A Grand Guy: The Art and Life of Terry Southern

by Lee Hill

  The Loved One would turn out to be one of the strangest films made in the sixties. It was a far blacker, if less controlled, comedy than Dr. Strangelove. (A young Hal Ashby worked on the rough cut of The Loved One, but Richardson would complete editing in London.) When the film was released in the fall of 1965, most critics viewed it with incomprehension. Promoted as the film with something to offend everyone, The Loved One was an acquired taste that alienated many.

  Rod Steiger’s portrayal of Joyboy as a lisping monster of murderous and repressed appetites was almost too painful for some viewers to stomach. Where Dr. Strangelove was deadpan, The Loved One was corrosive. John Gielgud, Jonathan Winters, and Roddy McDowall rounded out the cast. Newcomer Anjanette Comer played Morse’s beautiful but prudish love interest. Liberace, Dana Andrews, Milton Berle, James Coburn, and a very young Paul Williams appeared in cameos. Haskell Wexler’s black-and-white cinematography portrayed Los Angeles as a well-dressed, but bloated corpse.

  Many years later, après Monty Python/National Lampoon/Saturday Night Live, The Loved One began to look visionary and became a cult movie. It remains a film with too many ideas for its own good. Still, if the casting of Morse is a Brechtian motif that doesn’t pan out, the other eclectic performances never fail to click. Jonathan Winters is especially hilarious doubling as a fired studio exec turned gravedigger and a corporate boss with space-age designs on the funeral business. In departing from Waugh’s original, Richardson, Southern, and Isherwood did not so much adapt The Loved One as rewrite it. The results were quite different, if equally disturbing, funny, and haunting as Waugh’s novel. Unfortunately, for the purposes of marketing, Waugh was quite vocal about how much he hated the film even before shooting began.

  If the reception of The Loved One was considerably cooler than that accorded Dr. Strangelove, this did not bother Southern at all. Coming off Dr. Strangelove, Southern was treated with awe and respect by Richardson, Calley, and Ransohoff. Richardson, who was a less assured stylist than Kubrick, often let his screenwriters set the tone for his films. Thus, the interplay between Isherwood and Southern produced an odd blend of camp and burlesque in some scenes and a sad gothicism in others. Richardson and Calley also shared Southern’s belief that business and pleasure should be combined to heighten the spontaneity of the creative process. Many of the rushes were screened in the Beverly Hills Hotel with champagne and canapés laid out for the production’s inner circle. Richardson would often toast cast and crew with a raised glass at the beginning of each day’s shooting.

  Peter Bart, then an entertainment writer for the New York Times, visited The Loved One and observed this of Southern: “[He] is another writer who stays on the set during production. It is the theory of Mr. Southern, who wrote Dr. Strangelove, that a script is not an unalterable document, but merely a plot outline. He not only encourages improvisation but also takes part in it himself.”

  The set was also visited by Jessica Mitford, whose book The American Way of Death had been part of Richardson’s inspiration for updating The Loved One. She wrote an exclusive feature article on the filming for Show magazine. The first assembly of The Loved One ran five hours. A scene with Jayne Mansfield as a travel receptionist was cut out. The Whispering Glades scenes were shot at Greystone, the estate built by Edward Laurence Doheny II, which would later become the home of the American Film Institute.

  One of the first people outside the production to see The Loved One was Barney Rosset, whose cousin Haskell Wexler was one of the coproducers. Rosset wanted to publish the script of the film, but Terry had already made a deal with Random House to create a pictorial souvenir of the film’s making. The result, The Log Book of the Making of The Loved One, was one of the more bizarre tie-ins in movie marketing history. Its chief strength was William Claxton’s photos, which captured the production’s infectious spirit of mischief. Many of the stills showed Southern looking like a perfect icon of cool in his sunglasses, T-shirt, and chinos. Southern’s text was amusing, but shed little light on the actual difficulties of getting The Loved One made. Unlike his Esquire pieces, the Grand Guy persona was too much in the way of the subject.

  One of the most terrifying scenes in The Loved One is Aimee’s introduction to Mr. Joyboy’s mother. Played by the all too convincingly obese Aylene Gibbons (who managed to get a few bit parts in TV shows like Ironside and It Takes a Thief ), Aimee’s distaste turns to terror as she watches Mom flick the channel changer in search of her favorite Taylor Ice Cream commercial. As the meal begins:

  JOYBOY (happily)

  You should have helped yourself, Aimee—we don’t stand on ceremony around here. (Beams at Mom.) Right, Mom?

  At the words “we don’t stand on ceremony”, Mom tears into the pig like a savage, holding it as though it were a slice of melon. Aimee watches in sickened fascination. Ghandi pecks wildly at the pig, screeching “There is no death! There is no death!” Aimee seems on the verge of swooning, tears her gaze away from Mom, and looks down at her own plate, which is piled with a mound of stew. She quickly averts her gaze, looking now at Joyboy—who is shoveling stew into his mouth with gusto. There seems no escape; she turns her eyes toward the wall, is confronted by the TV screen showing a man eating a turkey leg with wild-eyed zeal.

  As The Loved One completed shooting in the fall of 1964, Southern began work on The Cincinnati Kid, a gritty look at high stakes poker set in the Depression starring Steve McQueen. Shot on MGM’s Culver City soundstage with additional location work in New Orleans, the Filmways production had script problems. The source novel by Richard Jessup was heavy on atmosphere and character, but short on the kind of A-to-Z plotting that producers are comfortable with. Ransohoff said he and Calley had gone through several scripts: “[Paddy] Chayefsky started it, then George Good wrote on it…. Then we had Ring Lardner [Jr.], Terry Southern. I think there were four or five really good writers before we finally got that script down to where it went to. And even then two top writers, Lardner and Terry Southern, shared screen credit…. I had $300,000 in that script.”

  Then of course there was the little matter about the film’s original director, Sam Peckinpah. Peckinpah was shooting scenes he wasn’t supposed to shoot. Some say they were unauthorized nude scenes. Others say he was shooting in black and white. Ransohoff and Calley decided to fire Peckinpah about a week into principal photography. The hell raising director would not make another film until 1969’s The Wild Bunch. His replacement was the Canadian-born director, Norman Jewison, mainly known for producing television variety shows like The Judy Garland Show. His four films as director up to that point were unremarkable. Jewison was eager to work on something with some depth to it. He was determined to make The Cincinnati Kid that film.

  Jewison and Southern got along well. During one difficult setup, Southern, ever so helpful, came up to Jewison and whispered, “Think Mavor Moore!” Moore, a legend in Canadian theater in the late fifties and sixties, had been one of Jewison’s mentors. The out-of-nowhere reference sent Jewison into a fit of hysterical laughter and he wasn’t able to restore his composure for at least half an hour.

  In addition to Claxton, Southern was also becoming fast friends with Rip Torn. The character actor was a fellow Texan. Torn had a reputation for being difficult, but what this really meant was that he took his acting very seriously. He had little time for the superficial backslapping of the typical movie set, but Southern’s lack of pretension and antic humor won him over. They would become close friends until the end of Southern’s life.

  The Cincinnati Kid and The Loved One were released in the fall of 1965. Unlike the latter, Kid was a commercial success. The film can be seen as an accidental allegory of Southern’s future struggles with success and artistic purity. In the film, the Kid played by McQueen plays poker for kicks and just enough money to get by. He is persuaded by his buddy Karl Malden, who is under pressure from Torn’s character, to set up a big game. As the match begins, the kid discovers the game is fixed, unbeknownst to his chief opponent,
played by Edward G. Robinson. Thus his loyalties become complicated. Should he help his friend? Should he stay true to his gift for championship poker? Should he take the money and run? The kid eventually decides to take the high road, but he loses anyway. Although he still has his pride, he has lost his girlfriend, played by Tuesday Weld, as a result of having a quick affair with the Ann-Margret character. In real life, Southern would be faced with similar conflicts about mixing art with commerce as his screenwriting took him further away from the values of Faulkner, Algren, and Henry Green.

  In the evenings and weekends, Southern and Gail went to parties and clubs to soak up Los Angeles’s social scene. In addition to Torn and Claxton, Southern became friends with actors like George Segal, Richard Benjamin, James Coburn, Peter Fonda, and Dennis Hopper.

  Hopper had lost a lot of acting work after fighting with Henry Hathaway on a Western. He still got the occasional bit of television work, but he was spending most of his downtime investing in pop art and developing a sideline in photography. Many of his subjects included the new artists emerging in California such as Bruce Conner, Ed Ruscha, and Wallace Berman. Hopper introduced Southern to a young London gallery owner, Eton-educated Robert Fraser, who would become a close friend in the mid-sixties. Fraser and Hopper would later collaborate on “Los Angeles Now,” a group showing of new California art, at the former’s Mayfair gallery.

  Some old associates, like John Marquand, found it sad, ironic, and inevitable that Terry was now going Hollywood in a big way. The Quality Lit Game was in distinct second place to Terry’s new life in the film world.

  “Artie Shaw thought Terry was great,” says John Marquand. “When Terry began to make it with Dr. Strangelove and there was the money and the wife was sort of left behind and he began to pick up babes, Artie said, ‘That’s the story of my whole generation. I saw it happen again and again.’ [The affair with Gail] broke up the marriage with Carol. Gail was referred to sardonically by Carol and my first wife, Susan, as Miss Beach Ball because he had apparently met her on the beach.

  “I remember Terry once sitting around Paris and saying F. Scott Fitzgerald was a sellout and then seven years later, who was a sellout? He was doing Dr. Strangelove. None of us had ever gotten to do that.”

  Despite a small degree of envy and resentment over Terry’s somewhat patronizing attitude toward his (Marquand’s) New England roots, Marquand understood that his friend was becoming a part of the sixties in a way others from the Paris Review salon would never be. Dr. Strangelove not only gave Southern an entrée into the international film world and the high-roller lifestyle, it brought him into contact with an emerging generation of actors, producers, filmmakers, painters, musicians, and writers who wanted to merge different media, break down barriers, and test the limits. In public, Southern would be tight-lipped about such artistic aspirations or make fun of them through deadpan tomfoolery, but beneath the hipster persona, he understood that film was the perfect medium for the sixties. To him, it was the only way one could capture the energy and the chaos that now permeated life in America.

  Southern’s acclaim and achievement as a natural screenwriter did not come without a price. His marriage to Carol would not survive his relationship with Gail. Carol and Nile moved out of the house in East Canaan. Mutual friends took sides. Terry became spiritually, as well geographically, isolated from the New York literary establishment. Over time he would discover not everyone in the film business was as cool as Richardson, Kubrick, or John Calley. There was an emptiness to the film community that could deaden the mind at times. Yet Terry had no choice really. Henry Green had told him that a writer must seek out new forms of communication. Making the decision to go to London and work on Dr. Strangelove had started Terry’s own search. Now he was too far down the road to find his way back even if he wanted to.

  Little of this change appeared to disturb Terry. He was obdurate about the quality of his new life. He was working on a bigger canvas, deeply in love, living the real-life movie called the sixties, and making it hot for them.

  Throughout 1965 and 1966, Terry and Gail seemed to be everywhere. When not in Los Angeles, they hung out in Malibu, where there were lots of weekend parties, brunches, and barbecues hosted by the likes of Jane Fonda and Roger Vadim, or maybe a producer type like Dominick Dunne. In New York, the couple would often stay at the Chelsea Hotel, another cool scene like the Chateau Marmont, where one might bump into the likes of William Burroughs, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, or Arthur C. Clarke. Eventually Terry and Gail decided to rent an apartment on West Twenty-fifth Street as a kind of base camp during this gypsy period. Terry was writing everywhere—in airplanes, hotel lobbies, restaurants. Sometimes he would come into Si Litvinoff’s office on West Fifty-fifth Street and work with a secretary.

  Meanwhile the farm in Connecticut was dormant much of the time. When the movie money came in, Carol supervised the renovations alone. The kitchen was remodeled with Spanish tiles. One of the big rooms was converted into a recreation area where eventually (but, sadly, without Carol and Nile), Terry would listen to jazz, Lenny Bruce, or some of the new pop music by Bob Dylan or the Beatles.

  Contact with Carol and Nile had become increasingly erratic since he began living and traveling with Gail. For a while, not knowing how long the relationship would endure, Gail would gently persuade Terry to reconcile with Carol, if only for his son’s sake. It was a difficult period. Terry was conflicted about his relationship with Gail. He still loved Carol and was nostalgic for the life they shared in Europe and East Canaan. Yet he was also deeply in love with Gail, his passion for her tied up with the possibilities of the sixties and the giddy rush of his new fame and fortune. “Terry was terribly conflicted and he did try to reconcile,” says Carol, “but his desire to be with Gail was stronger.”

  Almost all of Southern’s activity now revolved around one film project or another. The odd Quality Lit pieces grew few and far between. A review of Naked Lunch for the Washington Post Book World was followed months later by a feature on his new best friends, Dennis Hopper and his lovely wife, Brooke Hayward, for Vogue. The logbook for The Loved One was published to a puzzled response along with the film that prompted it. There were also the sketches and parodies for Paul Krassner at the Realist.

  On the screenplay front, Southern was juggling an adaptation of Candy, a Western treatment called Something Else, and the first of several drafts of a Magic Christian script. Peter Sellers was underwriting the last gig through his Brookfield Productions. Then there was the early work on Blue Movie, which Southern was privately hoping Kubrick would direct.

  Southern did lots of interviews in this period. Because of Candy and Strangelove, he was now seen as a hip commentator on the times. The London Evening Standard’s film critic, Alexander Walker, was all ears when Southern described the premise of Blue Movie.

  “A film about love can be an aesthetic experience, but at what point does it become an erotic one? Can a pornographic novel be an artistic success?” he asked Alexander rhetorically.

  Alexander asked Southern if there were any limits to freedom of expression: “That’s what people have assumed, that there must be limits. But that assumption seems to be being disproved over and over again. We’re only at the start of exploring the relations between the aesthetic and the erotic. There’s only one rule I know. ‘You won’t make it unless you go flat out.’”

  The media attention encouraged Southern to indulge his philosophical side. Plimpton asked Maggie Paley, a writer and Paris Review associate, to interview Southern for the Art of Fiction series. They did the bulk of the interview at the Russian Tea Room, where Terry was becoming a regular. He often met friends there and picked up the bill for lavish meals. Southern had a bit of a crush on Paley (as was the case with many of his friendships with women) and felt relaxed enough in her company to talk seriously about screenwriting. The Grand Guy volume was on low.

  During the interview, which sadly was unpublished, Southern was at great pains to exp
lain why he thought movies were now more important than novels. “The only excuse for writing a novel is if it can’t be done as a movie” is a recurring refrain in the interview. He says his primary motivation for seeing his new novel, Blue Movie, through to the end is that he has never seen “a good dirty movie.” The erotic, Southern believes, remains a formidable barrier to filmmakers because it is so subjective.

  When Paley asked whether success will change Terry Southern, the writer became circumspect.

  “As for my ‘outlook,’ I would certainly welcome a change there, because it is basically one of extreme discomfort. I’m afraid, however, that God would have to show his hand, in a more dramatic way than ‘money and fame’ before that could happen…. No, the important thing is to keep in touch with the youth of whatever culture you’re in. When you lose them, you can forget it. When they’re no longer surprised or astonished or engaged by what you say, the ball game is over. If they find it repulsive, or outlandish or disgusting, that’s all right, or if they love it, that’s all right, but if they just shrug it off, it’s time to retire. Well, you could still write for a living if you wanted to, but it would be uncomfortable if you had any relationship to the work other than that.”

  In early 1966, Terry flew to London, where he began work with Joseph McGrath on what was intended to be a timely parody of the James Bond craze. McGrath, a cheerful Scot who worked with Richard Lester on The Running Jumping and Standing Still Film, was best known for directing Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s British TV show, Not Only…But Also.