Seducing the Demon (17 page)

Around that time, I was sent by my publisher to meet the talent booker for Johnny Carson’s
Tonight Show.
I waited in a cubicle while the great booker finished a phone call. Then I was ushered in.

“So,” she snapped, “why should you be on the
Tonight Show?
What’s the book about?”

“It’s about a young woman who wants to be a writer and how she overcomes her fears and learns to be independent. It’s about husbands and wives, wives and lovers, and ... ”

“That’s enough,” the booker said. “Johnny isn’t interested in human relationships.”

The follow-up to that rejection story occurred just this past year when my publisher took me to lunch with the premier talent booker on another national show.

I arrived first, clutching a very obscure and annoying book in German whose author had just won the Nobel Prize. I tried to read it while waiting for my publisher. But I was too jumpy. Why are Nobel Prize authors so infuriating? Either they are grim to the point of making you want to kill yourself (Coetzee) or so obscure that even the English translations seem written in another language.

Should I have arrived late to make an entrance? I am really nervous. My publisher finally arrives—just in time to see the chef appear to tell me I am his favorite writer and bring a complimentary tranche of foie gras for my delectation. I thank him profusely and promise to send him autographed books. I pick at the foie gras, checking my watch. My publisher and I are both frazzled.

“Are we being stood up?” I ask him.

“Don’t jump to conclusions,” he says. But he seems nervous too.

We order wine in the daytime because we are both so rattled. We try to talk, but we are looking at the entrance to see if we are being stood up. The minutes pass. It’s not possible that the talent booker chose a restaurant in his own office building only to arrive late. That would be a real slap in the face. Get my publisher to come from SoHo and me from the Upper East Side just to prove his power. Or perhaps he isn’t coming at all? Perhaps he forgot the appointment? My publisher and I make stilted conversation. Normally easy with each other, we are poisoned by the talent booker’s lateness. After a nerve-wracking, shifty-eyed, twenty-minute wait together, I ask him to go downstairs to look for our guest. Never meet a talent booker in a restaurant with Dantean levels! Not there, he says. I hand him my cell phone. (Why doesn’t he have his own?) He calls the booker’s office, calls every number he can think of. Is this my publisher’s fault? Has he fucked up, or have I become obscure? Are other tables listening? Are they aware this is Judgment Day for us? Eventually the maître d’, with that uncanny maître d’ intuition, comes over to make nice and compliment my jewelry. The chef appears again with another brilliant complimentary dish—snails in champagne this time. I tell my publisher to keep calling and he does—calls office after office only to find everyone out to lunch.

Thirty-five minutes late, the talent booker arrives with barely an excuse—“in a meeting I couldn’t get out of”—and starts telling us a long, involved story about how he was underpaid and finally got a substantial raise because a superstar at his network intervened for him. The implication is that we couldn’t do anything for him. We are chopped liver. We need him much more than he needs us, and our thirty-five minutes of waiting rubs our noses in this messy truth. He asks my publisher snottily if he does anything besides “coffee-table books,” as if he were a nobody from a nowhere publishing house. We both feel chastened, though in fact we’ve done nothing wrong except pursue rather than be pursued. We showed abject weakness. Always let them pursue you even if it means losing some media buzz.

This is fame in New York. Every encounter is a calibration of your current worth. Nothing is neutral. If you were insecure before you got famous, you’ll be twice as insecure now. No one has ever bettered Hemingway’s description of literary New York:
a jar of tapeworms feeding on each other.

“So how
are
you?” the talent booker asks, knowing the answer.

“I’m fine,” I lie.

When I started to publish in the seventies, serious authors disdained TV TV was considered low-class and tacky. Now TV is even lower class and tackier, but authors—including me—will go on any program that will have them just to get exposure—if they are lucky enough to be invited. This is because books have gone so far down the food chain that any TV show is better than bringing out a book with no exposure at all.

 

 

My first TV experience came in 1973 with Fear of Flying. I was flown to Detroit—which at that point was the asshole of America. The taxi driver taking me to the TV station told me that my host (whose name I forget) was famous for “talkin’ to women about their organzi.”

“Organzi?”

“Yeah—he’s the first person to say ‘organzi’ on TV Very controversial.”

“Oh, I see. ‘Orgasm.”’

“Yeah, organzi.”

The TV studio is icy cold. Mr. Organzi is taping five shows that day and I am the last in line, so I wait and wait. Finally, I am taken into the frigid studio, where I confront a grizzled, gray newsman who has modeled his broadcasting style on Walter Winchell’s.

“Come meet Erica Younnnng. Who has caused quite a stir with her brash, abrasive and potty-mouthed novel.” (“Potty-mouthed” is a term I abhor, smacking as it does of toilet training as a metaphor for speech.)

At this point, I would have walked out, but walking out of a taped show doesn’t do the trick. But I was so beaten down and scared that I began muttering like a graduate student about Joyce and Proust, as I do when I am terrified.

 

 

Once Merv Griffin invited me on his television show only to ask me if I really wanted to pee standing up.

“Isn’t that what all you women’s libbers want?”

He had surrounded me with old Hollywood dames like Adela Rogers St. Johns who claimed that they had never suffered discrimination as women. That was what some TV shows did in the early seventies—brought out old warhorses to prove that feminism was a lie.

Now that we live in the age of reality TV, inevitably someone will create a reality TV show about writers. The problem will be how uneventful and unvisual a writer’s life is. In movies, the writer sits at a typewriter, typing a few words and then noisily seizing the paper out of the roller, balling it up and throwing it on the floor. This is the way Jane Fonda played Lillian Hellman in
Pentimento.
But now that we use computers instead of typewriters, we don’t even have the noise of the roller to add to the drama.

In the reality TV show
Writer!,
producers will be hard pressed to find a resident hunk or ingenue, because writers are usually not so good to look at. Manic and self-conscious, the writers inevitably will spend part of the show locked in the bathroom, unwilling to face the cameras. The camera pans to the unattended computer, as in an endless Andy Warhol epic. But eventually one writer will rise to the challenge and reveal the writer’s true life: She looks at her Amazon rating and despairs. She flips through books for inspiration. She polishes all the shoes in the house. She masturbates. She squeezes her blackheads even if she doesn’t have any blackheads. Then she puts a gun in her mouth and commits suicide in gonzo fashion like Hunter Thompson. For one night, the ratings go through the roof. Then they plummet again, because you can’t have a writer committing suicide every week—and what else can a writer do that is visually captivating?

No sooner had I written this fantasy than I opened the newspaper to see writers competing to be locked up in Long Island City for thirty days in something called “the Flux Factory” so that they could turn out novels in that period. Spectators are allowed to watch. “We’re exploring what it is to be a writer,” says Morgan Meis, who is the “curator” of the exhibit, which is called, imaginatively,
Novel.
Here I thought I was kidding, and someone’s actually doing it! But of course to show an exhibit of a novel-in-progress, you’d have to be inside the novelist’s brain—a far more exotic place than the Flux Factory. The whole point of imaginative writing is that it is neither time-bound nor place-bound. Novelists writing are not that different from lawyers or students writing.

And the process of writing, duh, takes place in the mind. Our outer lives are not that different from the outer lives of other people. It’s our inner lives that matter.

Despite the boringness of our lives, writers do have fans, but we may wonder what these fans are really seeking.

Once I got a letter from a fan saying that since his wife died he had been very lonely so could I please send him my soiled underwear for him to sniff? He had gotten the idea because his wife’s underwear was very comforting to him, but now that he had worn it out with sniffing would I kindly send mine? Another letter from the president “at very large” of a club called The Hung Jury invited me to be the “Mistress of Measurements.” It was clear from my books, he wrote, that I was a “size queen” and he was sure I’d enjoy these measurements very much. I have also been followed by stalkers, deluged with photographs of naked men and solicited by the dodgiest of charities. After a while, I stopped answering fan mail entirely.

Now, I loved authors who gave me pleasure and I kissed their pictures, but it never would have occurred to me to reach out for their underwear or their personal attendance upon my genitals. In fact, I had rarely written to an author before I became one. They seemed to inhabit another world. What was it about my work that inspired such requests?

I want to be loved, and sometimes being loved seems to imply breaking down the barrier between author and reader. But something else was happening here. What these requests seemed to imply was a literal-mindedness all my work decried. I am sure there are plenty of readers who love my work and would never think of making such requests—for which I am grateful. But the crazier readers do reveal something about the link between reader and writer: the desire to pass through the covers of a book into someone else’s imaginary world. These odd requests are really saying “Rescue me.” If only I could.

 

 

The idea of escaping into a book and running away with the author or the characters is something we’ve all felt. We find the fantasy in
Peter Pan,
in
Mary Poppins,
in
The Wizard of
Oz, in fairy tales like “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.” What if we could enter that magical world, come back, and the only sign of our trespass into the magic was worn shoe leather or a scarf carelessly left in the scene on the mantelpiece plate? We all want to move between dream and reality with such ease.

I certainly do. If I could go to sleep one night, wake up in Renaissance Venice and have an affair with William Shakespeare ... well, at least I could write a book about it. Is the desire to write very close to the desire to escape? Is that why the compulsion is so strong? The world we live in is appalling. Can there be a better one somewhere?

Probably this is also what fans want. The link between the writer and the fan is one of shared fantasy. The writer seems to paint a world where the fan’s problems vanish. The writer is doing this for herself, but the fan thinks it is especially for him, and that’s where trouble and disappointment enter the picture. If you are sane, you know the world of the book is invented. It is not a tangible place but an escape into fantasy.

That’s why being a writer has meant forays into the realm of demons. That’s why it’s such a dangerous profession. In order to make the world of fantasy real, you have to believe in it yourself—at least for the time you’re writing the book.

 

 

So, Julia Phillips and I met in California several months after our work at the Sherry. By then it was late autumn and my book had caught fire in paperback and was everywhere, selling something like three million copies in the first three months. I had the rough script of the novel with me. She was too jumpy to read it. She picked me up at the airport, deposited me at the Beverly Hills Hotel, made an appointment with me for the next day, then took off for points unknown. She was always taking off for points unknown in those days.

I looked around my room dazed from jet lag, made some phone calls—one to the Fasts, who were organizing a party for me the next night; one to Henry Miller, whom I was to meet the day after; one to my husband, Allan Jong, in New York, who was going to sleep. I wandered out into the lobby and then to the street, hoping to walk a bit. But there was no place to walk. I went to the pool to see who was there. Any stars? No one. Only the moon rising and the soft air of Beverly Hills, promising magic. Imagine how New Yorkers who came to this place in the teens and twenties must have felt—when the air was full of orange blossoms or the smell of smudge pots, the whole town an orchard on the edge of the desert.