Читать книгу Turning Right at Hollywood and Vine - Roger L. Simon - Страница 9

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FROM SOUTH CAROLINA BACKWARDS

I have only a dim memory of how I felt in August 1966, when—standing by the side of the road between Sumter and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina—I stared dumbstruck at the severed fourth finger of my left hand. I can’t remember if blood was streaming from the stump as I stooped to pick the finger up with my good hand. I assume it was, though all I can be certain of is that I was trying not to faint and that the Southern cop opposite me had a terrified look on his face.

That cop may not have been older than I (I was twenty-two), but he was about a head taller and a lot broader. Only minutes before he had been pointing angrily past my wife Dyanne at Bruce Dinkins, the thirteen-year-old African-American kid in the back seat of the Corvair, demanding to know what “that boy” was doing in our car.

We were on the way to integrate the segregated bathhouses of Myrtle Beach, but I wasn’t in a hurry to tell the cop that under the circumstances. Already I felt guilty about dragging young Bruce along on the enterprise. Dyanne and I had made him the lead in our student production of A Raisin in the Sun, and he regarded us as gods from the North, but this situation had spun out of control. Bruce probably blamed himself when the junior redneck dropped the jack at my feet.

We’d had a flat and, lacking our own jack, had flagged down a highway patrol car. The young cop had seemed happy to oblige us until noticing our racially mixed group. He turned surly, muttering, “Y’all do it yerself,” with his eyes fixed on the young teenager. But I didn’t know how to use the jack and had barely gotten it up when the whole car came down on my hand, breaking my finger off at the base.

Now Bruce was standing there watching one of his gods potentially bleed to death. I urged the shell-shocked cop to drive me to the nearest hospital. “Don’t get blood on my hat,” he said, referring to the pristine Stetson on the seat beside him, as we barreled toward a small clinic in the town of Clinton. Dyanne waited with Bruce at the side of the road for a tow truck to come. When I got to the hospital, the receptionist asked for my address and emergency contact. I hesitated. The hospital was all white. Was it actually still segregated, I wondered? This could be a big mess. But I didn’t have a choice. I told them to call the man who ran our program back in Sumter. I didn’t bother to mention that he was the cousin of Martin Luther King.

I then slumped against the wall and nearly passed out, feeling as if I were living my own low-rent version of Edward Albee’s play about the death of Bessie Smith. At least I was still alive, unlike Andy Goodman, my childhood best friend from New York’s progressive Walden School. He’d been shot the previous year by the Ku Klux Klan in a racial incident that inspired the film Mississippi Burning. There hadn’t been a day that summer when his murder was far from my mind.

Minutes later I was being wheeled into an operating room in that tiny clinic in rural South Carolina. I have never been religious, but I have a fleeting memory of saying a short prayer—before the anesthesia put my lights out—that the Southern doctor sewing my finger back on had been trained at some fancy out-of-state medical school.

Even though I’d had my occasional dreams of martyrdom-lite—being sprayed with power hoses, say, or even stung gingerly with cattle prods—an amputated finger was more than I’d bargained for. I’d signed up for the Yale Southern Teaching Program in the spring of 1966 full of idealistic images of Freedom Riders singing “We Shall Overcome.” This was going to be the summer when I grew up socially and politically. After all, I was now a full-fledged civil rights worker, engaged in the greatest struggle of the era.

And for a while it had gone well. Dyanne and I had done our bits registering voters on rural black farms, teaching African-American history to schoolkids in the “colored” part of Sumter and even organizing the first production (albeit truncated) in that part of the South of that seminal drama of black family life, A Raisin in the Sun. On weekends we would motor around neighboring states, once visiting the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee office in Atlanta in search of black history materials. There we ran into two of the more famous young idols of the period—Stokely Carmichael and Julian Bond. The exceptionally handsome and charismatic Bond—now president of the NAACP—was then making his first run for a congressional seat. He showed me a leaflet he planned to distribute to voters with the symbol of the Black Panther Party of Lowndes County, Alabama. It was the first time I had seen that famous sign of Black Power—though I had heard about it—and felt hurt when Bond rejected my offer to go precinct walking with him. He apparently didn’t need a white boy in the black districts of Atlanta. I tried to understand. I had other things to do then, other ways I could serve the cause of racial equality.

This, however, was all cut short by my encounter with a redneck cop on my way to integrate Myrtle Beach. But was I actually the victim of a civil rights incident? Or had I just been a clumsy urban graduate student unable to operate a simple automobile jack without bringing the car down on my hand? What would I tell my friends and family when I got home? The whole affair was ambiguous.

My life before then had been more sheltered than I wanted to admit. Dartmouth College, where I had spent my undergraduate years, was a good school, but painfully far from the action at a time when I correctly surmised the world was about to go upside down. Dartmouth in those days wasn’t even coed, a sure-fire prescription for social retardation, though at least I had a girlfriend at Skidmore.

I’d tried my best in high school to be ahead of the curve—wearing sunglasses, black turtleneck, and beret, in the emerging beatnik style—but the results were marginal. I was the youngest member of my Scarsdale High class and even being the first of them (probably) to smoke grass (with a local jazz musician who was teaching me to play the drums and called joints “medicated cigarettes”) didn’t amount to much. Nor did being the only one to witness Jack Kerouac reading live at Hunter College auditorium (circa 1959). My eyewitness tale of the Beat Generation icon slumped over the lectern, waving a bottle of Scotch while holding forth from the pages of The Subterraneans and beckoning the young Allen Ginsberg—then resembling a bespectacled yeshiva bocher from a road show Fiddler on the Roof—to join him on stage was of interest only to a tiny minority of like-minded Scarsdale High School classmates.

We were the ones trying to be superficially cool, listening to Thelonious Monk and Gerry Mulligan on Symphony Sid’s late night radio or, in the case of the folkie set, Joan Baez, but actually dreaming of normal teenage things like losing our virginity or getting into our college of choice.

I failed at the latter, only making the waiting list for Harvard, and just barely achieved the former before arriving at Dartmouth, having lost my cherry over summer vacation to what I thought was a desperately aging hooker (she could have been thirty) in a walk-up off the Place Clichy. “J’ai un étudiant!” she shouted as we climbed the stairs. At least she hadn’t used the more demeaning élève, declaring me a student and not a “pupil.” Perhaps she guessed I was college-bound.

Of course, this was still the very early Sixties—not yet what we’ve come to call “The Sixties.” Dartmouth when I arrived had much the same atmosphere as Scarsdale High, though it was far from New York and its Greenwich Village Mecca, to which I would escape from the suburbs any chance I had in high school. The student body consisted of a lot of innocent jocks, a few nerds-before-their-time—mostly in the math department—and some preppies who didn’t make it into Princeton. But there were exceptions; there always had been. My father had gone to Dartmouth and introduced me to his classmate Budd Schulberg ’36 at a Yale game when I was about twelve. I knew even then this was the kind of Ivy graduate I aspired to be, assuming that I would graduate and not dare to go the full bohemian route like Scott Fitzgerald—to drop out (or be dropped out) in my junior year.

I searched out these eccentric types the moment I was on campus, but they were upperclassman and seemed inaccessible to me. One of them, Stephen Geller, cut a swashbuckling figure not only because he directed a production of Waiting for Godot and made his own student film (unheard of then), a burlesque of Bergman’s Seventh Seal, but also because he came from Los Angeles and his father worked in The Industry (an arranger for Tennessee Ernie Ford, as it turned out). Geller knew people who actually made movies for a living, that weren’t the doctors and lawyers or, worse yet, business people who had until then constituted nearly the entire panoply of adults in my life.

Somewhere in the second half of my freshman year, he and six others—a couple were attractive younger faculty wives, I was interested to note—staged the first ever nuclear disarmament demonstration in the history of the Ivy League in the middle of the Dartmouth Green. This was in the winter of 1960-1961, not long after the far more dramatic demonstrations in Berkeley, California, against the House Un-American Activities Committee (commemorated in the film Operation Abolition), which many consider the beginning of our modern era of protest. But I was more transfixed by the local New Hampshire event and yearned to participate.

Even then I realized on some instinctive level the important bond between progressive politics and artistic success, though I had no idea how intricate it was. But besides wanting to show my colors as an incipient progressive, the subject of the tiny Dartmouth demonstration had a rather large personal component for me. Nuclear weapons provided an eerie background to the childhood of most of my generation. And for me they were more than that. They were the major point of contention between my father and me, the focus of my adolescent rebellion.

My father, Norman Simon, was a radiologist—among the first in private practice in the City of New York—who volunteered his time for the Atomic Energy Commission. Although it was probably something of an exaggeration, I was told as a boy that my father would be de facto Governor of New York in the event of a nuclear attack. He had treated the “Hiroshima Ladies”—the group of victims of the Hiroshima blast who were flown to the U.S. for examination—and was supposed to know as well as anybody how to deal with the effects of radioactive fallout on the human body. When I was very young, he would spend many of his weekends at the Atomic Energy Commission installation in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, or at Los Alamos itself. (I have a dim recollection of being introduced to the Manhattan Project scientists Lisa Meitner and J. Robert Oppenheimer as a child. I must have been about three.) He would return from those weekends with a grim expression, having attended lectures on the latest doomsday weapons—by then they must have been thermonuclear—that only those with the highest security clearance were allowed to see.

My father’s obtaining that elevated clearance provided the background for one of my more potent childhood memories. I recall at the age of seven standing in the lobby of our apartment, two blocks from New York’s Mt. Sinai Hospital, where my father practiced, watching a pair of FBI agents conduct an interview about my dad. The agents were scary enough to me in their gangster-movie wide-brimmed fedoras, but not nearly as disturbing as the man they were questioning. He was the superintendent of our building, an angry drunk who beat his kid with an old-fashioned cat ’o nine tails. I knew this because his son Byron was my after-school playmate; I had seen the super whip him on more than one occasion in the shadows of the dank corridor near their basement apartment. I had also seen the welts on Byron’s back and arms. The idea that a drunken thug like that super held my father’s future in his hands was unnerving to my seven-year-old self. Nothing good could come of that. And my fears were only exacerbated by my pal and confidante Nick, our handsome young elevator man from the Bronx. He informed me that the feds had been asking if my dad was a commie. I knew for sure that he wasn’t, but I wasn’t certain what the elevator man thought, or anybody else for that matter. Those were paranoid times, even for a seven year old. And I couldn’t ask anyone the truth at home. The atmosphere between my parents, never particularly relaxed, was extremely testy until that investigation was finally over and I somehow learned my father had the coveted “Q” clearance, whatever that meant.

So the old “duck and cover” game we used to play at PS 6 back in the early Fifties, hiding from atomic bombs with our heads in our hands while contorted under those cramped nineteenth-century folding school desks—that was a family matter to me. My fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Feig, whose husband was also a doctor, knew this. She’d announce to my classmates that “Roger’s father” would come in to check up on them if they didn’t behave in the proper manner during their proxy nuclear holocaust exercises.

I was proud of this parental recognition then, but by the time I was in junior high, adolescent hormones were kicking in and I was starting to separate from my father. I didn’t like that he worked for the Atomic Energy Commission, and especially disliked that he often represented the AEC in debates with the newly formed Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. Never mind that my father told me not only that he actually sympathized with SANE but also that by the end of their debates everyone was really listening to him, because, after all, he knew the facts and they knew only their idealistic pronouncements. I wasn’t buying. More than that—I was embarrassed. My father was on the wrong side.

Not long into high school, I was attending my first meetings—found in ads on the back of The Village Voice—of a short-lived group called the Student Peace Union. They advertised that they were a “Third Camp” in opposition to the foreign policies of the United States and the Soviet Union. I didn’t realize then that the “Third Camp” consisted mostly of Trotskyists trying to find a way to rope in a few naive Quakers and other pacifists and put them on the straight and narrow to world socialism. In fact, at that point, I had no idea how to recognize any of the socialist sects or their methodologies or internecine rivalries. I wasn’t even fifteen.

I came in from Scarsdale for the SPU lectures at the Judson Church with a high school friend whose parents were Quakers and members of the American Friends Service Committee. In reality my friend and I weren’t very interested in the lectures. We wanted to meet the Village beatnik girls of our dreams. That meant we would skip out of the political speechifying after about ten minutes and head over to Rick’s Café Bizarre or Rienzi’s Coffee Shop on Bleecker in the hope of running into one, or preferably two, of those mysterious creatures in leotards. Of course, when we did, we suburban kids couldn’t have been of less interest to them. So my friend and I ended up spending most of our time drinking hot cider (why was that hip?) and playing chess. Later, too young to go inside, we would “free beat” in front of Birdland, listening to Coltrane or Cannonball Adderley before taking the last train back to Westchester. A couple of times we even puffed on a joint late at night at the Scarsdale station. It seemed the safest place for such reckless abandon.

In true teenage fashion I resisted sharing these experiences with my parents, especially the furtive pot smoking. This was still the Fifties, remember. But I suspect that my mother romanticized my adventures anyway, thinking they were more than they were. (That would have been easy at that point.) She’d had literary dreams and I got some of my aspirations from her. Like seemingly half of my family, my mother had wanted to be a writer.

Ruth Simon—daughter of the Polish-born Ben Lichtenberg and the Bronx-born Minerva Kahn—dropped out of college in her junior year to take an assistant’s job with the Paris branch of the Chicago Tribune. There she hung around Left Bank cafes and met journalistic lights like Walter Lippman. It was a time in her life she told me about repeatedly when I was a boy—her trips to Spain after the Civil War and to Germany with the Nazis already in control. But as the Second World War loomed, she returned to America and, bourgeois impulses at work, agreed to marry my father after only a couple of dates. It helped that he was smart and good-looking (both my parents were attractive), but all the same he came from a seemingly lower-class Jewish family of Russian and Ukrainian immigrants from the mill town of Lawrence, Massachusetts and had to pass muster with my mother’s more “aristocratic” father. Ben Lichtenberg was a foppish public relations man who admired Napoleon, dined frequently at the Pavillion, allegedly changed his Sulka’s silk shirts five times a day and claimed to be related to the Baron von Lichtenberg—supposedly, or so my grandmother told me, one of the rare Jewish royals of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. (Google has nothing on this.)

After marrying, to keep her hopes of an independent career alive, my mother spent another couple of years as a publicist for classical musicians, during which time she walked around Manhattan wearing a hat fashioned from a long-playing record of Metropolitan Opera star Lili Pons. But after that, she never worked again. Later, I would live out those Paris literary dreams for her, but then, when I was in high school, hers were at their most thwarted. She was beginning to realize that she was staring down the barrel of forty years of stultifying suburban life out of a Cheever novel.

So my mother ameliorated her pain with a haze of prescription drugs. She was more or less addicted to tranquilizers and barbiturates throughout my high school years. My father the doctor kept the medicine cabinet well stocked, making it easy for her. I don’t know if he was consciously medicating her, but it was certainly conventional for that generation to do this to themselves and sometimes to their children. The humorist S. J. Perelman was my father’s patient, but it wasn’t for that reason alone my father kept an autographed copy of The Road to Miltown on the living room coffee table. My generation’s (and my) later much more public experiments with drugs don’t seem so astonishing when juxtaposed with this secret reality of the Fifties, which sometimes bubbled to the surface in New Yorker cartoons. Maybe we were only making explicit what our parents had kept hidden.

Although my father came from that Orthodox immigrant home back in Lawrence, my parents’ lifestyle, particularly in Scarsdale, was Jewish-WASP. They rarely went to synagogue or discussed religion at home; they liked to entertain formally and were members of a country club. Surfaces were of paramount importance. Even in the social sphere, things had to be dealt with in a decorous manner. My parents were Stevenson Democrats but I can’t remember them actively lobbying for any political cause or even going to a meeting. Their involvement in the growing civil rights struggle was only peripheral. They sent me to visit family friends in Louisiana when I was thirteen, but when I returned, aghast, with my stories of “colored” water fountains and other Jim Crow horrors, they merely clucked their disapproval. They never did anything about it. The two exceptions came from my father’s aforementioned professional interest in nuclear energy and his usually unspoken fascination with the Holocaust.

This kind of repressed behavior and hypocrisy is of course popularly associated with the Fifties. When, shortly after college, I read Yale psychologist Kenneth Kenniston’s The Young Radicals—which defined the left-wing youth of my generation as being in rebellion against liberal parents who rarely acted on their values—I thought I’d found the academic version of my own autobiography. And for those days, I had. But the dialectic moves on and I had no idea how my view of my parents, particularly of my father, would circle back on itself. I am far more sympathetic to him now and recognize that his activities with the Atomic Energy Commission were in many ways heroic. He was a committed man in the sense that he believed that, on balance, the values of this country are positive and its role in the world necessary. He wanted to defend and protect it through his scientific work.

At that time, however, I was in Kenniston-style rebellion. By my sophomore year at Dartmouth I had become roommates with Alan Coggeshall, a tow-headed, angular character who resembled a latter-day Ichabod Crane and even came from Peekskill, New York, not far from Washington Irving’s Sleepy Hollow. These were the days (1962) when we were first getting an inkling of the existence of psychedelic drugs and Alan, less risk-averse than I, would head off to Cambridge on weekends to participate in the early LSD experiments of Harvard psych professors Richard Alpert and Timothy Leary. When I listened to his tales of rainbows exploding to Bach cantatas, I never dreamed that Leary himself would be one of my closer friends in Hollywood in the Eighties, or that Alan would be dead the year after we graduated. He was in the back of a car that went flying off the road on its way to Bennington. I always assumed the driver was stoned, but don’t know for sure.

What I do know is that Alan’s LSD tales, fascinating though they were, made me nervous. Was I ready for explosions in my brain? Would I come back again? I remember feeling waves of apprehension when a package Alan had ordered arrived at our dorm room from Smith Cactus Farm in Laredo, Texas. It was peyote. Though the psychedelic cactus wasn’t yet illegal, I could hardly believe it had actually arrived—dozens of scuzzy little dirt-covered buds inside a flimsy cardboard box wrapped in twine, all for about five dollars post paid. Save some die-hard Aldous Huxley fans, almost no one had heard of the plant then, in the early Sixties.

Among our minute group of incipient Dartmouth hipsters, however, a few were claiming already to have ingested the cactus. Eating it straight was supposed to be a one-way ticket to the vomitorium, so they said they’d either ground it into a paste for cookies or whirled it with ice cream and milk into a shake. One, an aspiring poet from West Virginia, had described his experience to me in glowing terms. Yes, he was sick for an hour or two and threw up all over the bathroom, and, yes, there was a period when all he could see were giant beetles coming out of his toilet … but then the visions … ah, the visions. He waved his hand at the transcendent magic of it all and gazed at me as if I were hopelessly square and hopelessly cowardly.

I didn’t know whether to believe him or not, but he certainly had a point about my being scared. When the time came to turn on to our cactus stash, I pretended to eat while nipping tentatively at the skin of one of the buds as if the flesh beneath were imbued with rattlesnake venom, not mescaline. Then, when I thought no one was looking, I stuffed the cactus in my pocket. I waited until others began to report a “buzz” before nodding my concurrence. Yes, I said, those street lights outside our dorm did glow with incredible colors. The group clustered in our room that night was probably suspicious of me, but I just had to live with it. I wasn’t ready for my first hallucinogenic trip and wouldn’t be for some time to come.

Turned on or not, as my years at Dartmouth wore on, I felt increasingly isolated in Hanover, New Hampshire. Many of the more interesting upperclassmen like Geller had left and the world was changing at a rapid clip, the epicenter of the student universe moving west to Berkeley and the Free Speech Movement. By the time I entered the Yale Drama School in fall 1965, I was relieved to be in New Haven. There was a Berkeley girl in my playwriting class—Dyanne Asimow—and I quickly fell in love with her, knowing she would be a good companion in my growing desire to explore this new world and be part of the “My Generation,” as the Who sang. And for a while, she was. But in those days, and in Hollywood especially, staying together wasn’t easy.