|
Jean Shepherd's A Christmas Story has dethroned It's a Wonderful Life as Hollywood's official holiday movie. It's a bright movie, a colorful, twinkling, sparkling movie, and it deserves its status as classic. But those familiar with Shepherd's old radio monologues wonder how he could have become so closely associated with such a resolutely nostalgic film - a word and tone that Shepherd despised. This was, after all, a man who once said, "Childhood seems good in retrospect, because we were not yet aware of the basic truth: That we're all losers, that we're destined to die, and death is a defeat."
Shepherd's voice narrates A Christmas Story, but the film contains little of the voice that was heard on New York's WOR from 1955 to 1977, where his nightly monologues built a loyal cult following. Most of his shows revolved around the travails of kid-dom in Hammond, IN, a working-class town full of refineries and steel mills that "cling to the underside of Chicago like a barnacle clings to the rotting hulk of a tramp steamer." He often referred to this place as "the great inverted bowl of darkness," and would spend his life trying to capture the Stygian blackness of its landscape and its soul.
At an early age, he latched on to amateur radio as a hobby. Amateur radio in the Depression era was a lot like trying to post to an early internet message board - before Google, before ubiquitous links. Listeners trawled the dial, searching for kindred souls, and it is this kind of solitary vigil that honed Shepherd's style, that of a lone voice in the night searching for sympathetic ears.
After enjoying some success as a late-night DJ in Cincinnati and Philadelphia, he came to New York and wound up at WOR, doing the graveyard shift between 1 and 5:30 a.m. His free, associative style and love of jazz made him an instant favorite with the beatnik set (Jack Kerouac supposedly used him as a character in On the Road). Shepherd built up a dedicated cabal of devotees by referring to them collectively as the "night people," who were in a constant struggle against the sunny world of the "day people."
WOR was not a perfect match for his talent. It was a conservative, middle-of-the-road frequency, and Shepherd had little intention of being a company man. When a station manager told him he couldn't sell soap, Shepherd responded by asking his listeners to take to the streets and buy up all the cakes of Sweetheart soap they could find, just to prove otherwise. The problem: Sweetheart was not an advertiser, and Shepherd was promptly booted off the air. Only a mass protest from his fans convinced the station to take him back.
By the early 60s, Shepherd's broadcasts had moved to late evening, squished into a 45-minute format that forced him to pare down his loftier digressions. This was when he truly became a legendary storyteller. His legion of followers was now younger, usually high school students who would listen to him after bedtime, transistor radios safely tucked under their pillows. Armed with a depthless imagination and the seeming ability to recall every moment of his life, he wove intricate tapestries from his memories. He would veer off-topic at every turn, picking up threads and tossing them aside, only to tie them all together just as the clock ran out. He did it all without writing one word down beforehand, and he did it five nights a week.
His stories captured the ridiculous terror of youth, the fear of not knowing what's around the corner and the disappointment of realizing that, more often than not, nothing at all is around the corner.
"I have a sneaking suspicion," he said in a 1960 broadcast, "that [in] almost anything that man embarks on there is a touch of sadness connected with it anyway. There is a built-in sliver of, well, frustration. The dream never comes up to the reality." And so it is in most of his stories of childhood. Tongues get stuck to frozen flagpoles. A secret decoder ring spells out a crummy commercial. A hopeful young buck suddenly realizes that he is the blind date, not his companion; he is the one everyone is being nice to.
What saves Shepherd's stories from being complete downers is the sheer delight in his voice. He had the wan, sighing laughter of a man who knew and acknowledged every mistake he'd ever made. He often asked the listener if they remembered similar things from their own childhoods–even leaving a few breaths' space for them to answer, creating an intimate dialogue with his audience. The laughter he provoked was not the mocking guffaw of an audience against a poor sap, but the realization that we're all in the same leaky boat together.
Much of Shepherd's best work did not last. His words were let go, to be digested as they were produced. Thanks to the efforts of hardcore fans, hundreds of his broadcasts were taped and can still be enjoyed today. But thousands more have been lost forever.
Shepherd was a genius fully aware of his powers. Those who knew and worked with him say he was constantly enraged at the wiles of philistines who failed to appreciate his artistry. He often blamed radio itself: "No one worth his salt is listening to the radio at this hour," he once lamented. "In fact, no one worth his salt is doing radio at this hour."
So he branched out, writing short stories for Playboy and performing on college campuses. He produced several series for PBS and, in 1976, wrote the screenplay for and narrated Phantom of the Open Hearth. The movie is similar to A Christmas Story in its collage of a plot but far more savage in its tone, coming a lot closer to capturing Shepherd's prodigious dark side. But his seeming inability to outgrow cult status made him an extremely bitter man. After he left WOR in 1977, he ignored his radio legacy for the rest of his life, insisting it was but one line on a multimedia resume.
When A Christmas Story was released in theaters in 1983, it garnered little notice, and Shepherd was quick to disparage it in interviews. "The title doesn't mean anything, unless you think of it as ‘A Christmas Carol' as rewritten by Scrooge," he groused to the Newark Star-Ledger shortly after its release. "If I'd had my way, [the music] would have been ‘Silent Night' played on a kazoo and washboard." Eventually the film's success made Shepherd a very rich man, and furthered his belief that radio was a mere signpost on his road to stardom. At a live performance late in his life, when a fan asked him when he might be returning to radio, Shepherd sneered in response, "When you go back to the fourth grade."
And yet, there was evidence that Shepherd continued to love the medium that he blamed for his ghetto-ization. The house where he lived out the rest of his days in Sanibel Island, FL, was equipped with an enormous antenna–part of a ham radio rig where, one imagines, the private, old-man Shep searched through the cold nights for other voices and other ears.
|
