“The only reason we got permissive sex in this country is that people are making money off it. They only reason the radicals talk so much about the war is because the politicians stand to make money off it” (Peter Brady, 30 years old)
(Yes, I know the last remark above is totally incomprehensible, unbelievable, makes no sense and is the sort of thing you might expect to hear from a brain damage case, but Peter Brady was the youngest of the bunch. Younger than me, younger than most of you, and ostensibly one of the ones still “trustable” by the under-30 generation. Does this tell us anything?)
There are ten or twelve more single-spaced pages of remarks, but why pursue it? Two weeks worth of columns is more than enough space to give these men their ups.
It’s time to make a statement and take a position and try to formulate a generality that isn’t just hot air. And if such can be whomped-up from these crude materials, it is this:
We have long been a country where nature imitates art. When Evan Hunter wrote The Blackboard Jungle with its wholly inaccurate portrait of what delinquency was like in the New York school system—and when the film was cobbled up from that once-removed fantasy, thereby making it a third-hand unreality image— the kids began imitating what they’d seen in the film and read in the book.
We have a tendency to let our art-forms exploit us. In the Forties, we were deluged with pro-war movies in which Robert Taylor or John Hodiak or John Garfield gritted his teeth and fired into the endlessly advancing ranks of the Japanazis, thereby proving to us that even though (at first) we were losing the war, we’d pull it out of the fire and save the American Way of Life—if only we’d Buy Bonds.
So, similarly have we swallowed whole the myth of the Common Man. The Mr. Deeds or the Mr. Smith who, because of his homespun philosophy, common sense and garden variety decency, emerges just at the last moment, just before the town lynches the wrong man or sells its heritage to the international cartel or lets the bully finish off the town weakling—and he saves the day. We believe in the Common Man. The man who works with his hands. The man who makes up the labor unions and the merchant class and the middle-America homeowner. We believe in his good sense, in his perceptions of what is right or wrong.
No good. It won’t work no more. The “common man” philosophy is based on simple truths, eternal verities, on black and white and right and wrong. But the world is not that kind of Giant Golden Book any longer. The world is an incredibly complex skein of interwoven potencies, of power in too many hands, of power corrupted and people used.
The Common Man is no longer merely as outdated as the passenger pigeon. He is a living menace.
He is the man who votes for Wallace because Wallace offers him easy cop-out solutions to the fears he feels. He is the man who thinks everybody can earn a living. He is the man who, because he personally never lynched a nigger, believes there is no such thing as prejudice.
He is the man who believes only what affects him, what he sees, or what is most consistent with the status quo that will keep him afloat.
The time for worshipping the Common Man is past. We can no longer tolerate him, or countenance his stupidity. He is the man who keeps our air polluted, our country at war, our schools infested with police state-ism, our lives on the brink of oppression and our futures sold out for oil leases.
The Common Man—the kind Susskind showed us with such sorry clarity—has to go. If we are to continue living in this doomed world, if we are to save ourselves, we must kill off the Common Man in us and bring forth the Renaissance Man.
* * * *
45: 31 OCTOBER 69
After those last two blood-curdling columns about The Common Man (and the attendant mail that’s been pouring in, both with huzzahs from those of us who are scared shitless by TCM and with death-threats from several Common Men—thus proving every once in a while I hit a truth or two) this time I’d like to do a happyhappy tippy-toe commentary that will leave you with a smile on your lips and a song in your heart. There are two ways to do same: 1) review a show that has something going for it and talk nice about it or 2) blast the crap out of a stinker in Menckenesque terms.
Either way is fun, so this week I’ll do both.
(But first a small aside, having nothing to do with TV. Last week’s Freep featured an article by a chopper thug named Mike Brown. Mr. Brown is against a lot of things I think are very nice, but whereas I wouldn’t take up a .30-06 to stop him from hating Jews, Blacks, gays, Communists, Catholics, Free Masons, hippies and all the other species he cannot abide, as long as he didn’t get physical about it ... Mr. Brown—how his own last name must bug him!—has banded together with a number of other over-six-foot proto-beefy bikers to DEFEND AMERICA BY VIOLENCE. Mr. Brown ought to get hip to the simple core truth that his problem is based on his own insecurity about being an adequate male. What you or I would do if we felt uptight like that, is go find us a lady and give her some pleasure. What Mr. Brown does is use Molotov cocktails on trucks. We’d use the penis, he uses the truncheon. Mr. Brown has banded together in the typical homosexual-fear unit and thrust between his legs not a loving woman but a snarling chopper. If he wasn’t so pitiable, he’d be ludicrous. All concerned folk who read Mr. Brown’s shriek of sexual impotency and frustration should send their freeze-dried semen to his lair, in hopes he will either face his emotional problems by making love, not stupidity, or—failing that—drive his air-cooled courage off a cliff in Coldwater at 100 mph.)
Onward and upward with truth and/or beauty.
First, the decimation. Second, the praising.
Up for destruction, one 90 minute movie produced for ABC by Aaron Spelling’s jellybean operation over at Paramount. It was on the network a week ago Tuesday, and it was called The Monk. When—as a potential writer of 90-minute movies for this series of “World Television Premieres”—I was called in several months ago to sit through a screening of this classic cheapie cornball abomination, I could not really believe ABC would go ahead and put it on the air.
It was so bad, so completely and thoroughly without redeeming value of any kind, I felt certain the ABC khans would varf, retch, rush for toilets, and then come back and possibly lynch Spelling; the director, George McCowan; the scenarist, Tony Barrett; and even the principal accomplices thespically speaking, George Maharis, Janet Leigh, Carl Betz, William Smithers and even Jack Albertson, who should have known better. But they didn’t, the ding-dongs. They ran it. They even took out ads for it.
Gawd, now that’s what I call a frenzy for suicide.
In case you are among the blissful millions who missed this epic of stupidity, allow me to describe what it was about the show that makes it the lowest point thus far in a low season.
The idea is a fresh one. It’s about this private eye...
The original idea was conceived (if that is the word ... spawned might be more on-target) by Blake Edwards, who created Peter Gunn some ten years ago. I understand the Monk idea was an earlier one, and was drawered when Peter Gunn took off. Edwards never finished the original version. Spelling bought it (I suppose because it had Edwards’ name on it; surely it had nothing else going for it). He assigned the script-writing chores to Tony Barrett, a very nice man who used to write extensively for the Gunn series and worked for Spelling on Burke’s Law. But Tony Barrett opted for cliche, and what he wrote would have looked pale on the Gunn series itself. It’s the hack detective story about the big-time mob attorney who’s afraid he’s gonna be bumped off unless Gus Monk protects him, and Monk says fuck off you hood, and the attorney gets bumped, naturally, only it wasn’t the attorney in that flaming car it was ... well, you know the rest.
I’ll tell you about the level of originality of this dog: during the screening, Maharis is leaving Miss Leigh to go off on a mission of spectacular (ho hum) danger and as he reaches the door, Janet says, “Gus ...” and he turns around and looks at her, and me, sitting in the darkened viewing room, I say, “Be careful,” a second before Janet says, “. . . be careful.” At which point I got up and went out and got a pint of orange drink and a burrito from the studio coffee wagon. When I came back, not much had happened that I didn’t remember happening in 77 Sunset Strip back in 1959.
Maharis acted with all the wizard skill and animation of a poison dart-victim weighted down by anvils, trying to walk across the Bay of Biscayne on the bottom. Miss Leigh, who was cute and sensitive and fine to watch in this kind of role in The Manchurian Candidate and Psycho and even as far back as Orson Welles’s Touch Of Evil, has allowed herself to either grow hard and brittle and leathery looking—like a dyke who ain’t happy about being a dyke—or wasn’t hip to the way they were shooting her. Everybody else mugged and overacted and slimed up the premises, thus telling us all we need to know about Mr. McCowan’s directorial strengths, and in all it was marked n.g. from the git-go.
At some point along the way—and this is the point of reviewing such an obstinately shitty flick—the powers that khan ... should. They should get hip to the fact that old men who wrote Raymond Chandler-fashion twenty years ago can’t retool for contemporary drama. They should stop letting themselves get whip-sawed by fast talking Executive Producers like Danny Thomas and Aaron Spelling, who sell them meadow muffins which are called chocolate éclairs. They should begin to realize that they have a nice, viable form in the 90-minute movie, and stop castrating it by buying safe, hackneyed, cliche stories resuscitated from moldering issues of the pulp Argosy, vintage 1934. They should finally throw up their hands and admit that crud won’t get it (if you haven’t checked lately, ABC, you’re trailing in the Ratings Race) and see if they could get somewhere with quality.
Like the guy who died on stage, and it was suggested from the audience that they give him an enema, it might not help ... but it couldn’t hurt.
Taaaa-daaaaah!!
It also couldn’t hurt to watch a lovely show called My World—And Welcome To It that NBC brings us every Monday night at 7:30. It’s a half hour sitcom, but many marks above the Lucy level. Based on drawings and anecdotes and short pieces by James Thurber, it has a charming cynicism and unabashed joy in life that no series since the ill-fated It’s A Maris World of 1962 has managed to capture.
William Windom, as the Thurberesque cartoonist chivvied by his sensible wife, his elderly (before her time) girl-child, and a random pack of dogs, editors, dream fantasies, plights of our time and garden variety horrors of contemporary society, runs the gamut from staunch nobility in the face of madness to bemused resignation that They Are Out To Get Him. He is Everyman with a green eyeshade.
The really great thing about this series, though, is that it attempts to use video as a medium. There is animation and cartoon backdrop and stop-action and all kindsa groovy things. It’s visually very interesting. And using the Thurber material inventively (they’ve played with such famous bits as The Unicorn In The Garden, If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomatox and the legendary anecdote about Harold Ross of the New Yorker insisting on knowing which of two hippos in a cartoon was the one delivering the punchline) they seem hellbent intent on singlehandedly raising the quality of TV situation comedy.
And so I shouldn’t get stoned by agents for neglecting their clients, let me hasten to add that as inept an acting job Janet Leigh and Raymond St. Jacques and William Smithers and Maharis did in The Monk, that’s how good the acting of Joan Hotchkis (as the wife) and Lisa Gerritsen (as the aging toddler) is in My World— And Welcome To It.
It ain’t often I recommend anything as unreservedly as this show. And to the guy who wrote in to TV Guide saying the show wasn’t doing appropriate honor to the work and memory of the God Thurber ... well, sir, you are hereby consigned to an eternity watching Gilligan’s Island reruns.
Trouble with people, Clem, is that they don’t know when they’s well off.
* * * *
INTRODUCTORY NOTE TO A SPECIAL COLUMN: The premier publication of the “new wave” in speculative fiction is an English magazine titled New Worlds. Recently, one of its editors, Charles Platt, wrote me a letter in which he solicited a contribution for an offbeat symposium on the theme of “1980.” He did not want the usual sort of predictive piece on what the effects of over-population or atomic energy would mean to the world of 1980, but rather (as he put it) “a writer’s personal, subjective, idiosyncratic reactions to the 1980’s—how they see the general idea of there being a future, themselves in it, aging, progress in the various arts ...” Charles spoke very specifically of this column—having read it on a recent trip to the States—and he suggested I try something like it for New Worlds. Yes, why not. So ... postulating I don’t pick up a .45 slug in the head before that time, here is a sample of The Glass Teat from the Los Angeles Free Press, dateline Thursday November 13th, 1980. Res ipsa loquitor.
* * * *
THE GLASS TEAT
I’ve run out of pipe tobacco and I’m getting nervous. Maybe tomorrow or the next day I’ll have one of the kids try to slip into Pasadena and rob a pipe store. Maybe I’ll do it myself. For those of you who may be reading this—if the printing press hasn’t broken down again—you may gather that my wounds have healed sufficiently well for me to consider a smash&grab raid. Yes, your faithful columnist didn’t buy it last time out
But things here in the “underground” (if you’ll pardon the pretensions) are not good. The goddamed Good Folks are stepping up their activities. Christ only knows how they can find the extra money to finance stronger tac/squads ... the way their taxes bleed them. But I suppose it’s money well spent, from their viewpoint: cleaning out the dissidents. As far as I know, we’re one of the last three or four pockets left in Southern California. And they almost brought down Chester Anderson’s chopper last week when he made his run to drop the Free Press on LA. But I suppose we’re still a pain in the ass, if hardly effective, because Mishkin came back on Sunday with the new wanted posters. My faithful readers will be delighted to know the price on this columnist has gone up to a full ten grand, plus a year’s meat-and-sweet ration points. Now that’s what I call critical acceptance.
However, enough personal chit-chat.
My subject for this week is the President’s speech on The War, carried over the four major networks. For those of you reading this column in shelters and the outback, it won’t provide anything more than another taste of the bitter gall we’ve grown to know as a steady diet. But for those of you Good Folks—true patriotic Americans—who find one of these newspapers lodged in your eucalyptus or missed being washed down the sewers by the watersweepers, it may offer a moment of doubt in your unshakeable faith. At worst, it can proffer a moment of humor, and God knows you poor fuckers don’t have many of those these days.
He’s wearing makeup better these days. They’ve managed to disguise the insincerity of the jaw, the deviousness of the eye-pouches, the corruption of the jowls, the thug-like stippling of unshaved follicles, the corn-ball widow’s peak.
They’ve even managed to exquisitely cover the plastic surgery scars and the discoloration left by last December’s assassination attempt on him. (I still contend if Krassner had used a thermite jug instead of that damned Molotov cocktail, he’d have bagged the snake. But, if at first you don’t succeed ...)
But nothing serves to conceal his dissembling. Nothing works to cover his mealymouth. Nothing manages to fill in with substance the empty spaces of his endless promises. He used all the time-honored phrases—my fellow Americans, this Administration, the Search for Peace, let us turn our faces away from conflict, grave concern, you are entitled to your minority opinion—all of them. They were all there—arrayed in shabby tediousness. The War has been going on for seventeen years, my fellow Good Folk: how many times have you heard the Man mouth the words “peace with honor”?
And he’s still wiping his nose publicly, on-camera.
He revealed a secret letter he had sent to Premier Mbutu, offering nothing new or conclusive, merely babbling that the United States is anxious to make some progress at the Trobriand Island Conferences. Well, hell yes, gentle readers, he wants to make some progress at the talks. Now that Tanzania and Zambia have joined the “menace” of Black Communism the President tells us is washing its tide over all the civilized world, he’s scared out of his mind that his own American Black States—Kentucky, Georgia and Illinois—will get more out of hand. He hasn’t forgotten (or by any means forgiven) Governor Gregory; offering sanctuary to Dennis 3X and his militants after what they did in Washington was enough to make the Man declare Chicago ripe for low-yield H-bombs.
Of course he wants peace, the snake! He wants peace on terms no one will give him. He wants more mindless flag-waving. He wants us to believe that there is some incredible nobility in our interfering in the internal affairs of seventeen Asiatic and African nations! He wants it all to go back the way it was, when he was a whey-faced lad in a small Florida town, forty years ago. He wants the death toll that now stands at 855,-000 to rise to a nice even million. And he wants you to swallow higher taxes so the Pentagon can raise its budget and build the spacedrop platform without worrying where its next billion is coming from. Won’t that be a charmer, gentle readers: your sons and husbands and brothers dropping straight down from deep space into India and Rhodesia.
The Man gibbered you, friends. He said nothing new. He merely tried to pull the fangs of the December Offensive you know we dissidents will be mounting next month. He doesn’t want a repetition of last year’s Grade School Uprising.
He wants to make certain that the last few of us out here scrounging for canned goods to stave off scurvy don’t get any help or succor from “confused, misled Americans who fail to realize that by aiding the dissident elements in our society you are helping to prolong the war.” Well, he needn’t worry. It’s been seventeen years, and those of us who long ago committed ourselves to saving you poor scuttlefish from your own gullibility, we know we won’t get any help. We’ve had our examples. Bobby Seale died in a Federal Penitentiary six weeks ago. Pneumonia. Sure, it was pneumonia. How many of you remember Bobby Seale?
You want some straight talk, gentle readers ... you want to know how we really feel about it?
Most of the spark has gone out of us. We can afford to tell you truths like that. We aren’t on the same wavelength as those of you who lie publicly to keep up “morale” and buy “public support” with lies. We can tell the truth because nothing can stop us from doing what we have to do. We know we can’t win, we know we can’t change the course of history. But we do it because it’s reflex now. We’re resigned to living like animals in these sections of the Great United States you’ve come to call the outback. We’re secure in the knowledge that one after another, we’ll be picked off and killed. The tac/squads don’t even take prisoners any more. They got their new orders last year: flatten them.
You don’t know, you’ll never know. You’ve let — yourselves be lied to so often and so ineptly, you’re willing accomplices to your own destruction.
How do we feel about it? We feel that if there is a God he’ll hasten the ecological debacle you’ve permitted to spread. He’ll kill off the diatoms in the ocean faster, and he’ll deplete the oxygen supply, and well all go under at the same time, gasping for air like iron lung rejects.
But if that doesn’t come to pass, here’s how we figure it: the Man and “Confucius” Ta Ch’ing and Mbutu will one day say fuck it, and turn loose the Doomsday Machines. And if—as predicted—it kills off ninety-six per cent of the population of the Earth, that’ll be cool. Because you deserve no better.
And as for me, I personally look at it like this: if I’m in the ninety-six per cent that gets zapped, then I’m dead and I’m sleeping and I’m at peace at last and I don’t have to fight a fight you scuttlefish never wanted me to fight. If I’m in the four per cent that manages to escape alive, well, I’ve learned how to live in a rabbit warren, and I’ll survive.
Either way, I’ll be delivered from ever again having to sit and be bored by the TV appearances of a man whose obvious disregard for humanity puts him solidly at the front of a nation that is notable for self-loathing.
My only regret is that I’m out of pipe tobacco. It’s funny how little things come to mean so much at the final extreme.
Goodbye, gentle readers. I always end my columns these days with those words. Chances are very good that by this time next week one or the other of us won’t be around.
* * * *
47: 14 NOVEMBER 69
This week, painful reappraisal and viewing-with alarm. The former is something I do only when irrevocably pressed to the wall by the realization that my godhood is fraying at the edges and the latter I do so often it has become the systole and diastole of my routine existence. Nonetheless, painful though they may be, they must be done this week.
Reconsideration of ABC’s The New People is definitely in order, because after the first show—the airing of the pilot segment by Rod Sterling—I recommended this sixty-minute’s hype. Well, friends, they sucked me in, too. I will confess that much of my feeling of having been impressed by The New People was due to Richard Kiley’s bravura performance as the last adult left alive when a planeload of peregrinating teen-agers gets downed on an uninhabited island in the Pacific. Kiley brought to the situation of a melting-pot of young minds forced to create a new society in their own image, a strength and order that catalytically forced the weaker characters of the kids to react in some positive and impressive ways. But Kiley’s character was only in the pilot segment, used to set the scene. Then he was killed off. Now the shows rest heavily on the shoulders of unknowns like Peter Ratray, David Moses, Zooey Hall, Tiffany Boiling, Dennis Olivieri and Jill Jaress. And occasionally on the backs of semi-knowns like Rick Dreyfus and Brenda Scott.
But, surprisingly, the blame for this show’s having gone instantly and disastrously downhill does not lie with the kids. They are quantum-jumps below even McQueen, Garner, Farrow or Barbara Hershey (all of whom were doing comparable TV parts at approximately the same ages) in talent, but they are game, and they do the best they can with the shabby material they get for scripts. For therein lies the reason The New People is mired down in the horse latitudes of the ratings. The basic concept of the show is a viable one; while not entirely fresh (they’ve been doing the old “how will people react in a microcosm of society” shtick since Outward Bound), it is workable. The production values are more than satisfactory, having managed to squeak-by in establishing an entire AEC-abandoned test site city—a bit that does not bear too close examination before it becomes patently ridiculous, yet one we are willing to accept if the rest of the show functions logically. The direction and photography are hardly distinguished, but in a field where second-rate talent is the best one can hope to get when your real talents all flee to theatrical films, it is acceptable.
So all that remains on which to rationally dump the blame for the increasing failure of this show, is the script work. And there it takes no great depths of perceptivity to recognize why The New People has come a cropper.
The second week’s plot was an impossible farrago of clichés harkening back all the way to Paul de Kruifs Microbe Hunters or the discovery that the anopheles mosquito causes malaria; one of those insane dumbplots in which people begin keeling over from The Dreaded Plague and some kid who had a semester of Pharmacology 101 brews-up the antidote from Brillo pad squeezings and the memory of his Granny’s faithful spiderweb poultice chest-rub.
I can’t tell you much about the third week’s plot because the teaser and six minutes of act one were all I could stomach of acting so porcine and dialogue so pretentious that they instantly buried the story of one of the castaways who was either pushed or fell off a cliff. If you’ve ever watched a show that telegraphed itself as being unviewable a few minutes into the story, you’ll know what it was that impelled me to switch over to Laugh-In. (And while I’m at it, may I point out to the manufacturers of The New People that of all the ridiculous, insipid, insulting and generally all-around moronic theme songs jammed up the noses of the viewing public—dating all the way back to such classics as 77 Sunset Strip snap! snap! and Hawaiian Eye— The New People is far and away the most offensive. Not merely because of its lack of musical value, but because of its cheap attempt to “reach the younger viewer” with what the old farts who created it think is a contemporary sound. Not only is it a far cry from even kitsch value as a contemporary sound, but it is a tieline into understanding why hypocrisy is spotted instantly by today’s TV viewer. Particularly the younger ones. They know this is a young idea, written and produced by old people, trying to sound young. And they won’t go for it. And that’s why The New People has not pulled the core of viewers it needed to succeed. Older viewers can’t identify with a bunch of young snots, and the young people won’t be a party to being hustled.)
The fourth segment had hold of a marvelous idea, but once more opted for the obvious, cliche treatment, thereby emasculating the basic concept. Take a Suth’rin kid whose big love is automobiles, and stick him on an island where there are no cars, and how does he go about getting himself wheels; and further, once he has them, what does he do with them? It was a nice idea, synched-in with the theme of how much individual responsibility does a man have in a society where you can’t really be made to pay for your acts? It was enough to hold one’s attention, but it was hardly the heavyweight drama this series promised.
Fifth week, turn off again. Dulls the senses. Bludgeons the spirit. Twitches the fingers toward knob-turn. Laugh-In got my business. Again.
Sixth week, Brenda Scott played a hysteric to Peter Ratray’s strong, semi-silent type. The kids get a little stir-crazy and some of them decide to build a raft to float off the island. Plotted as tightly as one of those see-through knit dresses, it was pedestrian, predictable, fiddled with improbabilities and coincidences, and resembled for logic the attempt of Shipwreck Kelly to go over Niagara Falls in a Dixie Cup.
I’ve reappraised at such length a series that is obviously a bummer, for the sole reason of trying to save it. The basic idea, I repeat for the fourth time, is a solid one. There is something of consequence inherent in the plight of forty kids trying to create a workable society on an island unaffected by the world their elders made—save in the corruptions passed on to them by their elders.
But the producers of The New People are traveling down the road to cancellation tread by so many other series: the road that is paved with the hack scripts of old men and/or weary writers. There are young writers in town who know how to mirror the attitudes of the young, who know how to present problems that concern all of us now, who have a sense and a feel and a compassion for what’s going down today. These are the writers who should be employed on The New People. They should be given their head, should have the reins let out on them, should be allowed to run with their ideas. Not hobbled and held in by arbitrary ideas of “what is so” by producers and networkers whose closest approach to the minds of the young is when they ride down the Strip of a Saturday night with their windows and their minds closed.
It should not fall to a television critic to point out to a show’s creative personnel the insanity of having a show about the minds and hearts of young people— being written by old people. If I want an authority on how to chop-and-channel a Mercury, I don’t hire the lady who won second place in the Betty Crocker Bake-Off.
And as for viewing-with-alarm, I am alarmed that the wonderful Music Scene show (which, unfortunately, comes on not only directly opposite My World—And Welcome To It but just before The New People, thereby laying two heavy strikes on it for openers) is down near the bottom in ABC ratings. This is a program that deserves to continue. It is wryly cynical, has sparkle and dash and originality, and even manages to make some scalpel slashes at the current scene.
David Steinberg and his compatriots are the most ebullient and compelling hosts we have been offered in many moons, and to see them back on the bread lines would be a shame.
Regularly, they showcase talent we don’t see nearly enough of: Janis Joplin, Johnny Cash, Three Dog Night, Isaac Hayes, Richie Havens and Buffy Sainte-Marie. And they do it with innovation and sincerity.
I urge those of you who have not yet caught on to Music Scene to do so at once. It’s so good the scythe-wielder of TV attrition will certainly mow it down forthwith. Or perhaps, having sounded the alarum, we can do something to prevent this winner going the way of the Smothers Bros.
* * * *
48: 28 NOVEMBER 69
Television and its occult machinations have finally produced their first genuinely tragic figure. How odd: we might have thought Senator Joseph McCarthy the proper one to be so recognized. TV stripped him raw—aided by the US Army and old Joe Welch—and in the last days of the now-famous McCarthy-Army hearings we saw that paragon of despotism bludgeoned from his position as a destroyer of lives, from his position as a disseminator of fear and hatred, from his position as the antichrist of Democracy ... to a sobbing, hysterical mass of ruined flesh. Soon after, he died. Destroyed by television. Surely McCarthy was the front-runner for the title. Then came William Talman, whose career was thrown up for grabs on the Perry Mason series because of bad publicity attendant on some minor dope-&-sex peccadillo; cancer added to his tragic stature. But his friends stood by him, to their everlasting credit, and he remained with the show. Yet he was a candidate. And then we saw Lyndon Johnson creamed by TV. By dissent and the rising gorge of American disgust at the way he manhandled the highest office in the land. If not McCarthy or Talman, then certainly weary old LBJ.
But no. None of them hold a candle to the man who emerges as the sorriest creature ever to flash across the land in phosphor-dot reality.
Art Linkletter is the most tragic figure.
It is difficult to bring myself to club a man when he’s down, and make no mistake (as that incipiently tragic wager of war, Mr. Nixon, would say), Art Linkletter is down. So what you read here is carefully considered and even more carefully written.
Because the deadly irony of what has happened to Art Linkletter forces one to pause and consider just how uncaring the universe really is. For here is a man who helped build a multi-million dollar show business career in large part from the cute sayings of children, who never managed to glean from all those years kneeling beside tots with their directness and simple truth, enough perceptivity or perspective to help his own daughter as she crawled inexorably toward her own death. It is a universe that allows stupidity to exist, and so we must conclude the universe simply doesn’t give a damn.
Diane Linkletter, twenty years old and quite pretty, threw herself from a sixth floor window in West Hollywood on Saturday, October 4th of this year. She was on a bad trip with acid. (Dear God, how silly and futile resound the hip terminology of the in-group: “bad trip.” What must she have been seeing, thinking, feeling as the LSD drove her down six floors to end the worst possible, short trip anyone can imagine?)
And she left behind Art Linkletter, who comes, too late, to a concern for young people.
Remorse, guilt, sorrow. He has no corner on the market, and saying other parents have experienced similar tragedies makes no mark. Life is not a comparison of other people’s chamber of horrors. Yet Art Linkletter’s purgatory is a very special one, for it was fashioned on network television and furnished by his persistent refusal to understand.
As the story is told, immediately after he learned of his daughter’s death, Linkletter tried to quash the item. It would have been ugly for the world to know the daughter of such a man—a man so immediately identified with children—had been so alienated that she had taken her life in such a hideous fashion. But for whatever reasons, he verified the report that, yes, it had been acid. And weeks later he appeared on television (TV again), having appeared before Nixon’s committee on drug use. Now he was cast in the tragic role of grieving father, and emerged as a fighter in the war against drugs.
Well, fine. Not being a doper, I can’t get very worked up about marijuana, but I’ve had enough friends and friends of friends blacked-out by heavier staff to welcome anybody as an ally. But Art Linkletter seems still to fail to understand.
He fails to recognize the simple truth that when drugs were confined solely to the black ghetto, and hundreds of thousands of minority kids were getting their lives fucked-up, no one cared. Oh, the “authorities” made their token raids and arrests, but the great white world didn’t care, didn’t really think it mattered. But now that a Jesse Unruh’s son gets busted for pot, now that an Art Linkletter’s daughter dies behind drug use ... now, now the white community in the person of Art Linkletter cries out in anguish.
Too late, Mr. Linkletter! Too goddamed little and too goddamned late! Because you still don’t know that your Diane’s death was only symptomatically caused by LSD. It was caused by the world you, in great part, helped create for all the Dianes. It was caused by you and all the righteous “good folk” who continue to believe the hoary clichés of your own youth. That anyone can make it in America if he has the will and determination. That authority is always right, that children should respect their parents whether they’ve earned the respect or not, that hard work brings its just reward, that nice girls don’t do this or that, that good little boys don’t do that or the other. It was caused by all the people like yourself who’ve allowed the police to turn loose the hoses and the dogs and the tear gas and the cattle prods on “the enemy” in our streets.
Who is the enemy, Mr. Linkletter?
Is it the dreaded Communist Menace?
Is it the anarchist rabble?
Is it the drug-crazed dissenters?
No, Mr. Linkletter, it’s your own kids.
How many parents will end their days sorrowing for their kids like you, because they fail to recognize the insanity of turning hate and prison and death against an “enemy” who is simply your kids?
Do you yet understand the nature of your tragedy, Linkletter, all of you? Do you understand that your tragedy is in what happened to the college dissenters convicted last week, in police photographing twelve and sixteen year old kids in the Valley as “subversives” because they wanted to join the Moratorium Day marching, in the trial of the Chicago Conspiracy 8, in the gagging of Bobby Seale. Can you dig it, Mr. Linkletter—Bobby Seale is your son!
Diane’s death grew logically out of her disillusionment. I never knew her, I don’t know you, but I know what was in her gut, because it comes from the guts of hundreds of other Dianes and Bobby Seales with whom I’ve come in contact. Disillusionment at Art Linkletter for helping to preserve a hypocritical and repressive laissez-faire society in which Diane and her contemporaries were lied-to every day of their lives. Lied to by TV (and that’s you, Art), lied to by authority, lied to by the dichotomy between what you told her the world was like and what she found it to be for herself.
Jingo-ism! Dammit, jingo-ism. “Generation gap,” “silent majority,” “the American way,” “the menace of Communism,” “student radicals,” “the drug culture.” All of it is bullshit! It’s death, Mr. Linkletter. Death and blood and suicide and stupidity.
I bought your record, Mr. Linkletter. The one made with Diane before she died. We Love You, Call Collect it’s called, and there’re photos of you and Diane on the cover. I’m not going to be gross and suggest you take any delight in this 45 rpm item. I suppose you’ve continued to let it sell in hopes some kid or parent may learn a lesson from it. I hear your voice break and tears in your words on this record, and I hope I’m not being hustled; I hope that was something more than theatrical histrionics. It would be too horrible to consider it anything else.
But the record is another part of your on-camera guilt, Mr. Linkletter. Because it proffers the same weary clichés to the young people that your generation has always proffered. It resounds with the helpless confusion and sorrow of people who have found the world in which they grew up totally different from the world of today. Well, what did you expect? You’ve allowed that world to poison itself with war for fifty years, you’ve permitted corruption and racism to flourish, you’ve sacrificed everything beautiful and meaningful to the building of bigger and better military establishments, political machines, television careers ...
I understand also that Art Linkletter is going down to Synanon, to find out about drug use. It’s a step in the right direction. But it’s only a tool to be used in finally prying open that locked skull-box of set ideas and rigid beliefs. I’m not exactly sure how I came to be addressing Mr. Linkletter directly in this column, but I’ve switched back to the impersonal to prevent any of you who might pass it off as one man’s anguish, from wriggling free.
For Art Linkletter has made his bed and now he’ll have to sleep in it. What happened to him can happen to all of us. Unless we act now to stop the senseless stupidity and hatred that seem destined to rule this country. I can summon very little pity for Art Linkletter; for Diane, yes, quite a lot. Because I know how lost and helpless she must have felt. How lost and helpless all those kids in their real or mental prisons now feel.
You are TV, Mr. Linkletter. You have the power to go to school again, to understand all the reasons why Diane died. And once having learned, to speak up. To go to the council chambers of Nixons and Agnews and cry to them as you cry to us on your record.
Because you’re only the first. The first major figure in the TV pantheon to discover that what you shot across the tube for so many years was waste and frippery and lies. In the council chambers of the networks, several weeks ago, the heads of the big three joined to establish a “youth” liaison with the younger generation, to find out what they are thinking, what they are about, what they want. They picked a kid named Waxman, I believe, to be the voice of youth.
You might speak to them about that, Mr. Linkletter. And tell them you’d like to spend some time going to school, and then assisting in forging that link between the generations. And the first step is not to lie, and the second is to try to understand.
There’s no help for Art Linkletter. He’s lost his, and I would certainly find it impossible to pack the guilt he’ll have to pack. But guilt and sorrow can be softened by making sure what has happened to oneself happens to no one else.
It will take a strong and intelligent and very probably selfless man to carry such a load. Only time will tell if Art Linkletter packs the gear. Until then, he is merely the most tragic figure produced by the TV Generation.
* * * *
49: 5 DECEMBER 69
I swear to Christ, sometimes I feel as though I’ve tumbled assoverteakettle down a rabbit hole. What I mean, maybe you aren’t getting the same stuff over your TV set I’m getting on mine. Because the stuff on mine is crazy as a neon doughnut and I refuse to believe I’m seeing straight. Maybe all those Zonk-rays from the color set are turning my brains to cottage cheese. With chives.
On the Frank Reynolds ABC news I see where a US Marine has copped to the rumors of a Vietnamese massacre being true. And I see photographs that were taken on the spot, genuinely horrendous photographs. They look like replays of Bergen-Belsen or Buchenwald. Piles of emaciated bodies. Children with their faces blown off by riflefire. Mothers with bullet holes through their heads, stilled in the act of trying to hurl their babies from them. And the babies, lying twisted as Raggedy Ann dolls, as dead as their mothers. Somewhere between 170 and 700 people. Civilians. The total has not yet been agreed upon. Maybe VC-supporters, maybe not. But civilians, either way. Dead; all of them dead.
It happened 20 months ago, at My Lai, and we’re just now finding out about it. When the first photos appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, there was instant snarling from the Pentagon. It wasn’t true. It didn’t happen. The first Marine to talk about it was a psychopathic liar. And every day the Tom Reddin News on Channel 5 began with a map of Southeast Asia behind The Man, and he smiled and said triumphantly, “Today, further proof that the ‘alleged’ massacre of Viet Namese civilians never happened! Pinkville is a calloused lie!”
And then the dam broke. And one after another the men who had participated in the crime came forward and extended their hands like Lady Macbeth and said they were finding it difficult to wash away the damned spot.
So now the Army has “taken steps” to set things to rights. They’ve initiated court-martial proceedings against the Lieutenant who ordered the massacre. And some twenty-odd others. (I won’t even comment on the military position of letting the mass-murderers wander around on their own recognizance. All I’ll say is that Sirhan Sirhan only bumped one man, and he was indicted without bail.. But then, he killed an Amurrican, not them little slant-eyed devils.)
Now I don’t know how you feel about this whole thing, there’s an entire range of emotions one can experience, I suppose, but I’d suspect they have to weigh heavily on the side of revulsion, shame and horror. Yet my TV set showed me a gentleman in the House of Representatives who got up and deplored the military’s preferring charges, on the grounds that it would make any soldier who committed (what he called) an “error in judgment” liable to prosecution as a “common criminal.” Well, I’ll agree with the rep; that Lieutenant is hardly a “common” criminal. I cannot conceive of the sort of mind that can butcher a hundred and seventy unarmed men, women and children—but it is unquestionably not “common.”
So, you see what I mean about nutsy things coming in on my tube? Here is this shameful disgrace blotched on the escutcheon of the United States, and some ding-dong asshole in the House of Representatives is uptight because it might force other potential slaughterers to pause and consider abiding by the terms of the Geneva Convention.
But that’s hardly an isolated dichotomy. Reagan finally gets around to having an ecological conference, to discuss how much longer we’ll be polluting the state (not to mention the entire planet), and for two days we are bombarded with much high-flown political-sounding rhetoric intended to convince us that The Gipper is finally hip to the peril. He’ll do things, he says. He’ll take steps. And the very next day my TV set shows me the resumption of oil drilling in the Santa Barbara channel. Those poor slobs living out there dash out in fishing boats to prevent the oil company from hauling in their platform, and Reagan is still mulching about saying he’s going to save the land. Because oil leases mean heavy sugar to the state and federal governments, and you know the oil lobby isn’t going to let death and destruction get in the way of their showing a profit on their ledgers.
And the bill to double the income tax deduction for individuals is defeated soundly, but the oil men get another oil depletion allowance.
And TV news is primarily Establishment-oriented, but Spiro attacks them for being in any way fair to the dissent movement. To the resounding support of the Great American Masses.
And a soldier goes AWOL and finds sanctuary in a Unitarian church, and the Army brands the guy a traitor because he puked on the bayonet range when one of his buddies was told to “Kill Kill Kill” and he said he didn’t believe in killing, and they beat the shit out of him.
Oh, lemme tell ya. Crazy stuff.
The interesting thing about all this, of course, is that—among other serendipitous side-effects—almost every deep-rooted belief of Americana is being exploded into lies and confusion. So with everything they’ve ever accepted as rockbed fact being proved a fraud, television viewers are flocking in ever greater numbers to situation comedies, where the ideals and beliefs of their youths thirty and forty years ago are still maintained. They can watch Lucy and Petticoat and Green Acres and continue to believe that that life still exists. In some mythical terra incognita, they know not where.
But how do they react to the massacre, the good folk who have always believed that Our Fighting Men are good and decent and honorable? How do they shiver and quake to the explosion of the Jack Armstrong myth? Do they rationalize it as the act of an isolated kill-crazy Lieutenant? If so, what about all the other guys in that outfit who joined in, dragging people to the edge of the ravine as their victims pleaded to be left alive, as they turned their weapons on them? Do they think about the conditioning that permits a man to murder children and hold his tongue about it for twenty months?
If ever there was an apocalyptic incident that speaks to the death of the past in this country, this week we have it. We can ignore the pollution, we can permit the political corruption, we can deny the paranoia and racism of our culture, we can substitute personal experiences with shitty Jews or blacks or Catholics or young people or old people for a careful, reasoned understanding of the human condition—but we cannot ignore this massacre.