by Lee Hill
“Barris was just all-out insanity,” says Burroughs’s longtime assistant, James Grauerholz. “The story is that he said, ‘I finally read the book last night. Can you take out the sex and drugs?’ Terry and Bill looked at each other and said, ‘We’ll try.’”
At their next meeting with Barris a few days later, they discovered their patron had called off the project. They were ushered out of Barris’s offices and told to find their own way home. The two men walked to a nearby friend’s house and called a taxi. The cab was so small that Burroughs had to sit on Southern’s lap.
That same spring, a promising A-list project came Southern’s way. Jerry Schatzberg’s second film as director, Panic in Needle Park, starring Al Pacino, had generated considerable buzz at Cannes. Twentieth Century-Fox asked him what he would like to do next. With a development deal in hand, he hired Southern, whom he knew socially when he co-owned a discotheque in the late sixties.
“Nathanael West was one of my favorites,” remembers Schatzberg. “I had read all his stuff. The people at Fox didn’t know who [West was]. They just knew Panic was getting good reviews and they wanted to do something with me. So I suggested A Cool Million and they said, ‘Oh yeah, anything.’ The book was tied up. I think Columbia had the rights to it. My agent had to get the rights through Columbia and we started to work on it with Martin Bregman as the producer. I told him I wanted Terry to write this and our agents talked and all that and Terry came in. I think we worked for about a week. He drank all my liquor and we didn’t get very much done. So I told him that he would come at this time, at this hour, and we would write this thing together. And that just worked very good…he was brilliant with dialogue. And we had a lot of fun.”
Timothy Bottoms was discussed as Lemuel Pitkin, the young hopeful, trying to pursue the Horatio Alger dream in an America where everyone is on the make. Faye Dunaway was considered as well. Donald Pleasance and Sally Struthers were other names who came up as possible casting choices. Schatzberg and Southern attempted to work in allusions to Nixon and Watergate. Schatzberg enjoyed the process of working hands-on with Southern, but he was surprised at how much pushing Southern needed.
“I think he was just insecure like all artists are. We used to eat, drink, talk, joke, laugh, and fart and whatever would go. Then his girlfriend would come by to pick him up and they’d sit here and finish the rest of my liquor. I just put a stop to it. I love having fun, but we were getting paid to [write this].”
Schatzberg was pleased with the script, but the results got tied up in Twentieth Century-Fox’s bureaucracy.
“They read the script…. [Richard] Zanuck may have said, ‘Yes, let[Schatzberg] do a script, do a film,’ and then the guy who read the script didn’t understand it. That’s usually what happens. Our agents tried to keep it happening, but I guess it was a little bit too bizarre for them. Probably now, in the last ten years, somebody like Terry Gilliam could do it. With different kind of money. I could probably do it [now] with some European money…. But it’s still a good idea. I remember I talked to Terry about it once. It’s still an interesting screenplay. I guess the screenplay is still ours…. Anytime in this business when you can give them some good name or project they go ‘yeah, yeah.’ Then they read the script and close the door. It’s a bizarre business and it’s still the same.”
Merlin, yet another promising screenplay from this period, was written for a producer who hoped to get Mick Jagger to play the lead of an Arthurian knight who is close to the magician. Southern remained close to the Stones, especially Keith Richards, but Jagger’s commitment to a film project was always a tentative proposition. Still, Terry’s friendship with the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band gave him a ringside seat at one of the biggest media events of the summer of 1972.
Southern accompanied the Rolling Stones on their first U.S. tour since the disastrous December 5, 1969, Altamont concert. He was covering the tour for the Saturday Review along with Richard Ellman from Esquire and Truman Capote for Rolling Stone (Capote never turned in his copy). In addition to the roadies, groupies, and prestigious scribes, the Stones were followed by a shifting cast of café society types such as Lee Radziwill and her then boyfriend, photographer Peter Beard; Atlantic Records head Ahmet Ertegun; Andy Warhol; and Mick’s estranged wife, Bianca.
Documenting this intriguing collision of sense and sensibility was Beat photographer and filmmaker, Robert Frank. Working with a two-man crew, Frank shadowed the Stones and Company to compile the official documentary of the tour, provisionally entitled Cocksucker Blues, the title of a song Jagger had written to fulfill the Stones’ contract with Decca Records. Gluttons for punishment, the Stones had commissioned Frank to document the tour cinema verité fashion. Gimme Shelter should have been a warning. In the Maysles Brothers film, Mick and Keith hardly come off as Albert Schweitzer types as they stare blandly at chaos and murder in the Moviola footage of Altamont. Somehow Frank had gained the Stones’s confidence with his landmark black-and-white album cover design for the newly released double-album set, Exile on Main Street.
The tour became notorious for a level of excess monumental even by the Stones’ jaded standards. Frank would detail that excess with fly-on-the-wall exactitude in his documentary. While much of the film is standard handheld, grainy rock-doc shtick—the monotony of life on the road, the interchangeable towns, the freakish adoration of American boomers—the ways in which a group of musicians could insulate themselves from the rigors of touring had never been photographed so clinically and without apology. Drugs of all kinds are used and displayed openly, from the reasonably innocuous booze and reefer to cocaine and heroin. Roadies grope seemingly compliant women like grapes on a withered vine. Their chauvinistic behavior culminates in a notorious midair gang bang on the Stones’ touring plane (with Mick and Keith providing impromptu musical accompaniment). As the rich and famous drop by to chat backstage, they are greeted with varying degrees of ennui. Cocksucker Blues is a film about people seeing how close they can skirt despair and death and still survive.
In a cameo that he would later prefer to forget, Southern looks remarkably disheveled in jeans, matching jacket, and turtleneck. His beard is scruffy and his glasses look like the kind of cheap frames that need to be taped. It is a jarring contrast to the cool, elegant hipster in sunglasses staring from the cover of Sgt. Pepper. Joking backstage, Southern is filmed snorting cocaine and then saying, “If you had a million dollars a week to spend on coke, you could probably develop a habit.”
As fascinating as Cocksucker Blues remains, when the Stones viewed it months later in the cold light of a London screening room, they unanimously agreed to shelve the film. Frank fought the decision. A compromise was arrived at. The film could be shown only with Frank in attendance in a highly structured context such as a museum. However, the Stones’ decision would not halt a healthy bootleg trade in the film.
During the tour Southern befriended Peter Beard, who was supposed to be taking pictures to accompany Truman Capote’s piece. Beard’s combination of nihilism and gung-ho preppiness intrigued Southern.
Terry started to get excited about a possible film inspired by Beard’s elegiac book on elephant hunting in Kenya, The End of the Game.
“Peter immediately showed me these notes for a screenplay based on his experiences in the Congo with wildlife conservation and poaching, where this entire population of elephants died off,” recalled Southern. “He wanted to have a movie exploring this mismanagement…[with a character called] Major Thomson, this asshole British park warden and his wife and their relationship.”
The End of the Game turned into a project that the two would tinker with until Southern’s death. Countless directors were discussed and approached, including Nicolas Roeg. Beard even toyed with the idea of directing the script himself.
“When we first started talking, we were flying to San Francisco and there was this terrible storm,” Southern recalled. “It was so severe that we had to make a wide approach to San Fran
cisco airport, so we flew right over the Golden Gate Bridge. When we crowded around the window to look down at the bridge, we saw these buildings…. Truman Capote said, ‘Well, that’s probably the most horrible prison there is. That’s San Quentin.’ Keith said, ‘What a gas it would be to play a gig there.’ And Capote, who was ultragay, replied, ‘Well, they would love it, and they would certainly love you and MICK! They would just devour Mick.’ So Keith spoke to Mick about it and Mick asked Truman and me to go check it out. So we did that. The prison was a horrific situation…talk about stress and density…they had a record number of stabbings…in the end, basically the warden said yes, but the security people said it was [too difficult to arrange]. And there wasn’t enough insurance to stage the gig.”
The tour was exhausting. Terry was almost kicked off it by Peter Rudge, the tour manager, who was worried about another Altamont-type scandal. Returning to New York, Beard and Southern were greeted at JFK by Lee Radziwill.
“I had a car parked in the long-term lot at JFK. It was a blue ’65 Mustang convertible,” said Southern. “I was going to stay at Larry Rivers’s in Southampton. We got to the airport and Lee Radziwill met us. She had no car. We told her we had made arrangements to go to Southampton. She said that’s okay, she had something to do in New York, but that she would come out and pick us up. So we went to Larry Rivers’s place. The next day I got a call from Peter, who said, ‘Listen, Lee Radziwill is in love with your car. She’ll give you anything if she can buy it!’”
Instead of taking money for the car, Southern decided to lend it to Radziwill.
“The next thing I knew she was driving around with Jackie…did you ever see Grey Gardens? Well, they were working on that film and I didn’t have the heart to reclaim the car, which they had for about two weeks. Larry had a car. So that was part of my early history with Peter Beard.”
Terry’s piece on the tour, “Riding the Lapping Tongue,” appeared in the August 12, 1972, edition of the Saturday Review. The perpetually ailing journal of middlebrow liberalism was an unusual venue for one of Southern’s now infrequent forays into journalism. “Riding the Lapping Tongue” was an uncertain mix of styles. Screenplay-type directions broke up various digressions on a feminist protest, a newspaper spoof describing Capote’s attempts to hold the Stones ransom, Jagger’s “extraordinary potential for acting,” and quick collagelike descriptions of the activity on the tour plane, backstage shenanigans, and the music itself. There were flashes of the target-specific irony of “I Am Mike Hammer” and “Twirling at Ole Miss,” but generally the piece was a disappointment. Southern seemed to be trying too hard to be with it. Instead of him, it was Robert Greenfield, a Rolling Stone freelancer who replaced the couldn’t-care-less Capote, delivered the definitive account of the tour in a series of articles that were collected in his book STP: Travels with the Rolling Stones Across America. Greenfield managed to be sympathetic to the Stones’ fishbowl existence, but also detached enough to analyze how the rebels of the sixties were becoming increasingly alienated by money and power from the counterculture they helped inspire—counterculture, Greenfield also recognized, that was beginning to show visible signs of the same decadence.
Sometime during that frenzied summer, Southern found time to do a bit of agitprop for George McGovern’s campaign. At a rally in Easthampton, he cowrote a playlet that featured Taylor Mead. Josh Alan Friedman, then in his midteens, attended the rally with his father, Bruce Jay, and recalls seeing Southern’s bizarre arrival.
“He really looked like a lunatic that night. His hair was disheveled. It was the height of the hippie-antiwar era and Terry amongst even the hippest people was really underground. He had Taylor Mead on one side, he had some porn star with him, some blond porn star—some tall woman who looked wiped out. They put on a sketch he had written at this performance hall. Tom Paxton played. It was a little anti–Nixon, anti–Vietnam war rally to raise money for McGovern, that kind of thing. It didn’t really make sense to me. I remember Taylor Mead kept falling down in the middle of the sketch and yet it didn’t matter somehow. I was asking my parents, ‘Who is this disgraceful man who can’t seem to recite dialogue without falling down?’ I guess they just patted me on the head: ‘It’s all part of the show. Don’t worry about it.’ I remember being amazed at Taylor Mead, a guy who could be so drunk and was literally falling down as he was reciting lines.”
Southern’s skit, “Nixon: No Tit and Ass Man,” did not exactly rank with Bertolt Brecht in its concerted attack on a corrupt political establishment. McGovern’s campaign was troubled by the resignation of his running mate, Thomas Eagleton, and a general perception that he was too “pink.” Although disillusionment with Vietnam was at its peak and the Watergate scandal was gaining momentum, Richard Nixon was eventually reelected.
The summer revels provided a welcome distraction from the very real cash flow problems that were making life along the Blackberry River desperate. Gail was helping to pay the mortgage by continuing to teach dance at a private girls’ school. Her dreams of becoming an actress were now subsumed by her efforts to maintain a clean, well-lighted place where Terry could write.
Southern’s Quality Lit reputation was still good enough for Tom Wolfe and A. W. Johnson to include “Twirling at Ole Miss” as one of the forerunners of gonzo in their anthology, The New Journalism. The other writers in the anthology, from contemporaries like Gay Talese and Norman Mailer to relatively new kids like Joan Didion, Michael Herr, and Hunter S. Thompson, had taken the possibilities of the diffuse genre and extended them to the limit. Like Southern, these were all writers who had grown dissatisfied with the traditional novel and short story, but it was journalism and not the cinema that had reinvigorated them. Southern might have been better off following their lead, as the cinema was proving to be a rather fickle and temperamental mistress.
Southern was entering his “I can’t even get arrested” phase. With the tax problems, child support, and projects increasingly stalled in development hell, a gig as a lecturer at New York University for $1,000 per semester was nothing to sniff at. Beginning in the fall 1972 through the spring 1974, Southern taught screenwriting. His students included the future film comedy director Amy Heckerling and writers like Steven Aronson (the coauthor of the celebrated true crime book Savage Grace) and Lee Server, who would write about subjects as varied as pulp fiction and Asian cinema.
Southern’s search for extra cash led to some humbling scenes. Tony Hendra, one of the editors at National Lampoon, recalls him walking into the magazine’s offices offering to write anything for $100 a shot. Hendra and other Lampoon editors like Michael O’Donoghue felt bad for the man who was something of an icon to them.
Southern’s first Lampoon contribution, “Hard-Corpse Pornography,” appeared in the November 1972 issue. It showed that Southern’s ability to shock was not lost. The piece was written in the form of a letter dashed off to Michael O’Donoghue, relating Southern’s shocked discovery of an organization of Vietnam veterans involved in a clandestine practice called “gook rimming.” This extreme metaphor for a war that tested the limits of absurdity and obscenity was a perfect example of form merging with content. It also pointed out that Southern’s most effortless and enjoyable writing was now being done in the form of letters to friends. As wonderful as these letters were to receive, some wished Southern would apply his energies to more substantial work.
Southern’s other Lampoon contributions were not as effective. A “collaboration” with William Burroughs, “Strange Sex We Have Known,” was hyped on the front cover but was essentially two unrelated squibs grafted together by the subject of bizarre sex. “Puritan Porn” and “The Dawn of Corn-Hole” were the kind of labored dirty jokes that Nelson Lyon would come to dread when he became Southern’s writing partner in the eighties. Aside from “Hard-Corpse Pornography,” Southern’s work for the Lampoon was unmemorable. Clearly the pressures of keeping the taxman at bay, diminishing fortunes, and sheer survival were stretching Terry’s b
ull-shit detector to the limit.
A mere year or two after the publication of Blue Movie, the kind of erotic cinema Southern believed was beyond Hollywood began to connect with the barely articulated needs of the Me Generation. Radley Metzger had started Audubon Films to mesh soft-core imagery with a European art-film style. Russ Meyer was breaking out of the exploitation circuit with films like Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! In Baltimore, John Waters was mounting his assault on the middle class with Pink Flamingos. Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door brought hard-core to the suburbs. Then there was Marlon Brando giving Maria Schneider a bit more than the Method in Last Tango in Paris.
Along with Gore Vidal, William Burroughs, and Sylvia Miles, Southern served as a jury member at the 1972 New York Erotic Film Festival; a compilation film was later released. Southern met Nelson Lyon, the director of one of the entries, The Telephone Book, a dark satire about obscene phone calls. The two would become close friends and collaborators in the eighties.
The commercial success and media attention surrounding these disparate films briefly opened the door to the notion that anything was possible in commercial cinema. Certainly Southern thought so. As he enthused to Michael Perkins at Screw, “…we’re getting into a golden age of filmmaking with videotape. There’ll be no censorship or sponsor problems. It will be the era of the home-made dirty movie. Imagine the enormous impact that will have.”
These were prophetic words. Video would indeed have an enormous impact…on the coffers of the major studios and the adult film industry concentrated in the San Fernando Valley. Its emancipating effect on American culture would remain minimal.