Hollywood is less a place on a map than a state of mind, generally a hive mind that creates a comforting echo chamber intended to keep everyone in line, especially in matters and ideas political. So, it was no surprise my four luncheon companions were now all in the same mood: gloomy, seething, scared, almost disconnected. Until a few moments ago, the discussion had been lively, quick and entertaining. And then, at some unseen point, in an unnoticed moment, one of us crossed a line, said something or taken something personally — and a dark silence fell, shattering an easy fellowship that had survived amongst us for many years.
The subject had been Clinton v. Trump. As usual, in nearly all my interactions with my Hollywood colleagues, it was me against the house. As a well-known renegade conservative I was expected to be the whetstone (though I inevitably ended up the knife) in the contrarian position. From the beginning, when I first broke from the pack to work openly for Ronald Reagan’s election, I learned the town’s rules were stacked against me. Over the years, though, the bitterness increased, the invective became more vile, and one’s political views — if they differed from the norm — became cause to question one’s moral claim on existence. Well, maybe not existence but certainly one’s right to a career. From open argument to “Non-Democrats need not Apply” in a handful of elections.
How did this happen? How did a community of creative people become so narrow-minded, so vengeful? It wasn’t always like this. The popular culture once lifted us up, prided itself on that. What the hell happened? And when?
In the mid Seventies, when my wife Gloria and I followed our careers to Hollywood, we found that as big as the Entertainment Business was, the creative community was quite small. Three networks, seven major studios and the fin-syn indies supplied the world with nearly 90% of its music, film, and television. World War Two had left behind a virtual American Empire as ubiquitous and dominating as Victorian Britain or Republican Rome had boasted. Except we had not spread ours at the edge of the swords of battle-hardened legions or by sending out bankers and grocers from London to build dependent consumer economies. No, we had won our dominion with an irresistible popular culture that spoke of strong personalities, individual freedom, the joys of eccentricity and the justice of the common man’s common sense. Bette Davis, Johnny Mercer, Barbara Stanwyck, Jimmy Stewart, Bogart, High Noon, Mae West, Capra, Sinatra, thousands more, all conspired to paint a picture of a world where all things were possible. A second generation — Presley, Jimmy Dean, Singin’ in The Rain, Rod Serling, fortified the process.
And Americans were justifiably proud of what they’d accomplished; consider the windy North Carolina Beach where two bicycle mechanics with the now-improbable names of Wilbur and Orville managed to coax a heavier-than-air-machine off the ground and make it fly for 12 seconds! It hardly gained 18′ maximum altitude and didn’t get too far — but for the first time, man flew. For the can-do Americans, that was just a hint. A mere 66 years later — hardly one person’s lifetime nowadays, thanks largely to American medicine — these people with their jazz and wild west and The Charleston stretched that 12 seconds until they not only sent a man to the moon — and here’s the hard part — they brought him back!Just to make things a little less easy over the 66 years, this once English-Scots-Irish-German nation continued to assimilate millions, opening its golden door to the world’s huddled masses yearning to breathe free, Irish tenant farmers the English had starved into emigrating, hardscrabble Italians fleeing the hunger of Calabria, terrified impoverished Jews escaping the Tsar’s pogroms that would eventually see nearly 2 million of them murdered. The 80 million Americans who read about Kitty Hawke in 1903’s morning papers ballooned to almost 200 million who watched “one small step for a man, one great step for mankind” on their 1969 television sets.
And, oh, yes: they also found time to break the stalemate on The Western Front in 1917 and end the devastating, gut-wrenching carnage of WWI; save Europe from the scourge of Nazism and Asia from Japan’s racist, murderous “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”; block “People’s China” from enslaving South Korea (and just take a look at North Korea if you wonder if that was worth it); destroy the Soviet Union not by force of arms but by sheer economic effort backed by the political will to stand up to bloody dictators; and, lest anyone still think Civil Rights was a gift of the Boomers, it was Roosevelt in 1943 who re-integrated the civil service (reversing Woodrow Wilson’s resegregation); Truman who reintegrated the Armed forces in ’44; Ike who desegregated the nation’s railways and bus routes in ’53 and who sent troops into the South to force the opening of schools to children of all races equally.
It was a proud record. What amazing people. And as kid in England, after WWII, the Yanks were just that. We were proud of them. They had come from places whose names we couldn’t even pronounce (you try Ypsilanti or Kalamazoo with a thick Cockney accent) many of them to die on French beaches for the freedom of people they knew little or nothing about. In time, I would understand why. In Britain, Canada, Australia, across the Commonwealth, war memorials invariably begin “To the Glory of God and those who fell for King & Country…” But the small American town cenotaph inevitably proclaims “For those fallen in the cause of freedom…”.
The great blessing of my life was that in 1948 my parents managed to get out of England, at that time an unpleasant place for Jews given the war against the “Palestinians” (i.e., Jews) in the Holy Land. We came not to America but to Canada — different in so many ways, but in heart and soul and spirit, in generosity, courage, and basic decency, America’s shining twin. I thought myself the most fortunate child on God’s earth. I had landed where I wanted to be, amongst people I had always virtually worshipped. But try as I might, I couldn’t avoid the growing awareness that people my age, natives, so to speak, were dismissing this view of their country, denying what I thought were indisputable facts. Now, having settled in mid-Seventies Hollywood, Gloria and I worked at what we hoped would be rewarding and worthwhile careers. But we continually bumped into situations where our notions of what the ‘common virtues of Americans were or what the country stood for seemed almost transgressive to people our own age. Oh, we’d seen this before, in the Universities, especially during our time at Oxford where the loudest and bitterest anti-American invective would come from U.S. Rhodes scholars, some destined to hold the highest of political offices in our country. But this was Hollywood, the home of the America’s vibrant popular culture, the place that actually built what we routinely refer to as “America’s beacon of freedom to the world.” In the beginning, we thought it was simply a matter of misinformation that could be cured by fact-checking. (I had yet to understand that Alinsky and his ideas of what constituted truth were being fed into the universities through Jacques Derrida and the Modern Language Association; I assumed everyone understood a scoundrel like Chomsky was probably also a half-wit. Wrong again.) So we became pilgrims in search of what would later be given the Orwellian title “Teachable moment.”
And that was how I met my first Ameriphobe.
It began one evening in the dining room of a stunning home in the Malibu Colony with a view of “the necklace”, thirty miles of semi-circular shoreline whose twinkling lights stretched to Palos Verdes. It was early in Clinton’s first term and I had been presented to him at the White House — not, I hasten to say, because I was a loyalist, but because I had been invited by Jan Scruggs and the Board of the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial to give the Veteran’s Day Keynote address at “The Wall”. Breakfast at the White House was automatically included. (My peacetime military service, such as it was, with The Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment) of Canada barely qualified me to stand among the disdained heroes of that forgotten war, let alone address them. But they had few friends in Hollywood and my films had persistently addressed their cause and thus, in a cruel inversion, they were thanking me.) In any event, back to Malibu.
The vegan rice cake with arugula paste starter was being replaced with venison au four when the host, the functioning head of one of the networks or studios, presumably bored, decided to stir things up. With a grin and his chin stuck out, and in a voice loud enough to silence all other crosstalk, he challenged me:
“So Clinton. Was he fantastic or what?”
“Er…I’d actually met him up at Oxford. Students ‘n’ all. Opinion already set.”
The catering sommelier showed me the suggested wine bottle. “This usually goes well with that.” The venison was yet to be served so I wondered if by “that” he meant the host’s tone. What the hell, I thought: can’t give up alpha-dog that easily.
“Surely one prefers spirits with antlered meat, no?” I sniffed. The sommelier winked. My one-upmanship had worked.
“Talisker? Oban?” I asked hoping to catch my host short of the really obscure stuff. But he just grinned more broadly.
“Your choice. Got ’em both.” He paused. “So forget Bill. What the hell are you doing with a gang of Viet Vets?”
In those days, it was common in Hollywood scripts to use “Viet Vet” as a descriptive phrase for ill-shaven, mentally disturbed, often potential serial killer Hell’s Angels. That made sense since you could count Vietnam Veterans almost on one hand. Bob Sheffel. Pat Sajak. Ted Steinberg. Paul Maslansky. Tom Selleck and Bob Papazian were Vietnam era vets but never in-country. Certainly not my host who continued to press me.
“Seriously, Chetwynd, give me one reason why I should make a big deal about the military?”
“How about because you’re free to ask that question.” My whisky arrived.
“That’s because we won the wars. That’s about politicians making policy and guys like Patton and Ike making it real.”
It was Talisker, a rare whisky, or I’d’ve held him down and poured it in his eyes. A long draught of the Isle of Skye’s finest, then: “Anyone here know what Dieppe is?”
Of course not.
So, with the candles flickering in a light onshore breeze and soft music drifting in from the living room, I told them of Dieppe, a port on the Norman Coast of Northern France. I took them back to February, 1942. By then, Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the other parts of the Empire had been at war with Germany and Japan for over two and half years. It had been a dreadful ordeal, the Axis exacting a terribly heavy price in blood and treasure for what seemed a futile resistance. The only hopeful sign had been Montgomery’s British 8th Army who had finally stopped Rommel’s Afrika Korpsand led by the bagpipers of the 52nd Highland Division, had begun the counter-attack that would rout and would drive him back to Europe. The Commonwealth Air forces had so far defended Cyprus and defied the German siege of Malta. From the beginning, Churchill had told his people they could not win this war — but if they could stop Hitler until America came to their side, they would save Western Civilization. And then, some ten weeks prior, Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor. America was in the war! The exhausted allies wanted some quick fruits of this great juncture. But since Hitler had turned on the USSR, betraying the communists’ confident and friendly trust in him, Uncle Joe Stalin was demanding we immediately come to his relief with a Second Front — an invasion of France to force Germany into a two-front war. In that ambition he was supported by the entire American Left and that portion of the media that described itself as Liberal. But it posed a problem: the allies had nowhere near the number of landing craft needed for an amphibious landing. And even if they did, they’d need a huge force to land in Normandy, the closest stretch of beach without ports and the ships and soldiers the Germans stationed in them. No, it meant a raid on a fortified port. And Dieppe — uniquely fairly isolated, with a large mole or retaining wall to ensure no waves once inside — was the obvious choice.
But who would be called to spill their blood in a wildly daring and almost certainly doomed raid on a port defended by a battle-hardened Wehrmacht division, fortified with pillboxes, field artillery, supported by two crack Panzer Units and 200 Luftwaffe fighter bombers? Although the Americans were anxious to join the fight, there were hardly any U.S. troops available yet; their war was but weeks old. ANZAC (the Aussies and Kiwis) had taken hard licks through the South Pacific and most of their units were not yet back up-to-strength. So despite Canada’s heavy losses in the Defense of Hong Kong, it was they who agreed to bear the significant burden of the fight. (Canada raised, per capita, the largest armed force in the world to fight WWII: by war’s end, this nation of barely 11 million souls had put 1.4 million men and women in uniform.) A force of five thousand Canadians was augmented by 1000 British Commandoes1and 50 U.S. Army Rangers2, all that were available.
Churchill and his generals (Mountbatten commanded the operation; his Intelligence chief was Lt.-Col. Ian Fleming of James Bond fame) knew that if this was to be a genuine dress rehearsal and was to have any credibility, it would have to be organized as broadly as an invading force of tens of thousands — as was eventually the case in June, 1944. So whether by design, mismanagement, or simple pity for men — or boys, as many were yet to see their twentieth birthday — these 6,000 some odd troops were brought to their disembarkation point, briefed to Senior NCO level, meaning almost everyone knew where they were headed and what were the objectives, given a good pay advance…and 48 hours leave. An intelligence risk? No doubt, but that was perhaps what was intended. A dangerous invitation to young men to avoid a possible, perhaps probable death, by letting them slip into the night with cash in their pockets? Most certainly.
But here’s the thing of it: When the embarkation roll call was taken, not one man failed to answer. Not one. To a soul, they had returned to their posts. To their duty.
I described the glitches caused by the lack of planning, the bravery of the men who fell, the letters found in their pockets to girls only just met hours before German Spandau MMGs ripped their young bodies in two. I told the stories of the kids from Southern Ontario’s Royal Hamilton Light Infantry who defended a school full of children even after all their ammunition was spent, of the boys of the South Saskatchewans who wrote home excited that would see France, only to be struck down on her stony beach, of the Fusiliers Mont-Royal, stranded on the mole, cut down by German machine gun fire, murdered in cold blood. And of the Cameron Highlanders of Canada who were virtually wiped out taking the tiny patch of beach. And then I spoke of the consequences: A Naval Destroyer, the Berkley, lost with all souls dead or captured. Luftwaffe losses 48, Commonwealth Air Forces 149. Of 50 US Rangers, 17 were lost, of the 1000 Royal Marine Commandoes, some 35%. And the 5000 Canadians? The equivalent of 150,000 U.S. troops in today’s population numbers? 3,367 killed, wounded or POW. 68% losses.
68%! Staggering for that small country. Church bells tolled from St. John’s, Newfoundland to British Columbia’s westernmost Pacific hamlet. People wrapped their arms about themselves, mourned, rocking — not wailing or with sackcloth and ashes, but like the Highland Clansmen and Women who built that country. With quiet dignity and pride they “had done their bit” in the fight for freedom.
I told my dinner companions of Sergeant Gordie Betts, my first platoon sergeant, a former Cameron Highlander, now a Black Watch man, a veteran of that dark August. One night, in a Montreal Tavern, the mood just right, I dared to ask him: “Sarn’t Betts,” I asked. “You were at Dieppe, eh?” He nodded, then looked away as if to say, I’ll not go there, laddie, that’s not for idle bar talk. I waited a moment, then, as softly as I could. “I’m not after war stories, Sarn’t. It’s but one question.” There were about six of us around the table. Cross talk ended, everyone silent. I’d crossed a line a non-combat peacetime Militia NCO didn’t normally dare cross. A long beat before he turned back to me, locked me in eye contact. He stared into me for a very long beat before, perhaps seeing what he wanted, he nodded — a terse, grim, single forward jerk of the head. “All right, Corporal. You get one. Just one.”
I took a breath. “Six and a half thousand guys. Yanks. Brits. Us. Everyone with money and the chance to take French leave — jump the wall, go AWOL for six hours, that’s all you needed, then the ships would’ve sailed and you’d’ve blamed the booze and if you turned yourselves in, you’d’ve been free and clear. Thirty days detention, loss of rank, maybe, but that’d be it. Didn’t you at least think about it?”
“Different generation, Corporal. See, nowadays we’re trying to make the world perfect for our kids, make sure they got all the things we never had, all that kinda stuff. Trouble is, seems that all we ended up doing was making a bunch of kids who only have to think about what they wanna live for. See, us guys, we hadda figure out what was worth dying for. And a world full of fucking Nazis, that wasn’t gonna be worth living in, was it now? So getting’ rid of them hadda be worth dying for. Do you read me, Corporal?”
I did. How could I not? “Yes, Sarn’t. Copy you loud and clear, Sarn’t.”
“So what would you have done, Corporal?”
“Dunno, Sarn’t. Like to think I’d’ve reported in.”
He grinned. “You may make a good soldier, after all. One day.” He raised his glass of Molson Export, “And do me a favor: call me Gordie, will ya, Chetwynd?” He drained his glass. “This round’s on you.”
The guys cheered, slapped my back. It was one of the great gifts of my life, the beginning of my admission to the world of men whose acceptance I so urgently craved, given to me in a beery tavern onRue Ste-Cathérine by one of the bravest men I ever knew, a man who found his place in the fraternity under fire of Wehrmacht machine guns. He’s gone now, but may God bless his soul and all like him.
By the time my story was done, the on-shore breeze had picked up, the candles flickered and dimmed, and I knew my telling had done credit to my heroes. There was not a dry eye. My host personally refilled my Talisker. His voice was thick and gravelly.
“I have to do this. I want this movie. Come in on Wednesday. See my people. Pitch it. We’ll do it.”
And so it was, the following week, I sat in the steel-and-glass conference room wih its sweeping views of the South Coast and not-too-distant Pacific and recounted the story to virtually the entire development department. They too were moved. Deeply. As is protocol, everyone waited for the Senior V-P Development to respond. She swiveled in her chair, stared out at the sun glinting on the Ocean, shook her head in disbelief. She swiveled back to face me, her expression profoundly troubled. She spoke slowly, carefully, choosing her words.
“So…so…these generals…including Mount-what’shisname, James Bond and even Churchill, sent these boys to a certain death?”
“I wouldn’t say it was certain. But it was surely probable.”
“The Bloodthirsty bastards…
From somewhere down the table, “Great role for Ryan O’Neal. His agent says he’s looking for –
“I interrupted immediately, this was going south, the whole wrong direction. “No, no, no! You’ve got it wrong! The Generals wept for their men! This was a horrible moment for them, like Ike sending the jumpers into D-Day! But it was a price the war demanded. Churchill said D-Day was won at Dieppe, the things learned there made all the difference! Stalin was mollified and stepped up resistance! That’s the point! Don’t you see? It was dreadful sacrifice but because of it I’m pitching you in English, not German! In fact, that I’m even alive…!”
I trailed off. I saw her eyes go dead. I had lost her. The worst moment in a pitch, the moment you realize you’re the bull, not the torero.
She coughed. “No thoughtless bloodthirsty generals?” I shook my head.
“In which case” she asked, “Who’s the enemy of the piece?”
“Why, Hitler,” I replied. “Hitler and the Nazis.”
She looked at me as though I were an idiot. “No, no, no,” she said, irritated, cross, dismissive. “I mean the real enemy!”
What I said and did next was, for a while, a Hollywood cocktail party story of some currency. It’s forgotten now.
But the thing of it is, on that day in the early nineties, I had met my first Ameriphobe3, the first of what would become many. Now, I sometimes think that’s all who are left: people who can only understand the darkest of human cruelties, Nazism and all it stood for, as a cypher for the evil in ourselves. In fact, unless the evil can be placed in an American context, it cannot be properly explained. One current show uses an attack on the Capitol during a State of the Union address as a predicate to depict Policeman in Michigan kicking a handcuffed Arab teenager to death. That’s correct: a manacled young Arab-American is kicked to death by white police officers. Never mind that this has never happened, forget that despite all endless allegations of Islamaphobia against the American people, the increase in religious persecution in our country since 9/11 has been directed largely at Jews. The producers’ point, presumably, is that if you wish to understand why “militants/insurgents/whatevers” behead, drown, or burn alive human beings, you must first build a fictitious structure revealing how and where that evil resides in us.
But, of course, it doesn’t. (By the way, the first episode makes it quite clear the Muslim extremists are being framed; as of Episode Three, I’m guessing the culprits are White Supremists — evil terror-mongers no doubt, but since Timothy McVeigh’s sickening strike at OKCity, ones who seem unable to organize a decent demonstration, let alone the comprehensive destruction of our nation’s capital.) Most curiously of all, though, Ameriphobes detect evil in Americans with whom they disagree but seem blind to it in themselves and their friends. Which brings me back to my silent lunch in one of the town’s best restaurants.
We had started promptly at one o’clock with a ritual roundtable flaying of Donald Trump. The “Billy Bush Tape” in which a soft synonym for vagina (begins with a “p” as opposed to the hard synonym which begins a “c”) had just surfaced and each of the men had taken turns excoriating Trump, expressing their disgust, raining words like “sickening”, “degrading”, “dehumanizing” (a favorite Alinskyism). Until it was my turn. I was utterly incredulous.
“I’ve known you guys for forty years. We’ve lived through marriages, divorces — yours, never mine — played cards, shared the problems of raising kids in an era of drugs — and we’ve made our way the best we could. And each and every one of you has slipped from the straight and narrow when it came to talking sex and women. You know it. Hell, it was on our watch the whole industry became vulgarized. It was our watch that got America from the family hour to some of the worst, most foul-mouthed “entertainment” imaginable. Hollywood boasts to the world that it changed views of sexuality, that we can claim credit for ending discrimination against gays and for getting Americans comfortable with the whole GLTBTQ agenda. But when it comes to gun violence? Moi? Are you kidding me? Listen, I like Spader and enjoy his J. Peterman catalogue dialogue on Blacklist, haven’t missed an episode — but violent? Gimme a break! He kills more people in an hour than ISIS! And a lotta them on spec! More people get offed in what used to be family hour! And what’s Billy Bush’s big crime? That 11 years ago– — ”
I stopped, realizing I had become very loud, and the entire restaurant had fallen silent, staring. Feeling stupid I looked down, glanced at my watch. Not quite half past one. These friendships might not last to coffee. I turned to stare out the window where the business of comforting the wealthy clientele ground on in 100 degree heat
1:30 is High Lunch at tony Hollywood eateries, arrival hour for those too busy and important to be on time at 1. A Tesla vies with a Bentley for the valet parker’s attention, only to be outflanked by a bright yellow Lamborghini screeching to a halt in the middle of the street, the (presumed) owner leaping over the door, greeted by the valet staff with broad grins reserved for insecure but very wealthy chronic overtippers. A mere Infiniti man myself (albeit a Q50) ours is a Tesla/Prius table. (The status ladder allows you to grandfather in a Prius if you’d been driving one for five years before the Tesla was introduced. I think that was the basis of the original DREAM amnesty markers.)
I looked back to the table; my friends and I were comprehensively forlorn. We had come close once before, during the Nineties, when Norman Powell, Ted Steinberg and I produced “National Desk”, a PBS public affairs series they claimed to be conservative (and was, at least as far as we could make it so.) Our managing editor Fred Barnes (he shared the august title with Mort Kondracke) prodded us into a series of shows loosely gathered around the rubric “The War on Boys”; we dealt with Ritalin, the proportionality abuses of Title IX, the lowering of Military Standards to accommodate social experimentation of women in the service — the subject had endless possibilities. We found it connected to Rainbow curricula, there was no end. It was gloomy. We alleged there were forces loose in the country determined to make testosterone a pathological infirmity. Now, twenty years later, with men — well, white men, in any event — the butt of every joke on television, the uneducated schmo in every commercial, the dangerous predator in every drama, the blockhead in every romance that can only be saved by the wise counsel of a woman (of any age: an eight year old daughter or an eighty year old bubby will do, or the character Key & Peele designated — I believe — as “The Kindly Wise Older Negro) I look back on Fred’s prescience with awe. The nabobs at PBS considered us fascists. Told us so. But Fred had been right.
The entrées were arriving. Something had to be done. It had to come from me, the solitary hold out.
“Look,” I tried, “if it was Kanye West who used that language—”
“He’s not running for President” someone interrupted.
“Okay…but even so, last night on the new FX comedy, they were talking about boners—”
“TV, not the national election!”
A long pause. Then from one of the guys known to be especially foul-mouthed: “Y’know, even if I do swear every now and then, it’s not about that. Trump just isn’t a gentleman. He’s just a plain old asshole. A prick.”
It was said without irony or any self-awareness. The disconnect was complete: The election was not a real event to be judged by rational people weighing the future of their children and grandchildren. It was just another TV show, and in this one Trump should understand his was a supporting role. Clinton’s the star! And no bad language in this show.
I wanted to ask about emails, Libyan Embassies, so much, but I knew the answer: that’s a different show! “The Good Wife” maybe. Like the Oliver Platte role. The remains of my smoked salmon and cream cheese pizza were removed, replaced by Short Rib Parmigianino. Or something like that.
I wanted to continue the debate, make the case I believed in, stand up for a manhood that can detest the abuse of women but also understand that not all words from all men should be taken too literally, not in this day and age, especially in a society that’s forgotten how to teach boys what it is to be a man, where huge sectors of the population grow up without fathers, and college men are considered prima faciepredatory monsters and many wonder whether the slogan “Black Lives Matter” mean theirs don’t. I wanted to beg them to look at Trump and his family and ask if that’s the definition of a woman beater we should be promulgating.
But I stayed silent, allowed these once lively, now tendentious men, the last word. It was a war of attrition and I was attenuated. Consumed by conflict fatigue. Their discussion turned to populating the next cabinet with the “right” kind of people. I toyed with stuff on my plate, let the Ameriphobic ethics chat wash over my me.
Sorry, Sarn’t Betts. Guess I didn’t turn out to be the good soldier after all.
But thanks for your service.
—
This blogpost was originally posted on The Caucus.