I didn’t know yet that “biting the hand that feeds you” was at the bottom of Tom’s work philosophy—which in retrospect seems related to how we didn’t talk about money except when he said, “Your top rate, right?” I was grateful to get off easy like that. We were paying two dollars a word, and I was embarrassed saying it out loud. Other magazines—Esquire, the New Yorker, Rolling Stone—were paying double that. Such specifics seemed like the last things on his mind.
—
MCGUANE’S SECOND NOVEL, The Bushwhacked Piano, had come out in 1971 with the New York Times announcing “a talent of Faulknerian potential.” The last sentence of the novel read: I am at large. More than being at large, Tom was lifting off. Every writer I knew was reading him. Saul Bellow described him as “a language star.” The opening sentence of his third novel, two years later, Ninety-two in the Shade, felt generationally intimate. It was ominous and hilarious at the same time, articulating more or less the national mood in the mid-1970s: Nobody knows, from sea to shining sea, why we are having all this trouble with our republic…It was a very fast read with an exactness of intent reflected in the dedication: for Beck for Beck for Beck. Every word seemed perfect, both obvious and nuanced, “hinged and sprung,” as Thomas Carney wrote in Esquire.
When the producer Elliott Kastner came to visit at Raw Deal to talk about projects, he took Tom’s Rancho Deluxe screenplay upstairs to read while Tom fed the horses. Less than an hour later, Kastner was back down at the kitchen table announcing that he and Tom were going to make the movie and they were going to shoot it in Livingston. Already a local celebrity, Tom was now a rainmaker. The movie brought several million dollars into town. It also brought Frank Perry, who had directed Play It As It Lays, and a hipster cast—Slim Pickens, Sam Waterson, Harry Dean Stanton and Elizabeth Ashley—who all thought Livingston was a hoot and invited friends to visit. The leading man, Jeff Bridges, fell in love with a local girl named Susan Geston and bought a place up the road from Tom. Jimmy Buffett wrote the score, including “Livingston Saturday Night”:
You got your Tony Lamas on, your jeans pressed tight,
You take a few tokes, make you feel all right,
Rockin’ and rollin’ on a Livingston Saturday night.
Pickup’s washed and you just got paid.
With any luck at all you might even get laid,
’Cause they’re pickin’ and a-kickin’
on a Livingston Saturday night.
Livingston was still authentic, but now there were movie stars on the next bar stool at the Wrangler and playing pool at the Long Branch (“the Short Stick”). Lots of people were flying in to what Tom called “flyover country” to check out the scene. The director Sam Peckinpah, who didn’t have anything to do with Rancho Deluxe, moved from L.A. into the Murray Hotel, where there was a high-stakes poker game every night, and producers and directors were showing up with offers for Tom. He wrote The Missouri Breaks, which Arthur Penn made with Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando, but first there was 92 in the Shade, the movie—shot in Key West starring Peter Fonda, Margot Kidder and Warren Oates, along with Ashley and Stanton. Tom stepped in to direct when Robert Altman pulled out at the last minute.
Key West had been on his circuit since boyhood fishing trips with his father, and by the late 1960s he was back, hanging out with guides but often spending days on the water alone, learning the complexities of the tides and tarpon and permit. It was a fishing-and-writing life, with plenty of dope and prowling the bars with old friends Guy de la Valdene, the poet Dan Gerber and Chatham and Harrison. The movie was tangentially about that life, and directing it kicked Tom’s intensity up several notches. Chatham had given him the nickname “Captain Berserko” for his up-all-night antics in Marin County, where they were steelhead-fishing buddies, but that had been just the beginning; 92 in the Shade was Captain Berserko time for everyone on the set, especially the actors. “Maybe there was too much acid” is how Becky once explained it to me.
Tom was prone to tangents and distracted by his sexual escapades. His raucous public affair with Elizabeth Ashley made tabloid headlines and led to his split from Becky, who took off with Warren Oates, then Fonda. By the time the film wrapped, Tom was with Margot Kidder, who was soon pregnant. There is a photograph of Tom with Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote at the wrap party. Tennessee and Truman are both laughing. Tom, drink in one hand, cigarette in the other, is between them, staring into the camera. People sometimes said Tom had warm eyes, calm and friendly. Not in that picture.
Tom’s first divorce (Becky), his second marriage (Margot), the birth of their daughter (Maggie), and his second divorce (Margot) all happened in less than a year. Becky went on to marry Fonda, moving with him to Indian Hill Ranch, next to the Raw Deal, where Tom was then living with Margot. Peter started calling Tom his husband-in-law, and maybe sometimes it was that simple. Tom’s bad luck was that his life was getting more attention than his work. There was even a gossipy piece about him in Esquire with the headline “McGuane’s Game,” and a subhead that asked, “This crazy life that novelist Thomas McGuane has been living—is it a dream? Or a nightmare?”
When 92 in the Shade got a terrific review in the New York Times but flopped at the box office, Tom told People magazine, “I know it’s a good film, and as Fidel Castro once said, ‘History will absolve me.’ ”
—
THAT FIRST PIECE TOM WROTE for Outside was “The Heart of the Game,” an almost cinematic contemplation of hunting that snuck up on you, a technique I understood later was instinctive to him. The first sentence: Hunting season in your own back yard becomes with time, if you love hunting, less and less expeditionary. This year, when Montana’s eager frosts knocked my garden on its butt, the hoe seemed more like the rifle than it ever had before, the vegetables more like game.
At first read, it seemed confusing. I told Tom I was thinking the piece should start with the second graph, which began, My son and I went scouting before the season and saw some antelope in the high plains foothills of the Absaroka Range. All we would have to do, I said, is add hunting before season.
“I wrote it on purpose,” Tom said.
“Well…” I knew that, of course, but had never thought much about writers’ intentions. I was proud of making quick decisions about ledes. I could work through my reasoning—something about telling the readers where you’re taking them, getting right to it, whatever it happened to be. But what if I was unthinkingly undermining the ambition of the writer? That set me straight. An editor could do nothing worse.
“And you asked for it,” Tom added.
Tom made his killing shot in the piece with the buck bounding toward zero gravity, taking his longest arc into the bullet and the finality and terror of all you have made of the world, the finality you know you share even with your babies and their inherited and ambiguous dentition, the finality that any minute now you will meet as well. I was stopped cold by ambiguous dentition and have never read anything like it.
The piece ended with Tom dressing out the buck he had hung over a rafter in his woodshed with a lariat: I could see the intermittent blue light of the television against my bedroom ceiling from where I stood. I stopped the twirling of the buck, my hands deep in the sage-scented fur, and thought: This is either the beginning or the end of everything.
I didn’t change a comma, top to bottom, and the piece ran in the first issue and set the literary tone for the magazine. Tom wrote a dozen pieces for Outside over the next couple years, lifting the magazine with his tight control of language, humor and what one critic called his mastery of “macho angst,” whatever that was. He wrote columns about fishing and dogs and growing up in Michigan, and longer pieces about rodeo and team roping (I like to get a leetle loaded and rope horned cattle) and taking his horses to contest. I sent him an Outside T-shirt, and he wore it to a cutting. He told me once that he liked “long reaches,” and the reach he was proudest of was the one between being nominated for a National Book Award (Ninety-two
in the Shade) and winning the team roping at the small local rodeo in Gardner the same year, 1973. We were on the phone maybe once a week then and finally I asked him about the new novel I knew he had going.
“It’s not for you,” he said, meaning Outside. “Maybe it’s not for anybody.”
Odd, I thought. Not like him. He told me he had a hangover. Later, when I got a bound galley of Panama, it was a relentlessly funny read, even as it was about loss and depression. Tom let you know where he was going in the lede: This is the first time I’ve worked without a net. I want to tell the truth. At the same time, I don’t want to start a feeding frenzy. You stick your neck out and you know what happens. It’s obvious.
Tom thought it was his best novel although, except for the New York Times and the Village Voice, it was reviewed as various combinations of self-indulgent, self-absorbed and self-destructive. It was in fact a tremendous high-wire act of honest writing but the critics gnawed on Tom’s celebrity as if he had betrayed some monastic tradition of keeping your head down. It didn’t help that his main character and narrator, Chester “Chet” Pomeroy, was a performance artist and rock star who sometimes did the wrong thing trying to save himself. At one point early in the novel Chet says, There was as much cocaine as ever. I had a pile of scandal magazines to see what had hit friends and loved ones. The critics’ expectations smashed head-on into Tom’s life as tabloid fodder.
Tom’s was not an unknown predicament for a writer and, as with Hemingway and Fitzgerald, the equation is always Writer + Drinking + Fame = Squandered Talent. But his Captain Berserko persona didn’t prove the equation and Tom knew it. Visiting Key West years later, he was asked if he thought it possible for a person to write like an angel and yet in every way be despicable. He said it was highly probable and in many cases a fact.
—
AFTER OUTSIDE, I edited Tom at Rocky Mountain, Smart and Esquire, but then we didn’t work together for more than ten years, until he wrote a piece for me at Sports Illustrated. No one was better at decoding the redeeming value of sporting ritual, and Tom was interested in writing about fishing again—not for his beloved trout or tarpon but for snook. Snook, he explained, were covert, suspicious and sneaky even if they did crash bait. Sleazy was another word he used. Snook humiliated anglers. Hard to see, hard to hook, hard to land and, because they are so good to eat, hard to release. Tom always had trouble catching them. Plus: When they’re at the threshold of death, a translucent window appears in the top of their heads. So the twenty-eight million or so NFL-obsessed SI readers got close to eight thousand words on snook.
But not just snook. Toward the end of the piece Tom wrote that he had once had an episode of serious depression, and its onset was marked by a loss of interest in fishing. This was the sort of hairpin turn he was so good at, as if he were driving with one of those spinner “suicide” knobs from the 1950s on the steering wheel of his prose. He wrote on that he marveled at people discussing depression, gnawing the topic of their own malaise like dogs on a beef knuckle. My experience of it was a disinclination to speak at all. I had the feeling of being locked in a very small and unpleasant room with no certainty of exit, and I recall thinking that it was the sickest you could possibly be and that my flesh had been changed to plaster. My business at the time was flight from expectations.
He had knocked me over again, and I read on as he thought of incessant-angler pal and novelist Richard Brautigan, who relinquished his fly rod as he spooled up for suicide. Fishing, for many, is an indispensable connection to earth and life, and it matters little that the multitude that practices it is incapable of translating its ambiguities to another idiom.
That’s not writing you edit. As always with Tom, though, when I sent him the galleys, he came back with detail work that he approached like finish carpentry. In one passage he said to change “helpful” to “optimistic.” It was supposed to be “hopeful” but “hope” appears a line or 2 later for an “awk rep.” It was like that with Tom every time.
When Tom found something he wanted to do, he worked at it systematically. He studied. He could fish, hunt, sail, ride, rope, cook, whatever…all better than anybody anyone knew. By this time he was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the National Cutting Horse Association Hall of Fame and the Fly Fishing Hall of Fame. On the occasion of that last honor he e-mailed that it was a consequence of unscrupulous self-promotion. I wrote back that as editors are always looking to take credit I wanted to get in on the festivities, no matter how distasteful.
He had written a lot about fishing, which is, I suppose, what he meant. I had run his journalism about fishing as well as most all else he was interested in writing about, including a little cooking and even some golf (chiefly wading for golf balls), and before the snook piece he had sent me what he called a souvenir of our work, a beautiful, slipcased limited edition collection of his fishing pieces called Live Water. Directly following the title page I read an acknowledgment to me as an editor whose conviction that those whose stories he most wants to read usually don’t feel like writing them enabled him to pry most of the following out of me.
Ha! I thought. But he had precisely defined one of the truths of editing. It was always that way with the best writers. If you could match them up with the right idea, all you had to do was hook paragraphs.
—
LONG AFTER MONTANA SEEMED IMPORTANT to anyone who didn’t live there, Keith Kelly started calling me “Big Sky” in his media column in the New York Post. It was pejorative, mocking, and I finally called Keith and asked him to lose it. Keith said he thought it was funny but if it was a big deal to me…I said it was, and after I hung up I thought about flying out of Bozeman to New York to take the Rolling Stone job. I remembered sitting next to Jeff Bridges, who was reading a script. I was looking down at the Yellowstone flowing out of the valley like a silver ribbon and telling myself that it was important to remember what I was leaving because I wouldn’t be coming back for a long time. I don’t know how I knew that.
When I did finally return it was for the wedding of Young Thomas, who had grown up to be famous on his own terms as a knife maker in the Samurai swordforging tradition, an artist, with a studio in Bozeman. Much else had changed too, not that everyone had grown up. Sam Peckinpah had died, but he was still talked about for moving to a place up the valley and then buying the local cab company to ensure his late-night rides home from the poker game. Real estate was soaring, and another wave of movie stars was arriving. Dennis Quaid was building a house near the old Raw Deal with his new wife, Meg Ryan. With very little evidence of a counterculture hangover, Livingston was turning into one of those towns that make Ten Best Places to Live lists. Russell Chatham had his own art gallery, publishing business and restaurant. There were rumors that Robert Redford was coming.
Tom had been married to Laurie Buffett, Jimmy’s sister, for more than a decade by then, and they now lived one watershed over on an immaculate ranch in the Boulder River Valley, outside of tiny McLeod, in Sweet Grass County. He was raising cattle, working his cutting horses and fly-fishing all over the world. He had quit drinking, just stopped by force of will like he did everything. He always had what Bill Kittredge, who ran the writing program in Missoula, called a “genius for living well,” and now his reach was about that and family, too.
At the wedding he looked the perfect father of the groom, tall and calm and handsome, any tempestuousness lifted off him. When we shook hands that night, his eyes were warm, deep but untroubled. The reception went late into the night and at one point Susan Bridges and I were talking outside. Men in boots and hats were smoking in the moonlight with sophisticated women. Montana was different now; we agreed easily on that. She wasn’t sure which had changed more, the people or the place, but they had changed each other. “Friends are still friends,” I said lamely. I wondered if the locals were finally turning cynical about all the people who had come and gone.
“I’m a local,” she said.
“You live
in Santa Barbara.”
“Everybody grows up,” she laughed.
Like Tom, I thought.
“Even Tom.”
—
WHEN I READ A TOM MCGUANE story now, mostly in the New Yorker, his talent spins me like it did when I first read Ninety-two in the Shade. It’s all there, the uncanny language, the surprising specifics that made me a better editor just by reading his sentences. Before I had the chance to edit any of the fine writers I worked with later, that first go-around with Tom set me straight.
−ENDIT−
Cahill (1,025)
WIDE-SHOULDERED AND TALL, Tim Cahill had been a scholarship Division I swimmer at Wisconsin. After college he put on a little weight, which gave him a powerful presence, but he was gentle and could hold his liquor and never got too high, either. When you saw him in the water, you thought of dolphins—at least that’s what Susan McBride said about him once. She said she liked that, and that he had called her McBride when they first started going out and still did even though they’d been married for a while. Cahill had friends who were cartoonists and that was cool, too, and not surprising when you read his copy.
Cahill was there, grinning, at the editorial meetings when Outside incubated out of Rolling Stone’s “Men’s Issue.” (As if every issue of Rolling Stone wasn’t already…) And at Outside he soared as a writer, developing a recognizable voice in its own evolving, hybrid hipster-environmentalist-investigative-travel-adventure-humor genre. Whenever he was asked about his job, he said it was simply to “create great literature that will live forever in the minds and hearts of men and women for time immemorial. Goddamn it.”
The Accidental Life Page 5
