The Great Shark Hunt, page 11
I shook my head. Killy’s hard-sell scenes no longer surprised me, but finding him trapped in a beer and hotdog gig was like wandering into some housing-project kaffeeklatsch and finding Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis making a straight-faced pitch for Folger’s instant-brewed.
My head was not straight at that stage of the investigation. Two weeks of guerrilla warfare with Jean-Claude Killy’s publicity juggernaut had driven me to the brink of hysteria. What had begun in Chicago as a simple sketch of a French athlete turned American culture-hero had developed, by the time I got to Boston, into a series of maddening skirmishes with an interlocking directorate of public relations people.
I was past the point of needing any more private time with Jean-Claude. We had already done our thing—a four-hour head-on clash that ended with him yelling: “You and me, we are completely different. We are not the same kind of people! You don’t understand! You could never do what I’m doing! You sit there and smile, but you don’t know what it is! I am tired. Tired! I don’t care anymore—not on the inside or the outside! I don’t care what I say, what I think, but I have to keep doing it. And two weeks from now I can go back home to rest, and spend all my money.”
There was a hint of decency—perhaps even humor—about him, but the high-powered realities of the world he lives in now make it hard to deal with him on any terms except those of pure commerce. His handlers rush him from one scheduled appearance to the next; his time and priorities are parceled out according to their dollar/publicity value; everything he says is screened and programmed. He often sounds like a prisoner of war, dutifully repeating his name, rank and serial number… and smiling, just as dutifully, fixing his interrogator with that wistful, distracted sort of half-grin that he knows is deadly effective because his handlers have showed him the evidence in a hundred press-clippings. The smile has become a trademark. It combines James Dean, Porfiro Rubirosa and a teen-age bank clerk with a foolproof embezzlement scheme.
Killy projects an innocence and a shy vulnerability that he is working very hard to overcome. He likes the carefree, hell-for-leather image that he earned as the world’s best ski racer, but nostalgia is not his bag, and his real interest now is his new commercial scene, the high-rolling world of the Money Game, where nothing is free and amateurs are called Losers. The wistful smile is still there, and Killy is shrewd enough to value it, but it will be a hard thing to retain through three years of Auto Shows, even for $100,000 a year.
* * *
We began in Chicago, at some awful hour of the morning, when I was roused out of a hotel stupor and hustled around a corner on Michigan Avenue to where Chevrolet’s general manager John Z. DeLorean was addressing an audience of 75 “automotive writers” at a breakfast press conference on the mezzanine of the Continental Plaza. The room looked like a bingo parlor in Tulsa—narrow, full of long formica tables with a makeshift bar at one end serving coffee, Bloody Marys and sweet rolls. It was the morning of the first big weekend of the Chicago Auto Show, and Chevrolet was going whole-hog. Sitting next to DeLorean at the head table were Jean-Claude Killy and O. J. Simpson, the football hero.
Killy’s manager was there—a tall, thick fellow named Mark McCormack, from Cleveland, a specialist in rich athletes and probably the only man alive who knows what Killy is worth. Figures ranging from $100,000 to $500,000 a year are meaningless in the context of today’s long-term high finance. A good tax lawyer can work miracles with a six-figure income… and with all the fine machinery available to a man who can hire the best money-managers, Killy’s finances are so skillfully tangled that he can’t understand them himself.
In some cases, a big contract—say, $500,000—is really a 5-year annual salary of $20,000 with a $400,000 interest-free loan, deposited in the star’s account, paying anywhere from 5 per cent to 20 per cent annually, depending on how he uses it. He can’t touch the principal, but a $400,000 nut will yield $30,000 a year by accident—and a money-man working for 30 per cent can easily triple that figure.
With that kind of property to protect, McCormack has assumed veto-power over anyone assigned to write about it for the public prints. This is compounded in its foulness by the fact that he usually gets away with it. Just prior to my introduction he had vetoed a writer from one of the big-selling men’s magazines—who eventually wrote a very good Killy article anyway but without ever talking to the subject.
“Naturally, you’ll be discreet,” he told me.
“About what?”
“You know what I mean.” He smiled. “Jean-Claude has his private life and I’m sure you won’t want to embarrass him or anyone else—including yourself, I might add—by violating confidence.”
“Well… certainly not,” I replied, flashing him a fine eyebrow shrug to cover my puzzlement. He seemed pleased, and I glanced over at Killy, who was chatting amiably with DeLorean, saying, “I hope you can ski with me sometime at Val d’Isère.”
Was there something depraved in that face? Could the innocent smile mask a twisted mind? What was McCormack hinting at? Nothing in Killy’s manner seemed weird or degenerate. He spoke earnestly—not comfortable with English, but handling it well enough. If anything, he seemed overly polite, very concerned with saying the right thing, like an Ivy League business school grad doing well on his first job interview—confident, but not quite sure. It was hard to imagine him as a sex freak, hurrying back to his hotel room and calling room service for a cattle prod and two female iguanas.
I shrugged and mixed myself another Bloody Mary. McCormack seemed satisfied that I was giddy and malleable enough for the task at hand, so he switched his attention to a small, wavy-haired fellow named Leonard Roller, a representative of one of Chevrolet’s numerous public relations firms.
I drifted over to introduce myself. Jean-Claude laid his famous smile on me and we talked briefly about nothing at all. I took it for granted that he was tired of dealing with writers, reporters, gossip-hustlers and that ilk, so I explained that I was more interested in his new role as salesman-celebrity—and his reactions to it—than I was in the standard, question/ answer game. He seemed to understand, smiling sympathetically at my complaints about lack of sleep and early-morning press conferences.
Killy is smaller than he looks on television, but larger than most ski racers, who are usually short and beefy, like weight-lifting jockeys and human cannonballs. He is almost 6-feet tall and claims to weigh 175 pounds—which is easy enough to believe when you meet him head-on, but his profile looks nearly weightless. Viewed from the side, his frame is so flat that he seems like a life-size cardboard cut-out. Then, when he turns to face you again, he looks like a scaled-down Joe Palooka, perfectly built. In swimming trunks he is almost delicate, except for his thighs—huge chunks of muscle, the thighs of an Olympic sprinter or a pro basketball guard… or a man who has spent a lifetime on skis.
Jean-Claude, like Jay Gatsby, has “one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.” That description of Gatsby by Nick Carraway—of Scott, by Fitzgerald—might just as well be of J.-C. Killy, who also fits the rest of it: “Precisely at that point [Gatsby’s smile] vanished—and I was looking at an elegant young roughneck, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd…”
The point is not to knock Killy’s English, which is far better than my French, but to emphasize his careful, finely coached choice of words. “He’s an amazing boy,” I was told later by Len Roller. “He works at this [selling Chevrolets] just as hard as he used to work at winning races. He attacks it with the same concentration you remember from watching him ski.” The assumption that I remembered Killy on skis came naturally to Roller. Jean-Claude is on TV so often, skiing at selected resorts all over the world, that it is nearly impossible to miss seeing him. This is The Exposure that makes him so valuable; every TV appearance adds dollars to his price. People recognize Killy, and they like his image—a sexy daredevil, booming downhill toward a cushion of naked snowbunnies. This is why Chevrolet pays him a salary far larger than Nixon’s to say, over and over again, “For me, zee Camaro is a fine foreign sports car. I own one, you know. I keep it in my garage at Val d’Isère” (Killy’s hometown in the French Alps).
Jean-Claude emerged from the 1968 Winter Olympics with an incredible three gold medals and then he retired, ending his “amateur” career like a human skyrocket. There was nothing left to win; after two World Cups (the equivalent of two straight Heisman Trophies in U. S. collegiate football) and an unprecedented sweep of all three Olympic skiing events (the equivalent of a sprinter winning the 100, 220 and 440), Killy’s career reads as if his press agent had written the script for it—a series of spectacular personal victories, climaxed by the first triple-crown triumph in the history of skiing while the whole world watched on TV.
The nervous tedium of forced retirement obviously bothers Killy, but it comes as no surprise to him. He was looking over the hump even before his final triumph in the ’68 Olympics. Between training sessions at Grenoble he talked like a character out of some early Hemingway sketch, shrugging blankly at the knowledge that he was coming to the end of the only thing he knew: “Soon skiing will be worn out for me,” he said. “For the last 10 years I have prepared myself to become the world champion. My thoughts were only to better my control and my style in order to become the best. Then last year [1967] I became the world champion. I was given a small medal and for two days after that it was hell. I discovered that I was still eating like everybody else, sleeping like everybody else—that I hadn’t become the superman I thought my title would make me. The discovery actually destroyed me for two days. So when people speak to me about the excitement of becoming an Olympic champion this year—should it happen—I know it will be the same thing all over again. I know that after the races at Grenoble the best thing for me is to stop.”
For Killy, the Olympics were the end of the road. The wave of the future crashed down on him within hours after his disputed Grand Slalom victory over Karl Schranz of Austria. Suddenly they were on him—a chattering greenback swarm of agents, money-mongers and would-be “personal reps” of every shape and description. Mark McCormack’s persistence lent weight to his glittering claim that he could do for Killy what he had already done for Arnold Palmer. Jean-Claude listened, shrugged, then ducked out for a while—to Paris, the Riviera, back home to Val d’Isère—and finally, after weeks of half-heartedly dodging the inevitable, signed with McCormack. The only sure thing in the deal was a hell of a lot of money, both sooner and later. Beyond that, Killy had no idea what he was getting into.
* * *
Now he was showing us how much he’d learned. The Chevvy press breakfast was breaking up and Len Roller suggested that the three of us go downstairs to the dining room. J.-C. nodded brightly and I smiled the calm smile of a man about to be rescued from a Honkers’ Convention. We drifted downstairs, where Roller found us a corner table in the dining room before excusing himself to make a phone call. The waitress brought menus, but Killy waved her off, saying he wanted only prune juice. I was on the verge of ordering huevos rancheros with a double side of bacon, but in deference to J.-C.’s apparent illness I settled for grapefruit and coffee.
Killy was studying a mimeographed news release that I’d grabbed off a table at the press conference in lieu of notepaper. He nudged me and pointed at something in the lead paragraph. “Isn’t this amazing?” he asked. I looked: The used side of my notepaper was headed: NEWS… from Chevrolet Motor Division… CHICAGO—Chevrolet began its “spring selling season” as early as January first this year, John Z. DeLorean, general manager, said here today. He told newsmen attending the opening of the Chicago Auto Show that Chevrolet sales are off to the fastest start since its record year of 1965. “We sold 352,000 cars in January and February,” DeLorean said. “That’s 22 per cent ahead of last year. It gave us 26.9 per cent of the industry, compared to 23 per cent a year ago…”
Killy said it again: “Isn’t this amazing?” I looked to see if he was smiling but his face was deadly serious and his voice was pure snake oil. I called for more coffee, nodding distractedly at Killy’s awkward hustle, and cursing the greedy instinct that had brought me into this thing… sleepless and ill-fed, trapped in a strange food-cellar with a French auto salesman.
But I stayed to play the game, gnawing on my grapefruit and soon following Roller out to the street, where we were scooped up by a large nondescript car that must have been a Chevrolet. I asked where we were going and somebody said, “First to the Merchandise Mart, where he’ll do a tape for Kup’s show, and then to the Auto Show—at the Stockyards.”
That last note hung for a moment, not registering… Kup’s show was bad enough. I had been on it once, and caused a nasty scene by calling Adlai Stevenson a professional liar when all the other guests were there to publicize some kind of Stevenson Memorial. Now nearly two years later, I saw no point in introducing myself. Kup was taking it easy this time, joking with athletes. Killy was overshadowed by Bart Starr, representing Lincoln-Mercury, and Fran Tarkenton, wearing a Dodge blazer… but with Killy in eclipse the Chevrolet team still made the nut with O. J. Simpson, modestly admitting that he probably wouldn’t tear the National Football League apart in his first year as a pro. It was a dull, low-level discussion, liberally spotted with promo mentions for the Auto Show.
Jean-Claude’s only breakthrough came when Kup, cued by a story in that morning’s Tribune, asked what Killy really thought about the whole question of “amateur” athletic status. “Is it safe to assume,” Kup asked, “that you were paid for using certain skis in the Olympics?”
“Safe?” Killy asked…
Kup checked his notes for a new question and Killy looked relieved. The hypocrisy inherent in the whole concept of “amateurism” has always annoyed Killy, and now, with the immunity of graduate status, he doesn’t mind admitting that he views the whole game as a fraud and a folly. During most of his career on the French ski team he was listed, for publicity reasons, as a Government-employed Customs Inspector. Nobody believed it, not even officials of the Fédération Internationale de Ski (FIS), the governing body for world-class amateur ski competition. The whole idea was absurd. Who, after all, could believe that the reigning world ski champion—a hero/celebrity whose arrival in any airport from Paris to Tokyo drew crowds and TV cameras—was actually supporting himself on a salary gleaned from his off-season efforts in some dreary customs shed at Marseilles?
He spoke with a definite humility, as if he felt slightly embarrassed by all the advantages he’d had. Then, about two hours later when our talk had turned to contemporary things—the high-style realities of his new jet-set life—he suddenly blurted: “Before, I could only dream about these things. When I was young I had nothing, I was poor… Now I can have anything I want!”
Jean-Claude seems to understand, without really resenting it, that he is being weaned away from the frank unvarnished style of his amateur days. One afternoon at Vail, for instance, he listened to a sportscaster telling him what a great run he’d just made, and then, fully aware that he was talking for a live broadcast, Jean-Claude laughed at the commentary and said he’d just made one of the worst runs of his life—a complete-disaster, doing everything wrong. Now, with the help of his professional advisers, he has learned to be patient and polite—especially in America, with the press. In France he is more secure, and far more recognizable to the people who knew him before he became a salesman. He was in Paris last spring when Avery Brundage, 82-year-old president of the International Olympic Committee, called on Jean-Claude and several other winners of gold medals at the 1968 Winter Olympics to return them. Brundage, a tunnel-visioned purist of the Old School, was shocked by disclosures that many of the winners—including Killy—didn’t even know what the word “amateur” meant. For years, said Brundage, these faithless poseurs had been accepting money from “commercial interests” ranging from equipment manufacturers to magazine publishers.
One of these gimmicks made headlines just prior to the start of the Games, if memory serves, and was awkwardly resolved by a quick ruling that none of the winners could either mention or display their skis (or any other equipment) during any TV interview or press exposure. Until then, it had been standard practice for the winner of any major race to make the brand-name on his skis as prominent as possible during all camera sessions. The “no-show” ruling worked a hardship on a lot of skiers at Grenoble, but it failed to satisfy Avery Brundage. His demand that the medals be returned called up memories of Jim Thorpe, who was stripped of everything he won in the 1912 Olympics because he had once been paid to play in a semi-pro baseball game. Thorpe went along with the madness, returning his medals and living the rest of his life with the taint of “disgrace” on his name. Even now, the nasty Olympics scandal is the main feature of Thorpe’s biographical sketch in the new Columbia Encyclopedia.
But when a Montreal Star reporter asked Jean-Claude how he felt about turning in his Olympic medals, he replied: “Let Brundage come over here himself and take them from me.”
It was a rare public display of “the old Jean-Claude.” His American personality has been carefully manicured to avoid such outbursts. Chevrolet doesn’t pay him to say what he thinks, but to sell Chevrolets—and you don’t do that by telling self-righteous old men to fuck off. You don’t even admit that the French Government paid you to be a skier because things are done that way in France and most other countries, and nobody born after 1900 calls it anything but natural… when you sell Chevrolets in America you honor the myths and mentality of the marketplace: You smile like Horatio Alger and give all the credit to Mom and Dad, who never lost faith in you and even mortgaged their ingots when things got tough.
