“A quiz show,” says Kenyon, “can teach us almost nothing, and it certainly cannot educate. The world of the educated man is not full of answers, as our television screens would have us believe—it is full of mysteries, it is foggy and dark, with lots of unlighted passages leading off to no one knows where. The more educated a person is, the more such passages the person discovers.”
“But all this does not mean,” says Kenyon, “that television is incapable of educating its viewers. The problem is one of faith. Your faith as broadcasters. I believe you can have faith in the audience.”
“I’ve heard,” says Kenyon, “from so many people who say, ‘please, let’s have something that stretches us a bit. Let’s have something that wakes us up and even keeps us awake, because television so often is a kind of soporific—we use it to go to sleep. But ‘please,’ they say. ‘Teach us. We want to know things!’“
In the front row Kenyon finds Ernestine’s eyes. Glinting, alive.
His notes are incomplete and he’s reached their end, but with Ernestine watching him he feels he can go on, and he does, something opening up inside him. And how good it is, how completely nourishing, to speak publicly without a script, to believe the words he is saying.
A reception follows the keynote—a wood-paneled banquet room with urns of coffee and platters of fruit. The broadcasters press close around him in their identical suits, lapels badged and hair immaculately parted. They want him to elaborate, some of them. Some want to challenge him. Some want to bandy the names of mutual acquaintances at NBC. At the perimeter, reticule in one hand, coffee cup in the other, Ernestine seems suddenly tired, withdrawn. Every few minutes Kenyon glances over, tries to reassure her with a look. But soon through the bobbing heads he sees that she’s gone.
He stands his ground, stammers out answers, shakes their hands, receives their thanks and thanks them in turn. Finally the crowd begins to drain from the banquet room, the broadcasters hurrying to the next scheduled panel. He’s free to go.
Ernestine is not in the lobby, her coat gone from the coat check. Kenyon bundles up and hunches forward through the narrow, ice-blown streets.
At the Beacon’s front desk he learns that she’s collected her key and retired to her room.
Upstairs he taps at her door.
After a moment her voice answers: “Yes?”
“It’s just Kenyon,” he calls through the door. “Everything OK?”
“Fine.” Her voice is very flat. “I’d like to rest a little.”
“Me too. I’ll see you later then.”
Down the long, long hallway, weaving amid the maids’ trolleys, room key in his hand, footsteps hushed in the deep carpet. The room, freshly made up, anonymizes him as he closes the door. And then he’s overcome, unexpectedly, by his own fatigue. Performing, performed upon, you always forget how tired you are. He wants to think some more about the Life piece, but his system is in revolt. He’ll shut his eyes. There’s time. They needn’t check out till 3:00. Their train leaves at 6:00.
Kenyon hangs his suit and shirt. In undershirt and shorts he turns back the covers, settles in, plunges to sleep.
He’s in the booth, the lights ablaze, the studio crew zipping about in the dark. An hour before broadcast, an all-systems check: These our actors as I foretold you were all spirits and are melted into air into thin air. Fred Mint’s voice in his earphones, the back of Fred Mint’s shirt beyond the glass, not yet in his jacket. The host is testing the mike, the tissue ruff still circling his collar from makeup. One acts a Ruffian another a Soldier this Man a Cheat and that a Merchant one plays a designing Fool and another a foolish Lover, but the Play done and the Actors undressed they are all equal and as they were before. Beyond the glare Mint’s face twists back across one shoulder to wink, his fingers making a sign: A-OK? Kenyon nods, thumbs up, earphone audio confirmed. But still Mint taps at the mike, and in the earphones the tapping is oddly wooden tap tap…
Kenyon stirs, whips his head across the pillow to check the bedside clock. Has he slept the day away? But it’s not yet noon.
Another tap tap at the door, then Ernestine’s voice in the hall. “Kenyon?”
He finds a monogrammed robe in the closet, folds it closed across his undershirt, cinches the belt.
When he opens the door, Ernestine still looks remote. She doesn’t ask if she woke him. She comes in and immediately sits down in the desk chair, facing him across the room.
“Are you feeling all right?” he says. “Can I get you some tea?”
“No. Kenyon, I need to ask, is there something you want to say to me?”
Now comes a cool disturbance, low in his belly. The rush of fear. Has he been too inattentive, too distracted? He wanted her to be here with him, beside him, but for fear of pressing himself on her he’s been overly timid, overly slow in his attentions.
She says, “Since we got here I’ve been thinking, thinking Why did Kenyon bring me to Boston? And this morning during your keynote, in your face, I saw it. I listened to you. You were telling the truth. Maybe for the first time you were telling the truth. But you haven’t said a thing to me.”
“The truth—”
“Yes. You still haven’t said it, Kenyon—to me.”
She knows. She knows that it was all a fix, all along. It’s so very clear to him now. But there’s something else to tell her—something that must come first.
“Then I’ll say it now, Ernestine. The truth is, I think I love you.”
In her face, everything clears. She looks stunned, overcome. She says, “You think?”
He’s still standing all the way across the room, barefoot in the ridiculous robe. “It isn’t a winning answer.” He shrugs. “But this isn’t television.”
Ernestine straightens. She takes a breath. She gets up and walks across the carpet to stand close in front of him. She is looking him over now, something churning in her thoughts. She is shaking her head almost imperceptibly. “I think I love you too. But that’s not what I meant at all.”
“It’s the first thing that came to mind,” he says. “It’s not what you meant?”
He can’t tell her all the rest: the fixing, all the pretending before the cameras—he can’t yet say these things aloud, though she already knows—not yet.
“No, it’s not what I meant,” she says. She moves still closer and now their bodies are pressed together, her breath on his lips. “But it’s enough for today. And no, this isn’t television.”
She kisses him, her lips very full, her mouth all warmth, and they are embracing now.
“One truth at a time,” she whispers, breathing the words into his mouth, over his tongue. He swallows them down.
For all his lying, he has never lied to her. He never will.
“I’m still tired,” she says. “Can we rest?”
“Here?”
“Yes.”
“Ernestine, I don’t think we should…”
“I don’t either. Just lie down and rest with me.”
She draws him to the side of the bed, kicks off her shoes, and reclines across the covers fully clothed. “Come on. Take off that silly robe.”
“Ernestine, I never thought … I wasn’t expecting this…”
“I know,” she says. “But go ahead. Take it off. No one’s watching. Just me.”
So Kenyon uncinches the robe and hangs it, and then he is before her in nothing but his sagging undershirt and baggy undershorts, knobby elbows and long legs exposed.
For a long moment she stares at him standing there—a steady, compassionate look. Then she waves him closer. He stoops and crawls into her arms.
They fall asleep almost immediately, then wake again just in time to check out and make their way to the train station.
LIFE (ATTEMPT)
Having seen me win $129,000 over the course of twelve weeks on a television qui
z program, people often ask me not how I managed to answer all those difficult questions, but how I first came to be on their TV screens. Though I am asked innumerable other things every day, everything from “Can I have your autograph?” to “Will you kiss my baby?” to “Will you marry me?”, this is by far the most common question: How did you get on television? What I hear them saying is simply this: “How can I make money on TV like you?” Unfortunately, my answer won’t be much help, because in my case it was all thanks to a friend and a toothache.
Last fall, I was on the telephone saying goodbye to a friend who was moving to Europe, where her husband had received a new job. This friend told me that she’d had a turn on a television quiz show the week before (I forget the name). Though she hadn’t managed to win anything more than a watch, she recommended that I take a stab at it myself, and she gave me the producers’ names and phone numbers and the address of an office on Madison Avenue.
At this time I knew next to nothing about television. I did not have a set of my own. At any rate, I misplaced the scrap of paper on which I’d written the information, and soon the whole thing had slipped from my mind. But several weeks later, on a Friday morning in November, I woke up with a vicious toothache. It happened to be a lovely fall day, so following a visit to my dentist, I spent a half hour or so wandering through midtown. I happened to have with me a book into which I’d tucked the scrap of paper weeks before, and then I found myself on Madison Avenue, standing across the street from the very address I’d scribbled down and forgotten until now. This seemed a serendipitous experience, and something in the crisp sunlight seemed to be suggesting freshness and regeneration, so in a spirit of adventure I crossed the street and walked through the door.
High up in an office on the fifteenth or twentieth floor, I was given some forms to fill out before being seated at a desk for a rather grueling paper exam. The questions seemed to be of the wildest variety and almost comically difficult at times. Having never seen a quiz show I did not yet know how representative of these suspenseful programs those exam questions really were. It was several hours before I’d completed the tests, and I dropped them in a receptionist’s tray with the feeling that my day had gone to waste.
Only a few days later, I received a call from that production office. My exams, they told me, showed me to be a good candidate for a quiz show. But instead of the program for which I’d tested, they said, they would like me to appear on another one with a slightly different format, a newer show that was broadcast every Wednesday night at 10:30. It was Tuesday morning. Could I be at the studio the following night at 8:00?
That’s how it started. And in the last several months I have had to get used to a great many things that are new and strange. The truth is that I have gotten used to almost none of it. People ask me now about money, about fame, and I hardly know how to answer. I cannot simply say, as I want to say, that it feels unreal— that the unreality of it all is my main sensation.
But finally, after the many weeks of bright lights and prize money in that glass booth, I have begun to have the time to think. A few things have grown clearer to me in this short time—the question of television, for example. As everybody says, TV could and should be better than what we have at the moment. On the other hand, I’ve had the chance to see firsthand how many bright young people there are behind the scenes, hard at work trying to improve it. If you were to ask me now whether I worry that television will become only a great venue for hucksters, I would tell you no.
—No, no, no, his mind is saying, and Kenyon stops writing.
He must scratch it all—this lying superficiality, this “celebrity” dross! Scratch it all!
It’s time he writes something true, goddamn it, something worthy!
He reads back through his words, back to that one promising note: the subject of unreality. There it is. He’ll start over now…
I am told that there are now over 500 television stations in this country. I am told that 85 percent of American homes are equipped with a television set. Most disturbing of all, I am informed that the average household watches five hours of television every day. Five hours! Since completing my run on the quiz show, I have had some time to think, and what I am thinking about most of all are those hours upon hours, which amount to 150 hours per month per household. This in turn amounts to nearly 2,000 hours per year for almost nine out of ten homes in America. Nearly 2,000 hours.
For eleven weeks I stood locked in a glass box. It was in many ways a very uncomfortable, deceitful, and humiliating experience—and yet all around me, all the time, were people eager to assure me that my situation was enviable, even glamorous.
Thinking again of those 2,000 hours, of the unreality of my own experience, I must ask you: aren’t we, each one of us on both sides of a broadcast, stuck in our own little boxes, our own little isolation booths?
An admired senior colleague of mine at Columbia University, Mr. Trilling, has written: “The deception we best understand and most willingly give our attention to is that which a person works upon himself.” Have we ever understood that as well as we might today? With those 2,000 hours in mind I ask you this.
[End attempt]
COMMENTATORS
“Kenny is almost a Greek tragic hero, a vast commercial property being used by Geritol. He has strong opinions about the debasement of values by commercialism, but he can’t condemn commercialism now.”
Q:
Mr. Lacky, is it a fact that on some occasions, some of
these contestants to whom you made this offer, to
supply them the questions and answers ahead of time,
initially refused to go along with it?
A:
They were reluctant to, yes.
Q:
But on no occasion did a contestant actually refuse.
A:
That’s correct.
Q:
So you persuaded them?
A:
I can be very persuasive, sir.
It was my job.
Q:
Did you attempt to persuade them using
appeals other than monetary rewards?
A:
I would like that question over again, please.
Q:
I will rephrase. Did you offer them the inducement, or
the altruistic suggestion, that they would advance
the cause of humanity in some way?
[Discussion off the record]
Q:
I will rephrase. Did you tell them they could advance
causes in which they were interested—for the good
of mankind—by appearing on this program?
A:
This was one of the considerations. I had them
take it into consideration.
Q:
You would agree then that you used all kinds of
appeals to the best instincts of people to get them
on this program?
[Discussion off the record]
Q:
I will rephrase. Were there inducements offered
to contestants that would appeal to them—inducements
concerning the furtherance of knowledge, information,
and assistance to the American public?
A:
This was one of the considerations, yes sir.
Q:
And did you use that type of appeal to them in order
to overcome their scruples against receiving
advance questions and answers from you?
A:
Yes. But I am not a super-salesman.
I didn’t club anybody over the head.
Q:
Did you also tell these contestants that, after all,
this was only entertainment and
ever
ybody was doing it?
A:
I may have said that, yes sir.8∗
KENYON
He’s waking up. He’s coming back—isn’t he?—back into himself. It’s gradual, but it’s happening, a bit like the water rising in a rain gauge, almost imperceptible. Very soon, he’s sure, he will recognize himself again—he will be recognizable, and not only to strangers, whose attention means less and less to him every day, but to his family, to George and Mom and Dad. How he’s missed that.
He’s rounding the corner off Sixth Avenue now, proceeding across the plaza at Rockefeller Center. Down in the rink, skaters crowd the ice, getting in their last figure-eights of the season. Almost mid-April already, April 12th to be exact, and Kenyon has a 6:00 p.m. engagement at the NBC offices. He’s to sign his contract—again, the contract he already signed, but this time in the presence of the press: the “publicity signing,” with Mr. Denning, Vice President of the network, seated beside him. They’re to smile and smile as they pen their signatures—redundantly, meaninglessly—across a dummy contract, photographers pressing in.
Must it be a signing? Kenyon had said to Mr. Bigler and Miss Gray. That kind of pretending, is it actually necessary? I mean, I would think an announcement would suffice—
It’s a photo opp, said Bigler. To see you sign is the whole idea.
I’ve already signed, though. It won’t be true.
It will be slightly true, said Bigler.
And so he’ll be fed to the cameras again, always the feeding of those lenses, those flashbulbs and flapping shutters and the hungry red eye of the television cameras—so that his image can go outward, outward always, along the wires to the so-called press, the so-called public.
Kenyon is early: it’s only a quarter of six. He pauses in the plaza to watch the swarm of bodies across the ice. The scratch of the skates is muted under the music piped through the loudspeakers, an antic Benny Goodman number. Up ahead, beyond it all, looms the crypt-colored stone of the NBC tower. And directly in front of Kenyon, at waist-level, is a great slab of polished granite engraved with the words of John D. Rockefeller, the man’s famous I believe litany:
Q & A Page 19
