by Ann Wroe
Of the many influences on Ray Charles’s career, those sessions at the Red Wing Café were perhaps the most fundamental. The singer who wooed, teased and thrilled audiences the world over for 50 years, swaying on the piano stool in his sparkling lamé jackets, was still the delighted little boy teetering on the soda crates. He never saw the bright lights that surrounded him for much of his life, but he told his biographer that lights were his best memories of the years when he could see: flaring matches, lightning he tried to catch, and the sun blazing through the tall trees in the woods he used to explore.
Mr Charles felt the music was there even earlier, like an extra limb or a sixth sense, as soon as he was born. It was “one of my parts”, he said, “like my blood”, or a force inside him, “nothing separate from me”. However he struggled to describe it, one thing was clear: if you wanted to stop him playing and singing, “You’d have to remove the music surgically.”
Which music was it? A mixture of almost everything he had ever heard, from Minnie Pearl to Sibelius, from Art Tatum to Chopin, from the Baptist choir in Greenville (in which he sang) to hillbilly players strumming on their guitars. At the start of his career, as an orphaned teenager travelling round Florida, he imitated the rural musicians with whom he played, though already he had a formidable ability to orchestrate music in Braille. A little later, living on scant savings in the red-light district of Seattle, he modelled himself on the crooner Cole. But after realising he was known only as an imitator, a “boy” with no name of his own, he determined to make a music that was distinctively his.
That music turned out to be an amalgam mostly of gospel and blues, with the gospel hotter than anyone imagined. Mr Charles’s first act of daring, in 1954, was to transform the hymn “My Jesus is All the World to Me” into “I Got a Woman”. His second, in 1959, was to use moaning and wailing gospel-choir techniques in a song called “What’d I Say?” to suggest the sexual play between a woman and a man. Banned on radio stations all across America, it sold a million copies.
To those who complained of blasphemy and abomination, and who saw unleashed black sexuality as a threat to America second only to Soviet missiles, Mr Charles gave an innocent rejoinder: he was only singing what he felt. He was talking about a woman as he would talk about God. The fact that women in his act lingered round
him like sirens, in skin-tight turquoise dresses, and that he was hooked for years on heroin and promiscuous sex, was somewhat smoothed by the knowledge that his music had sprung both out of a desperately hard life and, however wildly, out of church.
Mr Charles did not invent “soul”, as he came to call it. But he put his stamp on it so thoroughly, as unmistakably as the gravelly baritone and the dark glasses, that he may as well have done. It was the same with “his” songs. After hearing him sing “Georgia on My Mind”, few remembered that it had been written by Hoagy Carmichael; and after his renditions of “America the Beautiful”, most famously at the tearful Republican convention that re-crowned Ronald Reagan in 1984, the anthem was more or less declared to be his property.
He was seldom, however, an overtly political figure. At first he seemed no more angry about segregation – in which, even at the blind school he attended in Florida, the white and black children were kept apart – than he did about his own blindness, whose effect on his life he dismissed as “nothing”. But he beganto protest when he found that blacks and whites could not sit together at his concerts. He soon became friends with Martin Luther King, though he believed his role in the struggle was different. As a music-maker, he wanted to sing about “the general Joe” and the hardships suffered by both blacks and whites as they tried to settle, love and earn a living. As a star, he had no trouble raising money for King’s legal costs.
At bottom, Mr Charles felt that music could do the job of integration. He believed it could do anything. At his concerts, he was well aware of holding audiences in the palm of his hand: wildly roiling them one moment, making them cry the next, and then sliding to a silence in which you could hear a pin drop. This was power; to revert to his seeing days, this was lightning you could catch.
Julia Child
Julia Child, cookery teacher, died on August 13th 2004, aged 91
ST PAUL saw the light on the road to Damascus, Archimedes while soaking in the bath. Julia Child’s moment of illumination came in a restaurant in Rouen in 1948. The meal was simple: oysters on the half-shell, sole meunière, green salad, a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé, café filtre. But the whole experience, she later wrote, was “an opening up of the soul and spirit for me.”
Until that moment, Mrs Child knew nothing of French food. She had never tasted crème fraîche or encountered a shallot. Nor had most Americans. Their menus revolved around Jell-O, Cream of Wheat and a single, rubbery, species of cheese. Almost single-handedly, Mrs Child was to change all that. Under her trilling and exuberant guidance, Americans came to embrace at least the cooking of France.
The main problem, she understood, was fear. The language was foreign, the recipes long, the ingredients difficult to get, and the whole enterprise shot through with French superiority. Mrs Child determined to show that French cooking could be fun; that even a frazzled New Yorker, after a day at the office, could cobble up a mean boeuf bourguignon.
Her eruption on television, in 1962, made the point superbly. She had just produced 734 pages, in two volumes, called “Mastering the Art of French Cooking”. This, the work of ten years, was still a mite intimidating. But Mrs Child appeared on set with a frying pan, a portable hot-plate, an apron, a whisk and a dozen eggs, and merrily whipped up an omelette as she was being interviewed. In the book, the process took ten pages; on screen, it took two minutes. She was launched as a star.
Americans had seen TV chefs before, but not like this one. The towering Mrs Child was a maniac with blades, never meeting a knife she didn’t like; she once jointed a chicken with a sword, and was spoofed bleeding to death on “Saturday Night Live”. Dishes were tasted liberally, and fingers licked. She drank as she went, recommending a glass for any tired cook, and her sing-song aristocratic tones (“Bon appétit!”) grew steadily more extravagant.
Mistakes were summarily dealt with. An offending loaf was tossed over her shoulder among the potted plants; a misflipped potato pancake was scraped off the range and back into the pan; her false teeth were firmly readjusted in front of the camera. She began her demonstration of coq au vin by dropping a whole chicken on the floor, dusting it off and remarking: “It’s OK. No one’s looking.”
Behind the fun lurked a stickler for exactitude. French cooking, she believed, was about rules; it was as much science as art. As a scientist, she was obsessed with discovering how to make perfect French bread with American all-purpose flour in an American oven. It took two years, 284 pounds of flour and all the ingenuity of her husband, Paul, who lined her stove with quarry tiles and, to produce the necessary burst of steam, dropped a brick into a pan of hot water at the bottom of the oven. Within two or three decades, Americans had no need to go to the trouble; they could buy good French bread in shops across the country. But that too, you could argue, was Julia’s doing.
Nothing in her background made her a gourmet. She ate prodigiously as a child, but so did her equally tall sisters. Though they were a rich family, the food was poor; her mother, who kept a cook, could make only biscuits and Welsh rarebit. Julia misbehaved, and smoked her father’s cigars; she remained a smoker half her life, despite the risks to a discerning palate.
She thought she might be a novelist, or preferably a spy. During the second world war she joined the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, and was sent to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka); there she met Paul Child, a serious foodie as well asher first and last love. His posting to Paris sealed her fate. After the Rouen epiphany en route, Julia enrolled at the Cordon Bleu school in 1949; on graduation, she started her own cookery class. By this time, she had discovered that her greatest joy was shopping and eating as the French did, and
teaching how to do it. She went on almost until the day she died.
As a national institution, with her turquoise kitchen and copper pans eventually enshrined in the Smithsonian, she was excused from changes in fashion. She loved red meat with a passion, while America switched squeamishly to chicken; her cookery included lashings of eggs, butter and cream, when the national waistline was alarmingly expanding. “Just slowly incorporate another stick of butter,” was Mrs Child’s soothing response to emergencies with sauce. She could hardly think of another larder essential, except potatoes; and these too, when cooked, demanded to be buried in butter and cheese.
In 2000, when she was awarded the Légion d’Honneur for bringing the delights of France to Americans, she was served all her favourite things: oysters, caviar, Dover sole, duck, profiteroles and a good deal of champagne. Her life could appear one long indulgence of comfortable houses and perfect meals. Yet Julia was no snob. She encouraged all the clumsy, aspiring cooks who wrote to her and sought her autograph; and when stuck in an airport she would eat a hamburger quite happily, comme tout le monde.
Ion Cioaba
Ion Cioaba, self-proclaimed gypsy king, died on February 23rd 1997, aged 62
When Ion Cioaba proclaimed himself King of all the Gypsies Everywhere he found himself short of loyal subjects. About 5,000 followers turned up for his coronation in Romania in 1992 at a monastery he had borrowed for the occasion. They cheered as a solid gold crown, made in Switzerland, was lowered on to his head. But many other gypsies “everywhere” – some 10m in 40 countries – felt that the notion of kingship contradicted their scattered existence.
Unlike the other great diaspora, the Jews, the gypsies have never desired their own nation state. If they had, it would not have been Mr Cioaba’s Romania. It would have been somewhere in central India, from which a low caste tribe, the Dom, famous for its singing and dancing, fled to escape from Muslim invaders. Dom became corrupted into Rom, hence Romany, the gypsy language, a mixture of Sanskrit and acquired words. (Gypsy was the name given to the tribe by the English, in the erroneous belief that it had originated in Egypt.)
Whatever Ion Cioaba’s ungypsylike ambitions, no one doubted that he did his best for his much maligned people. Perhaps because of their chosen exclusivity, gypsies are often seen as a threat by communities close to their encampments. Not even the politically correct have fought to suppress the nursery rhyme, “My mother said that I never should / Play with the gypsies in the wood”. The Soviet Union sought to suppress the gypsy culture, tried to get gypsies to assimilate, and had the ultimate sanction of the gulag. In the United States, which has more than 1m gypsies, some states have passed laws banning fortune telling, a move apparently directed against gypsy women. However, American gypsies appear to be well organised, with the country divided into “economic territories”, each controlled by a gypsy group.
Romanian gypsies had the misfortune to live under, first, a fascist dictatorship and then a communist one. During the second world war several members of Mr Cioaba’s family were among the 40,000 Romanian gypsies deported to German concentration camps (where more than 500,000 gypsies from European counties died: Auschwitz had its own gypsy section).
The post-war ruler, Nicolae Ceausescu, did not persecute the gypsies – at least no more than he exercised a rule of fear over all Romanians. Gypsies gave up wearing in public the gold earrings and other ornaments they were fond of, knowing that the police would seize them. But their closed society gave them some protection from the excesses of the state. Gypsies traditionally do not marry non-gypsies and they avoid inessential dealings with them, preferring to work for themselves. They have their own god, called Del, but no clergy, although some are Roman Catholic or Orthodox Christian. They have purity codes and are pacifists. That said, anyone who attends the World Romany Congress is likely to bump into academics, scientists and others with jobs usually held by gaujes, Romany for outsiders. They are happy to be thought of as gypsies, just as American Indians who become industrialists like to tell of ancestors who fought against Custer.
Mr Cioaba kept a foot in both worlds. Some of his critics said he had collaborated with the Ceausescu regime. He was president of a state-registered trade union, the unlikely sounding Union of Nomadic Metalworking Gypsies, but this may have arisen simply because his clanspeople were metalworkers. In 1986, accused of cheating the government over a copper deal, he was jailed and, he said, tortured. He claimed that the real reason for his imprisonment was that he made himself a nuisance by demanding rights for gypsies.
He drove a Mercedes car, which upset some Romanians. But not all gypsies are poor. Mr Cioaba belonged to the Kalerash, a rich gypsy clan. At any rate, when the Ceausescu regime was toppled in December 1989 Mr Cioaba was judged to be on the right side and served on the Provisional National Council, the country’s frail start towards the democracy it achieved only in 1996. In a triumph for bureaucratic language, Romania formally recognised gypsies as a “transnational non-territorial minority”. Mr Cioaba formed the Gypsy Party and stood for parliament. But neither he nor the party got anywhere.He turned to the world stage and claimed to be the United Nations spokesman for gypsies everywhere. He demanded that gypsy children be accepted in their local schools, and set up a centre for teaching adult gypsies to read and write (Mr Cioaba was illiterate).
In an interview with a German television company, Ion Cioaba argued for compensation for the families of gypsies who died in the camps, and some money has since been paid. But the gypsy life disturbs the German sense of order. Because of this, and worries about its unemployed, Germany has been deporting gypsies to the countries from which they migrated. Mr Cioaba did not much care for national borders. Gypsies, he said, were the only true pan-Europeans. There’s a thought.
Eddie Clontz
Eddie Clontz, master of tabloid journalism, died on January 26th 2004, aged 56
THE relationship between truth and reporting has ever been a tricky one. No scene remains undistorted as it passes the eye of the beholder, and none reaches the page exactly as it was. But while living with this discrepancy, many journalists struggle with a much baser temptation. What they really want to put into their copy is that extraordinary “fact”, that jaw-dropping story retailed by a single source down a crackling telephone line, which would earn them a banner headline if they could only stand it up.
Eddie Clontz felt this more than most, and he never resisted the temptation. As the deviser and, for 20 years, the editor-in-chief of Weekly World News, his delight was to run the wildest stories he could find. He described himself not as an editor but as a circus-master, drawing readers into his tent with an endless parade of fantasies and freaks.
The News had, and has, an unassuming look, a black-and-white tabloid with blurry graphics that sits at supermarket checkouts across America, among the chewing gum. But its headlines, in inch-high sans serif, are another matter. “ARCHEOLOGISTS FIND MIDDLE EARTH IN NEW JERSEY SWAMP!” “SEVEN CONGRESSMEN ARE ZOMBIES!” “TINY TERRORISTS DISGUISED AS GARDEN GNOMES!” (“These guys are typical al-Qaeda operatives,’ says a top CIA source, ‘with beards down to their belt buckles’.”) Such stories, all from one recent issue, would have made Mr Clontz proud.
The News for which he was hired, in 1981, was a sorry affair, a dumping ground for stories that failed to make the National Enquirer. It had been started mostly to make use of the Enquirer’s old black-and-white presses after the sister-tabloid had gone to colour. Mr Clontz soon shook it up. Out went the tired celebrity gossip; in came space aliens, dinosaurs, giant vegetables, and a “Psychic” column in which his brother Derek would find readers’ car keys. Circulation soared. In a good week, it can reach well over a million.
Two stories in particular got Mr Clontz noticed. In 1988, his organ revealed that “ELVIS IS ALIVE! (King of Rock ‘n’ Roll Faked his Death and is Living in Kalamazoo, Mich!)”. A few years later, the News reported that a bat boy, with huge ears and amber eyes and “eating his own weight in insect
s each single day”, had been found by scientists in a cave in West Virginia.
Both items were followed up for years. Elvis went on appearing; Bat Boy escaped, was recaptured by the FBI, fell in love and endorsed Al Gore for president. Readers wrote in with their own sightings, bolstering whatever truth the nation believed was there. In 1993, Mr Clontz dared to kill the resurrected Elvis (“ELVIS DEAD AT 58!”) – only to reveal some time later that this death, too, had been a hoax.
Sheer chance seemed to bring Mr Clontz to this strange outpost of journalism. After dropping out of school at 16 and trying his luck as a scallop fisherman, he became a copy boy on his local paper in North Carolina. He moved next to a Florida paper, and from there to the disreputable corner office in the Enquirer building, in a run-down resort near Palm Beach, from which he was to entertain and terrify America.
His own politics were mysterious. Under the pseudonym “Ed Anger”, he wrote a News column so vitriolically right-wing that it possibly came from the left. Anger hated foreigners, yoga, whales, speed limits and pineapple on pizza; he liked flogging, electrocutions and beer. No, Mr Clontz would say, he had no idea who Anger really was. But he was “about as close to him as any human being.”
Mr Clontz also always denied that his staff made the stories up. It was subtler than that. Many tips came from “freelancecorrespondents” who called in; their stories were “checked”, but never past the point where they might disintegrate. (“We don’t know whether stories are true,” said Mr Clontz, “and we really don’t care.”) The staff also read dozens of respectable newspapers and magazines, antennae alert for the daft and the bizarre. When a nugget was found, Mr Clontz would order them to run away with it, urging them to greater imaginative heights by squirting them with a giant water-pistol.
