Oh, God!

by Avery Corman

  He scored pretty well against Kearnsworth, too, I thought, getting him to admit he had declared himself to be a critic of mine long before these proceedings and since he had once called me “a vileness, a lowly liar and a clown,” might possibly then be prejudiced.

  “Fairly sloppy of old Owen D.,” I said.

  “I’m not so sure. All those times he said dangerous—that could build up subliminally.”

  You get so vulnerable in that kind of spot, you’ll shift your opinion instantly. “Right. Tricky of that devil, wasn’t it?”

  The little lady cracked completely under cross-examination, admitting that her cousin was not really in a rest home under treatment, but on a dairy farm eating ice cream.

  “Terrific, Lester. You have obliterated their case.”

  “Hardly. We don’t really have anyone to call for the defense. I wouldn’t put you up there. He’d take you apart.”

  “That’s insulting.”

  “All he has to do is ask, ‘Did you say this? Did you say that?’ And you’re finished.”

  “So who have we got?”

  “Trust in the Lord.”

  Lester then stepped forward and he was beautiful. I think the way movie and TV lawyers act has influenced the way real-life lawyers now act, because he looked like he was on camera, our Lester, as he said with considerable panache, “The defense will call only one witness.” And then with a flourish of his hand, “We call The Lord God.”

  Fantastic. I mean just fantastic. There is that expression, “his jaw dropped.” Well, jaws really did drop. Everybody in the room—the judge, Shallimar, his witnesses, Judy, me—the room was filled with the dropping of jaws.

  And then Lester just folded his arms and stood there, waiting—and the way he stood, waiting, made everybody else wait—even the judge, who finally said, “What is the meaning of this?”

  “Your Honor, I have called on The Lord to take the stand.”

  “Are you trying to make a joke out of my courtroom?”

  “No, your Honor.”

  And then Lester was wonderful. He said, “Your Honor, when I just asked The Lord to take the stand, in that fleeting moment after I called Him, was there not some trace of expectation in your mind? Could it—? What if—? Just a trace, your Honor. A flash. Wasn’t there a hesitation in this room? Didn’t you feel it? Didn’t we all feel it? It was the possibility that God exists and if He exists, He could materialize to inhabit that chair—and who are we mortal men to doubt that possibility? In that moment, in that fleeting instant, when you, your Honor, when all of us in this room didn’t know—in that heartbeat lies the doubt, the reasonable doubt that the defendant’s story could be true. And as you withdraw to your chambers, please think back on that moment, that hesitation that contains reasonable doubt, and in your soul find for the defendant. The defense rests.”

  My buddy! I didn’t know what good it would do, but he gave it a good shot. The pity is, as things turned out, we’ll never know if Lester could have gotten me off with it.

  The judge withdrew to consider the evidence and we remained in the courtroom and waited. Lester and Judy went out into the hall to stretch their legs. I was under guard.

  Now the suddenness of what followed is very hard to describe and I’m going to be awfully longwinded in trying to give the feeling of it, but the closest thing to it in my experience was many years ago when I was listening to a World Series ball game on the radio between the Yankees and the Dodgers. It was the last of the ninth of a 0-0 ball game, Red Barber, the Dodger announcer, was announcing and Tommy Henrich was batting against Don Newcombe. The tension was tremendous. Then Red Barber said, “High drive. Home run. Ball game’s over.” Sudden as that. He didn’t yell. He didn’t give it a Mel Allen hoot. He just said it, understated, quickly. “Ball game’s over.” I resented it at the time, being a Yankee fan, feeling cheated out of hearing the announcer yelling. But Red Barber was right. Sudden things happen suddenly. And that’s my buildup.

  Lester came running in from the hall brandishing a newspaper. He got the judge to reopen for new evidence. The cavalry had arrived. The Georgetown University group had just released the results of their inquiry. They found, as they put it, “strong evidence to support the claims of a miracle.” On the spot, the judge threw out the case against me. High drive. Home run. Ball game’s over. I was a free man.

  13

  AH, TO BE FRONT page, prime time and sane again. Certified sane with a certified miracle. If you’re in that situation what happens next is that the phone never stops ringing, people who interviewed you before try to use their deep friendship with you to interview you again, you become the center of a worldwide frenzy within the Religious Establishment, as leaders of all faiths don’t quite know what to do with your miracle, whether to embrace you or worship you or ignore you, deciding finally to discuss you in an international interdenominational conference in a city unnamed because no one can agree on where to meet, several other universities form committees to report on the report from Georgetown under pressure from unhappy boards of trustees aggrieved that their universities had been scooped, a Presidential fact-finding board is formed of prominent clergymen which you decline to cooperate with, having done that sort of thing already, and which turns out to have been requested by none other than The Federal Bureau of Investigation who uncovered the fact that you had once participated in several Peace demonstrations and who wanted to make sure you were not a Commie plot, a stream of passersby becomes a constant in front of your apartment and the crowds would be even larger if not for the New York Post incorrectly listing your address in a story and sending scores of gawkers to the apartment of a poor photographer three blocks away who finds himself constantly being photographed by tourists, you are included on the route of the New York City sightseeing buses, fitting you in after Chinatown and before the U.N. and when your windows are open you can hear the bus P.A. system, “Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it is said God was recently in the basement of that house and the owner of that house …” Not owner, Mister. We only rent “… saw and spoke to God, as confirmed by experts at Georgetown University, which you may visit on your tour of Washington and for which we provide you with discount exchange tickets—that very house, ladies and gentlemen. You may take pictures.” And you speculate that once you’re included in one of those things, you stay on forever. “Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it is said God was once in the basement of that house and the late owner of that house, God rest his soul …” “Yes, ladies and gentlemen on the site of that building once stood a building where it is said …” You also get to have a round man with a shaved head wearing a white robe stand in front of your apartment every day carrying a sign, although sign is an insufficient description because this thing had about ten pages of hand-lettered material tacked to a long pole and the best I could make out from it—I read a few lines each time I passed by—was that it contained his theory of God and the Universe, involving some interplanetary domino theory and the planet Earth is the southeast Asia of the heavens—don’t ask. And an agent from an organization called Creative Management Associates calls to sell you on the idea of doing a one-hour network television special, which he will guarantee to be sold to a sponsor of taste like Hallmark Greeting Cards.

  “One hour. Prime time.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Your own production company. You take the profits.”

  “No, I don’t think that’s what I should be doing.”

  “You just get out there and rap.”

  “That would make for a pretty dull show, wouldn’t it?”

  “We build you up. Production values. A boys’ choir.”

  “Sorry.”

  “A girls’ choir?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Billy Graham does TV. Oral Roberts. You can be better. You got a nice demography.”

  “A what?”

  “New York. Jewish. We can get the big city markets.”

  And you vow to get your phone discon
nected. But biggest of all of what happens to you in this situation which has created a commotion on your block and a crisis in Religion is that you make the cover of Time magazine. Right. All the marbles. Not a story about God. Not a wrap-up piece on the whole controversy. It was me, my face, a Time cover. There I was, rendered in color in a mystical setting, and in the background, various representations of God as Man has imagined Him through the ages. I was very impressed.

  The day after the hearing, a couple of Time reporters had come to the house, but we didn’t know it was for a cover story. They asked about my reactions to recent events, most particularly how did I feel about the sanity hearing and The Georgetown Report and I said something as profound as “Faith can move mountains.” They printed that illuminating remark as well as their observation that “he is almost offhanded in his devotion, as though his belief is so clear to him, he is bored with the non-believing of others.” What the reporter was picking up were the mechanical responses of an over-interviewed person. It was like Judy and I, the young couple at home, had no real personalities in front of people any longer, only a fabricated interview personality. We decided it was something to watch out for and we should try to act more ourselves. So we started to work out some dialogue that would make us seem more natural the next time someone came to the house.

  “I’ll answer the door and I’ll say, ‘Hi, nice to know you. This is my wife, Judy.’ ”

  “And I’ll say, ‘Would you like some coffee?’ ”

  “Or tea.”

  “Right. ‘Would you like some coffee or tea? Or a drink?’ ”

  “Good. We’ll ask them if they want a drink, too. Let’s run over that. ‘Hi, nice to know you. This is my wife, Judy!’ ”

  “ ‘Would you like some coffee or tea or a drink?’ ”

  And then we caught ourselves and were very embarrassed at how over-involved we had become.

  The cover story about me in typical Time fashion started with the news of the Georgetown findings, some background on the entire God situation, and then drifted all the way back to my childhood. They had extracted some pictures from my mother and there I was in Time magazine at age ten. The caption under the picture was a quote about me from a former elementary schoolteacher. It said, “No particular distinction.” The next picture showed me at my Bar Mitzvah with a quote from the tutor who was run in at the last minute to help me remember my lines. The caption was, “Fairly slow.” Then there was a picture of me taken a few years ago for a Ladies’ Home Journal piece I did, just about when I first started selling articles and the caption was, “The yeast rises.” And finally two pictures side by side, one of me going into Bellevue under arrest and the other, coming out of the courtroom exonerated and the captions were “Pre-miracle.” “Post-miracle.”

  They had a quote from Owen D., who said, “Legal rulings notwithstanding, the man is a dangerous lunatic. If he wishes to go to court to sue for that, I would welcome the opportunity.” Old soldiers never quit.

  Cynthia I-only-sleep-with-men-I’ll-never-see-again Fox, a girl with whom I had a neurotic three-month relationship, and who distinguished herself afterward by baring her breasts at a Woman’s Lib rally, a liberated action she never approximated with me, was quoted as a former mistress—hah!—who recalls me as “A drip.” Don’t you think that’s a ’40s word for a ’70s girl?

  And David Merrick, with whom I have absolutely no relationship, save the time I sat next to him once at a movie screening and frankly didn’t know what to do with him being there—do you say, “Excuse me, Mr. Merrick, so long as I’m sitting next to you, I have these plays …?” David Merrick was brought in to give the Time readers some idea of where my professional play-wrighting career stood at the moment and was quoted as saying, “I haven’t read anything of his personally, but his name is hot.” This brought up a tricky moral point. Do you use your publicity—publicity about God at that—as a means of helping you sell your unsold plays? My moral decision was—you do. I called my agent immediately after the article appeared to say, “I’m hot. Do something.” So she did. She sent the plays to David Merrick and he turned them down.

  A person named Carlton Greener optioned both of them, though, and to bring it up to date on that aspect of my career, absolutely nothing has happened on productions for either. Greener says he’s still working on raising money and it would be going better if the plays were on a religious theme, but since one is about a college kid who dumps a basketball game and the other is about a piano player, he says there is a rather tenuous association with the subject matter with which most people associate me, and it might help if I considered a rewrite, hopefully working God into them, or at least a heavenly spirit.

  For all the press coverage, it was hard to tell where the public really stood on the miracle. Man in the street interviews and public opinion polls were turning up a lot of “Don’t Know’s,” people apparently holding back for some official word from the Religious Establishment, which still hadn’t been able to get itself together.

  As for God Himself, He just hadn’t been around lately. He had been giving me what I thought to be special attention. And then during the whole time of my arrest, detention and near-incarceration—nothing. I was speculating about this one afternoon. Judy was out shopping and the telephone man came to disconnect and remove the phone, only it wasn’t the telephone man wearing those overalls and carrying a tool kit, it was Him.

  “Hello, big shot,” He said.

  “It’s you! Where have you been?”

  “Listen, Mister Sanity Hearing, is that your business?”

  “Do you know they almost put me away?”

  “I know. He prays to me in the men’s room yet.”

  “I needed your help.”

  “So things worked out anyway.”

  “They sure did. Did you see Time magazine?”

  “I saw. So what kind of monkey business is that?”

  “I thought it was impressive.”

  “I have an old saying. When the press agent becomes the news and not the client, it’s time to fire the press agent.”

  Fire the press agent? Was that some euphemism for doing me in?

  “And if I drop you, what do you do from here—go on to another God?”

  I saw He really didn’t mean to do me in. On the other hand, I hadn’t thought of myself as a press agent in this.

  “I really considered myself more a reporter,” I said.

  “With some pretty fancy bylines lately.”

  “I’m not looking for it. They even offered me a TV special and I turned it down.”

  “They offered him his own special.”

  “I said no.”

  “You know, I’m beginning to worry about all this publicity you’re getting for yourself, personal. They could make you God, and I’d be out on the street.”

  “That couldn’t happen.”

  “You wouldn’t like to be God?”

  “Of course not. I couldn’t.”

  “You wouldn’t want it anyway. It’s a lot of heartburn.”

  What must it be like to be God? His face seemed to look kind of strained that day, like it was a lot of heartburn.

  “So you’ll do me a favor and keep it in Une. I don’t want on my hands a Pygmalion Monster.”

  I’m sure He meant either a “Pygmalion” or a “Frankenstein Monster” but I wasn’t about to correct Him.

  “I’ll be careful about the interviews.”

  “Better there should be no more interviews.”

  “No more interviews?”

  “No more TV either.”

  “No more TV?”

  I was feeling shot down. He was right, though. I had been getting carried away with my own publicity.

  “I’m sorry. You’re right,” I said.

  “When love comes along, there is no right and wrong, your love is your love.”

  “Excuse me.”

  “Just something crossed my mind. From West Side Story. I saw it last night in a drive-
in.”

  Some mad turn of phrase occurred to me and I was tempted to say, “Did you bring a date?” I’m sure He knew what I was thinking because He said,

  “Watch it, my ipsy-pipsy. Don’t take advantage.”

  “Well, what’s the plan? What do I do now?” I asked.

  “Let’s stay with what we got. See how it develops.”

  “I shouldn’t do anything?”

  “What do you want, to help with God’s word or be a cover boy?”

  A little of both, I was thinking.

  “You give a fella a little turn in the limelight, he wants to be a dancer.”

  No more TV! No more interviews!

  “There are people who would be happier with less. Monks. They don’t become stars, they grow vegetables.”

  “Of course I’ll do as you wish.”

  “Good. Enough with the promotion and the exploitation. We gave the world the ball, let them run with it!”

  He had some curious ways of expressing Himself.

  “So that is what I wanted to say to you. Now I’ll do the phone.”

  “You’re going to do the phone?”

  “What do you think? I wouldn’t know how to do it?”

  And He did it. He actually disconnected the phone like a telephone man, working very efficiently, while I looked on, fascinated.

  “God is boundless,” He said.

  Then He put the disconnected phone into his tool box, snapped the box shut, smiled as though He just thought of something clever to say—and said:

  “Don’t call us. We’ll call you.”

  14

  HAVING JUST BEEN MUZZLED by The Lord, and having recently lived in—as the Chinese curse goes—“interesting times,” I decided Judy and I had earned a vacation. The only thing that seemed to require my attention was the big all-faith international conference which was being called to discuss the miracle, and that was still far from being worked out. Rome wanted it in Rome, the Eastern religious leaders wanted it in the East, the West in the West. It was like they were picking a site for the Olympic Games.

  It was a good time to get away. But where do you go if you’re a phasing-yourself-out Time cover story? I didn’t want to go too far away from New York, feeling I should at least stay available to the press if some questions came up. But I didn’t want to go where I would attract attention, having the arrogance to assume I would.