A Grand Guy: The Art and Life of Terry Southern

by Lee Hill

  Southern was not without resources, however, and usually in the form of friendships. Jean Stein had always been an unabashed fan of all things Southern. She had even considered writing an Edie-type book about her friend. When she took over Grand Street from Ben Sonnenberg in 1990, she injected an enormous amount of cash into the magazine and revamped it completely in design and format. The modest black-and-white digest was replaced by a glossier format to compete with Bill Buford’s Granta. Each issue now contained a full-color art portfolio breaking up the prose, poetry, and other belles lettres. Stein set up an editorial board that included the Farrar, Straus & Giroux editor Jonathan Galassi, Edward Said, and English critic and writer Jeremy Treglown.

  In the first issue of the revamped Grand Street, published in the spring of 1991, Stein ran an excerpt from her long-in-progress Los Angeles book, a cross-cultural, multivoiced secret history of the city. The piece consisted of Southern and Dennis Hopper’s Rashomon-like reminiscences of hanging out at Larry Flynt’s Pink Palace in 1983. The gonzo tale of mischief and misadventure read like classic Southern à la Blood of a Wig. Eager to help her friend and stand apart from such competitors as Granta and the Paris Review, Stein encouraged Southern to contribute on a regular basis to the magazine. He did his best to comply even if his heart wasn’t in it. Terry loved Jean. As with many of his friends, he often sent her ribald letters pretending to be the head of the panty-of-the-month club and asking Stein to donate. Jean thought Terry was the closest thing America had to Jonathan Swift. She had helped Terry off and on over the years and was now supplying him with a couple of hundred dollars a month as a retainer. It eased his cash-flow problems. Gail continued to bring in most of the income through her ballet school.

  The favorable reaction to Bockris’s interview and the Grand Street piece demonstrated that there was considerable untapped curiosity about Southern. But Terry’s temperament as a writer, complicated by his recent bout with cancer, made him a challenging figure for an agent to market. On movie projects, he dallied with a score of agents including such high-powered names as Arlene Donovan, Michael Carlisle, Rowland Perkins, and Ron Mardigian without settling with anyone. Yet he stayed loyal to his representative in the Quality Lit world, Sterling Lord. Lord had been rewarded with little but broken contracts since Blue Movie, but he did arrange for Red Dirt Marijuana to be reissued. Citadel Underground, a new imprint specializing in out-of-print counterculture fiction and nonfiction from the sixties, reprinted the collection in 1990 along with Emmet Grogan’s Ringolevio, Ed Sanders’s Tales of Beatnik Glory, and Jane Alpert’s Growing Up Underground.

  Nile, Victor Bockris, and others close to Southern felt Lord wasn’t pushing him in the same way someone like superagent Andrew Wylie had relaunched the careers of William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. Like Burroughs and Ginsberg, Southern had amassed an amazing amount of unpublished work—in the form of stories, letters, screenplays, and treatments—that Nile felt had the potential to be packaged.

  Southern’s long-in-the-works autobiographical novel, Texas Summer, became Nile’s pet project in what he hoped would become a Terry Southern renaissance now that Bockris’s interview and the Red Dirt Marijuana reissue had attracted interest. Texas Summer was in many respects a kind of never-ending story for Southern. Richard and Jeanette Seaver, who now ran Arcade Books for Little, Brown, agreed to publish the book. Southern was paid a modest $7,500.

  According to Nile, Southern had the novel lying around his office in a binder labeled Behind the Grassy Knoll. While helping to renovate a few rooms in the East Canaan house, Nile took it upon himself to organize his father’s papers.

  “I used to just leave it out for him in a very organized way, hopefully in a way that was enticing him a little bit. Like, ‘Oh, what’s this? Maybe I should have a look at this.’ And I would say, ‘Dad, it looks like you’ve got a lot of that work done. It’s like 190 pages or something.’ So I don’t know really what prompted him to take it up again, but something must have clicked. It could just be something as simple as a nostalgia for Texas…for instance there wasn’t an editor or publisher saying, ‘Hey, what about that Texas Summer?’ It wasn’t that kind of situation. I think he had been really out of touch with the literary and publishing scene and I said, ‘Look, you really ought to ask my mom what’s going on out there. I’m hearing of advances that are really outrageous. There’s a lot of money for novels these days.’ Of course, it didn’t turn out to be really true for Texas Summer in his case.”

  Southern had finished most of what became his last published novel in the early eighties. The ambitious plan to trace the life of his alter ego, Harold, up to the Paris expatriate period of the late forties and fifties was abandoned. Instead Texas Summer became an uncharacteristically sentimental journey to a Texas that might have existed only in Southern’s imagination. The previously published stories, “Red Dirt Marijuana” and “Razor Fight,” were incorporated into a longer narrative dealing with a visit to a county fair where Harold and Big Lawrence kidnap the Monkey Man, Harold’s crush on his slightly older cousin, Caddy, and the escape of CK’s brother, Big Nail, from prison. Southern shifts the time of the novel to the 1950s instead of the Depression, but the few references to the Elvis decade seem superfluous. Texas Summer exists outside conventional notions of time. The real subject of the book is a distillation of distant memories—that point when the blissful confidence and ignorance of youth gives way to a grim awareness of one’s limitations and mortality.

  With Nile and Richard Seaver’s encouragement, Southern dusted off Texas Summer and dutifully cleaned up the manuscript. He dedicated the book to Gail and sent it off to Seaver, who scheduled it for publication in the fall of 1991.

  In the winter of 1990–91, Southern began writing The Green Mountain Boys, a script dealing with Ethan Allen and the American Revolution. James Goldstone, a veteran director of television and film whose credits included the Paul Newman racing flim, Winning, and the Mafia spoof The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, lived in Vermont, where much of Allen’s battles with the British took place. This was a spec project, but Southern threw himself into the work. He joined Goldstone in barnstorming around New England, visiting battle sites and old graveyards to gather research. However, Goldstone couldn’t get any studio interest in the film. The disastrous box office of the Al Pacino film Revolution still lingered in the memory of Hollywood decision makers.

  While Southern was finishing the script for Goldstone, his first cover story in years, a feature on the Texas rock band ZZ Top, appeared in the February 1991 issue of Spin. Publisher Bob Guccione Jr. had recently made Southern a contributing editor along with William Burroughs and Michael O’Donoghue to add more street credibility to a publication that seemed to always be in second place to Rolling Stone. Presumably Guccione or someone else at Spin thought it would be a good idea to get a Texan to write about a rock band from Texas. Desperate for work as usual, Southern wasn’t going to argue. He traveled to St. Louis to see the band play and managed to churn out an unusually long article. With the exception of odd tangents like a description of Rip Torn as Howard Hughes in an off-Broadway play, the piece was unremarkable. ZZ Top were a fun band, but they never possessed the influence or emotional impact of the Rolling Stones at their peak. A lot of the feature was written in overcooked gonzo mode with overused Southern catchphrases like “damnable wog hemp,” “hot damn, Vietnam,” and even “precious bodily fluids.” These were the clichés of style Green had warned him about years ago. It was nice to see Southern’s name on the cover of a prominent magazine, but readers could be forgiven wondering where the astonishment had gone.

  Southern began another piece for Spin about the Gulf War, which had just started. Now that was a subject Southern should have sunk his satiric teeth into. When the war ended, a short but eloquent piece on the outburst of jingoism that had engulfed mainstream culture during the Gulf conflict came out in the Nation’s July 8, 1991, issue. “The Bandwagon Moves On” did employ familiar S
outhern imagery of Texas fighter pilots and gung-ho generals, but this time the clichés seemed apt in describing the absurdity of America’s “turkey shoot” in Iraq. Yet ultimately the piece was too little too late. The American character had become distinctly postmodern. The patriotic binge had passed like a twenty-four-hour flu back in February. When Southern’s piece was published, recession-weary American voters were gearing up to toss George Bush out of the White House in the next election.

  The Nation piece did signal a resurgence of interest in the political scene. He had regularly taken to watching congressional hearings and debates on C-SPAN. The petulant self-absorbed rhetoric of a Phil Gramm or Newt Gingrich would prompt Southern to pick up his yellow notepad and dash off a terse riposte in the form of a letter to the Village Voice or a squib for the Nation, Newsday, or In These Times. One such dispatch, an August 17, 1993, letter to the Voice, was a miniature classic. Recollecting the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings, Southern described committee chairman Joe Biden’s “inappropriate nightmare grimace of hilarity” and then added that a psychologist friend had concluded that the senator might be suffering from a mild form of Tourette’s syndrome. What made the short letter so amusing was the quizzical, deadpan tone, reminiscent of Southern’s work from the late fifties and early sixties. It was the kind of effective, quietly detached rage that was missing from recent prose like the ZZ Top piece.

  While Terry was steeling himself to complete the final manuscript of Texas Summer for Richard Seaver at Arcade, he received a letter from Annette Insdorf, head of Columbia’s graduate film department. She wanted to know if Terry was interested in teaching a graduate screenwriting course at Columbia beginning in the fall of 1991. The money wasn’t great, but it was a steady gig. He accepted the offer.

  The money from the teaching job went to pay the taxman, but it did boost Southern’s spirits. While he and Gail hated the weekly two-hour drive into Manhattan, it provided a steady routine until his death in 1995. The M.A. students appreciated Southern’s nonformulaic approach to the craft of film writing. Terry was not Syd Field or Robert McKee preaching a beat every ten minutes into the script. If he had a philosophy, it was for students to push their ideas as far as they could.

  According to John Emile, who attended the course in 1992–93, Southern would arrive at the weekly afternoon seminar with a satchel bulging with students’ screenplays-in-progress. “It seemed unlikely that they would ever be read; but they were always returned well thumbed—ragged, even—and tagged with innumerable yellow Post-its. Terry used three sizes of Post-its: large for extended commentary, medium for annotations involving sentences, and small for suggestions regarding word choice. The small ones were found throughout, in great number. Like every good teacher, he was persistent in trying to show that there was a [higher] level to aspire to. At one point, apparently frustrated by my careless spewing of words, he attached a large Post-it which read: ‘There are usually only one or two words which work in a given instance.’”

  Another student, Caroline Marshall, recalls falling out of her chair with laughter when she received these comments: “He crossed out ‘bazookas’ like any high school teacher grading an essay and wrote in the margin, ‘Try hooters, knockers, tits, or bazooms.’” Marshall says Southern urged his students to use description with precision: “Never say just ‘red dress.’ Be specific: ultra-revealing, micro-mini with fringe.”

  For the most part, Southern was a silent but encouraging presence at the seminars. Students would read selected pages of dialogue from their scripts and share comments. Southern’s comments were usually positive. However, another student, Charles Zigman, who made a film of “Heavy Put Away” as his thesis project, recalled an occasion when Southern lost his cool with a student. A sincere young woman began reading a lengthy excerpt from her script, an interminable feminist rewrite of Joan of Arc. When she completed reading a rambling scene in which Joan confesses her love and devotion to her same-sex lover, she asked Southern what he thought. He gracefully replied, “Why don’t they just get stoned and fuck?” The student ran out of the classroom, never to return. The rest of the class took Southern out for a beer.

  In addition to his new duties as an instructor, Southern continued to work on screenplays. In February 1992, Southern’s old pal from England Joe McGrath asked Terry if he would like to work on a spoof about the Cannes Film Festival. An independent producer, Walter Robin, had raised the development money. McGrath and Southern had stayed friendly since The Magic Christian via late-night phone calls and postcards. Whatever misgivings Southern had about McGrath’s adaptation of his classic novel did not get in the way of a warm friendship.

  McGrath flew out to East Canaan to get the ball rolling. The producer’s original title for the film was Starlets. McGrath and Southern decided to call it Festival, which was clear enough to reassure the money men, but vague enough to allow them to push the premise to the limit. Robin had approached Tony Curtis about the part of Sid Berko, a porn producer selling his wares at the film festival.

  “Terry found out [Walter Robin] was a voice-over artist. He had a good voice that sounded like Orson Welles, so Terry called him ‘Big Walt.’ Curtis and Robin didn’t get along. Curtis phoned me and said, ‘Never forget this, McGrath, we’re both poor boys, we don’t need this!’ He didn’t want to do [the film] so then we met George Segal. George came to London and saw me and said, ‘If you guys get it together you can hawk it around with my name on it, too,’” recalls McGrath.

  On the surface, Festival sounded suspiciously like a retread of Blue Movie. McGrath and Southern wanted to emphasize the fact that in Cannes you are never out of camera range. They hoped to convey a slapstick hall of mirrors where narcissistic actors, directors, and producers are followed by camera-wielding television crews and paparazzi. Some of the script’s funniest moments are Berko’s philosophic exchanges with his secretary, Velocity Storm:

  INT. BERKO’S SUITE. ALCOVE.

  Berko is sunning himself, lying on a recliner, reflector bib under his chin. Velocity lets herself in quietly. Berko regards her one eye open.

  BERKO

  Well, how was the Fassbinder? Same old “Let’s hide the knockwurst in the ingenue?” Haw!

  VELOCITY

  (archly)

  No, it was really quite charming. The sort of thing that could benefit people like yourself.

  BERKO

  What did they do, give out free cocksplints to the audience?

  VELOCITY

  And Spanish fly to the starlets. How’d you make out with the toddler?

  BERKO

  You won’t believe it, Vel. I gave her six big ones. Hey, talk about your ever-loving ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’! Vel, she came like a machinegun! It was scary.

  (Pause, gives her a narrow look.)

  Any sign of our nemesis?

  VELOCITY

  Nope. I really don’t think they’re crazy enough to try anything in a situation like this.

  BERKO

  Oh yeah? Isn’t that what people used to say about the grassy knoll.

  McGrath joined Walter Robin on a strange location trip to a Baltic resort in Russia that was going to double for Cannes. McGrath gamely tried to see the possibilities in the bleak complex of poorly built hotels. Then, perhaps mercifully, Robin ran out of development money. Festival might have worked with a more secure production team. Robert Altman’s The Player and Garry Shandling’s Larry Sanders Show would build upon the coarse politics of moviemaking to create some of the funniest and most exciting film and television of the nineties.

  A certain piece of unfinished business resurfaced while Southern toiled on Festival. Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, in spite of their mutual antipathy, were still keen to do an Easy Rider sequel. One of the latest variations, which was unintentionally funny, was that River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves would play the sons of Captain America and Wyatt, who had been conceived in the commune. In order to get the sequel moving, Fonda tried to get Southern to relinquish any
claim to the film in exchange for $30,000. Easy Rider had made all the above-the-line players, especially Fonda and Bert Schneider, rich or at least free of money worries. However, all Southern received from the film were residuals—annual checks amounting to $50, maybe $100 a year. That was barely enough to cover his New York Times subscription. To his credit, Southern ignored Fonda’s offer.

  In late 1991, Texas Summer was published, but it seemed to take months for the book to catch the attention of reviewers. Arcade/Little, Brown hadn’t done much in the way of publicity. David Streitfield of the Washington Post went out to East Canaan to find out what had happened to Southern between Blue Movie and the new novel. His article, which ran in the Post’s style section, gave the impression Southern was an addled burnout case. The reviews of Texas Summer that began trickling in did little to suggest otherwise. The New York Times’s Brad Tyer wrote, “From his vantage point as a literary hipster, Mr. Southern used to cast a good-natured sneer at what he called the ‘quality lit game,’ even as his work redefined what literature could include. One is left wishing he had re-entered the game on a more fertile field.” Sadly, this was not a minority opinion.

  The publication of Southern’s first novel since Blue Movie should have been the kind of media event heralded by Vanity Fair profiles and similar coverage. Instead the book seemed to be released in a vacuum.