Snapshots from the ’60s

originally published March 19, 2008

Satisfaction, or Not: As anyone who listens to oldies radio can tell you, nostalgia tends to be fairly disingenuous. This is especially true of ’60s nostalgia, which tends to dwell on fuzzy memories of Woodstock, Haight-Ashbury and Vietnam. But the San Francisco ’60s were not the New York ’60s, nor the London ’60s, and certainly not the Midwestern ’60s, which had as little to do with flower-power as chalk has to do with cheese. As with any other era in the vast expanse of a decade, the ’60s were a far greater tapestry than Time-Life Records would suggest in their late-night commercials.

Zachary Lazar, who wasn’t even around for the ’60s, invokes the essence of that time, in all its varied glory and decadence, in his remarkable new novel Sway (Little Brown, 2008). Based on meticulous research, the novel envisions the paths of three notable figures of the time, as those paths wind and converge and part again on their way to inevitable tragedy. Lazar steps into the mind of Rolling Stones founder Brian Jones, as his little rhythm-and-blues band finds itself catapulted into a sudden success for which he is utterly unprepared. A brilliant musician, but neither a songwriter nor a showman, Jones watches as Mick Jagger takes over his band, and his girlfriend Anita Pallenberg gravitates toward the much cooler Keith Richards. Finding himself becoming obsolete, Jones hastens the process through drugs and violence, and eventually drowns in his own swimming pool while surrounded by people who either don’t notice or don’t care. This is old news, rock and roll lore, but Lazar’s imagining of Jones’s interior life is insightful and heartbreaking. For the first time, I found myself empathizing with the existential angst of being young, rich and famous.

Parallel to Jones’ dark journey are the trips of gay experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger (most famous for his book Hollywood Babylon) and failed-musician-cum-Manson-Family-acolyte Bobby Beausoleil. Lazar follows Anger through the chrysalis of his teen years struggling with a nascent preference for boys and rough trade in the unforgiving ’40s and ’50s; through his attempts to carve out a career making deeply disturbing but evocative films on his own terms; and eventually meeting Beausoleil, a drifter with a guitar and a penchant for making life difficult for everyone around him. The three story threads converge with Anger’s film Invocation of My Demon Brother, an attempt to act out Anger’s fascination with the occult through a bizarre Stones performance, with Beausoleil in a part. When the trails diverge again, Jones is dead, the Stones are on their way to the tragedy at Altamont, and Beausoleil is drifting again, this time toward Spahn Ranch and his destiny as part of Charlie Manson’s tribe.

The novel’s connections are tenuous, really, the convergence little more than a relative blip in the histories of any of these people, but what gives the story its power is Lazar’s deft and emotional prose, and his skill at getting inside the heads of these very different people and showing us the joys and chaos of their time through their respective eyes. The result is a powerful novel that manages the near-impossible, to actually say something new about the ’60s.

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Meanwhile, in Hollywood: If this year’s Academy Awards seemed a bit odd, defying the abilities of anyone I knew, at least, to predict the winners - Marion Cotillard? Diablo Cody? - imagine how perplexing they were in 1967. That year proved to be a turning point in Hollywood as the Best Picture nominees were a pair of maverick all-but-independent films - two films about race relations starring Sidney Poitier, and one of the last of the big-budget musicals from the creaky and gasping studio system. The selection proved to be stark, undeniable proof that the movie business was undergoing a changing of the guard that would result in some of the finest cinema ever made, as documented in Mark Harris’s remarkable book Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood (Penguin, 2008).

The movies in question were Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? and Doctor Dolittle. The making of any one of these films would merit a book in its own right, but Harris tackles all five in interwoven fashion, from their initial concepts through endless meetings and negotiations, casting and recasting, wranglings with studio heads and temperamental stars, and the upheavals each of the films wrought in the old ways of doing the movie business. Harris’s research is exhaustive and his handling deft as he neatly segues from Poitier’s struggles to balance his obligations as a black movie star in the civil rights era with his longing to play roles that didn’t depend on his blackness, to Rex Harrison’s determination not to be upstaged in Dolittle by any actor who could sing better than he could (which, let’s face it, was just about anyone), to Bonnie and Clyde’s journey from an attempt to imitate the French New Wave to one of the most quintessential pieces of Americana ever shot.

The book is fascinating, not only as an invaluable look at the motion-picture industry as it moved from the era of the movie moguls to the era of directors like Coppola, Scorsese and Altman (covered in Peter Biskind’s indispensable 1999 book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, a great book to read after this one), but as a portrait of a changing American landscape, the nation’s entertainment reflecting its fading innocence and growing cynicism.

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In Book News This Month: Want a job in the publishing industry? Apparently the major houses could really use some fact-checkers, because Penguin USA just recalled all copies of the recent autobiography Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival after it was discovered that the book’s author, Margaret B. Jones, a half-Native American gangbanger who ran drugs and guns with the Bloods, is actually Margaret Seltzer, a nice Episcopalian girl from the San Fernando Valley who drew from her experiences doing gang outreach in L.A. to concoct her fictitious adventures in the ’hood. This follows hard on the heels of last month’s news that the memoir Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years by Misha Defonseca (Mount Ivy Press, 1997), which has become required reading in many schools, was also fabricated. And of course there was James Frey’s drug-addict memoir A Million Little Pieces (Random House, 2005), which Oprah plugged to her book club and which turned out to be fudged as well.

The worst part of Margaret Seltzer’s story? She was ratted out to the New York Times by her own sister. Now that’s tough.

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William F. Buckley, Jr. (1926-2008): One of the nation’s most influential and erudite conservative voices was stilled on Feb. 27, as William F. Buckley succumbed to emphysema at his home in Connecticut. He was 82 years old and had suffered from the ailment for years, yet was at his desk working when he died, as seems most fitting for the prolific author and commentator. Buckley was most famous for founding the National Review, the country’s leading journal of conservative thought, in 1955, and for his long-running public-affairs TV program “Firing Line.” He was also the author of many works of fiction, in particular a series of espionage novels featuring master spy Blackford Oakes. His last book published was Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription: Notes and Asides from National Review (Basic Books, 2007).

Anyone who knows me may find it strange to hear me eulogize Buckley, whose politics generally ran diametrically opposite to my own, but the man was to be admired for his intellect and his devotion to political discourse in civilized terms. He was never anything less than a gentleman, even with those with whom he disagreed vehemently, and stood out as a fine example to people of all philosophical stripes of how to advance a position with class and dignity. In a media universe now dominated by Bill O’Reillys and Sean Hannitys, Buckley will be sorely missed.

John G. Nettles