November 11, 2007
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After spending two-thirds of my life in America, I still occasionally get asked where I’m from. I usually stall for a moment or two and ask if they mean currently or originally. But I realize that they’ve detected my British accent with all that that implies. An Outside-American. So invariably what I do next is to identify myself as an ex-NewYorker and, if necessary, somebody who’d published a tabloid newspaper there for a while in the Sixties. But it’s the ex-NewYorker tag that really gives one an identity, and one cherished by the fabulists who really believe that if you can survive the urban jungle there you can deal with just about anything anywhere. See how far those skills might get you in the real jungle. Anyway, when I first arrived in the Big Apple I was fresh from a couple of years spent in Canada to which I had fled from a stuffy and stagnated England. I was an ambitious, young reporter eager for new opportunities. In Toronto I had been working for the wire service British United Press (later, UPI) until I was hired by tycoon Jack Kent Cooke whose representative, novelist Hugh Garner, summoned me to a press conference to announce his acquisition of a group of Canadian magazines. Working alone on the lobster shift at BUP, my job was to read the wire as it came in, then rewrite and send it out on the radio wire. It had to be written in such a manner that it could be snatched off the teletype by the news reader and read out. "Never start a sentence with a name or anything important" I was instructed, "because listeners never hear the first few words..." What impressed Cooke, the junior tycoon, was my previous experience on Fleet Street papers, the Daily Mirror and Daily Mail. Cooke, the boy wonder of Canadian media, had long ago achieved his ambition of becoming a millionaire before he hit 30. The legend was that he'd persuaded publisher Roy Thompson of his considerable (but actually non-existent) skill at running radio stations and had turned Thompson's lowly CKEY into a money machine by the distinctly American method of utilizing every second of time, cutting out the leisurely pauses between commercials that had been the station's previous style. Cooke, an avid sports fan, already owned the Toronto Maple Leafs and one of the perks of my new job was a seat in the press box at ice hockey games. Schooled as I had been in rugby and the snails pace of cricket it was a revelation that any game could move so fast. For a while I was a fan and to this day, it’s the only sport to which I give more than passing attention. At any rate, working for him at Saturday Night a weekly cultural socio-political magazine, I learned to write profiles of businessmen and turn out the kind of upfront Talk pieces that are characteristic of The New Yorker. After answering an ad for a paper at Nassau in the Bahamas I spent a miserable month or two there ("It's a place where Bay Street is lined with palms--all itching for payoffs" said a cynical friend) before finding myself back in Toronto jobless. Once again Cooke rescued me, meeting me accidentally in the street and directing me to seek a job at one of his other magazines, Liberty . This was much more interesting. First I was dispatched to Ottawa to profile Canada's best-selling novelist Nicholas (The Cruel Sea) Monsarrrat, then to interview Billy Graham. My sarcastic piece in the Canadian Home Journal on this saintly figure prompted an unusual number of complaints. Liberty' s crass new editor Frank Rasky reacted by anointing me "Screwball Editor" urging on me such stunts as feeding a lion in the cage at the zoo, spending the night in a haunted lighthouse, being hypnotized before a visit to the dentist, hanging from straps to assist the window cleaners on a 30-storey building and sending me out with a $1000 bill to see how much of the day I could survive with no other money. But I was still restless. I had made a couple of overnight trips to New York to which I had already lost my heart. Oh, the magic of those balmy spring mornings in Manhattan! The air redolent with the promise of a shining future. Would that I could recall even a few seconds of it. Live for the moment, I know now, but I didn’t sufficiently appreciate it then. When I announced my intention of leaving Toronto, Cooke summoned me to his office and asked: "Why are you always running away? Why don't you stay here and grow with the organization?' (Within a year or two he was himself in the U.S. having--with some never-explained influence--obtained for himself retroactive citizenship). So at the beginningS of my new life, there I was, an innocent Brit journalist, excited by Manhattan which was so different to the stuffiness of a constipated England where progress seemed to have stalled. (Years later, my memories of Britain helped me understand why it failed to stand up to America over the savagery of the Vietnam War). I loved New York from my first moment there. Living in a cheapo Greenwich Village apartment from Day Two, I spent my time in search of “the scene”, although it wasn’t a term in use at the time. I was a lonely, sloppily-dressed single, roaming the Village bars to drink beer and look at girls, soothed by an endless stream of Sinatra from the jukebox. Knowing no other skills but that of a reporter, I felt that I could see the need for a new newspaper in the village, so five days into my new life, I put up a handwritten card in the Sheridan Square bookshop seeking anyone interested in such a publication. My meager income was still coming from writing features for the Canadian magazine. But none of the people who answered the ad in the bookstore window had any money, and so this idea of starting a new paper went nowhere. And the idea of becoming a publisher myself, was far from my mind. I was a skilled reporter—that’s the job-training I’d had, at papers with seven-figure circulations—and with all the newspapers and magazines around, it seemed inevitable that I would find an outlet for my writings. I was a trained journalist, I thought, and proud of the profession as it was then and still is (occasionally). The whole ideal of living to write about just what you saw, signs you interpreted (in every sense of the word); noting down what you’d heard, seen and read. That was the life that called to me. Maybe it’s the origin of my belief that one’s destiny is what one makes it. “I don’t know why you are always complaining about money” my shrewd old mother said to me when I was 60, “you’ve never done anything you didn’t want to do. Ever”. I was stunned. She was right. How had I managed to get away with it? My very first news editor glanced at a story I handed to him, started to ask questions and gave the piece back to me when I couldn't answer." "If you can't answer questions", he said, "never raise them". This was an important lesson that I have remembered (and taught to others) ever since and another early lesson came in my early time at the Daily Mail when I was assigned to cover a cooking event in some parish hall. "What happened?" he asked when I returned. I said: "It was quite funny. There were seven housewives on stage with seven ovens and at a signal they all grabbed their plates from their table and shoved them in the ovens and slammed the doors...." My boss interrupted: "Write it exactly the way you told me" , he instructed.
For some reason, I’ve always belonged to the Resist Authority faction and so I’ve never been subdued by the authority of big stars. I really admire some of them; you’ve got to give credit to anyone who’s able to transport you out of your everyday life even for a few moments. But my admiration has limits. I ‘m not much for hero worship, much as I might be grateful for the chance to talk to some of these idols. That irascible Toronto editor dispatched me to the Carnegie Hall apartment of composer Leonard Bernstein, a charming and friendly man, about whom I remember nothing except the ease with which he handled my questions and the entrance of his strikingly beautiful wife who served food and drink. Then it was out to the coast to interview Rock Hudson (towering a foot above me in the studio picture that MGM’s efficient pr department sent to all such visitors). What I recall most about my encounter with Milton Berle in his Hollywood office were the filing cabinets full of jokes which he’d collected for 30 years. He’d began his career as a child star, appearing in movies with Chaplin and Marie Dressler; wisecracked his way through a prodigious radio career and for some years now had been the biggest name in television. He was friendly although business-like and appeared to be very proud of his collection of gags. He ran a sample off on me and although I can’t remember now which joke it was, you’ll get an idea of the ‘Thief of Badgags’ repartee from a typical rebuke to his audience: “I don’t mind personal insults, but when you insult my jokes you insult Fred Allen, Bob Hope, Burns and Allen, Trevor McGee and Molly Picon”. Back in Manhattan I was deputed to write about the composer Steve Allen, then the host of NBC's Tonight Show. I met him again later when I went up to the NBC studio to hand him the first issue of the Village Voice, which he displayed to his audience. Steve, a polymath who was once described jokingly by Andy Williams as “the only man I know who’s listed on every one of the yellow pages”, used to send his friends Xerox copies of what he felt to be significant clippings. When I got to know him better, he joked that a priest had once told him that he seemed to have never had an unpublished thought, and any thoughts he didn’t already have were reflected in his mailings, the clips always reflecting how deeply was his vision of a peaceful, one-world humanity. These printed stories, memos of things-in-the-news-we-ought-to know-about, were always appreciated by those of us who were on his mailing list. When I rented one of the very first answering machine for my home telephone I inveigled him into leaving a recorded message which delighted callers for months afterwards. Years before Steve was killed in a traffic accident in October 2000, two months before what would have been his 80th birthday, I spent an entire day at his house in Sherman Oaks, talking about everything under the sun from economics to pollution, from the appeal of talk shows to the supposed efficacy of prayers, about which he was skeptical. “Aristotle once said they were of no avail”, he mused, “and another philosopher whose name escapes me for the moment, suggested that saying prayers is like saying that the universe is governed by a Being who changes his mind if you ask him to”. Steve was so well read that quoting Aristotle, or any one of a hundred ancient sages, came to him by second nature. One of his early television programs, in fact, consisted of staged ‘conversations’ between some of these vintage savants. How we talked! All morning and through lunchtime -- a tray of sandwiches and salad, deftly prepared by him in the kitchen as we debated politics. “Once the American public looked for the best leader” he observed. “Now they look for the best follower”. He had an interesting take on why even the most sophisticated of us seem to draw strength from a king or a president—“the mighty man who lives on the hill. He is more of a father to us than we realize”.
In 1955, a year after my arrival in New York, I was assigned to interview Marilyn Monroe. She was a big name but much outranked at the time by such screen goddesses as Joan Crawford, Bette Davis and Garbo. For one reason or another Marilyn was surprisingly easy to contact. I called the genial press agent Frank Goodman and requested an interview with Ms. Monroe and within days we’d arranged to all meet in the lobby of the Waldorf Towers, her Manhattan home since separating from Joe DiMaggio. Frank looked at his watch. It was 2:40pm. “Maybe I should call her suite?” but almost as soon as he’d said it, she was there. Short, black skirt over bare legs, polka dotted blouse, her blonde hair falling untidily over enormous sunglasses. "I'm not late am I?" the goddess asked, and being assured of the time added: "Oh, ten minutes? Well, Sir Thomas Beecham told me ten minutes was all right" Baffled but delighted by this unexpected endorsement, we set off up Lexington Avenue for Child's, a now-defunct bar, which MM had declared to be one of her favorites. Noticing the curious stares from passers-by I observed that her "disguise" didn't seem to be working because passers-by were staring at her. The goddess gave me a reproving glance. "It's probably because I'm a girl" she said. "I do hope it's because I'm a girl". Sitting across the table from her was an exhilarating experience, but I suppressed my excitement; there was work to be done. In suspension from her studio, 20th Century Fox for persistent tardiness, she had just left DiMaggio and was being constantly linked in the columns with one man or another. Tabloid theories aside, I said, what kind of a man did she really like? "Well," she replied, "what I really like are men who are poets--but that doesn't mean they have to write poetry. Do you know what I mean?" And leaning across the table she squeezed my forearm for emphasis. I was in ecstasy; who among us, after all, could not imagine himself a poet on such an occasion? She hardly stopped smiling the entire time we were together and scarcely needed prompting to talk about the Actors Studio, whose daily workshops she was attending. "I feel more serious about this than anything else in the world" she declared. "I want to be a good actress and if I ever know I'm good I shan't care what people say about me..." Her sentences tended to trail off towards the end as though she wasn't quite sure how to finish them, and I asked if interviews made her nervous. "Yes. I used to stutter a little but in any case I've always been shy. Still am. I suppose I'm getting better at meeting people but sometimes I'm quite terrified. On that (Ed Murrow) Person to Person show, for example." Was she ever lonely? "Aren't we all sometimes. Aren't you? I know I am. It doesn't have anything to do with whether you're with anybody or not. I love to go for walks on my own, though, especially in New York. I don't even want to go to Europe until I've seen more of New York. I haven't been outside the United States....No, no. That's not right. I was in Canada twice. At Banff and also at Niagara Falls. I think Banff is the most beautiful place I've ever seen and Niagara Falls looks even better from the Canadian side. I made that movie Niagara there and can't really understand why those women's organizations made such a fuss about it. It's true I played a tramp in the picture, but I was only acting. How silly if people thought you were what you played in movies". Frank ordered more drinks and the warmth of the Indian Summer leaked into the half empty bar, momentarily breaking the magical mood. He’d been her agent for a while but seemed to be as fascinated by this conversation as I was. What had come through to me about Marilyn was her apparent naiveté and total lack of guile. And yet she was obviously very smart and fully aware of her skills. Since her separation from DiMaggio she had been taken in, seemingly protected by the photographer Milton Greene and his wife with whom she had formed a company, Marilyn Monroe Productions Inc. "I really believe in this", she said enthusiastically. "We're going to do all kinds of things--movies, TV, anything else that we think is creative. Of course I won't be the only one in it. I'm not very good at business--I don't even understand it much--but we want to be company that doesn't get so big that all it cares about is money". I knew that she had been suspended by 20th Century Fox, only part of the way through the seven-year contract she had signed with Darryl Zanuck, and I asked her what the current situation was. She sighed. "It's difficult to say. Better not to talk about it at present, I think, because I'm just not sure what's going to happen. The situation could change overnight. I disagreed with them over How To Be Very, Very Popular, not because of the story but because there were one or two things I didn't understand. A good director can get certain results and so I was interested in talking to the director to ask him how he was going to handle these things. But it didn't prove possible to sit down and talk about them so I didn't report for work and was suspended." As that seemed to be all she was going to say on the matter, I brought up the subject of carping critics. She seemed surprisingly self-confident and untroubled by them. "It doesn't really matter what people say about you", she said. "Sometimes it's bound to hurt a bit but it won't alter things, especially if you know yourself how things really are." She reached for her glass of Harvey's Bristol sherry and accidentally knocked over the glass. As the liquid ran across the table Frank signaled to a waiter. One was hovering instantly at her side bearing a rag, and Marilyn mopped away with her half-open blouse --I saw her white bra!--all the while muttering something about how easy it was for an actress to be misunderstood. I mumbled something about the difficulty of certain people being taken seriously when they looked so attractive. MM smiled and looked coolly into my eyes. "Oh, I don't know" she said lightly. "You look nice and I'm sure you're a good writer". What happened after that I was almost too dazed to remember. There was some discussion concerning the role of Grushenka in Dostoievsky's The Brothers Karamazov, it being the role she said she most yearned to play. Frank leaned over the table and said gently, “I think I should be taking you home now, Marilyn. It looks like it might rain”. The goddess looked bewildered at first, as though she had no plans to leave. Then she rose slowly as she edged out of the booth and smiled at us both, saying how much she’d enjoyed our little chat. Outside the bar on Lexington Avenue, it was late afternoon and the crowds were growing. Frank hailed a cab within moments and both climbed in. As I made my farewells I told Marilyn that if she ever cared to visit, I’d enjoy showing her around Greenwich Village (where I then lived in a $46-a-week apartment). But of course I never saw her again. A few days later I picked up the phone at my 26 Perry Street home to hear a husky voice ask: "Mr Wilcock? This is Marlene Dietrich". Once again a press agent had come through, requesting an interview to which the great lady herself had chosen to respond. Sadly, many of the people I met in my New York days remain little more today than mere name-drops, but I’ll always bless my luck that I spent an hour or two with these interesting ladies. ======================================== NEXT: comments? send an email to John Wilcock ======================================= |
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