42
ONE OF THE things I miss about Gene Siskel is that he’s not around to make jokes about my current condition. He would instinctively know that at this point I wouldn’t be sensitive, having accepted and grown comfortable with my maimed appearance. He wouldn’t have started joking too soon. His jokes would have the saving grace of being funny. Here’s one I’m pretty sure he would have come up with: “Well, there’s one good thing about Roger’s surgery. At least he no longer needs a bookmark to find his chin.”
I’ve never concerned myself overmuch anyway about the way I looked. I got a lot of practice at indifference during my years as the Michelin Man. Before I acquired my present problems, I was not merely fat but was universally known as “the fat one,” to distinguish me from “the thin one,” who was Gene Siskel, who was not all that thin, but try telling that to Gene. On the set of the show, between actually taping segments, we had a rule that there could be no discussion of the movies under review. So we attacked each other with one-liners. Buzz Hannan, our floor director, was our straight man, and the cameramen supplied our audience. For example:
Me: “Don’t you think you went a little over the top in that last review?”
Gene: “Spoken like the gifted Haystacks Calhoun tribute artist that you are.”
“Haystacks was loved by his fans as a charming country boy.”
“Six hundred and forty pounds of rompin’ stompin’ charm. Oh, Rog? Are those two-tone suedes, or did you step in some chicken shit?”
“You can borrow them whenever you wear your white John Travolta disco suit from Saturday Night Fever.”
Buzz: “Yeah, when are you gonna wear it on the show?”
“He wanted to wear it today, but it’s still at the tailor shop having the crotch taken in.”
Buzz: “Ba-ba-ba-boom!”
“Here’s an item that will interest you, Roger,” Gene told me one day, paging through the Sun-Times, his favorite paper, during a lull in the taping of our show. We taped in CBS Chicago’s Studio One, home of the Kennedy-Nixon debate. “It says here, the Michelin Man has been arrested in a fast food court in Hawaii for attempting to impersonate the Pillsbury Doughboy.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I read the paper over breakfast. There was an item in Kup’s column saying your forehead was named as America’s biggest zip code. (Glancing at the studio monitor.) Oh… my… God! CNN has just reported that your hairline is receding so rapidly the rising sea level is threatening coastal cities.”
“Ba-boom!” Buzz would say.
Yes, I was fat, but I dealt with it by simply never thinking about it. It is useful, when you are fat, to have a lot of other things to think about. If you obsess about fat, it will not make you any thinner, but it will make you miserable. If you try any diet you have read about in a magazine or heard about from a celebrity, it will make you even more miserable. I maintained tip-top mental health during all the years of my obesity. When Chaz dragged me kicking and screaming to the Pritikin Longevity Center, I lost a lot of weight in a healthy way, and I enjoyed it. I kicked and screamed all the way toward anything that might do me any good. It is a proud trait of the American male.
I never looked all that fat to me. I wore a navy blue pullover vest on top of my L. L. Bean oxford-cloth shirt, and when I glanced down it contained everything in an attractive convexity merging serenely with my khakis.
“Phone for you, Rog,” Gene said, handing me his cell. “Your shoes are calling.”
I favored blue sweater-vests, because whenever I wore brown Gene said, “Buzz, the usual offer of ten silver dollars to any cameraman who doesn’t make Mr. Ebert look like a mudslide.”
“Is the offer limited to close-ups?”
“Twenty coins for any cameraman who can not take a close-up of Mr. Ebert.”
“Don’t worry, Roger,” Buzz said. “I’ll write a note to management about expanding Studio One so the cameras can pull back a little more.”
“Now you’re playing on the same side as Mr. Tact,” I complained.
“That’s why they call me Mr. Thumb Tact,” Gene said.
“I heard you were severely lacerated while trying not to thumbtack a note to your forehead,” I said.
“Ka-boom!”
When I wore a green blazer on St. Patrick’s Day, Gene congratulated me on my Master’s win. For this and other reasons I invariably wore the blue blazer, blue oxford shirt, blue pullover sweater-vest, and khakis. This look was original with me. No other fat man ever thought of it.
Now I look like the Phantom of the Opera. This is so much fun I almost forgot my subject today. There are a lot of Phantom fans who wouldn’t think that was such a terrible thing. Some of them have been waiting in line on the sidewalk outside Her Majesty’s Theatre in London for more than thirty years. Indeed, that musical was the inspiration for my only published novel, Behind the Phantom’s Mask, which was written as a newspaper serial.
“The first book in history,” Gene said, “that placed below Amazon’s sales ranking.”
“I tried to carry all Gene’s books home from the store,” I told Buzz, “but it was too much for me.”
“Why was that, Roger?”
“Because there weren’t any.”
“Ka-boom!”
One day in London I was cruelly made aware of my fat. I was walking through Sir John Soane’s Museum at 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields for maybe the tenth time. This has been called “the most eccentric house in London.” It was the home of the great eighteenth-century architect, who bequeathed it to a grateful nation. (“Now let them dust the bloody man’s rubbish,” Mrs. Soane said.) Sir John had filled every nook and cranny with an accumulation of books, furniture, oils, watercolors, drawings, mirrors, statuary, writing implements, rifles, pistols, brass buttons, coins, swords, rugs, etchings, tapestries, stuffed heads, and even the Monk’s Tomb, engraved “Alas, poor Fanny!” Here rested Mrs. Soane’s beloved lap dog, which could never remember which marble bases it was not to pee on. Those must have included the supports for Soane’s beloved Egyptian sarcophagus.
Of Sir John’s breakfast room, Ian Nairn wrote: “If man does not blow himself up, he might in the end act at all times and on all levels with the complete understanding of this room.” I would stand in a corner and try to understand it. Among its features were concave mirrors at the corners of the ceiling, and outside views in parallel windows, one seemingly transparent, the other seemingly a mirror.
In this house is a wondrous art room which contains, I don’t know, let’s say eighty paintings, including even the original Rake’s Progress by Hogarth. This room is occupied by a guard with a peculiarly knowing smile. He is sure you will look again at your leaflet and say, “I don’t see eighty paintings.”
The guard: “Quite right, sir! A complaint we often hear from visitors.” Then he pauses and leans forward a little, as if waiting for you to take the bait, which you do, because almost any conceivable question will be the wrong one. The most obvious would be, “You mean there aren’t eighty paintings in this room?”
“There most certainly are, sir!” He explains that the walls hang on hinges, and the room actually contains three times as many paintings as are on view. Faced with this unfolding display one winter afternoon, my eye fell on a handsome seventeenth-century chair, which had a little card behind it on the wall, saying (as no museum chair ever does) “Have a seat on me!”
My eyes lit up and I advanced on it, until I felt the guard’s gentle touch.
“Oh, no, no, no, no, no, sir!” he said, paraphrasing the saddest line in all of Shakespeare.
“But it says to have a seat,” I said.
“And so it does. But it’s not for the likes of you!”
I turned away mute from this crushing warning and wandered lonely as a cloud ’neath lowering skies in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. A slight mist became a light rain. It was January and chilly. I opened my umbrella, for I love London most when I am strolling at twilight under a slight rain with a big brolly. I began to cheer up, and reflected that dinner hours had commenced.
Over the years, people almost never discussed my weight, at least to my face. Perhaps they were being tactful. Perhaps they were blind. I preferred to believe they simply did not notice it, as I never did. I avoided reading blogs, where it was deemed sufficient reason to discredit my reviews: “Why should I believe that fat slob about anything?”
There was only one other disturbing incident. This was in Bangkok, Thailand. Chaz and I were visiting Thailand because at a charity auction she had obtained two weeks, two spas, and a luxury Bangkok hotel at a shamefully low price. “This was a steal!” she exalted. “These people are all so busy they don’t have time to take off for Thailand.” A bargain indeed, although its value diminished when we discovered the luxury package did not include air travel.
Bangkok was a shopper’s paradise. Chaz visited a custom tailor’s and ordered four $10,000 designer outfits for $102 each from the pages of Vogue. One day while strolling, I saw a little tailor shop with a three-piece white summer suit displayed in the window. Sydney Greenstreet would have been proud to wear it. There was a sign: “Fine Linen Summer Suit Made to Measure—$80!”
I went inside. The tailor and his assistant explained the procedure. “We measure you, quick-quick! Then we make suit, hurry-hurry to hotel! Then we try on, make alterations as needed! Then we hurry deliver suit, your room, eight p.m.”
They stood me on a pedestal and the tailor barked out measurements while his assistant wrote them down.
“Your sign says this is eighty dollars,” I said. “I thought the Thai currency unit was the baht.”
“You are only American tourist who think that,” he said. “We do dollar for your convenience.”
“But you’re sure this suit is really eighty dollars?”
The tailor looked thoughtful.
“Well… it eighty-dollar suit, sure enough. But you… hundred-dollar man!”
But back to the Phantom of the Opera. What is it like to resemble him, since I have lost most of my lower jaw and am what is now described as having Facial Differences? To begin with, I must make this clear: Many people have problems much worse than mine, and at a much younger age, and sometimes joined with other disabilities. I may seem tragic to you, but I seem fortunate to myself. Don’t lose any sleep over me. I am so much a movie lover that I can imagine a certain small pleasure in looking like the Phantom. It is better than looking like the Elephant Man. I would describe my condition as falling about 72 percent of the way along a timeline between how I looked in 2004 and the thing that jumps out of that guy’s intestines in Alien.
The problem is that no one seems to settle on what the Phantom should look like. I don’t look at all like the modern Phantom, played by Gerard Butler in Joel Schumacher’s 2004 film. He’s handsome as he punts along the sewers. The Phantom I resemble, the real Phantom, is the one played by Lon Chaney in Rupert Julian’s classic 1925 version. The 2004 Phantom doesn’t skulk about in a clammy subterranean grotto. He inhabits a spacious dockside room in a sewer marina. His disfigurement is picturesque. As his sleek off-white mask covers his right temple, eye, and upper cheek, and curves gently to meet his nose, it looks like a fashion accessory. Everybody will want one.
In the 1925 version, the Phantom wears a full face mask. When Christine Daaé removes it, there is one of the great smash cuts in cinema, showing the Phantom full face with his mouth gaping open. Although his complexion is far from untroubled, his real problems involve his mouth, teeth, and jaw—nothing to do with his right temple. If the Phantom looked as he did in 1925, he could no more sing in a musical than I can. Both the wound and the mask were relocated by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Now the Phantom is clean-cut, square jawed, and looks like the cover illustration of a romance novel.
I rather avoid mirrors. I do not dwell on my appearance. I wear a black turtleneck when I think I might have my picture taken. I usually decline when people want me to pose for a photo with them: I imagine their friends peering at my peculiarities.
“Do I look okay, Gene?” I asked him one night when we were waiting backstage to go on the Leno show. As usual, I was wearing the sweater–sports coat–khakis combo.
“Roger, when I need to amuse myself, I stroll down the sidewalk reflecting that every person I pass thought they looked just great when they walked out of their house that morning.”