Kitman's Secret
NORD, PETER
Kitman's Secret You Can't Judge a Book by Its Cover By Marvin Kitman Weybright and Talley. 279 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by Peter Nord I have discovered the secret of Marvin Kitman. I know why people...
...I don't know why, I'm only following orders...
...And what is the result...
...Russell Baker and Art Buchwald are as funny, and Martha Mitchell is funnier...
...Curse...
...Mutter...
...You and I, we get upset at hard-sell salesmen, get uptight when Nixon tries to sneak in an abm program, and have our little esthetic or great philosophical quarrels with the advertising industry...
...Although he is the founder of a whole new school of tv criticism—the yenta school...
...Because he's our number one political satirist...
...Read Kitman too quickly and you might miss his unerring, if freaky eye (which sees things like Bert Parks resembling that giant George C. Til-you trademark at Coney Island...
...As the story ends, our bullish chronicler has left behind a trail of chaos and confusion at Merrill Lynch, Radio Free Europe, the Defense Department, and the Central Committee of the USSR...
...Consider his latest collection, You Can't Judge a Book by Its Cover...
...When you buy this book (You can't wait for the movie...
...Playing the timid role is not for him...
...Sign a petition...
...Now do you see his secret...
...Here Kitman offers the back yard of his home in Leonia, New Jersey, as an abm missile site...
...Mendel Rivers Experimental Missile Base" caper...
...Though he'll never destroy the enemy, he gets satisfaction knowing that at any given moment, someone, somewhere in the System, is probably saying, "Who's this Kit-man...
...Because he's our best cultural critic...
...He's a real pain in the ass...
...Entitled "The First Fiduciary Imperialist Trust Syndicate Cartel Pool Combine" (a nice touch by the old pro—using long titles that are printed in larger type than the text necessitates a lot less actual writing), it goes something like this: Bugged by an overbearing account man at Merrill, Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, our hero informs the irritating fellow that he is wary of the market, afraid that he will be "wiped out by peace...
...At best a backlog of mildly amusing stories about how we were screwed by big business or big government, which we can tell at cocktail parties to people who aren't listening because they're waiting to tell their own stories...
...Among the many nonfiction stories in which he stars is one that details his exploits as an international financier...
...Not Kitman...
...his theory on child-raising (Asked by his eight-year-old daughter what "a whore of Montmartre" is, he goes into an explanation of Paris' arrondissement system...
...Skipping accounts of how Kitman got his message through to Marshall McLuhan, and how he formed the Yellow Hand Investor's Group (to buy cigarette stocks after the Surgeon General's report, and automo-tives after the publication of Ralph Nader's book, on the theory that the publicity would drive the prices up—which it did), we come to the last chapter...
...This tells of Kitman's short, happy life as the world's highest paid advertising trainee, and of his meteoric rise to retirement...
...Kitman is, you guessed it, the schlemiel who wins, the Charlie Chaplin in all of us who kicks the cop in the behind and gets away with it...
...his Groucho Marxisms (To an instructor-salesman from the Famous Artists School...
...Spiro Agnew wouldn't get it—but Walter Mitty would...
...For $250,000 I Would Give All of This Up...
...To protect himself, he wants to buy things like the Grand Russian Railroad of 1869 and the Budapest Subway of 1897, then pyramid them into an international mutual fund...
...He hasn't John Simon's sting, Stanley Kauffmann's intellect or Susan Sontag's build...
...Let's turn now to the "L...
...Ulcers maybe, or migraines...
...Clearly, Kitman's hold on the political-literary, California-wine-by-the-gallon-buying crowd is a consequence not of his prose style but of his life style...
...Kit-man doesn't so much review a program as tell you what his wife and children were doing while he was watching it...
...And you should...
...Kitman then leaves advertising, as he leaves everything, with his virtue and sanity intact and his pockets fuller?more than can be said, on all counts, for those he leaves behind him...
...So we bang a phone...
...his wrath ("Sometimes I wish Miss [Helen Gurley] Brown would just take a cold shower...
...Before he is done, Kitman once again muddies things up at the Defense Department (surely they have someone there whose sole responsibility is untangling the webs Kitman weaves...
...And this I call Salami Sandwich, from my lunch period...
...And he makes money doing it...
...During his swift career, Kitman read and wrote a lot of memos, heard some colorful talk, and was ultimately credited (wrongly) for the writing of the most infamous tv commercial ever produced: the Hertz Rent-A-Car epic that featured a heel-clicking, leather-coated, monocled, German-accented Efficiency Expert, who ended his spiel with, "Why are we doing all of this...
...He is a white-collar guerrilla fighter, sniping with words, harassing with irony...
...He explains in a letter to Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird that since neighboring Teaneck, the Pentagon's proposed site, has been agitating for "peace," it hardly deserves such an honor...
...Behind that face with the look of a Thurber owl turned fortyish and fleshy is the mind and soul of a revolutionary...
...With Donald Meek gone, who could play the role...
...He also confounds the Borough Council of Leonia and the local American Legion post, who only wonder whether the abm silo could go through Leonia's notorious trap rock...
...skim at your own risk...
...I know why people who stopped reading printed humor when S. J. Perelman stopped writing like S. J. Perelman now eagerly follow Kitman's adventures in The New Leader, Newsday, Cosmopolitan, the Armstrong Racing Daily, or whichever publication is carrying his latest kvetch...
...By telephone, telegraph, mail, and in person, Kitman eventually involves Robert McNamara, Radio Free Europe (he wanted to advertise), Columbia University, Russian State Planning Commissioner S. Dimshits, Prince Radziwill, and Georgi Malenkov, to whom Kitman generously offers a slot on the board of directors...
Vol. 53 • May 1970 • No. 10
