Bob Carroll Part 2
A Most Unforgettable Character
Part II: Second Impressions
By the time we got to Rhet year, I was more comfortable with Bob’s eccentricities. In Poet year, he had helped direct “Billy Budd” where I played the part of Billy, so I had a chance to watch him in his native element – theater. There he was totally comfortable and competent, without needing to be cynical or aggressive. Seeing that side of him helped me understand and tolerate the other side, the Socratic gadfly that would attack and disrupt whatever comfortable world-view I had been able to construct during those turbulent days after John XXIII wrenched open the rusty Vatican windows. I was taking baby steps, trying to gradually expand my pinched Catholic perspective while still remaining within traditional parameters, and Bob would have none of it. He had already embraced an Incarnational theology that would have made Jesus wince. A few years later, Bob would express this theological vision in a multi-media Holy Week presentation called “Christ Suffers.” (It would be the last time the faculty would allow Bob to perform in the chapel.)
Anyway, even though Bob was a constant challenge to my faith and comfort, I trusted him on some level. Deep down, I knew he was God-struck, like one of those pesky, in-your-face saints it always takes the Church centuries to recognize, sanitize, and canonize. That made it easier for me to deal with him.
The seminary’s rule against particular friendships, though originally rooted in Sulpician homophobia, was also based on the hope that we seminarians would mix with a wide swath of our peers rather than confining ourselves to a small group of friends. This worked for most of the student body, except for the hard-core jocks. Addicted as they were to the adrenaline of competition, they were at a loss how to interact with guys who didn’t share their passion for sports. The rest of us were able to accept a kind of serendipity in our relationships, allowing chance to dictate whom we might encounter during any recreation period. One evening, I ended up with Bob, Conrad Gruber, and Al Larkin, and we began discussing our favorite films. We were walking around the back of the building near the water tower when someone pointed to it and said, “You know, that would be a good set for a movie.” As we looked around, we realized that there were a lot of other good movie sets on the seminary grounds as well. “So hey,” we said, “let’s make a movie.”
We decided we should all brainstorm further, so for the next few months we ignored the particular friendship rule and walked together regularly planning our movie. Each of us had fragmentary images of what the movie might look like (for me it was a hodgepodge of Laurel and Hardy skits), but no one had an overall vision until one night Bob finally decided we should call it “The Sweet Life,” a take-off on “La Dolce Vita,” Fellini’s Vatican-condemned movie about Italian decadence. This was classic Bob, choosing a title that was sure to freak out everyone in the seminary. The movie wasn’t really about decadence; it was about how cruel and oppressive seminary life could be for those lonely students who didn’t fit in. Because of my own Pollyanna outlook, I was unaware that others were suffering in the same seminary environment I enjoyed so much. This was Bob’s unique genius - and his most challenging cross: to always see the world through the eyes of the most vulnerable and marginalized members of society. He chose Larry Moorman to play the role of a misunderstood loner - Larry, who at our 25th reunion would stand up and say, “You guys . . . you’re all telling these funny stories about the seminary. For me it was like . . . Auschwitz!” Bob knew what the seminary was doing to guys like Larry, so he portrayed him painting a happy face on a ball, creating a fragile alter-ego which he then held desperately close to his heart, trying to protect it from the seminary’s destructive forces. At first I was clueless about what Bob was trying to do. Only gradually did the symbolism sink in.
For all his artistic insight, Bob was technically challenged, so he wisely turned all the camera work over to Al and Conrad. He was also socially challenged in some circles, so he relied on me to recruit a lot of the supporting cast. I got Cunningham, Browne, Osness and Nevin to play the collar-up tough guys whose ominous presence terrified Larry. I also got Mike Murray to chase a desperate, ball-clutching Larry into the swimming pool.
The movie opened with a close-up of Jim Koehne, lying dead in his black suit in a field while the camera slowly pans up to St. Joe’s in the distance as a narrator reads from “The Little City of God.” We wove clips from day-to-day seminary life into a sad tale about alienation, culminating in a scene where the entire student body is chasing Larry down the front driveway trying to separate him from his beloved ball.
Bob and I spent most of that summer vacation editing and splicing the film. I would drive over to his house in the Sunset, eat dinner with him and his parents, and then go down to the basement to edit. That’s when I got to know his mother. She was a treat - bright, funny and a bit neurotic, the perfect foil for Bob’s Groucho routines. He delighted in saying outrageous things that he knew would get a rise out of her. “Oh Bobby!” she’d shriek, sounding and looking a lot like a flustered Diane Keaton. Just as she was about to completely lose it, Bob would grab her around the waist and bend her back in a Rhett Butler/Scarlet O’Hara embrace, which would always get her giggling like a little girl.
Bob had limited patience with scraping and gluing film clips together, so I did most of the physical editing. It was a long frustrating job because all too often my splices would break as soon as we ran them through the projector. We recorded the sound track on a Wollensak tape recorder, and, since we had no way to overlay the two, one of us would run the projector while the other ran the recorder. Periodically we’d have to stop one machine or the other to get them back in sync. It was Rube Goldberg all the way.
Bob always had the overall vision for the film. I was there to soften his edges, reign in his esoteric tendencies, and inject enough humor in the story so that we wouldn’t lose our audience. We made a pretty good team, and had the film ready to premier when we arrived at St. Pat’s that fall. We showed it after supper one evening, and advertised it at lunch that day by having Bob Murnane walk around with “The Sweet Life” written in magic marker on his expansive forehead. As I expected, our audience laughed at the slapstick parts, groaned when the film broke, and mainly missed the overall message.
A couple of years later our class put on the Mission Carnival in the barn. The theme was James Bond, and Bob spent a whole week constructing a papier mache Goldfinger sculpture in the middle of the room. When people entered the barn, the first thing they saw was a huge finger spray-painted gold. When they looked closer, they realized it was a middle finger.
Around that same time, Bob and I went on a walk one Thursday and saw some guppies for sale in a pet store. We decided it would be fun to put them in the profs’ water pitcher that night. We snuck into the refectory about half an hour before supper and dumped them into the pitcher, imagining a big hubbub when the profs saw fish swimming around in their water. To our great disappointment, though, no one seemed to notice anything, even Dumpy Becker who drank his usual six or seven glasses of water. We figured the nuns must have seen the guppies and thrown them out before everyone got to the refectory. After the meal, we went up to the profs’ table to check. There, at the bottom of the almost-empty water pitcher were eight dead guppies. We hadn’t realized ice water would kill them.
Early in Third Theology, Bob, Conrad, Al and I got the movie bug again. St. Pat’s had even better movie sets than St. Joe’s. We got together and brainstormed for several weeks without any luck. Then Bob’s dad died and a couple of us were allowed to go up to San Francisco for the funeral. It was a big deal, with the archbishop and a lot of dignitaries in attendance. I joined the line to offer my sympathies to the family, and when I got to Bob, he grabbed me in a bear hug and started whispering in my ear: “I got it. Last night in bed I got the plot for our movie. It starts with a rich bishop and . . .” He kept talking, but I wasn’t able to pay attention to what he was saying, because we were holding up the line, and besides, it just didn’t seem proper to be planning a movie during a funeral.
When Bob got back a few days later, he’d sketched the whole plot out on a sheet of paper in his usual chicken scrawl, and that was the beginning of “A Ballad of the Church and the Modern World.” We used the Archbishop’s house to film Jack Folmer as a greedy bishop, and used an empty student room to film Mike Anderson as a seedy criminal. The two come together in the bishop’s attic, fighting over the bishop’s money, and eventually the crook shoots the bishop. He in turn is then pursued by the police (John Zaija, Mike Sullivan, and Don DiAngelo) to the back garbage pit and shot. The two bodies end up in the same funeral procession when a tractor (piloted by Jack O’Neill) drives through the procession and interrupts the bishop’s casket. I was the one who talked Jack into driving the tractor, without telling him the full context of the movie; he’s never forgiven me for it.
You’ve all heard the story about what happened once the movie was shown, how everyone freaked out and demanded that it be destroyed. This was pure gold for Bob. He had been watching Hollywood deal with censorship for years, and here was his chance to play the role of artistic hero, martyred for the cause of free speech. I felt the same way. Unlike with “The Sweet Life,” where I really didn’t understand a lot of Bob’s vision, I was right with him on “The Ballad.” We were both fed up with organized religion, and the movie reflected that. This was when Bob and I really bonded – in the face of that seminary Inquisition. It prepared us for our next adventure – Mississippi.