6 June 13-19, 2024 miaminewtimes.com | browardpalmbeach.com New Times | music | cafe | culture | Night+Day | news | letters | coNteNts | T A C O W E E K M I A M I . C O M “He wasn’t just into interviewing people; he was living Miami for the better part of a year,” the city’s first Cuban-American mayor notes. “Joan Didion and others wrote nonsen- sical things about Miami that they picked up from the Herald or Miami’s community news- papers. But Allman didn’t start off disliking the city, and his book wasn’t about him. It was about Miami, and there was nothing distorted, exaggerated, overly critical, or hagiographic.” The manuscript absorbs the reader be- cause Allman brought to the task at hand an ace reporter’s insatiable curiosity about his chosen subject matter. “He was a first-rate journalist,” says Graber, who spoke by phone with the hospitalized Allman for the last time a few days before he died last month. “He wanted to know everything about the government and politics of Miami and the players who were making things happen.” But there was also an unorthodox side to Allman’s modus operandi as an interviewer. “He did not take notes,” Viglucci says. “He thought people were more guarded if you were writing things down. So he would go to his ho- tel room afterward and write everything down from memory.” He once asked Allman about that unusual journalistic practice, which seemed all the more remarkable in light of the richly de- tailed chronicles contained in the four books he published during his lifetime. “He told me, ‘I just prefer to have a conversation and let people open up.’” A Lasting Love Affair The author’s love affair with the city did not end with the publication of the book in 1987. He continued to visit Miami on a fairly regular basis, acquiring a 39th-floor apartment in Miami Beach’s Akoya condominium tower in 2009, and over time he assembled a motley crew of friends and acquaintances. (In 2013, he also published Finding Florida: A True History of the Sunshine State, to some controversy.) “He had this larger-than-life personality, and he would gather this disparate group of people and hold court,” says Viglucci, who occasionally hosted the author at his Coral Gables home. “He had traveled all over the world, and he loved to tell stories or prompt other people to tell their yarns.” Allman sold his Collins Avenue apartment in 2021, and by that time, his attention and energies were primarily focused elsewhere. He was applying his prodigious talents to re- searching and writing a new book about an 800-year-old house he’d purchased in the medieval hilltop village of Lauzerte in south- western France. Entitled In France Profound: The Long History of a House, a Mountain Town, and a People, the book does two things: It narrates Allman’s personal experiences with the dwelling and the inhabitants of Lauzerte, and it uses the town and its environs as a vehicle to recount the turbulent history of the region dating back to the 12th-century reign of Eng- land’s King Henry II. It will be published posthumously by Grove Atlantic in August. Allman was a heavy smoker for the better part of 30 years — and though he’d quit by the time he met the Chinese physicist John Sui in 2000, his lungs began to seriously trouble him during the first quarter of this year. All- man returned to Miami for the final time in the early spring to reminisce about the city at a public event sponsored by Florida Interna- tional University’s Maurice A. Ferré Institute for Civic Leadership. Miami-based filmmaker Aaron Glickman attended the April 2 event and interviewed the ailing author during his stay. “He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t walk. He was in bad shape,” the digital media publisher recalls. T.D. Allman is survived by his brother Ste- phen and his sister Pamela. His legacy in the context of Miami can be best captured through his own words. “These days, for both good and ill, Miami is America,” Allman wrote 37 years ago. “Like America, it’s fast, big, new, reckless, thought- less, and even kind of scary. But Miami’s also got America’s saving graces. There’s some- thing about the place that engenders cooper- ation and invention, excites the imagination, and produces hope. “Miami will go on getting more and more ‘American’ — and not just because Miami is becoming more and more like the rest of the country, but because the rest of the country is becoming more and more like Miami. Other American cities already are discovering that they, too, have Hispanic voters and that there is big money to be made in foreign trade. “You have to come to a place like Miami, seemingly so ‘foreign,’ to appreciate that ex- traordinary power, that all-pervasive — com- pletely subversive — force of what can only be called American civilization.” [email protected] T.D. Allman, who once called himself an accidental Floridian, spent a chunk of the 1980s in the Magic City, researching and writing Miami: City of the Future, a prescient work of reportage. Atlantic Monthly Press “AT A TIME WHEN THE WORLD WAS CALLING US ‘PARADISE LOST,’ HE SAW MIAMI FOR WHAT IT COULD BE, NOT FOR WHAT IT WAS.” Required Reading from p5
