Ross MacDonald

by Tom Nolan

  Hoping to sharpen Linda’s memories of February 23, her psychiatrist gave her sodium pentothal. A fuller account of that Thursday evening emerged. At a store where high school kids could get wine without showing ID (“Not forever, I hope,” Millar commented), Linda bought a half-bottle of 20 percent alcohol port, she said, drank it in the car, then bought another half-bottle and drank it too. This scenario puzzled Millar: “One-fifth gallon in an hour, yet within a few minutes of this no signs of intoxication were detected by trained people, doctor, policemen, aunt.” Was Linda lying or holding things back under pentothal?

  With the psychiatrist, Linda acted unnaturally flip, denying regret about anything except not having a car. She noted her lack of remorse and said she must be a psychopath or a sadist. The doctor felt she was trying to hide her true feelings; her tension and anxiety seemed apparent. Linda became dependent on the psychiatrist. When he was unable to see her the last week of March, she grew fearful and depressed and stayed in bed all day. She spoke to her parents of her terrible guilt and her pity for the boys and their families. Over and over she said she wanted to die.

  Margaret was able to resume work on a novel, doing a page or two a day; but for Millar, fiction was out of the question until Linda’s problems were resolved. Alarmed by his daughter’s condition, he stayed awake nights on suicide watch. During these sleepless hours, Millar wrote a candid autobiographical document, “Notes of a Son and Father.” In third-person voice, he filled a spiral-bound notebook with frank revelations of his life as a child, teenager, husband, and father. He aimed to show how his and his wife’s actions adversely affected their child (“we are interested in the moral mechanisms of family life, and when the machine broke down”), with the larger purpose of aiding Linda’s treatment. In a belated attempt to save his daughter, the intensely private Ken Millar bared his soul.

  Linda knew her father was staying up on her account, and that both parents checked her room at all hours. On the last Saturday night in March, she told a court-appointed psychiatrist, she felt more hopeless than ever: “Nothing seemed to matter. I felt, ‘So what if I go to a reform school?’ It looked as if I might. I was so depressed about the night of the accident, and my bad life. I wanted to hurt my parents and myself.” Crying, she got out of bed and slashed her wrists with a razor. The next time Maggie came to her room, Linda held out her bleeding wrists and said, “Look what I’ve done.” On her psychiatrist’s recommendation Linda was admitted to Dani Rest Home, to be closely watched and treated with Thorazine. Her April juvenile court hearing was postponed, and the home tutoring ended.

  A week after Linda went in the rest home, Margaret Millar’s Beast in View won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award as best novel of 1955. (Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye was the 1954 winner.) This wasn’t the first or last time the Millars experienced extremes of good and bad fortune at once. Random House editor Harry Maule accepted the Edgar in New York on his author’s behalf. Soon a small ceramic bust of Poe nestled among the teacups at 2136 Cliff Drive. Circumstances dampened Maggie’s pleasure in winning the Edgar, but they didn’t extinguish it. Nonetheless the grim irony of being honored for a story of schizophrenia, sudden death, and suicide while living through similar events couldn’t have escaped her. “Ironies,” Margaret said years later, “one’s life is filled with them. When you get old enough you collect ’em. Most of’em are—not too good.”

  There were plenty of ironies for Millar too: The irony that Linda, rebelling against her father by doing the things he’d forbidden, brought about what Millar himself had feared and been able to avoid at her age: scandal, tragedy, death. The irony that the car he’d bought to keep her out of trouble had driven her into it. The irony that Millar had sought out and knew the man whose expertise tied Linda to trouble. The irony that the world Millar researched for fiction—juvenile courts, mental health clinics, probation departments—was now his reality: he and his family were living the sort of story Millar and his wife got paid to make up.

  Greatest of all was the eerie irony that so many things that had happened were foreshadowed in Millar’s books and notebooks. Time and again Millar had shuffled plot pieces involving hit-run accidents (often with young victims), hunts for a “killer car,” civic outrage, ambiguous guilt, mental breakdown.

  Since college, he’d subscribed to Wyndham Lewis’s notion of the artist as shaman or scapegoat of the culture. “Artists are people who voluntarily undergo what other people undergo involuntarily,” Millar had said as an undergraduate. Three years ago at Ann Arbor he’d lectured, “Many modern writers have felt the need to undergo and imaginatively express the sharpest pain and bitterest moral dilemmas of our society.” Through Linda, Millar was experiencing moral pain and mental anguish in a way more real than he’d ever imagined. Maybe these awful confluences of art and life were what prompted the semi-Delphic warnings Millar would utter in later years, such as, “As a man writes his fiction, his fiction is writing him. We can never change ourselves back into what we were. . . . So we have to be careful about what we write.”

  The worst of Linda’s ordeal seemed over by May, when she was moved from the rest home to the California branch of the Devereux Schools, though Millar guessed it would take a year’s hospitalization for her to recover from her “severe breakdown.” He wrote von Auw May 4, “Life seems to come in tidal waves, with long stretches of calm between. Well. Reality has its compensations, too.”

  There was more reality to come. The Millars expected Linda to be granted probation at her closed juvenile court hearing May 10, with bail vacated and psychiatric treatment continued. But because of her refusal (under lawyers’ orders) to discuss the accident, the judge declared Linda an unfit subject for juvenile court and remanded her for arraignment and trial as an adult. If convicted on both counts, she could get ten years in prison. Her parents wept.

  Money was a problem now. Legal and medical expenses were running over a thousand dollars a month, and the Millars’ property was still tied up as bail bond. The Millars borrowed a thousand (with interest) from George Hand and his wife. Other friends made cash loans or gifts. Millar was forced to write von Auw a letter he’d hoped to avoid: “I am prompted by the moral and practical necessity of retaining for Linda, who is being held on the verge of a schizophrenic break, the best psychiatric treatment available, and incidentally lawyers who can see her through the courts to further treatment. . . . Will Bantam or Knopf pay me the full paperback advance for Barbarous Coast now? Failing that, will Knopf give me a general advance of say $1500 on future earnings? Failing that, will Knopf advance $1250 on an unwritten novel? Failing that, will your office advance us a thousand or more, with the understanding that it will be repaid within three months, if not from earnings, then from money realized on our property as soon as it can be liquidated? This is a rough series of questions to throw in your lap. If none of them can be answered affirmatively, don’t feel that there will be any sense of personal letdown. . . . M. is holding her own emotionally very well, and is back at work on the conclusion of her book. Linda is a little better than holding her own, and the ultimate prognosis is encouraging. The fact and degree of her illness need not be kept secret from someone like Alfred. You can also tell him if you like that in and through this situation I’ve taken a step towards becoming the writer he would like to see me be. . . . Whatever happens, don’t feel anxious for us. I imagine most families have this one great crisis, and in the deepest sense we have passed through the worst of ours.”

  Von Auw immediately sent Millar a check for a thousand dollars from agency funds. Knopf hurried the sale of Coast to Bantam and a week later sent two thousand dollars (the author’s half of the paperback advance) to von Auw, which the agent forwarded to Millar after deducting Ober’s thousand-dollar loan. This was enough to tide Millar over. He gratefully informed von Auw the money would enable him “to move immediately to get for Linda perhaps the top adolescent-psychosis man in the country.”

 
But things got worse. Linda’s doctors thought it advisable she be voluntarily committed by her parents to the State Hospital in Camarillo, sixty miles from Santa Barbara. Millar tried to look on the bright side: “Happily it’s no snake pit but a well-organized institution where she seems to feel secure and where we have plenty of opportunity to visit her.” It was a blow though. In California, people said “Camarillo” to mean “loony bin,” and in fact there were such references in The Barbarous Coast and Beast in View. Camarillo was a place to keep out of. “Maggie’s a grief-stricken woman,” Ken reported to von Auw, “but she’s holding on. So am I.”

  Linda returned briefly to Santa Barbara the last Friday in May, when all three Millars were summoned to a closed Superior Court session of the county grand jury.

  Linda’s 2 P.M. turn on the stand was brief: on advice of her attorneys, she refused to testify or give evidence and was allowed to step down. Her father was sworn in.

  Millar had cooperated fully with authorities since February 23. Belief in the principle of law was a cornerstone of his being. Claire Stump recalled an example of his integrity: “One of my children picked up several golf balls at a putting range and brought them home, and I made my child take them back. Some people said, Oh, you’ll just make the child feel guilty.’ But Ken said, ‘Well, that’s the beginning of her moral life.’ ” Lydia Freeman said Millar insisted his daughter face whatever legal penalty came her way in 1956: “He was determined that Linda should go through with whatever the law demanded.” At the same time he got his daughter good lawyers, and the lawyers told him not to repeat what Linda had said about the accident.

  A visibly distressed Millar (“I appreciate you are under some strain,” the district attorney apologized) answered Vern Thomas’s questions with polite “Yes, sir’s and “No, sir”s until they reached the heart of the matter: Millar’s conversations with his daughter.

  “What did the girl have to say about this collision?” Thomas asked.

  “I refuse to answer.”

  “You say you refuse to answer?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “On what grounds, sir?”

  “On the advice of Mr. Seed.”

  “Well, the advice of Mr. Seed, as far as this proceeding is concerned, Mr. Millar, would be immaterial. It is my understanding that a person who is charged with an offense has a right to refuse to answer on the grounds—constitutional grounds that the answer or answers given might incriminate him. You are not seeking to exercise any constitutional privilege here, are you?”

  “I don’t know the law, sir. I refuse to answer for the reasons that I gave you.”

  “Isn’t it a fact that your daughter has admitted being involved in this collision on Alisos Street and striking down these kids and running away from the scene?”

  “I refuse to answer.”

  “On the same grounds, the advice of Mr. Seed, your counsel?”

  “Yes. Mr. Seed is the attorney who is representing my daughter.”

  “When your daughter left the house, she was driving the car, was she?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You saw her drive out of the premises? Correct?”

  “I heard her. I assume that she was driving. I know that she was.”

  “Do you appreciate that you might be cited for contempt to the Superior Court for refusing to answer these questions that I place to you, Mr. Millar?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You appreciate that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You refuse to answer any and all questions, as I understand it, that I may place to you regarding anything the girl may have said about this Alisos Street collision; is that correct?”

  “Yes, sir.” The threat of being held in contempt of Superior Court didn’t budge him.

  Margaret Millar, after confirming that Linda had left the house that night driving the Ford Tudor, wasn’t much help to the D.A. either. “I have never been present when Linda has discussed the accident with anyone,” she told Thomas. All she’d done, she said, was reassure Linda: “I said that I had more faith in the case and they would discover the truth, and that she need not be worried about it.” Margaret wept.

  “I appreciate, Mrs. Millar—”

  “It is horrible.”

  “—you are under a great deal of strain, but I am under the unfortunate obligation of fulfilling certain duties.”

  “Why, sure.”

  “This is not at all pleasant for me, Mrs. Millar,” said Thomas, used to seeing the Millars under friendlier circumstances. “We meet, but I must go into these matters.” He asked if she had at any time spoken with Linda about the Alisos Street incident.

  “Her father took over all that,” Margaret said. “They were trying to—He has always spared me things, because I get upset.”

  The D.A. didn’t need more from the Millars. There were enough other witnesses for the grand jury that day (including Ray Pinker) to establish the rough outlines of a case. A two-count felony indictment was returned that night against Linda Jane Millar. Three days later she was arraigned. On June 11, Linda returned from Camarillo to plead not guilty. A jury trial was set for July 10.

  * * *

  The February accident had become a focus of civic concern in Santa Barbara, prompting public forums and proposed actions. There was a petition drive to install sidewalks on Alisos. A town hall meeting at the Lobero Theater on the problems of young adults cited the lack of a city program “to aid and reclaim young people who actually get into serious trouble.” A teenage traffic-safety conference organized by kids from Linda’s school was hailed by town fathers as a worthy effort by Santa Barbara’s responsible youth. At another teenage panel sponsored by the American Legion, one young spokesman insisted “ninety-five percent of America’s teenagers want to be helped by their elders, want to ‘do the right thing,’ but the remaining five percent has given today’s youth an unjustified reputation for irresponsible, reckless conduct.” (Linda told her father some of these meetings’ “youth leaders” were among her school’s worst drunks.)

  The Millars were targets of nasty gossip. Some said Ken and Margaret were alcoholics who fought constantly and neglected Linda. Others speculated the Millars’ jobs as mystery writers somehow induced morbid tendencies in their child. There were rumors Linda ran down those kids intentionally; others said someone else had been driving the car. A young man who’d taken advantage of Linda’s drunkenness in a movie house two nights before the accident to make a pass at her (she’d slapped his face) came to the Millar house after her arrest to upbraid her. (“Nice person,” Millar dryly noted.) “It was just a ghastly experience for the Millars,” Claire Stump said.

  The Santa Barbara Star referred to “bitterness” in some quarters over supposed special treatment of Linda Millar. (Her father meanwhile feared the judge would be swayed to make an example of her, a scapegoat for all the teen accidents.) Geoff Aggeler, Linda’s friend from Laguna Blanca, witnessed the bitterness: “I was at the Catholic high school, which was attended by some of the richest kids in town and some of the poorest. There was a lotta resentment about Linda among my classmates; the kids who weren’t so well off were really hostile. It was perceived that because her father was so prominent as a writer and with his connections that she would get off in a way that maybe they wouldn’t in that same situation. It was a red-hot topic at my school, and it gives you an idea of the shock wave that went around. The nun in our creative composition class actually assigned us to write an essay on the subject of what should be done with this girl. Yeah, it was real heavy. Most of my classmates were really denouncing her, but I wrote an essay being very sympathetic to Linda and saying this was a lot of hypocrisy. Nobody knew I was a friend of hers, and I didn’t mention it. I wasn’t terribly popular there anyway so I didn’t care. Actually I began with a Scripture text: ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.’ They hadn’t had that kind of perspective on it; I think maybe they thought about it a little bit after that.
”

  Adding to the controversy was a story Linda’s lawyers went public with. The News-Press banner-headlined it with skeptical quotes on June 13: “ ‘Witness’ in Hit-Run Case Here Sought.” The woman operator of a “doll hospital” had contacted Linda’s attorneys and told of a female customer in her shop the day after the Alisos crash saying she’d seen a man jump out of the driver’s side of “the death car” and flee on foot before a young woman drove off in the Ford. “I have suspected something like this was involved from the very beginning,” John Westwick said. Linda’s lawyers hired an LA private investigator (a real Lew Archer, as it were) to canvass homes near the accident site with the shop woman in search of her vanished customer, but they had no luck. “Linda is not in a competent mental condition to confirm or deny the story of a man being in the car,” said Westwick, who revealed that Linda was confined at Camarillo. He hoped News-Press coverage would locate the witness.

  * * *

  Meanwhile the latest Macdonald book made its way into stores and onto reviewers’ desks. The leading mystery critics outdid themselves in praising The Barbarous Coast. Anthony Boucher told his New York Times readers that “no rational enthusiast of the detective story (or indeed of the novel) should think of missing a word of Ross Macdonald,” and that this Archer was “written as admirably as one can ask from a novelist in any genre.” James Sandoe in the New York Herald Tribune hailed Coast as “an admirable, thoroughly absorbing piece of work” and thought it appropriate it appear under the new “Ross Macdonald” name, because it showed this writer had gone beyond “clever pastiche” to “a manner that is quite admirably his own. . . . The consequence is a nightmare of shocking lucidity and exceptional terror with a dawn of relief such as we usually experience after nightmare.”

  Given such a solid book and no doubt wanting to boost Millar’s fortunes and spirits, Knopf took a fine-looking New York Times Book Review ad for Coast, proudly showing the Borzoi medallion and declaring this to be “Macdonald’s masterpiece!” Despite the ballyhoo, Coast got off to a slow start, shipping only thirty-two hundred copies in its first weeks and prompting a stiff-upper-lip note from publisher to author: “You know how much I like THE BARBAROUS COAST. . . . I am not giving up hope by a long shot.”