by Lee Hill
“I never knew Terry not to be working day and night, but his periods of concentration were kind of short. He was also doing three or four different things at one time,” Loguidice explains. “The thing was that Terry was driven because of his destitution. He never seemed to have any money. On the one hand, he was constantly taking on these projects in the hope of getting a grand here or two grand there, and so people would say, ‘Oh, he’s not reliable.’ Yet I don’t know of any writer who actually worked more all the time, but as far as his financial situation, he was completely undisciplined about money. The IRS, of course, was on his back. He was so deep into the IRS that it was one of those situations that unless you have a windfall it drags on forever.”
In April, Southern found himself in the ironic position of being asked to work on Biker Heaven: Easy Rider 2, a sequel to a film he, if one heard Fonda and Hopper correctly, allegedly had little to do with. Despite the sheer absurdity of making a follow-up to a film in which all the principal characters were killed, Biker Heaven’s coproducers, Bert Schneider and Peter Fonda, felt the idea had possibility. Michael O’Donoghue and Nelson Lyon came up with the black-as-coal concept of having Billy and Captain America come down from heaven to recapture the flag from a postnuke America run by bike gangs, neo-Nazis, and assorted mutants and riffraff. This time, Terry really had little to do with the script. He basically went over the initial drafts put together by O’Donoghue and Lyon, who felt Southern was indifferent to the whole project.
“By this time, Terry really didn’t give a shit as long as he had a payday. In fact, I think he felt that writing had betrayed him,” argues Lyon. “There was something like ‘Oh what’s the use of writing for the big bucks and being in that arena and subjecting yourself to torture and betrayals and nobody wants you around anyway.’ So although he was always writing little articles and pieces that would appear God knows where, if they were published, he really felt as if his own writing had betrayed him. And also with the porn thing, it had become like—which happens to a writer—these are people who are trapped in their own clichés. That’s a little bit of what Terry was trapped in—the clichés and the hip jargon. There was no need to expand or astonish.”
When the first draft of Biker Heaven was turned in, Fonda apparently balked at the new vision of his Captain America character. Schneider slowly cooled on the project although he did ask for some more rewrites. Ultimately Lyon and O’Donoghue received only a portion of their agreed on writing fee. Lyon believes Southern saw about $20,000 for his work, which was more than he ever made from the first film.
In the summer of 1983, a snapshot of Southern in happier times appeared in a new magazine called The Movies, edited by Charles Michener. The column-length piece gave a jokey account of how the term “prevert” originated in Dr. Strangelove. All that stood out in the brief piece was the image of Southern and Kubrick sitting in the back of a limo en route to Shepperton Studios talking story. To Southern fans, oblivious to the career follies of the last decade and a half, it was a tantalizing but tiny fragment of what should have been a longer piece.
About the same time the piece appeared, Southern received the long-awaited summons from Stanley Kubrick. For years, Kubrick had held the film rights to the 1926 book Traumnovelle (Dream Novel) by Arthur Schnitzler. Attracted by the book’s conflict between bourgeois stability and erotic obsession, Kubrick had toyed with the idea of updating the material to contemporary New York. At this stage, Kubrick was envisioning the project (which eventually became his 1999 swan song, Eyes Wide Shut) as a vehicle for Steve Martin, whom he loved in The Jerk, or for Woody Allen.
Kubrick asked Southern to read the book and send him some sample pages of dialogue. Southern had never heard of the book, but he dispatched Nile to get him a copy. Nile could track down only a library copy, which Southern duly read. He then mailed off some pages to Kubrick.
“What he did was write a letter to Stanley saying, ‘Dear Stan, were you serious about one of those protagonists being a gynecologist? How is this for sample dialogue between them?’” recalled Nile. “And the letter goes into three pages of outrageously sexual humor in dialogue form. Of course, Kubrick had no use for it, I’m sure. Terry was implying, ‘Let’s do that Strangelove thing again. I’ll be in top form writing the most outrageous lines, just tell me what the basic situation is.’”
The pages concerned the gynecologist’s dialogue with a female patient about a medical phenomenon known as “hooded clit.” It was the kind of tomfoolery that might have had a place in Candy but that sabotaged Southern’s chances of getting Kubrick to seriously consider him as a collaborator on this project.
Josh Alan Friedman, an editor at High Times, had been trying for years to get Terry to write something for the magazine. The publication had printed an interview by Victor Bockris in which Southern discussed the important, and not entirely negative, role drugs played in Hollywood. In the May 1983 issue, the last of Southern’s con stories, “Tito Bandini (If That Indeed Is His Name),” appeared. Friedman had found an unfinished short story by Southern in the High Times files and asked Southern to finish it. “Of course, that took him a few months of spit and polish on an old story,” says Friedman. The published story dealt with a cocaine deal that goes down during a dog show at Madison Square Garden. Like “Heavy Put Away,” it was structured around the conceit that Southern had been told this story verbatim by a reliable source. It was amusing in a shaggy-dog sort of way, but a reader could be forgiven for thinking the whole exercise was beneath Southern’s talent. The cocaine world had been more tellingly and amusingly described by Southern in Easy Rider and in the book Snowblind by Robert Sabbag.
Before coming to High Times, Josh had worked as an editor at Screw. Because of what Southern felt was Friedman’s connection to the adult film industry, he asked him to track down the whereabouts of an actress known as Nancy Suiter, the star of such “classics” as Wine Me, Dine Me, 69 Me, and The Ecstasy Girls. It was a typical faux-serious lark that Southern used to fuel his letter writing.
“[Suiter] was a young, blond cheerleader type, his favorite,” recalls Friedman. “I started to track her down all over the country. Man, what was the outcome of that? I called the agency and the agent said she left the business…. It became like a crazed detective thing. I was tracking her down from month to month from one state to another a little bit like Lolita. She had married some rich rancher and left the business or something.”
In September, Dennis Hopper called Southern and asked him to come out to Los Angeles to work on The Jim Morrison Story. Larry Flynt, the notorious founder and publisher of Hustler, was underwriting a film about the Doors singer for his wife, Althea Flynt. Hopper was going be the director. A contract was drawn up, paying Southern $25,000 for a first draft and future monies up to $100,000.
Southern and Hopper arrived at Flynt’s mansion, “the Pink Palace,” in the midst of what looked like a convention of zanies. Acid prophet Timothy Leary and Watergate “plumber” Gordon Liddy were rehearsing for a speaking tour. Native American activist Russell Means, professional atheist Madlyn Murray, Frank Zappa, and Stokely Carmichael also wandered in and out of the mansion’s gaudy halls. Flynt sped about his dream home in a motorized, gold-plated wheelchair wearing a diaper made out of the American flag.
After a few days, Southern discovered that the rights to the Jim Morrison story were controlled by someone else (a Doors film directed by Oliver Stone was eventually released in 1991). He informed Althea and suggested that a film about a fictional character could circumvent this legal problem. Flynt, according to Southern, was preoccupied with a campaign to get various celebrities to “to show gyno-pink” in Hustler in exchange for a million dollars. He was also fighting a losing battle with the federal government over tapes he had of automobile magnate John De Lorean, Alfred Bloomingdale (the subject of a heated sex/murder scandal), and the Reagan administration. And last, but not least, Flynt was preparing a presidential campaign.
One morning,
Hopper woke up in his guest room to find the Flynt mansion was surrounded by federal agents. They were negotiating with Flynt’s bodyguards for access to the mansion. They had a court order authorizing them to seize videotapes of De Lorean in cahoots with drug lords and the FBI, which Flynt claimed to have in his possession. Hopper woke up Southern and they managed to discreetly vacate the mansion before things got out of control. The tapes turned out to be a red herring, but Flynt was still charged with contempt of court, fined, and jailed for a time.
The Jim Morrison/Larry Flynt episode was later reconstructed by Jean Stein in oral history mode for Grand Street. As the eighties marched on, in the absence of any new fiction, life often seemed like a Terry Southern novel.
On May 1, 1984, Southern turned sixty. Youngblood, now known as South Idyll, remained on the perpetual back burner. Putnam, who had contracted the novel, was asking for the return of a $20,000 advance. In a special issue of Esquire devoted to fiction, Southern was still talking about the book as a work-in-progress. Instead of new fiction, there was a reissue of Flash and Filigree by Arbor House with a new introduction by William Burroughs.
Sandy Lieberson, who was working for Twentieth Century-Fox at the time, hired Terry to work on a script called Intensive Heat, based on the life of the jewel thief Albie Baker. Southern had known Baker socially in the late fifties and early sixties. Baker was the kind of ex-criminal who goes straight and becomes embraced by the intelligentsia. Baker had turned his exploits into a memoir called Stolen Suites and fancied himself as a writer.
“I was just trying to help Terry. I always recommended him for work on scripts and maintained contact with him whenever I would go back to the States,” said Lieberson. “Whenever I would go to New York, Terry would come down from Connecticut and we would have dinner or drinks. [Intensive Heat] came pretty close to being made because Robert De Niro wanted to do it…. De Niro met with Albie a number of times about it. Atone point, he even optioned it.”
Albie Baker maintained creative control on the film project. He was unhappy with Southern’s work. He asked Lyon, Southern’s on-again, off-again partner, to salvage things. “Albie said he made such a terrible mess out of the screenplay and failed so abysmally again with this ‘ho ho ho’ stuff,” recalls Lyon. “He wrote Terry this awful letter like, ‘Terry, you can’t write anymore. You’ve lost everything da-da-da-duh.’”
Lyon agreed to help Southern out on a rewrite because his friend was once again in difficult, if murky financial straits. Yet it was a demoralizing experience for all concerned.
The few bright spots of this mid-eighties period were Southern’s delightful appearance in Burroughs, a documentary directed by Howard Brookner, released in 1984, and the Penguin reissues of The Magic Christian and Candy in trade paperback in 1985. Brookner’s well-received documentary had evolved organically in fits and starts between 1978 and 1983. Brookner had initiated the project in film school and had eventually gotten some money from the BBC to finish it. Unlike many of his collaborations, Southern’s friendship with Burroughs was relatively uncomplicated by business or work. Toward the end of the documentary, Burroughs and Southern are seen joking around at the kitchen table at the former’s Bowery apartment known affectionately as “the Bunker.” Burroughs gives Southern a tour of his orgone box, prompting Terry to quip, “It’s a bit like California, a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.” This was the Terry Southern few fans were aware of—a warm, gentle, and funny man with a deep loyalty to old friends.
One old friend reached the end of the line in 1986. On June 1, Mason Hoffenberg died of lung cancer in New York. He was sixty-four. He had remained a heroin addict up until his death.
Southern and Hoffenberg’s mutual friend from their Paris and London days, Mordecai Richler, heard the news while eating in a chic restaurant on West Thirty-seventh Street. John Calley, of all people, dropped by his table and said, “Mason’s dead.”
Richler hadn’t seen Mason in any meaningful way since 1966. Back then Richler was living with his wife and kids in London’s Kingston Hill financing his novel-writing habit with lucrative screenwriting work. It was the height of the British film boom, when England was flooded by American studios wanting to cash in on “Swinging London.” His last meeting with Hoffenberg was a depressing glimpse of an old friend humbled by heroin addiction.
“Mason was in a very bad way and he wanted to kick,” recalled Richler. “I had an Irish doctor who was very understanding, and I phoned him. Mason was staying with Marianne Faithfull. So I got him some methadone. I brought him back to our place and put him in the bedroom. He was in there all weekend. Then he came down and said he needed some drugs, so I drove him to Leicester Square, where he could go to an all-night drugstore. I remember guys who had too much pep pills hanging around the tube station. I only saw Mason a few times after that. When I had picked Mason up at Marianne Faithfull’s, Mason wanted to shoot up, but he could no longer find a vein. He said, ‘You know, you could break my shit with a stick.’”
On another occasion in this period, Richler met Hoffenberg at the White Elephant, a Soho restaurant then favored by film and theater people. Mason was having trouble with a bad needle and was in obvious need of a bath. Sean Connery came by to say hello to Richler and looked askance at Hoffenberg, who then broke into a cold sweat. It was typical of many people’s interactions with Mason in the wake of Candy.
Hoffenberg spent most of the sixties shuttling between London and Paris. His marriage collapsed. Most of the money Hoffenberg made from the “db” that had briefly made him a household name was from the movie sale. The rest came from his mother. His wife looked after their two kids, Daniel and Juliette.
When Sam Merrill met up with Hoffenberg for the controversial Playboy interview, he had been in a methadone maintenance program. He eventually kicked, but became an alcoholic. In Woodstock, New York, he became friendly with Bob Dylan as well as with members of the Band. He seemed to exist by living off friends. What little writing he did was in the form of a long, meandering autobiographical novel.
According to his daughter, Juliette Hoffenberg, Mason began a long romance with Eliza Brownjohn, the estranged wife of the English critic and poet Alan Brownjohn. They lived together in Los Angeles, where Hoffenberg became friendly with the future producer of The Fly, Stuart Cornfeld. In L.A., Mason tried to live a relatively stable life, but lack of money and the addiction intervened. He also lived for a year in Majorca. By 1978, he was living with his mother. After her death in the same year, he moved to an apartment on East Seventy-ninth Street, where he lived until his death. Hoffenberg was reconciled with his son and daughter in the intervening years.
One of the last people from the sixties to see Mason was Anita Pallenberg. She was coming to the end of her own torturous journey on heroin and lived a reclusive existence in Long Island.
“One day we went to see the New York Marathon. I don’t know for what reason, it was probably drugs,” recalls Pallenberg. “We made a few jokes about all these people in the Marathon and us. Once he came out to visit me on Long Island where I was living and by then he was very sick. He already had asthma. He used to say coughing was the only exercise he got and eventually that’s what killed him…. And he had a prescription weused, too. It was all very drug-related. The next thing I heard was that he died.”
By the end of the eighties, Pallenberg had kicked drugs, moved back to London, and enrolled in St. Martin’s College of Art to study fashion design. She now works for Vivienne Westwood.
According to Patti Dryden, the illustrator who became his friend in his final New York years, Hoffenberg’s influence was steeped in a certain fifties underground way of looking at the world.
“If you’re talking about what Mason’s claim to fame was, it was not what society thought was valuable,” said Dryden. “He once told me he was very proud of the fact he knew Nico, Anita Pallenberg, and Marianne Faithfull and he was responsible for all three of them becoming junkies. He wou
ld surround himself with these attractive women. I remember spending an evening with Anita Pallenberg, Marianne Faithfull, and him. They had a great affection for him. I don’t know if it’s true he turned them on to junk, but I wouldn’t put it past him.
“One time I got very depressed over something—and this shows you Mason’s introspectiveness—I was crying and he said, ‘Let’s get together and we’ll walk around.’ That’s nice, I thought. So we got together and I was crying and trying to talk. I think it must have been about romance. He said, ‘I’ve got some junk at home and I think if you start on that it will make you feel better.’ That was his solution to everything. ‘What are you trying to do, turn me into a fucking junky! I don’t want to be like you.’ But that was his way of helping. And I can see if you get together with someone who was a little less strong-willed, they might go, ‘Well, hmm, maybe that would be a good thing.’”
The copyright wrangles over Candy wouldn’t be sorted out until long after the book ceased being a bestseller. Southern’s comparatively successful writing career drove an irreparable wedge between Hoffenberg and his former Left Bank buddy.
Southern did not show up at Hoffenberg’s funeral, but they did meet briefly before he died. No one quite remembers the details of the meeting, but it did inspire Terry to pen a short story called “The Refreshing Ambiguity of the Déjà Vu.” The story is a slight but elegantly written piece in which a mysterious woman in a limousine stumbles upon Candy Christian putting on a kind of roadside peep show in the Gobi Desert. Her girl-next-door looks are faded, but a brief sparkle of fun can still be discerned. The story was eventually published in Grand Street in 1992. In a final salute to a lost friendship, the credit read “written by Mason Hoffenberg and Terry Southern.”