Gloria Emerson dies
Marston Moor
Originally filmed for the BBC TV series "24 Hours" entitled 'The World
Of John and Yoko.'
----------
John: [angrily in response to Gloria Emerson's cynical view of John
returning his MBE] If I'm gonna get on the front page, I might as well
get on the front page with the word "PEACE".
Emerson: But you've made yourself ridiculous!
John: To some people, I don't care.... if it saves lives!
Emerson: You don't think you've - oh - my dear boy, you're living in a
nether nether land.
John: Well, you talk to a...
Emerson: You don't think you've saved a single life...
John: Maybe we'll save some in the future...
Emerson: You've probably helped Cold Turkey move up the charts.
John: It didn't do a bit of use, it's still gone down so it didn't do
anything.
Emerson: But you don't equate of the civil war that's going on in
Nigeria with that, and then talk about "this is my form of a protest
because people in anti-war campaigns are too SERIOUS and they get
battered", what do you know about a protest movement anyway? It's a lot
more than sending your chauffeur and your car back to Buckingham Palace.
John: You're just a snob about it.....
Emerson: You're a Fake! I know in England it's kind of smart not to be
too serious about anything.
Yoko: Everything needs a smile you know.
Emerson: [condescendingly] I see.... Take the massacre ha ha ha. Can't
you give up something else if it means a little bit more....
John: It's not the sacrifice, you can't get that into your head, can
you? You've stated half a dozen times that the MBE is irrelevant, I
agree, it was no sacrifice to get rid of the MBE because it was an
embarrassment...
Emerson: Then what kind of a protest did you make?
John: AN ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN FOR PEACE. Can you understand that? A very
big advertising campaign for peace..
Emerson: No I can't...I think it shows you're vulgar and
self-aggrandizement, are you advertising John Lennon or peace?
John: Oh, do you want nice middle class gestures for peace? and
intellectual manifestos written by a lot of half-witted intellectuals
and nobody reads 'em! That's the trouble with the peace movement.
Emerson: Well - it just seems a nether nether land, I can't think of
anyone who seems more remote from the ugliness of what's happening than
you. I do see you getting up on a Tuesday morning and thinking 'let's
see, what shall we do today? - what war is going on'.
Yoko: [exasperated] That's your imagination you know, I mean really
that's YOU.
John: [to Emerson] You carry on, why don't you make a film while you're
at it.
Emerson: I'm somebody who admired you very much.....
John: [interrupting] Well, I'm sorry if you liked the old moptops, dear,
and you thought I was very satirical and witty and you like Hard Days'
Night, love......
Emerson: I'm talking about cashing in on the Beatles.
John: .......but I've grown up but you obviously haven't.
Emerson: Have you?
John: Yes folks.
Emerson: What have you grown up to?
John: Twenty-nine.
Emerson: How was Greece?
Yoko: It's beautiful...
John: We did a nice war protest on the army TV while we were there....
Yoko: .....by the way.....
John: I suppose you didn't like us going to Greece, eh? You think you
shouldn't go to a fascist country like Greece, and it's alright to live
in a fascist country like Britain or America is it?
Emerson: [pausing to think] I think America is a good place to live
right now, because I mean, if you were interested or committed and not
too cowardly you might conceivably make a difference by what you
did.....
John: Well, we've been trying to go to America to do something for the
last seven or eight months..
Emerson: Oh, but you'll turn it into a carnival...
John: Yes yes...
Emerson: ...taking it seriously, you don't understand how they approach
us my dear they are so grey....
John: You tell me what they were singing at the Moratorium.
Emerson: [confused] Which which ........?
John: ....the recent big one, they were singing "Give Peace a Chance".
Emerson: A song of yours probably.
John: Well yes, and it was written specifically for them.
Emerson: Where are we and what is this? What do you have to do with the
Moratorium? So they sang one of your songs - great song sure, but is
that all you can say about that - the Moratorium?
John: You were saying that in America, they're [mimicking Emerson] 'so
serious about the protest movement but they were so flippant they were
singing a happy go lucky song'. Which happens to be one I wrote, and I'm
glad they sang it, and when I get there I'll sing it with them. When I
get in. And that was a message from me to America or to anywhere, that I
use my songwriting ability to write a song that we could all sing
together, and I'm proud that they sang it at the Moratorium, I wouldn't
have cared if they'd sang We shall Overcome but it just so happens that
they sang that, and I'm proud of it, and I'll be glad to go there and
sing with 'em.
Emerson: [sarcastically] Make it jolly.
John: I will make it jolly.
Yoko: Yes yes you know, we have to make it jolly.
Emerson: Why?
John: We can't all afford to be neurotic.
Yoko: If we all make it jolly then maybe we MIGHT STOP THE WAR, you
know.
Emerson: By being jolly.
Yoko: Yes yes, because the thing is - when you're happy and when you're
smiling, you don't want to kill somebody, do you? You know, it's when
you're very serious you start to think about violence and death and
killing. I mean, have you ever seen a person killing somebody with a
smile on his face? and being happy? No, killers are unhappy people, and
they are violent because they are so unhappy and so damn serious.
Emerson: Mrs. Lennon, we are boring each other so I'll go away. [getting
up to leave] Thank you - Goodbye.
John: [to Yoko] Well, I think that's what you wanted.
Yoko: But the last point was a good point and she didn't want to
respond....
John: She didn't hear anything.
-----------------------------------
31 years later Gloria Emerson was referred to the meeting in an
interview for "Feed" magazine........
FEED: There's a rather famous, rather bitter exchange between you and
John Lennon, captured in the documentary Imagine [released in 1988].
Emerson: If he really wanted to stop the war in Vietnam, all he had to
do was tell the U.S. Army he wanted to go there to entertain the troops.
Many entertainers did. And it would have thrown the army into the most
extraordinary panic. I think he could have stopped the war if he had
gone.
FEED: He had that much power?
Emerson: He had that much power. But I didn't hear a lot of the Beatles
in Vietnam. I mostly heard the Supremes and Jimi Hendrix -- and Diana
Ross, of course. But I'm sorry I spoke harshly to him. We had had a long
exchange, and he was very unhappy to be there, as was I. It was at a
studio in London.
FEED: You were interviewing him?
Emerson: No! What was I doing there? Someone conned me into coming. [I'd
be] the last person in the world to interview John Lennon, who didn't
want to speak. So why did he come? No conversation was possible. And he
made a scathing remark about writers, and I said, "You are the only
writer here." But can you imagine if the Beatles had come to Vietnam to
sing to the American troops? I think it would have frozen everything!
-------------------------------------
Gloria Emerson RIP
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/05/obituaries/05emerson.html
Gloria Emerson, Chronicler of War's Damage, Dies at 75 By CRAIG R.
WHITNEY
Published: August 5, 2004
Gloria Emerson, a journalist and author who wrote with angry dignity
about the effects of war on Americans, Vietnamese and Palestinians, was
found dead by friends and the police yesterday morning in her apartment
in Manhattan. She was 75 and left no immediate survivors.
The medical examiner's office said that it had not ruled on the cause of
death. Her physician, Karen Brudney, said Ms. Emerson had been suffering
from Parkinson's disease, which she feared would leave her unable to
write, and she left many notes at the apartment indicating that she had
taken her own life.
Both as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times in Vietnam in the
early 1970's and later as a writer of nonfiction books and a novel, Ms.
Emerson wrote passionately about ordinary people and soldiers ground up
by the machinery of war in places like Vietnam, Gaza and Algeria.
War as she wrote about it was not ennobling but debasing, a misery that
inflicted physical suffering and psychic damage on civilians, children,
and soldiers on both sides. Her literary model was Graham Greene, whose
dark portrayal of the early days of the American war in Vietnam
influenced her articles and her style. "Loving Graham Greene" was the
title she gave her novel, published by Random House in 2000.
She was working in the London bureau of The Times in 1969 when, as she
wrote in an obituary she left with a covering note that was dated
Tuesday, "Ms. Emerson requested that she be sent to Vietnam because she
had been in that country in 1956 and wanted to go back to write about
the Vietnamese people and the immense unhappy changes in their lives,
not a subject widely covered by the huge press corps who were
preoccupied with covering the military story."
Her articles from Vietnam, many reported with the help of Nguyen Ngoc
Luong, her interpreter, brought alive for many readers people who had
been an abstraction, the Vietnamese whose "hearts and minds'' the United
States went to war to win, but lost to communist adversaries who
prevailed despite millions of casualties.
One of her articles after the unsuccessful South Vietnamese attempt to
cut off North Vietnamese supply lines in Laos in 1971 reported how
Sergeant Co, an infantry platoon leader, clung to the skids of an
American helicopter to get out alive. " 'Each helicopter could have been
the last one, so what choice was there for me?' he asked. 'Only the
madmen would stay and politely wait for the next helicopter.' "
Her literary voice was always gravely serious. In person, she was well
dressed, precise in speech and eccentrically funny.
She was constantly giving money to veterans, refugees and street
beggars. She could be possessive and domineering, especially toward the
photographers whose work she thought would outlast her articles
published with them; the words she compared to ice cubes that melted in
the sun.
As Ms. Emerson put it in her own obituary: "Her dispatches from Vietnam
won a George Polk Award for excellence in foreign reporting, and, later,
a Matrix Award from New York Women in Communications. Her nonfiction
book on the war, 'Winners & Losers' (Random House, 1977), won a National
Book Award in 1978 but she described it as 'too huge and somewhat
messy.' Its subject was the effects of the conflict on some Americans,
or 'an absence of the effect,' as she once said."
Typical of "Winners & Losers" were lines like these, about Joseph
(Teddy) Humber Jr., who lost both his legs in a mine explosion in
Vietnam in 1972 and came home to his family in Westboro, Mass. "Teddy
did not seem to always know what the others were saying," she wrote. "He
seemed busy with something else; perhaps it was pain. He sat at the
table without moving, often without hearing."
Another book in 1985, "Some American Men," published by Simon &
Schuster, ranged further into the souls of her countrymen and their
afflictions in sports and love as well as in war. "Gaza, a Year in the
Intifada," about a year she spent with Palestinians in what she called
"an occupied land," was published by The Atlantic Monthly Press in 1991.
"Made to feel inferior, treated with contempt and cruelty, the Gazans
struggled to transcend their own feelings of helplessness," she wrote
then.
"The book provoked hostility among friends, and others felt it was
anti-Israel, but Ms. Emerson insisted this was not the reason for
writing it," she explained later, in the obituary she left behind. "She
hoped to provide a primer for those who felt the situation in the Middle
East was too complicated or too controversial to understand.''
Born in New York City to William B. Emerson and Ruth Shaw Emerson in
1929, she began her career in The Times's women's news department in
1957, describing herself on her application as a widow, giving her
married name as Znamiecki.
"I applied for a job at The New York Times many years ago, and felt
correctly that my life depended on it," she explained in a note written
just before her death. "I didn't go to college, I ran away from an
alcoholic wretched home and went to work on a hotel giveaway magazine."
She continued, "Getting a job on the women's page was a gift from heaven
although I hated writing about shoes and clothes, all under the eye of
the advertising department who measured editorial mention of retailers.
You cannot imagine what it was like in those days."
She left the paper in 1960 to live in Brussels with Charles A.
Brofferio, whom she described as "an ill-suited husband" she divorced a
year later.
The Times hired her back as a reporter in Paris in 1964 "on the
understanding that I would cover the haute couture collections twice a
year," she explained. Moving to the paper's London bureau in late 1968,
she made her way to Belfast to write some articles about the conflict in
Northern Ireland, and in 1970, as she put it, "I was allowed to go to
Vietnam because the war was supposed to be over so it didn't matter if a
female was sent. Et voilà...............................
..then the power went off.
·.·´¨ ¨)) -:|:-
¸.·´ .·´¨¨))
R. Stevie Moore
((¸¸.·´ ..·´
-:|:- ((¸¸ ·.·
THE SON OF TRUTH
Well, that's it then, isn't it?
Good death to you, Ms. Emerson.
...``I don't know what I got going right now,'' Mark Prior, Cub.
LetsbuildIraq!
She did Lennon better than Al Capp.
Both of which showed that Lennon was an Idiot at everything past making music.
THE SON OF TRUTH
>From: here is nowhere flu...@foodbowl.com
>Date: 8/6/2004 6:56 AM Central Standard Time
>Message-id: <Xns953D83EF...@140.99.99.130>
>
>http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/05/obituaries/05emerson.html
>
>God bless.
>
God Damn.
Martin Hofner
> >Subject: Re: Gloria Emerson dies
> >From: here is nowhere flu...@foodbowl.com
> >Date: 8/6/2004 6:56 AM Central Standard Time
> >Message-id: <Xns953D83EF...@140.99.99.130>
> >
> >http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/05/obituaries/05emerson.html
> >
> >God bless.
> >
> God Damn.
>
He just did you asshole. Vile twerp aren't you?
Obviously you inherited everything from your mother.
Phred
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