The 60s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  Reagan’s speech that evening would conflict with the President’s State of the Union address on television, a reporter pointed out. Did he feel bad about this?

  “Well, you know what they say about preachers,” said Reagan. “There’s no worse audience for a preacher than another preacher.”

  After several more questions, he was asked to say what the No. 1 issue in the campaign would be.

  “I’d like to have a dead heat,” Reagan said, and explained that there were two issues of equal importance. “One has to do with a kind of morality issue—eroding moral standards,” he said. “And the second has to do with economics….Inflation has eroded people’s savings…the stability of our currency….Put these together….”

  A moment later, Reagan was finished. He took time on his way out to sign an autograph and exchange a few words with people. Someone mentioned Death Valley Days and a Borax commercial that Reagan had made. He said, “I miss Death Valley Days once in a while.” There was a short discussion of the commercial, and Reagan exclaimed, “You know, I made ’em prove it to me before I’d say the ad, and it works!” Then, with a last handshake, and a smile, Reagan was gone.

  Geoffrey T. Hellman

  MAY 4, 1968 (“PLAYWRIGHT-NOVELIST”)

  TOM STOPPARD, THE author of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which last week won the Tony Award as the best play of the season, and a few days later was named best play of the year by the New York Drama Critics Circle, was born in 1937 in Zlín, Czechoslovakia, a town that is the center of the Czech shoe industry, which was founded in 1913 by Tomáš Bata. Zlín was renamed Gottwaldov in 1948, after Klement Gottwald, the first Communist President of Czechoslovakia, and the Bata industries were nationalized around that time and renamed Svit. Bata had factories all over the world, and in 1939, when Mr. Stoppard was not quite two and the Germans were about to take over the country, his father, a company doctor, was transferred to a Bata branch in Singapore. In 1942, when the Japanese were about to take over that naval base from the British, Mrs. Stoppard and her two sons were evacuated to India; Dr. Stoppard was killed shortly thereafter. The boys went to an American school in Darjeeling for a couple of years, and in 1946 their mother, who had married an Englishman, took them to Bristol, England. “I went to prep school in Nottinghamshire and to public school in Yorkshire,” Mr. Stoppard told us when we called on him at the Algonquin shortly before the Tony Awards were announced. “I became a reporter on the Western Daily Press, in Bristol, when I was seventeen, and after four years I moved over to the Bristol Evening World, which is now defunct. I was interested in life more than in literature. My ambitions were exclusively journalistic. I wanted to end up as God knows what—a correspondent under fire in some foreign field, perhaps.”

  We asked Mr. Stoppard how he got into the theatre, and he said, “I wrote a lot about the Bristol theatre, which was flourishing, and I knew the people in it. I became quite hooked on it. I wrote a play, A Walk on the Water, that was produced on television in England in 1963. The next year, I spent five months in Berlin, on a Ford Foundation grant. I lived in a large house on the edge of the city with twenty other Ford-grantee writers—German, English, and American. It was part of the battle to keep Berlin culturally alive. There I wrote a one-act verse burlesque called ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,’ and I subsequently wrote Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which has no connection with the other. It was well received at the 1966 Edinburgh Festival and has been in the National Theatre’s repertory since last April. My first play has just been produced in London under the title Enter a Free Man. It has been badly received.”

  Mr. Stoppard handed us a New York Times report on it by Charles Marowitz, who characterized it as “about as weighty as a feather boa and as substantial as a blancmange left out in the sun.” “I’m inclined to agree,” Stoppard said. “It was produced in Hamburg, in German, in 1964, and I went to see it. I guess I should have left it at that. I don’t understand any German, so I couldn’t really judge that production. It was Charles Marowitz who recommended me for the Ford grant, by the way.” The telephone rang, and he said to someone, “A tuxedo? I don’t have one….I don’t have a white shirt….I don’t have a dark coat. I just don’t have the right kind of clothes, do I?” Mr. Stoppard, who was wearing a bright-colored flowered shirt, a flowing black silk tie, and light-brown tweed trousers, hung up, smiled engagingly, and said, “Alexander Cohen’s office. They want me to tape an acceptance of the Tony Awards thing, which will be announced on television on a day when I won’t be here. They’re going to lend me a white shirt and a dark coat. All the candidates who won’t be here then have to tape acceptances. Of course, I have no idea whether I’ll get an award or not. It’s rather ghostly, isn’t it, talking to a nonexistent audience about a nonexistent award?”

  Stoppard had come to New York for a week to look in on his play, “do a little fiddling with the actors,” and be on hand for the Knopf publication of a novel, Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon, which was published in London in 1966. We asked him how it was received there. “It was not received at all,” he said. “It got very few reviews. It just sort of slunk in. It stopped dead in its tracks. I liked it enormously when I wrote it—I worked on it for months, all day and half the night, while my wife and I were living in a flat in London, and she read the new pages out loud in bed every night—and I thought that it would be a great success and that Rosencrantz, which I’d just finished, would simply be an interesting episode. The action of the novel takes place within twenty-four hours in contemporary London. The characters have a sort of eccentricity that moves them into a Surrealistic context, but the book isn’t in the least Surrealistic. Nothing in it is unreal or distorted, although some of it is heightened to a degree of absurdity. I think that realism has room for absurdity. It’s sort of a funny book. I wrote it to be funny. Writing it was a very nice period of my life. Things you write tend to go off, like fruit. There are very few things I’ve written that haven’t tended to decompose, later on, before my startled gaze—that is perfectly natural, since literary material isn’t mineral but organic, and nature changes—but Malquist wears well, at least for me.”

  James Stevenson

  SEPTEMBER 2, 1967

  PAUL SIMON AND Art Garfunkel are both twenty-five years old. Paul Simon is short and black-haired. Art Garfunkel is tall and thin and has curly blond hair. When we met them, at a hotel in New Haven late one afternoon not long ago, both were wearing jerseys, Levi’s, and low boots. The records of Simon and Garfunkel (including the albums Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme and Wednesday Morning, 3 a.m.) have sold over six million copies. Their songs—written by Simon, arranged by Garfunkel, and sung by both, with guitar by Simon—form one of the most original and moving bodies of pop music in America. Both Simon and Garfunkel were raised in Kew Gardens Hills and attended Forest Hills High School. Simon graduated from Queens College, and Garfunkel graduated from Columbia, where he is now working toward a Ph.D. in mathematical education.

  One of Simon’s songs, “A Simple Desultory Philippic (Or How I Was Robert McNamara’d into Submission),” goes:

  I been Norman Mailer’d, Maxwell Taylor’d,

  I been John O’Hara’d, McNamara’d,

  I been Rolling Stone’d and Beatle’d

  Till I’m blind.

  I been Ayn Rand’d, nearly branded

  Communist, ’cause I’m left-handed.

  GARFUNKEL: People who have gone through our kind of experience in pop music are baffled by the role they’re in. Only two years earlier, they were fans. The “in” person is not a different cat, but there’s a fantastic bombardment of stimuli thrown at you. If you go to work and try to digest them right away, though, the effect will be a kind of growth.

  SIMON: Our name is honest. I think if we ever lie, they’re going to catch us. I always thought it was a big shock to people when Bob Dylan’s name turned out to be Bob Zimmerman. It was so important to people that he should be true. You have to be vulnerable.
Then people can see you laid out, and they don’t hit, and they know you won’t hit them. Every time you drop a defense, you feel so much lighter. There have been times when I’ve had no defenses, and I felt like I was flying.

  Another of Simon’s songs, “The Sounds of Silence,” goes:

  The words of the prophets are written on subway walls

  And tenement halls

  And whisper in the sounds of silence.

  GARFUNKEL: I care that what we do is good. A lot of people in pop music are influenced by the fact you don’t have to be good, but I can’t do that; I can’t help but take it seriously.

  SIMON: I think a lot of the praise we’ve had is really not warranted. If people’s standards were higher…A lot of the things we’ve done have been hack. I don’t take the title of “poet.” It would be a slap in the face of Wallace Stevens to do that. But I see the possibility now that I could be one, and that pop music could be an art form.

  GARFUNKEL: When we were teen-agers, we didn’t care so much about being good as about being popular. We were real fans of rock ’n’ roll. We recorded our first song in one of those booths at Coney Island for twenty-five cents. It was early Alan Freed. We laughed a lot. I used to dig the idea of lists. I’d keep charts of the top forty songs on big sheets of graph paper. Each record was a colored dot on a vertical line. The records became very personal to me; I’d watch a song fall off from No. 2 to No. 7 and then strain to get back up to No. 4. I wish I still had those graphs. I have a real love of facts. Paul and I have different disciplines. I follow the use of logic to an end, rather than the play of ideas. I have very few beliefs. Paul is the opposite—what I call a “divergent thinker.” He loves the idea of going off in different directions. The “convergent thinker” takes the facts and thinks the world should make sense. Even as you know it’s a dead end, there’s a stirring to know: “Is this really right?” The fact that people have so much trouble understanding each other drives me crazy. All I want to do is understand the world. I wonder “How accurately am I reading it?” We had a small hit record in 1956; it was just rock ’n’ roll. Then, in 1963, Paul started writing songs—songs that were different. Bob Dylan had opened it up. I thought Paul’s songs were really nice. We made an album for Columbia called Wednesday Morning, 3 a.m. It had been out for a year, and it wasn’t doing anything, so Columbia took one of the cuts, “The Sounds of Silence,” and overdubbed some background—bass, electric guitar, drums—and released it as a single. In three months, it was an established hit. The music business has taken over now, but teaching is an experience I’d still like to include in my life. Like a trip to Japan. I’ve been at Columbia for eight years, and I’ve always been teaching on the side, in my neighborhood. What really excites me is the scientific side of teaching—the lab aspect. Two people’s brains, and the psychological interaction.

  SIMON: After “The Sounds of Silence,” the Simon-and-Garfunkel thing just kept going. There was no time to get off. Finally, I said, “This is what I want to do, and I want to do it as well as I possibly can.” I’m stimulated to go forward. If I fail, I’ve got so many ego points I’ll never be as paranoid as I was. So—straight ahead, and work! When you find you’re in control of your destiny, it’s fun. You do things you want to do.

  GARFUNKEL: For a long time, I had a real dislike for all aspects of the recording business. The trappings held nothing for me—the fan structure, all that.

  SIMON: Interviews are a big danger. An interview is a real ego trip. You have to remember that your opinion is not important—it’s merely of interest.

  GARFUNKEL: I didn’t take very well to the stage. To be out, and involved, is not my natural state. When I was in high school, I withdrew a lot. My friends were reduced to one or two. I read a lot, and I played the game of “doing well in school”—maybe by default. My parents never pushed me, or were overly proud, though. I could never accept myself as “one of the gang.” Everything I did was cast in the image and perspective of the outsider. I became a sociologist in spirit, an incessant observer. I’ve got more relaxed onstage, though. It’s the impetus of Paul. And singing for large groups increases one’s sense of power.

  SIMON: I always like to perform, given the proper circumstances—a full house and good sound. I’m in complete control, and I get the pleasure of making music with someone else. When I’m on the stage, I’m up, and happy. I feel like laughing. I’m continually surprised at the response. I never thought we would affect people so much. It’s not so much the epiphany for them as the relief. People fear that they’re alone. They listen, and they feel what I feel, and they say, “I’m not alone!” The basic approach on the stage is to exaggerate things and make them larger than life. But we’re in a time when so much is larger than life. So we take an uncommon approach. I feel you can be effective by being the same size as life, or smaller.

  Another of Simon’s songs, “The Dangling Conversation,” goes:

  It’s a still-life watercolor

  Of a now-late afternoon

  As the sun shines through the curtain lace

  And shadows wash the room

  And we sit and drink our coffee

  Couched in our indifference

  Like shells upon the shore.

  You can hear the ocean roar

  In the dangling conversation

  And the superficial sighs

  The borders of our lives…

  SIMON: Writing is often an excruciating process. I’ve been working on one song for three months now. In the past, I could go faster, but I wouldn’t accept those songs now. Now I say, “No. It’s got to be framed right,” and I spend months. Every time I pick up the guitar, I start on the song. When I go to sleep, I spend half an hour thinking about it. Songs get stagnant, and they turn on me. Lines that were good you begin to discard. I use the guitar. I grab a chord, and then I’m into something. My early songs were derivative. I was influenced by so many people. Elvis Presley influenced me to play the guitar; the Everly Brothers influenced our singing; Bob Dylan…Later, these merge with your personality. I use less imagery now, less metaphor. I give you the picture, stretch it, and let you feel it. When your mind is about to turn off, I try and get a word or a line that’s different, so you snap back. If I lose the guy, I don’t get him back. I want to make the words rich and yet plain—tasteful without being prissy or too delicate. One word can throw it off. It’s not poetry. I’m writing sounds that must be sung, and heard sung. I’m conscious of the medium I’m working in. What should be said in a song? What would be better said in an essay? A song is an impression when it’s heard only once. Of course, sometimes I make a song purely an impression, like “Feelin’ Groovy.” I think: Yellow…pink…blue…bubbles…gurgle…happy. The line “I’m dappled and drowsy”—it doesn’t make sense. I just felt dappled. Sleepy, contented. The song only runs one minute and twenty-nine seconds, with a long fadeout. When you’ve made your impression, stop. I don’t want the audience to have time to think. It’s a happy song, and that’s what it was. There’s the other kind of song, like “The Dangling Conversation.” It’s intricately worked out. Every word is picked on purpose. Maybe it’s English-major stuff, but if you haven’t caught the symbolism, you haven’t missed anything, really. You’ve got to keep people moving. The attention span is very limited. People don’t listen carefully. Unless you jolt ’em, it’s going to be down the drain. You’ve got to get the right mixture of sound and words. I write about the things I know and observe. I can look into people and see scars in them. These are the people I grew up with. For the most part, older people. These people are sensitive, and there’s a desperate quality to them—everything is beating them down, and they become more aware of it as they become older. I get a sense they’re thirty-three, with an awareness that “Here I am thirty-three!” and they probably spend a lot of afternoons wondering how they got there so fast. They’re educated, but they’re losing, very gradually. Not realizing, except for just an occasional glimpse. They’re successful,
but not happy, and I feel that pain. They’ve got me hooked because they are people in pain. I’m drawn to these people, and driven to write about them. In this country, it’s painful for people to grow old. When sexual attractiveness is focussed on a seventeen-year-old girl, you must feel it slipping away if you’re a thirty-three-year-old woman. So you say, “I’m going to stop smoking. I’m going to get a suntan. I’m going on a diet. I’m going to play tennis.” What’s intriguing is that they are just not quite in control of their destiny. Nobody is paying any attention to these people, because they’re not crying very loud. I feel a strong affinity with the flower scene. I always think about beautiful people and beautiful fields, and I think about floating through them. People say, “Why don’t you split?”—I’m sitting here making a quarter of a million dollars—and “Why live in it?” But I’m really strung out over people. I’m drawn to people; they all know what pain is. I give my money away. I give it in chunks. I’m always trying to run around and patch things up. The ghettos. It’s not human to live like that. I met a Puerto Rican acid-head by the Park one day, and he said, “You’re Paul Simon,” and we talked, and I took him to my apartment. It must have looked like Shea Stadium to him. I said, “I want to lay the Beatles album on him,” so I put the earphones on him, and he’s flipping out, and I think: Everybody should have what I have. I used to think I was much sharper than everyone else—very aware, perceptive, seeing things. Then, recently, I realized it wasn’t true. Everyone’s perceptive. Everyone is sensitive and perceptive, and they all know what pain is. I have compassion for that. There’s a gentleness and understanding in young people today, and there’s only one choice: the human race must come to the aid of the human race.

  It was now seven o’clock. The evening was cloudy and threatening. Simon and Garfunkel, who were on a concert tour, drove from their New Haven hotel out to the Yale Bowl, where they were scheduled to perform at eight-fifteen. They went out early because Simon wanted to make sure the sound system was right. After parking their car, they walked down a ramp under the Bowl and out onto the football field, near the fifty-yard line. The grass was a brilliant, eerie green under the dark, rainy sky. Carrying Simon’s guitars, they walked downfield to one of the end zones, where a stage had been set up. Except for some concert officials and a number of policemen who had gathered at the portals, ready to cope with the huge crowd that was anticipated, the vast stadium was empty. Ten minutes later, Simon climbed onto the stage to test the sound. He stood alone, a slight figure, holding a twelve-string guitar in front of the microphones. He struck the first notes of a song of his called “Homeward Bound,” and the sound seemed to leap out and fill the stadium. He began to sing: