Book Excerpt
So he said, among innumerable other fantasies, partial truths, exaggerations, and appropriations from people he had met or had read about. "I think he rather self-consciously cultivated an aura of mystery," said C. Michael Curtis, one of his roommates in college -- Fariņa really did attend Cornell, and he was one of several students suspended for their involvement in a protest against university policies on parties held off-campus, although he later misrepresented both the event and his role in it. "He liked to be thought of as having lived the dangerous life. He could take the smallest detail and form it into a much more elaborate scheme. It is hard to know how much of this fantasy world he thought might actually have happened or how much of it was calculated. I've known liars, and I've known fantasists. He was more of a fantasist. There was something so boyish and irrepressible about his fantasies, and he wasn't aggressive about pushing them. He would sort of drop a lot of vague hints that would encourage you to think things, and he would say, 'I can't talk about it,' and he would give you a quizzical smile and then he would go on to change the subject. There were times when I thought that he really considered himself as someone who had done all these things and whose life might actually have been in danger. And there were times when he seemed to want to let everybody in on the fact that everything he said was a grand joke.
"He had a strong sense of himself," said Curtis, "and it had a wonderful effect. I mean, he mesmerized you. He was so likable that most people were happy to accept whatever he said. He was just wonderfully charming and lovable."
In truth, Fariņa was born and raised in a pleasant, Irish-Catholic pocket of Flatbush, Brooklyn. Like the Baez sisters, he was a first-generation American of Anglo-Latin descent: His mother, Tessie Farina, a high-spirited beauty christened Theresa Crozier, came from a family of fishing people in Northern Ireland; and his father, Richard Farina Sr., a rakish go-getter born Liborio Ricardo Fariņas, was reared in a brood of workers living on the Stewart Central sugar plantation in the remote Mantanzas province of Cuba. (When Richard Sr. came alone to the United States at the age of 18 in 1925, he adopted an Americanization of the family name, Farina; his son reclaimed the tilde, but not the s, after college.) An only child in an environment with a tradition of big families -- his father was one of at least 18 children -- Richard came early to an attitude of entitlement. (Tessie Farina had a hysterectomy as a result of problems during Richard's birth.) His father's position as a tool maker (not a laborer, like many men in his sphere, but someone who constructed the machinery the workers used) gave the family some status in the neighborhood, and his mother, alone in the house with her only child, coddled the boy. "He could have anything he wanted -- any toy, any game," said his father. "He knew he could have everything the other boys and girls couldn't have. And his mother took care of him day and night. He was all she had. For her, the world revolved around him. That's the way he grew up." Over the course of his childhood, Richard was diagnosed with asthma and allergies to numerous foods, including eggs, mustard, garlic, and brussels sprouts. Tessie Farina, following a doctor's recommendation to give the boy a change of climate, took him to spend a few weeks with his father's relatives in Cuba; as his cousin Severa Fariņas Lugonis remembers the visit, Richard, who was eight years old and did not understand Spanish, was too shy to go to the outhouse without his mother (or, for that matter, to go drinking with Hemingway). At home in their five-room modern apartment on Linden Boulevard in Flatbush, his mother protectively restricted Richard from most outdoor play, and he developed an active internal life. "He had quite an imagination," recalled Richard Sr.'s nephew Humberto Fariņas, a frequent household guest. "One thing I remember about him, he would be very concerned about the funnies. He was that type of boy, you know, because he would spend so much time reading funnies and playing with toys by himself and stuff like that. His mind was always on something that was not real." Richard attended Holy Cross Catholic Elementary School and was an altar boy and sang in the church children's choir, the only sign of interest in music his father would later recall; the first thing his parents remember him saying he wanted to be when he grew up was a priest. Around the age of 10, Richard invented his own comic-strip characters and drew their adventures on sheets of construction paper he taped all over the walls of his room. His father went into Richard's room to fetch him for dinner and found his son lying on his back on the floor, gazing at his creations.
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