Fallen Idols is a memoir that begins in the radical sixties in Greenwich Village. The author, the young Leonard Schulman, is living on West Fourth street, just two blocks away from the young emigre from Duluth, Minn.. Bob Dylan.... The author of this charming and engaging memoir, already knows of the young genius, Mr. Dylan, having been exposed to early Dylan by his first love at Brooklyn College. The songs and life of Dylan are to affect our hero in curious ways. In the course of this book he comes to know two photographers--David Gahr and Barry Feinstein--who were close to Mr. Dylan. They tell him stories unheard of before the the great bard. Schulman comes to know other important people too--mostly through his work at Time magazine. How a Brooklyn street kid, got the job and his work at the magazine (for nearly 30 years) is a big part of the book. In the course of his life he meets many people whom he comes to see as 'fallen idols." One of the most important is James Wilde, Time magazine's most intrepid war correspondent. Mr. Wilde becomes a friend and mentor. In the nineties he travels to work for Wilde in Time's Nairobi office as a stringer. Here many adventures occur (worthy of a movie). There are other fallen idols. Too numerous to enumerate. But let me mention at least one--Vittorio Fiorucci--the monstre sacre and great Montreal artist. The creator of Juste Pour Rire's little green man. The book follows in the great literary tradition of Kerouac and Cormac McCarthy as he (Schulman) traverses--over a lifetime--wide areas of the globe--seeking and finding moments of joy and passion and nirvana. It is a journey that will excite you with the tears of things, as he seeks to find, along with all of us--permanence and love. (Another of his fallen idols is Norman Mailer and. . . oh, you'll just have to read the book.) But reader beware, Mr. Schulman's book is not for the faint of heart. So be careful. . . this book may knock you out. Like Hamlet advised "t'were as if a mirror were held up to nature." Human nature, that is. And it ain't always pretty.
Fallen Idols (lacrimae rerum)
A MemoirBy Leonard SchulmanAuthorHouse
Copyright © 2012 Leonard Schulman
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4685-2582-3Chapter One
No, that's not true.
He had also told me that his father was a skinflint. And that was the reason for his false teeth. "Dad bought a new car instead."
A new car instead.
Haw! Haw! He enjoyed a good joke, even on himself.
We were yukking it up.
I had just arrived in Istanbul, the fall of '93. We are in the living room of his apartment in Kalamis on the Asian side of Istanbul. Wilde drinks down hot coffee with gusto. He enjoys good food, elegant surroundings, good music, good pot. Classical Turkish music is playing in the background. He fires up a big fat joint.
"You know, luv," he says to me with an easy smile, "have you ever heard the old saying that every-time an Englishman opens his mouth he makes another Englishman despise him? Well, it's true, luv; it's true."
And then poof, like smoke, he was gone.
He had a knack for making dramatic entrances and exits ... but soft! Where had the wry wag gone to? I peeked into his bedroom ... There he was—under the covers, fast asleep.
A few days later with On-Ke gone (she had taken the first jet out after I arrived) James Wilde, Time magazine's Turkish bureau chief, disappeared into the streets and bars of Istanbul. He was off on a horrendous, round-the-clock drunk.
We had had a few sane days together, catching up. The second night I was there he looked me dead in the eye and said the same thing to me that he had said both times I visited him in Kenya (1985 and l989). "You look funny," he said. "Lenny, be careful, don't go funny. Why not get a mail-order bride?" The pot was calling the kettle hot. (I was already more than halfway to "funny." If by ... what did he mean by funny?) I'd laugh it off.
Wilde and I had been tight for about six years in Brooklyn. Both of us Time employees. Wilde lived in Brooklyn Heights and me in Park Slope. We'd had a lot of fun together. This was one interesting dude and one of the few upper-level Time employees who'd allowed me into his personal life.
So as promised I flew from New York City to see Himself.
It was my first trip to Turkey.
Although I didn't know it at the time there would be more trips to Turkey in the years ahead. I would even move there after Wilde's death—on June 26th, 2008, in New York—and live in his daughter Siobhan's house for a year in the small town of Buyukdere, near Sariyer. The house was on Ahiler Sokak, down the alley, directly across from the Mayor's office. It was a three-story, ivy-covered brick building, a couple of blocks from the Bosphorus. From the roof I could see the water and the many fishing boats. From inside I could hear the street vendors calling, "Balik, balik." [Fish, fish]
A strange narrow house with oversized steps and a small dark backyard filled with hundreds of large leaves from the deciduous magnolia and the linden tree that grew there.
One day in the center of town I saw a horse dart out from behind a fence—narrowly missing me—run into the street, slip and fall down. This all took place in a heartbeat; in front of a bus stop, across the street from a small park. What to do? Finally a kid ran up, got the horse back up—not easy—and went off with him down the road. Where to? This was Turkey. How would I know? Follow him? To what end? Turkey. I liked the energy. I liked the vitality and the unexpectedness of it all. I liked the people, the kids who got up to give me their seat on the metro or the bus. The mosques, the minarets, the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. I liked the barbershops, the crowded tea shops, the bakeries, the bread shops, the fish restaurants, the cats that prowled everywhere. The street musicians. The jazz and blues clubs. The mama cat who gave birth in the back yard to a litter of kittens. The doner stands. The sea gulls and the crows. The orange juice stands and the nut shops.
What I didn't like were the slugs that came out every night and crawled around in my house, on the ground floor. I'd pick them up in a paper towel and throw them into the street before I climbed the two flights of stairs to where I slept on the top floor, on a mattress on the floor—the house bending and waving—and me dreaming, dreaming of what has been and what was still to come in the Turkish night.
Chapter Two
On our second night together Wilde had a story to tell.
Vietnam in the mid-sixties. A place he had spent twelve years both during the French occupation, and then the American. He had come back home and found his girlfriend impaled on a long green pole. The horror! The Viets had murdered her.
His narration of the tale was spine-tingling and, like Conrad's Marlow, he was a master story-teller: he related in precise detail how, with meticulous care, with great Zen-like patience and cunning, he had planned the assassination of the killer (disassembling and assembling the revolver until he could do it in the dark, do it in his sleep) and how he had carried it out—in his own sweet time and immaculate style—nothing would go wrong! The assassin of his Vietnamese girlfriend would be dispatched clinically; and without a hitch, it succeeded just as planned.
This tale was followed by another—a long, intense monologue with many winding corridors: a labyrinth of intrigue and madness; a hall of mirrors, a cat's cradle—about his servitude to a metaphysical Goddess that he called, "the Admiral."
He was raving mad.
This submission to the Goddess, he patiently explained with a cold, cruel smile, also took place in the killing fields of Vietnam. He said that he had met her in another dimension while recovering from a life-threatening illness, or injury, I forget which. Anyway, it was his fate to follow the many orders she gave him. He was, in short, her slave. Was this something out of H. Rider Haggard, or was it for real?
I have repressed many of the tasks he told me he had to perform. After his confession—for that is what it was—he put the fingers of his right hand deep into my throat and told me how easy it would be for him to rip it out. I believed him. You had to give the old boy his due. He certainly knew how to welcome a traveler to Istanbul—the home of the old Ottoman Empire—the city of murder, mystery and intrigue. Wilde had style.
Wilde had style in his personal life, too. The large upscale apartment was filled with his world-class antique collection: artifacts, religious objects and paintings, African masks, Persian rugs, many crucifixes, framed Islamic calligraphy and many prints of war and executions. An original Eames chair. A Lamu chair. Icons. Idols.
Jet-lagged and beat I fled to the bloody guest bedroom. Art from around the world. I recognized several of the bloody body of Christ on the cross paintings that he bought in Africa. He had enough to fill a wing at the Met. By contrast my storefront apartment at 175 Mott Street (this was a five-story tenement building that abutted the north wall of St. Patrick's Old Cathedral's cemetery) contained very little, mostly books, and my friend Bob Edelson, a one-time marketing executive on Madison Avenue (Kenyon and Eckhardt), now a photographer, who was staying with me, working as a street-vendor and selling his photos of New York City on the streets of Soho.
I don't think my head was on the pillow more than five seconds before I was in the world of dreams. That world in which a third...
