The Ferrari in the Bedroom (6 page)

The male, however, was confused, since he had been conditioned from infancy to the ideas of an earlier age; the romanticism of a world in which men pursued women and women capitulated, and there was a thing called Love. It has been observed that the two sexes do not necessarily travel at the same rate of speed through time, and that the female of the species is perhaps more advanced into the 20th Century than the male. Hence the male’s confusion as to what and where he is. The male is also, historically, not as adaptable as the female to changing conditions of life, so hence the transition into a new, impersonal, urbanized existence has
not been as easily consummated by the man as it was by the woman.

The fascinating results can be seen everywhere. The romantic development of the male Beatnik of the early Fifties who tried to fantasize himself out of his time and developed great glass bubbles of fiction around his life, fervently imagining himself to be a 19th century cowhand, a fistfighting hobo of the Thirties, a Whaling sea captain, a Spanish bullfighter, and God knows what else. The remnants of this fantasizing are still with us in the Bob Dylans, who once was quoted on a record jacket extolling one of his discs as having “Fistfought his way across America, singing for nickels and dimes.” Poor little one-hundred-and-thirty-five pound Bobbie. I can’t imagine who he fistfought with, but I’m sure he fervently believes he did. He is really the end product of the Kerouac era, with one difference but it is a significant one, and that is whereas Kerouac avowedly wrote Fiction, Dylan believes his, and would bridle at the idea that it was pure fantasy.

Why do men in the 1970s find it necessary to dream themselves into another existence? Well, that’s not so easy to answer, but I suspect it could be that the outside world, the world of Mao Tse-tung and the great void beyond, have become a little difficult to deal with. Children have always played House with interchangeable roles, and I suspect that great portions of our population are reverting to childhood in their moment of terror.

And of course there is that matter of Responsibility. This is one of those words that is slowly beginning to creep out of the language as others have in the past, like Honesty, Patriotism, Courage, and Immoral. It is facinating to watch how closely language itself reflects changing times. H. L. Mencken was a dedicated student of this phenomenon,
which led to the development of Semantics as a branch of The Humanities.
Responsibility
is a word that now is used almost exclusively to describe something that
Society
should have toward the individual and is hardly ever mentioned, if at all, in the reverse. In short, as we become more and more child-like and create a firmer foundation of fantasy for our lives, playing House with a vengeance, it is obvious that we must eventually reverse roles if we are to avoid personal responsibility. A male who has adopted a female role cannot be expected to have the responsibilities of Fatherhood, being feminine, and conversely a female who has clothed herself in the outward guise of masculinity should not be asked to wash the dishes.

And ultimately, of course, Sex will have to go too, since it obviously entails many dangers, such as who is going to do what to whom. And even more to the point,
why?
So the development of a race of Neuters sliding back and forth on the identity scale at will was inevitable; asexual, non-involved, self-loving, and almost entirely devoid of the more human compassions, and cruel to the extreme.

Cruelty is one of the most obvious characteristics of the output of the New Neuter, both female and male, a kind of constant running Put-down of all the Others, the Others, of course, being those who are, for one reason or another, Out.

The ascendancy of the Girl as top dog, or shall I say top bitch, in our society has created some exotic byproducts. Among them is the male Soap Opera. A Soap Opera can be defined as a sexual fantasy wherein the chief character is triumphant in all situations and maintains an air of superiority through great perils and incredible catastrophes, but always remains successful in the end. Helen Trent was the great prototype of the Soap Opera world. Even her tag-line
was highly significant: “The program that answers the age-old question—Can a woman of thirty-five attain true Love?”

You bet. At least old Helen did. Every male who appeared on the horizon immediately went ape, threatened suicide, suffered amnesia, developed catatonic blindness, and took to drink, all over the love of Helen Trent, which of course she withheld.

Helen Trent is so close to James Bond as to make one wonder whether the late Ian Fleming might have been an old Helen Trent fan. A few decades back, countless downtrodden women lorded over by an all-powerful male out having, at least so his woman thought, endless Fun At The Office mooned dreamily over the ironing board as Helen Trent, Wendy Warren, Mary Noble and other spectacularly sudsy ladies squelched, ground under heel, obliterated, loved and left male after male as the afternoon wore on toward that disastrous moment when Attila the Hun slammed the door open and hollered “Where’s supper!” For her, Helen represented real life that was being lived somewhere Out There, and oddly enough was a spookily accurate harbinger of Career Girls to come. Countless offices today are riddled with steel-jawed, skiing, surfing, motorcycle riding Helen Trents that have about as much use for males as James Bond has for chicks.

Ah yes, James Bond. The new Helen Trent for a multitude of sunken-chested, bespectacled, Pepsi-drinking
Playboy-
reading, fantasy-ridden, lonely males. 007, the nuclear bomb of Passion (or at least Sex, and there is a difference, gentlemen) has become the will-o-the-wisp dream phantom of the great horde of those who prefer to read, or are afraid to date. The amazing number of males who today moon about Sex, read about it, see it in films, write about it
and do everything but
have
it is highly reminiscent of the virginal ladies who in the 1950s and early 40s read
True Confessions, True Romances,
and gaped at Bette Davis epics of celluloid sensuality. The old novel of the beautiful sensual female has all but disappeared. Kathleen Winsor and
Forever Amber
are fragile period-pieces of another age, written for women who dreamed, to be replaced by the current crop of novelistic Male sexual fantasies of the Norman Mailer/J. P. Donleavy/Ginger Man stripe. Sebastian Dangerfield is the reading man’s Amber. Fantasy studs who thunder their way through billowy fields of acquiescent females, untouched by any of them, triumphant to the end, but all with a wicked glint of delightful, boyish humor in their dancing eyes.

Exactly the way Amber St. Clair was described by an earlier fantasy merchant of an earlier era. Even the names are similar; Amber St. Clair—Sebastian Dangerfield. My god, will Sexual wonders never cease?

The women who read and quivered to Amber had as little real Sex in their lives as the nervous, hollow-cheeked, gaunt admirers of Philip Roth have in theirs. And for the same reasons. They both belong to a Minority group in the Sex game.

Today’s movies bulge with Male pipedreams, gigantic heroes in the arenas of Studdery that boggle the imagination. Why, if one believes the movies even Woody Allen has a chance with Ursula Andress, and poor tired-eyed, weak-chinned Peter O’Toole is more effective than a red-eyed, short-tempered Durham bull among a herd of cows.

And what are the New Women doing during all this? Nothing. They don’t have to. Now in the saddle, growing taller and heavier by the minute, they no longer need the fantasies and dreams of an earlier time.

The resident Husband now quietly mooning over the automatic washing machine, eyes glazing lustfully over Miss June, the Playmate of the Decade, his well-thumbed paperback edition of
The American Dream
by Norman Mailer in the back pocket of his lowcut saddle-stitched Neo-Gary Cooper Levi’s, waiting for the dryer to finish the week’s laundry, his hands chafed and worn by long immersion in Mr. Clean, The Dishwater Wonder, uneasily fears the moment when Helen of Troy slams open the front door and bellows, “WHERE THE HELL’S SUPPER!!”

We are all in it together, and there is no turning back. The Great Role Reversal is rumbling upward and outward in an enormous mushroom cloud of irresistible force and all we can wait for now is the fallout and the casualty reports. A new age is dawning.

EDITOR’S NOTE:
Have you envied those lucky devils who constantly appear on TV outdoor specials fishing and hunting all over the world, and in color: Rip Torn shooting caribou; Robert Stack hunting everything; Bing Crosby popping away at quail? How does it feel to be one of these fortunate Showbiz outdoorsmen?

Jean Shepherd,
Field and Stream
contributor and four-time
Playboy
Humor Award winner, TV and radio performer and avid although largely unsuccessful fisherman caught Coho salmon in Lake Michigan on CBS’s “Fisherman’s World” last year. It was an exotic experience.

Upon being invited to go ice fishing by the producer of “Fisherman’s World” he decided to keep a diary on just what it is like to be a TV fisherman. He returned from the Wisconsin hinterland with his tattered notebook: bourbon-stained and dog-eared, his tackle box in one hand and the latest copy of
Variety
in the other. He, for the first time in print, gives us the lowdown on the fascinating and growing world of the Celebrity Sportsman.

January 16, 1972

[Written en route]

Boarded 727 United Airlines flight to Chicago at 7:50
P.M.
Club Commuter flight. Just think, in a few hours I’ll be out of this urban world of phony values and shallow attitudes and I will be in Wisconsin, where Life is real and Nature beckons.

I peer out of the plane window at long lines of airliners waiting for take-off in the miserable New York smog. Temperature 26 degrees. It is warm here in the First Class section. Behind us, in the rear of the plane, the grubby peasants in the Tourist section (steerage class) are already telling their lewd jokes; babies are crying, and old ladies complaining fitfully. Here in First Class all is serene. Well-fed ad men bound for Chicago and points West and god-knows-what chicanery surround me. We are up and away into the blackness, Manhattan receding below, a string of flickering Christmas tree lights scattered in the inky darkness.

By god, I’m lucky! There are probably forty million guys out there in Audienceland who would give damn near anything to go fishing on TV. I loll back in the soft vastness of my First Class seat, counting my blessings. I’ve come a long way from fishing for listless, suicidal crappies in Cedar Lake, Indiana, to the magnificence of CBS (full NET, in Color). Well, I deserve it. Fenton McHugh, the producer of “Fisherman’s World,” knows a good appealing characterful face when he sees one. There’s one fly in the ointment, though.

Ah! The stewardess, a thin, nervous blonde, is passing out the drinkies. Two little green bottles of martinis and a corned beef sandwich. I feel a tiny glow of pleasure deep inside because I know they are paying for their drinkies back in Steerage. Let ’em eat cake, I say. The blighters are getting cheeky anyway. What the hell are these macadamia nuts
anyway? I never heard of them before I started to fly First Class. They must have been invented by the airlines.

Two ad men in the seat ahead are getting noisy. They appear to be talking about TV. A third, wearing a Tom Jones shirt with tasteful plum and cerise stripes and a seven-inch-wide grape-colored tie that would have made a circus barker cringe, stands in the aisle, leaning over his two henchmen:

“Ed, the numbers boys tell you it’s a buy. Don’t argue. If it flops they can’t hang you. After all, the numbers are what it’s about, boy.”

He slops a little vodka on the top of my head as the plane jiggles a bit in turbulence. If they only knew that a real TV star was sitting here, on top of it all, in mufti!

Oh yes, where was I? The fly in the ointment. The last time Fenton had me on TV I drew an assignment in colorful, exotic Manistee, Michigan, a town not without its rough-hewn, rustic charm, if you like diners and Shell stations, but certainly not one of the great watering places of the Western world. Now I’m en route to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and in mid-Winter! Why do other guys not half as cute as I am get sent to places like Bimini or the Andes, to fish for rare bugle-billed golden dudgeons while I have to settle for ice fishing for the usual minnows the Midwest fishermen have settled for for centuries? Oh well. Maybe you have to work up to the really great shows. Probably Robert Stack started out fishing with night crawlers for bullheads in an Ohio pay lake, on a black-and-white local show. Now look where he is, on all those African safaris, and hunting tigers with Maharajas.

My agent, his shifty eyes glowing with mendacity, his fake Viennese accent redolent of Seventh Avenue strudel, had yelped:

“Vell, ve are on our vay! Ve beat oud two musical comedy stars, a juggler from der Johnny Carson show und the lead guitar player for a rock group.”