The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales From a Strange Time Read online

  There are some people in "the trade," in fact, who can't understand why the Chevrolet wizards consider Killy as valuable -- on the image-selling scale -- as a hotdog American folk hero like O. J. Simpson.

  "What the hell were they thinking about when they signed that guy for three hundred grand a year?" muttered a ranking "automotive journalist" as he watched Killy's act on Saturday afternoon.

  I shook my head and wondered, remembering DeLorean's owlish confidence that morning at the press breakfast. Then I looked at the crowd surrounding Killy. They were white and apparently solvent, their average age around 30 -- the kind of people who could obviously afford to buy skis and make payments on new cars. O. J. Simpson drew bigger crowds, but most of his admirers were around 12 years old. Two-thirds of them were black and many looked like fugitives from the Credit Bureau's garnishee file.

  Mark McCormack signed to manage Arnold Palmer a decade ago-- just prior to the Great Golf Boom. His reasons for betting on Killy are just as obvious. Skiing is no longer an esoteric sport for the idle rich, but a fantastically popular new winter status-game for anyone who can afford $500 for equipment. Five years ago the figure would have been three times that, plus another loose $1,000 for a week at Stowe or Sun Valley, but now, with the advent of snow-making machines, even Chattanooga is a "ski-town." The Midwest is dotted with icy "week-night" slalom hills, lit up like the miniature golf courses of the Eisenhower age.

  The origins of the ski boom were based entirely on economics and the appeal of the sport itself. . . no freaky hypes or shoestring promotion campaigns. . . the Money Boom of the 1960's produced a sassy middle class with time on its hands, and suddenly there was a mushrooming demand for things like golf clubs, motorboats and skis. In retrospect, the wonder of it is that it took people like McCormack so long to grab a good thing. Or maybe the problem was a lack of ski heroes. Does anyone remember, for instance, who won Gold Medals at the '64 Winter Olympics? It was the prominence of Jean-Claude Killy (as a hot racer in 1966 and as a press hero in '67 and '68) that suddenly gave skiing an image. Jean-Claude emerged from the '68 Olympics as a sort of sauve Joe Namath, a "swinging Frenchman" with the style of a jet-set maverick and the mind of a Paris bartender.

  The result was inevitable: a super-priced French import, tailored strictly for the fast-growing U.S. leisure market, the same people who suddenly found themselves able to afford Porsches, Mercedes and Jaguars. . . along with MG's and Volkswagens.

  But not Fords or Chevvys. "Detroit iron" didn't make it in that league. . . mainly because there is no room in the brass ranks of the U.S. auto industry for the kind of executive who understands why a man who can afford a Cadillac will buy a Porsche instead. There was simply no status in owning a $10,000 car with no back seat and a hood only five feet long.

  So now we have a DeLorean-style blitz for Chevrolet, and it's doing beautifully. Booming Chevvy sales are mainly responsible for GM's spurt to a plus-50 per cent of the whole auto market. The strategy has been simple enough: a heavy focus on speed, sporty styling and the "youth market." This explains Chevvy's taste for such image-makers as Simpson, Glen Campbell and Killy. (Speculation that DeLorean was about to sign Allen Ginsberg proved to be false: General Motors doesn't need poets.)

  Killy has spent his entire adult life in the finely disciplined cocoon that is part of the price one pays for membership of the French ski team. As a life style, it is every bit as demanding as that of a pro football quarterback. In a sport where the difference between fame and total obscurity is measured in tenths of a second, the discipline of constant, rigid training is all important. Championship skiers, like karate masters, need muscles that most men never develop. The karate parallel extends, beyond muscles, to the necessity for an almost superhuman concentration -- the ability to see and remember every bump and twist on a race course, and then to run it without a single mistake: no mental lapses, no distractions, no wasted effort. The only way to win is to come down that hill with maximum efficiency, like a cannonball down a one-rail track. A skier who thinks too much might make points in conversation, but he seldom wins races.

  Killy has been accused, by experts, of "lacking style." He skis, they say, with the graceless desperation of a man about to crash, fighting to keep his balance. Yet it's obvious, even to a rank amateur, that Killy's whole secret is his feverish concentration. He attacks a hill like Sonny Listen used to attack Floyd Patterson -- and with the same kind of awesome results. He wants to beat the hill, not just ski it. He whips through a slalom course like O. J. Simpson through a jammed secondary -- the same impossible moves; sliding, half-falling, then suddenly free and pumping crazily for the finish line to beat that awful clock, the only judge in the world with the power to send him home a loser.

  Shortly after I met him, I told Killy he should see some films of O. J. Simpson running with a football. Jean-Claude didn't know the game, he said, but I insisted that wouldn't matter. "It's like watching a drunk run through traffic on a freeway," I said. "You don't have to know the game to appreciate O. J.'s act -- it's a spectacle, a thing to see. . ."

  That was before I understood the boundaries of Kilty's curiosity. Like Calvin Coolidge, he seems to feel that "the business of America is business." He comes here to make money, and esthetics be damned. He wasn't interested in anything about O. J. Simpson except the size of his Chevrolet contract -- and only vaguely in that.

  Throughout our numerous, distracted conversations, he was puzzled and dimly annoyed with the rambling style of my talk. He seemed to feel that any journalist worthy of his profession would submit 10 very precise questions, write down 10 scripted Killy answers and then leave. No doubt this reflected the thinking of his PR advisers, who favor such concepts as "input," "exposure" and "the Barnum Imperative."

  My decision to quit the Killy story came suddenly, for no special reason. . . an irrational outburst of red-eyed temper and festering angst with the supplicant's role I'd been playing for two days, dealing with a gang of cheap-jack footmen whose sense of personal importance seemed to depend entirely on the glitter of their hired French property.

  Some time later, when I had calmed down enough to consider another attempt at cracking the PR barrier, I talked to Jean-Claude on the telephone. He was in Sun Valley, allowing himself to be photographed for a magazine feature on the "Killy style." I called to explain why I hadn't made the night with him, as planned, from Chicago to Sun Valley. "You've made some funny friends in the past year," I said. "Doesn't it make you nervous to travel around with a bunch of cops?"

  He laughed quietly. "That's right," he said. "They are just like cops, aren't they? I don't like it, but what can I do? I am never alone. . . This is my life, you know."

  I have a tape of that conversation, and I play it now and then for laughs. It is a weird classic of sorts -- 45 minutes of failed communication, despite heroic efforts on both ends. The over-all effect is that of a career speed-freak jacked up like the Great Hummingbird, trying to talk his way through a cordon of bemused ushers and into a free, front-row seat at a sold-out Bob Dylan concert.

  I had made the call, half-grudgingly, after being assured by Millie Wiggins Solheim, the Style Queen of Sun Valley, that she had learned through the Head Ski hierarchy that Jean-Claude was eager for a soul-talk with me. What the hell? I thought Why not? But this time on my terms -- in the midnight style of the Great Hummingbird. The tape is full of laughter and disjointed ravings. Killy first suggested that I meet him again at the Auto Show in Chicago, where he was scheduled for a second weekend of Chevvy gigs on the same 1-3-5-7-9 schedule.

  "Never in hell," I replied. "You're paid to hang around with those pigs, but I'm not. They acted like they expected me to sneak up and steal the battery out of that goddamn ugly car you were selling."

  He laughed again. "It's true that they pay me for being there. . . but you get paid for writing the article."

  "What article?" I said. "As far as I know, you don't exist. You're a life-size dummy made of
plastic foam. I can't write much of an article about how I once saw Jean-Claude Killy across a crowded room at the Stockyards Amphitheatre."

  There was a pause, another quiet chuckle, then: "Well, maybe you could write about how hard it is to write about me."

  Oh ho, I thought. You sneaky bugger -- there's something in your head, after all. It was the only time I ever felt we were on the same wavelength -- and then for only an instant. The conversation deteriorated rapidly after that.

  We talked a while longer and I finally said, "Well, to hell with it. You don't need publicity and I sure as hell don't need this kind of fuckaround. . . They should have assigned this story to an ambitious dwarf hooker with gold teeth. . ."

  There was a long pause at the other end of the line. Then: "Why don't you call Bud Stanner, the manager from Head Ski. He is here in the Lodge tonight. I think he can arrange something."

  Why not? I thought. By the time I got hold of Stanner it was 1 A.M.

  I assured him that all I needed was a bit of casual conversation and some time to watch Killy in action.

  "I'm not surprised Jean-Claude wouldn't talk to you tonight," he said with a knowing chuckle. "I happen to know he's being. . . ah. . . entertained at the moment."

  "That's weird," I said, "I just finished a 45-minute talk with him."

  "Oh. . . ?" Stanner pondered my words for a moment, then, like a skilled politician, he ignored them. "It's the damnedest thing you ever saw," he continued cheerfully. "Goddamn broads won't give him any peace. It's embarrassing sometimes, the way they come on him. . ."

  "Yeah," I said. "I've heard." Actually, I'd heard it so often that I recognized it now as part of the program. Killy has a very obvious, natural kind of sex appeal -- so obvious that I was getting a little tired of hustlers nudging me to make sure I noticed. McCormack had set the tone at our first encounter, with his odd warning about "discretion." Moments later, replying to somebody who'd asked him if Killy had any plans for a film career, McCormack had grinned and said, "Oh, we're not in any hurry; he's had plenty of offers. And every time he says no, the price goes up."

  Killy himself says nothing. Straight interviews bore him anyway, but he usually tries to be civil, even smiling, despite the brain-curdling tedium of answering the same questions over and over again. He will cope with almost any kind of giddy ignorance, but his smile snaps off like a dead lightbulb when he senses a carnal drift in the conversation. If the interviewer persists, or launches a direct question like, "Is there any truth in this rumor about you and Winnie Ruth Judd?", Killy will invariably change the subject with an angry shrug.

  His reluctance to talk about women seems genuine, leaving disappointed reporters no choice but to hunker down in misty speculation. "Killy has a reputation as a skiing Romeo," wrote the author of a recent magazine article. "Typically French, though, he remains discreet about his swinging love life, saying little more than, yes, he has a girl friend, a model."

  Which was true. He had spent a quiet vacation with her in the Bahamas the week before I met him in Chicago, and at first I got the impression that he was fairly serious about her. . . Then, after listening to his pitchmen for a while, I wasn't sure what I thought. The "discretion" that would have been the despair of any old-style, low-level press agent has become, in the hands of McCormack's cool futurists, a mysterious and half-sinister cover story, using Killy's awkward "no comment" behavior to enhance whatever rumor he refuses to talk about.

  Jean-Claude understands that his sex-life has a certain publicity value, but he hasn't learned to like it. At one point I asked him how he felt about that aspect of his image. "What can I say?" he shrugged. "They keep talking about it. I am normal. I like girls. But what I do is really my own business, I think. . ."

  (Shortly after that phone talk with him in Sun Valley, I learned that he really was being "entertained" when I called, and I've never quite understood why he spent 45 minutes on the phone in those circumstances. What a terrible scene for a girl. . .)

  I tried to be frank with Stanner. Early on, in our talk, he said: "Look, I'll give you all the help I can on this thing, and I think I'm in a position to give you the kind of help you need. Naturally, I'd expect some play for Head Skis in your photo coverage and of course that's my job. . ."

  "Fuck the skis," I replied. "I couldn't give a hoot in hell if he skis on metal bowls; all I want to do is talk to the man, in a decent human manner, and find out what he thinks about things."

  This was not the kind of thing Stanner wanted to hear, but under the circumstances he handled it pretty well. "O.K." he said, after a brief pause. "I think we understand each other. You're looking for input that's kind of offbeat, right?"

  "Input?" I said. He had used the term several times and I thought I'd better clarify it.

  "You know what I mean," he snapped, "and I'll try to set it up for you."

  I started making plans to go up to Sun Valley anyway but then Stanner disrupted everything by suddenly offering to arrange for me -- instead of Ski Magazine's editor -- to accompany J.-C. on that Eastbound flight. "You'll have a whole day with him," Stanner said, "and if you want to come to Boston next week I'll save you a seat on the company bus for the ride to Waterville Valley in New Hampshire. Jean-Claude will be along, and as far as I'm concerned you can have him all to yourself for the whole trip. It takes about two hours. Hell, maybe you'd rather do that, instead of working your ass off to make that cross-country flight with him. . ."

  "No," I said. "I'll do it both ways -- first the flight, then the bus ride; that should give me all the offbeat input I need."

  He sighed.

  Killy was there in Salt Lake, red-eyed and jittery with a Coke and a ham sandwich in the airport cafe. A man from United Airlines was sitting with him, a waitress stopped to ask for his autograph, people who had no idea who he was paused to nod and stare at "the celebrity."

  The local TV station had sent out a camera crew, which caused a crowd to gather around the gate where our plane was waiting. "How do these people know when I'm here?" he muttered angrily as we hurried down the corridor toward the mob.

  I smiled at him. "Come on," I said, "you know damn well who called them. Do we have to keep playing this game?"

  He smiled faintly, then lined it out like a veteran. "You go ahead," he said. "Get our seats on the plane while I talk to these camera people."

  Which he did, while I boarded the plane and instantly found myself involved in a game of musical chairs with the couple who were being moved back to the tourist compartment so Jean-Claude and I could have their First Class seats. "I've blocked these two off for you," the man in the blue uniform told me.

  The dowdy little stewardess told the victims how sorry she was -- over and over again, while the man howled in the aisle. I hunkered down in the seat and stared straight ahead, wishing him well. Killy arrived, ignoring the ruckus and slumping into his seat with a weary groan. There was no doubt in his mind that the seat was being saved for Jean-Claude Killy. The man in the aisle seemed to recognize that his protest was doomed: his seats had been seized by forces beyond his control. "You sons of bitches!" he yelled, shaking his fist at the crewmen who were pushing him back toward the tourist section. I was hoping he would whack one of them or at least refuse to stay on the plane but he caved in, allowing himself to be hustled off like a noisy beggar.

  "What was that about?" Killy asked me.

  I told him. "Bad scene, eh?" he said. Then he pulled a car racing magazine out of his briefcase and focused on that. I thought of going back and advising the man that he could get a full refund on his ticket if he kept yelling, but the flight was delayed for at least an hour on the runway and I was afraid to leave my seat for fear it might be grabbed by some late-arriving celebrity.

  Within moments, a new hassle developed. I asked the stewardess for a drink and was told that it was against the rules to serve booze until the plane was airborne. Thirty minutes later, still sitting on the runway, I got the same
answer. There is something in the corporate manner of United Airlines that reminds me of the California Highway Patrol, the exaggerated politeness of people who would be a hell of a lot happier if all their customers were in jail -- and especially you, sir.

  Flying United, to me, is like crossing the Andes in a prison bus. There is no question in my mind that somebody like Pat Nixon personally approves every United stewardess. Nowhere in the Western world is there anything to equal the collection of self-righteous shrews who staff the "friendly skies of United." I do everything possible to avoid that airline, often at considerable cost and personal inconvenience. But I rarely make my own reservations and United seems to be a habit -- like Yellow Cabs -- with secretaries and PR men. And maybe they're right. . .

  My constant requests for a drink to ease the delay were rebuked with increasing severity by the same stewardess who had earlier defended my right to preempt a first class seat. Killy tried to ignore the argument but finally abandoned his magazine to view the whole scene with nervous alarm. He lifted his dark glasses to wipe his eyes -- red-veined balls in a face that looked much older than 26. Then a man in a blue blazer confronted us, shoving a little girl ahead of him. "Probably you don't remember me, Jean-Claude," he was saying. "We met about two years ago at a cocktail party in Vail."