Twilight of the Idol: Arnold Schwarzenegger

Waiting for Arnold Schwarzenegger when he returned to his hotel in London after winning Mr. Universe--his second Mr. Universe--was a telegram from Joe Weider, the muscle-culture magnate whose products--equipment, magazines, supplements, videos--had instructed and inspired countless bodybuilders for decades. The telegram read: "Congratulations on your victory. You are the new young sensation. You are going to become the greatest bodybuilder of all time." This was by way of inviting Schwarzenegger to make his maiden voyage to America.

Schwarzenegger had been among the beneficiaries of Weider's products and their promise. A long and fervent disciple of those magazines and their advertisements, he would retrospectively come to think of Weider as "sort of the Hugh Hefner of the muscle world: he owned the magazines, had his picture and column in every issue, and included his wife, Betty, a gorgeous model, in almost every beach shot." He would tear out and hang on his wall pictures of the great bodybuilders, most particularly his idols Reg Park and Steve Reeves (the latter of whom had also starred as Hercules). The magazines gave shape and color to his ambitions, rendered them actual, and, in doing so, perpetuated those ambitions and facilitated their enlargement.

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Silk Thread: The Strange Mystery of Jim Thompson

In the study of the Jim Thompson House & Museum in Bangkok, just above Thompson’s old desk, are two separate horoscopes, foretold and framed, hanging on the wall. One of them predicts good luck in 1959, the year Thompson chose to move into this house, retired from the U.S. Army and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), having already relocated to Bangkok and gotten rich revitalizing the Thai silk industry. The other horoscope included in the frame predicts bad luck at the age of 61 for he who was born in the Year of the Horse. Thompson had been born in the Year of the Horse, and in 1967, at the age of 61, he went for a walk in the woods of Malaysia just south of here and never came back. Not even his remains have ever been found.

Thompson’s house is now a museum, although during his lifetime this city would never have accommodated such a thing. He perfected a popular silk that was better than other silks—a silk cut from lengthier cloths and colored by stronger and faster-acting and better-varied dyes. When it was chosen for all the silks used in the movie version of The King and I (1956), it became more popular still. At the time, Thailand had given up on its own silk industry, importing a cheaper fabric from other countries. The localized empire Thompson established would improve the lives of Bangkok’s citizenry, handsomely employing them in a business benevolently run. Still, his enemies were legion, and they extended all the way up into society’s highest strata. The mystery of just why and how Thompson disappeared, and by the agency of whom, is one that persists still and probably always will.

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Race for the Prize: On Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland

We'd be forgiven for wondering today what the whole thing could have possibly meant, even if back then it seemed like it meant everything. When her editors at the New York World asked Nellie Bly to write about a trip around the world, they were really just boomeranging back an idea she’d thrown their way a year earlier. Back then they’d believed that, as a woman, Bly wouldn’t be safe making such a trip, and, anyway, wouldn’t a woman require too much baggage? (They meant baggage in the literal sense — it was 1889.) Anyway, her editors did end up promising that if they sent anyone, it’d be Bly.

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Jasper Johns as Michael Crichton Knew Him

Charlie Rose once asked Michael Crichton — in that way only good friends can get away with — why he’d never written characters as interesting as himself, and Crichton responded — in that way only good friends can get away with — by ducking the question. That’s too bad, because Rose’s question was an excellent one, as anyone knows who’s readTravels (1989), Crichton’s picaresque memoir of psychological discovery by means of geographic exploration. He climbs Kilimanjaro; swims with sharks; beholds the pyramids; directs Sean Connery in Ireland in The Great Train Robbery (encountering a cool demeanor grounded in personal ethos that Crichton can’t help but admire); deep-sea dives for a wreckage in Bonaire (and nearly dies); goes hiking in Baltistan (and nearly dies); encounters gorillas in Africa (and nearly dies). Plus there’s medical school and psychoanalysis and L.A. and the death of his father and psychic experimentation (everything from seeing auras to bending spoons with his brain).

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Literary Notes on Donald Fagen

Only Bob Dylan and the Beatles, among musicians, have ever enraptured the literate and the literary, on literature’s terms, as much as Steely Dan has. But unlike the Lennon-McCartney catalogue, with its readily identifiable John songs and Paul songs, there are for Steely Dan no easily taxonomied tracks for Donald Fagen or Walter Becker, individually. Ever since the two of them began making solo albums, in the 1980s and ‘90s, superficial observers have smugly believed to have the code cracked--because of the superiority, and superiorly Dan-like quality, of Fagen’s albums. But there are some serious problems with this thinking.

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On George McGovern

Although his name had become a kind of shorthand for leftwing political loserdom, there were layers to George McGovern—and layers between layers—that the ridicule and vitriol could never gauge or fathom or even recognize. In 1972, he lost in a landslide to Richard Nixon, who took every state except Massachusetts on his way to re-election. But that’s only because the Watergate investigation couldn’t keep pace with the voting schedule—mere months are all that separated a Nixon landslide from a McGovern one. The biggest mystery of that election is how McGovern could have let himself lose the labor vote, not just as a Democrat but as someone who had studied labor so extensively—who had, in fact, completed his history-doctoral dissertation on the Colorado coal-strike of 1913-14. That wasn’t the only compelling contradiction McGovern carried. They called him a pie-in-the-sky peacenik, for the way he protested the war in Vietnam. But having been a bomber-pilot in World War II, his pacifist tendencies were harder-earned (to say the least) than the combative tendencies of his political opponents, just about every single last one of them. He knew about the basic freedoms, and spent nearly his entire career advocating globally on behalf of one of them: the freedom from hunger. He did so before he was a Senator, as John F. Kennedy’s Food for Peace director, and then during the entirety of his career as congressman and senator, both before and after the 1972 defeat. And then he kept on doing it, as a private citizen. He had earned the right to take extreme stances, because he had lived in extreme circumstances. It was true for McGovern in both war and peace. He watched not one but two of his children die young of alcoholism, and wrote an incredibly painful and moving book, Terry, about the death of the first, in 1996: another extraordinary chapter in one of the most extraordinary unwritten bildungsromans in American public life: The Education of George S. McGovern. The mistakes he’d made as presidential candidate were not repeated twenty years later, when his Texas campaign manager ran against George H. W. Bush. And McGovern has to get part of the credit for that. Not just for providing Bill Clinton with an object lesson, but for providing him with an example of courage and ideals, not to mention the training and opportunity his campaign had provided. Even that late-in-life chapter from McGovern’s Education was 20 years ago now, the epic life contextualized in its broadly epic dimensions. What happened after is authorship, and sky-diving, and public-speaking, and making the non-partisan rounds with his fellow WWII fighter-pilot George H. W. Bush. Through it all ran a wry self-deprecation for his very real electoral failures, and an utterly deserved self-respect for those even realer successes that far transcended the merely electoral.

Originally published at The Faster Times

Memoir of 'Memoir of a Gambler'

There were few places on the ship less conducive to reading than the library. In the summer of 2000, in my early twenties, I was stationed aboard an aircraft carrier. The library sat directly beneath the flight deck, which means that in addition to the thump, rattle, and screech of the planes as they landed, there was the heat from the catapults and their fuel, a heat so thick it invaded your respiration like some perniciously odorless fume, trespassing on your psyche and then inhabiting it. Reading there was out of the question, but we weren’t on the ship to read. Which is why it always surprised me how many great books they had in that library.

I found one of the greatest purely by chance. I knew neither the book, Memoir of a Gambler, nor its author, Jack Richardson. It was the title that hooked me. Our ship would soon be returning to San Diego, after a six-month cruise throughout the Pacific Ocean and Arabian Sea, and so I knew I would soon be gambling again. Having already become a devotee of the sports-gambling culture of San Diego—or, more specifically, its adjunct playground of Tijuana—I needed little encouragement. But in the book I now held in my hands, I would find plenty of encouragement anyway.

On the cover, this Jack Richardson struck a classically arch pose, arms crossed in a subdued brown sport coat and vest, staring self-importantly into the camera; beside him, on a circular bar-table sat a gleaming, thickly cut glass ashtray, a lone cigarillo perched on its edge. The back cover featured a blurb from William Styron (a notoriously selective blurber, even on behalf of friends), proclaiming, “Jack Richardson is a wonderful writer and his book is a powerful portrayal of one man’s obsession—sad, hilarious, erotic, and, above all, pitilessly honest. I readMemoir of a Gambler with fascination and delight.” The bio inside the back flap revealed that the author was a distinguished playwright who had also written for many of the magazines I cherished most, and then, on the copyright page, a partial explanation for why I did not recognize him from any of those magazines: “Copyright ©1979.”

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