The 60s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  A little after eight, I joined Dr. Urey and his wife, a gray-haired lady in a blue dress, who had already turned on their television set and were waiting for Neil Armstrong to come out of the LM. Mrs. Urey set a bowl of green grapes on the table in front of the television set, and explained quickly that they came from Arizona, not California. Dr. Urey, who has had a number of ideas about what the moon is like, was obviously settling back to enjoy the evening; he said that he wasn’t particularly anxious about any of his theories, because he had good reasons for them even if they should prove wrong. But he added that he hoped they were right. Dr. Urey has been one of the impact selenologists, who believe in a relatively cold moon, though one that may have had a certain amount of volcanic activity, and recently he has inclined toward the view that the flat maria such as the one the astronauts were on were sediments deposited by oceans long since dried up. Vulcanists, on the other hand, have believed that the same ground was made up of lava or ash flows. The astronauts lowered the pressure inside the LM, and as the television camera was turned on and Armstrong came down the ladder and stepped onto the moon, Dr. Urey sat forward in his chair and remained absolutely still. He seemed pleased when Armstrong described the moon’s surface as primarily gray (a color Dr. Urey had opted for against brown), covered with fine particles, and sticky. Stickiness, he said in a hurried aside, was a characteristic of small particles in vacuums. Moments later, however, when Armstrong, gathering the contingency sample, said that he saw vesiculations—bubbles of a sort—in some rocks, Dr. Urey seemed downcast; vesiculations, he explained, are characteristic of pumice, and pumice is a lava—a relatively frothy one. When Colonel Aldrin came out of the LM and Armstrong took the television camera some thirty feet away in order to record a panoramic view of the countryside, Dr. Urey said that it was beautiful in the manner of an Arctic wasteland, and, indeed, the two astronauts, in their heavy suits, did look like old photographs of Admiral Peary at the North Pole. They moved as though the ground were slippery (as it would be at the Pole)—a characteristic that Dr. Urey and others had thought likely. In fact, except for the vesiculations, nothing surprised Dr. Urey. A minute later, he expressed surprise over a report of Armstrong’s that many of the rocks littering the ground were standing on edge. This bothered Dr. Urey, because rocks that had been ejected from craters during their formation shouldn’t be standing up on the surface but should be buried beneath it. He wondered aloud whether this phenomenon might not suggest some sort of erosion that had removed the fine particles from around the rocks. Dr. Urey quite evidently couldn’t wait to get his hands on some of those rocks, and he expressed a particular desire for a large angular one in the foreground of the television screen, which he hoped the astronauts would bring back. (They didn’t.) As Armstrong and Aldrin erected the American flag, jumped around to test their mobility, and photographed each other, Dr. Urey said impatiently, “Oh, hurry up and get the samples!” Shortly afterward, Armstrong, who had got back to business (as Dr. Urey saw it) and was again reporting on the ground beneath his feet, remarked that the rocks he had first described as vesiculated no longer appeared that way. Dr. Urey said almost gleefully, “No pumice! The astronauts haven’t seen pumice after all! The astronauts know very well what pumice looks like, yet they’re not reporting any pumice!” He beamed at Armstrong, who was now saying that he thought the little holes in the rocks might have been made by impacting micrometeorites. As time was running out and the astronauts were behind schedule, Dr. Urey began to worry that they wouldn’t have time to take any underground core samples. He was anxious about the core samples because if there had once been oceans on the moon, they might show layers of sediment. As the astronauts were hurrying to pack up and get back into the LM, Dr. Urey said, “Don’t forget Geiss’s experiment!” (Dr. Johannes Geiss, whose solar-wind experiment with a silvery foil the astronauts were to bring back with them, was once a post-doctoral fellow of Dr. Urey’s, and an old friend.) Dr. Urey sat on the edge of his chair during the last-minute scramble on the moon, though he leaned back again in evident dismay when Armstrong, who was gathering a final batch of rocks, suddenly used the word “vesiculation” again. Dr. Urey said that he was quite confused now about whether Armstrong had really seen vesiculations. “I’m inclined to think that he was in a hurry the two times he used the word,” he said. “The time he corrected himself was probably his more considered opinion.” After the astronauts were safely back in the LM, Dr. Urey—clearly impressed with the operation—said everything had gone so smoothly and predictably that he didn’t know much more about the moon than he had known before. “When they come back with the samples, we’ll have some real answers,” he said.

  Donald Stewart and Whitney Balliett

  JUNE 4, 1960 (“THE TRUE ESSENCE”)

  FOR THE PAST six months, the built-in seismographs with which jazz admirers record every move of their idols have been writing right off the page, short-circuiting, or simply going dead. The cause of this impressive disturbance, which has been equalled in jazz only by the Louis Armstrong eruption in the early twenties, the Benny Goodman explosion in the late thirties, and the Charlie Parker–Dizzy Gillespie–Thelonious Monk upheaval in the mid-forties, is an unassuming and hitherto unknown thirty-year-old alto saxophonist from Fort Worth named Ornette Coleman, whose quartet has been performing off and on since last November before bulging houses at the Five Spot, a small Third Avenue–type bar on Cooper Square. (Suffice it to say that Coleman’s playing, which is largely indescribable, involves a unique form of free improvisation, set forth in a flow of sounds that may resemble an automotive disorder in one measure and pure bird song in the next.) These houses have included every jazz critic in town; celebrated jazz musicians, like Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus, Percy Heath, and Lionel Hampton, all of whom have become so exercised by Coleman that they have asked, and been granted, permission to sit in with his quartet; and a host of the merely curious, among them Leonard Bernstein, Faye Emerson, Jule Styne, the Ambassador to the United Nations from Ghana, Marc Blitzstein, Sam Levenson, Virgil Thomson, Betty Comden, and the thirty-four members of the senior class of the Stockbridge School, who made a pilgrimage to the Five Spot all the way from Massachusetts. In an effort to find out a little more about this Wizard of Oz, we arranged to have dinner with Coleman one evening last week at a restaurant on West Eleventh Street. He arrived a moment or two after we did, carrying a compact instrument case, a large navel orange, and a tightly furled umbrella, which swung easily from his left arm. A slim, handsome colored man of medium height, dressed in an impeccable dark-green suit and a black tie, and wearing a beard, Coleman checked his case and umbrella, placed the orange carefully beside his butter plate, shook hands in the self-deprecating way that is often affected by the great, sat down opposite us, and, without hesitation, began a concentrated, non-stop, from-the-inside-looking-out monologue that had a lot in common with one of his instrumental solos: “I’m not very hungry. I just ate a little while ago, but I’ll have a small Salisbury steak and a salad, maybe with some Thousand Island dressing. I haven’t heard one person yet who can explain what I’m doing. People laugh at me, shake their heads. But I won’t let any of that affect me. There’s but one thing you can do—play the true essence of yourself. Talent and appearances have nothing to do with each other. Look at van Gogh. He cut off his ear; it didn’t hurt his talent. Most people fail to hear what is being played at the moment it is played. They pay more attention to behavior and what they see than to what is happening musically. I know exactly what I’m doing. I’m beginning where Charlie Parker stopped. Parker’s melodic lines were placed across ordinary chord progressions. My melodic approach is based on phrasing, and my phrasing is an extension of how I hear the intervals and pitch of the tunes I play. There is no end to pitch. You can play flat in tune and sharp in tune. It’s a question of vibration. My phrasing is spontaneous, not a style. A style happens when your phrasing hardens. Jazz music is the only music in which the same note can be played night after n
ight but differently each time. It’s the hidden things, the subconscious that lies in the body and lets you know: you feel this, you play this. Do you understand that? After all, music is harmless. It all depends on which way a person is using it. I give my musicians one of my tunes and tell them, ‘You play that your way. You add to it what you can. Enlarge it. Extend it.’ But this isn’t easy, I know. The other night, at a rehearsal for a concert I played in of Gunther Schuller’s music at the Circle in the Square, Schuller made me play a little four-measure thing he’d written six or seven times before I got it right. I could read it, see the notes on the paper. But I heard those notes in my head, heard their pitch, and what I heard was different from what Schuller heard. Then I got it right. I got it his way. It was as simple as that.”

  Coleman paused abruptly, picked up the orange, hefted it, and rolled it around reflectively in his hands. We asked him to tell us about his early career. “I started playing the alto when I was about fourteen,” he said, replacing the orange and attacking his Salisbury steak. “My family couldn’t afford to give me lessons, so I bought an instruction book and taught myself, but I taught myself wrong. I thought the low C on my horn was the A in the book, and when I joined a church band the leader said, ‘Look at this boy. Playing the instrument wrong for two years. He’ll never be a saxophone player.’ You can’t live down your mistakes, but if you keep thinking about them you can’t emerge from them, either. I hooked up with a carnival band, then a rhythm-and-blues group, which stranded me in California in 1950. They kept telling me in that band I was doing this wrong, doing that wrong. In the next six, seven years, I travelled back and forth between Fort Worth and California, playing once in a while but doing day work mostly—stockboy, houseboy, freight-elevator operator. By 1957, I had got very depressed in California, and I wired my ma would she send me a bus ticket home, and on the day the ticket arrived, Les Koenig, of Contemporary Records, asked me to audition some of my tunes for him. I did, and he gave me my first record session. I began playing around California, and in 1959 John Lewis heard me in Frisco and asked me to come to the School of Jazz, at Lenox, Massachusetts, that summer, and after that, since I felt I’d never got a chance to exist properly, to know what I truly am, I migrated to New York. Now I’m set. Or, anyway, set to be set. What I’d like most now is a vacation, but I’ve got three musicians depending on me. I’m tired. Six hours a night, six nights a week. Sometimes I go to the club and I can’t understand what I feel. ‘Am I here? How will I make it through tonight?’ I say to myself. I’d like to play a couple of nights a week is all. I’d have more to say. I’d get closer to harnessing my feelings, to getting down to the true essence. Well, it’s time to work.”

  Coleman yawned, picked up his orange, and tossed it into the air.

  “What are you going to do with that orange?” we asked.

  “Why, eat it, man,” he said, laughing. “What else? An orange is very pleasant two o’clock in the morning.”

  A. J. Liebling

  MARCH 3, 1962 (FROM “POET AND PEDAGOGUE”)

  WHEN FLOYD PATTERSON regained the world heavyweight championship by knocking out Ingemar Johansson in June, 1960, he so excited a teen-ager named Cassius Marcellus Clay, in Louisville, Kentucky, that Clay, who was a good amateur light heavyweight, made up a ballad in honor of the victory. (The tradition of pugilistic poetry is old; according to Pierce Egan, the Polybius of the London Prize Ring, Bob Gregson, the Lancashire Giant, used “to recount the deeds of his Brethren of the Fist in heroic verse, like the Bards of Old.” A sample Gregson couplet was “The British lads that’s here / Quite strangers are to fear.” He was not a very good fighter, either.) At the time, Clay was too busy training for the Olympic boxing tournament in Rome that summer to set his ode down on paper, but he memorized it, as Homer and Gregson must have done with their things, and then polished it up in his head. “It took me about three days to think it up,” Clay told me a week or so ago, while he was training in the Department of Parks gymnasium, on West Twenty-eighth Street, for his New York début as a professional, against a heavyweight from Detroit named Sonny Banks. In between his composition of the poem and his appearance on Twenty-eighth Street, Clay had been to Rome and cleaned up his Olympic opposition with aplomb, which is his strongest characteristic. The other finalist had been a Pole with a name that it takes two rounds to pronounce, but Cassius had not tried. A book that I own called Olympic Games: 1960, translated from the German, says, “Clay fixes the Pole’s punch-hand with an almost hypnotic stare and by nimble dodging renders his attacks quite harmless.” He thus risked being disqualified for holding and hitting, but he got away with it. He had then turned professional under social and financial auspices sufficient to launch a bank, and had won ten tryout bouts on the road. Now he told me that Banks, whom he had never seen, would be no problem.

  I had watched Clay’s performance in Rome and had considered it attractive but not probative. Amateur boxing compares with professional boxing as college theatricals compare with stealing scenes from Margaret Rutherford. Clay had a skittering style, like a pebble scaled over water. He was good to watch, but he seemed to make only glancing contact. It is true that the Pole finished the three-round bout helpless and out on his feet, but I thought he had just run out of puff chasing Clay, who had then cut him to pieces. (“Pietrzykowski is done for,” the Olympic book says. “He gazes helplessly into his corner of the ring; his legs grow heavier and he cannot escape his rival.”) A boxer who uses his legs as much as Clay used his in Rome risks deceleration in a longer bout. I had been more impressed by Patterson when he was an Olympian, in 1952; he had knocked out his man in a round.

  At the gym that day, Cassius was on a mat doing situps when Mr. Angelo Dundee, his trainer, brought up the subject of the ballad. “He is smart,” Dundee said. “He made up a poem.” Clay had his hands locked behind his neck, elbows straight out, as he bobbed up and down. He is a golden-brown young man, big-chested and long-legged, whose limbs have the smooth, rounded look that Joe Louis’s used to have, and that frequently denotes fast muscles. He is twenty years old and six feet two inches tall, and he weighs a hundred and ninety-five pounds.

  “I’ll say it for you,” the poet announced, without waiting to be wheedled or breaking cadence. He began on a rise:

  “You may talk about Sweden [down and up again], You may talk about Rome [down and up again],

  But Rockville Centre is Floyd Patterson’s home [down].”

  He is probably the only poet in America who can recite this way. I would like to see T. S. Eliot try.

  Clay went on, continuing his ventriflexions:

  “A lot of people say that Floyd couldn’t fight,

  But you should have seen him on that comeback night.”

  There were some lines that I fumbled; the tempo of situps and poetry grew concurrently faster as the bardic fury took hold. But I caught the climax as the poet’s voice rose:

  “He cut up his eyes and mussed up his face.

  And that last left hook knocked his head out of place!”

  Cassius smiled and said no more for several situps, as if waiting for Johansson to be carried to his corner. He resumed when the Swede’s seconds had had time to slosh water in his pants and bring him around. The fight was done; the press took over:

  “A reporter asked: ‘Ingo, will a rematch be put on?’

  Johansson said: ‘Don’t know. It might be postponed.’ ”

  The poet did a few more silent strophes, and then said:

  “If he would have stayed in Sweden,

  He wouldn’t have took that beatin’.”

  Here, overcome by admiration, he lay back and laughed. After a minute or two, he said, “That rhymes. I like it.”

  There are trainers I know who, if they had a fighter who was a poet, would give up on him, no matter how good he looked, but Mr. Dundee is of the permissive school. Dundee has been a leading Italian name in the prizefighting business in this country ever since about 1910, when a man
ager named Scotty Monteith had a boy named Giuseppe Carrora whom he rechristened Johnny Dundee. Johnny became the hottest lightweight around; in 1923, in the twilight of his career, he boiled down and won the featherweight championship of the world. Clay’s trainer is a brother of John R. Stingo, an ancient connoisseur, who says, “Body-punching is capital investment,” or the late Sam Langford, who, when asked why he punched so much for the body, said, “The head got eyes.”

  Now Cassius reappeared, a glass of fashion in a snuff-colored suit and one of those lace-front shirts, which I had never before known anybody with nerve enough to wear, although I had seen them in shirt-shop windows on Broadway. His tie was like two shoestring ends laid across each other, and his smile was white and optimistic. He did not appear to know how badly he was being brought up.

  Lillian Ross

  DECEMBER 7, 1963 (“FUGUE”)

  MR. GLENN GOULD, the pianist, held a private showing one recent morning, for Mr. Yehudi Menuhin, the violinist, of a movie starring himself. The movie, which had been made from an hour-long video-tape recording, was entitled The Anatomy of Fugue. It was projected on a screen the size of a pillowcase, in a room the size of an average closet, in the local office of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which had broadcast the tape. Mr. Gould, unslept and unbarbered, was in town for a couple of days from his home, in Toronto. He had on his usual baggy dark-blue suit with outmoded overpadded shoulders, a raggedy brown sweater, and a worn-out bluish necktie. A yellow pencil protruded, eraser end up, from his coat pocket. He was burdened with a baggy brown overcoat, a brown wool muffler, and a navy-blue cap. Mr. Menuhin, pink-cheeked, chubby, trim, and serene, had come to town from his home, in London, to start on a three-month, twenty-eight-city recital tour that would include several benefit appearances and one appearance on the Bell Telephone Hour. He was neatly encased in well-tailored pin stripes and well-laundered supplementation. Mr. Gould sat on a straight-backed office chair, with his coat, cap, and muffler on his lap, and with his arms crossed and his hands tucked under his arms. Mr. Menuhin sat on a straight-backed office chair right behind him, his fingers intertwined over his midriff.