The Accidental Life

by Terry McDonell

  “Are you kidding?” she said the morning I bought it, sitting across from me at my desk. I had invited her in for a meeting, but my assistant had made the appointment without telling her why.

  “Four thousand bucks,” I said, showing off, and then quoted Samuel Johnson: “ ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.’ ” Not funny.

  “I just want to write,” she said, as uncynically as I have ever heard that said.

  She was twenty-three then and she didn’t know it but her career was going to take off with magazine pieces leading to best-selling books and movies (Coyote Ugly; Eat, Pray, Love; The Signature of All Things). But even as a rising success in magazines, she was sometimes short of cash. That wasn’t funny, either.

  —

  AT EVERY MAGAZINE THERE WERE unending fire drills to get writers paid. Money had to be wired to places like Woody Creek and Missoula and Key West. Everyone had their own values and cash-flow problems, and they worked them out like gypsy states as best they could with shifting alliances, more or less braiding ropes to rustle what the very successful freelancer Jon Bradshaw called “donkey money” from the rich caravans of greedy, expense-account publishers.

  Let me edit that over-written sentence: Everyone had their own values and cash-flow problems, and they worked them out like gypsy states as best they could with shifting alliances, more or less braiding ropes to rustle what the very successful freelancer Jon Bradshaw called “donkey money” from the rich caravans of greedy expense-account publishers. Notice that fifty words just became sixteen. If you were getting paid by the word, that is significant math. Writers were always on the short end except, in this case, where I kept the redundant word “greedy.”

  What makes this even worse is that word rates have dropped like rocks in draining ponds. Paying three dollars a word was no problem for me at Rolling Stone and Esquire, and there were many writers at Condé Nast magazines getting five dollars. Twenty years later, a dollar a word makes writers almost happy, in light of what they might get from even a thriving website like the Huffington Post. Understanding traffic formulas tied to compensation, and conversations about the importance of exposure do not make writers feel better.

  Getting paid on time and having expenses reimbursed could be the most difficult and frustrating part of the business, much harder than landing the assignment in the first place. It’s worse now, especially when dealing with big publishing companies that string out freelance payment as a matter of policy. This is “the float” bankers talk about. The number of necessary approvals on a fixed timeline from the day the editor accepts the piece takes beyond six weeks at many magazines. So the writer calls the editor, the editor calls accounting, which circles back with the news that the general manager or whomever has not signed off yet.

  In the days when I was coming up, top editors and publishing executives enjoyed lavish expense accounts and numerous perks: country club memberships, first-class travel, black radio cars on constant call. The top women fashion editors and publishers had wardrobe allowances (as well as discounts from designers). An editor I knew at People joked one Christmas about expensing $20,000 of veal piccata that year. Writers would hear about such high-handed excess and complain to their editor, who would likely take them out for some veal piccata, and that would be that.

  Most writers were bad negotiators, some even bragging about being bad at business as if that elevated their writing careers to an admirable level of idealism. Agents could be useful but never wanted to be bothered with their 10 or 15 percent of what magazine pieces paid unless they were important to their client, which was true only if the client had nothing better going—a book most often, or a movie or TV project. There were exceptions, of course, but those were all love stories, like Barry Levinson, who always wanted to write about Baltimore sports, or Tom Robbins on Debra Winger, and those guys were already rich.

  Almost every writer I edited had a moment, or many, when they were tapped out. Even Tom McGuane, who always seemed flush, told me once that he was going to “sell Laurie’s silver.” Tim Cahill signed his letters “Wolf at door.” I lost track of the disconnected phones. Hunter Thompson turned getting paid into theater, stopping just short of sending dead cats in the mail.

  −ENDIT−

  Bob Ward (1,550)

  WARD CALLED ME at my office at Rolling Stone and asked if I knew what Lee Marvin’s last words were.

  “You do,” I said, “or you wouldn’t be calling about it.”

  “ ‘At least I outlived that motherfucker Danny Kaye.’ ”

  “You made that up.”

  “Well, those were his last words to me…on the phone, when he told me how sick he was.”

  Lee Marvin, the baddest, coolest movie star of the 1960s and ’70s, had died that week at sixty-three in Tucson, where he’d been living with his high school sweetheart and second wife, Pam, and where Ward had visited them for a profile for Rolling Stone (“Drinks with Liberty Valance”). Like most of the people Ward wrote about, Lee and Pam had become his friends. He had also written about Marvin’s only rival for Hollywood cool, the hipster leading man Robert Mitchum (“Mr. Bad Taste and Trouble Himself”), in what he was calling his “Tough Guy” series, which would become part of a collection called Renegades, published by Tyrus Books long after he had left journalism for television.

  In the book’s introduction, Ward described himself as having been a mustachioed, cowboy-haired, ill-kempt, bourbon-drinking, wild man who would go anywhere at a moment’s notice, meet total strangers, get them to reveal crucial things about themselves, sleep two hours a night, come back home on the red-eye with a filled notebook and then sit down and lash together a ten-thousand-word story over the weekend, while still finding time to play the guitar, go to all-night discos with…I remember bars, not discos, and the talent beneath all that swagger. Ward was a sensitive guy, but he didn’t let you see much of that, at least not in the beginning.

  When he turned to journalism, Ward had already written Shedding Skin, which had won a National Endowment for the Arts first novel award and had gotten him a solid teaching job at Hobart College, in upstate NY—which he walked away from, saying he was bored. Journalism came easily to him. He picked up sharp details (Vietnam strongman Nguyen Cao Ky wearing a heroic black jump suit, his lithe body strung like a bow, his lavender scarf trailing war mythology like a Sam Peckinpah dream,) and was a natural storyteller and a deceptive listener. People told him things before they knew they were opening up. Secrets flowed—like how tough and closed off and dangerous Lee Marvin’s father had been with him, and how, literally how, Lee had killed Japanese soldiers during the war with his father’s .45. And deeper secrets too, about fathers and sons that Ward saved for himself.

  Sometimes after he filed, I’d call him and start quoting his piece back to him as a compliment. Ward’s first sentence about Robert Mitchum told you just how wild the piece was going to get: A big, crazy, sexy, sixty-five-year-old little boy who can’t get used to the idea that he’s supposed to act like, like Ward Cleaver, you dig?

  And in the next paragraph you learned: All he drinks nowadays is tequila—and milk, though not together. A little later, Mitchum’s eyelids hang down his face like two broken blinds in a flophouse. At another point in the piece Mitchum tells Ward that Marilyn Monroe “had the guts of a lion.”

  Ward’s pieces were all like that, hallucinations of a newer New Journalism, and Ward cranked them out for eight years, writing two more novels along the way, Cattle Annie and Little Britches (1977, as well as the screenplay) and The Sandman (1978), and working long and hard on a third, Red Baker. But the novels were in line behind Ward’s big-game profiles, and he went after the biggest: Clint Eastwood, Larry Flynt, Reggie Jackson, Waylon Jennings…

  Covering celebrities—more specifically, talking them into cooperating for pieces and photo shoots, getting the all-important access—was an ego-triggered minefield that usually fell to editors to negotiate, and almost never with th
e stars themselves. It was always easier if you knew them or knew someone who did—usually by working with them. Richard Price was able to profile Richard Gere because Gere had starred in the film of Richard’s second novel, Bloodbrothers. Jim Harrison once called Jack Nicholson to ask him to cooperate for a piece Tim Cahill was doing for Rolling Stone, and Jack sat in a lawn chair in his yard in Aspen during a snowstorm for the cover photograph.

  Ward always took care of all that himself, even as it got harder and harder. Publicists were rising as the gatekeepers of journalism, but Ward seemed to blow through them, and once he got to Clint Eastwood or whomever, the filters came off. Ward said his only dread was of a subject telling him he “owed everything to Jesus Christ.”

  —

  RED BAKER WAS A MONSTER of a novel when Ward finally finished it. The title character was a Baltimore steelworker, laid off and running wild—boozing, screwing around, finally turning to crime—trying to build a new identity on the bones of the one taken away from him. Michiko Kakutani wrote in the New York Times, “Mr. Ward writes with a directness and sincerity that is increasingly rare in these days of fashionable irony and high-tech literary pyrotechnics.” Time magazine noted, “Ward has no manifesto and wisely refuses to use Red as a convenient symbol of the wronged working class. With patience and faith, his hero emerges cold—forged by tragedy, observing that what sets one man apart from another is not brains or money but ‘what he will risk for love.’ ”

  Ward’s friends were happy for him and what they all said was that Red Baker had soul—like Bob. But it had taken him six years to write and made him only $10,000. Bob and I had gotten to know each other by then—at dinners, parties, a few days together in the Bahamas—and I told him he could write whatever he wanted for Rolling Stone. But he was uncharacteristically down about writing in general. I think I called to ask if he was interested in doing a piece about Harrison Ford. Or maybe it was Keith Richards.

  “Thanks,” he said, “but what the fuck.”

  “You don’t sound very chipper,” I said.

  “What the fuck.”

  He didn’t want any assignments, wasn’t even sure he wanted to write anymore. That’s when what Ward called his “run” started. Red Baker got optioned and Ward wrote the screenplay, which got stalled in development, but one night at Elaine’s, his agent, Esther Newberg of the powerhouse ICM agency, passed it to the television writer-producer David Milch, who read it and offered him a shot at a script for Hill Street Blues. When Ward aced that, he was offered a staff job. He married his girlfriend, Celeste Wesson, an NPR producer, moved to Laurel Canyon, and by his second season on Hill Street was making $250,000 a year.

  When Hill Street Blues was over, Ward moved to Miami Vice. I had left Rolling Stone for Newsweek and then quit after a year to raise investor money to start Smart magazine—and I was freelancing. Now I was the one looking for writing money.

  “You don’t sound very chipper,” Ward said when I called with an idea for Miami Vice, where I already had a writing credit. The first time I had written for the show it had been producer Michael Mann’s idea and I was still drawing a Newsweek paycheck. Now I was pitching for real, and Bob and I had reversed roles.

  I launched into something about the show’s heroes, Crockett and Tubbs, coming across a clandestine group of vigilante cops. The setup was fine, but I had no story. Ward gave me the assignment anyway and we fixed the story by letting the bad guys win, thus giving Crockett existential doubts about what it meant to be a good cop—the soul of every story line Miami Vice ever ran.

  The episode was called “Over the Line,” and Ward and I shared a story credit. Sonny Crockett learned the lesson of Red Baker. There was redemption in simply understanding where you stood and squaring up against it.

  The next time I heard from Ward, he had a story for me. I had launched Smart by then and he was executive-producing TV shows, but he had looked at the new magazine and “knocked something out” for me.

  “I never told you much about my father, did I,” he said.

  “A little,” I said. “That he could be tough on you.”

  “He was hard to know.”

  I thought about what Ward had written about Lee Marvin and his father beating him and what had come out of that. Ward’s new piece was a short story called “Scouts,” about working-class fathers and sons falling away from each other: Troop 99 in Baltimore was in a bad part of town—and very different from what you’d find in the official handbook.

  The pain in that sentence was ominous. The best writers all knew how to do that. You didn’t edit it into their pieces any more than you edited their sensibilities. What you did was ask for more detail.

  −ENDIT−

  Editcraft (262)

  AVOID CLICHÉS LIKE THE PLAGUE, and no matter how amazing or incredible or unbelievable anything is, know how challenging it can be to raise the bar—even when you are writing about icons living in La La Land or Tinseltown or on the Left Coast.

  Likewise it is prudent to take Kurt Vonnegut’s advice: “Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.”

  Think like Mark Twain: “When you catch an adjective, kill it.”

  “Kill your darlings” means cut anything precious, overly clever or self-indulgent. It is a stark, brilliant prohibition attributed most often to William Faulkner but also to Allen Ginsberg, Oscar Wilde, Eudora Welty, G. K. Chesterton, Anton Chekhov and Stephen King, who used the phrase in his effusive On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft: “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”

  When the 2013 biopic of Allen Ginsberg, Kill Your Darlings, came out, Forrest Wickman on Slate tracked what is probably the best attribution to Arthur Quiller-Couch in his 1914 Cambridge lecture “On Style.” The prolific poet, novelist and critic railed against “extraneous Ornament” and emphasized, “If you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—wholeheartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.’ ”

  Wickman’s research also brought him to an even more important rule for journalists: “Check your sources.”

  −ENDIT−

  Kurt Vonnegut (1,072)

  I WAS ON THE CORNER of Third Avenue and Forty-eighth Street, and Kurt Vonnegut was coming toward me, walking his big, loose-boned walk. It was fall and turning cold and he looked a little unbalanced in his overcoat, handsome but tousled, with long curly hair and a heavy mustache that sometimes hid his grin. I could tell he saw me by his shrug, which he sometimes used as a greeting.

  I was on my way to buy dinner for some Newsweek writers who were suspicious of me as their new assistant managing editor. I had been brought in from Rolling Stone, and no one at Newsweek had heard of me. I didn’t know them either, but I knew Kurt, who was one of the first people I met when I moved to New York. We were neighbors on Forty-eighth Street, where he lived in a big townhouse in the middle of the block, and he’d invite me over for drinks. I had gotten him to contribute to Rolling Stone by keeping an eye out for his speeches and radio appearances and then suggesting ways they could be retooled as essays.

  “Come have dinner,” I said. “I’ve got some Newsweek writers who would love to meet you.”

  “Not in the mood,” Kurt said.

  “They’re fans,” I said. “It’s part of your job.”

  Kurt lit a Pall Mall and gave me a look, one of his favorites, amused but somehow saddened by the situation. He could act, Kurt.

  “Think of it as a favor to me,” I said. “They’re not sure about me, and I’ve edited you.”

  “Sort of,” he said, and I knew he had already had a couple drinks. He never got mean, but he got honest.

  “What else are you doing for dinner?” I said, knowing he seldom made plans. />
  “The last thing I need is ass kissing,” Kurt said.

  “That’s what I’m doing right now.”

  “They’ll want to know which novel I like best.”

  “Cat’s Cradle,” I said.

  “Wrong.” He flipped the Pall Mall into Forty-eighth Street, and we started walking together toward the restaurant.

  The writers were already at the table, drinks in front of them. They looked up when we came in, surprised to see Kurt with me. There were six or eight of them, including the columnist Pete Axthelm, who was my only ally going into Newsweek because I knew him from Runyon’s, a bar in our neighborhood where everyone called him Ax.

  I introduced Kurt around.

  “Honored,” Ax said, or something like that, and the ass kissing began.

  The social dynamic of any table of writers, I had already learned, was dependent on the charity of the dominant writer, in this case clearly Kurt, who was both self-deprecating and blunt. The waiter came but no one ordered food. The empty Scotch glasses were backing up. The writers asked Kurt about his work habits, his hours, stuff like that. When did he write?

  “All the time,” Kurt said. “That’s all I do.” He let that settle, stirred his drink with a long finger and added, “You could say I’m writing now.”

  That last sentence had an edge but it was intimate too, almost generous, the way Kurt said it. Everyone nodded, and some loose talk followed about deadlines and guys who had trouble meeting them. Axthelm, who had started as a sportswriter, said he’d heard a story about how Kurt had worked briefly at Sports Illustrated before it launched, when the editors were going through the exercise of putting an issue together every week, practicing to go live. Part of the story was that the managing editor, Sidney James, had hired a collection of established sportswriters from around the country, but they couldn’t write well enough. So then he hired a few pros living in New York City, but these guys didn’t know sports. That was Kurt’s group, and Kurt cocked his head: yes, he had needed the money.