by Nat Segaloff
Silliphant settled into a lordly residence atop Bangkok’s Natural Park Apartments. When asked, he said he made the move so he and his family could further their study of Buddhism. He also mentioned starting a film school for Thai filmmakers and had written a script about an adventurer, that, according to fellow novelist Christopher Moore, he hoped would do for Thailand what Hawaii Five-O and Magnum P.I. had done for Hawaii. [280] To those who knew him better, he added that it was the credits flap surrounding Over the Top that was the final insult. To those who knew him much, much better, he admitted that it was for tax reasons: “He told me he owed a million dollars in taxes,” said one friend, “because business people had put him in tax shelters that didn’t work. So he got out of the country.”
“I didn’t come here on a fling,” Silliphant maintained to Los Angeles Times writer Daniel Cerone, who tracked him down for an interview in 1994, “but to change my whole existence, my personality, my understanding of life, and to leave what I call the eel pit of Hollywood behind. And it feels so good to be part of the human stream and not some Hollywood big shot who worries about what table he gets at Jimmy’s and won’t let the parking attendant touch his $80,000 Mercedes. That seems so far away now. That’s not the way we’re supposed to live.” [281]
The Hollywood lifestyle may cost less in Bangkok, but it still costs. No longer able to be the romantic expatriate who could make do on a paltry book advance in Cuba in 1954, Silliphant — in his early seventies when he moved to Thailand — was disappointed when the job offers slowed down. The young people he embraced in the Yaqui days had by now taken over the industry and forgot who he was. He was even told by his new agent, “For God’s sake, don’t take in a list of everything you’ve written, nobody will believe it.”
One project did come through. In 1992, he adapted Truman Capote’s 1951 The Grass Harp for Charlie Matthau, Walter’s son, to direct. The rights had been obtained by Matthau’s colorful mother, Carol, who had been a close friend of Capote (and was believed to have been the model for Capote’s eccentric Breakfast at Tiffany’s heroine, Holly Golightly). The picture would not be released until 1995, and it became Silliphant’s last produced script, but it would be one of his favorites.
“I couldn’t pay Stirling to do a first draft based on what he would normally make, or even, for that matter, WGA scale,” Matthau said. “I was a big fan of Stirling’s and really liked him when I met him, but I figured nothing was going to come of it because I didn’t have a paycheck for him. He called me a few days later and said, ‘You know, I have a really good feeling about the project and you. I’ll write it on spec.’ I worked with him for about a year on it.” The two men communicated by fax.
The Grass Harp is a picaresque story of a young boy, Collin Fenwick (Edward Furlong), who comes to live with his two aunts — the straightlaced Verena Talbo (Sissy Spacek) and her free spirited sister, Dolly (Piper Laurie) — when his parents die. Its incidents range from the poetic to the outlandish, yet remain rooted in Capote’s strong notion of character. Set in 1930s Alabama, partly in a tree house, the script attracted a cast befitting its pedigree: Nell Carter, Charles Durning, Jack Lemmon, Mary Steenburgen, Scott Wilson, and Charlie’s father, Walter.
“Stirling had a great sense of story and he was great viscerally,” Matthau continued. “He knew what would work well on screen. Of course, he was delightful to work with — I had a great time with him — a gentleman. He was also very intelligent. He could ‘get’ these things that were ephemeral and abstract and could relate them to a story that was being told visually, and not lose the audience, and also keep the spirit and the idea that were the reasons that you fell in love with the material to begin with.”
Silliphant, in turn, expressed his confidence in young Matthau’s talent and abilities. “I must tell you,” he wrote, “that, of all the directors with whom I’ve worked over some thirty-plus years, you, without any question, have shown me the keenest story and construction sense.” [282]
While the project was still in development, Matthau asked Kirk Ellis, his classmate from the University of Southern California Cinema-Television school, to do a rewrite. “[Kirk] was working for me at the time as a story analyst,” Matthau continued. “He had some coverage of the draft that Stirling wrote and he had some good notes on it, and I said, ‘Well, why don’t you just take a crack at it?’ I think it was a nice mesh of all of their sensibilities, mostly Capote’s, but I thought Stirling was great because he’s a wonderful craftsman. He was able to make sure that there was a real story and that it didn’t just drift off into being poetic. It was an instinctual thing and sometimes when you’re developing stuff, especially from books, you can be dead wrong or dead right, and in this case it worked out.” [283] The move was enough to finance the $8 million picture, but it also meant that, in accordance with industry standards, Silliphant’s deferred writing fee would be shared with Ellis so that, instead of $600,000, he received half. [284]
Throughout this, the dream of starting a Thai-centric film industry never left his mind. He tried to make films there with Robert Ginty, a heavily credentialed theatre actor who became better known as a TV and movie action star. The two men decided to shoot an adventure film in their country in 1992. They didn’t exactly use Silliphant’s John Locke novels, the ones he had declared unfilmable. Instead, Day of Reckoning grew from his proposed Thailand-boosting TV series whose main character, “Jack O’Brien,” is an American Special Forces captain who served in ‘Nam and then moved to Thailand, became a Buddhist, and opened a travel business. All Silliphant and Ginty needed was THB 38 million (USD $1.5 million) [285], the Thai baht being the crucial part because they wanted to shoot the movie in Thailand with a Thai crew and evocative locations that revealed the sensibilities of the country and didn’t just serve as picturesque backgrounds. When they had no luck raising the money after a year of trying (“Most Thai investors would still rather fill a swamp and put up buildings than back a film,” Silliphant said bitterly), Ginty — Silliphant insisted it was without his knowledge — sold the property to Paramount and NBC where Fred Dryer, fresh from the success of his Hunter TV series, was looking for another project. Dryer and Victor Schiro were executive producers, and Ginty and Silliphant wrote the teleplay with Dryer’s input (via fax). When Dryer arrived in Thailand to shoot the picture, however, the script, said Silliphant, was vastly different from his own.
“There really was no story there before,” Dryer told Daniel Cerone. “It was about a guy who lived out on a rice barge in front of the hotel. He had a travel agency, with these slow-turning fans, and a lot of women taking care of him. He was a typical American expatriate who lives in Asia for specific womanizing reasons, and he was very sexist. It was very deprecating to the Thais. I brought in a guy who’s there because he has found a place in the world that fits him.”
Silliphant disagreed with the accusations and charged that Dryer “slashed and burned” his work: “I saw all the grace notes and textures of the writing and characterizations vanish one by one — the dialogue reduced to easy banality or to strong, silent looks; the story line pounded into an A-B-C linear form. There may still be two scenes left in the entire two-hour movie in which some hint, some faint luster of the original writing, may be sensed.”
The final picture, which cost $4 million, aired on NBC on March 7, 1994. It did not inspire a series, as was hoped. “Obviously, no word from NBC, Paramount, Dryer, et al,” Silliphant wrote after the movie aired and the Cerone article broke. “It is as though a massive non-event has just occurred, something you thought might be as disastrous as the earth abruptly becoming a black hole but which turned out to be as unnoticed as a silent (but non-deadly) fart. Only in Hollywood do people destroy each other during a fractious production, waste four million dollars and months in post-production hassling, then all on a Monday night the boil breaks. And — nothing. Well, not that it matters. Here in Bangkok, infants slept soundly in their beds. Nobody knew about Day of Reckoning and, had t
hey, they couldn’t have given a fuck less, so why should I?” [286]
The experience massively reinforced Silliphant’s image of Hollywood as an “eel pit” and stiffened his desire to establish an indigenous Thai film industry. To that end, he announced plans to write a screenplay called Forever that would be directed by the Thai director Prince Chatrichalerm Yugala. The next year, in fact, he co-wrote with, and Yugala directed, the Thai-based action picture Gunman II.
What troubled him the most, he told Cerone, was “the American insular point of view. Our refusal to learn languages. Our refusal to really look around and see this is one big world… . We are so absolutely insulated — and Hollywood, in particular. We’re like in a shell. We’re like the crab. We scuttle around on the rocks but we can’t break out of the shell to realize this is a huge world. And there are wonderful films to be made.” [287]
Life in Bangkok wasn’t just movies. As a famous ex-pat, Silliphant lived well, courtesy of “raids” that he would make to Los Angeles. He would fly there without announcing visit, make a script-doctoring deal, and flee back with money in his pocket that he never told Uncle Sam about. He downsized from his penthouse and he moved into a house, throwing parties for visiting Hollywood friends. Writer Jerry Hopkins noted one such affair where he asked several of his ex-pat friends to bring their Thai girlfriends so his Thai girlfriend would have someone to talk to. Once the women realized that they all came from different social classes, however, they refused to mingle and silence enveloped the festivities.
In Thai culture, a mistress is called a mia noi (minor wife), and Silliphant had two of them. By then, Tiana was in Vietnam shooting From Hollywood to Hanoi and editing it at DuArt in New York. She and Stirling remained married while inhabiting separate worlds. “It was a difficult time for her,” the son knew, “because she was, on the one hand, being pushed away by a husband who wanted to live his own life however he wanted to live it, and then, on the other hand, he was very much into the idea of them being husband and wife. He refused to consider a divorce, not that she pushed for it, but that she was getting, as any woman would, just kind of wondering what was up and where it was going.” [288]
Friends also reported that, despite proclaiming the spiritual, Silliphant reverted to the sybaritic life he had known in Hollywood, the one he insisted he’d left behind. To his new friends he was a king. To his old, he was distant. “He and I had plans that I would come out and visit,” recalled writer and protégé David Morrell. “The schedules were always a little strange. I sent him a letter and I got a letter back and I know Stirling’s stuff, and I swear he did not write it. It was full of all these Britishisms, and I’m sure somebody else wrote it, telling me that it wasn’t going to happen. It wasn’t in character for him, as I knew the guy.”
Explained Tiana, “He was seriously studying the Joseph Campbell documentaries. He got into Joseph Campbell. I believed he was on a spiritual quest. He said he was going to Buddhist retreats. I was editing my film in New York. He said, ‘you will heal America and Vietnam, and I am doing the Ho [Chi Minh], story. Maybe you will direct it and it will be the biggest thing in my career and I’ve got to find my spiritual side for this.’” She takes a long pause before saying, almost in a whisper, “He was preparing to die.”
It was after the 1992 Telluride festival, where her film was honored, that Tiana met playwright Christopher Hampton. Hampton, who had received a Tony nomination for his 1987 play Les Liaisons Dangereuses and the Oscar for its screenplay (as Dangerous Liaisons, 1989), was as politically savvy and as passionate about Southeast Asia as were the Silliphants. (He later adapted Graham Greene’s The Quiet American [2002], which is set in Vietnam.) Tiana introduced him to her husband in Los Angeles in 1993, where Hampton’s musical adaptation of Sunset Boulevard was in rehearsal. It was their only meeting, but it made an impression on the younger writer, who would go on to win Tonys for Sunset Boulevard (1995) and for his adaptations of Art (1997), and God of Carnage (2009). [289]
Prostate cancer is not a quick or easy death, but it is highly detectable and usually treatable if it is discovered early enough. Silliphant’s first presented as an enlarged prostate around 1976 when Tiana noticed he was getting out of bed several times a night to go to the bathroom, with no results. “We were in the house on Benedict Canyon,” she said. “He said that his brother had prostate cancer and got reamed out (was catheterized), and his father, but you never pay attention to that — an eighty-year-old guy dying of prostate. Stirling said, ‘I don’t have prostate, I’m never going for a checkup.’ I said, ‘You’ve got to.’
“We got him the best — Abe and Muriel Lipsey knew every doctor — and they got us the best urologist, a woman doctor. He went in. She said we need a biopsy. He said no. I talked him into it. Well, they did a biopsy. Then she called and said they need another one, we’re not sure. He went ballistic. He said, ‘You cut into me!’”
Before the doctor could report her findings to the Silliphants, according to Tiana, she died, and apparently left no one to take over, or even unravel, the practice. Whatever the reason, from this point on, Silliphant’s mind was closed. “After that he fled the scene and never went back to doctors again,” Tiana said. “We all went into denial. He began to hide his symptoms. He didn’t want me to know. He would sleep always turned away and said he was discovering his female side. That’s when he plotted moving to Bangkok. We had already been to Bangkok. He said the American medical system is killing me. Look at American medicine, then look at all these geezers living in Asia. He let it grow fifteen years. Stirling insisted it was bronchitis because he coughed a lot. Well, all older men cough a lot.”
It’s highly likely that he opted not to have his prostate removed because doing so would have resulted in incontinence and sexual dysfunction. He covered this by insisting that he considered this existence to be merely a transition from a past life to a future one, often telling friends, “I have come to believe that I was Thai in a previous life.”
When the pain was such that he was suffering twenty-four hours a day, he had Tiana take him to a traditional clinic in Hanoi where she translated and he received massage, acupressure, and incense. “I feel like I’m 125 years old,” he reported. “I feel feeble. I have no strength. I can’t even hold a chopstick properly. And my back is in terrible pain...what medical people call constricture [290] I had to roll out of bed, onto the floor, get onto my knees, and then do a push-up on my feet. I went to the hospital and she said I had to relax my muscles and she gave me Valium, which I took for two weeks and, when the muscles finally relaxed, it too me ten days at the end of the course of Valium to recover any kind of clarity of mind or focus of eyes. Really totally disoriented by a drug. That’s when I determined I was going to try Eastern medicine and herbal medicine and stop taking pills coming out of the United States, Belgium, and the United Kingdom.” [291]
During the ordeal, he did not tell his son that he was sick. “Like most things that were secrets of his, I heard from Mom,” young Stirling said. “I graduated high school in 1994 and started college the same year. In December of ‘94 I went to Bangkok for Christmas holiday. His health had deteriorated and my Mom was there and she was really concerned. Pretty much made him go to get x-rays or see an oncologist — it was the first time he had been to a medical doctor. He had been trying all these holistic therapies, thinking that the problem was somewhere else and diagnosing himself with his Grey’s Anatomy. She finally forced him to go in and not only was he diagnosed with cancer, but late stage cancer. The pain that he’s complaining about, the back pain, that was actually the cancer that, by that point, had eaten the cartilage away, so his spine was just grinding against each other. He was living with it because he didn’t want to — I don’t think he was keeping a secret from us. I think he was keeping a secret from himself. He genuinely believed he did not have cancer up until that time.”
Young Stirling was attending the University of California, Santa Cruz, but quickly put his life on hol
d to join his father in Bangkok. “He just kind of completely went into denial. He was pissed off. He felt he was a guinea pig of the medical establishment. He always had this kind of rebellious punk rock attitude towards the institutions and whatnot. He felt like the medical institution was corrupt and incapable of telling the truth and he felt he was guinea pig and had been de-balled by them, as he put it, and he was not going to let another gloved finger near his ass or get his balls fondled again. He refused to go onto any kind of testing or screening after that.” [292]
“You can get killed in a hospital,” Silliphant insisted. Like most of his deeply held opinions, this one was the result of research for a script, in this case a 1977 Screen Gems pilot called A Small Step Forward. “The third largest cause of death in America is doctors. It’s true. There’s cancer, heart, and doctors.” The show was to be the medical profession’s version of Police Story, the then-current series that brought new realism to cop dramas. “Doctors are human. They make mistakes; they also have been known to do things like the rest of us; they don’t know all the answers.” [293] The show was never produced, but Silliphant’s steeping himself in statistics may have been enough to put him off treatment.
Having refused prostate removal, his only remaining options were chemistry, radiation, and blood augmentation. He chose them all, but, by late 1995, it was clear that the disease was terminal. “The cancer never, never lets you forget it’s in there doing its thing,” Silliphant wrote from Bangkok. “I wake up one morning and test for pain. I roll over slowly and sit up in bed. Jesus, not dizzy this morning! Great! Then I get up and I feel a stab in the rib at the 10th. level. No, ho, ho, old friend, I say, there you are! Another morning — no pain. I’m planning on going back in next month and taking some more radiation, once more at that 10th. level where the initial damage was the worst, and also in the femur and lower spine. This is a kind of holding action. It doesn’t cure anything, but it does help relieve the pain.” [294]