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All the information is vital for crossexamination, says Bailey, "because you will continually open doors and you'd better damn well know what's on the other side. This is the reason we waste so much time learning things we will never use. At least we will never be confronted by the unexpected."
F. Lee Bailey has always liked to know, almost viscerally, what he is talking about. At Harvard, where he was an undergraduate for two years (and thinking about becoming a writer), he assigned himself a short story on what it feels like to commit suicide by running a car engine in a closed garage. So he decided to find out for himself, drove his car into his garage, closed the door and waited. He discovered that a would-be exhaust-suicide gets sick to his stomach—at which point Bailey hastily halted his experiment.
The same answer might have been somewhere in a book, but the young Bailey was much too impatient to fumble around for it in a library. He was, in fact, an indifferent student, despite a 172 I.Q. (according to an application to MENSA, the New York-based genius club). Recalls his younger (by seven years) brother Bill, also a lawyer: Lee was known around their home town of Waltham, Mass., less as a brain than as "the kid who would do something when everybody else would chicken out."
One early escapade was a lengthy "safari" around a neighbor's farm in a 1932 Chrysler he had bought for $50. Bailey gleefully knocked over trees, bulldozed bushes and savagely tore up the soft turf; for years afterward he talked about the special joy he had had "bulling through the elephant grass." Restless, obstreperous intelligence runs in his family. One grandfather liked to sit in a dark closet playing chess over the telephone without a board in front of him. Bailey's mother founded and ran a successful children's nursery, while his father, a newspaper ad salesman, had trouble holding jobs because he could not refrain from telling his employers how to run their businesses.
The couple separated when Lee was ten. The boy was badly hurt. He and his mother eventually began to feud, so she sent him away at 13 to a remote New Hampshire prep school, Cardigan Mountain. There Bailey pursued such enthusiasms as writing, oratory, carpentry and a bruising brand of hockey. His headmaster worried that "Lee is far too much a law unto himself."
But Bailey has told his biographer, Les Whitten, that during his first year away from home, "I was probably as happy as I have ever been."