THE MAD DOG OF L.A. LETTERS : Between Jumping on Desks and Battling Half of Hollywood, Harlan Ellison Has Written a Bookcase Full of Classic Stories

“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 he walked away from a $4,000-a-week job writing stories for the revived “Twilight Zone” in 1985.

For the Christmas show, Ellison had made his contribution to the battle against racism with an 11-minute segment about a black Santa anti-Claus who preys on white bigots. Ed Asner had agreed to star, the sets were built; the actors were in costume. And then, at the last minute, Ellison says, CBS decided to hold everything. “I told them, ‘You pull the plug and I walk.’ ”

It was a threat that might have had more impact if he hadn’t provoked CBS to try to fire him once already by impishly asking pointed questions about the formal qualifications of the CBS editors who were passing judgement on his stories. When it became clear that CBS wouldn’t budge on the black Santa episode, Ellison quit what had easily been his happiest, most productive and creative year in television.

What did Ellison do then, a visitor asks.

“I walked into the forest of anger and chewed trees,” says the writer, who is wearing a faded yellow terry-cloth bathrobe with “Don’t bug me” embroidered on the back.

Chewed trees?

Ellison points out the window to a scrubby, brown hill. “I went out the hillside and I would grab a tree and I would shake it. I would grab great gobs of 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.”

PROLIFIC AUTHOR, fiery critic and general all-around nuisance, Ellison is the author of 48 books and has been translated into 35 languages. A four-time winner of the Writers Guild Award for Most Outstanding Teleplay, he’s written television scripts for “Outer Limits,” “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour,” “The Twilight Zone” and “Star Trek.” (“He goes in and writes the single episode that people remember,” says screenwriter and novelist Alan Brennert. “(In a ‘Star Trek’ episode titled ‘The City on the Edge of Forever’) he gave Captain Kirk (William Shatner) a tragic, haunted quality, which is not an easy thing to do.”)

Altogether he’s published some 1,200 essays, scripts, columns, reviews and short stories, some of which are among the most reprinted stories in the English language. The bibliography of his published works (including citations for innumerable reprints and translations) runs to 660 single-spaced pages.

In an era of safe, compliant writers, Ellison is what one critic has called a “sublime rebel”; his work aims to be subversive, which is perhaps one reason Ellison’s career is littered with the smoking remnants of 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. Not only won’t he suffer fools gladly, but he doesn’t suffer them at all. He has no time for “functionally illiterate” producers, ignorant editors or anyone else he considers stupid, incompetent or politically misinformed.

He’s shown up at story conferences carrying a baseball bat. Once, he brought a a chamois bag containing a pistol, which he then proceeded to clean during a meeting (though without ever alluding to it). In a famous fit of pique, he once leaped over a desk to throttle a man for sneering that “all writers are hacks.”

To his friends, these are the acts of a man of principle. To his enemies, they show the childish self-destructiveness of deeply angry man. “He is a very talented author,” says Andy Porter, publisher of a small New York City-based monthly magazine called Science Fiction Chronicle, “but he has this strange personality quirk . . . . He burns his bridges before he crosses them.”

His determination to remain his own man, says his friend, 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 prose has meant that he appears most often in the kinds of small fantasy, music, writing and film magazines that allow him total control.

Ellison readily admits he’s not easy to get along with. “I go to bed angry every night, and I get up angrier every morning,” he says. But increasingly his rage isn’t directed so much at other people as the predicament that he--and any writers who always wanted to make a difference--eventually finds themselves in. “I’m 55 years old,” says Ellison, who on this cool, gray morning is propped up on his water bed, recovering from both a hemorrhoid operation and a broken fifth metatarsal in his left foot. “I’ve only got a finite number of years left in me.”

“Susan!” he says, calling to his wife in another room. “Susan, would you please get something for me in the library?” And he sends her off with a series of complex instructions for finding the one book out of about 75,000 alphabetized and categorized volumes filling the walls, shelves, closets and drawers of his house and covering his pool table to a height of 3 feet. Ten minutes later, Susan, a slight, brown-haired woman who is Ellison’s fifth wife, is back with a slip of stationary on which she has copied a quote from the 19th-Century French author, Jules Renard.

“Here it is,” Ellison says, reading aloud: “Writing is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none.”

It’s humiliating and infuriating, Ellison says. “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, Ellison says, he received a call from a guy who invited him to lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel to make a proposition. He wanted to do a series for Ron Silver, an up-and-coming actor whom Ellison admires.

As Ellison tells the story, he was delighted.

“Great!” Ellison says. “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 . . .?” Ellison says, eagerly awaiting the high-concept bombshell that’s going to blow him out of his chair.

“That’s it,” the producer says.

Ellison just sits there, he says, and looks at the man and thinks: “You poor piece of ambulatory phlegm! 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,” then said, “ ‘I can’t stand this.’ And I walked out--which is what I’ve been doing since I got here in 1962 . . . walking out of meetings.”

IF A PERSON’S home is a reflection of his inner psyche, Ellison is a compulsive collector and unreconstructed fantasist, albeit a spotlessly organized one with striking tastes. He lives in a gleaming custom hillside house filled with art (including many of the original paintings for his book covers), hand-crafted doors, hand-carved dinosaur models, a two-story library with a walk-around balcony, and a secret underground room accessible by a button in a bookshelf (where he hid protesters during the anti-war years, he says). The overall impression, says one 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 overbearing) manner. He’s 5-feet, 5-inches tall, with an eagle nose; abundant, graying, blown-dry hair, and a habit--when giving a speech--of hectoring his audience till it turns into a seething mob.

In fantasy and science-fiction circles, he is revered as a living god, when he’s not being reviled for his dogmatic opinions. Besides writing, he’s taught or lectured in universities all over the country, appeared on talk shows, hosted radio programs and served as a director of the Writers Guild. He’s well traveled and widely read and is a fan of music, film and gourmet food. His friends range from Robin Williams and Thomas Pynchon to Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Dreyfuss, who based his role in “The Goodbye Girl” in part on Ellison.

“Harlan is larger than life,” says Phil DeGuere, his former boss on “The Twilight Zone.” “If he were anything other than a human being, he’d be a protected species, and they’d build an amusement park around him and sell popcorn.”

Full of contradictions, Ellison will tell you that anything that gets in his way gets a “Harlan-sized hole through it.” But his voice cracks when he talks 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, another friend says, that he gets upset when they load the dishwasher improperly.

Ellison’s first four marriages failed, but he says the problem was never that he drank, abused his wives or ran around. Instead, he admits, “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 five hours without running into the street.” (Now, Susan says, he gets up every morning and brings her tea in bed.)

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

Which is no surprise 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. “

“LOOK AT THIS child,” Ellison says, taking out a large group photo of his sixth grade class sent to him by a former girlfriend a few years back. 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. (He) never had a prayer. He was never going to grow up to be the best beloved guy in town or well-ordered.”

Ellison was the only boy in the only Jewish family in Painesville, Ohio. His father, Ellison says, was a dentist whose practice included mobsters. Imprisoned during the depression for transporting bootleg liquor, his father spent the last years of his life selling jewelry and appliances. Life in the Midwest wasn’t any easier for the younger Ellison.

“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 daylights) out of me. Regularly. I was a little loudmouth of a kid, quick as a whippet and 10 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.”

At 13, Ellison ran away 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 says, he hitchhiked back and forth across the country, living in hobo camps, working as a tuna fisherman and driving a dynamite truck.

After being kicked out of Ohio State University for telling off a writing professor who thought he had no talent, 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 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 cottage off Beverly Glen and ground out stories for 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, his more serious efforts (pounded out with two fingers in a single sitting at 120 words per minute) quickly earned him a lasting reputation.

His stories, a reviewer once wrote, were full of “visceral and paranoid obsessions,” of would-be rapist/murderers skinned and vivisected in the sky by the modern street-smart god of urban residents (“Wimper of Whipped Dogs”). Ellison described a world in which every minute one is late is deducted from one’s allotted life span (“ ‘Repent Harlequin,’ Said the Ticktockman”); 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 another critic. “That would be too easy. Instead, his heroes crash into the night en route to final, fatal meetings.”

Although he won awards for his short stories, many of his fans liked his non-fiction stories even better. Always written in the first person, they are intensely personal, vivid, often-shocking accounts of his life, wars and loves. In “Shatterday” he tells the reader he has discovered that the pain of a lost love lasts 12 minutes. In “The 3 Most Important Things in Life” he tells of leaving a maddeningly irritating first date trussed-up and spread-eagled naked on her mother’s white carpet in Beverly Hills, and of seeing a man brutally and offhandedly killed for talking in a movie theater.

But it was in his columns of social commentary for the L.A. Weekly and other publications that Ellison pulled out all the stops. If he liked you, you were the best plumber, car mechanic or editor who ever walked the planet. But if he took issue with your attitudes or intentions, he never let his duty to attack be unduly tempered by misguided compassion or fair play. The common man, Ellison has written, is a beer-swilling bigot. Fundamentalist Christians and Republican Presidents are beneath contempt. Gun owners are “functional illiterates with virility problems.”

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 cottage where he used to live. Another time, Ellison says, he caught a Vietnam vet who had taken offense at one of his columns aiming a 30-06 with telescopic sights at his kitchen window.

In an incident recorded by Gay Talese in a 1966 Esquire article titled, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” Ellison easily bested a belligerent Frank Sinatra at repartee in an exclusive Beverly Hills club. When Sinatra’s bodyguard tried to throw him out, Ellison laid out the bodyguard with a pool cue. But one should not conclude from this, Ellison says in all innocence, that he’s in any way a macho 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,” Ellison says. “I face up to whatever it is.”

And the problem he’s facing at age 55, burdened by the chronic-fatigue syndrome that’s “like slogging through hip-deep mud,” illiterate producers, an anti-intellectual society and the swift flight of the years, is the need to have an impact, make a difference and otherwise have one’s life count for something.

Ellison’s friends and agent say 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 wider recognition his talents deserve. “Novels are what get publishers excited,” Brennert says. “Novels are what they promote.”

But, instead, friends say, Ellison seems more inclined to sit down, pound out a story in a meteoric single sitting and fire it off without revisions. His current major project, editing the third and last book in a science fiction/fantasy anthology (“The Last Dangerous Visions”) is more than a decade late. And his luck in getting screenplays produced has been little short of a tragedy. 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,” he says, “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.

It’s enough, he says, to make you wonder sometimes: “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,” Ellison says, answering his own question, “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.’

“OK, 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 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 ‘40s and ‘50s, 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?’ ”