The New "Ironside": Good or Bad for Crips?

When NBC announced a reboot of “Ironside” was coming this fall, you might have dismissed it as just the latest Hollywood rehash.  But for wheelchair-users like me, it’s either cause for celebration or an omen of despair.

The old Raymond Burr series about a tough-as-nails paraplegic ex-police chief was never exactly enlightened.  But as a disabled kid in the 1960s and 70s, I clung to it with near religious fervor.  For me, Chief Ironside was a model for refusing to be defined by others’ limited expectations.  I came to rely on him as a kind of lifeline.

I never could walk or even stand, but like the hardboiled cop I didn’t want to be underestimated.  I felt determined to live a full, active life--to strut my stuff.

So I welcome the return of “Ironside,” but with a note of caution.  Will the producers screw it up?

To be sure, the original program had flaws.  It never talked much about the Chief’s disability.  Yet that was partly what made the portrayal so appealing.  It was simply an aspect of his character.  It didn’t define him, just as mine wouldn’t define me.  I knew his fictional physical limitations were different from my real ones.  But for me, just seeing a guy in a chair who was fearless and in charge was revelatory and redemptive.

The old show had other shortcomings, too.  Ironside rarely had to explain himself to others, as I was always having to do.  “I can’t walk,” I would answer nosy strangers.  “I was born this way. … It’s a neuromuscular weakness called spinal muscular atrophy.”  On “Ironside,” no one asked because everyone knew.  He’d been shot in the line of duty. His reputation preceded him.  

He also had a knack for materializing on the upper floors of buildings with no elevator, and apparently never had a problem finding an accessible bathroom.  Late in the series, he even drove his own van without adaptive hand controls! 

Nevertheless, the show introduced me, and much of the world, to a wheelchair-accessible van, complete with automatic lift.  Ironside's office had a built-in ramp and speakerphone, too.  I didn't have any of that, and you'd better believe I wanted it all.  The empowering paraphernalia had the effect of magic, especially compared to the other prominent image of disability on TV in those days--the pitiful kids on telethons.

Granted, my memories are hopelessly tinged with nostalgia, as will be my appraisal of the new version.  I’m bound to tsk-tsk every little difference—such as moving the series from San Francisco, a source of endless plot lines in the days of Haight-Ashbury hippiedom, to New York.  And switching the composition of Ironside’s hand-picked team, if not eliminating it altogether, seems a no-no.  In the original, his crew included one of TV’s first female police officers (two of the first, actually, considering a cast change in year 4) and a smart young African-American man who frequently faced down racism as he rose from the Chief’s assistant to a full-fledged attorney.

Not to mention the casting of the lead role.  Instead of a heavyset, gruff-yet-avuncular old white guy, we now have his opposite in buff, middle-aged Blair Underwood (who, like Burr, became famous playing a TV lawyer). 

But none of that matters.  The new show could still win me over.  Yes, some will complain about a nondisabled actor once again portraying a paraplegic.  Even that doesn’t faze me, though, if he plays it well.  And by well, I mean realistically.

Indeed, a touch more disability realism than the original managed would be most welcome.  No, it shouldn’t overwhelm the story.  We don’t need to see Ironside’s bladder and bowel procedures.  This isn’t a documentary.  But every now and then, couldn’t the new Chief wrestle with equipment failure, pressure sores, strangers’ stupid questions, or architectural barriers?

Let’s face it: Simply presenting a tough guy on wheels isn’t enough to impress anyone anymore.  Not in the age of Stephen Hawking, “Push Girls,” or “The Sessions.”  Audiences are smarter than they used to be.  To get the willing suspension of disbelief, you've got to infuse some convincing details.

Better still, the new show could have a social conscience.  It could address the economic and political inequities people like me face. 

But let’s not get carried away.  If it doesn’t do any harm, that might have to be good enough.  Of course, I could be pleasantly surprised.  I never imagined we’d see so many people in wheelchairs riding city buses as we do today, or that Michael J. Fox would return to prime time with Parkinson’s (as is happening this fall).  Disability inclusion has come a long way. 

Perhaps the original “Ironside” helped make this progress possible.  Its new incarnation could play a similar role, as long as it recognizes its potential to open people’s eyes to life’s possibilities.

Guilty pleasures

1. Amazon.com. While I was shopping online for some stuff for my daughter, I came across a DVD of old black-and-white mystery movies. Four movies on one disc. It was about the price of a rental. I added it to my cart.

2. Old black-and-white movies. So last weekend my wife and I popped the DVD of old mysteries into the machine. We had seen (and liked) "The Kennel Murder Case," with William Powell as private-eye Philo Vance, before, so we skipped right to something called "Eyes in the Night." It starred Edward Arnold as wealthy private investigator Duncan "Mac" Maclain, whom I'd never heard of. Well, not only was it a pretty good little flick, but Mac happens to be blind. Now, before the PC police get on me, the disc did not have Closed Captioning or Descriptive Video. Nevertheless, I thought the depiction of disability was pretty cool. He doesn't have superhuman hearing or smell, but he is constantly under-rated, especially by the bad guys. He does things like turn off the lights to disorient the bad guys. Naturally, the darkness has no effect on him, so he can knock them all out. Which is improbable, to be sure, particularly because Edward Arnold was pretty pudgy. But as I say, he's not superhuman. At one point he's rescued by his well-trained guide dog. (I wonder if all the movies on this disc involve dogs. I'll lecha know. )

3. Old TV shows. The blind detective led me to think about "Ironside," the old wheelchair-using detective series I loved as a child. And not just because Raymond Burr was even pudgier than Edward Arnold! I discovered the first three seasons are on hulu.com … and I've been addicted to them. I realize it's totally unrealistic--the dude ends up in all kinds of places, including, say, the second floor of a two-story house, with no explanation as to how he got there. In fact, he never calls ahead to check on access, which was even more of a necessity in those days than now. And the things he's able to do with his upper body and arms make me wonder why he's not using crutches instead. But there is a ramp in his apartment/office. And he does have a lift-equipped van (a lift-equipped truck, actually, in the first two seasons). By the end of the series, a decade or more later, I think he was driving the van himself, though I don't recall any hand controls shown… Again, not the best depiction of disabilities, but I can't help loving it. Something about seeing this guy in a wheelchair living a more-or-less normal life--bossing everyone around, no less!--feels good. Or maybe it's just nostalgia.

If you have favorite disability portrayals, or other guilty pleasures you care to share, please send them to me at bmattlin@post.harvard.edu

Part 24 of "Miracle Boy”

Today is Columbus Day--except not here. California doesn't celebrate Columbus Day. Which I understand, but even after all these years it still feels weird that the kids have school today … and in fact, have no days off in all of October!

Anyway, here's the next installment of my manuscript …

In sixth grade, when I turn eleven, I vent my frustrations on a good friend named Gary. Gary and I like to play Ironside, or at least I do. He's always Mark because, well, he's Black. (Guess whom I play?) On the show, Mark is the street-smart dude who drives the chief everywhere and helps him at home while attending police school. I actually like Mark better than the other supporting characters, so Gary has a position of honor. I don't think of it as racial stereotyping. In fact, secretly I wish I were Black. I like the psychedelic clothes and fluid manner of talking and walking. The outsider status resonates, too.


I have a new motorized wheelchair—my first—which is too heavy to get up the school steps, but at home I love to zoom around, especially fun in my building's labyrinthine basement. Gary and I play there after school, staying clear of the housekeepers who do laundry and the maintenance workers' office as we explore the myriad dark passages and commodious storage lockers, pretending we're on a mystery investigation. It's taken me a while to get an electric wheelchair. They've been mass-produced since 1956, when Everest and Jennings rolled the first one out of its California factories, improving upon designs putatively sketched by George Westinghouse in the late-nineteenth century and British engineers during the first World War, then perfected in the early 50s by a Canadian inventor named George Klein, primarily for World War II vets—demonstrating the connection between war and disability progress. The first E & J power chairs were notoriously slow, but in the early-70s they become the vehicle of choice for active quadriplegics—brandished by Ed Roberts and his trendsetting crew in Berkeley. The only reason I didn't have one before is Dr. Spiro feared it'd make me lazy, make me not use my arms and build strength. Now we know I can't build up my muscles, so he finally wrote the prescription.


The first day I get the motorized wheelchair home I chase Alec all around the apartment. I'm not a good driver yet and keep crashing, leaving tell-tale gray scratches on the white walls.


One afternoon at school, Gary spills paint on a picture I'm drawing. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe he had a good reason. The unforgivable point is his bravado about my defenselessness. "How are you going to get me?" he taunts.


I'll make him sorry for that. I can't fight him physically, but I have other powers. Remember? Words and sympathy are my raw tools.


I look around the classroom. Everyone's gone to P.E. I'm excused and Gary is too, to keep me company. If he resents being my companion, he never says so.


Slowly, silently, I start dumping books and papers and pencils out of my small desk. I have just enough arm strength to reach in and move things out. Gradually, one by one, I cover the entire floor within a two-food radius of where I'm sitting. Some of the papers sail even farther—which I was counting on. Gary watches in disbelief.


When the other kids and Ray, our teacher, return, I don't have to say a word. Someone immediately notices the shambles and demands to know what happened. "Gary threw my stuff all over the floor," I allege.


Gary stares in shocked betrayal, tears welling in his eyes. "No I didn't."


Our teacher doesn't say a word. He's in a spot. Accuse the handicapped boy or the Black boy? I feel no recriminations. I am ... proud. I've mastered the perks of disability.


A girl in our class says, "How could Ben throw so far?" And I know I've won. Never mind that in trying to prove I'm not helpless I've actually reinforced the opposite—made people think Gary took advantage of me.


Even after Ray asks the class to help clean up, I stay mum. This new course I'm on—aggressive, spiteful—satisfies my insecurities. If Gary had gotten in big trouble, perhaps I would've broken. I would've relented. He doesn't, which may mean our teacher suspects. Doesn't matter. Gary's an innocent victim of my need to flex, but I figure you have to be tough to survive in a sometimes unfriendly world.


All goes smoothly for a time. Then, a year later, when I'm twelve . . .

The Disability Revolution Begins -- Part 22 of "Miracle Boy”

Back by popular demand--ha!--
Here's the next section...

THE BIRTH OF THE MOVEMENT THAT CHANGED THE WORLD, or MY BIG FAT ATROPHIED PREADOLESCENT BODY

 Nineteen years earlier, in 1953, at the age of 14, Roberts contracted polio and found himself unable to move, in a hospital bed, using an iron long (portable ventilators hadn't been invented yet). There, he made a discovery similar to the one I'm making in the early-70s—the discovery of a new kind of freedom. Here's how Ed Roberts describes it years later:

I decided that I wanted to die. I was 14 years old. Now, it's very hard to kill yourself in a hospital with everything set up to save your life. But the mind is a powerful thing. I stopped eating. They started to force feed me. It was really demeaning. I dropped to 54 pounds.

My last special duty nurse left, and the next day I decided I wanted to live. You see, that was a big turning point. Up until then, these nurses were available and doing things for me around the clock—I didn't have to make any decisions for myself because they were always there. When they all finally left, that's when I realized that I could have a life, despite what everyone was saying. I could make choices, and that is freedom. I started to eat again.

Roberts and his crew, who call themselves the Rolling Quads, are fighting against a system in which institutionalization of the disabled is still widespread. Some states go so far as to forcibly sterilize people with certain disabilities. Some prohibit marriage for the genetically disabled, for fear of procreating hereditary conditions like mine. Visibly disabled people are actually barred from appearing in public in cities such as Columbus, Ohio—Dad's hometown—until 1972 and Chicago until 1974, under what are collectively called the "ugly" laws because they target anyone perceived as unattractive, for being a disturbance of the peace.


The movement to change all this and more is rising in discrete pockets all over, inspired by Black civil rights. Closer to home, in New York City, at the very same time though unbeknownst to me, Judith Heumann organizes a group called Disabled in Action to push for equal-access legislation. If Ed Roberts is the father of disability rights, Judy Heumann is the mother. She, too, is a polio survivor and wheelchair-user. In the 1950s she went to court to win the right to attend New York public schools, and in the 60s sued for the right to teach in them. But I'm not aware of any of this at the time. I have nothing to do with other handicapped people because the only ones I've seen are the kids on the Jerry Lewis telethon or in the special schools or summer camps I'm sometimes threatened with having to attend—the ones who are treated patronizingly, as if they haven't a brain in their heads. I know I'm not like them, so I think I have nothing in common with any other people who have disabilities. ("Disabilities" is already becoming the correct word in some circles, but not mine. I'm still handicapped.) I'm ignorant that others are making or have made the same sorts of discoveries I'm struggling with.


Feeling alone in my struggle, I become unsure of myself, unsure of whether I'm moving forward or backward. At ten, I'm increasingly conscious of my physical limitations. I may even be growing slightly weaker, though it's not obvious except I don't seem to be burning calories as effectively as I used to. I gain fifty pounds between annual doctor visits. I have to buy clothes measured in "husky" sizes. With my hopelessly curly, sandy-colored hair, I look more like a sybarite Bacchus than an angelic Cupid—though whether my fatness is a cause or an effect of my growing insecurity I won't hazard to guess. Doubtless my parents split-up is a contributor.

I begin emulating Chief Ironside's grouchy, hard-boiled demeanor from TV, if not his girth. Not a pretty combination, the softness on the outside mounting an ineffective pillow against a molten hardening within.

***