4: 25 OCTOBER 68
Several things perplexed me this last week. The first was the Mitzi Gaynor special on Channel 4, Monday night the 14th. The second was the CBS Playhouse special, J.P. Miller’s 90-minute drama The People Next Door, on Channel 2, Tuesday the 15th. The third was a segment of the Channel 11 Donald O’Connor variety show—Thursday’s offering, the 17th, specifically. They befuddled me, unsettled me, and defied analysis…until something crummy happened later Thursday night, something that really zapped me and dropped everything into place.
May I tell you about it? Thank you.
The Daisy is quiet these nights, since all the lemmings followed the spoor to the Factory and Arthur and the Candy Store. So it’s a good place to go late at night for a cup of coffee and a few dances. After the O’Connor show had been on a while, and my mind had been extruded out through my nostrils, a young lady and I motored down. It was quiet, nice.
We sat and talked for a while, and then a small podium was set up, and two young men who call themselves “The New Wave” came out. They each carried an unamplified guitar, their hair was stylishly long, they were nice-looking guys, and they mounted the stools on the podium, and they prepared to play.
At that moment, into the small but polite audience came a table-load of stretch-black knee socks/dark lint-free suits/midnight beard-stippled/powdered and cologned/cigar cellophane crinkling/pure Hollywood types. With their ladies of the evening. They were noisy. That is the most polite way to put it. They were noisy.
They took a table at the edge of the dance floor, within arms’ length of The New Wave. As the two boys started playing—with great skill and beauty—the egg-suckers began gibbering. Talking, laughing, doing all the square old shticks that old squares pull in the presence of the terror generated in them by youth. (And I finally learned what a tramp is, incidentally. Their chicks were in their twenties—naturally: old impotent squares need fresh meat to reassure them the world isn’t entirely against them, that they aren’t completely turning to ashes in their husks—and the chicks laughed right along at such brilliant bon mots as “Is that a girl or a boy with all that hair?” A tramp is a chick who will laugh at a swine’s gaucheries because she wants something from him, even if it’s only another stinger.)
The New Wave played eight or nine songs of genuine beauty, most of which they’d written themselves, many of which said something fresh and searching about life in our times, the struggles of the young for identity, in general a fine and lovely set, concerned with what is coming down these days. The old farts could have learned something if they’d listened. But they wouldn’t. As those sweet guitars worked, the crustaceans of the Alcoholic Generation screamed louder, made more impolite remarks, jeered, goosed their whores and went to decay and garbage before the eyes of The New Wave—who were beautifully cool and ignored them without dropping a measure—and everyone else in the room.
I left the Daisy confused by what I’d seen, and deeply troubled. Oh sure, I’d seen this kind of ridiculous behavior before, many times, in many night clubs, at many concerts, in movies. But why, I asked myself, couldn’t they have at least taken a table at the rear of the room if they wanted to talk, if they didn’t want to hear a live performance? Why did they sit right in front; and sitting right in front, why couldn’t they open their gourds and maybe learn what these kids had to say.
These were the kind of swine, I thought, who groove on those hincty, square, bible belt-style Las Vegas lounge acts, all screamhorn and sweaty thighs. Trini Lopez and Shirley Bassey and Sam Butera and Robert Goulet and a big sequined finale where everybody exudes phony enthusiasm marching around singing When The Saints Go Marching In. The Judy Garland lovers. The ones who dig…and it all dropped into place…Mitzi Gaynor and Donald O’Connor and what The People Next Door were putting out.
The linkage was there, plainly. And though I shied away from the cliché, it was dear god help us, the Generation Gap. Those were the most gapped people I’d ever seen. And I knew why those three tv shows had unsettled me.
The Mitzi Gaynor special was old. It was cornball. It was all that papier-mâché elegance, all the highkicking chorusboy shit that goes big in Vegas, and goes down smooth as honey in redneck territory, because it feeds the unrealistic images all those rustics have of glamour and showbiz. It was the essence of the-show-must-go-on-ism. (And let’s put a hole in that one right now: what the hell would it matter if the show didn’t go on? Is the arrogance of the showbiz type so monumental that he thinks the course of Western Civilization would somewhichway be slowed if the Osmond Bros. didn’t make the midnight show on New Year’s Eve at the Sahara?)
The same holds true for the O’Connor show. Night after weeknight we are treated to a dull, dreary hegira of Vegas lounge acts, slouching like some rough beasts toward a Bethlehem that looks like nothing so much as the interior of the Stage Deli. It is outdated entertainment. It is an atavistic throwback to the cornball of the Thirties and Forties, without the saving grace of being nostalgic or even camp. They take it seriously. Henny Youngman still works as though he were a fresh, apple-cheeked act. The days of belting, busty chanteuses and vaguely off-color comics with cuffs that shoot automatically is past. They are on the other side of the Gap. They are as far from The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and Laugh-In as Little Orphan Annie is from the Mona Lisa.
Sure the septuagenarians should have equal time in the networks’ programming. Sure they should. But when will the powers-that-do realize that being au courant, achieving that across-the-board viewership they revere more than the blood of Christ or their mother’s gefilte fish, means more than adding Harper’s Bizarre to an Ed Sullivan bill featuring Kate Smith, the Sons of the Pioneers and Betty Hutton doing her roadshow rendition of Hello Dolly?
Time is passing them by, and they obstinately remain gapped.
Even as J.P. Miller, author of The People Next Door, is gapped. Demonstrably obvious from his 90 minutes of hysterical reaction-formation to his own son’s dropping out and becoming a hippie, The People Next Door was a dishonest and stacked-deck as a drama could be.
I won’t go into the plot. If you missed it, you didn’t miss much but an object lesson. It was an exercise in hypocrisy. It started with cliché characters and espoused a view of the generation of revolution as imperfect and disembodied as the uniformed opinions of the most militant and frightened Orange County Bircher.
It was the vocal statement of a man who is confused and terrified by the things young people are doing today, a statement that did not comprehend the blame lies in the venality and alienation of the older generations. It was as dense and studiedly unknowing as the grave-fears of a little old lady dying away her moments in a Beverly Boulevard convalescent home.
One can only conjecture what effect Miller’s play had on the errant son. Were I he, it would have solidified once and finally my feelings that Dad was a phony intellectual, and a man to distrust simply because he knows not where it’s at. Nor where it’s going to be.
5: 1 NOVEMBER 68
Wags at a recent craft forum meeting of the Writers Guild suggested that the reason for the recent bombing of the Free Press was this column. I pshawed them, naturally. It’s true I received an irate call from an irate producer, whose series I’d bummed in these pages, assuring me that I was a toad and that I would never work on that series. (This, gentle readers, is a threat roughly as imposing as telling a man who has just crawled out of the Gobi Desert on hands and knees that he cannot have a peanut butter sandwich.)
It is also true that I received a communication from CBS News here in Los Angeles, demanding to know the names of the confidantes who had freely discussed the hypocrisy of their network and its news staff. There were implied threats. Dark and devious references to Judge Crater and Amelia Earhart and Ambrose Bierce. (I didn’t nark on my sources, gang. Bamboo shoots under the fingernails could not drag that privileged communication from me. Which brings us to an interesting sidelight that came down this week: a representat
ive of ABC-TV, facing the Senate investigating committee on television violence, copped-out that not only was ABC clean clean clean, but that because of the effulgent brilliance of ABC’s Mod Squad—a disaster area I dealt with several weeks ago here—a teen-aged girl, a “user,” had “kicked,” and “split her scene,” and had joined forces with the L.A.P.D.—like the kids in the series—to work as an undercover informer, a “stoolie.” This network rep was really
h-e-p, he used all the jargon…user, kicked, split, where it’s at…unfortunately, he doesn’t smell out the horror of what he’d said: that the ethical corruption of the series had miasmically drifted off the tube, and clouded that poor little chick’s mind, thereby causing her to turn on/in her contemporaries. And if it be demonstrably true that this nitwit show can cause one person to turn from “evil” to “good,” then it should conversely be true that it could turn them from “good” to ,” and so it probably follows that seeing violence on Mod Squad could get thousands of little teenie-boppers to run amuck and send their parents through meatgrinders. God save us from network representatives so chickenshit frightened for their jobs that they feed the witch-hunters the raw meat they need to batten and fatten.)
So…anyhow…back to the point, whatever it was, originally. Oh yeah, threats, displeasure. I remember.
This column has attracted some small attention, and not all of it dedicated to the concept that the author is a pussycat. So, before the impression is too strongly implanted that I am a bitter, cynical, rude and violent critic with a heart as mellow as a chunk of anthracite, I am sliding this column in among the contributions I make weekly in which I explain the Ethical Structure of the Universe and help Keep America Strong! A column of fun, folks. Get set for funtime! A direct appeal to your funnybone, in an effort to prove that I am a man of mellow habits and gentleness. And how do I set about proving this to all my critics? By listing those current shows that I recommend unqualifiedly as excellent tv fare, and then by making a few thoughtful suggestions as to potential series that might make it big on prime-time.
First: the shows I recommend:
Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In
The Smothers Bros. Comedy Hour
The Ghost And Mrs. Muir
Mission: Impossible
Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour
The Dan Smoot Report
The Sign-Off Sermon
(I also recommend the new ½-hour police series Adam-12, on Saturday evenings. Very nice, very realistic, and almost too damned good to believe from gung-ho Jack Webb.)
Now there may be those among you who think I’m kidding when I recommend Ted Mack and Dan Smoot and the prayer just before the station signs off. Nothing could be further from the truth. I’m dead serious. For sheer sustained bald humor, nothing is funnier than Mr. Smoot awakening us to the
danger of the International Communist Freako-Devo-Pervo-Sickie World Conspiracy. And if you think Laugh-In is funny, fall down on Ted Mack’s show. You don’t know what humor is till you’ve seen a boilermaker from Moline making music by rapping his skull with his knuckles. (And remind me some time to tell you about the freakout existentialist experience I had one Sunday morning with the Original Amateur Hour. Uh!)
And if one chooses to worship Ba’al or Zoroaster, the late night psalm is refreshing, stimulating, uplifting and hysterically convulsing.
But it must be obvious to everyone that tv has nowhere nearly approached its potentialities for comedy series. So in a constructive attempt to hip them to what can be done, I offer the following proposed series concepts, some of which are mine, some of which come from other tv writers who wish their names unknown and their homes unbombed.
Berkowitz of Belsen! With the success of funny POW camp shows like Hogan’s Heroes, the next natural step is a funny series about a Nazi extermination camp. Our hero is Morris Berkowitz, an engaging scoundrel of the Phil Silvers-Sgt. Bilko stripe, whose hilarious exploits among the quicklime pits and gas chambers of Belsen are calculated to send you into paroxysms of joy. I can see a typical segment now: Berkowitz has flummoxed the cuddly Kommandant of Belsen into selling him half a dozen ovens for purposes of setting Berkowitz up in the pizza business. Conservative, Orthodox and Reform pizzas, all with meat.
Johnny Basket-Case! A two-fisted western about a trouble-shooting multiple amputee who rides his great white stallion Trumbo side-saddle, in a wicker basket. He is a sensational shot, firing the six-gun with his mouth.
Freakout! A weekly series of music and blackouts featuring kids who’ve been committed to the UCLA Intensive Care ward, acid-victims all. Their hilarious nightmares and problems being fed intravenously while in shock should help establish a necessary rapport between the generations.
A Man Called Rex! A situation comedy about Oedipus and his Mom. Heartwarming social comment and unaffected comedy for the Love Generation.
Chicago Signal 39! A true-to-life police show starring those two great Americans Fess Parker and Buddy Ebsen, as a pair of Chicago flying squad cops assigned to the Special Riot Detail. Homespun comedy about mace and mad dogs. Will play big in the Midwest.
This is only a sampling of the wonders modern tv could provide, if they would only carry to logical extremes what is already being delivered to the public.
And this sampling should once and for all put an end to the base canards leveled against this column and this columnist that we view with disgust and horror what comes out of the glass teat each week.
See, I told you. I’m a pussycat.
6: 8 NOVEMBER 68
As slanted and inept as television’s handling of the news may be, it is light-years away in integrity and lucidity from Time Magazine, a phenomenon of 20th Century life I put on a level with dog catchers, summer colds, organ music at skating rinks and the comedy of Phyllis Diller: in short, items I can well do without.
I don’t read Time. Except to check them against Ramparts and gauge the degree of paranoia Mr. Luce is currently proffering. Yet the other day my secretary, Crazy June, in an attempt to destroy my mind, wafted a copy of Time under my snout (she was hellbent on reading me an item about snake-handling ministers of the Holiness Church of god in Jesus’s Name, somewhere in Virginia; don’t ask me why) and I caught a glimpse of Time’s television page.
I was pinned to a listing of the Nielsen ratings released last week. I have to reproduce that list for you. The mind flounders.
1) Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In (NBC)
2) Mayberry R. F. D. (CBS)
3) Gomer Pyle-U.S.M.C. (CBS) and Julia (NBC)
5) Family Affair (CBS)
6) Bonanza (NBC)
7) Here’s Lucy (CBS) and The CBS Thursday Night Movie (Doris Day in The Glass Bottom Boat)
9) The Beverly Hillbillies (CBS)
10) Ironside (NBC)
Now I have to confess that I have never seen a segment of the Lucille Ball show (I Love Lucy back when I was in high school was more than enough for me), or the Mayberry R.F.D. thing (which I gather is an offshoot of Gomer Pyle which is an offshoot of the original Andy Griffith Show), or Julia, which I understand is deeply sensitive and touching. In the line of work I have caught all the others—at least when they were onscreen for the first season. It’s been years since I’ve considered the peregrinations and problems of Hoss Cartwright or Ellie Mae Clampett, or wept sadly that an actor as fine as Brian Keith has to play second banana to a couple of saccharine cutesy moppets just to make a good living, but I consider myself reasonably au courant with what’s available on prime-time, and aside from thoroughly enjoying Laugh-In (you see, I love Goldie Hawn and I lust after Judy Carne), I am frozen into immobility at what the bulk of the nation is choosing to watch.
Six of the ten leading items are wafer-thin, inane, excruciatingly banal situation comedies dealing with a view of American home life that simply does not exist save in the minds of polyannas and outpatients from the Menninger Foundation. All six of those items run only 20-some-odd minutes (minus commercials), which indicates how
deeply the plot goes into any problem jury-rigged for the actors. Two more of the top ten are light comedy, the Doris Day film and Laugh-In. Miss Day fits neatly in with our first six winners, and Laugh-In manages to become consistent with the others by its escapist elements—laughter and silliness. Of the ten top shows, only two even remotely resemble drama. And both of them are—psychologically speaking—”family” shows. The Cartwright strength is in the family unit, and “Ironside” has his little family of assistants, the two white kids and the obligatory black kid.
While their world gets ripped along the dotted line, the average middle-class consumer-slaphappy American opts for escapist entertainment of the most vapid sort. No wonder motion pictures grow wilder and further out in subject matter: audiences are getting their fill of pap on the glass teat. No wonder such umbrage and outrage by the masscult mind at the doings of the Revolution: they sit night in and night out sucking up fantasy that tells them even hillbilly idiots with billions living in Beverly Hills, are just plain folks. No wonder the country is divided down the middle; tv mythology causes polarization.
Walking the streets these days and nights are members of the Television Generation. Kids who were born with tv, were babysat by tv, were weaned on tv, dug tv and finally rejected tv. These kids are also, oddly enough, members of the first Peace Generation in history, members of the Revolution Generation that refuses to accept the possibility that if you don’t use Nair on your legs you’ll never get laid.
But their parents, the older folks, the ones who brought the world down whatever road it is that’s put us in this place at this time—they sit and watch situation comedies. Does this tell us something? Particularly in a week when prime-time was pre-empted for major political addresses by the gag-and-vomit boys Humphrey and Nixon? It tells us that even in a year when the situation facing us is so politically bleak that optimists are readying their passports for Liechtenstein and pessimists are contemplating opening their veins, that the mass is still denying the facts of life. The mass is still living in a fairyland where occasionally a gripe or discouraging word is heard. The mass has packed its head with cotton. The mass has allowed its brains to be turned to lime jello. The mass sits and sucks its thumb and watches Lucy and Doris and Granny Clampett and the world burns around them.