The Patch

by John McPhee

  His handsome face, young in its outlines but creased with premature wrinkles, has a frightened look, as of a mantis who has lost faith in the efficacy of prayer. He suggests the antithesis of Renaissance man—painfully aware of nearly everything, truly able at nothing. His spine seems to be a stack of plastic napkin rings. But he has no false bravado, and he is relentlessly attractive. In nearly every woman there stirs the same silent response: “Marcello obviously needs professional help, but first he needs me.”

  Marcello has so often been cast as himself—he was actually called Marcello in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita—that he went eagerly for his role as a Sicilian nobleman in Divorce Italian Style, which gave him a chance to grease down his hair, grow a mustache, and decay even more.

  THE PHONE RINGS. The man who answers is lower middle-aged with a lower middle paunch. He looks something like a nearsighted kipper.

  “Ell-ow,” he says in pure cockney.

  “Is Peter Sellers there?”

  “’E aynt eer. Ooze callin?”

  Peter Sellers is there, of course, at his flat in London, and he is on the line. Contentedly, he clicks down the phone. Shy men like Sellers hate to talk to friends, let alone strangers. Sellers is the world’s best mimic, equipped with an enormous range of accents, inflections, and dialects—including five kinds of cockney, Mayfair pukka, stiff-upper BBC, Oxford, Cambridge, Yorkshire, Lancashire, West Country, Highland Scots, Edinburgh Scots, Glaswegian Scots, Tyneside Geordie, Northern Ireland, Southern Ireland, French, Mitteleuropa, American twang, American drawl, American snob, Canadian, Australian, and three kinds of Indian. He fools everybody. Everybody but his friends. They are wise to him. When they call him up and a sweet old German nanny answers, they say, “Come off it, you old bastard.” The trouble is that there really is a sweet old German nanny at Sellers’s place, and she often gets an earful when she answers, “Voss diss?”

  Sellers is the son of vaudeville troupers. He has been a performer since the age of two, and he spent his youth acquiring every sort of face but one of his own. He became a brilliant actor by painful necessity, since he is by nature diffident, introspective, and not particularly articulate unless he is pretending to be someone else. He once said, “I’ve got so many inhibitions that I sometimes wonder if I exist at all. I have no desire to play Peter Sellers. I don’t know who Peter Sellers is, except that he’s the one who gets paid. Cary Grant is Cary Grant—that’s his stock-in-trade. If I tried to sell myself as Peter Sellers, I’d be penniless. Write any character you have in mind and I’ll shape myself to what you have written. But don’t write a part for me.”

  Sellers builds characters out of people he knows or seeks out, getting ready for new roles by fastening himself to the real article—union leaders, neurotic Americans, old generals—and absorbing their personalities down to the last tic. The result is always funny, sometimes merciless. But when he reads a new script, Sellers usually panics. “Better ring up and say I can’t do it,” he tells his wife. He paces frantically for hours. “Then,” she says, “Peter buys a new car and he’s all right.” In the past fourteen years, he has owned sixty-two automobiles. One was a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud, but it made him uncomfortable. He put a classified ad in The Sunday Times: “Titled motor car wishes to dispose of owner.”

  JOSEPH MARTIN, computer methodologist at The New York Times, has been pursuing for some years what he describes as “the ideal philosophy of creating a newspaper.” According to the ideal philosophy, you start by “capturing the keystroke at the origin.” Keystroke? The reporter, at the typewriter, hits the original keystrokes of a story. Martin aims to absorb them electronically, retain them in a computer, and eliminate all the laborious and manifold retypings that now occur as a piece of writing makes its way, typically, from reporters through bureaus to the home office to the desks of editors and eventually to linotype machines. The ideal philosophy also calls for the elimination of the typing paper that writers write on, which is regarded as an unnecessary and archaic encumbrance. Following suggestions of reporters and editors, and with the help of an electronics firm in Westchester, Martin has coaxed into being a device that can actually do all this.

  The Times is just up Forty-third Street from The New Yorker. When I arrived to have a look at Martin’s device, the third-floor newsroom was in a state of routine cacophony: a large open space as aswarm with bodies as the floor of a stock exchange, copy paper in motion everywhere, copy editors looking like physicists with crooked cigarettes and feral eyes, reporters hugging telephones or already down in the trenches—sporadic bursts of typing. The machine that was going to tranquillize this scene was locked away in a quiet cubicle. I was led to it by Joe Martin, a slim and somewhat solemn man with a graying crew cut, and by Socrates Butsikares, an editor with decades of experience on various news and feature desks, who now coordinates editorial-staff interests with those of the rest of the company and is thus deeply involved in the electronic innovation. A big man, Butsikares wore a bright yellow shirt, and there were lemons on his tie. We were joined as well by Israel Shenker, who is an old friend of mine and is one of the Times’s bright-star reporters and most skillful writers. Shenker had not previously seen the machine that was designed to change his world.

  At thirty-two pounds, it rested heavily on a table. Resembling a small blue suitcase, it was eighteen inches by thirteen by seven. It would fit under an airline seat. Its name was Teleram P-1800 Portable Terminal. Butsikares unpacked it. Its principal components were a TV-like cathode-ray tube and a freestanding keyboard that had the conventional “qwertyuiop” arrangement of a typewriter keyboard plus flanking sets of keys that had designations such as SCRL, HOME, DEL WORD, DEL CHAR, CLOSE, OPEN, and INSRT.

  Butsikares plugged the keyboard unit into the TV-screen unit, sat down, and began to write. As his fingers fluttered, words instantly surfaced on the screen, up to forty-four characters per line:

  Washington, D.C.—President Ford said today

  that he would no longer ask the Congress to

  soak the poor while his fat-cat rich friends

  take away the wealth of the Republic.

  “Now, suppose you want to get a little color into this,” Butsikares said, and he began tapping keys—marked with arrows pointing up, pointing down, pointing sideways—around the HOME key. A tiny square of light, known as the “cursor,” began to move up the face of the tube. It was something like the bouncing ball that used to hop from word to word in song lyrics on movie screens. It climbed to the first line, then moved left until Butsikares stopped it in the space between “Ford” and “said.” He tapped the INSRT key. He then wrote:

  who was wearing his faborite blue suit and his soup-stained blue tie,

  The new words came into the space after “Ford,” and to accommodate them the cursor kept shoving to the right all the other words in the sentence. They went around corners and down the screen. Butsikares moved the cursor until it rested upon and illuminated the “b” in “faborite.” He pressed the DEL CHAR (delete character) button, and the “b” vanished. He replaced it with a “v.” “Now, suppose you want to take a word out,” he said, and moved the cursor to the word “away.” “All the cursor has to do is touch any part of the word,” he went on. “Then you hit the DEL WORD key, and it’s gone.” Away went “away,” and the words to either side moved to within a space of each other. Similarly, the cursor could—if directed to—eat whole lines, whole paragraphs. “What you have written is not set in cement,” Butsikares said. “You can change anything easily. If I had my druthers, I’d rather write on this thing than on any typewriter I’ve ever seen.”

  When the screen fills (it holds about a hundred and twenty-five words), the writer just keeps going. For every new line that comes on at the bottom, a line disappears at the top. To go back and look things over, just hit the SCRL key. The whole composition will roll backward or forward like a scroll. In blocks of some three hundred and thirty words (a little less than half a Times column), the
developing story is transmogrified into sound frequencies and drawn off into a cassette. If the writer needs to see what is in the cassette, that, too, can be brought back to the screen. At the end, after the cursor has made its final tour through the text to help polish up the prose, the reporter goes to the nearest telephone. The P-1800 contains couplings that will fit over the telephone’s earpiece and speaker, and the reporter straps these into place, then dials 212-556-1330, the computer’s number. At three hundred words per minute, the P-1800 sends words as bleeps to Forty-third Street. If the story is, say, seven hundred and fifty words long, the computer has it all in a little over two minutes. An editor, sitting at an “editing terminal,” can then call for the story and see it instantly. The editor’s machine is much like the reporter’s—a rolling scroll, a dancing cursor. The editor can perform extensive changes, condensations, paragraph-shufflings, and meddle muddles, but the editor can never destroy one word of the writer’s copy, because deep in its tissues—Butsikares is now assuring Shenker—the computer will preserve the original version “until Hell freezes over.” While the temperature is dropping, though, the editor’s version goes into the newspaper, because the computer stores both, and it is the editor, in the course of things, who ultimately presses the button that causes the computer to set the type that readers will read. The story—written by a reporter and then fed through wires, transistors, and brains—has been fussed with along the way but never recopied.

  “Try it, Shenk,” Martin said.

  “It’s a new world, Shenk,” Butsikares said.

  Shenker, wearing a dark, neatly tailored pinstriped suit, looked less like a reporter than like a banker being approached for a loan. He sat down, shot his cuffs, and addressed his fingers to the P-1800. Butsikares and Martin watched expectantly. Shenker wrote smoothly, swiftly, and without hesitation, his words lighting up on the screen. He wrote:

  Israel Shenker doesn’t think that this is

  the answer to gunpowder.

  “It is easier to work with than paper,” Butsikares said. Shenker kept going, words leaping to the screen:

  It may replace the electric train as a gift

  to youngsters at Christmas.

  “The machine saves half an hour on deadline,” Butsikares told him. Reporters would no longer have to call in stories and dictate them to tape recorders, as many do now, trusting transcribers to retype them correctly on paper.

  Shenker went on writing:

  The machine could be useful if it allows one

  to sleep later or get to the office late.

  But my considered judgment is that if we got

  up a half hour earlier or worked a little

  harder we wouldn’t have to strain our

  muscles carrying around a large machine and

  searching for a harder way to do a story.

  “This is only a test model. They cost five thousand dollars apiece, and we are not placing our full order until the weight is down to around twenty-three pounds.”

  Then again, this is an ideal machine for

  editors. It will prolong their joy at the

  spectacle of reporters struggling with

  something that they don’t understand.

  Squat and bull-shouldered, Butsikares had the appearance of a lineman some years retired from a defensive platoon. “If you take a device like this out with you and you find you don’t like it, Shenk, don’t use it,” he said. “You have to ask yourself, ‘What am I trying to do? What am I covering? Is time of the essence? Will the machine help?’ It is perfect for wars, riots, golf matches, conventions. Gordon White has already used it to cover three football games, including the Cotton Bowl, and he would have missed deadlines if he hadn’t had it.”

  Shenker went on typing:

  I suppose the only thing this machine won’t

  do is eliminate editors. Let us have a

  machine that gives the reporter his due.

  Shenker at last sat back. “Have you tested this for radiation?” he said.

  “Yes,” said Butsikares. “You can be a father.”

  “You can write on it, but you can’t think on it,” Shenker commented. “It would be great for Mozart, who used to compose in his head and then write what he saw there, but not for me.” Struck with an afterthought, he went back to the keyboard:

  Do not wire until you see the flights of

  their whys.

  Do not sire until you flee the plights of

  their lies.

  “Shenk, if someone had come to you once saying, ‘Listen, kid, I’ve got a great machine—it will do away with the quill and the inkwell,’ you wouldn’t have liked it.” Shenker’s fingers were still in motion:

  What hath overwrought God?

  On the way back to The New Yorker, I stopped at a phone booth, coupled my ear to the earpiece, and dialed 556-1330. After a moment came a clear, piercing response in high C sharp—the sort of thing only German shepherds are supposed to be able to hear. Since I was not a cassette, there was nothing I could say. The phone, held close to the ear, caused pain.

  EYES STARE OUT of the darkness, green and narrow. They move closer. A young black cat, just full grown, steps out of a bit of sewer pipe and starts to move through the city. Its gait is stealthy, preying. It walks across curbs and over the cracks in sidewalks. It hunts and bristles and pads along, looking. The eyes again. Another cat. Snarl. Fangs. Battle. A fierce toss of bodies, fearsome screeches, victory. The black cat moves on. All the while, words are appearing above, below, beside the animal. And people’s names. Directed by Edward Dmytryk. Titles designed by Saul Bass. Charles K. Feldman presents Walk on the Wild Side.

  “Titles designed by Saul Bass” is the arresting line. Movie audiences used to resent, with the same resentment that is provoked by a television commercial, the long parade of credits at the beginning of a film. Saul Bass has single-handedly changed that. More than half of New York’s film critics actually cited Bass’s black stalking malkin as far and away the best thing in Walk on the Wild Side. It was. Suggesting the story’s themes, it set a mood that the ensuing picture tried but failed to match.

  Bass is imitated by just about everybody now, but no one has come near him. Sometimes his effects are relatively simple. Looking up from the hub of a wagon wheel, he stared out across a tan Pacific of endless real estate and then placed three small words on the threshold of infinity: The Big Country. To credit the cast and crew of The Seven Year Itch, he used a set of pastel panels opening like tessellated greeting cards. That was all. But the colors and layout were as visually delightful as a Mondrian in motion. And the “t” in Itch scratched itself.

  TOM EGLIN’S SENSE OF HUMOR, sharp enough in the first place, seemed to rise—to become increasingly rich in perception and range—in response to his besetting illness. Wry, funny, anecdotal, he was an easy patient to visit. He cheered you up. He told you stories. There was a basketball backboard in his bedroom with a berserk little ball. He counted up, with amusement, the shots you missed.

  Mindful of our common Scottish backgrounds—his even closer in time than mine—he told me a story about taking his sons on a voyage among the isles of Scotland. An educational cruise it was, professors aboard, a ship called Argonaut, a captain who was not called Jason. As the boys sailed into the very waters of their heritage, they were seasick. This, as they had read, was

  the land of the bens and the glens, where not even

  Sir Walter Scott could exaggerate the romantic

  beauty of that lake and mountain country penetrated

  by fjords that came in from seas that were starred

  with islands. The weather changes so abruptly

  there—closing in, lifting, closing in again—that all in

  an hour wind-driven rain may be followed by calm and

  hazy sunshine, which may then be lost in heavy mists

  that soon disappear into open skies over dark-blue seas.

  When the ocean is blue, the air is as pure
as a lens, and

  the islands seem imminent and almost encroaching,

  although they are ten or fifteen miles away—Mull, for

  example, Scarba, Islay, Jura, the Isles of the Sea.

  With all that off the starboard rail, the boys were seasick; and when they were finished being seasick, they came down with flu and went into steerage in the hold. Telling the story with a slight blush and smile, Tom confessed annoyance. He said that he had been, in fact, profoundly irritated by his sons’ becoming sick, “because the trip, as you can imagine, was not inexpensive.” This was one Scottish father speaking to another directly from the heart.

  When Bill Bradley came to Princeton, Tom was his freshman adviser, Tom’s mission being to guide this aimless youth toward some sort of utilitarian destiny. Evidently, Tom succeeded. It was the beginning of an enduring friendship, and Tom’s encouragement and generosity of counsel were prized by Bill from then to now. From time to time, our three paths crossed. When Bill was in college, and practicing by himself one summer in the Lawrenceville field house, he missed six jump shots in a row. He said to us, “You want to know something? That basket is about an inch and a half low.” Some days later, Tom got a stepladder, and he and I measured the basket. It was one and three-eighths inches too low. Any basketball player would know that the hoop was low, but not—within an eighth of an inch—how low.

  When Bill was an N.B.A. basketball player, in the early nineteen-seventies, he occasionally went to Lawrenceville to practice alone. One day, feeding the ball back to him, I developed a grandiose fantasy. “Suppose I were somehow to get into a game with you in Madison Square Garden,” I said. “Could you get me a shot in the N.B.A.?” “Of course,” he said, and he sketched out a certain baseline move by which a person two feet tall could score on Abdul-Jabbar. At that moment, out of nowhere, Tom appeared. Bradley told him to guard me, and the play worked. Tom and I reversed roles, and the play worked—the play being so ambiguous that I couldn’t stop it even though I knew what was going to happen. Now two people whose height added up to a single basketball player’s would forever be grateful to Bill for their one and only shot in the N.B.A.