It
is 20 years since I blew up the reactor, almost to the day, and here I am
sitting next to Mickey Mantle at the bar in the Smothers Brothers’ dressing
room in Las Vegas. How could I have ever predicted that this would happen to me?
I was never a New York Yankees fan.
As a kid growing up in Rhode Island we were all diehard Red Sox fans and hated
the Yankees. So in 1982, when I found myself sitting next to Mickey Mantle at
the bar in Tommy and Dick Smothers’ dressing room, I didn’t know what to say to
him. Turns out I needn’t have said anything. After shaking my hand, he stared
off into space, glassy-eyed and downright sloshed.
After seating himself, a major task, he swayed a bit from side to side, making
me wonder if seat belts shouldn’t be mandatory on bar stools.
Moments earlier he and Kyle Rote
had weaved their way into the Smothers’ suite in the hotel. Kyle was not in
much better shape than Mickey, stumbling a little getting to the bar and
managing to get himself into the seat on the other side of Mickey. He managed
to carry on a conversation with a couple of other guests, though the words were
slurred enough to be incomprehensible—at least from my vantage point. Mickey
was silent and continued to stare as though in a trance. Apparently, there was
a celebrity golf tournament going on in Las Vegas that day and a few friends of
Tommy and Dick were gathered in the suite. At the time Kyle Rote had been long
retired from his career as running back for the New York Giants. He was then a
sportscaster for NBC. I surmised that he either covered the golf event for the
network or participated in it. Mickey also may have played in it. Either way,
there had been some heavy partying before they arrived here.
I had flown
into Las Vegas that afternoon from Denver. On the way into town from the Las
Vegas airport I saw a billboard promoting the Smothers Brothers show at one of
the big casinos. On a whim, when I got to my hotel, I called the casino and was
able to get through to Tommy. He invited me to the show that evening. “Come up
to the dressing room before the show and have a drink,” he suggested. I
couldn’t turn that down.
That’s how
I came to be sitting next to a very shitfaced Mickey Mantle. I felt dismayed
and uncomfortable. I may not have been a New York Yankees fan, but there were
certain ballplayers that I admired, and he was one of them. As a Red Sox fan,
the great Ted Williams, of course, was at the top of my baseball hero list. But
not far behind were Mickey Mantle and Joe DiMaggio, even though they were both
damned Yankees. And here was Mickey, sitting next to me. I tried desperately to
make conversation, but any response from him was an incoherent mumble.
Questions ran through my mind in rapid succession – what did he think of
today’s hitters, who was the toughest pitcher he ever faced, …? But I knew
he probably would not or could not answer them. And so I simply babbled on
about the great New York Yankees and the history of great ballplayers on the
team and what an illustrious career Mickey had and all the time knowing that my
words were drifting past him like butterflies in a strong wind. Soon Kyle decided that he and Mickey should
head back to their rooms in the hotel. However, Tom Smothers had to guide them
both to the door and then help them into the elevator. Afterwards I couldn’t
shake this image of the two spending the night in that elevator, riding from
top to bottom and back, because neither could remember the floor they were on.
Kinda like that Kingston Trio song, Charlie on the MTA– They may ride forever in that eleva-tor, they’re the men who never
returned. A sad evening but the show later was a great performance by the
Smothers Brothers.
* * *
It was one
of those strange twists of fate that brought me to that dressing room and
Mickey Mantle. In April 1980 Mason Williams was a guest at our house in
Evergreen. Mason had been invited as the featured musician to play at the Earth
Day celebration in Denver that year. The arrangement for Mason’s performance
was made by a good friend of ours, Jane Russo, who worked in the Denver office
of the Environmental Protection Agency. She asked us if we could host Mason
during his stay. Barbara and I had been enthusiastic fans of the Smothers
Brothers Comedy Hour in the late 1960s, and Mason’s award-winning song Classical Gas was among our favorites. Mason had been the head writer for the
wildly popular Smothers programs. So, we were excited to have him as a guest.
While
staying with us, Mason learned about my nuclear physics background. He and Bob
Gardiner, an Academy Award winning filmmaker, were working on a screenplay
entitled Hot Ice, which he described
as a nuclear meltdown comedy. Learning that I was now a well published writer,
as well as a former nuclear physicist, he invited me to help write the
screenplay. It sounded like so much fun, I couldn’t turn it down, even though I
wasn’t sure the world was ready for a comedy about a nuclear meltdown. It was
only a year after the Three Mile Island accident. I had just published a major
article in Audubon magazine about TMI and how close it came to becoming a major
disaster. On the other hand, maybe it was time for some humor.
It was in
October of 1980 when Mason introduced me to Tom and Dick Smothers. Mason was
finishing work on an NBC Smothers Brothers Special to be aired on the network in
November. He invited me to come to the NBC Studio in Burbank for the last two
days of scripting and rehearsals and the video taping of the show. Afterwards
Mason and I would then go to Bob Gardiner’s place in Laguna Beach to work on Hot Ice.
Despite the pressure everyone was
under for the upcoming show, on my arrival at the studio I was welcomed warmly
by all. When I was introduced, Tom and Dick took time to ask about my
photography and writing. Tom, especially, seemed fascinated by my radical
career change. Others greeted me as though I were part of the group.
I got to sit in on the final
polishing of the script and watched the walk-through and the rehearsal. The
script session was fascinating. These were pros and were very serious about
their comedy. Pat Paulson was involved, as always playing the dead-pan
presidential candidate. Carl Gottleib, who had been in the movie MASH, was one of the writers, as was Bob
Gardiner, Ed Begley, Jr., musician Glen Campbell, Martin Mull and, of course,
Tom and Dick and Mason.
Pat Paulsen was a very sweet guy,
very down to earth and a year or so later we got together for a drink in Denver
when he was giving a performance there. Carl was a bit brusque and very
business-like, though I suppose he had to be—he was listed as the show’s
producer. Someone had to crack the whip. I liked Ed Begley Jr. —he was very
cordial as was Glen Campbell. I didn’t get to spend much time with Martin Mull,
but the whole gang of them went out of their way to make me, the outsider, feel
comfortable. There didn’t seem to be an inflated ego in the bunch.
Though the script was nearly
finalized there were a few suggested changes offered by some in the group.
Judging from the occasional quip or joke, I can well imagine how lively it must
have been at the very early stages of writing the script. These were creative
people. Ideas floated through the air like a butterfly, which someone would
snatch and put a spin to it and float it again. Some punch lines needed
refining. More ideas floated. I was mesmerized by the process, because, in my
physics career, one did not make things up. We dealt with cold, calculated
facts. This was way more fun.
Some ideas were a bit off the wall,
but often that led to another thought related to the first. And then someone
else would toss in another variant, taking it in a different direction. Tom
Smothers had the final say and it soon became apparent that he was the brains
behind creative decisions.
Adding to this creative frame of
mind, I had noticed, while walking down the hallway to the scripting session,
the definite odor of cannabis (Uh, yes, I was very familiar with cannabis
odor). I’m sure that wasn’t sanctioned by NBC, but it was probably overlooked
as long as the smoke wasn’t too blatant. I certainly did not see anyone smoking
a joint so it was kept sub rosa.
The show was taped the next day
before a live audience. Actually, there were two audiences; during the first
part of the taping there were pauses and breaks, some scenes and lines were
changed, and the show continued. This was all planned, which is why there was
another audience brought in for the last half of the taping which also had
pauses and breaks. It took almost all day to do a one-hour show. When I watched
the show a couple of weeks later back home, it was all very smooth; none of the
pauses and breaks were apparent at all. This was professional showbiz, as you
would expect.
Mason and I drove with Bob Gardiner
to his place after the taping of the show. Bob lived on the second floor, a
small walk-up apartment a few blocks from the beach in Laguna Beach. He was
twenty-nine then, though he looked as though he might still be in high school.
Bob was the consummate free-spirit in an era of lots of free-spirits. In 1975, when he was twenty-four years old,
he and Will Vinton won an Academy Award for the Best Animated Short Feature, Closed Mondays. It was all done
painstakingly with clay animation, making slight motion changes in the clay and
capturing these frame by frame with a motion picture camera. It was all done in
a garage-turned-studio. Even by today’s computer-generated animations, the work
still stands as a tour de force. The film
can be seen on YouTube and has had more than 55,000 views—mostly, I suspect, by
aficionados of the art of animation.
One of the first things I noticed
when we entered Bob’s place was the Oscar he had won. It was not prominently
perched on a trophy shelf or in a carefully lighted display box. Instead it was
on the floor, being used to hold open a door that tended to close when the
ocean breeze blew through the windows. An Oscar, the epitome of recognition in
the motion picture profession, was a doorstop! This defined Bob Gardiner for
me. He was one of the most talented and creative individuals I have ever met.
Pick a musical instrument and Bob could play it. Once, while staying at our
house, he seated himself at our old upright piano and played various songs, old
and new, for almost an hour non-stop. Then he picked up a guitar and did the
same. He’d never had a music lesson in his life. His artwork was superb. He and
Mason published some children’s books about where Santa went after Christmas,
all with Bob’s delightful illustrations. Even while he and Mason and I worked
on the script for Hot Ice he often
made quick sketches to illustrate his thoughts about how the characters should
look.
Mason was meticulous. Scenes were outlined
on large file cards so they could be laid out on the floor or tacked on a wall
and rearranged to match our ideas on the story flow. Characters also were put
on file cards to match with various scenes.
Mason and Bob had come up with the
basic premise of the story, which I can only best describe as Dr. Strangelove meets Godzilla and China Syndrome as told by Mel Brooks with characters out of Blazing Saddles.
The story: Cosmopolitan Edison
company’s Happy Valley Nuclear Power Station and Theme Park undergoes a severe
accident resulting in complete meltdown of the reactor core. In order to cut
costs, Cosmo Ed has cheated on the plant’s specifications by making the
containment vessel thinner than required. The core melts completely through the
bottom of the containment building, melting its way down through layers of
bedrock finally halting in a layer of rock comprised of high carbon content.
The enormous heat and pressure of the molten core brings about a phase change
in the carboniferous layer, forming layers of crystalized carbon—also known as
diamonds. These diamonds are huge and flawless. When discovered by using a
remote probe during the damage assessment, the CEO of Cosmo Ed sees a way of
making billions of dollars to not only cover their cost of cleaning up the
meltdown but making a huge profit by marketing these diamonds.
There is only one slight problem:
the diamonds are highly radioactive—Hot Ice. This doesn’t deter the CEO and
board of directors. Enter a consultant hired by Cosmo Ed to assess the damage.
He is a sophisticated and brilliant nuclear physicist named Newton Archimedes—a
kind of Sean Connery James Bond type character. When he discovers how highly
radioactive the diamonds are, he threatens to blow the whistle on their
dangerous scheme. And thus, one or more major conflicts ensue. Newton
Archimedes and his lovely Swedish partner, the brilliant biophysicist chemist metallurgist
geologist, Lambda Angstrom, must escape their confinement by the company’s
para-military security forces and alert the world about the dangers. All the
while, Cosmo Ed sells these flawless diamonds to the wealthiest men worldwide
whose wives and mistresses begin dying from mysterious causes after wearing the
beautiful necklaces and bracelets and rings. The supply of the world’s most
beautiful women is in jeopardy.
Do Newton and Lambda escape from
the evil forces of Cosmo Ed? Can they make it to the offices of the New York
Times? Is the evil plot revealed? Are the perpetrators caught and punished? Are
the beautiful women saved?
We continued work on the script,
planning our sessions when travels brought us close enough together. In 1983 I
had an assignment from a travel magazine to shoot photos and do a story on the
Pacific Crest Trail. In the time allotted to do the story, there was no way
that I could backpack that 2500-mile-long trail from the Mexican border to
Canada. So, traveling by car, I hiked certain segments of it to get a flavor of
the various ecosystems it traversed. I planned one of those sections to be in
Oregon, very near Mason’s vacation cabin in Oakridge, located on a lovely trout
stream that, fortuitously, was not far from the Pacific Crest Trail. That gave
an opportunity to work some more on the script. Bob had been living in
Portland, so he could join us. We worked there for five days. When we took
breaks from the writing, Mason pulled on his waders and fly fished in the river
while I roamed the lovely forest taking pictures. Bob would smoke a joint and
practice his music with one of Mason’s guitars.
The writing sessions were not
without a certain amount of stress. Bob’s creativity seemed endless, fueled by
pot, and the more he smoked the more hyper he got. Ideas flowed from him like a
gushing firehose. A lot of it was great, but some off-the-wall ideas strayed
too far from the main story. The big problem was putting order into the chaos
of his thoughts. He was brilliant. But his mind could not find a way to bring
order to his great ideas and Mason and I struggled to get it down on paper in
some semblance of a script. At one point, in frustration, Mason slammed his
fist into and partly through a wall in his cabin.
When we left these writing sessions
we kept in touch by phone and snail mail (no internet then). Occasionally I
would get a heavy package from Mason containing a three-ring binder thick with
pages of the script along with revisions and some new ideas and thoughts. Those
several days we spent at Mason’s cabin were the last time we three got together
to write. And sometime later Mason declared the script finished. Or at least,
finished enough.
Most screenplays for the average
90- to 100-minute movie range from 100 to 150 pages in length. Our epic was
well over 300 pages.
Hot Ice
never made it to the Silver Screen. Mason did try hard. He circulated it to
some friends and contacts he had in Hollywood, including Rob Reiner and Lili
Tomlin. All turned it down. As interest in it waned, we three screenwriters
drifted apart. Mason continued with his music, organizing concerts from time to
time with bluegrass groups. He never gave up entirely on Hot Ice. Sometimes I would get a large envelope in the mail filled
with notes and ideas, along with a new CD of his music. Bob, I learned, bounced
around taking various jobs involving his art. He did a number of television
commercials and some videos. For a while, before computer animation came on the
scene, his clay animation was popular in television commercials. On occasion
Mason had comedy writing gigs and he got Bob involved to give him some income.
I think Bob supported himself mostly by tending bar and playing piano in bars
and clubs.
I ended up in Siberia. In 1986 I
had a contract to do a book with Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the Russian poet,
entitled Divided Twins: Alaska and
Siberia. That year I made the first of my many trips to Siberia. I was out
of contact with Bob and Mason for a long time after that
Months went by, then years, without
much contact. And then I got an email from Mason in April 2005. Bob Gardiner
had taken his own life, hanged himself in his studio in Grass Valley,
California. He was 54 years old. It was devastating news.
What is there about the brilliant,
creative mind that sometimes, perhaps too often, leads down a path of
self-destruction? Has anyone discovered the answer to that question? I’ve
worked with, and among, creative people most of my life—in science and in
writing and in visual arts. Some stand out in my mind. Bob Gardiner was high on
the scale of brilliance. And so was Mason Williams.
