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 hardback edition of Unstrung Heroes, he once said: "I think of the first editions 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). He is a correspondent for GQ http://www.gq.com/contributors/frank-lidz and Men's Journal, http://www.mensjournal.com/the-shark-is-backand, and, since the 1980s, has written for the New York Times on travel, TV and film. http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?query=Lidz&d=&o=&v=&c=&n=10&dp=0&daterange=period&srcht=a&year1=1981&mon1=01&day1=01&year2=2010&mon2=02&day2=04&bylquery=Franz%20Lidz&sort=oldest Inspired by the advice of Ezra Pound http://en.wikipedia.org/Ezra_pound scholar Hugh Kenner http://en.wikipedia.org/Hugh_Kenner ("You have an obligation to visit the great men of your time"), he once made a pilgrimage to Gore Vidal's http://en.wikipedia.org/Gore_vidal 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." http://en.wikipedia.org/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 who designed the first transistorized portable tape recorder (the Steelman Transitape), http://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/28/obituaries/sidney-lidz.html would read to him from the works of Beckett, http://en.wikipedia.org/Samuel_Beckett Pinter http://en.wikipedia.org/Harold_Pinter and Ionesco. http://en.wikipedia.org/Eugène_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 http://en.wikipedia.org/Reggie_Jackson high school (Cheltenham, Pa.) and Rod Serling's http://en.wikipedia.org/Rod_Serling 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." In the late 1970s, Lidz wrote a column called "Insect Jazz" for an alternative newspaper in Baltimore. http://www.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=3423 When Lidz came to S.I. for a job interview in 1980, he 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 never read the magazine http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/inq-blinq/franz.html and had covered only one sporting event in his life—a pigeon race in a small town in Maine. He got the job interview on the strength of a prickly profile of P.J. O’Rourke http://en.wikipedia.org/P._J._ORourke written for Johns Hopkins magazine, http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/inq-blinq/franz.html where he was briefly the executive editor. http://www.jstor.org/pss/2712766 When he shuffled into S.I. 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 include 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 , a surreal voyage into the 5th Dimension with Darren Daulton http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1oH6E9/sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2006/writers/franz_lidz/02/16/darren/ , a 10-page Arthur Conan Doyleish rumination on Jeopardy! http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1oH6E9/sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2006/writers/franz_lidz/02/16/darren/ 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/John_Turturro and Andie MacDowell http://en.wikipedia.org/Andie_McDowell as Sidney and Selma Lidz, and directed by Diane Keaton. http://en.wikipedia.org/Diane_Keaton Lidz's contract forbade him to slam the movie, but he did say: The script was very neatly typed. In a 1995 New York magazine profile that ran before the film's release, he confessed, "My initial fear was that Disney would turn my uncles into Grumpy and Dopey. I never imagined that my life could be turned into Old Yeller." http://books.google.com/books?id=6-QCAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA58&lpg=PA58&dq=unstrung+heroes+hebrew&source=bl&ots=WpZ-YXJ4Rs&sig=6IHxhuVT5w_qiMXUhGeG4JwsrwM&hl=en&ei=3dB6S6z9LdGk8AaekqieCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=9&ved=0CCwQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=&f=false Four years later in an essay for the New York Times, he cracked that the cinematic Selma had died not of cancer, but of Old Movie Disease: "The way Disney killed off my mother -- after fixing pancakes, she praises her kids, plants a perversely passionate kiss on her husband's lips and, to soulful strains of You Are My Sunshine, drifts off to die in a comfy armchair -- reminded me of Mad magazine's send-up of Love Story." He added, "Someday somebody may find a cure for cancer, but the terminal sappiness of cancer movies is probably beyond remedy." http://www.nytimes.com/1999/01/10/movies/film-in-a-higher-state-of-being-that-is-dying.html?pagewanted=1 Ghosty Men, he wrote, was inspired by the real-life cautionary tales that his father told him: "At bedtime, I would listen raptly to his urban horror stories, tales that filled the dark with chimera, bogeymen, golems. The most macabre was the tale of the Collyer Brothers, the hermit hoarders of Harlem." http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/26/nyregion/the-paper-chase.html?pagewanted=1

Lidz lives on a six-acre farm in Pennsylvania's Brandywine Valley with two llamas (Ogar and Edgar), two Great Pyrenees (Ella and Errol), two cats (Yojimbo and Sanjuro), three dozen chickens and guinea fowl (don't ask), two daughters (Gogo and Daisy Daisy) and one wife (Maggie), an author http://www.amazon.com/Ponts-Houses-Gardens-Brandywine/dp/0926494694/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1265325080&sr=1-1 and 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. "I always wanted to play the title character," he once said, "but I would have spent the whole night in the wings." http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1121873/index.htm 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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