Shelf Life — Scott Dickensheets: Going in pursuit of ‘The Secret Parts of Fortune’

Friday, July 21, 2000 | 9:04 a.m.

ott Dickensheets' books and magazines column appears Fridays. Reach him at dickens@vegas.com or 990-2446.

Sucker's big. Hefty! Seven-hundred-plus pages of reprinted magazine articles entombed between hard covers, which you might think is a stretch to ask people to spend their Harry Potter money on. But most of the pieces collected in Ron Rosenbaum's "The Secret Parts of Fortune: Three Decades of Intense Investigations and Edgy Enthusiasms" (Random House, $29.99) deserve the preservation they're getting. Individually, they ask a lot of deep, important, entertaining questions about the perception of reality, the accuracy of history, the nature of belief. And collectively they pose this very pointed one: What is the shape of a writer's career?

No mere journalist, Rosenbaum is something like a philosopher with a press pass. He rose to prominence at the Village Voice in the '70s, then wrote seminal stories (most included herein) for the brainier national magazines, including Esquire, Harper's, Rolling Stone and others. His last book was the acclaimed "Explaining Hitler," a gripping intellectual survey of the many contradictory theories about the motivations of the Nazi leader.

The stories he's been drawn to over three decades were stories of ideas, often involving marginal characters in conflict with the dominant society, or heretical notions obsessively pursued, or magic rabbit holes in contemporary history, or intellectual mysteries. Included here are pieces on "phone phreaks" (early hackers), cancer victims seeking crazily unorthodox treatments in Mexico, a dental faith healer, the curse of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Yale's secret Skull and Bones Society (shaper of George Bush), America's nuclear infrastructure, Jack Nicholson and "The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal," which you'll have to read to believe.

Rosenbaum often proceeds from a philosophical query; thus his foray into Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories sets out to answer not the standard questions, "Did Oswald do it?" or "Did Oswald act alone?" but the more philosophically fertile, "Who was Oswald?" In the introduction, Rosenbaum sheds light on the workings of his own mind by telling the story of an article he didn't write. Early in Rosenbaum's career, a man he calls Norman Bloom buttonholed him for several long conversations in which Bloom claimed to have found a secret message from God encoded in Bach's "Goldberg Variations." Most of us in this business have had similar encounters -- mine was with a guy who wanted me to write about how the CIA had conspired to ruin his life.

"I never wrote the story Norman Bloom wanted me to write," Rosenbaum explains. "But if I didn't write the story, in a way it inscribed itself on me, stayed with me ..." It fostered in the young writer a taste for stories with eccentric characters or ideas at their conflicted hearts, and this book is a portrait gallery of some of the most enigmatic real people you'll meet in a book: spies, nuclear tacticians, Nabokov scholars, Elvis scholars, twin weirdo gynecologists, Burt Reynolds.

He usually structures his reports as first-person dispatches, often describing his attempts to puzzle out the story behind the story. This allows him to do something largely unheard of in American journalism: admit to confusion, doubt and ambiguity as he sifts conflicting evidence and contradictory certainties. That firmly grounds each story in the particulars of the Rosenbaum's mind instead of forcing on us the misleading tone of third-person authority that is the house voice of modern journalism. He follows clues into cul-de-sacs -- his investigation into the murder of a Kennedy mistress yields not a dark conspiracy theory (the destination one presumes when a murder is connected to Camelot) but to what is probably a tale of an ordinary slaying that happened to have sensational elements. In cases like that, he is content to unsolve the mystery -- not get to the bottom of it, but dispel the "premature certainty" of an established line of thinking.

Rosenbaum's interests are admirably varied, a good quality if you're a journalist trying to fob off 700 pages of odds and ends. So not every story is one of gravity and portent and conspiracy. In one report from the '70s, he investigates battles between purveyors of canned laughter, that irritating laugh track that's helped sap the humor from sitcom TV. In another, he dissects Mr. Whipple and the "Please don't squeeze the Charmin" commercials. In another, he offers to marry Rosanne Cash. (He's kidding. I think.)

Of course, no one save Rosenbaum himself could keep pace with every intellecutal twist and turn of this book. Its final third features samples from the column he writes for the New York Observer, "The Edgy Enthusiast." In these, he frees himself from what we in the biz call "the news peg," some topical reason to be writing about a subject. He simply indulges his interests and whimsies. He'll chase some obscure literary footnote into the intellectual ether, and although I try to hang on, like a TV cop on the hood of a getaway car, often my fingertips give out and I'm thrown clear. I don't hold that against "The Secret Parts of Fortune." If I wanted a book whose every fold and wrinkle captivated me, I'd write my own.

Ultimately, this fine volume's breadth, depth and variety give you a full picture of the shape of Rosenbaum's career, a career spent pursuing in journalism the sorts of large, compelling ideas usually left to fictioneers and philosophers. There are worse ways to have spent three decades.

Reading matters

Burbank will make booktore appearances on Aug. 5 (noon at Barnes and Noble, 2191 N. Rainbow Blvd.), Aug. 8 (7 p.m. at Borders, 1445 W. Sunset Road) and Aug. 12 (1 p.m. at the Gambler's Book Club, 630 S. 11th Street). Mark your calendars.