Hunter had been there; and he’d been with Kovic again in Miami at the Republican National Convention for the vets’ “Last Patrol”:
Not the kind of procession you just walked up and “joined.” Not without paying some very heavy dues: an arm gone here, a leg there, paralysis, a face full of lumpy scar tissue…all staring straight ahead as the long silent column moved between rows of hotel porches full of tight lipped Senior Citizens, through the heart of Miami Beach.
…The only Vet speaker who managed to make himself plainly understood above the chopper noise was an ex-Marine Sergeant from San Diego named Ron Kovic, who spoke from a wheelchair because his legs are permanently paralyzed.
I would like to have a transcript or at least a tape of what Kovic said that day, because his words lashed the crowd like a wire whip. If Kovic had been allowed to speak from the convention hall podium, in front of network TV cameras, Nixon wouldn’t have had the balls to show up and accept the nomination.
Writing like that rattled you awake, especially now that Nixon had a lock on the election. I found Kovic and delivered Hunter’s greeting.
“He should be out here with us,” Kovic said.
Meanwhile, Nixon’s photo op was inside the hotel with several hundred Youth for Nixon bussed in from his hometown of Yorba Linda and other conservative spots around Orange County. They were fresh-faced kids, as was reported by the pool reporters allowed into the ballroom. Nixon smiling with those kids was going to be the front-page photo in the morning and the demonstration was going to be a sentence or two buried in the jump. Standing with the vets and Kovic in his wheelchair, you knew they knew all about that. Their frustration with journalism was another layer of their hatred of the war.
Back inside the Century Plaza, Hunter was still smoking next to the palm tree and watching the press corps milling around in the lobby, complaining about the lack of access. That was their story. My story was going to be a ground-level look at the way the Nixon campaign stage-managed the event inside and neutered the demonstration outside. I would skip all of the beside-the-point argument that the anti-war movement was dead and go with the obviousness of the in-your-face efficiency of the Nixonians. I figured Hunter would agree.
“Fucking sheep,” he said when I walked up to him.
“Sheep?”
“Those kids downstairs…” he said, with deadpan emphasis. I nodded. He rolled the cigarette holder to the other side of his mouth, leaned his head toward me. “We’re all sheep.”
I had my quote. I studied him closely for detail to set it up, to describe what the Prince of Gonzo looked like talking about sheep. Even behind those dark glasses, he looked sad.
—
COVERING THE ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT always felt a little uncomfortable if you had not been to Vietnam yourself, and when Hunter finally went, he said he had no choice. In 1975, he had talked Jann Wenner into sending him to cover the fall of Saigon for Rolling Stone, but when the assignment blew up, he quit the magazine cold. It was one of those apocryphal, myth-building stories about Jann that Hunter banged like a tambourine. The details, according to Hunter, had him arriving in Saigon (without a promised $75,000 advance) to find the country in chaos and other journalists scrambling to get out before the city fell. Hunter’s plan had been to ride into the capital on an NVA tank but Jann had not wired the money and had canceled Hunter’s company life insurance.
“Fucking Jann…”
My first move as managing editor at Rolling Stone was to try to get Hunter back in the magazine. He had remained on the masthead (his piece on the fall of Saigon wouldn’t run until ten years after the city fell), and what Rolling Stone staffers called his “goat dance” with Jann was bumping along with predictable skirmishes. I called Hunter and suggested that he write about Roxanne “Foxy Roxy” Pulitzer and the mischief around her divorce from her significantly older newspaper-heir husband in Palm Beach. Both claimed the other had wrecked their marriage with drugs and adultery with more or less the same people, including the wife of the heir to the Kleenex fortune.
It was, as I explained to Hunter, a media story and a chance to write about tabloid journalism—which I suggested was as much a part of the American Dream as Las Vegas. And, of course, he would have to stay at the Breakers, the historic luxury hotel, to get the true feel of Palm Beach.
When I told Jann I wanted to send Hunter, he said sure, go ahead, try, but it would never happen. The next day I got a memo from him about how I was wasting my time. “Hunter won’t do the work,” Jann wrote. “You’ll see!”
I sent Hunter a copy of Jann’s memo.
The piece ran after I left for Newsweek, shepherded by David Rosenthal, who replaced me (and would later support Hunter with book advances many times when he was running Simon & Schuster). The headline was “A Dog Took My Place” and eight thousand words later the epilogue was as high-riding as anything Hunter ever wrote:
I am living the Palm Beach life now, trying to get the feel of it: royal palms and raw silk, cruising the beach at dawn in a red Chrysler convertible with George Shearing on the radio and a head full of bogus cocaine and two beautiful lesbians in the front seat beside me, telling jokes to each other in French…
We are on our way to an orgy.
When I called Hunter to congratulate him on the piece, he sounded strong and strangely sober. “I sent that fucking memo back to Jann with my expenses,” he said.
−ENDIT−
Gonzo (455)
THERE ARE CONFLICTING STORIES about the first use of the word gonzo to describe Hunter’s journalism but all credit Bill Cardoso. Maybe it was on the press bus during the 1968 New Hampshire primaries, maybe it was in a letter praising Hunter’s 1970 Kentucky Derby piece, maybe it was just one night in a bar, but it was definitely Cardoso who used gonzo first, and he and Hunter agreed on that. It came to mean more than the lack of objectivity in the amped-up first-person voice that Hunter’s work personified, but Cardoso would say only that he meant the word scatologically—as in crazy shit—and that he had used it many times before he applied it to Hunter’s journalism.
Cardoso worked for the Other Bob Sherrill during the last two months LA was alive. He was getting back into journalism after owning a jazz club in the Canary Islands but was already famously the most unfamous practitioner of the New Journalism, among the New Journalists. I wish that sentence was as sharp as it is true in the way Cardoso wrote that the Tournament of Roses Parade was “the meeting ground of Babbitt and Costello.”
Cardoso and the journalist and promoter Harold Conrad painted layers of polish on the word hipster—or, as Cardoso sometimes put it when describing himself, wordhipster. Conrad was less unfamous, since his friend Budd Schulberg had based the cynical fight press agent in The Harder They Fall on him, and Humphrey Bogart had played him in the movie. Harold wrote what used to be called a “Broadway column” for the New York Mirror, and the masters of the form, Damon Runyon and Walter Winchell, both wrote about Harold—mostly about his nights out with the gangster Bugsy Siegel. Conrad introduced Cardoso, Thompson, George Plimpton and Norman Mailer to Muhammad Ali, and put them in ringside seats. His idea was that if you get important journalists to cover the fights, the rest takes care of itself—especially after a toke or two.
You could ask Cardoso about that if he were still around, calling Conrad his main man for supplying all the bangi-bangi at the Muhammad Ali–George Foreman fight in 1974 in Zaire. Bangi, of course, translating from the Swahili as weed, or marijuana. With Cardoso gone since 2006, Bill Murray is probably the best authority left on Conrad. I assigned Conrad a cover story on Murray for Rolling Stone and they got to know each other. Bill’s still got the classic bar furniture from Harold’s place on West Seventy-second Street in his house at Snedens Landing. “I used to think I was sort of hip before I met this Harold Conrad” is what he said at Conrad’s wake.
−ENDIT−
Dark Nights (1,223)
SNEDENS LANDING, SOME TWELVE MILES UP the Hudson River from
Manhattan, is rich and discreet, with beautiful old trees. Celebrities and publishers and some writers lived there, but not writers I knew. The New Yorker writer Calvin Tomkins lived there and had written Living Well Is the Best Revenge, about the expatriate glamour couple of the 1920s, Gerald and Sara Murphy, who had made their home there into the 1960s. Over the years other “colonists” included Noël Coward and Ethel Barrymore, and later Orson Welles and Vivien Leigh and on and on. Many of the houses in Snedens had names like the Red Barn, Pirate’s Lair and, my favorite, Ding Dong—suggesting a wild-ass Brigadoon. The Ding Dong House belonged to Margot Kidder after she moved from Montana via L.A., when she was burning through what she called her “Lois Lane money.”
Margot loved writers and writing and politics and had started her memoir. Bill Murray was a neighbor. So was Mikhail Baryshnikov, whom her Montana friends called “that toe dancer.” Her best friend, Rosie Shuster, who had launched Saturday Night Live with her first husband, Lorne Michaels, married the painter John Alexander on Margot’s sloping lawn with summer light bouncing off the Hudson. It was Brigadoon with CAA on hold on Line 2. But there were dark times, too.
—
ONE WINTER NIGHT I was seated across from a former lover of Margot’s, the ex–Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau, whom she had just started seeing again. William and Rose Styron were on either side of Pierre. Nation editor Victor Navasky was there too, with his wife, Annie. I met them all for the first time that night. Margot looked fresh and happy, eager as always for her friends to like one another. She knew more people from different directions than you’d expect from a movie star—a circumstance she mocked the more complicated her celebrity got for her. “Real life is more important” is what she would say when fans asked her what it was like to kiss Superman.
That night at the Ding Dong House, she started the dinner with a toast to Pierre and the declaration that the night would be “all politics and books, no show business.” Everyone seemed to have a lot to say about both, except Styron, who said he was only allowed to drink wine these days, no more of the hard stuff, and then glanced from face to face around the table. He was handsome still, and thought by many to be America’s greatest working writer. But that night, at that table, he seemed to smolder. This was five years before he wrote about his crippling depression in his “Darkness Visible” piece for Vanity Fair.
It was a long drive down from Roxbury, Connecticut, for the Styrons, and I wondered about that as the conversation rolled around the table, mostly about politics, but also some jokes about the cravat Pierre was wearing. At one point Pierre got up and played the sommelier, complete with towel over his forearm. Margot’s various ex-boyfriends and husbands were also discussed, with Tom McGuane as the narcissistic but brilliant centerpiece. I knew Styron had helped McGuane when he was first trying to get published and that McGuane loved Styron’s work, and I said that. Styron didn’t seem to hear and I went on to say something flattering about Styron’s first novel, Lie Down in Darkness, being important to McGuane. No response.
Margot and Rose were doing most of the talking, anyway. I kept glancing at Styron, who wouldn’t look directly at any of us. At some point Pierre must have decided to take charge and, after answering Rose’s question about the poetry of politics or some such, he turned to speak directly to Bill. I never saw anyone ask a more poorly timed question with better intentions.
“Can you tell us, Bill, about what you’re working on? How is it going?”
“I want to leave,” Styron said. “I’m sorry.”
The Styrons left right away. It was a long drive home, Rose explained. Margot took this hard, and her mood dropped. The plan must have been for the Styrons to spend the night, but there was something more. The rest of us, except Pierre, left shortly after, saying good-bye to Margot shivering on her cold porch.
—
MARGOT HAD BEEN RICHARD BRAUTIGAN’S Montana neighbor when he killed himself with his .44 Magnum back in California in the large, old house he had bought in Bolinas before he started spending time in Livingston. His body was not discovered for a month. I had run a short piece of Richard’s in the first issue of Outside and knew him well enough in Livingston to hear the story circulated among his friends that he’d left a suicide note that read, “Messy, isn’t it?”
The story was apocryphal, and not funny when you thought about it. Not discovered for a month. Drinking and loneliness were the mix of Richard’s depression, as they were for many writers, but until Styron’s Darkness Visible, few wrote about it. Styron called alcohol an invaluable senior partner of my intellect, besides being a friend whose ministrations I sought daily—sought also, I now see, as a means to calm the anxiety and incipient dread that I had hidden away for so long somewhere in the dungeons of my spirit.
Maybe it is in those dungeons that creativity rages. Maybe we all catch glimpses of it many times without recognizing what we are seeing.
—
I HADN’T SEEN MARGOT in years when, at a stoplight in Livingston on a trip back to Montana, she pulled up next to me in an old SUV. It was the Fourth of July and a parade was planned for later that day. She had moved back to be near her daughter and grandchildren, and bought a big, solid house in town. She had climbed out of her own bipolar hell after landing, disoriented and terrified, in a stranger’s backyard in L.A. Now she was getting acting jobs again and devoting herself to politics, which explained, sort of, why she was made up in a strange oxidized green color and had an oversized tiara on her head. I didn’t recognize her.
“It’s me—Margie,” she said, leaning out her window.
“Who are you supposed to be?” I asked, when I saw that it was her.
“The Statue of Liberty.”
She was on her way to a political rally she had organized, where thirty-five other women in similar costume were waiting for her to lead them in the parade—replete with suffragette banners that read “Montana Women for Peace,” “Montana Women for Gay Rights,” “Montana Women for the Environment,” “Montana Women for Equal Pay for Women,” “Montana Women for…,” etc., etc., etc. Life was good, she said, and that I should come over to her house later, which I did.
We sat in her backyard talking about old friends, writers most of them, crazy times—one insane night in Key West with McGuane and Hunter competing to take the most drugs. Crazier times. We knew who was already dead, suicide an answer to questions suffered in what Styron had called depression’s dark wood. At one point we were almost making a list…
“Everyone we knew then had that in them,” she said.
−ENDIT−
Bibliomemoir (338)
ANOTHER EDITOR, A RIVAL OF MINE with a fondness for hypocrisy, once said there was nothing worse than a truthless writer, but I didn’t know any. I knew some whose writing had too much style and not enough story, but their lives were never like that. The writers I knew made their lives more interesting just by being writers—which is not the same as writing, but that divergence leads to nasty distinctions good writers never care about anyway. Let’s just acknowledge that writing is hard so it is okay to be a little tortured, and some writers are. It can all go very dark, but there is no sweeter validation than getting published for the first time. I sometimes reminded writers of that.
Good editors, like doctors, develop a bedside manner. My editing was full of questions— all the same question, really. What is the story? What’s the point of it? What do these sentences mean? Do they mean what you want them to mean? What if I told you they read like walk-ons in a Pirandello play?
To diagnose is an excellent verb for editors to keep in mind. But what are you trying to say? is not always an easy question, and the story isn’t always what the writer says it is. I thought often about what it was like to read the writers I knew best, how direct their prose seemed and how the work spoke for itself, yet that made them even more mysterious. It was that way with all of the writers whose work I loved.
Bibliomemoir is a word I never used, never w
rote until this sentence. It was defined beautifully by Joyce Carol Oates as “a subspecies of literature combining criticism and biography with the intimate, confessional tone of autobiography.” Put another way, it is defining or giving meaning to a life through reading, and then writing about that reading. There is probably a seam between the reading and the living, but as an editor I could never find it.
−ENDIT−
II
One of the basic rules of Esquire was, if you’re going to write about a bear, bring on the bear!
—BYRON DOBELL, Esquire EDITOR
Ambition (977)
WHEN I DIDN’T STAY OUT LATE I went to bed early but would wake in the middle of the night thinking about my next issue. It wasn’t dread, but the ideas seemed relentless and exhausting. This was a problem until I forced myself to make notes.
There is science related to this, with studies supporting a theory of creative insomnia. I have no problem correlating creativity with sleep disturbance, but for editors I think the insomnia is a marker for ambition. They need to succeed so badly that all they can think about are ways to make their magazines better or at least fuck over a rival or two. I told myself that while timid editors would be seeing their lack of confidence blooming into futility in the glow of their digital alarms, I would get up and write something down, working simultaneously with the exhilaration of being too early and the fear of being too late. No wonder I couldn’t sleep.
The Accidental Life Page 12