But when my work was done in Baltimore, there was plenty to come home to. A month after the play opened, my son Ian was born. All the anxiety and feverish striving of the previous months were instantly eclipsed by that one gigantic event. There is no clearer demarcation in a man’s life than the birth of his first child. It is the bright line between not being and being a father. I felt as if a new dimension had been added to my being, as if I had cast a shadow for the first time. The magnitude of the moment was not lost on me. I was throttled with a complex mix of intense emotions, ranging from ecstatic joy at Ian’s arrival to heart-stopping fear that something might happen to him. It was the best possible cure for an unemployed actor’s solipsistic self-absorption: suddenly there was another person in my world more important to me than I was to myself.
Jean had left her job to care for the baby, and almost instantly we began to feel the economic pinch. Despite the deep sense of fulfillment at Ian’s birth, the pressure to provide was like a steadily building drumbeat in the soundtrack of my life. True, I had gained perspective and a clearer sense of priorities. My career anxieties were now less about me and more about my family. But those anxieties were still there, and more crippling than ever. The sizzle of the city had turned to a sputter. Its economy was dire. Half the theaters on Broadway were dark. My prospects had never been bleaker. Dealing and The Beaux’ Stratagem had begun to feel like aberrant blips in a desolate stretch of joblessness. And as if all this were not enough of a burden, parenthood was hard. For all its joys, caring for a baby in our tiny apartment was draining for both of us. Sleep deprivation left us bleary-eyed and bone-sore. But every morning I shook off my fatigue and hit the streets, hustling work with redoubled determination.
Though hardly a lifesaver, a curious job did present itself. Since moving to New York, I had sporadically volunteered at radio station WBAI-FM, performing sketch comedy and radio drama with a gang of similarly out-of-work actor friends. The station’s management now offered me a steady (if part-time) job, doing more of the same. This meant writing and producing whatever I liked, on my own schedule. If the job was unlikely to advance my fortunes much in the entertainment business, at least it promised an intriguing challenge, a new creative direction, and a little anarchic fun. Most important, I would be paid. I was offered the lordly salary of $115 a week. I leaped at it.
These were the salad days for WBAI. Dubbed “an anarchist’s circus” by the New York Times, the station was perfectly in tune with the activist cacophony of the radical left in the early seventies. Late night hosts like Steve Post, Bob Fass, and Larry Josephson gave voice to the caustic spirit of the city’s lefty fringe. The staff was brilliant, cynical, contentious, and frequently stoned. In their midst, I was a goose among grackles, but from my first day there I had a ball. Before I knew it, I was doing full-time work for my part-time salary. I spent hours in the station’s cluttered, dimly lit studios, housed in a rambling deconsecrated church in the East Sixties. Fueled by the manic energy of my stoned-out sound engineers, I churned out hours of programming for the station’s unseen audience of New York hipsters. Stealing blatantly from Beyond the Fringe, The Goon Show, and Firesign Theatre, I cooked up daffy parodies of game shows, newscasts, beer ads, NASA astronauts, Chekhov, Mister Rogers, and Martin Buber (because of his funny name). I recruited actor friends to record plays by Shakespeare, Shaw, Wilde, and Thomas Middleton. I perfected a dead-on audio impersonation of Richard Nixon and aped him mercilessly. Everything I did was flung out over the airwaves with never a word of editorial input or constraint.
Our mother lode, of course, was political satire. I had never been very vocal politically (nor have I ever been since), but the everyday politics of that era presented me with a subject too good to resist. I would arrive in the morning with a couple of willing, unpaid confederates. We would step over to the Reuters teletype in the station’s newsroom and pore over the printed pages that were rattling out of it. I would always have a couple of half-baked comedy sketches in hand, but on a good day I would jettison them in favor of up-to-the minute satirical commentary on the day’s events, fed to us by Reuters.
Our finest (or most infamous) moment came on May 2, 1972. We arrived at the station that morning and headed to the teletype. A major item of breaking news supercharged us. J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime head of the FBI, had died in his sleep. Hated and feared by every major public figure, the despicable Hoover had been miraculously transformed overnight into a beloved national hero in the public press. Reverential tributes were pouring in from statesmen of all stripes, every one of whom Hoover had terrorized with compromising information about their private lives, right up until the night before. The hypocrisy of these tributes elated us. We immediately set about providing a different perspective. We would create our own version of a J. Edgar Hoover memorial tribute, and we would put it on the radio.
As we saw it, Hoover was a creature of a bygone era. So to memorialize him we hit on the notion of parodying a 1940s “News on the March” featurette. Working at a feverish pace, we dragooned people from all over the station. We put the sound engineers to work collecting audio effects and heroic forties-era music. We hit up the news staff for arcane biographical facts. These guerrilla journalists were uncannily well-versed in all sorts of damning information about Hoover that the public was not to learn about for years — his ruthless use of blackmail, his racism, his drunkenness, his prurience, his gay companion Clyde Tolson, even his transvestitism. Armed with all of this, we wrote a five-minute script that raced from scene to lurid scene of Hoover’s shady life, mercilessly lambasting him while maintaining a gleefully ironic tone of public canonization. And the title for our venomous little screed? “J. Edgar: A Desecration of the Memory of J. Edgar Hoover.”
The WBAI staff was so thrilled with the sketch that they chose to air it at 6:25 p.m., immediately preceding their evening newscast. Seconds after it ended, the actual news came on. The lead story, of course, was Hoover’s death. It was announced in sober tones not unlike my stentorian narration of the “News on the March” parody that had gone before. The effect was like an underground nuclear blast. Until that moment I had never had a sense that anyone out in the world was actually listening to anything I produced. When you perform on the radio, you hear neither cheers nor jeers. But that night I found out just how far my voice reached. For several hours after the Hoover piece hit the airwaves, the switchboard at the station was lit up like Chinese New Year’s. We had managed to scandalize hundreds of thousands of people. A huge segment of WBAI’s listenership, the most left-wing audience in the entire nation, was appalled. To our merry band of newsroom anarchists, this was an undiluted triumph. They celebrated as if their soccer team had just won the World Cup.
The episode was the high point of my WBAI days and typified the whole crazy enterprise — raucous, reckless, politically charged, a little dangerous, and deliriously fun.
But $115 a week?!
Despite all the high times at the station, I knew that they weren’t meant to last. In terms of the hard realities of life, my low-paid radio job was barely better than unemployment. It was leading me nowhere professionally, it was never going to sustain my family, and in spite of its part-time status, it was affording me precious little time at home with my wife and baby son. At WBAI, I was just marking time until something better came along. And late that spring, just as I was reaching the end of my tether, something better did come along. John Stix called again.