by Avery Corman
“I saw your piece on The Stones. I thought something might be cooking.”
“This is God! He’s bigger than The Stones!”
“Free-lancing stinks,” he said. “You need a vacation.”
“You’ve got to believe me!”
“Look fella, I’m doing a piece on press agentry. That’s why I came. But this …”
He patted me on the shoulder again, in a gesture that was all pity and he walked away. I turned to the camera crew.
“What about you guys?”
“For this we can shoot the guy on Broadway with the Bibles.”
They were all leaving!
“Don’t you have any questions? Don’t you want to make sure?” They were sure. “Don’t you even want to see the transcript?” They didn’t want to see the transcript.
Can you imagine the nerve of those people? They all came because when they saw it was about God, they thought it might be some kind of publicity stunt—and they were disappointed because it only turned out to be the real thing.
The hippy from The Good Earth remained. He was about twenty-two, wearing dungarees, a western shirt and sandals. He sat relaxed with his feet up on a chair.
“The establishment press for you,” he said.
“They just walked out on God,” I said, desolate.
“God. That’s beautiful, man. You can’t beat that.”
Judy threw him a look that said—what are you doing? Don’t encourage him. But I didn’t need much encouragement.
“And you believe it?”
“I’ll put it this way. I may not believe it. But then I don’t not believe it.”
“I’ll buy that,” I said.
“There’s been a few people I know say they saw God. Mostly on acid.”
“This wasn’t on acid. It just was.”
“Beautiful.”
“Would you like to see the transcript?”
“Sure.”
He read it slowly, nodding his head every few sentences. Finally, he looked up at me.
“Heavy, man.”
“And you believe it?”
“Like I say. I don’t not. But then it’s not for me to judge.”
He was still with me. I’d been turned down by Life, the Times, Newsweek, ABC-TV, WINS, the News, but he was still with me. Judy knew what I was thinking and jumped in.
“Honey, isn’t it clear that people just can’t accept this. All those reporters who left. All the reporters who didn’t even show. It’s time to forget it.”
“But there’s interest. We have here a fellow with a publication. By the way, could I see it?”
He produced a copy of The Good Earth, a twelve-page newspaper, rather shabbily printed, militantly anti-establishment, and all within ecological terms. There were articles like “The Major Murderers” listing names of polluting corporations. A section called “The Murdered” with pictures of human corpses, dead fish and birds. The main body of the paper was six pages called “Dire Warnings” listing a series of pessimistic speculations about the end of the world. Its heart was in the right place, though, and what if it were a publication of zealots—I had become a zealot myself.
“This is perfect. What better place to run an interview with God than in a publication devoted to man’s continuance? It’s yours. Exclusive.”
“You know we only run stuff the establishment press won’t touch.”
“You just saw.”
“That’s true.”
He looked at the transcript again.
“God?”
“God!”
“It’s possible, I guess.”
“It’s a miracle.”
“Well, why don’t we let the public decide?”
“Why don’t we?”
Judy was dying.
“We’ll run it.”
“You got it.”
We shook hands on it.
“By the way, what’s your circulation?”
“One hundred thousand.”
“One hundred thousand? That many?”
“Don’t underestimate the underground, man.”
I wouldn’t—ever again. That one issue of The Good Earth would start the chain that would turn the world upside down, especially me.
5
THE GOOD EARTH WAS put out by three former editors of college newspapers. I had met Jimmy, the editor in chief. The others were a fairly square-looking boy named Ralph and Rita, a gorgeous girl who was completely unconcerned with her own gorgeousness. They were all gorgeous, really. They got very excited about the interview and I don’t want to go into a whole thing about kids often being more sensitive to important issues than their elders, but without them, it wouldn’t have happened.
The story was laid out with a big headline, “An Interview with God,” and we worked on an opening paragraph to set the stage for the interview itself. It told who I was and that the following was presented not as fiction or satire, but as an actual interview that I said I had experienced. Then came the interview, complete. And then some observations by me on the basic need to believe and the simple logic of it—“If He appeared in the past to ordinary men …” Then a statement by the editors declaring that as far as they could determine, this was a non-drug experience, that they weren’t judging its verity, not having been there … and finally, that they were running it because the establishment press had no balls.
It all ran to four pages and they decided it was so important they would kill everything else and just put it out as a four-page paper. And there it was. Thanks to these kids, I had my special issue.
The first thing I learned about the underground press is that it’s not so underground. I had this image of publications smuggled inside of suitcases. But a lot of underground newspapers are sold over the counter at newsstands and on college campuses and through mail subscriptions. You could get The Good Earth on the west coast, at hipper colleges around the country and at several locations in New York City, alongside the other offbeat papers, which were mostly sex exploitation jobs. It was bought largely by kids, but occasionally by a pervert busy buying up every sex newspaper at a newsstand and thinking that The Good Earth was a euphemism for Good Sex or something.
I was very pleased with the way the issue finally looked. The kids at the paper assured me it would go over well, only it might take a while to happen. It would be a couple of weeks before the paper got to the west coast, even longer for it to get filtered through to some of the midwest colleges, and they were always behind in the office on subscription mailings. So there was no way at the moment of judging its full impact. Meantime, I drifted around the city checking on newsstand sales, waiting for the public reaction and covering myself by personally mailing copies of the issue to all the members of the press I felt were important. A little public relations idea. I’m not married to a publicist for nothing.
That particular lady was going through a very bad time. She didn’t know if she was married to a maniac or a drifter. What was upsetting her was the fact that I refused to admit my temporary insanity. Notice “temporary” insanity. Judy, out of love, I presume, was not prepared to say I was permanently insane. But I refused to see her doctor. I refused to say the interview was a figment of my temporarily confused mind. And worst of all for an executive wife married to a free-lancer, I refused to work on anything else to make money while awaiting the snowballing effect to my interview. This accounts for me being labeled a drifter as well as a maniac.
I waited and for the first few weeks, nothing happened. The kids said it was too early, the copies were still filtering through. But there were no letters coming into the paper. There was no response from the regular press to the issues I sent out. I was impatient. Judy was unhappy. And it turns out, so was He. One day I opened my mail to find:
What’s with this Good Earth? Life maybe. Time! Newsweek! But The Good Earth? You better come and talk. Same place, Wednesday at 6 p.m.
In the long sweep of history, there have been a lot of men called up on the c
arpet, but this was the ultimate. Warily, I went to 600 Madison Avenue, pressed the elevator for 26 and got out at 37 again. The intercom was in the room waiting for me. Out of it came His voice.
“Nu?” He said.
“Hello, God,” I said, trying not to look nervous.
“So? The Good Earth? You call that coverage?”
“One hundred thousand circulation!”
“Peanuts. I’m God over billions. He delivers one hundred thousand.”
“But nobody else wanted the story.”
The next thing He said was kind of cruel.
“I think I bet on a pisher.”
“I’m not that,” I said, oozing guilt and remorse.
“I give a fella a story, a hot story, exclusive yet. He buries it. You got your Time, your Newsweek, your Walter Cronkite …”
“But they turned it down.”
“For this I showed up? I’m God. I don’t have to do this.”
“It’s not so bad. It was a special issue. I thought it looked pretty good.”
“They’re nice kids, but they got no readership.”
“I tried.”
“You tried.”
“I did. Did you see? Life, the Times, the press conference …”
“Okay. You tried. I take it back. You’re not a pisher. But you’re not a Hearst either. Hearst! What he would have done with this.”
But I had tried and I had cared and I didn’t know why He was blaming me.
“You know, maybe if you show up and nobody is very knocked out about the story, that’s not a reason to blame the reporter. Maybe it has more to do with your basic relationship to Man.”
There was no answer. Then He said, “You might have a point. All right, forget it. I don’t blame you.”
I felt the fires of purgatory diminishing.
“But an underground newspaper! Page One all over it should have been. I could have seen to it. But I don’t get into managing the news.”
“They said it would take a while. We still don’t know the full result.”
“So I’ll wait a little longer. I got nothing better to do. But I’ll tell you this—if it doesn’t make more of a to-do than up to now—you’ll think of something, okay?”
“Okay.”
Who was I kidding? What could I do? The discussion having been left on that open-ended note, I went home, half hoping to blot it all out with a nice coma. Lacking the ability to do that, I did the next best thing. I developed a beautiful psychological cold, requiring my wife to attend me constantly with hot tea, aspirin and vitamin C, thereby restoring the balance of our relationship from maniac-accuser versus maniac, to wife and unwell husband. I managed to milk the situation for three days, remaining in bed the whole time watching television. On a Friday night, I had the news on. David Brinkley, who often concludes his segment on NBC with a wry remark, had this to say:
“And finally this note. An underground newspaper of ecology which calls itself The Good Earth has printed an exclusive interview in a special edition. This would not normally command the attention of a network news program, but the interview claims to be with God. Yes—God. And on the outside chance that it could be true, this reporter would like to hedge his bets. So if He’s listening, let God know, we did report it. We did not scoff. Thank you and goodnight for NBC News.”
It was a brand-new ball game.
6
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT, TO clean up the expression for the clergy reading this, is that the snowball hit the fan. After that newscast, NBC and The Good Earth were deluged with inquiries. People were curious—the press, the public, believers, agnostics, kids on campuses, old ladies in the Bible Belt. The printer pleaded with the staff to go back to press and they ran off another 25,000 copies which were gobbled up within a week. The printer himself put up the money for a rush job of 50,000 more and even that didn’t seem enough.
It became one of those delicious get-even moments of life. The media, from whom I couldn’t buy a base hit, were now scrambling all over each other to get to me. There were reporters at the door and phonecalls day and night. It got so that I had to hire somebody just to deal with the press, and in one of the most obviously nepotistic moves ever, I hired Judy.
I should interject that Judy had been considering quitting her job for some time and this was a good excuse. But I don’t know why—and forgive me for airing this in public, Dear—is Women’s Lib and the traditional exploitation of women sufficient reason that I had to pay her a salary out of my own pocket?
Still, she was a real ace; schooled in the booking of rock music groups on rounds of press interviews, she started booking me as though I were a rock group. We worked out a stock interview containing the basic details of my encounter with God, and for the next couple of weeks, this is what I passed on to the press—over breakfast, over lunch, over dinner, over tea and cheesecake, over late-night corned beef sandwiches. A small personal note. During this period, I gained several pounds and got hives.
Mostly the reporters wanted to determine if I was a nut. Since I was not, and since I had my efficient and stable wife present to dignify the interviews and me, they had no easy out. The path most of them chose was not to comment on the factuality of the interview with God—nobody was committing himself on that, but to report what they considered to be the hard news of the story, that an underground newspaper called The Good Earth had run the interview, that the interviewer claimed it to be true and that the issue was in great demand.
There’s a funny kind of escalation the media get into here. They help create a news event in the first place—in this case by mentioning a newspaper—and in so doing, create a demand for it. Then they report the demand, which is essentially reporting on the results of their reporting. But who was I to argue? It wasn’t a Page-One story yet, but it was getting picked up. The fact that so many copies of the paper were cleaned out in a short time was something the press could use, and it was reported over the wire services, in the major city newspapers, on the network news shows and in Time and Newsweek in their Press columns. I was delighted, which was naïve of me, because what hit the fan next wasn’t a snowball, it was metaphysical backlash.
On the next weekend I was vilified in over 200 church sermons, and to show how ecumenical the anger was, in 30 Saturday synagogue sermons. Typical of the comments were those of a Baptist minister in Sumter, South Carolina, J. B. Kearnsworth, who said, “This charlatan, this snake in the garden of God’s creatures …”—meaning me—“This vileness who would so defame the name of our Lord and seek to raise himself from his degraded state, this lowly liar and clown …” Well, I had clearly offended many men of the cloth, in my opinion because I had upset the traditional lines of communication between themselves, their flocks and God, and this undercut their sense of power and I don’t care if I get in trouble with them for saying it, since I got in enough trouble anyway.
They railed on. A pastor in Alabama called me a menace. And a rabbi in Brooklyn called me a shmuck.
Their diatribes even extended to the kids on the newspaper and that really bothered me, but the kids laughed it off. They were having a terrific time living with the sudden success of their paper and were all excited about taking advantage of their new-found audience with their next big “Murderers of the Environment” issue—and did I want to pitch in? I could have “Deaths from Asphyxiation.”
I was preoccupied with the backlash. There were some telegrams to the White House calling for my deportation. To where? I came from here. A few newsstands had their copies of The Good Earth “confiscated” by vigilante groups, and there was one organized letter-writing campaign to the press protesting the publicity given the interview, all using the phrase “conspiratorial-communist-eastern faggot-establishment press.” But these were largely restricted to pockets of anger around the country. The big city religious leaders and the tonier organizations such as the Roman Catholic Archdiocese in New York and Temple Emanu-El chose to ignore the interview completely.
T
he media dutifully reported the volume of mail they had been receiving in response to their own reporting of their own story, which is more escalating your own escalation and that became the new wrinkle on the old news.
Then came the next big news break. On a Saturday night in a nationwide telecast from the Astrodome in Houston, Texas, I made Billy Graham.
Now if you’re Billy Graham and somebody is going around saying he interviewed God, and it is reported widely in the press, and there are thousands of copies of the interview in circulation, with hundreds of clergymen devoting their sermons to the subject, at some point you’re going to have to say something.
But if you’re Billy Graham, you’re also intelligent and sophisticated in the ways of media and religious controversy and you’re not going to become embroiled in a Holy War. So what he did was take the safe middle of the road. I say middle of the road, because at one extreme he could have vilified me or, on the other hand, just believed me. What he chose to do was simply acknowledge me. He mentioned the interview and declared that “his insistence on its validity was simply one more example of Man’s deep need to know God.” Billy Graham. He had gotten himself off the hook.
It was important, though. Having Billy Graham mention your conversation with God, no matter how equivocally, is still great publicity. Judy was elated. Somewhere along the line, maybe out of self-protection, or maybe just out of concern for our relationship, she managed a subtle bit of repression on herself. As we got more involved in dealing with the press, she began to completely ignore the original reason for the publicity—the actual interview with God. She started to focus instead on the mechanics of the publicity, worrying about the quality of interviews, the quantity of pickups in the press, the number of people reached. In fact, it was taking her over. She was all caught up in the project, plunging on as though she were pushing a hit rock recording. Now if your wife begins to block out areas, which if you discussed, would get you in trouble, and decides instead to fixate on something else which you need anyway, you go along with it.
“Yes, Honey, Billy Graham. That’s terrific,” I said.