Reading for My Life

by John Leonard

  Talk about spooky. It shudders the penetralia of caves. Whatever else he’s done or failed to do in Harlot’s Ghost, Mailer—our very own Knight-Errant, Don Quixote, Tripmaster Monkey, Zapata, and Scaramouche—has at last made the personal political. Which leads one to wonder whether, all this time, he really wanted to play ball with Arthur Miller and Joe DiMaggio.

  Ed Sullivan Died for Our Sins

  All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned….

  —Karl Marx

  EACH WEEK SINCE October 1988, I’ve delivered myself of a five-minute “media criticism,” a sort of sermonette, on CBS Sunday Morning. A dozen times in those eight years a stranger has stopped me on the street, at a movie, or waiting in line for a glimpse of Matisse to ask: “Do you write your own stuff?” To which I have learned to reply, passively-aggressively, “Well, they didn’t hire me for my looks.” But at least it’s a human question. More often and more mystifying is the suspicious stare, the abrupt nod, the pointed finger, and the accusation: “I saw you on television.” After which, nothing. Not “I liked what you said,” or “You’re full of crap,” or “How much do they pay you?” Just “I…saw you.” And then the usual New York vanishing act, like Shane. This used to bother me a lot, as if the medium lacked substance, or I did, or the spectral street, maybe even Matisse. Lately, though, I’ve begun to wonder whether what such strangers really seek on the surprising street is assurance. The problem is epistemological. They saw me on television. I am real. Television might also be. After almost half a century of looking at the ghosts in our machines, we are agnostics about reality itself.

  Never mind docudramas, re-creations, staged news, creative editing, trick photography, computer enhancements, or commercials that sell us cars by promising adventure and sell us beer by promising friendship. Our dubiety about television probably started with the quiz show scandals in 1959. Oh how they wept, like Little Mermaids. That’s one of the things I remember most about television in the fifties. Nixon cried in his Checkers speech. Jack Paar cried about his daughter. And Charles Van Doren cried because he’d been caught. So did Dave Garroway cry on the Today show because he was upset about Van Doren, the English instructor-son of a famous poet-professor, who’d parlayed his 21 winnings into a job as a “guest host” on Garroway’s very own program. And because Dave was upset, so was his chimp, J. Fred Muggs. Who says men don’t have feelings? “A terrible thing to do to the American public,” cried Dwight D. Eisenhower on finding out that Van Doren, Patty Duke, Dr. Joyce Brothers, and even Major John Glenn, before he ascended into space and the Senate, had all been fakes. This was some months before Ike lied to us himself about those U-2 overflights. Nor had Ike been exactly aboveaboard about the CIA in Guatemala and Iran. But big government and big business have always been more creative than big TV, e.g., Watergate, Abscam, Chappaquiddick, Iranamok, BCCI, S&L, Whitewater, and the Gulf of Tonkin. As Reagan apparatchik Elliott Abrams once told Congress: “I never said I had no idea about most of the things you said I said I had no idea about.”

  Enough fifties nostalgia. As much as we may have loved Lucy, what we did to our children was Howdy Doody and Captain Video. When John Cameron Swayze died recently, we ought to have been reminded of how bad TV news used to be back when his Camel News Caravan was “hopscotching the world for headlines,” before he went on to pitch Timex (“takes a licking and keeps on ticking”). Even the Golden Age of TV drama was full of home-shopping Ibsens like Paddy Chayevsky and greeting-card Kafkas like Rod Serling, of bargain-basement Italian neorealism and kitchen-sink Sigmund Freud, where everybody explained too much in expository gusts, yet all were simultaneously inarticulate, as if a want of eloquence were a proof of sincerity and an excess of sincerity guaranteed nobility of sentiment, like a bunch of clean old Tolstoy peasants. And how clean were they, really? So clean, you never saw a black face, not even on a railroad porter. So clean, that Chayevsky’s own family in The Catered Affair had to be Irish instead of Jewish, as the butcher in Marty was somehow Italian. So clean that when Serling wanted to tell the story of Emmett Till, a black Chicago teenager lynched for whistling at a Mississippi white woman, U.S. Steel Hour turned it into a pawnbroker’s murder in a Thornton Wilder sort of Our Town. So clean, that the Mars candy-bar company would not allow a single reference on Circus Boy to competitive sweets like cookies or ice cream, and The Alcoa Hour was so solicitous of a good opinion about aluminum it wouldn’t let Reginald Rose set a grim teleplay in a trailer park, and, most famously, the American Gas Company insisted on removing any mention of “gas chambers” from a Playhouse 90 production of Judgment at Nuremberg.

  A better beginning for any discussion of American television’s childhood and prolonged adolescence in the Age of Faith is the original Mr. Ed. They didn’t hire him for his looks.

  From 1948 to 1971, every Sunday night at eight o’clock, a man who couldn’t sing, or dance, or spin a plate entertained fifty million Americans. Never before and never again in the history of the republic would so many gather so loyally, for so long, in the thrall of one man’s taste. As if by magic, we were one big family. And what a lot of magic there was, as well as animals and acrobats, ventriloquists and marching bands, David Ben-Gurion, Brigitte Bardot, and the Singing Nun. All by himself on CBS, hand-picking every act, Ed Sullivan was a one-man cable television system with wrestling, BRAVO and comedy channels, Broadway, Hollywood and C-SPAN, sports and music video. We turned to him once a week in our living rooms for everything we now expect from an entire industry every minute of our semiconscious lives. Such was his Vulcan mind meld with his audience, one thinks of Chairman Mao.

  Tiresome as the Boomers are, celebrating from their electronic nursery the nitwitticisms of Leave It to Beaver, Gilligan’s Island, The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family, and Happy Days, they have intuited a truth about television as a timeline in our secret lives. It’s as if this reservoir of images, consumed since childhood, stored on memory tape, amounts to something like the “pottery clock” of the archeologists, like clam-bed fossils and dinosaur teeth, Irish peat bog and California bristlecones, rings of trees, layers of acid, caps of ice, and the residue of volcanic ash. We carbon-date ourselves. I was ten years old when I first saw Sullivan, in 1949, talking to Jackie Robinson on a tiny flickering screen in my uncle’s Long Beach, California, rumpus room. I was twelve when I realized that he’d be around forever, or at least a lot longer than your average stepfather. We were living then—after the rooms above a bowling alley in Washington, D.C., a ranch in New Mexico, a northern Wisconsin fishing lodge, and a southern California Cubist sort of pillbox through whose portholes blew breezes of orange rind, petroleum, and cow dung—in Queens, New York, behind a tavern, lullabied to sleep each night by Johnny Ray on a jukebox, singing “The Little White Cloud That Cried.” On the portable Zenith my mother really couldn’t afford, except that her latchkey children needed something warm to come home to after PS 69, there was Ed, chatting up Margot Fonteyn before she became a dame. As the following year he’d chat up Audrey Hepburn, before or after, I can’t remember which, he laughed out loud when an Automat ate Jackie Gleason. I was probably too busy to sit still for longer than Crusader Rabbit. I had my socialist newspaper, the Daily Compass, and my toy telescope to look at Sagittarius at night from the apartment house rooftop for signs of Velikovsky’s multiple catastrophisms. At least a mock-heroic Crusader Rabbit made fun of the internal contradictions of the ruling class. Ed on the other hand… how could he have been back there in California and right here in Queens? And around, too, later on with Elvis in 1956, when I was flunking volleyball and puberty rites in high school? As, like the FBI, he’d find me wherever I went, in Cambridge, Berkeley, even Greenwich Village, chatting up Buddy Holly, Ernie Kovacs, Noël Coward, Stevie Wonder, Sonny and Cher, Cassius Clay, Eskimos, and Beatles. Ed was my
first inkling that henceforth all of us everywhere would simultaneously experience everything that is shameful or heroic about our country on one big headset; as if, in a nomadic culture, the TV screen were the windshield of our mobile home, and all America a motor lodge.

  There were only three channels to turn to at the start, duking it out for the most desirable hour of the television week. Ed’s prime-time competition took the high road (Philco Playhouse, and Steve Allen) and the low (Bowling Stars and The Tab Hunter Show). Jimmy Durante, Perry Como, Eddie Cantor, Bob Hope, and Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Sir Francis Drake, Bill Dana, Dragnet, National Velvet, Jamie McPheeters, Broadside, Buckskin, and Wagon Train came and went while Ed stayed put. James Garner in Maverick beat him two years running in the ratings, then collapsed from nervous exhaustion. Back in the days when corporations owned entertainers like trademarks or tropical fish—when Arthur Godfrey belonged to Lipton Tea, Milton Berle to Texaco, Bob Hope to Pepsodent, Dinah Shore to Chevrolet, and Jack Benny to Jell-O; when Kraft, Lux, Revlon, G.E., Westinghouse, Magnavox, Budweiser, Armstrong Circle, and Johnson Wax all had Theaters; Bell Telephone, Twentieth-Century Fox, and U.S. Steel had Hours; Philco, Schlitz, and Prudential had Playhouses, Geritol an Adventure Show Case, DuPont its Show of the Month, Hallmark a Hall of Fame, Twin Toni a Time, Firestone a Voice, and Pabst Blue Ribbon Bouts—Colgate Palmolive spent $50 million on a Comedy Hour to knock Ed out of his Lincoln-Mercury. But he won his time period every week until Colgate bought a slice of him themselves.

  Like Eddie Lopat, the crafty Yankees southpaw, Sullivan seemed to throw nothing but junk, and still they couldn’t hit him. How did he do it, this spinning of the public like a plate?

  They were making up TV as they went along, by accident and some sort of bat sonar, without focus groups, market surveys, “Q” ratings, or Betsy Frank at Saatchi & Saatchi. “A door closing, heard over the air,” wrote E. B. White at television’s dawn, “a face contorted seen in a panel of light, these will emerge as the real and true. And when we bang the door of our own cell or look into another’s face, the impression will be of mere artifice.”

  Imagine at any moment in those prime-time years a six-room suite on the eleventh floor of Manhattan’s Delmonico Hotel, where Ed and his wife, Sylvia, seem to have lived forever, with a Renoir landscape, a small Gauguin, autographed snaps of Cardinal Spellman and Ella Fitzgerald, and an original Disney cartoon in which Ed plays golf with Donald Duck. He gets up at 11:00 A.M.; breakfasts invariably on artificially sweetened pears, iced tea, and a room-service lamb chop; reads the papers and makes hundreds of telephone calls, dialing them himself. He puts on one of his Dunhill suits—numbered like his shirts and ties, so that he can tape a new introduction to an old rerun without looking as though he’d dropped in on his own program for a surprise visit from Kurdistan—and a pair of buckled loafers. (His favorite shoes were a gift from George Hamilton, whose feet he once admired.) He lunches invariably between 3:30 and 4 P.M. at Gino’s on Lexington Avenue on roast chicken from which he detaches and pockets a drumstick, which he’ll nibble later on. (From a childhood bout with scarlet fever and a high-school football injury, he developed permanent sinus trouble: America’s tastemaker can’t smell or savor his own food.) He hasn’t a manager, an agent, a chauffeur for his limo, or even a limo. He likes to talk to cabbies about his show and to Lincoln-Mercury dealers. On his way to the studio, he will carry his own change of clothes on a wire hanger in a garment bag. After a movie screening or a Broadway play, he’ll supper with Sylvia at the Colony, Le Pavillon, or La Grenouille. They order sweet wine, which Ed improves with hoarded packets of Sweet ’N Low. And then they are off to the Yonkers harness races and the frantic nightlife of the clubs.

  We aren’t talking about a Rupert Murdoch, a Michael Eisner, a Ted Turner, a Barry Diller, a John Malone, an Aaron Spelling, or any other morning star pedaling his epicyle in a Ptolemaic universe of hype according to which the very heavens buzz in eccentric orbits around the need of a vacuous public for gas. Ed is a regular guy. Except… he’s made somehow of air.

  Almost from their first date, a heavyweight prizefight, Ed and Sylvia were self-sufficient, a mollusk of a marriage. They never ate in. Nobody cooked. The only domestic help they needed was the hotel maid. Isn’t this odd? Not just the single chop for breakfast, the drumstick in the Dunhill pocket, the Sweet ’N Low for wine, but this peculiar weightlessness, as if the Delmonico were an aquarium: artificial sweetening; artificial light. As in a Hollywood movie or TV action-adventure series or experimental novel, nobody had to wash a dish or make a bed. Till she was twelve their daughter, Betty, never ate with them; she ate at Child’s with a paid companion. Days and nights always had this floating quality, like the dream life of athletes and gangsters, actors and comics, showgirls and sports, hustlers and swells; of songwriters, gag writers, and ragtime piano players; of men who gambled and women who smoked; guys and dolls. Ed and Sylvia were children of the roaring jazz-age twenties, that nervy postwar adrenaline-addicted Charleston state of mind confabulated in New York by admen, poets, and promoters, and then nationally syndicated by Broadway columnists like Damon Runyon, Walter Winchell, Louis Sobol, and Ed himself—men who had gone to newspapers instead of college.

  Newspapers and Broadway: together as Ed came of age, they were inventing twentieth-century American popular culture. Whatever else might go on behind the shades of a Puritan-genteel New England, a Calvinist-Victorian Heartland, a Pentecostal small-town South, or the desert-western wastes—and probably a lot more did go on than anybody guessed, except the expatriate novelists—Broadway was the big time and the hot ticket, where they dreamed for us all those imperial city dreams of license, celebrity, and scandal; of crossing race, class and gender boundaries into the demimonde and the forbidden; a floating operetta; a rilly big shew.

  Or so we were told by the columnists. Because the newspapers moved to Broadway, too, and magazines like Vanity Fair, Smart Set, and The New Yorker. Broadway was invented by Variety, the showbiz daily, and by Runyons and Winchells who covered the theater, nightclubs, and crime waves the way they covered sports. The columnists had all been sportswriters, anyway, before they went to Broadway; they reported the neon night as if it were one big game, in a permanent present tense, with its own peculiar slanguage of ballpark lingo, stage idiom, underworld argot, immigrant English, fanspeak, black-talk, promoter hype, and pastrami sandwich. That’s about all they reported, too. They certainly didn’t report the political corruption and the racism that have always been the big city’s biggest stories, not even the real-estate swindles attending the construction of the IRT subway that brought those crowds to Times Square to begin with. What they wrote, in a Broadway Babel pastiche of “suckers,” “bogus,” “lowdown,” “scoop,” and “who sez?” were press releases for a saloon society of singers like Caruso, fighters like Dempsey, and mobsters like Lansky; a fictitious twenties where the long legs of the chorus girls went on forever and all the gangsters were as cute as Gatsby.

  If not from novels like The Big Money and Ragtime, then surely from biographies like Neal Gabler’s Winchell: Gossip, Power, and the Culture of Celebrity and Jimmy Breslin’s Damon Runyon, or such dazzling social histories as Jackson Lears’s Fables of Abundance (on advertising as the “folklore,” “iconography,” and “symbolic universe” of market exchange) and Ann Douglas’s Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (on the convergence of “formalism” and the hard sell, of “avant-garde innovation and media smarts” to create “an egalitarian popular and mass culture”), we ought by now to suspect that some of this was fantasy: the raffish flipside of Tin Pan Alley songs about Easter bonnets and grand old flags and of Hollywood films about home towns full of nuclear families. While the ad agencies that gave us Aunt Jemima for pancake mix and Rastus for Cream of Wheat may have been entirely WASP, the songs were composed and the movies produced mostly by the children of immigrants, who marketed these American myths as a form of wish-fulfillment—as if the melting pot were
a centrifuge for spinning cotton candy, from which we’d all emerge uniformly pink and squeaky clean. Later, after a twist of the color-adjustment knob to achieve the perfect Aryan fleshtone, TV sitcoms would be pink fables, too. As much as the popular culture craves velocity and sensation, it’s also a state of longing.

  But everybody drank too much and wrote fiction or ad copy (what Jackson Lears, wittily, calls “Capitalist Realism”). In the era of photojournalism and jazz-age novels, Edward Steichen and J. P. Marquand worked for J. Walter Thompson, and F. Scott Fitzgerald for Bannion, Collier. Sherwood Anderson was a copywriter before Winesburg; Dorothy Parker wrote underwear ads for Vogue; Maxfield Parrish painted General Electric calendars and Jell-O ads; Joseph Cornell designed perfume double-spreads for Harper’s Bazaar and House & Garden; Alexander Woollcott plugged Muriel cigars; Georgia O’Keeffe pushed Dole pineapples, and Rockwell Kent, Steinway pianos. (Dr. Seuss and Jim Henson also got their start in advertising. So did Philip Rahv, in southern California, before coming east to coedit the Partisan Review. Allen Ginsberg was in market research correlating supermarket sales of toiletries with the money spent on ads by his toothpaste and baby-powder clients when he wrote “Howl.” For that matter, George Bernard Shaw, Arnold Bennett, and H. G. Wells all flacked for Harrod’s department store, James Joyce sold ad space for a Dublin newspaper—“What is home without Plumtree’s Potted Meat? Incomplete!” recalled Leopold Bloom in Ulysses—and Bertolt Brecht wrote radio jingles for a German car company.) Even reportage of the time verged on the fictitious. From Breslin, we learn that while Damon Runyon’s father, in a wild American West, had reported the truth about that gloryhound, George Custer, his son didn’t report it about such gloryhounds as Pershing in Mexico and Patton in Europe. Runyon’s famous and shameless rules for the journalism of his time were: Never bite the hand that feeds you, and Go along to get along. Pistol-packing Winchell hardly stirred from his reserved table at the Stork Club, except to tool around town in a squad car listening to cop radio. Most of what he needed for the columns that let him bed down with showgirls and ruin the careers of homosexuals got leaked to him by eager publicists or confided to him by that matched pair of sinister buddies, J. Edgar Hoover and Lucky Luciano.