Ross MacDonald

by Tom Nolan

  Three of his old ones (The Moving Target, The Way Some People Die, and The Barbarous Coast) were being collected by Knopf (with the Doubleday Mystery Guild) in the Archer anthology Millar had proposed, under his title, Archer in Hollywood. At his own suggestion Millar wrote a foreword, an autobiographical piece that tantalizingly balanced his urge to reveal with his need to conceal. It concluded, “We writers, as we work our way deeper into our craft, learn to drop more and more personal clues. Like burglars who secretly wish to be caught, we leave our fingerprints on the broken locks, our voiceprints in the bugged room, our footprints in the wet concrete and the blowing sand.”

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  As readers might work to glean facts from his fiction, so Millar’s friends sifted his smiling silences for nuggets of speech. His manner was unnaturally formal and reticent; no wonder he found Hollywood’s jostle unbearable. Even during this year of success, Millar kept cool. “Ken had an aura of great strength about him,” said Jerre Lloyd, a young Tulane law professor who met him in Santa Barbara in the summer of 1966. “Physical strength for one thing, but there was a matching strength in the way he processed things mentally. That’s why it was sometimes hard to have a conversation with Ken. He made these strong declarative statements, and they were so well thought out that it usually wasn’t possible to add anything useful to them. Everything he said was almost an aphorism.” (“Style is structure on a small scale.”) “You’d hang on what he was saying; it was really good. But you didn’t have small talk with Ken; that was just not possible. He couldn’t be casual about anything, with anybody. There was nothing easy about Ken. Nothing. He was friendly, but I don’t think he was naturally gregarious. At the same time he went out of his way to be with people, so it was kind of strange.”

  Lloyd and Millar shared an interest in public affairs and policy; Lloyd had been active in Louisiana state politics and the civil rights movement. But Lloyd was more eager to talk with Millar about literature. “He was absolutely brilliant about that,” Lloyd said. “I’ve never known anybody that was a greater student and analyzer of books and writers. That was his long suit, as far as I’m concerned. He had a great knowledge of literary tradition. I was attempting to write novels in those days, and I was very much antitradition; and he would say, ‘Well, you know, that’s a tradition too.’ ”

  During his summer in Santa Barbara (he’d soon move there), Lloyd met with Millar in late afternoon, after writing hours, either at the Hope Ranch house or at Lloyd’s run-down residence hotel on lower State. “Ken loved to come there and watch all these old types in the lobby,” Lloyd said, “hoping he’d see something he could use in one of his books.” Lloyd’s shabby hotel found its way into the novel Millar started in 1966 (The Instant Enemy). “Casing a scene” is what the author called such reconnaissance trips. When he and Dick Lid went to the Bay Area once, Millar insisted they stay at a dilapidated San Francisco hotel, Lid said: “One of these fleabags, you know, in a room on the third or fourth or fifth floor, where the tap was all stained and the water would barely trickle out, and you couldn’t get hot water up there; you knew you weren’t gonna be able to have a shower. Green chenille bedspreads on these old twin beds—oh, God, it was ugly. Ken deliberately wanted to stay there to soak up some atmosphere.”

  In August of 1966, Millar got the Lids’ permission to case their San Fernando Valley house, an angular, modern place cantilevered above a golf course, as a setting for his next book. He came to Northridge with Linda and her three-year-old son, who were visiting from Phoenix where Linda’s husband now worked. The Lids were pleased at how good Linda looked. The last time they’d seen her was in 1959, when they’d driven her to an appointment with her UCLA psychiatrist; on their way back to Santa Barbara, she’d had them stop at the beach, where she’d swum so far out they’d become alarmed. There was nothing alarming about Linda today as she stood in the kitchen talking about marriage and motherhood. The Lids were relieved she’d found her way to some measure of happiness. Millar was relieved too. “Perhaps I’ll never work as hard, quite, as I have in the last ten years, paying off the bloody medical bills,” he wrote Anna Branson this September. “Lin’s in good shape now.”

  So were he and Margaret, he thought. His wife finished the bird-watching book on which she’d worked so diligently for two years; Millar edited her manuscript and airmailed it to the agents on the last day of September. By then Harris Seed was nailing final riders onto Warners’ contract for The Chill, with the studio to pay Millar fifty thousand dollars for movie rights to the novel; Warners took trade-paper ads announcing the project for 1967, with Paul Newman billed again to play Harper.

  It had been an exhausting if exhilarating twelve months. “The changes of the past year or so have been hard for me to handle,” Millar admitted to Knopf (who visited Santa Barbara this autumn, after the death of wife Blanche), “what might be called the dubious rewards of ‘late success’—but they’re under control now, I think. . . . I’m working my way back into fiction and beginning to get glimmerings of the next decade as opposed to echoes of the last one.” Rains came to Santa Barbara in November, and with them the best part of the year for him: a cold sea that gleamed as gray as gunmetal, a beach empty of all but the hardiest swimmers, a sky full of Cooper’s hawks. Good working weather. Millar had a book going, and he hoped to surprise the customers.

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  February 16, 1966

  Editor, News-Press: Ever since my service as a naval officer in far Pacific waters in the forties, I have been haunted by the thought of American young men dying in Asia, and others having to garrison that thankless continent’s shores and hinterland. We are beginning now to take on just that bleak and unrewarding task—a task which could eventually bleed us dry, as it bled France and England. For God’s sake and our own, let us somehow avoid that open-ended, bottomless mantrap.

  —Kenneth Millar 4420 Via Esperanza

  Their new residence in Hope Ranch Park, the lush enclave above Santa Barbara, was a long way from Mrs. Funk’s boardinghouse where Millar slept as a kid, and from the home where Mayor Sturm’s daughter lived within whiff of the tanning factory. The Millars’ Via Esperanza perch, up where the big birds nested, gave them a different social perspective.

  Jackie and Henri Coulette visited them there soon after the Millars moved in, Jackie recalled: “Hank had just been invited to have his entry in Who’s Who in America, so he rather diffidently but proudly told them. Maggie said, ‘Oh, ho! No kidding! There are seven of us in this block in Who’s Who!’ How’s that for deflating you? And of course she had her own entry. That was the last time Hank attempted to brag in front of them.”

  The Millars’ neighbors in this elevated zone included founders of such major corporations as Northrop and TRW: some of the wealthiest people in the country. (The actor Fess Parker was also a neighbor, allowing Millar to tell people, “I live next door to Davy Crockett.”) Millar felt uneasy about his new location, he later told critic-journalist John Leonard: “I kept wondering what am I doing in a place like this, and what will a place like this do to me?” Hope Ranch residents raised eyebrows at these newcomers, with their old Ford covered with pro-ecology and antiwar bumper stickers; the Millars felt their Republican neighbors perhaps didn’t much like them. More bothersome, after a birding vacation in Texas, the Millars came home to find someone had broken in through a window and taken fifty dollars, a bracelet, and six bottles of beer. “A burglary, even in absentia, leaves a funny feeling in a place,” Millar told Knopf. Almost as bad was the treatment they received from “the stupidest deputy sheriffs in the world,” Millar wrote von Auw. “One deputy’s theory was that we had broken the window in a quarrel and had then gone away and left it hoping that it would appear to be a burglary. No kidding.” In time their affluent neighbors seemed to accept the Millars as benign Bohemians (“Oh, they’re writers”), two of Hope Ranch’s “token Democrats.”

  In any case, Hope Ranch d
idn’t change the Millars. Except for enjoying their swimming pool and a lot more floor space, they lived about as simply up here as they had in the forties down on Bath Street where the Union Pacific rumbled by. “The house in Hope Ranch was quite spacious,” Jackie Coulette said, “but there was certainly nothing grand about it, or in it. The furniture was minimal, utilitarian. They had three or four dogs, and the dogs had the run of the place. I don’t think they ever entertained. Maggie might throw a bag of chips out on the table and a boxa cookies and say, ‘Well, if anybody’s hungry . . .’ Maybe a soft drink. Ken liked beer. Food was always very simple fare, and modest amounts. I guess what a lot of people think of as the niceties of living, the ‘comforts,’ didn’t seem important to either Ken or Maggie.”

  And Maggie Millar went her separate way, Jackie noticed: “She had very little time for a lot of people Ken thought of as his friends; she didn’t pay much attention to or have very much interest in these people he sort of collected; they weren’t part of her world. I think she rather liked me. I had thought she liked Hank—she was always certainly cordial—but I have a first cousin who worked at the Coral Casino, and Maggie indicated to my cousin that she didn’t think much of Hank!”

  “Maggie scoffed at everything,” said Jerre Lloyd, who moved to Santa Barbara in 1967 and visited Millar weekly at Via Esperanza. Lloyd would have liked to spend time in Margaret’s company but wasn’t “allowed” to, he said: “She’d be watching television in the family room whenever I came over; she’d say hi and all that, and then, ‘Ken’s in the study.’ Every Tuesday when I went over there, for years, he would not be in the living room with Maggie—because I was supposed to meet him in the study. Which was not oppressive or anything, but it was kind of weird. There was a curious lack of casualness in Ken; everything had to be formalized. I really didn’t understand Ken, and he really didn’t understand me. We spent a lot of time together for two people who didn’t understand one another.”

  Sometimes Lloyd and Millar took one of the dogs for a walk. Other times they’d sit and talk in Millar’s study. “It was a small workroom with some nondescript paneling and shelves of books everywhere,” Lloyd said. “Right outside his study was a large closet, I think it had been a coat closet. He opened the door one day, and it was kind of startling: it was completely filled with paperback books, mostly his own in various editions. We’d talk about literature. I was very much influenced by the Black Humorists of the day”—Heller, Friedman—“and as he’d often say, that wasn’t his cup of tea, but he read them anyway! He read everything. He was always pulling things off a shelf for me to read. Occasionally I’d find something he didn’t know about, which was hard to do.”

  Millar encouraged Lloyd’s efforts at novel-writing and tried to get his manuscripts published. “He did tremendous favors,” said Lloyd. “He’d have people read my stuff that I never could have gotten to read it. He did a lot of that at the luncheons: try to put people in contact with other people. And there wasn’t anything selfish in it; he kept quiet about it. But I can’t emphasize too much the amount of good that he did. I think the reason was that he’d been so badly treated himself by Raymond Chandler. Not that he had any malice towards Chandler, or anyone else for that matter. But he thought Chandler had been gratuitously negative, and he was anxious not to do that to anyone else. I’ve never known anyone who spent the time to help people that Ken did. He certainly considered himself a professional writer, and he considered it a profession that had ethics and rules. And it was more than that. The way he thought, there was kind of a sacredness to it too.”

  Millar helped Dennis Lynds significantly in 1967, writing a letter to his old Dodd, Mead editor Ray Bond recommending Lynds’s Act of Fear, a private-eye novel written under the name Michael Collins. Bond bought the book, and Ross Macdonald wrote a blurb for its jacket. Later Millar helped get Dorothy Olding to be Lynds’s agent.

  Herb Harker, Millar’s former adult-ed student, still hoped to write fiction professionally. While working as a geological draftsman, a cartographer, and in advertising, Harker went often for friendship and advice to Millar’s house. “He didn’t mind giving his time as long as he felt it was being spent well,” Harker said. “He guarded his energy carefully, to be sure he had what he needed to do his own work; but he was very generous. One time he said to me, ‘Sometimes I wish I wasn’t a writer almost as much as you wish you were.’ He never explained that; I suppose he was referring to the fact that the writer is a lonely soul. If you’re serious about it, it’s very restrictive; it kind of dictates your life. But he seemed very content to go day to day; he had his routine and he followed it.

  “I felt Ken was one of the finest people I ever knew, quite apart from his gifts as a writer, just in his attitude toward his fellow man and the approach he had to life. He didn’t need a lotta possessions to fulfill him; he was content with his work, and the chance to get in the ocean every day, and walk his dogs. That’s what we’d do when I’d go over in the evening. For quite a while he had four dogs, and we’d take a couple and just walk around in Hope Ranch. We talked about politics; I think we had sympathetic views. We’d talk about movies and entertainment; he was a jazz fan. And of course problems regarding the environment. He was very concerned about the condors. I was concerned, but he went out and did something. We talked about writing: what works, what doesn’t work. One of the things that always impressed me: I could mention a story he hadn’t read for twenty years, something by D. H. Lawrence or something, and he knew the story in detail and could talk about it; his memory was amazing. If I was having some problems with the family or wondering what to do with one of my kids, we’d talk about that. I felt like he was a wise man as well as a good one, and I went to him a lot for counsel. I felt he was a vulnerable man, like he’d experienced great pain in his life. But maybe that was one of the things that made it possible for him to write the stories he did: the fact that he knew what it was like to be hurt.”

  Some of that hurt went into The Instant Enemy, which Millar took extra time with because of Harper’s and Black Money’s success. With more attention on Macdonald, Millar felt this book should be better than the last one. He airmailed it to New York on June 3, 1967; Ash Green formally accepted it June 7. The “majestic instancy” of this dazzled Millar—but not so much that he didn’t ask for a raise in advance from Black Money’s twenty-five hundred to four thousand dollars; given greatly improved sales, he felt that was fair. Knopf agreed. The firm also okayed a change in division of the paperback advance (now eighty-five hundred dollars) from a fifty-fifty split to sixty-forty in Millar’s favor.

  Things weren’t running so smoothly in Hollywood. This autumn Millar and Seed learned that Warners’ plan to film The Chill was on indefinite hold. They attributed this to changes in studio management. William Goldman, paid to write The Chill’s script, knew differently: “The director, Jack Smight, had come to me and said he’d do a sequel if I would, and somehow I got the notion Newman was interested in The Chill. So I wrote The Chill, which of course is a phenomenally complicated story, and made the script as simple as I could. I was as adroit as I could be in getting rid of some of those twists and still keeping enough so the movie worked. I went with it to Newman—and he didn’t like it because it was too complicated. I said, ‘But it’s amazingly much less complicated than the book!’ Well, Newman hadn’t read the book. I said, ‘Then why did you want me to do it?’ Then I was told Newman never read the book of stuff he was gonna do because he felt, quite rightly, that sometimes you got seduced by the book and carried over some of its quality into your reading of the screenplay. I was shocked. I had thought Newman wanted me to do The Chill. Of course without his involvement, this screenplay was worthless.” It’s also possible that Newman (as he told Millar when the two met at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions) simply didn’t want to play Harper again for fear of being typecast.

  Millar got his Warners money (as did Goldman), but Macdonald’s promising post-H
arper prospects seemed dried up. His and Seed’s relationship with a post-Swanson agent foundered over the man’s insistence on trying to sell Archer to TV against Millar’s wishes. The author didn’t want a quick cashing-in. What he had in mind was a long-term, multibook deal with substantial payments and a good chance at quality results; he was willing to wait out the current Hollywood bear market rather than sell himself and his life’s work short. By the end of the year, the Millars were living on savings again and on whatever money their books brought in.

  It was the books that were important, Millar felt, and interest in his was growing. Macdonald’s work was the subject of its first master’s thesis in 1967, by Ohio State graduate student Steven Carter; Millar wrote Carter several long letters about the novels’ content and construction. (“Technique is poetic justice seen from below, and not only in fiction.”) The Millars’ friend John E. Smith, now librarian at the University of California at Irvine, created the Kenneth and Margaret Millar Collection of books and manuscripts. And in December 1967 the Los Angeles Times Sunday magazine, West, published a substantial feature article on Ross Macdonald.

  The West piece was written by Dick Adler, who spent a day in Santa Barbara interviewing Millar (“a lean, sun-browned man of 52 with the dry, reserved manner of a Vermont farmer giving directions to a tourist”). “I met him for breakfast down by the ocean,” Adler recalled. “Then I went back up to his house, met Margaret, chatted. He showed me his workroom.” Adler got Millar to talk somewhat revealingly of his reckless adolescence and about the “sad and angry” letter he’d once written Knopf about Pocket Books’ meddling, but Millar wouldn’t discuss Linda. “The whole idea of his daughter, he didn’t really want to talk about,” Adler said. “We spoke about why is it always a child—a child in jeopardy, a child in crime? He said, ‘Let me just say that it’s based on things that really happened to me, or to people in my family.’ I had about five, six hours with him, and then—this happened to me with J. B. Priestley too—at a certain time a taxi arrived that had been preordered. They obviously decided they were going to limit the time. Which is only sensible, if you arrive on foot; you’re at their disposal. So either he or she arranged to have the cab come. It was a nice amount of time I had, but it wasn’t going to be the ‘man who came to dinner.’ They had to work.” Precisely.