Seen and Unseen

The first chapter, “Mom,” is still to come, at the start of the new year. Before then, here is another fragment, a holiday stocking-stuffer, an unexpected coda to my start as an intern at CBS News in 1964 that took place decades later in Beverly Hills. No, not at the Four Seasons hotel, where I met Mike Wallace for the last time; this meeting was at about the same time, but at a more remote retreat, one of those places in the hills where you can have truly private meetings, where things can happen that never happened. For me, it was one of those many occasions when time folded over, and I relived a moment from decades earlier.

Geoffrey Cowan, former Dean of the USC Annenberg School and friend and colleague of many decades – and boss of a few of them – used to say that ideas flow from the east coast to the west. His trajectory was from Park Avenue via Mississippi Freedom Summer and Harvard to Hollywood, but mine was different, from the Black church, where people would arrive every week from the South without a penny (or just enough for a subway ride), and the dream factories of Hollywood, then via M.I.T. back to New York and then to L.A., sort of: I never moved there, not for USC, not for Quincy Jones, and instead I commuted every week. Now I am in Washington, a town my mother despised and my father thought lacking in both imagination and accomplishment, but more of that later.

So my take on Geoff’s comment is that reality moves from the east – the Black church and live television – to Hollywood’s fantasies, painstakingly produced entertainment. Wealthy people in the East owned stuff – real estate, steel mills, railroads – while other easterners moved west to make fortunes with fantasies.

And people certainly moved from east to west throughout American history, millions of them, until recently; now they move to Florida and Texas. With that context, here is the story of how my working as an intern at CBS News in New York in 1964 led directly to my encounter 45 years later with (music cue)…

The Simpsons

Sixteen years ago, I was a Vice Provost at the University of Southern California, another of those jobs which I never expected to have and for which I would never have applied. One day an invitation arrived, to the 20^th anniversary party of “The Simpsons.” Yawn. But no, this was not to the huge media party. This was not a big party on the Fox movie lot in Century City. Instead, this was an invitation to the small private party limited to the cast and writers. I could bring a plus one, but no media, and no photos.

“This is obviously a mistake,” was my first reaction. They meant to send this to someone at the USC Cinema school. So I played along and RSVP’d, waiting for them to catch the error. Instead, they confirmed and told me the location, a private room in a Bel Air retreat.

Side note: For all of the years I was on campus at USC, I commuted each week from the East Coast, on JetBlue to Long Beach (great small airport) or United to LAX (large but not great airport). At both airports, I would rent the very cheapest econobox car. The week of the Simpsons party was the only time in the hundreds of trips I made to L.A. when the car rental company had run out of econoboxes, and so for the same price, they put me in a Prius, which was the perfect car for my arrival at the party (and which the rental car people had to show me how to drive). What luck, if you believe in such things.

The night of the party I drove up the hill, dropped my car at valet, and went to the assigned room. And indeed, the partygoers were the cast and the creators – Matt Groening and James (“James to my friends”) Brooks. And me. At one point, a Fox executive dropped by, climbed on a chair (or was it a table?), and announced loudly that Fox had renewed “The Simpsons” for another 20 years. Loud cheers all around, and one yelled “F--- YES!!”

(An aside: That was sixteen years ago, and “The Simpsons” is still going strong, year after year anchoring the Fox television Sunday night lineup. So we only have four more years until the “20-year renewal” will have come true.)

They welcomed me, and everyone had a good time. But still, but still. Why was I there?

Then I had an idea: It must have been Matt Groening, whose “Life in Hell” cartoons I admired in a local Marin County weekly when I was living in northern California in the 1980s. Who knows: He might have seen a pic of me when I was vice president of news at National Public Radio with my favorite “Life in Hell” cartoon posted behind my desk. The first frame showed his two fez-capped characters watching TV. No dialog. The second frame was the same, again no dialog. The third frame was the same but with one character saying, “Why are we watching this crap?” The fourth frame was the same but with the other character replying, “Lost the remote control.” The fifth and six frames were identical to frames one and two: the two of them sitting watching TV, no dialog. I loved it.

But no, it wasn’t Matt Groening.

It was a small midweek party, and everyone had to go to work the next morning. We all left together and, to my surprise, no one had a car (i.e., a limo); they had all driven, and we were all in line at valet. (Thank goodness for my Prius, I thought. It was the right dress code, and my Prius was not the only one. You don’t drive a Lamborghini to a private party; that’s for show.)

Waiting for our cars, the man in the line in front of me turned and asked, “You don’t remember me, do you?”

James Brooks? Where could we have met? Why did he remember me? Then I remembered, before he created “Room 222” and the Mary Tyler Moore show, before he directed “Broadcast News” and “Terms of Endearment” (winning Oscars for best picture and best director), before he was “James to my friends,” he was. . .

“Jim!”

Brooks had been a desk assistant and then a writer at CBS News.

We started swapping stories about CBS in the 1960s. “What were you doing?” “I was running copy for the new guy, Mike Wallace.” “I worked with Dallas Townsend.”

And then, as the valet driver pulled up his car, ever the skilled writer, Brooks had saved his best line for last, saying slowly, “I. once. made. coffee. for. Edward. R. Murrow.”

Me: “I fold.”

Behind us in line was Nancy Cartwright, the voice of Bart Simpson.

“You guys are crazy,” she said.

Brooks turned around and looked at her.

“It was the best year of my life.”