I Hated to Do It: Stories of a Life

by Donald C. Farber

  Random House and all the major and even minor publishers have changed their standard contracts to provide specifically that they acquire not only publishing rights but the electronic publishing rights, which was an additional argument in the original lawsuit, noting that if the language of the original grant was sufficient, why did Random House rush to change its clause to be more specific about acquiring those electronic rights?

  Where are the authors on this subject? Random House and the other major book publishers offer the authors a royalty of 25 percent of the net receipts from a book, and Rosetta offers at least 50 percent of the net receipts, sometimes more. As trustee of the Vonnegut Copyright Trust, where this author stands is an easy answer for me.

  That isn’t all. In recent years, Arthur and I have been working together on a number of projects that are good for both the Vonnegut Trust and for RosettaBooks. We try to divide the work, with one principle in mind, and that is that someone else do the work.

  I think the reason that we get along so well is that Arthur and I agree on everything except those very few things that he knows that I should know and that I don’t know, and except those very few things that I know that he should know and that he doesn’t know. We also seem to have a lot in common, agreeing on most social, cultural, and political issues. I really think we both have to admit that in his case, his wife, Susan, and in my case, Annie, have been most helpful in what we do and maybe even how we do it, although I know we only dance around this idea, without ever completely acknowledging it to anyone.

  You bet, I like Arthur. He is smart and his cryptic ripostes in our e-mails are always amusing.

  Heartbroken

  It was a friendly, warm gathering as we got together at our apartment for drinks and dinner to celebrate the twenty-fifth wedding anniversary of Jane and Kurt Vonnegut. Everyone was in good spirits, and it appeared that a good time was had by all.

  The next morning Jane showed up at my office early to tell me that Kurt had left her. Jane was a dear woman whom Annie and I were very close to. She was a caring mother, so proud of Kurt’s work, sensitive, smart, and well loved. She was heartbroken at the thought of not being with Kurt, especially since she had gone through the hard times with him and now he was becoming famous, well-known, and sought after.

  ***

  Kurt leaving Jane was happening at the same time that Mark Vonnegut, their son, was in British Columbia going through his hippie stage. Mark was not well, but Kurt and Jane were separated, Jane back in Barnstable and Kurt in New York City, and Annie and I were the only contact with Mark, which occurred through the voice of someone we did not know at the other end of the telephone. We would get a phone call about Mark, or we would hear from the hospital and have to get in touch with Kurt. It was a frantic time, and Mark ended up receiving some shock therapy even though it was not legally permitted without certain approvals. Mark later graduated from medical school at Harvard with honors and is now a happy pediatrician in Boston, doing what he wanted to do, saving lives.

  Neither Kurt nor Jane wanted to embarrass me by asking me to represent them with a divorce, so each engaged an attorney. Each attorney was so bent on proving how good he was, so there never could be a meeting of the minds since each attorney was making unreasonable demands of the other party. Finally, in desperation, Kurt came to me and said, “You know, Don, Jane and I really should be divorced, why don’t you represent both of us and get this thing settled in a reasonable manner?”

  Now, no lawyer in his right mind likes to represent both opposing parties in a litigation matter, especially in a matrimonial matter like a divorce, and litigation was something I rarely, if ever, participated in. I did have one case where under the same kind of circumstances I was drafted to do the job when I represented Geraldo Rivera and Edie Vonnegut both with their divorce, and that one turned out well for all parties.

  With Kurt and Jane, wanting to help my friends, I said that I would do it on one condition, and that condition would be that when we worked out the separation agreement to their mutual satisfaction, before proceeding, it would have to be approved by an attorney selected by Jane. The attorney Jane selected carefully read the agreement, suggested one minor change, which I immediately agreed to, and Jane and Kurt were no longer married.

  During his lifetime Kurt started three separate divorces from the person he married after Jane. In each case, Kurt asked that I furnish him with a divorce lawyer, and each divorce was ended at his request.

  Duke Ellington

  After one of our trips to California with Kurt, I had finally worked out all of the details of something I had been working on for several months. I was proud and happy. I had previously acquired the rights to do a musical stage adaptation of The Hustler, which was a novel written by Walter Tevis, published in 1959. It was the story of Edward “Fast Eddie” Felson, and in 1961, it was made into a film, which was a critical and commercial success and was nominated for multiple Academy Awards. It remains widely regarded as a classic.

  The film starred Paul Newman as Fast Eddie and included Jackie Gleason in the cast. I had actually negotiated the acquisition of the rights with Walter Tevis, whom I remember lived in Chicago at the time. This was a real coup for me, acquiring those rights, and I had arranged for two of my clients to participate in making the musical stage play. Kurt had agreed to write the book for the play and Duke Ellington was going to do the music. Kurt and the Duke would both do the lyrics as required. I still have the original contract signed by the Duke, which I keep on my desk.

  Duke Ellington was very famous. His music was being played everywhere, and his band, with him leading it, was touring the country. He always appeared in the most prestigious places. When he was in New York City, he played the Rainbow Room. The Rainbow Room was elegant. From the sixty-fifth floor of Rockefeller Center, one could see the city lit up at night, and Central Park was magnificent. The restaurant served quality food and drinks, and yes, one paid for the entertainment, to see and hear the Duke, and also paid for the food and drink, which was not cheap.

  Duke and his orchestra always brought down the house by playing the pieces he composed that had become so famous and still are today, like “Take The ‘A’ Train,” “Sophisticated Lady,” “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing),” “I Got It Bad (and That Ain’t Good),” “Solitude,” and that haunting piece “Mood Indigo.” Of course he would play up in Harlem also, but we always saw him at the Rainbow Room.

  I do have to admit that when we went to the Rainbow Room for performances by the Duke, I was always pleased that he would kiss Annie twice, even though he would only kiss me once. Duke knew what he was doing.

  Unfortunately, the play never got written and never got made. Duke died in April of 1974 at the age of seventy-five, before he could write the music for the play. We had it all worked out how we were going to depict the pool scenes on stage. It was a disappointment that I shared with Kurt, who had been looking forward to working with Duke on this venture.

  Duke’s Manager Cress and Lady Day

  I had met the Duke through his manager, Cress Courtney. How I met Cress, I will never know. Cress was a bit beyond belief. He managed Duke and knew a lot about the business. In fact, his knowledge of the business and his knowledge of the lives of some of the people in the business turned into a very embarrassing adventure for us one evening.

  Wanting to take Cress and his wife to an event that might be of interest to them, we hired a limo and picked them up at their brownstone in lower Midtown on the East Side. We knew Cress drank, as most of us did, and he sometimes may have drunk a little more than most of us did. That night he probably drank a lot more than most of us did. We were taking him and his wife, Shirley, to see a play, Lady Day, about Billie Holiday, which was at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. As fate would have it, the star of the show had written the book of the play and was also a client of mine. We were seated at the rear of the theatre, and about four minutes after the curtain went up and they
were into the life of Billie Holiday, Cress, sitting directly in front of us, sprang to his feet and shouted for all to hear, “It didn’t happen that way!” His wife pulled him down and the rest of the first act was interrupted on several more occasions with shouts of, “It didn’t happen that way.”

  Now it may not have happened that way, and Cress may have been right about how it did happen. But a play about Billie Holiday was taking place on the stage that night, and the author may have taken some artistic leeway with the actual facts, if anyone really knew what those actual facts were.

  At intermission, my wife and I stayed clear of Cress and Shirley, but we think, from what we heard, that she had threatened to divorce him if he didn’t keep his mouth shut. There was some angry shouting back and forth. We returned to our seats, and during the second act, Cress did not say a single word.

  Bruce Campbell and Dick Shawn, Funny Man

  We had become very friendly with one of Kurt’s avid fans, Bruce Campbell. Bruce was a fascinating character who loved Kurt’s work. Actually, Bruce had produced one of the most famous antiwar movies of all time, Johnny Got His Gun. Bruce was also married and divorced from the daughter of Dalton Trumbo, the man who wrote the novel, published in 1938, that the film Johnny Got His Gun was based on.

  Bruce was thoughtless on occasion. His memorable line was, “I should have grabbed a broomstick.” He took his young daughter for the weekend, and when his ex-wife wanted the kid back, Bruce just kept the kid. So when there were armed police officers in his front yard who wanted to take his daughter to her mom, Bruce appeared on the steps in the front of the house with a BB gun. Which is why, had he grabbed a broomstick, they would not have shot him in the leg, and he wouldn’t be limping around.

  Wherever Bruce traveled, and he traveled a lot, he always carried trunks full of Vonnegut books and memorabilia, which he displayed. His father started one of the most famous talent agencies in the country, and Bruce knew people, but he was always broke. When we first met him, I think he was living out of his car; that is, before he moved into the gatehouse of Mommie Dearest, the daughter of Joan Crawford.

  Bruce was always looking for a new venture for me and for Kurt. He decided that we should see this performer Dick Shawn, who was working in a club in LA. So Kurt, Annie, and I got on a plane and headed west. Dick Shawn was indeed funny. He had a major part in the film of The Producers, and Bruce got the idea he should be on Broadway. We caught the act and the next day lunched with Dick. He was a very smart, sensitive man, and Broadway was where we wanted to arrange for Dick to perform. What is ironic is that Dick Shawn never made it to Broadway, but rumor is that he had convinced Jackie Mason to do the Broadway bit, and he made a big success of it. Bruce told me that Dick Shawn was too insecure about the move to Broadway.

  The act we saw in LA back then was memorable. Dick Shawn was inventive, and in addition to the humor, he often did routines with some social significance.

  He dealt with the Big Questions. Evolution. Religion. Cosmogony. Freud. Everything was delivered in a Pirandello-like setting: you were never quite sure that his wacko theories—that dinosaurs perished because they could only walk forward, for example—were not really convictions of an odd sort.

  The rubble of wadded newspapers has been a staple of the show since Shawn first performed it in nightclubs. The first part of the show is given over to a comedic monologue that could be entitled “The Evolution of the World According to Dick Shawn”: “In the beginning, man didn’t know he had a brain. What did he need a brain for? There was nothing to remember.”

  Dick Shawn died onstage when he had a heart attack in the middle of a performance. I always thought he lived up to his reputation of being the funniest comedian of our time. Kurt, as we did, enjoyed his performance, but Dick never did make it to Broadway. We met him for lunch and talked about it, but it didn’t happen.

  Discussions in My Office with Kurt

  Kurt took the dollar bill for the rights to produce one of his plays in Japan and threw a dime on the desk for the commission.

  A royalty check was just deposited for $15.83 for one of his poems that was used as the lyrics on a CD.

  Kurt’s response: “Better than a poke in the eye!”

  A royalty check for a few hundred thousand dollars was also just deposited.

  Kurt’s response: “Almost worth a poke in the eye!”

  A Polish Translation

  In 1972 I received a copy of a Polish translation entitled Rzeźnia numer pięċ, which, since it had a number in the title, I figured had to be Slaughterhouse-Five. So what does Kurt write in the front of my Polish translation? “Dear Don—Why did the Pollack have fifty-three holes in his head? He was trying to learn to eat with a fork. Love, Kurt Vonnegut.”

  Kurt had a chance twenty years later to tease me about something else Polish, and he did just that. I got involved representing Victor Kubiak (pronounced Wiktor), who produced and presented a musical play on Broadway entitled Metro. Victor flew Annie and me over to Poland for a weekend just so we could see the play in Warsaw. We loved the kids involved in the play, who were all poor kids that Victor fed and clothed and trained to be actors. We loved the Stoklosa music and hoped for the best. Frank Rich, the critic of the Times, gave it an awful review, and Kurt never let me hear the end of it. In fact, in addition to the Polish joke he wrote in the book, Kurt had to tell me that in Poland all Coke bottles said at the bottom, “Open other end.”

  Rodney Dangerfield and Back to School

  I received a request for Kurt to perform in a Rodney Dangerfield movie. As usual, I phoned Kurt and we talked about it. The theme of the movie, as most everyone now knows, is Rodney goes back to the college his kid is attending and is buying people to do his classwork for him. Someone asks him, “Who’s writing your English paper on one of Kurt’s books?” There is a knock at the door, and Kurt looks in and says, “My name is Kurt Vonnegut.” When the offer of a few thousand dollars was made, Kurt and I decided it wasn’t worth his time to fly out to California and go to the trouble involved in multiple film takes, so I said they would have to “make us an offer Kurt can’t refuse.” When they quadrupled the offer, I called attention to the fact that the offer was still one that could be refused. A new offer of about ten times the original offer looked good enough for Kurt to make the trip to our beloved Hollywood. Kurt was paid handsomely for those five words, and the scene has become one of those film classics often referred to by film lovers. He was paid handsomely not because he wanted more money; he just didn’t want to do it.

  Kilgore Rosewater

  With me, his lawyer, his friend, his buddy, Kurt was social, business, and all things, speaking almost every day for almost forty years, sometimes three or four times a day, and missing a day on occasion. With this going on, how could one not know Kurt from every aspect better than anyone else in the world? “Better than anyone else in the world” did not necessarily answer many questions about Kurt.

  It got to be a habit. Kurt and I would talk on the phone, usually early in the day for starters. That was when I would get to the office around nine o’clock, and this one day when Kurt hadn’t called by ten thirty, I called his home only to learn that Kurt was not up yet. I knew this was not like Kurt. I raced from the office, hopped into a cab, and was at his house in five minutes. I literally ran up the stairs to the fourth-floor small nest where Kurt worked.

  Kurt lived in this brownstone, painted white, that had three floors and a narrow, winding staircase leading up to a small, very small, pigeonhole on the fourth floor where Kurt had his bed and his typewriter so that the typing would not bother anyone.

  Kurt was mumbling not understandably, except I heard him sort of say, “I guess I had a drink and took the wrong pill.” There were several pillboxes on the window ledge and some appeared empty. I knew I would have to get an ambulance and get him to a hospital fast. I am about five feet seven and Kurt was about six feet three, so I knew I could never get him down the winding staircase from t
he fourth floor. I was very worried, so I called an ambulette, urging them to hurry, and they did.

  The ambulette arrived with two husky guys who carried Kurt down those stairs to the ambulette, relieving me of the chore, which of course was an impossibility.

  Other than the medical workers, I was alone with Kurt in the ambulette and he muttered, “Don’t let them take me to the hospital up here, I want to go down to the Village.” He knew another family member had a not very good experience at an uptown facility, and I made sure we got him to St. Vincent’s Hospital downtown.

  The doctor in the emergency room at St. Vincent’s, Dennis Greenbaum, had met Kurt personally at our house, so when Kurt arrived, for good reasons he was smart enough to sign Kurt in and registered him in the hospital under the name I suggested, Kilgore Rosewater. It was not necessary at this time to publicize that Kurt was hospitalized. The press was in the dark, and unfortunately I had failed to notify some people that Kurt was Kilgore Rosewater in the hospital. An honest oversight on my part that didn’t sit well with some.

  Annie and I visited Kurt while he was in the communal room for the patients who were mentally disturbed, where he and the rest of the patients were being watched. He was very funny. He said, “This is great. I go upstairs to the game room and the guys up there are so confused they believe everything I tell them, and I haven’t lost a single game of Ping-Pong.”

  Kurt was partly sedated when Sidney Offit and I stood at the foot of his bed and we talked about what to do when he got out of there. Because we didn’t want to ask Kurt in his then state, Sidney and I never did find out for sure why Kurt took the “wrong pill,” but we talked around it with Kurt and we both knew. We both knew it was more than one pill, and we both knew why he took the pills, but that is one of the secrets that neither Sidney nor I have any intentions of discussing except between ourselves, which we did.

  It’s one thing to help a person with his money, to pay the bills, to make the film deals, and it is another thing to advise a person about his personal life when you know that events in that personal life must have prompted the person to swallow a bunch of pills. Actually, not only did Sidney and I know why it happened, but Kurt knew that we knew why it happened. And Sidney and I, knowing Kurt, also knew that what we could do to help our dear friend Kurt was limited by Kurt’s mixed feelings and his emotional state of mind.