Danse Macabre (18 page)

Even anxiety-ridden air travelers have their own fairy tales—all those
Airport
movies, which, like "Hansel and Gretel" and all those Disney cartoons, show every sign of going on forever . . . but which should only be viewed on Thanksgivings, since all of them feature a large cast of turkeys.

My gut reaction to
Creature from the Black Lagoon
on that long-ago night was a kind of terrible, waking swoon. The nightmare was happening right in front of me; every hideous possibility that human flesh is heir to was being played out on that drive-in screen. Approximately twenty-two years later, I had a chance to see
Creature from the Black
Lagoon
again-not on TV, with any kind of dramatic build and mood broken up by adverts for used cars, K-Tel disco anthologies, and Underalls pantyhose, thank God, but intact, uncut . . . and even in 3-D. Guys like me who wear glasses have a hell of a time with 3-D, you know; ask anyone who wears specs how they like those nifty little cardboard glasses they give you when you walk in the door. If 3-D ever comes back in a big way, I'm going to take myself down to the local Pearle Vision Center and invest seventy bucks in a special pair of prescription lenses: one red, one blue. Annoying glasses aside, I should add that I took my son Joe with me—he was then five, about the age I had been myself, that night at the drive-in (and imagine my surprise—my
rueful
surprise—to discover that the movie which had so terrified me on that long-ago night had been rated G by the MPAA . . . just like the Disney pictures). As a result, I had a chance to experience that weird doubling back in time that I believe most parents only experience at the Disney films with their children, or when reading them the Pooh books or perhaps taking them to the Shrine or the Barnum & Bailey circus. A popular record is apt to create a particular "set" in a listener's mind, precisely because of its brief life of six weeks to three months, and "golden oldies" continue to be played because they are the emotional equivalent of freeze-dried coffee. When the Beach Boys come on the radio singing "Help Me, Rhonda," there is always that wonderful second or two when I can reexperience the wonderful, guilty joy of copping my first feel (and if you do the mental subtraction from my present age of thirty-three, you'll see that I was a little backward in that respect). Movies and books do the same thing, although I would argue that the mental set, its depth and texture, tends to be a little richer, a little more complex, when reexperiencing films, and a lot more complex when dealing with books.

With Joe that day I experienced
Creature from the Black Lagoon
from the other end of the telescope, but this particular theory of set identification still applied; in fact, it prevailed. Time and age and experience have all left their marks on me, just as they have on you; time is not a river, as Einstein theorized—it's a big fucking buffalo herd that runs us down and eventually mashes us into the ground, dead and bleeding, with a hearing-aid plugged into one ear and a colostomy bag instead of a .44 clapped on one leg. Twenty-two years later I knew that the Creature was really good old Ricou Browning, the famed underwater stuntman, in a molded latex suit, and the suspension of disbelief, that mental clean-and-jerk, had become a lot harder to accomplish. But I did it, which may mean nothing, or which may mean (I hope!) that the buffalo haven't got me yet. But when that weight of disbelief was finally up there, the old feelings came flooding in, as they flooded in some five years ago when I took Joe and my daughter Naomi to their first movie, a reissue of
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves
. There is a scene in that film where, after Snow White has taken a bite from the poisoned apple, the dwarves take her into the forest, weeping copiously. Half the audience of little kids was also in tears; the lower lips of the other half were trembling. The set identification in that case was strong enough so that I was also surprised into tears. I hated myself for being so blatantly manipulated, but manipulated I was, and there I sat, blubbering into my beard over a bunch of cartoon characters. But it wasn't Disney that manipulated me; I did it myself. It was the kid inside who wept, surprised out of dormancy and into schmaltzy tears . . . but at least awake for awhile.

During the final two reels of
Creature from the Black Lagoon
, the weight of disbelief is nicely balanced somewhere above my head, and once again director Jack Arnold places the symbols in front of me and produces the old equation of the fairy tales, each symbol as big and as easy to handle as a child's alphabet block. Watching, the child awakes again and knows that this is what dying is like. Dying is when the Creature from the Black Lagoon dams up the exit. Dying is when the monster gets you.

In the end, of course, the hero and heroine, very much alive, not only survive but triumph—as Hansel and Gretel do. As the drive-in floodlights over the screen came on and the projector flashed its GOOD NIGHT, DRIVE SAFELY slide on that big white space (along with the virtuous suggestion that you ATTEND THE CHURCH OF YOUR CHOICE), there was a brief feeling of relief, almost of resurrection. But the feeling that stuck longest was the swooning sensation that good old Richard Carlson and good old Julia Adams were surely going down for the third time, and the image that remains forever after is of the creature slowly and patiently walling its victims into the Black Lagoon; even now I can see it peering over that growing wall of mud and sticks.

Its eyes. Its ancient eyes.

Radio and the Set of Reality

B
OOKS AND MOVIES are all very well, and we'll come back to them before long, but before we do I'd like to talk a little about radio in the mid-fifties. I'll start with myself, and from me, we can hopefully progress to a more profitable general case.

I am of the last quarter of the last generation that remembers radio drama as an active force—a dramatic art form with its own set of reality. This is a true statement as far as it goes, but of course it doesn't go anywhere near far enough. Radio's real golden age ended around 1950, the year at which this book's casual attempt at media history begins, the year I celebrated my third birthday and began my first full year of doing it in the potty. As a child of the media, I have been pleased to have attended the healthy birth of rock and roll, and to have seen it grow up fast and healthy . . . but I was also in attendance, during my younger years, at the deathbed of radio as a strong fictional medium.

Drama is still to be found on the radio, God knows—
CBS Mystery Theater
is a case in point—and there is even comedy, as every devoted follower of that abysmally inept superhero, Chickenman, knows. But the
Mystery Theater
seems oddly flat, oddly dead; a curiosity only. There is none of the heavy emotional zap that used to come out of the radio when
Inner
Sanctum
's creaking door swung open each week, or during
Dimension X, I Love a Mystery
, or the early days of
Suspense
. Although I listen to
Mystery Theater
when I can (and happen to think that E. G. Marshall does a great job as host), I don't particularly recommend it; it is a fluke like a Studebaker that still runs—poorly—or the last surviving auk. Even more than these,
CBS
Mystery Theater is like an electrical power cable through which a heavy, almost lethal, current used to run and which now lies inexplicably cold and harmless.
The Adventures of
Chickenman
, a syndicated comedy program, works much better (but comedy, a naturally auditory as well as visual medium, often does), but the intrepid, klutzy Chickenman is still something of an acquired taste, like taking snuff or eating escargots. My own favorite moment in Chickenman's career occurs when he gets on the crosstown bus clad in boots, tights, and cape, only to discover that, since he has no pockets, he doesn't have a dime for the fare box.*

And still, endearing as Chickenman seems as he stumbles gamely from one abysmal situation to another—with his Jewish mother always close behind, bearing advice and chicken soup with
matzoh
balls—he is never quite in focus for me . . . except maybe for that one priceless moment as he stands slumped before the bus driver, cape between his legs. I smile at Chickenman; I have occasionally even chuckled; but there are never moments as gut-bustingly funny as the moments when Fibber McGee, as unstoppable as Time itself, would approach his closet or when Chester A. Riley would engage in long and uneasy conversations with his next-door neighbor, a mortician named Digger O'Dell ("He sure is swell"). Of the radio programs I remember with the most clarity, the only one which properly belongs in the clause macabre was
Suspense
, also presented by the CBS Radio Network. My grandfather (the one who worked for Winslow Homer as a young man) and I really presided at the death rattle of radio together. He was fairly hale and fairly hearty at the age of eighty-two, but incomprehensible because he had a heavy beard and no teeth. He would talk—volubly at times—but only my mother could really understand what he was saying.

"Gizzen-groppen fuzzwah grupp?" he might ask me as we sat listening to his old Philco table model. "That's right, Daddy Guy," I'd say, with not the slightest idea of what I'd agreed to. Nonetheless, we had the radio to unite us.

At this time—around 1958—my grandmother and grandfather lived together in a combination bed-sitting room that was a converted parlor, the biggest room in a small New England house. He was ambulatory -barely-but my grandmother was blind and bedridden and horribly corpulent, a victim of hypertension. Occasionally her mind would clear; mostly she would go into long, excited rants, telling us that the horse needed to be fed, the fires needed to be banked, that someone had to get her up so she could bake pies for the Elks supper. Sometimes she

*And for some people, Chickenman doesn't work at all. My good friend Mac McCutcheon once played an album of the Great Fowl's adventures to a group of friends who simply sat and listened with polite, blank expressions on their faces. No one even chuckled. As Steve Martin says in
The jerk
: "Take those snails off her plate and bring her the toasted cheese sandwich like I told you in the first place!"

talked to Flossie, one of my mother's sisters. Flossie had died of spinal meningitis forty years ago. So the situation in that room was this: my grandfather was lucid but incomprehensible; my grandmother was comprehensible but far gone in senility.

Somewhere in between was Daddy Guy's radio.

On radio nights, I would bring in a chair and place it in my grandfather's corner of the room, and he would fire up one of his huge cigars. The gong would sound for
Suspense
, or Johnny Dollar would begin to spin that week's tale through the unique (so far as I know) device of itemizing his expense account, or the voice of Bill Conrad as Matt Dillon would come on, deep and somehow unutterably weary: "It makes a man watchful . . . and a little lonely." For me, the smell of strong cigar smoke in a small room brings up its own set of ghost referents: Sunday night radio with my grandfather. The creak of batwing doors, the jingle of spurs . . . or the scream at the end of that classic
Suspense
episode, "You Died Last Night." They died, all right, one by one, that last handful of radio programs.
Johnny Dollar
went first; he totted up his last expense account and drifted away into whatever limbo waits for retired insurance investigators.
Gunsmoke
went a year or two later. TV audiences had associated the face of Matt Dillon, only imagined for the previous ten years or so, with that of James Arness, Kitty's with Amanda Blake, Doc's with Milburn Stone, and Chester's, of course, with the face of Dennis Weaver. Their faces and their voices eclipsed the voices which came from the radio, and even now, twenty years later, it is the eager, slightly whining voice of Weaver that I associate with Chester Good as he comes hurrying up the Dodge City boardwalk with gimpy enthusiasm, calling, "Mr. Dillon! Mr. Dillon! There's trouble down t'the Longbranch!" It was
Suspense
, the last of the grisly old horrors, that held out the longest, but by then TV had demonstrated its ability to produce its own horrors; like
Gunsmoke, Inner Sanctum
had made the jump from radio to video, the swinging door finally visible. And visible, it certainly was horrible enough—slightly askew, festooned with cobwebs—but it was something of a relief, just the same. Nothing could have looked as horrible as that door
sounded
. I'm going to avoid any long dissertation on just why radio died, or in what ways it was superior to television in terms of the imaginational requirements it imposed on the listener (although we will touch briefly on some of this when we talk about the great Arch Oboler), because radio drama has been rather overanalyzed and certainly overeulogized. A little nostalgia is good for the soul, and I think I have already indulged in mine.

But I do want to say something about imagination purely as a tool in the art and science of scaring the crap out of people. The idea isn't original with me; I heard it expressed by William F. Nolan at the 1979 World Fantasy Convention. Nothing is so frightening as what's behind the closed door, Nolan said. You approach the door in the old, deserted house, and you hear something scratching at it. The audience holds its breath along with the protagonist as she/he (more often she) approaches that door. The protagonist throws it open, and there is a tenfoot-tall bug. The audience screams, but this particular scream has an oddly relieved sound to it. "A bug ten feet tall is pretty horrible," the audience thinks, "but I can deal with a ten-foot-tall bug. I was afraid it might be a
hundred
feet tall." Consider, if you will, the most frightening sequence in
The Changeling
. The heroine (Trish Van Devere) has rushed off to the haunted house her new friend (George C. Scott) has rented, thinking he may need help. Scott is not there at all, but a series of small, stealthy sounds leads her to believe that he is. The audience watches, mesmerized, as Trish climbs to the second floor; the third floor; and finally she negotiates the narrow, cobwebby steps leading to the attic room where a young boy has been murdered in particularly nasty fashion some eighty years before. When she reaches the room, the dead boy's wheelchair suddenly whirls around and pursues her, chasing her screaming down all three flights of stairs, racing along after her as she runs down the hall, to finally overturn near the front door. The audience screams as the empty wheelchair chases the lady, but the real scare has already happened; it comes as the camera dwells on those long, shadowy staircases, as we try to imagine walking up those stairs toward some as-yet-unseen horror waiting to happen.