Republican Party Reptile

by P. J. O'Rourke

  There’s been a lot of discussion about what kind of music to listen to while staring doom square in the eye and not blinking unless you get some grit under your contacts. Watch out for the fellow who tunes his FM to the classical station. He thinks a little Rimsky-Korsakov makes things more dramatic—like in a foreign movie. That’s pussy style. This kind of guy’s idea of a fast drive is a seventy-five-mile-an-hour cruise up to the summer cottage after one brandy and soda. The true skidmark artist prefers something cheery and upbeat—“Night on Disco Mountain” or “Boogie Oogie Oogie” or whatever it is that the teenage lovely wants to shake her buns to. Remember her? So what do you care what’s on the fucking tape deck? The high, hot whine of the engine, the throaty pitch of the exhaust, the wind in your beer can, the gentle slurping noises from her little bud-red lips—that’s all the music your ears need, although side two of the first Velvet Underground album is nice if you absolutely insist. And no short jaunts either. For the maniacal high-speed driver, endurance is everything. Especially if you’ve used that ever-popular pickup line “Wanna go to Mexico?” Especially if you’ve used it somewhere like Boston. Besides, teenage girls can go a long, long time without sleep, and believe me, so can the police and their parents. So just keep your foot in it. There’s no reason not to. There’s no reason not to keep going forever, really. I had this friend who drove a whole shitload of people up from Oaxaca to Cincinnati one time, nonstop. I mean, he stopped for gas but he wouldn’t even let anybody get out then. He made them all piss out the windows, and he says that it was worth the entire drive just to see a girl try to piss out the window of a moving car.

  Get a fat girl friend so you’ll have plenty of amphetamines and you’ll never have to stop at all. The only problem you’ll run into is that after you’ve been driving for two or three days you start to see things in the road—great big scaly things twenty feet high with nine legs. But there are very few great big scaly things with nine legs in America anymore, so you can just drive right through them because they probably aren’t really there, and if they are really there you’ll be doing the country a favor by running them over.

  Yes, but where does it all end? Where does a crazy life like this lead? To death, you say. Look at all the people who’ve died in car wrecks: Albert Camus, Jayne Mansfield, Jackson Pollock, Tom Paine. Well, Tom Paine didn’t really die in a car wreck, but he probably would have if he’d lived a little later. He was that kind of guy. Anyway, death is always the first thing that leaps into everybody’s mind—sudden violent death at an early age. If only it were that simple. God, we could all go out in a blaze of flaming aluminum alloys formulated specially for the Porsche factory race effort like James Dean did! No ulcers, no hemorrhoids, no bulging waistlines, soft dicks, or false teeth . . . bash!! kaboom!! Watch this space for paperback reprint rights, auction, and movie option sale! But that’s not the way it goes. No. What actually happens is you fall for that teenage lovely in the next seat over, fall for her like a ton of condoms, and before you know it you’re married and have teenage lovelies of your own—getting felt up in a Pontiac Trans Ams this very minute, no doubt—plus a six-figure mortgage, a liver the size of the Bronx, and a Country Squire that’s never seen the sweet side of sixty.

  It’s hard to face the truth, but I suppose you yourself realize that if you’d had just a little more courage, just a little more strength of character, you could have been dead by now. No such luck.

  Manners

  and Mores

  Hollywood Etiquette

  “Hollywood” is not, of course, a place. Nor is it a synonym for the entertainment business. There are upstanding citizens who make their living in that field. The real Hollywood is the reductio ad absurdum of personal liberty. It is ordinary men and women freed by money and social mobility to do anything they want unencumbered by family pressure, community mores, social responsibility, civic duty, or good sense. There’s a little streak of it in us all.

  The entertainment business is a venue for Hollywood because heaps of money can be made by entertaining and because the public is famously tolerant of entertainers. Los Angeles is a site for Hollywood because, if all the freedom and money go blooey, it’s warm enough to sleep on the beach. Other places and professions have had this distinction at other times. During the eighteenth century it was the pirate nests of the Caribbean. When the Medici popes were in office, it was the College of Cardinals.

  It is interesting that when people have great resources and few restraints they don’t always run amok doing evil to their fellow man. In Hollywood the evil is mostly self-destructive. On the other hand the good is limited to an occasional movie like Tender Mercies. Thus Hollywood is a disappointment to Hobbes conservatives and Rousseau liberals alike. But it is fascinating to the student of manners.

  Manners are the formal and ceremonial manifestations of a society’s underlying values. Usually these values are things like loyalty, altruism, veneration of the elderly, valor, etc. But what sort of manners emerge in a society such as Hollywood’s where the only underlying value is personal gratification? The answer is none. Friends are ignored. Enemies and chance acquaintances are greeted with kisses. People meet in public places to discuss finance before breakfast. Total strangers ask you what you paid for your shoes.

  It’s hard for a visitor from the civilized world to detect any standards at all. People shout the details of their sexual lives but conceal with embarrassment the brand of car they own. The streets are lined with expensive clothing stores, but no one dresses up. Restaurants have unlisted phone numbers. You never know what the natives are going to do next.

  Not only the rich and irresponsible act this way but also the would-be rich and the would-be irresponsible. Feckless eccentricity has spread to every level of society, especially in the service industries. Waiters introduce themselves by name, inquire into your home life, and, if you aren’t careful, will invite themselves to sit down and sample your wine choice. At the grocery store, when you extend a palm for change you’re liable to have your Line of Life and Mountain of Venus examined and longevity foretold by the number of wrinkles around your wrist. Policemen pull you over for traffic infractions and show you résumés and 8×10 glossies.

  A strong element of fantasy must be allowed for in Hollywood behavior. It can be disconcerting to do business with a bank officer in jogging shorts who does deep knee bends while discussing variable-rate mortgages. Meanwhile the man who cleans the pool comes around in a Cardin suit. The owner of every commercial establishment seems lost in dreams of grandeur. The drive-in restaurant has valet parking.

  But sometimes Hollywood is too normal. Bellhops salute and carry eight bags without complaint. Taxi drivers tip their caps and say “You’re the boss” when you tell them to go to Bel Air from Santa Monica by way of Sherman Oaks. It takes a while to realize what’s going on. The bellhops and taxi drivers are acting. They’re engaged in that rarest kind of fantasy life, imagining reality is real. Don’t expect an encore, however. Tomorrow they’ll be surly, drug-addicted rock stars.

  Though there are no standards of behavior in Hollywood, there are some criteria of status: money, power, and fame. Money—though it is the first cause, prime mover, and only useful product of Hollywood—is the least important. Hollywood is a single-crop economy, and there’s just too much money around. Millions are paid for Benedict Canyon building lots 2 degrees shy of vertical. Olympic-size swimming pools are built for families who haven’t been outdoors since 1965. People send their pets to psychiatrists. Everyone has money or spends it as if he did. (Though there’s no idea of what money might do. A fortune Joseph P. Kennedy would have used to elect a new Senate is spent on wristwatches.)

  Money being common, prestige goes instead to power. There’s endless talk about power in Hollywood and much deference paid to it. But it’s a silly kind of puissance. What would Talleyrand have made of someone who had the power to put Leave It to Beaver back on network television or the power to turn a popular soft-drink ji
ngle into a $30 million movie staring Lorna Luft? As for real power—the force to direct events and guide human affairs—the people of Hollywood don’t seem to have that over even their own lives.

  Since money is hackneyed and power is trivial, the real gauge of Hollywood status is fame. People are introduced in terms of their fame, even if they don’t have any: “This is Heather. She would have been on Good Morning America if Andropov hadn’t died that day.” Fame is so important that the slightest association with it confers standing: “I’d like you to meet Trevor. His sister-in-law goes to the same chiropractor as Bo Derek’s aunt.” Even physical proximity to fame will do: “Wayne here lives three blocks away from Sonny Bono.”

  Fame of one’s own is best, of course, but it’s strictly quantitative. Any kind of fame will do. A lesser-known Supreme Court justice, the woman who tried to shoot Gerald Ford, and the actor who played Timmy on the Lassie TV show are about equal.

  If absolutely no fame or any association with it can be mustered, then singularity will do. The people of Hollywood put immense effort into making themselves unusual. This isn’t easy in a world where being normal is the next worst thing to being pale and fat. Half a dozen soi-disant actresses may show up at a party in identical skunk-striped pedal pushers, yellow rain slickers, and antique corsets worn as blouses. In the last resort, Hollywood people buy strange automobiles and show you a 1962 pink Cadillac limousine with a baby grand piano built into the backseat. “It’s the only one like it,” they’ll say. True, thank God.

  With no values larger than the self, no sensible norms, no meaningful pecking order, and no fixed goals or objectives except attracting attention, Hollywood is a place of confusion. Play is confused with work and duty with employment so that a $50 million stock issue, a tennis match, and a dangerously ill mother are all greeted with the same mixture of frantic worry and stupid enthusiasm. Hollywood people often get themselves in financial trouble because they forget that spending thirty hours a week at a Nautilus gym is difficult, but no one will pay you to do it.

  Confusion reigns in every aspect of existence. Romance is remarkably muddled. Sex is confused with love. Love is confused with marriage. People not only go to bed on a first date but discuss business there. Couples don’t stay wed long enough to get to know each other. Child-rearing is muzzy in the extreme. Children are mistaken for friends or, sometimes, possessions. Often there seems to be a casting call for baby in the house. Who will get the part? Will it be Mom? Mom’s third husband? Or the baby? There is even spatial confusion in Hollywood. Practically everyone runs or jogs. Then he gets in the car to go next door.

  No distinction is made between private and public life. All talk, even to the dogs, is about money, power, and fame. Or it would be if anyone’s attention span were long enough. Hollywood conversations are disconcerting things to overhear.

  Producer A: “We paid a million five for our house.”

  Screenwriter B: “Did anybody get fired at Universal Studios today?”

  A: “Cher dyed her hair green.”

  B: “What did that Rolex cost you?”

  A: “I just signed to do a sequel to Rhinestone.”

  B: “We paid a million three for our place in Palm Springs.”

  Even Hollywood people can’t keep this up for long without going nuts. As a result, talking on the telephone has replaced real conversation. Not that you ever talk to the person you called. There are too many answering machines, answering services, call-waiting features, multiple lines, and extension phones in peculiar places like the car trunk. And whoever you called is always on the phone already anyway. Instead you have long, intimate talks with the decorator, the Mexican gardener, the secretary, the nanny, or, most often, a phone repairman. This and cute recorded messages is how Hollywood people stay in touch. And stay in touch they must. No one in Hollywood is secure enough to spend five minutes alone with his thoughts.

  Hollywood people are insecure about their taste, about their intellect, about themselves. And they should be.

  Taste cannot function in such an environment because taste is contextual. Taste is the appropriate thing, and nothing can be appropriate to everything and nothing at once. A Hollywood individual may have a sense of style, but it’s a loose cannon on the deck. When you drive through Beverly Hills you see grand Spanish haciendas with English lawns, charming French chateaus with attached garages, stately Tudor manses with palm trees and cactus gardens, all built right next to each other on dopey suburban lots. The owners could afford vast estates except they’re ignorant of nature. They could own elegant townhouses but there’s no town to put them in. Instead they live in a World’s Fair of motley home styles divorced from natural setting and human community alike.

  The intellect cannot function in such an environment. The mind doesn’t work without order and rank. Thus Hollywood people can hardly think. And when they do think, they think the strangest things:

  “The Grenada invasion must have been wrong because no one has written a best-seller about it yet.”

  “A lot of people think it was just Robert Redford, but if it hadn’t been for Dustin Hoffman there never would have been a Watergate exposé.”

  When had at all, intelligence tends, like fame, to be quantitative. Ask someone if a record album is good, and he’ll give you its position on the Billboard Top 100 chart. Ask someone how his six-year-old daughter is, he’ll tell you her IQ.

  In Hollywood the smallest exercise of the mental faculties becomes a Sisyphean task. You’ll be standing in line at a movie theater and the ticket seller will ask the person in front of you, “How many?”

  “Oh, wow,” comes the response. “There’s, you know, me. That’s one. Then there’s this woman I’m with. I mean, I’m not really with her. We both see other people. But, like, we’re together tonight except we don’t know whether our relationship is growing or not. So there’s her. That’s two. And then there are these friends of ours. But they didn’t make it . . .”

  In fact, the human soul cannot function in such an environment.

  There is general agreement that primitive societies are valuable resources. Mankind benefits in understanding and knowledge from the preservation of native cultures. But I don’t think any ethical social scientist would object if we got rid of this one.

  Dinner-Table Conversation

  The Book of Proverbs says, “Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.” But a dinner with brilliant conversation surpasses herbs, ox, and love combined. The best pleasures of the feast proceed from the lips, not to them.

  As a scene for conversation, dinner has great advantages. The company is gathered closely together. Interruptions are discouraged. And performing one of the few pleasant bodily functions sets a happy mood. Also, there is another use available for the mouth. This is important. Statements and responses may be composed while teeth glean the inside of an artichoke leaf, while a bite of something more substantial yields respite when you’ve chatted your way into a cul-de-sac. And a drink of wine loosens the expressive tongue and reins the critical ear. The only better place for conversation is bed. But unless you have ultramodern standards, that limits the guest list. And even then, having five or six people in your bed is more likely to cause talk than conversation.

  Any kind of dinner is not sufficient, however. A tea or buffet won’t do. It may be an indication of today’s Freudian obsessions, but few modern people can talk with anything in their laps. Dinner must be a sit-down meal. And the number of guests must be small, seven at most. Conversation is not a spectator sport or a relay race to be run up and down a banquet table seating fifty. There should be no visual obstructions such as immense floral centerpieces. It is impossible for a guest to make any but the most pastoral repartee when his face is framed in mums. Also, the food has to be of a kind which allows one guest to look another in the face while eating. Corn on the cob is bad. Spaghetti is worse. French onion soup is unthinkable. Emphasize refreshments. The better t
he wine, champagne, and brandy, the stronger and brighter the talk. Eschew the guest who doesn’t drink. He’s too likely to talk about why he doesn’t. Also avoid hard liquor. The grape evokes the muses. But there is something in spirits distilled from grain that brings forth domestic animals. Gin martinis are particularly dangerous. Guests are reduced to dogs in their communicative abilities—sniffing and nipping at each other and raising the hair on the napes of their necks. The best way to beg off serving martinis is to keep only the worst brands of sweet vermouth in your house.

  Of course, the guests must be carefully selected. Mix good talkers with good listeners. And don’t confuse good listeners with people who are simply quiet. Furniture is quiet. A good listener listens with enthusiasm. He encourages the talker, asks pertinent questions, is able to expand upon the subject or deftly change it if the talk has become monochromatic. A good talker must have all the qualities of a good listener plus an ability to hold forth at length: to tell a fully rounded anecdote, make an elaborate jest, convey news in piquant detail, or give an unexpected coif to the feathers of reason. And a good talker must be able to do this without inspiring other guests to pitch him out a window. Such people are invaluable. They give the rest of us time to eat.

  Conversation is a group activity, and the participants should be thought of as a team, albeit with certain stars. The best teamwork is the result of practice. The best guests for good conversation are guests who’ve had good conversation with each other before. Their moves are polished. Mr. X will give lavish praise to some item of popular culture and pass the ball to Miss Y, who will say something pert.