Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [102]
The rap on Sinatra has always been his personal life. You can complain about the life he’s lived, but he has an appealing enthusiasm for it that’s part of his charm.
There are strange things going on in our brains that cannot be measured by numbers or described in words. It’s impossible to say why a poem is good, or why a piece of music, a novel, or a movie is great. You can’t apply reason in judging a picture painted by Picasso and come up with an answer that explains its greatness.
No amount of thinking about it can produce an answer to why so many people enjoy listening to Frank Sinatra. Genius is unfathomable . . . but whatever it is, Frank has it.
E. B. White
(On the occasion of the death of E. B. White)
E. B. White may have written the English language more gracefully than any American who ever lived.
Each of us wants everyone else to know what we know, to like what we like. E. B. White was my literary hero, so give me this. Andy—he was known as Andy to his friends—was not as widely known as those
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movie stars, or even as well-known as a lot of writers who aren’t as good as he was. Seems terribly wrong, but I’m probably better known than he was. As the phrase goes in the newspaper business, I couldn’t carry his typewriter.
It was partly Andy White’s own fault, although “fault” isn’t the right word. He wanted no part of celebrity. All the people he cared about already knew how good he was, and that’s all that mattered to him. He didn’t care whether his picture was ever taken, and he refused to be interviewed for television.
Several times over the past twenty years, I told him he owed it to the world to submit to an interview on camera so everyone would know what he looked like and how he was. He just laughed. He said that people would be disappointed because he didn’t talk as well as he wrote, and they’d think he was a fake.
For the past few years Andy has been ill with all the things that can go wrong with an eighty-six-year-old body, and he’d lost interest, too, after his wife died eight years ago. “Life without Katharine,” he said, “is no good for me.”
I talked to a mutual friend who had seen him only last week. He said Andy’s eyesight was failing and the thing he most liked was to be read to from one of his own books. Strange, in a way, but I suppose for a writer it was like looking at old photographs of yourself when things were good.
I got to know Andy White when I adapted this little masterpiece of his called Here is New York for television, years ago. When we were finished, we were nervous about showing it to him, but he liked it. He had only one complaint: the director filmed the actor, playing the part of E. B. White as a young writer, lying on a bed in the Algonquin Hotel with his shoes on. Andy told us he’d never lie on a bed with his shoes on. His prose is like that, too.
Heroes are hard to find. He’s been my hero for fifty years. Life without E. B. White is not as good as it was for me.
Lonnie
Lonnie is an institution in the building where I do a lot of my work. He shines shoes but that’s only a small part of what he does. The best thing Lonnie does is keep everyone’s spirits up.
The other day I had a good talk with Lonnie while he fussed over making my shoes look better. We settled some world problems and straightened out our own company. As I climbed down off the chair Lonnie has mounted on a platform so he doesn’t have to bend over much, I said, as you’d say lightly to a friend, “Thanks, Lonnie, you’re a good man.”
“Well,” Lonnie said philosophically, “we’re all supposed to try and make things better, aren’t we?”
That’s what Lonnie does in the small piece of the world he has carved out for himself. He makes things better. He makes everyone he meets feel better and he makes their shoes look better. If all of us did as much, it would be a better world. He not only does his job but he throws in a little extra.
Lonnie is black,