Stirling Silliphant: The Fingers of God

by Nat Segaloff

  “With this disease there is no such thing as a ‘speedy recovery,’” he added in a letter to Tom Brown, a friend from both Thailand and the USA. “With mutating cells within one’s body, one simply fights a holding action, a delaying action, pushing back the inevitable as long as possible with every means possible — in my case a double hormonal approach. Median survival rates under this treatment appear to be currently running around thirty-six to sixth months, with some blue ribbon contenders actually logging ten years. Since I will be seventy-eight in January, these ratings are meaningless.” He advised friends to be patient, for it was his problem, not theirs. “My life as I have now ordered it is perfect for the time, the place, and my condition,” he wrote. “I do not need anything additional because I would simply not have the capacity to absorb or accept it. Please try to explain this to all concerned in a loving way. This is not rejection — this is a simple statement of the actuality of things.” [295]

  However pragmatically he might have been facing another life, he was not eager to put his current one in order, including rapprochement with his daughter. “I get really sad when I think of the story about Dayle,” reported Stirling Linh. “[Tiana] pushed for reconciliation because, being Asian, the mom is always more of the family bridge-builder. He wasn’t interested. And I don’t know if [Dayle] had gotten wind that he was sick or it was just coincidence, but it was four or five months before Dad died that she sent him a long letter, which he refused to read. I opened it and said, ‘Well, if you won’t read it, let me read it to you.’ It said, at the very least, if I can’t see you again, I’d like to know what I did to make you cut off contact with me. And he actually wept for about thirty seconds, and then promptly dried his tears and put himself back together and said, ‘Well…’”

  A similar incident involved his murdered son, Loren. Novelist David Morrell recalls an evening he and his wife spent at the Silliphant home in 1988. “We had just lost our son to cancer the year before and we were still shaken by it,” Morrell recalled, “and, as we had dinner, Stirling began talking to me about his son having been shot — which I now realize was nearly twenty years earlier — and he began to weep. He was sobbing, and tears were falling into his plate. That was the last time I saw him.” [296]

  And yet Dayle was different. “He had a funny thing with women,” Stirling Linh continued. “I wouldn’t call him a retro-sexist, but he really surprised me a few times. I think it was really hard for him to have a daughter. He was never able to deal with that. The things he was going through at the time — the divorce, the death of Loren — I think poor Dayle was just at the wrong place at the wrong time. I don’t know why he took it out on her so hard.” [297]

  With Tiana traveling the festival circuit in 1996 with her film and young Stirling enrolled at the University of California in Santa Cruz, Silliphant, his health rapidly declining, fell under the care of a series of house retainers and hangers-on, including lawyers who, Tiana said, had him sign a one-page power of attorney, which was actually the last of a forty-page document that he never saw.

  One day, Silliphant summoned Stirling Linh. When the boy saw his father’s condition, he called Tiana. “He said, ‘Mom you better come home.’ He put his father on the line who said, ‘Darling, I have to check into the hospital.’ He went to the hospital and they washed his blood and he felt great and had energy. But in the end it had gone to the bone. We had to find out the hard way in these three weeks of tests and he hated me again because I was the responsible wife who made him face the truth. He didn’t want to know.”

  Silliphant died on April 26, 1996. He was cremated following a service in a Buddhist temple in Thailand and his ashes were given to Tiana. But he did not go gently into his final resting place. Before she left Bangkok, Tiana had asked her hotel to ship a suitcase packed with video equipment to a cinematographer she had met. It was a gift. Silliphant’s ashes were packed in a similar-looking suitcase, which she intended to take home. But the hotel sent both of them to the cinematographer. When Tiana discovered the mistake, she asked the cinematographer to return the ashes. He refused, said he had buried them in a grave in North Vietnam under a name and location he would not reveal, and demanded an excessive “reimbursement” for the information. Tiana traveled to Vietnam, turned detective, and made inquiries of local residents, using the blackmail photograph of the gravesite to identify the cemetery. At first, she encountered resistance from some of the peasants who believed that she was a counter-revolutionary, until she produced the extortion letters that proved her legitimacy. By 2009, Tiana and young Stirling had tracked down the fake grave (marked with the name Nguyen Van Ich), broke into the sepulcher, retrieved the urn, and held a proper Buddhist ceremony. They scattered his ashes into the waters of the world, the seas that he loved to sail, the oceans that did not know borders.

  “I not only think about him as my dad and as a teacher but as one of the best friends I ever had,” young Stirling said. “In some ways it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be coping with everything because I was rehearsing that scenario my whole life. He was so much older than I was. When I was at El Rodeo school, I remember being conscious of other kids asking me if that was my grandfather, because he was as old as their grandparents were at the time. I was very conscious of his mortality. I didn’t think it was going to come as soon as it did. But I don’t think kids think that way.” [298]

  There was continuing discord between the Estate and the Thai lawyers who had glommed onto it. People whose connection with Silliphant had been ephemeral, at best, came forward claiming that they had been in his employ. A grieving Tiana leveled charges of malfeasance ranging from taking payroll money away from the servants to stealing Silliphant’s In the Heat of the Night Oscar. When she threatened to hold a public press conference to level charges at those who were supposed to be administering the Estate, the statuette was returned, along with vague threats of defamation, and were ignored.

  Now Tiana found herself, for all intents and purposes, homeless. She returned to America in 1997 and stayed with Silliphant’s old military buddy, Raymond Katz, who had become a successful manager/producer. Although all the recent widow wanted was a place to stay until she could settle matters in Bangkok and rebuild her career in America, Katz had other, more personal desires, and the arrangement quickly became untenable. When she was able to gather the resources, she rented a Spartan apartment in Hollywood while her son finished college in Santa Cruz. Over time she was able to gather funding and favors from friends, find a house, and retrieve the family’s possessions from storage.

  Ethel Noaker Silliphant Wellershaus died in 1996, a few months after her older son, who had been supporting her in a Sun City rest home. Tiana was one of the last family members to visit.

  There had been no memorial service at the Writers Guild. Such a commemoration would have been de rigeur for as prolific and successful a writer as Silliphant. But he had not just burned bridges when he left Hollywood, he’d blown them to smithereens, and much of his good will along with it. Referring to the town as an “eel pit” in print or telling the San Francisco Sunday Examiner that “Television has reached the bottom of the barrel, yet it constantly finds fresh, new depths,” [299] were not endearing deeds. Rather than risk a sparse house, the family and their advisors opted for a private remembrance. Tiana held an intimate service for friends (including the author) in a garden beside the Bergamot Station art gallery in Santa Monica where she was exhibiting photographs from Vietnam. Incense, flowers, candles, his picture, and the recovered Oscar were accompanied by chants and tears.

  16: The Measure of a Man

  Stirling Silliphant’s legacy is diverse. Most of his scripts were works-for-hire under a controversial provision imposed by U.S. Copyright law (alone in the world) that deems the employer to be the author of a registered work, not the person who actually creates it. Thus his estate has no control over remakes or assignment of rights by their corporate “author” other than to receive residuals, w
here applicable. Tiana and her son Stirling have spent considerable time and resources pursuing their rights.

  As for the speculative writing into which he poured so much of his soul and his rare free time, most of these properties remain in narrative treatment form awaiting expansion into screenplays — as if anyone but Stirling Silliphant could ever write a Stirling Silliphant script. When he was interviewed by William Froug in 1972 for The Screenwriter Looks At the Screenwriter, Silliphant impressed Froug with his efficiency as well as his achievements. “A conversation with Stirling can leave you both stimulated as well as exhausted,” Froug wrote. “His mind races ahead seizing new ideas and articulating them with the ease of a trapeze artist who knows precisely when to leap.” Speaking with Silliphant at the Pingree headquarters at Paramount Pictures — one of six offices he kept all over town including one on the Sunset Strip — he noted that the writer drove around in a white Rolls-Royce, had a personal income of $500,000 a year, and “is neither Glick nor Gandhi” but is “a brilliant, determined, ambitious man moving at all deliberate speed toward his own private destination.” [300]

  Froug reported that Silliphant went through the 100-page transcript of their interview the afternoon he received it, made notes and changes on every page, and gave it to his secretary to retype while phoning Froug to discuss the changes, then had it back in Froug’s hands that very evening.

  In other words, a writer writes, but a good writer rewrites. This begins to explain his literary legacy.

  “I suppose at the beginning of my screenwriting,” Silliphant recalled of his evolution as a writer, “I still had one foot in the old bear-trap — still unable to escape from the constant reminders all writers get all the way back to Greek theater — about act one, act two and act three. It was not until I wrote more and learned from my mistakes, and until I lived more and learned from life itself that every moment is a lifetime, and that matters seldom have a remembered beginning or a conscious end. When life ends, we are, fortunately, not aware of the exact split-second of our passing. So that we are constantly having to deal with the existing moment in time, and this present-time moment has always fascinated me at the expense of past and future. So, when I write, I let the characters drive the story. If there are expositional or connective elements to be dealt with, I keep trying to push them back, deeper and deeper into the film, right to the very end — and, at that point, to avoid the Agatha Christie summary/round-up scene where all the suspects are called into the parlor and we learn the butler did not do it, I try to end my story without the explanation, that is, without the factual explanation, hoping that the emotional truth of what has happened to the a characters will be resolution enough. I must concede that if you’re doing a typical piece of Hollywood shit where nobody can leave the theater until the good guy has blown the bad guy away, you have serious problems with my way of handling a story. My answer — for me, at least — is not to get involved writing the kind of film in which I have to solve a plot problem. Just a simple choice of material!”

  He had an even stronger feeling about plot: “I detest that word plot. I never, never think of plot. I think only and solely of character. Give me the characters, I’ll tell you a story. Maybe a thousand stories. The interaction between and among human beings is the only story worth telling.” He had similar disdain for writers who try to direct the film from the page, that is, add camera angles and movement (even though he had done both) and parentheticals to show what the actors should be feeling. “I fucking detest it,” he fulminated. “I spit in the milk of the brothers of the bastards who do it. It is so inexperienced of such writers. It reveals instantly their lack of knowledge of the hard process of filmmaking. First of all, the director isn’t even going to read such nonsense. And any actor who’s not on his first gig and who has never before held a real-life-by-God-script in his trembling hand is going to black out all those ‘instructions’ in his copy.”

  “He was attracted to the kind of simplicity that could happen at any moment when there was conflict and contact between people,” noted his son, Stirling Linh , who is also a writer. “One thing he would coach me on is how to make a scene between two people talking or arguing even better, and that was to bring in an unexpected third element, which could be something as simple as a janitor dropping a mop and one of the participants in the conversation stopping the conversation and walking over and picking up the mop for the janitor. He was detail oriented in that those little things mattered to him. Signature aspects of his writing are its leanness and its simplicity. He felt the same way about filmmaking. He was always saying that if the camera isn’t from someone’s perspective then it shouldn’t be there. And the John Locke novels were sort of the Bourne before Bourne, that sort of thinking man’s mercenary.” [301]

  Though he lived well into the computer age, Silliphant refused to use one. “I tried, really gave it my best shot, but it never connected for me,” he insisted. “I felt too much separation between me and the [computer] screen; somehow the words up there lacked immediacy. I could not relate to them.” His weapon of choice was not exactly a steam-powered Royal manual model, though. “I find that I am faster on the IBM Wheelwriter than any computer instructor I’ve ever known is on the computer. Believe it or not, I’ve held contests with the doubters and every time creamed them. Also, the painful process of retyping, as opposed to the instantaneous capability of the computer to change and revise, makes me deal with what I’ve written in a constantly intimate sense, so that, by the time I’m through with a script, every page has been revised, polished and rewritten a dozen or more times. If I were to make this process computer-easy, I would divorce myself from the hard work of facing up to every word as though for the first time.”

  His writing method was similarly precise: “I type on plain white paper with three holes punched into the left side of the sheet so I can place the finished pages into a loose-leaf notebook and move them around if I decide to change my continuity or if I want to replace the scenes already written. Also, I never write a script in continuity. I always write my favorite scene first. I always ask myself, ‘What is the single most important, most moving, most dramatic scene in the film, the single scene people will still be talking about a week later?’ I write that scene first, no matter where it might play in the finished script. And I put it into the notebook. Then I write my next-most-favorite scene and put it into what may end up being its appropriate position. And so on and so on until I have to start connecting those fragments. The last thing I write are these connections and I spend hours thinking of them in terms of images and locations.”

  “Stirling was a brilliant writer who could turn a blank page into fantastic material by just dropping that paper in the typewriter (no computer in those days),” said Charles W. “Chuck” Fries, for whom he and Bert Leonard had developed Route 66 at CBS. [302]

  “Once he started his work day, he never left the office,” his son recalled. “We barely saw him unless he had to go pee or make coffee. I don’t know if he took lunches, which is funny, because he was such a big food person. I’d do my homework in his office, on the carpet. He was totally in another world and didn’t even notice my presence. I was also not making any noise.” In addition to wearing the green eyeshade, he would act out the scenes at his desk, gyrating, bouncing, and rocking back and forth at the keyboard, sometimes speaking his dialogue aloud, and other times reacting to it. He would play music on headphones. There were sometimes complaints from neighbors who could hear him typing into the night. Only a writer who has been “in the zone” can appreciate what it’s like when a character takes hold. Where Silliphant was using many of his characters as surrogates, his identification with them could be doubly profound.

  His concentration was legendary. “One day I went to his office to see him,” David Morrell said. “He’d just had his wisdom teeth out that morning and, by god, that afternoon he was writing. He’s sitting there at his typewriter with his cheeks all puffed out with cotton like a chipm
unk, and he’s writing.”

  Just as William Goldman had no idea what a script looked like the first time he was hired to write one, Silliphant refused to be confined by formats that made it easier for studio budget wonks to do their jobs but harder for writers to do theirs. “I have no self-imposed criteria for ‘how a script should look.’ Or all the rest of the incantations which the guys who write the ‘How To’ books recommend. All that stuff tends to be trendy and to drop by the wayside as time drums relentlessly by. Every script is different. Laying these ‘rules’ in is like coaching a guy on foreplay. Scripts cannot be ground out by guidelines. To me, a script should be seamless: one complete piece, with nothing that can be added and nothing that can be taken away. You can only arrive at that totality from within a script, not by waxing and buffing.”

  What is seldom, if ever, brought up is Silliphant’s chameleonic ability to write for an astonishing number of ongoing television series, sometimes only one or two episodes, and yet pick up on the characters, their speaking rhythms, and their interpersonal dynamics. Today it is common for a freelancer to slave over a script, endure network and producer notes, turn in a final draft, and then have the executive producer or show runner do a final pass, sometimes for credit. Silliphant’s scripts were seldom molested.

  Moreover, his impressive — no, incalculable — output of over 200 produced credits in his forty-five-year career (Appendix A) begs the question of whether he has ever been blocked. Surprisingly, the answer is ‘no,’ but that’s because the question was wrong, and the explanation is as good a writing lesson as one is ever going to hear. “Never in the sense most writers think,” he said. “It doesn’t hover out there like some dour incubus. I have never felt it was going to get me. Simply because the act of writing is a professional exercise. You assemble words to express a point of view. I can see no reason, short of being drunk, drugged, or physically incapacitated in some other way, why a professional cannot just do the work at hand. The only writer’s block I have ever experienced is the sense that what I may be writing is below my hopes for what I may be trying to write at any given time. Sometimes you simply can’t get it right. It eludes you. I have learned in these cases to let it go. Don’t chase bad writing. Replace it with good writing — and start all over again.