Who knew I knew you

 

By Roger Verdon

 

Fame isn’t something that washes off. Even if it dims over time, it’s still there like a faded tattoo that once had a more vibrant life. Most of my run-ins with fame were marginal and remain so. Yet fame is seductive and we are drawn to it like a bright light. Most of us can count run-ins with fame on one hand.

    When I began listing mine I was surprised by how many marginal run-ins I’ve had.

     I’ve sat down and talked to Bob Dole, took a fleeting and unexpected elevator ride with writers Kurt Vonnegut and William S. Burroughs at a Lawrence, Kansas Holiday Inn, stood next to Beat poet Allen Ginsburg in Abilene and listened to writers Gore Vidal, Shirley Anne Grau  and Jimmy Breslin crack wise at an authors’ luncheon in New York.

    I once came close enough to Richard Nixon to smack him in the head, which now is a lost opportunity.

   As a student, I gave a reading at Southampton College the same night and in the same place as Edward Albee, the author of, among many other plays, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Albee stood at a lectern and spoke while wearing a rich brown leather jacket. Brilliant guy with wonderful affectations and mannerisms. Sounded British, but later I learned he was born here, just like the rest of us. I still covet that jacket.

   I have been critiqued by the late Roger Caras (birds don’t chirp, you can do better than that, Roger), who worked on the movie 2001, with director Stanley Kubrick and writer Arthur C. Clarke, and then went on to write great wildlife books and was the narrator of  the Westminster Kennel Show. I had a mentoring relationship with the late Tom Berger, who wrote, among so many other things, Little Big Man. 

    I’ve been this close to the king, Elvis, but unlike the women in the audience I did not throw my undergarments at him, nor did I toss undergarments at singer Tom Jones, whose tight pants tested physics. Billie Joel was more fun than both of them and no undergarments were required. Billie’s famous quote, “Wichita, don’t take any ___ from anybody!” ended the show and became a philosophy I adopted.

     I worked with Pete Souza, not a household name, but the photographer to two presidents, Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama. We rarely communicate because I am reluctant to become a pest now that Pete is right in the belly of the fame beast, and the maker of all these famous images, including the Hillary Clinton hands-over-mouth moment when all the Washington hotshots watched the Osama Bin Laden raid. One only hopes Pete will write a book about both his famous bosses and the thousands of famous types he has met face to face.

    Pete is the antithesis of paparazzi. He’s much more skilled and has ready access to all the world’s players, yet his environment is absolutely consumed by fame and he can still be impressed by the likes of Bruce Springsteen in the flesh. 

    I knew Pete when we were struggling to come up with stories in western Kansas on long cold days, when I impressed him with my New York skill of breaking into the newspaper company’s car when the keys were locked inside and when I suggested he shoot (photograph) that dog that was up on a roof. It turned out to be a readable story with a funny photo.

   I hope he writes a memoir and retires to the rich and profitable speaking circuit, where he will grace thousands of luncheons with great stories and terrific pictures. Schedule him now because he will be totally booked for years to come.

    I sat on a university media panel with the late writer Christopher Hitchens, who told the room, “I agree with Roger.” Thanks, Hitch. You died much too young.

    I shook hands with Congressman Patrick Kennedy and the late N.Y. Governor Hugh Carey and I once met a guy who knew Nelson Mandela. This guy, a college professor, had a photo of himself and Mandela positioned in his office for maximum effect. You can’t help but ask him what’s up with the photo, which presents the opportunity to tell the same tale over and over again.

    This is cheating a little. You know the late Mandela must have posed with a hundred people in a day and to show off such a photograph is ingenuous about the fame game. But we all reach out for fame by standing in line to get an autograph or waiting outside a venue for a photo and then share it as often as possible.

    It’s like writing a column that stretches for fame and glory and finds so little.

    I have real letters from the late Andy Rooney and Colin Powell responding to letters

I sent to them. I treasure them both, especially Rooney’s, whose typewriter needed a new ribbon and whose prose lacked punctuation. I love that letter.  Sometimes fame sneaks up on us. One of my classmates in college was Linda Gronlund, who was studying oceanography at the time I was studying writing. I always remembered Linda because she was a jokester and one day in class she drew me a little angel on a piece of 8X11 paper. I framed it because it was special to me. It became even more special years later when her name came up on the passenger list of United Airlines, Flight 93, which crashed in Shanksville, PA., one of four planes hijacked on Sept. 11, 2001.

 

Two days later, she would have been 47. Seeing her name on the manifest gave me chills. Still does.suspect your list of run-ins with fame is similar to mine or even more substantial. In any case, it’s interesting to recall characters who have passed through or around the periphery of our lives.

 

I suppose there are a few folks I’ve missed along the way.

 

That’s OK; I’ll make them famous another time.

 

 

 

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