by Lee Hill
On June 1, 1967, the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in England. The following day it was released in the United States and Canada. For the rest of the summer, no other cultural artifact, let alone record album, seemed more important to discuss. In addition to the psychedelic beauty of the music, everyone was fascinated by the elaborate cover featuring the Beatles flanked by a crowd of cult figures dead and living. In the cover’s upper left-hand corner surrounded by Lenny Bruce, Francis Bacon, Tony Curtis, and Dylan Thomas, was a certain Terry Southern wearing his favorite shades and looking a bit like Marcello Mastroianni in La Dolce Vita. The album cover was designed by Peter Blake and photographed by Michael Cooper on March 30. The famous faces on the cover were chosen by the Beatles with recommendations by Blake, Cooper, and Fraser. Ringo gave the thumbs-up to Southern.
Southern had just put out his own “album,” Red Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes. The anthology had been in development for several years. Joe Fox at Random House had encouraged Terry to put a collection together back in the early sixties, but it ended up being placed at the New American Library. Like Sgt. Pepper, the cover of the anthology was striking. It featured a photograph taken by Robert Dudas of Jane Fonda embracing Southern, who looks toward the camera (or reader) with a half smile and slightly cocked eyebrow.
With the exception of a few smaller pieces and unpublished work, Red Dirt Marijuana assembled all of his critically acclaimed fiction and nonfiction since his Paris days. “The Butcher” and “The Automatic Gate” from the now defunct New-Story appeared alongside “I Am Mike Hammer” and “The Road out of Axotle” from Esquire. Like an expertly compiled greatest-hits album, the anthology played to Southern’s many strengths as a stylist, journalist, satirist, short story writer, and commentator. The back cover featured blurbs from Nelson Algren, Lenny Bruce, Norman Mailer, and Gore Vidal (not known for dispensing raves easily), who called Southern “the most profoundly witty writer of our generation.”
But which generation did Vidal mean? As the summer of 1967 began, Southern’s World War II generation and the somewhat younger fifties crowd were now being supplanted by baby boomers in their teens and early twenties. There was now a word—hippie—for the young people with long hair, colorful flowing clothes, and beatific smiles who seemed to be everywhere, walking city streets, hanging out in parks, and traveling the highways that summer. Unlike the hipsters and the beatniks, hippies were not cool so much as warm. They were always smiling, digging things, and expressing love of one kind or another. San Francisco, with its Haight-Ashbury district, was pushing London out of first place as the world’s grooviest city. Bands like the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Moby Grape were creating a blend of hard-edged rock that paid improvisational nods to jazz, folk, and the blues. The hippies liked to gather en masse for happenings or be-ins where marijuana was smoked openly, music was played all day and night, and everyone was encouraged to “to do their own thing,” which often meant getting laid or getting stoned or variations thereof. Yet even if the hippies seemed to spend a lot of time doing nothing, beneath their blissed-out expressions, one could detect the fervent belief that something revelatory, liberating, and consciousness-expanding was just around the corner.
For Southern, the summer of 1967 was an emotional peak. Red Dirt was getting strong reviews from critics who had him pigeonholed as just a madcap humorist. The movie work was rolling in and he was meeting the movers and shakers of the decade. And to top things off, he was considered, thanks to the Fab Four, one of those movers and shakers.
Southern and Gerber took some time off during the summer and rented a house in Southampton. It was a summer filled with music, wine, food, and passionate discussion. In addition to hanging out with Larry Rivers, Southern saw a lot of Bruce Jay Friedman and his sons, Josh Alan, Drew, and Kip. Friedman was also generating a lot of heat due to the success of his play Scuba Duba, about a man whose wife runs off with a black man. Friedman’s most vivid memory of the summer was of Southern dropping by his house with two gifts. One was a Lenny Bruce album featuring the classic routine “Frank Dell at the Palladium,” about a Vegas comic who lands a prestige gig at the London theater only to bomb because of his inappropriate jokes about Dunkirk and the like. The other gift was Sgt. Pepper.
“‘Frank Dell at the Palladium’ remains to this day my favorite nineteen minutes of anything. Just extraordinary. I always use it as an example of what I find funny,” said Friedman. “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band opened up a whole world…. I had written my first play, Scuba Duba, and I was rewriting it and casting it and I was very swept up in the theater. He in turn was pushing film. Both of us had begun as prose writers or whatever and he was strongly suggesting that theater was a waste of time and unreal and that movies were good. And we argued literally, neither one giving ground, for long hours into the night and these were close to being hostile arguments. I remember him saying, ‘How can you take a medium seriously when you are in the audience and you can see people spitting?’ And he would just spit into the surf. And I would say, ‘It’s a live transaction between you in the audience and the actors and that makes it real and immediate, whereas in film, it’s removed and on the screen,’ and on and on into the night with that particular argument. “
Unlike Southern, Friedman still believed in the possibilities of Quality Lit. Movies, especially American movies, were “nothing for a serious man to be doing. Now, of course, I would kill to get a screenplay job. I thought what you did, even the theater was a little meretricious…serious people wrote novels, serious people lived in the shadow of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner, and I was self-conscious about doing a play. And he was totally sold, one of the early people in, dare I say, ‘our crowd’ of the people I knew, who took movies seriously. There are only two I know of. The other is David Newman, who is a pure screenwriter, and then Terry.”
Despite their difference of views, Friedman and Southern respected each other’s work. Southern even asked Friedman about the possibility of turning Scuba Duba into a film.
“At one time, he was in the picture as someone to adapt Scuba Duba. He was the right choice actually. I was not the key figure here nor did I care particularly. I just really wanted to make a film sale. I never really believed in…in other words, the play existed exactly the way I wanted it onstage. Whatever happened to it after that, it’s always been my attitude, just had nothing to do with me. If they made a movie, fine, if they didn’t, I had my play. Now I am wrong. I have had some films and my son, Drew, would remind me, ‘Dad, kids who see this won’t know that you’ve written anything else.’ So I’ve been wrong.
“There is no question that Terry’s work spoke to me. In a nutshell, it was screamingly funny, always outrageous, and he always pushed the edge of the envelope, it seemed to me. And that spoke to me. And also the thing that’s lost in all of that is his books were very hot, you know, Candy was and even Blue Movie, later on, which was my favorite. They were very, very hot. Forget about erotic. They were hot! So there was that. That’s a trick. I’ve never been able to write about sex. In fact, I wouldn’t know how. I like it, but I’ve never been able to write about it. He was absolutely magnificent in hitting that right note.”
The only dark note in the summer had been the arrest of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards on highly dubious drug charges. Robert Fraser had also been arrested after the police raided a country gathering at Richards’s Redlands home outside London on June 28. The two Stones were released after an appeal ruled the charges were made in error. Unlike Jagger and Richards, Fraser was not so lucky and lost an appeal for possession of twenty-four heroin tablets. He was given a six-month sentence When he was released in 1968, Fraser’s ebullient devil-may-care attitude was shaken. His gallery, which had never been known for its rock-steady finances, went out of business. He continued to deal in art with mixed success until dying from AIDS in 1986.
From 1964 to 1967, Southern had seen very little of Nile. In 1968 Terry ret
urned to New York to live, and Nile recalls Terry popping up at his mother’s New York apartment as he played with neighborhood kids. “Hello, son,” said Terry tentatively. Nile realized this was his mysterious father and reserve turned to excitement as Terry’s visits accelerated into drop-ins at the office (stockpiled with boxes of Cracker Jack and other candies), expensive presents like a fully functioning minicar, and excursions to the country. Gail even taught Nile how to ski as he became older.
As a father, Terry maintained his support payments and was always warm, kind, and encouraging to his son. But he wasn’t much of a disciplinarian. Since work and play were inextricably tied together for his father, Nile would find it difficult to accept the same harsh realities Terry avoided as he grew older. And Terry continued to relate to his work as a purist. Seeing it not as a series of career moves, but as new ways to express himself. While the money was a potent influence, Terry never managed it effectively.
According to Carol, Terry continued to hint that his relationship with Gail was only temporary. A part of him seemed to have difficulty comprehending that the success of the last few years and the glamorous lifestyle that went with it had changed things forever.
“I waited for him for a long time,” Carol said. “We had Nile and ‘the place’ and memories of a relationship that had been very romantic and intense. Four or five times over those years he did come back, but never more than a few days, and it was always very painful. He wanted to come back, but he was very tied to Gail and there was something in that relationship that was very strong for him. Addictive almost. After he left, he kept a kind of imaginary relationship in his head…he always idealized our life together. Finally, I realized that his talk of coming back was just that and would never materialize. But he was just such a persuader. It took me a long time to get used to the changes.”
Facing such difficult decisions was beyond Southern at the best of times. And for now, as the Summer of Love raged on, he felt it was too negative and counterproductive to dwell on such matters.
An Easy Rider at the End of the Road
I want to forget the sixties, not remember them. I look on that period as one of bad karma for me. I want to start from now.
—Anita Pallenberg, quoted in Blinds and Shutters
As the Sgt. Pepper summer blossomed, Southern continued to play hard and work hard. Dino De Laurentiis, with the endorsement of Jane Fonda and Roger Vadim, hired him to fly to Rome and work on the rewrites for Barbarella. Principal photography would lumber on through the summer and fall of 1967. It was the biggest Italian-French coproduction in some time, with a secured distribution deal through Paramount.
Terry was familiar with the Jean-Claude Forest comic strip through the Evergreen Review, which ran an English translation. Forest, a veteran French illustrator and cartoonist, had created Barbarella for his own amusement and eventually sold the strip to the Paris-based V magazine in 1962. Barbarella combined Brigitte Bardot’s pinup sexiness with imagery that mixed Flash Gordon, the Marquis de Sade, and Vogue. The plots were also a study in inspired incongruity—the Perils of Pauline as written by Michel Foucault or Simone de Beauvoir. The strip became an instant hit in France and Belgium, leading to a best-selling book. Thanks to English fans like Barney Rosset and Robert Fraser, the strip became a cult fave in England and the United States. And what was Barbarella, after all, but Candy in space?
As an example of big-budget international filmmaking, Barbarella was a Casino Royale–size headache for De Laurentiis. Like Dr. Strangelove, Southern’s script doctoring on Vadim’s epic would prompt endless speculation over what he did or didn’t contribute to the final result. In addition to Southern, the credits listed almost half a dozen other names. A team of Italian and French writers, including Jean-Claude Forest, had already labored on the initial drafts that got the production the green light. Tudor Gates, an English scribe known chiefly for his work on Hammer horror films, supplied some of the English translation. Then there was Charles Griffith, an alumni of Roger Corman, friend of Fonda and Vadim, and the other American writer on the film; in the end he would not receive an on-screen credit. According to Carol Southern, Terry did more than touch up Barbarella and apparently completed a draft that had a fairy-tale quality, little of which ended up in the final film.
When preproduction began in earnest in April 1967, Southern flew to Rome, where he worked for a few days in a hotel near the Spanish Steps. Southern would return to Rome in the fall to supply deadpan throwaways like “A lot of dramatic scenes begin with screaming” that could be dubbed in at the last minute. Southern was already friendly with Jane Fonda and Roger Vadim through his regular attendance at Sunday brunches thrown at their Malibu home.
“The strain was with Dino De Laurentiis,” recalled Southern. “He was just the flamboyant businessman. His idea of good cinema was to give money back on the cost of the picture before even going into production. He doesn’t even make any pretense about the quality or the aesthetic.”
The Barbarella gig was yet another opportunity to mix business and pleasure. It was another over-the-top megaproduction with complex special effects, giant sets, and weird costumes. John Phillip Law played the Bird Man. Veteran New York stage actor Milo O’Shea was the evil Duran Duran. Anita Pallenberg had been recommended to Vadim as a natural for the role of the Black Queen and she was given a screen test in Rome.
“The fact that Terry was writing was flattering,” Pallenberg recalls. “It was Vadim who gave me the screen test, but I always felt very grateful to Terry for supporting the choice. Dr. Strangelove has always been one of my favorite movies. I remember when we were doing Barbarella, it was all very complicated because we were filming very slowly. I don’t know if it was due to De Laurentiis, Vadim, or Terry—it was one of the three—but the script pages weren’t always ready. Sometimes Terry used to send the script by telegram and one time it was this one line—‘You’re a dead duck’—and he wrote my lines as well. So it was kind of funny in that way. Then again, when Candy was made, I got a role in that as well. So I felt really a part of his work. Like he was my protector.”
Pallenberg’s involvement led to a mini-reunion of the Robert Fraser gang. Keith Richards, Mick Jagger, and Marianne Faithfull visited her on the set in April. In her memoir, Faithfull recalls Christian Marquand, Southern, and Living Theatre founders, Julian Beck and Judith Malina (who were touring Europe and avoiding the IRS, which had shut down their operations in New York), adding to the Dionysian atmosphere surrounding the film. Southern teased Pallenberg about her Method-like approach to the role of the Black Queen: “Ah, by my troth, here comes the Black Queen! Rats scurry across polished marble floors, and little snakes hiss at her baleful entrance.”
In September, “Blood of a Wig,” the last story in Red Dirt Marijuana, was published in the October Evergreen Review. Inspired by his stint at Esquire, the story ranked among Southern’s best in spite of (perhaps because of) its odd structure. A memoir and meditation, it begins in a low-key, matter-of-fact fashion with the hipster narrator describing his efforts to endure the banality of a nine-to-five gig at an Esquire wanna-be run by a managing editor who is more a crass Jerry Springer type than an urbane and thoughtful Harold Hayes. Taking a small nugget of personal experience as a jumping-off point for fantasy was now a major part of the Southern approach. Where the Esquire gig was, for the most part, a pleasant way to pick up a steady paycheck, in “The Blood of a Wig,” the incident is transformed into a strange psychedelic escapade. Looking for a new high, the narrator gets a lead on “red-split,” a hallucinogen synthesized from the blood of a schizophrenic Chinese poet, Chin Lee. The specifics of the drug experience are barely detailed by the narrator except to say: “Sense-derangementwise, it was unlike acid in that it was not a question of the ‘Essential I’ having new insights, but of becoming a different person entirely. So that in a way there was nothing very scary about [the drug], just extremely weird, and as it turned out, somewhat mischievous.”
Howev
er, the drug’s influence on the writer’s efforts to complete a tedious assignment are immediate. Southern then appropriates Paul Krassner’s controversial “Parts Left Out of the Manchester Book” sketch, which almost led to the Realist getting shut down in 1965. Krassner’s scandalous vision of LBJ humping JFK’s head wound aboard Air Force One is pitched by the narrator to his boss, who reacts with disgust. According to Krassner, Rosset and company at Evergreen had to clear the story with him first to ensure the “appropriation” was homage and not plagiarism.
The Krassner reference is the least satisfying part of “Blood of a Wig,” which doesn’t so much end as slowly fade out as its narrator ruminates on insights he has gained into “Viet Nam, Cassius Clay, Chessman, the Rosenbergs and all sorts of things” thanks to “red-split.” “Blood of a Wig” would be Southern’s last published short story for some time. It signals an increasing shift away from the “clean deliberate prose” so admired by Norman Mailer to a looser, more colloquial style that reached its peak in Blue Movie. Although “Blood of a Wig” is still a richly told comic fable that ranks alongside Southern’s finest work as a short story writer, one detects a level of impatience in its construction.
In October 1967, toward the end of his stint in Rome, Southern, accompanied by Gail, visited Peter Fonda in the French village of Roscoff. As Barbarella’s seemingly endless production began to wind down, Vadim had started to shoot “Metzengerstein,” an episode of the anthology film Spirits of the Dead (Louis Malle and Federico Fellini directed the other two episodes). Vadim, with his yen for erotic frisson, had decided to cast Jane and Peter as brother and sister characters to raise the incest subtext an extra notch. As was with many cinematic endeavors of this Mad Hatter period, a hectic shooting schedule did not get in the way of sightseeing, fine dining, and getting quietly, but determinedly wrecked. During one of many such confabs, Peter told Southern about an idea he had for a movie.