by Lee Hill
“I think Texas Summer is a fine piece of work,” said Richard Seaver, “but he had been gone from the scene so long that every reviewer said, ‘Here’s Terry Southern twenty years later, but this is not the Terry Southern we knew.’ Of course it isn’t, it’s a totally other voice. It is not sarcastic. It is not him being acerbic, flippant, acid, funny, or satirical. People weren’t ready for this other voice, but I think the book would have been better had he done a little more with it.”
Perhaps Southern’s legacy might have been better served if he had turned in another Texas-inspired tale called Whut?, a script that grew out of a series of running jokes between the painter Neil Welliver and Terry about hillbilly hicks making “A-Dult Movies.” Written in the late eighties just when Southern was beginning to resurrect his Texas novel, it might have satisfied the craving for one more satiric romp on the order of Blue Movie or Candy.
In spite of Texas Summer’s indifferent reception Terry did what he always did in these circumstances, which was to keep busy. He began helping Perry Richardson with The Early Stones, a new book using unpublished photos by Michael Cooper for Hyperion. It was a way for Richardson to make some money out of Blinds and Shutters. When the limited-edition book was published, the publishers had diminished Richardson’s involvement and he received only a small credit.
For The Early Stones, Southern supplied an amusing but all too short preface about meeting Brian Jones and Anita Pallenberg for the first time. A rambling Q-and-A banter between Southern and Richards formed the book’s accompanying text, but the pictures tended to explain themselves. Whereas Blinds and Shutters was a mesmerizing and exhaustive visual and oral history, The Early Stones seemed sketchy and provisional. It was a frustrating book for Southern fans, who admittedly would have bought his collected laundry lists at this stage, and even more so for the casual reader. In the final analysis, it was just another book about the Stones and not in the same league as Robert Greenfield’s STP, Stanley Booth’s Sympathy for the Devil, or Roy Carr’s The Rolling Stones: An Illustrated Record.
The book allowed Richardson to establish A Publishing Company, which he ran from his home in Devon in partnership with Julio Santo Domingo, a mysterious Guy Grand–like Spanish businessman. Richardson and Southern tried to get Domingo to invest in a film project about the rock musician Lenny Kravitz. The idea never seemed to get past the riffing stage. Southern had the half-serious notion of getting Woody Allen and Spike Lee to codirect a film with the general theme of race relations.
In the same summer that The Early Stones arrived in bookstores, Terry and Gail traveled to a post-wedding party held at Carol Southern’s Long Island place. Nile had been married a few weeks earlier in Boulder to a Greek-born beauty, Theodosia, whom he met in Athens on a cultural exchange. Terry was happy to see his only child get married. He had always striven to provide his son with the necessities and often expressed concern to friends that Nile would make the same mistakes he had in navigating the tricky waters of art and commerce. Nile had spent much of his twenties working as a film editor for small production companies and had begun writing his own fiction, which owed more to William Burroughs and cyberpunk than to the work of his father.
More occasional pieces came out of Southern’s typewriter in the summer and fall of 1992. He wrote liner notes for a promotional copy of the Black Crowes’ second album. Chris Robinson, the lead singer of the band, whose music owed a great deal to the Faces and the Rolling Stones in their Sticky Fingers/Exile on Main Street phase, was a big fan of The Magic Christian. For Newsday, Southern wrote “Putting America to Work for Something Besides Killing” just as the 1992 U.S. election campaign was going into high gear. When asked whom he was going to vote for, Southern would say “Frank Zappa” or “Jerry Brown.” He even phoned Brown’s campaign office to lend support and was delighted to find out that the secretary on the other end of the call was familiar with his work. Brown even returned Terry’s call.
When Bill Clinton was elected the new president of the United States that November, Southern vocally supported him. Like many liberals, Southern wanted to share in the optimism of the first one hundred days. At least Clinton wasn’t George Bush. Ironically a few years before Southern had written a short teleplay on spec called “The Brightest and the Best” about a Clinton-like president who has an affair. The script contained much discussion of semen samples in test tubes. In the summer of 1998, when Clinton’s Oval Office dalliance with Monica Lewinsky turned into a real-life sideshow, many of Southern’s friends remembered how they thought Terry’s teleplay was too wacky and coarse for its own good.
The commute to teach at Columbia was grueling for Terry and Gail. Gail did most of the driving while Southern looked over students’ scripts. They tried to shape the new routine around a dinner, visit with friends, an opening, a book launch, or a similar event.
In November, Terry began feeling dizzy in class. His vision was blurred. Gail took him to the doctor. He had had a mild stroke. Southern was very lucky. The attack made it difficult for him to walk without a cane, but he was still able to function as before. However, the stroke was an unsubtle reminder that he was no longer invincible. The martinis, the Dexamyl, the wine, and the dope smoking would have to stop…or at least, their use must be dramatically reduced. Aside from a couple of rescheduled classes, the stroke did not affect his ability to teach. Gail hoped that if Southern listened to his doctor and took his medication, he could live and play for a few more years.
Before the year ended, “The Refreshing Ambiguity of the Déjà Vu,” the Candy-inspired sketch, appeared in Grand Street. It was barely a short story, but somehow the seductive style kicked in. Fans wondered if Terry and Mason really wrote it together. In some ways the story was the literary equivalent of the Beatles’ “Free As a Bird” single. The piece was meant as a lark, but the effect was elegiac. Its publication raised a question no one wanted to ask or answer—why weren’t there more Terry Southern novels and short stories?
If Southern sensed that the snows of yesteryear were now (to push a literary allusion further) being washed away by the torrents of spring, he did not let on to those who saw him. Despite the cane and white beard, he surprised friends and visitors with his energy and curiosity.
In late February 1993, Southern and Gail flew out to Dallas for a long-overdue salute to a prodigal son. Josh Alan Friedman had moved to Dallas in the mid-eighties to pursue a musical career. He enterprisingly organized a series of screenings and a reading at the Dallas Museum of Art. The afternoon of the reading, Friedman took Gail and Terry out to nearby Alvarado for what would be the writer’s final visit to his birthplace.
That evening, after Dr. Strangelove was screened, Southern read from The Magic Christian. Despite his frail appearance, Southern recited his classic with unusual vigor and enthusiasm. The spontaneous laughter of the audience almost made Southern lose his cool repose as he recited the adventures of Guy Grand.
“If he had in the four days that he was here been acting feeble and frail,” recalled Friedman, “he was not during that one hour. It was if he had reserved all his energy for that reading. It was Terry in his prime reading from The Magic Christian. He was wonderful and the audience cracked up. The day afterward, there were fifty people lined up outside with Terry at a table. This is a big museum and a big recital hall. Terry was sitting at a table and he didn’t bring any copies of Texas Summer down, which had just come out. I told him you should get a box from the publisher because everybody is going to want one directly from you. But he didn’t know about stuff like that. Novelists today sell their own books. Musicians sell their own CDs. He was from the old school and he was too dignified to do that. But people were lined up with records, like the soundtrack to Easy Rider or Barbarella, old copies of books and paperbacks and any other type of memorabilia. Again he didn’t show a lick of emotion as he sat there just smiling and signing any book or record that people wanted signed. Later Gail said it really meant a lot to him. He had never once d
one a bookstore signing like that or had a line of people. Nobody had ever bothered to set that up for him except that particular thing.”
When Southern returned to East Canaan, he began work on the text for another photo book, From a Dead Man’s Wallet. Peter Beard had been asked by a Japanese publisher to put together a book of images from his famous diary collages. Beard had described his journal as the project that never ends. In addition to the coffee-table-book text, Beard also got Terry to write captions for a series of photo spreads in Esquire’s revamped Gentlemen’s Quarterly. The latter assignment represented a new low in Southern’s postsixties career. Beard was only trying to help, but the sight of Southern dashing off two-to three-sentence captions for an unmemorable fashion layout was a major comedown from the days when he was part of Harold Hayes’s all-star team along with Mailer, Talese, and Wolfe.
Meanwhile Hal Wilner, whom Southern had befriended during Saturday Night Live, had developed a lucrative sideline as a record producer. He achieved considerable critical acclaim and respectable sales by creating a series of tribute albums. The records paid homage to composers like Thelonious Monk, Nino Rota, and Kurt Weill by getting artists as varied as Todd Rundgren, Lou Reed, and Marianne Faithful to record intriguing interpretations of the work of these masters. Wilner’s model would become widely imitated in the nineties, but often without the same care and passion. In 1990, in collaboration with Nelson Lyon and Michael O’Donoghue, Wilner had assembled Dead City Radio featuring William Burroughs reading his work to a vocal and musical accompaniment provided by the likes of Donald Fagen and John Cale. Wilner, O’Donoghue, and Lyon felt Southern could benefit from a similar project.
Setting up the recording sessions was easier said than done. Wilner had become increasingly involved with lucrative film work, such as Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, in addition to his SNL duties. Recording didn’t begin until 1994 and then proceeded in erratic fashion.
“It was like the impossible record,” Lyon recalls, “because Terry was often gasping. He was like on his last legs. I was pushing him to the point where he nearly fainted. He was only doing it finally out of a friendship thing and enduring the pain of take after take after take, which I would insist on because I knew there were problems in the editing.”
In order to take some of the pressure off Southern, Lyon commissioned a troupe of players including Sandra Bernhard, Jonathan Winters, and Marianne Faithfull. Wilner came up with the conceit of a cabaret to frame the various readings. The recording begins with an answering machine message by Terry and then segues into a section of The Loved One with Southern playing the roles of a funeral director and a client. The record, which Lyon described as “the most carefully fucking designed thing I’ve ever done,” remains tragically unreleased.
Through 1993 and 1994, Southern’s health ebbed and flowed. Sometimes he seemed in boyish high spirits. At other times, he was barely able to walk. In June, he and Gail flew to Greece for a second wedding ceremony thrown by Nile’s Greek in-laws. Southern enjoyed the festivities, but the flight to and from was exhausting. He stayed in his chair during most of the reception and made full use of the wheelchair service provided by the airline.
In January 1994, Harry Nilsson, who had spent his remaining years fighting a legal battle to restore financial stability for his family after the collapse of Hawkeye, died from a heart attack. Then, in November of the same year, Michael O’Donoghue died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage. Both men were only in their fifties.
Southern’s encroaching sense of mortality, coupled with his weakening health, must have made his latest foray into Quality Lit challenging. Little, Brown had commissioned Terry to write a memoir on the basis of a proposal put together by Nile. Only two chapters would emerge, “Flashing on Gid” and “Strangelove Outtake,” dealing with Maurice Girodias and the making of Dr. Strangelove respectively. Both appeared in Grand Street.
The memoir excerpts nicely balanced Southern’s penchant for abbreviated nicknames and mock-heroic exaggeration with more sober insights into the creative process. In general, the tone was warm, reflective, and witty. Little, Brown’s Fredrica Friedman expected something different: “On the basis of the pages now, I would suggest that two areas need work. First, the material should be funnier, wilder, more antic. It also needs context for the reader: who are you, what do/did you do, what are you known for? And what is the point of telling these stories?”
One can imagine Southern reading this memo, which in fairness was intended to help him with a form not close to his heart, and asking, “And just who are you, Ms. Friedman, if that is indeed your name?” Gradually Southern’s interest in the memoir dwindled and the project lapsed.
In September 1994, Southern received a Gotham award for Lifetime Achievement by the Independent Film Producers. The lavish dinner and ceremony were held at Roseland. Sigourney Weaver and the Coen brothers also received awards. The Gotham was a long-overdue recognition that Southern did matter and had made a difference to film culture. If he had been healthier and more career savvy, perhaps he would have been working with some of the young turks in the audience. Certainly the Coen brothers, Jim Jarmusch, Steven Soderbergh, and other independent filmmakers owed Southern a few aesthetic debts. Quentin Tarantino’s just-released Pulp Fiction had flashes of Southern-like weirdness, but the hot young director, who might have benefited from Southern’s depth, seemed more infatuated by the neo-noir of Elmore Leonard and the so-bad-it’s-good trash of countless exploitation films.
Earlier in the year, on May 31, Dennis Hopper appeared on The Tonight Show. Hopper made some flippant remarks about Rip Torn’s nonappearance in Easy Rider. When Jay Leno asked why Rip passed on the George Hanson role that went to Jack Nicholson, Hopper said they had a problem.
LENO: What kind of problem?
HOPPER: Well, at dinner he pulled a knife on me. He thought I was—I was cutting him out of the picture, as he put it—uh, before, we were just writing the script, and he decided the script wasn’t really correct.
LENO: Now, is that the best way to settle an argument with a director? If he’s cutting, I mean if he cut you out of the picture before—somehow knifing the director seems like it would pretty much end your—
HOPPER: Yeah, well, it was, uh, it was, uh, it was one way for me to say we’re not working together. That was pretty easy.
Hopper’s ill-advised late-night joking triggered a lawsuit by Torn, who initially asked for a public retraction. Hopper refused. Before the case came to an end in March 1997, Torn’s lawyer compiled a series of eyewitness accounts of what happened back in 1968 when Easy Rider was still in preproduction. Because Terry agreed to testify on Torn’s behalf, he had a falling-out with Jean Stein, who was Hopper’s friend as well as Southern’s. During a dinner, she told Southern she wouldn’t give him an allowance anymore if he was going to gang up on a friend. Stein had stood by Hopper’s side when he was a drug casualty in the hospital in the early eighties and she wasn’t letting her money go, even very indirectly, to anyone planning to sue her good friend. The dinner ended abruptly, and soon after, the checks stopped coming.
Stein and Southern never spoke again. On the bright side, Southern’s drafts for Easy Rider were entered into evidence when the lawsuit between Torn and Hopper came to court. Their appearance sucker-punched Hopper, who claimed he had written the screenplay himself. As of this writing, Hopper’s draft remains missing.
Like so many new years, 1995, Southern’s last on earth, was filled with uncertainty. After almost thirty years with Sterling Lord, Southern changed agents. Jimmy Vines, in his late twenties, took over Southern’s representation and arranged a reissue deal with Grove. Flash and Filigree, Candy, The Magic Christian, and Blue Movie were reissued in handsome trade paperback volumes by Grove in the summer of 1996. Vines was also going to explore the possibility of publishing Southern’s drafts of Dr. Strangelove, Barbarella, and Easy Rider in book form. This was a great idea that quickly became bogged down in the old issues of auth
orship and copyright. While it was clear that Southern had made emphatic and valuable contributions to these and other films, it wasn’t as easy to conclude that he was the sole creator. Unlike Paddy Chayefsky, William Goldman, or Harold Pinter, Southern had never had the foresight to spell out his creative control in contractual terms. Even at the peak of his screenwriting career, Southern had depended on the good graces of his friendly auteurs.
Southern grew weaker and more fragile over the spring and summer. His hair looked ghostly white. On windy days, it seemed as if his beard were trailing behind like a small cloud. Still he agreed to run a screenwriting workshop at the Whiteheart, a restaurant up the road from his house. There were plenty of weekenders who would pay good money to sit at the feet of a film legend.
On May 1, Southern turned seventy-one. The year before, Stein had thrown a birthday party for him at Elaine’s. Darius James, author of Negrophobia, recalled Mick Jagger making an appearance at that bash. The Stones’s singer ignored everyone else, but spent a long time talking to Southern. It had been quite a night, but now, a year later, Stein and the Southerns were no longer speaking.
Southern’s final project during 1994–95 was his text for Virgin. Perry Richardson had won the contract to write a history of Richard Branson’s record company. He been given a rare degree of creative autonomy considering the corporate PR nature of the commission. The conceit behind the Virgin book was to make fun of the whole idea of rock ’n’ roll history. Richardson promptly hired Terry.
“Terry was so precise with language even when we were doing the Virgin book,” said Richardson. “A classic example for me was when we were describing some wild-eyed musician. I had come up with the phrase ‘rabid glee’ and Terry said, ‘I think that’s too garish.’ So we kicked around ideas for about half an hour and finally Terry said, ‘I got it! How about “grim relish”!’ What we were doing was just playing with the English language.”