Joan Didion - Slouching Towards Bethlehem

As it happens I am comfortable with the Michael Laskis of this world, with those who live outside rather than in, those in whom the sense of dread is so acute that they turn to extreme and doomed commitments; I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people manage to fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.

But of course I did not mention dread to Michael Laski, whose particular opiate is History. I did suggest “depression,” did venture that it might have been “depressing” for him to see only a dozen or so faces at his last May Day demonstration, but he told me that depression was an impediment to the revolutionary process, a disease afflicting only those who do not have ideology to sustain them. Michael Laski, you see, did not feel as close to me as I did to him. “I talk to you at all,” he said, “only as a calculated risk. Of course your function is to gather information for the intelligence services. Basically you want to conduct the same probe the F. B. I, would carry out if they could put us in a chair.” He paused and tapped the small red book with his fingernails. “And yet,” he said finally, “there’s a definite advantage to me in talking to you. Because of one fact: these interviews provide a public record of my existence.”

Still, he was not going to discuss with me what he called “the underground apparatus” of the C. P. U. S. A. (M. -L.), any more than he would tell me how many members constituted the cadre. “Obviously I’m not going to give you that kind of information,” he said. “We know as a matter of course that we’ll be outlawed.” The Workers’ International Bookstore, however, was “an open facility,” and I was free to look around. I leafed through some of the Uterature out of Peking (Vice-Premier Chen Yi Answers Questions Put by Correspondents), Hanoi (President Ho Chi Minh Answers President L. B. Johnson), and Tirana, Albania (The Hue and Cry About a Change in Tito’s Policy and the Undeniable Truth), and I tried to hum, from a North Vietnamese song book, “When the Party Needs Us Our Hearts Are Filled with Hatred.” The literature was in the front of the store, along with a cash register and the kitchen table; in back, behind a plywood partition, were a few cots and the press and mimeograph machine on which the Central Committee prints its “political organ,” People’s Voice, and its “theoretical organ,” Red Flag. “There’s a cadre assigned to this facility in order to guarantee the security,” Michael Laski said when I mentioned the cots. “They have a small arsenal in back, a couple of shotguns and a number of other items.”

So much security may seem curious when one considers what the members of the cadre actually do, which is, aside from selling the People’s Voice and trying to set up People’s Armed Defense Groups, largely a matter of perfecting their own ideology, searching out “errors” and “mistakes” in one another’s attitudes. “What we do may seem a waste of time to some people,” Michael Laski said suddenly. “Not having any ideology yourself, you might wonder what the Party offers. It offers nothing. It offers thirty or forty years of putting the Party above everything. It offers beatings. Jail. On the high levels, assassination.”

But of course that was offering a great deal. The world Michael Laski had constructed for himself was one of labyrinthine intricacy and immaculate clarity, a world made meaningful not only by high purpose but by external and internal threats, intrigues and apparatus, an immutably ordered world in which things mattered. Let me tell you about another day at the Workers’ International Bookstore. The Marxist-Leninists had been out selling the People’s Voice, and now Michael Laski and three other members of the cadre were going over the proceeds, a ceremony as formal as a gathering of the Morgan partners.

“Mr. — Comrade —Simmons — what was the total income?” Michael Laski asked.

“Nine dollars and ninety-one cents.”

“Over what period of time?”

“Four hours.”

“What was the total number of papers sold?”

“Seventy-five.”

“And the average per hour?”

“Nineteen.”

“The average contribution?”

“Thirteen and a half cents.”

“The largest contribution?”

“Sixty cents.”

“The smallest?”

“Four cents.”

“It was not a very good day, Comrade Simmons. Can you explain?”

“It’s always bad the day before welfare and unemployment checks arrive.”

“Very good, Comrade Simmons.”

You see what the world of Michael Laski is: a minor but perilous triumph of being over nothingness.

1967

seven thousand romaine Street is in that part of Los Angeles familiar to admirers of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett: the underside of Hollywood, south of Sunset Boulevard, a middle-class slum of “model studios” and warehouses and two-family bungalows. Because Paramount and Columbia and Desilu and the Samuel Goldwyn studios are nearby, many of the people who live around here have some tenuous connection with the motion-picture industry. They once processed fan photographs, say, or knew Jean Harlow’s manicurist. 7000 Romaine looks itself like a faded movie exterior, a pastel building with chipped art moderne detailing, the windows now either boarded or paned with chicken-wire glass and, at the entrance, among the dusty oleander, a rubber mat that reads welcome.

Actually no one is welcome, for 7000 Romaine belongs to Howard Hughes, and the door is locked. That the Hughes “communications center” should lie here in the dull sunlight of Hammett-Chandler country is one of those circumstances that satisfy one’s suspicion that life is indeed a scenario, for the Hughes empire has been in our time the only industrial complex in the world — involving, over the years, machinery manufacture, foreign oil-tool subsidiaries, a brewery, two airlines, immense real-estate holdings, a major motion-picture studio, and an electronics and missile operation — run by a man whose modus operandi most closely resembles that of a character in The Big Sleep.

As it happens, I live not far from 7000 Romaine, and I make a point of driving past it every now and then, I suppose in the same spirit that Arthurian scholars visit the Cornish coast. I am interested in the folklore of Howard Hughes, in the way people react to him, in the terms they use when they talk about him. Let me give you an example. A few weeks ago I lunched with an old friend at the Beverly Hills Hotel. One of the other guests was a well-married woman in her thirties who had once been a Hughes contract starlet, and another was a costume designer who had worked on a lot of Hughes pictures and who still receives a weekly salary from 7000 Romaine, on the understanding that he work for no one else. He has done nothing but cash that weekly check for some years now. They sat there in the sun, the one-time starlet and the sometime costume designer for a man whose public appearances are now somewhat less frequent than those of The Shadow, and they talked about him. They wondered how he was and why he was devoting 1967 to buying up Las Vegas.

“You can’t tell me it’s like they say, that he bought the Desert Inn just because the high rollers were coming in and they wouldn’t let him keep the penthouse,” the ex-starlet mused, fingering a diamond as big as the Ritz. “It must be part of some larger mission.”

The phrase was exactly right. Anyone who skims the financial press knows that Hughes never has business “transactions,” or “negotiations”; he has “missions.” His central mission, as Fortune once put it in a series of love letters, has always been “to preserve his power as the proprietor of the largest pool of industrial wealth still under the absolute control of a single individual.” Nor does Hughes have business “associates”; he has only “adversaries.” When the adversaries “appear to be” threatening his absolute control, Hughes “might or might not” take action. It is such phrases as “appear to be” and “might or might not,” peculiar to business reportage involving Hughes, that suggested the special mood of a Hughes mission. And here is what the action might or might not be: Hughes might warn, at the critical moment, “You’re holding a gun to my head.” If there is one thing Hughes dislikes, it is a gun to his head (generally this means a request for an appearance, or a discussion of policy), and at least one president of T. W. A., a company which, as Hughes ran it, bore an operational similarity only to the government of Honduras, departed on this note.