by Lee Hill
Candy and Hoffenberg were, at their worst, annoyances. Terry and the film world were dancing till dawn cheek to cheek. Si Litvinoff, who remained Terry’s lawyer and business manager, advised him that one way to avoid the inevitable tax penalties that the sudden influx of big money would bring was to become a producer himself. It was practical advice, but acting on it would end up leaving Terry more impoverished than he ever was in the fifties.
Michael Cooper lent Southern a copy of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. The two began to talk up the book as a possible film project to star the Rolling Stones as a gang of “droogs” raping and pillaging in near-future England. One film version of the book had been shot—Vinyl—a Factory quickie loosely scripted and directed by Ronald Tavel and Andy Warhol. Vinyl consisted of a series of vignettes that looked like a continuous aborted gang rape of whichever Warhol groupie was available the day of filming. Given the nature of Vinyl’s production, it wasn’t difficult for Southern through Si Litvinoff to option the book for a bargain basement $1,000 against a final price of $10,000. David Puttnam and Lieberson helped to set up a development deal at Paramount. The studio underwrote a draft written by Southern and Cooper.
When David Hemmings was briefly considered as Alex, the Stones and Cooper became upset and Mick once more went back to the top of a very short casting list. Getting the film off the ground was increasingly problematic. The attentions of the Stones ebbed and flowed, given the demands of recording, touring, and having fun. Potential directors like Richard Lester balked at the violence and the difficulties of translating Nadsat—the nearly incomprehensible dialect of the book’s narrator—to the screen. Ted Kotcheff, who had just directed a sequel to Room at the Top, became the director of choice. But then the Lord Chamberlain, the chief censor of film and theater in Britain, sent back the script unread with a note: “I know this book and there is no way you can make a movie of it. It deals with youthful incitement to authority which is illegal.” Paramount put the project into turnaround.
During the downtime on Casino Royale, Southern was asked by John Calley to help him and Martin Ransohoff on a troubled London production called Eye of the Devil. Based on an obscure novel called Day of the Arrow by Philip Loraine, it was a gothic thriller about the wife of a French nobleman trying to prevent a strange religious cult from killing her husband. It starred David Niven as the patriarch Philippe de Montfaucon, and David Hemmings, just coming off the shoot of Blow-Up. Rounding out the cast were such British film stalwarts as Emyln Williams, Flora Robson, and Donald Pleasance, one of Southern’s favorite character actors.
It was a “tightening and brightening job” for a picture that had been shut down in 1965 with Kim Novak in a role taken over by Deborah Kerr. The original director was Michael Anderson. He was replaced by J. Lee Thompson (who directed the original Cape Fear with Robert Mitchum and Gregory Peck). Sharon Tate was also in the film. Ransohoff and Calley had invested a lot of energy in trying to save this troubled project. On paper, it resembled the kind of potboiler that could be transformed into an elegant horror film, but it lacked the kind of charge that even a similar disaster of the time, Joseph Losey’s Secret Ceremony, possessed.
In the summer of 1966, Southern returned to the States. He had just enough time to drop in on friends in New York before going out to the coast to do some more work for Filmways on a Tony Curtis comedy, Don’t Make Waves, based on a novel by Ira Levin. Curtis played a go-west-young-man bachelor who becomes mixed up with a variety of California hedonists, health nuts, and zanies. Alexander Mackendrick, best known for his Ealing comedies and Sweet Smell of Success, was the director, but he had little love for this overheated comedy. Most of Southern’s work was involved in writing dialogue that could then be looped into the film. When asked about the film years later, Southern could recall only the grim death of a stuntman involved in a skydiving scene. The stuntman became entangled in his parachute and drowned after landing in the water. One macabre detail stuck with him—the fact that a camera in the stuntman’s crash helmet filmed the fatal accident. Don’t Make Waves was best remembered for its surreal finale when Tony Curtis wakes up in a beach house that is about to slide off its hillside perch into the sea.
Returning to New York, Southern began work in earnest on Blue Movie. He also became involved in an odd theatrical venture called Pardon Me, Sir, but Is My Eye Hurting Your Elbow? The revue included contributions by Gregory Corso, Southern, Jack Richardson, Arthur Kopit, Philip Roth, Allen Ginsberg, and Bruce Jay Friedman. Southern’s contribution was a sketch called “Peaches and Plums,” a study of teen sexuality that covered the same territory as Candy. The sketches were later collected in a book with illustrations by Mad magazine’s Mort Drucker. Bruce Jay Friedman recalled a publicity launch for the revue: “I think the producer was Si Litvinoff, when it was going to be a film. They took a picture of all the authors: Jack Richardson, Arthur Kopit, Jack Gelber, maybe Terry—I’m not sure, but there was one guy I didn’t recognize. I was pissed off about it, such was my arrogance. ‘Who the fuck is this guy and why is he in this picture with all these literary immortals!’ Well, it turned out it was Francis Coppola. He was a writer and he had a piece in there. He was the asshole I didn’t recognize.”
Just as Robert Fraser’s gallery was becoming the in place to be seen in London, a little Italian restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper East Side was attaining a similar status. Opened by Elaine Kaufman in 1963, Elaine’s became a club for the decade’s up-and-coming writers. By the seventies, it was attracting movie stars, business types, fashion models, producers, and other glitterati, but Kaufman remained loyal to the early group that put the restaurant on New York’s cultural map. Before Woody Allen became a regular, the hierarchy was very simple. Those who had published got first dibs on the best tables and those who hadn’t paid their tab were, if it wasn’t too crowded, allowed to pull up an extra chair. The perpetual regulars at the time included Jack Richardson, Arthur Kopit, David Newman, Peter Maas, Gay Talese, Harry Joe “Coco” Browne Jr., Harold Hayes, Willie Morris, Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, Frank Conroy, Lewis Lapham, and George Plimpton. It wasn’t an A-crowd or a B-crowd. It was a scene unto itself with a growing list of special guest appearances by icons like Muhammad Ali, Warren Beatty, Michael Caine, or Shirley Maclaine.
“I started going to Elaine’s as soon as it was open,” David Newman recalled warmly. “Elaine’s used to be a narrow corridor. One room. It used to be just a long hallway. The thing is, Elaine—and we would all credit her many times over in print, various tributes, and anniversaries—in those years, which were the lean years for most of us, just carried us. My wife and I ran a tab at Elaine’s for over a year. We were there every week and every now and then you would say, ‘Gee, I feel terrible.’ You would tip the waiter and never pay for the bill, but we knew she was keeping a record. But Elaine would always say, ‘Someday, I’ve got plenty of confidence in you, when your ship comes in, you’ll square off with me.’ And it wasn’t just me, it was me, and Jack and Bob Brown [Esquire editor] and twenty other people…who lived through years when Elaine said, ‘You can pay when you can pay me.’ The wonderful thing was that we all did. I remember that the year my ship came in around the time of Bonnie and Clyde, I suddenly had this huge tax bill—I settled up a little up front—but my accountant said to me, ‘Who the fuck is this Elaine! Your income is going to her.’ Terry used to be part of the Elaine’s gang. He went, all the Esquire editors went, all the playwrights, and Terry was as a regular there as much as anybody.”
Newman says the big attraction of Elaine’s was that it was like having “a dinner party without having to make a dinner party. We would say, ‘Let’s have dinner with all our friends’ and then we would say, ‘Let’s go to Elaine’s, there’s bound to be eight of them there.’ Table Four was the writer’s table. You would just go in with no reservation. You would squeeze two more chairs in and sit around with ten guys and girls. Deals were made, marriages…ended, and clandestine affairs went on. Elain
e’s was home. It was like being in a private club.”
Bruce Jay Friedman was another of the founding patrons of Elaine’s. For him and other writers coping with the pressures of work, the restaurant was a clean, well-lighted place.
“Jack Richardson had a play running and I admired him tremendously. He took me up [to Elaine’s] and suddenly I had a place to go where I knew there would always be a table where I could sit with a sort of modest party going on. When I got separated and divorced, I went there a lot. I still make it a first stop whenever I go into Manhattan. Terry was a player, one of the people who would show up…. Careerwise [the mid-sixties] were a good period, but with great personal sadness. That was one thing that made it tolerable. That place. It saved my life. Elaine being a great friend. You always knew that any hour of the day or night—well, any hour of the night, there was this one table where there would be a scene. If there weren’t writers assembled already, some would drift in and it would be comfortable. It was a club for writers initially until slowly film-business people and other unsavory types came in.”
Given the heavy literary contingent, the talk was of projects and specifically money and deals. There was also chatter about politics, local, national, and global (from a defiantly New York point of view). Civilians (or those just wanting a meal) were often irritated by Elaine Kaufman’s enigmatic reservations policy. Many a hardened veteran of haughty maître d’s found their match in Kaufman, who exiled with one expression while simultaneously bidding a hearty welcome with another.
Terry also hung out at O’Neal’s. Patrick O’Neal, the dashing Irish American actor of How to Seduce an American Wife and The Kremlin Letter, and his brother co-owned this Upper West Side version of Elaine’s just off Columbus Circle. Meanwhile, downtown in the Village, Mickey Ruskin was starting Max’s Kansas City, a dive for the most part, with the exception of its legendary back room. In the back room, bathed in warm bloodred light, café society met the demimonde. Warhol’s Factory crowd made the place a popular hangout.
“Edie Sedgwick would always come around at one point in the evening. About two or three o’clock in the morning. The place would get tremendously electric with anticipation…. Although Warhol was ultragay, he was always surrounded by beautiful women,” Southern recalled.
Business and pleasure were inseparable now. Terry quickly became accustomed to the perks of working in the movie business. In the blur of movement from one groovy scene to the next, Gail recalls a moment that epitomizes the carefree ease (thanks to the largesse of his big studio employers) with which they traveled. “We were going from L.A. to London, and we got on the plane and I didn’t really have any cash on me,” says Gerber. “So I said, ‘Terry, do you have any money?’ He said, ‘No, why?’ ‘Well, I don’t have any money, do you have any money?’ ‘No, about $1.25.’ ‘Well, how do we get to the hotel from the airport without any money?’ ‘Oh, there’ll be a car there.’ He just took off from L.A. pre-credit-card time knowing there would be a car at the other end and without five dollars in his pocket. Then we ended up in London and sure enough there was a car there.”
Gerber’s acting aspirations took a distinct second place to Southern’s work. Eventually she would start teaching at a private girls’ school near East Canaan and work for the Actors Studio to preserve her own identity, but during these go-go years, she seemed happy just to join the ride.
As 1966 drew to a close, it became apparent that the youth culture fueled by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan was undergoing a significant change. Various strands—the folk movement, the Students for a Democratic Society, the growing antiwar and civil rights movements, the new priests and prophets of LSD like Ken Kesey and Timothy Leary—were moving toward a brief synthesis that became known as the counterculture. The counterculture would include a core of individuals as disparate as Leary, Dr. Spock, Abbie Hoffman, Alan Watts, Herbert Marcuse, Allen Ginsberg, Tom Hayden, Martin Luther King Jr., Eldridge Cleaver, Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, and many others actively involved in articulating and promoting educational reform, drug experimentation, sexual liberation, freedom of expression, human rights, and radical political change from social democracy to Marxist-Leninism, Maoism, and anarchy. Universities and colleges around the world became receptive focal points for this ferment. Surrounding this growing center of activism was a more apolitical and detached majority. For this group, mainly in their teens and twenties, the counterculture was expressed in long hair, informal clothes, recreational drug use usually in the form of marijuana, and rock music. For the larger group, the agenda of social change was probably only icing on the cake of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. Yet together these parts of the counterculture formed a formidable alternative to entrenched systems of governance, authority, taste, and behavior.
Like so many of the leaders and innovators of the unruly beast that was the sixties counterculture, Southern was older and more experienced than many of the young people he came into increasing contact with. Although he did not talk about it, his war experience, coupled with boyhood memories of racism, made Southern keenly aware that one could not passively accept violence, injustice, or intolerance as givens. One could effect change through example, and by embracing new ideas and staying curious. While Southern was making a lot of money and having a lot of fun, he wanted his work to have relevance to the sixties landscape. If he wasn’t exactly sure how he could contribute, he would do his best to keep an open mind.
“I think this is a golden age for creative work of any kind,” Southern told Newsweek. “The people who go all out will make it. We’ve only scratched the surface of our Freudian heritage. We are undertaking an exploration of the mind and we’re making some interesting discoveries. We have discovered the value of not being prejudiced. The assumption has always been that there have been limits. But we now know there are no limits.”
Such pronouncements were rare from Southern. He preferred to express his seriousness through his writing. To many of the new friends he met in this period, there was always something a little opaque about Terry’s motivations. Arthur Kopit, whose off-Broadway hit Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad, led to some strange screenwriting assignments, maintained a jokey relationship with Southern in the hectic years of the mid-sixties. While Kopit enjoyed his friend’s humor, he felt he never really got close to Southern.
“Terry created the enigmatic Grand Guy and he saw himself as being safe if he played this role. Maybe there was a kind of safety in this invented character, in this way of talking. He was the only person I knew who talked in quotation marks. He could say, ‘Good morning, eh, Art?’ and you thought, ‘Well, yes, it’s a good morning…. I haven’t thought of good morning in quite that way.’ So he would put quotes around everything. ‘Know what I mean? Chuckle, chuckle. Seen any good shows lately, Art?’ He would see somebody else and he would have a quip. He was a quipster and it was delightful, but I don’t know if it took its toll on him. He was such a charismatic and strong figure and a brilliant writer, but I don’t know the degree to which he was trapped by this kind of manner that he had. Beneath the brilliance, the cleverness, the imagination, there was a hiding of some sort…a real shyness. He invented himself in some way. I don’t know whether that trapped him finally.”
While working on a script for Otto Preminger in early 1967, Kopit came up with the idea of a Terry Southern–like prank to play on his friend.
“There wasn’t much to do because the film wasn’t going anywhere. I would go to the office and hang out and make phone calls and talk to Preminger, who was between projects. It was kind of a lazy time. Preminger sort of knew the film was never going to get done and I sort of knew it wasn’t going to get done. I was being paid by the week, so I would just come in and call friends and have chats with Otto about other projects and about his painting. I now was pretty good at imitating Otto’s voice and at one point I recorded Otto calling me from one room to another, saying, ‘Kopit, Vy aren�
�t you verking? You should be verking. I know you’re in your office and you’re pretending to be verk, but you’re not verking. Tell me the truth?’…So then I started calling Terry and just putting on Otto’s voice and saying, ‘I know you’re not verking. Why aren’t you verking? Vot ist going on?’ And Terry so loved that because everybody could recognize Preminger’s voice. At first, Terry was freaked out. He thought this was really weird, Otto Preminger calling him and saying, ‘Why aren’t you working?’ And of course, Terry wasn’t working…. That was a pretty safe bet.”
During the winter of 1966–67, Southern was beginning work on Barbarella, based on Jean-Claude Forest’s sexy science fiction comic strip, for Roger Vadim. The film version of Candy was now passing into the hands of Christian Marquand. Southern’s script was still attached to the project and he hoped to be a coproducer. He also did some writing on a new television version of The Desperate Hours for Ted Kotcheff and talk show host/producer David Susskind. The hostage drama that was first made popular by Humphrey Bogart as an escaped fugitive terrorizing a suburban family was a little stodgy, so Southern and Kotcheff tried to update it, with mixed results. Their mutual friend George Segal played the bad guy as a kind of criminal hipster and Yvette Mimieux was the wife who creates the sexual tension. When Kotcheff began working on another TV play for Susskind, a version of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Southern arranged for Andy Warhol, of all people, to sit in on the shoot.
In February, Warhol joined Southern, Larry Rivers, and Edie Sedgwick to judge a beauty pageant of female impersonators at Town Hall. Si Litvinoff and Lewis Allen coproduced a Frank Simon documentary of the event later released as The Queen. “I had to go pick Edie up because she was so doped up. We just got the documentary together in about two weeks and gathered everybody we knew,” Allen recalled. “Edie burned up her apartment smoking or something and was living down in the Chelsea Hotel. I waited interminably for her…she could scarcely move. There was a good deal of footage of Terry interviewing all the ‘girls’ in the show that’s not in the movie.”