Riding the Yellow Trolley Car: Selected Nonfiction

by William Kennedy

  TRANSLATION

  (From Saturday Review)

  (By Robert Lewis Shayon)

  One of McLuhan’s basic propositions is that we are crossing a technological frontier dividing the age of the collectivist from that of the individualist: We are being retribalized. The all-at-onceness of the “field approach” to problems is rapidly replacing the fixed, visual approach of applied or “resolute” knowledge.

  The Title of this piece: Clarity Is a Four-Letter Word (plus three)-----)

  WE PAUSE HERE FOR TELEVISION IDENTIFICATION:

  MLA (4) “Television is not pictures. It’s X-ray. It’s involvement in depth.… It can encompass millions of years of human development in a few seconds.”

  Addenda (The addenda will take the form of words): The effect of the television age, McLuhan more or less said, is not a biological thing; rather it belongs to our nervous system.

  (PHASE IV—Self-Revelation)

  “I never have a point of view in anything I say. Keep moving. A point of view means staying in one place. That sort of thing came in with the printed word and the telegraph. Newspapers have no point of view. They have to add one on the editorial page.”

  (Equal time is herewith offered to the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the Objectivity Clubs of North America. Rebuttal must be relayed, voice-over, through your local television channel.)

  Question: WHAT IS CULTURAL CONFUSION?

  (Joke) (The message): “The teacher asked the students what they thought the world would be like without Thomas Edison. One student answered: ‘If it weren’t for Edison we’d all be watching television by candlelight.’”

  STATEMENT FROM THE AUDIENCE (1): Marshall McLuhan is not confused.

  COMMENT FROM THE GALLERY: “What a crowd, eh?” “It proves that all you got to do is make yourself unintelligible.”

  SELF-REVELATION (concluded)

  “I never have a point of view. I never make a value judgment. I never try to win arguments. If you say to me ‘I couldn’t disagree with you more,’ I bypass you. I could waste a lot of time trying to convert you and people are never converted by arguments. People who live by argument are fragmented.”

  (A CRY FROM BELOW): “But if we have no sense of direction, then we are living in a world of anarchy.”

  McLUHAN: “Yes. Exactly.”

  VOICE: “Huh?”

  McLUHAN: “Most people would rather muck along with anarchy than confront the need for order. I don’t say I know how this can be done.”

  (PHASE V—Art)

  TMP (2) “Expo ’67 was a success because it had no story line.”

  Message: “Artists of the twentieth century are trying to explain why they have pulled the story line out of action. We can no longer use connected space [i.e. connected narrative, i.e. the well-made novel, i.e. the neat movie, i.e. the neat newspaper story] in printing, or in point of view. We can only use a mosaic. The New York World’s Fair was a flop because it had a story line.”

  Conclusion: What he means is that we must have gaps in things.

  Question: “Who fills in the gaps? The viewers.”

  Elaboration on the role of the artist: “The future of the future is the present. It always was and it is now. The only person with enough sense to look at the present is the artist, and when he presents his findings he’s branded as a kook or a nut. What is ahead is already here.”

  (PHASE VI—Medicine)

  TMP (3) “When Pasteur said he discovered bacilli which were invisible, he was thrown out of the medical profession as a charlatan.”

  Message: In the electronic age, forces are invisible. “And yet we try to arrange these things visually. Astronauts when they leave the earth take their environment with them. (WHICH PROVES): Environments are more potent than anything they contain. The medical profession pays no attention [to environment] as a cause of disease or disorder. They regard the body as a container. This is enough to create sickness on a very large scale.”

  (PHASE VII—Sex)

  “The miniskirt is abstract art, like Giacometti. It is not as erotic as old visual garments were. They were very involving. But the old idea of eroticism was not involving, but specialist. Hot. Twiggy is not hot, but real cool.”

  (ARBITRARY CUT-OFF POINT):

  “I am not here to propose models for solution, but means of awareness.”

  Click.

  Fadeout.

  Go to black.

  1967

  Postscript: This oddity, homage to McLuhan’s hit-and-run inscrutability, grew out of his visit to Albany on October 3, 1967. I covered his speech, in which he revealed to the audience for the first time what I decided to title (since he hadn’t) the “Theory of the Tactility of the Russian Peasant,” which was his sudden but prophetic perception on the train to Albany that masses of people the world over, and especially in America, would soon become ungovernable in ways comparable to the Russian peasant masses that spent six months of the year in bed (“because they liked it,” said McLuhan). His conclusion for America: “We are headed for tactile living that we are not prepared for.”

  Diane Sawyer:

  The Subject Is Beauty*

  My friend McGarr says Diane Sawyer is the most beautiful woman in the world. McGarr is rarely wrong on these issues. I would say she is, without doubt, the most beautiful blond woman of my era. This remark is retroactive and considers the temporary supremacies of Grace Kelly, who was exquisite, and Catherine Deneuve, who remains so today. Diane matches them but generates more heat, more light: ancillaries to empyrean beauty.

  Being beautiful is useful, but by itself it will not make you the queen of all journalism and other psychic realms. Tick off all the beautiful women in your life who settled for being ornamental. Think of those burdened with stupidity. I knew a beautiful child who evolved into a gorgeous adolescent and at thirty was a hag.

  We are all responsible for our faces, which makes Diane an exceedingly responsible citizen. At forty-one she embodies the truth that beauty of the first order is nuclear: that it arrives with the embryo, but also that it must be nurtured, or else it decomposes. We mustn’t overvalue beauty. We know that. However, we usually do. Great beauties are so rare that we make goddesses of them and then behave like foolish mortals.

  Beauty of Diane’s kind creates the illusion of perfection. Even in interviews with her she emerges as flawless. She argues charmingly against this, citing her contact lenses, denigrating her hair as thin and mousy. But the contacts are neutral objects, and she is wrong about her hair, which is also perfect.

  I have yet to find any women who fault her or begrudge her anything. They like her style and intelligence, and they say she is what a woman should be. Men also say this. I am one of those fond of saying this.

  Naturally she cannot be perfect. Let’s face it: there are many things we do not yet know about her. How is her pool game? Her soufflé? Can she carry a tune? Our knowledge of these things will come in time. Meanwhile, we accept her perfection and admit our love.

  1987

  * This story was written for Esquire magazine’s ongoing series, “Women We Love.” I admired Diane’s early sojourn on the CBS morning show, but admired her even more when, as her first reporting assignment for 60 Minutes, she came to Albany in 1984 to do a profile on me. My billiard room had not yet been built, so I am still in the dark about her pool game.

  “Tropicality” Defined

  We were talking about being in the tropics, the essence of the tropics, tropicality and so on. We dispensed with the jungle and got down to the sun, the sea, skin, a tumbler of rum and ice, and the beach.

  Peter Reed of St. Croix happened along and heard us utter the word “beach.” “I hate the beach,” he said. “I spend a lot of money buying up beaches and selling them for the sand in concrete.”

  This did not seem to reflect the tropicality we were searching for, but it made a point: that the beach has more than one function in the tropics. (When we say “tropics” we mean subtropic
s. Nobody in our set ever goes to the beach in the real tropics unless they are an alligator.)

  The beach, for instance, looms large in the memory of Bill Katz, the Albany, New York, curmudgeon you might have seen buzzing around Mexico in the mid-1960s. Bill doesn’t remember which town he buzzed, except that “it was small, off the beaten track, had a Catholic church, one hotel, a lot of flowers and a café. Men were walking around with guns, and Indians with bows and arrows came out of the jungle to play bingo. The church, of course, ran the bingo game.”

  Bill checked out the beach, which looked beautiful. But as he looked at it he knew he would worry about sharks if he swam; and furthermore the hotel clerk had warned that the water this day was thick with jellyfish. So Bill went back to the hotel bar and drank rum and had a wonderful afternoon just thinking about the beach.

  Our own time with jellyfish came off the island of Icacos, not far from Fajardo, Puerto Rico. When we dove from the boat the water was brimming with baby jellyfish: abundant, benign, almost invisible. It was like swimming along with cellophane noodles. Yet we are here to report that inhaling baby jellies is not harmful to your health if you do it in moderation.

  We recall trying to be tropical on a beach at Acapulco, testing out the Dos Equis on somebody’s veranda, trying to stay out of the sun (for when we had hair we were red-haired) but being steadily foiled by passing vendors who wanted to sell us sunglasses, or coconut meat, or a watch; and finally we took our quest elsewhere.

  We are often deceived in this quest by what seems like genuine tropicality but which turns out to have originated in 1942 in Warner Brothers’ wardrobe department: that white suit, for instance, that Sidney Greenstreet used to wear whenever he sat beneath his three-bladed fan. We bought a white suit to wear last July in Puerto Rico, but San Juan was so hot that very few people were wearing any clothing at all. And Panama straw hats. Do you really think people in Panama wear hats? Do you know what a sweat band can do to your forehead when the temperature hits 103?

  Tropicality turns out to be a concatenation of values revealed to us only by prolonged synthesis. After considerable deliberation, for instance, we have eliminated sand as an essential element of tropicality. Sand is not necessary. Sun is usually thought to be essential, but dusk is just as good. Dusk is so good that we wrote a poem about it years ago in Puerto Rico. Here is our poem.

  Dusk is a musk

  For intellectuals like usk.

  Most people don’t give

  A particular fusk.

  Poetry is not necessary for tropicality, but water seems to be. We have been debating whether watching the moon over Crooked Lake in upstate New York has any usable elements of tropicality and decided no. Too far north. Tropicality needs the tropics if it has any aspirations to authenticity.

  It truly needs the sea. Sheila Smith of New York City grew up by the sea and concludes that the sea air, the smell of salt on your body when you come out of the water, is all very sensual; and sensuality is certainly an ingredient of tropicality. We sometimes envision ourselves being sensual by sitting under a palm, appreciating the water a few feet away that may or may not lick at our toes. But for Laurie Bank Berry, who was raised in Mexico, such contemplation isn’t enough. “I don’t just look at it,” she said, “I swim in it.”

  Supremely correct, of course. For some people. Without offering contradiction, let me suggest that wetting oneself (and we are extremely fond of wetness) is not an indispensable ingredient of basic tropicality. We have hundreds of images relevant to our time in the tropics: sweat, for instance (another form of wetness), and sunburn, and rust, and mildew, and sand fleas, and the expensive watch our wife, Dana, left on the dashboard, and which melted. None are necessary.

  Skin may be necessary but it can be elusive. We discussed this with Larry Ries of Saratoga Springs, New York, who, with his wife, Madeleine, had just returned from Sarasota, Florida. Larry, a noted skin observer, almost had the opportunity for expansive observation during a visit to Sarasota’s Lido Beach, which is a nude beach, or was until the week before Larry got there. Four women covered only with skin had been arrested by police and a sign posted: “Appropriate Dress Required.” And so, by the time Larry arrived, women on the beach were merely topless. So there you are.

  Corlies (Cork) Smith, a New York book editor, came closest to defining the essence of tropicality when we raised the question with him. “Everything slows down,” he said.

  Bingo. Here come the Indians.

  This is the secret formula. This is why people get sand in their shoes, though we haven’t heard of it happening lately in just those terms; and it is also why, and how, beach bums are born.

  What occurs when the essential mix is present is a calming of the spirit, an absence of distraction, an opening into the freedom merely to be. If we were to draw a picture of the elements of our own tropicality there would be a chair, an umbrella for shade, rum, limes, ice and nothing to do, no place to go in order to be. We can be right here. This is the place to be.

  We would be staring out at the rolling and breaking surf, looking up at that coconut palm out of the corner of our eye, careful that our ankles aren’t getting sunburned, sipping the rum, talking to the listener across the table, and considering how the past has yet again come full cycle and moved with incredible speed into this unsuspectedly vital present. The sea would break on, the sun would secede, the rum: well, it would be important to deal in moderation with the rum or else miss dinner entirely.

  Tropicality is the condition that pervades the place you didn’t know existed until five minutes ago. Once perceived it must not be abandoned, for it has brought you very close to certain ultimate truths. But then, alas, you begin to understand that you can’t catch it by the throat and take it home; that you must let it go. And so you immediately start scheming how to come back next month, or next year, and reconstitute it.

  Return is possible, of course, but not easy. Conditions must be right. Above all: on the return trip do not forget the limes.

  1985

  Rudolph Valentino:

  He’s No Bogart

  Clarence Brown, a noted director of silent films, wrote to film historian Kevin Brownlow in 1966: “I have had the opportunity and the pleasure and the good luck to direct the two people I consider were the greatest personalities of the screen—Rudolph Valentino and Greta Garbo. You’ll be hearing about Valentino, who’s been dead for forty years, and you’ll be hearing about Garbo from now on as you have in the past. See how many of the other stars are remembered in ten years. Garbo and Valentino are the two who are going down through posterity.”

  His full name, says one biographer, was Rudolpho Alfonzo Raffaele Pierre Filibert Guglielmi de Valentina d’Antonguolla. He was Italian, a 1913 immigrant. He became famous in 1921 in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalpyse and he died in August 1926, after surgery, at the age of thirty-one, having made a series of immensely successful costume pictures—Monsieur Beaucaire, Camille, A Sainted Devil, Eugenie Grandet, The Conquering Power, and three that were shown a week ago at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center film festival: The Eagle, directed by Clarence Brown, and costarring Vilma Banky and Louise Dresser; Son of the Sheik, his last film, also with Miss Banky; and Blood and Sand, with Lila Lee and Nita Naldi.

  In one scene in Blood and Sand (remade in later years with Tyrone Power and Rita Hayworth), a woman spectator at the bullfight is so overcome by the sensual appeal of Valentino the torero that she rips off the top of her dress and throws it to him.

  “Many life-hungry women,” wrote Jim Tully in Vanity Fair in 1926, “have literally been turned out of theaters in which Valentino appeared on the screen.”

  No women behaved life-hungrily enough to be turned out of the Saratoga theater last week, but when Valentino stroked Vilma Banky’s neck in The Eagle, there was a slight but audible chorus of sighs. And in Blood and Sand, in which he romances his true love, Lila Lee, and his profane love, that campy vamp Nita Naldi, he exuded, according to at least on
e female patron who was willing to be interviewed, the aura of James Dean, also Vittorio Gassman, also Tyrone Power (“but better”).

  “The one person he doesn’t look like,” said the woman, “is Rudolph Valentino.”

  Since this had been her first Valentino film, her comment was a tribute to the old boy’s ability to transcend his own myth and image. She, like most people who came to age after the silent film era had passed, knew only the Valentino legend, the man whose death caused unbounded female grief in the land, the man whose movies usually carried an undressing scene (in Blood and Sand he bares a shoulder, an arm, and two sockless ankles and shins) for the female audience. The legend was based on those few often-seen photos of Valentino that show his slick, glossy black hair, his sideburns, his unsmiling full mouth, his dark eyes. The era of Latin Lovers was perennially referred to in the press, and Sunday supplements often trudged the old photos out of their files. But of them all—John Gilbert, Ramon Novarro, Antonio Moreno, and others—the greatest, it was always said, was Valentino.

  A statue in Beverly Hills commemorates eight major figures of silent films: Mary Pickford, Harold Lloyd, Conrad Nagel, director Fred Niblo (who did Blood and Sand, but, more important, Ben Hur, the lead role of which Valentino declined, saying “Where can I go after Ben Hur? I have no place to go but down”), Tom Mix, Will Rogers, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and Valentino.

  Valentino was an acknowledged hero to Hollywood, legendary while still alive, an economic glory to the industry. When he died, an era died. When sound tracks killed the silents, they also killed most of those lovely lovers with unmanly voices.

  The era of Clark Gable arrived, and in December 1931 Gable was cocky enough to comment (as quoted by Walter Winchell): “I modestly anticipate a Valentino future.” O. O. McIntyre also noted that year: “Those horrible Valentino sideburns are in again,” attesting to an effort, at least in certain quarters, to revive some portion of that romantic image. (It remained for the hippie culture to really revive sideburns.)