The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Oney profiles characters, both saint and sinner, in ‘A Man’s World’
Gregg Allman, John Portman, Harry Crews among his subjects.
“No one taught me how to be a man,” Steve Oney writes in the introduction to his new collection, “A Man’s World: A Gallery of Fighters, Creators, Actors and Desperadoes.”
Oney had to teach himself, which he did by doing his job: profiling a rogues gallery of characters, both well-known (UGA phenom Herschel Walker) and lesser known (killed-in-action Marine Chris Leon).
The payoff for Oney: They provided many examples of behavior, both good and bad, to emulate or avoid.
The payoff for readers: We get this collection, a valise full of 20 portraits from 1977 to the present and a peek into the magical and dying world of the big magazine article.
Best-known for his 2004 opus “And the Dead Shall Rise,” an exhaustive, 784-page account of the Leo Frank trial and lynching, Oney has also steadily served up long-form magazine journalism, with an emphasis on the profile.
Oney comes to the Margaret Mitchell House June 15 to discuss “A Man’s World.” Georgia readers will be delighted to find a crowd of local figures among Oney’s characters. They include:
John Portman, Quintessential Atlanta architect, creator of the Hyatt Regency, Peachtree Center and dozens of other downtown landmarks, who Oney memora-
bly introduces by describing his elaborate hair, a sculptural “tsunami” that curls and crashes across Portman’s balding pate. “Portman wears his design philosophy right atop his noggin.” Gregg Allman, who Oney met at a low point in Allman’s career and portrays as a sinner seeking a second chance. Recovering from addiction, a bad marriage and a few bad albums, Allman was soldiering on, with the kind of guts Oney admired. “He’s a more substantial person than he even realized.”
Harry Crews, the Bacon County native and Dionysian raconteur. Oney was a wet-behind-the-ears graduate of the University of Georgia when he flew south to interview the novelist who was gonzo before gonzo was cool. Scotch-and-milk and barking contests ensue.
As the Crews story underscores, one of the joys of the book is its glimpse of a time when celebrities were not so tightly managed.
This comes home in Oney’s 1979 snapshot of Hubie Brown, the wildly profane, combative coach of the Atlanta Hawks, whose blistering, inventive language Oney notated in precise detail, while sitting on the bench with the players. (Brown’s invective stretched the boundaries of acceptable copy at the Journal & Constitution.)
“It was impossible to believe that just 40 years ago a coach this volatile and outrageous was stalking the sidelines of the Atlanta Hawks,” Oney said, in a conversation from his home in the Hollywood Hills. “The world was much less scripted then than it is today.”
Also that year he found himself spending a week with Robert Penn Warren, hiking, swimming and sitting at the dinner table with the giant of Southern literature, and listening in on squabbles with his wife, Eleanor Clark.
Their relationship, Oney writes, of “Red” Warren and Eleanor Clark, “is one of sweet collaboration wed to a propensity for ceaseless oratorical battle.”
To Oney’s chagrin, after the story ran Warren sent him a four-page, singlespaced letter critiquing the profile’s shortcomings. Warren addressed some matters of fact — Ford Madox Ford and Katherine Anne Porter were not contemporaries, for example — but his major complaint was Oney’s faithful reporting on Warren’s vigorous, heated debates with his wife.
Oney ultimately recognized that Warren was treating his profile with respect, and was grateful for the criticism.
Some of Oney’s subjects have passed from the popular radar, including Bryan Brown, the rough-cut Australian actor known chiefly for his steamy scenes in the television miniseries “The Thorn Birds,” and for marrying the co-star who sparked such erotic chemistry, Rachel Ward.
“That story was on the cover of GQ with a Herb Ritts photo of Bryan Brown,” said Oney, still surprised at Brown’s disappearing act. “He was headed to super stardom.”
And then it didn’t happen. “That’s the thing about a magazine story,” he said. “It contains the time. That’s the weakness of the form, and that’s the validity of it.”
Other pieces seem prescient. The 2010 profile of Andrew Breitbart, purveyor of reactionary web sites, presaged much that has happened since then. “When I wrote it, he seemed to be a voice crying in the wilderness, but everything he said came true.”
Opinion was divided on whether Oney treated Breitbart correctly. Former Constitution editor Gene Patterson sent him a note congratulating him: “You skinned that polecat.” Another friend told him, “you let him off too easy; you’re as bad as he is.”
Access to his subjects was critical, but Oney’s profile of flawed baseball star Robert “Bo” Belinsky shows how much a reporter can accomplish even if his subject is no longer living.
Belinsky, self-styled playboy who pitched the first major-league no-hitter in Los Angeles history, then lost almost everything to alcoholism, recorded some of his thoughts on cassette tapes before he died. A friend put those tapes in Oney’s hands. It was, Oney says, like having a conversation from beyond the grave.
But Oney also trusted his research. “I wrote a book about the Leo Frank lynching in which almost no one in that book I ever met,” he said. “I have faith in documents. I have faith in historical research. On some level, material like that is more accurate than what you’re going to get in an interview. It stands still. It has stood the test of time.”