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). 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 and Men's Journal, and, since 1983, has written for the New York Times on travel, TV, film and theater.

Early Life

Born in Manhattan, Lidz inherited his absurdist sensibility from his father, Sidney, an electronics engineer who designed the first transistorized portable tape recorder (the Steelman Transitape). Sidney would read to his young son from the works of Samuel Beckett,Harold Pinter and Eugene Ionesco. In second grade, Franz landed a part as a guard in a 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. 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. "Nobody in the play had any idea what this thing was about," he recalled. "It was incomprehensible, and survived on the energy of the actors. I'd get bored reading somebody else's lines, so I started making up my own lines every night." 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, 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."

Writing Career

Lidz chose journalism because "I wanted to find an 'ism' that wouldn't become a 'wasm'." A graduate school professor had told him, "It's fun to be a reporter. You get to wear a sweater all day." He took the advice and, 200 resumes later, found himself in Maine, at the one newspaper that gave him an interview. For the next year, he was one of three novice reporters at the weekly Sanford Star, where he wrote a column, covered the police and fire beats, and courted controversy (his first feature story was a profile of the town drunk). He banked occasional finders' fees from the National Enquirer for story ideas he'd pass along, e.g., WOMAN LOSES MEMORY FOR LAST 16 YRS. OF LIFE, FORGETS KIDS, and NORWAY BISHOP SAYS NUDISM MAKES FRIENDS, FIGHTS PROBLEMS. He left Maine to become a crime reporter and write a column called "Insect Jazz" for an alternative newspaper in Baltimore. He wrote profiles on local characters: a manager of strippers who gave them names like Sheela the Peela and Rhonda Lay; the East Baltimore bookmaker Louis Comi; and Theodore Balls Maggio, who made a living fetching lost balls out of the Jones Falls. When Lidz came to S.I. for a job interview in the summer of 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 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 written for Johns Hopkins magazine, where he was briefly the executive editor. 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?" At the magazine, he wrote about a profusion of offbeat characters, including his Uncle Arthur, who had amassed a phenomenal collection of discarded shoelaces. '"The sports angle,'" Lidz explained, '"was that most of them were laces from running shoes.'" 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, three weeks in the Sahara covering the Paris-to-Dakar Rally, a surreal voyage into the 5th Dimension with Darren Daulton, a dispatch for Slate (magazine) from the 2004 mountain bike bog snorkelling championship in Llanwrtyd Wells, Wales, a semester in a Roman gladiator school,a 10-page Arthur Conan Doyleish rumination onJeopardy!, 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.

Unstrung Heroes, The Book

Unstrung Heroes chronicles his improbable childhood with Sidney Lidz and his four "impossible" brothers. Sidney was the youngest and relatively sanest. Neighbors indulged him as "Crazy Sid, the mildly crackpot inventor." As for his brothers, Lidz wrote: "My uncles were smelly, screwy, astonishingly scrawny old guys who had abandoned everyday life.... They were happy to be outsiders; they never had to make the same compromises true adults did; they remained innocent and faithful to their own loopy dreams." Uncle Leo was a self-proclaimed literary genius who was sent to an asylum after declaring himself the Messiah of Washington Heights. Uncle Danny was a paranoid of unparalleled persistence. Once during a game at Yankee Stadium, Mickey Mantle hit a foul ball that landed near Franz and a terrified Danny, who scrambled to hide under his seat, convinced that Mantle was trying to assassinate him. Uncle Harry, a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, was sincerely committed to the belief that he was the world boxing champion in nine different weight divisions, and Uncle Arthur was the proud possessor of what was very likely the world's largest collection of used shoelaces. 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."

Unstrung Heroes, The Film

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. The setting was switched from New York to Southern California, and the four mad uncles were reduced to an eccentric Odd Couple. Lidz's contract forbade him to slam Unstrung Heroes, 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." 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."

Ghosty Men

Ghosty Men, Lidz 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." Besides deconstructing the brothers' descent into their own world of filth and isolation, Lidz shares recollections of his Uncle Arthur, an eccentric hoarder who was a featured character in Unstrung Heroes. Arthur amassed everything from magazines to parking tickets plucked off windshields, and lived "nested inside his walls of junk." He was so habitual a hoarder that Lidz's mother used to call him the lost Collyer brother. "Small, bent and eternally boyish, Uncle Arthur dresses in layers of Salvation Army overcoats kept closed with rusty safety pins," Lidz wrote. "Like a Beckett tramp, he holds his pants up with bits of rope. Uncle Arthur was a 19-year-old novice collector when he moved to a tiny tenement apartment in Harlem, only three blocks from the Collyer homestead. He already knew that Homer and Langley were the preeminent junk collectors. '"I'd walk by their house and wonder what of value did they have," he said. '"You got to have brains to collect that much stuff. I always wanted to get in touch with them. I always wanted to get in touch with anybody who collected as much as I did. They collected more. They had their junk up to the windows. I didn't have that much." Uncle Arthur does, however, have quite lot, and he has turned squalor into an art form."

Fairway To Hell

In this wildly comic memoir, Lidz goes in search of golf's real soul and takes a globe-hopping and wholly serendipitous journey to the margins of that ancient game. He chronicles his adventures on the links with Bill Murray and the drunken heavy metal band Judas Priest, and a New England farmer who raises llamas as caddies. He reports from a Zambia course at which 15 holes are guarded by live crocodiles, the Fattie Open - where you're penalized if you weigh under 250 pounds, and a pitch-and-putt tournament at a Florida nudist colony. The author encounters a burrowing botfly on a course in Panama and engages in an increasingly preposterous e-mail exchange with a Nigerian scam artist about bank accounts and rocket golf carts. "Here, there and everywhere body parts – normally concealed from public view -- bobbed, swayed and quivered," Lidz writes of the nudist colony. "Some breasts were the size of Pinnacles; others hung like head covers stuffed with bricks. Some men had chest hair thicker than muskrat pelts; some women had hair on their heads, but nowhere else. A few of the ladies wore day dresses, untied and unbuttoned. A few of the gents wore bulging T-shirts from which drooped what looked to be a Thanksgiving turkey's giblets. No woman carried a purse, though one man sported a colostomy bag. In case you were wondering, his bag didn't match his shoes."

Personal

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 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." Lidz insists that his dream double-play combination is Ginsberg to Whitman to Pound because they represent "true poetry in motion." Inspired by the advice of Ezra Pound scholar Hugh Kenner ("You have an obligation to visit the great men of your time"), Lidz 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."

References:

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

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