This is the first part of a two-part series.
A large bronze plaque on the highway leading to the White Sands National Monument in New Mexico stands as a memorial to the life and violent death of a former Indian fighter, dedicated law enforcement official and lawyer, Colonel Albert Jennings Fountain. He was on his way to file documents at the Mesilla, New Mexico courthouse as the evidence to prosecute some prominent local citizens. Among the bad guys was A.B. Fall, a man who later became America’s Secretary of the Interior; he also became the highest ranking government official ever to be sent to prison during the infamous “Teapot Dome Scandal.�
Colonel Fountain and his young son Henry were ambushed and murdered near the White Sands; in spite of a century of searching their bodies were never found. The details of this crime were unknown until the reading of a deathbed confession of one of the perpetrators in the early 1920s. Colonel Fountain had been among New Mexico’s most prominent and influential figures. He had also been Billy the Kid’s lawyer and the great-great-grandfather of my best friend, a warm and wonderful lady I’ll mention only by her surname of Cheri.
I first met Cheri in the late 1960s after I’d been discharged from the Army. I met her on a lunch break from her job at the Guggenheim Museum. She was an actress performing in the evenings at Cafe La Mama in Manhattan’s East Village. The Guggenheim was her day job.
New York was alive with off-Broadway theatrical productions from the long-running “Three Penny Opera� to the longer running “Fantastiks.� Al Pacino, who’d studied with Cheri’s crowd, had slept on the floor of her 30th Street apartment.
“We’d come home and there was Al, sleeping.� Hey, that was everybody’s struggling time. After Pacino’s huge success in the first “Godfather� film he went directly into off-Broadway theater work on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Pacino loved theater, all of it. At this writing he’s appearing as “The Merchant of Venice� in the Public Theater production of Shakespeare in the Park.
Cheri’s roommate, an Apache Indian woman named Tenaya, who was eventually to score big bucks in a famous series of television commercials, had met a guy she referred to as Jimmy Earl. Nice guy, big guy with a booming voice. During a brief visit by Cheri’s mother she prepared a Mexican food dinner for him. He loved it.
Jimmy Earl had recently completed a critically acclaimed Broadway run of Shakespeare’s “Othelloâ€� and the whole crowd, actors, museum people and lone cartoonist, were invited to attend a New York City-sponsored production of “Macbeth,â€� performed in the evening at an uptown schoolyard surrounded by police officers. We were seated on metal folding chairs, with local street gangs gathered beyond the fences. “Macbethâ€� starred James Earl Jones. As the saying goes — “Only in New York.â€�
Cheri had established a very practical point of view about theater; loved it, maintained an interest in it but realistically dropped it professionally. She became a major player in the world of art museums. Our relationship evolved into a deep, wonderful friendship.
Eventually we each got married, had daughters that became close friends; we are now living on opposite coasts with weekly phone calls and daily e-mail holding us together. But long before she skipped town she’d become a major success at the Guggenheim Museum in an important part of an art museum operation; Cheri had joined the Registrar Department at the Guggenheim.
Bill Lee lives in New York City and Sharon, and has been a professional cartoonist for decades.
