The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir

by William Friedkin

  Miss Nordblad was wearing a lipstick-red suit; she put her hand on my shoulder. “I don’t know, William. Really.” For the rest of that day my stomach was in knots. I walked every street near the school looking for her, even though I didn’t know where she lived, then into other neighborhoods, before I came to realize that her loss was permanent. I haven’t seen or heard from her since, but I often think of that little girl in her wide-brimmed hat and Victorian dress, forever nine years old. In the space of that year, I found and lost love, and learned to live with disappointment.

  I found I could frighten the neighborhood kids by making up scary stories. I would improvise terrifying scenarios out of whole cloth, and the little girls would listen with rapt attention, often moved to tears, but they kept coming back for more until the effort to invent new stuff taxed my imagination. But I discovered that people, especially young people, liked to be scared. Many years later, Dr. Louis Jolyon West, then head of the Neuropsychiatric Clinic at UCLA, explained to me why he thought people enjoy suspense and horror films. You’re in a dark room with dangerous, life-threatening events happening before your eyes, but as a viewer you’re in a safe place, removed from what’s happening on screen. “A safe darkness,” he called it. A handful of films have terrified me: Psycho, Diabolique, Alien, Jaws, Seven, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But even as they make me afraid of the unknown, I can leave the theater when they’re over, and I continue to seek the experience.

  Growing up in the homes of my aunts and uncles and in a one-room apartment with my mother and father, I heard no music, read no books, went to movies only on Saturday afternoons (I had gotten over my fear of them). A bunch of us would go to the Modé Theatre near the El station at Irving Park at noon on a weekend, and we wouldn’t get home until six in the evening. The movies were cartoons, short subjects, and serials: Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny, the Green Hornet, Boston Blackie, the Bowery Boys, Don Winslow of the Navy, the Lone Ranger and Tonto, Hopalong Cassidy. The good guys always won, except in the cartoons, where the rascals often triumphed until they got blown up or fell off endless cliffs. My friends and I used to believe that the action was taking place behind the screen and that Hopalong Cassidy would come out of the back of the theater on his white horse after an afternoon of chasing bad guys. Every Saturday we waited behind the theater until we finally got the message that no one was coming out, and so we sadly drifted off to walk home or ride the bus or the El, where life was less glamorous. No movies from my youth left a serious impression on me.

  My parents enrolled me in Hebrew school in addition to public school. The Hebrew school was called Agudas Achim. It was in uptown Chicago near Argyle Street, a few blocks north of our apartment. Argyle was a Jewish neighborhood with kosher butcher shops, delicatessens, and grocery stores. I paid little attention to what was taught in Hebrew school, but I was bar mitzvahed at age thirteen.

  There was a boy about a year ahead of me whose name was Joel Fenster. He was a classic bully who preyed on those he perceived to be weak and vulnerable. I was his favorite target. When I was eleven, he would seek me out after school and demand the few coins I had in my pocket. He’d grab my books and hold on to them until I produced the ransom. I began to accept his bullying as a punishment I had to endure each day. Embarrassed by my inability to resist, I never told my mother or father about it. I had learned to suppress, and it haunted me before I went to sleep until it dawned on me one day that this was no way to live.

  One morning at the age of twelve, I woke up feeling anxious, but with a newly acquired confidence about that afternoon’s confrontation with Fenster. I plotted my strategy and even looked forward to it. As we left school that day, I no longer tried to avoid him; I sought him out, and he started in immediately. “How are you today, asshole?” he sneered.

  “Joel, I’ve had enough of your shit.” The words leaped out of my mouth.

  He was amazed at this reaction from his punk. “Oh, yeah?” He grabbed my book.

  “Give it back.” I stood my ground.

  “Make me,” he shouted, then threw the book into the street and put me in a headlock as he had so often before. But I had recently watched the wrestling matches on our little television set, live from Marigold Gardens. Remembering some of the moves, I kneed Fenster in the groin. In shock, he retreated, and I jumped on him with a headlock and squeezed as hard as I could. He screamed in pain as I wrenched him to the ground and began to pummel him, banging his head on the sidewalk until he bled and making up for the years of oppression he had inflicted on me.

  “Give up?” I yelled in his face. “Do you give up, you son of a bitch?” I wanted to kill him. I had the distinct impulse to end his life, and I felt it would make me happy if I did. But he gave up, and that was the last trouble I had from him; he had tasted the fear.

  At election time the Democratic ward committeeman, in our case the Forty-Eighth Ward, would come around and visit my mother. Drinking coffee in the kitchenette, he would show her a sample ballot and say, “Now, here’s who you vote for, Mrs. Friedkin, and these are the propositions you want to put a check mark next to”—all Democratic candidates and initiatives, of course. My mother would smile, offer him more coffee, and agree to whatever he said. When he had gone over the ballot with her several times to make sure she understood, he would say, “Now, what can I do for you?” When I was twelve and about to start summer vacation from school, she asked him if the Party could possibly find me a job. “How old are you, William?” he asked.

  “Twelve, sir.”

  “Twelve—well, you know, you have to be sixteen to be eligible for Social Security and a decent job.” Frowns all around. “Do you like baseball, William?” I did; I was a Cubs fan, though I had never been to a game, but I knew the lineup of the 1947 Chicago Cubs by heart. “Let me see what I can do,” he said.

  He could do whatever he wanted. The Party ruled Chicago, and though I was an only child, my huge extended family represented a lot of votes. Within a week I had a Social Security card declaring I was sixteen and a summer job selling soda pop at Wrigley Field. I carried thirty bottles of pop in half-moon-shaped cases with a thick strap around my neck. I would make two cents a bottle, sixty cents a load, and during a nine-inning game I could do twelve cases, six or seven bucks. Not chump change. On weeks when there were doubleheaders, I would sometimes bring home sixty dollars, which was more than my dad made as a salesman for the Duke Shirt Company on South State Street.

  Goldblatt’s Department Store in the uptown neighborhood was where families could fill all their needs, from kitchen appliances to clothing to vacuum cleaners. My mother did a lot of shopping at Goldblatt’s, a few blocks from our apartment, and she used to take me with her.

  As a teenager, I knew the layout of Goldblatt’s pretty well, and I’d go there with two friends and steal stuff. The guys I hung with, like me, had no moral compass. I literally didn’t know the difference between right and wrong. We’d go into candy stores or record stores and sneak out with whatever we could. We used to deface buildings and break car windows. Every night was Halloween.

  One afternoon, three of us went into Goldblatt’s to boost school supplies, notebooks, pencils, and so on. I was stuffing things into my clothes when a large hand grabbed my shoulder.

  Busted. By a burly store detective. First time I’d ever been caught. We were paraded through the store past staring customers and up to a back office on the second floor. He searched us and said, “You guys are goin’ to juvie [juvenile hall], you know that? You little punks.” He asked for our parents’ phone numbers and called them.

  My mother soon arrived. She listened to the detective’s account and immediately burst into tears. He had followed us as we went on our little tour of the store, and we confessed to having done this before. But for my mother’s tears and pleas, I would have gone down for six months or more. But it was her reaction that made me quit that behavior on the spot. I didn’t want to cause her any more pain.

  From an early
age my ambitions overwhelmed my abilities. I wanted to be a basketball player, but I didn’t make the high school team until my last year. From the age of twelve, I idolized Bob Cousy and the Boston Celtics. I practiced in our apartment and at various indoor and outdoor courts in the neighborhood, trying to improve my skills, but they were never enough to convince the coaches. In the Chicago high schools, there used to be two basketball teams, divided by height: juniors were under five-eight, seniors were over. To play junior ball, which was a faster game, you had to measure in, and I was at least five-nine. The belief among those trying out for junior ball was that you could stay up all night and develop a natural slouch before measuring in. I took the elevated train from our apartment to downtown Chicago and watched the midnight showing of a film called The Strip starring Mickey Rooney while practicing my slouch. I was exhausted but overjoyed the next day when I stepped under the bar and Coach Eugene Fricker, a tall, thin, bald man, pronounced me eligible at five-eight.

  The tryouts came a day or two later, and I felt sure I’d make the team. After handing out twelve jerseys, Coach Fricker looked around at the twenty or so other hopefuls sitting cross-legged on the floor, shrugged, and said, “That’s all I have.” I remained seated, in shock, next to Tommy Bailey, a good player who also didn’t get a jersey. I felt the air escaping from my lungs like a punctured basketball.

  “You should have made it,” Tommy said sadly.

  The gym was oppressive. I had to get out of there. I ran all the way home in tears. I was fourteen years old, and the harder and faster I ran, the more I cried. I see this young man in my mind’s eye, a shy, sensitive boy with little self-confidence. A vast realignment of expectations takes place when you fail at something you really want to do. It wouldn’t be the last time that would happen.

  My formal education ended in 1953, when I graduated from Senn High School on the North Side. I never read a book in school, wasn’t even curious. My grades were adequate, and my only distinction was as the high school’s bad boy. I found a black executioner’s mask I put on while running in and out of classrooms and throwing chalk and erasers around. I would do this at special events that were held in the schoolyard on Memorial Day and other ceremonial gatherings. I became “the masked marauder.”

  I didn’t have a promising future, nor any idea what I wanted to do, except not spend one more minute in a classroom. I didn’t go to college, not because we were poor, but because I had no motivation to do so. It’s a miracle I didn’t wind up in jail or on the streets, as did many of my friends, but Chicago gave me a value system and a work ethic. The people I met, the friends I made, were basically blue collar and without pretense. Marcel Proust dipped a little sweet cake into a cup of tea, and the scent as it approached his nostrils brought a rush of memories of his childhood in a French provincial town. All I need to achieve that experience is a slice of deep-dish pizza from Pizzeria Uno on Rush Street, or a bratwurst on rye from the Grill at Berghof’s Restaurant on Adams near the Art Institute, or a French dip sandwich from a dive called Mr. Beef on North State Street. It was on the South Side that I later heard Muddy Waters in a club called the Checkerboard Lounge, and the Miles Davis Sextet with John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Cannonball Adderley, Philly Joe Jones, and Paul Chambers playing on top of the bar at the Sutherland Hotel on Forty-Seventh Street and South Parkway.

  Radio had a strong influence on me. Dramatic radio in the 1940s, a form now long dead in America, with shows like The Shadow, Inner Sanctum, Suspense, Lux Radio Theater, and I Love a Mystery, ushered me into other worlds created only by the human voice, music, and sound effects. They conjured worlds that became real because they took place in my imagination, and they were terrifying in ways I seldom experienced in the movies.

  One Saturday afternoon, after high school graduation, my parents and I browsed through the want ads in the Chicago Sun Times. An ad caught my attention:

  * * *

  Opportunities for young men to start in the mail room and acquire a career in television. High school education required.

  * * *

  It was literally a “male” room then. No women could apply. This would have been 1953, when live television was something of a miracle. When I was twelve, we got our first television set, a twelve-inch Philco with rabbit-ear antennae. There was little programming and only three networks. The Milton Berle Hour was on NBC, Jackie Gleason on the old DuMont Network. The black-and-white images were so distorted you could barely see the show, no matter how you adjusted the rabbit ears, but the image itself was a miracle. We were like the first cavemen who saw fire or stared in wonderment at the moon and stars. I remember getting up early just to see the profile of an American Indian, like the one on a buffalo nickel, set in the middle of a focus chart. For a long time, people would stare at this image because it was there, magically in your own home. One week after I saw the ad, I took the El from Lawrence Avenue uptown to Lake Street downtown and walked several blocks northeast to Michigan Avenue above the Chicago River. 441 North Michigan was the home of the Chicago Tribune newspaper, a gray Gothic tower that also housed its radio and television stations, WGN—“World’s Greatest Newspaper”—and WGN-TV.

  I went to the fifth floor, where the mail room was located, and there was only one person there: Ray Damalski, a shambling hulk of a man, balding, with thick glasses and baggy clothes. He had a jovial manner and a large, round red face. I told him I was applying for a job and hoped I wasn’t too late. He told me to sit down and tell him about myself. I had no résumé, but I guess he liked me because he gave me the job. Thirty-three bucks a week, six eight-hour days, no overtime. I was thrilled—my first steady job.

  Before I left, my new boss said, “By the way, kid, are you stupid?” I asked what he meant. He said, “Do you have a copy of the ad that brought you here?” I did. He looked at it and laughed before pointing at it. “What address is this?” The address was 448 North Michigan, the distinctive white wedding cake that is the Wrigley Building. Ray said, “You’re at 441—the Wrigley Building is across the street. And do you see the call letters of their station?” It was WBBM-TV. “That’s in the Wrigley Building. This is Tribune Tower, and our station is WGN. This isn’t our ad; you came to the wrong place.”

  I was mortified.

  “That’s all right,” Ray said with a smile. “You look like a nice kid. Nice, but dumb. Come in Monday at eight o’clock, and I’ll show you what to do.” I had taken the first small step of what was to become a marathon.

  I loved working in the mailroom. I was meeting people from a fascinating world, broadcast radio and the new world of live television. I was seeing at first hand how television shows were made. At the end of a day in the mailroom, some ten hours, I could stand in the back of the control rooms and watch how they functioned. A typical program had two or three cameras, and the director would view their output on monitors and talk to the cameramen over headphones. He would ask for various lenses and call out to the technical director which shots to put on the air. The technical director sat at a console and could switch to Camera One or Two or Three at the push of a button, or, by pushing or pulling a lever, dissolve from one camera to another. Typically, on an interview show for example, the director might say, “Camera One, give me a wide shot of the set; Two, give me a close-up of the host; Three give me the guest—a little wider—okay, take one, ready Two, and . . . take two” and these shots would appear seamlessly on a master monitor that showed what the viewer would be seeing at home. The director would also call for various sound cues from the audio engineer and cue the projectionist to prepare and roll film clips that contained commercials. The director’s voice was constant in the control room, and he determined what was seen and heard. The other technicians did their work silently at the director’s command. I wrote in a pocket notebook what happened when a command was given. Some of the shows were more complex—live dramas, musicals, news programs. I learned how to do them by rote, preparing myself for what I hoped would eventually become my
job. I had found a calling. You had to first become a floor manager. The floor manager would position actors or announcers or props on the set and cue various performers to speak or move at the director’s command. He too wore headphones with the director’s voice in his ear. Some floor managers were so good at what they did, they wouldn’t get promoted—they were too valuable “on the floor.”

  I used to take the El to work and back every day, a distance of about twenty miles from our apartment on the North Side. Neither of my parents knew what sort of work I was doing, though I tried to explain it. But I had a steady job and was giving half my salary to them. I would leave at seven in the morning and not get home until nine at night or later, depending on how long I stayed at the station, watching and learning. I would work six days a week, often seven. After a year, I began to think I wasn’t going to get promoted. Two other young guys, one who started after me, moved up. I became depressed but kept it to myself. Occasionally I’d tell my mother how disappointed I was, and how I felt I was going nowhere. She was encouraging as always. I tried to make myself useful and likable at work. I repressed all thoughts of bad behavior and the bursts of anger that would often well up within me. It looked as though I’d spend my life in the mailroom or move on to some other entry-level job. But because I’d ignored my education, I had no idea what to move on to.

  My father, who had never been sick a day in his life, began to deteriorate and was taken to the Cook County Hospital, where he was given a cot in one of the halls. We didn’t know what his illness was, probably cancer. His care was barely adequate, and he died within two weeks. I went to visit him every day with my mother, and she was shattered; Dad was the only man in her life. I used to dream I was hovering over his cot in the hallway of the county hospital.

  In the WGN mailroom my education began. Francis Coughlin (Fran) was a wise man in his late forties when I met him in my early twenties. He wore dark suits, usually with a bow tie, over a heavy frame. Despite the suits, he always appeared a bit shabby, but he was filled with energy and intelligence and he moved with the light-footed grace of a man half his size and age. He wore thick glasses, and his thinning brown hair left a residue of dandruff on his jacket. Fran was the person who most changed my life. An elegant wordsmith with the gift of the Irish gab and a great sense of humor, he had been a reporter and columnist for the Chicago Tribune and wrote speeches for its eccentric owner, Colonel Robert R. McCormick, who would deliver them each week over WGN radio and the Mutual Broadcasting Network, which he owned. When WGN-TV went on the air in the early 1950s, Fran became its go-to program writer. He was also the resident intellectual on a popular quiz show called Down You Go, broadcast over the DuMont Network.