Among the Intellectualoids / Jerry Rubin's Body
Duggan, Joseph P.
restraint to subordinate personality to plot. Miraculously, there isn't a hint of a love interest between Fonda and Douglas (which would have provided a few insur- ance runs at the box...
...This happens to be true to character and theme, but it also suggests that Brooks may have as large an ego as "Brooks...
...He drinks 21/4 cups of matutinal coffee and makes somewhat of a ceremony of this, always insisting on either a French bean or the Hawaiian kona variety and always preferring to drink it while in private and while reading...
...Lemmon wears the perpetually pained look' he has favored in recent years, but it's justified by the pressures he faces...
...Basic Books / $11.95 My relationship with TyrreU began some years ago when Time magazine declared him the author of" some of the liveliest prose since"...me...
...Thank Jehovah that I spent the early evening listening to a symphony...
...The subject today is health, your body, relationships, and sexuality...
...Back in the lobby, the woman from Eve' s Garden was hawking six-inch-square pink I I I satin pillows embroidered with the message, "I LOVE ME...
...Miraculously, there isn't a hint of a love interest between Fonda and Douglas (which would have provided a few insurance runs at the box office), or between Fonda and anybody...
...Occasionally he writes in longhand on legal pads, more often he uses his Olivetti Lexikon 82, which he places on his lap due to the lingering effects of a back injury suffered in the company of an aggressive sorority girl in the spring of 1967...
...I like my body," she told me, "because I'm tall, I have good posture, I don't eat junk food...
...He hates "business" lunches and often eats at his desk...
...Undoubtedly this book will be reviewed in other journals and it would be as unseemly to praise it in Tyrrell's magazine as it would be hopeless to condemn it...
...On a visit to the gynecol...
...It's also a right-on-target send-up of PBS's "An American Family...
...At a lunch-hour news conference, a certain Suzie Chafee, a pale and frail-looking woman nevertheless introduced by Jerry Rubin as "that great spokesperson for health and symbol of health," put in a kind word for--can you believe it ?--corporations...
...My objections would be pruned down to a few hem-hems, and one of his faithful editors would turn my review into a testimonial to the greatest writer since, well, probably since me...
...He wears striped Brooks Brothers pajamas...
...only when he moans, "I love that plant," with a hanging gardenia in the background, do things sink to the bathetic...
...If Tyrrell's portrait of America today is accurate, I am glad tobe a cloud...
...Brooks' comedy, filled with false bravado and rickety shrieks, is a creature of the airwaves...
...Take it AWWWWWF...
...Tyrrell believes, ifI read him right, that the national stage is dominated by personages much less diverse than in my day, but far more repellent, if only in their sameness and the blatancy of their fraudulence...
...In The China Syndrome character is a function of work, and the actors--particularly Fonda, who is superb--illuminate this important theme...
...H.L...
...What a night...
...According to Mr...
...ogist, "Brooks" assures Jeanette Yeager that he "won't film anything that will embarrass you--I'm locked into a PG," but the doctor covers his face and throws the crew out: He's been exposed as a blackmarket baby-dealer by "60 Minutes...
...What I don't like about my body is that I'm overweight...
...But Tyrrell is not me...
...I'd like to thank the great kingpins," she said, "Perrier, who donated the water [all those attending The Event received all the free Perrier water they could swallow], and Dannon Yogurt, and the other corporations that have done so much to promote health...
...Next on the speaker's podium was "comedian and human rights activist" Dick Gregory, who came off as a crackpot even at this bizarre affair...
...It presents a nightmare world where there is no "real life" except media...
...Along the way he rudely bumps off 23 public nuisances, starting with John Kenneth Galbraith and ending with Henry Kissinger...
...I detected stares and murmurings of incredulity from the crowd, hitherto aswim in credulousness...
...He harangued the audience about how "93 percent of the water on tap in this country is unfit for I I human consumption" and how "about 92 percent of the food additives we now use in America we didn't know-about until the Nuremberg Trials...
...My ashes were heaved to the winds in 1956...
...1 ~176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176 Jerry Rubin strode to the center of the stage at the Julia Richmond Auditorium on New York's Upper East Side, a chilled bottle of Perrier water in his hand...
...All in all pretty tame stuff...
...He rises at seven, almost always in a cheery humor...
...Public Nuisances, Tyrrell's first book, is an attempt to draw a "pointillistic portrait of an especially influential American: the public nuisance...
...And he is in his abattoir promptly at 8:30--a little later if traces of alcohol from the evening before are still in his bloodstream...
...A young woman sidled up to me, smiling...
...Ben Wattenberg has said Tyrrell "writes the funniest stuff in America and he is the biggest public nuisance in America...
...What emerges is an arresting new theory of American leadership which I commend to the pedagogues for their cerebrations and coronaries...
...Jerry Rubin, shining his Moonie smile, was telling all who would listen that The Event was "wrapping up the 70s and ushering in the 80s...
...Very little is known about him save that which appears in his FBI file, and I, having suffered comparison with him for all these years, probably know more about 2 6 T h e American Spectator May 1979...
...After dinner he returns to his desk and either reads or writes until 10:30, whereupon he mixes a cocktail or two and leisurely reads or listens.to music until 11:30...
...He's the kind of fellow who will say "But seriously" every other sentence, and who takes a preposterously scientific interest in the craft of comedy, In Real Life BrOoks plays "Albert Brooks," a smooth-talking director who decides to make a documentary about a year in the life of a typical American family...
...Typical father Warren Yeager (Charles Grodin), a veterinarian, kills a horse on the operating table because he's worried about how he looks...
...While Brooks is an expert practitioner, his film is seriously flawed by its length: After an hour and three-quarters we have long since wearied of what is, after all, one joke, and he has taken to repeating himself, Real Life would have made an ideal hour-long TV special-which, being the same in form as "An American Family," would have provided yet another layer of self-reference...
...Making sure we don't forget that show-biz is everywhere, "Brooks" is on screen-bungling, meddling, editorializing--more often than the Yeagers...
...Spearheaded by Animal House, deadhorse jokes have become a minor trend...
...AMONG THE INTELLECTUALOIDS by Joseph P. Duggan j erry Rubin's Body earnestness, Rubin continued...
...This is all very nice...
...I have a very balanced, natural diet--except that I use artificial sweeteners...
...And the day dragged on like that until well after midnight, an orgy of self-absorption and "human potential actualization" capped off by a rock-and-disco party with music by "Johnny Average and the Falcons...
...what I had to listen...
...Now be is dead...
...At $60 a ticket (or $45 or $32 for balcony seats), the price was a steal...
...As he goes he calls Gore Vidal a jackanapes, Bella Abzug a hater who "longs for the sound of bones breaking," Teddy Kennedy a singing bartender, and the present President of the united States a "grinning dunce," a "really cheap mind," and so forth...
...Mencken, formerly of the Smart Set, the American Mercury, and the Baltimore Sun, was declared the most influential private citizen in the United States in 1927 by the New York Times...
...Nicholas Ball in 1966 and married J erry Rubin last year, chimed in: "Today is also about positivity, openness, and sharing...
...As far as I'm concerned," Rubin addressed the audience of 1,500, "The Event already is a terrific success, and you've made it a great success...
...Rubin led the audience in several "games," one of which was to have everyone approach a stranger and tell him "what you like and what you don't like about your own body...
...His manservant draws his bath while Tyrrell sings and waits for it to reach 68 degrees Fahrenheit, He eats a large breakfast...
...Yet in the end catastrophe is averted...
...Tyrrell and I share many tastes, admire many of the same people, and even have friends in common, which is surprising since I died on the evening of January 29, 1956...
...It punctures, especially, the absurd notion that the people under scrutiny can act as if cameras weren't trained on them 24 hours a day...
...thereupon he offers "Brooks" a bribe to leave that scene out of the final cut...
...With wide-eyed Joseph P. Duggan is an editorial writer for the Greensboro [N...
...This peculiarly serf-conscious brand of humor is limited in scope and almost cannibalistic in method, but with Mel Brooks spoofing movies, "Saturday Night Live" TV shows, and Steve Martin stand-up comics, it's clearly ~ la mode...
...The Event, billed as "the first awareness extravaganza," offered fourteen and a half hours of "human potential actualization," featuring as speakers or "group facilitators" such luminaries as Werner Erhard, George Carlin, "Bucky" Fuller, Dick Gregory, and Masters and Johnson...
...Let me instead contain my observations to Tyrrell the man...
...Tom Wolfe has called TyrreU a "holy terror" and the "funniest political essayist in years...
...It was apparent now where all the flower children had gone...
...The China Syndrome is a valuable reminder that, contra the disaster genre, tense cinematic drama is not directly proportional to the amount of carnage and rubble on screen...
...Sun Myung Moon...
...At four he duly breaks for two barbaric hours on the handball courts...
...Comedian Albert Brooks' new film, RealLife, also takes TV as its text...
...Schwarzenegger ignored that advice and proceeded in his Austrian accent to give a dry, almost academic lecture on "sa role of sa mind een bodybuildingk...
...to the rest of the evening was appalling...
...A final reason for the film's powerful suspense has to be the magnitude of the danger: We're told that a large hunk of California could be contaminated...
...The exhibit for an outfit called Custom Supplements, Inc., for instance, was pushing customized, pre-packaged vitamins in order to spare health-conscious folks the "opening and closing of bottles twice a day, which is The American Spectator May 1979 ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER !" The celebrated bodybuilder walked onstage, clothed in a navy blazer, an offwhite, open-necked, collarless cotton shirt, and a pair of flared, khaki-colored trousers...
...C. ] Record andis Americana editor of The American Spectator...
...Since then our names have often been linked, and so it is not inappropriate that The American Spectator would ask me to review this book...
...If he has writing to do he prefers to start in the morning...
...Pumping Iron, "want-power" is a prerequisite to will-power, though, frankly, I wasn't able to figure out the difference between the two...
...2] I i the significant ingredients of his art than anyone else...
...He wore a bulky wool pullover and tapered slacks that could have come from Bloomingdale's, a red carnation, and a serene-but-somehow-goofy smile that made him resemble the followers of the Rev...
...He spends his afternoons with the business of The American Spectator...
...He is a member of two athletic clubs...
...The archetypal Yippie, now a full decade past the distrusted age of 30, was short of hair and clean-shaven...
...He has no other fixed habits of writing...
...Mimi Leonard, a tall blonde who made her debut at the St...
...Mencken polemic, especially designed for vanquishing public nuisances...
...From reading Public Nuisances it is apparent that Tyrrell comes from a noble journalistic tradition, hence he has no sense of fairness whatsoever...
...a Brooklynese woman bellowed from the rear of the auditorium...
...The lobby of the auditorium was a state fair for "human potential" types...
...176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176 BOOK REVIEW Public Nuisances R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...An American Family" is something of a dead horse itself, and Real Life is more than straight satire...
...He begins the book with some very amusing apocryphal obituaries and ends it with a salutary suggestion for a new style in H.L...
...Now rich and famous and pushing upon their middle years, they had traveled from Berkeley and Haight-Ashbury to the Upper East Side, from one stage of adolescence to another, the new one energizing them with Perrier water instead of acid, cladding them in Gucci loafers and Saks Fifth Avenue jogging shorts instead of sandals and tattered jeans...
...As co-director Jerry Rubin put it, it was a "kind of California event in the middle of New York City...
...Real Life is both the documentary itself and a film about its production (under "Brooks' " loony notions about art and reality, everything is permitted...
...Of all the nights to head off to my bedchamber with only two Gibsons to my credit...
...As all his intimates know, Tyrrell sleeps on his left side, in the fetal position...
Vol. 12 • May 1979 • No. 5
