But I suspect that this is a vain hope. Whenever I think of the self-concern and intransigence that prevent certain people from facing up to this plague, I recall the tobacco manufacturer I encountered some years ago. I am an alumnus of a so-called prestigious Southern university, and I met the gentleman on a spring morning when we sat in our robes waiting for the commencement exercises to begin. The university has been endowed principally through fortunes made in cigarettes, so it was not unfitting that he, a member of the board of trustees, was also chief executive officer of one of the largest tobacco companies in America. Although he lived in New York, he was a Southerner (you could tell from his down-home accent and a kind of countrified friendliness that he was a good ole boy), and as we sat in the heat, shooting the breeze, I gradually perceived that he was in something less than robust health. His complexion was sallow—no, waxen—bags hung haggardly beneath his eyes; his lips had a violet, cyanotic hue. His end of the conversation was interrupted by thick, croupy coughs. Unfiltered cigarettes of the brand he manufactured never left his lips except when he removed a butt to light a fresh one. He was a caricature of a chain smoker, but then I asked myself, What did I expect? Certainly not abstinence in a tobacco tycoon—but even moderation?
Finally his voice grew serious. He said he was in a long, drawn-out fight with the Surgeon General, whom he called a son of a bitch. He expressed his belief that the Surgeon General's report on smoking was a plot, although he didn't say whose. I listened patiently for a while, and I suppose I should have been more circumspect, but I wasn't. I told him, in as delicate a fashion as possible, that I had quit cigarettes some years before due to chronic bronchitis and that, begging to differ with him, I felt that the Surgeon General's report had made a good case for smoking as the cause of my trouble. At that point I sensed a veil coming down between us, and his eyes narrowed, reflecting betrayal. “There's not an iota of truth in that entire book,” he said sharply, “and you are very gullible if you buy any of its cheap line of garbage.” Those were his exact words, and they are imprinted on my memory as clearly as the terrible convulsion that seized him at that instant, turning his face crimson and causing him to lose his voice in a fit of strangulation. Both embarrassed and concerned, I rose to fetch a glass of water, but when I returned I saw that he had wheeled about and his back was implacably set against me. I was the enemy. We never spoke again. Thus always yawns the chasm between the apostate and the true believer.
[Nation, March 7, 1987.]
Too Late for Conversion or Prayer
I must speak of my favorite pill in the perspective of Christian theology. In order to explain this connection I shall have to include some intimate personal details that I hope will not offend sensitive readers.
A number of years ago I got into a friendly but spirited argument with the Episcopal bishop of New York, whom I encountered at a party on Martha's Vineyard. We were discussing the existence of God. I declared to the bishop that the nonexistence of God could be proved by the existence of the prostate gland. The bishop, a liberal, had been describing Darwinian evolution as the product of “God's divine wisdom.” No wise God, I countered, could have let evolve a biological species, such as Homo sapiens, in which any organ so stupid, so faulty, so prone to disease and dysfunction as the prostate gland had been allowed to exist. Ergo: if God did exist, he certainly was not wise. The assembled guests, who were listening to our discussion, applauded me—at least the men did—but the argument went unresolved.
Some years after this meeting, when I began to experience prostate trouble, I wondered if I might not have courted the wrath of God through my contemptuous skepticism. Maybe the bishop was right. It could be that God did exist, after all, and it was disbelievers like me whom he punished most exultantly by wreaking havoc on their prostate glands. I thought about expressing contrition, but the seriousness of my symptoms convinced me that it was too late for conversion or prayer.
When a man begins to have prostate trouble he experiences difficulties with his plumbing. The problem is often idiosyncratic, varying from man to man, but it almost always involves aberrant behavior of the bladder. Sometimes a man will feel the urgent need to urinate many times a day, discovering that each time he goes to the bathroom he passes only a small amount of urine. Sometimes the flow is not steady, sometimes it is weak; often one has to push or strain to begin urination. All of these difficulties are the result of a usually benign condition in which the enlarged prostate encroaches on the urethra.
In my own case the most serious manifestations occurred at night, when the call to urinate forced me to get up almost every hour. Such an irregular sleeping pattern began to create in me severe exhaustion. More seriously, however, I discovered that my flow was beginning to shut down almost completely. One morning at dawn I realized to my horror that I couldn't urinate at all. I had to be driven to the emergency room of the hospital, where I was relieved of my distress by a catheter inserted into my bladder. It was my birthday. You may imagine the revolting self-pity I felt at celebrating that day as I shuffled around hesitantly with a tube stuck up my penis and a plastic bag attached to my leg.
Of course, I went to a urologist immediately. The doctor examined me carefully and determined that I didn't have cancer. This was a great relief, but then he said that I might have to submit to a surgical procedure to relieve the symptoms. I asked him to describe the operation. He told me jovially that, because the procedure resembled the technique used to ream out sewer pipes, it was often called the “Roto-Rooter.” A long instrument with a blade at the end was inserted up through the penis, and portions of the prostate gland were shaved off; this allowed the return of the urine flow, and the patient began to function normally. Well, almost normally, the doctor said after a pause. I asked him to explain.
There were side effects to be expected, he went on. The most common complication had to do with sexual function. The capacity for orgasm was usually retained, although, he added, a bit hesitantly, some men felt diminished pleasure. More significant, however, was the nature of the ejaculation. He then described a process so bizarre that I scarcely believed it, but it happens to be true. In the majority of cases, the semen was propelled not forward in the usual fashion but backward into the bladder, where it was eliminated through urination. Would this cause one's partner, I wondered, to whisper not “Have you come, darling?” but “Have you gone?” At any rate, as he described this process, known as “retrograde ejaculation,” I began to feel faint. Although the majority of the operations had no seriously negative aftermath, he continued, he felt it was his duty to tell me that, in a few cases, there were complications. I again asked him to elaborate. Some men were left impotent, he said, with no erectile function. What else? I inquired. A small number of patients suffered permanent urinary incontinence, requiring the daily use of diapers.
By this time I was sobbing uncontrollably, but inside, so the doctor couldn't see.
Then his expression brightened. Surgery should of course be avoided if possible, and he wanted me to try a new pill that had just been made available to urologists. Although it was not yet approved by the Food and Drug Administration, many urologists had achieved great success in preliminary tests. Originally intended as a medication to lower blood pressure, it was discovered to have the property of relaxing the muscles at the bladder outlet. The doctor urged me to take the pills home and see if they worked.
Dear reader, to make a long story short, a miracle happened. The pill worked magnificently. For the past five years I have been taking one small five-milligram dose nightly, and my flow has been like Niagara. There have been no side effects. I did not have to have that Roto-Rooter. I do not have to wear diapers. I am not impotent. My semen does not go backward but still spurts out merrily in the direction Nature intended. I am at peace with my genitourinary system and with the world. The pill is a true wonder drug, which demonstrates for me that if the bishop of New York was right and God exists, and that if he is trying to punish men by w
ay of their prostate glands, we have triumphantly outwitted him.
[Egoïst 7 (1985).]
Bagatelles
The Big Love
It usually requires a certain arrogance to say of a new book that it is a masterpiece. For one thing, the risks are large; in his runaway enthusiasms, the person who is rash enough to proclaim a new book “great,” “a staggering achievement,” “a work of art of the highest order” (these are the phrases most commonly employed) is likely to be proved wrong, even long before time and posterity have had a chance to assay his judgment. Recall, for example, By Love Possessed. A masterpiece? The reviewers seemed to think so, yet now it seems apparent that it wasn't that at all—at least not proven; opposed to what was originally claimed for it, too many people have considered it an unfair struggle and a thick-headed bore. At certain rare moments, however, there will appear a work of such unusual and revealing luminosity of vision, of such striking originality, that its stature is almost indisputable; one feels that one may declare it a masterpiece without hesitation, or fear that the passing of time might in any way alter one's conviction. Such a book is The Big Love, a biography of Beverly Aadland by her mother, Mrs. Florence Aadland. To Mrs. Aadland and her collaborator, Tedd Thomey, we owe a debt of gratitude; both of them must feel a sense of pride and relief at having delivered themselves, after God alone knows how much labor, of a work of such wild comic genius.
I would like to make it plain, however, that—as in most high comic art—there is a sense of moral urgency in The Big Love which quite removes it from the specious and, more often than not, sensational claptrap we have become accustomed to in popular biography. Witness the first line of the book—a first line that is as direct and in its own way as reverberant as any first line since “Call me Ishmael.”
There's one thing I want to make clear right off [Mrs. Aadland begins], my baby was a virgin the day she met Errol Flynn.
[Continuing, she says:] Nothing makes me sicker than those dried-up old biddies who don't know the facts and spend all their time making snide remarks about my daughter Beverly, saying she was a bad girl before she met Errol….I'm her mother and she told me everything. She never lied to me. Never.
Already it is obvious that we are in contact with a moral tone entirely different from, let us say, the lubricity of Errol Flynn's own biography, My Wicked, Wicked Ways, or the self-exploitation and narcissism so prevalent in those boring memoirs, which appear almost monthly, of yet another international lollipop. In striking this note of rectitude, Mrs. Aadland makes it clear that furthest from her desires is a wish to titillate, or in any way to make sensational an affair which, after all, ended in such tragedy and heartbreak for all concerned. Indeed, if it were not for the sense of decency and high principles which informs every page of The Big Love, we would be in the presence not of a comic masterwork at all, but only one more piece of topical trash, hardly distinguishable from the life of a Gabor sister.
The stunning blonde who was to become “Bev” to her mother and, at the age of fifteen, “Woodsie” (because of her resemblance to a wood nymph) to Errol Flynn, was conceived, so Flo Aadland tells us, in an apartment on Mariposa Avenue in Hollywood on December 7, 1941. The date, of course, was ominous, contributing much to further Flo's lasting suspicion that her own life, and now Bev's, was “preordained.” Tragedy had dogged much of Flo's life. She possessed, for one thing, an artificial foot, the result of a traffic accident, and this misfortune—usually referred to as “the tragedy of my leg”—coupled with a previous miscarriage, had made it seem to her that life had hardly been worth living until Bev came along. Bev—who was a precocious child, walking at ten months, singing “all the radio commercials” at a year—altered the complexion of Flo's life entirely. “She was such a different baby, different in intelligence as well as beauty. I wondered…if she had been given to me…to make up for the tragedy of my leg.” Shortly after this her speculation was confirmed when, riding with little Bev on a Hermosa Beach bus, she met a female Rosicrucian “who had made a deep study of the inner ways of life.”
Discussing Bev, the Rosicrucian told Flo: “ ‘This baby has an old soul….She is very mature….Were the babies you lost before both girls?’
“ ‘Yes,’ I said.
“The Rosicrucian lady nodded and then held both of Beverly's hands tightly in her own. ‘Twice before, this baby tried to be born….She has always known she was to fill the emptiness that entered your life when you lost your leg….And you must realize this also….This child has been born for untold fame and fortune.’ ”
Bev's early life was the normal one for a Hollywood youngster. So gifted that she was able to sing, in immaculate pitch, a popular song called “Symphony” at seventeen months, she was also almost overwhelmingly beautiful, and at the age of three, impersonating Bette Davis, won the costume beauty contest at the Episcopal Sunday School (an Episcopal activity peculiarly Californian in flavor). Later she was chosen mascot for the Hermosa Beach Aquaplane Race Association, cut the ceremonial tape for a $200,000 aquarium, and, not yet six, played in her first movie, a Technicolor epic called The Story of Nylon. As young as Bev was, she already exerted upon men a stupefying enchantment. A Hollywood doctor—“a very learned man, an authority on Eastern religions who had lectured all over the world and written many books”—was the first to pronounce the somber warning. “He held her hands the way that Rosicrucian lady had done….‘Mrs. Aadland,’ he said seriously, ‘wherever did you get this little girl?’…Then he sat down in his chair and did a very strange thing. He closed his eyes and passed his hand back and forth just above Beverly's bright blonde curls. “I think I see sort of a halo on this girl,’ he said.” Shortly Flo hears the gloomy, admonitory words: “ ‘I think men will be terribly affected by this girl….Be very careful with your daughter….I think men are going to kill over this girl. I have the feeling in my heart that she has the scent of musk on her.’ ” Her religious training enables Flo to comprehend: “I knew what he meant [about musk]. It wasn't the first time I had run into that phrase. I had read it in the Bible.”
When Flynn began seeing Bev—then aged fifteen, and dancing in the movie version of Marjorie Morningstar—Flo sensed no impropriety. Thrilled that her daughter should be dating such a famous man, “overwhelmed by the fact that my baby called this man Errol,” she confesses that she nearly fainted dead away when first led into his presence. To be sure, she says, “I'd read about his trials for the statutory rape of those two teenagers in 1942. And I'd seen the headlines in 1951 when he was charged with the rape of a fifteen-year-old French girl.” As for Bev, however, “I still didn't believe he would take advantage of her.” Against this gullibility may be measured Flo's near-insane outrage, some months later, when, during the course of a plane ride to join Errol in New York, Bev reveals not only that she was no longer chaste, but that Errol—on their very first night together—had done what the cynical reader knew he had done all along: he had, indeed, ravished her, tearing her seventy-five-dollar bolero dress, muttering “Woodsie, Woodsie” over and over, and “growling in his throat.” Flo's indignation, however, is short-lived; despite this traumatic event, Bev seems deeply in love with Errol and Errol with Bev. On sober second thought, in fact, the future looks pretty rosy for Flo.
While [Bev] talked, the love bloom was all over her—in her eyes, making her cheeks pink. “Mama,” she said, “can't you imagine what it's going to be like with Errol from now on? Can't you imagine the lovely clothes, the spending, the famous people we'll meet?…Mama…he's told me how good I am for him. He's told me that we're going to write the Arabian Nights all over again.”
And so the incredible joy ride commences, and the sedulous Florence is rarely absent from the scene, or at least its periphery. There are drinking bouts, yachting trips, dances, and other social events, including a well-publicized nude swimming party at a country estate near New York which Flo, with characteristic delicacy, assures us was not an orgy. “Beverly later told me
all about it. [The people] weren’t riotously drunk or mad with passion. It was an unconventional but casual swim. Afterwards they got out, dressed, and enjoyed some pork chops and apple sauce together. Beverly helped serve the food and was complimented by the others on her clothes and manners.” The East Coast holds Flo—L.A. born and bred—in its thrall; her description of the Connecticut countryside, “the homes with their unusual gabled roofs,” has a quality both eerie and exotic, as if it were the Norwegian troll country. At one club function, a handsomely swank place, also in Connecticut, Bev has her first encounter with snow. “We sat down at a table…” Flo says, and describes a boring situation.
I looked around for a movie magazine or something interesting to read, but could find only copies of Time and Fortune….Pretty soon we noticed it was snowing outside. Without saying a word to me or anyone else, Beverly got up and went outside. It was the first time Bev had ever seen snow falling and, being a native Californian, she was thrilled. I watched her through the large picture window….She held up her arms gracefully and whirled them through the air, touching the falling snowflakes. She never looked lovelier. Her cheeks were flushed to a healthy pink and she wore one of her nicest outfits, a gorgeous peach-colored cashmere sweater and matching skirt….As the big white snowflakes came down thicker and thicker, she did a very crazy thing. She took off her shoes and began dancing and skipping around on the golf greens….She looked like an absolutely mad fairy princess, whirling and cavorting, holding her arms out so beautifully….When she came in, she said: “Oh, Mother, it was so beautiful!” Her nose was red as a raspberry and when I touched it with my finger tip it felt like a cold puppy's nose.
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