Hoo-hah! Pekar book news and an unused piece by Harvey

My buddy John Lent, editor and publisher of the International Journal of Comic Art called today and told me he had my Harvey Pekar: Conversations book in his hand. I argued with him because the press just emailed me that it would be out in November. He insisted and eventually I conceded - he's got an advance uncorrected proof. Darn! A collectible I don't own!

Harvey's working with DC Comics now - the first miniseries American Splendor: Another Day was just collected and is some of his best stuff. Vol. 2 is out as individual comics, and you can find them on Amazon or at a local comic book store.

I called Harvey and let him know the book's becoming more real and also asked his permission to republish some of his stuff that the Press cut from the book on this blog. Here's a 1987 piece Harvey wrote about being interviewed by David Letterman. I didn't even try to get permission to use those interviews. It appears here courtesy of and copyright by Harvey Pekar. Print it out and put it in the appropriate place in the book, after the 1987 interview by Henry Allen of the Washington Post:

Late Night of the Soul with David Letterman

Harvey Pekar / 1987

From The Village Voice, August 25, 1987, pp. 45-46. Reprinted with permission of Harvey Pekar.

Compared to many artists I'm in good shape. I've got a civil service job in Cleveland that pays me enough to write and publish, without making compromises, a comic book called American Splendor. In April '86, Doubleday issued an anthology of my work and it received gratifying critical response. Then, last summer, an assistant producer from Late Night With David Letterman contacted me about making an appearance on the show. It turns out that Letterman's head writer is from Cleveland and had recommended me as a guest. I was scheduled for October 15 and told, "Above all, don't get too serious."

Trouble was, I'd never been on TV. I knew nothing about Letterman except that he was a renowned put-down artist, and had no idea what to expect. I figured it'd be a one-shot; I'd answer a few questions and go home. All I wanted to do was sell a few books and avoid embarrassment.

I guess I'm jaded—I live in Cleveland and I've seen it all—so I wasn't surprised when Letterman started asking me these dumb questions, like "How are things in Cleveland?" They were so silly I started giving him incredulous looks and ridiculing him, saying he was a show biz phony and complaining about the lousy money he paid ($100 for the first appearance). The audience ate it up. Here was this sour faced, sloppily dressed file clerk turning the tables on Mr. Condescending Wise Guy. Letterman, who's, off camera, a quiet, thoughtful man, held me over five minutes and publicly asked me to return.

They raised the amount I got for the next show to $490. That plus free plane rides and a hotel room for my wife and myself made doing Late Night again worthwhile. I wasn't selling out, was I? The thought bothered me, and, as my next appearance, on January 6, approached, I began to consider injecting some substance into my slapstick act. For some time, I'd been reading disturbing reports about the state of affairs at NBC, which, with the rest of RCA, had been purchased by General Electric in December '85. GE sent their man Robert Wright over to assume the NBC presidency in September '86. Wright quickly made his presence felt by cutting the budget 5 per cent, laying off around 300 people. In December there was another stunner: Wrright had issued a secret memo in which he advocated setting up a political action committee at NBC. "Employees who elect not to participate in a giving program should question their dedication to the company and their expectations," he'd written.

This looked like material for my next Letterman spot. After all, Dave was already making cutesy quips about Wright's mental capacities. I'd improve on his act. I'd dig up a lot of solid, hard formation on GE and spill it on the show. On top of that, I'd be cocky and funny. I'd offer Wright equal time, and challenge him to a debate for money, marbles, or chalk.

So I went to the library looking for dirt. It was all over the place. While researching a 1961 price-fixing conspiracy GE had been involved in, I found an article stating that the company had been convicted of antitrust violations in 29 of the previous 50 years. They were still doing questionable things in the '80s. I ran across articles with titles like "Defense Department Disqualifies GE From New Work," "GE Pleads Guilty to False Claims, Statements," and "Foul Play on a Mega-merger? (Inside Traders and the GE-RCA Deal)." Armed with this information, I'd square up in front of the TV cameras and take on the beast in its lair.

I talked about my GE-bashing ideas to a couple of Letterman staffers and they thought it would be okay, so I was surprised when head producer Barry Sand pleaded with me an hour before the show not to talk about GE. He said it would be inappropriate: "This isn't Meet the Press." Beyond that, he said he'd checked with the legal department and there might be dire consequences for me and members of the Letterman staff if I condemned GE in a serious way. I had trouble believing Sand, but I knew Wright could make it rough for him and his co-workers, whom I liked, so I decided to shelve my plans and do about what I'd done on my first show – mess around.

The January program was loose, a lot of fun. Letterman and I visited a Live at Five broadcast, which aired while we were on the set. I saw weatherman Al Roker, who'd previously worked in Cleveland, and got into a noisy discussion with him about the old days and great weathermen of the past. (Cleveland is a spawning ground for outstanding meteorologists of every description.) Once in a while, the camera would cut to guest Ruth Westheimer, who sat in the corner looking puzzled. Later in the segment, Letterman asked if I liked him and I replied, "Man, I don't even know you!"

Laughs came so easily that night! I felt pretty good about myself. But the next day I was embarrassed when a buddy asked, "Hey, big shot, I thought you were gonna talk about GE. What happened?" What happened was that I'd demonstrated I could get laughs by acting like "the lunatic from Cleveland." Was it possible to have a normal, interesting conversation on Late Night? The segment producer told me only celebrities could get away with it. Maybe not even celebrities. If Einstein returned from the other side with the answer to the origin of the universe and made his initial appearance on Late Night, Letterman would chide him about his baggy clothes.

Late Night would wind up a trap for me if I played along. I'd gotten indications that even Letterman, a quick-witted, perceptive guy but no intellectual, may be annoyed by the show's bright-eyed vacuousness. Once during a commercial he said to me, "Do you believe I get paid for this?" But the money's good, be gets a lot of days off, obviously likes doing comedy, and is good at it. Does anyone think he's going back to Ball State for his Ph.D. in meteorology?

Meanwhile, my life was beginning to change. A filmmaker offered me $1000 a day for a walk-on. A director wanted to dramatize some of my stories and have me act in the production. A TV producer pitched me to the Fox network as a talk show host. I told him I wasn't interested, I didn't want to waste my time in lightweight conversation with celebrities and live in a fishbowl. The producer laughed at me and went on negotiating. He set up a deal for me to go out to L.A. and do a couple of pilots for Fox. I said I still wasn't interested. He couldn't believe it. He got his friends and business associates to try to talk me into it. When I wouldn't change my mind, they couldn't believe it. Why do so many Americans think the greatest thing in the world is to be on TV, that the more people see you the better off you are?

But a little show biz doesn't represent a commitment, right? So I was going back on Late Night March 24. What would I talk about? You guessed it, GE! Was I obsessed? Well, yes and yes. Yes, I am obsessive. Yes, it's always worthwhile to focus the public's attention on outfits like GE. And yes, it's okay to bite the hand that holds out $490.

I devised a new strategy for the March 24 show. I'd begin my segment as usual, then craftily lead the conversation around to GE and explode. I wouldn't tell the producers my plan, so they couldn't stop me. It didn't work out too well. I opened with a strident pitch for my second Doubleday anthology, shouting, flapping my arms, waving off Letterman's attempt to stop me. I got some yuks, but it occurred to me that a lot of people thought I was a lunatic. Our conversation didn't flow, it ground along. I was depressed and Letterman seemed melancholy. Still, he was convulsing people with remarks like "Where'd you get those eyebrows? You look like Zero Mostel."

I was getting shakier and more frustrated by the minute. Then I remembered there was something bigger here than my ego; the world had to be saved from GE. "Stop your slide, man, dig in your heels and make your move." I mentioned that as youths Tom Brokaw, Robert Redford, and I had roamed the Pacific Northwest, rock climbing and white water rafting, then said, "Speaking of Tom, I hear he's upset about working at NBC News because there's a conflict of interest between them and GE. GE's the third largest defense contractor, you know." The crowd was silent, puzzled. Letterman shifted to a commercial.

GE and NBC got plenty of attention this spring and summer. Its subsidiary, Kidder, Peabody, & Co., was fined $25.3 million for securities violations. In late May, the Cleveland Plain Dealer broke a story concerning three southern Ohio power companies suing GE for over $1 billion for selling them a defective nuclear reactor. GE had sold reactors of the same type, all with design flaws that made them unsafe, unreliable, and costly to operate, to other utility companies around the country. Billions of dollars have been spent trying to repair them and bring them up to standard, money that rate payers ultimately supply. Amazingly, it was discovered that GE had a report, compiled by their engineers in 1975, identifying the reactors' defects. GE executives decided to sell them anyway and let a purchasers/pay for most of the repairing and upgrading.

The GE reactor story is an important and ongoing story, yet NBC national news hadn't covered it by July 31, when I made my last appearance on Late Night. That reminded me of the congressional hearings that had been held in April, concerning problems inherent in TV networks being owned by conglomerates. Wright and NBC News chief Lawrence Grossman testified that GE couldn't possibly get away with forcing the network to alter the content of its news broadcasts. Any attempt to do so, they claimed, would result in an uproar so great that it as bound to fail.

I vowed to bring the subject up on my next appearance. What if I just jumped up and down and started yelling about GE without a lead-in? What could Letterman do, not ask me back? So what; I had a decent job, a place to stay. I had to do something constructive on TV, if not for the good of humanity then just to feel at peace with myself. Get the GE monkey off my back.

Before the show I ran into Letterman. We had a chat and he told me I had star potential, but during my last appearance we'd gotten bogged down in bickering. It was okay to insult him, since Late Night resembles professional wrestling, but if I did, the crowd would be on his side since it was his show.

I said, "Okay, but I want to talk about GE."

He said, "This isn't Meet the Press."

I insisted, so he finally agreed to let me do it if I didn’t stay on the subject too long. His bottom line was, “I’ll ask the questions, you answer ‘em."

Before the show, the segment producer came up to me with a list of eight questions. I noticed that GE was number seven and smelled a rat. So I went over to Letterman and asked him to move it to number two, so we could get it in.

The show starts. First is a harried zoo-keeper from Columbus who inadvertently loses track of some snakes and a hummingbird. Then Chris Elliott does a Marion Brando imitation. Next is a Gomer Pyle-type guy, supposedly doing a remote from Pittsburgh about an Arena Football game. Then I walk in, scowling. Letterman asks me about the TV talk show offer. I tell him I turned it down. "Why?" he asks. "Because," I tell him, "I been watching you up here." Hilarity breaks loose. The first five minutes are magic. During the commercial Letterman leans down and says, "perfect."

He isn't going to ask about GE. I've got to act alone. After the break I start shouting denunciations of GE. Letterman tries to interrupt. "Shaddup," I say, "I'm doing my thing."

Letterman complains that what I'm doing is inappropriate, that I, as a guest in his house, shouldn't be sneezing in the hors d'oeuvres. "Bullshit, where's the hors d'oeuvres," I say. The bit ends.

I'd wondered what would happen if I seriously bad-mouthed GE on NBC. Now I know. David Letterman can put down their lightbulbs, but I can't criticize their nuclear reactors.

There's plenty more to come in the book, and I'll have 2 more pieces Harvey wrote to post here in the next two months.