Sam—what a perfect fit that name seemed for Samuel Lipman. Nobody I
know ever called him Samuel. He was Sam, and within his circle of
friends, and even enemies, if
you said Sam, it was like saying Johnny
(Carson), or Frank (Sinatra), or Michael (Jordan), everyone knew
about whom you were talking. I’m fairly certain Sam would not have
approved those Johnny, Frank, and Michael references; I’m fairly
certain he would not have known who Michael Jordan is, though Sam
was a sports fan in his youth.

Midway in his more than four-year battle with leukemia, while talking
about quack cures for cancer, I mentioned to Sam that I had somewhere
read that Steve McQueen, in the last months of his battle with
cancer, had gone to Mexico in search of a cure not allowed in the
United States. “Who,” asked Sam, after a pause, “is Steve McQueen?”
Sam was then fifty-eight and had spent all his life in America; and I
thought to myself, boy, Sam really knew how to live. How Sam lived
was as an immitigable highbrow. Not long after I first met Sam, one
evening when we were walking in Washington, I asked him if he watched
many movies or much television. “I consider the movies and
television,” he said, without breaking stride, “dogshit.”

Although I had been reading Sam’s music criticism with admiration
since he first set up as a music critic in Commentary in 1975, and
although I was once on