In a time when men are separated by economic barriers, by social and political beliefs, by territorial and linguistic walls . . . religion keeps them stupid, keeps them intractable, keeps them locked within their fears.
It became hideously apparent, watching First Tuesday. A Protestant woman in Ulster, probably a good woman, a woman who would never intentionally hurt anyone else...saying, “They had that new housing project, and all the Roman Catholics moved in, and—a Roman Catholic coal man told me this—they wanted the coal dumped in the bathtubs. Now it’s a slum. They’re dirty. All they want to do is drink and lay around. And as long as they can go confess, they think it’s all right. They breed like rabbits, you know . . .”
I could hear a White woman saying the same things about black men: “They move into a good neighborhood, into a new project, and the next thing you know, it’s a slum. They’ll live in filth and starve their kids, so long as they can drive a Cadillac. And they breed like rabbits, you know . . .”
I saw, on that program, militant students campaigning for civil and religious rights. And I saw the Irish cops using their truncheons the way Daley’s pigs used theirs. And why shouldn’t they? After all, weren’t they fighting God’s fight? Weren’t they carrying out the word of the Lord?
How they do believe it, all of them, all of us.
That the Lord speaks only to us, in Yiddish or Latin or Arabic. That God is on our side. Holy Wars, each of them. And will they never realize what they do?
Is it any wonder that kids today reject God?
How can they believe in such a God, who brings hatred and terror to his supplicants? Such a God must be totally mad. Living in a Heaven that is certainly Hell, and sending down messages of awfulness to be written in blood and treachery and bigotry.
Why do the churchmen wonder in confusion that their pews are empty Sunday after Sunday ... is it beyond their ken that the young people want no more of this insanity? Can they not see that holding jazz masses and sending their pseudo-hip men of the cloth into the drug scene and into the ghettos only reveals them for the hypocrites they are?
No, wait a minute, I’ve gone too far. My friend Philly makes a good point. It isn’t religion, because religion is merely belief. If you believe in yourself, or you believe in people being kind to one another, or you believe in that fine chair over there, that’s religion. Being part of the universe is lovely: you breathe out carbon dioxide for the plants, and the plants breathe out oxygen for you, and when you see a falling star you know God is the Natural Order of things, and if you are a part of that Natural Order, then you are God, and I am God, and even that sorrowful, hating woman in Ulster is God. And that’s cool.
It’s organized religion. It’s religion with a label. That’s what stinks. It’s what keeps all those old Jewish men on Fairfax from having a nice bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich. It’s what sends all those young girls into the ghoulish lives of nuns. (And did you dig the Saturday night movie several weeks ago, of Audrey Hepburn in The Nun’s Story?—without even trying to put down the nun game, it was a petrifying picture of women who have “married Christ.” And if that isn’t theological necrophilia, I don’t know what is.) It’s what twists men’s minds.
If you ever had any doubts that was true, you only needed to see First Tuesday last week.
And having so positioned myself, I now await with clean hands and composure a bolt of lightning from Heaven to strike me in my atheistic spleen. If you find a column under my byline next week, it will mean God didn’t take too unkindly to my pulling the covers of those who say they serve him, but in fact serve another, more crimson master.
* * * *
23: 21 MARCH 69
Darling, by the time you read this, I’ll be in Rio. Phoenix? Galveston? No thanks. I’ll take two lumps. I was once tossed up underneath the jail in Fort Worth. On a vag charge, hitchhiking with 170 in my kick. They whomped me. Twice. Two lumps. About seven years later, which was seven years ago, coming through Fort Worth again, I was in a car accident—fault of this snockered cowboy, one of the long-standing denizens of the Alcoholic Generation—and the local newspaper made a foofaraw about it. Seems I was a “c’lebrity” by that time. Ah-HAH! So, down comes the Sheriff of Fort Worth, big beautiful bull moose of a guy, name of Cato Hightower. Got me all squared away with a motel room, repaired my squashed typewriter, took me to dinner, lovely fellah. Never knew I was the same dude he’d tanked seven years before. That’s about all with Fort Worth, to which I was led, here, by way of Glen Campbell and Phoenix/Houston, because I needed the line from the song to let you know that while you crouch there smog-snogged, I’m down in gorgeous Brazil canyoudigit, attending the 2nd International Film Festival of Rio de Janeiro, at which they’re showing a TV segment of The Outer Limits for which I won a Writers Guild award a couple of years ago. They think it’s some sorta classic of fantasy in films, and I ain’t about to shatter their little bubble, because they paid all the expenses and do you have any idea how much loot it costs to go to Rio?
All of which bottom-lines to this: I’ll watch a little Brazilian TV while I’m down there, and though I don’t speak Portuguese, at least I can report on the Latin Ralph Williams or how a Biz commercial looks in bossa novalese. But using that line from the Glen Campbell song brings to mind that I’ve been meaning to mention him and his Good Time Hour for several weeks.
Glen is so clean, it hurts.
Now I am a real cleanliness freak. Friends and lovers of mine will attest to the fact that I am so neatsie I border on anal retentiveness. But Glen Campbell is so soft and pink and succulent looking, I have visions of the makeup man dusting him with ZBT Baby Powder before he goes onstage. And his show is nothing if not clean. Clean, clean, clean! His banjo-plonking buddy, John Hartford, got off a mildly blue remark last Sunday, about as innocuous as you can get and still evoke a titter from the basically prurient loons who attend these tapings, and Campbell got uptight so fast I thought his E-string was gonna snap.
What an irony. Here is immaculate Glen Campbell, hearing spirit messages through the telephone wires, digging Galveston’s sea-winds crashing, et al, a spinoff from The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, obviously “making it” for the scuttlefish in Kankakee, while his mentors, the Smothers, are being assassinated during the Ides of March.
I’m sure you heard about the caper. For the last year or so, the local CBS outlets around the country, responding to affronted letters by the Fundamentalists in their locales, have been demanding advance tapes of the Smothers shows, to see if there was anything in them that was “offensive.” This, in effect, put censorship powers in the hands of timorous station executives. They had the clout to decide whether entire cities would or would not see the show. The odiousness of this cop-out on CBS’s part—acceding to such a despicable demand—sat not at all well with Dick and Tom. But they sorta shrugged and went with it. For a year. Couple of weeks ago they decided they’d had it. No, we ain’t gonna do it no more. So they didn’t send the tapes out. And CBS blanked them. They put on a rerun. (Ironically, Canada got the new show.) When that went down, the Smothers Duo decided they weren’t going to do the show next year. And at last report, CBS was still mumbling in its Ovaltine.
So if you haven’t responded overwhelmingly with letters as I suggested several weeks ago, for Christ’s sake, get off your ass and do it!
Otherwise we will have nothing to gaze upon but the baby-fat face of Glen Campbell. Clean. Clean. Clean.
On to other matters.
Many of you have written me letters, some demanding that I strike out against fluoridation, others suggesting I state just which political activist groups you should join, offering to service me sexually because we are apparently soulmates, enlisting my aid in placing your unfinished epic poem about the fall of the Great Wall of China with a publisher, and just a shitload of other etcetera.
Well, I don’t intend this as a shock to anyone’s nervous system, but honest, friends, I am a teevee critic. This column is intended to look at what’s happening around us, culturally and politically and esthetically, but in terms of what television is saying, and how they’re interpreting the passing scene. I frequently skitter off into the realm of serendipity, but that’s only because I happen to rap that way. My own personal beliefs are pretty obvious in what I write about, and the way I write about it, but if you feel the need to mount the barricades, don’t look to me to sound your specific clarion call. There are things that piss me off mightily, and I do what I can to bring them to the populace, but when it comes to individual activity, I am strictly a crawling-through-the-sewers-with-plastic-charges-strapped-to-my-back kind of guerrilla; and for that sort of scene, having True Believers underfoot is about as handy as being in a street fight with your girl friend pulling at your arm trying to stop the slaughter. A guy can get killed that way.
Final item for this week: several of you have asked when you’ll see the next installment of my diary of the script on which I’m working for The Name of The Game. We’ll, this is it.
I got well into the treatment (for those of you who missed the first thrilling installment of this chronical, a “treatment” is the story-line you write for the producer and the network, before they tell you to go ahead with the script) on dissent at the university, and made the grievous error of watching some television shows myself.
After seeing Adam-12 and Tuesday Night At The Movies (a World Premiere done by Universal titled The Whole World Is Watching, a pilot movie for a next-season series) and Ironside, all of which dealt with dissent on campus, I realized that once again the gargoyles had taken over the cathedral.
They have now started to merchandise dissent, even as the fat burghars and the tummelers and the entrepreneurs merchandised the hippie culture when they moved into the Haight. And the effect is the same. They have killed the subject for any sensible and original attack. So I tore the twenty-five pages of unfinished treatment in half, tore it in fourths, threw it in the circular file, and called my producer, the beautiful George Eckstein—who is surely one of God’s great creatures—and told him the way I felt about it. He agreed, and asked what else I’d like to write about. I said, “How about pornography?” He said, “For or against?” I said, “For, naturally.” He said, “Starring Robert Stack?” There was a disbelieving quaver in his voice. I said, “Yeah.” A little slowly, but with fear of his own trust in me, he said, “Okay, take a crack at it.”
Friends, at the moment I am rushing to complete the treatment of a Name Of The Game segment I have titled Smut. It will be done before I go to Brazil, and by the time I flap back into town, both George and I— and you, shortly thereafter—will know whether I was able to write it in such a way that I could tell some truth and not scare off both the network and Mr. Stack.
I’ll keep you posted.
And if you don’t see a column here by me next week, don’t panic (he said, with faint hope). It’ll only mean I had too much getting-together to write two columns ahead.
Oh, and incidentally, as a reply to the nice ladies who offered to share carnal pleasures with me because they fancy my writings, I am currently deeply involved with a dynamite redhead named Leigh Chapman, herself a film and TV writer, who keeps a Huck Finn smile on my face. But the offers were appreciated. It’s a good life, sometimes, ain’t it, folks?
* * * *
24: 28 MARCH 69
As tax-time hurtles inexorably down on us, a hungry carrion bird we must annually feed with our own flesh, the Aesop that television can sometimes become offers a fable that points a strong moral: there are no more willing boobs than those who remain boobs willingly.
In a year when we are compelled to pay taxes so the police can purchase tanks, so student dissenters can be more effectively muzzled, so the rich can get richer and the poor get poorer, so the new Attorney General can go into wiretapping in a big way, so the oil companies and the nighthawk land developers can more comfortably rape the victim earth—we are told the infamous 10% surtax will not be dropped as promised, but maintained another year. There are no more willing boobs than those who remain boobs willingly.
How we detest that war in Viet Nam! How we despise the inertia that keeps it fed with men and materiel and money needed so desperately in this country (for instance to alleviate the incredible hunger and poverty the Florida land-owners railed at the McGovern Commission did not exist, despite all the starving workers the Commission saw). How we detest having to pay such an enormous chunk of our taxes to keep the inertia in effect, to keep up the evil of Viet Nam! And how gently we sit, with folded hands, as Johnson’s Folly—a ten per cent overcharge on our taxes, earmarked specifically for napalm and low-yield defoliation—is not dropped in one year as we were promised, but is slyly retained by our new Commissar. By Tricky Dicky, who, now having hyped 42% of the scuttlefish into voting him the clout, drops even the clown mask of trickiness, and out-front calls us boobs to our faces.
Some months ago, when (with incredulity) I heard the surtax would not be dropped as we had been promised, I swore I would not pay it. I swore I would go to jail first. Perhaps it will come to that. (Though the silly futility of the gesture became obvious to me last week when my CPA did up my taxes. I told him there would be no surtax paid by Ellison. I told him had they kept their promise, myself being a usually law-abiding boob, I would have paid it this once, felt had, but say no more. But when they flout their own promises, when they take relish in calling me a boob by insisting they’ll surtax me again next year, I draw the line. I make my stand here. I deny them the funds to kill. And my CPA shook his head sadly at my naïveté. Boob, he said politely you won’t go to jail: they will attach your bank account. I will empty the bank account, I replied, knowing what hassles that would make for myself. Then they’ll attach your wages, he responded. Then I’ll—I stopped. It was hopeless. The marauders were everywhere. By the balls they had me. Not only a boob, but a helpless, futile, posturing boob.)
Yes, perhaps it will come to jail. Much as I hate the slammer, as ugly as the memories of jails are to me, I think I would much prefer incarceration to standing passively by as they grind away my ethics with a cheese grater.
And Aesop, the TV point-maker, showed me what boobs we really are:
Last Tuesday night, March the 18th, CBS presented its bi-monthly newsmagazine of the air, 60 Minutes, with Mike Wallace and Harry Reasoner. They juxtaposed two fifteen minute sections about life in these United States that at once sickened, horrified and frustrated me.
Beginning with a brief documentary about people on welfare relief in Baltimore, they succinctly presented a living statistic, visual documentation of the two million Americans—mostly black—who live in a hell of deprivation and personal debasement amid the plenty of a nation that possesses 50% of the world’s total wealth, ten times the per capita wealth of any other nation!
Eighty-two per cent of those on relief are women and children. Mainly mothers with children, who make so little from the public dole that they cannot leave their kids and find work, thereby keeping them on the welfare treadmill. A spokesman for these women, a marvelously articulate, honest black mother of seven in a Baltimore ghetto, let it all hang out when she snapped back at the interviewer’s suggestion that she had had some of her kids merely to pick up an extra thirty-two dollars and change per month: “You crazy? You think I like goin’ down there to that welfare office and gettin’ treated like an animal the way they do? I want to get off the welfare. Ain’t nobody can live decent on what they give you. I only get forty-five dollar a month for each child—up to five children, after that they don’t give you no more noways—and that don’t ‘clude bus fare to school, or enough for supplies, nor nothin’!”
There was a personal strength in the woman that was difficult to ignore. Even in the ghastly plaster-falling cell where eight people crammed together for the barest essentials of a life devoid of sunshine or hope, she was determined to make for her brood the best life she could. And later in the segment, when Governor Charles Percy told of how he and his family had been on relief during the Depression, how humiliated he’d felt when the food parcels had arrived, how he knew all the canards of the reactionaries that those on welfare were in toto loafers and ne’er-do-wells was so much bullshit ... then I felt genuinely lost. Why had we not nominated a man like Percy for President? Why could we not have set in office a man with some humanity in him, a man who could understand that we don’t like being willing boobs?
The segment proceeded, and in fifteen brief minutes it made a case against the current outmoded welfare apparat and for the first time—that I know of—on television, told the mass of the American viewing public that those two million black faces wanted off the dole, wanted to regain their dignity, and a semblance of joyous living.
Then, from abject, pesk-crawling poverty, 60 Minutes winged down to Palm Beach for fifteen minutes of examination of the Beautiful People. Palm Beach, where at times during “the season” there are more millionaires per square inch than anywhere else in the world.
Oh, it was a chi-chi segment all right.
Mrs. Woolworth-Birdseed plays a fine game of tennis. You really must play tennis on her courts to be “in” in Palm Beach. She had the begonias dyed to match the color of the swimming pool.
Mrs. Thorton-Twitchell plays tennis wearing a necklace. On occasion she scrubs her own floors, and on Wednesday afternoons she washes her porcelain birds.
One never goes anywhere in Palm Beach in a Rolls Royce that is filled. Two or three is the most the car should carry. If you have four or more, you take two Rolls’s and go in a caravan.
Mrs. Grubber’s party cost $50,000 but it was a tame evening for her. She only wore the ruby earrings, no necklace, bracelet or brooch.
And on ... and on ... and hideously on....
Fat bellies, wattled necks, liver spots from eating too well, too much, too often. Aging owners of the American Dream. The titled. The privileged. With their WASP clubs that don’t admit Jews, and their Jewish clubs that discourage the goyim. Maintaining a level of society steeped in prejudice, conspicuous waste, arrogance, phony charity to assuage guilt, and insulating themselves from reality by erecting a wall of bland indifference to that black woman in Baltimore.
The parallel, the Aesop moral of the show, could not be ignored. 60 Minutes did not need to editorialize verbally. By the chockablocking of the two extremes, they stated the case for Life in Our Times with pellucid verve.
Well, we are by no means the ghetto-trapped black woman...nor are we Mrs. Asshole-Moneyswine with her dyed blue begonias. But here we sit in a nation that will not tax the giant corporations as they should be, will not tax the Church as it should be, will not tax organized crime as it should be, will not tax the oil companies as they should be ... but has the audacity to surtax us again and again to pay for the war that will only help to enhance the fortynes of the Palm Beach habitues.
Here we sit, with Aesop the TV telling us we are certainly boobs. Telling us the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. And maybe worst of all, the mass of us, neither extremely rich nor extremely poor, but in the middle, will get more and more of our world chipped away from us . . . whether we like it or not.
It makes one wonder: at what point does the boob despise himself enough to take up the club and smash to jelly the heads of those who exploit him?
* * * *
25: 18 APRIL 69
For those of you out there who make a fetish of jotting down annual high and low tide figures, who fill in every box on a baseball scorecard, who save old newspapers and knot up twittles of twine till you have a giant ball—in short, for those of you who pay close attention to trivial matters—I am back from two weeks in Brazil and New York. For the rest of you, who could care less, the only benefit you will derive from my journey is a revelation of what TV is like in Rio de Janeiro, under the hand of a military dictator, with eighty per cent of the population stone illiterate. But that comes next week, or the week after, as soon as one of my spies back in Rio manages to smuggle out some statistics to me. And if you think I’m kidding about smuggling the information out, you should be in Rio at seven o’clock every night, when every station simultaneously broadcasts the same news, word-for-word, videotaped by the same announcer.
It suddenly makes you very warm and cuddly feeling about the good old US of A, despite all the nonsense going down. I can suddenly dig where all the superpatriots are at, when they say “America: Love it or Leave it.” Shit, Jack, comes to one or the other, I’ll love the ass off it ... the coffee in Brazil can kill you!
But it isn’t Brazil about which I choose to ramble this time. It is about the snake pit that was waiting for me when I got back to Los Angeles.
If you recall, in the last exciting chapter of “Harlan Ellison, Boy Scriptwriter,” our hero had decided not to do his Name Of The Game script on student dissent because every Manny, Moe and Jack was doing the subject to death (there was another one on Mod Squad last week). Our intrepid hero, committed to integrity and T*R*U*T*H, had somewhichway flummoxed his producer, George Eckstein, into allowing him to write the script on pornography. Our Hero, you recall, had started out in deadly fashion by titling his epic Smut.
(One sure way of avoiding being bought-out by the Establishment is by setting a price they can’t possibly meet.)
But, onward.
Our Hero thereafter sat down and wrote a splendid 24 page “treatment” of the script as he intended to develop it. As we all know, a script assignment for TV is divided into three parts: treatment, first draft, final draft. You can be “cut off” after the treatment, meaning they pay you only for what you have already written, and the assignment is dead. (There are two variations on the “cut off.” In the first mode, they pay you x amount of dollars and they own the treatment or story idea. In the second manner, they pay you less money and you own the treatment; the latter method is more advantageous if it’s the kind of idea you can rewrite and sell to another show, but let’s face it, how many shows are there on the air with little people on a planet of giants? You getting the picture, troops?)
If the treatment passes muster with the producer, the studio and the network schlepps, then you are given a “go-ahead” (oh! how they do use the English language!) and from that point on, win or lose, class or shit, you cannot be taken off the assignment. Until it’s over, at which point they start rewriting you, but that’s another horror story.
Okay, so I wrote the treatment, a contemporary action-adventure story loosely paralleling a Jack-the-Ripper theme, the main point of which was that Dan Farrell (played by Robert Stack), as editor of Crime Magazine, is trying once and for all to establish a direct casual link between crime and reading pornography. You know, that old saw about girlie magazines warping the minds of kids so they go on and rape their school teachers, or drag nine-year-old birds into the coal bins of church basements. You know.
(N.B. Only a real sickie, like the wizards who make these suggestions, could think there’d be any jollies in screwing a nine-year-old. You ever see the figure on a nine-year-old? Twelve-year-old, okay, that’s a different matter ... but nine? Chickens?)
In the writing, I had to face the inescapable problem that Mr. Stack is a highly conservative gentleman, and he would never give script approval to a show in which he came out for smut and filth. So I had to pose an intellectual problem, and let the answer be revealed to Stack as he went along. It was a tightrope act, I’ll grant you, but because of the purity of my desire and the clean hands & composure which I brought to the project, I was able to accomplish this well-nigh-impossible feat of legerdemain.
Even George Eckstein was amazed.
I handed in the treatment before I left for Rio, and though George had some reservations about the number of hideous, ghastly, brutal murders committed in the segment (3), he was delighted with the manner in which I’d managed to make a case both pro and con for pornography. That is, I’d made a pro case for good pornography, such as the Alexander Trocchi and Hank Stine and Philip Jose Farmer novels being published by Brian Kirby out at Essex House, but had bummed the crotch magazines whose Brobdingnagian photos of moist pudenda are about as sexy as a closeup of Ausable Chasm guaranteed to turn-off all but righteous acne-fetishists.
When I returned, I found George Eckstein whimpering beneath his desk at Universal Studios. The man was a distant echo of his former magnificence. He needed eight scripts to shoot for next season, had had twelve in the works when I’d left, and now had six that the networks had thumbed-down.
He was incapable of speech. His secretary and I helped him into the sofa, put a cold compress on his furrowed brow, and I went off around Universal to find out what had happened.
The answer was quick in coming. Senator John O. Pastore (D., R.I.) had happened.
All five foot four of him had happened to television. This latter-day Fredric Wertham had clouded up and rained all over TV. “Violence, smut, degradation!” he had shouted, in a voice acknowledged to be the loudest (by decibel-count) in the Senate.
And with their usual fortitude, the network mufti had stood their ground for artistic integrity and the merits of realism in television drama, and had started killing scripts left and right.
I discovered that one script in which there was no violence had been strangled a-borning because there was a suicide in it, and near the end someone calls a girl who has slept with countless hordes of men a “nymphomaniac.” The word come from upstairs that if there was to be a suicide, it had to be an unsuccessful one, and that the word nymphomaniac could not be used. This was one of the more rational decisions. The others were straight out of chicken-licken the sky is falling.
Naturally, Eckstein had not even submitted my treatment, in which three luscious girls are done away with. By a deranged killer with a length of silk rope. Oh boy! Blood! Naked thighs! Insane chuckling in the dark!
When Eckstein had recovered somewhat, we talked over the possibilities of salvaging what had been written, and at last report George was going to propose to the network Gods that Our Hero rewrite the treatment to examine how and why pretty young girls wind up in stag movies.
For those of you who have been following this diary of a script in The Glass Teat, you will perceive that much ground has been covered since the assignment was first given. Yet no progress has been made.
I will keep you advised as this black comedy proceeds.
In the meantime, don’t give up hope; the Kid has sold a series to NBC (in conjunction with his partner, Paramount) which the network seems to be exceedingly high on. I am at present scripting the pilot segment. It is a one-hour dramatic science fiction idea called Man Without Time and has considerable clout built into it. If the Gods be kind, in addition to the staggeringly obscene amounts of money I’ve made and can make from this series (I own 15%), we may be able to get something rewarding before your now-bleary eyes. I’ll keep reporting on this one, too.
Oh, and by the way, as a public service announcement, they’ve pretty well established that color TV sets give off harmful radiations, so if you don’t want your kids coming up with warped chromosomes or their kids being born with three heads, I suggest you not sit up close to the color box, and keep the viewing to a minimum.
Which, considering the clams currently being hacked onto the screen, shouldn’t be too hard to manage.
* * * *
26: 25 APRIL 69
If we can forget about white Stetsons for a while, maybe we should talk about The Hero. The Good Guy. What brings me to an examination of the phenomenon of The Hero is a movie-for-TV-intended-as-a-2-hour-pilot I caught on the 17th, on CBS’s Thursday Night Movie. The film was titled U.M.C., which stands for University Medical Center. It is coming on as a continuous series in the Fall. There are few good things to say about the film itself, for—like most medical shows in particular, and most films-for-TV in general—it was a crashing bore.
Correction: it was a plopping bore.
The nominal “star,” a silver-haired gentleman named Richard Bradford, is an iron-jawed type straight out of the Richard Egan mold, and played his part as the noble healer with all the verve of a three-toed sloth. The cameos were so tiny one might more accurately term them intaglios ... Edward G. Robinson said seven lines and spent the rest of the time in a coma; Maurice Evans pontificated two or three times, reminding us what the English language sounds like when spoken properly; Kim Stanley gave her usual excellent but all too brief performance; Kevin McCarthy allowed himself to perform as an attorney in the style of fustion most memorable as having been proffered by Fredric March in Inherit The Wind, a disservice to his considerable talent, and the easy way out insofar as interpretation is concerned. And that about says it.
For the film in particular. But not for the subject of The Hero.
You see, we’re re-entering (it would seem) the doctor cycle. A few years back it was Kildare and Casey and Breaking Point and that other psychiatric series, whatever it was called. They ran their course, and we went through the traditional situation comedy, western and detective/cop cycles. But now, with the networks spasming with a serious case of the Pastores, hoping to cure themselves of the disease of violence by blood-letting and the use of leeches, occupations such as cowboy and cop become untenable on a medium pathologically dedicated to portraying a world in which violence does not exist. So alternate Heroes must be found. Non-violent heroes. Good guys who epitomize drama without ever really getting near the heartmeat of violence that lies at the core of our troubled today.
So what does TV come up with? Again? The doctor.
While I would be the last one to deny that there are bold and dedicated men in the medical profession— even as there must be bold and dedicated plumbers, cabinet-makers, telephone linemen and pharmacists—it strikes me as merely one more indication of television’s paucity of inventiveness that the best they can do is offer us another spate of physicians.
Yeah, sure, doctors are generally considered to be Heroes. They deal in life and death, and I suppose in a network presentation that can read like “high drama”; and since they sweat and struggle for years toward the ultimate goal of saving lives, they are obviously on the side of the angels. One would be a cad to suggest, however obliquely, that medical men are merely more highly-trained plumbers, cabinetmakers, pharmacists, as committed to coining a good buck as they are to the Hippocratic Oath. Yet a professional man is still a professional man, and aside from the inherent drama of dealing with life on the line, a doctor’s life is usually no more compelling or fraught with danger than that of a high-steel construction worker. Physically, I would imagine considerably less.
(I realize this view is tantamount to heresy, not only to the AMA, which has a considerable stake in maintaining the image of the doctor as holier than thou [I anticipate the burning of a Blue Cross on my lawn], but to the even hordier hordes of yiddishe mamas, not the least of whom is mine own, who conceive of no fate for their nubile daughters as glorious as marrying a “doctuh.”)
Where I’m going with all of this is not to a conclusion that medicine men are quacks and should not be portrayed as Heroes. Hell, John Romm, my doctor, not only cured the tendonitis inflicted on me by an over-zealous cop, but he got me off cigarettes, a feat only slightly less miraculous than the mountain giving birth to the mouse. Where I’m going is that TV’s conception of what it takes to be a Hero is slightly myopic. Jeezus, sometimes I have a gift for the ridiculously understated: myopic? Righteous tunnel vision is closer to the truth.
So what alternates do we have for the archetypal Hero? Let’s go down the list, and see how many TV has considered.
Let’s begin with the one I mentioned en passant a moment ago: the construction worker. Does anyone here recall a very groovy series that ran for one season in 1959, starring Keenan Wynn and Bob Mathias as The Troubleshooters? Despite some serious handicaps, not the least of which was Mathias (who, oddly enough, had much in common with “Dr.” Richard Bradford, acting-wise), the show was filled with high adventure, danger, and managed to convey, within the parameters of hokey TV melodrama, the sheer wonder of men who literally go out to change the face of the earth. The old Empire series had a segment in which Frank Gorshin portrayed a “fire dancer,” a troubleshooter called in to extinguish a wildcat oil well fire. Naked City did one of its most memorable shows about the Amerindian high steel workers in Manhattan. Non-violent in the Pastore sense of the term, the lives of builders and shapers can be infinitely more compelling than those lives lived in sterile white corridors.
Or how about the men of the W.H.O., the World Health Organization, if we must have doctors. Treating patients in jungles and backward, emerging nations, with all the political and ethnic conflicts attendant, must provide more pathos than that in a University Medical Center.
What about cross-country truck drivers, a la The Price of Tomatoes? The men who push freight across this continent are heroes, too. They keep it all happening. What about Peace Corps volunteers? Or news photographers out on the line? Or men like Chuck Dederich, founder of Synanon ... Dr. Spock...committed teachers in ghetto schools ... diplomatic couriers ... social workers. About this last: George C. Scott and Susskind had the right idea. East Side, West Side may have been depressing most of the time, may have turned off the scuttlefish out in the Great American Heartland, but by Christ they dealt with depressing realities, the kind of realities the scuttlefish choose to believe don’t exist in their soft pink-and-white bunny rabbit world of Green Acres.
How about explorers? No one can deny that a series about Marco Polo or Lewis & Clark or Cortez is built-in with more heroics than that of a modern physician. And while I know I’m not only building dream castles, but trying to furnish them and move in first of the month, a series about a student militant, a series about a Congressional investigator, a series about a civil rights worker, or a series about a university psychiatrist experimenting with LSD, would be genuine stoppers. And if you choose to take any other position than that of the Center or the Right, these are Heroes in the truest sense of the world.
The bottom line, I suppose, is that TV’s conception of what it takes to be a Hero is—like much of the posturing on television—intellectually fifty years out-of-date. TV, in declaring heroes only those who work at occupations considered noble by the mass, remain safe, and remain bland. Doctors, veterinarians, spies for the U.S., cops, people in the world of show biz (That Girl), or just-plain-folks (Mayberry, RFD, Beverly Hillbillies, The Good guys) are certainly non-violent, inoffensive and safe, but they are also predictable, bland and rapidly boring.
The Hero is not the man who looks good while risking nothing. Which is why Hogan’s Heroes has no Heroes in it. The Hero is the man who can stand to lose something heavy is he commits himself.
And what I suppose I’m getting at is that in these times of fence-sitters, hemmers and hawers, bet-hedgers, what we need to see on our TV screens are men and women who have something at stake, something to lose, something that can ennoble them for us. We need guidelines today, and those guidelines are hardly evident in fare such as Here Come The Brides.
A doctor is a good thing, I can dig it. But he sure as hell isn’t my idea of a man in a position to become a Hero. His job isn’t dangerous enough. Not nearly as dangerous as, say, that of a television critic.
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27: 2 MAY 69
The only no-talent “second lead” in the history of television series programming who crossed them up and turned out to be a star was Bill Cosby. That was because Culp was a beautiful loving cat who shared what he knew about acting, and Cosby’d be the first to confirm that.
But can you dig all the bright young jocks bopping around the screen these days, who simply don’t cut it, and never will, because they’re overshadowed by name leads with more clout lost or strayed then these kids will ever show? The roster goes something like this:
Kent McCord runs second to Martin Milner. Richard Dawson places to Bob Crane. Gary Conway, Don Marshall and Don Matheson look sick next to Kurt Kasznar; William Reynolds loses (again), this time to Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.; James Stacy bulks tiny beside Andrew Duggan. David Soul and Bobby Sherman don’t have a prayer next to Robert Brown. Don Mitchell grows faceless in the face of Raymond Burr. Ben Murphy (who?) and Robert Stack. Stephen Young and Carl Betz.
And every season they roll in more of these faceless devils who will wither in the television wasteland, hoping the “exposure” will catapault them, if not to stardom, at least to solvency. And every year they go the way of Don Quine. It would be sad, if it weren’t so predictable.
The only one currently swinging (and off he goes with new year cancellation) is Otis Young, who gives Don Murray a helluva fight for center stage. (Does it strike anyone as fine and interesting that the two big new talents to emerge from the box in the last few years are both black?)
There’s an obvious reason why these cats are doomed, of course. Aside from their general lack of charisma and/or talent. It is that their roles are superfluous. Like Ben Murphy on the Stack segments of The Name Of The Game, they are jacked-in by format writers as a sop to “the younger audience.” They are supposed to be identification for the youth set who can’t see themselves in Walter Brennan or Lorne Green. They are patent shucks like Luci and Desi Jr., brought in to revitalize saggers like Lucy, or they are calculated vote-getters like The Monkees (the single greatest hype of this decade). And they fail ninety-nine per cent of the time.
They fail to grab the younger viewer. They fail to up the ratings. They fail dramatically and they fail personally. Because they are like a second nose. They can sniff, but they don’t really blow.
Instead of creating series ideas that require the services of younger actors who have the steam and the muscle to carry a series, the networks either slip us fading swordsmen like Mike Connors, Darren McGavin and Robert Wagner (who have some redeeming qualities but become embarrassing hustling teenie-boppers on-screen)—or they put all the meat of the shows on the Gene Barrys, the Robert Stacks, the James Whitmores, and let the Enzo Cerusicos flounder along behind playing straight men.
Writers are instructed that the subsidiary parts must not become dominant or the star will get uptight, directors instinctively shoot the two-shots so the star has the better angle, studio protocol forms itself so the star has a parking space beside the sound stage and the second lead parks outside with the secretaries and the guys in the payroll department.
If you get the impression I’m lamenting for these poor nameless ones, you have glommed the wrong impression. They get paid a helluva lot more than school teachers, postmen, sanitation truck workers and research chemists—occupations I consider substantially more noble than that of poseur—so no one should cry for them. Their greatest loss is that they will be denied the inordinate amounts of egoboo and adoration they often need to sustain them in lives of hapless shamming.
What I am lamenting is the crippling of often intelligently-conceived series ideas by the addition of the second nose, the second lead.
They are unnecessary. But unlike the auk, the dodo and the passenger pigeon, though their time is long past as a species, they have not been allowed to slip quietly, like the saurians, into the primordial slime. Though their function is no longer valid, they have not been excised like the appendix of the vestigial tail.
I cannot conceive of the perpetuation of this archaic thinking as a result of inadequate acting talent on the Star or potential star level. It would appear that the networks erroneously believe they must still offer the viewer a Doris Day or an Eve Arden or a Barbara Stanwyck to get the audience, when Patrick MacNee and Diana Rigg have shown this is clearly untrue.
For rather than opt for inventiveness and daring and fresh conceptualizations in their series proposals, the networks continue to choose the safe path, ignoring the lessons of Cosby, Otis Young, Leonard Nimoy and Martin Landau. And condemning more and more young actors every year to stunted careers that inevitably end in failure.
This is merely one more facet of a policy toward new programming that is so encysted with its own past, even the possibility of new directions seems impossible. It is a system whose existence is seemingly validated only by the inertia that keeps it running. A self-fulfilling prophecy, a laocoonian serpent swallowing its own tail, a moebius cliche of endless repetitions. Last week I dealt with another element of this problem in noting that we go from cycle to cycle—cops to westerns to medical shows to situation comedies and back to cops—and this week a look at all those second leads. Walking gravestone markers. Carrying the seeds of their own destruction in the roles they accept. Which are, I guess, better than no roles at all, but guaranteed to cut them off at the hips in mid-season.
The answer, of course, is an obvious one. In two parts. The first is selecting actors with undeniable talent, not merely Barbie and Ken dolls who look good in their Harry Cherry suits. Talent cannot be ignored. We’ve had too many TV actors pass on to other, larger areas, to ever accept the canard that TV is solely the province of the mediocre. Steve McQueen, Leonard Nimoy, James Garner, Robert Culp, Dick Van Dyke, Bill Cosby, Mia Farrow—all of them came from television and all of them proved their worth by using their special talent to surmount mediocre material handed to them.
But the second part of the answer is the more important. Conceptualization.