths,” he likes to say. “We speak with our bodies.” When the parade preceding the bullfight comes to a halt, he stands, as do the Mexicans and Spaniards, with the waist pushed forward and the shoulders back. When he becomes angry, he rages, but he can transform himself in a moment into a jolly companion again. In the company of other bullfighters or of aficionados, he glows and bubbles. Last winter, at a hotel in Acapulco, he discovered that the headwaiter, D’Amaso Lopez, had been a matador in Seville between 1905 and 1910. “Ah, Maestro!” cried Franklin, embracing Lopez, who grabbed a tablecloth and started doing verónicas. “He is overjoyed to see me,” Franklin told his host at dinner. “I’m a kindred spirit.” At parties, he likes to replace small talk or other pastimes with parlor bullfighting, using a guest as the bull. (Rita Hayworth is considered by some experts to make his best bull.) Claude Bowers, former United States ambassador to Spain, used to invite Franklin to his soirées in Madrid. “Sidney loved to perform,” an embassy man who was usually Franklin’s onrushing bull has said. “He’d give the most fascinating running commentary as he demonstrated with the cape, and then he’d spend hours answering the silliest questions, as long as they were about bullfighting. He was like a preacher spreading the gospel.”

Franklin gets along well with Mexicans and Spaniards. “On the streets of Seville, everybody talks to him,” a friend who has seen a good deal of him there says. “He knows all the taxi drivers and lottery vendors, and even the mayor bows to him.” Franklin claims that he has made himself over into an entirely Spanish bullfighter. “I know Spain like I know the palm of my hand,” he says. “I happen to be much more lucid in Spanish than in English. I even think in Spanish.” Franklin’s lucidity in Spanish has been a help to other Americans. Rex Smith, former chief of the Associated Press bureau in Madrid, occasionally used him as a reporter. During a rebellion in 1932, he commissioned Franklin to look into a riot near his office. “Suddenly, I heard a great hullabaloo outside my window,” Smith says in describing the incident. “I looked out, and there was Sidney telling the crowd, in Spanish, where to get off.” “Sidney is fabulous on language,” Hemingway has said. “He speaks Spanish so grammatically good and so classically perfect and so complete, with all the slang and damn accents and twenty-seven dialects, nobody would believe he is an American. He is as good in Spanish as T. E. Lawrence was in Arabic.” Franklin speaks Castilian, caló (or gypsy talk), and Andalusian. The favorite conversational medium of bullfighters in Spain is a mixture of caló and Andalusian. Instead of saying “nada” for “nothing” to other bullfighters, he says “na’, na’, na’,” and he says “leña,” which is bullfight slang, instead of the classical “cuerno,” in talking of an especially large horn of a bull. In conversing with a lisping Spanish duke, Franklin assumes a lisp that is far better than his companion’s, and he is equally at home in the earthy language of the cafés frequented by bullfighters. The Spanish maintain that Franklin never makes a mistake in their tongue. One day, he went sailing in a two-masted schooner. A Spanish companion called a sail yard a palo. “You ought to know better than that,” Franklin told him, and went on to explain that the sail yard he had spoken of was a verga, that palo meant mast, and that there were three terms for mast—one used by fishermen, another by yachtsmen, and the third by landlubbers.

When Franklin first went to Mexico, in 1922, he did not know any Spanish. A few years later, while he was training for bullfighting on a ranch north of Mexico City, he started a class in reading and writing for forty illiterate peons, of all ages. After three months, sixteen of Franklin’s pupils could read and write. “They idolized me for it,” he says. In any restaurant—even a Schrafft’s, back home—he follows the Spanish custom of calling a waiter by saying “Psst!” or clapping the hands. His Christmas cards say, “Feliz Navidad y Próspero Año Nuevo.” Conversation with bulls being customary during a fight, he speaks to them in Spanish. “Toma, toro! Toma, toro!” he says, when urging a bull to charge. “Ah-ah, toro! Ah-ah-ah, toro!” he mutters, telling a bull to come closer.

In putting on his coat, Franklin handles it as though it were a bullfighter’s cape, and his entire wardrobe is designed to express his idea of a bullfighter’s personality. “Sidney always took a long time to dress in the morning,” says Hemingway, who often sleeps in his underwear and takes a half minute to put on his trousers and shirt. “I always had to wait for him. I don’t like a man who takes a long time to dress in the morning.” Most of Franklin’s suits were tailored in Seville. “Genuine English stuff—nothing but the best,” he tells people. His wardrobe includes a transparent white raincoat, several turtleneck sweaters, some Basque berets, a number of sombreros, and a purple gabardine jacket without lapels. His bullfighting costumes are more elegant and more expensive than those of any other matador in the business. He has three wigs—two parted on the left side, one parted on the right—which are the envy of bald bullfighters who have never been to Hollywood or heard of Max Factor. A bullfighter’s looks have a lot to do with his popularity, especially in Mexico, where a bald bullfighter is not esteemed. A Spanish matador named Cayetano Ordóñez, professionally called Niño de la Palma, who was the prototype of Hemingway’s young bullfighter in The Sun Also Rises, lost a good part of his Mexican public when he lost his hair. In 1927, when he appeared in Mexico City and dedicated one of the bulls he was about to kill to Charles A. Lindbergh, he was young, slender, and graceful, with dark, curly hair. “An Adonis,” Franklin says. “Niño had a marvelous figure. All the sexes were wild about him.” Eight years later, Niño, who had been fighting in Spain, returned to Mexico heavier and partially bald. The moment he took off his matador’s hat in the ring, the ladies in the audience transferred their affections to a slimmer and handsomer matador, and the men turned to the bulls. One day, Franklin showed his wigs to Niño. “Poor Niño was flabbergasted,” says a witness. “He put on a wig and stood in front of the mirror for an hour, tears in his eyes. My God, what a scene when Sidney tried to take the wig away from him!” Franklin used to wear his wigs whenever he appeared in public, but lately he has worn them only in the bullring, at the theatre, and when having his picture taken. He says that someday, if the action in the ring gets dull, he is going to hang his wig on the horn of a bull.

In accordance with his belief in noblesse oblige, Franklin feels that he can afford to be generous toward his fellow man. “Sidney doesn’t envy his neighbors a thing,” says a friend. “He is the extreme of what most men like to think of themselves, so much so that he never thinks about it. He doesn’t want things. He thinks he has everything.” Although Franklin does not carry noblesse oblige so far as to forgive enemies, he is tolerant of those whose friendship for him has cooled. He has rarely seen Hemingway, whom he had come to know in 1929, since leaving him in Madrid in 1937, in the middle of the civil war. Franklin had been doing odd jobs for Hemingw...