Cruising with Kate: A Parvenu in Xanadu by Bernard Conners
It’s a life worthy of showcasing in a movie, although it’s a movie we might not believe as we watched it: a middle-class boy, one so nervous that his 8th-grade classmates nickname him “Worry Wart,” grows up to become an FBI agent working under J. Edgar Hoover.
Not enough for you? Along the way, the boy would become a Golden Gloves boxing champion, a pro football player, a friend and confidant of author George Plimpton, the editor of The Paris Review, a best-selling author, a film producer, a soft-drink franchise owner…and oh yeah—wealthy. Really, really wealthy.
It’s the kind of “strike-it-rich” life that’s pure Americana, and makes us believe, if only for a moment, that the streets of our country may very well be paved with gold. And it’s all contained within the pages of Cruising with Kate: A Parvenu in Xanadu (British American Publishing, 2015).
Cruising with Kate is the memoir of Bernard Conners, the living definition of the “parvenu” in question. (OK, we didn’t know what a parvenu was, either, so we’ll save you the trouble of looking it up. It’s “a person of obscure origin who gains wealth, influence or celebrity.”) Conners’ father died while the boy was young, and his mother, an English teacher, raised eight children. You don’t get much more modest or middle-class than that.
Conners’ life, however, reads like a Zelig-style success story. A talented high school athlete, he would go on to become a gifted quarterback at St. Lawrence University, and play briefly for the Chicago Bears. He won boxing titles while serving in the Army, and would go on to become an FBI agent, winning commendations from J. Edgar Hoover himself.
Bernard F. Connors
It was his friendship with Plimpton, however, that introduced Conners to The Paris Review and the glitz and glamour of the New York City literati. And a loan from Conners’ mother-in-law allowed him to buy the Canada Dry franchise that helped him build a fortune, leading him to book publishing, film producing, and palatial homes in Lake Placid, Palm Beach and New York City—all the while with his wife Kate by his side.
No great success story would be complete without conflict, however, and Conners describes his: a lifelong battle with what he calls his “butterflies”—insecurity that began as a child and led his 8th-grade classmates to dub him not “Most Likely to Succeed,” but rather “BERNIE WORRY WART CONNERS.” Conners describes graduating from the FBI Academy as “a crime fighter with butterflies. The slightest provocation, a mere smile from a pretty girl, could start them fluttering.”
Now at age 88, having lived the American success story more than a couple of times over, Conners describes himself in the final reel of his life as having defeated his constant nemesis. “In life’s closing moments, awaiting the ferry on the River Styx amid a cargo of ghostly wares, [I] would have expected a final flurry of gossamer wings,” he writes. “But it was strangely still. No butterflies.”
And as the lights come up in the theater and we ponder the unlikely story of the life we’ve just witnessed, we once again believe in the promise of a country in which any old parvenu might make good. “If he could do it, so could I,” we think. “So could I.”
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