Ross MacDonald

by Tom Nolan

  During the same weeks he went to the bank-burning trial, Millar attended the Citizens Commission meetings, where witnesses ranged from the vice-chancellor of the university to a reformed drug addict. “My sympathies are not with violence,” he wrote Bill Ruehlmann (now teaching in Arizona), “but to a degree with the students, faced as they feel themselves to be with a futureless kind of future.” To a journalist, he said, “I put my hope in the intelligence of young people, but I feel also that drugs have been a major misfortune. They have ruined a lot of people. Hard drugs, overall, are a terrible national menace. At the same time it’s unfortunate that kids caught with pot are treated as hardened criminals. Kids looking for reality who can’t get it from their parents will do drastic things to find it.”

  The commission’s work ended with the public distribution of a carefully written and informative report. “It came out somewhat more liberal than I’d dared to hope,” Millar told John Smith, “. . . but I don’t suppose the kids will like it much.”

  The jury in the Isla Vista bank-burning trial surprised Judge Westwick and most courtroom spectators by acquitting most of the eleven defendants. Langfelder, though, was convicted. “I was facing arson charges,” he said, “and expecting to do time in the Santa Barbara County jail. But I did a lot of detective work; we had to defend our case, we dug up a lotta stuff.” Langfelder’s defense people used the services of a private investigator. Millar, who knew few actual detectives, happened to know Langfelder’s. This idealistic young PI called Millar before the Isla Vista troubles and came to his house for a talk. Macdonald later wrote:

  I remembered his name. A few years before, as a local university student, he had joined the campus branch of the John Birch Society in order to expose its purposes. Since then, he told me in my study, he had carved out a career as a private detective . . . in the Bay area [and] apprehended some fifty criminals. I was surprised by his reason for coming to me. He wanted to establish a code of ethics for private detectives, and thought my Archer stories might serve as a starting point. Nothing came of that. Events carried him away, as they tend to do with young men of action. I saw him once more, in Superior Court, when he was gathering evidence for the defendants in the Isla Vista trial. Then he went underground on another case.

  In another blurring of art and life, Macdonald’s description of this man could serve as a thumbnail sketch of Lew Archer, or a self-portrait of Ken Millar:

  He is built like a middleweight. . . . His style could be that of a graduate student or an artist, or possibly a young lawyer for the defense. But he is more diffident than self-assertive. He watches and listens, and talks just enough to hold up his end of the conversation. For all his goodwill and energy, there is a touch of sadness in his expression, as if there had been some trouble in his life, a fracture in his world which all his investigative efforts had failed to mend.

  Many people meeting Millar were struck by his fundamental sadness: “not a bitterness or gloom or resignation,” wrote Matt Bruccoli, “but a tranquil sadness—perhaps even a cheerful sadness.” Bruccoli, at work in 1970 on his Ross Macdonald bibliographical checklist, visited Millar in Santa Barbara and later said, “I had the feeling when I was with Ken that I was in the presence of a man who had had great troubles. There was a quietness and a reserve about him that seemed to come from some source I couldn’t quite identify. He was not ebullient; he was not spontaneous. But neither was he unfriendly! He was a very private man, and I didn’t ask probing questions; I was just happy to spend three hours with him, talking books. I thought Ken was one of the best American writers of his time, and I still do. And I didn’t say ‘mystery writer’—I said writer.”

  When Bruccoli visited, Millar was finishing a book that put the 1964 Coyote fire to fictional use. Written with the working title Digger (a country name for death), it was published as The Underground Man. Millar dedicated this sixteenth Archer novel to Macdonald’s bibliographer.

  The author thought it important that the novel after The Goodbye Look be as good or better than that best-seller. “There is always moral pain involved in following a great success,” he told Ash Green, “and I never worked so hard on a book in my life.” The result was as much a suspense novel as a detective story, and its author was cautiously pleased. “The main thing,” he told Green, “is that it’s different from the others, from all the others indeed, and not a self-imitation. Looking over it in some coolness, I think it may get me some new readers. . . . Not,” he was quick to add, “that I expect a further breakthrough in sales.” Millar told Olding he could use a larger advance from Knopf, but he worried about upping his rate unduly: “Certainly I don’t want to strain the situation or interfere with their promotion of the book, which in the case of Goodbye Look was generous and effective. What do you think about asking for $7500.00?” Green, enthusiastic about The Underground Man, swiftly agreed to the sum, which seems modest even by 1970 standards for an author whose last book had ridden the New York Times top ten list for three and a half months.

  * * *

  As he worked on his novel, went to Citizens Commission meetings, and attended trials, Millar had also found time in this busy year to help friends. When Herb Harker after years of spare-time writing finished a novel-length manuscript, the first thing he did was bring it to Millar on a Thursday night. “That same weekend,” Harker said, “we moved into a different house. I mentioned to Ken the street we were moving to. He said, ‘Well, Lew Archer can find you.’ On Sunday we were ready to leave for church when who do I see at the door but Ken. He said, ‘I just wanted to stop by and tell you that I really like your book. I want to finish it in the next couple of days, then we’ll talk about it.’ So we got together and talked about it at length. He’d made a lot of notations, of course. Then I went back to work on it. He made a lot of wonderful suggestions as to what I might do to improve it; and finally he said, ‘Well, I think you should send it off.’ ” Millar got Dorothy Olding to read the manuscript, and she agreed to represent it. Though she couldn’t sell that novel, Harker wrote another in the meantime, which Olding placed with Random House.

  Millar also arranged in 1970 that Olding read Black Tide, Bob Easton’s history of oil drilling in the Santa Barbara Channel, which the agent sold to Delacorte; Ross Macdonald wrote its foreword. Millar was delighted when things worked out so well. “I’m like you,” he told Olding, “love to see nice things happen to my friends.”

  He went out of his artistic way for strangers too. By 1970, Macdonald was a prime source of quotes for jackets of books (usually novels) sent by agents or editors. He wouldn’t praise a book he didn’t like, but when he thought well of something, he’d often send not only a solid blurb but a detailed critique for the author’s benefit. (And he corrected typos as a matter of course.)

  Sometimes authors showed up in person to thank him. “Leonard Gardner, who wrote Fat City”—an acclaimed novel about boxers in central California—“came by yesterday evening,” Millar wrote Green, “tall and thin and melancholy and humorous, and I liked him just as well as I liked his book, which made him the current California white hope. He’s messing around, as he said, with a movie script for his novel which Ray Stark bought. I have some movie action going, too. . . . Some good people are getting ready to make The Chill, I’m told.”

  Those people included director Sam Peckinpah, whose recent western The Wild Bunch was a critical and box-office smash. Peckinpah signed with Harper producer Elliott Kastner to film The Chill, and it seemed Bette Davis might play the key female role. “Here we have a chance for a good one,” Millar wrote Olding. The project’s financing fell through, though, and The Chill was once more put on ice.

  But other good things were happening for Macdonald. Academic recognition increased: George Grella of the University of Rochester published a strong essay (“Murder and the Mean Streets: The Hard-Boiled Detective Novel”) on the fiction of Hammett, Chandler, and Macdonald; at Boston University, doctoral candidate Robert Brown Parker (later a
uthor of several thrillers with a detective named Spenser) submitted as his dissertation “The Violent Hero, Wilderness Heritage and Urban Reality: A Study of the Private Eye in the Novels of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald.”

  The New York Times’s Harrison Salisbury gave Millar an assignment for a thousand-word piece on California’s “national, social, political and economic tendencies” for the Times’s new “opposite editorial” page; though Millar later begged off writing this op-ed piece (it needed more research than he’d realized), he was flattered to be asked. Cosmo bought The Underground Man for condensation (the first Macdonald they’d taken in five years); the author wired Olding he was “delighted”—but this time, he added, “Let them cut it.” He noted with pleasure “carom shots” where Ross Macdonald was mentioned in reviews of other California authors such as Joan Didion and Joseph Hansen: indications that Macdonald was becoming an established part of the literary landscape. Bay Area educational filmmaker Art Kaye got Millar’s cooperation in making a short documentary on Macdonald (“It will help to get my name around in the schools,” Millar explained to Olding); Kaye started filming in Santa Barbara in October.

  If Millar and Kaye succeeded in expanding Macdonald’s campus audience, Bantam Books was ready to meet the demand with style. The paperback house came up with a great graphic look for its latest Macdonald repackaging: each book had title and author’s name in shadowed “three-dimensional” typeface above striking rectangular-boxed photo art, with William Goldman’s now-famous quote at the top of the covers. “I’m told that Bantam is going to put out batches of five in boxes for Christmas,” Millar wrote Olding. “It’s either feast or famine, as we used to say.” Critic Gene Shalit displayed the new Bantams coast-to-coast on NBC-TV’s Today show and called Ross Macdonald “America’s best mystery novelist.”

  But the most exciting thing of all for Millar was a remark made by Mississippi author Eudora Welty in the New York Times Book Review. She’d once nearly sent Ross Macdonald a fan letter, she said: “I never mailed it. I was afraid he’d think it—icky.” Millar didn’t hesitate to send her a letter, along with his second Knopf omnibus, Archer at Large. Welty replied with a “warm . . . most pleasant and (naturally) intelligent letter,” Millar eagerly informed Knopf; the highly regarded Welty said she’d been following Archer for years. Millar had read Welty for a long time too, ever since her first stories in the Southern Review, a little thirties magazine coedited by Cleanth Brooks. Though Millar and Welty had Brooks in common (Brooks having taught that 1942 Michigan course), the two authors otherwise almost dwelt in separate literary hemispheres. “To receive such a letter from such a writer,” Millar wrote Knopf, “seemed to me about the nicest thing that had happened to me since you accepted Blue City.” He volleyed another letter to Welty, and a long correspondence began.

  * * *

  “So much luck as I’ve had makes one superstitious,” Millar confided to Olding. Inside the successful California writer was a poor Canadian boy who’d learned life was a cruel game of snakes-and-ladders. As a character in a Macdonald book said, “Your good luck and your bad luck balance out; the whole thing works like clockwork.”

  Millar’s happiness and uneasiness increased on Sunday, November 1, when his daughter and her family came for a day’s visit from Inglewood, a hundred miles south. Linda was thirty-one now and seemed in better shape than she had in years, though her father could see there were scars on her psyche. She’d been hospitalized in 1968 for a circulatory disorder that caused a slight stroke; recently she’d given up a medical assistant’s job when she couldn’t keep up the pace. But Linda was a good mother to her seven-year-old. She was in fine spirits this sparkling autumn Sunday. Three generations of Millars had a whale of a good time at the Natural History Museum, where Linda had spent many happy days as a youngster. Millar saw his guests back to the highway in late afternoon. As their car drove out of sight, Linda smiled and waved. Millar went home to work on the proofs of The Underground Man, needed in New York by November 10. He wrote Ash Green a letter that evening about Linda’s visit and said, “Life is so very good on certain days that one almost lives in fear of having to pay for it in full. But life is by definition a free gift.”

  Four days later, on a Thursday morning, he learned that his only child had died in her sleep. The cause was at first said to be the circulatory disorder that had troubled her in the past. Millar subsequently told people his daughter died of “a cerebral incident.”

  He could hardly bear to speak for days. Each hour was a burden, and talking to other people only made it heavier. Linda would be cremated and her ashes placed in Santa Barbara Cemetery on Saturday, November 7. The Millars told almost no one.

  Dick Lid in Woodland Hills got a terse call from Millar that Saturday morning: “Ken said, ‘Linda is dead.’ That was it, just—long silence. I said, ‘When’s the funeral, I’ll be there.’ He said, ‘In an hour, you can’t make it.’ And hung up. He had arranged the call so I couldn’t be there.”

  “Somehow Ken and Maggie both felt responsible for Linda’s death, I’m sure,” Ping Ferry said, “even though that wasn’t the case; she was an adult.” After the funeral, Linda’s survivors went to the Millars’ Hope Ranch house. Margaret years later told journalist Paul Nelson how the family coped: “[Linda’s husband] Joe was with us, and Jimmy, and we just didn’t know what to do. I mean it was just one of those terrible situations. And I said to Joe that the Beatles movie A Hard Day’s Night was going to be on television, and he said, ‘I’d like to see it because Linda and I watched it together in Japan.’ They lived in Japan for a while, and they watched it in Japanese. And we watched it that night, and somehow—it got us through the night. I loved it, I just simply loved it. There’s certain movies I could just watch over and over, and have, and that’s one of them. I’ll tell you, there’s something very poignant about that film; I always manage to bawl at the end of it.”

  That night and on Sunday, Millar wrote letters to friends expressing feelings he couldn’t put into speech. To John Smith, who’d known Linda, he said, “You will understand me when I say that she was a valiant girl, one of the great moral forces in my life and after Margaret my dearest love. . . . There is some relief in the knowledge that Linda made a great effort and succeeded in it, though she died young.” He wrote Olding, “She died young, aged 31, but her short life was as full as many others. The people who knew her best, including her husband and me, felt that she was in almost unaccountable ways a great person. In spite of emotional illness she raised a fine boy with loving care to the age of seven, and in spite of physical illness she worked as a nurse’s aide and more recently as a medical assistant. Like my mother, her great ambition was to look after the sick, and in fact she was looking for work in that field the day she died. Her ashes are being placed in Santa Barbara Cemetery above the beach where she took her first swim in the Pacific. She was a strong swimmer in her day. . . . Linda is at peace.”

  “I presume he was an atheist,” said Millar’s friend Herb Harker, a Mormon, “which doesn’t in the least diminish him in my view, because I never knew a man more concerned about other people; and to me that’s the most important thing. He never learned much about my religion, and I never learned much about his. It was kind of off-limits. I only remember one time where we really kind of got into it. As I remember, Ken said he did not think there was an afterlife. And I said, ‘Well, we know that anything physical can’t be destroyed. You watch a log burn, you think it’s gone, but it isn’t, it still exists; there’s smoke and ashes, there’s heat—all it does is change.’ I said, ‘It’s difficult for me to see why, if you can’t destroy matter, you can destroy life and have it suddenly end.’ And Ken said to me, ‘Does that give you comfort?’ And I felt like what he said was kind of harsh; it really offended me. I was hurt, mostly, because it seemed to trivialize the feeling I had: as though I believed this because I’m afraid not to.”

  Asked (a few years after Linda’s deat
h) by interviewer Paul Nelson if he was religious, Millar replied, “In a sense. But I don’t know that I can define the sense.” Nelson persisted: Was he an atheist? “Oh, I believe in human values,” Millar said. “I don’t have any direct contact with the divine world. If I did have, I’d be afraid of it. I don’t know whether that makes me an atheist or not. I think I live in sufficient fear and trembling to qualify as a believer. But I don’t want to know the source of my fear and trembling too intimately.”

  Fear and Trembling was a Kierkegaard work that influenced Millar greatly. In another place, Kierkegaard wrote, “Sin is despair,” and conversely, “Despair is sin.” Millar didn’t despair after Linda’s death. And he did have his own sort of beliefs, as he’d tell Nelson: “We’re all members of a single body, to degrees that we have no idea except in moments of what might be called revelation. Oh, I believe it. Yes. And the idea of all of us being members of a single body, so to speak, has a religious connection. I think it’s literally true: we live or die together. And the influences just of one person on another—any two people who know each other—are absolutely staggering, if you trace them. It’s the essence of our lives, that interrelationship.” It was the essence of Macdonald’s fiction too. After Linda’s death it became some essence of what kept Millar going. He continued for one thing for the sake of his grandson, who needed him, and whom the Millars needed.