Jerzy Kosinski’s Cockpit

There was a time when American fiction writers were celebrities.

Throughout the 1970s, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal and Truman Capote turned up regularly on late-night television, and you could count on each to be outspoken and opinionated, and to meet America’s vision of a public intellectual.

Then there was Jerzy Kosinski. Charming and witty, with his Polish accent and full head of hair, he wasn’t gruff like Mailer, sniffingly condescending like Vidal or weird as Capote. Kosinski made 14 appearances between 1971 and 1980 on The Tonight Show, making him recognizable enough that when Bantam Books reprinted several of his novels in the early 1980s, his portrait was prominent on each front cover.

Born in Poland in 1933, Kosinski and his family survived the Holocaust thanks to local villagers who aided Polish Jews. After the war, his father aligned with Poland’s newfound Communist regime and Kosinski, forging official documentation, migrated to the U.S.

Nearly all his books were best sellers; he’s best known for Being There (1971) and The Painted Bird (1965), novels that won him accolades, literary awards and were later adapted as films.

His book Cockpit, published 50 years ago in 1975, although superficially about a former operative in a security agency called "the Service," isn’t a spy novel. Novel may not be the right word to describe it either. Like his Steps (1968), the book is constructed of random vignettes written in the first person. Cockpit’s protagonist (a cold and clinical word, but this shoe fits) is a Class A sociopath, ticking every box: a lack of conscience; patterns of antisocial behaviors and attitudes; controlling with threats or aggression; manipulating others using intelligence, charm or charisma.

Most of the pieces in Cockpit revolve around violence or sex, sometimes both; the sexual content is often reminiscent of those “erotic” ghost-written letters used to run in Penthouse Forum. Sometimes it’s English-as-a-second-language awkward (“I induced her orgasm”).

It’s a claustrophobic read not helped by the lack of chapters, points where you can catch your breath. The copy just flows on and after a while, the cumulative examples of animal cruelty, mimicking bureaucrats to frighten people, stealing mail, scaring children, retracting one’s penis to make women believe it was amputated, and just the overall creepiness is wearying. At one point the narrator, speaking of the hours spent secretly photographing, developing and enlarging photos of his sexual activities, says, “I am overcome by its pointlessness.”

Understood.

Since most of the narrator’s antics – secret surveillance, trolling, photographing (not even filming) sex – seem almost mainstream these days, Cockpit is creepy, but almost quaint.

Plagued by allegation of plagiarism and deteriorating health, Kosinski died by suicide in 1991, ingesting lethal amounts of drugs and alcohol, then sealing the deal with a plastic bag around his head. 

Unless there’s some sort of Kosinski revival, like a biopic -- and he's probably worthy of such treatment -- I'm not sure if anybody is still reading him. As with many other celebrity authors, the guys who dominated The New York Times best-seller lists for decades, he seems to have dropped out of public consciousness.

Turn on, tune in, turn your eyes around 

With the sun having set over the Summer of Love several months before, a few rays of psychedelic sunshine were still beaming down on the Top 40 charts in January 1968.

Driven by its Hammond organ and fuzz guitar -- and the cowbell, the Strawberry Alarm Clock’s Incense and Peppermints was slipping down the charts after holding the number one spot for one week in November. It was easy to question the band’s Haight-Ashbury Street creds, always neatly attired for television in kaftans, paisley pants and beads as if they had a key to the costume closet of a theatrical company, plus their contributions to the soundtrack of Dick Clark’s hippie exploit flick Psych-Out. Nonetheless, still groovy after all these years.

Strawberry Alarm Clock

According to Eric Burdon, what broke up the Animals was that he got turned on to acid and pot, while the rest of the band preferred Guinness. The reinvented Burdon found a new band of like-minded musicians and together they wrote Monterey, which may help explain the obvious lyrics and production.

Referring to their fellow musicians who played the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967 as "young gods" and "religion was being born" was pure hippie drivel, calling Brian Jones “his majesty Prince Jones” is just embarrassing. Hey Eric, you may have forgotten that you and Jones are peers.

The clumsiness continues by namechecking musicians followed by their corresponding instrument: Ravi Shankar by a sitar, The Who with power chords, Hugh Masekela by a trumpet. I will admit to really digging this record when I first heard it as age 13. Monterey went to #15 on the Billboard Hot 100.

The experimentation of Sgt. Pepper (and Revolver) likely gave producer James Guercio permission to drop a snippet of Avant-garde music into the middle of the pop ballad Susan by the innocuous Buckinghams (without the band's knowledge). The sample (Central Park in the Dark written for chamber orchestra by Charles Ives in 1906) made Susan the scariest thing on Top 40 radio, monster movie music crashing out of nowhere, a thunderstorm in the middle of a sunny afternoon. Most radio stations played the edited version without the noise. It peaked on the charts at #11.

Unassuming and pretty aren’t words very often used to describe Rolling Stones songs, yet She’s A Rainbow is both (which may explain why it only got as far as #25). The lyrics are pure acid trip (“She shoots colors all around, like a sunset going down”), although the strings (arranged by future Led Zeppelin John Paul Jones) can border on what used to be known as elevator music.

By the end of the month, Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In) by the First Edition was beginning to move up the charts, as good a satire of psych music as there ever was (although I always doubted whether the band was in on the joke), signaling an end to Top 40’s brief flirtation with psychedelia.

The Ghost Who Walks

The Phantom always promised more than it delivered.

Created by Lee Falk, the character began as a newspaper comic strip in 1936. The Phantom was a true pulp hero, more Doc Savage than Superman, relying on his strength, smarts and two holstered handguns (and of course, he was an expert marksman) to battle evil.

Working out of a fictional country in Africa, the Phantom checked off all the boxes: cool purple costume, terrific origin story (phantoming is the family business, handed down from generation to generation since 1560 and leading to the locals thinking the Phantom immortal, calling him The Ghost Who Walks), his Skull Cave headquarters, a pet wolf named Devil and a skull ring that left a long-lasting mark on the faces of bad guys.

As newspaper comic strips began to lose some of their stronghold on popular culture storytelling in the 1960s, the Phantom moved to comic books. Gold Key owned the Phantom franchise from 1963 to 1966 and that’s where the expectation versus execution argument begins. The Gold Key issues of the Phantom sported dynamic covers painted by George Wilson, good enough that Gold Key reprinted them on the back covers minus the title and cover blurbs. But inside, the stories were never very exciting, the artwork stiff.

A typical Gold Key Phantom cover

The license was transferred over the decades to other comic book publishers with mostly negligible results. A Phantom movie was released in 1996 which I seemed to remember enjoying at the time, but I can’t recall any details.  

At a used bookstore I recently came across two Phantom novels published by Avon Books. The painted covers by the same George Wilson who did the Gold Key comics covers lured me in just as they did in 1965. Avon published 15 Phantom books from 1972 to 1975, adapted mostly from Lee Falk’s comic strip, then ghosted by sci-fi author Ron Goulart, writing as Frank S. Shawn. That’s four books a year, a difficult pace similar to the production of the old pulp novels.

As with the comic books, the novels left me feeling that this was a great missed opportunity. They have an entertaining, if shlocky pulp feel to them and seemed to have been written quickly. In The Swamp Rats (1974), the Phantom is almost a secondary character in his own book; sometimes several chapters tick by without any involvement from him, at least until the end when his heroics are needed to end things and bring the villains to justice.

The Hydra Monster (1973) isn’t a monster at all, but a crime organization similar to Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD’s nemesis Hydra, created many years earlier (including a reference to cutting off one limb and two replacing it, part of the Marvel Hydra creed). As additional evidence that these books were written very quickly, Devil the wolf plays a significant role through the first half of the book before disappearing completely.

Going into these books with low expectations feels right. They’re quick reads and if you aren’t paying too much attention, enjoyable in their own ways.