by Tom Wolfe
“Then you can roll right back into the living room, and if somebody rings the doorbell you don’t move at all. You just press a button on this big automatic console you have by your chair and the front door opens, and you just yell for the guy to come in, and you can keep watching television.
“At night, if you want to go to bed, you take another track into the bedroom, which shoots off on another side, and you just kind of roll out of the chair into the sack. On the ceiling above your bed you have another TV set, so you can watch all night.”
Roth is given, apparently, to spinning out long Jean Shepherd stories like this with a very straight face, and he told me all of this very seriously. I guess I didn’t look like I was taking it very seriously, because he said, “I have a TV set over the bed in my house right now—you can ask my wife.”
I met his wife, but I didn’t ask her. The funny thing is, I did find myself taking the story seriously. To me it was a sort of parable of the Bad Guys, and the Custom Sculpture. The Bad Guys built themselves a little world and got onto something good and then the Establishment, all sorts of Establishments, began closing in, with a lot of cajolery, thievery and hypnosis, and in the end, thrown into a vinyl Petri dish, the only way left to tell the whole bunch of them where to head in was to draw them a huge asinine picture of themselves, which they were sure to like. After all, Roth’s dream house is nothing more than his set of boiled shirt and tails expanded into a whole universe. And he is not really very hopeful about that either.
Part 2
Heroes and Celebrities
Chapter 7
The Marvelous Mouth
ONE THING THAT stuck in my mind, for some reason, was the way that Cassius Clay and his brother, Rudy, and their high-school pal, Tuddie King, and Frankie Tucker, the singer who was opening in Brooklyn, and Cassius’ pride of “foxes,” Sophia Burton, Dottie, Frenchie, Barbara and the others, and Richie Pittman and “Lou” Little, the football player, and everybody else up there in Cassius’ suite on the forty-second floor of the Americana Hotel kept telling time by looking out the panorama window and down at the clock on top of the Paramount Building on Times Square. Everybody had a watch. Cassius, for example, is practically a watch fancier. But, every time, somebody would look out the panorama window, across the City Lights scene you get from up high in the Americana and down to the lit-up clock on that wacky Twenties-modern polyhedron on top of the Paramount Building.
One minute Cassius would be out in the middle of the floor reenacting his “High Noon” encounter with Sonny Liston in a Las Vegas casino. He has a whole act about it, beginning with a pantomime of him shoving open the swinging doors and standing there bowlegged, like a beer delivery man. Then he plays the part of the crowd falling back and whispering, “It’s Cassius Clay, Cassius Clay, Cassius Clay, Cassius Clay.” Then he plays the part of an effete Las Vegas hipster at the bar with his back turned, suddenly freezing in mid-drink, as the hush falls over the joint, and sliding his eyes around to see the duel. Then he plays the part of Cassius Clay stalking across the floor with his finger pointed at Sonny Liston and saying, “You big ugly bear,” “You big ugly bear,” about eighteen times, “I ain’t gonna fight you on no September thirtieth, I’m gonna fight you right now. Right here. You too ugly to run loose, you big ugly bear. You so ugly, when you cry, the tears run down the back of your head. You so ugly, you have to sneak up on the mirror so it won’t run off the wall,” and so on, up to the point where Liston says, “Come over here and sit on my knee, little boy, and I’ll give you your orange juice,” and where Cassius pulls back his right and three guys hold him back and keep him from throwing it at Liston, “And I’m hollering, ‘Lemme go,’ and I’m telling them out the side of my mouth, ‘You better not lemme go.’ ” All this time Frankie Tucker, the singer, is contorted across one of the Americana’s neo-Louis XIV chairs, breaking up and exclaiming, “That’s my man!”
The next minute Cassius is fooling around with Rudy’s phonograph-and-speaker set and having some fun with the foxes. The foxes are seated around the room at ornamental intervals, all ya-ya length silk sheaths, long legs and slithery knees. Cassius takes one of Rudy’s cool jazz records or an Aretha Franklin or something like that off the phonograph and puts on one of the 45-r.p.m. rock-and-roll records that the singers keep sending to him at the hotel.
“Those are Rudy’s records, I don’t dig that mess. I’m just a boy from Louisville”—he turns his eyes up at the foxes—“I dig rock and roll. Isn’t that right?”
All the girls are hip, and therefore cool jazz fans currently, so most of them think the whole thing over for a few seconds before saying, “That’s right.”
Cassius puts a 45-r.p.m. on and says, “This old boy’s an alley singer, nobody ever heard of him, he sings about beans and bread and all that old mess.”
Cassius starts laughing at that and looking out over the city lights, out the panorama window. The girls aren’t sure whether he is laughing with or at the alley singer.
Cassius scans the foxes and says, “This is my crowd. They don’t dig that other mess, either.”
The girls don’t say anything.
“Is that your kinda music? I know it’s hers,” he says, looking at Francine, who is sitting pretty still. “She’s about to fall over.”
And maybe at this point somebody says, “What time is it?” And Rudy or somebody looks out the panorama window to the clock on the Paramount Building and says, “Ten minutes to ten.”
Cassius had just come from the Columbia Records studio, across from the hotel at Seventh Avenue and 52nd, where he was making an album, I Am the Greatest, a long pastiche of poems and skits composed wholly in terms of his impending fight with Sonny Liston. The incessant rehearsing of his lines for two weeks, most of them lines he had sprung at random at press conferences and so forth over a period of a year and a half, had made Cassius aware, as probably nothing else, of the showman’s role he was filling. And made him tempted by it.
After cutting up a little for Frankie Tucker and the foxes and everybody—showing them how he could act, really—he went over to one side of the living room and sat in a gangster-modern swivel chair and propped his feet up on the panorama-window ledge and talked a while. Everybody else was talking away in the background. Somebody had put the cool jazz back on and some husky girl with one of those augmented-sevenths voices was singing “Moon Over Miami.”
“What’s that club Leslie Uggams was at?” Cassius asked.
“The Metropole.”
“The Metropole, that’s right. That’s one of the big ones out there, ain’t it?”
His designation of the Metropole Café as “a big one” is an interesting thing in itself, but the key phrase is “out there.” To Cassius, New York and the hot spots and the cool life are out there beyond his and Rudy’s and Tuddie’s suite at the Americana and beyond his frame of reference. Cassius does not come to New York as the hip celebrity, although it would be easy enough, but as a phenomenon. He treats Broadway as though these were still the days when the choirboys at Lindy’s would spot a man in a white Palm Beach–brand suit heading up from 49th Street and say, “Here comes Winchell,” or “Here comes Hellinger,” or even the way Carl Van Vechten’s Scarlet Creeper treated 125th Street in the days of the evening promenade. Cassius likes to get out amongst them.
About 10:15 P.M. he motioned to Sophia and started leaving the suite. All five girls got up and followed. The procession was spectacular even for Seventh Avenue on a crowded night with the chocolate-drink stands open. Cassius, six feet three, two hundred pounds, was wearing a black-and-white-checked jacket, white tab-collared shirt and black tie, light gray Continental trousers, black pointed-toe Italian shoes, and walking with a very cocky walk. The girls were walking one or two steps behind, all five of them, dressed in slayingly high couture. There were high heels and garden-party hats. Down at the corner, at 52nd Street, right at the foot of the hotel, Cassius stopped, looked all around and began loosening up his shoulders,
the way prizefighters do. This, I found out, is Cassius’ signal, an unconscious signal, that he is now available for crowd collecting. He got none on that corner, but halfway down to 51st Street people started saying, “That’s Cassius Clay, Cassius Clay, Cassius Clay, Cassius Clay,” the way he had mimicked it back in the hotel. Cassius might have gotten his crowd at 51st Street—he was looking cocky and the girls were right behind him in a phalanx, looking gorgeous—but he headed on across the street, when the light changed, over to where two fellows he knew were standing a quarter of the way down the block.
“Here he comes. Whatta you say, champ?”
“Right, man. Hey,” said Cassius, referring the girls to the taller and older of the two men, “I want you all to meet one of the greatest singers in New York.” A pause there. “What is your name, man, I meet so many people here.”
“Hi, Pinocchio,” said one of the foxes, and the man smiled.
“Pinocchio,” said Cassius. Then he said, “You see all these queens are with me?” He made a sweeping motion with his hand. The girls were around him on the sidewalk. “All these foxes.”
“That’s sump’n else, man.”
Cassius could have gotten his crowd easily on the sidewalk outside the Metropole. When it’s warm, there is always a mob out there looking in through the front doorway at the band strung out along the bandstand, which is really more of a shelf. If there is a rock-and-roll band, there will always be some Jersey teen-agers outside twisting their ilia to it. That night there was more of a Dixieland or jump band on, although Lionel Hampton was to come on later, and Cassius entered, by coincidence, while an old tune called “High Society” was playing. All the foxes filed in, a step or so behind. The Metropole Café has not seen many better entrances. Cassius looked gloriously bored.
The Metropole is probably the perfect place for a folk hero to show up at in New York. It is kind of a crossroads, or ideal type, of all the hot spots and live joints in the country. I can tell you two things about it that will help you understand what the Metropole is like, if you have never been there. First, the color motif is submarine green and Prussian blue, all reflected in huge wall-to-wall mirrors. If the stand-up beer crowd gets so thick you can’t see over them to the bandstand, you can always watch through the mirrors. Second, the place attracts high-livers of a sort that was there that night. I particularly remember one young guy, standing there at the bar in the submarine-green and Prussian-blue light with sunglasses on. He had on a roll-collar shirt, a silvery tie, a pale-gray suit of the Continental cut and pointed black shoes. He had a king-size cigarette pasted on his lower lip, and when the band played “The Saints,” he broke into a terribly “in” and hip grin, which brought the cigarette up horizontal. He clapped his hands and hammered his right heel in time to the drums and kept his eyes on the trumpet player the whole time. The thing is, kids don’t even do that at Williams College anymore, but they do it at the Metropole.
This same kid came over to ask Cassius for his autograph at one point. He thought “The Saints” was hip, but he must not have thought autograph-hunting was very hip. He wanted an autograph, however. He handed Cassius a piece of paper for his autograph and said, “It’s not for me, it’s for a buddy of mine, he wants it.” This did not score heavily with Cassius.
“Where’s your pen?” he said.
“I don’t have a pen,” the kid said. “It’s for a friend of mine.”
“You ain’t got no pen, man,” said Cassius.
About a minute later the kid came back with a pen, and Cassius signed the piece of paper, and the kid said, “Thank you, Cassius, you’re a gentleman.” He said it very seriously. “It’s for a buddy of mine. You’re a real gentleman.”
That was the tone of things that night in the Metropole. Everything was just a little off, the way Cassius saw it.
From the moment he walked into the doorway of the Metropole, people were trying to prod him into the act.
“You really think you can beat Sonny Liston, man?”
“Liston must fall in eight.”
“You really mean that?”
“If he gives me any jive, he goes in five,” Cassius said, but in a terribly matter-of-fact, recitative voice, all the while walking on ahead, with the foxes moseying in behind him, also gloriously bored.
His presence spread over the Metropole immediately. As I said, it is the perfect place for folk heroes, for there is no one in there who is not willing to be impressed. The management, a lot of guys in tuxedos with the kind of Hollywood black ties that tuck under the collars and are adorned with little pearl stickpins and such devices—the management was rushing up. A guy at the bar, well-dressed, came up behind Cassius and touched him lightly at about the level of the sixth rib and went back to the bar and told his girl, “That’s Cassius Clay. I just touched him, no kidding.”
They sat all the foxes down in a booth at about the middle of the Metropole Café and gave Cassius a chair by himself right next to them. Lionel Hampton came up with the huge smile he has and shook Cassius’ hand and made a fuss over him without any jive about when Liston must fall. Cassius liked that. But then the crowd came around for autographs, and they wanted him to go into his act. It was a hell of a noisy place.
But the crowd at the Metropole hit several wrong notes. One was hit by a white man about fifty-five, obviously a Southerner from the way he talked, who came up to Clay from behind—people were gaggled around from all sides—and stuck the blank side of a Pennsylvania Railroad receipt, the kind you get when you buy your ticket on the train, in his face and said in a voice you could mulch the hollyhocks with:
“Here you are, boy, put your name right there.”
It was more or less the same voice Mississippians use on a hot day when the colored messenger boy has come into the living room and is standing around nervously. “Go ahead, boy, sit down. Sit in that seat right there.”
Cassius took the Pennsylvania Railroad receipt without looking up at the man, and held it for about ten seconds, just staring at it.
Then he said in a slightly accusing voice, “Where’s your pen?”
“I don’t have a pen, boy. Some of these people around here got a pen. Just put your name right there.”
Cassius still didn’t look up. He just said, “Man, there’s one thing you gotta learn. You don’t ever come around and ask a man for an autograph if you ain’t got no pen.”
The man retreated and more people pressed in.
Cassius treats the fact of color—but not race—casually. Sometimes, when he is into his act, he will look at somebody and say, “You know, man, you lucky, you seen me here in living color.” One time, I remember, a CBS news crew was filming an interview with him in the Columbia Records Studio A, at 799 Seventh Avenue, when the cameraman said to the interviewer, who was moving in on Cassius with the microphone: “Hey, Jack, you’re throwing too much shadow on Cassius. He’s dark enough already.”
All the white intellectuals in the room cringed. Cassius just laughed. In point of fact, he is not very dark at all.
But he does not go for any of the old presumptions, such as, “Put your name right there, boy.”
Another wrong note was hit when a middle-aged couple came up. They were white. The woman struck you as a kind of Arkansas Blanche Dubois. They looked like they wanted autographs at first. They did in a way. They were both loaded. She had an incredible drunk smile that spread out soft and gooey like a can of Sherwin-Williams paint covering the world. She handed Cassius a piece of paper and a pencil and wanted him to write down both his name and her name. He had just about done that when she put her hand out very slowly to caress his cheek.
“Can I touch you?” she said. “I just want to touch you.”
Cassius pulled his head back.
“Naw,” he said. “My girl friends might get jealous.”
He didn’t call them foxes to her. He said it in a nice way. After she left, though, he let her have it. It was the only time I ever heard him say anything co
ntemptuously of anyone.
“Can I touch you, can I touch you,” he said. He could mimic her white Southern accent in a fairly devastating way.
“Naw, you can’t touch me,” he said, just as if he were answering her face to face. “Nobody can touch me.”
As a matter of fact, Cassius is good at mimicking a variety of white Southern accents. He doesn’t do it often, but when he does it, it has an extra wallop because he has a pronounced Negro accent of his own, which he makes no attempt to polish. He only turns it on heavier from time to time for comic effect. Once I heard him mimic both himself, a Louisville Negro, and newspapermen, Louisville whites, in one act.
I had asked him if the cocky act he was putting on all over the country, and in England for that matter, surprised the people who knew him back home. What I was getting at was whether he had been a cocky kid in Louisville back in the days before anybody ever heard of him. He changed the direction slightly.
“They believe anything you tell ’em about me back in Louisville. Newspapermen used to come around and I’d give ’em predictions and they’d say, ‘What is this boy doing?’
“I had a fight with Lamar Clark, I believe it was, and I said [Clay mimicking Clay, heavy, high-flown, bombastic Negro accent]: ‘Lamar will fall in two.’ I knocked him out in two, and they said [Clay mimicking drawling Kentucky Southern accent]: ‘Suht’n’ly dee-ud.’ (Certainly did.)
“I said, ‘Miteff will fall in six.’
“They said, ‘Suht’n’ly dee-ud.’
“I said, ‘Warren will fall in four.’
“They said, ‘Suht’n’ly dee-ud.’ ”
Clay had a lot better look on his face when people came by to admire what he had become rather than the funny act he puts on.
One young Negro, sharp-looking, as they say, in Continental clothes with a wonderful pair of Latin-American sunglasses, the kind that are narrow like the mask the Phantom wears in the comic strip, came by and didn’t ask Cassius when Liston would fall. He shot an admiring, knowing look at the foxes, and said, “Who are all these girls, man?”
