Once back in LA, I did what any normal American boy with no prospects and no money would—I took the last of my cash and bought a house. That home, which belonged to some nice socialist friends of Dyanne’s similarly nice socialist parents, was in Echo Park, a barrio plagued by Chicano gangs. I loved it, especially for the apprehensive faces of my Hollywood contacts when I told them where I lived after inviting them to dinner. But, despite the gang graffiti on the garage door, the house itself was quite welcoming, a slightly long-in-the-tooth craftsman left over from the long gone days (1920s) when that neighborhood was tonier.
It was there, shortly after returning from Europe, that I entertained Love Story author and screenwriter Erich Segal. Just in the nick of time, the film adaptation of Heir was heating up and our mutual agent, Ron Mardigian of William Morris, brought Segal over. Segal was only a couple years older than I, but vastly more famous. “I wrote a book on Plautus,” were the first words out of his mouth. Evidently he wanted to make sure that I regarded him not as a mere author of schlocky best-sellers, but as a full-fledged Harvard classicist. His study of the Roman playwright, I was informed immediately thereafter—and, needless to say, without asking—had received “excellent reviews from the scholarly press.” I stopped myself from giggling. Much as I instantly knew the pompous Segal was an absurd choice to adapt my “noir-ish” novel of a rich boy driving his dead girlfriend around in the trunk of his car, I didn’t want to jeopardize the movie. I was still living more or less hand-to-mouth and would receive a significant check only upon filming.
In fact, I had been typing my next book practically from the moment I stepped off the boat from Europe, working against the clock to preserve my dream of becoming a writer from the encroaching reality of supporting a family. I gave up on the deserters, reaching for my subject into the world of my friends and acquaintances—the adventures of Barbara Garson and her husband Marvin. Politically speaking, they interested me more than the deserters. Barbara, a left-wing activist who had been in Dyanne and my screenwriting class at Yale, was notorious then for writing the anti-Vietnam War hit MacBird, a satiric Shakespeare knockoff in which a dolt-like LBJ was presented as a modern Macbeth. It ran Off-Broadway for several years. Marvin had been a somewhat less prominent Berkeley student protest figure. The theme of my book was to be what happens when a “revolutionary couple” sets out to change the world and ends up making a million in the process.
To demonstrate my growing support for women’s lib, or perhaps for the shock value of a man doing such a thing, I wrote the book in the female first person, looking backwards from Barbara’s point of view, or rather from the vantage of the fictional Barbara, Tanya “Mama Tass” Gesner. It was called The Mama Tass Manifesto and had the opening sentence, “If Emma Goldman could see me now, the only female gas station attendant in Brixton, Oklahoma.” The title was printed in the curvy font of a Grateful Dead poster and the flap copy included a quotation from Chairman Mao about the necessity of picking up the gun. (It was 1970!) Instead of the normal author photo on the back, the book had a reproduction of my driver’s license with the address crossed out, to give the impression of a mug shot.
Some of these packaging ideas came from my editor from Heir, Alan Rinzler, who bought the book for Holt, Rinehart & Winston when the manuscript was half finished. To this day, I thank him for it. It wouldn’t be the last time that he’d rescue me in a moment of need, although he would never publish the book you are reading or probably anything else I write for the foreseeable future. Alan—who published seminal works like Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land and Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas—now considers me an apostate and recently emailed me “I knew you when….”
And he isn’t the only one. At a cocktail party a few months back, I ran into the liberal humorist Harry Shearer of This is Spinal Tap and now of the Huffington Post. A mutual acquaintance, not realizing we had known each other for over thirty years, attempted to introduce us by asking Harry if he knew me. He replied cuttingly, “I knew Roger when he was another person.” There are plenty of others who just turned away.
But am I “another person”? I will leave that to the reader to decide.
In any case, The Mama Tass Manifesto is steeped in the radical politics of its time, which were all around me. Echo Park had become a haven for the refugees of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. Most of them were grouped around an organization called the Echo Park Food Conspiracy, led by the lawyer Art Goldberg and his sister Jackie, both of them ‘red diaper babies’ and self-proclaimed Maoist revolutionaries. Art still practices law in that neighborhood. Jackie is currently a California State Assemblywoman in the forefront of the gay marriage movement.
In those days, Jackie, occasionally accompanied by longtime California Communist Party leader Dorothy Healey, taught a course in American labor history one night a week at our house. Art, more of a glad-handing sort, ran the Food Conspiracy. The idea was to use cheap, cooperatively bought food as an organizing device, setting up a neighborhood market where young activists could radicalize the mostly Latino poor of the community. I remember the jovial Art walking among the various shoppers, thrusting his fist in the air and clapping some on the back. “Venceremos, amigos,” he’d say, “La lucha continua!” The struggle continues! He interspersed his barely serviceable Spanish with smiling nods to local Asians, whose native languages he couldn’t identify, let alone speak. Whenever he saw me, he’d pull me aside and say, “Hey, Roger, the struggle continues! Howzit goin’ in Hollywood, man? When’re we gonna get some of your movie star friends down here? Teach them a little Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung thought?” It was hard to tell if he was joking or not.
But in truth there were developing connections between the film world and the young radicals of the time, and I was a part of them. One of my first studio screenplay assignments after returning from Spain was an original idea of mine called The Black Wizard of the Dakotas. Inspired by John Ford and the left-wing Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha—and based on information I’d gleaned from Jackie’s labor history class—Black Wizard was a Marxist Western (with a hint of magic) about the nineteenth-century Colorado mining strikes. The script was developed at Warner Brothers for director Paul Williams. Williams had just made a critically-acclaimed but low-budget film called The Revolutionary, the tale of a college student known as “A” (played by Jon Voight, today one of the few movie star supporters of the Iraq War) who rebels against his bourgeois father and gets caught painting anti-capitalist manifestos on the wall. But I don’t think even Williams and his producer partner Ed Pressman had any idea of just how left my script would be. (Let’s say Maxim Gorky couldn’t have done better.)
Not that the executives at Warners seemed to care. There was no mention of the script’s politics in our meetings, but they eventually chose to make another film with Paul Williams on a subject they deemed more commercial: marijuana. Unfortunately, Dealing: Or the Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost Bag Blues was a flop. Williams—whose career skidded and who has had trouble making movies ever since—went on to attempt to help fugitive Black Panther Huey Newton escape to Cuba under bizarre and ironic circumstances, which I witnessed.
That Panther connection may have been what attracted Pressman and Williams to me in the first place. They probably knew something about it when they came to dinner in Echo Park the first time. At the time, I donated some of my Hollywood money to the Black Panther Breakfast Program; I regarded this humorously as a tithe, though it was considerably less than ten percent. (The Breakfast Program, which fed inner city children, was well publicized then and helped distract from some of the Panthers’ more controversial activities, like drug dealing and murder.) Around ten o’clock at night and often unannounced, some of the brethren in black berets and leather jackets would arrive at my house with a half-dozen or so kids in tow. “Hey, Rajah,” the ringleader would say, “these children got nowhere to go for ham ’n eggs tomorrow.”