The Talkies

...First he is picked up by a health foods salesman who advises him to get plenty of Vitamin F and sells him a blender...

...To this bit of homespun confusion he adds the note that "She suffered ter-ribly, Tonto, but she never complained...

...By the practice of Indian witchcraft he cures Harry of his bursitis...

...It is better than "warm" and "human" in that it shows us pictures of life which are occasionally accurate...

...They soon began thinking they had real power, and it took someone like Pat Buchanan to pin Magruder's ears back...

...Jokes about urinating in public places simply do not go well with soliloquies on cancer...

...Jeb never really was his own person...

...They dressed alike, talked alike, and even walked alike...

...But it also has its fantasy—Harry hitchhiking with his cat, Harry making it with a beautiful hooker outside Las Vegas, Harry finding another cat that looks just like Tonto after Tonto dies...

...He wanted it so badly that as he drove out of the gates and back to reality, he remembers that his hands were "trembling...

...Harry lacks a personality, in short...

...He made grades by buttering up the teachers, and sought peer-group recognition by running for class president and dating the school's prettiest, most popular cheerleader...

...fiction writers like T.S...

...The movie does not know whether is a supercilious comment on popular culture, as it sometimes seems to be, or a serious comment on growing old...

...I'm sick of Halaeman thinking I'll write junk for him and I'm sick of you new guys coming in here and thinking you're in charge of everything...

...It is a terribly mixed-up mishmash, which I kept hoping would succeed, and which has its moments, but which basically falls plummeting to earth one too many times to pick itself up and go on punching...

...Many of the aides were "new guys," insecure and anxious to prove themselves in the eyes of Haldeman and the President they hardly knew...

...Following the Scopes Trial in 1925 this group, living in and around Nashville, went on the defensive against Mencken and the Menckenites —particularly the group centered around Chapel Hill (and the University of North Carolina), which was then as now one of the truly enlightened places in the South...

...He chose Williams College for its status, but during his freshman year he was shocked to find that he was just another "High School Harry" compared with all the "preppies" who dressed in Ivy League clothes and went out with girls from the "best" schools and the richest families...

...At age seven—in the summer of '42—he was wangling invitations to visit expensive Cape Cod homes...

...Soon his daughter-in-law can't stand to have him around and quaintly tells him, "I don't see your other children burning up the telephone wires to ask you to stay with them...

...Poor mothers, they always take the rap...

...So the hippie insists that they visit the poor old creature who now lives in a nursing home in Indiana...

...While he continued his attack on Southern insularity and moralism, and more specifically on the churches of the region (he was fond of remarking that the Ku Klux Klan was "simply the secular arm of these churches"), he insisted that not until the young Southerners entered the fray could there be any hope for the region...

...Hobson might have offered us some critical appraisal of these groups, but he apparently writes under the theory that one pays one's money and one takes one's choice...

...As he walks around the neighborhood Harry gossips with the other elderly residents, gets mugged, watches television, and generally seems fairly content with his life...

...He wanted something better...

...He is, in other words, much more the scholar than the critic...

...Jeb resembled many of the young men who came to the White House in those early days of the Nixon Administration...

...He climbed the corporate ladder for eleven years after college, changing jobs five different times...

...Years later, the words of an old neighbor and friend would come back to haunt them: "Gail, whatever you do, keep Jeb out of politics...

...He is simply different things at different times and they do not come together at any point where one can say, "This is what Harry is like...

...Magruder came from a middle-class background, and even though his family led a comfortable existence, Magruder says his mother always pushed him to achieve the wealth and social status his parents never had...

...The son is broke and on his way to insanity...

...He is a marvelous deadpan comic and more use should be made of him...

...You know how cute these old folks are...

...Gail, his wife, had no desire to move to Washington...

...He calls her "the greatest influence on my life...

...Already the revolver is straining in its holster, begging to be used...

...Since he has given his car to the hitchhiker, Harry now hitchhikes himself...

...The amount of time he devoted to the Rebels—advising them, contributing to their journals, finding other contributors, helping them get books published, advertising them, as it were, in his articles—is frankly amazing...

...Jeb thought he had seen a "glimpse of something better" when he drove through the gates of San Clemente in 1969 to interview with Bob Haldeman...

...Notice how poor people are never evicted from buildings so that schools or hospitals or parks can be built...

...But let's face it...

...We used to call it the "Nixon Hop...

...The movie has some elements of reality—Harry is extremely crotchety and hard to take, the street scenes in New York are all too grim and true to life...

...Then he is picked up by a beautiful hooker on her way to Las Vegas, who obligingly pulls off the road and gives her services while the background music goes into "Love is a Many Splendored Thing...

...Harry and Tonto does not know whether it is supposed to be a touchingly realistic drama about growing old or a fantasy story about growing old...

...Damn it," Buchanan shouted when Jeb presented him with an assignment...

...It's the suffering that hurts...

...However, he must leave his building when it is torn down to make way for a garage...

...Notice how noble old people suffer terribly without complaining...

...Harry (played by Art Carney) is an old teacher, long widowed, who lives in a condemned building on Morningside Heights, Manhattan...

...Magruder fails to comprehend his own unimportance if he thinks the reader will be interested in obscure White House memos he wrote or in how he organized the Inaugural...

...I, for one, think that his numerous quotations from letters and articles written by the so-called Fugitives (who later called themselves Agrarians) convict them to a man of pursuing ignes fatui...

...He picks up a homely fifteen-year-old hitchhiker who is heading out to a commune in Colorado...

...A movie can be both, preferably at the same time, but the funny and sad moments here are so discordant that they cannot happily coexist with one another...

...A kid's got to have a life of his The Alternative: An American Spectator December 1974 21 own," he tells Hagman, who obviously should be in mental hospital...

...One of Harry's grandsons is there and he runs off with the hippie hitchhiker to the commune...

...But his cat will not use the john on the bus, so he gets out of the bus and stands by the side of the road looking mournful for a while...

...Indeed, all that Magruder can tell us about his political ideals is that as a college student, majoring in politi: cal science, he tended more toward the conservative ethic...

...As Hobson puts it, Mencken and South-baiting were synonymous terms...

...If the heart of his research has to do with values, or rather the transvaluation of values, he does not himself evaluate—at least not to any extent...

...Jeb's off-and-on flirtation with politics over the years had put considerable strain on their marriage and family life...

...Nevertheless, Hobson has performed a great service in uncovering the wealth of material on Mencken and the South, and his book is a worthy contribution to the Mencken shelf...

...Then the cat runs away and bus must leave without him, so he buys an old car and starts driving across the country, sans driver's license...

...He moves in with his son in the Bronx and proceeds to make a fantastic pest of himself...

...This latest effort by Paul Mazursky, director of Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice and Blume In Love, is about an old man and his cat...

...His' constant companion is a miserable-looking orange cat named Tonto...

...He describes that as "less big government" and "more emphasis on self-reliance...

...So Jeb joined a fraternity and quickly took on the accepted code_ dress, behavior, and values...

...Most of the jobs were good, well-paying jobs, but Jeb was never satisified...

...They find her demented and deranged but still in love with the dance...

...That's nothing unusual for Jeb Magruder, for he's been rushing things all his life...

...Harry charitably offers him money but says he cannot stay with him...

...Now here comes the real loveableness of the old gent...

...However, he gives up after one try and decides to go out to visit his daughter in Chicago...

...The story is episodic and as such reveals what is wrong with the movie: it simply tries to be too many things and succeeds at being each, so that it comes across as no consistent thing...

...While the hippie watches, misty-eyed, Harry and Jessie waltz around the dayroom with its oblivious residents...

...Other adventures befall them when they get to Chicago...

...Finally, the movie does not seem to be sure of what statement it wants to make about Harry himself...

...I should point out that Hobson is much less interested in interpreting the material before him, which he has dug out of the various collections of Menckeniana, especially the lode of letters in the New York Public Library, than he is in simply uncovering it and then letting it speak for itself...

...But there was little she could do to stop him now...

...and the famous UNC sociologist Howard Odum—agreed with Mencken's views and helped to propagate them, the Nashville group defended the status quo...

...One suspects that Magruder's cause was 22 The Alternative: An American Spectator December 1974...

...Jeb needed the money so he hired a professional writer and rushed the book to market, sacrificing substance for expediency...

...Some edifice redolent of the stench of materialism andprofit is always the villain...

...When he arrives in Las Vegas, he absent-mindedly starts urinating against the wall of a casino...

...The movie closes on Harry living by the beach in Santa Monica with lots of very good-looking old people...

...Most of them were nothing more than errand boys for Haldeman and Ehrlichman, but they enjoyed the trappings of power —the plush offices, the black limousines, and the dubious honor of eating at the White House mess...

...One is struck by the contempt Magruder shows for the others he worked with, especially those he viewed as a threat to his own position...

...In high school, he was the classic goody-goody...

...Access to the Oval Office was the name of the game, and the infighting among aides was intense...

...When the fifteen-year-old takes off her clothes in a motel room, Harry is moved to reminisce about his first love, Jessie, a real, honest-to-gosh friend of Isadora Duncan...

...At the end of the movie, I did not feel as if I really knew him...

...As they drive along he talks to her or the cat about his former wife and her death...

...Doesn't that remind you a lot of the old people you know...

...In fact, the only clear message of the movie is that living in California beats living in New York...

...Harry and Tonto WHEN I HEAR the words "a warm and moving motion picture" I reach for my revolver, so it was with my revolver by my side that I ventured out into the fall twilight to see Harry and Tonto...

...This loveable old Harry tells his daughter-in-law that she should go on a macrobiotic diet and lose a few pounds, he sets his cat loose to scratch his hostess, and he keeps the family up at night...

...So Jeb learned how to get ahead early in life...

...Organ music screams in the background...

...When he gets thrown in jail for his peccadillo, he shares a cell with an elderly Indian (played by Chief Dan George) who has the only really funny moments in the show...

...Jeb desperately wanted to become a part of that glamorous world...

...Suzanne C. Cox Confessions of a Charlatan JEB MAGRUDER has been a good salesman all his life, but he isn't going to have an easy time selling us his book...

...Stribling, Thomas Wolfe, Julia Peterkin, and Frances Newman...

...He describes being struck by the "sheer perfection" of life at the Western White House—the immaculately groomed lawns, the white-coated Filipinos serving drinks, the limousines, helicopters, airplanes, and yes, the golf carts awaiting one's beck and call...

...But the problem was that there were not enough men like Buchanan in the White House...

...Serpent in Eden is unnecessarily repetitious and too much given to citation (the slender volume contains some 900 footnotes...

...The movie also does not know whether it is supposed to be funny or sad...

...Then it's on to Los Angeles, where he is picked up by his other son, Larry Hagman, in a Cadillac convertible...

...They were actually more concerned with making themselves look good than with making the President look good...

...So the movie is not as "warm" and "human": as all that...

...Harry's daughter, bitchily played by Ellen Burstyn, tells Harry that, well, shucks, she guesses she will always love him but she guesses they will always argue...

...But while I suspect that the point of the movie was supposed to be that Harry is a lot more "together" than any of his children, the movie itself, upon close examination, simply falls apart...

...But he repeats these phrases so often that they begin to sound like words he memorized out of a campaign fact book...

...While various Southern authors—journalists, like Gerald Johnson, Nell Battle Lewis, Julian and Julia Harris, Grover Hall, and, somewhat later, W.J...

...and Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom defended Fundamentalism as a proper and deserving part of the Southern "tradition...

...I increasingly realized," he says, "that I had grown up without any firm set of beliefs, except for the business ethic, the success ethic...

...Donald Davidson, for example, wrote glowing accounts of the "spiritual unity of the South...

...He refuses to let his cat• be handled by the bomb searchers at the airport, so he gets on a bus...

...With that bit of conviviality ringing in his ears, Harry sets out to find another place to live...

...Death's easy to take, Tonto," he says...

...In fact, much of the book is just filler...

...Watergate has about as much appeal to the American palate these days as a plate of cold leftovers, and aside from a few juicy tidbits, Magruder offers us little that is new...

...Jeb's personal ambition was too powerful a force for even his wife or his family to overcome...

...He was restless...

...In 1934 Tate wrote that Fundamentalism "fortunately still reigns...

...Harry is a complex person, as everybody is, but since everybody is a complex person, it is not a particularly profound comment to say that someone is complex and can be happy or sad, mean or kind...

...He went along$0 Retbe4ii An American Life: One Man's Road to Watergate by Jeb Stuart Magruder Atheneum $10 with exactly what everybody else did, even when he knew it was wrong...

...He adopted the accepted code wherever he went—school, the army, the business world, the White House...

...Many of them, like Magruder, had no deep personal loyalty to the President, nor any deep intellectual commitment to the cause they served...

...Cash...