Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble (24 page)

The real story of the Loud marriage, as told in this book, is a good deal more complicated and tacky, mainly tacky, than what I gather came out in the television
series. The Louds and their five children lived in Santa Barbara, California, Pat working hard at being Supermom, Bill at his strip-mining-equipment business. As the marriage went on and the number of children increased, Mrs. Loud began finding telltale clues around the house. First a love letter to Bill from another woman, then a loose glove in his suitcase, lipstick on his handkerchiefs, a brochure from a Las Vegas hotel. The love letter enraged her so that she packed her four children into the family car—she was pregnant with the fifth—and drove off into the night. As it turned out, she did not get very far; Mrs. Loud, who has no selectivity index whatsoever, explains: “When I’m pregnant, I have the trots all the time, and sometimes it’s really essential to get to a john fast … and there wasn’t any gas station.… So finally I turned around and went home.” In 1966, she found a set of her husband’s cuff links, engraved “To Bill, Eternally Yours, Kitty,” and all hell broke loose. Her husband assured her he had bought the cuff links in a pawn shop, but she did not believe him. So she snuck off, had an extra set of his office keys made, and while he was off on a business trip she went to look through his files.

“It was all there,” she writes, “as though it had been waiting for me for years—credit card slips telling of restaurants I’d never been to and hotels I’d never stayed at, plane tickets to places I’d never seen, even pictures of Bill and his girls as they grinned and screwed their way around the countryside.”

Bill Loud returned from his business trip. Pat Loud slugged him, in front of the children. He slugged her back, in front of the children. They both went to see a psychiatrist. They both stopped seeing the psychiatrist. They spent night after night getting drunk as Bill Loud
recited the intimate sexual details of his infidelities. The subject of open marriage was introduced. Pat Loud began going to local bars during lunch and picking up businessmen. “We would have a few drinks and some tortillas,” she recalls. “Then we would let nature take its course.” She threatened divorce. He started seeing his women again. And in the midst of this idyllic existence, Craig Gilbert, a film-maker with a contract from public television, came into their home and told them he was looking for “an attractive, articulate California family” to do a one-hour special about.

It is impossible to read this book and not suspect that Craig Gilbert knew exactly what he was doing when he picked the Louds, knew after ten minutes with them and the clinking ice in their drinks that he had found the perfect family to show exactly what he must have intended to show all along—the emptiness of American family life. Occasionally, in the course of this book, Pat Loud starts to suspect this, nibbles around it, yaps like a puppy at the ankles of truth, then tosses the idea aside in favor of loftier philosophical pronouncements. “If he knew it,” she concludes, “it was not necessarily because he actively smelled it about us, but because he knew in a way what we didn’t—that life is lousy and it’s tragic and it’s supposed to be and you can pretend otherwise if you want, but if you do, you’re wrong.”

Gilbert had no trouble persuading the Louds to cooperate. Bill had always been outgoing and exhibitionistic. Pat, for her part, saw the show as a way to appear as she had always wanted to—the perfect mother, cheerfully beating egg whites in her copper bowls. When Gilbert informed them that the show was going to be so good that he would shoot enough for five specials and
then twelve, the Louds consented, apparently without a tremor of anxiety.

“Of course,” Pat Loud writes, “if you’re going to be in print or on the radio or TV, you can’t help thinking of all the people who will read or see you, and the first ones I thought of were all Bill’s women. There they would sit in frowzy little rented rooms scattered about California, Oregon, Washington, and Arizona, little gifts from Bill here and there, a memento from some trip or something he’d bought them, pathetic scraps of forgotten pleasure in their failed and lonely worlds. Their bleached blond hair would be falling sloppily out of its hairpins and their enormous breasts would be falling equally sloppily out of their torn, spotty negligees as they clutched their glasses of Scotch and rested their fat ankles on footstools to relieve their aching, varicose veins.… In pathetic, panting interest they would turn on their televisions to look at the Louds, and they would weep.… If they’d had Bill for a few hours or days, if they’d had a few sessions of what they probably thought of as blinding ecstasy, I had had him a thousand times more.”

Pat Loud offers a number of other explanations as to why her family agreed to Gilbert’s proposal—the one she seems to believe most firmly is that anyone would have. But she is less sure about why the reaction to the show was so enormous. “What nerve have we touched?” she asks at one point. “I would like to know; I would really like to know.” I suspect I know. I think the American public has an almost insatiable need to feel superior to people who appear to have everything, and the Louds were the perfect vehicle to fill that need. There they were, a beautiful family with a beautiful house with a
beautiful pool, and one son was a homosexual, the rest of the children lolled about, uninterested in anything, and the marriage was breaking up. All of it was on television, in
cinéma vérité
—a medium that at its best (I’m thinking of the Maysleses’
Salesman
and the Canadian Film Board’s
Lonely Boy
and
The Most
) has always tended to specialize in a certain amount of implicit condescension.

It is on the subject of the making of the series that Pat Loud is most interesting.
Cinéma vérité
film-makers have always insisted that after a time, their subjects forget the cameras are there, but as Pat Loud makes clear, it’s just not possible. “You can’t forget the camera,” she writes, “and everybody’s instinct is to try and look as good as possible for it, all the time, and to keep kind of snapping along being active, eager, cheery, and productive. Out go those moments when you’re just in a kind of nothing period.… You don’t realize how many of those you have until you’re trying not to have them.… And what you also don’t realize is that you
have
to have them—they’re like REM sleep.”

Ultimately, Pat Loud seems to have come to believe that she owed more to the film-makers than she did to herself or her husband; any concept of dignity or privacy she may have had evaporated in the face of pressure from them. Again she nibbles around the edges of this, almost but not quite getting it, but the suggestions of what happened are there: the illiterate Californians trying to impress the erudite Easterners; the boring, slothful family attempting to come up with a dramatic episode to justify all that footage; the woman who had always tried to please men—first her father, then her husband—now transferring it all to Craig Gilbert.

And when, in the course of events, Pat Loud decided
she wanted a divorce, Craig Gilbert convinced her that she owed it to him, to all of them, to do it on the air. “If I decided to divorce during the filming,” Mrs. Loud says Gilbert told her, “I must be honest enough to do it openly and not confuse the issue further by refusing to allow it to be shot.” Again she almost has it, almost sees how she was conned, and then falls into utter nonsense. “Couldn’t it be,” she asks, “that since circumstance and fate had put me in a position to rip away the curtain of hypocrisy, that maybe, just maybe, we could help other families face their problems more honestly?” And then she switches gears, and makes sense again: “A psychiatrist told a friend of mine recently that in his experience he’d found that there is almost always a third force present when divorce finally happens. The miserable marriage can wobble on for years on end, until something or somebody comes along and pushes one of the people over the brink.… It’s usually another man … or another woman … or possibly a supportive psychiatrist; in my case, it was a whole production staff and a camera crew.…”

And so the marriage and the television series ended, and along came the notoriety. And now there is the book, and there will be more: more talk shows, more interviews. It all seems sad; there is no way to read this book and not feel that this bumbling woman is way over her head. She has made a fool of herself on television, and now she is making a fool of herself in print. She does not understand that it is just as hard to be honest successfully as it is to lie successfully. And now, God help her, she has moved to New York. She will get a job, she tells us at the end of the book, and perhaps she will be able to fulfill her fantasy. Here is Pat Loud’s last fantasy. She’s at this swell New York cocktail party, “exchanging terribly
New York in-type gossip about who’s backing what new play and who got how much for the paperback rights to Philip Roth’s latest,” and there is this man who takes her to dinner, and then to bed, and they have a wonderful affair. “I’m not saying he would solve everything, or pick up the pieces, or even make me happy. Nor is he as important as a good job. But the nice thing about fantasies is that you don’t have to explain them to anybody. They are absolutely free.” There she goes again, almost making sense, talking about the importance of work, and the need not to look to anyone for the solution of her problems, and then she blows it all. “They are absolutely free.” That’s the thing about fantasies. They’re not absolutely free. Sometimes you pay dearly for them. Which is something Pat Loud ought to have learned by now. Will she ever?

March, 1974

It was, as these things go, a fairly ordinary week. One Flying Wallenda. Two midgets who claimed to be the world’s smallest married couple. An anthropologist who insisted that people who eat bear meat become more aggressive than people who eat eggs. A tiger who chewed up the carpet. And the requisite number of folk singers, politicians, writers, actors, doctors, palm readers, and tax experts who travel the country filling up the air time on local television talk shows. Not that any of them mattered to me. The reason I was there—and the reason a great many more people than usual watched
The Panorama Show
in Washington the week of April 1—was that Martha Mitchell was the co-host. Martha of the late-night phone calls, Martha the black-and-blue political prisoner, Martha who lives alone now while her husband commutes between his Essex House suite and his trial in the federal courthouse, Martha whose own daughter has chosen to spend most of her time with her father—Martha was making her first public appearance since “the mess,” as she refers to it, began. From Monday through Friday, she sat under the lights, doing a perfectly creditable job, and I sat there in
the studio watching and waiting—I’m not sure for what. A few bitchy remarks about Richard Nixon, maybe. A couple of tidbits about her own state of mind. An insight or two about political wives, or about how-the-mighty-have-fallen, or some such. I had never confused Martha Mitchell with Diogenes, never thought she knew a great deal about Watergate, never found her anything but a rather frowzy, excessive, blathering woman who never (until the Watergate break-in) said anything that I found remotely sympathetic. I did not expect to find her charming, and I did not expect to find her canny, and I certainly did not expect to find her moving. All of which she was. At the end of the week, one reporter who covered the show suggested in print that the staff of
Panorama
had taken advantage of Martha, had used her, had held her up as a freak, had titillated the public with coy and tasteless references to her sanity. It seemed to me more complicated than that. Martha Mitchell has always used the media at least as well as they have used her. She even told a story about it on the show. She was asked by host Maury Povich about her late-night phone calls to the press.

“A lot of them were planned,” she explained. “I’d call in the daytime and say, ‘Now this is my story, let’s put it out at midnight.’ Sometimes they’d ask where I was calling from, and I’d say the balcony of Watergate. Now it’s not in any way possible to get a telephone out on the balcony of Watergate, but that was just a little come-on to make it more interesting.”

“You mean you could determine when a story would be broken?” Povich asked.

“Well,” she said, “I learned pretty early on in the
game what you have to do to get a story on the wires or printed. That’s what I did.”

“I thought it was all off the top of your head,” said Povich.

“Well,” said Martha Mitchell, “I try to be dumb.”

The Panorama Show
got exactly what it wanted from Martha Mitchell—a lot of publicity and attention. And she got from it the chance to prove that she wasn’t crazy. In the end, it was a fair trade.

It is, of course, extremely easy to become known in Washington as a crazy lady. Even Marion Javits is thought of there as a crazy lady. But Martha Mitchell’s reputation as one was earned. She always reveled in the image she created as the slightly dizzy dame whose husband could not control her. In fact, she rarely said anything he did not approve of; nonetheless, the image worked perfectly. But in June, 1972, it all caught up with her. No one ever takes crazy ladies seriously. And so when she called U.P.I.’s Helen Thomas to claim that she was being held prisoner in a California motel and injected with drugs against her will, the press dutifully reported the claim and did virtually nothing to check it out. She was telling the truth—but almost no one knows that, even now. It is almost impossible to think of another politician’s wife who could have gone through such an experience and had so little serious attention paid to it. When John Mitchell resigned as the President’s campaign manager shortly afterward, the White House had an easy time convincing the press—and the public—that he had done so in order to look after his wife. Now, almost two years later, the Mitchells are separated; he is facing an apparently endless series of court
battles; and she is living alone in a Fifth Avenue cooperative where—she notes sadly—she has never even had a chance to use the dining room.