The belt moved at fifty-two cars an hour – slightly less than one a minute. Since I’d got that red and green ‘numbers hidden in the dots’ test wrong, and as a result was deemed to be slightly colour blind (a vital attribute in any fine artist in waiting, as I’m sure you’ll agree), the only job they’d trust me with was washing the right-hand front, side, and rear windows inside and out, to remove the inspector’s grease pencil hieroglyphs. Unfortunately, in this particular era of brashly expansive mid-century automotive design, that meant covering a hell of a lot of glass.
A 1959 chevrolet impala – look at the size of the windscreen on that baby!
There was no way I could finish inside and out in just over a minute. While my genial workmates (most of whom seemed happy to work through nine hours of darkness in return for the freedom their wages bought them in the next fifteen hours of daylight) were off enjoying a tea break, I could often be found way down into the next person’s section, drops of falling ammonia solution mingling with the sweat on my brow, as I struggled in vain to catch up.
It was probably on one of these conscientious missions down the line that I discovered the painful truth that what I was doing was absolutely pointless. As soon as I’d cleaned my windows, off they went around the corner where another inspector would dirty them up. I wouldn’t have minded stepping in at the end of the process – giving that windscreen the clean of its life and sending it out into the world so everyone could say, ‘Yes, it’s sparkling wonderfully, I’ll buy ten of those.’ It wasn’t just a question of ego – well, not entirely – all I wanted was to be able to take pride in a job well done.
The processes of industrial mass-production were not the only aspect of the student employment market that seemed to conspire against an individual’s God-given right to take satisfaction in his work. The most white-collar of my temporary employments, a mail-room gig in the office of Welton Becket, LA’s most prestigious architects (the first of many professional opportunities contacts made at Oxy would bring me – remember, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know), was no less disillusioning. It seemed progress up the social and/or economic ladder was no insurance against having to compromise your principles.
That firm was working on what became the new LA Music Center concert hall, and Dorothy Chandler – the department store heiress and wife of LA Times proprietor Otis Chandler, who was a big noise on the board of the orchestra – was constantly coming in and tinkering with the models, so that you’d see these amazing designs being constantly corrupted. I started to feel that maybe the way Welton Becket got to be number one architect was by bending with the wind that was coming out of the arses of their clients. I was young and idealistic then, so this kind of thing made me crazy.
Although I was only dimly aware of the way the cards were falling at the time, in retrospect it was becoming increasingly clear that only the corruption-free environment of show business could provide me with the kind of morally pure working environment I was looking for. It wasn’t so much that I knew where I was going, but that I knew which doors I didn’t want to walk through. So I declared I would only do work I had complete control over and never work just for money.
My first step in that direction, on leaving Chevrolet in a fit of artistic pique, was to get a job for the rest of that summer with a children’s theatre. Designing and building sets, painting myself green and pretending to be an ogre was much more fun than washing windscreens for a living, and the relatively small amount of experience I accumulated there enabled me to somehow blag myself an improbably high-powered position for the next summer as ‘drama coach’ at Camp Roosevelt – a select summer dumping ground for the children of Hollywood A-listers in my favourite San Bernardino mountains, up above Palm Springs.
The vertiginous physical terrain I already knew and loved, but in ‘professional’ terms, I was massively out of my depth, having no formal theatrical training of any kind. In some ways, Camp Roosevelt would set the pattern for the rest of my life – go in at the top, then work my way down. It was also enormous fun. This was the place where my Hollywood Jewish friend-making could really get into gear, as gentiles were outnumbered by approximately ten to one, and I became known as ‘Gilly the Goy’, after the last two words of an innocent question about a potential problem with the catering – ‘What are we going to do about the [orange] juice?’ – were misheard by one of my fellow camp counsellors as ‘ . . . the Jews’.
Everything went swimmingly for the first six weeks or so, until I gradually began to sense that the lavish production of Alice in Wonderland that I had promised to deliver as the centrepiece of the final parents’ visiting day of the summer was far too elaborate to actually pull off. My ambitious plans foundered on the lack of any organisational infrastructure to help translate my vision from two dimensions into three – imagining the whole thing was the easy part, the difficult bit was the reality of actually doing it without the facilities, time, money, or basic talent to make it happen. Whenever I’d start to get something going, these Hollywood brats would have to go off horse-riding or for an archery lesson – so they were not at all like grown-up actors in any way.
Where better to experience the first real catastrophe of my career than in loco parentis for the temporarily abandoned children of such Hollywood bigshots as Hedy Lamarr, Danny Kaye (whose charming daughter Dena has remained a good friend of mine to this day), the director William Wyler (whose son behaved like a little shit but ultimately responded quite well to discipline) and composer Ernest Gold (whose son Andy would end up playing the guitar riff and arranging ‘Heart Like A Wheel’ with Linda Ronstadt)?
I ended up pulling the plug in the final week before the show. It’s such a weird thing to establish yourself within a community and then feel like you’ve let down everyone within it. The scars run deep . . . even unto today when I often wake from a dream of the fear of repeat failure on whatever my current project might be.
Nevertheless, my over-riding memories of that summer of my junior (i.e. third) year at Occidental are still happy ones. At weekends, a few of us counsellors sometimes got to escape down to Palm Springs, where one of our number’s stepmother turned out to be the divine Debbie Reynolds, who had now married a shoe magnate (the yet more seductive intervention of Liz Taylor having done for Debbie’s first marriage to Eddie Fisher) and whose second home was a sleek, desert-modern house with a fabulous swimming pool.
These rough drawings are all that remain of what could have been – had it only gone ahead – one of the most disastrous summer - camp theatre productions of all time. I think it’s safe to say that my loss was Lewis Carroll’s gain, but looking at them now I can still feel the formative trauma of this last-minute cancellation gnawing at my guts.
The idea of being in a movie star’s home, swimming in her pool and even – in a potentially calamitous show of youthful exuberance – bouncing on her bed, was thrilling beyond anything I had ever previously dreamed of. Perhaps it was for the best that I didn’t know at this point that some years later I would get to dance with Debbie. The excitement would have been too much.
I was certainly starstruck. But the funny thing about preparing to graduate from college in the America of the early 1960s was that my yen for Hollywood glamour and the high-minded ideals of making the world a better place that had first carried me to Occidental did not at that point feel fundamentally incompatible. The swearing-in of President Kennedy in January 1961 lent a newly youthful lustre to the highest office of State, and JFK’s launch of the Peace Corps later on that same year even made the idea of doing worthwhile things in far-off lands briefly fashionable.
The crusading atmosphere of the all too short-lived Kennedy presidency was another notable instance of theoretically archaic imagery pervading the American pop culture of my youth. As the optimistic post-inauguration spring of 1961 turned to summer, the original cast recording of Camelot – Lerner and Loewe’s Tony Award-winning Broadway musical adaptation of T H White’s compendium of Arth
urian legend – was America’s number one album for months on end.
The name of King Arthur’s legendary court would become posthumously entwined with the memory of JFK from the moment his widow mentioned his love for the show in a Time magazine interview shortly after his death, but before that it was more of a subconscious linkage. That show was the vehicle for a veritable bus-load of strange attractors as far as I was concerned. Richard Burton played the chief Grail-seeker and Julie Andrews (whose own alluring cameo in this book is still a little way off) his Guinevere, but it was the show’s less famous but similarly well-regarded director, Moss Hart, who was about to provide the cue for my next move.
Of course vietnam ~ a.k.a. the War Corps (e) ~ would soon change all that. But in the meantime, enough of my missionary instincts had survived my dwindling prospects of academic success for me to still be applying for postgraduate study abroad in my final year at Oxy. My desire to travel to exotic destinations – Hong Kong, the Philippines, the Punjab, anywhere – seems to have been more clearly defined than my sense of what I should actually do once I got there. Maybe I was expecting to put bras on the natives.
found graduating from Oxy quite depressing. It wasn’t my final slump into academic mediocrity that troubled me – that was a done deal – but rather the prospect of breaking up the Fang gang. We’d had such a grand time doing that magazine – taking it up from three issues a year to six, and sweeping the whole student body along with us – and now those days were over. I had absolutely no idea of what I was going to do next, so for the first few months after leaving college, I took the stop-gap option of another eight-week summer-camp counselling job, this time up in the Sierra Nevadas (where Burt Lancaster’s daughters were our highest-ranking Hollywood progeny). It was there that I read the book Act One – the memoirs of the aforementioned theatrical eminence Moss Hart – which would give me the plan of action I so urgently needed.
$400 for two months less valid state and federal employment charges didn’t seem like such a bad deal with food and lodging thrown in…and Camp Trinity did live up to its ‘party ranch’ sobriquet to the extent that I finally managed to divest myself of that possession which no self-respecting twenty-one-year-old man – even one who had gone to college on a missionary scholarship – would wish to carry with him too much further over the threshold of adulthood. This landmark was passed in the company of one of my fellow counsellors, I hasten to add, not one of my impressionable young charges. No names, no pack-drill beyond that, though – who do you think I am, Zsa Zsa Gabor?
In later years, once I’d been lucky enough to get the chance to direct movies of my own, I would learn to identify a mysterious – sometimes magical and sometimes disastrous – process whereby ‘the making of the film becomes the story of the film’. But I would never have found myself in the director’s chair (a largely metonymic furnishing concept in itself, as you’re generally spending too much of your time rushing around in a panic to sit down all that much) without an approximately equal and opposite propensity for imagining my way into pre-existing narratives. This staple resource of the child’s imagination is one I have adapted to become the motor of my adult life. The big question I have never quite been able to answer is, ‘Am I driving the car, or merely hitching a lift?’
It never feels like I’m in control of the direction the traffic is going in, and yet somehow it always ends up reaching some kind of destination, and more often than not the one I originally intended. Reading Moss Hart’s autobiography at Camp Trinity in the summer of 1962 was one of the most influential events of my whole life. So complete was my identification with the character of the director of disastrous summer-camp drama productions who somehow progressed to co-writing Broadway hits alongside his hero George S Kaufman that it motivated me to pursue my own goal of working for Harvey Kurtzman with single-minded dedication. I’ve never thought of myself as a particularly ambitious person, and yet those who have read that book more recently than I assure me that I actually twisted its narrative framework quite considerably to fit the requirements of my own professional advancement.
Either way, it’s a great book. And the story of the callow youth who suddenly found himself in a creative partnership with his hero had enough plausibility to sustain me through Harvey’s rejection of my initial Hart-inspired overtures. I’d cheekily sent a couple of copies of Fang to the Help! offices in New York while I was still at Oxy, and he’d been very positive about them (to be honest, it was kind of him not to sue us for copyright infringement), but when Act One inspired me to contact him again to raise the possibility of my heading to the home of Help! – rapidly becoming a mecca for a new generation of what would later be known as underground cartoonists – Harvey did not exactly encourage me. His reply was roughly along the lines of, ‘Don’t bother – there’s a million people in this town with no jobs. Why would you want to join them?’
When I refused to take his no for an answer, he agreed to meet me at the Algonquin Hotel in NYC – a key location in Hart’s story: the former home of the distinctly non-Arthurian Round Table of literary wits Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, George Kaufman et al. Surely this had to be a good omen? So it proved, as just as I walked in through those most elegant of revolving doors, Harvey’s now former assistant Chuck Alverson was – if not physically, then at least in career terms – on his way out.
The Algonquin Hotel, scene of my auspicious first meeting with Harvey kurtzman.
I’d gone there with no expectation of getting a job, but I’d saved enough money working at Camp Trinity to buy a bit of time, and I just wanted to give myself a chance to make something happen. The first time I stepped out of the station at Times Square, the impact of the looming tall buildings hit me right in the guts. That’s the fundamental difference between LA and New York – the former is flat, while the latter is way over your head. People didn’t generally look at the best part of the buildings – which was the tops – because their gaze was glued to the pavements, but my neck was always craning upwards. I think that’s why so many of my films (Brazil and The Fisher King being the obvious ones, but it applies to Baron Munchausen and Time Bandits as well) ended up having a vertiginous aspect – because it’s taken me decades to process the overwhelming impact of my first arrival in New York.
Knocking on the door of that suite in the Algonquin was no less of a headrush. Inside that room were all the famous cartoonists I’d grown up admiring (or at least so it seemed to me at the time – Willy Elder, Al Jaffee and Arnold Roth were definitely there). And what were this pantheon of the cartooning gods working on? Why, a salacious spoof comic for Playboy called Little Annie Fanny – just as Zeus had decreed they should be. Harvey had popped out for a minute, but when he did turn up, he was a lot smaller than I expected (perhaps inevitably given the superhero status I had accorded him) – this little brown nut of a man, vibrating with compressed energy.
As if this scenario was not already idyllic enough, Harvey offered me Chuck’s job more or less on the spot. This was beyond luck, it was destiny. OK, so the $50 a week he was going to pay me was $2 a week less than the dole would have been, but as excited as I’d been by the dream of working on Help!, the reality was even better. Life was moving so fast that it felt like the city was setting a beat – every morning I’d wake up and New York would say, ‘Ramming speed: Boom! Boom! Boom! ’
My old Fang buddy John Massey, moon-lighting in deep water as a Help! cover star.
Chuck Alverson – who hadn’t been sacked, he just had other things to do such as working for the Wall Street Journal – kindly took me under his wing and let me sleep on his couch for a while until I got a place of my own. At one point I found myself rooming with a bunch of air stewardesses who wanted to act but in the meantime would come in at all hours of the night from long-haul flights. Then I got my own room in an avariciously subdivided mansion block right up by Columbia University.
It was fully 8-foot by 8-foot, with a basin and my own toilet somehow crammed i
n. There was just enough room for a bed and the desk I shared with a pet cockroach (who loved paint and would come out to sniff the plate I used to mix the colours on), so I’d move everything onto the bed when I had work to do, and then back onto the desk when it was time to sleep. Whenever I sat down to work, the cockroach would come scuttling out from his quarters in the desk (which were proportionately a good deal more spacious than mine) to get a lung-full – if cockroaches have lungs – of whatever noxious lead fumes were on offer. I would later pay tribute to our interspecies friendship in one of my first extended animations, Story Time, but for the moment I certainly appreciated the company.
Living in New York wasn’t exactly lonely, but it did teach you how to be on your own. I was doing a lot of communicating at my desk and in the office, but the only way to speak to anyone back home was to send a letter to my parents or friends and fix a precise time for them to call the public phonebox outside the apartment. Then I’d be there to pick up the receiver at the appointed hour, the operator would ask if I was willing to accept a collect call, I would generously say ‘Yes’, and the company running the box would inadvertently pick up the tab. It was a black day for American students when the telephone companies got wise to that little scam.
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