The con men of Liebling: New book reprises journalist's
favourite stories of rogues and flim-flam artists
by Robert Fulford
(The
National Post,
26 October 2004)
AJ. Liebling, a great journalist who was born 100 years ago this month, understood that some of the best stories fall into your lap and demand to be told. This happens, of course, only if you manage to be in the right place.
In April, 1943, Liebling was a war correspondent for The New Yorker. The right place for him was a back road in Tunisia that served as a U.S. army supply route. By the roadside he came upon the corpse of an American soldier. He was a private who had been nicknamed Mollie, short for Molotov, because he was always agitating like a Communist. At the time V.M. Molotov was the Soviet foreign minister.
Mollie provided the subject of a great Liebling article, which became the title story of Mollie and Other War Pieces, published in 1964. That book is among the 12 Liebling first editions in my library, one I particularly prize and reopen often. Liebling did his finest writing as a war correspondent, though he handled several subjects brilliantly: boxing, French food, the sins of newspapers, Governor Earl Long of Louisiana, the city of Chicago (which he called The Second City, a name appropriated by the theatre company) and Colonel John R. Stingo, an ancient flimflam artist whom Liebling immortalized in The Honest Rain-Maker.
The story of Mollie suggests why, 41 years after Liebling's death, many of us cherish his memory and continue to admire his hundreds of articles.
Along the edge of that road in Tunisia, Liebling recalled, you could find all the detritus of war, human and otherwise, strung out like beads on a string. "Mollie, for me, was the gaudiest bead." Liebling quickened to the peculiar mix of qualities in that young soldier's life. Mollie was brave and imaginative, but he was also a fraud. Like many characters Liebling wrote about, he was dissatisfied with his original identity and anxious to create a new one, by fictional means if necessary. That impulse often ends in squalor or the penitentiary, but Mollie was one con man no one could condemn.
Liebling gathered his story from soldiers who fought alongside him and then from New Yorkers who knew him before the war.
He learned that Mollie had been simultaneously a valuable soldier and an undisciplined rebel, always an inch away from a court-martial for breaking the rules. He hated army-issue clothes and routinely went into combat wearing a billowing black-and-red cape, a beret decorated with long rooster feather, and riding boots. He had long curly blond hair that he refused to cut. In his blanket roll he usually kept Arabian carpets.
A friend said, "Mollie was the biggest popoff and the biggest screwball and the biggest foul-up I ever saw, and he wasn't afraid of nothing." On one occasion he captured 568 prisoners of war. When an Italian unit was holding up the American advance, Mollie said to the men beside him, "I bet those Italians would surrender if somebody asked them to." He walked across a minefield waving at them. They shot at him for a while and then stopped, assuming he was crazy. After he explained the benefits of surrender he led the Italians back to the American lines, having relieved them of various pistols and field glasses for his personal collection.
By wild audacity he arranged the bloodless capture of a potentially difficult position. The friend who called him a screwball noted that a disciplined soldier would never have done what Mollie did. His lack of inhibition made him a hero. "He gave the battalion confidence and the battalion gave the regiment confidence...."
That exploit won him the Silver Star, awarded posthumously; he died soon after, aged 26, perhaps while going off on his own (as he often did) to explore enemy positions.
Mollie had convinced his fellow soldiers that he was a wealthy gambler from New York, known as "the Mayor of Broadway." They thought his name was Carl Warren, but back in New York Liebling discovered that he had enlisted as Karl Warner. That was a recently self-chosen name. Mollie's sister said he was born Karl Petuskia, the son of Russian immigrants in Cokesburg, Pa., where he left elementary school to become a pit boy in the coal mines. She also said that before the war he was a bartender at Jimmy Kelly's club in Greenwich Village. Liebling went there, and to the union for restaurant employees. He discovered that Mollie was never a bartender. He was a busboy.
By then Liebling was acquainted with a diverse company of eccentric strivers, the subjects of his early articles. He loved their sense of life and possibility. Naturally he fell for Mollie, the pit-boy-turned-New-Yorker carving a fresh identity for himself, making a fresh start in the chaos of war. "He has become a posthumous pal," Liebling wrote later. Walking through the West Side borderland between Times Square and the slums, where Mollie once lived, Liebling often thought of him and what he represented. "It cheers me to think there may be more like him all around me--a notion I would have dismissed as sheer romanticism before World War II. Cynicism is often the shamefaced product of inexperience."
Liebling liked hearing about Mollie's intense curiosity, not unlike Liebling's own. He was tolerant of stories about Mollie's bragging -- Liebling, after all, famously said, "I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better." Mollie's story became so important to Liebling that "I once half-convinced myself he was not dead." He tried to write a play, imagining that Mollie didn't die but went on to greater triumphs.
The play didn't work, so Liebling had to settle for giving his imaginary pal a small place in history: A magazine article of masterpiece quality and the title of a book. This season, to celebrate Liebling's centenary, the University of Nebraska Press has reissued Mollie and Other War Pieces as a paperback. A larger and broader collection, the 536-page Just Enough Liebling (North Point Press) has also recently appeared.
These books are attracting a fresh shower of praise from reviewers, and those who don't know Liebling may consider it excessive. So far as I'm concerned, however, he's one of the few journalists who can never be praised too much.
He learned that Mollie had been simultaneously a valuable soldier and an undisciplined rebel, always an inch away from a court martial for breaking the rules. He hated army-issue clothes and routinely went into combat wearing a billowing black-and-red cape, a beret decorated with long rooster feather, and riding boots. He had long curly blond hair that he refused to cut. In his blanket roll he usually kept Arabian carpets.
A friend said, "Mollie was the biggest popoff and the biggest screwball and the biggest foul-up I ever saw, and he wasn't afraid of nothing." On one occasion he captured 568 prisoners of war. When an Italian unit was holding up the American advance, Mollie said to the men beside him, "I bet those Italians would surrender if somebody asked them to." He walked across a minefield waving at them. They shot at him for a while and then stopped, assuming he was crazy. After he explained the benefits of surrender he led the Italians back to the American lines, having relieved them of various pistols and field glasses for his personal collection.
By wild audacity he arranged the bloodless capture of a potentially difficult position. The friend who called him a screwball noted that a disciplined soldier would never have done what Mollie did. His lack of inhibition made him a hero. "He gave the battalion confidence and the battalion gave the regiment confidence..."
That exploit won him the Silver Star, awarded posthumously; he died soon after, aged 26, perhaps while going off on his own (as he often did) to explore enemy positions.
Mollie had convinced his fellow soldiers that he was a wealthy gambler from New York, known as "the Mayor of Broadway." They thought his name was Carl Warren, but back in New York Liebling discovered that he had enlisted as Karl Warner. That was a recently self-chosen name. Mollie's sister said he was born Karl Petuskia, the son of Russian immigrants in Cokesburg, Pa., where he left elementary school to become a pit boy in the coal mines. She also said that before the war he was a bartender at Jimmy Kelly's club in Greenwich Village. Liebling went there, and to the union for restaurant employees. He discovered that Mollie was never a bartender. He was a busboy.
By then Liebling was acquainted with a diverse company of eccentric strivers, the subjects of his early articles. He loved their sense of life and possibility. Naturally he fell for Mollie, the pit-boy-turned-New-Yorker carving a fresh identity for himself, making a fresh start in the chaos of war. "He has become a posthumous pal," Liebling wrote later. Walking through the West Side borderland between Times Square and the slums, where Mollie once lived, Liebling often thought of him and what he represented. "It cheers me to think there may be more like him all around me -- a notion I would have dismissed as sheer romanticism before World War II. Cynicism is often the shamefaced product of inexperience."
Liebling liked hearing about Mollie's intense curiosity, not unlike Liebling's own. He was tolerant of stories about Mollie's bragging -- Liebling, after all, famously said, "I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better." Mollie's story became so important to Liebling that "I once half-convinced myself he was not dead." He tried to write a play, imagining that Mollie didn't die but went on to greater triumphs.
The play didn't work, so Liebling had to settle for giving his imaginary pal a small place in history: a magazine article of masterpiece quality and the title of a book. This season, to celebrate Liebling's centenary, the University of Nebraska Press has reissued Mollie and Other War Pieces as a paperback. A larger and broader collection, the 536-page Just Enough Liebling (North Point Press), has also recently appeared.
These books are attracting a fresh shower of praise from reviewers, and those who don't know Liebling may consider it excessive. So far as I'm concerned, however, he's one of the few journalists who can never be praised too much.
