The Patch

by John McPhee

  Senator Fulbright described his golf game in a general way, and there was something in his manner that might have suggested—had I been less familiar with the probity of the source—the crafted self-deprecation of an organized hustler. “My game is pretty poor,” he said. “I don’t play enough. I’m getting old and decrepit. There’s nothing very exciting about my golf game or about the life I lead. As we get older, we get progressively duller and duller—you’ll find that out. I used to play more, but ever since I’ve been the chairman of the committee I haven’t been in the seventies. My golf is very poor. I played lacrosse at Oxford in 1926, and, before that, football at Arkansas. I injured my knees very badly. The cartilage is out. That hampers my golf. I didn’t have a scheduled match. I just went out that afternoon and picked up a game.”

  The game he picked up was J. Lawn Thompson, M.D. (District of Columbia, Thunderbird—701), physician to Cabinets and Congresses, and former curator of Lyndon B. Johnson.

  “Hello, Dr. Thompson. How did you fare on the golf course with Senator Fulbright the other day?”

  “As usual, I was talked out of everything. Senator Fulbright is a very persuasive man, not only in national politics but on the first tee. He has a way of creating unjustified sympathy for himself. He tells you how hard he’s been working, you know, and how tired he is, and that he hasn’t played golf very much, and the next thing you know you’re giving him strokes when he should be giving you strokes. So that’s how I fared. I reached in my pocket and paid him all of my Medicare fees for the past month.”

  “What was your score, Dr. Thompson?”

  “Eighty-four.”

  “What was the Senator’s score?”

  “Three shots less—just enough, you know, to hang me up on the wall.”

  I would also try a call to the office of Senator Smith, for it nagged me that Muskie’s license plate merely said “SENATE.” What, then, could hers possibly say? “It says ‘1,’” said her administrative assistant.

  Moving slowly through the parking lot, Mr. Remeor next pointed out a Florida Lincoln Continental—MC 9.

  “Member of Congress, Ninth District,” I said.

  “You’re ready,” he said. “Paul Rogers, of West Palm Beach, is the Congressman from the Ninth District of Florida.”

  Ohio, Continental—FMF. “That’s a tough one,” Remeor said. “Unless you happen to know that Congressman Michael A. Feighan, of Ohio, once married a girl named Florence Mathews.”

  District of Columbia, Mercury—34l. “That’s Doug Mode,” Remeor said. “He’s a lawyer. Does the same sort of thing I do. Doug was a pallbearer at Walter Hagen’s funeral, and he has a set of Hagen’s clubs, but he’s not much of a golfer. He plays golf in the fall, when there are no gnats. Today, he’ll be in there playing gin. He was the advance man for Dewey in the ’44 campaign.”

  I asked Mr. Remeor if he himself was a golfer.

  “Oh, Lord, no,” he said. “I can’t stand the game.”

  Passing by a Mercedes-Benz, DPL 2079 (D.C. plate), Remeor said, “Luis Machado. Note the diplomatic license. He was once the Cuban Ambassador to the United States. Before that, he was president of the Havana Country Club.”

  Cadillac, D.C.—144. “You know Abe Fortas’s old law firm, Arnold, Fortas & Porter?” Remeor said. “Well, that’s Porter. Porter has a chauffeur named Henry Ford.”

  One automobile at Burning Tree—a Continental, Texas, BKZ 922—attracted us not because of its license number but because of its size. There was something magnified about it. It seemed too big for a continent, let alone a Continental. Each of its fenders appeared to be large enough to garage a Volkswagen. Surely all this automobile could not be the carapace of a mere Senator. Mr. Remeor had no idea whose it was, so I later called a policeman friend and he radioed somewhere and word came quickly back that Texas BKZ 922 was the automobile of Lieutenant General John C. Meyer, Director of Operations, United States Air Force, two hundred combat missions over Europe, one of the top air aces of all time, Croix de Guerre from France and Belgium, Air Medal, Silver Star, D.F.C., and D.S.C., with thirteen (Did you say thirteen? Roger. Repeat, thirteen) oak-leaf clusters. I put in a call to the Pentagon, and soon sensed just how big a general General Meyer is, for in order to propose a talk with him I had to spend fifteen minutes talking with another general—Brigadier General H. L. Hogan III (five oak-leaf clusters)—who politely told me that he would see what he could do, and would call me back. A day or so later, he called to say that he was still having difficulty getting through to General Meyer on the matter of the golf game but that he would continue the effort and call me again. “I just didn’t want you to think we weren’t working on the problem,” said generous General Hogan. “Let’s see what we can whomp up.” Two days later, the Pentagon called again. “This is General Hogan,” said General Hogan. “Stand by for General Meyer!”

  “This is General Meyer speaking. My game is generally pretty bad. I must have played a lousy game that afternoon, because if it was good I would remember the score. I played with two other generals. We didn’t find the weather particularly cold. I would guess I was somewhere around my usual game, which is like ninety-two or three or four. If I was worse than a hundred, I would remember that, too. If I’d played a good game, I could tell you every stroke.”

  At Burning Tree, as we retreated down the long driveway, Mr. Remeor said, “You may recall that Burning Tree is where the Martian landed on the eighth green and went up to President Eisenhower and said, ‘Take me to your leader.’ This place has a rich history. The policy of the club has always been that it wants no publicity whatsoever, but sometimes it can’t help getting it. According to another story that went around, Ike was playing here one day and Secret Service men came running out of the woods and conferred with him, and then they rushed up the fairway to the next foursome and said, ‘Excuse us, gentlemen, but do you mind if the President plays through? We have just received word that New York has been bombed.’ … Yes, yes, Nixon is a member here. The President and the Vice President—Nixon and Agnew. They’ve even got the president of the P.G.A. in there, as their pro. Of all the American Presidents who have ever played the game, John Kennedy was by a country mile the best golfer. His back bothered him, and he played for only a short period each time he came out here. He would just show up, shoot a few pars, and leave. Think of this: Nixon sponsored John Kennedy for membership here. The club has a collection of drivers that have been used by Presidents. By and large, the members are an informal and unstuffy bunch of men. In the summertime, they play in short pants and wear no shirts. Some of them play in their undershorts. They put on long drawers and play all through the winter. I’ve been in clubs all over the world that have big mazumbos in their membership, and this one is the least pretentious, the most homey, the most humble. There is nothing burning here. Centuries ago, there was a tree here that glowed in the night, probably from phosphorus, so the Indians called this region Potomac, the Place of the Burning Tree.”

  HER FEET ARE TOO BIG. Her nose is too long. Her teeth are uneven. She has the neck, as one of her rivals has put it, of “a Neapolitan giraffe.” Her waist seems to begin in the middle of her thighs, and she has big, half-bushel hips. She runs like a fullback. Her hands are huge. Her forehead is low. Her mouth is too large. And, mamma mia, she is absolutely gorgeous.

  By her own description, Sophia Loren is “a unity of many irregularities.” She has rewritten the canons of beauty. A daughter of the Bay of Naples, she has within her the blood of the Saracens, Spanish, Normans, Byzantines, and Greeks. The East appears in her slanting eyes. Her dark brown hair is a bazaar of rare silk. Her legs talk. In her impish, ribald Neapolitan laughter, she epitomizes the Capriccio Italien that Tchaikovsky must have had in mind. Lord Byron, in her honor, probably sits up in his grave about once a week and rededicates his homage to “Italia! oh, Italia! thou who hast the fatal gift of beauty.” Vogue magazine once fell to its skinny knees and abjectly admitted: “After Loren, bones are boring.”
Catherine de Medici decreed that women should strive for a waist measurement of 13 inches. Sophia Loren sets the template now: 38-24-38. She is what the Spanish call “much woman” and the French “une femme plantureuse.” Italians once called Gina Lollobrigida “La Gina Nazionale.” They now call Sophia Loren “La Sophia Seducente.” They prefer the seductress. Gina was, in their curious view, too refined. Sophia, they say, is a woman of the people, their donna popolana.

  Her body is a mobile of miscellaneous fruits and melons, and her early career was largely a matter of putting them on display. But Sophia no longer leans forward for just any passing Leica. “Someday,” she says with the earnestness of a starlet, “I hope that everyone will say I am a great actress and I will be remembered for that.”

  (She won the Academy Award for Best Actress, in 1962, for Two Women.)

  Pozzuoli, on the Bay of Naples, where Sophia grew up, has been described in a travel book as “perhaps the most squalid city in Italy.” The most squalid city in Italy has music in its streets, cluttered pink-and-white buildings, seagulls screaming overhead, a bright blue waterfront, a Roman amphitheatre where Gennaro—the patron saint of Naples—achieved his exaltation simply because a pride of lions refused to eat him. It now has a municipal slogan: “What a woman we have exported.”

  Little Sofia—the “ph” was inserted later because it seems more exotic to the Italian eye—was turned over to a hired wet nurse after her mother’s breasts went dry as a consequence of poor health. From a bed swarming with six grandchildren, the wet nurse last week reminisced: “Sophia was the ugliest child I ever saw in my life. She was so ugly that I am sure no one else would have wanted to give her milk. It was my milk that made Sophia beautiful, and now she doesn’t even remember me. I gave milk to hundreds of children, but none of them drank as much as Sophia. Her mother gave me fifty lire a month. Sophia drank at least a hundred lire worth of milk. Madonna mia!”

  Schoolmates scrawled on the door of her house the word stecchetto (little stick), because she was as thin as one. At fourteen, the little stick suddenly blossomed. Gymnastics classes were held in the Roman amphitheatre, and the men of Pozzuoli began to show up to watch Sophia doing calisthenics. “It became a pleasure just to stroll down the street,” Sophia remembers. Mamma had thought that Sophia should try to become a teacher, but she took another look and put her in a beauty contest. In the spring of 1950, mother and daughter went off to Rome to seek work in films. “There I told my first big lie for Sophia,” her mother says. “Someone called out, ‘This way for girls who speak English.’ ‘Sure,’ I told the man, ‘my daughter speaks English. Don’t you speak English, Sophia?’

  “‘Si, Mamma.’”

  IN THE MOSCOW STATE CIRCUS there are no elephants. No tigers. No lions. No giraffes. No orangutans. Bears.

  Big bears. Little bears. Black bears. Brown bears. Mamma bears. Great strong hammer-sickle thick-coated rocket-powered Soviet bears. Trained by Valentin Filatov on a third of a ton of lump sugar a day, they roller-skate, ride bicycles and scooters, and hang from whirling trapezes. Three of them draw a troika. Two of them fight, wearing boxing gloves. They hook and jab. They drive motorcycles in the dark, turning the headlights on and off and stopping for traffic lights along the way. They’re so intelligent they’re painful to watch, because they make an American think of all those snobbish, slobbish fat brown blubber-bottomed freeloading Yellowstone bears, who have yet to lift a claw for their country.

  ONE SUMMER in the nineteen-fifties, the editorial staff of Time began to collect material for a cover story about Americans on holiday. Boris Chaliapin, who had produced more Time cover pictures than any other artist, was asked to create a work expressing the theme. The resulting picture was not used. It was consigned to darkness with the fatal term “NR” (“not running”). Chaliapin had painted the Statue of Liberty on water skis. Her robes had been shed on Bedloe’s Island and were draped there over her plinth. She now wore a bathing suit. Torch in hand, she scudded across the harbor.

  I remembered that painting (who could ever forget it?), having seen it once, long ago in Time’s editorial offices in Rockefeller Center, when I worked there. It had been the star of a collection of analogous works, which had been commissioned and completed but, for one reason or another, had never seen the light of print—a gallery’s worth of NR Time covers under dust in an outsize closet. Wondering how the collection had evolved in the intervening years, I called up Henry Grunwald, my former editor, now Time’s managing editor, and asked him.

  Unused cover paintings and cover sculptures had a tendency to disappear, he said, but there was no lack of them on hand. He happened to have one, by Larry Rivers, on his own wall. It showed God lying in a coffin.

  “Whose idea was that?”

  “Larry Rivers’s.”

  “May I look at it?”

  “You may.”

  “And the others?”

  “Why not?”

  Grunwald is a courtly man, born and raised in Vienna, educated in New York, and he has an accent that lilts at all volumes. I found him sitting at his desk, twenty-five stories up. Framed by a window behind him, he himself might have been an NR cover of Henry Kissinger—the rippling hair, the middling height, the eyes that seemed to inflate behind glasses that had dark rims. The resemblance between the two men is considerable, and it is flattering to each to say that he looks like the other. Grunwald wore a striped tie and a brown-and-white striped shirt. He was managing his magazine through an intercom console that had many levers. As he went on speaking to genies all around the building, he waved hello and pointed to the wall where God lay dead.

  The picture was a collage. God’s coffin was a foldout affair, as if from a children’s book, and an arrow that led away from the bier seemed to suggest a route by which He might escape. Subordinate themes surrounded the central image—sets of pictures and symbols having to do, apparently, with functions that in some way people had wrested from God. Medicine. Weather. Dishwashers. Rockets. Very, very subtle. Da Vinci’s God had been pasted in and then, with a red crayon, crossed out. Rivers’s God seemed in no hurry to get out of the coffin. All this had been too complex for the magazine, Grunwald told me. NR. Rivers had done the collage to accompany a cover story titled “Is God Dead?,” and those words alone ran on the cover of the magazine, in red letters on a solid black field—the first time ever that the magazine had not used some sort of picture.

  Larry Rivers had another cover in the NR collection, Grunwald told me. It had been an attempt to paste together the essence of Norman Mailer. In two rooms nearby, several dozen NR’d pictures, collages, and sculptures had been set out for viewing, and in one corner was Rivers’s Mailer, coming apart in layers. Rivers had started with a photograph of his subject’s face and then—preserving little more than the eyes—had placed upon it numerous cutouts in cardboard and silver paper, and a Band-Aid, and a pair of large ears, and cardboard glasses, and a pushpin in the chin. Pencil squiggles served for hair. “It was Rivers’s conceit that Norman Mailer wears a false face,” Grunwald said. “That is, he saw Mailer’s face as a mask with Mailer’s own eyes in it.” As you stare at Rivers’s Mailer, the mask indeed seems to become the face, the face the mask—with eyes at the bottom of cardboard wells. “It seems quite lifelike,” I muttered. “One almost expects it to speak.”

  I looked around the room from cover to cover, NR.

  Spiro Agnew. Papier-mâché sculpture by Paul Davis. NR’d because it looked too much like Lyndon Johnson.

  Jean-Paul Sartre. By Ben Shahn. Sartre in profile, with sheaves of manuscripts under his arm—Les Mots, La Nausée, Saint Genet. A background of mottled pastels. How could the magazine have rejected that?

  It hadn’t, Grunwald said. Cover stories on such people had often been swept aside by unexpected developments in the news or lost in a fruitless quest for “the right moment.” And, of course, one never knew when a writer might implode. In Sartre’s case, the idea for the story had kicked around for years,
but the magazine’s book-review staff had never pulled itself together enough to produce a story. Of Ben Shahn’s work for Time, only the Sartre had not run. Shahn had done cover portraits of Lenin, Alec Guinness, Sargent Shriver, Johann Sebastian Bach, Martin Luther King Jr. When Shahn came into the office, he would sit and chatter with Rosemary Frank, the cover researcher, and he would tell her about the Depression days, when he had been a painter for the W.P.A.

  W. H. Auden. An oil by René Bouché. A study in wrinkles, a splendid face. The accompanying story had been written while Otto Fuerbringer, Grunwald’s predecessor as managing editor, was away on vacation. Apparently, Otto didn’t like Auden, Grunwald said, and Otto came back too soon.

  Marilyn Monroe, by Aaron Bohrod. In a pale sky among wisps of cirrus, she stood in an oval picture frame, wearing a string-strap top with a scoop neck. It seemed demure by contemporary lights, an attractive and flattering portrait. One could hardly imagine a better treatment of Monroe. In 1956, Roy Alexander, Fuerbringer’s predecessor, had killed it because it was too sexy.

  Claes Oldenburg. Self-portrait, on graph paper. His tongue hanging out. An ice bag on his head. “The news, alas, knocked it off the cover,” Grunwald said. “The story on Oldenburg ran without the picture.”

  Time had once planned a cover story on the Establishment, and now here was all that was left of the idea—a painting by Edward Sorel of a turreted, moated medieval castle being defended by substantial, solid-looking University Club types against a horde of scruffy creatures who were carrying a battering ram. On the front end of the battering ram was the severed head of Spiro Agnew. The castle was full of Bundys, Galbraiths, Gardners, McCloys, Achesons, Schlesingers, Oakeses, and Rockefellers, with William F. Buckley Jr., in the form of a flying dragon, hovering in the air above. “It was a better idea than story,” Grunwald said, ruefully recalling the wreckage. “The story never worked. We could never quite figure out whether or not we were part of the Establishment, and, if so, how to deal with ourselves.”