by Lee Hill
On July 24, 1980, Sellers died of a heart attack in a London hospital. His last film, The Fiendish Plot of Fu Manchu, overshadowed his performance in Being There. Yet another overproduced, underwritten comedy, it was distinguished only by the elaborate disguises Sellers wore and the behind-the-scene battles with the original director, Piers Haggard, who resented being reduced to a traffic warden by the manic actor. Sellers’s death left Grossing Out in limbo. Lorimar put the project in turnaround. Hal Ashby moved on to more promising projects, which turned out to be a series of dreadful films, including a mediocre concert film, Let’s Spend the Night Together, and a dire Neil Simon vehicle, The Slugger’s Wife. Southern tried to shop his script around to the likes of Stanley Kubrick and actor Paul Newman.
Not one to indulge in self-pity, Southern gamely threw himself into another project. Si Litvinoff had purchased the rights to a novel called Aria by Brown Meggs. Aria was a comic behind-the-scenes look at the world of opera. Litvinoff approached George Segal to star and Ted Kotcheff to direct. Segal and Kotcheff had worked well together on Fun with Dick and Jane and Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?, two slick comic entertainments that had enjoyed healthy box office returns. Twentieth Century-Fox was underwriting the development of the project. According to a contract drawn up on August 25, Southern would be paid a $30,000 advance from a total writing fee of $85,000. Unfortunately, the work he turned in seemed to lack energy.
“What killed [Aria] was Terry’s script,” said Litvinoff. “In my estimation it was [intended to be] the Dr. Strangelove of the classical world. He didn’t do it like Strangelove, but like Easy Rider, unfortunately.”
“[Aria dealt with this] Duddy Kravitz–type record producer who wanted to make the ultimate recording of one of his favorite operas,” said Kotcheff. “It was a very funny book and I’ve always been interested in classical music…. Si and I thought Terry was the perfect writer [but] he was spreading himself too thin. It was obvious around the time of Aria that you felt he had a crushing financial problem. He was not able to work at his best…[the] script was really bad structurally, with shades of Southernisms, nuggets here and there. Fox just dismissed it.”
The East Canaan farm had been remortgaged at one point to pay off the IRS, and this of course created more obligations. Thirty thousand dollars could disappear quite quickly when one had old debts, college fees, and current expenses to deal with. Gerber and Southern were also fond of fine dining. Shuttling back and forth between upstate Connecticut and New York often required overnight stays at a hotel.
Around this period, Southern took on the job of writing a soft-porn film, Electric Lady, directed by Philip Schuman (who later made a documentary about the making of Yellowbeard, a rather leaden pirate comedy written by Graham Chapman). The plot, such as it was, concerned a team of sex researchers. Southern’s name was proudly displayed in the credits by the producers. On the bright side, no one seemed to notice and the film seemed to circulate mainly in the twilight world of adult cinema.
On December 8, 1980, John Lennon was shot and killed in New York City outside his apartment at the Dakota. Along with the election of Ronald Reagan as the new president of the United States in a landslide victory, Lennon’s death was an almost too-perfect confirmation that the dreams of the sixties had died. For Southern, who was as indelibly associated with the counterculture as Lennon and the other Beatles, it was painfully clear that many Americans were retreating into the old Cold War standbys of xenophobia, militarism, and the pursuit of wealth for its own sake. What made this shift to the right more depressing were the number of baby-boomers who embraced these harsh values as avidly as they had embraced sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll a few years before. Here lay part of the problem. Unlike Southern and other members of the World War II generation who were inspired by the emancipating influences of the sixties—free speech, civil rights, ecology, artistic experimentation, etc.—many of the boomers who weren’t politically active merely saw the decade as one long frat party. Now it was time to return the empty beer bottles for the deposit. The eighties would become the decade of the yuppie, where no one batted an eye when Jerry Rubin cut his hair and began to throw “networking” parties for up-and-coming entrepreneurs.
Despite the emerging dog-eat-dog tenor of the new decade, there were still plenty of Southern watchers in the hinterlands who were beginning to despair of ever seeing new Terry Southern stories or books in print. In 1980, an enticing morsel from The Donkey and the Darling appeared alongside a nursery rhyme by Norman Mailer and a scary story about a girl who turns into a cat by Paul Bowles in Jonathan Cott’s delightful anthology Wonders. Those fans who managed to stumble on the oddball squibs in places like Hustler or Oui were usually more depressed than enchanted. Thus when “Heavy Put Away, a Hustle Not Entirely Devoid of a Certain Grossness Granted” appeared in the twenteith-anniversary edition of the Paris Review in the spring of 1981, there was cause for celebration.
Inspired by an anecdote told to Southern by John Calley, “Heavy Put Away” was a classic meditation on innocence versus colder-than-ice cynicism. Framed as a magazine query rejected by a woman’s magazine, the story unfolds as Southern’s allegedly “verbatim” recording of a con perpetrated by an acquaintance called Art, who was interviewed “on the terrace of the ‘Sow ’n’ Merkin.” Art describes the fateful tragedy of Sally, who agrees to sleep with a charming middle-aged man in exchange for a couple of thousand dollars. Sally needs the money to pay a pile of bills incurred by her stuntman husband’s work-related accident. She rationalizes this distasteful pact on the basis that the man is “wonderful, gentle, sweet, attractive, generous” and her family desperately needs cash. On the night of her assignation, she sleeps with the man in a luxury bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Yet to be paid, Sally is persuaded to give up her wedding ring on the pretext that he wants to buy her a more expensive replica and become a kind of silent benefactor to the woman and her family. The man then disappears and the woman waits for his return. As the hours pass, Sally begins to realize she has been duped. She is forced to call her husband, who is in a partial body cast, to help her sneak out of the hotel. In the process, she is also forced to explain how she ended up at the hotel.
Southern asks Art the point of this elaborate setup that only earned the con men a couple of hundred bucks from the sale of an inexpensive wedding band. Art replies, “You’ve got a pretty materialistic slant on things, don’t you?” This is the last sentence in the story.
“Heavy Put Away” is a brutal glimpse into the mind of a narcissistic neohipster motivated only by the art of the con. Where the narrator of “The Blood of a Wig” was searching for the ultimate high as a gateway to greater knowledge, here Art and his conmen acquaintances are engaged solely in a kind of nihilistic endgame. The story is a prescient fable of a decade in which deal-making took precedence over any considerations of right or wrong.
Much later, Ron Rosenbaum wrote an insightful commentary on what is Southern’s last great short story, calling “Heavy Put Away” “a slyly disguised parable about Art—not Art the con man, but Art as a cruel con game, a discipline that drives those in its thrall to dark and ugly transgressions for the cold contemplative rewards of the esthete…the story isn’t exactly an excuse for bad behavior…in the parable, as I read it, Southern sees himself as both perpetrator and victim, both the con man and the woman in the hotel so cruelly deceived by Art. Southern, too, is a victim of Art, robbed of innocence, of stability, by the deranging, impoverishing obsession with its cold con.”
Southern’s ambivalence toward Art’s cold duplicity—which is essentially an act of malice against a defenseless woman and her desperate family—is insightful. Like many shy and sensitive individuals, Terry lived vicariously through the impulsive confidence of acquaintances and friends who can politely be described as less than ethical. As loyal and supportive as friends such as Ted Kotcheff, Jean Stein, or George Plimpton were, Southern was just as easily influenced by charismatic and amo
ral movie executives and producers whom he encountered in the bistros and hotel lounges of Los Angeles. “Heavy Put Away” is an acknowledgment that Southern understood and perhaps admired their cutthroat ethos. Although in practice, he was too much of a nice guy ever to act on them or employ such techniques to a tactical advantage in his business dealings.
The period 1980–81 was relatively quiet. There were nibbles. Andrew Braunsberg took out a $12,500 eighteen-month option on Blue Movie. If the film went into production, Southern would get first crack at the script. Maurice Girodias, who had unsuccessfully transferred Olympia Press to New York in the mid-sixties, approached Southern about updating Candy. This time Southern kept his distance and passed.
Meanwhile, another opportunity was developing in the form of some television work. Beginning in 1975, Saturday Night Live, the hit late-night comedy show conceived by Lorne Michaels, had successfully sneaked some of Southern’s satirical outrage past the homogenizing filters of NBC executives. For its first few years, the show was a refreshing oasis of hip, engaged music and comedy sketches whose subjects and targets roamed freely across such sacred cows as sex, drugs, religion, and politics.
One of the show’s founding producer/writers, Michael O’Donoghue, had left the show in the late seventies to work on various film projects. In 1980–81, after the departure of Lorne Michaels, Jean Doumanian, the show’s music booker, was promoted to executive producer. Although she was good friends with Woody Allen, her comic instincts were sadly lacking. A new cast and writing staff selected by Doumanian turned out to be disastrous. Doumanian was fired and replaced by Dick Ebersol. He asked O’Donoghue to come back and overhaul the ailing show. It was a strange decision. O’Donoghue had deeply mixed feelings about his Saturday Night Live work. He accepted Ebersol’s offer only in order to give the show what he called “a decent Viking burial.” His opinion of Doumanian’s handiwork was even less charitable. Referring to her 1980–81 cast and writing team, he said, “The Angel of Talent had passed over these people.”
Over the summer, O’Donoghue began firing much of Doumanian’s cast. The revamped cast for the forthcoming 1981–82 season would include Christine Ebersole, Mary Gross, Brian Doyle Murray, Tony Rosato, and a few survivors from Doumanian’s reign: Robin Duke, Tim Kazurinsky, Eddie Murphy, and Joe Piscopo. For the writing staff, O’Donoghue assembled Rosie Shuster, who had written for the first seasons of SNL, veteran comedy writer Herb Sargent, and Mark O’Donnell. O’Donoghue also decided to hire two close friends whose television series experience was minimal. They were Nelson Lyon and Terry Southern.
Southern had known O’Donoghue on a friendly basis since the latter had contributed a comic strip, Phoebe Zeitgeist, to the Evergreen Review. The strip began as a spirited homage to Candy and then morphed into something sinister and darker…like O’Donoghue himself. O’Donoghue had also supported Southern’s contributions to National Lampoon. To O’Donoghue and Lyon, Southern was a national resource.
NBC’s business affairs department drew up a contract that would pay Southern $2,154.55 a week during the show’s sixth season (this would go up to $2,692.30 the next season, with the option of increases up to $3,000 over the next three years). However, in return for a steady paycheck, Southern would have to adapt to the physical demands of a television show that taxed the stamina of even the hardiest boob-tube veterans.
While O’Donoghue was often busy juggling network politics with Ebersol and the other NBC suits, Terry increasingly sought out Nelson Lyon as an ally and friend on the show. Although to discerning viewers, the show often resembled the world’s longest-running office skit, the behind-the-scenes competition to get sketches on air was strictly All About Eve time. Such competition was never Southern’s métier.
Lyon describes the routine: “What would happen on Saturday Night Live, and I guess it still is the mode, was on Monday you would pitch ideas. Everybody sat around, the cast and the writers, Ebersol and the bosses, and Michael silent. People don’t laugh too easily…it’s a highly competitive, tense atmosphere starting off. Luckily, before I got into writing sketches, I had a piece of film I had put together called Clams, so I felt quite at home with film and I knew what to do. I could do a satirical five-minute parody of Alfred Hitchcock and Brian De Palma. I could play around in the editing room with opticals and write and put it together, so I was at home.”
But Lyon knew Terry felt defenseless in this snake pit of übercool wits.
“People were pitching these ideas and they were just funny sketch ideas and had a certain snap and there’s a routine for sketch comedy, a formula. Then it was Terry’s turn and everybody was waiting for the great Terry Southern. Terry, in a voice that could hardly be heard, shyly starts talking about these Tough Tours of the ghetto in a dry voice and really so scared in front of these bunch of kids. Nobody laughs and then he talks about ‘Sex with Brookie,’ another sketch idea, and nobody laughs.”
Southern may have been broke, alcoholic, a little overweight, and shabby looking, but he was no fool. He knew he needed to be protected in this climate where the only aesthetic criterion was which sketches got the easy laughs during read-through.
“About three, four weeks before the opening of the first show,” says Lyon, Southern approached him in the bar in the Time-Life Building. “He said, ‘Let me pay for the drinks. And put me on your team’ and all this stuff. I said, ‘I know you can write comedy.’ In other words, he needed some ally and help and friends, which is really what collaboration is about. You really have to like [people], be friendly with and have a natural support system…. SNL is actually a protected atmosphere. In Hollywood, it’s something else again, so much fear and terror and arrogance and power. If you are writing with somebody, you need somebody who is really good, who you can really work with, and who can defy the others. It’s an us-against-them marriage”
Hal Wilner, who worked with the musical acts and coordinated the use of incidental music for the sketches, concurs with Lyon’s assessment of Southern’s unease with the SNL work environment. “I remember one of Terry’s first sketches being done in the read-through and I don’t think the upper ups got it at all. It was called ‘Sex with Brookie.’…It’s about these two guys and one talks about how he went about fucking Brooke Shields. It was very Lenny Bruce. You could just hear the voice. I think NBC was just a weird kind of atmosphere for Terry. Michael left midway through the season, so Terry didn’t have his guy up there. So he just had a few sketches in. He got involved in this Dr. Strangelove sketch. You could just tell Terry wasn’t very happy with this and he made the most horrifying remark to me: ‘I feel like the professor at the end of The Blue Angel.’ Okaaay. Well, it was a bad year. He didn’t get a number of things on that were very memorable.”
On the surface, the 1981–82 season was boilerplate SNL mixing up the occasionally interesting combination of host and musical act with the more familiar flavor-of-the-moment TV/film star with one-hit-wonder music act. Beneath the surface, one could detect signs of O’Donoghue’s take-no-prisoners, snake-in-the-grass, sniper-on-the-rooftop approach to comedy. The appearance of L.A. hard-core punk band Fear almost led to a riot. The following week, Lauren Hutton introduced William Burroughs reading “Twilight’s Last Gleaming” behind a desk and in front of surreal black-and-white rear projections.
Then there were the sketches that Southern had a hand in. In addition to “Sex with Brookie,” Southern collaborated with O’Donoghue and Lyon on “An Imaginary Conversation with Ron Reagan,” “Do Your Darndest,” “Donnie and Marie,” “Heroic Dog,” “Hooker Brides,” and “KY Madness in High Places.” Not all these sketches made the final cut. Southern was contemplating putting together a collection of censored sketches called Too Hot for SNL. Sometimes he just sat in the room and riffed with Lyon or Donoghue and simply looked over such pieces as “Last 10 Days of Silverman’s Bunker,” the scathing portrait of NBC programming head Fred Silverman, which compared the executive’s management style to Adolf Hitler’s last ma
d days in a Berlin bunker. Silverman, a Jew, was naturally shocked and hurt by the comparison. After the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, Southern wrote a thoughtful film montage, that shows a janitor cleaning up the bloody podium where the incident took place. Among the debris is a bloody white dove. It was an atypical piece in a season that seemed to draw a line in the sand between the play-it-safe-sophomoric-humor of Ebersol and the scorched-earth nihilism of O’Donoghue.
The show’s production routine required the cast and staff to generate new material from scratch every week in the space of two to three days. At the same time, sets were being designed and constructed, props organized, and costumes fashioned, depending on the complexity of the sketch. The ego of that week’s host had to be massaged in one form or another. To get through the rigors, many staff members used various stimulants, including cocaine. Southern reacted to the availability of the drug in tones of mock outrage and delight: “Talk about your everlovin’ cornucopias of sense-derangement! Wow-ee! Boy-oh-Boy! Bro-ther! Holy Mack! I mean, I’ve been to some heavy-hitting Hollywood soirees, and on two Rolling Stones tours, and I’ve seen nose-candy by the carload, toot by the truckful, but I’ve yet to see anything comparable to the sheer quantity of primo-primo heaped and stacked in the writer’s wing of SNL!”