by Nick Webb
Here’s a memo from the Pan files that speaks of Douglas’s sometimes exasperating need for attention.
To: Sonny
cc: Jacqui [Graham]
Re: DOUGLAS ADAMS
From: Caroline
29 October 1979
Douglas is under the impression he is having dinner with you and Jacqui on Wednesday, 31 October (Halloween). He had assumed I would be there but I told him (quite truthfully) that I had a date for dinner that night but, if asked, I would be happy to be around here for a drink earlier on. I was actually intending to wait until we had tied up terms for the second book before getting him in for a drink with you, but now he has hooked onto you via Jacqui I guess it makes no difference.
BUT he is now PESTERING me about the fucking evening. Approximately three times on Friday and twice already today. I can’t dine with him on Wednesday and I’m sure poor Jacqui has had her fill of him for a while, but maybe I’m wrong. Do you or Jacqui want to finalize what you want to do with the fucker on Wednesday and let him know—or let me know so I can give him an answer next time he calls . . . ?
Thanks.
Underneath Caroline wrote in longhand: “Bet you ten quid he gets on to either one of us by noon today! C.”
However, coping with Douglas’s stupendous talent for restaurants was the least of any publisher’s problems with him. The shatteringly stressful vexation was getting the text out of him in the first place, for Douglas enjoyed being a famous writer, but he loathed the process of becoming one. That entailed writing.
The stories of his delinquency about deadlines are, sadly, all true. Famously he said he loved deadlines because he loved the sound of them whooshing by. The reality was that his dilatoriness was just not funny. It caused a deal of grief for his publishers, but for them it was just a matter of professional inconvenience and commercial pain. Poor Douglas suffered agonizing despair when he felt he just could not do it. He was known to fall to the carpet and weep.
Publishers are used to authors running late; over the years they have evolved a nicely judged scale of responses. When an author confesses to lateness, as a publisher you cannot afford to be too urbane (“Don’t worry . . . par for the course . . . get it right rather than do it now . . .”), even if you haven’t scheduled the book in question and it’s not particularly time-sensitive. Many authors are so chronically insecure that they interpret a forgiving response as indifference (“Oh no,” they think, “my publisher doesn’t appear to want it”). This may legitimize further dilatoriness on their part. No, you have to be distinctly disappointed, but not so narked that you induce a paralysing degree of anxiety in your wayward author. On the other hand, if the work in question is a major chunk of turnover, the absence of which will make a noticeable dent in the annual accounts, and the entire trade is geared up for its arrival on a particular date, your need to get the work on time acquires an unusual sincerity. Even more so if you have paid a large advance for it.
With his third book, Life, the Universe and Everything, Douglas had decided to change agents. Jill Foster is smart, but Douglas felt that he needed representation from a high-profile heavy. Ed Victor is such a man; with his mellifluous mid-Atlantic voice, he is one of nature’s great salesmen. He is celebrated in the media world and was once listed as the man who, with his wife, Carol, a lawyer, went to more parties in London in one season than any other human being. (Henry James is supposed to be the all-time record-holder, having attended more dinner parties in one year than there are days in the year.) For Douglas’s third and fourth books, Ed had negotiated a lorry-load of money.
Now Douglas loved serious money and all the options that it could buy, but at the same time he told his friends that he felt trapped by the huge advances that imposed a pressure all of their own. If someone is paying £5 a word, they had better be bloody well-chosen words. He found it terribly difficult to get down to any work. Being preternaturally smart, he understood what he was doing and then despised himself for being so weak-willed. His crude subterfuges for not writing were never convincing, least of all to Douglas himself.
It was with So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish,* 137 Douglas’s fourth book (and the first not to be based on his radio scripts) that matters took a drastic turn.
Sonny Mehta recalls what happened:
There was always the problem of when the manuscripts were going to be delivered. I don’t think it was writer’s block so much as he hated doing it. I’m sure he always meant to write, it’s just that more interesting things came up. Either thinking, or going to the pub for a drink, or meeting some mate for lunch, or something like that. I can understand it entirely—I’m much like it myself when you come down to it. I did have a great deal of sympathy for him.
But I did lock him up in the hotel room—that is absolutely true. We were really up against the wire. We had the jacket done and all the rest of that kind of crap. Then, of course, I speak to Douglas. “How’s it going?” I say, and he says, “Oh, pretty well. You should have it in a couple of months.” This used to go on and on and on. Then I’d phone Ed, and Ed would say, “Listen, I think Douglas is working. He said you should have it in a couple of months.” And as I recollect, Ed finally said, “I think we ought to have a meeting about this.” So we all turned up at Upper Street, where Douglas and Jane were, and we sat down and had a long talk, and it became clear, actually, that Douglas had only written about twenty-five pages. So then I went back to the office, and I spoke to Simon [Master] and I said, “Look, you’re not going to have the manuscript.”
This was important, because we’d made a big fuss about the fact we were publishing it in hardcover* 138 and all the rest of it—apart from the fact that we were counting on it, just in financial terms. So I had a long talk with Ed the next morning and I said, “Look, Douglas has got to finish this book, and if we just wait, we may be waiting eighteen months, two years . . .” Clearly I was enormously concerned, and I’m sure Ed was too, because there was money in it for him too. So I said, “Why don’t I put Douglas in an environment where he’s really got to work?” Ed said, “It’s an interesting idea.”
So I came up with the wheeze of putting him in a hotel room someplace. But it was no good putting him in a hotel room if he wasn’t going to be supervised. So I said, “Look, I’m going to do this: I’m going to get a hotel suite and I’ll move in myself and make Douglas churn out pages.” Everyone thought it was a good idea if I was prepared to do it. We found the Berkeley—fucking great terrace outside, I might add . . . It did cost a few bob. I phoned Bruce Harris at Crown, and said, “Listen, this is what I’m going to do,” and it turned out those guys were even more anxious than we were at Pan, so I said, “But you’re going to have to pick up half the tab for the hotel.” There was a big silence and then they agreed.
And so I went to look at the suite, and I told Douglas that we’d better be there at 3 o’clock tomorrow, and he agreed. He and Jane talked about it. I said, “Bring clothes and whatever else—there is going to be a routine, I’ll spell it out to you when you turn up.” And we sent a cab around to pick him up.
So he turned up with a typewriter, his clothes, a guitar or two—I didn’t mind at all. [Douglas was in a Dire Straits mode at the time.] I was just so relieved the fucker turned up. The office shipped across a case of wine for me and boxes of manuscripts, so that I would be able to work. And I moved in. There were two bedrooms—I remember putting Douglas in the smaller one because I was extremely pissed off.
The reason we hit the Berkeley was he wanted to swim, and there was a pool upstairs. The other reason was that it was close to my house, so I could nip out from time to time and say hello to my wife. So I explained the routine was that I’d get him out of bed; he’d go up for a swim; we’d have breakfast; finish by 8:30 a.m. Then Douglas would sit down at this small desk with a typewriter, and I would sit in an armchair at forty-five degrees from that, my back facing him, and I’d read a manuscript. I’d wait for the sound of those fingers on his typew
riter keys—which sometimes would happen, sporadically, and then there’d be long periods of silence, and I’d turn around to check him out and see that he hadn’t croaked on me or something. He’d be sitting up, staring out the window at this roof terrace. Every now and then I’d say, “How’s it going?” And he’d say, “Fine, fine.” And you’d hear paper being crumpled and thrown into a bin.
It was quite macabre, looking back on it. Gradually the pile of manuscripts that I was reading would grow on the floor as I went through yet another submission. At the end of the day I would gather together whatever pages Douglas had written, and we’d talk about it and then I would phone the office. My assistant, Jenny [Gregorian] would turn up and collect the pages and take them to the office. Room service would come down for lunch, and in the evening we would go out to some restaurant round the corner, have dinner, and then I’d bring Douglas back, and say, “Okay Douglas, you’d better get some sleep,” and he would be sent to his room.
That is roughly what the routine was. Every now and then he would get up and play the guitar. And we’d talk a little bit . . . you know. That was about it. Occasionally I’d go through the bin to see what he’d chucked away—you know, discreetly, when he was gone to have a piss or something—and it would say things like, “Who the fuck does he think he is?” There was one page, I remember, of very choice abuse, which I actually kept and had on my notice board for quite a while—even in New York, actually. During one of the refurbishments it kind of vanished, along with other memorabilia.
This kidnapping of Douglas has entered publishing legend. Sonny and Douglas are so unlike each other that at times it must have been like some dodgy hostage siege.* 139 Sonny was extraordinarily patient, but he has always had the capacity to concentrate on a manuscript and, being incarcerated in a hotel with coffee and room service, he probably got through an unusual amount of work.
It says a lot for Sonny’s sympathy, and the general affection in which Douglas was held, that this desperate expedient was resorted to at all. Of course, Pan needed the book and you just cannot terrorize an author into creative brilliance. But there are not many industries in which a party in breach of contract would receive such succour.
Every evening in the Berkeley, Sonny would sit and read the day’s output under the close inspection of Douglas. All authors need approval. In my experience the best writers are actually or incipiently a little nuts; you have to be slightly mad to pursue such a solitary craft in the first place. Reading an author’s work in his or her presence is a kind of agony. No study of your face has ever been so close or unremitting. Was that a twitch? Did you smile? In which case, at which bit of text? Did you get that joke? For Christ’s sake, say something. Most authors are content—no, “content” is not a word that can be applied to writers—are prepared to wait until they’ve finished the book before demanding admiration from their editor. With his later books there were times when Douglas needed love almost page by page.
Sonny, who is not a natural thespian, nevertheless has authority. “This is fine, Douglas,” would carry as much weight from him as volumes of gush from a lesser figure. Despite their solitary confinement, Sonny and Douglas remained on good terms. When the final page was delivered, they went out for a dinner that was so large and alcoholic that it was erased from both their memories.
Sonny never had to lock up Douglas again. Later, Sue Freestone, first on a freelance basis and then as his editor at Heinemann, took over the role, and discharged it with empathy and compassion.
What of the book itself? It is regarded by hardcore Douglas fans as rather thin. But it is very funny and more emotional than many of his others which tend to be sparkling with intellect, but less sure on characterization and human interaction. So Long is in many ways a tender love story, and its construction—which is very episodic—is full of little scenes that are almost self-contained and that show off Douglas’s talent as a sketch writer. In Sputnik Sweetheart, Haruki Murakami, the wonderful Japanese writer whose work in some ways has been influenced by Douglas, described the story within the story forever being written by one of his characters as “the best patchwork quilt of a novel sewn by grumpy old ladies.”* 140So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish is also rather quilt-like; it’s enveloping, warm, a bit soppy, and the squares of the patchwork alternate between the surreal and the everyday. In places it reads almost as if he didn’t want to write the fantastical bits, but could not short-change his readers with their expectations of the weird.
Douglas ends the book on a note that seems both to work within the context of the narrative and to stand outside as a commentary upon it: “There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler’s mind . . .” The truth is that he really did not want to write any more if he could avoid it. He was determined to make another Hitchhiker’s sequel impossible. Unfortunately, he was so inventive that he could escape from any dead-end of plot, as he had proved already by writing around the smashing into atoms of the planet Earth. Like Conan Doyle, forced by public demand to revive Sherlock Holmes after his headlong drop with the evil Moriarty into the Reichenbach Falls, Douglas had been pushed by his legions of fans—and, let’s not be ingenuous, by the huge advances—into carrying on hitchhiking.
Heartbreakingly for many of his fans, he killed off Marvin the Paranoid Android, who, after billions of years of boredom and depression mostly spent in a car park waiting to be patronized by dim primates, is allowed blissfully, finally and irrevocably to stop.
“I think,” he murmured at last, from deep within his corroding, rattling thorax. “I feel good about it.”
It’s a message from Douglas: no more. He yearned to move on.
NINE
Hippodust, Films and the Telly Saga
“Nobody knows anything.”
WILLIAM GOLDMAN,
Adventures in the Screen Trade
“California is a great place to live if you happen to be an orange.”
FRED ALLEN
Californian evenings . . . As film people sit round their great oak-effect fires, and chronicle their adventures in the movie business, many are the tales told of the agent kings, borne on the heroic bodies of starlets from the field of battle to their Valhalla in the Polo Lounge. There they hold court, enthroned in bar furniture of the deepest plush, toying with their iced mineral water as they talk of fortunes won and lost, and deals that made or broke the names of mortal men. And of all the sagas, sung from rooftops, whispered in corners, few have been so terrible, so extended, so downright capricious as the Great Non-making of Hitchhiker, the Movie.
Shortly before he died, Douglas, with his talent for the telling analogy, said that making a film was like trying to grill a steak by having a series of people come into the room and breathe on it. In a moment’s despair, he told Ed Victor how he calculated that he’d wasted five and a half years of his life trying to get the movie made, and that, “I’m not going to spend another fucking minute on it.”
“Of course,” Ed recalled, “a month later he was back devoting himself to the film. He just wanted that film so much.”
There’s even this bitter definition in The Deeper Meaning of Liff:
Spiddle (vb)
To fritter away a perfectly good life pretending to develop a film project.
In part it is the horrific expense of making a movie that pervades the business with anxiety. It may be true that many people in the film world are unsure about their own judgement and frightened of looking like idiots, but in fairness the risks are huge. In publishing, for instance, if an editor buys a book that doesn’t sell, total loss will be the advance, the expenditure on manufacture and distribution, and the burden on overheads—tieing up costly machinery with a dog. Unless it were a huge punt on something disastrous, the total loss is unlikely to be more than tens of thousands of pounds or dollars. A movie, on the other hand, can burn up $100 million and recover only a few million in theatrical release and video sales. In a tough town like Hollywood you can
not have many disasters on that scale. Fear stalks the studio corridors like a Psycho-killer in Residence.
From the moment Hitchhiker’s was published in 1979, there was talk of a film. There had been mention of George Lucas, whose Industrial Light and Magic had stunned the world the year before with the special effects in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. However, there is no record of any flirtation with Lucas. Given that Douglas squirreled away everything (though in no kind of order), such a rumour was probably just wishful thinking.
But before the film saga could begin, the telly mini-series of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy had to come, and go.
The series was made at the end of 1980 and broadcast in six episodes from 5 January 1981 to 9 February 1981, about three months after publication of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, which was still riding high in the bestseller lists. These days, TV and film rights are usually sold together on the grounds that if both were to be exploited simultaneously they could interfere with each other. Besides, their markets are so intertwined that it makes sense to keep them linked. For instance, even were it possible to negotiate a non-exclusive contract, whose video would be released first if both a film and a telly company make a version of a particular work? Films consume such prodigious quantities of money that every right with any commercial potential known to man, not excluding stained-glass dramatization and microdots, has to be part of the deal and is factored into the original decision. At the time, however, Ed Victor was able to put the film rights into play without the TV series representing too much of an encumbrance.
The TV version was firmly in the hands of the BBC. The Beeb had been thrilled by its success with the two radio series. Being jealous of its property, it was irritated that the runaway sales of the books were being enjoyed by an external publisher. During this period the institution was emerging from its noble mantle of public service into a harsher world of commerce and it was coming under a lot of pressure from the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, a woman suffused with the frightening certainty of one whose electoral prospects had been incalculably enhanced by the bloody war over the Falkland Islands.* 141 She seemed to have an almost visceral dislike of a broadcasting corporation that many of us regarded as a national treasure. In the demonology of the right wing, the BBC was staffed by left-leaning, over-privileged, disrespectful public schoolboys who were insulated from the real world* 142 by the public’s money in the form of licence fees.