Which Lie Did I Tell?: More Adventures in the Screen Trade

by William Goldman

Get started on a story. The fucker hadn't even begun, hadn't given it a thought. And each week when he got his A and I got my C, he couldn't help it, he would fight it, he apologized for his behavior--but he would just get helpless with laughter.

  I took an essay-writing course. The half-dozen most brilliant girls at Oberlin--no place has more brilliant girls than Oberlin--and I was the class idiot. (I am not making this shit up.)

  The teacher, wonderful Professor Roellinger, would always start with me. And these genius girls would sit there, nodding silently. Then Roellinger would say, "Who can help Bill out on this?"

  And they would all raise their brilliant little hands.

  And they were so nice. "That's some of your best work," they would assure me, "but perhaps it would make more sense, Bill, if you put your first point before your second point instead of after."

  I took a creative writing course at Northwestern one summer. Worst grade in the class. Again. No sign of talent. Again.

  And I so wanted to write. I had these stories and I wanted to tell them and I was telling them but everybody turned away.

  I graduate Oberlin in '52, go into the Army, am sent to the Pentagon by mistake. (Since I am clearly as inept as I was back in essay-writing class, getting stuff out of order, I will now make sense of that last sentence.)

  It is the fall of 1952, and I am at Camp Breckinridge, Kentucky, doing basic training. Basic training in those days was sixteen weeks' duration, the first eight military stuff--marching, firing, pulling pins, etc.--and the last eight a speciality.

  Since I could type, I was sent, with gasping clarity, to clerical school, along, that same day, with six other guys. All of us college grads, none of us dumb. Immediately we are the teachers in the school.

  The captain in charge of the clerical school knew one thing only: God had, for some reason, smiled on him. Because he was a crazed golfer and he realized that for the next twenty-two months--the remainder of our military commitment--he could do nothing but work on his golf game.

  We seven could run the school without his presence.

  How to keep us, though. Easy. He wrote a letter to the Pentagon, requesting that we be assigned to his clerical school until discharge. We were, he wrote, these fabulous, brilliant, and hardworking privates. The best.

  The Pentagon got his letter and this was their reply: Fuck you. If these seven guys are as brilliant and fabulous, not to mention hardworking, as you say, we want them here. Great jobs await them here.

  His request denied, his heart broken, the captain watched us run his place for the weeks remaining. And then, sob, he was alone again with the usual run of recruits one got in those days.

  And we were sent to the Pentagon?

  We were and we weren't.

  During World War II, soldiers were sent overseas direct from basic training. I think the five Sullivan brothers--all killed aboard ship without a chance to say goodbye to their loved ones--were the reason things changed.

  At any rate, all soldiers, at least in 1952, were given two weeks' leave after basic, before reporting. The seven of us went home, said our goodbyes to our families, then joined up again in Washington, a fortnight later, all of us wondering what our "great jobs" would be.

  We never found out. Because during the two weeks that we were home the jobs were filled by others. So there we were, in Washington, with no jobs. What was the Army going to do with us?

  We found out later that day--send us to Korea. They were going to ship our asses out immediately. On the next troop ship leaving for Korea.

  Which never came.

  The Korean War was winding down, there was no more use for us there. (We did not know this at the time, of course. The idea of getting "sent over" lingered with us. Providing not good thoughts. All those terrifying possibilities.)

  So there we were, at the Pentagon, with twenty months to get through and no job. What we did not know was that to the ordinary Pentagon civilian boss, we were gold. The more people you have under you, the more power you have and the higher your rating.

  We were sent to the basement. Where we did a lot of reading at our desks. And had an amazing number of rubber-band fights. This sounds childish, I suppose--suppose shit, it was incredibly childish--but we were going crazy from boredom. We got amazingly accurate with rubber bands and were the only office in Pentagon history--we are talking of the highlight of my military career, understand--that was refused a request for additional rubber bands.

  Those twenty months were an amazing waste for us all. I remember once being given an entire sixty-page (or so) booklet containing abbreviations for every job title in the military. My job: improve them as I retyped them. I actually made the front page of The Washington Post when they discovered that one of my abbreviations had more letters in it than the job title it was abbreviating.

  Another assignment was to copy an entire document of considerable length, and you must understand this, I am a fast typist but not an accurate one, and it took me weeks to do what my lady boss wanted, and when I finally finally was done, I gave it to her and she took it with two fingers and right in front of me dumped it in the wastebasket.

  At night, after supper, I went back to the Pentagon, alone, went into my office, now empty, and night after night wrote my stories. I don't know how many, but I do know this--none of them were accepted by any of the magazines I sent them to.

  The Army got rid of me in September '54--Corporal William Goldman if you please--and I went back to Highland Park, Illinois, for a couple of days before starting grad school at Columbia.

  That first night home the phone rang and it was a friend who was about to get discharged from nearby Fort Sheridan. "Do you want to see Gunga Din?" he said.

  I always want to see Gunga Din. It is, with no doubt whatsoever, the greatest movie ever made. And only an idiot (or a critic) would argue that point. Sure, I said, where?

  "It's playing here on post."

  Just tell me when, and I'm there, I told him.

  "One problem," he explained. "You've got to be a soldier to get in." And that, sports fans, is how I spent my first civilian night--getting illegally back into my corporal's uniform, feeling guilty as shit, and terrified, lying my way back onto an Army base to see that joyous film.

  Great as ever.

  Columbia began terribly. My Oberlin record was so pathetic I could not get accepted on merit.

  So dear departed friend Douglas Moore, the head of the Columbia Music Department, used his powers and I was accepted.

  Registration day will always stay with me. Columbia was a big university, Oberlin was a small college. I had never seen so many students as that first morning. I went to the English Department, was given a form that had to be initialed by the professors whose classes I was taking, then bring the form back for authentication.

  Hours and hours of standing in lines, getting some courses, not getting others, then finally, kind of triumphant, mid-afternoon, back to the English Department, where I gave the form to the secretary of the department. She looked at it--and boy is this etched in acid in my memory--said this: "But this is the wrong form."

  I tried to explain: she had given it to me.

  Did not faze her. "You'll have to do it all over again" was her reply, ripping it up, handing me another with this hate-filled smile. "You don't mind doing that, do you, Mr. Goldman? After all, you're lucky to be here."

  As I type this I realize something--she kind of looked like Linda Tripp.

  I studied my ass off, was tops in my class again, first time since eighth grade. I went on writing my stories during my two Columbia years--got a master's with honors, had the hours for a doctorate--got one job offer--Duluth University, teaching English comp, I think, for $3,200 a year.

  But I didn't want to teach in Duluth. And I didn't want to go back to Chicago and get some job writing copy at an ad agency. I knew if I did I would die of alcohol.

  Because I wanted to tell my stories.

  I had over a hundred rejection sl
ips by then. Never even one scrawled note of encouragement from some kind editor. It was getting harder for me to go to my desk. Confidence is everything and mine was going, going so fast.

  So--and I don't know where the madness came from--in despair, twenty-four years old, a total failure in life, I went back home to Highland Park and, in my small bedroom, on the twenty-fifth of June, 1956, I sat down at my desk and started typing.

  I had no idea what I was about to write, but I knew I had to write something, and so, for three weeks, I wrote, just sitting there, and this thing burst out of me, and I cannot tell you how strange that was, since I had never in my life been even on a this page before, and suddenly there I was on this page, and then this page, and what country I was visiting I had no idea, or how I got there, or was I going to get out alive.

  As I write this, I can still see myself lying in bed those nights, having no idea what I was going to type the next day, but knowing I had to get something down--I left my body those nights, I was floating on the ceiling, looking down at the me thrashing and wondering what tomorrow could bring.

  On July 14th, it was done. It had a title: The Temple of Gold (from the climb Gunga Din does to save everybody, never mind that he gets shot to death in the process, never mind that he knew it was going to happen).

  So there I was with this 187-page thing, this heffalump, but what do you do next? What I did was this: contact a guy I had met in the Army who had met an agent once.

  So off The Temple of Gold went to this agent, Joe McCrindle, who liked it, and who sent it off to a friend who was an editor at Knopf, who liked it too.

  The acceptance call totally paralyzed me.

  I was living on West Seventy-second Street in New York then, with John Kander and my brother, Jim, now dead, who wrote a wonderful musical, Follies, and a glorious play, The Lion in Winter.

  Kander was out when the call came but he was back a little later and I told him and he was, of course, stunned and pleased and he asked who I had called to tell.

  Nobody, was my answer. I was frozen.

  So for the next, I don't know, hour, maybe more, Kander would call friends and say, "Billy's novel was taken by Knopf and he wanted you to know," and then he would hand me the phone and I would stum-ble through a few words, then Kander would take the phone back and explain that I was not too up for talking at the moment, and on he went to the next.

  I know how strange this all must seem to you, and I did not know this then, but I was terrified of telling my favored brother, almost five years older, because he was the one who was programmed to succeed, but his writing career was still on hold then, no one wanted his plays then, but they would, that was the deal, and I was supposed to fail. It was like Greek crime for me to have done what I so unforgivably did: surpass my brother.

  But running stride for stride was this: I knew I was a fraud.

  And sooner or later, there was going to be a reckoning, and when it happened, I was going to suffer for my sins.

  I think, in a way, I decided to forestall that punishment by working--if I could just write enough, the Fates might never catch up with me. I decided a novel a year would be fair, since I didn't have a real job. All I did was go to the movies.

  And the next year I wrote Your Turn to Curtsy, My Turn to Bow--I am not much at titles, but this was my favorite, still holds pride of place. Two years later came Soldier in the Rain (I was involved in the theater is the reason it took so long--I was doctoring my first show on Broadway).

  I had two original shows on Broadway the next year--not for long, alas, but the amount of time making things happen is the same, hit or flop. Boys and Girls Together came out in 1964, but so did No Way to Treat a Lady so I was still hustling, doing my best to keep the Fates from destroying me. Movies were starting to take up some time now too.

  Now, dear reader, we are back at Princeton, I am a teacher and this terrible thing happens--I cannot write a novel. I wasn't blocked, as I had been when I was halfway through Boys and Girls Together. What happened was I became obsessed with my Princeton job.

  A very few teachers had changed my life, had been so crucial and glorious for me, so I wanted to be the best teacher these Princeton kids ever had.

  I wanted them to think of me as I thought of Miss MacMartin and Mr. Hamill, who got me through high school, and Mr. Murray at Oberlin and Miss Rogelski in second grade. I wanted the college kids to say, when they were full of sleep, "I had this writing guy at Princeton, and we used to talk--in seminar--and God, he was wonderful, he came at such a great time in my life."

  All I wanted, not much, was to be remembered forever.

  Well, there wasn't time for my own writing. I cared only about them. I started teaching in early fall, and I had my office, of course, and I went there some, to read the paper mostly, and the teaching got more and more exciting for me.

  Suddenly, then, Christmas vacation.

  And it had been three years since I'd written any fiction. Other stuff, sure, but in my heart I'm a novelist who happens to write screenplays--and at that moment I realized this: I had no novel pressing inside me. But I had to write something or the Fates would begin to close in.

  So in a state of (I suppose) even more than the usual panic, I decided to try something I had never written before: an original screenplay.

  When I begin a piece of writing, I know a lot but not enough. I know the pulse that makes me want to attempt whatever the piece is, article, novel, story, screenplay. (I just finished an article for the Sunday Daily News--this is early April of '99--about what is happening with my beloved Knicks this year. And what is happening is that the beat writers are trying to save the job of the inadequate head coach, Jeff Van Gundy. Their lack of truth-telling has driven me nuts this year--and that rage is what made me write the piece, what accompanied me every second I was thinking about it or writing it.)

  I had no such rage when I sat down in my Princeton University office to tell Butch and Sundance's story. What I had was this: they moved me. These two guys, surviving for years together, and becoming legends a second time. Famous outlaws who never killed, who traveled with a beautiful young woman, who were remarkably popular with the ordinary people of their time--well, if I could get that down, maybe I'd have something.

  Butch had been, in the Old West, one of the two legendary figures while still alive, the other being Jesse James. And then, in eight years of life in South America, Butch and Sundance became the Banditos Yanquis, legends again.

  You have to know this about me now: I am moved more by stupid courage than anything else on earth. Have no idea why. But it has been with me for a very long time. Three examples from my childhood.

  When I was probably seven or eight, I happened to read a book titled Scarface, the Story of a Grizzly. I remember next to nothing of it, except that Scarface was the biggest grizzly around, and tough enough to take all the crap life throws at you when everybody wants you dead. But my memory is, he was decent, didn't take advantage of being the toughest one around. And in the last chapter Scarface is old, but you still don't want to mess with him, and he is walking along this narrow mountain path, when, above him, an avalanche starts. And I figured he's escaped worse, he'll make it to a safe part of the mountain path.

  But he didn't do that.

  He turned and faced the oncoming avalanche. Then he stood up and as the giant rocks came down at him, he raised his giant paws and fought them, giving as good as he got until the boulders outnumbered him, carried him over the cliff to his death.

  I remember Minnie's coming up and asking was I all right--Minnie is the woman who worked for my family and is the main reason I am still around--and I couldn't answer, couldn't do anything but sob my heart out.

  The second example is when I am about the same age and the great Gershwin musical, Porgy and Bess, came to Chicago. My family went and we sat there and if you don't know the story, it's about this cripple, Porgy, who can't walk, he gets around on this pathetic goat cart, towed by a scrawny goat,
and we're someplace in the Deep South. Porgy is hopelessly in love with Bess, a beauty but weak. Toward the end, Porgy is sent to jail (he murdered the village monster) and while he is there, Bess is wooed by a pusher, Sportin' Life, who, using drugs as a lure, steals her away, takes her to New York City, the other end of the universe as far as anyone in this town is concerned.

  Porgy gets out of jail, and I am dreading the moment when he finds out Bess is gone. I mean, cripples don't win beauties in this world, not unless they are very rich indeed, and Porgy is a beggar. So he is out of jail and I am so scared for him, his life is over, how is he going to survive his loss, and he chitchats with the villagers and then he says it--where's Bess?

  No one wants to answer but finally he finds out--Bess is gone, she is gone forever, gone to New York City.

  Silence in the theater. Then Porgy says these three amazing words:

  "Bring my goat."

  And the music gets magical and here comes the goat and Porgy gets on his cart and the whole cast is singing "Oh Lord, I'm on My Way," one of the greatest songs ever--

  --I was gone again.

  The show ends and wild applause.

  I am sobbing out of all control.

  Curtain calls, more cheers.

  You know what I'm doing.

  Now, we had very good seats, near the front, and people started to put on their coats--

  --and they cannot not notice me.

  "Is he all right?" a gentleman asks my parents. Now, they didn't know what to answer, because they had no idea if I was all right or not. Soon other grown-ups began patting my head (I remember this humiliation, oh, do I ever) and the aisles are filled and movement is slow and the only sound is me trying to muffle my crying while I was figuring out--what was going to happen to Porgy? He didn't even know where he was going, that it was so far, that it would take him to places he had no experience of, that it was going to be so awful because what if his goat died, where was he going to get the money for another, or what was he going to do when one of the wheels came off his cart?

  I cried all the way home, and we lived in the suburbs.

  Now, neither of these outbreaks are close to what happened to me when I was eight and Gunga Din came to the Alcyon. Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., are all captured with knives to their throat while these evil Indian murderers are about to slaughter the entire British garrison, who do not know they are walking into a trap.