by Lee Hill
Reflecting back on Junky’s brief promise and then equally swift disintegration, Grauerholz had this to say about the illusory nature of star power and the vagaries of film financing:
“You get this prostitution factor that just never appealed to me. I could never see chasing celebrities for their fame, their money, cocaine, or anything else. I always felt that if you have a good idea, regardless of the famous people involved, the idea is to make a great piece. I have this profile of being a skillful handler of William’s reputation and all this, but my preoccupation has always been with the various books that were going to be submitted for publication, or the records, readings, whatever. They should be good. It should be professional and of a very high standard of care. To see these people falling all over each other being idiots, I could see we were never getting anywhere. The Junky movie project wasn’t a Hollywood project. It was a rich guy with money footing the bill for a lot of drug-addled insanity and delusions.”
Tough City attracted a bit of development money and a nibble from All in the Family producer Norman Lear, but didn’t go anywhere. Southern began writing With Extreme Prejudice with James Coburn and a London-based company called Artiofilm. It was a prescient thriller about a plot to kill the pope. Southern spent a lot of time with Coburn at the actor’s home talking story. As with Junky, he taped some of the writing sessions. Coburn loved to describe the atmosphere of papal intrigue and the clothes the characters wore. Jazz played constantly in the background. There were the occasional breaks to ingest substances of one form or another. Southern would receive approximately $10,000 in installments for his work.
In the spring, with little fanfare, The Rolling Stones on Tour—A Log Book—was published. It consisted of Annie Leibowitz’s exhaustive pictures of the 1976 tour. Southern’s text was amusing and occasionally informative. The book sold reasonably well to music fans, but added little luster to Southern’s name in Quality Lit circles. Southern fans, who did not live in the incestuous orbit of café society, could be forgiven for wondering out loud, “What the hell is this guy doing?” Southern seemed oblivious to the fact that all the energy devoted to yet another unfilmed screenplay was draining his talent.
What, for example, was someone as talented at novel writing and the short story doing churning out a screen outline for another version of “The Most Dangerous Game?” It was a story so stale that one of the more recent versions had been a forgettable made-for-TV movie. It was a far cry from Dr. Strangelove and Easy Rider.
Southern kept his counterculture credentials intact with work on Haven Can Wait, a play cowritten with Loguidice for an August 23, 1978, benefit to raise legal funds for Abbie Hoffman. Jon Voight, Allen Ginsberg, Dave Dellinger, Ron Kovic, Kinky Friedman, Ossie Davis, Odetta, Rennie Davis, Anne Waldman, Ramsey Clark, Michael O’Donoghue, Paul Krassner, Bobby Seale, Taylor Mead, and Rip Torn were among the star-studded cast that appeared before what Loguidice described as an “absolutely out of their minds rock ’n’ roll crowd.” Hoffman, who was still on the run, made a virtual appearance through film and videotape. Haven Can Wait was the kind of unwieldy gargantuan son et lumière display that energized Southern. The play was an absurdist treatment of Hoffman’s life and struggles, including this strange re-creation of the Chicago Seven Conspiracy Trial:
SCENE: THE HAVENLY COURTROOM OF JUSTICE JULIAN ‘J.O.’ JULIAN.
The Judge fixes the Prosecutor with a fomrulative gaze.
JUDGE: Has the sexual-witness arrived?
PROSECUTOR: No, I regret to say the eminent Dr. Benway has not yet arrived. The Prosecutor, however, is prepared to offer at this time a series of anecdotes which may well—
JUDGE (impatiently interrupting): Anecdotes?
PROSECUTOR: Yes, your honor, anecdotes which may prove to be germane or analogous, to the issues at hand—These anecdotes being rendered in the format of the so-called ‘Polish Joke.’ With the Court’s permission?
JUDGE (nodding sagely): Proceed.
The Prosecutor assumes the easy and expansive manner of the professional raconteur.
PROSECUTOR: Well, there were these two Polock [sic] fag hair-dressers, and—.
COUNSEL (rising): Objection…Your honor, I submit that ‘Polish Jokes’ are not an acceptable substitute for testimony and evidence in a court of law. If the Prosecution has no witness to call at this time, the Defense will do so.
JUDGE (after peering eccentrically at the Counsel, looks to the Prosecutor): Any objection, John?
PROSECUTOR (shrugs, chuckles): Beats fucking mud.
COURT REPORTER (being one of the boys): Yer fucking A!
JUDGE: Give ’em enough rope, eh Jack! (Wags a finger mischievously.) Yer a shrewd one, ye are, Jack Mitchell!
PROSECUTOR: Ay, and that’s what they be payin’ me for now, isn’t it?
They exchange BROAD CONSPIRATORIAL WINKS, and the Judge faces the Counsel.
JUDGE: All right, Mr. Constable, bring on your next weirdie.
COUNSEL: Your honor, the Defense wishes to call to the stand at this time our distinguished poet laureate, Mr. Allen Ginsberg.
APPLAUSE. The Judge raps vigorously for silence, eyes Counsel narrowly.
JUDGE (his expression changing to one of sly shrewdness): ‘Poet-deviate’? Did you say ‘poet-deviate,’ Mr. Kunstler?
COUNSEL (with emphasis): I said, ‘poet laureate,’ your honor, and I must take the most serious exception to your uncalled for—
JUDGE (interrupting furiously): Just one minute, Mr. William Counselor! Are you trying to tell the court that this witness—this Jehovah’s Witness is not, in actual fact, a self-avowed PREVERT?!?
COUNSEL (cooly): Your honor, I would suggest to you that the sex-life of the witness is not relevant to the substance of his testimony.
JUDGE (menacingly): And I would suggest to you, Mr. William A. Kunstler, that you are on the verge of being in contempt.
COUNSEL (bewildered): In contempt, your honor?
PROSECUTOR (chuckling with good-natured drunken joviality):
That’s a little town just outside of Scranton, P.A. (continues chuckling, starts coughing, has a nip.)
His laughter is joined by that of the Judge, and the weird chortle of the Reporter.
For a time, Southern briefly toiled on a treatment for a script about pyramid power called Dawn of the God Kings. Then, in September 1978, Joel Freeman, a producer of films like Trouble Man, commissioned Southern to adapt Harry Crews’s novel The Car, relating the life of a carnival worker who has the ability to eat automobiles whole. The project seemed an ideal marriage of two darkly comic sensibilities. Southern’s adaptation faithfully captured the flavor of Crews’s bizarre allegory about America’s love affair with the automobile. Of course, as always, the problem seemed to be getting the project past the development stage.
In the fall, Southern was one of many shadowy contributors, along with Michael Arlen, Carl Bernstein, Nora Ephron, and Frances Fitzgerald, to Not the New York Times. It was a parody issued during the 1978 newspaper strike, which began August 9 and lasted until the late fall. Tony Hendra, George Plimpton, and other Elaine’s regulars assembled the lark at Plimpton’s East River apartment on the pool table.
Southern also surfaced at the Nova Convention in New York, an eclectic gathering that brought together Brian Eno, Patti Smith, Merce Cunningham, John Giorno and others to pay homage to William Burroughs and his influence on art and culture. The event ran from November 30 through December 2 at a series of venues around New York University. Aside from a nonappearance by Keith Richards, whose connection to Burroughs was tangential anyway, the convention was a hit of sorts. Southern introduced Burroughs, who was entering an exciting phase of his career, revolving around charismatic readings.
Burroughs read carefully selected excerpts from his work behind an old wooden desk as a doctor delivering a diagnosis of some awful terminal disease. Earlier during the convention, Southern read a fragment of his autobiographical novel dealing with his Texas boyhood, now calle
d Youngblood. Howard Brookner, a young filmmaker, filmed the proceedings for what would turn out to be a long documentary project on Burroughs, which was finally released in 1983.
The event culminated in a lively party at Mickey Ruskin’s new restaurant at One University Place. It was one of the last high-profile public appearances by Southern. As he balanced Victor Bockris’s girlfriend, Marcia Resnick, on one knee and a glass in the other, he was still the life of the party. His Grand Guy persona continuing to serve him well in what was not his most fertile period.
11
Grossing Out
I’ve had a long friendship with Terry, I like his work, think he’s funny; he’s a mess, but he’s also marvelous. He’s a picture of the human condition. If there’s a median where you’re OK, and one side is heading toward being awful and the other toward possibly being beautiful and poetic, he’s somewhere between the median and the bottom. He eats too much, he drinks too much; at the same time he’s so funny and strangely polite and gentle.
—Larry Rivers
As the seventies ended, Southern still dreamed of another big Hollywood score. It was a form of addiction as debilitating in its way as heroin or alcohol. Peter Sellers, the absurdly talented and possibly mad actor who had worked on Dr. Strangelove with Southern, shared this addiction.
Sellers was able to maintain his habit thanks to the profits from the highly successful Pink Panther series. Yet the actor was weary of playing Inspector Clouseau and his relationship with writer/director Blake Edwards was so acrimonious they often communicated only through assistants on the set. Audiences loved watching Sellers as Clouseau don an endless array of silly disguises, engage in judo with his manservant, Cato, and drive Herbert Lom as Inspector Dreyfus to the brink of madness. The latest installment, The Revenge of the Pink Panther, released in the summer of 1978, proved to be one of the most popular films of the year, along with the John Travolta musical Grease and Warren Beatty’s Heaven Can Wait. The Pink Panther money allowed Sellers to sustain eccentric obsessions with astrology and the afterlife as well as maintain a hideaway in Gstaad, Switzerland. The revenue also made up for such embarrassing flops as There’s a Girl in My Soup, Where Does It Hurt?, and Murder by Death. However, as batty as many of his career decisions were, Sellers was sufficiently self-aware to know that he was capable of performances that would stand the test of time. The Ladykillers, I’m All Right Jack, Lolita, and Dr. Strangelove remained perennials on late-night TV, repertory cinemas, and retrospectives.
Like many stars, Sellers tried to exert more control over his work by optioning and developing screenplays. In the early seventies, he became obsessed with Jerzy Kosinski’s 1971 novel Being There, the story of Chauncey Gardiner, who spends his entire life as a rich man’s gardener cut off from the outside world except for television. When his patron dies, this blank slate of a human being wanders into the Washington beltway. His innocuous meanderings are mistaken for political wisdom and he becomes the friend and adviser of a dying presidential kingmaker.
Kosinski’s fable had a powerful resonance with Sellers, who often felt as if he lacked a clear sense of self and only felt truly alive when impersonating others. Sellers hired a number of writers to adapt Being There, with little success. Eventually Sellers and producer Andrew Braunsberg hired Kosinski himself to write a screenplay. Hal Ashby, the quintessential seventies director of The Last Detail and Shampoo, came on board. The package attracted Shirley Maclaine, Jack Warden, and Melvyn Douglas. Lorimar, the successful producers of the TV show The Waltons, had just started a film division and agreed to underwrite principal photography. The cast went before cameras in the fall and winter of 1978–79. United Artists released the film in late 1979 in time for Oscar nominations. Reviews were almost unanimous: Sellers the comic genius was back. His performance as Chauncey Gardiner was a tour de force as powerful as the “triple crown” of Dr. Strangelove.
Being There rejuvenated Sellers. He began to seek out similar material. Some years before, Sellers had found himself in a private jet sitting next to an arms dealer. They struck up a conversation and Sellers found himself fascinated by the incongruity of the man. On one hand, there was the obvious obscenity of a man whose income was based on instruments of death. On the other, there was the fact that the man was well dressed, courteous, and worldly. He was the perennial guest of kings, presidents, and statesmen. He traveled the world in luxury in spite of the fact that his wheeling and dealing helped to create further conflicts, displace the lives of millions, and lead to the death of countless others. Like Being There, the idea of a film about the international arms trade percolated for some time. Sellers gathered books and magazine articles on the subject. Now, with Lorimar asking if Sellers and Ashby would like to develop a follow-up project, Sellers contacted a writer who seemed perfect to write about this shadow world of diplomacy, espionage and genocide. Sellers and producer Andrew Braunsberg contacted Southern and made a deal. Terry was in seventh heaven. This was a can’t-fail dream deal—Sellers, Ashby, and Southern.
The resulting script, Grossing Out, with Ashby attached as director, was steeped in the kind of technical minutiae found in Jane’s Fighting Ships. Despite its coarse title, Grossing Out was a deeply serious script. Like A Piece of Bloody Cake, it is a character study of an intelligent, well-intentioned, politically conservative man who realizes he is working for self-interested psychotics. In this case, Bob Larchmont, the auditor at Republic Aviation, an aerospace firm, becomes caught up in a world of Pentagon slush funds, payoffs, and clandestine deals with supposedly enemy nations, terrorism, and covert operations of byzantine complexity. Profoundly cynical about the Western nations’ professions of peace and global harmony, Grossing Out offers vignette after vignette detailing the selling and trading of arms in far-flung hotel lobbies and dingy cantinas to high-tech trade shows and office towers. In one scene, Bert Murchison, a vice president of a California aerospace firm, gives his chief auditor, Bob Larchmont, a lecture in Kissinger-style realpolitik:
LARCHMONT
Tell me why one of the largest aircraft companies in the world has to pay a million and half dollar bribe to sell its planes? Why don’t you tell me that?
Murchison stares at him, expressionless for a moment, then sighs heavily.
MURCHISON
(very serious)
All right, Bob, you call it a ‘bribe’…we call it a ‘consultant’s fee’…the Japanese call it ‘brokerage expenses’…the French ‘entertainment costs’…the British call it ‘grease’…‘grease for the squeaky wheel,’ they say—the point is, they were all doing it before we were even in business…I mean it’s their ballgame, and if we don’t learn to play by the rules, we’re out of it—it’s as simple as that. While Murchison speaks, Larchmont stares vacantly at the silent Third World footage: an endless column of Cambodian refugees—mostly women, children, and old men—walking over a vast expanse of countryside, belongings in hand and on their backs.
MURCHISON
(continuing)
And we can’t afford to be out of the game, Bob—our economy would collapse. (gently) Don’t worry, the Pentagon knows all about it—you’ll be covered.
LARCHMONT
(absently, still watching the set)
Yes, well, I guess ‘consultant fee’ is as good a phrase as any…
MURCHISON
(sagely)
The phrase-of-choice, Bob, the phrase-of-choice.
LARCHMONT
(after a pause)
Just out of curiosity—how is the money…transferred…to the ‘consultant’?
MURCHISON
(smiles, knowing he has won him over)
Gracefully, Bob, gracefully.
Southern began working on the script steadily through the winter and spring of 1979–80. Restless as always, he couldn’t help working on other projects. Dennis Hopper raised the possibility of an Easy Rider sequel. James Coburn was still trying to get Extreme Prejudice together. There were meetings with Lewis Allen to di
scuss a musical about the Cotton Club called Johnny Blood. Southern had come up with the idea with two unlikely collaborators, New Yorker writer Brendan Gill, who lived near Southern in Norfolk, Connecticut, and Harry Nilsson, as the composer.
“He wrote that with Brendan Gill,” Lewis Allen recalls. “They talked about it coming in on the bus from Canaan together. I didn’t commission it, but they gave me the script. I have it around somewhere. It was quite good…it was all set in Harlem and Johnny Blood was kind of the king of black pimps there and he was protected by the Harlem community and the cops couldn’t get in there, that sort of thing. It was very interesting. But you know a musical is a complicated thing…. They brought it to me. Brendan was a good friend of mine, too. Musicals are so hard to do. You’ve got to get something extraordinary or a star or something like that.”
Southern stayed at the Chelsea Hotel on his business trips to New York. For Grossing Out, he made occasional trips to Los Angeles to discuss progress on the script. Nile was starting an undergraduate film studies program at UCLA.
“I remember attending a few Hollywood parties that my dad invited me to and let’s say they would be at Si Litvinoff’s house and Pablo Ferro would come along,” recalled Nile. “Pablo was Hal Ashby’s creative consultant and helped Hal do some tricky sequences…. He did Kubrick’s trailers and titles. He still does work for Jonathan Demme and John Carpenter. He’s half Cuban and half American Indian and has a very interesting kind of all-consuming, slightly dictatorial style in dealing with producers. He just says, ‘Look, I am creating this thing!’ At these parties, Haskell Wexler would be there. This guy, I forget his name, but he was called the ‘Shrink to the Stars.’ He was a psychiatrist…. My dad really liked him. My dad would say to him, ‘I want you to look inside my son’s head.’ At the time I was having some real problems, so it was pretty funny. It was a great, ironic moment for me when I am kind of at a breaking point and my dad’s joke ‘look inside my son’s head.’ Barbi Benton, Richard Benjamin, George Segal…all sorts of characters would be at the parties.”