Rat Pack
Elia Kazan, Linda Tripp, Christopher Hitchens--What's not to love?
In life, as in acting, timing is
everything. (Well, except for
looks. And luck. And having
rich, connected parents.) So
give Elia Kazan, the stage
director-cum-film
director-cum-stoolie-
cum-patriot-cum-"bourgeois slob"
(so declares the man himself in
his 1988 autobiography), this
much: For an old man wearing
adult diapers, his timing is
still pretty damn impeccable.
Indeed, on that score at least,
even Abraham Polonsky—the
Stalinist screenwriter who says
he hopes Kazan gets shot and who
asked the Hollywood crowd to sit
on their own hands (rather than
each others') on Oscar night –
would have to agree.
Replicating the lucky
intersection of fiction and
reality that helped boost the
box office take of such films as
The China Syndrome (fortuitously
released at the same time that
the Three Mile Island nuclear
plant blew its stack), Absolute
Power (fortuitously released at
the same time that a sex
offender occupied the Oval
Office), and 2001: A Space
Odyssey (fortuitously released
at the same time that humans had
evolved to a point where they
would pay to see two-plus hours
of Keir Dullea jogging in zero
gravity), Kazan managed to
finally snag his overdue
lifetime-achievement Academy
Award at the precise moment when
being a rat is suddenly the Next
Big Thing again.
And let's give Kazan an added
bonus too: His presence will
enliven an Academy Award
broadcast whose main draw—and
it's a good one—is a widely
advertised lack of Billy
Crystal. (Crystal, incidentally,
did not respond to more than
1,000 requests by this reporter
asking if his decision not to
host the Oscars this year was,
in fact, made by the forces of
international Communism. He was
similarly unresponsive when
asked the same question about
his decision to make the
anticapitalist propaganda piece,
City Slickers II: The Legend of
Curly's Gold.)
Rats haven't been this popular
since the early '70s, when
flicks like Willard and Ben
(featuring the Michael Jackson
ballad about an interspecies
love that dares not speak its
name) had the whole nation
rooting for ill-tempered vermin.
To be sure, these days, rats
aren't quite as popular as when
they were chewing up Ernest
Borgnine's face on the big
screen.
Exhibit A in this turn of events
is, naturally, Linda Tripp, who
has played the thankless Joyce
DeWitt role in the ongoing East
Coast remake of Three's
Company. Beyond all else, what
people absolutely loathe about
Tripp—whose US$90,000+ annual
salary at the Pentagon is one of
the great nonsexual scandals of
the Clinton administration (for
that kind of coin, you'd think
she would have to kill a few
Sudanese babies with her bare
hands or something)—is the
fact that she "betrayed" her
"friend" Monica Lewinsky and, so
the story goes, "ruined" the
poor girl's future (precisely
what sort of future Lewinsky –
who told Newsweek that she would
consider attending law school if
it weren't for that pesky LSAT –
had is never spelled out).
In truth, by finking her out,
Tripp turned Lewinsky into
precisely the celebrity she
clearly always wanted to be:
the United States' answer to Princess Di
(well, maybe Fergie's more like
it; in any case, we await the
Elton John rewrite of "Candle in
the Wind"). Even more than
giving her fame and fortune, by
counseling the highly absorbent
intern to save that blue dress,
Tripp provided Lewinsky with the
physical evidence that
vindicated her story of an
actual relationship with the
prez (and let's face it, Tripp
or no Tripp, Paula Jones case or
no Paula Jones case, the
famously loose-lipped Lewinsky –
hence the presence of stain in
the first place—would have at
some point gone public with her
updating of the Abélard-Héloïse
myth). Absent the dress,
Lewinsky would most likely be
the valedictorian at a DC giggle
academy somewhere (one that
doesn't require the LSAT for
commitment), mumbling heavily
sedated tales of Oval Office sex
parties and occupying a
well-padded room between John
Hinckley Jr. and the
enterprising fellow from a few
years ago, who scaled the White
House fence and took pot shots
at the presidential mansion.
Exhibit B is Nation columnist
self-styled "man of the left,"
whose bid to become his
generation's Whittaker Chambers
has included not only erratic
personal behavior and bad teeth
(lest we forget the most bizarre
vignette from the Cold War that
was left on the cutting-room
floor of the recent CNN
documentary: Communist copy boy
Alger Hiss only admitted knowing
Chambers after peering into the
latter's legendarily
snaggle-toothed food hole) but
the willingness to fink on a
"friend." Hitchens, immediately
dubbed Snitchens by wags
relieved that his surname was
not Orange, ratted on Sidney
Blumenthal, the one-time
journalist who assumed the staff
position vacated by Monica
Lewinsky in the Clinton White
House. Specifically, Snitchens
signed an affidavit
contradicting Blumenthal's
testimony that the president
never circulated tales about
Lewinsky being a stalker. "Is it
a principle to betray a friend?"
asked a New Yorker editor at a
"clear the air" tribunal
convened at The Nation's "spiffy
new offices."
Apparently not at a magazine
that had a soft spot for Stalin
and still carries a torch for a
Democratic president, whose
chief accomplishments include
delivering congressional
majorities to the Republicans,
ostensibly balancing the federal
budget (another GOP favorite),
and kicking thousands of bums
off of welfare (ditto). Of
course, the principle that the
enemy of my friend is my enemy
(unless they're both my friends,
in which case, let's just get
together and make prank phone
calls to the enemies of my
friends' friends) remains in
force: Fellow Nation columnists
Alexander Cockburn (who anointed
his old chum "a Judas and a
snitch") and Katha Pollitt (who
falsely claimed that Hitchens
had once referred to dames as
"douche bags") laid into
Hitchens, and tales of his
denying the Nazi-driven
Holocaust quickly circulated. In
a recent Letters page, The
Nation announced that "about 95
percent" of its mail has been
negative toward Hitchens
and has contained numerous cancellation
threats and demands that he be
canned.
Leading the contemporary rat
race, of course, is Kazan
himself, who famously named
names before the House Committee
on Un-American Activities in the
early 1950s. (Almost as
famously, he recounts in his
autobiography, he also banged
Marilyn Monroe the very night
she got engaged to Joltin' Joe
DiMaggio.) Kazan, a one-time
Communist Party USA member,
coughed up the names of
eight people while in a
cell in the Group Theater; all
were already known to
the committee and all
were or had been active members
of the party. Over the years,
undeniable documentation has
emerged that the CP-USA was a
Soviet-run front that routinely
demanded that its members lie
about its membership and true
aims. In fact, Gus Hall,
long-time leader of the party,
was cutting Bolshevik checks for
about $2 million a year well
into the 1980s. (The gravy train
only dried up when Hall
criticized Mikhail Gorbachev's
glasnost and perestroika reforms
as "old social democratic
thinking class collaboration.")
The party also demanded that its
artist members tailor their work
to party fashions. Dalton
Trumbo, later of Hollywood Ten
fame, meant his antiwar novels
Johnny Got His Gun and The Remarkable
Andrew, written during the
Stalin-Hitler pact years, to
dissuade American participation
in World War II. Another
Hollywood Ten member,
screenwriter Albert Maltz, who
timidly suggested in The New
Masses that artists might enjoy
something like creative freedom,
was castigated for his
"bourgeois liberalism" and later
publicly criticized both
himself and other members
foolish enough to defend his
original essay.
Such facts, along with the
well-known and finally accepted
reality that Stalin was not in
any sense a good Joe, make it
impossible to brand Kazan as
simply a liar or right-wing
dupe. As even Nation publisher
Victor Navasky, author of Naming
Names, the book that continues
to shape memories of the
Hollywood blacklist, grants
these days, "There's nothing
wrong with naming names per se,"
it all depends on the names. So
the attacks on the director tend
to emphasize not politics and
truthfulness but—what else? –
that he betrayed his "friends,"
a no-no everywhere, but
especially in Hollywood, where
relationships are forever. As
Rod Steiger, who memorably ended
up on a meat hook in Kazan's On
the Waterfront defense of his
testimony, recently mumbled on
CNBC's Hardball, ratting out
friends is "an unforgivable sin."
(Apparently, there are special
dispensations for working with a
rat.)
Indeed, the attacks on
Tripp, Hitchens, and Kazan—and
the next rat to join the parade
and keep it moving for at least
a few more months, Boy George
Stephanopoulos, whose memoir All
Too Human: A Political
Education, has been criticized
not for its accuracy but for its
timing—underscore that we
detest rats not because of any
grand "friendship über alles"
principle. In each case,
regardless of their own manifest
personal failings and self-
serving rationalizations, the
rats have simply gnawed through
carefully cultivated illusions –
that Stalin's secret fans were
simply well-meaning "social
idealists" (Navasky's term) and
not irredeemable bastards who
didn't mind the gulag as long as
they would be manning the gates;
that Clinton is somehow not a
personal and political
superfreak who has fucked over
those who believed in him most
of all. The rats have forced us
to behold uncomfortable truths
about our most cherished
delusions. No wonder we hate
them so much.
Nick Gillespie is editor-in-chief of reason. This story originally appeared in Suck, and can be viewed in that format here.