Looking for Mr. Goodpov

By Roger Rosenblatt

Every time a new world leader rises from the smoke, the press and the public try to piece him together from known fragments, however tiny. This works the way police composite pictures are assembled: witnesses contribute nostrils, ear lobes, chins, until a fully shaded face emerges, looking more like a Can-you-draw-this? ad for a crooked art school than a bleeding, breathing person, but nonetheless the best one can do by so splintered a method. So it goes for Yuri Andropov, the Soviet Union's new leader. In past weeks, Western observers have labored mightily to produce a portrait of the man, not by leaning on the ice-block facts of his biography but by poking about for the warm little things: Andropov's tastes, his hobbies, his manner. By such humanizing items, it is assumed we shall know him. And it is also assumed we shall like him better for being one of us.

Mr. Andropov offers impediments to this effort because the little humanizing aspects of his life do not form an immediately recognizable or coordinated whole. There is, for example, his alleged preference for gypsy music, Chubby Checker and Glenn Miller. While these things are not antipodal, it is hard to envisage Mr. Andropov among friends singing gypsy tunes, as he is said to do, in a "pleasant light tenor," then switching abruptly to The Twist or Pennsylvania 6-5000. Still, the image is peppy. The question of interior decoration has come up as well. In one account Mr. Andropov's home is graced with "European furniture," and in another with "modern Hungarian furniture." Unless one has an unusually precise idea of the modern Hungarian style, one strains to characterize Mr. Andropov by his possessions.

Among which, according to all sources, are the novels of Jacqueline Susann and/or Harold Robbins, bottles of Johnnie Walker Scotch and/or cognac, tennis racquets (he is called a tennis "fiend") and perhaps a book or two on China, in which he is thought to hold an "amateur interest." That is about as far as the pieces take us. We have the fact of his terrible eyesight, which might explain his fiendishness on the tennis court, and we have one instance of his sense of humor, when he urged a cognac on a reluctant dinner companion, telling him, "You'd better accept. The KGB has a very long arm." Oh, yes, he is said to speak fluent English, although this was called into question by his use of an interpreter when he conferred with Vice President Bush. Either Mr. Andropov's fluency is exaggerated, or after reading Susann and Robbins, he is unaware that Americans speak English too.

Our purpose in culling such items is optimistic; we would like to see through to the real Mr. Andropov, clasp him to our bosom and cast aside the husk. In Andropov's case, the husk is considerable: a 15-year hitch as head of the most powerful secret police in the world, a three-year term as Soviet Ambassador to Hungary, where he may or may not have acquired his penchant for furniture, but did help crush a revolution; membership in the inner circle that decided Czechoslovakia deserved an invasion in 1968. He has also been a longtime quasher of dissidents, and was eager to remove civil liberties from Poland. Noteworthy as such information is, none of it has the exhilarating effect of making one suspect Mr. Andropov has the gypsy in his soul.

For much the same uplift have people always foraged for the small, personal glimmers in the lives of the powerful. Several U.S. Presidents endeared themselves to the public through their pastimes: Ike's golf, Kennedy's touch football, Truman's piano playing. Hoover took to fishing and throwing a medicine ball, though not at the same time. Nixon had no hobbies to speak of, unless one counts the knotting of one's ties. The most interesting pastimes were those of Calvin Coolidge, who reportedly took pleasure in the mechanical horse and pitching hay. The former probably delimited the demands of the latter.

Dictators' pastimes are far more striking because they often contrast with the rulers' normal behavior. Nero, no fiddler incidentally, did play the lyre and sing to vast, appreciative audiences. Hitler was a painter who started out doing postcard-size works of art and, as his career improved, worked his way up to large water-colors of wartime destruction: rubble, crumbled walls, caved-in roofs. Eventually he created his own subjects, a rare chance for an artist. According to his lackey, the featherbrained Putzi Hanfstaengl, Hitler also adored whistling. His best numbers were Harvard fight songs, which Putzi, a Harvard alumnus, would thump on the piano whenever the Fiihrer was in a frisky mood. After the war, whenever Putzi was asked what Hitler was like, he never failed to marvel how that man could whistle.

Sometimes a leader's pastimes imitate the way he governs. In his great biography of Stalin, Adam Ulam surmises that Stalin's sadism and recreation were allied. Stalin reveled in all-male, all-night banquets populated by middle-aged cronies drinking themselves witless and engaging in practical jokes. Among Stalin's favorites were placing a tomato on a chair about to be sat in and pushing friends into ponds. One can only imagine the hilarity and camaraderie at such occasions. One can also imagine the recognition on the faces of Stalin's former drinking buddies when at the purge trials they beheld the old zany spirit dancing in their master's eyes.

Among modern leaders, Muammar Gaddafi is called a man of simple tastes who spends days alone in meditation on the desert, when he is not threatening to blow up the world. What Indira Gandhi does for fun is not generally known. As for the absent Idi Amin, his pastimes were said to run to the wild side, what with his peculiar way of making enemies an internal issue. Amin has been known to show a light heart, however, and has played the accordion at dances. It would be a sad end to so carefree a hobby if Amin were now discovered because someone happened to overhear Lady of Spain. Still, the mind is cheered by the image of Amin on his accordion, Nero on his lyre, Hitler whistling away. Where a band like this would play offers problems, but its repertoire would surely include I've Gotta Be Me.

It is far too early to guess if Mr. Andropov will ever qualify to sing with such a group, pleasant light tenor or no pleasant light tenor. He would probably add Little Things Mean a Lot, neither a Chubby Checker nor a Glenn Miller hit, but a fitting theme song for a man whose life is being appraised from small angles. Alas, as the world unhappily discovers, little things do not always mean as much as the bigger ones, especially when one of the big things is the Soviet Union. But not to worry. For the moment it is enough to relish the portrait of a leader of half the world lounging in his modern Hungarian easy chair, dipping into Valley of the Dolls, sipping Scotch, chuckling over KGB jokes, pondering China in his amateur way and dreaming of the day when he and the gypsies can get down to some serious fiendish tennis in Afghanistan.

--By Roger Rosenblatt

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