Slouching Towards Bethlehem (6 page)

Ira Sandperl first met Joan Baez when she was sixteen and was brought by her father to a Quaker meeting in Palo Alto. “There was something magic, something different about her even then,” he recalls. “I remember once she was singing at a meeting where I was speaking. The audience was so responsive that night that I said ‘Honey, when you grow up we’ll have to be an evangelical team. ’” He smiles, and spreads his hands.

The two became close, according to Ira Sandperl, after Miss Baez’s father went to live in Paris as a UNESCO advisor. “I was the oldest friend around, so naturally she turned to me.” He was with her at the time of the Berkeley demonstrations in the fall of 1964. “We were actually the outside agitators you heard so much about,” he says. “Basically we wanted to turn an
un
violent movement into a
non
violent one. Joan was
enor
mously instrumental in pulling the movement out of its slump, although the boys may not admit it now.”

A month or so after her appearance at Berkeley, Joan Baez talked to Ira Sandperl about the possibility of tutoring her for a year. “She found herself among politically knowledgeable people,” he says, “and while she had strong
feel
ings, she didn’t know any of the socio-economic-political-historical terms of nonviolence.”

“It was all vague,” she interrupts, nervously brushing her hair back. “I want it to be less vague.”

They decided to make it not a year’s private tutorial but a school to go on indefinitely, and enrolled the first students late in the summer of 1965. The Institute aligns itself with no movements (“Some of the kids are just leading us into another long, big, violent mess,” Miss Baez says), and there is in fact a marked distrust of most activist organizations. Ira Sandperl, for example, had little use for the V. D. C. , because the V. D. C. believed in nonviolence only as a limited tactic, accepted conventional power blocs, and even ran one of its leaders for Congress, which is anathema to Sandperl. “Darling, let me put it this way. In civil rights, now, the President signs a bill, who does he call to witness it? Adam Powell? No. He calls Rustin, Farmer, King,
none
of them in the conventional power structure.” He pauses, as if envisioning a day when he and Miss Baez will be called upon to witness the signing of a bill outlawing violence. “I’m not optimistic, darling, but I’m hopeful. There’s a difference. I’m hopeful.”

The gas heater sputters on and off and Miss Baez watches it, her duffel coat drawn up around her shoulders. “Everybody says I’m politically naive, and I am,” she says after a while. It is something she says frequently to people she does not know. “So are the people running politics, or we wouldn’t be in wars, would we.”

The door opens and a short middle-aged man wearing handmade sandals walks in. He is Manuel Greenhill, Miss Baez s manager, and although he has been her manager for five years, he has never before visited the Institute, and he has never before met Ira Sandperl.

“At last!” Ira Sandperl cries, jumping up. “The disembodied voice on the telephone is here at last! There
is
a Manny Greenhill! There
is
an Ira Sandperl! Here I am! Here’s the villain!”

It is difficult to arrange to see Joan Baez, at least for anyone not tuned to the underground circuits of the protest movement. The New York company for which she records, Vanguard, will give only Manny Greenhill’s number, in Boston. “Try Area Code 415, prefix DA 4, number 4321,” Manny Greenhill will rasp. Area Code 415, DA 4-4321 will connect the caller with Keppler’s Bookstore in Palo Alto, which is where Ira Sandperl used to work. Someone at the bookstore will take a number, and, after checking with Carmel to see if anyone there cares to hear from the caller, will call back, disclosing a Carmel number. The Carmel number is not, as one might think by now, for Miss Baez, but for an answering service. The service will take a number, and, after some days or weeks, a call may or may not be received from Judy Flynn, Miss Baez’s secretary. Miss Flynn says that she will “try to contact” Miss Baez.”I don’t see people,” says the heart of this curiously improvised web of wrong numbers, disconnected telephones, and unreturned calls. “I lock the gate and hope nobody comes, but they come anyway. Somebody’s been telling them where I live.”

She lives quietly. She reads, and she talks to the people who have been told where she lives, and occasionally she and Ira Sandperl go to San Francisco, to see friends, to talk about the peace movement. She sees her two sisters and she sees Ira Sandperl. She believes that her days at the Institute talking and listening to Ira Sandperl are bringing her closer to contentment than anything she has done so far. “Certainly than the singing. I used to stand up there and think I’m getting so many thousand dollars, and for what?” She is defensive about her income (“Oh, I have some money from somewhere”), vague about her plans. “There are some things I want to do. I want to try some rock ‘n’ roll and some classical music. But I’m not going to start worrying about the charts and the sales because then where are you?”

Exactly where it is she wants to be seems an open question, bewildering to her and even more so to her manager. If he is asked what his most celebrated client is doing now and plans to do in the future, Many Greenhill talks about “lots of plans,” “other areas,” and “her own choice.” Finally he hits upon something: “Listen, she just did a documentary for Canadian television,
Variety
gave it a great review, let me read you.”

Manny Greenhill reads. “Let’s see. Here
Variety
says
‘
planned only a twenty-minute interview but when CBC officials in Toronto saw the film they decided to go with a special
—’” He interrupts himself. “That’s pretty newsworthy right there. Let’s see now. Here they quote her ideas on peace...you know those...here she says
‘
every time I go to Hollywood I want to throw up
’
...
let’s not get into that...here
now/her impersonations of
Ringo Starr and George Harrison were dead-on
,’
get that, that’s good.”

Manny Greenhill is hoping to get Miss Baez to write a book, to be in a movie, and to get around to recording the rock ‘n’ roll songs. He will not discuss her income, although he will say, at once jaunty and bleak, “but it won’t be much
this
year.” Miss Baez let him schedule only one concert for 1966 (down from an average of thirty a year), has accepted only one regular club booking in her entire career, and is virtually never on television. “What’s she going to do on Andy Williams?” Manny Greenhill shrugs. “One time she sang one of Pat Boone’s songs with him,” he adds, “which proves she can get along, but still. We don’t want her up there with some dance routine behind her.” Greenhill keeps an eye on her political appearances, and tries to prevent the use of her name. “We say, if they use her name it’s a concert. The point is, if they haven’t used her name, then if she doesn’t like the looks of it she can get out.” He is resigned to the school’s cutting into her schedule. “Listen,” he says. “I’ve always encouraged her to be political. I may not be active, but let’s say I’m concerned.” He squints into the sun. “Let’s say maybe I’m just too old.”

To encourage Joan Baez to be “political” is really only to encourage Joan Baez to continue “feeling” things, for her politics are still, as she herself said, “all vague.” Her approach is instinctive, pragmatic, not too far from that of any League of Women Voters member. “Frankly, I’m down on Communism,” is her latest word on that subject. On recent events in the pacifist movement, she has this to say: “Burning draft cards doesn’t make sense, and burning themselves makes even less.” When she was at Palo Alto High School and refused to leave the building during a bomb drill, she was not motivated by theory; she did it because “it was the practical thing to do, I mean it seemed to me this drill was impractical, all these people thinking they could get into some kind of little shelter and be saved with canned water.” She has made appearances for Democratic administrations, and is frequently quoted as saying: “There’s never been a good Republican folksinger”; it is scarcely the diction of the new radicalism. Her concert program includes some of her thoughts about “waiting on the eve of destruction,” and her thoughts are these:

My life is a crystal teardrop
.
There are snowflakes falling in the teardrop and little figures trudging around in slow motion
.
If I were to look into the teardrop for the next million years
,
I might never find out who the people are
,
and what they are doing
.

Sometimes I get lonesome for a storm
.
A full-blown storm where everything changes
.
The sky goes through four days in an hour
,
the trees wail
,
little animals skitter in the mud and everything gets dark and goes completely wild
.
But its really God
—
playing music in his favorite cathedral in heaven
—
shattering stained glass
—
playing a gigantic organ
—
thundering on the keys
—
perfect harmony
—
perfect joy
.

Although Miss Baez does not actually talk this way when she is kept from the typewriter, she does try, perhaps unconsciously, to hang on to the innocence and turbulence and capacity for wonder, however ersatz or shallow, of her own or of anyone’s adolescence. This openness, this vulnerability, is of course precisely the reason why she is so able to “come through” to all the young and lonely and inarticulate, to all those who suspect that no one else in the world understands about beauty and hurt and love and brotherhood. Perhaps because she is older now, Miss Baez is sometimes troubled that she means, to a great many of her admirers, everything that is beautiful and true.

“I’m not very happy with my thinking about it,” she says. “Sometimes I tell myself, ‘Come on, Baez, you’re just like everybody else, ’ but then I’m not happy with that either.”

“Not everybody else has the voice,” Ira Sandperl interrupts dotingly.

“Oh, it’s all right to have the
voice
,
the
voice
is all right...”

She breaks off and concentrates for a long while on the buckle of her shoe.

So now the girl whose life is a crystal teardrop has her own place, a place where the sun shines and the ambiguities can be set aside a little while longer, a place where everyone can be warm and loving and share confidences. “One day we went around the room and told a little about ourselves,” she confides, “and I discovered that
boy
,
I’d had it pretty easy.” The late afternoon sun streaks the clean wooden floor and the birds sing in the scrub oaks and the beautiful children sit in their coats on the floor and listen to Ira Sandperl.

“Are you a vegetarian, Ira?” someone asks idly.

“Yes. Yes, I am.”

“Tell them, Ira,” Joan Baez says. “It’s nice.”

He leans back and looks toward the ceiling. “I was in the Sierra once.” He pauses, and Joan Baez smiles approvingly. “I saw this magnificent tree
growing
out of bare rock,
thrusting
itself...and I thought
all right
,
tree
,
if you want to live that much,
all right
!
All
right
!
OK! I won’t chop you! I won’t eat you! The one thing we all have in common is that we all want to
liver

“But what about vegetables,” a girl murmurs.

“Well, I realized, of course, that as long as I was in
this flesh
and
this blood
I couldn’t be perfectly nonviolent.”

It is getting late. Fifty cents apiece is collected for the next day’s lunch, and someone reads a request from the Monterey County Board of Supervisors that citizens fly American flags to show that “Kooks, Commies, and Cowards do not represent our County,” and someone else brings up the Vietnam Day Committee, and a dissident member who had visited Carmel.

“Marv’s an honest-to-God nonviolenter,” Ira Sandperl declares. “A man of honesty and love.”

“He said he’s an anarchist,” someone interjects doubtfully.

“Right,” Ira Sandperl agrees. “Absolutely.”

“Would the V. D. C. call Gandhi bourgeois?”

“Oh, they must know better, but they lead such bourgeois lives themselves...”

“That’s so true,” says the dreamy blond boy with the violet marble. “You walk into their office, they’re so unfriendly, so unfriendly and cold...”

Everyone smiles lovingly at him. By now the sky outside is the color of his marble, but they are all reluctant about gathering up their books and magazines and records, about finding their car keys and ending the day, and by the time they are ready to leave Joan Baez is eating potato salad with her fingers from a bowl in the refrigerator, and everyone stays to share it, just a little while longer where it is warm.

1966

michael laski
,
also
known as M. I. Laski, is a relatively obscure young man with deep fervent eyes, a short beard, and a pallor which seems particularly remarkable in Southern California. With his striking appearance and his relentlessly ideological diction, he looks and talks precisely like the popular image of a professional revolutionary, which in fact he is. He was born twenty-six years ago in Brooklyn, moved as a child to Los Angeles, dropped out of U. C. L. A. his sophomore year to organize for the Retail Clerks, and now, as General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party U. S. A. (Marxist-Leninist), a splinter group of Stalinist-Maoists who divide their energies between Watts and Harlem, he is rigidly committed to an immutable complex of doctrine, including the notions that the traditional American Communist Party is a “revisionist bourgeois clique,” that the Progressive Labor Party, the Trotskyites, and “the revisionist clique headed by Gus Hall” prove themselves opportunistic bourgeois lackeys by making their peace appeal not to the “workers” but to the liberal imperialists; and that H. Rap Brown is the tool, if not the conscious agent, of the ruling imperialist class.