Ok, so in an earlier post I told you how I made friends with the late, great Marshall Frady while we were reporting the Middle East War in November 1973. Now, I'll tell you how that led to a 57 day Mexico City honeymoon paid for by Playboy.

As we became friends in Egypt, Marshall became fascinated by my recent background as a translator for Salvador Allende. He told me of his long-held dream of going to Cuba and interviewing Fidel Castro for Playboy. Turns out that back in '59, when the Revolution first came to power, Marshall was a romantic teenager and he told me a story about landing in Havana with a bike and getting booted because he was under 18.

Now he was proposing that with my Allende connections, maybe I could help him negotiate the interview with Castro. I said sure and forget about it promptly, writing it off to a typical late night booze-driven bullshit session.

In the meantime, I came back to live in Los Angeles in early '74, with no money and no steady job -- trying to break out as a 23 year old freelancer.  I was living with my sister in February of that year when my fiancee, Patricia Vargas, arrived from Chile. With no money and no job. We had 90 days to get married by the terms of her visa. And we had no plan to speak of. The beauty of being young!

Then, around the 15th of the month, out of the blue, I got a call from Marshall who was out in South Carolina where he lived.  With his deep southern drawl he told me that he had spoken to Playboy and the interview with Fidel had been approved.  Would I be willing, he asked, to go down to Mexico City with him for maybe 3 days to negotiate with the Cubans.  I was so excited, and so green and inexperienced I didn't bother to ask exactly what my role would be. But it seemed it was mostly as a "fixer." I would set it all up for Marshall and he would do it. That was a big enough breakthrough for me.

I immediately said yes. We figured a round trip ticket would cost about $200 and that I would need a another couple of hundred for maybe 3 nights at a first class hotel in Mexico City. Cool, Marshall said. And within a few hours, Playboy sent me $1000 via American Express.

There was a glitch, however. I wanted to bring Patricia along. And to do so we would have to get married first. So on the same day my mother was undergoing explorative cancer surgery and with no advance notice, Patricia and I and my sisters went to a small wedding chapel in North Hollywood where we laughed through a fundamentalist ceremony,  Indeed, the whole thing was so improvised that we had to pay $5 extra to rent aluminum wedding rings!

We were married at 11:30 a.m. We had one drink to celebrate. And by 3 p.m. that afternoon Patricia had a green card (ahh, the Good Old Days).  When I got back that afternoon, Marshall called me and told me he was tied up with a messy divorce and that he could not meet me in Mexico the next evening as planned. He would be a few more days, he said, but I should just go ahead and chill out in Mexico City and he would catch up. Playboy would wire ahead some more cash to keep me there a bit longer.

I can't remember exactly but it was more like 4-5 days until Marshall arrived. And we all had a great first night as we drank like fishies in the Plaza Garibaldi and Marshall picked a fight with some crude German tourists. I joined in the fray -- with my rudimentary German-- claiming that I was a Russian and was ready to avenge Stalingrad. A great start!

The next morning, very hung over, I facilitated a meeting at the Cuban Embassy and we had a long chat with a certain Mr. Paron.  He said he would cable Havana with out request and that we should await an answer. 

Ok, Wait where? For how long?  Mr. Paron said he didn't know how long and it was up to us where to wait as --well-- who knows? Fidel might want to see us on 12 hours notice so we should probably hang close.

We checked in with Playboy and --this is in the salad days of the man-- our editors said, no problem. Hang in there. We'll AmEx you more money for another week or so.

One week turned into two and two into four and so on.  Every day I would call Paron and every day he would tell me he didn't know. Then Marshall would call Playboy and the magazine would say hang in there. By the third or fourth week I was declared a full partner in the interview venture. Sort of like being named co-captain of the Titanic.

No matter, we were having a ball. In fact, after about 2 weeks we moved to a less expensive hotel so we could increase our food and beverage budget. I had no money and no credit cards. Ditto for Marshall. So we would fluctuate between feast and famine.  As time passed, now 5-6-7- weeks, we would tug on Playboy's teet every week or so and they would wire us $1000-$2000 at a time. We would spend it, quite naturally, and then hope the next CARE package would arrive before we were dead broke. There were a few days when we were reduced to charging all food to the room because we had zero pesos.

Our daily schedule was grueling. Get up at noon. Call Paron. Call Playboy. Have a long lunch. Do the prolonged happy hour at the Mexico City Holiday Inn. Stumble back. Go to dinner, buy lots of mariachi musc and drink ourselves into a hole. Oh yeah, on occasional afternoons, Marshall and I would practice playing dominoes, rehearsing to compete with Castro in one of his favorite games.

We finally settled on one restaurant as our HQ. The snooty Bonaparte's in the Zona Rosa. The biggest advantage is that it was across the street from our Hotel Geneve which meant we had little chance of getting lost on the dark way home every night.  And every night we'd polish off a bottle or two of Chilean red wine and then move to Gran Marnier and then on to Corodon Bleu cognac.  Because we had only cash, we would call for the bill several times during the evening to make sure we had enough to cover the spiraling tab.  I think you get the drift. One evening, we came up short and Marshall said he would go back to the hotel and pick up some more traveler's checks to pay the bill. I was too thumped to object. Of course, he never returned because he passed out in the room. The restaurant folks let us slide because they knew we would be back the next night.

I was a tyro compared to Marshall who could drink anyone under the table. But I held my own. My wife did pretty well for someone who weighed 95 lbs and most evenings would end with her dancing flamenco on a table top as bored waiters waited for us to leave.

Eventually, we buckled down and rented some IBM typewriters and wrote some respective book proposals. Marshall really mentored me and his guidance informs my work more than 35 years later. The details on all that are in the link at the top of this post in my obit for Frady.  In short, Marshall wrote a proposal for what became a classic bio of Billy Graham.  My book on Chile would not be written for another two and half decades, but the proposal was born on that trip.

After 57 days of run around from Havana, we --and Playboy-- pulled the plug. The expense tab was $17,000. That didn't count the marathon collect calls Marshall would make every night to Carolina as he battled out his divorce.

Marshall never did the interview with Castro. He did go to Cuba 20 years later while doing a book on Jesse Jackson. And the piece he wrote on Cuba more or less led to his departure as a staff writer for The New Yorker.  They didn't like it.

Ten years later I started working for Playboy, doing some of their long-form interviews.

I'm still married to Patricia.

The smell of Gran Marnier makes me nauseous.

I miss Marshall. He died suddely in 2002.





Patricia Vargas Cooper. Mexico City Bull Ring. 1974





Left to right: Marshall Frady, My wife, Patricia. Barbara Frady. 2000. Brentwood.