Reading for My Life

by John Leonard

  It would also have been necessary to face up to the two most important television fathers of the eighties, neither bearing much resemblance to reality for the rest of us. One, of course, was Bill Cosby. Cosby had originally proposed a blue-collar sitcom. ABC turned him down. He then upwardly mobilized the concept to white-collar professional, starring himself as Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable, an obstetrician practicing out of his Brooklyn Heights brownstone; Phylicia Rashad as Clair, his lawyer wife who left that home to toil nobly every day for Legal Aid; and five children for whom a wise, if sarcastic, dad would always be there, whether they wanted him or not. ABC turned that down, too. NBC was shrewder.

  The other important father of the eighties was Edward Woodward as Robert McCall, in The Equalizer: a retired intelligence agent who set up shop, in a Manhattan apartment to die for, as a last-resort detective, bodyguard, and avenging angel, doing good as a way of doing penance for his nasty past in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. While McCall’s relations with his own son, Scott, were strained, it was amazing how often the children of strangers in trouble happened on his classified newspaper ad and left desperate messages on his answering machine. To which messages he invariably responded. This was post-Freudian and deeply satisfying: the mythic father all children wish for and none of us has ever had, or ever will have, who promises to protect us from the Dark Side—exactly like Ronald Reagan.

  But not many of us work at home in such agreeable neighborhoods as Brooklyn Heights with friends like Stevie Wonder, B. B. King, and the Count Basie Band to drop in. Even fewer of us are guilt-stricken intelligence operatives, any more than we are a Captain Ahab or the Lone Ranger, which is why we watch television instead of leading insurrections. We don’t even work for ad agencies. We are, like an Al Bundy and a Homer Simpson, less thrilling. Not old enough yet for a reptilian retirement in Florida, we seem never to have been as young as the demographically desirable NYPNS (Neat Young People in Neat Situations), DINKS (Double Income, No Kids), or what the mystery novelist David Handler calls YUSHIES (Young Urban Shitheads). Did I really have to think about Yup instead of fatherhood? Of course I did. As a professional critic, it was my zeitgeist duty to think about whatever the crybaby boomers were thinking about, which was always their conflicted, Y-person selves. As a guy said to a gal in the TV movie Bare Essentials: “The only food-gathering you’ve ever done is at a salad bar.”

  For instance: thirtysomething. Sensitive Jewish Michael and supermom Hope and bearded Elliot and blonde Nancy and red-haired Melissa and long-haired Gary and careerist Ellyn felt bad every Tuesday night from 1987 to 1991 about children, adultery, Thanksgiving, computers, and the sixties. Growing up hurts so much you want to suck your big toe. They rode their anxieties, like Melissa’s Exercycle. Or wore them, like Hope’s Princeton T-shirt. They played parent the way they played mud volleyball or laser tag. For all the smart talk, their frontal lobes seemed full of video rentals instead of books or politics; medium tepid instead of Big Chill. They were as lukewarm and secondhand in their erotic fantasies as in their attitudinizing, as if they’d bought the whole Xerox package of other people’s prefab experiences already market-tested by Michael and Elliot at, of course, their ad agency. There was no true north in them, nor any bravery.

  Who needed this in my living room? I could leave the house, and go to the corner, and find an overmuch of such people in my own yupscale neighborhood: sun dried as if in extra-virgin olive oil, crouched to consume their minimalist bistro meals of cilantro leaves, medallions of goat cheese, and half a scallop on a bed of money; gaudy balloons of avarice and ego tethered by their red suspenders to all that’s trendiest, waiting with twenty-four-carat coke spoons for Tom Wolfe or Dave Letterman. By day this block belonged to barbers, dry cleaners, shoemakers, and locksmiths. But at night, in the sports bars, pubs, and ethnic restaurants, the Y-people bloomed like henbane or belladonna and you heard their wounded wail: “Gimme, gimme.” For their many sins, they had been punished on a Black Monday with the stock market crash of October 1987. But they’d forgiven themselves and promptly risen, almost the very next night, with an hour of prime-time television of their very own, like a platinum American Express card.

  Why was thirtysomething such a popular success and The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd a network flop, shuffled off to cult status on Lifetime cable? Wasn’t Blair Brown a boomer, too, eating Chinese, teaching piano, listening to rockabilly in a West Side apartment building where the elevator never quite properly stopped to meet the floor, as Molly never quite met life at the proper angle? But Molly was a poet, divorced from a jazz musician. And worked in a bookshop, where D. H. Lawrence was actually spoken. And then at a publishing house, where she wasn’t on the best-seller fast track. And dated, instead of an account executive or a pork-belly future, a black cop, whose name was Nathaniel Hawthorne. And was lusted after by her own psychiatrist, who happened also to be female. And went out after work to night school and museums instead of sports bars. A brave and baffled Molly made her own experiences. You’d never catch her in silk jacquards, tapered Lord & Taylor tunics, tobacco-suede Euforia boots, and Lady Datejust Oyster Perpetuals, eating steamed skate and pumpkin seeds on Columbus Avenue, smelling like the guts of a sperm whale. And yet the television culture disdained her almost as much as it had disdained Geena Davis and Alfre Woodard as storefront lawyers in Sara, or the Linda Kelsey who had quit the rat race to teach preschoolers in Day by Day.

  However, by the time I got to Providence I was a humbler and chastened Know-Only-Some-of-It. In Kyoto, in front of Takanobu’s Portrait of Taira no Shigemori, a Japanese scholar told André Malraux that “You want to be in the painting, whereas we want to be outside it. European painting has always wanted to catch the butterflies, eat the flowers, and sleep with the dancers.” As if television were my European painting, I had spent a good portion of the eighties alone in my house, wanting to catch, eat, and dance with those butterflies, flowers, and dancers. I was hitting bottom, and then in the beginning stages of a recovery from alcoholism. Never mind the horror stories about hospitals and estrangement. You have already seen their equivalent, if not in your own lives, then certainly in the TV movies: a wife hiding out in a West Side loft, with her spices and her afghan; the children in exile in Madison, Prague, and Taipei; the X-rays, EKGs, and CAT scans; the old people who seemed, in their tatty bathrobes, to be practicing a martial art on the lawn each morning and the young people of the adolescent wing who roamed in packs at night in their fluted Ionian deathgowns; the withdrawal dreams of basilisks, scorpions, and ravens’ heads; of peacock tails and Pontic rhubarb. In Saul Bellow’s More Die of Heartbreak one character asks another: “Uncle, how do you picture death—what’s your worst-case scenario for death?” Uncle replies: “Well, from the very beginning there have been pictures—inside and outside. And for me the worst that can happen is that those pictures will stop.”

  When I came back from the hospital to an empty house, television no longer seemed an upstart medium, amusing in its presumption, about which to sermonize and smarty-pant. There were, to be sure, the video cassettes that arrived now by messenger and express mail, the same size and as self-important as the books I spent the other half of my professional life reviewing. I no longer had to leave the house and visit the networks and wait around in darkened anterooms for a member of the appropriate craft union to replace a cartridge and punch up a preview tape. I had only to consult the clock of my convenience, settle my fragile self in front of the VCR, and, like a car alarm, anticipate being burgled. But tape was not enough, nor was there enough tape, to fill all the holes in my apprehension. I needed TV in a different way. And it was like looking through the window of a washing machine during a spin-dry cycle, at tumbles of bras and socks, at twisted arms and severed heads. I was, suddenly, watching TV as a civilian. I fell into it, as if to water bed. After a decade of passing out and coming to, I couldn’t sleep at all. Like some Aztec Mother Serpent, my metabolism was shucking skins. There are onl
y so many books and tapes a pair of eyes can read or watch, so many words a pair of hands can process, so many walks a pair of feet can plod, around the block or to a meeting. At those amazing meetings, in an underground network of church basements, over the cardboard cups of lousy coffee in a blue smog of cigarette smoke, we told each other stories to get us through the night. These many stories were really merely one, about a lost child in a black forest of bad chemicals.

  None of this was television’s fault. But enough of it showed up on television to suggest to a disordered mind, if not coincidence or causality, at least an eerie series of correspondences, a hanging-together of related metaphors as the metaphors had bunched up in, say, Nahuatl poetry, or Roman and Gothic worldviews, among Mings and Renaissance Florentines. So I watched Hill Street Blues not only because it was the best TV series of the eighties and not even because Daniel J. Travanti as Frank Furillo and Joe Spano as Henry Goldblume had assumed the Alan Alda Hawkeye role model of the New Man Who Has Non-Predatory Feelings, but because Furillo was a recovering alcoholic, and when Kiel Martin’s LaRue finally got himself to an AA meeting, there was Frank already in The Rooms. I watched Cagney & Lacey, not only because such a partnership of class-conscious fast-talking street-smart feminists was so singular as to have become Gloria Steinem’s favorite show, nor because anyone could have guessed that Sharon Gless and Tyne Daly in New York would make Thelma and Louise imaginable in Hollywood, but because Chris Cagney so obviously had a drinking problem, and when she finally got around to doing something about it after her father’s death, the series dogged her every step of the difficult way, all twelve of them. Toward the end of the decade, while I liked everything else about Murphy Brown, its breezy nonchalance on the matter of Murphy’s drinking ticked me off, as if alcoholism were another of her quirks or cranks. In the pilot, Murphy was just back from Betty Ford. Thereafter at Phil’s she drank designer water. One New Year’s Eve, subtracting scotch, she was minus a sense of humor. Otherwise the flagrant behaviors of her drinking days were recalled by her officemates as comic romps. So much for recovery. It’s as easy as having a baby, if you forget about both for weeks at a time. And having a baby, of course, was another half-baked, unbright idea that occurred to Murphy’s writers and shouldn’t have, not for fear of ruffling Dan Quayle’s indignant feathers but because even the sleepiest of us knows a real-world Murphy would have aborted. Compare such glibness to the gallows-humor sitcom fashioned for the nineties by John Larroquette—Under the Volcano with Barney Miller’s laugh track—from his own experience of bottoms and recovery, which partook of memory, process, and duration.

  On the other trembling hand it was hard for me to watch either Cheers or St. Elsewhere. I needed never again to be in bars or hospitals: those dreamlike Easter Islands, with their long-eared priest-kings, their birdman cults, their ancestor worship, their megalithic petroglyphs, those great stone faces under black-rock top hats on Cubist penguins with their goofy, abstract, Bob Hope look. For the only time in my life, I sounded even to myself like Goethe: “How dare a man have a sense of humor when he considers his immense burden of responsibilities toward himself and others? I have no wish to pass censure on the humorists. After all, does one have to have a conscience? Who says so?” But whatever a Jackie Gleason drank on stage in the fifties and a Dean Martin in the sixties and seventies, it wasn’t funny, as Sid Caesar, Carol Burnett, Dick Van Dyke, Susan Saint James, and Don Johnson had strobelit reason to know.

  Obviously, this is no way to review television. You have to watch St. Elsewhere so that you will be prepared when some of the same writers come up with Homicide: Life on the Streets, as you have to watch A Year in the Life to understand where Northern Exposure and I’ll Fly Away came from. But it is also an important way that civilians do watch television, as if by periscope under the heavy water of our own vagrant needs and monomaniacal compulsions, down where we are bottom-feeding like octopods on the fluffy bacteria and tube worms of everything we feel bad about, all those thermal vents in a problematic self. While I was reading and reviewing Gabriel García Márquez, Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, Milan Kundera, Nadine Gordimer, Don DeLillo, Günter Grass, Christa Wolf, Kobo Abe, and Cynthia Ozick, I was afraid of Cheers. What if I were coming home from teaching English as a second language in an overcrowded public school, or an assembly-line factory job, or milking cows and greasing tractors? What if after a hostile takeover, leveraged buyout, or obsolesence, I hadn’t a job at all? Or grew up uncertain of my sexual identity? Or was running out my string in a geriatric gulag where, like a rhododendron, I was misted twice a day? Or were poor, black, gay, Inuit, Rosicrucian, or a mixed grill of the above? What then would I require of television? How would it, all unwitting, muddle with that mind?

  Years ago, when my daughter was five, together we watched The Littlest Angel, a Christmas special about a shepherd boy who dies, goes to heaven, returns briefly to earth to collect his box of favorite things, and then gives that box to God (E. G. Marshall) as a birthday gift for the Christ child. While I remember objecting to the idea of all that polishing and vacuuming in heaven (the Protestant ethic of drudgery even unto afterlife), The Littlest Angel seemed otherwise harmless. Not so to my daughter. First, when the shepherd boy looked around at the other angelic gifts, he was so ashamed of his, he tried to hide it. God, of course, noticed. “God is sneaky,” my daughter said. “He can see around corners. He’d never lose at hide-and-seek.” Next, after the program, she burst into tears and couldn’t sleep. It took me an hour to find out what upset her so. She had noticed that when the little boy returns to retrieve his box of favorite things, his parents can’t see or hear him. That must be what death is.

  We hadn’t watched the same program. I couldn’t protect her from The Littlest Angel; no one protected me from The Yearling. Childhood isn’t Sesame Street, nor adulthood sitcoms. Suppose Amy hadn’t eventually graduated from The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family, and the afternoon soaps she taped all through college, to trade in her prurient preoccupation with Jim Morrison of the Doors for an equally obsessive crush on Martin Luther and become a doctoral candidate in Reformation history? Suppose, instead, she had turned into a professor of American Studies at Hampshire College, like Susan J. Douglas. Douglas published in 1994 a remarkable meditation on growing up female with the mass media, Where the Girls Are, in which she watched the same TV programs, went to the same films, read the same magazines, and listened to the same music as every other alert munchkin. Through her eyes, what sort of television culture do we see? She had to wait a long time, from Molly Goldberg and Alice Kramden, for a Joyce Davenport. Why did Stephanie Zimbalist need a “Remington Steele” in the first place? What is a young girl being told by Queen for a Day, The Newlywed Game, June Cleaver, Elly May Clampett, and Lily Munster? By Connie Stevens as Cricket in Hawaiian Eye and Diane McBain as Daphne in Surfside Six? By Police Woman and Wonder Woman and Bionic Woman? There’s nothing abstract about Douglas’s gratitude to NBC News for Liz Trotta, Norma Quarles, and Aline Saarinen, nor her celebration of Kate & Allie, Cagney & Lacey, China Beach, and Designing Women. While I saw The Equalizer as a Superdad, Douglas resented him as a collector of wounded women. While I was admiring a bionic Lindsay Wagner for her lioness graces, the violin string of restless intelligence that refined the shadows and planes of her good-bones face, Douglas deplored the dumbing-down of “liberation” into narcissism: Buns of Steel! On the other hand, while I disdained Charlie’s Angels as a harem fantasy (except for Kate Jackson, the Thinking Angel with a whiskey rasp of a voice, the Lauren Bacall–Blythe Danner erotic croak), Douglas identified with a trio of adventurous and resourceful young women who saved themselves and each other while occasionally cross-dressing.

  Periscopes! Like God and television, we see around corners. In the popular culture, we all play hide-and-go-seek. We find our models in the oddest places: a glint here, a shadow there, a scruple, a qualm, some style and attitude. Douglas reminds us that pop culture is more than TV. She found an abun
dance of possible selves in music: in the Shirelles and Cyndi Lauper; in Joan Baez, Diana Ross, and Janis Joplin; in Aretha Franklin, Bette Midler, and Madonna. But also at the movies with Joan Crawford and the Hepburns (Kate in Pat and Mike, Audrey as Holly Golightly); in books by Pearl Buck, Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, and Susan Brownmiller; in sports, with Billie Jean King, and in politics with Shirley Chisholm. And so was the enemy everywhere. To save her own sanity, Douglas had to swim out from under magazines like Cosmo, Seventeen, Glamour, and Redbook; from Revlon and Victoria’s Secret; from Mary Poppins, James Bond, and biker movies; from Norman Mailer, Hugh Hefner, liposuction, and Ultra Slim-Fast.

  To which we might add a Whole Earth Catalog of other shadows on our blameless childhoods. As much as the fifties were I Love Lucy, Howdy Doody, and Davy Crockett’s coonskin cap, or Dick Nixon and Charles Van Doren in prime-time tears, they were also Korea and Peanuts, Marilyn Monroe and Rosa Parks, Joe Stalin and atom-bomb air-raid drills, Joe McCarthy and polio, hula hoops and Grace Kelly, Levittown and Ralph Ellison, Edsels and Sputniks, Castros and Barbies. (From M. G. Lord’s 1994 “unauthorized biography” of that doll, Forever Barbie, we would learn that Mattel Corporation practically invented the advertising of children’s toys on television in 1955, committing most of its entire net worth of five hundred thousand dollars to commercials for a jack-in-a-box, a Burp Gun, and a Uke-A-Doodle on The Mickey Mouse Club, paving the way for Mortal Kombat.) Instead of Barbie, I had a Lone Ranger atomic bomb ring with a color snapshot of the mushroom cloud, available in the late forties from General Mills for a couple of Kix cereal box tops. I also loved those horror comics that so alarmed congressional committees and psychiatrists like Dr. Frederic Wertham in the early fifties, as if they’d never heard of Grimm’s fairy tales. Nowadays, we only pay attention to cartoons if they show up on TV, like The Simpsons on Fox or Beavis and Butt-head on MTV. We haven’t noticed, at the candy store or the head shop, Swamp Things, Freak Brothers, the Flaming Carrot, Reid Fleming (World’s Toughest Milkman), Elektrassassin (Cold War Beast), Dr. Manhattan (the Princeton physicist who fusions himself into a human hydrogen bomb) or Love and Rockets (lesbians who wear combat boots and speak barrio Spanish). Plus any number of musclebound acid-heads into the superheroics for the money, the sex, the violence, the publicity, and the chance to dress up in their underwear.