Los Angeles Times Magazine, 1990

"I'm suicidal,'' says Harlan Ellison cheerfully. "I'll throw it all down the tube. I don't care.''

Ellison is sitting in the art deco dining nook of his house in the hills above Sherman Oaks and explaining why in 1985 he walked away from a $4,000/week job writing stories for the new revived Twilight Zone.

For the Christmas show, Ellison had written his contribution to the battle against racism-an 11 minute segment about a black Santa anti-Claus who preys on white bigots. And then at the last minute CBS pulled the plug on the show, making Ellison so furious, he says, he "walked into the forest of anger and chewed trees."

Chewed trees?

Ellison, who is wearing a faded yellow terry cloth bathrobe with "Don't bug me" embroidered on the back, points out the window to a brown scrubby hill. "I went out the hillside and I would grab a tree and I would shake it,'' he says, holding his hands in front of him like claws. "I would grab great gobs the earth with my hand and throw them as far as I could. I would yell. There was this great coiled snake in my gut and it had to speak."

Meet Harlan Ellison: prolific author, fiery critic, general nuisance, and all-around black bear to "functionally illiterate" producers, ignorant editors, and anyone else he considers stupid, incompetent or politically misinformed.

He's been known to stand on a director's desk and shout. He's shown up at story conferences carrying a baseball bat. Once he brought a pistol in a chamois bag which he then ostentatiously proceeded to clean during the meeting (though without ever alluding to it). In a famous fit of pique, he once leapt over a desk to throttle a man for sneering that "All writers are hacks.''

As a result is his personal and professional career is littered with the smoking remnants of explosive encounters with editors and producers who think their stock options and private parking spaces on the studio lot entitle them to order arbitrary changes in his scripts and stories.

Although this has made him almost a legendary figure to some other writers who have neither his self-confidence, chutzpah, or reckless courage, it's also come at a high price. His determination to remain his own man, says the writer Howard Fast, has cost Ellison "god knows how many millions'' in lost income from scripts and screenplays. And his refusal to allow anyone to tamper with his columns or stories has condemned Ellison to generally appearing in the kind of small narrow focus outlets which permit him total control. Most of all, it's cost him dearly in readership and recognition.

"I'm 55 years old," says Ellison, who on this cool grey morning in late December is lying on his waterbed recovering from both a hemorrhoid operation and a broken 5th metatarsel in his left foot. "I've only got a finite number of years left in me." And in "a semi-literate society," the odds against making it as a writer are fearsome.

"Susan!'' he says, calling his wife in other room. "Susan, would you please get something for me up upstairs?'' And he sends her off with a series of complex instructions for finding the one book out of some 75,000 alphabetized and categorized books filling the walls, shelves, closets and drawers of his house and covering his pool table to a depth of three feet. Ten minutes later, Susan, a slight brown-haired woman who is Ellison's fifth (and, he says, last) wife is back with a slip of personalized stationary on which she has copied a quote from the 19th century French author, Jules Renard.

"Here it is," says Ellison, reading out loud: "Writing is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none.''

And this sort of thing happens time and time again, says Ellison, despite the fact that he is the author of 48 books, a four-time winner of the Writers Guild Award for Most Outstanding Teleplay; he's written television scripts for Star Trek, Outer Limits, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour and The Twilight Zone. He's written some 1200 essays, scripts, columns, reviews and short stories, some of which are among the most reprinted stories in the English language. He's been translated into 35 languages. The complete bibliography of his published works runs to 660 single spaced pages.

And yet, says Ellison, "everywhere I go I find that writers are treated as if they are invisible, as if they don't matter... In this town particularly, the writer has a history of being brutalized because it is a town that flies almost entirely on horse pucky and hot air. Most of the people in the business are not artists. They are sort of Willy Loman types... ex-salesmen out there on a smile and a shoeshine and what they consider an idea is ridiculous."

A couple of months ago, says Ellison, he gets a call from a guy who invited him down to lunch at the Beverly Hills hotel to make a proposition. He wanted to do a series about Ron Silver, an up and coming New York stage actor whom Ellison much admired.

"Great!'' says Ellison. "What kind of a series is it?''

"I got this great idea. I want it to be about the battle between good and evil.''

"And...?'' says Ellison, waiting for the high-concept bombshell that's going to blow him out of his chair.

"That's it.'' says the producer.

Ellison sits there, he says, and looks at the man and thinks "You poor piece of ambulatory flem! You sad excuse for a human being. Don't you understand that isn't even an idea? That isn't a concept. That's nothing. There's nothing there!''

So Ellison says to him, "How do you want this good and evil to be? Do you want it to be an angel and he fights the devil? How about we make him a cop and he fights criminals. Or perhaps we can make him a doctor and he fights disease?''

And the producer says, "Yeah, yeah, almost any of those will be good.''

Ellison was disgusted. "And I just threw up my hands,'' he says "'I can't stand this.' And I walked out-which is what I've been doing since I got here in 1962--I've been walking out of meetings.''

If a person's home is a reflection of his inner pysche, Ellison is a human pack rat, albeit a spotless organized one with cozy striking tastes. He lives in a gleaming custom house in the hills above Sherman Oaks filled with art (including many of the original paintings for his book covers), hand crafted doors, hand carved dinosaurs, secret underground rooms accessible by a button in a bookshelf (he hid protesters during the anti-war years, he says) and a two-story library with a walk around balcony. The overall impression, says one former visitor, is that of something designed by "a precocious 12 year old with unlimited bank account.''

Ellison himself has a sharp, quick, decisive (some would say dogmatic) manner. He's 5'5" tall, with an eagle nose, abundant, graying, blown-dry hair and a habit, when giving a speech to a middle class audience, of hectoring them till they turn into a seething mob.

Full of contradictions, he, on the one hand, will tell you that anything that gets in his way gets a "Harlan-sized hole through it." On the other hand, his voice cracks in a half-sob when talking about his lonely childhood or how a decade-and-a-half of chronic fatigue syndrome has wrought havoc with his personal and professional life. According to his friends, he's generous to a fault, lending them money or a spare bedroom when their marriages fail. At the same time he is so compulsively orderly, says one longtime friend, that he gets upset when they improperly load the dishwasher or fail to compact the trash. For a serious writer, he's astonishingly able at self-promotion, but should you choose to hear another side, he will also provide the names of his enemies and suggest how you might reach them.

Although Ellison has been married five times, the problem, he says, was never that he drank, abused them or ran around. But "a lot of the time I'm a pain in the ass." And before he met Susan, he says, "I don't remember anyone who could stand being in my company for more than 5 hours without running into the street." (Now, says Susan, he gets up every morning before her and brings her a cup of tea in bed.)

For someone who comes across as so streetwise and worldly, there's a surprising streak of naivete in Ellison. When a friend of his recently died of brain cancer he was so convinced he also had a tumor that he underwent an expensive brain scan which, while not finding any tumors, did reveal, he says with unconcealed delight, that he had the brain structure of a child.

Which is no suprise perhaps to people who know Ellison.

"There's an eternal child in Harlan,'' says novelist Alan Brennert. "Harlan is 55 going on 15.'' He is also "engaging, opinionated, infuriating, and charming. If he weren't as talented as he is, you wouldn't tolerate it. But he has the bona fides.''

Ellison grew up in the late thirties and early forties as the only boy in the only Jewish family in Painesville, Ohio. (His father was a dentist whose clients included mobsters. Imprisioned during the depression for transporting bootleg liquor, he spent the last years of his life selling jewlery and appliances.)

Nor was for Ellison growing up in the midwest any happy barrel of pickled herring either. "You wouldn't think that in Ohio-the Buckeye state, the center of the Great Amurrican Heartland-one would encounter much bigotry,'' Ellison once wrote. "You'd be wrong. They used to beat the shit out of me. Regularly. I was a little loudmouth of a kid, quick as a whippet and ten times smarter than anyone else in town, but that humble greatness wasn't what made them hate me, naturally. It was this Jewish business... I was the green monkey, the pariah. And I had no friends. Not just a few friends, or one good friend, or grudging acceptance by other misfits and outcasts. I was alone. All stinking alone, without even an imaginary playmate.''

It was a wound that still festers after all these years.

"Look at this child,'' says Ellison, taking out a large group photo of his sixth grade class sent to him by a former girlfriend a few years back. And there in the first row off to the side, apart from everyone else, hands on hips, chin thrust out, lips skinned back, a defiant smile on his face and a bandage on his right temple, is the young Harlan Ellison. "This child is smaller than the smallest girl. He's like a feral creature. I looked at that and I burst into tears. Look at that poor little fucker. This son-of-a-bitch never had a prayer. He was never going to grow up to be the best beloved guy in town or well ordered.''

At 13, Ellison ran away from Painesville and joined a carnival. Although he was caught in Kansas City and returned home, six months later he ran away again, this time all the way to Matawachan, Ontario, where he found a job working as a tree topper in a logging camp. Over the next couple of years, he hitchhiked back and forth across the country, living in hobo camps, drinking chicory coffee out of tin cans, working as a tuna fisherman off Galveston and as the driver of a dynamite truck in North Carolina. Deciding to become a writer, Ellison moved to New York where in 1956 he sold a story to Infinity Science Fiction for $40 (years later, Ellison would gleefully quote the the late critic James Blish who called it "the single worst short story every published in the field of science fiction").

In 1962, Ellison moved to Los Angeles where he took up residence in a treehouse-cottage off Beverly Glen and ground out stories true confession, western, detective, science fiction and men's magazines while trying to break into TV and feature films.

Although some of his early stories were pure hack work for which he was paid a penny a padded word, his more serious efforts (written in a single sitting at 120 words per minute in a white hot heat) quickly earned him a lasting reputation. Writing in a category that he called "magic realism,'' his stories were, a reviewer once wrote, the work of a "sublime Rebel," full of "visceral and paranoid obsessions,'' said another, of would-be rapist/murderers skinned and vivisected in the sky by a modern street-smart God who protects urban residents ("Wimper of Whipped Dogs"), of a mad, over- regimented world in which every minute one is late is deducted from one's allotted lifespan ("'Repent Harlequin,' Said the Ticktockman"), of a gutted, blasted trigger-happy futurescape in which a boy kills his girlfriend to feed his best friend ("A Boy and His Dog.")

"Things do not go bump in Ellison's tales,'' wrote one critic. "That would be too easy. Instead, his heroes crash into the night en route to final, fatal meetings.''

Despite the award-winning success of his short stories, many of his fans, if anything, liked his non-fiction stories even better. Always written in the first person, they were intensely personal unpredictable accounts of his life, wars and loves. (In "Shatterday'' he tells the reader that he has discovered that the pain of a lost love lasts 12 minutes. In "The 3 Most Important Things in Life" he tells what he says is an absolutely completely true story of leaving a maddeningly irritating first date trussed-up naked and spread-eagled on her mother's white carpet in Beverly Hills.)

But it was in his columns of social commentary where Ellison pulled out all the stops. If he liked you, you were the best plumber, car mechanic or editor that ever walked the planet. But if he took issue with your attitudes or intentions, he never let his opinion be tempered by modesty or fair play. The common man, Ellison has written, was a beer swilling bigot. Fundamentalist Christians and Republican presidents were beneath contempt. Swaggart was full of "religious crap.'' Gun owners were "functional illiterates with virility problems.'' Ellison's older sister was a non-entity and his grandparents were "the ancient Jews from Hell.''

Not surprisingly, over the years some people have been less than charmed by Ellison's pronouncements, throwing eggs at his door, screaming obscenities over the telephone, and showing up at his house knives in hand. Not long after he wrote a column on neo-Nazi bikers, someone planted a bomb at the Beverly Glen cottage where he used to live. Another time he caught a Vietnam vet who had taken offense at one of Elision's columns aiming a 30-06 with telescopic sights at his kitchen window. In an incident recorded by Gay Talese in a 1966 Esquire article entitled, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," Ellison first bested Frank Sinatra at repartee in an exclusive Beverly Hills club. (Then when Sintatra's bodyguard tried to throw him out, Ellison layed out the bodyguard with a pool cue.)

Which is not to say, says Ellison in all innocence, that he considers himself a macho kind of guy. It's rather, he says, that his sense of self- worth doesn't permit him to walk away from people who treat him with disrespect. "I can't do it," says Ellison. "I face up to whatever it is."

And the problem he's facing at age 55, burdened by chronic fatigue, illiterate producers, an anti-intellectual society and the passing years, is having an impact, making a difference, having one's life count for something.

Which is not to suggest that Ellison's life so far has been a failure. In some fantasy and science fiction circles, he is revered as a living god (or reviled as the most likely candidate for a stake through his heart.) Besides his writing, he's taught or lectured in universities all over the country, appeared on talk shows, hosted radio programs, served as a director of The Writers Guild. He's well traveled and widely read, a fan of music, film and gourmet food. His friends range from Robin Williams to Thomas Pynchon to Richard Dreyfuss (who based his role in "The Goodbye Girl" on Ellison). He's listed in "Who's Who."

But still, says Ellison's friends and agent, they've been after him for years to write the one big novel that will knock the socks off the reading public and get him the recognition his talents deserve. "Novels are what get publishers excited," says Brennert. "Novels are what they promote.''

But, instead, Ellison he seems far more interested in sitting down, furiously pounding out the story in a meteoric single sitting and firing it off without revisions-which is not a system that lends itself to novel writing.

Nor has Ellison found writing for the movies any better. He's written 25 screenplays for feature films-''For which,'' he says, "I was very well paid''-but only one of them ("The Oscar'') ever got made (and he's so ashamed of that one that he asks reporters not to mention it.)

"God, don't use this,'' says Ellison, "but here am I this award winning author-translated into in 35 languages for Christsake!-Encyclopedia Americana called my last book ("Angry Candy'') one of the major literary events of the year and ... here are (all these screenplays) I've written and (they're all) just sitting there."

No one will ever read them. They've taken years out of his life. It's enough, says Ellison, to make you wonder sometimes, "Why am I doing this? Why am I doing this instead of being in Montana somewhere where the breeze is blowing across the plains and you raise cattle and raise corn and ride your truck into town and you get a beer and talk to friends and see some concrete return on what you are doing?

"You do it,'' says Ellison, "because all writers in some insane place believe that to write is a holy chore, that what one wishes to do is speak to one's time, to make a difference, to say, 'I was here. I was a force for good in some way.'

"Okay, then you say, 'Posterity! I'll leave it to posterity, goddamn it! I'll do the work and let posterity have a shot at it. Am I good enough to have my name next to Borges when I'm dead? Can you say Kafka and Ellison in the same breath and not giggle and roll about on the floor?'

"And then you look around and see how many writers are totally forgotten, writers who did wonderful work: John Fante, Steve Frazee, Shirley Jackson, Frederic Prokosch?"

Ellison is practically shouting now. "What about John O'Hara? O'Hara was the most popular writer of the forties and fifties for God's sakes and nobody reads O'Hara. He is totally out of print. And you look at that and say, 'Goddamn. Goddamn, Jack! If John O'Hara can't make it, what the hell chance do I got?'''