The (Original) Adventures of Ford Fairlane
Page 1
Praise for The (Original) Adventures
of Ford Fairlane
“Don’t let Andrew Dice Clay prevent you from reading this. Substitute J. J. Gittes and you’ll have a great ride. From coast to coast Ford Fairlane knows his way around the scene. With Tom Waits–like prose, you’ll be out-hipped. Rex Weiner is so hip.”
—John Densmore, The Doors
“Fast-paced, engaging storytelling. Pure adrenaline! If Philip Marlowe was reincarnated as a punk rock PI navigating the devastated war zone of downtown Manhattan in the late seventies, he would look a lot like Rex Weiner’s unforgettable Ford Fairlane.”
—Jonathan Shaw, author of Narcisa: Our Lady of Ashes
and Scab Vendor: Confessions of a Tattoo Artist
“The resurrected Ford Fairlane stories are a breezy, joyously perverse, laugh-out-loud pleasure: part Chandler, part Philip K. Dick—and all Rex Weiner.”
—Bruce Wagner, author of Dead Stars
and I Met Someone
“If you miss the New York City that was edgy, messy, filthy, after-hours, and off-the-books—you know, the city with a rock and roll heart—please welcome back Ford Fairlane.”
—Joe Nick Patoski, author of Stevie Ray Vaughan: Caught in the Crossfire and Willie Nelson: An Epic Life; host of the Texas Music Hour of Power, Marfa Public Radio
“A flip Philip Marlowe and hipster Sam Spade, Ford Fairlane’s lively capers capture the color and crackle of vintage new wave New York, from the funky clubs to the danger-fraught streets. Rex Weiner takes us on a cool, rhythmic ride.”
—Joe Kane, editor of VideoScope Magazine
“Ford Fairlane distills the feisty swagger of downtown New York in the mad, broke, striving, glorious seventies.”
—Nancy Naglin, author of The Salvation Army Tales
and You Owe Me An Answer
this is a genuine vireo book
A Vireo Book | Rare Bird Books
453 South Spring Street, Suite 302
Los Angeles, CA 90013
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Copyright © 2018 by Rex Weiner
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, including but not limited to print, audio, and electronic. For more information, address: A Rare Bird Book |
Rare Bird Books Subsidiary Rights Department,
453 South Spring Street, Suite 302,
Los Angeles, CA 90013.
Set in Warnock Pro
Printed in the United States
epub isbn: 9781947856813
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data
available upon request.
Dedicated to Carlos Laszlo
“Break on through to the other side…”
—The Doors
Contents
How The Adventures of Ford Fairlane were Created
NEW YORK
Chapter 1
Where it all began
Chapter 2
Laffs and stilettos on the Lower East Side
Chapter 3
Fifty-Two Pick-up or Die
Chapter 4
Night Train to Nowhere
Chapter 5
Manic Panic
Chapter 6
A Sunnyview of Life
LOS ANGELES
Chapter 1
The Snatch
Chapter 2
The Funny Joke
Chapter 3
The Connection
Chapter 4
Like Falling Off A Cliff
Chapter 5
Mysteries of the Cuckoo’s Nest
Chapter 6
The Permanent Chill
The Backstory
Interview with Andy Schwartz
Interview with Jay Levin
Interview with Floyd Mutrux
About Rex Weiner
Acknowledgments
How The Adventures of
Ford Fairlane were Created
People always ask me how much of my original stories made it into the movie, and I have to say it’s all there in the stories. And there’s more where that came from…much more.
It all began when I was living in a Manhattan loft on Twenty-Second Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues—what the real-estate wheels now call the Flatiron District. Back then, in the 1970s, it was just another sooty warehouse side street with trucks unloading noisily. My building—six floors of copper-wire coils, fluorescent light fixtures, circuit breakers, and other crap was owned by an electrician who made all his bucks in the 1950s and ’60s wiring the exploding post-war school system in city suburbs. Now the Baby Boomers were hipsters like me looking for raw loft space, and with no more fat municipal contracts to fill his coffers Mr. Electric was ready to turn out the lights and retire to Florida.
My girlfriend, Deanne Stillman, and I bought the place, fixed it up a little, and had a blast. We were writing for magazines, publishing books, running something called the Underground Press Syndicate, making a bit of money, and keeping a fifty pound tank of nitrous oxide in the corner just for laughs, so to speak. Our social circle included the dopers at High Times, where I was a member of the founding editorial staff, and the first cast of Saturday Night Live, due to the fact that Deanne was best buddies with SNL writer Anne Beatts and Judy Jacklin, consorts of Michael O’Donoghue and John Belushi, respectively.
Our regular watering hole was The Bells of Hell on Thirteenth Street, where some of the National Lampoon crowd—Doug Kenney, Ted Mann, Tony Hendra, etc.—came to get liquored up and snort lines of blow off the bar after last call. The Bells was also home to crusty journalists from the Daily News, the New York Post, and The Village Voice, along with a chorus of bibulous writers drawn from the rock-crit ranks including Lester Bangs, Nick Tosches, Billy Altman, and John Morthland.
Occasionally, I’d get up onstage in The Bells back room with my rock group, King Rude, opening for Turner & Kirwan of Wexford, the Irish house band (it was, after all, an Irish bar). We did mostly covers of obscure blues tunes and a few original rocking ditties penned by guitar slinger and Screw columnist Joe Kane (“Smut From The Past”) and myself, songs with titles like “I’m Pissed Off At You,” and “Coma Baby.” Occasionally, the great East Village Other writer Dean Latimer would get up and sing his classic “California Sunshine Girl,” a hilarious epic about a Midwest guy who follows his sweet little hometown girlfriend out to Hollywood only to discover her performing onscreen in a hardcore-porn flick, with the various acts yodeled by Dean in scabrous detail.
Our drummer was Don Cristensen who also played with the legendary Contortions. They were part of the so-called No Wave scene, a raucous rejoinder to the new wave scene, which was itself a rebuke to the punk rock scene, much of which revolved around the infamous CBGB on the Bowery. King Rude, in its original incarnation as Blind Orange Julius, was one of the first bands that CBGB owner Hilly Kristal booked to play his joint under the impression that we were a blues band, essential to Hilly’s quirky vision of a club featuring Country, Blue Grass, and Blues music.
Actually, we could barely play worth shit and had no equipment. Our first gig, on a double bill with a band we ridiculed for its stupid name, the Ramones, we just plugged our guitars into the amps that were sitting idly by. The Ramones returned in person and took issue with our use of their equipment. During the ensuing argument, I slipped a few bucks to a henchman who went to a local bakery and returned with a meringue pie that I heaved into Joey Ramone’s face. That effec
tively ended Blind Orange Julius’s engagement at CBGB.
Don, the drummer, invited me to check out his other gigs, and I began heading out after dark to late-night downtown joints like Tier 3, Mudd Club, Club 57, and various lofts and cellars where the late-seventies music was happening.
To be honest, I had lost my taste for music ever since it turned into the “music industry” in the modern sense. I could never sit in a stadium watching rockers “rock.” And when disco overran R&B, it seemed to obliterate the place where the music began, which was the blues. If I couldn’t hear a backbeat, I didn’t want to hear it at all.
But there was something happening in those late-night clubs that intrigued me—a lifestyle, a scene, a discordant rejection of the music industry, lots of heroin and too much alcohol, and more than a hint of violence in the air. New York was a dangerous place in those days.
I decided I wanted to write about it all, but I was tired of the journalistic pose. I didn’t want to “report” on things anymore, and I certainly didn’t care to issue critiques on the music—for bands I liked or didn’t like. That seemed pointless. What I liked was the texture and language of the scene—bands with names like Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Defunkt, The Raybeats; self-invented characters like Lydia Lunch and the music, described by one critic venturing forth with “the most ferociously avant-garde and aggressively ugly music since Albert Ayler puked all over my brain back in— what?—sixty-four.”
So I invented a character loosely modeled on myself, a streetwise young dude, armed with a knowledge of music history that helped him do the job he had to do: chasing down secrets, the mysteries of the music. He was a private eye, a detective in the classic film noir mode, a “new wave detective” (as the first stories were originally subtitled) who worked in the music business, a man who knew everybody and everybody knew him. He was professional, dedicated, and he had style, but was ready to tangle with anybody who tried to cross him. And you wouldn’t want to cross Ford Fairlane.
In some ways, the writing was a literary experiment: how to make a fictional character real by surrounding him with real people and real places. Off the top of my head (with echoes of Ford Madox Ford, for some reason), I gave my hero the name Ford Fairlane. It sounded like rock and roll.
In other ways, my experiment was also an attempt to escape a rut. My relationship was falling apart, my patience with a post-Watergate journalistic writing career wearing thin. I’d always imagined myself a New York City writer living in the world of writing, editing, and publishing. I’d been a publisher at the age of twenty-one (The New York Ace) and had my first Op-Ed piece in The New York Times at twenty-two. My exploits in the radical politico “underground” scene had already been chronicled in the Times and New York magazine, and my nonfiction book, The Woodstock Census: Nationwide Survey of the Sixties Generation, coauthored with Deanne, had been published to good reviews by Viking, along with a five-city tour. But after nearly a decade, none of it seemed to add up to anything. Where was I destined to find my ultimate niche—The New York Review of Books? Highly unlikely.
The first Ford Fairlane “adventure” was published in the now-defunct New York Rocker in 1979, a ragged little black-and-white newsprintzine. Andy Schwartz, the nerdy music fanboy who was publisher/editor, agreed—amiably enough but without a great deal of enthusiasm—to serialize my story in six biweekly installments. I wrote them fast and dirty, not knowing where the plot would lead, using whatever I encountered by day or night in the streets and clubs. And the deal was, I was writing for free. Not that I couldn’t have used the money. At some point I’d moved out of the loft to a basement hole in the Chelsea Hotel and from there to a cold-water dump on First and First, just off Houston Street, with a hole in the floor where junkies had blown through and jumped down to rob the candy store below. The Ford Fairlane stories were typed out with gloves on, with an empty belly and a head full of Old Overholt whisky while puffing packs of Camels, unfiltered. In those days, I was sad, mad, and bad. Ford was my outlet for all my dark, violent, and discordant feelings, which was the tenor of the times in late 1970s Gotham, a bankrupt municipality that even the president of the United States advised to “drop dead.” As Ford Fairlane says, “It’s a dangerous decade, baby.”
California was far away. Too much sunshine always seemed like a clever lie to a New Yorker like me. Never in my days on the city’s mean streets, from where I was born in 1950s Brooklyn to my 1960s days on the Lower East Side to my last stint in Hell’s Kitchen toward the tail end of the 1970s, did I imagine I’d end up in California, much less in Hollywood making movies and TV. Blame it all on Ford Fairlane.
My break came when my old friend Paul Krassner, yippie jester behind the groundbreaking satirical journal The Realist, got a gig in October 1980 as head writer for something called The Steve Allen Election Eve Comedy Special for a new cable TV company called HBO. It was the dawn of the Reagan Era, and Krassner hired me to come out to Hollywood and join the writing staff. I’d never written for television before. But the money was decent, and what the hell: it seemed like a nice break from the dreariness on First and First, where my professional poker player roommate Shay Addams (down on his luck after being banned from Vegas casinos due to his proficiency at card counting) and I were breaking up furniture to burn in the fireplace for heat. And if I could stick it to right-winger Ronnie Reagan with some sharp jokes, that would be just dandy.
Staying at the Magic Motel on Franklin, just under the Hollywood Hills, I called my old pal Richard Meltzer, one of the original rock crits, and he took me to see Darby Crash at the Starwood. Meltzer introduced me to the LA punk scene, totally different from New York’s but no less compelling, and I started hanging out at the Zero Zero, Rajis, The Masque, and other dumps around town. My friend Jay Levin, formerly of the New York Post, had founded the LA Weekly, and as publisher he agreed to publish a second Ford Fairlane adventure for the Weekly, this one bringing my rock and roll PI to LA in the same Dickensian serialization as the first one.
In between writing sessions at HBO’s brand-new offices high atop Century City’s South Tower (none of my jokes and few of Krassner’s made it into the show), I was hanging in the clubs, getting laid, doing whatever pills and powders came my way, and turning in the Ford Fairlane stories. Like New York in the first adventure, the City of Angels became a character in the second series of episodes. That time and place of dive bars and funky pre-foodie restaurants, most of which no longer exist, was captured in one sentence describing a day in Ford Fairlane’s LA life: “Lunch at Duke’s. Pinball at Barney’s Beanery. A steak dinner at Port’s. Booze and nine-ball at the Raincheck.” I had no idea if anybody liked the stories, but had some fun writing them. When the HBO gig was finished and I left LA for New York, I had no idea what was in store for Ford, or for me. Maybe, I thought, some smart editor at a publishing house will pick it up as a detective series. Or something.
As luck would have it, I got a job as editor of Swank, “The Magazine for Men,” one of many Playboy knockoffs launched in the 1950s. Mario Puzo and Bruce Jay Friedman were among my predecessors, once publishing fiction by the likes of Norman Mailer, Graham Greene, and Arthur C. Clarke. I would be the last editor when there were still articles to edit (they went to an all-photo format after I departed). Editing a girly mag was a snap. It lifted me out of the ranks of starving journos and into the executive suite. My office on Fifty-Seventh and Seventh overlooked Carnegie Hall. If I left my window open to the early spring breezes I could hear Frank Sinatra rehearsing for his comeback concert while the day’s aspiring centerfold stripped in front of my desk.
New York was starting to look like it had possibilities again. Each evening I would walk home from work across Times Square to my pad in Hell’s Kitchen, stopping at joints along the way like Bernard’s and the Melody Burlesque to schmooze with bartenders and strippers, street poets and pill-heads, downtown graffiti artists and uptown culture vultures, and fellow editors and
writers aspiring to what Terry Southern called the “quality lit game,” thinking everything was the way it was going to be. The great Gotham churn of hopes and dreams, leavened by the recapitulation of daily life, was my future present.
Then one day I got a phone call from somebody who said he was a movie producer. He said he’d read my Ford Fairlane stories in LA Weekly and he thought they’d make a good movie. Was I interested? I hung up on the guy, convinced it was one of my drinking buddies pulling a prank.
Six months later, in October 1981, I was in Hollywood under contract to Columbia Pictures to write the screenplay for a movie based on my Ford Fairlane stories. I had my name on a parking space at the studio (located then in Burbank), an office, a secretary, and a fat per diem that allowed me a room at the Chateau Marmont and a vintage Mustang convertible from Rent-a-Wreck, not to mention all the trouble that cash money can buy.
The producer was Floyd Mutrux (Freebie and the Bean, Dusty and Sweets McGee) who was also proposing to direct. A funny little dude with a scruffy beard and complicated private life involving several ex-wives, kids, girlfriends, the whole Hollywood schmear, Floyd had a rock and roll sensibility, along with a Ferrari, a vintage Mercedes, inhabiting a world of substance abuse and young babes. All of which he proceeded to share with me during the year we spent running all over LA writing the script. It was never clear to me if he understood my stories, or if he’d ever even read them. Floyd had his own particular take on Ford Fairlane that was more a kind of mood than an actual story or character that he struggled to impart to me. Sometimes, rocketing along Mulholland at midnight in his top-down Ferrari with X blasting from the Bose speakers and the city lights twinkling down below, I’d think: Yeah, now I get it. But most of the time we were just raising hell from one end of LA to the other. At least he was teaching me screenplay writing as we went along; Floyd was a savvy instructor and I learned a lot—when we were both sober. I learned that screenwrititng is tough, Although a lot of fools out there are trying, you really have to be a good writer, first of all. Then you must learn what goes on in front of and behind the camera, not to mention what goes on inside the fickle head of a studio executive. In any case, I got pretty good at it—good enough to sell a few scripts, and even teach screenwriting classes in later years. But back then I hadn’t a clue. I figured I’d polish off the damn screenplay, collect the check, quit this crazy Hollywood ride, and head back to New York.