The New Yorker Radio Hour - Episode 10: Lenny Shiller's Famous Cars, and the Search for a Lost Father

Episode Date: December 25, 2015

Lenny Shiller owns some of the most recognizable cars around; his vintage vehicles have been appearing in movies for years (often with Lenny at the wheel). We’ll visit the garage in Brooklyn they call home.  A black woman raised in a white family searches for the biological father she never knew, a man known as Big Brown, while coming to terms with her race. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNMIC Studios and The New Yorker. You're here with Lenny Schiller. We're in what I affectionately call Lenny's Garage. I guess I'm known as a car collector. Some people call me Brooklyn's Jay Leno because I'm up to 63 cars, I believe. I've actually lost count. It's either 63 or 64. I'm David Remnick, and thanks for joining us for the New Yorker Radio Hour today.

I hope you're having a great holiday. We're starting the show off in a garage. A garage full of cars, vintage and antique cars going back to the 30s. They don't get driven very often, but you've seen some of them because for decades, Lenny Schiller has been renting these cars out to movie sets. Most recently, he had a car in the Spielberg thriller, Bridge of Spies. Here's Schiller with the New Yorker's Jonathan Blitzer. Describe this car a little bit for it.

Yeah, it's a 1949, Christle Woody Wagon. I thought the Woody Wagon was in Quiz Show. Yes, you're correct. The Woody Wagon was in Quis Show. It was used in the scenes upstate. I think it was shot at Sterling Forest. And actually Robert Redford was in that car. Oh, look at this car.

Because you could be anywhere. As long as it's no, there's nothing, what do you call them, an acronym, something that's later. Yeah, you could be almost anywhere. You pop a 49 car there and it transforms the setting to the year of the car. Dick, I'm glad you can make it. Hi. My original idea for collecting was to have one car

from each year from 1936 to 1958. And there's a reason for that is over there was a 1936 Chevrolet. That was my grandmother's car. So that was your first one. That's car number one. That's car number one.

As a little kid, when we visited my grandparents up in the Catskills, I would run into the garage. I guess I had the bug in me. I would run to the garage, was actually a barn, and I would sit behind the wheel and make believe like little kids do.

But when my grandmother gave up driving and was going to part with the car, I really felt it was important to keep it in the family. One time you were driving in a movie, and your daughter was hiding in the back seat because she wanted to go on this ride with you. Oh, yes, that was actually the first movie.

That was the 36 Chevy. Yeah, that was the movie The Chosen. I hadn't really worked on any movies, and she was a little kid and wanted to be in the car. And as we drove by, she popped up to look out the window. And that, of course, ruined the scene, and they pretty much yanked her out of the car. Anyway, now I can look like Arrow Flynn.

Who is he? Robin Hood. Captain Blood, Arrow Flint. You don't know who Arrow Flynn is? The movie star? Oh, never been to a movie. In Enemies the Love Story, at first they used it as a prop. And then they also used it on another scene.

When they were doing that movie, there was a video store on the corner, Hester Video, and he refused to let them cover up the sign. It's a post-World War II movie. So they paid me nice money, just to park in front of that store and blocked the sign. I mean, you've appeared in all of these films, sometimes as the soda man when you're driving your soda truck. Correct. The idea is to blend in with the scene.

You don't want to call attention to yourself. And actually, most movies, like a car like this Volvo, which I just bought, this 63 Volvo, they don't want a call like that in a movie. They prefer no yellow cars, no red cars, and no white cars. Nothing can take the attention away from the scene itself. Exactly correct. Tell us about some other movies. Well, I guess I had that salsa truck, and it was in a Paul Mazursky film, Enemies a Love Story, with the late Ron Silver.

And that was fun. I did get to play the salsa man in that movie carrying the salsa bottles. And actually, I think the bottles are now worth more than the truck. So that soda truck has been in several more films, too. I mean, that's maybe... Yeah, I think it's... At this point, it's been in eight movies. The last big movie I worked on with that truck was Pollock in 1999.

The Ed Harris. The Ed Harris. Correct. The Ed Harris movie. What's the matter, Jackson? You're all right? You've always been interested in rare pieces. I mean, you've not gone for the kind of flashy luxury cars,

although you have some. Well, my philosophy is why have a Model A Ford when you can have a 1929 Durant or a 1924 star that nobody has seen? Something really odd. Was it the funeral? You taught some of these actors how to even drive sticks. Oh, the funeral, yeah, that was Chris Penn.

Couldn't drive a stick shift. So I had to teach him how to drive a stick shift, at least pull the car up. in first. He was kind of a character to deal with. And Christopher Walken. Christopher Walker could get into any car and drive it, you know, hands down. Maybe one day they're going to find me with my blood draining into the sewer. And when I'm dead, I'm going to roast in hell. I believe that.

I guess my fondest recollections of some of the music videos, I actually provided the car for parents just don't understand, which is Will Smith's first video. There's no need to argue Paris just don't understand. This is a red Porsche, if you remember that video. But the most famous guy here is the Love Shack car. The 65 Chrysler 300, the one that's the color of Pistachio Ice Cream. That was the actual car in the Love Shack video where I'm driving a Chrysler, it's as big as a whale. That was kind of a revival hit for the B-52s.

If I drive this car, I get sometimes. gets recognition. Now and again, as a favor maybe to an old friend or because a project seems especially interesting, you'll do it, you'll do a film or a shoot,

but for the most part now, you're here in the garage working on the cars that you love. You know, that's, I don't really mind taking the vehicle out for photo shoots. I really stay away from music videos

because they're long hours. And movie work I'd only do if it's a favor. Because I remember, I was with you during the shooting of Bridges Spies. Yes, you're the big tall fellow. They kicked off the set,

as I recall. Well, I was protecting the ball. I was there for the bottles. I was there watching the bottles. That's right. But what they noticed you had a small pad and you were taking notes. I don't know what gave me away. Jonathan Blitzer, a writer and fact checker with car collector Lenny Schiller. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Now we're going to do something a little unusual. We're going to bring you a story that comes in three parts. The story's about a family, although maybe not in the usual sense. It's about an artist named Adriana Altie.

the family she grew up with, the birth mother she met later, and the biological father she never met. Adriana is a childhood friend of the historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore, and together they'll tell the story of the search for the man known as Big Brown. My name is Adriana Altie, and when I was eight years old, the thing that I wanted most of all for my eighth birthday was a tape recorder. And this was because I was given to putting on little shows or making up little songs and that type of thing.

So I get the tape recorder and I was, I mean, I was horrified. Do I sound like, I mean, I sound like a black person. And I said, you know, to my mother, well, that sounds like a black person. She said, well, what do you mean? Like people have voices and voices are the same. People are the same. And I was like, okay, that is not, you're just not going to get, you know, good information. Maybe they don't want to hurt your feelings.

They don't, or they don't know. You need to find these things out on your own because people are not going to tell you the truth. My name's Jill Lepore, and I write for the New Yorker and I teach history at Harvard. I'm a historian. And I want to tell a story about origins. And this is the story of the origins of my friendship with my friend Adriana Altie. and it's also a story about race, and it's a story about sound. The town I grew up in was a very small town in New England,

and it was very white. It was white, white, white. And to tell you how white it is, there is a statue of a lamb, a white lamb in the town common, and that is because Mary Sawyer of Mary had a little lamb from that town. Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow. You know, there weren't really any people like me there.

You know, first day of kindergarten got off the bus and you went, you know, marched up. And they told you asked, they asked your name. And then you either in that class or the other class. And I told them, you know, my name. I later was to find out that, you know, they called my mother and said, you know, Mrs. Altie, did you, did you send the foster? that you have to school today? And, you know, and she said, yes.

And that's how I learned that that was not my last name. Because they had my last name in what it really was on the list, which I didn't know. And I went, and then I got it later, I went home. And they told me, well, actually, this is your actual name. But don't worry because it's going to change when you, you know, get adopted. And I was like, when it was the first I'd heard of it. That was in September. And then I was adopted in December.

When she was five and went to kindergarten, there was a photograph of her in the newspaper because there's this little, this picture of, so this would have been in 1971, a bunch of little white kids getting on a bus. And then this little black girl who's like more than a foot taller than everybody else. And it was kind of like a Ruby Bridges photograph or something. That was really hard and it was absent being part of a black family that was part of a political movement that was in. integrating schools. This was this tiny little girl carrying on her shoulders a history of racial segregation. My family, they're great. They're very kind people. They love me very much. And they just thought, well, we'll just love this child and that's all. That's all I need to do. They didn't

want me to feel bad. So they would tell me things like, you're just the same. You're just the same as everyone else. And I know what, I mean, obviously, I know what they meant by that. And I, you know, as in hindsight, I'm like, well, okay, I understand what they're trying to say, but I'm like, but I am, but I am different though, and they're like, no, you're not. And I said, but I look different. They're like, well, you're just the same. You're just the same. And it doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter if you're, what color you are, you could be orange, you could be blue, you can be what, and I'm like, well, I'm not orange or blue. I'm, you know, I'm this other color. And I remember being in a play, and I was like a snowman in the play. this boy said something like, you can't be a snowman, because snow is not brown. And I said,

yes, I said, snow can be brown. Haven't you seen it when it's like dirty or, you know, like this and that? I really just thought, well, he's just stupid. How does he not know that snow can be, I didn't know he was insulting me. I'm going to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee. George can't hit what his hands.

The hands can't see you. Now you see me, now you don't. He think he will, but I know he won't. They tell me... The first person I saw who was the same color as I was that I thought looked really nice, like I liked the looks of, was Muhammad Ali. You know, he's so handsome and so, like, I don't know. He was, like, great. He said he was the greatest. And he was, you know, people were talking about him. He was going to be that heavyweight champion and all these, you know, things. I thought, oh, this is like a, I don't know, listen, this is all right, man, me be all right. this whole brown thing might not be so bad, you know. So then, you know, at some point I, you know, I heard my mother say, well, you know,

he has a big mouth, that guy. And I'm like, well, what do you mean? And she's like, well, I don't like it. You know, I just was kind of like, well, I don't, this is like a bad deal. I felt very badly. Like, I didn't want to be, you know, brown. I just didn't. The black man has been brainwashed, and it's time for him to learn something about

When you look at television, he sees white house they've got, white swan soap, king white soul. I remember having heard someone say one time that he had said something about Mary had a little lamb or something like that. He's a little bit more than Mary had a little man and his feet is white as snow. But he says it in the context of like talking about the brainwashing that goes on. And I just thought that it was funny that one of the things he talks about is Mary had a little lamb and that, I mean, that's the town I was from. Even though we grew up in the same place, we had really different childhoods. I lived in the town one town over from Adriana's town, and then I moved into her town when I was a freshman in high school.

I actually didn't know at first that she did live in Sterling because I had never seen her before. So, and she was like, oh, you just moved to Sterling. So I was like, oh, okay. And I immediately liked her. We had French class together, and we kind of propped each other up through what was a really difficult year. So I thought I liked you. I just thought, this is like. She's neat.

I like her. And also, you know, she seemed to really like me. When we were graduating from college, we were both 22, her father died. And at his funeral, her biological mother showed up. You know, she, she's white. And she had two small, like small children who were, you know, my color. And I was with a college friend of mine, Ed, and, And it was a very weird thing where I looked and I said, oh, Ed, I know who that is.

He said, who, who is that? I said, oh, it's not good. It's not a good thing. And he said, what? What, who is it? I said, Ed, I think, I think that's, I think that's my birth mother. And he said, what? That's Adriana Altie with Jill Lepore.

Their story continues in a moment. You're listening to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick and welcome back to the New Yorker Radio Hour. Before the break, we heard Adriana Altie talk about growing up as a black girl in a white family in a mostly white town in New England. When she was a young woman, her biological mother came to talk to her at her father's funeral. And I was thinking, oh my God, like what is she doing here? Like, this is not a good thing, what's happening? And she said, hello.

And I said, hello. And she said, you know, I'm your mother or whatever. And I said, okay, I know, I know you are. That's Adriana, and here's New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore, her old friend, with the story of how they started searching for Adriana's father. I was mainly appalled at this woman for showing up at Adriana's father's funeral. But her story behind that was that she had. tried to go to the house over the years to see Adrianna,

maybe even to steal her or to talk to her or something. But Adriana's father told her not to come back, to just respect the family. So she saw on the paper that he was dead. So I guess she figured, well, he's dead. I don't know. There's a good and a bad sort of interpretation of it. On the one hand, she wanted to, like, pay respects.

But also you could say, well, oh, so he's dead now. So now you don't have to respect his wishes anymore. You don't have now. Well, now it's fun. The very first day that I met her at the wait, and she asked me to come back to her house, she also asked me to come work for her. And she was actually published these magazines,

and she probably thought it would be a good way for us to get to know each other. It just seemed like she had this plan, and it sounded like, it sounded good, even though I was a little, I was a little leery, but I'm like, well, how can I not do this? I mean, it just, it works. You know, I did end up working for a time. So when we were working, like during the day or in the office,

we were doing the thing of like trying to get into know each other a little bit. She used to say to me a lot, you think you know everything. You don't. And I don't think I know everything. And I didn't think I knew everything then. But I said, why are you? She says, but I know you. She says, I know you because I knew your father.

The story that Adriana's birth mother told... We'll call her Nina, but that is not her real name. The story that Nina told is a really surprising one. One of the first things Nina told me was that Bob Dylan really loved your father. And what you should do is... And it so happened that there... I guess the reason she thought to say this is that there was going to be a concert somewhere or something. And she said, you need to go.

and you need to like go backstage and you know introduce yourself to Bob Dylan and say you're Brown's daughter and he will love you he may even know something about where Brown is you know and so of course I'm listening to this and I'm thinking well no I mean I'm not this is not the sort of thing that I would do even if I believe it to be true and at that point I you know I wasn't sure that I did North country fire, where the winds hit heavy on the borderline. Remember me to one who lives there. She once was a true love of mine. Nina, in 1965, had gone to New York from Worcester.

She was a Jewish woman from a very traditional, ordinary family in Worcester, kind of conventional. But she wanted to see the world, like you would want to see the world in 1965. And the place you'd go is Greenwich Village, which in 1965 is just an incredibly interesting scene to be dropped in the middle of. It's an interesting scene poetically and musically and artistically. And when she was there, she fell in love with this street poet, a guy named William Brown. She said, well, he would walk through Washington Square Park and she saw him one day, and she just decided, you know, that she was going to have him. She just thought he was great. What the hell is going?

on here? You see, we have a sort of a situation here. I fell in love with your daughter. As incredible as it may seem, she fell in love with me. And we flew back to San Francisco to see if you or Mrs. Straiton would have any objections if we got married. They guess they had their own version of guess who's coming to dinner, guess who's not staying for dinner kind of thing. So Nina brought Brown from Greenwich Village. They went up to Worcester to meet Nina's parents. But it didn't go well. Not everyone is Spencer Tracy and Catherine Hempurn. And Nina's parents got really terribly upset. And it sounds like maybe even got a bit violent, particularly her father. But she said, he said to me, your father is in a lot of pain. So I'm going to leave. You need to stay here. You need to stay and be here with him. But I need to go.

You know, of course, the one interpretation is, well, you know, he ditched her. But that isn't the way she was saying it. And I think the point she was trying to make was that this man, like, you know, basically attacked him and was, you know, angry and got violent with him. And his response was, you know what, he's in pain and he's having a hard time. So I'm going to, you know, go. That's the last time that Nina ever saw. Brown. She found out she was pregnant and her parents decided she couldn't keep the baby and convinced her that she should give the baby up for adoption. They spirited her away to a lying-in hospital

in Boston. And this would have been May of 1966. Nina gave birth. And when it came down to that moment, she couldn't give the baby up. She just couldn't do it. She was also really ill at the time. and so Adrianda was put into foster care, who was an unusual placement. Actually, before about that time in the middle of the 1960s, that kind of placement, interracial placement, putting a mixed race or a black child in a white family, that would have been incredibly unusual.

My name is Sheila Frankel. I work for the Department of Children and Families, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and my job title is adoption search coordinator. Sheila Frankl worked for the state in the early 19th, and the social worker who trained her is the social worker that went to that lying in hospital in May of 1966 when Adriana was born and brought her to her foster family. In the 60s, there was a lot of shame connected with adoption for all members of the adoption triad.

By the adoption triad, Sheila means the birth mother, the adoptee, and the adoptive parents. Social workers try to match the physical characteristics of the child with, the adoptive parents and also the race and the ethnicity. But Clayton Hagen was the head of adoption for Lutheran Social Services and more than transracial adoption. He had an idea that adoptive parents could figure out what they wanted and what they needed, what they could do. And if they wanted to adopt a child from another country or race,

we should let them do it. We shouldn't ask too many questions. I don't think there was a lot of preparation for what went on. We actually, our agency, placed many black and mixed racial children because of his influence. But I think it was 1972, the National Association of Black Social Workers protested this practice, and they came out with a position paper. And so after that, there was a whole new concern about whether this was the right thing to do

to place these black and mixed-rised kids in one. white families. I mean, think about this moment, like the Black Panther movement has come to power. Muhammad Ali is talking about Black is beautiful. There's a kind of notion of racial pride that's suffusing the whole culture. And then you have the Adoptie rights movement with people looking back at their childhoods and saying maybe this wasn't the right thing. So after 1972, it's just a different conversation. I'm just really struck as a historian. When I think about that time that, you know, before 1966 when Adrianna was born or after 72 when she was finally adopted, There's just this moment, this little window in the middle of the 20th century

where what happened to her could have happened. In May of 2015, Adrienne was visiting. She visits a lot. She's really close to my kids. And I was in the middle of working on a New Yorker piece that I'd been really obsessed with all spring where I was trying to track down this long, lost, forgotten African-American artist from the Harlem Arts Movement,

who happened to have been a sculptor. And Adrian is an artist and an amazing artist. And so I had a thousand questions for her about sculpting. How do you cast in bronze? And what does it mean to work in Plaster? And she was really patient with all my questions. And finally, she just told me to stop. I said, you need to, you know, can't you help me find my father.

And I said it like that because, you know, she finds things. She gets things done. And I also knew that this sounded like something she should be very interested in. So I was really interested. You know, I tried before and I had any look. The thing is that so much has changed, so much is on the Internet that wasn't on the Internet. Even like month by month, week by week, new stuff is up there. There's like digital newspaper collections that weren't there, recordings.

So I said, all right, so I'm okay, I'll try. I will take a look. Well, I will if. Yeah, but if you gather up everything that you've done. Put together a memo. But she said with this lovely, tidy email with all the research she'd done over the years, and every little scrap of information that she found out about this. William Brown. And a lot of it is stuff that we've heard before. Like, this is going to go newer.

But then it was she sent, at the bottom of the email, there was a list of things that he was called. And it was like, around town with William Brown. There were just like a bunch of rhyming things, downtown Brown. And one of them was Big Brown. So this seems like a made-up character. And that actually is another reason that it probably sort of failed to find him sooner is that there were other names. And also, I also, I was always just looking for, you know, William Brown is a pretty common name. I thought that she meant like that was something that she called him or that people, friends of his call him. I think once we did have the internet, I was like, it never occurred to me to like for Big Brown.

I mean, it was like, well, people probably call him that, but that's not his real name. Then when I started trying Big Brown and just like doing a basic Google search for like Big Brown and Bob Dylan, he pops up. And then he's kind of everywhere. The first thing that was incredible was finding this photograph that was from 1965 in Washington Square Park. It's quite a dramatic and beautiful photograph. He's wearing, he's a very large man, very strongly built and speaking publicly before an audience

so you can see like a white college student sort of sitting at his feet and another student with a backpack is wandering behind him. And he has his right arm outstretched and reaching upward in his index finger pointing. And if you follow the sort of science, light line of his arm with the finger, so goes up towards the American flag, which is waving from the top of a building in the background. I sent it to Adriana, and she didn't get right back. I emailed her, she didn't get right back. So I texted it to her. And I said, oh, my God, this is your

father. Oh, my God, this is your father. And I said, well, why do you say that? You know, why? Why? Because he's big and he's brown, and I was kind of joking and kind of not. She's like, no, that's not. Because I think it looks like. She's like, I'm 100% certain. And I don't know. Like I'm, you know, so I started to think, well, if I do see it now, am I, like, trying to see something because I want it to be true? But I, you know, so I sent the picture to Nina.

You know, she wrote back, oh, my God. Where did you get that? That's him. That's him. So after we found this incredible photograph, I looked up the photographer. It's this guy named Liori Henderson. This guy brown, being brown. Brown, he would be out there reciting his poetry.

And he was really quite vocal and quite, you know, like, big guy, huge guy. And so that picture of him, and with him looming in the foreground like that, with that expression on his face and with his finger pointing in the air, he was good for those gestures. So what do you think it says about Brown? He could have been up in Harlem doing his poetry, but he's gone down in the village and he's doing it to the, like a different audience. I think that's a sign of his vision. I think that shows that this guy

saw something beyond being a black man. If he had stayed up in Harlem or East New York, Brooklyn, or something, that probably would have been too limiting. And furthermore, I think the issues of concern in the black community were too intense to be concerned about this creative expression. We were worrying about how to survive, how to pay them, you know. I mean, they were dealing with issues of social. justice and racial equality and all. And Brown, I'm sure, was too. And also,

he might have felt that he had a message coming from a black man to point of view that he felt that a white audience need to hear. That's Leroy Henderson with staff writer Jill Lepore talking about the search for William Brown known as Big Brown. In a minute, Jill and Adrianna Altie

find that some of the wildest rumors they heard about Big Brown turn out to be true. and they discover the sounds that he left behind. And this man kill a thing he loves. I'm David Remnick. That's ahead on the New Yorker Radio Hour. By all let us be heard. Some do it with a bitter look. Some with a flattering word.

The coward does it with a kiss the brave man with a soul. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for joining us today on the New Yorker Radio Hour. Next week we'll hear from Aziz Ansari about pitching ethnically diverse TV shows. They say things like, well, I don't know if mainstream audiences will enjoy that. And what that basically means is I'm not sure why people are going to relate to that. Guess what? White people relate to anything. People watch anime movies about bugs and fish.

They're relating to those problems. That's next time on the New Yorker Radio Hour. Today is a special episode of the show that we're devoting to one story. Adriana Altie's quest, aided by her friend Jillipur, to find her biological father. His name was William Brown, but they didn't know his date of birth or where he was born. And he left a record of himself

only through his poetry, performing as Big Brown. You put Big Brown in YouTube, and, you know, his album comes up. And Adriana starts emailing me. Oh, my God, I found a recording. Here he hears the poet with his album between heaven and hell.

Big Brown. There are all these songs And then there suddenly we have his voice. And suddenly so suddenly I can hear, you know, this is him talking. The blues ran there blowing away any char of gladness until you find that you like a sunken man in this ocean of sorrows and sadness. It's a bit of a mystery when it was recorded. But it's seven tracks and it's Big Brown. It's called Big Brown the first, Big Brown, the first man of poetry.

Like there's one that. It's called me. And it starts off, the greatest cat I ever met is me. There's been no cat I could love all this. It's very, very funny poem. It's so winking and parodic and it's just funny. Look at me. I'm a sly with a guy, but I maintain my eye and don't love nobody.

So we had this, you know, very exciting moment where we had found this recording. And then, but of course, then there was a, you know, a brief lull. So, because we went to dinner and we weren't talking about it because we'd been talking, talking, and we weren't talking about it. And I said, oh, no, she's going to move on. So I said, what about this Danny Fitzgerald character? What are you looking to that? So Danny Fitzgerald is a blues musician.

and he lived in New York in the 1960s, and Adrian had found an album that he recorded. Talk about that time. I met Big Brown in Washington Square Park. Yeah, he was a poet. That wasn't got a lot of his up from him. Bob Dylan. Right.

So I said to Jill, well, can't, you know, why don't, you know, why don't you just call Dylan? So I got an email address for the guy who handles Dylan's email, and I wrote to him, and we thought he would talk to us, but in the end he didn't talk to us. But Adriana found something else. Yes, I did. It turns out that he has given interviews where he talks about Brown.

He said, all these black guys would come up from south of the border and recite poetry in the park. Now they'd call him rappers. The best was a guy named Big Brown who had long poems. Each one was about 50 minutes long. They were long, drawn out bad men's stories. Romance, politics, just about everything you can imagine was thrown into his stuff. I always thought this was the best poetry I ever heard. Now, you have Bob Dylan saying this is the best poetry you ever heard.

That's not nothing. That's not nothing. And that's, you know, actually was what she was saying was true. If Big Bounden had been performing in Harlem, it would have been just like another guy and people would be like, yeah, he happens to be very good at doing it. But it stood out in a different way, I think, in Greenwich Village than it. would have in a different neighborhood. In fact, it stood out so much to people who were interested in the 1960s in the study of folklore and folk life that a bunch of folklore scholars began

collecting these things, these things that are called toasts, which are these, they're like Braggart poems. They're these rhyming poems about, there are a lot of them are about hustlers. They tend to be sexually outrageous. They're a lot about pimps and prostitutes. and they have this whole badass thing going on. Honky Chonk, bud, the hip cat, Stewart, was digging a game of poop. His parents wasn't sagging, but this cat wasn't bragging because he knew he was looking real cool. He was choked up tight. My name is Abiyudun Oyewole, and I'm a poet educator.

Abiyudun Oyoole was a founder of the last poets in 1968. Selfish desires are burning like fires among those who are hard to go. So many of us who were researching the whole oral tradition situation in America, we had to go back to the toast. Just like those folks in the toasts had to know something about Hi John the Conqueror and people who could fly, which are folk tales that we brought with us from the slave plantations. And so that was really just a part of your learning process if you wanted to get down what they call the spoken word. And those who stole, the people's goal are definitely corrupt. Credit cards, master charge, legacies of wills, real estate.

You know, I know the toasts were born basically in prison. A lot of guys would just sit around and be creative. You know, it's like it's a necessity as the mother of invention. So you don't have a TV, you don't have your boys on the block, you don't have all the things to do that you would have to do if you were not incarcerated. So you're sitting around. Your mind is still working, but how do you direct it? So guys would create stories.

They would create these phenomenal stories of all these colorful characters. Of course, Doriello DuFontaine was one. She could persuade you to do things that you didn't want to do and give her money that you didn't want to give, but she always came out on top. Dorella DuFontaine is a toast. It's a toast that Brown was known to have performed in Washington. Square Park. And in 1969, the last poets recorded a version of it with Jimmy Hendricks.

It's a hand in the glove when you look at it. I mean, with Big Brown and Ginsburg and all the beat poets were doing down the village. It's alive and well today in more ways than one. I mean, these guys represent something that we are trying to capture now. We've got a whole generation of young people who are living, breathing, and dying with the word. David Amram is a well-known composer and conductor and jazz musician. And in the 1960s, he was living in the village and knew a lot of the same people that Big Brown knew. He hung out with Ginsburg and Kerouac. And he tells the story about a time he brought a classical composer who was visiting from Europe down to Washington Square Park to meet Brown.

I said, Brown, this is a guy from Tondaleo. He's from Holland. And he's a wonderful composer. He came all the way over here. Symphony played his piece that he wants to check out. old American Brown said, come on with me, man. So we walked over a gesture. So we took us to the middle of the fountain.

He said, here's where you're going to see and hear it all. And Big Brown said, see what I told you, man. And then he started one of his wraps into Tom's ear. And Tom put his hand up to hear Brown. And then with his other hand on his other ear was looking. listening to all those great sounds at the same time. Brown had become like a sports announcer describing all the different things

that was happening, and then also giving a little rundown of the people who were playing, you know, saying that cat's from Ohio, and he ran away from home, and he's a songwriter, and there's a accordion players, families lived in the village, like for two generations, so it doesn't speak English, and went through the whole routine. And Tom said, now he said,

I've seen and heard America. The nomination of the Democratic Party. One thing I found, which was actually very strange, and it took a while to figure out what it was, was it was Big Brown was nominated for, as a presidential candidate, as part of the Beat Party of America. So I looked up in the newspaper,

and it turns out there was an AP Wire Service story in the summer of 1960, when Nixon and Kennedy are the nominees for the major part, There's a third party ticket, the Beat Party of America, holds a mock presidential primary contest in Greenwich Village, and during the first round of voting, Big Brown got the most votes. So the AP wire service story reads like this. Big Brown's lead startled the convention. Big, as the husky Negro is called by his friends, wasn't the favorite sonny of any delegation, but he had one tactic that apparently earned him votes in a chatterbox convention, only once. did he speak at length? And that was to read his poetry. No, I don't indulge in politics,

but I spoke up a UN national, foreign situation, and possible integration. Didn't nobody speak with me? I'm with the whole South Seattle. Nina had always said, she didn't know whatever happened to Big Brown, but she had heard years later

that he was run over by a steamroller in a Hollywood and killed. And I thought, I put that in the category of crazy-ass things that Nina says that no one could possibly believe because that is out of Looney Tunes. Like, that is not a real death.

That is what happens after Wiley Coyote drops an anvil on your head. Then Danny, it's Gerald says, on this recording, we're listening to on the way home. And then he went to California, and he got run over. I mean, maybe he really did get run over by his team, really. It was really hard to find out. Adrian had tracked down all kinds of people that might have known Brown. Danny knew this guy named Bill Gross.

Brown once stayed in Gross's apartment, found this guy named Ned Otter. His father had taken pictures of Brown when Ned was a kid. There were pictures of Brown on the wall of his apartment. And so we asked all these people, what happened to him? Did he really get run by a steamroller? I heard that he had been in California and been on a beach. I don't know why the name Manhattan Beach comes to my mind. I believe the version I heard was that he was gotten a fight or that he was attacked at 9.

on the speech and stabbed. And this is what comes to mind. I know Danny says he was run over, but I believe it was some kind of a violent death. I heard he was rubbed out by mobsters. I heard he was shot during a card game, like a poker game, shot or maybe run over. Did you ever hear run over by a steamroller?

No. Okay, because that's the one we keep here. Did you ever hear stabbed on a baller? beach. Nope. Did you say, my friend, that you're not afraid on this day when you meet death? Will you tell me that when the day arrives and you take your very last breath? Now, you've got to die.

You know that's true, but you say it bothers you none. Oh, I see your parents. Everyone who said anything about him or anything I've read about him is that he is not only as a character, but he's the kind of person that. that you, you know, if he's around, it's not like he's going to go unnoticed. In that sense, either he's gone or he's in some way so diminished from what he was that, you know, is not recognizable as the same person. So either way, this person can't be around because how could someone like that be around

and not have anyone take note? So once we kind of really were hunkered down looking for Big Brown, I thought, oh, I should see if there's any, he uses poet. You know, there are all these collections of poetry and sound archives all over the place. So I went to, like, the obvious places, like the Woodbury Poetry Room at Harvard and looked through their archive. And just various, then I went through oral history collections, trying to see if anybody thought, this oral history movement in the 1960s. Someone surely sat this guy down and didn't oral history.

I get, kind of nothing. So then I was looking through the finding guides to the collections at New York University, which is in Washington Square, was pouring through the Larry Rivers Collection. Rivers was this kind of beat artist of some renowned and acclaim. And he was also a filmmaker. He was a painter and a filmmaker. Rivers, actually, I had known him mostly as like a painter, so I actually didn't know about this film.

He made a film of documentary of sorts about breasts. And I was like, oh, okay, here we go. You know, this is the perfect setup for what we're going to hear is probably not going to make me very happy. See, yeah, we didn't know that it was. Yeah, we didn't know. We just saw it was Brown on tape. We had no idea it was about breast.

Like, for instance, if you're with the woman, isn't it mainly that you make the aggressive, suckling gestures, and that she very rarely, I mean, I have... Women are looking for you continuously as hard as you're looking for them. If they like you or if they're curious about you, they're seeking you as strong as you're looking for them, you know? You know, Larry's trying to sort of lead him down this, like, how do you feel about breast?

And Brown goes off in this whole sort of... Well, you know, they're part of the woman. woman and you're going to know the woman and they're so I'm thinking, oh, good. Good, he's good. He's a good, good man. I was proud. I was just, I just felt like, oh, he was led down this path. It could have been really very unpleasant to hear

and he just, um, it's great. They're talking, they're talking just like you talk out of your mouth. Absolutely. Well, what about elbows? What's wrong with elbows? Why, what? I never went out that far. Well, that's what I'm trying to say. But then I'm sitting there thinking like, Just ask him, like, where were you born? What are you born? What's your social security number?

What's your actual name? I mean, here's somebody's actually talking to. I'm like, where's the important questions? Nothing. It's like, I want to know. I mean, unless a cat can play her, you know, for the sound and the rhythm and the jazz that comes from her, you know what I mean? She's just, you know, just a nice girl.

I was thinking about after lunch when I said, what are you going to do now? And you're like, I'm going to go back. And I was like, we already listened to it. And we transcribed it mostly. And you're like, I just want to listen. to him. Yeah. It's probably simplistic to say, but I mean, they make him like a real person where I have, I mean, I've known of him about him since, you know, I met my birth mother. So for, you know, almost 30 years. And I didn't ever really sort of get from her the feeling of like, that I knew him. So it kind of has done that. And it's interesting what, um, You know, what Limer was saying about being in the village, and he's an artist. So he was there.

And, you know, Brown was performing. He's an artist, and he was there. But there weren't really black people, that many black people. There was predominantly a white thing. But people were there because of their art and because of their, you know, what they were trying to do. And that's something that I've had a struggle with. And that, you know, I went from being very young to going to art school where I was, you know, maybe one of two black people and practically in the whole, you know, school or at least my class.

And, you know, not just an artist, not a black artist, not a white artist, but you're just an artist. Most of us go through life finding people and losing people and finding them again. And that's actually a big part of why I'm a historian. I like to figure out where things came from, but I also like to find things have gotten lost and find people that have gotten lost. So this story has actually been really hard for me because I thought we would find. find him, like find him meet him, find out exactly what happened to him. And it's really hard to find a guy named William Brown. But I know, too, that it's meant so much to Adriana to find out what we have found. And I kind of think that she's kind of put the pieces of him back together in a way

that brings him to life. She was visiting when we were kind of finishing up doing the research that we had done. And she said, I have to go home now because I've just ordered 50 pounds of brown clay. It's going to be delivered. And I have to get home. because I have to be there to pick it up. And I said, okay, well, hold on. Wait, back up. What are you going to do with 50 pounds of clay? I decided to make some sculptures of him.

So what does that mean? That means. To make him. Well, you know, I mean, it means, literally means, you know, putting the clay on the armature and making his face. Like now that I know what he looks like and can sort of guess. You know, I'll have a lot, actually a lot of. ideas for different things that I want to do based on, you know, him.

I don't know. I have it. It has actually been a while that I've been very, you know, excited to make something. I don't know. So do you feel like you found him? I feel like I do feel like I found enough to feel like I knew who he was. And, you know, it makes me very happy in a way that, you know, when I was younger, I didn't want anything to do, you know, with that.

at all. And by the time I had, you know, sort of gotten old enough to realize that, you know, it's not bad to be brown or whatever. I didn't, I hadn't lived as part of a black community, a community of color. And I, so I felt a little like I'm almost like a, like an imposter in some ways. Like, I felt that I was, you know, appropriating something. And I, because I didn't feel connected myself to it. And maybe that is what I'm doing, but I know that I feel more connected to it. And I feel like I'm, in a way, have a right to, you know, this person who turns out as like a pretty great guy. You know, and I'm very, you know, I'm very happy about that. I'm happier than I would have thought that I would be. I definitely didn't anticipate that I would

feel like connected to him in a way, because, you know, I met my birth mother. And, you know, she is my birth mother, but I didn't ever, I couldn't see myself in her. And I don't know him, but everything I have heard about him makes me feel like I know him, and I feel like I am like him. I mean, I'm actually like somebody where, I mean, I've never been like anyone that I've ever known. So, you know, and still felt like that I could come. claim them. You are like him. I mean, I think for me to see, to see that photograph and see

how much he looks like you, and the first time you sent me the record listening to that first track, I remember just, oh my God, how can that, like that could be inheritable? Like, you sound like him to me. So it fills in a lot for me. So I feel, in this very different way, I'm so happy to have found the best poet Bob Dylan ever knew. When you get all you long for in your struggles in life, then the world make you king for a day. Go to the mirror and look at yourself and see what that guy has to say. For it is not your mother, your sister, or your brother,

whose judgment upon you must pass. The guy who counts most in your life is the guy staring back from the glass. He's the one to live up to, never mind all the rest for he's with you. You clip to the end and you'll pass your most dangerous difficult task if the guy in the glass is your friend. You could be like Jack Hall and chisel a plumb thinking you're a wonderful guy, but the guy in the glass said you're only a bum if you can't look him square in the eye. You could fool the whole world down the pathway of years and get paths on your back as you pass. But your final reward would be heartaches and tears.

A free will get in the glass. To their own self, be true. That's the New Yorker's Jill Lippor with her friend, the artist Adriana Altie. Our story, The Search for Big Brown, aired in the first episodes of the New Yorker Radio Hour, and since that time, we've heard from some listeners with leads

about Brown's time in California and his fate. I'm David Remnick, and thanks for joining us. Let us know what you thought of today's show and leave a comment on New YorkerRadio.org. Next week we'll be back with more stories and I'll speak with a reporter for the New York Times who's been covering ISIS

from the very beginning. They literally believe that they are living at the moment before the rapture to use a Christian corollary. They think they're on the verge of this end of times battle. And it's not just some sort of metaphor. They really believe that this is going to happen and that they are there, you know,

A lot of them have profile pictures of them on horses. They think they're going to be there on their black steed at the moment of, you know, of the end of the world. Rukmini Kalamaki is a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. That's next time on The New Yorker Radio Hour. See you next week. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yarns. This episode was produced by Emily Boutin, Ave Carre.

Rio, Rianne and Corby, Jill Duboff, Karen Frillman, David Krasnow, Sarah Nix, Paul Schneider, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Eric Malinski and Becky Cooper.