My prosperity was the fault of Sally Pope who back in the Eighties came up with the idea of offering a Powdermilk Biscuit poster to listeners, and the show became a financial boon to MPR. The tidal wave of orders gave the station a fine mailing list to which they sent a catalog of PHC products, which became a for-profit business. A young secretary named Donna Avery was put in charge, and it turned into one of those inspiring success stories in which the nicest person is picked out of the chorus and becomes a star. She became the Goddess of Commerce, built Rivertown Trading, which began with Powdermilk posters, into an enormous success, and when it was sold, it contributed mightily to the MPR endowment. I visited the shipping center once and was astonished— acres of merch on pallets, conveyor belts, assembly line packing, trucks at the loading docks. Mountains of CDs, DVDs, T-shirts, caps. The radio station earned millions from it.
This financial boom stimulated the creation of a commissariat of vice presidents whom I didn’t recognize because I was working all the time. They were like buzzards in a tree, defending their branch against other buzzards, feeding off the wounded below. They avoided me in the halls because clearly they found the show an embarrassment, the commercials, Piscacadawadaquoddymoggin, the gospel music, the joke shows. When you’re the Executive Vice President for Interactive Synergy and you fly away to a public radio conference in Santa Barbara and the other attendees look at your name badge and ask you about a show with rhubarb pie commercials and stories about Norwegian bachelor farmers, you feel not just insulted but also degraded.
In 2002, I was, as I was in 1974, a man at a keyboard—from an Underwood typewriter to a Selectric, then a CPT word processor, a Toshiba laptop, finally a MacBook—trying to keep the balloon aloft. I’d had my illusions and taken wrong turns, but the show was real and the music authentic and the comedy sketches and stories rode on the back of the wagon, and its being a live broadcast saved us from perfectionism. We took short views. I don’t remember what happened in 1991 or 2008 or 2012, but I remember what Thursdays were like, when the rubber hit the road, and the alarming rehearsal on Friday, and Saturday at 5 p.m. Central the show spread its wings and flew. And I remember the coroners moving onto the management floor and their resentment of the show’s success. I don’t remember the year it happened, just the chill.
In 2002, Prairie Home packed its bags and left the MPR building, an amicable disconnect under a new contract, and moved to an old one-story frame office building by the Soo Line tracks near the river, our home for the next fourteen years, which we called “The Fort.” Everyone had an office with a window and a door; Kate had the big one because she ran the place. There was no time clock, people worked as needed to get the job done. There was a big lunchroom, and once a month a catered meal, sometimes a masseuse came in, and if you wanted to work from home, you did. This staff accomplished more than any other twelve people since the apostles. Weekly shows, tours, the annual Holland America cruise, a summer tour, books, CDs—it proved that friendly working conditions are conducive to good work.
It was a relief to make a home at the Fort. MPR had gone corporate during my years on the road and spoke a technometromatic language unintelligible to us civilians, and though Bill Kling still protected the show from people who talked about “content” and “metrics,” he was loosening his grip, looking ahead to retirement, and I could feel the wolves watching from deep in the pines. The newsroom was enemy territory. Forty people working in tiny cubicles whose job was to fill small holes in Morning Edition and All Things Considered. There was no investigative journalism, not even a nod in that direction though everyone knew that public schools were in trouble, the Minneapolis Police Department was corrupt and beyond anyone’s control, and the state legislature was a medieval fiefdom of powerful lords. The newspeople focused on the arts, authors, academics, the nonprofit world, the comfort zone of the liberal intelligentsia. It was the sleepiest newsroom in town. Whenever I walked past it, I could feel the chill. PHC had earned millions for MPR and what’s more, we had a lot of fun doing it, and we were deeply resented by staff who, because they read the news in a college-educated voice, felt superior to the audience, and here was a tacky show with ketchup commercials and the damn hymns—what in hell is “Softly and Tenderly” doing on the same station that brings you the BBC News? And it was playing Tanglewood and Ravinia and Wolf Trap and selling all the seats, so it was beyond criticism. At the old KSJN, housed in cramped quarters, we rubbed elbows with news-people and classical music announcers, ate lunch together, knew each other’s families, and now, having contributed to the company’s bottom line, we lived among stone-faced people who wished we would die in a plane crash so they could write it up. As they say, No good deed goes unpunished.
I was teaching a class at the University, Composition of Comedy, and one week I flew back from New York for class and neglected to get back on Central Standard Time. I walked into the classroom, took off my coat, set my briefcase on the table, took out my notes about the importance of structure in comic writing, and smiled at the students and didn’t recognize any faces. I leaned down and said to a girl in the front row, “This isn’t composition, is it.” She said, “No, it’s trigonometry.” “Good,” I said. “That’s what I thought.” And picked up my briefcase and coat and headed for the exit as a young man with a crew cut and clear-rimmed glasses arrived and set his briefcase on the table. He was the trigonometry guy. Not me. I was in the wrong place. That’s how I felt about MPR. It was the home of the disgruntled, and I loved my job.
It was a happy time. I had a daughter who sat backstage and loved the women singers. I was sober. I ventured into philanthropy. I donated a saltwater swimming pool to a school and named it for my wife, who is a fearful swimmer. The audience was always lovely to behold. At a show at Tanglewood, a little girl in the front row fell sound asleep as people around her hooted and slapped their knees. She leaned her head against her mom and dozed off. A boy wrote to say that he loved Lake Wobegon because when it came on, his parents stopped fighting. A man died at a show at a winery near Seattle; he had been very ill for a long time but wanted to see the show and his wife brought him, and toward the end of the first hour he leaned against her and slipped away. She held him and during intermission, she told an usher and the EMTs came and carried him off.
I wrote a thousand songs. I wrote songs like some people make pies, occasional songs, nothing ever to sing again. I wrote a song for every stop on the way. The song about the Berkshires for a show at Tanglewood:
Under the bright blue Berkshire sky,
cars with kayak racks go by
the bakery where two old aunts
sit with coffee and croissants
and a ham and spinach quiche,
and a small dog on a leash.
Tourists holding bright brochures
describing the sightseeing tours.
Cellphone service is poor, or worse,
so people sit down and converse
with people a few feet away,
as Emily Dickinson did in her day.
As I do now, in your ear:
I am happy to be here.
I was a song machine, and Rich Dworsky improvised accompaniment. For Bend, Oregon (Life is sweet at 3,625 feet and many people relocate to a city named for not being straight) and Milwaukee (In a city with so many breweries, how do they find people to serve on grand juries? Where Oktoberfest is not limited to Oktober, how many judges are sober?) and Nantucket (I am simply delighted to be in a town about which limericks are recited ). I wrote one about Los Angeles, sang it once at the Bowl. No orange groves in Orange County. And Manhattan Beach? No way. Not much adventure in Ventura but you can bake in Bakersfield all day. Nothing surprising in Eureka, and San Jose—what can I say? Not much holy in Sacramento though it’s sandy in San Diego Bay. Nobody’s modest in Modesto but I admit I love LA. I feel empty in Yosemite. Take me away to LA.
And having written one for LA, I wrote one a few weeks later for SF.
I wal
ked in San Francisco in the fog and the mist.
I went out a Lutheran, came back a humanist.
Got back to the hotel and my spirit rejoiced:
This town may be cold but by God it is moist.
Richard Dworsky, music director.
I loved to write parodies of Dylan, who wrote so many great parodies of himself.
If not for you, I’d have no revenue,
Never would’ve got through the U,
I’d screw up my job interview, be totally screwed,
One sad dude living in solitude in the nude,
No aptitude to pursue,
Wouldn’t know beef stew
From chicken cordon bleu,
Or conditioner from shampoo, if not for you.
Satire is perishable, like lettuce. The few songs of mine that still appeal are straightforward love songs. I don’t care about your wine list. I’ll just have a glass of beer. I don’t need to hear the specials. I just wish that she were here. I wrote it when I was alone in New York and Jenny was on the road with City Opera and the city felt empty. I wrote one for my grandsons. In the valley here we be, sitting on your daddy’s knee, Freddie and his brother Charlie eating chocolate candy. Summer days I was a kid, all the funny things we did. When grownups came, we ran and hid, back behind the lilacs. In the heat of summer sun, round and round the yard we run, chase the dog and just for fun we put him in the sprinkler. Summer days my pals and I lay and looked up at the sky, wondered how do airplanes fly over Minnesota.
In my twenties, I aimed to be a satirist because it was an acceptable outlet for arrogance, and now, looking back, my New Yorker stories seem very dated, locked in the leather harness of irony. I loved the emotional freedom of the radio show that let me sing a lullaby to my child: Little girl lost in a forest of dreams. For a moment it seems something big and cold got ahold of you. But Daddy’s arms will gather you in. I will take you home. Where we go, there will be birds to cheer you. Where we go, I’ll be right here near you. I will take you home. The audience takes a deep breath, they recognize the feeling, they’ve been there, they appreciate freedom from irony, they feel comforted. My dad never put his arms around me that I recall. It doesn’t matter. I was wealthy with aunts, and twenty years ago the last of them left the world while I wasn’t looking and I wrote:
Goodbye to my uncles, farewell to my aunts.
One after another, they went and lay down
In the green pastures beside the still waters
And make no sound.
Their arms that held me for so many years
Their beautiful voices no longer I’ll hear
They’re in Jesus’ arms and He’s talking to them
In the rapturous New Jerusalem,
And I know they’re at peace in a land of delight,
But I miss them tonight.
It’s a good song. I still sing it now and then. When it comes to love, we are all amateurs. A person can develop fine skills of mockery, and, God knows, love makes us vulnerable to satire. You embrace your wife and speak tenderly and you hear the snickers of your teenage children. Love between the elderly is hilarious to them. Nonetheless, I hold her tight and grasp her rear end and the satirists go Ewwww in disgust, and this gives an old satirist like me pleasure, having love and being mocked for it, and also holding the finest of all buttocks. I have a framed photograph of my wife, naked, and when I die, I want it to come along with me, in the event I am accidentally buried alive. And also a flashlight.
29
Altman
ONE DAY I GOT ON the downtown B train at 96th and Broadway in Manhattan across the aisle from a young Black woman in a gray herringbone pantsuit, who, I noticed, was reading Love Me. I sat, watching her, trying not to stare. Young Black professional women are not supposed to be reading old white male humorists. She was way out of her demographic. She didn’t laugh, but she kept reading, turning the pages through Times Square and 34th Street and 14th Street, past my stop, and I watched her. And then she smiled. And she laughed, quietly. An invisible thread connected us. I dearly wanted her to like me. I had worked two years on that book, and for fifteen minutes, it was all up to her, she held my heart in her hands. I don’t care if the Times thinks it is immature, I wanted her to laugh. New York women keep a serious face on the subway, the equivalent of a Do Not Disturb sign, but I made her laugh. I almost walked over and said, “That’s my book” but she might’ve said, “Hell it is, I bought it, back off, mister.”
My career peaked with the publication of Love Me, but I didn’t know it and I kept marching. I wrote a Lake Wobegon screenplay and Tony Judge called George Sheanshang, who was Robert Altman’s attorney, and we learned that Mrs. Altman, Kathryn, was a regular listener to the show. Aha! Connections! It pays to know the right people. So a meeting was arranged, and I went to Altman’s office in New York with his movie posters on the wall, M*A*S*H, Nashville, Popeye, McCabe and Mrs. Miller. He was 78, moving slowly, gruff, speaking in short sentences. He said his wife liked the show, that he often sat in the next room watching basketball on TV and heard her laugh and came into her room to find out what she was laughing at. He did not say that he laughed along with her and I doubted that he had. I don’t think small-town Minnesota was his territory.
The screenplay I offered him was about John Tollefson returning to Lake Wobegon for the funeral of his father, Byron, who died of a heart attack coming up from the basement with a bag of frozen peas. John had been fired from his TV weatherman job in Boston for having said, while forecasting a thunderstorm, the limerick about lightning coming out of the ass of the young man of Madras as he clangs his brass balls together and plays “Stormy Weather.” He comes home in disgrace for his dad’s funeral and falls in love with his old high school sweetheart and they marry. There was a lesbian couple who fight like cats and a drunken wake and a pissing contest. The story takes place in January. That is what killed it for Mr. Altman. He said, “I don’t know if you’ve ever done location shooting in winter, but I have, and I don’t plan to do it again. It’s an interesting story except for one thing. The death of an old man is not a tragedy. So I don’t get the point.” He said he wanted to make a movie, though he was being treated for cancer and he would consider making a movie about a radio show and shoot it entirely at the Fitzgerald Theater. So I wrote him a new script in about a week, urged on by his illness.
He appeared quite frail when I saw him a month later; he walked gingerly across the Fitzgerald stage, as if on a tightrope, an assistant walking close behind him. I said, “Are you sure you really want to do this?” He was sure. “I want to go out with my boots on,” he said. “I don’t want to sit around and wait for it. I want to be missing in action.” The producers had secured a relief director, Paul Thomas Anderson, who stood at Altman’s elbow and was prepared to come in from the bullpen if needed. But the going out with my boots on made me wonder if bravery had overcome his good judgment—had I given him an amateur contraption of a screenplay and the man was desperate for work to take his mind off his mortality? I wondered about that for the next year: was it good enough? Being a Minnesotan, my answer was: no.
I mentioned to Jim Harrison that Altman was on the case and Jim, a great poet who’d worked on six movies in the Nineties, wrote me a letter.
Screenwriting is a visual, not a verbal, talent. You have to “see” everything you write and avoid the fandangos of words that we love. You go directly from the image to the word, never vice versa. Movies have to move. Don’t worry about getting people in and out of doors. Audiences have a greater visual intelligence than any other kind. Reading books about it doesn’t work. It’s helpful to watch your five favorite movies and figure out how the writer constructed the narrative. Write the kind of movie you yourself love to watch. You can’t do better than that because you’re not a hack. Despite your Christian background you should have at least one 4-H girl bent over a bale of hay. Take all your money up front. A writer’s percentage points are as valuable as gum wrappers.
Good advice, but I had no time to study five movies. I cranked out a screenplay about two singing sisters, Yolanda and Rhonda Johnson, and Mr. Altman said, “I think you’ve got something there.” He lined up Kevin Kline to play Guy Noir and Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly to be Lefty and Dusty. (“Casting is nine-tenths of what I do,” he said.) He talked Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin into playing the sisters. “Meryl is a terrific singer,” he said. “And Lily will learn.” I read an interview with Lindsay Lohan in which she said she was going to be in the movie playing Meryl’s daughter, so I created the daughter. I wrote in the angel of death. “Okay to put a supernatural being in?” I emailed Mr. Altman. “Okay, but no special lighting effects,” he said. He cast Virginia Madsen in the part, and when shooting began, he took a great deal of time fussing with the lighting as the angel walked unseen in the balcony. She was a radiant blond angel, and he loved directing her as she descended the balcony aisle, glowing in the dark.
That Time of Year Page 31