Could it be that The Times-Dispatch, most daily newspapers in the United States and others abroad were hustled?
You know, as in the dictionary reference “hustling the suckers.” One definition in Webster’s reads, “to sell something or to obtain something . . . by energetic and especially underhanded activity.”
In February, the T-D published an obituary on Eddie Parker of San Antonio. The headline read, “Eddie Parker dies; in spired two movies.” A photo showed Parker lining up a pool shot.
The opening paragraph of the wire service obit flatly stated that Parker was “a legendary pool player known as ‘Fast Eddie’ who inspired the movie, ‘The Hustler.’”
He was, the article continued, credited with inspiring the writing of the 1959 book as well as the screenplay for the 1961 movie.
Has anyone not seen “The Hustler” with Paul Newman as Fast Eddie Felson, a role he reprised in the 1986 sequel, “The Color of Money”? The article said Newman was portraying the real-life Parker in both movies. Newman won the best actor Academy Award for “The Color of Money.”
The New York Times ran the wire service obituary, but The Washington Post published a nearly 1,000-word article by a staff writer. That story described Parker’s “smooth talk” and said he became “a national cult figure after Paul Newman portrayed him” in the film.
As I read the obituaries, I was reminded of my college days at the University of Kentucky in Lexington in the late 1940s. Across South Limestone Street from the student union building was a student hangout with a pool hall upstairs.
My friend John and I retreated there frequently for a friendly game if we had a quarter for a rack of balls. Almost always at the next table was a lone player, a shy, thin, gawky kid, his blond hair in the burr cut of the post World War II times.
John and I joked about the kid, Walter Tevis. He was a fellow student working his way through college. He never spoke or looked our way but grimly concentrated on his shots.
Later, when I was an assistant editor on the Lexington afternoon newspaper, Tevis reviewed, free-lance, a community theater play. It fell to me to edit the article. Being a know-it-all, 22-year-old, I sniffed at the style and structure, rolled paper into my Smith-Corona, and rewrote the review. I don’t recall that Tevis submitted any more free-lance articles.
I would see him often as I walked at night after work along West Main Street to my one room-with-kitchen flat. He usually was sitting by a window in his English-basement apartment, a figure visible in lamplight, reading or writing.
In 1955, I moved to Richmond to join The Richmond News Leader and thought no more of Tevis. In 1959, John phoned. “Have you heard about Walter’s book?” he asked. “You must get it and read it. It won’t take you long.”
Walter Tevis had written “The Hustler.” I read the 214 pages in one evening. I was impressed. Tevis had become an artist of description, dialogue and crisp writing. Simple, direct sentences moved the narrative quickly forward.
So now Parker, the model for the book’s Fast Eddie hero, was dead. Tevis himself died of lung cancer in 1984, shortly after writing “The Color of Money.” He also was the author of “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” another novel turned into a motion picture.
Nearly six weeks after reading the obituary, I was on the Internet catching up with columns by fellow ombudsmen. I clicked on a piece by Ian Mayes, ombudsman for The Guardian of London whom I have quoted in a previous column. He was writing about Tevis and Fast Eddie Parker.
The Guardian also had published the obituary on Parker, with its claims of connection with Tevis and “The Hustler.” However, Eleanora Tevis, the widow of Walter, phoned Mayes from her home in New York and disputed the contention.
In his column, Mayes related Mrs. Tevis told him that through the years, many pool players claimed to be Fast Eddie Felson.
“Walter,” she said, “consistently stated that ‘The Hustler’ was a work of fiction and the characters therein were fictitious.”
Walter Tevis was interviewed in 1983 by a Pittsburgh newspaper reporter, Mayes wrote, after the death of a pool player called Edward ‘Fast Eddie’ Pelky. The wire obituary at the time began:
“Edward ‘Fast Eddie’ Pelky, the famed pool shark portrayed by Paul Newman in the movie ‘The Hustler,’ has died . . . ”
Mayes wrote that Tevis told the reporter, “I’m weary of explaining this. Nobody believes you when you keep telling them you invent your own characters.”
The headline on that story: “All ‘Fast Eddies’ say they’re Hustler.”
Tevis also was described in the Pittsburgh newspaper story, Mayes wrote, as being upset with people who would ask him of another character in the book, “When did you meet Minnesota Fats?”
Tevis wondered whether they would have asked Walt Disney, “When did you meet Donald Duck?”
As for the latest claimant, Fast Eddie Parker, another reporter in 1987 had checked with four close associates of Tevis. They told the reporter they had “never heard of Parker and questioned his role, if any, in influencing Tevis,” Mayes wrote.
Last week, I went back to the Internet and discovered Eleanora Tevis also had called The Associated Press to dispute its story. AP issued a “clarification” stating Tevis’s widow “said that her husband had repeatedly denied that Mr. Parker or anyone else had been a model.”
I didn’t find that the clarification appeared in The Times-Dispatch. It was published in The Washington Post and The New York Times.
All of this intrigues me possibly more than you. Did Fast Eddie Parker, who had an early reputation as a pool hustler, get caught in a web of his own making and entangle all those newspapers as well?
Without “The Hustler” connection, it seems unlikely his obituary would have received much notice.
I sent my recollections of Tevis, described above, by e-mail to Mayes. In turn, he sent a copy to Eleanora Tevis. She replied that my “recollection of Walter is priceless,” which I hope means it was accurate.
She also keeps in touch with Paul Newman, Mayes told me, and was sharing the London correspondence with the actor.
I told my assistant, Terri Lupien, that we might be getting a phone call from Newman.
“I’ll put him right through,” she said. “But first I’ll tell him I use his salad dressing.”
