MR. MIKE'S AMERICA
David Manning
a funny thing happened to macabre comedy master michael o'donoghue on
his way from coast to coast -- he found a country as weird as himself
BY PAUL SLANSKY
It was a time when people walked the nation's streets with orange-foam
pads clamped to their ears and antennae bouncing above their heads.
The newspapers of the day told of several thousand men and women who
had allowed themselves to be paired off and married by the leader of a
religious cult, while on television there was a show that featured
actual couples discussing their actual sexual problems with an actual
therapist. Hundreds of consumers mistook a dishwashing liquid for
lemon juice and squirted it into their drinks.
A gold designer handgun was available to the public, as was a
breakfast cereal that claimed to taste like doughnuts. The Post Office
boasted of its plan for post-nuclear-war mail delivery, which seemed
to depend heavily on the distribution of emergency change-of-address
cards. The President, who was known far and wide as a man who loved to
laugh, communicated his displeasure with a foreign country by posing
for a photograph with a representative of that country and refusing to
smile.
And it was a time when, from a pay phone in the mental hospital to
which he'd been committed, a would-be Presidential assassin told a
reporter that he regretted putting a bullet through the brain of an
unintended victim. "I just honestly wish I could go back before the
shooting," the young man said, "and let him move two inches out of the
way." It was the beginning of last summer, and I was about to drive
across the country with the dark prince of black comedy, Michael
O'Donoghue, also known as Mr. Mike.
-
"I've never been one of those snotty New York writers who sneer at
L.A.," says O'Donoghue, turning his BMW into the Holland Tunnel in
Lower Manhattan and heading for New Jersey. "I think the concept of a
sybaritic culture is terrifying to a lot of people from the Northeast,
but not to me.' Not to a 42-year-old man who gets really cranky if he
goes too long without a bubble bath.
O'Donoghue has been talking about moving to Los Angeles for years, and
now he is doing it. He is leaving the faded elegance of his Greenwich
Village brownstone to live, for an indefinite period, in a rented
house in the Hollywood Hills. Since there are certain amenities --
art, music, fine silverware and silk dressing gowns, to name a few --
that a civilized man cannot be expected to give up, O'Donoghue has
packed those into the rear of his car and is moving them West himself.
It is his first cross-country drive in more than 20 years.
It's already past noon on Wednesday, June 30th, and O'Donoghue wants
to celebrate the Fourth of July in L.A., so there aren't any leisurely
encounters with Mr. Bubble on his immediate schedule. Not to worry; he
has drugs. He reaches behind his seat and pulls out a blue Right Guard
aerosol can. He unscrews the false bottom and casually displays the
contents: 35 perfectly rolled joints, a dozen Percodans (he gets
migraine headaches) and a little something special to help with the
late-night driving.
"A friend of mine has this theory about my comedy that has to do with
my migraines," O'Donoghue says as we move through the eerie light of
the tunnel, "which is, if I'm gonna get migraines, they're gonna get
migraines, and I'll just have to give 'em to them." O'Donoghue, as any
serious comedy fan knows, was present at the creation of the two
dominant comic institutions of the Seventies: the National Lampoon and
Saturday Night Live. As a performer on the latter, he clawed his way
into the national psyche with his "impressions" of how Mike Douglas,
Tony Orlando, Elvis Presley and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir might
react if 18 inch-long steel needles were suddenly plunged into their
eyes. As it happened, they all reacted pretty much the same way -- by
flailing violently about the stage, clutching at their eyes and
emitting bloodcurdling shrieks of pain.
O'Donoghue quickly became known as the sicko of Seventies comedy, the
only man who set out to disturb his audience on such a primal level --
needles in eyes, for God's sake -- and then dared them to laugh
anyway. "People either got that joke or they didn't," he has said.
"There wasn't anybody who said, 'Well, I sort of liked it.'"
Then came the creepy Mr. Mike and his "Least Loved Bedtime Stories."
Describing the grisly demise of a soft, furry animal, lingering fondly
over a particularly gruesome detail, Mr. Mike was obviously no
stranger to madness. Again, the challenge to the audience: Is this too
scary for you? How about a photo album called The Vietnamese Bay Book?
Wanna hear a song called Cancer for Christmas?
"People often attack me for my black humor," O'Donoghue told an
interviewer a few years apo. "Now, if I were immortal, then it would
be unethical for me to make fun of these pathetic human beings who
have coronaries and pitch forward and piss blood on the rug. But, as
it happens, I'm one of them, and it's gonna happen to me also, so I
feel I have a perfect right to rant about whatever I want."
Now, after years of trying to get his emotional life into some
semblance of order, O'Donoghue is ready to play the game. He wants to
hear his rants echoing throughout the pop culture, to become widely
known as the genius his friends and fans have long believed him to be.
He also wants to make a lot of money. With his remaining hair cut
severely short, his eyes inaccessible behind ice-blue reflecting
glasses and his skeletal six-foot frame somehow conveying both extreme
fragility and enormous strength, O'Donoghue will cut a striking figure
in the Hollywood community.
He is already making his presence felt. Single Women, his mordant
country song about the pickup-bar scene, was a big hit for Dolly
Parton and is soon to be a made-for-TV movie. He is creating a
Twilight Zone clone called Factory of Fear for cable television. And
he is co-writing and directing a sequel to a movie most people thought
was unsequelable, Easy Rider, in which he intends to bring Dennis
Hopper and Peter Fonda back from the dead for one last bike ride
through an America in ruins.
So here he is, following the signs to the New Jersey Turnpike, ready
to observe the national decay firsthand. I am here to share the
driving. He knows I'll probably write about the trip and, if the truth
be known, that prospect doesn't displease him. This, after all, is the
man who once said, "Life is not for everyone." It is quite possible,
in fact, that one of O'Donoghue's favorite things is to have someone
recording his every word for posterity.
-
"The funniest death to me," O'Donoghue says with a giggle, "is a movie
producer doing Quaaludes, falling asleep in his hot tub and
parboiling. I don't know if it has ever actually happened, but the
idea is sure humorous to me.
"Everybody lies all the time in L.A.," he continues, puffing on the
first joint of the trip and warming to the topic of his new home.
"People just lie as a matter of course. They go to those screenings
and they have to walk past the producer and his wife after the movie's
over -- 'Jeez, I just loved it, Sol; most exciting film in years. Yes,
I think Night of the Lepus is a classic' -- and something in them
snaps. Something deep within them snaps, and it never returns. Then
they just lie about everything. 'Great dinner, honey. Great salad.
Great sex.' Great has become a meaningless word; it's just a rhythm
word now." He smiles contentedly, passes the joint and says, "I am
always happy in L.A."
We stop for lunch on Interstate 78 in Pennsylvania, at a Stuckey's
with a sign above the door that says, NOW! WE HAVE VIDEO GAMES! In
fact, they have one Ms. Pac-Man machine, and it sports an OUT OF ORDER
sign. The catsup pump here rests only two inches above the condiment
counter, so if you want catsup on your hamburger, you actually have to
rub the meat against the spout. Life on the road can get raw.
"If you were a kid," O'Donoghue says, "and there were a video-game
restaurant where you could just suck on some kind of milk-shake/meat
device while you played the games, you'd be pretty happy, wouldn't
you?"
Having put 160 miles on the odometer, O'Donoghue is obviously in
excellent spirits. "We've already gone more than one twentieth of the
way," he crows. He sits in a window booth with his taco and his
chocolate shake and thinks about a song he's writing for his biker
movie, an anthem honoring the early American flag that carried the
words "Don't tread on me." "Now, there was a fuckin' slogan," he
laughs. "Stay the fuck away from me or I'll kill you.
On the table across from ours, someone has left a copy of this week's
National Examiner. "HITLER IS ALIVE," the headline declares and, in
smaller type, "AT AGE 93, NAZI MADMAN MASTERMINDED ARGENTINA'S
INVASION OF THE FALKLANDS."
"I thought that bore Adolf's inimitable mark," he says.
It is O'Donoghue's stated belief that running out of gas is "possibly
the stupidest thing human beings can do," so we pull into a Texaco
station before getting back on the road, though the tank is nearly
half full. Fearing that self-service gas pumping requires some special
knowledge that he lacks, he busies himself washing the bugs off the
windshield. "There's no mystery to this," I say, inserting the nozzle
into the tank. "If I can do it, believe me, it's easy."
"Well," O'Donoghue says matter-of-factly, dipping the squeegee back
into its bucket, "I guess you've just found out that I'm a major
puss."
Driving through the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia at sunset, we spot a
billboard announcing, BUFFALO RANCH AND MANSION FOR SALE. "What an
impulse item as you're traveling across the country," O'Donoghue says,
reaching for one of the four open packs of More cigarettes on the
dashboard. "'Whoa, honey, let's pick up a buffalo ranch and mansion.'
None of my trendy friends have buffalo ranches. Can't you just hear
it? 'I have to get back to the bison; it really clears out my head."
We decide not to eat dinner until we get to Roanoke, so we stop for
snacks at an Arco AM/PM Mini Market. Hundreds of service-station
owners are now supplementing their declining gasoline income with
little stores where motorists can stock up on such items as Chee-Tos,
Chuckles, Chewels, Chips Ahoy!, Cheez 'n Crackers and Choco-Diles. We
buy nine candy bars, three boxes of cookies and two Cokes.
To make up for our late start, we drive until three A.M. and stop in
Morristown, Tennessee. The Knoxville World's Fair -- home of the
fabulous Sunsphere -- is only another 45 miles down the road, so we
don't exactly have our pick of accommodations. The night clerk at the
Ramada Inn has a vacancy in the Fair Village Annex out back. The room
is in a trailer. We take it.
-
Seven hours later, O'Donoghue, wearing yesterday's driving outfit --
white shirt and jeans -- is having his first cup of coffee in the
hotel restaurant. As I sit down, he looks up from his Tennessee map
and says, "I couldn't remember what you wanted, so I ordered you the
squid."
At the next table is a family of five, heading East after paying their
respects to Elvis at Graceland, which is the one thing both of us
really want to see on this trip. They tell us how many hours they had
to wait to get in (six) and how "worth it" it was. All five of them
are wearing Elvis T-shirts.
It looks like we'll be arriving in Memphis just about the time
Graceland closes. Should we stay in town overnight or just forget
about it? O'Donoghue thanks the waitress for filling his Thermos with
coffee, then says, "Let's not decide right now. There's so little to
do, let's save it. We'll really discuss it and weigh the merits of all
our choices later on."
Back on I-40 West, a kid in his late teens is holding up a sign that
says, COLORADO. O'Donoghue points to the full back seat as we pass
him. "But," he says, "if you were a 13-year-old girl, fella, somehow
we'd have found room for you."
Behind us in the car, on top of the clothes and silverware and other
incidentals that O'Donoghue is taking West with him, are two paintings
wrapped in newspaper. They were bought from a Southern art dealer, and
they are the work of Chicago nurse killer Richard Speck.
"Compared to a Monet or a Manet, these were relatively cheap -- $200
apiece," he says, very pleased with his purchase. With his left hand
on the wheel, he reaches his right hand over the back of his seat for
the car-cassette case. He picks out a Flatt and Scruggs tape and a
Blondie tape and puts them on the dashboard. "I read an article about
Speck that mentioned that he paints. I figured, If Van Gogh could cut
off an ear, let's see what this guy can do."
O'Donoghue reaches behind his seat again, this time for the Right
Guard can. "I had a dream about stabbing someone to death once," he
says, "and in it, I understood perfectly why people wind up with 76
stab wounds in them when they die. You know, everyone always says,
'Boy, this guy must have been some psycho.' The truth of it is, the
first ten just slow them down a little bit, and the next ten slow them
down a little bit more. People don't die that quickly, so you have to
stick them 60 or 70 times to really put them on the floor. It's a lot
of stickiness and grotesque emotions," he says with a slight shudder,
"a bad way to kill and a bad way to die." I can imagine O'Donoghue
telling this story on Merv.
He lights a joint. "I truly feel that mass murders are native-American
folk art," he says, as if he couldn't conceive of anyone's arguing the
point. "Many of these people -- particularly someone like Ted Bundy,
social worker, very loving always reaching out for others -- could
have film careers like Redford's.
"Tobe Hooper and I were talking about casting the quintessential
American psychopath in this movie we're writing, and one of us
mentioned Liberace. That fantasy somehow turned up in some film
magazine as a fact, and then, suddenly, it was in Liz Smith's column.
Liberace responded and, for some crazy reason, he was not happy about
this totally false story that he was going to be playing a sexual
psychopath. But he'd be great.
"Liberace's very interesting," O'Donoghue continues. "At a time in the
Fifties when you could practically get the electric chair for even
being considered a faggot, he was prospering and living an outrageous
life -- you know, piano-shaped swimming pools and jeweled 18th Century
clothing -- a wacko lifestyle, and he still lives it. He's a real
rebel in a funny way. I quite admire him."
But even Liberace can't compete with what appears, there, up ahead on
the left -- the fabulous Sunsphere. "Boy, that is impressive, isn't
it? O'Donoghue says with more than his usual measure of sarcasm. "It
looks like a fuckin' water tower. Well worth traveling thousands of
miles to see; the crown jewel of any vacation. As the barkers used to
say outside freak shows, 'Seconds to see, a lifetime to forget."' We
don't have time to stop for a visit, but we both resolve to buy
Sunsphere belt buckles at our next stop. Now, about half an hour down
the road, on our right, a sinister looking white factory complex is
spewing pollution over the farmland.
"Maybe I'm a little old-fashioned, but I still send cards on Earth
Day," says O'Donoghue. "The family gets together and we make hand
puppets and, you know, protest nuclear energy'. Its great.
"But it doesn't matter how much you protest the bomb," he goes on.
"Clearly, it's gonna be used. What has ever been invented and not
used? Actually, there was something -- the steam engine was invented
way back in 100 or 200 B.C., and they just used it as a toy. They
never realized its potential. I mean, that's mankind really bobbling
it."
Just west of Nashville, we stop for lunch at the Waffle House, where
waffles come with some oleo substance called Shields Cup-O-Gold. "Is
this butter?" I ask. "It doesn't say butter on it."
"If it doesn't say butter, there's a legal reason for it," says
O'Donoghue, whose attention has been drawn to a front-page story in
today's Tennessean about two young men who shot three people to death
for no reason. "We were taking speed and drinking cold drinks,'"
O'Donoghue says, reading the explanation of one of the killers.
"We picked up our rifles and started shooting. I don't know why we did
it.'" He is silent for a moment, then says, "They were drinking cold
drinks." He turns the page and finds a story about a nearby town's
banning video games. "Any time a whole bunch of kids like something,
they find a reason to ban it," he says, wadding up his napkin. "If
kids suddenly started stuffing napkins into their pockets and really
liked doing that, they'd find a reason to forbid it."
"What were you like as a kid?" I ask.
"I was a wiseass," O'Donoghue says. "Not surprising, really; you could
almost have guessed that. In fact, it's always thrilled me that I have
actually made my money out of essentially being a wiseass. All the
time I was mouthing off, wising off about God knows what sobersided
subject, I was actually preparing for my future. A professional
wiseass; that's just a lovely thing to be."
He goes off to phone his girlfriend, screenwriter Carol Caldwell, who
is waiting for him at their Hollywood address. When he comes back to
the table, he lights up a cigarette and obliges my request for a
briefing on his background: Born in Sauquoit, New York, a small town
outside Utica. Irish white-collar father, Welsh-German housewife
mother, sister five years younger. Had rheumatic fever when he was
five and spent a year indoors. Not especially popular in high school.
Majored in English at the University of Rochester, from which he was
thrown out during his junior year because of an "attitude problem."
Went out to San Francisco just a little bit too late to find the
beatniks and got fired from a job as a reporter trainee at the San
Francisco Examiner after getting into a fight in the city room.
Returned to Rochester, got married, got divorced. Started a theater
group and worked as a door-to-door salesman (costume jewelry) and a
credit manager for Sherwin Williams, the paint people. "Real nice
job," he says, stubbing out his barely smoked cigarette. "They told me
that if I did good work, I could have my own paint store in
Youngstown, Ohio."
Instead, he moved to Manhattan, where he started writing the Phoebe
Zeit-Geist comic strip for Evergreen Review. Wrote a 48-page book
called The lncredible Thrilling Adventures of the Rock, which began,
"As you'll recall, when we last left the Rock, he'd been sitting in
the same spot, in the same forest, for about a hundred million years."
Helped found the National Lampoon, where he wrote such comic gems as
"How to Write Good" in which he advised would-be wordsmiths that any
story could be satisfactorily concluded with the sentence "Suddenly,
everyone was run over by a truck." Co-produced the first Lampoon
record album, Radio Dinner. Edited the Lampoon Encyclopedia of Humor.
Ran the Lampoon Radio Hour.
Then -- along with John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner and several
others associated with the radio show -- O'Donoghue moved into TV via
Saturday Night Live. Spent three years with the show accumulating
drawersful of censored material, such as the song Cancer for Christmas
("Santa's bringing sacks of morphine / And some cigarettes. Time to
call the Bide-a Wee / And give away your pets"). Did a late-night
special for NBC called Mr. Mike's Mondo Video, which wound up in movie
theaters when the network decided it could not broadcast a program
featuring such segments as "Celebrity Deformities" (Dan Aykroyd
probing at his webbed toes with a screwdriver) and "American Gals Love
Creeps" (Debbie Harry, Laraine Newman and a dozen other sexy women
purring lines like, "I love a man who smells his fingers" and "When I
feel a firm colostomy bag, I know I'm with a real man"). Wrote several
screenplays and published a $60 collection of his poems, Bears.
(Sample verse: "Doin' time for stealin' watches, / In a room without a
view. / There's a hotel up the river / where the towels steal you.")
Sold very few copies of the book.
O'Donoghue returned to Saturday Night in 1981 to help resurrect the
corpse left by short-lived producer Jean Doumanian. Told everyone
that the only hope for the show was to reinject the element of danger
into its content and execution, and that didn't mean more blow-job
jokes. Wrote his most famous censored piece ever, "The Last Ten Days
in Silverman's Bunker," in which the increasingly desperate NBC
president tried to save his job with such shows as Tom Edison, the
Woman ("Loni Anderson in a sort of offbeat docufantasy that asks the
question 'What if Tom Edison was a remarkable woman with an
extraordinary pair of twin zeppelins?'"). Got fired.
"I really think that comedy operates out of a center of integrity, or
at least it should," O'Donoghue says, lighting yet another cigarette.
"But NBC is a pretty big, fat, corrupt spider itself. If you're not
free to attack that, then the corporate corruption just spreads right
through you, and then you start running scared. Soon you start saying,
'Well, they'll never let this on,' and then you're censoring yourself.
Then it's like you're going out every night and repairing the barbed
wire around the concentration camp. 'Whoa, they might have been able
to slip through here, but those Nazis would have caught 'em for
sure.'" He pauses, then adds, loudly enough to be overheard, "I hate
that philosophy!
"I knew the life expectancy of the Lampoon was five years," O'Donoghue
says, "and then they should have kicked everyone upstairs and gotten
an entirely new staff who just hated our guts and who thought we were
old farts and who didn't know how to run a magazine. And that should
have been a process, like a Stalinist sort of purge, because you don't
want a well-run magazine.
"Same deal with Saturday Night Live. The first three times we did that
show, we really didn't know if we could get 90 minutes or if it would
just break down and be dead air. Well, there's an exciting show for
you. You can cut that tension with a knife, and the people at home can
feel that, too. They should get somebody who has no idea how to put
that show on. The way it is now, it's just a blemish on the face of
the earth."
In the parking lot, O'Donoghue pours a cup of coffee from the Thermos,
takes a sip, puts it on the dashboard, turns on the ignition and makes
a sharp left out onto the main road, causing everything on the
dashboard -- cigarettes, lighters, maps, note pads, cassettes,
snapshots, headphones and, of course, coffee -- to cascade onto the
floor.
"This is a major fuckin' disaster," he moans, pulling o` the road.
Several handfuls of tissues later, order is restored. "Actually, it's
not such a bad disaster, is it?" he says with relief. "A little coffee
on the rug; the rug is brown. I've seen worse."
-
"Memphis has a weird history," O'Donoghue says as we approach the city
limits. "Around 1870, maybe a bit earlier, they had a yellow-fever
epidemic that wiped the town out. It was just like the plague had
come. Then it happened again ten years later; same deal. So it's
really checked the growth of the town. Memphis is a great city, one of
my favorite American cities." He passes me a joint and adds, "There's
someplace in Memphis where you can stand and see three states."
"Mississippi, Arkansas and what else?" I ask.
"Tennessee."
After dinner at a former ice-skating rink called the Palm Court, we
stop for a look at the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King, Jr.,
was killed. There is a large plaque above the spot on the balcony
where he fell. The manager offers to let us inside King's room if we
give him money. A prostitute offers us sex if we give her money. We
ask for directions to Graceland.
Unfortunately, the directions are wrong, as are the ones we receive
from eight other local citizens over the next 45 minutes.
"We've been here before," O'Donoghue says when he drives past the
Admiral Benbow Inn for the third time. "I think we're fucked now.
Perfectly 1000 percent fucked."
"I say, 'Fuck Graceland.' I just say, 'Fuck it.'"
"I agree, but I have no fuckin' idea how to leave this town,"
O'Donoghue says. "We're gonna have to fight our way out of here, ask
20 more people for directions."
"Where the fuck are the signs for Graceland?"
"Are we close now?" he asks moments later.
"We're not getting any closer. We're heading for Mississippi."
"Oh, we missed our turn. Shit! I'm utterly, utterly fuckin' lost."
At 10:30 p.m., some 22 hours after entering Tennessee, we leave it.
LAND OF OPPORTUNITY, an Arkansas billboard welcomes us. HOME OF MISS
AMERICA AND MISS U.S.A.
We decide to spend the night in Little Rock, about two hours away. To
cheer ourselves up after having missed Graceland, we tell each other
jokes. Mine is about a guy whose doctor tells him, "I've got some good
news and some bad news." The guy says, "Give me the bad news first.'
The doctor says, "You've got a week to live." The guy says, "If that's
the bad news, what can the good news possibly be?" The doctor says,
"Did you see that receptionist out front? The one with the big tits?
Well, I'm fucking her."
O'Donoghue counters with one that Belushi used to tell about Adam and
Eve. He doesn't remember the setup, but the punch line has Eve washing
her private parts in the river and God shouting down, "You asshole!
Now all the fish are gonna smell like that!"
"American humor is a really angry rube humor," O'Donoghue says. "Very
mean and aggressive. I've always liked American jokes."
We discuss comedy for a while. O'Donoghue likes Andy Kaufman ("He's
not so insane that every six months everybody in America isn't talking
about him for some stupid reason") and is leery of David Letterman ("I
fear that benign wacky; I see more and more of them around"). He
thinks that Johnny Carson is "the best interviewer alive" and that Ed
McMahon is a "great saver." He doesn't seem to really hate anyone.
"Even in people you don't like, you have to admire professional
aspects of them, just knowing how tricky certain things are," he says.
"I was watching some TV movie and I said to myself,'Sonny Bono isn't a
pathetic actor. Sonny Bono is a competent actor.' It's very easy to
make fun of him, him being Sonny Bono and all, but he's hitting his
mark and saying a line and registering a moderately interesting
expression. That's a real tricky skill. I can't do it; I'm not a
particularly good actor at all." He takes a drag of a cigarette and
adds, "This is not to say I would have dinner with any of these
people."
OK, but isn't there any comic that he absolutely can't stand? "I have
to dig really deep in Marty Allen to find that little spark of genius
that I'm sure Marty has under all that hair," O'Donoghue says. "God,
what a grotesque creature he is."
-
We leave the Little Rock Sheraton at ten o'clock Friday morning. The
temperature is already in the 90s and the BMW is not air-conditioned.
Out on the flat highway, I have to swerve around several squashed
animals baking in the sun. "Motor meat," O'Donoghue says.
Our first stop of the day is Coon Hollow Fireworks, a huge emporium
where a man leaving with a giant shopping bag full of weaponry says to
the cashier, "Well, have a bang-up Fourth! Haw, haw, haw."
"I just go berserk when I live away from America for too long,"
O'Donoghue says when we're in the car again. "There's a certain
let's-get-drunk-and-drive-on-the-wrong-side-of-the
road-with-the-lights-off philosophy out here that I really need."
Back on the highway, he stands up through the sun roof and, at 70
miles per hour, fires off a Polaroid of a truck with the legend COOPER
TIRES, THE TIRES WITH TWO NAMES.
"What are those?" he says, watching the picture develop in seconds.
"Cooper and Tires?"
As I approach the Oklahoma border, a Datsun roars by with three
beautiful women, two of whom have their bare feet sticking out the
window. "Have you ever heard the expression -- I think it's Southern
-- that girl is so beautiful, I'd crawl 15 miles through broken glass
just to let her pee on my toothbrush?" O'Donoghue says. "Now, that's a
beautiful gal."
Lunch is biscuits and gravy at the Biscuit Hill restaurant, where a
sign over the cash register reads, WE DO NOT CARE FOR YOUR PROFANITY.
TAKE IT ELSEWHERE. When the cherry pie comes, it looks like part of a
clown's face, which reminds me of something I recently read about
Richard Nixon. It seems he went to the circus with his grandchildren
and, afterward, he went backstage to congratulate the clowns. Then the
reporters covering that major event asked Nixon what he liked most
about the circus, and he said, "I really like those clowns."
"He's probably the kind of guy who would laugh at Topo Gigio,"
O'Donoghue says. "No one ever liked Topo, and I always wondered who
his audience was."
He decides against eating the clown pie. "As far as stars and
celebrities go," he continues, "Americans are as fascinated by failure
as they are by success. So it really doesn't matter which way you're
going, as long as you're going in one direction or the other. They'll
fuckin' eat you up either way." Back on the road, O'Donoghue selects a
tape of English songbirds that he thinks would be just the thing to
complement the oil derricks we're passing. I spend almost a minute
trying to peel the shrink wrap off the cassette. "Who invented this
stuff?" I ask, expecting no answer.
"Cellophane was invented in 1908 by J. D. Brandenberger," O'Donoghue
says instantly. "I dedicated Phoebe Zeit-Geist to him for his
incredible contribution to mankind. I thought it was a great invention
myself."
"OK, Mr. Wizard, what else do you know?"
"I know that polar bears kill only with their left hands," he says,
crushing his half-smoked More into the ashtray, which, with dozens of
such long brown butts jutting out of it, looks like a huge, menacing
insect. "I know that the average human skin weighs six pounds. I know
that the Klamath Indians in Oregon used to use woodpecker scalps in
place of money. I know so many facts."
The sound of songbirds mingles with the rush of the wind as we speed
through a particularly desolate stretch of Oklahoma. Except for the
rebellious ashtray, the inside of the car reflects our combined
compulsiveness. All our belongings are neatly and safely arranged; no
garbage is allowed to accumulate around our feet. We are moving
through America maintaining the illusion of control. "Look at that,"
O'Donoghue says with considerable awe in his voice, pointing to a
highway sign that warns, HITCHHIKERS MAY BE ESCAPING INMATES.
Another fact.
-
"Are you a registered voter?" I ask, apropos of nothing, as we come to
the outskirts of Amarillo. It's half an hour past sunset, and all the
road signs are black silhouettes against a dark-purple sky.
"The only vote I've ever cast was for Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.,"
O'Donoghue says. "He said, 'I'm a crook; elect me,' which was the only
honest thing I'd ever heard from one of those guys."
"When did you first perceive that you were being lied to?"
"When I was fairly young, they had migrant camps in Upstate New York,"
he says, leaning back in the passenger seat and propping a brown shoe
on the dashboard. "My mother would always shudder as she went by the
migrant camps. And they weren't in my books about the policeman
stopping traffic so the little baby ducks could cross the street; I
knew that. And no one was explaining that if they paid those people a
decent wage, you'd have to pay a dollar and a half for a can of beans.
So everyone looked the other way, and that's when I began to see that
those books about our society were lying to me. Once you know that,
you find confirmation everywhere.
"It's very interesting to teach children what you hoped your society
would be like," he continues. "But you should teach them as truth that
it did, indeed, turn out *this* way. In the script for this movie I
wrote, Planet of the Cheap Special Effects, I had a scene in which
they're living underneath this planet and an explorer asks, 'What's
your planet like? What are your cities like?' And the queen puts up
this triangular view screen, hopefully, this Bruce McCall drawing with
gyroplanes and all these ramps leading from one building to another.
And he says, 'That's a beautiful planet,' and she says, 'That's not
actually our planet. That's the way we'd like it to look if we ever
got some money to fix it up. It's just rubble now, just garbage.'"
He flips over the Sons of the Pioneers tape that's been playing. "The
lie on television is that everything is solvable. Sure, we've got
problems, but if we just love one another enough, we can solve these
problems. Reach out and you just put a smile on people's faces.
"The fact is, a lot of people have money; you don't; you're getting
fucked. And they've had it and kept it for hundreds and hundreds of
years and just told you these silly lies. They always have really
irked me, those lies. More than anything else, the lie of our society
and how it works has made my writing go in a particular direction.
"Coming out of the Fifties, we were really betrayed by all the
promises they had made and didn't keep about what life was gonna be
like. The TV screens got a little bit better, but we didn't get
Picturephones. No Picturephones -- a big disappointment. Or car
phones. The car's the ideal place to phone people." He lights a
cigarette and says, in conclusion, "I've always thought that the point
where America blew it was in not having landed on the moon in the
Fifties."
-
We have dinner at the Big Texan steakhouse, where a very tall young
man shakes our hands hard before he seats us. A 72 ounce steak is free
if you can finish it in an hour. If you can't, or if you throw up
along the way, you have to pay $26.20. According to the restaurant's
tally, 3047 people have eaten free so far.
Our order -- steaks, oddly enough -- is taken by a waitress wearing a
cowboy hat, a miniskirt, a fringed vest, boots and red garters. "The
key to a successful restaurant," O'Donoghue says, "is dressing girls
in degrading clothes."
We stop for gas not long after passing a sign that reads, LOS ANGELES
1007 MI. I pump the gas and O'Donoghue wipes the dead bugs off the
windshield; this routine hasn't varied since we left New York.
"I would really hate to be forced at gun point to drink the bug
juice," he says, noticing the color of the water after a day's worth
of windows have been cleaned with it. "They get the tourists they
don't like and say, 'So, you're from New York, eh? Well, maybe you'd
like to drink the bug juice.'" He stares at the bucket for a moment.
"It probably goes good with motor meat," he says.
At 12:22 Saturday morning, we cross the Texas-New Mexico border into a
new time zone and, suddenly, it's Friday again. "Traditionally,
there's a party when this happens, and all the cars pull over to the
side and celebrate," O'Donoghue says. "I don't understand why that's
not happening tonight."
There are few vehicles on the road as we press on toward our third-day
goal, Albuquerque. "We haven't seen a police car in hours," I say,
keeping us moving at a steady 70.
O'Donoghue looks out at the pitch-black desert. "There really isn't
much for a cop to do out here," he says.
-
"This is your classic Fourth-of-July weekend traffic," O'Donoghue
says, switching lanes as we ride through New Mexico early Saturday
afternoon. Jerkoffs like these doing 14 miles an hour in the passing
lane."
His ire fades quickly, though. We are well rested -- Howard Johnson's
Motor Lodges are still the greatest -- and there is no longer any
doubt about our Sunday arrival. Today's drive across the desert can be
a leisurely one. We take advantage of this by getting off the
interstate and driving through the heart of Gallup on the once
legendary Route 66.
"Wonderful street," O'Donoghue says as we pass block after block of
buildings whose architecture is either classic Southwestern or
fast-food modern. We stop for chocolate shakes at the Avalon
Restaurant, where we discuss the disappearance from the landscape of
certain great American things.
"There are so many things they've taken away from us," O'Donoghue
says.
"Such as what?"
"Hood ornaments," he says. "They were just lovely, and they gave a
sense of respect. And they took 'em away because if you can save one
human life -- that's always the argument -- it's worth it, if you can
save one human life. Actually, I'd be willing to trade maybe a dozen
human lives for a nice hood ornament. I imagine those things really
did tend to stick in bicyclists."
The shakes are delicious, and on the back of the check, just under
where it says OUR HEARTY THANKS, the waitress has written, JESUS LOVES
YOU.
At the entrance to the highway, an aging hippie is hitching to S.F.
O'Donoghue lights a joint. "San Francisco rock, San Francisco writing,
it's always real lightweight, ephemeral stuff," he says. "Nothing
important has ever come out of San Francisco, Rice-A-Roni aside."
The fruit-inspection station is closed as we enter Arizona at 1:50
P.M. We are both wearing headphones plugged into a Sony Walkman that
lies between our seats. The machine is playing Kitaro's Silk Road,
trance music that provides the perfect sound track for contemplating
signs urging us to BUY CRAFTS DIRECT FROM INDIANS AT INDIAN CITY,
during the INDIAN CITY FIRE SALE.
Outside Flagstaff, we see a sign that says, LOS ANGELES 454 MI.
"Four-fifty-four," O'Donoghue says with a smile. "We're set. They'll
come get us if something happens now."
-
O'Donoghue, with his note pad in his lap, is working on the lyrics to
Don't Tread on Me. One line he's pleased with is "I put up with a lot,
but there's a lot that I don't like." He sings it over and over. He is
very happy to be making a biker movie.
"I saw The Road Warrior, liked that a lot," he says. "Megaforce made
me angry. People keep telling me Barry Bostwick is a good actor, but
having seen him in only this film, I can't buy it. His eyes are so
close together, he looks like he could look through a monocle on the
center of his nose. They're really close. It's hard for anyone playing
a flat-out hero to have those eyes." Never having seen a Barry
Bostwick film, I say nothing.
"When I see movies like Kramer vs. Kramer, On Golden Pond or The Four
Seasons," he continues, "I really have fantasies of the film going on
for about two thirds of the way like that and then the vicious bike
gang being introduced into it, which is a totally random element.
"But I've gotta make mine a real biker movie, too," he goes on. "You
know, whatever that scene is where the nork in the Volkswagen honks at
one of the bikers and everybody goes, 'Ooo, he shouldn't have done
that; oh, wow' -- that's gotta be in there.
"I've always liked that John Huston technique of getting all these
high-strung actor types out in the middle of fuckin' nowhere and
locking them up and making a movie and just watching them go
clinically berserk and filming the results. The producer, Bert
Schneider, is really assembling a lot of lunatics -- including myself
-- to work on this film, a lot of unstable types. I'm looking forward
to this movie being a media circus. I love media circuses."
"Who do you think is the audience for this film?
"American people, I would think," he answers. "It's not very elitist,
you know, a biker movie." He laughs. "Anyone who gets annoyed when a
Volkswagen touches his bike. People who think, like, You touched my
car, you'll have to die--that mentality.
"We're on a fast schedule. I'm gonna write it this summer, I hope with
Terry Southern and Nelson Lyon. We're thinking of shooting in the
early winter and then gettin' it to the kids by Christmas. Reap teen
coin. Reap massive amounts of teen coin. That's the plan. Write it,
film it, cut it, reap teen coin."
"Why do so many people think you're an elitist pig?" I ask him. "You
seem to revel in pop culture as much as anyone does."
"It's interest versus lifestyle," he says. "I revel in it, but I don't
actually live in the pop culture. I live in almost another time."
"Which time is that?"
"I don't know, but things were more gracious back then. And everything
wasn't covered with corkboard and wall-to-wall carpeting. It was a lot
different back then. For instance, restaurants wouldn't have
considered giving you unbuttered toast with little squares of ice-cold
butter. They wouldn't have considered it."
O'Donoghue reaches into the back seat for the camera to get a shot of
the exit sign for Andy Devine Avenue in Kingman, Arizona. "You know,"
he says with a laugh, "I'm beginning to like this concept of
everything you need in life being behind your chair."
-
The first town across the California border is Needles, and O'Donoghue
-- of all people -- is not about to pass by without stopping for a
peek. It's dark when we pull into the parking lot of Hobo Joe's, but
the temperature is still in the high 90s. The restaurant has Peanuts
cartoons all over its walls, because Snoopy has a cousin who lives in
Needles.
Someone has a radio on in the next booth, and we hear a news item
about Cathy Evelyn Smith, who, after returning to Canada, was quoted
by the National Enquirer as having said that she'd given John Belushi
his last shot. "She must have been in some kind of a stupor if she
admitted second-degree murder in a country that we have an extradition
treaty with," O'Donoghue says. "What did she think, she was up there
with the walruses and the fuckin' elk and they'd suddenly say, 'Well,
she's out of our hands now. She's slipped across the border to
Canada'?"
O'Donoghue -- whose friend Doug Kenney, a Lampoon colleague, was
killed in a fall from a Hawaiian mountain in August 1980 -- learned of
Belushi's death by overhearing the excited conversation of strangers
one sunny afternoon on Rodeo Drive. "Everybody felt they knew
Belushi," he says. "Everyone here would have felt they knew Belushi,
and Belushi would have made them feel that way. He would have stopped
and said hello to them. He had that look, Belushi; he looked real
regular. He looked like one of those things off Northern California
that ecologists are always trying to save from oil spills.
"You know, it shocked me the first two or three hundred times I saw
the footage on TV of poor old bloated John being carried out of the
Chateau Marmont in a body bag," he says, laughing a nasty little
laugh. "But now I know it just means it's time for the news."
"What does it feel like," I ask him, "when a good friend dies?"
"It means you keep crossing out addresses in your address book," he
says. "George Burns's address book must really be amazing to see."
Then, realizing that he hasn't answered the question, he adds, "It's
real strange."
When we stop for gas, he calls his girlfriend to tell her our arrival
plans. "She says we're in luck," he tells me, getting back into the
car. "July is Chevy Chase month on the Z Channel."
O'Donoghue runs through the list of titles that make up Chevy's
oeuvre: Foul Play, Caddyshack, Seems Like Old Times, Modern Problems,
Under the Rainbow, Oh Heavenly Dog. "Marilyn Miller and I are writing
this women's-prison movie, Kittens in a Can," he says, "and I came up
with this idea that when the prisoners were naughty, the Chevy Chase
Film Festival would be held over for another week." He laughs. "Cruel
and unusual punishment."
-
"I feel like I'm driving through a Carson monolog," O'Donoghue says
the next morning, passing America's most famous cemetery, Forest Lawn.
Several signs warn that the left lane is reserved for car pools during
rush hours. "The car pool is a concept that's really sweeping the
nation," he says. "There's nothing Americans like more than sharing
their cars with total strangers. You could probably have a picnic on
that lane and nobody'd disturb you for hours."
KROQ is playing Bow Wow Wow's I Want Candy as we pull onto the
Hollywood Freeway, our final stretch of highway. "This song has
everything people fear about rock 'n' roll," O'Donoghue observes.
"African-jungle rhythms and white women singing about fucking, about
wanting to fuck all the time."
He lights the last joint of the trip. "I have a theory about L.A.
architecture," he says as his Spanish-style rental comes into view
high above Fairfax Avenue. "I think all the houses had a costume party
and they all came as other countries."
An hour later, Carol Caldwell and I are lounging on the living-room
couch, watching TV. O'Donoghue walks in wearing a silk dressing gown,
having taken a leisurely bubble bath. With her short haircut and
skeleton earrings, Caldwell is the essence of punk chic. "Did you play
any miniature golf?" she asks. "You know, any Goofy Golf?"
"They don't have Goofy Golf courses off the expressways, little lady,"
O'Donoghue says. "If a truck driver wants to pop some reds and play 18
holes, he's out of luck. All you see are Arco signs and sagging power
lines.
"If anyone doubts that the corporations have taken over America, they
should get out on the road," he says. "It's not 'Come on board the
Delta Queen!' you know, or 'Snakes as Big as Your Arm!' No, all that
fuckin' stuff died years ago. Arco's taken over the snake farm now."
"Well, did you have Magic Fingers in any of the places you stopped?"
Caldwell asks.
"No, you hardly ever find Magic Fingers anymore," O'Donoghue says.
"But we experienced the Knoxville World's Fair, the fabulous
Sunsphere, the way it was meant to be experienced. Why, some people
say that on a clear day, you can see that towering Sunsphere from 400
yards away."
"Well," she says, "did y'all at least see the Grand Canyon?"
"No," O'Donoghue says, "but we saw a sign that said, THIS WAY TO THE
GRAND CANYON, which is so close, really. I'm at the point where I
could say, 'If I saw the sign, I saw the thing.'"
--Playboy Magazine, March 1983
Sydney Brown
>
Quite the opposite reaction from me. I BEG for someone that off the mainstream
to actually receive some mainstream attention again.
I was not always a fan of Michael O'Donoghue, but I always wanted to see what
he'd do next, be it funny OR stupid.
Something sorely lacking today.
-Sydney Brown
I'm just here to help.
Douglas North
Same here. Thanks to the guy who posted it! Too bad this guy died and
the purveyors of shitty inane network sitcoms are all still alive.
Comedy died in 1994.
Can it be ressurected?