Off to the Side: A Memoir

by Jim Harrison

  I had spent several days in Puerta Vallarta at the premiere party for Revenge, directed by Tony Scott (Ridley’s brother) and starring Madeleine Stowe, Kevin Costner, and Anthony Quinn. I liked Mexico so much that I had neglected to watch the film. I had a few drinks and went swimming, or so I remember. Kevin Costner was still a fairly fresh face then and was a bit shy and unassuming. He was embarrassed in a cocktail lounge when I pointed out that he had received a dozen notes from surrounding ladies and I had gotten none. He kindly offered me several of the notes. Jay Maloney, a young Ovitz agent, was with us to keep track of Kevin. It is a sad memory because we had a fine time in Mexico and now Jay is dead from a suicide after an astounding success. For several years Jay was always going to visit me at my cabin or at our casita on the Mexican border. The plan was that I would drive him into the wilderness early in the morning, drop him off, then pick him up in the evening so he could “cool off.” He never arrived though there were several misses. His death was at the same time dumbfounding and expected. It has struck me that Costner has also gotten chewed up by studios and agentry, with a rather obtuse selection of wrong projects after Dances with Wolves. There were a couple of good ones but a hot, bankable actor needs judgment plus balls of iron when it comes to refusing his agents, producers, and studios. Actors and actresses easily become overexposed and quite literally “used up” by the industry, and then consequently discarded. Nicholson had this in mind in his long and steadfast refusal to appear on television. The celebrity and sporting media are ruthlessly obsessive and single-minded. There are stretches of thousands of column inches on Brad Pitt, Gwyneth Paltrow, Tiger Woods, and Michael Jordan, as if there were no on else in the theaters, or on golf courses, or in the arenas. It is similar to the media at large a couple of years ago when we had months of dire portents about Y2K, and then nothing happened. You very much wished that pundits could be sent to separate desert islands to reread their babble.

  You’re sitting by yourself in the dark theater several rows away from your wife and perhaps a few friends who are nervously sniggering. You hold off on the wine, waiting for an emergency, and though you just put out a cigarette on the street you already want another when the first frame slides in a split second through the projector. The bottom line is that you’re not even hoping for something great, fine, or even real good. What you are hoping for is something well short of bad.

  Through a half-dozen movies I’ve been connected with, my first impressions, minute by minute, were that the films didn’t look like they did in my head when I wrote them. Of course not. Nothing does. While I clearly didn’t get raped by an elephant with Revenge, my own vision of the material was improbably darker and grittier than the director’s. Everyone connected with the film should have read Octavio Paz’s great book about the Mexican character, The Labyrinth of Solitude. When I mentioned this book while giving a conference to the Mexican press in Puerto Vallarta an attending Columbia studio rep had looked at me with bleak alarm. Mention a book! How dare you, you filthy writer!

  My main problem with Revenge was the hundreds of lit candles when Kevin and Madeleine first made love in a cabin. Where did all the candles come from? No one owns that many candles except a candle store and we’re in an isolated cabin in the Sonoran Mountains. O well. I thought the performances of Costner, Stowe, and Quinn were good and I especially liked that of a minor character, Miguel Ferrer. Naturally I have wondered what John Huston would have done with the material but I’ll never know. Costner also edited a version he much preferred but I never got to see it.

  I walked out of the Bay Theatre startled that it was still daylight, resolved to work even harder on my novels because any movie I contributed to would inevitably be out of my control. John Calley had once asked if I ever intended to direct but, for a change, my modesty overcame any ambition to be a big-shot director which must be a lifelong obsession. When I think of the good directors I’ve known, including John Huston, Orson Welles, Sydney Pollack, Federico Fellini (only for a long dinner), Hal Ashby, Robert Altman, Ed Zwick, Francis Coppola, Jim Brooks, Marty Ritt, Bruno Barreto, Mike Nichols, and Sean Penn, among others, I note that none of them were novelists and poets and part-time directors. It is a measure of our apparently genetic immodesty in America that so many Sunday painters think they can easily become actual artists, good home cooks become chefs, and rich men who like wine can say on starting a vineyard, “In ten years I’ll make a wine that equals Lafite Rothschild.”

  * * *

  Curiously there’s another film, one I had written many years before with Tom McGuane, that came out abortively soon after Revenge. I absolutely refuse to ask anyone what the name of it is because there’s still an ever so small abscess back in my brain over the matter. I have the ugly memory of my eldest daughter, who was still in high school at the time, walking up the driveway looking for the check that never arrived. I certainly would have murdered if I thought I could have gotten away with it, but then with my temperament I would have lugubriously confessed moments after pulling a trigger. McGuane and I have been the closest of friends for over three decades but we never should have worked together. The title for Legends of the Fall came out of one of our abandoned projects. Way back then we were both under the daily thrall of booze and various pharmaceuticals. I therefore, being of present sound mind, refuse to offer up the name of this movie.

  Another of my films with the same viral resonance, a true celluloid Ebola, was the made-for-TV version of my novel Dalva. An old friend, John Carter, a curator at the Nebraskan Historical Society who has helped me on many projects, warned me on the phone, “Don’t watch a minute or you’ll dive under the bed and puke up a hairball like a house cat.” I admit that I received three hundred thousand for the rights, which, after the bad news was revealed, had the effect of smearing Jergen’s on a bullet wound, but then I was the one who sold his darling child for adoption. Maybe this constitutes sympathy for the devil. It often seems quite inscrutable because it takes essentially the same energy to make a bad film as a good one.

  By the mid-nineties I had begun going to France twice a year because my books were doing better over there than they were in America. When certain nasty fellow citizens hear this they like to say, “Just like Jerry Lewis,” but then in twenty or so trips to France I simply have never heard the name mentioned. France became a retreat and relief, and also good food had become a dominant solace in my life, so much so that I was writing a monthly food column for Esquire called “The Raw and the Cooked.” France was also as far as I could get from my self-imposed Hollywood miseries. The entertainment industry, however, has become quite global, and I got a stomach jolt early one morning when my publisher Christian Bourgois and his driver Frank picked me up from Charles de Gaulle and there beside the freeway was an immense poster for the movie of Legends of the Fall.

  I actually liked the movie. To love it was impossible because, once again, the film was destined to fall short of the resonance of my interior vision. There was the strong consolation that it was visually beautiful, and I had no quarrel with any of the casting. Aidan Quinn did particularly well with the unsympathetic part of Tristan’s brother Alfred. I also thought that Julia Ormond did an excellent job as Susannah. She’s English and has had a difficult time adjusting to our less subdued dramatics. All my real quarrels became rather remote and peripheral. Like Nicholson I thought the film should have been far grittier. It was also too short by a half hour, cheating Brad Pitt of his key madness scene on the yawl full of bloody elephant tusks. The other quite logical disappointment is I didn’t make one red cent out of the film except for earlier property rights though the film grossed very well This is hard for outsiders to understand but it’s absurdly pro forma for insiders. I wrote the novella and the first two versions of the screenplay which would have entitled me to a partial credit but I refused to petition the Writer’s Guild for moral reasons, thus losing possibly a couple hundred grand in video royalties. I refused because the real work was done by Bill Wit
tliff who also wrote the filmed version of Lonesome Dove. The Writer’s Guild has never been able to come up with a broadly fair way of apportioning credit though it must be said that without the Writer’s Guild Hollywood would be an abattoir of bloody writer carcasses.

  When a project begins the creator of the material has an implicit partnership with the producer, director, and often the bankable actor. You may even become friends of a sort, but by the time the movie is released and the money toted up you’re right on par with the guys who wash the pots and pans in the studio commissary. Your percentages are meaningless. Everyone’s points, except for those of the studio, producer, director, and bankable actors, are as worthless as my Australian oil stock. Bob Schuster, a partner of Jerry Spence, was irked enough to look into it pro bono, to no avail. Of course it’s almost common knowledge that Hollywood accounting practices make the Enron-Arthur Andersen mess look standard. You travel well past anger into a misty and quizzical zone where you wonder why people behave so dishonorably, but when you watch them closely you understand that it must be easy to endure contempt. No one murdered any babies. It’s just business. Of course as our accounting scandals worsen from coast to coast you finally perceive that those at the top get all the money so Hollywood becomes less than unique.

  I knew it couldn’t last for reasons of exhaustion but between 1987 and 1997 I wrote dozens of drafts for various screen projects, plus the long novel Dalva, two collections of novellas, The Woman Lit by Fireflies and Julip, and a collection of poetry, After Ikkyu. I felt pleasantly secure with my publisher, Sam Lawrence, and when Sam died I felt even more secure with his protégé, Morgan Entrekin, who runs Grove/Atlantic. It’s of inestimable value for a writer to feel comfortable with a publisher in an industry that has become more like Hollywood than it wishes to admit.

  I gradually worked our way out of the homeless potentialities, had quit cocaine, wouldn’t fish in Key West without my family, and had reduced drinking by half to two-thirds. It wasn’t very dramatic. I talked to my home physician, Dr. Bob Johnson, and to a heart-specialist friend in San Francisco, Dr. Howard Kline. I have a little vodka now which isn’t dangerous because I don’t really like it. The saving grace was my growing affection for French red wine which was even more pleasurable when I cut out the whiskey in my life. The only possibly spiritual aspect happened in a period at the cabin when I dreamt I should always walk the sometimes precipitous edges of life. I began to fall more in love with the sheer moment-by-moment nature of consciousness and no longer wished to be drunk.

  * * *

  Recently, I spent a night in Portal, Arizona, over near the New Mexican border. This is a small mountain village where I stay in a combination motel/diner/grocery store when I wish to get away from it all. There are no phones in the motel rooms, which helped, but there are televisions and I was intermittently watching the Academy Awards for the first time in twelve years because our casita a few hours west of here has no television by choice. I missed most of the awards because I had to have my dinner pork chops, and then I had to see the end of the Lakers game, and then I had to have a nap. I wasn’t exactly connecting because I hadn’t seen any of the nominated movies. The closest theater is an hour away but on a video player recently I watched a splendid Mexican movie called Amores Perros, also O Brother Where Art Thou?, which had wonderful music.

  In other words I’m out of date, and what’s more, running out of time, scarcely a unique position. They say Nabokov wrote part of Lolita here in Portal when he was chasing butterflies as an impassioned lepidopterist. A very old local cowboy asked me if Nabokov had written Lolita “from life.” I said as a hedge that everything is written from life but much of it’s the life of the mind. The old cowboy wasn’t satisfied and I don’t blame him. Nabokov is dead and his sexual habits belong to the ages. I was recently irked when a famous feminist writer said that the very dead Allen Ginsberg was a pedophile. I knew Allen off and on for over thirty years and never saw any evidence of such behavior. They move the cutoff age around a lot but I didn’t witness Allen interested in anyone under eighteen. What I’m really questioning is the urge by many to make well-known people smaller than they are, or were.

  While looking at the awards I can’t say I felt any emotions. I like good movies, not award ceremonies, the same difference in watching the improbable Michael Johnson run the four hundred meters or watching him climb the dais for the gold medal. The Academy Awards are a big one but in general you can scarcely keep track of the hundreds of movie, literary, sport, and other award ceremonies. Every small city in the Midwest seems to have a retail store called the Trophy Trolley. I went in one years ago out of curiosity. It was full of trophies of every size and price. There was a recent binge of lists that seemed to feed the same impulse wherever on the food chain. I even envisioned a list of “The Hundred Best Wines of South Dakota.” We must police life, control it, order it.

  Hollywood looked very large until my forties when it got quite small, and then it gradually reacquired its proper size. I wanted to make a living and be part of making a fine movie and pretty much failed on the latter, but then I’m certainly not going to let myself recast big people as small. I remember early on in New York when I was called by and had dinner with Luise Rainer, an early Hollywood escapee who starred in The Good Earth and The Great Ziegfeld. That evening she wore a kind of turban and diamond tiara. She carried it off in the same way John Huston and Orson Welles looked fine in voluminous black capes. She was physically only a normal-sized woman in the same way as Jeanne Moreau, whose voice alone could make your ears tingle. When Jeanne and I were trying to work together in New York I’d call before we met to see if she preferred a bottle of Cristal or flowers and she always said, “Both” with a resonant laugh and husky voice. I coaxed her into talking about one of my early heroes, Albert Camus, with whom she had had an affair. Once in Paris we went to a grand fete at the Louvre together at which every dignitary in the place made a bow before her presence, but then it was the work that made her permanent. The film Jules and Jim would have done it alone. When I was lucky enough to have dinner with Fellini at Elaine’s it was pleasantly confusing because I was the only American at the table and everyone including Alberto Sordi, Giulietta Masina, and Mastroianni was mostly speaking Italian. Fellini like Henry Miller had leavened my despair in college so the evening meant a great deal to me. He invited me to come cook with him in Rome and I’ve always regretted not going.

  Directors and painters are uniformly more interested in food than are writers. Once in Paris I was near Rue Brici looking for an oculist because I had sat on my glasses when I spotted Francis Coppola working at his laptop in a shabby café. He looked up and said without preamble, “I know where we should eat.” He had been a little pissed at me because I had refused to try to write a screenplay for Kerouac’s On the Road for the same reason I didn’t want to attempt Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude for John Huston. The former lacked a coherent narrative drive while with the latter it was partly modesty but also an unwillingness to be reductive with such grand material. Both were classics and I didn’t want to butcher them. Despite this disagreement with Francis food was immediately more important and the next evening we met at his apartment and went to L’Ami Louis with a group that included Danny DeVito, Francis’s daughter Sofia, and Russell Crowe, who at the time had just gotten warmed up in America with L.A. Confidential Though it had been recommended to me by various people, French friends, albeit food snobs, had told me that L’Ami Louis was a “tourist” restaurant. If so, that night the restaurant was full of French citizens, the kind you also see on the Upper East Side of New York or in Beverly Hills. Like me Francis is a food bully and insisted on ordering for everyone. Food bullying is a kind of neurosis you have to fight against if you wish to keep your friends as dining partners, but Francis plunged on, ordering a platter of foie gras, a gross of snails, some roast chickens, and a leg of lamb. One of our party, a young woman, was a vegetarian and the waite
r brought her a lovely selection of vegetables which seemed more and more enviable as the evening progressed. It was a gluttonous mudbath with me idly toting the bill as I counted eleven empty bottles of fine wine. Crowe whispered to me that he’d like a beer and when I told the waiter he brought a full bucket of various beers. I wasn’t truly concerned about the bill because if it came my way I would have bolted and swum the Seine River. Francis and De Vito were quarceling about various producers and studios that had haunted Francis’s contentious career. Danny jumped up on the top of the banquet and did an admirable song and dance to the applause of the French patrons. The check came and Francis skillfully pointed at DeVito. A truly viable Hollywood tradition is that whoever is doing best that year picks up the check. I didn’t even avert my single eye as DeVito pulled wads of francs from various pockets, left over from Cannes. The waiter politely shook his head no to four thousand bucks (my estimate of the cash) and out came a credit card. Americans in Paris. Why not?

  Another speculation arises when I think of people with a great deal of talent. Maybe the notion of “bigger” leads us astray like the woefully overused “great.” Maybe they are like other people only more so, as if seven identical people could be contained within a single skin, and as a consequence there is a magnum amount of accessible vividness and emotional energy.

  A producer named Douglas Wick saved my weary neck in my remaining years writing screenplays. Soon after my novel Dalva had been published, Melissa Mathison had come over to Nicholson’s house and we spent a long afternoon trying to figure out if there was a viable movie in the book. Melissa had done well, a euphemism, with E.T. and Black Stallion, and I no longer wanted to try to adapt my own material. I was simply too close to it to make necessary alterations for a visual narrative drive. Besides, the only real fun in screenplay writing was the first draft of an original which simulated the pleasure of novella and novel writing. The consequent drafts are more like elaborate board games. I had heard from Mike Ovitz that I should write only a first draft, which would take full advantage of my storytelling, and then leave the following drafts and shooting script to those more skillful in the trade. Stanley Jaffe had said to me rather blankly, “I didn’t hire you because you were a good screenwriter but because you can make up interesting people,” a New York producer’s reflection on the majority of screenwriters, expert on technique but short on character volume.