Elvis Is Dead and I Don't Feel So Good Myself

by Lewis Grizzard

I would suggest that if gay people — who seem to have become more and more vocal and more prone to displays of public affection as their numbers and acceptance into the mainstream have grown — have the sudden urge to love on one another and they can’t find a motel room or the backseat of a car parked off in the woods somewhere, they should go back into the closet. It won’t be for long, and they can come right back out when they’re done.

  I also am against gay people as a political force, because it’s not wise to mix sex and politics. Had our forefathers known what was going to happen to American sex, they likely would have put something in the Constitution about separation of sex and politics; then sixteen-year-old pages in the House of Representatives could have gone into the cloakroom alone without fear of being accosted by heavy-breathing lawmakers.

  On the other side of the coin, had we had a Constitutional dictum against sex and politics, we might also have been spared John and Rita Jenrette, who tried their darnedest to give heterosexuality a bad name ... and with all of us following the sordid saga on television.

  10

  Eddie Haskell is Still a Jerk

  I MENTIONED EARLIER that Phil Donahue and his television show have been a great source of consternation for me. Five mornings a week, Donahue gets together with a crowd of women who live in Chicago and apparently have nothing better to do, and they discuss strange things.

  One morning recently, for example, his guests were two homosexual women and a baby. The two homosexual women, who said they were very much in love, had decided they wanted a baby, so one of them was artificially inseminated with the sperm of the other’s brother, and the baby on the program was the result.

  One of the homosexual women was black and the other was white, and I think they named the baby something like “Joy” or “Mud.” I only remember that the baby didn’t have a regular name like we used to give children — a name like Randy or Arlene.

  I frankly don’t care if a black female homosexual and a white female homosexual decide to love each other, but I do have some concern for the offspring. Having been conceived in such an unconventional manner and having been given a name that would embarrass a dog, I wonder if the child will have the desire or the opportunity to do the things that are important to most children — such as playing Little League baseball, eating crayons in school, or laughing at a clown.

  What bothers me about this situation in particular, and about the Donahue show in general, is where all this might lead. Television today is probably the greatest single influence on the American public. A recent study showed that the average TV in this country is on six hours and fifty-five minutes a day; that’s almost forty-nine hours a week. In a ten-year period, that’s almost three years of watching TV! It’s not surprising, therefore, that in many cases society has become what it watches.

  So my question is this: Will all these televised discussions of aberrant lifestyles eventually make such behavior completely acceptable, and will people start producing babies with home chemistry sets and giving them names that will make it difficult for them to survive when they enter the Marine Corps?

  Actually, my problems with television didn’t begin with Donahue. After my Aunt Jessie, who lived next door, brought home the first television I could watch on a regular basis, it took me a year to figure out that Howdy Doody was a puppet. I presumed he had once suffered from some sort of crippling disease, and that was why he walked funny. He also had a strange mouth, which I attributed to not brushing regularly. When Howdy talked, the entire bottom portion of his mouth moved like he was trying to eat a large cantaloupe. Whole.

  Finally I noticed the strings attached to him. It was like the day I found out there is no Santa Claus and the day somebody told me they heard Lash Larue was in a porno film. It broke my heart. You know kids, though. I couldn’t wait to tell everybody I knew of my discovery.

  “Howdy Doody isn’t real,” I told one of my classmates at school.

  “Yes, he is,” he replied.

  “No, he isn’t. He’s just a puppet. Somebody pulls his strings and that’s what makes him walk and talk.”

  The kid started crying. I didn’t dare tell him that Clarabelle’s big red nose was probably fake, too.

  Soon I discovered “Superman.” I enjoyed watching “The Man of Steel,” but I had some problems with him, too. In the first place, I never thought Superman’s disguise as Clark Kent was all that clever. Lois Lane had to be a bigger dummy than Howdy Doody not to see right through it.

  Whenever Superman decided to become Clark Kent, all he did was put on a coat and tie and a pair of glasses. That’s a disguise? Superman and Clark Kent talked exactly the same, were the same height and weight, and if Lois had been any kind of reporter at all, she probably would have noticed that they had the same mole or freckle or other telltale body markings.

  In retrospect, Lois Lane had no business working for The Daily Planet. She should have been on the obit desk in Topeka.

  Something else used to bother me about the “Superman” show. Anytime “The Man of Steel” had a social misfit cornered, the crook would pull out a gun and fire six shots at Superman’s chest. Of course, bullets just bounced off, because you couldn’t hurt Superman.

  Even as a kid, I knew what I would have done after that. I would have gone quietly. But not the crooks on “Superman.” After watching their bullets bounce harmlessly away, they would throw their guns at him. Anybody knows you don’t further rile a man whom six bullets couldn’t stop by throwing your gun at him.

  * * *

  There were a lot of family shows on television in those early days. There was “The Donna Reed Show,” for example. Donna was always so pleasant. I wonder why she never had that-time-of-the-month problems like other women?

  “Father Knows Best,” another great family show, was one of my favorites. Even so, I used to wonder why Robert Young never took his tie off. When he came home from a long day at the insurance office, he would keep his tie on and replace his jacket with a sweater. He did the same thing later as Marcus Welby, and remember that you never saw him without a tie on when he wound up selling Sanka. He may have been the only man in history to wear a tie more than Richard Nixon.

  “Leave It to Beaver” also was a big hit. In fact, it still is. “Leave It to Beaver” reruns are on several cable stations today, and a fellow named Irwyn Applebaum has even written a book entitled, “The World According to Beaver.” The book contains examples of the sort of dialogue that was featured on the show. Here’s one between Wally and his friend, the ever-obnoxious Eddie Haskell.

  EDDIE: “Come on, Sam, time’s a-wastin’.”

  WALLY: “Look, Eddie, I can’t go with you guys today. I’ve got to work out in the yard.”

  EDDIE: “Work in the yard? Aw, come off it! We got... Oh, good morning, Mr. and Mrs. Cleaver.”

  JUNE: “Hello, Eddie.”

  WARD: “Good morning, Eddie.”

  EDDIE: “Well, if you’ve got work to do, Wallace, I don’t want to interfere. I was reading an article in the paper just the other day, and it said a certain amount of responsibility around the home is good character training. Well, goodbye, Mr. and Mrs. Cleaver.”

  WARD: “Good-bye, Eddie.”

  EDDIE (whispering): “Can I talk to you outside, Wally?”

  WALLY: “Okay, Eddie, what’s up?”

  EDDIE: “Come on, Moe, drop the hoe. Lumpy’s out in the car and we’re ready to roll.”

  WALLY: “I told you, Eddie. I can’t. I got work to do.”

  EDDIE: “Come on, Isabel, you gonna let your mother and father push you around? Why don’t you read them the child labor law?”

  WALLY: “Hey, Eddie, isn’t it about the time of year you’re supposed to shed your skin?”

  I take a certain amount of comfort in knowing that Eddie Haskell comes off as just as big a jerk today as he did twenty years ago. There are so few elements of life that have gone unchanged in that period.

  “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet�
�� was another classic of those timid times. There was Ozzie and Harriet and David and Ricky, and they lived in a big house and everybody was happy and problems were easy to solve. Television of the fifties rarely dealt with anything more intricate than a husband forgetting an anniversary or a wife burning dinner for the husband’s boss.

  In those days, Ozzie was always around to talk over problems with David and Ricky. As a matter fact, I still don’t know what Ozzie did for a living; I never recall his going to work. If they did “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet” today, Ozzie probably would be a dope dealer.

  * * *

  There are a lot of things I miss about television the way it used to be. I’ll take John Cameron Swayze over Peter Jennings on a big story any day, and has there ever been a better detective than Sargeant Joe Friday on “Dragnet”?

  Joe Friday didn’t waste a lot of time keeping Los Angeles free of crime on his program. All he wanted was the facts. Today, television cops get involved in a lot of extracurricular activities, such as fooling around with women.

  (Fact: Jack Webb, who played Joe Friday, died not long ago of a heart attack. Maybe he should have taken a few days off occasionally and gone to Pismo Beach with a girlfriend.)

  “Amos ’n’ Andy” was a favorite at my aunt’s house. George “Kingfish” Stevens was always trying to con Andrew H. Brown, and sooner or late the Kingfish would end up in court with his lawyer, Algonquin J. Calhoun, representing him:

  “Yo’ Honor, it’s easy for the prosecutor to talk that way about my client, George Stevens. It’s easy ’cause my client is a crook, Yo’ Honor!”

  “Amos ’n’ Andy” was classic humor, but unfortunately we can’t watch it on television today. It’s allegedly racist.

  That’s just another example of how confusing the modern world has become. I can’t watch “Amos ’n’ Andy” because it’s racist, but it’s okay to watch “Sanford and Son,” which is filled with racist situations and remarks.

  Remember the time Fred had to go to the dentist? He found out that the dentist was black and insisted on having a white man work on his mouth. And don’t forget his classic line, “There ain’t nothin’ uglier than an old white woman.”

  There must be some big difference in the two programs, but I swear I can’t see it. Maybe it’s a matter of perspective.

  I remember several years ago when I was working in Chicago, the nation’s most segregated city, and caught a cab home one night after work. The cab driver was black, and we began to talk.

  “Where you from?” he asked.

  “Atlanta.”

  “Thought so,” he said. “I’m from Mississippi.”

  Here it comes, I figured. A black cabbie is about to give me a lecture on how much better life is away from the racist jackals of the South.

  “I’m going back one of these day,” he said instead.

  I was startled. “You don’t like it here?”

  “People ain’t the same up here,” he said. “In Mississippi, they always let you know where you stand. They put up signs down there that say, ‘No Niggers Allowed.’ Up here, they don’t put up no signs. They just let you walk into a place and then tell you you can’t stay. I liked it better when I knew ahead of time where I was wanted.”

  I guess that’s how I feel about television these days. I liked it better when I knew what was okay to laugh at and what wasn’t.

  It is modern television, in fact, that has helped to foster the two most offensive Southern stereotypes — the racist redneck and the belligerent country sheriff. And nothing irritates me more than to see Southerners being portrayed on television by actors or actresses who can’t speak the language.

  Take y’all, for instance. Southerners never say you all, and even if we did, we wouldn’t use it in the singular sense. The proper word, used when speaking to two or more others, is a contraction, y’all.

  On television, however, some honey from the Bronx who has landed a part as a Southern belle inevitably says to her lover, “Why don’t you all come ovuh heah and sit down by lil’ of me.”

  I doubt that “Amos ’n’ Andy” was near the embarrassment to blacks that yankees trying to portray Southerners is to Southern whites.

  * * *

  Television actually was responsible for my first encounter with discrimination, because it brought major league baseball into my life.

  For the first time, I could see Mantle and Musial and Williams and Snider. I became a hardcore Dodger fan — they were still in Brooklyn then — and consequently developed a keen hatred for the Yankees.

  I mentioned my love for the Dodgers one day to a cousin, who happened to be a Yankee fan. “The Dodgers!” he said, almost spitting out the words. “They’re a nigger team!”

  Perhaps I had overheard the older folks talking, or perhaps I had read something in the newspapers about Jackie Robinson, the first black man in major league baseball, but I never considered it when pledging my allegiance to the Dodgers. So when my older cousin made what was obviously a derogatory remark, I was hurt and confused. I pressed my cousin for more information, but all he would say was, “Niggers ain’t got no business playing major league ball.”

  I decided to take the question to my mother. “Do niggers have any business playing major league ball?” I asked her.

  “The word,” she said in her sternest schoolteacher voice, “is knee-grow. I don’t ever want to hear you say that other word in this house.”

  Fine, but that didn’t answer the question. Frankly, I was more interested in baseball than in race relations at the time.

  “I don’t know anything about baseball, son,” she said, “but your daddy played with Negroes in the service.”

  That settled it. If my father had played with Negroes, then there was no problem with Jackie Robinson playing with the Dodgers. Besides, all I wanted Robinson to do was help beat the Yankees, which is exactly what he did in the 1955 World Series.

  I was so thankful for the Dodger victory that I said a prayer in church, reasoning that God, in all His infinite wisdom, certainly must be a Dodger fan, too.

  * * *

  Parents today are concerned that their children see too much sex and violence on television. There wasn’t any sex to speak of on TV when I was a child, unless you count watching lady wrestlers tumble around with one another in those tight-fitting outfits they used to wear.

  There was violence, but the victims usually deserved the thrashings they got.

  Johnny Mack Brown walks into a saloon in the Five O’Clock Movie and says, “Gimme a milk.” Heroes in those days didn’t drink liquor, you recall.

  “Milk?” laughs an ornery galoot standing next to JMB at the bar. “Here, tenderfoot,” he continues, pushing a drink toward Johnny Mack, “try a little of this red-eye. It’ll put some hair on your chest.”

  Johnny Mack Brown, after gulping down his milk, of course, would proceed to beat laughing boy to within an inch of his life, and the saloon would be totally destroyed in the meantime. I never thought about it much back then, but now I wonder who paid for the damages after all those saloons were destroyed.

  I watched so many westerns as a kid that I’m still an expert on who rode what horse. Try me.

  Gene Autry? That’s a throwaway. He rode Champion. Hopalong Cassidy? A little tougher, but no problem for an expert. His horse was Topper.

  How about the horses of the sidekicks? Tonto rode Scout. Frog Millhouse’s horse was named Ringeye. Festus Hagan’s mule on “Gunsmoke” was Ruth.

  What our parents should have worried about our seeing on television was not sex and violence, but rather a way of life that was totally unrealistic — one that we would never be able to emulate. Just as viewers today are influenced by the whackos on “Donahue,” we were given a model of the way a family was supposed to work when we watched early television.

  Ward and June never argued on “Leave It to Beaver,” and Jim and Margaret knew their roles in “Father Knows Best.” Jim sat in the den with his stupid tie
and sweater on, while Margaret made dinner. And none of the kids ever got into any kind of trouble that couldn’t be handled in a calm family conference.

  One of the most unrealistic examples which television promoted was that of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans (who may have been the first feminist, now that I think about it. She kept her maiden name, and she never rode sidesaddle. Donahue would have loved her).

  Roy went off everyday and fought cattle thieves, while Dale stayed home and watched over the ranch. When Roy returned, Dale cooked him something to eat, and then they’d sit around singing “Happy Trails” together. For years, “Happy Trails” was my favorite song:

  “Happy trails to you,

  Until we meet again.

  Happy trails to you,

  Keep smiling until then.

  Happy traaaaails to youuuuuu,

  ’Til we meeeeeet aaaaagain.”

  Of course, it didn’t turn out that way at all. “Happy Trails” turned into “Forty Miles of Bad Road.”

  I came home after a hard day’s work one evening and said to my then-wife, “Rustle up some grub, woman, and call me when it’s ready. Me and ol’ Bullet will be out in the backyard.”

  “Rustle your own grub, Roy,” said my wife. “I’m taking Buttermilk and heading out for a few drinks with the girls.”

  * * *

  I’m not certain when it was that I stopped watching television on a regular basis. I think it was soon after they took “Gunsmoke” and “Have Gun Will Travel” and “Peter Gunn’’ and “Perry Mason” off the air and replaced them with programs that gave me headaches.

  I still search for the old shows — the ones that are being rerun, thank goodness. Give me Andy and Barney and Aunt Bea and Opie over “Hart to Hart” any day. And every time I flip through the channels looking for an old program and run across “Family Feud,” I secretly hope that herpes can be contracted by kissing game show contestants.

  I never liked “All in the Family.” Everybody was always screaming at everybody else, and it made me nervous. Maude was a grumpy old bat, and that program where Tex Ritter’s son John lived with those two air-brained women was horrible. Ol’ Tex must still be twirling in his grave.