It is there, in that aside, that Liebling becomes immortal, in the dead-on factual detail (the sad look that never left Turpin's face, not even in the short time he held the title) and the larger vision of the necessary courage in the unlucky and melancholy of this world.
-
Sports
Peter Dreier & Kelly Candaele:
A conspiracy of management cronies is blocking 91-year-old union pioneer Marvin Miller from the Baseball Hall of Fame.
-
Sports
Ruth Messinger & Jerry Fowler:
Don't let Olympic fever obscure the role China plays in the Sudanese government's reign of terror, rape and killing.
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Sports
Dave Zirin:
Mauricia Grant, the first black, female
inspection official in NASCAR history, is suing her former employer for
sexual and racial misconduct. It may be the best thing that's ever
happened to the sport.
-
Books
Greg Grandin:
Readers of Fidel Castro's My Life will find explanations of the Cuban Revolution, but no apologies for its suppression of dissent.
-
Sports
Dave Zirin:
Two Oklahoma corporate raiders have stolen one of Seattle's most beloved sports franchises with an unlikely accomplice, the NBA's commissioner, David Stern.
-
Sports
Dave Zirin:
It's a little known fact, but Ralph Nader is seriously interested in sports, which is why he believes there should be a Bill of Rights just for the fans.
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Race, Ethnicity & Religion
Dave Zirin:
Is Don Imus irredeemably stupid or just a run-of-the-mill racist?
» More
The sadness comes through, despite Liebling's determination to make his prose like champagne. He had his problems, even if readers felt that he and
The New Yorker were a match made in heaven. I can imagine that the ladies adored Liebling and sometimes came close to unsettling his dedication to the deadline. Look at that face: Hasn't it known temptation? But his marriages were defeats, more or less. Number one, Ann McGinn, turned out to be schizophrenic, inclined to disappear for days at a time and the forlorn subject of many medical bills. Number two, Lucille Spectorsky, was a spendthrift and simply not able to get the jokes or the timing in Liebling's own Sugar Joe delivery. Still, he was resourceful. When the divorce to end that marriage obliged Liebling to endure a brief residence in cuisine-deprived Reno, Nevada, he heard of the vexed state of the Paiute Indians at nearby Pyramid Lake, went up to visit them and delivered the reports that now make up
A Reporter at Large: Dateline--Pyramid Lake, Nevada. To see the ingenuity with which Liebling observes that bleak landscape and its bleaker human history is to know that he, or someone like him, might still bring freshness and humor to Iraq.
Marriage number three, to the writer Jean Stafford, herself a battered relic of earlier battles (she had been married to Robert Lowell and horribly injured in a car crash that occurred with him at the wheel), was happy but curtailed. For Liebling was so overweight the dire word "obese" came into use. He had gout and pneumonia, and this was long before Lipitor. In addition, he had regular bills, tax notices and the same old nagging of deadlines even as spirit and inspiration trailed away.
In a just America, Liebling's fat face would be on a stamp, and there would be movies extolling his life and his hours into the night typing up those delicate, poker-faced, but comic accounts of having been there, or thereabouts, or near enough to guess what kind of a piece might be written. Just Enough Liebling is a witty but provocative title--count on it, you are going to want much more.
About David Thomson
David Thomson is the author of
The Whole Equation: A History of
Hollywood,
The New Biographical Dictionary of Film and a book on Nicole
Kidman, to be published in September (all from Knopf). He lives in San Francisco.
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