Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 425: The Most Brazen of Genres with Madeleine Blais
572 Plays4 months ago
Madeleine Blais is the author of several books, her latest being Queen of the Court: The Many Lives of Tennis Legend Alice Marble (Grove Press), now out in paperback.
Newsletter: Rage Against the Algorithm
Show notes: brendanomeara.com
Support: Patreon.com/cnfpod
In the parting shot, I made an error in math referring to the number of hypothetical Mondays remaining in my life. The "correct" number is 1,872. The error has been scrubbed.
Recommended
Transcript
Show Support & Services
00:00:01
Speaker
Oh hey CNFers, this show as you know takes a lot of time and part of what keeps the lights on here at CNF Pot HQ is if you consider hiring me to edit your work. A generous editor helps you see what you can't see. It could be something as simple as a pitch, though they're not simple. They're shorter but not simple.
00:00:18
Speaker
A proposal, an essay, hell even a book, oh boy. If you need help cracking the code, email me at creativenonfictionpodcast.gmail.com and we can start a dialogue.
Community Engagement
00:00:31
Speaker
Also, there's patreon.com slash cnfpod for a few bucks a month. You help support the show.
00:00:38
Speaker
and be part of a cool community of non-fiction writers. I'm going to start bringing back the audio magazine to life. I might bring back the last one that I had to table on codes. Keep your eyes peeled. Depending on your tier, you get some face-to-face time with me to talk things up. Because sometimes you just need to talk it out, man.
00:00:59
Speaker
Definitely she became totally, totally real to me. It was just like in my office, my home office every day for weeks on end, months on end, years really.
Personal Updates & Excitement
00:01:16
Speaker
Oh hey CNFers, my voice has recovered. If you're still sticking around after that meandering one minute opening whatever that was, at the end of the month I will likely lose my voice again because I see the mighty Metallica for two more nights at the end of August. But until then, you have my full voice.
00:01:40
Speaker
Who do we have today? Lachlan, you jerk.
Introduction of Guest Madeline Blaze
00:01:45
Speaker
We have Pulitzer Prize winner Madeline Blaze on the show. She returns after many years. She was originally on episode 74, now she's back for 425.
00:01:58
Speaker
This time to talk about her paperback release of her wonderful biography, Queen of the Court, the many lives of tennis legend Alice Marble. It's published by Grove Press and the timing is fitting since the US Open is ready to rock and roll in Flushing Meadows.
Pioneering Tennis Legend Alice Marble
00:02:18
Speaker
in New York City, United States. Marble was a pioneer of the power tennis we see today. Big serve, servant volier, at a time when women were expected to be more genteel in their athletic pursuits, and certainly in the style of play that they adopted on the court list.
00:02:36
Speaker
lest their little bodies break. As you'll find from Maddie's recounting, Marble's life was very much Forrest Gumpian with the people she overlapped with and indeed the many lives she led.
00:02:51
Speaker
Hey, got a new review to share. Remember, if you write a review, not only will I read it here, but I'll coach up a piece of your work of up to 2,000 words. Just a screenshot of a review, send it to me when it publishes, and we'll get it done, all right? You might just like what you see. So here's a review. Five stars from Scott writes. He writes.
00:03:16
Speaker
Great show for the wayward CNFers. I love that. If you love to write creative nonfiction, this is the place for you. I've been writing a memoir for a while and love hearing how other writers do their work from craft issues to other processes and getting their work to the finish line. Brendan asks great questions as a fellow writer dealing with the same issues and he is easy to listen to, driving to and from work.
00:03:41
Speaker
He has a good sense of humor and love for CNF. Also, love his metallic guitar riffs. I listen to one per day and never get tired of listening. Always helpful if you're writing every day. Keep it going, Brendan. I will keep it going. Thank you, Scott.
00:04:00
Speaker
A little more about Maddie. She's a longtime friend and mentor of mine. I took her Diaries, Memoirs, and Journals class back in the fall of 2003 at UMass Amherst at the start of my fifth year there.
00:04:14
Speaker
It was a great little cohort we had, and Mattie has always been there for me over the years. I've had other people who I thought I could lean on, sort of rebuff or ignore me over the years. The vibe being, you're out of the nest now, time to fly away, figure this shit out on your own.
00:04:33
Speaker
Which is kind of a bummer, but I suppose there's some hard truths to it. You do have to flub your way through it and hope you have a partner bringing in health insurance. And I have got a partner who is responsible for the health insurance. Maddie though, she's been in my writing life going on 21 years and she's still going. And you're going to hear about this most brazen genre of biography, her first.
00:04:57
Speaker
And also how even in a chronological narrative, she gives herself permission to write out of chronology before stitching it all together. Great stuff here, CNFers. Parting shot, dealing with a boat with no rudder, no oars, mast, sail. Is that a leak? Here's Matty Riff.
00:05:27
Speaker
sports writer my whole life. And it's a sports I had never heard of Alice Marvel. And and so and yet here she is in this like this incredible life that she led. And I'd never heard of this woman. It's so how did how did you find out about her? And how did the culture at large just forget about her? Such a good such a good question. I found out about her many years ago in a passing reference that my mother made when I looked blank.
00:05:56
Speaker
my mother gave me one of her looks, which was a look sort of pretty saying, thinking in a way that my generation had missed out on so much because in her generation, she was born the exact same year by chance as Alice Marble. Alice Marble was the it girl during the depression for not as a movie star, although she was friends with Carol Lombard, who was the biggest movie star of the 1930s, but as a tennis player. And she was an all around
00:06:25
Speaker
kind of objective curiosity and admiration because not only was Alice Marble a good tennis player, but she was a torch singer and she was a writer who wrote things for various tennis magazines. And she eventually designed a line of clothing or more than one line of clothing. She was so omnipresent in the newspapers
00:06:45
Speaker
that she was used as an object lesson once in grammar. A newspaper said, trying to tell people how important commas were, said, if you change the comma in this phrase,
00:06:57
Speaker
Alice Marble, comma, champion to Alice, comma, marble champion, then you'd have an entirely different meaning. Just everywhere you looked, she was there kind of making a name for herself. What happened was that she achieved her greatest fame in 1939.
00:07:17
Speaker
It was her banner year in many ways, I guess in almost always. At Wimbledon, she made a clean sweep and later at Forest Hill, she made a clean sweep. The Wimbledon game that she won when she won the singles champion was played on July 8th, 1939. And she was the female champ. Bobby Riggs was the male champ.
00:07:40
Speaker
People remember that name because Bobby Riggs is the player that challenged Billie Jean King, or maybe she challenged him, I'm not sure how it worked, to the Battle of the Sexes in 19, I believe 73, so a long, long time ago. But those two, Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, went at it in a televised spectacle of tennis, the point of which was that Billie Jean King wanted to popularize the game and also invite women to play it more than they had been.
00:08:10
Speaker
And it was, in fact, a pretty amazing moment in sports because it changed the sense of tennis as sort of an elite sport and a sport that women were kind of allowed to play in a genteel way but not really allowed to be aggressive about. So Billie Jean can help with that. But anyway, in 1939 when Alice Marble won Wimbledon in
00:08:31
Speaker
a very easy set of games against Kaye Stammers, the English champion. She and Bobby Riggs were fetted at the Wimbledon ball that evening. And for Alice Marble, it was as if
00:08:46
Speaker
The world really had opened up to her in glorious technicolor. She was a working class kid from San Francisco, learned tennis on public tennis courts. Her family was cash strapped. Her father died when she was six years old.
00:09:03
Speaker
leaving her mother with five children. The oldest was a boy who was 13 who immediately dropped out of school and got a job laying floors, the only job he could get. Two years later, his 11 year old brother turned 13, dropped out of school and also took on that kind of work. A family member who worked for the trolley car system in San Francisco, a man, a brake man, the mother, Jesse Marple, the mother's brother, moved into the house.
00:09:27
Speaker
and help pay for groceries and help pay the mortgage actually. But they were just paycheck to paycheck this family and working under a lot of pressure. They were living under a lot of pressure. Through it all, Alice Marble from the beginning of her young life was an extremely gifted athlete, a strong, strong kid.
00:09:50
Speaker
And she basically, her first love was baseball, which I know really loves Brandon's. And she used to go to the rec park in San Francisco and watch the San Francisco Seals play. And I learned during my research that even though they were a minor league team, in those days, the California teams had the weight of major league teams in many regards, up to and including the kinds of people who played for them.
00:10:17
Speaker
Joe DiMaggio played for the Seals, as you may know, and leftio duel. But I learned a little bit about early baseball. It was pretty, but I loved the most of the nicknames. But at any rate, Marva was a kid in the, you know, just in the peanut gallery and she would catch fly balls like the other kids. Well, she actually caught them a lot more than the other kids. And at one point the player said, hey, boy, come on out in the field. You know, you can toss a ball with us.
00:10:44
Speaker
And she stood her ground and said, I'm not a boy. And he said, I don't care what you are. Come on out. And she was just, she had an arm from.
00:10:52
Speaker
that was a gift to the gods. And that arm is really what that, her pitching arm is what caused her to become in many ways a great tennis player because her serve was, she had a natural serve that was completely deadly. And women were supposed to be a little more restrained in their play, this and that. She was not like that. She just hit the ball with all her might and went point after point. At any rate, she's not on the field.
00:11:17
Speaker
She's wearing a little midi dress and a beanie and kind of a funny little raggedy outfit. And she's catching the ball. And somebody from the newspaper from the San Francisco examiner catches on. And they actually call the family and ask Mrs. Marble, Alice's mom, if
00:11:37
Speaker
they could take a picture of her and run a little story about her, which they did. And this is available in all the archives. It's a photo of Alice Marble showing how she threw a ball. She's pictured on top of the roof of the San Francisco newspaper building because they staged the photo. So she wasn't throwing it at anybody. It's just, you know, demonstrating how she threw a
00:12:01
Speaker
That article kind of created a name for her, a mystique and an aura. It was definitely a brush with fame, maybe locally in San Francisco, but San Francisco was always a sports town. So there she is, this little girl that people have heard about. And her older brother, by then he's a teen. She's maybe 12 and he's 17 or 18.
00:12:22
Speaker
But he said, this can't go on. You're never going to have a career in baseball. You have to take what schools you have and find a sport that will accept you. And he, out of his very small earnings, bought her a tennis racket and gave it to her when she was about 13 or 14 and just told her she had to go over to Golden Gate Park and learn how to play tennis. The family lived not far from the park, maybe
00:12:51
Speaker
Oh, a couple of miles. But as anyone who's been to San Francisco knows, on those rolling hills, a couple of miles can be a big deal. She would run to practice on these hills. Her quads were amazing. In fact, they were also amazing because her family lived in a house that was 60 steps up to get to the front door. Oh my.
00:13:11
Speaker
And she would run up and down all day long. So she was this kid in an incredible condition with this real drive in her, but she had no finesse. So when she was starting at tennis, she didn't have any of the
00:13:24
Speaker
She always had a good ball sense. She was born with that. But she didn't really understand the physics and the dynamics of tennis and a tennis ball and how to control it. It took a lot of false starts for her to finally sort of find her way in tennis.
00:13:43
Speaker
And she became kind of a west coast junior champ. So she had some nice ratification with that. Got sent to the nationals, the junior tournaments that precede the nationals when she was a teen. And on the east coast, met with quite a bit of, what if you
00:14:02
Speaker
I don't know, almost animosity, because she partly because of her class, she really not refined in the way that other young women were who played tennis. She had not come up through the obviously through the eastern system of tennis. So these beautiful clubs in gorgeous settings and locations, not
00:14:25
Speaker
gaudy at all, more that understated, you know, sort of wealth that used to be popular. I don't know if it's so popular anymore. But she got to go to those venues and play, and sometimes though she just sort of made enemies because she wasn't really refined in her manner. And the people thought that she was a little bit coarse or rough. And it took some time before she kind of learned to speak the language of East Coast tennis. I should say, because maybe your listeners don't know this, that tennis on the West Coast was always
00:14:55
Speaker
pretty egalitarian. Not only were there public courts, but male and female were invited into the game. The public courts existed in profusion. They were not grass courts are not that fancy. But because they were made out of concrete, they, you know, they also
00:15:14
Speaker
stood the test of time and they could be used over and over. But she got to play pretty readily on the West Coast. That was a place where girls were invited into the game and there was a history of some great female powerhouse tennis players that preceded Alice Marvel's time or just preceded it, such as Helen Wills Moody, who's probably perhaps still well known a great champion. Helen Jacobs is another one. They had a California lineage.
00:15:41
Speaker
What's, speaking of that egalitarian nature, this kind of gets a little ahead of the timeline, and I'm blanking on her last name, but I believe her name was Aletheia. Oh, yes, Gibson.
00:15:55
Speaker
And I should say, it's Althea Gibson. I pronounced it wrong in the initial recording. And in 2023, same year that Maddie's book came out initially, Sally H. Jacobs, she published a biography titled Althea, The Life of Tennis Champion Althea Gibson.
00:16:14
Speaker
And I haven't read it yet. I actually have it in my NetGalley account. I would love to read it and have Sally on the show to talk about this other sort of forgotten tennis star, groundbreaking tennis star in her own right. So in any case, Althea Gibson. So that name will come up again in this conversation.
00:16:35
Speaker
And just one of the pioneering black tennis athletes in an almost exclusively white sport. And Alice, post her career, wrote really a blistering, scathing, beautiful column that came to her defense. And it was really progressive for the time.
00:16:58
Speaker
It was. What happened was I probably should make clear that when Alice Marva won Wimbledon on July 8, 1939, it was what, six or seven weeks later that Hitler invaded Poland. And basically tennis went dark in Europe and certainly in England. It took maybe a year or so before tennis became a
00:17:19
Speaker
an unnecessary pursuit because we were at war ourselves. And although during the war, Alice Marvel did play exhibition games, her career really ended with World War II. And she was, it ended when she was at the very height of her career. So no one knows what other records she might have broken.
00:17:38
Speaker
She had to pivot, as we say, I like to think of her as the queen of the pivot. And what she did at that time was associate herself with American Lawn Tennis, which was a fairly, I don't know, well edited magazine. And she wrote columns for them that that publication. It was a publication that believed that anything that was good for tennis was good. And therefore,
00:18:07
Speaker
because it was believed by some of the editors, not just Alice Marble, that
00:18:12
Speaker
whoever plays the best tennis should be allowed to play tennis. They were in favor of integration as a publication. They showed this desire for integration over the years, even before Alice Marvel wrote her stirring editorial by covering the American Tennis League, the league that was for the black players. They never got the same coverage as the white leagues and certainly didn't have the same degree of spectatorship or whatever.
00:18:42
Speaker
But they did cover Black players, so they knew who was coming up in that world. And when Marvel wrote her editorial
00:18:50
Speaker
the magazine in 1950. She hadn't been playing tennis as an amateur and later she did play a bit as a professional in the early 1940s. She hadn't really been playing for really for a long time. She'd been a, she was a commentator on the sport, but she wrote this stirring editorial arguing that Alice Marvel, that Athia Gibson should be, who was the black champion, the black female champion, who wanted to play at Forest Hills
00:19:16
Speaker
should be allowed to play. And she felt it would be a shame on the sport of tennis if the current people that were in charge didn't accept her and give her the chance to play. But Marble also said, this is inevitable. This is going to happen. Why not now? The men who ran the United States Law and Tennis Association acquiesced and allowed one Black
00:19:44
Speaker
female champion and one black male champion from the American tennis league to play at Forest Hills. They did something that was a little bit sneaky, in my opinion. They said these two players would be allowed to play, but they didn't have to and weren't even allowed to really be part of the qualifying tournaments, which meant that they could not
00:20:06
Speaker
go to all the preliminary tournaments and all these places outside of Forest Hills and play tennis and sometimes win, sometimes lose, but also learn who's
00:20:18
Speaker
what you know learned by playing against certain people what their strengths and what their weaknesses were and therefore you would refine your strategies with those people so that when you came to face them in Forest Hills you knew who you were dealing with you learned during that time also who might be a good partner for doubles or mixed doubles that sort of thing so the two black players were allowed into the game into the into the Forest Hills
00:20:41
Speaker
to what we would call the U.S. Open today, the Nationals. But they were not allowed to be part of the preliminary, for many years, the preliminary games. Althea Gibson played the first year, not so well, but I think by the second year, I think she won the Nationals. And then she did, and I think it was 1957, Moon Wimbledon.
00:21:02
Speaker
So she had the stuff, there was no doubt about it. And Marble felt that she had every right to prove that she had the stuff. And if she didn't have it, that was okay with Marble. There would be someone else who did. But Alice Marble was one of the, she had other people backing her, other players, not everybody, but many, who understood that this was just simply fair play. And in Marble's opinion, inevitable.
00:21:25
Speaker
because she said it's impossible to ignore real talent. And she felt in the case of Gibson, there was real talent. If you go to the US Open, you'll see that a few years ago, a statue of Gibson was installed. And when I was there, I guess you'd call the person, the dosage of the guide, someone who was at the statue greeting people.
00:21:47
Speaker
What was interesting is so many people, black and white, who were older, would come up and tell this docent how they had seen Gibson play and how inspired they were by her as a player. But in tennis, as in any sport, and once again, Ben, I feel like I can't tell you anything about sports that you don't already know. Nobody just exists on their own. You're always the product of the coach that shaped you and the players that came before you that paved the way.
00:22:15
Speaker
And in the case of Gibson, she was shaped by marble in many ways. But also, when marble finally left the New York area and relocated back to California, she didn't go back to San Francisco. She went to the LA area and then eventually to Palm Springs and Palm Desert area. But in the LA area, she was working
00:22:37
Speaker
In the 1950s, her job was that she was a nurse's aide in a pediatrician's office. She just could not get any other kind of work. So she just did that for about seven or eight years. But while she did that, she coached tennis. And one of the people she coached for about three or four months was Billie Jean King.
00:22:59
Speaker
And the reason Billie Jean's heard of her, wanted to work with her, Billie Jean was just a teen. Billie Jean asked her own coach who said, I think this would be a good idea. Billie Jean's parents were on board. Her father had been a soldier during the war in Norfolk, Virginia, and had seen Alice Marble
00:23:21
Speaker
play at an exhibition match for GIs. And he remembered her as being a really great player and just an incredible athlete. So he'd always, he kind of knew who she was. And so when his own daughter wanted to play with her, it was fine with him. And the family arranged it. It wasn't the most convenient thing in the world. I think there were 40 miles distance between where King grew up and where Marbo lived.
00:23:47
Speaker
There were not great super highways to get to this, but the family would drive her there on Saturday morning. Marble would school Blue Jean King all day. And then in the evenings, they'd just take time off, but the next day they would play tennis as well. Finally culminating, it was she played on Alice Marble had access to a neighbor's court. And then the tennis practice and training would culminate.
00:24:11
Speaker
with Billie Jean playing with the host, the man who owned the tennis courts as a as a as a gift. So that's what that's how you kind of paid paid for your use of the court, you play with the owner. And during that time, Alice Billie Jean King went from, gosh, in her age group, maybe 17th in the country to number four. And Billie Jean King has said that she always admired marble,
00:24:38
Speaker
and feels that she was the first feminist. I don't know if she believes in all of sports, but she believes in tennis in the sense of being a woman who was very outspoken for the rights of other women.
00:24:49
Speaker
What's amazing about my reading of this book was how Forrest Gumpian marble's life was and just the eras that she traversed and the people she overlapped with, you know, being William Randolph Hearst, DuPont, and just the totality of her life had that Forrest Gumpian element to it. I imagine that was pretty illuminating in your research.
00:25:18
Speaker
First of all, I love that phrase. I didn't use it in the book because I wasn't sure if people would necessarily get the reference, but there was a way in which she, by chance, seemed to have relationships with some of the most famous people in the 20th century, and some of the people she'd only met grisorally, like after she won Wimbledon, Ambassador Joe Kennedy, father of JFK.
00:25:45
Speaker
He was the ambassador to England, came and gave his congratulations, but that was just somebody that she met momentarily. But she did know William Randolph Hearst because her coach, whose name was Eleanor Teach Tenet, known as Each, used to play at the Hearst Castle and be invited as a guest, play with the guests there.
00:26:06
Speaker
many of whom were movie stars. The thing about tennis was in the 20s and 30s, it was what movie stars today, it was their, oh god, it was their Botox, their Pilates, their half facelifts, their, I don't know, what was everything, it was the thing that was, they felt that would give them a beautiful body and a beautiful glow. So tennis was everything to the movie stars. And
00:26:30
Speaker
Teach Tenet understood that and we get wormed, wormed her ways, maybe stronger way to put it, but was able to get, get invited to the Hearst castle. And eventually she brought her protege, Alice with her, and both the older coach and Alice would play with Charlie Chaplin and other guests of the castle. And these were real encounters that, that became part of Alice Marvel's, you know, social life and part of who she knew.
00:27:00
Speaker
Of course, the more there were encounters like that and the more she lived in a sort of glamorous world, even if it was a borrowed world, the further she moved away in a way mentally, maybe not in her heart, but certainly mentally and in terms of her life experience from her own family.
00:27:18
Speaker
And by the time Marvel was saying her 30s and 40s and 50s and trying to just lead her life and find meaning in it, et cetera, it wasn't that she was estranged from her family, but she didn't see much of them. And it was in an era when people didn't just go flying everywhere they wanted to every minute.
00:27:36
Speaker
But because she had met so many of these prominent people, it was almost as if she just led a life that was so different from the working class life of her family that it was almost like two different worlds. When Marvel was in her 20s, she developed something that was diagnosed possibly as tuberculosis. It wasn't. It was a different kind of lung disease.
00:28:01
Speaker
She did survive it. She went to a sanitarium that was ridiculous in Monrovia, California. By ridiculous, I mean the person who ran it felt that the way to cure TB was to eat a lot of bacon and cream. So why it was ridiculous is she went from like 135 pounds to 185 in the course of a few months. And this did not cure anything. It just made her lose a lot of her athletic ability for a while.
00:28:28
Speaker
But while she was there, Teach arranged for Carol Lombard, who was the most famous comedian of the time and a wonderful actress, to send to send Marvel a letter. Carol Lombard sent her this letter cheering up Marvel and
00:28:45
Speaker
after that Lombard for many years became almost like an older sister and a mentor to Alice Marvel and helped actually helped her solve some of the the problems that Alice Marbles felt that she faced as a person who hadn't had some of the advantages of other young women who played tennis at one point Alice Marbles saw herself on a newsreel and said oh my god I walk like a stevedore you know I'm not walking so so Carol Lombard
00:29:12
Speaker
got her a course at, I don't know if it was University of Southern California, UCLA, but a course in fashion. She got her some, oh, she had some acne that needed to be addressed and helped her with that, find the right doctor, and also got her to go to this term course. There was a man named John Powers who taught charm. It was, what he taught was, I thought, I read his book. It's pretty ridiculous. I love the book.
00:29:41
Speaker
because it is so ridiculous. But he got Alice Marvel to go to a charm course and to, you know, stand up straighter and probably use the right fork under certain circumstances, that kind of thing. But Carol Lombard, it should be said, towards the end of the 1930s, was madly in love with and married Clark Gable, who was the leading male actor of the time. So it was quite a marriage of two Hollywood royals. And Alice was part of that circle. It ended
00:30:11
Speaker
truly tragically when right after World War II was declared, Carol Lombard
00:30:17
Speaker
insisted on trying to do something for the war effort and went back to her home area in the Midwest to sell war bonds, was trying to get back to California to be with Clark and decided to take a plane. In those days, planes didn't fly straight from, say, Chicago to LA. There would be many stops, three or four or five for refueling, whatever. At any rate, the plane took off from one of its stops in bad weather and crashed into a mountainside.
00:30:47
Speaker
Lombard died. And Clark Gable was, I think, pretty grief stricken for quite a while. But and it was a loss for, in my opinion, a psychological and an emotional and a very real loss for Alice Marble because Carol had been such a light in her life. She was just a person filled with light and she spread it. And Marble needed that. And with that,
00:31:15
Speaker
taken away from her right as the war was commencing, etc. It just made all those highs of the incredible tennis career of the 1930s seem in the past, you know, almost, you know, right away. So here's Alice Marvel in her late 20s, and the best is behind her in many ways, which is, I guess, maybe true of some athletes. So
00:31:40
Speaker
And they always say about athletes, you know, that they die two deaths, the one when their career ends and then when they die in the fullness of time. The first death from Marvel came pretty early in her life. Other people that she met, DuPont was this famous banker, the most rich man in America, I guess. He was married when he met Marvel.
00:31:58
Speaker
But he didn't stay married for long. He got divorced because he was just absolutely convinced that there was nobody in the world he wanted to be with more than Alice Marvel. She unfortunately didn't agree. So anyway, DuPont was a kind of, he loved horses more than anything and he had a big horse firm in Delaware.
00:32:17
Speaker
but often thought about him. He smelled of, he was a scrawny guy who smelled of mud and manure, not that it mattered to him. He was just sort of his own, he was a strong taste unto himself. He was utterly in love with her. And she just could not imagine being married to him. But he did get divorced and eventually
00:32:41
Speaker
he remarried, he married another woman who was working class from San Francisco who played tennis and who won Wimbledon. So as I often say, he had a type. But there are all kinds of consequences for this. And I'll try to make this. There's so many stories to tell here. Dupont
00:33:02
Speaker
having never completely lost his ardor for Alice, even as Alice and he aged and became more and more beset with physical frailties, etc., took care of her. He did create a modest annuity for her. At one point he wanted to move to Palm Desert where she was also planning to move. He built a nice
00:33:25
Speaker
compound for himself and even built a house for her on it, that she could just have being clear. He was rich enough to be able to create a compound and invite people he wanted to be with to be near him. And she was fine with that. She was also, she helped, she actually paid her to supervise some of the building of the property and make sure everything was going well. She moved in, I think it was December 29th, 1965, I think it was.
00:33:55
Speaker
And he died two days later. And the minute he died, one of his four children, one of his daughters from his first marriage sent a letter to Marvel saying, you must vacate the premises immediately. And so her dream house, her little dream bungalow in Palm Desert disappeared
00:34:18
Speaker
not overnight, it took two nights. But it's no longer in her life. But she ended up staying in Palm Desert, which is where she spent the final third of her life. And she had been there as a young person with her teacher after the TB. When she was recovering her health, she'd gone there with Teach and played tennis. So it had always been one of her place close to her heart and she was happy to be back.
00:34:44
Speaker
Okay, in just a moment, Maddie is going to read a little passage from Alice Marbles' editorial in support of Althea Gibson. It's just a brilliantly illuminating passage and really speaks to Marbles' ideals and progressive ideas for the time.
Advocacy for Racial Integration in Tennis
00:35:02
Speaker
I believe the piece was written in the 1950s, so that gives you some context.
00:35:07
Speaker
Just to make it clear, from my point of view with Alice Marble and what she stood for, her two greatest legacies were not only how, as a tennis player, she changed the way women played the game by bringing her power, service, and aggressive style to the courts, but really, as an activist, also in the editorial she wrote for American Long Tennis about Althea Gibson. And I'm going to just read if it's OK. Just a couple of quick paragraphs. These are Alice Marble's words.
00:35:37
Speaker
But as a writer, I so admire her writing because it's so clear and passionate and uncluttered. Anyway, here's Marble. Quote, can't honestly say that I believe Miss Gibson to be a potential champion. I don't know. But if she's refused a chance to succeed or to fail,
00:35:57
Speaker
then there is an eradicable mark against a game to which I have devoted most to one. And I would be bitterly ashamed. If the field of sports has got to pave the way for all of civilization, let's do it. At this moment, tennis is privileged to take its place among the pioneers for true democracy.
00:36:21
Speaker
If it declines to do so, the honor will fall to the next generation, perhaps, but someone will break the ground. The entrance of Negroes International Tennis is as inevitable as it is proven to be in baseball, in football, and boxing. There is no denying such talent.
00:36:42
Speaker
The committee at Forest Hills has the power to stifle the efforts of one Althea Gibson, who may or may not be the stuff of which champions are made. But eventually, she will be succeeded by others of her race who have equal or superior ability. They will know at the door as she has done. Eventually, the tennis world will rise up en masse to protest the injustices perpetuated by our policymakers. Eventually, why not now?
00:37:13
Speaker
Anyway, that's Marvel and I just always loved that. That is to me what she really stood for in her deepest self.
00:37:21
Speaker
Yeah, it's such a great sentiment and, you know, ahead of its time, and it allowed, you know, her, well, just marble style of play, a power serve, serve in volley. It really ushered in, it took a while, but it ushered in definitely a new style of tennis that would eventually pave the way for Althea Gibson, the Billie Jean Kings, and then we're talking into more modern times with Navratilova and then the Williams sisters.
00:37:48
Speaker
you can really trace that lineage back to her style of play and her activism to really pave that road.
00:37:57
Speaker
It's amazing. I also think I should bring up something that's, this isn't awkward, but except during the research, it made me somewhat sad to realize how tough times were for Alice Marble as she aged up. She regretted, she said that she didn't have a dozen children. She had no children and she had never really married. And as I said, was
00:38:26
Speaker
not in very much touch with her family. They had kind of parted ways, not because of any terrible problems or scenes or dramas or anything like that, but she had just become a person who led a life in a different orbit. So she's now in the desert. The desert was nice about treating her as a celebrity. It sounds like people there
00:38:48
Speaker
enjoy celebrating who people are and also who they were. And they made sure that Alice Marble was welcome in many places, but times were not easy for her. At her condo development, she ended up at one point being literally the pool manager.
00:39:06
Speaker
because she needed a little bit of income. She just didn't have a lot of money. She never made money as a tennis player. People often said to me, well, she must have been rich. No. There was no money. You had to be an amateur.
00:39:20
Speaker
to play tennis at the highest levels when she was playing at the highest levels. And even though she did go on a pro tour and make some money, it dissipated much of which was shared 50-50 with Teach or Coach. I sometimes think that Teach knew how to pad the accounts and just get more money from Alice Marbles than maybe she was entitled to. Lele Marbles in the Desert.
00:39:43
Speaker
She's trying to hold her head high. She does play tennis, she does coach a bit. Sometimes she coaches children for free because she doesn't feel it's fair to ask certain kids who don't seem to have much in the way of money for it to pay. So she's just got a good heart, but things are slowing down for her pretty drastically. And while that's happening, something's happening to her mentally. And I'm not gonna say that she lost her mind because that would be one, dramatic and two, not really accurate. But she did start to fantasize
00:40:12
Speaker
Not about how she'd met a great tennis player, there was no need to fantasize about that. It was true. But about how certain things in her life had been different than they were. Up to and including, she imagined that she'd been married sort of secretly during the end of World War II or towards the end to a man who was a great hero who ended up dying in a mission, a flying mission over Germany.
00:40:39
Speaker
And when people asked his name, she would, including reporters over the years, she'd say, well, let's just call him Joe. As time went on, let's just call him Joe became my own code for something that's not really accurate. You just, let's just call him Joe. But anyway, she, she seemed to believe that she had been married and she talked about it a lot.
00:41:00
Speaker
He had, everything was vague about him. He was like a Mr. Etch-a-Sketch, in my opinion. You couldn't really grab on to any real details, except that everything about him seemed to make him into a paragon. And as time went on, she'd be adding more and more accolades to him, up to one point, up to an including at one point, saying he'd been a Rhodes scholar. Of course, I checked with the Rhodes people to see if there's anybody named Joe was from, allegedly from a certain state, Nebraska, I think.
00:41:27
Speaker
Anyway, I couldn't find him at a Rhodes Scholar. I couldn't find him having graduated from the Ohio University where he allegedly went. I couldn't find any mirrored certificates for them in New York. I tried my best. It's hard to prove a negative, but I could not find anything that proved that he existed. My impression is that he wasn't, but became even more tangled up in Alice Marple's head because
00:41:52
Speaker
she imagined that after this mythical man died suddenly and tragically in the war that she was recruited by different people in the war effort to go to Geneva, Switzerland and play some exhibition tennis matches that were in her in her saying of it well publicized
00:42:14
Speaker
by day so she could reunite with an old semi lover in the evening who turned out to be someone who is still Nazi loop in order for himself to capitalize on it in the future when the war ended. And he was not in her opinion or the way she described this person. Let's call him Hans.
00:42:33
Speaker
He was a bad actor, but in her long and winding story about having been a spy, you can imagine that it ends with her saving the day. And at a certain point, this was a story that was retailed very widely in her circle in the desert.
00:42:50
Speaker
And people heard about it, including Rita Mae Brown, who's always been a tennis fan and is a great writer. And Rita Mae Brown was hired by ABC Movie of the Week, people to turn Ellis Marvel's life story into a movie for television.
00:43:11
Speaker
Back when a television made certain movies, not very many, it was a big deal and they tried for quality. It was a big deal to create a quality production. I think that Rita Mae Brown wrote 12 drafts of the screen flight. But as ABC examined it more and more, they simply wanted proof that they wanted some proof that Marvel had actually done this and Marvel had none to offer.
00:43:42
Speaker
Rita Mae Brown was a little bit breezy about it and said, well, everyone knows she tells stories. You know, what does it matter? Everyone's dead anyway. It's such a good school. So there I was trying to figure out how do I prove that she didn't play in this tournament and go to Switzerland. I went, aha, American long tennis magazine.
00:44:01
Speaker
I happen to be very lucky. I live near Springfield College, which is a school that has dedicated itself to the teaching of certain sports and to being partly basketball because
00:44:12
Speaker
basketball was invented in Springfield, Mass. At any rate, called down there, their library had every issue of American long tennis, which I had read dutifully through, you know, Marvel's career, but I hadn't been reading it quite so carefully in say late 30, not by, by when you stop, when you stop playing tennis, I stopped reading it as carefully, but I decided to go back to those years.
00:44:35
Speaker
And I read every issue very carefully because Marvel had said a million times that these tennis games were well publicized. And American Long Tennis cared so much about tennis that it would publicize a pickup game in New Guinea. This is true.
00:44:52
Speaker
The player that they heard of was playing. And I have proof of that that they're just anything, anything that meant anything to tennis they cared about. And there was absolutely nothing about Alice marble, who was one of their darlings I mean they she was a big deal.
00:45:07
Speaker
playing well-publicized tennis clinics or matches in Switzerland towards the end of the war. And although, once again, the fact that there were no articles about it doesn't prove that it didn't happen, but that was, to me, the keys to the kingdom. It was very unlikely that any of that had happened.
00:45:29
Speaker
And so I'm left with this person who as time goes on, is living in the desert with a cat named Frisky in a small very nondescript condo, working as the pool lady, drinking too much and kind of living in her own head. And I was worried about the book in the sense that I thought this isn't going to a happy ending. There's nothing I hate more as a writer than a fake happy ending. And I wanted to honor her
00:45:57
Speaker
who she was. And I asked, I sent the manuscript in progress to a dear old friend of mine, an actress. Her name is Mercedes Rule, and we had gone to college together. And I said, Merce, what am I going to do? You know, you're a good reader. You understand the complexity of lives. This woman, Alice Marble, towards the end of her life reminded me of, reminds me of Blanche Dubois, a character from T. Williams.
00:46:22
Speaker
Well, Blanche DuBois is practically catnip to anyone in theater. They really want to find out about this character. And my friend Merce read it, and she sent me a note. And I wanted to share a quick excerpt from what she sent to me, because I think it does capture what I was trying to do. And I would like readers of the book who pick it up to know that they're in for a certain kind of melancholy towards the end, but there's something also
00:46:49
Speaker
so touching about it that I hope they're touched and not in any way turned off. But what Merce wrote was, and she's just reading the manuscript of progress, so this isn't the whole book, but she said, the beginning, the rise from hard scrabble is of course fascinating, but I think the powerful drama ramps up during World War II in how she struggled desperately to keep meaning and purpose in her life, how she succumbed to alcoholism and self-mythologizing,
00:47:18
Speaker
how she hung greater and greater fabulations about herself as she fell. It is the most interesting to me because it is tragic and complex. Finally, it is the story. Lily Lohman, Lily Barr, I keep coming back to Lear. No matter what, I find a touching nobility in the end. And what I want to also share is that towards the end,
00:47:43
Speaker
marble still kind of the toast of the desert would try to go out and give oh gosh she'd host at different facilities or clubs it would be called breakfast at Wimbledon and she'd host watching Wimbledon on tv with people while they had breakfast and she would tell them all about how she'd met kings and queens in England long ago.
00:48:03
Speaker
Someone, one of her, a person who had a great deal of contact with her towards the end said that one thing that was amazing about her was that when, just when you thought all was lost, you know, she was just in shambles, she'd have the chance to appear in public and find and be in the limelight. Once again, she did love the limelight. And she'd
00:48:22
Speaker
She put on a kind of clean, crisp, tidy outfit in public she couldn't smoke cigarettes and somehow without that smoke around her face she looked younger and more alert more with a brighter and happier, and what this one person said
00:48:39
Speaker
She loved seeing the transformation from this hard-smoking, hard-drinking, kind of embittered person who essentially felt she had been forgotten. I saw her take on the role of guest speaker at one of the clubs where they had major tennis matches. More than once, I saw her change before my very eyes. She acted so composed, I saw the steeliness that was always in her.
00:49:03
Speaker
She was like an old war horse, heeding the call of a bugle. I thought, when you read the complexity of her life, how she was given so many gifts. She was the gift of intelligence and of her physical might and determination. And yet there were some gaps or some lacuna, some deficits that didn't quite sustain her over the course of
00:49:30
Speaker
all of time, and yet she was always trying. She was always, in fact, to borrow a metaphor from her favorite sport. She was always at bat. Over the course of your research and your writing and spending all this time that a biographer spends with their central figure, did you come to, especially at this point in the journey of it, have you come to miss her?
00:49:56
Speaker
Oh, yeah, I do because I'm really thrilled that the paperback is coming out because now I'm just getting a little more of a, you know, more of a bump in public attention. So I'm thrilled about that.
Writing During the Pandemic
00:50:07
Speaker
I definitely she became totally, totally real to me. It was just like in my in my office, my home office every day.
00:50:17
Speaker
for weeks on end, months on end, years really, because this book was begun before COVID, done during COVID and then after as well. So it was quite a long journey to try to capture. I should say it's the first time I'd written a biography. I now know this as a writer, that if you write a biography, once you've written one and you've invented or invented your own template for how to do it, I think it's probably easier. At the moment, I'm not contemplating doing another biography,
00:50:47
Speaker
Because I want to go I'm going back to a project that I put aside to do to do Alice Marvel and to do another book about Miami in the 1980s so I have another project in mind. But the thing I also learned about being a biographer is it's the most I call it the most brazen of genres because you're trying
00:51:05
Speaker
to do nothing less if the person is gone from us than resurrect a person, someone who's long gone. And so I think, boy, the wonderful hubris of that. Oh, wow. The only thing I didn't understand completely was how the research worked. Someone like Marble, who really occupied almost the full swath of the 20th century, born in 1913, died in 1990.
00:51:31
Speaker
you can go down, as they say, so many rabbit holes. And I had to learn to, you have to learn to, it's like one of those all you can eat restaurants. You can't research everything as deeply as you want because you will never get the story done. So you have to have this brutal economy always at the heart of the process of research, which is, is this helping to advance the story or not? It may be interesting to me as a person, but if it's not advancing the clause, which is,
00:52:00
Speaker
trying to capture the life story of this one human being, then you have to stop the research and go forward. It's so great to hear you say that because that's what I've been largely in my late stage revisions with the Prefontaine book, experiencing something very similar. My rough, rough draft was basically this bloated 160,000 word narrative timeline, essentially.
00:52:25
Speaker
And through massive calls and lots of conversations with an incredibly astute editor, he's always just saying, he's like, you know what? He's like, you as the biographer, you have your finger on the scale. You choose what goes in here. And every chapter has to be framed in such a way where it has to be doing a certain amount of work for the story that you want to tell about this guy, this resurrection, as you put it.
00:52:49
Speaker
And so you talk about that hubris, but also you have to be so brutal about the decisions you want. And what you leave on the floor could be a book unto itself, but it's just in the rubric or the framework of the thing that you're looking to tell, you need to make sure that all those ores are rowing in the right direction. And that can lead to some tears on the floor too. You're like, damn, all that research I did. Shoot, I hate to see it on the floor, but it's got to go.
00:53:20
Speaker
Yep, that's exactly how I feel. You said it perfectly. Absolutely perfectly. And it is part of the process. So all your listeners who are contemplating going into the genre of biography, or at least they're getting fair warning from you and from me about the process, which is it's very complicated.
00:53:39
Speaker
It really, really is. And how did you, you know, you say, you know, this being the first biography that you've tackled and you've done the kind of the shadowing of a team as you did it with In These Girls Hope is a Muscle and a couple memoirs. But this is an entirely different beast in terms of how you formulate that research and synthesize it and build the world around it. So how did what what did the template that you spoke of end up looking like for this?
00:54:06
Speaker
Well, I think I had to, in my case, I had to realize that the story had to be told chronologically. It could begin with a high moment or a moment of drama. But basically, it's a once upon a time kind of narrative. And anything fancy in terms of the narrative technique was going to probably distract the readers because there was so much to say. So I had to make sure that I wasn't doing anything that was distracting.
00:54:31
Speaker
And nonetheless, it was, you know, I had to add it a lot out. I had to kiss many, many darlings goodbye or murder them or do whatever we're supposed to do with the darlings. I did a lot of that. And it was it was painful to do that. But but I had no choice. I mean, I really I could have just I could I could have done a whole book on Model T cars. I could have a whole done a whole book on the earthquake in San Francisco.
00:54:56
Speaker
I could have done a whole book on torch singers. I don't know if I've emphasized too much as she was a torch singer for a while, at the Waldorf Astoria, which deserves its own whole book. You can just go on and on and on to the point where you can be, I think probably if you're not careful, pretty paralyzed in the face of the kinds of choices you have to make.
00:55:15
Speaker
So that brutal economy that use your word, your expression is what really needs to be kept foremost for people in the minds of would be biographers as they go forward. Oh, for sure. It's I'm thinking of like when you when you say you could have you could have taken any slice of marble story and it could have been a book unto itself. It could have been like marble marble during the war. And that could in and of itself probably sustain itself for
00:55:44
Speaker
how for a slim book of some kind. And it's I find I had this great great thing that my editor slated for deletion and I might lobby for it to go back in because it's just so weird and quirky and cool.
00:56:00
Speaker
At one point, my guy – he was going into a race, and the LA Times had their track writer predict it, and they brought in an astrologer to read the stars and the charts to see who would win this race, and they pitted them up against each other. And it's just so wild and zany.
00:56:19
Speaker
And he's just like what he's like this all of this is like it's kind of weird and funny, but what is it really doing? I'm like what is really doing is that it's really cool and funny and uh, but that might not ultimately that's one of those things that might just have to be something I talk about that got cut from the book but not put in because Ultimately, what is it? What work is it really doing for the story?
00:56:42
Speaker
That's it. You have to be brutal. And, you know, and it's I don't know how many. Well, how many words is the manuscript at this point aiming for? It's still around 120. I think my editor would love to see it around 105 110. Yeah, it's 120 isn't bad.
00:57:00
Speaker
Well, I can say now, at least here we are towards the somewhat of the tail end of August, that word count is around 108 to 109. That will likely get down to 105 in the end. Well, that's your update. It seemed like a good launching off point. All right. Well, back, back to, back to business. Is there some, you know, anything 128 under?
00:57:24
Speaker
is pretty good, I think. But in terms of getting readers to read the book is what I'm really thinking about. But don't forget, I'm sure that the writers who are listening know that some of your outtakes can make nifty little essays in Lit Hub and other places that I did one for Air Mail. I did a couple of other places. I did something for the Wall Street Journal about tennis books, all things that I became a little expert in, and they didn't fit in with the narrative of this biography, but they found a home.
00:57:54
Speaker
And they help bring attention to your work too. So they're really wonderful writers who figured out how to get, I've seen a couple of people get about 10 pieces published all over, you know, including an ARP or Yankee magazine, you know, crazy, a place that you would never think of. Right when the book is being published and just as part of that sense of bringing, bringing, bringing the book to, you know, to the, to as much attention to the widest audience possible.
00:58:22
Speaker
When you were getting into the writing of it, what were some things that you like to kind of have in place so you could effectively access the things you need, so you could get into a good flow, so to speak? How did you set up your day and your writing time to accomplish that?
00:58:45
Speaker
Well, I think one thing I'll say is that sometimes when I was writing this book, and I feel this way about my current project too, I think the expression in my head probably is go with your strengths. I don't always write everything chronologically. If something is something in the middle of the book, middle of Alice or partway through it, it's just coming more readily. I give myself permission to work on that. And it's kind of cool because maybe it's chapter eight.
00:59:10
Speaker
So then finally I do get the first seven chapters draft and live. Voila. Chapter eight is just waiting to just be installed and another, you know, 5000 words are in the book.
00:59:20
Speaker
Um, so that's the one technique that I have never minded writing a chronological story on chronologically. It's been, it makes sense to me to do it that way. I also like to kind of know what the end is. Now you're going to say, well, in the end, you know, a person lived their life that the biography, the end is somewhat a given.
00:59:41
Speaker
and their life is over if they're no longer here. But I knew that I had to build, in this case, she led more than one life. She had the life of her mind and her fantasy was part of what I had to address at the end. And I ended up creating a file for that that I would just add to, add to, add to. And when it came time to put it towards the end of the book, I knew,
01:00:08
Speaker
I had a very strong amount of data that I could present to the reader. It's the most forensic thing I've ever written because data arguing, it's evidence. It gave me this slight fantasy that very slight that I could have been a lawyer, which is ridiculous. I could not have been a lawyer.
01:00:27
Speaker
Yeah, it's wild. I love hearing you talk about the writing out of chronology just in terms of you might have just good material here. It might be a little stumped early on, but just to get momentum, doing what you did by writing something that might be a little further down the timeline and going back to it. And then maybe some of those earlier chapters, suddenly they start to crystallize because they're feeding towards something.
01:00:53
Speaker
Right, right. Exactly. And when you get when you when you have that that chapter that's sort of down the line, kind of a little bit under control and you encounter it and it seems to be working. It's also the other thought I always has. Oh, my God, I have money in the bank.
01:01:09
Speaker
I love the sound of that too. In terms of just the research and the reporting of this book, what elements of it or what parts of it pose the biggest challenge for you in terms of your research and ultimately the writing of it? Well, you know what? I think the biggest challenge was that the more I recognized
01:01:31
Speaker
that things that had been presented to me as givens about her life, including the brief early marriage and the work as a spy, were not true. And I was going to be in the position as a biographer of saying that someone was a liar. That's the first word to make.
01:01:49
Speaker
I don't even, and this is maybe just me or maybe some, you know, I have this kindly relationship with Alice Marvel, I guess, but I consider her a fantasist more than a liar in some ways. And the fantasies were really about how she wanted her life to be different. They weren't about, they weren't lies that were meant to steal money from people or result in a crime or what leader. She, and then I began to think, this is way more interesting. And the challenge of
01:02:19
Speaker
trying to make sure that the reader isn't surprised all of a sudden when I go, oh, this isn't true. This is why they go, what the heck? So from the very beginning, I make it clear that there was some dispute about some of the things that she said about her life pretty much from the prologue, because I didn't want someone to feel that I had suddenly jumped out of a bush and said, hi, I'm here, and I have a whole different story to tell you.
01:02:47
Speaker
Yeah, well, very nice. Well, Maddie, I want to be mindful of your time. And I certainly don't like it when Zoom just unceremoniously cuts off a conversation. So I'd rather cut it off with a few minutes to go rather than let Zoom do it. So this is just so wonderful to get to hear your voice and hear you talk about this wonderful biography you've done. So I just want to thank you for the work, thank you for the time, and thank you for just always kind of being there for me over the last 20 years.
01:03:17
Speaker
Brendan, you were always marked for greatness and I'm really glad you have a new book coming out and I've really been proud of these podcasts you've been doing over the years. It's a great service to the genre of literary nonfiction, creative nonfiction, and also you always seem in every interview you do to find
01:03:39
Speaker
to talk to the writers partly about the ethical component of what they're doing. I believe there's an ethical component in any form of art, fiction, nonfiction, whatever.
01:03:50
Speaker
And there's some kind of, there's got to be some truthfulness, some honesty. And that's what you are constantly, I think, emphasizing. So I want to say you're wonderful. We had a more than one wonderful class at UMass. Go UMass. Go UMass Amherst. And we talked before the broadcast about classmates and your memoir group from back in the day and how they're doing. And just a small group of people who met in a
01:04:15
Speaker
kind of very nondescript classroom 25 years ago, and they're still working hard and doing beautiful things in this world. And you're one of them, so thank you.
01:04:30
Speaker
Awesome. Yes. Thanks to Maddie for, well, everything over the 21 years you've known each other. And thanks to you, CNFers, for listening this far. If you dig the show, consider subscribing so you never miss a new one. You don't have to listen to them, but at least you know that they're there.
01:04:49
Speaker
Don't forget about the monthly rage against the algorithm newsletter. It's back to a month after my weekly experiment. That did not go well. First of the month, no spam. So far as I can tell, can't beat it. I'm not usually one to use journal entries as jumping off points to parting shots, mainly because my daily journaling is this vapid collection of career angst and body dysmorphia. But I stumbled on a topic I've been wrestling with as I submitted a late draft of the Prefontaine book.
01:05:19
Speaker
Now if I had to equate what this past week has been like, despite my best efforts, which if we're being honest is not really my best efforts, but this is relative. It's being in a boat without a rudder, without oars, without a motor, without a mast, without a sail, and look!
01:05:37
Speaker
There's a breach in the hall and we're taking on water. Oh by the way, there's no bucket either. We're bobbling along at the mercy of the currents. Iceberg straight ahead? Sure, why not? It's sit and wait time, which is good for any book.
01:05:54
Speaker
And when you've been so deeply immersed and then suddenly you've come up for air, you're left with this time and it feels kind of weird. Yeah, I wish I was the type who could be okay with this notion of doing nothing, of just resting. But do I really need rest? I'm sort of the laziest biographer and writer in the business. When I see what other biographers do, I'm like, fuck. Probably should have done more of that.
01:06:21
Speaker
Instead, I'm trying to catch up on some podcast reading, keep the podcast machine humming on whatever two cylinder engine it operates on, looking ahead to the marketing plan, reaching out to people who might want to waste an hour talking to me about the book, tracking down photo permissions, maybe writing an essay or two, trying to keep the house from falling into ruin because I'm just such
Life, Career, and Authenticity Reflections
01:06:46
Speaker
a shit show. I am pig pen.
01:06:48
Speaker
I leave a trail of destruction and dirt in my wake, no matter what. As you can tell, this is the current I'm floating in without a paddle, and the waves are crashing over the gunnels, man. Over the gunnels.
01:07:06
Speaker
It would be nice to be at peace in writing, sure, but just in general. Gosh, what must that feel like? To be at peace in your mind, in your body, in your work? To have hobbies? To have friends who don't cringe when they see your name pop up on caller ID? I did the math, man.
01:07:24
Speaker
I'm 44, okay? Good chance, if I'm lucky, I've got 36 years remaining. But I'm taking the under on that, given just how high my blood pressure is.
01:07:39
Speaker
Let's just say listen to these podcasts and enjoy them while they last. There's a little over 1,872 weeks in this hypothetical life remaining. Maybe 18,000 beers to go before I sit on my deathbed awash in regret. I know I will feel so much regret. Weighted down from the judgment of ghosts. In some ways, you know, I've hedged against the one big regret
01:08:05
Speaker
You know, the biggest one, when you, I don't know, look at those things, like, what do people regret on their deathbed? And one is not necessarily being true to yourself. I think I've done that a little bit. You know, being a writer, and like, say not a lawyer, unless that's your calling, but I was kind of, at one point, kind of pushed into, hey, be a lawyer. And I was like, no, no, no, no, keep your laws. So that was a tick in my column of following my path, and not necessarily for the approval of others.
01:08:34
Speaker
hosting a podcast in my voice. Even if that means I'm a quote cheesy shock jock high energy D bag and quote, if you know, you know, there are so many
01:08:46
Speaker
judgmental people in my life and by extension our lives right you know that I worry about certain things like I don't know getting a tattoo or like wearing bright colors or experimenting with anything besides binge drinking Jesus if my if my beard gets too scraggly I have people in my life who have told me I shave it off
01:09:09
Speaker
I have people who have told me not to gain any more weight. How many voices live in your head? How many voices besides your own, at the expense of your own, are you trying to appease? That deathbed's coming, man. Coming fast. Scares the hell out of me. All this time I've wasted, all this time I continue to waste, while others haven't had a fraction of the luck and privilege I've had over the years.
01:09:37
Speaker
speak nothing of the time that I've had. You know, as lots of other people have come and gone. My gosh. I'm gonna call a friend. Maybe you should text your crush or something. And this, CNFers, is what happens to your brain when you turn in your fucking book.
01:09:55
Speaker
something that I've been so privileged to work on at the near exclusion of everything else. Are there drugs for this kind of mindset? Weed? The making of Horcruxes? Stay wild, Cian Evers, and if you can't do, interview. See ya!
01:10:32
Speaker
you