The Bootblack Stand: Letters to Plunkitt from Jane Fonda and Dick Gregory
The Bootblack Stand Dr. George Washington Plunkitt, our prize-winning political analyst, is celebrating the publication of his new book, which is now available at avant-garde bookstores throughout...
...But Mrs...
...Now isn't it about time we take pregnancy for the serious disease that it is...
...We sacrificed for years to end that war, many of us imperiling our careers and mental well-being...
...Nor does she look old, nor old trying to look young...
...Strangely, we would have been more distrubed by the sight of Harriet going through the same experience, sitting down collectedly with Thorny the neighbor, and painfully unburdening herself of her contempt for the simpleton Ozzie, the tedium of his golf playing and boyish fakery, for David, the straight, Wheaties-grown dullard, for Ricky with his narcotized eyes, for her own infernal sandwiches, and their whole vacant, sun-drenched life...
...She insists on the role of stabilizer and organizer - "I've got enough mutinous troops around here" - and the others concede her that role eagerly...
...How can we be sure the war is over...
...Last week a young gay couple, Ralph and Sid Bflum, were refused help at a local family planning organization...
...Bill always gives his all, which is also all surface, yet Pat is leaving him for his dishonesty, his disingenuousness, which she says has made her unlovable...
...The Magnificent Louds...
...In fact, they make her assumption of it necessary, a fine courtesy, by affecting chaos and disorder at every opportunity...
...They know they are typical, all right, but they believe that people are supposed to be typical Where do they get this notion...
...Neither warm nor cold, it sustains rather than creates conversation, a family trait...
...At installment one of the series, Craig Gilbert was careful to point out that he was about to present us with an, not the, American family...
...Now the object of the dream must become the solidifying agent because the dreamer goes on dreaming...
...It is the striving toward fictional normality which has shaped the Louds, torn them asunder, and left them naked before us...
...GWP ROSENBLATT (continued from page 4) We focus primarily on Mrs...
...GWP Dear Mr...
...She ordered Bill from the house on those earlier occasions, and will do so this time as well...
...Yet not a word of gratitude has come from these in-grates...
...The Flying Louds...
...His caveat was both unnecessary and untrue...
...Oversized, stylish, she wears them as a visor...
...She descends to breakfast each morning like a piece of machinery, yet it is clear that she is aware of her rigidity...
...To parallel real and fictitious characters in this way should be an offensive tdea...
...She gives him the time and the weather...
...Just like Ozzie caught dancing too close to his old flame at the class reunion, Bill Loud will be in the "dog house...
...She answers everybody's questions, and solves all problems...
...No one knows this better than the Louds...
...I do not mean that the editing of the series has produced an artificial dramatization...
...was she herself...
...Pat says that the pain Bill has put her through has caused her to become "unlovable...
...I mean that the Louds have done so themselves, have created and managed an imitation of life based on the other imitations which mass culture calls art...
...What she does not say directly is that when she made the discoveries, she reacted to them on her own terms...
...More than any superficial similarity, they share the fundamental condition of being simultaneously the firm foundations of their families and the romantic idols in which great dreams have been invested...
...Dear Citizen Fonda: I think you have fallen hard for another of Dick's tricks...
...I am getting active in the gay lib movement...
...Yet precisely because the externalities of their lives declare them to be the American family, they do not know what it is to be an American family, or any kind of family for that matter...
...She looks as if she were frozen at thirty-five, though she has reached forty-six, yet the question of age does not really crop up...
...And if it is over, what is Nixon up to anyway...
...She has mastered the craft of withholding herself: from her clothing, her voice, her homosexual son with whom she plays a perpetual Venus and Adonis...
...Isn't it about time we help troubled young couples like Ralph and Sid to lead normal married lives free of the dread of unwanted children...
...Instead of working counter to it, she elaborates on it, just as the children elaborate on their own loose-jointed-ness...
...Robert Warshow asked, what use can we make of our experience in a world of mass culture...
...George Washington Plunkitt, our prize-winning political analyst, is celebrating the publication of his new book, which is now available at avant-garde bookstores throughout New Jersey...
...The sadness of this business is not that the Louds resemble the Nelsons, but that they have been pursuing the Nelsons' reality...
...She much prefers her neurotic Lance, who is down and out in Europe and writes home for money...
...Nothing could be clearer than that the Louds were chosen for this presentation because of their typicality, because they had teenagers, a suburban life, multiple cars, a swimming pool, because they photographed well, and because they were Californians...
...Loud knows what we think of her...
...He tries to pump up their talk, as if with an organ bellows...
...Of ourse, Harriet had the advantage over Pat of being confined by her director to the business of making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for seven or eight years, and her benign toleration of everybody else's changes was born partly of circumstance...
...The divorce of the Louds, the central action of the series, is a great sadness...
...But not Pat Loud, When she lays bare her life, it seems as if she is talking about someone else...
...She has thick dark hair which she ties back like a young girl's, but she does not look young because of it...
...Her voice, (like Harriet's) has the tone of instructions piped through ear phones on a museum tour...
...She tells her in-laws that her husband has made his philanderings so obvious to her that she can only suppose that he meant them to be discovered...
...The Louds were born a tv program, waiting to be discovered...
...On her visit to Lance in New York, she lolls about his pad like the siren of a world which might have been...
...Loud, quite openly, does not wish her family to change...
...Address all correspondence to The Bootblack Stand, c/o The Establishment, R.R...
...Why are we so unmoved...
...Delilah, the Ann Miller of tomorrow...
...Plunkitt expects to earn ten million dollars from sales of his new book, he has agreed to continue to advise public figures through this column...
...Yet Pat is not diminished in the slightest by her identification with fiction...
...It will require no thinking of anybody, no revelations and no changes...
...The reason why each of them is interchangeable with some stock counterpart is that the louds are playing American Family, not living it, just as they had played American Family long before Craig Gilbert, their producer-director, hit upon his brainstorm...
...When she calls her husband long distance, even before they become officially estranged, she sounds as if it is she who has answered the phone...
...What kind of family would raise a person so lacking in amenities, social graces, and gracious living...
...Not one of these POW's has yet paused to thank people like Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Abbie Hoffman, Arthur Bremer, or me for ending that goddamn war...
...What can I do to help...
...She comes on from the start as a woman who has absorbed all the components of attractiveness without permitting herself to become attractive...
...They always thought of themselves as a family show...
...marshalls at Wounded Knee and while no one raises a squeak about the tons of litter left by our government on the vir-ginally beautiful face of the moon...
...Power to the People Jane Fonda, A.B...
...They discuss divorce over a barbecue...
...Then is off again, to a Baltimore shipping depot, or to a shoe store to buy taps for Delilah, or to a book...
...She arranges airplane tickets, reminds the children of their school calendar, reinforces various routines, even fetches a spoon for her youngest, Michele...
...By now her appearance comes automatically, and the outfits which are supposed to be casual are worn like a kind of uniform...
...Plunkitt: Lately we have been hearing a lot of apple pie and mommery from the POW's even while millions of oppressed Indians are starving under the guns of U.S...
...But now that I have ended the Vietnam war I have decided to get involved in still another battle for human justice...
...The word is not only exactly right, but brings Bill to mind, who is constitutionally lovable...
...When Kevin returns from overseas, he shows signs of independence which Pat resents, and tries to tease him out of...
...From popular culture, where else, the very culture they sustain...
...On the phone, Pat tells Bill to wire another fifty, and when Bill protests, "he's got to do it for himself," she treats his comment as an aphorism...
...After all, this is why the Louds agreed to do the series in the first place, to promote the careers of their children, perhaps to be discovered themselves...
...Done right, that scene would have stunned us powerfully...
...Your child is bound to be a jackass, and then you will have marshalled to your cause the women's fever, the buffoons, and a radicalized 4-H...
...This difference aside, however, Pat and Harriet could play each other...
...The answer, as he well knew, is that mass culture produces the art of mass experience, individual experience distended into types and categories which spread over the land confusing and distorting our taste...
...The principal difference between the two women is that Harriet used to urge on the maturity of her boys, to the point of the show's survival through David's and Ricky's marriages...
...The terrible thing, or what ought to be the terrible thing, is, as we learn in one of the latter episodes, that Mrs...
...In Harriet this is theater, in Pat, life, but it is the same part played...
...Deciding after twenty years that she will divorce her husband because of his countless infidelities, she brings her case to her brother and sister-in-law...
...The control she exerts over herself, her body and gestures, so dominates the impression we take of her that in a sense the force of that control, which ordinarily should be repellent for its dehumanizing effect, is her most attractive feature...
...Peace and Freedom Brother Dick Gregory Dear Mr...
...But it is a scene he will get, nevertheless, because a show down, for all its stomping and screaming, will still be in Pat's control...
...She will make a "scene," even though it is not certain that a scene is what Bill was seeking when he so obviously planted the evidence of his guilt...
...I suggest that you marry Gloria Steinem and become pregnant...
...Each is her Juno, of O'Casey's play, married to a dreamer and bungler whose wildest dream (and biggest bungle...
...Loud will not allow even that attraction...
...Not only are these guys war criminals, as Phil Berrigan has so eloquently said, but they are also very poorly bred...
...They were meant to be identifiable as types, and are so...
...Plunkitt's book is about the importance of altruism in politics and it is titled What's in It for Me...
...Her props are her glasses...
...Gregory: It seems to me that what the protest movement really needs is some cross-fertilization...
...Although Dr...
...The suggestion it carries is thai...
...the real person is diminished by the comparison, her complexities and variations, which are the human signs, reduced to thfe simplifying elements of melodrama...
...Bill, who does not withhold himself, who was born with a face that takes everything (nothing) seriously, and bears the expression of a man eternally in line for something, like a tv taping...
...Cherishing the legend of Lana Turner who was "discovered" as she dangled her legs from a stool in a soda fountain, the Louds too want their children to be discovered...
...11, Box 360, Bloomington, Indiana 47401, Continental U.S.A...
...Indeed, her complexity is enhanced by it, because she seems purposefully to cultivate the trappings of simple-mindedness, as -ifshe sought to be fictitious herself...
...Always informal, her white slacks are startling, she gives the impression of having studied long and hard to look so smart...
...I mean really, really over...
...Well, there is a stench about it all, a moral stench...
...Their unconscious pretense is what we feel close to, and cannot bear...
...Grant and Kevin on a golden platter...
...Dear Mr...
...This evasion is the heart of her trouble, the heart of all the Louds' troubles...
...The stability of the family depends entirely on her who initially had been the end of romance, and now encourages romance in others (the tap dancers, the rock n roll stars) in order to hold on to her power...
...Plunkitt: As the whole world must know by now, at the height of the Vietnam war, I decided to oppose it by abstaining from all solid food until I brought that heinous war to an end and a conclusion...
...Loud because, like Harriet, she runs her show...
...So now history will fain record that I am the first man ever to end a war by becoming emotionally involved with juices and linglonberry yogurt...
...I have lost so many pounds and even ounces that if I stand sideways and stick out my tongue, I am often mistaken for a zipper and occasionally for a skinny clown...
...Crud...
...Even when the Louds simply walk together, they lope distractedly, like water birds in an open zoo...
Vol. 6 • May 1973 • No. 8
