The Other Glass Teat

by Harlan Ellison

  All of which…and the point for us…shows that we on the Left (wait a minute, lemme look and see, is that where I am…oh yeah, I guess it is) are equally paranoid as nits like TT and McIntire and Miss K.S. when we insist that Patriots on the Left are being squelched by tv and the Establishment-run media. Obviously, for how can we doubt the sane, logical, and literate comment of TT; we are all being badly used? There is no truth at all coming out of Cronkite’s mouth. Forcing the conclusion that not only is there no war in Vietnam, nor has there ever been one, but we have (or do not have) racism in America, we have (or do not have) peace demonstrations, we do (or do not) have riots on campuses, and we do (or do not) have trouble right here in River City.

  It is enough to make a man go gibbering into the night.

  The only thing that stops me is that out there in the night, chances are good, lie in wait the staff members (all two of them) of The Thunderbolt, draped in percale.

  Article the second, finally, is the one that gave me the biggest chuckle, and also brought to fruition one of the secret lust-dreams of my pixie heart.

  It’s a piece on page 4 of TT headed: TV—Race Mixing Saturation, and it is decorated with an ABC-TV promo photo of The Mod Squad’s Clarence Williams III with “white co-star.” Apparently TT doesn’t read Life magazine, because “white co-star” is Peggy Lipton, an extremely attractive lady whose face and form and words adorned Life a few weeks ago and who has, for several years, resided in that special lockbox of my cranium wherein reside Marta Toren, the young Elizabeth Taylor, Brenda Vaccaro, the late Inger Stevens, and a nameless redhead who once worked as a Jackie Gleason billboard girl…all ladies for whom I have decidedly unclean thoughts.

  So here I am, on this American Airlines 747 condominium, cruising along at 37,000 on my way to New York and then a lecture gig up in Bethel, Maine (40 degrees below zero, you could die from it), about three weeks ago, and I’m busily typing part 2 of my Amerind column, and the stewardess eases up and says, “I’m sorry, Mr. Ellison, but your typing is disturbing a gentleman in first class.” I was sitting way up front in the lounge so I could work, you dig? My response was unruffled and gentlemanly, as is my wont. “Fuck him,” I said, smiling cherubically.

  She goes away, see. Then a minute later comes this big shadow falling across my typing paper. I look up, knowing it is the behemoth from first class, come to jam me out through a Lucite port, and I’m getting ready to deliver either a stinging retort or a savate kick in the crotch, whichever time and space permit, when the shadow guffaws and says, “Harlan Ellison, for god’s sake!”

  And it is Herb Schlosser, head of new projects for NBC, now president of NBC, a man to whom I have sold a series which ended disastrously (but we won’t go into that here), and we spend some time amicably rapping. He lets me type, I feel warmth for him, and a little later, taking a break, I go back to his seat to rap some more, and find him sitting talking to (gasp, wheeze, pant) Peggy Lipton.

  See, it is all tying together, ain’t it?

  So I insinuate myself into Ms. Lipton’s ethereal company via Herb’s introduction of me as “the brilliant genius tv critic of the Free Press.” Humble lad that I am, I nudge a clod of cow manure with my toe and blush at his absolutely on-target appraisal of me. (The cow manure, incidentally, was a leftover from when the 747 was the flagship of Latvian National Airways. Their slogan: “Your Cattle Car in the Sky.”)

  He happens to have a copy of The Glass Teat right there with him, and he gives it to Ms. Lipton. Thereby convincing me that no tv exec worth his salt travels without a copy of the book in his luggage, close at hand for quick bon mots and factual analyses of the Industry. Also, I had given it to him when he’d come up to stop me typing.

  So Peggy—by this time we were on a first-name basis—leafed through it and found my several references to The Mod Squad and Aaron Spelling, its executive producer.

  After I had the stewardess put a piece of underdone steak on my eye, I went back and tried to reestablish friendly relations. I recanted all I had said, and swore I would praise outrageously the series from then on. (As steady readers of this column know, I am not above selling my integrity and/or body for someone who looks like Peggy Lipton.)

  Thinking she might enjoy seeing herself in a really worthwhile publicity outlet, as differentiated from Leftist Communist Jew-Controlled Miscegenated Publications like Life, I showed Peggy The Thunderbolt.

  After the stewardess put an uncooked frankfurter on the other eye, I went back and we chuckled intimately over the article which said, in part:

  “The television networks blossomed forth this season from their vast waste land with new integration propaganda shows. More than ever before, the Blacks have been elevated to stardom with routines portraying them as cute, amiable and brilliant.”

  (Remember, Eusona, you ain’t cute, amiable, or brilliant. And you’re not a Star, either, so find that goddamn colander!)

  “Strangely enough, the detective or crime shows do not have any programs showing the Blacks in their true role in society, committing 85% of all crimes of violence, looting, burning, rioting and otherwise warring against White society. In fact, the Negro is always the good guy or the hero. The Whiteman in such shows is bigoted, prejudiced and always at fault.”

  (Which, Eusona, we know to be clearly not the case. Take the editor of TT, for instance. A pussycat if ever there lived one. And for god’s sake, Eusona, don’t mention last Sunday’s Bonanza in which Lou Gossett played a black heavy. It might shatter TT’s conception of The Conspiracy.)

  “ABC-TV leads the networks with seven regular integrated programs. NBC has 4 and CBS 1…. CBS’s Glen Campbell Show Oct. 25, featured him singing a romantic duet with Negress Dionne Warwick called ‘Wives and Lovers’ after which they hugged and actually kissed!”

  (Now listen, Eusona, when you get here next Wednesday, I don’t want none of that hanky-panky with huggin’ and kissin’ me. I don’t give a damn if you do like me, I got my heritage as a Whiteman to pertect. Forget the colander.)

  “All three tv networks are dominated by Jews.” (I knew we’d make it in there somehow, Eusona; you dig, you blacks are just iggerent dupes for us!) “The Jew David Sarnoff heads the giant of the industry, NBC. The Jew William Paley heads CBS and Leonard Goldenson runs ABC.” (Don’t tell that to Elton Rule, he’s the Token Goy at ABC.) “To see who directs and produces the majority of the shows all one need do is read the credit listings at either the beginning or the end of the program. Most of the time you will find them loaded with Jewish names.

  “This is indeed a saturation campaign to brainwash the American people into accepting the African savage as an equal—in spite of all the evidence of their behavior we witness on the street.

  “Television is a menace which has tremendous influence. Their specialty is the instilling of a guilt complex within White people designed to lower our racial pride, thus preparing the way for mongrelization of the White race.”

  And suddenly, after I’d read all that, my sense of humor went out for a smoke.

  It is no surprise to any of us that deranged minds much like those behind The Thunderbolt exist. Nor is it any shock that even in Pasadena there are fifteen-year-old kids who’ve already been touched by the hand of death; lovingly stroked by the hairy claws of their bigoted parents. None of this is fresh, or new, or startling. But we need to have it dumped like shit on us from time to time, so we can stop and look around and say, “My god, maybe tv isn’t as bad as we think it is. If it gives creeps like these some bad moments, then it’s all worth it, even dumb series like Barefoot in the Park and Julia.”

  And in conclusion, after this long slide through the swill from Savannah, please note two things:

  First, that I didn’t give an address for you to subscribe to this sheet. One reading, even here, is more than enough to get their message. Through countless reminders in The Thunderbolt to “renew your subscription,” I get the feeling that lack of funds will kill these animals quicker than a
thousand columns.

  Second, that the more we support All in the Family, the brilliant new CBS series that laughs at bigots and shows them for the crippled buffoons they truly are, the more we support sanity and the demise of garbage-can liner like The Thunderbolt.

  97: 5 MARCH 71

  APOLOGIA: Not only is it distressing to learn that the very editors who publish this column don’t read the copy very closely (or that they are fuddled enough to trust me without question), but it is doubly distressing when that sloppiness of scrutinization results in a harmful act—no matter how innocently perpetrated the act may have been.

  What I’m referring to, of course, is my column of two weeks ago. After spending installments 95 and 96 of this column laying bare the twisted gut of The Thunderbolt, a white racist newspaper whose only redeeming value is in the gallows entertainment we can painfully draw from laughing at its blind stupidity and moronic bigotry, I ended the evisceration by stating quite clearly I was purposely not including the address or subscription information for the filth sheet. My reason was quite simply that The Thunderbolt was in financial trouble—all through its pages it begs for subscription renewals—and while the idly curious might get some moments of amusement from their vicious attacks on blacks and Jews and members of the Left, sending five dollars for a sub would permit them that much more life. I added that one reading of this “newspaper” was sufficient to get its repetitious message, and if anyone was in accord with its policies and pronouncements, or was sufficiently curious about other editions, there were some obvious ways to get a subscription. But I wasn’t going to aid and abet. It may be an arbitrary decision on my part, but it is my column, and I have the feeling there’s enough anguish and madness in the world without sending five bucks to help the monsters at The Thunderbolt keep poisoning the minds of dullards.

  In any case, I said it very clearly. No subscription or mailing information.

  When the column appeared, the editor of the Freep included the masthead of The Thunderbolt with its sub rates, and an address. Apart from being dismayed that the staff didn’t read what I’d written, just on the general principle if your name appears as responsible for what’s in the paper, you should read it to make sure the columnist isn’t running amuck…inserting that masthead is, to my mind, a harmful act.

  I’ve said why I think so.

  Further, I take full responsibility for what I lay down in these columns, but I choose not to take the rap for something someone else did. (On top of all this many of you—if I am to judge from the letters—thought I’d suffered brain damage, seeing the pronouncement and the contradictory act on the same page.) I’ve registered in the strongest possible terms my unhappiness with what went down with the editor of the Freep, Brian Kirby, who happens to be a very good man, as well as a close friend. Brian assures me he read the column, but adds he didn’t think it was as serious as I’ve indicated. Apparently he didn’t read the column closely enough, for on reexamination I cannot see any way that final paragraph could have been misinterpreted. Brian contends I’m making unnecessary waves: that running the info was not a bad thing…that you have a right to all the data. Well, I don’t want to pillory Brian, but I conceive of that as obfuscation, and I urge those of you who may have been entertained by my columns not to help finance race prejudice and bigotry by subscribing out of curiosity to that detestable publication. But then, in the final analysis, only those morbid few who slow down and gawk at freeway slaughters would be interested in any larger doses of The Thunderbolt’s vileness and paranoia. Perhaps I shouldn’t have worried in the first place. This has been an unpaid apology and explanation.

  NOTE: Remember that script that ran here in five parts? It airs over ABC next Wednesday, the eleventh of March, at 10:00 p.m. Watch The Young Lawyers and we’ll talk about it here next week.

  98: 12 MARCH 71

  THE GREAT RAPE: Part One

  I am a bitter and vengeful man this week. Yesterday, as you read this, The Young Lawyers aired what was left after evisceration of my script, “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs.” Those of you who read it here in five installments, who may have compared the written version to what was seen on screen last night, will understand my mood.

  I am bitter and angry and vengeful and sick at heart, not merely because something over which I labored with love and dedication for three months was murdered, but also because, for two and half years of this column, I have been a fool. I have written a series of one hundred small articles (this is the 98th) which said, at core, this is the single-most-important medium for education and information and quality entertainment ever devised by the febrile mind of Man, and we must not desert it; we must not abandon it to the unmerciful hands of businessmen and Philistines and cynics who conceive of an audience as being boobs; we must try to maintain some standards of responsibility to our people and Our Times; we must resist the impulse to flee in horror and leave the spoils to the Visigoths. Or as Ray Bradbury has said, “The gargoyles have taken over the Cathedral.”

  I have spent many months of the past two and a half years writing of what I’ve seen on the tube and what it seems to mean to people sitting before their tubes all over this nation. I’ve reported back in as faithfully as I knew how, and always, at the back of my temper, was a tone of cynical optimism. I always felt something could be done, if only we kept at it, if only we deluged them with letters and threats of nonpurchase of rectal suppositories.

  As recently as two weeks ago, sitting in a meeting of members of the Writers Guild dedicated to change and uplift of our guild, I listened to good writers who were disillusioned and weary, who said there was no hope, that one who cared about his craft and the truth of his writing was doomed to failure in television, that there was no way to break through and gain even the smallest trace of control of creativity once the script was written and handed in.

  No! I shouted. No, that’s not true. I did it! By going further than most tv writers choose to go, by rewriting for nothing, by insisting no one touch the words but me, by walking the sets with the production staff, by actually sitting on the set and making myself available for changes of lines…I, the great Harlan Ellison, the wondrous and committed Artist, the seeker of truth and beauty, the Complete Writer…I have been able to carry my heart’s blood and my mind’s wonder to full fruition. My Young Lawyers script will show you it can be done.

  They looked at me, and I was so sincere, because I had been through it (even as you readers went through it with me for many weeks), that they could not laugh. They were not convinced, because they had been bludgeoned so often, but they were willing to wait and see.

  Now I come before them…and I come before you…to tell you I was a fool. A silly, vain, self-important, ego-surfeited asshole who actually thought he could take on a snake without a head and slay it.

  I saw my show last night. It sucks.

  Not only is it bad by any recognizable yardstick of dramatic criticism, it is a script that has been watered down and emasculated and raped and pounded till it became the worst of all possible end-products: merely another bland example of video porridge. It says nothing. It avoids and skirts and shies away from any positive statement or examination of character.

  I want to take it apart, piece by piece, as I would the worst piece of amateur writing in a workshop, and lay it out so you can compare the show to the script, and see why it is that after three years of refusing to write television, and finally being seduced into believing I could sneak one past, I once more swear to you I will not expend my efforts on the box. Not that anyone will give much of a damn, but if you conceive of me as a writer with even

  the tiniest talent, you will be able to extrapolate and understand why it is that men with far greater talents refuse to write for tv, why they have deserted the medium out of frustration and terror, and have left it to the hacks. Even taking my work at the lowest level of craft expertise, you can project how much more hideous it must be for the Chayefskys, the Roses, the Mosels…who no longer
care to throw their meat on that ghastly chopping block.

  To effect such a dissection, however, I must castigate men I worked with, some of them friends. I must place blame for lack of responsibility, lack of strength, and lack of talent where it seems to me relevant. Perhaps some of what I will say is incorrect and cruel, but I am a bitter, angry, and vengeful man this week. And they have taken my child and ripped off its limbs and sent back the basket case with the admonition it was done out of expediency, and I should love the multiple amputee all the same. I am not that noble. If my friends and those who might care to hire me again are offended and conceive of me as an ingrate, as a sour-grapes troublemaker, I urge them to go fuck themselves. I subscribe to Cosimo de’ Medici’s remark, “Nowhere are we commanded to forgive our friends.”

  But understand at the outset that these men and women are not the true culprits. Through weakness of spirit or spine, they merely shovel the bodies into the furnaces; the oberstleutnants and Gruppenführers are the time demons at studios like Paramount, at networks like ABC, and in homes like yours—who insist we have no time, the show airs in six weeks, hurry hurry hurry, we want our hours filled even if it’s with shit, we don’t care if it’s good as long as it’s Wednesday!

  There are, too, the Great Thieves, the saurian studios—archaic relics of a time long dead—who steal millions off the top to keep their inept and overpriced plants open, who take money away from what could be put on the screen to feed the voracious maws of the greedy unions. Studios like Paramount that forbid off-the-lot location shooting, even if it’s a block away, because it might cost a few dollars; that steal and steal and steal just to keep their executive offices wall-lined with fine paintings but deny the most basic set decoration or research or shooting time to what they finally sell the public. Studios like Paramount that have learned no lessons from the deaths of MGM, 20th, and their like. They are a cancer in the tv industry, and by limping along year after year with parsimonious budgeting of series, they keep the level of video viewing at the swamp level.