by Bruce McCall
I guess I just wasn’t cut out for dramatic confrontations. Before I could stammer my decision, Hank preempted me with a bigger bombshell of his own: He was leaving Heumann, Oglivy & Mather in December and returning to New York and to Ogilvy. I should think about doing so, too.
Gasp! That was late August 1970. The next four months were an easy downhill slope. Relief, the knowledge that all this Sturm und Drang would soon be behind me, loosened my psyche. It would not be a tearful leave-taking, for me or for the creative staff. My guilt at abandoning the creative department to the cobwebs and the rats was greatly assuaged when Hank hired Walter Lürzer and Michael Conrad, both German, a writing team from heaven who overnight turned around the agency’s creative reputation from nothing to first-rate.
My final day arrived, a Friday shortly before the Christmas holiday. No elaborate leave-taking ceremony marked my departure. Relaxed at last, I fell in with a motley crew of copy and art people, first swilling beer in an empty office in the deserted agency, then adjourning for dinner at a restaurant favored by Frankfurt’s demimonde.
By the end of dinner I was smitten by a beautiful young Brunhilde nearby at the table. I’d never been so beguiled. She was Emma. She returned my stare with a smile that could melt ingots. The chemistry between us was inexplicable. What it fomented was irrepressible. Instant mutual lust like this belonged in bodice rippers, not real life. Later, at the apartment where our little group had ended up, I went out onto the balcony to collect my thoughts and try to understand what was happening. Emma sidled up. This was no time for thinking. We embraced, writhing with mutual desire.
“I have to leave on Sunday,” I whispered. “I can’t stand the idea that I’ll never see you again.”
“There is all day tomorrow,” Emma said.
I picked her up next morning. We repaired to my apartment and fucked like rabbits until nine that night. Years had compressed into hours. Every minute swept me further under her spell. Emma wasn’t talkative. She didn’t need to be. She seemed as torn as I was by having to part.
The taxi I’d called pulled up to the curb beside us. Emma said softly, “Ich liebe Dich.”
“I love you,” I replied. “You’re coming to New York as soon as you can. We’ll take it from there. Wiedersehen.”
Sunday morning I boarded the Lufthansa 747 flight to New York, settled into my seat, and commenced to muse about how three emotionally empty years had been redeemed at the last possible moment. My life had reached its highest plateau. Even dour, ugly, empty Frankfurt was transformed. I mused in a state close to ecstasy all the way home to America.
My Lampoon piece imagined a proto-“Everything Store” stocked not with the gadgets we all need, but with the junk we all deserve.
Chapter 8
America Discovers Satire
It’s December 1970. I dutifully put my seat up and push the meal tray shut as the Lufthansa 747 trundles to a gate at the International Arrivals terminal at New York’s JFK airport. It’s been a long nonstop flight from Frankfurt am Main. Customs and baggage pickup are painfully time-consuming. I check my watch: it’s been an hour and ten minutes since we landed. I’ve survived an ordeal slightly less taxing than a month with an angry mob. Good practice for life in New York.
But the meaningful half of me is still back in Frankfurt. I’d met Emma on my next-to-last day in Germany. I couldn’t believe my sudden good fortune. She was young and blond and, putting it politely, a full-figured fraulein. She spoke in a throaty voice. She looked you straight in the eye. Emma reciprocated my interest. And my passion. My final day in Europe, in Germany and in Frankfurt, was spent with Emma in my bed in the Mendelssohnstrasse apartment. I’d remember it for years as the best day I ever spent in Frankfurt. She flew to New York in late May and we commenced a leisurely cross-country drive to Los Angeles in a welter of sex and tourism. Then we drove back to New York. My chronic sense of emotional starvation had vanished. It was right to wallow in an idyll of love and freedom.
Of course it couldn’t last. The great romance of my life evaporated by the end of the year. Emma had proposed that we marry and settle in Germany. Maybe we should have; it could have turned out swimmingly. I instinctively panicked, surrendering to a fear of commitment that had forever blighted my life. I stalled. After two months, Emma gave up. As fast as it had flared up, what had been so hot and so steamy cooled down. Das Ende.
As had been the case before when an emotional tsunami knocked me on my keister, the muse appeared to assuage the emptiness and pain of reality. Without requiring me to lift a finger, the Gods of Funny more than smiled down on me: they tossed me a life preserver to help me solve my career and my life. It was the National Lampoon.
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Humor in the American print world was a brittle wretch without a home. The New Yorker’s occasional humor pieces, by James Thurber, S. J. Perelman, Peter De Vries, and the like, shone brilliantly but cast a small glow. Mass-market magazines—The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s—ran sitcoms, safely bland. Adventurous humor had a brief heyday in the twenties and thirties in smallish publications: Judge, the pre-Luce Life, The American Mercury, et al. But all were killed by the Great Depression.
The National Lampoon, that Harvard-descended newsstand magazine, had clicked on its advent in 1970 and was booming. In my Frankfurt exile I had of course known nothing about it. But the second I came across an issue, my brain threw a party for my creative soul. This had never happened before: first shock, then burning jealousy. This troop of snotty college kids had sneaked in, rifled my prefrontal cortex, and now they were getting rich and famous by duplicating my personal ideas of satire and parody.
In 1968 Henry Beard and Doug Kenney graduated from Harvard, as did the third partner and moneyman, Rob Hoffman, who was admitted to the bar just in time to broker a deal. The Lampoon name was leased; Beard and Kenney moved to Manhattan. The National Lampoon was born.
America hadn’t seen anything like it. Stinging satire! Wicked parody! Humor with brains! Crammed in were tits, farts, juvenilia—the postpubescent male readership demanded their candy. But the editorial guts of the Lampoon whizzed past the puerility of Mad and Cracked, overleaping hackneyed formulas that had served as the humor standard of American comedy sensibility (Bob Hope! Jack Benny! Cartoons in The Saturday Evening Post! Gimme a freakin’ break!) that had reigned over the pages and airwaves since the death of vaudeville. This generation had grown up in a society in such turmoil that dried-up institutions crumbled under the pressures of change. The Lampoon blasted past the dim-bulb mainstream American humor tradition to create the first seriously post-stupid comedy forum of the era. Its fresh outlook reflected the sensibilities of an all-night Harvard dorm room bull session and the fun of pure mischief. It made the monthly magazine safe for all the geeks, polymaths, smart-asses, and autodidacts—all the misfits who’d been sharpening their parodic/satirical scythes in high school lunchrooms, upstairs bedrooms, and college cafeterias forever.
The magazine injected a powerful virus into the bloodstream of America. It was more a serendipitous fluke than a shrewd plan. Half a dozen people came together at a critical moment of U.S. history and found a bully pulpit. Their various talents coalesced into something greater than the sum of their parts.
Doug Kenney exuded an ethereal mist through a pharmaceutical daze. But when roused, Kenney at the top of his form matched every living humorist anywhere. He was a midwesterner by birth and a free soul by choice. Henry Beard, on the other hand, had lived for most of his pre-Harvard life in private schools. All they had in common was humor. Both were fearsomely smart: neither felt that creating a clever humor magazine was their sole intent. A monitor in their brains was constantly checking the world zeitgeist; the monitor’s alarm system would sound if the zeitgeist should register serious trouble. Some zeitgeist. Its detection system messaged a simple devastating fact: the early seventies sucked, and nobod
y was doing much to try to correct the malaise. No sentient American in that turbid time could ignore the shabby state of social and political life. Beard and Kenney sure didn’t. They envisioned a satirical magazine to ridicule the primary villains: Nixon, Hoover, Kissinger, Agnew, Westmoreland; the political right wing; disco. A satirist’s cup overflowed. The Lampoon made satire a viable presence and a commercial bonanza for the first time in American history, striking a chord that would outlive the Lampoon itself and that has reverberated through the culture ever since.
I knew nothing about who was running the magazine, or even if freelancers had a place there. I wangled an interview. Assuring myself that I had nothing to lose, I slid some wacky satirical pages—probably something related to cars (big surprise!)—into a used mailing envelope and jumped on the uptown subway from my cozy little Greenwich Village flat. Half an hour later, I stood in the National Lampoon’s reception area on the fourth floor at 635 Madison Avenue. “Reception area” overstates the three feet inside the front door. No receptionist was on duty, there were no chairs, and only a peek into a few offices sans nameplates. I stood for several minutes, trying to look blasé in case I was spotted as an interloper and attacked. Eventually a tall, skinny, mop-topped nerd with thick glasses and a formerly white turtleneck under a bunchy gray suit he could have worn for a month came out of an office. A pipe was so tightly clenched in his teeth it seemed to be holding his jaw in place. “Welcome,” he said. “I’m Henry Beard.”
He was Supernerd. The sanest guy on the premises. The smartest. The quickest-witted. The funniest. The most effortlessly prolific. And fast. Several times a year, a scheduled article isn’t nearly finished and there’s going to be a three-page hole in the middle of the magazine. Henry to the rescue: two days later he emerges from his dark, dank grotto of an office with his perfect parody of Dickens’s Bleak House, complete with notes for the illustrator. Henry Beard and I meshed virtually on sight. My puny handful of samples seemed to excite his imagination. At least it excited him enough to offer me ongoing work. Our initial arrangement was for thirty pages a year, of some combination of writing and art. My first piece for Lampoon epitomized this arrangement: a brochure mock-up for the 1958 Bulgemobiles (“Too Great Not to Be Changed, Too Changed Not to Be Great!”).
As we worked together in the first months, his off-the-cuff comments fed me fresh ideas, bolstered my confidence, and invariably enlarged what I’d seen as an okay idea into an ambitious piece. If I pulled it off, he’d suck on his pipe and say in a quietly reverent tone, “Sublime.”
Henry did enjoy a certain advantage over Lampoon writers: he was born with three brains. One brain held an estimated 500,000 infobytes, growing daily with fresh info input. He spoke at machine-gun speed and seldom raised his voice. And perhaps most amazing of all, he patiently absorbed—while drawing out the best of their talents—the tantrums and hissy fits of a staff of born malcontents, ingrates, and prima donnas, all while keeping their respect. “As much a forum as a nightclub, a mini-campus whose entrance requirements were only that you should be overeducated and funny,” Tony Hendra wrote of the Lampoon in his piercingly perceptive 1987 survey of humor, Going Too Far. It’s still the most cogent description I know.
The magazine relied on a motley group of varied talents for most of its content. They weren’t recruited so much as their talents adhered to sundry aspects of the Lampoon and ensured month-to-month continuity. Their individual contributions won them attention and admirers. But they were also working parts of the whole.
Occasionally I’d breeze into the Lampoon to drop off a piece. I found myself speaking exclusively to Henry and the genius art director Michael Gross and his right-hand man, David Kaestle, also a genius.
Maybe because they don’t control the words and they never sign pieces with their names, magazine art directors are almost never celebrated, or even simply credited, for their epic contributions. Lampoon covers could make the magazine fly off the newsstand or render it a dud. The Lampoon’s most famous one, “If You Don’t Buy This Magazine, We’ll Kill This Dog” withstands comparison with any cover in the history of consumer publications.
The Lampoon naturally slopped over into my private and social life. I dined with most of the magazine’s brain trust in myriad combinations in dingy Village restaurants, where the ribaldry and sheer antic energy, augmented with Molson’s and cheap red plonk, generated article ideas and entire issue themes. I marveled at finding myself invited to hang out with an elite fraternity of gifted young talents as only a Canadian high school dropout, hanging on to the humor big-time by his fingernails, who now supped with Harvard men, Yalies, and a Cambridge grad, ever could.
My five years of close proximity to that clutch of Renaissance maniacs taught me an invaluable life lesson: spend every hour you can with people smarter than you, who make you feel dull-witted. Sometimes on my stopovers in the Lampoon writers’ warrens, I’d get into conversations with tall, gentle Brian McConnachie. Brian never evinced the slightest desire to flail Washington’s evils, America’s broken promises, or headline events. He marched to a different drum—or perhaps it was a xylophone—working in eccentric directions, supplying the magazine with humor from Mogdar, the invented place he claimed as his own planet. “Cowboys on a Walnut Farm” intrigued Brian for years. He never felt he’d maximized the idea’s potential. He was still pruning it a decade later.
Sean Kelly charged down from Montreal and wrung spot-on parodies from his black-Irish soul on everything from Catholic dogma to poetry of the Great War. Sean was no parlor wit: he was dead serious about humor. He also came armed with almost too much erudition. You came away exhausted from conversational encounters.
Tony Hendra was, like Kelly, a lapsed Catholic. Tony, he of the Cambridge purr and thick skin and a résumé as a nightclub comic, was a soft-spoken Brit on the outside and a pissed-off Yank inside. He waged verbal war against meat and religion, among numerous targets. George W. S. Trow, also a “Talk of the Town” writer at The New Yorker, composed send-ups of New York’s precious art world and a strange piece about Marshal Pétain drifting into senility. He was a lively, original writer and the one Lampoon voice I didn’t get. The feeling was mutual.
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I was ten years older than any other Lampoon regular. Henry Beard conferred the title of contributing editor on me; I contributed plenty and edited nothing. I chose to stay an outsider. This distancing of myself from Action Central fit a lifelong pattern. I was thus blind, deaf, and dumb to the wormy underside of this volatile assemblage. I never got to know and never sought to know who was banging whose main squeeze, or what nefarious plots the Lampoon publisher, Matty Simmons, was allegedly about to hatch against his ingrate wards. I was unaware, in the spring of 1973, that the Lampoon was putting on a live comedy show, Lemmings. I paid for my own ticket, well after opening night. (Call me Mr. Insider!)
Tony Hendra was behind the Lemmings production, which was an unqualified success. Alas, like the kid who didn’t get an Xbox for Christmas but his little brother did, Michael O’Donoghue felt traduced: he demanded justice, in the form of his own extracurricular project. Michael’s threats, tantrums, and will to win worked. He got his own radio show, symbolically several floors above the magazine at 635 Madison.
For me it proved a windfall. I owned a good pair of ears, a lifetime of listening, and a head full of radio ideas. An hour of radio devoured ideas like a sperm whale devours plankton. Out of my imagination, as fast as I could type, poured enough tight five-minute sound pieces to fill an entire Lampoon Radio Hour every week. Engineer Bob Tischler was under pressure to deliver sixty minutes of great radio per week, to run on a syndicated basis on stations in major markets. Every week he pulled it off.
I’d written a forties newsreel in weekly installments, with a stentorian announcer describing idiotic events against a tinny musical background, just like actual newsreels, relying on bits and pieces o
f footage and no original sound. New York radio rabble-rouser Don Imus stole the opening: “Megaphone Newsreels: Around the world, across the seven seas and right . . . into . . . your face!” I was so flattered to hear my stuff on the radio that it never occurred to me to sue.
I loved writing for the show. My work there probably had a higher batting average than any of my other creative pursuits. Alas, The National Lampoon Radio Hour lost sponsors and outlets at a rate that guaranteed a brief lifespan. More’s the pity. Michael’s idea of a radio show was, with its slashing and bashing, an aural version of its magazine parent. A knot of obscure young comic actors—John Belushi, Bill Murray and brother Brian, Chevy Chase, Christopher Guest, and Gilda Radner among them—were brilliant. They put more life into the scripts than the scripts had in the first place. By 1977, it seemed impossible that only a couple of years earlier, these future TV stars would have been hanging out on the Radio Hour floor, hoping to pick up a few bucks.
Brian introduced me to Polly Holihan, whom he befriended when she came aboard to work with Michael O’Donoghue on the Lampoon Radio Hour. Polly was a veteran of Dick Cavett’s TV show. She was strong-willed, energetic, and witty enough to hold her own with Mr. Mike, a self-invented terror who transmuted his semi-hysterical misanthropy into satire nasty enough to make Lenny Bruce call the cops. The more I saw Polly, the more impressed I became. We spent time together that I found preferable to my fetish for solitude. The next step was cohabitation; the next, engagement, and two and a half years later, marriage. That was forty-three years ago. We seem to be good for each other.
