by Tom Nolan
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Naturally the front page of the New York Times Book Review, if it is given over to a very enthusiastic notice of a reasonably good book, does influence sales, but I have seen favorable reviews printed there of books for which we have not in the following week received orders for thirty copies.
—Alfred Knopf, Atlantic Monthly, 1957
However skeptical Millar had once been about Santa Barbara’s cultural climate, he’d always loved its physical beauty—especially the mind-calming, soul-cleansing sea. The introduction in the late 1950s of oil-well platforms off the Santa Barbara coast had so dismayed and angered Millar and his like-minded writers’ lunch friends that this El Cielito bunch had concocted a half-serious plan for some not-so-civil disobedience. “We’d all been in the service,” said Al Stump. “One guy was an expert on explosives, another was a machine gunner from the Italian campaign; I’d been on a navy carrier, gunnery. And Ken Millar knew his way around things. So in a drunken moment we conceived the idea of going out at night and blowing one of those wells out of the water. Be easy to do: just slap some plastique on a couple of the legs and get outta there. That would be a message to the oil companies, that they weren’t gonna ruin our beach. But then we got sober and, reconsidering it, came to the conclusion that we’d kill some people if we did it. It turned out there were night watchmen aboard these damn wells.”
Those first offshore structures were grudgingly accepted by the natives. But at the end of the sixties, federal and local authorities allowed construction of a lot more wells, five miles out but clearly visible from the Coral Casino. At first citizens objected to this new derrick invasion on aesthetic grounds; they hated the sight of the things, which stood about twenty stories tall. Before long there was much more to complain about than a spoiled view.
On a January Tuesday in 1969, an underwater well blew out and ran wild at Union Oil’s Platform A, spewing oil and gas up from the ocean floor with tremendous force. The well’s casing was inadequate to stop the boiling black ooze. One scientist guessed twenty thousand barrels of oil were floating offshore. Ken and Margaret Millar, like thousands of other townsfolk, were sickened and outraged, not only about coastal damage but about danger to diving birds. Within days a citizens group called GOO (Get Oil Out) had formed. The Millars joined GOO’s vocal ranks at a weekend protest rally at East Beach.
Five days after the blowout, with the leak still uncontrolled, Secretary of the Interior Walter Hickel came to town to look things over—and decided to let the oil companies keep drilling. By now oil was coming in on Santa Barbara’s beaches. “It lay so thick on the water,” Millar wrote, “that the waves were unformed; they made a squishing sound.” The hulls of all the harbor boats were coated with the black tide, and so were a lot of birds. Condor expert Ian McMillan told the Millars he thought about twelve hundred square miles along the coast were polluted, and that hundreds or thousands of birds were dying at sea.
Bob Phelps from the New York Times telephoned Millar for pointers on how to cover the story; Millar suggested he find out how former interior secretary Stewart Udall came to grant oil-drilling leases after promising local leaders he’d protect the Santa Barbara Channel. Millar concluded that the federal government needed the oil companies’ millions to help pay for the Vietnam War, and that Santa Barbara’s leaders hadn’t been able to resist the combined pressures of Uncle Sam and Union Oil. He cut his Union Oil credit card in two and mailed the pieces to the company’s president to signal his separation from the polluters.
Soon he had a chance to express his displeasure in person. When California senator Alan Cranston brought Democratic Party leader Senator Ed Muskie to view the spill, the Millars were among those at the airport to greet them with homemade protest signs; Margaret’s read “Ban the Blob.” The citizens got a bonus target for their anger when a Union Oil jet landed and disgorged the company president. “Many of us booed him,” Millar wrote later, “not so much for ruining our coast as for treating us like natives who could be quieted by the techniques of public relations.” Maggie Millar was especially vociferous, said Ping Ferry: “Margaret was always in the forefront of these demonstrators, shouting the strongest possible language—things like ‘You criminals!’ ” She was photographed shaking her “Ban the Blob” sign in the oil executive’s face, in a picture reproduced in newspapers and magazines around the country. The Union Oil man, trailed by reporters, for some reason marched up to Millar and demanded to know who he was. “My name is Kenneth Millar,” the writer said, adding for the newsmen’s benefit, “and I happen to be secretary of the Scenic Shoreline Preservation Conference.” (“No one ever could intimidate Ken,” Margaret proudly recalled. “Nobody!”) “That was quite a speech,” the oilman huffed, stalking off. This moment too was reported nationally. When Millar wondered why the exec had singled him out, Maggie said the man was obviously accident-prone.
In the wake of Democrat Muskie’s visit, Republican president Richard Nixon came to see the oil spill, landing on the beach in a helicopter. The sign-wielding Millars were there to greet him also. Oil kept washing ashore, uniting all sorts of Santa Barbarans: conservatives, liberals, students, fishermen, housewives, professors, artists, construction workers. “This thing radicalized the entire city,” Ping Ferry said.
Millar, agreeing to write a piece on the spill for Sports Illustrated, rented a twin-engine plane and went up with Margaret, Bob Easton, and some naturalists to inspect the damage. Fifty miles of coastline were smeared with oil. Birds and wildlife were clearly endangered on and near the Channel Islands.
As the weeks wore on, the oil kept oozing, despite the oil people’s assurance that everything was okay. Stearn’s Wharf became a focus of protest. The old city-owned structure, previously a favored spot for shops and tourists, was now a service facility for the offshore wells; big oil trucks rattled its creaky timbers. The Millars were among a group of a thousand who gathered at Stearn’s Wharf on Easter for a mass meeting where speakers argued for an environmental right movement to parallel the civil rights struggle. At rally’s end, several hundred (including the Millars) took nonviolent possession of the wharf. When a truck loaded with oil casings tried to drive onto the pier, Ken and Maggie and others sat down to block it. The driver hopped out wielding a tire iron; local police stepped in to defuse things. “We took it seriously,” Maggie Millar said, “because we loved that wharf.”
Millar loved the whole town, he’d discovered. Santa Barbara, he wrote Olding, was “the objective correlative of my mental life.” He and Maggie and about seventy other protesters picketed Steam’s Wharf for fifteen days, this time with Millar holding the “Ban the Blob” sign and having his picture printed all over the country. When construction of a new oil platform was approved within half a mile of the faulty one, Millar was among those who took to sea in a quixotic flotilla of launches and sailboats that tried (unsuccessfully) to block its assembly.
With Easton, Millar did a second article about the spill for the New York Times Magazine. He saw writing these pieces as his civic duty. (Easton found, though, that Millar’s concern to protect the environment was matched by an equally strong urge to protect his prose. Writing with the prickly Millar, Easton said, was like “collaborating with a porcupine.”) The Times story used as its title an “eleventh commandment” articulated by local historian Roderick Nash: “Thou shalt not abuse the earth.”
Easton and Millar became prime movers of Santa Barbara Citizens for Environmental Defense, a group that brought an ACLU-aided class-action lawsuit against the oil companies. The writers hoped to take advantage of the Santa Barbara spill to warn of more such dangers and maybe head them off. “We’ve got to convert this horror to positive good,” Millar quoted Easton. “Perhaps we can use it as a pivot to turn the country around before we completely wreck our living space.” The activists saw their hopes realized. Within a year of the spill, Earth Day was proclaimed an annual event; and a new eco
logy movement pressed for legislation to protect the nation’s resources and quality of life. As for stopping Channel oil drilling, success was mixed: safeguards were improved, but new wells went in.
Typically, Millar had responded to the problem on several levels: intellectually, viscerally, socially, personally, aesthetically—and morally. Considered by his strict standards, the oil spill was “an ecological crime,” and in due course Lew Archer would pursue such criminals.
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In the midst of these rallies and protests, another set of events began in the spring of 1969 that had bigger consequences for Millar’s life and Ross Macdonald’s career. In late April, John Leonard, assistant editor of the New York Times Book Review, came to Santa Barbara to interview Ross Macdonald. The Book Review, Leonard said, was planning to take “special notice” of The Goodbye Look in May.
Millar knew he’d acquired a core following of smart young readers around the country. Some even came West to visit or interview him—for instance a young fellow from the Harvard Crimson, who turned out to be a prodigious quoter of Archer novels (“knew my books better than I do,” Millar told Green). From such fans Millar learned there were Macdonald “campus cults” at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. While Millar had spent two decades writing “Alfred Knopf-quality” hardcover books, a generation of bright youngsters had discovered him for the most part in Bantam paperbacks.
One such devotee was the Times’s John Leonard, who described himself “haunting the paperback stores rooting out broken-spined editions” of Macdonald novels. But Leonard got hooked initially by a hardback. “I have a tactile memory of reading The Chill in hardcover,” he said. “I was living up in Brighton, Massachusetts, I was working the antipoverty program, I was reading a lot of mysteries, and that one just blew me away. I remember thinking, Oh my God.’ I grew up in southern California, and I was immediately taken with the way it combined the deep, dark Freudian family secret with all the great California landscape and mores. I got everything else by him that was available.” Leonard hailed from Long Beach (Archer’s hometown), and he thought Macdonald captured the California experience as well as any writer: “Page by page and chapter by chapter, this was family life as it seemed to me out there: the fast, fluid culture, the reinvention of the self, a kind of dread in the sun. You learn about how the money operates, and you get wonderful things about surfers and the like, and of course there’s the family secret; it comes up over and over again in his writing. The older I get, the truer and shrewder that seems.”
As a New York writer, Leonard discovered other Macdonald fanatics, such as Ray Sokolov, a young Newsweek critic. In February of 1969, Leonard wrote, he and Sokolov hatched a benign “literary conspiracy” on Macdonald’s behalf over gin and tonics in an Eighth Avenue bar: “We dilated on the thesis that Ross Macdonald had, quite consciously, married Freud to the detective story; that this was a worthy union; that not enough people were aware of it—his books sold modestly in hardcover and were only sporadically available in paperback—and attention should be paid. As a new Lew Archer novel, The Goodbye Look, was to be published in May, it was up to us to seize the moment.”
In charge of making fiction assignments at the New York Times Book Review, Leonard was well placed to get the ball rolling. And the Knopf people, primed by Millar, were ready to get behind The Goodbye Look in creative ways. The book’s jacket drew attention to both novel and author with an enlarged and distorted rendering of Alfred Knopf’s photograph of Macdonald, somewhat in the fish-eye style of the Beatles’ Rubber Soul album cover. Twenty years ago Knopf had launched Lew Archer with jacket art showing a trench-coated Macdonald looming in silhouette as if he himself were “the moving target.” Now Archer/Macdonald ruefully cast “the goodbye look” from a book that would say hello to a great many new readers.
Coincidentally, Macdonald’s Times benefactor had been acquainted with Millar’s previous Times champion: Leonard knew Anthony Boucher in the early sixties at KPFA, the Pacifica radio station in Berkeley. They never discussed mystery fiction, though, Leonard said: “I was not at that time a mystery reader at all. I was director of drama-literature programming; Tony Boucher did an opera program called Golden Voices, and then I talked him into doing a science fiction review program. I just got to know him as this strange, delightful cultural maverick.”
Leonard was a bit of a cultural maverick himself, and when he showed up in Santa Barbara, he felt Millar was initially on guard: “This must have been close to the first time there was a sort of mainstream literary interest expressed, so he was maybe wary of what my motives were. He was a very shy man, so it was a little difficult to talk to him; easier to talk to Margaret. But he was clearly very serious about his writing. What he didn’t want to talk about was his daughter and any of that material, which I’d heard about in a fuzzy way from the editor at Knopf, so I just didn’t push. I’m no crack reporter, and I wasn’t out there to do that; it was clear whenever I tried to ask something about it that that was painful and unnecessary, and it was not something I needed. Much more he just wanted to talk about the oil slick and the dead birds in Santa Barbara, and about writing. He gave me some of the essays he’d written, and I brought those back to quote from. I was impressed with how seriously he responded to craft questions. I thought I was going out to get a sort of pleasant sidebar; I came back with something much more substantial.”
Leonard wanted The Goodbye Look to receive serious Book Review coverage—a piece as long as the weekly would do on a worthy mainstream novel, written by someone appreciative of Macdonald’s oeuvre—but first he had to convince fellow assistant editor Walter Clemons that Macdonald deserved it, so that the two of them could present a united front to editor in chief Francis Brown. Clemons had never read Ross Macdonald, though an old Princeton classmate for years had urged him to. After quickly reading eleven Macdonald novels, Clemons agreed to help Leonard. Together they talked Francis Brown into giving The Goodbye Look a long solo review. To write it, Clemons chose that Princeton friend of his who’d been raving to him about Macdonald for years: Harper screenwriter William Goldman.
What happened next took even the conspirators by surprise. “I had no idea that we would play this so big,” said Leonard. “The Times didn’t usually do long interviews with anybody except dying mandarin modernists. It just happened that, through a combination of some of the responses Millar gave me and the fact that Goldman was so enthusiastic and the fact there was not a lot to compete that week at the Book Review, we parlayed all this space. It was startling.”
On Sunday, June 1, the front page of the New York Times Book Review was given over entirely to William Goldman writing about Ross Macdonald’s The Goodbye Look. Page two was also all about Macdonald: the conclusion of Goldman’s review led seamlessly into Leonard’s interview essay (with photograph), which jumped to another half-page. It was an extraordinary package, presenting Ross Macdonald as an author of serious purpose and achievement. “The finest detective novels ever written by an American” was the headline over Goldman’s fifteen-hundred-word review, in which he wrote, “Macdonald’s work in the last decade has nothing remotely to do with hard-boiled detective novels. He is writing novels of character about people with ghosts. . . . Like any first-rate writer, he has created and peopled his own world. Nobody writes southern California like Macdonald writes it. . . . I’ve been reading him for 20 years and he has yet to disappoint. Classify him how you will, he is one of the best American novelists now operating, and all he does is keep on getting better.”
Leonard’s even longer profile-essay picked up where Goldman’s review left off: “Ten years ago, while nobody was watching—or, rather, while everyone was looking in the wrong direction—a writer of detective stories turned into a major American novelist. Ross Macdonald said goodbye to Raymond Chandler in The Doomsters (1958). He pledged himself to ‘extracting a vision of the self from internal darkness—a self dying into fiction as it comes to birth.’ Ever since he has been producing
books as complex and as pertinent as any we have, and better written than most of what we have. Those books explore guilt, justice, mercy, exile, new beginnings, the ‘closed circuit’ of time, the ‘family romance’ (as in Freud: the fantasy you use to rationalize your relationship with your family and yourself), the tension between causality and revolt (you are compelled in your actions, but still responsible for them), and, crucially, the spider web of consequences spun from the abdomen of Oedipus. . . . Macdonald’s moral vision, his interest in psychology and sociology, his concern for the continuities of family life, his willingness to risk more of himself in his stories, his clean spare style (‘beware the inflated rhetorical’), combined to move the detective novel—‘democratic, accessible to everyone, respecting unities and form, almost Elizabethan’—into the mainstream of American fiction.”
A terrific notice on the front page of the New York Times Book Review was about the best coverage an American author could want in 1969: an unbeatable combination of cultural validation and the sort of publicity money couldn’t buy. Such reviews made writers famous overnight and boosted books onto best-seller lists. That had happened earlier this year when the Book Review led with Kurt Vonnegut’s sixth novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. But the Times’s recognition of Macdonald was more unexpected and hence caused an even greater stir, said John Leonard: “Vonnegut was known quite specifically in New York, and everybody in the publishing world had been waiting for that breakout book, which Slaughterhouse-Five was clearly going to be; that was all geared up and ready to go. With Macdonald it was more the opposite: a lot of enthusiasm for a writer who—though obviously everyone who took mystery fiction seriously knew him very well—had not up to that time gotten that kind of attention.”