by Avery Corman
“ ‘Why have you chosen to appear at this time?’ This I told my fella in the first interview—that I’m here to say I built into what you got, everything you need to make it work, and I think if you know this to be a fact it could help you a little.”
And so it went. He was careful not to commit Himself on specifics, leaving most questions for Man to decide. He wouldn’t take sides on religious questions. And He was, at all times, very colloquial. He even had something to say about that at the end.
“Listen, I want to say that I hope nobody gets offended from my manner of talking. This was chosen originally to fit the fella who I picked out to talk to because he was a contemporary fella—and it just so happened he was a Jewish fella from New York. Likewise if I look to him to be Jewish, it’s for the same reason, and nobody should be offended because I’m no more Jewish than I am anything else. Also I don’t mean to take all these fancy questions from important scholars and give back snappy answers. The big thing is not how I say it, but what I’m saying and I think I can communicate with more people by talking this way than with fancy words like ‘cosmologica’ and ‘ontological,’ which believe you me I know how to use. So what I’m really saying to the world is: I’m here and it can work and I root for you and I like you a lot and try not to hurt each other.”
10
IF I HAD ANY desire to be smug the next day when I handed over the answers, I’m glad I repressed it. My arrival with those typed pages caused such a look of surprise on the faces of those men, it was almost poignant. A couple of them took to crossing themselves, the professor from Southern Methodist, a frail little man, looked like he was about to faint, while the stuffed shirt from Princeton just glared, enraged no doubt.
They said they would certainly need some time to go over the material and in what had to be a small victory, they all got up and saw me to the door, down the hall, down the University steps, across the green and out the gate. I looked back as I was about to turn a corner and disappear out of sight, and they were all still standing at the gate, watching me.
When I got home, Judy filled me in on the waves I had made with the statement about my basement encounter with God. The press had been calling—could they see where it happened?—and we arranged a press tour of my basement. “This is the light switch, these are the steps, this is the hot-water heater, this is the paint can, this is the fuse box …” The following day, a wire-service photo of my basement appeared in nearly every paper in the country.
Remember those puzzles on the backs of breakfast food boxes—how many rabbits can you see in this picture? Well, 106 people from coast to coast called their local newspapers to say they had actually seen God standing next to the heater in their newspaper pictures.
There was resentment, too, over the fact that I said God looked Jewish.
“Couldn’t you have said He looked average, Middle American?” Judy asked.
“But He didn’t.”
“And you had to say He had a Jewish nose.”
“That’s what He had.”
“What’s the difference between a Jewish nose, an Italian nose, and an Armenian nose?”
“The nose.”
Judy felt that to a lot of non-Jewish people I was saying God is Jewish. I pointed out that even He was on record on the subject, which would come out of the Georgetown report.
“Nobody knows that yet.”
“They will soon enough when the group releases it.”
“Yes, people will love that you said He served you oatmeal cookies.”
“That’s not in the record.”
“And His voice. Why couldn’t you say He sounded like a radio announcer? They’re always straight, down-the-middle voices.”
“Honey, with His voice He couldn’t have gotten on WEVD.”
WEVD is the Yiddish-American station in New York and to be accurate about it, they actually have terrific sounding voices.
True to Judy’s instincts, we started getting some crazy calls. It tallied out to something like eight “Jew Bastards,” five “Dirty Jews,” six “Kike Commies,” and one obscene breather who slipped in there somehow. We decided to change our phone to an unlisted number with a twenty-four-hour answering service and I imagined somebody getting the number anyway and the answering service lady saying, “Yes, I’ll tell him. He’s a commie-homo-bastard. Thank you for calling.”
There were some hate letters calling me a fagit, fakkit and faggid and a few that didn’t get commie right either. And some hate telegrams, a new product of our electronic age. Western Union won’t accept malicious wording in a telegram, but what obviously started out as “Drop Dead, Jew!” got through as “Wishing you discomfort in your Jewishness,” and what was probably intended as a curt “You Jew!” arrived as “You are a Jewish person.”
In an open field outside of Battle Creek, Michigan, 5,000 Seventh-Day Adventists held a candlelight vigil to refute my claims and pray for me.
In Chicago, a 51-year-old housewife claimed she saw God in her basement, the reporting of which set off a chain of other miracles, with God allegedly appearing in five basements, two garages, six kitchens, fourteen bedrooms—do you think there is a sexual connection there?—and three ceilings.
My believability must have been on the upswing, though, and I know this is a perverse statistic, but even so, twelve hallucinators saw God exactly as I first described Him, Nehru suit and all. I wondered if He could have actually appeared to any of these people, but when I asked Him He said, “What do you think, I have nothing better to do than shlep in and out of basements like a plumber?”
I was asked to do an interview at home for CBS-TV News and Mike Wallace walked through the basement with me, bringing an NBC and ABC request to do the same with—as I had been cautiously dubbed by the journalists—“The Alleged God-Seer,” “The Man Who Says He Saw God,” and my favorite, “The Miracle Claimant.”
We arranged for me to appear on The Flip Wilson Show and I knew that would make God happy. But it brought out a lot of my repressed desires to be a performer, stemming back to my all too brief solo in the song “Dry Bones” for the DeWitt Clinton High School Chorus, and numerous neurotic moments doing impersonations of Johnny Mathis and Tony Bennett at the teenage parties of my life. For a brief instant I imagined what it would be like to stand out there and do something, like my Tony Bennett. “Because of you, there’s a song in my heart …”
The moment came and Flip Wilson said, in a bastardization of even the cautious appellation of the journalists: “We have a special guest tonight in our studio audience, the alleged man who says he claims to have seen God.” And I stood up and waved to everybody and sat down. I never got to sing.
God said do Johnny Carson, so Johnny Carson was next. I talked to the producer by phone only he wasn’t going to give me as much exclusivity on the show as I hoped. He explained, after all, they have a widely varied audience and a need for “stars” in the show business sense, and as I was a controversial figure to boot, they had to work around me, so I was booked to appear with Tom Seaver, Raquel Welch and Peggy Lee.
Going on one of these shows has a strange quality because you sit backstage in a room waiting to go on, watching a television set which carries the program as it’s being taped at that moment and it feels like you’re watching TV at home, only you’re not watching at home, you are the show. Then you go out, do your appearance, and because it is taped you can go home and watch yourself. It’s strange. Anyway, Raquel Welch plugged her latest movie, Peggy Lee plugged her latest song, Tom Seaver plugged his latest book, Johnny and Ed plugged their sponsors’ products, and I went out to plug God.
Carson was nervous. So much of his audience is out in the heartland, you just knew he didn’t want to offend them. This probably accounted for my going on so late in the show, what would be about 12:45 A.M., New York time. His staff had prepared a set of questions on index cards, and I thought that at this stage I probably could have index cards of my own with the set answers, so routine h
ad getting interviewed become. And it was routine until I said,
“Yes, Johnny, I’m here to say I saw God,” which brought a lady to her feet in the back shouting,
“God lives! He is alive, in living color.”
Later that night, when the show was aired, this was bleeped out, as well as the sight of the woman being carried from the studio screaming, “God lives on NBC!”
Carson, who had turned pale, managed to get off a quip to me, “Can’t take you anywhere,” and called for a station break to restore order in the studio. Trying to be humorous myself, off mike I said to him that they could use the woman’s “God lives on NBC!” as a station break, but he didn’t think that was very funny.
During the break Carson went off to confer with his staff, Ed McMahon did a commercial for a product that cleans out stuffed drains, and Raquel Welch leaned over to say that I was a very interesting person.
Carson came back with new resolve to finish the show and before we went back on, asked me if I’d be willing to submit to a little experiment his production staff had cooked up. They had brought down a police artist, the kind of person who specializes in drawing faces from eyewitness descriptions. They thought it would make for good television if I could talk the artist through a sketch of God, as I claimed to have seen Him. It sounded imaginative to me and I agreed. Carson explained to his audience what we were going to do. Then the artist came out and on camera began to sketch the face as I described it, making adjustments along the way—“Eyes a little closer together, mouth a little weaker, etc.” He worked very fast and it was remarkable. If you’ve ever seen any of these before-and-after drawings when they capture a suspect—the artists may not get it precisely right, but they do get a feeling of the face, and he was getting it. I could see we were just about running out of air time when Carson said:
“We’ll be back to look at the final result after this word from Ed.” From Ed we got the news of a new paper towel and then we were back to God. The finished result was not photographically perfect, but it did have something of the sense of Him.
“Yes, that looks a lot like God as I saw Him.”
The camera came in for a closeup of the sketch, they pressed the Applause sign for the studio audience, but somebody started shouting, “No, no, liar!” the audience was buzzing, there were a couple of boos, an old lady fainted, and The Tonight Show was out of time and off the air.
Carson stepped forward and asked his audience to please calm down and they did except for grumblings from some offended people who looked like they wanted to hit me, as opposed to the ladies who wanted to touch me or the girls who wanted my autograph or the vast majority who were probably more upset that Peggy Lee didn’t have time to sing another song.
The producer of the show came up with a uniformed guard and said it would be better if the guard saw me to a cab, considering the excitement in the studio, and he led me out a side door. He hailed a cab and I got in, still shaken by the boffo ending to the show.
I sat down, too preoccupied to notice the driver of the cab. It was God. He was wearing a cap, a plaid jacket and He had a little black cigar stub sticking out of his mouth.
“So. The Johnny Carson Show. Finally.”
“You have a way of startling me.”
“Sorry, but for me, it’s very easy to be dramatic.” He chewed on His cigar. “I’ll tell you, I didn’t love how it went,” He said.
“Well, there was a little excitement at the end.”
“What was with that drawing thing?”
“It sounded like a good idea.”
“Cops and robbers he plays with God.”
“What do you mean?”
“An artist who draws crooks. He makes everybody look like a crook. He made me look like a second-story man.”
I happened to notice the dashboard. As part of His gestalt, He had a hack license with His photograph and the name, GOD typed out.
“I want you should do more television,” He said, “and no more drawings and no more with the going on for the last fifteen minutes—that’s for fellas who write diet books.”
We reached the house and I was about to get out of the cab when I saw that He’d been running the meter.
“Do I pay you?”
“What do you think?”
I didn’t know. I waited for a reaction from Him, but He just looked at me. The meter read $1.10. Tentatively, I handed Him a dollar and a quarter and He took it. So I said,
“Keep the change.”
And He said, “Thanks, bud.”
I had just given God a tip! And He accepted. Then He burst out laughing.
“Here. Take your money back. I was just kidding. A little joke.”
And He drove off, chuckling to Himself all the way. It led me to a philosophic observation. I decided that one of the things Man doesn’t need in this Universe is for God to have a sense of humor, especially a lousy one.
11
JUDY HADN’T ACCOMPANIED ME to the taping because she was at home, preparing for a little dinner party. It was with friends whom we had been ignoring during the excitement of the last few weeks. Elaine and Lester Hirsh were already there when I arrived and the plan was for us to have drinks, eat, and then because it was inevitable, we would all watch me with Johnny Carson.
We each brought to the watching of the show something of our own personalities and when it was over, we all had different responses. Judy thought it was wonderful and that the artist’s drawing was a great publicity idea. Elaine, who is a shy person, couldn’t get over my sitting there in front of so many people. Lester, who is my attorney and a practical person, was intrigued with the number of commercials on the show. And I, who am a person whose hair is thinning, thought I looked bald.
Seeing God puts demands on your friends. They really don’t know what to say. Elaine kept going to the fact of what a celebrity I was becoming, while Lester asked a lot of questions about how much I got paid, and do you have to join the union to go on television.
“Yes, that’s all interesting, but do you believe I met God?”
They looked at each other for support. Desperately, Elaine turned to Judy.
“Do you, Judy?”
Judy had made her separate peace. She also had her pat answer: “I believe he believes, which is the same as believing.”
“That’s good enough for me,” Elaine said. “I believe Judy believes that you believe, which is the same as believing.”
“I think it’s getting a bit removed,” I said. “What about you, Lester?”
“I believe Elaine believes that Judy believes ….”
“No, come on, a straight answer.”
“I don’t really know. But I would defend your right to say what you believe—and I may have to.”
“What do you mean?” Judy asked.
“I’m just kidding.”
“Lester always sees the dark side,” Elaine said. “It’s either because he’s a lawyer, or he’s a lawyer because of it, but he always sees the terrible consequences of every situation.”
“What terrible consequences?” Judy asked.
“Go on, Lester,” I said.
“Well, let us assume that the lady who fainted at the end died, or was permanently hospitalized … let us just say …” Don’t you just love lawyers? “… if this poor old lady brought a suit against you claiming that her death or permanent hospitalization was caused by you—that’s really reaching—but you could become involved.”
“Yes, that’s really reaching,” I said.
“But it could tie up your time. That’s what a lot of stupid lawsuits do.”
“What else could happen?” Judy asked.
“Two old ladies could die or become permanently hospitalized,” I said.
“You could be sued for character assassination.”
“By?”
“By members of God’s immediate family.”
“So nothing could happen.”
“It wouldn’t hold up, but you could be sue
d by every church in the country on the grounds that your remarks eroded confidence in the church and cost them contributions.”
“Feel better, honey? Lester is telling us I have a perfect legal right to see God.”
I was wrong. Lester’s idle cocktail party speculations that night were to have very real applications. It began with a decision by the publicity department of The Tonight Show. Television shows want publicity and publicity departments are in the business of doing it, so they released to the press an eight-by-ten-inch glossy photograph of the police artist’s rendering of God along with a press release giving the background of the drawing. It was picked up by everybody—the wire services, newspapers, television news programs. The next day, you couldn’t look at a news source without seeing that drawing.
“Is this God’s face?”
“God, from the miracle claimant’s view”
“Alleged God-seer’s alleged God”
It brought forth some of the loudest, most virulent attacks on me of any incident in the entire controversy. This time I had gone too far, I had created a graven image, had cheapened Him, was un-American—I don’t know how they got to that—and was a menace to God-loving, God-fearing people everywhere.
Well, we live in an open society, we are told, and there is free speech and if nothing else I was in my legal right of free speech to say whatever I chose on this subject, so you would think.
Well, one night—incidentally, this has nothing to do with what happened, I just include it to demonstrate how little the average person, in this case, me, knows about his rights under the law—one night, Judy and I go into a midtown pizzeria and the pizza we order comes out cold and oily and terrible, and I try to send it back, but the waiter is afraid of the chef and won’t take it back and says I should go into the kitchen myself and argue with the chef, and I say bring the manager and the waiter says the manager isn’t there, and the chef won’t come out, and we won’t eat the pizza and I’m not going to pay for it. So we get up and walk out of the restaurant, whereby the waiter, wearing his red waiter’s outfit, follows us into the street walking alongside of us, yelling and waving the check in our faces, down crowded Broadway, with people stopping to watch us, and the waiter calls a policeman who makes us go back to the restaurant, and the manager magically appears and says forget it, and what we did wrong, according to Lester, is leave the restaurant because there was a contract which we broke by not paying the check, and if I’m not certain how the law works pertaining to pizzas, how would I possibly know about the provisions of the New York State Mental Hygiene Law?