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AND THEN, ALL of a sudden, there was Beyonce Knowles doing a concert at the grave of President Ulysses S. Grant! For Scaturro, who has spent his adult life protecting the 18th president’s final resting place on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, this was an amazing thing. Finally, Grant’s tomb was back in the public consciousness!
But then Knowles started dancing. And when I say “dancing,” I don’t mean dancing at all, but “thrusting,” “gyrating,” “bumping,” “grinding” and “selling lots of Pepsi products.” Suddenly, Scaturro’s glass went from half-full to completely empty.
“At first, you know, I thought, ‘It’s nice that they’re featuring the tomb because more people will know about it,’ but then the more we watched, the more appalled we got,” says Scaturro, president of the Grant Memorial Association. “The older people in the family were wondering how she even kept her clothing on while she was gyrating like that. For me, it was just an issue of lascivious dancing on a great man’s grave.”
When Frank Scaturro talks, I listen. I met him a decade ago when he was just a precocious college kid who shamed the National Park Service into properly maintaining the memorial, which was then covered in graffiti and urine. The place was so filthy that the State of Illinois even demanded that Grant’s remains be re-interred in the Land of Lincoln. But Scaturro turned up the heat and today, the memorial is as grand as it ever was—a source of great pride for the now-30-year-old lawyer.
To defend that pride, Scaturro fired off letters of complaint to Interior Secretary Gale Norton and NBC. In his letters, Scaturro complained that Beyonce’s “explicit performance was patently inappropriate for that location,” that “organizers of any event at that location should be required to observe a certain decorum that clearly was not met by the level of explicitness in Ms. Knowles’ performance” and that Knowles’ gyrations constituted “lascivious choreography.”
Clearly, I needed to get a hold of this footage.
Neither NBC nor Columbia Records would provide material assistance to my efforts. In fact, neither even called me back—me, a man so clearly in desperate need of an explicit performance of lascivious choreography.
Under a constant barrage of calls and heavy breathing, Columbia Records finally sent me a statement. If Watergate was characterized by “non-denial denials,” this statement was the “non-apology non-apology.”
“The location was chosen by the show’s producers,” the statement began. “Beyonce and all of her performers were dressed beautifully and appropriately for that evening’s hot summer temperature and for the type of television show they were asked to appear on. If the show’s producers had made Beyonce or her management aware of any wardrobe or performance guidelines, they certainly would have complied with them.”
Scaturro was unimpressed. After all, his issue is not with Beyonce, but with the Parks Service for letting her make such a lascivious and explicit display (although if you ask me, the only controversy is how come she doesn’t take off all her clothes already because, clearly, this is the actual product she is selling, and to remain clothed amounts to a particularly frustrating form of false advertising).
For Scaturro, the issue is clear. “I have no problem with Beyonce Knowles, but clearly such an event would not have been staged at JFK’s tomb,” he said. “Why is Grant’s tomb always treated with so little respect?”
Where to begin? First of all, no other presidential tomb is the set-up line to the most famous unfunny joke in the English language. The answer to “Who’s buried in Grant’s tomb?” is, indeed, Grant (and his wife, Julia Dent Grant). It was used as a consolation question on Groucho Marx’s game show—a question so easy that not even the most idiotic contestants could screw up).
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Grant himself has not gotten fair treatment from the history books. It’s amazing, when you consider that Grant was regarded in his own time as the equivalent of Washington or Lincoln. Here was the guy who won the Civil War, after all, and became the nation’s first true civil rights leader, ordering the de-segregation of hotels, trains and other public accommodations (although the Supreme Court eventually overruled him). When the memorial was dedicated in 1897—a full 12 years after his death—a million people showed up to mourn. Until World War I, Grant’s tomb was the most-visited tourist attraction in the nation—ahead of even the Statue of Liberty (which still, apparently, smelled a bit French). It remains the largest mausoleum in America (unless, of course, you count the governor’s mansion in California). Yet if Americans remember him at all, Grant is remembered as a bungler and a drunk—both of which are myths.
“No one in American history did so much yet gets so little credit,” says Scaturro. Scaturro had to deal with his own uprising when Chapman Foster Grant, a great-grandson of the former president, told The New York Daily News, “If the old guy were alive, he might have enjoyed it.”
Not a chance, Grant experts say. “First of all, Grant despised music,” says John Simon, editor of Grant’s papers at Southern Illinois University. “He used to say, ‘I recognize only two songs: One is “Yankee Doodle” and the other is not.’”
But certainly as a military man, hardened by combat, Grant must have appreciated the beauty of a fine woman like Beyonce? No, he would not have.
“Did you ever see a picture of his wife?” asks historian William McFeely. “This was not an attractive woman. But he was unbelievably faithful to her. His enemies tarred him with everything they could think of—corruption, drunkenness, what have you—but never adultery. He was a one-woman man.”
Even if they shared little in the looks department, Julia Grant definitely had some of Beyonce’s carnal sassiness, McFeely says. “In one letter to Grant, she told him that she’d named one of the four posts on her bed ‘Grant.’ You don’t need to be a strict Freudian to know what she meant. She enjoyed sex.”
The names of the other three posts on the bed have been, unfortunately, lost to history.
Gersh Kuntzman is also a columnist for The New York Post. His website is at www.gersh.tv
© 2003 Newsweek, Inc.
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