Odd Jobs (8 page)

I
WELL REMEMBER
my first experience of being on TV. It was in 1962, and I had contributed to a book of five boyhood reminiscences; the other contributors were a revered playwright, a best-selling writer, a celebrated cartoonist, and an esteemed critic.
^*
I was the youngest of the five. Thanks no doubt to the celebrity of my elders, a group interview was arranged at a New York station, for a half-hour live show. There was a dry run; while the others, especially the cartoonist and the best-seller writer, irrepressibly sparkled and effervesced, I sat there demurely in my chair, wondering at the shabby, cluttered surroundings from which our electronic marvel was to emanate. A break was declared before the real broadcast, and the cartoonist and the writer excused themselves and visited, it turned out, a bar on the street downstairs. When they returned, and the cameras began to roll, the two were companionably silent, and sat back in their chairs with imperturbable smiles. It dawned on me that theirs had been the opposite of a dry run, that a conversational vacuum had been created, that air time was rushing by, and that
I must talk
. I opened my mouth; words came out, any words. They sounded good. I gestured with my hand, and I could see the gesture flicker on a half-dozen monitors. The klieg lights were burning brighter than midday,
and, as the cameras rolled, little red bulbs glowed above their great lavender lenses like rubies in the brows of dragons. They were feeding on me; I was being lapped up and broadcast into thousands and thousands of sets.
I was on TV
.

The feeling was scary and delicious, of an impalpable multiplication and widespread scattering of the self. Stammer, warts, miscombed hair, crooked necktie—out it all went, over the airwaves. From within this messy room, with its floorful of snaking gray cables and its invisible scurry of behind-the-camera technicians, reality was being reprocessed and reborn; millions of jittery images, refreshed thirty times a second, flowed from my face, my voice. It was as if I had spent all of my life previous to this moment in a closet, and at long last proper attention was being paid.

Americans, once a shy and dry-voiced race away from the intimacy of their own work sheds and back porches, have certainly, in these last thirty years, become better at being on TV. Game shows turn hundreds of them into momentary stars every week. On the news, witnesses to shootings, victims of floods, debunked economists, and freshly traded quarterbacks all now gaze into the camera levelly and speak in shapely sentences. Golfers are expected to have a few words for the camera between shots, and do; local police chiefs never know when they’ll have to supply a twenty-second statement for the national news, and when their moment comes they enunciate as sonorously as Raymond Burr playing Perry Mason, if not John Housman urging the praises of Smith Barney. Television has so interpenetrated our daily lives we are no more shy of it than of the family cat. It comes into our homes, and our homes go into it. During the last hostage crisis [TWA, Athens-Tunis-Beirut, July 1985], families were shown on television watching television, where the kidnapped were being interviewed by their kidnappers, and then were in turn, the families, interviewed by the local television news team.

We love being on TV. Passersby mug and wave behind the on-the-street reporter. Spectators go to sports events wearing funny hats and purple hair to court their death-defying second of electronic multiplication. People in ballparks drape banners from the railings to attract the camera to themselves. “The wave”—the successive standing up of section after section—is folk art invented for television, a stadium full of hams performing as one huge telegenic creature. Television need not focus any longer on the famous; its focus
is
fame, and throughout the
Western world the nightly news commentators are better known and more trusted than the political leaders.

In my very slight TV career, I have waited for my six-minute morning-interview stint in company with Muhammad Ali and Peter, Paul, and Mary, with a ninety-nine-year-old beekeeper and a seven-year-old chess player. The latter showed no less aplomb than the former. Radio and the cinema in their heyday tended to create an elite of the golden-voiced and the silver-skinned; almost anybody can be on TV, once the switches are thrown. Being natural beats any performing skill, and a German interviewer recently explained to me that, on television, being a bit ugly helps. Everything, in a sense, helps. There is no hiding from the camera; but, then, in this laid-back era of the global village, why hide? The studios themselves tend to be cozy places, with coffee and doughnuts in the green room, cheerful confusion on the set, and tinselly cardboard props leaning against the walls. The atmosphere is that of an underrehearsed high-school play: no matter how badly things go, it’s only our parents out there and we’ll meet at the sub shop afterwards to laugh about it.

Once I found myself enmeshed in a televised spectacular. Three hundred “stars” were assembled, many of them nouveaux novas but all of them with an undeniable lustre, even a detectable radioactivity; the women had eyelashes like receiving antennae, and teeth shaped by laser beam. The taping of the unwieldy show, in the Radio City Music Hall, dragged on and on, through mistakes and retakes; the saintly patience of professional performers was amazing to a short-fused print-media type like me. Elderly actors and actresses (Jimmy Stewart, Ginger Rogers) already deep into apotheosis gamely went through their paces, and went through them again. The ordeal began in the morning and finished at two the next morning, when the grand finale was staged. We all assembled to sing a song whose words were flashed on cards behind the central camera. Most of the audience had melted away or was milling about in the hysteria of advanced fatigue. The moon was sinking over Manhattan. But were we in front of the cameras tired? No. We were on TV. Lillian Gish was in front of me, Cesar Chavez to the left, Dinah Shore and Raquel Welch somewhere in the vicinity. On my right, a tall enamelled female, unknown to me but no doubt known to millions, had a throat of steel as she warbled from the cards. A retake was called for; she and the others all sang louder, even more thrillingly, so that I felt lifted
on wings of unnatural energy, pouring my miserly old scribbler’s heart into that lavender lens at two in the morning.

Being on TV is like being alive, only more so.

I
N THIS MEDIA-MAD AGE
, one of the few questions that people still ask an old-fashioned word writer is how he feels about film adaptations of his work. My answer is, “Embarrassed.” I feel embarrassed, watching the gifted and comely actors writhing and grimacing within my plot, heaving away at lines of dialogue I put down in a few minutes’ daze years before, and straining to bring to life some tricky moral or social issue that once bemused me. I feel I have put them (along with the director and cameramen and set designers) in a glass box; like wide-eyed fish in an aquarium they bump their noses on the other side of the screen and ogle me helplessly. I yearn to break the glass, to set them free to do their own thing—juggle, jog, take off their clothes, put
on
some clothes, tell us what bemuses
them
these days, cook up their
own
story.

For me, it is an act sufficiently aggressive to take pencil and paper in hand (or to switch on the word processor with its mind-curdling hum) and to forge sentences and paragraphs out of my flitting fancies and dimming memories. That these words are then turned, by a large and highly paid crew, into photogenic, three-dimensional,
real
furniture, bodies, and conversational tussles strikes me as rather horrible, in the way that an elephant tusk patiently carved and filed into many tiny interlocking figures, pagodas, and ginkgo trees is horrible.

In the late Sixties two youngish men full of energy and flattery approached me about making a motion picture of my novel
Rabbit, Run
, and a deal was arranged. After some time, in 1970, I was invited to attend a showing of the result. My wife and I went to the appointed theatre in Boston and found ourselves the only audience in all the rows and rows of seats; an author, it suddenly dawned on me, was expected to organize a viewing party of agents, editors, and well-wishers. In lonely splendor, then, after a nervous consultation with the projectionist, we watched a giant flickering that began with my title and ended with the
concluding sentence of my text flashed onto the screen, over the figure of a man running. In between, everything was mine yet not mine, and intensely embarrassing.

Not that the film lacked good qualities or surface fidelity to the novel. There were admirable performances by James Caan and Carrie Snodgress and stunning views of Reading, Pennsylvania, whose steep streets of row houses had been in my mind as I wrote. But the voice of the novel, and the cogency of its implied argument, had vanished in a hash of visual images and coarse simplifications. The movie often failed, it seemed to me, to make sense. For instance, in a central early episode, my hero impulsively gets into a car and drives away from his wife and his life; within twelve hours he gets lost somewhere in West Virginia and realizes he has nowhere to go but back to Pennsylvania. The basic movement, out and back in, was rendered in the movie by an unintelligible montage of speeding automobiles and highway signs; when I mentioned this muddle in a telephone conversation with the director, he admitted that, when they returned from Pennsylvania to Hollywood, they discovered they had no “night footage.” You make a film, of course, out of footage, and if in some sequences you have nothing but, in another phrase of his, “deplorable footage,” you use that, or else leave holes that only the author, let’s hope, will notice.

Since 1970, as of 1986, only television movies have been made of my stubbornly verbal works: two short stories, “The Music School” and “The Christian Roommates,” were produced for public television, and a two-hour film, given the title
Too Far to Go
, was fashioned from a set of linked short stories. In the first two instances, the choices struck me as strange. “The Music School” is a monologue whose principal action lies in the leaps of the narrator’s voice, and “The Christian Roommates” attempts to render the nuances of relationship within a group of Harvard dormitory-mates in the early 1950s. Both adaptations appeared, as I watched them on television, lugubrious. My hero in “The Music School” is troubled by guilt but on film he is positively sodden with it; on film the roommates’ jittery antipathy turns downright pathological. As I watched, my attention gratefully flew to bits that weren’t in the story, or were a matter of a word or two: in
The Music School
, a science-fiction episode eerily emerges through a violet filter, and we witness the lively industrial process, staffed by nuns in full habit, of the baking and cutting of communion wafers; in
The Roommates
(my “Christian” was dropped, as perhaps too provocative), the hero’s sketchy home-town romance is
elaborated with a delightful wealth of period make-out music and exposed underwear. Many details, indeed, in “The Roommates,” which was spun out to two hours, were admirably full and careful. The college students glowed with health and beauty, and Northwestern’s buildings (not Harvard’s) posed handsomely. But of my short story the point itself—that one of the Christian roommates was so distressed by the other that he lost his faith—was serenely omitted.

In fairness, can any film adaptation fail to seem, to the author of the original, heavy on detail and light on coherence? Would any representation of the troubled married couple in
Too Far to Go
have failed to embarrass me? Perhaps inevitably, the suburbia became a movie suburbia, free of peeling paint and crabgrass, and the adulteries movie adulteries, skinny plot-turns as predictable as, in other cinematic contexts, pratfalls and shootouts. Footage problems arose when a car accident that I had located in a snowstorm was implausibly transferred (because of seasonal filming, or a studio shortage of soap flakes) to a rainstorm; not even a monsoon could have sloshed so many buckets of water across the windshield behind the entangled couple.

Words have a merciful vagueness wherein readers can—nay,
must—
use their imaginations. Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless; we do not imagine, we view. Written images perforce draw upon imagery our memory has stored; no one reads the same book, and each reader is drawn into an individual exchange with the author’s voice. A seductive relationship is in progress, which the reader can terminate more easily than involvements in real life. Film, instead, breaks upon us like a natural phenomenon—ungainsayable, immediate, stark, marvellous, and rather bullying. My exposures to adaptation, it should be said, were the work of talented people who were fond of my writing; my impulse was all the stronger, then, to break the glass box and let them out, to do their own things, while my text, safe between covers, did its.

M
OVIEMAKERS
, like creative spirits everywhere, must be free; they owe nothing to the authors of books they adapt except the money they have agreed to pay them. In the case of the first book to be made into a film,
Ben Hur
, not even a financial indebtedness was acknowledged; the movie would be good publicity for the book, it was argued, and General Wallace should be acquiescently grateful. He and his lawyers disagreed, establishing a happy precedent for those of us who, as the saying goes, take the money and run. And hide, ideally. For the author owes, at least, his Hollywood benefactors a tactful silence.

A film adaptation of a novel of mine
^†
is about to be released. It bears the book’s title, and my own name will presumably scurry by in the credits. One would have to have an ego of steel not to be pleasantly dented, or dimpled, by such attentions. Otherwise, the movie will bear, indications all agree, little resemblance to my text—which exists, however, in hardcover and paperback editions and even in a large-print edition for the dimsighted. That is one of the charms of the authorial business—the text is always there, for the ideal reader to stumble upon, to enter, to reanimate. The text is almost infinitely patient, snugly gathering its dust on the shelf. Until the continental drift of language turns its English as obscure as Chaucer’s, the text remains readily recoverable and potentially as alive as on the day it was scribbled by one’s own hand. Not so film: its chemicals fester in the can, it grows brittle and brown, its Technicolor bleaches, it needs a projector and a screen, it is scratched and pocked and truncated by the wear and tear of its previous projections. So let’s not begrudge it its moment in the sun—the moment when, in the darkened theatre, the movie bursts upon us as if it
were
the sun.