22

ZONKA

I BOUGHT MY Smith-Corona ball-bearing typewriter for twenty-five dollars from the Daily Illini, loaded my books and clothes into the family Dodge, and drove up Route 45 to Chicago on September 3, 1966, a Saturday. I would be sharing a flat with a law student, Howie Abrams, on the ground floor of a two-flat on Seventy-Second Place in South Shore, close to the University of Chicago. On Monday, I went to work at the Sun-Times. On the Friday of that week, there was a staff party at the home of Ken Towers, the young city editor, who also lived in South Shore. That’s where I met Bob Zonka, whom I would love more than any other man since my father died.

People felt a particular quality in Zonka. They gravitated toward him. You sensed he noticed you—you, particularly you—and was in league with you, and had your back. He had a conspiratorial quality; he and you were in league against the world, and were getting away with it. A little more than twenty years later at his funeral, our friend Jon Anderson stood beside the coffin, looked around the room of mourners, and said, “Most of us here were probably sure we were Zonka’s best friend.”

Bob was the last editor of the Sun-Times who began at the paper as a copyboy and worked his way up. Bob must have gone to college, but he never mentioned it and I never thought to ask. Zonka seemed to have been formed fully educated. The party at Ken Towers’s house was to celebrate his promotion to features editor. I stood to one side feeling joy and uncertainty as a new member of this group, the fraternity of Chicago newspapermen, the most desirable club in the world. Zonka materialized next to me. “You’re the kid Jim Hoge hired,” he said.

He was a large man, balding, not a good complexion, kind of a Karl Malden face. Not lovely, but men and women loved him, and the women I knew him with were beautiful and proud to be at his side. He chain-smoked and drank too much. I was also starting to drink too much and found this quality attractive. I studied him to learn how it was done. According to my definition, I never saw him drunk, and many nights we drank until long after the chimes at midnight. He said he had never had hangovers. I find that impossible to believe. He became my friend, mentor, father figure, accomplice, and the center of a universe of what seemed to me altogether the most privileged people in Chicago. He loved that word, “altogether.” “Ebert, this is altogether the best story you’ve written today.”

Zonka was married and had three children and a home in the suburbs that I never saw. I met his wife Mary Lou and liked her instantly, but something was happening in his marriage that he never discussed and it ended fairly soon after we met. His wife and children told me at various times that he simply pulled out one day and moved into Chicago, and they didn’t know why. It was something he wouldn’t discuss. It remained an area of silence in our friendship, a Don’t Go zone. I often met his children, Lark, Marco, and Laura (“Package”), at his apartment on Belmont in Chicago, and after his death had a brief but heartfelt romance with Lark, which was founded at least in part by our sadness. All three children felt wounded and betrayed; Lark kept the most distance, but all were in frequent communication, and so was Mary Lou, who struck me as nicer than she should have been about the way she and her children had been treated. I was his close friend, his best friend according to the Anderson definition, but I never knew the story of that marriage. It is often that way. How a marriage appears from the outside is not how it seems within a family. Not long before his death Zonka had planned a trip to San Francisco to meet Marco’s child, his first grandchild. Marco, a hippie idealist, was involved obscurely in the tofu business. Zonka postponed that trip when I got the advance on my Perfect London Walk book that allowed me to buy him a ticket to London. Marco told me, not with anger but with sadness, that he was bitter Zonka put friends above family. I said Zonka had never been to Europe, would otherwise never have the money to go, and had no idea he was soon to die.

Zonka was the center of a wide circle, and his homes were often filled with confidants, strays, and visiting firemen. He was a scout. He collected the brilliant, the charismatic, the characters, the raconteurs. In his company we felt we had admission to a crowd altogether more fascinating than ordinary people were likely to meet.

It was because of Zonka that I met Harry and Irene Bouras, who lived in an Evanston home that contained as many books and works of art as physically possible. Harry was a man of effortless gifts. He was above all a painter, but he commanded literature, history, drama, architecture, and politics, and once a week he delivered a talk on WFMT, the fine arts station that was our sound track in those days. That station was also the home for decades of Studs Terkel, who told me about Harry, “He comes in, sits down, and talks for thirty minutes. Not even a note. I’ve never seen anything like it.” This coming from Studs, who could do the same thing.

Zonka also introduced me to Jacob Burck, who was teamed with Bill Mauldin as one of our two editorial cartoonists. Jake always seemed unimaginably ancient, another chain-smoker, formal in a twinkling European manner. He lived in a house he and his wife had filled with his inexhaustible outpouring of art. He couldn’t pick up a stone without sketching a few lines on it that turned it into the head of a man or an animal. Through Zonka I met the Chicago novelist Harry Mark Petrakis, in whose company Bob seemed to become Greek, and the novelist Father Andrew Greeley, in whose company Bob became Irish. And where and how did Bob find Alcibiades (Al the Greek) Oikonomides, the cheerful giant who towered over our gatherings in those days? Al presided over our regular Friday night dinners at the Parthenon in Greektown on Halsted and seemed to know everyone Zonka knew, and (here is the curious part) no one Zonka didn’t know, except for the Jesuits at Loyola, where he was a professor of antiquity. Did Zonka supply him with a circle of friends?

I came to the Sun-Times with a lot of experience from the News-Gazette and the Daily Illini, but Zonka taught me his newspaper code, which he liked to express as, “When you have to march, march.” This included writing a story you lacked all enthusiasm for, meeting a deadline no matter what hours were necessary, getting an interview after you’d been decisively turned down, not falling in love with your deathless prose, remembering you were there to write a story and not have a good time. These were not rules he enforced. They were standards he exuded.

Zonka’s desk was in the far southwest corner of the city room, where he propped his feet and observed goings-on. He did not much like the boy editor Jim Hoge, “Baby James.” He built a little fiefdom of loyalists back there in the corner and entertained people such as John McMeel, a young Notre Dame graduate who was trying to sell a new comic strip named Doonesbury. Zonka and McMeel agreed over an extended period of negotiations in several bars that the Sun-Times should buy the strip, but it ended up at the Tribune. I never heard the full story, but I’m sure there was one.

Zonka lived as newspapermen did in the Front Page era, and indeed in those days the city room still had writers like Ray Brennan and Jack McPhaul, who dated from those days. Zonka was both on the job and off the job every waking hour. If he was having a long lunch in the upstairs room at Hobson’s Oyster Bar he was “making friends for the paper,” and that often resulted in good stories. He kept in touch by calling his own desk. One day Jon Anderson picked up the phone. “The Zonker asked if there was any activity around his desk,” Anderson told me, “and I said, ‘Only Hoge directing the movers.’ ”

Zonka resigned from the Sun-Times. The paper wasn’t large enough to accommodate two men who thought they should be its editor, and although Hoge was manifestly better suited to the job, Bob remained in constant rebellion. He had by then married Connie Zonka, a publicist whose clients included Columbia College Chicago in its early days under the educational showman Mike Alexandroff. Connie and Bob established an office and Bob bonded with Mike, another larger than life character, who was then running the school out of a single building on Lake Shore Drive with a combination of promotion and willpower. Both Harry Bouras and I ended up teaching there. That was how it worked. Columbia is now a considerable institution whose buildings, theaters, and dorms sprawl across the South Loop, but in the early days it was held together with smoke and mirrors. Connie’s sister was the famous Broadway costume designer Patricia Zipprodt, who helped her find Columbia people upon whom to confer honorary degrees, which is how Bob Fosse one year found himself being honored by a school he had never heard of, and having lunch with Zonka and me in the Greek Taberna in the basement of the Time-Life Building.

Connie had fallen under Zonka’s spell while she was married to Richard Harding, owner of the Quiet Knight folk club on North Wells. In the kind of synergy that seemed to unfold naturally in those days, when the Quiet Knight was planning to move from Old Town to New Town, we turned its closing night into a benefit to buy a ticket for John McHugh to fly to Los Angeles for a bit part as the bartender in a bar named O’Rourke’s in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Admission was five dollars and since no booze in open bottles could be moved, the deal was we’d drink the bar dry. Richard lined up some of his acts, including Malvina “Little Boxes” Reynolds and the Chad Mitchell Trio, and McHugh took advantage of Connie’s connections with a costume company to appear, for reasons unclear, as Henry VIII.

I believe it might have been that night that Connie and Bob locked eyes, and history was made. I was also present in another bar when Richard Harding discovered by mischance the two of them smooching. This was handled by all three in a fairly civil manner. Bob was then living in a two-bedroom apartment on Belmont, a block in from the lake, and Connie and Richard on the ground floor of a three-flat a few doors down the street. Richard moved out, Bob moved in, and Alcibiades Oikonomides took over Bob’s old flat. That inspired a memorable housewarming to which Al the Greek invited Jesuits from the faculty of Loyola and a crowd of Zonka followers. Al at that time had a mattress on the floor, a kitchen table, and some lamps. He invariably appeared in a dark business suit, a white shirt and tie, and slightly smoked glasses, which for a friendly man with a bullet head made him seem somehow shady.

“I have here everything I need, man!” he told me. “I sleep on the mattress, I eat on the table, I buy new white shirts at Walgreens, and when my collar gets dirty”—he opened the door to his second bedroom—“I throw it in here.” He slammed the door before I could get a good look. Al had laid in a good supply of Roditis Greek wine and Johnnie Walker Black Label. There was no music, and the rooms were illuminated by table lamps sitting on the floor. Talk filled the rooms, and later in the evening several earnest conversations developed between Jesuits and sinful newspapermen. I believe the sacrament of penance was performed at least once.

“By all the gods, man!” Al cried at one point. “These Jesuits have had all the whiskey!” He thought he had another half gallon of Johnnie Walker around somewhere, but new supplies had to be ordered in from the corner package store.

At least six weeks later, Al was presiding as usual on a Friday night at the head of a long table at the Parthenon in Greektown.

“By all the gods, I have had an explosion at my apartment,” he announced. “I decided for the first time to use my kitchen, and I turned on the oven to heat it for a pizza. I am reading in the other room, and suddenly there is a great explosion and a blast of flame comes out of the kitchen!”

He roared with laughter.

“What do you think had happened? Somebody had hidden that missing bottle of scotch in the oven, and it exploded!”

Across the table from me, John McHugh looked thoughtful.

Connie and Bob’s apartment became the scene of one gathering after another. They often invited their clients to dinners with their friends. They represented the suburban Lake Forest Playhouse, the enterprise of a creative producer named Marshall Migatz, and that led to a long evening with Jason Robards Jr. after the premiere of O’Neill’s Hughie. One Thanksgiving the Zonkas pushed together two tables and a slab on sawhorses to improvise a dinner table reaching from one room to the next, and Colleen Dewhurst was guest of honor. Clair Huffaker, the author of Western novels, was represented by Bob on a book tour for One Time, I Saw Morning Come Home and became a friend after the two of them filled a taxi with helium balloons and set them free over Lake Michigan.

One night there was a historic dinner at Bob and Connie’s with the directors Gil Cates and Armando Robles Godoy, who was in Chicago from Peru as the guest of honor of the film festival. Gil, later to serve as president of the Motion Picture Academy, was relaxed and benevolent. Armando was another of the tall, mustached romantics who seemed to fall into Bob’s orbit. That night he was seated next to the first wife of our friend Jack Lane, the photographer. The next morning I was awaked in my apartment on West Burton Place by Jack and his friend Ed McCahill, a Sun-Times reporter.

“Roger, I need to find Armando,” he said. “He has stolen my wife.”

“All the festival guests stay at the Ambassador East,” I said. “He’s probably under his own name.”

I went back to sleep. The phone rang. It was Armando.

“Roger,” he said, “somebody has slipped a note under my door, reading Beware! You are a stranger in a strange land!”

“That’s undoubtedly from Jack Lane,” I told him.

“The husband! Aye, yie, yie!”

“He and his friend McCahill are probably downstairs in the lobby,” I said. “Here’s what you do. Get on the elevator and push the button for the concourse level. There’s a passage under State Parkway linking the Ambassador East and West. Walk over to the West, catch a taxi, and get out of Dodge.”

About that time the publicist for the film festival, who called herself the Blessed Virgin Mary Sweeney, was arriving at the East. She knew Lane and McCahill from Riccardo’s.

“What are you doing here?”

Even in his hour of turmoil, Lane was unable to resist: “Waiting for Godoy.”

Gil Cates has never forgotten that dinner. I’ve seen him many times over the years, on the sets of his movies and as the Academy president and frequent director of the Academy Awards. He invariably asks me if I remember that night. He would ask about Zonka. They sometimes chatted on the phone. They never met again, but he sent flowers to the funeral. “There was something about that man,” he would tell me. “I’ll always remember that night.”

Zonka wasn’t happy with life as a publicist. “I wasn’t cut out for stamping envelopes,” he told me. What went unsaid was that Connie was better at it. Our friends Herman and Marilou Kogan, in whose Old Town apartment I first met Studs Terkel, had by then retired to New Buffalo, Michigan, a small town just over the Indiana line on the shore of Lake Michigan. He told Bob the weekly New Buffalo Times was for sale. Zonka bought the paper, Connie took an apartment on Lake Shore Drive, and together they rented a big old house on a bluff over the lake.

Bob was the editor at last. Also the publisher and owner of the ancient press. He hired a secretary. An old guy came in once a week to operate the press. He had a high school kid deliver bundles of the paper in a pickup. He paid a member of the school’s photography club to take photos at a dollar a pop. A prominent citizen died, and Zonka told the kid to put on a tie and shoot a nice respectful photo at the funeral.

“Some of these kids, they just don’t have the instinct,” Zonka complained later. He showed me what his photographer had handed in. It showed the family lined up at the graveside, seen from behind.

Zonka wrote about local politics and schools, law enforcement and zoning, taxes and lawsuits. Those were subjects you expected in a newspaper. But he also wrote about going fishing with his and Connie’s son, Milo. And how sweet it was when spring finally came. About preserving the area’s parks and shorelines. About his priceless three-dollar dog named Spoons. About the day they chopped down the tree in front of Rosie’s Restaurant. And when he obtained the plans for an antique cider press and convinced local carpenters and metalsmiths and the kids in the high school shop class to build him a half-scale model to his design, in time for a pressing of the first Michigan apples.

When his father died on September 29, 1984, he wrote, “He was an anxious man, my dad, and anxious to do the right thing. When I told my father I wanted to be a newspaperman, he took me to the Sears at Western and 63rd. There he bought, on time, a Remington portable typewriter, a Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary and a Roget’s Thesaurus. ‘That’s the best I can do for you,’ he said.”

The paper was not making a lot of money. The first winter, before he and Connie rented the house, Bob slept on a deck chair in the press room. He traded ads for dentistry and veterinarian services. He got to know everyone in town. He bonded with Rosie, whose restaurant was the breakfast hangout. He made good friends with Nick and Sophie Fatsoulas, who had a little restaurant next to Jackson’s big fruit and vegetable stand at the red light on Red Arrow Highway. Zonka was Serbo-Croatian, drawn to Greeks. “Sophie’s Place,” as we called it, became his dinner club, and when Russ Meyer came out for the lake fishing, we took our catch there and Nick prepared the lake trout Greek style.

The house on the bluff became the scene for weekend gatherings of the Chicago crowd, and one by one friends began to settle in Berrien County, which was later renamed “Harbor Country” by Karen Connor, another friend of Zonka’s who had relocated and set up as a Realtor. In the early 1970s the area was far from being a fashionable location for second homes of Chicagoans and South Benders. It was blue collar, a little run down, with cheap housing left over from its previous boom in the 1920s. In those days it could be reached by interurban rail and ferry boat from Chicago, which is how Saul Bellow’s Augie March once crossed to Michigan. Ethnic and labor groups set up summer camps, and in Union Pier, once a terminus for the Underground Railroad, African Americans including Jesse Owens bought summer homes. The Capone mob owned an inn near there, and when it was being rehabbed around 1980 a hidden room was found in the basement that some people fancied had once held gambling devices. Jumpin’ Joe Savoldi, the Notre Dame football star, champion pro wrestler, bottler of Jumpin’ Joe’s Root Beer, and American spy who parachuted into Sicily, bought land near Carl Sandburg on the lake and brought his Sicilian brothers over to build a house with sixteen-inch fieldstone walls, and it is in that house that I am writing this sentence. One of the brothers, quite old, was driven over to see the house about fifteen years ago, and said it had held up well.

Everybody’s families gathered in New Buffalo. There were lots of kids, including Milo, who was a holy terror in fireworks season, which for him began on Memorial Day and ended on Labor Day and was sometimes celebrated in the middle of the night. May I speak for all of us from those days in saying we are proud and astonished that he is now a family man, investment counselor, and the city manager of a town in Florida.

Bob and Connie were divorced after about fifteen years of marriage but shared custody of Milo and remained good friends. Bob called me in 1980 and said he’d found a duplex in Union Pier with beach path access. This was a small two-bedroom country house from the 1920s, to which an A-frame addition with a sleeping loft had been added. He suggested we buy it together. Including the double lot, the price was $50,000. Jack Lane had given up his high-end business as an advertising photographer and he and his second wife, Sharl, had moved to New Buffalo, where he worked at his first love, country and contracting. Zonka said he wanted a deck built.

“How big?”

“As far as the eye can see. And a fire pit.”

“How big?”

“Big enough to roast a goat.”

By then many key members of the circle had moved into the area, and the fire pit was the focus of much anecdotage, punctuated by explosions from Milo somewhere in the woods. Announcing a gathering, Zonka always said, “I’ll light a candle in the window,” and he always did. Dan and Audrey Curley were frequent weekenders. Bob’s older brother Lou, a lifelong paraplegic and successful businessman, had died by then. His younger brother Tom and his wife bought a house not far away. It was the summer of 1987 that I got the advance for The Perfect London Walk. It was understood that Zonka, who had never been to Europe, would come along.

In London we took rooms at the Eyrie Mansion, and Bob bonded with Henry Togna Sr. He traveled the city hungrily, having imagined it all of his life. McHugh and I noticed something: Bob took a pass on the walk over Hampstead Heath and took taxis whenever possible, even when our destination was in sight. “I’m out of training,” he said. “In New Buffalo, you can park right outside of everywhere.” McHugh was sharing a room with him and was awakened one night by cigarette smoke. Bob was sitting up in bed. That morning he and I cornered Bob and badgered him that he had to give up smoking. “I’ve been smoking since I was thirteen,” he said. “That’s just the point,” John said.

Back home, Bob announced that he was lighting the candle in the window, and there was a gathering at his place. We began around the fire pit, watching the sparks fly up into the night sky. It was a chill evening, and everybody had sweaters on except Zonka, who wore one of his short-sleeved shirts and explained that he was a hot-blooded Slav who would not require a jacket until the snows fell.

We moved inside. The occasion for the party was the publication of my new Movie Home Companion, which was dedicated to Zonka. I sat between McHugh and our friend the best-selling priest Andy Greeley, who owned a lake home nearby in Grand Beach, home of his friends the Daleys. In his house Greeley held frequent salons, and celebrated Mass in the backyard every Saturday, never forgetting the sermon. Seated the other side of John were Grace and Norman Mark, both over six feet with loud merry laughter. Norman had been TV critic of the Daily News and a talk show host. Grace had been his big crush in high school, where their eyes must have met over the crowd, and they’d met again and made a second marriage.

Following the Zonka immigration, they’d bought a house in Lakeside and now were having serious problems with dampness in the basement. Grace murmured their troubles in John’s ear. She was fairly new to us then and had attracted attention, as tall, elegant blondes in black leather pants are likely to do. During a break, Andy leaned over and asked McHugh, “What is she talking to you about, John?” McHugh lowered his voice. “Female problems, Father. You know.”

Greeley nodded and we fell silent. Grace continued, “When they got a good look down there, they told us the walls had been completely softened by mold and would have to be entirely removed.” John and Andy exchanged a significant nod.

After the room had cleared, Zonka said, “Ebert, I think this was altogether the best party I’ve had here. The whole crowd was here.” And so they were: my girlfriend Ingrid Eng and her daughters Monica and Magan; Father Greeley, Al the Greek; Jack Lane, McHugh, the Marks; Dennis and Connie Brennan, who ran the bookstore; Terry Truesdell, who had a woodworking shop downtown and whose wife, Judy, would run for Congress; Sophie and Nick; Tom Zonka; Marilou Kogan, now a widow; and Ivan and Marge Bloom, who had another two-city marriage, Ivan owning a showroom in the Merchandise Mart and Marge owning a spa on Whittaker Street. With a few exceptions, all of them had come to the area following Bob.

The next morning Bob drove down to the Union Pier bakery and brought back apple strudel. We made coffee. We sat around and replayed the party. We told the story of the walls doomed by mold, which showed every sign of becoming a classic. Things had gone very late, and now it was time for Bob to drive Milo to the train station to be met by Connie in Chicago. I was sleepy and went over to my half of the house to have a nap. I vaguely heard Bob return to his half of the house.

I had a vivid dream in which I had awakened, walked over to his side of the house, and found Bob seated at the head of the table, dead. In my dream I wrote a memorial column for the New Buffalo Times, word by word, very specific. I didn’t like that dream, and it awakened me. I got out of bed, went next door, and called through the screen: “Bob?” At the foot of the lawn, the Engs were sitting in the sun. I walked inside, and Bob was seated at the head of the table, dead, a cigarette having fallen from his hand.

I called out to the yard for the Engs. The girls telephoned for an ambulance, made difficult because it was hard to describe the address of the house in the woods. It made no difference. Ingrid held a mirror to his lips and we felt for a pulse, but he was clearly dead. We called Andy Greeley, and he hurried over. Bob was a Catholic, long since lapsed. Father Greeley said the last rites and pronounced conditional absolution. The ambulance found the house. We called the family and friends.

I sat down and started to write the story exactly as I had worded it in my dream. It appeared in the next issue of the New Buffalo Times, which was edited by McHugh with the help of the secretary and the old guy who came in to run the press. These words had been dictated in my dream: “As I write these words, I am looking out the window at the lawn where Robert Zonka stood last autumn and sowed wildflower seeds into the wind. In the spring, the flowers pushed up through the snow, and Zonka stood on his deck and said that was the way it was supposed to be. No landscape gardener was going to get within a mile of his land, where he encouraged the natural grasses and flowers of the sandy dunes to grow.”

The family gathered. A decision had to be made about the newspaper. There’d been a change in management at the NBC 5 News in Chicago, and McHugh had been swept out with the old team. He moved into Bob’s house and edited and published the paper for a year, until a buyer was found. He liked the area and decided to stay, teaching himself programming and installing computer systems for small businesses. He and his girlfriend from Chicago, Mary Jo Broderick, bought a house in the village of Three Oaks and live there today.

In Skoob, a used bookstore in London, Bob had purchased a large volume of Don Quixote with the illustrations by Gustave Doré. It was on the table before him when he died. When I spoke at the memorial service, I quoted Cervantes’ words on the last page:

For if he like a mad man lived,

At least he like a wise one died.

There were more real tears at the funeral than any other I have ever attended. Sherman Wolf and I clung to each other and sobbed. Bob was buried in the New Buffalo cemetery. The next spring when I visited his grave, I saw the stone, on which his children had the words from Don Quixote engraved.

When Bob saw or parted with anyone, he invariably said, “God love ya.”