Off to the Side

by Jim Harrison

  After trips to Brazil, Ecuador, and Costa Rica I became convinced that American literary critics had been amiss when writing about supposed “magical realism.” All of our life processes and the natural world are viewed quite differently in South and Central America. Borges, García Márquez, and dozens of others are decidedly not white Protestants and to refer to their prose as magical realism is demeaning to them. It’s simply their realism. As you sit on a veranda listening to old sambas while looking at the warm Atlantic, including the old prewar samba “Estrella Dalva” (O morning star), the world becomes far wider, more haunted and timeless. Even the ocean looks larger with Imanja rising from the sea like Botticelli’s Venus in her curved shell.

  One summer morning in 1987 the director Hal Ashby stopped by the cabin. I could hear his Corvette thumping its bottom along my rumpled two-track for minutes before he drove into the clearing. He had called the tavern the night before saying that he was driving from New York to L.A. and would be in the area. This seemed to be a little odd because the cabin was about a thousand miles out of the way from a direct line between New York and Los Angeles. I knew from both Jack and Warren Beatty that Hal was perhaps fatally ill and though we were not close we had spoken any number of times of trying to do a project together. We spent several hours pleasantly talking and he said he understood why I loved the cabin. When he drove off I figured he was just saying good-bye to friends.

  Despite my confusion I liked certain people in the film business very much. Some people despite their massive celebrity are very appealing on an ordinary basis. I was very sorry at the death of John Belushi who didn’t seem all that crazy by Key West standards. One late evening while we were talking about teaming up for The Confederacy of Dunces he said he hoped he wouldn’t have to gain weight for the role, and this after eating a massive pizza by himself. Belushi was either morose or soaring, a rare and true comic genius. I kept thinking of the Old West phrase that despite his evident brilliance he simply “didn’t have a lick of sense.” I also found Don Henley of the Eagles very amenable. I was always struck by the high price, their entire lives, that musicians of magnum success end up paying, wherein they are forced to become permanent spectacles like public monuments. This is not a matter of sympathy but truth. Rock and roll didn’t really touch me like jazz and rhythm and blues, though I was quite overwhelmed one night at the Top of the Rox to hear James Taylor singing to five of us. There were many others I didn’t know well but impressed me, like Bill Murray who seemed to have Nicholson’s unilateral stability. The same with Danny DeVito. John Candy was wonderful but you weren’t very confident that he would make it and he didn’t. It’s never been adequately explained why owning comic genius is the most grueling of all.

  I was quite lucky to have the soothing company of both Lou Adler and Nicholson who handled L.A. as if it were their own personal birthday cake. Going to the Lakers games drew you away from the quarrels of meetings, in addition to just seeing splendid basketball, which never quite works on television. Jack and Louis had seats on the floor next to the visitor’s bench where the game was improbably visceral and the subtlety of the moves detectable. They also co-owned a guesthouse in Aspen. Once at the foot of Little Nell in an apartment I sat all afternoon with Art Garfunkel eating cheeseburgers, drinking beer, and keeping track of the way skiers fell down. Later Arty stopped at our farm in northern Michigan on his meticulously mapped walk across America. I had studied the map in his New York condo, also the log of the books he read, which was chastening in view of my own sloppiness.

  I’ve often supposed that my survival with a modicum of sanity depended on the way I continued fishing and hunting for two months a year, and often more than that, whether in Key West, Montana, Michigan, Mexico, Ecuador, or Costa Rica, though by 1990 Key West had worn out for me because I couldn’t bear all the changes, the burgeoning tourism that was doubtless a good thing for some but not for me. My claustrophobia has predicated where I’ve lived and traveled, and the limitations could be irksome. Once I couldn’t hang in there in New York for a possibly rewarding meeting with Harrison Ford because it had been raining several days and the relentless beeping of cars and cabs drove me batty. Under usual circumstances both New York and Paris are made tolerable by my walking several hours a day. Paris has made legal inroads on the beeping problem but not New York. In the eighties and early nineties my sure cure for claustrophobia was long driving trips, usually solo, but sometimes with Dan Gerber until a painful divorce dug a three-year hole in his life. He has since recovered. Divorces can be harrowing for friends who are invariably asked to take sides. For a couple of years I carried a dog whistle and when people would talk about their divorces I’d blow the whistle loudly.

  Miserable projects were often leavened by the steadiness of the people involved. I worked well on a dead-end project with Sydney Pollack and Mark Rosenberg. I had come up with a story about a group of sixties radicals who went to a university together and reunited while trying to get their old ringleader out of a Mexican prison. I knew the material well and thought I had written a good version but Sydney didn’t like it. Mark liked most of it and had a broad background as a student radical. It was a loggerhead situation, which reminded me of the time Taylor Hackford wanted Edward Curtis to shoot someone in my screenplay, something I couldn’t do with a historical figure who never shot anyone. As the years went by I blamed Taylor Hackford less and less because the connection between movies and reality is questionable at best, and the pretension of biographical reality should be avoided because those who are knowledgeable or directly involved will yell foul. Something similar comes up in literature in translation when someone expertly translates the sense of a poem but then it’s no longer a poem. With Sydney and Mark it became evident that the material was still too raw to deal with. At the height of the noontime quarrel one day Bill Murray burst in the garden door of Sydney’s office, sat on Mark’s lap, and began eating his lunch. Mark was a glutton like myself and his feelings were clearly hurt, but at that moment I figured out what was wrong with my screenplay. Ordinary radical leaders are boring. A week with Ralph Nader would leave one comatose and wanting to wrestle with the Sex Pistols.

  On trips to L.A. after completing three or four days of meetings during which I’d stay in a hotel I would move up to Nicholson’s for a few days of cooling off before going home. I learned to do the same thing in New York, spending at least an extra day merely walking, eating, and spending time with friends. If you want your marriage to last you don’t want to come home with the acrid smoke still coming out of your ears. At Nicholson’s I’d swim for a couple of hours and then follow whatever the program was. Dog paddling always seemed my most appropriate Hollywood stroke. One day we went over to Mike Eisner’s for a fund-raising lunch for Bill Bradley who was my favorite politician well before I met him. Bradley had ended up marrying Ernestine Schlandt, a Ph.D. in comparative literature and a colleague from my days at Stony Brook. I later went with Jack to a fund-raiser in New Jersey for Bradley, and few years further down the line I went to Washington to do the early Charlie Rose Show and to spend an evening with Bradley, for whom I was writing some environmental piths, gists, quips for his speeches. The Eisner lunch was a preposterous case of a writer being off to the side, as I certainly didn’t belong to the group of hotshots and moguls. I felt as addled as I did one day in a cabana at the Beverley Hills Hotel and a mobster offered me a true bundle of cash to write a screenplay for an unnamed star and I asked where do I put the cash? Under my daughter’s bed? Eisner is a man who, like Barry Diller and David Geffen, is able to see the entertainment business in the manner of what John Huston prescribed for directors: topographically, with the large view not preventing the consciousness of details. I sent Eisner a copy of my novel Dalva when it was published and within days I got a letter back explaining why it wouldn’t make a movie though he liked the novel. The busiest people seem to have time to get everything done. This is only offering respect to a kind of person with abilitie
s remote from your own interests.

  Nicholson more than any other major star I’ve met knew how to protect himself, how to live a private life with his books and paintings away from the public eye. It was a matter of controlling all incursions whether in Beverly Hills, New York, Paris, or London. This requires a good deal of precision and energy, of knowing what you want to a degree that I as a writer found forbidding. Of course I saw this kind of social pressure only at a distance, and when a certain amount of it arrived for me in France I mostly wanted to run for the cover of Arles or Marseilles, whereas famous actors and actresses have to cooperate to a certain extent because it’s part of their livelihood. Nicholson also used his place outside of Aspen as a retreat. Aspen people like Parisians tend to leave their noteworthy citizens alone. One morning in Aspen we looked at stacks of possible screenplays for hours and our reward was to go to a fashion show about which I wasn’t enthused until I learned that our seats would be backstage where the ladies changed outfits.

  Even at a goodly distance of time I’ve not been able to draw specific conclusions about show business except minor ones, like certain actors and producers are spectacularly good drivers. Jack, Harrison Ford, Sydney Pollack, and the producer Doug Wick always amazed me when driving, partially because I’m so lousy in traffic. Having only one eye doesn’t help. In fifty or so trips to L.A. I tried to drive from the airport in a rental car only once, a shattering experience. After rush hour I could drive locally though not well in Beverly Hills and environs though other cars would beep at me for driving too slow. Once during a long stay at the Beverly Hills Hotel Jack had loaned me an older mint El Dorado convertible, but after a few days I found the car decidedly unliterary, filling me with anxiety over wrecking it. I felt like a goofy showbiz pimp which may have been close to the mark. A number of times I asked studios to have a five-year-old brown Taurus station wagon sent to my hotel but they were never able to deliver.

  Having two daughters made me a little more aware of how actresses are treated. The situation comes close to the inscrutable in that actresses are rarely as “bankable” as actors but nearly all producers and studio powers are male, hence the movies that get made tend to be male-oriented. Maybe it’s an insuperable “sexist” problem (a foggy word). I think of actresses I have known, some of them only slightly, and none of them seem to fit the overweening media renditions of actresses. Jessica Lang, Madeleine Stowe, Deborah Winger, Michelle Pfeiffer, Anjelica Huston, Lauren Hutton, Winona Ryder, Amy Irving, Jeanne Moreau, and Catherine Deneuve have struck me as far less impulsive and ditzy than an equally long list of their male counterparts. Perhaps I become jaundiced by the fact that actresses are far more interested in literature. For instance, when I had drinks with Lauren Hutton at the Top of the Rox we talked about William Carlos Williams. I’m not saying that these women are “bookworms” but that they were far better read as a group than any other save English teachers. All of them seemed to have a somewhat melancholy awareness of how brief the industry, if not the public, would find them acceptable on the screen. Curiously, two of the oldest, Moreau and Deneuve, struck me as the sexiest, but then there is a necessary defensive posture among actresses to keep the usual mad dogs off their tracks. The sheer fact of male-female desire is always there but both magazine pages and movie screens are thin indeed. I’ve always been irritated when occasionally angry readers think that I personally represent the hundreds of characters in my novels, some of them ful-somely unpleasant. Of course it’s impossible for actresses and actors to avoid public identification with their roles, which are just that, roles. It seems far-fetched but way back in my early time at the Sunset Marquis I talked with Arnold Schwarzenegger about German literature while he was eating an entire wheel of brie from our refrigerator after pumping fifty tons of iron in an hour at Gold’s Gym. Go figure, as they say. If you think of Hollywood, in toto, as a huge, whimsical Trojan horse moving through time it’s not surprising that the culture is largely ignorant of the nature of all the people inside the horse who make it move, make it function.

  GETTING MADE

  My fifties were a blur of work partly due to a television program. One evening after an ample dinner with good wine my wife and I began to watch a program on the homeless. I quickly began to snooze and made my way to the bedroom but when I got up for my evening’s work Linda was quite upset, untypically so. The program on the homeless had distressed her mightily, so much so that she was in tears when she announced that our daughters might someday be homeless. She has rarely been truly alarmed in our long marriage, and after she went to bed I spent a couple of hours of brooding on ways to save some money. I had less than a firm notion of what I had done with several million dollars other than pay taxes. Our farm was now a hundred acres, the house was fine, we probably had two newish cars though new cars get old at a puzzling speed, and there was also the cabin, but no accumulated savings, stocks, bonds, suchlike. Joyce regularly gave me financial reports but I always squinted past the columns of nasty details to the bottom line which offered up how much I had to spend.

  When it came to money I was shot through with comic insincerity. There were poignant details like you didn’t have to pay taxes on borrowed money which made it pleasant. During the then recent marriage of our eldest daughter Jamie to her University of Michigan classmate Stephen Potenberg we had made a dent in the better bottles in our wine cellar, some ‘49 La Tours, ‘61 Lafites, ‘58 Yquems, and I had idly thought that they totaled in value more than I had made in the first few years of our marriage. Jamie, who had been self-supporting in New York City for a number of years working for Dean & Deluca and Rolling Stone, had actually hidden a number of fine bottles so I wouldn’t swill them all during my melancholy nights. The facts of financial life that homeless evening became quite lurid due to a Dickensian sentimentality I absorbed from my father in whose life it was far more justified. There was the perpetual image of an early painting, Orphan in the Storm, or the London or New York street kid walking home in shabby knickers with a loaf of bread he had earned. Much more powerful were the images from reading Hamlin Garland or Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. The fact that all of this had nothing to do with my actual situation was irrelevant. Within the perimeters of the mystery of money I kept thinking of the biblical rich man wherein he is described as owning three camels, two horses, and a granary full of grain. The fact that a billion people in the world live on less than a buck a day does not seem to decrease the shower of tears coming to those whose worth was reduced in the plunge of the technicals from five hundred to two hundred million. When I received fifty times less for writing the work than the actor who performed it I had a fairly clear notion of the system that made this possible, but this was only a small detail in an economic life in which I definitely asserted my ignorance.

  I have spent entire moments casting around for someone to blame. Why don’t they teach basic personal economics in junior high? And, better yet, beginning anthropology so that fools might get an early inkling as to why they are fools. My parents, whose sole intent was to make the monthly paycheck last a month, could scarcely give their children advice in advance in the unlikelihood that an overflow might occur. My surviving brothers and sister, John, David, and Mary, found their careers in rather altruistic occupations, and we rarely have spoken about money except in quips and nervous smiles. I am forced, finally, to accept the idea that money isn’t highly valued because I grew up in an atmosphere where money wasn’t highly valued, a world that now seems antique and archaically ethical. Our past seeps into our psyches in absurd little glimmers. I’m not paying over two bucks for a pound of butter for my cabin but then forty dollars for a bottle of olive oil seems reasonable. Cranberry juice at four dollars is an outrage but a Côte Rotie at fifty is a deal. Now that I’m older I no longer mind the acute scrutiny I accept from others on this baleful matter. Never having filled out a check stub I have fun telling others to do so.

  You feel real naked when they begin making movies you have written, m
uch more so than when you publish a book. From the very beginning with books you have accepted total responsibility, and your tender emotions don’t do that much waffling in their state of vulnerability. In a book you cease to worry whether your readers see the material the way you do because you’ll never know, though you’re tipped off in bad reviews that your efforts may have lacked universality. Good reviews that like you for the wrong reason are another matter. Movies, however, are a thoroughly collaborative art and you will clearly see how the director, producer, art director, wardrobe people, soundman, actors and actresses have understood your story.

  My aide Joyce’s husband, Bob Bahle, owns a small movie theater in Sutton’s Bay, Michigan, so I was fortunate to screen “my” movies alone or with a few friends (and a few bottles of wine). Sitting there in the dark before the projector starts you have the distinct feeling you might be raped by an elephant or, if your imagination is running to the sea, a whale. Your milky brain is full of cursory banalities … your future depends on this blah, blah, blah… your bluff has been called, argh … why is it blamed on the screenplay? That sort of thing.