Lorenzo W. Milam

He did all these things while living alone in an apartment in Berkeley, Calif. Not content with that, he went about town on a Stanford University-built electric gurney. That gurney, with Mark lying there on his back, enclosed in a plastic bubble, was forever and a day on the streets, O’Brien guiding the machine with his foot. He would zoom down the sidewalk, run off the curb and the whole thing would topple over — dumping him out on the pavement. Somehow he would dragoon people around him into picking him up and sticking him back on his contraption, inside the cocoon, and then he would roar off again, ramming into walls and people, oblivious to the strange sight he was making in a city so used to strange sights.

That Mark was out on the streets and not hidden away in some nursing home was a testament to his Irish dander. Remember, this is a man who — since age 6 — had the use of one muscle in his right foot, one muscle in his neck and one in his jaw. That’s it. He made full use of the three. He used the foot muscle to steer his monster machine; he used the other two to bang with a stick on the keys of a computer, to write, cajole, editorialize, storm, cry, laugh and rage. You tell me he wasn’t a nut-case?

They educated him at home the first 20 years of his life and then stuck him away in a nursing home. He put up with that for a while, then one day he said, “I’m going to college.” He did, too — moved out on his own, at age 30, got his degree (in English, at the University of California, Berkeley) in five years, then started graduate school.

They should have applauded him — right? Nonsense. At one point, Social Security administrators tried to take away his benefits because he wasn’t keeping “appropriate records” pertaining to his attendants. They made him go through an extended hearing to keep his $400 a month. Your tax dollars at work.

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O’Brien’s special gift, I suspect, was his heart-stopping honesty. He wrote an article for a book of mine about sex and disability (“CripZen: A Manual for Survival”), and I felt his personal revelations — about masturbation — were dandy but, well, a bit too personal. I asked if he didn’t want to use a pseudonym. He wouldn’t hear of it.

And when he finally, at age 36, had his first taste of love, with a sex surrogate, he wrote a long article about it that was published in several places, including the Sun magazine of North Carolina. The paragraph about looking at himself in the mirror always struck me as being one of the most poignant in all of disabled literature:

After she got off the mattress, she took a large mirror out of her tote bag. It was about two feet long and framed in wood. Holding it so that I could see myself, Cheryl asked what I thought of the man in the mirror. I said that I was surprised I looked so normal, that I wasn’t the horribly twisted and cadaverous figure I had always imagined myself to be. I hadn’t seen my genitals since I was six years old. That was when polio struck me, shriveling me below my diaphragm in such a way that my view of my lower body had been blocked by my chest. Since then, that part of me had seemed unreal.

He was honest about his sexuality — and equally honest about his loneliness, which for most of the disabled is a harsh fact of life. (There will always be something very bittersweet about the ad he posted on his
home page: “I am looking for an intelligent, literate woman for companionship and, perhaps, sexual play. I am, as you see, completely paralyzed, so there will be no walks on the beach.”)

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O’Brien left some fine presents for us. Not the anger, which made him write, “God damn this wall I cannot punch God damn this bat I cannot swing God damn this eucalyptus leaf I cannot pull down off a tree and hold up to my lover’s nose.” No, his gift for us was not rage — for that’s something that runs heavy and fast in the blood of all his disabled brethren. Nor was it something they call “courage.” “Saying a disabled person is courageous,” he once wrote me, “is like saying that a black person has natural rhythm.”

Once O’Brien did an interview with physicist Stephen Hawking. As he was waiting, some ninny from PBS came up and asked Mark if seeing Hawking gave him hope. He wrote, “This struck me as an awfully stupid question. Hope for what? Could Dr. Hawking change my life, make me walk, get me a lover? I tried to think of a polite way to answer her. I just didn’t want to get sucked into being cast as a Spokesperson for the Disabled in a dreary story headlined ‘Disabled Inspired by Dr. Hawking.’”

I suspect that the thing we should most value Mark for, outside of his appealing (and sometime appalling) honesty, was his chutzpah. I am thinking about the way the interview with Hawking came about. Mark set the whole thing up, and somehow got his dreadful space-age gurney maneuvered into the meeting hall at UC-Berkeley where the physicist was appearing. I can almost picture it now. Hawking in his little chair, with his motionless face and his typing-talking machine; O’Brien laid out flat on his back on his gurney, his face pressed to the side, his voice barely audible:

O’Brien: Do you ever feel frustration, rage at being disabled?

Hawking: No.

O’Brien: Does your work help you to deal with these feelings?

Hawking: Yes. I have been lucky. I don’t have anything to be angry about.

Pure O’Brien. He wasn’t interested in the stars, or in time, or even in the history of time. He was trying to get Hawking to talk about his feelings — to talk about this astonishing thing that had happened to his body, and what it did to his psyche. For O’Brien, and I, and all our disabled friends know that there is no one in the world, not even a mental giant like Hawking, who can lose the use of his body without having it resonate powerfully in the soul.

O’Brien: Dr. Hawking, what can you say to all the disabled people who are stuck in nursing homes or living with their parents or in some other untenable situation and who feel that their life is over, that they have no future?

O’Brien later wrote, “As I heard this long question unravel like an ill-mannered ball of yarn, Hawking continued to look at me and typed his answer into the voice synthesizer. I couldn’t see his right hand, the one he used to type. I waited. All of us waited. Then the silence was cracked by the voice synthesizer’s crisp, booming voice.”

Hawking: It can be very difficult. I know that I was very fortunate. All I can say is that one must do the best one can in the situation in which one finds oneself.

The good doctor left him in the lurch, didn’t he? Refused to show even a teeny bit of what they call “emotion” or “feeling.” O’Brien blew it, didn’t he? Maybe. Except for the fact that those of us who have long ago penetrated that ghastly myth of disabled courage against all odds know that O’Brien was onto something — something to teach the teacher. Something that (perhaps) Hawking, if he is lucky, has, by now, finally figured out: It hurts. And there doesn’t have to be any shame in that hurt.

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If we were to do something silly like try to create an epitaph for Mark, I probably would not dwell on his books, or his angry articles about Jack Kevorkian, or his fine baseball stories, or even the 1997 Oscar — that wonderful present for him and Jessica Yu, who directed the documentary film “Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O’Brien.”

I would, rather, choose to engrave, on the stone, a poem — one he wrote 10 years ago, titled, with typical (and delicious) O’Brien-esque irony: “Lifestyles of the Blind and Paralyzed”:

The pay is lousy,
no vacations or sick leave,
and the compliments …
You’d rather do without them.

On the plus side,
you’re exempt from military service,
get to watch lots of TV
and pay half price at the movies.

They’re out there, my public,
dying to ask me what happened to you,
wondering how I pee
and using me as proof

that God is just
and punishes only the wicked.

I recall thinking to myself that at last we had a national network that would give us something besides pop music, five-minute newscasts and ads. I also remember thinking that the work that many of us did in setting up alternative radio stations in the 1960s and 1970s had finally been vindicated, and that a new form of lively, involved radio would soon be commonplace.

It came and went so quickly — that promise. If you listen to the programs on NPR, Public Radio International or any of the 605 public stations in this country, you might wonder what all the excitement was about. For sure, you can forget all that stuff about “voices [that] would otherwise go unheard.” In the place of programs for the wondering and the curious (not to say the poor and the needy), we have those endless, mindless jazz programs, quiz games on the order of “Says You!” and “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!” and the daily advertisement for the wonders of corporate socialism called “Marketplace,” all brought to you by Archer Daniels Midland and General Electric and Exxon and Texaco and New York Life. Oh yes, there’s also the insulting patter of a couple of guys who think my car is so important that I want to hear about it for two hours every Saturday.

And if you ask whatever happened to those wonderful programs from before, the ones that could change us and move us, the response concerns money: “We’ve got to pay the bills. You don’t know how expensive it is to do radio.” People always say that.

Actually, I do know how expensive it is to do radio. My first station, a public station in Seattle — put on the air long before NPR and PRI — had an annual operating budget of $25,000. Admittedly, that was in 1965 dollars. Admittedly, we had two paid employees and a huge volunteer staff. But with that $25,000 we did some astounding programming — stuff that would turn your head around: live drama, live chamber music, music from all over the world, wonderful and diverse commentary. And those were the years of the civil rights struggle. We had tapes from Jackson and Birmingham and Selma, soul-wrenching tapes about what was going on in the streets, put together (and paid for) by volunteers who not only were talented but cared about radio and cared, deeply, about what we put on the air.

“We have the listeners now.” People always tell us that, too. “In the past decade,” NPR says, “we’ve doubled our listenership.” But 22,000,000 listeners is not the point. It only confirms Milam’s first law of broadcasting: Double the income, double the listenership and the programming gets more stupid.

Poor NPR. Emasculated, lost its nuts, and at such a young age. They say it happened sometime in the ’90s, when Congress insisted that NPR become self-supporting. But that’s not it. The balls of great American radio were not stolen by Newt Gingrich but disappeared in the early days when it was decided that public broadcasting would be built on the commercial model. Instead of looking to the wondrous, shit-kicking experimental radio coming out of England (BBC), Canada (CBC), France (RDF) and Japan (NHK), it was decided that NPR would be a gussied-up version of NBC, CBS and ABC. And soon enough, NPR began to follow their rules: Don’t rock the boat, don’t get the natives up in arms, don’t question the system and, most of all, don’t mess with the sponsors.

Thus, for $100,000,000 a year, a quarter-million dollars a day, we get “The Savvy Traveler” and “Along for the Ride” and “Only a Game.” It’s only a game, right? And that hundred mil — where does it come from, where does it all go? As they said in “Chinatown,” if you want to know why everything is so weird, follow the money. Two percent of NPR’s budget comes from the feds, and 55 percent or so from its member stations. Most of the rest comes from corporate sponsors and foundations.

Every now and again I think that it’s all a delusion — that something important and alive is happening out there in radio land and that I just don’t know where to look. Maybe they do it when I’m asleep. Even when I tune in to the much-vaunted “All Things Considered,” I hear an extended review of rock records (rock!), another (another!) peek at the stock market and a one-minute review of books. The promises made to us long ago are long forgotten.

Ten years ago I got a C-band satellite receiver and started listening to the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. network. Now that’s radio. Great classical and ethnic music. A wonderful jazz program in which the producer actually does some serious homework on the masters, mixing interviews and biography and music: Bix Beiderbecke, Miles Davis, Fats Waller, Artie Shaw, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie. Talks — serious talks — on politics and science and art and literature: Shakespeare, Chaucer, Keats, Yeats, T.S. Eliot. Instead of one-minute book reviews, a full half-hour of serious interviews with an author. And, oh yes, radio dramas, commissioned by the CBC, performed as high art.

One of those dramas came into my bedroom on a Saturday afternoon, back in 1991 or 1992. It was called “Grasshopper Hill.” I was lying in bed reading while listening idly to the radio. Then I stopped reading. The protagonist had been caught by the Nazis and put in a concentration camp. At the end of the war, he emigrated to Vancouver and ended up teaching in a college there. He was describing to another teacher, his lover, what it was like.

He didn’t want to tell her everything, but she insisted, so he told her about being in the camp, working during the day in the storehouse for eyeglasses and hair and jewels they called “Canada.” Canada was paradise for working prisoners, the one place where you could have everything, especially food, taken from the new victims — food that, sometimes, you had to kill for.

As he talked his anger, bitter and mocking, became very clear. He had seen too much. No matter how hard she tried, there would always be that between them. He had seen too much there, in that other Canada. Love, any love, could never reach him.

In slightly more than an hour, I learned more than I could ever want to about what it was like to be in Auschwitz — what it did to the soul, to one’s humanity, to the ability to be touched. It was a radio drama that could and did change one’s view of the world, of what we laughingly call “Western civilization.”

I subsequently contacted the CBC and finally found someone who had helped make the program. I talked her into making a copy for me (which was highly illegal). I then made several copies and sent two to NPR — one to its president, another to Susan Stamberg (whom I had met a couple of times). I also sent a copy to my local PBS station. I asked all of them to listen to the tapes and try to figure out a way to get them broadcast. I thought “Grasshopper Hill” was that important.

I don’t have to tell you what came of it all. I was an innocent. I was still thinking of the NPR we had back in the beginning — the radio network that had been set up to give voices to those who had been voiceless for so long. At least, I thought, they would respond to my request and thank me for trying.

It’s very simple, really. All you have to remember is that early on, public radio was just that — for the public. But then, somehow, while we weren’t looking, they privatized it — gave it to those who have far more say-so than you or I, turned it over to people who have a distaste for controversy and challenge and complicated issues.

Public radio has become very, very private — a National Private Radio owned lock, stock and barrel by those who have all the chips.

Until those times, twice a year, when they crank up the money-begging machine and tell us that we’re listening to public radio. National Public Radio. Yours and mine. To support. Until the goal is met.

As he has for years, Lewis continues to headline the annual telethon for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. It’s no accident that “Jerry’s kids” sometimes move about not unlike the comedian of yore. The “Merck Manual of Medical Information” defines “muscular dystrophies and other myopathies” as “muscle weakness causing waddling gait, toe-walking, lordosis, frequent falls, and difficulty in standing up and climbing stairs.” Sounds just like the Jerry Lewis I remember from back in the day. He is, in more ways than not, one of his beloved kids.

And, like a kid, Lewis is always getting in a fix. Recently, while being interviewed on the “CBS Sunday Show,” he said, “I’m telling you about a child in trouble. If it’s pity, we’ll get money. I’m giving you the facts. Pity. You don’t want to be pitied because you are a cripple in a wheelchair, stay in your house.”

As usual, it raised a few hackles among the militant disabled but, in truth, he’s right. We disabled will always evoke pity. And if we want to get away from it, we damn well better stay at home.

Yesterday I was at the Piggly-Wiggly and I got the security guard to download my wheelchair from the car to the pavement. As he helped me get in, he said, “I’m just hopin’ that my friend won’t be using one of these the rest of his life.” I asked him what he meant and he said, “He got in a wreck last week. Drunk driver. They cut his legs off here [motioning across his thighs]. I just hope he won’t be in one of these things the rest of his life.”

I, of course, agreed with him.

That kind of stuff used to drive me up the wall. Here I am, trying to slip through life without anyone knowing that I’m a hopeless cripple and people are forever and a day patting me on the head, telling me that God will never give me something I can’t handle. Then, five will get you 10, they’ll start in on an anecdote about one of their friends or relations who are “in the same place you’re in.” Fights, falls, cancer, car wrecks, diabetes, amputation, hunting accidents, stroke — I’ve heard them all.

I’d be a fool not to see pity in their words. But I would also be a fool not to accept their words with, God help me, a touch of forgiveness. It used to drive me bananas, this cut-off-at-the-knees stuff, but something has mellowed me. Security Guard is reaching out in the only way he knows how. He means no harm. His pity is part and parcel of me and my life and my wheelchair and, I would guess, everything else having to do with life in the world around us.

Despite my disabled brothers’ and sisters’ outright loathing for Jerry Lewis, he’s probably right. He’s playing the pity card, in spades, and it works. Those little kids, the young and the innocent — cut down in the bloom of life. They’ve been given something that should never have been. They have learned at age 5 or 10 or 15 what it is like to be 80 or 90 years of age.

As a result of Lewis’ work, the MDA is one of the richest foundations in this country. Last year, it took in over $150 million. That’s 150 million smackers in cold, hard cash. Its total assets are close to $200 million. Its expenses are somewhat out of hand, but it spends $15 million a year on research, and an additional $40 million that goes to grants, allocations and assistance to individuals. The MDA’s director is paid $350,000.

Lewis knows the vocabulary of crippledom as well as I do. Just like me, he’s been around. He has to look no further than New Mobility, the hottest magazine in the disabled world, to see the word “cripple.” The pages are peppered with it — along with “gimp” and “crip” and, every now and again, from the likes of shameless writers like me, “basket case.”

We don’t call ourselves “disabled” with our fellow crips. We wouldn’t be caught dead saying “differently abled.” The word of choice is “crippled” — and it’s an ancient and honorable word. The Rev. W.W. Skeat, of etymological fame, tells us it comes from the Anglo-Saxon word “creopan” — to creep.

I guess that the only people who are going to shy away from it are those proper folk who like to complain about Jerry and me and the kids. We just think it’s a commonplace word that’s honest and true.

Already, she’s a beautiful woman who has the power “to inflict heavy damage.” With her will and her no-nonsense muscles — it takes muscles to swim as gloriously as she did — she puts an end to this early threat to her well-being.

Soon after, with the combination of beauty and power, she is on her way to the top, beginning with Billy Rose’s Aquacades at the 1940 San Francisco World’s Fair; and then — shortly after — as a rising young star at MGM. Swimming, always swimming; and smiling, always smiling.

She was the first real on-screen swimmer. She was good at it. It was pure power. It was her livelihood. And then there were the aesthetics of it. In one of the few lyric passages in “The Million Dollar Mermaid,” she tells us about being on camera, in the water: “I began lolling underwater, rolling over and over very languidly in that pretty little suit … It was as if I were at home. And of course I was — I genuinely loved swimming and being underwater … It appeared as if I had invited the audience into the water with me, and it conveyed the sensation that being in there was absolutely delicious.”

“As if I had invited the audience in with me.” And they came quickly, too. Soon enough she was a star; soon enough she was married, the breadwinner, the man of the family for her “buffoonish” husband and three children — bringing in, over the next 15 years, some $10 million in 1950s dollars.

The second key event in Williams’ tale comes with what we now call a “mid-life crisis.” She’s almost 40. Under the pressure of television, MGM — which has been her training ground, her main support and her source of fame — is falling apart. She wasn’t minding the store, either. Her husband, somehow, managed to squander all $10 million and more — on bad investments, booze, the horses.

After everything disappears (her marriage, her job, her youth, her money) she finds herself on the edge. “I was single again, and at a crossroads in my life. I was deeply in debt, with a career on the ropes, and I had three small children I was going to have to nurture and support. It was at this time that I read about Cary Grant’s use of LSD under a doctor’s supervision, and how it had given a new direction to his life.”

In those days, LSD was still an experimental drug, and was often used by doctors to help bring people out of terminal depression. A clinic in Hollywood administered the drug to her in a controlled setting, and, shortly afterwards, looking in the mirror, this is what she saw: “I was startled by a split image: One half of my face, the right half, was me; the other half was the face of a sixteen-year-old boy. The left side of my upper body was flat and muscular, like the chest of a boy. I reached up with my boy’s large, clumsy hand to touch my right breast and felt my penis stirring. It was a hermaphroditic phantasm that held me entranced as I discovered my divided body. I don’t know how long I stood there touching and exploring, but I was not afraid.”

The two-in-one, the arsey-versey, the perfectly bifurcated soul. Esther Williams is still a gorgeous woman, but hidden somewhere within her, as with all women, is a man.

In psychological jargon, it’s called the animus. Inside all of us, Carl Jung wrote, lies our opposite. For men, it is the anima, the female part, “relatedness, emotionality, a spontaneous and unplanned approach to life” (as psychologist Yoram Kaufman would later describe it).

For women, it is the animus, “to judge and to act, for discipline and aggressiveness … The animus is symbolized by male figures appearing in a woman’s dreams and fantasies, as a husband, son, father, lover, Prince Charming …”

Williams’ acid-induced vision produces the two other key events that turn up in this autobiography. The first we might call “The unveiling of the animus.” She’s in love with Jeff Chandler, the handsome leading man from the ’50s. They are thinking about getting married. They’re in his house. She’s cooking supper. She goes upstairs to find, “Jeff was standing in the middle of the bedroom in a red wig, a flowered chiffon dress, expensive high-heeled shoes, and lots of makeup.”

She screamed. And screamed. And screamed. “‘Take that off! Take that all off now!’ I yelled and started screaming again.”

Most critics have taken this passage as a wonderful joke. What a laugh! Hunky Jeff Chandler, dressed in drag. The gossip columnists have had a field day with it. But it’s a five-page scream, and it goes beyond normal terror. “I couldn’t stop myself … It’s a scream that has no logic. It is sheer, uncontrolled panic. I just stood there in the center of the doorway and screamed. It was the kind of scream that … has one tone to it. It doesn’t go into any bars of music. It’s not a movie star scream, but the kind you make when your mind shuts down.”

What was it about Jeff Chandler in drag that created such an explosion in Esther Williams? She’s no dummy. She has seen lots of strange sights in show biz. There was Johnny Weismuller: “Under the stage (out of the audience’s sight) … he’d whip off his trunks so I could see that he was beautifully equipped, and if he caught me, he’d try to get my suit off.”

Or Morton Downey: “I had to listen to Morton Downey as I walked out onstage for each entrance … in sotto voce, heard only by me, Morton spewed four-letter words, regaling me with graphic descriptions of what he would like to do on and to my body.”

She’s been hustled by countless stars and producers: Victor Mature, Billy Rose, Desi Arnaz. She’s acted with dozens of boys: Mickey Rooney with his temper tantrums; Gene Kelly: small, petty and mercilessly cruel to her; Red Skelton crying because, in one sequence, he’s going to have to shave his chest hair. What’s different about this new vision is that she’s fresh from her LSD experience, an extraordinarily powerful one. On acid, she saw herself in the mirror not only as a woman, but as a strong young man, whose “clumsy hand” touched her breast, as she “felt my penis stirring.”

When Williams saw Jeff Chandler dolled up (high heels! chiffon dress!) she was, again, looking in the mirror, as she had on LSD — but this time she saw something different. She saw before her Esther Williams — a man in woman’s clothing. And the vision scared the bejesus out of her.

Shortly after, she found a way to deal with it, for within months, she took up with actor Fernando Lamas. It was a marriage that was to last for 22 years. Like almost all of the men she was associated with, Fernando was a boy. But he had something different going for him. He was the kind of boy they call macho.

They made an agreement. They would have a perfect MGM married life. She knew those well, because she had acted them out in dozens of movies, with names like “Thrill of a Romance,” “Neptune’s Daughter,” “Easy to Wed” and “Fiesta.” The script was simple. There would be a beautiful husband, a beautiful housewife, a big house. Lamas wouldn’t play around. He would be faithful. She’d play her part of a married woman. No children (she had children, but he didn’t want them in the house; she complied.) She wouldn’t make any movies, either. Fernando didn’t like competition — from within, or from without.

Most of all, he would always be the man. She would never cross him. Once she tried. She called him “stupid.” You don’t call a Latino “stupid,” ever. He grabbed her dress “and wrenched it down, ripping both side seams down to the waistline. The dress was completely ruined, and I was sitting in the parking garage exposed and humiliated by what had now become a public display.”

The unmasking. Before, she had been this strange, bifurcated being. No longer. She tries to assert herself, and Lamas rips off her dress in front of everyone. Look, he is saying. You are a woman. You don’t believe me. Look in the mirror. And if you ever doubt it, or me, I will always unmask you. Now everyone knows that she is no longer the mermaid (torso of a woman, lower body a fish). Under Lama’s tutelage, she’s just a woman, a married woman, a hausfrau who cooks and takes care of the house; who won’t ever touch another man; who will grow fat, so no one will ever want to touch her.

“If a positive conscious relationship cannot be maintained toward the animus,” writes psychologist Kaufman, “we meet the notorious animus-ridden woman.” For 22 years Esther Williams lived like that. For outsiders, it was the perfect MGM marriage — learned from all those happy films she made. Perfect strong husband, perfect passive wife.

Lamas had been quick to recognize his main competitor, the one inside of her. He was even quicker to stamp it out — and she was eager to cooperate. Because she had looked in the mirror and didn’t like what she saw.

The East Coast media has gone quite gooey over “The Million Dollar Mermaid.” There was an interview on National Public Radio. There was a fond review in the Washington Post, and an even fonder one in the New York Times — with a follow-up interview, a nice squishy one by Todd S. Purdam.

Too bad they missed the boat. She knew her lines perfectly. She’d been memorizing them for years. “Nothing quite prepares a visitor for the sight of Esther Williams herself,” Purdam croons, “in short white shorts, black flats, black tube top and white cotton blouse adorned with a rhinestone-speckled applique of a top hat and gloves on the front. She emerges from the shade of her living room in full-body makeup, legs firm and posture perfect, smiling that 1,000 watt waterproof smile, and asks politely, ‘Would you like to take a swim?’”

Yikes! We’re back in 1950 again, on the MGM swim lot, aren’t we?

At one point, Purdam questions her about the fact that she stayed with the tyrannical Lamas for so long. Why didn’t she just get out? “I think it’s so funny when people think they can’t control a movie star,” she says, smiling brightly. “They can. We’re just women, you know.”

Right. We’re just women, you know. And mermaids.

And, in the mirror, at times — strange, passionate young men.

Salinger apparently lives in a tiny town in New Hampshire and only comes out of his shell when he sees a picture of a sexy young girl on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, or when someone has the bad taste to dig up his old stories out of the Saturday Evening Post — dreadful World War II short stories with names like “The Last Day of the Last Furlough.” As in Hughes’ case, at times like these Salinger’s lawyers surface, letting us all know, at the very least, that he’s still alive and kicking.

Many years ago, my mother read “The Catcher in the Rye.” She was appalled by the school life that it depicted. She asked me what I thought of the book. “I thought it was very funny,” I said. And it was. The horror of Pencey Prep was lost on me and on most of my friends, because we were right in the middle of it.

The story of how one of the students at Pencey was driven to suicide by his peers went over my head because at the school I went to, rough hazing was so commonplace that we didn’t even feel the need to comment on it. It’s like asking a very poor person what it feels like to be poor. Since they are dealing with it every day, the question becomes meaningless. “We were so poor that we didn’t even think about being poor,” is the way they react to such a question.

This torturing of students was very democratic. I remember one afternoon coming down the stairs of Hamill House and in the hallway Ed Lawson, the captain of the wrestling team, was beating up on Nicolas Kulukundis. For some reason I paused and told Lawson that he should stop doing whatever he was doing to Nicolas, a very shy and very awkward Greek. Lawson paused in his work, told me that if I didn’t shut up, he was going to pound my head “into that wall over there.” I shut up.

Kulukundis’ father, I found out later, owned most of the shipping fleet in postwar Greece and, to this day, I often catch myself hoping that Nicholas will one day remember fondly how I had saved him from mayhem and reward me with a tanker or so.

Salinger was a writer who made many of us feel not-so-alone in the drear, dry ’50s. We knew we had what he called “craziness” — a bit juvenile, a bit Zen — and, in our bleak post-pubescence, he was a writer who talked to us: talked our language, with characters like Holden, and Franny, and Zooey, and Esmi. A spare and very funny language it was, too.

Paul Alexander, the humbug who cranked out “Salinger: A Biography,” reminds me of Ed Lawson — a bully, one who’s always trying to “get” someone — but in this case, a word bully. Lawson just can’t seem to figure out that Jerome David Salinger is a person who prefers being left alone. He isn’t interested in appearing on “Oprah” or “The Tonight Show” to talk about his life and his loves. Many of us admire Salinger greatly for his writing, and — since we despair at the current, noxious confusion between the artist and the art — we admire him equally for his reticence. It is, truly, an unwillingness to exploit the self. It is, if you will, the reverse side of Norman Mailer.

In Alexander’s first chapter, “A Sighting,” we don’t see Salinger. Rather, we get to see Alexander, the original Ivy League groupie, unable to leave a man alone — to the point of skulking around Salinger’s house in New Hampshire, poking through the garbage can, sneaking a peek in the mailbox. And not only is Alexander a noisome spy, he also has delusions of grandeur. “What I felt,” he sighs, “was that as I was watching the house someone inside it was watching me.” Yeah. Hoping like hell this twit would go away.

In 1933, Gertrude Stein published “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.” It was the life story of the woman she had loved and lived with for so long. It’s a winsome book, an affectionate portrait of not only Toklas, but of Stein pretending to be Toklas, and thus giving us a Chinese box portrait of the two of them. It’s only in the last line that the name of the true author is revealed.

In 1972, writer Clifford Irving decided to do the same with Howard Hughes. But Irving forgot that he wasn’t Gertrude Stein. Also, he didn’t live with — and presumably didn’t love — Hughes. It was, instead, a con job of the first water, a totally fabricated piece of chicanery — which finally caused the reclusive subject of the book to rise up in wrath. Irving got salted away in the hoosegow for a couple of years for his troubles, and the “Autobiography” was never published. At least, not until now, a quarter-century after the fact.

Hughes was obviously an interesting, driven, perhaps tortured person (anyone who has a jillion dollars and yet chooses to get strung out on codeine clearly has some issues.) But the fictionalized account that comes to us from Irving’s hand presents us with a ho-hum braggart; a repetitive, arrogant, fop; a lout with a penchant for the pretty skirt. No wonder Hughes was so miffed. How would you like some ham-fisted, second-rate scribbler making up your autobiography whole cloth, and doing a bad job of it?

The scandal is not that Irving fabricated it; the scandal is that he had such lousy insight into the character, works and peculiarities of Hughes — and that he did such a puerile job with whatever facts he could dig up or make up. In response to a purported question about Hughes’ purported affair with Jean Harlow, Clifford has his doppelgänger say: “If you want to know whether or not I had an affair with her, the answer is yes. I went to bed with her because she was the star and I was the director and in those days it was one of the obligatory things to do. She came to my office one evening after the shoot and asked me to read some lines with her. I did that, of course, and the next thing I knew she was down on her knees, unbuttoning my fly.”

Somehow — just somehow — it’s hard to picture one of the most bold, original and wealthy adventurers in America telling some second-rate fraud about a ho-hum knob-job that took place 40 years before. As they say in English literature, it just don’t parse.

Irving only got two-and-a-half years in the Graybar Hotel for his efforts. It should have been much more. If the judge had been forced to read through the whole of this pastry-pot, Irving would have gotten 25 years to life: for botching what could have been, after all, a great picaresque novel.

Soon enough, he left Reynolds for Elizabeth Taylor. And when that marriage collapsed, he got hitched to Connie Stevens. Throughout all these musical chairs, he was singing, pouring out records — and the money was pouring in, along with the women. Queen Elizabeth asked him to dance; Bette Davis “made drool eyes at me.” He knew, sometimes intimately, Ava Gardner, Audrey Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe, Gina Lollobrigida, Brigitte Bardot, Joan Collins, Sue Lyon, Lana Turner, Margaret Truman. So much fun, so many parties. One wonders how he was able to find time to record songs between his bouts of passion.

In anyone else’s hands, this would be your typical ho-hum let-me-tell-you-about-being-a-star-and-getting-laid routine. But there is something else going on in “Been There, Done That.” First, Eddie Fisher and his co-writer know how to put words together. The story is fascinating; the one-liners are funny; the vignettes are out of this world. Especially when he is telling us exactly what it was like to live with Elizabeth Taylor: “She was drinking and taking pills and passing out. She was constantly passing out. It was just awful; not awful enough to make me miss my life with Debbie, but awful.”

Once when he threatened to leave, Taylor swallowed an entire bottle of Seconol. “I tried to stay calm,” Fisher writes, “although it’s hard to stay calm when foam is coming out of your wife’s mouth.” Another time, he dared to venture the opinion that she should do something about her addictions. “Elizabeth, what would you think about going to see a psychiatrist?” he asked.

“As it turned out, not very much,” Fisher recalls. “She erupted. She started screaming at me … She got out of bed, totally naked, and ran down the stairs. I ran right after her. She got into her Cadillac and turned on the engine. It was crazy, this hysterical naked woman trying to drive while I ran alongside the car, holding on to her door. I was begging her to stop, telling her, ‘It’s not you, it’s me. I’ll go to the psychiatrist. I’ll go, I’ll go, it’s me …’”

There’s a genuine juvenile enthusiasm in “Been There, Done That.” It’s the sense of wonder that you or I would have if we woke up one morning as a star. And we get the feeling that Fisher’s still stunned that a poor kid from the streets of Philadelphia could end up, all of a sudden, living “under the bank on the hill, where the money just rolls down.” With Elizabeth Taylor.

The tale of Elizabeth and Eddie — they called him “Mr. Taylor” — is enough to make a grown man cry … and, often, to laugh: “The one thing that it was impossible to ever forget when you were with Elizabeth Taylor,” he tells us, “was that you were with Elizabeth Taylor … She was smart and funny and beautiful. And sexy. Very, very sexy. Sexually she was every man’s dream; she had the face of an angel and the morals of a truck driver.”

Fisher did not marry Elizabeth Taylor. Rather, he entered into a contract with her to let her run his life, and to be subject to her every whim, to deal with her incessant pill-taking, her endless boozing, her tantrums, her sulks, and her impossible Jezebel nature. “I had successfully made the transition from one of the country’s most popular singers to Elizabeth’s companion and nurse,” he writes. “I was caught in a magnificent trap, and even though I was madly in love with her, it was still a trap. I’d forgotten who I was … The only singing I was doing was around the house.”

And what did he do when he she ran off with Richard Burton? “I couldn’t stop loving her, and needing her. I missed her more than I had ever missed anyone in my life. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sit still, so I did the only thing that made sense at the time. I appeared on the television quiz show ‘What’s My Line’ as the mystery guest.”

Fisher’s final meeting with Taylor gives him a chance to reflect on what he had been to her — and what Burton was now to become: “We met at their suite at the Regency. I was surprised at how the balance of their relationship had changed. Elizabeth was in complete control, Burton had become almost docile and very domesticated … As Elizabeth and I were talking, he was performing all my old duties: He was picking up, giving her a pillow, pouring drinks. He had become her nurse. Maybe he was doing ‘Hamlet’ onstage, but in real life he was playing my role.”

Fisher’s first experience with drugs came from one Dr. Max Jacobson. He remembers the date with exactitude: April 17, 1953. And he didn’t stop for 37 years. Most of the famous people he knew — in show biz, in music, in politics — were doing it. Even John Fitzgerald Kennedy: “I had arrived at Max Jacobson’s office for my shot and found the place in an uproar. ‘Come wit me,’ he ordered. ‘I haf to see the President.’ I knew Max had very powerful friends, but the President? … With Max, anything was possible. Max could make night into day. Max with his filthy fingernails and his magic potions treating the President of the United States?”

According to Fisher, the president took Dr. Max with him when he went to Vienna for a summit meeting with Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev. “Looking back on it, it’s amazing how we all just accepted the fact that the President was taking Dr. Feelgood with him to a meeting that would affect the entire world. The fate of the free world rested on Max’s injections. I can still see Max taking a little from this bottle, a little from that one, and ‘pull down your pants, Mr. President.’”

What sets Fisher’s tale apart from the thousand-and-one other I-Was-A-Star books is the fact that he is obviously no dummy. He’s someone who can tell us his funny-sad tale with wit and a certain amount of astute introspection. And occasionally, he will stop and make a cogent summary of the foolish things he’s done with his life: “By the time I was thirty-three years old I’d been married to America’s sweetheart and America’s femme fatale and both marriages had ended in scandal; I’d been one of the most popular singers in America and had given up my career for love; I had fathered two children and adopted two children and rarely saw any of them; I was addicted to methamphetamines and I couldn’t sleep at night without a huge dose of Librium. And from all this I had learned one very important lesson: There were no rules for me. I could get away with anything so long as that sound came out of my throat.”

Who would ever suspect that Eddie Fisher, the man who made so many awful records — songs he himself calls “bubble-gum” — the man who was shooting meth and cocaine for 37 straight years, the one who bungled several marriages with several of the most gorgeous women in Hollywood — who could ever guess that he would create an autobiography that is such a kick in the pants?

This is a man who, literally, got a shirt off of JFK’s back; one who loved the loveliest women of our time; one who hung out with all the stars and the mafioso kings; one who turned down part ownership in Caesar’s Palace (“I wanted nothing more to do with Caesar and Cleopatra”); the man who abandoned all his children, the man whose third wife would write, “I wish you good luck, good health and wealth and happiness in your own time on your terms — I do not wish you love as you wouldn’t know what to do with it.”

Fisher is a man who shot up with the stars, and who ended up, in his most desperate days, travelling with “Roy Radin’s Vaudeville Review,” also known as “The cavalcade of has-beens,” along with Tiny Tim, Georgie Jessel and Donald O’Connor, “who was whacked out of his mind most of the time.”

When he was on top, he says, “I walked into theatres and championship fights without a ticket. I could make a phone call and have airplanes wait for me. Now I had to learn how to lead a normal life.”

Fisher is now 70. Surprisingly, he survived. He makes it quite clear that even now, his main regret is that he wasn’t able to hang onto his No. 1 shiksa, Elizabeth Taylor. This juvenile passion and his endless roll-call of sexual conquests are not very impressive. But we are impressed that Fisher is able, at this late date, to come up with a brand new act, one associated neither with his music nor his weenie.

Here we have a faded pop star who has, out of the blue, developed a brand new trick that he doesn’t even mention in his book: The ability to write winningly and well. “Been There, Done That” is self-deprecating, and droll — and sometimes very sad. But all the while it’s honest, and very, very good.