by Lee Hill
According to Lyon, Southern was generally well liked by everybody (no small accomplishment in SNL’s fishbowl of dueling egos), but he was doing a lot of cocaine.
“His office was like a whole fucking den, bottles, a cocaine grinder. He would play these little practical jokes on me…he would put weird clippings on my desk so the production assistants would see them. He had this little voodoo doll that he had taped to the top of the desk. This [girl] was supposed to give blow jobs and it was a blow-job device. The voodoo doll had little hairs around its mouth. I would find these pranks. He was a prankster in everything he wrote, too.”
By mid-January, the growing divide between the Dick Ebersol and Michael O’Donoghue visions of the show was becoming unbridgeable. O’Donoghue seemed to have no respect for the costing infrastructure of the show. The “Last 10 Days of Silverman’s Bunker” sketch, if it had been staged, would have taken a hefty $20,000 chunk of that week’s budget. Ebersol also railed at O’Donoghue’s increasing preference for longer sketches that paid little attention to commercial breaks. When Burroughs appeared on the show, O’Donoghue refused to edit the writer’s monologue despite Ebersol’s demands. O’Donoghue simply had no respect for Ebersol. The breaking point was Ebersol’s refusal to run the “Silverman’s Bunker” sketch in its original form. On January 17, 1982, O’Donoghue was fired.
In the midst of these conflicts, Lyon tried to support his hero and friend—Southern—and create enough solo work to prove to O’Donoghue, Ebersol, et al., that he was pulling his weight on the new writing team. While he shared O’Donoghue’s desire to push the envelope of SNL’s sketch comedy, he felt the contretemps over “Silverman’s Bunker” was much ado about nothing.
“[The sketch] just went on and on and on,” Lyon recalls. “I never thought it was particularly funny. I mean, who gave a shit about Silverman, but Terry was just too happy to write anything if that was the project. He needed nurturing and protection from Michael. He went on writing his own sketches and fragments for ideas.”
Southern’s strengths at embellishing upon a premise did gain him some notice on the 42nd Street sketch. When Bernadette Peters was guest hosting, Lyon came up with the idea of a parody of the classic musical, 42nd Street. He pitched it to Peters.
“‘Let’s do 42nd Street, but do it where a girl comes to the Forty-second Street of today. The world of porno.’ Bernadette laughs and says, ‘I like that.’ Ebersol laughs and so that was my first fucking independent sketch. Terry says I am on my own, let me join you. So I said, ‘By all means.’ Terry’s contributions to the sketch were great.
“I created this porno star by the name of Miles Long, you know the old movie 42nd Street. The ingenue who saves the show is named Hedda Gabler, that’s her stage name, her real name is like ‘I’m Ruby Sawyer from all that shit.’ Terry had characters coming in and out saying, ‘Oh, let’s go have a fix.’ He had this black dominatrix with two midgets in tutus and black masks on a leash. I mean, just out there.
“Michael O’Donoghue had really disassociated himself from the show at that point. He wasn’t even showing up and he was giving the finger to everybody. That was really freaking Terry out because his chief protector is gone.
“[Terry] needed the money really badly and he was getting paid more than anybody. So here he is in this agony position of being so great and having the reputation and being older than everybody, getting paid more than anybody, and really feeling alienated from the show.”
Lyon helped Southern shepherd previously rejected sketches like “Sex with Brookie” on air.
“We knew we had this bond, but we could really write these subversive things and we could do that together, so it made it really jolly for us,” says Lyon. “Then I did ‘The Mild One’ [a parody of the Marlon Brando film The Wild One]…that was one I didn’t get Terry on. He was cross with me. He wanted to be part of that, but there was just no room for him.”
Toward the end of the season, after O’Donoghue’s departure, Lyon went out to Los Angeles. He was working on a screenplay with John Belushi, who was living at the Chateau Marmont. A teetotaler when it came to drugs, Lyon made the fateful mistake of joining Belushi and Cathy Smith for a cocktail of a heroin speedball. It was the kind of once-only experiment-for-experiment’s-sake that the cosmopolitan Lyon could rationalize. He left the two in their bungalow later that same evening. The next day, he found out that Belushi had overdosed. Lyon would spend much of the next few years tainted by the scandal of being one of the last people to see Belushi alive.
“It wasn’t really resolved until 1985 when they had to extradite [Cathy Smith],” he recalled ruefully. “It was just like ‘Oh, he was involved, he was one of those druggies.’ Belushi’s death was the watershed. It was like ‘Oh God, drugs, no more drugs.’ It was like the only time I had done heroin…it was like John and Cathy Smith making cocktails. I had never shot up anything in my life and I had to be very careful about saying that, too because I was the key witness. If they were able to prove that I had ever taken more heroin or if I had shot up anyone, my testimony would have been thoroughly discredited, so I was just telling the truth.”
Terry’s tour of duty at SNL was exhausting. Lyon was taken to dinner at Ma Maison one night by Dick Ebersol, who offered to renew his contract. However, Ebersol, said Lyon, told him “‘a lot of your friends aren’t coming back,’ meaning Terry. He couldn’t wait to ax [Terry]. And the thing was, Terry really wasn’t writing and at that point it was really ‘what’s the use?’”
O’Donoghue believes Southern’s work was just too subtle and delicate for many in the cast to perform. For O’Donoghue, the only cast members he really felt had an ear for Southern’s work were Eddie Murphy and Christine Ebersole, who later starred in Milos Forman’s Amadeus. “It was hard to get the people to play his stuff. They weren’t Peter Sellers. They didn’t know how to play the reality. They were always going for the cheap laugh. You can’t do that. They would blame the failure on him rather than themselves.”
In the years after the disastrous 1981–82 season, O’Donoghue would often refer to SNL’s decline into formula as a case of the avant-garde becoming the garde. For Southern, the experience had been draining. “[Working on SNL] was the best-paying job, but the worst I’ve ever had, given the sort of deadlines you have to work to,” Southern said. “It was difficult because you had this very strict deadline each week, but it’s not the way to go about anything. It’s pushing back the theory of art.”
It was sadly characteristic of Southern that he confused a television writing gig with the more personal kind of writing that a novel or short story might entail. Of course, Southern was not alone in such confusion. At any rate, the experience injected much-needed cash into Southern’s bank account.
12
Various Cowriters
…preoccupation with ‘“style”’ is surely the greatest jeopardy (more so than booze or dope) that exists for the serious writer. One must take care, as the English novelist Henry Green so aptly put it, “not to become trapped in one’s own clichés.”
—Terry Southern, preface to “The Road out of Axotle”
One of the few good things about Southern’s tumultuous stint on Saturday Night Live was that he had forged a deeper friendship with Nelson Lyon. The striking New Yorker, who bore an uncanny resemblance to Aleister Crowley, became Southern’s frequent collaborator in the eighties and (although Lyon would no doubt recoil at the term) something of an artistic conscience. The collapse of Grossing Out and Terry’s brief sojourn on Saturday Night Live were demoralizing. Southern became more reliant on collaboration as a way to weather the emotional ups and downs of screenwriting. Nelson Lyon, who was becoming a pariah because of the Belushi death, enjoyed Southern’s company, humor, and ability, when pressed, to come up with the word, line, sequence, or image that elevated mere craft to something approaching genius.
After Saturday Night Live, Lyon became involved with Johnny Blood, the on-again, off-again Cotton Club proj
ect that had been kicking around for the last few years. Lewis Allen and Brendan Gill, recalls Lyon, were still involved in a nebulous capacity. They hoped to turn the musical into a screenplay. Lyon was not impressed with the material so far, but he took a deep breath and began to write. He decided to take the premise of the 1937 French film Pépé le Moko, in which Jean Gabin plays a gangster hiding out in the Casbah in Algiers, and transfer it to Harlem in the twenties. Collaborating with Terry on Johnny Blood was a tad problematic because Lyon lived in Los Angeles, while Southern stayed in East Canaan, still trying to work with Gill.
“Terry brought in Brendan Gill because we were separated by the coasts,” recalls Lyon. “He needed somebody to write with. Then Gill wrote this useless, terrible shit. He just couldn’t write. It was the only argument Terry and I had. Why are you bringing this ridiculous, arrogant hack into this project? He can’t deliver the goods.’ ‘No, no, he was wondering about you and I had to defend you.’ And I said, ‘Terry, how dare you? Get fucking rid of him! He’s your responsibility. You brought this shit in. I thought this thing up. Get him the fuck out.’ At that point there was some interest in this thing from the Quincy Jones people and shit like that.”
There was an attempt by a powerful agent at ICM to package the script with hot stars and actors, but eventually it ran up against a competing project initiated by the formidable team of Robert Evans and Francis Coppola. The Coppola-Evans project was eventually filmed and released in December 1984.
Around the same time, Southern was meeting Peter Beard at the latter’s Park Avenue apartment to work on The End of the Game. By this stage, the script was an excuse for Beard and Southern to riff off each other for a few hours and then go partying. Despite the informal never-ending story nature of The End of the Game, the script that emerged from their sporadic writing sessions had potential. If one can imagine Born Free mixed with Dr. Strangelove and Walkabout, one gets a sense of the script’s bizarre tone. Where The End of the Game stumbled was in the use of a lazy framing device. The main story, dealing with wildlife mismanagement in contemporary Kenya, turns out to be a rough cut being viewed by jaded and corrupt Hollywood executives. After brief consideration, the execs decide to make an action film called The Man-Eaters of Tsavo on the back lot. “It’s a cruel cold world,” one exec observes, “and our audiences deserve a bit of entertainment—not a damnable sermon.” While the core of the script focusing on well-meaning but deluded conservationists is rich in irony and pathos, the studio prologue and coda are perfunctory to the point of self-parody.
In late September, Southern was contacted via his latest West Coast representative, Ron Mardigian at William Morris, by James B. Harris. Since amicably parting from Kubrick in 1963, Harris had embarked on a directing career. His first film, The Bedford Incident, was a realistic study of Cold War brinkmanship closer in spirit to Fail-Safe than to Dr. Strangelove. Harris then made Some Call It Loving in 1973, starring Richard Pryor as a drunken hipster philosopher in a funky update of Sleeping Beauty. When he called Southern, he had just released his third film, Fast-Walking, a tense prison drama starring James Woods.
“I had a deal to pick up this book,” Harris recalled, “called The Gold Crew [by Thomas N. Scortia and Frank Robinson]. It was about an American submarine that used to be out on patrol all the time. There were two crews that would take the boat out. They would have a gold crew and a blue crew. The gold crew would come back and the other crew would take the boat out.
“This book, which was written as a serious piece, dealt with a situation where the captain and the crew went insane and decide that they were going to start World War III and attack. It turned out that the boat was recently painted and that there was some kind of chemical in the paint fumes that makes the men crazy.”
Southern and Harris met in New York through the fall and winter of 1982–83 to cowrite a darkly comic adaptation retitled Floaters. Harris had no trouble working with Terry on a one-on-one basis. It was when he left Southern alone, says Harris, that things would get a little unpredictable. For example, upon returning from the Rotterdam Film Festival where he was screening Fast-Walking, Harris would find a series of notes all highlighted MAYDAY.
“I guess he used that term because we were doing a navy picture and Mayday is a code for being in terrible trouble,” said Harris. “He was having a problem on delivery on the date he said he was going to deliver, and what can you do? Nothing except to encourage him to get on with it. Which he always promised me he would do and eventually he did. I don’t know what was going on in his personal life at that time and it was none of my business anyway. All I know is that when we were together he was coherent, easy to work with, and very talented. I thought the script was pretty damn good.”
Alas, Harris discovered that the rights to the source novel had become embroiled in a dispute with MGM, which wanted to keep the book and bought Harris out of the project. In 1986, a made-for-TV movie called The Fifth Missile starring Sam Waterston, Richard Roundtree, and David Soul was shot in Italy returning to the sober tones of the source material. Dr. Strangelove Redux remained elusive.
Part of Terry’s problem delivering Floaters to Harris was his work on yet another fringe project where friendship and pleasure intermingled with business. Larry Rivers continued to harbor filmmaking aspirations. He and Joe Loguidice had collaborated on a forty-five-minute short film called “The Gardener,” based mainly on improvisations, that was shot in the Hamptons. Rivers wanted to do something in Mexico, where he and Loguidice were partners in a time share.
“Larry wanted to get into more scripted stuff so I starting working on At Z Beach, which Terry helped write and I directed,” said Loguidice. “It was a film about how artists come to choose a certain subject and we wrote it like a black comedy.”
In December, Terry and Nile joined Rivers, Loguidice, and various friends and acquaintances such as William Claxton, Peggy Moffatt, Lauren Hutton, and the cabaret artist Phoebe Legere, in the coastal town of Zihuatanejo, approximately a hundred miles south of Acapulco. At Z Beach began shooting on video. Southern and Loguidice conducted interviews with various expatriate Americans. Some were recent arrivals with lots of money. Others were dissolute down-and-outers. Terry would craft scenarios out of their conversations. The yellow script pages that survive of this strange Cassavetes-like enterprise focus, not unsurprisingly, on the sexual tensions among this community. As this excerpt shows, At Z Beach was an attempt to document and fictionalize a portrait of Larry Rivers and Friends in a kind of La Ronde situation:
MARGO
Hey you know I don’t think I’ve ever seen a landscape of yours before.
LAR
Well actually it isn’t…
MARGO
Well is it a seascape?
LAR
(laughs)
No, I mean it isn’t mine—I had someone else paint it for me.
MARGO
(surprised)
Are you kidding?
LAR
No, it’s a new period for me, Margo—I hire someone else to do the actual painting, and then I just sign it. Pretty far-out huh?
MARGO
(uncertainly)
Very funny.
The increasing emphasis on sex led to Loguidice falling out with Rivers on the project. Rivers took over the loosely defined director’s chair and continued to shoot.
“At Z Beach was a misconceived project in my view,” recalls Nile, “but what do you expect from a painter wanting to make a movie about himself? I think Larry really wanted a ‘direct cinema,’ which was made—quite excitingly by Pennebaker or the Maysles—and I knew and worked with both of them at the time—so I kind of wanted that to happen.”
Nile also recalled some of the script sessions that dealt with Larry’s obsession with children and in particular a twelve-year-old-girl, Chelan, who was a figure of innocence and budding adolescence in the films.
“Terry always kidded Larry about his interest in children—sending him lette
rs and postcards—for instance he’d take a notice about Girl Scouts looking for a ‘fun guy’ counselor and he’d say, ‘Attention, attention Lar E. Rivers,’ or another with a ‘Tot Finder’ fireman decal. Larry, being very self-absorbed and interested in his own psychology, I think was interested in taking on this joke of Terry’s and exploring it as an artist.”
Under Rivers’s direction, the script tried to capture his routine in Mexico and his involvement with an American woman with a daughter fathered by a long-departed Mexican man. Shooting on video was an ordeal for the crew rounded out by Rivers’s assistant, John Dike, as cameraman, a model named Diane as production coordinator, and Nile on sound. It was hot and the sun created harsh contrasts on videotape. Nile was bitten by a scorpion. Terry drank a lot.
Nile became friendly with Legere near the end of shooting. Her mix of sexual bravado, intellectual curiosity, and innocence was very Candy-like. The two became partners and lived together for the rest of the eighties. For Terry, the interpersonal ups and downs were all raw material for At Z Beach. Apparently an assembly of the video footage was made by Rivers and Dike, but outside of a screening at the Whitney it had little impact on the outside world.
Southern’s devotion to what some might call a vanity project when his energies might have been better spent on a legitimate screenplay, or even a novel, was typical of his indifference to any rational sense of career management.