Entrapment and Other Writings (35 page)

The players had finally caught on that they were being played for a group of idiots. Risberg and Gandil had waited, together, for one Sport Sullivan, also handling Rothstein money; but Sullivan had not shown up. He was using Rothstein money to make his own bets.

Nothing was said between the players, but all understood that the fix was off. After the Reds had scored four runs, in the sixth game, Jackson slashed a single to center; Felsch followed with a hit on which Jackson scored from first. Schalk drove a single to left scoring Felsch. With the score tied 4–4 in the tenth inning, Weaver opened with a double, Jackson advanced him to third with a single, and Gandil singled, bringing in Weaver. Final score: White Sox 5, Reds 4.

The White Sox got a run in the first inning of the seventh game, another in the third, and the Reds began making errors. In the fifth inning Jackson crashed a hard double to left, scoring two men. Final score, Cicotte pitching: White Sox 4, Reds 1.

To Arnold Rothstein, any man of talent who worked for peanuts was a dumb brute. He didn’t like dealing with dumb brutes. Now, with the games standing 4–3 and the White Sox playing like themselves, he became genuinely frightened.
*
He’d bet over $100,000 on the Series, and Rothstein did not lose lightly.

The fix, apparently, had come unglued. He called in Sport Sullivan.

Their talk was quiet. Rothstein revealed neither anger nor anxiety. He was, in fact, cordial.

It wasn’t until after he had left that the full impact of what Rothstein had been saying struck Sullivan: if the White Sox won the Series, Sullivan could not live.

Sullivan suppressed his inner panic and phoned the number of The Man in the Bowler Hat in Chicago.

The Bowler Hat’s trade was murder.

“Does Williams have children?” he asked Sullivan. No. “Is he married?” Yes.

“Good enough. Send five hundred. Will make contact upon receipt.”

Lefty Williams and his wife were confronted, the evening before the eighth game, in the entrance to their hotel, by a man in a bowler hat. He was smoking a cigar and asked for a private conversation. Mrs. Williams excused herself.

She did not know, and may never have known, that the conversation centered on her.

When the man in the hat informed Williams that he was to lose, the following day, Williams turned away. An iron grip on his shoulder turned him back.

It was no longer a question of money, the Hat assured Williams. It was a matter of his wife. She could get hurt. She could get hurt bad.

Williams stood enraged, wanting to strike out. Yet he was afraid. He was deadly afraid of this Hat.

Not only was he going to lose, The Hat told Williams, but he was going to lose in the first inning. Or else.

Then he walked away.

Williams put his first pitch over for a strike, the next afternoon, on the Reds’ lead-off man, Rath. Rath took a cut at his second pitch and fouled it. Then he popped out to Risberg.

Daubert, the second batter, singled. Williams put two strikes across on Groh; then Groh singled sharply to right.

Edd Roush, the Reds’ heaviest hitter, came into the batter’s box. Gleason signaled to the bench for James and Wilkinson to start warming up. Schalk walked out to the mound to talk to Williams.

Roush smashed Williams’s first pitch to right, Daubert scored easily, and Groh stopped at third. Schalk was now bellowing at Williams and shaking his fist.

Christy Mathewson, in the press box, observed to a sportswriter that, so far, Williams had thrown nothing except fast balls.

Duncan, following Roush at the plate, sent a screaming foul into the left-field seats. Williams’s next pitch went high and wide of the plate. Schalk had to leap desperately to prevent a wild pitch. Duncan then singled to left, Groh and Duncan scoring easily.

Gleason shouted something at Williams, but Williams ignored him. He threw hard to Kopf for a strike. “Nothing but fast balls,” Mathewson repeated.

Gleason called to Bill James to replace Williams. James let in one more run. The Reds had gotten four hits, on fifteen pitches by Williams, and three runs.

In the eighth, with the score 10–1 against them, the Sox put on a four-run rally.

Final score: Reds 10, White Sox 5.

So long, Swede Risberg.

No rumors of the fix had yet reached us by midsummer of 1920. The White Sox were still white. Swede Risberg was still my favorite player. I began to walk pigeon-toed because Risberg was pigeon-toed. I did this for a full year before my mother asked me why I was walking “like that.” I couldn’t explain. I still walk like that.

Chicago, New York, and Cleveland were in a triple tie for first place in August of 1920, when the Yankees came to town. Neither Jake Somerhaus nor I had ever seen a major-league ball game. We rode the el out to Comiskey Park to see Cicotte pitch against Babe Ruth. Carl Mays, the submarine-ball pitcher, was going for New York.

By the time we got there, that Sunday morning, bleacher seats had been sold out two hours before game time. A crowd, predominantly black, was milling around the bleacher walls, which were still of wood.

We followed a throng onto a rooftop a block from the park, and saw the first half of the first inning, in which Cicotte struck out Ruth. We also saw that the cops were beginning to have trouble with the mob pressing the bleacher walls. They were riding here and
there, striking blindly at heads, but fans were already beginning to clamber over the walls. We headed for them; by the time we got there it was a small-scale riot. Somebody gave me a boost and over the wall I went into the park.

I didn’t run. I joined the fans sitting on the grass behind the left fielder.

Some left fielder.

He was Shoeless Joe Jackson.

I
saw
him.

I was almost close enough to
touch
him.

He hit over .400, had the greatest throwing arm in baseball, and he could run. What’s so important about learning to read and write after
that?

In later years I saw Grover Cleveland Alexander and Jack Johnson in Hubert’s Museum. But that was after they had had their day. This was the living man in his prime. I’ll never see his like again.

In the seventh inning, Cicotte struck out Ruth again and shut the Yankees out, 3–0.

Our love of the game was not shaken by the exposure that followed. But we stopped pitching baseball cards and took to shooting dice. The men whose pictures we had cherished were no longer gods.

Jake Somerhaus went to the University of Wisconsin on a scholarship and pitched winning ball there for four seasons. He never grew heavy enough, however, to make the majors.

Once I was walking with a young woman, who turned to me and said, “You’re favoring your leg. Does it hurt?”

“It’s an old injury,” I said.

“How did it happen?”

“A big Swede hurt it when I was a kid.” I invented a story to gain sympathy—“The Swede was a hard guy.”

The interview took place Thursday, April 4, 1957, in Champaign, Illinois
.

INT:
Do you agree with most critics that
The Man with the Golden Arm
is your best work?

ALG:
I suppose I do; though, in lots of ways, the new one [A
Walk on the Wild Side
] has more vitality.

Would you change anything in
The Man with the Golden Arm
if you could rewrite it?

Certain things. For one thing, I wouldn’t have had Frankie Machine commit suicide. A more tragic ending would have been for him to go into isolation—cut himself off from people—as many addicts do.

What did you think of the movie version of your book?

The book, after all, was a tragedy. There is no easy solution to the problems I wrote about. I didn’t recognize any of the people in the movie as the people I had in the book. The names were the same, but that was all. That ending was just ridiculous, though. But then, I wrote the book before I saw Kim Novak. Who knows?

What did you think of the way they had Frankie Machine kick the habit?

You mean that business where Kim Novak goes around gathering up all the silverware?

Yes, that part
.

You know, when an addict’s sick like that, he becomes almost totally helpless. He couldn’t hurt anybody even if he wanted to. It’s hard work for a guy like that just to tie his shoelaces. Yet they gave the impression that a sick addict becomes some sort of raving, foaming-at-the-mouth monster.

Do you think there’s been anything lately, in the movies or on the stage, that treats narcoticism in a true manner?

There certainly hasn’t been much. Jack Kirkland, I thought, did a nice job with the play version of my book. But the play didn’t make it. The movie made all the dough.

Did you see
Hatful of Rain?

Yes; I went with a friend of mine. We had to leave in the middle of the second act.

Not long ago, in
Time
magazine, there was an article telling how certain writers get in the mood to write. Faulkner takes a shot or two of whiskey, Hemingway sharpens pencils. Do you have a device of this sort?

Yes, as a matter of fact. You might laugh, but sometimes I go over to the gym and work out on a punching bag. It loosens me up.

Incidentally, have you ever met Hemingway?

Yes, a couple of years ago. It was a Christmas Eve, and I had been bumming around Key West and Havana for a while. I was drinking in Havana, and I decided to call his house. At first, I couldn’t get to talk to anyone. But I left my number with one of the servants, and
later on his wife called back. She said he wasn’t well, he was in bed, but that I should come up. I told her if he was sick, maybe I shouldn’t come. But she said it would be all right. She said one of her duties was keeping people away, and if he didn’t want to see me, she wouldn’t be inviting me. Well, I went on up. Hemingway was in bed. It was a strange sight: he looked something like a professorial Santa Claus, with this white beard of his, and his steel-rim glasses. He was lying there, with a baseball cap on, to keep the light out of his eyes. He looked a lot older than I thought he would. You know, his belly was swollen from injuries from that crash in Africa. He still hadn’t recovered from that. Well, I saw he wasn’t feeling too good, so I thought I’d do most of the talking. The doctor had limited him to one scotch an hour, but he kept telling me to have as much as I wanted. Well, you see, I had just seen this Walt Disney Technicolor picture,
The African Lion
, which I thought was a great movie. Some of the shots they had were magnificent—you know, with these lions sticking their paws out like this for these impala that were leaping over them, reaching out and snagging the things as they jumped past, like a damn outfielder grabbing a fly-ball or something. Well, I told him all about how great this picture was, and all the while he kept giving me this funny look. Here he had these gigantic stuffed heads hanging in the front room—rhinos, lions, deer, everything—and there I was, telling him how it was in the movie. I caught myself before filling him in on what it was really like in the First World War. But it was very interesting, meeting him.

What did Hemingway talk about?

As I said, he didn’t talk much about anything. When he did talk though, it wasn’t easy to follow him: he’d go from one subject to another, a phrase about this, a phrase about that, like something from James Joyce. After a while, though, you saw how it all tied together. He’s really very complicated, and always on the alert. He watches you like a hawk, digs everything you say. It’s almost like
he’s waiting for you to say something that doesn’t ring true, something that isn’t straight. Really, he’s a very sharp old man.

(Reading from notes): Last year, in an editorial
, Life
magazine directed contemporary American authors to use the “raw stuff of saga” provided by advances in research and industry. It urged the “bad boys” of American literature to “look the industrialist in the eye without spitting in it.” What is your comment on this?

Life
wants writing that’s so hygienicized and so cellophanized that it’s lost all its vitality. This kind of writing breeds a sort of spiritual isolationism. There is something more to our life … it shouldn’t be merely a collection of gadgets, two cars in a neat garage. So many lives are made up of gadgets and nothing more. There are all these myths, you know. Our society is full of them: the General Motors myth, the gray flannel suit myth. And the biggest myth of all is that of the gadget, gadgets everywhere, a collection of
things:
two Fords in the garage, a deep freeze in the basement, and an all-purpose wife in the kitchen. There was never a time when men lived more tidily in such disorder. There were never more analysts telling other analysts what to do. There was never a more rigid moral code adopted so flexibly … so much abundance with so little satisfaction …

You think, then, that Americans are deceiving themselves most of the time?

We live in an age where self-deception is at its height. Nowhere is there such discrepancy between people’s lives and what they hear every day about their lives. Magazines like
Life
exist by fostering this kind of self-deception.