by Tom Nolan
All four papers were good; the first one, George Grella’s, Millar thought “quite brilliant.” In his eighteen-minute talk (reprinted in the New Republic), Grella, a young professor at the University of Rochester, pinpointed recurring patterns in Macdonald’s plots, which in their “richly exfoliating complexity” he said more resembled Dickens’s and Faulkner’s than Hammett’s or Chandler’s. Grella listed thematic statements the plots expressed: “All men are guilty and all human actions are connected. The past is never past. The child is father to the man. True reality resides in dreams. And most of all, everyone gets what he deserves, but no one deserves what he gets.” Sam Grogg gave a paper adapted from his Macdonald dissertation. (“I was a little flustered,” said Grogg, “because not only was I saying some words about him in front of him, in public, I was saying the words to him, not to all those other people. And I sat back down after I’d given my little speech, and Ken kinda leaned over and patted my leg, and he said, ‘Thanks.’ I still remember that!”) Chicago State University grad student Johnnine Hazard, who’d also done a Macdonald dissertation, read a paper placing Lew Archer in the tradition of realistic “plain” detectives (“courageous, honest, persevering, daring, modest, clever, selfless, successful in a very unromantic world”). She closed on a personal note that got a laugh with its Watergate allusion: “Graduate students rarely have the pleasure of meeting the subject of their thesis, and I’m very grateful to have the opportunity of meeting Mr. Macdonald; but I wouldn’t be candid if I didn’t add that I have a few tremors too. And when I get done hearing Mr. Macdonald speak, or answer questions, I may decide, as they do in Washington these days, that what I said here is inoperative.” Finally Sheldon Sacks, a University of Chicago professor whose usual field was the theory of eighteenth-century literature, explored Archer’s ethos in a half-hour talk that ended: “Ross Macdonald has allowed me the great privilege of following Lew Archer, detective, through the end of the maze, to permanent human significance, even in the most grotesque brutalities of riddles in time.”
After ninety minutes of scholars’ praise, an emotional Macdonald stood to deliver his own essay. It took him a few sentences and several throat-clearings to get the tears from his voice. “I’m really quite overwhelmed,” he said, “and deeply honored, that four such eloquent papers should have been prepared about my work, and that so many of you should have turned out to hear them and listened to them with such appreciation. I—I really can’t tell you how—how joyous an occasion this is, for me. And really quite unexpected when, twenty or twenty-five years ago, I started on the Archer trail.”
His talk, “Down These Streets a Mean Man Must Go” (playing on a famous phrase of Chandler’s), traced Millar’s lifelong involvement with “serious” and “popular” literature and suggested how the two were intertwined. “His paper was extremely good, a terrific job,” George Grella said. “I remember certain things vividly; they’ve stuck with me. He talked about his childhood, and it’s just heartbreaking to think of the things that happened. He said he was about sixteen and went into this pool hall kind of place and picked up a book on a rack there, and it was a Hammett book, and he started reading it and he said he had this extraordinary feeling that he was finally reading a book about the life that was happening all around him. I thought that was stunning. The other thing was how he’d wanted to complete Coleridge’s ‘Christabel,’ and I find that very very telling: because in a way he’s always writing these sort of dark romances, pervaded by medieval ideas and some sense of perversion, which is all in that unfinished poem of Coleridge’s.”
At the end of his talk (“if you can believe this of an academic meeting,” Millar wrote Peter Wolfe), the five or six hundred in the Palmer House ballroom gave Macdonald a standing ovation. “Those people just revered this man,” Grogg said. Millar sat down then to sign books and speak with all who approached him, exercising what Grogg called “that amazing gift he had to put this hand over you.” As Ross Macdonald, Millar could transcend his own insecurities and become the wise father figure people expected Lew Archer’s creator to be.
* * *
Frank MacShane saw Ken Millar undergo a different sort of transformation in Santa Barbara in 1974. MacShane, chairman of Columbia University’s writing division, was in California researching an authorized biography of Raymond Chandler; he looked up Millar at the suggestion of Eudora Welty. Nattily dressed in academic tweeds, MacShane was startled by Millar’s appearance and manner at the Coral Casino: “He came out dressed like a parody of a certain sort of American on vacation, in this kind of Hawaiian shirt, Bermuda shorts, and a straw hat: he looked rather ridiculous. But exceedingly courtly at the same time. So courtly and so—weird. It was very stiff, to say the least. We went into this building, and he was so very formal: ’Well, Professor MacShane, what would you like to eat?’ I got rattled, and I pointed at what I thought was a salad—it was this enormous pile of lettuce. And so it was on my plate. We went upstairs to eat. I hadn’t even read his stuff; probably I seemed like a total dumbbell. Anyway I kept asking him questions about Chandler, and he would answer in monosyllables; it was hard to get him to say anything. And all the while I’m stuffing down this ‘salad.’ It was getting pretty dreary. I didn’t know if he was like that normally, or whether I’d done something wrong.”
No doubt his reticence had to do with MacShane’s project. Chandler was still a sore topic for Millar, who’d recently turned down a publisher’s suggestion that he write a Chandler biography. When a New York Times Magazine editor phoned and asked him to pen an appreciation of Chandler, Millar exploded, “If Chandler had wanted to be kindly remembered, he shouldn’t have tried to do me in!” (He recommended Julian Symons for the assignment.)
The sudden appearance of Margaret Millar rescued MacShane’s meeting: “His wife changed everything in one second: she was full of fun and vitality, and it became human again. Still he was very formal and not very forthcoming. I was a bit disappointed, ’cause I’d come all the way up there to see him. He said, ‘Well, Mr. MacShane, have we finished our business?’ I said I guess so, but you mentioned a bookshop; maybe we could go see that. ‘Very well. Let us go downstairs and see what we can do.’ He had just got a puppy, who was tied down below”—MacDuff, a replacement for Brandy, who’d died—“and so he got the dog, put it in the back of the car, and off we went. Then he said, ‘Tell me, Professor MacShane, you have written other books, have you?’ I said, yes, I had. ‘What was that?’ ‘Well, I wrote a book on Ford Madox Ford.’
“ ‘Ford Madox Ford?’
“He suddenly changed! ‘Well, now!’ he said. ‘I know his daughter, she lives right around the corner, we must go see her.’ We must do this, we must do that; it was incredible! He turned into a most lively and amusing character and insisted on taking me to see the university. Then he said, ‘Now you must come up to the house.’ By now I’d sort of recovered from the shift of gears! And he couldn’t have been nicer and more friendly, and such a contrast with the terrible, frosty beginning. He was most eager to talk about Wystan Auden, whom I knew as it happened, and who had been at Columbia. And he was very enthusiastic then about Chandler and what he’d done; he thought he was a wonderful writer. And he was a great enthusiast of Ford. I hadn’t realized how literary he was in that sense, that he’d read so much. That’s where his heart was, in a way.”
But when Brad Darrach spent a week in early 1974 observing Millar for a People magazine story, the mask seemed firmly back in place. “He was a very controlled man, facially,” Darrach said. “It wasn’t that he was consciously trying to hide; I think he was pretty open. I think decisions had been made long, long ago that a lot of impulses had to be cemented solid, so they wouldn’t get loose.
“I had the feeling he was manacled to his wife, and maybe she to him. I was aware of the ravine in their marriage: something very fundamental had happened between them, and I felt it had reached the point where there was barely civility. It was a really arid home atmosphere w
hen I was there. From things he said, I got the impression she was a person who had either taken a terrible blow or made a decision that she was massively aggrieved: the whole abandonment of her writing, for one thing. I had a feeling as in certain earthquakes: you know how the bottom will fall out of an area, like a limestone sink? It was as though the bottom had fallen out of her in some way, and she had to reestablish her whole life; and I had a feeling she had decided to do it in some way without him. And it all centered around the daughter, I’m sure.
“He talked a great deal about his daughter; it was much on his mind. I remember him talking about the daughter taking cough medicine and drinking it when she was small: that should have been a clue to them, but it wasn’t. He was intending to write a book about all of that. Of course the theme of the disappearing daughter occurs all through his books, but I think he meant to write something very direct about that whole experience. What happened during that period between him and his wife I think was an area that was sheathed in some kind of silence.
“When he and his wife were together, there was a numbness. She was almost surly. In fact I would say she was surly. I didn’t see it a lot, ’cause they weren’t together a lot in my presence. But it was like, ‘Leave me out of this; I don’t want to be involved in this.’ ” Darrach’s story recorded this vignette:
One day in the beach club pool, Margaret is asked teasingly, “How does it feel to be married to a great man?”
“Haa!” she yelps. “Ask Mrs. Nixon!” Whirling, she splashes water in her husband’s face. “And how does it feel to be married to a great woman?”
“Uuuhhh!” he groans. “I can’t say it’s like climbing Everest—but maybe Annapurna.”
“Yet when she had me to herself,” Darrach said, “she was very pleasant and sweet. I think she was a woman comfortable talking about subjects in which she was interested, and not comfortable talking about herself. She was clearly not going to talk about anything personal; we certainly didn’t talk about the daughter. She was like a person who had accepted a mold: ‘Okay, this is it, this is who I am, this is what I’m gonna do—and that’s all I’m gonna do, and you can’t have any more of me.’ She was not a woman with many friends, I think.
“There was some similarity between them, in that sense of accepting limitations. But in her case, it was resentful; in his case, it was more fear-based, like, ‘I have to set limits or I might explode, or my life would fly apart, or there’s an abyss I might fall into.’ You felt he was a more endangered person. She felt self-secure in ways that he did not; there was something about him that was clinging to her.
“He accepted that role in the relationship; I have a feeling it must have gone back before this terrible thing happened with the daughter. Because it’s like his wife had the eephus on him, you know? And he couldn’t shake it.
“I think he chose constriction, in his writing and in his marriage. I do admire his books. In my opinion they’re not ‘great works of art,’ but they’re remarkable; there’s artistic and emotional power in them, and an unusual amount of it. He’s certainly up there with the most interesting masters of that form. But for him to write through Archer is such a constriction of the man he was. He was like a tree trying to grow up through a rock or something: he struggled. He had certain glittering talents, like his verbal flash, but they really weren’t his best ones. He told me he’d felt he had no clear subject to write about; and so he accepted and used, obviously to great advantage, this mystery form, and he sort of wedged himself into it—like those square pears growing in a box, you know? He was constricted; he chose to be constricted—almost as though he were afraid of his own life force, of the things he might do if he didn’t corset himself.
“I liked him. I felt he was a really valuable being. Every generation there must be a thousand Shakespeares around, you know? But getting through is another matter. I keep thinking of him in terms of things that grow; and he got blocked. Had to crawl up a wall rather than blossom in the open air. He was a bigger man than he ever got to be.
“I have an image of him in my mind, based on something he told me of him as a little boy in a little room, looking out a window, solitary, alone. Northern childhoods, you know? The bleakness, the barrenness, the grimness. I seem to remember a sense of waiting to live. And I had a feeling that went on to the end of his life, that waiting to live. It’s sad. That was an important soul.”
* * *
Margaret could be more than surly to Millar when no journalists were around. “I felt sometimes she was very cruel to him,” said one friend who asked to remain nameless. “Sometimes if he was late for an appointment with her, he’d become very upset; he would. Because he knew he was in for trouble: she would shout at him, you know. But those were isolated incidents. For the most part she and he were very congenial with each other, and good friends. But I was disgusted with her sometimes. And she was disgusted with me sometimes, so we worked out even. But I felt like Ken was kind of on edge a lot. When I would phone to see whether I could come over some evening, he would almost always check with Maggie to see how she was feeling and if it would be all right, even though I would just be seeing him in his study. Frequently the answer would be no, it was not convenient. Of course that’s her privilege; that was her home.
“It seems like there must have been some rivalry there. For years she was kind of the star of the family; and then gradually, gradually, he came along and kind of overtook her. I don’t know whether that created any problem or not. Maggie’s an original; she’s not like anybody else, and I had great admiration for her. But I think she’d be difficult to live with. And I felt like Ken was a vulnerable person, and I felt bad for him sometimes.”
To a New York friend going through a rough marital patch, Millar confided, “Margaret’s and my marriage has been very close to the edge at times, though not in recent years. I am glad now that we held on, gradually changing from lovers to friends, loving friends. I guess I don’t believe in endings.” When Julian Symons asked in 1974 if the couple might come to a planned World Crime Writers Conference in England, Millar replied, “It’s very doubtful that Margaret will attend . . . since she stopped writing crime fiction some four years ago. I hope she comes back to writing eventually, but at the present time she’s just beginning to read again. Our daughter Linda’s death, which occurred some four years ago, was a blow to Margaret. But her pleasure in life and nature is reviving, though I don’t think to the point where she would be ready for the big trip once again. I brought her home in poor shape from the last one.” To Bill Ruehlmann, Millar said he had “to limit my time away from home, where our life is slow and quiet and demanding and intricate, and has to be paid attention to.”
Despite such demands, Millar was grateful. “I must say I enjoy the variety of this later life,” he told Ruehlmann. One diversion he and Margaret both enjoyed was watching some of the filming of a TV movie based on The Underground Man. The first project from Millar’s elaborate Filmways deal, this Paramount television feature starred Peter Graves (fresh from the long-running Mission: Impossible) as Lew Archer and was also the pilot for a possible Archer series.
Millar approved of Graves (“a serious and very pleasant man”) as his detective; in fact, he told LA Times columnist Cecil Smith, he’d had a sort of premonition about the actor: “In thirty years of writing about Lew Archer, I never thought much about how he looked. Except that he was Californian, tanned, athletic. Then one night a few years ago, I saw Peter on Mission: Impossible and thought, ‘That’s Lew Archer; that’s the way he looks.’ It was really quite eerie when I was told Peter was playing Lew, because I had nothing at all to do with the casting. Even stranger was the casting of Dame Judith [Anderson] as Mrs. Snow. All the way through the writing of the book, the image I had in mind for Mrs. Snow was Judith Anderson, who is a neighbor of ours in Santa Barbara. It gives you the feeling of having had it all happen before.” Another thing Millar noted with surprise was how much he identified with his fictional
character: whenever one of the actors in a scene addressed “Archer,” Millar looked up.
After seeing a few days’ filming at the Santa Barbara courthouse, he and Margaret went by limo to LA (the first drive there for either of them in years) to see interior scenes shot. Millar made another unexpected connection: the Benedict Canyon location house was the former home of early film cowboy Fred Thompson, a celluloid hero of Millar’s Wiarton youth. In his quiet way, Millar seemed to be having a ball. “Rather fun discussing characterizations with Dame Judith and Peter Graves,” he wrote Wolfe. Cecil Smith described the Millars watching the action “as intently as any star-struck tourists.” Judith Anderson told People magazine, “The director was always saying, ‘Judy baby, Judy baby.’ Finally Mr. Macdonald couldn’t control himself and he said very softly and gently, ‘We in Santa Barbara wouldn’t ever call her that.’ The director asked, ‘Well, why not? What would you call her?’ And Mr. Macdonald said, ‘We’d call her Dame Judy baby.’ ” A cameraman took a still shot of the Millars with Graves: Millar, head cocked, gives the actor an up-from-under glance and a quizzical smile, as if asking, “Is that you, Lew?” Margaret Millar favors Graves with a pleased grin. “These are good days,” Millar wrote Bruccoli, “and Margaret agrees.”
There was something else to be happy about in 1974: the Mystery Writers of America, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first Archer book, was at last honoring Ross Macdonald—not with a best-novel Edgar but with the organization’s Grandmaster Award for distinction in the mystery genre. New Awards chairman Ed Hoch had a lot to do with the MWA’s ex-president getting this special Edgar, whose previous recipients included Agatha Christie, Rex Stout, Ellery Queen, Erie Stanley Gardner, Georges Simenon, James M. Cain, Alfred Hitchcock—and (in 1972) John D. MacDonald. “That was one of the points I made,” said Hoch. “I said, ‘Hey, how come you’ve already honored John D. MacDonald, and you’ve never honored Ross Macdonald?’—who, to my mind at least, was a much better writer.” Millar was delighted with the honor: “a kind of longevity award,” he described it to his teenage correspondent Jeff Ring. “A number of nice things have happened to me,” Millar told Mike Avallone, “but nothing (except my wife) nicer than this.” To Peter Wolfe, he wrote, “I’ll finally have an Edgar.”