The Other Glass Teat

by Harlan Ellison

  So this week I’ll talk about Zalman King.

  I’m back writing television. The last foray was early in 1969. The Name of the Game, remember? It came to naught, and naughting was good enough for me.

  But Mike Zagor, one fine writer, and the guy who created the Writers Guild Open Door program that instructs minority talents in writing teleplays, called me many months ago, and said he’d created a series called The Young Lawyers. And would I come down and look at the pilot? Yeah, sure I would. Mike is a fine, committed writer.

  So I went down to Paramount and saw it—and so did you, on the ABC Movie of the Week twice last season—and it was quite good. Mostly because it starred a kid named Zalman King. I’ll repeat the name: Zalman King. Remember it. If he isn’t the hottest thing on the tube by this time next year, I’ll eat this entire edition of the Freep, second section, freak sex ads and all, covered with peach butter.

  Well, one thing and another, and the story I wanted to try for The Young Lawyers got turned down and I went my way. But about three weeks ago the producer of the series, Matt Rapf, got in touch with me and said let’s try it again. So I did, and they dug my treatment, and thus far they’ve let me do the story the way I want to write it, and who knows—in a month or two you may see a script of mine (currently) titled “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs” on The Young Lawyers. I’m into the first draft of the script now, and in a later column I’ll do a rundown on the interesting sidelights accompanying the writing of it for a production schedule that has to take into consideration only twenty shooting days for Lee J. Cobb, who also stars in the series.

  But this week I want to talk about Zal, and about friendship, and about what a gigantic talent he is. Not only because it’s nice to once in a while stop crying doom and look on the happy side, but because I think it’s as much my responsibility to draw your attention to the heavyweight joys in this life—in this case, Zalman King—as it is to tell you the world is coming to an end.

  And because my weary soul needs the respite.

  How I met Zal was like this:

  I was one year into Hollywood. What a nightmare. Got here from the other side of the land with a dime in my pocket and the pieces of a marriage that had to be set to rights in two separate lives where there’d been one before. Broke; Jesus, broke. Nothing to eat the last five hundred miles but a box of Stuckey’s pecan pralines. But I had an agent—through a lucky break, a fluke, a chance, I had an agent. And the agent got me television assignments, and I danced my elfin troll rigadoon for story editors and producers and they gave me assignments. And I blew every one of them. No one’d bothered to show me how to write a script. So I blew them. But there’d been enough money from the story treatments—before I was “cut off”—to keep going. Rice Krispies and spaghetti five nights a week, but it was still going.

  The only deal I didn’t blow was an adaptation of my book Memos from Purgatory for Joan Harrison who was then producing The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. I wrote the script, and about a year later rewrote it, and finally they went to shoot it. At Universal.

  It was my first big show. I’d done a half-hour segment of Ripcord previously, but they wouldn’t let me on the set, so Memos was the first time I was to see my words turned into people moving. I was scared and arrogant and puffed up with pride and uncertain and worried and that whole dumb crowd. But what it felt like! Like Otis Redding sweating “Shake” at the Monterey Pop Festival.

  I went out the first day of shooting, early in the evening. It was a back-lot shooting, on a mock-up New York street. The book was based on some time I did with kid gangs in Red Hook, in Brooklyn, and there was James Caan playing me, Harlan Ellison; and Lynn Loring; and a bunch of young guys hired on as members of the Barons.

  The first shot was of a semi coming down the street, and Caan/Ellison escaping a horde of kids trying to stomp him by rolling under it, and escaping into a shoe repair shop across the street.

  The director was Joe Pevney. The clackboard man got ready, the sound man yelled, “Speed!” and the assistant director yelled, “Quiet onna set!” and the clackboard man stepped in front of the camera and said, “Scene twenty-six, take one,” clacked his board, and Pevney said, “Roll ’em!” and there went Caan across the street into the path of the big truck, hit it at a dead run, jumped up into the link between cab and trailer, boiled through and jumped off the other side, across the sidewalk, and into that shoe repair shop. Everyone applauded. “That’s a take!” Pevney yelled.

  I turned around and was looking at Zalman King.

  I know women who think Zalman King is beautiful. His wife, Pat Knop (one of the most remarkable sculptresses I’ve ever met, whose statues are as breathtaking as Zal’s acting is muscular), certainly thinks so. But encountering Zalman King eight years ago, fresh out of New York and on his first acting assignment in Hollywood, many words came to mind but none of them was beautiful.

  Zal King has a “beautiful” face the way Charles Bronson has a “beautiful” face. Craggy is the exact word. Hewn from heavy substances describes it. Smoldering, intense, underlit with humor but informed by obvious intelligence. He looks Jewish, with all of the physical strength that connotes, and none of the weaknesses. When he wants to look mean, it is a subtle shifting of musculature, and it chills.

  He was playing a killer delinquent in my show, and he wanted to look mean. I turned around and was chilled.

  To another person on the set whom I knew casually, I said, “Who the fuck is that?” And was told Zalman King.

  I shivered.

  (Judging books by their covers is a stupid habit, and one hard to break. Had you, for instance, never met Robert Bloch, who wrote Psycho and other chilling novels, you would assume he was a deranged madman. In truth, Bob Bloch is the sweetest, kindest, gentlest man in the world, with an unbelievable sense of humor. As he is fond of saying, he has the heart of a child. He adds, “I keep it in a jar on my bookcase.” The same holds true for Zal King.)

  The next day I went down to Universal for some indoor sequences and was dumbfounded at the level of intensity he brought to any scene in which he played a part. He literally “upped” the other actors. (And I watched him work with Walter Koenig, most recently of Star Trek, who was at that time fresh to tv also. Walter was the other sensational actor in the show. Together they worked as professionally and as heavily as any two actors I’ve ever seen. And not coincidentally, I became friends with Walter, too.)

  After the shooting, we rapped, and subsequently met on a social level. We became casual friends. Not close, but with considerable respect for each other’s work. For Zal King is a serious actor, with none of the sententious and asinine connotations that phrase usually contains. He works on a vibratory level that virtually gathers all light to itself when he’s into a role.

  Time passed and Zal went back to New York and married Pat and did a horde of underground films and a television special I missed (but heard raves about for the next two years) about some gang kids who rape a woman on a subway.

  And then I went to see The Young Lawyers pilot. And there was Zalman King, playing Aaron Silverman, one of the law students working for Boston’s Neighborhood Law Office. He was better than ever. Time had put even more incalculable character into his face, and experience had sharpened his technique so he was able to play the most emotional scenes with a soft voice.

  When I was finally asked to write for the series, I said, “I’ll write for that guy.” And they showed me a segment of the series slated for September. Yoked with Lee J. Cobb it is a remarkable visual experience to see Zal King at work. Cobb and King call back memories of Cobb and Cameron Mitchell in the original stage version of Miller’s Death of a Salesman. The same levels of emotion, the same electricity, the same respect of one fine actor for another. God, they are good on screen. “Yeah,” I said again, “I’ll write for those guys.”

  Then I went down on the set and watched Cobb and Zal work under the eye of the camera. Jud Taylor was directing them. A scene in Cobb’s off
ice at the NLO.

  There is a feeling one gets on a set before a show has premiered. If you’ve ever felt it, you know what I mean. It is expectancy. It takes two forms. If the show is a bomb, if the stars are pains in the ass, if the directing is sluggish and the writing spotty, the crew radiates a miasmic aura of depression. They perform skillfully (at the rates they get, they’d damned well better!), but the heart isn’t in it. The other form is like getting an enema with a Playtex glove studded with cactus needles. It’s painfully buoyant. Everyone moves swiftly, there are no tanglefeet tripping over cables, the takes go smoothly and quickly, the director can joke with his people, visitors come away nodding and smiling. Everyone feels a success. The Courtship of Eddie’s Father had that feel, before it aired, and so did the Cosby show; so did The Fugitive and Batman and Run For Your Life.

  The Young Lawyers has that feel.

  It comes from the leads, of course. Without the stars really giving, it is all by rote. But when Lee J. Cobb and Zalman King have at one another, everyone on the set knows what is going down is something close to art.

  When they broke, Zal came out from under the lights and squinted in my direction. It’d been seven years. No reason to expect him to remember. He came through the set and over the cables and past the makeup table and stuck out a hand the size of a badminton racquet. “Hey, Harlan,” he said.

  Friendship is a nice thing. It helps mortar up the chinks in one’s wearying soul.

  I’m writing for tv again, troops. Writing for Lee J. (if my mother could see me now) Cobb and Zalman King.

  And if you miss The Young Lawyers, if you miss Zalman King, you will be the poorer for it.

  79: 18 SEPTEMBER 70

  This coming Sunday, September 20, I think you’ll want to forgo watching the first half of The World of Disney or Hogan’s Heroes or even the debut of the new ABC series, The Young Rebels (don’t fret; I’ll watch it and tell you what you missed), because at 7:30 on Channel 11, Metromedia will be airing a one-hour “documentary drama” of some significance. It’s titled I’m 17, I’m Pregnant…And I Don’t Know What to Do.

  KT screened it for a group of radio people the other day, and they asked me to take a look, and I must tell you as anthracite-hearted as I am, when it ended, I sat with tears in my eyes. It is quite a piece of film, friends.

  The Children’s Home Society of California (under a grant from the James Irvine Foundation) produced it with Lee Mendelson Films, and quite apart from its instructional importance, it is an artful dramatization of a subtle and heartbreaking social problem: what do pregnant girls without husbands do with their babies, if they don’t miscarry or have an abortion? What do they do if they decide to have the children? In simple, graceful, and unpretentious fashion, this most exemplary hour gives one answer.

  Through the story of Pam (played with understated brilliance by San Francisco State theater arts major Denise Larson) and her agonizing decision to carry her child to term, the merits of the adoptive family program are outlined. It is such a familiar story, so terribly commonplace, that it immediately ties in to our emotions, and as we hear Pam’s boyfriend express his feelings about the pregnancy, as we study the tormented faces of Pam’s parents, as we see Pam appeal for help from the Children’s Home Society and finally engage in group confrontations with other unwed mothers, we are carried without effort to the heart of what must surely be one of the most awful situations in which a young woman can find herself. Through gentle hints and careful suggestions, the characters and attitudes of potential foster parents, social workers, pregnant girls, and teenaged friends are limned, all of it done with a sureness of craft and an ambiance of humanity. And when, in extremis, Pam must give up her (now) fourteen-month-old little boy, we have seen what both sides of the decision are like. We understand that choosing to keep a child may be as wrong for the child as choosing to give him up.

  This is an area of information that needs cogent and kindly exploration. We all know a girl can have an abortion, we all know she can take steps to prevent pregnancy in the first place, and we know she can give up the child for permanent adoption. But the Children’s Home Society of California is another alternative. It provides temporary foster parents until the natural mother can get her head together and make a decision either to raise the infant herself, or give it up forever.

  And I think it is all to the credit of the producers of the film that they do not include such facts as:

  One out of every eleven births in the United States is illegitimate, an all-time high. Twenty-five thousand of these children are in foster homes in California, and, in the Los Angeles area alone, eleven thousand children reside in a kind of limbo where the odds against them are such that if a child remains in a temporary foster home for over a year, chances are that he will be part of the 25 percent that will never, never have a reunion with the natural mother. The darkness into which such children are cast is a lonely and chilling thing to consider.

  I think it is to the producers’ credit that none of the above is explicitly stated in the film, for cold statistics would only serve to raise in us a guilt reaction to the problem, when the film itself steadfastly deals with the human beings involved, and pierces unerringly to the core of human sorrow.

  In these days of planned parenthood, of appeals to help defuse The Population Bomb, of contraceptive measures that steadily gain acceptance despite the criminal dogma of such as the Vatican, we fail to realize that not all young people are ultrahip, not all teenaged girls know where and how to go and get the ring fitted, not all high schoolers coming to sex far earlier than their parents can summon up the chutzpah to go and have an examination before getting The Pill. There are uncounted thousands of young women who simply do not know. We are still merely an emerging nation in terms of sexual enlightenment; the Judeo-Christian ethos still holds sway throughout most of this country. Parents still fight sex-education classes in schools. Do-gooder organizations, motivated for the most part by their own Puritanical constipations, continue to stymie free and open dissemination of sex information. Exploiters and pariahs (such as some of those who advertise in the Free Press) continue to make of sex a seamy and corrupt activity. Otherwise au courant mothers and fathers still choose to turn away from the reality that their sons and daughters are having sex, and continue to shroud it in secrecy, giving it a clandestine and unsavory appeal. Perhaps the greatest benefit for men and women alike from the Women’s Liberation Movement will be to unfetter our thinking in this area.

  For if one sees this hour of superlative documentary-drama, one will realize that the important part of freeing us from our sexual ghetto is not that anyone can Do It when he or she desires, but that hopeless traps such as the one into which Pam is locked need never be again. I venture to say no one who sees this memorable hour of television will come away from it thinking unwanted pregnancy is just a matter of poor planning. The effects on people, on naïve girls and young men who never intended to be calloused rakes, on bewildered parents and helpless infants who must grow up in orphanages, are too brutalizing, too terrible to be allowed to go on. Toward a clearer understanding of the frail human condition, and as an hour of utterly worthwhile and memorable viewing, I urge you to do Sunday the twentieth at 7:30 with Channel 11.

  Then I won’t feel so silly about having sat there close to tears.

  —

  Correspondent Herbert Bernard adds this interesting footnote to the “World’s ‘Our Little Miss’ Variety Pageant” column:

  “Did you happen to observe that when Frankie Avalon read his touching poem on ‘What Is a Little Girl?’ the lines included something to the effect

  ‘…Little girls come in all colors,

  white, red, yellow, black, etc.…’

  and though I watched carefully, I detected nothing but pretty little white faces in the large audience of tots.”

  —

  I have been watching the KCET coverage of the hearing into the death of Mexican-American newsman Ruben Salazar.
I watched it late into last night. I saw a blue-ribbon panel of delegates to that hearing from the Chicano community storm out in protest, and I had the eerie and chilling feeling that this was very much what it must have been like at the Chicago Conspiracy Trial. And I went a little colder realizing the game of justice in our courtroom arena is not necessarily the Game of Truth. The system is so complex, the machinery so ponderous, and the technicians keeping the system’s machinery functioning are so locked into “accepted concepts of the natural order,” that Pontius Pilate by comparison seems a paragon of impartiality and ethical purity.

  —

  80: 25 SEPTEMBER 70

  THE NEW SEASON: PART ONE

  Last year at this time, I did minute capsule reviews; it sufficed. Almost all of last year’s product was wretched, and it didn’t deserve more than a passing note. Blissfully, almost all of the stinkers died and so they will not be with us this year. (Unfortunately, Bracken’s World was not among the deceased, and I now realize that though I promised you a full-length takeout on the series, I never got around to it. There seemed to be too many other things of importance happening to bother with anything as trivial as Bracken’s World. But with the addition of Leslie Nielsen as studio head John Bracken this season, I watched the series opener last Friday and I solemnly promise sometime within the next five or six weeks I’ll do a full column on that particular running sore of a series.)

  The shows this year, however, are something else again. They are so full of commentable material it may take me three or four weeks to sort it all out, and it will provide substance for months to come. Because…

  Time magazine called me the other day. Apparently one of the entertainment editors in New York reads this column, and knowing that each year I manage to find a common thread that defines the tone of the season, I was asked what label I would arbitrarily paste on the 1970–71 viewing scene. The 1968–69 season (if you tonstant weaders recall) was the Year of the Widows; 1969–70 was the Year of the Plastic People. And this year, certainly, the content and formats of what I’ve seen in just the first week mark this as the Year TV Exploited Social Consciousness and Youth.