PART 20: REACHING FOR THE STARS

The first piece of interoffice mail I received at Brooklyn College was a memo from Payroll telling me my salary had been raised to $9200 – an extra $70 a month with which to splurge. And it wasn’t easy money; the teaching load for junior faculty was four courses, which included three sections of composition. That’s twice as many courses as professors at major universities teach. It was the same course load I’d had for the past few years at Hunter, where I made even less money. But that was the way everyone started.

When I got my doctorate, people asked me if I felt different, now that I had three new letters added to my name. Did young Jack Donne, rake and poet, feel different when he became old Dr. Donne, the Dean of St. Paul’s? His poems didn’t change all that much; early on, he wrote about sex as if it were a religion, and later, about religion as if it were sex. My life had barely changed in its externals. I had a little more money, a longer commute, and a big increase in status within the academy, but just as in graduate school where I had had to sing for my supper by writing a dissertation, now, if I wanted to climb the academic ladder – to assistant professor with tenure, to associate professor, to full professor – I would have to write my way up. Brooklyn was much less demanding about publication than the elite universities were; Harvard and Princeton expect a book at each stage, and eventually I would have to (and did) publish a book if I wanted to to the top rung at Brooklyn or wherever I was by that time. But all that was required  to achieve tenure and an assistant professorship at Brooklyn were a few scholarly articles in respectable periodicals (which had catchy titles like Publication of the Modern Language Association, Annals of English Drama 975-1700 and, my favorite, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology). This didn’t dismay me; it was what I wanted to do, and I did it with some success: in the next seven years, four of my articles were published. Not a star track record by any means, but respectable. And I was also writing book reviews for Saturday Review, Commentary and The New Republic.

Teaching composition was still, and always would be, a chore, but my elective course was half of a two-semester upper-class elective survey of Shakespeare’s plays, which required of the students two prerequisite literature courses to enter. And here, I was in my element. Every department has a Shakespeare guy, and I was hel. These were the most popular courses in the English department, because Shakespeare had become a rock star. Every semester there would be a wait-list with 15 or 20 names on it, students who had been squeezed out in the crush of registration and wanted what was known as an “overtally” – a permission slip, signed by me, allowing them into the course. A line of mendicants would form outside my office, seeking my blessing to shoehorn themselves into an already full classroom. They knew that I knew that several students already in the course would drop during the first week, frightened off by the syllabus, which I’d made as threatening as possible: I had appended a list of secondary sources to be read (no one ever read them), and in the course description I used phrases like “in the context of the historical and social background of the early modern period” and “the literary and dramatic conventions of Renaissance theatrical practice.”  But teachers who gave out overtallies indiscriminately often found themselves with five or six extra mouths to feed in the classroom, and there were already 30. Still, I might make room for a few promising kids, if they said the magic words. Here is what the magic words were not: “Professor, I have to take this course! If you don’t give me an overtally, I won’t graduate on time!” I want, I need, I have to have. What I was listening for was, “Professor, I can be an asset to the course. I played Petruchio in high school, I always raise my hand in class, and I already have an idea for a term paper topic.” This formula regularly provided me with a sampling of the best Humanities students BC had to offer.

The commute notwithstanding, I was enjoying my first real job. I was still tied to  Columbia; BC’s library wasn’t adequate for research purposes, so I used my alumni privileges at Butler, and my heart still sank a little when I emerged from the subway at 116th Street and Broadway glimpsed the frieze that surrounds that self-important name-dropping library: HOMER HERODOTUS SOPHOCLES PLATO ARISTOTLE DEMOSTHENES CICERO VERGIL – and that’s only the front. Dead white men – Columbia’s idea of what a liberal arts education is all about. 

At first, the academic routine didn’t seem truly routine, but it soon would. All those promotions are valuable – each comes with a pay bump, credit toward sabbaticals or released time, and often, one fewer course to teach – but they don’t disguise the fact that being a college teacher, whatever your rank, is pretty much the same-old same-old until retirement. Every September and every January, you walk into a room filled with students, distribute the course description, and start your spiel; two months later you’re grading mid-term exams; then more yammering, and at term’s end you collect the term papers, spend an exhausting week reading them, give the final exam, try to decipher the handwriting in all those blue books, and finally assign the students their semester grades. Then it starts all over again. Both the myth of Sisyphus and Zeno’s Paradox come to mind.

And my $9K per annum was barely subsistence-level pay. I could afford my apartment’s $125 a month rent, food, movie admissions and the occasional date, but my working wardrobe was pretty threadbare -- two sports jackets and three pairs of trousers and four button-down shirts, two white and two blue. My students noticed things like that, too, as I realized when I walked into my classroom and heard one kid exclaim triumphantly to the guy next to him, “Blue! Gimme the fifty cents.” But I was resigned to a life of genteel poverty until one day, my phone rang.

“Hello?” said a female voice with slight Midwestern overtones. “You don’t know me, but I have a question to ask you. Would you like to be on a quiz show?”

You bet I would. Quiz shows had been around for decades, but the prizes were puny until The 64,00 Question came along. Its successor, Twenty-One, had sparked a scandal in 1957 involving a Columbia professor named Charles Van Doren who had held the country spellbound as he racked his brains, agonized, and finally answered a series of arcane questions that won him the (then) astronomical sum of $129,000. It turned out that it was all acting; Van Doren had been given the answers in advance by the show’s producers, and coached in performing his histrionics. He was disgraced and banished from Columbia (his opponent only got screwed out of his winnings), but the show’s popularity had established a trend: you could at least theoretically make big bucks by answering questions like “What motion picture won the Academy Award for 1955?” or “What was the fate of Henry VIII’s fourth wife?” Child’s play for a movieholic English teacher. So I said, “Sure! Who is this?”

“My name is Nancy Wasserman,” said the voice on the phone, “and I work on an NBC quiz show called Reach for the Stars. Your friend Susan Witty was a contestant, and she recommended you to us. Have you ever seen the show?”

I hadn’t, but so what? An MC asked you questions, you answered more of them than the other contestants, they gave you prizes. But when I called Susan Witty to ask about her experience – she hadn’t won anything, but had fun – she explained about quiz shows. They weren’t as straightforward as I’d thought. On What’s My Line, Beat the Clock and The Price is Right there was always a wrinkle or a catch, and there was one of each on Reach for the Stars. The wrinkle was that instead of answering a question, you might be asked to perform a stunt. The catch was that the prizes weren’t cash, but merchandise. This made winning a losing proposition. Whatever you won – a car, a boat -- you had to pay income tax on its fair-trade value, which was always more than it really cost at the dealers’. Jeopardy, on ABC, would have been preferable because it awarded cash prizes, but that wasn’t on the table.

And Nancy Wasserman wasn’t inviting me to be a contestant; I would have to prove my mettle by taking an entrance exam. Well, taking exams was what I’d been doing for decades, so that didn’t scare me. The following week, I went down to the show’s offices and found a room with a dozen assorted people sitting in chairs facing a very good-looking, very young woman with short dark hair and a killer smile. There was no preamble; when we were all present and accounted for, Nancy turned to me and sang, “Anything you can do, I can do better.”   

Irving Berlin, Annie Get Your Gun. “I can do anything better than you,” I sang back. Little did we realize that we were defining the parameters of our relationship. “No you can’t.” “Yes I can.” “No you can’t.” “Yes I can, yes I can, yes I can!!” Most of the other hopefuls looked at each other mystified – had we rehearsed this? Of course not; we were simply on the same wave-length. Nancy bantered with each of them in turn, and then gave us a very easy written 20-question test and dismissed us. The next day, she phoned me. “You’re a 20,” she said.

That meant that I would be up against a tough opponent. Since the Van Doren episode, quiz shows had found a new, semi-ethical way of rigging the process of matching contestants. They had very little interest in how smart you were; it was all about being telegenic, which I guess I was, and about ensuring that the game would be tightly contested. The test score just told them on which rung of the ladder to place you. They’d start out with three 10s; one would win, and they’d bring in two 12s, and so on up to the top. You stayed on the show as long as you kept winning. They currently had a housewife from New Jersey who had won five times in a row, and they were looking for someone to knock her off. Nancy told me to show up at NBC’s Studio 8H the following Monday, with two changes of clothing because they taped multiple episodes in a single morning. All my jackets and shirts looked pretty much alike, but at least my ties were different. I sat in the Green Room with the housewife from New Jersey and the other fellow who would make up our trio until someone knocked and said “Time!” At which point the housewife from New Jersey – Phyllis, her name was – took out a can of hairspray and filled the room with noxious aerosol. If it was a ploy, it worked; coughing and blinded, I stumbled out to the set, dazzled by the blazing lights.

The format of Reach for the Stars was simple enough. Three contestants faced an emcee who said, to each in turn, “Reach for the stars!” – at which, if you were up, you ran over to a large magnetic board on which were affixed, by magnets, a number of cardboard stars in different colors, covered with glitter. You plucked a star from the board and handed it to the emcee, who turned it over and read aloud whatever was written on the back, which might be either a question or an instruction to perform a stunt. I really hoped I wouldn’t have to perform a stunt. At the end, the contestant who was in the lead got a shot at the grand prize, which that day was a car.

                        A contestant performing a stunt, with the stars in the background

The emcee was a sportscaster named Bill Mazer, who also hosted a talk-radio show called “Stump the Amazin’” on NBC. It too was a kind of quiz show: drawing on his truly voluminous memory, he answered sports trivia queries phoned in by listeners. And he was indeed amazing; if you asked him who had played third base for the Cardinals when they won the pennant in 1964, the answer would come immediately -- “Ken Boyer,” he’d say, and then recite Boyer’s lifetime batting average and the other teams he’d played for, perhaps accompanied by a personal reminiscence. There was no Google for him to consult, no time for him to look things up: it was all there in his capacious and obsessive memory. I was a fan of his show, and the only contestant that day who recognized him. That gave me some kind of edge, I thought.

Nancy had told me that this particular show would be a mano-a-mano duel between me and Phyllis, who had won four successive times in a row, and I had been selected to knock her off. The third contestant wasn’t thought to pose much of a threat to either of us, and indeed, as the game wore on, he answered very few questions. Phyllis only missed one. I missed two. “Who led the raid on the government’s arsenal at Harper’s Ferry?” It was my first question, and nervousness made me blank on the name “John Brown.” But unforgivably, a few minutes later, when I was given a fat pitch that I should have hit out of the park, I whiffed. Who wrote the lines “Half a league, half a league, half a league onward?” Okay, the 19th century wasn’t my field, but it’s not as if I’d never read Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” But what came out of my mouth was “Browning” – I was still thinking about John Brown.

I was also called upon to perform a stunt, which I’d dreaded – and rightly so. I was given five sharpened wooden pencils of different lengths and a tin pie plate, and I had to balance all of the pencils, points up, on the plate, with my fingertips. It would have been easier if they’d all been the same length, but I kept getting three or four of them in position and letting them slip as I tried for the next. It seemed to take forever – and my hands were shaking. The camera caught this in close-up, and Nancy told me much later that seeing my tremor made her fall in love with me.

My proudest moment that day was when Mazer asked me to name two teams that Babe Ruth had played for, and I named all three. The Boston Red Sox had traded Ruth to the Yankees at the beginning of his career, which saddled them with what is still known as “The Curse of the Bambino,” and the Yankees, to their everlasting shame, sent him back to Boston – the Braves, this time – at the end of his career. Mazer smiled beatifically at me, two sports geeks having a moment. But the shot at the Grand Prize -- a Pontiac Firebird convertible -- went to Phyllis. She answered the question that won her the car, and I could have answered it too. Are you ready for it? It’s in three parts. A wrong answer will stop you. With which wars do you associate the following novels: The Red Badge of Courage, All Quiet on the Western Front, and Rabble in Arms?

I had read the first two books, so I didn’t have to guess: the Civil War and World War I.  But I’d never heard of Rabble in Arms. A mental picture appeared: a painting that I had seen somewhere of a barefoot waif playing a military drum. It made me think of Washington’s troops, freezing and starving in the cold winter of 1775, so the answer had to be “The American Revolutionary War.” And it was. Except that the painting I had in mind, which is by William Morris Hunt, dates from 1862, and the drummer is summoning volunteers for the War Between the States. So I didn’t win a hot car, which was just as well. Phyllis, on her accountant’s advice, turned down the car and the boat she’d won the day before; she was too smart to fall victim to the IRS. The show’s producer told us that our battle had been the highlight of the season – Reach for the Star’s best show during its brief tenure of 13 weeks.

I did win something – $100 worth of merchandise from a catalogue store called Spiegel’s, and two live sea horses, which, thank God, never arrived. And I also won the show’s production assistant, Nancy, who had refused to date me before I’d appeared and lost to avoid the conflict of interest. In effect, I was rewriting my dissertation as Marriage and Money in American City Comedy, 1967.  The interest must have been apparent on both sides; as she was leaving the studio, Phyllis said to Nancy, “Send me a wedding announcement.” She knew a thing or two, that Phyllis.