Archival Revival (Brown Paper Bag Edition)

As I'm sure you've heard by now, Playboy founder Hugh Hefner died. Back in 2013, I wrote a long essay about satirist Harvey Kurtzman (best known for creating Mad, first as a comic book, and then as a magazine), in whose life Hefner played no small part. It's pretty lengthy, but only part of a larger piece that is almost TWICE as long. So, if you do decide to read it, rest assured you're getting off easy.

These failures didn't happened in a vacuum. I haven't gone much into Harvey Kurtzman's personal life so far, but he had one. Arguably a bigger one than most American males of his era as he often worked from home. He had a wife Adele, whom he married in 1948; a daughter Meredith, born 1949; son Peter, born 1954; and another daughter Elizabeth, 1957. Peter was autistic. In the 1950s and '60s, autism was much less understood than it is today. It was also, for reasons that are not at all understood now, much less common than today. All that rarity and misunderstanding must have cost money. Things were not looking good for Harvey Kurtzman in 1962.

Hugh Hefner to the rescue! He wasn't going to give Kurtzman his own magazine to play with this time around. Instead, he would get a comic strip that would appear within the pages of Playboy itself. After years of failure, Harvey Kurtzman would once again taste success. I mean, the strip ran for 26 years. It had to have been a success, right? Originally, this new strip was meant to be just a sideline as Kurtzman continued with Help! But before long it was Help! itself that was relegated to the sidelines, until it disappeared entirely in September of 1965. The comic strip would become Kurtzman's mainline, his calling, his vocation, his occupation, his livelihood, his situation, his nine-to-five (with plenty of overtime), his bread-and-butter, his grind.

That Harvey Kurtzman on the left in the above photo. Will Elder, the class clown as always, is the man in the center. Jack Davis is on the right. Though she once famously donned bunny ears and cotton tail as part of an undercover assignment for Esquire, the woman in the middle is NOT Gloria Steinem (though it would have been one helluva picture if it was), just some anonymous Playboy Club employee pressed into service. Everyone seems to be having a good time, but, remember, it's a publicity shot. This may simply be their way of saying, "Cheese!"

Little Annie Fanny was ostensibly a parody of Harold Gray's once-popular comic strip Little Orphan Annie, but the similarity ends with the title logo. It wasn't even drawn in Gray's style. In fact, it wasn't drawn at all but gorgeously painted by the ever-versatile Will Elder. Originally, Kurtzman wanted to transfer Goodman Beaver over to Playboy, but Hefner nixed the idea. So Goodman instead got a kind of sex change operation. Fanny told the story of a leggy, buxom, blond naif who was continuously preyed upon by the mavens of Politics, Industry, and Culture, thus she represented the Modern Everyperson trying desperately to resist molestation by impersonal forces beyond her control or understanding.

Well...no. Little Annie Fanny was never as pointed as all that, but it could have been. I haven't read every Annie strip that's appeared in Playboy, but the ones I have seen weren't nearly as funny as Kurtzman's best stuff from Mad, Trump, Humbug, or Help! Others have said the same thing. In preparation for an interview with Will Elder in 2003, The Comics Journal publisher Gary Groth did read every single strip, and found the satire "intermittent at best." For all his reputation as envelope-pusher, sexual humor doesn't seem to have been Harvey Kurtzman's forte. At least not during his 26 years at Playboy.

Lets back up a bit. Sexy, buxom dames, whether drawn by him or one of his artists, had been tropes in all of Kurtzman's comics in the 1950s and early '60s. No surprise as he was simply parodying and satirizing the times he lived in, the Marilyn Monroe/Jayne Mansfield/Brigitte Bardot era. But the difference between parody and satire depends on how well one sees through a culture, an era. Though the term "sexual harassment" wouldn't be coined until sometimes in the 1970s, Harvey Kurtzman seems to have pointed out its existence in the 1950s. Or was he simply trying to be funny? In a Mad parody of Archie called "Starchie" (not to be confused with Beaver Goodman story in Help!) the principal chases two high school girls around his desk. As Will Elder observed nearly 50 years later, "Well, it happens. Some teachers prey on their students." In "Superduperman" the Clark Kent character uses his X-ray vision to look through the door of the women's bathroom. Gloria Steinem wouldn't disagree that a man with such an ability might do just that. If Kurtzman meant these joke as criticisms, he would have been way ahead of his time. But since they are jokes, he very well could have been doing no more than playing for laughs. Ba-dum-ching!

Annie Fanny, however, never seemed to realize she was being sexually harassed until her last shred of clothing had come off. That she was never out-and-out raped was due less to any vigilance on her part and more to the fact that her would-be molesters were even dumber than her. The blind seducing the blind. A typical strip would end with Annie walking, or running, away, stark naked as her pursuer lay writhing on the ground in a state of coitus interruptus. That could be funny at times. Except as this was "entertainment for men" the average male reader might actually identify and feel sorry for the luckless leches, rather than feel any relief that Annie had escaped unscathed. The predators were the Everymen, and she was the impersonal force beyond their control or understanding (they just couldn't understand why she didn't want to get laid.) I doubt Kurtzman really meant for it it to be perceived that way, and he did make sporadic attempts to satirize the Playboy ethos. But it's hard to bite the hand that feeds you if the other one has you by the balls.

Little Annie Fanny originally appeared once a month and ran seven or eight pages. Within a year it was down to an average of about four pages every other month. By the 1970s, it was down four or five stories a year, then once or twice a year in the 1980s. This was wasn't due to any slide in popularity. As far as Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder were concerned, it might as well have been 100 pages seven days a week. The delays had to with the fact that despite his carefully self-cultivated image as a laid-back hedonist who never got out of his pajamas, Hugh Hefner was actually a nitpicking control freak.

In that 2003 interview, Will Elder tells of Kurtzman informing him after he had turned in his art that Hefner wants this or Hefner says get rid of that. "Jeez," Elder thought. "He actually looks at and reads every detail." Many of those details would have been the background gags Elder was known for but that Hefner considered high school stuff. Painting the strip was time-consuming enough, without having to do it all over again. Elder soon needed help with the art. Kurtzman called in comic book artist Russ Heath to help. Even that wasn't enough, as Hefner kept asking for redoes, proving his dissatisfaction extended to gags in the foreground as well. Other artists helping out were Frank Frazetta, Al Jaffee and Jack Davis (whose style wasn't really all that compatible with Elder's; still his trademark flailing limbs seemed appropriate on the sex fiends who regularly pursued Annie) Throughout the 1960s, until Elder finally came up with a faster technique, it was not uncommon to see the art attributed to three different people. All these artists lived in New York City's tri-state area, but getting the strip out in time meant extended stays at the Playboy Mansion, then located in Chicago. There they would work on Little Annie Fanny, take what they prayed would be the final version to Hefner's bedroom (truth is stranger than parody) making sure they removed their shoes before walking on his white carpet (...as well as satire.) Hef would either approve, or, more likely, disapprove, and they'd be back at the drawing, or rather, painting, board again.

To be fair to Hefner, these were all commercial artists. They were used to taking orders. It wasn't art for art's sake with them. At least not all the time. Harvey Kurtzman himself could be an exacting task master. Beginning with the war comics, Kurtzman would prepare a penciled layout on what's called a Bristol board, then trace over that with some kind of tissue overlay, and transfer that to another board, maybe even a board after that if he was dissatisfied, until it ended up on a final illustration board. Keep in mind he was doing all this for other artists, who might have felt their creativity infringed upon a bit. Elder had no problem with this technique, as Kurtzman allowed him (until Hefner intervened) free reign with the background gags. Other artists grumbled but inevitably went with the flow. Except for John Severin. A friend of Kurtzman's since high school, he broke with him back in the 1950s over the layouts.  That's one artist who never got to see the inside of the Playboy Mansion.

If Hefner's complaints about the art extended beyond Elder's gags, then they were really directed toward Kurtzman, seeing as he did the layouts. And it wasn't just the art. He increasingly didn't like Kurtzman's scripts either, giving 20 page critiques--nearly five times as long as the average Little Annie Fannie story. More changes, more time wasted. So Kurtzman, who had written the first 23 issues of Mad by himself, now needed someone to help him write the bi-monthly four-page Annie stories. He got that help from Larry Siegel, who had written for Humbug before moving on to Mad. Siegel could be a truly hilarious writer, and he's had an interesting career, one that's included three writing Emmys for The Carol Burnett Show. Unfortunately, the Annie stories I've seen with his name on it aren't any funnier than those with Kurtzman's alone. He seems to have had the same basic problem: how to top Annie's own toplessness.

Chalk it all up to the curiously narrow vision of a man who has spent sixty years insisting he's anything but. For all his reputation as an envelope-pusher, sexual humor doesn't seem to have been Hugh Hefner's forte. Look at the other cartoons (many beautifully done in color) that appear in Playboy. What do you usually see? A naked woman in the foreground, and a man, more often than not fully clothed, in the back. A forgettable caption underneath. A naked woman can be many, many things, but hysterically funny isn't usually one of them. Quite a few of the cartoonists who have appeared in Playboy over the years have also had their work published in The New Yorker, and they're almost always funnier in the latter. Such is freedom from formula. If you overlook the potential for abuse, Little Annie Fanny at least got some comic mileage out of the  horny males (and in one 1978 strip, females) clownish pursuit of the title character. But that made for a one-joke strip, even as the topic, usually a very topical topic, changed from appearance to appearance. Then again, who picks up Playboy for the laughs? You read it for the articles.

According to Elder: "Hefner didn't want anything to resemble Mad magazine. If you understand that, you understand the whole process of Annie Fanny." OK, fine, but then why the hell hire two guys from Mad? I think Kurtzman and Elder weren't trying to relive past glories so much as simply being themselves. Now they were expected to be like Hugh Hefner, the failed cartoonist.

Most of what I've told you so far about Harvey Kurtzman's long tenure at Playboy was taken from that Will Elder interview. If that's all I had to go by, I'd just chalk it up as sour grapes from someone who didn't like always having to repaint his work, especially if that meant erasing all his little background jokes that never advanced the narrative anyway. However, there was another witness, and here's where our story takes a particularly sad turn.

As the 1960s drew to a close, a new trend had emerged within--no, no, that's not right. This new trend emerged way, way, way, way outside of the publishing industry, as well as neighborhood drugstore magazine racks. I'm talking "underground comix", written and drawn by people so obviously radical they refused to use proper spelling. Among them were Kim Deitch, Spain Rodriguez, S. Clay Wilson, Jay Lynch, Bill Griffith, Rick Griffin, Vaughn Bode, Denis Kitchen, Victor Moscoso, Skip Williamson, Rory Hayes, Trina Robbins, Art Speigelman, Aline Komiskey, Rand Holmes, Jay Lynch, and Gilbert Shelton. Most of these new cartoonists were inspired by Kurtzman's Mad when young, and some were even published in Help! Their choice of subject matter, however, went far beyond the most tasteless Mad parodies or dirtiest Annie Fannys, as their comix were full of explicit sex, explicit violence, explicit drug use, and even explicit politics. Sold mostly in head shops (neighborhood drugstores of a kind, except the clientele was typically under 30) they did not carry the Comic Code Authority seal, and no one cared. Well, a few judges did, as the stores that carried them were now and then busted for obscenity. Many of these comics came off the mimeograph machine, and were on such low-quality materials they made the faux-cheap paper Bill Gaines favored for Mad look like it was spun from fine silk. Kurtzman, as I said earlier, never wanted Mad or any magazine he worked on to look cheap. By 1969, though, he may have been having second thoughts. He reportedly flirted with becoming an underground cartoonist himself. Now, this movement was part of the larger counterculture, which Kurtzman had made fun of quite a bit in Little Annie Fanny, treating it not so much as a threat to the Republic, as others at the time did, but merely as a passing fad (which in many ways it was.) Hippiedom nevertheless intrigued him. On a trip to California, the epicenter for all things groovy, he actually visited a commune. He also went to a party thrown by some underground cartoonist friends. However, the loud music and hard drugs proved a little too much for the middle-aged Kurtzman, and he made a hasty retreat back to the mainstream that had so fueled his satire. Also, it paid better.

Still, if he couldn't be an underground cartoonist himself, maybe Kurtzman could at least introduce some who were to the mainstream media (which by now included Playboy.) He set his sights on the most well-known of these cartoonists, his friend and disciple Robert Crumb.

When we last saw Robert Crumb, his first Fritz the Cat comics were just getting published in Help! Though Fritz would arguably become his first great success, it wasn't until the hipster feline appeared in Cavalier, a Playboy knockoff, that he found a larger audience. Harvey Kurtzman did at least anticipate that larger audience for Crumb someday, and hoped for a slice of it himself, if he could just keep Help! afloat. As part of an agreement to write and draw about it when he came back, Kurtzman sent Crumb and his newlywed wife Dana on an all-expense paid honeymoon to Bulgaria. Not exactly Niagara Falls, but Crumb reportedly enjoyed himself.  He returned to the U.S. with some moody, evocative pictures of the then-Soviet satellite. Crumb was all set to replace the departing Terry Gilliam as art director when Help! folded. And so he went back to Cleveland and American Greetings. Bored with a job at which he excelled, he turned to not alcohol but a form of escapism that was then gaining in popularity: LSD. Still perfectly legal at that point, Crumb found he enjoyed having his consciousness expanded, until he took one bad batch that left him in a fugue state for about a year. Amazingly, this had little effect on his job at American Greetings (and just think, the first acid-inspired art in the United States appeared not in head shops but the more traditional drug stores under such headings as "Birthday", "Commencement' and "Get Well Soon.") In his spare fugue time, certain characters began appearing to Crumb, characters whom would someday soon have names like Mr. Natural, Angelfood McSpade, Eggs Ackley, and Flakey Foont. When Crumb finally emerged from the fugue, he was more restless than ever. On a chance encounter in a bar with a few friends on their way to San Francisco, he decided then and there to join them. He would phone his wife about it when he got there. Though he wasn't really a hippie himself--he dressed like some cub reporter out of a 1930s Warner Brothers movie--he settled somewhere near the intersection of Haight-Ashbury, the Jerusalem of the Counterculture. Hooking up with some mimeograph owner who called himself a publisher, Crumb put out Zap, which he sold himself on street corners. More comics followed, and soon the whole world, at least the portion of the world that had turned on, tuned in, and dropped out, got to know Mr. Natural and friends. Actually, one comic story, if you could call it a story, did make its way to the mainstream, where it enjoyed surprising popularity. Though his fan base may have swooned to the  music of Steppenwolf, Jefferson Airplane, and Jimi Hendrix, Crumb's own tastes ran toward 1920s and '30s country and blues. He turned an old song by an obscure musician named Blind Boy Fuller into a one page strip. Characters with big feet and an amazing sense of balance did a kind of reclining strut under the words KEEP ON TRUCKIN'. Endlessly reproduced on posters,T-shirts, bumper stickers, and patches, it soon became one of the most famous images of the late '60s and early '70s. And now Robert Crumb himself was famous (Blind Boy Fuller, though, remained an obscure figure.)

Kurtzman decided it was time for Robert Crumb to meet Hugh Hefner. A job could be in the offering. The idea that Crumb should appear in Playboy seems ridiculous now. Though feminists were none too fond of either one, Crumb's vision of female sexuality varied wildly from Hefner's (steroids vs. silicone). It probably made sense in 1971, though. Crumb was famous and Hefner was famous; why shouldn't the two of them get together? So it was arraigned that Crumb and a few of his underground cartoonist pals should visit the Playboy Mansion in Chicago. According to a 1972 interview, Crumb thought it was cool at first. They hung around the game room and played pinball. Talked to a few bunnies (the help) that were around to serve them. And just explored the place. There was a pool, several TV sets, and on every end table and coffee table was a copy of Playboy. Crumb thought the paneling on the walls looked kind of cheap. As time went on, and it did go on, the whole place began to seem to him like the world's largest Holiday Inn. Eventually, the whole group settled in the dining room, where they ate and waited. And waited. For hours. Where was Hefner? Turns out he was playing backgammon. They asked Kurtzman when could they meet him. "Kurtzman was like sweating," Crumb recalled. "He didn't want anyone to disturb Mr. Hefner. He was worried that someone, me or Jay Lych or Skip Williamson, would upset Mr. Hefner." They left without meeting Mr. Hefner. As far as I know, Crumb hasn't met him yet.

Hefner assistant and Playboy's soon-to-be cartoon editor Michelle Urry did contact Crumb a short time later. She offered him $500 a page and complete freedom, except he couldn't draw anything explicit. If you've ever seen a Crumb comic done between 1967 and 1972, you'll know that removing anything explicit would be like taking the whale out of Moby Dick. Thus, the conversation did not go well. Crumb was also upset that Kurtzman seemed so intimidated by Hefner, and let Urry know that. He turned her down flat. She got mad herself and told him that someday soon the underground cartoon fad would fade, and he'd come crawling back to Playboy begging for a job. She was half right. The fad did fade, and Crumb went through some tough times, but he never worked for Playboy. Except once, when his art, in reduced form, appeared within Little Annie Fanny itself (strip regular Ralphie is shown reading an underground comic.)

Harvey Kurtzman and Robert Crumb remained friends, each writing forwards or introductions to the other's collections. Sometime during the 1970s, Crumb visited Kurtzman at his home in Mount Vernon, New York. It was a big house--Hefner paid well--that was put to good use as he now had four children, daughter Nellie having arrived in 1969. Kurtzman, who had been drinking, showed Crumb an Annie strip that had just come back from Hefner with all sorts of blue pencil markings indicating changes that he wanted made. After acknowledging to Crumb that Hefner had saved him from poverty, Kurtzman began to cry...

You may have cringed upon reading of Kurtzman's breakdown, as I did when I first came across it in a book Crumb had written. You may also have wished that he he'd stuck to his guns, that he'd been more like he was at the outset of his career, a bold, brash young man who through the simple art of lampooning could puncture the assumptions and certainties of a complacent people. But there's a problem. That very boldness and brashness caused him to walk out on the best publisher he would ever have, William M. Gaines, so certain was he that he could produce a higher (and slicker) form of lampoon somewhere else. He stuck to his guns through Trump, Humbug, The Jungle Book, and Help! even as his ammunition was running alarmingly low. When it was near depletion, he over-compensated (as well as was over-compensated) by becoming Hugh Hefner's lackey. It was Kurtzman who repeatedly warned us not to confuse reality with market-driven illusion. As someone who spent his life in such market-driven industries as comic books and magazines, he could not help but get caught up in the confusion himself.

Perhaps we should see the breakdown that Crumb witnessed as a kind of good thing. Remember me telling you before about "The Organization Man in the Gray Flannel Executive Suit" from The Jungle Book? That earlier, darker version of Goodman Beaver who represses and conforms his entire personality out of existence? Kurtzman's tears at least proves that he hadn't. Or, to paraphrase Charles Bukowski, Kurtzman still had a soul left to lose.

Annie Fanny took off her clothes for the last time in June of 1987. For a change, something of Kurtzman's ended because he wanted it to end...No, wait, Playboy, which owned the copyright, did attempt to bring the strip back ten years later with a different writer and artist. It lasted all of two issues.

Not too flattering a portrait of Hefner, is it? Keep in mind, however, that this was basically written from Harvey Kurtzman's (or perhaps Will Elder's and Robert Crumb's) point of view. Hefner, of course, can't now defend himself, and may have gone to his grave completely unaware that he earned such enmity from some of the people who worked under him. At least Hefner's hands-on approach proves that he wasn't quite the pipe-sucking, silk pajama-wearing slacker so often portrayed in the media (including the slice of the media that he himself owned.)

Of course, Hugh Hefner's legacy doesn't begin and end with Little Annie Fanny. What about the rest of it?

  

Sorry it took so long, but at least I gave you folks some stuff to look at while I tried to sort out Hef's legacy.

The long-running joke about Hefner's magazine is that if an upstanding member of the community was caught with it in his possession, he could sheepishly defend himself by claiming he read it for the articles. Ha, ha, ha--but how much of a joke was it? Could it be read for the articles? While I doubt anyone ever EXCLUSIVELY perused Playboy for that reason, I'm sure the articles got read. In its own way, Playboy was a general interest magazine, with a sometimes intellectual air about it, and could be appreciated on that level. Kind of like The New Yorker on Viagra. As for the "Playboy philosophy", that you should be able to live any kind of lifestyle as long as you had enough money as Hefner did and could totally escape the economic constraints imposed on the rest of us by the societal concerns of Church, State, and a capitalistic system that occasionally needs to keep its workers in line, was about as accessible to the average prole as a President's Day at an Aston-Martin dealership. Nevertheless, the Sexual Revolution Hefner helped spark and for many embodied in the long run benefited us all, not just A-list celebrities drunkenly trying not to trip over the non-plastic pink flamingos roaming the grounds of the LA Mansion  It may be a stretch to say sex education in school and the birth control pill had anything to do with the Playmate of the Month, but all those phenomenons did come to fruition at about the same time. Finally, in 1955, when Playboy published Charles Beaumont groundbreaking science fiction story "The Crooked Man", it proved that Hefner could look beyond his airbrushed human bunnies and champion, or at least tolerate, desires not his own.

1926-2017

In Memoriam: Dick Gregory 1932-2017

"Segregation is not all bad. Have you ever heard of a collision where the people in the back of the bus got hurt?"

"Last time I was down South I walked into this restaurant, and this white waitress came up to me and said: 'We don't serve colored people here.' I said: 'That's all right, I don't eat colored people. Bring me a whole fried chicken.' About that time these three cousins came in, you know the ones I mean, Klu, Kluck and Klan, and they say: 'Boy, we're givin' you fair warnin'. Anything you do to that chicken, we're gonna do to you.' So I put down that knife and fork, and I picked up that chicken, and I kissed it."

Gregory was born in St. Louis (as was another black comedian ten years earlier: Redd Foxx) A very good athlete, he earned a track scholarship  to Southern Illinois University--Carbondale, where he set school records as a half-miler and miler. Unfortunately, there was another institution out there very much interested in athletic young men: the U.S. Army. I was under the impression there was such a thing as college deferments during the draft era, but for whatever reason, Gregory didn't get one, and he spent the next two years serving Uncle Sam. This was many years before the military's 1970s post-draft advertising slogan Be All You Can Be, but Gregory soon found he had another skill, one that couldn't have gotten him a scholarship as track and field had, but would bode well for him nonetheless. A commanding officer who noticed Gregory was a bit of a cut-up, encouraged him to enter an Army talent show. Gregory did and won (I don't know what, but it obviously wasn't a deferment), and then entered several more, and won those, too. When his hitch was finally up, Gregory briefly returned to SIU, but didn't stay long. He was now determined to be a comedian, and moved to a city in a neighboring state.

Chicago. Note the sign to the left, and though it's obscured partially by a streetlight, you should still be able to make out the name of a popular comedy team of the day (which reminds me, I have another obituary to do once I'm through with this one.) Gregory wouldn't be playing in the same venues as those two guys. Not yet anyway. As he himself put it: "Blacks could sing and dance in the white night clubs but weren't allowed to stand flat-footed and talk to white folks, which is what a comic does." So he played to black audiences in black clubs, but a white or two could occasionally be found in the audience, such as this fellow:

Hugh Hefner may look a bit grim in the above picture, but he was said to have laughed out loud at Gregory's Civil Rights-infused act (see jokes at top of post) and got the young comic a job working here:

Hefner's own Playboy Club. Gregory was now performing his comedy to mostly white audiences, but he didn't tone it down any. And didn't need, too. Black comics were becoming increasingly more popular with the white folks. Nipsey Russell, Godfrey Cambridge, Bill Cosby, and the aforementioned Foxx all began to be heard and laughed at during  this era. Still, nightclubs were hardly the apex of show business. For that you needed that new medium, television, and, increasingly, if you wanted to get on television for the very first time, you needed this guy:

Before Jimmy, Jay, Conan, Jay, and Johnny, there was Jack. Gregory actually turned down invitations to appear on the late night talk show at first, which puzzled Paar. It seems black comics in the past had performed their monologues but were not asked afterwards to sit down and chat with Paar, which wasn't the case with the white comics. Paar promised they would chat, Gregory appeared on the show, and soon became a household name.

 I actually can't find a photo of Gregory on Paar's show, so you'll just have to settle for Merv.

Gregory killing a white audience, in the only way he knew how.

As the 1960s wore on, Dick Gregory morphed into a political activist, and remained one right up until the end. He never out-and-out quit comedy, but nightclub owners became reluctant to book him. It's one thing to joke about civil rights, it's another to get arrested for it. Gregory, for his part, no longer wanted much to do with nightclubs anyway. Those places served booze, which he had come to see in political terms ("If they took all the drugs, nicotine, alcohol and caffeine off the market for six days, they'd have to bring out the tanks to control you.") So he basically earned his living on the college circuit, while continuing his outside activities. In addition to fighting for social justice, Gregory became a conspiracy theorist. The Kennedy assassination, the King assassination, 9/11, and even the 1969 moon landing were all at the mercy of his skepticism.

Gregory often fasted as a means of protest, weighing only 100 pounds at one point. And he never quite put the weight all back on again.  He may not have always looked as he does in the above picture, but he sure was a pretty skinny dude these past few decades.

Though it wasn't the reason why he chose to starve himself, Gregory decided a extremely limited diet had been good for his health, and wished to share his nutritional findings with others.

You may disagree with Gregory's views, express disapproval at his choice of associates, snicker at some of his more outlandish doings, but at least respect the fact that he basically sacrificed a career as a comedy superstar, with all the earning potential that entails, to fight for the things he truly believed in. Sure, a lot of celebrities these days have their own pet political and social causes, but they make damn sure first their agents are out lining up jobs for them before they start marching. Dick Gregory? I don't think he even had an agent! (He did back in the 1960s, but I can't find anyone who might have represented him lately.) 

Through it all, Dick Gregory maintained his sense of humor, always ready to crack a joke, be it a protest rally or an appearance before Congress. I used to watch C-SPAN quite a bit back when I had cable, and Gregory appeared on it from time to time, usually before a college audience (the network covers lectures, seminars, and whatnot when Congress is not in session.) Once he was on some serious-minded panel discussing the serious-minded topic of urban poverty. The discussion turned to crime, and Gregory had this to say:

"I saw in the news that this burglar broke into a drugstore and stole all the Viagra. The police put out an all-points-bulletin, telling everyone to be on the lookout for a hardened criminal."

You can take the activist out of the Playboy Club, but you can't take the Playboy Club out of the activist.

Archival Revival (Feed Your Head Edition)

It's recently come to my attention that this is the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love, which originally came about when a committee of San Francisco nonconformists, realizing the rundown neighborhood in which they lived and worked was rapidly becoming world-famous, decided that such a label might put a positive spin on things. However, in the years since, I think the Summer of Love has come to mean something much larger than that one neighborhood or those mere three months of the year. It's now synonymous with The 1960s (even if the decade was more than 3/5ths over by then.) Mostly because it was about this time that the general public became aware of a colorful (sometimes literally so) group of people known as "hippies". But what exactly was a hippie, and how did such an individual come to be identified with not just a season when a lot of people go on vacation, but an entire decade, or even an entire era? A while back I did a post on the TV show Star Trek where I digressed a bit to take a look at the social currents that were then swirling about the science-fiction series. Here is some of what I wrote: 

Eleven years before the Summer of Love.

 

Ten years before the Summer of Love.

Three years before the Summer of Love.

On January 14, 1967--halfway through Star Trek's first season--somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 people showed up for The Human Be-In that was held in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, a stone's (or stoner's) throw from the low-rent neighborhood of Haight-Ashbury. What exactly was this Be-In? A few months earlier, California had banned lysergic acid diethylamide, a psychoactive drug better known as LSD that allowed those taking it to visit strange new worlds without having to first book passage on a starship, and so this was a protest of sorts, though pictures of the event shows very few people carrying signs. Mostly they're dancing and appear to be having a very good time. Maybe that was their way of protesting. Whatever they were doing, it caught the attention of the national, and even international, media, which tentatively portrayed the event as a humorous sideshow to the serious issues of the day. There was a problem, though. What to call all these young people? Well, just calling them young people sounds OK to me, but perhaps that wasn't good enough copy. According to the writer Tom Wolfe, who kept close tabs (no pun intended; he was strictly an observer) on this scene, a good many of those young people liked to refer to themselves as acid heads. That wouldn't do for a family publication. Nor would another term they like to use, freaks. Newspaper readers might get the mistaken impression that 20,000 Siamese twins, hermaphrodites, and bearded ladies had shown up in Golden Gate Park. A 50-years old local columnist by the name of Herb Caen came up with a suitable alternative: hippies, and the term stuck beyond a Madison Avenue copywriter's wildest ad campaign. Within a few weeks, "hippie" had become a household word, even used by those who wouldn't let a hippie in their tool shed much less their house. The only people who weren't using the term were the hippies themselves, and even they eventually had to give in rather than disappoint all those teenage runaways now arriving weekly in Haight-Ashbury by the busloads, thanks to all the publicity the low-rent neighborhood had gotten (indeed, it soon became the most famous low-rent neighborhood on the planet.) Though he certainly helped popularize it, Caen didn't actually invent the term "hippie". The words "hip" and "hep"--both meant you were in the know--had been in use in the African-American community since the early 1900s. White kids were introduced to the terms via swing music during the '30s and '40s. As a minority of those white kids got older, especially if they were artistically inclined, or maybe were just different from anybody else (otherwise, what's the point of a subculture?), they moved to places like Greenwich Village, or North Beach in San Francisco (before rents went up in the latter and they all had to relocate to the more affordable Haight-Ashbury) where, since the middle of the 19th century, they were called bohemians. Not that that's what the Bohemians called themselves, at least not in the beginning. Those who didn't like artists, or people who were just different, sarcastically compared such folks to Gypsies, in the mistaken belief that the latter group had originated in Bohemia. Yet that label had gotten old by the middle of the 20th century, and so a few Bohemians took to calling themselves hipsters ("angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection" as one young poet put it.) "Hippie" was coined around the same time, probably by some unsung beatnik. Not that the unsung beatnik would ever have called himself a "beatnik" (at least not until the teenage runaways began arriving in Greenwich Village and North Beach by the busloads.) That term, too, was coined by the enterprising Herb Caen, though a friend of Jack Kerouac's by the name of Harold Huncke had come up with the "beat" part a decade earlier. So many terms, so many ways to attract teenage runaways, so many ways to scare the hell out of Middle America.

However, it wasn't what you called them, or what they called themselves that mattered. It was the sheer visibility that was so unsettling. Sure, there had always been Bohemians, but nobody gave them much mind until their numbers all of a sudden seemed to increase a thousandfold (thanks, no doubt, to post-World War II birth rates.) Difference had never loomed so large. The mainstream media could no longer treat it as a comedy side show. It WAS the serious issue of the day. In one respect, though, it still was a sideshow. They were freaks, as least as far as the non-freaks in the (soon-to-be prefixed as "Silent") Majority were concerned. Long hair on men was especially frowned upon. As was facial hair. Combine the two and you have what to 1967 Mainstream America would have resembled a bearded lady. That some of these strange, new people might differ from each other went unnoticed. Eventually, the hippies, Yippies, flower children, folkies, mods, Jesus freaks, back-to-nature hedonists, campus radicals, Weathermen, fugitives, hustlers, rioters, flag burners, bra burners, draft card burners, draft dodgers, doves, panhandlers, dope peddlers, Merry Pranksters, junkies, Transcendentalist Meditationists, Marrakesh backpackers, hitchhikers, organic farmers, communal dwellers, THE END IS NEAR (or NIGH) picketers, rock stars, rock concert promoters, sitar players, groupies, dee-jays, Sunset Strip go-go dancers, exhibitionists, Satanists, underground newspaper publishers, underground cartoonists, health store owners, head shop owners, cellar cafe owners, coffeehouse (but not coffee shop) owners, street performers, Off-Off-Broadway producers, avant-garde stage directors, experimental film directors, free-form poets, cut-up novelists, pop artists, potty-mouth comedians, Marvel superheroes, graffiti artists, New Journalists, public intellectuals (unless your last name happened to be Buckley), vegetarians, American Southwest desert nomads, gay liberationists, Maoists, Che Guevara admirers, Hell's Angels, Black Panthers, Black Muslims, dune buggy drivers, Volkswagen drivers, any Oregonians not employed by the logging industry, and last, but certainly not least, teenagers, were all filed (or lumped together) under a heading fraught with sociological meaning: The Counterculture. 

As I reread what I wrote, I see I left out a commonly used term of that era: Generation Gap, essentially the difference between teen or college-age kids and their parents on such matters as politics, morality, fashions, and what radio station the dial should be set on. If you're still not sure what the term means, watch just about any episode of All in the Family (the 1960s having spilled over into the '70s.) Is there still a Generation Gap? Maybe more of a cranny. I mean, kids still listen to different music than their parents. The reference points are still different. And a parent still may take offense if a member of the younger generation refers to one of their beloved movies or TV shows as "old". But it all lacks the sociological heft of the 1960s Gap. Back then parents felt THREATENED by youth culture. Today it's just a pain in the ass (as well as an irritating reminder that you're getting along in years and no longer "with it".) What I find funny is how often the middle-aged parent of today will nevertheless mimic the middle-aged parent of yesterday. More than once I've witnessed a father or mother born five or even ten years after the Summer of Love bitch and moan that "the kids these day are too wild. It's not like when I was young and we obeyed rules and blah, blah, blah..." The Gap has become routine, ritualized even, the complaints handed down from one generation to the next like an old heirloom. That original 1960s Generation Gap just seemed so much more vital, so much more urgent. 

It's now also so much in the past:

So go celebrate the anniversary with an Early Bird Special. Especially if you've got the munchies.

Home Wreckers

1943-2017

I've only paid sporadic attention to playwright (and sometimes movie star) Sam Shepard over the years, so I'm not going to give you a full rundown of his career. I did watch and "enjoy" the PBS version of his play True West with a young Gary Sinese and John Malkovich that first aired in 1984,  and has been shown several times since. If you're wondering why I put the word "enjoy" in quotation marks--Hey, I did it again!--the play is a trenchant commentary on the American Dream, family dynamics, the creative process, and what happens when you neglect the housekeeping. Shepard may have had some other response in mind than mere "enjoyment". Cold sweats, maybe. Anyway, have a look:

Whew!

An actress by the name of Margaret Thomson played the mother. I don't blame her for wanting to get the hell out of that madhouse and visit Picasso, even if he was dead by then. She could drop in on Matisse and Duchamp while she's at it.

Well, I hope you enjoyed that (I thought italics might work better.)