People: May 2009 Archives

I met John McHugh in the autumn of 1966, when I was a cub reporter on the Sun-Times and he was a rewrite man, two years my senior, on the Chicago Daily News. We are still best friends. He worked the overnight shift, and among his duties was taking calls from readers. After midnight, they wanted to settle bets. "And what do you say?" McHugh would ask. He would listen, and then reply, "You're 100% correct. Put the other guy on." Pause. "And what do you say?" Pause. "You're 100% correct." If he was asked for his name, he said, "John T. Greatest, spelled with three Ts."

One night in autumn 1969 we found ourselves in the Old Town Gate, three blocks from our customary posts at O'Rourke's Pub. "I had my first job in Chicago here," he reminisced. "I invented the Roquefort Burger. Somebody ordered a cheeseburger and I, being a dumb Mick, didn't know any better." I told him Roquefort Burgers had long been widely known. "You've got to be shittin' me."

John is one of 10 brothers from Sligo, Yeats Country, on the west coast of Ireland. His father had been a member of the IRA gang that held up the Ulster Bank of Sligo. "They were raising funds for the cause," he explained. "All of the money was never accounted for. Trooper is the only man in Sligo who has a son who graduated from Indiana University." He was entrusted to Indiana under the protection of a cousin in Indianapolis

It's been more than 25 years since Billy (Silver Dollar) Baxter last graced the Cannes Film Festival, and yet as I pack for this year's event, I am thinking about him even now, and I am smiling. Billy single-handedly created an alternate reality at Cannes, and such was the force of his personality that those who came within earshot were seduced. In the words of Elaine May, he carried on a way of life that was extinct before he was born.

Billy was a loudmouth operator from the pages of Damon Runyon, whose gift was creating scenarios to entertain us. He didn't want our money, he didn't want publicity, he didn't want a free lunch, he only wanted our laughter, and to know that we would pass around the latest "Billy Baxter story." We are still passing them around. Billy is still very much alive, and we are in touch; he lives not far from Broadway, which is to Billy as the stream is to the trout. But all of my stories about him will be set in Cannes, because that was his stage, and he the player on it.