Ross MacDonald

by Tom Nolan

  Again Millar wrote Olding to complain of Bantam’s “sour” decision. Here Pocket Books was about to reprint its early Macdonalds for the fourth time, while Bantam was dropping much more recent titles after only one reprint: “I sometimes wonder if anyone at Bantam has read the books.” What troubled him most was the prospect of having his work scattered among three paperback houses, which would “effectively and permanently limit” his softcover sales just when (thanks to this movie) they should become his “main source of income.” With his ship at last about to come in, Millar didn’t want it crashing into the pier. He told Olding, “Like the Century Plant, some writers have a sudden late flowering and then die. I trust I won’t be one of them.”

  His campaign was a success: Bantam made new contracts for the books it had dropped. The writer was pleased no end, he told Knopf’s William Koshland. Without missing a beat, he began lobbying Koshland for that Archer omnibus.

  Millar was profoundly humble and could be amusingly self-deprecating. (He signed one letter to Olding this month “Erie Stanley Millar.”) But when the chips were down, as they were now, he wasn’t shy about stating his worth. “I believe we should be ready for what looks like a positive upturn, and even to assist it,” Millar told Koshland. “My twenty-year-run is, I suppose, the most sustained performance in the history of the American detective story, and quite a few people are beginning to realize it.”

  The author bet big on his future this autumn. Using ten years’ savings (not “movie money,” he made sure to tell Knopf), he and Maggie put a down payment on a hilltop home with swimming pool in the exact middle of Hope Ranch Park, Santa Barbara’s most desirable residential area. With the large house came four lush acres in a secluded greenbelt a mile’s walk from the beach. “They paid ninety thousand,” Bob Easton said. “That was a whole lotta money in those days. Ken said one reason he did it was, ‘I knew I’d really have to work like hell to pay for it.’ ”

  The Millars moved into 4420 Via Esperanza on September 10. “We wonder at our good fortune and/or daring,” Millar wrote Olding. “My dear wife is very happy in this ‘new’ house,” he told von Auw, “which means that I am, too.” In fact he’d never seen Maggie happier, he said, in work or in life. “Pressing merrily ahead” with her bird book, she’d learned she’d be named one of 1965’s twelve Women of the Year by the Los Angeles Times. Millar busied himself with a new regimen of chores at Via Esperanza, including much of the gardening on the four-acre lot. Linda and her husband lived in Canoga Park now and often came to Santa Barbara with two-and-a-half-year-old Jimmy: “a living doll,” in his grandfather’s considered opinion. Millar turned fifty this December. In some ways it seemed his life was just beginning.

  * * *

  * * *

  * * *

  Paul

  Newman

  is “Harper”

  Bad guys hate Harper.

  They punch his nose.

  They kick his head.

  See bad guys punch and kick Harper.

  See Harper punch and kick bad guys.

  See Harper.

  —Newspaper advertisement, April 1966

  It was another of those loops in time Lew Archer often made: those circles that Macdonald, and Millar, liked to close. Here was Ken Millar on a Friday in January 1966, in a musty screening room on Warners’ Burbank lot, the same studio where Margaret Millar had twenty years earlier written her script for The Iron Gates while her husband, on naval duty in the Pacific, invented his “successor to Marlowe.” The lot was still here, Jack Warner was still here—and maybe this room, with its faded Hearst Castle draperies, was the very one where Margaret in 1945 viewed The Big Sleep, Warners’ not-yet-released film of Raymond Chandler’s first novel, starring Humphrey Bogart (as Marlowe) and newcomer Lauren Bacall.

  Now Millar was here to see what Warners had done with his first private-eye novel. With Millar was Dick Lid, Harper screenwriter Bill Goldman’s army buddy from the days when they stocked up on hard-boiled books at the post library: another circle closed.

  The Warners connection was no coincidence. Kastner’s team brought Target here intentionally with the idea of re-creating the spirit of Warners’ private-eye films of the forties. Some of Harper’s scenes had been shot on the same stages as The Big Sleep, using some of the same crew. And playing Harper’s client was Big Sleep costar (and Bogart widow) Lauren Bacall.

  Lid and Millar, alone in the screening room, watched a scratchy work print with no music or titles. Even in rough cut the movie looked good. Paul Newman played Lew Harper, the “new style” private detective, with gum-chewing insouciance. “I thought Newman was terrific,” Goldman said later. “The car Harper drove”—a beat-up Porsche—“was Newman’s idea. The fact that he wore short-sleeve shirts was Newman’s choice; he felt that was right for the character.” Newman said he modeled Harper’s “almost inattentive” manner on Robert Kennedy’s: “While you’re talking, you can see him preparing his rebuttal. . . . I thought that was a nice bit of business for a private detective.” The actor told Goldman he’d enjoyed playing Harper more than anything else he’d ever done.

  Directed by Jack Smight, Harper seemed brash and “with it”: a “movie-movie” that both celebrated and winked at the tough-guy ethic. At one point a character played by Robert Wagner did an impression of Jimmy Cagney. Then Harper did an impression of Newman playing Rocky Graziano: an injoke with added meaning for Millar. The film flaunted an extraordinary supporting cast; filling minor roles with major talent was a fad Harper started. Julie Harris as the jazz pianist, Wagner as the millionaire’s pilot, Shelly Winters as the aging movie queen, Arthur Hill as the love-struck lawyer, Pamela Tiffin as the missing man’s daughter, Janet Leigh as Harper’s about-to-be-ex-wife, Sue (who didn’t appear in the novel), gave a strength in the batting order that made this film feel like an event.

  Good locations added to the visual appeal: a “Santa Theresa [sic]” mansion, ghostly oil derricks, a rusting freighter at the San Pedro dock. The guru’s Temple of the Clouds was a Hollywood Hills place called Moonfire. The Bel-Air Hotel, where Millar had once talked things out with Alfred Knopf, played itself. Harper had its hard-boiled cake and ate it too, undercutting the private-eye code (“All I can do is do the dirty job all the way down the line”) with an ambiguous freeze-frame ending (soon to be another Hollywood fad).

  As Millar watched Harper, it wasn’t love at first sight. Goldman’s script, and Newman’s performance, took a 1949 story and coated it with a smart-alecky sixties veneer. Millar got a better impression of the film when he saw it later in a movie house filled with noisy ticket-buyers. Paul Newman wasn’t Lew Archer, Millar said eventually, but he made a great Harper.

  The Warners screening included a cameo appearance by Millar’s Hollywood agent. “Swanson came in midway,” Dick Lid said. “Made his entrance, said hello, and left. I gathered we were meant to feel tremendously flattered. Ken was not.” Seven months ago, Millar had pronounced himself well rid of H. N. Swanson, writing to New York, “One advantage of the twenty-year Swanee episode was that his stupendous inability to see my work leaves me virtually pristine when I want to be.” Millar had sold the Target option thinking it was for a low-budget, independent film and was irked to learn the contract Swanson negotiated made no provision for greater payment should the book become a major studio movie. Despite Harper’s $2 million budget, all Millar got was $12,500. Yet in one of those turnarounds that seemed to have as much to do with Margaret’s sensitivities as Millar’s good judgment, he’d recently announced to von Auw that he and Maggie were returning to Swanson’s fold: “Swanee presents his problems, but at least after twenty years we know what they are.”

  He and Swanson were in sync on one thing, Millar wrote von Auw: “Swanee and I saw Harper last Friday and agree it will be a commercial smash. It’s also pretty good.” Warners was keen for a sequel, and Goldman would soon start writing one based on The Chill.

  As Harper neared release, Black Money was p
ublished to fine reviews. Bennett Cerf called Millar from New York and said many people told him the new Archer novel was Macdonald’s best yet. (Millar of course agreed.) The author intended to take a brief rest and enjoy his new house, do a little reading, stir some plots. But he barely had time to savor Black Money’s notices. The word was out on Harper, and producers were eager for Macdonald’s services. No one this month was giving Millar any semipitying Hollywood looks.

  At Swanson’s behest, Millar met with TV’s Lee Rich and discussed a possible series, The Hunters, about a husband-and-wife detective team (partly inspired by the Girolas); Millar committed to write a “presentation” and a pilot synopsis. A few days later he accepted another assignment from Seven Arts Productions (“the maddest of all,” he told Knopf) to concoct a plot for a movie scheduled to film soon with George Segal in Hong Kong; his fee was ten thousand dollars. “It’s all rather fun for a change, after twenty-five years chained to a desk,” he wrote Knopf. But Millar asked Harris Seed to review these agreements. Seed also took on the task of renegotiating the Harper contract; matters regarding rights to Archer had to be resolved before Millar agreed to sell Warners The Chill. Involving his lawyer was costly, Millar told von Auw, but he’d found it cost him more not to: “You will excuse my continuing to push. I’ve been underground a long time, and this is unquestionably the big breakthrough.”

  Hollywood interest in Macdonald increased in February, when industry trade papers judged Harper a probable smash. The Hollywood Reporter’s literate critic James Powers wrote, “At a time when too many producers are stumbling over themselves to do takeoffs on the Bond character, Harper leaps right back over all those limp bodies to take up the pure American character of the private eye, approximately where Dashiell Hammett left him a generation ago.” Kastner and his partner wanted a long-term deal for the Archer novels, and Swanson was eager to get this for “the boys.” Millar, counseled by Seed, held back. “Let the boys make a picture with Archer and then I will possibly feel inclined to do business with them,” Millar scrawled in a memo to Swanson; he was in no rush to tie up his books. “In the case of a great series, the writer is the or a star. This takes a while to sink in!” He added in gleeful postscript: “Meanwhile Maggie can always support me!”

  Millar labored on the Hollywood projects at home, then brought his pages to Hollywood for thirteen-hour meeting days, spending more time in LA in two months than he had in the last twenty years. Millar liked working with director Alexander MacKendrick on the Seven Arts project, but The Hunters sessions were stressful. “A presentation is a pretty mixed art form,” he noted; TV “creation” sent his blood pressure soaring. Margaret grew concerned for his health and warned him not to get too involved with Hollywood. He thanked her for her concern, in notes left next to the teapot, and apologized for the disruption his comings and goings were causing her; but he felt obliged to make the most of these opportunities.

  Hollywood was a headache, though. Seed and an LA colleague advised Millar that his recent Swanson-made contracts were bad ones. Millar got out of the Seven Arts project, taking five thousand dollars. Seed started restructuring the Mirisch-Rich deal, which seemed to violate Writers Guild rules. Meanwhile Swanson urged more agreements on Millar, who refused them. “Turned down $35,000 for Chill,” he wrote an Ober agent, “because they wouldn’t use the name, Archer. I agree 35 is low, but I had a hell of a time getting Swanee up that high; he said it was ‘high.’ All Swanee wants to do is make deals.”

  Harper opened nationwide in April. Critics’ verdicts were mixed: the Herald Tribune’s Judith Crist wrote it a mash note; Pauline Kael, in McCall’s, was scathing. In general the reviews were fine, and Ross Macdonald was mentioned in nearly all of them. Newman’s hero was cheered as a relief from gadget-toting, womanizing screen spies—the return of the classic American private eye. What had been thought derivative in 1949 was a nostalgic asset in 1966: “Harper even starts out like Raymond Chandler,” enthused the LA Times’s Philip K. Scheur.

  Millar was more interested in receipts. He asked von Auw to send him information on box-office takings in time for Seed’s negotiations over The Chill. The news was good: according to Weekly Variety, Harper was the fourth-highest-grossing film in the country (behind Dr. Zhivago, The Singing Nun, and The Sound of Music).

  Harris Seed and his LA associate went to the Warners lot on April 18 to meet personally with Jack Warner and the studio’s general counsel. The Santa Barbara lawyer found a film mogul’s timetable took precedence over scheduled appointments. “I remember waiting two hours in Mr. Warner’s office while his two male secretaries twittered about,” said Seed. “It turned out he was watching a screening. I didn’t know it at the time or I’d have been even more angry. My associate counsel from Hollywood was trying to tell me this was normal, and I’m thinking, ‘I don’t like it.’ ” Once begun, the talks went well, Seed said: “Contrary to most events down there, price wasn’t the only object for us; price was secondary to legal rights. To them, I guess, price was paramount and legal rights secondary. That’s how come we got together.” Seed wanted a Chill contract that would retroactively correct the Target deal. It was a unique concept, said Seed, but they went for it: “It ended with Warner Bros, keeping Harper and Ken retaining ownership of Archer, which was the big thing.”

  Millar was pleased his books and services were in demand, but these negotiations felt like a constant battle. He blamed most of the problems on contracts Swanson urged him to sign and the New York agents okayed. On April 27, Millar sent von Auw a strong letter terminating (finally) his connection with Swanson and, “with regret,” cutting off Ober from any share of his movie or TV money: “I wish for the present to remain unrepresented by any agent in Hollywood, so that my attorneys can complete the Augean task of disentangling my affairs from the mess in which they’ve been plunged by abominable contracts. . . . My three attorneys are doing this hard expensive work, and I can’t afford to be tithed additionally merely to avoid rocking the boat. (The boat nearly sank.)”

  Almost overlooked during this hectic period were events that in any other year would have been milestones. The Mystery Writers of America’s outgoing president got his third Edgar nomination, for The Far Side of the Dollar, and the English Crime Writers Association honored a Macdonald work for the second year in a row, this time with its top prize: The Far Side of the Dollar took the Gold Dagger Award as best crime novel of 1965.

  In June, Harper opened in England, where (as a goodwill gesture by Warners to Millar and Seed) it was titled The Moving Target. (In another gesture, second-stage U.S. ads for Harper included this boxed notice: “Based on the sensational best selling Novel ‘The Moving Target’ by Ross Macdonald, America’s No. 1 master of suspense and intrigue.”) The movie was a U.K. hit (“the best of Hollywood in many months . . . wrapped up in an irresistible package,” Queen magazine), with Macdonald cited in all reviews.

  Black Money meanwhile was doing better in the United States than any previous Macdonald hardcover. Knopf printed eleven thousand copies of the book, and by March (before Harper’s release) nearly ten thousand had sold. Alfred personally ordered a three-column “profile ad” of Macdonald, Black Money, and the Archer series in the New York Times.

  Both Macdonald’s paperback publishers did new editions of Archer novels this year. Pocket Books’ movie tie-in edition of The Moving Target solved the problem of how to connect an old title with a new film very simply: by arbitrarily renaming the book Harper and slapping Paul Newman’s picture on its cover. (No one named Harper of course appeared in the text.) Millar was furious at Pocket’s “little trick,” done without required permission from Knopf. For good measure, Pocket misspelled his pseudonym as “MacDonald” on the book’s cover, title page, and spine (as it did on four other Macdonald Pocket Books this year). Three hundred thousand of these Harper paperbacks were printed.

  Bantam was proud of its new Macdonalds: three older Archers and The Far Side of the Dollar. After hiding the det
ective in recent seasons, Bantam brought him front and center this year of the Harper in photographic tableaux of a gun-toting male nuzzled by half-naked women, with the proud legend “Lew Archer—the Hardest of the Hard-Boiled Dicks.” By year’s end Bantam had 3 million Archers in print.

  * * *

  Sweating through April and May over story synopses, Millar came to hate his Hunters assignment. People who wrote for TV, he concluded, “live in a world of mental slavery.” In a note written during or after one story conference, he admitted, “This really is not my line.”

  “It has to be frustrating,” Seed thought, “for a writer who’s used to having nothing in his work changed, not even a comma, to be in a situation where people are telling him to change everything.” Seed’s objections to The Hunters deal were financial: “I thought it was a horrible contract. I finally said to Ken, it’s no damn good. You’re not getting paid enough, it’s frustrating to you—go back to doing what you do: being a novelist.”

  Millar took Seed’s advice and in June cut his losses, accepting a flat fee for what he’d already done on The Hunters (though he’d be paid additionally should a series be made). He’d worked all winter and spring on Hollywood projects and had little to show for it. When he quit, his blood pressure dropped twenty points. Millar vowed to write nothing but books from now on.