Night Beat (63 page)

But listen to Tupac Shakur before you put his life away. You will hear the story of a man who grew up feeling as if he didn’t fit into any of the worlds around him—feeling that he had been pushed out from not only the white world, but also the black neighborhoods that he grew up in. You will also hear the man’s clear intelligence and genius: his gifts for sharp, smart, funny perceptions, and for lyrical and musical proficiency and elegance. And, of course, you will hear some downright ugly stuff—threats, rants, curses, and admitted memories that would be too much for many hearts to bear. Mainly, though, you hear the tortured soul-searching of a man who grew up with and endured so much pain, rancor, and loss that he could never truly overcome it all, could never turn his troubled heart rightside up, despite all his gifts and all the acceptance he eventually received.

In case anybody wants to dismiss this man’s reality too readily, consider this: We are experiencing a time when many of our leaders are telling us that we are vulnerable to people who live in another America—an America made up of those who are fearsome, irresponsible, lazy, or just plain bad; an America that needs to be taught hard lessons. And so we have elected to teach these others their hard lesson. In the years immediately ahead, as a result of recent political actions, something like a million kids will be pushed into conditions of poverty and all that will come with it—including some of the horrible recourses left to them. Imagine how many Tupac Shakurs will emerge from this adventure—all those smart kids, who despite whatever talents they’ll possess, will not be able to overcome the awfulness of their youths, and who will end up with blood on their hands or chest, or both.

Indeed, what goes ’round comes ’round. The America we are making for others is ultimately the America we will make for ourselves. It will not be on the other side of town. It will be right outside our front doors.

ella fitzgerald: grace over pain

T
ime and again, in the days following Ella Fitzgerald’s death in mid-June, at age seventy-eight, you heard the same assessment of what made her art great and what made it endure: She was among America’s most prized jazz and pop vocalists because, unlike so many of her notable contemporaries, she sang in a voice that did not confess pain—indeed, she did not allow the emotional realities of her life to infuse or consume her craft. On the surface, this is an easy judgment to offer, and certainly not a disparaging one. It is true that Fitzgerald did not live a life that made the headlines, unlike Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra, whose legends and whose art seemed carried along by rhythms born of darkness and despair. It is also true that, whereas Holiday found a personal release in the expression of other writers’ material, and Sinatra understood the emotional fiber of a lyric better than any other vocalist of the century, Fitzgerald seemed virtually to purge personal considerations from her singing in favor of exalting the purity of melodic composition itself. She was often called an instrumentalist who
sang—
whose entire attention was given to form, tone, mellifluence, and a brilliant ability to improvise on how those elements mixed with a song’s cadence and a band’s beat. Listening to Ella, many fans got caught up in the pure joy of her ingenuity and balance, and because those things were such a wonder to hear, it did not appear that anguish might be a part of what had shaped her creativity.

Still, there was real pain—possibly even horror—in Ella Fitzgerald’s early life, and it almost certainly played a decisive part in fashioning her artistry. She was born in Newport News, Virginia, in 1917, the child of a common-law marriage. She never knew her father—he left the family while she was an infant—and her mother died when Ella was a young teenager. That was when her true troubles began. According to a 1996
New York Times
article by Nina Bernstein, Fitzgerald was abused by her stepfather following her mother’s death, and at age fifteen, was taken in by an aunt in Harlem. There, Ella scavenged the neighborhood for money, running numbers for a time and helping street prostitutes avoid police searches. Eventually, she was caught by authorities and ended up in an orphanage, the New York State Training School for Girls, where, according to Bernstein’s reportage, Fitzgerald—like many of the other young girls crowded into the school’s decaying cottages and dark basements—was likely subject to frequent beatings by male staff members, and endured other tortures as well. According to at least one source, Fitzgerald never forgot her hatred of that experience.

But Ella also found a way to transcend—or at least to dream of transcending—some of that torment: She developed a love of pop singing and show dancing, and aspired to dance professionally in one of Harlem’s many nightclubs. In 1934, she went onstage as a dancer at an amateur contest at the Apollo Theater, but when her moment in the spotlight came, she froze—too frightened to dance. Instead, she opened her mouth and sang—a rendition of Connee Boswell’s “The Object of My Affection”—and she won first prize.

After that, Ella caught the attention of saxophonist Benny Carter, who had played with bandleaders Fletcher Henderson and Chick Webb. Carter pestered a reluctant Webb to give the ungainly-looking young singer a try, and after Ella won the favor of the bandleader’s audiences, he arranged for her parole from the Hudson orphanage, into his custody. Fitzgerald became Webb’s star attraction and co-wrote the band’s biggest hit, “A-Tisket, A-Tasket.” When Webb died in 1939, Ella became the band’s leader for a time, and further developed her elegant swing sensibility and her remarkably lucid talent as a balladeer. In 1942, she went solo, and as jazz music changed over the years—from the fluid rhythms of swing to the complex melodic and rhythmic permutations of bop—so did Fitzgerald’s style. She was one of the first singers to take the innovations of alto saxophonist Charlie Parker and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and apply their bebop methods to vocal improvisation. She developed a wild, gliding style of melodic extemporization and phonetic phrasing that became known as “scat” singing, and next to Billie Holiday, it established her as the most influential and admired vocalist in jazz.

It wasn’t until the mid-1950s, though, that Fitzgerald began to make a major contribution to the recorded body of popular music. For several years, jazz producer Norman Granz had featured Ella in his Jazz at the Philharmonic productions—an annual tour series that featured such instrumentalists as Illinois Jacquet, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, and Charlie Parker playing in freewheeling improvisational jamborees. Granz came to believe that Ella’s considerable prowess had been largely wasted on trite, novelty-minded material in her lengthy tenure at Decca. To offset that mistake, he set out, in 1956, on what was considered by many (including the singer herself) as a risky venture: He would pair Fitzgerald with the great songs of America’s finest Tin Pan Alley, Broadway musical, and jazz composers—including Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Johnny Mercer, and Duke Ellington—in effect creating a massive recorded encyclopedia of American popular song. The results proved not only popular and groundbreaking (along with Sinatra’s Capitol albums from this same period, the Granz-Fitzgerald recordings helped define the conceptual possibilities in the new long-player album format), but also historic in the best sense. There have been numerous other great composers of American popular music and there have been many other great interpreters of that work. But nobody outside of Fitzgerald and Granz ever set out to define an entire era’s musical spirit, and managed to do so with such an epic effect. Forty years later, the series still stands as a matchless and indispensable achievement.

Ella would go on to make several other fine albums for Granz on Verve and his subsequent Pablo label, and would also join in memorable collaborations with Louis Armstrong (her most consistent vocal partner), and Frank Sinatra and Count Basie. But after the
Songbooks—
as before them—she was esteemed primarily for her prowess as a live artist. I had the pleasure of seeing Fitzgerald in concert a few times during the mid-1980s—a period in which her voice was widely regarded to be in decline, though I’ve often been drawn to aging singers; it is both instructive and poignant to hear how an older vocalist reconciles earned emotional wisdom with losses in tonal range and breath control. To my ears, Ella really didn’t have much to compensate for; she was, in fact, probably the most vibrant jazz vocalist I’ve ever watched. She could steer through such larks as “Sweet Georgia Brown” with a matchless, careening wit, wielding her springy swing sense, cheery phrasing, classical tonality, and gospel-inflected soulfulness with a dizzying aptitude. In addition, her frequent duets with her longtime bop-based guitarist partner, Joe Pass, on Duke Ellington songs—such as “Satin Doll,” in which Ella wove a minor-key scat fugue around Pass’ major-key harmonic patterns—were spellbinding and joyful. Clearly, she had been around this same territory many times before; she knew every melodic twist and turn with the certainty that a driver brings to his favorite homeward route. And yet, like a driver who couldn’t resist kicking new life into familiar curves, she brought an impulsiveness to the material that transformed their performances into a thrilling ride for anybody within range.

In her later years, Fitzgerald was beset by increasingly debilitating physical problems—including eye cataracts, heart trouble, and diabetes. She kept performing until 1992, when the diabetes became incapacitating. In the following year, the condition led to the amputation of both her legs below the knee. After that, Ella stayed close to her home. She never sang again in public, but there was really no need. For over half a century, she expressed remarkable ideals of invention and beauty through her singing, but her voice wasn’t just a pleasure to hear: It was also an amazing work of personal redemption. It is true that Ella sang in tones filled with joy, but her joy was not a simple thing—it was a joy born from her self-willed refusal to succumb to all the limitation and degradation that her childhood had known. Ella Fitzgerald’s victories were all her own, and the rest of us—anybody who ever loved her or her voice—can only hope that someday, somehow, we are once again lucky enough to witness such glorious and hard-won grace in popular music.

timothy leary: the death of the most dangerous man

I
t is a late afternoon toward the end of spring, 1996. I am seated with several other people on the floor of a bedroom in a ranch house, high up in the hills of Benedict Canyon. Through the plate glass doors on one side of the room, you can see the day’s light starting to fade, and a breeze soughs through the trees and bushes in the house’s back yard. On the bed before us lies a gaunt, aged man, covered in a red blanket, sleeping a restive sleep.

We have all gathered into this room for the same purpose: We are here to watch this man as he takes sleep’s journey to death. It is not the sort of thing that many of us have done before.

The man who is dying is Dr. Timothy Leary—one of the most controversial and influential psychologists of the last forty years, and a guiding iconic figure of the countercultural tumult of the 1960s and 1970s. It was Leary who, as a young promising clinical researcher, helped develop the theory of transactional analysis—effectively changing the doctor-patient relationship in modern psychology—and it was Leary, who only a few years later, conducted a provocative series of psychedelic experiments at Harvard University that helped pave the way for an era of cultural and psychosocial upheaval.

But nothing Leary has done in the years since has stirred as much reaction as how he has been preparing for his death. A year and a half ago, Leary learned that he had fatal prostate cancer—and he promptly did the one thing almost nobody does in such a situation: He celebrated the news. Leary announced to family, friends, and media that he intended to explore the consciousness of dying the same way he once explored the alternative realities afforded by drugs: with daring and with humor. As time went along, though, Leary’s proclamations became more audacious. At one point he suggested that when the efforts of maintaining his life no longer seemed worth it, he might take one last psychedelic, drink a suicide cocktail, and have the whole affair televised on his World Wide Web site. Then, following his death, a crew of cryonics technicians would come in and freeze his body, later removing and preserving his brain. Needless to say, these sort of hints have attracted a fair amount of media interest and have also stirred disdain and criticism from various quarters—even from a few right-to-death advocates who felt Leary wasn’t taking dying somberly enough. “They’d have me suffer in silence,” he once told me, “so I can save them the pain.”

But when all is said and done, Leary is
not
dying outrageously. Rather, he is dying quietly and bravely, surrounded by people he loves and who love him.

Even as he is dying, though, he is still Timothy Leary, and he still has something to say.

Around 6:30 in the evening he wakes, blinks, wincing momentarily in pain. He looks around him, seeing familiar people, including his stepson, Zachary Leary, and his former wife, Rosemary, who once helped him escape a California state prison and flee the United States. He winks at Rosemary, then—looking at the rest of his visitors—says: “Why?”

He smiles, tilts his head, then says: “Why
not?”

A couple of people in the room laugh and repeat the phrase back to him.

It goes on like that for a few minutes, Leary saying “Why not?” over and over, in different inflections, sometimes funny, sometimes sad. At one point he says,
“Esperando”—
Spanish for: “Waiting.” A few moments later, after another litany of “why nots,” he will say, “Where’s the proof?” And still later: “Go now.”

He looks back to Rosemary and mouths: “I love you,” and she mouths the same back to him. Finally, barely above a whisper, he says “Why?” twice more, then drifts back into his heavy sleep.

I FIRST MET Timothy Leary only a few weeks before his death. I approached him nervously.

Like many of the people I knew who came of age in the 1960s, I had been influenced by Leary’s spirit and by his teachings. As a result I had taken psychedelics—mainly mescaline and LSD—with the idea that I might see visions that would change my life, and once or twice, I guess that’s what happened. I remember one night I went looking for God (a required acid activity at some point or another) and came back realizing that God was indeed dead—or that at least if God was a divine power that might judge and condemn us for our frailties and desires and madnesses, then he was dead in my own heart and conscience. Exit God. Hasn’t been seen since.

Another time, I took acid not long after a brother of mine had died following surgery (I know: not such a good idea), and I plunged into what was called (appropriately, I decided) a bad trip. That night I saw the death of my lineage—the deaths of my ancestors, the deaths of my parents and brothers, the deaths of the children I had not yet had (and still have not had), and, of course, the death of myself. I sat in a dark-red oversized chair that night and watched death move before me and in and out of my being, and I gripped tight to the arms of that chair until the morning came. It was the only sunrise I have ever been happy to see. I was not the same for days after. Maybe I was not ever the same again.

That was 1971, and it was the last time I took acid. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the psychedelic experience—I loved it and had much wonderful fun with it over the years. It’s just that I didn’t fancy the idea of running into death any more than necessary.

And so when I went to see Leary the first time, I wasn’t sure what I was getting into. I was fascinated by his history and had things I wanted to ask him, but there was this problem: The man was dying, and that meant getting close to death.

You could say I was unprepared for what I found. Death had already been welcomed into Timothy Leary’s house, and it was being teased relentlessly, even joyfully. The place, in fact, was full of life. About a dozen staff members and friends, most of them in their twenties—were in and out of the house constantly. Some of them—a crew called Retina Logic—were busy working in the garage on Leary’s web site. It was a cause that was close to Leary’s heart: He planned to have all his writings and various memoirs stored on it in perpetuity, and he was thinking of maybe even dying there, on an Internet telecast. Other house regulars, such as Trudy Truelove and Vicki Marshall, were busy making Leary’s schedule for him, slating him for a steady stream of interviews, visits with friends, dinner parties, and rock & roll concerts. Clearly, death did not hold the upper hand in this house—at least not yet.

As I waited for Leary in his front room—full of brightly colored art pieces—I noticed a contraption in the corner alongside his large glass patio doors. It was the cryonics coffin he was supposed to be placed in at the hour of his death. His blood would later be drained and replaced with antifreeze compounds, so that his brain might be preserved. It might have been a creepy thing to stumble across, except it was actually sort of comical. Somebody had draped it with Christmas lights and plastic toys, and a Yoda mask had been placed on the coffin’s head pillow.

Leary entered the room seated in his motorized wheelchair. He was pretty adept with the thing, able to make sharp, quick turns and wiggle his way in and out of tight spots, though sometimes he would collide head-on with his big, beautiful golden retriever, Bo, who’s blind as a bat. Bo wandered Leary’s house and yard constantly, bumping into tables, doors, people, trees—a sweet, majestic Zen-style guard dog.

I learned quickly that it was almost impossible to conduct anything resembling a linear interview with Leary. It had nothing to do with his temperament. I found him always cheerful, funny, and eager to talk. But he was easily distracted. He’d break off suddenly to focus on whatever was happening around him or to gaze appreciatively at the short skirts that one or two of the women around him wore. “I’m senile,” he told me on that first visit, “and I make it work for me.” Some of the distraction, I suspect, was the by-product of the steady stream of pain-killers and euphorics that he availed himself of—including morphine patches, marijuana biscuits, Dilaudid tablets, glasses of wine, and balloons of nitrous oxide, his seeming favorite. I was glad he had the stuff. In those moments when I saw him doubled over, cringing in pain, I could only imagine how much worse it might have been without his calmatives.

Other days, I found him completely lucid and focused. One afternoon we were talking about, well, death. I had been telling him about my last acid trip. He winked at me and laughed. “But of course,” he said. “Everybody says it’s a dying,
death
experience. If you don’t die, you didn’t get your money’s worth from your dealer. Dying was built right into it. Why do you think we were using the Tibetan Book of the Dead as our guiding text?”

I understood then that I was talking with a man who had already died many times over his years. It’s like he said: that was one of acid’s core truths. It could take you into all kinds of deaths—deaths of ego, deaths of misconceptions—and you could then walk back alive. More or less.

I asked him what he thought real death would be like.

He reached over to his nitrous tank, filled a large black balloon, and sat quietly for a few moments. “I don’t think of it,” he said, looking a little surprised at his own answer. “I mean, yes, every now and then, I go:
’Shit!’
You know, every now and then. The other night I was looking around and I thought, ’Good God, my friends here—their lives have been changed by this. The
enormity
of it.’ But I just take it as the natural thing to do.”

He took a sip from his balloon, and seemed to be looking off into his own thoughts. “It’s true that I’ve been looking forward to it for a long time,” he said. “The two minutes between body death and brain death, the two to thirteen minutes there while your brain is still alive
—that’s
the territory. That’s the unexplored area that fascinates me. So I’m kind of looking forward to that.”

Leary stopped talking for a moment, clenching at his stomach, his face crumpled in pain. After several seconds, he gained his breath and returned to his balloon.

“The worst that can happen,” he said, his voice husky from the nitrous, “is that nothing happens, and at least that’s, um, interesting. I’ll just go, ’Oh, shit! Back to the Tibetan score card!’ But yes, it’s an experiment that I’ve been looking forward to for a long, long time. After all, it’s the ultimate mystery.”

TIMOTHY LEARY was fond of pointing out that the probable date of his conception was January 17, 1920: the day after the start of Prohibition—the official beginning of America’s troubled attempts to regulate intoxicants and mind-altering substances in this century. Born in Springfield, Massachusetts, on October 22, 1920, Leary was the only child of his Irish-American parents. His father, Timothy—also known as Tote—had been an officer at West Point and later became a fairly successful dentist who spent most of his earnings on alcohol. In 1934, when Timothy was thirteen, Tote got severely drunk one night and abandoned his family. Timothy would not see him again for twenty-three years. In the most recent (and best) of his autobiographies,
Flashbacks
(1983, Tarcher/Putnam), Leary wrote: “I have always felt warmth and respect for this distant male-man who special-delivered me. During the thirteen years we lived together he never stunted me with expectations.” But his father also served as a “model of the loner,” and for all his charming and gregarious ways, Leary would have trouble in his life maintaining intimate relations with family members—a problem that would not disappear until his last several years.

By contrast, Leary’s mother, Abigail, was a beautiful but dour woman who was often disappointed by what she saw as her son’s laxity and recklessness. In her own way, though, she also served as a model. In
Flashbacks,
Leary wrote: “I determined to seek women who were exactly the opposite to Abigail in temperament. Since then, I have always sought the wildest, funniest, most high-fashion, big-city girl in town.”

For years, Leary seemed prone to the wayward life that his mother feared so much. He studied at Holy Cross College, West Point, and the University of Alabama and had serious problems at each establishment (in fact, he was more or less driven out of West Point for his role in a drunken spree), though he finally received a bachelor’s degree during his Army service in World War II. Then his life seemed to take a turn. In 1944, while working as a clinical psychologist in Butler, Pennsylvania, Leary fell in love with and married a woman named Marianne. After the war, the couple moved to California’s Bay Area, and had two children, Susan and Jack. It was at this point that Leary’s career began to show some promise. In 1950, he earned a doctorate in psychology from the University of California at Berkeley, and over the next several years, along with a friend and fellow psychologist, Frank Barron, Leary conducted some research that yielded a remarkable discovery. He and Barron were interested in proving just how effective psychotherapy was. Instead, by testing a wide range of subjects over an extensive period they learned that one third of the patients who received therapy got better, one third got worse, and one third stayed the same. In essence, Leary and Barron proved that psychotherapy—at least in its conventional applications—couldn’t really be proven to work. Leary wanted to discover what
would
work—what methods might provide people with a genuine healing moment or growth experience. He began exploring the idea of group therapy as a possible viable solution, and he also started developing a theory of existential-transactional analysis that was later popularized in psychiatrist Eric Berne’s
Games People Play.