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$400 for two months less valid state and federal employment charges didn’t seem like such a bad deal with food and lodging thrown in…and Camp Trinity did live up to its ‘party ranch’ sobriquet to the extent that I finally managed to divest myself of that possession which no self-respecting twenty-one-year-old man – even one who had gone to college on a missionary scholarship – would wish to carry with him too much further over the threshold of adulthood. This landmark was passed in the company of one of my fellow counsellors, I hasten to add, not one of my impressionable young charges. No names, no pack-drill beyond that, though – who do you think I am, Zsa Zsa Gabor?
In later years, once I’d been lucky enough to get the chance to direct movies of my own, I would learn to identify a mysterious – sometimes magical and sometimes disastrous – process whereby ‘the making of the film becomes the story of the film’. But I would never have found myself in the director’s chair (a largely metonymic furnishing concept in itself, as you’re generally spending too much of your time rushing around in a panic to sit down all that much) without an approximately equal and opposite propensity for imagining my way into pre-existing narratives. This staple resource of the child’s imagination is one I have adapted to become the motor of my adult life. The big question I have never quite been able to answer is, ‘Am I driving the car, or merely hitching a lift?’
It never feels like I’m in control of the direction the traffic is going in, and yet somehow it always ends up reaching some kind of destination, and more often than not the one I originally intended. Reading Moss Hart’s autobiography at Camp Trinity in the summer of 1962 was one of the most influential events of my whole life. So complete was my identification with the character of the director of disastrous summer-camp drama productions who somehow progressed to co-writing Broadway hits alongside his hero George S Kaufman that it motivated me to pursue my own goal of working for Harvey Kurtzman with single-minded dedication. I’ve never thought of myself as a particularly ambitious person, and yet those who have read that book more recently than I assure me that I actually twisted its narrative framework quite considerably to fit the requirements of my own professional advancement.
Either way, it’s a great book. And the story of the callow youth who suddenly found himself in a creative partnership with his hero had enough plausibility to sustain me through Harvey’s rejection of my initial Hart-inspired overtures. I’d cheekily sent a couple of copies of Fang to the Help! offices in New York while I was still at Oxy, and he’d been very positive about them (to be honest, it was kind of him not to sue us for copyright infringement), but when Act One inspired me to contact him again to raise the possibility of my heading to the home of Help! – rapidly becoming a mecca for a new generation of what would later be known as underground cartoonists – Harvey did not exactly encourage me. His reply was roughly along the lines of, ‘Don’t bother – there’s a million people in this town with no jobs. Why would you want to join them?’
When I refused to take his no for an answer, he agreed to meet me at the Algonquin Hotel in NYC – a key location in Hart’s story: the former home of the distinctly non-Arthurian Round Table of literary wits Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, George Kaufman et al. Surely this had to be a good omen? So it proved, as just as I walked in through those most elegant of revolving doors, Harvey’s now former assistant Chuck Alverson was – if not physically, then at least in career terms – on his way out.
The Algonquin Hotel, scene of my auspicious first meeting with Harvey kurtzman.
I’d gone there with no expectation of getting a job, but I’d saved enough money working at Camp Trinity to buy a bit of time, and I just wanted to give myself a chance to make something happen. The first time I stepped out of the station at Times Square, the impact of the looming tall buildings hit me right in the guts. That’s the fundamental difference between LA and New York – the former is flat, while the latter is way over your head. People didn’t generally look at the best part of the buildings – which was the tops – because their gaze was glued to the pavements, but my neck was always craning upwards. I think that’s why so many of my films (Brazil and The Fisher King being the obvious ones, but it applies to Baron Munchausen and Time Bandits as well) ended up having a vertiginous aspect – because it’s taken me decades to process the overwhelming impact of my first arrival in New York.
Knocking on the door of that suite in the Algonquin was no less of a headrush. Inside that room were all the famous cartoonists I’d grown up admiring (or at least so it seemed to me at the time – Willy Elder, Al Jaffee and Arnold Roth were definitely there). And what were this pantheon of the cartooning gods working on? Why, a salacious spoof comic for Playboy called Little Annie Fanny – just as Zeus had decreed they should be. Harvey had popped out for a minute, but when he did turn up, he was a lot smaller than I expected (perhaps inevitably given the superhero status I had accorded him) – this little brown nut of a man, vibrating with compressed energy.
As if this scenario was not already idyllic enough, Harvey offered me Chuck’s job more or less on the spot. This was beyond luck, it was destiny. OK, so the $50 a week he was going to pay me was $2 a week less than the dole would have been, but as excited as I’d been by the dream of working on Help!, the reality was even better. Life was moving so fast that it felt like the city was setting a beat – every morning I’d wake up and New York would say, ‘Ramming speed: Boom! Boom! Boom! ’
My old Fang buddy John Massey, moon-lighting in deep water as a Help! cover star.
Chuck Alverson – who hadn’t been sacked, he just had other things to do such as working for the Wall Street Journal – kindly took me under his wing and let me sleep on his couch for a while until I got a place of my own. At one point I found myself rooming with a bunch of air stewardesses who wanted to act but in the meantime would come in at all hours of the night from long-haul flights. Then I got my own room in an avariciously subdivided mansion block right up by Columbia University.
It was fully 8-foot by 8-foot, with a basin and my own toilet somehow crammed in. There was just enough room for a bed and the desk I shared with a pet cockroach (who loved paint and would come out to sniff the plate I used to mix the colours on), so I’d move everything onto the bed when I had work to do, and then back onto the desk when it was time to sleep. Whenever I sat down to work, the cockroach would come scuttling out from his quarters in the desk (which were proportionately a good deal more spacious than mine) to get a lung-full – if cockroaches have lungs – of whatever noxious lead fumes were on offer. I would later pay tribute to our interspecies friendship in one of my first extended animations, Story Time, but for the moment I certainly appreciated the company.
Living in New York wasn’t exactly lonely, but it did teach you how