by Sam Wasson
Nothing. Just January 1968. Everyone in darkness.
And in the darkness, Mimi Fariña, in a clear, gorgeous voice spoke out: “Vietnam.”
A king now, with a Best Director Oscar for The Graduate, Mike Nichols, at thirty-six, had nothing left to prove, another way of saying he had nothing left. No director in American history, not even Orson Welles at the top, had his combined record and youth. It was a problem.
Looking back, Nichols could argue he only knew normal for the give-or-take two years of Compass that preceded his overnight superstardom. He loved more people than he could bring with him. He had already lost Sills, he feared. He was losing all the time. He thought seriously about getting back together with Elaine and Sills and doing a play they all loved. He dreamed of their old theater. Of building a new one. The physical space didn’t matter; in fact, Nichols didn’t want one. “It seems to me that it is important to start with the people, not with a building,” he said. Without real estate, his imagined repertory company would rove freely from stage to stage to screen, following each other everywhere, all the while deepening their shorthand and advancing their talent. Nichols got commitments from Elaine, Sills, Barbara Harris, Alan Arkin, former Compass Player Alan Alda, and others, all friends. In a sense, with The Apple Tree, a Broadway musical Nichols peopled with Harris, Alda, and Robert Klein, featuring a third act based on a Feiffer story, he had already begun the process of reunion. And he would build his next film, Catch-22, into a repertory dream. Beginning with a script by Buck Henry and with Alan Arkin in the leading role, Nichols said, “I plan to cast everyone I’ve ever worked with in the picture.” But repertory meant more to Nichols than old friends. The ensemble of his mind’s eye would stand as America’s premier repertory company—a theatrical family that clung together over time, and grew. Nothing like it existed in America. “I am so sick of hearing how great the English actors are, and yet it is true,” he said. “The reason they are so good is that they are able to go off into repertory and perform fifty plays in two years. There’s no such opportunity for an American actor to do the same. That’s why we need repertory.”
A refuge from the world, Paul Sills’s Game Theater gave two years of solace to Sills and his informal repertory of amateur improvisers, until Martin Luther King was killed, and then Bobby Kennedy, and Sills could no longer convince himself that his local theater of personal liberation meant a goddamned thing. He had to reach more people. Thinking, perhaps, that Second City had been right all along, that satire was the loudest megaphone, he considered opening “a bar where we could put the Democratic Party on trial for getting us into Vietnam in the first place,” then reconsidered. Political satire was exclusive to grown-ups, the already-converted, and however popular its message, satire’s appeal was esoteric. If the revolution was to spread, it had to come from primeval wisdom. If it was to be sustained, it had to begin early, with children. How to reach them?
Fairy tales. Ancient teachings that speak to intuition. Sills would use his mother’s games—games anyone could play—to improvise with fairy tales—stories everyone knew. Perfectly matched, Spolin’s 1963 text Improvisation for the Theater, and the Brothers Grimm. Both conveyed identical revelations about the power of personal transformation. “This ‘invisible inner self,’” Sills explained, “is what fairy stories are about.” It was what improvisation was all about. That alone was a revolution. “You can’t reject outside authority until you realize you have a self,” explained Sills’s daughter, Aretha. “That’s what the fairy tales were about for him, so they were political in a sense.”
They moved into the original, abandoned Second City at 1846 North Wells, then set for demolition, renovated the space—Carol Sills designed a round stage surrounded by bleachers—and invited the community, anyone interested, in discovering with Sills the next outflow of his improvisational charge. “Paul,” said improviser Cordis Heard, “was some sort of mystical, mythical figure at that point.”
Heard was in the theater that first night, in the spring of 1968, as Sills marched into the empty space, a worn copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales tucked under his arm, and announced: “Let’s just read. Let’s just start.”
Joining his evolving ensemble of experienced improvisers, Sills selected players from the audience of hippies young and old, matching first-timers to Grimm’s descriptions of princes, princesses, and enchanted animals, handing them the texts—“The Blue Light,” “The Fisherman and His Wife,” “The Goose Girl”—and directing them to read and improvise, speaking from the pages and their hearts in both the third and first persons, pivoting their intuition between narrator and self. Heard explained, “You can use the text to tell you what happens, to take you into the magical woods, and then what happens there, in the woods, we improvised.”
“I don’t want your psychology,” Sills told his players. “I just want you to tell me what you’re doing and then do it.” And: “Your political consciousness comes through the work, just being you, being free.”
No props, no scenery—their absence would generate continual rediscovery of, as Sills said, “the free space and the whole person connected with other whole persons.” The time was right. They spent the entire summer of 1968 discovering themselves in the fairy tales, discovering, moment by moment, the precepts of what Sills dubbed Story Theater.
“There are some guys calling themselves yippies coming to town for the convention,” Dennis Cunningham, once an improviser, now a left-wing lawyer, explained to Sills. “They need a place to stay—”
“I’d like to, but—”
“Paul—”
“I just fixed it up.”
“A couple of nights—”
He would not admit it, but Sills was scared. The yippies had made some provocative jokes—although they didn’t sound like jokes—about their Chicago plans. “They can stay downstairs in the bar,” Sills decided. “We have a mimeograph machine there. They’ll want that.”
In July 1968, as Chicago prepared to host the Democratic National Convention, Sills began to improvise a work about the Boston Massacre of 1770. Outside the theater, across the facade of the original Second City building, he draped a wide banner advertising the show—COMING SOON: THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION.
You didn’t know how much the yippies were kidding. Even before they arrived in Chicago for the Democratic Convention, when they announced they were going to contaminate the city’s water supply with LSD, you may have thought, well, no, there’s no way, but still you wondered—and if you were Mayor Daley, worried—what outrageous incident they would provoke instead. “Essentially what we’re going to do is throw a lot of banana peels around Chicago,” their front man, Abbie Hoffman, warned the press. “It’s all conceived as a total theater,” he said, “with everyone becoming an actor.” The idea was to put on a show, grab hold of the media’s convention coverage, and direct America’s attention where it belonged, to ending the war in Vietnam. Were it not for the uncomfortable amount of tension and the slight threat of crazy that accompanied the silliness, the yippie fanfare looked like a put-on. So did the preconvention calm. Anywhere you looked along the park, you could see cops eying pedestrians, and pedestrians disappearing around corners.
Just to be safe, Daley would err on the side of fascism. Insulted by their pseudo-seriousness and flamboyant disrespect for American manners—whatever that meant—Daley denied demonstration permits to the yippies and other antiwar organizations, a provocation that only inflamed the New Left and did not stop the yippies, hippies, Panthers, parents, undercover agents, Allen Ginsberg, and war protesters of every stripe from gathering ten thousand strong in Lincoln Park, the very hot afternoon of Sunday, August 25, a day before the convention, and two blocks from Second City’s new home at 1616 Wells Street, wherein rehearsals for the next revue, A Plague on Both Your Houses, showed the organization to be as divided as the Democratic Party. “We were all against Vietnam,” Sheldon Patinkin said. “And Plague was [shaping up to be] what was for us a very politi
cal show, but we couldn’t get our cast to work.” Divided by age and sensibility, Second City’s late-1968 troupe looked as vaudevillian, as philosophically divided, as its mid-1960s companies. Other than laughs, who were they? Topical satire had always been Bernie Sahlins’s mantra, and for Second City’s first years, when political satire still needed training wheels, his kindness served him exceptionally well. But in the Vietnam era, the mounting confluence of the political and personal spheres—better delineated in the Eisenhower and Kennedy years—changed the emotional tenor of politics. Sahlins was in the intelligent-laughter business, but now no one at Lincoln Park was laughing. As for intelligence, public discourse—the Committee understood this—was no longer a college seminar; it was a fight. A fight that had, outside the theater walls, permeated all aspects of Second City’s domain, the comedy of everyday life. But inside, without Del Close or Paul Sills to push and prod, and a company dominated by stand-ups, their improvisation was ten years behind schedule.
That night, sometime after eleven, the Second City gang filtered out of the theater for goodnights and cigarettes and stopped short at the sharp smell of tear gas coming off the street. It preceded the noise, the yelling and honking and pop pop of firearms and the onrush of hundreds of feet smacking down North Avenue, toward them. Across from the theater, Sheldon Patinkin watched a couple of kids get thrown against a Walgreens and beaten by the cops. J. J. Barry, renowned for his Mayor Daley impression, ran for a barracks of sandbags the cops had constructed in an empty parking lot near the drugstore. Through the stampede, he saw policemen crouching behind the barricade, aiming automatic weapons into the melee. Out of the roar, screams and smashing windows, a distant chorus came from Lincoln Park, “We Shall Overcome.”
The streets were blood. With allies in Paul and Carol Sills, certain protesters ran from Lincoln Park directly for Story Theater; others, with nowhere else to go, blindly followed, some actually pushed into the theater by the force of the mob. Acting fast, the Sills family transformed the theater’s beer garden into a sanctuary. Abbie Hoffman, for a flash, took a safe spot at the fire pit. There was food. When the tear gas flew in over the walls, they moved the wounded into the theater, transformed now into an infirmary, letting in as many as they possibly could, piecing together details of the attack from story bits that poured in with the blood. The ten thousand demonstrators that had come to fill Lincoln Park were denied nighttime access, but with no place else to sleep, they held in together while the police, in helmets and gas masks and mounted on horses, lined the perimeter and moved inward, firing rounds of tear gas at citizens, beating their arms and heads with clubs and the backs of handguns. The protesters had no weapons. Some threw bags of shit. Some used their bodies and the backs of picket signs to protect themselves. Those that could ran west, for Old Town, while others, stumbling and out of breath, wheezing on the poison fumes and blind in the white fog, scrambled and fell on their way out. Not everyone made it to Story Theater.
Monday, the following day, as Democrats filled the amphitheater, Mayor Daley called in six thousand army troops, equipped with rifles, bazookas, and flamethrowers to join the six thousand Illinois National Guardsmen who had already been added to the twelve thousand Chicago policemen, and violence intensified. No one was spared. Pedestrians on their way home were chased after and thrown down, but the news media limited their coverage to the amphitheater, where Vice President Hubert Humphrey, tentatively committed to the war in Vietnam, was gaining the edge over antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy. Outside, battle waged through the early-morning hours of Tuesday night, and settled to an angry hush by Wednesday afternoon, as protesters gathered, peacefully, for a rally outside the band shell in Grant Park. Again, the police pushed in. An unprovoked attack on peace advocate Rennie Davis catalyzed activist Tom Hayden, who took the microphone and, in outrage and disgust, rallied those who had come in love to steel themselves for war. He declared, “This city and the military machine it has aimed at us won’t permit us to protest. Therefore, we must move out of this park in groups throughout the city and turn this excited, overheated military machine against itself! Let us make sure that if blood is going to flow, let it flow all over this city. If gas is going to be used, let that gas come down all over Chicago . . . If we are going to be disrupted and violated, let this whole stinking city be disrupted and violated.”
John Belushi, a Chicago native, took in Davis’s speech and the riot that followed. It was the summer after his freshman year. He had come to Grant Park with friends and his longtime girlfriend, Judy Jacklin, and at the close of the speech found himself standing about ten feet away from an enraged group of protesters who had taken control of a police paddy wagon, rocking it back and forth, and finally shoving it onto its side. “Democracy is no good unless it is dangerous,” he had written to Judy from college. “We live in a country where we can speak out about what’s wrong about the country to make it a better place.” Participating in political happenings and brushing up on his political literature, Belushi had radicalized. Deciding that the “so-called most radical student group,” Students for a Democratic Society, was as useless as all those pot-smoking hippies with their childish dreams of brotherhood, Belushi, once among them, now aligned himself with action at all costs. That’s why he had come to Grant Park.
The police swarmed the paddy wagon, and Belushi and his gang fled from the park, up Congress and down State Street, crowds roaring into the street behind them, and dove back into the protest on its march to the amphitheater. The National Guard launched another round of tear gas and Belushi, his eyes burning, doubled over, caught sight, up ahead, of a cop beating the shit out of a kid begging for mercy. Belushi ran over to help, the cop hit him in the ribs, and he bolted for cover.
Toward evening, the demonstrators were cornered at the foot of the Conrad Hilton Hotel where Humphrey, moments from winning the Democratic Party’s official nomination, counted his votes twenty floors above the people. Down below, the yippies, having lost their candidate, were on their way to winning the media. “Theater—guerilla theater,” Abbie Hoffman had explained, “can be used as defense and its offensive weapon,” and now they were doing it. It was happening. News crews had turned their cameras from the convention floor—where shouts had turned to brawls—to the streets outside the hotel as police, supposedly sweeping the street clean of protesters, deceitfully blocked every escape route while civilians, between blows, chanted, “The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!”
Inside the Hilton Hotel bar, McCarthy delegate Jules Feiffer heard the shouts coming from Michigan Avenue. Demoralized by McCarthy’s loss, sickened by the violence, and despairing of the state of the union, he had been drinking with his pals Studs Terkel, William Styron, and Jim Cameron, a journalist from the London Evening Standard, nursing his wounds with martinis and dark laughs at the failure of the convention to acknowledge the massacre unfolding outside the amphitheater—“The horror,” Feiffer said, “and the sense of shame that we’re sitting here watching this roman coliseum”—when the picture window overlooking Michigan Avenue shattered and in crashed a dozen demonstrators. They fell onto the hotel floor, trying to gain their footing amid the broken glass. A wave of cops rushed in after them, clubs swinging, beating anyone they could grab, even those unmoving on the floor, while Feiffer, lifting the remains of his drink, thought, Yes, well, this is the end of the country.
Belushi recovered in Judy’s brother’s house that night. He was out of danger, for the moment, but still in pain, and swirling. After showering, he regained total consciousness and called Judy. “I can’t believe how much tear gas hurts.”
We the Punks
1969–1984
8
1969–1972
We take you now to a changing Second City, sometime in January 1969, where the savageries of the Democratic National Convention, already months in the past, still persisted in its improvisers, bartenders, waiters, and the venerable Bernie Sahlin
s. Sahlins pulled his hair out perseverating over Chicago’s emotional collapse and what the senseless devastations in the park and on the streets had done to his funny little cabaret, where his mandate for ten years—play to the top of your intelligence—now had little to do with a country that, every day, seemed to have lost its ability to reason. Attendance was way down. Bernie’s current batch of improvisers—the burlesque bunch that included J. J. Barry, Martin Harvey Friedberg, and Burt Heyman—lacked the original company’s intellectual and satirical fervor. Come to think of it, so did Willard, Steinberg, Klein, et al., the wildcard company that had preceded them. But declining standards was the old complaint. Second City, they always said, was better—then.
Looking over his spreadsheets, Bernie could see that Second City’s slow but sustained slip could be traced to a concomitant incline in laugh-oriented performers—those cattle calls at William Morris—a trend he, ironically, had perpetuated. He could see that losing Paul Sills, matchless in his power to turn those performers into improvisers, supported the thesis, and that in losing Del Close—firing him—Second City forfeited the laboratory environment it needed to flourish. All true, but for the immediate solution, Bernie had to leave his office, step onstage, and as an improviser would, assess his audience. Who was going to Second City today, now? What kind of suggestions did they give the improvisers? Where did they laugh? That would tell Bernie which improvisers were bringing it home. What did those audiences wear? (Suits and ties, mostly, the old uniform of the beatnik.) He had to look at their faces. (Glasses, glasses everywhere.) What did they smoke? (Not marijuana, but cigarettes.) They were his original audience—what was left of them, anyway—a decade later, the Jewish intellectuals, the Mike and Elaine set, the stalwarts thirty and forty years old, come in from the suburbs still hoping for a hit of the neurotic, Freudian old days, and not getting it. Satire had been their revolution. They got one Kennedy, lost two, and their revolution ended. Where were the successors?
