When I was in, perhaps, the seventh grade, I enjoyed a weekly
trip to the local library with my mom and little sister. As a voracious reader
with a special appreciation for stage musicals and comedies, I would curl up in
the theatre section and read to my heart’s content. One day I came across a
work I didn’t know: A Face in the Crowd, by Budd Schulberg. The title
and the author’s name were both
unfamiliar to me. But I was well-acquainted with the star of the production.
Andy Griffith, who had appeared on the Broadway stage and then the film adaptation
of No Time for Sergeants. This was the comic tale of a hillbilly bumpkin
drafted into the U.S. Army during World War II. My father, a veteran himself,
loved good-hearted humorous takes on military protocol, and so I saw—and adored—the
film at an early age. With Andy Griffith as the leading man, I assumed A Face in the Crowd would be
equally lovable and funny.
Wrong! This 1957 work (which turns out to have been a film
script based on Schulberg’s original story) does star Griffith as a country boy
not much used to sophisticated folk. But he’s far from good-hearted. When we
first meet him, he’s drunk and disorderly in a smalltown Southern jail, one
that just happens to be visited by an attractive young radio producer (Patricia
Neal) searching out local color. Discovering his gift of gab and his easy way
with an acoustic guitar, she christens him “Lonesome” Rhodes, and helps turn
him into the star of his own local radio show. Then TV comes calling. Soon he’s
attracting serious attention, especially from women of all ages. When I
discovered his sexual adventuring, both with Neal and with a young high school
cheerleader (Lee Remick was introduced in this role), I was seriously shocked.
(Needless to say, in the late-1950s, the physical nature of these relationships
was not shown on screen, but I certainly got the message. And I’ve always
considered A Face in the Crowd my
jump into adult reading material.)
Today I’m a lot less easily shocked. But A Face in the
Crowd still startles in its prescience about the way demagogues get
started. Lonesome Rhodes is not simply interested in pretty women. He also
quickly realizes that, thanks to the new medium of television, his homespun
charm is his ticket into the halls of power. We see him instinctively
discovering how to spread a sponsor’s message for an essentially worthless
product. And before long he’s advising a major U.S. Senate candidate on how to
improve upon his stuffy image, by way of a cute nickname and some new folksy
mannerisms.
Essentially, the country boy is turning into a monster, one
who is well aware that—thanks to the hold he has on his enormous TV
audience—there’s nothing to stop him from making his own power grab in the near
future. Surely we can well imagine him joking and crooning his way into the
White House. Sound familiar? Back in the day, screenwriter Budd Schulberg and
director Elia Kazan pointed to Will Rogers, Arthur Godfrey, and other media
folk of the era as partial models for their central character, along with
preacher Billy Graham and populist politician Huey Long. Today there are some obvious
celebrity types who’ve made far bigger gains in the political world. Thanks to
their street smarts as well as their ability to break all the rules and come
out smiling, it sometimes seems as though nothing can stop them.
