B. 1958
Prince
Famous and influential musicians die every year, but 2016 was bewildering. David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, Prince, Leon Russell, Phife Dawg ... it’s as if we walked out to look at the stars and found major constellations gone. Who had even gotten over Lou Reed yet?
None of those deaths took a bigger plug out of me than that of Prince, mainly because his impact on my childhood had carried such asteroid-level force. To be an 8-year-old white boy in a beige-carpeted basement in southern Indiana and have “1999” come on at the end of 1982 was ... there was no going back from it. It offered lots of lessons, first and foremost how to deal psychologically with the threat of existential annihilation. You may recall that 1983 was the year of the made-for-TV nuclear-holocaust movies: “The Day After” and, most disturbing of all, “Testament.” I slept less that year than in any year until my 20s. We were all going to die, and die horribly — I didn’t know much, but I knew that. No one was telling me how to deal with this. My mom tried. She told me about the Cuban missile crisis, in a “we’ve been here before” sort of way. But now came Prince. He sang what continues to be one of the most wonderful lyrical openings to a pop song: “I was dreaming when I wrote this./Forgive me if it goes astray.” Then he told me what you do in the face of certain and total destruction. The advice has held up. Live.
There’s a temptation to try a thing about “the meaning of Prince,” i.e., one of those half-true, crypto-competitive think pieces we tend to trot out (we including I) at times like this. When an artist you love disappears, everyone else’s ideas about that person can seem grotesque and stupid, and even if right, right for the wrong reasons. I’m having it happen right now with all the essays on Dylan’s Nobel. How dare you talk about Bob! Partly it’s the narcissism of minor difference, but partly it’s the simple inadequacy of language. You know that old line, that writing about music is like dancing about architecture? (So is writing.)
One thing that seems maybe worth saying is to note how all the writing on Prince so far has paid such scant attention to his deepest and most important gift, his feel for pop melody. We often do this, for some reason, in talking about pop singers, almost as if the gift were shameful. But it’s like discussing Olympic runners without mentioning their speed. Everything else that made Prince special — style, virtuosity, movement, guts, beauty — all of it could be removed piece by piece like body parts in a game of Operation, and there would still be Prince on the table. But if the man had not been able to write a song like “When You Were Mine” or “Raspberry Beret” (by write it, I mean put the notes and vowels in an order that made them hard to forget), we would never have heard of him. Because he could, though, we have, and people will, for hundreds of years.
The only thing I’ll risk adding to what will no doubt soon become a library shelf of Prince biographies and appreciations has to do with the man’s name, Prince Rogers Nelson. It interests me. Years ago I wrote an essay about Michael Jackson and learned that the name “Prince” — which Michael bestowed on his sons, in a gesture that most of the world quite reasonably took to be ostentatious and silly — had in fact been in Michael’s family for hundreds of years, and was a name first given to one of his slave ancestors in the South. Could this also be the case with Prince? That is, after all, his real name. The birth certificate says Prince Rogers Nelson (the clerk wrote Prince Roger Nelson, a mistake). But it turns out that neither the name Prince nor that of Rogers had been used by Prince’s family in living memory. The reality of where he got them was way weirder.
First, there is the immediate derivation, one most Prince freaks know about: In the ’50s, his father, John, formed an experimental jazz band called the Prince Rogers Trio. At one point, they were called simply Prince Rogers (“prince rogers,” read the business cards, “a whole new concept in music”). They played in restaurants and supper clubs. They never “went anywhere.”
The question becomes, Where did Prince Rogers get “Prince Rogers”? Where did Prince’s father pick it up? Was there a real human being called Prince Rogers, a person whose name would have been known to the band and family? There was.
The first Prince Rogers’s real first name wasn’t Prince, though. It was Douglas. He was born Douglas T. Rogers. I don’t know where he got the name Rogers. I can’t find his father. His mother was Jettie Layton. He grew up in Decatur, Ill., and left while still in high school to join the Navy. When he moved to Chicago, he intended to pursue premedical studies at DePaul. But something fateful happened, and he fell into the circle of an infamous spiritual figure known as Prophet Jones.
In the world of midcentury black Christianity, Prophet Jones was a figure equally loved and reviled. He had once been a man named James F. Jones in Birmingham, Ala. Down there he got mixed up in a church called Triumph the Holy Righteous Church, one of the countless splinter sects that emerged from the black evangelical revivals of 1890–1910, a kind of third Great Awakening in American history. In the 1930s, he went to Detroit as a missionary, and there he received his call. He could boast of hundreds and at times thousands of followers, black and white. The Detroit Free Press covered his doings extensively. Life magazine published a profile of him at one point; The Saturday Evening Post called him the “Messiah in Mink.” He conducted services from a kind of throne. Next to his throne was an empty chair for his dead mother. He claimed to be a real prophet: God spoke to him, showed him the future. He predicted that Eisenhower would win, and when this came to pass, Ike invited him to the inauguration, which made for excellent P.R. for the prophet.
Douglas T. Rogers became his right-hand man, or some combination of that and a body man. Never had the terms been more appropriate: Among the pictures of Prophet Jones, a startling number of them show Rogers, too. In the prophet’s organization, high-ranking figures were called princes and princesses. So Douglas Rogers became Prince Rogers, and people forgot he had ever been called Douglas.
It gets intriguing, in that Prophet Jones was most probably gay (a woman who knew him in his early days described him as a member of the “third sex”), and so, it appears, was Prince Rogers. Presumably they were lovers at first, after which it mellowed into a long partnership. The prophet’s scene was: lots of young men around, all the time, doing as the prophet wished. The prophet lived in a “French castle” with 54 rooms. He wore silk robes and an earring and a woman’s diamond bracelet and kept his hair long and wavy in back. At one point he was busted on “gross indecency” charges. The city’s Vice Bureau had sent in a spy, a handsome young man. The prophet, they claimed, had made “immoral advances.” When they threw Jones into his cell, he asked for two people: his lawyer and Prince Rogers.
Another time a would-be assassin broke into the castle. Prince Rogers, the church later claimed, had helped to thwart this attempt on the prophet’s life. According to the newspaper, however, he ran the opposite direction and fainted. “That’s all right,” said the prophet. “He’s just unconscious. It’s just the spirit of God.”
The prophet’s fame outside Detroit rested primarily on his radio show. His program, broadcast across multiple states, aired on Sundays. It seems safe to say his sermons were entertaining. It was said “to sound like a rock ’n’ roll concert.” Little Richard, in an interview with John Waters, owned the prophet as an early influence.
It would have been via this show, either closely listened to or casually overheard in the home of one John L. Nelson, that the name Prince Rogers entered the story of Prince Rogers Nelson, and the story of Prince. The prophet often mentioned his beloved prince in those Sunday transmissions. Strange evidence exists, in a 1954 issue of Jet, that Prince Rogers had become a known figure in Northern black culture: A handsome grifter in Chicago had tried to buy a fancy camera with a bogus check, and he claimed to be Prince Rogers, “secretary to the fabulous prophet.”
I don’t know what it all means. Certainly there seems to be some ... appropriateness ... in the idea that a sexually ambiguous black man known for displays of spiritual ostentation played some role in our hero’s evolution. Prince’s music and his theology, his musical theology, drew from so many of the same depths: eroticism and religion, physical purity and material display. But was there any real influence? We’d need to know first whether Prince’s father or any of the other band members ever got into Prophet Jones, or if the prophet’s message somehow played into the mission of the Prince Rogers Trio. Maybe they just thought it sounded good. We’d need to know whether Prince, as a boy, ever heard of the earlier Prince Rogers and his “fabulous” prophet. These things may be not merely unknown by now but unknowable. As for Prince, all we know is he has transitioned.
Prophet Jones died in 1971, but the first Prince Rogers seems to have lived on, in Los Angeles, into the ’80s. Long enough to witness the rise of his namesake. He has to have wondered.
He did not live to see midnight 1999, which according to Prophet Jones was the moment when death would pass from the world for good. “Men will stop dying in the year 2000,” he wrote, promising, by one account, that anyone “still alive then would become immortal.”
John Jeremiah Sullivan is a contributing writer for the magazine and the Southern editor of The Paris Review.
Central Florida is the in-between you make go away by pressing a little harder on the gas. Orange groves at dusk, sky full of pastel color, and Janet Reno is driving the car, a rental. It’s 2002, Reno is running for governor of Florida, and I’ve spent days riding shotgun with her, reporting for this magazine, accompanying her to various campaign events — most of them populated by older women, bright and warm women with structures of freshly coifed hair, who fawn over Janet Reno, who knew her mother, an investigative reporter for The Miami News. To them, Janet Reno is the daughter who left Florida to fix America, serving eight controversial years as attorney general under Bill Clinton, and has now returned to fix the Sunshine State.
There is a photograph of the astronaut Edgar Mitchell emerging from the Apollo 14 capsule, a ragged cone of scorched metal and shredded foil bobbing in the South Pacific 880 miles off the coast of American Samoa. A wetsuit-clad Navy swimmer is helping him out of the access hatch and into an inflatable raft. Mitchell, dressed in an olive-drab flight suit and a biological mask, steadies himself with his left hand on the door frame. He is 40, with the receding hairline and blandly gentle affect of a family dentist. It is Feb. 9, 1971, and he has just had an epiphany.
You had to have a little bit of patience and a lot of luck to catch Miss Cleo. She appeared on TV only late at night, after the second round of reruns and right before the white fuzz took over the screen. Miss Cleo was usually sitting at a table, draped in a glorious amount of fabrics, a stack of tarot cards in front of her, candles and incense burning behind her. “You have questions, I have the answers,” she would intone knowingly in her Jamaican patois, before singing out the words that would become her signature catchphrase: “Call me now!”
... and it is a collaboration that makes me additionally thankful for this splendid enigma: What did you and Eno chat about in between takes? Your favorite Hammer films? Is a hot dog a sandwich, yes or no?
He drew inspiration from a painting he kept on display in his studio, a depiction of souls plummeting into hell — a constant reminder of the multitudes that even his pen, wielded by a cartoonist for Christ, could not save from eternal fire. Still, Jack T. Chick did what he could, illustrating and mass-marketing his palm-size booklets that told different stories with the same message: If you do not accept Jesus Christ as your savior, you are hellbound.
In 2003, the State of New Jersey allowed a black-bear hunt for the first time in 33 years. The resulting controversy, still smoldering today, seemed irresolvable: Depending on whom you asked, the hunt was either sadistic blood sport or noble tradition. Two sociologists, Dave Harker and Diane C. Bates, scrutinized 10 years of clashing regional newspaper editorials and letters to the editor and concluded that the two sides did not even seem to be arguing about the same animal. Actual bears had been replaced by “competing social constructions” of bears. Those in favor of the hunt imagined the animals as “menacing threats” that needed to be controlled; those against saw them as docile and benevolent creatures that just wanted to “live in peace.”
When the shaking stopped on April 18, 1906, William A. Del Monte’s mother bundled him in a tablecloth and carried him out of the house and into the street, where her husband waited in a buckboard wagon. Amid San Francisco’s chaos — broken water and gas mains, shattered windows, twisted telegraph wires, six-foot chasms in the fissured earth — a horse began hauling the family from their North Beach neighborhood to the ferry terminal by the Embarcadero. Dawn was breaking. Small fires were beginning to burn. Houses, tipped diagonally, seemed on the verge of collapse. The city’s power was down, and its supplies of fresh water were mostly gone.
In 1963, the 19-year-old Frank Sinatra Jr. sang with the Tommy Dorsey band, just as his father had two decades before, though now Dorsey was seven years dead and The New York Times referred to the musicians performing under his name as a “ghost band that has become the nucleus of a ghost show.” The younger Sinatra was praised for how close his mannerisms and phrasing were to his father’s, but he was damned for lacking his father’s “creative presence.”
The song came gushing out like an open hydrant on a hot summer day, but for Natalie Cole, it was a complicated kind of high. Minutes before she heard her breakthrough hit, “This Will Be,” on the radio for the first time in 1975, she had scored a heroin fix and was tripping down 113th Street in Harlem. Drugs were a recent mainstay; she started using heavily in college, during the substance-fueled psychedelic era (she still managed to get her degree, in psychology). Music, meanwhile, was her birthright — after all, she was the daughter of Nat King Cole, one of the most beloved singers of the 20th century. Growing up in the exclusive Hancock Park section of Los Angeles, she could wander into the living room and find the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Sinatra gathered round the family piano. Now that she had a big hit of her own, fame was proving to be a stronger stimulant. She kicked heroin, married one of her producers, had a son, had more hits, appeared on “The Tonight Show.”
In the online video that started Kimbo Slice on his way to bare-knuckle fame in 2003, two heavily muscled black men, each smooth-headed and stripped to the waist, square off in a backyard in Florida. Behind them you can see a grill, a satellite dish, palm trees. The web address of a porn site appears on the screen. Kimbo lowers his guard and taunts his opponent, Big D, who strikes Kimbo’s heedlessly exposed chin with no visible effect. Kimbo lands a blow that drops Big D to all fours in the sere grass. Staggering to his feet, Big D holds out open hands in a pacific gesture and says, “Chill, dawg, just chill.”
When Zerka Moreno gave birth to her son, Jonathan, in 1952, she saw his arrival as a “golden opportunity.” How much more fun and creative might his life be, she wondered, if he were raised using therapeutic techniques like role-playing or talking to an empty chair? Each was pioneered by J.L. Moreno, Zerka’s husband and the founder of psychodrama, a form of therapy in which people act out their experiences and feelings in an effort to gain insight or achieve catharsis.
In 1981, the Louisiana Legislature passed a law that forbade public schools to teach evolution without also instructing students on “creation science.” The Creationism Act was challenged in court for breaching the constitutional wall between church and state, in a case that reached the Supreme Court in 1986. For seven justices, the decision involved a simple constitutional question. They saw the law as an effort to force religious belief into the science curriculum, and they struck it down.
Reno’s mother began building the family home, near the Florida Everglades, in 1949, long before Miami’s suburban sprawl crept into the area. Reno moved here at age 14, and — apart from stints in Tallahassee and as U.S. Attorney General — lived here for the rest of her life. The bed and other antiques once belonged to her maternal grandparents. ‘‘I don’t know how old they are,’’ says her sister, Maggy Hurchalla, ‘‘but I’ve known them for as long as I remember, and I just turned 76.’’
Credit Mitch Epstein for The New York TimesAcross the length of 2016, the photographer Mitch Epstein — known for making careful large-format images that draw rich meaning out of places and objects — arranged to visit the living and working spaces of some of the monumental figures we lost this year. The goal was to arrive not long after each person’s death, in those days when a person’s spirit can still seem palpable somewhere among their rooms and their things — as in his photograph of the writer Jim Harrison’s studio, where the items on a bedside table seem as if they were set down only moments ago.
One day in the summer of 1953, Josephine Couch went with her boyfriend, Salvatore Del Deo, on an overnight trip to the dunes outside Provincetown. They’d been invited by a friend, a former chorus girl who went by Frenchie Chanel, to stay with her at her tar-paper shack by the water. That day, amid the compass grass and rose hips, Josephine, 27, felt the rest of the world vanish: Birds cried, but the white noise of surf and wind enforced a hush. At night, the moonlight caused the dunes to glow. Josephine fell asleep in the arms of Salvatore, whom she married that fall, to the cooing of a dove.
She was lucky, she believed, to be taught by “Harvard’s great men.” At 17, Ruth Hoffman was freshly enrolled at Radcliffe, the women’s college affiliated with Harvard, and keen on studying biochemistry. It was 1941. The two institutions had separate campuses but shared a faculty. Harvard professors lectured their male students and were then obliged to repeat it all to the smaller, all-female classes at Radcliffe. That teaching women was a chore, even an insult, was something Hoffman read on their faces. Her professors did little, she felt, to hide their disdain.
At 11, a boy is a dangerously ideal target for bullying: His horizons are limited, his sensitivity is ripe, his reactions are hot.
On the second day of the first Circle of Mothers retreat, in 2014, Afeni Shakur approached the stage to speak to the assembled crowd. Some days, it felt as if America was brimming with grieving mothers, so the event’s founder, Sybrina Fulton, wanted to gather many of them together in the hope that they could help one another move forward. Her son, Trayvon Martin, was shot and killed two years earlier. Shakur’s son, the rapper Tupac Shakur, had been dead for almost 20 years.
Carnival proprietors taking drugs and poisons to intentionally breed baby freaks: That’s the unvarnished core of Katherine Dunn’s third novel, 1989’s “Geek Love.” The Binewski Carnival Fabulon needs a boost, and Aloysius and Crystal Lil Binewski hatch this twisted plan to turn things around. Lil births a boy with flippers, beautiful Siamese-twin sisters joined at the waist, an albino dwarf hunchback and a boy with telekinetic powers. It hardly sounds like a universal cipher, the kind of humanist tale that attracts readers over time. Yet somehow this strange, singular book has spent the 27 years since its publication doing just that, speaking clear and true to a certain kind of reader.
The year 1989 was a good time to be 13 and have your MTV. The channel gave you the recipes for being chicer, more alternative, more you; for being gayer, blacker, more confrontational; for being cooler, basically. Perhaps it was your meal plan: “Yo! MTV Raps” for breakfast, “120 Minutes” for a midnight snack. And for dessert, “House of Style.”
On the 7:02 a.m. commuter train from Fairfield, Conn., to Manhattan, a woman with scarlet lipstick and chestnut hair slid beside a businessman reading his newspaper. “May I ask you a question?” she said. “What do you think about breast-feeding?” This was the mid-1950s. The woman was Dana Raphael, an anthropologist, a protégée of Margaret Mead and an outspoken feminist who, a decade before Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique,” refused to take her husband’s name and shunned the conventional wedding her mother planned. She initially also had no intention of following the de rigueur practice of bottle feeding. But after she tried but mostly failed to nurse her firstborn son, she began an anthropological quest that would end up spanning decades: Why was breast-feeding more successful in some cultures than in others?
There’s a story about Muhammad Ali that might have been lost to history, disappearing among all the other Ali esoterica, but for The Los Angeles Times photographer Boris Yaro. On Monday, Jan. 19, 1981, Yaro heard reports of a suicidal jumper on the radio. His editor wasn’t interested, but Yaro drove over to Los Angeles’s Miracle Mile regardless, where he found a young black man in flared jeans and a hoodie, perched on an office-building fire escape nine floors above.
Role models often appear with a thunderclap, a bright flash on a dark horizon, but can feel remote and evaporate just as quickly. Gwen Ifill was different. I didn’t know her, but I did get to know her influence, how it entered the lives of my students, especially girls and young women of color, whom I taught in Newark, N.J. For those like Jephtane Sophie Sabin and Isabel Evans, who watched Ifill on PBS over many years and eventually had the opportunity to meet her, Ifill created a warm and welcoming climate in which their aspirations had the chance to take root. Her impact wasn’t instant but played out slowly over time, like the rain of a wet season.
Jacques Rivette’s “Out 1” — a 12-hour film, completed in 1971 and all but impossible to see in its entirety until very recently — begins with an extended sequence that combines artlessness and high artifice. The members of an experimental theater troupe (one of two such entities in the film) participate in an exercise that consists of writhing and squirming on the floor while wordlessly moaning and keening. It’s the primordial soup from which the film’s elaborate and elusive narrative will evolve, a reminder that every story begins in chaos and noise. Cinema, like other art forms, imposes a capricious kind of order on the mess of human experience, and “Out 1” illustrates this principle with a characteristically Rivetteian blend of intellectual rigor and anarchic whimsy.
When you hear that a writer you first came to know in your youth is still writing in his advanced old age, you are at first surprised, as though he has risen from the tomb to write the poem you are reading. Then, once you absorb this fact, you go on to believe, quite illogically, that he will not die after all — certainly not soon.
For nearly 20 years, Coca Crystal’s weekly public-access show began with her smoking a joint. The show’s title was a scrap of messy poetry, as unwieldy as the program itself: “If I Can’t Dance, You Can Keep Your Revolution.” It was a no-fi interview show featuring scribbled title cards and minor downtown celebrities; regular guests included a singing dog and a disheveled poet who recited his work in a tapioca-thick mumble. She dedicated one episode to “the second anniversary of the first nonstop balloon crossing of North America.” The show isn’t easy to characterize, but Crystal probably described it best: “an hour of talk, telephone and technical failure.” Every episode ended with her dancing to groovy music — a little shoulder sway, some finger snaps.
During a Final Four basketball game against the University of North Carolina, on April 1, 2007, Pat Summitt, the coach of the University of Tennessee Lady Vols basketball team, found her team down by 12 points with 8:18 to go. She was fuming — her gold rings were dented from being banged on the parquet floor. Summitt was a screamer. She loved to win. Over 38 years at Tennessee, she won 1,098 games — more than any other coach in N.C.A.A. Division 1 history. She also understood winning as a far more potent and radical act than even the most rabid male football fans would understand while pounding their painted chests.
“Ran into Bill Cunningham on his bike, I just wish I could do what he does, just go everywhere and take pictures all day.” From “The Andy Warhol Diaries,” entry dated Thursday, May 17, 1984