A Grand Guy: The Art and Life of Terry Southern

by Lee Hill

  “A Piece of Bloody Cake was ahead of its time,” recalled Kotcheff. “I thought All the President’s Men was a decent piece of work, but it concentrated on the newspaper reporters. This script was about the actual people involved in the break-in like Gordon Liddy and the guy who thought he was James Bond. It was about how these sociopaths suck otherwise normal people into their crazy power fantasies. For example, Liddy wanted to stock this houseboat with call girls and film Democrats being fucked on camera. There was also a scene where these White House plumbers stage hippies having sex on the American flag and plan to insert this footage into antiwar films.”

  A Piece of Bloody Cake is a remarkably sedate piece of writing. The absurdity of the Watergate conspiracy emerges slowly as the script cross-cuts between the growing reservations of a clean-cut FBI family man assigned to the Nixon team and the black security guard who will stumble upon the break-in. If the film had been made, it would have made an appropriate companion piece to Francis Coppola’s The Conversation.

  Kotcheff was unable to get the script approved. Southern mailed a copy to Kubrick, who once again responded with a friendly and noncommittal “read with interest and pleasure and will advise.”

  Still things were looking up. The time spent with Kotcheff in Los Angeles had brought in enough money for Southern to forge ahead. Terry secured a prestigious commission from CBS to write a script for The American Parade, a series of historical teleplays designed to commemorate America’s Bicentennial. CBS gave the producers an unusual amount of freedom. William Claxton ended up directing Terry’s contribution, Stop Thief!, starring another friend, Rip Torn, as Boss Tweed. It was aired on August 21, 1975. Reviews were lukewarm applauding the series’ good intentions, but with little enthusiasm. Americans may have been proud of their history, but they preferred not to watch it on network television, thank you. Stop Thief! would be Southern’s only on-screen credit in the seventies.

  That same summer, Southern went out to visit Torn in New Mexico on the set of Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth. Si Litvinoff and Max Raab were the producers of the film. Terry decided to take Nile, now fourteen, along. It was a chance to meet one of his heroes, David Bowie. Nile recalls a strange interlude visiting Bowie at his motel, where it was obvious that the rock star’s relationship with costar Candy Clark went beyond simply rehearsing lines together. During a couple of days off, Terry, Rip, and Nile went on a classic hunting and fishing trip in the country. It was the kind of outing Terry felt every boy should have with his father.

  According to David Cammell, who was an associate producer on the film, Southern raised a few eyebrows by taking off on the trip with a car belonging to the production. Southern was getting his expenses covered by Litvinoff and Raab with the hope that he would write a magazine piece about the making of the film. Instead, Roeg decided to film Southern playing himself in a scene where the media gather as Thomas Newton, the Bowie character, is about to embark on a space mission. The scene was cut out of the initial theatrical release and then later restored when a “director’s cut” was issued on video and laser disc in the mid-nineties.

  For the rest of the fall and winter, Southern stuck pretty close to home in Connecticut. He worked on a couple of highly speculative projects including a teleplay called On the Loose, with William Claxton and Michael Parks. Southern had known the cult actor, who became famous for his role in the TV series Then Came Bronson, since his Filmways days. Parks enjoyed Southern’s company immensely, but he was unable to pay Terry more than a nominal fee for the work he did. Southern tried not to complain when these funds did not appear as expected. Although as a tense answering-machine message from the period suggests, Southern’s patience and generosity barely disguised his desperate need for cash. He was still living beyond his means and the house in Canaan was a constant drain on his resources.

  Some more pin money came his way when Earl McGrath, then the Rolling Stones’ manager, arranged for Southern to accompany photographer Annie Leibowitz on the group’s Black and Blue tour. A coffee-table book with Southern’s text was the plan. In sharp contrast to 1972, this tour was quite sedate. Jagger had become more involved in the detailed planning of the tour and there was little room for the kind of twenty-four-hour partying of yore. The tour was notable for its elaborate set designed around the lapping-tongue logo of Rolling Stones Records. At a key moment during concerts, a giant air-filled phallus would billow up from the stage and confetti burst out over the group and audience. This type of gimmicky Vegas-style showmanship would dominate live concerts of the late seventies. The coffee-table book did not emerge until 1978, but Southern kept the Stones camp amused with a parody tabloid paper called The Record World.

  After the Stones tour, Southern and Gail again retreated to the Hamptons to visit Larry Rivers. Another script idea was discussed. Yet again, it focused on one of Rivers’s obsessions, sex. Southern wrote a treatment called Johnny Stud, which referred to one of two inflatable dolls that a fashionable couple “uses” for amusement.

  As the decade passed the halfway mark, the Southern scorecard was looking bare. A Cool Million, Blue Movie, and A Piece of Bloody Cake were bright prospects that never quite gelled. The other work—the occasional magazine piece, the teaching, and spec work with friends—brought in some extra cash. Southern was doing his best to stay positive and keep busy. He didn’t stop to notice that he was turning invisible.

  10

  Junky

  Good writers have so much (dare I say ‘beauty and excitement’?) to come back to that they are likely not to stray far afield for any great length of time,” Southern wrote in an unpublished essay about drugs and the writer. He added that heroin was the exception to this theory. The effect of the seductive opiate “is to reduce everything to a single glow, where it is no longer a question of doing or becoming—one is. A difficult package for anyone to resist. Almost no one kicks a major junk habit; only super-artists, whose work is even stronger than the drug itself: Burroughs and Miles Davis are rather obvious examples. Mere mortals, however, beware.”

  If these cautionary words were in Terry’s mind when he embarked on the ill-fated adaptation of William Burroughs’s first novel, Junky, one can only guess. The project surfaced at a time when, rightly or wrongly, a perception of Southern as a “druggie” or “hippie” had dramatically slowed down his influence and power in the Hollywood creative community. There was considerable hypocrisy in this kind of labeling. Hollywood was awash in cocaine by the end of the seventies. It was the decade’s drug of choice. When its presence at informal meetings and parties was as ubiquitous as a lunchtime martini was in the fifties, the question of who had a problem with blow was moot.

  Nonetheless Southern’s druggie image, regardless of its validity, did not help his stature in the ever-shifting pecking order of Hollywood. In the substance-abuse department, Dexamyl was Terry’s real crutch. The amphetamine was a popular diet pill in the fifties that gained popularity because it didn’t lead to the horrific downers of other forms of speed. As Southern began juggling screenplays and script-doctoring assignments, the need to “dex it” became more neccesary. The drug gave him the psychological and physical support he needed to complete huge chunks of writing in a short time and still have energy left for some rest and recreation. Combined with Terry’s drinking, Dexamyl had a damaging effect on his constitution. He gained and lost weight radically throughout the seventies. Unlike Paris Review colleagues like Peter Matthiessen and George Plimpton, who were more physically active, Southern did not take care of himself. Photographs from the decade show dramatic changes in Southern’s appearance. Sometimes he looked bloated and heavy. Then after a few weeks at his East Canaan dacha, he would emerge fresh-faced and energetic again. But the years were taking a heavier toll on him than they should have.

  For the first half of the seventies, Southern had endured the IRS, the stillbirth of Blue Movie, and an almost complete estrangement from Quality Lit. The oppressiveness of career and money proble
ms had been compounded by Richard Nixon, Watergate, inflation, the seemingly endless Vietnam conflict, and then its dispiriting conclusion with the fall of Saigon. These events had sapped much of Southern’s sixties optimism. However, the election of Jimmy Carter in the fall of 1976 gave Southern hope. There were also some fascinating signs of cultural revolution as punk, disco, and reggae surfaced in the clubs. He had been to CBGB a couple of times and dug the scene. He was especially fond of Debbie Harry, the peroxided lead singer of Blondie.

  Southern’s financial pressures and doubts about his screenwriting career had been lightened by a Washington lawyer, Richard Ben-Veniste, who obtained some of Terry’s files through the Freedom of Information Act. The files Ben-Veniste was able to get released were not as voluminous as some suspected. In early 1965, the FBI had Terry under surveillance because of Candy and Dr. Strangelove. An informant had led the FBI to believe that Southern was in possession of a cache of pornographic films and other material. Further investigation (which mainly involved watching who visited Terry in East Canaan) led to this vague filing:

  With reference to the pornographic library of films which SOUTHERN allegedly has in his possession, it is not known to this office whether it is a local violation in Connecticut to display films to “guests” and it is therefore left to the discretion of the Bureau as to whether such information should be made available, strictly on a confidential basis, to a local law enforcement agency covering SOUTHERN’s place of residence.

  The rest of the FBI’s watch on Southern consisted of monitoring the vigorous sales of Candy in Hartford despite the efforts of the vice squad to get distributors to remove copies from bookstores and newsstands. Carol Southern was also described as a “‘beatnick’ [sic], in that, she is sloppy and extremely dirty.” As Terry recalled it, the times she was probably spotted were when she was working in the garden or surrounding grounds and wore appropriate clothing for such work.

  As with much of the FBI’s surveillance of writers, the reports revealed little more than bureaucratic stupidity and overkill. The FBI appears to have lost interest in Southern very quickly. Still the released reports were not pleasant reading for Southern or Gerber. They had felt terrorized by their treatment by the IRS. In 1972, Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg had been audited not long after their public endorsement of the McGovern campaign. The two artists were able to pay what they owed and continue with their work, but the effect was chilling. Things were starting to improve a little bit for Terry. Through his lawyer, Peter Herbst, he had negotiated an offer of compromise with the IRS.

  As the Carter administration entered the White House, Southern began to get sucked into a new Hollywood pipe dream appropriately called Junky. It was a project that had the potential to be a New Hollywood classic like Easy Rider or the recently released One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It would be a chance to bring the dark vision of his grand good friend Bill Burroughs to the screen.

  Jacques Stern, an old Beat Hotel friend of Burroughs with connections to the Rothschild family, was now living in New York. A childhood bout with polio had left him wheelchair-bound. His lawyer, Joe Bianco, had helped him form an offshore entity, Automatique Ltd., to develop film projects. Burroughs and Stern had an odd love-hate relationship in which old slights hadn’t quite been forgotten. Nonetheless, Burroughs was grateful when Stern decided to produce Junky. Of all Burroughs’s novels, it had the most obvious appeal as a commercial film venture. Published in 1951 as a cheapie Ace paperback under the pseudonym Bill Lee, Junky remains a fascinating first-person account of heroin addiction in the forties. It was the book that gave Burroughs the confidence to become a writer and pursue the groundbreaking vision of Naked Lunch.

  Under the terms of Stern’s option of Junky, Burroughs was to receive a $20,000 advance up front. Southern was taken on as screenwriter and Dennis Hopper would act and direct in the proposed film. They, too, received $20,000. The film’s total budget was estimated at $1.7 million and Stern and Bianco had reserved hotel suites to conduct presales meetings at the Cannes Film Festival in May.

  On March 3, 1977, Burroughs, Southern, and Hopper received their checks at a party organized at Jean Stein’s Central Park West apartment to celebrate. Gerard Malanga took a picture of the group.

  “It was kind of vague why all this was happening,” recalled Malanga. “Here’s Dennis Hopper, here’s Terry, here’s Bill. Something must have happened because it didn’t get off the ground. That’s always a big mystery. [Stern] was kind of a wiry guy like Steve Buscemi. Really thin with the hair dangling down the side. That day I think I took one photo of Jacques in the wheelchair on the side…. I don’t know why but I always associated Jacques Stern’s name with drugs.”

  A press release issued on March 14, 1977, by Abracadabra Productions (a rather unfortunate name given the eventual poof-and-it’s-gone nature of Stern’s completion guarantee for Junky) and Automatique Ltd. optimistically stated that filming would commence on July 15 with principal locations in New York and Mexico City.

  On paper, the Junky team didn’t look entirely crazy. Hopper arranged for Paul Lewis to sign on as a line producer on spec. In addition to working as the production manager for Easy Rider, Lewis had worked with Peter Bogdanovich and Brian De Palma. Hopper and Southern’s mutual friend Jean Stein also lent her moral support and name to Junky. Paul Wasserman agreed to handle public relations.

  Ted Morgan in his biography of Burroughs described the Junky project as a yearlong orgy of drugs, booze, and reckless spending. True, Hopper, then in the throes of his own addictions, was not in the best shape to command a feature film. He was, to his credit, trying to use work as a way of coping with his demons. He had just returned from the Philippines, where he had completed a role as a war photographer in Apocalypse Now, when the Junky project began to percolate. James Grauerholz, Burroughs’s companion and secretary, remembers Hopper saying that his feelings were really hurt because Brando wouldn’t act opposite him in front of the camera. Most of his scenes with Brando were played to the air.

  High-strung and agitated, Hopper was hoping Junky would put him back in the director’s chair after the debacle of The Last Movie. Burroughs was still getting used to New York life. He was living in the Bunker, a former YMCA locker room converted into a Bowery apartment. His assistant, James Grauerholz, helped to reorganize his business affairs. Both Grauerholz and Burroughs were hoping a feature film might generate income and interest in Burroughs’s books. Southern obviously needed the money, but he was also excited about working with a kindred spirit and great friend. If any screenwriter understood the underground milieu that had shaped Burroughs, it was Terry.

  March and April were dominated by a flurry of activity surrounding the script. Terry and Gail moved into room 320 of the Gramercy Park Hotel to be close to Stern’s apartment at 11 Gramercy Park South. They were able to look out on the private garden and watch Stern glide over from his apartment in his motorized wheelchair. As one might imagine, Stern’s Strangelovian appearance was a source of quiet amusement to Southern.

  “Stern was trained as a physicist,” said Southern. “He would doodle these mathematics equations. He would get mad at Burroughs and claim that Burroughs prevented him from winning the Nobel Prize by telling people that Stern was on junk. I would ask Stern, ‘What is your first language? French?’ ‘No, my first language is mathematics!’ Burroughs would say to Stern, ‘Go on, show Terry your stuff,’ and Stern would write out these long, beautiful intricate equations. Stern was a complete decadent drug user. He had paralysis from polio, which left him wheelchair-bound, and he lived in Gramercy Park…he had this hypodermic-type device taped to his wrist. All he had to do was tap this device and he would get a jolt of speedballs made from heroin and cocaine. We would see him coming out of his brownstone town house zooming around in the wheelchair. He was ultralucid. He had these two girls, one black and one white, both wearing short miniskirts, who were his assistants. One was a philosophy student. They were just sort of go
fers and when called upon would perform certain unnatural acts for Stern.”

  Southern would spent the day writing the script based on the meetings, which would lead to parties or dinners. It was another business-mixed-with-pleasure scenario that Southern thrived on. He carried a small tape recorder around to record the free-flowing discussions. On one tape is recorded a very drunk dinner where Hopper, Southern, and Burroughs try to remember Jean Cocteau’s advice to the young poet. “Étonne-moi!” croaks Burroughs. Hopper says, “Astonish me, man.” Terry begins to recite the quote in a Chill Wills–type accent.

  Once again, Southern was the man in the room with the pen and paper. His genial demeanor and laid-back working methods gave the mistaken impression he wasn’t doing anything. Stern’s erratic behavior was also making Burroughs and Grauerholz nervous.

  “I remember one time Jacques Stern was on a cocaine rampage and said that he was going to get Samuel Beckett to play William,” recalls Grauerholz. “Or to play somebody, I don’t know who. Then [Jacques] picked up the phone and supposedly reached Beckett and demanded that he take this part. I just remember one side of the conversation. He could have been talking to the dry cleaner downstairs. But he screamed at [the phone] and hung up.”