By this time I’d been hitting the side of my head with the heel of my hand so long, I had a headache. So I went out and got a couple of Empirin while these dancers did a few turns.
When I came back, the singer who couldn’t sing—his name is Dean Jones—was saying that everybody loves a child star, and he had one for all of us who were panting with our need. (Looking around the room, I saw no other dirty young men with a penchant for nymphettes, and so settled back on the sofa with open admiration for Mr. Jones, who had somehow pierced the veil of respectability I wear, and prepared myself to slaver over some nubile little pre-groupie toddler who would satiate my naked lusts.)
“And here she is…Happy Hollywood!”
Imagine my surprise to be confronted with a five- or six-year-old Shirley Temple surrogate with a face as evil as one of the Borgias. (My instant reaction to this child was one of physical revulsion. I could not clear my mind of the scene in Barbarella where the depraved children turn life-sized dolls with razor-sharp teeth loose on the semi-naked Jane Fonda. It was a scene of singular horror, and snaggle-toothed Happy Hollywood looked for all the world like nothing but one of those knife-toothed dolls.)
She spoke in a high, quavery voice guaranteed to shatter goblets, and she dedicated her song—with all sincerity—to our great and wonderful United States of America astronauts…and named them one by one…going on to name the project heads at the Houston tracking center. I kept expecting someone to hit her in the face with a pie, but it never came to pass. She actually sang It’s Only A Paper Moon, complete with vaudeville tap dancing and extravagant hand movements reminiscent of the Supremes in their formative days. Again, I found myself hitting my head.
It went on in this vein for several years. At least it seemed to be several years. It may only have been decades, who knows? And the big extravaganza ensemble number was a Paean of Praise to Richard Milhous Nixon. Everyone dressed in suits of American flags, prancing around, shooting off fireworks, waving banners, and singing we’re all god’s Chillun and Dickie is god. (A thought occurred to me: they arrested Abbie Hoffman on the steps of the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, D.C., on his way in to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee, because he was wearing a shirt made from an American flag. They indicted him on charges of desecrating the symbol of America Über Alles. Has anyone preferred charges against Dean Jones and his company of Merry Pranksters for doing the same on coast-to-coast television? No? I rather thought not. The rules work for you, when you espouse the party line, but god forbid you should be on the opposing team.)
They sang and danced this Ode to the Odious for another decade or three, with one of their number bobbling blindly around the stage wearing an enormous papier-mâché head of Nixon; the most hideous case of hydrocephalicism I’ve ever seen.
And again, with little evil-faced Happy Hollywood down on one knee, saying, “We luuuuuuv you, Mr. President!” I kept expecting the wings to explode with a barrage of cream pies. But it didn’t happen. They played it straight.
Either that, or all the head-hitting had given me a concussion.
And when the show was over, I sat there, genuinely stunned, trying to arrange my thoughts in some coherent manner. Had I indeed seen what I’d seen? A right-wing reactionary satire show? It was a contradiction in terms; a defiance of the square-cube law; a ghoul created of the spare parts of dead bodies, like a Frankenstein’s Monster; an enormous put-on, so cleverly conceived even I could not penetrate its straight face; an atavistic throwback, a creature neither fish nor fowl, lying there flopping its flippers trying to stand up; a video thalidomide baby.
I decided to reserve judgment till the next week. But they did it again. Happy Hollywood shucked us. Dean Jones inspired us. And the high point of the show was Ralph Williams selling one of his brannew ‘conomy carz quipped with heeder’n’five widewalls, finally catching those pies I’d expected to down Happy and Dean. And you want to know something, that poor bald sonofabitch was the only noble creature on the show. But do you get the message? They wouldn’t pie each other, but they’d pie Williams…the only one in the group who was secure in his own bag, doing his own thing. He was safe to attack!
I watched again last night (as I write this) and it was more of the same. Happy dedicated her song to Mr. Nixon’s wonderful new cabinet, Dean Jones sang a song about the nobility of getting out there and sucking up them bullets like a good American, and they managed to even emasculate the Smothers Brothers, who “guest starred.” I think they said “tell it like it is,” a hundred and seventy-eight times, more than enough repetitions to convince me that if I never heard that ungrammatical phrase again, it would be entirely too soon. The ensemble number was dedicated to the philosophy that every wrong road is a boon because it tells us where not to go; a concept firmly in the tone of the American Theme.
So what do we have here?
As I see it, we have a response to The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and the ill-fated Turn-On. A sort of right-wing attempt to prove how good things are these days. It might more appropriately be titled The Establishment Strikes Back.
And it forces me to devise what will henceforth be known as Ellison’s Theorem: the further right your position, the less telling your satire. A corollary of which is that you can’t lampoon anywhere near where you stand, because you’d annihilate your own troops.
They’ve put together a “satire” show guaranteed to offend no one, espousing all the time-worn adages and cop-outs of the midwestern Judeo-Christian ethos. And it is going across big. (I was informed, and received the intelligence with unabashed incredulity that Happy Hollywood—that gross little no-neck monster—has received literally thousands of letters of awe and affection from the Great American Heartland. Glory be to Baby Leroy, we has us a new moppet star! Just what we needed!) (Like an extra set of elbows.)
So take heed, all ye out there on the barricades; it is a sign of the times. The Establishment is no longer going to leave the guerrilla warfare to the dissidents. They are going to use our own weapons against us—and we should’ve expected it. The cunning mothers are like the v.d. germ; it adapts and gets too strong for penicillin. The Young Republicans are waging war against the rioters on campus. The short-haired reactionaries are handing out red/white/blue badges showing you support the status quo, and now tv has taken up the cudgel.
What’s it all about, world? I’ll tell you what it’s all about: we’ve got to get cunninger than them. Anyone for von Clausewitz?
21: 28 FEBRUARY 69
Come with me now as I hew out of a mountain of Jell-O, a structure of cowardice. Observe, if you will, two men—Leonard Goldberg and Elton H. Rule—the former, head of programming at ABC-TV, the latter, president of that network, who crutch along on spines of rubber, trembling timorously from lack of any discernible courage, so motivated by lack of understanding as to what “serving the public good” means, that they crawl crablike across a terrain of fear and hypocrisy.
ABC, because it was the youngest network, and—like Avis—because it was not number one, had to try harder. In trying harder, ABC occasionally took one or two steps further into bold and original programming than either NBC or CBS, the two arteriosclerotic elders of the television pantheon. It didn’t happen often; usually all we got from ABC was cheapjack imitation and a replacement of plot with violence. But from time to time ABC did take a hesitant step toward maturity and responsible programming. So we came to expect that if there was a series possessing some degree of clout, it would be scheduled on ABC, rather than its two doddering rivals.
But Elton Rule has shown he is no man for courage. And the great expectations for ABC were dashed when he knuckled-under instantly to the blue-nosed, hidebound minority out there in the Great American Heartland, who were offended by the relatively mild and innocuous Turn-On some Wednesdays ago, and canceled the poor mother after the first commercial. It was a sign of evils to come, and this week I detail one more such. One that can be more debilitating th
an the loss of Turn-On.
Several weeks ago, on Sunday, February 16th, I was invited to attend the live taping of the pilot segment of a new half-hour comedy series into which ABC had poured over two hundred and ten thousand dollars. The show was called Those Were The Days and was written and directed by Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin, both men of great skill.
Those Were The Days is the American version of an enormously popular English tv series, Till Death Us Do Part, that ran for three years in England and is now in constant rerun throughout the United Kingdom. In both its incarnations, the series is about a simple, everyday household in which a young married couple are living with the girl’s parents. The family unit is a familiar one…the mother is a sweet, solicitous homemaker, god-fearing and church-going…the father is a solid consumer type, simple and direct, a working stiff, a trifle crusty, but charming…the kids are sweet and wholesome, deeply in love, a little awkward about having to sponge off in-laws, but industrious, college-going, all American. Sounds dull, doesn’t it? Safe? Inoffensive? A natural for ABC?
Then why is it that Goldberg and Rule chickened-out and refused to schedule the series for next season, even after they’d laid out over $200,000?
The reason is simple. The head of the household, good old Archie Justice, is a bigot. A common garden-variety, prejudiced against Jews/blacks/Italians/
Mexicans/Everybody bigot. He isn’t a KKKer, he isn’t a member of the German-American Bund, he isn’t a gun-carrying Bircher, he’s simply like the bulk of us, a stupid man who sees no insult in calling Afro-Americans “them black beauties,” or Jews “yids,” or Irish “micks” or Italians “wops.” And he will defend with all the lung-power at his command his right as a good American to express himself in that time-honored manner.
It wouldn’t be so bad in the house if the kids weren’t campus political activists who doubt the existence of god, self-consciously carry the banner of equality as do most “liberals,” and who find themselves constantly at loggerheads with blustering Archie.
In company with something over two hundred other people, culled from supermarkets in Pacoima, street corners in Pasadena and bowling alleys in Tuston, I sat through a delightful half-hour taping of the pilot script. It was by no means offensive. When Archie, in a rage, says “god damn it,” his sweet little wife calls him on it. Archie then explains how he was not swearing because, “god. That’s a good word isn’t it? And damn. You dam a river, don’t you? It’s in the bible. god was always damning this one, or that one, for committing ‘insects’ in the family. Now that ain’t swearing, is it?” The racial references became not quite harmless, but certainly impotent, when taken in context with the character of Archie.
The point to be made, simply, is that the series dealt with a common American archetype, and did it with rare good humor and extraordinary good taste.
It would have made a dynamite series.
After the taping—in which Carroll O’Connor as Archie and Jean Stapleton as his wife were abetted by the brilliant D’Urville Martin as a black oddjob-man doing a calculated Stepin Fetchit to stay out of Archie’s way—and were flawless in their performances—Norman Lear emerged on stage to ask the audience’s opinion. He was greeted with unrestrained huzzahs and applause. The random sample audience loved it. They had laughed till tears rolled down their faces, and they knew they were seeing a winner.
Then Lear asked if anyone in the audience had been offended by anything he’d seen.
Three or four people raised their hands, and Lear gave them full time to express their unease. One man said he thought it was a terrible show because he wouldn’t want his kids to hear swearing like that. Another woman said she thought it was disgraceful to portray such things on television. A wizened old man who was a dead ringer for The Hanging Judge opined that Lear and his cohorts were not only trying to subvert the American Ideal, but inferred that the series, if aired, would somehow mysteriously pollute the precious bodily fluids of all American Youth.
The bulk of the two hundred in the theater laughed them down. Yet I had a premonition, and asked Lear, from the floor, “Using ABC’s reaction to Turn-On as a guide, do you think they’ll have the guts to put this series on the air?” Lear shrugged and then smiled and said he had been in closest contact with Rule and Goldberg through all stages of the production, and they were solidly, courageously behind the project. He said he felt certain it would be on the 1969–70 ABC schedule.
Poor Lear. All these years in the Industry, and he still believed in Santa Claus. He believed, in fact, right up to Thursday night, the 27th of February. The pilot had been shot in a hurry, because ABC wanted to show it to top management at the last moment, as the coup de grace. On that Thursday night Lear and Yorkin and all the actors and even CMA, Lear’s agent, believed there was a Santa Claus, because it was on that Thursday night ABC showed it to their task force. The reports were glowing; everyone loved it. “Played like a baby doll, sweetheart!”
On Friday, the 28th, ABC announced its schedule for next year.
Is anyone surprised that Those Were The Days was not on it?
The only time I ever met Norman Lear was backstage at the taping, at which time I shook his hand and told him he was a good man, and had done a good thing. One of these days I’ll run into him again, and I’ll ask him if he still believes in Santa Claus.
And like all men in this business, who set out to tell something even remotely like the truth, to deal with something even remotely like reality, I suspect Lear will have the appearance of a man stunned by a hammer.
For make no mistake: This was a good show; it was adult, it was funny, it was presumptuous, and it would have been a success. Oh, of course it would have brought its share of outraged cries from that withering minority of backwater scuttlefish who cannot accept the fact that one pallid “god damn” on after-9:00 television means nothing to kids who hear “mother fucker” a hundred times a day in the streets and schoolyards…it would have brought down the impotent wrath of the DAR and other blowhard patriotic nits who refuse to recognize that bigotry does exist in this country…and it would raise shrieks from the vocal minority of Puritanical throwbacks who still live in Plymouth Bay Colony and could never understand that showing all the Archie Justices of this country for what they are, with a degree of affection and ridiculousness, pulls their teeth.
And like the ones who would have howled, had ABC had the balls to proceed with the project, Rule and Goldberg made an a priori decision, and faded to black before the battle was even engaged.
This column conceives of their act as naked cowardice. They may wear their facades of bold businessmen in a commercial arena, but they are like the Emperor with his new clothes. Everyone of us children on the sidelines see them naked, with their petards hanging out. And we cringe at having gutless wonders like that running our public airwaves.
I would suggest to Messrs. Goldberg and Rule, should a good elf somewhichway slip this column before their poached-egg eyes, that here is one newspaperman who was not offended by the show; there are undoubtedly others. If they wish to save some of that $210,000, why don’t they set up a screening of the pilot for columnists and tv people from all over the country, and then make a decision? Is that too incomprehensible a move for them to make, in an effort to save a product that can enrich us—rather than merely continuing with series like It Takes A Thief, in which a crook is glorified, week after week?
How about it, gentlemen: the glove is dropped.
Santa Claus and I want to know if you can find the guts to act like responsible creators, rather than timid and flaccid cowards.
22: 7 MARCH 69
Where to start…where to start? For me, a heavy column. Maybe not for you, but for me. I find myself once more impelled to declare a position, as a result of NBC’s often-brilliant First Tuesday program. I caught it last week, the installment for March, and saw an incredibly strong segment on racial intolerance in Ireland. The Protestants against the Catholics. The Orangemen against the
wearers of the green. The Fundamentalist fanatics of Rev. Ian Paisley against the Papists. And it made me sick. Hundreds of memories of my own childhood flooded back on me….
I was in Lathrop Grade School, in Painesville, Ohio. Maybe third grade. I was the only Jewish kid my age, as I recall. There were a few other Jewish families in Painesville—a town thirty miles east of Cleveland—but even so, I was quite alone as a Jew. They used to beat the shit out of me, regularly. It got so I could wade into the middle of them and let them pummel me, and not even feel it. Have you ever been so inured to pain that you actually sought their fists, as a defiance of them? My mother used to have to come to school to pick me up; not because I was afraid to walk home the few short blocks from Lathrop, but because they ripped my clothes, and we weren’t terribly wealthy, and we couldn’t afford to have my clothes ruined. I got used to it. Weep no tears for that little kid getting kicked unconscious in the schoolyard by Jack Wheeldon, because he learned defiance early, and it changed his life. No, he came out of it okay. But weep for this other one:
The one who walked behind me all the way from school one afternoon. This little girl. A nice one, she was. She wanted to help me.
You see, I was a Jew, and that meant that I was one of those who ground up babies to make matzohs for the High Holy Days. She believed that, and she wanted to save me. She followed me for several days, and then one day she caught up with me and tried to help.
“You’ve got to repent,” she said, seriously.
I stared at her. I didn’t know what she meant, but I was frightened.