They’re truly touching, the little fools. They can’t seem to differentiate between the stories they admire and the writer who wrote them. No, you bright-eyed little students and fans of Greatness, not me! It’s not me you love, it’s the talent. I have nothing to do with that: I’m the vessel into which the wine was poured, but the crockery has no sweetness, it merely suffers itself to be carried about and used, at the whim of the talent.
I stand up there and tell them, over and over again, “Toulouse-Lautrec once said, ‘One should never meet an artist whose work one admires; the artist is always so much less than the work.’” I tell them that in lectures at high schools, in rap sessions at colleges, in essays accompanying my short stories, in person and in print. They refuse to listen. You refuse to listen!
Dan Blocker, who died, who used to be on Bonanza, once told me of a woman he encountered when he was putting in a personal appearance at a rodeo.* She was a sweet, motherly old lady who came up to him and began talking to him as though he were Hoss Cartwright. “Ma’am,” Dan said, stooping down to smile at her, “Hoss Cartwright is just the character I play on teevee; I’m Dan Blocker.”
She smiled at him with one of those aw g’wan with you smiles, as though charmingly chiding him for thinking she was such a penny fool. And then she went on, “Yes, I know. Now…Hoss, when you get home to the Ponderosa tonight, you tell your daddy, Ben, to fire off that old Chinese man who’s been doing your cooking! You and your brother Little Joe need a good woman in there to cook you some decent food…”
Nothing strange. Nothing out of the ordinary. She was a product of her times, her culture, and her inability to separate fantasy from reality; precisely because everything is done, every waking and sleeping moment of the day, to eradicate that important boundary from your minds. Where does shadow and image leave off and substance begin? None of us can tell any more. We really believe it matters what the car we buy looks like. We really believe there is “honor” in what happened in Vietnam. We really believe growing old is terrible.
You believe it. I don’t.
And you really believe that there are living gods whom you can elevate to pedestals—famous writers, talented actors, adroit painters, dissembling politicians, slick columnists, guitarists and Fender bass players and mumblers of doggerel you delude yourselves into thinking are poets merely because their soggy images are shouted at 350 decibel amplification, their right hands grip a microphone, they sweat a lot, their bellies are flat, their clothes are sequined, and they’re so hip they won’t rhyme “June” and “Moon,” but the banality of their lyrics is as awful as a bulbous-eyed Keane waif, as empty of depth of originality as the iconography of Elvis on black velvet.
You cannot separate a talent from an individual. And so you raise to godhood those whom, were they not gifted with that special ability, you would deride and pillory and cast into prisons for their selfishness, evil, rapacity and lack of humanity.
This week: the subject is godhood. I suppose, in some ways, an extension of last week’s thoughts on friendship. And since I’m clearly the only one among you pure enough, noble enough to discuss the subject critically, I’ll cop to having been on both sides of the godhood scene—as god and worshipper—and tell you about two famous men I’ve known.
The first one is Herbert Kastle. He may not be famous to you nits who don’t even know the names of the actors who strut for you, or the writers who scribble for you, or in fact the names of anyone failing to appear on the Johnny Carson Show, but around Dell and Avon paperbacks’ publishing offices, around the money coffers of Great American Literary Houses like Bernard Geis and Delacorte, Herbert Kastle is famous as hell. You don’t make $150,000 from THE MOVIE MAKER, $100,000 from MIAMI GOLDEN BOY and $100,000 from MILLIONAIRES (with the total far from registered) without becoming famous as hell. Not to you mud-condemned slugs who read books and never look at the names of the authors, but to the fat old tigers and their sleek editorial cubs who give out one hundred and fifty grand advances to authors who can come away from their own books with hundred thousand dollar royalties. (As a comparison, ninety percent of the writers in the world never make a dime beyond the advance money they receive for a book, and the advances are usually about three thousand dollars. Now lay those figures against what Kastle carts off, and you’ll realize how much greater must be the slice of the pie enjoyed by the publishers.)
Herb Kastle is famous. He’s also likeable. He looks like a cuddly Jewish teddy bear, all the best kinds of character lines in his face, San Andreas crinkles radiating from the corners of his eyes, no-shape comfortable body in which one could easily live if one’s head was straight.
More important, Herb Kastle is a fine writer. His first few books, KOPTIC COURT (1958), CAMERA (1959), COUNTDOWN TO MURDER (1960), THE WORLD THEY WANTED (1961), THE REASSEMBLED MAN (1964) and HOT PROWL (1965), drew him to my attention as a man who wrote in that special cathartic style that spoke to Irwin Shaw’s contention, “He is on a journey and he is reporting in: ‘This is where I think I am and this is what this place looks like today.’” A writer does not write one novel at a time or one play at a time or even one quatrain at a time. He is engaged in the long process of putting his whole life on paper. For Herb Kastle—who, when he started, was a nice Jewish boy with a wife and a family and all the middle-class twitches to which we are all heir—writing was clearly a way of purging his soul, and the struggles with his identity were clear in every novel he wrote.
(That struggle is nowhere more evident than in his new novel, ELLIE, published by Delacorte Press on March 21st. It is very likely Kastle’s finest work to date; a searing and unrelenting study of a man obsessed by that sex object most destructive to his nature. It will sell like orangeade at the final truck stop before the Gobi Desert. In publishing circles it is the Last Tango of the contemporary sex novels. I strongly urge you to slither out and buy it. It is guaranteed to mess your mind.)
The other day, Herb Kastle wandered into my house and finally, after fourteen years of what I’d taken to be a casual acquaintanceship, laid on me the crushing revelation that I had been a profoundly important influence on his life and his success. In some strange Vonnegut karass way, we are linked, and I’d never realized it. And in the moments after he blurted that linkage, I understood that I had been elevated to godhood.
And could not handle it.
I first met Herbert D. Kastle in New York, in 1959. We met in the offices of Theron Raines who, at that time, was agenting for both of us. But I’d already (apparently) had an effect on Herb. I’d been writing professionally for three years, was at that time in the Army and had come into New York on leave, to try and scare up some money. My first wife had run off again, for the millionth time, taking with her the furniture, all my clothes, and every cent in the bank account. I had decided to divorce her and was desperately trying to find the pennies to get back into civilian life.
I’d read KOPTIC COURT the year before and, without knowing Kastle, had fired off a letter to him through his publisher, enthusing about the vigor and honesty of the book. (It’s recently been reprinted by Avon in paperback, and I re-read it a while ago; miraculously, it holds up as well as when I first came to it. It’s another one I commend to your attention.)
The letter had been a casual thing for me. I’m inclined to revel in the utter craftsmanship of other writers, and like to let them know, since it so seldom occurs. But for Herb, I learned later, it was a seminal communication. One of the things I’d talked about in glowing terms was that the novel had a last line punch like a short story, a very rare and difficult thing in this universe. I couldn’t have known of it, of course, but Herb had worked on that ending for a week. He was justifiably proud of the effect it had produced, and usually it’s not the sort of thing readers notice. So here came my letter, out of nowhere, fastening on that certain special act he had performed with clean hands and dedication and composure…and someone had noticed.
When we met in Theron Raines’s office, we immediately liked each other: I was thrilled to meet a man who’d given me hours of fine reading, he was pleased to meet a writer who had been deeply enough affected by his life’s work to send out a cry across the emptiness in which most writers work.
I can’t recall meeting Herb again until almost ten years later, when I was already an established Hollywood writer, and his life and writing had taken a different, to me ominous, turn. (Although we almost shared a book once. Walter Fultz, the man who bought my first novel, back in 1956, was editing for the now-defunct paperback house, Lion Books. He wanted to put together a co-authored volume of stories by Herb and me: my stories of the street gangs of Brooklyn, Herb’s stories of the uptown young Jewish thugs. It never came off, and Lion Books had to close down when they got caught in a distributors’ crunch. And Walter Fultz, just a few years ago, died suddenly and under mysterious circumstances; one of the finest men I have ever known. As a sidelight to tragedy, Walter’s emotional problem is one that, today, would be acceptable. Had he lived today instead of fifteen years ago, he would never have had to exist in the shadows of closets, would never have had to struggle with his life; to seem to be that which he wasn’t; would never have had to be ashamed of what he was; and he would be with us today. I miss him.)
Ten years later, I was working on The Oscar at Paramount for Joseph E. Levine. Herb had come out to California for a visit. His marriage of many years was on the rocks and he was putting a continent between himself and his pain; yet another foolishness: the shimmering interface between oneself and one’s bad karma defies space-time equations: a continent is no thicker than a membrane when one carries the misery inside: there is no escape, no Cloud-Cuckoo Land, no place to hide; literally no doors and no windows.
Herb came to have lunch with me at the Paramount commissary. We were never alike. He was always subdued, cool, interiorly directed, polite, charming. I was always a street urchin, quick to anger, quicker to cool down, rabidly enthusiastic about everything, flaming, loud, crude. Each has its merits and flaws. But we weren’t alike. And it was the difference between us that drew us together. He liked my raw style, I envied his ease in moving through the world like a phantom cat burglar turned novelist. But there was no competition between us. Writers who are good are never in competition; each has a corner on the market for the special product each produces; no writer can write another’s book, not really.
Yet I think only in the most recent past has Herb come to know something about me that functions as my driving force: I consider myself an Artist, not merely a scribbler. When we sat across from each other in the Paramount commissary, with actors and producers waving and me digging the shit out of it—a little kid from Painesville, Ohio, playing at being in the magic land of Hollywood—Herb clearly saw me as a surrogate Sammy Glick, a moderately talented writer who had used charisma and drive to cash in on the big time. He was wrong about that, but he had no way of knowing it.
And again, without my knowing I was doing it, I steered Herb’s life in a direction that would shape all the rest of his days. Or so he tells me.
I had been offered a job writing a B flick for Bert I. Gordon, a very decent and charming man who made low-budget thrillers that could always be counted on to do well at the saturation booking level. I didn’t have time to do it, I was scheduled for another Levine film after The Oscar, and so I suggested to Herb that I recommend him to Bert Gordon for the project. It was, again, a casual thing, and I didn’t even remember having done it until Herb reminded me the other day. It’s the sort of kindness one does for one’s friends without thinking in terms of coin returned.
I lost track of Herb; but what happened is that he got the assignment, wrote the screenplay for The Museum of Dr. Freak (which was shelved and never filmed for reasons probably having nothing whatever to do with the script), and from there moved on to scripts for the Bonanza and Honey West television series.
But from that lunch meeting, and from the tunnel vision through which Herb saw me…saw what he thought was me…he began to make notes on a Hollywood novel. He called before he flew back East with the outline for the book, and told me that he was about to change his life, that for the space of three books he was “going into business” and that he’d keep in touch. Then he went away.
In 1968 Herb sold THE MOVIE MAKER to the Mike Todd of the publishing world, Bernard Geis—he who gave us Jacqueline Susann—and it was an instant financial success. It was a splash book.
I bought a copy but didn’t get around to reading it. On looking back, I think there was an ambience to the work that put me off, made it easier for me to rationalize why I didn’t have the time to read this latest book by a writer whose words I’d anxiously absorbed (sometimes only minutes after they’d come into my possession). It had the unsavory feel of something left too long in the greenhouse. The scent of decaying orchids came off that book. It was probably my imagination.
A year later, when it was in paperback, a friend called me and said, “Hey, did you know there’s a character in this cheap sex novel, THE MOVIE MAKER, who’s a dead ringer for you? Do you know a guy named Herbert Kastle?”
I sat down and read THE MOVIE MAKER.
Yes. Herb Kastle had taken me as the model for Lars Wyllit, the driven, feisty, cunning, moderately talented sexual profligate with hangups about his height. As I’ve said in this column many times, none of us cares to cop to our true face.
Eichmann never thought of himself as a human monster, merely as a man doing his job. Capone never sat beside a swimming pool in Miami Beach, his brain rotting away from tertiary syphilis, saying to himself, “I’m a gangster.” He surely thought of himself as a businessman. I’ve never known a hooker who thought of herself as anything different from a clerk in a Woolworth’s. The image of me that had been filtered through Herb’s mind struck me as being too blatant, too shallow, too easily dismissed, too cartoony, really to touch anywhere near the complex wonderfulness that I knew was my real self. (He said, humbly.)
Even so, Lars Wyllit was the only character in the book for whom the author showed any genuine love or caring. Cheap as that little fucker was, Lars Wyllit comes off well in the novel. A lot better than the Herb Kastle surrogate, the ostensible hero of the novel, Charley Halpert, in whom Kastle displays a sort of pity and hopeless nobility.
I called Herb in New York, we talked, he asked if I was pissed-off at the way he’d portrayed me, I said no, he was more than entitled to write it any way he saw it…and we promised to get together when next he came West.
Some time later, he did, and we got together at MGM where I was working. At that time, Herb talked about having done the Geis novel, and I ventured the opinion that it was not a particularly healthy book, from the outlook of a writer’s self-analysis. It was a book of self-loathing. Herb didn’t talk about that too much.
But the money was rolling in, the book had freed him of the rigors of his past and his unsuccessful marriage, and he was now in the process of reaching maturity; adjusting to a lifestyle that included fame, money and women. Lots of women. In a strange sort of way, I think I now see, Herb Kastle had come relatively late to success, and he was trying to live the life he thought I lived. In some ways he had perceived correctly about me, for I, too, have always been cannibalistically hungry for serious recognition, but he had overlooked a core truth. I had always been poor and driven, he had had critical acclaim and middle-class comfort; when I began to “make it,” it came slowly, in gradual stages, like taking immunization shots of rattlesnake venom so when the big bite came, I sickened, but did not die. Herb, on the other hand, was trembling with the venom from a massive overdose all at once.
On the inside cover of my Bantam paperback copy of CAMERA, he wrote this, in 1969: “Harlan: Here are a few beasts who cried sex at the heart of love. You could say this novel was the first step away from KOPTIC COURT toward MOVIE MAKER & the three Bernard Geis novels that will follow. Wonder if I’ll ever turn back again. Best wishes, Herb Kastle.”
It was a turn away from the heart of love about which Herb Kastle had written so feelingly. THE MOVIE MAKER had a raw and bloody fascination, but it was a book of self-hate and the horror of self-discovery. I could only hope Herb would find his way out of the swamp.
We didn’t see each other again for some years. His next novel, MIAMI GOLDEN BOY, was published with the same hoopla as THE MOVIE MAKER and, the wheel turns, the wheel turns, it came my way as a review assignment for the Los Angeles Times Book Review section. I read the book, and thought it was rather undistinguished, the sort of thing one comes to expect from Bernard Geis sexploitation writers, hardly the gleaming jewel Herb Kastle had proffered in years past. I reviewed it honestly, but not harshly. I did a full takeout on “schlock” novelists, rating them from the best of the species—with Herb, James Michener and David Slavitt (Henry Sutton) at the top, down through Irving Wallace, Herman Wouk, Leon Uris, Harold Robbins and others in the mid-rank to “troglodytes” like Jacqueline Susann and Taylor Caldwell in the sub-cellar—and apparently, again without meaning to do it, I influenced Herb’s life because the review caused MIAMI GOLDEN BOY to sell better in Los Angeles than anywhere else in the nation. Pickwick could not keep it in stock.
And Herb read the review. He read it and he heard the tone of sadness for the Kastle-who-had-been.
We talked of it on several occasions. And he told me MILLIONAIRES, the third of the big-money books he’d “gone into business” to write so he could break free of his old life, was a better book. He hoped I’d like it.
I did. It was strong, determined, honest, and yet held all the commercial elements that mean big paperback reprint sales, movie deals, attraction for the under-the-hair-dryer set.
He had taken a direction with his talent he knew was dangerous, but apparently he had come back from the edge at the final tick of midnight. Herb Kastle has always seemed to me a writer who possessed that rare inner vision to know truly what he’s writing, how good or bad it is, what its worth to posterity and to his own self-esteem is, and to thank god not even the $100,000 rolls in the hay of success could take that from him.
Now it’s 1973, and Herb lives out here. He’s writing movies, he’s living in a beautiful home, he has the lifestyle his adolescence demanded and his maturity finds supportable. He went into and came out on the other side of a mutually destructive love affair with a woman who forms the model for Ellie in the new novel. He wrote the book with ferocity and the need for purification of system one gets from a sauna bath, and it reads with the drive and fire of a man who has glimpsed a personal hell and decided not to burn.
But he walks in here and tells me I’m the one who brought him to this place, at this time; and I shudder to think he genuinely believes it.
I am not his god, or his mentor, or his stalking horse. I did whatever was done without even thinking of the life and soul of Herb Kastle. And that’s the bottom line about elevating mere mortals to godhood: gods are as liable to hurt as help, and because they do not understand the enormity of their power, they make no distinctions between the two.
And so, even as Herb wrote ELLIE as an open letter to be read by that one woman, as I wrote last week’s column on friendship for that one friend to read, so I write these words about the folly of ever letting oneself be totemized by one’s friends or fans or acquaintances. And I tell you to your face, Herbert D. Kastle, I reject the office. Keep it for yourself.
And since I’ve run out of space this week, I’ll resume the chronicle of godhood, and about how I made the mistake Herb made in worshipping another human being, the week after next. Next week I want to talk about the animated film festival at the L.A. County Museum of Art, since it opens next week and if I wait it’ll be dated. But come back for some light chatter next week, and the week after that I’ll tell you how my personal god shoved a flaming stick up my ass.