HIPPIE
HIPPIE SHAKE
Richard Neville
Pothead Meet Plastic Man
Extract from Chapter 14, Hippie Hippie Shake, Bloomsbury Books 1994.
London, November 1970: Before darting off to my
sisterÍs wedding I
tacked a note on my basement door for Jerry
Rubin. The high profile
prankster was due to fly in from New York for the
launch of his book,
Do It. "Stuck at a family wedding", I
wrote, "make yourself at home".
Reeling from culture clash, I wondered how anyone
could
contemplate wedlock.
The elegant mansion in Mayfair blazed with
chandeliers. The
champagne was fizzing, the Fleet Street luminaries
were throbbing in
black ties and tulle, like extras in a Fred
Astaire movie The best man
was Christopher Booker, a cultural adversary who
had written The
Neophiliacs, a book condemning our generationÍs
perpetual quest for
novelty.
Despite his association with Private Eye, and its relentless
Ozophobia, I liked him on sight. .
"I don't know why you underground people
bother to rail
against modern society", he remarked,
sweeping a flute of bubbly
from the butlerÍs passing tray, "when it's
falling apart of its own
accord". Before I could marshal a rejoinder,
there was a fracas in the
hallway. Three strangers pushed their way into the
far side of the
reception room.
"Good Lord, itÍs the Drugs Squad," said
Christopher.
But why the Hawaiian shirts?
The butler offered champagne and was jabbed aside
with a
thumb.
Jill sailed over.
"WeÍre after Richard Neville" came a
loud nasal voice, a
heavy
Brooklyn accent.
I was slow to realise who they were. It was a
moment of
collision. The redhead in the centre was Jerry
Rubin, telling my sister
Jill he was about to
rip down a few of the chandeliers.
I rushed to
intervene.
Jill hissed in one ear: "WhoÍs this mean eyed
little shit?"
"A friendƒ"
Jerry bellowed: "Who are all these pigs?"
"My sisterÍs guests".
"Fuck. LetÍs get outta here."
"Calm down. Circulate. Interesting people,
cucumber
sandwiches...."
"Shit, man" chorused JerryÍs s
bodyguards. "We gotta a
revolution to fight".
Jerry looked round belligerently. "LetÍs get
the fuck outta
here", he said again.
I waved goodbye to Christopher Booker.
* * *
Private Eye reported the wedding had been raided
by three
undercover agents from the Drugs Squad, using fake
accents. Rubin
moved into the back room of the basement and onto
my phone line.
His New York office urgently needed to be informed
of his
interrogation at Heathrow, where UK immigration
officials had
granted the yippies a weekÍs stay and wished them
a happy holiday.
"They'll be sorry", he barked.
The bodyguards had just returned from Algiers,
where Timothy
Leary was staying with Eldridge Cleaver and other
Black Panthers,
all recipients of political asylum on that stretch
of the sunny south
Mediterranean coast. Jerry was breathlessly
debriefed. On his 50th
birthday, peace & love Tim had been presented
with a pistol. The
Weatherwomen had turned up for weapons
training. Tim and
Eldridge were about to tour the Palestinian
guerrilla camps. Wow!
Media reps crowded the basement for interviews.
One woman asked
Rubin if there was anything written in Do It which
he regretted.
"Yeah - the sexism", he said, updating
his street-cred with enviable
speed, my partner Louise cleared away the beer
bottles, the pizza
crusts. I was torn by his presence. Rubin was a
street-smart
prankster, whose war-painted pantomimes had
knocked the stuffing
out of HUAC, the McCarthy immortalised House
Un-American
Activities Committee. His zest for rebellion
reminded me of another
redhead - a comic book hero from a Sydney
childhood, Ginger Meggs.
Still on bail from a five year stretch for
disrupting the Democratic
Convention in Chicago. Rubin delighted in taunting
authority
wherever he went. Having already won the Academy
Award of
Protest, he was now scrambling to script the
sequel. "Becoming a
revolutionary", he told me, "is like
falling in love".
"Yes", Louise silent-mouthed from the
kitchen, "with
yourself".
The Oz obscenity trial was looming, there was a
need to drum up
Movement support, and perhaps at the expense of
any critical
perspective, I found myself absurdly eager to
forge an alliance
between Oz and the yippie star.
Rubin was invited to
appear on the David Frost Show. "Great", he said. "We can use TV
to destroy TV".
"Why?" Louise asked from the bed. Her
current pastime was
to lie about, stoned, watching Betty Davis
re-runs.
"My generation
was reared on hamburgers and Walter Cronkite",
Jerry replied, "so I know what a fucking
powerful motherÍs tit it is."
"Right on", I said, weakly, as Louise
dust panned the roaches.
"We need to take the TV away from the control
freaks," he
lectured.
"To humiliate the frontmen."
I mentioned my role in the live kidnap of the
Sydney compere
of Bandstand.
"But we mustnÍt become bastards of the
media". He inhaled
deeply and passed the dead butt.
A friend dropped by and congratulated Rubin on his
book.
"ItÍs too individualist and chauvinist",
he replied. "I canÍt look at it
anymore". There was no keeping up with this guy.
On the day of the David Frost show, November 7,
1970, the
basement was packed with familiar faces. Jerry
Rubin stood by the
stereo, flanked by his burly cohorts, Brian and
Stu, who were
rumoured to have swung iron bars at police in
Chicago.
Jerry recounted a yippie stunt on the high rating
Merv Griffin
Show, when fellow prankster Abbie Hoffman had worn
a shirt made
from the American flag, violating state laws.
"The pigs from CBS
blacked out his figure", he said. "Merv
Griffin was shown talking to a
half black screen". Scary. "The pigs
censored his body, man, it was
electronic fascism".
The plan was to storm the stage. Frost's producers
had allotted
its yippie guests a dozen audience tickets, and
the rest of us would
slither into the studio via the Greenroom. Mick Farren stood at the
back behind bumblebee shades and fingered a
"smoke bomb"
(actually, another of his ship-in-distress flairs)
and Felix Dennis
brandished a green, plastic water pistol. Warren
Hague, a gay activist
from Toronto and one of the best orators the Gay
Liberation Front
had in those days, said he planned to use the show
to come out of the
closet.
"Again?" asked Jim Anderson.
"Honey, I make a show of coming out every
chance I get."
"Great,"
Rubin said. "The media deadens our consciousness.
TonightÍs our chance
to shock the sleeping viewers into attention".
"Yeah - how?" asked a voice.
"By doing anything we feel like doing. We can
be obnoxious,
obscene, violent, horrible, immoral,
contemptible..."
Louise caught my eye and I knew what she was
thinking - that
wonÍt be hard.
"TV turns everything into mashed
potato", said Rubin, "including the
slogans of revolution..."
"Yeah, fuck celebrity guests", Mick
Farren put in. "Tonight,
weÍre taking over the show".
"Right on", said Rubin. "Wow! This
is Chicago energy."
"LetÍs have a party". Mick gyrated on
his stacked heels. "A
party on live TV. The masses can see what our
bloody culture is all
about".
"Too much! Far out!", etc, etc.
Through the window we could hear the chugging of
the taxis
from ITV, and wished each other luck.
I sat in the Frost show audience feeling uneasy.
The rest of the
saboteurs had made it inside, apart from David
Widgery and Sheila
Rowbotham, who at the last minute decided to stand
at the studio
door handing out International Socialist
tracts. The ease of our
admittance was curious. The White Panthers, now
double in size,
were still holed up in the Greenroom. Mick Farren
and a comrade
liberated the content of the vodka cabinet and
discussed nuances of
party doctrine with a clutch of comely
researchers.
David Frost welcomed the audience and introduced
his three
American guests, all exuding an air of punchy
sullenness. Ill at ease,
Frost navigated his clipboard, trying to pin down
RubinÍs erratic
rhetoric.
"YouÍre just a plastic man", Rubin said,
"Why stick to
prepared questions?"
Frost ignored this, asking him to explain.....
"Don't you have a mind of your own?"
Rubin asked. "Don't
you want to get to the truth?"
Frost looked dazed. Stu Albert extracted a
theatrical joint and
lit up. "Pot is part of the revolution",
he said, "Here - try it?"
"No thanks."
This was the cue for our stampede. In this moment of truth,
someone said, "WeÍre either with them or
against them." On stage, no
one knew what to do. Suddenly, Warren Hague, his
tiara askew, flung
his arms around the host and planted a wet kiss on
his cheek:
"Sweetheart, greetings from Gay Lib".
Frost leapt in the aisle and pondered his
clipboard. A London
yippie with a Super 8 disguised as a video camera
panned across the
bedlam. Someone yelled, "David Frost is
dead", sprinkling him with
pink petals. Another, "We are all David
Frost." Cheers, jeers. A
piercing yell: "Fuck the media".
From the aisle, Frost turned to his next guest,
Robert Ardrey,
an anthropologist who had just published The
Territorial Imperative
in which he claimed that humans could never shake
off the
programed aggression of ancestral apes. "This
proves my theory", he
said.
"Yes?" Frost.
"Look at them - infantile apes".
"Fuck you!" The yippies chanted.
A man in a suit stood up at the back - it was
National
Rembrance Day. "How often have you lot ever
laid a wreath at a
cenotaph?"
Boos, jeers....
FrostÍs
fury whitened his make-up. Louise and I shrank back
to the wings, avoiding his eyes, both knowing how
fairly he had
treated my friends and me in the past. Caroline
Coon stretched
herself on the floor between front stalls and
stage, chin resting on
palms, like a moody poet. Frost opened his mouth
to try one more
time and Felix rushed forward with his plastic
pistol, screaming,
"Die.... die" and squirted him in the
face. The water splashed onto his
shirt and tie. Frost rubbed his eyes. Louise I were horrified - both
wanting to die, die - there and then.
Frost called for a commercial break. He and Ardrey
disappeared. We milled around, our focus gone.
After a few minutes,
we suspected a trap, the enactment of a
contingency plan. Could the
cops be far away? As we ran from the ITV complex,
sirens pierced the
night. Frost began transmitting from a stand-by
studio. "What you
have just seen", he said, " is a
powerful commercial in favour of law
and order."
***
It was headlines in all the Sunday papers, to the
delight of the key
players. YIPPIE RIOT.... INVASION OF THE POT
MEN.... THE
FROST FREAK OUT. The Independent Television
Authority
announced an enquiry. Harold Soref, Conservative
MP for Ormskirk,
said it was monstrous for TV to encourage
exhibitions of public
depravity. The Sun's editorial called it a
"disgrace that David Frost
should be gunned off TV screens by a hippie with a
water pistol".
Peter Black in the Daily Mail denounced the
"horrible hippies" as
mad, bad and dangerous - "you longed to see
courageous Frost punch
one on the nose".
The yippie threesome was triumphant
"Fantastic water action,
Felix," said Rubin, back at the basement with
a nightcap joint.
"It was liberating, a catharsis. Shit,"
Stu waxed. "Up to now,
embarrassing people to their face has been hard
for me. Gimme a pig,
I'd rather shoot him in the back. Wow, a water
pistol....". He laughed.
"Thanks, buddy, now IÍm a real yippie".
He gave Felix a high five.
On Sunday, Jerry Rubin phoned New York and read
out the
headlines - "The front page!" he crowed,
as Louise glared. "More
than Abbie got for Merv Griffin."
