And I Owe It All to Exeter

My main nemesis was Bill Clark, who taught math (E-) and was the football and baseball coach. He was the master of Soule Hall where I lived that senior year. One night I was chasing Spennie Welch down the curved stairs with a flintlock musket my grandfather had given me-a relic of the Revolutionary War. As I was going down, suddenly, around the curve of the wall, on his way up to see what all the commotion was, came Bill Clark, also referred to as "Bull." He gave this little scream. I don't really blame him. The barrel-end of the musket looked like the mouth of a tunnel. A fair-sized rocket could have emerged from it. I knew I was doomed, as Holden Caulfield would say. If he had toughened it out and said, "What are you doing with that flintlock musket when you should be in your room applying yourself," it would have been all right. But he had given this little scream, and he knew that I knew, and I knew that he knew that I knew. And that was it.

Could it have been that, having failed in all departments at Exeter, I was driven in later life to compensate, to try once again to succeed where I hadn't? I've wondered, on occasion, whether these exercises in participatory journalism for which I am known were as much to show my mentors at Exeter that I had somehow managed to intrude onto the highest plateaus of their various disciplines.

In the 1970s, I played for the Baltimore Colts against my old team, the Detroit Lions, in an exhibition game in Ann Arbor in front of 103,000 people, the largest crowd ever to see a professional game up until that time. I was sent in for four plays as their quarterback, and while I was in there we made 18 yards, 15 of them on a roughing the passer penalty. Old Bill Clark, I bet he'd never run onto the football field in front of 103,000 people. No, sirree. I daydreamed at the time that in his pep talk before the Andover game that year, he said, "We've got a great tradition here. Got a guy playing in pro ball. So go out there and make him proud."

Nor do I think that Bill Clark ever stood on the pitcher's mound in Yankee Stadium in a postseason All Star game and looked down on the likes of Willie Mays. I threw my big, sweet roundhouse curve ball and Mays popped the ball up-out by the monuments in deep center field-but the ball was caught and he was out. True, later on, Frank Thomas of the Chicago White Sox hit the longest home run seen in the stadium all that summer, up in the triple tier-so far, in fact, that I felt that I'd been a partner in quite an engineering feat. Look what he and I had done together! I wonder if Bill Clark wouldn't have traded for that.

He was also the hockey coach. We had tryouts on the frozen Exeter River-a race, and I came in last. What could he have thought when he learned that I played goal for the Boston Bruins?

Mr. Rodgers was the tennis coach. I played tennis against Bobby Riggs. True, Bobby was playing while wearing Wellington boots and had a dachshund on a leash as a weird kind of handicap, but I could pride myself in that Mr. Rogers, the tennis coach, had never played Bobby Riggs.

I wonder if John "Call me John" Mayher ever knew, having relegated me to the role of a young widow, that I have been in three Oscar-winning films-Lawrence of Arabia, in which I played a Bedouin; Warren Beatty's Reds, in which I tried unsuccessfully to seduce Diane Keaton, probably because of my unfortunate experience with Susie Mills in the bowels of Phillips Church; and Good Will Hunting, in which I played a psychiatrist accused of being gay. I'm not trying to suggest that these films wouldn't have received Oscar nominations if I had not been involved, but I see no harm in suggesting that is indeed so.

I like to think that John Mayher did know of these minor triumphs, at least the early ones, and that just before the curtain went up at Exeter he called his cast together around him: "Boys," he says, "give it your all. We have a reputation to live up to. An Exeter boy made it to Tinseltown. You can do as well. Break a leg!"

And music. I wish Mr. Landers could have known I played the piano at the Apollo Theater in Harlem-on amateur night, which is held every Wednesday, a great tradition which has produced the likes of Nina Simone and Dinah Washington. I was allowed to compete so that I could write about the Apollo and its history firsthand. The audience is the judge. The place is packed, and if they don't like what's going on, they stomp their feet and hoot, and out comes the hook in the form of a personage called "The Great Adam," firing a pistol and dressed, at least in my day, in a union suit. He removes the contestant to the wings, while the audience hollers and carries on.

My debut at the Apollo was a rock and roll night. The guy who preceded me played some rock and roll on an old-fashioned tea kettle, blowing across the spout and banging the tea kettle lid on the top, a one-man band sort of thing, and it wasn't more than half a minute before the Great Adam came out, firing his pistol, and the tea kettle man was escorted off. So I went out, touching the trunk of a tree just offstage for good luck. The emcee was Honey Coles, the great tap dancer. I was dressed in a business suit. "Well, what are you going to do?" Honey Coles asked. "I am going to play the piano," I said. "And what is the name of the composition you will be playing?" I thought of saying Debussy's "Bells," but then I thought there might be somebody in the audience who would recognize that it wasn't Debussy's "Bells" and might make mention of the fact, prompting the pistol-firing entrance of the Great Adam. So I said, "It's called 'Opus No. 1.' " " 'Opus No. 1,'" Honey Coles announced, and I sat down at the grand piano (whose keys had been touched by the fingers of Duke Ellington and Fats Waller and such), and I played "Opus No. 1."

And guess what? Despite some rumblings of discontent at music which sounded less like Debussy's "Bells" than the background music to "The Edge of Night," I managed to survive the entrance of the Great Adam, and indeed won second prize, losing out to a young girl who tap danced to the tune of "Dancing Shoes."

They call the Apollo "the stepping stone to the stars," and I like to think of Mr. Landers at a lesson, leaning back and saying, "Young man, I had a student once, liked to play Debussy cadenzas. Made it to the Apollo Theater. Practice, young man, practice!"

I wonder if Mr. Bennett-who taught English and may or may not have been the one who gave me a C- for the story about the chauffeur's race-ever knew that I ran a literary magazine and occasionally wrote books and magazine pieces, mostly about mavericks and people who remind me slightly of myself.

As for all my C's, D's and E's, I'm not sure this is a vindication, but eventually I ended up at Cambridge University, Kings College. At Cambridge, there are no exams until your final year, and then there are two weeks of exams, held in June but referred to (typically English) as "the Mays"-three hours in the morning, three hours in the afternoon. There is one exam you can't study for: the essay. You are asked to write for three hours on whatever question is proffered.

The question was: Write (in so many words) on Charles James Fox. I didn't know who Charles James Fox was. If I'd applied myself at Exeter, if my head hadn't been off with its pals, funning it up, I would have known. But I didn't. We all should know, actually. Fox was a member of Pitt's cabinet, a strong supporter of the American position at the time of the Revolutionary War, an eccentric, a compulsive gambler, and so on. But I didn't know this. So after half an hour or so, I picked up my pencil and wrote as follows: "Charles James Fox was a mediocre second baseman for the Cincinnati Reds," and went on about this completely imaginary figure for the rest of the exam. And guess what? I eventually got an honors degree-a low one, I must admit, but still.

Now at Exeter, Mr. Bennett would have slapped an E on there, and "watch the overuse of commas and exclamation points," and that would have been that.

I have come to the conclusion that my life, whatever there is of it that might be termed successful, was indeed very much due to Exeter's credit . . . that I had somehow to vindicate myself. And I am grateful for Exeter, terribly grateful, and I wish my grandfather had never given me that flintlock musket.

"Thy sons to the jubilee throng." It's a call that suffices here at this annual gathering whichever institution came up with that line, Harvard actually. And so it is good to come back. I am very glad to have thronged to this jubilee.

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