Public Burning (36 page)

In any case it's certainly true, no matter whether Uncle Sam and/or the Phantom wanted it this way or not, the Rosenbergs suddenly have a terrific rating—overnight they've shot past every show in the country, and up in the city their executions are already being acclaimed as the biggest thing to hit Broadway since the invention of the electrical spectacular. To be sure, there's not much competition this time of year, it's the off-season for theater and rerun time on TV, but short of a Bowl Game or a return from the other world by Harry Houdini (and where would he appear? the old Hippodrome is gone…), it is difficult to imagine any act outdrawing the Rosenbergs. And it's not simply because they're to die, people die every day—look at poor unlamented and uncelebrated Willi Goettling who got executed over in East Berlin: he played to a few pigs and an empty field—no, it's the way they've been linked, like all top box-office draws since the days of the Roman Circus, to archetypes. Irving Saypol and Judge Kaufman have helped them in this. So have Uncle Sam, Congress, the press, the FBI. They have worked hard at it themselves, though they have not achieved exactly the image they sought. And they have become—no less than Valentino and Garbo, Caruso and Bernhardt, the Barrymores and the Bumsteads, Rin Tin Tin and Trigger—true Stars, their performances forever engraved upon the American imagination, their fame assured for generations to come. Sooner will the nation forget Walter Pidgeon and Greer Garson than Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

Waiting for the Court to arrive, the crowds on the Mall exchange rumors, take snapshots of each other with Baby Brownies, buy pop and ice cream from passing vendors, sun themselves on the grass, listen to the newscasters on their portable radios. The Justice Department is said to be working on back-up moves just in case things go wrong this morning, but there seem to be few doubts which way the Court will vote. Less certain is the outcome, also due today, in another trial out in Hawaii: that of the six longshoremen—the so-called “Aloha Shirt Set”—accused of Communism. The trial has already lasted seven and a half months, during which time eighty-three witnesses have unloaded more than three and a half million words of testimony, and now the jury—all American nationals, but of mixed Chinese, Japanese, Hawaiian, and Caucasian descent, a real goddamn zoo in the minds of most statesiders—has been locked up for over a hundred hours trying to reach a verdict. They're nervous about it, because they're aware that Hawaii's prospective membership in the Union may well rest on the results.

This seems to be the morning's pattern: there are no clear victories. Five thousand Red demonstrators attack a pro-Mossadegh rally in Teheran, but are repulsed—though Mossadegh himself, like Rhee, is a pain in Uncle Sam's fundament. In Quezon City, a security guard and a leader of a Huk rebel outfit trying to sabotage Manila's water supply are shot dead before any damage is done (that's good), but in Indochina, the French Army's biggest fuel dump is ablaze and still erupting after a daring night raid by Vietminh commandos (that's bad). The four-man Vietminh suicide team has run through a wall of French machine-gun fire to hurl firebombs on the steel storage tanks in Haiphong, the tanks exploding just like in all the movies, big orange balls of roiling fire billowing up into the skies, thousands of gallons of burning oil spilling out onto the highway—hundreds of French troops and volunteers are needed just to contain it. Authorities report that “…at least one of the raiders was hit.” Probably.

In Malaya, Sir Gerald Templer orders house-to-house searches and confiscation of all rice in excess of a week's portion, to keep the villagers from feeding the terrorists (“This is not a punishment! It will enable you to tell the terrorists truthfully that you cannot spare rice for them!”), and progress is reported in the sticky Burma-China talks in Thailand, but while the Legion of Superheroes are fighting it out amongst themselves over what to do with Royal Dutch Shell's rich oil holdings in Sumatra, guerrilla bands sweep down from Galdengoen Mountain hideouts south of Jakarta and murder sixty villagers. As Uncle Sam has often said, muttering through a rubbery jaw, his thumb hooked under a sheriff's badge: “It is a
condition
what confronts us—not a theory!”

WORLD
NEWS
PUTS
DAMPERS
ON
STOCKS,
The New York Times
has revealed this morning. The instability of the world is frightening people. So are the Soviet “peace offensive” and the threat of a Korean truce. Volume on the Exchange dwindled to a nine-month low yesterday, and is off to an even slower start this morning. The value of such A-bomb stocks as Du Pont is sinking. General Motors, American Telephone, U.S. Steel, General Electric: all down. There's a rash of strikes, new taxes, and rising prices, including hikes in the cost of crude oil, steel, cigarettes, and linoleum. Store sales are down and the profit ratio is at a nineteen-year low. There is frank talk of a coming recession. The American Management Association, ingathering at the Statler, is told that “American industry should prepare now to weather a business recession in order to ward off government intervention, should one occur.” Companies are warned to get rid of undesirable personnel now: “Don't discover them when you are trying to cut expenses in a depression!”

In an attempt to offset these fears, Treasury Secretary George Humphrey has let it be known that there is “no reason to fear peace, U.S. military spending is still necessary, armistice in Korea or no.” Defense Secretary Charlie Wilson has backed him up on this with talk of the arms race and the need for a lot of new weaponry, and General Gruen-ther of SHAPE has announced his plans to make use of new atomic weapons in the defense of Europe, few ground troops: a proxy attack by one of Russia's satellites is expected there any day, and a lot of gear is going to get shot up. This morning, in a fresh move, two U.S. admirals—Combs and Oftsie—are sent into the arena: testifying before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee, they urge approval of Ike's request for $115,000,000 in new funds for guided missiles and planes capable of delivering “small” atomic bombs, and lean irascible Admiral Oftsie, pushing for more new supercarriers like the
Forrestal
, says: “Small atomic weapons have created unlimited possibilities for naval aviation,” because there are many targets against which the “small bomb is the preferable weapon.” Which encourages the First National Bank of Boston to issue this statement:

And there are other reasons to modify the pessimism down at the Exchange this morning. Television set production is up 70 percent, for example, doing even better than pornography and missiles. Births are still outnumbering deaths nearly two to one, assurances of an expanding market. And there's always American ingenuity: already this year it has come up with such products as plastic carpets, paper snow fences, blind-men's canes that glow in the dark, cockpit listeners, 3-D movies, propane locomotives, chlorophyll cigarettes, and Eisenhoppers. Net sales of General Foods is up from $196 million in 1942 to $701 million today, and mainly, they say, thanks to research and packaging. A packing company has designed a new hide puller, a revolving safety knife, hydraulically operated, that tears a carcass right out of its birthday suit without injuring either suit or meat, a real breakthrough, while out in the nation's meat-packing center a photo of Marilyn Monroe, still in her hide but nothing else, has been uncovered by a horny young cartoonist—and who knows? if he can come up with a magazine to go around it, he may well have the publishing sneak hit of the year with it.

This sensationalist trend in the nation's magazines is worrying to some people, of course. The sex and violence in them have been attacked by everybody from the Phantom's
Daily Worker
—which claims to be offended by “strip cartoons” and “hate campaigns” and “sex reports” and shocked at stories like “Girls in Gangs” and “Love Harvest in Blood”—to Arkansas Congressman Ezekiel C. Gathings, whose House committee, investigating salacious pocket books, comics, and cheesecake girlie mags, finds that the industry has “degenerated into a medium for the dissemination of artful appeals to sensuality, immorality, filth, perversion, and degeneracy.” The cheap pornography of the likes of Steinbeck, Farrell, Caldwell, and Moravia is cited by Gathings's committee, along with the depravity of such newsstand successes as
Whisper, Keyhole, Foo, Nifty, Zip
, and
Wham!
, just as the
Worker
goes out after
Flirt, Titter, Wink
, and
Climax, The Saturday Evening Post, G.I. Joe Comics
. But, as Zeke Gathings himself has to admit: “Pornography is big business.” And in times like these, one must not, as they say, look a gift horse in his private parts. “Make money,” Mother Luce has said, “be proud of it; make more money, be prouder of it! School yourself for the long battle of freedom in this country!” And so, if it works, who can blame the American publishing industry for running pictures of girls in their panties, dead soldiers bubbling blood, or violated virgins, or for keeping up with current events by printing timely stories this week like “The Bride and the Hangman,” “The Night Love Turned to Terror,” or “We Played and We Paid—the truth about two who took the easy way”?

Likewise the movie-palace managers, struggling against the very TV boom that's cheering others: they're also swinging with the new tits-and-blood trend, what else can they do? and this weekend—at least in the area around Times Square—have booked timely films like
High Treason, A Slight Case of Larceny, Devil's Plot, Three Sinners
, and
The Atomic City
, a flick about G-men hunting down H-bomb spies. They have no illusions, of course, about drawing away any of the nighttime trade from the Times Square burnings themselves. But it's not yet certain just when that show will go on, maybe not for weeks, and meanwhile the streets are filling up with restless undirected masses and the summer sun is climbing in the sky—they can hardly be blamed for trying to lure in a piece of the popcorn action at the very least. If they don't get it, after all, the pickpockets will. Indeed, it's a service to Uncle Sam to keep these potentially inflamed and aimless mobs off the streets and air-conditioned while he's sorting things out at the Supreme Court and the President's Cabinet meeting. So some play the sex angle, others the executions, and many attempt a bit of both at the same time. Rita Hayworth dances for the Baptist's head in
Salome
at the Rivoli, for example, and “Terror Stalks the Screen in 3 Dimensions” at the Paradise in
Man in the Dark
. Three-D “
THRILLS
that almost
TOUCH
YOU
” can be had all over town today, but the one that's lining them up in the streets is
House of Wax
, which, made by a one-eyed man, is all about reality and illusion and famous people going up in flames. Julius Rosenberg and his boy used to play a kind of baseball game in their ghetto flat using a paddle and a ball on an elastic string, and
House of Wax
pays tribute to this with a stunning bat-and-ball sequence that sends people leaping right out of their seats. “The Year's Shock Drama,”
Invasion USA
, is on at the Fox, and
O.K. Nero!
, “A Roman Scandal of Roaring Spectacle,” is at the Globe.
Murder Without Crime
at the Beekman shares an imaginative twin bill with
Double Confession
, starring Peter (“the droop-eyed cinemenace,” as T
IME
say) Lorre, whose wife, Karen, is out in Las Vegas this week, suing him for divorce. The Grande puts on an FBI thriller,
Walk East on Beacon
, said to be the story of the original Groun'-Hog Hunt, and at the 6000-seat Roxy, that palatial old queen from the movie heyday of the twenties,
Titanic
gives way to
Pickup on South Street
, “The Double-Barreled Triple-Powered Forty-Five-Calibre Rocker-Socker of the Year:
IT'S
A
BLOW-TORCH
!” A veritable paradigm of the times! As T
IME
, open-eyed, sums it up:

Yes, there are happy endings, but the world is tough and you have to work for them. No one knows that better than Uncle Sam, who has been flying about the world all morning, coping with the Phantom's overnight malice, sweeping up the Free World streets ravaged by an alien ardor, hurling abuse at Russian tanks in East Berlin, rounding up prisoners in South Korea. All night long, on the battlefront to the north, transport planes on flare sorties have been turning night into day in one of the brightest pyrotechnic displays of the war, dropping million-candlepower flares at short intervals for hours on end, surprising gooks in their nighttime mischief and giving them a kind of preview of the Apocalypse before picking them off. Then, with the dawn's early light, the battleship
New Jersey
and cruiser
Bremerton
have led surface ships in an artillery assault on the Korean east coast, and the west coast has been hit by the Polkadot Squadron from the USS
Bairoko
. In the daily air battle, Major Jimmy Jabara, the Wichita Ace, bags his twelfth MIG. In fact, Yanks are reportedly downing fifteen enemy MIG-15s for every Sabre Jet lost…