Another Little Piece of My Heart (20 page)

How to parse the relationship between Johnny Carson, the essence of mainstream, and his frequent guest, a tall, gangly freak named Tiny Tim? With his giant nose and dishrag hair, he was the ugliest man in pop music. Carson made jokes about him entering the Miss America pageant representing Death Valley. But Tiny Tim had put everything that didn’t show on his body into his voice. He sang in an ungainly falsetto, accompanying himself on a ukulele, and his repertoire consisted of old-time tunes such as “Tiptoe through the Tulips.” These relics of a forgotten innocence were keys to the kingdom where he yearned to reside.

His real name was Herbert Buckingham Khaury, and he’d grown up in a stretch of upper Manhattan where it wasn’t cool for a guy to wear makeup. The other kids called him “Crazy Herbie.” He was the scapegoat every working-class neighborhood needs, which meant that he endured a hail of abuse. But he lived for his old records, and he gravitated toward any theater that showed films from the thirties or even the twenties. “I had to be alone in the dark,” he told me, “because then I could feel like I was alone with the performers, feeling their voices inside
me.” It was a lot like the way I’d felt about great writers when I was a boy—their voices were inside me, too—and I understood why he had put so much energy into creating an alter ego. In that persona he was a wind chime vibrating to the breezes of memory. It was touching to watch this lug transform himself into such a wistful creature. Like a great clown, he could cast his audience into a realm of childlike purity. The same quality made him one of the first camp superstars, because, in the end, his delicate pose of androgyny skirted failure.

That may explain why his first gig was at Hubert’s Flea Circus in the old Times Square, where, for a nickel, you could see a parade of performing freaks among the trained insects doing tricks. Tim also worked the subways for pocket cash. But his favorite dive was a bar in the Village where, as he put it, “the ladies liked each other.” He must have seemed like just another gender bender in cosmetics to them. But he wasn’t trying to be a woman, he explained. He wanted to imbibe the feminine aura. In makeup, he said, “I feel that I’m in a garden of paradise, alone with beautiful ladies. They are the essence of my soul.”

I wasn’t sure whether he was giving me sincerity or feeding me good copy, and I decided that it was both. His act was a pretense, but it had been born of real suffering, and I wondered what would happen once the ordeal was replaced by stardom. Especially since he was straight; straight as a yardstick and just as inflexible. Sex, for him—and he would only spell the word—was something that must be redeemed in marriage, and he couldn’t get married until he saw a sign from heaven. Meanwhile, he told me, “I try never to be alone with a beautiful woman, because then the devil in me becomes dangerous.” In short, he was destined to play Las Vegas.

That was where I saw him in 1967. It was my first trip there, and I felt like I was in a ring of hell reserved for pop critics. The entrance to Caesar’s Palace, with its 150 feet of floodlit fountains and its garden of pseudo-classical statues, was beyond even my mother’s decorative schemes. A Cinerama billboard proclaimed Tiny Tim’s name in letters seven feet high. What was a denizen of the flea circus and the dyke bar doing in this feather-and-pastie fantasia? As soon as I unpacked, I headed for the Circus Maximus room to find out.

I stood in the wings among the showgirls grabbing a smoke while he warmed up. There was no trace of the fey troubadour he played onstage. He was more like a baseball player, trotting in place and swatting the air with his hands—
here comes the windup and then the pitch … a wicked
spitball.
The look on his face took me by surprise. It was intent and thoroughly butch. So there was a jock inside him, cohabiting with the angelic faerie. How would this marriage of convenience fare in the face of fame? I was always looking for the story that hadn’t been told, the part left out of the press bio, and now I sensed what it was. I’d heard reports about parties in his hotel room, bacchanals where he rolled in rich desserts ordered from room service. Yes, he would admit to me, he’d had a few drunken bouts, spent too much money, and, yes, he’d slipped a few times and given himself to women. But then he had to “cut the cancer out.” It sounded like the rap of a married man who cheats and then consults a priest. But this was someone who had devised an elaborate system of fantasies to cushion him from life. What would happen to the tenuous balance between art and desperation once the freak succeeded? It was a question I would ask myself many times; in fact, it was a theme of my writing on rock stars. In Tiny Tim I saw an extreme version of the answer.

He was so fragile that, on the road, his manager roomed with him. But I demanded to be alone with my subject—that was always my condition for doing an interview, and I usually got my way. At the appointed hour I knocked on the door of his chamber. “Hel-lo, Mr. Goldstein,” I heard Tiny Tim say in that familiar warble, and I walked in. It was the day after his first performance, and I expected to see breakfast dishes and other signs of late rising. But I didn’t count on tray after tray of cakes and puddings, a number of them overturned on the carpet. He still had smears of cream on his chest and face—or maybe he was wearing one hell of a foundation. “I’ve always wanted to do this,” he said sheepishly, pointing to the mess. I didn’t ask him to elaborate.

By then I’d learned a lot about the fragility of icons, and I didn’t want to collude in his misery. So I filed a piece that described the state of his room but not my misgivings about his fate. My apprehension was well taken. His star faded with the sixties—not even a wedding witnessed by Johnny Carson on
The Tonight Show
could restore it. But he continued performing long afterward, despite suffering a heart attack onstage, until finally, at another gig, he had a coronary that would be fatal. He wasn’t the first performer, and I doubt he’ll be the last, whose existence depended so heavily on the ratification of fame that he would die in the service of show business.

*

Tiny Tim was a good example of how the New Journalism, with its semi-literary credentials, worked in tandem with the culture’s taste for the freaky. The appetite for extreme and enigmatic behavior was what kept writers like me in business. We were explorers on the frontier of the new. But it wasn’t just the lively prose or the ability to personalize our stories that made us indispensable; it was our eagerness to interpret what we saw. Whether we used the first person or the objective voice, we weren’t wedded to any concept of neutrality—neutrality was a lie. I had no doubt about it, since I’d witnessed protest marches that bore no relationship to what was described in the press, which seldom conveyed in any detail the brutality of the police. I concluded that the only reliable reporting would come from engaged individuals free of the constraints of institutional style. The New Journalism now meant more to me than using fictional techniques; it was about actively participating in the event—the correspondent as witness and truth teller. Walt Whitman had written the code I swore by: “I am the man. I suffered. I was there.”

In the sixties, reporting still had a virile image. The mystique of tough guys pounding on old typewriters and drinking themselves noble persisted even in an era of white-suited wags and j-school pros. And journalism was, for all its compromises, an enemy of entrenched power. It was the rock music of the written word, and for many intellectuals a way to kick out the jams. I suspect that was why Norman Mailer ventured into my profession.

It began with his account of an antiwar march in 1967. Thousands of protesters tried to levitate the Pentagon by ohming and chanting. Mailer was there, and his narrative of the event,
Armies of the Night,
became his greatest success. It won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, a remarkable twofer. Despite our difficult meeting at the
Village Voice
office, when I’d fled from his raised fists, he was still my primo literary hero. But there was a problem. He had dropped, from a great height, onto the street where I lived. And so I saw him in a different way.

We ran into each other from time to time at social events. Smiles were exchanged, but I didn’t want to connect with him. It wasn’t his legendary belligerence that put me off—I had learned not to take it seriously. It was the sense of privilege and insulation that hung over his shoulders like an ermine cape. By then I’d gained quite a lot of knowledge about what it meant to be trapped in a role. Or maybe it was just that as I got closer to the writers I idolized, they seemed more like
competitors. In any case, everything I’d admired about Mailer’s style as a student—its radical candor and erudite intensity—now felt inappropriate. The image of the bad-boy genius, which he’d worked so hard to create, now collided with the subject he was writing about. I would feel that way about many hip intellectuals when they tackled youth culture. They didn’t understand how the values of my generation were different from theirs, and they fell back on reflexes that had once been rebellious but were now reflexive. And when an ego as big as Mailer’s tackled a phenomenon as remote from his daily life as the antiwar movement was, the result was a show of pure Me.

Armies of the Night
is about a great American writer and media sensation going through changes, but the event it describes was about the struggle to end an unjust war. Ordinary kids were more important than Mailer in that battle, and far less insulated from the violence that ensued. He tried to compensate for his status by casting himself as a character called Aquarius. In this guise he could fully express his ambivalence about the new spirit of the sixties. It met my standard of engagement, but its effect was to make his own experience more important than the action, and his persona the most fascinating thing of all. As artful as the book was, it seemed like a violation of the countercultural ethos that I’d come to share. We kids saw politics as a collective activity, something we did together. Radicals in Mailer’s generation had struggled to maintain their individuality, but we fought to maintain community. These were very different battles, and they made Mailer’s project suspect. It was all signature, and I learned little from it except for the example it offered of the kind of writer I didn’t want to be.

The honorific term for people like Mailer was “public intellectual.” They took positions, signed petitions, and wrote passionate works of dissent. But they didn’t shy away from self-promotion; like everyone in the sixties, they went for it big-time. From my position at the crossroads of culture and hype, this was an unsettling discovery. It meant that intellectuals were now part of the celebrity culture. Those who knew how to use the mass media, such as Mailer and Warhol, Gore Vidal and Truman Capote, had joined the spectacle and TV expanded the star system exponentially, so that it included anyone deemed exotic. In the fifties, it was Beat poets, and homosexuals sitting behind potted plants. But in 1967 the hip thing for a chat show with blue-chip pretensions was to have a professor as a guest. These weren’t run-of-the-tenure-mill
types. They had to have an outsize sense of their importance, a blind confidence in their ideas, and a conviction that they could single-handedly alter the course of history. Most important, they had to have a skill that wasn’t supposed to exist in the academy. They had to be entertaining.

The
maiven
who benefited most from this opening was Marshall McLuhan, a James Joyce scholar turned media savant. Gabbing with Dick Cavett or savoring a cameo role in a Woody Allen film, McLuhan was the perfect gnomic oracle, ever ready to make a point no one could firmly grasp. He epitomized the style of fluid thinking that was trendy at the time. Anything that sounded compelling could be—just might be—true. As in McLuhan’s fame-blazing slogan “The medium is the message.” This was a very reductive update of Walter Benjamin, the German cultural philosopher of the 1930s who argued that the mass production of images had changed the nature of perception. Benjamin was a Marxist mystic who didn’t know from quips, but McLuhan had none of those limitations. His knack for cryptic assertions—New York is obsolete; movie stars will soon cease to exist—propelled him into prime time.

The fact that no one outside media-studies courses reads McLuhan today says something about the quality of his thinking. He produced a buckshot of ideas that usually hit only the vicinity of its targets. Yes, TV was a “cool” medium, as he proclaimed, but cool was the style of the time; today TV is a “hot” medium and we live in the age of Snooki. Yes, TV was turning the world into a “global village” (his phrase), but each new tool of communication, as it spreads, globalizes experience; today the Internet is having much the same effect. Any novel mass medium will produce the shifts McLuhan described, and television was still relatively new when he wrote. What he did get right was the importance of inventing a role. Like me, he had devised a new one—the media guru—and in 1967, that was enough to make you wise.

I didn’t merit a private audience with the Wizard of Ozzie and Harriet. I was told by McLuhan’s publicist that he “only does sit-downs with national media.” I settled for one of his press conferences. It was a bit like interviewing the Maharishi, minus the garlands. McLuhan dispensed edicts, and we wrote them down. After about an hour of this ritual I decided that it was a shuck (the word we used for a scam). I wrote a piece that described him as a cross between Madison Avenue and
Harvard Square, a “para-philosopher” who specialized in “concept barbs,” like the slogans in commercials. His ideas about TV were really about the triumph of advertising and the incursion of its techniques into the realm of theory. This was yet another hype.

But my real beef with McLuhan had to do with rock. My generation hadn’t been shaped by TV, as he claimed. It was a distant second to music in terms of influence. So his ideas about us were wrong on the face because, like most of his peers, he ignored our primary form of expression. I don’t think he ever wrote a word about rock; it didn’t interest him, probably because its technological properties were just a small part of what made it special. As for hippies, at the press conference I attended he called them “despicable, revolting people.” Only someone who was oblivious to youth culture could have concluded that what made us distinct was the medium we grew up with. Television was nothing mysterious to me; what didn’t make sense was the way people in power acted. But there were a lot of baffled elders out there, and they needed a guide. As a cautionary tale I kept, pinned to the wall above my desk, a quote from the
Herald Tribune
proclaiming McLuhan “the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Pavlov.” Why not since Dick Cavett?