The Glass Teat - essays of opinion on the subject of television

by Harlan Ellison

  There is no need to dwell on the already-established and potentially-inevitable level of paucity proffered by these series. If it were not for the ingenuousness of Miss Barbara Eden—one of the surest comediennes going—and Larry Hagman’s herculean efforts at bringing some dignity to what is essentially a mindless enterprise, Tuesday night on NBC would be totally without light. And having given praise in the only quarter where it is deserved, I reluctantly address myself to considerations of ghastliness.

  Bearing in the back of the mind the many paradigms of NBC’s other female-oriented shows, as well as those on other networks—Lucille Ball, Doris Day, Petticoat Junction, Mothers-ln-Law, Family Affair, That Girl, The Flying Nun, Bewitched (the one superlatively intelligent exception is The Ghost & Mrs. Muir)—one comes to a realization that Someone Up There is not only thirty years behind the times in terms of the Female Liberation Movement, but is easily thirty years behind in accepting reality. Even as blacks despise stereotypes of themselves in the mass media (though even the square Network Programmers are hip to how laughable it would be to try and get away with a Steppin Fetchit character), so do intelligent women, I’ve found. Dithering fumblefoots as portrayed by Lucille Ball or Mario Thomas are as repellent to women of dignity and pride as Julia is the black community as a whole. As I understand it, that is not precisely what Afro-Americans intend when they refer to “pride in black.” But I digress. We were rapping about women.

  The Female Liberation Movement—and I have this on the best authority: a seven foot blonde who manages to combine sensual femininity with a don’t-fuck-with-me-self-assurance—is most lumbered by its own fifth column. Subversion from within. So many women have been brainwashed by the image of the happy little homemaker, birthing babies and cooing over the wonders of pre-soak Axion that it is virtually impossible to convince the mass of chicks that they are really truly emancipated, and don’t have to stagger about wearing a subservient facade.

  And because of this fifth column, Network Programmers—who are 99% male, and what is worse 100% male chauvinist—keep playing to that image. Every season sees its share of Blondie-Doppelgangers. This coming season, Tuesday night on NBC will be surfeited with them.

  Tossing aside the terminally damning obviousness that what they are dealing in are hoary clichés, the more serious indictment that can be laid on this kind of thinking is that it helps perpetuate an unrealistic view of an entire segment of the population. It aids and abets the dangerous gapping between reality and image in our society. When the ideal held up for a modern American woman to revere and emulate is no more demanding than Debbie Reynolds (as she plays it on her series), what can we expect but another generation of simpering female Dagwood Bumsteads? The only out the contemporary chick is offered in terms of TV images is Samantha (a witch), Jeannie (a genie), or Sister Bertrille (who can fly). The message is painfully clear; if you can’t wiggle your nose and make miracles, or hop into the sky and fly away, or flip your ponytail and change the world, girls, pack it in and settle for being some guy’s unpaid slavey. Because all those other women you see cavorting in phosphor-dot reality are inept, hampered with children, prone to execrable involvements or simply accident-prone.

  Around us, we see women taking the reins more and more in a world seemingly bent on being cruel to itself. There is hope, we feel, in the more sensitive rationality of women—to stop wars, to give the underdog an even break, to clean up the messes we guys have made. Yet on TV if we see a Committed Woman, she is usually a housewife taking time off from making nesselrode pie to carry a placard for allowing school kids to put on their yearly musicale. And she’ll probably wind up in the slammer for it. But with funny. How does this compare with the women I’ve seen on protest marches and rallies, who’ve been beaten senseless by cops’ riotsticks? How does this compare with the women who went for a walk in 118° heat in the Imperial Valley, to support the grape boycott? How does this compare with the genuinely incredible women who ramrodded the Bradley campaign or fight for free speech, or went to Chicago and Washington and Selma?

  This year we’re going to get doctors who are heroes, school teachers who are heroes, lawyers who are heroes, and of course cops who are heroes. None of them are female. (Peggy Lipton on Mod Squad doesn’t count. She isn’t strictly speaking a cop, she’s a noble fink for the fuzz, and besides, Pete and Linc usually wind up saving her attractive fanny.)

  It’s another scintillant TV season of lies and unusually off-center representations of still one more social element. Except this time it’s a social element that is composed of half the population.

  One can only wonder how much longer the birds are going to allow themselves to be used as consumer machines for pimple-disguiser, hair-remover, smell-deadener and uplift bras. How much longer before they start demanding some authentic portrayals of themselves as human beings?

  Because, frankly, it’s about time they made their move. It shouldn’t have to fall to guys like me to tell them their shackles have been struck off. Or will they wake up only when guys like me demand our ribs back?

  * * * *

  37: 22 AUGUST 69

  Oh my, no sooner am I back in town, back writing the column, promising it won’t be skipped again (after which, promptly, the very next week, it’s skipped, thereby doing a gaslight number on my poor head), than I’m in trouble once more. How do I seem to offend you all? It’s really uncanny! There’s no telling what casual comment will outrage some ethnic group. It’s enough to make a guy clam up and stay out of the line of fire. In fact, I can dig why all the scuttlefish refuse to “get involved” and speak out; hell, without even trying to piss someone off, you can have an entire social strata down sucking the marrow out of your bones.

  This time it’s the WASPs in my readership who are properly annoyed, because with all the civil rights action going down, they’re the only group a commentator can bum-rap, without having himself protest-marched. Two weeks ago it seems I made sort of an offhand crack about the “alleged” existence of something the communications media call “blue-eyed soul.”

  Sort of Ajax-clean nitty-gritty Fights Back. Or something.

  It all seemed pretty funny to me—honkies trying to horn in on what is clearly a black product. I didn’t think anyone took it seriously. But here come de mail, here come de mail, and I get four letters from WASPs in Tuston, La Canada, Glendora and (this one I don’t even believe, it’s gotta be a made-up) the City of Industry, all of which accuse me of being a traitor to my pigmentation because I won’t credit Whitey with having soul. (Man, I was blown away! I didn’t even know those people out there had gotten shoes yet, much less learned to read! I mean, if they could read, then they must have seen there were other names on the ballot than Reagan or Nixon.)

  So I’m all ready to drop a fragmentation item in this week’s edition about how those kindly folk out there should take not just this column, but the entire Freep—both sections—roll it into a tight funnel and jam it up their blue-eyed soul. Feeling very smug, was I. Until I bought Tony Joe White’s album, hoping some of the other cuts would be as heavy as Polk Salad Annie, and found out that down home voice was coming out of a good old boy who looked like a Florida redneck. Second biggest aural shock of my life. The first was finding out, about ten years ago, that Mose Allison was white.

  So already I’m reeling, right?

  Then I turned on the Johnny Carson thing a couple of weeks ago, August 5th to be precise, right after the column with that remark was published, and had my smug mind crinkled like Alcoa-Wrap. (You probably didn’t hear it, what with all the shrieking in the land from the NarkDepart moving its families here and there. Personally, I chuckle and gloat at the beautiful inhumanity of it. Let them know what it’s like to be naked and harassed. Don’t try and make me feel bad because the Freep pulled their covers and “inconvenienced” them. I can’t work up any sad about undercover finks having to move to new lairs and eyries, maybe sweating out a freako phone call or two. Now they know how the rest of us
feel. We get the freako phone calls all the time. And worse. The “inconvenience” to the narco squad and their families doesn’t seem to me one one-millionth as inhumane as the years spent in reform schools, county jails, penitentiaries and other gaols by kids whose worst affront to their society was taking a toke of grass. When marijuana is legalized—as it most certainly will be when Liggett & Myers, et al, find they can’t advertise traditional cancer-sticks on TV; a certainty I gauge as inescapable when considered in the light of the information that L&M has copyrighted the words “Acapulco Gold”— when the powerful tobacco lobby in Washington gets behind grass in a sort of “joint effort” yuk yuk—who will repay all those kids for their ruined lives? Who will take their fingerprints out of the FBI files? Who will erase from their minds the memories of the smell of piss and disinfectant from how many lockups and drunk tanks? Who will put them back in college and make up the years they lost on the way to their B.A. or M.A.? Who will lobotomize the crime-data they picked up in the slammer? Who will apologize for witch-hunting them, and treating them like criminals for a “crime” no worse than that perpetrated by every member of our parent’s generation who sipped a teacup of Cosa Nostra bourbon in a speakeasy, 37 years ago? Who will pay reparations when pot is legal? Who? No one, that’s who the bloody hell who! So I conceive of the Freep’s publishing that secret list of nark addresses and phone numbers a courageous and significant gut-punch in the dirty war for justice. Beside that, dirty trick though it may be, the renting of new apartments for the secret police seems like a mere bagatelle. None of which has to do with the main topic of this week’s column, but I felt compelled to get on the record, particularly after I spoke to a student group at Cleveland High School, out in the Valley, last week, and was called to task for the Freep’s “inhumane act.” So now you know where it’s at for me. Back to the Johnny Carson Show, and blue-eyed soul, and what I started to say a while ago.)

  There before me was one of the mythical creatures of all time—akin to dryads, hobbits, smoke ghosts and leprechauns—a chick with blue-eyed soul. This kid was called Elyse Weinberg, and she went about three points further toward gut-level than either Janis Ian or Buffy Sainte-Marie. She isn’t as funky as Janis Joplin, she isn’t as gothic-moded or genius’d as Laura Nyro, she isn’t as gravelly as Judy Henske, she isn’t as heavy or as gorgeous as Lotti Golden, but would you believe she puts Joan Baez and Judy Collins away proper?

  So I had to re-gear my thinking—which is happening much too frequently these days for any security at all—and I had to wonder how and why such blue-eyed sisters as this Elyse chick and Laura Nyro and Lotti Golden and all the others suddenly came trumpeting on the scene. And naturally, I blamed TV for even this largesse: what else would you blame, in the Age of McLuhan, for everything from smog and violence to Elyse and the Dutch Elm Blight?

  Where has this chick been? I asked me. And from the slag-heaps at the rear of my skull, a voice screamed, “You shmuck! Don Shain at Tetragrammaton Records told you this broad was dynamite two months ago, and he even sent you her record, and you stuck it up on the shelf because you were going out of town, so why don’t you take it down and listen to it?” So I did, and you know, high pressure Shain was right: she’s even heavier on records than she was on the tube. (The reason for that will close out this column and lead into the next, so bear it in mind.)

  Where this chick had been, of course, was getting born. She didn’t spring full-blown with a voice like that out of nowhere, like Athena from the forehead of Zeus. She was twenty years of shit-pop-music in the making. She is a natural reaction to Patti Page and Doris Day and even Jeri Southern. She and Lotti Golden and Janis Joplin and Laura Nyro are the female equivalents (coming on the scene a little later than their male counterparts) of Mose Allison, Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, and most recently Tony Joe White. They were the men who studied not Julius La Rosa or Buddy Greco or Tony Vale, they were the ones who listened to Lightnin’ Hopkins and Blind Lemon Jefferson and B.B. King. They were the ones who understood that the true voice of American Music was not in the phony cabaret idiom, the big-cufilink-whiteonwhite-shirt idiom. It was the sound of the black man with passion and verve.

  And they revolutionized the sound of today. Granted, they followed Otis Redding and James Brown and Wilson Pickett out of the ghetto into Motown and Staxmoney villas, but they laid down the highest tribute ... even the Britishers. They said this is the real sound. And now the women have done likewise.

  Elyse Weinberg and her white sisters are paying the highest tribute to Big Maybelle and Billie Holiday and Mildred Bailey. They are singing with the voice of the land. And they are saying to television that twenty years of proffering Dinah Shore and Lawrence Welk and Dean Martin is all they’re going to give. They are saying that the Lennon Sisters and the King Family don’t get it no more. They are saying that if there’s going to be truth in the land, it’s going to come first, as an example to others, in the songs and the singing.

  Yet somehow television cannot comprehend the simple reality of such a situation. They still program prime-time hours of (such upcoming wowsers as) Leslie Uggams, the Lennons (presented, God help us, by Jimmy Durante!), the King Family, Dean Martin’s Goldiggers, all the Vegas lounge acts—though the supreme nadir was reached when Sandler & Young, two Mafia rejects with voices as compelling as fishmongers suffering Cheyne-Stokes breathing, were given their own summer hour. They manage to ignore the enormous purchasing power of the young, whose taste in music run more to Stevie Wonder than Glen Campbell; they still trot out those dyspeptic old firehorses, and wonder why they aren’t selling the depilatory and now-beverages.

  But Lotti and Elyse and Janis and Laura are making all the waves, and the day is rapidly approaching when they will be freed from the slums of TV, the afternoon lip-synch dance shows, and will even put Diana Ross and her glitter scene to shame.

  They will dominate. But not if they are treated the way Elyse Weinberg was treated on the Carson Show, hosted by Flip Wilson; which brings me to the lead-in for next week’s column. I’ll start with Wilson and the shameful manner in which Elyse was shunted on and offstage...and while I’m starting with Wilson, I’ll proceed onwards and downwards with some observations about, uh, er, nigger comedians. But you’ve gotta understand ... some of my best friends ...

  * * * *

  38: 29 AUGUST 69

  So we’ll understand from the outset just where I stand in this terra incognita of racial identity, paddies and jigaboos being what they are, let me take you back back back through the veil of time to Chicago, 1961. Rainbow Beach. You probably never heard of it. Little shit strip of land on the scungy Lake Michigan shore. Landed gentry, all white, naturally, decided they were not going to follow suit with all the other beaches in Chicago, were not going to integrate. No black allowed. So, also naturally, the blacks decided to stage a swim-in. God only knows why anyone—black or white— would want to swim in that crud-infested water, but they did. (As a matter of fact, it might well have solved the entire race thing; no matter what color you were when you went in, you’d be green when you came out.)

  The ancestors of the Blackstone Rangers came out on a Sunday with weapons, and were met by white street gangs. It was brutal. Nobody won. Lotta heads got dented.

  The following week, everyone in Chicago knew there was going to be worse trouble on the Sunday coming. The South Side ghetto was an armed camp. Spade cab drivers rode around with loaded shotguns on their laps. White cops went in threes. Nobody in Highland Park wised-off to his Negro help. Lorraine Hansberry wrote a poem. James Baldwin got sent in by Time to cover it.

  I went out on the beach. My sentiments went with black. I was there to aid and abet the swim-in. Riot started. Oh boy. Got my skull fractured by a black with a tire iron, got my rib cage sprung by a white with a length of chain. You see, the trouble was: I was gray.

  Now you know where I’m at? Good. Just so long as we understand that your faithful columnist stands four-square for Justice, Decency, Equal Righ
ts and All That Good Stuff.

  Because what I want to rap about this week is, mainly, nigger comedians.

  (I can just hear Lenny Bruce back there, affronted, saying, “Nigger? Nigger? What kind of a cheap hook is that? Jesus Christ, does he need cheap sensationalism to get their attention? Nigger!?! God, what bad taste!”

  Okay, so you’ll call me a kike and we’ll call it even, and we’ll move on.)

  What leads me into these observations is the tail-off from last week’s column, wherein I commented on the abominable treatment afforded singer Elyse Weinberg on The Johnny Carson Show, hosted by black comedian Flip Wilson. (No, scratch that. Knowing what comes next, let’s refer to Wilson as a mocha comedian. Black connotes strength, even in coffee. Mocha is diluted, weaker, softer, ameliorative. Yeah, that pins Wilson for me. A mocha comedian. Light tan, with three lumps.)