by Ken Grimes
Straight down the line, baby.
Straight down the line.
After that earlier dialogue, you think, Oh, God! Now it’s come to this!
And “this” is where I see our own Walter, announcing he’s quitting.
The way in which Double Indemnity moves along the track to its inescapable end is the way this fellow will end. He can handle his drinking. He’s got a plan. Say, drinking only on weekends. It doesn’t matter. What he’s thinking about now is the taste of that first drink.
Crash.
He’s Walter. The bottle’s Phyllis. They’re a perfect fit. The bottle is alive with solace and the fulfillment of desire. So was Phyllis for two thirds of the film.
There is no stop on this train ride until you’re over the rail and onto the track, like Phyllis’s husband.
There is another reading of “straight down the line.”
If this member of our group is anything like me, that first drink, that taste, is as good as a kiss, a long embrace and the return of a flaming romance. That first drink, and it all unravels. Not immediately, but give it time, until a drink later he realizes he’s stuck with it. It’s straight down the line for both of them, and neither one can get off, and the last stop (says Walter’s boss) is the cemetery.
When you’re in the “Surely one drink won’t hurt” frame of mind, don’t stop with imagining the first taste of that first drink. Imagine the second drink. Imagine the third. The fourth. At what point does the memory of that first lush icy taste on your tongue disappear and you start, well, just drinking?
What has kept me sober is that I know I can’t drink just one. That sounds stodgy; it sounds boring; it’s unimaginative. It would sound so much nicer, more romantic or sentimental, to say it’s the love of my grandchildren that keeps me sober. It isn’t. Nor is it my health; nor is it writing. It’s knowing I can’t drink just one. I go straight down the line with two, three, four until I see myself over the rail and onto the track. I know it would happen.
Crash.
In Double Indemnity, there’s no strenuous drinking (although they don’t exactly miss a chance). When Phyllis happens to have only a pitcher of iced tea handy, he drinks it, says, “A little rum would get this up on its feet.”
My sentiments exactly, Walter. Up on our feet until we all fall down.
Crash.
16
MG
Throw Me from a Train, Please
One of my favorite movie scenes is the opening of Throw Momma from the Train. Billy Crystal plays a writer with severe writer’s block. His ex-wife has stolen his book idea and is famous because the book is a best seller. He stares at his typewriter (how pleasant to see this relic) and tries desperately to get beyond the three words he has written. He stares out the window; he paces around the room, reciting the three words over and over; he makes himself a cup of tea and spends endless minutes dipping the tea bag in and out of the cup; he adds a shot of whiskey to the tea; he finally tries Scotch-taping his nose toward his forehead.
I don’t know if I’ve ever had writer’s block. In my drinking years, I would tell myself I had it. I could not come up with a sentence. I would stare at a blank page that remained irretrievably blank, not the temporary blankness through which I could see or sense a word or two but a blankness beyond blankness. My mind felt as if it were trying to navigate broken rocks barefoot. I didn’t try the Scotch-tape trick.
What I wanted was easeful thought, smooth and seamless. What I got was a blank page that stayed blank while my mind was busy with the dinner menu.
After thirty years of writing books, my mind still resists. At times it appears to begrudge me every word I try to set down.
There I was with, say, fifteen books written, and I could still scare myself into thinking the fifteenth (or twelfth or seventh) could be my last book. Writing has always been precarious for me, but back then it was an utter cliff-hanger.
Rarely did I drink while I wrote. That’s not because I was being a good little writer but because I wrote in the morning and I didn’t drink in the morning. (When I did write in the evening, I would certainly keep company with a martini.)
The difference in the writing between my drinking life and my nondrinking life was not in output. I insist that one can write even when one can’t (a seeming tautology). I’m all for putting words—any words—down on paper and worrying about them later. “Never, never, never walk away” was my motto.
What was the first book I wrote after I stopped drinking? I think it was Rainbow’s End. I have a clear memory of Richard Jury sitting on the roof of the La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe with a local policeman, engaged in the Santa Fe ritual (not quite as flamboyant as the Key West ritual) of watching the sun go down. I recall most clearly that everybody up on that roof out in the crisp New Mexico air was drinking.
It might seem to anyone who read the books from both parts of my life that they were pretty much the same (just as good or just as bad). Again, there was no difference in output. Consequently, one might wonder (and believe me, I did) what advantage lies in my not drinking.
It’s one thing to stare down at a blank page and try to formulate a sentence—anything just to write—and not be able to (correction, thinking I wasn’t able to), and conclude: That’s it, I’m done for, I’m finished as a writer. It’s quite another to see an unformed sentence or a blank page as a temporary wall, knowing it will come down, and probably in the next fifteen minutes.
That is an enormous difference.
Writing is thinking. The thinking is in the writing; it is not about the writing, and it doesn’t come before it; the thinking lies in the process of writing. Trying to think outside of that process won’t do you much good.
I believe I have finally discovered the answer to the eternal problem that students complain of when trying to write papers in English 101. (Not that the problem stops there; no, it continues on forever.) “I don’t know what’s wrong,” a student says. “I’ve got these words in my head that I can’t get down on paper.” How familiar and how true. The same thing happens to me, but I write around what I want to say. The problem is that you can’t really think out beforehand whatever it is you’re going to say. The writing of it is the thinking of it. In other words, don’t think, write. That sounds as if it’s leaning lemminglike over the edge of impossibility, but it’s true.
Drinking helped me with such mental acrobatics. If there’s anything that releases you from forced thought, it’s a stiff drink. Perhaps just as important, it’s company, and company is one of the things that drinking is very much about.
On the other hand, on those occasions when I had a drink while writing, the writing came with a certain ease. (Was this the easeful thought I so wished for?) If that’s the case, why not keep on drinking? There are many writers who would lay claim to alcohol helping their writing, giving it an edge.
So what was the problem?
I don’t know the answer, aside from the enormous difference mentioned above. Perhaps it’s that thought shouldn’t be easeful; writing shouldn’t be easeful; it shouldn’t feel as if it’s smooth and seamless.
That’s not exactly the right answer, since writing does become easier, drinking or not, when you find you’re in a groove. Or, as Stephen King wonderfully put it, when “you fall through a hole in the page.”
You forget what you’re doing and do it. What do you know? That sounds almost like drinking.
But drinking takes no effort. Writing takes an enormous amount, which is why more people don’t do it.
We’d rather drink.
17
KG
“You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again”
I was sober for nine months and in recovery when I was twenty-six years old and working as a book publicist at Random House. During that time, I had the opportunity to spend a month with an author who changed my life and taught me some lessons about those who can’t surrender to this disease. I kept a diary of the time I spent in New York City
with her. Here is some of what we grappled with together and apart.
Julia Phillips—the producer of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and The Sting and Taxi Driver (all of them favorite films)—rolled into town to promote You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, an explosive tell-all about Hollywood in the 1970s and her personal destruction through booze and drugs.
Julia had it all. Funny, smart, and young. She was the first woman to win an Oscar as a producer—at age twenty-nine, for The Sting—and she went to the Academy Awards high on Valium, coke, and pot. Her acceptance speech brought down the house when she uttered the immortal “You don’t know what a trip it is for a Jewish girl from Great Neck to meet Liz Taylor and win an Academy Award in the same night.”
She went on to destroy her career over and over with freebase cocaine (a high so scary that even I wouldn’t go near it) from 1978 to 1980. In those three years, she smoked and spent somewhere between seven to ten million dollars.
She kicked the cocaine habit, but she still liked her vodka and marijuana and smoked four packs a day, thank you very much. A rigorous workout regimen and a spiky hairdo kept her looking youthful. Energy came off of her in waves. Julia was the type of drunk who ran umpteen miles on the StairMaster in her suite at a ritzy hotel overlooking Central Park while watching TV and jabbering on the phone, smokes and bottle of vodka on the coffee table nearby.
A week before her book tour, she threatened to cancel all the interviews our publicity department had arranged, screaming at the director of publicity in Los Angeles, “I walked away from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and I can walk away from this!”
That was just the beginning. Book tours are carefully constructed edifices built on staggered interviews, with each national media outlet demanding to be first, second, et cetera, in print, then broadcast, followed by appearances in major cities. Trying to recast the cement a week before the start of the tour would be murder, but I was told to do it. Hers was our biggest book of the spring season.
Julia soon proved to me that she had her finger on the pulse of popular culture. After her tirade, she told me in her gravelly voice, “Ken, this book is going to number one on the New York Times best-seller list. I know what I’m doing.”
So I tore up the schedule and planted an item in the New York Post’s influential “Page Six” column about the book and the commotion it was making in Los Angeles. I immediately received six phone calls from major television programs including an offer from Donahue to have Julia on for the whole hour, an honor usually bestowed only upon Hollywood actors.
This meant I had to cancel the guaranteed commitment with Joan Rivers, whom I personally had promised would get Julia first, before the book became a cause célèbre. The public relations business is a strange one: Rarely is anything put on paper. It’s all handshake agreements built on trust, with a publicist knowing that if he pisses off a producer at a national TV show or a prominent magazine or newspaper, then not only will he be persona non grata, his whole company would take a black eye for all of the authors.
All of this was running through my head when I decided that, instead of having a driver and a limo pick up Julia, I would go along for the ride and be at JFK airport to greet her at midnight. I thought she would appreciate some groveling, Hollywood-style, to impress upon her how important her book was to the company.
It worked. She came down the runway, a thin, tiny woman with a sly smile and her trademark shock of gray hair standing on end like a porcupine. Behind her was her assistant, Susan, tall, Los Angeles–pretty in revealing clothes, with a big mop of unruly brown hair. After we retrieved multiple steamer trunks of luggage and stepped into the limo, Julia complained bitterly about not being allowed to smoke on the six-hour flight and immediately lit a cigarette.
Her nonstop kibitzing continued until she ground out the cigarette, reached into her coat, lit up what was left of a joint, and pronounced, “Tomorrow I start A.A.!”
We all laughed, particularly since I had told Susan I was in recovery, and we had one of those friendly, falsely intimate moments found only in the Los Angeles entertainment community. Susan was knowledgeable about the twelve steps, and we both couldn’t help loving Julia. The sickly-sweet smell permeated the limo with Julia’s every puff—the car windows up, of course—making my eyes water and my mouth dry.
To get in Julia’s good graces, I fired off the unintentionally funny line (as only the young and ambitious can): “Julia, in my three and a half years of book publicity, I’ve never worked on a book this big!” Julia was thrilled. When we arrived at the Ritz-Carlton on Central Park, she and Susan went inside, and I got the bonus of a ride to my apartment in downtown Manhattan, filled with hope and foreboding.
Much to my surprise, Donahue went very well. Julia sold the book, was funny and honest, and handled all of Phil’s questions with aplomb. She was on best behavior, and orders for the book soared.
After an action-packed day at work on Julia’s and other books, I went to pick up “Jules” at ten P.M. for her eleven-to-midnight interview on The Larry King Show. This was before his show on CNN, when his radio show was a mainstay for big-name touring authors. I called up to the suite, and Susan warned me, “Be careful. She’s really tired and in a bad mood.”
I took the elevator up and entered the room, where Julia was sitting at a table with her best friend, the editor in chief of Random House. “Jules” was visibly pissed.
“Ken, you’ve made me do too much today. I’m tired, I haven’t gotten enough sleep—don’t you understand? I’m a forty-seven-year-old woman, and I can’t take it.” And on. And on. I stood there stone-faced, quickly factoring in the projected length of this tongue-lashing, the amount of time it would take to drive to Larry King’s studio, the traffic in midtown this time of night, knowing that if I fucked up on getting her to the most important national live radio show in the country, it would be my head.
I finally got her out of the hotel and into the limo and she turned to me and apologized. “Ken, I’m sorry. I wouldn’t normally do that in front of other people, but you have to understand, I’m really tired.”
We arrived at the studio with eight minutes to spare before the show went live. Julia turned on the charm with Larry and killed the whole hour. I took her back to the hotel and dropped her off, desperately needing a twelve-step meeting.
As I attempted to go to sleep, I ran Julia’s life through my head. I loved all that Julia had done because I was a movie buff. I couldn’t possibly compare my talents to hers, but I did relate to how my choices had been dictated by alcohol and drugs.
I woke up the next day, exhausted. The strain of getting Julia to Larry King’s show had worn me out. I slept late, and when I got to work, I discovered that Julia was refusing to do Howard Stern’s radio show because she was too tired. Groaning, I picked up the phone and called Stern’s infamous producer and on-air foil, Gary Dell’Abate, and told him that Julia was very tired, overworked, and couldn’t come to the studio to do the show.
Gary screamed at me, “Phillips is sucking every dick in town but blowing off Howard? You gotta be fucking kidding me!”
Gary threatened that Howard would ridicule Julia on-air and make her look really bad, and “this ain’t an idle threat” (the following day, Howard did complain bitterly about Julia on-air). I apologized for fifteen minutes and then dragged myself into the weekly marketing-cum-torture meeting for the big-shot editors who ran Random House, a meeting reviled by everyone in our department; one of my friends threw up out of anxiety before going into the meeting. Many of the editors were nice, but the most self-important would sit imperiously and grill the unlucky PR people who had to describe the publicity gained—or lost—for the lead titles that week. Those oh-so-often-dog-shit titles for which they had overpaid, for which publicity was supposed to spin into gold.
This week was different. The publisher and the editor of Julia’s book were very pleasant to me. In the meeting, my sterling imitation of Julia’s gravel
ly exclamations had brought down the house. After the meeting, I told the editor—who was very cute—that I appreciated her being nice, and she replied, “You know, Ken, it’s not like it’s a hard thing to do.” Yeah, right.
A few hours later, I was back outside our office building in midtown, waiting for a limo to take Julia and me to a popular live midday talk show on CNN. The limo was fifteen minutes late. I began to panic. Julia was waiting at the hotel. I saw a limo go by with a driver who looked like Julia’s, and I ran two blocks, desperately trying to catch up. When I got to a red light where the limo had stopped and peered inside, it wasn’t the same driver. I ran back to work—no cell phones in those days, so I had to go to my office to call the limo company. Apparently, the NYPD had chased the driver away, and he wound up in an auto accident. I told them to send a car to pick up Julia and decided it would be faster for me to run across town than take a car to the CNN studio.
Julia was fifteen minutes late and glowered at me as she stormed into the greenroom. I asked how she felt about just landing at number one on the New York Times best-seller list. She replied, “I’m really not surprised, I knew it all along,” blah, blah, blah.
Julia went on the set, and was lit in to about some aspect of the book—Goldie Hawn’s dirty hair?—while Susan and I caught up in the greenroom. Susan told me that Julia was always asking if she gossiped about how crazy her boss acted. I said Julia must be watching a movie of her own life: She could see her own awful behavior as if it were up on the screen, but she was unwilling, even powerless, to stop herself. Susan agreed. After the show, I dropped them both off at the hotel and went back to work, feeling so nauseated that I thought I was going to throw up.
The twelve-step slogan “Don’t get too hungry, angry, lonely, or tired” reminded me I’m always near-suicidal or -homicidal if I’m hungry. I polished off a sandwich and felt better.
