The Accidental Life

by Terry McDonell

  Clockers was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and became hugely influential. (TV writer-producer David Simon credited it years later as an inspiration for The Wire and hired Richard to write for the show.) What Richard liked best, though, was that he was a novelist again. “No more scripts,” he told me. But that was right after he found out that the studio had signed Spike Lee to direct from Spike’s own screenplay of Clockers.

  Richard followed Clockers with three novels—Freedomland (1998), Samaritan (2003) and Lush Life (2008)—but his most reliable paydays kept coming from screenwriting and movie rights. The difference was that now it wasn’t the easy money it had been in the 1980s and ’90s, when they were still making $40 million movies. He told the New York Times that he had found himself “pitching to get jobs on movies based on Marvel heroes, and I said: ‘What am I, in a playpen?’ There’s no dignity to it.”

  So with the help of De Niro and Scorsese, Richard sold CBS a TV series, NYC 22, about a group of rookie cops. The “22” was for the station’s precinct number in Harlem, where Richard had moved into a big solid brownstone. When he told me about the show, he also mentioned that he had been signed to write a series of detective novels for Henry Holt under the pen name “Jay Morris.” And he had a Harlem novel going.

  Exhausting, I thought. His marriage to Judy Hudson was over. His two daughters were grown. His marriage to the writer Lorraine Adams was beginning. With Judy, he had lived through more than two decades of the New York art scene, building his career while blowing away dinner parties with his stories. Judy painted, and they collected art. Eric Fischl and April Gornik, Robert Longo, name an artist—you met them all at Richard and Judy’s various houses—Great Jones Street, Gramercy Park, Shelter Island, Georgica, Amagansett. That was all over now, way over, with much pain all around. But Richard seemed happy, and grateful for the work in a way I had not seen before, or perhaps had just not noticed.

  One night he and Lorraine came down to dinner in the East Village, just a couple blocks from his old loft. NYC 22 had suffered a short run in a bad time slot and had not been renewed, which seemed a relief to him. They were just back from St. Petersburg, where Richard had picked up more research on his way home from a week of work on the set of a new Ridley Scott picture in Prague—Child 44, based on the Tom Rob Smith novel about a disgraced member of the Soviet military police investigating a series of child murders connected to leaders of the Communist Party during the Stalin era. Richard had written the screenplay way back, maybe seven years earlier. Now it was finally a go, with big stars and a big budget and that meant principal photography money.

  “Ka-ching!” Richard said, but as always when it came to his movie work, he was much more interested in talking about something else. Like St. Petersburg and its deep Russian weirdness for a kid from the northeast Bronx. It was one of his fish-out-of-water riffs, with echoes of our search for the Grapes of Wrath Hamptons, except he was in St. Petersburg looking for Grapes of Wrath Dostoyevsky. We ordered more wine.

  After the next bottle, we talked about our weddings. I was at both of his, and Richard’s speech at my second went over like our pitch to Aaron Spelling, especially the part about how he had shown up at my office at Rolling Stone way past his deadline to turn in his Richard Gere profile “red-eyed and looking like I’d spent the last seventy-two hours bobbing for apples in a vat of Gold Medal flour.”

  Several other guests took me aside later and asked about Richard. Did he ever play clubs? He could do stand-up if he ever felt like it. I told them Richard had heard that before.

  −ENDIT−

  The Hallmarkcardian Wars (1,754)

  WHAT WAS FUNNY TO P. J. O’Rourke was never slapstick or absurd, and he loved language, which made editing him joyous—not a word often associated with the editorial process. Sometimes all we did was laugh, although actually laughing is something P.J. never did. Our first piece together, “Cocaine Etiquette,” was one of the first I assigned at Rolling Stone. P.J. wrote: Cocaine and etiquette are inseparable, they go together like cocaine and, well, more cocaine.

  Our joke was that all we really did was not work, but maybe we were working from the inside out, like happy anthropologists comparing field notes. We had another joke about deadlines being our friends, and P.J. always met his with clean copy. He was a tight grammarian; the structural rules governing composition reflected his improbable love of logic. He could talk about morphology and pragmatics—both words he taught me. Copy editors loved him. One of his girlfriends, a graduate student in biology, told me she thought P.J. was an “explosive thinker.” I figured she meant what I thought of as a “dangerous thinker” but had come up with a better adjective. I had just edited this:

  Q. What should be served with cocaine?

  A. Most people enjoy a couple thousand cigarettes with their “face Drano.” Others mix “indoor Aspen Lift lines” with multiple sedatives that achieve that marvelous feeling so similar to not having taken drugs at all. But everyone, whether he wants to or not, should drink plenty of whiskey or gin. If you smell strongly of alcohol, people may think you are drunk instead of stupid.

  The explosiveness came with the pop—an obvious truth at the end of the point he was making. It worked with his funny stuff, and more powerfully when his irony turned hard. P.J. on Somalia: Before the marines came, the children were dying like…“Dying like flies” is not a simile you’d use in Somalia. The flies wax prosperous and lead full lives. Before the marines came, the children were dying like children.

  That Somalia piece, “All Guns, No Butter,” was for Rolling Stone after P.J. went on contract and was listed on the masthead as the “Foreign Affairs Desk.” What he did mostly in that job was travel the world from war zone to war zone, shit hole to shit hole, filling his notebooks with concise if sometimes absurdist reporting, which he ran through an IBM Selectric back home in New Hampshire or Washington, D.C.—where he had taken an apartment to be close to what was becoming his default target, big government. His first book about politics was Parliament of Whores and you could see he was building on his pants-down Republican conceit. Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.

  Beyond his one-liners, P.J.’s basic construct was to take familiar concepts like, say, God and Santa Claus, push them to their logical extreme with a coating of his seemingly good-natured biases, and end with a hilarious (and logical) kicker. So God was a Republican and Santa Claus was a Democrat. God was a stern old guy with a lot of rules who held everybody accountable, with little apparent concern for the disadvantaged. God was difficult, unsentimental, politically connected and held the mortgage on everything in the world. Santa Claus was cute, always cheerful and loved animals. He knew who’d been naughty and who’d been nice, but he never did anything about it and gave everyone everything they wanted. For his kicker P.J. wrote, Santa Claus is preferable to God in every way but one: There is no such thing as Santa Claus.

  When he branched out from Rolling Stone, it was to the Atlantic Monthly, the American Spectator, the Weekly Standard, and the Cato Institute. You could see his interests shifting toward policy, which may or may not have had something to do with P.J. settling in to raise a family, albeit as the kind of dad who teaches his young daughter not to use dirty words like junior senator from New York. His writing on child rearing had been percolating since he’d noted that nearly everything about Hillary Clinton’s It Takes a Village was objectionable, from the title—an ancient African proverb which seems to have its origins in the ancient African kingdom of Hallmarkcardia—to the acknowledgments page, where Mrs. Clinton fails to acknowledge that some poor journalism professor named Barbara Feinman did most of the work.

  Anything Hallmarkcardian was in for it, and he was especially interested in Hillary, beginning when she was First Lady and P.J. gave the keynote at the opening of the Cato Institute’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. Health care is too expensive, so the Clinton administration is putting Hillar
y in charge of making it cheaper. (This is what I always do when I want to spend less money—hire a lawyer from Yale.) If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free.

  By the time Hillary was running for president the first time, P.J. had turned her into a cartoon archetype: Hillary Clinton is Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown. Hillary Clinton is “America’s ex-wife.” Obama supporters couldn’t wipe the smiles off their faces. Then, of course…according to the Obama administration, the rich will pay for everything. The bad news is that, according to the Obama administration, you’re rich.

  When Don’t Vote, It Just Encourages the Bastards came out in 2010, the Guardian said that P.J.’s wit had won him friends on both sides of the political divide and made him the world’s most important living humorist. An earlier 60 Minutes profile had said almost the same thing—that he was the most quoted living man (according to The Penguin Dictionary of Modern Humorous Quotations).

  The best sellers had started when he walked away from Easy Money, and they kept coming. P.J. quotes got passed around like, well, P.J. quotes. Before the Internet, I kept a file of them, including some long paragraphs. I used short ones to spice my letters and sent long ones to writers whenever they seemed frozen or blocked, as unsubtle suggestions to take some chances. As P.J. liked to put it, safety has no place anywhere.

  This sampling of favorites is not just a stunt to get more of his quotes into the book, although P.J. always liked stunts. If this were a magazine, it would be a sidebar.

  THE BACHELOR HOME COMPANION: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO KEEPING HOUSE LIKE A PIG (1987)

  The only really good vegetable is Tabasco sauce. Put Tabasco sauce in everything. Tabasco sauce is to bachelor cooking what forgiveness is to sin.

  REPUBLICAN PARTY REPTILE: THE CONFESSIONS, ADVENTURES, ESSAYS, AND (OTHER) OUTRAGES OF…P. J. O’ROURKE (1987)

  Some people say a front-engine car handles best. Some people say a rear-engine car handles best. I say a rented car handles best.

  HOLIDAYS IN HELL: IN WHICH OUR INTREPID REPORTER TRAVELS TO THE WORLD’S WORST PLACES AND ASKS, “WHAT’S FUNNY ABOUT THIS?” (1988)

  Each American embassy comes with two permanent features—a giant anti-American demonstration and a giant line for American visas. Most demonstrators spend half their time burning Old Glory and the other half waiting for green cards.

  PARLIAMENT OF WHORES: A LONE HUMORIST ATTEMPTS TO EXPLAIN THE ENTIRE U.S. GOVERNMENT (1991)

  The Democrats are the party…that says government can make you richer, smarter, taller and get the chickweed out of your lawn. Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work, and then they get elected and prove it.

  GIVE WAR A CHANCE: EYEWITNESS ACCOUNTS OF MANKIND’S STRUGGLE AGAINST TYRANNY, INJUSTICE AND ALCOHOL-FREE BEER (1992)

  It’s impossible to get decent Chinese takeout in China, Cuban cigars are rationed in Cuba, and that’s all you need to know about communism.

  ALL THE TROUBLE IN THE WORLD: THE LIGHTER SIDE OF OVERPOPULATION, FAMINE, ECOLOGICAL DISASTER, ETHNIC HATRED, PLAGUE, AND POVERTY (1994)

  Traffic [in Vietnam] was like a bad dog. It wasn’t important to look both ways when crossing the street; it was important to not show fear.

  THE CEO OF THE SOFA (2001)

  If you’re gay, Al Gore will let you get into the military. George Bush will let you get out. You choose.

  PEACE KILLS: AMERICA’S FUN NEW IMPERIALISM (2004)

  The idea of a news broadcast once was to find someone with information and broadcast it. The idea now is to find someone with ignorance and spread it around.

  THE BABY BOOM: HOW IT GOT THAT WAY—AND IT WASN’T MY FAULT—AND I’LL NEVER DO IT AGAIN (2014)

  Board games and card games were for rainy days, and if it looked like the rain was never going to stop we’d get out Monopoly. Despairing of its page upon page of rules, we’d make our own. This is how both Wall Street investment strategy and Washington economic policy were invented by our generation. We also invented selling “Get Out of Jail Free” cards to the highest bidder. And we made deals with each other that were so complex that by the time six hotels had been placed on Baltic Avenue none of us had any idea what we were doing. This is the origin of the derivatives market and the real estate bubble.

  —

  YEARS AFTER P. J. O’ROURKE and I had worked together, we had dinner at a midtown steak house not far from where he had lived in that ship’s bow of an apartment. He was on the road to promote his new book, Baby Boom, and we saw each other whenever he was in New York. When it came to our politics, we had started in the same place, apolitical kids radicalized by the Vietnam War. As I settled into adulthood thinking of myself as a liberal, P.J. went from pants-down Republican to libertarian philosopher with a mean streak: At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child—miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats.

  But there we were, both of us wearing ties and ordering Caesar salads. I told P.J. I was writing about the writers I had edited and that while going through my files I had found that our correspondence was a little thin.

  “That’s because we always talked on the phone when we were working,” P.J. said. “Or maybe we went out.”

  “We never talked politics.”

  “We were working.”

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  Discouragement (386)

  EDITORS WORK WITHOUT APPLAUSE, except perhaps from a few of their writers and sometimes just for offering up assignments. You can’t trust that, and good editors learn quickly. Still, discouragement comes from being too hopeful, which I sometimes was. Michael Herr’s writing and reporting for Esquire in Vietnam from 1967 to 1969 was the best I had ever read. His 1977 book Dispatches was reviewed as an instant classic of war literature. So as soon as I got to Rolling Stone in 1981 I went after him, asking for whatever he might like to write. I took it as a positive sign that the one piece he had previously published in RS had become the last chapter in Dispatches. Herr wrote back to say that although the magazine’s founder and my boss, Jann Wenner, was alright with him, the problem of Rolling Stone not paying enough was insurmountable.

  Frankly, his next paragraph began, it was impossible for him to imagine his work ever again in the Stone, and even more frankly, provocatively, that was too bad because readers of the magazine could use a little relief from the ongoing vulgarity. True enough, I thought. He ended the paragraph suggesting you might want to put a match to the corner of this letter around now.

  Rather than lighting a match, I looked for an opening somewhere before the end of the letter. That was always how it went with Hunter and many other writers. But then:

  I spent too many hours with one of your predecessors while his tears scalded his bourbon not to appreciate the difficulties of your position.

  That stopped me. It was far from my first taste of the journalistic frustrations of working for other people. It had been made obvious to me many other times that I didn’t have the last word. But this was humiliating in its kindness and understanding. The difficulties of your position. I would never enjoy the power of my decisions until my position changed. Rereading the letter, I knew that I would have to start my own magazine, and I saved it as a kind of totem. Remembering that letter helped me when I was raising money to launch Smart. And I hear it still, like a wind blowing through my career, every time I pick up Dispatches.

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  Jann Wenner (1,620)

  I NEVER KNEW ANYONE to bring out as much bad feeling and envy as quickly as Rolling Stone’s founder, Jann Wenner. People said they hated Jann. But they loved him too, and if you worked with him on ideas you knew how smart he was and that went a long way. His passion, too, was obvious and moving, and made him vulnerable.

  The close of my first issue as Rolling Stone’s managing editor coincided with the assassination of John Lennon, in early December 1980. I was in a b
ar on Second Avenue when the news broke, and I went immediately into the office. Making calls to writers to organize our coverage, I found that most had already heard from Jann, who’d been working his phones at home. Later that night he walked to the Dakota, where John had lived, and stood across the street until dawn.

  In the office that morning we argued about what the magazine should run. Jann wanted to keep the name of the killer, Mark David Chapman, out of it. I wanted to include everything we had, including the specifics of the murder. One of our writers, Gregory Katz, lived in the Dakota and had collected eyewitness accounts, and I described the details: Chapman had shot Lennon in the back at almost point-blank range, firing five hollow-point bullets from a .38 revolver, and there had been blood everywhere.

  “This is too hard,” Jann said, turning away. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry, too,” I said, and told him I understood how he felt about keeping that story out of what he wanted to be a memorial issue, but still…Maybe a minute passed before I asked, “Are you going to write something?”

  “We just need to get through this,” Jann said, turning back to me, tears on his cheeks.

  The day before, on the last day of his life, Lennon had posed with Yoko Ono for a planned cover story about their new album, Double Fantasy. Annie Leibovitz’s photo of him naked in a fetal position, curled around Yoko, became the cover and ran without a headline. No artist was more important to Rolling Stone. Jann had put John on the first cover when he’d founded the magazine as a precocious twenty-one-year-old in 1967. The image was a still from the anti-war film How I Won the War, which set the tone for the magazine with its mix of music, politics and culture, as well as for Jann’s subsequent one-on-one interviews with musicians, which he conducted with directness and, significantly, a lack of the fawning that usually trivialized the coverage of rock stars. This issue about John’s murder was a catharsis for Jann. He wrote on the last page that he had loved Lennon, adding, “Something of being young has been ripped out of me—something I thought was far behind me.”