The Right Places (26 page)

Furthermore, the 1940s image of the lady lecturer created by the late Helen Hokinson—corsaged speaker addressing a sea of flowered hats (following a chicken-in-timbales luncheon), on the subject of Flower Arranging or Secrets of Slipcovering—is now hopelessly out of date. So is the picture of the effete critic who has come to the woman's club to talk on the Joys of Poetry. Today congressmen, senators, Joint Chiefs of Staff and Supreme Court justices have taken to the lecture platform, along with ballplayers, sopranos, columnists, doctors, lawyers, composers, gurus, women's liberationists and ballet dancers. Lecturing has become an important second source of income for actors between plays, authors between books, singers between concerts, even photographers between assignments. Bosley Crowther, former film critic for the New York
Times
, claims he put his children through college by lecturing. Senator Barry Goldwater in 1968 made sixty thousand dollars in lecture fees alone and is the envy of all his Senate colleagues. Everyone whose name shines with the slightest glint of fame scrambles to climb aboard the gold lecture wagon to join those who are currently making money at it—such diverse figures as Harry Golden, Rise Stevens, Art Buchwald, Dick Gregory, Bob Feller, Kitty Carlisle, George Plimpton, Philippe Halsman and Madame Claire Chennault.

Matching—indeed outweighing—the eagerness of those willing to lecture and be paid for it are the organizations with budgets they are eager to spend on lectures. These, too, are a far cry from the club luncheons Miss Hokinson sketched. Women's groups no longer have a corner on lecturers' services. It is as though in the last decade, in a spirit of uplift, men's organizations all over the country decided to put aside their traditional evening of drinking and card-playing in favor of listening to the reminiscences of Baroness Maria von Trapp, whose life story was turned into
The Sound of Music
. Or to hear the powdered accents of the Duke and Duchess of Bedford, whose joint lecture, titled “An Evening of Elegance,” is, according to Their Graces'
agent, “really just a plug to get tourists to come and visit their castle.”

The greatest demand for lecturers comes from colleges. “They're the bread and butter of our business,” says Alan S. Walker, president of the Program Corporation of America. “Look at it this way: every single college and university in the country books between ten and fifteen speakers every year. That adds up to a tremendous market.” Whatever the reason for this activity, one lecture bureau, the American Program Bureau of Boston, takes in about three million dollars every year from college campuses, three-quarters of the agency's revenue. With more than four thousand colleges and universities, there is an audience of over seven million people—and they have money to pay.

There is another reason why the college audience is particularly enticing to lecturers and the agencies. This big, rich audience turns over every four years. This means that a lecturer can be booked again—and again—at any given college. This is not the case in, say, the annual Republican Club Fund Dinner in Tulsa. After one engagement a speaker becomes “dead” for that organization for as long as a dozen years, and he may even be dead for all of Tulsa. This is because this year's program chairman has got to come up with something better than last year's speaker; if not, it would be like arriving in last year's hat. “With colleges,” says one lecture agent taking a hardboiled view, “you can send them a speaker and maybe he's lousy. So what? Two, three years later nobody will remember whether he was or wasn't.”

Which brings up the inevitable question: How valuable, or how entertaining, are the lectures being peddled—and delivered—to this seemingly insatiably lecture-hungry public? The answer, needless to say, is that it depends. There are, to begin with, two basic kinds of lecturers. There is the person who, having achieved a certain amount of fame or recognition in his field, decides, as it were, to cash in on it with “a little lecturing on the side.” These are people who regard lecturing as something else to do, an added source of income, an excuse to get away from their wives (or husbands) for a few weeks each year. These might be called the casual lecturers who are really only as good as their names happen to be. At the moment, for example, Arthur Ashe is considered one of the “hot” lecture properties and his
signature is being sought by a number of agencies, though of course no one knows—or cares—whether Mr. Ashe is as skillful on the platform as he is at the net.

Lecturers of this type, however, tend to have relatively short careers. According to an agent, “The first year we have them we can book them anywhere—they can be just as busy as they want. The second year there's a slip. By the third year, unless they're awfully good, they're dead.” And yet it is this group that composes the majority of the lecturers in the business. According to W. Colston Leigh, who runs a New York agency often called “the Tiffany's of the lecture bureaus,” “Ninety per cent of the people in this business are no damned good. It's like any other profession. Only the dedicated and talented minority really succeed.”

The dedicated and talented minority are, of course, the second group. These are men and women who take their lecturing seriously, who work at it with full strength, who believe in what they're doing—and saying—and work on their platform performances with as much intensity as a painter works on a canvas. They learn how to establish rapport with an audience, how to build a mood and control it, how to get a laugh or a tear. They learn how to judge an audience's reaction and how to attune themselves to the subtleties of the composition of a group, and to tell instinctively when an anecdote that might be appreciated by one kind of audience will not by another. These lecturers leave their audiences enriched or entertained or both, and needless to say, these lecturers are the more durable sort, in demand year after year.

Into this category fall such people as Louis Untermeyer, who, in his mid-eighties, recently retired from a long career of lecturing, and Emily Kimbrough, who loves lecturing so much that she lectures, then writes a book about lecturing, then lectures about writing a book about lecturing. Edward Weeks, editor emeritus of the
Atlantic
, is another of this long-lasting breed, as was the late critic John Mason Brown. Eleanor Roosevelt, for years a Colston Leigh client, was still another who—though never really a very good speaker—managed, by some magic of her personality or spirit, to hold audiences enthralled with her fluty voice.

Since the lecture industry has, for the last decade, been enjoying
a seller's market, with more organizations clamoring for speakers than there are speakers to speak—and since the speakers themselves are subject to such a high turnover rate—the lecture-bureau business has become highly competitive. Everybody, as Jimmy Durante used to say, wants to get into the act and is furiously beating his own drum. In the scramble to out-celebrity each other, lecture bureaus have been known to adopt practices which, while not actually illegal, might be considered a bit unsporting, and in their efforts to lure Famous Names to their lists their most important tool has been the greatness of the size of the human ego. For example, a familiar tactic has been for a lecture agent to call up a Supreme Court justice or similar luminary and say, “If I can get you a lecture engagement paying a top figure of five thousand dollars, may I represent you?” In most cases the celebrity, flattered at the thought that such a high price is placed on his words, says yes right away, and then, in a few days, forgets all about it. No five-thousand-dollar engagement may ever come, but in the meantime the celebrity's name has been printed on hundreds of thousands of brochures scattered to organizations across the country, lending prestige to the lecture bureau—and to the other speakers, less well known, whom the bureau represents.

The new student power on college campuses has also been shrewdly put to use by certain less-than-scrupulous lecture bureaus. Today undergraduate managers and student committee members have complete and final control of “special events” at the great majority of colleges and universities. Only on a few campuses must students refer their choice of speakers to officials for approval, and though the students do their best, they are often unprepared for some of the more “sophisticated” selling methods of the lecture agencies. For example, a familiar way to offer lecturers to colleges is in a series, and nearly every lecture series has at least one star. Let us say, then, that college X has decided to buy a ten-lecture series, the capstone of which will be an address—to take a ridiculous example—by Queen Elizabeth II. We assume that the Queen does not know that she has been offered. The other nine lecturers are a prize-winning electroplater from Detroit, a world's-record-breaking speed typist, and so on, but it was the Queen, really, who sold the series, for it is
her
opinions on pot and black militancy that everybody at college X wants to hear.
The lecture bureau has told the students that the cost of the ten lectures will be five thousand dollars—five hundred dollars apiece, which is modest enough—and has piously added that, in the event that any of the speakers fails to make his engagement, the five hundred dollars for that speaker's date will be cheerfully refunded. It is all put in writing and a contract is signed—all legally holeproof. Alas; on the day the Queen is expected she is stricken with laryngitis and has taken to her bed. For her nonappearance, five hundred dollars is promptly sent back to the college. The lecture bureau has made forty-five hundred dollars for nine mediocre speakers, and a campusful of unwitting students has been gulled. Unfortunately, practices like this are too common to be funny and are extremely difficult to detect.

But lecture agents have headaches to put up with, the commonest of which are the clients who—in order to avoid paying the commission, which can run anywhere from twenty to thirty-five per cent of the fee—accept speaking engagements on their own without telling the bureau. When he finds out about it all the lecture agent can do is scold. If he fires his client the client will simply trot off to another agent who will be glad to have him—such is the demand today for anyone with the slightest gift of gab. And clients have peculiar quirks that must be catered to. The popular Emily Kimbrough, for instance, dislikes flying, and her tours must be slowly and tortuously routed over railroad tracks.

Beginning lecturers, initially entranced at the heady thought of money to be made, occasionally have agonized second thoughts. This happened in the case of Andy Warhol, who agreed to a schedule of fifty college bookings for the American Program Bureau—or as it later turned out, the APB agreed to deliver Andy Warhol to fifty colleges before actually asking Andy Warhol how he felt about it, just assuming that, like most people, he would be delighted. He wasn't. Well, the APB argued, why couldn't he go along and show the colleges some footage from his underground films? Warhol agreed to this, but at the last minute, overwhelmed by stage fright, he sent a “double” with hair dyed silver (like Warhol's) and some of Warhol's clothes. The double toured in Missouri, Montana and Oregon and was quite a success. “That boy was more what the kids really wanted,”
Warhol says. “They liked him better. He smiled prettier. He was friendlier. He was a flower child.” Nonetheless, when the deception was discovered, a red-faced APB was forced to return many fat fees. Since then Warhol has kept his in-person dates, but he goes accompanied not only by film footage but also by two cohorts, Viva Superstar and Paul Morissey. They answer questions for him. He merely stands there, rigid and mute, thus becoming the gab circuit's first non-speaking speaker.

And even the old pros have lapses now and then. Vincent Sheean, normally a popular and reliable platform performer, once spent a few bibulous hours with friends before a California lecture date. At some point during the cocktails Sheean apparently forgot whether he was supposed to deliver a lecture or attend one. When he got to the auditorium he paid a dollar for his ticket and took a seat in the audience. When he looked at the program and saw that he was the speaker he took his ticket back, collected his dollar, and took his place at the podium. Those who heard him testify that he was never in better form.

This was not the case with another speaker who had undergone a somewhat more alcoholic encounter prior to his lecture. After being introduced he rose, a bit unsteadily, to the lectern, gazed for a long moment at his notes, then said, “Thank you very much,” and sat down.

The pitfalls of lecturers abound. When a certain novelist, who must be nameless, heard that a critic whom he particularly hated had taken to the lecture circuit, the novelist chose a brilliantly cruel, if expensive, mode of revenge. Using a false name, he engaged the critic as a lecturer, hired a hall, and appeared as an audience of one. When the critic stepped onto the bare stage to face an empty house, the novelist sat back comfortably in his seat, smiled, and said, “Okay, let's hear you do your stuff.”

There is also a danger which I, in my own somewhat limited experience as a lecturer, have named the Mrs. Oppenheim Syndrome. The Mrs. Oppenheim Syndrome is most likely to be experienced in smaller cities, where warring social factions may exist within the community or within the sponsoring organization itself. I first met up with it in Scranton or Wilkes-Barre. It doesn't matter which; the two
Pennsylvania cities, near each other and sharing an airport, hate each other. Each thinks the other is its social and physical inferior and rarely do the two see eye to eye on anything. Following my talk at the “after-party”—a formidable part of the engagement in itself—I was cornered by a Mrs. Oppenheim of Scranton (or Wilkes-Barre) and a female ally presumably from the same place, was pressed between them into the corner of a triangular banquette table, and then engaged in heavy conversation. After half an hour or so, unable to move, I became aware of a heightening mood of tension in the room. The opposing Wilkes-Barre (or Scranton) part of the gathering was beginning to feel that I was dividing my time unfairly, possibly committing the unpardonable sin of snubbing the Sponsoring Organization. But, trapped as I was by Mrs. Oppenheim and her friend, I felt there was nothing I could do short of crawling across one of the ladies' laps. Twenty minutes later it was too late. From the corner of my eye I watched as the offended Wilkes-Barre (?) group stood up as if by a signal and, with marvelous precision, marched to the door, faces frozen and noses in the air, and left the party.