Dr. Bell's Monster

Ah, the telephone, what a lovely invention!

--Marcel Proust

Now that the telephone is 100 years old, is it not time to admit that it has taken over? Is it not the world's largest machine, and are we not its dutiful tenders? Is it not the nervous system of the noosphere--the layer of human intelligence glazing the earth's surface that the Jesuit (continued on page 86) Dr. Bell's Monster (continued from page 79) paleontologist/theologian Teilhard de Chardin warned would be the next stage in the evolution of human consciousness? Does not the continued non-incineration of humankind hang on the slender filament of the hotline? Can you not annoy the bejesus out of anyone you loathe by giving his name to the Government's heroin tip line, toll-free? Has not the concept of "taking a vacation" been superseded by that of "getting away from the telephone"? Is not long distance better than being there?

We are the People Our ParentsPhoned Us About

We are the telephone babies. The doctor who pulled us into the world was summoned by a phone call. We teethed on toy handsets. When we were miniature, they pushed us up to the receiver to goo for Grandma. Our first balcony scenes were played over the telephone. Our initiation into adulthood was discovering that telephone voices could lie. We buy, sell, bitch, threaten, cajole, tease, stall, praise, ask, harangue, invite and proposition over the telephone, and as long as we live, few of us will ever be far from one. When we are called by the great Traffic Manager to the big Central Office in the sky, everyone whose number appears in our little black book will be advised by telephone. Shortly thereafter, our line will be disconnected, our name will be stricken forever from the Book of Telephones and our most important number recycled.

The Mind of the Telephone

When we penetrate to the heart of contemporary myth and history, we discover that it is all about the telephone. This shouldn't surprise us, since both history and myth concern the extremes of human interaction and the telephone system has become the predominant means by which humans interact. Scan Watergate for telephones and see if their role in that event is not most striking.

The break-in itself was, of course, an attempt to replace faulty bugs on several telephones at the offices of the Democratic National Committee. White House involvement was first suspected because the address book of one of the burglars contained E. Howard Hunt's "W. House" phone number. Public speculation about Watergate was stimulated by Martha Mitchell's repeated telephone calls to reporter Helen Thomas. The case was broken by the admissions of James McCord, the former CIA phone-tapping expert. McCord's new lawyer was Bernard Fensterwald, Jr., who had become prominent as counsel to Senator Edward Long's committee on wire tapping. The Senate Watergate committee's majority counsel was Samuel Dash, who had achieved prominence through a wire-tap study he did for the Pennsylvania Bar Association. During the hearings, somebody telephoned Senator Sam Ervin, identified himself as Treasury Secretary Shultz and told him that Nixon had decided to make the tapes available to the committee--a hoax that led Ervin to laughingly characterize the telephone as "an instrument of the Devil."

The tapes that finally did Nixon in included many telephone conversations. When asked how she accidentally erased part of one crucial tape, Rose Mary Woods claimed she had done it while reaching for the telephone.

Telephones, telephones and more telephones. According to Norbert Wiener's theory of cybernetics, any system of enough complexity embodies a quality we know as mind. The telephone system is the most complex that man has yet created, so it must embody the highest of machine intelligence. Nixon and his stooges, I once explained to a friend, tried to seize dictatorial power by messing with the phones, so the system maintained its integrity by plotting his downfall.

"Are you serious?" my friend asked.

"Of course not," I said--but perhaps I was.

Or take the mysterious accidental death/suicide/murder of Marilyn Monroe, a media martyrdom that has provided the pretext for several books and nonbooks, a hit single and a "Movie of the Week" in which Connie Stevens spent two hours on the telephone. The day before Marilyn bought the farm, she tried unsuccessfully to telephone old flame Bobby Kennedy at the Justice Department in Washington. Peter Lawford says he called Marilyn the night she died to find out how she was. It has been alleged that he was calling to invite her to a party; that Bobby Kennedy was at Lawford's house and that Marilyn had called him there. Before she went to sleep, Marilyn had a thing about "putting her telephones to bed"--under the covers in the next bedroom. Her housekeeper became alarmed when, next morning, she saw the long cord of one of the phones underneath Marilyn's closed bedroom door and she immediately telephoned Marilyn's psychiatrist. The psychiatrist reported that he found Marilyn holding the handset, with her finger in the dial; the housekeeper says she was lying on top of the phone.

Lawford believed that Marilyn had taken a heavy dose of sleeping pills but was awakened "by the phone's insistent ring." Forgetting that she had taken pills earlier, she took another batch to put her back in dreamland and the accidental overdose killed her. Walter Winchell wrote, "She was phoning to save her life.... The louse to whom she appealed panicked. 'I'm a married man! I can't get involved! I'll phone my agent to get a doctor!' ... And he couldn't reach his agent ... both of whom haven't slept since." Immediately after her death, the records of her toll calls for the previous week disappeared from the phone company. It is said that the L.A. chief of police removed them.

"I suppose you think the mind of the telephone plotted Marilyn's death," said my friend.

"Au contraire," said I. "She was one of its biggest customers, after all. She treated her phones like human beings, let them sleep together. No, I think the telephone tried to save Marilyn."

"You're shitting me."

"Of course I am," I said--but perhaps I wasn't.

The Telephone Game

Reality is too complex for oral transmission.

--Jean-Luc Godard, Alphaville

When we were young, they lined us all up and showed Michelle the Brownnose an index card with a message on it. Michelle whispered it to Christopher, who whispered it to Brian, who whispered it to Jennifer, and by the time it got to Robert, the message had become, "Who is Ravel to catch? It is easy to compose a possible melody." Then Michelle the Brownnose, in a singsong voice that rekindled thoughts of setting fire to her braids, read from the card: "Who is to bell the cat? It is easy to propose impossible remedies." They didn't call this The Whispering Game. They called it The Telephone Game, and I think they were trying to tell us something.

Even when you are trying hard to convey information accurately over the telephone, words seem to have a way of transmogrifying by the time they reach the other end. That's the reason we write letters "confirming our telephone conversation," dictate memoranda of telephone calls or even tape them, surreptitiously or otherwise.

Nearly all of the clues for spotting a liar are missing in the telephonic interchange. The unsteady hand, the dry mouth, the shifting gaze, the untimely swallow, the cold sweat, the clammy palm, the halting breath cannot be perceived over the phone. All we have to go on is the cadence and intonation of speech. The result is that one can lie, fib, puff and otherwise shoot pooty with impunity over the phone, because in the event that one is caught, the prevarication can always be downgraded to a "misunderstanding" ascribable to the Telephone Game phenomenon rather than to any intention to deceive.

Lying on the telephone isn't restricted to matters of substance--delivery dates, (continued on page 184) Dr. Bell's Monster (continued from page 86) prices, discounts, specifications or what you are doing Saturday night. The telling of falsehoods forms the very basis of telephone etiquette. Let's say that you phone an office to speak to somebody. The secretary answers and tells you he has "stepped away from his desk." This may mean that:

A. Your party does not wish to speak to you just then;

B. Your party does not wish to speak to you ever;

C. Your party really is too busy to take any calls just then, yours included;

D. Your party is still out to lunch but doesn't want his secretary to convey the impression that her boss takes long lunches;

E. The secretary didn't get your name right and your party doesn't know it's you calling;

F. The secretary is under the false impression that her boss does not wish to speak with you;

G. The intercom line is busy and the secretary will be goddamned if she's going to walk all the way to your party's office to tell him you're calling;

H. Or (and this is extremely unlikely) your party actually has stepped away from his desk.

The first thing that a young woman is taught when she reports for work in the world of getting and spending is that her basic job is not typing or filing--but lying. She is employed to weave a scrim of falsehood behind which business can be conducted without telephonic interruption by undesired callers--or desired callers at inopportune times. Allowing her to use natural womanly tact is not even considered. Instead, she is taught a repertoire of prevarications:

"He's in a meeting," "He's in conference," "He's on another line," "He's tied up at the moment," "He's on a long-distance call," "He's still at lunch," "He's gone for the day," "He's not in today," "He's on vacation this week."

The exasperating part of all this is that, for all you know, the person you're calling may not be trying to avoid you. He may actually be in a meeting, but there you are, thinking he's trying to brush you off. It isn't so bad when you're sure they're lying. It's when you don't know that the paranoia begins and you crave to hear a straightforward "He's really very busy and we're only writing construction loans for old customers, so I think you're wasting time trying to telephone him--why don't you send him your ear in a Baggie?" or "Mr. Gotrocks doesn't take calls from anybody whose last name ends in a vowel."

But all seriousness aside, the fact is that the screening of phone calls is a license to lie, and this corrodes whatever weak impulse people have toward truth-telling in more consequential areas. Not that we don't believe her, but how could poor Rose Mary be expected to tell the truth about who erased the tapes when a precondition of employment for any secretary is that she be an expert, convincing and habitual liar?

Long Distance Is Being There

Lead Tenor:

'Twas the penis, he thought-was, his own--

Just a big playful boy of a bone ...

With a stout purple head,

Sticking up from the bed,

Where the girlies all played Telephone--

Bass:

Te-le-phone....

--Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

The bell rescues her from a nightmare and his voice flows out of the white Princess phone tart and sweet and fructuous as gooseberry preserves. He has been on a salvage job out in the Gulf for a month now and her tissues are burning for it. "Talk to me, honey," she moans.

"Lemme speak to one of your nipples," he drawls. "Hey, how you doin'? You hot and pink and standing up for Poppa like a good little rosebud? Lemme speak to the other little baby. Oh, I can smell you through the phone. Yes I can! You smell of woman sweat and Chanel No. 5 and those little hairs around you, I can hear 'em rubbing up against the telephone, mm-mm. Lemme say hello to your pussy. Pussy, sweetheart, I hope your mistress ain't gettin' too squirrely up there all alone. Ooh, pussy, you are hot! God, I can feel how overheated you are all the way over long distance. You gonna seize up if you don't look out! I think I better wet you down."

She presses the receiver to her frenulum clitoridis with both hands and feels him slurping from 400 miles away. Then he starts to hum like an old radio and she strains against the handset, strains, strains, strains against the handset, until there is a pulsating moment in which the distance between them is bridged and Alexander Graham Bell spins in his grave like a barbecue bird on a roadside rotisserie.

All Alone by the Telephone

I used to think obscene phone calls were like when I was 11 and we'd all get on different extensions and call the number for Fuchs. "Is this Mrs. Fucks?" we'd squeak, if we could stop giggling long enough. That was many years before I saw this article in Today's Health called "They're Cracking Down on the Telephone Nuts ... and You Can Help!" Eager to be of assistance, I dropped everything and read it at once. I discovered that there is a whole spectrum of telephonic obscenity, ranging from the lowly "breathers" (whose idea of hot noogies is calling up strangers and respiring) to an elite who have only to drink telephone juice to be transformed into latter-day Mr. Hydes. There was the infamous brassiere salesman of Minneapolis, whose shtick was calling as many as 100 housewives a day (!) and announcing that his company had introduced a new bra for women with big breasts. "If you have a thirty-six inch bust or larger," he explained, "we would like to send you a free set of our lingerie after you answer a few simple questions," which got progressively raunchier until the lady hung up.

Then there was Dr. Martin of Miami, who offered women a cancer checkup if they would answer a few simple questions about their breasts and cervixes. And a "Father Steiner" of New Jersey, who offered to hear a Catholic woman's confession over the phone, especially her sins of sexual indiscretion. For non-Catholic women, the good padre became Dr. Barry of the Kinsey Institute, who asked questions like, "How often have you had sexual intercourse with your husband during the past month?"

P.S. Father Steiner, aka Dr. Barry, was finally nailed while phoning in the nude (!!). Turned out he was a 26-year-old salesman, married, two kids, a town councilman, who used his mistress' phone to absolve/survey 135 penitents/respondents on a good day. "I guess I need help," he said.

My favorite character I'll call Frederick of Hollywood, about whom Today's Health really lets loose:

"In California, a 35-year-old housewife who was preparing dinner at home alone while her husband was at work and her 13-year-old daughter was at school answered her telephone late one afternoon.

"A brisk male voice greeted her. 'I have your daughter tied up and gagged in the next room. If you don't do exactly what I tell you, I'm going to rape and kill her. Understand? OK. Now take off all your clothes. Your dress first. Now your bra. I want you to strip for me--all the way. And tell me everything that you're doing, thinking and feeling as you take off everything.'

"Terrified, the woman nervously removed all her garments and choked out the gutter words that her telephone tormentor was coaxing out of her. Then her faceless caller ordered her to perform some solitary acts. Though they shocked her, she was too frightened not to comply with his commands. Finally, she stood trembling and naked at her telephone.... Her sadistic caller chuckled mockingly and hung up. Five minutes later, her daughter, who had been walking home from school during this call, found the weeping woman in a bathrobe, lying on her bed in a state of hysteria."

The part that knocks my socks off is how the lady actually strips and diddles herself, even though Frederick of Hollywood could never know if she were dressed in a snowmobile suit, weeding her terrarium whilst oohing and aahing. The fact that she obeyed old Fred's demands demonstrates the power of the telephone.

"Many of these obscene callers are teenage girls," observes Herb Bugle (Herb was manager of New York Telephone's Annoyance Call Bureau). "Their victims are men as well as women, old and young."

All of which tells me how I Can Help. Girls, if you've got to talk dirty to strangers, call me collect.

Conversations Without Don Juan

Some time ago, I needed to get in touch with Carlos Castaneda, who has every sophomore in America convinced that The Teachings of Don Juan, A Separate Reality, Journey to Ixtlan and Tales of Power are works of nonfiction. I got the elusive author's telephone number from an individual I will call Rolodex, because he has everybody's ten little digits on little notched cards. A female voice answered.

"Can I speak to Carlos for a minute?" I asked. This seldom fails to get celebrities to telephones, if only for a minute.

"Oh, he just walked out the door! I'll see if I can get him; hold on a moment.... No, sorry, he's gone. Can I take a message?"

"No, thanks, I'll call back."

Four times a day for a month I went through this drill. Never was Carlos home. Never did I give my name. Always was he trotting out the door. I began to detect a pattern and rang up Rolodex to complain that he'd dealt me a stiff.

"Hey, I'm sorry," he said, "but I didn't want to discourage you. You see, Carlos has this thing about telephones. There are two levels to it. For one thing, he feels that in order to come across to the public on the mythic plane, he must keep himself incommunicado. This means he doesn't grant interviews or permit photographs--and, most important, doesn't talk on the telephone to strangers. He considers the telephone to be a mundane, profane means of communication. He says, 'You can't just call Mescalito on the phone, you know.' He thinks that if he were accessible by telephone, it would demystify him and compromise his power. Also, he doesn't want to be pinned down on things like how he met Don Juan or where Don Juan lives--since, of course, Don Juan is only a projection of Carlos' personality, the trickster side.

"There's another level to Carlos' aversion to the phone, too. He had several extremely unpleasant experiences where he was talking on the phone to somebody he didn't know too well, and suddenly the other person's mind sort of melted and flowed through the wire right into his mind--and then he couldn't get this invading mind out of his mind even by hanging up. He had to work it loose ever so patiently over a period of weeks or months. So whenever the telephone rings, he takes a walk. He feels like he's in danger just being in the same house with an open telephone line."

So I gave up trying to connect with Don Juan's alter ego by phone. If a phone caller's mind can fly into his like a foreign object into someone's eye, I wouldn't want Castaneda daubing at my mentality with the corner of a piece of psychic Kleenex.

The Call of the Telephone

Hear my phone ringin'

Sounds like a long-distance call.

--Muddy Waters, Long Distance Call

Most businessmen from force of habit will turn their heads at the ring of the telephone bell. Cognizant of the fact, a haberdasher had the bell box of his telephone placed in his show window, out of sight.... The bell could be heard plainly by passers-by.

This window is on one of the main streets. Hence, the occasional telephone ring attracts considerable attention. Fully half the men who are passing the store when the bell rings will look toward the window and often they will stop--and read a large placard in the window: "My telephone is a busy one. Phone your order to me and save time and money."

--System, "The Magazine of Business," April 1912

Not in Pavlov's wildest imagination could he have conceived of the way 20th Century man falls off his stool at the sound of a ringing telephone. Adrenocorticotropic hormone zinging from the pituitary body to the adrenal cortex.... Epinephrine spritzing from the adrenal medulla to quicken the heart, relax the bronchioles, constrict the blood vessels, inhibit the intestinal smooth muscle. Break the stemware, slip in the bathtub, drop the baby, but answer that telephone! Not for nothing do they call it the Bell System.

Some years ago, the administrators at Doctors General Hospital in San Jose, California, tried to install Ericofons, the one-piece Swedish phones with the dial in the base. They wanted Ericofons because their bells made a "pleasant chirping sound." Pacific Tel & Tel refused to let Doctors use the Swedish phones, chirp or no chirp. During the hearing at which the hospital challenged the company before the Public Utilities Commission, an examiner asked a P. T. & T. witness whether the standard bell was designed to be "so irritating that the called party will answer promptly."

"I don't think we like to put it that way," said the engineer, "but there is a certain amount of that in the design. Mr. Examiner, if I may comment, we usually call it 'urgency.' " (Surprisingly, the hospital won.)

Is there any sound that cries out to be stilled with more urgency than a phone's insistent ringing? Yes--the "screamer" they slap onto your line if you try to leave your phone off the hook. Does anything try your patience like waiting for a phone booth? Is a two-minute wait for a busy executive in his reception room not refreshingly brief compared with two minutes on hold waiting to talk to the same person on the phone?

Much of the urgency associated with the telephone undoubtedly springs from the fear that unless we move fast, we will miss an important call. What earthly frustration rivals--after one has struggled with the front-door lock, thrown his packages to the floor and dived for the telephone--the sound of a dial tone? But this sense of urgency has been conditioned into us by telephone engineers. They don't want us to take the phone off the hook, enjoy a leisurely shower, return the handset to its cradle, then receive a call from a friend who tried us twice while we were doing our toilette. They want us to keep the phone on the hook to keep our friends from using the wires and relays any more than necessary and to interrupt our shower to answer the phone even for a sales pitch from an encyclopedia salesman or, for that matter, an obscene call. The idea is to minimize the amount of time the system's switching apparatus is being used in ways that don't make money for Ma Bell--such as calls that must be redialed because our phone is off the hook.

Watson, Come Here, I Want You

"Perhaps we can talk about it over the phone?"

"There are things that have to be discussed face to face."

--Isaac Bashevis Singer, Enemies, A Love Story

Voice Contact Needed

--Indicator light on credit-card-verifying terminal, Ma Bell's Restaurant, New York City

I call the New Yorker magazine library to make an appointment to look through its files for telephone cartoons. The librarian says I can't come up, it's against magazine policy, but she will be happy to describe the cartoons I am looking for--over the phone. Somehow my telephone presence is deemed to be less intrusive and disruptive than my physical presence, despite the fact that the librarian must spend time and energy making word pictures instead of leaving me to rummage. I shrug and waggle my left index finger counterclockwise at my left temple, but the librarian can't see me do either of those things, because we are on the telephone.

Conversely, at my hotel in Rome, I ask the portiere to telephone a concert hall and find out if tickets are available.

"Non è possibile," he says, with that special little smirk they learn in hotel scuola.

"And why is that?" I say with my ugliest American how-much-is-that-in-what-used-to-be-real-money scowl.

"Because, sir, they will not tell you over the telephone."

"They will not tell you?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Why not? Because it is necessary to go there personally."

"Oh, well. When in Rome...."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Nothing--just an old American expression. The full saying is, 'When in Rome, the reason they won't tell you over the phone is because you've got to go there.' "

Do I have to tell you that when I got there it was closed?

Face to face is still thought to be more real than phone to phone. The New Yorker librarian wanted me less real, so she kept me on the phone, even though it meant more work. The portiere was intimating that I'd have to get pretty real before an Italian would give me any information. If you visit your doctor and describe your symptoms, you have to pay. If you telephone him and describe your symptoms, you don't have to pay. The medical profession doesn't consider a telephone consultation to be as real as an office visit in which precisely the same information is exchanged. But whether you visit your lawyer or talk with him on the phone for an hour, you get the same bill. Conclusion: Because they believe more fully than doctors in the reality of the telephone encounter, lawyers do less work for free. Alternative conclusion: Because their canon of ethics is too antiquated to allow physicians to charge for work done on the phone, patients who visit the office subsidize patients who do not. Keep in mind that the very first telephone conversation consisted of Bell, who'd just spilled acid on himself, asking his assistant to present himself immediately in the flesh.

The Telephone Artist

An editor once asked Bobbi Cowan, one of the top publicity people in the music industry, why she was in PR. "Because I give great phone," said she--thereby giving great phone. Those who are capable of giving great phone are at the same sort of advantage as men with long legs were in the days of mounted shock combat. I know a successful businessman who spends many of his working days at home curled up in fetal position on a water bed in a darkened room, making and taking telephone calls. He goes through extended periods when to be in the same room with a co-worker would make him break out in a cold sweat, to see a stranger would make him nauseated. But on the phone, he's Mr. Personality, and the people he does business with undoubtedly visualize him in shirt sleeves at a glass-and-chrome desk with a skyline behind him. In reality, he's huddled in a smelly bathrobe, chewing his cuticles, with his head under a pillow, thanking the Lord and Ma Bell that the dial of a Touch-Tone Trimline lights up.

On the other hand, I've spoken to plenty of people--ranging from General Omar Bradley to Joey Gallo--who may be pushy in person but are pussycats on the phone. But the strongest telephone personality I've ever encountered is neither a general nor a gangster but Hillard Elkins, producer of Oh! Calcutta!, Alice's Restaurant and The Rothschilds and prince consort to Claire Bloom. If there were a way of implanting a mobile telephone in the human body, Elkins would be the first to sign up. He says he could conduct all his affairs over the phone--"meeting someone is merely a matter of protocol." He has a telephone next to his toilet and he uses it to call his secretary, whose desk is eight feet away. In hi-fi terminology, there is a quality known as presence. A reproduced audio signal has presence if it seems to be right there in the room with you. Elkins' resonant-baritone telephone voice is an ectoplasm that transcends space and materializes in the room where you are holding the receiver. He is a master ventriloquist, for, indeed, you never do see his lips move. When you speak, you sound farther away from yourself than he does.

I would not describe Elkins as short, I would describe him as not tall. He identifies very strongly with Napoleon Bonaparte, another producer who was not tall, and his town house in Manhattan's East Sixties is replete with Napoleonic memorabilia. I discovered that Elkins was a radio actor as a youth. I concluded that when on the phone, he acts the part of a large person, large of body, large of soul, large of mind, large of pocketbook, and that he achieves his remarkable presence by intoning his lines as if he were saying "Thank you for welcoming me into your office today."

Phone-upmanship

Every school child knows the story of how the late Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen considered Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson to be his telephonic rival. Ev particularly envied Lyndon's car phone. Finally his own car phone came through and, of course, the first person he called on it was L.B.J., car to car. "Lyndon," he shouted. "How the hell are you?"

"Just a second," said Johnson. "My other phone is ringing."

But two telephones in one limo was nothing compared with what Johnson had over Dirksen once he became President. Whatever future generations may make of Vietnam and holding a beagle by its ears, Lyndon Baines Johnson's place in history is secured by his version of Executive Override. This was the system Johnson had installed that meant that, say, the Secretary of State would be on his white phone ordering a sausage pizza, when suddenly he would hear an operator saying the President was on the line and then, goddamn if it wasn't old Lyndon woofing at him without so much as a "May I?" Talk about concentration of power in the Presidency! What greater clout than never to have to wait on a busy signal?

The telephone-status competition for non-Prexies has been severely complicated by the rise of the lumpen-unlisted number. For a paltry six bucks a year, or for free in some places, you used to be able to show everybody how swell you were by having your number delisted. But in the past few years, the percentage of unlisted phones skyrocketed to over 30 percent as civilians discovered what the stars always knew--that an unlisted number was a nifty way to avoid bill collectors.

Self-conscious telephone-status efforts have lost their punch, anyway. The only kind of telephone numbers that go over any more are ones that radiate a lack of affectation and an abundance of simoleons. William F. Buckley, Jr., gets some kind of award for having a telephone line that's rigged to ring his New York office, his New York apartment and his home in northern Connecticut, leaping tall area codes at a single bound. Perhaps the prize ought to be dinner at Ma Bell's with New York deejay and raconteur Jonathan Schwartz, who is so totally gone over the Boston Red Sox that he spends some $55 a game to call an accomplice in Beantown who puts the receiver next to the radio so Schwartz doesn't miss a single pitch.

Telephone Operators

Why else should the female mammary gland have replaced the ringing telephone as the movies' most photographed insert?

--Joseph L. Mankiewicz, More About All About Eve

We are indebted to the movie moguls of Hollywood's golden age for rescuing business telephony from the "Whom shall I say is calling?" insipidity of the early days. Mogulhood was impossible without telephonic virtuosity, because the studios had moved to L.A. for shooting weather, leaving the home offices in New York, where the money was. The cliché mogul scenario went something like this:

1. Interior Office Close-up--Bald, sun-tanned, overweight man with big cigar in mouth screaming into telephone. A telephone bell is heard. He brings another handset to other ear and shouts into it.

2. Interior Office Medium Shot--He is sitting at an enormous desk alternating between two phones. There are eight phones on the desk. Another phone rings.

Mogul: Listen, I got a call on another line. Here, you two say hello to each other.

He puts the two handsets together on the desk, the transmitter of each to the receiver of the other. As he picks up the phone that is ringing, another begins to ring....

The most virulent of the virtuosos was Harry Cohn, of Columbia pictures, whose heavily attended funeral inspired Red Skelton to quip, "Give the public something they want to see and they'll come out for it."

Cohn used the telephone as a weapon. He himself didn't get into the office till noon, but he used to phone the studio at 9:30 A.M. to find out which executives were not at their desks. He phoned the latecomers' offices and left messages for them to call him. Then he refused their calls so they could pee in their knickers about what the old man wanted. Cohn was the inventor of the now-common technique of humiliation by Speak-R-Phone. He amplified telephone conversations while others were in his office, responding to the victim in earnest tones while holding his nose and giving him the finger. Agent Irving Lazar got the picture and began his conversation with a barrage of salty language. "Wait a minute," Cohn cut in. "Don't you know there are ladies in the room?"

"Then maybe you'd better turn off the loud-speaker," said Lazar.

Hollywood heavies still have plenty of telephones. Beverly Hills has 1.6 phones for every man, woman and other human resident. Former Paramount vice-president Robert Evans, for instance, has 32 phones in his 16-room hacienda. But moguls have mellowed since the days when Jack Warner could declare himself the only person on the Warner Bros. lot authorized to make an outside call. Mario Puzo, noted telephonophobe, describes his initial encounter with Evans, who was in charge of production for The Godfather: "I liked Evans right off for one reason. There were five of us having a conference in his office. He had to take a private phone call. So he stepped into a little closet to take it. Now, Louis B. Mayer would have told the four of us to squeeze into the closet and shut the door so that we couldn't hear him take the call at his desk."

Where are the telephone moguls of yesteryear?

The Telephone King

There are those who will tell you that you haven't experienced Alan King unless you've seen him on the Sullivan show. There are those who will tell you that you haven't experienced Alan King unless you've seen him at Caesars. There are those who will tell you that you haven't experienced Alan King unless you've seen him in Miami Beach. Then there is the truth: You haven't experienced Alan King unless you've spoken to him on the telephone.

"The part I love is when the secretaries are jockeying over whose boss must suffer the indignity of getting on the line first," King growls through his 12-button prosthetic ego; then he does a dialog:

" 'Mr. Zanuck, please, Mr. King calling.'

" 'One moment, please ... I have Mr. Zanuck; is Mr. King ready?'

" 'Mr. King is ready. Is Mr. Zanuck ready?'

" 'Mr. Zanuck is ready for Mr. King's call. Do you have Mr. King on the line?'

" 'I have Mr. King on the line. Do you have Mr. Zanuck?'

" 'I have Mr. Zanuck on the line.'

" 'I have Mr. King on the line ready for Mr. Zanuck.'

" 'I have Mr. Zanuck on the line ready for Mr. King.'

"My secretary isn't going to buzz me till she's got him on the line and his secretary isn't going to buzz him till she's got me on the line. It's a matter of protocol! It's a matter of honor! Someday Zanuck's secretary's gonna give in and Zanuck and King will talk, if they can remember what it was about."

Look, MA, No Handset

I've got a friend named Chuck Wein who's an underground famous person for having been a director of Andy Warhol's films--Warhol didn't make all of those movies himself, for heaven's sake--and for constantly having his destiny revealed to him by playing cards found lying on the streets of such places as Bangkok, Hong Kong and Perth, Australia. Chuck is also renowned for being the hardest person on earth to reach by telephone. By comparison, Howard Hughes is as accessible as the weather lady. For example, I called the executive producer of Arizona Slim, a soon-to-be-released cinespectacle starring Sean Walsh and--would you believe?--Yvonne De Carlo, to try to sniff out Chuck's latest telephone number. I figured that if you were giving somebody several hundred thousand dollars to make a film, you'd have to be able to call him on the phone to scream at him, right? The E. P. was happy to oblige. Thinking that maybe I had located Chuck a trifle too easily, I dialed the number in L.A. The man who answered told me in advanced conversational Tex-Mex to do something salacious to my grandmother. He didn't sound like anyone Chuck would be living with. I called 17 other numbers I had for him. They ranged from a Chinese laundry in West Hollywood to an all-night masseur who was ready to zip over to my house until I told him it was 2926 miles away. But mostly I got recorded messages telling me that the number I was calling was out of service at the time and to make sure I had dialed correctly.

A while back, Chuck called me and I scolded him roundly for leaving such a trail of used-up numbers behind him that even I, one of the great unsung skip-chasers of investigative fantasy, could not track him down. He proceeded to offer a dissertation on how the telephone had been interfering with the development of man's psychic powers and how "strong minds like ours" didn't need it and shouldn't fall back on it. He explained that he categorically refused ever to have a telephone, that the only time he ever had a telephone number was when the house he was renting at the moment happened to come with one, and that he usually used other people's phones as message drops.

"The telephone did a good job of getting people used to the idea of contacting anybody else in the world instantaneously by knowing their special code," Chuck said. "But once you've got that concept down, you don't need the telephone. You just zero in on whomever you want and beep-boop-boop-boop-beep-beep, you're in contact."

"Maybe you're in contact," I demurred, "but us mortals would rather pay a dollar forty-five for the first three minutes, plus forty-six cents for each additional minute between the hours of eight A.M. and five P.M., Monday through Friday, and put it down as lunch."

"Yeah, well, if you could wean yourself from the telephone," Chuck insisted, "you'd see that it's just a crutch and that the most effective form of telecommunication is mind to mind, without that whole messy expensive tangle of wires in between. In Beyond Telepathy, Andrija Puharich, the psychic investigator slash physician who is Uri Geller's keeper, talks about how a person who is dialing a phone call is in the adrenergic state and can act as a telepathic sender, even to someone who's asleep. So why bother with the hardware?"

A couple of moons later, I wanted to reach Chuck, because I was off to Tangier to see some people and thought it would be amusing for him to be there at the same time--Tangier having been one of his haunts during the Silly Sixties. I bothered with the hardware and called the number he had last given me. A girl answered.

"Hi. Is Chuck there?" I said.

"Fuck yourself, mister," she said, and she slammed down the phone. Maybe she hadn't heard me correctly. Anyway, she didn't sound like anybody Chuck would be living with, either. So I called every other number I had for him, and they were all duds. Finally, in desperation, I called his mother.

Now, I stop at nothing to get my man, but I don't like to disturb mothers unless I'm absolutely at wit's end. Mothers of grown wild men have got a right to privacy and I know I can't stand it when people call my mommy looking for me. It's like they're the school attendance officer and I'm out somewhere hooking rides on the back of a bus.

Wein's mother's number was out of service at that time and there was no other number.

I gave up. This was ridiculous. Mothers are never supposed to have their telephones disconnected. Home is where, when you go there, there's always a telephone you can use.

So there I am, sitting in the Parade bar in Tangier with Sanche de Gramont, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Secret War, and his charming wife, Nancy, telling them about this former Tangerine buddy of mine, name of Wein, who I wish they could meet, but I couldn't get in touch with him because he's so weak-minded that he thinks the telephone is not for strong minds.

"What's he like?" says Nancy.

"Well, he's very berserk. He's constantly having strange interludes with peripatetic extraterrestrial do-gooders he calls the space brothers. Chuck Wein is the kind of guy who, when you've been trying to phone him in Hollywood for weeks without success, you're sitting in a bar in Tangier and you turn around and in he walks."

By way of illustration, I turned around and in he walked.

I must have made a face like I'd just seen Marley's ghost, because Sanche and Nancy started laughing. Chuck saw me, acknowledged my presence just as matter-of-factly as could be, sauntered over and plunked himself down.

"I've been trying to call you for a month to get you to come here," I gasped.

"Well, I'm here, aren't I?"

It took Sanche and Nancy about 12 bars to comprehend that, no jive, the Chuck Wein I'd been telling them about was sitting at our table. I don't think I'd believe it today if I hadn't been so fortunate as to have been drinking with a Pulitizer Prize-winning journalist. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of by A. T. & T.'s Long Lines Department.

I Have Been Privileged to Have Known the Cobra Woman of the Telephone for Five Years--Three of Them on Hold

Once I lived in New York City and spent all my time going to press parties and openings. Now I live in a cottage on a lake in the mountains and spend all my time looking to the heavens for a sign. I have a gold phone with a long cord that plugs into a jack on my porch. Often when I am outside communing with the great Manitou, I take a break and direct-distance dial the Cobra Woman of the Telephone and ask her to brief me on what went on at the previous day's bashes. "Well, Bianca was there with her walker, Mick whatsis-name...." Her voice is like a knife blade skittering across dry ice. If you threw it onto an oscilloscope, you would discover no frequencies outside the narrow audio range of a telephone. Live and in person, the Cobra Woman of the Telephone sounds exactly like the Cobra Woman on the telephone. "Andy was there, of course, but then, darling, he goes to every supermarket opening. One of my other lines is ringing.... Let me tell you, gala it wasn't. New York State champagne and franks in blankets. Haven't these people ever heard of catering? Next it's gonna be Gatorade and tortilla chips. Oh, my God, two of them are ringing; just a minute.... Listen, I've got London on one line and L.A. on the other, so we're going to have to make it standing up. Let's see, Groucho was there; you'd think he'd be old enough to know better. I mean, you'd never catch W. C. Fields coming to any of these things! Honey, I've got to dash--you wouldn't believe who I've got on hold! Call me later."

There came a point in my life when I realized that telephone society was more real than face-to-face society, that it was more important what the Cobra Woman of the Telephone said about the extravaganzas of the previous evening than what had gone on there. I realized that I could save a fortune in cab fare, Alka-Seltzer and bills for cleaning spilled Tequila Sunrises off my Lurex tank tops by removing myself to a farm and checking in with the Cobra Woman via A. T. & T. I now know much more New York party poop than I ever did when I actually socialized, because when I call the Cobra Woman of the Telephone, it's long distance--so she keeps all the local yentes flashing impatiently inside their little square clear-plastic buttons while she tells me what I will not believe.

One day the Cobra Woman of the Telephone realized that her best friend, the Dowager Duchess of the Telephone, hadn't rung her to scream about the gaffes of the night before.

"There's only one possible explanation," she said to the Black Prince of the Telephone. "She would have called if she were busy. She would have called if she were out. She would have called if she were in jail. She would have called if she were kidnaped. She would have called if she were sick. So there's only one possible explanation. She must have died."

The memorial service was attended by the entire telephone tree of New York pop society. For two hours that afternoon, the engineers at New York Telephone kicked their pen registers and jiggled their crossbars and scratched their heads; but by the time they had dispatched their crews, traffic was back to normal.