by Pat Conroy
“Your mother called me too. I think she’s angrier than Don. She thinks the whole book should’ve been all about her,” Stanny said.
“My whole family is a bunch of narcissists,” I said with a sigh.
Then my father disappeared from Atlanta, and it began to be a major concern for all his family as his self-imposed exile stretched to three days and counting. I called Jim Townsend, the founder of Atlanta magazine, and he put in calls to the police chief and the mayor. At night, I would drive around Dad’s old haunts, and even ate breakfast with his running buddies at the Darlington to see if I could coax any stray information from them. But they were as deeply concerned as I was. Lou Lipsitz said, “You might as well face it, Pat: Your book probably made your dad go kamikaze. I bet he rented a Piper Cub and flew it into a mountain in North Georgia.”
“Shut up, Lou,” I said, and resumed my search, but that afternoon my uncle Willie called a second time. “Nice going, Pat. We think Don went off somewhere to kill himself.”
My sister Carol Ann had read an earlier version of The Great Santini that I had brought her the previous summer that she had spent fighting off the madness that the family had bequeathed to both of us. When she finished it, she told me I had restored her childhood to her, that her own survival depended on repressing those same memories that I recorded in the novel. I had given her back a childhood voice that she had lost somewhere when we followed Dad from base to base. She thought I had captured exactly the way that terrible family felt as she was growing up in it—in the discordance and bristling tension of living an impossible life.
My brothers have always remained the solid citizens of my realm when it came to my defense of my portrait of Dad. I could not ask for more valiant safekeepers of my point of view. They were quick to the fight and articulate from the start. Mike, Jim, and Tim have faced a squad of doubters and naysayers about the accuracy of my memories. From the first, my brothers leaped to the front line of defense and backed me up a hundred percent from the day of publication until the present day. There may have been a lot wrong with my childhood, but I was born into a round table of knightlike brothers. It took my sister Kathy many years to make her own complex peace with the novel. Carol Ann’s long rearguard war against me had not commenced, but she was already sharpening her arrows in secret and concealing weaponry in false drawers and hidden cupboards of her troubled soul. Carol Ann had developed a hazardous talent for searching out the most scrofulous shrinks on earth, who in their breathtaking banality would convince her of their superiority and genius. She let them cut her out of the family like the removal of a malignancy that could not be named. But that secret war was yet to begin, and there was still no sign of Dad.
The reaction of the Chicago Irish part of the family held no surprises for me, except it startled me that all of them seemed to have read the book. Chicago was uncharted territory for me. In some interior way, I knew this tempest was tribal in nature, but I had barely met the tribe and knew nothing about their customs and ceremonies. But their phone calls infuriated me, and that was when I was beginning to learn that I could plead ignorant to all things Irish, but Ireland lived deeply inside of me, a fierce and intransigent resident in my bloodstream. Ireland has always ridden coach to the South in my fog-bound family history. But I was learning all the anger and hurt of the Irish immigration as they banded up against me in defense of one of their own. Though I lashed back in fury, their loyalty impressed the hell out of me.
That my Southern family felt much the same affection for Dad and that no one but my brothers believed in my caustic portrait of him astonished me. Surely they had witnessed attacks on my mother and his kids over the years. But when I thought hard about it, I could come up with no instances when I could remember Mom getting slapped at Aunt Helen’s dinner table or Dad knocking his sons around when we were visiting Aunt Evelyn’s house in Jacksonville. Stanny or Grandpa Peek would visit for months at a time during my childhood, but I could come up with no centering image of violence when they were resident in our many different houses. I now believe that my mother invited Stanny and her father for extended visits because it provided a measure of safety for her and her kids.
Before my father returned from his long sulk, the calls in his defense came rolling in from all my Southern kin—Uncle Russ issued a complaint, as did Uncle Joe and my beloved Aunt Helen. It occurred to me that there was some uncanny genius at work in my father’s perfection of child and spousal abuse. He did it in the dark, like a roach crossing the kitchen floor at night. He slapped Mom in towns where they knew barely a soul. I would most often get slapped when he picked me up from football, basketball, and baseball practices, but strangers rarely saw that, and a kid was the last person believed in the American society of the fifties. My father had kept his abuse secret by mostly confining it to the fortresses of family routine. But as the days wore on, the calls got harsher and harsher. It was my uncle Willie who first called me a liar, and I blasted him with a surge of vitriol that proved my own Irishness to him once and for all. But he’d hit the central nervous system with the phrase that would send me spinning out of control. I was a liar who had invented a series of lies to wound this good and tender man—some perversity inside me made me invent tales of wife beating and tantrums that never happened except in the imagination of a most ungrateful son. I’d made it all up and sold out my father for the price of a book.
My father returned to Atlanta a week after he left town. He had heard his family had turned on me hard, and he handed me a letter when I opened the front door to him at my house on Briarcliff Road.
“Read any good books lately?” I asked as we shook hands.
“A piece of worthless shit that I stomped on and threw across the room,” he said. “Read my letter.”
The letter was an open one sent out to all the members of his family and my mother’s as well:
May 15, 1976
To the Magnificent Seven:
Let me start my epistle by simply stating that I was deeply touched by your oldest brother’s latest literary endeavor. Pat is a very clever storyteller and I was totally absorbed and encountered every emotion as, reading very slowly, life with father unfolded in this work of fiction. It was as though I knew some of the characters personally.
Pat did a superb job in developing the character Mary Ann, excellent on Ben, Lillian, Karen, Matt, and, with all modesty, fell far short on Santini—which is quite understandable with such a dashing and complex character.
My absolute favorite parts, not necessarily in order, were: 1. Dave Murphy, 2. Mess night, 3. Toomer scenes, 4. Our trip to Beaufort, 5. Bull goes on base, 6. Opening chapter (mushroom soup incident), 7. Bull and Ben out to recruit depot, 8. Archaic word usage, 9. Mary Anne and Ben prom night, 10. Ben’s basketball game—including one-on-one.
Characters which I enjoyed that were nonfamily were: Toomer, Dacus, Loring, Jim Don, Spinks, Sammy, Red, and the Hedgepaths, to name a few, but the setting for some was interesting and often amusing.
In all honesty, I read the first hundred pages, and I was furious; at page 222, not that the page is important, I was livid and put the book down; when I resumed reading it came easier for me, and now I look back, the writer had me, and many readers will feel much the same, in the palm of his hand. I laughed at some scenes, cried at others (figuratively speaking, of course), and you came away a better person having lived with the Meechams.
I thought the book was great and it should make a real terrific flick. But how do you go about the task of telling your son and his family that you are profoundly grateful and extremely proud of his latest literary endeavor. Particularly when I fell into his literary trap and could have choked him as often as twice a page early in the book; but he would only say, “Read on, Macbeth, read on.” How true.
When you’re Irish, dumb, and then stupid, it is a series of major obstacles to overcome. Each of you possesses an essential quality of greatness that cannot be explained as to the whys and wherefores, but
I can only thank the Deity for His benevolence.
Pat’s literary ability has never been excelled as in his plea with God in the last pages of the book. Maybe the reason I was so impressed was that it was in the area of religious discussions that I had my greatest concern and my gravest reservations. All of you should read these words; his informal prayer does pay great honor and glory to our Deity. We all take turns rejecting God for one reason or another; the spirit can never rest until you make your peace with your creator. And so the “Hound of Heaven” shall pursue each of you.
To Pat, my oldest son, may you forever wear the cloak of authority, as befitting the eldest Conroy, as a sign to all of our pride in you as Son and Brother. And may Barbara and your children have the patience to endure the idiosyncrasies of such a clan.
Lovable, likable Donald Conroy, U.S.M.C. (Ret.)
Cc: Pat Conroy, Carol Conroy, Mike Conroy, Kathy Conroy, Jim Conroy, Tim Conroy, Tom Conroy, Mr. & Mrs. J. P. Conroy Sr., Rev. J. P. Conroy, Mr. & Mrs. Herb Huth, Will Conroy, Sr. M. Conroy, Jack Conroy, Ed Conroy
“Nobody fucks with one of my kids,” Dad said, when I finished the letter and put it down on the coffee table in front of me. “Nobody.”
Once Dad’s letter arrived in Chicago and among my mother’s people, the criticisms ceased. I never heard a disparaging word from family members again. It took a longer time to soothe my father’s ruffled feelings about the book. After some time, he learned to use the book to his great advantage and to turn his fictional self into a blissful second career.
“Dad, I’m sorry I hurt your feelings with the book,” I said the day I read the letter. “I really am—but I want you to know that nothing I write can ever make up for my ruined childhood.”
“You exaggerated everything,” he said.
I answered, “I exaggerated nothing.”
When my friend and bookstore owner Cliff Graubart threw me a book party for the publication of The Great Santini, my father was one of the first guests to arrive and the last to leave. It was the first time he had come to Cliff’s Old New York Bookshop as a celebrity, and people gathered around him to question him about his response to the book. Then I saw someone make a request that would alter my father’s world forever. A guest opened my book to the title page and asked my father to sign it.
At first, he hesitated, then shrugged his shoulders and began to inscribe the book in his lovely penmanship, but with the slight awkwardness of the southpaw. He signed many copies of The Great Santini that night, and his inscriptions became prized by many collectors. His first inscriptions were witty. He signed to one of my friends, Frank Orrin Smith, in the following way:
To Frank, I hope you enjoy these weird fantasies of my oldest son. The boy was always a little goofy and there was nothing that Peg and I could do to help him. He obviously did not take discipline well at all.
He signed off as, “Yours truly, old lovable, likable Col. Donald Conroy, USMC ret.”
The next day, I signed books in Rich’s department store with a small crowd of readers in attendance. When I handed a book back to a woman who’d bought it, I saw my father watching from the back of the store, pretending to be shopping for cutlery. I waved for him to join me in the book department, and with feigned reluctance, he approached the signing desk. I introduced the real Great Santini to the twenty-some people who were in attendance, and they seemed thrilled to meet him. The request for an inscription happened again when a pretty customer asked my father to sign her book. My father hesitated, and I could see his old allegiance to protocol and the chain of command were making it unclear what he should do. I helped him by pulling out a chair beside me.
“Sit here, Dad,” I said. “Sign away.”
So, my father took his place beside me and, in many ways, he never left my side, nor I his, for the rest of our lives. Together we had forged a secret language made up of the blood and contentious harmonies that composed the music of our lives together. I marveled at my father’s charm as he schmoozed with the readers and made them laugh and feel happy to be there. Two separate lines formed—one for me and one for the Great Santini. Dad’s favorite part of the afternoon was when he looked up and I heard him say, laughing, “Hey, son, my line’s longer.”
My father learned to turn my portrait of him to his own favor. He would joke about my famous sensitivity, and how could he help having a son with such a spineless, emotional makeup who wilted in the face of lawful orders by a parent who flew fighter jets? On the Neal Boortz radio show in Atlanta, Dad became a frequent guest, and he would often give parents his unsolicited opinions about raising children. “Don’t spare the rod. America is falling apart because parents are afraid of their own children. The father is the center of the family unit. He gives out the guidance and the punishment. He is judge, jury, and king. From him, all good things flow.”
One day when Dad got home from Neal’s show, he asked me what I thought, and I said, “The Great Santini giving advice about raising children. That’s not exactly why I wrote my book. Jesus Christ! My dad, the Nazi Dr. Spock.”
For the rest of his life, my father and I would sign all my books together. We signed for five hours in Atlanta when The Prince of Tides came out in 1986. When Beach Music appeared in 1995, we signed for seven straight hours in Charlotte. We made a vow to each other that no customer would ever leave these stores without books signed by us both. Though he often drove me nuts with his bullheadedness, his prejudices, his free-flowing narcissism, his awful Santininess, his letter had given me a way back to him. There was something in my father that the book touched, and it opened up a place in his heart that I thought had closed off long before I was born. So we began a journey together, set off on a voyage that would take us to many places and shared experiences that I never thought were possible with such an incomprehensible man. But that would come in bits and pieces and slow increments over the years. When I was on the modest tour for The Great Santini, I called my father on the road to give him a piece of news that would have a critical impact on both of us.
“Dad,” I said, “Hollywood wants to do a film of The Great Santini.”
CHAPTER 6 •
On the Set of The Great Santini
The making of movies from the books I have written has been one of the most surprising and unsettling parts of my adult life. When I first watched Jon Voight playing me in the movie Conrack, based on The Water Is Wide, I winced each time someone on the screen spoke my name, then went around for the next year feeling ugly. Harriet Frank and Irving Ravetch, the gifted screenwriters who delivered the script, could not imagine a white Southern man could bring himself to be nice to black people—it was inconceivable in the Hollywood I entered in 1972. When the folks I met there found out I was from South Carolina, they would look at me as though I raised police dogs to attack poor black people marching for their freedom. There’s always a strong attraction and repulsion about the South in Hollywood, so the screenwriters felt like they had to make the Jon Voight character kind of goofy and disconnected as he performs those ditzy rituals in his first appearance on-screen. That I was born and raised in the South, and that the civil rights movement had a profound effect on me and thousands of other Southerners like me, did not make sense to anyone when I got to Los Angeles. Our image was set in stone. In the South, there were only fire-breathing white racists and wonderful, life-affirming black people hungry for their God-given rights.
The Conrack experience was a grand one for me and my entire family, and a troubling one for the town of Beaufort, South Carolina. When The Great Santini was sold to the movies, the complications became apparent after Bing Crosby Productions purchased the book. It had never occurred to me that Hollywood would ever play a leading role in my life, especially those years at The Citadel when I dreamed of being a poet.
Then I received a phone call from Charles Pratt, the producer of the movie, who told me two notes of interest about the film—one that thrilled me and one that sickened me. He informed me that the actor Ro
bert Duvall had signed up to play Santini. I had followed Mr. Duvall’s career since he played Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird, and I thought he was on his way to a long and distinguished Hollywood career. Then Charles Pratt told me that they planned to make the entire movie in Beaufort. Instantly, I thought of the strategies I could employ to keep my parents from having a fistfight on the set, or to prevent encounters between them as they walked the streets of a very small town.
After their divorce, my mother and father’s relationship became so rancorous and contentious that all seven children knew that there was no possibility of some peaceable agreement between them. When the divorce was final, Mom married a naval doctor, John Egan, and I thought there might be some cessation of hostilities between my parents. But Mom remained furious over the life she had lived with Dad, and I thought she had every right to be. Dad was hurt by the divorce, and I told him he had no right to those unexamined feelings.
The morning following my conversation with Charles Pratt, Dad arrived for coffee at my apartment in Atlanta, and I gave him the news as he was reading my copy of the Atlanta Constitution. I told him about Robert Duvall. He pretended to be disinterested in such a trivial piece of gossip, and then I heard, “Who’s Robert Duvall?” Dad said it without lowering the paper.
“The Irish lawyer in the Godfather series,” I said. “The guy who loves the smell of napalm in the morning in Apocalypse Now. Sounds like typecasting to me.”
“I know that guy,” Dad said as he lowered the paper. “What a role he just signed up for! This’ll make his career.”
“It’s the modesty of your character that attracted Duvall to the role, Dad.”
“Nah, I bet he’s been waiting for a script with some meat on it for years. He’s been a character actor.”
“Charles Pratt told me that he felt like he had hired a young Humphrey Bogart,” I said. “It’s being filmed in Beaufort.”