yourself without having to reveal too much of the real you.
Here are a couple of my Fang covers – the first was a kind of Hansel and Gretel thing, with evil dwarves killing rabbit. The other one found me doctoring an old photo to come up with Fang’s new tooth-inspired logo, which was much less work and therefore obviously the way to go in the future.
By the same token, one reason students tend to like watching kids’ TV shows is probably because even though you know you’re technically too old for them, they offer you a link back to the reassuring world of childhood. Thus at five o’clock in the afternoon the whole dorm would settle down to enjoy the many custard pies of Soupy Sales, or repeats of Albert Einstein’s favourite handpuppet show – Stan Freberg and Bob Clampett’s Time for Beany. It wasn’t just televisual comfort food either – kids’ shows often tended to be the most interesting, because the adults at the networks weren’t likely to be paying attention, so you could get away with murder . . . just as the proto-Python children’s programme Do Not Adjust Your Set would do when I came to England a few years later.
Fang’s most blatant steal from Help! were the fumetti. That lovely-sounding word – go on, roll it round your tongue – is Italian for ‘puffs of smoke’, which in this context is a more poetic way of saying ‘speech bubble’. The idea came from a wonderful Fellini film starring Alberto Sordi called Lo Sceicco Bianco (a.k.a. The White Sheik) – which made lustrously cinematic hay out of the Latin vogue for romantic photostories – and Harvey Kurtzman’s stroke of genius was to apply the medium satirically.
He’d always wanted to make films, and this way he could mirror the ambition and scope of a major Hollywood production on only a tiny fraction of the budget. As we soon discovered when we started doing them in Fang, fumetti were effectively stop-motion movies: a great cinematic training ground, not only in storytelling but also in making sets and costumes, and finding locations and actors. I loved creating these films in still form so much that I almost didn’t graduate.
I abused my editorial power by giving the lead role in our fumetti to Susan Boyle – not the singer, but the girl in my year who I was mad about. But she never seemed to get the message, even when I made us a joint ‘electrical’ plug costume for a fancy-dress party. Everyone else was quite – ahem – shocked that I would do something so blatant. (I was the male plug, and she was the socket: who said true romance was dead?) The symbolism didn’t elude her, it just didn’t translate into action.
Alert readers who have speculated that the sexual revolution had yet to reach the campus of Occidental College have certainly put their finger on it (which wouldn’t have been allowed in those days). The single-sex dormitory doors clanged shut at ten, and it was a real adventure just to sneak out and get a snog. As frustrating as this was at the time, I don’t think it was a bad thing. I went back years later to get an honorary degree, and by that time all the dorms were co-ed. Of course everyone was getting laid, but a lot of clever people were throwing their lives away by getting hitched too early too. I said to the students in my speech that if I was running the place, I would make it so Victorian that they’d all hate me . . . but in the end having to outwit me in order to give in to their basic instincts would make them stronger, cleverer people.
‘Homo-side Story’ was John Latimer’s idea – it was all good, gentle fun in a way you probably couldn’t get away with now. We’d be out on the streets of LA shooting with all the paraphernalia of actual filmmaking (including as many extras as we could talk into it) except the movie camera and the sound.
The area around the old downtown site of the Angel s Flight funicular railway – as seen here – was one of our favourite locations, because we could get on with what we wanted to do in the reasonable expectation that no one would bother us. It’s subsequently been redeveloped out of existence, so good luck to anyone planning to make a mildly homophobic remake of West Side Story there today.
As sheltered and carefree as my four years at college must sound (and do feel) in retrospect, I wasn’t living in a Brideshead Revisited bubble. I think one of the reasons my parents were so tolerant of my plummeting academic grades was that I never came whining to them for extra money. And the lessons I learned in the course of the motley assemblage of holiday jobs that helped me pay my way through college would prove just as enduring as the things I was being taught at Occidental.
My dad got me work humping stuff around on building sites, and I also worked in a butcher’s shop for a while, inevitably at the very bottom of the food chain – when you found yourself cleaning out the big barrels of salt beef (from the inside), you knew the only way was up. I also used to have to go into the walk-in freezer, which was always tricky because if you didn’t pay attention you’d find yourself impaled on one of those spikes that the meat hung from. A job in a restaurant posed more danger to the diners than to me, as I was basically there to swab floors and clean up messes, but when the salad boy was off, they’d make me do his job as well, so one minute I would be down on the floor, scrubbing away with some awful disinfectant, and then somebody would say ‘salad with vinaigrette’, and I’d leap up and with my filthy hands scoop up the lettuce, throw it into the bowl, and put the dressing on. I’ve often wondered how many customers died from that.
I also found gainful employment at the post office, where the game was to see how far away you could stand from the sorting cubicles and still throw the mail into the correct section, and as a shipping clerk in a factory which made beauty- salon furniture, packing huge lounge chairs and hoisting them onto the trucks (I loved the fact that – Archimedes-like – I could lever these wooden behemoths into their motorised receptacles single-handed). At this time I was also becoming a real freak for Russian literature in general and Dostoevsky in particular, so I’d sit there huddled among the crates with my little packed lunch reading The Brothers Karamazov – when the Soviet invasion finally came, I was going to be first in line to welcome them: ‘Comrade, I know your books, as well as your language.’
While the long-promised communist takeover stubbornly refused to materialise, the job that would impact most explicitly on my subsequent creative endeavours was on the assembly-line night shift at the Chevrolet car plant – going in at eight in the evening and working through until five the next day. The nightmarish production lines that often cropped up in Monty Python animations were certainly inspired by this experience. Not so much because the repetitive and regimented nature of the work itself gave me any particular problems – Sisyphus was always my favourite classical character – but more because the pressure to keep up with the pace of the line did interesting things to your mind.
The belt moved at fifty-two cars an hour – slightly less than one a minute. Since I’d got that red and green ‘numbers hidden in the dots’ test wrong, and as a result was deemed to be slightly colour blind (a vital attribute in any fine artist in waiting, as I’m sure you’ll agree), the only job they’d trust me with was washing the right-hand front, side, and rear windows inside and out, to remove the inspector’s grease pencil hieroglyphs. Unfortunately, in this particular era of brashly expansive mid-century automotive design, that meant covering a hell of a lot of glass.
A 1959 chevrolet impala – look at the size of the windscreen on that baby!
There was no way I could finish inside and out in just over a minute. While my genial workmates (most of whom seemed happy to work through nine hours of darkness in return for the freedom their wages bought them in the next fifteen hours of daylight) were off enjoying a tea break, I could often be found way down into the next person’s section, drops of falling