Guest column: Harlan Ellison on Twist vs. McFarlane

Originally published September 1, 2000, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1398

The following is a guest column by Mr. Harlan Ellison. In my recent coverage of the Tony Twist decision (where Todd McFarlane got hammered by a St. Louis jury for transforming hockey player “Tony Twist” into corpulent thug “Tony Twist), Harlan was struck by Todd’s (and Todd’s supporters) clear lack of comprehending what (if anything, in his eyes) he’d done to deserve this. Harlan has elected to draw from personal experience and spell it out for him. Here is Mr. Ellison:

So Todd McFarlane and Erik Larsen walk into a building.

You’d think one of them would have seen it.

Erik Larsen looses the gardyloo: “Poor millionaire Toddy! If this verdict stands, o lord lord lordy lord, think of the hideous ‘chilling effect’ on First Amendment rights! Oh me! Oh my!”

Oh, horsepuckey.

What we’re talking about here is an amateur writer’s fannish gag of naming characters after real people. They are called “Tuckerisms,” named after Wilson “Bob” Tucker, a science fiction and mystery writer who was very very big in the SF field. He was a toastmaster, a humorist, and a friend.

When Bob Tucker did his novels, he occasionally used the names of real people, such as F. Towner Laney, or Charles Burbee. They were very prominent fans. He did mystery novels: The Red Herring, The Chinese Doll, others. They’re excellent novels, they’re just wonderful, though now long out of print. In his SF stuff he did the same thing, he used the names of fans. So “Tuckerism” became the accepted nickname for such loving homages, and for a while a fairly widespread kind of thing. Almost every writer at one time or another has done it. It’s usually done as a nod to friends, an in-joke, and no one takes it seriously.

What happened to McFarlane is a very different thing. He used a name in a malicious way, as he has done in the past with Peter David and John Byrne. A smartass version of “Tuckerism,” as weapon. It is a mean-spirited, amateurish, adolescent trick used by a person with a nasty heart. A professional does not do it, ever, because pros are aware of the fact that in this litigious society, anyone can sue anybody at any time, with our without genuine grievance. And it causes ancillary damage to innocent parties: Look at the money in settlements it has forced on Wizard and HBO, just so Todd McFarlane could demonstrate his childish bravado.

It doesn’t matter whether they’re wrong or right or if they have a case or don’t have a case, as when Michael Fleischer sued me. And I was praising him, PRAISING him in the interview that I did, but he didn’t like the way I praised him. So he sued me and tried to make some money off it. Well, I always fight these things to the wall. At the moment I’m battling Remarq and AOL and we’re fighting a case very much like the one that the federal judge dealt with in the Napster decision today. Copyright infringement. Mooches and punks who think they can post other people’s stories for free are learning that copyright applies on line as well as off line. But, I digress.

Back to the dangers of Tuckerisms.

In the early days of my career, 1956, I was assigned by the editor of Infinity Science Fiction as one of three writers who would do a trio of short short stories, each with the title “Blank.” The three writers who were picked by editor Larry Shaw were Randall Garrett, Isaac Asimov, and me. Isaac did a story called “Blank!” Randy did one called “Blank.” Mine was “Blank…” In my story, because Isaac and I were friends, and everyone called him Ike, my villain’s name was “Rike Akisimov.” An example of using a Tuckerism. Dopey… but I was young in the job.

But apart from that, I can’t recall doing that kind of thing very much. When I was in the army and I hated my first sergeant and the captain in my company, I used their names in a story. But I didn’t use their first names, just their last names. I was aware that you couldn’t do that kind of thing and make someone a negative character because I was running the risk of being jumped on. I didn’t do it often, and when I did, it was just for a lark.

So I came to Hollywood in 1962 and started working in TV. After a little while, I was writing The Man From U.N.C.L.E., the series produced by the famous Norman Felton. I had an office at MGM and I was their fair-haired boy because I had written some very clever shows for them, according to the critics. And I went to The Man From U.N.C.L.E. after having made a big splash on Burke’s Law and I was making top dollar in Hollywood and had been, by no merest chance, dating Norman Felton’s daughter. Norman was very high on me and wanted me to create my own series since The Girl From U.N.C.L.E. wasn’t doing that well. So I was building my own series at the time.

Right around this time, the most popular novel in America was Peyton Place. So I created a plot for The Man From U.N.C.L.E. about a woman, Jacqueline Midcult (played by Sharon Farrell), living in a small Iowa town, who finds a diary in the attic of her family home and the diary is filled with a long story detailing the adventures of a spy. She uses the notebooks as the basis for writing a roman a clef, a spy novel entitled “The Pieces of Fate.” What she doesn’t know is that this was her grandfather’s or her father’s memoirs, when he was part of the enemy network THRUSH. So now she’s got these books, THRUSH goes after her, and UNCLE sends Kuryakin and Solo to protect her and find out where she got the info. And the script was called “The Pieces of Fate Affair.” I wrote it in 1966. And it aired as the 82nd episode on February 24, 1967. It aired once, was not rerun, and was not included in the syndication package. And I will tell you why. And you will understand why this relates to Todd McFarlane and why it chills.

In the script–and it was a silly thing to do, however innocently it was intended–I used the names of some of my friends in the SF world. I thought they’d get a kick being in-group trivia in an enormously popular primetime TV series. There was a bookstore in town called Jack Vance’s Bookstore. There was a THRUSH assassin named Simeon Spinrad (because Norman Spinrad was my closest friend, and he laughed and I laughed, and it was like that). Don’t forget The Man From U.N.C.L.E. was very much parody, it was never a serious kind of program. The Complete Directory of Primetime Network and Cable Shows, 1946-Present by Tim Brooks and Earl Marsh describes it as a “spy spoof.” And Bill Koenig’s The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Episode Guide described that episode as one of the season three highlights, saying, “Ellison’s script parodies small-town life, the literary world and television. He’s also witty enough to make the light-hearted approach work.” (Note: Peter unearthed the encomium: I am far too humble to toot my own fife.)

Also in the episode was a book critic who was an undercover THRUSH agent, and I called her Judith Merle. The part was played with incredible elegance by Grayson Hall, who was that year an Academy award nominee for best supporting actress, “Night of the Iguana.” So we’re talking about a very fine and very well cast part. She played most of her scenes in silk pajamas in a circular bed that turned as she gave instructions to get and kill Solo and do the things a spy does. The show aired and everybody loved it.

Now, at that time there was a book reviewer named Judith Merril. She was also a well-known editor: The Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year. She had a great deal of power, but she was a very opinionated and confrontational woman. She had at one point been married to Ted Sturgeon. She was known for having had affairs with any number of writers whose works would then be included in Best of the Year. If, on the other hand, you invoked her wrath for any reason, such as turning down her advances (as I once did in H. L. Gold’s apartment in NY) you found that your work somehow didn’t make it into the best of the year collection. (Well, actually, I did achieve that singular feat without compromising myself, once; but it was years later.)

Judith Merril led a strangely bifurcated life. It was incredibly dichotomous, because on the one hand she would go to these SF cons and people would treat her as if she was the Dowager Empress of China. She was feted and lauded and catered to and curried. But in truth she was working as a waitress in a diner in a small town near Milford, PA. So most of the year, she was schlepping ham and eggs, and then, Cinderella-like, she would go and become this great literary lion. She was in England at the time that “The Pieces of Fate Affair” aired. I didn’t think anything of it, her name wasn’t used in a bad context; it didn’t do anyone any harm. I never gave it a thought, in truth. My stupid!

Judy didn’t have much money, she had been Bohemian strapped most of her life. So she flies back from England, gets off the plane; and the first thing that happens is her daughter says, “You were maligned on this episode of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. on this show that Harlan Ellison wrote.” She got her all het up about it.

Without even seeing the show, they hired a man named Milton Amgott. Amgott was a science fiction fan who also happened to be an ambulance-chasing attorney, who’d worked for all of the destitute, amateurish SF writers of the 1940s and ’50s. If they had a problem, if they got thrown in jail, if there was a drunk charge on them, or they needed a will drawn up, Milt Amgott did it. But he was basically a barrister friend to the SF indigent.

Amgott took this case and proceeded to let MGM and NBC know that he was going to sue for libel on behalf of Judith Merril who had been “horrendously maligned by Harlan Ellison.” They were going to sue me for a million, MGM for a million, and NBC for a million. Even though no one could specify exactly how Judy had been damaged. Nonetheless, Amgott seemingly initiated the lawsuit. He advised MGM and NBC that he was gonna sue. Well, instantly I got in touch with Judy. This was very easy to do, because Judith Merril’s literary agent in NY was the same as mine: Robert P. Mills. And Bob Mills set up a meeting for Judy and me for me to talk. I flew to NY, I sat down with Judy and Bob in the office, and I said, “Look, Judy, you’ve known me for 15 years, and we’ve been friends, and I meant no harm.” We both chuckled as longtime friends would, when I mentioned “Tuckerizing” which Judy acknowledged she had done a few times over the years herself. I asked her if she’d seen the show. She said no. I said, “Kiddo, this isn’t like some frivolous fanzine feud. This is the Big Time. This is MGM and NBC. These people have no sense of humor and they don’t play around. This can do me great and permanent harm, Judy. So before you jump on this thing, look at the show, we’ll get you a tape, and you’ll see that I meant no harm… and I did you no harm.”

And she said “Harlan, I would never sue you, honey. But we have to include you as a defendant because you wrote the show. But we’re never gonna pursue it with you.”

I said, “Judy, it doesn’t matter if you pursue it with me. Hollywood is a town where they live in fear of this kind of thing. And if there is so much as a whisper that I have done this kind of thing, it will kill my TV career.”

“Oh, no no no, honey,” she said lightly, “that will never happen.”

I said, “Judy, I’m telling you, it will happen. Don’t do this to me, for pity’s sake, don’t.”

And Bob Mills said, “Judy this is foolish. It can’t possibly do you any harm. For anyone who knows enough to know that there’s a Judith Merril who is a book critic, they’re going to laugh. It’s just friends doing a funny little thing with friends. Don’t do this.”

I said, “Look, Judy, I’ve saved five thousand dollars, in the bank. I’ll give it to you. Take the five grand. Please stop this.”

She got up from the chair and she came over and hugged me and gave me a kiss on the cheek. She said, “Honey, that’s the end of it. I’m not going to pursue it.” I breathed a sigh of relief.

Well, needless to say, she did not drop the case. And my TV series was canceled before it ever got into the production stage, and I did not work on NBC for five years and they never re-ran that episode of “The Pieces of Fate” affair, and I lost thousands of dollars in royalties and residuals (although it did eventually turn up twenty years later on CBN, now called the Family Channel). But to this day, I’ve not earned one more cent from that episode.

And you wanna hear the upshot? You’re gonna love this. Milton Amgott, in fact, never even filed the lawsuit. Judy couldn’t pay him, and so all that ever surfaced was the original threat in 1967. No lawsuit, no follow up, no damage—except to me—and no one to remember the bogus attempt at reaching into MGM’s and NBC’s “deep pockets.” And ten, fifteen, eighteen years later, they settled out of court for something like $2000. But in the process she blighted my TV writing career. That’s what killed me. At the height of my popularity, I was cut off from one of the three major markets, and the studio, MGM, where I’d been working for two years. Never spoke to her again, never saw her again; she died a few years ago. When they settled for the two thousand dollars, the Studio or NBC (I can’t remember which after all this time) came back to me on the indemnification clause and demand, “We want you to recoup the two thousand for us.” I said, “Screw you, I’d rather starve, never work in TV again, rather than reimburse you because it was convenient for you to settle out of court.”

But I learned the lesson: “Tuckerisms,” using the names of people you know, or real people in fictional works, can get you clobbered. It is bad, bad, bad, bad business. And any writer who is a professional knows it. Let me say again: BAD! DUMB!

And so the Spawn case is no more an assault on First Amendment rights or Freedom of Speech (even though Mr. McFarlane would like to pretend it is) than I am the prima ballerina of the Bolshoi ballet. What it was was Mr. McFarlane… who thinks he is above all common rules of social congress… who views himself as some sort of wonderful rebel who performed an amateur act of adolescent spitefulness… and who—like a little baby who came down and took a leak in the middle of his parents’ party in order to gain attention—had his Johnson taken off with a cheese grater by Tony Twist, who was absolutely in the right. Mr. McFarlane did something stupid and has no one to blame for what happened to him but his own big stupid self. And no one should have any concern that a jury judgment like this will have even a scintilla of that much touted “chilling effect” on writers. Being who Mr. McFarlane is, and judging him only by his past inability to cop to his own missteps, not even he will “get it,” and he’ll keep doing this kind of adolescent jackanapery until the next time he gets knobbled. There is nothing more meaningful in this little imbroglio than there was in mine, but you see how serious such silliness can become. And if ya wanna know the bottom line for anyone with a brain in his head but a McFarlane stalking horse like the intellectually paralogical Erik Larsen, this ain’t nothin’ more tragic than a prankster adolescent getting his knuckles rapped with a judicial ruler. May some gods or other provide Mr. McFarlane with the commonsense to get past his hubris and immaturity to come to grips with that simple truth.

(This installment only copyright © 2000 by the Kilimanjaro Corporation. All rights reserved.)

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705. )