Fantastic Metropolis

Everyone has a secret life. It may seem trite to state this, but sometimes it needs restating. Even the most banal individual has some sort of secret life, often a profoundly rich secret life. Can it be said that the more boring the public face of the person, the more fecund their clandestine existence? Not necessarily, but I’m sure it is true for some people. (Not that we’d ever know about it.) “The Important” often seem to lead lives so busy and so full that we cannot imagine they have the time to pursue secret lives. For make no mistake—one must pursue a secret life. Although some have secret lives thrust upon them, in most cases, the individual runs toward the secret life willingly, almost as a kind of release. At least, I find this is true in my case.

Famous people who have either pursued a secret life or had one thrust upon them include William the Conqueror, P.T. Barnum, Teddy Roosevelt, Indira Gandhi, Kate Blanchett, P-Diddy, and George W. Bush. Of course, many countless thousands of others have led secret lives, but for some reason these seven have caught my magpie eye where others did not. The secret lives of Genghis Khan, Rasputin, Woodrow Wilson, Margaret Thatcher, Jennifer Aniston, William Hurt, and Bill Clinton, for example, do not excite nearly as much interest upon a thorough review and investigation. When charting these secret lives on the bulletin boards in my office—when cutting out various photographs and articles and spreading them out across the floor, when noting the connections between them with candle wax and gobs of paint—the first seven formed a rather pleasing if mysterious pattern, while the latter seven seemed only chaotic and random, with no order to speak of.

Therefore, I did not choose the latter seven for my planned exhaustive book on secret lives of famous people—a companion volume to my book of fictional secret lives of “ordinary” people. (I use double quote marks around “ordinary” because in all of my travels and conversations with people around the globe, I confess to being unable to determine what “ordinary” or “normal” might mean; each person, in his or her way, has seemed extraordinary to me. I feel like Kinsey, faced with data that determined “norms” but not “normals.”)

Of the seven I chose, the most challenging to research and investigate was, of course, William the Conqueror, simply because the trail was so old, and for this reason I haven’t gotten past writing about his secret life (70 pages of the book-in-progress).

I received my first clues about William the Conqueror from examining pages from the Domesday Book at the British Library while on a book tour last year, and it has taken me until almost this very moment to track down the relevant details, to receive the confirmations and recognitions—including a look at a very old, inscribed, fragment of sword, said blade “shewed” to me by an ancient woman who claimed to be the Conqueror’s great-to-the-nth-degree granddaughter—that would allow me to publish my conclusions, with some degree of their accuracy.