Which Lie Did I Tell?

by William Goldman

  Okay, working backwards now.

  “colorful characters played—even in the smallest roles—by fine actors.” Full marks to Pakula here. He not only had final say on who played what, he coaxed splendid work from all concerned. I don’t think Redford has topped it since. Robards won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. Jack Warden, John McMartin, Martin Balsam, Hoffman remarkably unmannered. Super ensemble work.

  “sound and editing finesse”—That is a phrase written by someone who read it someplace and knows zip about movies. I have no idea what it means. Sound guys are off in their own world. But I would certainly credit Pakula with working with his editor to give terrific pace to what is essentially a talk piece.

  “the grit of the best documentaries, mystery (the shadowy appearance of Deep Throat)”—Sorry, that is Gordon Willis you’re talking about here. Directors have little to do with the actual look of a flick. You say to your cinematographer, “I want this to look like a Hopper painting,” and you pray he can do it. The documentary look was always present in the Watergate material. Jo-Jo the Dog-faced Boy would have known it shouldn’t look like a Doris Day musical.

  And the Deep Throat appearances? All all all Gordon Willis, the prince of darkness among great cameramen. (An old joke was that Willis shot the only movie where you could not tell Paul Newman’s eyes were blue.) One of the Oscar winners from this flick said in his acceptance speech that the main reason the movie worked was Gordon Willis. If Pakula did anything, he knew enough to shut up and watch a master and go along for the ride.

  “Into it, Pakula has packed a convoluted yet clear narrative, suspense”—Total horseshit. That was from the book. Everything in the movie is from the book and there is a very good reason for that—it had to be. There were a lot of powerful men from Nixon on down who were not presented back-lit and beautiful. Warner Brothers was terrified of lawsuits, as they well should have been. It was a risky undertaking and the last thing they needed was to have the release delayed because of court dates. Woodward and Bernstein had not been sued for their book. Meaning, it was accurate. Now, as any lawyer will tell you, you can sue the Pope for bastardy. Doesn’t mean you’re going to win, but if you have the money in this great land of ours, nothing will stop you. And these powerful Nixonites sure could have sued the movie.

  But since they didn’t sue the book, their case was woefully weakened.

  As long as the movie stayed strictly with the book. Which it did.

  So to credit Pakula for story or look is simply wrong. He was a hired gun, certainly not the guy the producer wanted, and he came into a finished situation.

  Let me make one thing perfectly clear—Pakula did a splendid job directing this flick. I am not in any way criticizing his directing—I think it was outrageous he didn’t win the Oscar. (Rocky robbed the store that year.)

  But to ever give a director credit for work he had nothing to do with is as damaging as not giving him credit for what he did do. I have written this before, but there are eight people that have to be at their best for a flick to reach its potential:

  Actor

  Cinematographer

  Composer (if you don’t believe me, rent Chariots of Fire)

  Director

  Producer

  Production Designer

  Sound

  Writer

  If you like a movie, praise us all.

  * * *

  Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

  * * *

  If I seem to be more personal in what follows, it’s for one reason: because I remember. I have no idea what the other writers went through in the course of their lives, leading to the production of the scenes you have now read; I don’t know where they were or who they thought they were, any of that stuff. And if I know about me, it’s because I couldn’t block out all that I wanted to.

  I had no idea when I sat down to write it, but I have come to believe that the jump off the cliff in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid has turned out to be the most important scene of my life. I can argue that everything good that has come out of my relationship with Hollywood was because of this scene.

  What did I know when I wrote it? About screenwriting, really very little. The first draft of Butch was done over the Christmas vacation of 1965–66, when I was, quite by accident, teaching creative writing at Princeton University.

  My then-wife Ilene and I moved to Princeton early in ’65, when our second daughter, Susanna, was about to be born. I remember, just as we were settling in, getting news of a start date for Harper, my first American film. (I had doctored Masquerade the year before.)

  I think I may have done another screenplay around this time. In the Spring the War Ended, from the fine novel by Richard Zinackis. A marvelous piece of material, and as current now as then—it was about American deserters in World War II, thousands of them, all of them hiding out in Brussels. Their nightmare was simply that when World War II ended, their own private war was about to begin—ignored while the cannons blasted, now they were targeted, and how were they going to survive, somehow get back home?

  I wrote the screenplay and the producer liked it, gave it to a top director, Martin Ritt, who climbed immediately onboard. But Fox, the studio that owned the material, buried the project because they needed all the Pentagon cooperation they could get, since they were about to enter production on Patton.

  I don’t remember if I swore off movies at the time, but I was more than a little frustrated, and very pissed. And certainly, for the time being, a novelist again.

  The teaching came about this way.

  We had moved, I had taken a room at an inn there where I planned to write. Then the writing professor came calling. Princeton had two in those days, the regular full-time guy, and a visiting guy.

  It turned out it was the regular guy who contacted me, because he had suddenly gotten a shot at a year’s sabbatical and in order to accept it he had to find another writer immediately to replace him. And since I was right there in town, I was asked.

  And I was thrilled. Every piece of nonfiction I’ve ever tried has had, at its basis, teaching. I always wondered how I would like the life of a professor. I talked it over with Ilene and we agreed there was no downside. The job would be seven or eight hours a week of teaching and seminars, and for the rest, I would get to work on a novel. I had not attempted anything in over two years, having been wiped out by Boys and Girls Together. (I had wanted to write a long novel. Dumbest thing I ever did.)

  It was finished in ’63, published in ’64 to brutal reviews. I was on the verge of tears for a month. The good thing that came out of it was that I decided never again to let the fuckers get to me. I have not read a review of anything of mine in thirty-five years now, and never will, good or bad.

  Aside: I don’t think that’s a terrible idea for us. If there is a critic you love—and I don’t care from what field—then you must read that critic, whether he is dealing with your work or anyone else’s. If you detest them, as you should, if you find them poor sad inept creatures, as they are, if you feel that not only are they failures as critics—which goes with the job—but worse, failures in life, then why on earth would you bother to read them? End of aside.

  A word about my work habits. I was a total writing failure growing up. By which I mean I could never get anything published, not even when at Oberlin I was fiction editor of the literary magazine. There were three of us who decided what got printed, two brilliant young women and moi, one of them the poetry editor, one the overall boss. All work was submitted anonymously, and each issue I would take my latest glory and stick it in with the other stories, and each time when the three of us met—I can still feel my heart pounding—oh God, I wanted someone here on earth to admit that I might, just might, please let me have just a fucking smidgen of talent.

  “Well, we can’t publish this shit.” That’s what my two lady friends would say. Each issue. “Well, we can’t publish this shit.”

  I took a creative writing course at Oberlin
. I was the only one in it who wanted to write. Got the only C. Everyone else, B-pluses or A’s.

  I remember my oldest friend on earth, John Kander, of Kander and Ebb the songwriting team (Chicago, Cabaret, New York, New York) was in the class and the day before each assignment was due—and I would have spent hours and hours and hours on my stories, working all week on them—Kander would look at his watch and say he better get started on a story.

  Get started on a story. The fucker hadn’t even begun, hadn’t given it a thought. And each week when he got his A and I got my C, he couldn’t help it, he would fight it, he apologized for his behavior—but he would just get helpless with laughter.

  I took an essay-writing course. The half-dozen most brilliant girls at Oberlin—no place has more brilliant girls than Oberlin—and I was the class idiot. (I am not making this shit up.)

  The teacher, wonderful Professor Roellinger, would always start with me. And these genius girls would sit there, nodding silently. Then Roellinger would say, “Who can help Bill out on this?”

  And they would all raise their brilliant little hands.

  And they were so nice. “That’s some of your best work,” they would assure me, “but perhaps it would make more sense, Bill, if you put your first point before your second point instead of after.”

  I took a creative writing course at Northwestern one summer. Worst grade in the class. Again. No sign of talent. Again.

  And I so wanted to write. I had these stories and I wanted to tell them and I was telling them but everybody turned away.

  I graduate Oberlin in ’52, go into the Army, am sent to the Pentagon by mistake. (Since I am clearly as inept as I was back in essay-writing class, getting stuff out of order, I will now make sense of that last sentence.)

  It is the fall of 1952, and I am at Camp Breckinridge, Kentucky, doing basic training. Basic training in those days was sixteen weeks’ duration, the first eight military stuff—marching, firing, pulling pins, etc.—and the last eight a speciality.

  Since I could type, I was sent, with gasping clarity, to clerical school, along, that same day, with six other guys. All of us college grads, none of us dumb. Immediately we are the teachers in the school.

  The captain in charge of the clerical school knew one thing only: God had, for some reason, smiled on him. Because he was a crazed golfer and he realized that for the next twenty-two months—the remainder of our military commitment—he could do nothing but work on his golf game.

  We seven could run the school without his presence.

  How to keep us, though. Easy. He wrote a letter to the Pentagon, requesting that we be assigned to his clerical school until discharge. We were, he wrote, these fabulous, brilliant, and hardworking privates. The best.

  The Pentagon got his letter and this was their reply: Fuck you. If these seven guys are as brilliant and fabulous, not to mention hardworking, as you say, we want them here. Great jobs await them here.

  His request denied, his heart broken, the captain watched us run his place for the weeks remaining. And then, sob, he was alone again with the usual run of recruits one got in those days.

  And we were sent to the Pentagon?

  We were and we weren’t.

  During World War II, soldiers were sent overseas direct from basic training. I think the five Sullivan brothers—all killed aboard ship without a chance to say goodbye to their loved ones—were the reason things changed.

  At any rate, all soldiers, at least in 1952, were given two weeks’ leave after basic, before reporting. The seven of us went home, said our goodbyes to our families, then joined up again in Washington, a fortnight later, all of us wondering what our “great jobs” would be.

  We never found out. Because during the two weeks that we were home the jobs were filled by others. So there we were, in Washington, with no jobs. What was the Army going to do with us?

  We found out later that day—send us to Korea. They were going to ship our asses out immediately. On the next troop ship leaving for Korea.

  Which never came.

  The Korean War was winding down, there was no more use for us there. (We did not know this at the time, of course. The idea of getting “sent over” lingered with us. Providing not good thoughts. All those terrifying possibilities.)

  So there we were, at the Pentagon, with twenty months to get through and no job. What we did not know was that to the ordinary Pentagon civilian boss, we were gold. The more people you have under you, the more power you have and the higher your rating.

  We were sent to the basement. Where we did a lot of reading at our desks. And had an amazing number of rubber-band fights. This sounds childish, I suppose—suppose shit, it was incredibly childish—but we were going crazy from boredom. We got amazingly accurate with rubber bands and were the only office in Pentagon history—we are talking of the highlight of my military career, understand—that was refused a request for additional rubber bands.

  Those twenty months were an amazing waste for us all. I remember once being given an entire sixty-page (or so) booklet containing abbreviations for every job title in the military. My job: improve them as I retyped them. I actually made the front page of The Washington Post when they discovered that one of my abbreviations had more letters in it than the job title it was abbreviating.

  Another assignment was to copy an entire document of considerable length, and you must understand this, I am a fast typist but not an accurate one, and it took me weeks to do what my lady boss wanted, and when I finally finally was done, I gave it to her and she took it with two fingers and right in front of me dumped it in the wastebasket.

  At night, after supper, I went back to the Pentagon, alone, went into my office, now empty, and night after night wrote my stories. I don’t know how many, but I do know this—none of them were accepted by any of the magazines I sent them to.

  The Army got rid of me in September ’54—Corporal William Goldman if you please—and I went back to Highland Park, Illinois, for a couple of days before starting grad school at Columbia.

  That first night home the phone rang and it was a friend who was about to get discharged from nearby Fort Sheridan. “Do you want to see Gunga Din?” he said.

  I always want to see Gunga Din. It is, with no doubt whatsoever, the greatest movie ever made. And only an idiot (or a critic) would argue that point. Sure, I said, where?

  “It’s playing here on post.”

  Just tell me when, and I’m there, I told him.

  “One problem,” he explained. “You’ve got to be a soldier to get in.” And that, sports fans, is how I spent my first civilian night—getting illegally back into my corporal’s uniform, feeling guilty as shit, and terrified, lying my way back onto an Army base to see that joyous film.

  Great as ever.

  Columbia began terribly. My Oberlin record was so pathetic I could not get accepted on merit.

  So dear departed friend Douglas Moore, the head of the Columbia Music Department, used his powers and I was accepted.

  Registration day will always stay with me. Columbia was a big university, Oberlin was a small college. I had never seen so many students as that first morning. I went to the English Department, was given a form that had to be initialed by the professors whose classes I was taking, then bring the form back for authentication.

  Hours and hours of standing in lines, getting some courses, not getting others, then finally, kind of triumphant, mid-afternoon, back to the English Department, where I gave the form to the secretary of the department. She looked at it—and boy is this etched in acid in my memory—said this: “But this is the wrong form.”

  I tried to explain: she had given it to me.

  Did not faze her. “You’ll have to do it all over again” was her reply, ripping it up, handing me another with this hate-filled smile. “You don’t mind doing that, do you, Mr. Goldman? After all, you’re lucky to be here.”

  As I type this I realize something—she kind of looked like Linda Tripp.


  I studied my ass off, was tops in my class again, first time since eighth grade. I went on writing my stories during my two Columbia years—got a master’s with honors, had the hours for a doctorate—got one job offer—Duluth University, teaching English comp, I think, for $3,200 a year.

  But I didn’t want to teach in Duluth. And I didn’t want to go back to Chicago and get some job writing copy at an ad agency. I knew if I did I would die of alcohol.

  Because I wanted to tell my stories.

  I had over a hundred rejection slips by then. Never even one scrawled note of encouragement from some kind editor. It was getting harder for me to go to my desk. Confidence is everything and mine was going, going so fast.

  So—and I don’t know where the madness came from—in despair, twenty-four years old, a total failure in life, I went back home to Highland Park and, in my small bedroom, on the twenty-fifth of June, 1956, I sat down at my desk and started typing.

  I had no idea what I was about to write, but I knew I had to write something, and so, for three weeks, I wrote, just sitting there, and this thing burst out of me, and I cannot tell you how strange that was, since I had never in my life been even on a this page before, and suddenly there I was on this page, and then this page, and what country I was visiting I had no idea, or how I got there, or was I going to get out alive.

  As I write this, I can still see myself lying in bed those nights, having no idea what I was going to type the next day, but knowing I had to get something down—I left my body those nights, I was floating on the ceiling, looking down at the me thrashing and wondering what tomorrow could bring.

  On July 14th, it was done. It had a title: The Temple of Gold (from the climb Gunga Din does to save everybody, never mind that he gets shot to death in the process, never mind that he knew it was going to happen).