Merry Christmas by Jimmy Cannon

There was a game the man played with himself Christmas week a year ago in the visitor's room on that floor of the hospital which looked down on the city, southward across Central Park. The man's right eye was infected and he couldn't read or watch television for two months. His vision was obscured by the medication the nurses dropped into his eye every hour around the clock. The sedatives handled most of the pain but not all of it.

So at dusk, led there by boredom, the man would go to the visitor's room. He closed both his eyes and then, slowly, opened the bad one. It was the most beautiful sight he had ever seen.

The lights of the city ran together, in a furry confusion. They didn't collide or sparkle but blended together in a glowing softness. The lights of the city were more like the petals of flowers strewn across the night which seemed to be made of silk. The colors of the night seemed to be dye that had flowed from a child's dream of Christmas.

The buildings lost their shape. They rippled and bulged, like a happy fat man's vest billowing with laughter. The sky was tender above them, more like a luminous moon-dappled sea. The stars lost their hard gleam. They shone, marvelously distorted, in fuzzy bursts, as though they were diamonds that had exploded into fluff. The moon melted into a wide bloated caricature of a man in the sky.

After a while the man strolled to the night nurse's desk to chat. They had sent most of the patients in the children's room home for Christmas. The ward was shut down. Three of the children had been brought to the floor where the man was to spend Christmas. One was Penelope.

There stood Penelope small and sedate in her maroon bathrobe. There she was, imbedded in her silence, proudly inquisitive, a child with russet hair, primly defiant. She came onto this floor of sick adults as an equal. Penelope was too stern, too poised, too serene for childhood.

This is Penelope, the nurse explained to the man, she is a little lady. She was, the nurse said, the perfect patient who had become accustomed to the routine of hospitals. It seemed logical for her to be there at Christmas time. The man thought it must be terrible for a child who has been in hospitals so much that she does not find them strange. The other children cried, the nurse said, but Penelope was brave and dignified and not even afraid of needles.

The flattery did not touch Penelope. She examined the man with a decent inquisitiveness. The dark glasses and his heavy beard did not startle her. In her childhood, spent in so many hospitals, all men had defects. No one was whole, only the doctors and the nurses. Penelope had a cleft palate. There had been a series of operations. One of the great surgeons had become interested in her case. It was slow but Penelope had been educated to wait.

Penelope, the nurse said with a sorrow that wasn't professional, refused to talk. The ridicule of other children had shut her up. The crippled voice had been imitated by bantering playmates. So Penelope spoke to no one.

The man, who is a bachelor, is clumsy with children. Always he has been an alien among them. They make him a stranger and he is uncomfortable in their presence. But this pretty child was not one of them but a tiny adult, experienced in pain and humility. The man leaned down and attempted to be casual.

My name is Jimmy, the man said. You're Penelope, aren't you? The blue eyes, clear and interested, were blank in their beauty. So the man asked about her dolls and her story books. He wanted to know what she wanted for Christmas. There was no reply, only that somberly interested look ...

He was dozing when the nurse knocked. With her was Penelope who held a picture book in one hand. The nurse said Penelope had been found wandering in the corridors, tapping on doors and calling the man's name in her tortured voice. It was, the nurse said, the first time she had heard the child speak.

The nurse left. The man, who finds all children strangers, sat on the bed and Penelope pretended to read from the book. The man will never forget that voice, struggling and grotesque, and he was very close to weeping. After that Penelope came every day and read to him. But she would not utter a sound if there was any one else in the room.

They spent part of Christmas together in his room. The man is everlastingly grateful to her. She gave him the most precious of all gifts when she allowed him to reach her. Never before had he felt the true meaning of this day until he heard Penelope say Merry Christmas.


Note: This tale appeared in a collection of articles by Jimmy Cannon in “Who Struck John?” Dial Press, 1956.

Ten random thoughts on the tenth

--- I am frequently torn between my adoration of Julie Harris and my disregard of James Dean -- because of the conundrum of Julie having a high regard for Dean’s work.

--- I would relish an article on how the Turner Classic Movies monthly schedule is constructed. From one who knows. What is included? Which films play when and why?

--- Neither my wife nor I are overly committed fans of Olivia de Havilland, but every time The Heiress is televised (TCM this past Wednesday) we are hooked. Richardson is glorious; the property is foolproof. And Olivia is excellent.

--- It seems many of our female bloggers (particularly the younger) are partial to the suave: e.g., Franchot Tone, William Powell, and Warren William. Might this have to do with the look and style of the younger males to whom these bloggers come into everyday contact?

--- Finished reading Todd McCarthy’s Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood. A very good book, which understandably seems to tail off as the author discusses Hawks’s later work.


--- My wife and I watched Ruth Chattterton in Female and spent the better part discussing who might have been a more appropriate lead (ignoring studio restrictions): Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell or Mary Astor?

--- How good was Virginia Weidler? Very. She seems to be omnipresent on Turner Classic Movies lately.

--- My wife and I finished watching the complete series of The Wire together (it took us about two months for the sixty episodes). It was her first viewing -- my fourth or fifth. She was taken with it.

--- Because it appears on television with some regularity, we watched a bit of Three Came Home again. It is a decent film with an aging star, later in her career, but it has such a cramped look. I know it is prison based -- but?

--- The anniversary of the shooting of John Lennon seems to have received much more Internet and television coverage this week than the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Note: “Random thoughts” pieces bring to mind the great Jimmy Cannon, whose “Nobody Asked Me, But” set the form. Any similarity stops there.

Off the Lot 4: Jimmy Cannon

Jimmy Cannon

Jimmy Cannon was one of our finest writers but is little known today because he wrote mostly about sports. Born in New York City; he died there some sixty years later. He was a newspaper guy. In appearance, anyway, he was along the lines of those we see in the films of the thirties and forties. He looked world weary, yet wise in the ways of city streets and foreign wars.

I did not know Jimmy Cannon, but met a few who did. They told me that he was a loner: a lifelong bachelor who haunted the baseball stadia by day, the fight arenas by night, and the saloons after the fights. He was New York Irish was Jimmy Cannon, with all that entailed. He stopped drinking along the way for reasons unknown to us.

Jimmy Cannon spent his lifetime probing the mysteries behind Who Struck John? and used that old barroom conundrum as a compass. There was lot of Damon Runyon about him. They were only about a generation apart but Cannon was the better writer. There was a sadder streak throughout his work, and blood in his ink.

Although he focussed on sports, he wrote one of the most moving Christmas pieces I have ever read. The setting is a New York hospital on a Christmas Eve when Jimmy Cannon and a little girl with a cleft palate were brought together. It is a tale O’Henry might have told. And Cannon called it “Merry Christmas.”

Jimmy Cannon came out of the city and lived in the city and died in the city. He loved New York and understood it. He was raised in the old Greenwich Village. His descriptions of the city are urban poetry -- if you were there when guys wore fedoras in the bars all day. If you were there when the only sports that mattered were baseball, boxing and horses. Or if you were there during the August heat waves when there was no air conditioning. Or if you were there when the movie houses were full, the features were double, and the stars no longer in the skies -- but on the screens.

Jimmy Cannon lived sometimes in an apartment and sometimes in a hotel, but always in Manhattan. He cut no grass; he owned no golf clubs. He left his city only to go to war, as did so many of his generation. He was at the liberation of Paris as a reporter for The Stars and Stripes. He was in Korea in that wicked winter of a place in that wicked winter of a war. He came home from each war and wrote for the New York papers.

Jimmy Cannon wrote with an uncanny understanding of his subjects, a number of whom counted him as a friend. Joe DiMaggio was among them. Ernest Hemingway had a high regard for Cannon’s writing. And Frank Sinatra had Cannon’s stuff sent to him wherever he was. Joan Blondell was seen in his company. Dietrich read him poetry in Paris during the war. Woody Allen did not know him, but was influenced by him. Allen has told us that his image of New York City as a black and white Gershwin town comes from reading Jimmy Cannon.

And those of us who lived in the buildings about which Cannon wrote, and who watched the teams about which he wrote, and who watched the athletes about whom he wrote – those of us also read Jimmy Cannon. We were New Yorkers. He read us; we read him.

I delivered newspapers in the Bronx in the Claremont Park section in the late forties and early fifties. I had about fifteen or twenty apartment houses. Only the last one had an elevator. The paper was the New York Post, then in the hands of Dorothy Schiff. But most of my customers read it not for politics but because it had subsumed The Bronx Home News and had good coverage of local events. And it had Jimmy Cannon. And when I reached that last building I would rest young legs made tired by a hundred storeys of stairs and I would sit in a lighted area near the roof -- and under a skylight, I would read Jimmy Cannon.

A sordid postscript:

In recent times, lesser lights have tried to copy Jimmy Cannon’s writing format or emulate his style. But such pretenders rarely acknowledge their source. Now most are journalism majors, from good colleges, who wear expensive suits and play golf, and some of them consort with what now passes for glitterati. At night, they go home to the suburbs or upstate to their million dollar homes. At night, after the fights and the saloons, Cannon was more likely to be found roaming the streets of the city he loved.

Remembering a False Alarm

Sixty years before September 11, 2001, on December 9, 1941 there was a false air raid warning in New York City. It was two days after Pearl Harbor. In some places schools were closed and children sent home. I distinctly remember the event although reported details vary from my recollection. Some accounts say that children were sent home around noon. I recall being interrupted by an air raid warden on the way to school and told to return home. But the years encroach and memories are suspect.

Apparently on the same day, one of our great local writers, Jimmy Cannon, was stationed in Fort Dix and wrote about the event in a piece that later appeared in The Sergeant Says by Jimmy Cannon, published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York in 1943.

I remembered the Cannon piece when September 11 occurred and I think about it again on each anniversary. Because of the parallels. Because of the parallels between what New Yorkers thought, said and did on that day nine years ago and how much those attitudes were similarly reflected in the words of that lifelong New Yorker, Jimmy Cannon, more than a half century earlier. (New Yorkers are a difficult lot, but a special breed.)


Excerpts from False Alarm by Jimmy Cannon

The voice talked about the city. It was a radio announcer's voice and I resented its clean diction and its wheedling salesmanship. The voice of warning spoke to the people of the city as though it were trying to sell them a laxative, a tube of tooth paste, a cake of soap, or a pack of cigarettes. It was a cold voice, aloof and precise, and I knew the announcer had spent a lot of time with vocal teachers.

The voice told the people of the city to stay off the streets, to be calm, to remain in their homes until the all-clear had sounded. The voice said unidentified planes had been spotted beating toward the city. Those planes, I thought, are coming to bomb my family and my friends to try to destroy the city that I love. We sat there in the barracks, waiting to go on guard, and we cursed the planes and I felt angry and helpless.

It was a false alarm. The planes never came. But that polite radio announcer's voice pronouncing the warning made me hate the enemies of democracy more than anything else ever will. I'd always thought of war as being fought in strange lands, in parched fields or in far-away mud. I thought of it as something that happened to remote cities where other peoples lived. Although I have always thought our life and our property were in jeopardy, I never imagined New York under fire. I do now. I think of my family and friends and the city I love every time I take a rifle in my hands and every time I fix my bayonet.

Poster’s Note: Jimmy Cannon served in World War Two covering the war in Europe for The Stars and Stripes.

New York Stories 1: Woody Allen on Jimmy Cannon

An extract from In the editing room with Woody Allen: from defense to offense. By Ira Berkow. International Herald Tribune, November 2, 1995.

"Jimmy Cannon's New York is my New York," Woody Allen said recently, sitting in his home-away-from-home, the suite at the Beekman Hotel on Park Avenue where he edits his movies. "My whole feeling of New York City as a black-and-white Gershwin town comes from reading the late Jimmy Cannon," Mr. Allen said. "I never missed him."

Mr. Allen … can still recite passages from Cannon's sports columns in The New York Post during the 1950's: the time he described "the serene dependability of Stan Musial," or "the bookmaker who took a guy's money all year and then gave him a ball-point pen for Christmas." And he still remembers Cannon describing how he had been in a New York apartment late at night where Frank Sinatra was singing at a piano, and then how he walked home alone through the melancholy New York streets as the sun was coming up.



An afterthought: I have been working on a posting about Jimmy Cannon, which should appear before too long. When I was growing up, and even later, like Woody Allen, I never missed a Cannon column.