Off to the Side: A Memoir

by Jim Harrison

  Picture him: a cold November day,

  the world through a long lens; he’s

  in new blue pants and races the river

  for thirty-three steps.

  Walter won. Hands down. Then lost

  again. Better to die trying! The sky

  so bleak. God blows his nose above

  the Chelsea Flour Mills.

  What is he at forty, Nov. 9, 1978, so far

  from home: grist for his own mill; all

  things have become black and white

  without hormonal surge.

  And religious. He’s forgiven god

  for the one hundred ladies who turned him

  down and took him up. O that song—

  I asked her for water and she gave

  me kerosene.

  No visions of Albion, no visions at all,

  in fact, the still point of the present winding

  about itself, graceful, unsnarled. I am

  here today and gone tomorrow.

  How much is he here? Not quite with

  all his heart and soul. Step lightly

  or the earth revolves into a berserk

  spin. Fall off or dance.

  And choosing dance not God, at least

  for the time being. Things aren’t what

  they seem but what they are—infinitely

  inconsolable.

  He knows it’s irony that’s least

  valuable in this long deathwatch.

  Irony scratching its tired ass. No trade-offs

  with time and fortune.

  It’s indelicate to say things twice except

  in prayer. The drunk repeats to keep

  his grasp, a sort of prayer: the hysteria

  of the mad, a verbless prayer.

  Walter recrossed the bridge which was

  only a bridge. He heard his footsteps

  just barely behind him. The river is not

  where it starts and ends.

  MIDDLE HOLLYWOOD

  Quite suddenly John Calley retired from Warner Brothers and I immediately felt like a waif or orphan. In quick succession after his departure Warners rejected David Lean for Legends of the Fall because it would be too expensive, and refused to hire John Huston for Revenge because he was too difficult to work with. I was already somewhat deranged at the time but the news was a real stunner. It had occurred to me that Hollywood was a microcosm of the boxing world and I was Leon Spinks who had misplaced his teeth and was arrested with cocaine in his glove box, in short a very good fighter in the short haul but with no real prospects. Hollywood seemed to be in transition and I was unaware of the details. Only the year before when I had had lunch with Calley and Ted Ashley, the chairman of Warner Brothers, Ashley had said he thought it improper that a writer of my quality should be forced to work with an actor like Sean Connery. Now Hollywood was going through a period, however brief, when everyone was dispensable except bankable stars. In meetings there was no real point in bringing up quality filmmaking with people who had openly rejected the great John Huston.

  Jack became cagier after this incident, saying that Orson Welles would be acceptable as a second choice. This was a matter of pouring salt in the studio’s wounds but was quite wonderful for me as I had several splendid meals at Ma Maison with Welles. The meals were on Warner’s tab and billed directly so I didn’t have to use a transitional credit card that might have been questionable. I had become more relaxed in the berserk milieu and food had come to supplant cocaine as a primary morale aide. Welles called rather early one morning to say that he had “planned” a special meal for us that would include the freshest possible Atlantic salmon to be flown in that morning plus Patrick Terrail had managed to get hold of some French agneau sel, lamb that had grazed on the salty grass near the Atlantic, and so on, and on and on. I have no idea what this five-hour “business” dinner cost. I remember that I, with Orson’s diminutive black driver, had to brace a foot on the rocker panel to get Orson out of his limo. A Hungarian countess friend of Welles lasted halfway through the dinner before she fled in disgust. Welles advised me to avoid hatcheck girls who would inevitably cheat on you with musicians. I filed this away with other advice I was unlikely to use. We became bleary and teary over the beauty of Rita Hayworth whose Life cover photo I had cut out and saved as a very young man. He and Huston had been close friends for many years and neither were particularly upset over their involvement in the Revenge disaster. He told me that when they dined together in France at expensive restaurants they would stick each other with tabs by feigning illness and on one evening both had simultaneously collapsed to the floor with fake heart attacks. With Welles I began to understand that the director’s battles with studios could be more extensive and profound than a writer’s.

  It was gradually dawning on me that it wasn’t a good idea to write several screenplays a year plus their revisions in addition to trying to hang in there with your calling as a poet and novelist. It was both exhausting and a little schizophrenic, though the poems and novels came from a different place and I needed only to “access” this region to be off and running. On a very creaturely level I was ruining my health and thought constantly of methods of escape though this was unlikely as the dominant element of sanity in my life.

  The solution to this crushing sense of claustrophobia turned out to be ridiculously easy. I simply drove north one June day into Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the scene of my first novel, Wolf, and looked for a cabin, a retreat. Years before on a trout-fishing trip I had been curious about Grand Marais, a small harbor town on Lake Superior, because there were three trout streams in the area, the Fox, the Sucker, and the Big Two-Hearted, plus innumerable beaver ponds in the dense forest. After a few days of looking around I found a cabin on a tip from a local bar owner, Jerry Alverson. The cabin had been expertly built of logs in the mid-thirties, and the fifty acres were bisected by the Sucker River. I spent an entire ten minutes looking at the place then drove back to the tavern in the village, called the Realtor, and offered the asking price. I had no knowledge of real estate bargaining but discovered shortly thereafter that there had been a number of lesser offers so in being a bit of a fool I had won the prize. It was a little embarrassing when I drove home and admitted to Linda and my aide Joyce that I had neglected to go inside the cabin. I had to go back to L.A. so they drove north and actually went inside and told me on the phone it was fine.

  At the moment I didn’t have the cash to pay for the cabin so I called Ray Stark who had been trying to buy an option for the novella The Man Who Gave Up His Name. I named a figure and he said, “Why?” and I said, “Because that’s what I’m paying for a cabin so you fucks won’t kill me.” As opposed to many in the community I liked Stark, who was an old-fashioned mogul, very much so. Once on a project he demanded that I appear in L.A. the next day and I said I couldn’t because I had to go bird hunting with friends. “You’re a fucking bird-watcher?” he asked. “No, I kill them and eat them.” “Fine,” he said, “just come as soon as you can.” Later on when I was cornered again by the IRS Stark sent a check in twenty-four hours against a future project. Naturally you fulfill your obligations and do a better quality of work for someone with this forthright generosity. I was sure I didn’t want to be on Stark’s wrong side but then I never was.

  I began to alternate weeks at the cabin and our farm and continued to do so from May through October for twenty years. One advantage of the cabin is that there was no phone service or electricity. I had a generator when I needed lights and the stove and refrigerator ran on propane. People who are driven batty by the phone should treat themselves to the pleasure of doing without one for a week at a time, especially in a place where all sounds not made immediately by yourself are natural, except for a very distant truck or chain saw. You heard birds, wind, rain, the river, coyotes, and, rarely, wolves. In late September and October you also heard the thudding roar of Lake Superior when the first northwest storms arrived, which often lasted three days,
the worst of them I remember having winds up to ninety knots and the marine forecasts warning of seas over thirty feet. These storms were bracing and as far as I could get from the way I was making a living. One evening I saw a female wolf semi-crouched in the two-track leading to the cabin out to the main road. I had heard a wolf the two previous evenings but had despaired of seeing one. My bird dogs at the time, Tess and Sand, on hearing the wolf crept up to hide under the bed. I figured there must be something in canine genetic memory that told them this was a threatening sound. Years later while I was bird hunting with Rose, we discovered a wolf den and she hightailed it back to the car two miles distant. Rose is a bit neurotic and is also disturbed by the circular wail of a loon, and once on seeing a bear she leapt her seventy pounds into my arms. I didn’t blame her having recently helped a bear hunter put over two hundred staple stitches in a hound after a fight with a bear smaller than itself.

  While at my cabin if anyone in the golden West wished to reach me they had to call after ten in the evening at the Dunes Saloon. The cabin itself became an addiction and I even came to love the five-hour drive north from our farm, feeling safe when I crossed the huge Mackinac Bridge into the Upper Peninsula. One evening I was late for an “important call” at the Dunes and had to explain to a producer that I couldn’t leave the cabin on time because a very fat mother bear was sitting beside my picnic table watching her two babies demolish my garbage can. Another time the producer Mark Canton was appalled when I told him that a large garter snake was living in my stove where it curled around the pilot light for warmth, and when I plopped down a skillet or turned on a burner the snake, who was finally caught and transplanted, would shoot out a burner hole which was startling. Canton said, “Don’t talk about snakes, I’m Jewish.” I couldn’t help but add that I had shot a rattlesnake in the bedroom of our casita near the Mexican border, then couldn’t get back to sleep for a while.

  The cabin gave me a total retreat from a livelihood that I had shown no great talent for, but also added another illusion. For years I assumed that the cabin restored me from and for my battles with the “real world” where, in fact, it only prepared me for more time at the cabin. There was an often not amusing cultural shock in trying to track a bear across a grand sand-dune area of a dozen miles, and then twenty-four hours later being in a rancorous meeting at a studio where I had been told my latest screenplay was “soft in the middle,” a less than helpful criticism.

  During those early years in the great North I did manage, however, to devise some survival techniques, the first of which was to try to withdraw my combative emotions from the long and dreary meetings. The second was never to have a drink in daytime hours because it made me too agreeable. The last was to be in bed nine hours before a morning meeting. These rules were all dreadfully bourgeois but then I had a family to support and there was that curious feeling held by the Spanish that you didn’t want to drop dead in the wrong place. Passing away in an English manse in Beverly Hills didn’t seem preferable to toppling over with kerosene and Bordeaux stains on my shirt in the cabin clearing. I had loaned a couple hundred grand to friends and acquaintances, none of which was ever repaid except by the two poorest of them, one an Indian and one a laborer who in the summer worked sixteen hours a day when he was in his early sixties. Beyond a certain livable point for my family it was evident I didn’t care about money, at least not to the obsessive point of many men I had met.

  Freedom is time and it is significant for a writer when he earns enough to buy himself clear time. The beauty of the cabin was that it minimized interruption. I’ve always been a claustrophobe, sometimes to the panic level, even aurally with loud music. How much better to work in an area where mostly what you hear is the sound of a hundred or so species of birds. The dominance of creature life took me back to the cabin of my childhood. The rain on the roof that soothed me when my blind eye was a hot coal in my head now soothed self-administered injuries. If I sat for an hour or two on a log beside the river my concerns rather easily drifted away with the movement of the current, perhaps a main reason people fish for trout. If you spend a fair amount of time studying the world of ravens it’s logical indeed to accept the fact that reality is an aggregate of the perceptions of all creatures, not just ourselves.

  With mind and heart more settled I wrote a novel called Sundog which enlarged the field of vision in my previous work. I also, and not surprisingly, wrote a long poem, “The Theory and Practice of Rivers,” which afterwards I recognized as being basically Zennist of an occasionally enraged variety. I had a dozen or so stumps in a twenty-five-mile radius of the cabin where I sat to compose myself during hikes. This technically wasn’t zazen I suppose but then my effort was toward simple survival, and besides, there is evidence that the roots of meditation are to be found in prehistoric hunting techniques. You sit and wait without thinking about waiting or sitting.

  I don’t have a strong enough constitution to write about my long string of failed screen projects. After it was all over it dawned on me that the people involved would have done as well with my projects as the ones they ended up making. It was all a crapshoot and I wasn’t a central player unless I could bring along a bankable actor. There were so many variables, some of which I didn’t completely understand. For instance, I think the horse picture I wrote for Ray Stark and Marty Ritt, the wonderful director who had done Hud among others, would have been made if Ritt’s heart condition hadn’t worsened to the point that he couldn’t be insured. The research in Lexington was pleasurable because I had to learn the intricacies of the thoroughbred trade in a month’s time. My only previous exposure had been at Diana Guest’s, Guy’s mother’s in France, but in Lexington I had to visit all of the main farms. Ray Stark, who was also in the thoroughbred business, came down for the Keeneland sale and it was fascinating to watch the very rich bid too much just to keep a particular horse away from someone else. It was a “dick thing,” as the young liked to say a few years back. Ray took me to a lunch at Bunker Hunt’s home. This was before his silver collapse and I remember being seated between Phillip Niarchos and one of the Sangster group from Ireland, and across from a quiet sheikh from Saudi Arabia. It was a nonsmoking house except for an anteroom where I sat and had a cigarette with a group of burly bodyguards with whom I felt more in common. Several times when traveling with Nicholson, I suppose partly because of my poor tailoring and thickish appearance, I had been mistaken for his bodyguard. At Studio 54 in New York, for instance, the bouncers had insisted that I check my nonexistent pistol and I had refused for the fun of it, and at the Plaza Athenee Hotel in Paris the head of security took me aside for a brief meeting on how “we” were going to handle the paparazzi. I patted my nonexistent holster and he became quite upset, saying, “But we don’t shoot photographers in France.” Nicholson on one of our walks would hold up a bottle of Evian so the photos couldn’t be used because they had become advertisements.

  Part of my research for Ritt on the horse picture was to go to the track with him several times. Marty was one of the best handicappers in Hollywood, if not the top dog. I lost thousands on my “intuitions” rather than betting on his accurate tips. My real success was fixing a busted radiator hose in his Mercedes with electrician’s tape. “You midwesterners can fix anything,” he said. I had an embarrassing evening in Lexington when word got around that I was from Hollywood and I was guided to a restaurant where for my entire meal people leapt through a beaded curtain and sang me show tunes directly in front of my table at full volume. I’ve always found show tunes embarrassing, if not loathsome, and to hear “I’m as corny as Kansas in August” bellowed at you while trying to eat lamb chops is a difficult assignment. When I told Stark he thought it was very funny but then he didn’t live through it.

  Sometimes it was the travel that was the tonic. I worked on an unpromising idea (my own—you can’t really dramatize an unbuilt dam in Central America) for Stanley Jaffe and his assistant Patricia Burke, whose offices were in New York City which me
ant I could stay at the Carlyle and walk down Madison to work in the marine combat boots Doug Peacock, the grizzly-bear expert, had given me. New York employment also allowed me to see my mind doctor on a regular basis for symptomatic relief from the contemporary world. Like Ray Stark, Stanley Jaffe was a bear, a real tough guy, but we got along fine, probably because of my work ethic.

  Another earlier project for Columbia and Taylor Hackford, a screenplay on the life of Edward Curtis, allowed me a large travel budget to visit many of the Indian reservations on the trail of Curtis. Still better for travel was Lou Adler’s project in Rio de Janeiro. We met in New York but then Lou had a bad neck and perhaps several girlfriends, so I went ahead to Rio alone to look at the territory. My mission was to devise a screenplay idea, also to convince Sonia Braga to be vitally interested in this unwritten project. I was guided by a Brazilian, Christina Kler, who had rented us a lavish apartment with five servants right on Ipanema. The evening of my arrival I went to a rather frightening Umbanda rite in the countryside outside of Rio where the devils had been cast out of a black drummer and he had bounced around a garden on his back like a bullfrog. Rio in the weeks leading up to Carnaval is a lively place, a little too lively for my taste. My paranoia increased when Christina told me that when a Swede comes to Rio he never leaves. Sonia Braga was of surpassing loveliness though she and her friends were a bit cynical of me as a Hollywood emissary and I had failed to bring copies of my novels and books of poems to convince them otherwise. As a relief from Rio madness Christina took me north to Bahia, the most intoxicating city I’ve ever visited, with a large magic store next to the cathedral. Every street corner acoustic guitarists seemed the best you had ever heard and the women, often a mixture of black, Indian, and Portuguese, were the most graceful in the world. I hadn’t quite recovered from the Umbanda ceremony of the first day where I had drunk a secret potion from a wooden bowl to level out my life, not an immediate prospect because Lou arrived and we went to seven grand balls in seven days, one of them on top of a mountain where my vertigo kicked in to a dizzying degree. Back at our duplex we were surrounded by heavily armed guards because the minister of the interior lived on the first floor. During my first few days in Rio I determined that a couple of plainclothesmen who followed me in my barhopping were there to make sure I kept out of harm’s way. I was convinced that our cook, Sebastiana, was a witch, though a good and positive witch. Later back at my cabin my sleep was full of lurid Brazilian nightmares and when I called Christina about the matter she consulted Sebastiana who instructed me to drop three lighted candles into moving water at midnight. I did so and the nightmares vanished despite my cynicism over the matter. Still later I rethought the potion I had drunk from the wooden bowl because after the splendid Brazilian cocaine I quit the drug forever soon after returning to America.