Ross MacDonald

by Tom Nolan

  Millar was dismayed at how few MWA colleagues saw fit to congratulate him on what he’d accomplished in recent years. Maybe they simply didn’t understand what he was about, he mused; after rereading the serious piece he’d done on Hammett for the 1964 Mystery Writers’ Annual, he wrote Olding, “No wonder I puzzle MWA.” In 1972, the Mystery Writers of America gave their Grandmaster Award not to Ross Macdonald but to his exact contemporary John D. MacDonald.

  At least Margaret Millar didn’t go unrecognized: her Beyond This Point Are Monsters got a 1971 Edgar nomination. The question of Margaret’s career was a somewhat delicate one, with her once ascendant star now standing still while her husband’s soared. Most people who telephoned the house these days were seeking Ross Macdonald; if Maggie answered, some addressed her as Mrs. Macdonald—or maybe she was Mr. Macdonald’s secretary? Margaret was better known now in other countries such as Germany, where she’d had recent good-sellers, than she was in the States. Jackie Coulette said, “I remember how impressed I was when Hank and I were walking down the street in Lund, Sweden, and there was a window display of Maggie’s work in a bookstore; I didn’t realize she was that big a name.” Millar made a point of mentioning his wife’s achievements to all who interviewed him. “He was very protective of her,” Sam Grogg said, “and she was very mothering of him. There was going to be a new paperback series of all her works”—Avon paid fifteen hundred dollars apiece to reissue ten titles—“and he talked a lot about that; he was very proud of her. And very deferential, in wanting me to acknowledge her: ‘Don’t forget that Margaret here is another writer!’ They were a great couple.”

  Still, there could be an edge to Maggie’s attitude. Dennis Lynds was at a 1972 screening she attended of Kaye’s film at Santa Barbara’s Anacapa Theatre in a week when Millar was out of town. “She sniped through the whole thing,” he said. “Little remarks here and there: ‘Oh, there’s the Great Man.’ ‘There’s this,’ ‘there’s that’—it was quite something. I don’t know if she was being jocular, but—there was an undercurrent.”

  The urge to commit a book struck Margaret less and less often. Given Millar’s income, she didn’t need to write; and increasingly, she didn’t want to. With bird-watching, gardening, swimming, and now distance bicycling (which Millar joined her in), Margaret found plenty to do. She’d had her say as a writer, she told people; she was retired.

  Ross Macdonald meanwhile continued to permeate the scene. “What gives me particular pleasure,” Millar confessed to Knopf, “being a word-man, is that I’m following Hammett and Chandler into the current language. In last month’s Esquire, in an article on Joe Bonnano, Gay Talese referred to a Ross-Macdonald-like situation, and there are similar references in the current TV Guide and the L.A. Times West magazine. Today I had lunch with a young Harvard teacher who will be teaching a couple of my books next fall; two weeks ago I had lunch with a Yale professor who taught Zebra-Striped Hearse last year. There are several books underway, one at U. of Missouri and one at U. of Chicago (the latter a doctoral dissertation), and Matthew Bruccoli’s lavishly illustrated checklist.”

  Especially gratifying was the University of Michigan’s bestowing on Dr. Kenneth Millar its Outstanding Achievement Award for distinguished alumni. Millar traveled alone (Maggie canceled at the last minute) to the U of M campus in November 1972 to accept the honor. He was apprehensive but ended up having a good time. Things had changed at Michigan: the English Department people seemed more sympathetic now to popular art in general and crime fiction in particular. Macdonald enjoyed a lot of adulation from faculty and students at the grad school where once upon a time Millar’s fiction-writing was viewed with barely veiled contempt. Millar closed another one of those circles he loved to round off.

  “Life is beginning to taste good again,” he wrote Bruccoli, “after a couple of years which were ruined by the alternations of good and bad fortune.” What was most pleasing to him—more than the awards, the academic recognition, the journalist pilgrims (all of which he liked)—was knowing that in this hectic year he’d written another novel; and not just any book, but one in which he’d distilled (in typically concealed and revealing fashion) a lot of his painful feelings about the good and bad fortune of all his years. Sleeping Beauty was its title, and Millar called it “the book which is most important to me.”

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  It is interesting that children rather noticeably understand irony. They get it from fairy tales.

  —Eudora Welty, “And They All Lived Happily Ever After,”

  New York Times Book Review, 1963

  “Look, I’m telling you my family secrets.”

  —Ross Macdonald, Sleeping Beauty

  A seventeenth-century fairy tale by Charles Perrault provided the phantom underpinning for Macdonald’s seventeenth Archer novel, in which Millar through fiction paired the most distressing event in Santa Barbara’s recent history with the most tragic fact of his private life.

  In Perrault’s tale, a spiteful curse fates a princess to pierce herself fatally with a spindle at fifteen. A good fairy alters the curse so the princess will instead fall into deep sleep for a hundred years, then be wakened by a king’s son who’ll marry her.

  In Macdonald’s book, a young woman named Laurel Lennox suffered the effects of a misadventure when she was fifteen: she and a teenaged boy (“who may have a kind of hex on her”) ran off to Las Vegas, pretended she was kidnapped, and got a thousand-dollar ransom. The boy was jailed and Laurel exonerated, but she’s never really recovered. Separated from a husband who “treats her as if she were a fairy princess,” Laurel gobbles Seconals and sometimes longs “to go to sleep and never wake up.” During a visit to Archer’s apartment, she steals some Nembutal and leaves abruptly, perhaps bent on suicide.

  Hired to find the missing woman by her husband, Archer becomes a sort of surrogate prince, looking for Laurel in Pacific Point, whose citizens are transfixed by communal catastrophe: an oil leak that seeps up from the ocean bed and spreads ashore like an evil spell.

  The slick, caused by an ill-advised oil platform stuck in the seafloor “like the metal handle of a dagger that had stabbed the world and made it spill black blood,” is an “ecological crime” to match the forest fire in The Underground Man. But where Underground danced along like wildfire, Beauty oozes like the black tide, slow and inexorable. The huge slick spreads from sea to shore “like premature night,” turning beach sand to pitch, smearing windows, fouling air, killing birds. Clumps of people silently watch the oil’s progress, spellbound like the servants in Perrault’s tale, “as if they were waiting for the end of the world, or as if the end had come and they would never move again.”

  In the wake of this unnatural act, the laws of physics seem suspended, as if the world’s turned upside down. An owl flies across the night sky “as silently as a fish under water.” A lake resembles a chunk of sky spattered on the ground. The moon floats low to the earth like a target balloon. Seagulls seem made out of white plastic. An old woman who looks like an aging boy drinks water “as if it was hemlock.”

  Human nature is awry. Parents reject their roles in word and deed (“Could you possibly not call me Mother, dear?”). Couples who hate one another are held together by anger and guilty knowledge; lovers are driven apart by inexplicable tensions. Some marriages fracture over pride and sexual greed; others are held together by lust and the love of money.

  Time stretches, or speeds up, trapping the unwary in traumas of fifteen or twenty years past. Houses become enchanted keeps, holding occupants in thrall to things that happened there: a man raises his son in the home where the mother was murdered; the son makes it his own disenchanted wedding cottage. People in this bewitched place are but dimly aware of the trances they’re in; years go by like weeks, minutes stretch for hours.

  Archer himself starts perceiving the world as distorted. Returning to his apartment after thirty hours, it seems to him years have passed: “There wa
s a drabness in the light, a sourness in the air. It gave me a shock to realize that the change was not in the apartment but in me.” When he comes to a lookout tower, Archer has the odd feeling the tower’s watching him, though inside he finds nothing “but a drift of sand marked with footprints”: a visual echo of the “beautifully shaped prints” Laurel’s “narrow feet” had made in the beach sand when Lew met her.

  In Laurel Lennox, Macdonald showed his last picture of Linda Millar, altering her image through the looking glass of fiction. Laurel’s a rich girl with emotional problems, haunted by an adolescent folly for which someone else took the brunt of the blame. Fearful and unhappy (but with “a real sweetness underneath it all”), troubled by everyday cruelty, Laurel resists bringing a child into the world. Seemingly damaged by some forgotten event, latently suicidal, she’s sought help from psychiatrists. “She has so much empathy,” her grandmother says, “it’s virtually psychotic.” Yet the grandmother adds, “This may seem a strange thing to say about a girl who has suffered as much as Laurel and made so many mistakes. But I don’t think she wants to be any different. And of course she’s had her good times.”

  Lew had only a brief encounter with Laurel, but she made a deep impression on him, he says: “Dark and troubled . . . At the same time quite strong, in her way, and valuable, even beautiful. I never met a girl who cared so much.”

  Like a father, Lew feels responsible for Laurel. “I shouldn’t have let her get away from me,” he says. “I knew she needed help, but I didn’t want to admit it to myself. I wasn’t prepared to give it, I suppose.” But he worries that his paternal motives are impure: “I caught an oblique glimpse of myself as a middle-aged man on the make.” After consummating one of his few seductions (with the Lennox girl’s aunt, in the Lennox girl’s room), Archer experiences semi-incestuous shame: “I dreamed I was sleeping with Laurel, and woke up guilty and sweating in her bed.” In an instant he moves from sex to guilt to death: there’s an oil-soaked corpse floating in the sea outside—a grotesque double to the oil-damaged bird Laurel had held when Lew met her.

  Sleeping Beauty sustains an involving tension. There are recurring reminders that time is finite. An earth slide leaning against a cliff looks to Archer “like sand in the bottom of an hourglass which had almost run out.” In the empty room of someone else who’s disappeared, Lew notes an alarm clock that isn’t ticking: “It had stopped a few minutes short of midnight, or of noon.” But the same signs that signal something ending could also cue renewal. An hourglass can be turned right side up. The clock could as easily mark the start of a new day as the end of an old one.

  There’s a tenderness at the book’s core, emanating from Archer’s looking for Laurel. His task reminds us of his pursuit of the missing boy in The Underground Man, but here the quest is even more involving. Laurel seems more vulnerable because she’s damaged, like the oil-soaked bird she tried to save. Perhaps, like the bird, Laurel’s hurt beyond repair.

  That “black bird” again brings to mind the Maltese Falcon, an object Millar said could symbolize the absence of the Holy Ghost. Beauty’s sharp-beaked bird and the girl who holds it augur the loss, through greed and pride, of nature and of life itself, in the form of a single grebe or an only child.

  In Sleeping Beauty Macdonald developed characteristic themes with skill. The family romance, with its attractions and compulsions, is exemplified among others by Laurel and husband Tom Russo: both united and threatened by common memories of a lost childhood paradise (“In flight from the past,” Millar wrote in a notebook, “Laurel runs directly into the past”). Parents groom children to repeat their own mistakes, then punish them. Children shoulder the guilt for grown-ups’ actions. Lies are repeated enough they seem true. People suppressing the awful past are compelled to make a terrible present. Guilt is a cause of mutual enchantment, freezing time and crippling the will.

  Adding another dimension to the work is its fairy-tale motif, developed all the way to the end: the main villain’s demise occurs with a fall through the air and a swirl of smoke worthy of a witch dispatched by the Brothers Grimm. Like a fairy tale, the book can be read over and over for instruction, irony, pity, terror.

  Through Macdonald’s art, Millar did the impossible: turned life’s hourglass upside down, retraced those “elegant footprints” along the shore. This time the story came out right: the princess is found, the pills thrown away, the victim rescued, the wicked punished, the scapegoat set free. The hero succeeds. The spell is broken. The daughter lives.

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  As a man gets older, if he knows what is good for him, the women he likes are getting older, too. The trouble is that most of them are married.

  —Ross Macdonald, The Zebra-Striped Hearse

  Charlotte Capers: I would like to ask you about Kenneth Millar, whose pseudonym is Ross Macdonald. He is a celebrated detective story writer, or writer, and is a friend of yours, and I’m interested in how you two met.

  Eudora Welty: We met because he wrote me a letter after I had said, in an interview published in the New York Times with Walter Clemons, that I admired his work. . . . Then I reviewed a book of his, The Underground Man, and we got to be friends again. . . . I think so much of his work, and he’s such a nice man. Then, in a typical Ross Macdonald fashion, we, unknown to each other, turned up at the same time in the same hotel in adjoining rooms in New York. . . . At the Algonquin—and met then, and had some good conversations, and walked, and talked, and so on, and got to be good friends. So, I felt that he was almost like an old friend, especially after he dedicated his new book to me, so I invited him to come to this wonderful occasion for me, and he came, which I think was just wonderful—from Santa Barbara. I was sorry his wife couldn’t come. She had planned to.

  Capers: What’s the title of his new book?

  Welty: Sleeping Beauty.

  Capers: I’m his fan, too, I can’t wait to read it.

  Welty: Oh! I know it! I’m going out today to try to buy some copies. Rosie wanted to take my inscribed copy home on the plane, but I wouldn’t let her.

  Capers: I don’t blame you. Well, I thought he was a most attractive man, and I’m delighted that he came.

  —Charlotte Capers, “An Interview with Eudora Welty, 8 May 1973”

  “It is certain to become the third straight bestseller by the author of The Goodbye Look and The Underground Man—the incomparable novelist whose books the New York Times has called ‘the best series of detective novels ever written by an American’ ”: so Knopf trumpeted Sleeping Beauty in a full-page ad in the Times Book Review in the spring of 1973. Millar had tried to make the novel a worthy follow-up to its best-selling predecessors, but Sleeping Beauty was also a highly personal work—“more of my lifetime images came in on that oily tide than ever before,” he told Peter Wolfe; and he sent a typescript to his most valued reader, Eudora Welty, for her prepublication reaction. Millar dedicated the book to Welty, not only from gratitude for her Underground review but because he felt they’d become good friends. Welty liked Sleeping Beauty, Millar wrote Ash Green: “She gave me such a reading as authors dream of.”

  Eudora Welty was Macdonald’s best-known literary champion, but he had other notable fans, including Welty confidants Reynolds Price and Elizabeth Bowen. (“She was crazy about him,” Welty said of Irish writer Bowen. “She used to carry around paperbacks when she was doing lecture tours in America, and when I would give her one of his to read—I told Ken this, I think it embarrassed him—she would say, ‘Oh, beloved Ross Macdonald!’ ”) Along with the younger Joan Didion and the older Wallace Stegner, Macdonald was among the most highly regarded writers in California by 1973: roughly comparable in career terms to where Raymond Chandler had been a quarter century earlier when Macdonald launched the Archer series. The memory of Chandler’s behavior toward the first Archer still stung Millar; he’d made a conscious effort to repay Chandler’s nastiness with his own kindness to young writers. Earl
y in 1973 he read a book that “challenged” his achievement the way Target had challenged Chandler’s; Millar reacted with a generosity that helped launch its author’s career.

  Yale Drama School grad Roger Simon had published two novels before he wrote The Big Fix, a breezy private-eye tale with young, political, pot-smoking LA detective Moses Wine. The Big Fix would be published by Straight Arrow, the book division of Rolling Stone magazine. Simon was friends with a colleague of Dick Lid’s at Cal State Northridge, and Lid agreed to show Millar a manuscript copy of The Big Fix.

  “He responded with the most wonderful, warm, generous letter to me,” recalled Simon, who lived in Los Angeles. “He really liked the book. I think what he liked was it hadn’t been done before: that it took the form and moved it forward and had a different sensibility; and he liked the literary style. He felt I was deficient in plotting; I still am, although I’m better now. I was sort of bowled over, but practical: I wrote back saying thank you, thank you, thank you—and my publisher would love for you to give a quote! And he did, he gave me a great quote. He also invited me to have lunch with him up there in Santa Barbara at the writers’ luncheon.”

  Simon drove up to a Wednesday gathering at El Cielito in March of 1973, he said: “Of course I didn’t know exactly what he looked like; I guess he must have realized who I was, ’cause he knew I’d be coming at a certain hour and I’d look confused, right? And I looked fairly hippie at the time: I had long hair and a beard. He had a very quiet, wry, puckish sense of humor. The way he identified himself was, he picked up this straw panama hat and put it on, like Lew Archer, and stood up and looked at me, and smiled!

  “He did have this sort of mannered way; he seemed almost out of time. But he was really shy. Part of it may have been that there were so many years between us; I was twenty-nine. He was the obvious heavyweight of that luncheon gathering; on the other hand, he wouldn’t impose himself. I’ve been around a lot of people particularly in the movie business who are powerful, interesting artists; and I would say of the fine artists I have known, without exception he was the most modest. He was extraordinarily generous with other writers, almost in a gurulike way; he wanted to mentor people he liked. I learned from him it was a good thing to be like that—if not good for your work, at least good for the soul.”