Santos is a classic example of the bread-and-circuses Quisling whose lust for the buck (or in this case new cruzeiros) forces him into such public positions as the one expressed in a recent interview:
“But what do you want me to do? A certain publication criticizes me. It wants me to present programs of a higher level. But TV is a fierce battle to capture the audience. There’s no middle-ground, either you have an audience or you don’t. Who doesn’t, disappears.
“I was always crazy about money.
“There are certain programs which are bad for my image. For instance, the City Against City show. When one of the cities loses, all of the people from that city turn against me. Even though it’s prejudicial to me, it can’t be taken off the air because of its popularity with the viewers. Because of this, many shows which were considered horrible—and I agree that they were— couldn’t be taken off.
“I’m the most optimistic guy in Brazil.”
His optimism is based, probably, on his position as a 34-year-old millionaire (in Brazilian terms) with more side-interests than Senator Dodd.
Santos is only one of many manifestations of the corrupt and debased nature of Brazilian television. Even as the Roman -arena and stock car races have kept the groundlings too busy being entertained to know their heads are being turned around by their governments, television has been turned to this most odious of uses.
Telethons on which physical deformities and terminal cases have been exhibited as grand guignol works of art.
News reports filtered, laundered, managed and castrated by such government agencies (horrifying object-lessons to those among you who think Yanqui TV ought to be government overseen) as the IBOPE, the Brazilian Institute of Public Opinion and Statistics. News reports that come on almost simultaneously on every radio station and TV channel, each one a carbon copy of the others.
Frequent news blackouts, when things get sticky ... such as now.
No documentaries, save travel talks.
The deification of the absurdly banal in such comedy soap operas as The Trapp Family. You think our daytime soapers are bad. They are as a cold sore to mouth cancer when compared to their Brazilian counterparts.
A level of programming guaranteed to provide no thought, no controversy, no enrichment.
By aiding and abetting the Brazilian Establishment in keeping the illiterate mass desensitized to the winds of revolution and change sweeping over the world, by substituting cheap slapstick for social involvement, by permitting the nationwide audience to believe it cannot rise above its station in life, television in Brazil has become a more effective riot control weapon than tanks or mace or troops.
It seems almost as though Brazilian video (divided between TV Globo and TV Tupi) is engaged in a program of barring the way to the twentieth century for the common man. The twentieth? Hell, consider the twenty-first century! And consider how Brazilian television handled the Apollo 11 moonflight:
No preparations were made to utilize the facilities of INTELSAT properly. Where almost every other nation in the world had been rigging its equipment and schedules for a month before the lunar landing, Brazilian television went on its imbecilic way with its usual belly-laugh programming, and on the day of the landing, beginning in the early afternoon, rather than showing what was happening at Houston, rather than relaying information as accurately as every other televising country was doing, Brazilian TV broadcast the microcephalic antics of Silvio Santos followed immediately by the loon Chacrinha.
Kindly note these were special programs, cut specifically for that day. It was as if on the day of JFK’s funeral, CBS and NBC had prepared two special three-hour segments of Green Acres or Queen For A Day to be shown in lieu of the grim proceedings. Granted, it makes life a little more smiley, but it could hardly be construed as serving the needs of the viewing audience by keeping them in touch with the world around them.
And if it seems this is a gringo’s carping about a state of affairs that does not bother the Brazilian people, I offer the following excerpt from the Jornol Do Brasil of 23 July:
“Instead of torturing the public with their foolish exuberance, Rio stations could have easily filled in the remaining time, while waiting for the heroic arrival of the 5rst man on the moon, with really interesting news such as that sent minute-by-minute over the teletype.
“But ... it was necessary to give a little local color to the transmissions, and at the precise moment in which man was entering a new era, Rio TV viewers were informed that the presence of a man on the moon would not alter the tides, nor would it change women’s menstrual cycles. While everyone held his breath in expectation of the unequaled feat, the composers of Mangueira (a samba school were asked if they would agree to have a parade for the moon-men.”
O Pasquim, in its July issue, related an even more incredible state-of-affairs during the moonshot. It seems that rather than having any intelligent and accredited commentators onscreen during the mission, the “keep the people uninformed” program was pursued by having an inept commentator named Hilton Gomes interview a “scientist” named Heron Domingues and a “philosopher” named Rubens Amaral, who opened their stint by shaking hands and taking credit for man’s arrival on Luna.
(What follows is excerpted intact, translated from the Portuguese.)
“I want to give you my heartiest congratulations for this magnificent feat,” Heron Domingues said smiling.
“But this would have been impossible without your collaboration,” replied Rubens Amaral, with false modesty.
“The fact is,” observed Heron, “that the public understands our efforts.”
“And has been telephoning constantly,” interrupted Amaral, “in a show of solidarity for our work.”
(If you, gentle reader, are shaking your head in righteous confusion, don’t feel like the Lone Ranger.)
(Then followed a fifteen-point resume of all the asinine and inept and downright scientifically inaccurate remarks made by these three ding-dongs. I’ll only repeat a few here . . . they’re sufficient to boggle the mind.)
(Remember: these are the two “experts” selected, presumably, from the cream of Brazilian intelligentsia, to inform the folk of what was going down. Or up.)
“The temperature at the moment is 150 degrees centigrade—we don’t know if this is above or below zero.” (Domingues)
“In the right leg of Armstrong’s spacesuit is a sample of Lunar soil, which is different from ours.” (Amaral)
“The man won’t leave any footprints on the moon.” (Domingues.)
“Armstrong is a cameraman, or shall we say, one of our television colleagues?” (Gomes)
“We’ve just gone to the window to check, and the moon really is a long way off.” (Gomes and/or Amaral)
“There exists two hypotheses about the Luna-5: one ridiculous and the other absurd.” (Domingues)
“Really ... interesting.” (Amaral in a rare moment of lucidity.)
“The respiration of the Americans is throbbing.” (Amaral, brilliantly translating NASA’s information that “the heartbeats had quickened.”)
“Without the attention and kindness of our TV viewers, this great feat would have been impossible.” O Pasquim commented on this one: “It’s interesting to note that he didn’t reveal the exact way in which TV viewers helped. According to reliable sources, it was by means of prayers.”)
At last report, Santos, Chaerinha, Gomes, Amaral and Domingues were being sought by an outraged and finally-uprisen Brazilian populace, to star in a new TV series called Biggest Asshole On The Moon. Paulistas and cariocas were placing bets in their respective cities to see which one of these estimable pawns of the establishment would make the loudest squeal as he was fired from a giant cannon at the moon. Which really is a long way off.
* * * *
40: 26 SEPTEMBER 69
This week another shower of goodies. They ran the banned Smothers Brothers show on KTTV; I caught an even half-dozen of the new shows in debut performances; there were two important specials I want to gibber about—Woody Allen and The Battered Child—and it’ll probably all slop over to next week’s installment, but that’s what I’m into, so don’t wander too far.
The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour that CBS censored into the relative oblivion of independent airing last April 6th was viewed on something over eighty stations nationally, Wednesday, September 10th.
After all the foofaraw about how obscene it was, after CBS, martinet position about “defending American morality,” the show came as something of a letdown. Artistically, it was far from the best SmoBro product, and objectively, it was light-years away from their most controversial. The plain fact—horrifyingly obvious considered in the context of the total show—is that CBS was chickenshit frightened of Senator Pastore. There was nothing else on the show even remotely controversial. Oh sure, there was a pseudo-Nelson Eddy/Jeanette MacDonald duet between Tommy Smothers and Nancy Wilson, but it was in painfully good taste, and even accepting for an instant the shuck offered by CBS that their southern affiliates would have dropped the show for that duet, it would take someone who had been oblivious to the black/white things the southern stations have been showing, since I Spy, to believe it for a moment.
No, what that banned segment shows us, showed all of the country, was that not only are the network potentates a gaggle of cringing, petrified, spineless twerps, they are ripe patsys for extortion and blackmail. Pastore is the blackmailer—a power-mad little Caesar with the Monkey Trial morality of a troglodyte—and CBS was his willing victim this time.
And just what element of the SmoBro show was it that held CBS in such quivering thrall? Was it Tommy’s unclothed penis? Was it a full-face scene from Oh, Calcutta? Was it Kate Smith going down on a chacma baboon? Hell no, it was merely Dan Rowan mealy-mouthing whether or not to give the Fickle Finger of Fate Award to Senator John Pastore, that’s what it was.
As blatant and mind-croggling an example of personal censorship as we have ever witnessed on network television. Whether Pastore actually saw the tape of the show and blew heavy about it, or CBS just pre-censored itself, the crime was revolting, as gutless, as unethical as even the dimmest, dumbest viewer could desire. CBS saying the show was censored for “moral” reasons is about as valid as Lester Maddox refusing to integrate on grounds of “states’ rights.” It is another example of the moral corruption of our politicians, not of our television personalities.
Now that we’ve seen it—not just a few TV critics and newspapermen, none of whom, incidentally, had the balls to speak up since April 6th, but all of us—what will CBS do? Knowing we know them for what they are. Knowing their pat little up-the-line obfuscations won’t play any more. Knowing we have proof they don’t give a damn about serving the public interest. Knowing we understand the contempt they have for us, the ease with which they’ll sell us out. What are they going to do, those fatcat heroes, those shadow entrepreneurs, those lizard-blood killers of every truth, every hope, every dream? Do we get mad, CBS? Do we want to kill? Oh, babies, you’ll never know. You’ll never suspect, but let me tell you bow deep it runs, what you’re building, where it’s going to go, till the day they come after you at your tower in CBS Television City. Like this:
I had an uncle who fought in WWII. He was attached to an English, commando unit in Europe. One time when he was sick with a fever, years later, I was tending him, and he thought he was going to die, and he told me the worst thing he’d ever done. It was bitter cold, one winter during the war, and his unit came crawling through the night, and they found a German battalion bivouacked in a forest. It was so numbing cold, the men had doubled up together, sleeping hugging each other in sleeping bags to keep from freezing to death. My uncle, and his unit, crawled in, moved among them, and carefully cut the throats of one man per sleeping bag. Not both of them ... only one. To leave all those poor fuckers to wake up the next morning hugging corpses with an extra mouth. It was a terrible thing; my uncle couldn’t live with it; it killed him, butchered his soul.
That’s how deep the hate runs, CBS. Keep fucking around.
* * * *
Look, CBS, I’m talking to you like a Dutch Uncle. You see, what’s happening is that we’re building a psychopathic society. Everybody lies, everybody sells out, everybody stinks of hate. We’re all being driven mad as mudflys, CBS. The hatreds are running deep, core-deep. How much longer do you think we can tolerate our guardians of the public trust, dudes like you, who corrupt and bastardize that trust? How much longer can we be expected to see you contributing to the creation of that mad world, without taking the lynch rope in our hands? The rope, or the razor. Mme. DeFarge lives in all of us, CBS, and you’re summoning her forth. By your corrupt acts we see that only corruption pays off. By your dishonesty we see that only dishonesty—or the razor—offer hope of cessation to this madness, one way or the other.
I’m sorry I yelled at you, CBS. No ... no, I’m not; not really. Perhaps I should have spoken softly, to win your mind, to convince you of the sincerity and immediacy of what the people are saying. Perhaps this time I should have spoken softly; I’m sorry. But tell me, CBS, at what point do all the soft voices stop and you begin to hear the terrible snick-snick of Mme. DeFarge’s needles?
* * * *
Now, if the typesetter left a two-line space between that last line and this one, indicating I want to change the subject, we can go on to what I hope (if I live long enough) will be an annual feature of this snake pit:
* * * *
ELLISON’S MINUTE CAPSULE REVIEWS OF NEW SHOWS!!!
The Bill Cosby Show: Missed it the first week, but caught it last Sunday. Seemed awfully situation-comedy to me, but funny. Cosby learned well from Culp, and brought the best of his standup stuff with him. I’m sorta disappointed to see it played so White (Cosby might as easily be Jim Nabors for all the difference in tone), with all that great specialized background Cosby has, but I’m willing to wait a few weeks and see if Cos can’t work in a tot more soul.
The Bold Ones: The New Doctors on Sunday the 14th didn’t show me much: John Saxon could have phoned in his part, E.G. Marshall wasn’t onscreen enough to get his teeth into it, David Hartman tried his best but he lacks a certain charisma, and for the better part of the hour all we had to contend with was Pat Hingle doing something that resembled, in thespic terms, an Amerindian rain dance. The script was a slightly slicker version of Ben Casey or The Doctors and, in all, it seemed as though I was watching TV 1963 again. On the 20th, NBC fired the second stage of their rocket with The New Lawyers and things perked up. James Farentino and Joe Campanella (aided as minimally as possible by Burl Ives) did their turn in a script that started out to say something important about the disregard of some police for the constitutional rights of those they arrest... and went rapidly downhill into banality and cop-out a la Universal Studios’ determined effort never to produce an honest drama. Steve Ihnat played well, as usual, and that, coupled with the verve of Campanella and Farentino, gave me some hope that perhaps this tripartite series might not be a total dud. Actually, I’m waiting to see Leslie Nielsen and Hari Rhodes in the law enforcement third of the project. Hari is a friend, see, and he knows I’ll expect him to start pushing for some heavy scripts. Because if he doesn’t, he knows he’ll get the same shit from me that I get from him every time they run The Oscar.
My World—And Welcome To It: Don’t miss it. A nice piece of work with William Windom playing James Thurber. Animation, shtick, good acting, genuine comedy, a real addition to the scrawny roster of worthwhile viewing. If only they’d scrap that bloody laugh track!
The Debbie Reynolds Show: As many points as I have to give Miss Reynolds for quitting the show when NBC crossed her and ran a cancerstick ad, I cannot tell a lie. I managed to watch that awful first show for four minutes and twenty seconds (by my Accutron) before I fled shrieking. One can only wonder if Miss Reynolds caught the show herself. One remembers the Tammy Grimes Graf Zeppelin of some years ago. It was too bad Tammy didn’t hate cigarettes.
The Courtship of Eddie’s Father: is also fine. Producer Jimmy Komack, despite his stated reluctance to even take a visible part in the proceedings (many months ago), steals any part of the show in which he appears. What he doesn’t grab, this kid, Eddie, played by Brandon Cruz, manages to cop. And so my award for bravest man in the world goes to Bill Bixby, who plays the “lead.” Any man who’ll toss himself onto a screen with leggy, foxy chicks, a tiny Japanese lady, Jimmy Komack and a kid actor, has got to be the most secure, bravest actor in town.
Bracken’s World: Oh, this one, friends, I gotta do an entire column on. Suffice it to say that a man who wrote a movie as shitty as The Oscar is the only one in a position to comment on Bracken’s World. I know it’s going to be tough sitting through it, gang, but I recommend that you not miss it. It has the evil fascination of rotting orchids. And smells about the same. More of this cesspool at a later date. I’m going to let them expose their running sores and pustules a while longer before I lance them proper.
* * * *
Yeah, just as I thought. No room to tell you how good and groovy Woody Allen was, or how uptight The Battered Child put me, or even about the ABC News Special on Ethics In Government, which was really chilling. But I’ll be here again next week, so maybe we can rap about them then.
Oh ... yeah ... I almost forgot. For those of you who might have caught your charismatic commentator on John Barbour’s Sunday night show (KTTV, Channel 11) last week, who called to tell me they wished Mr. Barbour had spent more time with me and talked about something more important than Western movies, rest easily. Mr. Barbour and his producer have indicated they want me to return shortly, and I will take such an opportunity to say onscreen a few of the things I’ve been saying on your behalf in these columns.
One never knows. I might attract a following, become a “TV personality,” talk about revolution and getting it all together ... and get shot in the head by a True American.
Stay tuned. History may swallow all of us as we hone our razors.
Is that the snick of needles I hear?
* * * *
41: 3 OCTOBER 69
This is a special week for me. It’s the first anniversary of this column. The 42nd installment. [Through a fluke of rearrangement to maintain continuity, it is the 41st column in this book; but it was the 42nd I wrote. —HE] And what grinds me most is that it isn’t the 52nd. I missed ten weeks worth of columns; eight times my fault, twice the Freep’s. In this year, since Art Kunkin collared me at that party and said write something for us, a great many things have gone down. For me, for you, for television, for the country, and for the world.
We’re on the moon now, but we’re still in Viet Nam. Julian Bond got elected, but so did Nixon. Kurt Vonnegut had a best-seller, but so did Jaqueline Susann. 60 Minutes and First Tuesday got some things said, but we lost the Smothers Brothers. Che turned out a dud, but Easy Rider came out of nowhere. Reddin left the law, but we got him on the tiny screen. There were plenty of protests, but very few riots.
Don’t ask me if things got better this last year, because I don’t think so. I went down to the Valley, to a high school, to talk to some kids about . . . stuff, you know . . . what seems to be happening . . . trying to understand, and like that . . . and while I was inside the school, some other kids busted my car and swiped my tapes. What do you say? How pissed-off you get, how upset, how ironic? Very little of it makes any sense. The nits behind Operation Intercept actually think they’re going to kill off marijuana, when everybody with a grain of sense knows all they’re doing is setting up a Prohibition scene so grass becomes big enough business for the Cosa Nostra to add it to its roster of enterprises. How do you break through their fifty years of conditioning? How do you get them to tell a little truth, cop to the fact that everybody’s turning on, that maybe it’s not devil-weed, but only as good or bad as booze? The military spend our money, kill our friends, fuck up our country, and all in the name of keeping us safe from the wrong bogey man. We’ve gone so far into the bag of killing trust and honesty among one another that we’re like Cro-Magnons again. We have to approach one another with our hands outstretched, palms up. We have to show we’re weaponless. And still it doesn’t help. Why do we continue to hurt one another? Why do we persist in lying? And why do we stand by and let other men poison our world?
So don’t ask me if the year has totaled out at profit or loss. I don’t know. The only thing I know is that I’ll be here this year, too, and I’ll keep trying to make some sense out of it. Entertainment is only part of what I’m into here, and I have to thank those of you who loved or hated what I did last year sufficiently to comment on it. And I ask this of you: keep me honest. Copping out gets easier and easier, the higher the stakes get.
Now let’s get to work this week.
* * * *
ELLISON’S CAPSULE REVIEWS OF NEW SHOWS!!! (Part 2).
To Rome with Love: returns John Forsythe to the ranks of situation comedy half-hours. He’s not a bachelor father in this incarnation, he’s a widowed father, with three little girls, one of whom, played by Joyce Menges, is the nicest looking chick to come on the tube since Anjanette Comer made it. But even Miss Menges’ sensual face isn’t enough to save this paucive little half hour from falling down the saccharine tube. There are so many poignant moments of Forsythe and his kids looking woebegone because “Mommy” is dead, one begins to suspect she croaked from familial diabetes. If this series were to fold tonight, it would have passed with no one’s having known it was there.
The Bold Ones: The third section of Universal’s acromegalic rotating-series (doctors, lawyers and police) was aired last Sunday, with Leslie Nielsen as a Deputy Police Chief and Hari Rhodes as the DA. Jesus, did it stink! The script had three names on it, and in case you need a rule-of-thumb, gentle readers, for knowing when a script is going to stink on ice, use that. More than two names (and usually only one) means it was hashed and re-hashed by every sticky-finger on the lot, and what you’ll be getting is watered-down nothing. Instant vacuum.
The female lead was a lady named Lorraine Gary, whose marital relation to Universal’s top attorney causes pause to wonder on what grounds she was tapped for the part, because she recited every sententious line of that gawdawful script in Capital Letters As Though They Should Have Been Carved On Mt. Rushmore. But she was only the foremost of many downers that show sported. Hari Rhodes was awkward, overacted and generally a talent wasted. Not to be undone, Nielsen, who is as competent and professional a stock artist as Universal has kicking around out there, leaned into his role with such affectated ferociousness that one expected him to have a coronary at any moment. The plot was straight out of 1939 Black Mask magazines, and I swear the shades of Hammett and Woolrich and Chandler must have been thrashing in their graves. I understand that this section, originally slated for eight productions, even as the Doctors and Lawyers were slated for eight, has been cut back to six. It’s amazing how the Universal thugs will never cop to their own inadequacies, but cut off the field troops as if it was their fault the ambush failed.
Music Scene: is my pick as the best of the new. The tone and tempo of the potpourri is strongly reminiscent of Barry Shear’s well-remembered The Lively Ones of some years ago. By pre-taping all sorts of people doing all sorts of pop numbers, and then selecting from the backlog as one or another talent hits the charts, Music Scene can roll with the on-the-moment top dogs, and provide a running compendium of the best in current music. There are six bright and funny young people— notable among them is David Steinberg, who grows more infectious with each appearance on TV—who fill the interstices between numbers with SmoBro-like one-liners and shticks that are so hip they must go over the heads of the septuagenarians in the Great American Heartland. The sets and innovative thinking used to showcase the groups and individuals are superlative. Three Dog Night did Easy To Be Hard against a background of wrecked automobiles, and the eerie feeling it produced made, that song (one I’m not especially fond of) seem, for the first time, meaningful. James Brown did a turn that was also incredibly effective and even the taped melange of John and Yoko (who has got to be the ugliest chick in the civilized world) moved at a pongy pace. The show is intelligent, lively, colorful, something meaty on which to chew. And it is a beautiful lead-in for young viewers to:
The New People: which got off on the right foot behind some bravura acting by Richard Kiley as the only adult left (temporarily) alive on a downed airliner full of young people. The show employed the very best tenets of dramatic writing to say what it had to say about Our Times while not sacrificing action. That it slipped, momentarily, into Preachment can be chalked up to Rod Serling’s script, and it’s a bad habit Mr. Serling has not yet learned to control. But one we can tolerate when he manages to perform his craft so well in all other particulars. This is a series to watch. It is potentially solid gold.
I missed The Brady Bunch, the Durante/Lennon Sisters Hour, Bronson again, Room 222 and a few others, but I’ll be falling in on them this week, so look for them next time.
I did manage to see a few minutes of the Bob Hope special, which was glutted with more unfunny comedians than the world has witnessed since Quantrell was working. It only served to convince me more strongly that any number of Grand Old Men (some of whom are younger than me) ought to be confined to Vegas or Friars dinners.
Understand Debbie is back with her show, and inside information has it that her leaving the program because they ran a cigarette ad was strictly a hype. It seems they cut her salary somewhere during the summer, and she just walked to get them to up her again. Be interesting to see what would happen if they Viceroy’d her again, at the new rate.
* * * *
42: 10 OCTOBER 69
So early in the new season, and already we have a name for it. Each year’s heaviest tone has been discernible in the most prominent product. The year of the hardcase cowpokes, the year of the doctors who struggle for humanity, the year of the witless situation comedies...last year was the year of the widows, white and black.
And this year is the Time of the Plastic People.
A parade of silly, coiffed and cuffed templates; a smoothly-performed pavane of slick, empty clichés; a ghastly rigadoon of obstinately endless phoniness so corrupt it climbs to a new video pinnacle.
Purple is as purple does.
The punishment fits the crime.
Purple plastic people push me to puce and paucive pejoratives. They also make me puke.
But that’s another vessel of vomit.
(You’ll pardon me. Occasionally the Writer takes over from the Critic and the sound of me own silver words gets a tot too much. It usually happens in columns wherein I am discussing the craft of writing. Which is what this is.) (On second thought, make that The Craft Of Writing. If I’m going to be pretentious, I might as well go all the way.)
Anyhow, the problem is ,..
(Hold it. Make that THE CRAFT OF WRITING. I’m feeling festooned with power. It means I’ll probably get actively abusive.)
The problem is Bracken’s World and Harold Robbins’ “The Survivors” as an emerging species. Bracken’s World is still festering, as I indicated two weeks ago, and I’m summoning up firepower. Gonna let’m run for another coupla weeks so all you folks can dig’m in their full flower. Then, when I flit them, you can’t say I didn’t give them a chance to mend their ways, even if it did mean scrapping the series and putting all those nice young kids back on unemployment.
In any case, the evil that Bracken’s World manifests is also redolently obvious on ABC’s The Survivors, a multi-million dollar gawdawful cobbled-up by the Albert Payson Terhune of the Garbage Novel, Harold Robbins. Since the one rivals the other for greasiness, I’ll deal here with Robbins, with ABC, with The Survivors and with the taste of the American Scuttlefish. Those who survive may consider they’ve won a merit badge.
Mr. Robbins, one of the more artful dodgers of our time, pulled a little fast ramadoola on Elton Rule and the ABC brain dancers, and using the same technique he employed to hustle Trident Press into an enormous contract for The Adventurers on the basis of only a title, he angered his little pixie way into their exchequer with the title The Survivors.
There’s no point going into the horrors and hectics that pursued this abomination on its pestiferous path from Robbins’ skull to the tiny screen ... the loss of one producer after another (until they settled on Walter Doniger, the whizzer who gave us Peyton Place)...the internecine warfare between the “stars” ... the rewrites of the rewrites of the rewritten scripts...the money flushed down the gilded toilet ... no point. Let’s just dwell on the finished product that debuted on Monday night, September the 29th.
The product is the same old product. Soap opera.
Except Robbins’ product has enzymes.
Newly-activated, sparkling with green and blue and gold spots. Before your eyes. The green is from moral rot, the blue is the alleged better blood of the jet set, and the gold is fool’s.
Advertised as a “television novel,” The Survivors is simply daytime tearjerking without even a nod toward verisimilitude. It’s the downhome story of the Carlyle family: simple, good-hearted billionaires who lead lives like you or I. Septuageneric Daddy owns his own bank and is shtupping his thirtyish secretary on the side. Indolent playboy son races at Monaco, quits three laps short of winning to chase a piece of tail, and gets himself and his Lear jet hijacked to a Latin duchy in the throes of revolution. Daughter is a clotheshorse with an illegitimate son who’s married to an elegant embezzler notable for having clipped Daddy to the tinkly tune of seven hundred grand.
Why go on? Add the dimension of thespic luminaries like Ralph Bellamy, Kevin McCarthy, George Hamilton and Lana Turner, and you have the total package. No better or worse than the general sling of slop we get? Is that what you think? Oh, come come, my friends. Just reconsider the cast: Bellamy, McCarthy ... Hamilton and Turner. Two fine actors and two gold lamé loxes whose “acting” ability is so scant it can only be termed amoebic. So why opt for glitterfolk like Hamilton and Turner, chockablocking them with genuine talents like Bellamy and McCarthy, when you have your choice of every fine actress and actor in town?
Because Lana Turner and George Hamilton are intrinsically involved in the myth-world The Survivors tries to tell us is an actuality. Hamilton’s spotty past is well-known, as is Miss Turner’s. They are living, walking, talking symbols of the recherché mode of existence on which this series builds its rationale.
Which brings us to the rotten core of the matter.
Mr. Robbins, whose novels are ennobled by the words dishonest and illiterate, has made a not inconsiderable fortune by proffering to all the scuttlefish living lives of dreariness and encapsulation, a phantom image of a world in which the rich get richer and there are no poorer. A world in which black men do not exist, in which women are fit for little better than consumer consumption on the Tiffany/Cartier level—and having illegitimate babies.. A world in which the pettiest problems become high drama merely because they occur in a red velvet snake pit.
Chromed and rhinestoned, Robbins has marketed a world where everyone is J. Paul Getty or Aristotle Onassis, and considering the lives and hopes of the Average Man would be as unthinkable as one of the Czar’s cossacks worrying which peasant’s cabbage patch he was galloping through. It is a view of the universe that was disgracefully irrational fifty years ago, and is totally out of place in the world of today.
The vapid, incestuous, self-concerned fools who people Robbins’ series are the very people against whom every revolution in the world is directed. The Wall Street bankers who backed Batista against Castro, thereby assisting in driving Fidel into the waiting arms of Communism. The munitions men, the high-rollers, the wastrel playboys, the maudlin women with their overweening concern for their falling breasts and mansion peccadilloes. The blind and the precious. Those to whom creature comforts come before ethic. The emotionally and intellectually de-sensitized. The rhodium-plated ghouls who live off the masses, whose fortunes and perpetuations of fortunes can only be realized when field-laborers are forced to work for 30¢ an hour. These are the contemporary nobility Harold Robbins and his bloated associates at ABC have chosen to offer us as idols. I would be willing to wager the much-belabored network jingoism of “viewer identification” was not mentioned with great frequency when this epic was being assembled. For there is no one in this series with whom to identify. The men are all crippled by their corruptions and intravenous tie-lines to the corrupt power structure; the women are all indolent leeches, living off that same corruption and merely offering their bodies to their men as payment. They are modern courtesans (albeit with that little piece of paper that makes it legal) and their men are little better than cheaphustle 42nd Street johns.
Once again ABC has proved that it will go with “name power” rather than quality. It has swallowed the Robbins shuck—as distasteful as it may be—and convinced itself that what it’s digested is caviar, not guano. It has lied to itself in believing we can’t see that Miss Turner has grown older and more lined without having improved one whit as an actress. (No amount of Lord & Taylor clothes will cover it.) It has lied to itself in believing that we will accept a paragon of moral and ethical turpitude like no-neck George Hamilton as a model of Concerned Humanity. (As an actor, he is the compleat gigolo.) It has lied to itself in believing that a world about to commit suicide is interested or enriched by a weekly viewing of the very societal elements most responsible for anguish in our times; and that by gilding them, we will accept their right to rule.
If the series was at least an accurate portrait of that materialistic, destructive coterie of thieves and killers, it would serve as an object-lesson—-perhaps to delineate the face of the enemy for the younger generation. But ABC has even shied away from that nitty-gritty, and has slapped together every cliche and hack theme of a hundred Robbins and Robbins-imitated novels. And what punishment will they be meted for it?
Mr. Robbins will make a billion megabucks, ABC will get it sponsored up the ass and out the gullet, and the peons in the Great American Heartland will accept this as just another affirmation of the impossibility of ever climbing out of the mud.
Troops, they come wearing white-on-white, with diamond cufflinks and plastic hair. And if this series inspires you to any feelings but a desire to tear down their towers, then you are already lost.
I do not think it mere chance that Robbins, in the fullness of his contempt for the true human condition, chose the name of this series. If he, and ABC, and the people whose shadow-images are played by these actors, have their way, they indeed will be the only survivors.
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43: 17 OCTOBER 69
“the common man”: part i
I cannot remember being more disturbed or depressed about something I’d seen on television than what concerns me this week. So unraveling and serious is it, I feel, that I don’t think there’ll be much ranting or pyrotechnics. You can usually tell when I’m genuinely bent out of shape; I get very quiet.
Helen McKenna, a reader of this column from San Diego, sent me a carbon of a “letter of concern” she’d written to ABC, NBC and CBS. Her concern stemmed from an article in the September 27 issue of TV Guide. The article, by Edith Efron, was titled The “Silent Majority” Comes Into Focus. It was another in TV Guide’s more-or-less continuing series of reassurances to the Common Man in its readership that all the unpleasant things happening in this country will pass, that this craziness stemming from longhairs and unruly adolescents is essentially unimportant, that the Common Man will prevail, as he always has in the past.
It was a he, of course; an elaborate lie as distasteful to those of us who know it will not pass, who see those “America—Love It or Leave It” bumper stickers and fear their undercurrent inferences, as TV Guide’s wretched editorial vindication of the CBS cancellation of the Smothers Brothers. TV Guide is edited out of Radnor, Pennsylvania and that is a small town where the thunder of a world in upheaval reverberates back merely as a laugh-track gone slightly out-of-synch.
Miss McKenna’s letter, a small moan for nobility in a land sadly lacking in same, came three days after I’d seen the two hours of television which so frighten and shake me this installment. They seemed to tie in together so well, I would like to address this column to Miss McKenna and all the Helen McKennas who know our time is running out, that we have come to the brink of nightmare and must find new answers or perish in our own poisons.
I am glad she did not see the program I’m about to discuss, for had she, she would have known (as I now know) that Miss Efron and TV Guide well understood the audience they were addressing with their perpetuations of the lies that basically America is sound at the grass roots, that the Common Man, like the Fifth Cavalry in a late late show western, will rush to save us at the final desperate stroke of midnight.
The show aired over KCET Channel 28, the educational channel, on Friday, October 3rd. It was The David Susskind Show and it was titled “The White Middle Class.” In two hours of gut-level conversation, Mr. Susskind gave a forum to five typical, average, middle class white Americans. Not rabid Birchers, not hysterical religious fanatics, not insensitive bigots...just five ordinary Common Men. And they revealed themselves to be typically American.
And—dear God, why am I so numb and resigned? —that was the horror of them.
The five men were:
Mike Giordano, 47 years old, from Newark, New Jersey; take-home pay $140 a week as a factory mechanic; net annual income, $8500; father of nine.
Frank Mrak, 44 years old, from Cleveland, Ohio; works in an employment agency and moonlights a second job selling life insurance for a total income of $10,000 annually; he was the subject of a Life piece on the working class.
Paul Corbett, 40 years old, a traveling salesman from Philadelphia; six children, and a net income of $9000 a year. Remember this man.
Vincent De Tanfilis, 41 years old, works for an insurance agency; married, with two children, he lives in Norwalk, Connecticut; he earns between nine and ten thousand dollars per year.
Peter Brady, 30 years old, with five children; a truck driver who lives in Freeport, Long Island, he works as a part-time bartender, and makes between eight and nine thousand dollars a year.
Five sensible men. Rational men who might easily and with no denigration be labeled “pillars of the community.” I saw them as epitomizations of the Common Man. The basic fiber of the American way of life. And so I could set down with absolute accuracy what they said, how they felt, I asked KCET to run the show for me at a private screening. There could be no room for error in this column, and I wanted to set it down just right. So on Monday, October 6th, with a cassette recorder to capture their every word, I sat in a darkened viewing room and lived again that most terrifying two hours with five models of what the bulk of our country considers the Common Man ... the “good” man.
And this is what they said; their words, unedited.
On the subject of welfare: “The most colossal fraud ever perpetrated on this country.” (Giordano) / “They are nothing but a bunch of thieves who want what I worked for. It is not Christian for me to do for people who won’t do for themselves. Paul’s admonition to the Apostles was, ‘If you do not work, you do not eat.’” (Corbett) / “It’s all going into the pockets of those who don’t deserve it, malingerers, crooked politicians. Someone is lining his pockets.” (De Tanfilis) / “They’re stealing from us legally, and they call it welfare.” (Corbett) / “The hard core unemployed can’t cut it. They all want to start at the top. They don’t want to start at the bottom the way I did, the way my father did. We can’t all be bus drivers; some of us have to be passengers. We can’t all be chiefs; we have to be Indians.” (Giordano)
On the subject of Viet Nam, the arms race and money spent by the Pentagon on weaponry: “Seventy-seven billion for armaments? I’m in favor of it, because that’s to support our nation, not to destroy it.” (Corbett) /”I find it alarming that the Russians are expanding their forces while we are decreasing ours.” (Corbett) / “I have absolute faith in the Pentagon. I believe they are the only ones qualified to set their budget. I don’t care if it’s a hundred billion or a hundred and ten billion; I don’t care.” (Mrak) / “I’m against the Viet Nam war, but not as a dove. I’m against it because when I was in World War II I learned that you fight a war to win it; and I’m against the way we’ve been fighting the war ... dragging it out.” (Mrak) / “We should drop the atom bomb.” (Corbett) / “You peaceniks have been around for centuries. The guy who yells peace is the guy who always gets war, but the guy who stands up and says you mess with me and I’ll give you war ... he gets peace.” (Giordano) / referring to a young man with long hair who spoke from the audience:) “Withdraw! Withdraw! You people . . . what’s the matter with winning? I know the people in Washington are continuing the war, so they can soak up the tax dollars . . . and the war could have been won seven years ago ... by getting in there and really fighting!” (De Tanfilis) / “The ones that are prolonging this war are the long-haired brats. Because the government listens to ‘em, and the more they scream the more the war gets on the front pages.” (Brady) / (Corbett asked Susskind if he didn’t think we should have won the war long ago. Susskind said no, he didn’t think we should have been there in the first place. Corbett then said, “I suppose you think we shouldn’t have gone to war against the Nazis, huh?” Susskind said they weren’t comparable situations. And Corbett said:) “Oh, I see, you don’t think Communists are as bad as Nazis.” / (Susskind asked if it might not just be barely possible that the United States had been wrong in entering the war. All five shouted, “No!” as one. And then Corbett said:) “No, sir! If they’re against Communism, they can’t be wrong. You can’t make a deal with the devil. J. Edgar Hoover says it’s a conspiracy to destroy America, therefore it’s evil. It must be stamped out at the roots, even if we have to stamp out all of Russia.” / “There’s too much weaponry. We all ought to sit down and say we’re going to get rid of the super-weapons and just go back to safe weapons.” (Giordano) / “It’s the liberal Mafia that keeps this war from being won.” (Corbett)
It is difficult to proceed, setting down so much jingoism and muddy thinking. On the one hand these men all deplore the high income tax that keeps them working six days a week and leaching all joy from their existences, they deplore the ten per cent surcharge that was instigated by a man they elected, and extended by a second man they elected . . . but on the other hand they find nothing wrong in the bulk of their tax dollar being spent on the Viet Nam war or on military hardware that has been proved either boondoggle or ineffectual before it’s built.
They were, to a man, paranoid. There were conspiracies everywhere. The Black Militant conspiracy. The White Liberal Conspiracy. The Communist Conspiracy. The Bureaucratic Conspiracy. The Conspiracy of the Judiciary. All their troubles stem from poor people on welfare rolls and from “bleeding heart liberals” who steal from them.
These were the opinions, the very words, of the average citizens who make up the bulk of this nation’s population. There were more. Many more statements about the law, about the protest movement, about blacks, about relief and welfare to the aged and infirm, about racial prejudice and integration. They are startling and baldly revealing statements.
They were the thoughts and fears of the Common Man.
My space this issue has run out. There is considerably more that needs to be said here, and more space needed, so I beg your indulgence, and ask that you return here next week for the second part of this study of Who We Are, Who They Are, and the problem of the Common Man.
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44: 25 OCTOBER 69
“the common man”: part II
“Black people just can’t cut it. They don’t have the intellectual ability. Now I know how the Liberal Mafia can discredit somebody who speaks his mind like that. They call him a bigot and a racist, and that makes you no good. It means what you say is no good. But I’m no bigot and I don’t even know what a racist is. What is a racist? Can somebody tell me what a racist is? If you go to the Ivory Coast in Africa, kids of four and five years old are making baskets and learning how to make things. But if you go into North Philadelphia or Bedford-Stuyvesant or Harlem you see the old man sitting around with his bottle of wine, which is paid for by me, the hard-working taxpayer.”
That quotation is actually two men speaking. Paul Corbett, 40, a traveling salesman . . . and Mike Giordano, 47, a factory mechanic. I’ve fused the two quotes together because during the two hours of the Susskind interview these two men were the most outspokenly racist and bigoted, the most jingoistic and illogical. What each said might easily have come from the other’s mouth, and during the period excerpted above, their comments overlapped as they rushed to get their gut-feelings out. I don’t think either of them could honestly fault me for melding them into one definitive personality.
Because Messrs. Corbett and Giordano—and their three compatriots—were speaking the words of contemporary middle-class America. They were expressing the secret and frequently not-so-secret beliefs of The Common Man in our country today.
Giordano also said, a trifle hysterically, “All I want is to be left alone! I’m not asking anyone for anything! I just want to be left alone. Every time I turn on the TV someone is telling me how bad off the blacks are, how the little kids fight off rats in the slums. I don’t want to feel guilty, I just wanna be left alone!”
It was a pathetic sight. A grown man very nearly on the verge of tears as he expressed his confusion and fear of the world around him. He’s a working-man, an average sort of joe who knows only that thousands of dollars for which he worked brutally hard (he says) are being stolen from him by the aged, the infirm, the destitute, those who have illegitimate babies, who lay up in their ghettos with wine he’s buying ... while four-year-olds on the Ivory Coast are making good living wages at cottage industry.
These are the men who voted for Wallace. They insist they are not bigots and racists, yet they cannot define the terms and seem to have no awareness that it is they to whom we refer when we speak of these types.
Giordano owns guns. He bought them to protect his property. The way he put it, unedited: “I hope I never have to use the gun I bought, but I would be remiss in my duty if I did not protect my house ... I have to protect myself, I have to protect my house.” Do you see something rather peculiar there? He doesn’t say he has to protect his wife and his nine children ... he says he has to protect his house.
There is very little point in going on with the comments these five men made. They are hardly startling remarks; we’ve heard them endlessly for the past fourteen years. Yet they were so well capsulized, so concretized in their own slogan rigidity, that the conclusions they indicate—on the part of these five and all the Common Men—give us a primer of the fears and stupidities that will certainly kill us, and our planet, if they are not soon combated.
Such as:
“The two or three hundred years of injustice we whites are supposed to’ve perpetrated on blacks is a fraud.” (Giordano)
“All the federal money for relief is going into the pockets of crooked politicians.” (Vincent de Tanfilis)
“The Liberal Mafia has coerced the decent colored man. They were happy the way they were till all this noise started.” (Corbett)
“I live in an integrated community. There are 27,000 whites and seventeen to thirty non-white families.” (Frank Mrak) And non-white could mean Mexican-American, Japanese, anything. But he thinks he lives in an integrated community.
“Billy Graham says the protest movement on campus is due to the infiltration of dissident elements like Communists. This SDS sucks kids in on LSD and it’s a conspiracy.” (Frank Mrak) Not so incidentally, Mr. Mrak didn’t know the difference between SDS and LSD. He confused them, called one the other, and in general exhibited that most fundamental tip-off that we were dealing with the Common Man: inability to tell fact from fancy, reliance on rumor, gossip and the slogan.
“Administrators on campuses have no backbone. They outta take a firm line with kids.” (De Tanfilis)