In the
first half of our two-part interview with author, screenwriter, and Science
Fiction And Fantasy Writers Of America Grandmaster Harlan Ellison,
Ellison addressed his reactions to Erik Nelson's new documentary biopic Dreams With Sharp Teeth, and
how it portrays him. In part two, Ellison moves on to talk about his potential legacy,
how his personality has overshadowed his work, the contract between writers and
readers, and his best and worst encounters with strangers. And also, Neil
Gaiman's accent.
The
A.V. Club: You spoke earlier about how often "Repent,
Harlequin! Said The Ticktockman" has been reprinted, and in the film,
you talk about how that story, and the film itself, may be the portrait of how
you're remembered. Are you comfortable with those two pieces as a legacy?
Harlan
Ellison:
[Laughs, adopts Humphrey Bogart voice.] Schweetheart, lemme put it to ya thish
way: I got no choice. [Laughs.]
AVC:
If you did, though… If you knew just one of your works would survive a
thousand years from now, do you have any idea what you would want it to be?
HE: Ummm… no. Bogart once
called acting a mugg's game, M-U-G-G-apostrophe-S. Meaning that it ain't worth
the time to talk about it. I don't know. I'm always amazed at—somebody
will come up to me and they'll say, "Gee, I read such-and-such a story when I
was in high school, and it just changed my life." And I think to myself, "Wow.
What an odd choice to have changed your life." Let me digress, not very much,
but slightly. There is a philosophical point that should be made here, because
it goes to the hubris of writers. [Sighs.] There's no point in saying less than
your predecessors have said. Hemingway said, "You know, I'm in the ring with
Dostoyevsky every time I sit down." And Jules Renard, he said, "Writing is an
occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have
none." So one can be misled by the approbation… I ramble, one thing leads me to
another, and you're the one who's going to have to find your way through this
rat's maze.
I
think the problem with F. Scott Fitzgerald, as wonderful a writer as he was,
was Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. He wrote this great book, one or two,
and suddenly became the spokesperson for his generation, the lost generation.
He was touted and praised and raised to iconic stature, so all of a sudden, he
began to believe his own publicity, I believe. Everything that was said about
him: "You are a spokesman, you are the voice of your times, you are the
greatest writer who ever came down the American pike." And then came
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, in which you alter the reality by
perceiving it yourself. You look at it through the microscope, and boom! Things
change. He began looking at himself, and that innocence of childhood or nature
that I mentioned earlier suddenly became something of which he was aware. And
the moment he did that, he became too self-conscious to write, and he boxed
himself in, and he wound up doing the Pat Hobby stories and The Crack-Up, about his own writer's
block and his nervous breakdown. So if you begin to believe that posterity is
going to look at you—and we have no way of knowing if it will. I mean,
good God, does the name Clarence Budington Kelland mean anything to you?
AVC:
Sorry, no.
HE: Nor to 10 out of every
nine people that you'll meet. Clarence Budington Kelland was, during the '20s,
'30s, '40s, and on into the '50s, the most popular writer in America. He had a
serial—the height of success in America in those days for a freelance
writer was to get a serial in Collier's or The Saturday Evening Post. Well, Clarence Budington
Kelland just wrote—everything that was picked up by Collier's, The Post, they made into movies.
He wrote Westerns, he wrote children's books. He wrote everything, and he made
more money than the President of the United States. Today, you go to a library,
you cannot find a Clarence Budington Kelland book! He was a pretty good writer.
He was not William Faulkner, he was not Colette, but he certainly was a very
good, decent writer. With the exception of one or two people whose names are
common coin—Shakespeare, perhaps Faulkner—being well-known and
being remembered is a mugg's game. There's no way of knowing whether you're
going to wind up being Geoffrey Chaucer or Clarence Budington Kelland.
This
epiphany came to me, thank heavens, very early on. One night, quite late, the
phone rang, and it was a woman, and her voice was choked, and she told me her
name—which of course I cannot now remember, I mean, we're talking 35,
maybe even now 40 years ago. And she said her husband had left her, run off
with another woman, her child had died of pneumonia or diphtheria or something.
She had no money, she was going to have to move, they had turned the
electricity off, and all of her furniture was gone. She was sitting in the
middle of an empty room, out of which she would soon be moving. And all she had
left were her personal effects and a stack of paperbacks. And she said to
me—and you know, you hear this said to you, and there's nothing to say to
it—she said, "I was going to kill myself." She said, "I was on my way
into the bathroom. I had been sitting on the floor with a flashlight, and I was
going into the bathroom to get a razor blade to cut my wrists, and I stumbled
over the stack of paperbacks. And the one that came out on top was one of your
books, Mr. Ellison." How she found me, I don't know, but you know, my phone
number even then was not inaccessible. And she said it was my book Paingod, and she started to read
it, the story "Paingod." And she said, "I started to cry." And she said, "It
gave me hope. And I didn't kill myself. Thank you." And I said, "You're
welcome," and that was the end of the conversation.
Now
I sat there and thought about this, and started to puff up like a fuckin'
pouter pigeon. And then I had the epiphany. The epiphany was this: that if I
accept the praise, the kudos, for something that I've written, then I also must
accept the responsibility if someone reads one of my stories, takes a sniper
rifle, goes up in a bell tower, and shoots 13 people on a campus, and they say,
"Well, I read it in Harlan Ellison's book." And as an author, you can't do
that. And
the extension of the concept—of avoiding the Heisenberg Uncertainty
Principle, not starting to believe that you matter, that you're important, that
the words you put down will resound down through the halls of eternity and
people's lives will be altered—beyond that, the rest of that, the
parameters of that equation are that I cannot pay attention to what people say
about my work. For me, personally, I am just this shards-and-ashes human being,
who really gets upset when someone says something bad about me. If it's true, I
cop to it. If I have any good qualities, it's that. I am not one of these
people who instantly takes umbrage when he's corrected or—I love being corrected. People
are still correcting me on word misusages now, after 50 years of being in the
trade. But I can't worry that I am not beloved by everybody. [Laughs.] When I
lecture, people say, "God, he's so surly." Well, fuck you! You knew what you
were getting when you came to the lecture. And if you didn't, you found out
within a minute or two. I'm here to tell it the way I see it, and I may be as
right or wrong as anybody else. But if you let the image of the messenger get
in the way of whatever message there may be, however large or small, that's your problem, not mine. So,
the movie—which brings us back to "Do I see it as an apt representation?"
I do. I see it as a representation of a… [Laughs.] As Neil Gaiman says [in the
film], a cranky old Jew. I love that! The first time I saw that, I just fuckin'
fell apart! I couldn't stop laughing.
AVC:
Well, coming from him, given his legendary gentle politesse, it's particularly
hilarious.
HE: Well, with that accent,
right. Also, have you heard anyone else ever pronounce the word "trachea"
tra-KEE-a?
AVC:
No.
HE: Nor have I! Where the
fuck did he get that?! Mr. Poncy Brit.
AVC:
The thought you were developing there switched tracks in the middle. You
started out talking about how you can't take responsibility for how people
react to your work, but it almost immediately turned into talking about how
people react to you personally. Do you think of it as the same thing?
HE: Well, look. It's standard
bifurcation. Robert Bloch, who wrote Psycho and who wrote some of the
most grisly stories ever written, people used to say to him, "Bob, are you
really that gruesome a man?" He said, "No." He said, "I have the heart of a
small boy. I keep it in a jar on my desk." And Stephen King, of course, has
reprised that line many times. And at first he didn't credit it, until a bunch
of us jumped on him and said, "Come on. It's Bob Bloch's line." There is Harlan
Ellison the human being, who takes a crap a couple of times a day, and who
farts, and who eats, you know, chicken croquettes, if I can find them. And then
there is the writer, this writer-person, who is a much finer person than I.
Much more orderly, much more meaningful. Worthier, that's the word, worthier than I.
Early
on, I said, "Well, you know, the human being is hag-ridden by the talent. I
have very little control over it. There's an onboard computer, if you will,
that when I sit down to write, tells me everything I need to know. I trust it
implicitly." And people say, "Well, how often do you rewrite?" I say, "I don't
rewrite. When I sit down at the typewriter—and I still use a manual
typewriter, not an electric and not a computer. I can't stand to work on a PC.
I mean, I know how to operate a PC. But I don't use 'em, I still go to my
typewriter and I produce a real manuscript, the way I have for 50, 60 years.
That other Ellison, that bifurcated Ellison, takes over. And trying to
integrate the two is the great paradox and the great problem in every writer's
life, in every artist's life, in every person's life. I mean, everybody has a
talent, whether it's scrapbooking, or kite-flying, or brain surgery, or
writing, everybody has a talent. And if they discover it, and they turn it to
their purposes and make a living out of it, well, then they become not "that
person," but they become "that writer" or "that doctor" or "that supervisor."
Am I making any sense at all?
AVC:
It just seems that throughout your life, your personality has overshadowed your
work. People who don't know your work know of you, and let that color whether
they seek out your work, and how they read it, or don't. Does that bother you?
HE: Of course it bothers me. The
integration of that duality is—without the low-level "celebrity," in
quotes, my 15 minutes would probably have been over at the end of the '70s. The
fact that you're interviewing me four days shy of my 74th birthday—I am
older than entire countries, including the state of Israel—the fact that
you're interviewing me on the 23rd of May in the year 2008, when I was born on
27 May, 1934, is undoubtedly due to the appurtenances to my career, my actual
writing. I was interviewed on NPR the other day, and the guy said, "What are
you doin' these days?" As if, God, ya know… [Adopts querulous old-man voice.]
"Well, I'm not doin' much. They removed my spleen, and I'm now just sort of
sittin' here in a basket." He said, "I don't see anything much by you in
print." I said, "Well, I can't be responsible for the limited nature of your
reading matter." I said, "I have a piece on Arthur C. Clarke coming up in the
current issue of Skeptical Inquirer. I just had a very long essay in Interzone, a magazine out of
England. I'm writing a piece on my student Octavia Estelle Butler for an
anthology that Norton is publishing. I'm writing new stories. I'm still
working. I don't work as much, and I don't work as steadily, and I don't work
at the fever pitch that I worked when I was 20, but I'm still working, and I'm
still here, Jack. Still standing after all these years."
People
are like kittens and babies. They play with what's in front of them, and they
lose interest in everything that isn't right in front of them. And kittens only
have two purposes in life. One is to make everything that's moving stop, and
the other is to make everything that's stopped, move. So if you are seeking the
approbation of the kind of audience that would pay attention to Sanjaya, or to Lindsay Lohan, as opposed to Frances
Parkinson Keyes, or William Faulkner, you're gonna be frustrated, and you're
gonna be lonely, and you're gonna sit and mope about the loss of your 15
minutes. I have never given myself time to be disappointed that way. Nowadays,
if someone says to me—there was a smartass writer who said… [Adopts whiny
dolt voice.] "You know, I thought you were big stuff, and then I asked one of
my friends, 'Do you know the name Harlan Ellison?' He said, 'Who?'" And I said,
"Listen, dude,
just because your friends are as stupid as you are doesn't mean that I should
feel diminished." I said, "Ask them who Guy de Maupassant is. Ask them who
Rachel Carson is. They won't know any name unless it's the name of the person
who's paying them their paycheck that week." So you cannot let
yourself—yes, it bothers. Yes, it bothers. But without the one, I
wouldn't have the other.
[pagebreak]
AVC:
It seems like a shallow question, but—
HE: No, it's
not a shallow question. It's deeper than you think it is. It is a deeper
question than you think it is. Because you either get a yes or no answer to it,
but it's the shadow that lies behind the yes or no that makes it not a shallow
question at all. It's a troubling thing. You show me a writer, scuffling his
toe in the dirt like Jimmy Stewart and saying, "Aw, shucks, I don't care if I'm
remembered after they plant me. Just let me make enough money for beer now."
I'll show you a fuckin' stone liar. Because writing—form follows
function, and the act of writing means you wish to communicate. Whether you're
writing a memoir for yourself you put in a drawer, or you write a poem and you
send it to a little magazine, or you write for publication, it always
means—the form follows function. It's inherent in the form, "I need to
say this. I think I'm important enough to say this, and I think it's important
enough for you to listen to it." Now that is the egocentricity of despots, for
Christ's sake. And so any writer who pretends to a disaffection for
recognition, well, I think they're being duplicitous.
AVC:
Recognition and communication are two different things, though. It sounds like
you're saying that all writers want to get important ideas across, that there
aren't people writing just for money or fame.
HE: Are you saying, do I
believe that there are not just hacks out there who have an ability to put
words together, and so they do it to make a living?
AVC:
Exactly.
HE: I believe there are many like that. It is not a
matter of purpose, I think it is a matter of just talent. Michelangelo said,
"Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle." There are those who
feel the burning in them. They write because they cannot not, or paint because they
cannot not,
or dance. I mean, one must be insane to be a ballerina or a gymnast. These are rigors
that stunt your childhood and bend you for the rest of your life. And yet there
are people who dedicate themselves to it with a ferocity that is akin to Alaric
the Goth! So I think there are people—I know a number of writers who are
not terribly endowed, but they work at it, and they have careers that have
lasted decades. And the one thing they do have in common, and this is, I
suppose, after all the rodomontade I've just ambled through, the salient point
is this: No one sets out to do bad work. There are people who are capable only
of mediocrity, and when mediocrity is the norm, as it is in the world, that
falls into Ted Sturgeon's "90 percent of everything is crap," because when he
said "crap," he meant "mediocrity." They're doing the best they can, which is
an explanation, but not much of an excuse.
I think art—and I said this in the
movie—art must be tough! I think art has to be hard. I don't think it
should be easy. I think it should take foot-pounds of energy to produce that
art, otherwise we would have more mediocre writers, and we don't have room for
any more mediocrity in the world. There's already enough of it being visited on
us night and day through the Internet, and through television, and through
politics. These are places where the human soul should aspire. These are places
where great things should happen, and in fact they are not. And that's probably
one of my biggest gripes with the Internet, that it settles for mediocrity and
disinformation, which puts all information on the same level. Everything has
the same value, whether it's Albert Einstein speaking, or [email protected].
AVC: So should artists' personalities or lives
matter when considering their work?
HE: No. Definite, absolute, unequivocal no.
Dostoevsky was a drunk. He was a gambler who gambled away his family's money.
He borrowed from everybody, never paid them back. He was an absolute shit. He
wrote The Idiot!
What does it matter that he was a shit? The Idiot is still here. No. No,
what a person is, is fascinating or a documentary, but it should not in any way
influence—and that's one of the things I hate about the literary school
of deconstruction. There's this whole school of French criticism that
deconstructs everything, and says, "Well, the reason he wrote this story is
because he had boils on his neck when he was a child." Or everything can be
traced back to the fact that you were a black woman passing for a white woman.
Or because you were a Sephardic Jew in Weimar, Germany. I think it is all the
tomfoolishness of the tenured. Ooh, that's a great phrase! "The tomfoolishness
of the tenured." Oooh. I can give you an example of this that's really
hilarious if you want it.
AVC: Sure.
HE: A number of years ago—this goes back again,
and I lose track of time, but it's as fresh as if it were yesterday in my mind.
The Modern Language Association, the MLA, was doing a section on my work. A
couple of people had picked my stuff to talk about. And I was bootlegged into
one of these talks. I sat at the back of the room. And the academic, who
happened to be a Jesuit priest, and a very rigorously trained man, was talking
about my story "I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream." And he went on at great
length talking about the basic Apollonian/Dionysian conflict, and the
God-vs.-man matrix syndrome, and all of this wonderful, epistemological
gobbledygook, and I sat back there and listened. It was pretty smart stuff, it
was pretty cool. But it was all wrong. It was absolutely all wrong.
And afterward, they played a very bad—I
mean, it was pretty cruel what they did to this poor man. His name was Father
William something-or-other. The person who was the moderator of the section
said, "Father Johnson"—or Jameson, or whatever the hell his name
was—"we have the author of that story, Harlan Ellison, here." And there
was a great stir in the room, and this when I was at the height of my
popularity, he said with charming humility. You can put that in paren, "(he
said with charming humility)." And he said, "Would you like to hear Mr.
Ellison's take on this?" Well, the right reverend Dr. Jameson wanted my opinion
on what he'd just said about as much as he wanted a hysterectomy with a
Roto-Rooter. And he truly lost the blood from his face, it drained, but he was
gracious, and he said, "Oh, yes, that would be wonderful." [Laughs.] And he
used the word "wonderful" the way you or I would use "glioblastoma"
or "dogcatcher."
And I came up and I said, "Well," I said, "what
was your name again?" He said, "William," I said, "Well, look, Billy," because
the minute you have to start calling someone "Father," you've lost the
argument. So I said, "Look, Billy, what you've said is really wonderful, and
I'm grateful for the serious attention. But in truth, what you've just said is
stuffed full of wild blueberry muffins." I said, "You didn't even notice that
the woman, the one woman on whom you based this whole theory about the
bitch-goddess and all that kind of stuff, is a black woman." And he said,
"What? What?" And I said, "Yes!" He said, "Well, where is that?" And I took the
book that he had lying there, and I turned to the passage, and I read, "her
face, black against the snow." And he said, "Well, I thought you meant…" and I
said, "I rest my case." They will find in it what they wish to find in it,
because that is their game. That is the game academics play, which is the same
game that politicians and dictators play. Stay in power. Keep your job. Write
the prescription in a hand that only an apothecary can read, and not the
patient, because then you won't need to have a pharmacist-and-doctor, privacy
language. It's the same way that kids use letters to fool their parents:
CTNMOS. "Can't talk now, Mom over shoulder," mommy's watching me. Something
like that. It's an acronym kids use now, because parents are checking to see
whether they're looking at porn, or what they're doing. So they've developed
this acronym secret language. Every group has its own lingua franca.
AVC: When you were talking earlier about the
woman who felt that you'd saved her from suicide, you said you can't take
responsibility for how people take your work. But do you think there's any kind of contract
between a writer and reader? Do they have any obligations to each other?
HE: Oh yeah. Absolutely, there's a contract. And
that's again a very smart question. That's exactly what it is. It's a contract.
Let me give you a for-instance of a breach of that contract. There is a mystery
writer, and I won't name him, 'cause he's a nice enough man. He wrote a book in
which he had a character do something that he was physically incapable of
doing. In other words—this was not the example, but if I told you what it
was, you could identify the book—but let's say he had no arms, and this
guy had him driving a stick-shift car. The instant I read the scene, I put the
book down. I couldn't trust him any longer. He did not know what he was talking
about. He was not paying attention. That is the only message that art conveys:
"Pay attention." That's it. That's the beginning and end. That's the alpha and
the omega. Pay attention. And the contract between a writer and a reader is
that the writer will break his or her ass to do it scrupulously, absolutely
properly. That you can't say, "Well, grammar doesn't matter," or "It doesn't
matter that I misspell," or "A copyeditor will fix it." Or if the syntax is
spavined, broken-backed. That doesn't go. If you're a jewel-cutter, you don't
let your wedge get dull. If you're a doctor, you don't let the scalpel get
dirty. When you're a writer, you have—as I said before, it's language,
the one tool that enables us to grasp hold of our lives and transcend our fate
by understanding. That's the contract. That's the contract. And the great
enemy—this one's from George Orwell—"The great enemy of clear
language is insincerity." So you have to have the passion and the skill and the
craft. It's not just enough to have the passion. You've gotta have all three.
AVC: So is there another side of that contract?
What does the reader owe the writer?
HE: Well, that's harder. That's harder, because it
sets a personal bar under which someone may not be able to limbo. I usually say
I write for the smartest, cleverest, wittiest audience I know, and that's me.
[Laughs.] What the hell else can you do?
AVC: You perform bits of your work several
times during the film, and your elevated language works particularly well that
way—it sounds almost like poetry. When you're writing, do you consider
what your stories will sound like if they're read out loud?
HE: Oh, absolutely. I never send a story off until I
have read it aloud to at least two or three people. Because when I
read—and I don't need their criticism, what I need is my own—when I
read it aloud, there is a flow, there is a poetry to it. Here's what I'm
writing right now. This is the piece that I'm writing. I'm gonna read you just
the first page. This is what I'm writing now about Octavia Estelle Butler. And
the piece is called "This Is About A Tall Black Girl And A Short White Guy." It
says, "This woman of whom we speak, this woman you call Octavia, who to me was
always Estelle, this imposing black person was more than a small human miracle.
Estelle was a loner. She came from a family that loved her, and her love in
immense measure returned. But not 'til she made of herself a human miracle who
fascinates us, even though she is gone, did her family and everyone else have a
clue how thick lay that fog, how deep and fast ran that hidden river, how
remarkable was her soul. 'Til she was a grown woman, that tall black girl, not
'til she was an adult, no one 'got' her. Not even her family." See, when I read
that aloud, there is a cadence. And I got that cadence—this is what
writers have influenced you—from Frederic Prokosch.
You talk about fame… My favorite book in the world
is The Seven Who Fled, by Frederic Prokosch. You can get one off Amazon in any
number of editions. It's a novel about seven people fleeing a Chinese warlord
across the Gobi desert. And there is one section near the beginning, in a
chapter called "Layeville," who is one of the characters, where he describes
the desert. And it is the most mesmerizing writing I have ever read. And there
is a flow to it, because Prokosch was also a poet. And this was the Harper
Prize novel, I think in 1933, or '34, something like that. And it was not his
first novel—his first novel was The Asiatics—but it was his
second. And for someone that young to write that brilliantly sets a mountaintop
for people such as I to aspire to. And you cannot—I will take that book
with me when I do writers' workshops, and I will read them just that one
section. It's not much, it's about a page. And I say, "When you can write like
that, then I will bow down and I will kiss the hem of your garment." So.
AVC: Given your somewhat legendary reputation
at this point, it's hard to know how to approach you. You seem to get all kinds
of people bracing themselves for antagonism from you, from people at readings
who sort of cringe and grovel to people who start off belligerent and angry,
expecting a fight. How would you like people to approach you?
HE: Well, I'll tell you the worst of it, and then
I'll tell you the funniest of it. [Laughs.] This is one of the worst things I
ever did, and I have done some terrible things in my time. It was a gang book
signing, with Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, the editor of the book we were
signing, whose name was Ron Borst, and I, and it was a book of movie posters.
We were sitting at a long table, and I was around at the end of the table, so
you had to go past three people to get to me. And because it was such a large
group of signers, the line stretched out of the bookstore, down the street,
around the corner, and into a parking lot, where they had to put up ropes to
keep people in line. And the funny thing is that Bob and Ray and I had known
each other for donkey's years, so we're busy cuttin' up and shuckin' and jivin'
and just breaking each other up and saying funny things to each other while
we're signing, and talking to the people, and being just in general very cheery
and accessible and nice. It was a terrific going-on.
The problem is that people were not leaving,
because they wanted to hear all the funny shit. They were gathering behind me
and crowding the back of the bookstore. And the line kept on going. So now
comes a woman, and she goes past Borst, gets his signature, and then Ray, and
then Bob, and she comes to me, and she's holding the book, and I can't remember
what it was she said, but it was incredibly stupid and rude. It met
at that median between obsequious and boorish that people come on with you
because they have to assert that you're not such hot stuff. They have to put
you in your place. And she said it to me loud enough that the people behind her
heard it, and you could see them playing Telephone. Or as my wife, who is
English, calls it, Chinese Whispers. You know, repeated, "My God, did you hear
what she said to Ellison? My God!" And it went down the line. And Ray and Bob
pushed back their chairs, as if they did not wish to be hit by a comet of
flying flesh. And I heard this voice say to this woman, "You know, when I hear a
remark like that, I know that you weren't born yesterday. 'Cause nobody could
get that fuckin' stupid in just 24 hours."
And the woman burst into tears, dropped the book,
and ran, and of course everybody now down the line said, "That bastard Ellison!
That dickwad! What did he—" Well, it was, of course, I who had said it.
People who come up to me, or approach me, or talk to me in a civil manner, are
treated civilly. I was raised well by my mom and dad. I'm not a boor, I'm not a
bad guy. I do a lot of shit that I think is funny, and sometimes it goes over
the line, but I do it not meaning to be a bad guy. There is a good heart behind
it. And you have to—that's what you have to rely on: "Is this done with a
good heart, or is this Ho Chi Minh here?"
That's the awful one. Here's the funny one. This
is decades ago, a friend of mine, William Rotsler, one of the great wits of our
time, and a wonderful writer and an artist and a sculptor and a moviemaker. He
was just a Renaissance guy and a terrific guy. In fact, it was Bill who came up
with the title "I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream." He did a little drawing,
and there was a little creature, looked like a rag doll, that had no mouth on
it, just stitches, that said, "I have no mouth, and I must scream." And I
thought, "Wow, what a great title for a story." And I asked Bill if I could use
it, and he said, "Yeah," and there it was. I don't think I've ever told anybody
that.
Bill was in attendance at a very large reception,
at a convention, may have been a Worldcon, in some place back east, I don't
know whether it was Washington DC or Pittsburgh or something like that. But I
came—at the time, I was dating some young woman—and we came off the
elevator into the midst of this huge ballroom full of people. And the minute I
stepped out of the elevator, it was like a scene in an MGM musical—you
know, where they clear the floor and June Allyson and Peter Lawford do their
jitterbug.
The waves parted, the Red Sea parted, and people
moved on both sides. I thought, "What the hell is going on here?" At the end of
the channel cleft between these two drifts of people was a young woman who I
did not know. And we walked, my date and I, saying hi to people on both sides
as we walked down this aisle. And the minute I got there in front of this young
woman—I had no idea who she was, but she was staring at me and facing me off.
It was High Noon,
and I was Gary Cooper, and peculiarly enough, she was Grace Kelly and not the
bad guys. And she unloaded on me. I mean, this—I guess the proper word is
bitch—unloaded on me, just began to rip me up one side and down the
other. I can't even remember what it was all about. When she was done, she
paused for breath, as if to say, "How do you like them apples?" And I turned
around with my date, we walked back the elevator, and I left. But as I was
leaving, I heard behind me, this woman say, "Why didn't he say anything? Why
didn't he say anything? What's the matter with him? Why didn't he say
anything?" And I heard Bill Rotsler—and Bill vouched for this
later—Bill said, "When you're the fastest gun in town, you don't draw
against plowboys."