MASH 13 MASH goes to Montreal Read online

  They had gone a little too far, as Josephine was perfectly willing to admit, when, rather than cutting the plant off at the ground level, they had started to pull the plant up by the roots and grind up the roots along with everything else.

  Some trouble making busybody* had gone to Congress, where bleeding-heart liberals and Socialists, just looking for a cause, had made a lot of noise about it. The tobacco industry, under Josephine’s leadership, had been quick and aboveboard to admit their error, and to take whatever steps were necessary to make things right. Josephine Babcock herself had composed the disclaimer, “These cigars are predominantly natural tobacco, with nontobacco ingredients added.”

  (* Specifically, one Hortense Quattlebaum, Ph.D., who, it turned out, wasn't even a smoker herself, although she admitted taking a little sniff of snuff on occasion.)

  Nothing, certainly, could be fairer than that. Even before the Supreme Court order, all cigar boxes of the Burton Babcock & Company had carried that warning, in letters a full three-eights of an inch high, right across the bottom of the box where everybody who turned the boy over couldn’t help but see it

  (Since cigarette packages already carried the message, “Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined That Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health,” there seemed to be no point in putting anything else on cigarette packages, and the nontobacco-ingredients statement had been left off.)

  As any fair-minded person would have to agree, this was meeting the government’s snoopers and do-gooders more than halfway. But, like the camel sticking his nose under a tent flap, once the bureaucrats got started, there was no stopping them.

  At God alone knows what cost to the taxpayer, a legion of government snoopers went to work, analyzing everything in a cigar. They detected the presence of soja hispida Babcockisis which, since it constituted about ten percent of the stuffing in cigars and cigarettes, could hardly be called brilliant detective work.

  Not content with that, government snoopers then analyzed soja hispida Babcockisis itself. They determined that it was a variant of the common soybean (the tobacco industry could have told them this, had they asked, and saved the taxpayers a large bundle of money) differing from the soybean only in that when it burned, a peculiar chemical reaction took place, making the gases generated virtually identical to those gases one sees coming from jet aircraft during landing and takeoff procedures.

  For some reason, while it was apparently perfectly all right for the airlines to spew thousands of cubic feet of these gases into the atmosphere day after day, the .3 cubic feet of gas in each cigarette and the 1.5 cubic feet in the average cigar* represented, according to the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, “a clear and present danger to human life.” An executive order was issued by the president himself, on television, forbidding any further inclusion of soja hispida Babcockisis in any form whatsoever in any tobacco product whatsoever.

  (* There is no such thing as an average cigar, as Josephine Babcock protested to the Senate Select Subcommittee on Tobacco Pollution.)

  As someone who prided herself in obeying the law of the land, even when that law was clearly a gross miscarriage of justice promulgated by dictatorial fiat by a president who would never get another dime out of her, Josephine issued the necessary orders to have soja hispida Babcockisis separated from the other cigar and cigarette ingredients.

  “Burn it!” she ordered, when her senior vice-president, Ingredients, inquired as to Madame Chairperson’s intentions regarding the separated bean.

  She wasn’t even permitted to do that. “That traitor to his heritage in the White House,” as Josephine referred to our nation’s maximum leader, issued yet another executive order. Citing as his reasons that smoke from the huge piles of burning soja hispida Babcockisis had not only seriously restricted visibility on the ground all over North and South Carolina, and as far north as Petersburg, Virginia, but had made people sick to their stomachs as far away from the burning site as Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Nashville, Tennessee, Savannah, Georgia, and aboard the SS Charles E. Whaley, a tramp steamer fifty miles at sea, he forbade, henceforth and forevermore, the burning of soja hispida Babcockisis in the open atmosphere.

  When she visited Precious Babykins at his pig farm, Josephine had of course told him of the problem.

  “Send some over, Mama,” he said. “I have my doubts, but maybe the pigs will eat it.”

  The pigs would not eat it, no matter what Bubba did with it. Josephine was very disappointed, not so much because the pigs had rejected it, but because it was Bubba’s first manifestation of interest in problems affecting Burton Babcock & Company, and it had been a failure.

  In desperation, she had turned to one Sydney Prescott, of Sydney Prescott & Associates, Advertising, of New York. The first time Josephine Babcock had seen Ms. Prescott, she had loathed her instantly, but business was business. Working on a contingency basis (if the idea worked, she got paid; if it didn’t, she didn’t), Ms. Prescott had upped the sales of Old Billy Goat Snuff, an old-time Burton Babcock & Company product that had about reached the end of the line, beyond credibility. She had not only turned the Old Billy Goat Snuff sales decline around, she had sent it soaring into space with an imaginative campaign that Josephine had to admire, her loathing of Ms. Prescott aside.

  What Ms. Prescott had done was pose one of those bony high-fashion models, the kind who inspire charitable donations for the hungry, in the process of sniffing some Old Billy Goat off the back of her long, bony, lavender-fingernailed hand. There was just one line of advertising copy: “Up Yours, Sweetie!”

  Old Billy Goat, which previously had its market limited essentially to Pennsylvania Dutch farmers, with an even smaller market in the Dakotas, overnight became the “in” thing of the feminist movement. A tin of Old Billy Goat was even placed beside each plate at the president’s wife’s Dinner for Outstanding Female Congress-persons, a truly remarkable thing to happen considering that the president’s wife knew full well what Josephine had said about her and her husband.

  “I’ll tell you what, darling,” Ms. Prescott said to Mrs. Babcock. “You don’t mind if I call you, darling, do you?”

  “I most certainly do,” Mrs. Babcock replied. “If you don’t wish to replace your dentures, I wouldn’t do it again.”

  “What I was about to say, Mrs. Babcock,” Ms. Prescott went on quickly, “is that Sydney Prescott sees a simple, yet brilliantly imaginative solution to your problem.”

  “Which is?”

  “Feed soja hispida Babcockisis to people,” Ms. Prescott said.

  “You’re as crazy as you look,” Josephine had said, getting right to the bottom line, as she thought of it. “Precious Babykins ... I mean to say, my son, Burton Babcock IV, has informed me that even his pigs turn up their snouts at it.”

  “Yes, I know,” Ms. Prescott replied. “I had a long chat with Bubba about it.”

  “You have spoken with my son?”

  “Indeed. And a splendid young chap he certainly is,” Ms. Prescott went on. “They don’t grow them like that anymore. Six-three, isn’t he?”

  “Six-four, actually,” Josephine had replied.

  “With such sparkling white teeth!”

  “I personally supervised Bubba’s diet,” Mrs. Babcock said. “Until he went off to college.”

  “If you don’t mind my saying so, he makes me wish I were twenty-years younger.”

  “Thirty years would be more like it,” Josephine replied. “And now that you do mention it, I do mind. You should be ashamed of yourself, at your age!”

  “Bubba said that he wasn’t surprised that his pigs wouldn’t eat it,” Ms. Sydney Prescott went on. “He says that pigs are smarter than people. Well, there you have it!”

  “There I have what?”

  “We’ll call it Wild West Beanos,” Ms. Prescott said. “In anticipation of our meeting, my chief photographer, Lance Fairbanks, and his capable crew are at this very moment scouring the plains of Texas in search of a
suitable model for Wild West Beanos. I have the preliminary artwork with me.”

  She handed Josephine an artist’s sketch of a tin can. There was an “overline,” an advertising term, designating words that appear above the artwork. This read: “100% Pure—100% American Grown.”

  Then came the words WILD WEST BEANOS in old-West- type letters.

  Beneath this was a sketch of a cowboy sitting on his heels before a campfire, holding a skillet presumably containing Wild West Beanos over a wooden fire, while his faithful horse watches curiously. The face of the cowboy was blank.

  “The cowboy’s face is blank,” Josephine observed.

  “As I said, Lance Fairbanks is scouring the Texas plains in his Winnebago looking for just the right face, some leathery old cowpoke, you see, to fill in the blank. I hope to have some advance proofs for you within the week.”

  Under ordinary circumstances, of course, Mrs. Josephine Babcock would have given in, at that point, to the delightful impulse to bodily throw Ms. Prescott out of her office. But there was something in Ms. Prescott’s presentation that precluded that. Precious Babykins was interested in the project! He had actually talked to this creature about it. When you got right down to it, the whole idea could really be said to be Precious Babykins’ own idea. He was the one who said that the reason pigs wouldn’t eat the goddamned bean was because they were smarter than people. It hadn’t taken any genius to proceed from that to the obvious conclusion that since people weren’t as smart as pigs, people probably would eat soja hispida Babcockisis, just so long as it came in the proper package. God knows the corn and wheat growers had them eating stuff she wouldn’t feed to the pigs.

  “I’ll be interested in seeing what you come up with,” Josephine said. “But don’t construe that as any sort of a commitment.”

  Chapter Four

  Unbeknownst to anyone of the Burton Babcock & Company corporate family, their problem with soja hispida Babcockisis was of great interest to America’s Most Famous TV Gourmet, Taylor P. Jambon. Indeed, Mr. Jambon saw in it a chance to redeem himself, public relations-wise, in the eyes of all the good folks out there in TV Land.

  For years, Mr. Jambon had had a good thing going with APPLE, of which he had been both the founder and the president. The Association of Pup & Pussy Lovers in Earnest, Inc. had, through the generosity of the American people, not only provided the wherewithal to spay cats at a vast network of cat-spaying establishments which just happened to be owned by Mr. Jambon’s brother-in-law, but had provided Mr. Jambon himself with a very generous tax-exempt expense account on which he could travel the world in great luxury while making appeals for funds for APPLE.

  The whole thing had collapsed a year previously when the word had gotten out that Mr. Jambon’s expense account cost APPLE over thirty-five percent of APPLE’S total revenue. The word had also gotten out that Mr. Jambon had not, as he led people to believe, been exactly giving his time and talent to APPLE, and had, in fact, been drawing an annual advisor’s honorarium of seventy-five thousand dollars. And it had become public knowledge that the cat-spaying operation had been charging APPLE precisely three times as much per spay than was the going rate among doctors of veterinary medicine, with the profits reaching Mr. Jambon via his brother-in-law.

  Mr. Jambon was convinced that his whole set of difficulties vis-à-vis APPLE was the work of Satan. He could think of no other reason—not even gremlins or little green men from Mars—that could have seen the whole thing collapse literally overnight, and under such circumstances.

  He had gone to Vienna, Austria on APPLE business. Americans’ Most Beloved Thespian, Patience Throckmorton Worthington, had agreed to do a few television appeals for APPLE, provided only that she be paid twice her usual fee (“Fatso,” she had said to Mr. Jambon in her deep, dulcet tone, “I can’t stand bleeping animals. If you expect America’s most beloved stage, screen, television and radio personality to make a pitch for you, you can bet your blap it’s going to cost. You’re going to have to pay Patience through the bleeping nose, if you get my point.”) and that the commercials be taped in Vienna, where “America’s Grandmother,” as she was often called, was in hot and lustful (if ultimately futile) pursuit of Boris Alexandrovich Korsky-Rimsakov, the World’s Greatest Opera Singer.

  Taylor P. Jambon had had no way of knowing, when he arranged for a free flight to Vienna,* that the opera singer whom Patience Throckmorton Worthington was after was an American. (With a name like that, Jambon thought, he should be a Frenchman or a German.) Nor could he have known that the singer’s best friends in all the world would turn out to be two butinsky doctors from Spruce Harbor, Maine. Nor that the stars of the most popular television news show, “One Hour,” Harley Hazardous and Trenchcoat Wally Michaels, would be in Vienna at the same time. Nor that Harley Hazardous and Trenchcoat Wally Michaels and the two doctors would, of all the saloons in Vienna, choose to booze it up in the same one and become instant pals over several gallons of Old Prague Pale Pilsner. Nor that Harley Hazardous, Trenchcoat Wally Michaels and the two hick doctors shared a mutual loathing of America’s Most Beloved Young TV Newsperson, Don Rhotten, who was, as his contribution to APPLE and for only twenty thousand dollars, going to appear with Miss Worthington.

  (* Via the U.S. Air Force’s VIP flight detachment; this because Sen. J. Ellwood "Jaws’' Fisch (Radical-Liberal, California), was on the APPLE advisory staff at fifty thousand dollars per annum.)

  Until the Vienna affair, Mr. Jambon had believed that there was sort of a television newspersons’ code of honor; that they would not, so to speak, blow the whistle on each other.* It wasn’t exactly blowing a whistle, what they did to Don Rhotten, APPLE, and Taylor P. Jambon —it was more like sounding an air-raid siren. In addition to running film of “One Hour” of Mr. Jambon, Don Rhotten and Senator Fisch whooping it up with a trio of Viennese dumplings while using APPLE’S American Express cards, Hazardous and Michaels had shown film of Patience Throckmorton Worthington taking a quart of straight bourbon aboard the plane to steel herself for the horrifying experience of having to hold a puppy in her lap. There had been a rather detailed report of exactly how the money sent in by the suckers out there in TV Land had been spent, and for the piece de resistance of their shoddy yellow television journalism, they had arranged for the opera singer, Boris Alexandrovich Korsky-Rimsakov, to throw America’s Most Beloved Young TV Newsperson, Mr. Don Rhotten, into Vienna’s famous Volksgarten fountain. The big splash was carried live by satellite into 16,476,000 American homes on the “ABS Evening News.” **

  (*He was, obviously, right about this. Harley Hazardous and Trenchcoat Wally Michaels were the exceptions that proved the rule. They had long before been declared personae non grata by the other practitioners of the television-news art for other incidents of letting the side down.)

  (** Students of Journalism and others interested in public affairs may find a detailed account of all this in a scholary tome published in the public interest by Pocket Books, New York. M*A*S*H Goes to Vienna is generally to be found on the racks of better-class bookselling establishments from coast to coast at the very reasonable price of a dollar and a half. A fifty percent discount is offered to honest television journalists. (Proof required; applications will be judged by the authors, whose decision will be final.))

  By the time it was all over and following a little chat with the United States attorney for the southern district of New York, Mr. Jambon had decided it was his clear, if painful, duty to disband APPLE and turn over all assets to the American Humane Society. He also had to sign, before witnesses, an agreement in which he henceforth and forevermore would cease and desist raising funds for pups and pussies for any reason whatsoever. The United States attorney had been drunk with power.

  “The only reason I’m not taking you to trial, Fatso,” he said, “is that I would have to put Miss Patience Throckmorton Worthington on trial with you. I just can’t find it in my heart to expose that lady for what she is, that is to say, a drunken old alley
cat, and destroy the cherished illusions of millions of Americans, including my own wife and children. But if you ever so much as bend over to pet a dog, Jambon, it’s slammer time, you understand me?”

  Sen. Jaws Fisch, of course, put out a statement that he hardly knew Mr. Jambon, and that he could not, of course, know what statements had been made in his name by every one of the 160 members of his staff. Don Rhotten had announced that it was all a misunderstanding, that he himself had been working on what he called the “exposé of that APPLE mess” and had gone, so to speak, undercover to do so. He denied that he bore Harley Hazardous and Trenchcoat Wally Michaels any ill feeling, and tearfully announced that it was his fondest desire to one day be able to join what he called “the brave and fearless team of television journalists on “One Hour.’ ”

  There had been nothing left for Taylor P. Jambon to do but go about his TV gourmet business with his head held high, and silently reminding himself of the great philosophic truth about “sticks and stones” and “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.”

  There was not, of course, nearly as much money in teaching the nation’s housewives how to make Ham Jambon, Oysters Apache, or Tacos Franchise on the tube as there had been in guiding the affairs of APPLE, and as time (and the terror the United States attorney had instilled) passed, Mr. Jambon began to think carefully about what had happened. The consent decree he had signed had dealt only with pups and pussies, canaries and other domestic animals. It had, he realized, had absolutely nothing to say about livestock.