Not Exactly What I Had in Mind (17 page)

For that matter you have to be a certain kind of person to carry off calling people Colonel or Big Fella. You have to be a person on the order of Babe Ruth, who never made any pretense of remembering anyone’s name, even longtime teammates’. Ruth called everyone
“Jidge”
a sort of affectionym for George, which was Ruth’s real first name. I believe Bobo Newsom, the old pitcher, called everyone “Bobo.” Or maybe it was Bobo Olson, the old fighter. I don’t think I want to call everyone “Roy.”

I am reminded, however, that Byron Saam, the Philadelphia Phillies’ announcer, is said to have opened his broadcast once by exclaiming,
“Hello,
Byron Saam! This is everybody!”

If only one were, in fact, everyone else. Then the burden would be on them.

Y
OU KNOW RONALD REAGAN
was originally set to play Rick in
Casablanca.
How different might the world be today if he’d done that, and Bogart had been elected President.

Bogie and Bacall in the White House! That would be something, wouldn’t it? Old Gorbachev may be slick, but slicker than Sydney Greenstreet? I doubt it. You know what might have worked? The Carter administration with Bogart in the lead. Bogie wouldn’t have had to force the toughness, and therefore could have done something with the sentimentality, the outsiderism, the crisis of confidence.

Bogart is all wrong for the Reagan years, of course, but who isn’t? Caspar Weinberger resembles the late William Holden with a headache, and Suzanne Pleshette, if she took amiability suppressants, could pass for Ann Gorsuch Burford. George Kennedy, with his head hunched down into his shoulders, could be George Schultz. But I don’t see much of a movie there. The President is too old to play himself, and no other actor projects his particular dispiriting innocence. Remember Gale Storm, of the old “My Little Margie” show? Perhaps she came closest.

As for Mrs. Reagan, well, let’s see. Anybody want to speculate as to what it would be like if Jane Wyman were First Lady and Nancy were in “Falcon Crest”?

I didn’t think so. The fascinating thing is that there is never anything interesting to say about the Reagans. Working oneself into a lather over them is like working oneself into a lather over, say, Mickey Rooney, It’s not going to do any good. Just as there are always going to be a certain number of welfare cheats, there are always going to be a certain number of people like the Reagans. It has never been my feeling that such people should be at our nation’s helm, but what do I know? I’m from Georgia.

In Laurence Learner’s revealing yet less than riveting book,
Make-Believe: The Story of Nancy and Ronald Reagan,
each Reagan gets typed pretty well. According to Clare Boothe Luce, Ron switched from left wing to right because “he was a healthy, normal guy who liked to saw wood. Then he started to socialize with the better class in L.A. People haven’t liked to admit that the rich are often smarter and better.”

It was Jefferson, I believe, who said that as cream rises naturally to the top, so too will the better class in L.A. Which is exactly Nancy’s crowd. “Miss Donahue, Nancy’s favorite saleslady at I. Magnin’s, said of [Nancy and her friends], They’re professional ladies,’ referring to the profession of being a lady,” Learner says.

Learner also discloses that, around Thanksgiving of 1960, Ron and Nancy played together in a “GE Theater” TV production of “A Turkey for the President.”

The best observation about Ronnie in this book is Nancy’s: “He doesn’t understand undercurrents.” He may not even have any. When he cried out, “Where’s the rest of me?” in
King’s Row
it may have been his undercurrents he was missing, not his legs.

Learner does not indulge in any such speculation. Astonishingly, he doesn’t even mention Reagan’s last movie,
The Killers.
He does dig up a 1950 quote from Ron in
Silver Screen:

“I’d love to be a louse. You know the kind of fellow who leers at the dolls and gets leered back at? The guy who treats women rough and makes them love it …? You know why I’d love to be a louse? Because the public loves him. He makes money for his employers. … And because the louse business is the sure, the open road to Fame in Films.”

In
The Killers,
Ronald Reagan plays a louse. It is a strange feeling to watch the leader of the Free World aim a rifle down into the street from an overhead window (the movie was released within months after JFK’s assassination) and shoot Clu Gulager and Lee Marvin. It is even stranger to watch him take a punch at Angie Dickinson and knock her flat.

Reagan is credible as a louse but not appealing, because he doesn’t seem to take much relish in anything, even Angie. I don’t know why commentators have focused so much on
Bedtime for Bonzo
and
Knute Rockne, All American,
when such a film as
The Killers
cries out for cinemo-political exegesis.

I do know why Reagan (who is so sweet to Nancy) hits Angie Dickinson, and also why Americans elected Reagan President. Tired of undercurrents.

G
ARY HART WON IN
New Hampshire. I was in Minnesota, Walter Mondale’s state. The
St. Paul Sunday Pioneer Press
had a story: Hart knew how to talk on TV, Mondale didn’t. Said an unnamed producer of network news:

“Hart speaks in sound bites: the fifteen- to twenty-second pithy statements that we absolutely must have to make a piece, statements with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

“When you try to cut into [Mondale], you always find that the complete thought he’s developing has a lot of pieces and structures. He doesn’t wrap it up well.

“It bothers me that you can’t get the smartest people on TV just because they speak in dependent clauses.”

The producer had used six dependent clauses himself. But he wasn’t on TV, he just produced it. Maybe I was into too many pieces and structures myself. Maybe America was. I did some research. These are dependent clauses:

• “… that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights …”
  
• “… that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.”
  
• “… whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
  

Fine. But America needs new initiatives. Fresh energy. High concept. America responds to a person who will wrap it up. These are sound bites:

• “Give me liberty or give me death!”
  
• “Go for it!”
  
• “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!”
  

Sound bites turn people on. Do people dance to dependent clauses? “When the deep purple falls …” Not anymore. Now it’s “Beat it, beat it, beat it!” and “Ma-ni-ac, ma-ni-ac!” I resolved to move toward sound bites myself.

Then Mondale won in Illinois.

I was confused. Confusion and sound bites don’t mix. Time for more research. I went to a dinner party and found a network anchorman there.

Dinner-party statements by anyone above cabinet rank are not for attribution. So the anchorman will go nameless. I asked him about the anonymous producer’s remarks. The anchorman spoke in a tone of professional appreciation:

“Right. I’ve just been cutting Hart. Everything he says is clip-clipty-clop, clip-clipty-clop.”

The anchorman moved his hand in a crisp, vigorous way.

I had to like that rhythm. I spoke to our hostess. “Great baked ham.” I took a good, sound bite. I was getting pithier and pithier.

Then Mondale won in New York.

“Maybe I’ll ease partway back into dependent clauses,” I said to myself. But it might be too late. I couldn’t remember any subordinating conjunctions. I swallowed hard.

More research. I watched Shirley MacLaine on “60 Minutes.” She was telegenic. She expressed firm opinions:

• You can learn from winning, you can learn from losing.
  
• There are no great people in politics anymore.
  
• The most brilliant poem ever written is Rudyard Kipling’s “If.”
  

Shirley MacLaine won the Academy Award.

I looked that poem up. It is almost all dependent clauses.

Then Mondale won in Pennsylvania.

My mouth was dry. I had gone for sound bites hook, line, and sinker. Should I have kept at least one tooth in dependent clauses? I couldn’t answer that question. Not in sound bites.

I needed more research.

I read a Mondale statement on winning in Pennsylvania: “This is a big win. … I would anticipate several tough fights down the road.”

Ahhhh.

Relief at last.

Of course Mondale was winning! He had caught on to sound bites. Probably read about them in the
Sunday Pioneer Press,
I thought back. When had Mondale brought his campaign into focus? After New Hampshire. How? By saying, “Where’s the beef?”

I read a Hart statement on losing in Pennsylvania: “If it gets down to a candidate running for President, in effect, on the backs of only one constituent group, I think that doesn’t say much for the ability of the candidate to broaden that base.”

Hart had drifted into dependent clauses.

Not me. Clipty-clop. I wouldn’t say “if” if I had a mouthful of it.

Shirley MacLaine may be right. But not about that poem.

It’s not just a question of what they say,

But also of who is “they.”

When cannibals speak of a gourmet dinner,

They mean that they ate a gourmet.

Dear Unnatural Parent,

IT IS 7:12 P.M.
Dusk drags sunswollen feet. In the distance, strings are played (tennis:
fwokt fwok).
Through the wall, I hear adenoidal voices arguing the feasibility of an unpublished poets’ union. Some squat, indifferently plumed bird is gawping, insentiently, into my window. I am at literary camp. Hurrah.

I
could
be at home, snug in my own room, munching fresh Mallomars and putting one more polish on Canto Five (“Greed Disgorges the Knight of Love”), but no.
You
insisted I come to Paper Mountain Writers’ Conference. Do you know, Next of Kin, what we do every morning? Every morning we do deconstruction. I
defy
deconstruction, anytime, anywhere. We are invited to deconstruct at 6:15
A.M
.,
outdoors.
Forty-five minutes’ supposed disabuse of our own texts,
sur l’herbe.
It is designed to tone us up.

Pah!

“Young people my own age” you desired me to meet. My roommate is a forty-seven-year-old driver of an Avis airport shuttle bus who is writing an account of his travels. Since 1972 he has been negotiating one 3.8-mile circle thirty to thirty-five times daily. “For eleven solid years,” he told me, “I tell myself, ‘Leland, this ain’t no career. This ain’t
leading
anywhere, Leland.’ But then I took this writing course at the junior college, and the prof said, ‘Leland, write what you know.’”

To begin with, he wrote rondels.

Rondels!

“Rondels are dead!” I told him. “Small things are dead! Verse is dead! Nothing
can
live save the major protean. We must return in one enormous motion to the epic-poetic and the great prose models!”

“Yeah,” he said. “I tell myself, ‘Leland, if you put together a long enough
sequence
of rondels …’ But then I figure, ‘Leland, old buddy, let’s get practical: no movie in it. So let’s do it first as a novelized version. Take the money. Run. Then we’ve bought ourselves some time.’”

Leland!

“Influential people in the writing business” you desired me to meet. Last night there was a cocktail party in the Founder’s Residence. One popular (except among all those people who have met him) biographer of robber barons and dubious empresses exchanging insider-talk with a peer:

“How many cities on your promotional tour?”

“Ten.”

“Really? I did seventeen cities myself.”

“Yes, but mine weren’t all in the same state.”

One novelist I have vaguely heard of (but whose novels I would not touch with a fifty-foot drop line) to another and vice versa:

“You know, my last book sold quite well.”

“Like hotcakes, I understand. But, then, the reviews were so flat.”

“They were not. They were
mixed.”

“Oh, that’s right — I understand you shredded them all yourself.”

Do I need this? I do not. Is this sublime? It is not. Does this stir up something new from ancient depths; does this bid fair to ricochet from age to age to age? Yes, and Kleenex is the Golden Fleece.

None of the so-called established writers at this chickadee-infested retreat seem to have read anyone except whoever of their number has just left the room, which gives those remaining an opportunity to remark that the departed one has evinced, in his latest overpraised offering, a failure of nerve.

As you know, I refuse to show my manuscript to anyone who is incapable of reading something larger than himself. Accordingly, I have not shown it to anyone here. Today I had a “conference” with my “adviser,” none other than Edward Noone, the author of
Hurled.
“Do you have anything to show me?” he asked.

“We’ll see,” I said.

That seemed to throw him. A silent moment passed. “So, uh, who do you read — who’re you influenced by?” he inquired, assuming no doubt that the first words out of my mouth would be “Well, aside
from you,
of course …”

“Scott,” I said.

He brightened. “Oh, you know Scott Spencer?”

“Sir Walter,” I snapped.

He looked startled.

“And, now that you mention it, Edmund.”

No, not startled. He looked
afraid.
As if he had asked whether I had any pets, and I had handed him Bucephalus, Leviathan, a breathing Sphinx.
Grandeur
is not a notion to these people. They shrink — which had seemed impossible — at the merest whiff of esemplastic sweep.

Another silent moment. “I believe,” I said, “that
you
have nothing to show
me.”
And then I left him with his word processor, which I hear he gnaws.