Namedropping:
Mostly Literary Memoirs
Preface: Post Time
In the course of the same old race I find myself writing about knowing some people—how fame seems to set some people apart from us, once known: I was astonished by Ernest Hemingway’s small, weak handshake when we were introduced at Scribner’s by John Hall Wheelock and by the jolt of force with which Elie Wiesel squeezed my hand.
How long ago seems knowing, too: when I first meet Isaac Singer he asks me, "Who is Mr. Saul Bellow?"
We’re on the Upper West Side in his apartment next to the funeral parlor. A yellow parakeet hops around on Singer’s bald forehead. Singer’s great comic story of faith, "Gimpel the Fool," has only recently been published from Yiddish into English in a translation by Saul Bellow. They’re both still a long way from Stockholm.
"Do you
know him? Can you tell me who this Mr. Bellow is?" he asks. It was
not always possible to guess Singer’s motives in acting as though he was
not impressed with worldly reputations. His features of a medieval Polish
saint, even to a faint white-haired tonsure effect around the crown of his
skull, were backlit by the glowing monitor from his mischievous incubus.
Little
Richard Penniman
(Excerpt)
Of this great rock and roll performer I have the most vivid recall. When he played the Electric Circus on St. Mark’s Place he was all over the room, on top of the piano, and even flat out, with his hair up in a high pompadour and gold tights and a gold and red satin cape.
When I went to
interview him some mornings later at his invitation in his suite at the
Times Square Motel at 10:00 A.M. about his former employee, the
"soul" singer Otis Redding, who, like Penniman, was from around
Macon, Georgia, and had even started out as Little Richard’s band
chauffeur, there was a naked couple fast asleep on the other twin bed in
his chilly, air-conditioned room.
Penniman was
also bare-ass naked when he came to the door. He said he didn’t mind
being interviewed, but why did I want to talk about Otis?
"I am the
greatest," he insisted. "You should talk about me."
"This is a
biography of Otis," I reminded him. "Maybe some other
time."
"Praise
the Lord," he said.
We sat opposite
each other on chairs, separated by a low coffee table on which was my tape
recorder.
I asked Little
Richard how he and Otis Redding had met, and he told me about the black
gospel churches around Macon and then began to masturbate, and after a
while he came all over himself, a lava-like eruption that left him
otherwise placid and unperturbed as he asked me to pass him some Kleenex
from the box on the table between us and continued his narrative.
"Otis used
to do me, sing just like me," he said as he dabbed at his chest and
loins, "but we already had one falsetto rhythm and blues singer, so
then he went baritone, and that was how the great Otis Redding came
about."
I’d switched
off the machine at the moment of his orgasm, and now I started it up
again. "You were saying?"
Penniman
started his monologue again, and within half an hour he was erect,
masturbating another time, and again Wop Bop! he came.
Afterward he
asked if I’d like to interview his old friend James Brown.
"He’s
also from around Macon," Little Richard said, "and he likes to
fuck."
"That’s
nice," I said.
"You may
not think so if it ever happens to you," Little Richard said.
He was naked
except for a conk bandanna on his handsome head.
"I hope
you got what you wanted, " he said at the door, as he let me out.
I shook my
head.
That couple in
the other bed were still out cold.
"Come
again really," Little Richard announced.
When I told my
friend Al Goldman, who’d arranged the interview for me with Little
Richard, about what had transpired, he said, "He must have really dug
you. He never did those kinda things with me."
CONTENTS
Part I. In
Addition to George Spelvin
Motke Kaplan
Alexander Kerensky
Yvor Winters, Thom Gunn, and Others
Aldous Huxley
Tillie Olsen
Dan Jacobson
David Lamson
Bashevis
William Bronk
Bernard Malamud
Part
II. New York, NY
Sy Krim
Wally Markfield and Others
Matthew Josephson
Max Margulis
John Hall Wheelock
Walker Evans
Randolf Wicker
Willard Trask
Herbert Biberman
William Butler
Morris Renek
Alfred Kreymborg
Doug Ward: Peers and Tears
Robert Lowell: A Life Study
Hunter S. Thompson
Saul Newton: Newton's Laws
Richard Price
Fred Busch
Joel Leiber
Jules Olitski
Lucinda Childs
Allen Ginsberg and Others
Lore Segal
Elie Wiesel
Charlie's Bird
Part
III Relaxing at the Touro
Elman: The Man and the Masks - A Night in Evanston
Spooks
Studs Terkel
Nuruddin Farrar
W. H. Auden
Little Richard Penniman
Grace Paley
Gil Sorrentino
C.P. Snow: The Name of the Game
Stanley Edgar Hyman
Faye Dunaway
Louise Varese
Pete Martin
George William Booth
Lyndon Johnson
Bill Kennedy
Roberto Sosa
Susan Meiselas
Ernesto Cardenal
Tomas Borge: "Falta Nada!"
Tears
Posted by permission of the State University of New York Press, from Namedropping: Mostly Literary Memoirs by Richard M. Elman © 1998. State University of New York. All rights reserved.
