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Franz Lidz

Occupation	Journalist, memoirist
Notable works	Unstrung Heroes (1991) Ghosty Men (2003) Fairway To Hell (2008)
Spouse	Maggie Lidz (1976-present)
Children	Gogo, Daisy Daisy

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, S.I., Men's Journal, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Observer, AARP the Magazine 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 and talk through movie screenings. In second grade, Franz landed a part as a guard in a production of The Wizard of Oz. The following year he delivered Hamlet's most celebrated soliloquy.

At age nine, Lidz moved to the Philadelphia suburbs. Lidz later 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 played Othello dressed as a house painter, in coveralls and a spattered cap, inspired by Benjamin Moore.

Career

Lidz chose journalism because he wanted a career that wouldn't go out of style. Lidz started off one of three novice reporters at the weekly Sanford Star, where he wrote a column, covered police and fire beats, amongst other things. He also banked occasional finders' fees from the National Enquirer for story ideas he had passed along. Later, he left Maine to become a crime reporter and write a column called "Insect Jazz" for an alternative newspaper in Baltimore.

In 1980, he joined the staff of Sports Illustrated, even though he had never read the magazine and had covered only one sporting event in his life. In August that year, he was made the managing editor of the magazine.

Lidz's career highlights include a road trip in search of sports on the equator; 10 days in dog-sledding school, and a look inside the mind games at the 1987 world chess championship between Gary Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov in Seville, Spain. 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.

Notable Works

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." Lidz's four serenely wacky uncles, the surreal Lidz Brothers, none of whom resemble Auntie Mame in any way, are mostly reminiscent of the inspired, raffish Ritz Brothers in their heyday. There is Uncle Leo, poetaster and a self-proclaimed literary genius who's sent to an asylum after declaring himself the Messiah of Washington Heights; Uncle Danny, a paranoid of unparalleled persistence -- during a ballgame at Yankee Stadium, Mickey Mantle hits a foul ball that landed near young Franz and a terrified Danny, scrambles to hide under his seat, convinced that The Mick is trying to assassinate him; Uncle Harry, a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, sincerely committed to the belief that he's the world boxing champion in nine different weight divisions; and Uncle Arthur, the proud possessor of what is very likely the world's largest collection of discarded shoelaces. Leo Lidz may speak for all these flipped Lidz tummlers when he tells his young nephew, "I'm not all I'm cracked up to be." "Looking back now," Lidz wrote, "I suppose there came a moment when I adopted Uncle Harry's style of evasion, which was to ignore reality if it became too painful. This worked for me when we moved in with my stepmother, Shirley: The most effective way to irritate her was to ignore her. It came to me sometime during my 16th year that my uncles' goofy, misdirectional approach to life was the direct opposite of Shirley's corseted suburbanism."

In his review of Unstrung Heroes in the New York Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt called the memoir "unusual and affecting... a melancholy, funny book, a loony tune played with touching disharmony on mournful woodwinds and a noisy klaxon."

Jonathan Kirsch of the Los Angeles Times likened the memoir to a "miniature Brothers Karamazov. There's not a false moment in the book, and that is high praise indeed."

In The Village Voice, Laurie Stone called Unstrung Heroes: "Astonishing, hilarious, angry, poignant, always pointed."

Of the hardback edition, Franz Lidz 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

Homer and Langley Collyer moved into their handsome brownstone in white, upper-class Harlem in 1909. By 1947, however, when the fire department was forced to lower Homer's dead body by rope out of the house he hadn't left in nearly a decade, the neighborhood had degentrified, and the Collyers' home had become a sealed fortress of junk. Dedicated to preserving the past, the brothers had held on to virtually everything they ever had touched.

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."

Washington Post critic Adam Bernstein observed: "Ghosty Men has the breezy vibrancy of a magazine story. Like Unstrung Heroes, the new book has to its advantage a sympathy for the forgotten and keen observations about what consoles broken souls. The Collyer Brothers made compelling reading then, as they do now in this short, captivatingly detailed book."

Luc Sante, author of Low Life, wrote: "Franz Lidz's Ghosty Men is funny and moving and full of odd details, and it will make you clean up your room."

Fairway To Hell

In this wildly comic memoir, Lidz went in search of golf's real soul and takes a globe-hopping and wholly serendipitous journey to the margins of that ancient game. He chronicled 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 reported 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 encountered a burrowing botfly on a course in Panama and engaged 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 wrote 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."

On the National Public Radio show Only A Game, host Bill Littlefield remarked: "Nobody who read Sports Illustrated during Franz Lidz’s employment there needs to be told that his writing is funny. Happily, his estimable wit is also evident in Fairway To Hell."

Collaborations

Lidz has written numerous essays for The New York Times with novelist and former Sports Illustrated colleague Steve Rushin. Three of them appear under the title Piscopo Agonistes in the 2000 collection Mirth of a Nation: The Best Contemporary Humor.

Personal Life

Lidz lives on a six-acre farm in Pennsylvania's Brandywine Valley with his wife Maggie(an author and historian at the Winterthur Museum in Delaware), two daughters and an assortment of pets. Lidz, when he was a grad student, married his wife a day after her high school graduation. His daughters Gogo and Daisy Daisy (Didi) were named after the protagonists in Waiting for Godot.

Lidz has been a commentator for Morning Edition on NPR, and a guest film critic on Roger Ebert's syndicated TV show. He has also appeared on David Letterman's show.

References

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