A final bit of inspiration from Valenti

I was always glad to see Jack Valenti’s dapper, diminutive form across a crowded room. We all need a little bit of egregious flattery in our gray little lives, and Jack was the master massager of the bruised or battered ego. We were acquaintances, not friends, but that never stopped him from saying something nice about something I’d written. He was a guy who kept up -- an omnivorous reader, a smart politician and, above all, an enthusiast for whatever cause had enlisted his loyalties. You couldn’t help but like the man -- and believe the nice things he said about you.

“This Time, This Place: My Life in War, the White House and Hollywood,” his posthumously published memoir (he died in April at 85), abounds with his ebullience. You will not find much negativity in it, but you will find therein a degree of old-fashioned, get-up-and-go inspiration, a certain amount of interesting insight into his years of intimate service to Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency and -- disappointingly -- rather less than you might like to know about his endless years as president and chief spokesman for the Motion Picture Assn. of America.

The book’s inspirational part comes early but is eagerly present until the last page. Valenti was born poor into the small, not-particularly influential, Italian community in Houston, and that double heritage -- Italian exuberance, Texan self-confidence -- was profoundly decisive. He started working as a teenager (first, presciently, as a movie theater usher), attended the new University of Houston prematurely, and then went to war. It may surprise some readers that, as a B-25 pilot, he flew 51 missions out of Corsica over Italy, escaping unscathed, but not unmarked, by the experience. A man who has faced death that often is not likely to be dented or daunted by anything life later throws at him.

Postwar, he received an MBA from Harvard, formed an ad agency, did campaign chores for Johnson, and, on the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated, was summoned to Air Force One and flew back to Washington, D.C., with his new boss. The big guy and the little man bonded -- in part because they had so intimately shared a great national tragedy, in part because LBJ prized loyalty above all else. Valenti begins his book with a very strong and straightforward account of the events in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, and the days immediately thereafter. And he’s still brooding on them in his final pages: “When that memory is triggered, it is as if all the grotesque horrors ... come abruptly back to life. Every minute of that dismal mental tape flashes across my brain, blotting out everything else.” You have to think that such an occurrence-- so vividly reminding you of life’s transitoriness -- will focus even a galvanically ambitious man on something beyond himself.

It’s true that Valenti became something of a national joke when he publicly declared that he slept a little better every night knowing LBJ was in the White House, but, hey, that was Jack. And, besides, as his book makes clear, he knew things about the president that most of us did not and his passages -- rich in quotation and ex post facto rue -- about the anguished escalation in Vietnam are, I think, invaluable additions to the record. When Johnson awoke in the morning, the first order of business was the casualty report. Valenti once asked him what it was like to begin the day that way. It was, said LBJ, like swallowing carbolic acid. Valenti was present at the meetings, in 1965, when Johnson’s closest advisors faced this stark choice: Withdraw from Vietnam or commit 50,000 new troops (and more later) to win the war.

Earlier, in happier times, there had been a dinner party at which much the same cast had been assembled. In Valenti’s book a jovial LBJ proposes a toast to “the best educated group of men ever to sit down to dinner at Blair House. We have here tonight five graduates of Harvard, three from Yale, one from Princeton, three Rhodes scholars

It was a gracious little joke, but Valenti suggests that Johnson was acutely aware of his lack of big league intellectual credentials and was inclined to prefer Valenti’s good populist instincts to the conventional (and wildly outdated) global wisdom of the Ivy Leaguers -- all Kennedy administration holdovers, incidentally -- none of whom defended their one dissident, George Ball, when he argued for cutting and running. Later, Valenti quotes William F. Buckley’s “richly venomous” comment: “I would rather have the first fifty names in the Boston phone book govern this country than the entire Harvard faculty.” The class system in America was, and remains, much more potent, and pernicious, than we may believe.

Of course, it is being eroded by the celebrity system, which, in some sense, erodes Valenti’s book. He ran the MPAA for almost 40 years and, appropriately, almost half his memoir is devoted to that period. Equally appropriate, he wants us to understand that he had some effect on American manners and morals. But most of these later pages are devoted to anecdotes -- pointless, fulsome, or both -- about the movie stars and moguls he met and adored (the one exception is Darryl Zanuck). He also speaks warmly of his growing fame, derived mainly from his annual appearances on the Oscar broadcasts. But what about substance? Yes, he tossed out the old, absurdly onerous previous system of movie censorship, replacing it with the ostensibly more democratic ratings board. But he does not acknowledge the deviousness of the way in which that board works or how in practice -- as opposed to defensible theory -- it works to keep American moviegoing in a state of permanently arrested adolescence. Nor does Valenti mention an even worse gaffe -- his hysterical opposition to home video. “The VCR,” he once cried, “is to the American producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone.” He will not recognize, even in retrospect, that far from being a blight on the industry, the VCR and the DVD were its salvation.

And what about his last great fight? He defends his absurd decision to ban award season videos, sent out to academy members and other influentials, because a few of these discs found their way into piratical hands -- even though everyone knows most pirated films derive from the studios’ duplicating facilities, from which it is childishly simple to smuggle films out to bootleggers. Had he won that fight, he would have effectively prevented some of the best American films (including many from the studios’ own boutique divisions) from having a chance at the awards (and economic rewards) that prizes often bring.

To put the point simply, this very engaging man finally became a version of his idol. Like Lyndon Johnson he did some good things for his employers -- notably, in enhancing the global reach of American movies -- but his basic sensibility was that of an observant courtier. He remained entrapped in a status quo defended by smug and richly privileged people. Historically, Hollywood has always resisted change, whether technological or sociological, because its managers do not want the even tenor of their prosperity upset. It would have been good if, at the end of his memoir, with nothing further at stake, Valenti had admitted his failure to move them bravely and gracefully forward. At the very least it would have transformed the book’s tone from engaging good cheer (and smooth readability) into something more challenging. By then he had nothing to lose -- except possibly his invitation to Dani Janssen’s Oscar party.

Richard Schickel is a film critic for Time and the author of many books, including “Elia Kazan: A Biography.”