Ross MacDonald

by Tom Nolan

  As usual he went to New York alone, and stayed at the Algonquin. Glad as he was to receive his honor, Millar didn’t want any special publicity fuss made; he nixed Bantam’s bid to arrange TV appearances. “He seemed to be a very shy man, or at least he wanted to stay out of the limelight,” said Hoch, who met Millar at the Essex House for the Edgar dinner on Friday, May 3. “My wife and I greeted him, and there were a certain number of press people who wanted to interview him—and we saw him at one point sneaking out around the back of a curtain, to avoid being trapped by the press!” Roger Simon, also at the dinner, said, “I remember him being treated like a real celebrity there. I have a visceral memory of him in the Essex House lounge, with everyone grouped around him, and a very confused look on his face. I think he realized he was a good writer, and quite clearly he took it seriously; but I think at a certain point his fame took off in a way beyond what he expected. And he wasn’t the kind of man who’d court that, in the way that people in the movies court the press and expect it. With Ken, given his inherent shyness, I think it came from over his shoulder; it sneaked up on him. I think this was a man who received more accolades than he ever expected.”

  The dinner in the Essex House Colonnades had five hundred guests. Millar sat at a table with Dorothy Olding, Ash Green, and other Knopf people. “The most touching moment of the evening,” reported the MWA newsletter, “came when Ross Macdonald in his shy, quiet voice, as he received the Grandmaster Award said, ‘We have one Edgar in our home on the fireplace,’ referring to that won by his wife, Margaret Millar, for her Beast in View. ‘And sometimes late at night we hear the sound of crying. But now,’ holding up his Edgar, ‘he won’t be lonely. Thank you.’ ” Millar wrote Bruccoli, “They finally decided to accept this rude westerner as one of their own.”

  Photographer Jill Krementz chronicled Macdonald’s Manhattan visit for People, taking pictures at the Edgar dinner and at the Knopf and Ober offices. (She also photographed Millar in Santa Barbara.) His last day in New York, a Saturday, Millar lunched with Krementz and her companion, Kurt Vonnegut (“most pleasant, and seems to serve in loco parentis to a whole group of younger writers,” Millar noted approvingly). That day Krementz took a classic picture of Ross Macdonald: a haunting head shot of the author in his forties-style fedora, staring with sober compassion straight in the lens, looking for all the world like Lew Archer. This indelible image would loom from the back jacket of what would be Ross Macdonald’s last novel, completing a passage begun with the noir silhouette on the first Archer book: in a quarter century, author had merged with creation. Macdonald became Archer, or Archer became him.

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  The same couldn’t be said of Peter Graves, playing Archer in the two-hour TV feature The Underground Man. Graves did his stolid best in the film, which had its “world premiere” on NBC Monday Night at the Movies May 6, but the odds were against him. The novel’s plot had been truncated and Archer’s persona fiddled with. This TV Archer lived in the past, watching reruns of forties movies, stocking his booze in a safe lined with a W. C. Fields poster, playing bland pseudo-jazz on his car’s eight-track. His “office” was a café-bar run by a former cop; barkeep and Archer played a running trivia game with old songs, plays, and films. But the PI was with-it enough to swap slang with a seedy hippie: “Lay something new on me.” Despite a good supporting cast and some nice Santa Barbara locations, the movie was lackluster and tedious.

  “I’m sorry it didn’t turn out better,” Millar wrote Peter Wolfe, “but it did present a structural problem, and, even in cut-down form, there was too much material for the script-writer to handle. I enjoyed it in parts, however, especially the scenes between Graves and [Jack] Klugman, and thought that Graves was appealing in the rôle.” When Matt Bruccoli said he’d viewed The Underground Man in company with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s daughter Scottie, Millar told him, “I would rather watch her than it. Paramount spent a lot of money on it, and hired some good actors, but the script seemed rather obscure and hysterical. You can’t say that about Scottie Fitzgerald.”

  Even before the film aired, NBC turned thumbs-down on an Archer series. That was fine by him, Millar wrote Wolfe: “a constant interest in a TV series—and who can avoid such interest. . . could become a real problem.” But the network changed its mind after The Underground Man drew well over 12 million viewers despite a minimum of promotion. Quick plans were made to film an Archer series for the coming winter. At first it was said Jackie Cooper would play Archer (no more peculiar a choice than Dick Powell as Marlowe), but when the ink was dry it was Brian Keith signed to star in thirteen hour-long episodes of a series that would replace the eight-year-old Ironside. Millar would receive $2,000 an episode in royalty and consultant fees; if the series was successful, Paramount would likely protect its “exclusivity rights” by paying Millar a further $150,000.

  Out of vogue a dozen years ago, private eyes were back in fashion. Recent TV detectives included Mannix, Cannon, and Barnaby Jones. They were joined in 1974 by Harry-O and Jim Rockford of The Rockford Files. Millar traced this screen wave of private eyes directly to the 1966 success of Harper. The trend achieved its aesthetic peak with the 1974 film Chinatown, in which Jack Nicholson played a PI in 1930s Los Angeles; LA Times reviewer Charles Champlin called Robert Towne’s Chinatown script an “homage à trois” to Hammett, Chandler, and Macdonald: “As in Ross Macdonald . . . the present villainies have blood ties to the buried past.”

  Several more big-screen detective stories went into production in the wake of Chinatown’s release, among them another movie of a Macdonald book: Paul Newman agreed to star with wife, Joanne Woodward, in a feature based on The Drowning Pool, to be produced for Twentieth Century-Fox by the men who had made Harper. Warners would release the film, which would shoot in Louisiana in October; the story’s locale was switched from southern California to Lake Charles and New Orleans (Woodward’s old stomping grounds). It seemed at first the tangle of contracts governing all the Macdonald projects would force this film’s detective to assume yet another identity; the movie for a while was titled Ryan’s the Name. But an arrangement was made enabling Newman’s character to be called Lew Harper, with the movie’s title The Drowning Pool.

  There were other film projects based on Macdonald and Millar books: Viacom optioned The Ferguson Affair for a television feature; a Canadian producer bought rights to The Three Roads. Millar was receiving TV and movie money regularly: thirty thousand dollars here, sixty thousand dollars there. The Drowning Pool deal was especially good, giving Macdonald an eventual one hundred thousand dollars plus 5 percent of net profits. Millar told Hank Coulette (not to boast but as fact) that these deals would make Macdonald a millionaire. Naturally such projects were gratifying, but they were also distracting for a man who felt it his duty to write books. As Millar also told Coulette, he had to do his main work before he was sixty: that’s as long as he could trust his health, given a family history of strokes and other illness. In 1974 he’d turn fifty-nine. “Too many awards,” he worried to Bruccoli, “not enough books.”

  Writing, his defense against the world, had become his world. The scenes he made up while sitting in a darkened room seemed more real to Millar than his own life. Yet he had less energy for creation these days; it seemed to demand more concentration. Critical or nonfiction prose came especially hard: doing the three-thousand-word introduction to his suspense anthology took him six weeks. He begged off writing a foreword for the trade publication of Bill Ruehlmann’s groundbreaking dissertation, Saint with a Gun: The Unlawful American Private Eye, though he was proud of his young friend’s achievement: “Time, which I used to have nothing but of, is now in short supply.”

  When Millar started sneaking up on a novel this spring, his blood pressure climbed steeply. It took two months of preparation before a breakthrough into actual writing, he told Wolfe; yet when summer came, his attention wandered. “Authors get weary of their own work and sometimes like to forget about it,” Millar told Jeff R
ing. “At the moment I am forgetting my authorial pains in the pleasure of owning a new pup.” This was Skye, a German shepherd, his second new dog since Brandy’s death. He found other distractions: he wrote a poem (his first in years), enjoyed another visit from Dorothy Olding, wrote Bantam’s Marc Jaffe about paperback sales. (“The Macdonald books go on and on,” Jaffe reported, “with SLEEPING BEAUTY off to a strong start. We have 432,000 copies in print at the moment.”)

  Millar went to New York a second time in 1974, to publicize the Macdonald-edited Great Stories of Suspense. He even agreed to some television interviews: “Am slated to appear on TV yoked with [Watergate figure] E. Howard Hunt,” he told Wolfe, “(who started with an early book as a Knopf author). Strange bedfellows, life makes.” The Hunt appearance fell through, but Millar enjoyed himself in Manhattan: lunching with Ping Ferry and wife at the Yale Club, going to Michael’s Pub to hear pianist Marian McPartland, and having such a good time in general that he felt he’d overcome his long-standing East Coast dread.

  Back in Santa Barbara, his manuscript waited. Millar was at work on it as another birthday approached. He had a striking way of announcing the onset of a new book: “The rats are stirring again,” he’d say. Some scurried out of his poor Canadian past, but he put them through their paces in privileged California, a place filled with people (like him) who’d come here from elsewhere to reinvent themselves.

  “Santa Barbara was an elephant burial ground,” Jerre Lloyd said. “People migrated there after acquiring a pile somewhere else, and you were always curious about how they’d gotten it. The ‘new money’ people were always careful not to talk about its origins. I felt the reason these people didn’t like to speak about their past was that they didn’t want to remind themselves of where they came from; but many of them were so secretive, it couldn’t help but pique your curiosity. I’m sure this phenomenon affected Ken as much as anyone.” When Lloyd asked what the central idea of The Underground Man was, Millar said, “Money stolen during the war, blown up on the bull market: that’s where a lot of these people got it.”

  He often felt like an outsider in California, and especially in Hope Ranch. But when Ken and Margaret Millar dressed for Sunday brunch at the Coral Casino or the Biltmore, they blended in with the visiting corporate execs and with other Hope Ranch dwellers; and they seemed proud of the niche they’d earned on their own terms in the Santa Barbara scheme of things. “They waited and waited over a period of years,” Jackie Coulette said, “and finally got the number one cabana at the Coral Casino beach club. It wasn’t anything special—just a bare little three-sided room with a few lounge chairs in it—but they felt they had truly arrived! It did have a wonderful view of the ocean, and of the pool and the other cabanas. It was the best lookout.” Maggie was an especially gleeful observer of the club goings-on, journalist Sally Ogle Davis wrote: “From the Millars’ cabana number 22 in the favored upper tier, she had a bird’s eye view of the human comedy. ‘Look at her,’ Maggie would declare, pointing out a grande dame of Santa Barbara society. ‘Everything’s been lifted but her morals!’ ”

  But the longer he lived in California, the more Millar’s thoughts turned to Canada. He said a Canadian found himself by going elsewhere. Millar had found himself as Ross Macdonald, California novelist: watching the natives with an outsider’s eye, in the tradition of such archetypal California writers as Frank Norris and Raymond Chandler of Illinois, and Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain of Maryland, not to mention such resident and visiting aliens as England’s Christopher Isherwood and Evelyn Waugh. Having earned his California identity, Millar was tantalized by the idea of disinterring his Canadian past; he was also scared of it. He wrote Julian Symons in 1972, “As I get older and look forward and back, I wonder if I can undertake the kind of family and personal history that I could, and probably should, write for Ontario. It’s too soon yet though, to embrace all that old sadness, the substance of my mother, the shadow of my father.” In 1974, Millar wrote Symons, “I hope I live long enough to write my own biography, as I have long intended to do. But not yet. There’s still more living to do now, before I come full circle to my Pacific Coast beginnings.” What he would try to do first, he said, was round off the Archer saga in some satisfying way: “The book I am working up now is last but one, I think, though it could serve as the last if it had to.” Time, Millar knew, was his enemy: the foe that defeated all Archers. As Macdonald told some Santa Barbara college kids who interviewed him, “I started out aiming at posterity. Now I’m just aiming at the present.”

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  First confession of the day: I have never read any of Ross Macdonald’s private-eye fictions. Second confession: After watching the first episode of NBC’s Archer, a new weekly series exploiting the character created by Mr. Macdonald, I doubt I will ever read any of his private-eye fictions.

  —John J. O’Connor, New York Times, January 1975

  The Drowning Pool (Warner Bros.) . . . This one was made from a novel by Ross Macdonald that I haven’t read, but he’s generally been better than he’s made to look here. . . . Before three minutes are up you know you’re in for a lot of sententious imitation Chandler: a private eye getting into a situation that is supposed to evoke moral resonances for our time. But it doesn’t have the usual tight beginning of suspense films that usually come unglued; this one begins unglued.

  —Stanley Kauffmann, The New Republic, July 1975

  Millar was at last well into a new manuscript by early 1975, a book he meant to be the next-to-last Archer—or the last, if need be. It was linked in a roundabout way to the series’ first book, dealing as it did with the disappearance of a once-famous artist, an idea that grew from the missing-author plot that had been the seed of The Moving Target. Millar made Archer’s “target” a kidnapped oilman and kept the vanished author in reserve; as he reworked the plot over time, the missing author became a vanished painter. In choosing this tale for the penultimate Archer, Millar traced a long circle through his spiral-bound notebooks back to Archer’s origins.

  He liked his manuscript and the name he’d found for it, The Blue Hammer, a reference to the human pulse-vein, from a line in a poem by Hank Coulette. Millar kept his working title a secret, making puns on it that only he got: “I’m busy on another Archer novel,” he wrote Bruccoli, “for which I have a smashing but secret title”; he told Sipper, “All I have to do is jack it up and put a good book under it.”

  He struggled with the book, though, in ways new to him. “My style seems to be changing,” he said with surprise to Peter Wolfe. “Style is really quite involuntary, at least in these later stages.” Friend and neighbor Ted Clymer said, “Ken spoke of working mightily to bring the parts and pieces of his book together; it just seemed that that task was becoming increasingly difficult. He told me once that he found that a modest amount of alcohol was a helpful stimulant to getting things started.”

  Meanwhile TV took another shot at Lew Archer, with a one-hour series starting January 30 on NBC. The results were poor. LA Times columnist Cecil Smith wrote, “To all Lew Archer fans, I must regretfully report this ain’t him.” The New York Times’s “Cyclops” also thought the series violated the spirit and content of Macdonald: “Archer is merely a confusion of headlines and the going paranoia.”

  Series star Brian Keith had plans to pull the show farther away from Macdonald; he told the LA Times if the show was picked up for a second season, he’d insist it be filmed in Hawaii: “I’ve got it in writing. I’ve even worked out how Archer would operate in the islands. I figure he’d probably live on a boat.” Keith (a Hawaii resident) seemed to be confusing Archer with Travis McGee, John D. MacDonald’s character, whose address was a Florida houseboat. Cecil Smith mused, “You wonder how Ken Millar . . . would take to an Hawaiian Archer.”

  Millar’s disappointment was apparent in a laconic letter written to Jeff Ring the day after Archer’s first episode: “You may wish to be told that Arche
r so-called is appearing on TV these next twelve weeks, Thursday nights, in the person of Brian Keith. He’s an accomplished actor, and about the right age. I have nothing to do with the scripts, except that I read them.” Soon he was spared even that. In early February, after only two broadcasts, NBC canceled Archer in what Daily Variety called “one of the speediest executions on record.” The network cited poor ratings and bad reviews as its reasons. Actually ratings were good: a 24 Nielsen share, nearly 10.5 million viewers. But killing the series saved NBC a costly move to Hawaii, and Paramount wouldn’t have to pay Millar $150,000 “exclusivity rights.”

  Another film project gave Millar a pretext to get away from his novel in April and go to Toronto, where, he told Bob Ford, “The Three Roads is, if all goes well, to be shot as a movie for its sins.” The author’s visit was apparently meant to attract financial backing. Millar appeared on some TV shows and gave newspaper interviews, then went to Kitchener to visit Margaret’s father (now ninety), something he almost always did when traveling East. From Kitchener he went to Manhattan and the Mystery Writers of America annual dinner at the New York Hilton, where Ed Hoch tapped Macdonald at the last minute to present Eric Ambler with this year’s Grandmaster Award.