I am very grateful to Harlan Ellison for telling this story. If I knew of a more complete version, I’d link to it. I remember reading his account of this meeting & marveling. He was relaying it in the magazine (I wish I had saved it) because he was the last person at the table who was still alive to tell the tale & he thought it was terribly important to let people know the truth.
So, yes, Harlan may have been a bit of a wanker, but he stood up to power and told the hard truth when he did not have to do so & stood to gain nothing from the effort. Thanks, dude.
I was the editor for the Harlan Ellison Hornbook (1990). It was mostly old columns he had written for L.A. papers (of course, he had promised my boss an entirely new work, but as time wore on this is what we got).
I let most of it go, as it was clean and previously published, but corrected several factual things…I remember he had mis-- heard and misinterpreted a Bob Dylan lyric, and that he didn’t know what a margarita was (he was a teetotaler). Can’t remember the others.
He grudgingly made the corrections, but added footnotes about what he had done, how he hated editors, hated me, hated making mistakes, and who cares about rum or Dylan anyway.
I found him charming, but I always trod lightly around him (I was in my 20s at the time).
He attended the 1988 Edgar Allan Poe Awards banquet, and made a lot of noise about how James Ellroy
should have won Best Novel for The Black Dahlia (which I also edited). This was several years before James got famous.
I’ve been reading various peoples’ memories of Harlan online, and it’s clear that anyone who knew him holds him in fond regard.
There was the story of how he kept people from rushing into an elevator in order for a man in a wheelchair – who had been squeezed out by the rush multiple times – to get aboard.
Someone else talked about how Ellison gave him a pep talk because people were calling him a hack.
When the Wachowskis were finishing up on The Matrix, they realized that some of their concepts had been taken from Harlan. Knowing his reputation, they went to him and showed him the movie, and then asked for permission. Which he gladly gave without payment.
Another author talked about how he realized at the last minute that there was a far better title for an anthology of his work. It was too late to change it, but Harlan insisted he should and volunteered to pay all the costs of reprinting.
And, of course, Harlan marched with Martin Luther King at Selma.
Anyone who thinks he was a terrible person knows nothing about him.
One thing I remember about him is in the late 1970s when “A Boy and His Dog” was shown at my college, one female student protested it as sexist. They arranged for Ellison to come and have a public discussion with her about the film. I didn’t go: hadn’t seen the movie, barely knew who Ellison was and might have had class that night. But that memory has stayed with me for 40 years.
What college was this? This sounds like something that a college might do today, but only if there was a massive outcry about something. I can’t believe they literally brought Ellison to the campus to have a discussion because of one person’s protest.
I’ve been told that the story that Ellison tells about being in the room when somebody suggested (in L. Ron Hubbard’s presence) that the way to make money is to start a religion is wrong. I was told that there was such an occasion, but Ellison wasn’t there. There’s a problem with believing any of the stories that Ellison tells. It appear that he often puts himself in events that didn’t involve him at all. It appears that he often just makes up stories out of whole cloth. Yes, Ellison tells great stories. Often they’re just stories, not true accounts of real events.
I’m going to await someone’s definitive biography of Ellison before accepting all those stories he told about his life. Someone needs to go over everything people have said about him, everything he has said about himself, everything available in official records, and new interviews with everyone he knew. Then that biographer can compare all that and come up with a reasonable account of what we can and can’t know about Ellison’s life.
University of Rochester NY. I don’t know if they specifically brought him in or if Ellison heard about it and did it on his own.
This is also the same era when the men’s basketball team, a weak Division III team (or something like that) played a game against the North Carolina Tar Heels (a division I powerhouse). After the national anthem, the coach turned around to address his team and found his starting line up was at the North Carolina bench to get the autograph of Tar Heels star Phil Ford.
My understanding is that Ellison came in on his own.
I missed this event by one year – I arrived at the U of R the next.
Rochester (and the University in particular) had a pretty active feminist community – they had once called a bomb threat in to prevent a showing of the movie The Story of O** – so it’s not surprising they were up in arms about a showing of A Boy and His Dog. and Harlan, of course, would ALWAYS want to defend his work against any charges, especially against censorship. Getting him and the Rochester Women’s groups together must have ben like throwing sodium suspension into water. I am SO sorry I missed this one.
*There’s no proof that it was them, but most people thought it was virtually certain. If not them directly, at least someone sympathetic to their views.