The lonely passion of Sparrow Robertson. Around 1pm each day, he roused himself from his slumber at the Hotel Lotti, the former Jacobin convent where he had taken a room for years, donned his suit, knotted his tie and headed out. Dapper. Always. Passing through the lobby, he ignored the Nazis loitering in their grey uniforms, dour and grimly efficient like their regime. Strolling along Rue Castiglione, muscle memory carried him a couple of miles to the offices of the Paris Herald Tribune, just off Champs-Elysees where a long swastika banner menaced from atop the Arc de Triomphe. The new world order of things.
At 21 Rue de Berri, he walked through the city room to the tiny cubby hole at the back where the handwritten “Do Not Disturb!” sign he nailed up back in 1930 still hung from the door. A one-time admonishment turned ironic joke now. Placing a fresh sheaf of paper in his typewriter, he began pecking away, the harsh rat-tat-tat of metal keys echoing through the empty spaces where his colleagues used to congregate. Every other desk long since abandoned. No phones rang. No gossip was exchanged. Those great hulking machines in the basement that once cranked out a daily newspaper read all over Europe stood eerily silent, the strident Communist Party anthems sung by the printers as they worked just one more memory of how things used to be. Before.
But there was a column still to be written. Every day. Duty called. Because he was the last sportswriter in Paris. This was his curious mission, his vigil, a solitary act of defiance against the German occupation. In between chomps of a banana, he tore lumps from a stale baguette and bashed out a one-fingered symphony for an edition that would never be printed and an international readership that had fled the city. No matter. This was all he knew to do. At the finish, he called for a copy boy to collect his work. Just for the theatre of it. Of course, none came, so he placed this column, like all others, on the vacant desk of Eric Hawkins, his editor who had hastily decamped to London when the jackboots reached the outskirts.
As the summer of 1940 gave way to autumn, the office, deprived of heat and light, grew dark and cold, the unpublished missives stacking up. A monument to futility. Yet still Robertson came each day to fulfil his Sisyphean task. Some afternoons, Mademoiselle Brazier, the building manager, came upon his lonesome station and urged him to stop torturing himself with this ritual. To no avail. She begged him to leave town too, to wait out the war in his cottage near Fontainebleau. A desertion impossible to consider. A man of 84, he had been married at least twice, but Paris was the great love of his life, their true romance dating back to the waning days of the previous conflict.
His personal resistance to the oppressive new rulers took brazen shape. Stubbornly choosing to ignore the Nazis in his midst, he refused to give up his room at the hotel when they sequestered the premises as military quarters and pretended ignorance of curfew and travel restrictions. Mostly, they left him about his forlorn business until one night an over-zealous crew at a checkpoint were startled by the little, old man flouting the law. They hauled him off to their commanding officer, at whose desk Robertson got up on his haunches, all 5ft 4ins of him, and, speaking out the side of his mouth in the gangster fashion he thought made him sound tougher, delivered his stock catchphrase when facing down any authority figure.
“Where do you get this stuff?” he asked.
The German in charge did a double-take and suddenly smiled. He recognised the impudent, mustachioed character in front of him from his outsized role in a merry night of impromptu cabaret at the Berlin Olympics four years earlier. It may or may not have been the evening when the famous violinist Fritz Kreisler accompanied Robertson in his celebrated song and dance rendition of “Mister Dooley’s Geese” in the cocktail bar of the Hotel Eden. There are competing versions of this yarn. One ends with the officer rebuking his soldiers for their manners and going off pub crawling Montmartre with the journalist. In another, Sparrow is merely sent on his way, back roaming the Paris night. A prisoner of his own love affair.
In the matter of the ghostwriter in the city of light, deciphering truth from mythology often proves difficult. His epic life straddled two centuries, two continents and too many peers who were graduates of the “Print the legend” school of journalism. Never mind the fact-checking, feel the wit. According to an autobiography he started to write but put away after six pages, he was born William Harrison Robertson in Leith Walk, Edinburgh sometime around 1855. His age, like so much about him, something of a rough guesstimate.
Nobody is certain how old he was when the family swapped Scotland for New York either, but he bore no trace evidence of an accent and had his first job at Hearn’s dry goods store on Broadway by 10. There followed a stint repairing guns for Smith & Wesson before he opened a sporting goods store in his early 20s. For the next three decades, he was a fixture on the thriving New York sports scene, first as a marathoner of note, later an athletics coach and track official. Wearing a distinctive brown bowler hat and clutching a snub-nosed pistol, he became the official starter and timer for prestige races all along the Eastern seaboard.
Something of a Gilded Age Phil Knight, he turned to cobbling, fashioning shoes for the most competitive runners in an era when athletics was a national obsession. There was a touch of Eddie Hearn about him too, dabbling in boxing as referee, matchmaker, promoter, and producer of boxing gloves prized by the finest fighters of the day. “The Sparrow’s Nest”, his establishment at the corner of Beekman Street and Park Row, was a daily hangout for writers, fighters and athletes of every stripe, including Mayo’s Martin Sheridan, the three-time Olympic discus champion.
“I opened up a public gymnasium where I promoted many boxing tournaments, one of which was the first coloured boxing championship of America,” wrote Robertson. “It was a huge success and it was there where the noted heavyweight Frank Craig started, whom I christened the ‘Harlem Coffee Cooler’ ... In the days of the bare knuckle fight days, and in and around New York, there were few that I missed, I also refereed hundreds of fights, bare knuckle and glove affairs, and when the famous Coney Island and Maspeth fight clubs were in existence I was official timekeeper at about all the important fights held in both institutions.”
He took his morning coffee drenched in applejack (a type of fruit brandy) and spent evenings propping up every gin mill across The Bowery, a staple fixture at Owney Geoghegan’s, Harry Hill’s, and Billy McGlory’s Dance Hall, notorious establishments where back room deals were done, reputations won and lost, and, in his case, nicknames earned. As Robertson cut a dashing rug one night, wearing an oversized rented white tux and tails that swept the floor, a prominent politico from Tammany Hall observed him preening his feathers and asked, “Who’s that sparrow over there?” Nobody ever called him anything else thereafter.
At the tail end of the first World War, he was dispatched to France by the YMCA to assist in the physical training of the newly arrived American Expeditionary Force. He presided over a famous track and field meet at Colombes even as the conflict raged on the western front, organised baseball games for the troops, and fell hard and fast for the unique delights of Paris. In the writer Damon Runyon’s telling of it, Robertson took one look at this wondrous metropolis, asked, “How long has this been going on?” and decided to make it his home.
“He was a rugged physical specimen,” wrote Hawkins, his editor. “Five feet four, wiry, slender, and in the years I knew him, aggressively outlined with a battered grey fedora perched at a jaunty angle over a deeply wrinkled weather-beaten face from which he peered at all old pals through beady eyes separated by a beaky nose – that was the Sparrow, a jaunty product of East Side political clubrooms and boxing circles who chose to make a new life in Paris at an age when most men think of retiring.”
At 64, he somehow inveigled a job as a sports columnist with the Paris Herald Tribune. The only problem with the arrangement was that he couldn’t write. Long-suffering copy editors tried to get him fired regularly, and the American author John Lardner described him as “illiteracy most famous product, the worst writer in Europe.” His good friend Henry Clune admitted he “hardly knew a comma from a gold toothpick, and his syntax was as baffling as Sanskrit.” Yet, his unique approach gained a cult-like following and prestigious admirers over the ensuing two decades.
When Eugene O’Neill took a house in France, a squadron of high-minded critics made pilgrimage from Paris to sit with the playwright at Chateau du Plessis near Tours. As they spent long hours grilling him about his writing, O’Neill interrupted their constant questions with his own inquiry, “Does anyone here know Sparrow Robertson?” When one of his shocked visitors answered that he did, the American said, “He’s my hero. Tell me all about him. He’s a grand bird!”
Although billed as “Sporting Gossip”, large portions of the column were devoted to recounting his daily odyssey around the saloons of Paris’s Right Bank, the people he encountered, and the prodigious quantities of drink consumed. A typical day involved pit stops at Fred Payne’s, the Hotel Chatham, the American Legion, the Ascot, Scribe, Maxim’s, Luigi’s, Les Caves Murae, Joe Zelli’s, Vetzel’s, Hotel Meurice, and Harry’s New York Bar. His bacchanalian antics became so widely read that Time magazine judged him “the Herald’s cocky, antique, legend-crusted pee wee, the champion drink-cadger of Paris”.
Historians quibble about whether he never actually paid for a round of drinks, survived mainly on a diet of boiled eggs, and knew a solitary word of French, “ici”. All agree that just about every celebrity who passed through postwar Paris supped with him. Referring to them in print affectionately as “old pals”, recurring visitors were initiated into the International Barflies, a confraternity whose members wore lapel pins, cherished badges of honour doled out by Robertson in acknowledgment of their services to the night.
One day, he was lunching with Gene Tunney, heavyweight champion of the world, the next dining with Lou Gehrig, the Iron Horse of the New York Yankees. The Prince of Wales regarded him as a good friend. Ernest Hemingway quoted him in journalistic dispatches. The company he kept. As war clouds darkened over Europe, however, the columns grew shorter and less ebullient as the cast of willing nocturnal accomplices dwindled and the city girded for imminent invasion. When Hawkins asked him if, like so many colleagues, he planned to catch a sailing to New York ahead of the Nazis’ arrival, he didn’t even reply.
Robertson’s obdurate determination to ignore the occupation lasted until the Germans eventually ejected him from the Hotel Lotti. On June 10th, 1941, he caught a train out of Paris to Fontainebleau, disembarking at Bois-le-Roi where he collapsed on the platform and died. Heart attack? Old age? Broken heart? Print the legend. Mourners at his funeral included a jockey, a boxing promoter, and journalists. The passions and phases of his life’s work represented at his death.
In the weeks following liberation in 1944, Hawkins returned to reopen the Herald’s musty offices and came upon the neat pile of unpublished Robertson columns in a basket on his desk. One man’s personal war effort. The final strident notes of the last sportswriter in Nazi Paris.
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