By Victor Greto
After nearly 32 years of marriage, Franz and Maggie Lidz fit together like the miracle-mesh of tiny gears inside an old Swiss watch.
When Maggie ticks, Franz tocks right back.
“Franz,” Maggie says, distracted, when her husband begins speaking and slips out a four-letter word.
It’s not a reprimand; it’s a love tap.
Franz, 56, who worked at Sports Illustrated for almost three decades before taking a buyout last year, has written a trilogy of “memoirs in disguise,” one of which was made into a movie.
His memoir, “Unstrung Heroes: My Improbable Life With Four Impossible Uncles,” became the 1995 movie directed by Diane Keaton and starring John Turturro.
The latest, “Fairway to Hell: Around the World in 18 Holes” (ESPN Books, $24.95), is like the other two — It’s not really about what you think it is, but it’s full of compulsively readable writing about characters as curious as himself.
Maggie Lidz, 49, is estate historian at Winterthur. She’s published a book on the family life at Winterthur estate, and is working on two others, the architecture of DuPont homes in the Brandywine Valley, and another about servants’ quarters at American country estates in the northeast.
But that’s not why you want to read this story this morning between bites of eggs and sips of coffee. You want to know how they met – and not just Franz and Maggie, but Franz and Maggie’s father, famed religion reporter Gerald Renner.
(Although how Franz met Maggie is a pretty cool story, you’ll have to wait a few paragraphs for that one).
But this needs to be said first. Franz Lidz speaks exactly the way his writing reads. With a half-smile, tiny eyes as shiny as dimes behind squared black-rimmed glasses, his words hang by their fingernails on a spinning rope of truth.
Toward the end of the summer of 1975, Franz was hitchhiking south on I-95 in Chester — you could do that back then — after spending about three months hiking through South America.
The older guy who pulled over to pick him up — they did that back then, too — wore red Pro Keds. Franz recalls this vividly because his eyes kept going back to them. For the record, Franz was wearing a poncho, long hair and black canvas Chuck Taylors.
The driver just happened to be going to Columbia, Md., near where Franz attended graduate school at the University of Maryland.
“He took me to Columbia, and just a few days later she” — Franz points across the table at Maggie, decked out in a blue dress and light-yellow sun hat, its puffed brim turned up to reveal a grin as sunny as the afternoon — “gets on my bus.”
To make money for graduate school, Franz drove a bus. Maggie didn’t have the quarter to ride, so he let her ride for free.
Seven years older than Maggie, who was only 17 and still in high school in 1975, Franz asked her out.
But here’s the red-Keds kicker.
The first night Franz went over to Maggie’s house, there’s this older guy sitting in a lounge chair, and what Franz notices is these red Pro Keds he has on.
“It was her dad,” Franz says, as superfluously as his affirmation of the story’s truth.
Not all that long after, Maggie asked Franz if he wanted to get married.
She doesn’t deny it.
“I said, ‘Great idea,’” Franz recalls. “She was the first person of any sex or species I wanted to marry.”
When Franz told the man with red sneakers they were getting married, while swilling a dollar bottle of champagne in plastic cups, Maggie’s dad said, “You ever hear of the Mann Act?” That’s the 1910 law that prohibits white slavery.
Franz and Maggie got married anyway, on May 28, 1976, the day after Maggie graduated from high school.
A vessel to pour words into
Franz Lidz dedicated his latest book to Isolde Motley, his wife’s employer back in the early 1980s.
“I loathe golf,” says Motley, a retired Time Magazine executive who had edited Art & Architecture Magazine when Maggie was an editorial assistant and then a photo researcher there.
“Franz knows I hate golf, so it may be an elaborate joke on Franz’s part.”
Actually, Franz doesn’t like golf all that much, either.
So why write about it?
“It’s a structure,” Maggie says. “A parameter.”
Like a cup to put water in?
When Franz was a kid, golf was a stern, austere, mirthless game, he says. The only person he knew that liked it was a father’s friend, who, sure enough, was stern, austere and mirthless.
Take a lean paragraph from his book, about a golf tournament held by guys who are extremely overweight, and you’ll see how golf serves, well, like a cup in which to pour words.
“These days, Laugeni watches what he eats,” Lidz wrote in a chapter called “Fat Accompli,” which takes place at a course in New Haven, Conn.
“It’s not that he eats any less, mind you; he just watches it. And it was hard not to stare at him tooling around the course in his cart while he clutched two wieners, three packs of Twizzlers, six bags of M&Ms, and a Diet Coke.”
Franz’s writing is his personality, says Steve Rushin, who worked for Sports Illustrated for nearly two decades, but who recently left the magazine to write a novel.
“He can’t buy a pack of gum or get a ticket without engaging that person in conversation or making an awkward joke that requires a response,” he says. “He sees life as performance art.”
How about half a paragraph from the chapter, “Golf Buffs,” on nudist golf at a course in Cypress Cove, Fla.?
“Here, there and everywhere, body parts…bobbed, swayed, and quivered. Some breasts were the size of Pinnacles; others hung like head covers stuffed with bricks. Some men had chest hair thicker than muskrat pelts; some women had hair on their heads, but nowhere else….No woman carried a purse, though one man sported a colostomy bag. In case you were wondering, his bag didn’t match his shoes.”
Let’s stop there.
“He’s completely quirky and different in his writing, and he’s the weirdest guy I know,” Rushin says.
Eccentric. Although Franz prefers calling himself “irascible,” that’s what Motley calls both Maggie and Franz.
“They make their own decisions without regard for what anyone else would think,” Motley says.
Maggie as much as Franz, says Michelle Liao, who owns Liao Collection Asian Antiques in Philadelphia and has been friends with Maggie for more than two decades.
Twenty-two years ago, Maggie jumped out of a taxi, crying “Stop, stop, stop,” because she had seen Liao’s store on 11th Street, filled with curios, collectibles and fine art.
“It’s an energy thing, and she loves everything,” Liao says. “We both like old things, unconventional, things very artistic and textured.”
Like Franz?
Half crazy all for the love of you
When Maggie and Franz returned from their honeymoon in Latin America — hitchhiking through Mexico, Guatemala and Belize — they moved to Philadelphia, where Franz got a job substitute teaching, and Maggie worked briefly in a yogurt shop.
But like a lot of young couples, they moved around a lot.
In only a few years, Franz bounced from a Maine weekly called the “Sanford Star” and Baltimore’s alternate weekly, “City Paper,” where he made all of $35 a week, to a six-month stint as the executive editor with Johns Hopkins Magazine.
A friend told him that Sports Illustrated was looking for writers, so Franz hitchhiked to Manhattan from Baltimore in August 1980 to interview for a position.
According to Franz, it was more than 100 degrees in Manhattan the day he walked into managing editor Gil Rogin’s office in a wool sports jacket that must have smelled like, well, New York City.
Rogin was distracted, working to open a bottle of orange juice.
“Here,” Lidz says Rogin asked him. “Open this and you can have the job.”
Lidz did it, and got the job.
Maggie and Franz moved to New York, where she worked at Time Inc. Magazine Development as an editorial assistant and then as a photo researcher, while attending Columbia University and earning a B.A. in American History in 1984.
Their first daughter, Gogo, named after one of the two main characters in “Waiting for Godot,” by Franz’s favorite writer Samuel Beckett, was born the following year.
They returned to Philadelphia shortly after Gogo was born. Franz could write stories for Sports Illustrated from anywhere, and Maggie wanted a bigger place to live.
There, Maggie worked as a researcher for the Philadelphia Historical Commission, and as a volunteer at the Atwater Kent Museum. In the early 1990s, she helped with the City Hall’s interior restoration.
Meanwhile, the couple had another daughter in 1988, whom they named Daisy Daisy — that’s neither a typo nor a hiccup.
Maggie didn’t like the name of the other main character in “Waiting For Godot,” Didi. However, “Daisy” happened to be the name of the pregnancy test kit the couple had used, and that started with a D.
They wanted another D name for Daisy’s middle name, but settled on repeating the name after that line in the old song, “A Bicycle Built For Two.”
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Franz’s work took him all over the world, from Africa and Europe to Panama and Asia. He wrote a 12-page essay on Don King’s hair. For one of the magazine’s famous swimsuit issues, he took a trip around the equator to talk about what sports are played there. He started in Ecuador, where they played a form of tennis and spun tops; in Kenya, where they held a camel race; and in Indonesia, where they held mind-numbing martial arts competitions.
Still, of all places to live or work, Maggie had her eye on Delaware.
A new life in old barn wood
Winterthur, to be exact.
She applied for a fellowship in 1993, but didn’t get it. She decided to go back to school, part-time, at the University of Delaware, where she eventually earned a Masters in Art History in 1999.
Her main project explored Winterthur’s architecture.
After she earned her degree, she began working part-time at Winterthur. She officially became its full-time estate historian two years ago.
Tom Savage, director of Winterthur’s Museum Affairs, calls Maggie “the Barbara Walters of Winterthur, she’s such a fine interviewer.”
She’s also a “bird-dog researcher,” Savage says. “It’s one thing to do research, another to synthesize it, so that both sophisticated and unsophisticated can understand.”
Recently, Maggie helped three others on staff, including Savage, put together the museum’s “Double Vision” exhibit, which shows a series of stereographs, or 3-dimensional images, taken in 1935 and 1938, that viewers may see through 3-D glasses.
Maggie’s love of 20th-century architectural history may relate to her love of apartment living. She was reared in apartments.
Which is why it’s a little weird that in 1993 she and Franz bought six acres in Landenberg, Pa., just past the Delaware border.
They live in a house made from the wood from two former barns.
The property includes three Great Pyrenees dogs, lots of chickens and those funky-looking creatures called guinea fowl.
“They look like they were designed by a committee of paleontologists,” Franz says of his favorite pets.
The dogs are huge, says Steve Rushin.
“When I visit and he picks me up at the airport, his car has fur flying and the dogs take up most of the space,” he says.
They’re one of a handful of species of dogs that can behave themselves around llamas — two of which the Lidzes had until they died recently.
Lidz says his next book will be a memoir about his life on the farm, and his family’s transition from city to country, a sequel to “Unstrung Heroes.”
“I’m thinking of calling it, ‘It Gets Worse,’” he says, but the publisher already has balked at the title.
The book will concentrate on Gogo’s and Daisy Daisy’s childhood, which included no TV — “His giant dog chewed through the cable and they never got it replaced,” Rushin recalls — but watching a continual stream of 1930s and 1940s screwball comedies.
The kids watched so many old movies, by the time “Daisy was four, she could do an impeccable WC Fields,” Motley says.
Maggie and Franz are not the only members of the family who write books.
In high school, Gogo was misdiagnosed with attention deficit disorder. A psychiatrist prescribed stimulants, and then added anti-depressants after she became suicidal on the stimulants. As she got worse, he added anti-psychotics to her drug cocktail.
He prescribed 15 different kinds of pills over four years.
Finally, another doctor decided that what was wrong with Gogo was the medication, and he weaned her off all the drugs. She’s been fine since.
“She didn’t have anything,” Franz says. “She was just so sensitive to all the drugs he gave her.”
Gogo wrote a piece about that experience for New York Magazine, and now has a book contract to expand it into a memoir.
But this will be no victimization piece. She has tentatively titled the book, “Life on the Pharm.”
Like parents like daughter.