Yet NBC managed. With Machiavellian ease.
At the half-time commercial break, we were treated to a “public service announcement.” It was ostensibly on buying savings bonds. It was headlined: “Buy Bonds Where You Work ... They Do” and of course the workman shown was a 24 year army vet, sweating in Viet Nam. He did his little number about how he’d bought a bond a month for eighteen dollars and change, every month for 24 years, and one of these days he was going to get R&R’d out of VC-territory, start cashing in some of that twenty-five grand he had stashed away, and blow it in Bangkok having—in his words—”a ball.” Then the vet vanished, and the screen went black, and the headline appeared again. Now in the usual run-of-the-commercial style, the headline would have held, without sound, to let the message sink in. But this time there was a soundtrack overdubbed (obviously cut at a later date than the video segment) in which he added, “Oh, and by the way, I just extended my tour over here in Viet Nam for another six months, because all of us guys believe in what we’re fighting for over here.”
Then Spock came back and they popped their first question at him: “Why do you feel we should be out of Viet Nam?”
Pow! That man was dead. With his mouth he dug his grave. Into a pre-recorded interview had been inserted that one special “public service announcement” out of the millions every network runs—concerned with multiple sclerosis, drunkenness, help the blind, drive carefully and help save our water birds—that could invalidate everything Spock said.
So I want to ask: no war on dissent?
And having asked so many questions, I herewith promise that as long as I am allowed to continue writing this column, I will continue to ask questions, and report some personal answers arrived-at from seeing what they set before us on the screen every day.
(I say allowed, for unbidden, the dead eyes of Martin Luther King and Lenny Bruce and Bobby Kennedy and Malcolm X swim before me. And behind them Peter Zenger and Galileo and Thomas More and poor Jesus Christ, all of whom were too stupid to know the only way the assassins overlook you is if you keep your head down and your mouth shut. This all smacks of melodrama, for which I have an unnatural love, and yet I feel the stormy stirrings of madness in the land, and even though I don’t seek the role of spokesman, any more than Lenny did, the time has come to speak out, to hold back the Visigoths, and that sure as hell makes the spokesman ripe for a bullet in the brain. So while you can enjoy me, gentle readers, I urge you do so, and ask the questions along with me.)
Who knows: we may even locate a few correct answers. And don’t be so scared. The worst they can do is kill us.
* * * *
Each new television season is marked by a trend which the general run-of-the-extrapolation critics choose to examine in terms of what is most prevalent: twenty-three new westerns or ten new private eye shticks or two series about gynecological gropers. (Mr. Amory, of TV Guide, did a brief turn on the abominable Joey Bishop bash a week or so ago, and he characterized this season as the Year of the Widow—citing Hope Lange in The Ghost And Mrs. Muir, Diahann Carroll in Julia and Doris Day in Doris Day. Tune in, Cleveland baby, and I’ll lay a few alternative titles on you.)
What with idiot shows like Blondie and The Good Guys rearing their microcephalic heads, we could call it The Year of the Asshole. Or that disaster called The Ugliest Girl In Town might make this season eligible as The Year Of The Closet Queen. Or the unseemly spate of pro-John Law shows—Hawaii Five-O, Adam-12, Mod Squad, N.Y.P.D., The F.B.I., Dragnet 1969 and Ironside—might easily tag this The Year Of The Cuddly Cop.
But those are merely staples in a diet guaranteed to cause scurvey of the mind. The two shows that really tell us where it’s at are The Outcasts and Mod Squad. These are the shows that dare to take the enormous risk of utilizing black folk as heroes. These are the shows that win the title hands-down for this being The Year Of The Shuck.
The year the mickeymice inherited the public airwaves.
The year they used Nat Turner as the mouthpiece of the hohky. Stuff him and stand him up and pull his ringstring, and the do-it-yourself Mattel Nat Turner doll will gibber about equality.
Oh, it is seamy stuff to watch.
In the event you have been busy in the streets doing what it is these shows talk about, but don’t understand, let me hip you to what’s coming down on Channel 7, Monday nights at 9:00 and Tuesday nights at 7:30 in living black and white.
On Monday, The Outcasts ride. Don Murray, who is so white he makes Ultra-Brite dull by comparison, and Otis Young, an Afro-American of uncommon surliness, are bounty hunters. One is an ex-Virginia Confederate soldier, the other is an escaped plantation slave. Through one of the great syntactical gymnastics in the history of plot-cramming, they wind up being trail-buddies. They mooch around together, preying on their fellow man and snarling at one another for sixty minutes of self-conscious ethnic drama. There are half a dozen obligatory interchanges each show, in which Young calls Murray “boss” and Murray responds with a churlish “boy.” They do it over and over till you feel the urge to tell them to kiss and make up. (But the networks aren’t ready for interracial faggotry yet; that’s next year.)
In the September 30th segment, viewers were treated to a scene in which Young and Murray—trail-weary after God knows how long—break jail and stop off after much eating of dust and pounding of ponies at a run-down way-station for express riders. The wife of the owner is a bit horny; and comes out in the moonlight to grab a little air, and anything else the boys have to offer. Now pay close attention: Murray and Young see this broad by the well, doing a lot of heavy breathing. They exchange a few bon mots about the state of their not-getting-any, and Murray sashays off to give the little lady a fiesta in the tackle and harness shed. Young watches.
Now I’ll even grant the producers of The Outcasts the benefit of historical verisimilitude. In them days a black man knew better than to try cozzening up to a white chick. The question does present itself, however, why didn’t Young drop a gentle hand on Murray’s shoulder and say something like, “Hey, hold up a minute, boss. Y’know, we both been on the trail eight weeks, and I seen the rushes of the next sixteen shows, and uh er, y’know not once in any of them sixteen shows do I get a piece, so why not let me go on out and further the plot a wee bit with that there fine little fox?” Granted, we couldn’t let Young do anything like that, I mean, actually get down with a white woman—but how much more like real men they would seem than the posturing prototypes they now play! Murray gets uptight when they won’t let Young sleep in the house—it’s the barn for the black boy, natcherly—but I wonder how tough he’d get if they refused Young service in a whore house? The point is, will Otis Young be given any more natural manifestation of manhood in this series than the wielding of phallic substitutes like horse and six-gun? Or will all the boy/girl jive be confined to the “acceptable” (i.e., white) Murray? Until separate but equal sack-time is established, this remains just another example of the shuck: the great American TV Boondoggle that seeing a black man make it sexually is too steamy and sordid for the fine-tuned sensitivities of the Great Unwashed.
Which brings us, with gorge rising, to Mod Squad. It has to be seen and heard to be believed. Take last Tuesday’s offering, a script I have it on good authority was rewritten by the Executive Producer. Now get this, because we travel fast and tricky:
These three overage Now Generation types, once free spirits but now straight-arrow types working as undercover narks for the L.A.P.D. (how they justify their gig is never really dealt with; one assumes that even the most militant Strip type would be converted to Redden’s Folly were he only to be exposed to the logic of the billy club and mace can), return under aliases to high school, to break the back of a car-boosting syndicate. Through incredible stupidity and ineptitude, the three Mod Squadders get their one witness shot through the gut. After 56 minutes of idiot plot the case is cracked, and in the final scene one of the three undercover cops, Clarence Williams III, goes to try and explain to the girl friend of the slain boy why he’s sorry she lost her man. The chick is busy cleaning out her school locker. Despite being an “A” student, the chick is going to drop out and “get a gig somewhere.”
Then follows one of the most incredible banalities ever concocted on network TV.
Mr. Williams III first demeans the dead boy friend (who was trying to avenge his murdered teacher) by telling his bird that “Doc blew his chance.” (He sure did; he should have stayed clear of the fuzz as he had done all through the first half of the show; at least he was alive.) Then he tells her the school is where it’s at. It’s where it’s happening, baby. And then he starts to cry, for no damn reason save possibly to demonstrate an aptitude for Glycerine Bawling 102. And then he tosses her the clincher: he quotes from Ted Kennedy’s eulogy of RFK and says (approximately), “Some men look at the way things are, and ask why ... I dream of things that could be and ask why not?” Then he asks the broken-up chick if she knows who said that. She, being no dud, knows this is a test that will count for % of her grade, and she replies, “A very great man.”
With the two of them thus bound together in banality, the mod cop splits, leaving the chick—we can only presume—to the tender mercies of higher education.
Did I mention that Mr. Williams and Judy Pace, the actress who played the girl friend, were black? I didn’t? Perhaps it was because they didn’t sound like any blacks I ever heard. They sounded like The System, and The System is white, so there must have been something wrong with my set’s color control.
What does all of this say? It says that those series are bastardizations. They relegate the black community once again to proselytizing the party line. They are a shuck.
They are ostensibly intended to show the black man and woman as normal, functioning members of the society, yet in actuality they are warped views of what’s going on by the aging mickeymice who put these shadow plays together. The producers in their Italian silk kerchiefs and wide belts need more than groovy gear from deVoss to get them into the heart of truth in the streets today. Or even the streets of Laredo, 1883.
In one series the black man is allowed to vent his frustration and loneliness and hostility only through the use of the gun. We know what jingo propaganda that parallels. In the other series a black man speaks in such an uncool, unhip, untruthful manner that even the dumbest white chick would laugh in his face and call him a sellout.
The mickeymice rule. They don’t know what the burning gut of the problem is all about, and so they try to shuck us by taking a palm-feel of a high temperature.
If this is integration on TV, it makes the days of Steppin Fetchit look almost cerebral by contrast.
* * * *
3: 18 OCTOBER 68
Nothing pleases me more than that the major networks had a few of their newsmen dribbled around the streets of Chicago like basketballs. Nothing delights me more than that a few of those arrogant swine with their creepie-peepies got their heads and Arriflexes busted by Daley’s kulaks. The only thing that would have pleasured me more would have been Cronkite or Huntley/Brinkley being beaten to guava jelly in full view of the cameras, in the gutter right outside the International Amphitheatre. There is a Yiddish word— quite untranslateable into English—kvell; it means, like, to feel as if the sun were glowing in your tummy; you rock back and forth with contained happiness. I would have kvelled to see “Good night, Chet,” and “Good night, David” said through puffy lips, around Band-Aid Sheer Strips.
No deep-seated hostility prompts these blood-curdled pronouncements. Though I’m not what might be considered a nonviolent person, I have no animus for the gentlemen of the Video Fourth Estate. My feelings are prompted out of a gut-level desire for justice. The Universe is run in a sloppy manner, I’ll grant you, but overall it has a dandy check-and-balance system, and for justice to be meted out in full, what the newsvideo boys got was not nearly what they deserved. I’ll try to explain.
In a roundabout way.
I know a girl who was at the Century City free-for-all. She wasn’t in the area where I was tumbling, but she was there. She’s a third grade teacher in a local grammar school. She went to the demonstration with a doctor of her acquaintance, and two attorneys. They were all dressed in acceptable Establishment garb: little white gloves and a pretty dress for her, suits and ties for the gentlemen. They dressed that way on purpose. They knew that a large segment of the demonstrating crowd would be in battle garb—sandals, hard hats, clothes that could stand sidewalk-scraping—and they wanted to show that all segments of the population were against WW2½. She told me, with a touching show of naïveté, that it seemed as though the television cameras, when panning across the throng, always avoided her little clot of squarely-dressed dissenters, in favor of loving closeups on the scruffiest, most hirsute protesters. I smiled. Of course, baby.
The news media invariably slant it. Whether it’s anything as flagrant as the prepared protest placards one of the local outlets took to a Valley men’s college for a debate, or as subtle as the proper defamatory word in a seven-minute radio newscast, the reportage is always corrupted so the dissenters look like fuzzy-minded commiesymp idiots (at best).
There seems to be no question of ethic or morality in the minds of those who write the news, those who program the news, or those who deliver the news. Several friends of mine who work for CBS News here in Los Angeles have confided off-the-cuff that it appalls them, the manner in which the outrage of the minorities is presented. In private they’ll say it, but they haven’t the balls to actually do anything about it. They won’t make protestations to their superiors, they won’t make statements to the newspapers, they won’t back up their hideous parlor-liberalism with anything but muted whispers to activists they milk for inside information.
So then the hypocrites get a little bloodied, and they shout “police brutality!” You could hear the outrage to the bottom of the Maracot Deep. Well, I’m afraid I can’t feel too upset about it.
Where were they when the cops turned their bikes into the crowd outside the Century City Hotel? Where were they when fifteen-year-old girls were getting their heads busted on the Strip? Where were they at Columbia and University of Chicago and Berkeley? Where was their outrage then? Ask not for whom the bell tolls, brother reporters: it tolls for every one of you who sell out the people looking to you for truth. And when you reap a little of what you’ve helped sow, don’t come crying back and expect the field troops to feel sorry. It doesn’t work that way. You called the rules of the game, and now you’re uptight because the trolls with their mace and clubs decided it wasn’t how you played the game, it was whether or not you won.
Which violent thought brings me to the topic of violence—or the lack of same—on prime time TV. Everyone and his Doberman has had his say on this little topic, and having been a man who lost two grand when a segment of a show he wrote was canceled for re-run because it was too violent, I feel I’m as equipped as any dog to comment.
It would be simple to make an artistic case for violence. All great art from Beowulf to Faulkner’s Intruder In The Dust has demonstrated that violence is often what results in moments of stress, when people under tension must seek release. Conrad, Shakespeare, Twain, Dickens, John D. MacDonald, Arthur Miller—all of them bring their characters to the point of no return, and then follows violence. It is the way the machine works. (Note this: physiologically-speaking, while Man’s forebrain, where he does his formulating, has grown larger as the eras passed, his medulla, where the emotions click, has remained the same size as his Neanderthal ancestors’. In effect what we have is a highly-complex thinking machine, able to extrapolate and cogitate and parse, still ruled by the emotions of something little more godlike than a killer ape. Deny this, and you deny the facts. Ignore it, and what emerges artistically is a shuck.)
A critic in Story Magazine recently ventured, in an article on the literary precedents for violence, that there is an “illiterate vocabulary of violence.” That when all reason fails, there is always the sock on the jaw. It says precisely what it means. There is no arguing with it. It makes a clearly-defined dramatic point. And as the most valid argument for that theory the author cited Melville’s Billy Budd. When Billy, harried and chivvied by the detestable Claggart, finds himself literally unable to vocalize his frustration, or to deny the charges brought against him, the injustice being done to him in all its monstrousness, his futile attempt to speak finds voice in only one possible way—he lashes out and strikes the First Mate, killing him with one punch. Any other solution to the problem would have been illogical, untruthful, fraudulent.
So then, if violence is necessary to the freedom of creating art, what is it about TV violence that has all the tippy-toe types running scared? What is it that has usually sane and responsible writers, producers and directors signing idiotic advertisements that they will never write violence again? (And thereby castrating themselves, and leaving the door wide-open for more and better network censorship; and proving what liars they are, for we all know if it comes down nitty-gritty to shooting that fight scene or writing that blood bath, who among them will walk away from the money?)
What it is, of course, is what George Clayton Johnson, the videowriter, said it was, at a recent brouhaha thrown by the Writers Guild of America, West. He said it was “gratuitous” violence. Let me hit that again: gratuitous violence. And what is that, gentle readers? It is a death onscreen that no one cares about.
If you’ve traveled through forty minutes of teleplay with a kindly old man who helps crippled children, and you see him shot to death on the steps of the altar where he is telling his beads, you care. You cry for that death. You feel you have lost someone.
If, on the other hand, Little Joe Cartwright shoots down seventeen faceless hardcases trying to prevent him from snipping that bob’wire on the South Forty, you don’t give a shit. They were extras. They fell and they lay there and that’s that. (And the grossest debasement of the human condition of all, practiced regularly in TV series, is the scene in which someone has been murdered and lies there all through the shot while the remaining actors talk over what they’ll do next. Have you ever been in the same room with a corpse? No? Try it some time, and try carrying on polite conversation while the stiff’s blood and brains seep into the carpet.)
It is the difference between our being stunned as though struck by a ball-peen hammer when we saw Bobby Kennedy get hit on-camera, or continuing to munch our potato chips through all those newsreel footages of massacres in the Congo. We knew him; whether we dug him or not, he was real, he mattered.
So the blame, and the solution, lies in the hands of my fellow screenwriters. Most of them couldn’t write their way out of a pay-toilet for openers, and they simply don’t have the craft or the heart to write what matters, what counts, what we can feel and care about. The solution to the question of violence stems from the insanity of the times, of course, but in interpretation it is filtered through the artfulness—or lack of it—of the writers. And then the producers. And then the directors.
If the shackles of series format were removed from the writing hands of the creators, we would be many long steps toward solving the problem. Dispensing with violence on TV is tantamount to dropping a Bufferin and thinking it’ll cure your cancer.
And if they decide that all violence must go, I suggest they start not with the innocuous banalities of combat demonstrated on half-wit series like The Outsider or Mannix but with the affectionate handling of freeway decapitations, sniper slayings, race riots and random brutalities delivered blow-by-blow in close close CLOSEUP by the ghouls on the Channel 7 news every night
Or doesn’t it disturb anyone to see a video newsman shoving his hand-mike down the gullet of a grieving widow on her knees before the burned body of her seven-year-old son?
* * * *
4: 25 OCTOBER 68
Several things perplexed me this last week. The first was the Mitzi Gaynor special on Channel 4, Monday night the 14th. The second was the CBS Playhouse special, J.P. Miller’s 90-minute drama The People Next Door, on Channel 2, Tuesday the 15th. The third was a segment of the Channel 11 Donald O’Connor variety show—Thursday’s offering, the 17th, specifically. They befuddled me, unsettled me, and defied analysis ... until something crummy happened later Thursday night, something that really zapped me and dropped everything into place.
May I tell you about it? Thank you.
The Daisy is quiet these nights, since all the lemmings followed the spoor to the Factory and Arthur and the Candy Store. So it’s a good place to go late at night for a cup of coffee and a few dances. After the O’Connor show had been on a while, and my mind had been extruded out through my nostrils, a young lady and I motored down. It was quiet, nice.
We sat and talked for a while, and then a small podium was set up, and two young men who call themselves “The New Wave” came out. They each carried an unamplified guitar, their hair was stylishly long, they were nice-looking guys, and they mounted the stools on the podium, and they prepared to play.
At that moment, into the small but polite audience came a table-load of stretch-black knee socks/dark lint-free suits/midnight beard-stippled/powdered and cologned/cigar cellophane crinkling/pure Hollywood types. With their ladies of the evening. They were noisy. That is the most polite way to put it. They were noisy.
They took a table at the edge of the dance floor, within arms’-length of The New Wave. As the two boys started playing—with great skill and beauty—the egg-suckers began gibbering. Talking, laughing, doing all the square old shticks that old squares pull in the presence of the terror generated in them by youth. (And I finally learned what a tramp is, incidentally. Their chicks were in their twenties—naturally: old impotent squares need fresh meat to reassure them the world isn’t entirely against them, that they aren’t completely turning to ashes in their husks—and the chicks laughed right along at such brilliant bon mots as “Is that a girl or a boy with all that hair?” A tramp is a chick who will laugh at a swine’s gaucheries because she wants something from him, even if it’s only another stinger.)
The New Wave played eight or nine songs of genuine beauty, most of which they’d written themselves, many of which said something fresh and searching about life in our times, the struggles of the young for identity, in general a fine and lovely set, concerned with what is coming down these days. The old farts could have learned something if they’d listened. But they wouldn’t. As those sweet guitars worked, the crustaceans of the Alcholic Generation screamed louder, made more impolite remarks, jeered, goosed their whores and went to decay and garbage before the eyes of The New Wave—who were beautifully cool and ignored them without dropping a measure—and everyone else in the room.
I left the Daisy confused by what I’d seen, and deeply troubled. Oh sure, I’d seen this kind of ridiculous behavior before, many times, in many night clubs, at many concerts, in movies. But why, I asked myself, couldn’t they have at least taken a table at the rear of the room if they wanted to talk, if they didn’t want to hear a live performance? Why did they sit right in front; and sitting right in front, why couldn’t they open their gourds and maybe learn what these kids had to say.
These were the kind of swine, I thought, who groove on those hincty, square, bible-belt-style Las Vegas lounge acts, all screamhorn and sweaty thighs. Trini Lopez and Shirley Bassey and Sam Butera and Robert Goulet and a big sequined finale where everybody exudes phony enthusiasm marching around singing When The Saints Go Marching In. The Judy Garland lovers. The ones who dig ... and it all dropped into place...Mitzi Gaynor and Donald O’Connor and what The People Next Door were putting out.
The linkage was there, plainly. And though I shied away from the cliché, it was dear God help us, the Generation Gap. Those were the most gapped people I’d ever seen. And I knew why those three TV shows had unsettled me.
The Mitzi Gaynor special was old. It was cornball. It was all that papier-mâché elegance, all the highkicking chorusboy shit that goes big in Vegas, and goes down smooth as honey in redneck territory, because it feeds the unrealistic images all those rustics have of glamour and showbiz. It was the essence of the-show-must-go-on-ism. (And let’s put a hole in that one right now: what the hell would it matter if the show didn’t go on? Is the arrogance of the showbiz type so monumental that he thinks the course of Western Civilization would somewhichway be slowed if the Osmond Bros, didn’t make the midnight show on New Year’s Eve at the Sahara?)
The same holds true for the O’Connor show. Night after weeknight we are treated to a dull, dreary hegira of Vegas lounge acts, slouching like some rough beasts toward a Bethlehem that looks like nothing so much as the interior of the Stage Deli. It is outdated entertainment. It is an atavistic throwback to the cornball of the Thirties and Forties, without the saving grace of being nostalgic or even camp. They take it seriously. Henny Youngman still works as though he were a fresh, apple-cheeked act. The days of belting, busty chanteuses and vaguely off-color comics with cuffs that shoot automatically is past. They are on the other side of the Gap. They are as far from The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and Laugh-In as Little Orphan Annie is from the Mona Lisa.
Sure the septuagenarians should have equal time in the networks’ programming. Sure they should. But when will the powers-that-do realize that being au courant, achieving that across-the-board viewership they revere more than the blood of Christ or their mother’s gefilte fish, means more than adding Harper’s Bizarre to an Ed Sullivan bill featuring Kate Smith, the Sons of the Pioneers and Betty Hutton doing her roadshow rendition of Hello Dolly?
Time is passing them by, and they obstinately remain gapped.
Even as J.P. Miller, author of The People Next Door, is gapped. Demonstrably obvious from his 90 minutes of hysterical reaction-formation to his own son’s dropping out and becoming a hippie, The People Next Door was as dishonest and stacked-deck as a drama could be.
I won’t go into the plot. If you missed it, you didn’t miss much but an object lesson. It was an exercise in hypocrisy. It started with cliché characters and espoused a view of the generation of revolution as imperfect and disembodied as the uninformed opinions of the most militant and frightened Orange County Bircher.
It was the vocal statement of a man who is confused and terrified by the things young people are doing today, a statement that did not comprehend the blame lies in the venality and alienation of the older generations. It was as dense and studiedly unknowing as the grave-fears of a little old lady dying away her moments in a Beverly Boulevard convalescent home.
One can only conjecture what effect Miller’s play had on the errant son. Were I he, it would have solidified once and finally my feelings that Dad was a phony intellectual, and a man to distrust simply because he knows not where it’s at. Nor where it’s going to be.
* * * *
Wags at a recent craft forum meeting of the Writers Guild suggested that the reason for the recent bombing of the Free Press was this column. I pshawed them, naturally. It’s true I received an irate call from an irate producer, whose series I’d bummed in these pages, assuring me that I was a toad and that I would never work on that series. (This, gentle readers, is a threat roughly as, imposing as telling a man who has just crawled out of the Gobi Desert on hands and knees that he cannot have a peanut butter sandwich.)
It is also true that I received a communication from CBS News here in Los Angeles, demanding to know the names of the confidantes who had freely discussed the hypocrisy of their network and its news staff. There were implied threats. Dark and devious references to Judge Crater and Amelia Earhart and Ambrose Bierce. (I didn’t nark on my sources, gang. Bamboo shoots under the fingernails could not drag that privileged communication from me. Which brings us to an interesting sidelight that came down this week: a representative of ABC-TV, facing the Senate investigating committee on television violence, copped-out that not only was ABC clean clean clean, but that because of the effulgent brilliance of ABC’s Mod Squad—a disaster area I dealt with several weeks ago here—a teen-aged girl, a “user,” had “kicked,” and “split her scene,” and had joined forces with the LA.P.D.—like the kids in the series— to work as an undercover informer, a “stoolie.” This network rep was really h-e-p, he used all the jargon ... user, kicked, split, where it’s at . . . unfortunately, he doesn’t smell out the horror of what he’d said: that the ethical corruption of the series had miasmically drifted off the tube, and clouded that poor little chick’s mind, thereby causing her to turn on/in her contemporaries. And if it be demonstrably true that this nitwit show can cause one person to turn from “evil” to “good,” then it should conversely be true that it could turn them from “good” to “evil,” and so it probably follows that seeing violence on Mod Squad could get thousands of little teenie-boppers to run amuck and send their parents through meatgrinders. God save us from network representatives so chickenshit frightened for their jobs that they feed the witch-hunters the raw meat they need to batten and fatten.)
So ... anyhow ... back to the point, whatever it was, originally. Oh yeah, threats, displeasure. I remember.
This column has attracted some small attention, and not all of it dedicated to the concept that the author is a pussycat. So, before the impression is too strongly implanted that I am a bitter, cynical, rude and violent critic with a heart as mellow as a chunk of anthracite, I am sliding this column in among the contributions I make weekly in which I explain the Ethical Structure of the Universe and help Keep America Strong! A column of fun, folks. Get set for funtime! A direct appeal to your funnybone, in an effort to prove that I am a man of mellow habits and gentleness. And how do I set about proving this to all my critics? By listing those current shows that I recommend unqualifiedly as excellent TV fare, and then by making a few thoughtful suggestions as to potential series that might make it big on prime-time.
First: the shows I recommend:
Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In
The Smothers Bros. Comedy Hour.
The Ghost And Mrs. Muir
Mission: Impossible
Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour
The Dan Smoot Report
The Sign-Off Sermon
(I also recommend the new ½-hour police series Adam-12, on Saturday evenings. Very nice, very realistic, and almost too damned good to believe from gung-ho Jack Webb.)
Now there may be those among you who think I’m kidding when I recommend Ted Mack and Dan Smoot and the prayer just before the station signs off. Nothing could be further from the truth. I’m dead serious. For sheer sustained bald humor, nothing is funnier than Mr. Smoot awakening us to the dangers of the International Communist Freako-Devo-Pervo-Sickie World Conspiracy. And if you think Laugh-In is funny, fall down on Ted Mack’s show. You don’t know what humor is till you’ve seen a boilermaker from Moline making music by rapping his skull with his knuckles. (And remind me some time to tell you about the freakout existentialist experience I had one Sunday morning with the Original Amateur Hour. Uh!)
And if one chooses to worship Ba’al or Zoroaster, the late night psalm is refreshing, stimulating, uplifting and hysterically convulsing.
But it must be obvious to everyone that TV has nowhere nearly approached its potentialities for comedy series. So in a constructive attempt to hip them to what can be done, I offer the following proposed series concepts, some of which are mine, some of which come from other TV writers who wish their names unknown and their homes unbombed.
Berkowitz of Belsen! With the success of funny POW camp shows like Hogan’s Heroes, the next natural step is a funny series about a Nazi extermination camp. Our hero is Morris Berkowitz, an engaging scoundrel of the Phil Silvers-Sgt. Bilko stripe, whose hilarious exploits among the quicklime pits and gas chambers of Belsen is calculated to send you into paroxysms of joy. I can see a typical segment now: Berkowitz has flummoxed the cuddly Kommandant of Belsen into selling him half a dozen ovens for purposes of setting Berkowitz up in the pizza business. Conservative, Orthodox and Reform pizzas, all with meat.
Johnny Basket-Case! A two-fisted western about a trouble-shooting multiple amputee who rides his great white stallion Trumbo side-saddle, in a wicker basket. He is a sensational shot, firing the six-gun with his mouth.
Freakout! A weekly series of music and blackouts featuring kids who’ve been committed to the UCLA Intensive Care ward, acid-victims all. Their hilarious nightmares and problems being fed intravenously while in shock should help establish a necessary rapport between the generations.
A Man Called Rex! A situation comedy about Oedipus and his Mom. Heartwarming social comment and unaffected comedy for the Love Generation.
Chicago Signal 39! A true-to-life police show starring those two great Americans Fess Parker and Buddy Ebsen, as a pair of Chicago flying squad cops assigned to the Special Riot Detail. Homespun comedy about mace and mad dogs. Will play big in the Midwest.
This is only a sampling of the wonders modern TV could provide, if they would only carry to logical extremes what is already being delivered to the public.
And this sampling should once and for all put an end to the base canards leveled against this column and this columnist that we view with disgust and horror what comes out of the glass teat each week.
See, I told you. I’m a pussycat.
* * * *
As slanted and inept as television’s handling of the news may be, it is light-years away in integrity and lucidity from Time Magazine, a phenomenon of 20th Century life I put on a level with dog catchers, summer colds, organ music at skating rinks and the comedy of Phyllis Diller: in short, items I can well do without, I don’t read Time. Except to check them against Ramparts and gauge the degree of paranoia Mr. Luce is currently proffering. Yet the other day my secretary, Crazy June, in an attempt to destroy my mind, wafted a copy of Time under my snout (she was hellbent on reading me an item about snake-handling ministers of the Holiness Church of God in Jesus’s Name, somewhere in Virginia; don’t ask me why) and I caught a glimpse of Time’s television page.
I was pinned to a listing of the Nielsen ratings released last week. I have to reproduce that list for you. The mind flounders.
1) Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In (NBC)
2) Mayberry R. F. D. (CBS)
3) Gomer Pyle—U.S.M.C. (CBS) and Julia (NBC)
5) Family Affair (CBS)
6) Bonanza (NBC) ‘
7) Here’s Lucy (CBS) and The CBS Thursday Night Movie (Doris Day in The
Glass Bottom Boat)
9) The Beverly Hillbillies (CBS)
10) Ironside (NBC)
Now I have to confess that I have never seen a segment of the Lucille Ball show (I Love Lucy back when I was in high school was more than enough for me), or the Mayberry R.F.D. thing (which I gather is an offshoot of Gomer Pyle which is an offshoot of the original Andy Griffith Show), or Julia, which I understand is deeply sensitive and touching. In line of work I have caught all the others—at least when they were onscreen for the first season. It’s been years since I’ve considered the peregrinations and problems of Hoss Cartwright or Ellie Mae Clampett, or wept sadly that an actor as fine as Brian Keith has to play second banana to a couple of saccharine cutesy moppets just to make a good living, but I consider myself reasonably au courant with what’s available on prime-time, and aside from thoroughly enjoying Laugh-In (you see, I love Goldie Hawn and I lust after Judy Carne), I am frozen into immobility at what the bulk of the nation is choosing to watch.
Six of the ten leading items are wafer-thin, inane, excruciatingly banal situation comedies dealing with a view of American home life that simply does not exist save in the minds of polyannas and outpatients from the Menninger Foundation. All six of those items run only 20-some-odd minutes (minus commercials), which indicates how deeply the plot goes into any problem jury-rigged for the actors. Two more of the top ten are light comedy, the Doris Day film and Laugh-In. Miss Day fits neatly in with our first six winners, and Laugh-In manages to become consistent with the others by its escapist elements—laughter and silliness. Of the ten top shows, only two even remotely resemble drama. And both of them are—psychologically speaking— “family” shows. The Cartwright strength is in the family unit, and “Ironside” has his little family of assistants, the two white kids and the obligatory black kid.
While their world gets ripped along the dotted line, the average middle-class consumer-slaphappy American opts for escapist entertainment of the most vapid sort. No wonder motion pictures grow wilder and further out in subject matter: audiences are getting their fill of pap on the glass teat. No wonder such umbrage and outrage by the masscult mind at the doings of the Revolution: they sit night in and night out sucking up fantasy that tells them even hillbilly idiots with billions living in Beverly Hills, are just plain folks. No wonder the country is divided down the middle; TV mythology causes polarization.
Walking the streets these days and nights are members of the Television Generation. Kids who were born with TV, were babysat by TV, were weaned on TV, dug TV and finally rejected TV. These kids are also, oddly enough, members of the first Peace Generation in history, members of the Revolution Generation that refuses to accept the possibility that if you don’t use Nair on your legs you’ll never get laid.
But their parents, the older folks, the ones who brought the world down whatever road it is that’s put us in this place at this time—they sit and watch situation comedies. Does this tell us something? Particularly in a week when prime-time was pre-empted for major political addresses by the gag-and-vomit boys, Humphrey and Nixon? It tells us that even in a year when the situation facing us is so politically bleak that optimists are readying their passports for Lichtenstein and pessimists are contemplating opening their veins, that the mass is still denying the facts of life. The mass is still living in a fairyland where occasionally a gripe or discouraging word is heard. The mass has packed its head with cotton. The mass has allowed its brains to be turned to lime jello. The mass sits and sucks its thumb and watches Lucy and Doris and Granny Clampett and the world burns around them.
It goes to something stronger than merely one’s personal taste in television shows. It goes straight to the heart of an inescapable truth: if the world is going to be changed, gang, if we’re going to find out where the eternal verities have gone, if we’re going to rescue ourselves before the swine mass sends us unfeelingly and uncaringly down the trough to be slaughtered, we have to face it: they will not help us. They will applaud now that LBJ has stopped the bombing, but they see no inconsistency in having beaten and arrested all the clearsighted protesters who said it three years ago, before how many thousands of innocent cats got their brains spilled? And now that what those protesters protested for has come to pass, will they rise up and say free them, reinstate them, honor them?
We know the answer to that.
The answer is: they’re too busy watching Gomer Pyle cavort around in a Marine Corps that never gets anywhere near jellied gasoline and burning babies.
Dear God, we must face the truth: for the mass in America today, the most powerful medium of education and information has become a surrogate of Linus’s blue blanket.
A ghastly glass teat!
* * * *
7: 15 NOVEMBER 68
The week was a veritable cornucopia of television-oriented goodies. It was a time when we were exposed to the incredible tunnel-vision of our public officials (or those seeking to be same) as regards the potentialities of the medium.
Instead of recognizing that television, in its McLuhanesque fantasy/reality, can spot a phony and pin a liar, Humphrey persisted in mouthing jingoism and concealing his true personality, and lost an election.
To our everlasting gratitude, however, the other side of the coin was exhibited by Max Rafferty, one of the few truly evil men I have encountered. He is a liar, a cunning ghoul with a nature that has apparently never been sullied by the presence of a scruple. On Wednesday morning, when he lumbered before the cameras in his campaign headquarters to concede the election to Cranston, he was asked what it was in particular that he thought cost him the race. Though I’m sure he didn’t mean it in the way I interpret it, he said it was obviously because the people dug Cranston more than him. And he was correct. Though Cranston is by no means a Great White Hope (and certainly no Great Black Hope) he was demonstrably not an insipid man, nor a brute, nor a mudslinger, nor a phony ... all of which are charges than can be laid at the feet of Rafferty with some success. The tube revealed Rafferty for what he was. And so, in a year when he had everything going for him, he lost. As he deserved to lose.
Rafferty, thank God, failed to understand the ways in which the medium could expose him. His guru, Nixon (I gag at having to call him President Nixon), finally came to understand the nature of the beast, after the licking he took at its hands in 1960. But the word never drifted down to Rafferty. For which small thanks can be given. Would that Humphrey had been as hip to TV as was JFK.
It became obvious this last week, inundated as we were with political “specials,” that the days of the fraud in politics are numbered. Or, more correctly, the inept fraud. The baby-kissing, slogan-mouthing hypocrite: the machine politician. TV’s eye is much too merciless, and the generations raised on TV are wise to the fraudulent; they’ve seen too many commercials to ever again be taken in by demagogues and political used car salesmen. (In this respect, I suppose we owe a helluva debt to Ralph Williams, whose hardsell parallels that of the office-seekers. Once having had one’s skull napalmed by the Ralph Williams scene, one need never fear having the wool pulled over one’s eyes by a Wallace or a Rafferty.)
Yet the demise of the one postulates the rise of another. The Show Biz Politician. Reagan is a classic example, of course. In a way, the Kennedys are another. I think the element is charisma. If a man can look sincere on the tube, if he can seem to be honest and forthright and courageous, he can sweep an election merely by employing the visual media.
In which case, the term “bad actor” would come to have a new, more ominous meaning.
Another goodie from the week that was: one of the pollsters, in conjunction with one of the major networks, promulgated a survey of feeling on the part of the American Public about Johnson’s bombing halt of North Viet Nam. Seventy-three per cent said it was a groove, they were nuts about the idea, oh boy, gosh-wow, simply peachy keen. Now I don’t know what boils your blood, gentle reader, but that is the same 73mother% that was out in the streets shouting “Lynch! Lynch!” at the kids who showed up at Century City, who chased the Dow recruiters, who burned their draft cards, who sat-in at a dozen universities, who marched to Washington, who got their skulls crushed in Chicago streets by the all-powerful John Laws. They are the same hypocritical 73% who refuse now to draw a line between all of that dissent, through Johnson’s vanished popularity, past Johnson’s decision (forced on him) not to run, ending with the bomb halt. Do you think there is no connection? Are they that incredibly unaware that they still think all those people with indictments against them, all those kids and old men lying-up in slammers across the country, all those girls and boys who’ve been fined or thrown out of school, are Communists? Where is the sense that we hear Nixon and Humphrey and Wallace rattle on about? Where is the awakening? At what point do those 73TVoriented% say, “Hey, wait a minute! If we agree with the bomb halt, and all those kids were demanding a bomb halt, then those kids were the same as us, only they saw it before we did! Then that means they’re okay, they’re real Americans, too. So let’s spring ‘em ... let’s erase those charges..., let’s hand them back their fines . . . let’s reinstate them in college ... let’s let Spock off the hook!” At what stage of cultural adolescence do the people assume responsibility for their mistakes? At what point does the shuck cease?
And if the people refuse to face up to what they’ve done, where is the responsibility of our video conscience? Which network will take the initiative?
I hurl a challenge.
History has now proved the years of dissenting anent Viet Nam were intelligently-directed. History has now shown that those who suffered, suffered for all of us, carrying a banner that only the bravest could carry. As Thoreau has put it: “He serves the state best who opposes it most.” Those who chose to go to jail rather than cop-out on their morality and their country, they are patriots. And so I hurl the challenge to the major networks:
Which of you will take a stand on this truth? Which of you will prepare a special in which you set forth this obviousness? Which of you will serve us, the people ... and us, the country ... as you say you do?
Which of you will point out what the dissenters have done for America, and the world?
Specials on traffic safety and Stonehenge and Miss America and the mating habits of the Great Arctic Tern are marvelous. But they cannot compare in importance to a special in which the value of the dissenters is finally acknowledged.
A country that needs to know the depth of its guilt unconsciously awaits this special.
Which of you will perform this service? At this stage it isn’t even an act of bravery, so that ought to make it well within the reach of your talents.
* * * *
8: 22 NOVEMBER 68
Having just emerged from the Valley of the Shadow, I’ve got to admit it, gang. I blew it. I had my chance, and I blew it.
Watched myself on the Joe Pyne Show last Saturday night. There I was, called on to defend my belief that we are getting managed, slanted, corrupted right-wing news as a matter of course, called on as a spokesman for all of you, and even for The Free Press, and I blew it.
I even tried to play it cagey. Came the day that Steve Kane, Pyne’s coordinater, called, my secretary Crazy June came into my office and said, “It’s the Pyne Show. Should I tell them Excuse A or Excuse B?” Excuse A is the one in which Crazy June returns to the phone weeping, and advises the pain-in-the-ass on the other end that Harlan is dying of cancer of the lymph glands and can’t come to the phone. Excuse B is the one where she tells them I’ve just left to conduct a guided tour through the heart of Mt. Vesuvius. It usually works. They usually get the idea. Go away.
But I’d done the Pyne Show once before, and had had a ball destroying Pyne’s replacement, Tom Duggan, by threatening him during the commercial break that if he didn’t act like a pussycat and talk nice to me and stop the jerko remarks about the length of my hair, I would hip the video audience to the fact that there was a fugitive warrant out for him in the city of Chicago. Needless to say, Mr. Duggan purred for the rest of the hour.
So I figured the Pyne People were gluttons for punishment and why the hell not. I took the call and Kane said he’d been reading my columns in these pages and why didn’t I come on and espouse Truth and Beauty and Wisdom to all the snake pit freaks who watch Joe.
(Now we all know that is a hype. Those people are sado-masochists of the purest stripe. They watch Pyne only because the Roman Arena was shut down, and they have nowhere else to go where they can turn thumbsdown and see some poor slob get a trident through his chest. The redneck schlepps who dig Pyne’s brand of hypocrisy and brutishness are the ones who can be convinced only by demagogues and rabble-rousers.)
But he said that Joe wasn’t feeling too well (I’d heard Pyne was about to cash in his chips via the carcinoma route ... and in fact, when I’d done the show previously, and a woman in the audience had asked Duggan how Joe was doing, Duggan had replied that Joe had been discharged from the hospital; to which my friend Brian Kirby, in the audience, had replied, “Yeah, dishonorably.”) and he would probably just moderate while I debated with someone from some video network news staff, like Jerry Dunphy. Well, the thought of being able to ask Dunphy when the last time was that he’d actually been out on the firing line covering a story appealed to me so much, I accepted. I was told to be at the studio on Monday night, the 11th, at 6:00, to tape the show for the following Saturday’s airing.
Came a week ago Monday, I was cagey, as I said. I wore clothes that were just square enough so the boobs who view the show wouldn’t discount what I had to say even before I said it on the grounds that I was obviously one of those long-haired, unreliable, dope-drenched, crummy hippies. But clothes that were just groovy enough so The People would know I was an agent provocateur gadflying the Establishment. (It was so successful a disguise that a goodlooking chick waiting backstage, out of her jug on somethingorother, told someone that I looked much straighter than my columns would indicate. Sorry about that, baby, I’m just one of those damned souls with a foot in either world.)
To my sadness, I wasn’t matched with Dunphy, but with a very nice, ultra-straight cat named David Crane, head of the news department at KLAC; in effect, though Pyne makes many times what he makes, Crane is Pyne’s boss.
And we went on the air—in case you missed it, I hope—and Pyne opened up with, “Well, Harlan Ellison, you say we aren’t getting honest news. Tell us about it?”
“Just like that?” I asked.
“No, I can prompt you,” Pyne came back.
“That’s okay,” I recovered. “I think I can tough it out.” And I launched into a recap of my column four or five weeks ago in which I said the cameras always focus on the barefooted members of every dissenting rally, but never the Doctors or Teachers or Squares in suits.
Crane came back reasonably by saying that what I was asking for was bias. That Daley in Chicago was upset because all the newsmen had shown was kids getting beat, but not cops ... and what I wanted was the complete other view. He said what newsmen had to do was be impartial.
Well, that seemed sensible to me, so I didn’t argue. Here I was, sitting there with my best indicting Synanon Games technique, ready to rip these two guys up the middle, and they outfoxed me. They both came on so gentle, so sweet, so honest, so sensible, that I was forced to agree with them.
When Pyne asked me what way I would have it, I responded, “I’d like to see a few more TV newsmen on the firing line.” And Crane then tossed back the old analogy about a soldier learning more about the war from headquarters than from his little piece of the battle. I had to agree with that, too.
It went that way for a long time.
Crane asked if I thought a newsman would get a better story if he’d been clobbered on the head by a cop’s baton. I said no, but it might give him a helluva insight.
One woman clapped.
I suggested that, for instance, the reportage of the Selma-Montgomery march had been slanted because there were 450,000 people marching but no network coverage I’d ever seen indicated there’d been more than 100,000. Crane jumped back that I was obviously deluded merely because I’d been on the march and so had not seen all the coverage he’d seen, which had showed just oodles and oodles of people.
The audience clapped for Crane.
I sat there like a good little boy and tried to work up enough of a mad through the fifteen-minute segment to call both of them lackeys of the Wall Street Imperialist Conspiracy, but Crane was more often right than not, Pyne laid back and let Crane do the work, and I found myself sounding like a cranky tot.
So I blew it, gang.
They convinced me. It’s a great world we’re living in. The news isn’t managed. We’re getting the straight scoop on everything. When idiot Bob Wright does a “documentary” on hippies and stands on the Strip with his cameras ordering kids to walk up and down so he can shoot dirty feet, when newscasters report only that “rioting” students at San Fernando State used “dirty words associated with the Free Speech Movement,” when Nixon spots are inserted in prime time before and after the most popular shows as opposed to Humphrey spots that bracket such heavyweight programs as Land of the Giants and re-runs of the Roller Derby... they are oversights that can be discounted.
Crane is a good man. I don’t doubt it. He very probably considers himself a liberal. He probably is, which tells you all you need to know about liberalism in Our Times. Pyne is a good man. No, let me retract that. The milk of human kindness isn’t running that syruply in my veins. Pyne is sharp. He is by no means the lout he appears to be on-camera. He is, without even knowing it, a major mouth in the illiterate, silent conspiracy against dissent in this country. He is a reactionary—by avocation; there are those who remember him when he was a poor liberal—and the election has proved that we are a reactionary nation. So be it. I’m willing to go along with it.
Fuck’m. It’s like Jefferson said: “People get pretty much the kind of government they deserve,” and this state deserves Reagan, and this country deserves Nixon. I’m convinced. It’s a good life. It is, it really really is. I was wrong. Nothing’s happening. Nothing’s amiss.
It’s as Joe, good sweet dear golden Joe, said to me, as his closing shot. Crane had just ended with the line that the American People ought to thank God for their Freedom of the Press, and wonderful twinkling Joe looked at me and said, “I think you ought to remember that, Harlan Ellison ... now go ... and sin no more.”
Yes, Daddy.
* * * *
Two years ago I was asked by Esquire to do a lead article on the new kind of woman emerging from Los Angeles and environs. After extensive research and interviews of several hundred women from all stratas of Clown Town society, ranging from teeny-boppers and goo-goo girls to stewardesses, high school teachers, housewives, secretaries, starlets and post-debs, I amassed a longish piece which I titled “Kiss Me And You’ll Live Forever—You’ll Be A Frog, But You’ll Live Forever.” Esquire called it “The New American Woman,” butchered it mercilessly, used a bad taste cover, and compelled me to remove my name from the piece. But the word leaked out that I’d done the article, and very soon I was being inundated with assignments from magazines to “write opinions about women.” I was even forced (a peculiar word for a writer, but perfectly appropriate in this case) to do a series of columns on women for Confidential. Then, last year, Cosmopolitan rigged some phony number about the most eligible bachelors in Hollywood, and threw me into the list, I presume as a sop to the working classes. All of this is pre-stated as sorta credentials for what is to follow in this column, with the staunchly-made declaration that I happen to dig girls very much. I am by no means a misogynist.
Which brings me to the subject of this week’s revelation of Truth in Our Times: a little blonde cupcake named Kam Nelson, who disports herself weekdays 5:30 to 6:00 on KHJ Channel 9’s The Groovy Show. In case any of you reading this are over the age of seventeen and don’t catch The Groovy Show, let me hip you that it is a high school-oriented tribal ritual in which an aging elf named Sam Riddle hosts Top Thirty records for dancing.
But it is not Mr. Riddle—a gentleman who manifests all the paranoia about growing old that terrors those who make their living off the young—with whom I’ll deal here. It is Miss Nelson.
Describing her is like cataloguing mist. She is more vacuity than substance. Her appearance is what my secretary Crazy June calls “the Chinese waiter look”: they all look alike, and it’s difficult to figure out which one stiffed you for the Moo Goo Gai Pan. Miss Nelson has that look; the look of no-look at all. Her face is one of those pretty little girl shots that, having vanished from your sight, vanishes from your mind. The reference point being that there is no character in the face. At 17, Miss Nelson has long blonde hair, nice legs and a baby-fat face with cheeks like a hamster storing nuts for Winter. But it is not her appearance, truly, that comes under attention here. I mention it only to establish her as a visual, physical role-model for all the girls presumably watching The Groovy Show.
Now, the question asks itself unbidden, why devote a column of discussion to a seventeen-year-old co-host of a rock-dance program? It certainly isn’t the kind of subject with which this column has dealt in the past— topics of political import, subcutaneous slanting of news, violence and its effect on the mass, or any of the other relatively “heavy” material the television medium offers for comment. Why?