Disquiet, Please!

by David Remnick

  ah well theres no talking around it were one of the smallest minorities in Hollywood nowadays us thinking that James Joyces Ulysses will be made into a superior movie TJ saying to me Harry youre one hundred per cent crazy him with his two dollar cigars and his Irving Thalberg award chasing those little chits of starlets and he not long married Mouth Almighty I call him and his squinty eyes of all the big stuppoe studio heads I ever met God help the world if everyone out here was like him yes always and ever making the same pictures showdownatshotguncreek whatever he calls the new one ah God send him more sense and me more money O he does look the fool sitting at the head of the conference table as big as you please he can go smother for all the fat lot I care Im unabashedly intellectual and Ill make this movie or Im walking off the lot this day week Ive still got my integrity after all how long is it Ive been out here wait yes since 1923 O I love lying in bed God here we are as bad as ever after yes thirty eight years how many studios have I worked at RKO and Fox and Metro and Paramount where I was a young man and the day I talked to deMille when he was making the original of The Ten Commandments and yes he wouldnt answer at first only looked out over the set and the thousands of extras I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of yes how someday Id have my own swimming pool and go to Vilma Bankys parties and all the long years since Joan Crawford in Our Dancing Daughters and Richard Dix and yes the year Metro missed the boat on Dinner at Eight and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and Asta rrrrrfffffrrrrrfffff and the andyhardy series and The Best Years of Our Lives and O all the Academy Award dinners yes Disney going about smug with his Oscars the Levant what year was it Gert and I took the cruise there I never miss his TV show and Rhonda Fleming with her hair all red and flaming and Sandra Dee and VistaVision and stereophonic sound cleaning up in the foreign market and Ben Hur and the night TJ asked me what my next project would be when was it yes the night they screened Psycho in Santa Monica eeeeeeeekkk its an Irish story I told him like The Quiet Man or shall we get Rock Hudson I was just thinking of it for the first time yes and I had Sammy give me a five page synopsis and the day in Romanoffs I asked Jerry Wald about it yes Ulysses by James Joyce which it is a highly controversial book and I asked him yes could out of it be created a picture as exciting as Peyton Place and yes he said yes it could yes but on a higher level Yes.

  1961

  GARRISON KEILLOR

  HOLLYWOOD IN THE FIFTIES

  Q. I understand that the frankest book yet about life in Hollywood has been written by someone named Mark Van Doren. Who is he? What is the title of his book?—K.L., Little Rock, Ark.

  A: Mark Van Doren (1894–1972) was a famous poet, literary critic and professor of English at Columbia University. You undoubtedly are confusing him with Mamie Van Doren, 56, a singer-actress fairly well known in the Hollywood of the 1950s and ’60s.

  —“Walter Scott’s Personality Parade,” in Parade

  FOR Mark Van Doren, famous poet and literary critic, the fifties in Hollywood were a confusing time, especially after he met Mamie at the home of his friends Donna and John Reed. Mark had just left RKO to go with Columbia after scripting Donna’s It’s a Wonderful Life (based on John’s Ten Days That Shook the World), he was exhausted and disillusioned, and the buxom young star of Untamed Youth and Born Reckless clearly offered something powerful and natural and free.

  “Show me things. Tell me. Touch me. You know so much, you’re a poet. I’m a child in the body of a woman. Show me,” she said, as they sat on the railing, looking out across the merciless sunbaked valley toward the Pacific Ocean shimmering like a blue-green vision beyond the used-car lots. Just then Donna called from the kitchen, “Do you want a slice of lemon in your nectar?” John was gone—who knew where? The moody hazel-eyed revolutionary had never lived by other people’s rules, not even after marrying Donna. And he hated Mark, after what Mark had done to his manifesto. He vowed to punch Mark in the nose if he ever saw him.

  You all know Donna Reed. Well, she was like that, except more so—the World’s Most Nearly Perfect Wife and Mother. She set her clock by her son, Rex, and after he ran away with Vanessa Williams, Ted and Esther’s girl, Donna grieved openly. Her pain hung around her like an old black bathrobe.

  Ted’s uncle, William Carlos Williams, could sense Donna’s need to be held, but he was in town to adapt his epic Paterson for Twentieth Century–Fox, and was writing a large body of water into the script so that Esther, a swimming actress, could be featured. The poet was crazy about his ballplayer nephew’s gorgeous wife. He hung his cap for her. The sun rose and set on her. Whenever Ted was in Boston, W.C. flew to L.A. Esther liked him as a close confidant, but he wanted to be more, much more, so his sudden boyish desire for Donna confused him.

  “I’m bad news for any woman I touch,” he told Jeanette and Dwight Macdonald. The former Trotskyite, author of The Root of Man, tugged at his beard as the famous poet stood poised on the tip of the diving board. Burt and Debbie Reynolds looked up at him and so did Carlos and Carroll Baker. Williams held his arms over his gray head, his knees slightly bent. He didn’t notice Lassie and Malcolm Cowley, who had just returned from a walk and stood half shielded by a clump of sumac. “Blouaghhhhh!” W.C. cried as he dove, splitting the water like a fork.

  IT troubled Mark that Mamie couldn’t swim an inch. He watched gloomily as Esther Williams plowed up and down the length of the pool, just as she did in Williams’s poem “The Singing Swimmer” (“the row of maidens / beside the cool water / and the splashing fountains when / suddenly you are there / to sing in your democratic American voice and plunge / deep below the surface and rise, / your white mermaid arms held out to me”).

  “Esther swims, why not you?” Mark whispered, but Mamie only laughed. Bertrand Russell glanced up from his chaise longue. “Jane swims circles around Esther,” said the tanned white-haired philosopher in his clipped English accent. The author of Principia Mathematica, from which Peyton Place was adapted by Edmund Wilson’s brother Earl (both of whom made a play for Peyton star Lana Turner after Frederick Jackson Turner, the historian, took a shine to Shelley Winters, Yvor’s ex), laughed harshly as he stood and stripped off his light-blue terry-cloth robe. “And I can take any son of a bitch in the joint,” he snarled, his icy eyes fixed on John and Ford Madox Ford, whose wives, Betty and Eileen, had vanished into the white stucco bathhouse with Danny and Dylan Thomas. “Any time you like, gentlemen,” he added.

  The silence hung in the pale-yellow air like a concrete block. From far away came the mournful hum of rubber tires on the burning highway, a viscous sound like liquids splashing on the grass, and also there was an odor like raisin bread burning in a toaster, except worse. It was a Wednesday. John Ford squinted against the hard light. He cleared his throat, like buckshot rolling down a black rubber mat. But it was Williams who spoke.

  He stood, water dripping from his white swimming trunks. “Look at us. Fighting each other like starving rats, while the people we ought to be fighting sit in their air-conditioned offices and laugh their heads off,” he said. “I’m talking about the bosses, the big boys, the playboy producers, the fat-cat choreographers, the directors, the dream-killers. Those are the bastards we ought to be battling, Bert.”

  “You sound just like John.”

  It was Donna. Dylan stood behind her, blinking, with D. H. and Sophia Loren. And Andy Williams. “Hi, Dad,” Andy said softly. Doris Day, C. Day-Lewis, Jerry Lewis, Lewis Mumford, Neil Simon, Simone de Beauvoir, Patti Page—everyone was there: the whole Rat Pack, except Bogart. Before Bacall, the wiry little guy had been with Bardot, Garbo, the Gabors, Candy Bergen, Bergman, Clara Bow, Teri Garr, but none of them were quite right. They were too different.

  “You’re right, Bill.” Mark let go of Mamie’s hand, and she sank like a wet sponge as the trim critic climbed out of the pool. “We’re writers, artists, literary men, not messenger boys,” he said, lighting a pipe. “And just look at us. Look at us.”

  “You look like writers,” said Ted Williams, squinting a
nd spitting in that special way of his, that his brother Tennessee had tried to copy until his mouth was dry and torn. “You can’t help but look like writers. Because that’s what you are. Writers.”

  “I’m as bad as any of the rest of you,” said Dylan sadly. Everyone knew his story, how the sweet voice of the poet was swallowed up in the silent, violent world of gray suits and men with blank empty faces and the watercoolers and the flat beige walls and the uncaring woman behind the desk at the dentist’s who looks up with that empty vinyl expression and says, “Next.” She doesn’t know about your pain. How can she?

  “Let’s walk,” said Mark.

  Mamie whispered, “Wait. Please.”

  “No,” he replied, and the writers left, marching down the long driveway into the dark, the lovely dark, and across town to the airport and back East to teach in college, all of them, and somehow they knew in their hearts and nobody had to say it that when they left, the women they loved would find new men and Hollywood would forget them and never mention their names again, and they did and it has and it doesn’t, and that is the plain goddam truth, I swear to God, you dirty bastards.

  1987

  FRANK GANNON

  RUNNING THROUGH THE WALL

  Hundreds of fans jammed the book department at Harrods department store in London to snap up more than 1,000 autographed copies of actress Joan Collins’s first novel, Prime Time.… A Harrods spokeswoman said the sale of 1,000 autographed books in an hour—some signed in advance—was a record for the store, breaking a record set just two weeks ago when actor Kirk Douglas’s autobiography, The Ragman’s Son, sold about 900 copies when he spent an hour autographing books. —Associated Press

  CHUCK Barris, creator of The Gong Show, his face set hard, signed his warmup books outside a Waldenbooks in Houston. Yes. He was spelling his name right, with two rs. His hand was moving well. He felt good—tense but good. He took a deep breath, crushed out a cigarette, and went inside and started autographing copies of You and Me Babe. An hour later, he had autographed over six hundred copies. At this time, 1974, this was a feat that was considered unapproachable. Today, schoolchildren can autograph six hundred books in an hour. Many can autograph eight hundred, and scores in the low nine hundreds are commonplace. The incredible has become the expected. The outlandish has become the normal. The weird has become the everyday.

  Yet surely there is some limit, some barrier beyond which book signers cannot go. History has not been kind to those who have predicted limits. Hans Fleeder, a University of Colorado psychology-of-the-hand expert, predicted in 1966 that Jackie Susann’s mark of two hundred and eighty-six signings would stand forever. Within a year, Susann’s mark had been broken over a dozen times. Today, tapes of sixties-era book signings look like slow motion.

  We look at them and think, Too slow. But we also think, How fast can we go?

  For years, this question was a purely hypothetical one: Ask fifty-nine “experts” and you might receive fifty-nine “expert” opinions, along with a great deal of tedious conversation. Today, however, we seem on the verge of a breakthrough. Today, for the first time, we seem close to an answer to that age-old question How many books can a celebrity author sign in an hour?

  There are many facets to this inquiry. Let us examine them.

  CULTURAL FACTORS

  The world population has tripled in this century. This has had an enormous impact. The equation is simple: The more people, the more paper. The more paper, the more printing. The more printing, the more words. The more people, paper, printing, and words, the more books, the more chances to exceed book-signing limits.

  Improved nutrition is also a factor here. For example, Jackie Susann often ate a breakfast of a chocolate doughnut and a cup of Sanka. Today’s fast signer wouldn’t dream of starting a day without a vast array of complex carbohydrates and carefully administered training fluids. A few years ago, in a famous incident, Sidney Sheldon, minutes before a signing, ate a Pop-Tart and drank a Dr. Brown’s. Fifteen minutes later, no one could read his signature.

  Forty minutes later, Sheldon began to sign the name “Rosemary Rogers” in his books. An EMS unit was called, and the exhausted creator of I Dream of Jeannie was rushed to the nearest hospital and swiftly hooked up to an IV drip. Today, thankfully, Sheldon is all right, but his story stands as a sad reminder of what a book signer faces when he truly “goes for it.”

  EQUIPMENT

  Perhaps nowhere else has modern technology had such a great impact. It is well known that Erich Segal experimented with a primitive felt-tip pen (actually a Q-tip coated with some foreign substance) as early as 1970, but it wasn’t until the Mario Puzo era that felt-tip pens became the norm.

  Today, the felt-tip pen threatens to become as archaic as a big Mississippi riverboat. Just last summer, a team at Caltech came up with a pen they called, whimsically, the CR-319. The CR-319 was so technologically advanced that it had to be scrapped after it broke the sound barrier during a signing at B. Dalton’s in Cincinnati. They’ve gone back to the drawing board on the CR-319, yet experts still predict that we will see faster pens in the future.

  “It’s inevitable,” says Gaylord Tendon, of Yo Labs. “Fast pens are sexy, and people will always be attracted to them.”

  OTHER FACTORS

  The great unknown factor in book signing has been “hushed up” in most book-signing circles until recent months, and is still largely unknown among the public at large: steroids. No one knows just how pervasive the use of these “signing enhancers” may be, but highly placed members of the Authors Guild agree that it is probably a common practice.

  “Anytime you’d see an author come in for a signing with a really big hand, you had to be suspicious,” says Gene Fibula, owner of the Booknook in Madison, Wisconsin. “You’d see more and more of these authors—little skinny guys with these gigantic metacarpals. You knew what was happening, but you never said anything. Why alarm the crowd?”

  Testing has proved impracticable. Authors are not stupid; they know how to mask the use of steroids. In a highly publicized event in 1987, Erica Jong was nabbed for blood doping, but the matter was dropped when further tests indicated that laboratory machines had been reacting to her nail polish. But most book signers, tragically, will continue to abuse almost anything modern science will make available to them.

  THE HUMAN FACTOR

  The human factor will be involved in the future of book signing no matter what agents and oddsmakers may predict. Book signing is exclusively a human activity. No gazelles, for instance, do it. Knowing what we know about humans, it’s hard not to imagine a scene like this:

  Judith Krantz is at the mall ten minutes early. Nervously she twists her head one way, then the other. She extends her fingers. Yes, she nods; she is ready.

  She puts her hands on her handler’s shoulders. Krantz and her entourage enter the arena and move through the wildly excited crowd. She sits down at the desk, half hidden by the mountains of volumes that tower above her on all sides, and takes out her pen. She turns and whispers to her handler. It is a harsh whisper—harsh from intensity:

  “I’m going to sign these books.”

  It’s not hard to imagine an author like Krantz, on a perfect day, in the best of shape and with the best equipment, shattering our concept of book signing.

  1988

  JON STEWART

  THE ENVELOPE, PLEASE: A VIEWER’S GUIDE TO THE EMMYS

  OPEN with vibrant, elaborately costumed dance number set to a medley of popular hits. As music swells, bring the dancing girls to an abrupt halt. End music. Add audience applause and a booming introduction of the well-respected, acerbic host. Play host’s signature theme song. Cross host to podium.

  HOST: General greetings and a query as to the audience’s well-being. Statement of own well-being. Survey of surroundings. Improvised analogy comparing surroundings to different surroundings. Sarcastic jab at expected length of proceedings.

  Pause for laughter.

  HOST (c
ont.): Confusion about actions of government officials. Statement of proposed personal action if given opportunity to govern.

  Pause for laughter. If laughter is not forthcoming:

  HOST (cont.): Recognition of enormous power wielded by many audience members. Statement of fear over possible consequences that failure to entertain said powers would entail.

  If laughter is forthcoming: