There was even a novel about the Snake Pit that was circulated surreptitiously among new inmates. Called The Wall-to-Wall Trap, the book fascinated me as the nightmare of all I hoped to avoid and feared I wouldn’t. Bill Schwartz pressed a battered copy into my hands with something like glee. I can’t say I remember it well, but I seem to recall that it featured a protagonist who wants to write novels, or otherwise distinguish himself, and who winds up instead toiling forever in the Snake Pit, where conditions described in the book spookily paralleled my own (even to the screenplay the hero attempted to work on between times). The cast of characters might have different names or genders, but they were strikingly similar to those around me.
Once in a while a filmmaker in town to promote his movie (we learned never to call them movies, they were always films or motion pictures) might wander into the Snake Pit by accident, looking for an office in the real world. It might be Martin Ritt or Richard Attenborough or Robert Redford or who knows? My heart would start jumping out of my chest, and I’d be on my way to buttonhole the poor guy with a display of my cinematic erudition when Schwartz would nab me by the collar of my jacket.
“Back to the salt mines, kid.”
And I’d watch whoever it was being gently led away, his head twisting back on his neck in surprise, likely as not, getting one last glimpse of our particular circle of Hell.
It began to seem I was destined never to escape that circle except at night when it was time to go home. Home was now a one-room apartment, three flights up, that I had rented at 88th Street and Second Avenue.
Next door to my building was a restaurant called Elaine’s. I had no idea of the place’s reputation and all unaware went in one night to have a beer. Meet the Invisible Man. After five minutes, even I understood. In the midst of Marlon Brando, Woody Allen, and Jackie Kennedy, all of whom happened to be there that evening, they simply weren’t about to take my order. I slunk out and climbed my three flights back to la vie de bohème.
At home at night, still within earshot of the demi- and haute mondes at Elaine’s below, I’d peck away at my screenwriting efforts. The first script I wrote was a life of Heinrich Schliemann, the amateur archeologist who discovered Troy. The world was obviously waiting for this one with bated breath. If I’d been working at Warner Brothers in the late thirties they would have made the picture, no question. Paul Muni would’ve played Schliemann.
Next.
BABY STEPS
My father had recently introduced me to an essay in a psychoanalytic journal, written by a fellow shrink, Philip Weissman, on why John Wilkes Booth had shot Lincoln. The piece intrigued me, and with Weissman’s permission, I set about dramatizing its thesis, namely that the real target of Booth’s rage was not the president but Booth’s own brother, the highly successful tragedian Edwin Booth. I produced my best piece of work to date, a thriller that informed at the same time as it entertained, a combination that was to become my specialty—also, on occasion, my curse. The structure of the piece was what made it work: I juxtaposed an hour-by-hour account of Booth’s movements on the day of the assassination with flashbacks to earlier portions of his life, thereby suggesting psychological connections of which Booth himself was not consciously aware but which seemed to explain the true motives behind each of his actions on the fatal day. I called my movie The Understudy.
We never really understand—at least I don’t—the progressions we make in life, why one thing leads to something else. About the time I was convinced I was going absolutely nowhere, I managed to escape the Snake Pit by getting Paramount to assign me the role of unit publicist on another of their small movies, this one called Love Story, to be shot in Boston and Long Island. A unit publicist is the guy who writes the original press kit and captions the photos taken on location—the stuff that I had previously been hired to translate into English. I leapt at the chance to go on location (a) because it got me out of the Snake Pit and (b) because I could get to watch a movie actually being shot. The director, Arthur Hiller, was extremely encouraging and open and at the conclusion of filming, the producer, Howard Minsky, optioned The Understudy. This left me with the vexing question of whether I should or should not wear my glasses when I appeared on The Johnny Carson Show.
These grandiose fantasies died with the option expiration date on my script and in 1971 I took another job, this one in the story department at Warner Brothers, where I discovered that I could synopsize any narrative, including War & Peace, in two pages. I also read enough dreck to encourage myself; I had to be better than 90 percent of what I was being asked to read. (Later, I would have occasion to wonder if dreck wasn’t exactly what they were looking for. An executive returned a positive reader’s report I had submitted on a serious novel with the note, “Nick, did you see what was number one this week? The Love Bug!” I.e., Get With the Program.)
But I was starting to realize I couldn’t keep this up forever. Yes, I had had a script optioned and even acquired an agent; yes, I had watched a film being shot and learned a good deal about the process; yes, I had figured out my stuff was as good, if not better, than the junk I was reading for Warner—but it all wasn’t adding up to anything. I may not have been treading water this whole time but I didn’t seem to be getting any nearer shore, either.
My poor agent, Janet Roberts, still couldn’t get me arrested. She’d given up, in fact, which I learned in the usual way of agencies: I found myself assigned a new agent, who cared for me about as much as I do for anchovies.
It was problematic—no, embarrassing—when people asked what I did for a living. How could I tell them I was a writer? I wasn’t a writer; I was a reader. To call myself a writer, I had to write something that sold.
What the hell could I write that would sell? Not screenplays; not yet, anyway. Not novels, either, obviously; each one of mine was more dreadful than the last.
What books were selling these days?
Nonfiction.
What the hell could I write that was nonfiction?
The answer was staring me in the face. I was six months late with the idea, but it was the only nonfiction subject I knew about firsthand that might find an audience.
I sat down and wrote about the making of Love Story, the film based on Erich Segal’s surprising bestseller, on which I’d served as the unit publicist. A shrewd updating of La Dame aux Camélias, the book—and film—relate the story of a prosperous Harvard undergrad who defies his patrician father to take up with an “ethnic” girl from the wrong side of the tracks, who gets sick and dies, reconciling the estranged father and son. Lest the La Traviata of it all be lost on you, the girl’s name was Jenny Cavalleri and she was a music major. The famous catchphrase of both book and film was “Love means never having to say you’re sorry,” which I later found is not the case. I called my book What Can You Say About a 25-Year-Old Girl Who Died: The Love Story Story. I worked night and day, bashed it out, and showed it to my family.
My father gave his opinion: “If you publish this book, you’ll never work in the movie business again.”
I got the book to Juris Jurjevics, an editor working for Avon Paperbacks. He abbreviated the title to The Love Story Story and offered me a three-thousand-dollar advance. I took it, converted the money to traveler’s checks, and had my car (preserved all this time since college at various sidewalk parking spaces through snow and slush) tuned for a cross-country journey. I finally realized, with some encouragement from my sister Constance’s boyfriend, Michael Pressman, that the place I ought to be trying my luck was Los Angeles.
“And don’t think you can go out there for two weeks and head home,” Michael cautioned. “You can’t do the tourist thing and accomplish anything. You’ve really got to put in the time.”
I decided to take his advice.
GO WEST
Driving long distances by yourself produces the illusion of thought: Time passes behind the wheel; the road unfolds before you like an endless typewriter ribbon (anyone remember them?) . . . and you
think you are thinking.
But later, lying exhausted in your motel bed, or trying on paper to recall what it was you were pondering, you are at a loss. The thoughts, like caged birds set free, are gone forever. Maybe they weren’t ever in the cage to begin with; you just thought they were.
I had put my small stash of clothes (mainly jeans and blue cotton work shirts), my portable electric typewriter, my stereo, and my large record collection into the capacious trunk of my faithful Pontiac Tempest. I had sent my two best screenplays, The Understudy and something called The Frame-Up, to the West Coast branch of my agency, International Famous, along with a letter stating that I would be in Los Angeles by August “in search of representation” and were they interested?
I hoped they were, for they were my only contact in a city where I had never been before and knew not a soul. If they didn’t take me on, the stark fact was that I had no alternative plan for my life. In later years, recalling this dicey approach, I wonder at my chutzpah (or incredible stupidity) when I come to recall how I had staked my entire future on one roll of the dice. I was simply terrified. Terrified, but going forward. I was out of choices.
West of Iowa City, I was into terra incognita. I couldn’t believe how flat the road is through Nebraska, then Colorado. You can drive all day and all night (and I did) through endless fields of wheat and corn.
And then, just as you feel sure these grains will go on forever, a wall rises up before you, abruptly ending it all. The Rockies. I had reached Denver.
In Denver I made the discovery that my driver’s license was due to expire in two weeks. What to do? I decided to adopt a local address, betook myself to the Denver DMV, and got myself a temporary license.
When I wended my way into the Rockies, I was the proud possessor of a Colorado temporary driver’s license. It was my only piece of identification. Certainly my bank account was not the sort that rendered you eligible for credit cards. If anything happened to me, some place in Denver was where they would look. What could possibly happen?
All the way across the country, I made unsuccessful attempts to reach the agent who has been foisted on me by IFA, following the defection (if that is the right word) of Janet Roberts. This fellow had had no use for me and kept ducking my calls. Finally, quite by accident, he picked up his own phone and found me at the other end, haranguing him from a phone booth near the freeway outside Sacramento. The conversation was brief and unpleasant and when I hung up, I was in tears, doubly angry because not only was I getting nowhere in my chosen profession, but I would now be driving into San Francisco, a city about which I’ve heard all my life, too angry and upset to enjoy it.
Or so I thought. The wonder of San Francisco (when I laid eyes on it two hours later) was so overpowering that by the time I got off the Bay Bridge I’d forgotten the guy’s name. I forgot everything except one of the most beautiful cities I’d ever seen.
I spent the latter part of July and the first two weeks of August exploring this enchanting place. After lingering almost a month, I didn’t want to leave San Francisco (a) because it was so wonderful and (b) because I was scared to death of where I was heading.
Nevertheless it was time to face the music, and so I turned south along the scenic Pacific Coast Highway. I visited San Simeon, and at the local lun cheonette encountered a fellow traveler, a lady of about forty, who struck up a conversation. She was friendly and intelligent—until I told her I was on my way to Los Angeles to make films—at which point she smiled and said, “Oh, my husband is a film producer. You must look us up when you arrive.”
Aside from the delusion that her husband was in the movie business (a delusion that, I confess, I expected everyone to harbor, such was my fantasy about Angelenos), Fran Laurence seemed tolerably sane on all other subjects, so I took her address. Who knew? In the end, her husband did turn out to be a genuine film producer (he’d worked with everyone from Judy Garland to Elvis), and the whole family sponsored me with a generosity unparalleled in my experience, greatly changing my perception of Los Angeles, when I reached it. Walter Mirisch was right.
Meantime I motored uneasily south, only half-registering the fabled wonders of Highway One as my anxiety increased. In Santa Barbara, I checked into a cheap motel. I was now a mere ninety miles from my goal, the dreaded Big Orange, where I didn’t know anyone nor had I any particular prospects. (Unless you counted Fran Laurence’s husband, and I wasn’t.)
I turned on the motel TV. I watched Tyrone Power and Dean Jagger in Brigham Young. Vincent Price plays John Smith. The Mormons have always interested me, courtesy of Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet. (I had made it a point, going cross-country, of visiting Salt Lake City.)
But I was restless. The film exerted an almost nightmarish fascination, the Mormon odyssey mirroring my own uncertain transcontinental meanderings. The movie was making me more uptight, not less.
Then an odd idea struck me. All the way west I had been reading paperback editions of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer novels. On the back of each book it was unaccountably explained that “Ross Macdonald” is the nom de plume of one Kenneth Millar, who lived in—wait for it—Santa Barbara!
What is the point of having a nom de plume if you’re going to tell everyone your true name and town of residence? The logic, I confess, is beyond me. But just for the hell of it, in my restless humor, I got out the Santa Barbara telephone directory, stashed near the Gideon bible next to my bed, and looked up Kenneth Millar. Lo and behold, there he was, big as life. I dialed the number.
“Hello?”
“Is this Kenneth Millar?”
“Yes?”
Wow. Now what?
“Well, uh, you don’t know me, but I’ve been driving across the country, reading your books.”
“Oh?” He was definitely wary now. No surprise. With the kind of books he wrote, the notion of some wacko picking up the phone (or worse) must have occurred to him, or even happened before.
(Then how come he told everyone how to find him on the back of each of his books?)
“I was just sort of wondering,” I pressed on, “were you, that is, are you a fan of Arthur Conan Doyle’s?”
Impossible to tell from the silence that followed what he made of me now. A literate psychopath? Someone who would bore him to death before bludgeoning him?
“I admire Doyle, of course,” he said carefully, “though I’d guess I was rather more influenced by Poe.”
Really. (I hadn’t yet formed my theory about how pointless it is to ask people about their influences.)
“Really?”
He let the silence hang there. I thought I’d pushed this about as far as I could. I found I was gripping the receiver in a white-knuckled clench.
“Well, thanks very much for your time. I’ll let you get on with your . . .” (what was it I interrupted?) “your life. So long.”
“Good-bye.”
I sank heavily onto the bed, covered in sweat.
LOS ANGELES
Los Angeles, when I arrived the next day, was just about as horrible as everyone predicted. I got off the San Diego freeway at Wilshire Boulevard (something that sounded vaguely familiar), and I headed east, assuming this broad thoroughfare would bring me downtown.
I had not yet heard Gertrude Stein’s celebrated description of Oakland, her own hometown: “Once you get there there’s no there there,” which will apply equally to LA.
I now know I would have reached downtown if I’d only kept going far enough along Wilshire, but I gave up after about fifteen miles. Often I’d see a cluster of office buildings draw near and think I’d found the damn thing, only to grind my teeth with vexation when this same inexorable avenue spun past them, leaving the pathetic little group behind, to be replaced by more bungalows and a series of incongruous palm trees, their tall, thin trunks raveling pointlessly upward forever, crowned, finally, by an absurd thatch of fronds.
Where did they keep the damn city?
There was really no postponing the moment any
longer. I fished out a dime, used a parking lot phone booth, and called the International Famous Agency. What was I going to do with my life if they said they weren’t interested?
We’ll never know the answer to that one because the call was forwarded to a young agent named John Ptak, who said he liked my stuff and wanted to meet me. I acquired directions and the rest is more or less history. After meeting with him, I opened the trunk of my car, checked my remaining supply of traveler’s checks, and concluded that I could hold out till Christmas.
I rented an apartment in someplace called Culver City, more or less beneath the intersection of the Santa Monica and San Diego freeways. It was the same size or smaller than my flat in New York, but I thought it was great because it had a swimming pool the size of a postage stamp in the middle of a courtyard. I emptied the contents of my trunk into the little place and got into my car to look for dinner.
After dinner I got into my car again and began driving before I realized that I had no idea where I lived. I had forgot to learn my address. All my possessions (my music collection! my Ross Macdonald books!) were resting comfortably in some anonymous location, but for the life of me I couldn’t recall where it was.
In my panic I began driving faster and faster up and down streets and boulevards, like a rat trapped in a maze. It dimly occurred to me that I would now be due for a fatal car accident in the wake of which all the authorities would find by way of identification would be my Colorado driver’s license with its nonexistent address.
My parents would take it that I had simply disappeared from the face of the earth.
In a sweat-stained condition bordering on all-out hysteria, I stumbled on the place somehow, driving past it at about sixty miles an hour, U-turned, parked, went in, and lay on the bed, hyperventilating.
The View from the Bridge Page 3