So As I Was Saying . . .: My Somewhat Eventful Life (8 page)
Read So As I Was Saying . . .: My Somewhat Eventful Life Online
Authors: Frank Mankiewicz,Joel L. Swerdlow
“Clockwise” and “counterclockwise” are also becoming part of linguistic history. They will join “horsepower” and “picking up steam” as words based on outdated technologies that stay in common use. We also need a word for the fake mechanical sound that things make after they no longer
need
to make a sound. The click on a computer keyboard. The whoosh sound when you delete a file and it disappears. The shutter-like click when you take a photograph with your cell phone. Hybrid and electric cars need engine noise added because they’re so quiet pedestrians can’t hear them coming. Such sounds have no raison d’être other than to convince us something has really happened. We expect the sounds.
Of course, the need for mechanical sounds may be temporary, useful only until the generation that grew up with the genuine mechanical sound dies out. Our new word will have to catch that aspect of it, too. “Spike” a story. “Do not fold, spindle, bend, or mutilate.” “Roll the tape.” “Radio silence.” When NPR first went on the air using satellites for remote sound, I asked our engineers to insert fake static so the listeners would feel, comfortably, that it was real.
* * *
Quips and jokes, often built around language, quickly became a part of many of my conversations. “It’s not a horse of a different color,” I might say with regard to whatever topic was under discussion. Then, sometimes within context, often abandoning it, the wordplay could begin, sometimes off on its own track, losing any meaning other than feeding on itself:
“You think the horse has left the barn?”
“Yes, the barn door was left open.”
“I’m not horsing around.”
“Don’t bother looking in that horse’s mouth. It’s a gift horse.”
“That’s where it came from, straight from the horse’s mouth.”
“Well, are you losing horsepower?”
“I don’t want to put the cart where it shouldn’t be.”
“That dog won’t hunt, and besides, I don’t have a dog in this fight.”
“Lie down with dogs, and you know what will happen.”
“Let sleeping dogs lie.”
“You’re dogging me.…”
“By barking up the wrong tree?”
“Or letting the tail wag the dog.”
“How did we get from horses to dogs?”
“Because there are more than two ways to skin a cat.”
These flippant plays on language could hijack any conversation. “Not to change the subject,” someone might begin, and I would interrupt by asking, “Why do people say ‘not to change the subject’ when they’re really eager to change the subject?” Often an analysis of words could be quite substantive, demonstrating that language has—and often
is
—power; for example, as soon as the “health insurance” debate became the “health care” debate, President Obama had lost ground.
What matters most is not always what the writer intends with his or her choice of words but how a reader reacts to those words.
The New Yorker
(soon, such a printed magazine arriving in the mailbox will seem like a Western Union delivery boy ringing the doorbell to give us a telegram) once really upset me. A writer reported that after returning from South Vietnam after the Tet Offensive, in 1968, the CBS News anchorman Walter Cronkite visited Robert Kennedy in his U.S. Senate office. The article claimed, in an offhand way, that Cronkite later said he only asked RFK why he wasn’t running for president, that he and RFK were alone, and that he spoke to me afterward. Mankiewicz, the essay says, remembers incorrectly when he claims to have been in the room and when he says Cronkite wanted Robert Kennedy to run for president. But the article is just wrong. Cronkite urged RFK to run for president. I know this is true, because a third person was in the room, me.
Two weeks later, I was still bothered by the piece. Why did I let it bother me so much? I’ve been covered by the media a huge number of times, and this was only a few sentences buried in the middle of a long story that had nothing to do with me. Who cares? Just forget about it.
Easy to say, but when you get to be my age, someone saying you have forgotten, or your memory is incorrect, has a different feel to it, even when it’s a retired anchorman trying to wriggle out of an unprofessional conversation.
* * *
Another perspective on age: When people, digesting the fact that I’ve lived for one-third the life of the United States, comment that it makes them reflect—often for the first time—on how “young” the country is. How young are we? Only 240 years since independence? It seems longer. And when we say we are “young,” what does that mean? That we as a country are relatively new? Hopeful? Oriented to the future? Naïve? Starry-eyed? No, I think that my being alive one-third of the time the United States has existed simply means I am “really” old.
I grew up without electronic screens. Television did not exist, nor did cell phones. Computers and smartphones did not appear until I was well into middle age. Most Americans today, and certainly all Americans tomorrow, will not be able to imagine such an existence. Statistics gathered by the National Institutes of Health tell us the average child in the United States spends forty-five hours a week with electronics, thirty in school, and only seventeen with a parent. And that was a study released in December 2008, based on data gathered earlier. Much has changed since then, and it’s only been in one direction. Now, for example, many companies have achieved great marketplace success selling phone apps designed to grab and hold the attention of babies as young as a few months. Parents, or caregivers, use these apps to captivate very young children during moments when quiet seems essential, such as standing in line to go through airport security. Use of such phone apps during the moments, hours, and days of “normal” child rearing remains (and is quite likely always to remain) undocumented, as is the probable impact of electronic screens on the wiring of the human brain that begins literally with birth and may continue throughout our lifetimes.
Thus, people whose brains are wired the way my brain is will one day—not too long from now—no longer exist. And in all likelihood, no one will notice or care.
* * *
I am often asked if I grew up in Hollywood during the Depression, to which I reply, “Beverly Hills.” Hollywood was not our home; it was my father’s workplace.
Newspaper stories from the time document just how unusually successful my father was. Franklin D. Roosevelt, during much of his presidency, waged what he described as a war against those he called “economic royalists.” At the core of this war, he had pushed through Congress legislation permitting the Internal Revenue Service to release the names each year of the nation’s top income earners and what taxes they paid. These lists, which always prompted intense newspaper coverage, frequently included the name Herman Mankiewicz; the lists show, in fact, that during some years he made much more than many of the famous actors and actresses who starred in movies he wrote. Pop made it clear to us kids that he might have been
rich
but he was not
wealthy
. He explained that “rich” is
making
a lot of money; “wealthy” is
having
a lot.
* * *
In school, the teacher who made the most lasting impression on me seems to have been Mrs. Moore, my seventh-grade teacher when I switched from the Dewey school to the “regular” public school.
Referring to something I have since forgotten, someone once said to me, “And the man ran faster than him.” Mrs. Moore wouldn’t approve. She’d ask you if you wanted to say, “And the man ran faster than him ran?” She was the prototypical junior high—definitely not middle school—teacher. She was quite short, with grayish hair in a bun, and a stickler for grammar, punctuation, form, and tradition. She taught English and made it seem much more fixed and rule controlled, even, than arithmetic. We parsed sentences and declined verbs, we diagrammed whole paragraphs on the blackboard, and as we read
A Tale of Two Cities
and
The Count of Monte Cristo,
we learned that even Charles Dickens and Alexandre Dumas could err, sometimes falling victim to faulty parallelism or the use of a nonword or even—God forbid!—not remembering that a pronoun following the verb “to be” is treated as a subject. Mrs. Moore hardly ever gave an inch. Indeed, when class was over, she would let us know with a terse command, “Stand to the right of your desk.” Then she would pause before saying, “Pass.” A new use of the verb “to pass”—a version, I guessed, of “pass out” or maybe “pass on”? She had a list of words that did not exist; “there is no such word as ‘gotten,’” she would interrupt a student answer and then often go on to list some other words that simply did not exist. “Proven” was on the list, along with “irregardless.”
But I still get confused about whether “that” or “which” is correct. As for the requirement that a pronoun following the verb “to be” be treated as a subject, if someone, even Dickens or Dumas, would say “He’s older than me” or some version of “It was him,” Mrs. Moore would interrupt with something like “He is older than me is old?” or “Him was it?”
Mrs. Moore often cited “wicker seats”—examples of misplaced phrases, of which her favorite was a classified ad: “For Sale, excellent rocking chair by woman with wicker seat.” To this day, as she did, I call such a construction a “wicker seat.”
She was almost alone among grammatical influences on my early life, but I really began to think seriously about language and usage thanks to her. Somehow, it was a lonely vigil, at least until my friend Bill Safire began to write a language column for
The New York Times
decades ago. I would talk about these matters with Safire, and often about Mrs. Moore. “Everyone should have a Mrs. Moore,” Bill said. But he did push back on one point. “Nowhere and never in the history of criminal justice,” said Bill, “has anyone stood before a police lineup, pointed to one suspect, and exclaimed, ‘That’s he, Officer; I’d know him anywhere.’” He had a point.
Mrs. Moore. You would never say, not even now, “Ms. Moore.”
* * *
Language can help provide insights into the toughest of situations. In a recent conversation about wartime atrocities, I mentioned a television news program interview with one of the soldiers who had killed wantonly at My Lai in Vietnam. As I remember it, the interviewer, Mike Wallace, said, “You had two little kids of your own at home, and yet you went ahead and shot, deliberately, small children with
their
families in
their
homes. How could you do that?”
To which the soldier replied, “At that time, we had only the one.”
* * *
In a recent conversation about wartime, I said I had never thought torture would ever be the official policy of the U.S. government and that “torture” is exactly the opposite of what the words “United States” stand for. Then I reflexively recited some lines of Alexander Pope’s:
Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
As, to be hated, needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.
As I spoke, I paused after “oft,” “face,” “endure,” and “pity.” The pauses came not with drama or self-consciousness but with what I hoped was tenderness and respect for each word: “too oft” … “familiar with her face” … “We first endure” … “then pity” … “then embrace.”
Then, anticipating a question, I added, “Pope—Alexander Pope,
Essay on Man
.”
The recitation surprised the much younger friends to whom I was speaking. What impressed them were not Pope’s words or the sentiments behind them but what my friends saw as an acrobatic feat of memorization.
I have always had an extraordinary memory for what I read and hear and also for numbers. I can go grocery shopping, watch the checkout process, and predict the exact total. But I am also a child of my times. In my youth, and lingering on through the 1950s, memorization was considered an essential skill. Mark Twain describes how, in his youth, he worked for Mississippi riverboat captains who often passed the time by reciting from Shakespeare plays by heart as they steered the boat, and they were not particularly well educated.
Teaching—forcing—schoolchildren to memorize has left behind generations of “old” people able to recite poems from memory. Such recitations might be done to impress other people, or as a form of reminiscence. That virtually every educated person was at one time expected to memorize poetry has been forgotten. When I was born, for example, a well-bred young man still wooed a respectable young woman by—at the appropriate time—sitting in the parlors of their homes reading poetry aloud to her and her parents.
* * *
“In James Joyce’s
Ulysses,
one of the things Bloom wonders about is whether fish get seasick,” I once told Safire. I smiled and shook my head in silent tribute to James Joyce. Such moments of admiration for language are common to me; it seems to be one of my deepest and most passionate loves. Insights about language, moreover, are often the avenue on which I can bring forth my political ideas.
“Unrequited hatred” is a typical example.
At Beverly Hills High School, our main enemy was Santa Monica. Santa Monica High. Samohi. And so that was the big football game of the year, our hated rival; our rallying cry was “Beat Samohi!” We’d have pep rallies and huge bonfires. “Beat Samohi!” And then one day, a few years after I graduated, I was driving down Olympic Boulevard toward Santa Monica, and I went by Santa Monica High School. And I saw the most amazing thing. There were big signs all over the campus. What were the signs? “Beat Venice.” “Beat
Venice
?” That was
their
big rival. They didn’t even care about Beverly High. So our feelings for them were the most difficult kind of emotion: You might call it “unrequited hatred.”