The late lamented Harry Golden wrote that, when he was a boy, he kept a scrapbook of all of the top news stories of the day. Years later, when he rediscovered it, he found that the news stories weren't really that interesting; the really interesting stuff was on the reverse side of each clipping – peaches for two cents a pound, a fire on 43rd Street, a birth, a death. History is one thing; everyday life is another thing, and a greater thing.
A few weeks ago I found a DVD set of the first season of “Peyton Place” - thirty-one episodes – for a couple of bucks. Peyton Place! My god, my mother and sisters used to live for that show in the mid-1960s. I wasn't allowed to watch; it was too racy. Since the 1960s, the show has mostly been just a memory; there have been a few airings – apparently the Romance Classics Network (!) showed it some time back. But getting my hands on this DVD set was too good to be true. Finally, at last, forty-six years later, I was going to get to see what my family wouldn't let me see in 1964.
It has been a revelation. The pacing is slow, much slower than modern shows, and the dialogue goes in misty circles. It is amazing how much gets said without even using the right words. One of the characters, Betty Anderson (a lovely young Barbara Parkins), gets P-R-E-G-N-A-N-T by town playboy Rodney Harrington (handsome Ryan O'Neal) – and somehow the show gets the message across without using the word, or even a euphemism. Betty looks troubled. She walks around the old pillory in the town square and meditates on being shamed publicly. She goes to the doctor. She's upset. “Does Rodney know?” the doctor says sympathetically. And there you have it.
I generally think of soap operas as slow, slow, slow. Not “Peyton Place.” In the first couple of episodes – the first disk of the set – I was treated to teen pregnancy, infidelity, spousal abuse, alcoholism, and “frigidity,” not to mention broad hints about intimations of illegitimacy, mental illness, and lots of other spectator sports. (Am I the only one who thinks Norman Harrington was maybe gay? Or as close to gay as 1964 TV could make him?) Censorship is jabbed at early on by Constance Mackenzie, the owner of the town bookstore, who wishes that a book would be “banned in Boston” so that it would sell better. (Don't forget that the original novel was pretty scandalous in its day, with heaping helpings of incest and rape on top of everything else.) Matt Swain, the avuncular newspaper editor, makes a thoughtful little speech about the Bill of Rights. Rodney joshes about joining the Peace Corps. We get constant reminders that, in a little New England town like Peyton Place, everyone knows everything about everyone, and scandals and rumors lie thick on the ground.
Now I understand why my mother and sisters ate up this show so eagerly. It was real life, everyday life, dressed up with a fancy hairdo. It was actually smart sometimes. The young people are dreamily beautiful. The older people, like characters in a mystery play, look exactly the way they're supposed to look: tired, intense, severe, gentle, thoughtful, troubled, angry. The street scenes and exteriors are Anytown USA. There are pregnancies, and marriages, and romances, and breakups, and estrangements, and reconciliations.
At one point, Alison Mackenzie, talking about her dreams for the future, says: “I want everything to happen.”
And everything does.
And that's everyday life, in the continuing story of Peyton Place.
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