adaptation to go to Stockholm, hang out with Vietnam deserters (we were in the midst of the war), and write a novel about them. I could tell that he was skeptical of my will to resist the blandishments of Hollywood and to follow through with this plan. He held out all manner of possibilities to me, including directing films before I was twenty-five. The truth is I have no idea what I would have done, but Feldman’s pancreas got the better of him and my gravy train was derailed. For the moment, my options were closed. Dyanne and I and our six-month-old son Raphael were on our way to Europe.
This was the spring of that epochal year, 1968, and I traipsed around the rainy Gamla Stan—Stockholm’s Greenwich Village—trying to get the inside story on the deserters. Finding them was relatively easy, but they proved to be a dull and predictable lot, lost in more sophisticated Europe and finally more interested in scoring the next joint than in discussing revolution, or much of anything else. I was unsure what to write about them.
Nevertheless, I continued across Europe with my young family, arriving in Paris days after May ’68 événements to see the cobblestones of the Left Bank streets torn up and the buildings papered with anti-de Gaulle posters. Something was happening. My generation was about to change the world, and I wanted to be part of it. The feeling intensified when we reached London and I watched the Chicago Democratic National Convention on the BBC. Everything exciting seemed to be taking place in the American streets and I was stuck in a grungy one-bedroom over a Tube station in Belsize Park. I wanted to go home. I wanted to participate.
But I had to write my book, not least because I’d already leased a “writers’ villa in Southern Spain” from an ad in The Saturday Review. Its owner, ironically, was the editor of London’s New Left Review; he justified having property in Franco’s Spain by saying that it allowed him to bring banned subversive books into a fascist state. Rationalization or not, he was right. The office I worked in until the spring of 1969—a separate one-room writer’s house outside of a villa in the picturesque village of Mijas, Spain—was lined top to bottom with the works of Marx, Gramsci, Che Guevara, et al., a more complete library of the Left than I can recall seeing before or since in a private home. The office’s picture window had a panoramic view of the Mediterranean, with Gibraltar in the distance.
Not that the fabulous digs helped me write. I spent most days poring over the International Herald Tribune for news of the political battles back home. Toward the end of our lease I had all but given up on working and would sit at my desk, gazing catatonically through the picture window with all kinds of gloomy fantasies going through my head, including Dyanne having an affair, à la D. H. Lawrence, with Esteban, the villa’s gardener. Also, I was pretty much broke, my generous Charles K. Feldman “annuity” reduced to a couple of thousand bucks. I was relieved when it came time to go home.
Once back in LA, I did what any normal American boy with no prospects and no money would—I took the last of my cash and bought a house. That home, which belonged to some nice socialist friends of Dyanne’s similarly nice socialist parents, was in Echo Park, a barrio plagued by Chicano gangs. I loved it, especially for the apprehensive faces of my Hollywood contacts when I told them where I lived after inviting them to dinner. But, despite the gang graffiti on the garage door, the house itself was quite welcoming, a slightly long-in-the-tooth craftsman left over from the long gone days (1920s) when that neighborhood was tonier.
It was there, shortly after returning from Europe, that I entertained Love Story author and screenwriter Erich Segal. Just in the nick of time, the film adaptation of Heir was heating up and our mutual agent, Ron Mardigian of William Morris, brought Segal over. Segal was only a couple years older than I, but vastly more famous. “I wrote a book on Plautus,” were the first words out of his mouth. Evidently he wanted to make sure that I regarded him not as a mere author of schlocky best-sellers, but as a full-fledged Harvard classicist. His study of the Roman playwright, I was informed immediately thereafter—and, needless to say, without asking—had received “excellent reviews from the scholarly press.” I stopped myself from giggling. Much as I instantly knew the pompous Segal was an absurd choice to adapt my “noir-ish” novel of a rich boy driving his dead girlfriend around in the trunk of his car, I didn’t want to jeopardize the movie. I was still living more or less hand-to-mouth and would receive a significant check only upon filming.
In fact, I had been typing my next book practically from the moment I stepped off the boat from Europe, working against the clock to preserve my dream of becoming a writer from the encroaching reality of supporting a family. I gave up on the deserters, reaching for my subject into the world of my friends and acquaintances—the adventures of Barbara Garson and her husband Marvin. Politically speaking, they interested me more than the deserters. Barbara, a left-wing activist who had been in Dyanne and my screenwriting class at Yale, was notorious then for writing the anti-Vietnam War hit MacBird, a satiric Shakespeare knockoff in which a dolt-like LBJ was presented as a modern Macbeth. It ran Off-Broadway for several years. Marvin had been a somewhat less prominent Berkeley student protest figure. The theme of my book was to be what happens when a “revolutionary couple” sets out to change the world and ends up making a million in the process.
To demonstrate my growing support for women’s lib, or perhaps for the shock value of a man doing such a thing, I wrote the book in the female first person, looking backwards from Barbara’s point of view, or rather from the vantage of the fictional Barbara, Tanya “Mama Tass” Gesner. It was called The Mama Tass Manifesto and had the opening sentence, “If Emma Goldman could see me now, the only female gas station attendant in Brixton, Oklahoma.” The title was printed in the curvy font of a Grateful Dead poster and the flap copy included a quotation from Chairman Mao about the necessity of picking up the gun. (It was 1970!) Instead of the normal author photo on the back, the book had a reproduction of my driver’s license with the address crossed out, to give the impression of a mug shot.
Some of these packaging ideas came from my editor from Heir, Alan Rinzler, who bought the book for Holt, Rinehart & Winston when the manuscript was half finished. To this day, I thank him for it. It wouldn’t be the last time that he’d rescue me in a moment of need, although he would never publish the book you are reading or probably anything else I write for the foreseeable future. Alan—who published seminal works like Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land and Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas—now considers me an apostate and recently emailed me “I knew you when….”
And he isn’t the only one. At a cocktail party a few months back, I ran into the liberal humorist Harry Shearer of This is Spinal Tap and now of the Huffington Post. A mutual acquaintance, not realizing we had known each other for over thirty years, attempted to introduce us by asking Harry if he knew me. He replied cuttingly, “I knew Roger when he was another person.” There are plenty of others who just turned away.
But am I “another person”? I will leave that to the reader to decide.
In any case, The Mama Tass Manifesto is steeped in the radical politics of its time, which were all around me. Echo Park had become a haven for the refugees of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. Most of them were grouped around an organization called the Echo Park Food Conspiracy, led by the lawyer Art Goldberg and his sister Jackie, both of them ‘red diaper babies’ and self-proclaimed Maoist revolutionaries. Art still practices law in that neighborhood. Jackie is currently a California State Assemblywoman in the forefront of the gay marriage movement.
In those days, Jackie, occasionally accompanied by longtime California Communist Party leader Dorothy Healey, taught a course in American labor history one night a week at our house. Art, more of a glad-handing sort, ran the Food Conspiracy. The idea was to use cheap, cooperatively bought food as an organizing device, setting up a neighborhood market where young activists could radicalize the mostly Latino poor of the community. I remember the jovial Art walking among the various shoppers, thrusting his fist in the air and clapping some on the back. “Venceremos, amigos,” he’d say, “La
