"A Town Without Time"

Gay Talese probably wouldn't enjoy hearing this, but besides "The Bridge", the Sinatra piece is the strongest in this collection.

'New York Is a City of Things Unnoticed'

• It is a city with cats sleeping under parked cars, two stone armadillos crawling up St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and thousands of ants creeping on top of the Empire State Building.
• the mannequins at Peck & Peck are made to look young and prim, while at Lord & Taylor they seem wiser and windblown. At Saks they are demure but mature, while at Bergdorf’s they look agelessly elegant and quietly rich. The profiles of Fifth Avenue’s mannequins have been fashioned after some of the world’s most alluring women—women like Suzy Parker, who posed for the Best & Co. mannequins, and Brigitte Bardot, who inspired some mannequins at Saks.
• These most unkempt of strays have a recognizable haunted look, a wide-eyed, wild expression, and they usually are found around the waterfront. <> The Bohemian, however, is more tractable. It does not run from people. Often, it is fed in the streets daily by sensitive cat lovers (mostly women) who call the strays “little people,” “angels,” or “darlings” and are indignant when the objects of their charity are referred to as “alley cats.” So punctual are most Bohemians at feeding time that one cat lover has advanced the theory that cats can tell time.
• off to another lady—an opera singer, a movie actress, a lady police lieutenant. <> Biz Mackey, a former featherweight prizefighter, started rubbing women the right way in Paris, in the twenties.
• The doormen that Biz passes each morning are generally an obliging, endlessly articulate group of sidewalk diplomats who list among their friends some of Manhattan’s most powerful men, most beautiful women, and snootiest poodles. More often than not the doormen are big, slightly Gothic in design, and possessors of eyes sharp enough to spot big tippers a block away in the year’s thickest fog. <> Some East Side doormen are as proud as grandees, and their uniforms, heavily festooned, seem to have come from the same tailor who outfitted Marshal Tito. Most hotel doormen are superb at small talk, big talk, and back talk, at remembering names and appraising luggage leather.
• * Foreign films have been making money at the Apollo for twenty years, and William Brandt, one of the owners, never could understand why. “So one day I investigated the place,” he said, “and saw people in the lobby talking with their hands. I realized they were mostly deaf and dumb.
• About 500,000 fifteen-dollar tickets are printed for New York’s police each year on West Nineteenth Street by the May Tag and Label Corp., whose employees sometimes see their workmanship boomerang on their own windshields. <> New York is a city of 200 chestnut vendors, 300,000 pigeons, and 600 statues and monuments.
• George Washington Bridge: its span often is ten feet closer to the Hudson River in summer than in winter. It is an almost restless structure of graceful beauty
• New York is a city in which large, cliff-dwelling hawks cling to skyscrapers and occasionally zoom to snatch a pigeon over Central Park, or Wall Street, or the Hudson River.

'The Bridge'

• some who catch rivets in small metal cones have blisters and body burns marking each miss; some who do welding see flashes at night while they sleep. Those who connect steel have deep scars along their shins from climbing columns. Many boomers have mangled hands and fingers sliced off by slipped steel. Most have taken falls and broken a limb or two. All have seen death. <> They are cocky men, men of great pride, and at night they brag and build bridges in bars
• * booming around the country with Indians who are sure-footed as spiders, with Newfoundlanders as shifty as the sea they come from, with roaming Rebel riveters escaping the poverty of their small Southern towns, all of them building something big and permanent, something that can be revisited years later and pointed to
• in what might be the most challenging task of a boomer’s lifetime, the construction of the world’s largest suspension span, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. <> The Verrazano-Narrows, linking Brooklyn and Staten Island (over the futile objections of thousands of citizens in both boroughs)
• the fact that comparatively few boomers were teetotalers or celibates. On the other hand, it would be equally misleading to assume that there were not some boomers who were quiet, modest men—maybe as many as six or seven
• * the section of catwalk upon which Anderson was standing snapped loose, and suddenly it came sliding down like a rollercoaster, with Anderson clinging to it as it bumped and raced down the cables, down 1,800 feet all the way to near the bottom where the cables slope gently and straighten out before the anchorage. Anderson quietly got off and began the long climb up again. Fortunately for him, the Mackinac was designed by David B. Steinman, who preferred long, tapering backspans; had the bridge been designed by O. H. Ammann, who favored shorter, chunkier backspans, such as the type he was then creating for the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge
• When Bob Anderson finally left the Mackinac job and St. Ignace, he had managed to save five thousand dollars, and, not knowing what else to do with it, he bought a round-trip airplane ticket and went flying off to Tangier, Paris, and Switzerland—“Whoring and drinking,” as he put it—and then, flat broke, except for his return ticket, he went back to St. Ignace and married a lean, lovely brunette he’d been unable to forget.
• But later they began to tell him about their ailments, their poverty, all their problems, and he knew what was coming next. So he quickly began to tell them about his problems, sparing few details, recalling how he had fallen behind in the rent of his shoestore in Brooklyn, how the Authority had thrown him out without a dime, and how he now found himself back in Italy where he had started—all because this damned bridge was going to be built, this bridge the Americans were planning to name after an Italian explorer the shoemaker’s relatives had never heard of, this Giovanni da Verrazano, who, sailing for the French in 1524, discovered New York Bay.
• force seven thousand Bay Ridge people to move—all sorts of people: two lovers, a divorced man of forty-one and an unhappily married woman who lived across the street. Each afternoon in his apartment they would meet, these lovers, and make love and wonder what next, wonder if she could ever tell her husband and leave her children. And now, suddenly, this bridge was coming between the lovers, would destroy their neighborhood and their quiet afternoons together, and they had no idea, in 1959, what they would do.
• * Ammann with an even larger task. And to master its gigantic design he would even have to take into account the curvature of the earth. The two 693-foot towers, though exactly perpendicular to the earth’s surface, would have to be one and five-eights inches farther apart at their summits than at their bases. <> Though the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge would require 188,000 tons of steel—three times the amount used in the Empire State Building—Ammann knew that it would be an ever restless structure, would always sway slightly in the wind. Its steel cables would swell when hot and contract when cold, and its roadway would be twelve feet closer to the water in summer than in winter. Sometimes, on long hot summer days, the sun would beat down on one side of the structure with such intensity that it might warp the steel slightly, making the bridge a fraction lower on its hot side than on its shady side.
• There were still disasters, but it was nothing like it had been in the middle 1800s, when as many as forty bridges might collapse in a single year, a figure that meant that for every four bridges put up one would fall down.
• This era drew its confidence from two spectacular events—the completion in 1874 of the world’s first steel bridge, a triple arch over the Mississippi River at St. Louis designed and built by James Buchanan Eads; and the completion in 1883 of the Brooklyn Bridge, the first steel cable suspension span, designed by John Roebling and, upon his tragic death, completed by his son, Washington Roebling. Both structures would shape the future course in American bridge-building, and would establish a foundation of knowledge, a link of trial and error, that would guide every engineer through the twentieth century.
• the St. Louis steel bridge: Andrew Carnegie, who had been selling bonds for the project, made his first fortune. The bridge was suddenly instrumental in the development of St. Louis as the most important city on the Mississippi River, and it helped develop the transcontinental railroad systems.
• John Roebling began to experiment with a more durable fiber, and soon he was twisting iron wire into the hemp—an idea that would eventually lead him and his family into a prosperous industry that today, in Trenton, New Jersey, is the basis for the Roebling Company—world’s largest manufacturers of wire rope and cable.
• he wondered if the suspension bridge might not be more graceful, longer, and stronger with iron wire rope, maybe even strong enough to support rail cars. <> He had his chance to find out when, in 1851, he received a commission to build a suspension bridge over Niagara Falls.
• Washington Roebling: he had every one of the 5,180 wires galvanized as a safeguard against rust. The first wire was drawn across the East River in 1877, and for the next twenty-six months, from one end of the bridge to the other, the small traveling wheels—looking like bicycle wheels with the tires missing—spun back and forth on pulleys, crossing the East River 10,360 times, each time bringing with them a double strand of wire which, when wrapped, would form the four cables that would hold up the center span of 1,595 feet and its two side spans of 930 feet each.
• * it is the last job, connecting the steel, that most captures their fancy. The steel connectors stand highest on the bridge, their sweat taking minutes to hit the ground, and when the derricks hoist up new steel, the connectors reach out and grab it with their hands, swing it into position, bang it with bolts and mallets, link it temporarily to the steel already in place, and leave the rest to the riveting gangs. <> Connecting steel is the closest thing to aerial art, except the men must build a new sky stage for each show, and that is what makes it so dangerous
• * The fast, four-man riveting gangs are wondrous to watch. They toss rivets around as gracefully as infielders, driving in more than a thousand a day, each man knowing the others’ moves, some having traveled together for years as a team. One man is called the “heater,” and he sweats on the bridge all day over a kind of barbecue pit of flaming coal, cooking rivets until they are red—but not so red that they will buckle or blister. The heater must be a good cook, a chef, must think he is cooking sausages not rivets, because the other three men in the riveting gang are very particular people. <> Once the rivet is red, but not too red, the heater tong-tosses it fifty, or sixty, or seventy feet, a perfect strike to the “catcher,” who snares it out of the air with his metal mitt. Then the catcher relays the rivet to the third man, who stands nearby and is called the “bucker-up”—and who, with a long cylindrical tool named after the anatomical pride of a stud horse, bucks the rivet into the prescribed hole and holds it there while the fourth man, the riveter, moves in from the other side and begins to rattle his gun against the rivet’s front end until the soft tip of the rivet has been flattened and made round and full against the hole. When the rivet cools, it is as permanent as the bridge itself.
• With help from an engineer, he created an electrical switchboard with red lights on top, each light connected with one of the turn-off switches strung along the bridge. So now if any punk turned off a switch he would give away his location. Olson also appointed a loyal bridge worker to do nothing but watch the switchboard, and this bridgeman was officially called the “tattletale.” If the wheel should stop, all Benny Olson had to do was pick up the telephone
• The difficult trick, of course, would be in getting the first of these ropes over the towers of the bridge—a feat that on smaller bridges was accomplished by shooting the rope across with a bow and arrow or, in the case of Charles Ellet’s pedestrian bridge, by paying a boy five dollars to fly a rope across Niagara on the end of a kite.
• Each catwalk section, as it was lifted, would be folded up like an accordion, but once it had arrived high up on the tower, the bridgemen standing on platforms clamped to the sides of the tower would hook the catwalk sections onto the horizontal ropes, and then shove or kick the catwalk sections forward down the sloping ropes. The catwalks would glide on under the impetus of their own weight and unfurl—as a rolled-up rug might unfurl if pushed down the steep aisle of a movie theater.
• each wheel would take perhaps twelve minutes to cross the entire bridge, averaging eight miles per hour, although it could be speeded up to thirteen miles an hour downhill. As the wheels passed overhead, the men would grab the wires and clamp them down into the specified hooks and pulleys along the catwalk; when a wheel arrived at the anchorage, the men there would remove the wire, hook it in place, reload the wheel, and send it back as quickly as possible in the opposite direction.
• the surgeon was able to offer Edward Iannielli two choices as to how the finger might be rejoined to his hand. It could either be set straight, which would make it less conspicuous and more attractive, or it could be shaped into a grip-form, a hook. While this was a bit ugly, it would mean that the finger could more easily be used by Iannielli when working with steel. There was no choice, as far as Iannielli was concerned; the finger was bent permanently into a grip.
• Iannielli was only 138 pounds, and McKee was more than 200. And Iannielli, with one finger missing on his left hand from the crane accident, and with the resewn second finger not very strong, could not seem to pull McKee’s heavy body upward even one inch. Then McKee’s jacket and shirt came loose, and he seemed to be just hanging there, dead weight, and Iannielli kept pleading, “Oh, God, God, please bring him up . . . bring him up . . .”
• Iannielli could see McKee’s shirt blowing off and could see McKee’s bare back, white against the dark sea, and then he saw him splash hard, more than 350 feet below, and Iannielli closed his eyes and began to weep, and then he began to slip over, too, but an Indian, Lloyd LeClaire, jumped on top of him, held him tight to the catwalk.
• both were back within the month. The other ironworkers were a bit nervous when the McKees climbed up that first day back, but the brothers assured everyone that it was far more comfortable working up on the bridge, busy among the men, than remaining in the quietude of a mournful home.
• * The Quebec Bridge disaster, it was assumed, would certainly keep the Indians out of the business in the future. But it did just the opposite. The disaster gave status to the bridgeman’s job—accentuated the derring-do that Indians previously had not thought much about—and consequently more Indians became attracted to bridges than ever before.
• soon the lights would be on in all the houses and everybody would be drinking and celebrating all night—the hunters were home, and they had brought back the meat. <> Then on Sunday night, Manuel Vilis said, they all would start back to New York, speeding all the way, and many more Indians would die from automobile accidents along the road than would ever trip off a bridge.
• * What else would bring such money and position on the reservation? To not become an ironworker was to become a farmer—and to be awakened at 2 a.m. by the automobile horns of returning ironworkers. <> So, of the two thousand men on the reservation, few became farmers or clerks or gas pumpers, and fewer became doctors or lawyers, but 1,700 became ironworkers
• * Danny Montour: “You know, I have a name for this town. I don’t know if anybody said it before, but I call this town the City of Man-made Mountains. And we’re all part of it, and it gives you a good feeling—you’re a kind of mountain builder . . .”
• he recalls the work done there years ago by his father, Joseph, and also his late uncle, Bobby, his father’s older brother. His co-workers at the World Trade Center have other men in mind when they look upon skyscrapers and other towering structures. For everyone in this occupation, the skyline of New York is a family tree.

'The Kingdoms, the Powers, and the Glories of the New York Times'

• * MOST JOURNALISTS ARE RESTLESS voyeurs who see the warts on the world, the imperfections in people and places. The sane scene that is much of life, the great portion of the planet unmarked by madness, does not lure them like riots and raids, crumbling countries and sinking ships, bankers banished to Rio and burning Buddhist nuns—gloom is their game, the spectacle their passion, normality their nemesis. <> Journalists travel in packs with transferable tension and they can only guess to what extent their presence in large numbers ignites an incident, turns people on.
• The troops at the Berlin Wall, largely ignored since Vietnam stole the headlines, coexist casually watching the girls go by. News, if unreported, has no impact; it might as well have not happened at all. Thus the journalist is the important ally of the ambitious, a lamplighter for stars.
• they must not worry when news seems to be happening because they are there, nor must they ponder the possibility that everything they have witnessed and written in their lifetime may someday occupy only a few lines in the plastic textbooks of the twenty-first century. <> And so each day, unhaunted by history, plugged into the instant, journalists of every creed, quality, and quirk report the news of the world as they see it, hear it, believe it, understand it.
• Clifton Daniel: The marriage of his son to Margaret Truman in 1956 permitted him to become acquainted with Harry Truman, and the two men have gotten along splendidly ever since, Mr. Truman once telling Mr. Daniel: “Hell, you did just as well as I did—you just stayed down in your little town helping the poor people, and I went up and mixed with those rich bastards.”
• * if Carr Van Anda was not a popular folk hero with his staff, as Edwin L. James would become, he was nonetheless respected as few editors would be; for he was not only a superb newsman but also a scholar, a mathematical genius and a student of science and logic... Van Anda, who read hieroglyphics, printed many stories of significant excavations, and one night, after examining under a magnifying glass the inscription of a four-thousand-year-old Egyptian tomb, he discovered a forgery, and this fact, later confirmed by Egyptologists, led to the conclusion that a young Pharoah, Tut-ankh-Amen, had been assassinated by a military chief named Horemheb. It was Van Anda who disputed the new Titanic’s claim to being unsinkable and when the ship’s radio went silent, after an emergency call for help, he deduced what had happened and drove his staff to get the story of the disaster that would be a world scoop.
• he believed that newsmen, in the interest of objectivity, should stay out of party politics and never become irretrievably committed to any one cause or person, a policy shared by nearly all journalists, although at a price. For this detachment from the world they observe robs them of a deeper experience that springs from involvement, and they sometimes become merely voyeurs who see much, feel little. They take death and disaster as casually as a dock strike, and they take for granted their right to publicize the weakness in others, to second-guess the Senate, to criticize other men’s plays, but they nearly have to lay it on the line themselves. Of course if journalists become committed to a cause or a great figure they might become apologists or propagandists, flunkies for the famous.
• Catledge at the same time felt his career had stalled—he was hitting his head “against the bottom of Arthur Krock’s chair,” he once described it to a friend
• The ceremony, the highest honor that a Persian can pay, consisted of beheading a sheep on one side of the road as the traveler approaches and carrying the head to the other side of the road; the traveler then passes between the body and the head.
• Then Daniel was back in London observing “an elderly cherub with a cigar almost as big as the butt end of a billiard cue”—Winston Churchill, one of the few names that survives the momentary madness that makes headlines; the others quickly die or fade—Naguib, Mossadegh, Klaus Fuchs. Men like Daniel go off to new names, new places, never getting involved, although sometimes they worry about the impermanence of their work
• To this day Daniel remembers very sharply the smallest details about her that night—her wonderful complexion, never suggested in her photographs, and the way she wore her hair, her shoes, the dark blue Fontana dress with the plunging neckline: Daniel recalling to a friend years later, “I looked down the neck of that dress and I haven’t looked back since.”
• winsome stewardesses who appeal to him not only because of their good grooming and precise tailoring, their pleasant smiles and desire to please—but also because of their almost ritualistic movements as they bend to serve, so graceful and controlled. “They are America’s geisha girls,” he once observed, flying back to New York after a speech in the Midwest.
• A. J. Liebling—who always experienced difficulty in getting the correspondents to remember to get the referee’s name—would merely write, in place of the name, the Italian word Ignoto—“Unknown.” Mr. Ignoto’s name would appear on sometimes two, three, or even four basketball games a night—far too energetic and omnipresent a man to be believed for very long. When the prank became known, Liebling was fired, and he went on to use his imagination more wisely on the New Yorker.

'Looking for Hemingway'

• He was an extraordinarily good-looking young man, twenty-three years old. It was not long after that that everybody was twenty-six. It became the period of being twenty-six. During the next two or three years all the young men were twenty-six years old. It was the right age apparently for that time and place. —GERTRUDE STEIN
• a literary quarterly to be called the Paris Review, over the protest of one of their staff members, a poet, who wanted it to be called Druids’ Home Companion and to be printed on birch bark.
• The Plimpton apartment today is the liveliest literary salon in New York—the only place where, standing in a single room on almost any night of the week, one may find James Jones; William Styron; Irwin Shaw; a few call girls for decoration; Norman Mailer; Philip Roth; Lillian Hellman; a bongo player; a junkie or two; Harold L. Humes; Jack Gelber; Sadruddin Aga Khan; Terry Southern; Blair Fuller; the cast from Beyond the Fringe;... Jules Feiffer; and into such a scene one wintry night earlier this year walked another old friend of George Plimpton’s—Jacqueline Kennedy.
• by just casting an eye over the photographs on the walls throughout the apartment, one could easily feel the presence of George Plimpton. One photograph shows him fighting small bulls in Spain with Hemingway; another catches him drinking beer with other Tall Young Men at a Paris café; others show him as a lieutenant marching a platoon of troops through Rome, as a tennis player for King’s College, as an amateur prizefighter sparring with Archie Moore in Stillman’s Gymnasium... causing Miles Davis to ask afterward, “Archie, is that black blood or white blood on your gloves?” to which one of Plimpton’s friends replied, “Sir, that is blue blood.”
• so many young women came and went that Plimpton’s business manager, a small, sharp-tongued Harvard wit named John P. C. Train, decided it was ridiculous to try to remember all their names, whereupon he declared that they should henceforth all be called by one name—“Apetecker.” And the Apetecker alumnae came to include, at one time or another, Jane Fonda, Joan Dillon Moseley (daughter of Treasury Secretary Dillon), Gail Jones (daughter of Lena Horne),
• Peter Matthiessen, then fiction editor of the Paris Review, was a tall, thin Yale graduate who as a youngster had attended St. Bernard’s School in New York with George Plimpton, and who now was working on his first novel, Race Rock. Patsy was a small, lovely, vivacious blonde with pale blue eyes and a marvelous figure, and all the boys of twenty-six were in love with her. She was the daughter of the late Richard Southgate, onetime chief of protocol for the State Department, and Patsy had gone to lawn parties with Kennedy children,... This apartment, in the fifties, was as much a meeting place for the young American literati as was Gertrude Stein’s apartment in the twenties, and it also caught the atmosphere that would, in the sixties, prevail at George Plimpton’s apartment in New York. <> William Styron, often at the Matthiessens’, describes their apartment in his novel Set This House on Fire,
• a French actress, Mme. Nénot, to go down to Cap Myrt, near Saint-Tropez, and visit her fifty-room villa that had been designed by her father, a leading architect. The villa had been occupied by the Germans early in the war. And so when Styron and Humes arrived they found holes in its walls, through which they could look out to the sea, and the grass was so high and the trees so thick with grapes that Humes’s little Volkswagen became tangled in the grass... in the evening, they sat in the bombed-out villa, a breathtaking site of beauty and destruction, drinking wine with the young girls who seemed to belong only to the beach. It was an electric summer, with the nymphets batting around like moths against the screen.
• Two poets wished to dissect John P. C. Train when, after a French printer had accidentally spilled the type from one poem into another, and the two poems appeared as one in the magazine, Train casually remarked that the printer’s carelessness had actually improved the work of both poets.
• though the Aga’s own son, Sadruddin Khan, a Harvard friend of Plimpton’s, had just become publisher of the Paris Review, an offer that George proposed and Sadruddin accepted rather impulsively one day when they both were running from the bulls at Pamplona—a moment during which George suspected, correctly, that Sadruddin might agree to just about anything.
• It was then that the tall figure of Trocchi spotted him and placed a hand on Logue’s shoulder. Logue looked up.
  “Alex,” Logue said, casually handing him the tin of poison, “will you open this for me?”
  Trocchi put the tin in his pocket.
  “Alex,” Logue then said, “what are you doing here?”
  “Oh,” Trocchi said lightly, “I’ve come down to embarrass you.”
  Logue broke down in tears, and Trocchi helped him off the beach, and then they rode, almost in total silence, back to Paris on the train.
• And in giving so many parties, in giving out keys to his apartment, in keeping the names of old friends on the Paris Review masthead long after they have ceased to work for it, George Ames Plimpton has managed to keep the crowd together all these years, and has also created around himself a rather romantic world, a free, frolicsome world within which he, and they, may briefly escape the inevitability of being thirty-six.
• Patsy and Peter are divorced. She is now married to Michael Goldberg, an abstract painter, lives on West Eleventh Street, and moves in the little world of downtown intellectuals and painters. Recently she spent several days in a hospital after being bitten by the dog of the widow of Jackson Pollock.

'Vogueland'

• “Everyone at Glamour of course hopes to work her way up to the Vogue staff of grim vigilantes,” says the writer Eve Marriam, once a fashion copy editor at Glamour. “But it rarely happens. Vogue has to be careful. The upcomer might use the word cute instead of panche; she might talk about giving a party instead of a dinner; or describe a suede coat ‘for weekending with the station-wagon set’ rather than ‘for your country home.’ Or talk of going to a jewelry store instead of a bijouterie. Most maladroit of all, she might talk in terms of a best buy rather than an investment, or a coup. Or refer to a ballgown as—one shudders to think of it—a formal.”


• Feature Editor Allene Talmey, whom editorial director Frank Crowninshield once described as a “Soufflé of Crowbars,”
• In 1909 Vogue was purchased by Condé Nast, under whom it flourished as never before, and no other magazine in the fashion field has ever been able to challenge it. Harper’s Bazaar, which has always been less conservative—“It goes one rhinestone too far,” a Vogue lady explains—does not provide its readers with quite so much of what Mary McCarthy calls “Democratic snobbery.” <> Some years ago Miss McCarthy, who did a rather extensive study of women’s fashion magazines for the Reporter, concluded that as one descended through the less chichi magazines—such as Charm, Glamour, Mademoiselle—one found more genuine solicitude for the reader and her problems

'Journey into the Cat Jungle'
__ “I heard that there were some rodents from Lake Success that had been shipped in with some U. N. filing cabinets,” said Mr. Kendell. “So these cats went in and took care of things. The cats seemed happy at the U. N. One of them used to sleep on a Chinese dictionary.”

'Mr. Bad News'

• anonymous notes in brown envelopes up to her through the house mail, the first of which read, “You look ravishing in paisley,” and was signed, “The American Paisley Association.” Later he identified himself
• snakes do not blink; that cats attach themselves to places, not people, and dogs to people, not places;
• For an obituary writer there is nothing worse than to have a world figure die before his obituary is up-to-date; it can be a harrowing experience, Whitman knows, requiring that the writer become an instant historian, assessing in a few hours the dead man’s life with lucidity, accuracy, and objectivity.
• * This is part of an occupational astigmatism that afflicts many obituary writers. After they have written or read an advance obituary about someone, they come to think of that person as being dead in advance.
• If this be the case—if the name dies before the man, as A. B. Housman would put it—then Whitman reserves the right to cut the obituary down. Vivisection. He is a precise, unemotional man. While death obsessed Hemingway and diminished John Donne, it provides Alden Whitman with a five-day-a-week job that he likes very much

'Gino’s Long Run'
__ One night recently, after a couple of Sambucas, I counted three hundred and fourteen zebras, and I saw for the first time that a single stripe was missing from the rumps of half the animals. <> When I mentioned this to Gino, he admitted in a roundabout way that the wallpaper possessed an artistic touch of negligence.

'The Kidnapping of Joe Bonanno'

• which is not to accuse the doorman of hypocrisy or cowardice but merely to suggest that his instinct for uninvolvement is very strong, and to speculate that doormen have perhaps learned through experience that nothing is to be gained by serving as a material witness to life’s unseemly sights or to the madness of the city.
• The younger Bonanno was considered something of an eccentric in the underworld, a privileged product of prep schools and universities, whose manner and methods, while not lacking in courage, conveyed some of the reckless spirit of a campus activist. He seemed impatient with the system, unimpressed with the roundabout ways and Old World finesse that are part of Mafia tradition. He said exactly what was on his mind, not altering his tone when addressing a mafioso of superior rank, and not losing his sense of youthful conviction even when speaking the dated Sicilian dialect he had learned as a boy from his grandfather in Brooklyn.
• The Bonanno organization, more progressive than most partly because of the modern business methods introduced by the younger Bonanno, had solved its communications problem to a degree by its bell-code system and also by the use of a telephone-answering service. It was perhaps the only gang in the Mafia with an answering service.
• she remained aloof for days although she understood as she had not before her father’s desire for the marriage. It was a wish shared by Rosalie’s father and uncle. And it would be fulfilled the following year, an event that Catherine Bonanno would regard as a marriage of fathers.
• the island had been conquered and reconquered no less than sixteen times—by Greeks, Saracens, and Normans, by Spaniards, Germans, and English, by various combinations and persuasions ranging from Holy Crusaders to Fascists: they had all come to Sicily and did what men do when away from home, and the history of Sicily was a litany of sailors’ sins.
• He remembered her description of how her family had sought to protect her from reality, and how accustomed she had become as a girl to finding holes in the newspapers around the house, sections cut out where there had been photographs or articles dealing with the activities of the Profaci organization.
• * The wedding event, the extravagance and splendor of it, had probably marked the high point of Joseph Bonanno’s life, the pinnacle of his prestige; and a social historian of the underworld, should one ever exist, might describe the event as the “last of the great gangster weddings,” coming before the Apalachin exposure and other vexations had put an end to such displays.
• By observing the way that a mafioso dressed, one could determine his rank within the organization. The lower-echelon men, Bonanno had noticed, all wore white dinner jackets to the wedding, while the middle-level men, the lieutenants and captains, wore light-blue dinner jackets. The top men, the dons, all were dressed in black tuxedoes;
• Bonanno had brought with him in his attaché case various spices and herbs and also a paperback edition of James Beard’s cookbook. Each night he cooked and the other men cleaned up afterward. He was impressed with the modernization of motels since his boyhood days at the Luna
• also the Greek letters of fraternities that he could identify, and he was constantly reminded of how far he had drifted from the campus life he had known a decade ago. <> It had been a very gradual drifting, occurring so slowly over a period of years that he did not really know when he had crossed the border into his father’s world.
• * His emotional link with his father was very strong, exceeding the normal bond of filial fidelity—it was more intense, more unquestioning, there was a unity in the tension shared and a certain romanticism about the risks and dangers involved, and there was also a kind of religious overtone in the relationship, a combination of blind faith and fear, formality and love. The many long periods of separation had in a strange way drawn them closer, had made each visit an event, a time of reunion and rejoicing; and during their months apart Bill’s youthful imagination and memory had often endowed his father with qualities approximating a deity, so impressive, absolute, and almost foreign had the elder Bonanno been in person.
• how his father had carried her into the house, had placed her on a table, and had squeezed lemon juice into her leg, massaging it in a slow special way that had not only stopped the bleeding but, after the wound had healed, had left no scar.
• Bonanno abhorred idleness, and one of his favorite expressions was: The best way to kill time is to work it to death.
• Although Giuliano was a hero in western Sicily he might easily be regarded elsewhere as a common thief—it depended largely on one’s point of view, and the same could be said when appraising the life of any man, the activities of any group, the policies of any nation. If Bill Bonanno had learned anything from reading the memoirs of great statesmen and generals it was that the line between what was right and wrong, moral or immoral, was often very thin indeed, with the final verdict being written by the victors.
• * And if he had gone into combat and had killed several North Koreans or Chinese Communists he might have become a hero. But if he killed one of his father’s enemies in a Mafia war, where buried in the issues were the same mixture of greed and self-righteousness found in all the wars of great nations, he could be charged with murder.
• He had fought in the North African campaign and also participated in the invasion of Sicily in which the Americans employed local mafiosi as intelligence agents and underground organizers against the Nazi and Fascist forces. Many such agents were rewarded with lawful authority by the Allies after the war, a fact documented in many books about the Mafia that Bill Bonanno had read;
• * The condition of coin-box phones was of vital importance to him and the other men, and he knew how infuriated they had all been at one time or another by malfunctioning phones, and they had sworn vengeance on the petty thieves who tamper with outdoor phones. Whenever they discovered one that was jammed or broken into, they reported it to the telephone company, and later checked back at the booth to be certain that the repairs had been made... also an identifying number that distinguished one booth from another. These last numbers were memorized by the Bonanno men as faithfully as baseball fans memorized the numbers on the backs of players
• He must go on a diet, he thought; he was becoming too large for phone booths.
• * Bill realized how his father had tested his patience and discipline, seeing how he would respond to a condition that was so necessary and common in the organization and yet was so unnatural to most restless men—waiting.

'High Notes'
__ He said, “I remember Sinatra once asked Pavarotti, ‘How do you sing a soft high note?’ and Pavarotti replied, ‘You keep-a your mouth closed!’”
__ “All the women were just fainting as he’s walking,” Bennett recalled. “All the women in the boxes fainting. Cary Grant, you know. So I said, ‘You come here often?’ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I own the track.’”
__ He started singing again, and when they finished she said, “It’s like our third date now!” <> Over the next half hour, they did six more takes, some with scatting, all of them acceptable to Bennett’s sons, in the control room, but at the conclusion of each take neither Bennett nor Lady Gaga wanted the duet to end.

'Frank Sinatra Has a Cold'

• On the particular evening, Frank Gifford, the former football player, got only seven yards in three tries. Others who had somehow been close enough to shake Sinatra’s hand did not shake it; instead they just touched him on the shoulder or sleeve, or they merely stood close enough for him to see them and, after he’d given them a wink of recognition or a wave or a nod or called out their names (he had a fantastic memory for first names), they would then turn and leave. They had checked in. They had paid their respects.
• but now he was focused on them again. The owner of the boots, who was just standing in them watching the pool game, was named Harlan Ellison, a writer who had just completed work on a screenplay, The Oscar. <> Finally Sinatra could not contain himself.
• One of Mahoney’s mannerisms, when he is sitting at his desk worrying, is to tinker with the tiny toy train he keeps in front of him—the train is a souvenir from the Sinatra film Von Ryan’s Express; it is to men who are close to Sinatra what the PT-109 tie clasps are to men who were close to Kennedy
• * in a sense, he was battling the Beatles. The press releases being prepared by Mahoney’s agency stressed this, reading: “If you happen to be tired of kid singers wearing mops of hair thick enough to hide a crate of melons . . . it should be refreshing, to consider the entertainment value of a video special titled Sinatra—A Man and His Music.”
• As Sinatra sang these words, though he has sung them hundreds and hundreds of times in the past, it was suddenly obvious to everybody in the studio that something quite special must be going on inside the man, because something quite special was coming out. He was singing now, cold or no cold, with power and warmth, he was letting himself go, the public arrogance was gone, the private side was in this song about the girl who, it is said, understands him better than anybody else, and is the only person in front of whom he can be unashamedly himself.
• his daughter Nancy, who in her younger days felt rejected when he slept on the sofa instead of giving attention to her, later realized that the sofa was one of the few places left in the world where Frank Sinatra could get any privacy, where his famous face would neither be stared at nor cause an abnormal reaction in others.
• * Soon the word spread like an emotional epidemic down through Sinatra’s staff, then fanned out through Hollywood, then was heard across the nation in Jilly’s saloon, and also on the other side of the Hudson River in the homes of Frank Sinatra’s parents and his other relatives and friends in New Jersey.
• By playing skillful politics with North Jersey’s Democratic machine, Dolly Sinatra was to become, in her heyday, a kind of Catherine de Medici of Hoboken’s third ward. She could always be counted upon to deliver six hundred votes at election time from her Italian neighborhood, and this was her base of power.
• But he did—as he would leave other warm places, too, in search of something more, never wasting time, trying to do it all in one generation, fighting under his own name, defending underdogs, terrorizing top dogs. He threw a punch at a musician who said something anti-Semitic, espoused the Negro cause two decades before it became fashionable. He also threw a tray of glasses at Buddy Rich when he played the drums too loud.
• Though Dolly Sinatra has eighty-seven godchildren in Hoboken,
• He is a piece of our past—but only we have aged, he hasn’t . . . we are dogged by domesticity, he isn’t . . . we have compunctions, he doesn’t . . . it is our fault, not his . . . <> He controls the menus of every Italian restaurant in Los Angeles; if you want North Italian cooking, fly to Milan . . .
• no matter where he is, no matter how elegant the place may be, there is something of the neighborhood showing because Sinatra, no matter how far he has come, is still something of the boy from the neighborhood—only now he can take his neighborhood with him. <> In some ways, this quasi-family affair at a reserved table in a public place is the closest thing Sinatra now has to home life. Perhaps, having had a home and left it, this approximation is as close as he cares to come;

'Dr. Bartha’s Brownstone'
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/34-E-62nd-St-New-York-NY-10065/31533263_zpid/

• during equally brief late-night dinners in hospital cafeterias, Paul Mantia came to know more and more, little by little, about this serious, privately sad, but never sentimental man who was his mentor.
• Monika Barbier: During her fifth year at TWA, while on a Boeing 707 jetliner flying from Paris to Rome, her persuasive manner helped to convince an armed hijacker to change his mind about ordering the pilot to land in Damascus, Syria, where she believed they would be treated cruelly by the airport personnel... But if she thought that charming a hijacker had better prepared her for persuading the Bartha family to change its mind about evicting tenants, she had greatly underestimated the single-mindedness and fortitude of Dr. Bartha’s sixty-two-year-old mother, Ethel.
• Ira Garr: handled the divorce case of publisher Rupert Murdoch following his fourteen-year marriage to his third wife, Wendi Deng.
• the Women on Waves story, amending that the Dutch abortion shop lacked proper registration and “may sail back to the Netherlands for its missing license, then return to Ireland in July, or it may sail on to South America or Africa to continue its campaign in places where the regulations on abortion are greatly restricted.”
• “But, as I said, Dr. Bartha had given up. He basically said, ‘The system is rigged, it’s like Communism was in Romania, and the New York judge is a lesbian who favors Cordula and Donna Bennick, and they’re all against me.’”
• _When you read these lines your life will change forever. You deserve it. You will be transformed from a gold digger to an ash and rubbish digger.
• * No money would be available, of course, until someone bought the lot—which was, in fact, worth more because Dr. Bartha had transformed his brownstone into two thousand square feet of empty space. If he had not made it disappear, his revered 124-year-old building might have sold for around $7 million,... But, as an empty lot, it represented a much more lucrative opportunity for real-estate developers—and indeed, within a year of the explosion, a creative and ambitious developer bought the lot for $8.3 million from Serena Bartha
• a glamorous forty-year-old Russian-born blonde named Janna Bullock... Reference was also made to her once having ridden a motorcycle from Saint Petersburg to Moscow accompanied by the actors Jeremy Irons and Dennis Hopper, as well as Thomas Kerns, formerly the director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. She herself had joined the Guggenheim board in 2007.. Ms. Bullock’s real-estate development company in Russia was seized and taken over by a rival group that included Vladimir Putin’s former judo coach.
• * Since Dr. Bartha’s building next door was no longer blocking their view, their fourth-floor residence was now bathed in extra light... The horizon was also extended northward for the rear-window beauticians at the Minardi hair salon, at 29 East 61st Street, where Marie Savage was a regular customer. <> Having sudden access to the two thousand square feet of added viewing space in New York undoubtedly represented a rare and valuable amenity, but no one could put a price tag on it in an ever-expanding and soaring city in which it so often seemed that the light was on loan.
• Each of the three hundred pieces would be marked by a number (which would match the number appearing on Jessup’s construction drawing) in order to help the workmen on 62nd Street, who would later receive the limestone and then carefully hoist it, hang it, bracket it, and finally interlock it into a predetermined numbered space within the building’s steel-fronted frame. For the workers it would be like doing a jigsaw puzzle with variously shaped cuts of limestone.
• it is probably also true that few individuals pause and ponder that perhaps under each newly poured concrete foundation there exists a potter’s field of terminated and conventional people who long ago inhabited and enjoyed that space as part of a farm, or a park, or a friendly front porch, or a room with a view, or some other desired and desirable place now landmarked in obscurity.
• The plot of Bartha’s story is about a 20 × 100–foot plot of land not much longer, and not as wide, as a tennis court. But while it is merely a dot on the map of the Upper East Side it is, no less than anywhere else, marked by the footprints and fingerprints of multitudes of diverse people who, since colonial times, have represented the will and ways of the larger city along with its propensity for differences and disagreements over politics and property.
• the so-called Commissioners’ Plan of 1811, which was based upon some of Casimir Goerck’s earlier recommendations and, in the words of the architectural historian Christopher Gray, writing in the Times, “made Manhattan’s streets an iron fist of right angles.”
• Since the town house was being built within a historic district, regulations demanded that its owners—in this case, the Woodbine Company partnership of Theodore Muftic and Francis Jenkins III—provide and pay for the distribution of vibration monitors to be affixed to the exterior of all buildings within ninety feet of the construction site.

'My New York City Apartment'
__ So he said I could take over this smaller, rent-controlled $70-a-month apartment with the understanding that he would keep the lease under his name (and I would be ghostwriting his checks).
__ By 1973, with dozens of violations lodged against our building for faulty maintenance, and with the Park Avenue cooperative willing to sell the brownstone, Nan and I bought it for the low price of $175,000—50 grand of which was absorbed by the seller to be used to repair and restore the floundering property.