By Arthur Salm
UNION-TRIBUNE BOOKS EDITOR
March 20, 2005
SHERMAN OAKS – He's shouting again, but that's just Harlan.
"LOOK IN FILE CABINET NUMBER ONE, NEXT TO THE PHOTOCOPIER, IF YOU CAN GET THE STUFF DOWN OFF THE SHELF WITHOUT EVERYTHING FALLING DOWN. IT'S IN DRAWER NUMBER TWO, UNDER 'REMARKS.' "
Author and life-force Harlan Ellison, 70, is seated in his art-deco/curio-shop kitchen calling out to his wife, Susan. His voice carries well, and it has to: The Ellison residence, once a simple tract house in the hills overlooking the San Fernando Valley, has over the years rambled up and out.
It now comprises a bewildering warren of rooms – some of them accessible through intricately carved wooden Hobbit doors just a few feet high – that contain, among, many, many, many other strange and marvelous things, dozens of framed movie posters ("Die Monster Die," "The Brides of Fu Manchu," "The Mummy"), hundreds of classic cartoon-and comic-strip-character juice glasses (a small room off the kitchen is devoted to them), at least that many pipes, a pool table somewhere beneath neat stacks of magazines, a skittles table (Ellison demonstrates the game with glee) and enough geegaws (e.g., Goofy figurines) to populate a one-tenth scale theme park.
On a bathroom wall there's an original pen-and-ink drawing of the evangelist Billy Sunday by the pioneering animator Windsor McCay and a "Smokey Stover" Sunday comic strip. On the counter sits a collection of stories by H.P. Lovecraft.
The house contains, by Ellison's estimate, 250,000 books. He keeps track of them with a library card-catalog system housed in those familiar wooden drawers.
And he has long exercised his own unbreakable law: "If I ever rewrote anyone else's script, I would never take any credit. As a result, I have made hundreds of thousands of dollars as a script doctor. I make a very decent living."
He does all this on a portable Olympic typewriter. Manual, not electric. Two index fingers produce, he says, 120 words a minute. "And I never make a mistake."
Repairs, typewriter ribbons? "I've got a guy."
He picks up a photocopy of a newspaper article – a couple of paragraphs of text and a photo of an ordinary-looking middle-aged man. "This is the bully that beat me up when I was a kid," he says. He stares at it for a few seconds, then slips it back into the file. "It's his obituary."
(Ellison grew up in Painesville, Ohio, not just the smallest kid in his class – "even smaller than the girls" – but the only Jewish kid in his elementary school. His childhood, he has made it clear, was not pleasant.)
"I place ethics and courage way way above everything else. I will not be frightened. Morality? Pffft!
Back to Harlan Ellison's Credo. "Things I will never do" (enumerating on his fingers): "Harm a child, go to Germany, do a commercial for McDonald's toadburgers, intentionally write (blank), eat lima beans. . . .
"I operate my life according to a quote from Pasteur: 'Chance favors the prepared mind.' I like the concept of luck and chance, but they're crutches people fall back on, like religion, to rationalize their own inadequacies and ineptitude in the championing of their lives. The greatest freedom one can know, and the greatest success one can know, is to control your own life.
"The problem with that is, you have no one left to blame – if you fail, you weren't smart, quick, honest, courageous enough. It wasn't God, society or because mommy locked you in the basement. You're responsible for your own life.
"It's the ultimate freedom – to be as good as I choose to be."
I love Harlan Ellison
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