The Call- Girl Sermon
BOROFF, DAVID
ON TELEVISION By David Boroff The Call-Girl Sermon What the senlimental novel of the 18th century and the women's magazines of the 19th century were for their day, the television drama is...
...By contrast, the student nurses are gauche Salvation Army lassies...
...Within its own drastic limits, TV is a civilizing agency...
...That's for old men, not for delicious young creatures like you," suddenly becomes primly professional...
...For another, television writers are almost professionally didactic...
...In a phrase, it is doggedly homiletic...
...The chief device in these seminars is the dialogue between the old and the young...
...Most of them are really failed rabbis...
...But liberal good will takes over...
...The line-up is impressive: Zorba keeping Ben Casey in line, Gillespie guiding young Dr...
...And if her "virtue" needs further underlining, it is provided by her pimp, an evil man in the most simple-minded terms...
...Kildare, the father (E...
...He, too, it appears, has had a heart attack—in a movie of all places, and the people around him were more concerned about the synthetic agonies on the screen than the real ones enacted in front of them...
...She comes from the high-priced purlieus—a real East Side chick, the kind one sees hailing a cab in midtown with that austere, preoccupied look that only professional hustlers seem able to muster...
...the resident, that it is...
...And beautiful...
...He is the evil one...
...He visits Clarissa in the hospital to tell her that her professional services are no longer required...
...As he is mumbling his Hippocratic apologies, she is stricken once more with a heart attack and dies in his arms...
...The culture shock over, the young nurses also try to demonstrate that to them she is merely another patient and that they genuinely want to make her well...
...Inger Stevens played the part with authority...
...When Clarissa tries to defend herself against all this outraged virtue, the resident turns on her too...
...ON TELEVISION By David Boroff The Call-Girl Sermon What the senlimental novel of the 18th century and the women's magazines of the 19th century were for their day, the television drama is for ours...
...try to understand...
...Almost as if they are worried about the new tyranny of the young, or the hegemony of the peer group, TV writers have been rehabilitating the old in their classical function as sages...
...In the television universe, the hospital is not where people are sick but where they get better...
...What should one do with this classy whore...
...This is no mean function...
...The less sophisticated critics—the uplifters—miss the point entirely when they argue that TV provides "mere entertainment...
...Clarissa is armored in arrogance...
...When she divests herself of the coat, it is almost a strip-tease in reverse: She is shedding the old life, donning new virtue...
...Stung, goaded by all this strident innocence, full of self-reproach, Clarissa establishes an ingenious parallel between her profession and nursing...
...Has television really gone hipster on us...
...And why not...
...What would the preachment be this time—tolerance, acceptance, understanding...
...It is the head nurse, the Wise Elder, who acts as raisonneur by castigating the young resident...
...What if she has another attack in the company of a really important client...
...A troubled person is a person in trouble...
...A call girl, Clarissa Robin (Clarissa Harlow...
...There is little doubt that Clarissa is the heroine of this ambiguous morality play...
...Nurses, she argues, respond to a buzzer, she to the summons of the telephone: "I call it sex...
...Should wickedness be rewarded...
...Would some hipster TV writer, a secret cabalist of Mailer and Burroughs, confer a kind of underground nobility upon her...
...What can they teach...
...Defenders gives pointers in the law...
...Afraid that her husband is interested in the call girl, she turns on her savagely: "Why don't you go back to swinging a beaded bag on Eighth Avenue, or whatever it is that you do...
...Sure enough, Clarissa, in a distraught state, proclaims her professional identity for all to hear...
...Dutifully he phones the head nurse, his tutor, to report...
...What does it mean...
...She orders the help around—they are (naturally) giddy with admiration for this glamorous "model"—and she inspires tender feelings in the young resident in internal medicine who ministers to her...
...for heaven's sake, don't take yourself too seriously...
...The panicky John returns for a visit...
...They love to teach...
...The end, to which we now come, poses a fascinating problem in middle-class ethics...
...Television is pre-eminently a middle-class domain, while radio, with the barbaric yawp of rock 'n roll, is lumpen-proletarian...
...She makes it quite clear that in his moralistic flip-flops he was boorish, coltish, a prig in a white coat, and unprofessional to boot...
...you call it mercy...
...What do they teach...
...This makes the antiseptic corridors second only to the dust-laden Western street as the most popular TV setting...
...In the end, the writer uses the oldest dodge in kitsch, familiar to veteran viewers of soap opera and Grade ? movies...
...Just how far does the TV cult of understanding go...
...Up to this point, the writer did his homework, if that is the word in this case, very well...
...I was more than a little curious, therefore, to see what all this professional wisdom would do with the call girl, that new frontiersman of our time, in a recent installment of Nurses (Thursday-CBS...
...Call girls, according to psychoanalytic scripture, suffer from feelings of self-abasement no matter how expensive they are or how many highbrow magazines they subscribe to...
...She is tough-minded, astringently honest, bright...
...Even old Jed (Buddy Ebsen in Beverly Hillbillies) acts as a corn-pone philosopher...
...even though she is his patient...
...The word "sick" comes quickly to our tongues— Jules Feiffer is the poet laureate of the time—but jolly meliorists that we are, we think in terms of cure...
...A somber postscript: In the last few weeks, two more series with hospital settings have entered the lists of daytime television...
...accept...
...G. Marshall) instructing his son in the refinements of the law in Defenders, the seasoned head nurse in Nurses initiating the virginal student nurses in medical lore...
...Nothing so fancy...
...Or is she too threatening for that...
...Does the high-priced prostitute get the mental-hygiene dispensation along with juvenile deliquents, the mentally sick, the retarded, the divorced, and the suicidal...
...Is it that society is one vast sick-room...
...Instead of sly expense-account concupiscence, he is all solicitude...
...be good-natured...
...The student nurses, bundles of wholesomeness who before were curious about Clarissa's career as a model, now have other questions in mind...
...Sympathize...
...The tensions finally erupt in a blistering attack on Clarissa by an unimpeachably respectable young woman who has lost a leg in an operation...
...Eleventh Hour is basic training in the uses of psychiatry: what to do until the doctor arrives...
...Thus far, everyone has learned something: Clarissa, that the world is not really a jungle...
...she is the victim...
...She is advised to undergo heart surgery, but that does not sit well with her professional schedule...
...In a final scene, after she leaves the hospital, he banishes her from her tony apartment and even deprives her of her mink coat...
...Alas, Clarissa is straight out of Dr...
...The resident intercepts Clarissa in the lobby as she leaves her handsomely furnished bagnio...
...It is rather that the society television reflects is a therapeutic one...
...Harold Greenwald, not Samuel Richardson...
...Determined to undo the damage, he rushes off to find Clarissa, who has just been discharged from the hospital...
...In fatherly fashion, he tries to persuade her that there are other men in New York who would behave as decently as he had...
...But for the writer of this script, Larry Cohen, the problem persists...
...Be tolerant...
...For one thing, there is no such thing as mere entertainment...
...slivers of theme work their way into the most escapist of fare...
...The story itself was artfully worked out...
...Driving in Florida recently, I was startled to hear a psychiatric jingle like something out of Evelyn Waugh: "Don't criticize...
...The day is saved for tolerance, but nobody has to face up to life with Clarissa...
...is stricken with a heart attack and is rushed to the hospital by her shame-faced John, who wants to do the right thing but is frightened to death of public disclosure...
...The resident, who earlier had been full of arch remarks like "Heart attacks...
...The variety shows train Americans in how to be Americans: Be easy-going...
Vol. 46 • April 1963 • No. 8
