Into the happy assemblage that made up Ramparts Magazine I began to infiltrate dissenters, longhairs, and general shit disturbers who disrupted not only the decorum of the Keating Building, named after the wealthy publisher, but also of quiet Menlo Park. Paul Jacobs, the professional radical and bald-headed author of ‘Is Curly Jewish,’ began the commute from San Francisco to be a consulting editor.
Jacobs lived in San Francisco, as did most of the Ramparts staff save those in far-off Berkeley. Such insular geography was due partly to my own western chauvinism, partly because the Bay Area had a natural, relatively unspoiled talent pool of writers, photographers and artists—and partly because of the peculiarly debilitating conditions of servitude in the artificial trout pond of creativity that is Keating’s Manhattan publishing empire. Whatever else Ramparts may have done, it ventilated the shibboleth that a national magazine need be produced only from New York.
One of the San Franciscans who helped Ramparts swing was the great Hal Lipset, the private eye known among his fellow gumshoes as the “private ear” for his proficiency in the modern art of electronic surveillance. (He once actually bugged a martini olive.) When Hal came to editorial meetings he brought his electronic vacuum cleaner with him and swept the office for hidden bugs. I suspect Ramparts was the only magazine of general circulation to have a private detective on the masthead, and Lipset’s devices figured significantly, behind the scenes, in many big stories. Hal was called upon in all situations of potential peril. Once a package of dog shit disguised as a bomb arrived in the lobby, addressed to Eldridge Cleaver. The alarmed receptionist called Lipset, who hastened down and convinced her to take it to the bathroom instead of the bomb squad.
Another consulting editor, Ralph J. Gleason, the respected Chronicle jazz columnist, was a media expert on Beatlemania and all-around counterculture buff. Gleason was in his mid-forties at the time of the rising of the sixties’ cultural moon but was more enthusiastic over the implications of the new lifestyle alternatives than many of those living them.
After Gleason wrote a particularly effusive Ramparts’ cover story on Bob Dylan, a letter to the editor which was a classic of its kind arrived at the paper. It was from Arnold Passman, a historian specializing in the history of disc jockeys, who wanted to know if the rumor was true that the effusive Gleason was really “a 48-year-old schizophrenic who can’t decide whether to split himself into three 16-year-olds or four 12-year-olds.”
Gleason, a good soul, took that without rancor, but his patience sagged at the squares hanging around Keating. The columnist just about bit through his pipe during one editorial meeting when Jim Colaianni, the ex-lay theologian Keating made managing editor because he had so many children, let it drop that he had driven some of his kids to the Cow Palace for a Beatles concert and waited for them out in the parking lot, listening to Gordon MacRae on the car radio. Gleason went cold with disbelief. “You mean you really stayed outside listening to some tin on the car radio when you could be seeing the Beatles? Man, you’re putting me on. Nobody could be that un-hip.” The managing editor nodded. Gleason, who was also a diabetic, poured himself a stiff shot of Keating’s orange juice.
One interloper whose style especially rankled Ed Keating was Robert Scheer, at that time a black angel in the High Seraphim of Berkeley radicalism. Keating and I had a running argument over Scheer. I thought he was the most important guy on the staff because he knew all the dirt about Vietnam, but Keating considered him one cut above a doorknob-stealer.
I met Scheer under the most bourgeois of circumstances. Our wives, rather my wife, Denise, and his wife-to-be, Anne, were working at the same stock and bond house in San Francisco, and became buddies. The ladies then put us together, and we all were close friends and Scrabble partners throughout the amazing Ramparts buck and grind of the next five years.
My friendship with Scheer was the more exceptional considering the differences in our personalities and backgrounds. I had never met anyone quite like Scheer. He was bright and formidable and arrogant, yet his arrogance had a soft edge—he had a curiously charming teddy bear quality about him, sort of an insecurity blanket, that, when you got to know him and he took it off, left the bare Scheer a warm and amusing person. Scheer was essentially an optimistic and affirmative spirit, although his optimism was tempered by an ingrown wariness that became at times a standard suspicion that the worst was going to happen (and, many of those times, it did).
Scheer told me a story about growing up in the Bronx that explained some of these attributes. To pet an animal he had to stand in line at the Bronx Zoo. Once he got to pet one, he was told to move on quickly to give the next kid a chance. I also came to understand Scheer’s deep-rooted competitiveness (which made him a damn good journalist) in terms of his four-year survival course in the left wing-Jewish intellectual Olympics at New York’s City College, with its constant one-upmanship and leftist backstabbing. I was unable to even imagine the conditions of such a combatant world. But if I thought Scheer was from Mars, he thought I was from Pluto, with my imperious, fat-dumb-and-happy Irish attitude toward everything. One attribute we shared, perverse as it was, was the ability to function normally in chaos and crisis; to listen to our friends and relations, we were good at creating both.
Scheer claimed that he had known me back when I was a fascist pig. He remembered me as particularly disgusting during the great civil rights sit-in of 1962 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. I had covered the show for the Chronicle and was upset that the protesters had picked that historic hotel—where my grandfather’s picture hung in one of the bars amid a rogues’ gallery of Earthquake and Fire era alcoholics—rather than one of the newer and more vulgar tents around town. I did vaguely recall Scheer in the midst of the rabble on the lobby floor. This unkempt and long-haired person had his hand on the bare white leg of a particularly well-groomed girl—a button-nosed pearl of Protestant features who didn’t look as if she belonged in that distaff crowd.
She looked as if her father was a vice-president of the telephone company, which in fact he was. The girl was Anne Weills, later Anne Scheer, and, by the gossipy standards of comparative politics prevalent in the Berkeley left, was more radical even than he.
The tale of the Palace sit-in later became a standard bedtime story at the homesteads of rich leftists where Scheer and I often camped on Ramparts’ money-raising expeditions.
Scheer would recall how he looked up from his vantage point on the floor, a cop’s flat foot planted on his chest, and saw this Brooks Brothers reporter from the Chronicle leaning against a wall watching the carnage with a gin and tonic in his hand, tsk-tsking because the protesters were getting the dust of reality on his grandfather’s picture.
I would then stand up and recite, in the tradition of Eliza telling the story of crossing the ice, how I had once been a henchman of privilege, a captive of the Pope, a cynic without redeeming social value, a person of gypsylike abandon—until I joined Ramparts and came to see the world the way it really was—so would the listener please give Ramparts $25,000 to help us burn the candle at both ends.
Scheer had brushed himself up a bit since I first saw him on the floor, but was still far out for Menlo Park in 1964. He was sort of cherubic yet surly-looking and always wore the same brown corduroy jacket, which was obscured at the shoulders by a bush-length beard. If a cartoonist were to draw him, Scheer would be just a pair of eyeglasses and a beard. He drove the girls in the copy department mad because he wrote on lined tablets, squeezing an incredible two rows of runic scribble between each line.
During one of our numerous conversations about what manner of menace Scheer was, I told Keating that I wanted to have Scheer around because I thought he was smarter than I. Keating gave me a grave look. “Never hire anyone smarter than you,” he said. “They’ll try and take over.” I finally carried the day by suggesting to Keating that Scheer might be helpful in raising money from liberals. Keating accepted this as a legitimate reason to take whatever risk he thought Scheer represented.
The Ramparts’ wampum situation necessitated occasionally utilizing barter as a means of exchange for talent. I worked out many such deals, but the most fun was with Jessica Mitford, who had an island to unload. Decca became a contributing editor to the paper, and we undertook a back-cover advertising campaign in glorious technicolor to smoke out a buyer for her real estate. The island was Inch Kenneth, a rump hunk of land in the Scottish Hebrides which afforded a sweeping view of the low-lying fog. The accommodations were in a stone-cold, ten-bedroomed castle of uncertain origin with faltering electricity and lights enough only to see where one was stumbling. Inch Kenneth was a pain in the derriére to reach, involving insular trains with splinters in the seats and carriage in unseaworthy boats. Once one arrived, there was little to do but sit in the chill wet fog and prepare for the ordeal of the trip back. The island came into Decca’s possession via her father. Even the Communist Party of England said no, thanks, when she offered to contribute it to the cause. But the idea of actually owning an island proved irresistible to many among the misguided in the Ramparts’ audience.
Decca had to deal with any number of imbeciles and wayfarers—one hot-shot wanted to hold a rock festival on it—before she found a real person to buy the island—a doctor of sorts, if memory serves. The best advertising copy for Inch Kenneth had been written some time before by Dr. Johnson, after that gentleman had the misfortune of residing there for a night during his well-reported tour of the Hebrides with Boswell in 1776: “Sir, the only person who would wish to buy an island is the one who never owned one.”
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