Between You and Me (18 page)

It was most unusual in those days of social and political politesse to hear anyone attack the powerful hierarchy of the Catholic Church with Sanger’s force and vigor. I shudder to think how scathing her comments would have been had she been alive in more recent years,

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when the stories surfaced about the heinous sexual abuses some American priests had inflicted on children and adolescents. At the same time, if she were alive today, she surely would applaud the dramatic changes in the lives of women; advances that were often the direct result of her pioneering efforts to give women control over their own bodies. Sanger did live long enough to witness the marketing of the contraceptive pill that she had helped develop, a major breakthrough that fueled the sexual revolution of the 1960s. And in 1965, the year before she died, the Supreme Court struck down a Con-necticut law that banned the use of contraceptives, a decision that certified, once and for all, the legality of birth control.

It wasn’t until after Sanger’s death that the women’s movement picked up steam and became the full-scale force that has had such a transforming effect on American society. One of its many triumphs was Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion. The pro-choice campaign leading to that landmark decision was a logical and perhaps inevitable extension of Sanger’s lifelong battle to make birth control legal and socially acceptable.

Because of the women’s movement, Sanger now enjoys a historical stature that, I’m sure, she could not have anticipated when she was getting arrested for opening birth-control clinics and taking other steps to defy laws that banned contraception. I know I didn’t anticipate it. When I interviewed her in 1957, her chief appeal to me was as a figure of controversy, an intrepid gadfly who had the temerity to challenge the moral authority of the Roman Catholic Church. Only in retrospect would I come to appreciate the depth of her influence.

Over the past two decades or so, I have received more requests for quotes or excerpts from the broadcast Sanger appeared on than from any other interview I did in the 1950s. To me, at least, that is solid proof of her enduring relevance and her permanent place in the pantheon of the struggle for women’s rights.

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At the time of the millennium, when Time magazine and CBS

News selected the hundred most influential men and women of the twentieth century, the luminaries were divided into five separate groups. One of them was labeled “Leaders and Revolutionaries.”

Among the twenty who made the final cut in that category were political giants who, for good or ill, had changed the course of world history (for example, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and Adolf Hitler) and such outstanding moral crusaders as Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Only three women were included in that illustrious group. Two of them—Eleanor Roosevelt and Margaret Thatcher—were political leaders in the conventional sense, and the third was Margaret Sanger.

F r a n k L l o y d W r i g h t

S a lv a d o r D a l í

T h o m a s H a rt B e n t o n

O F A L L T H E I N T E R V I E W S I did in that long-ago era of black-and-white television, none was more stimulating for me than my conversations with the grand old man of architecture—Frank Lloyd Wright. At the age of ninety, Wright was in the deep twilight of a long life and brilliant career when I interviewed him in 1957. He had thoroughly earned his reputation as a maverick, an innovative genius who had rebelled against the formal constraints of conventional architecture. Moreover, his fiercely independent views were not confined to his own sphere of creativity, for Wright was also an astute and at times acerbic social critic. There’s no doubt that he relished playing the curmudgeon, and he had a highly developed sense of his own worth, as I discovered early on in our interview.

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W A L L A C E : You said many years ago that you would someday be the greatest architect of the twentieth century. Have you reached your goal?

W R I G H T : You know, I may not have said it, Mike. But I may have felt it.

W A L L A C E : You do feel it?

W R I G H T : But it’s so unbecoming to say it that I should have been careful about it. I’m not as crude, as arrogant, as I’m generally reported to be.

W A L L A C E : What is arrogance?

W R I G H T : Arrogance is something a man possesses on the surface to defend the fact that he hasn’t got the things he pretends to have. He’s a bluff, in other words.

W A L L A C E : Let me ask you this: As an intellectual yourself, Mr. Wright, what do you think of President—

W R I G H T : I deny the allegation, and I refuse to marry that girl.

I don’t like intellectuals.

W A L L A C E : You don’t like intellectuals? Why not?

W R I G H T : Because they’re superficial. They’re from the top down, not the ground up. I have always flattered myself that what I represented was from the ground up. Does that mean anything?

W A L L A C E : What do you think of President Eisenhower as an intellect?

W R I G H T : Well, now, don’t ask me as an intellect, because how would I know? But he’s a hell of a nice fellow, and one of the nicest things about him is that my wife voted for him, and I voted for Adlai Stevenson. . . .

W A L L A C E : What do you think of the American Legion, Mr.

Wright?

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W R I G H T : I never think of it if I can help it.

W A L L A C E : What do you mean by that?

W R I G H T : They’re professional warriors, aren’t they? I’m against war, always have been, always will be, and anything connected with it is anathema to me.

Elsewhere in our second conversation, we discussed his own field of endeavor, and on that subject, his opinions were even more pointed.

W A L L A C E : What do you think of church architecture in the United States?

W R I G H T : I think it’s of course a great shame.

W A L L A C E : Because it improperly reflects the idea of religion?

W R I G H T : Because it’s a paragon-monkey reflection and not a reflection of religion.

W A L L A C E : Well, whenI walk into St. Patrick’s Cathedral—

and I’m not a Catholic—but when I walk into St. Patrick’s Cathedral here inNew York City, I am enveloped ina feeling of reverence.

W R I G H T : Sure it isn’t an inferiority complex?

W A L L A C E : Just because the building is big and I’m small, you mean? Ah—I think not.

W R I G H T : I hope not.

W A L L A C E : You feel nothing when you go into St. Patrick’s?

W R I G H T : Regret.

W A L L A C E : Because of what?

W R I G H T : Because it isn’t the thing that really represents the spirit of independence and the sovereignty of the individual.

Which I feel should be represented in our edifices devoted to culture.

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At the time of our interview, Wright had recently completed his own highly original design for an edifice devoted to culture—the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. His vision of an open ro-tunda and a sloping circular ramp that ran from ground level to the top of the building was a radical departure from the norm in museum architecture, and like many of his other works, it provoked controversy. Even before construction began, there were complaints that Wright’s design for the Guggenheim was so bold and dramatic that it was apt to overwhelm the art on display. Responding to that concern with his customary self-assurance, Wright wrote that “on the con-trary, it was to make the building and the painting an uninterrupted, beautiful symphony such as never existed in the World of Art before.”

Frank Lloyd Wright died in April 1959, a little over a year after our interview and just a few months before his last masterpiece opened its doors to the public. Overlooking Central Park, the Guggenheim soon took its place as a worthy neighbor of the Metro-politan and the other temples of fine art that are situated on the stretch of Fifth Avenue known as “Museum Mile.”

A few years ago I was asked to name the weirdest person I’ve ever interviewed, and I replied without hesitation, “Salvador Dalí.” In that category, nobody else came close to the flamboyant Spanish painter who had been in the forefront of surrealism, the avant-garde movement that shook up the art world in the 1920s and early ’30s.

Deeply influenced by Freud and the recent advances in psychoanalysis, Dalí’s work explored the hallucinatory realm of the subcon-scious. It provided him with a fertile field of inspiration, and in his best and most celebrated paintings, like The Persistence of Memory (the one with the limp or melting watches), the imagery is intense and haunting.

Yet for all his talent—and he had many serious admirers—Dalí’s work was all but overshadowed by his reputation as the reigning ec-

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centric of the contemporary art world. With his over-the-top personality and his penchant for making outlandish statements, he seemed intent on being perceived as a clown, a kind of high-culture cutup.

He tended to reserve his most extravagant comments for his favorite subject—himself. Among other choice remarks, he once said, “Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy, the joy of being Salvador Dalí, and I ask myself in rapture, ‘What wonderful things is this Salvador Dalí going to accomplish today?’ ”

Although he had lived in the States for an eight-year stretch in the 1940s, having fled Europe shortly after the outbreak of World War II, he resettled in Spain in 1948. Through the years that followed, he made frequent trips to New York, which by then had become the thriving center of the international art scene. During his sojourns in the city, he usually stayed at the fashionable St. Regis Hotel, where he spent a great deal of time sitting in the lobby. Even those who knew Dalí well couldn’t be sure why he did this. Was he there to observe the hustle and bustle of all the goings-on in the lobby, or was he merely putting himself on display in a prominent setting? He surely had no trouble drawing attention to himself with his foppish manner of dress (theatrical cape, ornate walking stick, long silk scarves, et cetera) and his signature mustache, a thin, neatly trimmed handlebar, the tips of which curved so far upward that they reached the top of his cheekbones.

Dalí popped up on my radar screen in the late fall of 1956, not long after Night Beat went on the air. During one of his visits to New York, he discovered our program and, I was told, became a fan of the broadcast. So he passed the word, through his contacts in the city, that he would like to be a guest on Night Beat, and both Ted Yates and I heartily welcomed the overture.

Although I had an appreciation for fine art, I was no connoisseur.

If some of our viewers had the mistaken impression that I was

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steeped in that culture, it may have been because they had seen me in a play that ran on Broadway in 1954. It was a light comedy called Reclining Figure, and I was cast in the role of an idealistic art dealer who knew his way around museums and galleries. I had been coaxed into the acting gig by my friend Abe Burrows, the author of Guys and Dolls and other hit musicals, who had been hired to direct Reclining Figure. I got through it okay, but I really didn’t care much for the experience, and not once since then have I had the slightest desire to act onstage or on-screen. (Of course, I’ve often been accused over the years of indulging in all kinds of histrionics on 60 Minutes, but that’s a horse of an entirely different color.) Evenif I had some flair for acting, I would have beenno match for a supremely gifted scene-stealer like Dalí. Since I was aware of his reputation, I fully expected him to come across as an outlandish bohemian. But I was not prepared for the sheer absurdity of most of his answers and comments, which were as surreal as the graphic fantasies he put oncanvas. Inhis autobiography, Dalí had writtenthat one of the few things he truly adored was old age, so I asked him about that.

W A L L A C E : Why do you adore old age?

D A L Í : Because the little young peoples completely stupid, you know.

W A L L A C E : Young people are stupid?

D A L Í : Dalí only believe geniuses are old people like Leonardo da Vinci who arrive at some real achievement.

At the time of our interview, I was a mere boy of thirty-eight (fourteen years younger than Dalí), so I didn’t think his adoration of old age had much merit. Since then, with the passing years, I have gradually come to realize how profoundly wise he was on that subject.

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In his book, Dalí had also asserted that “death is beautiful.” I asked him, “What is beautiful about death? Why is death beautiful?”

He responded to that with some mumbo jumbo about how everything alive “is erotic, is ugly,” but with the arrival of death, “everything becomes normal and sublime.” That led to a bizarre claim of immortality.

W A L L A C E : Tell me this, what do you think will happen to you when you die?

D A L Í : Dalí not believe in my death.

W A L L A C E : You will not die?

D A L Í : No, no. Believe in general in death but not in the death of Dalí. Believe my death becoming very—almost impossible.

The conversationturned a little less loopy whenI brought up his critics. I reminded him that his fellow artist Max Ernst, who had painted in the same avant-garde style, had described him as “the rack-eteer of surrealism.” From anarticle inTime magazine, I quoted this assessment: “Most of his fellow artists regard Dalí as a practical joker who will do anything for a laugh, even if it means creating bad art.”