“Welcome! Come on in. Allow me to greet you and tell you a little about myself. As you probably know, I have cerebral palsy. The ‘world’ told me I could never earn an income, my mother told me I could, and my father told me I must! And so I have, and still do.”—from Bill Porter’s Watkins website.
One summer, when I was still in my teens and job prospects were looking dismal, I answered a newspaper ad from an unnamed organization offering people with “initiative” a chance to make some real money. It wasn’t quite one of those “STAY AT HOME AND MAKE THOUSANDS OF DOLLLARS!!” ads you’ll still find in the backs of newspapers and popular magazines, but there was a hint of unlimited possibilities. The address turned out to be a Hoover vacuum cleaner command center in the back of a retail outlet in downtown Castlegar, my hometown. A middle-aged, high-energy guy in a suit beamed at the little group of us gathered in the office, pointing enthusiastically to a chart on the wall showing all the local salespeople and number of units sold. This was followed by a sales pitch that, with a few minor changes in wording, would have worked equally well for the seventh game of the Stanley Cup or graduation day at a Jesuit seminary. A simple message, really: You gotta have faith.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t a believer. The whole scene kind of creeped me out. I’d been whisked out of the real world and into an alternate universe where vacuum cleaners were exalted. Faith? I just wanted a summer job, not a mission in life. But my eyes were opened. For a select group of devotees, door-to-door sales was a call to be answered.
That strange Castlegar moment, and memories of Death of a Salesman and Glengarry Glen Ross, must have flashed through my mind when a close friend recommended a movie called Door to Door. I was a tad hesitant. But this friend has a pretty good track record (he’d also recommended The Scent of Green Papaya and Three Seasons), so it was just a matter of time before I followed up.
Glen, you’re now three for three. Directed by Steven Schacter, co-written by Schachter and William H. Macy, and with Macy in the leading role, Door to Door tells the true-life story of Bill Porter, Watkins salesman extraordinaire. This, too, is a story of faith. First and foremost, the faith of a mother in the infinite potential of her child. Is there anything stronger? Suffering from cerebral palsy from birth (“The doctor squeezed my head too tight when I was born”), William Macy gives a luminous performance as a man whose broken body is trumped by an indomitable spirit.
The year is 1955. A young Bill Porter wants to follow in his father’s footsteps as a traveling salesman. The cerebral palsy slurs Bill’s speech, twists his left arm backwards, hunches his back, makes walking difficult. His mother (played by Helen Mirren) never questions his choice. When Bill presents himself at Watkins headquarters in Portland, Oregon, he’s dismissed out of hand. He refuses to give up. Marching back into the office after the initial rebuff, he tells the head of sales to give him the worst route in the city. What does he have to lose?
It’s the route from heck. Barking dogs, feuding neighbors, a slob in an undershirt (listed in the credits as “the Go Away Guy”), a little boy who runs screaming at the sight of his twisted body and strange voice. With his mother driving him around, parking discretely in the distance, Bill at first is like a little kid trying to collect for UNICEF in Sodom or Gomorrah. Even Bill’s spirits get dampened on that first morning out.
Not for long, though. He opens his lunch to find that his mother has used food coloring to write “persistence” and “patience” on his sandwich. He’s a believer. When he actually, incredulously, makes his first sale he’s hooked for life. For the next forty years he’s on a roll—selling products he actually believes in, becoming a part of his customers’ lives, telling traveling salesman jokes with a preacher’s zest. I love the scene where, hospitalized after a dreadful accident, Bill’s talking laundry soap (scented or unscented?) to the guy in traction in the next bed. Surely one of the reasons he’s so successful is that his own severe handicap makes for a profound empathy with others’ lives. At the time the movie was made, in 2002, Bill Porter was still going strong, the once self-professed computer-phobe now wired and on-line.
Helen Mirren doesn’t get a lot of screen time as Bill’s mother, but she and Macy make the best of it. (I want to thank critic Carla Meyer for pointing out the acting magic it takes for the 56-year-old Mirren to utterly convincingly play mom to 52-year-old Macy!) Door to Door isn’t without its tragedies. Just as Bill begins to be successful, Mrs. Porter shows the first signs of an early onset of Alzheimer’s. Their relationship only deepens because of it. Their roles reverse. Mother becomes child. Bill does his best to repay her for all the years she’s fought for him. In the end, Alzheimer’s proves a far more unforgiving shadow than cerebral palsy.
Through his mother’s decline, Bill continues to work. Patience…Persistence……..Pride. Definitely with a capital “P.” His fierce independence is the armor which both makes him unstoppable and, at critical moments, perhaps unreachable. Bill dismisses out of hand a friend’s observation that his disability would allow him to stay home without worrying about a job. He lashes out at anything that resembles pity or charity.
Deprived of his mother’s help, Bill puts an ad in the papers for an assistant. A young woman struggling her way towards high school graduation answers the call. Shelly Brady (Kyra Sedgwick) turns out to be the perfect companion. Too perfect, perhaps, because she comes to embody one dream around which Bill Porter’s faith in himself wavers: sex, marriage and children of his own. To reach out for such intimacy is risk-taking far beyond anything else he’s ever done. There’s one devastating moment when he comes to realize how close that dream has come; another, how impossible it may be.
Nineteen eighty-nine is a year of high-points and crashes. After 43 years with Watkins, Bill Porter is Salesman of the Year—to the utter astonishment of young executives who can barely believe he’s on the company payroll. As for the crash, the film’s far more eloquent here than I can be.
By 1996, telemarketing has reduced the Watkins door-to-door sales office to a storage closet in the bowels of headquarters. No one even remembers it’s there. Individual telephone operators are selling $300 to $500 worth of products per hour. With typically self-deprecating humor, Bill’s wry comment to his boss is: “I’ve never done well on the phone. Women find my voice sexy and it distracts them.” Eventually, it’s not funny anymore. Bill gets tired of being treated like a dinosaur and hands in his briefcase.
Retired? Think again. A legend is just being born.
We should always celebrate new entries into that pantheon of cinema devoted to unlikely heroes such as Bill Porter. They remind us that being truly passionate about anything can be the ticket to some pretty amazing destinations.
And as for ending Door to Door with an meta traveling salesman joke, how perfect is that?
Looking Back & Second Thoughts
“I’m a working man now!” – Bill Porter
[Full disclosure: My wife was for many years the lone Watkins representative in our small rural village. She still buys Watkins products online at Amazon and at a small store in a nearby town.]
As Bill Porter would say at the start of his sales pitches, “May I be candid….” I think there’s some synchronicity in the fact that Door to Door–a film that stresses hard work, pride, independence, personal courage, perseverance, patience, humor, and support–came back into my life at the same time as the news media have been focused on the ugly circus coalescing around the arraignment of Donald Trump on criminal charges. While the film movingly reaffirms one’s faith in humanity, the Trump spectacle is a sucking swamp of cynicism, venality, and contempt for anything even hinting of an ethical standard. I’ll try to keep Bill Porter’s story in mind in the months to come, as I’m relentlessly bombarded by lies and hypocritical posturing.
Having said all that, I’m a bit ashamed to admit that Door to Door is one of those films I had absolutely no memory of reviewing for Seldom Scene. I’m not sure what that says about me. Perhaps I spend too much of my time focused on the horrors and injustices of the past and present, and a story of a simple, decent man gets pushed into the wings of my brain. But I think I’m back on track now. Thanks, Bill.
There are four things that I’ve taken away from this second look at several decades in Bill Porter’s life. The first is awe that a man severely affected by cerebral palsy could step out of his house almost every morning for 40 years, walk 7 miles to cover his sales territory, and then spend 13 hours at home typing out orders with the finger of one hand on an old typewriter. The second was his ability to build long-standing relationships with everyone in his life–his assistant Shelly Brady, his customers, and even the doormen and shoeshine attendants who could do for him what he was physically incapable of doing for himself. Third is the quality of the actresses in the three key supporting roles: Helen Mirren, Kathy Baker, and Kyra Sedgwick. Lastly, the sad acknowledgement that even this most heroic of lives must have its bittersweet moments and its regrets–the impossibility of arresting his mother’s dementia, the moments of anger when he felt he was being pitied or patronized, and the missed chance at a romantic relationship with a woman whose loneliness, pain, and need for his companionship he couldn’t see until it was far too late.
William Douglas Porter died in 2013, at Gresham, Oregon, age 81.
I don’t imagine there are too many door-to-door salesmen who have their own Wikipedia entry.
That entry has several links to articles about Bill Porter. ABC’s record-setting 20/20 program on Porter can by found on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPuWWSSbpX0.
Door to Door’s Writer-Director, Steven Schachter, is a bit of an unknown quantity. His career ran from his first film in 1983 to a writing credit for Shameless in 2012. He picked up his only two Emmy Awards for Door to Door.
