Fame Is the One That Does Not Stay
Awaiting My 15 Minutes
I have never met any famous people. The closest I can come is: Once almost famous, now almost forgotten.
There was Zero Mostel (1915-1977), in an elevator of his New York City apartment building, also home of the family of a college classmate letting me crash for a couple of nights in 1970. He didn’t have much to say – nothing funny.
Josephine Johnson (1910-1990), youngest ever winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. I wrote about that meeting a while ago on Substack. She had enough to say – but very softly – so softly I hardly heard any of it, and now remember none.
And Cloris Leachman (1926-2021) at an Alley Theater fundraiser in Houston, sometime in the 1980s. She dropped her earring, which my partner (now husband), Rick, retrieved from amongst the multitude of milling feet. So he can arguably claim a closer connection to her than I. She didn’t have much to say either (except “Thank you”) – nothing funny.
In a two-degrees-of-separation link with fame for me, if true, my husband also claims to have been smiled at by Alfred Hitchcock at Chasen’s in Los Angeles, before our time together. Or grimaced at; with Hitchcock it must have been hard to tell which. “If true.” I have my doubts, since I can't really even imagine anything of that importance happening BEFORE me!
We definitely dined in London with Andre Agassi and Stefi Graf – which is to say, they had a table way over there. But the waiters refilled our water glasses from the same pitcher. (That probably isn’t really true, since, as tennis superstars, they probably drank bottled water; but I plan to go on telling the “same pitcher” story anyway; it’s all I have.)
Who else? This could be seen as grasping, but Mel Gibson, and entourage, walked past me in the LA airport (short); Dawn French got out of a taxi as I passed on a London sidewalk (ample); Queen Elizabeth II trooped past, regally en-horsed, on her official birthday celebration, long, long ago.
In the same room, but not really met: Allen Ginsberg (“om”-ish), The Dalai Lama (serene) , Tennessee Williams (more regal than the Queen, though in an appealing way), Margaret Thatcher (ironclad). Politicians, pop stars, states persons, titans of industry? Zilch. Even John Bradshaw (1933-2016; remember him?), then a neighbor two doors down, managed to ignore me completely when he joined my sidewalk conversation with the woman who lived between us. The ego of my “inner child” has still not recovered from that massive snub.
Of course, fame is relative, and for most, none too durable. As example, all those Pharaohs of Egypt, world famous in their day, gods, even, some say; or said then, anyway. Who remembers them? Except for Ramesses (in the Bible; big statue), and Tut (golden mask; good for exhibition PR); maybe one or two others.
"Fame is the one that does not stay," Emily Dickinson said, even for those (definitely not all) who somehow manage to swing their famous 15 minutes. Pretty clear by now that I will not manage it.
So the hour I spent, one sunny afternoon in the early spring of 1971, with the famous (then, now, forever!) Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989) beams like the Lighthouse of Alexandria (280 BC–1480 AD), warning the other famous away from the perilous shore (perilous to their fame, anyway) of my acquaintance.
For those whose memories may be slipping, Robert Penn Warren was one of the leading writers of the mid-20th Century, co-founder of the New Criticism; chronicler, in fiction, verse and prose, of the New South; embodiment of the Southern mind and creative spirit, emerging finally from the rubble of the infamy of slavery, Civil War, Reconstruction and Jim Crow. Think of Mencken’s “Sahara of the Bozart” becoming a flourishing oasis of ideas and art. To latter-day sons of the South, as I was then myself, he seemed to offer legitimation and hope, of the intellectual kind.
He was/is most famous himself perhaps for his novel, All the King’s Men (1946), winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction (that’s TWO PP winners I’ve met!), turned into a 1949 Academy Award Best Picture. Personally, I preferred another of his novels, Band of Angels (1955), with its antebellem New Orleans setting, and starring, in the 1957 movie version, Clark Gable and the unforgettable Yvonne de Carlo (1922-2007).
All that was in the past by the time we had our hour. By then, Warren, scholar as well as novelist and poet, had long been on the faculty at Yale (where he had also studied in the way back when), and so had long before left the South in person (though never, certainly, in spirit) for a life in the Ivy League, in Connecticut – a life I was in the process of failing to achieve myself. I’d entered the Yale Graduate School, in History, in the fall of 1970, in high hopes, and would be leaving it, hopes dashed, by June 1971.
(Which reminds me, I sat in on one session of a class taught by another then famous Yale professor, Erich Segal (1937-2010) – Love Story – remember? He wore a snappy leather jacket on the cold day, as I recall.)
Why Warren agreed to read my story and meet with me is a mystery. Yes, I was a graduate student in the school where he taught, though “taught” is far too pedestrian a word for the Kabuki theater of such personages in such a place. A grad student, yes, but “studying” History, not English.
Perhaps he saw something of himself so many years before in me – not much surely, but some hint – a young southerner lost in the hostile north, a little fish adrift in an intellectual sea amongst ravenous big, big fish.
It was a Gothic tale I showed him, set deep in the woods of Western Ontario, on the edge of a lake at night, the haunting call of loons floating ghost-like over rippling, moon-reflecting water. Shore-lapping water: mustn’t forget that detail. There was drinking involved, and repressed sexual uncertainty, and angst. Lots of angst. And lots of drinking. (No drugs; those would have entered in had the writing waited a year or two longer.) Very deep and very shocking. Almost too shocking to share, I feared, but surely he, if anyone, would see beyond the shock, see the depth, unmissable, surely, with loons as chorus.
I had left the piece in his office mailbox, with my phone number attached, not really expecting a call, shocked, in fact, when a department secretary called to set up an appointment. This long preceded text, and even email.
The day of our meeting, I arrived nervous. Mr. Warren arrived courtly, as I recall, in a tweed jacket with an almost matching tie, not that I knew much then (or now) about “matching” fashion. It was “Mr. Warren” and “Mr. Tibbits,” as was the Yale custom, so I’d been told; not Dr. or Prof, since everyone was assumed to be a Dr., or about to be. Though not quite everyone; I soon proved that rule by exception. And so we were all Mr., to prove our common membership in the elite “egalitarian” club (not so many Ms-es then). Other, subtler pecks made the pecking order clear to those subtle enough to know.
How many hundreds, or even thousands, of such meetings with young writers must he have had by then, in his long career – mostly male and southern, I imagine – hoping he would give them hope that they might be the next Great American Novelist, Southern Division (or essayist, or playwright, or …).
My awe blocked clear memories of the hour, but I think back to the meeting with a feeling of warm melancholy. Unlike my memory of another then-famous Yale Mr. (1910-1996), whose no doubt witty ridicule of my inability to spell, one afternoon in seminar, still burns like a wasp sting: I, at least, have not forgotten him. So Mr. Warren must have been gentler.
He gave back my manuscript, with a few almost illegible annotations. I still have it somewhere, though I can’t quite put my hand on it now. He didn’t say much about my story. “Interesting,” perhaps (though probably not what he really thought); or “a beginning” (and also the “end” for that one, unless I can find it in the files, to see if 50 years might have given it a new impetus.)
He did spend a good part of our hour assuring me that every writer must find his own voice (it would be their now, I suspect). And telling me about a young protegee, immensely talented, steaming forward with a promising career – who married, and then failed to find the time to write. Could he have heard about my ill-fated engagement to a college classmate and hoped his cautionary tale might insulate the embryo of talent he saw in me, from temptations of the flesh? Not likely, I suppose. Though I didn’t, in fact, marry for another 40 years, but it wasn’t writing that kept me from it.
I don’t have any idea what RPW (Mr. Warren) really thought of my chances at writing success. But I like to think of his story of the young man diverted by marriage as encouragement of a sort. Wan encouragement, perhaps, but I won’t quibble about quality where any encouragement is in play. At least he didn’t say, “Do yourself a kindness, Mr. Tibbits, and the world too. Marry as early and often as you like, give up writing now, you stand no chance.”
Yes, definitely his assessment could have been worse. So glad I listened to him and didn’t marry early! (There’s me being my FAMOUS cockeyed optimist again – as usual. But it’s sure not to last more than 15 minutes.)