‘Radio and television … have succeeded in lifting the manufacture of banality out of the sphere of handicraft and placed it in that of a major industry.’ Nathalie Sarraute
Maybe I’m just being excessively Catholic, but I’ve long suspected there might be a certain, defiant, limited pleasure to be had in the pain of humiliation. After all, embarrassment reminds us as much of our abundant needs as our abject failings, and a writer might do well to listen carefully to the drama of his own requirements. In the true black night of humiliation, in the bloodletting hours, a writer becomes most fully and most properly himself. We might venture to call it the Writer’s Life: the only success you can count on is success on the page; the rest – golden whispers from the F. Scott Fitzgerald handbook of instant triumph – are nothing more than throat-clearing exercises in preparation for the three-act opera of mortification that must follow.
Aged twenty-six, with an acre of smiles and hopes, I was very happy to find myself on my first American book tour. The weather was fine, the New York Times liked my book, I had a new suit, and I went from city to city in a mild swoon of short drinks and long evenings, feeling certain the writer’s game was my kind of fun. Everywhere I went, it seemed, there was someone new stepping forward with a kind proposal: write for the New Yorker, come on the Studs Terkel Show, travel to Butte, Montana, marry my daughter; the days grew long with sustainable pleasures, and I understood it would only be a matter of time before I was asked to give the State of the Union Address. Then my plane and my self-satisfaction broke through the clouds to land in Chicago.
Now, Chicago is a friendly town. There are plenty of college kids and small magazines: they liked the book, and, if you were happily stupid, as I was, you might have allowed yourself to imagine that their enthusiasm described a general mood, that the whole of America indeed was turgid that day with love and recognition for the author of The Missing – a non-fictional meditation on the subject of missing persons. At that early stage I was not familiar with the concept of the ‘quiet news day’, therefore, when a producer from Good Morning Chicago rang to invite me on, I could only imagine they too were gasping for a bit of the O’Hagan goodness.
The make-up room was quiet at eight a.m. Around the wall they had framed photographs of American comics – Phyllis Diller, I remember, and Sid Caesar, caught laughing in that particular limelight-drunk way I’d been rehearsing since New Jersey – and so I sat in the chair with a perfect sense of belonging as the girl got to work with her orange sponge. A blonde woman was sitting in the next chair along and we caught one another’s eye. She was smiling at me, and something in her experienced face seemed to draw all the light from the lightbulbs surrounding the large mirror. ‘Do you mind if I say something to you?’ she asked.
‘No bother,’ I said.
‘Well. You look like you’ve got a whole lot of God in you,’ she said, her elastic smile seeming quickly to lunge across her cheek to land in a snarl.
‘God?’ I said. ‘Well, it’s been a good week, but …’
‘Definitely,’ she said. ‘Definitely God. Like Godliness.’
She put out her hand between the chairs. ‘My name’s Dana Plato,’ she said. ‘You probably know me?’ (Her voice had that semi-plaintive, questing upward swing at the end of sentences, the one Americans deploy so effectively, seeming hurt and demanding at the same time.) ‘I used to be in a big TV show called Diff’rent Strokes. It was really huge.’
She was speaking to me now in the mirror.
‘There was a lot of bad luck on the show,’ she said. ‘Everybody on the show, well … all of us, we had bad luck.’
‘Really?’ I said. But I knew fine well who she was. Diff’rent Strokes was a feature of my Scottish youth, famous for Gary Coleman, the bizarrely small black guy with the grin and the catchphrase – ‘What you talk’n’ about?’ – and Dana Plato played the wise-cracking girl in his adoptive family. I even knew about the ‘bad luck’: it had been a tabloid story for years, ‘The Curse of Diff’rent Strokes’, but I stared at her in the mirror as my face became more orange and her eyes got glittery with memory.
‘I got busted for armed robbery. It was a video store in Vegas,’ she said. ‘It was money, you know? And the other guys on the show … oh, there was guns and more drugs, the whole deal.’
‘God,’ I said.
‘Absolutely,’ she said. ‘I got out of all that when I became a Christian, and I went to rehab, and now I’m here in Chicago to star in a wonderful show called Hollywood’s Greatest Moments.’
I had to consider this for a second. Dana Plato was sitting next to me. She was wired. She was going on the show. With her blonde hair, her video store saga, her Godliness, the new production opening tonight – Jesus Christ almighty! How was any poor bugger supposed to compete?
‘She says you’re a wrider,’ said Dana.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘I love wriders. You’re a famous wrider, good heavens.’
‘No. Not at all,’ I said. ‘I’ve just started …’
‘Gee,’ she said. ‘A famous wrider. And we’re on the same show. You must be famous. You’re being cute. They don’t usually have wriders on shows like this.’
Several sorts of panic entered my soul at once. Some of those panics are the sort that might cause you to feel pity for me, but others were only shaming, and reveal a native understanding of the machinations of showbusiness self-interest the likes of which might serve to make Diana Ross look like Miss Congeniality. I took a deep breath and asked the most selfish question of my career. ‘On the show: am I following you?’
‘Yes. I think so,’ said Dana.
My heart almost erupted in the lower depths. I could just imagine it out there: first up, Mrs Popular-70s-TV-Show-Insider-Gossip-Rags-to-Riches-Riches-to-Rags-to-Riches-Motherfucking-Video-Store-Robbing-Rehab-Attending-God-Discovering-and-Now-Topping-the-Bill-in-Hollywood’s-Greatest-Moments-Goddam-Arse-Shattering-Showbusiness-Miracle-Survival-Extravaganza-Big-it-Up-to-the-High-Fucken-Heavens-for-Miss-Dana Plato!, thereafter to be immediately followed onstage by Young Mr Who-the-Fuck-is-He-With-His-Motherfucking-Nonentity-Book-and-Giant-British-Forehead-Dishing-Out-All-Sorts-of-Boring-and-Depressing-Crap-About-Missing-People-in-His-Weird-Accent. Jesus Christ! It was going to be a bloodbath. It was going to be the massacre at Glencoe. Dana Plato was showbiz King Kong and I was scantily-clad Fay Wray writhing in her massive, pounding, hairy palm.
I asked her again.
‘Is that right? They have ME following YOU?’
‘Yen. I love your accent. You’re cute.’
Somewhere in the universe, the applause for Dana Plato is still resounding and travelling, and the flow of love from that Chicago audience is still passing star formations that are yet to be observed by the strongest telescopes on earth. To say they loved Dana Plato will not do: they wanted Dana Plato for ever, they wanted the story of Dana Plato to go on and on, and for the message of Dana to sing out and fill all the terrible voids in our lives. They wanted Dana to never stop talking, never stop being, and for every home in America to keep an eternal light shining on their porches for the wise and suffering existence of Dana Plato.
Then I came on. The show was live. The studio set – like all those studio sets in America – looked like a terrifying screech of blue optimism under the yellow lights, and the studio audience was invisible as I took my place on the sofa. The two ‘anchors’ in front of me were the very soul of mild-mannered derision: attentive to nothing but their earpieces, they bent lovingly into the visiting powder brush – it was the ad break – and continued praising the departed Dana.
‘You bet. Just terrific. Super-terrific. You bet.’
My new suit felt old. I felt old. My hair felt old and my limbs felt heavy and my shiny-covered new book seemed dead on the table between us. I looked at the two presenters and made a swift and expensive mental note: they had that look, the anchors, that look that male American television presenters often have, that android appearance, sprayed-in, permatanned, so handsome they’re ugly. ‘Yeah,’ I heard one of them say to the gallery. ‘Keeping it short.’
The adverts were over. I could hear someone count down across the dark studio floor. ‘Okay!’
‘Welcome back. You’re watching Good Morning Chicago. Wasn’t Dana Plato just terrific? Well, let’s move on. Maybe you’re watching with your family this morning. We all have families, and our next guest, Andrew O’Hagan, is from Scotland. He is a writer, and he’s just produced a book about his grandfather.’
All the cables on the studio floor, raised up like snakes by the oily charm of the android, seemed to sway before me and hiss. I saw the whole sorry affair in a moment of surreal clarity amidst the piercing yellow of the studio: I had travelled far from home and got pissed on America; I had got myself drunk on small beer and fast cheer and now I was facing the terrible upchuck of a deluded fortnight. They knew and they loved Dana Plato, superstar, super-being, and now, here I was, Andrew O’Hagan from Scotland, Nonentity of the Century, being interviewed vigorously about a book that I HADN’T WRITTEN!
The point about humiliation, of course, is that it attracts more humiliation to itself. As a general rule, when someone tries to interview you about someone else’s book on live television, you don’t trust to your own character, you don’t put him down, you don’t express surprise at his stupidity and walk off – no, you don’t do any of those things. You sit up straight, you smile in a friendly way, you look at the dumb fucker with an earnestness that not only pays tribute to his but actually outstrips his, and you say something like the following:
‘Well, good morning, Chuck. It’s interesting you should ask about grandfathers and families because as you said everybody has one and they’re very important. I never actually knew my grandfathers myself, but I know a lot of your viewers will understand the value of community, which is one of the things I set out to tackle in my book The Missing.’
‘Right,’ said Chuck, ‘that’s interesting.’
Just so’s you understand: when an American TV anchor says something like ‘that’s interesting’, it’s code for ‘can we cut this weird fucker out before he makes us DIE OF BOREDOM?’ This is the central rule of the American talk show: it’s a stupidity contest, and, no matter what else, you must let the host win.
‘But we all love our grandparents,’ said Chuck. ‘It’s a very American thing to love your grandparents. Is that not right?’
‘Indeed,’ I said. ‘Where would we be …’
‘That’s a crazy accent you’ve got there.’
‘I’m from Glasgow, it’s …’
‘Yeah, weird. Now listen, Mr O’Haygone. We don’t have much time. Is there some change taking place in the family?’
For a nanosecond I forgot the rules. ‘Well, actually. My book is really about missing persons’
‘Exactly. There’s something missing in the way families relate nowadays. Is that what you’re saying?’
‘Well, when I was growing up some children went missing and I suppose I always wanted to enter into their story. I thought it would offer a picture of ordinary lives, and I thought I might try to follow the pattern of stories like that, and maybe describe a social atmosphere in the Britain of today.’
‘Gee,’ said Chuck’s sidekick, ‘that’s some heavy stuff. And have things kinda changed since your grandfather’s day?’
‘Well, I expect so, and actually, part of my search …’
Of all the people who had ever existed in the world, Chuck wanted me to die the most. He wanted me off his fucking show. He wanted Dana Plato back on and he wanted Depressing No Good Bastard from Scotland off his sofa. He wanted it now. He wanted it, like, yesterday. Coolly, with his unreal hair, he peered into the centre of my nonentityhood, and asked his last question.
‘Do you have any advice for the mothers of America?’
I already knew my humiliation was complete. I already knew I was lost, so why didn’t I seize the chance to be myself? Why didn’t I grab him by the lapels in front of his simpering, baby-headed audience of thickos, and say something large, something true and momentous and deserving? Because I’m a coward, that’s why, and that’s the thing about mortification – it’s fed by cowardice. So, when he asked me, a man with no girlfriend and no children, what advice I had for the mothers of America, my true instinct passed like a high-flying flamingo over the jungle-canopy of my sudden humiliation, and I glimpsed it for a second, and thought: Tell him, my advice to the mothers of America is not to stick a wet finger into a live electricity socket, but this coloured bird was gone as soon as it appeared, and I took a breath.
‘Not to be too anxious,’ I said. ‘When it comes to community, and changes in protection for children and families, it’s easy to become overwhelmed with the new anxieties. My advice to mothers would be to avoid that if they can.’
‘Good advice from this young author out of Scotland. He’s been talking about his book about his grandfather and families. Thanks for coming in.’
It was a small round of applause, but it fell like rain, and I walked through the studio and passed faces without words, and before long I was in the limousine, my orange face at the window, and we drove through Chicago, the driver oblivious to the world of authorly humiliations, and me in the back, dreaming of my brand-new life in an igloo somewhere north of Greenland.