Franz Lidz - Misplaced Pages

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Franz Lidz is the author of the childhood memoir Unstrung Heroes (Random House, 1991) , the urban historical Ghosty Men: The Strange But True Story of the Collyer Brothers (Bloomsbury USA, 2003) , and the golf memoir Fairway To Hell (ESPN Books, 2008). Of the harback edition of Unstrung Heroes, he once said: "I think of the first edition as my children, because I know where every one of them is." He was a senior writer at Sports Illustrated from 1980 to 2007, and a contributing editor at Conde Nast Portfolio (2007-2009). Inspired by the advice of Ezra Pound scholar Hugh Kenner ("You have an obligation to visit the great men of your time"), he once made a pilgrimage to Gore Vidal's villa in Ravello, Italy, inveigling his way in with the line: "I'm on a world tour of the homes of everyone I've ever seen on The Merv Griffin Show." He has appeared on David Letterman's show with his pet parrots Peter Rabbit and Mrs. Falbo, unsettling the host with the observation: "Peter speaks 16 bird dialects, including loon. He's learning Waring Blender, but I can't let him get too close to ours. He thinks it's a Jacuzzi." His father, Sidney Lidz, an electronics engineer, would read to him from the works of Beckett, Pinter and Ionesco. Young Franz landed a part as a guard in a second-grade production of The Wizard of Oz. His only line: "Don't listen to that man behind the curtain." The following year he delivered to his outrageously fortunate classmates Hamlet's most celebrated soliloquy. Born in Manhattan, Lidz went to Reggie Jackson's high school (Cheltenham, Pa.) and Rod Serling's college ( Antioch), where he was a theater major, touring the East Coast as a singing chain-fetishist biker in the rock musical Suzie Nation and the Yellow Peril. In a grad school drama class he chose to interpret the tragic role of Othello dressed as a house painter, in coveralls and a spattered cap. The professor was nonplussed. "I wanted to play Othello not as the noble Moor," explained Lidz, "but as Benjamin Moore." Catherine O'Hara, the Canadian comedienne of SCTV fame, has said: "Franz is so interested in people that he can always find something new to say about them. He can remember every detail about everybody he meets. It's like he's starved for weird information. It makes him really good at improvising." Lidz only became a journalist because a graduate school professor, told him, "It's fun to be a reporter. You get to wear a sweater all day." Lidz once wrote a column called "Insect Jazz" for an underground newspaper in Baltimore. When Lidz came to SI for a job interview in 1980, wore black Converse hightops, a wool sport coat and a hunted look. His résumé read like a picaresque novel. He'd been a DJ, a soda jerk, a substitute teacher, an improvisational actor, a wanderer through South America, a cabbie in Boston, a snail gunder in Philadelphia and a bus driver near Baltimore, which is where he met his wife, Maggie, when she was one of his passengers. ("She still owes me for the fare, he said.") Until he joined the staff of SI, he had covered only one sporting event in his life—a pigeon race in a small town in Maine. When he shuffled into Managing Editor Gil Rogin's office that steamy August day in 1980, Rogin was struggling to open a jar of orange juice. "Here, open this and you can have the job," he told Lidz. With a flick of the wrist, Lidz did it, handed the jar back and asked, "When do I start?" Lidz's career highlights included the second descent of the Zambezi River, a globe-girdling road trip in search of sports on the equator , 10 days in dog-sledding school , a two-week trek retracing Balboa's route through the jungles of Panama , and a lengthy powwow with Don King that resulted in a 12-page meditation on the boxing promoter's hair . His essay on George Steinbrenner and the New York Yankees' line of succession was called the "scoop of the year" in the 2008 Houghton-Mifflin collection The Best American Sports Writing Sports-Writing . In 1995, the unsentimental Unstrung Heroes was turned into a sentimental film , starring John Turturro and Andie MacDowell as Sidney and Selma Lidz, and directed by Diane Keaton. Lidz's contract forbade him to slam the movie, but he did say: The script was very neatly typed.

Lidz lives on a six-acre farm in Pennsylvania's Brandywine Valley with two llamas (Ogar and Edgar), three Great Pyrenees (Ella, Errol and Tyrone), three cats (Yojimbo, Sanjuro and Herman), three dozen chickens and guinea fowl (don't ask), two daughters (Gogo and Daisy Daisy) and one wife (Maggie), the historian at the Winterthur Museum in Delaware. "We must be the only household in the world that subscribes to Llama, Poultry News, Sumo World and The New York Review of Books," Lidz has said. On his first date with Maggie he realized that one week earlier her father, journalist Gerald Renner, had picked him up hitchhiking on Interstate-95. Lidz, then in grad school, and Maggie married seven months later -- the day after her high school graduation. For years afterward, Maggie's three younger sisters would greet their dad when he got home by asking: "Daddy, did you pick us up a hitchhiker?" Gogo and Daisy Daisy (Didi) were named after the protagonists in Waiting for Godot. Lidz insists that his dream double-play combination is Ginsberg to Whitman to Pound because they represent "true poetry in motion."

References:

http://www.portfolio.com/contributors/Franz-Lidz http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/writers/franz_lidz/archive/index.html

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