Disability without sentiment
WHEELING THE DEAL:
The Outrageous Legend of Gordon Zahler,
Hollywood’s Flashiest Quadriplegic
By Chip Jacobs
336 pp. Behler Paperback $16.95
Review by Penny L. Richards
Chip Jacobs had childhood memories of his uncle Gordon Zahler as a repulsive old hospital patient, stinking and demanding. Chip’s mother, Muriel, had earlier memories of her brother Gordon as a wunderkind, the daredevil child turned teenaged quadriplegic who went on to become a successful businessman. When Muriel asked Chip to write Gordon’s story, she envisioned an inspirational narrative of overcoming, with her brother as a shining example of perseverance; when Chip started to research the story, against his earlier misgivings, he found a more complicated, more fascinating character, whose life was well worth a book-length biography.
Wheeling the Deal is the result, and the tale, based mainly on extensive interviews with Zahler’s associates, is in many ways a useful contribution to the growing literature in disability biography. Because Jacobs had access to family lore and memories, we get an unusually detailed account of the impact Zahler’s quadriplegia had on his family relationships and on the family’s financial state.
Gordon Zahler was 14 when he used a springboard in the school gymnasium without adult supervision, and broke his neck upon landing far from his target. In 1940, such injuries were generally fatal, if not immediately, then within weeks from infections; but Zahler survived this incident, and several others that could easily have killed him.
Back home in Sierra Madre, stiff in his cast, the closest Gordon came to World War II was listening to updates from the Motorola radio on his nightstand table—or staring ahead. His dad had tacked up a large Rand-McNally map of Europe on the wall opposite Gordon’s bed. Black tacks signified where the Axis was advancing, red ones for the Allies’ position. Any night he was home for dinner, Lee would sit with Gordon while CBS Radio broadcast the latest update from London or the Solomon Islands. Afterwards, Lee frantically adjusted the tacks while he speculated about General Patton’s tactics. Gordon even pretended to be interested in the troop movements after the novelty wore off. He recognized what this meant to his dad, this diverson affixed to the wall.
Within weeks of Zahler’s accident in 1940, his family sold their house to cover hospital bills. Muriel had to give up her plans for college, and within a year of his father’s early death, Gordon and his mother Rose were on welfare. Rose Zahler’s fringe religious affiliation is another continuing theme, again with more personal nuance than most external biographies can manage.
Many histories of disability in the United States gloss over the role of religion, acknowledging its cultural importance but finding little specific to say about it. Perhaps because religious beliefs and practices take so many forms and affect disabled lives in so many ways, it’s difficult to generalize. Jacobs does the field a service by exploring his grandmother’s experience.
Born into a Jewish family in San Francisco, Rose Zahler was raised in El Paso and Brooklyn. As a young woman, she became a Christian Scientist and then a follower of George Edwin Burnell, whose “Science of Truth” philosophy blended elements of Catholicism, Christian Science, and other theological traditions into something called “the Instruction.” Adherents were encouraged to dismiss tragedy and confusion from their lives, which made the Instruction an especially attractive philosophy for Rose, who wanted fervently to believe that her son could be cured by faith if not by medicine. Burnell arranged prayer groups focused on Gordon’s spine (specialized prayers were called “treatments”); Burnell also attempted a miraculous healing by the laying on of hands. When a cure was not forthcoming, and despite her husband’s and son’s complete lack of interest in religion, Rose continued to find comfort in the Instruction—but she also sought advice from fortune tellers, just in case.
As Gordon Zahler’s magnetic personality and self-taught business skills lift him and his mother from poverty to prosperity, we see the many ways money is made in Hollywood.
While his able-bodied rivals navigated stop-and-go traffic or fixed a house water heater or chased illicit sex at the club, Gordon’s mind could whirl. Among other tricks, he trained himself to recall everything he couldn’t physically get his hands on. He started with his thousand-song music catalogue. By staring at lists on the music stand by his bed for an hour a day it was fairly easy. From there he memorized which of his dozens of tapes the songs were recorded on, then their order on the tape. When he was through with that he absorbed music-publishing contracts and other documents. By the early 1960s, his mind let him recite those same contracts, cue sheets, negotiating memos and tapes in such crisp detail that outsiders suspected it might be a parlor trick to impress them.
Zahler turned his father’s catalog of film compositions into a sound-editing business, providing musical cues for movies—many of the quality of his most infamous project, Plan 9 from Outer Space—and for the new market of television. This is the nitty-gritty of show business; there are cameos by Burt Lancaster and Nat “King” Cole, but Zahler’s career was built on the unglamorous work of making deals and managing a workplace full of technology and underpaid workers.
Jacobs spools out the revelations with just enough tension to keep the reader surprised and curious, but the style of writing is difficult to ignore, and detracts from the effectiveness of the work. Jacobs writes very informally here, with mistaken vocabulary and metaphors that are either mixed, clichéd, or nonsensical, on practically every page. I stopped trying to mark them when he reported about an “ex-actress who sired . . . three sons.” Sired? Really? On the very next page, the author confuses the words “moolah” (slang for money) and “mullah” (an Islamic cleric). Scenes that should be moving or shocking are rendered only silly by such missteps.
A more academic treatment of Zahler’s story might have brought in more context about the disability rights and independent living movement, begun most notably at Berkeley in the 1960s. I was left wondering—what did Gordon know of the “Rolling Quads” barely a generation younger than himself, who demanded the access and support he had mostly gained for himself, by charm, skill, luck, or cash? It might also be helpful to understand better the wider changes in the film and television industry that affected Zahler’s business. What we lose in context and analysis (and linguistic restraint), however, we gain in the exceptional level of personal detail here. Jacobs has documented a marvellous life, and done so without the sentimentality that ruins so many life stories of people with disabilities.
Penny L. Richards is a Research Scholar affiliated with the Center for the Study of Women at UCLA. She holds a PhD in Education from the University of North Carolina, and has published research articles in the fields of disability history, educational history, literary history, and women’s history. Her blog: http://disstud.blogspot.com
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