Uncle John's Great Big Bathroom Reader (52 page)

Hanging On

In 1936,the Empire State Building Corporation defaulted on the
mortgage and became technically insolvent. The only reason it wasn’t forced into bankruptcy was that Metropolitan Life, holder of the mortgage, didn’t figure it could do a better job attracting tenants than the current management was. Selling the building wasn’t a realistic option in the glutted real estate market, so they just left it alone, lowered the interest rate on the loan, and collected whatever money they could.

The strategy turned out to be a wise one. “By 1940,” Tauranac writes, “Met Life had received $3.8 million that it would not have received had they foreclosed, and although everybody might not have been particularly happy, they were satisfied.”

BOUNCING BACK

The Empire State Building began to recover in the early 1940s, thanks to the slowly improving economic situation and the buildup that accompanied America’s entry into World War II. In 1942, the Office of Price Administration signed a lease for five entire floors, and 19 other federal agencies would eventually move in, too. By 1944, the building was 85% full; in 1950,
Time
magazine reported that it was “jammed to the rafters,” with tenants paying $10 million worth of rent in a building that cost a little over $5 million a year to operate. In 15 years, the Empire State Building had gone from bankruptcy to one of the most profitable buildings in the world. And it would remain the tallest building in the world for more than 40 years.

Newer, taller buildings would eventually be built, but for many skyscraper buffs, there would never be anything like the Empire State Building. “It has been surpassed in height,” George Douglas writes, “but it has not been displaced in the hearts of New Yorkers and of millions of visitors for whom it is
the great
skyscraper, the building that comes first to mind as the tallest of the tall. For style, grace, and dramatic thrust it is hard to find its equal anywhere in the world.”

When you’re ready for the exciting conclusion, flip on ahead to Part VIII on
page 329
.

Some people’s fame endures not because they were good at what they did—but because they were mind-bogglingly bad. The BRI’s eccentric collection of history books is full of tales about people like Robert Coates. But then, he’s in a category all by himself.

R
OBERT “ROMEO” COATES (1772-1842)

Background:
Born in Antigua, Coates had dark, exotic looks that stood out in a British crowd. But he didn’t rely on nature to attract attention—he dressed in costumes covered with diamonds and feathers. In 1807, a few days before his stage debut in Bath, England, he arrived in town—in a diamond-studded carriage shaped like a seashell.

Claim to Fame:
Coates became wildly popular in England for butchering Shakespeare. As Margaret Nicholas writes in
The World’s Greatest Cranks and Crackpots:

He constantly forgot his lines, invented scenes as he went along, and turned to address the audience whenever he thought it was getting out of hand. If he enjoyed playing a scene, he would quite happily repeat it three or four times. He loved dramatic death scenes and had no qualms about “breathing his last” several times over. Exasperated playgoers would yell, “Why don’t you die?”

One night during
Romeo and Juliet
, Coates dashed off stage and returned with a crowbar...which he used to try to pry open Juliet’s tomb. He considered it an improvement on Shakespeare.

At another performance, someone hurled a fighting cock on stage (in “tribute” to Coates’ motto, “while I live, I’ll crow”). The bird pecked at Coates’ feet, but the actor delivered his romantic speech without missing a beat.

Coates proved that bad acting can be very profitable.

Nicholas writes:

His fame spread and soon he was playing to packed houses. People would travel great distances to see if he really was as bad as everyone
reported. He became such an attraction that even the Prince Regent went to see him.

When he played the part of Lothario in Rowe’s
The Fair Penitent
at London’s Haymarket Theater, at least a thousand people had to be turned away....

At another performance...his acting was so poor that several people laughed themselves ill and had to be helped outside into the fresh air and treated by a doctor.

Eventually, the rowdy crowds became a problem. No actress, for fear of injury, would play Juliet opposite Coates’ Romeo (his favorite role). And theater owners became less willing to risk damage to their property. He often had to bribe them just to get a part in their plays.

Without the income from acting to support his lavish style Coates went bankrupt. He was killed in 1848, at age 75, when he was run down by a hansom taxi.

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SPEAKING OF DUMB...

“In Altoona, Pennsylvania...TV anchorman Brandon Brooks demonstrated for his viewers how to protect their homes from burglars. He used his own home to demonstrate double locks on doors, windows that will not open from the outside, burglar alarms...

“Now it appears that thieves were watching the program. They not only learned where the double locks were, but where the TV set was and the VCR and the furniture and other things.

“So nights later—while Brandon Brooks was on the air back at the studio—the thieves broke into his house and cleaned him out.

“The window that won’t open from the outside: They smashed it.”

—Paul Harvey’s For What It’s Worth

Here are a few more stories about the deaths of famous people from Malcolm Forbes’ fascinating book.

M
ATA HARI

Claim to Fame:
Nude dancer, seductress, and supposed master spy for the Germans during World War I.

Cause of Death:
Firing squad.

Postmortem:
Mata Hari (her real name was Margaretha Zelle) was famous before the war for dancing what she claimed was an “authentic Hindu temple ritual.” It was really just an excuse for her to take her clothes off, and it gave her admirers an excuse to come and see her. “I could never dance well,” she admitted. “People came to see me because I was the first who dared show myself naked to the public.”

She may not have a been a spy at all—just a scapegoat. But when the French lost two hundred thousand men in the Battle of the Somme, they needed someone to blame. Mata Hari, who had antagonized authorities for years, fit the bill perfectly. She was arrested, tried for espionage, and sentenced to death. She refused to be tied to the execution pole, and reportedly also turned down a blindfold. Mata Hari was seductive to the end, smiling and winking at the firing squad as they raised their rifles in her direction.

JIMI HENDRIX

Claim to Fame:
Rock musician and one of the most talented guitarists who ever lived. His hits included “Purple Haze,” “Foxy Lady,” and an electric guitar version of “The Star Spangled Banner.”

Cause of Death:
Overdosed on sleeping pills and drowned in his own vomit.

Postmortem:
Was Hendrix’s death purely an accident? Was it a suicide? Was it a drug-induced combination of the two? We’ll never know for sure. Hendrix, who’d been sliding deeper into drug addiction in the months preceding his death, was reeling from a number of
poor concert performances earlier in the year. He was booed by an audience in West Germany, and he had walked offstage in mid-song during a concert at Madison Square Garden, telling the audience, “I just can’t get it together.” Hendrix was also battling with his record company and having financial problems. On September 13, he had to cancel a concert performance in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, because his bass player Billy Cox had a nervous breakdown.

On September 17, 1970, Hendrix and Mick Jagger’s ex-girlfriend Monika Danneman were in London. They went to a party and then to a bar, and returned home some time after 3:00 a.m. When Monika went into the bedroom, she saw Jimi with a large handful of sleeping pills. He reassured her that he was only counting them, then had a glass of wine and went to bed. Monika watched him until 7:00 a.m., when she took a sleeping pill and went to bed, too. When she awoke at 10:20 a.m., she saw that Jimi was lying still and had vomit around his nose and mouth. The sleeping pills were gone. Monika panicked and called a friend for advice, who told her to call an ambulance. It was too late—when Hendrix got to the hospital he was pronounced dead on arrival. The last recording of Hendrix’s voice is a message he left on his ex-manager’s answering machine at 1:30 a.m. of the morning he died. On it Hendrix says, “I need help bad, man!”

LYNYRD SKYNYRD

Claim to Fame:
One of the most popular rock bands of the 1970s.

Cause of Death:
Plane crash.

Postmortem:
In October 1977, the band released its fourth album,
Street Survivors.
The cover showed a picture of the band, surrounded by flames, and one of the featured songs was “That Smell,” which included the lyrics, “Ooh, ooh that smell. The smell of death’s around you.”

A week later the band’s plane crashed near Gillsburg, Mississippi, while en route to a concert date at Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Three band members were killed, including Ronnie Van Zant, the band’s lead singer and songwriter; and twenty other people on board were injured. Immediately after the crash, the band’s record producer recalled every unsold copy of
Street Survivors
and replaced the fiery album cover with one portraying the band members against a black background

With all the technological marvels taking place around us, the competition for world’s tallest building may not seem as interesting or as colorful as it once did...but it continues. Here’s a quick summary of the record-holders of the last 30 years.

T
HE WORLD TRADE CENTER

In the late 1950s, lower Manhattan was a low rent district teeming with pet shops, electronics stores, auto parts stores, and other small businesses. In 1960, David Rockefeller, chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank, proposed building a skyscraper to help revitalize the neighborhood. In 1962, the Port Authority of New York signed on to the project, and made plans to build a single office complex that would serve the needs of the “world trade community”—importers, exporters, shippers, international bankers, and government trade agencies.

Numerous designs were considered, including building one massive 150-story building, or three or four buildings 50 or 60 stories tall. The single building idea was rejected as being too tall; the multiple buildings were nixed out of fear that they would look like a “housing project.” Finally, the architects decided on two massive towers that at 1,368 and 1,362 feet tall would be scarcely more than 100 feet taller than the Empire State Building, at the time, still the tallest building in the world.

The two towers, nicknamed “David” and “Nelson” after the Rockefeller brothers, opened in 1972 and 1973...and were met with almost universal scorn. As George Douglas puts it,

The massive towers seem entirely out of scale with the tapering tip of lower Manhattan, rising abruptly into the sky like two upended florist’s boxes....They remind one of a pair of giant’s legs threatening to tip the whole island on its end, perhaps sinking everything into the sea. The effect on New York’s graceful skyline has mostly been annoying and mocking.

The buildings weren’t just ugly, they were also money losers for
years, and they failed to revitalize lower Manhattan. They dumped so much office space onto the market at once that there wasn’t any incentive to build any more...and the 9-to-5 workers who overcrowded the area during the day evacuated at night, leaving the neighborhood a ghost town.

THE SEARS TOWER

In 1974, Sears & Roebuck moved into Chicago’s Sears Tower, which at 1,454 feet, eclipsed the World Trade Center in New York. For the first time in nearly 75 years, the city that was the birthplace of the skyscraper was again home to the world’s tallest building. Sears planned to occupy the bottom 50 floors and rent out the rest. In
The Big Store
, Donald Katz gives us the Sears’ point of view:

“Being the largest retailer in the world,” former chairman Gordon Metcalf had told
Time
magazine, “we thought we should have the largest headquarters in the world.” The plan was to rent out the upper floors of the Tower until Sears employees occupied all 110 floors at the end of the century....Inside the company, the Tower was named for the vainglorious executive who ordered its construction. It was called “Gordon Metcalfs erection.”