Slice of Life Spans 84 Years, 20 Million Words : History: Eddie Ellis' 40,000-page diary offers perspectives on Hitler, the Depression, living, dying, and anything else he's come across in his long life. Guinness Book of Records lists him as the most prolific diarist.

By LESLIE DREYFOUS

Dec. 3, 1995 12 AM PT

ASSOCIATED PRESS

NEW YORK — Since you’re the reporter, you want to ask all the questions. But Eddie Ellis won’t stick to this plan. He’s got questions of his own. In no time, he’ll have half-crawled inside your skin.

It’s part of his charm, if a little unexpected.

Unexpected because, well, this guy is the most prolific diarist ever, according to the Guinness Book of Records. He’s filled 40,000 pages with more than 20 million words about his life. You can’t help imagining that he’s got to be, well, (how to put this nicely?) seriously self-absorbed.

But that’s the thing--the most wonderful thing--about Edward Robb Ellis. His long life has been about so much more than himself. By trade he was a newspaperman but, more than that, he’s been a kind of Everyman quester, questioner, quick-to-laugh seeker of truth.

“Ellis,” he occasionally says to himself, “it’s been quite a ride.”

Take a look in his eyes. A merry twinkle glints through the thick dark rims of his glasses. When he tips his head back to laugh, which he does often, a whole faceful of hair ripples along with the smile.

Focus for a moment on his wild silver mane. You can almost glimpse the razor-sharp part that once was, the kind of part made by raking a rat’s-tail comb through his slicked-back 1940s hair.

He’s 84 years old now and bothered by emphysema, but nonetheless it’s all right there: the after-hours drinks and swinging fox-trots at grand old hotels; the love affairs with great books and leggy women; the full-course Depression-era meals for 30 cents followed by vaudeville for a quarter.

In her smoky voice, the actress Talullah Bankhead once showered him with “Dah-lings.” The great poet e.e. cummings sat by politely as Eddie read aloud. Irving Berlin listened to him croon a Berlin ballad, and Harry S. Truman let the young reporter tag along on his morning walks.

His late wife, Ruthie, the woman he can’t forget, predicted decades ago that Eddie would someday be noted as a “someone,” that his life and diaries would matter. The other day, he came across a book she gave him on his 50th birthday. In it was inscribed: “For Mr. Potential of the 20th Century.” It damned near made him cry.

Now, in the twilight of his life, comes publication of “A Diary of the Century: Tales from America’s Greatest Diarist.” Maybe all his scribblings, most of which are now among New York University’s archives, were worthwhile. Maybe Ruthie was right.

As his friend, the veteran columnist Pete Hamill, writes in an introduction to the book, “There are human beings who will be helped in understanding our times through the diaries of Edward Robb Ellis.

“That is his accomplishment. That is his triumph.”

It started out as a lark, a bet with a few childhood pals. Who could keep a journal going the longest? While his challengers soon lapsed, Eddie kept on, chronicling everything from his first talkie movie (Al Jolson’s “The Singing Fool”) to TV reporter Diane Sawyer’s 1994 paycheck ($19,000 per day, twice as much as he’d earned per year as a reporter).

Ellis closed his first diary entry, misspellings and all, on Dec. 27, 1927, at the age of 16:

“Kewanee, Illinois, Hog Capital of the World: “Well Christmas is past and everyone happy. I got a wristwatch, billfold, DeMolay pin, and the usual hetregenous collection of sox, ties and handkerchiefs. Went to the students’ dance at the Kewanee Club last night. Took Barbara. Not so hot.”

Not so auspicious, either. But as the boy grew, so did his art.

He wrote about everything: the railroad coal car he shared with sooty-faced men (“jobless and hopeless, not college kids on a lark”); incoming enemy fire somewhere on Okinawa (“for years I had wondered what fear feels like); even his first sexual adventures (“Well, today Mamma dusted under my bed and found my diary . . .”).

On March 15, 1934, back when young Ellis only had time enough to write on the fly, he observed: “Lately I’ve realized that in this diary I confess things I otherwise might not even admit doing. Every day I have to face myself and my sins. . . . If I were to take the time necessary to rewrite my diary, it would be like a snake swallowing its own tail.”

A thin stream of midday sun plays along the windowsill in Eddie’s brownstone apartment, a cozily unkempt place on a quiet downtown street. Various busts and statues, original paintings and heavy pieces of Victorian furniture are scattered about. But books and bookcases are clearly the decorator’s chief motif.

Stretched from floor to ceiling are multiple volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, World Book Encyclopedia, Collier’s Encyclopedia. Doted-on biographies and histories, dog-eared collections on art, music, science, philosophy, math. They spill onto nearby couches, straddle the refrigerator and stove, dance along the corridors, stand sentry all around his bed.

Each morning, the ritual psychic strip-search begins again.

At first, Eddie lingers in bed, his thoughts drifting awhile. Eventually, he rises to nurse a few newspapers and some instant coffee before sitting back in his favorite rocker to face the day he lived the day before. He refers to a datebook full of maniacal detail: every quotable quote, notes on even the briefest of meetings, ticket stubs, business cards, press clippings, stray flowers, postcards, bits of doodled art, all carefully saved.

Then slowly, deliberately, carefully, Eddie begins to peck away at his manual typewriter, struggles to bring alive a small slice of life. At odd hours, at length or in a few brief lines, he has done this every day for nearly 70 years.

“I’ve just tried to observe what the hell happened,” he says, leaning back in his chair. “I guess I’m just a sort of two-bit, rinky-dink mystic . . . compulsive and compulsively interested in life.”

You can also describe him as a character, an eccentric, a Bohemian. He won’t mind. It’s one of the best things about being 84: He’s got no one to impress and nothing to hide. Ask him about his pot-smoking days or the tender affair he had at 70 with a woman not half his age.

He’ll tell you about all this in a voice honed over years of filing countless news and feature stories for the Associated Press, the United Press, for newspapers in New Orleans, Oklahoma City, Peoria, Chicago and, finally, the great but long-gone New York World-Telegram & Sun.

“Bruno stiffened in The Chair,” Ellis wrote on Jan. 6, 1950, after witnessing an execution at Sing Sing. “His back arched. His throat muscles froze into marble cords. His fingers snapped into tight fists. . . . A crackling sound zittered through the death chamber. Did this really sound like steak frying?”

“[He] has the slim hips of an athlete, a thick trunk and shoulders like a buffalo. Almost lacking a neck, his huge head seems perched on his shoulders. His mouth is long and thin, like a knife-gash in a melon,” he wrote after attending one of Sen. Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunt hearings in December, 1953.

From deadline daily journalism to his previous books, hefty accounts of New York City’s evolution and histories of American life during World War I and the Great Depression eras, words have been Eddie’s life.

They have failed him only once. When Ruthie died.

She was the only woman who had ever fully reached this restless man. When her heart stopped, Eddie’s snapped in two. For weeks, he could not write.

Not even in his diary.

Finally, fearful that he would never write again if he did not start then, “I took a deep breath and sat down at my typewriter, began pounding the keys and in one stressful afternoon told the story of my wife’s death. Then I collapsed. I had written without any thought of style. It felt like slapping raw hunks of beef onto a butcher’s block.”

He never wrote so poignantly again.

“Her legs were doubled up in pain, but I don’t think she was conscious,” reads the entry, dated Aug. 4, 1965. “I ran down a corridor and bit my wrist to keep from screaming. I felt the hair in my mouth. I wanted my wife and I wanted her alive.”

It was the low point of a life marked by few pains. Sure, there were the hard-drinking days when he said things he shouldn’t have said. Too many packs of cigarettes, empty skirt-chasing forays. Most of all, there was the daughter from his first marriage, which ended in divorce, and whom he did not help rear. That, more than anything, he wishes he could change.

But he does not dwell on regret, not now, at this age, when each autumn brings the question: “Will I live until next spring to see new leaves?”

About this much, there is no question: Eddie will keep on keeping his diary until he can’t. And when he reaches that point, he hopes he’ll be dead.

Late in October, shortly after Eddie wrapped a reporter around his little finger, a note written on his manual typewriter arrived:

“Hey! . . . How you like being in the Ellis Diary? What I wrote in my diary goes something like this. . . .”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Monday, Sept. 26, 1938

“Today I heard the voice of Adolf Hitler. Some other people and I sat on a balcony in the Black Hotel and listened on the radio to what is being called the Munich Crisis. . . . He has been called the Mad Dog of Europe, and now I understand why: His demands are extreme and his oratory so menacing that he chills one’s blood. . . .

“The war scare is a reality here in Oklahoma City. People buy the latest editions of newspapers and talk about diplomacy and war. Young men ask one another how they feel about conscription. Young women tremble lest their men be thrust into battle. I, for one, am a coward. . . .”

****

Tuesday, April 9, 1968

“I turned on TV to watch the funeral of Dr. [Martin Luther] King and watched it most of the day. The white people of Atlanta, where the service was held, may have been surprised by the magnitude of the audience and presence of so many famous people. I was struck by the similarities between King’s assassination and funeral, and those of President John F. Kennedy--the martyred man, the majestic widow, the bereaved children, the international mourning. . . .

“I wept again when Mahalia Jackson sang--sang from her guts, sang with torture in her black eyes. Then the masses of mourners on the lawn of Morehouse College began singing, “We Shall Overcome,” and deep inside myself I hurt like hell. God, may this tragedy help integrate the races, bring peace between blacks and whites.”

****

Wednesday, Aug. 29, 1990

“This brilliant August day I strolled south on Hudson Street in Greenwich Village and became thirsty and walked into a small Mexican restaurant. I sat down at a table in the front near the bar, by a mirrored wall.

“A woman sat at the bar. . . . She wore a blouse and a short skirt, very short, and her tan hose held beautiful legs that vanished into sleek shining black pumps with very high heels. Staring at her legs, mesmerized by them, I knew she knew she has beautiful legs and likes to show them, but I was unable to do anything about it.

“In the mirror on the wall I saw the face of an old man with white whiskers and long hair, and I also saw the potbelly that precedes me wherever I go. Oh, to be only 40 again! . . .

“But now the reality is that I am old and fat and ugly and lack the bravura that worked well back in the days when I chased women, especially lava-hot women who wanted to be chased. So I choked down a tortilla and a Coke and reflected that this sadness comes to men in all places when age diminishes them. So in a Mexican restaurant on Hudson Street in Greenwich Village on sparkling day in August, a tiny tragedy was played out by a man too old to make out.”

Source: Associated Press