Five Things You Don't Know About Carleton Eastlake: A Guest Post by Carleton Eastlake
I’m on maternity leave! During this time, a few of my favorite authors offered to step up and write guest posts so that this blog would remain active while I adjust to my new role as a mother. I may also be a bit slower to respond. Thanks for understanding and for being so supportive of me, my family, and my blog. Want to donate a few dollars to keep this blog running or perhaps contribute to my diaper fund? You can do so on Venmo or Paypal.
Five Things You Don't Know About Carleton Eastlake: A Guest Post by Carleton Eastlake
I HELD A DIPLOMATIC PASSPORT AT AGE 6 WHICH IS WHY I NEVER LEARNED HOW TO SPELL.
Actually “clutched nervously” is a more accurate description than “held” and my mother was doing the clutching. This was in 1953 when a parent had the awkward option of sharing a passport with their child: our passport photo featured me sitting on my mother’s lap.
This proved to be a bad decision – if my mother traveled with my father I would be left sitting in Paris without a passport, although nearly everyone was sure the Russians would invade some day and embassy kids – me – knew the Communists would attempt to kidnap us first, and if we didn’t have our passports with us when we fled the terrorists, the U.S. Army wouldn’t let us on the rescue plane and, no, or rather yes, therefore my mother didn’t dare leave Paris unless she took me with her on her lap.
So I got to see Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Monte Carlo, and probably Luxembourg, although it’s easy to miss if you’re driving fast. I’m pretty sure my skipping all those phonics modules at school is why I never learned how to spell.
Oh, about Paris and the traveling - my father being a physician had managed to avoid the then universal draft until he was a professor of medicine at the University of Oregon. Tipped off that his number was up, he volunteered for the Uniformed Public Health Service.
Which offered him a great deal. Being a professor, the USPHS commissioned him as a Lieutenant Commander and appointed him Traveling Medical Consultant Europe which gave him an office at the U.S. Embassy Paris, diplomatic plates for his giant Ford automobile, an even larger black Embassy Buick for that traveling and consulting, and base privileges at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, which aside from preparing for supreme command of the war with the Soviet Union after the Communists kidnaped me, held the most amazingly multinational Friday night bingo games on the planet – my family’s frequent partner was a Turkish colonel who like a magician carried an immaculate white handkerchief hidden up the sleeve of his tunic.
To my embarrassment and elation, Miss Lang, my beautiful, precious, amazing second grade teacher also sometimes joined us. (Yes. I entered the Freudian Latency Stage of childhood development a little late.)
Sadly, I learned even less French spelling than I did English. But apparently I did form some sort of attachment to naval uniforms – for the past several years I’ve volunteered as a media consultant for various U.S. Navy futurism projects.
I ALMOST BECAME A MEDICAL PSYCHOLOGIST WHICH YOU PROBABLY GUESSED FROM MY REFERENCE TO MY LATENCY STAGE.
After eleven years as a public policy lawyer (during which, come to think of it, I also worked with the U.S. Public Health Service, which has never actually occurred to me before as being a family tradition, but in fact they were my (non-traveling) medical consultants on a case) I wanted to do something even more directly human.
Also, I’d already had a lot of therapy of many different varieties. (Samples of which, hysterically disguised, appear in my novel Monkey Business.)
So I returned to UCLA to complete an undergraduate major in Psychology and applied to the then brand-new University of California at San Francisco’s Medical Psychology program. The idea of the program was to train psychiatrists directly without first running them through years and years of a general medical education.
I received an invitation to meet the director of the program. I booked a flight from Los Angeles, picked up a rental car, drove into San Francisco and we had a chat. The director told me he’d let me in if I really wanted him to. I’d graduated with honors from Harvard Law School, I was an (Acting) Regional Director of the Federal Trade Commission. Pretty clearly I’d be successful in the program. But – did I really want to go from being a relatively well-paid senior lawyer in federal service to once again becoming a starving grad student? Or was I independently wealthy?
I told him for sure, no, not wealthy, but some savings, and yes! I wanted to do it! On the flight back to L.A., however, it began, slowly, as I stared out the window, to occur to me that I’d just hopped on a plane for a day trip and, you know, rented a car to do it, and tomorrow would be back to running an office of 53 attorneys and investigators. Abandoning all that to cower in a cubbyhole in the grad library trying to stay warm might be…quite a transition.
So I started working nights and weekends at becoming a writer instead.
My chat with the program director was the best single hour of therapy I ever had. And a really fortunate one, since I later heard the medical association managed to block UCSF from ever getting their end-run into a psychiatric medical license off the ground.
I MADE THE FIRST TV AD WITH HONEST NUTRITION INFORMATION MAYBE IN THE WORLD EVER.
Once upon a time, multinational conglomerate corporations advertised their ultra-processed food-like products as being “high in energy!” by which they meant they were nearly pure sugar with a little spice and hardly anything nice.
I was a new trial lawyer at the Federal Trade Commission when we allied with the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration in trying to force the food companies to finally and for the first time ever give honest nutrition information to consumers.
The idea was to develop uniform nutrition statements – those charts you now see everywhere on the side of food packaging – and persuade the companies to use them. “Persuade” is a pleasant word covering the marshalling of lobbying and other political forces, the cooperation of the occasional unicorn of an honest company, statutory powers, and the public outrage inspired by nutrition books on the Best Seller List of the New York Times to twist enough arms to make it happen.
The FTC’s role in this was to use its power to ensure advertising is truthful and accurate to possibly require nutrition disclosures in TV advertising itself.
All of this was being talked about in interesting theoretical terms, which seemed slightly, well, vague and unpersuasive to me. So I got authorization to spend the gigantic sum of $60 (hey, in inflated dollars it would be a lot more now) to superimpose our draft of a nutrition disclosure chart on an actual copy of a broadcast ad.
It was really ugly.
I was invited to see the Commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission view my ad in the grand Commission meeting room. One of the Commissioners later appointed me as his Confidential Attorney Advisor.
I gather the ad was one of the thousand factors a thousand dedicated government consumer protection advocates used to scare the food industry into agreeing to stop resisting putting the disclosures on packaging if we would please never make them again look at what we might do to their beautiful TV ads if they didn’t.
Monkey Business is in part about my many years as a TV writer-producer. This ad was my first TV production ever.
I FINISHED IN THE MONEY AT A BMW AUTOCROSS RACING SCHOOL!
Listen, maybe 5th place out of 35 isn’t the big money, but they announced the top 6 times, and when they put the top 3 on a tiny podium, they let me stand near them, and I was pretty old at the time, and I do not think it is fair to put anxious writers in the same race with surgeons who are trained to have nerves of steel if they have nerves at all. Even so, I came in only 1.5 seconds behind Doctor Rocket Ranger Super Surgeon.
I also think I scared my instructor. And the class whooped with awe, amusement, and surprise I was still in the race when I crossed the finish line.
In case you don’t know it, modern BMW Ultimate Experience Autocross Racing Class (probably several ™ icons belong in there) is really fun and has scarcely anything to do with racing. When I was young, even college rally-racing after seeing A Man And A Woman meant speeding through the night with the Francis Lai theme playing in your mind while you girlfriend-navigator screamed in your right ear “Stop! Stop! We’re going to die!”
Which was proof my girlfriend was much saner than I, since when I rallied my father’s supercharged 409 Chevy, you had to shift precisely, double-clutching if you could, modulate your brakes skillfully, and still could oversteer yourself backwards off a cliff faster than a sane person can scream “We’re going to -!”
Although being only 19, I didn’t listen to my girlfriend until she more fatally said, “And we’re lost!”
BMW Autocross School was not like that. It took place on a very large smooth parking lot with an imaginary road course laid out with tiny, soft, BMW-blue traffic cones and while I imagined Anouk Aimée singing inside my mind the always-present instructor yelled in my right ear “Brake! Brake! Turn in! Accelerate!”
What with an automatic transmission, Artificially Intelligent stability controls, ABS brakes, and a Naturally Intelligent race car instructor yelling in your ear, all you had to do was follow orders.
I didn’t. I braked late, turned in hard, apparently was the only student who got the car to make skidding-like screams, yet astonishingly didn’t hit any cones, hence stayed in the money. The students waiting safely far back from the finish line applauded me. The instructor’s last yell was, “Why didn’t you listen? We could have won!” and I said, “I didn’t want to chicken out. That mattered more to me.”
And thus I learned that even if speed and courage don’t kill you, pursued blindly for their own sake, they may cost you the quickest line. And after nine or ten or twelve years of medical training, surgeons are really good at following orders.
WHILE ON THAT DIPLOMATIC PASPORT I FELL IN LOVE WITH AUDRY HEPBURN.
It was at a U.S. Army base movie theater outside Paris. My parents took me to see the slightly grown-up film Roman Holiday. Remember, they couldn’t leave me alone with the housekeeper because what if the Russians invaded and I didn’t have my shared passport? (The housekeeper had been in the Finnish Air Force and was also an Olympic contender – as we saw in 1939 and again in 2022, she would have won against the Russians. But I digress, again.)
I instantly fell madly in love with the gentle, musically voiced Audrey Hepburn. (As I mentioned above, clearly I was still in the adorable Phallic Stage and hadn’t yet retreated into Latency.) I liked her even more than Miss Lang.
We’d gone to the early show. In the Ford with the diplomatic plates I cried and cried until my parents turned around and took me right back into the late show to see Audrey again.
Childhood attachments! A key chapter in Monkey Business takes place while in the background a hotel lobby pianist of great skill and devotion plays subtextually significant themes from {sigh} Miss Hepburn’s films.
BIOGRAPHY
CARLETON EASTLAKE was named a 2022 Who? New! Author by the Brooklyn Book Festival for his debut novel MONKEY BUSINESS.
He graduated from UCLA in political science and psychology and from Harvard Law School with a concentration in law and the social sciences.
After a career in public policy law, being hired on Steven Spielberg’s series seaQuest also established him as a television writer-producer.
He has shared in Edgar and Saturn awards, is a current member of PEN International’s Writers Circle and a past President of PEN Center USA, is a former board member of the Writers Guild of America West, and now sits on its Membership & Finance and Television Credits Committees.
Five Things You Don't Know About Carleton Eastlake: A Guest Post by Carleton Eastlake
