A Grand Guy: The Art and Life of Terry Southern Read online

  A Grand Guy

  The Art and Life of Terry Southern

  Lee Hill

  For

  Esther and Claire Hill

  and

  Patty Johnson

  There are many people who appreciate the expression of sincere emotion in verse, and there is a smaller number of people who can appreciate technical excellence. But very few know when there is expression of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet. The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.

  —T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”

  As writers, you and I come from different worlds. You—as I understand it, correct me if I am wrong—are the pure writer who eschews any relationship between successful writing and commercial success.

  I think you are trying to draw a distinction between an artist and a professional. That is the difference between a party girl and a hooker. A party girl is somebody who does it for fun, but a hooker is somebody who does it for money. I’m just talking about the distinction this way so we can limit it to this dichotomy. I’m a party girl. No, I would prefer it, and that’s on record now, if you would say “party person.”

  —Terry Southern in an exchange with Victor Bockris, Interview

  Contents

  Cover

  Epigraph

  Prologue: For Love, Art, and a Lot of Money

  1 Youngblood

  2 You’re Too Hip, Baby

  3 Flash and Filigree

  4 Candy Christian Meets Guy Grand

  5 The Quality Lit Game

  6 Dr. Strangelove (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Hollywood)

  7 Making It Hot for Them

  8 An Easy Rider at the End of the Road

  9 From Green to Amber

  10 Junky

  11 Grossing Out

  12 Various Cowriters

  13 Hawkeye (Travels with Harry)

  14 Texas Summer

  Sources

  Bibliography

  Searchable Terms

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  For Love, Art, and a Lot of Money

  This is where it all happens!

  —postcard from Terry Southern to Random House editor Joe Fox

  Memory flash, Los Angeles, California, July 1964. Place-in-the-sun time. A convertible moves smoothly down Sunset Boulevard. The car radio seems to play Dionne Warwick’s “Walk on By” and the Beach Boys’ “I Get Around” constantly. The buoyant music is silenced occasionally by the latest news of the Beatles’ Visigoth-like sweep through America’s stadiums. Of course it’s not all fun and frolic. News bulletins also mention LBJ’s war on poverty and “aid” to Vietnam. Down in Georgia, a certain Lester Maddox is using ax handles to threaten black customers who enter his restaurant. However, the music and the news are just background to the two passengers in the car.

  The driver, a tall urbane man with sunglasses dark as night, occasionally glances to the side. His crisp white shirt reflects the glare of the sun. In the passenger seat, Steve Schapiro, Life magazine photographer, meticulously frames and shoots picture after picture.

  The car drives past a billboard that reads METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER IN ASSOCIATION WITH FILMWAYS PRESENT THE LOVED ONE…FOR THOSE WHO REALLY CARE! The driver allows himself a secret smile at these words. And why not? He is, after all, adapting Evelyn Waugh’s classic novel along with the noted English scribe Christopher Isherwood.

  The latest subject of the Luce empire’s scrutiny is a forty-year-old Texas-born writer named Terry Southern. After serving his country in World War II, he received an English degree at Northwestern University and studied philosophy at the Sorbonne. His short stories and articles have appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, the Paris Review, and Esquire. This courtly and reserved man of letters is also the author of Candy, a “dirty book” with precise comic timing. Funny, sure, but still dirty enough to get banned in Paris, France! It was written with a pal, Mason Hoffenberg, who is some kind of junkie poet. Newsweek describes their collaboration as a “Greek tragedy rewritten by Nathanael West and S.J. Perelman.”

  Southern is the author of two other books, Flash and Filigree and The Magic Christian, which are downright weird. Flash is a detective story, but the villain, a car-crazy dermatologist, never gets caught. In The Magic Christian, a fabulously wealthy businessman with untold millions at his disposal stages elaborate pranks to discover if it is indeed true that “every man has his price.”

  In its efforts to provide its readers, Mr. and Mrs. Front Porch, a full and balanced portrait of an up-and-coming author and commentator on morals, manners, and society, Life must ask some tough and probing questions. Is Mr. Southern a beatnik like Jack Kerouac or Allen Ginsberg? Er…well, he doesn’t look like one. More the tall, dark silent type, especially with the monstro shades. Is he a pseudointellectual writing naughty books for the chattering classes? Hmmm. Tough call. He seems quite serious about writing. He always carries a binder or satchel full of yellow lined paper and pens. Maybe he is a communist? He worked on the script for the hit movie Dr. Strangelove, which put an odd spin on America’s nuclear defense policy. It satirically suggested that a lone mad general could override the president’s fail-safe protocol to plunge the world into all-out thermonuclear combat. Well, hey, nobody wants that. Dr. Strangelove got people to talk about the Cold War in a relaxed and open way, but without the gloomy last-night-on-earth confessionals à la Fred Astaire and Ava Gardner in On the Beach. In fact, Dr. Strangelove is very funny—a unique blend of slapstick and agitprop. Who would have thought the end of the world could be so exhilarating?

  These are contradictions Time-Life’s phalanx of editors will have to sort out as they pore over ace reporter Jane Howard’s copy and Schapiro’s elegantly composed snaps. This Southern guy doesn’t add up. He has an attractive young wife and a cute three-year-old boy. Life has already taken shots of Southern and family on the bucolic grounds of his farm in Connecticut. There was even a family dog, a German shepherd. But what about the way Southern talks—just what part of Texas is he from?

  It’s a slow, seductive lilt that is the oral equivalent of mercury. There are moments when his voice eerily recalls Peter Sellers as Clare Quilty in Lolita. The accent is displaced—adrift between America and England. At other times, the voice evokes the measured diction of an Oxford don. Then it assumes a mock-heroic quality, especially in response to an ambiguous question. “How do I like to be addressed?” Southern might bark, followed by a sudden shift into country bumpkin mode, “Why you can call me anything you want! Just don’t call me late for chow! Ho ho.”

  Hot off Dr. Strangelove, Southern is out in La-La Land to work on The Loved One, an irreverent adaptation of Waugh’s caustic satire of Hollywood and the Denial of Death as epitomized by gaudy cemeteries like Forest Lawn. As Southern told a reporter just the other day, “I’m treating the script as I like to think Waugh would do it if he were writing today. It’s an attack on smugness and the fantastic illusions of our way of life.”

  Unlike F. Scott Fitzgerald, Southern doesn’t seem to be holding his nose as he performs what he calls “tightening and brightening.” Then again, The Loved One is hardly typical boy-meets-girl silver screen fare. The director, Tony Richardson, is a young Brit w
ho staged John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court Theatre. He made last year’s Best Picture, Tom Jones, a delightful Technicolor romp, complete with New Wave jump cuts and aerial photography. The Loved One promises to be of more interest to the readers of Cahiers du Cinéma than to the lunch crowd at the Brown Derby.

  Southern and Schapiro drive out to the Watts Tower—a giant piece of primitive sculpture constructed of stray bits of glass, metal, plaster, and junk by a barely literate migrant worker. They are met by Anjanette Comer, the lead actress in The Loved One. Schapiro takes some pictures of the two standing beneath the huge metal latticework. Southern is, to put it mildly, a bit of a flirt, but women do not seem to mind his gentle teasing and fondness for nicknames. There are rumors that he is working his way through the available female cast and crew of The Loved One like the proverbial wolf among a flock of sheep.

  As the photo session wraps, Southern drops by the Beverly Hills Hotel, where Richardson, whom Southern likes to call “Tip-Top Tony,” has arranged for dailies to be screened. It’s like a cocktail party for whoever wants to unwind after a day’s shooting. Feeling a little mischievous, Southern places a call to a friend in New York, Barney Rosset, editor of the Evergreen Review and founder of Grove Press—a kingmaker in the world of Manhattan “Quality Lit” and all-around grand guy.

  Across the country, Rosset picks up the phone and hears Southern: “You’ll never guess where I am. I’m sitting at the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel with all these beautiful women.”

  Although surrounded by stacks of proofs, copy, sales figures, etc., Rosset indulges Southern. “Well, congratulations, Terry. Good for you. Give me a ticket, I’ll come and join you.”

  As Southern goes into a rhapsody about bikini-clad nifties, poolside cocktails, the sunshine, and cool blue water, Rosset feels instantly transported to his friend’s side. When Rosset puts the phone down, he feels glad for Terry. They had even touched on a bit of business. Could Terry arrange for Grove to publish the screenplay of The Loved One when it was finished? Southern said he would do what he could. Rosset felt more than a casual connection with the film. He had heard good things about it from his cousin Haskell Wexler, who was not only its cinematographer but also a coproducer. Perhaps Hollywood was changing. Maybe there was room for the kind of personal, expressive work the Europeans had been doing for decades.

  Southern’s wife, Carol, and his son, Nile, had just returned to Connecticut after spending the winter and spring in L.A. with him. He had seen them a few weeks ago when he had dropped in to New York for a radio show with his friends the writers Elaine Dundy and Jack Gelber to discuss the contemporary novel. The host asked Southern to tell listeners what it was like to be a success.

  “Well, I’ll say this. That it’s grand and I am looking forward to some sort of corruption, Nathanael West–type wreck in an auto…a really fast automobile like a Mercedes 300 is what I am hoping for…. I figure if I do this picture [The Loved One] and one more.”

  Working the film scene was a lot like being behind the wheel of a fast car. You had to maintain a Zen-like control of the car. You couldn’t start getting scared when the turns got too sharp. You couldn’t get too focused on any one thing. You had to go with the flow.

  The next day, Southern was out early on the set. He had written a sequence that was not in the novel, but that he felt was true to Waugh’s intentions. The owner of the Whispering Glades cemetery hooks up with the Pentagon and NASA. He plans to convert Whispering Glades into a retirement home. The dead will be lovingly disinterred and rocketed into space.

  Richardson and crew have spared no expense in re-creating the film’s penultimate scene. A crowd of extras dressed as government officials, Army officers, dignitaries, and various captains of the military-industrial complex stand waiting for the launch of the first rocket with its payload—a coffin fresh from Whispering Glades. Richardson calls for silence on the set then cues camera and sound. The scene commences. Jonathan Winters bellows the countdown from a public address system: “10…9…8…7…6…5…4…3…2…1…Resurrection Now!”

  Richardson yells cut as the set fills with colored dry ice representing the rocket’s takeoff. Southern had liked writing the scene, but seeing Richardson turn his words into reality for a few unforgettable minutes is something indescribable. It will look fabulous on the big screen and certainly something special to tell the kid when he gets back home.

  Youngblood

  Magical. Stifling.

  These were the two extremes of Terry Southern’s attitude toward Texas. In his final novel, Texas Summer, Southern described the Lone Star State as a place where contradiction reigned. “The pond was like an oasis in a desert, a Shangri-la, with an atmosphere, almost a climate, separate from its immediate surroundings. A shimmering oval of crystalline blue, fringed with weeping willows interwoven in a soft-focus double ring because of their reflection in the water, the pond resembled an exotic blue mirror, its frame intricately filigreed. But there was something else—something curiously, classically, of Texas about the scene—a quality of strange hidden contrasts, something of abrupt mystery…a secret celebration of nature at its most darkly persuasive: the diamondback rattler coiled in a field of bluebonnets, the scorpion beneath the yellow rose.”

  Southern struggled for thirty years to complete Texas Summer. He strived to resolve his extreme ambivalence toward his birthplace. The novel, originally called Youngblood (a friendly nod to the hit by his songwriting pals Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller), reworked short stories that appeared in the 1967 anthology, Red Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes. New material was slowly woven around these stories to fulfill a long-unrealized dream to write one last “hard-hitting novel.” The final result, which Southern seems to have squeezed out of himself like blood from the proverbial stone, added up to just over two hundred published pages.

  If Southern could never quite leave Texas in his imagination, he made damn sure actual homecomings were kept to a minimum. While Texas played a significant part in his writing, Southern had little desire to actually set foot in the state if he could help it. This love/hate relationship was hidden behind a thick mask of irony and coy reminiscence. Depending on his mood and the listener, he would either describe his youth in Alvarado and Texas as suffocating and provincial, or launch into a colorful anecdote. In 1992, when pressed by a Dallas journalist, Robert Wilonsky, Southern replied, “I love Texas…it’s just by some unfortunate coincidence I haven’t been able to get back over the years, I just haven’t had the occasion.”

  “Growing up in Texas is probably a lot like growing up in Alberta or Saskatchewan—ideal—from a certain Huck Finn point of view. Lots of hunting and fishing, lots of baseball and football, and only a handful of grown-ups. It was also something of a cultural desert,” he told me in our first interview in 1990. Variations were repeated to others over the years.

  Between 1946 and 1993, Southern went back to Texas only once. In 1972, he joined the Rolling Stones on a blur of tour dates including a concert in Dallas. The tour, as immortalized in Robert Frank’s notorious documentary, Cocksucker Blues, was largely a semiorganized bacchanal of booze and drugs. Sightseeing was not high on the agenda for any of the participants. Then, in late February 1993, an older and subdued Southern made a final visit to Dallas and Alvarado. Josh Alan Friedman, a writer and musician (and son of fellow satirist Bruce Jay Friedman), organized a reading and salute to Southern at the Dallas Museum of Art. The next day, Friedman drove Southern and Gail Gerber, his companion since 1964, to Alvarado to see if the two-story Victorian-style bungalow in which Terry had spent the first few years of his life was still standing.

  “It was like The Last Picture Show,” recalls Gerber. “I thought his house was going to be like a mall, but when we got there it was as if time had stood still. The house was boarded up. There was just this little town square and I have pictures of Terry in what used to be the movie theater. It was moving and eerie. We drove around this little tiny village and the
re was a black guy playing with his kid on the other side of the tracks. There was a burial ground out back and Terry spent ages just standing there with his cane looking sort of dazed. Then he would walk ten or fifteen steps and stop, not looking at any particular grave or headstone, but just sort of standing there in some sort of daze or maybe he was collecting vibes. Who knew what he was doing! He would potter off to another portion and then he would stand there for a while. Then he got back in the car.”

  The writer’s apparent stoicism concealed a level of pain and regret about his early years that remained an enigma to those who knew and loved him.

  “I think that in order to understand Terry, you must remember he’s from Texas,” Carol Southern, his wife from 1956 through 1968, said. “It is the key to everything, because Texas is a strange place. I am not being pejorative, but Terry is his own person totally. He’s made mistakes. He’s had brilliant successes. Whatever happens to Terry, he is totally obdurate. Nobody can tell him what to do, or advise and influence him. I think this has its roots in Texas. It’s a country of characters. I think the other thing he grew up with in Texas is this courtly graciousness which he has always had. A courtliness which also keeps people away.”