A Grand Guy: The Art and Life of Terry Southern

by Lee Hill

Another observer of the Junky story sessions was Victor Bockris, then a contributor to magazines like Interview and High Times. Bockris was spending a great deal of time playing Boswell to Burroughs’s Johnson with plans to turn the table talk into a book. He felt that Hopper saw Junky in less than collaborative terms.

  “I think that Burroughs had a lot of trouble with Hopper in that situation because in the script conference Hopper would be so coked up that he would just talk for hours and hours and not listen to anything Burroughs had to say. Bill would say, ‘Now listen to me and shut up!’ Which is rare for Burroughs, and they did listen to him. There was a certain amount of annoyance with Hopper. [Ted] Morgan may have picked up on that and misinterpreted it and thought it may have had to do with Terry…. a lot of people were left blaming each other for why [Junky] fell apart. I’m sure it had something to do with Jacques Stern.

  “The whole thing from the beginning was a combination of really nutty people who needed someone really together—a practical overseer for the project. Jacques Stern couldn’t be that person, so the whole thing broke down. It was a drag, because it was a very good idea.”

  Increasingly it became apparent in the story meetings that Hopper wanted to set Junky in the present. Burroughs and Grauerholz believed the original 1940s setting would be less familiar, and thus more fascinating, to viewers. Stern had his own bizarre vision of Junky—another treatment called The Creation of Adam, a freewheeling look at the history of narcotics enforcement in America, whose specifics changed on a daily basis. Southern kept writing pages that stayed close to the book, but would occasionally throw in the odd idea by the others.

  On April 30, a series of meetings hosted by Joe Bianco was held to break some bad news. Stern, as it turned out, had been heavily dependent on a group of West German partners—Abracadabra Productions—who were now pulling out of Junky. Although Stern was rumored to be worth around $14 million, most of these assets were tied up in offshore accounts or inaccessible tax shelters.

  Bianco’s announcement deepened a growing divide between the principal players. The only thing that held them together was that they all wanted to make a film of Junky—except Stern, who still held the option. In a weird sort of Machiavellian way, it looked as if Junky was an elaborate attempt for Stern to get back at Burroughs. Why? No one was sure. Despite his wealth, Stern had never really succeeded at being anything other than a rich addict. Burroughs, a pauper by comparison, had become influential and famous by staying true to his literary vocation. Well, that was one theory. Grauerholz said Stern would often bring up the allegation that Burroughs had stolen from his top dresser drawer years ago at the Beat Hotel.

  On the morning of May 9, Stern called Burroughs and Grauerholz at their hotel. In a long rant, he claimed that he had copyrighted his Creation of Adam script in 1975, that he did not want Burroughs to do any writing on Junky, that he and Hopper would write the script, which would take place in the seventies with Burroughs playing himself in the latter part of the film. Stern claimed to have talked to Bob Dylan, who expressed interest in the part of Roy, a fellow addict in the book. If this manic call had a purpose it was to show Burroughs who was the creative boss. And if Burroughs and Grauerholz didn’t like Stern’s new plans for the film, he still had the option. “You can call it off if you want to, I’ll pay the guarantees…but it’ll be a long wait!” On this dramatic flourish, Stern hung up.

  Stern’s intransigence left Southern in limbo. He recognized that Stern was a loose cannon, but he felt an allegiance to Hopper as well as to Burroughs. For his part, Hopper was starting work on a draft of his own. Instead of playing an active role, Southern attempted to sit things out. The day after Stern’s call, Burroughs and Grauerholz met Southern and Hopper for an emergency meeting at the latter’s apartment. Grauerholz recalls expressing a hope that Dennis would concede that Junky “did not allow for an auteur director, and agree than any script submitted should be unanimously endorsed by Southern, Burroughs, and Hopper. I also pointed out that there should probably be some official recognition of the fact that Burroughs, as well as Hopper, [was] participating in the actual writing of the script—and not Southern alone, as in the original understanding.”

  Grauerholz felt Hopper was not amenable to the spirit of the kind of collaboration needed to make Junky fly. “He appears, for instance, to have concluded that the only acceptable and most dramatic ending for the story would be for William Lee to shoot his wife in the head, accidentally. I will leave it to you to imagine what William’s view of this idea would be.”

  As Stern’s lawyer, Joe Bianco was in the thankless role of picking up the pieces after the latest of his employer’s tantrums. He attempted to reassure Burroughs and Grauerholz that Stern’s phone call was due to ill health and added, “I have never known Jacques to find a paltry two million dollars or so an obstacle.”

  However, a memo received the same day from Stern referred to the production as The Creation of Adam, further deepening the sense that the project was on a rocky voyage. Stern was sounding more like the mad captain at the wheel who was going to drown them all.

  On May 15, Southern attended the funeral of James Jones with Hopper, Walter Hopps, and Jean Stein. After the funeral, Southern brought Hopper over to Ellen Adler’s, where a somber reception was in progress. Adler asked Southern and Hopper to leave not long after they arrived. Hopper, whose behavior was growing increasingly confrontational, was arguing with guests and using profane language in a situation where many children were present. For Southern, who prided himself on his courtly manners, being kicked out of a funeral reception was embarrassing in the extreme.

  It was becoming clearer and clearer that Junky was a mess. The Cannes Film Festival, which was to have been the launching pad for Junky, was in full swing without anyone from the production attending. Southern received a call from Stern simply stating, “Gone to Geneva. Dennis in charge till I get back.” If the project had any hope of getting made, alternative backing would have to be sought.

  Despite all the uncertainty and personality conflicts, Southern delivered a first draft of Junky on May 25, 1977. At 101 pages, it mirrored the book’s laconic style faithfully. Southern managed to stick closely to the book without using too much narration. His adaptation shifted quickly from New York, where Bill Lee, Burroughs’s alter ego, is involved in the petty dealing of Army Syrettes to support his heroin habit. Eventually Lee is arrested for trafficking and goes into detox at the Lexington rehab facility. After his release, he goes to New Orleans and then to Mexico for a while. Lee’s attempts to kick are foiled by narcotics officers who want him to become an informant. Lee avoids this only by staying on the run and leaving the country. As in the book, he embarks on a search for Yage, “a kick” that will bring enlightenment as well as a new high.

  Southern wove in a motif from Naked Lunch wherein Bill Lee stumbles into the Past Time Bar. Here his past and present converge—old cronies greet him, police officers and doctors reveal the corrupt faces behind the masks of officialdom, and most poignantly, Mary, a junkie who is dying from a bone disease, continues to look for tricks. The script ends with “the Mooch” entering the bar and shooting Lee. The images that pass before Bill Lee’s dying consciousness are the subway trains that he used to travel in search of easy marks.

  For the most part, Southern’s draft is spare and economical. There is the occasional episode written to appease Stern. For example, while Lee is given a tour of the Lexington facility, the script jumps from the forties to the present. Suddenly, this scene becomes a film within a film being screened on a video monitor by Dr. Miller. This is followed by a surreal sequence where Dr. Miller monitors an experiment where an alligator pumped with heroin is being monitored for withdrawal symptoms.

  Upon the delivery of this draft, Southern and Hopper had a meeting with François de Menil in the hope that the latter’s oil-rich family would take on the costs of development. Some form of “wildcat independent financing” was now needed, argued Grauerholz
. Terry suggested approaching Lewis Allen, the producer of Lord of the Flies and Fahrenheit 451 and various New York theater productions.

  As Stern’s behavior became increasingly unpredictable and with the first draft still awaiting feedback, Southern checked out of the Gramercy Park Hotel on June 1. Southern would later say that Junky failed because Stern lacked the background to attract and secure Hollywood’s attention: “It turns out that Dennis wasn’t that interested in making it and Jacques Stern didn’t have enough money to produce the film, but he had enough money to option the book and finance a screenplay…. He would get madat Burroughs. He claims that Burroughs prevented him from winning the Nobel Prize by telling people that Stern was on junk. If Jacques Stern had taken it more seriously as a real project instead of as a way to work out his relationship with Bill, it might have worked…. ‘Is that why you spoiled my chances for the Prize!’ There was an atmosphere of ultraparanoia between Jacques and Bill.”

  James Grauerholz tallied up the work done to that point. From what he could determine Dennis hadn’t written anything in any traditional sense. Jacques made lots of notes, including the mishmash that was The Creation of Adam. Terry’s final script was a combination of working drafts followed by notes from Jacques, Hopper, Burroughs, and Grauerholz. One of Terry’s drafts opened with a hydrogen bomb cross-fading into an extreme close-up of a hypodermic needle filling with blood. A team of temporary secretaries and stenographers racked up a lot of time keeping track of all the paper.

  “The whole thing was really a Jacques Stern production as in not a movie production, but a scene,” Grauerholz recalled wearily. He began working on a draft called Bill Lee. “As often happens when a project fails, the second-string players who really had their hearts in the project all along will walk up to bat and try to play the game, but it never works out. William wasn’t supposed to [write] anything, but be in on the whole deal. Terry wrote several drafts. William wrote like a number of twenty to thirty pages of summary which Terry used. Terry’s drafts, as I recall, borrowed liberally from Naked Lunch.

  “One thing that comes to mind is that Dennis wanted to, if memory serves, put the thing in present time. I was always deeply opposed to this. I always thought that the beauty of the story was [that] it happened in the forties and that the character was William. None of them knew William well enough to write anything for him, including Terry. Terry had known him for years and they were very, very chummy, but as far knowing William as a human being well enough to put words in his mouth in a scene that would have verisimilitude, they did not.”

  Ironically, at the very point when Junky was beginning to look like a lost cause, the media, especially the rock press, began to run brief news flashes about the project. Rumors floated about that Patti Smith, Miles Davis, and Lou Reed were planning to contribute to the soundtrack. Jack Nicholson might do a turn (Grauerholz does recall that Patti Smith was interested in playing the part of Mary, the only significant female role in the book and film). Penguin reissued the novel with a new introduction by Allen Ginsberg, giving the impression to the outside world that the project had a good chance of being made. Time magazine reported that Southern was also helping Hopper with his autobiography and that Hopper had just gotten his portrait done by Andy Warhol.

  Southern remembers one of the more amusing casting ideas. “The first scene [of Southern’s draft] deals with this guy who is coming to sell a package of Army Syrettes, 3cc ampules of morphine that are in medical kits for soldiers on the front, so that if you get wounded, you can shoot one of these up. That was one of the things was sold in trafficking at the time. Bill suggested we use Herbert Huncke, one of the guys he knew who actually sold this stuff at the time. So we located Huncke and asked him and he said, ‘I don’t think this part would be good for my reputation. I don’t need that kind of exposure!’ Burroughs would say to Herbert, ‘But you could use the heat!’”

  As Southern began to look for a way to discreetly extricate himself from Junky, the Non-Movie, The Donkey and the Darling, a limited edition children’s book started in 1968 with Larry Rivers, was finally published by Tanya Grossman’s Universal Art Editions. Not so much a book as an elaborate objet d’art, The Donkey and the Darling consisted of a series of handsome lithographs combining calligraphic-style text with Rivers’s striking illustrations. Each page of the story was signed by Southern and Rivers. The entire book was housed in a beautiful wooden green lacquered box roughly the size of a small cedar chest. When one opened the box lid, one could look into a mirror imprinted with the title of the book. Only thirty-five copies were made.

  The book was a beautiful thing to behold, but an artistic dead end for Southern the writer. A section of The Donkey and the Darling apppeared in Wonders, Jonathan Cott’s 1980 anthology of children’s literature by people who didn’t normally write for children. However, the more logical destination for the work, a trade edition, never materialized. It was a shame because the story was unlike anything Southern produced before or afterward. It was an exercise in style and narrative that Henry Green would have relished.

  The Donkey and the Darling is set in Sillicreechie, a kind of Winnie-the-Pooh fantasy land of cuddly animals. They coexist in various stages of harmony but fear the Bad Witch. The story focuses on the trials and tribulations of Baby Grey, a kitten, as she tries to find a friend among such disparate characters as Mouse, Good Toad, Bad Baker, Blue Fairy, and Real Painter. Southern takes delight in coming up with outlandish, almost iconic names for the inhabitants. On one level, the story is kind of a pop-art experiment in merging word with image. Rivers’s lithographs take this premise to the limit. Yet the text itself can be read simply as a playful excursion into myth as this excerpt demonstrates:

  Thick Toad was so fat he could hardly see. He would just loll about in Crystal Pond for hours on end, soaking up the water and getting more thick and thick. One time he just sat in the water all night, and by morning he was so swollen he could not get out of the crystal pond.

  Miss Mouse came to the pond bright and early each morning to wash her face; she could not bear Thick Toad, and she would not even speak to him he was always so fat and wet. The truth was that this Miss Mouse did not even like the water, but she would put a drop on her pointy-face each morning because she was so proper.

  It was as far removed from the heroin-is-not-a-kick-it-is-a-way-of-life world of Junky as one could get.

  Southern’s interest in Junky was waning. He had found himself a new writing partner, Joe Loguidice, the owner of a Chicago art gallery and occasional business adviser to Abbie Hoffman. Loguidice had written a script called Tough City about a tour bus that takes customers through the worst New York has to offer. Southern read the script over and suggested they collaborate. Loguidice was still getting his feet wet as a writer, but he had a lot of experience setting up meetings and making cold calls. They began a series of field trips to Los Angeles to pitch Tough City and flesh it out.

  Meanwhile, Junky was in limbo. On behalf of Burroughs, Grauerholz began to look for other backers and work on his Bill Lee draft more seriously. Stern’s Junky option was still in effect for the rest of the year, but Stern was doing nothing to keep things moving. Joe Bianco was still trying to impose some order on the project in spite of his client’s manic behavior. Hopper wasn’t actively working on the project, but was asking for $5,000 to waive his participation as director for four months and to compensate Paul Lewis. It was obvious that the community spirit of a few months back was fading away.

  Grauerholz considered the possibility of buying back Junky for $30,000, a portion of what Stern had thrown into the project. There was also talk with Joe Bianco about approaching other actors—like Jeff Bridges. Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Nicolas Roeg, Sydney Pollack, Terence Malick, John Milius, John Schlesinger, Milos Forman, and Kubrick were some of the big-name directors that were thrown around. Both men sensed they were clutching at straws. Grauerholz also wrote to Rudy Wurlitzer, the screenwriter behind Two-Lane Blackto
p and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, to feel him out about possibly writing a new draft. Wurlitzer politely declined, citing other commitments.

  In July, as Southern’s house was assessed by Raymond and Pierre Real Estate at $52,000, Grauerholz received $7,500 from Stern to keep Junky alive. However, dealing with Stern’s mood changes remained as big an obstacle as the lack of production funding. In a letter to Burroughs, then teaching at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Grauerholz described how Stern alienated a William Morris agent who had the idea of bringing Brian De Palma on board with Kris Kristofferson as the lead. Suspicions arose about Southern’s loyalty to Burroughs and Junky. Grauerholz had heard a rumor that Southern was in L.A. shopping a radically revised version of Junky around: “What it means Bill, this trip of Terry’s, what it means is that he doesn’t give a shit about your wishes—the wishes he so often claimed he would abide, [by], and here he is out in L.A. on an expense account from Jacques, $2,000 in his pocket from Jacques for ‘work on recent drafts’…and he’s waltzing around Hollywood handing out copies of this mad, offensive script without having made the slightest attempt to have your opinion of it, or even my opinion.”

  In another letter, dated August 11, 1977, Grauerholz tells Burroughs about tracking Southern down at the Sunset Marquis in Los Angeles, where Southern and Loguidice were working on Tough City. After playing phone tag with Terry, he got through to Gail: “I can’t escape the strong feeling that Terry is avoiding me, that my message of over [a] half-hour ago was in fact received and that is why Gail was answering, that for some reasons there is something going on they don’t want me to know about.”

  Grauerholz continued to keep Burroughs apprised of other developments over the summer. There was some vague interest at Paramount, where Michael Eisner was also considering Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. By the end of September, Grauerholz completed Bill Lee, his version of Junky, and mailed it to Burroughs. Southern had moved on. By February 1978, Junky reverted to Burroughs. As Stern retreated into his Gramercy Park apartment, his friendship with Burroughs was now damaged beyond repair. In 1979–80, Wim Wenders expressed some interest in Junky. In the late nineties, Steve Buscemi, the talented character actor who had directed the critically acclaimed Tree’s Lounge, took another option on Junky. He seemed to have as good a chance as anyone else to get this ill-fated project off the ground.