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Fashion, music, politics, sports

[February 7, 1964] Journalism and Me (a young woman tries the newspaper biz in the late '50s)

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by Victoria Lucas

We both were into journalism, for awhile.

Last month I wrote about John F. Kennedy's brief tour as a journalist and how I feel that affected his politics, his style, and his treatment of other people.  I hinted at my own foray into journalism and explained how there were a couple of things that connected me to him, in a small way.  The first was that photograph taken of me with him autographing a program in 1958 that began the column.  The second was the fact that we both had a fling with journalism, which is the subject of this column.  And what it was like to be a girl in a man's world.

Getting started on my short career in journalism

Kennedy's father helped Kennedy get his start in journalism, but then he steered him into politics.  By the same token, at first my dad supported my ambitions in journalism, encouraging me to write a column for a TV guide he published for Tucson, Arizona, called Scan Magazine. 

By then I had already started to write for my high-school newspaper, beginning with my sophomore year in 1955, so my dad knew I liked to write.  My column for Scan was called “Scanteen,” and I found interviews exciting. Perhaps you can see from the page reproduced below that I thought that, as a teenager (15 in late 1956), I had to be breathless about everything.  Because my dad and I shared a love of Pogo, the cartoon character, and his pals, I called myself “Miz Hepzibah.” (In a probably copyright-busting move — what did I know?)

My career as a columnist was, however, cut short both by my parents’ divorce, limiting my contact with my dad, and by his ceasing to publish the guide.  I took up publishing a church newsletter, which I did almost singlehandedly, drawing and typing on mimeograph stencils, running the machine, stapling the product, and then distributing it.  I stopped work on The Epistle when I threw myself into my job as a reporter for my high-school paper, making my schooldays into 12-hour affairs.

Tucson High had moved to a 12-hour schedule to accommodate the fact that we were now four different high schools.  Three new schools were under construction to take the pressure off our single public high school with a combined graduating class of 1,000.  Rincon might be in the morning, Catalina midday, and Pueblo in the afternoon, with Tucson High continuing students–well, it was complicated.  News, of course, happened all day, and I needed to be there for all of it.

So my mother dropped me off on her way to work in the morning, and picked me up after her work ended at night.  Sometimes she worked overtime, and I’d wait at school, often in the Chronicle office, until she called to let me know she was on her way.  (I answered the telephone anyway.) Dick Wisdom, who took the photo of Kennedy autographing my program featured in my last column, called me “loco luki” because, I suppose, I talked fast and was always rushing around.  (Despite my frenzied activities, I had few friends and only one date in my entire time at high-school.)

The newspaper office became my substitute home, away from the storms of divorce and accompanying emotions and my own court date.  I would always rather have been in the newspaper office than at home in those days.  Hence my inept drawing of the office on an album page for a forlorn Christmas, with its file cabinet and a fictional mantelpiece with stocking and mouse, but without some photo that has since come loose and been lost.

Meanwhile, in the summers of 1956 and 1957 I became a “student reporter” at the downtown evening newspaper.  This meant that I followed a reporter on his (note the gender) beat, then wrote the same story he did, and then had the story edited by the reporter and the assistant publisher (the publisher’s son) Bill Small, Jr.  If my stories were good enough, they were published.  This unpaid “job” came about because I participated in my high school newspaper staff’s overnight work in May of 1956 at the Arizona Daily Star, during which we “put the newspaper to bed” (released the pages to the printing presses).

Stepping up the beat

The first reporter I followed was John Riddick, as I remember, on the federal beat.  We walked to the federal courthouse from the downtown building on Stone Avenue that the Citizen shared with the Star, with the linotype machines on the top floor, the papers’ newsrooms on two different floors, and the presses in the basement.  We covered law enforcement, courts, and anything else the federal government did.  I can’t remember a single story I wrote.

The next summer was more memorable.  I had already noticed Fritz Kessinger, whom I would follow in the summer of 1957, in the newsroom, because one day he had come storming in with a bloody nose and headed for a restroom.  When I asked another reporter what had happened, he laughed and said something like, “Oh, he just put his nose in where someone else thought it didn’t belong.” It was from Fritz that I would learn what life as a reporter in a middle-sized American town would be like, and from Fritz that I learned to write stories that were actually published. 

In the fall in between we students had a newspaper page of our own, the “School News” page, and this continued until we high schoolers had our own section.  On the page below Fritz and I stand on either side of a student as he points out something in a story she is typing, and I have a byline on a story that won a contest, with a piece about the story beside it.

For those of you who have never spent time in a newsroom, that same page would have looked like the image below before photos and ads were placed and a slug added under “School News” to give the date and page number.  Each story was typed on 8-1/2 x 5-1/2" pieces of newsprint and, once given a pass by an editor, sent to the linotypists, returning as a galley that was then further edited for placement on the page.  Its last trip was being sent back to the linotype floor for corrections. Headlines were written and typecast separately.  The stories were mocked up like this on the page so we editors could see the final result before the photos and an ad at bottom right were placed.  After we and our staff supervisor were satisfied, the completed page in linotyped lead was sent for placement of the metal-clad wood blocks representing photos and ads, and thence to the presses.  Note that one ad at the bottom.  It was probably a desire for more ad space and the realization that a baby boom was supplying teenaged consumers that drove the next stage of my career in journalism.

A section of our own

By the spring of 1958, the last semester of my senior year, the Citizen had blown the “School News” up into the “Teen Citizen,” a full section of the newspaper.  This meant not just putting together a story or two for a Saturday morning to spend in the newsroom but spending much of each week gathering news for an entire Saturday of editing, blocking, and bringing in negatives to fill what eventually became 8 half-size pages of print, photographs, and ads.  With my continuing work on the school newspaper, my life was entirely taken up with journalism and schoolwork.  (Fortunately work on the school newspaper gave me academic credit in English.)

During that time of intense journalistic activity I had a chance to go into the “women’s” department and talk with the woman who was the editor of that page.  Her story did not encourage me.  Every day was a well-trodden path of weddings, births, ads for women’s products, engagements, fashion, and any other topics considered worthy of a woman’s attention (but not a man’s–the sports and editorial pages were elsewhere).  This editor was bored and unenthusiastic.  She still tried to get stories for the other pages of the newspaper, but she was not assigned anything but “women’s” stories and had to beg from men.  Inevitably they gave her the stories they didn’t want–ones that required a lot of time and driving, say, to Davis-Monthan Air Base, around 10 miles from downtown, for a story that probably was worth a couple of column inches at most.  She couldn’t get a byline, couldn’t get any attention for her work no matter how good it was.  She was stuck on the “women’s page.”

There had been only one other woman in the Citizen newsroom (not the women's department), even though all of us school editors were women.  Micheline Keating was a drama critic and could swear with the best of them.  "Mike," as she was called, was something of a "tomboy," with a "page-boy" haircut and a no-nonsense attitude.  She was one of the boys.  I didn't find Mike to be a good role model for me, because I valued my femininity.

By the time I was a sophomore in college Fritz was gone from the Citizen, having moved his wife and kids to DC, to take part in the feeding frenzy that is the start of any new administration, when the largesse of federal jobs whose previous holders have resigned becomes available to people with different politics.  I had had time, though, to absorb Fritz’s cynicism about county government and small-time journalism, and to listen to his story that one day he was sitting at his typewriter pounding out a story when he thought to himself, "Wait, I've already written this one!"  But after some checking he discovered he hadn't.  It was just that he had written a hundred stories like it and they had all begun to blend together.

Abandoning journalism

I graduated in the spring of 1958 and immediately went to work for the University of Arizona (U of A), because otherwise I had practically no money for college.  Starting there as a freshman in the fall, naturally I signed up for a journalism course.

And immediately hit a snag in my career.  All newsrooms have style guides, just like publishers and academic institutions.  I don't remember which one the Citizen used, but the U of A used the Yale University one.  When I asked about it, I think I was told it was a better standard.  But . . . but I had just spent the better part of two years working at a downtown newspaper, a real newspaper, as a student reporter and then school editor helping to put out an entire newspaper section.  And now I found myself in a situation where there was no cooperation, no affiliation between it and the university in the same town?  Where all my training would be lost and disregarded, and I would have to begin all over again?

Apparently that was the case.  I was back to writing stories for a school newspaper, meaning that I was writing the same high-school stories over and over again–proms, parades, student union doings, football games and …  I felt as if I was going backward, not forward, by taking journalism courses at the U of A.  As an editor I had written "heads" (headlines), stories, doled out bylines, assigned photographers and reporters to stories, laying out the pages as they came from the ad department and proofing the galleys.  (Once I even took a correction all the way up to the typists in the linotype shop on the top floor of the building–hot, sweaty, noisy, one of the worst jobs in the world.)

And now I was reduced to writing about the next freshman prom or faculty promotion.  I threw in the towel.  I wanted a college education but not one that I had just gotten–more thoroughly–as a high-school student.  It was as though the dirty, sweaty, shoe-leather-grinding business of working on a real grown-up newspaper had to be somehow glorified and academicized, invalidating all I had learned about writing and about life. 

And, yes, it had something to do with being a woman.  Newsrooms are male turf, with most women relegated to “Women’s Pages.” If the women’s department was all I had to look forward to after writing the same stories over and over for four years, well …

I decided to go back to my childhood plan of becoming a teacher.  So my career in journalism ended with my sophomore year in college, at about age 18.  I took no more courses and sought no more jobs at newspapers. 

Theatre now, that might be interesting, but nothing I could make a living at … At least I didn’t go into politics.


My role in “Jack” was production supervisor




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Fashion, music, politics, sports

[January 6, 1964] JFK & me

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by Victoria Lucas

I found it!

I know the title must seem very arrogant of me.  It’s meant to be self-deprecating–my New Year’s Resolution for 1964 is not to take myself so seriously.  It doesn’t mean I don’t take seriously the career and presidency of a man who, like Lincoln, is already said to “belong to the ages.” It’s not like I ever met Kennedy in any formal sense. 

But (like how many other millions of Americans?) I felt an affinity to him, and in the hours and weeks since his life was so tragically cut short I found myself remembering I did have one small contact with him once.  And, clinging to it, I started thinking about my own (even shorter) life’s trajectory and how it may have had some small likeness to his.  So I searched through my memorabilia and at last found documentation of that contact. 

The date was February 23, 1958.  Then a Democratic senator from Massachusetts on the Foreign Relations Committee and mentioned as a possible presidential candidate for 1960, Kennedy was making a short trip to to Tucson, Arizona to give a speech to the Tucson Democratic Party at a dinner on the 22nd and to speak at the Sunday Evening Forum on this evening at the University of Arizona. 

It was my senior year in high school, and I had racked my brains to find an excuse to talk to him.  All I could think of was to have him autograph my program (which I can’t find).  Even though I worked (without pay) for the Cactus Chronicle, the student newspaper of Tucson High School, and for the Tucson Daily Citizen, the afternoon newspaper of Tucson, I had no credentials to ask him questions.  I was not there on any assignment; paid reporters would be covering this one.  I was too shy to even think of asking him something just as a citizen who couldn’t yet vote (I was still 16).

Nevertheless, I was thrilled to be near Kennedy, whatever the excuse.  The program would have looked like the one below, with my scribbling all over it and Kennedy’s (then) upcoming appearance circled.

On the other hand, the photo was by a photographer who had been asked to be there, or who at least knew that he could sell his product.  Dick Wisdom was someone who, unlike me, knew what he wanted to do for a living, and was already doing it, and doing it well, in high school.

Unlike me, Dick had come to cover Kennedy, who was big news, and so he showed up at the stage door too.  I had no idea he was going to snap Kennedy and me together until I saw the flash and heard the pop.  I wasn’t news, and Dick needed Kennedy alone or with someone of importance, so this photograph has never before seen publication.

Despite his success, that night Kennedy demonstrated the fact that he still had not learned how to give a good speech by looking up frequently from his lectern and making enough eye contact with his audience.  I was shy too; but even I knew how to give a speech from my high-school course in public speaking.  The more I read about Kennedy, the more it was clear to me that politics was not his first choice of career.  In fact, I learned that, after he left the Navy in 1944, he had gone to work as a foreign correspondent for Hearst's Chicago Herald-American and New York Journal-American. 

Kennedy-watching

In the few short years that I watched and listened, Kennedy’s speechmaking got better and better.  He grew more comfortable “pressing the flesh” (as people call shaking hands), kissing babies, answering questions from large audiences and on television.  His speech that night was not just a demonstration of his shyness but of his prowess at speech writing.  I speculate that it was because his speeches, like those of old-time politicians, were grounded in the written word rather than in spoken, colloquial English, that he had such a hard time making the transition from reading a speech to really delivering one to an audience in a personal way.  I was impressed that he had gotten so far and yet was such a shy person at bottom.  (There was hope for me!)

Kennedy’s first commercial success at writing began as his Harvard senior thesis on the unreadiness for war he found in England when his father Joseph took him along to the US ambassadorial residence he occupied there in 1938.  Based on his personal experience and historical research, it was eventually published as the book Why England Slept in 1940, the title a take off on Churchill’s While England Slept.

His actual career as a journalist was short-lived because his father switched his pressure to become president from his eldest brother Joe Jr. to him when Joe died in WWII, as JFK almost had himself.  Everybody knows of the film released last year about Kennedy’s near-death experience on a Navy motor-torpedo boat named PT 109, and probably about the book of the same name written by Robert J. Donovan that prompted the making of the film.

I didn’t see the movie and didn’t read the book, perhaps because Kennedy didn’t write the book or appear in the movie, and he doesn’t have much to say about the whole incident when asked.  I did, however, read Profiles in Courage, which some say was ghostwritten.  (I wouldn’t know.) I liked his ideas.  I saw him as intelligent and articulate, and as someone who cared about people.

Kennedy’s interview style, by the way, was also, it seems to me, influenced by his own experience doing interviews as a reporter.  He answered questions thoughtfully and did not evade them.  He never attacked or used reporters the way other presidents–Teddy Roosevelt, for instance–did. 

And pretty clearly writing about historic events such as the Potsdam Conference gave him a historical perspective that he never lost.  I managed to get hold of the speech he gave the day before I saw him in Tucson.  He addressed members of the Tucson Democratic Party at a dinner on the 22nd, playing in part on the fact that it was Washington’s Birthday:

“Think back, if you will, to February 22, 1796. For 13 years, the Birthday of President Washington had been honored in the new nation. …But in 1796 no bells were rung or bonfires lit. The cannons which were to be fired were spiked by angry citizens. Washington, said one newspaper, was "The American Caesar. . . the stepfather of his country.” …The cause for this change in the public's affection was principally President Washington's approval of the Jay Treaty with Great Britain. Popular opinion which favored the French in their war with the British resented the concessions we had made and the grievances the British had failed to meet. But President Washington preferred an unjust treaty to a war which his young and still weak country could not survive. He longed to retire at the close of his second term with the reverence of a united country. But he chose instead to endure popular abuse rather than endanger the existence of those who were attacking him. It may well have been his finest hour.

We urgently need today to remember this example of Washington's courage and devotion. The popular path is not always the best one, even in a democracy.”

As usual, Kennedy focused on displaying courage and finding precedents in history, not on attacking others.  He attacked what a “Republican friend” had said in Phoenix, but declined to name him and only disagreed with his words.  I attribute this too to his brush with journalism–one may attack the other paper in town, but a reporter usually leaves such attacks to newspaper editors and owners, because no reporter ever knows for whom he or she will work tomorrow.

Abandoning journalism

Perhaps Kennedy learned and grew from his experiences as a foreign correspondent.  Perhaps he still missed those days, even well into his political career.

I, on the other hand, do not miss my stint as a journalist.  Like Kennedy's my tenure as a reporter was short-lived, but the reasons for that aborted trajectory are quite different.  It's an experience that highlights a few things about newspaper practices, journalism education, and (you’ve seen this before in these columns) sexism.

It's worthy of an article all its own.  Next month.




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Fashion, music, politics, sports, TV

[December 5, 1963] A Composer After My Own Heart (A theme song for Dr. Who)

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by Victoria Lucas

Tracking down the Dr. Who theme

After reading Mark Yon's column mentioning the British telly program "Doctor Who," I distracted myself from (shudder!) the assassination by trying to find out anything I could about that program, particularly the unique theme music (new music is my bag, you see).

My usual sources are the libraries at the University of Arizona (UA) and in downtown Tucson.  When those turn up empty, I start in on my private network–folks I know.  Someone mentioned that the music was supplied by the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop, who do all BBC sound effects and theme music.  But how to find out more?  And if it’s the music I’m interested in, how can I hear it?  There appear to be no plans to broadcast "Doctor Who" in the US.

OK, now I’m right up against the wall and climbing as fast as I can, because I’m stubborn.  (If you knew my family you’d know I come by it honestly.) And besides, I promised to write this column.  Oh!  My tape network.  I’ve mentioned before, in connection with hearing a radio program I missed, that I’m part of a sort of round robin that sends reel-to-reel tape around for hearing, copying, etc.  (I do sound and other services for local little theater–it comes in handy if there’s some effect I can’t produce or some music I need.) So I phoned my contact, who phoned his contact–etc. 

A gift from London

To my utter surprise and relief, it turned out that there was a package waiting to be sent from England, and I am the ideal person to receive it and send it on.  You know how composers are–well, maybe you don’t. 

Music composition is not a lucrative profession, for the most part.  It’s sort of like the few sports stars who occupy everyone’s attention, and everyone else who isn’t on one’s hometown team is ignored.  This is the age of the 20th-Century Canon, in the sense that "classical" musicians put their faith in a slightly varying list (like a set of sacred books) of composers and music that symphonies play and national radio and television favor.  When you go to a concert, leaving "pop" or jazz alternatives aside, you know you’re usually going to hear at least one of the four B’s (Bach, Brahms, Berlioz, Beethoven).  And a few others, most 19th or early 20th century European "classical" music..  I’m tempted to add a fifth "B" for Borge, but he makes a living playing (not composing) "classical" music, with a few jokes on the side.


Victor Borge in concert 1957

If you don’t compose or play music that sounds like the items on that list, you will have to find some other way to make a living, or live very frugally, squeezing out a few dollars here or there from donations, commissions, or occasional gigs that pay actual money.  Just ask my friend Barney Childs at UA, who holds a PhD in music composition from Stanford.  He teaches English as an assistant professor and composes in his spare time.  His music is often highly dissonant and doesn’t appeal to your average concertgoer, who expects dominant, consonant melodies presented in classical formats by musicians who, in turn, usually expect the same and may be so offended if their sheet music does not conform to what they learned in the conservatory that they will walk out or otherwise disrupt a concert.  Finding performers who will play unusual music can be quite difficult, making electronic music, despite its complicated techniques, attractive, since often the only performer is the composer.


Barney Childs and his ever present pipe

And in this case the composer who is to receive the package is more or less homeless, sleeping on other people’s couches or floors and traveling when and where he is paid to perform.  So I actually feel pretty good about inserting myself into this delivery process, quite aside from being able to listen to the very latest in (as it turns out) electronic music.  I’m responsible for finding out where he is from the local contacts I was given (too much long-distance calling for folks in England) and sending it on.  Best of all, the tape I just received and played has a sheet of (legible!) comments on the music and even some words about and a photograph of the performer, with her equipment. 

Meet the maker


Delia Darbyshire on tape machines

According to the comments, it seems that someone by the name of Ron Grainer composed music for the "Doctor Who" theme.  Another somebody–by the name of Delia Derbyshire (what a veddy British name that is!)–realized it as electronic music in the Workshop!

The anonymous writer also says that Derbyshire wasn't allowed to compose music on her job for the Workshop, but she was allowed to do "special sound by BBC Radiophonic Workshop," which apparently is anything she wants to do.  What a job!  But it sounds as it if was lot of trouble and some luck to get there, and some knocking around, because Derbyshire had a hard time finding anywhere she could use her degree in mathematics and music.  For instance, she was told that Decca Records wouldn't employ women, and … well, whoever heard of a woman composer?


Clara Schumann

I wanted to compose too after I learned to transpose while studying piano, but I didn't know anybody who had heard of a woman composer, and that includes my mother and aunt, harpists who had performed in the concert circuit.  My father was not supportive, although my mother always indulged me.  Without specific encouragement to realize my dream, however, I saw my future stretching before me, always playing other peoples' music that for the most part bored me, and I didn't like that future.  So I stopped studying music and started looking for some other way to make a living.  (Mind you, I was 12, as you might see in my previous column.)


Composer Luciano Berio

Derbyshire, on the other hand, had an opportunity to work with Luciano Berio last year when they attended the famous Dartington Summer School in Devon, England, so she was able to hobnob with at least one VIP of new music decidedly not in the Canon.  I wonder if this was the fulfillment of a dream for her.  It would be for me.

Behind every great man…


Ron Grainer

There is a brief note in the comments that made me laugh aloud: Derbyshire is so clever that when Grainer heard her music for "Doctor Who" and delightedly asked, "Did I really write this?", she answered "Most of it."

The same page in the package shows a small drawing of the composer’s music described as "swoops," and nothing more.  So there was a lot of room to improvise.  Come to think of it, the lack of a staff and apparent use of graphic notation remind me of John Cage, who used a transparency with lines to overlay dots and lines in his "Fontana Mix."  Talk about its being hard to find performers when your music is unusual, think of Cage’s predicament after the debut of his last year’s "4’ 33" after which many people consider him a joke!  On the other hand, put yourself in the position of a classically trained musician confronted with that composition’s page of sheet music indicating three parts, each declaring only "Tacet" (musicianese for "silence").  Was Grainer "avant garde," too?

I have to wonder whether what Derbyshire meant by her remark about his composition was that the rest of "most of it" was written by her, or by her assistant Dick Mills, a sound engineer who I understand is responsible for sound effects for a programme (note British spelling) called "The Goon Show."  Something tells me I would be surprised by the truth.


Dick Mills on the left

I can't imagine getting to England anytime soon–especially since I’m paying for the next leg of the journey for a piece of tape and its wrapping, a photo and a piece of paper, as well as some long distance charges.  But maybe I'll get to San Francisco again before long, where there's a place I keep hearing about called the Tape Music Center.  If I can’t make electronic music, maybe I can at least listen to it.  This little piece I received today, which I had to use a lot of leader to bind to a reel for enough time to play it, is a delight!




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Fashion, music, politics, sports

[November 22, 1963 cont.] Murder charge for Lee Harvey Oswald

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[The name of President Kennedy's assassin is now known to the world: Lee Harvey Oswald, once a Marine, a defector to the Soviet Union.  We also know the name of the Dallas police officer that he killed: J.D. Tippit.  Oswald was just formally charged for the policeman's murder, and we understand more charges will be forthcoming,

In other news, Texas Governor John Connally, injured in the same attack that claimed the President, is in serious but stable condition.

We now bring you the first of the reports from the Journey's correspondents…]


by Victoria Lucas

I do not think I shall ever forget these 4 words: "Texas School Book Depository." 

I hardly know what they mean.  It's a building.  The building in which the shooter hid to kill.  I can't say it, can't write the name of the man he killed.

My mother called me at work to tell me that he had been taken to the hospital, but we have no radio and of course no TV at work.  No news except what is brought to us from outside.  People with car radios, with a portable radio brought to work somewhere else. 

My mother called back.  He is dead.  Our president is dead.  Johnson has been sworn in.  I can't really take it in.  I'm crying.  People who come into my office have wet faces. 

What can I say?  I feel as if my own life has been taken away from me, and I don't know why.  Why am I writing you today?  I know no one else to write.  I guess I just want to let you know how it is here in Tucson, Arizona, hearing the news. 

My mother says that when I get home tonight I will see nothing else on the television.  There will be nothing else on except repeated footage from the assassination.  Yes, assassination.  And how the government is in transition.  Just as now there is nothing else to talk about.

He is dead.

He Is Dead.

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Book

[October 4, 1963] A Story Turned Inside Out—the movie of Burning Court

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by Victoria Lucas

Now here's a word you don't see every day:  "evert." It's used in biology or surgery to mean turning something inside out.  

That's what the movie by director Julien Duvivier, “inspired by John Dickson Carr's novel, The Burning Court,” did to the book.   

No one ever accused Carr of being less than ingenious, and the movie is ingenious too,  changing the topography of the book so thoroughly that it can only be compared to peeling off a glove by starting at the arms and pulling it back over the fingers.
 
If you read my review of the book (and radio program) you might remember that I asked, "Can a detective story have elements of the supernatural?  Can a mystery also be horror fiction?" The answer, for the movie, is still "yes," but instead of being a horror tale that shadows, overtakes, and finally transforms a detective story as in the book, it is a detective story that dispels the supernatural elements and turns the whole thing back into a murder mystery ending in a police inspector's office.
 
What is a 'burning court'?   It was a secret group that met to try those accused of criminal acts; the guilty were punished by burning.  
 
The relevance of the burning court is briefly described in a scrolling text near the beginning of the film:   an ancestor of Marie d'Aubray, a main character in the book and film, was "burnt at the stake" for witchcraft and poisoning "after having had her head cut off."   After declaring that d'Aubray cursed her betrayer and his descendants, the scroll ends with "The following tells the story of that curse."
 

 
This is a truly international film made with French and Austrian actors and both French and Italian production companies, on location in Hesse, Germany, based on a novel written by an American writer who lived in England for much of his life and adopted the British style of detective novels, instead of the French style evident in the movie.  The French style of murder mysteries includes the disclosure of whodunnit early in the narrative, and that is what happens in the movie.
 
Instead of opening as the novel does in a Philadelphia commuter train, which makes succeeding elements of horror that much more unexpected, the movie is set in a stereotypical venue of horror films, a castle in the Black Forest.
 

The castle setting
 
The characters are altered to fit the new locale and also to fit the new topography by Duvivier and scenarist Charles Spaak.  Instead of Edward Stevens, the plodding neighbor of the Despard family (the Desgrezs in the movie) and husband of the less restrained Marie D'Aubray, there is the writer Michel Boissand.  D'Aubray's name and her position as the descendant (or ?) of the Marquise de Brinvilliers, a famous poisoner, does not change. Her character develops during the film (not the novel), and Nurse Corbett (Schneider in the movie) reveals her true self more and more throughout the film, again different from the book.  Whereas Stevens is an editor at a Philadelphia publishing company, Boissand is a freelance writer come to interview Desgrez, who was already dead at the beginning of the novel, there named Miles Despard. Desgrez's two nephews remain, and remain at odds, but the niece is eliminated. So is the writer Gaudan Cross, who provided the first element of horror in the book, with only a few bits of his contributions given to Boissand.  Cross also provides the second body in the book, which in the film changes sex and manner of death.
 

Marie D'Aubray
 
The changed nature of Stevens/Boissand/Cross is handy because Boissand can do exposition in the film that would be more awkward for other characters, although D'Aubray's distress, the curiosity of the elder Desgrez, and a doctor with a revoked license (Partington in the novel, Hermann in the movie) provide excuses for revealing some things about the relationship of D'Aubray's and Desgrez's ancestors.  
 
Further signs of “eversion”: although certain elements of horror were added (a ride through and setting in the Black Forest, to start with), others were subtracted.   For instance, the story of the housekeeper about seeing a woman in 17th-century costume give Desgrez his poisoned drink and then disappear through a wall is kept and made a plot element, the most horrific part of the description in the book was discarded:  "The idea was that the woman's neck might not have been completely fastened on." A mysterious silver cup and a dead cat are also cut from the narrative.
 
The changes make sense if, whereas the novel is a detective story shot through with elements of horror, the movie is a horror tale shot through with elements of a detective story.  Once the movie scene is set for horror, it is increasingly degraded into an ordinary murder mystery, while the book added elements of the supernatural. But at the very end of both the book and the movie, a little stroke of horror enters to leave a question in the mind, just as, whether removing or donning gloves, the fingertips are the last to touch the gloves.  At the end of the movie, it is a most ordinary character, a police inspector, who adds his own element of gothic horror.
 

Police Inspector with Skull
 
There are some interesting cultural features of the movie versus the novel.  One is the fact that Partington, a friend of Mark's, is clearly identified in the book as a doctor who has been driven from his practice by having performed an abortion.  In the movie Dr. Hermann (a friend of Mathias Desgrez) says that he took pity on a young pregnant girl who would have otherwise drowned herself. This narrative is clearly meant to show the doctor in a more favorable light, but it also avoids the word "abortion," the procedure, and the social/religious controversy over it.  The former doctor does requite himself better in the movie than in the book, though with a German accent and a preference for psychoanalysis.
 

Dr. Hermann  
 
And then there is Mark's brother Ogden Despard/Stephane Desgrez.  In the book Ogden is a brooding, sardonic presence who is beaten up by Mark.  In the movie Stephane (a unisex name) is a more sympathetic character; and he gives signs of being a homosexual.  A masked ball occupies most characters the night of the first murder, providing some alibis. Stephane attends the ball in a dress that he also uses with a mask to gain admittance to his uncle's unwilling presence to ask for money.   He is practically disowned by his uncle, who dislikes him, and in the movie Marc refers to "the life you've been leading" as the reason for the dislike.
 

Marc, Stephane, and Lucie  
 
A strangely modern feature of the new topography is the body of Nadja Tiller, who plays Nurse Schneider in the film.  She is an Austrian celebrity whose increased role is congruent with her stardom. As is usual with female film stars, Tiller is a beautiful young woman, and the film shows her off to an extent one doesn't expect in a horror film (unless a monster is about to eat or kidnap her).  Marc's relationship with her in the movie (not the book) provides opportunities to see her in her underwear.
 

Nurse Schneider  
 
Other bizarre features that show up in the movie but not in the novel:  the funeral for the elder Desgrez, which he has decreed should be in the great hall of his castle (actually Castle Hohenbuchau in Hessen, Germany), with an open coffin and a sextet, which apparently (the instrumentation is too full for a small group) plays a Strauss waltz for everyone to dance.  A band playing Sousa follows the funeral procession to the mausoleum, through the gate of which Mathias is later seen seated on a chair.
 

Mrs. Henderson, Marc, Stephane, and Mathias laid out
 
Stephane's impatience with Boissand's speed in front of him, while he himself drives a customer's Porsche on a narrow, winding mountain road, is a bit of strange character revelation of Boissand's odd sense of humor, D'Aubray's passivity, and Stephane's over-the-top personality.
 
The roles of both D'Aubray and Dr. Hermann are much enhanced in the movie, and much changed.  The change is typified by a scene in which Dr. Hermann points out to D'Aubray after Desgrez's death that this time (under the curse), here she is alive and Desgrez is dead instead of the other way around, when her ancestor was executed.  D'Aubray is quite upset by this, says, "Why do you hurt me?" and runs away, emphasizing the difference between the D'Aubray of the book (self-assured, mostly uninvolved, coming into her own at the end) and the timid, pale woman of the movie who is subordinate to her husband and relies on Dr. Hermann to help her.
 

A view of a courtyard in the Schloss
 
Like the book, though, the movie defies classification.  Director Duvivier is best known for "Pepe le Moko," which came out in 1937, the same year as Carr's novel.  For both of them, that year was the heyday of their work. I repeat the recommendation I have seen before and made in my review of the book: don't see the movie first because it may spoil the much more detailed and structured book for you.  I would give both the movie and the book 4 out of 5 for ingenuity and hope you find an opportunity to enjoy them.
 




 

 

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Book

[August 4, 1963] Little Boxes Made of Ticky-Tacky: Carr's The Burning Court

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by Victoria Lucas

Those who think that the title of The Burning Court refers to a physical court in the sense of a courtyard or an ordinary courtroom haven't read the book.  In fact, there is no particular enclosed space that can be more than peripheral to it, with the exceptions of a train car, a bedroom and a crypt.

It's really a quite interesting tale just from the point of view of the controversy surrounding it.  Can a detective story have elements of the supernatural?  Can a mystery also be horror fiction?  Or, as one of the main characters opines,

"Ghosts?  No; I doubt it very much.  We've managed to struggle along for a very long time without producing any ghosts.  We've been too cursed respectable.  You can't imagine a respectable ghost; it may be a credit to the family, but it's an insult to guests."

The sort of society pictured in this odd short novel/long short story is just exactly one that is based on respectability, things that are "a credit to the family," and not insulting guests (at least not to their faces).

But what kind of book is it?  I'm not going to put it in a little box.  Or even a big one, no matter whether they're made of ticky-tacky or marble.  Malvina Reynolds may be referring to look-alike townhouses (with a hint of hasty construction) in Daly City, California, but there are boxes in the head as well, and I don't want to call them into service.  They're flimsy and inadequate.

I first heard of this book when a friend sent me a tape of the radio program based on it.  My friend is an old-time-radio buff and collects this sort of thing.  This one intrigued him, because he couldn't figure out what it is.  Knowing that I'm a mystery fan, he sent it to me.  When I sent it back I could not ease his perplexity, because I don't know in what genre it should belong, and I really don't want to confine this work to any of those little boxes in peoples' heads .

The mystery is first presented as a puzzle: a series of apparently unrelated events that must fit together somehow but don't make sense, as protagonist Edward Stevens sees it.  In fact, there is some misdirection as Stevens is introduced as a man who has had a lot to do with courtyards.  The first puzzling clues are the nervousness of the head of the editorial department in which Stevens is employed in Philadelphia, a photograph, and Stevens's wife's plea that he not "pay any attention" to their neighbor who wants to see him.

Well into the first chapter (entitled "Indictment"), I had the impression that a gothic novel had been set down in a 20th-century railroad smoking car, and had followed Stevens home.

It is not until some pages later that we are given a single hint of the nature of the "court" in the title.  I think I cannot tell you more about that without spoiling the unfolding of the story as well as the ending.  There are milestones as each puzzle piece fits into another, and the picture begins to hazily take shape, which is the main story arc.

That is the mystery part.  The horror part proceeds in jerks as horror movies do.  There is a scare, then a lull and life returns to normal for awhile, then another scare, and each heart-racing event ratchets up the levels of suspicion, fear, uncertainty, doubt of one's own perceptions, and anxiety, with suspense running through all.

Braiding the two threads of this story together are the ordinary trappings of life in upper-middle-class (or lower-upper-class) 1937 America.  Yes, the book is that old.  However, a movie was made based on it last year by a European collaborative group (France and Italy, among others, with French-speaking actors).  Now that I've read the book I'm hoping that the movie (due in September in New York City) will get here soon to my neighborhood foreign-movie theater and I can see the latest incarnation of the story after catching it in radio and printed form.

After reading the book I can say that the radio program did violence to it.  In shortening it to a half-hour format the script writers deleted and did a write-around of much of the explication, conflated some of the major characters, and cut out other characters and subplots, including a second murder!  The major cut, however, was done when they completely changed the ending.  The ending, mind you, is the part of the book to which most critics object the most.  Not only is it a denial and dismissal of the detective-novel solution of the previous chapters ("It's the easiest way out.  We're all looking for easy ways, aren't we?").  It is the most macabre and supernatural bit of the book–which is probably why the writers bypassed it with a bit of voiceover ghostliness that reminds me of nothing so much as the old "The Shadow" programs I used to listen to when I was a child.

I recommend this book to anyone who doesn't mind suspense, jolts of unease, gothic-novel horrors, and mystery-like puzzles, and who does like surprises, piquant phrasing, and entertaining writing.  (I only have one nit-picking complaint: Carr uses "antimacassar" for "doily"–antimacassars are for seat backs, not tables–and compounds the error by misusing the word more than once.  I love words, you see, and it's sort of like seeing an animal abused to observe a misuse.  I find myself wincing.)

If the movie that came out last year comes to town I'll review it in light of the radio program and the book — since everyone says that one should read the book before seeing the movie.

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Book

[June 10, 1963] Foma: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics (Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s Cat's Cradle)

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by Victoria Lucas

When a friend lent Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s newest novel, Cat's Cradle to me, I thought, “Oh, I know this book!" because I saw, as I flipped through it, the "ice-nine" and "Bokonon" I'd heard people buzzing so much about.  So I was glad to read it and understand the phenomenon.

But that's where my joy ended.  Vonnegut is a fine writer.  His style is idiosyncratic, askew; this is a novel novel.  But no one would accuse him of being optimistic or hopeful about the human future.  No Pollyanna he.

So in this account of the immediate future of our species, not only is there "The Bomb" to worry about, but there is a complex web of events that involves a new Doomsday Machine (ice-nine) and a new prophet (Bokonon), as if we didn't have enough of both of those.

The narrator, John, was recently divorced by his second wife because, as an optimist, she found it impossible to live with him, an ostensible pessimist.  He has writer's block ("loafing") on a book about the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima (title: The Day the World Ended), and slowly he is drawn into the events of the story by actions he has taken to get to know members of the Hoenikker family, children of the "father" of the bomb.

It is hard to say what Vonnegut means by pessimism, because nearly every time something happens in the book, good or bad John seems surprised.  I thought pessimism meant expecting the worst in all situations.  On the other hand, he is surprised when one of the few good things in the book happens: the music Hoenikker's daughter plays is not just good but exquisite.  Just when he thinks he has the world figured out as a terrible place, there it is–beauty!  "I shrieked at Julian Castle, who was transfixed, too, 'My God–life!  Who can understand even one little minute of it?'" Obviously not John. 

And this turns out to be part of his religion, the belief system written by a black man named Boyd Johnson but called Bokonon in the dialect (of what language?) used on an island called San Lorenzo — an island on which events will shortly cause the whole world to end.  The author quotes The Fourteenth Book of Bokonon, with the title "What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?"  The Fourteenth Book answers in one word: "Nothing."

In case I haven't already made it clear, this is a work of apocalyptic fiction.  In explaining how the doomsday tangle of vectors one might call a "cat's cradle" occurred and how attempts to untangle it failed, John uses a new vocabulary invented by Bokonon that has a certain ring to it.

For instance, Boku-maru is an act of intimacy and worship performed by two people placing the soles of their feet together.  The members of John's (or any) group who are fated to act together in something important are a "karass."  I particularly like "granfalloon," the word for an imaginary connection that (unlike the linkage of a karass) has no real significance (alumni of a school, for instance, or people from a particular state). 

"Foma" are "harmless untruths" to be distinguished from the "damned lies" of politicians and corporations which Mark Twain (or Benjamin Disraeli) placed in his famous phrase in my title.  As for the statistics, John mentions his two wives, 250,000 cigarettes, and 3,000 "quarts of booze" preceding the events of the book. 

About "foma," Vonnegut's epigraph reads, "Nothing in this book is true.  'Live by the foma that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.'  The Books of Bokonon.  I: 5" Of course the existence of the "Books of Bokonon" is also fictional, but several of the quotations from it, when not black humor or bordering on it, seem almost optimistic.  This one, for instance, asserts that a person can believe in lies that make one happy.

This book of foma didn't make me particularly happy, but, dripping with irony, it was entertaining, and it has probably stirred up the college students all over the US as it has on my campus, so I'll give it a 4 out of 5.  I recommend it to anyone with a sense of humor who doesn't mind feeling slightly depressed about prospects for human peace and a long and healthy human future.

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Science / Space Race

[May 4, 1963] The Love of My Life (so far)

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by Victoria Lucas

There is a miracle of modern technology that I haven't yet seen covered in these pages.  It's not much bigger than a breadbox (as Steve Allen would say) and has fewer moving parts than others of its kind.  If it weren't so expensive I would have bought one of my own by now.  Hint: you roll paper into it and type on it.  And it's electrical.

But first… a little story to explain why this invention is so exciting:

When I was 10, my mother, who was not allowed to work outside our home because people might think my dad couldn't support us, worked for my dad.  He purchased a used IBM Executive for her so that she could type a TV guide he published at the time.  I wanted to help, so she taught me to type, and specifically to type on the Executive, which allows for print-type-like spacing (half spaces, etc.). 

It was a little difficult to learn, but I soon got the hang of it.  It was fun to figure out how many words a line could hold and still be flush with the line above it at the right as well as the left, so you could do columns and "justified" pages (the term for flush right and left).  I will never forget typing rows and rows of local television programming of our three network stations in Tucson.
At the same time our baby grand piano that moved with us from California took up so much room that it occupied our small dining room by itself.  I took piano lessons until I was about 12, caressing the 88 keys.  Little did I think that one day I would use a typewriter with 88 characters on each type element!

Reluctantly, I skipped third-year Latin in high school to take secretarial courses (including a typing course) so I could make a living.  That was painful.  The old upright manual (no electricity) typewriters had keys so far apart that it was difficult for my little hands to reach from one side to the other to hit the "Return" key.  And the rows were far apart too.  The Executive had the advantage here: its keyboard had rows of keys at different heights, but the relative height of the keys was less and the spaces between them were filled.  (Coming from a theater background, I would call the height of the keys as they march up to the type basket a "rake.")

On the Executive it was easier to make my fingers fly over the keys, even for my hands as little as they were when I was 10.  On the manuals, my little fingers fell between the keys, squeezing them painfully, almost as often as they hit them.  Even reaching the space bar was a stretch. 

(A friend of mine reads detective stories, and, knowing about my way of making a living, he showed me some lines where Nero Wolfe's man Archie is asked to type and sign a statement.  He replies, "Glad to, if you'll give me a decent typewriter [in 1951]."  Then, he recalls, "What I got was what I expected, an Underwood about my age."  The Underwoods seemed to me to have the highest raked keyboards with the keys the farthest apart, but that's just my impression.)

Of course, in high school, I found myself envying Felicia Samoska, a tall woman with proportionately larger hands that easily spanned the manual keyboards and provided her with
beautiful and A+ CWPM (correct words per minute) scores.  We became friends, nevertheless; hers was the first and so far only wedding I’ve attended.  I had to accept the fact that I could never be a decent typist on a manual typewriter.  Both at home and at my mother's place of work (after she and my dad were divorced), I could use electric typewriters, and I enjoyed that.  (I think she also had an old L. C. Smith manual. Ugh!)

She taught me statistical typing, a specialty that required great accuracy and precise tabulation, done on an electric typewriter with an extra-long carriage.  I wanted to help, so sometimes when she picked me up from school we would go back to her work and I would help her finish up. 

Later I got the portable electric Smith Corona that came with its own rounded case, and except for the fact that it has a key basket and regular keys instead of a molded keyboard, I thought it was great.  I've typed hundreds, maybe thousands of pages on it by now, and it is wearing out.  It tires me out with keys that have to be punched, and my fingers still occasionally get stuck between keys, although the whole typewriter is smaller and has a lower what I think of as "rake" of the keyboard height.

But oh, then came the love of my life, my soul-mate, the IBM Selectric.

The Selectric typewriter one-uped the Smith Corona by singlehandledly destroying the carriage return.  When the Selectric's "carriage" "returns," it does not include the platen.  The only "carriage" is the metallic-looking plastic "type element" that looks like a little golf ball and moves on a slim wire from side to side inside the open top (making it all the more necessary to cover it when not in use to keep dust from getting on the works).  The keys are movable projections from a nearly flat surface, they are closer together than the keys on a manual typewriter, and they take little effort to press. 

"This is the best thing that's happened to typewriters since electricity," the commercial says.  Oh, yes!  Aw, look at its little face.  I want to kiss it! 

I'll never forget the day I first set eyes on you, lovely Selectric, at the University of Arizona Drama Department, where I now work.  You, embraceable you, with the little ball that moves and the platen that stays put, so the whole thing doesn't shake between lines.  You make it possible for me to type 120 correct words per minute without hardly trying.  Where have you been all my life?

Apparently, in the mind of architect Eliot Noyes, a frequent consultant to IBM who designs their buildings as well as their products.  This beautiful machine was first sold in 1961, and according to typewriter salesmen they're still a big hit. 

What are you going to do to steal my heart next, IBM?  For example, where is this computer thing going? Will it be the next love of my life?

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Book

[April 5, 1963] The Best Laid Plans (Tevis’s The Man Who Fell to Earth)

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by Victoria Lucas

Ten days after my 21st birthday last October, a 13-day “crisis” began that got people wondering anew whether the world would end soon, if nuclear bombs would start falling.  When the crisis (and not the world) ended, like others, I felt a sense of relief, but the Cold War wasn’t over, and it isn’t over now.  It most certainly isn’t over in Walter Tevis’s novel of the near future, The Man Who Fell to Earth.  A shadow of something big and ineluctable hangs over the book.

It is somewhat genre-bending, and I didn't recognize it as a work of science fiction when I started reading it.  But the first clue was the starkness of the prose.  The author has, as I understand it, been teaching English, but nevertheless it lacks a certain richness, contains a type of get-to-the-pointedness that I've come to associate with science fiction, even though I've read little of it.  "Let's just gloss over that" description, embarrassing fact, indescribable circumstance, not draw too much attention to details that would take a long time to explain and have no relevance to the plot.  "Just the facts, ma'am," as they say on Dragnet.

Of course my next clue was that, gradually, the main character, Thomas Jerome Newton, reveals that he is not from Planet Earth. 

Tevis is the man who gave us "Minnesota Fats" and "Fast Eddie," the author of the 1959 book The Hustler, made into a film 2 years ago.  That was his first novel, this his second.

This novel's characters answer the question: What if the aliens came (in this case only one) and H. G. Wells was right, disease was the cause of defeat, but it wasn't a physical disease in the same sense as the one that infected Wells's Martians, it was something that has been popularly regarded as a character flaw, as a funny stereotype?  Like alcoholism.  (Warning: There are no happy people in this book.)

I noticed that the catalog record shows "alcoholism" as a subject.  I wondered at that until I had read to a certain point in this cautionary tale of the best laid plans of mice and aliens.

At first it is noted that Newton “had only recently begun drinking wine, pleased to find that it had, apparently, the same effect on him as it did on men of Earth.” But when he meets Betty Jo, a woman who takes him in when he breaks both legs in an elevator because the G forces are too much for him, he sees that she is fond of gin—a little too fond, in fact—and he begins to join her. 

The first character to suspect that Newton is not human is Nathan Bryce, a college-level teacher of chemistry who quits to come to work for him, but "he smiled at himself, at the cheap, science-fiction level of his own private discourse.  If Newton were a Martian or a Venusian, he should, by all rights, be importing heat rays to fry New York or planning to disintegrate Chicago, or carrying off young girls to underground caves for otherworldly sacrifices."  Having taught at colleges, he would of course think of "science fiction" in this way because these are still common ideas among academics.  This is Bryce’s opinion, but Tevis must have seen a lot of such themes preparing to write short stories such as his "The Ifth Of Oofth" in a 1957 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction.

Nevertheless, Bryce thinks Newton must be "either the world's most original inventive genius, or an extraterrestrial" and sets out to find out if his misgivings are true, in the process unconsciously undoing everything Newton has done toward his goal.  By the time Newton visits Bryce in his apartment when “the Anthean” (as Newton’s people are called) is well along in his project, Bryce observes early in the evening that Newton "had already finished his first gin drink and had poured himself another.  A drunken Martian?  An extraterrestiral who drank gin and bitters?"  It doesn't seem to occur to him that the "drunken Martian" has caught a fatal human disease, probably because Bryce himself drinks heavily on occasion.  The expression “it’s all downhill from there” comes to mind.

I was intrigued by the fact that in several places, Newton's thoughts allude to his race and humans having the same origin, or previous visits to Earth by his people that jump-started human development of language and religion.  My research indicates that there was a book in French published in 1960 by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier (Les Matin des magiciens) that includes these ideas, but I have no indication that Tevis knows French.  Another possibility is that Tevis read H. P. Lovecraft (B-r-r-r-r-r!), some of whose work reportedly has this theme. 

Eventually, of course, we find out that Newton has come to the attention of the American government, despite hiding his project away in Kentucky (Tevis's home).  While the CIA seems more interested in studying his nervous system and psychology to find out whether they can coddle or torture weapons information out of him, the person whom Newton considers his best friend on the planet (Bryce) wants him to save the humans.

Curiously, it never seems to occur to the humans to save themselves.

What holds us back?  Tevis seems to me to put his finger on some factors restraining political problem solving.  They are incarnate in the characters of the cynical Bryce, who is selfish, greedy, and apathetic; Newton’s patent lawyer and business agent, also afflicted with selfishness and greed; his woman friend Betty Jo, a female stereotype of unselfishness who drowns any intelligence she might have in booze; and the government agents—as cynical and lacking in compassion as Bryce—who would have no qualms about using any sort of world-destroying weaponry they might tease out of Newton on our fragile planet.  A type of mental short-sightedness is endemic and finally culminates in Newton’s very real blindness that is nevertheless also symbolic.

Answering a question from Bryce about what he was trying to do, Newton says, “I was not at all certain what I was up to” because, although his project was to build a lifeboat to bring the surviving remnant of his people to Earth, “I’m not certain that my people will be able to stand your world."  But he did become certain that they would have nothing to do here but "wait for the bombs to fall."

All in all, I found it a depressing book.  But perhaps that’s only because, like Newton, I’m living under the shadow of the Cold War, and I take it seriously.  So aside from those who are curious about what else the author of The Hustler wrote, or about a possible future around 15 years hence, or about how aliens or alcoholics are portrayed, I think I would recommend this to anyone in the future who wants to know what it felt like to live through (?I hope) the Cold War.  The book has a few flaws, for which I would give it 3 out of 5 stars.

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TV

[February 4, 1963] Fiddler in the Zone (a most unusual episode of Serling's show)

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[If you live in Southern California, you can see the Journey LIVE at Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore in San Diego, 2 p.m. on February 17!]


by Victoria Lucas

Now that the Traveler has treated you to a review of the first four episodes of the new season of Twilight Zone, I thought you would like to hear about the secret fifth episode that aired last month, but not on Friday at 9:00 PM…

Most evenings I’m out, doing little theatre, or in, typing to supplement my income, but on January 15th, I had just finished a thesis and the drama season hadn’t recovered from the holidays yet, so I twiddled the dial on the television and there he was, “Old Blue Eyes.” Also known as Jack Benny, a fellow who has been on TV for more than a decade. 

A brief intro from the University of Arizona’s biography stacks: this graduate of vaudeville, like my mother, found his way onto radio in the 1930s and (unlike my mother), then into television.  Born Benny Kubelski and trained on the violin since age 6, Benny pretends to play badly, won’t reveal his age (which is perpetually 39), and is fully aware of his own ridiculousness–as evinced by his frequent, off-stage stares.

I have a feeling that SFF-lovers likely know Rod Serling and his “Twilight Zone” better than they know Benny and his menage of characters that include his wife, Mary Livingston, and vaudeville comedian Eddie Anderson (“Rochester”).  Of course, I could be wrong.  I am discovering that fans are a diverse lot.

Anyway, the plot of the January 15 show involves Benny pretending to try to hire Serling to add some culture to his uncouth “writers,” one of whom Serling says “can type with his toes.” Although they don’t know about Twilight Zone, they do know about “Wreck of a Heavyweight” (Requiem for a Heavyweight, which earned Serling his second Emmy).

When (predictably) Serling emerges disheveled a second time from the writers’ den, he and Benny decide to call it quits on the idea of making Benny’s scripts better, and he and Serling part friends.  However, Benny isn’t satisfied with Serling’s explanation of what the “Twilight Zone” is.  After Serling leaves and as Benny gets ready to leave his office, he opines to himself, “I can’t get over it.  An intelligent fella like him trying to tell me that there’s a Twilight Zone, a thing, a place!  Oh, well.”

As Benny walks home in the dark, a Twilight Zone-like fog envelops him and the music takes off on a Twilight Zone-like theme.  Before long he runs into a sign reading, “Welcome to Twilight Zone.  Population unlimited. [an arrow left] Subconscious 27 Mi./ [an arrow right] Reality 35 Mi.” (It gets a laugh, if only canned.) Benny finally sees his house across the street and goes and rings the bell.  Rochester answers but doesn’t recognize Benny.  Rochester calls on his employer, “Mr. Zone” (Serling) to deal with the situation, and Serling explains that the town is named after him (“You can call me Twi”), and he is the mayor.

Benny accuses Serling, Rochester, and tenor Dennis Day from his show of gaslighting him (credit to Ingrid Bergman in the 1944 film Gaslight).  But Serling has the last word within the teleplay: “Anybody who claims to be 39 as long as he has is a permanent resident of the Twilight Zone.”

I love it.  I hope you get a chance to see this episode in the summer reruns .  Benny is silly, funny, and one of the architects of my sense of humor, which runs to the dry and ironic.  I listened to his show when I was a little girl playing in the dirt with my two-inch-long toy cars a few feet from my father’s workshop, where he always had the radio comedy shows playing on the long summer nights: Benny, Edgar Bergen (whom I saw in Tucson!), Fibber McGee and Molly, Burns and Allen, Fred Allen, Duffy’s Tavern.  They will always make me laugh.  Unlike Twilight Zone, which I also watch — but not for the humor.

[P.S. If you registered for WorldCon this year, please consider nominating Galactic Journey for the "Best Fanzine" Hugo.  Check your mail for instructions…]




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