Portrait of Dick Clark as an Eternally Young Deejay

"This is amazing." Dick Clark shakes his head ruefully with boyish rueful head-shake charm. "Isn't that Gregg Allman over there? Isn't it? He's lost his"--Dick Clark strokes the area just under his lower lip with his thumb and forefinger--"his, you know, but I think that's him." Gregg Allman, seated with four other people, none of them Cher, has his back to us.

"And over there. This is amazing. You know what that is. That's a sales meeting." Dick Clark points to a group of impeccably laid-back, blown-dry, bechained males, loaded with feet-on-the-ground, belt-tightening cool, listening to another equally so, charting and graphing and passing out 45s, all as fish-coated waiters pass coquilles (continued on page 192)Dick Clark(continued from page 151) Saint-Jacques at nose level and the Christian Brothers Chablis flows like wine. "All those guys are disco jockeys. They reach maybe 200 people a night, but they can make a record. They're hot."

Dick Clark taps me on the arm, not offensively--we've been like Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis in The Defiant Ones, the bearded journalist and the clean-cut entrepreneur chained together by a common appointment book, a murderous round of conferences, sessions, questions, hurried phone calls, missed meals, and a certain giddy sense of shared fatigue is permeating the conversation. "This is very good. You could start your story with this. We have three generations of the music business right here in this room. Those disco guys are what's going on right now, and I guess Gregg Allman is the Sixties, and then, of course, there's"--he does not like the word to fall this nakedly from his lips--"me."

I need another drink just then, and Dick Clark is running low on vodka and tonic tall, which is OK, because he frankly confesses that he's a man who likes a drink after work, maybe two, though he has never smoked marijuana--"I guess I came too late. I developed too many other habits"--but he has passed a joint from person A to person B and smiled, because he doesn't believe in telling other people how to live their lives, unless you're talking about something like heroin. Dick Clark is nice. I've been with him for what seems like forever, and he's nice. His girlfriend, who is also his assistant, says so. His business associates say so. His radio producer makes a special point of taking me into the control room and telling me the two things that 1 will hear and observe over and over again, until their veracity becomes as certain as sunrise: Dick Clark is nice. Dick Clark is a professional. Dick Clark is a nice professional. Dick Clark is a professional nice.

See him earlier this same day, posing for 8x10 glossies to promote his two-hour 25th-anniversary American Bandstand TV special, surrounded by three young women dressed to symbolize the three epochs of Clark's reign (wide jitterbug skirt and rolled sox, miniskirt and high white boots, denim pants suit). "Smile with your eyes but not with your mouth," the photographer tells the prom queens, and Dick Clark buries his head in his palm. It's like he keeps his face there, in some vestigial marsupial thumb pouch, and he slides it over his skeleton, pops his lips twice, claps his hands rapidly several times, then whirls around, grinning like a carnival, shifting his hands like a mechanical barker, selling the sizzle, selling the steak. Later, I watch him change shirts between takes and he reveals his chest so confidently, so pridefully, not even watching for the reaction his flat 47-year-old body might evoke, must evoke, and I say, "I get the feeling that somewhere in an attic in Philadelphia, there's a picture getting very, very old." Dick Clark smiles with his month but not with his eyes.

So he's a pro. He knows the package, he knows the product. He has written a book about American Bandstand and Dick Clark, and it's selling like hot plates, and it's not a bad book for one of those self-serving showbiz-career bios--as Chubby Checker is alleged to say on the back cover, "Dick Clark takes us all back to the time when the whole world was twisting, rockin' and rollin'. Rock, Roll & Remember is fascinating, fun and factual." Chubby has a way with words, though why he chose to spell out twisting while leaving the other participles in their colloquial form is uncertain. But it's also a very sly book, crafty, ambiguous at crucial moments, and in reading it, I kept thinking that Dick Clark knew a lot more than he was telling. Dick Clark is a secret something. Swinger? Drinker? Thinker?

"How come you didn't put the real business part into the book, all the tricks that you learned that made you more or less a success?"

He doesn't like the more or less. "Let me first of all say, Jon, that I am truly a success. By the standards of the world, I have success. I have money; I have respect; I have happiness; and I'm doing what I want."

"But you didn't get it listening to Donovan's crystal images tell you 'bout a brighter day. You've lasted 25 years in a nasty little business; you've negotiated a million contracts; you've seen careers made and lives destroyed. How did you get through?"

"I don't understand the question."

"Listen, you've been swimming with sharks for so long and you've still got all your fingers and toes, so you're either a shark or a man who knows how to survive among sharks, and either way, it's a story; it's a book."

Well, we're still not there, because he thinks it's the Organized Crime Question. Earlier, I had asked him something that he had interpreted as the Payola Question, and he gave me the Payola Answer, nearly verbatim from the book and, sadly, quite boring unless you're deeply involved in assigning minor historical blame, the misdemeanors of the 13th Century, Elizabethan petty thieves. Who cares how many wrist watches Dick Clark got in 1959? Will Dickie Do and the Don'ts demand reparations? So, finally, I asked him why he, out of all the people accused before Congressional committees--Alan Freed, for instance, who invented the phrase rock 'n' roll and played black rhythm-and-blues music for sweet Midwestern white kids--was able to resume his career and his life more or less undestroyed. American Bandstand never went off the air. Dick Clark said that he hated to say it, but those other guys, and they were the pioneers, those other guys didn't really have the brains, they just didn't plan carefully enough. Dick Clark kept records, Dick Clark paid taxes on everything; hell, he overpaid some years, just to avoid the merest hint of hanky or panky, since Government suspicion is as fatal to a defender of pubescent sexuality as actual crime, advertent or otherwise.

Dick Clark says that, though he's heard the stories just like anyone, he met no one in all his years in show business who had identified himself as being a member of the, you know, though, of course, he didn't want to sound naïve, certain people might be, but it was impossible to prove anything. I drink. He drinks. The need for more drinks is perceived.

Let us consider what it is Dick Clark does; let us consider how smart Dick Clark has to be. Dick Clark produces and stars in American Bandstand (Saturday, 11:30 A.M., ABC), now in its 25th year of bringing the best, the worst and the in-betweens of American popular music to America's young whippersnappers and snapperettes; Dick Clark produces a yearly New Year's Eve show for ABC; Dick Clark produces the American Music Awards, now in its fourth year; Dick Clark hosts a three-hour-weekly radio show heard on more than 100 stations; Dick Clark has a rock-'n'-roll revival show he books into Las Vegas casinos by convincing skeptical casino owners to let him four-wall their showrooms, a technique he invented: Dick Clark has several shows in the developmental stage; Dick Clark has his book, now in its fourth printing; Dick Clark puts out record albums of olden goldies with his face on the outside; Dick Clark also owns real estate and the handtooled Bibles are moving nicely, too, as they say.

Consider Dick Clark, earlier this same day, biz-chatting with Dick Ebersoll, latest immaculate guru of the National Broadcasting Corporation, since he promoted Saturday Night onto the air and now Saturday Night is all that NBC has to boast about in front of surly affiliates. Dick Clark is selling his own late-night package, which involves different locations and musical variety acts and somebody to tie it all together, and the question is, who is that somebody? So we're all sitting around this office, which looks like a living room, God forbid it should look like an office, viewing today's candidate on video tape, one Kip Addotta, a young comedian of profound obscurity who, because he is John Davidson's opening act and because Dick Clark Teleshows prodded John Davidson's summer TV show, Dick thinks is pretty good, maybe, but he wants a second opinion. The attitude Dick Clark takes at this meeting is that he is not selling Kip Addotta, but he and Ebersoll and I are sitting around as cocritics, because it wouldn't be too good to get closely identified with Kip at this point, because if Ebersoll nixes Addotta, it mustn't seem as though the whole project is tinged with error. But it turns out that Ebersoll likes Addotta quite a bit--"Why haven't I heard of him?" he keeps asking the air--and he wants to know if Kip can ad-lib and if Kip chokes when talking to the biggies, and Dick Clark doesn't know, but Dick Clark will find out and another meeting is set up for later in the week. And so we notice that Dick Clark has not sold anything, but Dick Ebersoll has bought something.

"I remember watching Bandstand in the Fifties," I say while Clark pushes shrimp cocktail around, "and seeing you make an odd movement with your head just as you introduced a song"--I try to demonstrate this mannerism--"a sort of, you know, gooseneck wobble, and I always thought that was your version of the pelvis shake, a secret dance, a social code in code."

Dick Clark looks absolutely blank.

"Well, 1 mean"--I have not thought this question out carefully enough--"there was something, there was such a difference between you and the music, nice you and nasty music, wasn't there?"

"Oh, I had to be clean. I had to be cleaner than clean. Remember that I was promoting this lascivious music to America's young people. Remember that the guy who had the show before me was arrested for statutory rape. I get a lot of knocks for playing white-bread music, but I grew up listening to black music. I'm the guy who put Chuck Berry on television for the first time, and Fats Domino and Jimmy Reed."

"And what the readers of Playboy want to know, Mr. Clark"--my cuff seems to have dipped into my martini glass--"is whether or not, in all that time, you did not screw even one of those nubile 14-year-olds behind the Bandstand top-ten board under the very eyes and more specifically the noses of Platterpuss and Autograph Hound?"

"Never. Not once. That wasn't my fantasy. I was never turned on by young girls. I was never tempted. And it's a good thing, because it's the quickest way for a disc jockey to destroy his career."

"And you never cheated on your first wife?"

"Never. I never cheated on either of my wives, unless you count the last year of my second marriage ... well, that's complicated. I just, I guess it was the way I was brought up."

"Is it not true that in your home you have a mirror above the bed hidden behind a sliding panel that is controlled by a button near your bedside and that one evening you pushed the button at a tactical moment only to see, instead of a mirror, a blown-up photograph of your closest friends looking down at you and waving?"

"Well, that's not precisely true, but, I don't think it would be good for, I mean, that happened, but. I think you could say that Dick Clark is very sex-oriented. That should be enough." He takes a very long drink. All day long, he has been disconcerted by my not asking questions, to the point where he started building little stories for me--"Here's a nice angle, you'll want to write that down"--and now he is suddenly facing the prospect that I have come to pillory him sexually, and it is not a pleasant moment for a man whose ultimate dream is to be, well, Johnny Carson. But me, I'm playing What's Your Secret? and robust heterosexuality blossoming in one's middle years does not seem to be where it's at. I think that I'm worrying about values and I realize that the alcohol has settled in my melancholy gland.

"What do you believe in?" I ask, somewhat inaudibly. To my surprise, his face lights up.

"Now, there's something I flat-out hate. I'm a private citizen. I don't have the right to use my talent, whatever I got for entertaining you, to try to persuade you of my political beliefs. I mean, entertainers can contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars to a politician by holding benefit concerts, but if you're not famous, you don't have that option. I flat-out hate that."

"Right," I say. "I can remember interviewing Stevie Winwood for Rolling Stone and knowing I had to do a 7000-word piece and realizing that Stevie Win-wood knew only about 100 words, which left me 6900 words short."

Dick Clark laughs. "Oh, the English. There's something I flat-out hate."

"You flat-out hate the English?"

"Well, I hate the way they all come over here and give interviews about what's wrong with this country while they're using our music and taking our money. I guess that's why I never thought much of the Sixties. I never understood the drug part and I never liked the English."

I mean, who can be offended? Who is not concerned about the same thing? Bloody little toy English people, the mantel ornaments of Western civilization, vestiges of genetic decay, clammily unhealthy, ripping off Chuck Berry and complaining about gun-control policies. Dick Clark is not convincing, but his sincerity is overwhelming, and in an industry where genuine means friendly, he's the fucking king of the mountain. He may not believe in anything except nice, but nice is better than cruel or greedy or loathsome or hopelessly psychotic, and that is the arena we are currently playing in.

"So I guess you could say that you believe in situation ethics?" Only a drunk would ask Dick Clark a question like that.

"What are they?"

"What are what?"

"What you said."

"Oh, well, that you decide what's right or wrong on a case-by-case basis, that dogma isn't helpful because dogma doesn't know."

"Yes, well, that's exactly right. I didn't know it had a name. That's what I believe in. Keep busy, and try to be a good guy, and you'll get what you want. The real bastards burn themselves out. I'm 25 years in and I'm doing more now than I ever have."

And of course. Silly me. Here we have a man who's proud of his association with black music and proud to call Pat Boone a friend, proud of his rapport with the Hell's Angels and proud of the 200 keys to the cities he's been given, proud of his real continued affection for hot dogs and stock-car races and proud that he produced the first show that displayed the birth of a baby live on television, proud of his fame and proud of his ability to accept life and keep going--yes, yes, that's all familiar, symptomatic, perfect.

A liberal.

Dick Clark is the liberal still hiding in America's closet, the honest unbought money-making liberal, an enemy of art but a promoter of artists, a man without perceivable musical tastes who shaped and supported some of the best musicians of his generation, a man who has never been seen dancing, judging and winnowing America's popular dances, a cultural pipeline as unobstructed by taste and passion on the inside as it is smoothly and attractively packaged on the outside. Dick Clark exudes personality, but it's almost impossible to remember his face--you recognize it, of course, but you can't recall it between times.

Gregg Allman is leaving the restaurant just as we're ordering one more for the road. He stops at our table and extends his hand. "Mr. Clark, I'm Gregg Allman and I just want to say that I've been watching you all my life and I want to say I really respect you."

Dick Clark leans forward, sparkling with Protestant suave. "Gee, thanks, Gregg. I really appreciate that. Thank you."