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Wages: Blowing the Bicycle Horn

Chapter 10: How to ditch a children's entertainer.

John Armstrong 20 Sep 2007TheTyee.ca

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[This is the 10th of 14 excerpts, running Tuesdays and Thursdays, from John Armstrong's memoir of the working life: Wages.]

The entertainment desk was really no better or worse than the news side for butchering copy, although a number of the more ambitious and writerly reporters had fled there, both to escape the rim pigs and for the long-shot chance to do something more than the pyramid lede and "so-and-so said Thursday" stories that the news desk processed by the ton.

Those with aspirations to write top-drawer journalism features, the kind found in the slicks, the glossy magazines on the newsstand, knew the entertainment department was the only place you had a shot at it. The editors there were more likely to run a lengthy profile or a deeper piece of reporting than those on the city desk, who only wanted to get the holes in the paper filled in and do it with enough time left over to get drunk before they had to start again.

The problem with the entertainment section was that while you could theoretically propose a piece of some substance, you first had to finish whatever else the desk decreed needed coverage. By the time you were done with the weekly menu of aspiring and waning celebrities passing through town to promote whatever brand of supplements they were hustling that week, you were not likely to have much enthusiasm or time left for your own project.

In and out of rehab

It was axiomatic that no real star would wipe himself with the Picayune-Standard -- the genuinely famous didn't need publicity from a paper like ours. At any rate, they didn't do interviews with individual local papers; they did one for a reporter at a wire service and the same story was shipped to every paper that subscribed to it. No, we got them when they were trying to claw their way back up the heap or taking their maiden run at it, and a desperate crew they were.

Long-in-the-tooth, fucked-out actresses and rising local stars who had one line in a big-budget film: I interviewed one actor in his 30s who had made the jump to Hollywood, partied himself into the gutter, done a stint in rehab and come back for a visit.

The interview was to focus on his triumphant recovery from the hell of addiction but he was so coked-out he sniffled and honked his way through the conversation, chattering like a cartoon squirrel and twirling the curly hair on his head between his fingers neurotically, until he tore the coppery locks right out of his head and blood began to run down his scalp and onto his collar. As the publicist hustled him away, he was still telling me how the program had saved his life. He was up to about the fifth step when the door shut behind them. Fine with me -- now I could memo the thing back to the desk -- although I would just have to write something else.

The merry-go-round

There was no shortage of entertainers of all stripes clamouring to get into our pages, but the worst were the children's authors and entertainers. The last were a frightening breed -- it takes a special type of person to dedicate himself to riding a unicycle, playing the banjo and singing songs for an audience made up exclusively of people who can't leave the theatre unless they have help.

They were uniformly short, bald and bearded, the men that is, and too many of the women, with a strange and unsettling aura of forced cheeriness and wonder about them. They could go on for hours about how performing for children was more fulfilling than any other job they'd ever had, how much they loved it and how lucky they were to have found such a life-affirming and rewarding calling, and the minute they had an outside shot at any gig in the adult world, they dropped the little buggers flat.

One of them had actually sold an impressive number of records filled with maddening singalongs, enough that he could afford to leave it all behind, unhook his rainbow suspenders and follow his muse. He repackaged himself as an ecological activist, a Bob Dylan for the spotted owl and the spirit bear, and instead of "A Basketful of Bunnies" he sang protest songs about the seal hunt. "Blood ran on the ice / As they clubbed the little heads in / And they left the skinless corpses in the sun."

It was, as the Brits say, a bit of a non-starter. So here he came again, back on the children's hospital and birthday party circuit, singing all 35 verses of "My Bicycle Horn" with a deep and bitter rage. I was sent to interview him at the start of his comeback, and the hate and misery leaked out of him like acid from an old car battery. He was giving me the usual guff about how happy he was to be back doing what he loved and how lucky he was. It was such crap, I couldn't bring myself to even scribble the quotes down so right in the middle of it I asked him what we really wanted to know, "So the 'Eco Warrior' thing really died the death, didn't it?"

The veins in his head looked like fat, pulsing slugs crawling under his skin, and white flecks of spittle foamed and popped on his lips. I thought he was going to come across the table at me, but he could only twitch in anger so profound he was paralyzed by it. The publicist led him away, too. I was whistling a happy tune -- another one down, and I was off the hook with the editor.

"Geez, Skip, he just got up and left. I couldn't get anything usable."

Putting your best foot forward

There was a rule about interviewing, that you should always save any provocative question for the end so that if the subject got huffy you still had enough fluff to cobble an article out of. That was no good at all. You wanted to hit them with their public indecency charge, their drunk driving arrest, the lesbian wife who had run off with the personal assistant -- whatever it was the publicist told you not to ask about should be your first question. With any luck it would be the only one.

"You've got 15 minutes," the press flak would say, herding her charge to a chair; then, head turned and under her breath, "Please don't bring up the plastic surgery thing."

"Hi Gloria. Congratulations on the new movie. What happened to your face?"

The public had a right to know, but if you worked it right someone else would have to tell them.

The worst assignments were the musicians. The majority are inarticulate, a great number are incoherent, and the few who can put a sentence together have been interviewed so many times by so many hacks that they recite their lines with all the enthusiasm of a 50-year-old whore or the man who announces the departures at the bus depot: "Oh, that's it baby. Fuck me good. Now boarding at Bay Seven, local service to Ferndale, Langley and Brentwood. Oh make me come, give me that big onion. Please have your boarding passes ready. Oh Jesus fucking Christ. Thank you for riding Pacific Stage."

Old stars obscenely obliging

The easiest interviews were the old stars. They flew into town to play grandparents in a TV movie or to appear at some charity function, and off we went with our tape recorders and pads of paper like children to the strawberry patch. It was a breeze, barely work at all. They came from an era long before celebrities considered publicity a chore and a great favour they were granting. The old ones knew they were making a product for the marketplace, and if they had to go door to door to peddle the thing they'd do it with a smile for anybody who opened the door. Show them the back of an envelope and a pencil stub from a bowling alley and they'd talk to you for an hour.

One afternoon I was sent to lunch with an elderly actor, one of the last survivors of the old studio system, a veteran of several hundred movies starting at age five and continuing into his 80s. He was a tall, slender gentleman, boyishly handsome 50 or 60 years ago but now almost entirely bald, three or four long, fine hairs plastered across his scalp like cobwebs on a tomato, his handsome profile now desiccated like a pork chop forgotten at the bottom of the freezer. He was chatty as hell, but it was all unusable -- anything you asked him led back to which starlets he'd fucked 50 years ago. The publicist came in with a bottle of water for him. She had red hair, and that brought Rita Hayworth to mind. As she left, he leaned over.

"Rita used to take me back to her dressing room and bounce on my dick like it was a god-damned pogo stick. Jesus, she was a pistol. Nutty as a god-damned fruitcake but a grade-A fuck. I was what, 16? She dyed her pussy hair -- not many people know that. Crazy women are dynamite in the sack, just don't marry them. I was married 11 times and they were all nuts."

No matter what you asked him, you ended back at the same place. Away we went down memory lane, dotted on either side by porno theatres where the great lays of his youth were onscreen around the clock. "She always played these prim characters, but the minute you closed the door, it was 'Fuck me in the ass, fuck the shit out of me.' Christ, she had a mouth like a sailor when you got a few drinks in her. What a piece of ass she was. She wrung me out like a god-damned washrag. She ended up in the nuthouse, too."

His eyes were filmy with remembrance, but whether they were tears or just cataracts you couldn't tell. It was a great interview, but who would print it? The publicist came back to collect him.

"How did it go, boys?"

"Just fine. I told him all about the Golden Age." He got as far out of the chair as he could manage, his ass an inch or so off the cushion, and stuck out his hand. "Nice talking to you, kid." He hobbled away with one hand gripping her arm, and even so I doubted she was safe.

I went back to the office and scraped together a few quotes about the current project, cribbed wholesale from the PR handout to pad the thing, and made up the rest. It was all I could do.

On Tuesday, in the 11th of 14 excerpts, John Armstrong finds that despite his misgivings, the Standard Picayune could be the job of his life.  [Tyee]

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