Chapter 8: Polly's Wild Safari

January 15, 1974

Dear Diary: I just re-read the last entry in this book. It's hard to believe that I wrote it almost a year ago. When a person is busy, time just seems to slip away. And God knows, I've been a busy girl.

The semi-nude, wet-look commercial I described last time really took TV land by storm. After the first nation-wide network screening, people all over the country were flooding their local stations with phone calls, demanding to be told the time and date of the next showing, asking if super 8 millimetre copies could be purchased for home users. There were of course the usual hysterical protest from strict religious sects, moral cranks, and the editorial department of TV GUIDE (See: "An In-Depth Analysis-- Why Bestiality Sells Us Dog Food," in the December 13, 1973 issue).

Certain unmentionable TV comedians and late night talk show hosts made the ya-hoos belly laugh with jokes about me and the Chef... but when the two of us appeared on their shows, and they had to confront us face to face, we ripped them apart with our sincere love-for-the-weaker-and-endangered-species, ecological horse shit. The ones who tried to make funnies after we made our appeal for humanity to lower forms of life found themselves on the short end of the rating stick. The people were behind us, rooting for us, even though they hadn't the faintest idea what we were really about. To some it was obviously the dog food munching kinship, to others the animal sex... but for some reason, their numbers expanded to include folks who'd never tried Chef Fido's Gourmet Pooch, who'd never sampled the delights of a Doberman on the waterbed. The time was ripe for us, that was the only way to explain it. Like it'd been for Frank Sinatra, the Beatles. The papers actually started calling it 'Fidomania', and me, 'Fido's girl'.

The sales of Gourmet Pooch quintupled during the first eight weeks after the release of what the trade papers called 'The Wet- look Trilogy, ' three one minute spots on the same general theme: bath tub, beauty and bowser. In fact, by the following May, Philo Phoods was unable to keep up with the demand. They converted some of their other food plants, their 'Chilli Bonanza' and 'Beef Strudel', human food processing centres over to Gourmet Pooch, but that was just a drop in the bucket as far as picking up the supply. In the end, they had to build an entire new Chef Fido Food Complex outside Rock Ridge, Iowa. Covering a solid square mile of America's heartland, the new plant has the capability to turn out ten thousand cans of paella valenciana every six minutes, eight thousand cans of gnocci alia romana every two minutes.

I signed an agreement with Philo that stated should I ever decide to star in a major TV series, they would have the privilege of sponsoring me. For the right to continue our highly profitable relationship, they paid me three million dollars. Of course I didn't see a fourth of the money, what with taxes, legal fees, agent's fees, but, still, it was a lot of money for doing absolutely nothing.

Philo Phoods wasn't the only one throwing up new buildings. Weird Harold actually conned his father into giving him all the money he needed to put up the Sunray Bowl near the beach in Santa Monica. Typically, he picked the wrong side of Pico Boulevard to build on and, instead of getting the keen, clean, lowbrow, nouveau riche clientele of Palisades attorneys and Olympic Avenue fabric merchants in their maroon double knit trousers and white shoes, he was shocked to discover that most of his business was coming from dope pedlars, hookers, and bevies of switchblade toting teenagers. Oh, he made money alright, but he was constantly in trouble with the Vice Squad. I mean, he didn't encourage the pill pushing and cunt hustling... not old Weird Harold... but he couldn't really come down heavy on the local players without cutting his own throat. He kept saying all this stuff about how he could clean up on the bowling business if he could get rid of the Sunray's bad reputation. "After all," he'd say, mostly for his own benefit, "it's the only forty lane alley north of Lincoln Boulevard."

Yes, he and I are still living together, man and wife in name only. He has a room close to the kitchen. I have a room close to the little zoo I've managed to collect over the months. Most of the animals were gifts from admirers. Anyway, Harold and I pass each other in the hallways now and again. He's absolutely sure "things will work out between us if we just give them some time." And he goes into a rage every time the word "divorce" comes up in our brief conversations. He really freaks me out sometimes. I think, when the time is right for cutting the big blob loose, I'll let someone else break it to him, like the 6 O'Clock News, while I am safe some place far away.

Mom, unfortunately, is still living with us, still pushy, pushy, all for her little girl. She can't abide Harold's new enterprise... all of a sudden, bowling is too declasse for her, and she thinks that the Sunray could somehow hurt my career by getting me associated with "human garbage," as she calls Harold's bowling buffs. I don't think there's a restaurant or bar in Hollywood that will admit her any more. Secretaries at all the big media corporations are wise to her voice and hang up on her automatically. And still she persists. She waits outside the bars for the chance to collar a network big wig, outside Western Avenue massage parlours to tug on the coat-tails of TV station managers, vice presidents, camera men, for God's sake.

I don't understand it. She can't think that I need to pester the ass-holes for anything... I mean I could have whatever they have to give by making one phone call. Ever since I started in on the new TV series for Philo, she's gotten so much worse. I think she thinks that she's useless, that now that I have everything she can't give me the next best thing... a righteous pain in the ass. I swear to God if she slips any further downhill, I'm going to have to take some kind of drastic action.

Anyway, I mentioned the TV show, so the cat's out of the bag. We've been filming for about six weeks now on location in Zaire, Ecuador, and Tasmania. The format of the show, on the surface, is your typical Sunday early evening, 'Nature and Ecology' sop... right down to the disclaimer at the end of the show stating that "not all the scenes were shot in the sequence shown in the program, but they do reflect generally accepted scientific facts about the lives of the animals depicted..." Which means we catch the wild animals in metal nets from helicopters, drug the living shit out of them, and when they show signs of coming around, we toss them out in front of our cameras and let them strut their stuff.

What makes us different from our competitors? Well, first of all, there's little old me. No, they don't let me go around in the swamps of New Guinea with just a gob of soap suds on my shoulder. I wear safari clothes... a khaki, short-sleeved shirt, unbuttoned to the navel, and with no bra, of course... and a pair of super tight khaki shorts, so tight, in fact, that one of the film processing boys claimed, using a magnifying glass on the publicity stills, he count every hair on my pussy. So much for Dr Marlin Perkins and Bill Burrud.

Philo Phoods gave me a lot of static about the role Chef Fido was to play in the show. They, of course, wanted their trademark right up front, my co-star on every fucking program. I put my foot down. I was goddamn sick of being called "Fido's Girl," even if it had made me a millionaire several times over. My fan mail and movie magazine coverage was living proof that by myself I had enough sex appeal and audience drawing power to carry the emcee spot. I didn't need the black turd any more. My plan was to use a different animal co-host each week, depending on the exotic country the show was about... that way, by showing a new animal face each week, I would remain the show's undisputed star. Under duress I finally agreed to do the Chef Fido Gourmet Pooch commercial spots with Fido, but with the stipulation that the impression be given that I was the dog's supreme mistress... he would always be sitting in a servile position at my feet when I stood, and when I sat, he would be laying on his belly. There would be no more nudie scenes in bath tubs, showers or swimming pools. All the ads would be filmed on the same set as was used for our show openings and closings, a rough and ready den-cum-library with knotty pine walls, a big leather armchair, and oak trees visible outside the single, large window. Chef Fido would be treated no differently than any of the other animals on the show... not that that was any worse than I'd treated him before... but I felt it was important to convey a feeling of equality among the guest stars. Why should a black poodle be given special attention over, for instance, an orang-utan?

Aside from what I've mentioned so far, the other thing that set us apart from the run-of-the-mill nature show was our content. We didn't pull any punches... none of that pussy footing around the North Woods in shoe-shoes, using radio receivers to locate radio-transmitter tagged badgers deep in their winter hibernation. "Little is known about the winter sleeping habits of our friend, the badger. To find out more, scientists from Langston Institute of Hibbing, Minnesota devised an ingenious plan using new and sophisticated electronic tagging techniques and the badger's natural weakness for Heath Bars. We'll show you the amazing results of their research after these few words from Industrial Indemnity...": no sir! We knew what the folks at home wanted and we gave it to them. When we did a show on the sex habits of the American bison there was none of this radio collar bull-shit. We used choppers to herd the buffalo into steel pens where we gassed the hell out of them. Then our crew separated the males from the females and, after some discussion, we picked our stars using a bull dozer to load them on the back of a pair of flat bed trucks. We drove the groggy creatures out to our super scenic location and injected them with powerful sex hormone stimulants, then dumped them off the trucks onto what the script euphemistically termed their "bison boudoir." While the two monstrous creatures fucked the living daylights out of each other, with full colour and stereophonic sound, yours truly circled the juicy thrusting, bending low with hand held microphone, showing a bit of bare titty, while rattling off the standard Nature show mumbo gumbo about wild instincts and the danger of man's encroachment on nature's domain.

Hey, the entire crew from continuity girl to make up man to executive producer knew we had a winner going for us. We were tapping the id wishes of millions of normal, healthy city bred Americans. People who know next to shit about Nature or her wild creatures, people whose perverse and grotesque imaginings invented a world of happy mice, ducks who wore gloves and sailor suits, baby elephants who flew by flapping their ears, insects who tap danced. In a word, anthropomorphism, or the giving of human qualities to the inhuman, animate or inanimate. Well, goddamnit, if a woodpecker can read a Sunday paper, why doesn't he ever get horny, why doesn't he go down to Chirp City and knock off a piece of fallen sparrow? Huh? The answer, of course, is that in the tiny, vodka soaked minds of Rand Corporation nitwits he does! Everybody knows animals have no shame. They do it right in the open, in the daylight. Squishy-squishy and hot flop all over the dichondra. Only trouble is, thanks to freeways and neon lights and The Jefferson Airplane, all our wonderful, uninhibited, singing, dancing, FUCKING wild creatures are getting creamed, rubbed out, decimated.

But why the long face, America? Think you'll never see the mating lunge of the white rhino? Wrong! Think you'll never witness incest among juvenile baboons? Not so! Think the foreplay of jaguar is something they'll never show on TV? Again, wrong! It's all coming right into your living room this fall on 'Polly's Wild Safari'.

Our preview showings of the first program, 'The Mystery of Baboon Mountain', in selected cities across the country resulted in riots, pandemonium, and civil disobedience, so all of us, from the lowliest electronics technician to Major Scampi himself, sat down and talked out the re-editing. Mostly, we toned down the orgasm sequences, cut out the slow motion, psychedelic come puddle scene altogether, and inserted more bare boobs shots of me. Also, the sound man re-mixed the main sound track, bringing up my voice and lowering the grunting, juicy, humping sounds of the baboons. When we re-showed the program to different test audiences of the same cross sectional make-up in the same cities, we got the kind of response figures we'd hoped for. Nothing even bordering on destruction of private property, just sweaty palms and upper lips, spontaneous erections and, in some cases, ejaculations, as well as much knee crossing, seat dampening, and a new record for trips to the theatre rest-rooms.

Philo Phoods was so sure that we had the number one show of the season that even before the first network airing, they went into major production of Polly's Wild Safari dolls, bumper stickers that read: 'I'm a WILD one!' and a line of snazzy, complicated parlour games based on each installment of the program ('The Secret of Rhino Ravine Game'). The Polly dolls were constructed under the supervision of a clinical psychologist, a Freudian, and the matching animal dolls... white rhino, baboon, tapir, etc... under the expert eye of the head curator of the Copenhagen Zoo. In all, pre-premiere expenses for the exploitation products alone, ran over ten million dollars.

Regardless of the crass, mercenary side of the TV thing, I've got to admit that it had its romantic side, too. I got to meet a lot of new and exotic creatures. Of course, I always found the time to sneak off into the bush with the male co-host of the week and do a little in-depth research. Not that I fucked all the animals that wanted me. Take that gruesome white rhino, for instance. Have you ever seen a rhino with a hard-on? No, I guess not. Well, anyway, it's enough to make a girl give up the fast life and join a convent. A yard and a half of tube-steak as big around as a fifty-year-old spruce packed in its own armour plated pod. No, thanks. Pain, as you may have gathered, Dear Diary, in moderation is fine by me, but not suicide.

And, of course, yours truly fell head over heels in love during the shooting of the first episode. 'The Mystery of Baboon Mountain'. It had to happen, I suppose. Me being more than a little naive about the ways of baboons and very vulnerable. We called him Nordbert and he was a full-fledged adult male, Papio hamadryas, or sacred baboon. We found Nordbert and his entourage of thirty wives, juvenile males, and nurslings deep in the mountain jungles of East Africa. From the first time I saw him, through binoculars, I think I knew I was in love.

For a baboon, he was quite large, weighing about a hundred and fifty pounds and standing three feet tall at the shoulder. He had this incredible mane of long, frizzy hair... hair banded in tiny bars of black and white, that from a distance made him look merely grey... His hair parted in the middle of his sloping forehead, very close to the prominent brow ridge, and fell, merging with the fur on his narrow shoulders. When the darling was angry, which was most of the time, he'd ruffle out his mane, making it stick straight out like a crazy thing, making him look three times as large as life. He'd also open his long, narrow snout, so much like a dog's, and show razor sharp ivory daggers curving up from upper and lower jaws. Did he ever have some lethal looking canines!