Reading for My Life

by John Leonard

  Well then, rock. Ed passed on Elvis the first time around in 1955, at a loose-change price of five thousand dollars. In July 1956, however, a terrible thing happened to him on his way to the Trendex ratings. Elvis appeared on Steve Allen’s brand-new Sunday show directly opposite Ed. The Monday news was Ed, 14.8; Elvis, 20.2. To reporters calling for his reaction Ed said, “I don’t think Elvis Presley is fit for family viewing.” But that afternoon he was on the phone to Tom Parker, striking a fifty-thousand-dollar deal for three spots. And, contrary to what you think you remember, when Elvis showed up for the first of these, in September, we saw all of him. Having been burned in effigy in St. Louis, hanged in effigy in Nashville, and banned, at least his lower body parts, in the state of Florida, the full-frontal Elvis didn’t seem so awfully shocking. It was the second Elvis appearance that got shot from the waist up only, because producer Lewis had heard a rumor that a playful Elvis had taken to hanging a soda-pop bottle in the crotch of his trousers. Ed actually decided to like Elvis after a press conference in which a reporter asked if he were embarrassed when “silly little girls” kissed his white Cadillac. The King replied: “Well, ma’am, if it hadn’t been for what you call those silly little girls I wouldn’t have that white Cadillac.” Like Trendex, this was something Ed could appreciate.

  But did any of us appreciate what else was going on? With an Elvis, Ed not only opened the gates to the ravening chimeras and barbaric hordes of rock; he had also unlocked the doors to the attic, the bedroom, and basement of the Ike culture. After a long sedation, all that sexual energy seemed to explode. It may have been acceptable to cross-pollinate the races and classes in Times Square. It was something else again when long-haired, poor white Southern trash insinuated a rockabilly/hubcap-outlaw variant of R&B and “dirty dancing” into the ears, hearts, and glands of the Wonderbread children of a bored and horny suburban middle class. What Elvis meant, along with Kerouac, Ginsberg, and the motormouth Beats, was that the sixties were coming, an animal act that rattled everybody’s cage and couldn’t be contained on any consensus television program that doled out equal time to competing but acceptable subcultures in a median range of American taste. Some chairs were going to be broken, some categories, some heads, and some hearts.

  By the time rock got to Sullivan, the world was changing and so was television, and not, so far as he could see, exactly for the better. He loved Motown, especially the Supremes, in whom he seems to have found a dreamy mix of gospel and Tin Pan Alley. Rock, he merely put up with, because Bob Precht insisted: Even the Dave Clark Five (fifteen appearances) was no threat to Pearl Bailey (twenty-three), Theresa Brewer (twenty-seven) or, impossibly, Roberta Peters (forty). As for the Beatles, they were cute kids, if only they’d left their deranged teenyboppers back in Liverpool. The story goes that late in 1963 Ed and Sylvia, wandering through Heathrow Airport, ran into forty thousand screaming nym-phets. What was up? “Beatles,” an airline employee said. Ed: “Well, can’t you get some spray?” But as the New York Times once explained, “whatever Lolita wants, Sullivan gets.” That Christmas he agreed with Brian Epstein on three shows at four thousand dollars each. The rest was more compelling as pop history than as network television. In oddly Edwardian suits, with freshly laundered moptops, on their very best behavior, the Beatles were looked at by 74 million Americans in a single squat. What frightened Ed were the shrieking groupies—including, in his own studio, the daughters of Leonard Bernstein and Jack Paar. After the Beatles, he refused to let anybody into the theater under age eighteen without a parent or a guardian. Which didn’t keep fans of the Stones from pushing Mick Jagger through a plate glass window in 1967, or the Doors from misbehaving after they had promised not to. (Told they’d never appear again on the show, Jim Morrison said: “Hey, man, we just worked the Sullivan show. Once a philosopher, twice a pervert.”) And the worst sign of an approaching apocalypse was when Herman’s Hermits came to town. A high-school student hung around backstage with a borrowed press pass, and then left by the stage door, where he was mistaken for a Hermit. The mob tore at his clothes. Fighting free into street traffic, he was killed by a passing car. To have died for Herman’s Hermits—What was wrong with these people?

  What was wrong was that his audience, in the studio and at home, had gone to civil war. Parents and their children not only watched different TV programs on different sets in different rooms of a house divided, but these children seemed to live on different planets with alternative gravities, under bloody moons like Selma and Saigon. Pop music was no longer edifying, and not even harmless. For every Woodstock, there seemed, alas, an Altamont. Children of Ed Sullivan, flower-smoking media Apaches like Abbie Hoffman (a revolutionary Dennis the Menace who said that he’d prefer to overthrow the U.S. government by means of bubble gum, “but I’m beginning to have my doubts”) and Jerry Rubin (the poisoned Twinkie who announced, “Sirhan Sirhan is a Yippie!”) took over campuses and parks, the Stock Exchange, and evening news. No wonder Ed looked tired, even sullen, toward the end: Where was the coherence?

  Elvis, the Beatles, and the Doors signified the confusion to come of politics and culture. The juvenile delinquents had their own tribal music, and it wasn’t “Sentimental Journey.” Rock was political—and hair, and sex; even whales. This confusion perceived itself to be in a profound opposition to a tone-deaf, anal-retentive, body-bag establishment. To a child of the sixties, Ed’s last decade, they had the guns and we had the guitars. If the seventies belonged so depressingly to disco, just waiting for the eighties were metalheads and punks, shape changers and androgy-nous shamans who would scrawl graffiti and sometimes swastikas all over the walls of the malls. Rap and hip-hop would tell us things about the mythical America that Tin Pan Alley had done its best to cover up. By the end of the eighties, no less than Harvard University would publish a book on the Sex Pistols. We each listen now to our own musics, on wavelengths designer-coded for age, color, class, sex, and sneer, through Sony Walkman headsets, on skateboards, Rollerblades, and Harleys—when we aren’t tuned in to hate radio. Do we miss Ed and his consensus? Sure we do, like Captain Kangaroo and Ferdinand the Bull and the Great Pumpkin and all the other imaginary friends of our vanished childhood.

  Ed was a democrat and a fan. From Harlem, Port Chester, and Broadway; from the ballpark, the saloon, and the tabloid, all he cared about was talent, no matter what it looked like, where it came from, or how he pronounced it. Forget the feuds with Arthur Godfrey, Frank Sinatra, Jack Paar, Steve Allen, even Walter Winchell. What we saw on his screen was an encompassing, the peculiar sanction of the democratic culture. By being better at what they did than everyone else who did it, however odd or exotic, anyone could achieve his show, but nobody inherited the right. Ed’s emblematic role was to confirm, validate, and legitimize singularity, for so long as the culture knew what it wanted and valued, and as long as its taste was coherent.

  During the Cold War, he was absolutely typical. When the blacklist hit the entertainment industry, he was as craven as the times and as his own network. (At CBS, the Ed Murrows were few and far between. They fired Joseph Papp as a stage manager because he refused to talk about his friends to a congressional committee.) Attacked in 1950 by Hearst columnist Cholly Knickerbocker for booking dancer Paul Draper and harmonica player Larry Adler, both of whom had been accused of unspecified “pro-Communist sympathies,” Ed, through his sponsor’s ad agency, apologized to the public: “You know how bitterly opposed I am to Communism, and all it stands for…. If anybody has taken offense, it is the last thing I wanted or anticipated, and I am sorry.” Draper and Adler had to leave the country to find work. When conductor Arthur Leif refused to tell the House Committee on Un-American Activities whether he had ever been a member of the Party, Ed dismissed him from the orchestra pit right before a performance of, ironically, the Moiseyev Dance Troupe, fresh from Moscow. Again in 1961, folksinger Leon Bibb was dropped from the show when he wouldn’t apologize for his political past to American Legion Post No. 60 in Huntington, New
York. Bibb, too, had to leave the country. Sean O’Casey was dumped from a St. Patrick’s Day tribute in 1960, for left-wing anticlericalism. Bob Dylan dumped himself, in 1963, when he wasn’t permitted to sing “The Talking John Birch Society Blues.” Throughout a disgraceful blacklist period, Ed submitted performers’ names for vetting to the crackpot Theodore Kirkpatrick, editor of Counterattack and author of Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television, a report slandering half of the entertainment industry, from Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copeland to John Garfield, Uta Hagen, Lena Horne, Burl Ives, Zero Mostel, Dorothy Parker, Howard K. Smith, and Orson Welles.

  But then there was the other American obsession: race. At Harry Belafonte, Ed drew a line against the blacklist. From his earliest newspaper days Ed had been a brother. In his column he attacked New York University for agreeing to keep its one black basketball player on the bench in a game against the University of Georgia. When his friend Bojangles Robinson died, he paid anonymously for a funeral at the Abyssinian Baptist Church and organized a parade afterward to the Evergreens Cemetery in Brooklyn with an all-star cast of foot soldiers that included Berle, Merman, Durante, Danny Kaye, and W. C. Handy. When Walter Winchell savaged Josephine Baker, who had been refused service at his favorite Stork Club watering hole, Ed declared a war on the Mirror columnist that wouldn’t end till a memorable night in 1952 at that same club, when Ed hustled Winchell into the men’s room, pushed his head down a urinal, and flushed him—as if to signify and celebrate the triumph of TV over Hearst. And, obliging though he had always been to his sponsor, Ed was contemptuous of those Ford dealers in the South who objected to his hugging of Ella Fitzgerald on camera, his kissing of Diana Ross and Pearl Bailey. With Louis Armstrong, he’d go anywhere in the world: Guantanamo, Spoleto. From Duke Ellington to Ethel Waters there wasn’t an important black artist who didn’t appear on Ed’s show, just like famous white folks.

  But as television expanded—let a hundred channels bloom!—the culture fell apart. It was as if the magic once so concentrated in a handful of choices had managed somehow to dissipate itself, like an expanding universe after the Big Bang, into chaos, heat death, and fractals. By the end of the sixties there were twenty variety shows on TV, and that wasn’t counting the bloody circus of Chicago 1968, the porn movies from Vietnam and Götterdämmerung in Watts. Instead of Irving Berlin, Joan Baez; instead of Broadway, Newark. None of this was Ed’s fault. For more than two decades he had not only kept the faith but he had every week renewed it, telling us what was funny, who was important, and how we were supposed to feel about the world he monitored on our behalf. But that world had detonated, concussing even our own homes, where we went in separate furious sects to separate electric altars, alien dreamscapes, and bloody creepshows.

  Where’s the coherence, much less the consensus, when the people who watch The X-Files on Fox and the people who watch ice hockey on Sports Channel and the people who watch the News Hour on PBS don’t even speak to the people who watch Guns N’ Roses on MTV? Of the nation’s 95.4 million TV households, 70 percent have more than one set and 11 percent have four or more. Who needs Ed when we can become famous for nothing more compelling than having already been on television? How amazing that such a show ever existed at all: such innocent bonds, such agreeable community, so much Broadway, Tin Pan Alley, and Port Chester. Can you imagine a prime-time variety hour like Ed’s trying to make the nation feel more like a family, seeking some gentle like-mindedness in, say, fin-de-siècle Vienna, the world capital of dessert and alienation? Freud! Herzl! Schnitzler! In our studio audience, take a bow: Ludwig Wittgenstein! Instead of June Taylor Dancers, Gustav Klimt’s witchy women, combing their Secessionist nerve-strings, whipping us with their hair. After too many Strauss waltzes, twelve-tone music. After too much operetta, psychoanalysis. After an overmuch of puffy pastry, blood in the Sacher torte. History mit Schlag! Or, more daunting yet—a Toast of the Town for the Weimar Republic with Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya singing Hindemith golden oldies, Thomas Mann in a bully pulpit, and Rosa Luxemburg battered to death with a revolver butt on her way to prison, dumped in a canal. Behold the poet-dompteur: Wearing his signature steel-rimmed spectacles and his cute little leather cap, direct from the Black Forest where he ate Rilke like a mushroom—Bertolt Brecht. Let’s hear it for the Reichstag fire! Not to mention Adolf and his laughing gas.

  Ed had Liza Minnelli on his show—he even had her mother!—and held out as Joel Grey for twenty-three years, but life stopped being a cabaret.

  Sometimes late at night, in the rinse cycle of sitcom reruns, cross-torching evangelicals, holistic chiropodists, yak-show yogis, and gay-porn cable, surfing the infomercials with burning leaves in my food-hole, I think there must be millions like me out there, all of us remote as our controls, trying to bring back Ed, as if by switching channels fast enough in a pre-Oedipal blur, we hope to reenact some Neolithic origin myth and from the death of this primeval giant, our father and our Fisher King, water with blood a bountiful harvest and civility.

  Dear Bill (on the Occasion of His Inauguration)

  MOLLY IVINS TELLS me that you actually listen. So I’m suggesting some people who need to be heard. And I’m not going to bother you with my own interest group, the “delirious professions.” I went down to Washington, D.C., for a meeting of the National Council on the Arts, shortly after your election, and they could hardly wait. No more rifling of filing cabinets and knocking over desks truffling for lesbians. A vigorous nation invests in the arts not because it’s cost-efficient (a sort of seeding for a gross national product of mystery and magic), but because that’s how we dream our Republic. These difficult people constitiute an antimarket. Their business, instead of selling short, is to surprise us. If we could imagine what they will do next, we wouldn’t need them, and we do, not only for pleasure and beauty, or to bind up our psychic wounds, but to bear witness and discover scruple and imagine the Other—all those archeologies of the unspoken and enciphered. And they are also stormbirds, early-warning systems on the seismic fault lines of the Multiculture, before the cognitive dissonance and the underground tremors convulse us.

  But artists are noisy. You’ll hear them whether you want to or not. I’d like you to listen to the dispossessed. The world is full of them—Haitians, Palestinians, Muslims in Bosnia, Turks in reunited Germany, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi in obdurate Myanmar, old dry bones of high-school principals cannibalized by Red Guards in the Guangxi province of China, everybody on the Indian subcontinent, and, especially, Salman Rushdie, a Flying Dutchman astronaut of all our fevers—but we know you’ve got the Justice Department to fix up first off, and then health care, and after that (who knows?) maybe campaign financing so that the greedhead lobbyists won’t disembowel every other program you propose. So I’ll stick here to the domestic dispossessed, even though, now that you’ve finished One Hundred Years of Solitude, it’s time to read The Satanic Verses.

  I suppose I don’t have to remind you to listen to the women, not with Hillary around. Nor to the children, not with Marian Wright Edelman standing right next to Hillary. But you ought to be listening to the inner cities, at which you blew smoke from your saxophone after the Day of the Locust in Los Angeles. And what you will hear from those inner cities is not a demand for enterprise zones. Enterprise zones! More tax breaks and zoning variances for a handful of fast-buck businessmen to build something ugly on cinder blocks, surround it with barbed wire, bring in a few managers from outside the neighborhood for the high-paying jobs, hire a couple of hundred locals at minimum wage (nonunion, of course; no health plan), and so compete, on a Third World level, with the sweatshops of Santo Domingo and Singapore.

  The median household net worth for Anglos in Los Angeles in 1991 was $31,904; for non-Anglos, the median household net worth was $1,353. Imagine that. In the last decade, a million immigrants have crammed into older black Chicano slum housing, without the ghost of a social policy to accommodate them, with federal housing asssistance slashed 70
percent since 1981, without a single new public housing unit since the 1950s. In black Los Angeles, unemployment has risen by nearly 50 percent since the early 1970s, in a city that spends nothing on social programs for the poor.

  Nobody at your economic summit on C-SPAN seemed to have read Michael Katz’s The Undeserving Poor, and so nobody mentioned that only 0.8 percent of our gross national product is spent on welfare, mostly for Social Security. That, since 1972, Aid to Families with Dependent Children has declined 20 percent. That most poor people, 69 percent, are white, though almost half of all black children live in families with incomes below the poverty line. That, between 1970 and 1980, the birth rate of unmarried black women dropped 13 percent, while the birth rate of unmarried white women increased 27 percent.

  Barbara Ehrenreich has pointed out that the number of rich white men who have never married is almost exactly the same as the number of poor black single mothers: “In the absence of all the old-fashioned ways of redistributing wealth—progressive taxation, job programs, adequate welfare, social services, and other pernicious manifestations of pre-Reaganite ‘big government’—the rich will just have to marry the poor.”

  Listen to the homeless. They’re invisible again, but you can hear them if you really want to: at least a million out there; as many as 3 million homeless off and on; as many as 7 million at “extreme risk.” Although most are single men, many of them Vietnam vets, single women are increasing, and about a third of the homeless are families with children. This is the way we’ve dealt with the problem in New York City: Grand Central Station has reduced its public seating to six benches. The Port Authority Bus Terminal refuses entry to anybody, after 1:00 A.M., without a bus ticket. The transit cops have cracked down on anyone trying to beg, sleep, or sing in the subways. In the parks, we burn them alive.