John Payne knows that the storm building up over the Andes makes the chances for success nil, but there are six cases of the new miracle drug, pyrohexachlorinatedyaluminaoxysulphazynamine, in the old beat-up Spad, and a colony of Cholos beyond these mountains dying of the dread Dutch Elm Blight. As Payne’s comical grease monkey, Patsy Kelly, rolls the Spad out on the runway, Frances Gifford dashes out of the hangar, wearing her voguish new windsock. “John, John,” she pleads, flinging herself into his arms, “Lloyd Corrigan says the updrafts over the Valley of Montezuma’s Revenge will spiral you into the gorge. Please, please, pleeeeeez, I beg you, let them crummy Indios die! Don’t throw away our love!” But John shrugs her off, noting with pique that her tears and the slanting rain have run the colors of his new Madras flight-suit. In the shadows he sees the one he truly loves, Susan Cabot, fearful for his life, but knowing he must do this good thing. “Knock out the chocks, Patsy!” John yells, over the roar of the wind and dashes for the Spad . . .
“Hi, frenz, thissis Raf Wiyummz agen, an’ ritenow at my hunnerd an’ seventy locations allover Ventura Bul-vard we’re ennering the final month of our big eighteen month cleeranz sale, movin’ these li’l cupcakes outta here at an ‘mazing pace. Everything gotta go . . . the Edsels, the Morris Minors, the Cords, the Spads, the new nineen sissty-nine Muzdang with the audomadic faggdorry air conditioning, par winnows, par braygz, par steering, par antenna, par ashtray, onny three thawzan’ nine hunnerd an siggzdee three dollars ... shop an’ compare ...”
George Zucco has ordered that Richard Jaeckel must die, for squealing, little realizing that Richard is the brother of his most trusted aide in the mob, Willard Parker, who is, in reality, a T-Man. Willard has followed Marc Lawrence, Ted De Corsia and Neville Brand to the cheap rooming-house where Richard lives while working in the grease pit of the garage, trying to make a new life for himself after the hellish three years he served in Dannemora. Willard sees them enter the rooming-house, and dashes around to the alley. Leaping up, he grabs the dropladder of the fire escape and with panic clutching his heart races up the five flights of fire escape steps to Richard’s bedroom window. He knows that Richard has the information on him that will prove Zucco is behind the traffic in pyro-hexachlorinatedyaluminaoxysulphazynamine. As he reaches Richard’s floor, he hears a fussilade of shots...
“Hi frenz, thizzis Raf Wiyummz, Rafwiyummz Ford, anthissusthelastdayyoucancomedownanzupzupzupzupzupblahblahblahblahgurgleslurpfloop. Urp!”
Mostly, this week, I watched the all-night movies. In times past, the worst you could get from insomnia was dark circles under your eyes; these days the penalty is brain rot.
* * * *
16: 24 JANUARY 69
Bad manners should not, strictly speaking, be grist for this particular mill. Especially because the flagrant flouting of decorum and propriety on television is so ingrained after almost twenty years that it seems to be the accepted manner. But an incident that saw airtime on the Merv Griffin variety show, Channel 11, Wednesday the 15th (5:30 p.m.), is so appalling, so degrading, so demanding of comment—in that it brings to focus some things long needing to be said—that this week my column will bend the rule.
Generically, Griffin’s show is a “talk show.” There is some singing, and some comedy, but the mainstay of the program is conversation with various entertainment types, and that new breed of human being called “the TV personality,” which means they are either unsuccessful novelists or advocates of some offbeat cause. It is one with the Joe Pyne Show, The Les Crane Show, the Tonight Show, Joey Bishop, Donald O’Connor, Steve Allen, Joan Rivers, Alan Burke, and all the local imitations in every major American city.
The show to which we address ourselves here was hosted by comedian John Barbour, standing in for Griffin. And in specific I refer to an interview with Jean-Claude Killy, the world-famous ski champion and all-around groovy man of our times.
To call Barbour’s treatment of Killy cavalier, rude, degrading, shocking, uninformed, horrifying, humiliating, gauche, debased, obnoxious, reprehensible, vicious and in the ultimate of bad taste, would be to ennoble it. Barbour’s approach was typical of that no-class, no-taste breed of Yankee who makes the Grand Tour of Europe and endears himself with Stetson-wearing, backslapping, dirty-joke-telling rudeness and endless complaints about “them foreigners who ain’t civilized enough to speak English; they have lousy plumbing; they don’t appreciate us great wonderful Americans pouring all that foreign aid into their crummy little kingdom.” He is the compleat boor.
For openers, Killy is a soft-spoken man, a gentleman of controlled Continental manner. It is vastly appealing on a medium surfeited with stylistic descendents of Pinky Lee, all florid and bombastic, reveling in their own stupidities and crassness. When Killy came out and was greeted by Barbour, the host’s first shot—exquisitely gross, and a portent of horrors to come—was something like, “When I announced you were coming on the show, all the women screamed, Killy. What’s the story on that? What’s this big sex image you have?” The inference, of course, was that Barbour (impelled by the twinges of his own undernourished ego) saw nothing outstanding in an athlete who is known as “the fastest man on skis in the world,” has fought bulls without a cape, has worked at skydiving, sports car racing, skindiving, and is the holder of more Olympic medals for sports like slalom (which Barbour probably can’t even spell) than any other man in Olympic history. Of course we should see nothing attractive to women in this: we should only find the king of the smartmouths erotically compelling.
Killy tried to answer this unanswerable gaucherie with class. He spoke softly. Barbour leaped in, saying, “What’re you speaking so softly for? Are you trying to make love to me?! Are you gonna romance me, or answer my question?”
Then he asked the audience, “Can you people hear him out there? Huh? Huh? Huh?” It would have been a simple matter of courtesy for Barbour to have moved the microphone closer to Killy, or advise him that his voice might not be carrying. But he didn’t. “Huh? Huh? Huh?” The audience indicated they could hear Killy without difficulty, and Barbour, with a classic proof that he not only doesn’t know how to talk to people, but certainly doesn’t listen to them, jubilantly shouted, “See, they can’t hear you. Speak up, don’t try to romance me!” Killy moved over toward the mike.
One expected Barbour’s paranoia to interpret this as another homosexual advance.
But Barbour was too preoccupied with readying his next salients. The first was politely put as follows: “What’s all this I read about you being involved in a scandal during the Olympics? Huh? Huh? Huh?”
The “scandal” to which the semi-literate Barbour referred was the question of Killy’s having been paid by the Head Ski Company for wearing their product. The charges had been limp-wristed at the outset, and shortly after they were voiced, were blown away. There was no scandal.
Killy’s response was reasoned, and brief. “There was a question about my showing the Head mark on my skis. They did not pay me. The matter was disposed of quickly.”
Barbour was totally at sea. “Mark? Mark? Whaddaya mean, mark? I don’t understand you? Can’t you speak English? Whaddaya mean mark?”
Only a consummate dullard could be unaware—if not from a priori knowledge, then certainly from the context of Killy’s response—that a “mark” is the company trademark, its colophon, the little decal found on almost every commercial product, from Chryslers to creosote. Killy tried, unsuccessfully, three times to explain to Barbour what a mark was. But the Swine King was already off on his next searching, penetrating question.
“What’s this about you dating two French actresses at the same time? Huh? Huh? Huh?”
(Apparently the concept of going out with more than one girl is alien to Barbour. With a personality such as his, midway between maggot and masher, one does not doubt such a probability.)
Killy was a gentleman. He refused to answer. “That is my personal life, and I do not wish to discuss the ladies I know.”
Barbour pressed him, in the coarsest possible way. It was expected momentarily that he would dig an elbow in Killy’s ribs and leer, and ask him if they were good lays. Killy finally admitted that he was not making it with a pair of them lewd and lascivious frog flick stars, and was keeping fairly steady company with one young woman whose name Barbour would not recognize. Barbour broke up cackling, jibing at Killy with, “Ahhh, all you Frenchmen are alike!”
It went on in that vein for what seemed an eternity. Viewers encountering this horror show cringed in their seats. Only the most insensitive asshole, whose total conception of Europe is of a wasteland wherein one must not touch the water, could have conceived of this as anything but in calamitous, poisonous bad taste.
My Secretary, Crazy June, remarked on it with absolute chagrin the next day. She could only think what effect this kind of treatment of an outstanding emissary from overseas would have on his opinion of America, and by extension, what others overseas would make of us.
It was another example of the rampant bad manners of the so-called hosts of these talk marathons. There are far too many Joe Pyne and Alan Burke models on television. There are too few Les Cranes. In Chicago, a creep named Jack Eigen has been doing this number for years. In New York there are a host of them, led by Burke. I’ve appeared on this sort of show in almost every city in the States, and their model is Pyne. They use the word “controversy,” but what they employ is the same sort of rough-trade cheap jack yellow animosity that Mike Wallace pioneered in 1956. It is deplorable, and one can only assume that its sole reason for being are the hordes of debased scuttlefish out there in the Great Unwashed who don’t get their fill of personal vilification and hostility from the news reports. Obviously, until this kind of show, with its garbage can odor, no longer appeals to the atrophied tastes of the millions, it will continue.
And we will continue to be treated to such adagios of decorum as Barbour’s parting shots to Killy:
After a film of Killy running the slalom, in which Killy pointed out that he was concentrating so hard missing the pitons that his tongue was protruding from his mouth, Barbour became positively raucous, repeating the word “tongue” and leering, till his implied references to soixante-neuf were teeth-grittingly obvious.
And when Killy said he had to leave—probably having taken more than enough abuse from this pygmy— Barbour’s farewell was a charming, “Yeah, well, I know ya gotta go. So goodbye...and good riddance.”
And they killed Martin Luther King.
* * * *
17: 31 JANUARY 69
As some of you who read this column may know, among the many types of writing that flow off this typewriter there are occasional television scripts. I’ve written for shows as diverse as Star Trek, Man From U.N.C.L.E., Flying Nun, Cimarron Strip and Outer Limits. A couple of times my fellow videowriters have advised me that I may consider myself one of the more talented in their ranks, through the joys of twice awarding me the Writers Guild Award. Once for best anthology script of the 64-65 season, and last year for best dramatic-episodic script of the 66-67 season. I mention this in front, not only to puff my own shaky ego, but to prepare you for a sort of running diary I intend to introduce into this column.
From time to time I’m asked by friends, fans of this column, and aspiring TV writers, what the System is like. What it takes to sell a TV script. What the working conditions are like. How heavy the censorship gets to be. A myriad of questions it would take a week to answer. Or the contents of a running diary.
This week I got a job. I’ll be scripting a ninety-minute segment of The Name Of The Game, the big Universal/NBC showcase starring Robert Stack, Anthony Franciosa and Gene Barry in alternating roles. The series hooks itself on a publishing empire, ran by Barry, with Franciosa the hotshot reporter for Fame Magazine and Stack the ex-FBI man who runs the empire’s crime magazine. The series is based on the Universal film-for-TV Fame Is The Name Of The Game.
Last year, I was called in by David Victor, Executive Producer of the series, before its debut. We discussed my doing a script for the series. When I found I would be working with Doug Benton, a Producer for whom I’d done a Cimarron Strip, I agreed. Victor and Benton are two of the most honest, reliable gentlemen I’ve met in this game, and their type is so hard to come by that I will work for them anywhere, anytime, for any amount of money they offer. But, as things turned out, we never did the segment, for reasons that had nothing to do with them, me, or the series. (I got a job writing a movie; more money ... immediate deadline.)
On Friday, January 17th, my agent, Marty Shapiro of the Shapiro-Lichtman Agency, called to tell me George Eckstein wanted to see me. I remembered Eckstein as having been on The Untouchables as Producer, but had no idea what he was doing currently. Marty said he was going to produce the eight Robert Stack segments of The Name Of The Game for the 1968-69 season. A meeting had been set up for me at Universal City Studios for Wednesday the 22nd.
On Wednesday, I drove out to the black tower in the Valley, and went up to the ninth floor to see Eckstein.
A pleasant man with a direct manner, Eckstein told me that while the series had been popular, it had lacked some dimensions in its first season that he was going to try and correct. (I smiled. He was being charitable. Most of the segments of Name had been surfeited with the inane gloss Universal and NBC usually feel is necessary to impress the scuttlefish out in The Great American Heartland. It is the disease of creativity known as Overcompensation: everyone in the show has to be Beautiful, don’t shoot any scene in Bringdown Locations such as slums, let the Stars carry the show.)
We discussed the Stack segments in particular, and while Eckstein never bum-rapped anyone, I got the distinct impression that he felt most of the shows had been strained, that Stack’s (admittedly) proscribed range of abilities had segmented the shows so they lacked pace and clout.
Neither of us felt that Stack had been used as well as he could be. Eckstein then informed me that Stack had final say over the scripts. I was momentarily alarmed. Bob Stack is a pleasant man, a wealthy man, and a face known to millions of Americans. He has an image to protect. I knew personally that his politics placed him slightly to the right of Mr. Reagan, another actor who made good, and I had the distinct impression I was going to suggest some topics for scripts that would get me politely ushered from Mr. Eckstein’s office.
I was to be crossed-up. My first suggestion was a show that might strike somewhere closer to the nitty-gritty on the subject of college student dissent than what we had been seeing of late.
The postulated story went like this: A San Francisco State-type campus. An acting president a la Hayakawa. A state government pressing for “law and order” of the mace and truncheon variety. The Acting President, in an effort to stave off more confrontations, has called a series of seminars. At these seminars speakers of all political persuasions will participate. Cleavers, Karengas, Chavezes, Reddens, and because he represents the Establishment view of these goings-on via the mass media, Robert Stack. So Stack speaks. During the seminar, at which he espouses the time-honored philosophies of abiding by the law, using due process to achieve one’s end, the evil of violence, the value of working for what one gets, etc., he is challenged from the floor by a young white boy who is the editor of the underground campus newspaper, The Pig.
That night, the Acting President is murdered. All the clues point to the editor of the paper, a militant of the most persuasive sort. He is arrested and the gears of the law begin to grind. From his cell he writes one after another pronunciamento, a la the Ramparts series by Cleaver. He is rallying a strong coterie around his cause, accusing the Establishment of railroading him to keep him quiet.
Stack gets into it. The clues are too pat, the case too sturdily-constructed. He goes to the boy. The boys says fuck off, I don’t need any help. But Stack gets deeper into it. He is suddenly questioning some of the dead-certain beliefs he’s had about anarchy on campus. If this boy is willing to die for his Movement, then there is something here to be more seriously considered.
Stack’s two young aides are on the side of the militants. They nudge and chivvy their boss, trying to get him to open his mind to what the kids are about.
In the denouement, we find out that not only is the boy not guilty, he has had his girl out planting clues so he will be prosecuted for the crime. But he’s a shuck. He knows he’ll never go to the gas chamber. What with appeals and all the time-dragging mechanism of prosecution in America today, he can be of value to the Movement with copy-from-prison for some time. And if worse comes to worse, if the killer isn’t found, his girl can always cop to having dummied up the evidence. But if the killer is found, he has tremendous clout against the Establishment for their harassment. It is a power play. The unfortunate element of the situation is that while this phony bastard won’t really lay it on the line, he is surrounded by other kids who will, and are.
Thus, Stack comes to a more rational and reasoned view of the evils on campuses today. He knows all the things he believed in as gospel are not so, but neither is the random violence of the Movement right. He intends to work for reform.
I laid all of this on Eckstein. It was not as strong as I might have liked to make it, but it was considerably stronger than anything I’d yet seen. No cop-out on my part: I’m a militant, granted, and what I’d proposed as plot was exceedingly ameliorative . . . from where my head is at. But by doing it softer, I had a chance to get it on the air. Taking the hard line never would.
Even at that, I thought Eckstein would shake his head and say Stack would never go for it, or Universal would never go for it, or NBC would never go for it. But he didn’t. He said it was a very exciting idea, with plenty of room to stretch out.
So he called the Universal negotiators, and they called my agent, and they made a deal for $7500 for me to script the show, tentatively titled Corridor Without Mirrors.
(One catch. There is what is called a “cut-off” after the treatment portion of the deal. A script is written in three stages: the story, or “treatment,” a present-tense straight-line of the plot, in about fifteen pages, to let the network continuity people and sponsors and Stack know what I’m going to do with the script; then a first draft; then a final draft. If they don’t like what has been done in the “treatment,” the writer gets cut off, and paid about a grand for what he’s already done. If they dig it, the deal progresses, and there are no further blocks to finishing the script.)
That is where the history of this project rests right now. Today, the 24th, as I write this, I am about to go out to Universal to sit in on a screening of several segments of the Name series, to get the characterizations of the principals down pat. I will start writing on Monday.
While this column will not concern itself with the “Corridor Project” every week, from time to time I will bring you up to date, and we can follow, together, the progress of the dream. Will the starry-eyed Ellison get to write an honest script? Will the true word be given? Will the Blue Meanies at the network chop him off at the scruples? Will George Eckstein turn into a ghoul and gut the script? Will Robert Stack have Ellison investigated by Hoover’s Lads?
Stay tuned to this column for the thrilling next installment.
And keep your fingers crossed, troops. Here we go again.
* * * *
Hey, Ken, I know I promised to do this week’s installment of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, and I know you’re worried about them getting canceled because of bum-rap letters from the scuttlefish out there in the Heartland who are uptighted by denigrations of God, Motherhood and the American Way, and I promise honest to Ba’al that the column I started at your party will appear next week...but this week has been some other kinda crazy, man, and I have got to talk about it now; I think you’ll agree this is of more immediate and dangerous importance. Okay, baby?
First Tuesday is NBC’s entry in the big anthology documentary sweepstakes; their answer to CBS’s 60 Minutes. (And wouldn’t you know the sonsofbitches would put it on directly opposite 60 Minutes so you have to get cheated whichever one you watch. Would kill the mothers to put it on opposite something like Green Acres so we could have two nights of worthwhile viewing, wouldn’t it!)
NBC calls the show “a monthly, two-hour journal of news, public affairs and today’s living—leavened with occasional whimsy” and it airs the first Tuesday of the month, at 9:00, on Channel 4. A week ago Tuesday (as you read this) was the second edition, and what I choose to talk about this week does not, I think, fall under the heading of whimsy ... unless the humor be as black as the heart of a torso killer. Is it news? Perhaps. But if it is, it is news that has been withheld from the American viewing public for many years. It is certainly a public affair—and one about which we must instantly take action! For it speaks directly to “today’s living” and the sudden, gruesome cessation of same.
First Tuesday did a documentary segment on chemical-biological warfare in experimental stages, being conducted all across the United States ...
... and a more horrifying, cold-bloodedly insane declaration of disrespect for the basics of life and decency I have never encountered. It was more terrifying than all the Hammer Films horror shows ever conceived. In its pedestrian preparation for the eradication of sentient life on this planet through the use of botulism, anthrax and tularemia, it shrieked of the last extreme of human derangement. Its viciousness makes Jack the Ripper, Richard Speck, Charles Starkweather, Burke & Hare, Bluebeard and Madame Defarge shine as models of rational behavior. Beside the emotionless, rationalizing madmen who are preparing the aerosol sprays of nerve gas and plague, the Boston Strangler becomes a minor character disorder.
But... I gibber.
Let me try and relate it rationally, though the mind reels and the teeth chatter and the senses go numb at the consequences of what NBC presented calmly, quietly, seemingly without canard, certainly without editorialization.
CBW means Chemical-Biological Warfare. It means the use of “vectors”—animals bearing disease germs. It means seeding the atmosphere with anthrax the way US bombers seed the jungles of Viet Nam with defoliating weed-killers. It means spreading plague by aerosol spray. It means winds and air currents carrying the most virulent diseases known to man, killing guilty and innocent alike, indiscriminately. It means, dear God, the sheerest lunacy the concept of overkill has yet produced. It means that by its existence it can be utilized. It means there are actually men on this green good earth—and we saw them on that show—who can gather in conclave and discuss like ribbon clerks pricing bolts of cloth, how many megadeaths one seeding of turaremia equals. It means we have certainly come as far as we can rightfully hope to come without the wrath of all the Gods, dead and alive, the universe has ever known, descending on us.
I cannot bear to think that I live in a country where this kind of serious experimentation goes on, all in the name of defense against an enemy who is merely human. What a pallid justification for mass murder: the Commies are doing similar research. What do we become if we unleash this most hideous of the Four Horsemen? Do we ennoble ourselves by working our hands in the black death, all to preserve ourselves from the specter of another social system? How can we realistically lay claim to any decency in our “democracy” if we adopt methods of destruction that would make a Genghis Khan blanch?
Again ... I tremble and shudder and digress.
Fear does that to me.
Would that the crew-cut, lupine-faced architects of that damnable nightmare felt a like fear. But apparently they do not.
As we saw on that documentary, they do not shudder at cramming kangaroo mice in metal containers, spraying them with nerve gas, and watching them die 44 seconds later. They do not cry at the piteous squeals of their lab animals as they jam needles into their underbellies, injecting death into their bloodstreams. They do not pause and consider their humanity as they urge human volunteers to breathe deeply of the disease germs sprayed through the mouthpieces.
First Tuesday’s CBW segment was a seemingly-endless compendium of nightmare images. We saw a film made some years ago—and only now released—of school children who had been given over with their parents’ consent (!) for experimentation with germ warfare. Tiny figures, gas-masked and overcoated, hustled into a contamination chamber. We saw a lecturer describing the life-masks we would have to wear ... masks that come in enough sizes to fit persons from the ages of four to eighty. And a basket-carrier affair for tykes under the age of four. All done with aplomb and stately sincerity, as though the lunacy of what they were talking about did not exist.
And about that word “vector”...
One CBW experimenter, who had worked on a pilot project for disseminating disease germs via animal carriers, talked quietly and sensibly about having gone to . an island in the Hawaiian chain, an uninhabited island, and turning loose a “vector” studded with diseased ticks. He talked of the “vector” doing this, and the “vector” doing that. And it became the key to understanding the level of debasement to which these “scientists” had descended. Not once did he say “dog” or “rabbit” or “hamster.” He called the creature a “vector.”
They have encapsulated themselves, denied their gut feelings, for whatever motives they consider good and sufficient. And by dehumanizing the experiments, by using “vectors” instead of “rabbits” or “mice,” they can sleep nights.
But can we? Knowing our lives are held in the hands of men who may one day refer to a human plague-carrier as a “vector”?
And more horrors! more horrors! We saw rabbits used in an experiment to establish what only a tiny dose of nerve gas would do. A rabbit received merely a drop of some deadly fluid in his eye, and instantly the pupil contracted to a point where the creature was virtually blind. It took three weeks before the pupil returned to normal size. And that was with one infinitesimal drop.
We saw sheep in a pen, injected or sprayed with the virulence. Their heads hung pathetically, like cerebral palsy victims, all muscle-tone gone. We saw a cat in a cage; he was fed a mouse; he pounced and grabbed the mouse, and disemboweled him, as cats will do, then we saw the cat injected with a nameless fluid (Sander Vanocur suggested it might be LSD of a particularly nasty formula) and another mouse sent into his cage. The cat’s fur literally stood up and he cowered in fear of the mouse. At one and the same moment it was hilarious—like a bad MGM cartoon—and terrifying to see the ingrained instinctual behavior of an animal, fixed since the species came into existence, suddenly reversed. And it made me wonder what kind of perpetual bummer a human being would suffer if such a weapon was used.
But we were told repeatedly that these weapons were only experimental, that they were not “within our strike capabilities” at the moment. At the moment. But if that was so, how did NBC expect us to react to:
The filmed report of US Air Force bombers that had seeded the clouds near Salt Lake City, in a supposedly “uninhabited” area, with anthrax ... a seeding that had been miscalculated...and 600,000 sheep died horribly. True? Yes, we know it was true, for the Air Force has already paid the sheepherders in the area over $400,000 in restitution monies. The Air Force rep who was asked to comment on this admitted that the bombers had been a little “off-course,” but he said only sheep had died. Yet we saw films of rabbits dying from the same disease, in the same area. And though the Air Force has never formally admitted culpability in the matter, the AF rep admitted that if those bombers had been only slightly more off-course, they would have hit the central reservoir that serves Salt Lake City. He mumbled a few words to the effect that the death toll would have been staggering.
If they can do this ... Now ... with such little concern for their acts ... what must they be prepared to do in the event of a genuine threat?
It was an eye-opening presentation. For much of the nation. For those of us who were already aware of the chamber of horrors bacteriophage labs in New Jersey, Arkansas and Utah, it was only further documentation that they are proceeding apace, with little or no deterrent.
And suddenly, blindingly, all the student dissent for control of this and a voice in that became ludicrous. Screw it, troops! Stop fucking around taking over Sproul Hall... start picketing those goddam CBW labs on the campuses of the University of Texas, University of Pennsylvania, University of Washington, Stanford and Illinois Institute of Technology! Black, white, Mexican, Oriental, what the hell does any of it matter if we go blind and gag and feel the flesh ooze from our bones with running sores and agonizing death? One man, J. Robert Oppenheimer, stood up and said, “My God, what am I doing!?!” and the morality of the Bomb came under scrutiny. Oppenheimer was branded a traitor because he refused to accept the American Dream of killkillkill. History will call him a saint. If there is any history after this! Can the thinking young people of today do any less? What effect would concerted strikes at these labs have on the men who do the work? Perhaps none, but perhaps they might have to start examining what they are about!
Karate and akida and kung-fu are self-defense systems that proclaim they are only to be used as deterrents; but the other half of that proclamation is that once having committed, you go to kill. The Bomb was created, and no one wanted to use it ... but one man said the need is great enough, so use it. Now we have CBW and they tell us again we won’t ever use it.
Liars! The bullshitters are with us again! The demons in lab smocks are there, filling their vials and depressing the plungers on their hypodermics! Use it ... you bet your ass they’ll use it. For this is the end-result of all the stupid American Right Or Wrong patriotism that has so corrupted our country that we would wipe out the entire population of the Earth rather than see some other system of government in power. Pyrrhic victory, you imminent murderers!
NBC didn’t editorialize. They ended on a note of justification. After all, wasn’t Russia into the same bag? Killkillkill. The great American Dream. On the First Tuesday of February NBC showed us the true face of that Dream. It was a death’s-head vision.
After all that, Ken, I couldn’t laugh too hard at what the Smothers Brothers or Laugh-In had to offer.
Frankly, I’m terrified.
* * * *
19: 21 FEBRUARY 69
A few weeks ago, on the opening night of Sal Mineo’s directorial debut with Fortune And Men’s Eyes, I found myself sitting in the same row of the Coronet Theater as Doug McClure, a very nice guy and an actor of some quality who has been sadly misused by Universal Studios. We looked at each other, not having seen each other in several years, and instantly recognized a look of terror in each other. “Hey, Doug,” I whispered down the row, “make a deal with you: you leave town when NBC shows The King’s Pirate, and I’ll leave town when ABC runs The Oscar. He laughed. We both laughed. But we both lived in terror of the evenings when our youthful indiscretions would catch up with us. I don’t know how Doug handled it, but a week ago Wednesday I simply took the phone off the hook. (Not soon enough. They got it three hours earlier in New York and a friend called to cheer me up, damn him!)
I’ve apologized publicly, elsewhere, for having had a hand in writing that film; a film so embarrassingly bad why any producer would give me a chance to write another one is beyond my understanding. So I won’t do a mea culpa here. All I’ll say, to those of you who may wonder where I get the chutzpah to denigrate other-people’s failures when I have a veritable Krakatoa of failure to my own credit, is that having been through the shit, friends, I recognize the taste when I encounter it. Or, as Hymie Kelly says in The Oscar: “If you lie down with pigs, you get up smelling like garbage.” Expiation is so refreshing!
Onward!
Ken, this guy I know, braced me a couple of weeks ago as to why I didn’t actively support Laugh-In and The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. I told him that with the ratings Laugh-In has been getting I didn’t think it needed any special boosting from me. Those ratings, incidentally, can be misleading, in terms of trends. ABC, the great imitator, tried to cash in on the “trend” with something called Turn-On which both premiered and vanished all in a night, like the ghost of Christmas Past, February 5th. It wasn’t that it was a bad show, it was that it was an awkward show, and someone canceled it after the first commercial. The fastest death scene since Tammy Grimes gurgled her last, and Championship Bowling Starring Milton Berle rolled a gutterball.
ABC seems to be having better luck with What’s It All About, World? which is a scarifying fact of life on which I’ll comment shortly; but for now, I’ll return to my reasons for not hyping Laugh-In. They’re relatively simple, actually.
When all the squares on the streets of Tustin and La Mirada are socking it to one another, betting each other’s bippies, offering to expose their Walnettos, intoning “werry inter-est-ink” in pseudo-Eichmann accents, and in general blowing in one another’s ears to see if it’ll follow them anywhere, I figure this column isn’t needed for ersatz accolades.
But the Smothers Brothers, it has been pointed out to me, are not faring quite as well. Though the hip folk are watching the show religiously (or anti-religiously, depending on where your Valhalla is located), what the Smothers Sons are getting a potload of is letters of moral indignation and raw-throated outrage from the neatsy-clean tickytacky types out there in the Great American Heartland. The scuttlefish.
Well, the scuttlefish, it seems, don’t like the Smothers Boys sticking up for integrity and daring and a little truth and a lotta commitment, not to mention some honest concern for this great, glorious country of ours, as long as it’s being expressed by them long-haired, dope-puffing degenerates. And the networkers, heaven fore-fend, certainly don’t want to unsettle anyone. (Which is another reason I don’t stick up for Laugh-In; though it breaks me up with much of its humor, I think it’s a cop-out, and never gets near the gut of anything genuinely controversial. A few scrotum references are not my idea of a dangerous vision, contrary to the belief of some literary critics.)
But the Smothers Guys do. I speak in particular of two items they’ve offered recently. The first was a scathing putdown of that saccharine Top 40 “hit” in which the mealymouth widower bemoans the fact that his coocoo-clock wife, Honey, has passed away. It was a cheap song, for openers, and I’ve got to hand it to the Smothers Types and their writers for doing it in royally, exposing the tawdry sentimentality of it for the shuck it was.
But the second item was the heavier of the two. It was the ensemble offering, three weeks ago, with Burl Ives doing a Thornton Wilder Our Town to the strains of Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’. If you saw it, you know what came down. If you didn’t, I’ll describe it briefly.
Ives comes back to his old home town. He is pleased to see that with all the rampage and riot running amuck in America Today, his old home town is still the same, still living by honest, simple values, unchanged from the turn of the century. And as he professes this belief, we are treated to blackout vignettes of what’s really happening in the town:
A homicidal barber, cutting the hair of a hippie, rails about long-maned lunatics ruining his business, ruining the country, ruining everything. The hippie is terrified as the barber wields the razor, spouting endless violence. When the hippie gets out of the chair, the barber bids him goodbye, take it easy ... and gives him the peace sign.
A spinster schoolmarm in a drug store, getting her weekly supply of sleeping pills, diet pills, uppers, downers, sidewayers, and telling the druggist she’ll need all the tranquilizers she can get because she’s sitting on the jury trying the case of that terrible Jones boy. What’s he being tried for? asks the druggist. “Drugs,” says the teacher.
The local clergy rapping. One of them is a “traditional” prelate, who reveals himself as a venal, materialistic schlepp, and the other tries to tell him about getting out and working with the people in the streets. Ives encounters the latter, and says is it all in the streets? Isn’t there anything sacred any more? Like the good old institution of marriage? The pastor says sure there is, why today he married a young couple in love ... and we see them in silhouette. Ives beams ... yes, love is still the same. And then the couple is lit up, and we see it’s a black and white marriage.
Effective skit? You bet your ass it was. Simple, direct, eloquent, and enormously well-done because it was all underplayed, with just the right touches of comedy and not a cornball note in the entire production.
But the important thing about that bit was in what it means in terms of the reactionary tenor of the country. And as I’ve said before, if you haven’t yet snapped to the reality that this is a hideously reactionary, scared little cloud-world, just consider the outrage letters of the middle-class viewers, who get hacked when they hear the Church, the Schools, the Home, the Sanctity of the Family Unit and Propriety maligned. Oh, sure, in the Thirty Cities Ratings, the Smothers Clan does well, but in the outlying regions, where most of the soap-suds are bought, they die. And the network notices this, make no mistake.
So I guess supporting Smothers et al becomes a holy chore. Because that was a devilishly clever, well-thought-out pastiche, intended to state some cases for the abolition of arteriosclerotic thinking, in terms best conceived and semantically offered for winning over the scared squares.
Dig, this is somewhere near where it’s at, I think: the majority of the people in this country really don’t know what’s happening. They can’t be shot down like dogs for this lack of information ... they haven’t been given the opportunity for weighing one side against the other. The entrenched forces rule the mass media, in ways they deny because they don’t conceive of them as being misused. But we all know that the primary job of those in power is to stay in power; and if concepts such as the Smothers Troupe suggest each week go into practice, a lot of old tigers gonna have their teeth pulled, gonna get gelded, gonna get sent out to pasture. And they can’t have that.
So, inexorably, they will kill a show like The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. They have to. It threatens them too much. Courage and honesty such as Smothers II show us each week must be protected. And if a couple of hundred dingdongs can get something like Star Trek renewed, it would seem to behoove all of us who care, to start writing letters to CBS to counteract the potency of those assassin diatribes from Mashed Potato Falls, Wyoming. It’s that, or watch the satire segment of prime-time get taken over by shows like What’s It All About, World?, a horror of right-wing imbecility that is already in the process of catching on with the crewcut set.
A subject which I intend to eviscerate in this space next week. Watch the show tonight, so next week we can rap about it with mutual insights. There may even be a test.
* * * *
20: 28 FEBRUARY 69
The answer is: I haven’t the foggiest damned idea!
The question is: What’s It All About, World?
Now maybe I’m suffering from oxygen starvation, maybe I’m dry-hallucinating (that’s like dry-heaving without the use of chemicals), maybe I’m getting spirit messages from another continuum in the form of a TV show no one else is seeing, but for the last three Thursdays, at 9:00, I’ve been tuning in Channel 7, the ABC outlet, and I’ve been having the damnedest experience!
First comes the image of this awfully clean dude I recall from Walt Disney movies. He’s usually wearing a turtleneck and a Nehru jacket; wearing them the way the white-socks-and-brown-shoes guys wear them; awkwardly, as if he were trying to hook a corner of the identification image with “the young people”; makes me want to stop wearing turtlenecks and Nehru jackets, if he’s the kinda cat wearing them. Then he starts singing. But sincere, you know. Really sincere. How this land is my land, how it’s his land, from California to the New York island. But quietly proud, y’know. Humble. Sincere as a gas station attendant telling you your oil filter needs replacing.
Only thing is, he doesn’t sing so good. Has this musical range from E to B#. I kinda blink, tap the heel of my hand against the side of my head, maybe my hearing is impaired.
Then on comes this announcer who tells us this is a sparkling, contemporary new show, What’s It All About, World? And it’s filled—he tells us—with pungent, scathing satire on the events of the day, the world around us, the problems and turmoil of our times, all done with rare good humor. So I sit back and wait to see this new entry in the satire sweepstakes, having been pleasured by Laugh-In and The Smothers Brothers. Comedy Hour.
For openers, the show bares its muscles and shows us where its courage is at. It tackles one of the truly pressing topics of the day, fearlessly, satirically, pun-gently. How to save money when shopping.
Got to hand it to Ilson & Chambers, the producers: they sure as hell managed to avoid dealing with any of those stale, overworked topics of the day like rioting, racial upheaval, militancy in the suburbs, student dissent, police brutality, nuclear proliferation, the war in Viet Nam, the breakdown of law’n’order, the growth of organized crime, the horrors of chemical-bacteriological warfare, school dropouts, starvation in Appalachia, misuse of Federal land grants, the hazards of offshore oil drilling, censorship, the upheaval in the Church, black anti-Semitism, the generation gap or corruption in government. They struck directly to the heart of today’s most pressing social problem: how to save money when shopping.
By this time I’d been hitting the side of my head with the heel of my hand so long, I had a headache. So I went out and got a couple of Empirin while these dancers did a few turns.
When I came back, the singer who couldn’t sing— his name is Dean Jones—was saying that everybody-loves a child star, and he had one for all of us who were panting with our need. (Looking around the room, I saw no other dirty young men with a penchant for nymphettes, and so settled back on the sofa with open admiration for Mr. Jones, who had somehow pierced the veil of respectability I wear, and prepared myself to slaver over some nubile little pre-groupie toddler who would satiate my naked lusts.)
“And here she is ... Happy Hollywood!”
Imagine my surprise to be confronted with a five or six year old Shirley Temple surrogate with a face as evil as one of the Borgias. (My instant reaction to this child was one of physical revulsion. I could not clear my mind of the scene in Barbarella where the depraved children turn life-sized dolls with razor-sharp teeth loose on the semi-naked Jane Fonda. It was a scene of singular horror, and snaggle-toothed Happy Hollywood looked for all the world like nothing but one of those knife-toothed dolls.)
She spoke in a high, quavery voice guaranteed to shatter goblets, and she dedicated her song—with all sincerity—to our great and wonderful United States of America astronauts ... and named them one by one ... going on to name the project heads at the Houston tracking center. I kept expecting someone to hit her in the face with a pie, but it never came to pass. She actually sang It’s Only A Paper Moon, complete with vaudeville tap dancing and extravagant hand movements reminiscent of the Supremes in their formative days. Again, I found myself hitting my head.
It went on in this vein for several years. At least it seemed to be several years. It may only have been decades, who knows? And the big extravaganza ensemble number was a Paean of Praise to Richard Milhous Nixon. Everyone dressed in suits of American flags, prancing around, shooting off fireworks, waving banners, and singing we’re all God’s Chillun and Dickie is God. (A thought occurred to me: they arrested Abbie Hoffman on the steps of the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, D.C., on his way in to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee, because, he was wearing a shirt made from an American flag. They indicted him on charges of desecrating the symbol of America Uber Alles. Has anyone preferred charges against Dean Jones and his company of Merry Pranksters for doing the same on coast-to-coast television? No? I rather thought not. The rules work for you, when you espouse the party line, but God forbid you should be on the opposing team.)
They sang and danced this Ode to the Odious for another decade or three, with one of their number hobbling blindly around the stage wearing an enormous papier-mâché head of Nixon; the most hideous case of hydrocephalicism I’ve ever seen.
And again, with little evil-faced Happy Hollywood down on one knee, saying, “We luuuuuuv you, Mr. President!” I kept expecting the wings to explode with a barrage of cream pies. But it didn’t happen. They played it straight.
Either that, or all the head-hitting had given me a concussion. .
And when the show was over, I sat there, genuinely stunned, trying to arrange my thoughts in some coherent manner. Had I indeed seen what I’d seen? A right-wing reactionary satire show? It was a contradiction in terms; a defiance of the square-cube law; a ghoul created of the spare parts of dead bodies, like a Frankenstein’s Monster; an enormous put-on, so cleverly conceived even I could not penetrate its straight face; an atavistic throwback, a creature neither fish nor fowl, lying there flopping its flippers trying to stand up; a video thalidomide baby.
I decided to reserve judgment till the next week. But they did it again. Happy Hollywood shucked us. Dean Jones inspired us. And the high point of the show was Ralph Williams selling one of his brannew ‘conomy carz quipped with heeder’n’five widewalls, finally catching those pies I’d expected to down Happy and Dean. And you want to know something, that poor bald sonofabitch was the only noble creature on the show. But do you get the message? They wouldn’t pie each other, but they’d pie Williams ... the only one in the group who was secure in his own bag, doing his own thing. He was safe to attack!
I watched again last night (as I write this) and it was more of the same. Happy dedicated her song to Mr. Nixon’s wonderful new cabinet, Dean Jones sang a song about the nobility of getting out there and sucking up them bullets like a good American, and they managed to even emasculate the Smothers Brothers, who “guest-starred.” I think they said “tell it like it is,” a hundred and seventy-eight times, more than enough repetitions to convince me that if I never heard that un-grammatical phrase again, it would be entirely too soon. The ensemble number was dedicated to the philosophy that every wrong road is a boon because it tells us where not to go; a concept firmly in the tone of the American Theme.
So what do we have here?
As I see it, we have a response to The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and the ill-fated Turn-On. A sort of right-wing attempt to prove how good things are these days. It might more appropriately be titled The Establishment Strikes Back.
And it forces me to devise what will henceforth be known as Ellison’s Theorem: the further right your position, the less telling your satire. A corollary of which is that you can’t lampoon anywhere near where you stand, because you’d annihilate your own troops.
They’ve put together a “satire” show guaranteed to offend no one, espousing all the time-worn adages and cop-outs of the midwestern Judeo-Christian ethos. And it is going across big. (I was informed, and received the intelligence with unabashed incredulity that Happy Hollywood—that gross little no-neck monster—has received literally thousands of letters of awe and affection from the Great American Heartland. Glory be to Baby Leroy, we has us a new moppet star! Just what we needed!) (Like an extra set of elbows.)
So take heed, all ye out there on the barricades; it is a sign of the times. The Establishment is no longer going to leave the guerrilla warfare to the dissidents. They are going to use our own weapons against us— and we should’ve expected it. The cunning mothers are like the v.d. germ; it adapts and gets too strong for penicillin. The Young Republicans are waging war against the rioters on campus. The short-haired reactionaries are handing out red/white/blue badges showing you support the status quo, and now TV has taken up the cudgel.
What’s it all about, world? I’ll tell you what it’s all about: we’ve got to get cunninger than them. Anyone for von Clausewitz?
* * * *
21: 7 MARCH 69
Come with me now as I hew out of a mountain of Jell-O, a structure of cowardice. Observe, if you will, two men—Leonard Goldberg and Elton H. Rule—the former, head of programming at ABC-TV, the latter, president of that network, who crutch along on spines of rubber, trembling timorously from lack of any discernible courage, so motivated by lack of understanding as to what “serving the public good” means, that they crawl crablike across a terrain of fear and hypocrisy.
ABC, because it was the youngest network, and— like Avis—because it was not number one, had to try harder. In trying harder, ABC occasionally took one or two steps further into bold and original programming than either NBC or CBS, the two arteriosclerotic elders of the television pantheon. It didn’t happen often; usually all we got from ABC was cheapjack imitation and a replacement of plot with violence. But from time to time ABC did take a hesitant step toward maturity and responsible programming. So we came to expect that if there was a series possessing some degree of clout, it would be scheduled on ABC, rather than its two doddering rivals.
But Elton Rule has shown he is no man for courage. And the great expectations for ABC were dashed when he knuckled-under instantly to the blue-nosed, hidebound minority out there in the Great American Heartland, who were offended by the relatively mild and innocuous Turn-On some Wednesdays ago, and canceled the poor mother after the first commercial. It was a sign of evils to come, and this week I detail one more such. One that can be more debilitating than the loss of Turn-On.
Several weeks ago, on Sunday, February 16th, I was invited to attend the live taping of the pilot segment of a new half-hour comedy series into which ABC had poured over two hundred and ten thousand dollars. The show was called Those Were The Days and was written and directed by Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin, both men of great skill.
Those Were The Days is the American version of an enormously popular English TV series, Till Death Us Do Part, that ran for three years in England and is now in constant rerun throughout the United Kingdom. In both its incarnations, the series is about a simple, everyday household in which a young married couple are living with the girl’s parents. The family unit is a familiar one ... the mother is a sweet, solicitous homemaker, God-fearing and church-going ... the father is a solid consumer type, simple and direct, a working stiff, a trifle crusty, but charming ... the kids are sweet and wholesome, deeply in love, a little awkward about having to sponge off in-laws, but industrious, college-going, all American. Sounds dull, doesn’t it? Safe? Inoffensive? A natural for ABC?
Then why is it that Goldberg and Rule chickened-out and refused to schedule the series for next season, even after they’d laid out over $200,000?
The reason is simple. The head of the household, good old Archie Justice, is a bigot. A common garden-variety, prejudiced against Jews/blacks/Italians/Mexicans/Everybody bigot. He isn’t a KKKer, he isn’t a member of the German-American Bund, he isn’t a gun-carrying Bircher, he’s simply like the bulk of us, a stupid man who sees no insult in calling Afro-Americans “them black beauties,” or Jews “yids,” or Irish “micks” or Italians “wops.” And he will defend with all the lung-power at his command his right as a good American to express himself in that time-honored manner.
It wouldn’t be so bad in the house if the kids weren’t campus political activists who doubt the existence of God, self-consciously carry the banner of equality as do most “liberals,” and who find themselves constantly at loggerheads with blustering Archie.
In company with something over two hundred other people, culled from supermarkets in Pacoima, street corners in Pasadena and bowling alleys in Tuston, I sat through a delightful half-hour taping of the pilot script. It was by no means offensive. When Archie, in a rage, says “God damn it,” his sweet little wife calls him on it. Archie then explains how he was not swearing because, “God. That’s a good word isn’t it? And damn. You dam a river, don’t you? It’s in the bible. God was always damning this one, or that one, for committing ‘insects’ in the family. Now that ain’t swearing, is it?” The racial references became not quite harmless, but certainly impotent, when taken in context with the character of Archie.
The point to be made, simply, is that the series dealt with a common American archetype, and did it with rare good humor and extraordinary good taste.
It would have made a dynamite series.
After the taping—in which. Carroll O’Connor as Archie and Jean Stapleton as his wife were abetted by the brilliant D’Urville Martin as a black oddjob-man doing a calculated Steppin Fetchit to stay out of Archie’s way—and were flawless in their performances—Norman Lear emerged on stage to ask the audience’s opinion. He was greeted with unrestrained huzzahs and applause. The random sample audience loved it. They had laughed till tears rolled down their faces, and they knew they were seeing a winner.
Then Lear asked if anyone in the audience had been offended by anything he’d seen.
Three or four people raised their hands, and Lear gave them full time to express their unease. One man said he thought it was a terrible show because he wouldn’t want his kids to hear swearing like that. Another woman said she thought it was disgraceful to portray such things on television. A wizened old man who was a dead ringer for The Hanging Judge opined that Lear and his cohorts were not only trying to subvert the American Ideal, but inferred that the series, if aired, would somehow mysteriously pollute the precious bodily fluids of all American Youth.
The bulk of the two hundred in the theater laughed them down. Yet I had a premonition, and asked Lear, from the floor, “Using ABC’s reaction to Turn-On as a guide, do you think they’ll have the guts to put this series on the air?” Lear shrugged and then smiled and said he had been in closest contact with Rule and Goldberg through all stages of the production, and they were solidly, courageously behind the project. He said he felt certain it would be on the 1969-70 ABC schedule.
Poor Lear. All these years in the Industry, and he still believed in Santa Claus. He believed, in fact, right up to Thursday night, the 27th of February. The pilot had been shot in a hurry, because ABC wanted to show it to top management at the last moment, as the coup de grace. On that Thursday night Lear and Yorkin and all the actors and even CMA, Lear’s agent, believed there was a Santa Claus, because it was on that Thursday night ABC showed it to their task force. The reports were glowing; everyone loved it. “Played like a baby doll, sweetheart!”
On Friday, the 28th, ABC announced its schedule for next year.
Is anyone surprised that Those Were The Days was not on it?
The only time I ever met Norman Lear was backstage at the taping, at which time I shook his hand and told him he was a good man, and had done a good thing. One of these days I’ll run into him again, and I’ll ask him if he still believes in Santa Claus.
And like all men in this business, who set out to tell something even remotely like the truth, to deal with something even remotely like reality, I suspect Lear will have the appearance of a man stunned by a hammer.
For make no mistake: This was a good show, it was adult, it was funny, it was presumptuous, and it would have been a success. Oh, of course it would have brought its share of outraged cries from that withering minority of backwater scuttlefish who cannot accept the fact that one pallid “God damn” on after-9:00 television means nothing to kids who hear “mother-fucker” a hundred times a day in the streets and schoolyards ... it would have brought down the impotent wrath of the DAR and other blowhard patriotic nits who refuse to recognize that bigotry does exist in this country...and it would raise shrieks from the vocal minority of Puritanical throwbacks who still live in Plymouth Bay Colony and could never understand that showing all the Archie Justices of this country for what they are, with a degree of affection and ridiculousness, pulls their teeth.
And like the ones who would have howled, had ABC had the balls to proceed with the project, Rule and Goldberg made an a priori decision, and faded to black before the battle was even engaged.
This column conceives of their act as naked cowardice. They may wear their facades of bold businessmen in a commercial arena, but they are like the Emperor with his new clothes. Everyone of us children on the sidelines see them naked, with their petards hanging out. And we cringe at having gutless wonders like that running our public airwaves.
I would suggest to Messrs. Goldberg and Rule, should a good elf somewhichway slip this column before their poached-egg eyes, that here is one newspaperman who was not offended by the show; there are undoubtedly others. If they wish to save some of that $210,000, why don’t they set up a screening of the pilot for columnists and TV people from all over the country, and then make a decision? Is that too incomprehensible a move for them to make, in an effort to save a product that can enrich us—rather than merely continuing with series like It Takes A Thief, in which a crook is glorified, week after week?
How about it, gentlemen; the glove is dropped.
Santa Claus and I want to know if you can find the guts to act like responsible creators, rather than timid and flaccid cowards.
* * * *
22: 14 MARCH 69
Where to start . . . where to start? For me, a heavy column. Maybe not for you, but for me. I find myself once more impelled to declare a position, as a result of NBC’s often-brilliant First Tuesday program. I caught it last week, the installment for March, and saw an incredibly strong segment on racial intolerance in Ireland. The Protestants against the Catholics. The Orangemen against the wearers of the green. The Fundamentalist fanatics of Rev. Ian Paisley against the Papists. And it made me sick. Hundreds of memories of my own childhood flooded back on me....
I was in Lathrop Grade School, in Painesville, Ohio. Maybe third grade. I was the only Jewish kid my age, as I recall. There were a few other Jewish families in Painesville—a town thirty miles east of Cleveland—but even so, I was quite alone as a Jew. They used to beat the shit out of me, regularly. It got so I could wade into the middle of them and let them pummel me, and not even feel it. Have you ever been so inured to pain that you actually sought their fists, as a defiance of them? My mother used to have to come to school to pick me up; not because I was afraid to walk home the few short blocks from Lathrop, but because they ripped my clothes, and we weren’t terribly wealthy, and we couldn’t afford to have my clothes ruined. I got used to it. Weep no tears for that little kid getting kicked unconscious in the schoolyard by Jack Wheeldon, because he learned defiance early, and it changed his life. No, he came out of it okay. But weep for this other one:
The one who walked behind me all the way from school one afternoon. This little girl. A nice one, she was. She wanted to help me.
You see, I was a Jew, and that meant that I was one of those who ground up babies to make matzohs for the High Holy Days. She believed that, and she wanted to save me. She followed me for several days, and then one day she caught up with me and tried to help.
“You’ve got to repent,” she said, seriously.
I stared at her. I didn’t know what she meant, but I was frightened.
“You’re a heathen,” she said. “You’re damned to hell by God because you aren’t baptized.”
I wanted to run.
“Please, please”—she was almost crying—”you’ve got to believe in the Christ Child, because you’re going to Hell, and you’ll be burning, and you’ll ask for water on your tongue, and I can’t give you any, because you’re a heathen ...”
I turned and ran, terrified that she was right
No, don’t cry for me. Cry for her.
And for those Irish who hate and don’t know.
Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, once observed that it is possible to judge the level of a civilization by the amount of religion it needs to sustain it. The closer to barbarism, the more religion the culture needs.
Father Coughlin and his Church of the Little Flower in Detroit, spreading anti-Semitic poison.
Sirhan Sirhan, murdering Bobby Kennedy because he supported the Israelis against the Arabs. The Hebraic faith versus the Mohammedans.
The Catholic Church saying give me your children for the first ten years, and they are mine forever.
Christian Scientists letting their children die rather than allowing a surgeon to operate.
The Spanish Inquisition. Torquemada torturing women and children for doubting. The Salem witch trials. The Dan Smoots and the Paul Harveys and the George Putnams . . . who coat their bigotry and evil with the sanctimonious jelly of religion. Pope Pius, allowing Hitler to gas the Jews and the Catholics, and turning his head away. All the martyrs who ever were. Christ, who would shrink in horror at what his faith and kindness has become.
My position: religion is an evil and debilitating force in the world.