With William Burroughs

by Victor Bockris

  BURROUGHS: I took out my .32 revolver and laid it on the table. Do you know this play, it’s a corny old thing, you can’t read it. Well, this gentleman who’s the Toff and I think four seamen have stolen the eye out of an idol, a ruby, and the priests of the idol have followed them. So they’re holed up at this inn. The Toff has figured that he will trap the priests there and they will come in so he and his confederates can kill them. But the seamen are saying, “We’re leaving, Toff, we don’t see any point in staying around here. Argh! Give us the ruby!”

  “Certainly, Albert.”

  “No hard feelings, guv’ner … We’ll see that you get your share.”

  At this the Toff takes out a .32 revolver and puts it on the table and sits there. So then they all come rushing back in. “They’re here, Toff!”

  “Well, I expected them about now.”

  You see, one of the seamen had said he had given the priests the slip. The Toff said, “People like that, if we died they’d follow our grandchildren,” and this fool thinks he can give people like that the slip by running around a few streets in the town of Hull. The priests come in and then we manage to knife them one after the other while I stand as bait all through.

  “What’s this worth, Toff? Is it worth a thousand pounds?”

  “Worth all they’ve got in this shop, Herbert. Just whatever we want to ask for it.” Then the Toff says, “Get me some water, this whiskey is too much for my head, and I must keep it clear until our friends are safe in the cellar.” So someone goes out to get the water and he comes running back in and shouts, “Toff, I don’t want the ruby! Take my share back!”

  So the Toff says, “What is this, Albert? What’s the matter with you? Have you seen the police?”

  “I don’t want it, man, I’ll give you my share back!”

  And he says, “No more nonsense, Albert. We’re all in this together. If one hangs we all hang, but this isn’t a hanging matter. They had their knives.”

  “Take it back, Toff! Take it back! Take it back!”

  At this point the idol walks into the room, gropes over, gets the ruby and sticks it back in its eye. Then it walks offstage and intones, “Able Seaman Albert So and So!” and he’s pulled offstage, “Aaaaahhhh!” And finally I’m the last to go. You see all along they’d been saying, “I don’t think anything happens that our Toff doesn’t foresee, does it now?” And I’d always say, “Well, I don’t think it often does, Albert, I don’t think it often does.” So as I’m being pulled offstage by this force to be killed by the idol, I turn to the audience and say, “I did not foresee it.”

  BOCKRIS: What exactly does a toff mean?

  BURROUGHS: Listen, you don’t even know the slang of your own bloody limey country! It means a toff! A toff! You know, I would say something and they would say behind my back, “’E’s such a toff.” He’s a member of the upper classes, that’s the whole point, he knows what’s what. This guy is obviously down on his luck, you see, he’s working as a seaman on a merchant ship going after this ruby.

  BOCKRIS: What was your next part?

  BURROUGHS: I don’t think I ever had another.

  BOCKRIS: Any Shakespeare parts?

  BURROUGHS: I don’t go in too much for Shakespeare. I’m a great admirer of the immortal bard, but I can’t think of a part that I could really play with any real conviction, except perhaps Casca in Julius Caesar.

  DINNER WITH CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD, PAUL GETTY, JR., AND TERRY SOUTHERN: NEW YORK 1975

  ISHERWOOD: I was commissioned to adapt Scott Fitzgerald’s second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned. We really preserved the book. The dialogue was between seventy and eighty percent Fitzgerald, and everybody liked it. Then, suddenly, there was a change up in the higher office and they decided no more Fitzgerald. A bad bet! He’s done for! Or something.

  BOCKRIS: Gatsby made money. They made money before it came out, from selling rights.

  BURROUGHS: I cannot believe that they made money on that film.

  BOCKRIS: They broke even just through selling all sorts of rights. Is The Last Tycoon also a flop?

  ISHERWOOD: It was better than we expected.

  BOCKRIS: Did you basically enjoy it?

  ISHERWOOD: Well, I, I, I mean I was a bit bored with a lot of it.

  BURROUGHS: It’s always been my contention that the best movies based on books are made from bad books. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre made a great film. The book, which I read after seeing the film, was disappointing. Marathon Man was a great film. The book is, well, regular, as the Spanish say, passable. With a second-rate or little-known book they can take the necessary liberties to make a good film. When Hollywood is faced by a classic the results are usually awful. I always thought Fitzgerald is not for the movies. His dialogue is often wooden, the plot is nothing, it’s all in the prose that can’t be gotten onto the screen—like the last three pages of The Great Gatsby.

  ISHERWOOD: Oh, absolutely yes, I think it’s unmakeable.

  BURROUGHS: And then I can think of any number of bad or second-rate novels that would make great films.

  GETTY: Have you been to Hollywood?

  BURROUGHS: In 1971 Chuck Barris sent first-class plane tickets to L.A. to Terry Southern and your reporter. He was interested in seeing the script of Naked Lunch. A Daimler meets us at the airport. We are being driven to meet Chuck Barris and his secretary Keister.

  “Yes,” the driver said. “Her name really is Keister.” I experienced a premonitory chill.

  The place was called The Cocoanut as I recall, quite nondescript. Barris is a jock type with short-sleeved shirt and muscles bulging out, no meat on his plate, and he doesn’t drink or smoke. Keister is a slender blonde with brown eyes and harlequin glasses. We give Barris the script. He will get in touch tomorrow. We are driven back to our quarters in the Hyatt on Sunset Boulevard. The next day no word from Barris. Terry is putting out feelers and they come back negative. Barris doesn’t like the script. Still no word. Afternoon of the second day his office calls to invite us for dinner at his place in Malibu to discuss the script. At the appointed hour the car arrives, but it has shrunk down to a two seater. After I’ve been sitting on Terry’s lap for an hour, the driver deposits us in front of an unlighted house with a little snigger and drives away.

  “Now I can’t believe Old Chuck would stand us up like this …”

  “Terry, when your Daimler shrinks down to a two seater it is time to move on fast before they renege on paying our hotel tab.”

  Fortunately Terry knew some neighbors who took us in and sustained us with cheese and snacks.

  “I can’t believe Old Chuck …”

  “It’s ten o’clock Terry, let’s call a cab. It’s twenty-two miles to town.”

  Next morning we check out, and do you know what those cheapies had done? They had put a note on our accounts—the office assumed no responsibility for bar and restaurant charges. Can you imagine!

  Discouraged, and I thought rather outrageously depleted, we took a cab to the airport. “It eluded us then … no matter … tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms wider and one fine morning …”

  SOUTHERN: I didn’t tell you, Bill—I thought it might give you a coronary—but I’m getting in touch with Chuck Barris [a Hollywood movie producer] again for another project, but this time I’m laying out our terms very carefully, which I’ll have you okay, naturally, before flying out–but it’ll be a big car both ways. BIG CAR BOTH WAYS is the first thing [pounding the table], BIG CAR BOTH WAYS and then—definition, you know—the latest and the greatest, it’s gotta have video and all sorts of sense derangements and things.

  BURROUGHS: Sounds great. We want a coke budget, of course.

  BOCKRIS: Ask for that hundred-thousand-dollar cocaine budget right up front.

  SOUTHERN: A lot of toot up front.

  BOCKRIS: Terry was telling me about somebody who got an ice cream jar full of cocaine …

  SOUTHERN: No names, no names!

  BURROUGHS: Tho
se are the choicest presents that may be given or received. You know, a piece of opium as big as a melon. Last you for a while. You can pass at least some of it on as a legacy to your grand-children.

  HOLLYWOOD: OCTOBER 1978

  On arriving in Los Angeles, I called Timothy Leary to tell him that William had come to Hollywood from Boulder to visit the film set of Heartbeat, a movie about the triangular love affair between Jack Kerouac, Carolyn and Neal Cassady, and would be staying in a suite near mine at the Tropicana for a week.

  William was initially dubious about the nature of Los Angeles, so I gave a party to introduce him to some of the people I had met out there. Leary was at the top of my list. Other guests included Christopher Isherwood, Kenneth Tynan, Paul Getty, Jr., and Tom Forcade, who spent the whole party lying on the edge of the bed with a cowboy hat over his face. Tom Forcade was a legend in the American dope scene, and a pivot between the sixties and the seventies. He owned and published High Times, the most successful new magazine in the United States since Rolling Stone. I had known him for a few months when he joined us in California. I introduced him to Burroughs and they liked each other immediately. They also had a mutual interest in guns. Tom invited Bill to come shooting with him next time they were in New York together. The Nova Convention was in preparation at the time and its financial committee desperately needed $1,500. James asked me if Tom might be approached and I said I would talk to him about arranging a meeting. During the party, James came into the bedroom and said, “We need $1,500 … as a loan,” and explained the details. Tom listened studiously, said okay, and explained how to pick up the money from an office in New York. The party was a great success and William was soon thoroughly enjoying himself in the seedy ambiance of the Tropicana where the palm trees waft over the pool.

  The next day, William, James, and I drove out to Culver City, a fittingly dilapidated Mexican area, and turned into the Universal Studios parking lot, just like in a fifties movie. We were led onto a stage set of Neal Cassady’s house in the fifties—ancient copies of Life magazine, fifties toys and paraphernalia were scattered about. We stood around feeling conspicuous and uncertain of what we were meant to do there. Being an onlooker on a movie set is a very boring business. Everybody has something to do except you. There are no chairs to sit on so you have to just wander around and get in the way, or stand still and get in the way. And they do fifteen takes to get one minute’s worth of film.

  John Heard, the actor who plays Jack Kerouac in the movie, came up to William and said, “Hello, I’m Jack Kerouac.” For a moment of historical illusion, that was pretty good. William shook hands politely, but there was really very little to say except “How’s it going?” Heard, who was having some trouble with his role, inasmuch as Cassady always seemed to be having all the fun while Kerouac seemed uncertain and just standing there, shuffled off. When I recounted this episode to Allen Ginsberg, he said: “That sounds just like Jack.” I guess Heard had got the part down pretty well. Or it had gotten him down. You can never be sure just which way is real in Hollywood.

  Moments later I spotted Bill deep in animated conversation with a tall blond guy who turned out to be Nick Nolte (Neal Cassady in the film). I joined them and we discussed the unusual atmosphere created by an actor when he is playing someone who has died within recent memory. Burroughs asked if he felt any psychic contact with Cassady during the shooting of the picture and Nolte immediately replied that he had. He was sitting on a hammock in the backyard of the house they were shooting in on location. Improvising, he picked up a toy cap pistol that was lying in the grass and started playing with it, finally putting it to his temple and pretending to shoot himself as a statement of how Cassady felt at the time. When Carolyn Cassady saw the rushes the following day she said the only time she’d seen Neal sitting on the hammock in the backyard that is exactly what he had done. Nolte concluded that he “felt Neal around somewhere.” They were both born on February 8.

  Bill said that Kerouac always had Cassady talking a mile a minute, whereas he had driven with him for eight hours at a time without Cassady saying a word, but that his mind was always working. For example, he’d turn around and say he’d memorized the signposts for the last fifty miles. Bill said Jack and Neal were always complaining about each other. Neal said Jack was fat and stingy. Jack said Neal was trying to hustle him. Nolte reflected on some of the difficulties Heard had had with the Kerouac role. Later William told me that on numerous occasions over the next three days, he would be sitting beside Nolte and suddenly feel that he was sitting next to Cassady, at which point he would do a double take.

  Before we left, Sissy Spacek, who plays Carolyn Cassady, came over, stuck out a hand, and said, “Bill, hi, Bill! My name is Sissy Spacek. I play Carolyn, Neal’s wife.” Bill bent slightly toward her, extended a hand, and said, “Hello.” There was a pause while we stared at each other and then she said, “Well, I just wanted to say hi,” and walked onto the set.

  Sissy looked even greater when we arrived on the set at 12:30 the next day, for a brief photo session with Bill, during which I leafed through a very large collection of still photographs which had been taken throughout the shooting of the movie. Particularly interesting was the resemblance of Ray Starkey (who plays Allen Ginsberg) to Allen. Nick Nolte looked very much like photos of Cassady, but I noticed the resemblance really did come through the way he held his body rather than from makeup. I told Sissy Spacek, “You look like Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not.” She said she’d only just seen it, but turning to Bill said, “This is Lauren Bacall,” and did a snap second imitation with her eyes and posture. Bill did another appreciative double take.

  That evening we decided to dine at Lucy’s El Adobe Cafe, an excellent Mexican restaurant on Melrose. We had called ahead for a reservation, but when we arrived: “No reservacion, Señor.” Slipping past the maître d’ one by one, we commandeered an empty table for six. It is hard to move six hungry people. The waiters looked worried, but hastily served us and we gave little thought to the people whose table we had stolen.

  After the meal we got stuck running into a bunch of guys in the congested corridor that leads to the exit. Shuffling along, I found myself face to face with Jerry Brown. He looked a little tired and spaced out, as if he were waiting for a bodyguard to tell him what to do, a jacket slung over his shoulder.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Brown,” I said, touching his arm. “I’d like to take the opportunity to introduce you to William Burroughs.”

  Brown stuck out a hand and said, “Not the William Burroughs, the novelist, author of Naked Lunch?”

  “The very same,” replied Bill. Brown studied Burroughs intently. William seemed shy at first. Then he said, “We came out here to fight proposition six (the California antigay bill).”

  Brown replied, “You’ll win. The establishment is against it. Have you been in touch with Henry Miller recently?”

  “No,” said Bill, surprised and slightly bemused. “I haven’t seen him in years.”

  Brown looked embarrassed. “I somehow always associate you with him,” he said. Then, pointing to the table we had just vacated, he said that he’d been waiting for them to get his table ready and graciously invited us to dinner. We declined, hurried to our cars laughing.

  BOCKRIS: Did you ever meet Henry Miller?

  BURROUGHS: I met him at the Edinburgh Literary Conference in 1962 at a large party full of literary people all drinking sherry in the middle of the floor and he said, “So you’re Burroughs.” I didn’t feel quite up to “Yes, maître,” and to say “So you’re Miller” didn’t seem quite right, so I said, “A long-time admirer” and we smiled. The next time I met him he did not remember who I was but finally said, “So you’re Burroughs.”

  Los Angeles is a charming place to visit, but charm is a power that is hard to pinpoint, I was thinking as I stood on the veranda outside my room the evening before departing when a spectral form glided up, a vodka and tonic (no ice) in its right hand. My eyes traveled to the
spectacles of William Burroughs as he looked out over the city and said, “I will tell you about it. The sky is thin as paper. The whole place could go up in ten minutes. That’s the charm of Los Angeles.”

  While I flew back to New York to work with Tom Forcade on some “Hollywood deals,” William flew up to San Francisco where he was interviewed by Raymond Foye in a punk rock newspaper called Search & Destroy.

  FOYE: To punk rock you are something of a major provocateur.

  BURROUGHS: I am not a punk and I don’t know why anybody would consider me the Godfather of Punk. How do you define punk? The only definition of the word is that it might refer to a young person who is simply called a punk because he is young, or some kind of petty criminal. In this sense some of my characters may be considered punks, but the word simply did not exist in the fifties. I suppose you could say James Dean epitomized it in Rebel Without a Cause, but still, what is it? I think the so-called punk movement is indeed a media creation. I did however send a letter of support to the Sex Pistols when they released “God Save the Queen” in England because I’ve always said that the country doesn’t stand a chance until you have 20,000 people saying BUGGER THE QUEEN! And I support the Sex Pistols because this is constructive, necessary criticism of a country which is bankrupt.

  FOYE: What are your feelings about “punk rock,” politically, musically, or visually?

  BURROUGHS: It’s an interesting and important phenomenon. I am very much a fan of Patti Smith. But it’s always been my feeling that you get much more if you’re there than you can ever get with a record, because I can’t get the real impact of Patti Smith and the vitality that she produces in the audience, and the whole electrical energy that’s in a performance doesn’t always come through on record.

  FOYE: Do you think it’s making a dent in the establishment?

  BURROUGHS: The establishment is full of dents! I don’t think there is an establishment anymore. I mean, who is the “establishment” in America? There is an establishment still in England. Which is an anachronism, but it still exists, as people still do want the queen and the royal family. And there are still these five or six hundred very rich and powerful people who really control England. That’s why they can’t pay anyone a living wage. By the time the people at the top get through splitting it up there isn’t enough to go around. But in this country, I don’t know what you’d say was the establishment.