41 Shades of Gray

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

Another hot shot writer is in trouble for alleged serial plagiarizing. Benny Johnson was fired by BuzzFeed last Friday after readers found “41 instances of sentences or phrases copied word for word from other sites,” as editor Ben Smith put it in a blog post, according to Mashable.

There’s no reason for gloating, although I suspect some grizzled reporters are doing just that. I can hear them asking if Johnson, BuzzFeed’s viral politics editor, ignored the ethical training given out in J-school.

But it’s the wrong question, given the nature of BuzzFeed and Johnson’s alleged offense. Maybe Johnson didn’t even go to J-school.

He seemed to specialize in what are now called “listicles” – trashy, specious lists, as in: “7 Signs That Your Dog Is Having an Affair.” Like the best content curators, he borrowed liberally from others, but without crediting his sources, Smith admitted.

Yikes. It’s bad enough to plagiarize renowned works of fiction or history. But listicles?

Yet “curation” apparently is the basis of BuzzFeed’s business model. Adrian Chen wrote on Gawker in 2012 that BuzzFeed has “built a lucrative business on organizing the internet’s confusing spectacle into listicles easily comprehended by even the most numbed office workers.” Chen added, though, that “many are highly derivative rip-offs from other sites, cleaned up and reproduced without crediting their sources.”

Has it changed since then? Maybe. “Go to BuzzFeed.com and click on any one of its lists. In very fine print, buried below each photo, there will be a link to another site — usually Reddit,” Dylan Byers sneers on politico.com.

Byers also offers this explanation for how Johnson went wrong:

“When BuzzFeed reporters wrote, they were subject to the same rules as everyone else. Sure you could draw facts from elsewhere — everyone does — but you had to write it in your own language.

“At some point, Johnson probably got lazy and started inserting text into his posts the same way he had been inserting photographs — by pressing Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V. His mistake was that he forgot to put quote marks around it and add “according to.”

That seems right, although it’s all part of a viral content system designed for people with short attention spans.

And let’s not forget Johnson’s worst alleged offense:plagiarizing Wikipedia.

I used to joke that I’d fire any reporter who used Wikipedia as a source. There are too many small factual errors (and probably many big ones). It’s a slipshod practice.

But if you do sneak it in, at least have the courage to admit it. I’d hate to be the editor who had run an apology for ripping off Wikipedia.

Don’t think this is limited to listickle writers—book authors and academics also quote Wikipedia, which in fairness doesn’t purport to be a primary source. When did everyone get so lazy?

Here’s some free advice. If BuzzFeed is indeed focused on curation, it should source everything—it’s as simple as that. There’s nothing wrong with compiling a content sampler if you attribute pickups and include links.

For their part, writers should follow Robert Caro’s rule and source every single quote or paraphrase. Don’t worry if it bogs the copy down.

And Benny Johnson? One can guess that he enjoyed his moment in the sun. Or maybe he didn’t—it had to be stressful. Either way, what’s his future?

Fallen journalists rarely make it back—there are too few jobs even for good reporters. But that may be changing, along with other things in publishing. A clever person with a good business head could start his own site, or find another one to hire him. And like other nine-day wonders on the Internet, he may find that he is forgiven as long as he drives traffic and dollars. So much for ethics.

 

 

 

 

Move Over, Ayn Rand

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

Looking for a novel about a businessman unbound by the rules and fears of mortals? Here are three, and they’re not by that conservative icon Ayn Rand, but by the alleged one-time Communist Theodore Dreiser.

Yes, Dreiser wrote a somewhat admiring portrait of Frank A. Cowperwood, a thinly fictionalized version of the robber baron Charles T. Yerkes, in three monumental volumes: The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914) and The Stoic (1946). Later, they were repackaged as the Trilogy of Desire.

Granted, these aren’t the first books I’d recommend by Dreiser. His finest works are his first two novels: Sister Carrie (1900) and Jennie Gerhardt (1911). In these heartbreaking tales, he described poverty, the kind he experienced as a child, and how Carrie and Jennie emerge from it (a lesson that drew fire from moralists of the time). He combined awe and compassion with a newsman’s eye for detail, as H.L. Mencken would observe. That said, anyone interested in finance would do well to work through their way through the Trilogy.

The Financier traces Cowperwood’s early success on the Philadelphia stock exchange—and an early failure. The city treasurer has been illegally floating loans to him, and Cowpoerwood is unable to cover them when the Chicago Fire of 1871 causes a panic.

Cowperwood exhorts the sniveling treasurer to hold on, that the run on the banks will be temporary. But it’s too late. Both are indicted, and sent to jail.

Don’t think Cowperwood is broken by it: As Dreiser depicts him, he is a sort of Nietzschean superman, utterly fearless (which may be the whole point, assuming it needs a point). Cowperwood emerges, and walks right in to the real panic—of 1873. And he recoups his fortune by buying and selling short while others lose everything.

The Titan follows him to Chicago, where he builds and runs part of the elevated train system (yes, public transit was built by private enterprise in those days). Some men he breaks, others he pulls in to share his success. And he makes enemies—many of them.

For example, the blue-chip bankers of Chicago, all of whom despise him, create a scheme to call in Cowperwood’s loans. Their goal? To save themselves from an impending corporate failure. Here’s the scene:

As he entered the home of Arneel, he was a picturesque and truly representative figure of his day. In a light summer suit of cream and gray twill, with a straw hat ornamented by a blue-and-white band, and wearing yellow quarter-shoes of the softest leather, he appeared very model of trig, well-groomed self-sufficiency. As he was ushered into the room he gazed about him in a brave, leonine way.

 “A fine night for a conference, gentlemen,” he said, walking toward a chair indicated by Mr. Arneel. “I must say I never saw so many straw hats at a funeral before. I understand that my obsequies are contemplated. What can I do?”

He beamed in a genial, sufficient way, which in any one else would have brought a smile to the faces of the company. In him it was an implication of basic power which secretly enraged and envenomed nearly all those present.

 The bankers lay it out. They need cash to avoid a calamity, and “your loans are the largest and the most available. Do you think you can find the means to pay them back in the morning?”

“I can meet my loans,” he replied easily. “But I would not advise you or any of the gentlemen present to call them.” His voice, for all its lightness, had an ominous ring.

 “Why not?” inquired Hand, grimly and heavily, turning squarely about and facing him. “It doesn’t appear that you have extended any particular courtesy to Hull or Stockpole.” [Men losing everything in the failure]. His face was red and scowling

 “Because,” replied Cowperwood, smiling…“I know why this meeting was called. I know that these gentlemen here, who are not saying a word, are mere catspaws and rubber stamps for you and Mr. Schryhart and Mr. Arneel and Mr. Merrill. I know how you four gentlemen have been gambling in this stock, and what your probable losses are, and that it is to save yourselves from further loss that you have decided to make me the scapegoat. I want to tell you here”—and he got up–“you can’t do it.”

The bankers are stunned by his confidence, and even more by what he says next:

 “If you open the day by calling a single one of my loans before I am ready to pay it, I’ll gut every bank from here to the river. You’ll have panic, all the panic you want. Good evening, gentlemen.”

I don’t know about you, but that scene always makes me want to cheer.

Running in tandem with his business exploits is Cowperwood’s womanizing (a pursuit enjoyed by Dreiser himself). He ignores conventional pieties in this area just as he does in commerce.

Having brought Cowperwood this far, Dreiser abandoned him to focus on novels like The Genius (1915) and An American Tragedy (1925). Finally, he took him up again in his old age. In the third volume, The Stoic, Cowperwood is in London, building part of the Underground. His health and powers are declining (as are Dreiser’s): Thus, The Stoic is not quite as robust as the earlier books. But published a year after Dreiser’s death, it was a fine ending to the series. As with Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt, I reread the Trilogy every few years.

Thinking of curling up with an Ayn Rand book at the beach? Try the Trilogy of Desire. It covered some of the same ground in a much more powerful way.

DEAR FRIEND: The Rascals, Rogues and Roues Who Made American Junk Mail Chapter 14: The Road To Wellville

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

Painfully shy, so thin he was rejected for insurance policies, Edward W. Proctor did not look like a salesman. But his employer Charles Guild wanted him to sell, so Proctor did, starting around 1900. This took him to outfits like the Swamp Root Co., maker of the Swamp Root kidney and bladder cure, of Binghamton, New York. Asked what Swamp Root was good for, Willis Sharpe Kilmer, the founder’s son, replied, “About one-and-a-half to two million a year.”

And it brought Proctor to the D.A. Williams Medical Company, seller of a “uthrethral balm” to Civil War veterans. “Exposure, miasma, bad food, hardships of every description—these and not the bullets are responsible for the extremely rapid death-rate among the veterans,” it said in a direct mail letter.

In short, Proctor was selling mailing lists in the format of the time: Letters from customers. Guild explained it in an advertisement: “Letters for Rent. We carry millions of all kinds of letters received in reply to newspaper and magazine advertising, which we are offering for copy at low rates. Our specialty is Nervous Debility and Medical letters.”

Fourteen when his father died, Proctor left school and went to work in an ice house, then as a clerk in a law firm. He wanted to be a lawyer, but his main job after seven years was getting his bosses’ hats shined. So he took accounting courses.

Then he was hired by Guild, a failed advertising agent from Boston. Guild’s first firm had gone into receivership, the result of his financial mismanagement. So he moved to New York, and applied himself to selling ad space in mail order newspapers like Westerner.

This was a step down. These rags were mailed to people who hadn’t subscribed; stacks of them piled up in backwoods post offices. Now, thanks to rural free delivery, they were delivered right to the door. “These disgusting prints thus force their way unsolicited into the homes throughout the country and their demoralizing influence it would be hard to overestimate,” a critic wrote.

The average issue contained fiction like “The Fortunes of a Factory Girl,” jokes and cracker-barrel wisdom and columns on subjects like how to milk cows in winter, all written by “unknown people, whose acquaintance with philology, grammar and other essentials of successful word-weaving has been very slight.”

They also contained patent medicine ads, one more unbeleivable than the next. In a single issue of the Homemaker, Dr. A.J. Hill said that Preparia could “relieve the ailments of pregnancy,” Dr. Mixer sold a “sure cure” for cancer, Dr. Chas W. Green offered one for fits, and Milo Co. promised that “Any woman can cure her husband, son or brother of liquor drinking by secretly placing this remedy in his coffee, tea or food.”

Some of these firms went out of business soon after starting, but not the H.H. Warner Co. Hulbert Harrington Warner Warner had made a fortune selling office safes. In mid-life, he came down with kidney trouble, and the only remedy at hand was a potion made up of glycerin, water and alcohol.

In 1879, Warner bought the rights to this purported miracle drug from the doctor who created it and started advertising it as Warner’s Safe Cure and Kidney Cure, He soon was spending almost a million dollars per year on advertising, and his ad department was “the most important and principal feature of this concern,” a reporter wrote.

Warner was also active in the mail. He sent 35 million letters and almanacs a year, and the Rochester Post Office bought the first automatic machine to handle them. In one promotion, Warner invited readers to send $1 and a urine sample for a “free treatment by mail.”

Many medicine sellers did this, but few examined the specimens; those that did simply passed the vials over a flame. If the liquid turned dark, that meant sugar; white meant albumen. The treatments were the same for both. Pranksters who knew this sent horse urine to the Swamp Root Co., and said it was from a “Caucasian male.”

Warner’s writers moved on. They amused almanac readers by asking them to find spelling errors in their copy, and by describing a conversation on a new device:

Hello! What is it?

Please connect the telephone with Warner’s Safe Remedies Establishment.

Hello! Who is it? What’s wanted?

I do not believe you know me, or would if I should tell you who I am. I want to talk with you a few moments.

All right! Go ahead.

I want to ask you something about your pamphlet, your establishment, kidney disease, and lots of other things. I know you have got a good medicine, but I want to know something about how to keep well.

Whew! Tut, tut, tut—louder! I can only just hear you talking about keeping well, our pamphlet, kidneys, etc.

That’s it. You understand me now. Can you hear?

Yes, but before we get through with this subject, we would burn the wires off. Come to Rochester some day, and we will go through the entire subject.

Yes, but if I should come to Rochester I would take lots of your time, and you would get tired of talking.

Never mind. Come on! Be glad to see you. Good-bye.

Hold on a moment—one more word—may I bring my wife, too?

Yes, have her come, and the whole family: the neighbors, too, if you like.

Warner sold the company, then was ousted for manipulating the stock price in his own favor. But he had set the standard for everyone, and Guild was able to land some of these advertisers as clients.

Proctor felt that he had finally found a career. And he applied himself to it in a way that his boss Mr. Guild never would. Soon, he met rival letter brokers like Herbert H. Hull, who owned a million letters, and Frank B. Swett, who had even more. “There are five million chronic sick and incurables in the United States, and I’ve got letters from one million of them right there in that building,” said one such broker, pointing to his warehouse. They were convivial fellows who cooperated with each other even as they competed and what Proctor couldn’t learn from Guild he learned from them. He commenced his education.

He learned that the value of a letter decreased as it got older.

He learned that a person who wrote out of curiosity was not as good a prospect as one who knew what he would receive.

He learned that the names of mail order buyers were better than those copied from directories or clipped from newspapers.

He learned, too, that some of the most coveted names were those of sick people rejected for life insurance policies; treatments could be sold to these unfortunates.

More valuable still were the letters held by Lydia Estes Pinkham, of Lynn, Mass. Her Vegetable Compound, an herbal concoction with an 18% alcohol content, was guaranteed to “ease women through the Change of Life, dissolve and expel tumors from the uterus, and cure entirely the worst form of Female Complaints, all Ovarian troubles, Inflammation and Ulceration, Falling and Displacements, and the consequent spinal Weakness.”

Pinkham’s “mild Quaker face” appeared no only on bottles of the compound, but in all circulars and newspaper ads. “Many small newspaper offices possessed no cut of a woman’s face except that of Lydia’s maternal countenance, which occasionally was shifted from an advertising to a news column to do double duty as Queen Victoria,” wrote historian James Harvey Young.

Every ad for the Vegetable Compound invited readers to “Write to Mrs. Pinkham at Lynn, Mass., and she will advise you,” and millions of women did. But Pinkham insisted that the letters were “opened by a woman, read only by a woman, seen only by a woman,” and she wouldn’t rent them—to anyone. “They can’t be bought,” a broker said. “The old girl won’t even answer a letter about them. I don’t know what sort of a plant she has at Lynn and it doesn’t matter much, as her files are worth more than the plant.”

Rubbish, said another; Pinkham’s advertisements are “so wide in their scope…that hardly a woman can read them without feeling that she is a sufferer… they are practically worthless after written.” (Little did they know that Lydia was dead, and had been since 1883—the company was now being run by her children).

The tone of Proctor’s talks with these brokers can be inferred from an 1890s newspaper account, in which a young man meets a letter broker on a train.

“I am a dealer in old letters, and am now on my way home with a check for $250 in my pocket which is all velvet,” the broker said. “This check I received for the use, for one month, of 10,000 letters, of which I am the owner.”

The older man was happy to explain the business.

“You, in the course, of your life, have written in reply to some advertisement, asking information in regard to the article advertised, or sent a request for a sample to be forwarded, and enclosed the necessary price, otherwise you have been different from most persons.

“The letters received in answer to such advertisements have a distinct market value among parties who deal in novelties. They are better in every way than lists made up from directories, representing, as they do, interested parties, or, in other words, persons who, attracted by the catchy wording of advertisements will be still more liable to bite after reading lengthy circulars with arguments as to why they should purchase.”

The broker went to his compartment, and returned with samples.

“For these letters I pay at the rate of from $30 to $50 per thousand, and thus become the sole proprietor of them,” he said. “I have my customers, to whom I rent them at the uniform price of $50 per thousand for the first month’s use. They find them very valuable in sending out their circulars, and on their return these letters become a part of my stock in trade, being re-let at constantly decreasing prices, according to the number of parties through whose hands they have passed, until they remain marketable for many years at so low a figure as $3 per thousand for 30 day’s use.”

But these were not as valuable as his medical letters.

“I have got a number of hundred thousand of such as these, which we call ‘the blooming sucker variety,’ and for which I pay as high as $75 to $100 per thousand,” the broker continued. “These I let to my medical customers for, say, $125 per thousand for the first thirty days, reducing the price afterward.”

What good were these letters to a patent medicine seller? The broker explained it. “Did you ever go fishing more than once to a pond where you had spent a whole day trying to get a bite? Oh, no, you always go where you have been able to fill your basket before, and it is just the same in fishing for men.”

“Why, my dear boy, some of these medical practitioners in special diseases will not sell their letters for love or money. Why? Because after they have worked the fools under one name for all the money they can get out of them, the doctors then address a letter to the innocents under another name, saying they have learned that he (the patient) had been under the treatment of those unmitigated quacks, giving his former name, and telling why they condoled with him for such a misfortune, and wishing that he could have come under their treatment, which could but prove successful. Nine times out of ten they catch the gudgeon, not only the second, but even the third time.”

Chapter 15: Sacredly Confidential

The Jubilee Hitchhiker

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

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.

Sunday Night at Nine: Harpo’s Wild Ride

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

Marx Brothers fans tend to have favorites from different periods. Some like The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers, Broadway hits shot on a sound stage in Astoria in 1929 and ‘30. Others prefer the wacky Paramount comedies made in Hollywood from 1931 to ’33—Monkey Business, Horsefeathers and the anti-war Duck Soup. And some favor the lavish yet very funny MGM musicals developed by Irving Thalberg: A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races. But few would choose Love Happy, the final film made by the Marxes, despite the fact that it was Marilyn Monroe’s first.

Initially, the 1949 flick was a vehicle for Harpo Marx, the silent, harp-playing brother. But he had to enlist Groucho and Chico to get backing, and their parts were hastily written into the script.

Now entering their dotage, the Marx Brothers had not appeared on screen together since A Night in Casablanca in 1946, and the film before that was The Big Store, circa 1941. Fearing it had a turkey on its hands, United Artists pulled out. But producer Lester Cowen was resourceful: He went to several brands and “solicited paid advertising just to get the movie completed,” according to The Marx Brothers, by Mark Bego (Pocket Essentials, 2001). In other words, it was an early example of product placement.

These were squeezed into a memorable Times Square chase sequence, in which Harpo scampers on rooftops with neon signs flashing around him. The brands? Kool Cigarettes and Bulova Watches. But the climactic moment belonged to Mobil Gas. Cornered by his pursuers, Harpo mounts the Socony Mobil winged horse and rides the neon Pegasus into the sky. Stoned-out hippies later cheered that scene.

Meanwhile, back on earth, private eye Groucho is approached by a dark-haired Marilyn Monroe.

“Some men are following me,” she says.

“Really?” Groucho says. “I can’t imagine why.”

But that was the best of it. The movie tanked at the box office, and Groucho turned his attention to You Bet Your Life, his popular TV show. And yet, true Marx fans sob with gratitude when they get a glimpse of Love Happy on TV. Maybe it’s not their favorite, but there were only 13 Marx Brothers films after all, and each one was special in its way.

Winchell in Runyonland

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

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.

The King of Pulp

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

It was a fact well known in the publishing business that when Myron Fass put out a magazine, a smart person read it. Fass, the founder of the legendary Countrywide Press, was like a human divining rod when it came to spotting popular obsessions and quickly cashing in on them. The headstone was no sooner in place on John F. Kennedy’s grave when Fass came out with the first Jackie Kennedy pulp in 1963. A few months later, he hit the stands with the first Beatles one-shot, which sold millions. How did he know the Beatles were going to become the greatest pop phenomenon of all time? “Instincts,” he was reported as saying. “Voices in my mind.”

All of us should hear such voices. Fass also capitalized on UFOs, psychic phenomena, Son of Sam, Elvis, the Osmonds, Richard Nixon and the swine flu. He took a chance on history repeating itself with a one-shot item called, The Beatles Come Back, which some said was a harbinger of things to come. It was his one miscue.

I met Fass in 1977, when I was assigned to do an article on him. He offered me a job on the spot, and invited me out for lunch. “Nothing fancy,” he said. “Just a beanery.” I turned down the job, but accepted the lunch, and enjoyed getting acquainted with the then-50 year-old publisher and his product line.

In addition to his one-shots, Fass published monthly magazines on durable topics such as dogs, horses, guns, motorcycles, crime, sex and entertainment. Most of his books stayed on the stands for no more than a week or two—they appeared and disappeared like rumors. “We sell about 75,000 on each one,” he said at lunch. “Together they add up.”

Most of Countrywide’s publications had a strange uniformity of style, based on pictures and witty copy. Yet each was uniquely designed for the audience for which it was intended. The gun magazines read like they were put together by firearms experts. The rock mags—Blast, Punk, Rock, Acid Rock—were more fun than Rolling Stone, in my view.

The biggest sellers, which Fass was especially proud of, were the smut books like Jaguar, Duke, He and She, Guys and Gals and Stud. Each contained misogynous articles like, “Why Women Crave Penetration,” illustrated by hard-core photographs. For the more esoteric-minded, Countrywide published a bi-monthly offering called True Sex Crimes, which ran a story on necrophilia, titled, “Shacking Up With a Corpse Turned Them On.”

All of these periodicals were published out of a big, rambling office on Park Avenue South in New York. It had all the charm of a defense plant. Editors sat in cubicles, putting together their respective rags, and art directors worked on six publications at a time. Fass sat in an office to the side, ready to entertain any idea for a magazine, no matter how silly it seemed at first.

Some very talented people went through that mill, including Al Goldstein, the legendary Screw publisher who has since fallen on hard times. “I used to work on a scandal sheet Myron put out called the National Mirror—an Enquirer ripoff,” he recalled in 1977. “I’d sit there and write these ridiculous stories, using names of people like Franz Kafka, who Myron knew nothing about. It was a great place to learn the business, but you have to leave within six months, or you’d just melt into the woodwork. There are people there who’ll never get out. Myron is a brilliant man, but he can be abrasive. He fired me when I asked for a $15 raise from $125 to $140. Actually, it was the best thing that ever happened to me—I started Screw eight months later. Today, it’s Myron’s crowning achievement that he fired me.”

Another was Michael Gross, author of Bob Dylan—an Illustrated Biography. Gross said, “I went to see Myron with an idea for a Led Zeppelin one-shot. He offered me the editorship of Rock, and I took it, after he gave me a contract allowing me a certain amount of autonomy. He’s eminently fair about things like that, and money, but once after I did a really bad issue, he made me sign a paper saying that if I ever put out as bad a magazine as that again, I’d resign immediately. He doesn’t know anything about rock, in fact, he can hardly read, but he has a sure instinct about what sells a magazine.”

Fass emerged from Brownsville, Brooklyn in the 1940s, doing art work for such long-forgotten comic books as Black Diamond and Captain Tootsie. After serving in the Army Air Corps during the war, he headed a public relations campaign for the Army, encouraging servicemen to use contraceptives. Its slogan, which he authored, was, “You may think she’s your gal, but she’s anyone’s, pal.”

After the war, Fass went to work editing an early-day sex magazine called Fotorama, which he said had “crotch shots, but no nudity, but which was arrested nevertheless.” In the mid-‘50s, he put out movie mags for an outfit called Globe Photos, which eventually backed him in starting Countrywide. In the beginning, the Countrywide catalog consisted mostly of movie books and parodies of more established magazines like Confidential, but it made money, and by the 1960s, Fass had come into his own.

Fass, who died at 80 in 2006, was a forceful man pictured by his associates as being very much an eccentric. For example, he carried on a dispute with his partner Stanley Harris over who was really boss. In court papers filed in 1976, Harris charged that Fass had a habit of opening his jacket and displaying a loaded gun during office arguments. “Even if the weapon is never upholstered, its presence has an unwarranted coercive and intimidating effect, on the employees, and other persons dealing with the company.” On at least one occasion, the dispute reportedly erupted into a fistfight.

Fass seemed to care less. “Harris is a quiff,” he said. And he went on amusing and titillating the public with his endless catalog of magazines. “Publishing isn’t a science, it’s an art,” he told me. “There are no rules. You can’t learn it.”

 

The Birth of Maus

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By Ray Schultz

It was a bizarre conversation even by the standards of 1969. Five underground comic artists—R. Crumb, Spain Rodriguez, Kim Deitch, Gilbert Shelton and Art Spiegelman—met in New York to discuss their craft. Led by writer Dean Latimer, though, they spent more time talking about West Coast mating patterns.

One person held back from this raillery: 21 year-old Artie Spiegelman. And there’s no great mystery why. His mother, Holocaust survivor Anja Spiegelman, had committed suicide barely 18 months before this roundtable. Spiegelman had different concerns.

Just how different became clear when the collective comic book, Funny Aminals, appeared in 1972. The opener was an R. Crumb riff about two cats luring a bird into a pot. Then came Maus, a harrowing three-page strip about the Spiegelman family in Poland, in which the Nazis are portrayed as cats and the Jews as mice. “When I was a young mouse in Rego Park, New York, my poppa used to tell me bedtime stories about life in the old country during the war,” says the narrator named Mickey.

The patriarch describes life in the ghetto under “Die Katzen,” and recalls the moment when the family arrives at “Mauschwitz.” At this point, he says: “I can tell you no more…it’s time to go to sleep, Mickey!”

Hardly a typical underground comic, Maus was the first of two searingly personal strips Spiegelman did that year. In the other, Prisoner on the Hell Planet, he used human figures to document his mother’s suicide and his overwhelming guilt. “Now you cry!” a relative says: “Better you cried when your mother was still alive!”

He would do more than cry. In 1978, Spiegelman started a book-length version of Maus, based on interviews with his father Vladek.

A fellow underground press alumnus, I visited Spiegelman in his Soho loft that April. We caught up on things, and I met his new partner: a beautiful dark-haired French woman named Françoise Mouly. “We met in New York through a mutual friend,” Spiegelman explained. “Then Françoise went back to Paris, and I didn’t like the idea, so I went to Paris and Françoise came back. So it’s settled.”

The talk turned to what he was doing. Spiegelman had just published Breakdowns, a collection of his early work, including Maus and Prisoner on the Hell Planet. And he was a consultant for the Topps Bubble Gum Co., creating novelties like the Garbage Pail Kids and Wacky Packages. “I put on my company man disguise once a week,” he said. “I go out there with one part of my brain functioning and the other part completely asleep, and if it starts waking up, I have to club it back into submission.”

Then there was his new project: The expanded Maus. We went to his work table, and he showed me the opening pages. It was different from the first version—more dense with detail, less stylized, less focused on the mice as animals. In this work, the narrator is Artie instead of Mickey. If memory serves, Spiegelman had gotten as far as a scene in which Vladek and his in-laws are sitting at a dinner table in the days prior to World War II.

Why did he portray Jews as rodents, the very way the Nazis depicted them? He inferred that this was the point—the white gloves worn by cartoon mice and black-face minstrel characters were a symbol of oppression. Not everyone got it. One old-time cartoonist had said admiringly of Spiegelman, “He’s a good mouse man.”

I asked Spiegelman if he had seen the recent TV docudrama, The Holocaust. “I don’t watch too much television, but to me it just looked like more TV,” he said. “It was ‘One Life to Live—Auschwitz,’ or ‘As the Wermacht Turns.’ It’s just a soap opera.”

Riveted by the opening panels, I asked Spiegelman for an interview about the new Maus, and he agreed. We regrouped a few days later for the first of two sessions. An intense conversationalist, Spiegelman was generous with his time and patiently answered even dumb questions. Mouly, who was working on several projects, including a line of Soho street maps, joined us for part of it, and at one point we broke for coffee.

Little did they know that it would take eight more years for the first volume of Maus to be published, and another five for the second to appear. Nor could they have foreseen that Art Spiegelman would win the Pulitzer Prize and many other honors. It was enough on that spring day that he had started a monumental work, and that he had entered an enduring marriage, one in which there seemed to be little or no line between the creative and the personal.

“Do you two ever sleep? I asked.

“15 hours a day,” Spiegelman laughed. “All too much.”

RS: What are you trying to do with this longer version of Maus?

Spiegelman: I think it would be important not only to tell my father’s story, but also implicitly and explicitly to deal with my responses and my relationship to it. I can’t fully tell my father’s story, I can only tell my own. There’ll be a section where I’m specifically dealing with my responses in between sessions with my father. I’m using mice and cats—I didn’t have these experiences. I’m not going to do something removed like the Holocaust on TV.

RS: How does it differ from the first Maus?

Spiegelman: It takes place with more reality. Extending the metaphor would be too laborious, and would miss the point and create a false reality.

RS: I got the impression from the original version that your father would tell you these stories without your soliciting them.

Spiegelman: Well, I got some stories from my father and my mother when I was a kid. They would just crop up in conversation, like in the introduction, where my father says, ‘You think you have friends? Wait ‘till you’re locked in a room without food for several days.’ They would drop little time bombs on me like that, and they would tell me some stories. But if I pressed for too many details, they’d back away. The story I had in the first Maus was one I heard when I was a kid from my father. But he’d skirt certain things. He wouldn’t tell me too much about the death camps. He told me, ‘Well, they gassed people.’ But only recently did he tell me that when all these Hungarian Jews came into Auschwitz in 1944, there wasn’t even enough room in the gas chambers to deal with all these people—they were standing on line to go to the gas chamber. So they had them dig large trenches and get into them and gas was thrown in after them. Now this wasn’t very effective because the gas would escape into the air—as a result, a number of people were only half-suffocated, half-dead. What happened after that is that they tossed in hand grenades to kill more people who were in the trench. After that, there were still people alive, and they said, ‘The hell with them.’ They got more Hungarians to bury the first group of Hungarians, and they had those Hungarians dig their own trenches, and repeated the process. This was going on for days.

RS: How did your father survive all that?

Spiegelman: That’s essentially what this 200-page book is going to be about: the story of a survivor. In essence, he survived through a combination of good luck and exceptional present-mindedness. If somebody needed a carpenter, my father was a carpenter. If they needed a tin man, my father was a tin man.

RS: And he had all these skills?

Spiegelman: Only partially. (Laughter). He’d take an incredible crash course. To some extent, they all did this. He was able to pick up these skills pretty quickly. He was always very manually dexterous, and he was able to fake it as a shoe maker, as a carpenter, as a tinsmith. And that also kept him alive. As long as you could work, there was more of a chance at surviving than not.

RS: What did his family do in Poland?

Spiegelman: My father’s father had been involved in several businesses. The most long-term one was a seltzer-bottling business, and he actually got involved in bootlegging for awhile, since he had all the bottling equipment. You couldn’t sell booze without a government license and print it on the bottle. And my father’s father ended up getting involved in some kind of chicanery like this. And then my father was involved in textiles before the war. My mother’s family had been quite wealthy—they were textile manufacturers also.

RS: They lived in Warsaw?

Spiegelman: They lived in a place called Sosnowiec, which is in the part of Poland that was in question whether it was Germany or Poland. His father-in-law had a big textile factory, and he ended up working at that when he married my mother. And he had his own factory right before the war in another town.

RS: He was drafted into the Polish army when the war started?

Spiegelman: Yeah, he was one of the first. They called Jews up first. The Polish army didn’t last too long, and he was put in a prisoner-of-war camp for awhile. They were kept in very, very bad conditions, the Jews. Then they were given this offer where they could work and in exchange get better conditions. So my father was put in very hard labor, and got through the prisoner-of-war camp period that way. A lot of people who didn’t actually didn’t survive—they died of exposure to the cold and hunger. Then when he got back, this whole other period began—ghettoization and separating Jews from the rest of the population. The reason he was let out of the prisoner-of-war camp was that he was protected by International Red Cross sanctions relating to the military. As a civilian, they could treat him any way they wanted. As a soldier, they had to afford him some protection.

RS: Where was he when the war ended?

Spiegelman: He was in Dachau. When the Russians began approaching Auschwitz, they had all the people from Auschwitz evacuate the camp and march back to Germany. The Germans didn’t want to lose their Jews—they wanted to kill them. So what they did was they took all of the people in Eastern European concentration camps and were marching them back into Germany to retrench.

RS: To kill them there.

Spiegelman: Incredible but true. So my father was on this long march, and he ended up for a brief period in a camp called Gross-Rosen, and then he ended up in Dachau. And in Dachau I think he caught scarlet fever or typhus, I don’t remember which one. When he was liberated, he was dying of typhus.

RS: This will be portrayed.

Spiegelman: Yeah, the march will be portrayed. I think the book will take it all the way to his immigration to America. After the war, there was a reuniting with my mother. She started out in the same camp, Auschwitz-Birkinau. When they started retrenching to Germany, they were separated, but by that time my father had arranged a better position for my mother and she was safer. This is also in the book. These were fairly complicated maneuvers, but my father was able to bribe her way out of Birkinau, which was a death camp, and into Auschwitz, which was a work part of the camp. And she ended up finding a protector in this Czechoslovakian woman, who looked out for her, and was mistress of an SS man.

RS: Did you ever show Prisoner on the Hell Planet to your father?

Spiegelman: I never showed it to him, but he came across it. I was storing my originals at his house, never dreaming he would look at them—they were just sort of in a box. And one day, he went through the box and ended up reading that strip. When I did it, I really didn’t intend to show it to him, and I didn’t think that he would come across it. But I felt that if he did, that was his problem. My problem was to do it and not go out of my way to cause him any grief. My stepmother had seen it because a friend of hers had a son who read underground comics and showed it to him. My stepmother never showed it to my father.

RS: Was he hurt by it?

Spiegelman: No. He said it did make him cry because it made him relive everything, and it was very hard for him to take that way. But he wasn’t upset that I had done it. And I was very glad, because when I was working on Breakdowns, I was wondering whether to include Prisoner on the Hell Planet, or bind several copies—maybe a dozen—and just take the pages out and give him those copies. I thought that he’d be very hurt, first of all, to have it reenacted and relived, and I also thought it might be a problem for him that this was being made public because to him it’s a great shame. In the Jewish religion, committing suicide is a sin. In fact, at the funeral services, they specifically never mentioned that she killed herself.

Mouly: In society in general, it’s not considered a crime.

Spiegelman: If you succeed, they say that you committed a crime. If you don’t succeed, they say you’re mentally ill.

Mouly: But your father feels ashamed that your mother committed suicide?

Spiegelman: Among many other things. I don’t think I would be able to simplify what his reactions to her death were.

RS: Did you show him your other work?

Spiegelman: In the period I was rebelling, I showed him some of the pornographic stuff I had done, and I didn’t know what his reaction was going to be. I wanted to make him uncomfortable. But his only reaction was: ‘Huh! So from this you make a living?’

PART 2: SPIEGELMAN ON NARRATIVE

Art Spiegelman had just published Breakdowns, a collection of his early work, when this interview took place in 1978. Breakdowns Maus and Prisoner on the Hell Planet. Then there were pieces like Ace Hole Midget Detective, a purported detective comic.

In the latter, Ace Hole is hired by the art dealer Laurence Potato-Head to find Al Floogleman, “a bird who’d passed him some bum Picassos!” It seems to be a comment on the genre, but Picasso makes an appearance to say: “We artists are indestructible. Even in a prison or in a concentration camp, I would be almighty in my own world of art…even if I had to paint my pictures with my wet tongue on the dusty floor of my cell.”

What did it all mean? Here is what Spiegelman said about narrative and perception on that warm spring day:

RS: Except for Maus and Prisoner on the Hell Planet, most of the strips in Breakdowns seem to veer from straight narrative. What were you trying to do in Ace Hole Midget Detective?

Spiegelman: Here I was interested in narrative and the function that it performs in society. When people go to the movies and watch television, which is what most people do with their free time, what they’re really getting is a dream. You’re just going into this state where you’re passively pulling in this story, which is only a mild permutation of things you’ve heard or seen before. When you watch a TV series, one week’s episode is not very different from another week’s episode. You’re just going into this comfortable warm bath each time, essentially lulling yourself—it’s sort of a way of putting a thumb in your mouth and suckling. That’s the appeal of detective stories and all other popular fiction. What happens in a detective story is the detective ends up being like a father figure in the story—he’s the one who knows all the answers. He gets beaten up, but he’s tough. On one level, you think you’re reading this to see if you can outguess the detective and solve the murder. And you never can if it’s a well-written story because it’s this crazy roller coaster ride you’re going on. You’re trusting that the detective will solve it for you. Since these books are written in the first person, you end up getting right into the main character’s head—you feel like you’re the detective.

RS: And you experience all the great scenes and backdrops.

Spiegelman: All that’s really being changed is the character’s specific situations—the essential situation is always the same, story to story. I was more interested in dealing with the things that relate to detective stories rather than telling another detective story. On the other hand, I wanted it to work on a level of a detective story—if you read it, it would be a little haywire in a few places. At the same time, I ended up getting involved with the nature of the first-person narrative, what that does to you, and the nature of comic-strip panels and what that does to you. There are several things happening. On the first page, each character is drawn with a different tool. I never want people to forget that these are drawings, that these are lines on paper. So on the first page, you usually have the characters’ faces in these boxes. This would be Ace Hole, this would be Gretta, this would be Mr. Potato Head. Instead, I’m showing you the brush stroke. This is the brush I use to draw Ace Hole with, this is the curvical pen I use to draw the Picasso lady with, this is the rapidiograph that I use to draw Mr. Potato Head with. You’re being forced, I would hope, into looking at the fact that these are drawings rather than creatures that you can live with.

RS: What do these techniques have to with something more socially relevant like Maus?

Spiegelman: They’re not techniques. I’m dealing with something really fundamental, which is perception. And perception is fundamental to understanding Maus, to understanding Hell Planet, to understanding social change. It’s the way you take information in.

RS: You’re working this out for yourself?

Spiegelman: I’m not working it out for myself or anybody else any more than Hell Planet was for somebody else. I didn’t draw Hell Planet to amuse people or tell them an interesting anecdote from my life. Nor did I do it to warn people about suicide. Hell Planet was as much involved with my own interests and needs as these other strips are. It’s just that my needs are complex. I’m a complex person. Most people are, I would hope. And I don’t see them as that different or separate. I understand what makes some of my strips more difficult for people to understand than other strips, but for me these are all part of the same thing. The same needs of expression are at work in these strips as in Prisoner on the Hell Planet. Since one focuses more directly on content, it becomes easier to take in. That’s why I’m doing this Maus strip with the means of perception that are employed in reading Maus. I’m aware that what I have to do is very directly tell the story, and not get in the story’s way. Most of the time, I’m dealing with stories that are trivial. Most people are dealing with stories that are trivial. Therefore, I’m more interested in the way of telling the story, making people understand what they’re looking at when they’re looking at a story, rather than just telling them a story and lulling them to sleep one more time. I think it’s more important that people, myself included, be more aware (in a sensory way) of what they’re going through. When you’re looking at a movie, it’s important to know that it’s a movie. You can’t think you’re looking through a window at something that’s happening. You’re affected too greatly by what you see. Most people’s information comes to them from newspapers and from TV. That information is highly distorted by the medium that it’s coming across to them in. And unless you’re aware of those distortions, unless you’re aware of how they work, they have much greater effect on you. You’re much more capable of being controlled. You’re much more capable of being at the mercy of the people who have the power of the medium. And as a result, that may be the most important thing about the media is how they work. It’s important that when you’re watching the Holocaust, a Lysol ad comes on between segments.

RS: Lysol?

Spiegelman: Yeah, it really is, and it’s very significant, that you’re being shown something that broken up. Most of the people watching Holocaust on TV are not even aware of whether it’s a story or not. From what I understand, for television it was powerful. In terms of what actually happened in terms of life, it wasn’t powerful at all. And I’m told that for people who watch television, this was a significant event. That was close as they’ll come to understanding the Holocaust. I guess that’s good, but it’s also too bad that’s as far as it went.

How to Write Copy Like Groucho Marx

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

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.