Firing Hop Sing (or, Literary Interlude, with commentary)

I used to know Dan Blocker, who played Hoss Cartwright on Bonanza. He was a wise and kind man, and there are tens of dozens of people I would much rather see dead than Dan. One time, around lunch-break at Paramount, when I was goof­ing off writ­ing a treat­ment for a Joe Levine film that nev­er got made, and Dan was rest­ing his ass from some dumb horsey num­ber he’d been reshoot­ing all morn­ing, we sat on the steps of the weathered that prob­ably in no way resembled any saloon that had ever exis­ted in Virginia City, Nevada, and we talked about real­ity versus fantasy. The real­ity of get­ting up at five in the morn­ing to get to the stu­dio in time for makeup call and the real­ity of how bloody much FICA tax they took out of our paychecks and the real­ity of one of his kids being down with some­thing or other…and the fantasy of not being Dan Blocker, but of being Hoss Cartwright.

And he told me a scary story. He laughed about it, but it was the laugh of butchers in a slaughter­house who have to swing the mauls that brain the beeves; who then go home to wash the stink out of their hair from the spattering.

He told me—and he said this happened all the time, not just in isol­ated cases—that he had been approached by a little old woman dur­ing one of his per­son­al appear­ances at a rodeo, and the woman had said to him, dead ser­i­ously, “Now listen to me, Hoss: when you get home tonight, I want you to tell your daddy, Ben, to get rid of that Chinese fella who cooks for you all. What you need is to get your­self a good woman there can cook up some decent food for you and your family.”

So Dan said to her, very politely (because he was one of the most cour­teous people I’ve ever met),“Excuse me, ma’am, but my name is Dan Blocker. Hoss is just the char­ac­ter I play. When I go home I’ll be going to my house in Los Angeles and my wife and chil­dren will be waiting.”

And she went right on, just a bit affron­ted because she knew all that, what was the mat­ter with him, did he think she was simple or some­thing, “Yes, I know…but when you go back to the Ponderosa, you just tell your daddy Ben that I said…”

—Harlan Ellison, “Revealed At Last! What Killed The Dinosaurs! And You Don’t Look So Good Yourself.” Introduction to Strange Wine, 1978 

This depress­ing bit came back to me as I was read­ing a thumb­suck­er by Frank Bruni in the Times’s “Sunday Styles” sec­tion, about how some yo-yos got upset that some Glee stars struck hotsy-totsy poses for an issue of GQ, and what it all means. And how that little old lady nev­er died, but actu­ally mul­ti­plied, and got young­er, and stu­pider, and more self-righteous. Not that I’m par­tic­u­larly sym­path­et­ic to Bruni and the Times’ per­spect­ive on it: “ ‘Glee’ Photo Flap Is Latest In Image Spin Cycle,” oh do tell. Bruni dis­plays a thor­oughly uncanny abil­ity to overthink on top­ics that no indi­vidu­al in his or her actu­al right mind ought even begin to both­er with. Natalie Portman play­ing a strip­per to counter the squeaky-clean image she earned from act­ing in some Star Wars movies? To pro­pose that is also to pre­sup­pose that she made any kind of impres­sion in those Star Wars movies (not that I’m say­ing it’s her fault that she did­n’t). And appar­ently Jodie Foster took that part in Taxi Driver to “counter Freaky Friday.” Um, sorry, Frank, you’re maybe a little too young to remem­ber this, but that isn’t quite how they did it in L.A. back in the mid-’70s, trust me. For one thing, people did­n’t pay quite such fuck­ing obsess­ive atten­tion to child per­formers; nobody in the media was pars­ing Foster’s career moves or what­not. Oy.

Did I say “depress­ing?” Yes, it all is, indeed. Let’s cheer up with the inner gate­fold of the first Hatfield and the North LP, fea­tur­ing Robert Wyatt and Hoss and the whole gang. 

UPDATE: Adding a much-needed note of hil­ar­ity to the depress­ing pro­ceed­ings, com­menter Ratzkywatzky reveals Bruni’s entire premise is built on some­thing less than sand, as the ori­gin­al Freaky Friday came after the sup­posedly notori­ous and career-redefining Taxi Driver. “The fact that Disney did­n’t think twice about hir­ing her should indic­ate some dif­fer­ence in pub­lic atti­tudes from today.” Indeed. And there’s also the fact that being in Taxi Driver is slightly dif­fer­ent than pos­ing for Terry Richardson; Bruni seems to believe they’re equi­val­ent. Foster’s early filmo­graphy is pretty inter­est­ing; she really mixed it up. It includes Napoleon and Samantha on the one hand and Kansas City Bomber on the oth­er; and of course Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, in which Scorsese “dis­covered” her, as it were. I’m reminded some­how of a con­ver­sa­tion I had with Bill Mumy in 1993, wherein he reflec­ted on the fact that he and Foster came out of the child-actor gig rel­at­ively healthy and well-adjusted, and why many young­er per­formers of the sub­sequent gen­er­a­tion and bey­ond did­n’t: “We were super­vised pro­fes­sion­als,” he shrugged.