The Purple Decades (13 page)
Read The Purple Decades Online
Authors: Tom Wolfe
“I must be living right,” says Harrison. “I've been on this goddamned diet. I can't stand it anymore. That's why I came over here. Has Walter been in?”
Walter hasn't been in.
“Do you know Winchell?” Harrison asks me. “No? You ought to meet him. He's a terrific guy. He's the one who really put
Confidential
over.”
Confidential
over.”
The waiter is saying, “Now all you need is a couple of good-looking broads and it will be just like old times.”
Harrison says, “Well, you just keep your eyes open in a minute.”
The great pink-orange slabs of lox, the bagels, the butter and the cups of coffee start coming, and Harrison pitches in, and to hell with the diet. Lindy's is not crowded, but people are starting to crane around to look at Harrison. A lot of people remember
Confidential,
if not Harrison himself, and in any case the word is going around the restaurant that the publisher of
Confidential
in its most notorious days is there, and everyone has a look on the face that says, in indignation or stupefaction, How did that guy get out from under the deluge and come in here to feast on all that orange-blossomy lox?
Confidential,
if not Harrison himself, and in any case the word is going around the restaurant that the publisher of
Confidential
in its most notorious days is there, and everyone has a look on the face that says, in indignation or stupefaction, How did that guy get out from under the deluge and come in here to feast on all that orange-blossomy lox?
“You want to know what happened to the libel suits?” Harrison says. “Nothing happened, that's what happened.” [Harrison has a tendency toward oversimplification. Some suits against
Confidential
resulted in substantial settlements.] “Forty million dollars and nothing happened. It was all a show. They loved it. I was the one who took all the responsibility. I was the one who got crucified. I was terribly condemned. And all the time some big shots were giving me the stories themselves!”
Confidential
resulted in substantial settlements.] “Forty million dollars and nothing happened. It was all a show. They loved it. I was the one who took all the responsibility. I was the one who got crucified. I was terribly condemned. And all the time some big shots were giving me the stories themselves!”
“The movie stars were giving you scandal stories about themselves?”
“That's what I'm trying to explain,” Harrison says. “That's how we used to get them! From the big shots! And I was the one who always took the rap. I couldn't tell the world then, because it would jeopardize someone's standing. I'll tell you, sat right there in my living room and gave me two stories about himself. We had already run one about him and an actress, I forget where we got that one. But he was up in my living room. The deal was, he would give me the stories, but âI'll deny the whole thing,' he says.
“And Mike Todd. I knew Mike. I'll tell you a funny story about him. Mike Todd called me up from California to give me a story about Harry Cohn. Cohn was a big producer at Columbia Pictures. Mike Todd says, âI'll meet you at the Stork Club, I'll meet you tonight,
I've got a great story for you.' So he flew all the way to New York and he gave me this story about Harry Cohn.
I've got a great story for you.' So he flew all the way to New York and he gave me this story about Harry Cohn.
“There was this girl who wanted to break into the pictures, and Mike Todd wanted to help her out, but he really didn't have any use for her, so what he did was, he started raving to Cohn about this girl he'd discovered and told him he was getting ready to sign her up, but for $500 a week he'd lend her to him. So Cohn decided to outsmart Mike Todd and without saying anything he puts her under contract himself and she has her job.
“Well, you should have heard Mike Todd telling me that story. He howled! He almost died! And you know, he was so interested in that story, he came over and he worked on it with us. We almost had the story done, but we were having trouble getting a last line, and Mike Todd had to go back to Hollywood. Well, that night, in the middle of the night, he called me up from Hollywood and he said, âI've got it! I've got that last line for you!' Here was a guy who was one of the busiest guys in Hollywood, he was doing a million things, but he called me up in the middle of the night just to get that story right. My respect for him went up a million per cent!”
There it was again! The
aesthetique du schlock!
There is only one Mike Todd in Harrison's book. More bagels, more lox, more coffee; Harrison is going strong nowânames, names, names. The names
Confidential
was built on keep bubbling up. He used to meet these people in the damnedest places, he says. He was too hot to be seen with. He used to meet Lee Mortimer, a writer, in some damned telephone booth. Both of them would get right in there in the same booth and talk, and Mortimer would give him stories, for Christ's sake. “Then we'd glare at each other at some nightclub that night.” Other people Harrison remembers because they were supposed to be mad as hell at him but all of a sudden were acting very friendly when they met him. Harrison tended to overestimate the world's store of goodwill for him, but the fact was that even when
Confidential
was at its most notorious peak, people would meet Harrison for the first time, brace themselves for the worst, talk to him for a while and come away telling about his “curious charm.” Well, practically everybody seemed to like him in varying degrees, as Harrison recalls it, but there was only one Mike Todd. Mike Todd was not only friendly, he not only provided stories about himself, but he saw the beauty of
Confidential
as usually only Harrison could see it, he participated in it, he understood the
aesthetique du schlock!
aesthetique du schlock!
There is only one Mike Todd in Harrison's book. More bagels, more lox, more coffee; Harrison is going strong nowânames, names, names. The names
Confidential
was built on keep bubbling up. He used to meet these people in the damnedest places, he says. He was too hot to be seen with. He used to meet Lee Mortimer, a writer, in some damned telephone booth. Both of them would get right in there in the same booth and talk, and Mortimer would give him stories, for Christ's sake. “Then we'd glare at each other at some nightclub that night.” Other people Harrison remembers because they were supposed to be mad as hell at him but all of a sudden were acting very friendly when they met him. Harrison tended to overestimate the world's store of goodwill for him, but the fact was that even when
Confidential
was at its most notorious peak, people would meet Harrison for the first time, brace themselves for the worst, talk to him for a while and come away telling about his “curious charm.” Well, practically everybody seemed to like him in varying degrees, as Harrison recalls it, but there was only one Mike Todd. Mike Todd was not only friendly, he not only provided stories about himself, but he saw the beauty of
Confidential
as usually only Harrison could see it, he participated in it, he understood the
aesthetique du schlock!
“I get along fine with all those people,” Harrison is saying. “The only one who never liked me was _____. Did you ever read that story we did about _____, about how he ate Wheaties? That was
a fabulous story. That was the best story Breen ever did. Here is this girl, and she told me the story herself. She just told it to me when we were sitting in some place, I forget the name of it, it might have been Harwyn's, that was a big place then. Anyway, in this story, here is this girl, and every time she hears the âcrunch crunch crunch' of the Wheaties, she knows is coming back in the room. He thinks Wheaties are good for, you know, virility, and every time he goes out in the kitchen for the Wheaties and this girl can hear the âcrunch crunch crunch'âit was a fabulous story. You've got to read it. And that's the funny thing, he is the only one who never liked me. I ran into him one night in the Copacabana and he just looked right past meâand that was the best story we ever did!”
a fabulous story. That was the best story Breen ever did. Here is this girl, and she told me the story herself. She just told it to me when we were sitting in some place, I forget the name of it, it might have been Harwyn's, that was a big place then. Anyway, in this story, here is this girl, and every time she hears the âcrunch crunch crunch' of the Wheaties, she knows is coming back in the room. He thinks Wheaties are good for, you know, virility, and every time he goes out in the kitchen for the Wheaties and this girl can hear the âcrunch crunch crunch'âit was a fabulous story. You've got to read it. And that's the funny thing, he is the only one who never liked me. I ran into him one night in the Copacabana and he just looked right past meâand that was the best story we ever did!”
Yes! The
aesthetique du schlock! Schlock
, which is Yiddish for a kind of “ersatz,” is the New York publishing-trade term for the sort of periodical, known academically as subliterature, in which there is a story about, say, bars where young women from Utica and Akron are lured, seduced, hooked and shanghaied as call girls, and the title is “Sin Traps for Secretaries!” and there is an illustration made up of half photograph, of models with black censor bars across their eyes and a lot of thigh and garter strap, and half superimposed drawing, of a leering devil in a silk topper, all on a layout that the editor has returned to the art department with a crayon notation that says, “Make devil red.” Harrison would fret and enthuse over a
schlock
tale like the Wheaties one with the same flaming passion for art as Cardinal Newman or somebody dubbing a few oxymorons and serpentinae carminae into his third draft. Well, even
schlock
has its classics. All during the mid-fifties, the outrage was building up about
Confidential,
the sales were going up to more than four million at the newsstands per issue, the record for newsstand sales, and everybody was wondering, outraged, how such a phenomenon could crop up in the middle of the twentieth century after the lessons of the war, hate and all, and what kind of creature could be producing
Confidential.
That was because no one really knew about Harrison, the “air business,” and the Cézanne, the Darwin, the Aristotle of
schlock
âthe old New York
Graphic
.
aesthetique du schlock! Schlock
, which is Yiddish for a kind of “ersatz,” is the New York publishing-trade term for the sort of periodical, known academically as subliterature, in which there is a story about, say, bars where young women from Utica and Akron are lured, seduced, hooked and shanghaied as call girls, and the title is “Sin Traps for Secretaries!” and there is an illustration made up of half photograph, of models with black censor bars across their eyes and a lot of thigh and garter strap, and half superimposed drawing, of a leering devil in a silk topper, all on a layout that the editor has returned to the art department with a crayon notation that says, “Make devil red.” Harrison would fret and enthuse over a
schlock
tale like the Wheaties one with the same flaming passion for art as Cardinal Newman or somebody dubbing a few oxymorons and serpentinae carminae into his third draft. Well, even
schlock
has its classics. All during the mid-fifties, the outrage was building up about
Confidential,
the sales were going up to more than four million at the newsstands per issue, the record for newsstand sales, and everybody was wondering, outraged, how such a phenomenon could crop up in the middle of the twentieth century after the lessons of the war, hate and all, and what kind of creature could be producing
Confidential.
That was because no one really knew about Harrison, the “air business,” and the Cézanne, the Darwin, the Aristotle of
schlock
âthe old New York
Graphic
.
Harrison's father, he was saying, had wanted him to have a trade. Like plumbing, he says, that being the worst trade Harrison can imagine on short notice. The thing was, Harrison's father had been an immigrant, from Mitau. Harrison doesn't know where that is. His father and he were as different as black and white, he was saying. His father had the Old World idea of having a trade so inculcated in him that he was suspicious about any job that wasn't a trade. Harrison says he was about fifteen or sixteen when he got a job in an advertising agency, and he was getting seventy-five bucks a week. His old man
went right down to the office of the place to see what kind of funny stuff his son had gotten mixed up in. Even after he found out it was legit, he wrote it off as “air business.” “This
air business,
” he kept saying.
went right down to the office of the place to see what kind of funny stuff his son had gotten mixed up in. Even after he found out it was legit, he wrote it off as “air business.” “This
air business,
” he kept saying.
But the air business to end all air business was the New York
Daily Graphic.
Harrison went to work for the
Graphic
as an office boy, or copy
boy,
when the paper was the hottest thing in New York. It was one of those Xanadus of inspired buncombe in the twenties. The
Graphic
blew up scandal and crime stories like pork bladders. When the
Graphic
wanted to do a sensational story, they had writers, photographers and composograph artists who could not only get in there and milk every gland in the human bodyâbut do it with verve, with patent satisfaction, and, by god, celebrate it and pronounce it good with a few bawling red-eyed rounds after work. The
Graphic
's ghost writers developed the knack of putting a story, first-person and sopping with confession, into a famous person's mouth until it seemed like the guy was lying right out there on the page like a flat-out Gulliver. And those composograph artists. The composograph was a way of developing photographs of a scene at which, unfortunately, no photographers were present. If a gal were nude when the action took place but was uncooperatively fully clothed when the
Graphic
photographers zeroed in, the composographers had a way of recollecting the heated moment in tranquillity with scissors, paste and the retouch brush. These were wild times all around. These were the days of Texas Guinan and all that kind of stuff, Harrison was saying. Harrison was only sixteen or seventeen when he went to work on the
Graphic
, and he was only an office boy, or copy boy, but this piece of air business fixed his mind like an aspic mold. Okay, it was bogus. It was ballyhoo. It was outrageous. Everybody was outraged and called the
Daily Graphic
“gutter journalism”âthat's how that one got startedâand the Daily Pornographic. But by god the whole thing had style. Winchell was there, developing a column called “Broadway Hearsay” that set the style for all the hot, tachycardiac gossip columns that were to follow. Even in the realm of the bogus, the
Graphic
went after bogosity with a kind of Left Bank sense of rebellious discovery. Those composographs, boy! Those confession yarns!
Daily Graphic.
Harrison went to work for the
Graphic
as an office boy, or copy
boy,
when the paper was the hottest thing in New York. It was one of those Xanadus of inspired buncombe in the twenties. The
Graphic
blew up scandal and crime stories like pork bladders. When the
Graphic
wanted to do a sensational story, they had writers, photographers and composograph artists who could not only get in there and milk every gland in the human bodyâbut do it with verve, with patent satisfaction, and, by god, celebrate it and pronounce it good with a few bawling red-eyed rounds after work. The
Graphic
's ghost writers developed the knack of putting a story, first-person and sopping with confession, into a famous person's mouth until it seemed like the guy was lying right out there on the page like a flat-out Gulliver. And those composograph artists. The composograph was a way of developing photographs of a scene at which, unfortunately, no photographers were present. If a gal were nude when the action took place but was uncooperatively fully clothed when the
Graphic
photographers zeroed in, the composographers had a way of recollecting the heated moment in tranquillity with scissors, paste and the retouch brush. These were wild times all around. These were the days of Texas Guinan and all that kind of stuff, Harrison was saying. Harrison was only sixteen or seventeen when he went to work on the
Graphic
, and he was only an office boy, or copy boy, but this piece of air business fixed his mind like an aspic mold. Okay, it was bogus. It was ballyhoo. It was outrageous. Everybody was outraged and called the
Daily Graphic
“gutter journalism”âthat's how that one got startedâand the Daily Pornographic. But by god the whole thing had style. Winchell was there, developing a column called “Broadway Hearsay” that set the style for all the hot, tachycardiac gossip columns that were to follow. Even in the realm of the bogus, the
Graphic
went after bogosity with a kind of Left Bank sense of rebellious discovery. Those composographs, boy! Those confession yarns!
By 1957 people were starting to rustle through all the cerebral fretwork of Freud, Schopenhauer and Karl Menninger for an explanation of the
Confidential
phenomenon, when all the time they could have found it in some simpler, brighter stuffâthat old forgotten bijou, the
aesthetique du Daily Graphic
. That was a long-faced year, 1957. Hate? Venom? Smut peddling? Scandal mongering? All those long faces floated past Harrison like a bunch of emphysematous investment counselors who had missed the train.
Confidential
phenomenon, when all the time they could have found it in some simpler, brighter stuffâthat old forgotten bijou, the
aesthetique du Daily Graphic
. That was a long-faced year, 1957. Hate? Venom? Smut peddling? Scandal mongering? All those long faces floated past Harrison like a bunch of emphysematous investment counselors who had missed the train.
After his days on the
Graphic
, Harrison worked for a long time for Martin Quigley, publisher of the
Motion Picture Daily
and the
Motion Picture Herald
. Then, as he puts it, a funny thing happened. He got canned. He got canned for publishing the first of his girlie magazines,
Beauty Parade
, in Quigley's office after hours. “Quigley fired me and it was on Christmas Eve, I want you to know,” says Harrison. “Yeah! Christmas Eve!” But
Beauty Parade
clicked, and by the late forties Harrison was publishing six girlie magazines, among them being
Titter
,
Wink
and
Flirt
. Harrison's first great contribution to the art, sort of like Braque coming up with the collage at a crucial point in the history of painting, was the editorial sequence. Which is to say, instead of just having a lot of unrelated girlie shots stuck into a magazine of, say,
Breezy Stories
, the way it used to be done, Harrison arranged the girlie shots in editorial sequences. A whole set of bust-and-leg pictures would be shot around the theme, “Models Discover the Sauna Baths!” Class. Harrison's second great contribution was really the brainchild of one of his editors, an educated gal who was well-versed on Krafft-Ebing. It was she who sold Harrison on the idea of fetishism, such as the six-inch spiked-heel shoes, and the eroticism of backsides or of girls all chained up and helpless, or girls whipping the hides off men and all the rest of the esoterica of the Viennese psychologists that so thoroughly pervades the girlie magazines today. She once put a volume of Krafft-Ebing on Harrison's desk, but he never read it. Apparently, life in the Harrison offices was memorable. There are commercial artists in New York today who will tell you how they would be quietly working away on some layout when a door would open and in would tramp some margarine-faced babe in a brassiere, panties and spike heels, with a six-foot length of chain over her shoulder, dragging it over the floor. Harrison, who half the time slept in the office and worked around the clock, would be just waking up and out he would charge, fighting off the sebaceous sleepers from his eyes and already setting up the day's shots, with his piston-driven Dr. Grabow voice, as if the sound of the dragging chain had been the gong of dawn.
Graphic
, Harrison worked for a long time for Martin Quigley, publisher of the
Motion Picture Daily
and the
Motion Picture Herald
. Then, as he puts it, a funny thing happened. He got canned. He got canned for publishing the first of his girlie magazines,
Beauty Parade
, in Quigley's office after hours. “Quigley fired me and it was on Christmas Eve, I want you to know,” says Harrison. “Yeah! Christmas Eve!” But
Beauty Parade
clicked, and by the late forties Harrison was publishing six girlie magazines, among them being
Titter
,
Wink
and
Flirt
. Harrison's first great contribution to the art, sort of like Braque coming up with the collage at a crucial point in the history of painting, was the editorial sequence. Which is to say, instead of just having a lot of unrelated girlie shots stuck into a magazine of, say,
Breezy Stories
, the way it used to be done, Harrison arranged the girlie shots in editorial sequences. A whole set of bust-and-leg pictures would be shot around the theme, “Models Discover the Sauna Baths!” Class. Harrison's second great contribution was really the brainchild of one of his editors, an educated gal who was well-versed on Krafft-Ebing. It was she who sold Harrison on the idea of fetishism, such as the six-inch spiked-heel shoes, and the eroticism of backsides or of girls all chained up and helpless, or girls whipping the hides off men and all the rest of the esoterica of the Viennese psychologists that so thoroughly pervades the girlie magazines today. She once put a volume of Krafft-Ebing on Harrison's desk, but he never read it. Apparently, life in the Harrison offices was memorable. There are commercial artists in New York today who will tell you how they would be quietly working away on some layout when a door would open and in would tramp some margarine-faced babe in a brassiere, panties and spike heels, with a six-foot length of chain over her shoulder, dragging it over the floor. Harrison, who half the time slept in the office and worked around the clock, would be just waking up and out he would charge, fighting off the sebaceous sleepers from his eyes and already setting up the day's shots, with his piston-driven Dr. Grabow voice, as if the sound of the dragging chain had been the gong of dawn.
“And then a funny thing happened,” Harrison is saying, “one day my accountant calls up and asks me to meet him down at Longchamps. So I am talking to him in Longchamps and he informs me that I am broke. Broke! After making all that money! I couldn't believe what he was telling me! I think the thing was, we had six magazines, and if six magazines start losing money for a few months, you can lose hundreds of thousands of dollars and not even know what happened.
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