The Road He Travelled: the Revealing Biography of M Scott Peck by Arthur Jones

Author:Arthur Jones [Arthur Jones]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Published: 2007-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

ON THE ROAD

MAGAZINE WRITER BEN YAGODA was on the road with the now celebrated M. Scott Peck. Peck was stretched out on a bed in an Edison, New Jersey motel, nursing his perennially bad back, smoking the inevitable Camels and sipping his first of the evening’s cocktails. The cocktail, wrote Yagoda, was made with ‘“Lake Waramaug gin”, bought in his hometown liquor store’ and packed in his case. Just in case. The motel scene and interview was one that could have been repeated hundreds of time over the decade of the 1980s once Peck decided to take his show on the road.

Not many writers, however, displayed Yagoda’s wit. Seated by the side of Peck’s bed, the writer listened to Peck recount his problems, and Yagoda decided, ‘The scene isn’t without irony, considering I’m not a psychiatrist and the prone fellow on the bed is.’ Yagoda, a perceptive observer, described Peck (‘pleasant face, graying, thinning, blond hair and horn-rimmed glasses’), and assessed The Road (‘an attempt to combine more or less conventional ideas about psychotherapy with one of its traditional enemies, religion’). Later Yagoda went into the auditorium to catch part of the act and depicted Peck in front of his audience:

‘People ask me [said Peck] if I was born again,’ [Peck] pauses, then, with expert timing, ‘It was a very protracted labour and difficult delivery.’ Laughter. Peck [on the platform] is sitting in a large wing chair – his back again – a microphone in his hand, a carafe of coffee at his side. He waits out the laugh by slowly panning his head from left to right – another stand-up comic’s move. He sounds like a cross between Garrison Keillor [an American radio personality] and [preacher] Billy Graham, with a dash of William F. Buckley [an ultra-WASP, right-wing magazine publisher and television personality], especially in the patrician pronunciation of words like ‘littrachure’.

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