The Accidental Life

by Terry McDonell

  −ENDIT−

  Jimmy Buffett (1,201)

  JIMMY BUFFETT’S LIFE WAS RICH and open to anyone who knew his lyrics, and he had whiplash intelligence about his own best interests. He never wrote for money, only because it was good for Jimmy Buffett.

  We met in San Francisco, where I was editing Outside. Jimmy was in a leg cast from a softball injury in Aspen, where he lived then. We went to Vanessi’s, in North Beach, where Joe DiMaggio ate sometimes. Jimmy said he appreciated both the baseball and the fishing nuance, and sat with his broken leg propped on a chair. The waiter recognized something about him but couldn’t find his name so I said, “Jimmy Buffett, ‘Margaritaville’…”

  The waiter said, “ ‘Wasting away…’ ”

  “Not tonight,” Jimmy said, and asked for the wine list. “We’re working.”

  His new album, Changes in Latitudes, was moving up the charts, and my idea was that Jimmy would write something about…I wasn’t sure. Jimmy said Antigua Sailing Week might be interesting, “sort of a cross between America’s Cup and Mardi Gras. A drunken riot with boats.”

  “So we’re talking serious journalism,” I said.

  “So you want me to make fun of myself.”

  “With a straight face.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like ‘Why Don’t We Get Drunk and Screw.’ ” Jimmy had written that one as a country-love-song parody under the pseudonym “Marvin Gardens.” It was still topping jukebox plays after five years.

  “I can do that,” Jimmy said.

  —

  EDITING JIMMY WAS LIKE HAVING a business partner. His real business partners became his friends, or at least thought of themselves as his friends, and everybody made money. You didn’t have to be a Parrothead as long as you respected what his music meant to the millions of them and you worked as hard as Jimmy did on whatever you were doing together. Editing him went the same way.

  Starting with that cover story for Outside, Jimmy beat whatever deadline I gave him and never objected to any editing moves I made on his copy. There were plenty and he thanked me for every one of them, said he was grateful even, with almost no ego, which I took as confidence in his talent. He had started out thinking he would be a journalist, and told me once almost shyly that he thought maybe he had some books in him if he worked at it. His songwriting was loaded with literary references—Twain, Hemingway, James Jones, Herman Wouk, Pat Conroy, a long list—and he was friends with several writers I was working with, and his lyric Made enough money to buy Miami but I pissed it away so fast spoke to every hipster of the moment who could roll a tight joint.

  The road was always the best place to reach him. He said he wanted his privacy when he wasn’t working. But then again, he was always working:

  Hey,

  I am going to Cuba next week to reconnect with friends and I need a letter validating my journalistic credentials. I will write you something you can use. I am actually going in search of a Cuban surf club and the secret JB copy band that is reported to exist in some dingy club in old Havana. My friend Patrick Oppmann is now the CNN bureau chief there and I am on the board of the Hemingway Restoration Foundation, but going in on a Sport’s Illustrated credential tops the list. I get the feeling things are about to start popping down there, and it might be time to see it again before it becomes a cruise ship stop.

  JB

  That was the way most of his assignments started—with Jimmy assigning himself. As I moved from job to job, Jimmy would write another piece for me. There were perks for me too, like a quail-hunting trip to Thomasville to take pictures for Esquire. It was work but it was fun too and beyond a simple idea of a good time. We walked into a pine grove so I could see the grave of his bird dog Spring. He said he thought that losing a beloved pet helped prepare us for greater loss, a cliché maybe but he meant it and I knew his father was not well.

  In New Orleans, after we donated $60,000 from auctioning a guitar that he and all the Sports Illustrated swimsuit models had signed, he said onstage that it had been my idea. “God bless you,” those Katrina victims told me afterward, but it had been his idea. He also got me great seats at his Detroit shows for the Chevy executives that SI advertising revenue depended on, and would even say hello to them backstage just before he went on.

  I’d e-mail him that I was in Sicily and had just heard “Fins” in a bar full of anchovy fisherman. He’d send me pictures of a striped bass he had caught on a fly. Wherever I was, if I was looking for a place to eat or whatever, he’d come right back. One spring in Paris I got this:

  First—you have to do lunch at L’Avenue on Montparnasse just for the scenery. Bellota-Bellota in the 9th is all and only hams, mainly pata negras from Spain and the Pyrenees but it is amazing….Lac Hong—amazing Vietnamese. Out of the way place that reminds you of Viet Nam or Paris forty years ago. They even have Export 33 beer….Marius et Janette for seafood. It is on George V near the river. Very funky but the best plat du jour in Paris is Le Forum in the 8th. That should hold you.

  Jimmy had decided early that knowing the world would be part of his job and he kept working it, writing, touring, making shrewd deals and uncanny marketing decisions. His rise as an entrepreneur was stealth until suddenly it wasn’t. He and Warren Buffett had their DNA tested to see if they were related. “Well, we do have certain things in common,” said Warren, that old Parrothead.

  Jimmy’s music and books, restaurants, stores, casino, real estate, labels and licensing put him well over $500 million, worth more than any living musician except Paul McCartney and Bono, depending on which list you look at. And while his writer friends shook their heads, he had three No. 1 New York Times best sellers in a row: Tales from Margaritaville, a collection of short stories; the novel Where Is Joe Merchant?; and A Pirate Looks at Fifty, the memoir which made him only the sixth author ever to top both the fiction and nonfiction lists. It would be hard to argue that there was a more successful writer, and certainly none on the Forbes list of richest people.

  The last time I saw Jimmy, he came up behind me at a crowded party at a house on the water in Sag Harbor. It was a warm spring evening and everyone seemed to be talking about their upcoming vacations, maybe even taking the summer off.

  “Hey, old man,” he said. “We need to get back to work…”

  −ENDIT−

  Richard Price (2,933)

  WHEN I WAS LOOKING FOR MONEY to launch Smart, Richard and I came up with a TV series idea called Night, each episode playing out between sundown and sunrise—all very noir. Richard’s screenplays for The Color of Money and Sea of Love were both big movie credits, and I had gotten some slight attention for an episode of Miami Vice I had written. Both of our agents had encouraged us to come up with a show to pitch. It was what we did all the time anyway, have some drinks and maybe do a couple of lines and riff on “what if” story ideas: What if there was a nightclub called Night?

  Night was about two guys and a girl who owned a club together in Tribeca, an exotic location in 1985, especially if you didn’t live in New York. The girl was rich and a smart-ass. One of the guys was a wry police detective, and the other was a hipster journalist. But they were really Becky Thatcher, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. And they were all in love with each other. We cracked ourselves up.

  Pitch meetings got set up in L.A. right away. On the seven a.m. American flight from JFK to LAX, I pulled out some notes I’d made on the characters. Richard was fidgety, didn’t want to look at them.

  “If we practice,” he said, “we’ll blow it.”

  I said that was annoying…and if it was true, we should rearrange the meetings to pitch first to whoever we wanted to work with most.

  Richard told me about going with Martin Scorsese to pitch Paul Newman The Color of Money on Paul’s deck in Malibu. “Two ghost-white, asthmatic New Yorkers sucking on inhalers,” as he put it, both sweating in the sun as Paul lathered up with the Sea & Ski and they raced through the plot points. “And we almost blew it because I
was too locked down.”

  “You mean Marty had to step in?” I was worried about my part.

  “It’s a process,” Richard said. I’d heard that said before, but never without a smirk.

  —

  WE WERE SHARP in our first meeting, finding our rhythm (shtick?) right away. I would open with how nobody in L.A. knew what was going on in Tribeca, and Richard would break in with whatever story occurred to him about getting in and out of trouble downtown. I might say something about coming of age down there, and Richard would tell another story, and then another and find a bridge to what it was like working with Marty and Paul and how they’d both love to do something like Night but they didn’t normally do television.

  Then we’d both stop talking, allowing everyone in the room to reflect on the implications of doing or not doing TV, which was Pavlovian for the executives who were in those kinds of meetings and always self-conscious and defensive about not working in film. That’s when we’d agree that you could blow out some ambitious work on TV if you were willing to take a chance on quality writing. And, of course, that’s what everyone in the room was all about, and someone said that in every meeting, smiling at Richard each time.

  “Solid,” I think Richard even said once.

  I would finish with something about how, obviously, Richard and I lived in New York and knew the scene and in fact we knew people like Tom and Becky and Huck. You could tell by our outfits, especially Richard’s black T-shirt. It was also effective in an uncomfortable way that Richard couldn’t shake hands when he met you because his right arm had been withered by polio when he was a child in the projects—which I would explain with Dickensian nuance later in private when they’d get me aside to ask about it. This would be after we ended our pitch with how they should come to New York soon, so we could all hang out.

  We had two meetings in the morning, a lunch with some network people, and two more meetings in the afternoon before we got to Aaron Spelling, who at the time was building a 56,500-square-foot French château-style mansion in Holmby Hills called Spelling Manor. His numerous hit shows, including Charlie’s Angels, The Love Boat, The Mod Squad, Fantasy Island and Dynasty, had ruled prime time since the late 1960s.

  Aaron was wearing a powder-blue jumpsuit and seemed a little shy, if you can be shy in a powder-blue jumpsuit. He sat in what I thought was a Mies van der Rohe chair and we sank low into a plush couch across from him. It was a bigger room than the conference rooms used for our previous meetings but it was Aaron’s office. And there was good art on the walls instead of movie posters.

  We tried to make small talk while we waited for Aaron’s partner, Doug Cramer, who as an executive at one studio or another had been responsible for Star Trek, The Odd Couple, The Brady Bunch and Mission: Impossible. Cramer was also a serious art collector, with pieces by Jim Dine, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and Ellsworth Kelly, all friends of his, and people said he was the only openly gay player in Hollywood. Richard and I were both very curious, but there was no small talk about Doug or the art as we waited for him.

  “We both like art” was all Aaron said, and then “Let’s just go,” and I said something like “It’s an American love triangle,” and Richard jumped ahead with “And nobody has ever done it…on television…and it’s New York…and it’s sexy…and it’s dangerous…and it’s very, very hip, you can trust me on that.”

  Those were not Richard’s actual words, but that’s what I was thinking he sounded like to Aaron, who was nodding and nodding and after about a minute told us to hold up.

  “Just find Doug,” he said to an assistant taking notes. “He’s got to hear this!”

  When Cramer arrived we started over or, rather, Richard did and it was like stand-up when stand-up isn’t just funny but serious and soulful, too. Now it wasn’t just Tom and Huck and Becky, it was also Butch and Sundance and Etta, and maybe even a little Casablanca, but slick and modern, like Aaron’s office. Aaron and Doug kept stopping us to call more people into the room to hear the pitch and take more notes and Richard kept starting over, building on himself like Coltrane or Bird or Lenny Bruce or Lord Buckley and the rest of the pantheon of ancient hipsters. I think he even mentioned Bongo Wolf, as in “If Bongo Wolf lived in New York, he’d hang out at this club.” And on to the Mudd Club, and Indochine, Odeon—noir heaven, with slick night streets and warehouse fronts and we would all be there and be cool together and…

  We were in Aaron’s office for ninety minutes.

  On the way out, Aaron and Doug asked me if Richard was always like this, so creative, so on! I said it was most satisfying working with Richard because even as creative as he was, he was very reliable, always on time, always got his work done, never missed deadlines. Aaron and Doug agreed that this was good, and also that Richard could play clubs if he ever felt like it.

  It looked like we had a deal but back in New York Richard’s phone was ringing with another job. Not television. When he pulled out of Night to write Rocket Boys for Mick Jagger and David Bowie, our negotiations with Aaron and Doug were over.

  —

  RICHARD AND I WERE ORIGINALLY connected in the late 1970s as first novelists and “Write On Guys” in Playgirl magazine, along with Winston Groom, Thomas Sanchez, Barry Hannah and some other embarrassed young writers I got to know later, but none as well as I got to know Richard. He was the youngest and his early success with his first novel—The Wanderers, written when he was twenty-four—gave his street-kid confidence an efficacy that was attractive, even to other writers.

  We started going to the Hamptons at about the same time, Richard because he was seeing Judy Hudson, a painter who looked like Ali McGraw in Goodbye, Columbus, except that Judy was a deep WASP with sharp instincts about careers and real estate—the twin obsessions of New York City in the 1980s. Richard got all that, but the Hamptons were not his scene, at least not yet. He had never been tan in his life and hated the beach, and the rounds of parties made us both uneasy—everyone was just too rich. We spent a lot of Saturdays riding around in my old convertible searching for “Grapes of Wrath Hamptons.”

  I’d drive and we’d smoke a joint and sometimes Richard would talk about his work. He was starting a novel about a stand-up comic and would try out monologues—at least it occurred to me that he wasn’t just riffing. The Hamptons had a famous Gin Lane, but so did Hogarth—that kind of thing. The closest we got to any Grapes of Wrath turned out to be a waterfront strip of shingle houses and fishing shacks called Promised Land, on the shoulder of Napeague Bay, but that punch line ran a little dark and we both knew it.

  Promised Land was where a lot of the late-night domestic violence calls to the East Hampton police came from, and the dilapidated houses in the soft, beautiful light, with old boats and pickups in the yards, was material to reference the next time we were eating tiny asparagus spears wrapped in prosciutto on some manicured lawn on Further Lane in East Hampton or wherever we were both feeling uncomfortable.

  The new friends who listened to Richard on those lawns and at dinner parties thought he was very entertaining. They told him he could do stand-up if he ever felt like it, and he liked the attention even though there was something about the way they asked him to tell them again about growing up in the Bronx that was starting to piss him off. But he couldn’t help himself, couldn’t stop inhabiting his characters, with all their street lingo—and rolling out his own deadeye detail and hair-trigger insights. He was so verbally intense, so hilarious, nobody seemed to wonder how he was feeling about what he was saying. When people asked, like they always did, if he’d ever considered doing stand-up, he’d shrug. If he wasn’t on, he was shy, and I think his shyness used to piss him off, too. There was a lot of coke around, and using and then contending with it got wrapped into his stories in a kind of cannibalization of his own life. We talked about this sometimes, but usually when we were high.

  The novel he was writing about the stand-up comic was called The Breaks, and when it went a little cold on him it tipped
him further into the movie business. He started pitching his ass off—cashing in on his deep homeboy credentials. If you wanted street, Richard was your guy. Everybody on both coasts got that. He was approaching forty by this time, and never again had to mention growing up in a housing project. I remember Richard Gere arriving with a “Yo, Richie!” at a surprise birthday party for him at the loft he bought with Judy in the East Village, and I think I remember Robert De Niro arriving at another party with the same greeting.

  Richard had a good time with it, but instead of just polishing the image he took it deeper, embedding (a word we never used then) with police units around New York and in Jersey City. Some weeks he’d ride with them every night. He saw everything the cops saw and had after-hours drinks in their bars. Detectives became his friends and they’d come to dinner and to Judy’s parties, some with bulges on their ankles if you looked. It was research for the next novel, Richard said, but it informed his movie work, which just kept coming. His collaborations with Scorsese were big-budget hip: The Color of Money (a sequel to The Hustler) and Life Lessons (a segment for New York Stories). “I do the words, Marty does the music,” Richard said, embarrassingly, more than once. He didn’t talk that way about the remakes of Night and the City and Kiss of Death, but they were good, too. Richard even got hired to conceptualize and write the eighteen-minute video for Michael Jackson’s “Bad.”

  —

  THERE WERE NINE YEARS BETWEEN The Breaks and Richard’s next novel, Clockers, which I excerpted in Esquire in 1992. It was set around the workings of a crack cocaine gang in Jersey City and the dynamics among the dealers, the police and the community. Critics loved it. According to the New York Times, it came across “as both clear-eyed and big-hearted, able to illuminate and celebrate, in the midst of the most unpromising circumstances imaginable, a cop’s heroism and a small-time drug dealer’s stubborn resilience, without overly sentimentalizing either.” That review described Richard as much as his novel.