4
Atlanta’s literati
When I sit down and think about it, I can see my time in Atlanta was a very happy time for me in many, many ways. It wasn’t perfect, but it was really good.
I always have this need to form some group of people, and Cliff Graubart was one of the first people I met in Atlanta because he had a sign outside his Old New York Book Shop, “Hardbacks 25 cents,” and I thought, my God. I didn’t own any hardbacks, and I thought, that’s incredibly cheap. Of course they were all crap, but it got me into the store. And I started going through the stacks thinking, good God almighty. I realized I can get another college education out of this bookstore. I plundered that bookstore for the next 30 years.
But Cliff was always complaining about not making any money. “I can’t make a (expletive) shekel in this town.”
By then I had met a writer named Vern Smith, who had a novel coming out about Detroit, so I said, “Cliff, why don’t we give him a book party?”
He says, “A book (expletive) party? It ain’t his birthday.”
I said no. Just give a party celebrating the book coming out. So that began the parties at the Old New York Book Shop, which became something big on the Atlanta scene, kind of an institution, and now they’re legendary. At the time it was a new thing for Atlanta, some new order. Cosmopolitan magazine said that the parties at the Old New York Book Shop were the best and safest places for young women to meet young men in Atlanta. And I said, “Cliff, this is genius at work.”
But it was a nice group, a great democratic thing.
Governor Jimmy Carter gave a party at his mansion on West Paces Ferry for all the writers and journalists in town, and there weren’t that many of us. He didn’t permit drinking, you know, so he was watching all these writers go into delirium tremens. This is when I heard high heels clicking down the marble hall, and I turned around, and a beautiful, luscious Anne Rivers Siddons turned the corner with her Princeton husband, the very dapper Heyward Siddons, wearing his little bow tie. I met them that night.
Annie was a magnificent cook, fed us all, lived in a beautiful house, which none of us did then. Annie and Heyward’s was this post of civilization that we could always go to, were always invited to. They were an adult couple who were running a household that looked like a household, as opposed to the rest of us who lived in the inside of potato chip bags. If they ever had arguments, I never saw it. If they ever got mad at me, I never knew it. Those two people brought great kindness, great times of happiness into my life.
Paul Hemphill, the journalist from Birmingham — I met him that night. I met all the writers. Jim Townsend was there, who became very important in my life. He was the founder of Atlanta magazine, a brilliant mill town boy from Lanett, Alabama; had to drop out of the University of Alabama because he did not have the money to go there. He was an extraordinary drunk, but a fabulous personality, died at 47; one of my first eulogies.
Annie was mostly writing stuff for Atlanta magazine when I met her. She and I grew up together as writers; we all kind of helped each other. Then Annie and I sort of made it. I came out with “The Great Santini”; her first book was terrific, “Heartbreak Hotel.”
All this time I was trying to get Bernie and his wife, Martha Schein, to move to Atlanta. Bernie had gone to Mississippi and did valiant work there during desegregation. He was the first white principal of this school in Clarksdale, Mississippi. He got fired from his school like I did from Daufuskie, because he believes in integration and he tried to make it work, and those people ate him alive. Bernie actually did heroic work there, and then he came to Atlanta about a year later when I got him and Martha both a job at Paideia, the hippie liberal school where my kids went.
Cliff Graubart was a bachelor then, and I was a cook, so we had boys’ night out in Atlanta. Bernie would come, and Terry Kay, and the two California boys, Zach Sklar and Frank Smith, who had taken Herman Blake’s sociology class on Daufuskie Island. We would meet once a month, we’d talk, we’d laugh, we’d have fun. We would run our mouths, and I would cook. I got into cooking when Barbara went to law school.
What I did was I went down to Cliff’s bookstore; I said, “Cliff, I got to cook meals now, and I don’t know how to cook. Do you have a cookbook section?” He said, “Yeah, I hear Escoffier’s good.”
So I went home and started reading Escoffier. And it says, in the first pages, if you do not make proper stock, you should not eat. So I spend days. I’m breaking bones with hammers and axes out of the basement. I’m roasting the (expletive) bones. I’m doing all this (expletive). Anyway, I started making soups and sauces and these chicken dishes and lamb dishes and veal dishes.
And of course, I did not know I had started out in the hardest cookbook on earth. I finally, later on, took my first cooking class. Nathalie Dupree had become famous in Atlanta because she started a restaurant in Covington. I had gone out there to eat a couple of times, and it was a really good restaurant. I heard she was doing a cooking class, so I ended up taking that. She was eccentric, neurotic, but so is everybody, and I thought she was a good cooking teacher. I enjoyed her stories; I always love it if somebody can tell me stories.
Nathalie got a public television show about cooking. It was very big in Atlanta and Georgia, and I think it started Nathalie’s career. Her first producer was a woman named Cynthia. They would both come to all the parties at Cliff’s store. Cynthia was young, maybe 24, and somehow fell in love with the ancient Cliff Graubart. They got married in Rome after I moved there. Nathalie was the matron of honor, and I was the best man. Annie and Heyward came over and went on the honeymoon with Cliff and Cynthia through the hill towns of Italy. That’s where Annie wrote her book “Hill Towns,” which everybody had great problems with except me, because I didn’t mind her writing about me.
Nathalie Dupree called me up and wanted to sue Annie. She’s crying and said, “Have you read her new book?” Yes, I have. And she said, “Did you see what she did to me?” Yes, obviously you were Yolanda. She said, “My lawyer wants me to sue her.” I said, well, have fun. She said, “He wants you to go into it with me.”
I said, “Nathalie, if I sued a fiction writer for using the quirks of other people, who would be the greatest hypocrite in the history of the world? Yes, you’re right, it would be me.”
When Annie got a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Hoover Library in Alabama, I introduced her for that, and I told them about “Hill Towns.” “I’m Sam Forrest,” I said. “There’s no question about it. And in it, I am a fat drunkard who does not bathe. But I’m an artist. Annie herself is a beautiful, winsome ingénue, and naturally, the old, unbathed drunkard wants to have carnal relations with her as my character tries to do. And as he is fumbling and mumbling and cartwheeling his fat body over the lithe, beautiful body of this maiden from the South, he finally passes out on top of her. Poor Conroy, in his one lustful appearance in world literature, cannot get the job done.”
Years later after I published my cookbook, I get the phone call from Nathalie, she’s crying, she’s weeping, and she’s going to sue me. I said, “You’re always suing people.”
She was upset about the whole thing. She thought I had pilloried her, mocked her, made fun of her. She didn’t understand that I was making her into a character. There’s always an element of elegy anytime I put somebody into a book. Because you have noticed someone; they have distinguished themselves in the world you are creating. Whether good or bad, whether foul or fair, they are somebody. I also know that when I write about people, I have a large capacity for love for whatever reason, and that is also part of why I’m writing because I love them and they are part of my canticle, whatever that is. They are a part of my litany to the saints, however that comes out, and I try to be true and follow that wherever it takes me.
I said, “Nathalie, it’s the nicest thing anybody will ever write about you.”
Well, she started getting phone calls from people who’d loved it, and she has forgiven me. Cynthia and Nathalie did several cookbooks together, and I wrote an introduction for the one that won the James Beard Award. When they won, Cynthia said, “Now I know what it means to feel like Pat Conroy.”
I said, “You mean, suicidal?”
This excerpt is adapted from “My Exaggerated Life: Pat Conroy” as told to Katherine Clark, and printed with permission from the University of South Carolina Press. “My Exaggerated Life” is forthcoming March 13, 2018.
ABOUT THE STORY
Pat Conroy was renowned as a consummate storyteller, but his oral storytelling skills were very different from his authorial voice. Based on 200 hours of interviews conducted in 2014, “My Exaggerated Life: Pat Conroy” as told to Katherine Clark is a deeply revealing, outrageously funny, bluntly spoken account of the author’s colorful life told as only he could tell it. It’s also a painful reminder of what we lost when he died.
Suzanne Van Atten
Personal Journeys editor
personaljourneys@ajc.com
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