Reading Richard Condon In the Reign of Donald Trump

Watching the insanity of this year’s presidential campaign and contemplating the approaching fascist reign of Donald Trump and his perverse cabinet choices, I wondered what the novelist Richard Condon would say of the absurd and frightening miasma soon to pollute our flawed but beloved country.
In most of his 26 novels churned out over a long, lucrative career, Condon (1915-1996) cast a gimlet eye on the United States and its ruling classes--in his vision, an intoxicating cabal of bankers, politicians, Mafia dons, clergy, corporate moguls, CIA agents and lots of scheming, forever frat boys licensed to sell out the country while hypocritically espousing good clean living and praising what Gore Vidal liked to describe as our Sky God.
In his best novels (“The Manchurian Candidate,” “An Infinity of Mirrors,” “Mile High,” “Winter Kills,” “Prizzi’s Honor”), Condon managed to pull off a dandy daily double by displaying the page-turning gift of the best thriller writer while broadly satirizing the twisted, often iconic idiocy of American society. Those talents are perhaps most on parade in “The Manchurian Candidate,” a brilliant amalgam of conspiracy and dark humor. Cold-war conservatives could take comfort that the novel describes a Communist plot to install a sleeper agent in the White House (remember the candidate in question is not the brainwashed assassin Raymond Shaw but his moronic stepfather and Joe McCarthy doppelganger, Senator John Yerkes Iselin. Sound familiar?). Liberals could find some ironic satisfaction that McCarthy/Yerkes was really a Red who had infiltrated the likes of the John Birch Society. As Condon once said: “Every book I’ve ever written has been about the abuse of power.”
Condon clearly had fun writing. He loved strained-yet-memorable similes, witness this opening line from 1974’s “Winter Kills”: “Nick Thirkield once told Keifetz that being in the same family with his father and brother Tim was like living in the back leg of an all-glass piano.”
Even his weaker novels had their moments. Given the right’s canonization of Ronald Reagan, I’m struck by Condon’s savaging of the Gipper in 1990’s “Emperor of America,” in which a character offers this estimate: ''Ronald Reagan was the greatest President this country has ever produced. He gave us the F.B.I. race wars, the Qaddafi bombings, the 'Star Wars' flapdoodle, the Grenada farce, the Bitburg shaming, the endless bank failures, the Lebanon disasters, the crumbling national airlines, the rape of HUD, the oligarchy of Big Oil, insured inflation and the shoring up of sinister Israeli politicians - all to keep our people diverted and entertained until the Royalty Party could consolidate its position.''
So what would Condon say, not just about the gross and unstable Trump but the whole contemporary, crazy caravan journeying across our media-saturated, febrile brains on a daily basis? What would he say if exposed to Fox News and Sean Hannity? Or Rush Limbaugh? Or Alex Jones, who claimed that Obama and Hillary Clinton were demons who smelled of sulphur? Or the predictable punditocracy of Sunday morning TV, analyzing American politics as if it were an endless football game refereed by the more congenial we’re-all-in-this-together characters from “Advise and Consent”? What would Condon make of Steve Bannon or Mitch McConnell or Paul Ryan or the Koch brothers or the gun lobby or whatever other nut jobs you can think of who are given a spotlight to perform their particular danse macabre?
I think Richard Condon would smile and say, “I told you so.”
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Full disclosure: this is a revised and slightly edited update of a piece I posted here in 2011. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

Dream Fluff Donuts, Martin Scorsese and I

 This morning, Roxie the Lab and I—suffering from cabin-fever thanks to two rainy days in a row—went for our morning walk through the neighborhood, making a stop at Dream Fluff Donuts, a local landmark. Although there were only four people ahead of me, service was slow, and my mind wandered to a moment in the early 90s, a time when I was writing a nonfiction book and a screenplay based on the book, which was called “Tin For Sale,” about a crooked NYPD detective who went to work for the mob. Universal had bought the rights and assigned me to adapt the book, all because Martin Scorsese and Nick Pileggi were attached to the project (it was Nick who had brought me in as a writer, an act of kindness I will never forget).
When word got out that I was writing for Scorsese and Pileggi, two young, enterprising agents contacted Sterling Lord, my literary agent, and asked to represent me in Hollywood. One of them was Ari Emanuel (yes, the brother of Rahm and now the co-head of William Morris Endeavor). Meetings were set up with development executives all around town, including a producer who worked at Amblin Entertainment, Steven Spielberg’s company.
The producer ushered me into his office, dispensed with the usual formalities and got right to the point: “So what do you know about’ The Flintstones?’”
This was not a question I expected, since the screenplay I had written and the producer has presumably read—or at least a summary provided by a minion—was a dark, violent, curse-filled story with no redemption at the end. Reading it would not trigger the thought: we gotta get this guy to do a rewrite of a live-action version of “The Flintstones,” which at the point had gone through about a dozen frazzled writers.
I asked him if he had read my screenplay. He admitted he had not. I briefly told him what it was about. The producer feigned embarrassment, then asked me where I was from.
“Berkeley.”
The producer’s face lit up. “I went to college there,” he said, meaning Cal. “Have you ever been to Dream Fluff Donuts?”
Another question I was not expecting. I told him I lived a mere two blocks away.
“I love that place,” he said. “I took LSD a lot when I was in college, and Dream Fluff donuts were the best donuts when you were coming down from a high.”
For one of the few times in my life, I had an epiphany: could I really put my future and that of my family in the hands of people like this guy? Could I pay the mortgage in the future, pitching movie ideas to a parade of silly asses? Get my daughter through college? Build a nest egg? I’m not saying every studio executive was like this guy, but enough were in different ways.
The producer and I parted. “The Flintstones” opened in 1994.
William Morrow published my book. Universal never made the movie. I made some money. But I never wrote another screenplay, and when the opportunity arose to get back into the world of a weekly paycheck, I took it. All because of Dream Fluff Donuts.
Which brings us back to the present. After fifteen minutes of waiting, I turned to the ladies behind me and said, “No donut is worth this, take my place, I’m leaving.”
Roxie and I made our slow way home. About ten minutes later, someone behind us said, “Mister!” I turned. It was the two women who had waited behind me, each with bags laden with donuts for their families.
“We want you to have a donut,” one of the women said. I thanked them but demurred. They insisted. So I reached into one of the bags and took a donut, thanking them again. We went our separate ways. It was a lovely, modest act of generosity that made me feel better than I had in a long time.
Rox and I got home. I made tea. The donut was delicious. And I was on my own kind of high.