Comebacks

Dennis Conner did it. After losing the America's Cup in 1983, the first time in 132 years an American skipper had suffered such humiliation, Conner came back three and a half years later to compete again for sailing's Holy Grail. After dispatching 16 other 12-meter yachts in a series of 43 round-robin challenge races, he blew the Australians away four—zip in the showdown finale. Dennis Conner, the carpet salesman from San Diego.

Sugar Ray Leonard did it. Leonard, an Olympic champion, then the world welterweight champion, the good guy of boxing, had been forced to quit the ring five years earlier because of a dangerous injury to his eye that required surgery. In defiance of much wise counsel, he emerged from retirement to fight a machine of destruction who hadn't lost in ten years, who was a middleweight, not a welterweight, and whose motto was "No mercy." Leonard beat Marvin Hagler and to his three other titles added middleweight champion of the world.

We associate comebacks with sports, and these were two of the most thrilling in recent memory. Sports, of course, epitomizes the back-from-the-dead saga, perhaps because the setback often seems so final, the end of a career. Joe Louis endured a humiliating defeat at the hands of the great Aryan hope Max Schmeling in 1936, then destroyed him two years later. I wasn't even born then, but I know the story well; people talked about it for years. But businessmen make comebacks, too; Lee Iacocca took the moribund Chrysler Corporation and restored it and himself to health, after having been fired by Henry Ford II because Ford didn't like the cut of his jaw. Iacocca made $20,600,000 last year in salary, bonuses and stock options; Chrysler made close to 1.5 billion dollars. Performers make comebacks. Where was Cybill Shepherd a scant few years ago? Down and out in Beverly Hills. Tina Turner, abused and dismissed, turned up the volume on her ageless sexual energy and made entire busloads of younger rock stars look insipid. Dennis Hopper, the bad boy of Hollywood, shook off drug rampages and scandal to re-emerge as an Oscar contender. Now he's directing a film.

We love comebacks. More than that, we seem to need them. We need to know that the tide turns, that after defeat can come victory, after failure, success. We need it so much that we let Richard Nixon come back, the man in all the United States who may have least deserved it. We don't need Nixon, we need the myth of revival, of renewal. A man is down, he's been hit hard, but he picks himself up off the floor, dusts himself off and is ready to try again. He does and he wins! Like little children with a favorite book, we never tire of hearing this tale. We'll forgive just about anybody if he makes a comeback.

We even forgave Bobby Ewing for dying.

Sort of. There are people who make comebacks, there are others who merely come back, and Patrick Duffy's return to Dallas required no triumph of will or wile; he was just an actor coming in from the cold. Stacy Keach, on the other hand, shrugged off a cocaine conviction in England to star once again as TV's Mike Hammer—a character, by the way, created by a writer everyone had generally dismissed as a has-been but who has made a remarkable comeback of his own. Count no man out till he's out, and then count a little longer (wasn't Gene Tunney saved, after all, when he survived a count of 11 and went on to knock out Jack Dempsey?). We need this stuff; we need it because we've all been there, or somewhere like it. We've all passed through our personal Slough of Despond and had to find the resolve, the means, the courage to face our mistakes, our bad luck, and come back strong. We need the Dennis Conners and Sugar Ray Leonards and Richard Nixons because of what they signify: Don't forget me, pal. I'll be back.

An example. A friend of mine on the West Coast was doing well as an independent video producer; he had shot some documentaries for (concluded on page 125)Comebacks(continued from page 100) public television, he'd worked on video productions with some big stars, he was slowly building a reputation and a career. Then a major long-term project he had going with Home Box Office went into turnaround. In other words, it was dead. About a month later, he found out he had diabetes.

I was in L.A. around this time, and we drove up and down the freeways in his little blue MG. He was a mess. He was 36 years old, his budding career had gone down the cathode tube, and he faced a lifetime of insulin shots, not to mention all the other problems, such as deteriorating circulation and impotence and blindness, that diabetics can suffer. He drove very fast, I remember. He didn't talk much. Then one evening, while he was building a fire in the fireplace, he started beating the kindling with the poker, sending splinters flying all over the room. Then he walked out the back door and didn't return for a long time.

He fought the disease for two years. He tried to lick it with diet and exercise, with specialist after specialist, with sheer will power. His weight fell to 110 pounds at one point; at 6'1", he looked like a corpse. Finally, he found a doctor who showed him how to test his own blood-sugar level every morning to see how much, if any, insulin he needed that day, and that was the turning point that allowed him to bring his condition under his personal control. He stopped fighting the disease, started taking insulin as he needed it, regained his weight, slept through the night again. Then he took a neglected talent for graphic design and turned it into a business. The titles on a recent TV blockbuster miniseries were his. His business is booming. A year ago, he got married. He's spirited, happy—I'm proud to have this guy as a friend.

The details vary, but the struggle is achingly familiar. We get fired from our jobs or we get diabetes or we slip into alcoholism—and have to claw our way back into the light. Friends who've been there inspire us—but it's the people who have made grand public comebacks whom we look to for proof that even the most embarrassing failures need not be final. If nothing seems as perilous as celebrity, nothing is so noteworthy as that return from celebrity lost, from obscurity and exile.

Like Frank Sinatra's. Sinatra, who, if Kitty Kelley's biography His Way is to be believed, has got to be one of the most arrogant, hot-tempered, nasty stars ever to fall out of the American heavens, completely messed up his life and career chasing Ava Gardner around the world in the late Forties. As Kelley reports, he was still married to his first wife and his open defiance of the marriage vows did not endear him to his dwindling public. He was losing his touch as a performer, furthermore; his movies were bombing, his records weren't selling and his voice had a tendency to freeze at concert dates. He opened his mouth but nothing came out. He was deeply in debt. For a while, Ava Gardner supported them both.

But Sinatra is no Eddie Fisher, who, when he was finished, was finished. Sinatra is nothing if not determined. He went after the part of Maggio in From Here to Eternity, Maggio being the skinny Italian soldier who gets killed in the knife fight with Fatso, the sadistic sergeant. Nobody thought Sinatra could act, but he wouldn't give up. He sent telegrams to the producers of the film and signed them "Maggio." He tested for the part; big stars like Sinatra never tested for parts. He offered to do it for free. "I am Maggio," he said, over and over again. (Dennis Hopper said the same thing, trying to get the part of Frank in Blue Velvet: "I am Frank." And got the part. And made a comeback.) In the end, Sinatra was cast and was paid $8000. Eight thousand dollars! He owed the IRS $109,000, and that was a pittance compared with what he had agreed to pay his wife to get out of the marriage. But the film went on to win eight Academy Awards. Sinatra took home best supporting actor. Variety called it "the greatest comeback in theater history."

A story like that changes everybody's perception of the possibilities. This wasn't an obscure citizen wrestling with yet another job search or trying to figure out how not to screw up marriages number two and three. This was Sinatra, in full public disclosure—and that must really jack up the pressure. Plenty of public figures, after all, don't make comebacks; they wisely retreat to the background, like Gerald Ford, or attempt to come back, like Muhammad Ali, and only make sad fools of themselves. But Sinatra pulled it off, and his ultimate triumph makes our private setbacks a little less daunting, less overwhelming. At our best and bravest, we mimic that same refusal to quit, that fist-shaking I'll-show-you grit. The how of it is simple—defy and persevere. Use your head, too, of course; think out your strengths and weaknesses and plot a reasonable reach. We can't all be movie stars, but anybody can keep on trucking.

It's an inspirational story, all right. It's also, perhaps, a little phony. There are those who say that Sinatra got the role of Maggio not because he was gutsy and determined but because certain well-connected buddies put the squeeze on the producers. That could be. Friends in high places help. And luck, too, plays a part in comebacks. Was it to the Mets' eternal credit that Bill Buckner let Mookie Wilson's easy grounder roll between his legs in the sixth game of the world series? Claus von Bülow got a second trial on his attempted-murder charge, but did he make a comeback or did he just fall into the hands of a friendlier jury? Did Nixon actually plot and stage a return—or did he simply wait in the wings, guarding his health till the climate shifted, till we forgave and forgot? On the other hand, let us not confuse moral fiber with mawkishness. Television is full of sentimental, slightly phony comeback scenarios. Retarded men struggle for dignity outside the asylum and achieve it. Quadriplegics, with enormous effort, learn to ski again. Vietnam vets get their lives together after hitting the skids for eight or nine years. It gets more than a little tearful, more than a little tiresome.

But we keep on watching in spite of ourselves. The market in comebacks continues bullish. With good reason: This is the original country of the comeback. This is what America is for. Europe was locked into the rigidities of a class system; a man out of luck in Europe was out of luck forever. Not here. Nobody cared here what had happened to a man elsewhere. This was the country of the second chance. It still is. I used to live near a guy who had been a successful Broadway dancer; then, when his legs gave out, he became a printer and set up a printing shop. It failed, and he went bankrupt. He opened an art-supply store. That didn't do too well, either. When last seen, he was cheerfully establishing yet another enterprise. It was almost laughable; like Charlie Chaplin, this was a man who, if you told him there was no food, would matter-of-factly make a stew of his shoes. But you had to respect him. Only the dauntless get the magic back. Yes, the Mets were ridiculously lucky, but luck and pluck frequently travel together.

We need the comeback story, sentimental or not. This is the country where Liz Taylor loses miraculous amounts of weight, where Bette Midler makes a virtue of vulgarity, where Betty Ford sobers up—and nobody mocks the spectacle of restoration; not at all, we cheer them on. Call no man beaten until he's dead, and maybe, in the land of the born-agains, not even then. In this, the homeland of free enterprise, failure and defeat require a tonic to get us back on our feet, back in the market place. Not all of us, by any means, have what it takes. But the possibility exists: Others have done it; maybe we can, too. We all live by that possibility.

"At our best and bravest, we mimic that same refusal to quit, that fist-shaking I'll-show-you grit."