Rita and Bob

Yesterday, May 14th was the anniversary of the death of Rita Hayworth exactly one quarter century earlier.  I don't know very much about her life except what most of us who are casual old time movie fans do: that she was extraordinarily beautiful and was a true star of Hollywood's golden age, also that she was briefly married to foreign royalty and suffered from Alzheimer's disease for the last fifteen or so years of her life.  Her story struck me today while reading the actor Frank Langella's book "Dropped Names", a likely bestseller, if not already so, in which he offers his unique reminiscences of certain great luminaries of the stage and screen (as well as the world stage) that he has known, some through many years, others briefly and a few that he simply met once or more by chance. His tale of Hayworth is especially poignant.  Working with her on her last movie "The Wrath of God" (1972), the two actors began to routinely socialize on and off the set as her deterioration was evidenced and sadly, not fully understood (her then incipient disease).  Jeers rather than cheers were tossed at her in thinly veiled ways by cast and crew as she struggled pathetically to remember her lines.  Langella befriended her but could not help to slow the woman's downward spiral that had long since been set in motion by booze and other self abuses well before the physiological changes to her brain were apparent.                                                                                                                  

The 14th also would have been the 95th birthday of Bob Thurman, a major league baseball player for the Cincinnati Red Legs, who were increasingly being referred to as the Reds (perhaps a curious fact in view of the zeal of anti-communism then) by the time of his brief career with them beginning in 1955.  I remember Bob because I remember his face on a 1957 Topps Chewing Gum Co.'s baseball card that was among many in my collection.  This was the first year ever that I gladly and often plunked down my nickel for a six pack of cards wrapped in shiny colored opaque plastic paper and exuding the sweet aroma of a powdery pink, thin slab of bubble gum nestled under the stacked cards.  Bob's card was one I began to accumulate duplicates of, but not so numerously as those of certain other players whose images one began to groan about upon seeing them appear ad nauseum while opening newly purchased packs as one sought to complete each of the several series for that season.  Bob's card was a portrait photo and I preferred these to the "full body" shots of players, usually in typical poses such as a pitcher's with arms raised overhead, hands coming together and one holding a baseball lodged in the glove of the other; an infielder's hunched over an imaginary ground ball; or a hitter's with bat cocked at the ready and alternatively with body uncoiled after a supposedly successful swing.  Thurman was so unmistakably there each time I admired my little treasures, his bust inviting reflection: big brown skinned Negro, not quite a profile and the rich tobacco-like shade of his upturned visage giving an impression of warmth and passion that complemented the bright red of his Cincinnati cap.  Brown and red were becoming my favorite colors during this year of my life deemed to be the start of the Age of Reason.  Blue had been my first choice since kindergarten.  Now I knew right from wrong, or at least a judge would be armed with this alleged fact about my age group had I committed some heinous "adult" crime that year.  No dark thoughts or any especial precocity was I burdened with at that point nor do I have any clue about why browns and reds might be associated with incipient maturity. I just knew that I was falling in love with card collecting and that these little color photographs mounted on cardboard were increasingly coveted while a genuine fanaticism for the game was actually two summers away.  That year the cards were a throwback to the "Color" Bowman Co.'s card of 1953. i.e. unadorned shots, emphasizing the "real" backgrounds of several major league stadia (chiefly Philadelphia's Connie Mack Stadium, Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, Manhattan's Polo Grounds and the famed Yankee Stadium in The Bronx) and unlike in other years featuring the trim of bright primary colors, team logos, icons and other designs alongside the players' images and on the edges of the cards.  Again, the choleric vibes of Thurman's brown/red world was reinforced by another portrait card of his teammate, an earthy Mr. Rocky Bridges.  Rocky's face seemed too big for the card.  A "straight on" shot, Bridges' red cap is squarely upon his head and his jaw on one side seems to be bursting sideways until one's closer examination (or rather the explanation of an older playmate and then confirmed by an adult) determined that the "bulge" was of his cheek, behind which a deep brown plug of tobacco was the ensconced cause.  I wanted to try this "trick" but Mom would have none of it.  I remembered Dad's snuff box and thought he might be more amenable to the idea but he backed up Mom on this one.  Still, the red/brown world beckoned and chocolate syrup, tomato sauce, fire engines, beautiful blood bay colts seen in color western movies featuring John Wayne, containers of Sealtest ice cream, mud ("glorious mud, nothing quite like it for cooling the blood"), Phillies' pinstripes, fresh tobacco wafting from a Lucky Strike factory in Virginia and a plethora of other sights and smells were a riot of sensorial delight for this seven year old.

But what about Bob?  His image on that bubblegum card may have been just one of my many "oysters."  Still, the grownup me was now inclined to learn something about the actual man and who he was.  Wikipedia informs us that he was older than the age indicated ("born 1921") on his several cards printed from 1955 through 1959.  Baseball players as vain as movie stars: could that be?  No, Thurman's motive was economic and wholly justified. Playing most of his adult life in the Negro Leagues, his goal of making the majors, realized at long last in '55, needed the added security  of a perceived atmosphere of a player in his prime or at least not in his dotage, compared to the average big league athlete who might have been pushing forty. Thus, the 38 year old native Oklahoman determined to promote himself with the biography and birthdate of a 34 year old man.  It was thus, as a result of this dissembling, a very private celebration when, on May 14, 1957, his fortieth birthday, he homered in a game against the Phillies.  He was the first man in major league baseball to accomplish this feat.  The slow pace of the color barrier's demise allowed a last few wounds of racism to be inflicted and the abbreviation of more than a few black men's careers, like Thurman's, were not atypical results.  And his somewhat closeted  joy over the milestone homerun, though perhaps not tragic, reminded one of the collateral diminution of simple human pleasures wrought by injustice.

So the date May 14th was perhaps a bittersweet one for Bob Thurman and, provided she had someone to mourn, an unambiguously bitter one for Rita Hayworth's loved ones. Langella points out that the person who was Rita had passed from the scene many years before her biological day of death. Maybe the oft repeated cliche of "it (her death) was a blessing" was an accurate characterization of the event.  Like Bob, Rita no doubt knew happiness, hers unbridled and magical given the wonderment of the Dream Factory from which she was a Summa Cum Laude graduate.  Bob's journey may have been one of more pedestrian victories, but clearly, they were both very talented persons in their respective fields (he was elected to the Puerto Rican  Baseball Hall of Fame and still holds the record for most home runs in that commonwealth's league ).  Her stardom was, of course, particularly luminous. Still, the longing for immortality seems to always express itself a bit more achingly when we ponder the lives and stories of our wounded gods and goddesses. The twilight and dawn of Bob's major league career were nearly one and the same and its zenith, that day of the unique birthday present to his middle aged self, all were during the then newly setting sun of the waning halcyon days of Rita's career that included the song "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered" that she "sang" in the film "Pal Joey."  She did all those things and more to us, her adoring public.  Finally, the feast day of the patron saint for those suffering from alcoholism, St. Matthias, is celebrated on May 14th as well as that of St. Boniface of Tarsus who was a slave to his lover and who, together with her renounced their life choices and became Christians.  Thurman's assumed ancestry of slaves is the only connection, admittedly tenuous, I could find with the feast day and his life. These facts are however, to my mind, not mere coincidences but psychologically significant small bits of information that are the minute stitches in the tapestry of human affairs and I treasure them as I did those baseball cards of long ago.