Memories of The Great and The Good (17 page)

T
he front page of the newspaper had been folded over, so that what I first saw was the top half, which carried a photograph of a sweet old lady with a face like an apple wearing granny glasses. The name and the caption were hidden from view, and I had to guess who she was and what she was doing there.

I resisted the natural impulse to open up the paper and find out because, only an evening or two before, I had played a game with some friends that challenged this very ability to determine character and profession from the evidence of an uncaptioned photograph. The game was provoked by the assertion of an old friend, a veteran politician watcher, that in identifying character from photographs, we are the victims of eighty years of the movies' power to impose stereotypes. The mere suggestion that intelligent and literate beings like us had had their view of character dictated by a casting director so inflamed the self-respect of several guests (and the “self-esteem” of a feminist present) that at once a neutral, disinterested host was chosen to go off, riffle through a variety of magazines and newspapers and clip from them a dozen photographs of men and women in the news, none of them sufficiently well-known to be recognizable to anyone in our group. Some, perhaps, were famous in their own countries. Most were, to us at any rate, anonymous.

Each numbered photo was pasted on a large sheet of paper and put down on a table we were sitting around. Alongside the photo gallery was placed another sheet bearing a list, unnumbered, of the trade or profession of each of the characters on display. The game was, of course, to match the face and the profession.

At the end, I don't believe anyone had a much better score than twenty—twenty-five—percent. The sort of thing the group was faced with was the revelation that number 6—chosen by three people as a French novelist and by one as a surgeon—was, in fact, a Chicago truck driver, representing the Teamsters. A face confidently assigned by several of us to the one murderer on the list was a judge on the International Court of Justice at The Hague. And so on. The moral is surely no subtler than that contained in two famous tags: “We see in a work of art what we bring to it”—and more to the point, as Shakespeare usually is—”There is no art to find the mind's construction in the face.”

So before I unfolded that morning newspaper to know who was the little old lady (the apple wearing glasses) I immediately guessed she was the brave grandmother of a marine killed in Lebanon or—no!—perhaps the latest winner of a million-dollar lottery, the beneficiary of some ludicrous stroke of luck which alone could put such a modest, old, midwestern, rural face on the front page of the
New York Times
. She was, she is, Barbara McClintock, only the third woman in history to have won the Nobel Prize for science.

There is nothing condescending or cute in calling her a “little old lady.” She is five feet high, weighs seven stone (ninety-eight pounds) and is eighty-one. You can see her type, her physical type, any day on the tube: in commercials for Grandma Mary Lou's Bran Muffins— or telling us, with great sweetness and glinting glasses, what Deepdown, the magic ointment, has done for her arthritis.

The mention that Miss McClintock (she's a lifelong spinster) is eighty-one and the winner of this year's Nobel Prize for medicine will set a lot of people to wondering what happened to the theory, which is confirmed by generations of pioneer scientists, that the basic discoveries in any science have been made by people in their late twenties, early thirties at the latest. Barbara McClintock doesn't exactly give the lie to it. Forty years ago, she had evolved and proved to her own satisfaction the theory that won her the prize. But, she confessed cheerfully the other day, speaking of the scientists, the foundations, the journals she wanted to pass on her discovery to: “They thought I was crazy, absolutely mad.” She had published her results, but they were either ignored or ridiculed. “Nobody was reading me,” she said, “so what was the use?” She gave up publishing, not in bitterness or disdain. She was sure of her ground and she went on quietly every day breeding corn on the cob. How's that? Yes, what this continent calls corn and the other English-speaking peoples call maize. She's been mooching around her little corn patch on Long Island ever since.

Before we come to that, we ought to go back to her beginnings and how she came on this extraordinary, or astonishingly ordinary, specialty. She was (like Katharine Hepburn) the daughter of a doctor in Hartford, Connecticut. Against her mother's conventional belief—at the time—that no respectable girl went to college, she went off at the age of seventeen to Cornell University. But then, in this country, a lot of girls were going to college before and during the First World War. The great majority of them went to polish up their general culture with an arts degree. But this determined midget had a weird interest—plant breeding, an impossible undergraduate specialty—so she took botany. Fifty-five years ago, she earned a doctor of science degree in plant genetics, and from then on devoted her life to maize. It was a time when women were rarely, if ever, taken on as full-time staff lecturers at a university. So she moved around for fifteen years, until a philanthropic foundation offered her a more or less permanent job at a small lab, a genetics lab on Long Island, where she's been ever since.

That was in 1942. Her true laboratory was not a sterilized sanctuary gleaming with retorts and bubbling with noxious liquids. It was a patch of grass outside on which she grew her corn. The small, the jealous, world of geneticists heard about her unflinching dedication to this odd specialty and elected her to the National Academy of Sciences on the assumption that sooner or later she would come through with some eminently respectable research along known lines. Well, she didn't. After nine years of growing and planting and pollinating and watching and thinking, she announced her discovery, which she was convinced went beyond her observations of corn cobs. She said that genes are not fixed units, planted in a permanent position on the chromosome. She said they jump around according to no predictable plan, so that the color changes in a kernel of maize cannot be explained by a known pattern of heredity. They obey the command of some sort of switch, and move from one part of a chromosome to another at the bidding of yet another element known as an activator.

I imagine that this knotty theory is beyond most of us, but at the time even people in the genetic know thought it a fairly preposterous theory. As a Nobel Committee member said: “The trouble was, in 1951, only about five people in the world could possibly know what she was talking about.” So—like Mr. Toots hearing that the love of his life had turned him down—she said, “It's of no account, thank ‘ee” and for thirty more years went about her daily business with corn cobs, not caring much what the experts thought. “When you know you're right,” she said the other day, “you know that sooner or later it will come out in the wash.”

Well, it took a great deal more biological and chemical research, by many people in many places, before the wash revealed that, for example, bacteria that become resistant to an antibiotic pass on to other bacteria the resistant strain, by way of—guess what?—Barbara McClintock's crazy switches and activators. Two years ago only, in 1981, the world of science received the wake-up call as it might an earthquake and rushed to acknowledge her as a great and, if you'll excuse the word, long-neglected pioneer. Medical awards and money came pouring in with apologetic speed. And, two weeks ago, the Nobel Prize. She has no telephone, so she happened to hear it on the radio. She had no idea, and didn't seem to care much, what the prize was worth in cash. A reporter told her: “One hundred and ninety thousand dollars.” “Dear me,” she said.

O
ne time, years ago, the veteran Baltimore newspaperman, H. L. Mencken, was checking copy coming in from the night editor and sighing at the rising number of errors he was noticing, errors of fact but also of syntax, and even some idioms that didn't sound quite right. He shook his head and said, as much to himself as to the editor at his side: “The older I get the more I admire and crave competence, just simple competence, in any field from adultery to zoology.”

Maybe this complaint is, like arthritis, a normal companion of advancing years, like Socrates' lament over the bad manners of the young. But, at a given time, it may also be true for a given skill. Thirty years ago, two old painters painted and glazed the walls of my study, and nothing has had to be done to them since. I have to say that the skill of their successors in the rest of the apartment has been slap-happy by comparison.

What made me zoom in on the idea of competence, however, was the death the other day of a man who, more than any other single person I can recall—male, female or hermaphrodite—represented an American institution at its most competent. He was not a genius, not an innovator, not a landmark talent. It could well be that none of his works in the years to come will ever be revived. Simply, a totally competent professional. The name is George Abbott. And the institution he glorified and came almost to symbolize was—Broadway. Oddly, along that brassy, nonchalant street, he bore no nickname, which was a tribute to his appearance. There was something about him: a natural dignity, a dour quizzical face (he would have made a marvelous Scrooge) that did not invite familiarity. Six feet two, he stood like a grenadier. He never, ever, wore a sports shirt or other off-duty clothes. Always a gray suit, white shirt and necktie everywhere, in the hottest weather. He was known to actors, producers, sponsors, directors, designers, cast, young and old—to all but a tiny circle of close friends— as “Mr. Abbott.” He didn't request or expect this formality. He might have liked to be called George by one and all. Once, indeed, to a young protégé, he did say, “Please call me George.” The young man said, “I certainly will, Mr. Abbott.”

Like several other famous ones who came to appear as the essence or spirit of a certain place or kind of life, he was brought up far from it. Remember Frederic Remington, who in a short life sculpted and drew and painted more horses and Indians and cowboys than anybody in history? He was born in New York and studied at Yale. And how about that shambling boy from a mining town in the Rockies—with the prison haircut and the prairie twang who wore canary yellow shoes and was probably the first man to be said to dress like an unmade bed? Harold Ross, the founder-editor of
The New Yorker
, who sounded a new note of urbanity in American journalism.

Well, Mr. Abbott was, to be truthful, born in rural upstate New York but when he was barely in his teens his parents whisked him off to Cheyenne, Wyoming, a new town, only twenty years old, one of the towns created by the Union Pacific railroad, which indeed claimed the site and laid out the streets parallel to the tracks. It was named after a neighboring tribe by a Union general, Major General Grenville Dodge, who was then chief engineer of the Union Pacific. Pretty soon it was a hive for the regular three types of pioneers: the people who went west meaning to settle; the people who drifted west to feed and house them; and the bigger horde that saw in every settlement a glittering prospect of exploitation— real estate and land speculators, traveling salesmen turning into shopkeepers, craftsmen, gamblers, con men and (as everywhere out west where single men came to roost) what became primly known as ladies of the evening.

In his mid-teens, George Abbott became a Western Union messenger boy when the company was as chic and new as a CD-ROM. One of his first regular jobs was delivering beer to the red light district (a trade known in New Orleans as “the can rusher,” which the pimp and bawdy-house piano player Jelly Roll Morton boasted of as his first paid—meaning honorable—job). Every summer, young Abbott went off to work on a ranch, need I say a working ranch—there was no such thing as a dude ranch in those days. It was a constant marvel to Mr. Abbott's friends in later life to hear genuine western stories from the only cowboy they ever knew.

In most of the early towns out west, elementary education was provided by a small, one- or two-room school-house. It was rudimentary but evidently sound, for it always amazes superior city folks, if they ever stop to think, how many soldiers, statesmen and politicians who never went beyond the “little red schoolhouse” came to write and talk a decent serviceable prose. But if the settler parents wanted their sons to move on to high school, they usually had to be sent some distance away to a school that had been started as an adjunct or extension of the forts that the army had built during the Indian wars. Abbott was sent off to such a one, the Kearney Military Academy in Nebraska, the remnant of a fort abandoned once the Sioux had been conquered or dispersed and the railroad had displaced the wagon train.

A more unlikely training for a Broadway producer-director it is hard to imagine, but George Abbott maintained (rarely, and then only to an intimate friend) that what he picked up in the West and never lost was a habit of staying with any job he started and keeping one eye cocked over his shoulder for the man behind who—as the immortal old ballplayer said—”might be gaining on you.” All he got out of the military school was, he said, a cure for his chronic stoop.