Agoraphobia is in the Public Domain

Arrogance is the Word. As soon as this Jonathan Silk walked in my office, dressed in mustard corduroy pants his knees were winning their battle against and a mouse-colored sweater the moths had been having seven-course feasts off of, hair like a hen's roost in canyon winds, stubble on his chin worse than bread mold, I could see there was a big percentage of arrogance to his make-up.

"You're Jerry Willens," he said with the air of telling me something. "Good."

I watched him drop like he was unexpectingly boned into a carved Moroccan chair and elevate his dirty tennis sneakers to my inlaid-teakwood Siamese desk. I thought, there are flophouses on the Bowery that wouldn't let him in. I said, "I think it's pretty good."

"Black mohair suit and Italian shoes." He gave me the hard study with the eyes like an exterminator who has located a new and ugly bug. "Is there one agent in Beverly Hills whose horizons are wider than black mohair suits and pointy Italian shoes? You plan to skewer some shish kebab on those shoes?" He rubbed one filthy sneaker against the other filthier sneaker.

"I don't like you either," I said. "Now should we do some business?"

"Willens, I have one question to put to you: how many of my books have you read?"

"To be perfectly straight and above the board with you, none. But I hear a lot of wonderful things about them."

He sighed. He seemed in bad pain. "Your job is not to go around hearing wonderful things about my books. Your function is to read my books yourself and make up wonderful things to say to other people about them. You should be on the launching end of these ecstatic comments, Willens. Listen, you in the mohair suit, how in the name of ten percent of my earnings do you expect to sell me as a writer when you don't know what kind of writer I am?"

"I know what kind of writer Theodore Dostoievsky was and I don't read his collected works. I know what kind of a writer Dalton Trumbo is and I have never -- "

"Are his works collected? What's the collection called? Dalton Trumbo's One-Inch Shelf?"

Arrogant he was, plain and simple arrogant.

"Mr. Silk," I said, "let's get on the big picture. The boys upstairs briefed me about you; I know you came out to Hollywood to write a movie and now the movie's finished and you can't get another one."

"Not my fault. Can I help it if the writers in this town suddenly get it in their nicely barbered and pomaded heads to pull their imported alligator belts in another notch and go on strike against the exploiters who won't pay them more than two fast thousand a week?"

"Right. So with a strike in the offings the movie studios aren't starting any new projects, so, naturally, you want to get in a couple quickie television assignments before the strike deadline, and that's why the agency sent you down here to the TV department."

"And that's why you should let yourself down by a silken rope ladder from your Wilshire Boulevard Olympus and dip into some of my books to find out what it is you're going to be selling."

"I'll read them," I said. "I'll read every word you ever wrote backwards and forwards, I don't mean you wrote backwards and forth, I mean I'll read you back and forwards. That isn't going to help us in selling you to TV producers, though. You can't expect miracles, you don't have a single TV credit -- -- "

"I see," he said, fixing this know-everything smile on his lips. "Your job is to sell writers to television and you're quite sure you can't sell your most experienced all-around writer. What you're saying is, you can't do the job you're paid to do. You're telling me in advance you're an incompetent."

"I didn't say that, Mr. Silk. I said no such thing. I'm going to knock myself out trying to sell you but you've got to understand the obstacles, the drawbacks."

"Young fellow, you're thinking around a corkscrew. Stop counting up the obstacles and drawbacks and put your mind to one fact, namely, that over the past twenty years I've written nine fat novels, something close to two million words, which in bulk alone is a hell of a lot of credits and suggests that I am a professional writer of long standing who can handle just about any writing assignment ever invented. Why do agents always have black shiny hair? To go with their black shiny suits?"

He stood up and stretched. I swear, the holes in his sweater had holes.

"I'm glad you wrote all those books, Mr. Silk," I said. "I wish, if you'll take a little constructed comment from a black-haired agent, I wish you'd of thought a little about the future and written a few television plays, too."

"I did think about the future," he said, yawning. "Mine, and the human race's. That's why I didn't write any television. Now circumstances are pressing and I must do this foul, foul thing." He came around the desk, leaned close, and pointed his finger at me. The nail on that finger could of been cleaner. "Wear your hair any color you want. Wear it polka dot or candy-striped, if you want. What I'm going to lecture you on now is clothes, Willens. You've been looking at me as though I might be a ragpicker or a gutter wino who busted his way in here. Well, let me tell you something, these are my working clothes, I'm dressed like this because I've been working like a dray horse all morning and most of the afternoon, writing another book that won't make me any eating money, a serious book. What's your excuse for wearing black suits and pointy shoes? If they're your working clothes you must be in the mortuary business or a professional hangman or tango instructor. You all wear the same clothes, every mother's son of you, unless some of you don't have mothers, unless some of you are the product of spontaneous generation, and I'm against uniforms of all kinds because they tend to make people uniform. Willens, faint heart ne'er won any television assignments for seasoned novelists, and I'll enlighten you as to what a seasoned novelist is, a seasoned novelist is a novelist in a salt-and-pepper suit, so start thinking positive agent thoughts, my lad, I expect you to have me working on some well-paying television show in exactly a week's time. Is that clear?"

It was clear, and I wanted to throw the Player's Directory at him, both volumes. Where did he get off going around Hollywood knocking a top writer in the business like Dalton Trumbo, practically the Theodore Dostoievsky of the business?

• • •

I began to make the rounds of the television offices selling Jonathan Silk. I forced the picture of raggedy elbows and knees and fungus growth of whiskers out of my mind and did my best to sell him like he was an ordinary runof-the-mile writer.

Bright is not a word I ordinarily apply to myself. What I think of myself primarily as, the way I would describe myself first and foremost, is as a pusher, a type who gets in there and pushes against all the odds and obstacles, sees it through, in short, plugs. I pushed plenty hard for my ragpicker client Jonathan Silk, despite of any misgivings I might of felt about him around the private edges, and after a while the resistance began to give some ground. Doors showed signs of opening and heads appeared in the cracks to see what was what.

It was not to be believed, what a doom touch that man had. Every story premise of the leastwise possibility turned to gravel bits, sometimes to absolute bad lard, in his murderer's hands. The worst thing was, I never saw a man so set on selling producers goods they did not want, something they shrank back from like it was some plague or poison spider, and with the pitch that it was just what the doctor ordered for them, what would save them from cancellations and make their fortunes.

We sat down with the people at General Electric Theater and the genius of the novelists said, "I'm told you like contemporary family dramas, strong ones. Well, I've got a story idea about two present-day families and it's very dramatic. The Robinsons and the Cartwrights live in the suburbs on adjoining properties. In the teaser we show a tragic thing happening. Mr. Cartwright goes to the carport to get his Corvette. He begins to back out. Unknown to him, the Robinsons' two-year-old girl has crawled over and is playing in the driveway. Mr. Cartwright runs her over, killing her instantly. The Robinsons are half out of their minds from grief. Mrs. Robinson, in particular, blames Mr. Cartwright for what happened. But then, as the play unfolds, we begin to see that things are not so simple. Mrs. Robinson, we learn, started out to be an actress, was on the verge of a promising career in Hollywood. When she married, her husband insisted she give up her career and be just a housewife and mother, and secretly she had always resented him for this, feeling he kept her from fulfilling herself. Also, Mrs. Robinson resented the coming of the baby, which tied her down still more. She's been a careless mother, the baby had wandered off more than once. Besides, she drinks. Now, a series of mysterious accidents begins to happen to Mr. Cartwright. First a brand-new tire on his Corvette blows. Then his clutch inexplicably goes out of commission on a steep incline. In both cases Cartwright has a very, very close call. Can it be that somebody is out to get him? We learn a worrisome thing about Mrs. Robinson. She knows all about sports cars, she can take them apart and put them together, she used to drive in sports-car races..."

"It's a little stark for us," one of the story people said, studying the blotter on his desk. His black suit was of raw silk, not of mohair. I myself happen to think silk is showy. "A little, you know, strong. If you have any other ideas that might be more suitable for a family-type format, why, we'd love to hear them, call for an appointment any time."

Next, we went to see the people at Hong Kong. Silk got himself in his usual 45-degree slouch on the sofa and began to talk with his usual butter smoothness: "There's this fellow named Henry Murthers. He's 40, a bachelor, teaches algebra and geometry in a Brooklyn high school. For years he's had one passion, he spends all his spare time charting the day-by-day progress of some 50 or 60 stocks on the stock market and over the years he has been investing his pennies in the market according to his own mathematical formulas. Well, due to his careful study of long-term trends he has been cleaning up, and one day, at age 40, he looks over his situation and finds he's worth close to $500,000; he's secure for life. Now he can catch up on all the things he never allowed himself to think about; first of all, he can go looking for a wife. Henry has peculiar ideas about women. He has read all the books and seen all the movies about the Orient, and from his studies of the Sayonaras and Suzie Wongs he has come to the conclusion that American women are hopeless, the only truly feminine women left (continued on page 78)Agoraphobia(continued from page 56) in the world are in the Orient. All this is background, we open with wisp-haired Henry Murthers coming to Hong Kong to find himself a wife. There has been a lot of publicity in the papers about the Brooklyn schoolteacher who made a killing in the stock market and the moment he shows up in Hong Kong all the sharpies, scroungers, madams, hookers and all-round con merchants in town descend on him. Obviously he's the fairest game, the easiest mark, to have hit this wide-open town in years and--"

"Interesting premise," one of the story editors said, making a careful survey of all the lamps in the room, "but primarily comedic, I would say, very much on the comedic side. Possibly you weren't briefed on our story needs, our format here is that we're primarily an action show, you know, with beat-ups and shoot-outs at the high points of action, and it's a little hard to see how, starting with the premise of this Brooklyn bachelor looking for a wife, with that kind of primarily fey premise, you could work up much legitimate action..."

It went on like that. Jonathan Silk was full of maybe bright but, for sure, impossible ideas. For the Loretta Young Show he suggested a play about a Madison Avenue advertising executive who is a bigamist, with one split-level exurban family out in Darien and an entirely separate one, a wild, jazzy, swinging one, down in a Greenwich Village brownstone; to the Alfred Hitchcock Presents producers he submitted a story about two beatniks who do away with an advertising executive and are never apprehensed because they had no motive for the killing that could lead the police to them; it was just something Jonathan called a "gratuity crime" along the lines laid down by a French writer named Andry Jeed; they decided to do away with this man simply because they were against the gray flannel suit and the way of life it stands for. In both cases, the producers and story editors said, fine, interesting, food for thought there, and if Mr. Silk had any more ideas just a bit closer to their needs, more in line with their formats, premises that might be a degree more on the nose, why, let him call for another appointment, they were always glad to talk to an inventive writer with fresh ideas. At the end of the first week we had met with the people on eleven shows and the only result I could see was that all the doors I had managed to get open by giving them the full weight of my shoulders were now closed tight for good and held with padlocks.

My client still looked like a wetback or some drooping animal the cat had dragged in, but I will say this for him, he was his old arrogant self.

"What's the matter with these television people?" he said to me. "They say they want new blood and new ideas, but when somebody comes along and offers them something really new, something to get them out of their ruts, they turn saffron and their spines get rubbery and their eyes go corrugated with fear."

Well, he was a novelist; I suppose he had to express himself with his own kind of poet's license. All the same I could not take his exaggerations and had to say, "Come on, Jonathan. When's the last time you saw a corrugated eye?"

"They quake like scarecrows in a hurricane! Their nerves do the can-can, their eyes go on the trampoline! Can't they see it? I'm new blood, the newest and bloodiest blood around, and they have the sickness unto death, they need my transfusions!"

"They know that if they get blood with the wrong Rh factoring, if that's what the stuff is called, they can go into convulsions and die."

"Interesting. My agent, who is supposed to be selling me to television, is secretly convinced that I would give the whole industry convulsions. Very interesting."

"Jonathan, I'm going to level with you. It's for your own good, you have to understand I'm with no holes barred on your side. Jonathan, you're not thinking television. Television-wise you're lost and getting loster."

"Television-wise and pound foolish," he said. "I want those words inscribed on my tombstone. Remember that, please."

"You want to know what I think, Jonathan? Seriously? When you go into people's offices to tell them the kinds of horrible stories you've been telling, stories that aren't true stories, that are more like cold-towel slaps in the face and hotfoots, practically take offs, parody items, you know what you're doing? You're laughing out loud at the television people, making fun of them and this television media. You seem to me a fellow who's used to living by his wits. Why can't you get your wits working in this area and see the formats -- -- "

"Some people who live by their wits only half live," he said with a quick, nicely smile. "Especially agents. I'd like those words on my tombstone, too, under the words, television-wise foolish and pound-wise foolish, will you remember, Jerry?"

He was hopeless, like a bull in a Chinese shop, and his tangle of hair was falling down over his eyes like some tired spaghetti.

• • •

Then we got our first break.

One lunchtime, in the Metro commissary, I ran into Todd Hammermill, a fellow I sometimes refer to as the Ivy Leak. It's a small joke, what it refers to is two things, one, Todd Hammermill dresses in Eastern college-boy clothes, with pants and jackets that don't match, and, two, when he gets to talking along serious lines he often has a tendency to spray from the mouth, so unless you keep your distance you can get damp. It's a small joke. Well. Anyway, this Todd Hammermill, who used to do book reviews for the L.A. dailies before he got in this television mass media, a definitely literary fellow, came up to me and said, was it true what he'd heard, was I representing Jonathan Silk for TV? I said, yes, he'd heard right. Well, he wanted me to know Silk was his big hero, to him Silk's novels and stories were gems, the fullest expressions of today's moods and the trail blazers to the literature of tomorrow. Todd was just now settling down in his new job as story editor on Have Gun, Will Travel and he was interested in finding new writing blood for the show. I said Jonathan was a pretty busy man but I would see what I could do.

Two lunchtimes later we were sitting in a dark Culver City bar with Todd, having double martinis, rather, the two of them were having the martinis and I was giddying myself up on some fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice. For this occasion of meeting his public, his one-man fan club, I had convinced Jonathan to shave and even put on a tie, which with its many creases and loose threads looked like something no self-respecting cat would of dragged in from anywhere.

Todd Hammermill was in no hurry to get down to formats and story premises. What he wanted to talk about, over, around, through, was literature.

"They're making it tougher and tougher for legitimate, serious-minded writers, Mr. Silk," he said, trying to swallow down his awe before the great man. "A talent like you having to work in TV, it's a crime and a setback for American letters."

"American letters," Jonathan said, fingering his tie, "are in good hands. American letters go through the American post office, as they should, and get delivered despite sleet and snow, as they should, so we have few grounds for worry."

Todd didn't even crack a smile. "No, seriously, Mr. Silk," he said, "a writer of your stature, I'm ashamed even to be talking to you about doing any shoot-up epics for Have Gun, Will Travel."

"I might point out," Jonathan said, starting on his second double martini, "that you aren't talking to me about writing for Have Gun, Will Travel, you're talking about everything but."

"I know what you're doing," Todd (continued on page 86)Agoraphobia(continued from page 78) said, nodding his sadness. "You're steeling yourself for the television ordeal, saying that since it's got to be done let's get on with it, and I admire your courage, the courage in that attitude. But your having to take such an attitude, your having to cope with these commercial rat races, says something about the plight of the creative artist in the U.S., now doesn't it?"

Jonathan was rolling and unrolling his rag of a tie, a sure sign, I knew by now, that he was getting irritated under the collar, which, like the tie, was frayed all over.

"I have a theory about rat races," he said into his martini glass. "My theory is, so long as there are rats there'll be rat races, rats being very racy types, and we're all rats, whether we put immortal words together or shreds of garbage; the human race is a rat race, we're sniffers and prowlers in all walks of life. I'll tell you something else, for every rat who's being raced to death there's another who's being raced to death faster, in other words, bad off though a given rat may be, there's a rat worse off next door. Listen, I used to know a fellow who wrote short stories, good ones. He went off to the war and when he came back he was suffering from the world's worst case of agoraphobia. His agoraphobia was so bad that when he moved his family into a three-room apartment in a housing development up in the Bronx he not only couldn't leave the apartment to go outside, he couldn't even force himself to walk from the bedroom to the living room, luckily he could make it to the bathroom but just barely, and no farther. He was a writer, so he had to write, agoraphobia or no agoraphobia. But he couldn't just sit in his bedroom and turn out short stories, there's no market for serious short stories and he had to think about making a living for his family. So, sitting there in his bedroom in his pajamas, his horizons going no farther than the bathroom immediately adjoining, he founded a lonely-hearts magazine for people who wanted to meet other people, this fellow who couldn't step through his door to meet a living soul on the outside. For fifteen years now he's been sitting there in his pajamas, writing words of advice and good cheer to the lonely and the lovelorn and the generally abandoned, and reaching out into the faraway outside world with long literary fingers to move his miserable readers about and bring them together, this man who begins to shake and has to hide in the closet when any human face appears in his doorway, even if it's only the delivery boy with the groceries. Mr. Hammermill, let us stop talking about how bad things are for the creative artist in this barbaric land. All lands are barbaric, and things are bad all over, for everybody. Let's stop this weepy sorrowing over the things we artists have to do and simply do them, do them with dispatch and a hey-ho; let's, in short, talk about the format of Have Gun, Will Travel and your basic story needs, all right?"

But Todd wasn't listening. There was a far-off look in his eyes and when I examined them closer up, I swear, they seemed corrugated, damn near. Not with fear. With a kind of held-in inspiration, some sort of hesitation joy.

"You've got it," he almost whispered. "I think, yes, I'm almost sure, you're there."

"Where I am," Jonathan said with full irritation, "is neither here nor there, the Culver City branch of limbo, and what I've got is a swift pain in the sacroiliac from sitting here talking about letters, dead letters." He was nibbling like a rabbit on the unthreading end of his tie.

"I'm perfectly serious, Mr. Silk." Now Todd's eyes were marble shiny. "You've come up with a marvelous premise for Have Gun, Will Travel, a sensational premise."

"I thought," Jonathan said, "I was just telling a story about a poor slob with agoraphobia."

"Agoraphobia! Exactly!" The word shot out of Todd's mouth like a cannonball. "Can't you see it? A gunman with agoraphobia, great!"

Jonathan's eyes weren't corrugated, they were packed in dry ice.

"Agoraphobia isn't a premise," he said, "it's a mental condition, a diseased state of mind."

"I knew a man with your talent and background would come up with something absolutely original!" Todd went on in a bubble. "This would make an entirely unique play for us; I can see it now, shoot-outs have to take place in the open, but here we've got a great twist--Paladin's tracking a gunslinger who, right smack in the middle of the wide-open spaces, has a bad case of agoraphobia, he won't come outside, he's holed up in his hotel room and Paladin's got no way to get to him, there seems no way to force a shoot-down; brilliant, unique!"

"Let me get this brilliantly and uniquely straight," Jonathan said. "Are you truly, literally suggesting that I do a play for your program about a gunfighter with agoraphobia? This idea came out of your mouth and not mine. I'm not hearing things?"

"I not only want you to do it, Mr. Silk," Todd came back, "I insist on it, I'm begging you on my hands and knees!"

Jonathan considered this very long and very leaky drink of water for some time.

"I have an uncomfortable impression that some very massive tables are being turned," he said finally. "Certain people have accused me of having a flip attitude toward television, of parodying its needs and aspirations, and now, sitting here listening to you, I suddenly have the terrifying impression that you're parodying me. I can only tell you this, you have just summed up my innermost heart's desire; if you really want me to paint a picture of the Old West's wide-open spaces as a breeding ground for shrinking and shriveling violets of agoraphobics, it's a deal, just tell me how to proceed."

"The procedure's simple," Todd said. "All you do is put the idea down in an outline, just a few pages I can show to my producer, I'll clear it with him and then you've got a firm assignment. It's going to be an honor to work with you, Mr. Silk! We'll make television history!"

"I'll be satisfied, Mr. Hammermill," Jonathan said, frowning all over his face, "if I can make $2500 and keep out of jail."

Jonathan wrote the outline that afternoon. I had it in Todd Hammermill's hands first thing in the morning and he said wetly, swell, great, perfect, he'd get it cleared in 24 hours and we'd be in business. He didn't get it cleared in 24 hours, of course. He never got it cleared at all. The way I heard it, Todd's producer took one look at the outline and said, was he kidding, did he want to make a laughingstock out of the show and force it off of the air entirely? A little later I heard Todd had been bounced off Have Gun, Will Travel for reasons having to do with his not completely assimulating the basic format of the show, his not being all the way orientated toward television needs and directions. A little after that, his name began showing up in the L.A. dailies again, he was back at the old stand writing his daily book reviews. He was too much of a literary type, with a nottoo-firm grasp on the needs and directions of the television mass media, and there's no room for fellows of that type in a billion-dollar serious industry.

• • •

As I say, I'm primarily a plugger. Where others operate with their wits and bright ways, I push, and keep on pushing until something gives. Where I decided to push Jonathan Silk was along the lines of the agoraphobia premise. Agoraphobia, as I understand it, is a fear, and fears are very human, they make good, tight, suspensy television drama; in fact, I would say dramas of all types are built primarily around fears and their very human implications. This was my thinking on the subject, (continued on page 146)Agoraphobia (continued from page 86)and I decided to promote Jonathan Silk in this television media as a foremost authority on agoraphobia, a claim I was reasonably sure no other Hollywood television writer could make, so we did not have to worry about competition.

I arranged for him to meet with the people on The Untouchables. For a while I sat quiet in the corner and let him hang himself with his nutty premises, one about a bootleg king who had such a soft spot for Beethoven that he insisted on going to a concert at Carnegie Hall even though he knew all the members of the enemy gang were spotted in the Diamond Horseshoe with tommy guns, another about a gangster's moll who was an expect artist and made the plates for a counterfeit ring and the plates were perfect, only she ruined the whole operation by working her initials into the design because as an artist she had the urge to sign all her works. When the situation looked hopeless I spoke up, saying, "Jonathan, what about that other premise, the one you worked up specifically for The Untouchables?"

Jonathan looked me up and down with no detectable love. He said, "What premise?"

I said, "You know, the agoraphobia?"

"Ah," he said. "That. Yes." He looked me from down back to up, finally turned to the ring of deep-freezed faces around the table. "I forgot, gentlemen, there's this idea I came up with specifically for your show, it has to do with a gunsel of the Thirties who suffers from agoraphobia, the fear of open spaces. Let's see. Yes, this is how it goes. This gunsel is in the penitentiary on a five-to ten rap for safebreaking. He's got a fortune stashed away on the outside, the loot from the last job he pulled, and his pals want to get him out so they can make him produce this loot, but he won't budge from prison, he likes it there because he's cooped up behind walls and, as I say, he likes walls, needs them, he has a bad case of agoraphobia. His pals hire a smart mouthpiece to spring the gunsel but he won't even talk to this man, he doesn't want to be sprung. The lawyer is very smart, he studies the records of the gunsel's trial and finds a lot of improper procedure there, he draws up a brilliant brief and the court has no recourse but to free the gunsel. Now, let's see, the gunsel walks out of prison, rather, they push him out, and his pals are waiting for him, it's a tense situation, you can see what complications can develop ..."

His voice trailed off. The chief executive producer, no, it was the associate story consultant, pursed his lips and went through the motions of gulping as if swallowing something bad, then said, his eyes on the light fixtures, "It's a highly unusual premise, Mr. Silk, I would say that. We face a certain difficulty with psychological material like that, though, our format is more on the dramatic action side and this premise, well, it leans just a straw to the clinical, I'd say that, your gunsel has a problem that, while fascinating, would be hard to dramatize."

I took him to see the June Allyson Show people. He went through his whole repertory, from the hot-rod mama and the gratuity beatniks to the Madison Avenue bigamist and the counterfeiting lady artist who signed all her works, and the people looked hurt, positively hurt. So I spoke up from my corner again, saying, "Jonathan, haven't you left out the special idea you worked out especially for this format?"

He looked at me with narrow eyes and said hopelessly, as though he knew what was coming, "Uh, what idea?"

"You know," I said. "Agoraphobia? Remember?"

He took a deep breath, lowered his head, and began to mutter, "Indeed. Yes. Of course. Don't know how I overlooked it. Let me see now, yes, this is one I thought of especially for your family-type format, it's about a man who suddenly develops a bad, very severe case of agoraphobia, that's a fear of open spaces, you know, it's so bad he has to stay home from work, he can't step outside, he just stands at the window and looks out, then, one day, let's see, he's alone in the house, that's it, his wife has gone shopping, he looks out and sees his two-year-old son; the boy has just fallen in the pool in the back yard and he can't swim; there's nobody around, unless this man can steel himself for the ordeal and hurry outside ..."

He ran out of breath and just sat back and looked at the people. They looked at him as if they had never had any breath. Finally one of them said, "It's good, it's very good, but is it television?"

"If it's not television," Jonathan said, "I can't imagine what else it could be."

"I think, Mr. Silk," one of the story editors said, a fellow who looked a little drunk, "I think you'd have a more playable idea if the pool was indoors, and your hero, the father, was the one who couldn't swim, and he falls into the pool and his two-year-old son, who is an Olympic swimming champ, has to jump in and rescue him. The problem there would be, of course, that the small son has a psychological quirk, too, not agoraphobia, of course, claustrophobia, so that he's afraid of walls and has to spend all his time out of doors, and when he looks in through the picture window he sees his agoraphobic father drowning in the indoor pool but he can't force himself to go inside. But that's a rather different approach and I certainly don't want to seem as if I'm rewriting your stuff."

As I said, this man had the earmarks, marks all over, of being drunk, and from the way his associates avoided looking at him, from the way they made their mouths grin too wide as they looked away, I had the definite feeling that he would soon be writing book reviews for the L.A. dailies, maybe spelling Todd Hammermill. A mocker like that gets cut down fast in this billion-dollar industry.

That afternoon I drove Jonathan up the Hollywood hills to a high point on Mulholland Drive and we sat there looking down at the smogged-over geometry of the Hollywood basin on the south and the population-exploding San Fernando Valley on the north.

"I don't get it," I said. "I've tried to sell you with this agoraphobia theme everywhere in TV, from Revue to Four Star, from Metro to Warners, from Ziv to Cooga Mooga, and it's thumbs down everywhere."

"Jerry," he said, "listen, Jer, you're beginning to scare me, you positively are. You thought I was parodying the television arts, though all I was conscious of was a big effort to think their way. Then Todd Hammermill caught it from me and he began to parody his job without knowing it. Now, I swear to God, you, with this obsession of yours about selling me as an expert on agoraphobia, you seem to have caught the disease, too, and if my agent begins to parody them the way I appear to be doing then I'm lost, my head begins to spin, I'm about to faint."

It was the most unjustful accusation that had ever been made against me by anybody, friend or foe.

"Listen, Jonathan," I said, "I keep bringing this agoraphobia premise up because I believe in it, I consider it a distinctly human theme with a lot of immediate audience identification value, and I mean to sell it and you as a package or my name isn't Jerry Willens. Take it from me, agoraphobia will go."

"If it shows any signs of going," he said, making a noise like a groan, "please, please, don't stop it. Stand aside and wave bye-bye. Besides, your name isn't Jerry Willens, suddenly it's Jona than Silk, I look at you this minute and see myself in a black mohair suit and pointy Italian shoes and I tell you, the sight is driving me mad, mad."

I started up the car. "Nobody can stop me. I'm going to sell agoraphobia and not short."

"Jerry, you're cutting both our throats with one stone." He made the groaning noise again. "Now look what you've done, you've got me talking like you. Oh, oh, all the barricades are dissolving and, mother, I'm afraid."

• • •

The next thing that happened, Ziv announced a new TV series called The Wild Blue, which was to be all about the first explorations of men, specifically, Americans, into space. I drove Jonathan right over to the Ziv studios. I had briefed him on the format of the show and he had put some solid thought into ideas to fit their story needs.

We had to go through a big sound stage to get to the administration building, the stage where they had just built some outer-space sets for the new show, there was the surface of the moon with a lot of bumps and pocketmarks and in the middle of everything a 40-foot rocket ship standing on its hind legs.

"That's, what I mean, a moon," I said. "They put a lot of realism in that moon."

"It's realistic, all right," Jonathan said. "It's an exact reproduction of the inside lining of my duodenum after three weeks of exposure to television and you."

Jonathan began to lay out his ideas for this producer: "Here's a story I think is tailor-made for you people, it's built around a medical theme, more or less. The situation is, a crew of our astronauts has been missing, their spaceship went out of whack and they had to make an emergency landing on some asteroid or planetoid and their communications equipment was ruined so they couldn't report back, so they were listed as missing until a search party finally locates them. Now, they've been gone for over two years, and before the rescue party can take them back the space surgeon has to give them all a thorough physical. He discovers an astonishing thing, these are the first truly clean men in history. You see, these lost men have been living for over two years on an absolutely dead, sterile asteroid, one on which there's no life at all, not even the lowest forms of unicellular life, and as a result, their insides have not been under constant bombardment from all sorts of bacteria and viruses and molds and fungi as bodies on earth are from birth to death; they're clean as a whistle inside, sterile. This poses a hair-raisingly serious problem because, if their bodies are no longer hosts to all the germs and fungi all earth bodies contain, they must have lost their immunity to the full range of human diseases, their resistances are gone, in other words, the moment they set foot on earth again they will be in danger of contracting all sorts of diseases. As the first truly clean humans in the history of the human race they're a terrible threat to their fellow men if they come home. What this suggests, of course, is that while cleanliness may be next to godliness it can't be tolerated on earth; it's bound to make you sick. Well, the space doctor reports this emergency situation back to his earth base, and pretty soon these lost astronauts become a cause célèbre all over the world; the decision as to what to do with them becomes a matter of international policy; it goes from the top Pentagon level to the White House and then the General Assembly of the U.N., and a world wide debate rages around the matter. For a while it looks like these brave space explorers will be condemned to live their lives out on this dead asteroid because if they return and come down with all sorts of virulent diseases, diseases the general run of earthbound people don't get any more because they've built up an inherited immunity to them, they may become sources of infection, may be carriers of all sorts of anachronistic plagues and epidemics ..."

"It's a heck of an idea," the producer said with a sorrowed face, "and ordinarily it would work fine for us; it's definitely along the lines we're working along, but it just so happens that last week we assigned a writer to do a story about space medicine and the problems of human beings' infecting the dead reaches of space with germs brought from earth, which is tackling the selfsame theme from the other end, so to speak. You can see there's too much of an overlap there, a definite overlap."

"Haven't you got another space idea, Jonathan?" I said.

"Have I?" he said. His eyes were on me but far away, too.

"Sure you do. Agoraphobia? Remem ber the agoraphobia?"

"I do," he said, sighing heavily. "I remember the agoraphobia right next to the Maine. Well, let's see if I can reconstruct this now, yes, our premise is that there is one of the astronauts being trained for a mission who suffers from agoraphobia but doesn't know it, and neither do his instructors because they haven't devised any tests for this disease. How are you going to ascertain if agoraphobia is there short of putting your man up in space? So the astronauts take off, and in the middle of the long mission, suddenly this one man breaks out in a sweat and begins to pound against the walls of the spaceship, begging, screaming to be put down; he can't stand being in the middle of a lot of nowhere. It presents a terrible problem to the crew; you see, they've reached the point of no return; they're better than one year out from earth and have almost a year to go, and here's a man going berserk. They could knock him out with powerful sedatives but what are they going to do, keep him under sedation for another three years or so, and besides, who's going to take his place, do his vital job? That, in a sketchy way, is the premise. It could make for a tight, taut, tense, all-round suspensy dramatic situation, I believe, and I'd be glad to develop it for you in an outline if you're interested."

The producer was sitting forward on his chair, both his hands cupped under his chin, examining Jonathan with the kind of glad eyes that to me mean, we're in, we're all the way in.

"Mr. Silk," he said in a low and emotional voice, "I think you've got hold of something there, something important and full of meaning for our times."

He nodded several times. He leaned back and clapped his hands; I thought he was applauding but he was only calling somebody.

"Charlie?" he said in a loud tone. "Charlie, could you step in here a minute?"

A man appeared in the doorway leading to the next office. He was in the uniform of an Air Force major, with the curling doodids on his shoulder patch that said he was a medic.

"Charlie," the producer said, "meet Mr. Jonathan Silk. Jonathan, this is Major Dr. Rennie of the Air Force, one of our top-qualified space surgeons; he's been assigned to our program as technical consultant and we're mighty glad to have a man of his caliber around here. Jonathan, be good enough to run through your idea once more for the Major's benefit. You've got a big thing here and we've got to work it right, get all the technical bugs out, and Charlie here is the man to set us straight on the technical details."

So Jonathan ran through his idea once more, while I kept all my fingers crossed. Major Rennie listened. He listened some more. His eyes got, well, corrugated, his eyes were two corduroy roads. Not from fear. From being with it. And the happy-times smile on his lips sang me a sweet message, we're in, we're all the way in. We had brought space to the right people. This was the one office in all of Hollywood, in all of this TV mass media, where it was a seller's market for agoraphobia.

"Interesting," Major Rennie said through his teeth. He reached for a pad and began to make marks on it. "Ver-y interesting. Let's see, now. We put the spin seat about here, yes. Build the cyclorama of the heavens here, and here, and here, all around the seat. Right. What it amounts to is placing the spin seat dead center of a big hollow ball that's dark but with pinpoints of light all around for the stars, and----"

"Might I ask what it is you're drawing?" Jonathan said with a minimum of curiosity.

"Sure thing," the major said. "It's an astonishing fact but, as you say, for all the testing we've done with our astronauts we've never come up with a test for agoraphobia, only for claustrophobia. It occurs to me that we could design a rough setup for such a test, a sort of full-scale mock-up, and show it right on The Wild Blue. On the show you're going to write, I mean. It'll be a major contribution to space medicine, I assure you. I'll take the plans for the thing and send them straight on to the Pentagon ..."

I felt down and right proud. This confirmed the blind faith I had had in my client and his agoraphobia theme all along. How many clients can boast of dreaming up an idea for TV and, by it, making a big contribution to the science of conquering space?

"So we have a deal?" I said to the producer.

"If Charlie here says the idea works," the producer said, "that's plenty good enough for me. You're going to have a solid deal, all right. First, though, just as a formality, you understand, before we firm up and finalize the thing, I wish Mr. Silk would sort of draw up a little statement of two or three pages on the structure of his play, nothing elaborate, nothing as elaborate as an outline, just two or three pages that I can clear with the sponsor and the network, then we'll sign contracts and you're in business. Congratulations, Mr. Silk. You've come up with a good one, a, if I may put it this way, dilly."

When we got outside I was in such high spirits that I patted Jonathan on the back several times and jumped up and even clicked my heels. But he looked disturbed.

"Look here," he said. "As I understand the procedure, according to the Minimum Basic Agreement which the Writers' Guild has with all television producers, no writer is supposed to write one word on speculation, whether it's a full outline he does, or a two-page summary, or one lousy paragraph, he's supposed to get paid at least the minimum for the first stage, which I gather is $300. When this weasel says he wants two teentsy-weentsy pages instead of a full outline, what he means is that he wants to curve around the contract he has with the Guild and not pay me a cent if the thing doesn't clear with the network and the sponsor, and I'm not going to write one word for him on spec and be a fink. You call this guy right away and tell him I insist on at least minimum payment for any statement I write, no matter how short, at least $300, which was what I got when I did that outline for Have Gun, Will Travel."

"If you've got faith in this idea," I said exploringly, "and I think with U.S. Air Force space surgeons backing it up you ought to have a lot of faith, maybe you ought to sort of play ball with him a little, curve a little where he curves. I'm a strong union man myself, the strongest, believe me in that, but all the same I believe in trying to see the other fellow's point of view and sort of play ball, meet them halfways, etsetter."

"Call him."

So I rang up the producer of The Wild Blue. I put it to him that my client was not going to bust any union rules by writing on spec, he insisted on getting the minimum pay for his outline, or statement, or sum-up, or hurry-over, or whatever it was being called this season.

The producer's voice began to get very distant very fast.

"I don't care what Silk says," he came back at me. "I don't give any minimum guarantees to writers who never wrote a word for television, who are untried in the media. Let him do this two-page quick skim without guarantees and then we'll see."

"He won't do it," I said. I was on the rim of tears, we were so close to being in, so close. "What's more, I'm worried about protecting the whole unusual idea he laid out for you. Look, suppose the deal breaks up over this issue, what guarantee does he have that you won't take agoraphobia and assign it to another writer, some writer who is willing to play ball with you no matter what the Guild regulations say?"

There was a pause. When the producer spoke up again his words seemed to be coming from outer space somewhere, some very cold area.

"No guarantee at all," he said. "None whatsoever. Let me point out to you that space is in the public domain and has been for some time. Agoraphobia is in the public domain. Come to think of it, so is God. Have you or has your client tried lately to get a copyright on breathing?"

And all of a sudden the whole brilliant deal was out of the window and Jonathan Silk was unemployed and unemployable again. It was a crying shame. Just when we'd found the one office in all of Hollywood where there was definitely a seller's market for agoraphobia.

• • •

I was desperate. I was ready to beat my head against the wall like a claustrophobian. The situation was clear now; it looked like my client Jonathan Silk was never going to get his foot with its dirty sneaker one inch inside the television door through the usual process of throwing ideas at producers until they bit for one, then writing up under-the-counter outlines and getting them passed. I had to find another way in for this unraveling client.

With this in mind, and as an act of desperation in the last stages, I dropped over to Four Star to see my old friend Sidney Garbatte, co-producer of The Earth Movers, a pretty hot series about some tough American construction workers who knock around the world building bridges and dams and beating down anybody and anything in their two-fisted way.

"Sidney," I said, "I don't usually ask you for favors but this time I'm in a bind and you're the only one I can turn to. I've got this client, Jonathan Silk, he's a good and experienced novelist, he's written a gang of books, only he's finding it tough to break into TV because the people around here don't know him and what he can do. He's a high-type New York writer and he's very strong on story lines, he's a first-rate structure man, he can knock out rewrites and polishes practically overnight. Now, I understand you're in bad script trouble, you need some rewrites on some scripts, and I'm asking you as a special favor, as a personal favor to me, to give this Silk some assignments. It'll get him started and also it'll be a good thing for the show to get some New York blood in your stable, you know?"

"Bring him around, Jer, and let's look the man over," my good pal Sidney said.

I got Jonathan over to Sidney's office fast.

"I'm not too familiar with your format," Jonathan said in a feeling-out way.

"Neither am I," good old Sidney said. "Neither is anybody else on this show. What we're trying to do is turn out some reasonably entertaining entertainment, and the way we decide whether a play is that is, mostly we just look at it and if we're entertained, why, we feel it fits our format. Doing television is a game of blindman's buff and there's no sense pretending we've all got seeing-eye dogs to lead us to ultimate truths and high ratings. All I know about the mass media is that they're massive and pay massively, which is why I'm here instead of on the beach at Waikiki."

Jonathan sat up straighten. "I like your approach, Mr. Garbatte," he said. "You're hitting me where I shake hands with people. As I understand it, you have some scripts that need rewriting?"

"We have several scripts that start out with a good idea," Sidney said, "but the idea gets lost along the way. The development is bad and the writing is bad, and here is where I think an experienced writer can help us."

"I'll help," Jonathan said. "You've put me in a very helpful mood. Could you give me a sample of the kind of script you've got on hand?"

"I'll tell you about the one I'd like you to take a crack at first," Sidney said. "To start with, though, I ought to prepare you, this is a pretty offbeat idea; it may strike you as a little nutty at the outset but it has something, it just has to be brought out. Don't bust out laughing when you hear this. The premise is that there's a Mohawk Indian with agoraphobia ..."

This is how it happened, word for word, Sidney Garbatte looked Jonathan Silk straight in the eye and without swallowing or slitting his wrists began to talk about some Mohawk Indian with agoraphobia.

Jonathan stiffened in about the way I would guess a patient in a mental hospital does when they turn on the current for his electric shock therapy. He studied me, then his fingers, then his sneakers, then the ceiling.

"Well," he said, his voice shaking a little, "I suppose Mohawk Indians are subject to about the same stresses and strains as the rest of us. Could you elaborate on that premise a little?"

"Easy," Sidney said. "You see, for a lot of decades now there's been a rather sizable community of Mohawk Indians living out in Brooklyn; they're all structural steel workers, they do the dangerous high-steel work on most of the skyscrapers that go up around Manhattan, the craft is passed on from father to son. Well, what we're assuming is that a young fellow in this tribe works up a large-size case of agoraphobia and he can't go strolling around the steel girders all those hundreds of feet in the air, so the other Mohawks consider him an outcast and try to ostracize him and take a strong position against his marrying his fiancée, the daughter of one of the best high-steel men. What I thought was, we could start the thing off with a teaser in which a bunch of these Mohawks are doing a war dance up on the top beams of a skyscraper ..."

"It's lovely," Jonathan said as though he was speaking prayers. "It's so beautiful I want to cry. At this moment I feel that all the strands from my past life, from all my works and dreams, are coming together in a meaningful whole, an ultimate package, and for the first time my life has pattern. I'll write this play for you, Mr. Garbatte, I'll write the living daylights out of it, trust me. And I want to thank you for putting the final touches to my career, for showing me that there is still room among all the frozen formats for a surge of the miraculous and giving me the courage to go on."

"I thought you would see the beauty in it," Sidney said. "I sized you up immediately for a fellow who could see the deeper symmetries and shimmers in a tiling like this. Mr. Silk, I think you and I are going to get along, we are both men of enthusiasm and range."

When we got outside Jonathan stopped and leaned against the building. He looked like he was going to fall down; there was some kind of slugged expression on his solemn face.

"So this is Hollywood," he whispered, "where they package and package and everything finally adds up to a billion billion even. Oh, how beautiful, how positively gorgeous."

"I told you and told you," I said. "I tried to make you see the dramatic premise in agoraphobia but you wouldn't listen."

"Apparently you don't get the point," he said, breathing hard. "What he was talking about was fear of heights, not fear of open spaces, that's a disease called acrophobia, not agoraphobia. But he called it agoraphobia because there is a destiny that shapes our ends and life must occasionally have such payoffs, there must once in a while be a big package deal in every man's life. Jerry, thank you from the bottom of my heart for bringing me together with Sidney Garbatte. Before I met him I was a ragbag of odds and ends and now I am whole, healed into a fine unit, and ready to face the world again. Thank you, you miracle worker in your black mohair suit, thank you; I march into the future unafraid."

• • •

So this was how Jonathan Silk, with all his patches, got his first and only job in Hollywood television.

Three weeks after he turned in his script, which the Earth Movers people loved, slobbered over, for which they were very happy to pay Jonathan 1500 crispy and crunchy dollars. I was sitting with him one night in Cyrano's, the coffeehouse that was the preferred Sunset Strip hangout for more restless souls that season.

"Good news," I said, looking around to check the girls. "Had a nice chat with Sidney Garbatte today. He wants you to do some more rewrites and maybe tackle some story ideas of your own for Earth Movers. You're in there, Johnny, boy, I mean, in."

"That's very nice of Sidney," Jonathan said, "but tell him, no, thanks."

"Have you suddenly become independently wealthy? You know the Guild voted to go on strike end of the month, and if you don't squeeze in all the work you can between now and then you're going to be a plenty unemployed writer with no cash cushion."

"I've got the cushion, Jer, a cushy one. My situation has changed radically in the last 24 hours. You see, I sent the first half of my new book to my publishers in New York, and they liked the stuff so much that they decided to give me an extra advance of 3000 very crinkly dollars. With that money, plus what I got from Sidney for the rewrite, I can take the next three or four months off and finish my novel. Television really isn't for me, Jer. I belong somewhere where life isn't such a strict format, where there's more concern with consequences than with premises, where the miracles can explode the formulas, where the emphasis is on storied lives rather than story lines, and what that means is that I should be writing more books rather than television, which can never be a medium well done because it's out to scratch backs by the multimillions, and I'm not up to scratch, though the scratch is very good. I think you might have been right, more right than wrong, when you said I was out to parody the medium, I think without realizing it. I may have been trying to needle the producers and editors enough so that they would throw me out and let me do my true work. I thank Sidney Garbatte from the bottom of my heart but now I think I'd better go and package myself according to my own needs and directions. Right now I've got a terrific need to go and sit on a mountain in Big Sur and be my own network and my own sponsor."

A month later he wrote me from Big Sur, on the back of a laundry list, as follows:

"Pacific very blue, very broad. Have my own mountaintop and it's a very dramatic premise with a lot of real human identification value. Yesterday saw a wild boar in the redwoods back of my cabin, he was dressed in a black mohair suit and pointy shoes, I waved my friendliest Sunset Strip wave but he lurched away. Novel taking form, if not format, beautifully. Son, keep in good health, accept all the miracles in the public domain, be happy, and avoid fried foods. I wish you long life and good luck in card games. Your pen pal, Theodore Dalton Trumbo Dostoievsky."

He was arrogant, this Jonathan Silk, plain arrogant and definitely high-and-mitey in his thinking. All the same, his birthday was coming up, and so I sent him a tie, one that wasn't coming apart around the edges, a tie with small figures that were eyes but not producers' or agents' or even genius novelists' eyes, not corrugated, but clear blue like the Pacific, and with plenty of human identification value.