"The Tree Nobody Wanted"

[This is my Christmas story, The Tree Nobody Wanted, which I'm posting online. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the eBook version will be available on Kindle and other platforms for the holiday season. If you're new to this site, please tell me what you think of the story. And please consider the hardcover as a great Christmas gift for loved ones. It is available at tommccannbooks.com at a 50 percent reduction from the cover price.]

The Year is 1946, a year after the end of World War II.

The place is Brooklyn—the poor side, the tough side: Brownsville.

The time is Christmas Eve. The Christmas tree sellers have turned off their lights and gone home. The lots are empty, except for a few forlorn trees that nobody wanted.

An eleven-year-old boy is sent out to pick through those trees and bring one back to the apartment where his Nanny has raised him since infancy.

What follows is part fable, part remembrance, part miracle.

It’s a story of family values—even if “family” means a boy and his grandmother; a story of hope in hard times and great happiness growing from small things; a story of youth and age, rejuvenation and rebirth. It is a story of things that are not supposed to happen, but do. That’s part of the miracle.

Above all, it’s a love story—of a special kind that is the other part of the miracle.

Katharine Hepburn

Joan and I read a lot of books. We buy a lot of books, in the course of a year—hundreds. When we are finished with them, we save some, give some away to friends and family, and then throw some away. To some people, to throw away a book is sacrilegious, but we know we’ll never read or refer to some of them again, and others are just plain bad books. We have a place in Boston and a house on Cape Ann, and each has a lot of bookshelves. She and I almost never read the same book, and we try to keep them apart. In addition to keeping our books separate, each of us tries to keep together books that are related either by subject or author. I recently decided it was time to clear out some of the books to make room for others, which are piled on desks, tables, and chests of drawers.

I have about three linear feet of books on Katharine Hepburn. These are books about her, for the most part, and a couple written by her. I have this collection not because I was a great fan of her movies, but because she and I were friends for many years, and I liked her and she liked me. How we came to be friends is a story for another day, and perhaps I’ll tell it here at some point. It all started with a book I sent her that I thought would make a good script for her. She didn’t agree, but I kept a copy of the book and put it in the collection with the other Hepburn books. I was looking through the Hepburn collection the other day, and I found one book that stood out from all the others because of its size. Actually, it’s not a book: It’s a catalog of 250 pages. On the cover is a picture of Kate; the title is Property from the Estate of Katharine Hepburn. It is a Sotheby’s catalog, and it also states that the property will be auctioned off in New York on June 10 and 11, 2004. I picked up the catalog, and the same feeling of anger came over me that I had felt when I first picked it up seven years ago. “Anger” is probably not the right word. I was outraged that the property of the most private person I ever met would be pictured and itemized, next to a suggested price for each item.

Katharine Hepburn spent her entire life protecting her privacy and creating the image she projected to the world. She lived to be ninety-six years old, and toward the end of her life trusted some people to manage her estate including the things she left behind. In my opinion, there was a violation of that trust when these items—many of them very personal—went up for auction. The Katharine Hepburn I knew was not the Katharine Hepburn she chose to present to the world in interviews with people like Dick Cavett and Barbara Walters. The Katharine Hepburn I knew was polite, a good listener (would never interrupt), self-effacing, quietly intelligent, very gentle, fun to be with. I never felt that I was in the presence of a big Hollywood movie star. But she was always a very private person. For a long time I urged her to show the real Katharine Hepburn—the one I and a few others knew—to the world. I suggested she write a book in her own words without any ghost writer or editor. She was certainly capable of doing that. We talked about it at some length. She actually made a couple of starts and finished a manuscript. Of course, it was published and was on the bestseller list. Its title was Me, and despite the fact that I had a big interest in Kate as a friend, I couldn’t finish the book because it was more of the same of what she gave Cavett and Walters.

At one point I even sent her a bunch of yellow ruled pads and a dozen sharpened No. 2 Dixon pencils because that’s the way she liked to write, jotting down what she called “bits and pieces.” She wrote me a letter about it, and I am going to reproduce it here. As you will see, she talks about the “personal, personal stuff.”

Well, a lot of the “personal, personal stuff” about Kate Hepburn’s life was revealed in that Sotheby catalog and subsequent auction. It is now in the hands of strangers. What follows is just a partial list of some of the things in that catalog (descriptions beneath each):

·      Katharine Hepburn’s wedding dress from her marriage to Ludlow Ogden Smith, December 12, 1928. The dress is described in detail, is on a mannequin; the suggested price is between $2,500 and $3,500.

·      A collection of Katharine Hepburn’s passports from over the years. We all know about passport photos, and some of the pictures are very unflattering. She was always very fussy about pictures of her and in life had final approval over what pictures would be released; not so in death.

·      Leather-bound address books with addresses of friends, doctors, agents, etc. Incidentally, my name, addresses, and phone numbers were in one of them that was auctioned off, and at one point, someone called me up and asked, “Who are you?”

·      A group of Kate’s hats.

·      A pair of KH’s khaki pants—single pleat, zipper closure.

·      A sculpted bust of Spencer Tracy, done by Katharine Hepburn, which she liked very much.

·      A picture of Spencer Tracy that had sat on a table next to her bed.

·      A picture of Hepburn with no makeup on, her hair in rollers of different sizes made from rolled-up newspapers and used by her on a daily basis.

·      a brush and hand mirror engraved “KHH.”

·      Her cane and walking stick collection.

·      A Victorian needlepoint runner that was noted as having been in the cottage she shared with Spencer Tracy in Los Angeles. There also was a picture of her standing in front of the needlepoint with a picture of Tracy in the background.

 And on and on for 250 pages.

As I said, it made me angry. Even now after all these years, it still does. 

"... and the Cabots speak only to God."

Even when I was a kid, growing up in Brooklyn in the forties, I heard this little poem about Boston:

Here’s to dear old

Boston,

Home of the bean and the

Cod,

Where the Lowells speak

only to Cabots,

And the Cabots speak only

to God.

In those days I never dreamed I would ever get to see Boston, much less meet a Cabot. Why would a kid from Brownsville, Brooklyn, ever go to Boston? And why would I want to meet one of those people? Or more to the point, why would they want to meet me?

In the fifties I joined United Fruit Company, a banana company (Chiquita) founded in Boston in 1899. The company underwent a name change in the late sixties, but it was very well-known—infamous, in fact—for its tough dealings in Central America and its influence in Washington. The top bananas at the company certainly didn’t enjoy the negative publicity, but the fact is the company was responsible for the creation of the colorful phrase “banana republics.” Look up United Fruit on Wikipedia, but don’t believe everything you see there: The company never murdered anyone, for example, or worked people to death. Its negative influence was grossly overstated, and the good things it did were largely overlooked. There is no denying, however, that the company did have a hand or two (or three) in overthrowing Central American regimes which were “unfriendly,” as management used to say.

 I got a job in the New York office, located on the piers in lower Manhattan (now Battery Park City). I started in about as entry level a position as one can get. I was paid $32.50 for a five-and-a-half-day work week; my title was office boy/messenger. I liked the company and saw career opportunities there, so over the next few years I learned as much as I could about the company, both in the tropics and in its international markets. I “majored in United Fruit,” according to one reporter who later wrote an article about me. My hard work paid off because a few years later, in 1960, I was invited to come to work in the company’s Boston headquarters. I was a vice president of that Fortune 500 company when I resigned in 1970.

In 1947, several years before I joined United Fruit, a Bostonian named Thomas Dudley Cabot was president of the company for a very brief period—only a few months.

A few years after I resigned to pursue another career, I wrote a book about the company and my experiences inside the organization (An American Company: The Tragedy of United Fruit, Crown, 1974). I devoted a couple of pages to Mr. Cabot’s tenure as president, including the fact that it was short lived and, frankly, undistinguished. I even told an unflattering story about him, which I thought made the point very well. At the time I wrote the book I had never met Mr. Cabot.

Within a week of the book’s publication I received a long letter from Thomas Cabot. I was getting a lot of letters (including some from lawyers) about the book and threatening phone calls from people who were unhappy about the way I had portrayed them. Tom Cabot didn’t contact his lawyers; he didn’t call me at home; he didn’t spread the word in Boston urging his business friends to shun me or stop doing business with me. Instead, he wrote me a friendly, thoughtful, generous letter. He said I was correct in my treatment and evaluation of most things I said about him. He said he enjoyed the book but went on to say, “I hope you will pardon me if I give you a new version of some of the anecdotes which you include. Please don’t allow the corrections to impair the delightful quality of the stories in case you tell them again.” He suggested that if the book went into subsequent printings, which it did, I might want to make one or two small changes just to set the record straight.

What Tom Cabot did not say, but which I knew instantly, was that the story I told made him look foolish, and he didn’t deserve that. But my biggest mistake by far was not that I told the story in the first edition of the book. It lay in my not telling the reader what Tom Cabot went on to do after he was fired from United Fruit. He built up the Cabot Corporation; served in important advisories to several United States presidents; made large contributions to higher education both in the United States and Latin America; was very generous with his enormous wealth; and was an ardent conservationist long before Rachel Carlson’s Silent Spring and before environmentalism became fashionable. [For more on his interest in conservation, see Beggar on Horseback: The Autobiography of Thomas D. Cabot, David R. Godine, 1979.]

I replied to Mr. Cabot’s letter, telling him that of all the letters I had received, and all the favorable reviews the book received, none had pleased me more that his, and, at the same time, none had dismayed me more. He called me a short time later, and we had lunch in his private dining room at the Cabot Corporation. He insisted that we get on a first-name basis, and we did despite the fact that he was almost forty years older and it was difficult for me to call him by his first name. He and I met on many other occasions in the years that followed. I got to know him over the course of twenty years—through lunches, dinners, phone conversations, events at his home. In all the times we saw each other, he was unfailingly courteous (although occasionally he would tweak me a little about how we had gotten to know each other). And he was always interested in my life, career, opinions, and family, particularly my wife, Joan, and our son, Peter. He liked to give advice to young people. He once told Peter, “Aim high, always aim high.” Another time he told a seventeen-year-old Peter, “It is not easy to be rich,” and proceeded to tell him why. Never at a loss for words, Peter said, “I’ll try to remember that, Mr. Cabot.”

Tom Cabot taught me a lesson I shall never forget. He easily could have decided I was a lifetime enemy, but he chose instead to treat me as a friend. Tom Cabot was 98 years old when he died in 1981. I still miss him, as do many others whose lives he touched.

Michael Moore

I was never “big” on Michael Moore. From the time he burst on the scene in connection with his General Motors documentary Roger and Me, I was very turned off by Michael Moore. For the most part I liked his point of view when it came to corporate American and some of the other things he was saying and doing, but I did not like him. I thought he was over the top on many issues, shrill, just plain wrong about some things, and more. Other things that turned me off were his appearance; the way he slouched; the goofy-looking baseball hat he wore lopsided with his long, messy hair coming out on all sides; the sloppy, rumpled dungaree outfit; the sneakers; the glasses he wore—almost everything about him galled me. Gradually, over the years I warmed up to him a bit, but just a bit. I always admired his documentary films but practically nothing else including his several books.

Michael Moore has a new book out, Here Comes Trouble. It’s more than 400 pages, and I read it last weekend in just a few sittings. The best way for me to describe the book is to quote from the publisher’s inside-flap copy, which is something I never do because it is always self-serving and very often not accurate. But here’s what whoever wrote the flap copy to Here Comes Trouble said:

Michael Moore—Oscar-winning filmmaker, bestselling author, the nation’s unofficial provocateur laureate—is back, this time taking on an entirely new role, that of his own meta-Forrest Gump.

Smashing the autobiographical mold, he presents twenty-four far-ranging, irreverent, and stranger-than-fiction vignettes from his own early life. One moment he's an eleven-year-old boy lost in the Senate and found by Bobby Kennedy; and in the next, he's inside the Bitburg cemetery with a dazed and confused Ronald Reagan. At the age of seventeen, he goes to get a snack one day and ends up on the national news—creating a firestorm that helps eliminate racial discrimination at private clubs all across America. He begins his first underground newspaper in fourth grade; sixteen years later, the police are raiding the printing office of his latest publication—and the U.S. Congress steps in and takes up his fight. On top of all that, he becomes one of the youngest elected officials in the country at age eighteen—but not before planning a hilarious "dry-run" escape to Canada with his stoner friends just in case they get drafted to go to Vietnam. Fast-forwarding to 2003, he stuns the world from the Oscar stage by uttering the words, “We live in fictitious times . . . with a fictitious president" in place of the usual “I’d like to thank the Academy.”

And none of that even comes close to the night the friendly priest at the seminary decides to show him how to perform his own exorcism.

All of this is the stuff of great fiction—but every one of these stories is real. Before Michael Moore became the Oscar-winning filmmaker and all-around rabble-rouser and thorn-in-the-side of corporate and right-wing America, there was the guy who had an uncanny knack for just showing up where history was being made. You will be stunned and surprised to meet the Michael Moore you never knew.

Capturing the zeitgeist of the past fifty years, yet deeply personal and unflinchingly honest, HERE COMES TROUBLE takes readers on an unforgettable, take-no-prisoners ride through the life and times of Michael Moore. Alternately funny, eye-opening, and moving, it's a book he has been writing—and living—his entire life.

 Well, Michael Moore’s new book delivers on that promise. The book does indeed “smash the autobiographical mold” and did at times stun me. I was surprised to meet the Michael Moore I never knew. After reading Here Comes Trouble, I realized that Michael Moore has a big heart. Michael Moore loves this Country. Michael Moore is very intelligent. Michael Moore is right about a lot of things. Michael Moore is, in my opinion, still wrong about other things. Michael Moore is misunderstood by many, and a large part of that may be his own fault.

Michael Moore’s book deserves to be read. I did what every school kid is told not to do, and that is to judge a book by its cover. I judged Michael Moore by what I saw, the “cover,” and not by the content, what is inside the man. My mistake. My loss. Sorry, Michael.

"The Tree" is Free

In the preface to my most recent book, Charity Case (Exeter Press, 2011), I wrote, “I have been writing all my life. Well, at least from about age four, a couple of years before I actually learned to write. My grandmother, Nanny—whom you have already met if you’ve read The Tree Nobody Wanted: A Christmas Story—told me that when I was about four I would ask for some paper and a pencil. The paper had to have lines on it. I would spend an hour or more making tiny marks on it from left to right, neatly staying on the lines. She said every couple of minutes I would stop and look off into space as if thinking about what to write next. Then I would resume ‘writing’ again. Nanny told me I did not simply write squiggly lines or scribbles on the paper the way a four-year-old would do, but I also made tiny drawings on the lines—a kind of hieroglyphics—so if it was a story about a canary, I would draw something that resembled a bird and color it yellow with a Crayola crayon. Writing about a boat, I would draw a boat; a big house, something that looked very much like a grand house. . . . I loved to ‘write’ my stories, and Nanny loved to hear me and watch me as I ‘read’ them to her.”

A few years ago, I decided to leave my film and television career—as a producer and script writer—and the business I had built (Commonwealth Films, Inc.) for the last thirty-plus years and spend all my time writing. I felt it was fitting to write the story about the Christmas that this wonderful woman and I spent when I was a small boy living with her in Brooklyn. The result was a very small book, The Tree Nobody Wanted (Exeter Press, 2007). To my total surprise, it became one of those overnight sensations one hears about. Reviewers liked it; the media had nice things to say about it; I signed books in bookstores and set records for sales; and I received hundreds of letters from readers of all ages and from all over the country, telling me how much they liked the book. One common thread that ran through all of the letters and comments was that it touched people’s hearts. Those comments touched my heart, as did the success of that book and the response to it (which you can see a sampling of on my website, tommccannbooks.com). A great many people all over this country have already read the book, but I want more people to read it. I am more interested in having more people read it than I am with selling more copies. So, I will soon be putting the book up on this blog so everyone who wants to read it can read it at no cost. I hope you do, and I hope that you will tell other people about it. If you think you’d like to have the hardcover book itself, either for yourself or as a gift for a friend or relative, you can order copies through tommccannbooks.com at a 50 percent reduction from the published price. (The fulfillment people at Exeter Press will charge $7.50 a copy instead of $14.95 if you identify yourself as a reader of my “Real People” blog.) A Kindle edition will soon be available from Amazon, at $1.99, and wherever digital books are sold. A CD-ROM version is also available from Exeter Press, again for the 50 percent discount rate of $7.50.

Call It What It Is

One of the things I always liked about the sports world was that a player, a coach, or a manager always had several numbers attached to his or her name. Those numbers usually determined his value to the team and often his future with the team. In the case of baseball there are batting averages, runs batted in, home runs, errors, and more. A pitcher has the all-important earned run average, among other statistics such as the number of games won or lost in a season and the record of how he’s done against every batter over the course of a career. The manager of the team is judged by the standing of his team at the end of the season and often by some of the decisions made during the season. When it came time for a player, a coach, or a manager to have his services terminated, or for a player to be traded or cut from the team, there was no question about why it was being done. And it was called what it was—a firing. 

Not so in the business world where I spent Act One of my career. People were always being fired. But if it was someone at the top, it was never called that. He was given a “face save” or a “fig leaf” to cover the fact that he was being forced out. The man being fired (and they were always men in those days) was usually given the chance to resign. He might cite health reasons or say he wanted to spend more time with his family or some other lie. Sometimes he was “kicked upstairs”: If he was president of the company, he was made chairman of the board or vice chairman with no executive powers. He was given an office on another floor that was known as “death row” and allowed to keep his secretary, telephone, and club memberships. Often he was paid for the full term of his contract and even carried on the payroll until his “normal” retirement date years away. I saw a lot of this and even participated in handling a couple of them with the fired executive. They were always bitter and felt wronged despite the fact that they were given money and a face saver. Management also got to save face and avoid having to explain the reasons for the dismissal.

So, down through the years I really liked the honesty of the sports world. However, even that is changing these days.

In Boston we recently had the case of Terry “Tito” Francona, the manager of the Boston Red Sox. Even people who are not baseball fans knew that over the course of September the Red Sox had a “meltdown,” blew a large lead in their division which would have guaranteed them a playoff spot—and were eliminated on the last day of their regular season. A couple of days later, on September 30, Francona held an early evening press conference and announced that he was leaving the team after talking with the ownership that morning, saying, “. . . I felt like it was time for a new voice here. . . .” He repeated the “new voice” phrase several times. Then, at one point toward the end of a very long press conference, which must have been stressful and which he handled with clarity, patience, and sometimes even humor, Tito said, “To be honest with you, I don’t know, or I am not sure how much support there was from ownership. I don’t know that I felt real comfortable. You’ve got to be all-in in this job.” That comment clearly was not in the script, and a short time later the Red Sox front office held its own press conference and said nice things about Tito and his contribution to the team over the eight years he had been in the job. That record is indeed impressive with two world Championships—the one in 2004 was the first time in 86 years. The second came in 2007. But when asked about Tito’s comment about support from ownership, Red Sox president Larry Lucchino said, “I was actually puzzled by that comment.” 

A lot of the fans I heard on sports talk radio felt that Francona was a “scapegoat”; that the ownership “meddled” in baseball decisions and had no right to. Some insiders that talk show hosts called said that the principal owner, John Henry, was unhappy with Francona for the past couple of years because Tito refused to pay more attention to managing the team by a numbers approach Henry has been fascinated with for several years. The theory is that John Henry used the September meltdown as an excuse to get rid of Francona. 

That could be right either in whole or in part. John Henry is accustomed to winning. He wanted his team to win, and they didn’t. He wanted a manager who paid more attention to numbers. John Henry is a businessman; the Red Sox organization is a business. When the team wins, it is good for business; when they lose, it is bad for business. The fans who are critical of letting Francona go must remember that Henry is the owner; he has invested a lot of money in the team itself; the players; and the ballpark. John Henry has a right to be heard and listened to. He has the right to have the kind of a manager who can bring him more wins, more pennants, and more World Series titles. The Red Sox are his team.

Henry was able to afford to buy the principal interest in the team because he has made a lot of money over the last three or four decades. I am no authority on how he made the money, but I do know it had to do primarily with commodity markets and his knowledge of how to play and win in those markets. If there is any business that is all about “numbers,” it is the commodity markets. Some people have used the word “genius” to describe Henry’s skill at making money in those markets. When he came to the Red Sox, he took some risks and began to diversify the organization into other areas, from English soccer to race cars. In 2003 he hired a man named Bill James, who is senior adviser/baseball operations for the Red Sox. Bill James is a sixty-something baseball writer, historian, and statistician. The Red Sox hired him not for his skills as a writer and historian but rather for his knowledge of baseball statistics and his theories. James scientifically analyzes and studies baseball statistical data in an attempt to determine why teams win and lose. For a better understanding of how this works, read Moneyball, the bestseller by Michael Lewis, or go see the film based on the book, now in theaters. It is the story of Billy Beane, GM of the Oakland Athletics, who began applying some of these same statistical principles to running his low-budget, low-placed team in the late 1990s and was rewarded with astonishing results.  Incidentally, the word is that John Henry tried to hire Billy Beane in 2003 or 2004 to be the Red Sox GM, so that says something about Mr. Henry’s regard for the scientific numbers approach. But he is also smart enough to know that baseball, like business, is not just about numbers.

It is probably a safe bet that when Henry was running his commodity business with legendary results, he had a “theory” and it certainly involved numbers. If he wants to run his Red Sox business the same way, that is his business. If he wants to have a voice in how the baseball operations are run, again that is his business, and he has every right to do so without being accused of “meddling.”  A lot of people are saying things like that and worse. They are saying that the ownership should have nothing to do with the baseball operations. That argument reminds me that for decades the owners of some of our major newspapers and magazines have told their critics that they have nothing to do with the editorial policy or content or the hiring or firing of the people responsible for those areas. That is, in my opinion, nonsense. Why would anyone want to own a newspaper, magazine, television network, or baseball team if he or she could not have some voice in how things are run, which ultimately affects the profit or loss of his investment. 

Mr. Henry and his partners have every right to do what they did about Terry Francona and anything or anyone else concerning the Red Sox. I only wish they had called it what it was—a firing. To have done that would have enhanced management and ownership’s credibility. Notice I said “enhanced,” because the front office already enjoys a lot of credibility with the fans, the sports press, and I believe with the Red Sox players. I feel it was a mistake to call it Francona’s decision. I also have a feeling that Terry Francona would have been happier to say, “The ownership does not want me around next year,” instead of what he said.