by Lillian Ross
“That all right, Sam?” Schneider called.
“Exactly. Just the way I’d want it,” Beckett said softly, standing up to clasp his hands behind his head and stretch.
“Would you like to take a look, Sam?” Coffey said.
Beckett, pleased, peeked into the camera. “It’s fine. Good,” he said.
“Here, sit down, Sam,” one of the technicians said, and pulled up a new crate.
Beckett took him by the shoulders and chuckled affectionately. “Really, I promise you that when I get tired of standing up, I will sit down,” he said. “I promise to sit down.”
Schneider held out a Coke. “Here, have a drink, Sam,” he said.
A tough-looking young technician, walking across the set with an extra spotlight, stopped next to us. He looked protectively over at Beckett, who was back on his Coke crate, absorbed in the rehearsal of the next scene. “I can’t believe it,” the technician whispered. “Sam’s the nicest guy I’ve ever met. He’s just so nice that he makes you nice, too.” He shook his head, incredulously, and continued on his way.
We walked over to Beckett. He was quite tanned, and he explained that he had spent the weekend in East Hampton, at Rosset’s house. “I met Edward Albee at his place in Montauk, but I haven’t done much in New York,” he said matter-of-factly and not at all regretfully. “Kay Boyle brought a writer called Kenneth Koch over to say hello, but mostly I’ve been here, working on the film.”
Schneider strode by and off the set, and we followed. We asked him about the film.
“It’s really quite a simple thing,” he said. “It’s a movie about the perceiving eye, about the perceived and the perceiver—two aspects of the same man. The perceiver desires like mad to perceive, and the perceived tries desperately to hide. Then, in the end, one wins.”
We asked Mr. Schneider who did win, and he said that he thought the perceiver won. “You know, people come in here and ask Sam ‘What do you mean?,’ trying to make him something obscure, befuddling, inscrutable. Well, I think he’s the most crystal-clear poet—notice, I say poet—writing today. ‘Godot’? ‘Endgame’? They’re lucid. Maybe it’s just that we’re afraid to hear what they’re trying to say.”
Mr. Schneider strode on, and we turned back to Mr. Beckett, who was listening to a young woman from the studio. “Sam, the teen-agers love your novel ‘Murphy,’ ” she said. “They laugh and laugh.”
Beckett smiled. “Well, it’s my easiest book, I guess,” he said. He then told the woman that he was returning to Paris, where he lives, as soon as the film is finished.
“You should have been around for the exteriors,” said Coffey, who had walked over to the crate. “We shot under the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge. It was perfect. The street we were on was semi-demolished and desolate. It looked as though the street was all that existed, all there was—a world blocked off.”
Beckett nodded in agreement. “Pearl Street, it was,” he said.
Coffey edged away from the crate and beckoned to us. “You know, Sam’s incredible,” he said. “He grasps his own work visually. He can think cinematically. He spotted Pearl Street as the place right away, when we were driving around.”
Coffey looked admiringly over at Beckett, who was now engrossed in wordless conversation with Mr. Keaton. Keaton, with a disarming dead pan, was digging into one of his trouser pockets, looking for change. He dug deeper and deeper, through the proverbial hole in the pocket and straight down to the cuff. Upon reaching the cuff, he pulled out a quarter, held it up triumphantly, and handed it to Beckett. Beckett threw back his head and laughed.
“Sam, they released ‘The General’ again, you know, with foreign subtitles,” Keaton said at last, in a low, gravelly voice. “It went all over Europe, and all of a sudden everybody loved it. A German lady even sent me flowers.” He paused thoughtfully. “Now, why couldn’t she have sent them forty years ago?”
Beckett laughed again. “You could’ve used them then.”
“O.K., let’s go, Buster!” Schneider called, as Kaufman wheeled the camera into place for another take.
Beckett left his crate. He reappeared a moment later on the scaffolding, leaning over a makeshift rail, chin in hand.
Keaton, his face averted, was groping along the wall, clutching the green blanket. When he reached the mirror, he flung the blanket over it, blocking out all reflection.
“Cut!” called Schneider. “How was that? All right, Sam?”
“Exactly,” Beckett said quietly.
We left him on the scaffolding, peering shyly and profoundly, and even a little inscrutably, down.
1964
RED MITTENS ! — Lillian Ross
ZONGGGGGGGGGGG! Innnnnnnnnn! Swinging! The four-year-olds and five-year-olds are . . . swinging! They’re hot! They’re so far in that they’re coming out the other side. And they’re fed up to the gillies with teenagery. The teen-agers make the wrong kind of noise. Wear the wrong clothes. Dance around like nuts to the wrong sounds. Use too many words. Don’t have pre-school style. Are physically barfy. Almost have wrinkles and attaché cases, for godsake! Ah-yee-igh! It’s war! Long live King Babar! Last week, after mashedpotatoing our way through one of Tom Wolfe’s sociopop essays in the Herald Tribune, we took a sampling in the children’s playground at Fifth Avenue and Eighty-fifth. After morning kindergarten. After lunch. After naps. Herewith a report on our findings, for which we have borrowed a few leaves from that eminent socio-poppist’s popperei:
“Ya-hoo-hee! Ya-hoo-hee! Ya-hoo-hee!” Shrieks come from five-year-old Teddy Bowen here, wearing a wiggy brown duffel coat, no hat, no gloves. He has chapped cheeks and a messy nose. He does not even live in the neighborhood. But he is in charge. “Yee-hoo-hoo!” screams Teddy as he swings. “Pooh-pooh! I need more gas! Push me! Push me!” His command is obeyed by Robert Levy’s nanny, who—Holy Momsies!—strains her gillies pushing the swing. Robert Levy is the friend—who lives in the neighborhood—that Teddy Bowen is visiting. Robert Levy is small and thin of face, and he has big, worshipful eyes, which he trains on his hero, Teddy Bowen. It is Robert Levy now who starts with the Push Me thing, stooging it like crazy, yelling, “Pooh-pooh! I need more gas! Push me! Push me!” And Nanny falls to, pushing her guts out to please the little chaps. And true friend, true neighborhood friend, Pamela Tishman sits frozen and still in her swing. Old visitor Teddy Bowen has today become Robert’s buddy-buddy, which leaves Pamela Tishman where? Until twenty minutes ago, she was Robert’s true-blue. So Pamela sits in her swing, in her tight powder-blue Merry Mite snowsuit, her red mittens hanging down by strings—a soggy, wet, mushy, cat-smelling red wool mitten hanging from each Merry Mite elastic wristlet. Pamela’s raw-red icy fisties! She’d like to smash them in the face of old visitor Teddy here. “I need more gas! I need more gas!” screams Teddy, and he—Robert’s nanny outdoes herself to please—gets pushed higher and higher. Old runny-nose Teddy—where does he come off? He doesn’t even have on a Tidykins snowsuit, like Robert’s. A duffel coat! Circa 1963. Some chic! Now Teddy is yelling, “Hey! Let’s go climb on Alice in Wonderland, hey!” And buddy-buddy Robert dittoes, “Hey! Let’s go climb on Alice in Wonderland, hey!” They get out of the swings. Blam! Blam! Blam! Then General Chief of Police Big Daddy Cartwright Boss Teddy yells, “Hey, let’s go to the carrousel!” The carrousel, for godsake! Pamela hasn’t been to the carrousel in over six months, and she couldn’t care less. The carrousel! Pamela feels . . . superior— well, why not? Pamela announces that she wants to go home and play with her Little Miss Echo Doll, and with her Tearie Dearie Doll, and with her Betsy McCall, Fashion Designer, set. Old visitor Teddy probably still self-educates around with Playskool junk. But . . . Nanny puts in the crimp. Nanny says to cool it, home is out. Pamela sulks. Then Pamela comes on aggressive— “Last week, I sat on Alice in Wonderland’s head,” Pamela tells the chaps, just to impress them. They look . . . impressed. Pamela feels . . . on top. Nanny asserts herself some more and says that Alice is out. The carrousel is o
ut. Pamela—this kid really knows what’s out—says yeah, Alice, except for the head, is out.
On to the sand box. An idiot-faced baby girl is kneeling in the gunk, digging at it with a teaspoon. A teaspoon, for godsake! Idiot-faced baby has on a red coat, a red bonnet, patent-leather Mary Janes, and white stockings—Yichhhh!—and she is kneeling in the gunk on her white stockings . . . excavating . . . while her nanny sleeps. So Pamela Tishman sidles up to old baby and grabs the spoon and passes it to Robert, who sends it along to Teddy, who . . . heaves it—well, that makes Teddy Bowen one of them. Such yowls! Such woe! Holy Popsies! All from one idiot-faced baby, whose nanny wakes up and sees the white stockings! Covered with gunk! Now wide-awake—on the job—Nanny hauls choking, pained baby off to latest-model Krauty Karriage. Pamela Tishman is now buddy-buddy with Robert and with Teddy. The tribal drums! Oh, Dondi, you hypocrite, let us study real life together! Synesthesia! Old unholy triumvirate are now full of the Team thing. They scavenge a Baby’s Pal Original rattle. A hairpin. A Texaco Fire Chief hat. What next? What next? What next?
On to the shoot-the-chutes. Like a flaming, souped-up, chicken-happy Triumph onto the protective rubber padding at the landing site slides . . . Miles Robertson. And behind Miles steams . . . Henry Sutro. “Kh! Kh! Kh!” they are rasping. Total murder! Both Miles and Henry are wearing khaki Army uniforms, and each has on a steel battle helmet decorated with this splendid four-color-job American eagle. They land, shooting Atomic Ray pistols at a little girl in Glenconner plaid with velvet leggings, who hollers desperately—Come off it, Queen Victoria!—for the Royal Mounties. “You know what, Henry?” Miles says to his pally. “I just shot a Zombie!” “I just shot a Beatle!” Henry says. “Kh! Kh! Kh! I just shot two Beatles!” They stand facing each other, their $9.50 Flex shoes digging into the rubber landing pad, shooting atomic rays at each other. A park attendant, broom in hand, is sweeping. He sweeps around Miles and Henry—do they exist, do they feel? “My daddy has a real gun!” Miles tells Henry. “My daddy has two real guns!” Henry tells Miles. Kill! Kill! Kill!
Then who enters the Garden of Allah on bootsied feet? Who but the transistor-radio pack, looking for space, a site, for an . . . orgy! What a racket! What sounds! The transistors give out with “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do” and “Now We’re Through” and “Somebody Else Is Taking My Place” and “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” and “Bye Bye Baby.” Hung up on sex, for godsake! Rejection! They are dragging these cretiny guitars—when anybody who’s right in the skull knows that the sound is in Play Me E-Z Xylophones and Tuney Tinkle Triangles. These nutballs are singing about “The In Crowd” and “The Out Crowd.” As if they knew! And they try to do tricks on the swings, and they break the swings! And they laugh funny, like crying! Nutty teen-agers!
“I’ll kick them in the face!” yells Teddy Bowen.
“You better stick your hands up!” Loyal Sir Robert howls at the nuts. “Kh! Kh! Kh!”
Such noise! What it is is nuttiness . . . is what it is. Not like “The Three Little Kittens” or “London Bridge” or the story of “The Cuckoo Who Lived in a Clock.” Long live King Babar!
“The Rolling Stones are nuts!” Pamela yells. “It looks so hot on their millions and drillions of hair!”
“Stop dancing!” Miles Robertson yells at the interlopers. He and Henry Sutro have joined forces with Pamela, Robert, Teddy.
“They scream!” Henry Sutro says. “They scream like babies!”
But the invasion is untouched. The pimply cretins are dancing in the playground, twisting and frugging and swimming in their above-the-knee skirts— stripes!—and crazy-pattern stockings and shifts decorated with stupid cans of soup, and their high black boots and furry awning eyelashes. And the boys in these tight blue jeans and these boring sweatshirts and leather jackets.
“You know what, Henry?” Miles Robertson says. “I had this baby-sitter. She was a real nutball. She took eight hundred pictures of the Stones off the television. Kh! Kh!”
“My baby-sitter wears pink-and-purple stretch pants!” Henry Sutro says. “She’s ugly! Khhhhhhh!”
They look with disgust at the fuzzy-upper-lipped invaders. And who is the most recent arrival? A decomposing, decaying, arteriosclerotic, aging teenager. At least twenty-three! Clogged up with cholesterol. He’s wearing the hair, the tight jeans, the leather jacket —everything. And he’s being real cute . . . identifying! He climbs on the teeter-totter. The teeter-totter, for godsake! Nobody has gone near a teeter-totter since . . . last Christmas! He’s flabby in the patellas. He’s soft in the hypogastric zone. He’s jowly. Jowly! Next thing he knows, he’ll be a fatty. But there he sits on the teeter-totter . . . as if he thinks he’s dripping charisma, for godsake! Pamela Tishman sonic-booms it, jumping on the other end of the teeter from old identifier, followed by Henry and Miles and Teddy and Robert. They give old blubbery Fred Flintstone here a rough, flashy totter and teeter. When Henry and Miles and Teddy and Robert and Pamela hit ground, they all cut out! At once! And old identifier makes the big crash on his soft, flabby, jowly, decaying, blubbery, cretiny innominates. The uglies stop dancing. They shut up. They pick up their fallen nut. They split. And Pamela & Co. exchange sneaky laughs. Just wait . . . wait, wait, wait. A few more ticks and tocks, and Pamela Tishman will show Baby Jane what is really what and who is . . . here.
1965
THE MCLUHAN METAPHOR — Jane Kramer
WHEN the Westinghouse people announced that at the end of the World’s Fair they will again bury a Time Capsule filled with assorted cultural and technological mementos of twentieth-century man, a friend of ours suggested that they should replace the codes and artifacts with Dr. Marshall McLuhan, who could be counted on to explain us vividly to anybody digging around in Flushing Meadow two thousand years from now. Dr. McLuhan, a professor of English at St. Michael’s College of the University of Toronto, is also the director of the university’s Center for Culture and Technology and the author of three startling books on Western civilization—“The Mechanical Bride,” “The Gutenberg Galaxy,” and, most recently, “Understanding Media,” in which he joyfully explores the tribal virtues of popular culture, casts a cynical eye on the “classification traditions” that came in with print, and sees near-mythic possibilities in our computer age. He has compared the Bomb to the doctoral dissertation; discussed the “depth-involving” qualities of sunglasses, textured stockings, discothèques, and comic books; reported on the iconic properties of Andy Warhol’s signed soup cans; and predicted a happy day when everyone will have his own portable computer to cope with the dreary business of digesting information. In so doing, Dr. McLuhan has earned a reputation among the cognoscenti as the world’s first Pop philosopher.
Last week, Dr. McLuhan flew to New York to deliver a lecture at Spencer Memorial Church (which has its own reputation, as the world’s first far-out Presbyterian congregation), and we took the subway to Brooklyn Heights to hear him. At the church, an old, oak-beamed building that was bustling with young McLuhan enthusiasts, we found the Professor sitting quietly in the pulpit while a young man in a green corduroy jacket and narrow trousers propped an enormous Rauschenberg painting against it. The young man, who turned out to be Spencer’s minister, William Glenesk, explained to us that the poster was “left over from my Rauschenberg sermon.” He then told the audience that he had been a fan of Dr. McLuhan’s ever since 1951, when he attended the Professor’s course on Eliot, Joyce, and the Symbolist movement at the University of Toronto. Dr. McLuhan, a tall, steel-haired man given to twirling a pair of horn-rimmed glasses in appropriately professorial style, stood up, thanked Mr. Glenesk, and remarked that the warm May weather was certainly as depth-involving as a good Rauschenberg or a good elephant joke. The new art and the new jokes have no strict, literal content, no story line, he said, and continued, “They are the forms of an electronic age, in which fragmented, dictionary-defined data have been bypassed in favor of integral knowledge and an old tribal instinct for patterned response.” Severa
l members of the audience nodded ecstatically, and Dr. McLuhan went on to tackle practically every cultural phenomenon from the tribal encyclopedia to the shaggy-dog story, from Shakespeare to Fred Allen, from the wheel to the electromagnetic circuit. He goodnaturedly blamed Plato for writing down Socrates’ dialogues and thus inaugurating “codified culture,” and he praised the singing commercial for reinstating the old tribal institution of memorized wisdom. Every new technology, according to the Professor, programs a new sensory human environment, and our computer technology has catapulted us right out of the specialist age and into a world of integral knowledge and synesthetic responses. “The computer is not merely an extension of our eyes, like print, but an extension of our whole central nervous system,” he explained. He paused, twirled his glasses, and went on to say that every new environment uses as its content the old environment—“the way Plato used the old oral tradition of the dialogue for his books and the way television now uses the story form of the novel and the movies”—but that it is the technological nature of any new medium, and not its borrowed content, that conditions the new human response. Pop Art, he said, glancing affectionately at the Rauschenberg, is merely our old mechanical environment used as the content of our new electronic environment. “One environment seen through another becomes a metaphor,” he continued. “Like Andy Warhol’s ‘Liz Taylor.’ Our new, non-literal response to the literal content of that blown-up and endlessly repeated photograph turns Liz into an icon. It takes a new technology like ours to turn an old environment like Liz into an art form.”