He was so fragile that, on the road, his manager roomed with him. But I demanded to be alone with my subject—that was always my condition for doing an interview, and I usually got my way. At the appointed hour I knocked on the door of his chamber. “Hel-lo, Mr. Goldstein,” I heard Tiny Tim say in that familiar warble, and I walked in. It was the day after his first performance, and I expected to see breakfast dishes and other signs of late rising. But I didn’t count on tray after tray of cakes and puddings, a number of them overturned on the carpet. He still had smears of cream on his chest and face—or maybe he was wearing one hell of a foundation. “I’ve always wanted to do this,” he said sheepishly, pointing to the mess. I didn’t ask him to elaborate.
By then I’d learned a lot about the fragility of icons, and I didn’t want to collude in his misery. So I filed a piece that described the state of his room but not my misgivings about his fate. My apprehension was well taken. His star faded with the sixties—not even a wedding witnessed by Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show could restore it. But he continued performing long afterward, despite suffering a heart attack onstage, until finally, at another gig, he had a coronary that would be fatal. He wasn’t the first performer, and I doubt he’ll be the last, whose existence depended so heavily on the ratification of fame that he would die in the service of show business.
*
Tiny Tim was a good example of how the New Journalism, with its semi-literary credentials, worked in tandem with the culture’s taste for the freaky. The appetite for extreme and enigmatic behavior was what kept writers like me in business. We were explorers on the frontier of the new. But it wasn’t just the lively prose or the ability to personalize our stories that made us indispensable; it was our eagerness to interpret what we saw. Whether we used the first person or the objective voice, we weren’t wedded to any concept of neutrality—neutrality was a lie. I had no doubt about it, since I’d witnessed protest marches that bore no relationship to what was described in the press, which seldom conveyed in any detail the brutality of the police. I concluded that the only reliable reporting would come from engaged individuals free of the constraints of institutional style. The New Journalism now meant more to me than using fictional techniques; it was about actively participating in the event—the correspondent as witness and truth teller. Walt Whitman had written the code I swore by: “I am the man. I suffered. I was there.”
In the sixties, reporting still had a virile image. The mystique of tough guys pounding on old typewriters and drinking themselves noble persisted even in an era of white-suited wags and j-school pros. And journalism was, for all its compromises, an enemy of entrenched power. It was the rock music of the written word, and for many intellectuals a way to kick out the jams. I suspect that was why Norman Mailer ventured into my profession.
It began with his account of an antiwar march in 1967. Thousands of protesters tried to levitate the Pentagon by ohming and chanting. Mailer was there, and his narrative of the event, Armies of the Night, became his greatest success. It won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, a remarkable twofer. Despite our difficult meeting at the Village Voice office, when I’d fled from his raised fists, he was still my primo literary hero. But there was a problem. He had dropped, from a great height, onto the street where I lived. And so I saw him in a different way.
We ran into each other from time to time at social events. Smiles were exchanged, but I didn’t want to connect with him. It wasn’t his legendary belligerence that put me off—I had learned not to take it seriously. It was the sense of privilege and insulation that hung over his shoulders like an ermine cape. By then I’d gained quite a lot of knowledge about what it meant to be trapped in a role. Or maybe it was just that as I got closer to the writers I idolized, they seemed more like competitors. In any case, everything I’d admired about Mailer’s style as a student—its radical candor and erudite intensity—now felt inappropriate. The image of the bad-boy genius, which he’d worked so hard to create, now collided with the subject he was writing about. I would feel that way about many hip intellectuals when they tackled youth culture. They didn’t understand how the values of my generation were different from theirs, and they fell back on reflexes that had once been rebellious but were now reflexive. And when an ego as big as Mailer’s tackled a phenomenon as remote from his daily life as the antiwar movement was, the result was a show of pure Me.
Armies of the Night is about a great American writer and media sensation going through changes, but the event it describes was about the struggle to end an unjust war. Ordinary kids were more important than Mailer in that battle, and far less insulated from the violence that ensued. He tried to compensate for his status by casting himself as a character called Aquarius. In this guise he could fully express his ambivalence about the new spirit of the sixties. It met my standard of engagement, but its effect was to make his own experience more important than the action, and his persona the most fascinating thing of all. As artful as the book was, it seemed like a violation of the countercultural ethos that I’d come to share. We kids saw politics as a collective activity, something we did together. Radicals in Mailer’s generation had struggled to maintain their individuality, but we fought to maintain community. These were very different battles, and they made Mailer’s project suspect. It was all signature, and I learned little from it except for the example it offered of the kind of writer I didn’t want to be.
The honorific term for people like Mailer was “public intellectual.” They took positions, signed petitions, and wrote passionate works of dissent. But they didn’t shy away from self-promotion; like everyone in the sixties, they went for it big-time. From my position at the crossroads of culture and hype, this was an unsettling discovery. It meant that intellectuals were now part of the celebrity culture. Those who knew how to use the mass media, such as Mailer and Warhol, Gore Vidal and Truman Capote, had joined the spectacle and TV expanded the star system exponentially, so that it included anyone deemed exotic. In the fifties, it was Beat poets, and homosexuals sitting behind potted plants. But in 1967 the hip thing for a chat show with blue-chip pretensions was to have a professor as a guest. These weren’t run-of-the-tenure-mill types. They had to have an outsize sense of their importance, a blind confidence in their ideas, and a conviction that they could single-handedly alter the course of history. Most important, they had to have a skill that wasn’t supposed to exist in the academy. They had to be entertaining.
The maiven who benefited most from this opening was Marshall McLuhan, a James Joyce scholar turned media savant. Gabbing with Dick Cavett or savoring a cameo role in a Woody Allen film, McLuhan was the perfect gnomic oracle, ever ready to make a point no one could firmly grasp. He epitomized the style of fluid thinking that was trendy at the time. Anything that sounded compelling could be—just might be—true. As in McLuhan’s fame-blazing slogan “The medium is the message.” This was a very reductive update of Walter Benjamin, the German cultural philosopher of the 1930s who argued that the mass production of images had changed the nature of perception. Benjamin was a Marxist mystic who didn’t know from quips, but McLuhan had none of those limitations. His knack for cryptic assertions—New York is obsolete; movie stars will soon cease to exist—propelled him into prime time.
The fact that no one outside media-studies courses reads McLuhan today says something about the quality of his thinking. He produced a buckshot of ideas that usually hit only the vicinity of its targets. Yes, TV was a “cool” medium, as he proclaimed, but cool was the style of the time; today TV is a “hot” medium and we live in the age of Snooki. Yes, TV was turning the world into a “global village” (his phrase), but each new tool of communication, as it spreads, globalizes experience; today the Internet is having much the same effect. Any novel mass medium will produce the shifts McLuhan described, and television was still relatively new when he wrote. What he did get right was the importance of inventing a role. Like me, he had devised a new one—the media guru—and in 19
67, that was enough to make you wise.
I didn’t merit a private audience with the Wizard of Ozzie and Harriet. I was told by McLuhan’s publicist that he “only does sit-downs with national media.” I settled for one of his press conferences. It was a bit like interviewing the Maharishi, minus the garlands. McLuhan dispensed edicts, and we wrote them down. After about an hour of this ritual I decided that it was a shuck (the word we used for a scam). I wrote a piece that described him as a cross between Madison Avenue and Harvard Square, a “para-philosopher” who specialized in “concept barbs,” like the slogans in commercials. His ideas about TV were really about the triumph of advertising and the incursion of its techniques into the realm of theory. This was yet another hype.
But my real beef with McLuhan had to do with rock. My generation hadn’t been shaped by TV, as he claimed. It was a distant second to music in terms of influence. So his ideas about us were wrong on the face because, like most of his peers, he ignored our primary form of expression. I don’t think he ever wrote a word about rock; it didn’t interest him, probably because its technological properties were just a small part of what made it special. As for hippies, at the press conference I attended he called them “despicable, revolting people.” Only someone who was oblivious to youth culture could have concluded that what made us distinct was the medium we grew up with. Television was nothing mysterious to me; what didn’t make sense was the way people in power acted. But there were a lot of baffled elders out there, and they needed a guide. As a cautionary tale I kept, pinned to the wall above my desk, a quote from the Herald Tribune proclaiming McLuhan “the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Pavlov.” Why not since Dick Cavett?
In this climate of radical status flux, Clay Felker had an audacious idea. He wanted to send me to Saigon. “The Pop War!” he proclaimed, with a stop-the-presses look in his eye. As usual, he was right about the story. Felker had a real gift for matching writers with subjects, and going to Vietnam would have been a great career move for me. But there was no way that the experience would be as benign as his last bizarre assignment, which involved John Wayne. I pictured myself threading through the night town of Saigon, entering whorehouses and interviewing men my age who were traumatized by a war that I, and many of them, abhorred. Most of these guys were working-class. How could I move among them with my ponytail pulled up under a helmet? Wouldn’t it be clear that I was exempt from the draft? And how had I carried that off? A set of providentially fallen arches? No. I’d used something more effective—and unmentionable. I had “queered out.”
That’s what it was called in the project, and it was worse than even admitting that you had a tiny dick. But when my student deferment expired and I was summoned by the draft board, I considered all my options. I’d gotten a shrink to write a letter. When I saw the diagnosis—“schizoid tendencies”—I knew it wouldn’t fly. Schizoids could make very efficient killing machines. No way was I going to fight in this war. I was prepared to leave the country if I had to, and I’d already lined up a job at the Toronto Star. But I didn’t want to live in a sensible place like Canada. There was only one other recourse. I checked the box that said “homosexual feelings”—some phrase like that. I girded myself for the moment when the doctor saw it. Surely a siren would go off and I would end up standing naked while a circle of men spat at me. But I did have those … feelings, which is what I told the white-coated man who placed me behind a screen and asked a few questions in an even tone. Had I had sex with a man? Yes. (Back in the Bronx, with that boy who picked me up in his Pontiac with the Madonna on the dashboard.) Had I enjoyed it? Joy wasn’t the right word to describe my confused feelings, but I nodded yes, and that was that. I would never have to share the shameful secret if I didn’t care to. But it made going to Vietnam as a reporter seem like the height of hypocrisy. Of all the reasons why I was in a privileged position, toting a notebook rather than a gun, my uncertain sexuality seemed like the most unconscionable. It felt like a betrayal of the kids I’d grown up with. So I turned the assignment down, leaving the story of the “pop war” to someone more securely straight.
I suppose I should say something conclusive about my relationship to gay culture in the mid-sixties, but I didn’t have one. I had a friendship with a gay man, my roommate John, and an ample yearning toward certain guys, but no sexual connections with them. Even at the Voice, which had hired homosexuals during the fifties, when such a thing was unheard of in the media, the queers kept a low profile. As for the music scene, forget it. For all its florid androgyny, rock was a very macho milieu, and even critics I knew to be bisexual didn’t send those signals in their writing—nor did I. It wasn’t just discretion or cowardice; I honestly didn’t feel gay. But there was one exception to my heteronormativity. I dug drag queens.
I had met Holly Woodlawn and Candy Darling at the Factory. It was one of the first media-savvy scenes where camping was a truly public act, and where sexual personae of all sorts were part of the mix. I guess most transgender kids today would regard the sense of incipient failure that Holly and Candy displayed as the essence of oppression. In the films Warhol made with them, they could never get the man of their dreams—usually Joe Dallesandro, the outer-boroughs hustler as superstar—and they seemed always a shriek away from falling apart. This aura of incipient breakdown is why they were so fascinating to me. I don’t think it had much to do with my uncertain sexuality. It was more like a metaphor for my class anxieties, my inability to master the codes that marked someone as affluent, or even middle-class. I was much more sensitive about my Bronxitude than I was about anything else, and in order to hide my roots I wore a costume so flamboyantly hippie-dippy that it was beyond class. In effect, I was a drag queen in rock gear.
If I’d had the need to integrate my sexuality into the rest of my life, I might have come out as whatever I was. But I didn’t feel incomplete or inauthentic with women, and the cost would have been considerable in 1967, not just for a rock critic. Gay writers were expected to be bitchy, fragile, or geniuses, and I was none of those things. Instead, I went with the orthodoxy of the time and told myself that everyone was basically bisexual. It was hip to be androgynous, and I could convince myself that the fantasy I savored, of Mick Jagger in net stockings and pumps, was some sort of tribute to British style. In California I’d heard musicians talk about a “gay-off” as a kind of adventure in ecotourism; it had no implications for one’s identity. There were queers all around me, but they faded into the hippie parade. Whatever happened in gay bars—which were all run by the mafia in New York—decorousness was the dominant public code, especially among the homosexual elite.
Several important gay men took an interest in me in the sixties, but I didn’t respond to their overtures. It wasn’t just homosexual panic. I saw all gay men in Manhattan as rich, and I was afraid of rich people. I remember an invitation to the home of Henry Geldzahler, a renowned museum curator and a leading proponent of Pop Art. He was openly gay, an exceptional stance at the time. Over the course of a lengthy conversation I could feel him sizing me up. Perhaps he saw a certain potential in me, or maybe he just liked my type. I couldn’t tell, but it freaked me out, and I shrank from his gaze. I was sure someone like Geldzahler wanted only one thing: to be fucked dumb by me. I had the feeling that I was being slotted into the role of working-class stud, the mold I thought gay culture assigned to guys from housing projects. But that wasn’t me. Nor did I fit the other gay stereotype, that of the suave sophisticate. I was neither a butch vulgarian nor a fey aesthete. I was just an uncertain commoner, and that meant there would be no future for me in gay life, even if I’d wanted to be part of it.
After this incident I confided in John. We weren’t living together, but we were still close friends, and he had nearly as great a stake in my heterosexuality as I did. (He wasn’t the only gay man with whom I would play the role of an accepting straight friend.) John said it was all about training. I could deal with the problem of class by mast
ering the codes of conduct in my new milieu—after all, he was the son of a ward heeler, and now he was messing with upscale guys. “Sure,” I told him. “You’re fucking them.” My anxiety went much deeper than my proletarian roots, but he convinced me that all I needed was a crash course in etiquette. I would have to learn verbs like to dine and to summer—and, puh-leaz, he groaned, say Long Island, not Lung-island.
And so I set out to conquer my fear of the haves. My first stop was a soirée at the home of New York’s senior senator, the very honorable Jacob Javits. I wasn’t just there for basic training. I knew it would give my father nachas (earned pleasure of the sort you get from a successful child) to know that I was being invited to meet the most powerful Jew in American politics. Every year my father sent Javits a Hanukkah card, on the chance that the senator would see this greeting from a fellow Yid and intervene to wrest a promotion at the post office. Needless to say, he never got a reply. But maybe I could have a word with Javits on his behalf, he said bashfully. I promised I would, but I knew such things weren’t done—my father understood even less than I did about how to behave in tony circles. I stood in the corner of the senator’s elegant parlor as soigné people sauntered by. Mrs. Marion Javits, who was very much the socialite, approached me. I looked into her perfectly shaped eyes and explained in some detail who I was, thinking there must be fifty thousand Goldsteins in the New York phone book. “Oh,” she said, “I know who you are.” Then she floated off. I realized that journalists who appeared at salons were expected to be seen but not heard. I had a lot to learn.
Fortunately for me, the rules were changing fast. In a smug and stable time, there’s a logic to what passes for couth, just as there is for wisdom. But in a Lewis Carroll wonderland all you can trust is your reactions, and journalism is an art of the first impression. Immediacy is its major virtue, and this authority of the quick take was a major reason why serious writers attempted reportage. Though I still felt unworthy in their midst, the way I had around Italian guys in the project, now I had a secret weapon. The cool kids of Manhattan wanted a guide to the new hip action. This was a service I could provide, and they were seeking me out. Even Susan Sontag wanted to meet me. Me, Little Richie from the projects.
Another Little Piece of My Heart Page 16
