The World Is My Home: A Memoir

by James A. Michener

  They were a splendid pair, the quiet, dignified Rolleri, beloved by matadors who were so often rescued from perilous situations by his bravery and skill, and Valencia the comic scarecrow, the amusing fellow with the delicate hands and wrists. We traveled together into many parts of Mexico, following the bulls, but on Sunday night at seven we tried always to be in a famous restaurant in Mexico City, El Tupinambo, where the bullfight fraternity assembled. There we listened to the gossip, exaggerated our escapades out in the country, and came to know the famous matadors of Mexico and those visiting from Spain. Rolleri and Valencia would have small glasses of the wine that toreros favored, while I would have a cup of the thick bitter chocolate with the smoky taste that I liked so much.

  They were wonderful days, days when I learned about the art of bullfighting, for each morning during the week when we were not on the road I reported to the old red-walled bullring in the heart of Mexico City and there watched as bullfighters young and old went through their paces. I came to know a score of fighters, especially the young men on their way up. One of the most congenial was a young fellow whom we took out in the country twice for beginning fights. He called himself Cañito, Little Sugarcane, and he astounded me because he seemed totally without fear. In his earliest fights he displayed such enormous courage and more than adequate skill that I predicted he would one day be a luminary. He did not disappoint, for he became more than a star, but his lack of fear destroyed him; fighting a dangerous bull in 1960 with a recklessness that older matadors would have avoided, he was so badly gored that he lost a leg, and in later years I saw him hobbling about on crutches.

  Quite different was another rising star, Luis Procuna. A polished fighter with a flair for the dramatic, he could be either very good or very bad. Long after I knew him briefly, he was caught by the camera in what is probably the finest bullfighting photograph of recent decades. Standing erect, with feet touching heel to toe and arms in perfect alignment, he brings an enormous bull right to his chest, but what makes the shot unforgettable is that his handsome face is twisted with an arrogant, triumphant sneer, tongue jammed into his right cheek, as if issuing a challenge to all watchers: ‘O.K. layman. Try this one!’ He went on to become one of the best.

  Bullfighting introduced me to two men I will never forget. Curro Romero was a slim young man with one of those perfect faces that might have been carved from Grecian marble. In the ring he was a poet; sensible men went into ecstasy when he stood perilously close to some huge bull and unfurled a series of delicately linked passes. Orson Welles and Kenneth Tynan were great fans of his, and each told me that to see Curro on a good day was to see greatness in exquisite motion. Alas, I never saw him on a good day, even though I must have seen him fight forty times. Each time I saw him fight was a disaster, a calamity of such magnitude that had anyone but the gracious Curro suffered it, his career would have ended. With what looked like sheer cowardice he would refuse to give honest fight to even the mildest animal. Otherwise rational men would pay huge sums to see him fight in the vain hope that this time he might enact one of his masterpieces; but when he refused to try, they would riot, cursing him and throwing all sorts of objects at him. Long ago I wrote contemptuously of his misbehavior and in the decades that followed I received many letters saying simply: ‘Yesterday I saw your Curro Romero in Seville and he was superb’ or more often ‘Yesterday I went to see your boy Curro and the riot became so bad they had to call out extra police. Everything you said was true.’

  Just last year, when Curro must have been in his mid-sixties, at least eight correspondents airmailed me copies of full-page articles with striking photographs of what was termed ‘Curro’s grandest bronca [riot].’ In a series of six or eight photographs it showed him running in craven fear from his bull and calling down upon himself a blizzard of seat cushions, which darkened the arena. Then police moved in, as always, to try to rush him out of the ring under a protective covering of their capes, but an enraged spectator who had paid good money to see this fraudulent affair, broke through the police, rushed up to Curro, and hit him with such a fearful blow that he fell into the dust as he appealed pitifully for help. The last photograph showed his undignified rump as he fled under the capes. Next year, I suppose, other tourists who remember what I wrote will send me new photographs of his latest disaster. How he can still lure people into the arena at those prices remains a mystery, but as Orson Welles said: ‘Once you see him on a good day, you forget about all the others.’

  It was my good fortune, in those years when I was following the bulls, to know rather well a gargantuan American who was an even more enthusiastic aficionado than I. He was Kenneth Vanderford, from some small town in Indiana. He had worked for many years with the Creole Oil Company in Venezuela, where he persuaded the management to pay him a good wage while he conducted what he called ‘an intellectual study to prove to the Venezolanos that American big business was not heartless.’ His study? ‘With what names do Venezuelan parents most often christen their children?’ His finding after two years of extensive and expensive travel: ‘Maria for the girls, Juan for the boys.’ I don’t see how anyone could dislike a man so ingenious, and I prized him as a friend.

  He was notorious in Spain because, with a full beard carefully trimmed, he looked exactly like Ernest Hemingway. In fact, even those of us who knew him well were sometimes either startled or confused because he was Hemingway. I think he enjoyed playing the role, for never did I hear him correct anyone who accosted him thinking that he was the famous writer, but he did make one attempt to limit the deception: He carried two sets of cards that he handed out to Hemingway admirers who asked for his autograph. One version was in Spanish, the other in English, and if he saw clearly that you were Spanish, you got the English card, and vice versa. The English version read:

  If I did not wear this beard, you

  would not think that I was

  and while the lover of literature watched he would boldly sign ‘Ernest Hemingway.’ By the time the happy recipient found someone to translate the message into his own language, Vanderford would be far away.

  He was a veritable encyclopedia of bullfighting, the confidant of many of the matadors who tolerated his crazy masquerade, and a fine scholar of Spanish history. As he approached sixty with no foothold in America and no Social Security, I helped him land a good job teaching Spanish at Ripon University in Wisconsin, where he appeared on campus in a flowing Spanish cape lined in red. I was told by one of his enthusiastic students: ‘He still looks like Hemingway and that perplexes a lot of people who have vaguely heard that Ernest shot himself years ago.’

  I have never been able to reconcile my love for animals and my appreciation of the bullfight and have succeeded in keeping the conflicting emotions involving these contradictory attitudes compartmentalized. I am now prepared to believe avid hunters when they tell me: ‘But I cherish the animals I hunt,’ and I have seen that such men often go to great lengths to protect the very animals they chase and provide them with breeding and ranging areas, often at considerable expense. I am sure that Hemingway, who loved both bullfighting and the hunt for big African animals, would have been among the first to provide money for the welfare of animals. In my own case, I can only ascribe my conflicting attitudes to the innate perversity of man and volunteer no other explanation.

  My abiding interest in sports, which helped save me as a teenager, led to one friendship that provided in American baseball the equivalent of what I found in Spanish bullfighting in the controlled dignity of Domingo Ortega, who became a role model for me.

  Robin Roberts, of the hapless Philadelphia Phillies, was a big, uncomplicated chunk of All-American boy, witty, handsome, valiant through the last out in the final inning. He was a fastball pitcher and one of the best. Standing tall and robust on the mound, he delivered the ball with such speed that it whizzed right past the luckless batters who faced him. With a traditional last-place team he won an amazing number of games, so that he was considered, for so
me years, one of the two or three best pitchers in baseball.

  It was not unusual for Robin with his superb speed to allow the opposing team only one run, but his inept Phillies would get him no runs whatever, so he would lose 1–0 or 2–1 or 3–2. Nevertheless, back he would come in due rotation, only to lose once more. When he won eighteen or twenty games a season, he really won them.

  Robin had such a fastball, with not much curve, that opposing batters learned: ‘With Roberts, stand in there and swing. He’s a gentleman. He’ll never dust you off. If you miss, you strike out. But if you’re lucky enough to connect, you have yourself a home run because when the ball comes in so fast, it also goes out fast, right over the wall.’

  He threw a shocking number of home-run balls, especially in the late innings, giving the other team the one or two runs they needed to defeat him. My lasting memory of Robin is of him standing out there on the mound, score tied 1–1 in the eighth, and him smoked in that high fast one, and wham! Out of the park and another 2–1 loss. I have often thought of my own behavior in metaphorical terms relating to Roberts’s pitching experience. I stay in the game until the last possible moment. I do not try to mix up my pitches, but I am always willing to slam in that high, fastball, and if I do not get it past the batter, out of the park it goes. But I am still there, I am still throwing, always ready to try my luck on getting the next ball past that pesky batter. And if I fail this time, who gives a damn? We play again on Thursday.

  When Roberts’s honorable career ended—‘He could of won thirty more games if he’d a thrown at the batter’s head, but not Robin. He let them dig in and swing on that high fast one’—I became so outraged when he was passed over for entry into baseball’s Hall of Fame that I started a one-man crusade to get him elected. I politicked as best I could; I wrote an ill-advised article for The New York Times in which I pointed out how unfair it was to have elected Whitey Ford and rejected Robin Roberts when Ford had far fewer victories, even though he had been backed up by one of the heaviest hitting teams in the majors, while Roberts had to struggle along with one of the weakest. The unfairness was palpable, and I expected Robin to be swept in by a huge margin that year. But I had overlooked the fact that Whitey Ford was a high-living cult hero, especially among the many powerful sportswriters in New York, while Roberts, as one man told me, ‘was nothing but a big happy farm boy from the boonies.’ Also, the writers did not like my intruding on their turf, and several told me so. Thus, instead of helping my friend gain election to the Hall of Fame, I was a principal cause of his being rejected, and I was disconsolate. But in the ensuing year several writers confided in me that my article had been unusually relevant and that Roberts had been unfairly denied. At the next vote, with me keeping my mouth shut, he was swept in, and I do believe I was happier about it than he was.

  I also formed friendships with people in music whose tenacity I admired, most notably André Kostelanetz, an elfin Russian and a wizard with the baton, whom I met in the Pacific and with whom I often discussed music as we sat before the fire at his place or mine. One of the more hilarious evenings of my life resulted from his request for assistance: ‘The technical situation is this, James. I want to cut a record of my favorite encores, but if I call an extra practice to rehearse them, the cost will be terrific. However, if we can play the seven encores after the concert on Saturday night, legitimately, then that practice time is paid for by the organization sponsoring the concert. Can you raise enough applause to keep us onstage for seven encores?’ I said I’d try.

  That night my wife and I had a front box overlooking not only the stage but also the audience. André kept the main concert just a mite short, which left the audience hungry for more, and they were so enthusiastic that for the first three encores there was no need for a claque. But the ending of Pachelbel’s Kanon was so downbeat that some listeners began to leave; I started a rather loud clapping, which others picked up, and the exodus stopped.

  Now André played his transcription of an admirable but short Chopin number, and I was able to keep the enthusiasm high. But when he tried as his fifth encore one of his and my great favorites, Samuel Barber’s ‘Adagio for Strings,’ the critical moment came, for there was a substantial movement toward the exists. I halted this with a frenzied burst of clapping interspersed with shouts of ‘More, more!’ which others took up, and we were saved.

  He played a real barn-burner for his sixth encore, but it must have been evident to any careful observer that the concert was over. However, at a signal from André I burst forth with my final effort, shouting at the top of my voice while I waved my arms: ‘Bis! Bis!’ This so surprised members of the audience that they stopped to stare at me and, thank heaven, some took up this French cry (meaning ‘Again’) and André was able to launch into his seventh encore. It was short, noisy and played by an orchestra that was nearly exhausted. When my wife and I joined André in the Green Room later, certain friends waiting there gushed: ‘We’ve never heard such an ovation. Six encores!’ and he said modestly: ‘Seven.’

  When South Pacific became the reigning hit on Broadway, tickets became so precious that I could not afford to see the musical after opening night, but this was no loss because I was free to enter the stage door of the Majestic Theater and watch the play from backstage, catching as much of the action as could be seen from the wings. It was thrilling to watch the actors, first as ordinary people backstage in costumes who were clearing their throats and blowing their noses, and then as make-believe characters onstage in the glare of thirty spotlights. The transformation was magical, and I never tired of seeing how personalities changed in that transition.

  This opportunity to watch a theater at work allowed me to study two radically different approaches to art. I had assumed that when I was able, in the darkness, to talk with my friend Ezio Pinza we would resume our discussion of opera, but that did not happen ever again. Even though we spoke on many nights, when he learned that I was interested in sports he told me of the years when he was a professional bicyclist in Italy, and I could never hear enough of those rowdy experiences. As I listened I discovered in him an attitude toward art that not only amazed me but also gave me a model for my own later behavior.

  While onstage he was involved in a dramatic situation: his role was that of a middle-aged French expatriate in love with an American nurse considerably younger than himself and, to complicate matters, he has two half-caste children by a Polynesian wife now dead. Well, prior to his going onstage he would be telling me, for example, about a bicycle race in Italy when the stage manager would warn: ‘Three minutes, Mr. Pinza.’ And he would go on talking. ‘Two minutes, Mr. Pinza!’ and we would be cycling somewhere near Verona. ‘One minute, Mr. Pinza,’ and I would watch him drop his bicycle, gear up his emotions, and stride onstage exactly on cue and totally prepared for the scene. But when he walked offstage he would resume his story with every bit of his original enthusiasm.

  By contrast his co-star, Mary Martin—the young woman from Texas who had conquered Broadway in a series of small roles that by the force of her personality and artistry she had enlarged into starring parts—spent the moments before going onstage preparing herself emotionally to become the character she would be portraying. After a heartrending scene she would come off the stage so limp and with her eyes so filled with tears that she could not even see me or recognize me if she did. With her there was no quick resumption of her own life; even offstage she was still in the South Pacific and the nurse’s sorrow was as real to her as if she herself were Nellie Forbush.

  Two great artists, two radically different personalities, two attitudes toward art that were worlds apart, but each appropriate to the person in question. They behaved in characteristic fashion on the weekend when the musical had a full house on Friday night, at the Saturday matinee and on Saturday night, with a crucial national television show scheduled for Sunday. South Pacific was already a success in New York, but the television presentation would determine how the nation at large
was going to judge it, and, of course, both Pinza and Martin were tense with the prospect of being under the national spotlight.

  Pinza, who had perhaps the more to lose, called in sick on Friday, allowing his understudy to sing the role. He did the same on Saturday afternoon and again on Saturday night, resting his voice and his vitality for the big test. Miss Martin, who never in the long run of the musical missed a performance, had to work extra hard at the three performances that lacked Pinza. The result? At the Sunday telecast she was visibly tired and vocally somewhat off, while Pinza, rested and strong as a lion, was so magnetic and magnificent in voice that he enchanted the nation. He was never confused about his priorities.

  I tried to copy each of these artists. In my personal life I tried to keep myself low-key and detached like Pinza backstage, but in my artistic life I emulated the tremendous personal involvement of Mary Martin when she was onstage, and I found that this somewhat arbitrary and unnatural combination suited me perfectly.

  Wherever I went in these exciting years of extended travel I studied people, listened to their stories, weighed the honesty of their statements and always judged myself in terms of their achievements. Could I have been as brave as the downed pilot who made his way by night from behind enemy lines in Korea? Could I ever lead a group of people the way the nomad chieftain did when he took his people across the wastelands of Afghanistan? Would I have sacrificed as much as the mother in Djakarta did to keep her five children with her? And suppose I had been born with two clubfeet like Old Morag and they had gone untreated?