Ross MacDonald

by Tom Nolan

  Millar, caught in his own nightmare of shocking lucidity, and no doubt hoping for a dawn of relief, took little notice of his novel’s fate. But he couldn’t ignore his paperback publisher when Oscar Dystel, head of Bantam, came to Santa Barbara in late June and lunched for the first time with Kenneth and Margaret Millar. Dystel happily reiterated that The Name Is Archer had sold phenomenally well. Margaret Millar would soon be a Bantam author too: Dystel and company had acquired reprint rights to her Edgar-winning Beast in View.

  There were other business matters to attend to in June, mainly the signing of foreign contracts. The Ober agents, aware of the Millars’ needs, seemed to have overseas associates step up efforts on both authors’ behalf. New deals were done this summer for quite a few Millar titles with publishers in Japan, Sweden, Italy, Spain, England, and France.

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  A jury pool was already drawn for the People of the State of California vs. Linda Millar when the defendant’s lawyers made a surprise move: they asked that charges against her be judged without trial on the basis of grand jury testimony. This would bounce the matter back to juvenile court, with its more lenient penalties. The judge permitted it. After five months’ controversy and with no advance notice, Linda Millar’s case came close to resolution in a brief proceeding in Judge Ernest Wagner’s courtroom on July 11, with less than a dozen people (including Linda’s parents) present. After having read the grand jury testimony several times, the judge said, he believed “there can be no other logical conclusion” than that Linda Millar was at fault; he found her guilty of both felony charges.

  Westwick and Seed quickly requested probation for Linda, who’d just turned seventeen. The judge said he’d consider it but warned he’d need greater cooperation. Westwick assured him, “There has been a change in the attitude of the defendant.” Linda was ready to talk. Later that day she met with a probation officer and handwrote an account of what had happened five months ago:

  After I had dinner on the night of February 23rd, Thursday, my girlfriend . . . called me up and asked me if I could come over to her house to play cards. I asked my parents and they said it was alright if I went. While I was doing the dishes I decided to do some drinking before I went there. So after I finished the dishes I got 39¢ and left the house and drove directly to the Victoria Grocery Store where I bought a 39¢ bottle of wine. It was after 6:00 P.M. at this time but I don’t remember exactly what time. I drove from the store to the little side street across from the S.B. high school tennis courts where I drank the bottle very rapidly. I put the bottle under one of the trees. Then I decided I wanted some more wine so I went back to the same store again. I asked the proprietor if I could charge a bottle of wine and told him if he didn’t trust me to pay him I would give him my name and address. I gave him the false name of Alicia Morrison and the address of 117 or 217 Equestrian Ave. He said alright and I bought the wine. I also asked him if I could use the phone. I didn’t want [my girlfriend] to be suspicious about my being late. (On either my first or second trip I bought some dentine [Dentyne] gum which I chewed while drinking the wine.)

  I phoned [my girlfriend] and told her I had a few things to do and that I’d be over soon. I left the store and drove to the Jr. High (Santa Barbara Jr. Hg) where I drank the second bottle of wine. It was 39¢ too. I then decided to go cruising some more, not realizing I was so drunk and incompetent to drive. I drove around the Milpas area but I didn’t know what streets I was on. I drove down Alisos Street not knowing it was Alisos Street and I was driving fast. Suddenly the next thing I knew there were two boys—I wasn’t sure if it was one or two boys) right in front of me and a second later I ran into them. It was too late to do anything by the time I saw them. I saw a boy in a light-colored jacket fly up in front of me and I remember hitting him with the wheels of the car after he hit the ground. I don’t remember putting on the brakes or hitting the wall. I panicked and drove away from the scene of the accident without stopping. Right after the accident I turned to the left & up another street I don’t know the name of. I stopped the car quite a ways up the block. I didn’t know if it was 1 or 2 boys I’d hit. I got out and saw the two huge fender dents. It was then that I decided to kill myself. I drove around still not knowing where I was, and trying to think how to commit suicide. Then I saw a car with its parking lights on on the right side of the road which I thought was parked. I also didn’t know anyone was in it. With the intention of dying, I swerved the car to the right and crashed headlong into the car. The rest of the story you know. The reason it happened was because I was driving recklessly and didn’t see them and the reason I didn’t stop was because I panicked.

  Linda’s statement had some interesting inclusions and omissions. That false name given the store owner (and remembered all these months later) added novelistic specificity: “Alicia Morrison” could be a character in a Lew Archer tale; women with the initials A.M. were ubiquitous in the tales written by Anna Moyer Millar’s son. The gum chewed while drinking wine addressed the question raised in her father’s mind of how Linda could consume that much alcohol and not have it on her breath. Did Millar coach Linda? It wouldn’t be the first time he’d helped a family member fill gaps in a tricky plot.

  The girlfriend who invited her to play cards told investigators Linda had in the past used her as a cover to meet a boyfriend. Had something similar happened that Thursday night?

  Linda’s written confession wasn’t subject to cross-examination and became the official last word. The officer in charge of Linda’s case recommended probation. The judge went along, setting her term at eight years and imposing several conditions: Linda’s license would be revoked, she would undergo psychiatric treatment, she would continue regular schooling, and she would “refrain absolutely from any intoxicating liquor.” No frequenting of bars, no gambling, no associating with “idle, dissolute or criminal persons.” Should she violate these terms, Judge Wagner was empowered to sentence her to the Women’s Prison at Corona. Linda signed the probation agreement August 27, ending her three months’ confinement in Camarillo.

  Santa Barbarans learned of the case’s resolution in the evening’s News-Press. Several were mad enough to telephone Judge Wagner and threaten physical harm. “Many of the callers were laboring under the misapprehension that this was a homicide case,” the judge told the Santa Barbara Star. Both the town’s newspapers printed nearly all of Linda’s confession, but the upstart Star also quoted liberally from other documents in the fifty-one-page probation report. Juicy excerpts from school counselors’ records, friends’ statements, and doctors’ summaries showed Linda and her parents in the worst possible light: “Mr. and Mrs. Millar have failed to provide a normal home environment for Linda. . . . Linda has had considerable insecurity because her parents have used her as ‘material’ in their novels. . . . She has been morbid in introspection and attitudes. By reading books of her parents, one may realize how such feelings materialize. . . . When questioned directly as to why, in her opinion, she was prevented from making a statement to the Probation Officer or the Court earlier, she stated that it was because she was mentally ill and believed that she had committed murder, but since in her own statements she is now improved, she knows that this is not so . . . . Miss Millar’s difficulties stem from ‘a serious personality disturbance of the schizoid type.’ ” A sidebar described Linda’s suicide attempts.

  Having their anguish displayed in public was the excruciating conclusion of a gruesome six months for the Millars. Margaret was especially upset by this unpleasant finale, which underscored something Linda’s probation officer wrote: “It has been obvious to all parties that the possibilities of Linda making any sort of an adjustment in Santa Barbara are extremely remote.”

  The Millars sold their two houses and bought one in northern California. Another irony: their departure would coincide with the move to Santa Barbara from Michigan of one of Millar’s oldest friends, Don Pearce, whom Hugh Kenner, new head of the UCSB English department, had (at Mill
ar’s urging) looked up and then tapped to become his lieutenant. A saving grace: the Pearces bought the Millars’ Cliff Drive house, sight unseen.

  The Millars’ legal troubles were far from over. A $65,000 wrongful death suit was filed against them by the parents of the boy killed in the accident (with papers served by a deputy for Sheriff John D. Ross, whose name seemed to splice Millar’s byline with that of his Florida near-namesake). Another civil suit was brought by the injured boy’s family (with those summonses served by a deputy with the unforgettable name of Marlowe). But, as John Smith told a probation officer, the Millars were “not panicky about the future in spite of great financial drain.” With the criminal case closed, the worst really was over.

  Yet there’d always be cause to wonder: Was Linda’s account completely truthful? Had she lied to protect someone? Harris Seed said his client had a willful nature: “She was a headstrong young lady. Certainly had her own concepts and did things pretty much her own way.” Forty years later, Seed still thought it possible Linda hadn’t been alone that night. “Everybody knew it was that car—but was Linda driving it? Lotta doubt about that. Was she covering up for somebody? Lotta doubt about that. Yes, she pled guilty and received probation, after a very long procedure in which part of the time Linda was in a mental hospital. It was entirely possible to believe for a long time, or maybe forever, that Linda was shielding someone, and difficult if not impossible to find out. It was not an easy period. So it wasn’t open and shut, night and day. It wasn’t like, ‘Well, my daughter did it and she should serve her time,’ or some other damn thing; it was never black-and-white. Not easy to deal with no matter what side of that case you were on or who you were—doctor, lawyer, parent, defendant—difficult all the way. Even the court: problems. You could write a whole book about that case, believe me. I think that’s about all that I know, or all I’m gonna talk about, Linda’s difficulty.”

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  “When there’s trouble in a family, it tends to show up in the weakest member. And the other members of the family know that. They make allowances for the one in trouble, try to protect her and so on, because they know they’re implicated themselves. Do you follow me?”

  “I learned it long ago in the course of my work.”

  —Ross Macdonald, Sleeping Beauty, 1973

  On the eve of Memorial Day, I stared at my wife in helpless pride and longing. . . . She railed at me, saying that I was sick, would always be sick. I held myself in silence for the most part, but there was trouble and the shadow of blackmail. Linda slammed a door.

  —Kenneth Millar, “Memorial Day,” 1957

  Clearing a space in another part of the forest was what Millar started doing when he and Margaret and Linda moved into their new home in Menlo Park, California. It wasn’t just a figure of speech: he got a city permit allowing him to burn kindling on the lot at 518 Bay Road. The Millars’ place stood at the edge of the Peninsular oak woods that Scottish-born naturalist John Muir had written of, around the time of Millar’s birth in Los Gatos, forty-one years and twenty-five miles away. Millar, who savored slow revolving turns of fate in life and in fiction, saw an oblong sphere being traced on his biographical chart: a four-decade loop that started in northern California, went up to British Columbia, east to Ontario, south to Michigan, west to southern California, then north to where it began.

  His daughter helped chart the last part of the journey. In a way, Millar felt, Linda had taken on his curse, the one his grandmother had uttered long ago in Ontario when she predicted he’d come to a bad end. Linda relieved him of that by becoming the scapegoat. The sins of the father (and mother) were visited on the child, another pattern that occurred and recurred in Millar’s books. Linda’s trouble was a fulcrum for the rest of Millar’s life and art. He’d do his belated best to help her back to health.

  Remarkably, she already seemed well on her way. Out of Santa Barbara and free from the threat of reform school, Linda made what her Menlo Park psychiatrist called surprising progress. In September 1956 she enrolled in a Menlo Park high school. “Things are working out better than we’d dared to hope,” Millar said. “In the end there will be no scar on her. We can’t complain.” Dorothy Olding, von Auw’s Ober colleague, was encouraged by Linda’s cheerful demeanor when the agent saw the three Millars during a San Francisco visit.

  Millar liked Olding immediately. Although he doubted either of Ober’s chief agents, with their dazzling client roster (J. D. Salinger’s 1953 book, Nine Stories, was codedicated to Olding), took him quite seriously, Millar felt a rapport with Olding that over the years grew into something like love. For her part, the big-boned, handsome, unmarried Olding thought of Millar, now and in future crises, as the bravest man she knew.

  Surely it took courage to confront his most painful memories through the psychiatric treatment he began in 1956. For a year Millar had weekly sessions with a Menlo Park analyst, therapy he described as “a watershed event” in his life. In a sense he’d been prepping for it since college, through extensive reading of Freud and his followers. The perceptions of modern psychiatry were central for him. It didn’t much matter which school or discipline an analyst subscribed to, he said; the important thing was having a sympathetic doctor who’d stay one jump ahead of you. His therapist helped him put things in perspective, Millar said, helped him “get the genie back into the bottle.”

  The very hardest thing for him to face, he found, wasn’t his daughter’s deeds or his parental failings but his own painful childhood. His struggle to reconcile with it would last a lifetime. Don Pearce said Millar proved a fine analysand, though: “He was very good at honestly digging up and articulating things about himself, and wanted to do it—not just to feel better, but to have more of himself available for use in his work. ‘I want to get the most out of myself that I can,’ he said.” Millar’s therapy and Macdonald’s fiction developed a synergistic relationship through an oeuvre in which the writer repeatedly explored themes and events intimately meaningful to him. Jerry Tutunjian, who interviewed Macdonald in 1972, said, “I asked him about the accusation that he was writing the same book twenty-four times. He said, ‘No. Every time you do it, you dig deeper. It’s like going to a shrink: you’re telling the same story every time, but at the same time you’re discovering different aspects of it, and of yourself.’ ”

  It took Millar a while to make peace with the analytical process. In his early months of wrestling with the demons and angels of his past and present, his mood swings were dramatic. Pearce was alarmed by the change in his friend’s personality when a somber and edgy Millar visited him in Santa Barbara early in 1957.

  To begin with, Pearce said, Millar predicted dire things for America after its second rejection of Adlai Stevenson in the recent presidential election. “ ‘The whole country has just slipped backwards one big cog,’ Ken said, ‘and it’ll be two hundred years before we can get it back up to the level Roosevelt left it at.’ ” Pearce had looked forward to a pleasant evening with his friend in the Cliff Drive house he’d bought from the Millars, but things went awry: the harder Pearce tried to put Millar at ease, the more tense and prickly he got. When Pearce made reference to the ebullient Ken Millar of college days, Millar cut him short: “Don’t try to appeal to that Ken Millar, that Ken Millar is dead.” Millar stared at his cigarette and repeated dourly, “Dead.” A neighbor couple Pearce had invited over, former friends of the Millars’, made matters worse. “They began talking about how much Santa Barbara had changed since Ken had left,” Pearce said, “the awful traffic, and how dangerous it was to walk across the street. Ken became livid. He told them, and me, that he couldn’t stay in the room with people so undiplomatic and thoughtless as to bring up questions of traffic and accidents to him, and he simply left the house.” Pearce hurried after him. “He was in his car, backing out the driveway, and he flicked the headlights off—didn’t want to see me, even.”

  When Pearce sent a conciliator
y letter to Menlo Park, an upbeat Millar responded with a telephone call: “ ‘A letter like that deserves not a letter back but a conversation,’ he said, ‘I want to talk to you.’ And he went on in a way that seemed much too generous and hubristic and euphoric. He’d been up all night writing poetry, he said, and he wanted to read it to me. And he did. It sounded like a very bad translation, at sight, from some German introspectionist.”

  Millar wrote a lot of poetry in his year in Menlo Park, much of it in rambling blank verse, most of it more therapeutic than lyric. His best creative efforts went into a new Lew Archer novel, begun in the bleak autumn of 1956 and finished in the promising spring of 1957.

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  Circumstances required the new book be an Archer: given Millar’s legal and medical bills, this was no time to risk something new. The author used an already written manuscript to start from: an unpublished Archer novelette (“The Angry Man”) done in his best Manhunt manner. Onto this sketchy framework he built The Doomsters, a novel full of insights gained during his and Linda’s recent ordeal. The book became such a personalized fiction that Millar called it his “diary of psychic progress.”

  The Doomsters is suffused with pain and remorse. Its characters (including Archer) are damaged people: puppets jerked by neurotic or psychotic impulses, automatons propelled by greed and lust, hollow husks with false faces. Despite this heavy psychological freight, The Doomsters moves as swiftly as a Santa Fe Super Chief. From Archer’s opening line, the book declares itself a most unusual mystery: