Other Glass Teat

by Harlan Ellison

  In short, Christmas is to me humbug of a high order.

  So omnipresent is the hypocritical hysteria surrounding 25 December that the closest thing to a Scrooge we have to admire on tv, Jack Klugman as Oscar in The Odd Couple, was shoehorned into a (really funny, dammit) takeoff on the Dickens “classic” in last week’s segment. But refusing to defy convention, they had poor old irascible Klugman repent his perfectly logical attitude about not appearing in a holiday rendition of A Christmas Carol and off he went blathering tidings of good cheer, wassail, wassail.

  I realize this admission of my loathing for such a sacred event will lose me hordes of readers, many of whom sat still all year as I pilloried Agnew, Nixon, Reagan, the Left, the Right, the Fervent Center, motherhood, apple pie, and the American Way. But if you’d spent a whole week watching re-reruns of King of Kings (in two parts), The Robe, Demetrius and the Gladiators, The Story of Ruth, Miracle on 34th Street, Silent Night, Lonely Night, Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima, White Christmas, and a horde of moronic specials among which only How the Grinch Stole Christmas (through which I cheered for the Grinch) stands out as palatable, you’d be cranky, too.

  Christmas, it seems to me, sends everyone right off their chumps. They go berserk. My mail is clogged with hundreds of mass-produced Xmas cards all sporting prerecorded Muzak greetings, most of them hedging their best for Jews, Moslems, and Shintoists by proffering wishes for a “happy holiday,” be it Hanukkah, Christmas, Whitsuntide, or whatever other pagan ritual you observe. In the supermarket check-out line, with nine hundred Valley consumers waiting to pay for the gallons of booze and eggnog they’ll have to tipple up for their sodden guests, everything comes to a dead halt while the box boys and lady checkers rush over to one of their number clutching a walleyed puppy with a sprig of holly attached to his collar.

  Everyone goes completely bonko.

  (Yet in the parking lot, a stalled car nets its flustered driver a stream of obscenities from other motorists, delayed by ten seconds in their dash to the holiday parties and a little ineffectual groping of each other’s wives under the mistletoe.)

  Bah! Humbug! Bullshit!

  If they spent half the money they waste on Xmas cards alone for meals for children, it would better serve the intent of the Prince of Peace. I’m sure there’s a broken link in logic there somewhere, as my believing friends assure me, clucking their tongues and calling me a scrooge—not knowing they pay me the highest compliment. But even if my logic is spotty, you know what I mean. That is, you know if your minds haven’t been brainwashed by a constant sound track of “Deck the Halls with Boughs of Whatever.”

  Moving right along in this warm and cheery evocation of the holiday spirit, I must now tell you that in a lifestyle I’ve pursued for many years, a life-style which does not allow for acceptance or bestowal of Christmas gifts, a blemish has appeared.

  I received a Christmas gift that practically brought tears to my eyes.

  The Young Lawyers is doing my script, “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs.”

  If you’ve been with us through the last few months of columns, you’ll have read the script in its five installments, and you’ll be aware that because of a network reluctance to dwell any further on youth, dope, involvement, or relevance, the script had been shelved indefinitely.

  Well, last week, as I emerged from a screening of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s There Was a Crooked Man…(a Kirk Douglas starrer written by Benton and Newman of Bonnie and Clyde fame, which may not be as obstinately shitty a film as, say, George Seaton’s Airport, but is nonetheless a shabbily direct steal in remake form of Mark Hellinger’s 1947 masterpiece, Brute Force, almost scene by scene transposed into the Old West), I was stopped by Hank Coleman, head of business affairs for Paramount. “Hey, we’re doing your script,” he said, and seemed quite happy about it.

  Just the week before I’d talked to the new producer on the series, Herb Hirschman, and he’d told me the chances didn’t look good. When he’d replaced Matt Rapf as head honcho on the series, new scripts had been assigned that were less youth-oriented, and that had seemed to ring the death knell for “Whimper.” Mr. Hirschman advised me, however, that he’d liked the script a great deal, and had tried to get ABC to okay its production by substituting the drug element with “black magic” and a kind of a Manson shtick. Having learned long since one must camouflage one’s more fiery opinions, I died a lot inside, but said I wasn’t sure that would work, since the drug element of the script, while not starkly in the foreground, was a major motivator for the heroine. He agreed, but said it was a matter of getting ABC to say yes or forgetting the script. I must confess at that point I was at my second-lowest ebb (rock bottom was when I learned the script was killed in the first place) and would have been just as happy to see the words laid to rest, rather than to twist and cripple them merely to ease the befuddlement of network programmers who had lost the pulse of the audience.

  Mr. Hirschman was obviously concerned, and was very decent to me in confessing quite frankly that, because the script seemed richer to him than some of the new ones commissioned, he wanted to save it, and while we might not be as happy with a revised version in which black magic or a hippie cult leader served as analogue for a drug-oriented amorality, it was the only game in town and if we wanted to stand even a chance of winning, we might have to play it ABC’s way.

  I thanked him and he said he’d keep me informed on ABC’s decision.

  I heard nothing further till Jack Guss, the story editor of the series, saw me at that same screening. He said there was still hope, that ABC had rejected the idea of black magic, but had not yet given the go-ahead on the original version.

  So when I emerged from the Academy Award Theater, and Hank Coleman buttonholed me to tell me ABC had said do it the way it was written originally, I must confess my heart gave a leap inside me and I damn near hugged him. (Those of you who (a) recall that Mr. Coleman was not terribly happy with the length of time it’d taken me to write the script in the first place, (b) understand the protocol of Hollywood in which heads of business affairs are the men who haggle out the terms of contract with one’s agent, and (c) know Mr. Coleman, will realize how taken aback he was, and how motivated by pure joy I was.) (In fact, Mr. Coleman’s son, standing beside him, looked momentarily panicked as this strange longhair tried to embrace his father.)

  I sang all the way home.

  The following Monday I called Paramount and spoke to Jim McAdams, the associate on the series, and he confirmed that, yes, they were going ahead with it. The script was being put “up on the boards” for a shooting schedule, and it was planned for in-front-of-the-cameras in two sessions: January 6, 7, and 8, and 18, 19, and 20. There were problems, of course, because the script had been laid aside while changes had been made in the series.

  There might have to be cameo insertions of the new WASP attorney the network had insisted be added to the cast. Since we had lost the shooting days in Boston (where the series is laid), I might have to rewrite several scenes to take advantage of standing sets on the Paramount lot. Other minor fixes.

  But they seemed so minuscule compared to the fate ordained earlier, I reaffirmed my desire to come in at their behest and do whatever changing was deemed necessary—consistent with my nasty insistence on maintaining the purity of the work.

  And so, friends out there in Knobtwiddlesville, despite my blithely scroogelike attitude toward Christmas, this year I do do DO believe in Santy Claus. He gave me a surprise present I never thought I could get. And because of this amazing metamorphosis, I give you all a Christmas present (a bit belatedly; sometime in February if all goes well). The best present and the truest present I could give, since it lies outside my power to give you peace and universal kindness. I give you the best part of me, my words. Thrown up on your screens for whatever joy and enlightenment they may contain, assuring you they were set down with love and attention and truth as I know it.

  More than that I don’t think you have the right to expect
from any mere scribbler of sentences.

  And if I may be pardoned for saying so, “god bless us, every one!”

  92: 8 JANUARY 71

  It is probably not premature to advise you that these next ten weeks of columns will be my last. After two and a half years of doing “The Glass Teat,” I’ve begun to suspect my usefulness as a critic of television and the cultural scene surrounding it may be coming to an end. I don’t want to go into it here…now. I’ll use my final column to look back and assess whatever small good these words may have done. Suffice it to say, for the moment, there are no external pressures involved in my decision. Those who know me at all well will understand it is the call of my gypsy blood that compels me to close out “The Glass Teat” ten weeks from now. I’ve had my say, at considerable length, and having so done, I’d like to move on to something else. I haven’t decided just what as yet, but as soon as I get it figured out, and providing the editors and publisher of the Free Press and I can get together on some new forum for this writer, you might even find me wandering around here muttering about something else every week. We’ll see.

  The reason I bring this up now, instead of springing it on you ten weeks from now, is twofold. First, I don’t want you faithful fans should go into instant withdrawal, fat chance. The second part is that the lessons I’ve learned in doing these columns never seem to cease, and again this week I learned one, and I didn’t want to pass up the mention of this blessed serendipity, something that might get forgotten by the time I bid adieu.

  The lesson I learned this week was provided by Mr. Richard Cavett, a man whose late-night talkathons have provided me with an inordinate amount of meaty viewing these last two years. (By now the Lester Maddox-Jim Brown-Truman Capote contretemps has gone down as video history and we can look forward to seeing it rerun every year like those ghastly replays of The Robe, save with the Cavett show there is a certain joy to be derived from watching Georgia’s gubernatorial pinhead crucify himself before our disbelieving eyes.)

  Mr. Cavett sat as amicus curiae to the gladiatorial combat between film critic John Simon and a frenetic will-o’-the-wisp named Erich Segal, author of a book called Love Story and a film of the same name. And in the thrust of literary trident, the slash of Thracian invective, I learned an important lesson:

  Without critics we are doomed to die a strangulating death of mediocrity.

  Let’s talk about it. First, Mr. Segal and his magnum opus.

  Had I not seen Love Story only a few days before Mr. Segal appeared on the Cavett show, I might well have gone for his okeydoke and believed he had, indeed, written the great Mass American Novel. But unfortunately for Mr. Segal, I sat through every moronic moment of his great work and, for the first time, I adored the usually serpentine Mr. Simon.

  In the event you are one of the six or seven people in the civilized world who have neither read the thin little novel that has sold millions of copies in hardcover and paperback while holding top spot for almost a year on the best-seller charts, or helped break box-office records in every major American city since the movie version opened, I’ll quickly recap the plot. It will detain neither of us very long.

  Oliver goes to Harvard. Oliver is Ryan O’Neal. His girlfriend is Jenny. She has a smart mouth on her. Ali McGraw is Jenny. They get married. She comes down with a serious—but unnamed—malady and has only a few months to live. Finally, with upper lip stiffer than one’s credulity has to be to buy all this, she dies, leaving her young husband bereft. That’s it. That’s the entire plot, what with a few minor omissions about his wealthy family and their snobbishness, and her father who runs a bakery. You know, local color. That sorta stuff.

  Now the thing about this totteringly ancient plot that seems to grab folks (mostly the ladies, from what I can gather) is the incredible depth of love Oliver and Jenny have for one another, and the tragedy of her early demise. And I grant you, summarizing a full novel in as brief a space as above, even a classic novel, makes it sound pretty silly. Which I guess is unfair. (Moby-Dick is about this coo-coo chasing a big fish. Huckleberry Finn is about this hippy orphan kid and a nigger, running around the river. For Whom the Bell Tolls is about a guy who decides getting laid is more fun than blowing up bridges. War and Peace is about…but you get the idea.)

  Only trouble is, Love Story deals with the realities of love and death in the same way Dick Tracy deals with law and order. It is a schlock novel of the rankest form. It is cheap, treacly, mawkish, true-confession level sentimentality, played for every jerked tear in the ducts. It is what some critics once called a “three Kleenex movie.” The night I saw it, at a screening for the Writers Guild, it was all one could do to make out the simplistic dialogue over the sounds of sobbing in the theater. Strong men and liberated women wept unashamedly. A veritable Niagara of empathy. It was all I could do to keep myself from laughing out loud. Cindy and I sat there, covering our mouths so we wouldn’t do a bummer on the destroyed sympathizers all around us. A snicker did pass my lips, however, when at the end of the film, as Miss McGraw lay dying (rather prettily, not even a bedsore; apparently Mr. Segal picked a disease that smites yet does not wither), she implores Mr. O’Neal to hold her. Not satisfied with this clichéd denouement, Mr. Segal went one better into heart tug as she insists he not just put his arm around her, but actually crawl up onto the bed beside her.

  That really collapsed the audience. Not a dry eye in the house. Except Cindy’s and mine. I snickered.

  “You’re really fucked!” someone hissed at me in the dark.

  No, you don’t. Not on your pocket hanky, you don’t. I won’t cop to that one. I refuse to bite on a characterization of myself as a stonehearted sonofabitch who can’t give in to a little simple humanity in the face of genuine tragedy. Because Love Story isn’t tragedy, it’s bullshit. Pure and simple lard. Maybe chicken fat. Death of a Salesman is tragedy. When Linda looks down at Willy Loman’s grave and says she finally paid off the mortgage that day, and they’re free, I go to pieces. A Child Is Waiting is a tragedy. When Burt Lancaster takes Judy Garland to the state home where overage mongoloids and retards scratch their beard stubble and mutter like infants, I weep unashamedly. Kent State is tragedy. Almost a year later, when I look at the face of that coed, kneeling beside her fallen classmate, I feel my gut move as if a snake were squeezing my heart. Paths of Glory is tragedy. When the scapegoat soldiers are taken out to be shot, I scream with pain and loss and emotion.

  But not Love Story, thank you. That isn’t tragedy. It is sinking to the lowest possible level of the human condition to wring a few bogus, ersatz tears from people who could watch Catherine Genovese get knifed to death right in front of them, and wouldn’t make a move.

  I’m not bought that cheaply. And neither are my tears.

  It is this descent to crude bottoms that deprives Love Story of any claim to the big-A “Art.” And I don’t give a damn how many claims to nobility Erich Segal makes for his stupid book and movie.

  Because—and here’s the point—debasing emotions like love and recognition of one’s own mortality are the cheap tricks of panhandlers, flack merchants, con men, hypocrites, tasteless and talentless charlatans.

  John Simon apparently recognized all of the foregoing, because he came into Cavett’s arena and—very politely, but very firmly—let Mr. Segal know he saw through him. Now Simon has never been one of my favorite people; he isn’t the most lovable man in the universe, nor do I think he cares to be. But he is an honest critic, a man of taste and considerable wit, and his standards of cinematic excellence are at once rational and lofty. So, despite my reservations about Simon the Man, when Simon the Critic was pilloried by the Roman Circus crowd attending Cavett’s show, I learned my lesson about the need for criticism.

  Segal played to the mob like Pilate, or maybe like Willie Stark. He continually vindicated himself (to their applause and huzzahs) by saying he hadn’t set out to write Art, but had somehow—magically, wonderfully, ain’t I a cockeyed wonder?—struck a clear
bell tone of human compassion that reached billions and billions around the world. Simon chose not to deal him the obvious blow. Simon is a gentleman. I am not. Neither am I one of the “effete litterateurs” Mr. Segal said was the only group who’d denigrated his effort.

  What Mr. Segal and his book/movie represent is the mob taste for simple solutions and handy categorizations. Neither of these speak to Art in any way. Mr. Simon stated the case for the big A. He said the sentiment was false and cheap and forced, and when Mr. Segal demanded he give examples of truth in that area (though Simon was under no obligation to do so), Simon rattled off half a dozen better examples, from Thomas Mann to Schnitzler. It made Mr. Segal sit back in his chair.

  The studio audience, of course, booed Simon roundly. He could have been no more hated had he said Jesus Christ was a closet queen or Kate Smith fucks aardvarks. He was quite literally (and literarily) attacking a sacred cow. And the mob will not tolerate such heresies.

  Simon played on, unperturbed. He knew where he was. He was championing permanence, value, honesty, utter craftsmanship, ennoblement of the spirit, and good writing. He was not about to be bullied by a lynch throng.

  It was one of the finest moments I’ve ever seen on television, and it ranks John Simon forevermore in my mind in the forefront of courageous critics.

  Perhaps it’s only a vainglorious attempt on my part to validate my own criticisms, to say that we need, desperately need men like John Simon, who will point out the optings for debased matter over the striving for ennoblement. Perhaps I have little faith in the massmind, the common taste. But when I see Jacqueline Susann and Erich Segal holding sway at the pinnacle of the best-seller list, when I see Jackie Gleason and Andy Griffith refurbished or reissued while East Side, West Side and Slattery’s People vanish into cancellation, when I see Lester Maddox and Ronald Reagan deified while Adlai Stevenson and Eugene McCarthy go off with broken hearts, I am forced to the conclusion that people don’t always know what’s best for them. And while I would take up arms to prevent rule by an elite cabal, even as I take up arms to try and end the rule of the yahoos, it seems right and good that we have men like Simon, critics of taste, with a perspective across the centuries, who can raise their voices to say Sturgeon’s Law is true: