American
Entertainment
HAVE
A NICE DAY IN DALLAS
Dallas
returns to B.B.C. television on March 5
[1986]. British historian David Irving
takes a good- natured look at J.R. Ewing's family
seat.
NO, DALLAS IS NOT the world's most
exciting city. If you're not careful you can drive right
through and be out on the other side before you realize
it.
The skyscraper quarter -- the part the film cameras
pan across -- covers only a square mile, encompassed by a
tangle of superhighways along which beetle thousands of
cars, obediently crawling at the obligatory 55 miles per
hour.
In fact Dallas is downright tedious. We go downtown
around 6 pm to get supper, and find that it is the kind
of city that rolls up its sidewalks at five-thirty. It
reminds us of a Rhineland city
[Koblenz] where a
few years ago the last tramcar ran at 7:l5 pm.
Within fifteen minutes of the offices' shutting the
streets here are empty. It is hard to find anywhere to
eat. We look up at the glittering facades, the acres of
glass, the twenty-first century architecture, the
mirror-glazed cylindrical towers of the Hyatt hotel, and
we wonder if the people housed in these crystal empires
have private lives at all.
Dallas is, in short, even more uneventful than that
other city whose penetrating boredom President
Reagan elevated to a dubious fame by declaring after
the assassination attempt on him in Washington: "I should
have gone to Philadelphia."
But Dallas will soon be once again on
everybody's lips. One of the most phenomenally successful
television soap operas of all time, from March 5 it will
again monopolize BBC television screens, emptying the
streets.
So when we ask ourselves what to do here in Dallas,
the answer comes easily. Just as in Berchtesgaden you
take the Postbus up to the Berghof to pick over the
masonry ruins of Hitler's Berghof and listen for faint
echoes of events of forty and fifty years ago, in Dallas
we decide on a pilgrimage to "Southfork," the ranch where
the mythical Ewing family of bickering oil and cattle
millionaires of the flickering screen scheme and plot
their paths to power and privilege.
IT'S NOT EASY to find Southfork. The maps don't show it.
Our motel bellboy suggests vaguely, "I think Southfork is
up north somewhere -- near Plano." He sounds sheepish. No
Godfearing American likes to admit actually watching
Dallas. Let alone a citizen of that town.
He adds, "Greyhound do tours out there," and gets me
the company's leaflet. It says that the bus tour cost 20
dollars, so we decide to drive and head north out of
Dallas that evening. We are waylaid en route by the Texan
sunset, which floods a brilliant glow like molten gold
down the mirror facades of a bunch of skyscrapers that
sprout out of the flat plains just to the north of the
city: they figure in some episodes as Clive
Barnes's headquarters. We just stop and drink the
spectacle in, we plumb lose interest in Southfork for a
while, but just drive and drive instead. Petrol is so
cheap in the States, we say; and we like telling them
that too. It aggravates the Americans beyond measure to
be told their gas is cheap.
But we can't sleep properly. It troubles us that we
may be leaving Dallas without ever seeing Southfork. So
Saturday we try again, before flying on to New Orleans,
and this time we find Plano. We haul off the highway into
a gas station, and as we pay the check the girl behind
the drugstore counter says, "Sure -- Southfork! We get a
lot of people wanting to see that."
She takes a pad and with a deftness that betrays she
had done this more than once before, she sketches the
roads and lanes that will take us there.
" -- And here, where the road forks, you'll find the
ranch," she said. "Can't miss. Have a nice day."
Five minutes later, the prairie opens out into the
kind of empty landscape that the television viewers see,
and then ten minutes after that we find the fork.
*WE SHOULD HAVE REALIZED that we were there.
Not since we arrived once in pre-earthquake Mexico
City in torrential rain and saw a busload of pilgrims
debouche outside the cathedral and slither on devout
hands and knees through the putrid, stinking puddles to
the shrine of Guadalupe have we seen such striking proof
of what religion can do to intoxicate a people. Oil and
money are the Americans' new religions, and all America
seems to be there, gawping at Southfork. The ranch is on
the left side of a narrow country lane. Half a mile
before the gateway with its familiar white arch hails
into sight, embellished with the words Southfork Ranch,
we find both shoulders of the lane clogged with cars
parked nose to bumper.
We cruise our rented Fairmont slowly past the hallowed
entrance, where a dozen State troopers are controlling
traffic. We buzz our window open. "Where can we park?" we
say.
"Anywhere you can find a space, Sir," replies one
officer, touching his Stetson with a friendly salute.
"But not within a hundred yards to either side of this
entrance. Have a nice day."
Another car is just pulling out, so we squeeze into
the cavity, lock the doors and saunter in beneath that
arch. Our cameras record the scene for family posterity:
us at Southfork! Halfway down the entrance drive leading
to the modest garden surrounding the (only cottage-sized)
ranch-house itself, two burly men in a mobile trailer are
selling hotdogs and Cokes. We decide to forego them on
hearing of the price.
A single chain is suspended across the driveway. In
the distance we can see one of the Ewing family Mercedes
parked next to the ranch. Is the whole family perhaps at
breakfast, we wonder, or sunning themselves by the pool?
For a moment we fantasize. A man in shirtsleeves guards
the chain, sweating slightly in the over-humid air.
"Is it possible to go right up to the house?" we ask,
anxious not to appear too eager. "Sure," says Sweaty
Shirtsleeves. "Ten bucks each."
We give him a Fifty, and he peels change off the back
of a grimy roll of greenbacks. "You're in luck," he says.
"They're just filming a fresh episode."
"Who's there," we ask, affecting nonchalance.
"Pamela Ewing?"
That's the one with the inviting figure, the girl who
manages to convey the impression that She Can Do No Wrong
-- but that if she does do wrong, she does it right. We
adore Pamela. When we were running late with a manuscript
last year, our American editor
[Tom Congdon]
carroted us along by feeding to us a large picture of
her, one slice at a time, saving the best morsels for to
reward a particularly fine chapter. That's the way we
serious writers work.
"Who's there today, Wilbur?" Sweaty Shirtsleeves
echoed my question, turning to a mate. "Pamela?"
"Naw. Miss Elly and Lucy. It's Pamela
Monday," he says.
Briefly losing all reason we toy with the idea of
postponing New Orleans long enough to come back
Monday.
The chain is unhooked, and we stroll up the asphalt to
the house. Uniformed guards with pistols in leather
holsters and men with walkie talkies are cordoning the
area.
"Quiet please! Everybody dead quiet!" crackles through
a radio. Motioning us to pad as softly as we can along
the tarmac, they let us through to the back of the
house.
WE JOIN A respectfully silent crowd of about twenty,
strung obediently behind a low hedge, waiting in hushed
silence. We half expect them to kneel and a robed priest
to walk along the line, handing out the Sacrament. Beyond
the hedge is The Swimming Pool. Beyond that is a
sunshade, a sunseat, a table and a chair occupied, we
see, by Miss Elly, who returns on March 5 as the
original twinkling-eyed materfamilias of the Ewings.
The clapperboard clacks. As the cameras purr, we can
hear her clipped, taut voice reciting a few lines.
Granddaughter Lucy -- the comfortably upholstered and
dimpled teenage vamp -- is with her. "Take care of
yourself," we hear Miss Elly say, as Lucy plants an
obedient kiss on her granny's cheek. American kids are so
nice.
It is only a short scene. They repeat it a dozen times
until they have it in the can. That is the secret of
Dallas's success. As a writer we envy them the facility
with which they can pack so much intrigue and, let's
admit it, suspense, into each episode. One close-up of a
grimace, of a twitch of an eye, of a leer from J.R., and
we suddenly know more about the story than we could learn
from a dozen pages of manuscript
A book can't do that. Dammit, Dallas may be
American, but it is a well made series, one that is
gripping the viewers of the world -- a world that prefers
to believe that life in this vacuous city is really like
this: an stunning amalgam of sex, adultery, stab in the
back finance, suicide, and murder.
We look again at the Mercedes parked by the pool. It
has the licence plate reading
EWING l. Somebody must have driven
it here along those lanes and highways, and got the
thrill of recognition wherever he went. It is a symbol of
the borderline world between fiction and fact and fantasy
-- between escapism and religion. The Americans, and with
them the rest of the world, have begun to worship shadows
like Dallas to the exclusion of the substance:
they pay homage to the glitter, and forget the
reality.
We drive back along the superhighways to downtown
Dallas -- not too fast this time, so as not to miss it.
On our right we glimpse a tall brownstone building that
looks familiar. It overlooks Dealey Plaza. Sure we know
it. It's the Texas Schoolbook Depository. At its
seventh-floor corner window a young man called Lee
Harvey Oswald once crouched, nursing a high-powered
rifle against his cheek in November l963, and waited for
a motorcade to come into sight beneath him.
Not many people make pilgrimages to that place
now.
© David Irving 1986
