Just One Catch (31 page)

In the 1960s and 1970s, the blurring of High and Low would characterize American art and entertainment—from the visual arts (Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg) to the movies (Mike Nichols, Francis Ford Coppola); from the comics (R. Crumb, Charles Schultz) to literature (exhibit A:
Catch-22
). Critics have attributed this development to many causes: the easy availability of paperbacks (Jane Austen consorting on bookshelves with Mickey Spillane), tabloids, and television programming; technological advances (silk screening, photographic manipulation); and advertising, with its hunger for co-opting original ideas to spur mass sales. But Heer is also right: Much of the energy behind this mixing of cultural products, aims, and ambitions came from the drive for integration by groups of people seizing opportunities formerly denied them.

Not surprisingly, individuals who held privileged social positions, and shaped
their
ideas of culture around them, fought change. On July 17, 1955—shortly after the appearance of “Catch-18” in
New World Writing
—Disneyland opened in Anaheim, California. If “Catch-18” was part of the trend toward
blurring,
bringing with it new ideas of art, literature, and entertainment, Disneyland (in spite of its technical dazzle and television promotions) was part of the resistance to change, a wistful attempt at preserving “old” culture.

Originally, Disney, a son of the rural Midwest, had intended to call Disneyland “Walt Disney's America.”
His
America was not Joe Heller's. In fact, according to Raymond M. Weinstein, a scholar of modern culture, “Walt Disney had an intense dislike for Coney Island and what he thought it represented—dirty, disorganized … garish.” It wasn't the amusement rides Disney objected to; his revulsion seemed tied to something deeper—perhaps the ethnic mix, the noisy clash of immigrant voices and styles?

“Disneyland [was] the embodiment of one man's prepossession toward America's most important beliefs, values, and symbols [rooted in] … his boyhood experiences in the … Midwest,” Weinstein wrote. In its cleanliness, logical organization (its perfection of park administration), and old-fashioned Main Street atmosphere, it would be the anti–Coney Island. “Disney understood well the mood of the 1950s—with its bomb threats, Cold War, domestic paranoia, foreign conflicts,” Weinstein said. “[H]is brand of amusement played into everyone's desire to go back to their childhood and the childhood of the nation.”

Well, not everyone's—as the disruptive energy in the pages of
The Green Lantern, Commentary,
and
New World Writing
demonstrated.

*   *   *

JOE KNEW
it was no exaggeration to say that in the pages of comic books, journals, and magazines, a war was being waged for America's soul. Superman had gone from fighting corporate greed to battling Nazis—now, in this era of atomic-bomb threats and rumors of UFOs, he fended off invaders from darkening skies. However ridiculous these scenarios seemed, they offered debates on threats to the nation and what to do about them.

Similar considerations filled
Commentary
and other journals. For example, as early as 1952, a prominent member of
Commentary
's editorial staff, Irving Kristol, wrestled his conscience and broke with his fellow staffers' liberal views. He wrote that Joe McCarthy was certainly a threat to the nation's political integrity, but a bigger problem was the Left's refusal to disavow communism. The Left's dithering, he said, gave McCarthy ammunition. Kristol's colleagues fired back, accusing him in print of defending McCarthyism. The battle for the nation's soul—not to mention
Commentary
's—intensified.

Meanwhile, inside Henry Luce's empire, where Joe was safely ensconced, the arguments centered on corporate culture, corporate responsibilities.
Fortune
and
Time,
reflecting Luce's belief that America must
own
the century, insisted corporate leaders had to do more than earn profits; they had to forge in America a “business civilization” in which financial values shaped everything from arts and entertainment to architecture to the nation's infrastructure to the behavior of families. Capitalism had to have a moral basis.

What did this mean? Luce summed it up in practical terms: “I am biased in favor of God, Eisenhower, and the stockholders of Time Inc.” He promoted a certain image of American masculinity.
Time
and
Life
ran numerous articles on Billy Graham's increasingly popular Christian crusades, describing Graham as lean, blond, and handsome. Besides his physical attributes, a large part of what made Graham so attractive, said Luce, was the businesslike efficiency of his religious operation. When Graham went to New York City in the summer of 1957 for a series of rallies, he surrounded himself at news conferences with elite male business figures, including William Randolph Hearst, Jr., and Henry Luce. In Yankee Stadium, on July 20, Vice President Richard Nixon appeared at his rally. The stadium was an appropriate venue, not just for accommodating the crowd but also for stressing Graham's athleticism and love of sports, part of his all-American image. Sports metaphors leavened his sermons. “Christianity is not a religion for weaklings,” he asserted. “We must be strong, virile, dynamic, if we are to stand.”

What role did women play in this mix of bodybuilding, business, and faith? “I never talk alone with a woman,” Graham told an interviewer. Fervently, he avoided “lovesick women [and] bobby soxers” (as the interviewer put it). The American soul demanded sexual vigilance. Luce, praying each morning in his private elevator, agreed.

Next to
Time
on the newsstands, competing views of masculinity waved their muscular pages, including the pulp version with postwar variations. “In wartime the Armed Services taught soldiers how to fight enemies, but [back home], working-class soldiers depended upon the mass-market magazines for their civilian life-lessons,” wrote Adam Parfrey, editor of
It's a Man's World: Men's Adventure Magazines, the Postwar Pulps.
“All of them had, among the lures of woman flesh and vicious bad guys, a lot of warnings, how-to's, and comforting memories of wartime, when decisions were black and white, the villains darker and the victories sweeter.”

Bruce Jay Friedman went to work for Martin Goodman's Magazine Management Company in 1954, after a stint in Korea. Racism, misogyny, and imperialism were “just the way things were” in titles such as
Male, Stag,
and
True Action
—known in the trade as “armpit” publications, he said. “We didn't think twice about it”: This
was
blue-collar manhood.

The magazines printed the word
nympho
every chance they got. In addition to “girl pinching” pieces, a staple of the postwar pulps was “true” stories about battlefield heroism. Friedman would show Goodman a layout. “This one true?” Goodman asked. “Well, sort of,” Friedman replied. His boss nodded happily.

One day, Friedman hired a young writer named Mario Puzo, a big man who loved a good drink and a fine cigar. Puzo “would create giant mythical armies, lock them in combat in Central Europe, and have casualties coming in by the hundreds of thousands,” Friedman said. “Although our mail was heavy, I don't recall a single letter casting doubt on any of these epic conflicts.” After work each day, Puzo pounded away on a novel, a “Mafia epic,” he said.

Other regular features in the men's magazines included “Animal Nibbler” stories, “about people who had been nibbled half to death by ferocious little animals,” Friedman explained. “The titles were terrifying cries of anguish. ‘A Grysbok Sucked My Bones'; ‘Give Me Back My Leg'; they seemed to have even more power when couched in the present … tense. ‘A Boar Is Grabbing My Brain.'”

“Sintown” stories were a hit with readers. “I always thought [of them] as ‘scratch the surface' yarns,” Friedman said. “(Outwardly, Winkleton, Illinois, is a quiet, tree-lined little community.… But scratch the surface of this supposedly God-fearing little town and you will find that not since Sodom and Gomorrah and blah blah blah.) Any town with a bar and a hooker would do.”

Even here, amid the puerility, soul struggles evolved. As Cold War dustups frayed the country's nerves, and cracks began to appear in suburbia's blissful pavement, previously suppressed fantasies crept into the men's magazines. They took the form of “Leg Shackler” stories: “Slaves of the Emperor of Agony,” “Savage Rites of the Whip,” “Tormented Love.” As Parfrey noted, “Damsels [had] been distressed since the turn of the century in pulps, but nearly always the illustrations suggested that a hero was nearby, and his rescue pending.” More and more, “heroes came to play an increasingly minor role in illustrations until [they were] completely phased out.” Apparently, readers of these magazines came to believe that “saving women from torture was [no longer] on any level heroic.” This growing trend would reach its peak in the mid-1960s, Parfrey said, at “the time of the Vietnam War's escalation and the emergence of feminism.”

Skirmishes over manhood, politics, or corporate behavior might have been restricted to small pockets of readers here and there, given the specialized nature of magazines. But the tensions escaped their stapled spines. The term
culture war
would not achieve currency until decades later, but a culture war this was.

In 1954, Dr. Fredric Wertham published a book called
Seduction of the Innocent,
in which he claimed comic books and men's magazines were spreading an epidemic of juvenile delinquency and homosexuality among the nation's youth. His supporters boycotted newsstands and burned comic books. Writing in
Commentary,
Norbert Muhlen cursed the “dehumanized” and “repetitious” stories of “death and destruction” in comics, which were “helping to educate a whole generation for an authoritarian rather than a democratic society.” With little change, his words could have served a leg-shackling Nazi, but the U.S. Congress became concerned enough (or alert enough to an issue worth exploiting politically—it was certainly easier to face this than Joe McCarthy) to threaten government censorship of comics. In response, William Gaines, publisher of Educational Comics, and his business manager, Lyle Stuart, created the Comics Magazines Association of America, a self-regulatory agency set up to administer a code—a stamp of approval guaranteeing “wholesome, entertaining and educational” contents. Any title that didn't comply would face distribution hurdles. This move was meant to stave off harsher regulation by the government.

Gaines's company published
Tales from the Crypt, Weird Fantasy, The Vault of Horror,
and a relatively new title (from October 1952), written and edited by a man named Harvey Kurtzman:
Tales Calculated to Drive You MAD: Humor in a Jugular Vein.

“Of course, we had the big problem: could we ever live under the censorship of the Comics Code?” Kurtzman said. “We decided, absolutely
no.
We could not go on as a comic book.” Thus,
Mad
was born. Technically, by shifting from hand lettering to set type, the publication became a magazine instead of a comic. It was not bound by the strict new code.

Restrictions on magazine content were lighter (not to say ambiguous and paradoxical). “[B]oys were allowed to purchase [men's] magazines that promoted wholesale violence against an entire gender, while
Playboy
-style girlie mags that revered women and their bodies were considered unfit material for underage [readers],” Adam Parfrey wrote. (
Playboy
debuted in December 1953.)

“In many ways
Mad
represented a group of alternative New York Jewish intellectuals,” says critic David Abrams. “[M]any of
Mad
's staff were Jewish, either native New Yorkers or émigrés from Europe, a high proportion of them survivors of Nazi Germany. Like the New York intellectual milieu, many of them had come to political awareness during the Depression.”

Yiddish phrases stippled the magazine's pages. By 1967, theologian Vernard Eller could say, “Beneath the pile of garbage that is
Mad,
there beats, I suspect, the heart of a rabbi.” Abrams contends that “
Mad
's critique of America was far more effective and devastating than [its] better-known counterparts … such as
Commentary, Dissent, Partisan Review,
and
The New Leader.
” This was so, he says, because the intellectual journals were constrained by their sponsoring organizations (in
Commentary
's case, the powerful American Jewish Committee) or editors' ideologies. “[W]e like to say that
Mad
has no politics and that we take no point of view,” Gaines once said, but “the magazine is more liberal than not liberal.”

Abrams may overstate
Mad
's intellectual rigor, but he is right to call attention to its growing influence during the 1950s and 1960s. Its highly visible political satire, scored to Borscht Belt rhythms, perhaps eased the way for Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, and Joseph Heller, or helped them gain greater acceptance. Politics and punning, smarts and snappy play—the High and the Low—had embraced.

Mad
carried no advertising (ironic, given the location of its offices on Madison Avenue). Among its favorite targets for satire were ad agencies—“the essence of
Mad
's success is its nimble spoofing of promotions of all kinds,”
Time
noted in 1958. The Disney Corporation came under fire (Mickey Mouse as a rat-faced thug). Joseph McCarthy didn't escape: “Is Your Bathroom Breeding Bolsheviks?” asked one of the magazine's fake ads.