by Gore Vidal
If only Myron could have seen this! Of course he would have been saddened by the signs of decay. The spirit of what used to be has fled. Most dreadful of all, NO FILM is currently being made on the lot; and that means that the twenty-seven huge sound stages which saw the creation of so many miracles: Gable, Garbo, Hepburn (Katharine), Powell, Loy, Garland, Tracy and James Craig are now empty except for a few crews making television commercials.
Yet I must write the absolute truth for I am not Myron Breckinridge but myself and despite the intensely symbiotic relationship my husband and I enjoyed during his brief life and despite the fact that I do entirely support his thesis that the films of 1935 to 1945 inclusive were the high point of Western culture, completing what began that day in the theatre of Dionysos when Aeschylus first spoke to the Athenians, I must confess that I part company with Myron on the subject of TV. Even before Marshall McLuhan, I was drawn to the gray shadows of the cathode tube. In fact, I was sufficiently avant-garde m 1959 to recognize the fact that it was no longer the movies but the television commercial that engaged the passionate attention of the world’s best artists and technicians And now the result of their extraordinary artistry is this new world, like it or not, we are living in: post-Gutenberg and pre-Apocalypse. For almost twenty years the minds of our children have been filled with dreams that will stay with them forever, the way those maddening jingles do (as I write, I have begun softly to whistle “Rinso White,” a theme far more meaningful culturally than all of Stravinsky or even John Cage). I submitted a piece on this subject to the Partisan Review in the summer of 1960. I believe, without false modesty, that I proved conclusively that the relationship between consumer and advertiser is the last demonstration of necessary love in the ‘West, and its principal form of expression is the television commercial. I never heard from PR but I kept a carbon of the piece and will incorporate it into the book on Parker Tyler, perhaps as an appendix.
For almost an hour I watched a television commercial being made on the same stage where Bette Davis acted in The Catered Affair—that predictably unhappy result of the movies attempting to take over the television drama when what they should have taken over was the spirit of the commercials. Then I was given lunch in the commissary which is much changed since the great days when people in extraordinary costumes wandered about, creating the impression that one was inside a time machine gone berserk. Now television executives and technicians occupy all the tables and order what used to be Louis B. Mayer Chicken Soup only the name of Mayer has been, my guide told me, stricken from the menu. So much for greatness! Even more poignant as reminders of human transiency are the empty offices on the second floor of the Thalberg Building. I was particularly upset to see that the adjoining suites of Pandro S. Berman and the late Sam Zimbalist were both vacant. Zimbalist (immortal because of Boom Town) died in Rome while producing Ben Hur which saved the studio’s bacon, and Pandro S. Berman (Dragon Seed, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Seventh Cross) has gone into what the local trade papers refer to as “indie production.” How tragic! MGM without Pandro S. Berman is like the American flag without its stars.
No doubt about it, an era has indeed ended and I am its chronicler. Farewell the classic films, hail the television commercial! Yet nothing human that is great can entirely end. It is merely transmuted—in the way that the wharf where Jeanette MacDonald arrived in New Orleans (Naughty Marietta, 1935) has been used over and over again for a hundred other films even though it will always remain, to those who have a sense of history, Jeanette’s wharf. Speaking of history, there was something curiously godlike about Nelson Eddy’s recent death before a nightclub audience at Miami. In the middle of a song, he suddenly forgot the words. And so, in that plangent baritone which long ago earned him a permanent place in the pantheon of superstars, he turned to his accompanist and said, “Play ‘Dardanella,’ and maybe I’ll remember the words.” Then he collapsed and died.
Play “Dardanella”! Play on! In any case, one must be thankful for those strips of celluloid which still endure to remind us that once there were gods and goddesses in our midst and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (where I now sit) preserved their shadows for all time! Could the actual Christ have possessed a fraction of the radiance and the mystery of H. B. Warner in the first King of Kings or revealed, even on the cross, so much as a shadow of the moonstruck Nemi-agony of Jeffrey Hunter in the second King of Kings, that astonishing creation of Nicholas Ray?
10
Seated at a table in the Academy cafeteria. It is three weeks to the day since I arrived. People want to sit with me, but I graciously indicate that I would rather make these notes. They respect my writing at odd times in public places. There is a rumor that I am with the CIA.
While waiting just now to be served today’s lunch specialty, a chili con came that looks suspiciously like Gravy Train, a concentrated dog food which California’s poverty-stricken Mexicans mix with their beans, I noticed, as always with a certain pleasure, the way the students go about playing at stardom.
A fantastically beautiful girl called Gloria Gordon holds court at one table, wearing a silver lame’ evening gown, cut to the navel, while rock-and-roll singers do an impromptu number in the center of the room, to the delight of the western stars in their boots and chaps; a pleasure not shared by the motorcyclists in their black leather, bedecked with swastikas and chains, radiating hostility, so unlike the Easterners who are solemnly catatonic in their Brooks Brothers suits and button-down collars, each clutching an empty attaché case. The students regard the Easterners respectfully as being the farthest out of all for they are, reputedly, the drug-takers. Of course all the students smoke pot and experiment with LSD but only a few main-line, and of those few the Easterners, to a man, are thought to be totally hooked.
As a spiritual child of the Forties, I cannot give my imprimatur to this sort of behavior. The drug-taker is a passivist. I am an activist. Yet to be fair—how can the average person make a meaningful life for himself in an overpopulated world? There is very little of interest for him to do in the way of work, while sex is truly absorbing only for those who possess imagination as well as means. With these young people one has the sense that they know instinctively that there are plenty more where they came from and so why fuss? They’ll soon be gone, their places taken by others so closely resembling them that only a mother’s eye could tell the difference.
They are an anonymous blur, even to themselves, which explains their fitful, mindless shuffling of roles. In the morning Gloria will wear a silver lame’ gown complete with Miriam Hopkins cocktail shaker; in the evening her ensemble may consist of leotards and a sunbonnet. It is easy for these young people to be anything since they are so plainly nothing, and know it. Their metamorphoses, however, seldom involve more than a change of clothes and the affecting of certain speech mannerisms, appropriated from Western or Eastern stars of television series, liberally sprinkled with jokes told late at night on television by nightclub comedians.
Mimesis is normal, particularly in youth, and my only demur is that today’s models are, by and large, debasing. In the Forties, American boys created a world empire because they chose to be James Stewart, Clark Gable and William Eythe. By imitating godlike autonomous men, our boys were able to defeat Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo. Could we do it again? Are the private eyes and denatured cowboys potent enough to serve as imperial exemplars? No. At best, there is James Bond . . . and he invariably ends up tied to a slab of marble with a blowtorch aimed at his crotch. Glory has fled and only the television commercials exist to remind us of the Republic’s early greatness and virile youth.
Of all the students at the Academy, only one has sought to model himself on a Forties star: the sickest of the Easterners is currently playing Humphrey Bogart, and he is hopeless in the part. The rest are entirely contemporary, pretending to be folk singers, cowboys and English movie actors. Needless to say, all attempts at imitating Cockney or Liverpudlian accents fail. For one thing the accents are too much for them; for
another, any evidence that there could be a real world outside Southern California tends to demoralize our students. Of course they can observe other worlds on television but then that is show business and familiar. Even the Martian landscape of Southeast Asia loses all strangeness when framed by the homey plastic of a television set, while the people involved in that war are quite plainly extras lucky enough to be called upon to fill in prime airtime with the appearance of people dying and living.
Naturally, the Vietnam exercise appeals enormously to the students. “I mean,” said one of them, “if we don’t stop them there—you know, where they are now they’ll be right here in L. A.” To which I answered, “This city could not be worse run by the Chinese than it is by the present administration and, frankly, if the Chinese could be persuaded to take on the job—which is doubtful—I think we should let them.”
Since that exchange, Myra Breckinridge has been thought by some to be a Commie, not the worst thing to be known as at the Academy since the students are scared to death of Communism (like, man, they make you work!), and so regard any alleged conspirator or sympathizer with awe . . . which I like. As for the theory of Communism, they have not a clue. In fact, the only book any of them has read is something called The Green Berets, a jingoistic work written in the spirit of Kipling with the art of Mickey Spillane. Apparently this work is a constant source of sadistic reveries. Time and again have I heard the students speak wistfully of fighting and torturing the Vietcong, or rather of other young men fighting and torturing the Vietcong on their behalf. Not only are the male students drawn to violence (at second hand), they are also quite totalitarian-minded, even for Americans, and I am convinced that any attractive television personality who wanted to become our dictator would have their full support.
As usual, I am ambivalent. On the one hand, I am intellectually devoted to the idea of the old America. I believe in justice, I want redress for all wrongs done, I want the good life—if such a thing exists—accessible to all. Yet, emotionally, I would be only too happy to become world dictator, if only to fulfill my mission: the destruction of the last vestigial traces of traditional manhood in the race in order to realign the sexes, thus reducing population while increasing human happiness and preparing humanity for its next stage.
No doubt this tension in me constitutes my uniqueness, and genius. Certainly everyone senses it. Students flock to my lectures. Craving my attention and advice, they giggle, fascinated and frightened, at what I say. They sense my power, particularly the boys who are drawn to it even as they fear it. Of course these students are not entirely typical of the nation. They are somewhat stupider than the average, while simultaneously rather more imaginative and prone to daydreaming. Like most members of the lower classes, they are reactionary in the truest sense: the unfamiliar alarms them and since they have had no experience outside what Dr. Montag calls their “peer group,” they are, consequently, in a state of near-panic most of the time, reacting against almost everything. It was Myron who observed in 1964 that all of the male hustlers were supporting Goldwater for President. He wrote a fascinating analysis of this phenomenon and sent it to the ADA, but received no reply.
11
There is no denying the fact that Mary-Ann Pringle of Winnipeg is an attractive girl and I plainly dislike the fact since I am jealous of all women though I do not need to be. But then envy is the nature of the human beast and one must face that fact, like all facts. For instance, is it a fact that in my Posture class I have been unnecessarily cruel to Rusty, her boyfriend? Yes. I have been cruel. One must never lie to oneself or, for that matter, to others. No truth should ever be withheld. Without precise notation and interpretation there is only chaos. Essentially, each of us is nothing but a flux of sensations and impressions that only sort themselves out as a result of the most strict analysis and precise formulation, as Robbe-Grillet has proposed but not accomplished (his efforts to revive the novel as an art form are as ineffective as his attempts to destroy the art of film are successful). Of course, a true naming of things is impossible. Our minds are too feeble and our sensory equipment is too mysterious and complex for us ever to do more than make approximate definitions. Yet we must continue to make the effort, no matter how inadequate the result. In fact, I have made it a rule that whatever I consciously experience, I promptly submit to analysis. Take Mary-Ann Pringle.
I was in my office, just after lunch, looking over my notes for tomorrow’s class in Empathy, when there was a timid knock at the door (despite my vow never to make anthropomorphic references in referring to things there was no doubt in my mind, even as I heard that knock, that it was the result of a fist striking wood directed by a frightened i. e. timid intelligence).
Mary-Ann entered, wearing miniskirt (bright yellow) and sweater (dark green) and no bra. She is innocent, attractive, young. Her hands are those of a child, rather grubby with broken nails but marvelously smooth, like seamless gloves.
“Miss Myra, I wanted to know could I talk to you just a minute. I’m not disturbing you, am I, Miss Myra?”
As much as I dislike girls, particularly beautiful young ones, I found myself experiencing an emotion which might be called maternal. I promptly stifled it but was kind. “Of course you’re not disturbing me, Mary-Ann. My door is always open to you. Sit down. A cigarette? A Coke?”
I realized too late that I was playing Gail Patrick and would have to continue flashing brilliant smiles for the remainder of the two-scene since I seldom abandon a role once I have embarked upon it. Artistic integrity demands consistency, even with the unappreciative Mary-Anns of this world. I would have been much happier playing a sad but compassionate Loretta Young but since I had begun as Gail Patrick I would so remain, grinning doggedly.
After many soft hesitancies, she came to the point: my treatment of Rusty. “You see, he’s real sensitive underneath. Oh, I know he doesn’t look it being so strong and playing football one year pro and everything, but he’s got feelings like anybody else and when you said that he walked ‘like an ape with fleas,’ well, he was pretty darned upset and so was I.”
I looked grave through my smile, not an easy thing to do. “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. Truly I am. I only wanted to help. And he does have terrible posture.”
“It’s this old football accident he was too shy to tell you about which broke four ribs and when they healed he was sort of ass . . . assy . . .”
“Asymmetrical?”
“That’s right, sort of curved to one side. I mean it’s not noticeable except when he’s nervous and trying to walk straight and you’re staring at him and picking on him.”
“You make me very, very ashamed, Mary-Ann.” I sounded extraordinarily sincere even to my own ears. “He seems like such a strong confident young man that I never dreamed he was so sensitive.”
“Well, he is about some things. Like that.” Mary-Ann looked so forlorn, so touching, so young, so entirely attractive that it was all I could do to keep from taking her in my arms—a gesture bound to be misinterpreted!
Instead I assured her that I would try to curb my natural impatience in the future. Nevertheless, she must realize that in the teacher-student relationship one must always tell the total truth. In this case, though Rusty does walk like an ape with fleas, I am duty bound to add that his other bodily movements are often remarkably graceful, the result of a serene and as yet uncompromised old-fashioned virility which seems never to desert him, except in class when I draw attention to his defects. So I will, I vowed, remember in the future to mix censure with deserved praise. She was pleased and grateful. Lovely Mary-Ann. Is she as stupid as she seems?
12
I had just returned from Empathy II when Buck surged into my office; there is no other verb to describe his entrance. Wearing the white Stetson that is his trademark and the well-cut tweeds that reveal his true businessman’s identity, Buck entirely filled the room, his smile positively scarring the air, it was so broad, so happy, so ingenuous.
“Well, li’
l lady, you lookin’ reel good.” No, I must not attempt any further phonetic rendering of his speech which, in any case, shifts so rapidly from Cheyenne to Pomona that one could go mad trying to define its actual provenance. “The kids all love you. Honest they do. I’ve been getting crackerjack reports from them, particularly in Empathy, and I hope once our little business problem is ironed out, you will consider staying on.” He sank into the room’s only armchair and gave me a conspiratorial wink. “You got what it takes to be a fine teacher and helper to somebody like me, who’s ignorant as a yellow dog.”
“Not so ignorant!” Two could play at flattery. By the time I’m finished with Buck Loner, he won’t have the proverbial pot to piss in or my name is not Myra Breckinridge, at whose feet the proudest men have groveled, wincing beneath the lash of her scorn, whimpering for a chance to hold in their coarse arms her—my—fragile, too lovely for this world or at least their world, body. I am Woman. “But I will say that after a week of getting to know your students, I realize at last what overpopulation means. The brains have been bred out of the current generation. They are like the local oranges, all bright appearance and no taste.”
I meant to wound. I did. Buck sat back in the chair as though I had struck his great golden autumnal moonface. “Why, that’s very, very unfair, Myra. Very unfair indeed.” He seemed at a complete loss how to begin a defense.
In any case, I did not give him time. “I realize the scandalous state of the public school system in the United States as well as the effect television has had upon the mental processes of those whose childhood was spent staring at the box, and I accept the fact that these young people are a new breed who have gone beyond linear type in their quest for experience—‘knowledge’ does not seem to be the right word for what they’re after; perhaps the ‘easy buck’ says it all . . . no play on names intended. Anyway I find it extraordinarily difficult getting through to them even the simplest thought, but since I am an American brought up during the great age of film, I want to believe that our culture is still alive, still able to create a masterpiece like Since You Went Away, and so I must conclude that what you have assembled here are the national dregs, the misfits, the neurotics, the daydreamers, the unrealists, the—in short—fuckups who form a significant minority in our culture, witness what happened November twenty-second, 1963, at Dallas!”