No sooner do the credits and the Dixieland music begin than Studs Terkel is fidgeting in his seat. He clears his throat, squirms, then gets up and moves to another seat so he`ll have a better view of the screen. Under normal circumstances, Terkel is not a tranquil soul, but he has good reason to be more restless than usual. He is about to watch ”Eight Men Out,” in which he has a small but crucial part as Hugh Fullerton, the Chicago reporter who helped crack the 1919 Black Sox scandal. Terkel is an old hand, a confessed ham, at radio, TV and stage. ”But movies . . . that`s something else. The big screen. My debut.”
When the screening ends, Terkel is even more agitated, praising the movie`s young cast of ballplayers, its period authenticity and especially the work of John Sayles, who wrote the script (from the Eliot Asinof book), directed and played Ring Lardner, Terkel`s sportswriter sidekick in the film. But what about his own performance? His debut? Terkel seems to give the question his most solemn consideration, then smiles devilishly: ”As soon as I saw myself, I thought . . . Holy Christ! There goes Spencer Tracy.”
Even with his white hair, stumpy build and mug`s face, Terkel will never be mistaken for Spencer Tracy. But he makes a distinctive impression in his first movie, waving his long cigar like a maestro`s wand, registering indignation at each scandalous turn of events and delivering cynical remarks from the side of his mouth, as when he says to Lardner: ”This is Chicago, my friend. Anything can happen.”
That line was written by Sayles, but it might have been improvised by Terkel, who could offer his own tumultuous career as an example, among many hundreds, of the dialogue`s veracity.
From his modest theatrical origins as a soap opera mobster, nemesis to Ma Perkins, Terkel has become one of the most visible symbols of Chicago, almost as recognizable (and as controversial) as the Picasso, beloved, sometimes reviled, for his aggressive populism, for wearing his humanism on his sleeve. From the darkest years of the Red blacklist, Terkel has emerged as a national folk hero, a multimedia celebrity, winner of Peabody awards for his weekday radio program on WFMT, a Prix Italia for his 1962 documentary, ”Born to Live,” and a 1985 Pulitzer Prize for ” `The Good War`: An Oral History of World War II ,” one of his half-dozen oral histories. Like any high-visibility figure, Terkel is occasionally accosted on the street and asked for his autograph. While usually willing to oblige, he doesn`t pass up the opportunity for a small lesson in humility. ”Where`s yours?” he asks, demanding the autograph of the autograph-seeker. ”You`re just as important as anybody else, aren`t you?”
At age 76, when Terkel should be winding down, his mainspring is tighter than ever. Or as he puts it, ”Everything`s poppin`.” A few weeks ago, his face was on the cover of TV Guide and his voice was heard throughout the land narrating a PBS documentary on the Spanish Civil War, ”The Good Fight.” When ”Eight Men Out” opens early next month Terkel`s cameo performance could make him as much in demand as John Houseman, Clara Peller and other late-blooming actors.
That`s not the half of it. Terkel`s new oral history, ”The Great Divide,” is due in bookstores any hour. As the title and subtitle (”Second Thoughts on the American Dream”) indicate, the book is a sequel to both
”American Dreams: Lost and Found” and ”Division Street: America,” a compilation of interviews in which Terkel and his respondents contemplate our ”national loss of memory . . . our collective Alzheimer`s disease.”
Next Tuesday, a stage version of Terkel`s autobiography, ”Talking to Myself,” will premiere at Evanston`s Northlight Theater, in an adaptation by Paul Sills, a founder of Second City and Story Theater.
Then there`s Terkel`s morning radio show, which should bring him some extra exposure, beginning the first Monday in October, when it becomes an afternoon radio show. To promote Terkel`s switch to ”drive time,” from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m., WFMT may put his image on billboards, urging motorists, ”Take Studs Home with You.” A little further down the road, the 50th-anniversary edition of ”The Grapes of Wrath” next year will carry a loving introduction by Terkel, who, in the meantime, will be boosting, on the air and off, the Steppenwolf production of the Steinbeck novel that opens in mid-September.
Whether he`s watching himself on the giant screen, reading his words in print, listening to his voice on radio and TV, or seeing his face on a book jacket, possibly a billboard, Terkel must feel like his own Big Brother. But overexposure is not a problem for him. ”I don`t think about it,” he says.
”I just let whatever happens happen. As long as it`s not something I`m ashamed of, I`m satisfied, though I`d like it to be better than that. I do have a standard, which I hope comes through on my daily radio shows.”
It is a few days after the private screening of ”Eight Men Out.”
Terkel occupies a swivel chair in his corner office at WFMT, his back to the wraparound window with its view of the Chicago River and Lake Michigan. This panorama is threatened by the rising tide of books, manuscripts, tapes
and assorted other materials that are heaped on the sofa in front of it. Terkel has on his regulation red socks and gray Hush Puppies. But as a concession to the heat, he`s wearing a red golf shirt, with frayed collar points, rather than the red-and-white-check shirt that`s usually part of his costume.
A ”No Smoking” sign on his door announces the disappearance of another Terkel prop: his cigar. Though his role in ”Eight Men Out” required him to smoke a cigar, Terkel no longer smokes them in public. ”I`ve seen the light,” he says. ”I`m like the reformed hooker at the Sunday school picnic.” But if the cigars are gone, something new has been added to the Terkel uniform: a hearing aid, which he wears in his right ear. ”Me and Ronnie Reagan,” he says. ”The only thing we have in common.”
Except for the faulty ear, Terkel says he`s in the pink. ”I could lose a pound or two, but otherwise I feel pretty fair. The spirit of 76, that`s me. I`m a 1912 baby. Yeah, I always say, the Titanic and me. That went down and I came up. One day I`ll hit the iceberg myself. But until it appears, this is it.”
With an hour before he`s due in Studio 1 for his morning broadcast, Terkel explains how he happened to make his movie debut in ”Eight Men Out.” ”One day I`m at the station, minding my own business, when I get a call from John Sayles, who made `The Return of the Secaucus Seven.` He also wrote a wonderful story called `The Anarchists` Convention` and tackles books nobody else does. `How`d you like to do Hughie Fullerton, the sportswriter?` he asks. I thought for about a 10th of a second and said, `You bet.` ”
The film required about 30 days of location shooting in Indianapolis and Cincinnati, where, Terkel says, in one of his numerous conversational detours, ”I had this bite situation. One of the local TV guys comes up and says,
`How about you and me doing a bite?` I thought, `Jesus, Cincinnati. Germantown. Great restaurants. Duck and red cabbage and German potato salad. Cincinnati beer.` So where does the guy take me but to the station for a
`bite,` which turns out to be a fast shot on TV. That was one I never heard of. A bite.”
As he describes these and other scenes, Terkel doesn`t remain immobilized for long. He swivels, he spins. He`s up, down, up again, stalking around the office, opening cabinets, sorting through the debris, looking for a book, a letter, a tape, a newspaper clipping. He snaps his fingers, plays with a rubber band, gesticulates dramatically. His thin white hair is in manic disarray, with one long forelock hanging over an eyeglass, peekaboo style.
Such a typically hyperkinetic performance off camera would tend to suggest that director Sayles had to keep Terkel from overplaying his role in
”Eight Men Out.” But that wasn`t the case, Sayles testified. ”The main problem I had with Studs is that we were in a lot of scenes together, and I`m 6 foot 4 and he`s not. It was hard to get us in the same shot without moving the camera pretty far back.”
Sayles cast Terkel as Fullerton because the part ”called for a little guy who smoked cigars and knew everybody in Chicago, which is what he does as a person. And people were somewhat flamboyant in those days. They talked fast and shot from the hip. I knew Studs had played a lot of gangsters when he was a radio actor, and he still had these Edward G. Robinson rhythms in his speech.”
If anything, Terkel`s gangster rhythms may be even more melodramatic in person than they are in the movie. He`s a skilled interviewer and a graceful conversationalist on radio. When being interviewed himself, Terkel does shoot from the hip, but with a tommy gun, a fusillade of sentence fragments, strangled syntax and metaphors, theatrical shouts and whispers,
circumlocutions and reminiscences, all of which leave the listener a little slaphappy.
A reference to his ”poppin` ” career prompts an exuberant recollection of Olsen and Johnson`s ”Hellzapoppin,” a stage chestnut that ”my brother and I saw 15 times at least.” That leads to a flashback about other great comedy teams, among them Broderick Crawford`s mother and father, whose most memorable lines Terkel was still able to recall and act out:
He: Do you mind if I smoke.
She: I don`t care if you burn.
Obviously there`s nothing wrong with Terkel`s memory, but he does has grave and disturbing doubts about the recall power of his fellow Americans, which is one of the reasons for his new oral history, ”The Great Divide.” In interviews with schoolteachers and farmers, newspapermen and yuppie parents, his book covers such urgent matters as the sharp reversals in the American Dream and the religious, political, racial and generational divisions that are the hallmark of `80s America, gaps that technology serves only to widen rather than close.
”As Jacob Bronowski observed,” Terkel says, ”we have more facts at our disposal than Issac Newton ever did, but what do they add up to? Not the truth. It`s not the bomb that`s going to kill us. We`ll eventually be smothered in trivia.”
But the issue that seems to preoccupy Terkel is America`s ”historical amnesia.” This is reflected not simply by our national failure to learn from the past but to have any memory or awareness of it. During an early reading for Paul Sills` production of ”Talking to Myself,” Terkel was discouraged to find that the young actors were unfamiliar with many of the names, events and vocabulary from the 1930s. ”They didn`t know Bob LaFollette, the populist senator from Wisconsin. They`d never heard of the I.W.W. I had to explain about the Wobblies,” the activist Industrial Workers of the World.
Though his book seems bleaker and more pessimistic than its predecessors, Terkel is nothing if not hopeful himself, an eternal but not, he hopes, a cockeyed optimist. ”There are glimmers,” he says. ”Sometimes things look dark, but then I run into certain people . . . Florence Scala or Peggy Terry . . . ordinary people, but they have this quality. . . . And I feel good. There are these slender reeds of hope, which we hold on to for dear life.”
It`s a few minutes before 11 a.m., and Terkel has two shows to do: He`ll read a couple of Hemingway`s Nick Adams stories to fill out the second half of a taped interview with George Peppard, who is impersonating the author in a one-man show here. Then he`ll record a conversation with Michael Smith, the folk singer/composer about his role in Steppenwolf`s ”The Grapes of Wrath,” for broadcast later.
In a few weeks, Terkel`s program will shift to late afternoons, the twilight zone, as part of the station`s attempt to recharge its sluggish ratings, and he finds the prospect of a new time invigorating. ”I`ve been on in the mornings for 30 years now; maybe I did get into a groove, maybe it`s time for a freshening touch.”
Considering Terkel`s age and that of his program, a rude but unavoidable question occurs: How much longer can the show go on? For Norman Pellegrini, WFMT program director, the answer is: ”Forever, I hope. As long as he wants to be on, there`s a place for him. He has said to me, `You tell me if I look like I`m slipping.` But he`s not. There are times I wish he`d slow down a bit, just for his own good. But he thrives on this.”
Should Terkel eventually decide to sign off the air, he won`t suffer from inactivity. There are plans for more oral histories, one on race perhaps, another on money. Then there`s always the possibility of more films. ”He`s got a career as an actor if he wants it,” said director Sayles. ”But I think he already has one on his radio show.”
Terkel himself would probably agree with the accuracy of that one-liner.
”Sure, there are the books and the film and a variety of other things,”
he says, as he heads off for the studio. ”But this is my work. I`m like the old Scandinavian cabinetmaker. He`s not on the assembly line. He does it all himself. That`s me. It`s my hour. I choose the guests. I choose the music. I make the whole cabinet.”
