It is the Common Man one sees throwing a lit cigarette butt out the car window as we crawl up through the dry-brush canyons where the threat of fire lies heavy over the land. It is the Common Man who tells us the kitchen appliance we bought a year ago cannot be repaired, that it’s cheaper to replace the whole unit, and here’s a nice one over here you can have for a mere $79.95. It is the Common Man who stands as public monument, watching a sixty-five year old woman get her purse snatched, and then tells the cops, “I didn’t want to get involved.” It is the Common Man who thinks the space program of NASA has no merit because there are potholes in the streets of Watts. The same Common Man listens to Phyllis Schlafly and Jerry Falwell and the know-nothings who want to ban Catcher in the Rye from school libraries because it has dirty words in it. This too-common man and woman go on endlessly about the rabid ethnic types who cheat on welfare checks, who see rapists by the color of their skin, who lament the offing of their neighbors by their spouses with handguns, and see nothing wrong with cutting back lunches for school children.
These same Common Men and Women also cheat on their income taxes, manage to overlook the fact that William Bonin is white, frequent splatter movies in which women get icepicks in their eyes because it’s “entertainment,” and who applaud the expenditure of hundreds of thousands of dollars for that annual panegyric of bad taste, The Rose Parade, which hundreds of thousands could be used to buy school lunches if anyone really gave a damn.
I do not believe in luck. Louis Pasteur said, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” I believe to my core that because we accept a view of the world around us that is shoehorned into a thirty-second squib on the “ABC Evening News,” that we stumble through our lives being acted upon, rather than actually having anything to say about what our condition of life will be.
It is my conviction that the myth of the Common Man is outmoded and perilous for us to continue deifying. When, in 1982, there are people who actually believe the silly hogwash of “scientific creationists,” who continue to think the death penalty will deter monsters such as those who shot down innocent hostages at a Bob’s Big Boy, who think missiles and hardened silos will answer the threat of war, whose only acquaintance with ideas and the written word is through the pages of TV Guide or The National Enquirer…it is my perception that we will continue in the New Year to reap precisely what we have sown.
The time of thinking that intelligence and education and reasoning logically are useless qualities, fit only for eggheads, is past. We have had a decade of situational ethics, avoidance, non-involvement on a personal level of risk, response to the small problems and to the large with nothing but transient emotionalism. We have looked out for #1, we have gotten inside our own heads, we have used our space fer sure, and the point at which we find ourselves is at the crossroads, barefoot and as unknowing as children. Down one road lies more of the same, a dark specter waiting to chop us off at the hips. Down the other lies mist and fog.
Neither road is one we would choose if there were a nice Hyatt where we could stay overnight. But the roads are empty, and we have to keep moving.
Both roads lead to the future; the only difference is in the choice of walking the one with Pasteur and the Catcher in the Rye, or the other with the Common Man.
And I don’t trust that sucker any more than you do.
TRUE LOVE: GROPING FOR THE HOLY GRAIL
The following details Harlan’s 1978 experience with a video dating service on assignment for Los Angeles magazine. As usual, however, Harlan takes on larger issues than just making it on the singles scene.
I have this terrific theory. It’s all about how we stop schlubs like Son of Sam or Richard Speck or Charlie Manson or William Calley or the Hillside Strangler from killing people.
It goes like this: We live in a kind of berserk, wonky Show Biz Society. For the mass of people living ordinary, just-let-me-make-it-through-the-week lives, the denizens of the flash&glitter set who appear on the Johnny Carson show are more substantial, more real, than their neighbors or their families.
Whom Jackie-O is dating this month has more relevance to readers of the Star or People than the fact that their butcher was recently admitted to the Carrville Leprosarium with Hansen’s Disease. Zsa Zsa Gabor on fiscal responsibility and Debbie Boone on pollution have more impact than the most recent thoughts of Nader or Bucky Fuller. Every woman sees Mr. Goodbar as George Segal or Paul Winfield or Clint Eastwood or a phosphor-dot variation therefrom emanating; every man is seeking Ms. Juicy Fruit in the image of Raquel Welch or Farrah Whatserface or Donna Summer. Or etcetera.
So here’s a pudgy, bland little doughnut like Son of Sam, drudging away his life in the Post Awful (which sinecure would drive even a well-adjusted person out of his brain), and day by day, night by night he’s drenched with celebrities, none of whom have opinions or de facto worth any more valid than his own. But he’s a cipher, a nothing, a nobody; he can’t escape that realization. He’s a doughnut, and no one will pay any attention to him; nobody’ll throw a party or a parade for him. Frustration, lack of self-esteem, the pressure of everyday life, and he simply ain’t making it. Hey, look at me! he screams silently. But all he gets is jostled and shoved on the crowded sidewalks. So he goes out and gets some attention…by blowing people away.
No need to say he’s an exception, the manifestation of a “disturbed” personality. Whaddaya think, I’m a dummy? I know he’s disturbed. But if you gave him ten minutes of late night prime-time on Carson, he’d never kill anybody. He’d feed off that notoriety for years. It might not turn him into Albert Schweitzer, but at least he wouldn’t be out there fracturing the peace and sanity of the world.
Being on teevee is the secret lust-dream of the American People. Television is, in sad fact, the new reality. What happens on the tube really happens…what goes down in the perceived world is iffy; maybe it’s real, maybe not.†
And that’s one of the most important reasons why a videotape dating service like Great Expectations is so damned successful and does such a good job of bringing people together in what we laughingly term The Dating Pool.
My friend Sherry, the Sherry who runs the bookstore, not the Sherry who can’t get a steady job or the Sherry who is an interior decorator, said to me one day about a year ago, “I joined a videotape dating service; it’s really terrific; I’ve met a gang of interesting men. You ought to go over there.”
My first thought was that she was making what I took to be a not-so-subtle chop at my not having found a steady lady friend since the most recent divorce. But as it turned out, she only wanted me to indulge my curiosity. She thought I’d find it interesting. Well, I uttered the expected “yucchhh” at the thought of signing up for some artificial system of companion-procurement, and that was that.
Couple of weeks later I received a letter from something called Great Expectations. It was a form letter headed
THE END OF THE BLIND DATE…
and it suggested that if I had sated myself wasting away my life looking for love-mates in singles bars, groups or parties, I might be ready for Great Expectations.
But since I don’t drink, I have never been in a singles bar (yes, my guilty secret is out at last). Belonging to groups makes me nervous (I can barely handle my membership in the Book-of-the-Month Club). And as for parties, ever since the mass of my friends discovered dope (which nasty substances will never pollute my precious bodily fluids), I haven’t been invited to a get-together. I’m sure that’s the reason.
And I was about to roundfile the letter, along with the bulk mail that offered me parcels of land in the more remote areas of Tannu Tuva or the Orinoco Basin, come-ons to buy vegetable choppers, and the possibility of subscribing to a magazine concerned solely with bathroom equipment, when I noticed a handwritten addenda at the bottom of the form letter. It read, “We invite you to a free, private viewing of our program…& members…It costs nothing!”
Some weeks later, I had occasion to find myself at Sherry’s bookstore
, which is on Westwood Boulevard, which is just up the street from the address where Great Expectations said True Love, The Holy Grail, waited for me and, well, one thing and another, with an hour to kill, so why the hell not, you know how it is, er, uh, mmmm…
And I walked down to Great Expectations at 1516 Westwood Boulevard; and it was there, oh moment of karmic destiny, that I found the most perfect device ever conceived in aid of one’s groping toward The Holy Grail, sometimes mugged and printed under the AKA, True Love.
Great Expectations is not a computer dating service. It is not a photo dating service. It is not a referral service. And it sure as hell isn’t your tante Sophie fixing you up with this “very cute girl with a swell personality.” It is the very apotheosis of the Age of Emotional Technology. It is selecting a companion from a videotape interview and a written profile, and though it may be as flawed a system for finding True Love as the ancient and venerable art of the shadchen or Chinese marriage contracts between infants, as far as I can tell, it cuts down the potential for catastrophes in a big way.
It is a business. It is run for profit. That seems to distress some people. (One such troubled soul is John Ettinger, an independent television documentary producer who did a segment of Channel 7’s “Eyewitness Los Angeles” on Great Expectations recently, and who seemed hideously distressed that the service wasn’t run like the Midnight Mission. More on Mr. Ettinger, and the hypnotic effect Great Expectations has on the weak-willed, later. Stay tuned.) Nonetheless, it is difficult for the average person contemplating a “dating service” to get past the stigmatized mythos of “paying” for the search for True Love. If one considers how much is paid in emotional coin, in the wear-and-tear give-and-take of most social liaisons embodying the Search, the cost of a membership in Great Expectations’ service seems reasonable. But trying to explain the price structure in coherent terms is about as easy as filling out an IRS “short form.”
But I’ll try. Just not yet, please. It takes some working up to. For the nonce, let me tell you of the scene, and how I was embroiled in same at the behest of Los Angeles magazine, may its circulation increase.
Jeffrey Ullman is twenty-seven, happily married, and finds himself precariously poised on the precipice of financial success. He was twenty-five, happily married and impecunious when he had the moment of satori in which Great Expectations was born.
Ullman graduated from Berkeley in 1972 with a B.A. in Independent Journalism. His senior thesis was titled, “Getting on TV: If Not You…Then Who?” For the two years following his graduation he was a Video Documentarian. What that means—in a time when garbage collectors throw dreck as Sanitation Removal Consultants—is that he produced, wrote and directed low-energy-level documentaries for schools: over thirty in five years. But when a NEA grant came to an end in 1974, Ullman found himself back in Los Angeles without a pot.
At a dinner party thrown by his parents in September of 1975, Ullman overheard a conversation between his mother and a friend of the family, an attractive, successful, 28-year-old female record company executive, recently come to Los Angeles from New York. She was lamenting the sorry state of dating here in the City of the Angels. Though she had met many men and had no lag-time in her social life, she could not find “that certain someone.” Because she was an exceptionally attractive woman, she was constantly being hustled; but there was no click, no knight on a white charger; she had not been, in the words of Mario Puzo, “struck by the thunderbolt.” Ullman listened to this not unfamiliar lament, and its coda, from his mother, who observed that an inability to find suitable companions afflicted her older friends who were recently widowed.
Later that night, driving home from the dinner party on the Santa Monica Freeway, wracking his brain for a way to put his video experience to work profitably here in Los Angeles, the conversation of earlier kept intruding.
Not even Aristotle could codify the nature of the creative act, and so it escapes both Ullman and me precisely what synaptic relay was suddenly closed, that produced the circuit linkage. But in that moment, on the Santa Monica Freeway, Ullman perceived the natural extrapolation of using videotape as a device for bringing people together. That the linkage was produced out of a need to make an honest living should in no way demean its importance.
I mean, who knows what venal impetus directed Albert Einstein’s thoughts toward the space-time equations?
Ullman began researching the possibilities of a service that would employ video technology in aid of this most basic human need. Fifty to sixty hours a week were spent hip-deep in sociology texts, magazine articles about singles, books on social anthropology, psychology, telecommunications and, fruitlessly as it turned out, source material on how to run a dating service.
Funding was obtained from his parents and from a darkly mysterious background figure whose name I have sworn to keep to myself on pain of having my “I” key broken off the typewriter. Mr. Mysterious doesn’t matter, anyhow, because he was bought out three months later, to the vast relief of Ullman and his parents.
And so, on Leap Year Day, February 29th, 1976, Great Expectations opened shop.
Almost two years later, the membership is nearing 600 (52% male, 48% female) and what the Ullmans call “the relationship store” has a backlog of over one hundred and fifty videotape cassettes, each holding the life-essence of four or five seekers. Five highly-sophisticated Sony Betamax SLO-320’s flicker from noon till eight Mondays through Fridays and twelve to five Saturdays and Sundays. Through the 1550 feet of office space that were private apartments in the Karno Building twenty years ago, pass seekers after the Ultimate Truth, the Holy Grail, AKA True Love.
To this Valhalla of unanswered needs and unfulfilled dreams I came, wide-eyed and as close to innocent as four marriages and a lifetime of brutalization permitted.
There are over two million stories in the City of the Naked Angels. Mine is one of them.
To begin with, Randy Newman notwithstanding, tall people get me very cranky. Because of their insecurity at their yeti-like monstrousness, they have long engaged in a dire conspiracy to inconvenience those of us who are normal height, that is, five foot five or under. This conspiracy manifests itself in the height at which kitchen cabinets are built, the dispatching of six footers with enormous naturals who sit in front of us at movies, the inability to get a decent suit of clothes without shopping in the cadet section of C&R Clothiers, and other such indignities.
Jeff Ullman is six foot two.
I walked up the stairs at Great Expectations and was met by this great shambling hairy creature, who introduced himself as the gentleman who had sent me the come-on letter.
Maybe not cranky. Let’s just say I was underwhelmed.
In case you’ve lost the thread, I was on Westwood Boulevard, having an hour to kill, sorta, kinda, and thought I’d check out this weird dating service my friend Sherry had obviously touted onto me. “Oh, so you’re the famous writer I’ve heard so much about,” Ullman said, winning me to his cause instantly by striking at my weakest point: cheap appeal to vanity.
We sat down and he managed to outline the program at Great Expectations in between long bouts on the telephone with members who were calling in to exclaim jubilantly about their dates of the night before. To a man who had not had a date in six weeks, it was enormously depressing.
We talked for a while, and I was bemused. The odd mating rituals of the natives have always intrigued me. Despite his height, I rather liked Ullman. He did not try to con me into believing he was ramrodding Great Expectations out of a selfless dedication to the betterment of the human race. It was clear he was a businessman who had come up with an interesting, very likely workable way to deal with one of the most basic of human hungers: the need for companionship and love. But he had verve and enthusiasm, and a warped sense of humor that reminded me of my own, except taller.
So I thought I’d write an article about videotape dating. I write a lot of fantasy, in the general course of things, and surely this
was a recent, fantastic phenomenon in the uses to which technology could be put in service of the commonweal. Jeff Ullman thought that was a peachy idea.
But the nature of my romantic life is so complex that I felt I should divorce myself from the actual dating process at Great Expectations; I felt a detached view, written with a wry manner, winsome but puckish, would be the most truthful. I mean, what if I got embroiled in dating Great Expectations members and, because I’m such a wimp, they all turned out badly? Then I’d be writing about me and not about the service, which might be a little bit of sensational for everybody else who’s normal. No, I decided, this was going to be straight reportage. No Tom Wolfe or Hunter Thompson personal gonzo journalism. The unadorned reality. Sure.
Ullman was having none of it. Nor was the other Geoff—Miller, who edits Los Angeles magazine. They both insisted I actually memberize myself; actually put my face and mouth on a videotape; actually fill out a member profile; actually solicit dates with all those numbered women in the profile books; actually allow female persons to see my tape, read my profile and, if they were the sort of people who had taken leave of their senses, request dates with me.
They insisted that was the only honest way really to do a solid piece of investigative journalism. Ullman kept speaking of involvement and commitment; Miller kept hinting about the need for more and better consumer protection, the need to make certain we weren’t sending the love-starved Los Angeles hordes—pathetic lemmings of lust hellbent on hurling themselves over the precipice of romance—to a shuck-and-jive operation. He also said he’d pay me a decent rate for the article, rather than the parsimonious sums usually doled out to the beanfield hands who traditionally write for Miller.