Al Capone used to be the symbol of Chicago. Wherever Chicagoans went in the world and announced themselves, they would be gleefully greeted by the rat-a-tat imitation of a Tommy gun.
Many people deplored this association. They pointed out how Al Capone and his St. Valentine’s Day Massacre were black marks on Chicago. They’d scold people for reducing Chicago to these most brutal moments of the City’s past, when Chicago is so much more and has so much better to offer.
But somehow the association stuck. Al Capone reigned as the quintessential emblem of Chicago, despite its invention of everything from skyscrapers to atomic energy to the urban blues - despite its Magnificent Mile, its lakefront, its Art Institute, its hundred ethnic neighborhoods. Al Capone was still the icon that stood astride all that other.
Gangsters have often been mythologized and elevated to the status of heroes. But Capone’s apotheosis seemed even likelier, even more appropriate. Hadn’t Carl Sandburg memorialized Chicago as “Hog Butcher for the World… Stormy, husky, brawling… City of the Big Shoulders.” And Al Capone was all that – from butcher to brawling. On his Big Shoulders there rested the summary image of all things aggressive, vigorously self-assertive and claiming. Al Capone and Chicago fit together.
But over the last decade or so, I’ve noticed a change. When I travel, I’ve rarely been greeted by references to Capone any more. The air Tommy gun has been stowed away in people’s air violin case and forgotten. Now whenever people anywhere in the world hear I’m from Chicago, they instantly squeal, “Oprah!” and clap their hands.
People clamor around me, wondering if I know Oprah, if I ever met her. They ask if I can get tickets for her Show. Even more urgently, they wonder if I can use my influence with her as a fellow Chicagoan to get all sorts of favors granted from her.
One European woman I met immediately started to tell me tearfully about the horrible oppression her mother had suffered as a Basque native in Spain, especially during Franco’s regime. The woman had written a book about her mother’s suffering. She tried to impress a copy of her manuscript on me so that I could carry the precious pages back to Oprah. “Maybe Oprah can get it published? Maybe Oprah could even make it a ‘Book of the Month?’”
When I was on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and a tour guide heard where I was from, she immediately spoke up on behalf of the children of her village. “Do you think Oprah could come here and start a school, like the one she started in Africa?”
As I settled in to have lunch at a neat, prosperous little restaurant in Canada’s southern Ontario, I thought I would be safe from having to transmit any major, heart-rending appeals to Oprah. So I didn’t gird myself as I usually would have when the pretty woman at the next table started a conversation with me and asked me where I was from. But the word “Chicago” was barely our of my mouth, when she shrieked, “Oh, Chicago! Oh, Oprah! Do you know Oprah? Do you think you could get her to help me? My teeth are bad. Oh, I’ve been suffering so! I need some caps, some implants, something - and our social insurance refuses to cover it. And I just can’t afford to have it done myself. Could you get Oprah to help me - maybe through her ‘Angel Network?’" the woman smiled appealingly at me, revealing a chipped front tooth that listed a little at cross-purpose with its neighbor.
Yes, it’s clear that Oprah has become Chicago. The mention of Chicago evokes immediate worldwide association with Oprah, and consequent hopeful appeals for everything from tickets to teeth. Al Capone’s star has been dimmed by the sunshine glare of Oprah’s popularity and largesse.
I can’t help regretting this at least a little. You see, as Al Capone’s star has declined, so has mine. I have no claim to any connection with Oprah whatsoever. I never met her, never was able to get tickets to her Show, never even passed her on the street - whereas I can lay claim to some connection with Al Capone. Before Oprah, when my announcement of my Chicago citizenship would evoke the predictable excited references to Al Capone, I could be a crowd-pleaser by regaling my audience with my personal knowledge of the man. Well, it’s my personal knowledge once removed. My father worked with Al Capone.
My father helped Al Capone design, print and apply, some of the labels he put on the illicit bottles of whiskey he was producing in his stills. Perhaps their association was a glancing one, but it was enough for me to make capital of when Al Capone was Chicago to the world.
My father was a singularly taciturn person, even more taciturn than most husbands/fathers have a reputation for being. He was an “older father” when he had me, and he had lived a varied, knock-about life that had included the trenches of World War I, piano-playing in silent movie houses and in brothels, a stab at raising greyhounds for racing, as well as his bootlegging and Al Capone interlude. When he met my mother, he would court her in a modified version of the classic gangster pin-stripe suit. And he wore a Panama hat, jauntily tilted to one side in the same way Al Capone wore his signature Panama hat. Capone perhaps tilted his hat to put in shadow the scar on his cheek that he was so ashamed of having become his brand, an integral part of his public identity – Scarface Al Capone. My father tilted his hat as a rakish homage.
So my father reflected and perhaps imitated the times he’d passed through. However he had no gift for narrating them – no aptitude for weaving his life into anecdote for us. There was so much it seemed he could have told my mother and me, even if his participation in these gaudy enterprises was exaggerated and had actually only been tangential. But whatever he had seen, he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, relate.
The only information we got out of him about Al Capone was his assessment that the gangster had been “an amiable guy.” That singularly repeated adjective “amiable” seemed ironic to my mother and me, being applied as it was to one of the most notoriously brutal mobsters of all time. But that probably really was an accurate description of Capone’s demeanor when he was just in casual conversation with his family or friendly associates.
The actor Rod Steiger portrayed Capone in a brilliant 1950’s movie about the gangster. Steiger’s depiction of ruthless, vulgar self-assertion was mesmerizing, but probably not very accurate if applied personally to Capone. Steiger’s performance captured the times more than the individual. It captured the spirit of the Roaring Twenties in general, with all of that era’s diamond-studded, acquisitive, un-corsetted excess. But it wasn’t specifically true to Al Capone. Capone’s family objected to the movie portrayal, saying that quite unike the loud, raw, table-pounding, commanding figure Steiger had projected onto the screen – their uncle/brother/friend had really been a very polite, soft-spoken individual. Putting that picture together with the few general hints I’d gotten about Capone from my father, it did seem that in ordinary conversation Capone was likely a quiet, mellow, polite, and above all “amiable” individual.
I had this personally confirmed information of Capone to retail to the enthused world when Capone was King. I had shaken the hand of someone who shook the hand of … Now I have nothing. Never having met Oprah or having met anyone who met her - I have nothing to tell people who clamor “Oprah” at the sound of my “Chicago.” I don’t even have a nugget of inside information about the amiability of our current icon. I come off a complete disappointment.
But in addition to the diminishing effect this change of Chicago icon’s has had on my status, I have other reasons for being a little regretful about it. Yes, Capone’s influence and actions were reprehensible, while Oprah stands as a benevolent, enlightened symbol for Chicago. And yet, something about the adoption of Oprah as Chicago’s symbol doesn’t seem to be wholly positive. When people used to imitate the action of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre at the drop of the word “Chicago,” it was unlikely that many of them were expressing any aspiration to go on a shooting spree themselves. Nor were they expressing any admiration for the actual act of killing people. I don’t think most people were even considering the bloody real-life consequences of firing submachine guns at adversaries. Most of them probably wouldn’t really consider breaking the law in any way. No, Al Capone, like all gangsters and outlaws, lit people’s imagination in a more general way.
Al Capone represented the epitome of the can-do, take-charge attitude. While most of us are caught in a Gordian Knot of restrictions and complications, Al Capone simply blasted through all barriers. And oh what fun, oh how exhilarating it would be to assume that kind of right-of-way. You want something? You’re responsible for making it happen. And you CAN make it happen – not by literally disabling or killing other people – but by cutting through all the trivial demands that other people want to tether you to. Does the world say you are too fat, too poor, too dumb to accomplish your goals? You don’t listen. Does the world try to hobble you with endless tasks and taboos - wear a jacket to work, don’t smoke within 100 feet of the condo swimming pool, keep your dog on a leash at all times, sit up straight, smile – and on and on? You blow all that away and clear the field for what you really want, for what’s really important to you. Massacre all the mealy, all the mundane. That’s the kind of empowerment that most people relished in Al Capone’s example. Al Capone was a metaphor for the possibility of rising to command one’s fate by targeted indifference.
Oprah on the other hand has come to stand for acquiring things not through one’s personal, positive action, but through supplication. Whether people make their entreaties to God, to “the energy in the Universe,” or to Oprah herself, she seems to have fostered a passive expectation of deliverance. Oprah assumes and plays into a world of neediness. (More about that in another one of my blog essays). Rather than achieving potency by arrogating to oneself gritty, in-the-world authority – Oprah is the symbol of gaining favors by asking. By contrast, Al Capone, whether rude or polite, whether belligerent or amiable – somehow stood for a vital kind of self-empowerment. He had the image of a man who “Never asked nobody for nothin'.”
So yes, for several reasons I’m a little regretful that Al Capone is no longer the symbol of Chicago. Since Oprah replaced him as emblem of Chicago, I’ve lost considerable cachet. And we’ve all lost something of the proud energy that characterized the early part of the last century.
As I walk down Michigan Avenue, I sometimes picture Al Capone walking ahead of me, with his Panama hat jauntily cocked. But the distance between us gets longer and longer. He at last fades into a barely perceptible figment – off into the mistiness of Chicago history.
And now that Oprah is ending her Show, as she is leaving her most public platform – I wonder who will in turn, in time, replace her as the symbol of Chicago.
No comments:
Post a Comment