The Jubilee Hitchhiker

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By Ray Schultz

Richard Brautigan’s life is just as hard to fathom as some of his more obscure writing. But Williams Hjortsberg takes a stab at it in his excellent literary biography: Jubilee Hitchhiker, the life and times of Richard Brautigan.

Brautigan, for those who don’t know, was an American author with a huge following and a style that nobody could imitate. He was an iconic figure—tall, blond, with a walrus mustache and granny glasses, and he always had on a western hat.

His first novel, Trout Fishing in America, consisted of a series of  seemingly disjointed chapters linked by the narrative voice, and by the fact that Trout Fishing in America is a phenomenon with a thought process of its own. Here’s a sample:

As a child when did I first hear about trout fishing in America? From whom? I guess it was a stepfather of mine.

Summer of 1942.

The old drunk told me about trout fishing. When he could talk, he had a way of describing trout as if they were a precious and intelligent metal.

Silver is not a good adjective to describe what I felt when he told me about trout fishing.

I’d like to get it right.

Maybe trout steel. Steel made from trout. The clear snow-filled river acting as foundry and heat.

Imagine Pittsburgh.

A steel that comes from trout, used to make buildings, trains and tunnels.

The Andrew Carnegie of Trout!

The Reply of Trout Fishing in America:

I remember with particular amusement people with three-cornered hats fishing in the dawn.

Did I say sample? That was the entire chapter.

For all its whimsy and humor, the book also had a tinge of melancholy. Some critics thought it was too cute by half. But it took off, selling 2 million copies. Everybody read it, just as many later read Brautigan’s other novels: A Confederate General from Big Sur, In Watermelon Sugar, The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 and several poetry books.

“Just as the shining promise of the sixties gave way to the Nixon years, Richard Brautigan’s own star ascended,” Hjortsberg writes. “Work done in obscure poverty during the hippie decade now cast its golden light upon him. Money, previously in short supply, came in abundance.”

Yes, and he was as much of a celebrity in San Francisco as R. Crumb, the Grateful Dead or any of the Beats.

***
The time was November 1973. A woman I knew invited Brautigan and a few other people to a five-flight Greenwich Village walkup for a nightcap. Along with Brautigan came Charles Gaines, author of several books about bodybuilding, and a literary agent whose name I don’t remember. What was I doing there? I bought the wine while they were on their way—cheap red wine with twist-off caps instead of corks.

Brautigan had just finished a novel, which he didn’t tell us anything about. But he admitted: “When I finish a book, I like to go out to lunch for a month.”

The big shots sat on the bed, a mattress on the floor, while the rest of us gathered around the mattress. Brautigan asked Gaines about the bodybuilding craze.

‘I have one question, Charles: Why?”

Then Brautigan sounded off on Leonard Gardner, the author of Fat City: “How can he call himself a writer when he’s only written one book?”

I asked Brautigan what he thought of Nelson Algren. I felt he had been disrespectful to Algren in Trout Fishing in America, in a chapter titled, “The Shipping of Trout Fishing in America Shorty to Nelson Algren.”

He looked surprised, and repeated the question as a declarative statement: “What do I think of Nelson Algren.”

I never got an answer, but the subject came up of what I did. I told them I was a reporter and had spent several months doing research on Hasidic Jews. This was a few weeks after the Yom Kippur war. Brautigan raised an eyebrow.

“What do you think they should do with the occupied territories?” he asked me.

This felt like a trap. I was a Zionist in my heart, but wary about  being outwitted by a famous author. I fudged my answer.

“I think they should give them back.”

“You do?”

“With proper security guarantees.”

Now I’m deeply ashamed of my response. I don’t know what Brautigan thought privately, but his work seemed apolitical, and he never showed any animosity toward any group of people. I should have just unloaded with the anxiety many of us felt at that time.

The conversation lightened up, and Brautigan showed the wry laid-back charm that endeared him to people. By the time the party ended, I liked him a great deal and decided I would make it my business to read his new novel when it came out.

Nine months went by, and the book appeared: The Hawkline Monster, A Gothic Western. I bought it on day one and started reading it:

They crouched with their rifles in the pineapple field, watching a man teach his son how to ride a horse. It was the summer of 1902 in Hawaii.

They hadn’t said anything for a long time. They just crouched there watching the man and the boy and the horse. What they saw did not make them happy.

“I can’t do it,” Greer said.

“It’s a bastard all right,” Cameron said.

“I can’t shoot a man when he’s teaching his kid how to ride a horse.” Greer said. “I’m not made that way.’

Thus began the story of a pair of professional killers who are hired to kill a monster in the Hawkline mansion in Eastern Oregon. They travel there with the woman who hired them, an apparent Native American named Magic Child.

They reach a town called Billy, and meet the town marshal, a no-nonsense lawman named Jack Williams who seems to know Magic Child and has “a tremendous respect for her quick lean body.”

“These are my friends,’ she said, making the introductions. “I want you to meet them. This is Greer and this is Cameron. I want you to meet Jack Williams. He’s the town marshal.

Greer and Cameron were smiling softly at the intensity of Magic Child’s and Jack Williams’ greeting.

“Howdy,” Jack Williams said, shaking their hands.”What are you boys up to?”

“Come on now,” Magic Child said. “these are my friends.”

“I’m sorry,” Jack Williams said, laughing. “I’m sorry, boys. I own a saloon here. Any time you want there’s a drink waiting over there for you and it’s on me.”

He was a fair man and people respected him for it.

A couple of chapters later, the trio is riding through the Dead Hills, giving rise to this line:

Finally they came across something human. It was a grave.

In 1974, I found the book infuriatingly slight. But it was also very funny, and when I read it again recently, it didn’t seem slight at all: It’s just a splendid piece of entertainment. And it was a commercial success.

“By November 1976, Hawkline had sold 49,211 hardbound copies in America and an additional 73,750 in quality paperback,” Hjortsberg writes. (I like biographers who address the business side of things). “The mass-market paperback, released in September, had already reached 160,085 copies in sales. These figures were not lost on Hal Ashby, who planned to move ahead (with a movie) with Jack Nicholson.”

The movie was never made, but Brautigan was hot—again. Starting with the Hawkline Monster, he came out with a “genre” novel every fall for four years, the others being Willard and his Bowling Trophies, Sombrero Fallout and Dreaming of Babylon. I enjoyed them all, although none more than The Hawkline Monster.

Brautigan had one more commercial success, The Tokyo-Montana Express, in 1980. But he was sliding out of fashion. His sales nadir was the 1982 novel So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away. In 1984, at age 49, he blew his brains out in Bolinas, California.

Like many fans, I asked the same one-word question Brautigan had asked Charles Gaines: Why? Was it depression over his declining fortunes? Other writers have experienced all that, and managed to come back—look at Edward Albee. But here’s one clue: As Hjortsberg vividly portrays, Brautigan was an alcoholic, a falling-down drunk. He could be terribly cruel when ossified. And he enjoyed shooting up his kitchen with a gun.

But he continued writing. A new novel appeared years after his death: An Unfortunate Woman, about a dead woman whom we never meet and is never seen. It definitely has Brautigan’s tone—a subdued version of it. It’s one of the saddest books I’ve read. If there’s anything sadder, it’s You Can’t Catch Death, a memoir written by Brautigan’s daughter Ianthe. She loved him fiercely, although he wasn’t much of a father.

It’s too bad about his drinking. There was help available, and it might have saved Brautigan, but that’s easy to say from the outside. Artists are entitled to be complex. And as I enjoy these novels once more, I am reminded of just what an artist Richard Brautigan was.

Winchell in Runyonland

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By Ray Schultz

No reporter of a certain age can pass up a book about Walter Winchell and Damon Runyon, least of all one that promises to tell “The True Untold Story.”

Granted, there isn’t much left to be said about this duo. Winchell, the gossip columnist and radio star, has been picked apart by biographers; so has Runyon, whose stories inspired Guys and Dolls. Still, I sprang for Trustin Howard’s Winchell and Runyon: The Untold Story, because I’ll read anything I can get my hands on about them.

They were an unlikely pair, given their backgrounds. Winchell, Jewish, grew up on the Lower East Side. Runyon, a lapsed Protestant, was born in Manhattan, Kansas, and he was almost 20 years older than Winchell.

But those differences were outweighed by their similarities. Both were famous, both had come up the hard way. They loved the night life. And Runyon seemed to wish he was Jewish. He would go into Ratner’s, the dairy restaurant, and for breakfast order “Half a grapefruit, a big bowl of vegetables and sour cream, a big slab of boiled white fish, a bowl of kasha, an order of blintzes, a big piece of coffee cake and coffee as fast as you can refill my cup,” according to The Damon Runyon Story by Ed Weiner.

Howard is a TV comedy writer who started with Joey Bishop. He’s no historian. The book is slight, amateurish in spots. And precision isn’t his strong suit.

To hear him tell it, Runyon and Winchell became friends just before World War II. But Runyon used Winchell as a model for his character Waldo Winchester a decade before that.

And unless I’m misreading it, Howard seems to imply Runyon got drunk with Winchell at Texas Guinan’s in the 1940s. In 1913, as several biographers have reported, Runyon woke up on a train without knowing how he got there and never took another drink.

Finally, it isn’t quite accurate to say that Franklin Roosevelt “took to the airwaves to declare war on Japan”—he spoke before both houses of Congress, and Congress issued a declaration that Roosevelt signed. But let’s cut Howard some slack: He’s not trying to be Robert Caro. What he’s done here is present scenes—vignettes, almost—that he says have eluded formal biographers.

There’s Runyon’s account of how he lost a bundle on a race at Saratoga. (The male horse he’d bet on stopped to romance a female horse). There’s Runyon telling Winchell he’s right about “that little German asshole” (Hitler).

There are their jaunts around the city on the so-called dawn patrol. There’s Winchell consoling Runyon over his failed marriage. “We’re complicated guys, Damon,” he reportedly says. “Our work is our life.”

The anecdotes are believable, even without sources. And Howard doesn’t try to mimic Runyon’s style, a weakness of many writers who tackle Runyon as a subject: He’s got a voice of his own.

That’s All?

All too soon, we get to the story of Runyon’s visit to the vet with his cocker spaniel Nubbin. (Howard calls her Nubbins, but I’ll stick with the version that Runyon used in his column).

Nubbin needed a tonsillectomy. And Runyon confessed that his own throat was bothering him. The vet offered to take a look. What he saw alarmed him.

It turned out that Runyon had throat cancer. Doctors removed his voice box, but it was only a temporary reprieve. Winchell’s knees buckled when he heard the news, Howard writes.

Winchell was said to be a hard man—willing to ruin people. But he attended to his dying friend for nearly two years.

“The two of them truly become inseparable,” Howard writes. “And as Winchell promised a very sick Runyon, they are constantly at the track, the ball parks, the theatres, the nightclubs, just anywhere they can find some kind of action.”

The voiceless Runyon communicated by passing notes to Winchell. They exchanged good-natured insults. “I do not mind awaiting daylight in some pleasant deadfall but walking around is no good for me and Walter cannot show me that it is of any benefit to him, either,” Runyon wrote in his column. “Because while he walks around a heap, he always has a beef about not feeling any too well, and he gets balder by the minute.”

Runyon covered FDR’s funeral in April 1945, attended by a nurse, and continued turning out his column. “He writes on instinct,” Winchell said, according to Howard. “And no matter what he’s going through—his words never lose that edge.”

But Runyon was running out of time. He died in December 1946, at age 66, and Winchell honored him by starting the Damon Runyon Cancer Fund. As Howard tells it, mob boss Frank Costello donated $25,000 and cons in prison sent whatever they could. Winchell and Runyon’s children dropped his ashes over Manhattan from a plane. And Winchell opened a note that Runyon had left him: “I found that an irresponsible reporter in front of a typewriter can do more damage than a drunken surgeon in an operating room.” What an epitaph. The book ends, and at this point I will pay Howard the greatest compliment any writer can get: “That’s all?”

Der Ring Gott Farblunjet

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By Ray Schultz

One evening in May 1987, we passed the Ridiculous Theatrical Company on Barrow St. in Greenwich Village and saw flowers piled up on the sidewalk. What was going on?

We found out at the Sheridan Square newsstand. The Times reported—on its front page—that Charles Ludlam, the gentle wit who ran the company, author and star of Bluebeard and Camille, had died of AIDS at age 44.

We gasped. How could it be? So many people died of AIDS in that vile year. And now Ludlam. Greenwich Village would never be the same.

Our only consolation was that Ludam had done a lot in the time he had.

A Long Island kid, Ludlam moved to the city in his 20s and joined John Vaccaro’s Play-House of the Ridiculous. He co-authored two plays with Vaccaro, then left and formed the Ridiculous Theatrical Company.

Blessed with a gift for friendship, Ludlam gathered several talented players around him, including Everett Quinton (who kept the theater going after Ludlam’s death), Black-Eyed Susan, John Brockmeyer, Bill Vehr and Lola Pashilinski. Moving from one theater to another, they did plays like Turds in Hell, Hot Ice, Corn, Caprice and many more.

In Bluebeard, a mad scientist named Bluebeard tries to create a third sex: His failed experiments wander the island. I can still hear the one played by John Brockmeyer pleading, “Mercy, master!”

In Camille, Ludlam played the Greta Garbo role, dressed in a gown with his hairy chest visible, and he went over the top as Camille died of consumption. First he spit up blood (how was a trade secret). Then there was this Villagey double entendre:

Camille (weakly): I’m cold. Throw another faggot on the fire.

Servant: Madame, there are no more faggots.

Camille (with sudden strength): What! Not even on the street?!

What spectacles they were. And when Ludlam wasn’t doing them, he was entertaining kids with Punch and Judy shows and science fiction pieces. Still to come were The Mystery of IrmaVep and Gallas (in which he played Maria Callas in drag).

But let’s turn the clock back—to 1978. That’s when a magazine sent me down to interview Ludlam. At first, I was intimidated by the balding and goateed legend, but he quickly put me at ease with his enthusiasm and charm.

It was a good time for Ludlam. He was rehearsing a new play, Utopia Incorporated, and he had found a theatrical home in the basement theater on Barrow (the former Café Society Downtown nightclub).

“The lobby looks just fantastic,” he said as we sat down. “Did you see the mural? I’m in ecstasy. I’ve never in my life seen anything so fabulous.”

Someone handed around a bottle of corn liquor, and we all had a slug. Apropos of nothing, Ludlam mentioned the Pink Teacup, a soul food restaurant on Bleecker St.

“The waitresses are really outrageous right now,” he said. “They’re all in pink uniforms, and all the teacups are pink.”

I responded that they were vandalized when they tried to open on another block.

“Not every part of the country is as advanced as the West Village,” Ludlam said. “And of the whole West Village, Bleecker Street has to be the fever pitch of civilization.”

Here at the height of his powers is Charles Ludlam.

RS: There’s one thing I don’t get about Utopia Incorporated. If they’ve been cut off in Utopia for thousands of years, how could the hero have been swindled by the outsider’s father?

Ludlam: Right. It’ll all make sense in the end, though. The theory behind it is that there is a matrix of plot types. I no longer tell a story, I tell a type of story. And all things that accrue to that type of story can coexist in it. For instance, there is a type of story that might be roughly called the Enchanted Arcadia or Lost Horizon. The Tempest is that kind of story, The Wizard of Oz, the Time Machine, any going to Mars or any other planet, like Forbidden Planet. Usually, through some kind of natural holocaust or phenomenon, they get stranded in a strange world where time has stopped, or where they’re more advanced than we are, or behind us, or better than us, or worse than us. And they have a series of adventures within that world. Then they have the problem of getting out of there. Often the thing is destroyed in the end, and usually it is ruled by some kind of Wizard who holds some kind of mad power. So I get a plot type, and rather than tell a convincing story, which ties me down to logic, I encrust the plot type with all the possibilities even though they contradict each other.

RS: Do you mean it as a comment on the genre?

Ludlam: In a way, but I want not so much to comment on it as use it to my own advantage as artist. You don’t have to be literal in modern art. The techniques are based on reduction, distortion, rearrangement and collision of aesthetic principles. But modernism has never really been successful in playwriting because people could never get over this hump of the story. If you regard the story the way Picasso regarded the human figure or a bowl of fruit, then you become free.

RS: And this all falls under the heading ridiculous?

Ludlam: The name is sort of a fluke. Someone at a John Vaccaro rehearsal said, ‘This is ridiculous,’ and we just called it that. But I was interested in comedy and getting people to laugh, creating a really rich, baroque experience, a grandiose kind of theater, and to provoke a sort of moldy glamour.

RS: The broad brush…

Ludlam: I don’t really like subtlety. If you do away with subtlety and replace it with complexity, you can get something unbelievably rich and interesting. But we’ve never codified what the Ridiculous is into a theory or a hard cold notion. Like an amoeba, it changes shape and becomes different things. We do grand opera, we do nightclubs, we do variety acts. We tap dance. In one show, we do high tragedy. In Ventriloquist, I saw Susan in half.

RS: What were you trying to do with Der Ring Gott Farblonjet?

Ludlam: I followed the plot of the Wagner ‘Ring’ cycle and distilled it into something you could do in one night. We did a modernist interpretation of it. We had a small orchestra of musicians who played five instruments each. All the Valkyries had horns. The highest moment was the Wedding March, with Black-Eyed Susan as Gertruna, Ethyl Eichelberger as Gunther and John Brockmeyer as Siegfried. They do this wedding procession, and Susan’s dress was all these sheer plastic veils that we painted—you could see through the plastic. She was like walking stark naked to her wedding. And she had this headdress on of twinkling lights and these Nibelungen, these potato people, were carrying her veil, and they were all carrying these swans. When they went off, the procession would run around backstage, and get on the end of the line, so it just kept going on and on. That was the highest ecstasy I’ve ever achieved in the theater.

RS: You’re also played several roles in drag.

Ludlam: I love getting in drag and love people in drag. I like it artistically, but I also like it when people get into drag and walk down the street for the fun of it. I like when they do it on Halloween, and in Mardi Gras. It’s wonderfully festive and liberating. Gender is the one thing you’re born with against your will. You can change your social class, your nationality or your language, but you can’t change your sex. Uh, wait a minute…(laughter). Drag is a way of overcoming that limitation without undergoing surgery.

 

 

Art and Commerce

RS: How are you doing financially?

Ludlam: I’ve risen up financially from the pits. I can’t believe that we’re able to make a living for even part of the year. Sometimes people in the company have jobs, and I sometimes teach in college.

RS: You must have had some rough times.

Ludlam: There have been millions of crises. For example, we were stranded in Vienna with no money or bookings.

RS: How you stay alive other than box office admissions?

Ludlam: We have private contributors, and we get Council on the Arts money, and the National Endowment for the Arts. And we save everything because money is so at a premium for us. We have a small studio on 14th St. where we store all our old sets and costumes for future use.

RS: Have you ever been evicted from a theater?

Ludlam: Well, we have had to leave. Sometimes they sell the theater. Sometimes your lease runs out. Sometimes you can’t pay the rent anymore. That happened at the Provincetown Playhouse. We were doing Caprice, and we planned to run it for two months, but the critics hated it so much that the houses were absolutely empty. So we had to stop performing it a month before we thought were going to.

RS: What did they hate about it?

Ludlam: Everything.

RS: What was the idea behind the play?

Ludlam: It was about a fashion designer who was getting beaten out. His competition would steal his ideas and mass produce them and make money. I think it shocked people because it was racy and gay. I never really had plays with homosexual characters in them before. These characters were all homosexuals. But it was no big pleading for sympathy for homosexuals, or to liberate or hate homosexuals. It’s just that they happened to be in the fashion world, and I thought it made it very appropriate.

RS: Don’t you have a large gay following?

Ludlam: I’m very grateful to the gay audience. They’ve been very supportive over the years. There’s a feeling of comradeship. But we’re far from being exclusively anything. It’s problematical but it’s also a saving grace because the audience isn’t ever one kind of audience. I don’t create by formula. Ultimately, the audience has to come to me on my terms.

RS: How would you respond to the charge that it’s pointless and decadent?

Ludlam: It’s not pointless and decadent. Anyway, who would make that charge of such a hardworking, good-natured group of well-meaning people? Only a terrible spoilsport. Decadence is a kind of a peace-loving aestheticism. Maybe people want (the company) to be decadent, but it’s not—it’s the opposite of decadent. It’s war-like and ascendant and utopian and aggressive. Minimal art is decadent because it doesn’t want to deal with conflicts or ideas.

Family and Friends

RS: What’s your background?

Ludlam: My father is of the Long Island Ludlams, the first settlers of Long Island. His father was a Puritan. My mother’s father was a German-Lutheran. Both grandfathers married Irish Catholic girls and converted to Catholicism, so I was raised Catholic by Puritans. There was absolutely no relief.

RS: Do you still consider yourself a Catholic?

Ludlam: I’m very emotionally involved in the Catholic Church. It has very powerful images. It creeps into everything I do. But it’s a love-hate relationship. I loathe it, but I occasionally have visions like St. John of the Cross or something. I’m probably a saint. That’s why I have to watch my step—you know what happens to saints. But that’s the Catholic thing. I put up plaster-of-Paris religious statutes. I have a Lazarus and a black Madonna.

RS: How did you pull your company together?

Ludlam: We’re all friends. We wanted a very creative life in the theater, without hacking, looking for work all the time or having to put up with compromises. We had this similar viewpoint, we stuck together.

RS: Do the others contribute to the script?

Ludlam: If they weren’t there, there would be no script because I wouldn’t write plays. Their incredible contribution is themselves.

RS: But you’re the final word.

Ludlam: I like to work with people who have lot of ideas: It’s stimulating. But ultimately, one must be a tyrant. I always know exactly how everything should be without thinking about it. I could be completely wrong. but I don’t demand reasons of myself for everything I do. As a result I can just express myself. The other day, I decided that the volcano should destroy Utopia at the end, and Kay-Kay said yes, columns should topple, bits of brick and things should fall on the set. And they figured out how to do it, and there’ll be this maneuvered trap that will drop all this debris on the actors at the end.

RS: It seems that the visual is as important as the dialogue .

Ludlam: I think the visual has equal weight

RS: You write all the jokes, too?

Ludlam: I go to my joke file.

RS: Your joke file?

Ludlam: Yeah. Like Milton Berle, I have a joke file. All comedy writers have one. There’s seven basic types of jokes, and all jokes fit into one of those types. The rest is adapting it to the subject matter, and giving it a new twist and context.

RS: Have you ever tried to make it in the commercial world?

Ludlam: It’s happened a number of times. They wanted me to work on some project, and I’ve always played along because I wanted it to work out. But there seem to be so many obstacles in the way of—I guess they’d call your big break. I’m not patient enough to go through that. I have to be creative right at hand. I need a theater so I can work the minute I get the idea. For ten years, we’ve experimented and tried dozens of theaters, and now we have our own place, and we really want to create a center of excitement here. We have a ten-year lease.

RS: Do you think the company will be around in ten years?

Ludlam: It’s like enough to make you stop smoking and start eating vegetables to last for those ten years.

How to Write Copy Like Groucho Marx

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By Ray Schulz

Most of us know Groucho Marx as a comedian. And he was indeed one of the best. Adorned with a greasepaint mustache, he played an impertinent hustler in Marx Brothers classics like “A Night at the Opera” and “Duck Soup.” Then there was his long run as host of TV’s “You Bet Your Life.”

Well, it turns out that Groucho had another talent—for direct mail copywriting. Yes, he once wrote to booksellers to promote his book: “Groucho’s Letters.” And in the best direct mail tradition, he touted the benefits and asked for the order.

It must have worked: The book was a bestseller. But this was not your typical B2B sales letter.

For starters, the one-page missive appeared under a Groucho Marx letterhead—hardly corporate. Second, it referred to his sex life (or lack thereof). Finally, need we say, it was funny.

Was it ghostwritten? I doubt it: It sounds too much like Groucho or one of his characters—Otis B. Driftwood, Rufus T. Firefly or J. Cheever Loophole.

I don’t know about you. But all I have to do is picture the cigar-smoking Groucho to feel good.

Enjoy.

Feb. 28, 1967

Dear Bookworms and Bookies:

As you and the world knows, I have a classic book bursting forth next April called “Groucho’s Letters,” or something like that. This is no ordinary book like those hack pieces of writing that infest the best seller lists in the New York Times and other throw away papers.

Now let’s get down to cases. I have worked for two decades on this book, sacrificing my sex life whenever I could, turning down girls that I used to turn up, fighting high cholesterol night and day, abstaining from rich curries and buttermilk pancakes – in short, living like the most dedicated monk. Bananas and then more bananas until they stuck out of my ears.

And what have I been doing this for? Certainly not for money. Let me tell you here and now, I’ve got more money than a lot of you bookish fellows. George Bernard Shaw, an Irish writer of little note, wrote hundreds of letters to Mrs. Patrick Campbell and made a fortune. He wrote her a 12-page letter every day and she wrote him a 2-page letter once a week. Finally she quit the weekly letter and began sending him souvenir postcards from various watering troughs in the Dardanelles. And baby, from what I hear, she wasn’t alone on those islands. His letters were magnifique, but naturally, they took a lot of his time, what little time he had left after combing his whiskers and riding his bicycle. Mrs. Campbell, on the other hand, didn’t have any whiskers and didn’t have a bicycle. At any rate, Bernie never got to first base with her. This is the kind of stuff my book is loaded with.

My book can be a smash if you bookdealers have guts enough to neglect all the other merchandise you’re hawking in your literary warrens. So just put your shoulders to the wheel. Those of you who don’t have a wheel, just drop a note to Bob Gottlieb, care of Simon and Schuster, and see what you get back. This book is a cinch as people love to read letters because they like to stick their noses in other people’s business.

So for God’s sake, get on the ball. I have a wife and five children that I know of, and they’re all starving. People will treasure these letters because they’re loaded with sex, wisdom, jocular sayings and a special chapter on how to avoid probate. This is for those who feel they’re on their last legs. Now then, it’s up to you.

Groucho

P.S. My publisher (an impecunious sort) demanded that we include an order form. Feel free not to use it.

It’s too bad about Groucho. He should have stuck to copywriting and forgotten those crazy ideas about show business.

Thanks to the Mal Warwick Agency for forwarding this letter. 

How to Write Copy Like Damon Runyon

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By Ray Schultz

If ever a writer was good at engaging readers, it was Damon Runyon. He held them from the first sentence to the last, in any format, and he would do that online if he were alive today.

Who’re we talking about? Damon Runyon, born in 1880 in Manhattan, Kansas, died in 1946 on Manhattan Island. He was, to start with, a great reporter and columnist, as proven by his coverage—on deadline— from the Ruth Snyder-Judd Gray murder trial in 1927. (The pair murdered Snyder’s husband).

“Right back to old Father Adam, the original, and perhaps the loudest ‘squawker’ among mankind against women, went Henry Judd Gray in telling how and why he lent his hand to the butchery of Albert Snyder.

“She-she-she-she-she-she-she-she. That was the burden of the bloody song of the little corset salesman as read out in the packed court room in Long Island City yesterday.

“She-she-she-she-she-she. ‘Twas an echo from across the ages and old familiar echo, at that. It was the same ‘squawk’ of Brother Man whenever and wherever he is in a jam, that was first framed in the words:

“’She gave me of the tree, and I did eat.’”

Then there was his sportswriting. Many sportswriters wrote poems in those days, but it’s hard to top Runyon’s paean to the jockey Earl Sande:

Say, have they turned the pages
Back to the past once more?
Back to the racin’ ages
An’ a Derby out of the yore?
Say, don’t tell me I’m daffy
Ain’t that the same ol’ grin?
Why, it’s that handy
Guy named Sande,
Bootin’ a winner in!”

But it’s his fiction that has earned Runyon a small but real place in American literature. He wrote maybe 200 short stories, all in the present tense, creating memorable (if not admirable) characters like Big Jule, Nicely Nicely Jones, Harry the Horse and Sam the Gonoph.

The Snatching of Bookie Bob

Take his story, “The Snatching of Bookie Bob.” Bookie Bob is kidnapped by three thugs named  Harry the Horse, Little Isadore and Spanish John. He agrees to book their horse racing bets to pass time, and they end up owing him double the amount of the ransom.

Yes, I know—it’s the same basic plot as O. Henry’s “The Ransom of Red Chief.” But “Bookie Bob” is darker—and funnier—in its tale of Depression-era betrayal.

Consider the way Runyon starts the story, and at the same time explains why snatching is in vogue:

“Now it comes on the spring of 1931, after a long hard winter, and times are very tough indeed, what with the stock market going all to pieces, and banks busting right and left, and the law getting very nasty about this and that, and one thing and another, and many citizens of this town are compelled to do the best they can.

“There is very little scratch anywhere and along Broadway many citizens are wearing their last year’s clothes and have practically nothing to bet on the races or anything else, and it is a condition that will touch anybody’s heart.”

So the three wiseguys start nabbing people for ransom, and “much fresh scratch comes into circulation, which is very good for the merchants,” the narrator writes. He notes, however, that “you cannot snatch just anybody”—you need a reliable finger.

“The finger guy must know the guy he fingers has plenty of ready scratch to begin with, and he must also know that this party is such a party as it not apt to make much disturbance about being snatched, such as telling the gendarmes.”

It also pays to know if the victim “does not care to have matches run up and down the bottom of his feet, which often happens to parties who are snatched and who do not seem to wish to settle their bill promptly, because many parties are very ticklish on the bottom of their feet, especially if the matches are lit.”

Now what is Runyon really doing here but describing a process? He could just as well be explaining a best practice in B2B.

Butch Minds the Baby

Then there’s “Butch Minds the Baby,” an even more perfect blending of style and content. Butch, a reformed hoodlum, is offered big money to break open a safe, but his wife is at a wake, so he has no choice but to take his infant son on the job.

The narrator, “a little dopey” from needled beer, tags along, although he feels that cracking a safe with a baby present is “very dishonorable.” (Who’s this narrator? As he says in another story, “Nobody pays any attention to me, because I am known to one and all as a guy who is just around.” This is the story, by the way, that opens with the memorable line: “One evening along about seven o’clock I am sitting in Mindy’s restaurant putting on the gefilte fish, which is a dish I am very fond of, when in come three parties from Brooklyn wearing caps as follows: Harry the Horse, Little Isadore, and Spanish John”).

The scenes follow with impeccable timing. Butch heats up milk in a saucepan next to the safe, Little Isadore muzzles the baby to keep him quiet, Butch blows the safe open and the police arrive on the scene.

By this time, young John Ignatius is “beating his own best record for squalling,” the narrator writes, “and as we go walking along Big Butch says to me like this:

“‘I dast not run,’ he says, ‘because if any coppers see me running they will start popping at me and maybe hit John Ignatius Junior, and besides running will joggle the milk up in him and make him sick. My old lady always warns me never to joggle John Ignatius Junior when he is full of milk.’

“‘Well, Butch,’ I say, ‘there is no milk in me, and I do not care if I am joggled up, so if you do not mind, I will start doing a piece of running at the next corner.’”

The story is based less on a plot than a premise. But the tone is pitch-perfect. And Runyon sustains it to the very end.

Mastery of His Language

I could go on. I could tell you about Blond Maurice, who in 1936 is placed in quicklime by “certain parties who do not wish him well.” (He shows up later eating cheese blintzes in Mindy’s). I could mention Rusty Charley, who is known to carry a gun “and sometimes to shoot people down as dead as door-nails with it if he does not like the way they wear their hats—and Rusty Charley is very critical of hats.”

But why bother? You can read about these characters—and many more—in a fairly recent Runyon collection from Penguin.

Runyon has been criticized for making hoodlums loveable. But he was the first to admit that he was a “hired Hessian on the typewriter.” He wrote to entertain people, and he succeeded, for at least a dozen of his stories were made into movies, and another couple used for the musical “Guys and Dolls.”

Were there better, more profound writers around? Sure. But as novelist William Kennedy wrote, “Far more serious writers than Runyon have fallen on their faces and other parts because they lacked what he had: a love and mastery of his language, a playful use of its idiosyncrasies.”

How to Write Copy Like R. Crumb

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

R. Crumb opens his comic, “The Fight,” with this line: “Uh oh, this oughta’ be good.”

Don’t ask what happens next, or the name of the comic book it was in—Crumb had not yet taken to illustrating the Bible. But what a setup: It’s a classic use of what I call the anonymous editorial voice.

It’s the voice you find in decks, captions and other unsigned copy in magazines. It’s the voice you see in old-time mail order ads, the kind Crumb read in comic books as a kid.

It’s Crumb’s voice, but he’s not using it as Crumb. Rather, he’s acting as an omnipresent narrator or huckster.

In one memorable piece, the cartoonist starts by saying, “You people better get hip to the fact that we’re livin’ in the—LAP O’ LUXURY.”

In another, he mimics a public service ad to make a satiric point:

“Cliffy the Clown says:

“‘You can help solve the OVERPOPULATION PROBLEM this quick, easy way! This year, why not COMMIT SUICIDE?”

Note that Crumb  is speaking right to the reader. He may dislike advertising, but he has learned from the great copywriters of old.

Now we’ve come full circle. The anonymous voice of which Crumb is a master is uniquely suited to content marketing.

Let’s say you’re doing a B2B white paper. Even without a byline, it has to sound like it came from a human being, preferably one you know: Think of Dick Cavett doing anonymous ad voiceovers

‘The Line, the Line’

An R. Crumb white paper wouldn’t be boring: He would take complex material and make it so vivid that anyone could understand it. And he would display two of his other great qualities: Pacing, and what one Crumb admirer has called “the line, the line.”

These are on full view in the 1975 rant, “Let’s Talk Sense About This Here Modern America!” by “that cranky old fuddy duddy R. Crumb.” As it opens, an agonized America says, “Love me or leave me,” and Crumb adds: “This is not a happy comic strip.” He then runs through some rapid-fire visual bullet points:

  • America the Cruel Bully
  • America the Glutton
  • America the Greedy
  • America the UGLY!

Moving on, Crumb denounces motorcycles, calls for the return of trolley cars, depicts jet setters working in the fields (“Tsk! I just hate this ensemble I have to wear for this work!”), insults several ethnic groups and concludes by deploring aerosol sprays. Then, as easily as he gets you into it, you’re out. It’s a breathtaking performance even for someone who disagrees with the sentiments (and it would be hard to pinpoint Crumb’s politics).

“With comics, you’ve got to develop some kind of shorthand,” Crumb told the Paris Review when discussing his illustrated Book of Genesis last year. “You can’t make every drawing look like a detailed etching. The average reader actually doesn’t want all that detail, it interferes with the flow of the reading process.”

Here’s another lesson from Crumb. He told the Comics Journal that he’s an “entertaining cartoonist,” and not much else (“Bruegel, I ain’t,” he once said). His authority lies “almost in a satiric reflection of cartooning in some way. And maybe in telling a story.” That last phrase says it all.

Finally, Crumb makes every word count. “When you write slowly you have more time to think about how to word things,” he told the Paris Review. “I don’t type, I just handwrite everything in block letters. I take the time to think out how to articulate things.”

Not bad for a guy who admits he had trouble reading as a child.

Enough Storytelling–Let’s Tell the Truth

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

Abraham Lincoln was in a good mood as he got ready to go to the theater. The war was over, he’d shown the Rebels. He threw back a shot of bourbon. Now it was time for some fun.

Now, what’s wrong with that paragraph, besides the fact that it’s a total fabrication? Two things. First, it trivializes a tragic historical event. Second, there’s no way to know what Abraham Lincoln was thinking.

Still, I expect some writer to concoct a scene like this because that’s what the market demands (or so we’re told). We’ve entered the era of storytelling. And there’s no room for anything that slows down the narrative–like truth or attributions.

Maybe they’re right. But since most narrative I see moves slowly anyway (some of it is interminable, in fact) I’d just as soon we return to the journalistic basics. There are worse things than being dull and honest.

An Inexact Science

H.L. Mencken of Baltimore was 19 or so when he “took in the massive fact that journalism is not an exact science.” A rival reporter named de Bekker, rather than leave his barstool to report on a stevedore’s death, made up the facts on the spot, starting with the deceased’s name.

“Who gives a damn what it was?” de Bekker asked the two young competitors who were drinking with him. “The fact that another poor man has given his life to engorge the Interests is not news: it happens every ten minutes. The important thing here, the one thing that brings us vultures of the press down into this godforsaken wilderness is that the manner of his death was unusual–that men are not kicked overboard by mules every day. I move you, my esteemed contemporaries, that the name of the deceased be Ignaz Karpinski, that the name of his widow be Marie, that his age was thirty-six, that he lived at 1777 Fort avenue, and that he leaves eleven minor children.”

All three journalists present reported those sad facts, “along with various lively details that occurred to de Bekker after he had got down another beer,” Mencken recalled. And since their accounts were identical, they were applauded by their editors the next day for their unusual accuracy.

Making up facts is the cardinal sin of journalism. And while it was charming in Mencken’s telling, it’s now a surefire career destroyer (except in the blogosphere).

Another form of journalistic distortion is found in posed news photos, and in Time Inc.’s old March of Time documentaries. Case in point: Time’s 1938 feature on life inside Nazi Germany. In one scene, storm troopers collect money from ordinary Germans. Another shows nuns in a prison cell. But both scenes were shot in Hoboken, New Jersey, as I learned during a panel discussion at MOMA featuring Time archivist Bill Hooper.

The New Journalism

Does that mean that March of Time’s stepchildren, TV shows like 60 Minutes, fake their coverage? Uh, I didn’t say that… But the more daring the storytelling, the more careful one has to be about adhering to the journalistic rules.

This issue was hotly debated during the era of the so-called “New Journalism.” Not that it was a new idea, but reporters like Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese and Jimmy Breslin showed that non-fiction could be written in narrative form like fiction. To do it, they had to find what Wolfe called the “objective correlative”—the telling detail.

One seminal example of the genre is Breslin’s 1963 article,  A Death in Emergency Room One. The beginning:

The call bothered Malcolm Perry. ‘Dr. Tom Shires, STAT,’ the girl’s voice said over the page in the doctor’s cafeteria at Parkland Memorial Hospital. The ‘STAT’ meant emergency. Nobody ever called Tom Shires, the hospital’s chief resident in surgery, for an emergency. And Shires, Perry’s superior, was out of town for the day. Malcolm Perry looked at the salmon croquettes on the plate in front of him. Then he put down his fork and went over to a telephone.

“‘This is Dr. Perry taking Dr. Shires’ page,’ he said.

“‘President Kennedy has been shot. STAT,’ the operator said. “They are bringing him into the emergency room now.

Perry hung up and walked quickly out of the cafeteria and down a flight of stairs and pushed through a brown door and a nurse pointed to Emergency Room One, and Dr. Perry walked into it. The room is narrow and has gray tiled walls and a cream-colored ceiling. In the middle of it, on an aluminum hospital cart, the President of the United States had been placed on his back and he was dying while a huge lamp glared in his face.

To read that piece even now is to feel the enormity of the event. But Breslin wasn’t in the emergency room as it unfolded (nor in the cafeteria)—that scene is, to the best of my knowledge, based on interviews with participants. Yet it was published within 48 hours of the assassination.

In another powerful story, Breslin profiled an unemployed Vietnam vet, a Congressional Medal of Honor holder, who had crawled through enemy fire to save wounded fellow solders. The hero’s life unravels as older men at the VFW ply him with drinks.

Were these accurate depictions? They apparently were, but they couldn’t have been easy to do, given that facts don’t always lend themselves to narrative. Even time sequences have to be exact, as writer Janet Malcolm found out—she was criticized for a scene in which the subject says in person things he actually said later on the phone.

Then  there’s the ever-present threat of libel. No wonder Breslin and Wolfe sought a larger canvas—in fiction.

In Cold Blood

Truman Capote moved in the opposite direction. His book, “In Cold Blood,” on the murder of the Clutter family in Kansas, was the world’s first nonfiction novel, he claimed.

It doesn’t matter what it was called.  This was narrative the way it should be done, as you can tell from the very first paragraph:

The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call ‘out there.’ Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed toes. The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them.

Capote, one of our finest prose writers, finished  the book with a scene that brought closure to the story: The detective who worked on the case encounters a friend of one of the victims in the cemetery. “The message is clear: life continues even amidst death,” wrote Capote’s biographer, Gerald Clarke.

The only problem is that it never happened. Unethical? Most journalists would say so. But, as Norman Mailer observed at the time, “Truman must have his tone.”

Sorry, Kid, You’re No Truman Capote

Some might wink at Capote’s transgression—he wrote an American classic. But consider what has followed. These days, everything has to be written like fiction, even history, yet few writers have Capote’s gift for narrative or Breslin’s flair or reportorial doggedness.

Writers must now entertain above all else. Serious topics take on a storybook quality—it’s almost as if readers lack the attention spans to handle more complex forms of information. But not everything can be dramatic or entertaining.

At least a few journalistic malefactors—those caught making up stories—were driven by this need to startle and/or amuse, I believe. Not that this makes it forgivable—or even sensible. Few writers can invent anything better than what happens in reality.

Egregious factual liberties are also taken, I suspect, with that staple of self-help magazine articles: The composite character. They are simply not believable. How can you check?

Then there’s plagiarism. Some well-known historians have been caught using almost identical language to that of other writers. I wonder if they left out attributions that should have gone in because they got in the way of the story.

In narrative, as in all other forms of nonfiction writing, there are no substitutes for precision and clarity.