Take On the Talking Heads
Kato Kaelin All Over Again
by Garry Wills
May 4, 2000 -- The press coverage of the Elian Gonzalez matter has been either too much or too little. We all know about the too much. The too little has to do with things like the medical history of Marisleysis Gonzalez or the court record of her father. An even greater gap in coverage had to do with the "fisherman," Donato Dalrymple, who pulled Elian from the sea. What little was reported about him was false. He is not a fisherman. He is not, as he claimed, single. He did not, as he claimed, have one prior divorce but three.
It took Dalrymple three days, after taking Elian from the waves, to visit Elian to see how he was faring. By that time, it was clear that the house where Elian was staying was in the news -- so Dalrymple called TV stations to tell them what time their cameras should be there for his reunion with the child. From that point, he spent all the time when he was not at his job -- which is cleaning houses -- at the house, playing with Elian (though he speaks little Spanish) and giving interviews to reporters (telling them falsehoods).
The lack of enterprise in reporting on this man was finally remedied Thursday by The Washington Post. Michael Leahy wrote about the real Donato Dalrymple. He has never been a fisherman. This was the first time he had been on a fishing trip, and he was just guiding the boat while his cousin fished. But "fisherman" has a more dignified ring than "house cleaner," and Leahy reports that the Spanish word for fisherman became a title, Pescador, spoken with hushed reverence in the crowd that ringed the house in Little Havana.
The reverence was contagious. Peggy Noonan caught it way up in New York, and was inspired to write in The Wall Street Journal that the word called up for her the image of "the Big Fisherman" of the Sea of Galilee, whose miraculous resurrection she compared to the miraculous rescue of Elian by dolphins and the Fisherman Dalrymple. But now that Dalrymple's work history is better known, he may have to appear in Noonan's next religious vision not as the Big Fisherman but as the Big Cleaning Man. Instead of saying, "I am the Resurrection and the Life," he will mystically intone, "I am the Vacuum Cleaner and the Mop."
Dalrymple himself claims that Elian's rescue was miraculous. He told Leahy in Washington, "I'm the savior of a boy." He loves the title Pescador, and now dresses the part, buying new outfits with supporters' money at Banana Republic. In the Leahy interview he said: "When I'm in Miami, people shout to me, 'Pescador! Pescador! Don't leave for Washington. We need leaders here.'"
Though he cries on cue before the cameras, he is giddy with delight at all the attention he is getting: "I hear screams, 'Donato for mayor! Donato for mayor!' I'm flattered -- 800,000 Cubans love me. Yeah, I could see myself walking through that door and maybe running for mayor."
But his cousin, who was doing the actual fishing when they spotted Elian, thinks Dalrymple is just "a phony, a liar." In fact, that cousin, Sam Ciancio, who has known Dalrymple all his life, describes him as this event's Kato Kaelin. Precisely.
Copyright © 2000 Universal Press Syndicate
