(9 of 10)
Bach likes to say the plane is the property of Trans Creature Airlines and has cheerfully supplied it with a two-man fantasy crew. T.C.A.'s chief mechanic is Slim Ptarmigan, an old biplane mail pilot who knows "the old ways of flying" and wears a battered leather jacket. Captain Ralph Pomme de Terre, a "somewhat humorless" spit-and-polish pilot who handled Pan Am Clipper ships in the '30s, does most of the instrument flying. "I can't run an airline all alone," explains Bach. In fact, despite his mysticism, he is a supremely rational pilot who carefully plots alternative airports for storm weather or gas shortages, and works out fallback landing techniques in case of faltering engines or radio failure.
Aboard, or showing you around his Widgeon, Bach is a completely happy man. He feels about the plane the same mixture of total freedom and fortress security that sailors have about a well-found cruising sailboat. "If there's too much trouble," Bach says, "I know there are good people out there" (he waves vaguely westward). "I could just fly out there and land and ask if they needed some help and they'd take me in."
For the Birds. On Bach's most recent cross-country hop in the Widgeon, fans in bookstores took him in all over the Midwest, mobbing him for autographs. But he could not flog the book too long because he was bound for California to work for the next three months with Producer Hall Bartlett on the film version of the book. Bartlett got the film rights by one of those coincidences that have attended Jonathan's progress all along. While waiting in a San Fernando Valley barbershop, he began reading the book, which a friend had given him. Halfway through Bartlett rushed out and called Macmillan, then got hold of Bach, who was on the verge of selling the rights to Wolper Productions. "As I see it," Bartlett pitched, "it has to be a very simple movie. Without animation and without people. Just like the book." That did it. Bach promptly sold Jonathan to Bartlett for a mere $100,000 and 50% of the profits, retaining final approval rights on the film and all advertising and merchandising gimmickry.
The movie has just gone into production. Ray Berwick, who trained the birds for Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963), was persuaded out of retirement. He is even now up in Carmel, capturing seagulls and testing them for brains and instructibility. On the tenth edition of Jonathan, Bach edited in a girl's name, Judy Lee, among the seagull disciples, because he got a letter from a California woman named Judy Favor, pointing out that Jonathan was a male chauvinist. He has also allowed the film script to "imply" a relationship between Jonathan and a chick named Maureen.
What Ray Berwick calls "the greatest bird picture ever" will be released next year—along with the paperback —so that one way or another Jonathan will still be coming in the windows in 1973. If it becomes more than ever the book (and film) some people love to love, it will also become, like Love Story, more than ever the book some people love to hate. Bach will never turn his back on Jonathan, as he feels that