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Tell me the truest thing you know...

By Bob Greene
Tribune Columnist
February 22, 1999

I feel as if he's leaning over my shoulder right now, peering down at the keyboard, ready to pounce disapprovingly on any word I may write here.

Gene Siskel, knowing that someone is about to try to sum up his life on paper? It would drive him nuts -- you wouldn't be able to get him out of the room with a forklift. "Let me just help you out a little -- you don't want to put yourself in the position of getting anything wrong," he would most likely say. And then, before you knew it, he'd be sitting down in your chair to write the first draft himself.

I knew the guy for 30 years (it seems so odd to use the past tense); we began as young reporters in Chicago the same year, and I'm not sure I have ever encountered anyone quite as complicated. He was a true friend -- and he was exasperating, brilliant, frighteningly ambitious, surprisingly sensitive to perceived slights, funny, frustrating, stern, staggeringly confident about his considerable skills but at the same time a critic who loathed the sting of being criticized, older than his years and younger than his children's years, loyal, suspicious, simultaneously certain of his many triumphs yet hungrier than a man who has never won anything at all. . . .

On the one hand he would be more than satisfied with a bland, accurate one-sentence sum-up: He and Roger Ebert were the most famous film critics in the world. Yet he was constantly saying: Give me your very best answer. Tell me the truest thing you know about (him, her, it, whatever the subject at hand happened to be). So to honor him here today, it's probably best to go beyond the boilerplate.

He could feel, at the same time, like a wise, lecturing father who had all of life's answers -- and like a hurt little boy who needed to have everything made better before he could fall asleep. He could walk into your office when you were on deadline and trying to work and drive you absolutely crazy with his feigned obtuseness to the notion that just because he wasn't busy didn't necessarily mean that you weren't -- and in that same 60-second span make you stop what you were doing and laugh out loud. He made his fortune in the most brightly illuminated and self-revealing arena there is, national television, yet he was secretive beyond all reason. The thing that most worried those of us who were fond of him was that he said nothing at all about the details of his illness. That told us way too much.

We were at a restaurant once many years ago, and both of us went to use the pay phones, and he put coins into two of them at once -- and used them simultaneously, one phone held to one ear, one to the other, carrying on two separate conversations with two different people. He did not seem to think this was eccentric, merely efficient. He was quick to share his moments of victory with you -- "Good day for me!" I recall him saying to me once, an extraordinary sentence if there ever was one -- but curiously reluctant to allow you to help him out when he was feeling down. I don't know whether he somehow considered his illness that led to brain surgery to be a sign of weakness -- I certainly hope he didn't, I hope his silence was his way of shielding his children -- but I also hope he knew that he had nothing to hide, that he had already won every game that counted, starting with being as fine a husband as any man I have ever known . . . and I hope he knew that, had he let us know just how bad things were, we would have been not only accepting, but grateful to be told.

I got a one-sentence note from him during the holidays. "I miss talking to you," it said. It gave me the chills. For all the years we knew each other, ours was a friendship based on jokes and jabs -- when we did talk about serious matters, it wasn't about ourselves, it was about the exterior world. That note had a message for me that went well beyond its five words. It made me sad for many days, and when he announced that he was taking a leave from his jobs, I was not surprised.

When we were in our late 20s, and he began to display a solid, measured side that was in vivid contrast to the careless way we and our young Chicago newspaper colleagues had sometimes lived our lives before, I had a name that I used to call him: "Mr. Maturity." I said it as a jibe. "Mr. Maturity," I would say to him, as if to dare him: Come on. Loosen up. You don't have to be quite so old just yet.

The obituaries said he was 53. On his best days, he could seem like he was 11 -- overflowing with energy, eager to see everything the world had to offer, sparkling-eyed and boyish and a kid in the best possible sense. He was Mr. Maturity, and he was that delighted kid, all at the same time.

I can feel him looking over my shoulder as I type. "Tell me the truest truth." He married Marlene in 1980. I'm making plans to go to his funeral and all of a sudden I'm having trouble seeing the keyboard because something just occurred to me: The only suit I own is the one I bought to go to his wedding.

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