Off to the Side: A Memoir

by Jim Harrison

  McGuane used to compare the whole Hollywood experience to being on the high board, mostly at night, and possibly the pool below you was empty. I habitually think of it as being stuck on a shuddering elevator, always caught between one floor or another, always in transit up or down. When I was in Hollywood and attained a level of composure it was usually at the UCLA Botanical Gardens, kitty-corner from my old hotel the Westwood Marquis, or when I had moved up to Nicholson’s on Mulholland after finishing my immediate business. In those two places, which formed my California querencia, a place to stand at full strength, I could relax and see the broadness of the comedy in which I had made myself the featured actor. To receive the fullness of this comic sense I usually had to be sitting in nickel-ante zazen at the edge of Nicholson’s pool deck looking out and a little down at a broad green galley below, or at the botanical gardens, sitting on a park bench staring at the extravagant shapes of the Pacific-rim flora. It was then I was often struck by belly laughter. I could clearly envision the head shaking, the puzzled, smiling faces of my beloved dead.

  What Hollywood is depends on what kind of figurative glasses you are wearing at a particular time. I have never been in another place that manages so successfully to conceal its essential character. Early on during the first trips you are wearing a bum’s glasses as one of the countless thousands looking for work in the film business. On one of my very first trips I was driving with Dattila and Warren Oates on the Hollywood Freeway crossing the hill over toward Burbank when we stopped in traffic. I looked up at the apartment buildings stacked against the wall of the canyon and on a deck a young man was standing in an open robe whacking off and looking down at the traffic. I said, “Maybe he’s looking for a Lamborghini.”

  Literary types and eastern snobs like to quote Gertrude Stein, “There’s no ‘there’ there,” but then there’s plenty of there to any long-term residents who live in the dozens of neighborhoods. The incomprehension is the transient’s problem and in my case, and with so many others, you are wearing the “looking for a job” glasses which are not all that pleasant in New York for a newcomer either. You’re also wearing draft-horse blinders besides your glasses because of the singularity of your mission. After a couple of trips you perceive what Robert Altman later dramatized in his movie The Player, that Hollywood is made up of a few hundred “players” and then there is everyone else whom we might call the “scramblers.” The players are also scrambling but rather gracefully and at a rate of pay that is virtually unknown to all but a few in our economy. It is very hard for a scrambler to get more than nominally noticed by a player. Lucky for me that I was a novelist and Hollywood has always had a yawning desire, an unpleasant necessity for stories, though there is a specifically discernible lacunae when it comes to Hollywood knowing a good story from a bad story, but then isn’t this a problem they share with publishers? To be fair there are a few good filmmakers, producers, and directors, and a great number of bad or mediocre ones.

  This was a couple of years before the big break and Dattila and I were staying in a small, inexpensive suite at the Sunset Marquis, a place habituated by the low- and midrange road kill. Our rooms were sandwiched between Kinky Friedman of the Texas Jewboys and Harry Reems of recent Deep Throat fame. By local standards they were both fine gentlemen though Friedman like all musicians played music on his tape deck at living volume. There were many beautiful young women at the Marquis, some of them stashed there by executives, also aspiring actresses to whom you were invisible because you weren’t a player or even a near miss, or attractive enough to overcome barriers. You were supposedly writing a screenplay at the time for Warren Oates about a P.O.W. whose wife, believing him dead after a long absence, remarries, and then he returns home. For reasons I’ve never determined, actors like masochistic stories where they are beat around severely but then emerge as at least the moral victor. Maybe that’s how they see their lives. I was having a hard time on a slim budget mostly because I would do any amount of cocaine that anyone kindly offered, and the additional problem with cocaine is that you have to drink a lot to subdue the edgy feeling. That factor shot the mornings and after lunch at Ben Franks I’d have a traditional nap. The writing in small quantities took place in the afternoons between countless trips to the window where you could part the drapes and look down a couple of dozen feet to the pool where the kind of girls rarely seen in the Midwest were sunning themselves in the briefest bathing suits possible.

  On this particularly misty trip west Margot Kidder had taken Bob and me to a Director’s Guild screening of Shampoo. I was a little confused when after the movie finished David Geffen and Warren Beatty, whom I later got to know, circulated through the audience asking people what they thought. Naturally I said it was wonderful but this experience referred me to a mental flaw that came up again and again in the next two decades. From my childhood at the Reed City Theatre onward I liked just about every movie I ever saw, especially those in Technicolor though some of those most memorable were in black and white, say Huston, Bergman, and Truffaut. The fact was that my omnivorous curiosity which helped build the novelist and poet within me also made me accept The Egg and I and Ma and Pa Kettle on thr Farm or any of the Francis the Talking Mule series starring Donald O’Connor. Of course the 3-D craze passed me by because I was blind in one eye but just about any film experience left me fascinated no matter how banal. Naturally I liked the best movies the best but it was unthinkable to walk out of the worst because I had to see what happened, which made any crap passable. This kind of attitude made the intensely critical perspective necessary to being a good screenwriter difficult to muster. It would be embarrassing indeed to add up the money total it required the business to teach me how to write a good screenplay. The hardest thing for a novelist to learn is that you first have to see the frame and then let the words follow. So much of the novel is made up of what people are thinking and there the language properly comes first. Nothing else is possible. The mystery writer John D. MacDonald cautioned me that if a screenplay reads beautifully it’s likely not a good screenplay. That’s probably what was basically wrong with Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop and dozens of novelists’ screenplays where the language is lovely and the movement is lethargic.

  When a midwesterner is blown away he does his utmost to pretend that he isn’t. I went west after John Calley’s call but my agent and I had turned down, albeit nervously, the three-year option grant. I suppose that gave him the impression that we were difficult customers. Dattila, with both the demeanor and the thinking of a New York street kid, felt we would be stupid not to maximize this opportunity. After all, he had tried without success for nearly a decade to make me a living and we had spent an enormous amount of time on my visits to New York trying to figure our way out of the bind. Dattila also had my brother John’s way of worrying about my tenuous sanity without coming out and directly saying so. He had convinced me to see a “mind doctor” while I was in New York and over twenty years later I still see Larry Sullivan, a man with an immense range of practical wisdom. Many writers have felt that even the most modest forms of counseling and analysis might steal their secrets, whatever that might mean, which means that art is not so much natural as it is the result of dark and unbearable tensions. I wasn’t sure what my powers were but I was very sure that I wanted to stay alive and provide for my wife and daughters, and the effect of alcohol and drugs on my questionable sanity had become shameful.

  When Hollywood wants to court you they do so exhaustively. When I arrived for my first meeting with Calley I was put in a five-room suite at the Wilshire used by Doris Duke or Barbara Hutton, someone like that. It didn’t have the desired effect. There was an open and full liquor cabinet and I wondered how the hotel kept track. You could always drink a bunch and bring the bottles back up to level with water. Dattila arrived late in the evening and that calmed me down. I met with Calley for breakfast in the morning and was startled to see he was a nondescript man in a worn leather aviator’s jacket. He was prof
oundly witty and soon put me at ease. I asked to be put in smaller quarters in the future so the next trip he rented me one of the discreet bungalows behind the Beverly Hills Hotel. Things moved quickly and we made a deal for Revenge, which Nicholson wished to star in, and also sold an option for Legends of the Fall for which only the day before we had turned down a grand offer from MGM because we were unsure of the people.

  Off I went, as it were. I quickly wrote a passable screenplay for Revenge and then agreed as part of the three-screenplay contract to do a version of John MacDonald’s Travis McGee series. I had spent time with MacDonald in Florida while working with Rust Hills cutting ten pages of Revenge for its appearance in Esquire. The Travis McGee screenplay didn’t work out in my opinion because it was a generic approach to the series rather than settling on a single novel. I was working and playing overhard and was not a little angry because I couldn’t get a release from my three-picture contract to write a remake of James Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice for Jack Nicholson to be directed by Bob Rafelson.

  I had been home from an exhausting trip to L.A. for only two days when Calley called to say that Sean Connery had read my novella Revenge in Esquire and wanted to discuss a project with me and Calley told Connery that they had me under contract. I flat refused, being of unstable body and mind, but Calley said Warner Brothers was trying to hook Connery for a Bond project, and he would send a plane for me the next morning and have it take me back the following morning. The fact that I agreed showed that there was no hope of getting off the toboggan more than momentarily. Margaret, Calley’s secretary, then called to see what I wanted to eat on the plane and I said a corned-tongue sandwich from Nate & Al’s, a Jewish deli in L.A. that I favored, a six-pack of beer, and a bottle of bourbon. Margaret laughed and said that wasn’t the usual order. The next morning I boarded Warner’s Hawker-Sidley, larger and more comfortable then a Lear, in my best Hawaiian shirt and off we flew. The meeting soon after my arrival was successful and I was taken home early the next morning with another Nate & Al’s sandwich. My visiting father-in-law picked me up at the airport and was bemused to see how the black sheep was getting very white.

  The project was a flop, partly because Warner Brothers couldn’t legally secure the rights for a Bond project. I worked nearly a month at the Beverly Hills Hotel and ever after found its color of pink unendurable. Sean showed up bright and too early every morning but my nightlife had taken a toll and I was lethargic. One morning we had a meeting with Mike Ovitz and Calley. I said that my back hurt though in reality I had been doing coke and booze with two prominent ladies until nearly dawn. I got down onto the floor to stretch out and promptly dozed off in front of these three showbiz eminences. It was pretty impressive.

  I was clearly on the shuddering elevator and the door was locked. It was difficult for me to write with, anyone else around except back home with our young daughter Anna, and now I had Connery and a secretary in the suite. The distractions were too many. We would often lunch at the pool with bathing beauties idling around us and God knows where they came from. One day I lunched with Sean and Jack Nicholson, who’d never met, and Sir Lew Grade from London appeared at the table, cannily observing that I had the attention of two bankable stars. He wondered if I had anything to sell and I said no. “Just make something up and give me a call tomorrow,” he said. One evening I barbecued thirty pounds of prime beef ribs for a crowd including Sean, Jack, and Warren Beatty who all wore white suits. It was pleasant to destroy so much fine tailoring.

  Just the other day I figured out the legend of the thistle for that period of my life. Up at the Hard Luck Ranch near the border town of Patagonia, Arizona, I remembered that the year before I had begun daily watering a backyard thistle in this semi-desert climate. The thistle grew larger at a startling rate, a dozen times the size of those that didn’t get the daily watering. Within a month it was the largest thistle I had ever seen but then one day it toppled over from the weight of its unnatural size. I didn’t fall that quickly. It was a slow-motion fall, mostly mental in nature.

  One day at the Beverly Hills Hotel I got a poolside call from my father-in-law who rather dryly told me that he was dying and wondered how financially fixed we were. He probed a bit and when I told him the truth he whistled having closely witnessed our bleaker years. Shortly after this, my mother found out she had colon cancer and soon after that my brother John’s daughter Gloria was struck on her bike by a car. My mother survived another twenty years but Gloria died in New Haven after being in a coma for a hundred days. My brother recited her grave service on an icy and windy day with the Long Island Sound glittering in the distance. Nothing is harder to deal with than a small casket.

  The one sensible thing I did at this time was to hire a friend of my older daughter, Joyce Harrington, as an aide. After settling my tax debacle and its possible brush with federal prison (it’s better to have the money on hand when you come forward) it occurred to me that we needed someone to help with the large part of life at which I was so dramatically inadequate. I couldn’t type, entering a bank made me sweat, lawyers frightened me, and accountants addled me so that I couldn’t write for a day or two. Despite learning how to make money I couldn’t quite figure out that I had to, at the time, give half to the government. Joyce was one of seven children of a New York City meatpacker. She was much more functional and worldly than I. She pretty much took over all of my life except the actual writing, fishing, and hunting and over twenty years later is still with me. This worked fine because it has often struck me that I have no area of expertise in life except my imagination. I mean I’m a pretty fair fisherman and a moderately good dog trainer and bird shot but these talents are good in this world only through helping you avoid it.

  I flew off to London where Nicholson was filming The Shining to discuss the Revenge project. This was a delightful intermezzo and I had packed along volumes of Keats, Christopher Smart, John Clare, and William Blake, all of whom were detrimental to my film career. Amid everything else I had finished a novel called Warlock, the only book I’ve ever written that I loathe, shot through as it is with ironies that continue to scratch their tired asses.

  In London Jack lived on Cheney Walk on the Thames in a modest mansion that his English friends called a “raghead” house, usually rented by wealthy Arabs. Anjelica Huston and her sister Allegra, who later became my English editor, were there, and Harry Dean Stanton was also in London shooting the first of the Alien movies. Sometimes Anjelica and I would visit the set and then go to San Lorenzo’s for a very long lunch, then we would have our naps and Jack would come home from his long day of work quite exhausted. I was there for only a couple of hours that day but Stanley had shot the scene where Jack chops down the door with a fire ax twenty-six times, tiring work indeed. Every morning Tim, the cook, would discuss dinner with me, then drive off to Harrods to buy our nonbudget victuals. It was serene compared to Hollywood, with very little cocaine, though once as a practical joke George Harrison was sent to my bedroom to wake me from my nap with a long line.

  Stanley Kubrick was a fascinating man who utterly failed, to his disgust, to get me to learn how to play chess. He always had a newspaper stuffed into his red James Dean jacket which didn’t quite fit his portly figure. The smallest lapse in conversation and out would come the newspaper for reading though I once noted it was several days old. There were any number of somewhat drunken parties with upper-crust English who had a capacity for booze that competed with that of the Russians. The high point came with the arrival of John Huston and a long meeting where we discussed our procedure for the screenplay of Revenge. His plan was oddly similar to that of Fred Wiseman for A Good Day to Die, where you simply take apart two copies of the book, paste the pages, and cross out what you don’t like. He invited me to come down to his place south of Puerto Vallarta in Mexico which was approachable only by boat and where we could later work on the screenplay when the contracts were straightened out.

  I went to London twice for seve
ral weeks though we didn’t discuss Revenge all that much because Jack had total faith in Huston to lead the way. I felt the same. Huston was a grand character indeed, the most impressive of the many directors I met. He was thought to be far too arrogant by the studios, which he probably was from their questionable point of view.

  Much of any writer’s film job is waiting for the principals who are doing something else, and London was a splendid place to wait. I mostly walked, stopping at pubs like the Wharf Rat where twice I saw rock groups involved in rather ineffectual fistfights though they never managed to set their feet and slug it out. I liked a friendly musician named John Bonham who later died at age thirty-three.

  One day on a long walk I stopped at a posh restaurant where the staff was hesitant to serve me. I told Anjelica and she said it was because of my dreadful clothing which I thought was rather nifty by midwestern terms. She took to calling me “Walter of Battersea,” which referred to a lower-class neighborhood, so I wrote her a poem.

  Walter of Battersea for Anjelica

  I shall commit suicide or die

  trying, Walter thought beside

  the Thames—at low tide and very

  feminine.