100 Things I Want to Tell My Children and Grandchildren: #8

I met Madalyn Murray O'Hair

One cold winter night in Austin around 1979, while looking for the office of a psychiatrist (post-divorce therapy), I accidentally wandered into Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s office. You may recall that Madalyn Murray O’Hair founded the American Atheists organization in 1963. This was four years after she had filed suit against her son's school, leading to a Supreme Court decision ending religious activities in public schools. I immediately recognized Mrs. O’Hair when I entered the room as she was the internationally recognized face of Atheism and had been in the news many times. 

Although one might expect to see a cliché dressed in black surrounded by upside down crosses, instead before me, seated at a large desk covered by the detritus common to business, was a nicely dressed white-haired and bespectacled grandmotherly looking woman. Standing beside her was her son Jon, a tall almost handsome man with dark hair who appeared to be in his early 40’s. They were examining and discussing a document Jon was holding in his hand. (Pictured, Jon, Madalyn and granddaughter Robin)

After a couple of beats, when it became obvious they did not hear me enter, I cleared my throat. Startled, Madalyn and Jon looked up at me with what I can only describe as fear. Mrs. O’Hair was constantly receiving death threats. I could have been the loony, religious zealot there to avenge.  Their looks of fear melted into relief when I meekly said, “Can you tell me where Dr. Johnson’s office is?” 

In a tragic twist of fate, some years later Madalyn Murray O’Hair, her son Jon and a granddaughter were victims of a macabre murder. 

Click on “Read More” below if you are interested in this history. 

Blood Will Out: The True Story Of A Murder, A Mystery, And A Masquerade by Walter Kirn

Blood Will Out is about Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter (AKA Clark Rockefeller) a life-long impostor who deceives some people into believing he is an eccentric Rockefeller heir of aristocracy and wealth – that is until he is outed as a poser when he is arrested, tried and convicted of murder. This story is pretty interesting.

Blood Will Out is also about author Walter Kirn, a midwesterner from humble origins, whose own desperate ambition seems just a couple of moral notches above that of Gerharstreiter/Rockefeller. Kern goes to extreme effort to meet Clark Rockefeller just because he is a Rockefeller, and befriends him for 15 years prior to the revelation that he is a con artist. Kirn then ends up chronicling Rockefeller/ Gerhartsreiter murder trial, all the while pondering in disbelief his own gullibility. Now this story is VERY interesting.

Kirn is obsessed, to the point of blindness, with the fake Rockefeller, whose falsehood is clear it seems to everyone but Kirn. Attending Rockefeller’s murder trial, Kirn reflects back on his years of friendship and alternately ponders the possibility that it is all just a big misunderstanding, and how he could have been so thoroughly duped. What is most fascinating about this book is that Kirn clearly wanted to be duped. Rockefeller claimed to have never eaten a hamburger, had gone to Yale at 14, was a friend of Britney Spears, and to have a master key to all of the buildings in Rockefeller Center. (Kirn and Gerharstreiter/Rockefeller pictured)

Kirn is probably best known for his books, Up In The Air and Thumbsucker, both of which were made into movies.  But an earlier memoir, Lost in the Meritocracy, is the story of his “gift for mimicking authority figures and playing back to them their own ideas as though they were conclusions I’d reached myself.” The irony here is just so thick. “My fraudulence,” writes Kirn, “was in a way the truest thing about me. It represented ambition, longing, need. It sprung from the deepest chambers of my soul.” And almost in the next breath, Kirn complains that Rockefeller’s affect on him was ‘Galilean.’ "It humbled me. It reoriented everything. It revealed to me the size and power of my ignorance and vanity."   

I recommend that you read Blood Will Out because it is a spooky, well-written study of two irrational, yet intriguing characters, both living on the fringes of sanity, and both imprisoned by their delusions of grandeur.

The Good House by Ann Leary

I recall a quote from some aging celeb that went something along the lines of, “When you’re 30 you need good looks, at 40 you need money, and at 50+ you need a sense of humor.” Hildy Good, the narrator and main character of The Good House, a 60-something, successful realtor in a fictionalized New England coastal village, has a wicked and endearing sense of humor. She’s also a descendant of the “Salem witches” and although her friends have pegged her as a psychic, she’s really just an intuitive person with keen powers of observation and a storehouse of accumulated knowledge. The Good House has a number of plot lines and characters in its orbit, including Hildy’s likable and unlikely antediluvian paramour, local garbage man Frank Getchell, and stories of friendship, infidelity, treachery and intrigue. But this book is really about one thing, Hildy’s alcoholism.

The reason Hildy’s struggle with alcoholism feels so true is because it is. Author Leary (pictured) is a recovering alcoholic (and fyi – she’s comedian/actor Denis Leary’s wife). Hildy’s daughters intervene and although she goes into recovery, Hildy convinces herself (and nearly us) that there’s no harm in a glass of wine. “Really, Thanksgiving is a lot to ask of a sober person.” she tells us, along with more creative rationalizations, like, she’s a nicer person when she’s drinking.

I listed to the audio version of The Good House and thoroughly enjoyed Mary Beth Hurt's reading. Macmillan Audio provided an audio clip, which I believe you will enjoy. Click on Read More below to listen to that excerpt.

So go ahead and read (or listen to) The Good House because you’ll like Hildy; she’ll make you laugh, and the New England setting is pretty interesting. Oh, and you’ll be one up on the soon-to-be-released movie starring Meryl Streep and Robert De Niro.