Prime Green : Remembering the Sixties

by Robert Stone

  fresh croissants and pots of coffee past the tight turns. That part of town had some of Paris’s most fashionable restaurants but there were also bistros where the steak frites cost a fraction of what the same menu might demand in New York. Good wine delivered to the door was cheap enough to lure the abstemious and ruin the indulgent. This I suppose would also have been the Paris of Godard’s Breathless, whose ultra-American ingenue-temptress, played by Jean Seberg, lived at the Hotel Californie and sold Herald Tribunes on the street. It was also a quarter that for the denizens of Shakespeare and Com- pany was presided over by the genius of Samuel Beckett, who we knew lived not far away in Montparnasse. One evening Michael and I set out to actually find the great man. What we wanted from his presence was unclear to us even at the time. Maybe we thought he would treat us to a Pernod and a line-by-line explication of Molloy. We had heard that Beckett frequented a certain café and it seemed that this might be the place to run him down. I think we further nourished a picture of the divine Beckett surrounded by his charac- ters, drinking plonk with Nag and Nell and Vladimir and Estragon and of how we might pull up a couple of chairs and join them to ponder the meaninglessness of life in opaque evocative aphorisms. We actually located the place on the boulevard Montparnasse and got as far as the door. At that point we registered that the café, with hedges and murals and glistening Bar Americaine, was not the sort of place that would have welcomed Nell or Estragon or us, or even Beckett perhaps, before he had copped his Nobel Prize. We returned to the bookstore that was home. Talking to teenagers in contemporary France (I could probably say “modern” France to differentiate the present from the land of my antique recollections), I find they have trouble imagining how things were forty years ago. Staying in Shakespeare and Company in prime green: remembering the sixties 127

  the early sixties was immersion in various quotidian aspects of Paris that were distinctly odd to the American sensibility. The building that houses the shop is now a model of renovation, a structure main- taining its medieval Parisian exterior while furnished with every mod con. In the days I’m recalling the plumbing was as timeless as the chimney pots, consisting of a deep sink that served all floors and a convenience with foot-contoured platforms that enable those occu- pied there to keep their balance over the bottomless hole in the floor. Bathing was surrounded with rituals that made it doubly appreci- ated, since it consisted of an expedition over the footbridge to the Ile St. Louis and the public baths and the modest expenditure of two francs. One franc’s admission, fifty centimes for a towel, and a tip of fifty centimes more for the attendant, and the customer received a franc’s worth of hot water for a shower. It may have been worth as much to check out the bathhouse alone, a brick edifice that was a monument to nineteenth-century social justice and resembled the morgue in every silent movie version of Svengali. In the store we browsed and chatted, waiting for closing time so we could go upstairs and claim our assigned sleeping spaces among the second-story shelves. This could on occasion assume some as- pects of a lottery if George, carried away by hospitality, had wel- comed one or two more indigent scriveners than there were beds. At least once our friend Michael found that the patron had taken pity on a homeless street dweller and assigned his space to the clochard. Most nights, though, Michael could count on a comfortable kip from the wee hours until opening time the next day. We didn’t talk much about dreams so I don’t know if Michael had any. If he had I doubt they gave any clue to the future, a future in which he would have a beautiful daughter whom he would name Winona and who would become an internationally famous movie star under the name of Ry- 128 robert stone

  der, and that her lovely face and form twelve feet high would be on display at the Cinema Odeon a few blocks from our lodgings at Shakespeare and Company. On certain nights we would buy some kif from the Algerian hus- tlers in the back streets and then, in the hours after midnight, tune in Radio Luxembourg. Across the river, visible through the enor- mous second-story window, was Notre Dame. The cathedral’s tow- ers, spires, and buttresses were deliriously floodlit, and we would feast our eyes on the beauty of the place, sipping wine, tripping on fond absurdities, and generally rejoicing in the good fortune that had placed us so wonderfully at the center of our childhood dreams. Life sometimes can be subsumed in magic, although the supply is not inexhaustible. One time it touched us was during that summer in Paris. A little of that shimmer will always flicker in our hearts. prime green: remembering the sixties 129

  ELEVEN The offices of the paper I will call the National Thunder were lo- cated, in 1965, a few blocks down Fifth Avenue from the Flat- iron Building. The National Thunder was one of several publications that comprised a chain of imitation magazines and newspapers known as Universal News. They were imita- tions in the sense that their masthead names and cover layouts closely resembled those of other, better-known and more popu- lar publications. Universal News’s informing strategy was the hope of confusing a distracted and overstimulated public into buying its periodicals by mistake.

  The lord of this empire of the ersatz was a man called Fat Lou. Lou had half a dozen of these replicant outfits, ringer schlock maga- zines whose names were bogus household words. As an admirer once put it: “If there were a magazine named Harper’s Lou would start a magazine called Shmarper’s.” “Mine are better,” Fat Lou would often say. Maybe his most successful publication was what Fat Lou’s lawyers defined as “a weekly tabloid with a heavy emphasis on sex.” This was the National Thunder. It was an imitation of the National Enquirer, lacking the delicacy and taste of the original. Indeed, it offered read- ers an emphasis on sex, but an even greater emphasis on the bizarre, not to say the freakishly improbable. All Fat Lou’s wonders—the illusion of a modestly vast press cartel—required the combined labor of about ten men and women. We often pondered what ironizing aspect of fate had brought us, in mockery of our fading youth and bright hopes, to the crummiest end of Grub Street. There, in the dank basement of hackdom, lived the National Thunder, and there it was I labored. Actually, it was malicious fun to show a copy of the National Thunder to new hires and watch their lips tremble. “Now, the look of the publication may shock you,” we’d explain. If it didn’t it wasn’t for our lack of trying. Eventually we lost all decent restraint. Three of us put out the Thunder and each of us claimed some de- gree of leftist credentials. One of my colleagues was a Maoist mime, who served as a one-man politburo, providing social consciousness as required. “Armless Veteran Beaten for Not Saluting Flag” was one of his headlines. He also wrote the daily horoscopes under the byline Haji Baba, which allowed him to derive principles such as surplus value from the journeying of the stars. (“Don’t be afraid to ask for a 132 robert stone

  raise, Sagittarius! Your boss always keeps some of the value of your labor for himself!”) Another was a passionate young man who went about in a similar stage of outraged political excitement and who resembled the late actor Zero Mostel. My own specialty was the composition of headlines, and my weekly aspiration was to make the front page. The trick of the tabloid front page was to combine a lascivious or revolting photo- graph with a headline at least equally arresting of attention. Hack writers come and go, but a good art department, one that can reli- ably fake pictures from the photo library, is irreplaceable. It is not true, however, that one sleazy picture is worth a thousand inflated words. Hemingway would always say that he learned his trade at the Kansas City Star. With this in mind, I should pause for a little reflec- tion on what I learned at the National Thunder, beyond the depths of vulgarity of which I was capable. Certain laws obtain in all fictive enterprises, low journalism included. They are almost moral laws, the way grammar in its way is moral. I have come to believe that language, a line of print, say, is capa- ble of inhabiting the imagination far more intensely than any pic- ture, however doctored. The same principle applies to the novel, if it works. No Hollywood flick, no movie of any provenance, can ever provide an experience of the battle of Borodino as intense as that provided in Tolsto
y’s pages. Descriptive language supplies deeper penetration, attaches itself to the rods and cones of interior percep- tion, to a greater degree than a recovered or remembered image. Language is the process that lashes experience to the intellect. I learned this working against deadline, trying to get an old prime green: remembering the sixties 133

  horror-movie still to work as my front page. Our one-person art de- partment, serving the entire Fat Lou realm, was Natasha, an artist of great effrontery and skill. Our prospective cover was the head shot of a slain lady vampire. In order not to limit possibility and make the fantasy our own, we asked her, the art department, to ink out the fangs. In the process she had an accident; ink covered everything. Time was running out; the mats had to go to Jersey to be printed in- side of half an hour. Our front page was a distressed-looking starlet whose mouth was a mass of slop. In black and white, the ink looked for all the world like blood. I started playing with ghastly headlines, sizing them in. All at once, driven by hysteria, by Satan, by my Friday afternoon craving for a paycheck, suddenly I had it: mad dentist yanks girl’s tongue By God, it fit like a nail! Still, it remained to write the story, and I wanted this one for myself. Dateline: Podunk, Alaska, or Gondawooleroo, NSW, or Bluebell, Delaware. Anywhere that didn’t exist. We maintained an atlas to avoid the accident of hitting on an actual place. By now the readers (you, ladies and gentlemen, not the readers of the National Thunder) will have surmised the great redeeming element in our work. What kept us on the right side of madness was this: that as lousy as the world might be, though life might condemn us to the sick soft un- derbelly of journalism, things were not quite so awful that the lu- natic nightmares we fashioned had any direct connection with reality or, as it is sometimes called, truth. Anyway, this just in: —A beautiful young model, suffering an impacted wisdom tooth in this isolated desert community, was the victim of a ghastly muti- 134 robert stone

  lation yesterday. Overcome by periodontal pain while driving by Egg Drop, she called at the office of the town dentist, Dr. Homer Creel. Rendering his patient unconscious, he proceeded to work his ghoulish “surgery.” Speaking with great difficulty at Yoof City Ani- mal Hospital, the model, Miss Letitia Fumpton, fought bravely to describe her ordeal. “He told me something,” she said, on regaining consciousness, “something about discomfort.” Creel was taken into custody by the Federal Fish and Wildlife Service.— (Here space and custom required a picture of Dr. Homer Creel. Working against the clock, we shuffled through our gallery of pic- tures of creepy people. The weirdest, nuttiest person we could find represented was a nineteenth-century novelist. Since the novelist had never been a resident of Utah, at that time the only American state in which dead people could sue, we were home free. Dr. Creel’s head shot did not even require doctoring; his period attire was to be taken as a function of his eccentricity.) Our foto file had many morbid pictures of deceased individuals undergoing the gruesome horrors of decomposition. There were also many portrait pictures of people in the fullness of health. Some of these portraits, with a little alteration, could be passed off as anyone. Like Dr. Homer Creel, for example, the predatory periodontist. We used Generalissimo Francisco Franco as Haji Baba, the progressive astrologer. Trotsky had a role too, I remember, as a slumlord brained by one of his own defective bathtubs. Woodrow Wilson was the horse handicapper, a role undertaken in real life by one of Fat Lou’s cronies. Identity was a protean and unstable element around the Thunder. We could combine an action shot with a grinning cadaver or terri- prime green: remembering the sixties 135

  fied victim-to-be, a vehicle, a harness, what-have-you, all spliced by the genius of Natasha in the art department, into a form that told a very grim story indeed. Thus: skydiver devoured by starving birds And lickety-split there it was and you could hear the clacking beaks and the echoing screams of the doomed sportsman, his fea- tures ripped warm and bleeding, his fingers clawed from the harness by the hunger-crazed kites and corbies, not four-and-twenty but thousands! All this above the horrified upturned faces of the watch- ing crowd! As the weeks went by, bringing the due date of our next possible un- employment checks, we pulled out all the stops. At one point, some zany state’s attorney general, with nothing better to do than read scuzz tabloids, inquired into one of our stories, EXPLODING CIGAR KILLS NINE. The AG was ready to prosecute. We had to explain that just as names were changed to protect the innocent in our newspapers, so also circumstances were adjusted, that the order of facts or even the facts themselves were conceived in such a way that no one should suffer embarrassment. The light went on in his brain after a mo- ment. Our sales were interdicted in his state, which, we had to re- mind him, contained no such town as Ding-a-Ling. One day, going up in the elevator, I saw Alger Hiss. And it wasn’t like thinking you saw Joe Hill; he was really there. All at once I reg- istered the presence of a tall, professorial man in a faded brown fe- dora. In each hand, he carried a dark leather bag which might have been a sample case. It was a stormy day. His hat brim was turned 136 robert stone

  down and the morning rain ran onto the narrow shoulders of his raincoat. His stance was braced against the weight of the cases, which imposed on him a Willy Loman–like submissiveness; he was the portrayal of reduction and humiliation. Still, I thought his face was marked with a certain irony, the curled bloodless lips, the arched eyebrow. So sacrificial a figure he appeared, so accepting of his suspension from grace, that he gave off a sort of darshana, like the Christus in some Popular Front crucifixion by Philip Evergood. He and I were the only people in the elevator. I wanted to turn around and say something. Maybe I wanted to spin suddenly and say, “I know you didn’t do it, Mr. Hiss.” Or maybe I wanted to say: “I always knew you did it, commie!” Maybe I wanted to ask him: “Did you do it, Mr. Hiss? You can tell me.” I’d ask for an interview. All the rest of the day I went around telling people that I’d seen Alger Hiss in the elevator. It proved a conversation stopper. A few weeks before this tour of the corporate workplace ended, before I qualified for unemployment insurance again and could go back to work on my novel, I got hired away from the National Thun- der by a rival tabloid. I have trouble believing this represented any kind of professional recognition. However, two of the three of us from the National Thunder found ourselves working across town at a somewhat higher salary. The atmosphere at the Inside Scoop was different from that at the National Thunder. Though the word fits uneasily, one might have called it more authentic. It was not and did not attempt to appear a “chain.” The product was unitary, a tabloid on the pattern of the Na- tional Enquirer. Like its model, it sold sex and grotesquerie, though its inclination was toward show business and the rising celebrity culture. Its most distressing aspect, from the staff perspective, was prime green: remembering the sixties 137

  that some of the stories behind the headlines were more or less true; that is, events related to the ones in the story had actually occurred somewhere in the real world. These developments were always re- grettable, and the notion that they had befallen actual people, or re- flected human behavior, was disturbing. Sometimes informants or aspiring paparazzi showed up at the of- fices with tips or compromising photographs. The man who ran the paper I call the Inside Scoop had once been notorious for his gossip magazine. He had figured in a major Hollywood libel suit, and on one occasion an outraged reader gunned him down—real pistol, real bullets, real time. By the time I went to work for him, however, he was fading into relative obscurity, and his A-list of “showgirls,” “profiles,” and high-living gangsters was dissolving into morning- after mist. He himself had come to inhabit a ghost town peopled by phantoms of the Great White Way. To Big Bob, the most important man in town was Walter Winchell, to whose friendship and patronage he generously ascribed his own top position. This was in the period not long before Winchell’s death, when the Stork Club, W.W.’s column, big-time radio, and even the Daily Mirror were all things of the past. In Big Bob’s book, though, Winchell was bigger than Norma Desmond, and nothing lay beyond his powers of good or ev
il. Of Bob’s media glory, it seemed only this imitation tabloid re- mained, and I remember a wistful sense of reduced circumstances around the offices. The place had been engineered from a former milliner’s loft, a mere pistol shot’s distance from Bloomingale’s. As for me, a reasonably educated person with pretensions to a high call- ing, a family man and a father of young children, it was pitiful and, God knew, a moral and intellectual humiliation as well as a treason of clerkery and worse. 138 robert stone

  It was a shame how some of the stories were true. But the fact was that the old Scoop, with its overworked, underpaid staff of heads, hip- sters, players, and urban frontiersmen, its doctored, covert, and dis- gusting photographs—the shameless lies and the shameful authenticity—kept me in a state of unsound euphoria. It was the first job I ever held down where drugs were consumed during work- ing hours—exempting the half pints of Gold Leaf cognac that rewrite on the Daily News consumed between midnight and dawn. The skewed mortuary glamour of Big Bob’s operation, the Runyon- esque shadows and flashes, held me bound in fascination. In retro- spect, the associations I made between absurdist extravagance and controlled substances would cause me some trouble down the road. Having dodged or at least survived a bullet in the service of an unfettered press, Bob often entertained a large, elegantly suited man who looked as though he had illuminated a few disputations in his day. The big fella was known at the Scoop as Richie Construction, which was either a derivation of his name or his corporate identity. In any case, Richie knew and admired Walter Winchell, had made himself invaluable to the great man many times, and had a vast store of “Walter stories.” All Walter stories had the same general signifi- cance at their core, namely the obsessiveness of Winchell’s revenge, his vast mechanisms of control and readiness to injure anyone, no matter how pathetically powerless or well intentioned that person might be, in retaliation for the most ephemeral slights. Richie had explanations for many things that had been a feature of life in his era, from the ineluctability of Walter Winchell’s vengeance to the origins of organized crime. The creation myths of the two were identical. “The smart people worked it out. Somebody makes a mistake— they gotta pay.” He would recount this cheerless message with a sad prime green: remembering the sixties 139