Being There (BSB, CIP, Lorimar Film Entertainment, NatWest Ventures, New Gold Entertainment, Northstar Media, 1979)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles arrived from work just as The Glass Wall was ending and the next film on TCM’s schedule, Being There, was starting. It was based on a novel by Polish writer Jerzy Kosinski, and I suspect the programmers at TCM might have paired these two movies because Kosinski was also an immigrant from Eastern Europe – from Poland, not Hungary. I looked him up on Wikipedia and the accusations and counter-accusations about him would make a fascinating movie in and of themselves. His breakthrough novel was The Painted Bird (1965), published in English and an immediate hit in the U.S. It detailed the wanderings of a Jewish boy in Poland during the Holocaust and the people – often unpleasant and exploitative – he met. Kosinski always insisted the work was fictional, which didn’t stop some critics from describing it as an autobiography and others from denouncing it because it wasn’t (apparently Kosinski survived the Holocaust largely by being hidden by various Roman Catholic churches and religious communities, not by running around in constant flight like his character did). One of the more bizarre charges against Kosinski was that he had plagiarized large sections of The Painted Bird, while others claimed that he’d written it, all right – but in Polish, since he hadn’t yet learned English well enough to write in it, and he’d hired a secret translator to create the English version.

In 1970 he published Being There, about a learning-disabled man who was taken in as a child by a rich man, allowed to live on his estate, and ultimately was given the task of tending the man’s gardens. His name – to the extent he has one – is “Chance,” and he introduces himself as “Chance, the gardener.” Then the man he’s been living with (or at least under the same roof) all those years dies, and a couple of attorneys show up representing the dead man’s estate and say they’re there to close the house, leaving Chance to an uncertain future. Peter Sellers read Being There and instantly decided he wanted to star in a film version, only he spent nine years trying to set it up because he was no longer considered ‘bankable” – until director Blake Edwards and United Artists revived the successful Pink Panther franchise in 1974 and hired Sellers to reprise his role as Inspector Clouseau. By 1979 Sellers was once again considered a major star and he was able to get Lorimar Pictures, a TV studio (known mostly for The Waltons) which had branched into feature films, to bankroll a production of Being There and hire the quirky Hal Ashby, best known for fish-out-of-water stories, to direct.

The story deals with Chance, newly thrust onto an outside world he’s previously encountered only on TV (he was given a TV at his old home and when he leaves he takes its remote control with him, thinking he can use it to make unpleasant scenes go away in reality the way he could with his TV), who has an encounter with young knife-wielding Black gangsters who allow him to go on his way only after the leader gives Chance a slang-filled message he doesn’t even begin to understand. Then a deus ex machina arrives in the person of Eve Rand (Shirley MacLaine), wife of Benjamin Rand (Melvyn Douglas), one of Wall Street’s masters of the universe, a financier so rich and powerful he can literally dictate who gets to be President. When Eve’s car bumps into Chance and gives him a minor leg injury, she insists that she come home with him and convalesce for as long as he needs to. He ends up spending time on an estate far larger than anyone he’s ever dreamed of, being pushed in a wheelchair and fussed over, and his simple-minded observations about gardening are taken as deeply profound insights not only into the human condition in general but specifically as recommendations to the current President, “Bobby” (Jack Warden), about his economic policy. Bobby comes to visit Ben Rand and meets the man everyone in their circle calls “Chauncey Gardiner,” their mash-up of “Chance the gardener,” and takes his banal observations of how in order to grow your garden you have to keep it alive during autumn and winter so it’ll be ready to bloom again in spring and summer as serious political and economic observations.

Being There is a slow-moving film (quite a contrast from the fast and suspenseful Dr. Strangelove, Sellers’ other big satire of U.S. politics, though there’s actually a borrowing from Strangelove here: the scene in which Chance meets the Russian ambassador and they each tell each other that the other is “fine”) that takes two hours and 10 minutes to adapt a quite short novel that’s little more than a parable. (Kosinski is credited with his own screenplay, but according to imdb.com another writer, Robert C. Jones, worked on it without credit.) It’s also a movie that harkens back to earlier attempts to do the fal parsi (“innocent fool”) on screen, including Laurel and Hardy and, even earlier, Harry Langdon. The scene in which Eve Rand is overcome with sexual desire for “Chauncey” and flops all over her while he hasn’t the slightest idea of what he’s doing and why goes straight back to the scenes in Laurel and Hardy’s films in which vamps tried to seduce Laurel and he had no conception of what they were doing, often complaining that they were just making him ticklish. He’s approached at one fancy Washington, D.C. party by a Gay man (who’s identified only as “Gay” in the credits) who flat-out asks Chance, “Have you ever had sex with a man?” Chance responds, “I like to watch,” meaning he likes to watch TV, and the man who’s accosted him figures that he should find some other guy at the party so they can have sex together and Chance can watch. Later he gives the same answer to Eve Rand when she makes an even more determined effort to seduce him – by this time her husband is on his last legs and Eve is planning to marry “Gardiner” as soon as hubby croaks – and when he says, “I like to watch,” she strips and brings herself to climax while Gardiner tries to copy the poses of the yoga instructor who’s on his TV at the moment.

I noted Being There as a precursor to Forrest Gump – though Charles pointed out that Gump, unlike Chance, was at least aware of human emotions – and also as one of a peculiarly Eastern European strain of political satire, stories like Lieutenant Kizhe and The Inspector General, in which the bureaucracy goes so far out of whack that an interloper (sometimes, as in Lieutenant Kizhe, someone who doesn’t even exist!) can infiltrate it and rise to a position of great power advising the rulers before he’s exposed. The ending of Being There takes place at Ben Rand’s funeral, where the President shows up and delivers an interminable obituary quoting from Rand’s denunciations of the welfare state (which in a movie made the year before Ronald Reagan was elected President makes this movie seem timely, though not as uncannily timely as The Glass Wall!) and the members of Rand’s inner circle are anxiously debating whom they should run for President in the next election. (I guess “Bobby” was reaching the end of his second term and was termed out.) They choose “Chauncey Gardiner” precisely because he has no documented history – the FBI and CIA were both assigned to do background checks and each agency accused the other of destroying all his records – and therefore can’t be a target for opposition researchers. While Rand’s associates are mapping out his future (including becoming CEO of Rand’s company as well as Eve’s next husband, a match Ben supposedly blessed on his deathbed à la No Sad Songs for Me), the real Chance is walking through a puddle with a baby tree he intends to replant.