The White Album (11 page)

“Actually the message boards were part of a larger pilot project,” Mrs
.
Wood said
.
“An ongoing project in incident management
.
With the message boards we hoped to learn if motorists would modify their behavior according to what we told them on the boards
.
”

I asked if the motorists had
.

“Actually no,” Mrs
.
Wood said finally
.
“They didn’t react to the signs exactly as we’d hypothesized they would, no
.
But
.
If we’d
known
what the motorist would do
...
then we wouldn’t have needed a pilot project in the first place, would we
.
”

The circle seemed intact
.
Mrs
.
Wood and I smiled, and shook hands
.
I watched the big board until all lights turned green on the Santa Monica and then I left and drove home on it, all 16
.
2 miles of it
.
All the way I remembered that I was watched by the Xerox SigmaV
.
All the way the message boards gave me the number to call for
car pool info
.
As
I left the freeway it occurred to me that they might have their own rapture down at 120 South Spring, and it could be called Perpetuating the Department
.
Today the California Highway Patrol reported that, during the first six weeks of the Diamond Lane, accidents on the Santa Monica, which normally range between 49 and 72 during a six-week period, totaled 204
.
Yesterday plans were announced to extend the Diamond Lane to other freeways at a cost of $42,500,000
.

1976

1

I
was once
invited to a civil rights meeting at Sammy Davis, Jr
.
’s house, in the hills above the Sunset Strip
.
“Let me tell you how to get to Sammy s,” said the woman to whom I was talking
.
“You turn left at the old Mocambo
.
”
I liked the ring of this line, summing up as it did a couple of generations of that peculiar vacant fervor which is Hollywood political action, but acquaintances to whom I repeated it seemed uneasy
.
Politics are not widely considered a legitimate source of amusement in Hollywood, where the borrowed rhetoric by which political ideas are reduced to choices between the good (equality is good) and the bad (genocide is bad) tends to make even the most casual political small talk resemble a rally
.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” someone said to me at dinner not long ago, and before we had finished our
f
raises des
b
ois
he had advised me as well that “no man is an island
.
”
As a matter of fact I hear that no man is an island once or twice a week, quite often from people who think they are quoting Ernest Hemingway
.
“What a sacrifice on the altar of nationalism,” I heard an actor say about the death in a plane crash of the president of the Philippines
.
It is a way of talking that tends to preclude further discussion, which may well be its intention: the public life of liberal Hollywood comprises a kind of dictatorship of good intentions, a social contract in which actual and irreconcilable disagreement is as taboo as failure or bad teeth, a climate devoid of irony
.
“Those men are our unsung heroes,” a quite charming and intelligent woman once said to me at a party in Beverly Hills
.
She was talking about the California State Legislature
.

I remember spending an evening in 1968, a week or so before the California primary and Robert Kennedy’s death, at Eugene’s in Beverly Hills, one of the “clubs” opened by supporters of Eugene McCarthy
.
The Beverly Hills Eugene’s, not unlike Senator McCarthy
’s
campaign itself, had a certain
déjà vu
aspect to it, a glow of 1952 humanis
m: there were Ben Shahn posters
on the walls, and the gesture toward a strobe light was nothing that might interfere with “good talk,” and the music was not 1968 rock but the kind of jazz people used to have on their record players when everyone who believed in the Family of Man bought Scandinavian stainless-steel flatware and voted for Adlai Stevenson
.
There at Eugene’s I heard the name “Erich Fromm” for the first time in a long time, and many other names cast out for the sympathetic magic they might work (“I saw the Senator in San Francisco, where I was with Mrs
.
Leonard Bernstein
...
”
), and then the evening’s main event: a debate between William Styron and the actor Ossie Davis
.
It was Mr
.
Davis’ contention that in writing
The Confessions of Nat Turner
Mr
.
Styron had encouraged racism (“Nat Turner’s love for a white maiden, I feel my country can become psychotic about this”), and it was Mr
.
Styron’s contention that he had not
.
(David Wolper, who had bought the motion picture rights to
Nat Turner,
had already made his position clear: “How can anyone protest a book,” he had asked in the trade press, “that has withstood the critical test of time since last October?”) As the evening wore on, Mr
.
Styron said less and less, and Mr
.
Davis more and more (“So you might ask, why didn’t
I
spend five years and write
Nat Turner?
I won’t go into my reasons why, but
...
”
), and James Baldwin sat between them, his eyes closed and his head thrown back in understandable but rather theatrical agony
.
Mr
.
Baldwin summed up: “If Bill’s book does no more than what it’s done tonight, it’s a very important event
.
”
“Hear, hear,” cried someone sitting on the floor, and there was general agreement that it had been a stimulating and significant evening
.

Of course there was nothing crucial about that night at Eugene’s in 1968, and of course you could tell me that there was certainly no harm and perhaps some good in it
.
But its curious vanity and irrelevance stay with me, if only because those qualities characterize so many of Hollywood’s best intentions
.
Social problems present themselves to many of these people in terms of a scenario, in which, once certain key scenes are licked (the confrontation on the courthouse steps, the revelation that the opposition leader has an anti-Semitic past, the presentation of the bill of particulars to the President, a Henry Fonda cameo), the plot will proceed inexorably to an upbeat fade
.
Marlon Brando does not, in a well-plotted motion pictu
re, picket San Quentin in vain:
what we are talking about here is faith in a dramatic convention
.
Things “happen” in motion pictures
.
There is always a resolution, always a strong cause-effect dramatic line, and to perceive the world in those terms is to assume an ending for every social scenario
.
If Budd Schulberg goes into Watts and forms a Writers’ Workshop, then “Twenty Young Writers” must emerge from it, because the scenario in question is the familiar one about how the ghetto teems with raw talent and vitality
.
If the poor people march on Washington and camp out, there to receive bundles of clothes gathered on the Fox lot by Barbra Streisand, then some good must come of it (the script here has a great many dramatic staples, not the least of them a sentimental notion of Washington as an open forum,
cf
.
Mr
.
Deeds Goes to Washington),
and doubts have no place in the story
.

There are no bit players in Hollywood politics: everyone makes things “happen
.
”
As it happens I live in a house in Hollywood in which, during the late thirties and early fifties, a screenwriters’ cell of the Communist Party often met
.
Some of the things that are in the house now were in it then: a vast Stalinist couch, the largest rag rug I have ever seen, cartons of
New Masses
.
Some of the people who came to meetings in the house were blacklisted, some of them never worked again and some of them are now getting several hundred thousand dollars a picture; some of them are dead and some of them are bitter and most of them lead very private lives
.
Things did change, but in the end it was not they who made things change, and their enthusiasms and debates sometimes seem very close to me in this house
.
In a way the house suggests the particular vanity of perceiving social life as a problem to be solved by the good will of individuals, but I do not mention that to many of the people who visit me here
.

2

Pretty Nancy Reagan, the wife then of the governor of California, was standing in the dining
room of her rented house on 45
th Street in Sacramento, listening to a television newsman explain what he wanted to do
.
She was listening attentively
.
Nancy Reagan is a very attentive listener
.
The television crew wanted to watch her, the newsman said, while she was doing precisely
what she would ordinarily be doing on a Tuesday morning at home
.
Since I was also there to watch her doing precisely what she would ordinarily be doing on a Tuesday morning at home, we seemed to be on the verge of exploring certain media frontiers: the television newsman and the two cameramen could watch Nancy Reagan being watched by me, or I could watch Nancy Reagan being watched by the three of them, or one of the cameramen could step back and do a
cinema verite
study of the rest of us watching and being watched by one another
.
I had the distinct sense that we were on the track of something revelatory, the truth about Nancy Reagan at 24 frames a second, but the television newsman opted to overlook the moments peculiar essence
.
He suggested that we watch Nancy Reagan pick flowers in the garden
.
“That’s something you might ordinarily do, isn’t it?” he asked
.
“Indeed it is,” Nancy Reagan said with spirit
.
Nancy Reagan says almost everything with spirit, perhaps because she was once an actress and has the beginning actress’s habit of investing even the most casual lines with a good deal more dramatic emphasis than is ordinarily called for on a Tuesday morning on 45th Street in Sacramento
.
“Actually,” she added then, as if about to disclose a delightful surprise, “actually, I really
do
need flowers
.
”

She smiled at each of us, and each of us smiled back
.
We had all been smiling quite a bit that morning
.
“And then,” the television newsman said thoughtfully, surveying the dining-room table, “even though you’ve got a beautiful arrangement right now, we could set up the pretense of your arranging, you know, the flowers
.
”

We all smiled at one another again, and then Nancy Reagan walked resolutely into the garden, equipped with a decorative straw basket about six inches in diameter
.
“Uh, Mrs
.
Reagan,” the newsman called after her
.
“May I ask what you’re going to select for flowers?”

“Why, I don’t know,” she said, pausing with her basket on a garden step
.
The scene was evolving its own choreography
.

“Do you think you could use rhododendrons?”

Nancy Reagan looked critically at a rhododendron bush
.
Then she turned to the newsman and smiled
.
“Did you know there’s a Nancy Reagan rose now?”

“Uh,
no,”
he said
.
“I didn’t
.
”

“It’s awfully pretty, it’s a kind of, of, a kind of coral color
.
”