Ross MacDonald

by Tom Nolan

  So while he thanked his publisher for his “thoughtful and friendly warning that I may be mining a dwindling vein,” Millar wasn’t about to abandon mysteries on the dubious advice of the mercurial Alfred Knopf. Of course he admired Knopf enormously, Millar told von Auw, and well knew his imprint’s value; but he wasn’t sure the publisher was 100 percent in his corner. Millar was still sore from the pain Knopf put him through with Pocket Books. “If [the new book] has enough success to change his attitude to my work in an up-beat direction,” Millar wrote his agent, “that will solve my problem.” But Millar thought Knopf had real problems of his own: “I know this because Margaret who never kids me regards Alfred as a troubled and a troubling man.”

  Ray Bond, his old Dodd, Mead editor, had been in touch with Millar. After apologizing for his “stupidity” in turning down Blue City, Bond floated the idea of the author doing more “Kenneth Millar” books for Dodd, Mead. This scheme appealed greatly to Millar. But the task at hand was seeing the new Archer into Knopf print.

  Millar submitted it with the title The Dying Animal, which Knopf rejected as unattractive. Someone at the firm made a list of scarcely more appealing suggestions: Skull Crasher, Cut the Throat Slowly, My Gun Is Me, The Dead Don’t Cry, The Hardboiled Angel, A Gun for Lew Archer, Kill Hard!, A Doll for the Butcher, Slaughterhouse, The Blood Pit, Blood on My Knuckles, Blood on the Velvet, The Naked Kill, His Head in the Gutter, A Fist in the Guts, and A Handful of Guts. Knopf spared his author this Spillanesque litany, suggesting only The Wrong Way Out. Millar countered with something he thought possessed “wit, impact, and the all-important element of class”: The Barbarous Coast. “Agreed,” said Knopf.

  With Coast, Millar put final distance between his pseudonymous self and the prolific John D. MacDonald. Millar suggested Coast be bylined “J. Ross Macdonald,” in transition toward an eventual “Ross Macdonald”; but Knopf said they should take the bull by the horns and go straight to “Ross Macdonald” now. Millar said yes. With his agent he celebrated “the dissolution of my marriage of inconvenience to John D., whose writing fails to improve with time, I’m afraid.” This twelfth book—“my most important,” he was certain—would bear the name Millar signed to his work for the rest of his life. The new byline would happen to coincide with events that would change both Millar and Macdonald forever.

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  My imaginative identification with the outcast children of nineteenth-century English society enlarged my sympathies and incidentally prepared them for a world which doesn’t change as much as we like to think. Children are still being deprived, in India, in the Central Valley, and in the lower depths of our own city.

  —Ken Millar, Santa Barbara Library talk, 1956

  That made me think of a half-built life—and of my parents. I was mad when I thought they did not show me how to build my life. . . . I was mad at being forced to grow up—without help—I tried . . . but I didn’t do well.

  —Linda Millar, Rorschach test reaction, 1956

  As time passed and new books took their attention, the Millars forgot about their idea of moving away from Santa Barbara. Linda seemed happier at school now, and she loved the Ford Tudor. At first she was a careful driver, but early in 1956 she started speeding. She was cited by the Highway Patrol for running a stop sign and for not carrying her license. When Millar went with her to the Santa Barbara Probation Department, she was let off with a reprimand.

  Her father always defended Linda; his friends feared he idealized his daughter. For instance, he was proud that she never lied to him, but librarian John Smith knew this was not the case: when he caught Linda smoking, she begged him not to tell her folks. Linda assured her parents that she didn’t drink—but she bragged of her hangovers to a family friend’s daughter and said she snuck vodka out of the house or bought it at a grocery store that sold liquor to teens.

  Millar often blew up at his daughter about the poor company she kept, and how it would hurt her reputation. He didn’t know the half of it: Linda secretly met boys he’d forbidden her to date and had sex with them. Al Stump sensed enough about what went on to ban his own daughter from seeing Linda, he said: “We knew what Linda was up to, sneaking out the back window at night, running around with these kids who only wanted one thing. And then drugs were just starting to come in, dope and all. I had to tell Ken his daughter wasn’t the little angel he thought she was. He didn’t like it a bit, and it took him a long time to forgive me. Eventually he took it seriously, I guess, and tried to straighten her out, but maybe by then it was too late.”

  Despite what his friends thought, Millar was concerned about Linda in all sorts of ways. He was saddened by the cheap look she affected (short haircut, long fingernails, heavy makeup) trying “to be loved on any terms, by anyone.” He knew her bad behavior, whatever it was, was in angry rebellion against her parents, especially him. Her long ocean swims were another cause for alarm. It pained and grieved him to see what was happening with Linda. Badly wanting a boyfriend, she got involved with oddballs: an overweight misfit who fastened on her for support, then rejected her nastily when she wouldn’t marry him; effeminate fellows who weren’t much use to her; car-crazy kids who encouraged her recklessness; a handsome lady-killer who dropped her after one date. Meanwhile no one suitable asked her to the school dance, and her bid to join a “Y” club was ignored. It all added up, Millar feared, to a crushing emptiness.

  He tried his best to be a good father and a good husband, but there were problems. The roles sometimes seemed contradictory. Maggie had a need for “a jealous and exclusive love,” and he thought his wife hypersensitive to “the fairly normal incestuous content in the father-daughter relationship.” On the other hand, Linda was unhealthily aware of her parents’ sex life, and jealous of it. “It is hard to know,” Millar wrote, “where normality ends.”

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  In February 1956 the Millars took a week’s break from work and school for a vacation that turned memorably awful. At an out-of-state snow resort, Linda got angry and afraid at her first try on skis. A ride on a ski lift had her weeping with fright. Their last night at the resort, her parents allowed Linda to go out alone; when she came back wearing someone else’s coat, her father accused her of drinking and slapped her. Crying, she ran barefoot into the snow. Driving home the next day, Millar let her take the wheel on the desert highway to California, and Linda speeded into a dust storm. They stopped in Anaheim at the recently opened Disneyland, where Linda gleefully went on Mister Toad’s Wild Ride twice, which (given its emphasis on out-of-control driving) alarmed her father. Millar was appalled by the amusement park’s “organized childishness and emptiness” and felt his daughter must be disappointed too in the banality this culture expected young people to settle for. The family drove to Long Beach for an overnight visit with relatives of Margaret’s, where Linda went for Cokes with a sixteen-year-old boy cousin; they didn’t get back until 1 A.M. Millar, who’d been out searching for her, lectured his daughter angrily about her indiscreet and dangerous behavior. Nevertheless Millar insisted to friends the vacation had been “most successful” and immediately made plans for another such trip.

  Meanwhile Linda’s big and little problems mixed together in an adolescent jumble. She and her parents were highly strung individuals unable to coexist in their pressure cooker of a family. Linda was mad at her father and mother for not helping her put life together. She said she hated them, but she craved their attention. She did forbidden things to get noticed. She hung around with “bums” so she could feel superior. Her phony front got mixed up with her real self, until she couldn’t tell which was which. She didn’t feel she had control of the part of herself that did things her father said not to: the Linda who didn’t give a damn. She couldn’t imagine a future where things turned out well. She thought about running her car into a train. She kept drinking.

  The stage, as Freud or Sophocles or Millar might say, was set for tragedy.

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  “It isn’t true that there’s no such thing as bad publicity.”

  —Kenneth Millar, “Find the Woman,” 1946

  “I have only one daughter, Mr. Archer, only the one child. It was my duty to defend her, as best I could.”

  “Defend her from what?”

  “From shame, from the police, from prison.”

  —John Ross Macdonald, “Gone Girl,” 1953

  At 5:30 P.M. Thursday, February 23, 1956, a girlfriend of Linda’s whom the Millars trusted phoned and asked if Linda could come to her house and play cards. The Millars said yes, if Linda’s chores and homework were finished. After doing the dishes and feeding the three dogs, Linda drove away from Cliff Drive in the green Ford Tudor. It was six o’clock, and a light rain was falling.

  She’d told her friend to expect her at seven. At ten to seven the friend got a call from Linda saying she’d be late, she “had some business to take care of.” Linda never made it to her friend’s.

  It had stopped raining at seven-thirty, but the road was still slick as the Millar Ford drove past the intersection of Alisos and the oddly named Indio Muerto, where the streets merged in a curve near Highway 101. There were no sidewalks on Alisos (something residents had complained of), and the lighting was poor. Three thirteen-year-old boys, eighth-grade students from Our Lady of Guadalupe, were walking south on Alisos in the dark after leaving a dinner celebrating their school’s victory in a basketball tournament. The boys ate popcorn from a paper sack as they strode on the road shoulder or maybe in the street, since the dirt shoulder was muddy from the rain. They didn’t hear or see the Ford as it came up behind them. Two boys were struck and thrown seventy feet. The Ford, screeching brakes, rammed a concrete retaining wall, then sped away, leaving a churn of skid marks. The third boy, who’d only been grazed, ran for help.

  Less than five minutes later, at the junction of Cota and Laguna Streets a few miles away, the same Ford with Linda Millar at the wheel slammed the rear of a Buick stopped with parking lights on. The Buick and its male occupant were knocked more than sixty feet. The Ford rolled left and onto its roof, then came to rest on its right side.

  A youngster burst into the nearby Mom’s Italian Village restaurant where a Safety Council dinner was being held and shouted there’d been an accident. One man there hurried out and found Linda Millar sitting on a curb, weeping and screaming. He tried to console her, saying this could have happened to anyone. “Yes,” Linda said, “but Goddamn, what will I tell my parents?”

  A teenaged bystander fetched a blanket from his house and put it around Linda’s shoulders. He sat next to her and tried to calm her. “God damn,” she repeated, “what will I tell my folks?” Several times she asked was the Buick’s driver all right, was he walking around. (He was.) Once she tried to break away, saying she was going to kill herself. The boy put his arms around her and held her. Linda was sobbing hysterically when patrolmen arrived. The teenager rode with her in the police car that took her to Cottage Hospital. On the way, Linda tried to open the squad car door and jump out. Again the boy restrained her.

  She got to Cottage at seven-forty. A few minutes later, the two victims from Alisos Street were brought in. The surgeon on duty certified one thirteen-year-old dead on arrival. The same doctor briefly examined a loudly weeping Linda Millar. He gave her Luminal to quiet her, then went to attend the second thirteen-year-old, who seemed to have a concussion and a fractured leg. X rays were ordered, and the boy was admitted to the hospital. The surgeon then looked at Linda more thoroughly. Her injuries were minor, but she kept saying, “It was all my fault.” The doctor asked, “What was?” “The car,” she said. “It’s all smashed.” Don’t worry about the car, the doctor told her; you’re lucky to be alive. But until the Luminal took effect, Linda talked on and on about the shame she was going to bring her family. By then Millar was at the hospital, with Margaret’s sister. At nine o’clock Linda was released to their care.

  That night’s TV and radio news told of a statewide alarm issued for “the hit-run killer” who’d fled the scene of the fatal Alisos Street accident. Santa Barbara police stopped and inspected over seventy-five automobiles. Gas station and garage operators were told to be on the lookout for a late-model, metallic-green car with damaged right front fender and bumper. Privately, authorities thought the car they sought was already found.

  A pair of cops came to the Cliff Drive house Friday afternoon with Santa Barbara D.A. Vern Thomas, who knew Ken and Margaret Millar well from their frequent attendance at the courthouse. With her parents present, Thomas advised Linda Millar of her rights and asked what she’d done Thursday evening. Linda said after leaving the house she’d driven around aimlessly for ninety minutes, then crashed into the Buick. She said she’d been alone the whole time and denied being on Alisos Street. Thomas pressed her: Did she think a person involved in an incident in which a boy was killed and another injured should as an act of good citizenship stop and render assistance? Linda said they certainly should. Thomas asked directly if she’d been involved in the Alisos collision or had knowledge of it. Linda said no. The police impounded the Millars’ Ford Tudor.

  The front-page headline of Friday afternoon’s News-Press read, “Police Have Suspect Car in Hit-Run Death of Boy.” The car owner’s identity was withheld pending further investigation, the paper said. The Alisos accident was the lead story in Saturday’s News-Press too, under the banner headline “Expert Examining Hit-Run Vehicle.” Called specially to Santa Barbara to inspect the car was the most famous police chemist in the country: Ray Pinker, the same “test-tube detective” who’d helped Millar with his hit-run research and who played a cameo part in Meet Me at the Morgue.

  Serious trouble had found the Millars. They retained Harris Seed as Linda’s lawyer; he called in John Westwick, an experienced criminal attorney, to assist.

  By Saturday, Pinker had positively matched paint particles from the concrete wall at Alisos with paint from the Millar Ford’s bumper and headlight rim. He also matched a fabric pattern mark embedded in the grime of the Ford’s bumper guard with the gray trousers worn by the boy who had died. A warrant was issued late Saturday night for Linda Millar’s arrest. Police came to Cliff Drive to serve it. Millar told the officers Linda was sedated, under a doctor’s care. He promised to bring her to the police station himself in the morning.

  “Girl, 16, Faces Arrest After Hit-Run Death” was the headline in Sunday’s News-Press, which printed the names and address of Linda and her parents (“well known writers of mystery and suspense novels”). The revelation that Thursday night’s hit-run driver was apparently a teenager focused the city’s outrage over all the recent youthful car wrecks. The perceived contrast between the accident’s victims (working-class kids from parochial school) and the alleged perpetrator (daughter of folks with a house on the Mesa, never mind that the Millars lived in a poor neighborhood) sparked resentment in the blue-collar community. Better-off Santa Barbarans, more likely to know the Millars’ joint income only equaled a high school teacher’s salary, spread a different sort of gossip.

  Millar delivered Linda to the police as promised on Sunday. The Millars posted her twenty-five-hundred-dollar bail, putting up both their houses as security. Monday, Linda was arraigned on two felony counts of hit-run driving. The News-Press evening edition had a photo of her striding somberly into municipal court. Monday was also the day of the funeral for the youngster killed. His parents were said to be too grief-stricken to attend, but over five hundred fifty others (including the boy’s classmates and delegations from four other Catholic schools) went to his requiem mass. The subsequent procession was said by Santa Barbara traffic officers to be “one of the longest in many years.”

  Both wire services carried stories on the accident and arraignment, identifying the Millars (and “Macdonald”) as successful writers. United Press gave Linda’s IQ as 127 and said she was pretty.

  As Linda was a
minor, the judge in her case certified the charges against her for juvenile court and ordered an investigation by the Santa Barbara probation office. Following her lawyers’ advice, though, Linda refused to discuss the accident with probation people or court-appointed doctors. She did speak with apparent candor to a local psychiatrist her father got her, a man who also counseled Ken and Margaret Millar at this time. The psychiatrist saw Linda daily for weeks and recorded what she said of that Thursday evening: “She had been planning to go to a girlfriend’s house, but before going there had stopped and had something to drink, and that the next she remembered was that she had crashed into a car. She stated that she couldn’t exactly remember hitting the boys, but she thought she probably had.” In her most emotional moments, Linda called herself a murderer. These guilt-provoked statements were what caused her lawyers to forbid her to talk to police or probation officers.

  Her parents were also advised to keep quiet. All an “obviously distraught” Millar could tell the Santa Barbara Star was that “we are filled with grief for all the children. I hope and pray that the situation may be worked out.” To von Auw, Millar wrote bravely, “We look to the future without fear. Our community is reasonably civilized; Linda remains what she always was, a dear good girl without a mean bone in her body; we and everyone who knows her are with her, fully. And Maggie is stronger than I ever dreamed.”

  Linda took the prescribed sedatives Seconal and Placidyl nightly. Though she stopped going to school, she saw a home tutor. Incredibly, the Millars thought Linda could still graduate from high school in September.

  As part of the probation department investigation, a psychologist administered tests to Linda, whom she diagnosed: “very superior intelligence. Schizoid personality type.”