Who Said It? [by David Lehman]

Remember when the Sunday Times Book Review, frankly middlebrow and proud of it, used to run author's queries ("for a biography of Maxwell Anderson I would be grateful . . .") and legitimate questions from college grads who wanted to track down a favorite quotation (was it Scott Fitzgerald who said "live fast, die young, and have a handsome corpse?") In that spirit I offer you this cocktail party line that would have beguiled Flo Bear.

"If the Kennedy White House was decadent; the Clinton White House was sordid." Who said it? I have asked a lot of smart people, to no avail, and would be grateful for any leads. Meanwhile, my friend Burt Hooton proposes this multiple choice list of possible candidates:

1) Jane Fonda
2) Arthur Schlesinger
3) Diana Trilling
4) Pat Lawford
5) Jacques Barzun
6) Lawrence P. Berra

I'm not convinced by any of Burt's suggestions, though the terms of the distinction do sound as though they could have come from #3 or #5, and I appreciate the convention observed in #6.

You get extra points (which you will need this Sunday) if you can say what Ava Gardner is doing in this post or if you can make a convincing case in favor of Oliver Stone's theory of JFK's assassination. -- DL

Comments

[k griffey]

I don't know if this relates to Oliver Stoned, but here's something the Warren Commission completely whiffed on, Mr. Hooton. The gun Margot Macomber used to kill her husband, Francis, was a Mannlicher 6.5. This was the same type gun that Lee Harvey Oswald used to kill JFK! (Truth.) Now if it can be proven that it was the SAME GUN it would open a whole new line of inquiry into the assassination! What was that gun doing in Africa ca. 1935? (Besides killing Francis Macomber, I mean.) Was it returned to the states along with Francis' other "things," when Margot returned to Baltimore to claim Francis' estate and give up her modeling career? What was the Baltimore connection to that fateful day in November, 1963? When LBJ called MLK an "Oriole" he meant it as an affectionately complimentary remark, since he felt that, as a Negro, King must have possessed God-given athletic talent. But King misheard it as "Oreo," and in the resulting furor the original remark was obscured. But why "Oriole"? Why not "Yankee" or "Indian"? (Well, okay, not "Indian" ...) Was LBJ's comment a coded reference to "Baltimore"--meaning, ultimately, that Mannlicher 6.5 rifle? And what about Margot's modeling career? Francis said her face was beginning to crack open and fall apart, thus reducing her modeling possibilities to zero--or did a third-person omniscient narrator say that? But if it was a third-person omniscient narrator, why would such a controversy erupt about whether she killed Francis intentionally or not? After all, the narrator said quite clearly that she shot at the buffalo, not at Francis. Does Buffalo, New York, figure into any of this--another "eastern" city known for its snow jobs? And is it possible that third-person omniscient narrator wasn't Hemingway, after all, but an heretofore-unknown storyteller who had access to that Mannlicher 6.5--the Mannlicher 6.5 that disappeared after Margot returned to Baltimore? Could that unknown storyteller have been--Lee Harvey Oswald's FATHER? And did he hide it in his closet, where his son found it after his father's death? And who killed Mr. Oswald, Lee Harvey Oswald's father? The Mob? Castro? Marilyn Monroe? We may never know. Finally, isn't possible that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn't aiming AT John Kennedy, but at someone else--someone who was in a jealous rage at JFK for his indiscretions with Marilyn Monroe? Who was planning to poison him that night at the state dinner to be held in Cattleman's Hall? In other words, was Lee Harvey Oswald actually trying to PROTECT John F. Kennedy, his revered President, in a terrible accident of good intentions gone awry? Isn't it possible that Lee Harvey Oswald was trying to save John Kennedy's life?

I leave you with these thoughts, Mr. Hooton. They have troubled me for years, running around my brain like beaters circling a wounded lion. But then, so have thoughts of Ava Gardner.

[Tom LeClair]

And now we know why k griffey has just been elected to the Hall of Frame.

[The Best American Poetry]

Mr Griffey is on to something, I think. One of the biggest mysteries to me has always been: what did Oswald think he was doing? How did the co-conspirators manage to get him into that Texas depository? And then the plan, as I understand it, was to have Officer Tippet shoot Oswald instead of the other way around but by then I guess Oswald realized he'd been had. "I'm a patsy," he said,which should be as famous a line as "I didn't inhale" or "I didn't have sex with that woman, Ms. Lewinski." Speaking of Bill, the Bills, it seems to me, have borne Buffalo's curse with more dignity than did the long-suffering boosters of the Bosox, let alone the gum-chewing denizens of Wrigley. The fact is that Hemingway did not have an affair with Ava Gardner, but might have, if he had been younger and scouting out the "Green Hills of Africa" while the Carolina cutie was shooting "Mogambo" with Clark Gable and Grace Kelly. So I think you're on the right track, as Jim Ryun said to Zola Budd. Anyway, thanks Ken. This Budd's for you, bud. -- DL

[Philip Regan]

I would agree with the analysis of Jerry Lynch or possibly Ed Bailey.