“Be realistic. Demand the impossible.”
–Student slogan, May ’68, Paris
There was a moment in 1968 when anything seemed possible. When suddenly, unexpectedly, it appeared that my deepest desires were about to be fulfilled.
It happened when Lyndon Johnson, that towering contradiction, announced at the end of a televised address to the nation, “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”
“I did a backflip,” Tom Hayden recalls, “I was sitting in front of the television set and I fell over backwards.”
Todd Gitlin, another veteran of the ’60s, was equally astounded: “You’re often amazed when things you devoutly wish for actually come to pass, and this was one of those moments. It felt like we had won.”
I was a 19-year-old college student, staring incredulously at the flickering image of the commander in chief, when his words suddenly struck with the force of revelation. The war in Vietnam might actually be over! I might not have to make the fight-or-flight choice — jungle combat or exile in Canada — that had so tormented me, and thousands more like me.
We were all like Yossarian in “Catch-22.” We took this very personally. “They” were trying to kill “us.” But now Johnson had abdicated. We were free. It felt, quite simply, like a miracle.
Four days later, this mood was shattered. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed in Memphis. The assassin, said to be a white man, had escaped. I went to a memorial service at my campus chapel, and when a black student — an acting major with a resonant, baritone voice — stood up, all alone, and began singing “We Shall Overcome,” I started to cry uncontrollably.
This had never happened to me before, and it scared me. I ran out of the church, stumbling across the campus; when I simply couldn’t stop crying, fear and shame drove me back to my room, where I crawled into bed and stayed there, trembling, for hours.
Perhaps there were other reasons why I broke down, but I know I experienced King’s assassination as the murder of hope.
I was hardly alone. “This just seemed like the definitive statement,” remembers Gitlin, author of “The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage.” “America tried to redeem itself and now they’ve killed the man who was taking us to the mountaintop.”
No wonder Washington was burning and troops had surrounded the U.S. Capitol. The fire this time.
That’s what 1968 was like: whiplash. A moment of euphoria followed by crushing despair. Events happened with such intensity, and in such rapid succession, they left people breathless.
“There was blood everywhere,” recalls the Rev. Samuel Kyles, who was standing on the motel balcony next to King when the assassin fired. “In the midst of all the chaos, I saw there was a crushed cigarette in his hand. Martin didn’t smoke publicly but he started smoking privately because of all the pressure. The Vietnam pressure [King had denounced the war, incurring the wrath of the establishment and alienating some of his own supporters]. The pressure the FBI had on him. I took that cigarette, just took it out of his hand.”
It’s a detail that lingers: A cigarette burning in his fallen hand. Martin Luther King Jr., the man, not the saint. A man who knew fear, and kept going.
“At that point I had been so knocked out of my middle-class assumptions that I didn’t know what would happen,” said Hayden. “Perhaps the country could be reformed and Robert Kennedy elected president. Perhaps we would be plunged into a civil war and I’d be imprisoned or killed. It seemed impossible to tell what country we were in and what was about to happen.”
If that sounds melodramatic, just consider how the narrative arc of 1968 in America continued.
Out of the ashes of the riots in the wake of King’s murder, new
hope came in the form of Bobby Kennedy, who had undergone a profound transformation
from Vietnam hawk and aide to Sen. Joe McCarthy to dove and spokesman for
the dispossessed.
Kennedy’s campaign was suddenly a romantic odyssey. The last hero. The
crowds — black and white, young and old, working-class and affluent — were
enormous, frenzied. People reached out to touch him as if he were a rock
star, tearing off cuff links, even shoes. He broke bread with a fasting
Cesar Chavez to support the farm workers’ union. He won the California
primary. And then he too was gunned down.
The two great reformers, King and Kennedy, were dead.
That led to the inevitable showdown. Both sides, rebels and rulers,
were spoiling for a confrontation. Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley made it possible.
He denied permits for protesters at the Democratic Convention. While “the whole
world (was) watching,” his police rioted, clubbing demonstrators,
reporters and bystanders indiscriminately. The Democratic Party
self-destructed. The system fell apart on national television.
Backlash “law & order” candidate George Wallace stirred up the angry
white male vote. The country was dangerously polarized. Cold warrior
Richard Nixon — back from the political dead — won the presidency by a
razor-thin margin. The war in Vietnam would last another seven years,
engulfing Cambodia and Laos.
Curtain.
And that was just the year at home. In May ’68 there was very nearly a
revolution in France. In August, Russian tanks invaded Czechoslovakia and
crushed the Prague Spring, the experiment in “socialism with a human face.”
And in October the Mexican government massacred as many as 500 students
demonstrating for democracy in the streets of Mexico City.
Why was ’68 such a convulsive, extraordinary year? One theory,
popular among the chattering class, was that it was all Dr. Benjamin
Spock’s fault.
“Permissive child rearing, which actually I never experienced in
my own life, was supposed to be the source of the movement,” observed
author/activist Barbara Ehrenreich. “We heard over and over again that we
were a generation of spoiled kids, Dr. Spock’s kids. But that wasn’t true
of Germany. It was not true of Italy or Japan. The fact that this
outpouring of protest was international completely refutes that simplistic,
psychological argument.”
So what was the cause of this international phenomenon?
Demographics is no doubt a key. This was the arrival of the baby boom
writ large across the Western world. Universities were teeming from Paris
to Mexico City to Berkeley. By ’68 there were some 8 million students
enrolled in American colleges, many more than ever before.
“An enormous generation swamped the institutions that were supposed
to civilize them,” bemoaned Judge Robert Bork, who had his thumb in the
dike at Yale.
We were a generation in the midst of self-discovery and eager to
assert ourselves. The mood was distinctly rebellious on campus — for a
variety of reasons. In the United States, the struggle for racial equality
in the South clearly inspired and galvanized a youth movement.
But the war in Vietnam and the draft were absolutely central. I
remember a cover of Ramparts magazine that captured how I
felt: “Alienation is when your country is at war and you hope the other
side wins.”
The Vietnam War “broke my American heart,” said Students for a Democratic Society leader Carl
Oglesby, and I know exactly what he meant. It shattered forever my
childhood patriotism and made me question everything. The war not only
caused the greatest rift in American society since the Civil War, it
generated violent protests worldwide in ’68: London, Rome, Berlin, Tokyo.
Another factor was rising expectations. Not only were we
protesting social injustice, we — students, activists, freaks — came to believe
we were creating a new society, a counterculture. In the midst of ’68′s
tragedies, there was tremendous exuberance and joy. The economy promised
more affluence, the Kennedy-Johnson years brought more reforms, from civil
rights laws to the War on Poverty. Our motto, in a way, was: “More.”
And then, there was the music. From James Brown’s “Say It
Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud,” to the Rolling Stones’ “Street Fighting
Man.” No matter how many times the music has been cynically recycled as
nostalgic hooks in car commercials, the rock ‘n’ roll of ’68 was in real time
incandescent, sometimes incendiary.
It was on every radio, AM at that: Aretha Franklin’s
“Think,” Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart,” Sly and the Family Stone’s
“Dance to the Music,” the Temptations’ “I Wish It Would Rain,” Otis
Redding’s “Dock of the Bay,” the Doors, Cream, the Chambers Brothers and
the Beatles’ “Revolution” (warning about the dangers of carrying pictures
of Chairman Mao — excellent advice).
Much has been made of the impact television had on the ’60s
generation. But I would argue that radio was even more important. Cheap
transistors and car radios were like drums in the jungle for a worldwide
youth movement. They made the music nearly universal at a time when even
schlock rock — the Rascals’ hit, “People Got to Be Free” — carried a
“subversive” message.
No one caught the mood of impending doom more accurately than Bob
Dylan, who always seemed to be six months ahead of everybody else. In his
first post-motorcycle accident song, “All Along the Watchtower,” which Jimi
Hendrix transformed into a hit, Dylan wailed, “There’s too much confusion,
I can’t get no relief.” And in words that riveted me in ’68 and stayed with me ever since, Dylan implored: “Let us not talk falsely
now, the hour is getting late.”
In ’68 the Mexican students sang Beatles songs as they took to the
streets. Bernadette Devlin and the civil rights marchers in Northern
Ireland echoed, “We Shall Overcome.” In one of my favorite stories,
recounted by Paul Berman in his book “A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political
Journey of the Generation of 1968,” the young playwright Vaclav Havel
visited New York in the spring of ’68, went up to Columbia to observe the
student strike and purchased Frank Zappa and Velvet Underground albums to
take back to Prague, where they inspired a dissident band, the Plastic
People, and other cultural rebels.
For Havel and his comrades in the Prague Spring — who finally
succeeded 20 years later in their Velvet Revolution — Frank Zappa and
Lou Reed are heroes of the anti-authoritarian spirit that helped end Soviet
domination of Eastern Europe. (It’s a concept, incidentally, that Judge
Bork just can’t grasp. When I told him about the Havel-Zappa connection,
he just shook his head. Bork still wants to censor Zappa.)
And what of the relevance of all this, 30 years later? If nothing
else, knowing what transpired in ’68 is a way to understand our generation, the ’60s generation.
My father’s generation endured the Depression and fought World War II. But ’68
was our crucible. It was the year a generation raised in the
optimism of the New Frontier and the Beatles lost its innocence.
1968 remains a fault line in American politics: What side were you
on? As Pat Buchanan, who was a Nixon speechwriter in ’68, told me, “I
think there’s an amount of bitterness and animosity that our generation is
going to carry to its grave. These wounds aren’t going to heal.”
This is one of the reasons Bill and Hillary Clinton are the objects
of such venom. Clinton may not have been much of a street-fightin’ man,
but he was of that time, and hey, he dodged the draft, didn’t he?
Reporter Jules Witcover called his book on ’68 “The Year the Dream
Died.” The dream, that is, of King and Kennedy, of a nobler, more
inclusive, reformed America. Instead, we got Nixon, Watergate, Ronald Reagan and
25 years of political backlash in Washington. In a political sense, ’68 in
America was not the beginning, but an end.
Buchanan is fond of saying that conservatives won the political
battle, but lost the cultural war. The feminist protest at the 1968 Miss
America pageant certainly presaged the women’s movement, though contrary to
myth no bras were actually burned there. But, sure — legalized abortion,
gay rights, student power, drug enjoyment (and abuse), affirmative action,
uncensored expression — they’re all part of the cultural transformation
set in motion by the upheavals of the late ’60s.
But ’68 was also something quite specific. A year of high moral drama.
A sort of distillation of the ’60s when politics mattered and adrenalin
was the drug of choice. Before self-indulgence and narcissism set in.
Jack Newfield wrote that after the deaths of King and Kennedy we
became a generation of might-have-beens. What if Kennedy had won? What if
the Vietnam War had ended in 1969?
In other countries, the story is a bit different The
French students lost at the barricades but ultimately managed to
reform the antiquated educational system and to rejuvenate the
Socialist Party, which took power a decade later. Their cherubic leader,
“Danny the Red,” is now a member of the European Parliament.
In the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel, class of ’68, is president.
And in Mexico, at long last, democracy has stirred and an opposition leader
has been elected mayor of Mexico City. In a symbol of the change, a
Mexican congressional committee this year began investigating the army
massacre of student protesters in ’68, the “Night of Sorrow,” which the
government had shrouded in secrecy for 30 years.
In Paris ’68, the audacious slogan was, “All power to the
imagination.” That was the pure spirit of ’68. Question everything.
Dream. A simultaneous cultural and political revolt. That spirit — what
Paul Berman calls a “utopian exhilaration” — swept the globe. What became
of it?
Assassinations, repression and exhaustion extinguished the spirit
of ’68. But like a subterranean fire, it resurfaces at historic moments:
the student pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, or the end of
apartheid in South Africa. Berman argues, I think persuasively, that the
embers of ’68, especially in Prague, helped ignite the revolution of 1989
that brought liberal democracy to Eastern Europe and ended the Cold War.
Turn-of-the-century America, by contrast, seems an unlikely place for a revival
of utopian idealism. I don’t know where we might, in this skeptical, fragmented, self-absorbed country, locate the flickering spirit of ’68.
It’s Halloween 1958 in suburban Los Angeles. With mounting excitement, a 9-year-old dons a black cape, fastens a plastic sword to his belt and slips a black mask over his pale face. Instantly he’s Zorro, “the fox so cunning and free.”
Pausing a moment before a mirror to adjust his black hat and affect the requisite cavalier smile, he grabs his empty bag and sets forth in pursuit of precious candy. His confidence reveals itself in an outlaw swagger, which he savors until he steps into the street and notices that fully half the boys in his neighborhood are wearing an identical costume. Without warning, this October evening has become “The Night of a Thousand Zorros.”
Forgive me, but as soon as I hear the word “Zorro,” I am instantly transported to that rude awakening of my childhood. It is the first time I can recall falling prey to mass marketing, having (inexplicably) forsaken the earlier Davy Crockett coonskin cap craze. I was a fashion victim, that fall’s fashion for kids being a popular Walt Disney television series about a masked crusader in Spanish California of the 1820s.
Who knew? I thought they’d all be Bozo the Clown or Superman or Elvis, and I’d be the really cool, dangerous guy with the sword. Alas, my perspective was too personal. I lacked an ability to spot the market trends. And Zorro, believe me, was big that season.
First, there was the obvious appeal — the dashing disguise, the black stallion, the avenging sword. Like Robin Hood, another of my favorites, Zorro was a good outlaw, a rebel with a cause, which appealed to my incipient sense of social justice. He bedeviled greedy despots and clearly enjoyed himself in the process. He was sly and mischievous, and sometimes (to keep the kids laughing) broadly farcical, especially with his overweight sidekick, Bernardo. Plus the name was perfect — one word, the essence of cool, like a Brazilian soccer star, with that dazzling, slashing “Z.”
But there was something else. Unlike all-American heroes Daniel Boone or John Wayne, Zorro was exotic. Dark and mysterious. Not too dark to frighten children — this was after all a Disney version. But compelling. It was the attraction of the other: men in black, men in masks — like Batman, another hero with a double life and a hint of the forbidden.
For me, there was an equally significant precursor to Zorro, the Cisco Kid. Nothing on TV captured my 5-year-old imagination more than the syndicated adventures of that debonair Mexican bandit and his comical companion, Pancho. They were the Don Quixote and Sancho Panza of my preschool years.
I was living then in the anonymous tracts of Tarzana — this was Southern California, remember, fantasyland, and the town was named for Edgar Rice Burroughs’ fictional lord of the jungle. But Tarzana was as bland as Wal-Mart. It was whiter than New Hampshire. And even for a 5-year-old, it was dull until the Cisco Kid rode into my life on his horse, Diablo.
Played by the dashing Duncan Renaldo, the Cisco Kid was immaculately dressed — in black, of course — and exuded Latin charm. Cisco cut an adventurous, swashbuckling path across the rugged Southwest. His sidekick, Pancho, was an entertaining buffoon who spoke in ludicrously accented English. But he also could fight, especially with his trademark bullwhip. The actor who portrayed Pancho was Leo Carrillo, a descendant of an old California landowning family. I remember watching him lead the New Year’s Day Rose Parade on a magnificent horse with a silver-studded saddle.
I loved the way these buddies greeted each other each week on TV, yelling: “Hey, Ceesco!” “Hey, Pancho!” Then the Kid ordered, “Away!” and they rode off in swirling dust. I confess that on the rare occasions when I ride a horse, I always shout, “Hey, Ceesco …” to the dismay of my South African-born wife who grew up without benefit of TV.
As an adult I learned that “The Cisco Kid” had a long cultural tradition, originating in an O. Henry short story, “The Caballero’s Way,” and generating many movies starring the likes of Douglas Fairbanks and Cisar Romero. One indication of how influential the TV series was with my contemporaries, both Hispanic and white, is that the Latin-tinged rhythm and blues group War scored a funky No. 2 hit in 1973 with “The Cisco Kid” (“The Cisco Kid he was a friend of mine, he drank whiskey, Pancho drank the wine”).
Discovering the Cisco Kid, and later Zorro, was for me the equivalent of venturing out from Tarzana to visit Olvera Street in downtown Los Angeles during “Feliz Navidad” celebrations — the piqatas, the smell of fresh-cooked tortillas, the Virgin of Guadalupe replicas. It all seemed so appealingly exotic, and yet it was my home, too.
In the Southern California of my youth, when almost everything seemed new, I liked the idea that there was an older, pre-Yankee California. That before freeways, Lockheed and shopping malls, there were haciendas and rancheros. The proof existed in the crumbling missions of Father Junipero Serra, who we studied in the third grade. After field trips to San Juan Capistrano and Santa Barbara (“the Queen of the Missions”), I vowed to visit all 21 missions — an ambition I have tried, and failed, to instill in my own children.
Watching Zorro on TV at the same time, I was enamored of the adobe missions that allowed me to enter an imaginary world of romantic California: Spanish aristocrats, Mexican rebels, beautiful seqoritas. Born into a family of blonds, I lusted after the black-haired actresses on “Zorro,” even the Mouseketeer Annette Funicello, who once made a guest appearance as “Anita.” You laugh, but hey, to me at the time, even Catholics were exotic and captivating.
It’s almost impossible to imagine now, but Los Angeles was once the whitest, most uniformly Protestant city in the United States — a desert oasis of stolen water and orange groves populated by Midwesterners lured by real estate speculators. I grew up in that city’s postwar boom years when the Beach Boys still dominated airwaves. I remember the difficulty gringos had with the local Spanish names. My grandfather from New Jersey pronounced the name of his new home as “Las Angle-eeze,” an attempt I think to split the difference between Spanish and English.
The first racial divide I encountered was not between whites and blacks — blacks were so far removed from the San Fernando Valley where I lived that I barely knew they existed in Los Angeles until the Watts Riots of 1965. No, for me the tensions were linguistic, English and Spanish, and the antagonists were Anglos and Mexicans. The first racial epithet I heard was “greaser.” When my virtually all-white high school football team ventured into East Los Angeles — by the mid-’60s the vast center of L.A.’s Hispanic community — our coaches warned us to get back on the bus immediately after the game, especially if we won, to avoid a riot. Lurid rumors spread that in a pile-up on the field some “greaser” might pull a switchblade.
I was not immune from the racial prejudices of my peers, but it was hard to sustain any real animosity. I mean, I thought the Cisco Kid was a friend of mine, and Zorro, well, I wanted to be Zorro.
When I saw Luis Valdez’s masterwork, “Zoot Suit,” in the ’70s, I had the same reaction. Maybe these pachucos in the barrio of East L.A. should not have been rioting during World War II, though lord knows the L.A. cops provoked them, but man, was Eddie Olmos magnificent in his black leather coat and broad-brimmed hat, or what? He was a stunning reincarnation: Zorro as angry young man. He commanded respect.
All this came back to me when I saw the new “Zorro” movie last weekend in San Francisco. It was a sold-out, date-night audience — the kind where no one stays to read the credits — and it mirrored the profound demographic shift that has transformed California. There were lots of young Anglos, but they were outnumbered by Californians of Filipino, Chinese and Mexican ancestry. An African-American guy and his Middle Eastern girlfriend from Coventry, England, stood next to me in line. There were, in fact, quite a number of mixed-race couples.
This is the future of California, and the nation — increasingly Hispanic, multilingual and bound, for the moment at least, by a Hollywood culture that must keep expanding (even against its will) to tell the stories of all the diverse potential customers.
I’m not sure why this San Francisco crowd was drawn to “The Mask of Zorro,” but they seemed to like it, even though I found it to be a less satisfying genre movie than, say, “Indiana Jones.” The sword fighting was exciting and Anthony Hopkins was surprisingly convincing, despite his illogical English accent. My only real complaint was the dreadful song at the end — why didn’t they use a group like Los Lobos?
Frankly, though, once I saw the impossibly beautiful Catherine Zeta-Jones it was hard to remember anything else. That’s what happens when you grow up: The steamy tango scene seems a lot more appealing than dispatching the bad guys.
when Richard Nixon ordered U.S. troops to invade Cambodia in April
1970, I was standing in front of the New Haven, Conn., courthouse,
surrounded by National Guard soldiers who had been issued live ammunition.
Like every other young radical on the East Coast, I had come to New Haven
to protest the arrest of Black Panther leader Bobby Seale. We were
smoldering with discontent, and our mood had not been improved by a dose of
police pepper gas the night before.
From the standpoint of ensuring domestic tranquillity, this was an
inauspicious moment for Nixon to launch his invasion. When Tom Hayden
suddenly announced what was happening in Cambodia, 20,000 of us
decided in a burst of participatory democracy to return to our campuses and
organize a national student strike. Forget New Haven, we would paralyze
the country! At my own nearby college the next day, my friends and I kept
interrupting a Grateful Dead concert to urge our fellow students to
boycott classes for the rest of the semester. Our appeals met with
success, but, to my eternal humiliation, a large poster appeared in the
student dining hall mocking my efforts. It read, “Strike? Gee, Beav, I
don’t know.”
I had been outed, publicly shamed: a long-haired New Leftist in
regulation denim work shirt and bell-bottomed blue jeans exposed as a
former child actor in “Leave it to Beaver,” the quintessential suburban
sitcom. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. I was Gilbert Bates,
Beaver’s friend. “Gee, Beav, I don’t know” was my signature line. There.
I’ve admitted it. They can’t hurt me anymore.
From 1958 until 1963, I appeared in more than 50 episodes of
“Leave it to Beaver.” I was the blond kid with big ears who usually
manipulated the gullible Beaver Cleaver into committing some minor
transgression. I would then disappear while Beaver was caught and
punished. “I may be a dirty rat,” Gilbert acknowledged, “but I’m not a
dumb rat.”
Over the years there have been other embarrassing incidents, but
I’ve learned to endure them. In 1980, while making “Broken Arrow,” a documentary for public television on nuclear weapons accidents, my camera
crew and I were detained by the Navy and the FBI confiscated our film. In
the end, the government backed down, but for several days they threatened to
prosecute us for trespassing and — incredibly — espionage. I felt like
Woodward and Bernstein, a risk-taker pursuing the truth. That is, until I
read the review in the San Jose Mercury News. “In a way, it was pretty much the same sort of mess Talbot used to get Jerry Mathers into each week on ‘Leave
it to Beaver,’” the TV critic wrote. “As Beaver’s pal, Gilbert, he was a
scheming little runt without scruples.”
Whoa, wait a minute. In the interests of historical accuracy
I should say that, yes, Gilbert was a troublemaker and an occasional liar,
but my character was certainly no Eddie Haskell — that leering teenage
hypocrite who spoke unctuously to parents (“Well, hello Mrs. Cleaver, and
how is young Theodore today?) and venomously to the Beav (“Hey, squirt,
take a powder before I squash you like a bug”). Eddie, played by Ken
Osmond, was the show’s one truly inspired creation. Alas, poor Ken
fell victim to a series of false but persistent rumors that he had morphed
into the twisted rock singer Alice Cooper or, worse, started
appearing in porno movies. But, in fact, Osmond became an L.A. cop who
was once shot three times by a car thief and survived only because the bullets
struck his protective vest and belt buckle.
You see, this is what it has come to: I have spent my adult life
trying to conceal my “Leave it to Beaver” past or correcting the
historical record. Either way the series has become inescapable. When I
was a kid, I loved acting; in fact, I badgered my father (himself an actor,
Lyle Talbot) and mother until they allowed me to work. But how could I
have known as an innocent 9-year-old that I was taking part in a
television program that would live on for 40 years as an icon for baby
boomers? In the early ’80s, I turned down an offer to revive my role as
Gilbert in a dreadful “Beaver” reunion series. “I’m trying to establish
myself as a documentary filmmaker and an investigative reporter,” I
explained to the producers. “I can’t go back to being Gilbert.”
“Of
course,” they said, “we understand. You’re a serious professional. We’ll
rewrite the script.” They made Gilbert a hip psychologist analyzing the
adult Beaver’s divorce and dysfunctional personality. The producers
sounded genuinely baffled when I said, “I don’t think so.”
Now “Beaver” is back again, like a surreal jack-in-the-box popping
up in my life with a crazy grin. A “Leave it to Beaver” movie is
being inflicted upon America. And TV Guide is preparing a story and photo spread to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the start of the original series. So today, I officially surrender to Beaver Mania. I accept my role as a footnote in broadcast history.
“You got out at the right time,” Tony Dow — who played Beaver’s big
brother, Wally — told me recently when I saw him for the first time in
30 years. “You made a clean break and you found something you like to do.”
He had called me from an alley in San Francisco’s Chinatown, where he was directing promos for Don Johnson’s forgettable new series, “Nash Bridges.”
When I dropped by the set, I found Tony to be as friendly and down-to-earth
as I’d remembered. I asked him if he ever saw Jerry and he said, yes, they meet to try to figure out how to get a cut of all the money being made from the exploitation of “Beaver.” Tony and Jerry may be all-American icons, but they aren’t rich. They worked in television in the days when all you got was your salary and a few residuals. “At least I can do other things and be myself,” Tony said. “No matter what Jerry does, he’ll always be the Beaver.”
Which brings me back to the series itself. Why has it persisted?
What’s this obsession with “Leave it to Beaver”? Demographics, for one thing. Boomers still dominate the culture, and God knows boomers are a narcissistic,
self-referential, TV generation. And now that many of us are parents raising children in a less secure, divorce-prone, sometimes violent world, that “Leave it to Beaver” image of late 1950s suburban prosperity and stability has a certain retro appeal, even if we all know the image wasn’t reality, it was a new, improved reality.
“Beaver’s” longevity also has a lot to do with recycling. No one
recycles as aggressively as Hollywood. Whoever owns an old TV series can
sell it to cable for pure profit. And whoever can recycle an old idea for
a movie or TV show doesn’t have to think of a new idea. There are hundreds
of channels out there. One of them is running “Leave it to Beaver” right now.
There is one other reason for the show’s lasting appeal. And here I enter revisionist territory that would confound and appall my 21-year-old New Left self. Despite its obvious white-bread limitations and its hideous laugh track, “Leave it to Beaver” has some redeeming qualities. The relationship between the brothers, for one. Wally is a kind of ideal older brother — handsome, athletic, loyal — and Wally and Beaver share an awkward intimacy that is quirky and appealing. Which reveals the show’s other secret. Despite Ward Cleaver’s paternal homilies and June Cleaver’s maternal efficiency, “Beaver” was really about the kids. The show captured something of the experience of being a white kid loose on the streets of suburbia — at odds with the world of alien adults.
At rare moments, “Beaver” even transcended the “improved reality”
of sitcom suburbia to achieve a dreamlike, surreal quality. The episode
in which Beaver climbs a billboard and falls into a cup of simulated
steaming soup has the resonance of a modern fable: a boy swallowed up by a
giant advertisement.
Or consider the episode I caught at random this week, “Beaver’s
Doll Buggy.” It starts routinely enough: Beaver needs wheels for a
homemade soapbox car. He decides to obtain them from a classmate, a girl,
who gives Beaver her old doll carriage. Innocently, Beaver sets out for
home, across town, pushing the buggy. And then the journey turns into a
suburban nightmare. Little girls mock him. Housewives scold. A man says
he’s worried about this new generation: “They’ve gone sissy on us.” When
Wally hears what’s happening, he fears for Beaver’s safety. “The only
thing worse,” he says, “is to be caught in his underwear.” Mrs. Cleaver
seems oblivious until Wally shouts, “Don’t you remember what it was like
when you were a kid? Guys always pick on someone who’s different. This
could put a curse on our whole family.” Even Eddie Haskell shows concern:
“I certainly hope no one slaughters the little fellow.”
The episode becomes a meditation on the rigid sex roles of the
’50s. The hapless Beaver finally abandons the doll buggy in a ravine
rather than suffer further trauma. Ironically, Gilbert passes by, spots
the abandoned carriage, and salvages the wheels for his homemade
car. Later, he commiserates with the Beav about the dangers of
crossing gender lines (not in those words exactly). That’s the only hint of the social revolution that would erupt a decade later. It’s enough that we’re left with the image of our Everyboy trapped in a suburban hall of mirrors — it’s funny, it’s harrowing (from the kid’s perspective), there’s even a hint of Buster Keaton. And it’s hard to expect much more from a sitcom, I realize.
For years, I’ve figured I had to atone politically and aesthetically
for appearing in “Leave it to Beaver.” I’m still not off the hook, but I’m
beginning to think maybe I could get away with pleading no contest to a
cultural misdemeanor.
From a command post deep in the leafy suburbs of Bethesda, MD, a former Washington Post reporter is plotting a fundamental change in the way presidential candidates campaign this fall. Paul Taylor’s crusade — free, prime time access to voters, unmediated by journalists — might have seemed quixotic, but now appears on the verge of success. In October, Bill Clinton and Bob Dole may be speaking directly to us during breaks in “Seinfeld” or “ER.” Not in 30 sec. pit bull attack ads, paid for by their respective campaigns, but in two-to five-minute segments provided free by the networks.
Just think: we could hear what the candidates are really trying to say, even if Dole keeps ending sentences with “whatever,” and Clinton keeps stealing from the GOP phrase book.
Funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and aided by Walter Cronkite, Taylor has wrung major concessions from the networks — “when you’ve got Uncle Walter on your side, anything’s possible” —
although there is lingering resistance from TV executives who fear viewers will flee the room or switch to cable whenever Clinton, Dole or a third party candidate appear on screen. Some of the networks would rather provide free time in the midst of news programs, instead of cutting into prime time entertainment. “Nobody’s got it exactly how I hoped,” says Taylor, “but we’ve come a long way and I think we’re gonna get there.”
We spoke to Taylor, who works out of his home, about attack ads, voter cynicism, an arrogant press corps, sex and the Presidency.
Your proposal sounds good, but it won’t eliminate attack ads because the candidates are convinced that they work.
But how do they work? They work by persuading voters who may have been inclined to vote for your opponent, not to vote. That’s the easiest way to move people. So negative ads actually shrink the electorate. Is it any wonder that we have the lowest voter turnout of any major democracy in the world and the highest level of voter cynicism? Attack ads are like pro wrestling. They’re all about artifice, fakery and distortion. Let’s turn the campaign into a real boxing match. If you put candidates on the screen, back and forth on alternating nights, you accomplish that. You hold them accountable.
Voters aren’t just cynical about candidates and their manipulation of the media, they’re cynical about us, the press.
Exactly. My proposal is in part a response to that cynicism. Here’s my favorite statistic. Not only has the average sound bite on the network evening news for a presidential candidate gone down from 42 seconds in 1968 to 7.2 seconds in the 1996 presidential primaries,
but reporters covering them got six times more air time than the candidates! We have an essential role to play as watchdogs, as scrutinizers, as truth-tellers. But 6 to 1?
I think the American public is a little fed up with the reflexive, smart alecky cynicism of the TV pundits. I think we owe it to the public — and to journalism — to back out of the picture, every now and then. The most sacred transaction that happens in a democracy is the transaction between candidate and citizen. Let’s carve out some moment on prime time television when that can happen.
In his recent book, “Breaking the News,” James Fallows blames television and celebrity journalism for debasing democracy. You agree?
The journalists on those TV shows are often very good journalists. I count many of them as friends. But I don’t think they put a very attractive face of journalism forward. That edge, that attitude. They talk about politics with a smirk and a swagger. When I started out in journalism, “Meet the Press” was the model, very stately, perhaps a little dull. But the show was really about the public official, and the reporters were there, in what I consider to be their place, asking questions off on the side.
Now what happens is the shows are about the reporters. The candidate comes on. They joust back and forth. Then the candidate leaves and we’re left with the host, the reporters, talking, in a sense, behind the back of their guest. It’s like on Sunday night of Thanksgiving weekend, the guests have gone home, and we can all talk, “Well, you know the only reason he said that is he’s 18 points behind in the poll. You can’t believe that guy.” I don’t think that’s a good model for journalism. And it’s sad to me that the bright 20-year-olds starting out in journalism now have this as their career goal.
And I’ll tell you, in Washington, D.C., it’s the journalist who sits on the electronic throne and everybody else comes and goes. There’s no journalistic culture like that anywhere else in the world.
A recent New Yorker story suggested that your reform campaign is really your way of doing penance for asking Gary Hart back in 1988 if he’d committed adultery, setting in motion events that forced him out of the race. That you are so guilt-ridden that you had a midlife crisis and “quit the profession, exchanging (your) press pass for a hair shirt.” True?
No, but it made a pretty good story. It’s very flattering to be the lead guy in “The Talk of the Town.” And yeah, I’m the guy who famously or infamously asked Gary Hart whether he had ever committed adultery. This was a couple days after the Miami Herald reported he had spent a weekend with a woman, Donna Rice, who was about half his age and not his wife. But that’s not what drove me here.
I believe the question I asked at that particular moment as the Gary Hart story was unfolding was absolutely appropriate. I have thought about it a lot because it created a firestorm, both in and out of journalism. I got a lot of criticism from fellow journalists and a lot of nasty mail from people all over the country. But asking about the character of the men and women who seek public office is perfectly legitimate. And listen, I never thought that Hart was hounded out of the race by the press and the allegations of adultery. In my opinion, it was a crisis of his own making. His money was drying up, his political support was drying up.
Bill Clinton had his own crisis with a woman coming forward and saying, “I had a 12-year relationship with him.” And Clinton said, “I already confessed in a general sense that our marriage has not always been perfect. I’m not going to talk about it anymore.” His political support stayed with him and he weathered the crisis.
I can’t help but think of (former French President Francois) Mitterand’s funeral. In the front row was his wife and right behind her, his mistress and illegitimate child, on display for the whole nation. No one seemed to bat an eyelash.
There’s a line, I think it’s from the Brits, that these sexual scandals are best exposed, enjoyed and ignored. The best thing you can do as a society is have your fun, make your jokes — everyone’s titillated and laughing at the office water cooler — and then get beyond it to more substantive fare.
So John F. Kennedy is going to be the last president to be able to sleep with a Marilyn Monroe and not have it reported at the time?
We’ll see. My guess is that over time, the standards that are imposed on elected officials are roughly in sync with the kind of standards that society wants to impose on itself generally.
After the Hart campaign, you spent several years covering South African politics for the Post. I know it got pretty rough. You were shot. You were kidnapped. What impact did that have on you?
That was a wonderful reporting experience. I was there from ’92 to ’95, covering the first democratic election in the country’s history that made Nelson Mandela president. It was a thrilling, moving experience to see this sort of damned country emerge from agony and oppression. To watch that human spirit rise to the occasion was a wonderful story to report. I don’t want to sound all rosy eyed because South Africa remains a very difficult country and is going to be a hard place for many years. But that experience, I think, made me more idealistic and more hopeful about the possibilities of reinvigorating democracy in this country.
Quotes of the day
The Outsiders
“Journalists’ stance of being against, of being a part of the adversary culture, is disconnected from any Madisonian conception of democracy. Suppose being against means it will be impossible to maintain democratic institutions? Journalists say, ‘That’s not my problem.’”
– James Carey, professor of journalism at Columbia University, and author of “Communication as Culture,” interviewed in the June issue of Esquire magazine.
