The Glass Teat

by Harlan Ellison

  I had an uncle who fought in WWII. He was attached to an English commando unit in Europe. One time when he was sick with a fever, years later, I was tending him, and he thought he was going to die, and he told me the worst thing he’d ever done. It was bitter cold, one winter during the war, and his unit came crawling through the night, and they found a German battalion bivouacked in a forest. It was so numbing cold, the men had doubled up together, sleeping hugging each other in sleeping bags to keep from freezing to death. My uncle, and his unit, crawled in, moved among them, and carefully cut the throats of one man per sleeping bag. Not both of them…only one. To leave all those poor fuckers to wake up the next morning hugging corpses with an extra mouth. It was a terrible thing; my uncle couldn’t live with it; it killed him, butchered his soul.

  That’s how deep the hate runs, CBS. Keep fucking around.

  Look, CBS, I’m talking to you like a Dutch Uncle. You see, what’s happening is that we’re building a psychopathic society. Everybody lies, everybody sells out, everybody stinks of hate. We’re all being driven mad as mudflys, CBS. The hatreds are running deep, core-deep. How much longer do you think we can tolerate our guardians of the public trust, dudes like you, who corrupt and bastardize that trust? How much longer can we be expected to see you contributing to the creation of that mad world, without taking the lynch rope in our hands? The rope, or the razor. Mme. Defarge lives in all of us, CBS, and you’re summoning her forth. By your corrupt acts we see that only corruption pays off. By your dishonesty we see that only dishonesty—or the razor—offer hope of cessation to this madness, one way or the other.

  I’m sorry I yelled at you, CBS. No…no, I’m not; not really. Perhaps I should have spoken softly, to win your mind, to convince you of the sincerity and immediacy of what the people are saying. Perhaps this time I should have spoken softly; I’m sorry. But tell me, CBS, at what point do all the soft voices stop and you begin to hear the terrible snick-snick of Mme. Defarge’s needles?

  Now, if the typesetter left a two-line space between that last line and this one, indicating I want to change the subject, we can go on to what I hope (if I live long enough) will be an annual feature of this snake pit:

  ELLISON’S MINUTE CAPSULE REVIEWS OF NEW SHOWS!!!

  The Bill Cosby Show: Missed it the first week, but caught it last Sunday. Seemed awfully situation-comedy to me, but funny. Cosby learned well from Culp, and brought the best of his standup stuff with him. I’m sorta disappointed to see it played so White (Cosby might as easily be Jim Nabors for all the difference in tone), with all that great specialized background Cosby has, but I’m willing to wait a few weeks and see if Cos can’t work in a tot more soul.

  The Bold Ones: The New Doctors on Sunday the 14th didn’t show me much: John Saxon could have phoned in his part, E.G. Marshall wasn’t onscreen enough to get his teeth into it, David Hartman tried his best but he lacks a certain charisma, and for the better part of the hour all we had to contend with was Pat Hingle doing something that resembled, in thespic terms, an AmerIndian rain dance. The script was a slightly slicker version of Ben Casey or The Doctors and, in all, it seemed as though I was watching tv 1963 again. On the 20th, NBC fired the second stage of their rocket with The New Lawyers and things perked up. James Farentino and Joe Campanella (aided as minimally as possible by Burl Ives) did their turn in a script that started out to say something important about the disregard of some police for the constitutional rights of those they arrest…and went rapidly downhill into banality and cop-out à la Universal Studios’ determined effort never to produce an honest drama. Steve Ihnat played well, as usual, and that, coupled with the verve of Campanella and Farentino, gave me some hope that perhaps this tripartite series might not be a total dud. Actually, I’m waiting to see Leslie Nielsen and Hari Rhodes in the law enforcement third of the project. Hari is a friend, see, and he knows I’ll expect him to start pushing for some heavy scripts. Because if he doesn’t, he knows he’ll get the same shit from me that I get from him every time they run The Oscar.

  My World—And Welcome To It: Don’t miss it. A nice piece of work with William Windom playing James Thurber. Animation, shtick, good acting, genuine comedy, a real addition to the scrawny roster of worthwhile viewing. If only they’d scrap that bloody laugh track!

  The Debbie Reynolds Show: As many points as I have to give Miss Reynolds for quitting the show when NBC crossed her and ran a cancerstick ad, I cannot tell a lie. I managed to watch that awful first show for four minutes and twenty seconds (by my Accutron) before I fled shrieking. One can only wonder if Miss Reynolds caught the show herself. One remembers the Tammy Grimes Graf Zeppelin of some years ago. It was too bad Tammy didn’t hate cigarettes.

  The Courtship of Eddie’s Father: is also fine. Producer Jimmy Komack, despite his stated reluctance to even take a visible part in the proceedings (many months ago), steals any part of the show in which he appears. What he doesn’t grab, this kid, Eddie, played by Brandon Cruz, manages to cop. And so my award for bravest man in the world goes to Bill Bixby, who plays the “lead.” Any man who’ll toss himself onto a screen with leggy, foxy chicks, a tiny Japanese lady, Jimmy Komack and a kid actor, has got to be the most secure, bravest actor in town.

  Bracken’s World: Oh, this one, friends, I gotta do an entire column on. Suffice it to say that a man who wrote a movie as shitty as The Oscar is the only one in a position to comment on Bracken’s World. I know it’s going to be tough sitting through it, gang, but I recommend that you not miss it. It has the evil fascination of rotting orchids. And smells about the same. More of this cesspool at a later date. I’m going to let them expose their running sores and pustules a while longer before I lance them proper.

  Yeah, just as I thought. No room to tell you how good and groovy Woody Allen was, or how uptight The Battered Child put me, or even about the ABC News Special on Ethics In Government, which was really chilling. But I’ll be here again next week, so maybe we can rap about them then.

  Oh…yeah…I almost forgot. For those of you who might have caught your charismatic commentator on John Barbour’s Sunday night show (KTTV, Channel 11) last week, who called to tell me they wished Mr. Barbour had spent more time with me and talked about something more important than Western movies, rest easily. Mr. Barbour and his producer have indicated they want me to return shortly, and I will take such an opportunity to say onscreen a few of the things I’ve been saying on your behalf in these columns.

  One never knows. I might attract a following, become a “tv personality,” talk about revolution and getting it all together…and get shot in the head by a True American.

  Stay tuned. History may swallow all of us as we hone our razors.

  Is that the snick of needles I hear?

  41: 3 OCTOBER 69

  This is a special week for me. It’s the first anniversary of this column. The 42nd installment. [Through a fluke of rearrangement to maintain continuity, it is the 41st column in this book; but it was the 42nd I wrote. —HE] And what grinds me most is that it isn’t the 52nd. I missed ten weeks worth of columns; eight times my fault, twice the Freep’s. In this year, since Art Kunkin collared me at that party and said write something for us, a great many things have gone down. For me, for you, for television, for the country, and for the world.

  We’re on the moon now, but we’re still in Viet Nam. Julian Bond got elected, but so did Nixon. Kurt Vonnegut had a best-seller, but so did Jacqueline Susann. 60 Minutes and First Tuesday got some things said, but we lost the Smothers Brothers. Che! turned out a dud, but Easy Rider came out of nowhere. Reddin left the law, but we got him on the tiny screen. There were plenty of protests, but very few riots.

  Don’t ask me if things got better this last year, because I don’t think so. I went down to the Valley, to a high school, to talk to some kids about…stuff, you know…what seems to be happening…trying to understand, and like that…and while I was inside the school, some other kids busted my car and swiped my tapes. What do you sa
y? How pissed-off you get, how upset, how ironic? Very little of it makes any sense. The nits behind Operation Intercept actually think they’re going to kill off marijuana, when everybody with a grain of sense knows all they’re doing is setting up a Prohibition scene so grass becomes big enough business for the Cosa Nostra to add it to its roster of enterprises. How do you break through their fifty years of conditioning? How do you get them to tell a little truth, cop to the fact that everybody’s turning on, that maybe it’s not devil-weed, but only as good or bad as booze? The military spend our money, kill our friends, fuck up our country, and all in the name of keeping us safe from the wrong bogey man. We’ve gone so far into the bag of killing trust and honesty among one another that we’re like Cro-Magnons again. We have to approach one another with our hands outstretched, palms up. We have to show we’re weaponless. And still it doesn’t help. Why do we continue to hurt one another? Why do we persist in lying? And why do we stand by and let other men poison our world?

  So don’t ask me if the year has totaled out at profit or loss. I don’t know. The only thing I know is that I’ll be here this year, too, and I’ll keep trying to make some sense out of it. Entertainment is only part of what I’m into here, and I have to thank those of you who loved or hated what I did last year sufficiently to comment on it. And I ask this of you: keep me honest. Copping out gets easier and easier, the higher the stakes get.

  Now let’s get to work this week.

  ELLISON’S CAPSULE REVIEWS OF NEW SHOWS!!! (Part 2).

  To Rome with Love: returns John Forsythe to the ranks of situation comedy half-hours. He’s not a bachelor father in this incarnation, he’s a widowed father, with three little girls, one of whom, played by Joyce Menges, is the nicest-looking chick to come on the tube since Anjanette Comer made it. But even Miss Menges’ sensual face isn’t enough to save this paucive little half hour from falling down the saccharine tube. There are so many poignant moments of Forsythe and his kids looking woebegone because “Mommy” is dead, one begins to suspect she croaked from familial diabetes. If this series were to fold tonight, it would have passed with no one’s having known it was there.

  The Bold Ones: The third section of Universal’s acromegalic rotating-series (doctors, lawyers and police) was aired last Sunday, with Leslie Nielsen as a Deputy Police Chief and Hari Rhodes as the DA. Jesus, did it stink! The script had three names on it, and in case you need a rule of thumb, gentle readers, for knowing when a script is going to stink on ice, use that. More than two names (and usually only one) means it was hashed and re-hashed by every sticky-finger on the lot, and what you’ll be getting is watered-down nothing. Instant vacuum.

  The female lead was a lady named Lorraine Gary, whose marital relation to Universal’s top attorney causes pause to wonder on what grounds she was tapped for the part, because she recited every sententious line of that gawdawful script in Capital Letters As Though They Should Have Been Carved On Mt. Rushmore. But she was only the foremost of many downers that show sported. Hari Rhodes was awkward, overacted and generally a talent wasted. Not to be undone, Nielsen, who is as competent and professional a stock artist as Universal has kicking around out there, leaned into his role with such affectated ferociousness that one expected him to have a coronary at any moment. The plot was straight out of 1939 Black Mask magazines, and I swear the shades of Hammett and Woolrich and Chandler must have been thrashing in their graves. I understand that this section, originally slated for eight productions, even as the Doctors and Lawyers were slated for eight, has been cut back to six. It’s amazing how the Universal thugs will never cop to their own inadequacies, but cut off the field troops as if it was their fault the ambush failed.

  Music Scene: is my pick as the best of the new. The tone and tempo of the potpourri is strongly reminiscent of Barry Shear’s well-remembered The Lively Ones of some years ago. By pre-taping all sorts of people doing all sorts of pop numbers, and then selecting from the backlog as one or another talent hits the charts, Music Scene can roll with the on-the-moment top dogs, and provide a running compendium of the best in current music. There are six bright and funny young people—notable among them is David Steinberg, who grows more infectious with each appearance on tv—who fill the interstices between numbers with SmoBro-like one-liners and shticks that are so hip they must go over the heads of the septuagenarians in the Great American Heartland. The sets and innovative thinking used to showcase the groups and individuals are superlative. Three Dog Night did Easy To Be Hard against a background of wrecked automobiles, and the eerie feeling it produced made that song (one I’m not especially fond of) seem, for the first time, meaningful. James Brown did a turn that was also incredibly effective and even the taped mélange of John and Yoko (who has got to be the ugliest chick in the civilized world) moved at a Pong-y pace. The show is intelligent, lively, colorful, something meaty on which to chew. And it is a beautiful lead-in for young viewers to:

  The New People: which got off on the right foot behind some bravura acting by Richard Kiley as the only adult left (temporarily) alive on a downed airliner full of young people. The show employed the very best tenets of dramatic writing to say what it had to say about Our Times while not sacrificing action. That it slipped, momentarily, into Preachment can be chalked up to Rod Serling’s script, and it’s a bad habit Mr. Serling has not yet learned to control. But one we can tolerate when he manages to perform his craft so well in all other particulars. This is a series to watch. It is potentially solid gold.

  I missed The Brady Bunch, the Durante/Lennon Sisters Hour, Bronson again, Room 222 and a few others, but I’ll be falling in on them this week, so look for them next time.

  I did manage to see a few minutes of the Bob Hope special, which was glutted with more unfunny comedians than the world has witnessed since Quantrell was working. It only served to convince me more strongly that any number of Grand Old Men (some of whom are younger than me) ought to be confined to Vegas or Friars dinners.

  Understand Debbie is back with her show, and inside information has it that her leaving the program because they ran a cigarette ad was strictly a hype. It seems they cut her salary somewhere during the summer, and she just walked to get them to up her again. Be interesting to see what would happen if they Viceroy’d her again, at the new rate.

  42: 10 OCTOBER 69

  So early in the new season, and already we have a name for it. Each year’s heaviest tone has been discernible in the most prominent product. The year of the hardcase cowpokes, the year of the doctors who struggle for humanity, the year of the witless situation comedies…last year was the year of the widows, white and black.

  And this year is the Time of the Plastic People.

  A parade of silly, coiffed and cuffed templates; a smoothly performed pavane of slick, empty clichés; a ghastly rigadoon of obstinately endless phoniness so corrupt it climbs to a new video pinnacle.

  Purple is as purple does.

  The punishment fits the crime.

  Purple plastic people push me to puce and paucive pejoratives. They also make me puke.

  But that’s another vessel of vomit.

  (You’ll pardon me. Occasionally the Writer takes over from the Critic and the sound of me own silver words gets a tot too much. It usually happens in columns wherein I am discussing the craft of writing. Which is what this is.) (On second thought, make that The Craft Of Writing. If I’m going to be pretentious, I might as well go all the way.)

  Anyhow, the problem is…

  (Hold it. Make that THE CRAFT OF WRITING, I’m feeling festooned with power. It means I’ll probably get actively abusive.)

  The problem is Bracken’s World and Harold Robbins’ “The Survivors” as an emerging species. Bracken’s World is still festering, as I indicated two weeks ago, and I’m summoning up firepower. Gonna let’m run for another coupla weeks so all you folks can dig’m in their full flower. Then, when I flit them, you can’t say I didn’t give them a chance to mend their ways, even if it did mean
scrapping the series and putting all those nice young kids back on unemployment.

  In any case, the evil that Bracken’s World manifests is also redolently obvious on ABC’s The Survivors, a multi-million dollar gawdawful cobbled-up by the Albert Payson Terhune of the Garbage Novel, Harold Robbins. Since the one rivals the other for greasiness, I’ll deal here with Robbins, with ABC, with The Survivors and with the taste of the American Scuttlefish. Those who survive may consider they’ve won a merit badge.

  Mr. Robbins, one of the more artful dodgers of our time, pulled a little fast ramadoola on Elton Rule and the ABC brain dancers, and using the same technique he employed to hustle Trident Press into an enormous contract for The Adventurers on the basis of only a title, he augered his little pixie way into their exchequer with the title The Survivors.

  There’s no point going into the horrors and hectics that pursued this abomination on its pestiferous path from Robbins’ skull to the tiny screen…the loss of one producer after another (until they settled on Walter Doniger, the whizzer who gave us Peyton Place)…the internecine warfare between the “stars”…the rewrites of the rewrites of the rewritten scripts…the money flushed down the gilded toilet…no point. Let’s just dwell on the finished product that debuted on Monday night, September the 29th.