Hey Luc, I haven't seen that photo for many years. I remember that night, I think. The Three Musketeers. What a blast life was then. Your Felker piece was a gas. I remember profiling Larry Flynt, when he was still in Ohio, and had never met anyone from the New York press before .He let me see everything he did and it turned out to be the best work I'd every done. John had me go out and hang with LeRoy Nieman too,, the great sports artist. I got another good piece out of it. LeRoy wanted to kill me but that was how it was. My object was to write the truth about everyone I met, good and bad. John was,totally in sync with this. He was, as you say, a great editor and I have missed him. I looked up his name hoping to see he was writing for someone. Instead, I found an obituary with about three lines in it. There was so much more to him, a brilliant guy, with high style. And a wonderful sense of humor. RIP old pal. You made us all better.
This is why I don't look back. I don't want to be the guy who goes, "Sorry to be the one saying this, but.... it really was better then." I don't want to recall Werner Erhard's goon strolling in wearing a full-length fur coat and guaranteeing a lawsuit and Jon Larsen saying, 'We've got $9 million in judgments against us, let's go for 10.' And on and on. And now the big excitement is about Wash Po and NYT headlines. Will they say 'Treason," "racist," "anti-Semite," "propaganda." This is important? Headlines? What I do now is stupid in its own way, but at least it doesn't make me nostalgic. Good for you, Lucian, to be able to look back and forward.
Jeezus that Werner Erhard reference triggers - in a good way, at least at first blush, since I didn't have to deal personally with anyone who fell for the EST spiel / con / psychological abuse disguised as a "path to self-actualization" or whatever the precise b.s. was - a time when I was more or less studying the cults that kept popping up in the 60s & 70s. Kind of a psychological journey to see what they were offering, and how they were able to persuade people "This is IT! THIS is going to be the central focus, touchstone, absolute guide to your life!" Had the advantage of making the Nichiren Daishonin Buddhism episode in The Last Detail* make complete sense to me!
Again, amusing ONLY because I never knew of anyone close to me, who fell down into that kind of rabbit hole, but the moment I think of how damaging they were in so many lives, not amusing at all, just sad and outrageous.
The Last Detail was theatrically released in the United States by Columbia Pictures on December 12, 1973. The film received positive reviews from critics, who praised the performances of Nicholson and Quaid, as well as Towne's screenplay. It was nominated for two Golden Globe Awards, three Academy Awards, and four British Academy Film Awards (winning two).
Plot
On Saturday, December 15, 1973, Navy lifers Signalman First Class Billy "Badass" Buddusky and Gunner's Mate First Class Richard "Mule" Mulhall are awaiting orders in Norfolk, Virginia. They are assigned a shore patrol detail escorting 18-year-old Seaman Larry Meadows to Portsmouth Naval Prison near Kittery, Maine. Meadows has been court-martialed, dishonorably discharged, and sentenced to eight years in the brig for stealing $40 from a charity fund run by the wife of the Norfolk Naval Base Commander. Buddusky and Mulhall are given one week to escort Meadows to the Naval Prison at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Despite their initial resentment of the detail and their realization that the prisoner is a kleptomaniac who steals compulsively, Buddusky and Mule begin to like Meadows as they escort him on a train ride through the wintry northeastern states. They decide to show him a good time before delivering him to the authorities.
With several days to spare before they are due in Portsmouth, they make stops along their route to provide bon-voyage adventures for Meadows. In Washington, D.C., they go to a diner and order burgers, fries, and milkshakes. Next they go to a bar, but they are denied drinks, as Meadows is underage and cannot provide ID. Instead they get drunk in an alley, missing their train, which forces them to stay overnight at a hotel, where they stay up all night watching TV and drinking. At the hotel, Buddusky teaches Meadows a few flag semaphore signals and tries to get the young prisoner to stick up for himself by provoking him into a fight. The next morning, they take a detour to Camden, New Jersey to see Meadows' mother, only to find her away for the day and the house a pigsty, cluttered with empty liquor bottles. When they arrive at Grand Central Terminal in New York City, Mulhall states that the trio will not leave until their train for Boston departs in two hours. Buddusky, however, sees a group of Marines and instigates a fight with them in a restroom, with Mulhall and Meadows joining, in order to force the trio's departure. The three flee Grand Central and go bar-hopping, where Buddusky gambles with their per diem money by playing darts. The older sailors later take Meadows ice skating at Rockefeller Center. In an apartment building they also encounter a group of chanting Nichiren Buddhists who teach Meadows how to pray. While in another bar, a woman hears Meadows chanting the Nichiren mantra and invites the trio to a house party, where she offers to help Meadows flee to Canada after he tells her about the trip. Meadows declines out of loyalty to Buddusky and Mulhall. Buddusky also unsuccessfully tries to seduce a woman at the party, while Mulhall makes awkward conversation about serving in the Navy with the liberal party guests.
On the train to Boston the next morning, Meadows impresses Buddusky by arguing with the waiter over his breakfast order, showing that he's heeding Buddusky's advice to stand up for himself. Buddusky and Mulhall decide to take the virginal Meadows to a whorehouse. While in Boston, they flag down a cab driver, who takes them to a seedy brothel. Meadows selects a young prostitute to lose his virginity to while Buddusky and Mulhall wait in the hallway. After an aborted first attempt where he almost immediately ejaculates, Mulhall and Buddusky pay for Meadows to have a second chance with the prostitute. Buddusky and Mulhall make conversation while waiting for Meadows, where Buddusky reminisces about his former marriage and his life prior to the Navy. The next morning, Meadows tells the other sailors that despite her profession, he thinks the young prostitute might have had romantic feelings for him. ****** The wiki summary continues.
Werner Earhard provided the blue print to succeed for every psuedo-guru for self-improvement who followed. I couldn't understand how people could give that BS-artist their money.
Townes was a great screenwriter. "The Last Detail" I saw it when I was 4 years out of the Navy. I had seen full-time (not temporary) Shore Patrol pukes abuse sailors, and behave like they were redneck cops in Birmingham, Alabama, in the Jim Crow era. I intervened a couple of times when they were maltreating sailors. I got the distinct impression they wanted to beat me up! They and the MP's make up about half of our cops; like the police sgt. who kneeled on George Floyd's neck. When I read reports of police abusing people,
I wish reporters would include the Armed Forces backgrounds of the cops, which is where they probably first learned bad behavior. Never give police power to rednecks.
I should probably add that by "falling down into that rabbit hole," I mean not mere dabbling, attending some presentations or whatever, but going for that complete Kierkegaardian "Leap of Faith" in a way that likely would have appalled Soren K., i.e.,
into (1) the whole radical cutting off of ties with family (NOT just possible abusers in one's family, but across the board, as cult strategy implemented for isolating vulnerable younger people - or older people "who should know better but don't"), (2) Adopting as much of the cult's dogmatic edicts as "revealed truth" as one can do, and making a painful annoying hectoring "holier than thou" nuisance of oneself, yikes! (3) Just becoming mean-spirited about questioning the cult in general, (4) Hell that's more than enough, right?!
Possibly useful ancillary quick scan or "deep reading," I won't excerpt but a fraction of this, take a look if so inclined, the source is about as trustworthy a starting point online I know of, if anyone can add another, please let me know!
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813–1855) was an astonishingly prolific writer whose work—almost all of which was written in the 1840s—is difficult to categorize, spanning philosophy, theology, religious and devotional writing, literary criticism, psychology and social critique. Kierkegaard’s mode of philosophizing opposes system-building and owes more in its approach to the ancients, particularly his hero Socrates, though his work also draws strongly and creatively on the Bible and other Christian sources. The opposition to system-building means that Kierkegaard has often been understood as an arch opponent of Hegel, but scholarship in recent decades has challenged and complicated this view, suggesting both that some of Kierkegaard’s central ideas are creative developments of Hegel’s ideas, and that the main target of his critique is certain Danish Hegelians influential in his day, rather than Hegel himself (see especially Stewart 2003 and section 4 below). Also often dubbed the “father of existentialism”, this label obscures at least as much as it reveals, especially to those who associate existentialism with atheistic figures such as Sartre. Kierkegaard’s thought has certainly influenced thinkers in the phenomenological and existential traditions (including Heidegger, Sartre, Jaspers, Marcel, and Lévinas), but also thinkers in very different philosophical traditions, such as Wittgenstein (who famously described him as a “saint” and “by far the most profound thinker” of the nineteenth century). In addition to influencing philosophers and theologians—inside and outside his own Lutheran tradition—Kierkegaard’s thought has also influenced various novelists and poets (including Henrik Ibsen, Franz Kafka, Miguel de Unamuno, August Strindberg, W. H. Auden, Walker Percy, John Updike, Richard Wright, R. S. Thomas, and Haven Kimmel); artists and filmmakers (including Edvard Munch and Carl Theodor Dreyer); psychiatrists and psychotherapists (including Ludwig Binswanger, Carl Rogers, Rollo May, R. D. Laing, and Irvin Yalom). ******
Lucian, I am just a couple of years younger than you, and a retired journalist (and military brat, as well, though without your pedigree). I enjoy all your writing, but especially these retrospective pieces. I also remember the heady days of journalism in the early 1970s. I was working at newspapers in Alabama and Georgia, and during the course of my career, met a fascinating range of people. Before social media, and before cable news, newspapers and magazines had immediacy and power. To work at even a local newspaper was to feel like you had your fingers on the pulse of your community, you were in the know, and your paper had an impact. Your writing had an impact. I'm not mourning "the glory days" of newspapers vs. the current media environment. I just want to acknowledge that we had our run, and it was fun. And we made a difference, however small.
What a rich and varied In Memoriam, especially for news people who remember the action and some of those publications. To have been the editor of both the Paris Trib and Penthouse says the man certainly had range. (And Oui -- Playboy's tacky sibling -- surprised me. David Mamet and I, both of us then starting out in Chicago, wrote a couple pieces for them and called the magazine "Oy.")
So thank you for remembering this friend you lost twice, and for such a sparkling homage. Like Pete Hamill and other star journalists, he sounds accomplished in having both stellar copy skills and electricity for notable women. Wow.
Oh this is painful to hear. He was one of the groomsmen in our wedding in Mississippi (Mississippi did not agree with him) and we met up with him regularly in NYC. I remember him as brilliant smart and a troublemaker all at the same time. And moody, which meant he was completely aware of emotions surrounding every thing worth writing about. He was a great person.
So poignant reading this now. My best friend of 60 years died a week ago and I wouldn’t have known about it as I had no contact with her family. By fluke one of her friends knew of our long association and called me. It feels like a piece of your identity has been ripped away doesn’t it?
Great homage, Lucian. Sorry you lost a colleague and a friend, especially having to learn about it two years after the fact. That happened to me recently, albeit just one year after the fact. It stings.
For those of your readers who were BTL (Born Too Late) to have experienced print magazines still meaning something (late 60s into the early 80s), "everyone" in Noo Yawk "knew" that the March, 1968 issue of Harper's, edited by brilliant editor and equally brilliant writer Willie Morris, was going to be something: Norman Mailer's piece on the October, 1967 Pentagon protest (35,000, according to U.S. Deputy Marshals, 50,000, said the media) was going to take up the entire magazine. The day it hit the stands, I walked over to the big newsstand at 79th and Broadway. Sold out. Every newsstand up to 96th Street, sold out. I headed east, and in a far nook of what was still mostly working-class German Yorkville, snagged the next-to-last copy. The stand owner asked me what the big deal was: he never sold his allotment of 15 copies in a full month.
Yeah, Lombardi was a spark-showering editor. I would love (*love*) to read all of your Rupert torpedoes Clay piece, since I was one of the original editors at New West and had seen close-up when Clay took the original idea, a magazine for Southern California, and bloated it state-wide, to capture a projected increased of 75,000 subscribers, who were supposed to turn the magazine into a huge money-maker.
I loved the imagined sight of your tongue puffing up your cheek as you wrote that with "Lombardi in the editor's chair, you, too, could be Gay Talese or Tom Wolfe." Made to feel like them, sure; dress like them (both in their bespoke outfits), probably not; write like them, well...and I say that as the guy who actually did sit in the "editor's chair" for Tom Wolfe's "The Me Decade."
I don’t know if you remember I asked you if you had any news from him. I was his girlfriend first and then a great friend for many years. Like I told you I went to Larry Flynt’s wedding with him. I was in Paris when he became editor of the Herald Tribune.
I have been thinking about him so often and wondered what happened.
I have been googling over the years trying to find him and a long time ago I came across someone saying he had gone to live close to his parents who were ailing. Have you heard that?
He talked so often about you I still can’t believe he didn’t keep in touch with you. Why?
I just wanted to add a funny story about Lombardi. While he was working at the International Herald Tribune I was working a few months for an art gallery who was having a Basquiat exhibition. I must have taken Lombardi to see it and a few days later the Basquiat exhibition got a great review written by Lombardi in the banner I think they called it.
The owner of the gallery who was a big collector of Basquiat was so impressed thinking I had something to do with it I got a Bulgari watch for Christmas. He gave me a Bulgari key chain to give to Lombardi who was so insulted someone would give him a gift for an article he wrote I just gave it to a friend. I still have my watch and every time I look at it it makes me laugh.
Thanks for this, Lucian, beautifully written. Back when I was editing the Grover Lewis collection, I looked up or heard from a lot of the old RS folks. I wondered then what became of Lombardi, whom I couldn't track down. No one seemed to know.
Grover Lewis!!! That's someone I hadn't thought of for so long I literally had forgotten he existed. As Village Voice back of the book editor, I gave Grover and Lombardi both their first NYC exposure.
It's important to me to say that here because I may be correcting some misinformation I may have posted previously in Lucian's forum:
Jack Smith's father-in-law, much maligned by P01135809, is an important civil rights lawyer, Paul Chevigny. Such tricks memory plays! Reading a profile of Grover https://www.thewittliffcollections.txst.edu/research/a-z/lewis.html before replying here, I found an account of that first Voice publication of his I think I had transfered to Paul's credit.
Paul loves the blues so much that I wrote (here or privately) that he made a pilgrimage to Memphis, rediscovered some long-forgotten bluesmen, and wrote a piece about it that he brought to the Voice. The piece was so long that, not wanting to cut it, the only thing I could think to do with it was break it into parts and run them serially.
So this profile describes Grover as having gone to Houston, spent a week with Lightnin' Hopkins, and written a piece the Voice ran in five parts in 1968. That was when Paul and Bell Gale, Smith's late mother-in-law, were around the Voice and I must have somehow melded Grover's and Paul's love for the blues. I could never understand why I couldn't find anything about Paul's blues series online!
Grover and the Voice parted company on less than friendly terms a few years later—you probably know why, I've totally forgotten—and that could have had a subconscious effect. Sorry to learn he's no longer with us. —Diane Fisher
Great piece. Love these personal stories. Your friends were certainly colorful characters. One line in particular caught my rye and made me smile "if you want people to believe you’re successful, wealthy, sophisticated, act that way. You, too, can be Robert Evans.” He was the epitome of a colorful character. I should have sued him for stealing my name :) His real name was Robert Shapira. Not sure where the Evans name came from, but he and his brother owned Evan-Picone Fashions.
He was on a business trip tp Los Angeles and sitting poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel when Norma Shearer spotted him and put him in pictures. Nobody wanted him in The Sun Also Rises as the bullfighter and Ava Gardner's lover, but Zanuck said "The kid stays in the picture."
Quote from his obituary in The Guardian "Those words had first come from the mouth of the producer Darryl F Zanuck, who had cast Evans as the bullfighter Pedro Romero in a 1957 adaptation of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Ten days before shooting started, Zanuck received a signed petition from the rest of the cast, including Ava Gardner and Tyrone Power, asking him to remove Evans from the film. It read: “With Robert Evans playing Pedro Romero, The Sun Also Rises will be a disaster.” Zanuck arrived on set and told the assembled cast and crew: “The kid stays in the picture. And anybody who doesn’t like it can quit!”
Of course as head of Paramount he later became a very successful producer.
You know how sorry I am, Luc. This is the obit Lombardi deserved. Your/his New Times Voice sale piece will stand as a classic.
After you and he fell out I tried to follow his path, but it became too dispiriting. He edited the Miami New Times for awhile, then was out in some messy dispute. Next thing I knew he was back in Cherry Hill, and I guess settled in there longterm. That was pre-social media time and I found him in a prolonged pissing mismatch on a local bulletin board with a small town nobody; you can imagine. I tuned out. I think the last time I saw John I was at the Spring Street with you and—was this the same night?—Paul Rothchild [to anyone who doesn't know who that is, sic the sp].
Not that this matters much either, but I mentioned in another comment that I believe I gave Lombardi his first NYC break. To Dan Wolf's eternal credit, the Voice didn't distinguish between writers we knew and strangers. If we liked a piece we ran it and trusted our instincts that it wasn't fiction or plagiarized. Lombardi had been editing what was probably a one-man paper from home down there in Jersey and submitted a piece to us. I liked it and I ran it. I forget the subject, but it had to have had that one something we required: POV.
It was Charlie Rothschild, and I remember that night. Lombardi was one of the angriest people I ever knew with no good reason other than being from South Philly and thinking that had taken something from him, when it had given him who he was. So sad.
Hey Luc, I haven't seen that photo for many years. I remember that night, I think. The Three Musketeers. What a blast life was then. Your Felker piece was a gas. I remember profiling Larry Flynt, when he was still in Ohio, and had never met anyone from the New York press before .He let me see everything he did and it turned out to be the best work I'd every done. John had me go out and hang with LeRoy Nieman too,, the great sports artist. I got another good piece out of it. LeRoy wanted to kill me but that was how it was. My object was to write the truth about everyone I met, good and bad. John was,totally in sync with this. He was, as you say, a great editor and I have missed him. I looked up his name hoping to see he was writing for someone. Instead, I found an obituary with about three lines in it. There was so much more to him, a brilliant guy, with high style. And a wonderful sense of humor. RIP old pal. You made us all better.
~respect~
This is why I don't look back. I don't want to be the guy who goes, "Sorry to be the one saying this, but.... it really was better then." I don't want to recall Werner Erhard's goon strolling in wearing a full-length fur coat and guaranteeing a lawsuit and Jon Larsen saying, 'We've got $9 million in judgments against us, let's go for 10.' And on and on. And now the big excitement is about Wash Po and NYT headlines. Will they say 'Treason," "racist," "anti-Semite," "propaganda." This is important? Headlines? What I do now is stupid in its own way, but at least it doesn't make me nostalgic. Good for you, Lucian, to be able to look back and forward.
Jeezus that Werner Erhard reference triggers - in a good way, at least at first blush, since I didn't have to deal personally with anyone who fell for the EST spiel / con / psychological abuse disguised as a "path to self-actualization" or whatever the precise b.s. was - a time when I was more or less studying the cults that kept popping up in the 60s & 70s. Kind of a psychological journey to see what they were offering, and how they were able to persuade people "This is IT! THIS is going to be the central focus, touchstone, absolute guide to your life!" Had the advantage of making the Nichiren Daishonin Buddhism episode in The Last Detail* make complete sense to me!
Again, amusing ONLY because I never knew of anyone close to me, who fell down into that kind of rabbit hole, but the moment I think of how damaging they were in so many lives, not amusing at all, just sad and outrageous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Detail {{Good chance you know exactly the scenes I am talking about, but in case someone else stumbles onto to this...}}
Excerpts:
The Last Detail was theatrically released in the United States by Columbia Pictures on December 12, 1973. The film received positive reviews from critics, who praised the performances of Nicholson and Quaid, as well as Towne's screenplay. It was nominated for two Golden Globe Awards, three Academy Awards, and four British Academy Film Awards (winning two).
Plot
On Saturday, December 15, 1973, Navy lifers Signalman First Class Billy "Badass" Buddusky and Gunner's Mate First Class Richard "Mule" Mulhall are awaiting orders in Norfolk, Virginia. They are assigned a shore patrol detail escorting 18-year-old Seaman Larry Meadows to Portsmouth Naval Prison near Kittery, Maine. Meadows has been court-martialed, dishonorably discharged, and sentenced to eight years in the brig for stealing $40 from a charity fund run by the wife of the Norfolk Naval Base Commander. Buddusky and Mulhall are given one week to escort Meadows to the Naval Prison at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Despite their initial resentment of the detail and their realization that the prisoner is a kleptomaniac who steals compulsively, Buddusky and Mule begin to like Meadows as they escort him on a train ride through the wintry northeastern states. They decide to show him a good time before delivering him to the authorities.
With several days to spare before they are due in Portsmouth, they make stops along their route to provide bon-voyage adventures for Meadows. In Washington, D.C., they go to a diner and order burgers, fries, and milkshakes. Next they go to a bar, but they are denied drinks, as Meadows is underage and cannot provide ID. Instead they get drunk in an alley, missing their train, which forces them to stay overnight at a hotel, where they stay up all night watching TV and drinking. At the hotel, Buddusky teaches Meadows a few flag semaphore signals and tries to get the young prisoner to stick up for himself by provoking him into a fight. The next morning, they take a detour to Camden, New Jersey to see Meadows' mother, only to find her away for the day and the house a pigsty, cluttered with empty liquor bottles. When they arrive at Grand Central Terminal in New York City, Mulhall states that the trio will not leave until their train for Boston departs in two hours. Buddusky, however, sees a group of Marines and instigates a fight with them in a restroom, with Mulhall and Meadows joining, in order to force the trio's departure. The three flee Grand Central and go bar-hopping, where Buddusky gambles with their per diem money by playing darts. The older sailors later take Meadows ice skating at Rockefeller Center. In an apartment building they also encounter a group of chanting Nichiren Buddhists who teach Meadows how to pray. While in another bar, a woman hears Meadows chanting the Nichiren mantra and invites the trio to a house party, where she offers to help Meadows flee to Canada after he tells her about the trip. Meadows declines out of loyalty to Buddusky and Mulhall. Buddusky also unsuccessfully tries to seduce a woman at the party, while Mulhall makes awkward conversation about serving in the Navy with the liberal party guests.
On the train to Boston the next morning, Meadows impresses Buddusky by arguing with the waiter over his breakfast order, showing that he's heeding Buddusky's advice to stand up for himself. Buddusky and Mulhall decide to take the virginal Meadows to a whorehouse. While in Boston, they flag down a cab driver, who takes them to a seedy brothel. Meadows selects a young prostitute to lose his virginity to while Buddusky and Mulhall wait in the hallway. After an aborted first attempt where he almost immediately ejaculates, Mulhall and Buddusky pay for Meadows to have a second chance with the prostitute. Buddusky and Mulhall make conversation while waiting for Meadows, where Buddusky reminisces about his former marriage and his life prior to the Navy. The next morning, Meadows tells the other sailors that despite her profession, he thinks the young prostitute might have had romantic feelings for him. ****** The wiki summary continues.
Werner Earhard provided the blue print to succeed for every psuedo-guru for self-improvement who followed. I couldn't understand how people could give that BS-artist their money.
Townes was a great screenwriter. "The Last Detail" I saw it when I was 4 years out of the Navy. I had seen full-time (not temporary) Shore Patrol pukes abuse sailors, and behave like they were redneck cops in Birmingham, Alabama, in the Jim Crow era. I intervened a couple of times when they were maltreating sailors. I got the distinct impression they wanted to beat me up! They and the MP's make up about half of our cops; like the police sgt. who kneeled on George Floyd's neck. When I read reports of police abusing people,
I wish reporters would include the Armed Forces backgrounds of the cops, which is where they probably first learned bad behavior. Never give police power to rednecks.
I should probably add that by "falling down into that rabbit hole," I mean not mere dabbling, attending some presentations or whatever, but going for that complete Kierkegaardian "Leap of Faith" in a way that likely would have appalled Soren K., i.e.,
into (1) the whole radical cutting off of ties with family (NOT just possible abusers in one's family, but across the board, as cult strategy implemented for isolating vulnerable younger people - or older people "who should know better but don't"), (2) Adopting as much of the cult's dogmatic edicts as "revealed truth" as one can do, and making a painful annoying hectoring "holier than thou" nuisance of oneself, yikes! (3) Just becoming mean-spirited about questioning the cult in general, (4) Hell that's more than enough, right?!
Possibly useful ancillary quick scan or "deep reading," I won't excerpt but a fraction of this, take a look if so inclined, the source is about as trustworthy a starting point online I know of, if anyone can add another, please let me know!
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kierkegaard/
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813–1855) was an astonishingly prolific writer whose work—almost all of which was written in the 1840s—is difficult to categorize, spanning philosophy, theology, religious and devotional writing, literary criticism, psychology and social critique. Kierkegaard’s mode of philosophizing opposes system-building and owes more in its approach to the ancients, particularly his hero Socrates, though his work also draws strongly and creatively on the Bible and other Christian sources. The opposition to system-building means that Kierkegaard has often been understood as an arch opponent of Hegel, but scholarship in recent decades has challenged and complicated this view, suggesting both that some of Kierkegaard’s central ideas are creative developments of Hegel’s ideas, and that the main target of his critique is certain Danish Hegelians influential in his day, rather than Hegel himself (see especially Stewart 2003 and section 4 below). Also often dubbed the “father of existentialism”, this label obscures at least as much as it reveals, especially to those who associate existentialism with atheistic figures such as Sartre. Kierkegaard’s thought has certainly influenced thinkers in the phenomenological and existential traditions (including Heidegger, Sartre, Jaspers, Marcel, and Lévinas), but also thinkers in very different philosophical traditions, such as Wittgenstein (who famously described him as a “saint” and “by far the most profound thinker” of the nineteenth century). In addition to influencing philosophers and theologians—inside and outside his own Lutheran tradition—Kierkegaard’s thought has also influenced various novelists and poets (including Henrik Ibsen, Franz Kafka, Miguel de Unamuno, August Strindberg, W. H. Auden, Walker Percy, John Updike, Richard Wright, R. S. Thomas, and Haven Kimmel); artists and filmmakers (including Edvard Munch and Carl Theodor Dreyer); psychiatrists and psychotherapists (including Ludwig Binswanger, Carl Rogers, Rollo May, R. D. Laing, and Irvin Yalom). ******
Wow, I wish this didn't make so much sense that I can so easily visualize exactly the kind of thing you're talking about. Happy Thanksgiving, Rich.
Et tu.
Lucian, I am just a couple of years younger than you, and a retired journalist (and military brat, as well, though without your pedigree). I enjoy all your writing, but especially these retrospective pieces. I also remember the heady days of journalism in the early 1970s. I was working at newspapers in Alabama and Georgia, and during the course of my career, met a fascinating range of people. Before social media, and before cable news, newspapers and magazines had immediacy and power. To work at even a local newspaper was to feel like you had your fingers on the pulse of your community, you were in the know, and your paper had an impact. Your writing had an impact. I'm not mourning "the glory days" of newspapers vs. the current media environment. I just want to acknowledge that we had our run, and it was fun. And we made a difference, however small.
What a rich and varied In Memoriam, especially for news people who remember the action and some of those publications. To have been the editor of both the Paris Trib and Penthouse says the man certainly had range. (And Oui -- Playboy's tacky sibling -- surprised me. David Mamet and I, both of us then starting out in Chicago, wrote a couple pieces for them and called the magazine "Oy.")
So thank you for remembering this friend you lost twice, and for such a sparkling homage. Like Pete Hamill and other star journalists, he sounds accomplished in having both stellar copy skills and electricity for notable women. Wow.
Oh this is painful to hear. He was one of the groomsmen in our wedding in Mississippi (Mississippi did not agree with him) and we met up with him regularly in NYC. I remember him as brilliant smart and a troublemaker all at the same time. And moody, which meant he was completely aware of emotions surrounding every thing worth writing about. He was a great person.
You got him exactly... EXACTLY right.
So poignant reading this now. My best friend of 60 years died a week ago and I wouldn’t have known about it as I had no contact with her family. By fluke one of her friends knew of our long association and called me. It feels like a piece of your identity has been ripped away doesn’t it?
Great homage, Lucian. Sorry you lost a colleague and a friend, especially having to learn about it two years after the fact. That happened to me recently, albeit just one year after the fact. It stings.
I've heard that the best writers only come from having the best editors.
They're priceless if one ever gets the best.
You got the best.
He would be very proud of your work, and I'm sure he kept up with it.
All the editors do.
A good memorial for a good man.
For those of your readers who were BTL (Born Too Late) to have experienced print magazines still meaning something (late 60s into the early 80s), "everyone" in Noo Yawk "knew" that the March, 1968 issue of Harper's, edited by brilliant editor and equally brilliant writer Willie Morris, was going to be something: Norman Mailer's piece on the October, 1967 Pentagon protest (35,000, according to U.S. Deputy Marshals, 50,000, said the media) was going to take up the entire magazine. The day it hit the stands, I walked over to the big newsstand at 79th and Broadway. Sold out. Every newsstand up to 96th Street, sold out. I headed east, and in a far nook of what was still mostly working-class German Yorkville, snagged the next-to-last copy. The stand owner asked me what the big deal was: he never sold his allotment of 15 copies in a full month.
Yeah, Lombardi was a spark-showering editor. I would love (*love*) to read all of your Rupert torpedoes Clay piece, since I was one of the original editors at New West and had seen close-up when Clay took the original idea, a magazine for Southern California, and bloated it state-wide, to capture a projected increased of 75,000 subscribers, who were supposed to turn the magazine into a huge money-maker.
I loved the imagined sight of your tongue puffing up your cheek as you wrote that with "Lombardi in the editor's chair, you, too, could be Gay Talese or Tom Wolfe." Made to feel like them, sure; dress like them (both in their bespoke outfits), probably not; write like them, well...and I say that as the guy who actually did sit in the "editor's chair" for Tom Wolfe's "The Me Decade."
Newsstands! I remember those!
Big smile.
I don’t know if you remember I asked you if you had any news from him. I was his girlfriend first and then a great friend for many years. Like I told you I went to Larry Flynt’s wedding with him. I was in Paris when he became editor of the Herald Tribune.
I have been thinking about him so often and wondered what happened.
Thanks Lucian for this beautiful tribute.
Thanks Barbara. It was a pleasure to bring him back to life if only for 1500 words or so.
I have been googling over the years trying to find him and a long time ago I came across someone saying he had gone to live close to his parents who were ailing. Have you heard that?
He talked so often about you I still can’t believe he didn’t keep in touch with you. Why?
I just wanted to add a funny story about Lombardi. While he was working at the International Herald Tribune I was working a few months for an art gallery who was having a Basquiat exhibition. I must have taken Lombardi to see it and a few days later the Basquiat exhibition got a great review written by Lombardi in the banner I think they called it.
The owner of the gallery who was a big collector of Basquiat was so impressed thinking I had something to do with it I got a Bulgari watch for Christmas. He gave me a Bulgari key chain to give to Lombardi who was so insulted someone would give him a gift for an article he wrote I just gave it to a friend. I still have my watch and every time I look at it it makes me laugh.
He knew Basquiat back in the day. Raoul's...Spring Street Bar...Soho a tomb at night.
Perhaps one day no one will be left who warrants this kind of tribute written with so much power no question you had what editors wanted to publish.
Beautiful, sad, reminiscent apotheosis of youth and friendship and excellence. Thank you.
Thanks for this, Lucian, beautifully written. Back when I was editing the Grover Lewis collection, I looked up or heard from a lot of the old RS folks. I wondered then what became of Lombardi, whom I couldn't track down. No one seemed to know.
Grover Lewis!!! That's someone I hadn't thought of for so long I literally had forgotten he existed. As Village Voice back of the book editor, I gave Grover and Lombardi both their first NYC exposure.
It's important to me to say that here because I may be correcting some misinformation I may have posted previously in Lucian's forum:
Jack Smith's father-in-law, much maligned by P01135809, is an important civil rights lawyer, Paul Chevigny. Such tricks memory plays! Reading a profile of Grover https://www.thewittliffcollections.txst.edu/research/a-z/lewis.html before replying here, I found an account of that first Voice publication of his I think I had transfered to Paul's credit.
Paul loves the blues so much that I wrote (here or privately) that he made a pilgrimage to Memphis, rediscovered some long-forgotten bluesmen, and wrote a piece about it that he brought to the Voice. The piece was so long that, not wanting to cut it, the only thing I could think to do with it was break it into parts and run them serially.
So this profile describes Grover as having gone to Houston, spent a week with Lightnin' Hopkins, and written a piece the Voice ran in five parts in 1968. That was when Paul and Bell Gale, Smith's late mother-in-law, were around the Voice and I must have somehow melded Grover's and Paul's love for the blues. I could never understand why I couldn't find anything about Paul's blues series online!
Grover and the Voice parted company on less than friendly terms a few years later—you probably know why, I've totally forgotten—and that could have had a subconscious effect. Sorry to learn he's no longer with us. —Diane Fisher
Great piece. Love these personal stories. Your friends were certainly colorful characters. One line in particular caught my rye and made me smile "if you want people to believe you’re successful, wealthy, sophisticated, act that way. You, too, can be Robert Evans.” He was the epitome of a colorful character. I should have sued him for stealing my name :) His real name was Robert Shapira. Not sure where the Evans name came from, but he and his brother owned Evan-Picone Fashions.
He was on a business trip tp Los Angeles and sitting poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel when Norma Shearer spotted him and put him in pictures. Nobody wanted him in The Sun Also Rises as the bullfighter and Ava Gardner's lover, but Zanuck said "The kid stays in the picture."
Quote from his obituary in The Guardian "Those words had first come from the mouth of the producer Darryl F Zanuck, who had cast Evans as the bullfighter Pedro Romero in a 1957 adaptation of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Ten days before shooting started, Zanuck received a signed petition from the rest of the cast, including Ava Gardner and Tyrone Power, asking him to remove Evans from the film. It read: “With Robert Evans playing Pedro Romero, The Sun Also Rises will be a disaster.” Zanuck arrived on set and told the assembled cast and crew: “The kid stays in the picture. And anybody who doesn’t like it can quit!”
Of course as head of Paramount he later became a very successful producer.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/oct/28/robert-evans-obituary
How wonderful! The lede that you and Lombardi created for Felker, left me breathless. Bravo!
You know how sorry I am, Luc. This is the obit Lombardi deserved. Your/his New Times Voice sale piece will stand as a classic.
After you and he fell out I tried to follow his path, but it became too dispiriting. He edited the Miami New Times for awhile, then was out in some messy dispute. Next thing I knew he was back in Cherry Hill, and I guess settled in there longterm. That was pre-social media time and I found him in a prolonged pissing mismatch on a local bulletin board with a small town nobody; you can imagine. I tuned out. I think the last time I saw John I was at the Spring Street with you and—was this the same night?—Paul Rothchild [to anyone who doesn't know who that is, sic the sp].
Not that this matters much either, but I mentioned in another comment that I believe I gave Lombardi his first NYC break. To Dan Wolf's eternal credit, the Voice didn't distinguish between writers we knew and strangers. If we liked a piece we ran it and trusted our instincts that it wasn't fiction or plagiarized. Lombardi had been editing what was probably a one-man paper from home down there in Jersey and submitted a piece to us. I liked it and I ran it. I forget the subject, but it had to have had that one something we required: POV.
It was Charlie Rothschild, and I remember that night. Lombardi was one of the angriest people I ever knew with no good reason other than being from South Philly and thinking that had taken something from him, when it had given him who he was. So sad.
John's accomplishments despite his anger are an index to his brilliance.