And Garrison Keillor Meets “Garrison Keillor”

Who is Garrison Keillor?

Let me be precise: I’m not asking about “Garrison Keillor,” a character on the weekly public radio show A Prairie Home Companion. The character, played by Garrison Keillor, is gently ironic, a wry observer of the social and cultural scene in the mythical Minnesota town of Lake Wobegon, where “all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.” He also sings—this is still “Garrison Keillor” I’m talking about—and acts in skits in the program. He was also the central character in a full-length movie, a fictionalized, behind-the-scenes depiction of the radio program.

Who then is Garrison Keillor, the performer who plays “Garrison Keillor”? Could he be a different kind of person from the gentle, generous tolerant character he plays on the radio? On the evidence of a recent piece Keillor wrote for the online magazine Salon, maybe so.

Keillor wrote for Salon about being in Washington over the Memorial Day weekend. Over most three-day weekends, Washington—downtown, monumental Washington—is almost deserted. But starting a few days before the Memorial Day weekend, Washington is visited by Rolling Thunder, a brigade or so of motorcyclists, almost all riding Harley Davidsons, ridden by men with the aspect of Vietnam veterans. The Rolling Thunder Washington visitation is sponsored by an organization called Rolling Thunder, whose web site says that more than half of its members are in fact veterans and that they are dedicated to reminding the public of veterans left behind in Vietnam and helping all veterans.

If you’ve ever wondered how much noise three or four thousand Harleys make, it’s a lot. But I’m glad to see them come to town. The presence of the federal government makes Washington a magnet for visitors who want the government to do something that will benefit them or those who are paying their way; not so many asking the government to do something for others. And while I doubt there are many Americans languishing involuntarily in Vietnam, any reminder of people whom we pay and support not enough for doing a dangerous job is welcome, most especially on Memorial Day.

To Garrison Keillor, however, Rolling Thunder was an annoying intrusion on the peaceful Memorial Day he was counting on. “A patriotic bike rally,” he grumped in Salon, “is sort of like a patriotic toilet-papering or patriotic graffiti; the patriotism somehow gets lost in the sheer irritation of the thing… [The] vulgarity squats on you like an enormous toad and won’t get off.” Based on what evidence Keillor doesn’t indicate, he judges “the bikers riding in formation [to be] more interested in being seen than in learning anything. They are grown men playing soldier, making a great hullaballoo without exposing themselves to danger, other than getting drunk and falling off a bike.”

Finally the bikers—“full of bluster, giving off noxious fumes”—pass, and Keillor is free to cross Constitution Avenue and enter the National Gallery of Art to meditate before the paintings of Renoir, Monet and Cassatt: a wan, mildly anxious lady in a green sailboat, holding a baby who looks dreamily over the gunwales of the boat.

Keillor is baffled as well as annoyed at Rolling Thunder. He doesn’t “quite see the connection between [Memorial Day] and these fat men with ponytails on Harleys.” (This from a man who marks Memorial Day by gazing at the works of Renoir, Monet and Cassatt.) And what is it about the bikers being fat and wearing ponytails? Is their corpulence, like the noise they make, an aesthetic affront to Keillor? If they want to show their respect for the troops, he grumps, why don’t we airlift them to Baghdad?

I found Keillor’s dyspeptic rant somewhat unsettling, a bit like hearing a Keith Olbermann rant come from the mouth of Mister Rogers. But Prairie Home Companion has always left me a little uneasy. My antennae always go up when one social group is sent up for the amusement of another. The Lake Wobegon tagline, for example–”all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average”–has always seemed to mock the insularity of small-town folk whose provincialism makes them see themselves as grander than the perspective of the metropolis—Keillor’s perspective–reveals them to be. Similarly, Keillor’s meandering accounts of small-town doings that constitute the news from Lake Wobegon, the centerpiece of each week’s episode of Prairie Home Companion, have always seemed to me jaundiced renditions of small-town life delivered by someone who was determined above all to escape small-town life and its provincialism, and who now lampoons his erstwhile neighbors for the amusement of the upscale, well-educated, Volvo-driving, wine-sipping types who catch his act on NPR.*

I had a similar reaction to the version of “Garrison Keillor” that Keillor plays in The Prairie Home Companion movie. The 2006 movie distances the performer a step further than the radio series from the character he portrays. In the movie Keillor, who is also the film’s primary writer, plays himself, the radio impresario and performer, playing the avuncular on-stage version of himself. The plot revolves around a threat to the survival of A Prairie Home Companion from the new owner of the theatre in which the program is staged.

The program’s longtime performers—not the real program’s longtime performers but actors like Meryl Streep. Lily Tomlin, Woody Harrelson and Lindsay Lohan playing longtime performers of the Prairie Home Companion in the film—are distraught about the threatened demise of the show that obviously means so much to them. But Keillor seems unconcerned, even detached. “This isn’t really going to be your last show, is it?” a character played by Lindsay Lohan asks Keillor. “Every show is your last show,” replies Keillor facilely. “That’s my philosophy.”

Keillor’s “philosophy” echoes that of a character from another 2006 film, Martin Scorcese’s Oscar-winning The Departed. In an early character-establishing scene, Frank Costello, the brutal and cynical gangster played by Jack Nicholson, recognizes an acquaintance among the customers in his bar. “How’s your mother?” asks Costello casually. The customer’s face turns sad. “Oh,” he replies mournfully, “I’m afraid she’s on her way out.” “We all are,” says Costello as he walks away. “Act accordingly.” That’s his philosophy.

I don’t know Garrison Keillor; Garrison Keillor is not a friend of mine. I have never heard or read anything about what he is really like. I also recognize the risk of inferring anything about an actor from a character he plays, even, perhaps, if the character is himself. Only in the Salon Memorial Day screed does Keillor speak for himself rather than through a simulacrum.

But as illuminated by the Salon piece, there does seem to be a thread running through Keillor’s radio program and movie: a fantasy of community and close collaboration, based on its creator’s life, but created and conducted in such a way as to distance and detach the creator from his creation.

So what? So what if Garrison Keillor isn’t really the benevolent figure he portrays on radio and in the movie? What of it?

It wouldn’t be the first time an actor played a character with his own name but a different personality. The legendary comedian Jack Benny, played a miser who was also called Jack Benny**, but was generous in real life. Lucille Ball spent decades playing ditzes, all named Lucy, but was, in real life, a shrewd and determined businesswoman. Both enjoyed decades of popularity.

Presenting yourself as better than you are is not so favorably perceived. Media figures who present themselves as friendly and even avuncular but are less appealing behind the scenes are a staple of personality journalism. Remember the ruckus when Katie Couric, so cheerful and friendly on camera, was reported to have snapped at subordinates off camera? Remember—this was really a long time ago—the uproar that resulted when the immensely popular Arthur Godfrey, whose image was suggested by the title of his program, Arthur Godfrey and His Friends, fired the program’s most popular singer on the air for the “disloyalty” of hiring an agent? Godfrey’s image never completely recovered.***

Keillor’s image would seem to be in no such jeopardy. Maybe his Salon piece wasn’t that widely read. Maybe his fans read it and agreed with his take on the Rolling Thunder bikers. Or maybe I’m reading too much into the disjunction between the Salon piece and the Keillor persona.

But think back to the flood of coverage of the death of Tim Russert. Was anything more remarked-on than that he was the same person off camera as he was on? In a business in which artifice is taken for granted, there’s an integrity in that.

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