by Lee Hill
In a similar spirit of generosity, Southern agreed to write a regular column for Maurice Girodias’s latest venture. Girodias was starting the Olympia Review to compete with Barney Rosset’s Evergreen Review. Girodias launched his first issue in December 1961.
Southern’s column entitled “The Spy’s Corner” got off a to a great start with a mock interview with Ernest Badhoff, the leader of the “neonada” school of painting. Badhoff describes his “strange new kind of realism” to the interviewer, a method that involves blowing up the galleries that exhibit the neonadaists’ latest paintings. The burned and mangled remains of the paintings become new works. The humor of this sketch would be quickly realized by the autodestructive art of Gustav Metzger, who influenced the Who, the performance art of Chris Burdern, and even the piss paintings of Andy Warhol in the early eighties.
The next two installments of “Spy’s Corner” appeared in early 1962. Both pieces were reworked for The Realist: “Scandale at the Dumpling Shop,” a briskly effective piece of grotesquerie about toy dolls that feature “Teeny Tampons,” and “The Moon-Shot,” where it is revealed that one of America’s latest manned space missions has taken on a certain camp approach to its noble task.
Little of this work was making Southern a lot of money. Southern was gamely exploring a number of options. He even got Richard Seaver to write a reference letter when he unsuccessfully applied to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for a grant.
On his excursions into Manhattan, Southern looked exactly like a big-city writer in a dark suit and tie. Yet the day-to-day routine of life on the farm in East Canaan consisted of Terry and Carol trying to live off the land. They grew vegetables, raised chickens and pigs, and even had a few cows grazing on the property. Southern also had a hunting license and would occasionally go out to hunt deer.
Meanwhile he continued to write for the Nation and rustle up other work. For Glamour magazine, he wrote an article called “The Beautiful Art of Lotte Lenya,” which was intended to be a lengthy feature instead of the appreciation that was published, but Southern never showed up on time for the interview. “Razor Fight,” another fragment for The Hipsters, appeared in Nugget. Rust Hills at Esquire had politely turned down the piece, saying, “Parts of the story seem almost like a parody of the so-called initiation story—a ‘growing up’ story—like (Sherwood) Anderson’s ‘I Want to Know Why.’”
In spite of these reservations, Rust Hills asked Southern to take over for him during the summer as an editor at Esquire. He would receive $125 a week for roughly two months’ work. His duties were mainly to go through the slush pile and pass stories that he thought were worthy of publication. Southern would use this experience as the basis for “The Blood of a Wig.” In a sense, Southern was already an unofficial employee of the magazine now entering its most vital period under the aegis of Harold Hayes.
One of the young associate editors at the magazine, David Newman, was a huge fan of Southern’s The Magic Christian and the Olympia version of Candy.
“I thought I could get this guy, my hero, on the phone because I am now not only David Newman—I’m-a fan-of-your-work, but I’m an editor at Esquire,” said Newman. “I got Terry Southern on the phone. I told him tremulously that I was a great fan and an editor at Esquire and we would love him to do something for the magazine and he said, ‘Grand idea, Big Dave, Dave New.’ He came to the magazine for lunch and we were sitting across from each other something like this. Meeting Norman Mailer, William Styron, Robert Lowell, and all this was very impressive, but meeting Terry Southern was a major event in my life because I never thought I would get to meet this guy. He had an aura to me because that [The Magic Christian] had been so important to me in college. We immediately hit it off.”
After reading a brief news item about a baton-twirling school at Ole Miss, Newman asked Southern to go down to Oxford, Mississippi, for a few days and talk to the students. The vision of Southern, the author of Candy, chatting up all these fresh-faced innocent teenagers was just too irresistible for Newman.
“I thought this was so in-and-of-itself instantly satirical—the idea that only in America would you go somewhere to learn to twirl a fucking baton,” said Newman. “It seemed so quintessentially America coming out of the fifties (as we were then in the early part of the sixties). Here’s this guy Terry Southern and Candy had just been published, I don’t remember the chronology, but everybody thought instantly it was just a great idea and even Terry accepted instantly. He went down to the campus and wrote ‘Twirling at Ole Miss,’ which is a classic and it is now one of the canonized pieces of what is now called the New Journalism.”
Esquire was becoming increasingly recognized as the testing lab for a new breed of journalism that borrowed the techniques of fiction freely. Gay Talese, Jack Richardson, Garry Wills, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, and others were writing about politics, race, the movies, crime, pop culture, and other subjects with an energy and style that was becoming synonymous with the excitement of the Kennedy years.
During Southern’s replacement gig for Rust Hills, Newman recalls Southern walking into the office in a bit of a quandary: “He was wearing a dark blue suit and he was having lunch with somebody very important. He was really down on his luck and fairly broke at the time. Whatever that job paid at the time, it wasn’t much, but he needed the job. Even though he was Terry Southern, he needed a job in addition to his writing. He came walking in and he was going to have lunch in the Berkshire House or one of those places where we were always having fancy lunches and said, ‘Have you a pen with blue-black ink? I need a pen with blue-black ink instantly!’ I said, ‘Yeah, there must be some pen around.’ He was wearing this suit which had a hole in the knee the size of a quarter. There was all this bare skin and flesh showing. He rolled up his pants legs, took the ink, and colored his knee and skin in and rolled the leg back. Unless you looked very closely, you couldn’t see that it was skin, because he painted it to match the hole in his pants. So he went off to this lunch and I thought I’ll never forget that in my life. I imagine that later on he probably had to scrub his knee for an hour.”
Newman also vividly remembers Southern’s flair for trenchant interoffice memos: “Bob Brown was Rust Hill’s assistant. Bob got his bill from the Berkshire, one of those restaurants, that used monthly bills. For some reason or other, the guy who handed out the mail inadvertently put the bill on Terry’s desk. Terry opened it and read it: ‘Robert Brown, $234 for the month of something or other.’ Terry scrawled across it, ‘For the love of God, Brown, when will you settle up!’ and had someone courier it over to Bob Brown’s desk. Bob still has that. ‘For the love of God, Brown, when will you settle up!’”
A short story containing language that Esquire might have problems with prompted this memo to Newman: “At that point Esquire was slightly puritanical about four-letter words or how explicit sex was or whatever. Terry wrote me a note, ‘Do you think I should send this to Gingrich, or should I pass it on to coarse Hugh Hef?’ And I have never thought of Hugh Hefner again except as coarse Hugh Hef. The thing with Terry was that he would write to you or say things that sounded like The Magic Christian and you would get this frisson, this wonderful thing like talking like Hemingway.”
Southern’s association with Esquire coincided with several successful submissions to the magazine. “The Road out of Axotle,” one of Southern’s finest short stories, finally appeared in the August 1962 issue. Rust Hills had mulled over earlier versions of the story since the mid-fifties. The story follows the strange picaresque travels of the narrator, an American hipster, and two Mexican companions. Driving through the backroads of Mexico, they come upon an array of weird sights including a town plagued by a sudden invasion of locusts and a run-down toll bridge guarded by a dope-pushing sentry. The story tapped into the wanderlust of Jack Kerouac, but was also completely lacking in that writer’s sentimentality. According to Carol, Southern reconstructed anecdotes told to him by a writer named Mickey at Sports Illust
rated. Mickey was not terribly amused to see the published result, but, says Carol, “of course, this happens to every writer. I am not even sure if Terry was aware that was what he was doing.”
Boris Grgurevich, Southern’s hipster friend, apparently had a similar reaction after reading “Recruiting for the Big Parade,” which appeared in the June 1963 issue of Esquire. The article was culled from an interview transcript of Grgurevich’s experiences as a CIA recruit for the Bay of Pigs assault. A tape recording of their original interview reveals that Southern didn’t have to exaggerate much of what Grgurevich told him. With a bit of shuffling, ellipsis, and a few italics, the essential absurdity of the exercise and Grgurevich’s laconic presence, the piece was instant satire. Although the comic tone was the result of Terry’s editing and emphasis, Grgurevich felt he should have been identified more fully in the piece or credited in some way as a collaborator.
Around this time, Southern scored an interview with a hot director a few years younger than himself. Stanley Kubrick, a native of the Bronx, had rapidly moved up from the ranks of cub photographer at Look in the early fifties to award-winning film director in 1962. He was one of a new breed of independent filmmakers using Hollywood for their own purposes. With the exception of Spartacus, which he took over as a favor to Kirk Douglas, and some wasted months on One-Eyed Jacks, Marlon Brando’s ill-fated Western, Kubrick had stuck doggedly to his own trail. With his friend and business partner, James B. Harris, Kubrick had made The Killing and Paths of Glory. His latest film, a controversial adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, was just being released. Somehow Southern had wangled an interview with Kubrick at the offices of Harris-Kubrick Productions in midtown.
Jack Gelber says Southern didn’t know much about Kubrick at the time. Gelber had met the young director off and on over the fifties through Shirley Clarke. While Southern had seen Kubrick’s films, Gelber filled Southern in on some of the director’s background. Terry did know that not long before they met, Carol Southern had once met Kubrick in a Village bar, where she was given the director’s business card. A coincidence Southern found amusing.
Kubrick, by contrast, knew a bit about Southern’s work through Peter Sellers. During the making of Lolita, the actor gave a copy of The Magic Christian to Kubrick, telling him it was one of his favorite books and that he gave out copies at birthdays and Christmas. Kubrick, a voracious reader, was intrigued by this, read the book, and was delighted.
When Kubrick met Southern, he was working on a new project with Peter George, the author of a novel Red Alert, which, as far as Southern knew, had something to do with nuclear war. However, this was not the topic of conversation during the interview, which Esquire hoped Southern would turn into a piece as memorable as “Twirling at Ole Miss” or “Recruiting at the Big Parade.” However, the results were unsatisfying as far as big laughs went. The conversation was a fairly sedate overview of Kubrick’s career to date and his filmmaking philosophy. They were hoping to follow up the interview by having Southern visit the set of his next film.
Since the Esquire gig often required Southern to spend the week in Manhattan, he used Plimpton’s East Side apartment as a base camp during this period. Plimpton recalls Southern as a considerate guest except for the odd bit of mischief. One visitor to the Paris Review salon was Jonathan Miller, then touring with Beyond the Fringe in New York. He found Terry “an Ariel-like figure,” who was hard to pin down. Somehow Miller found himself along with a crowd of insomniacs, crouched on the floor of Plimpton’s apartment while Southern screened a pornographic film. The mood was somber and the interest more anthropological than salacious. Plimpton suddenly arrived and asked for the film to be taken off his wall. “Terry in a mood of propriety picked up an index card and interposed it between the light beam and the wall so that the film was now his personal property.” Miller does not remember whether or not this gesture mollified Plimpton.
The Esquire gig as Rust Hills’s proxy ended in September, but Southern continued to spend time in the Big Apple looking for bigger fish to fry.
On November 2, 1962, a telegram arrived from London for Mr. Terry Southern c/o George Plimpton at 541 East Seventy-second Street. It read:
SUGGEST YOU ADVISE FERGUSON COLUMBIA YOU WANT ARRIVE LONDON NOVEMBER 7TH TO COVER PREPRODUCTION PHASE AND WANT ROUND TRIP TICKET WITH NO REPEAT NO ADDITIONAL WEEKS EXPENSES IF INDEED ANY HAD BEEN AGREED UPON STOP SIMULTANEOUSLY I HAVE A PROPOSITION WHICH WOULD PROFITABLY OCCUPY YOU IN LONDON FOR NEXT EIGHT SEEKS STOP WILL PROVIDE NECESSITIES IN LONDON WHILST YOU PONDER PROPOSAL STOP FLIGHT DETAILS SHEPFILMS MIDDLESEX AND WILL MEET YOU
It was signed LOVE STANLEY. As they say in the movies, it was the beginning of a beautiful relationship.
Dr. Strangelove (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Hollywood)
His view and his temperament were much closer to Lenny Bruce’s than to any other director’s, and this was not merely an aspect of his. He had many modes and aspects, but Stanley was a hipster all the time.
—Michael Herr, Kubrick
Dark London winter mornings, and I would go over to Kubrick’s place in Knightsbridge at about 5:00 A.M. We would work in the backseat of his grand old Bentley, during the long ride to Shepperton Studios…it was a magical time,” Terry Southern wrote many years later. Despite the highs and the lows that followed his work on Dr. Strangelove, Southern would always recall his collaboration with Stanley Kubrick with warmth and kindness.
The magic began in the fall of 1962. Kubrick’s telegram had come at just the right time. Regardless of his aura of hipster cool, Southern was a struggling thirty-eight-year-old writer with a family to support and a big house in the country to maintain. Money was tight. Since becoming pregnant and giving birth to Nile on December 29, 1960, Carol stopped teaching in order to look after their new baby. Although Southern’s writing was now appearing in better-paying magazines like Esquire, this freelance income remained erratic. For example, when “Apartment to Exchange,” a whimsical take on a meeting between Franz Kafka and Sigmund Freud appeared in the November 1962 issue of Nugget, he was paid $250. Ten percent of this income often went to Sterling Lord for helping to land the piece. “The Moon-Shot Scandal,” a squib about the space race, was written gratis for Paul Krassner at the Realist. A swinging bachelor might be able to survive on that kind of cash, but not a man with a wife, kids, and mortgage. Academia seemed an unlikely refuge for Southern at this stage in his life, but cinema…now that was something.
In addition to the obvious monetary benefits of screenwriting, Southern, like so many serious writers, was in love with the movies. With the rise of the European art film and glimmers of a new American cinema, this passion was not without foundation in the early sixties. In a piece for the Nation, “When Film Gets Good,” printed in the fall of 1962, he articulated his thoughts on literature and film: “It has become evident that it is wasteful, pointless, and in terms of art, inexcusable, to write a novel which could, or in fact should have been a film. This ought to be a first principle of creative literature and of its critical evaluation; without it the novel, in the present circumstances, has only a secondary function as art.”
Southern’s novels, Flash and Filigree and The Magic Christian, possessed a cinematic structure that anticipated such great films of the sixties as Blow-Up, Jules and Jim, Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, and Belle de Jour. It was this episodic, larger-than-life quality, a genuine surrealistic wit, and an elegant blend of naturalism and irony that appealed to Kubrick.
Last but not least, Southern was frustrated with the limitations of the novel and short story. His latest project, The Hipsters, drawing upon his Paris and Greenwich Village years, was losing its appeal. The kind of new writing that did appeal to Southern were works—Naked Lunch, Cain’s Book, The Alexandria Quartet, Last Exit to Brooklyn, and The Recognitions—that stretched the forms and conventions of the novel. Ironically, these books also defied simple translation to the screen.
As Southern mulled over the film/
literature dichotomy, Stanley Kubrick arrived in New York to meet with his partner, James B. Harris, in the summer of 1962. They were deep in preproduction for their next film, based on Red Alert by Peter George, a novel they had acquired for $3,000. George, a former RAF lieutenant, had written Red Alert to express his fears about the nuclear arms buildup. He was also active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Red Alert dealt with a commander of an American air base who overrides the fail-safe protocol and sends a fleet of B-52s to bomb the USSR. Despite the last-minute efforts by the American and Soviet leaders to reverse this insane act, the one-man coup escalates into a nuclear holocaust.
George said that the idea for Red Alert came to him during a walk with a friend. A Vulcan bomber, leaving an airfield near Bristol, was flying too low for George’s comfort. “Supposing that one was carrying a bomb,” wondered George to his skeptical friend, “the chap went mad and let one off.”
As usual with Kubrick, the development of a rock-solid screenplay was essential. Aside from Red Alert, George had penned several mystery novels with titles like Come Blonde, Come Murder and Final Steal. Many appeared under pseudonyms for publishers like Harlequin, who had virtually cornered the market on dime-store romance novels. George was, to use an English colloquialism, an odd duck—a hack with pretensions. He made Jim Thompson, the pulp novelist who had worked on The Killing and Paths of Glory, look like a Nobel laureate.
George and Kubrick had started work on the Red Alert screenplay in London earlier in the year. Kubrick’s wife, Christiane, remembers him arriving at their Kensington flat for frequent writing sessions. She recalls an intelligent, talkative, and kind man who looked much older than his forty years due to his drinking. His hands and face had the blue-veined complexion that betrayed the ravages of alcoholism. Despite his polite demeanor, he looked as if he had seen better days.