The Good Old Days in California

Memoir of a Campaign Drop-in

by WILFRID SHEED

THE fun went out of the campaign so quickly it was hard to remember it had ever been there. Our show biz names versus their show biz names, our writers versus their writers, and which side was Barbra Streisand really on; the hysterical fun that followed the Kennedys everywhere they went, the sense of precariousness and racing the clock, and the counterfun of the McCarthy movement, with its kids and its cabarets — the buoyancy of an antiroyalist rising with a fantastic run of victories from Cork to Wexford, from New Hampshire to Wisconsin to Oregon. All gone now, like Jackie Kennedy’s water skis. And all one could think was, If I had such a good time last night, why do I feel so rotten this morning?

Senator McCarthy came out in the corridor of the Beverly Hilton early on Wednesday and said a few spare words of regret. His face was white and ravaged, like a private man’s, not just heavy and solemn like a politician’s. He looked as if he had possibly spent the worst night in the history of Christendom; but since McCarthy keeps his feelings to himself, we could only guess at his thoughts. One thing that might have occurred to him, though, in passing, was that he had himself left a similar ballroom, by a similar exit, not an hour before Robert Kennedy had.

At least, one figured afterward that it must have been the kitchen he went through on the way back to his suite. Behind him, the ballroom was the usual swinging snake pit; next day the Los Angeles Times would describe the mood there as gloomy, but if so, saints preserve us from ecstasy. We had just sustained one of our most arresting defeats: Kennedy would now stay in the race, which was essential to our plans, deadlock the convention, and leave it to McCarthy to break the tie — an ambiguous situation to be whooping it up over, but we were used to that by now.

Upstairs, everything was a snarl of cables and cameras. There was nothing to photograph right now, but the roiling apparatus would sit there solemnly all night for people to trip over, just in case. McCarthy workers, great and humble, had piled into the bedrooms with the best TV sets, of which mine seemed to be one. So I edged in anonymously and watched, from a hard-won beachhead on my own bed, the scene over at Kennedy’s place.

He looked, you may recall, unusually relaxed and content. Tales had been spreading of his total exhaustion, of his having to be helped into his car, and so on, but victory is politicians’ medicine. His speech was humorous, in that limited but pleasant kidding style he had fallen into, and magnanimous. It had been a clean light, as these things go, which meant that our loathing for each other was not quite irreparable; and Kennedy was mending fences as he went.

In retrospect, Sheed felt that this last speech had charmed him for the first time. But this, I fear, was an optical illusion. After a dogfight like that, you are in no shape to be charmed, not just yet. He left the platform, and we returned to our endless conjecturing, our audacious raids on delegates, and our happy Hubert-baiting. Even minor functionaries and hangers-on can fill a room with smoke and talk like power brokers. McCarthy’s coup had been to offer this old man’s dream to the underthirties.

It was to wits woolly with role-playing and booze and the thought of no-work-tomorrow that the news arrived in grotesque bits and pieces. “Shooting . . . shot . . . somebody shot . . . clear the hall, clear the hall . . . Jesse Unruh, Bobby, don’t know ... in the hip, in the head.” The TV was as confused as we were. The screen was a splurge of ungodly colors, baby blue and midnight orange. The young McCarthy workers sobbed and stared and said oh, no, and what’s happening and I don’t believe it. Bobby was reported to have gripped his rosary beads, a good sign. Somebody asked if receiving the Last Sacraments meant that the Church had given up on you. No, it was explained, just a routine precaution.

Time now to work on one’s sermon. What’s wrong with America, wrong with California, Los Angeles, guns, war, violence. Already die great popular preachers were wheeling like buzzards, coaching us in the right phrases and attitudes. “The fabric of our society torn . . . America sick, violence, guns, frontier . . .” By the next evening we would have heard it all; and we would be saying, we whores after novelty, that America wasn’t so bad, that the question wasn’t so simple, but prepared to abandon that position too if it became too crowded. Meanwhile, the President’s meatball commission would set to work and slowly regurgitate Eric Sevareid’s aperçus. Every journal able to lisp would start on its violence piece, and by fall the nation’s bookshelves would be stocked to bursting with this new toy.

Knowing all this added a last thimble of gloom to that long evening, which ended when I introduced myself to my guests circa 3:30 A.M. and asked them to clear out. Whether or not America is sick or violent, it surely is preachy and predictable; and one shares in this quality oneself, as if it were a public utility.

Since I had been doing a little speaking for McCarthy in the Los Angeles area, I suppose my thoughts had been in synch with those of my numerous roommates. There I had been, bad-mouthing Kennedy all week, in a spirit of play; and now found myself staring at the top of his head, knowing for sure that he was dead, grip or no grip. “This wasn’t what it was about, there’s been a mistake,” one wanted to tell someone. A lady journalist, unfiaggingly keen for Gene, looked in at the last minute and said, “After this, I don’t give a damn what happens to anybody,” and tottered off to her room. The special quality of the moment was a moral squalor beyond tragedy. It was a messy and embarrassing thing, like someone throwing up on the rug; one felt reluctant to face the daylight, ashamed to have been there. Not, it was my gun, I pulled the trigger — ah, guilty me —but simply an embarrassed silence seemed best.

The next day (short-story gray and misty), we all crept quietly out of Los Angeles. The TWA hostesses hitched at their togas and tried to make like Italians. What year was it that the three emperors were gunned, or poisoned, down? Rome, a very violent society. The pilot had a comic routine, which he interrupted with bulletins about Kennedy. “Very critical, extremely critical as to life.” The inflight movie was A Dandy in Aspic. When we landed in New York, we found everyone was a day behind in their grief and their theories, and we had to begin all over again.

AN Easterner arrives in Los Angeles armored with notions. You feel your brain beginning to rot as you hit the runway. And the people in the airport look tanned out of their minds, offensively bland, and desperately superficial. The main impression, it you can shed the one you came in with, is no impression at all. If someone had said to me, ha-ha, this is really Detroit, I would scarcely have known what to answer, except to wave weakly at some palm tree.

However, the mind never stops working. A city that leaves no impression is sinister too, right? This would not seem quite so silly later. Meanwhile, there was nothing for it but to stare with frozen horror at the spastic taximeter and at the nameless pastels sliding past the window. The Beverly Hilton itself is a fine figure of a hotel, with a front someplace in the middle and a string of off-mustard terraces to refresh your spirit on; but what you see from there is more of the same, pale greens and sickly beiges, and signs saying “Esther Feather’s Reducing Salon,” and Somebody’s custoin-made hats, operating out of dirty chartreuse warehouses; and beyond that — well, more of that. My one contribution to assassination-theory would be based on that first, blank look: namely, that all our assassins have been geographically dislocated; that our violence has something to do with feeling lost.

After a bath and supper (which I shall go into at corruscating length in the book version), I moseyed over to the Westwood CDA headquarters to see what work there was for a diffident, low-road speaker. This was the Wednesday night, a week from the primary. I got the impression that the smart writers had mostly headed for San Francisco already for the balmy cultural weather. Anyhow, they weren’t here, in this vague, cheerful barn of a headquarters.

The girl in the speaker’s bureau seemed confused and willing, the hallmark of a McCarthy student worker. The kids who had made the trek from New Hampshire had developed a style by now, flip, tired, gallant. Items: boy spread-eagled center floor in the Crenshaw headquarters taking the most ostentatious midday nap you ever saw — whacked out, poor devil; a girl staggering off from a party at 2 A.M. “to work the mimeograph for a few hours” (but Dame Mitty, you can’t!). And all the other Weary Warriors with their eighteen-hour days and tired grins.

The speaker’s bureau girl was not of the theatrical persuasion, but she did have one thing in common with most of the others: she knew practically nothing about Los Angeles. This most labyrinthine of urban sprawls was being blitzkrieged by kids who couldn’t tell a boulevard from a freeway. My first assignment was to a gentle middle-aged Jewish household, hardly my schtik, where I believe I was introduced as Wilbur Snead, or one of its variants, and then (quick glance at card) as literary editor of Life magazine and the New York Times. The first question I got concerned McCarthy’s attitude toward Israel.

That night, as on others, I found the speaker’s kit from headquarters more or less useless. I had dutifully memorized all the stock answers about oil depletion, poll tax, and so on, but found that my little audiences didn’t even know the questions. The famous distorted version of McCarthy’s voting record (concocted by a New York group of Kennedy backers) was still circulating briskly in Negro neighborhoods; but the white folks didn’t know or didn’t care. How was McCarthy going to end the war in Vietnam?, did he have executive ability?, or (fringe stuff) what was wrong with the CIA anyway? were the questions they asked.

I found myself sinking quickly into the deepest fens of demagoguery. How far to the left or right was this particular group was all I needed to know. Did they dig adventure, or was responsibility in government their thing? As proxy brood sow, I was there to serve. As to the enemy, Bobby became more two-faced and Hubert more ludicrous every night. Until one sobered up on Tuesday and looked at the mess. Unfortunately, I had not followed the sound advice of Leonard Lewin (putative author of The Iron Mountain Report), who had grown gray stumping the country for Gene: to wit. ignore the other fellows, be positive out here.

They do, I believe, like you to be positive in the L.A. area; might stomp you if you were not. It is interesting, as you leave some smiling hostess or other, to compare this resolute sunniness with the vicious, in-turned quality of the Los Angeles driving that waits for you outside. There seems to be no continuity between life in the car and life in the house. The closest thing in schizophrenia must be a Mafia gunman at a Holy Name rally.

A CHRONOLOGICAL rundown of the next few days would be misleading, because the mind has long since jumbled them, and that’s the form they now take. Speaking, driving, more speaking, more driving; Sunday now comes before Thursday, because that’s the logical order. Prejudice gave ground slowly to glib observation. You notice right away the cool proto-movie-star routines of garage attendants, busboys, of the fellow who rents you the inevitable car, so stylized after New York, where manners are formed by abrasion and erosion, and where the doormen are old rock formations. You notice the fact that people not only have no accents but use no slang to speak of (this may not go for special groups, beach-and-bike enclaves, but it does for the middle-class students and such that I met). There is no common speech because there is no city. With so many people, it seems dangerous not to have a city.

These are thoughts to drive by. To Anaheim for a small give-’em-hell rally in an improvised Eugene’s. To Santa Paula for a Mexican-American picnic, where you wish you could stay but can’t — the stern demands of the stump whisking you from good scenes and bad alike. And through the airless Simi Valley in Ventura County, where the physical facts of campaigning became a little clearer.

A formidable motorcade had rolled up outside the local bowling alley, twenty to thirty cars covered in gorgeous bunting, and Michael McCarthy, the senator’s sixteen-year-old son, perched on a back seat for display. With horns blasting and loudspeaker braying (bring our boys back, vote for Senator McCarthy), we set off through the desolate streets. Occasionally a stray dog would follow us. A small child would wave. Otherwise, silence, shuttered windows. It couldn’t be every day that they had a motorcade out this way, yet they responded like people jaded, sick, with excitement.

One soon wearied of waving v-signs at stonyfaced men who rubbed their cars in response, at stray gardeners who would not look up or around, even in anger. Occasionally on that long ride I thought I saw people actually lurking in their garages, peering from the shadows. All right, paranoia, but paranoia is modest good sense in the Simi Valley on a Sunday.

Meanwhile, a fellow in our car was trying to make a pitch to young Michael McCarthy. It seemed he wanted a civil service job, had written to Michael’s dad about six months ago, maybe the letter had been mislaid, I know your dad’s been awful busy (laugh), but maybe he could find just a moment, used to be friends back in Minnesota, sixteen years ago. Roots still in Minnesota, you know, Dad’s a wonderful man. “Mother would go back tomorrow if we could sell the house.”

Michael is a boy of great poise, and he dealt with the matter gracefully. But this bleak cry for help combined badly with the dry sun and the cheerless wind and the endless bungalows — which, two days before the primary, showed no signs of preference, no bumper stickers, no anything. The man told us he had been a salesman for twentyseven years, had learned from selling that you had to believe in your product, that’s why he believed in McCarthy; it was like religion or anything else, you had to sell it. Yet this Willie Loman of the Far West was one of the valley’s live ones.

For a presidential candidate, this would have been an off day. But for an out-of-shape dilettante, it brought the illuminations of fatigue. The first secret of campaigning must be to regulate your thermostat, to avoid excitement and depression equally, to save yourself for the next meeting and the next and the next. You cannot afford to feel like God, that would take too much out of you. Every excess must be paid for. Watch those naps, snacks, toilet habits. Remember the name of this man, and his wife, listen to his prattle and be prepared to prattle back in kind. I had always wondered at the steady, humming vitality of politicians, from breakfast rally to midnight caucus, but now I saw how it worked: the kind, empty eyes, the firm, indifferent handshake, everything economized on except appearances.

THAT evening, I returned to L.A., passing on the way something described as the world’s largest shopping center, set in a great vacuum, to talk to a group of, I think, Italian Catholics, more communal and New Yorky than anything I had struck so far. But all resilience was gone. I read the basic speech woodenly and hacked through the questions somehow. A professional politician would never have let this happen. He would not have wasted energy brooding about the denizens of the Simi Valley or about huge shopping centers where small ones would do, or about all the failures and solitaries who cluster about Los Angeles looking on the bright side and driving like werewolves.

All the while, this microscopic private campaign was trotting alongside the real one, and following its contours. Senator McCarthy had come to Los Angeles and gone, making his usual mild but favorable impression. Private observation informed me that he looked wretched before breakfast, an excellent thing in a candidate (how else could he represent the interests of my group?). More significantly, in some ways, Clarence Jones, Martin Luther King’s legal adviser and co-chairman of McCarthy’s New York campaign, had come to town, snapped his fingers at the easygoing Westwood staff, and had set to work making an eleventhhour pitch to the racial minorities, which the McCarthy workers had prematurely conceded to Kennedy.

Jones’s scheme included talking to as many Negro ministers as possible before they hit their pulpits on the Sunday before Tuesday’s primary, and circulating reprints of an editorial endorsement of McCarthy by the influential Negro newspaper the Sun Reporter outside the churches. McCarthy workers were reluctant to enter Watts at all, where pro-Kennedy fervor could, if inclined, wreak much damage to cars and sound trucks. But as it turned out, the editorial was circulated safely enough, and so was Louis Lomax’s endorsement of McCarthy after the Saturday night debate. And who knows, perhaps a percentage point was affected by this frenetic activity.

Meanwhile, one had had at least one glimpse of the incurable triviality of history. I went to a party on Thursday thrown by the Negro head of the CDA headquarters in Crenshaw, hoping to meet whatever other black supporters were around, only to find some sort of boycott in progress. A wistful spread was laid on, but only a few white workers and Myrna Loy showed up for it. Later a couple of Negro friends dropped in. With a lifetime to feud in, the matter had chosen primary week to erupt.

But the important thing now was the Saturday night debate. We had high hopes for this. McCarthy was reported to be indignant over the ground rules, and if his face shows a weakness, it is for petulance. But he was resting well and looked strong as a lumberjack. He would cream their boy.

Thank God (I suppose), he did not. For their own different reasons, the two men dealt gently with each other. The group I was with laughed when Senator Kennedy brought Israel into a question where it didn’t strictly belong: a routine political stunt, no hard feelings. His reference to the 10,000 Negroes who might descend on whiteRepublican Orange County if McCarthy had his way was not so well received. We took that to be a backlash pitch, and hoped that Negroes picked it up. Otherwise, the mildness of the occasion was unbroken. Kennedy might have lost, by looking less presidential and all that, but McCarthy had hardly won.

It was obvious that the big question the next day would be, what is the difference between them anyway? I thought the debate had revealed some significant ones, notably on the question of negotiating with the NLF, but it was hard to tell whether Californians cared about this, or anything else in particular. The task suddenly seemed to be to interest them in their own primary. There were on the margins random signs of Bobby-love and Bobby-hatred, both echoing through the squeal that followed him everywhere; but of serious political feeling, there seemed to be surprisingly little. Eighteen percent Undecided in a Saturday night poll. Eighteen percent, after all this.

On Monday, I talked to a bunch of Catholic colleges, plus the normal allotment of housewives. It took an act of faith to believe that this was still making a difference. I was told of one student who had changed his mind as a consequence of my harangue, but he was probably under voting age. Otherwise the important question now was whether to ring doorbells, or to phone up the neighbors and bother them that way. The activists in the audience threshed this out while the rest of us listened. I had no thoughts on the subject. Los Angelenos seemed infinitely inaccessible by any means at all.

That evening, the senator ambled around the seventh (McCarthy) floor chatting with his cohorts, and I had a chance to gauge him up close. He is physically imposing, and I could understand why his admirers had wished him to be photographed standing next to Kennedy. Americans would always like an extra few inches of President, all else being equal. He has a politician’s memory — I had met him briefly some seven years before, and he remembered this without faking. He listens fairly well, for a politician, looking beyond you, but picking up the drift. He seemed sharper and more concentrated than I remembered, as if the campaign had summoned his wits together.

Beyond that, he is the kind of wry Irishman that I have known more than my share of, feel comfortable with, would trust crossing a bog. The famous cynicism is de rigueur with this Irish-uncle type — emotions being for special occasions and cynicism for everyday wear; at any rate, a matter of style, not of moral conviction, and nothing to worry about. I felt no doubt that he would make a good President, if he wanted to; there remained some small doubt about that, however. We talked briefly about the debate, and he said that he thought Kennedy had made one or two mistakes. “Put him on bread and water for forty days and he’ll blurt out the truth,” he said, smiling. When I reminded the senator that he had been on that same diet himself, he said, still smiling, “Yes, but I’m tougher than he is.” Not hostile, but decidedly scrappy.

Robert Lowell (without whom no account of this sort would be complete) also turned up that evening, but our conversation was not noteworthy. The Boston Brahmin and the Roxy dropout sparred briefly, using the light gloves, is probably the simplest way to put it. There was nothing to do now but wait. At the Westwood headquarters next morning, a parking-lot attendant tried first to stop me, then, failing that, to extort an unprecedented fee. I pointed out that the lot was half-empty, and he said, “It’s as full as I want it to be.” When I rejoined rather pompously that people like him were hurting McCarthy’s cause, he said, “I don’t give a shit about McCarthy. I’m for Kennedy.” And a smirking crony drove this home: “We just want to get you people out of here.”

Upstairs, one of the sillier girls was going on about last night’s sniping mission — a couple of delirious hours spent tearing down Bobby posters and slapping up Gene ones. So the eighteenthcentury spirit, bullyboys, street goons, and vandalism, was alive in both sides, the more grotesque because there were no special interests involved to speak of, only personalities — and in a sense, only one personality, Kennedy’s, followed by that weird squeal. The speaker’s bureau was closed. There was some action downstairs, dubious small boys from Port Said and the Levant collecting stickers and hats, and so on, but upstairs it was like the last day of school, feet on the desk, detective story out, last-minute gossip.

This prompted a few last thoughts about the scholar-gypsies who had followed the McCarthy caravan from coast to coast.

Some of the McCarthy youth corps had run through a life cycle, from zealous to slightly smug, in a few months. The best of them, including their leader, Curt Gans, kept their heads down all the way; the worst would chat while a phone went unanswered, or would pick it up and sound ineffably bored into it. “She isn’t in. I don’t know. Yes, why don’t you do that.” Office work was clearly not their thing, and it was probably time for the more languid of these to be phased out and replaced by semipros, yet how could you fire them? They had gone to God knows what sacrifices in order to be able to lounge around here; they came at bargain prices — always a factor in the McCarthy campaign; they represented McCarthy’s appeal to youth, which Kennedy was alleged to envy; and their departure, however tactfully managed, would be interpreted as an erosion of this.

THAT evening I invited Lowell to my room for a drink. The usual election-day liquor crisis was raging, and I had to advertise up and down the corridor for a tooth-mug of bourbon. After a bit, the senator himself appeared, along with Blair Clark, both looking noncommittally morose. Although the polls were still open, the word was in from the killjoys at the networks that McCarthy had already lost by nine percentage points; a miracle could shave this to six.

McCarthy accepted a cigar and a small scotch and went out on the terrace with Lowell. Being as snoopy and star-struck as the next man, I wanted badly to follow them, but it was one of those scenes — the two tall men motionless, leaning on the rail looking out at Esther Feather’s Reducing Salon — that you don’t intrude on. I stayed inside and talked instead to Blair Clark (a man destined from birth to smoke a pipe). I had not quite gathered until now how precarious our man’s position actually was. If Kennedy lost and dropped from the race, enough of his delegates would split to Humphrey to scuttle McCarthy for good. If Kennedy won, our puny funds would dry up still further, and some of our workers would defect. The closest thing to a success would be what we finally got, a close defeat. But, of course, when we got it, it wasn’t worth having.

I finally did go out, on some ruse, and did a little light eavesdropping. They were talking about how the Indians lived in Arizona (McCarthy had spent the day there) and the virtues of living out of a canoe. The senator looked wistful. “Everyone should try living out of a canoe,”he said. “Do them good.”The talk turned to poetry, and he brightened. Lowell had been a good poet once upon a time, he conceded, before taking up obscurity; now, who could tell?

It was not a typical conversation, I gathered, but a sensible attempt to ward off stress, the banter of athletes or soldiers. McCarthy knows how to handle his nerves— he couldn’t have come so far otherwise — and talking with Robert Lowell is part of his strategy. They talked about which of his own poems he should read tonight if the mood was on him; Lowell had helped him with one or two of them and made his recommendation meticulously, liking the rhythm of this one, the imagery of that one.

For something to say, I asked McCarthy about his sports metaphors. He didn’t seem to understand the question at first; his eyes were tired and withdrawn, and it occurred to me that he had probably been thinking politics all along, deciding when and how to concede, while humoring Lowell and me with small talk. Lowell asked if he would join us for dinner, and he said, sadly, “You know I can’t do that. I’m a public figure now.” Charlie Callinan, his tiny bodyguard, came up to tell him he was wanted someplace or other, and he said, “Charlie has graduated from a presence to a force,” and left us. I noticed that he had smoked his cigar twice as quickly as I had mine.

That brings us almost back to the beginning. I had dinner with Lowell after that, and he talked about the Catholic politeness of the TV debate, and the Catholic nastiness. Every culture has its own forms of the virtues and vices. Then he talked about whether McCarthy would make a good President. Well, there were only two great ones in our whole history (I forget which). McCarthy would be a lot better than most. He also spoke fondly of Kennedy, and was sorry to have to choose between them. Earlier in the evening, a Washington correspondent had been asked to compare the Kennedy boys. “Next to Jack, Bobby is all heart,” he said. These scraps came back to mind later in the evening.

I saw the senator twice more that night. The first time was in Mary McGrory’s room, where he was watching television. He seemed severe now, bordering on the vexed — possibly over the incredible CBS projection of the final vote, which had him losing 52 percent to 39 percent or thereabouts. A mistake like that must play hob with a candidate’s blood pressure. But I fancy he was simply saving his strength and doing a little light planning. Because the next time I saw him, down in the ballroom, he was as serene as ever. They were having voting machine trouble in Los Angeles County (some were stolen), so we were still leading by a thin margin at midnight. To hell with the projections. We would stage a miracle during the night. “I want to be in that number,” we sang, and waved our fingers aloft. On to Chicago.

The next time I inquired after the senator, I was invited courteously to return to my room. Security guards had sprouted from every crevice, and the seventh floor had been quarantined for the night; not quite George Wallace’s dream of a bayonet every thirty yards, but we were on our way.

Back in the good old days, back on the Monday night, I had a friendly argument with a man about whether Southern California was the wave of the future. I thought about the separateness and the car cleaning and the people who learn their accents from TV; the next night I would think also of people who find the faces on TV realer than friends, closer than family, and for whom, a fortiori, young glamorous politicians can be brain-shaking torments, things to be loved and killed; but tonight, I just thought about the car cleaning.

And I thought about the hippies and New Letters who crowd together so as not to get like that, and who, for all their foolishness, do wish to form real cities and inner cities and bring the old ones back to life. And I stacked them against the losers, and disengaged winners and solitaries ranged along the Coast, who still think that they are the future, but who are too scattered and weak to affect even the present, even the neighborhood, and whose collective response to the future is Max Rafferty. And I thought (after all, the campaign was resting, no speech tomorrow. Indulge), we’ll just see about that. You had your day in the forties and fifties, Southern California, when people still thought there was magic in that stuff, splitlevel ranch houses and bloated shopping centers and drive-in banks, but just now, for a little while, I think humanity is going to win.

That, of course, was Monday night.