The contract was presented to the membership, and it was explicitly stated that this was the final dollar we could get from the producers; if we rejected the deal, it meant a strike. That was last Thursday night.
Now, let us understand something. It is not the strength of the negotiating committee that forces employers to accede to demands. It is the implicit strength of the union’s membership. The negotiators had done the best they could; they had wrung the last drop of honey from the producers. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough. At that point it was time for the members to show their strength, to firm up their resolve, to display some spine, and put themselves on the line. To risk losing something. To stop the mouth to mouth resuscitation of parlor liberals and actually go to the barricades. No one wanted a strike (particularly not me; had we struck, it would have meant killing an impending feature film deal, negotiations for which were going on at that time). But everyone was unhappy with the contract.
Particularly those of us who saw our chance to have a say in the future of tv slipping away.
Many people got up and spoke against the contract. But I looked at the faces of the members. They were bored. They were frightened. They didn’t want to hear that they might have to strike for sixteen weeks to get a decent contract. They were willing to accept the word of the negotiators that this was the limit we could get. They had been more than willing to let Furia & Co. go and do their damnedest, but now it was up to them. Now the words and the threats had to end and the militancy show itself. All the bullshit rhetoric about “We are a strong guild!” had to cease, and some muscle show itself.
They accepted the contract.
They chickened. They could not go that last step to danger. They didn’t care enough about making it better for themselves and their brothers in the everyday hour-to-hour Perdition of television. They didn’t care that the world is falling to pieces around their ears. All they cared about was they’d made a dollar or two, and if we struck it would be painful.
Several meetings ago, Nate Monaster—a past president of WGAw—got up and brought to the attention of the membership that moneys set aside for us in the WGAw Pension Plan were being invested in war stocks. Nate fielded the outrages of many (again, in the main, younger) members who wanted this heinous practice ended. He proposed a motion that the Executive Board of WGAw find a way to have our money transferred to nonwar stocks (we had been advised that since the plan was governed by law by trustees, our hands were tied)…even if it meant we lost money in the sale and transferral. It was a nice gesture, and one many of us hoped would get some action. It hasn’t, of course, but that’s beside the point. The thing about that motion and about that meeting that impressed me most was the moment one of our esteemed members (I forget which one now) took the microphone and could not believe Nate and the rest of us were sincere. Could not believe we would actually lose money rather than be involved with Dow and other firms of its ilk. He was not abusive, he was not angry, he was flatly flabbergasted. He was all at sea. Could not believe we would find the idea of our money being used to produce war matériel so abhorrent that we wanted out no matter what the consequences.
He was a nice man, probably a good man, surely a man who would not condone burning babies, but he was one with the massmind. He was the Silent Majority speaking out in confusion at this demonstration of ethic and morality at the expense of dollars.
It was not a nice thing to find out that my fellow practitioners of the noblest craft in the world were Spiro’s people. It was not nice to find out my sister Beverly was a bigot. It is not a nice feeling, despising men I’ve honored.
But they turned their faces away from the world last Thursday night, and they thrust their hands into their wallets for succor. And for that, I despise them. They are cowards. So I ask, a bit sadly, when the noblest among us cop out…what hope have we? Mel Shavelson, president of the guild, do you have an answer for us?
71: 17 JULY 70
I watched television last Wednesday night, the eighth, and it occurs to me that the March of Dimes never intended to put itself out of business. What I mean, the March of Dimes was out to get infantile paralysis; for years they sent me these dumb stickers—kind of a moral blackmail number through the mails—and for years I sent them some bread. The guilt was adult paralysis: I was such a sucker for their poster kids, I would have felt like Adolf Eichmann if I hadn’t slipped a tenner into an envelope. Never even used the goddamn stickers. But the thing that always got to me was their insistence that they were in business to put themselves out of business: that when they got infantile paralysis cleaned up, they’d throw a big bash and smoothly dissolve their organization. So they did away with infantile paralysis, then went and got themselves into the birth defect market, just so they could keep hustling me every Christmas with those tacky little stickers.
Which is not to say they don’t do a good job for a good cause. It’s just I hate their hypocrisy. Those clowns wound up thirty years later with such a heavy organization they weren’t about to end it all and go out looking for new jobs.
The same might be said for the social protesters in the entertainment media. I mean, one would get the impression that they’d like nothing better than to clean up violence and misery and poverty and pollution and prejudice and Spiro, and then quietly go on to some other line of work, maybe crop-dusting or antimacassar tatting.
But it’s obvious there is considerable bread in dissent, even as there is considerable profit in pollution….
(Digression. Texaco is advertising its lead-free gasoline. It is vastly overpriced. Lead is an additive. They charge us to put it in. Now they charge us again to take it out. Women’s Liberation, as the hippopotamus, currently suffers the services of the vanga-shrike of advertising: Virginia Slims, Feminique, and other useless artifacts insist in their commercials that the only way to be “free” is to use what they purvey, thereby not only demonstrating how shamelessly they will try and exploit the most noble endeavors, but also proving once and for all that they have no understanding whatsoever of what the Movement is about. The spoilers have never been more cunning…they can make a buck off death, or life, or clean air or dirty air or freedom or slavery. It makes one pause for a moment to consider the massed benefits of Capitalism, but since Howard K. Smith assures us America is not Imperialistic, I guess we needn’t dwell too long on it.)
And in safe dissent there is a fortune.
Safe dissent, as opposed to dangerous dissent, is identifiable in a number of ways, which specifics I offer here as a public service. If it is heard or read in a medium where no one will take notice of it—such as “little” magazines, science fiction periodicals, the back pages of underground newspapers, or at liberal cocktail parties—it is safe dissent.
What we might call, to coin a phrase, defanged dissent.
Further identifying keys: if it is dissent on a subject already socially acceptable—abortion, pollution, anti-Semitism, sit-ins at lunch counters—it is defanged; if it’s couched in phraseology so complex you have to have a double-crostic dictionary to unravel it, if it starts with phrases like “I think the kids today have the right idea…” and then uses the words but, however, even so, or some other grammatical linkage that leads into phrases like “we still have laws in this country,” it is defanged; if Tom Reddin or George Putnam could say it and appear to be making a fair statement of both sides of the issue being presented, it is defanged; if Life or Time does a cover story on it, it’s defanged; and if it appears in primetime, it is definitely defanged.
Which is to say, I watched tv Wednesday night the eighth, and I saw just a lot of defanged dissent. It showed up on the first half hour of Johnny Cash Presents The Everly Brothers; it put in an appearance on the debut of Channel 28’s Newsical Muse, to which I switched, midway in the Everlys; and it was rampant on the return of the Smothers Brothers, on ABC. It was all pointed and clever, and it didn’t mean a damned thing, because it was safe and decidedly defanged and if you saw it you just knew no
secret police would come beating on any doors to roust the subversives and you knew you wouldn’t read in the Times the next day about the mysterious suicide/accident/death of any of the video dissenters. It was all so clean and safe even Mrs. Mitchell might have watched it and chuckled mommily and murmured, “Oh, they’re such children!”
I suppose Don and Phil Everly thought they were being terribly dangerous and right on with Johnny Cash singing “The Lonely Voice of Youth Asks What Is Truth.” I suppose they thought they were taking a healthy swing for youth and truth against the Forces of Evil when they brought on Joe Higgins, that fat little guy who plays the Southern highway patrolman on the Dodge commercials (see this column for 26 June) as a Fascistic ABC security guard. I suppose that’s what they thought, I suppose.
And I suppose the endless references by the Smothers to their expulsion from CBS, their singing of “Okie from Muskogee,” the brief shtick with the bird that says, “I’m high,” and the dummy with the hardhat were considered pretty daring dissent, too. Yeah, I guess.
Actually, it was about as dangerous as a routine by Flip Wilson, whose most recent video forays in support of his people have manifested themselves as advertisements for suntan lotion and recruitment for the National Guard.
Only on The Newsical Muse did we get anything even remotely approaching serious comment on the current scene. Lew Irwin and folk singer Len Chandler, who talked and sang themselves out of jobs on KRLA’s Credibility Gap by being too on target, did a half hour of creditable gadflying, and I commend their Wednesday night stints to you with hardly any reservations. I say hardly, because I think they will have to add some visual shticks to the fare before it will entertain as well as the Gap did; but with Chandler’s acidic and heartfelt lyrics, with Irwin’s editorializing tone of Administration disapproval, they are the only ones currently working who come near to the core of anguish in all of us these days, Left or Right.
But, again, it is defanged dissent.
Because it is sung.
I hardly intend to put down Chandler. His work is well into the neighborhood of brilliant. But the past fifteen years have been surfeited with folk songs bemoaning everything from the “company store” to the paving of Paradise in order to “put up a parking lot.” Songs don’t get it. Songs are too easy to ignore. Songs—particularly for the young, whom I regularly bless in these columns—appeal more strongly on the levels of syncopation and rhythm than lyrically. And even more noticeably these days, with the Sound trending more toward Joe Cocker than Julius La Rosa, it is virtually impossible to understand the words until you’ve heard the song a dozen times or caught the artist on a tv variety show lip-synching it. (And usually, when you do, you get the bullshit lyrics of The First Edition’s “Tell It All, Brother” or the Vegas-lounge shuck of Bobby Stevens and his Checkmates singing “I Have a Dream,” vibrating there in his tuxedo, telling us how he’s gonna go back t’Jawjuh to straighten things out. Sure he is.) So the social protest of the songs only occasionally endears itself, as in “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Essentially, what it is, is defanged dissent that sounds nice.
Politicians don’t take songs seriously. I can’t think of one demagogue, from Bilbo to Reagan and including McCarthy, who was ever unseated or mobbed because of a song.
Which brings me back to my original point—excluding Cash, Chandler, Irwin, and Tommy Smothers whom I believe seriously care—that dissent is good business. As witness Flip Wilson or Bobby Stevens, not every black man gives enough of a damn about blackness beyond his own career to take the kind of positions or speak out as forcefully as Dick Gregory. They’ve seen that Greg doesn’t work too much on tv no more. But a few socially oriented zingers in any act make for spice, give intimations of guts, and so they toss them in.
The same for paddys, of course. We’re hip-deep in white entertainers who do such a great job of lip-serving freedom and equality that one really has to check the record to see how far, if at all, they’ve gone beyond making the sounds of genuine action.
TV is rife with defanged dissent, and it is this virtually harmless protest that gets the Orange County Birchers up in arms. Hell, they sometimes think Robert K. Dornan is a Communist and he’s little better than a hyperthyroid Joe Pyne. What television, Los Angeles, and the country need right now is a bold, muckraking series of shows that do what Ramparts, Scanlan’s Monthly, Esquire, the Free Press, and occasionally even Look do: exposés.
Using staffs of investigators, any one (or all) of the three major networks could field a weekly program that could amass evidence that could be presented to the proper authorities for action. Scripts based on accumulated evidence proving which legislators are on the take, which industries continue to pollute the environment, which city and state projects using tax dollars are merely boondoggles, which restaurants are substandard according to health department regs, what the incidence of random phone-tapping is and who’s doing it…a host of subjects that need a crusading, muckraking attack. And documentaries on subjects studiously avoided in the past: what it’s like for a white hooker in black neighborhoods; the revelation that Reagan is using the Rand-style think tanks to create a police state; the proportion of wealthy liberal Jews who own and operate tenements and schlock stores in ghetto areas; how many undercover ’varks actually provoke violence to enable their badge-bearing buddies to bust a parade or meeting; how effective the FBI really is, after all the director’s publicity bullshit is swept aside; how Isla Vista got radicalized.
That would be a dangerous series of shows to watch. Not safe and tidy like the excellent National Geographic specials, or defanged like Mark Lane hurling statistics while Dick Cavett mugs.
Tommy Smothers is a good man, but he’s been pretty effectively neutralized as a dissenter. It has to happen, and it’s a tribute to his past effectiveness. Because when the spokesmen get effective, they are put out of business, at least in terms of credibility to the massmind, which is the enemy that has to be convinced. It happened to Tommy, it happened to Benjamin Spock, it happened to Joan Baez, it happened to Dick Gregory and Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver and Ramsey Clark, and it will happen to anyone else who speaks out. But new spokesmen must be brought up to the barricades. For every Stan Bohrman or Les Crane who gets deactivated, we must find two others, who will keep the rascals honest, or point out how they have their knives in our backs.
Steve Wilson and Lorelei Kilbourne of Big Town’s Illustrated Press used to handle that kind of muckraking job on radio and early tv, but when Britt Reed and The Green Hornet went over to the side of the ’varks, the dissent movement lost much of its effective news-handling. What we need now is the emergence of an honest, ballsy, crusading tv editor who will take on some of these onerous tasks, and get some things said.
What we need is some dangerous dissent, some heavy talk, and some unassailable facts that will make it uncomfortable for the forces of evil in our times.
Songs about loving one another and mild comedy by the darlings of TV Guide is nice to have, also, but let’s not delude ourselves that the insipid little snipes we hear in primetime are causing the Monster Men any sleepless nights.
It ain’t that easy, friends.
72: 24 JULY 70
Well, it’s kind of a dumb story, but since you asked, I’ll tell you.
About a month ago, I mentioned somewhat casually that I’d once been a contestant on The Dating Game, and in my usual offhand fashion, being cute and not thinking you’d really take me up on it, I mumbled, “I’ll tell you about it sometime.” Some cute. I got a dozen letters demanding the story. Y’know, you people have positively a lust for the ugly.
But, as Art Baker used to say before Jack Smith replaced him with that big jar of Skippy Peanut Butter, this is for you, Mrs. Aline Tegler of Playa Del Rey…
You Asked for It!
Hardly a soul left alive today remembers the event, for it transpired before that now-infamous ABC monstrousness went on the air for its first season. That would have to be five or six years
ago.
Well, what happened was this: some young women I’d been dating at the time, quite apart from one another, were asked to try out for the show prior to its first few tapings. Part of the routine through which they were put was filling out an office form on which they were to note the names and phone numbers of other lovely girls and eligible bachelors who might make personable contestants. So three of these nice ladies—none of whom knew the others—quite independently wrote down my name. At the time I was an eligible bachelor. (I’m still an eligible bachelor, but now I’m an older eligible bachelor. Which probably says something ominous about me as marital timber, but that’s another story, for another time. Don’t write letters!)
So one morning when I was still living in a tree house in Beverly Glen, I got this call from a silken-voiced houri representing someone I’d never heard of, Chuck Barris and his Productions. This siren urged me to haul my fair young body down to an office building near Hollywood and Vine (if memory serves) where the joys of the world would be revealed to me. Promises of mounds of pliant female flesh were openly made. It was like recruitment for a Marrakesh harem. Well, sir, being a healthy young lad, I got into my best threads (which at that point of poverty were no great shakes, let me tell you) and hied my ass thence.
Once into the reception room of Chuck Barris Productions, I saw half a dozen great-looking girls, three great-looking secretaries, a great-looking receptionist, and about a dozen schlumpy-looking guys, some of whom had terminal acne.
Thinking I’d been singled out in some special manner, because of the lofty tone of the siren’s phone call, I went up to the receptionist and said, “My name is Harlan Ellison. I was asked to come down to see so-and-so.” She didn’t even bat an eyelash. (With phonies that length, she was lucky to’ve been able to open them.) “Take a seat with the other supplicants,” she said.