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 As the first blog entry got exhausted. My second book |
| Evolution of Love Part 2 |
| The summer of 1976 in New York City. Central Park's Delacorte Theater, where Shakespeare comes alive under the stars for free. Two actors meet during rehearsals for "Measure for Measure." She was Meryl Streep, twenty-seven years old, fresh from Yale Drama School with a master's degree and boundless ambition. He was John Cazale, forty-one, already a legend in theater circles and increasingly recognized in film. He'd just finished playing Fredo Corleone—the tragic, weak-minded brother in "The Godfather" films. On stage, she played Isabella, a virtuous nun. He played Angelo, a corrupt judge who lusts after her. Off stage, something electric happened between them. "He wasn't like anybody I'd ever met," Streep would later say. "It was the specificity of him, and his sort of humanity and his curiosity about people, his compassion." For Cazale, the feeling was mutual and immediate. Actor Marvin Starkman noticed it instantly: "Once he was in that play, the only thing he talked about was her." Their romance bloomed quickly. Within weeks, they'd moved into a loft together on Franklin Street in Lower Manhattan's Tribeca neighborhood. Fellow actors noticed Streep's constantly chapped lips—evidence of their intense physical connection. They laughed together constantly, challenged each other artistically, and found in each other what every artist dreams of: someone who truly understood. By all accounts, Cazale was one of the finest actors of his generation. His decade on New York stages had earned him rave reviews and devoted admirers. He'd befriended Al Pacino while working as a messenger at Standard Oil, and the two became inseparable—acting partners who brought out the best in each other. When Cazale landed the role of Fredo Corleone, he was thrilled to work alongside his idol, Marlon Brando. His performance was so compelling, so heartbreakingly vulnerable, that Francis Ford Coppola brought him back for the sequel. He also cast Cazale in "The Conversation." Sidney Lumet hired him for "Dog Day Afternoon," which earned Cazale a Golden Globe nomination. Every single film John Cazale appeared in was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. Every single one. It's a record that remains unmatched in Hollywood history. But to those who knew him, Cazale was more than his resume. He was thoughtful, sensitive, emotionally intelligent. Village Voice critic Ross Wetzston wrote that Cazale "may be the finest actor in America today." Pacino would later say, "All I wanted to do was work with John for the rest of my life. He was my acting partner." In early 1977, Cazale returned to the stage for what should have been a triumphant Broadway debut—the title role in "Agamemnon" at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater. He performed only once. The first preview, on April 29, 1977. After the performance, something was wrong. Cazale felt ill—worse than he'd felt before. Director Joseph Papp, worried about his friend, arranged an emergency doctor's appointment. Cazale, Streep, and Papp sat together as the diagnosis was delivered: late-stage metastatic lung cancer. Terminal. He was forty-one years old. For a moment, everyone fell silent. The world had just ended. Then Streep looked up. "So, where should we go to dinner?" It wasn't denial. It was defiance. A refusal to let the disease steal even one more moment of joy than it had to. What followed was ten months of extraordinary devotion. Streep could have walked away. Their relationship was still relatively new. No one would have blamed a young actress with a promising career for protecting herself from the coming devastation. She stayed. "I've hardly ever seen a person so devoted to someone who is falling away like John was," Pacino later said. "To see her in that act of love for this man was overwhelming." Cazale was determined to keep acting. Despite the terminal diagnosis, despite the cancer metastasizing to his bones, he accepted a role in Michael Cimino's "The Deer Hunter" alongside Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, and John Savage. Streep signed on too—not because she loved the role (she thought the female character was "essentially a man's view of a woman"), but because she loved Cazale. She wanted to be near him for whatever time remained. There was a problem. The studio's insurance company wouldn't cover Cazale. Too high risk. His participation in the film was in jeopardy. The cast and crew rallied. Cimino rearranged the entire shooting schedule so Cazale could film all his scenes first, before he became too weak. De Niro—who had worked with Cazale on "The Godfather Part II"—quietly stepped in to cover the insurance costs himself. He wanted Cazale in the film. More than that, he wanted to give his friend this final gift: the chance to do what he loved. Between takes, Streep was constantly at Cazale's side. She learned his medication schedule. She went to every radiation appointment, every chemotherapy session. She kept working—she had to, partly to pay his mounting medical bills—but every moment away from him felt like abandonment. In late 1977, she accepted a role in the television miniseries "Holocaust," which required two months of filming in Austria. She hated being away. "I was going crazy," she later said. "John was sick, and I wanted to be with him." When she returned, Cazale was noticeably worse. They withdrew from the public eye. For five months, it was just the two of them in their Tribeca loft. No work. No performances. Just time together as the snow fell on Manhattan, as Cazale grew weaker, as Streep held onto hope with a tenacity that amazed everyone who witnessed it. She stayed with him through the pain, through the fear, through the gradual diminishment of a brilliant man. On March 12, 1978, in a hospital room, John Cazale took his last breath. Meryl Streep was holding his hand. According to one account—perhaps apocryphal, but widely reported—when a doctor told Streep that Cazale was gone, she refused to believe it. She pounded on his chest, sobbing, calling him back. And then, for one brief, impossible moment, John opened his eyes. "It's all right, Meryl," he said weakly. "It's all right." Then he closed his eyes for the last time. He was forty-two years old. Streep was devastated. Friends said they'd never seen someone so completely shattered. She fled to Canada to stay with a friend, trying to process the loss. When she returned to New York, she discovered she was being evicted from the loft she'd shared with Cazale. She had nowhere to go and was too grief-stricken to care. Her brother Harry came to help her pack up Cazale's belongings. He brought along a friend—a sculptor named Don Gummer, whom Streep had met a few times but barely knew. Gummer offered to store her boxes at his studio. He was about to leave the country and offered her his loft while he was gone. As she stayed in this kind stranger's apartment, she began to think about him. They started writing letters. Six months after Cazale's death, Meryl Streep and Don Gummer were married in her parents' garden. "I was going to die if I didn't have something to hold onto," she later explained. She was pregnant within a year. "This baby is an affirmative commitment in pretty desperate times," she told People magazine. "The Deer Hunter" was released posthumously in December 1978. It was nominated for nine Academy Awards and won five, including Best Picture. Streep received her first Oscar nomination for the role she'd only taken to stay close to the man she loved. Looking back, those who knew Cazale still speak of him with reverence. Israel Horovitz, his close friend and collaborator, wrote in his eulogy: "John Cazale happens once in a lifetime. He was an invention, a small perfection." Pacino, asked decades later about actors who didn't get enough credit, said without hesitation: "John Cazale, in general, was one of the great actors of our time—that time, any time." Every film Cazale made has been preserved in the U.S. National Film Registry. There's a theater named after him in New York—the McGinn/Cazale Theatre at 76th and Broadway, dedicated in 1984. But perhaps his greatest legacy isn't captured in any performance, any award, or any tribute. It's the story of a love so deep that a young actress risked her own emerging career to stand beside a dying man. A love so powerful that it convinced a hardened New York crew to fight for one more role, one more performance, one more chance for a brilliant actor to do what he was born to do. Meryl Streep went on to become arguably the greatest actress of her generation, with a record twenty-one Oscar nominations and three wins. She raised four children and remained married to Don Gummer for forty-five years. But she never forgot her first great love—the man who made everything mean something |
| Andy Bowen and Jack Burke entered the ring at the Olympic Club around 9 PM. Two lightweight boxers fighting for a championship title and a $2,500 purse. Three-minute rounds. One-minute rest. Standard rules. They expected the fight to last maybe ten rounds. Maybe twenty if both men were evenly matched. Nobody expected what actually happened. Round ten. Both fighters were still fresh, still sharp. Trading punches, dancing around each other, looking for openings. Round twenty. Getting tired now. Breathing harder. But neither man showing signs of giving up. Round thirty. The crowd was getting restless. This was lasting longer than anyone anticipated. Surely one of them would go down soon. Round forty. Spectators were leaving. It was past midnight. They had work in the morning. But the fighters kept going. Round fifty. Both men were showing visible exhaustion now. Movements slower. Punches less precise. But neither backing down. Round sixty. Two hours in. Most of the crowd had left. The few remaining spectators watched in disbelief. Why weren't they stopping? Round seventy. Three hours. Andy's hands were swelling. Every punch sent pain shooting up his arms. He kept punching. Round eighty. Jack's knuckles were cracked and bleeding. The pain was excruciating. He kept punching. Round ninety. Four hours. Neither man could lift their arms above their shoulders anymore. They were fighting at close range now, bodies pressed together, just trying to land any blow that might end it. Round one hundred. Five hours. Spectators who'd gone home and come back couldn't believe the fight was still happening. The referee kept looking at both fighters, searching for a reason to stop it. But by the rules of the time, he couldn't stop the fight unless one man was knocked out, gave up, or couldn't answer the bell. Both men kept answering the bell. What nobody watching understood—what maybe Andy and Jack themselves couldn't explain—was why they kept going. The purse? After the first few hours, both men knew they'd be lucky to walk away with anything, given the physical damage they were accumulating. Pride? Maybe. But pride alone doesn't explain seven hours of punishment. The truth was simpler and more stubborn than any strategic reason: Neither man would be the one to quit. Jack Burke grew up poor in Texas. Boxing was his way out. Every fight was a chance to prove he belonged in the ring with anyone. He'd fought too hard to get here to give up now. Andy Bowen was from New Orleans. This was his hometown. His people were watching—or had been, before most of them left. He couldn't quit in front of his own city. So they kept fighting. Not because they wanted to. But because stopping felt impossible. Round 105. Jack felt something crack in his right hand. Then his left. Both hands were broken now. The pain was unbearable. He kept fighting. Round 108. Andy couldn't feel his hands anymore. Couldn't tell if he was landing punches or just flailing at air. He kept fighting. Round 110. Seven hours and nineteen minutes after the fight began, both men were barely standing. Their faces swollen beyond recognition. Their hands destroyed. Their bodies running on nothing but will. The referee stepped between them. "No contest," he announced. Neither man could continue. Neither man had been defeated. It was simply over. The crowd that remained—maybe fifty people out of the thousands who'd been there at the start—stood in stunned silence. They'd just witnessed something that would never happen again. Both fighters collapsed after the referee's announcement. Jack Burke's hands were so badly broken he couldn't box for months. When he did return to the ring, he was never the same fighter. Andy Bowen recovered more quickly, but the damage was done. One year later—almost exactly one year after the marathon fight with Burke—Andy Bowen died in the ring from injuries sustained in a different fight. He was 26 years old. The fight with Burke hadn't killed him directly. But it had taken something from him. Maybe the accumulated damage. Maybe something harder to define. The 110-round fight between Andy Bowen and Jack Burke remains the longest boxing match in recorded history. After their bout, boxing organizations implemented new rules: round limits, mandatory rest periods, physician oversight. The reforms were designed to prevent what Bowen and Burke had endured. The $2,500 purse—worth about $80,000 today—was split between them since the fight was ruled a no-contest. Neither man walked away with victory. Neither man walked away with defeat. They walked away with a place in history and bodies that would never fully recover. What drives someone to keep fighting when every rational voice is screaming to stop? It's easy to call it foolish. To say they should have quit after round thirty, or fifty, or eighty. But there's something in the human spirit that refuses to yield. That would rather break than bend. That sees quitting as worse than any physical pain. Andy Bowen and Jack Burke took that impulse to its absolute extreme. They fought until their hands broke. Until their bodies gave out. Until the referee had no choice but to stop them because continuing was impossible. It wasn't strategic. It wasn't smart. It probably wasn't even worth it. But it was human. The stubborn, foolish, magnificent refusal to be the one who gives up first. That night in New Orleans, two men proved that the human capacity for endurance—for pushing past every reasonable limit—is both inspiring and terrifying. Because sometimes, the line between heroic perseverance and self-destruction is impossibly thin. And sometimes, two men will fight for seven hours just to prove they belong on the same side of that line. 110 rounds. Seven hours and nineteen minutes. Two broken men who refused to quit. It's a record that will never be broken. Not because modern fighters lack courage or toughness. But because boxing learned, from Andy Bowen and Jack Burke, that some limits exist for a reason. That endurance pushed too far becomes destruction. That refusing to quit isn't always heroic—sometimes it's just stubborn pride demanding a price neither man can really afford to pay. They fought until they couldn't fight anymore. And the world decided that should never happen again. |
| In 1887, a court in Bombay gave a young woman named Rukhmabai two choices. Go live with the husband you were forced to marry as a child. Or go to prison. She chose prison. Her answer shocked a nation. It ignited a debate that spread from India to England. And it helped change the law for millions of girls who would come after her. This is the story of how one woman's refusal brought an empire to its knees. Rukhmabai was born in Bombay in 1864. Her mother, Jayantibai, knew firsthand the cruelty of child marriage—she had been married at fourteen, became a mother at fifteen, and was widowed at seventeen. When Rukhmabai was eight, her mother remarried a man named Dr. Sakharam Arjun, an eminent physician and social reformer. He was different from other men of his time. He believed girls should be educated. He filled his home with books and encouraged Rukhmabai to study. But even reformers had limits in 1870s India. When Rukhmabai was eleven years old, she was married to a nineteen-year-old named Dadaji Bhikaji. It was arranged by her maternal grandfather, following the customs that had governed Indian society for centuries. She was a child. She had no voice. She had no choice. Under the customs of the time, Rukhmabai didn't immediately move in with her husband. She stayed with her mother and stepfather, continuing her education in secret while Dadaji was supposed to "become a good man." He didn't. While Rukhmabai grew into an intelligent, cultured young woman—reading voraciously, attending lectures, corresponding with reformers—Dadaji descended into laziness and debt. He dropped out of school. He fell under the influence of a scheming uncle. And he began to see his child bride as the solution to his financial problems. In 1884, when Rukhmabai was twenty years old, Dadaji demanded that she come live with him. She refused. He took her to court. The case of Dadaji Bhikaji versus Rukhmabai became the most publicized legal battle in nineteenth-century India. Dadaji sued for "restitution of conjugal rights"—a legal term that meant, essentially, that his wife was his property and the court should force her to return to him. Rukhmabai's defense was unprecedented. She argued that she had been married as a helpless child, at an age when she couldn't possibly understand what marriage meant. She argued that she had never consented. She argued that a woman should not be treated as property to be claimed. No one had ever made these arguments in an Indian court before. In 1885, Justice Robert Pinhey ruled in her favor. He declared that English law applied to consenting adults—and Rukhmabai had been an infant, incapable of consent. Conservative India exploded. Traditionalists accused the court of attacking Hindu customs. Balgangadhar Tilak, the nationalist leader, wrote that Rukhmabai's defiance was the result of too much English education. Religious leaders warned that Hinduism itself was in danger. The case was appealed. And in 1886, a higher court reversed the decision. In March 1887, Justice Farran issued his ruling: Rukhmabai must go live with her husband, or face six months in prison. Her response became legendary. "I would rather go to prison," she declared, "than submit to a marriage I did not consent to." The words traveled across oceans. British newspapers covered the case extensively. Women's magazines in England rallied to her cause. The famed scholar Max Müller wrote that Rukhmabai's education had made her the best judge of her own choices. Meanwhile, Rukhmabai picked up her pen. Writing anonymously as "A Hindu Lady" in The Times of India, she published fierce essays attacking child marriage. She wrote about girls forced into motherhood before their fourteenth birthdays. She wrote about the death of dreams, the suffocation of potential, the theft of childhood. "This wicked practice has destroyed the happiness of my life," she wrote. "It comes between me and the thing I prize above all others—study and mental cultivation." Her words reached Queen Victoria herself. Rukhmabai wrote directly to the Queen, appealing for justice. She asked for one simple change to Hindu law: that marriages performed before age twenty for boys and fifteen for girls should not be legally binding. "This jubilee year must leave some expression on us Hindu women," she wrote, "and nothing will be more gratefully received." In July 1888, a settlement was finally reached. Dadaji accepted 2,000 rupees to dissolve the marriage and relinquish all claims to Rukhmabai. She was free. But she wasn't finished. With support from Dr. Edith Pechey, a pioneering British physician, Rukhmabai traveled to England to study medicine. In 1894, she graduated from the London School of Medicine for Women. She returned to India as one of the first practicing female doctors in the nation's history. For the next thirty-five years, Rukhmabai served as Chief Medical Officer at women's hospitals in Surat and Rajkot. She treated patients from every class and caste. She trained women in nursing and hygiene. She worked through epidemics when others fled. And she never stopped fighting. Even after retirement, she published pamphlets attacking the practice of purdah—the forced seclusion of women. In her will, she left her home to advance girls' education. The legal battle she fought in her twenties had consequences that outlived her by generations. In 1891—just three years after her case concluded—the British government passed the Age of Consent Act, raising the minimum age for marriage. It was the first major legal reform protecting girls from child marriage in India. It would not be the last. Rukhmabai died on September 25, 1955. She was ninety years old. She had outlived the husband who tried to claim her. She had outlived the empire that ruled her country. She had outlived the customs that tried to silence her. In 2017, Google honored her with a Doodle on what would have been her 153rd birthday. But her real legacy isn't a Doodle or a statue or a law with her name on it. Her legacy is every Indian girl who goes to school instead of becoming a bride. Every woman who chooses her own future. Every voice that refuses to be silenced. Rukhmabai was eleven years old when they married her off. She spent the rest of her life making sure no one could do the same to the girls who came after her. |
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