Harlan Ellison's Watching Read online

  This wasn't as fast to tell as I'd thought. Anyway, what happened was this:

  One day I was in the Burke's Law office, it's now 1965, and Aaron came in as we were trying to cast Betty Hutton for my script "Who Killed 1/2 of Glory Lee?" He was bubbling with excitement about the fabulous night he had spent the day before, at a "very exclusive new club" called The Daisy. He went on rapturously, explaining at length that this club was so exclusive that even if you had the Big Bucks for membership, you couldn't get in unless you Were Somebody. Well, I listened raptly (Richard listened with weariness and the boredom of familiarity). And after Aaron had strutted and fulminated about this den of grandeur whose portals were verboten to all but the denizens of the mountaintop, I said, "Hell, I could get in."

  Aaron looked at me with a condescending smile. "Forget it, Harlan. They only take in members who are famous."

  "I can get a membership."

  "No chance."

  "Wanna bet?"

  "Bet what?"

  I smiled that self-assured smartass smile that goes before a long fall from a great height, and I said, "I'll bet you a grand against a thousand dollars off my next script assignment, that I can not only become a member of The Daisy, but I can get in within twenty-four hours from right now."

  Aaron searched around in his briefcase for his wallet, pulled out a plastic card and held it up. It was a membership card for the Daisy. "For a thousand, you'll have one of these, with your name on it, and actually be a member of The Daisy by . . . " he consulted his wristwatch, " . . . eleven o'clock tomorrow?"

  I nodded, suddenly getting a little frightened. A thousand in 1963 was a lot of money. It may only be a loaf of bread and a jar of Vlasic pickles these days, but as a one-hour story and teleplay brought a writer top-of-the-show remuneration at $4500, that thousand dollars suddenly loomed very large.

  "You're on," Aaron said, smugly. He made like a Great White and everyone else in the office (except Richard Newton) grinned back, prepared to see the smartass get his comeuppance.

  When the meeting broke up, and I was on my way back to the tiny office where they kept me soldered to the typewriter, Richard overtook me and laid a big-brotherly hand on my shoulder. "At times," he said, with affection and concern, "I see you as a very foolish man who doesn't know when he's dancing at the lip of the abyss." I don't think I'll ever forget that moment: it may have been for me—at age 31—that I began belatedly to reach puberty. I might have tried to explain to him that I couldn't help myself, that I had been warped by Hoppity, but it wouldn't have made any more sense in 1965 than it does now.

  Nonetheless, I was determined to pull it off.

  In just such a foolhardy state of arrogance and braggadocio did Marie Antoinette say, "Let them eat cake!" and did Gary Hart challenge the newshounds to follow him and watch his every move.

  Once back in my office, I began attacking the problem in just the way Sherlock Holmes would have gone at it. Logically. Quietly. Rationally.

  Hysterically.

  I started calling friends who were "in the know." I asked them to tell me everything they knew about The Daisy, and who ran it. The name that came up was Jack Martin Hanson, who owned the posh and trendy clothing shop in Beverly Hills known as Jax.

  Nothing there.

  I kept probing, and one of my contacts said he'd heard that Hanson had just taken over Cinema magazine from a guy named James Silke, that the magazine was intended as something of a high-profile purchase for Hanson, a way to gain greater access to the film community and the people who had enough money to buy the clothes his shop sold, not to mention the kind of money needed to afford membership in his restricted Daisy.

  Bingo.

  I tracked down the number of Cinema's offices, and managed late that afternoon to speak to a young man named Curtis Lee Hanson. It did not escape my notice that Curtis Lee and Jack Martin had the same last name, Hanson. It turned out that Curtis Lee (now a successful and very talented writer/director, whose most recent feature was the thriller The Bedroom Window) was Jack's nephew, and he had just taken over as editor, Silke having departed to commence what eventually became an undistinguished filmwriting career.

  Hanson was vaguely aware of my name, had read something of mine somewhere, so he was friendly and receptive to my writing for his magazine. It was a snazzy slick journal, filled with photos, and with a somewhat loftier view of film than most of the gossipy, ephemeral magazines of the period. I said my fee for such writing was high, but that I'd make an exception in the case of Cinema, on one condition. (Curtis Lee heaved a sigh of relief; the magazine was paying almost nothing; it was a matter of prestige and like that.) He asked the condition, and I said, "I want a full, free membership in The Daisy. And I have to have the card in my hand no later than nine AM tomorrow morning."

  He said he didn't know if that could be done, that his connection with The Daisy was almost non-existent, that his uncle tried to keep the operations separate. I said it was non-negotiable, that it was the deal-breaker. Curtis Lee asked if I had something written already that he could show to Jack Hanson, to convince him that a magazine already publishing Bogdanovich, Dalton Trumbo and Terry Southern needed a Harlan Ellison.

  I said, "Well, I've just written a review-critique of The Train, the Frankenheimer film that'll be opening in about three weeks. Would that do?"

  He said yes, I said I'd have it messengered over to him, he said great, said he'd read it, said if it seemed up to their standards and needs he'd run it over to Jack and have him read it, said if Jack went for it he'd push for a Daisy card for me. I said thanks, hung up, and turned to my typewriter.

  I wrote that review-critique in about forty minutes. You will find it in this book.

  At eight o'clock that night, having sent the review to Curtis Lee by messenger from Four Star around one-thirty that afternoon, I got a phone call at my tiny treehouse home. It was Curtis Lee. "You want me to bring your membership card around, or do you want to pick it up?"

  I drove out, met Hanson for the first time in Beverly Hills, and took possession of Daisy membership card number 49. I also accepted an assignment to do a short piece on Edward G. Robinson as he neared his seventy-second birthday.

  Both pieces, and two more, appeared in the July-August 1965 issue of Cinema. I was a film critic.

  The next day, sitting in Aaron's office with Richard and casting director Betty Martin and three or four others, Aaron came rushing in, tossed the stack of scripts he'd read the night before on his desk and, without preamble, turned to me.

  "Well?"

  I looked innocent. I can do that. "Well what?"

  "You owe me a thousand dollars," he said, Great Whitelike.

  Everyone in the room looked nervous. It had been a good gag the day before, but they knew I couldn't possibly have pulled it off, and they now knew that Aaron would certainly call the business people and tell them that Ellison's next assignment was for a thousand less. Richard Newton didn't look happy with me.

  "Well, uh, no," I said slowly, forking two ringers into my shirt pocket. "You owe me a thousand." I brought out The Daisy membership card. High Noon. The Guns of Navarone.

  Go ahead, picture the scene in your mind. This is a book about movies, so run it through your head. It's good exercise.

  I've written elsewhere, and at length, about my brief crazy time of having Gone Hollywood. Much of that lunacy centered around The Daisy.

  *In the September 1966 issue of Los Angeles magazine, appeared a 5200 word article titled "Nightmare Nights at The Daisy." I wrote that article. Apart from a minor reprinting in a men's magazine exactly one year later, that piece has never been collected in one of my books of essays. It forms an interesting Hollywood footnote to this introduction. If you turn to Appendix B (page 423) you will find it as it was written at that moment in my life when I came to my senses and foreswore involvement with the social scene in the movie colony. Upon rereading, I find it verbose, purple, overstated and wincingly melodramatic. But in its wa
y, I guess, it is historical document at its silliest. Like the view of a former Flat-Earther after having taken his first space-ride.

  But if it had not been for the cattle call, for Richard Newton, for my awakening awareness that I did not want to grow up to be Aaron Spelling and needed to one-up the Great Man; had it not been for having been twisted and bent by Hoppity and the need to assert the know-it-all in me who now writes pontificating film criticism; had it not been for Curtis Lee Hanson, my friend and one-time editor, and Cinema magazine, now long-gone but fondly remembered; had it not been for that odd congeries of circumstances, this book of more than twenty-five years' worth of film comment would not exist.

  Having thus explained how I was corrupted, warped, driven to this unseemly stretch of writing, I know that those among you who paused in hammering together the gibbet to listen to this interminable screed, will now understand that I am innocent, that never has a cruel thought passed through my head, and that if justice is to be visited on anyone, it should properly fall on the ghosts of Max and Dave Fleischer and my Grandmother, on Aaron Spelling and Richard Newton, and certainly on Curtis Lee Hanson, all of whom ruined that sweet little Ellison kid.

  For myself, I've never cried, "Fire!" in a crowded theater.

  DARKNESS IN MAGIC CAVERNS:

  A nostalgic appreciation of moviegoing

  Chill beneath a cadaverously-gray autumn sky, the tiny New Mexico town. That slate moment in the seasons when everything begins to grow dark. The epileptic scratching of fallen leaves hurled along sidewalks. Mad sounds from the hills. Cold. And something else:

  A leopard, escaped, is loose in the town.

  Chill beneath a crawling terror of spotted death in the night, the tiny New Mexico town. That thick red moment in the fears of small people when everything explodes in the black flow of blood. A deep-throated growl from a filthy alley. Cold.

  A mother, preoccupied with her cooking, tells her small daughter to go down the street to the market, get a sack of flour to make bread for the father, coming home from work soon. The child shows a moment of fear . . . the animal they haven't found yet . . .

  The mother insists, it's only a few blocks and across the bridge to the market. Put on a shawl and go get that flour, your father will be home soon. The child goes. Hurrying back up the street, the small sack held close to her, the street empty and rilling with darkness, ink presses down the sky, the child looks around, and hurries. A cough in the blackness behind her. A cough, deep in a throat that never formed human sounds.

  The child's eyes widen in panic. She begins to hurry. Her footsteps quicken. The sound of padding behind her. Feet begin to run. Focus on darkness and the sound of rapid movement. The child. The rushing.

  To the wooden door of the house. The door is locked. The child pinned against the night, with the furred sound of agony rushing toward her on the wind.

  Inside, the mother, still kitchened, waiting. The sound of the child outside, panic and bubbles of hysteria in the voice, Mommy open the door the leopard is after me!

  The mother's face assumes the ages-old expression of harassed parenthood. Hands on hips, she turns to the door, you're always lying, telling fibs, making up stories, how many times have I told you lying will—

  Mommy! Open the door!

  You'll stay out there till you learn to stop lying!

  Mommy! Mom—

  Something gigantic hits the door with a crash. The door bows inward, and a fine spray of flour sifts between the cracks into the room. The mother's eyes grow huge, she stares at the door. A thick black stream, moving very slowly, seeps under the door.

  Let me tell you something straight: when I draw my last breath, and finally buy it, and should Cecil B. DeMille have been dealing me straight all those years and there is The Big Hiring Hall In The Sky (though I tend to distrust a man who would have Moses marry Yvonne De Carlo), I'm going to pass up meeting Hemingway and Shakespeare and W. C. Fields and Bogart and Marta Toren first thing on my arrival, and ask to be directed to the alabaster palace in which Val Lewton is spending a happy eternity.

  Oh, yeah. He'll be in a palace. Got to be.

  Nobody who produced films like The Leopard Man, from which came that scene I described at the outset, could be treated less respectfully by a benevolent God. And I'll walk up there to the palace and find Lewton on the back veranda, telling half a dozen lesser talents how to put together some celestial cinema. And one of the archangels in charge of casting will come up with the old one about, "Yeah, sure, Val, but God's got this chick, see . . . "

  And I'll interrupt them and say, "Mr. Lewton, sir, excuse me, but my name is Harlan Ellison and I've got you to thank for me not wasting my life, and for writing all kinds of stories people dug when I was alive, and for making my childhood bearable and . . . well, uh, er . . . "

  And I'll lapse into an awkward silence, because he'll smile, knowing all the shadows and mirages behind those inadequate words. He knew what he was all about when he was making those B shudderflicks in the Forties.

  But he could not have known, like pebbles tossed into a pool to produce ever-widening circles of impact, how important he was to me. But I know, and I'll tell you; and when you've been told, you'll know why all those martinet pedants of the New York Literary Establishment who still put down moviegoing live zombie lives of half-light. And you'll even understand why auteurs like Bogdanovich can't smell the flowers because they're too busy dissecting them.

  You see, I was the only Jewish kid in Painesville, Ohio, about thirty miles east of Cleveland, and you wouldn't think that in Ohio—the Buckeye state, the center of the Great Amurrican Heartland—one would encounter much bigotry. You'd be wrong. They used to beat the shit out of me. Regularly. I was a little loudmouth of a kid, quick as a whippet and ten times smarter than anybody else in town, but that humble greatness wasn't what made them hate me, naturally. It was this Jewish business. They actually believed Jews ground up Seventh Day Adventist babies to make matzohs at Channukah. They called me a kike. I didn't know what it was, but I didn't care for the tone of voice. So I was the green monkey, the pariah. And I had no friends. Not just a few friends, or one good friend, or grudging acceptance by other misfits and outcasts. I was alone. All stinking alone, without even an imaginary playmate.

  So I made my own worlds.

  Worlds cobbled up from the dreams and visions to be found in comic books with Plastic Man and Airboy and the Heap and Hawkman and the Boy Commandos and the Spirit; worlds found in the radio programs I devoured so avidly my ears grew mouths: I Love a Mystery, The Shadow, Lux . . . presents Hollywood, Quiet, Please, The Land of the Lost, Grand Central Station, Let's Pretend. Worlds in the pulp magazines: Startling Stories, Doc Savage, G-8 and his Battle Aces, The Spider, Black Mask.

  But most of all . . . the movies.

  Oh, God, the movies. For four hours every Saturday afternoon I was taken away from that miserable lonely charnel house of childhood and was permitted to ride beside Don "Red" Barry, swashbuckle beside Jon Hall, sleuth beside Sidney Toler, drool over Ann Rutherford and June Preisser, know fear as Kent Smith knew it and shudder helplessly as Rondo Hatton stalked the streets as The Creeper.

  I was a child of the Forties. In a time before the word "alienation" slipped from everyone's lips as easily as a rolling stone gathers no moss, I was a thoroughly, hopelessly, totally alienated kid who could not exist in the real world. And though the studio money-grubbers who churned out those wonderfully awful potboilers could never have known what succor they were bringing to my parched soul, they provided me the only world to which I cared to belong. The world of dreams, of celluloid escapes, of glorious moviegoing.

  (You know one reason I hate my sister, Beverly? She is eight years older than I am, see. And when my Mom and Dad would be at the store, downtown, working on Saturday, I was entrusted to her care. She had to get me downtown on the bus, to see the movie. Then she could go off and do whatever dull dumb things girls did in Painesville on Saturday afternoons. Had to b
e dumb, didn't it? She wasn't at the movie, fer chrissakes! But she used to torment me. She'd dawdle, and chivvy me, and tell me she wasn't going to take me, and then she'd put her dress up in back so her slip showed, and say, come on, let's go. And I'd say, we can't go with you like that, and she'd torment me with, sure we can, come on. And I'd sit down on my bed and start to cry, because I knew damned well we couldn't walk up Harmon Drive to Mentor Avenue and get on that bus and go downtown with her dress up in back so her slip showed. And she'd do that to me for an hour before we left. We always did, of course, but by the time we got downtown I was a nervous wreck. That's one of the reasons I hate Beverly. But that's another story.)