Ross MacDonald

by Tom Nolan

  The Millars were happy in their snug house on Camino de la Luz, but their lease was expiring, and the house was not for sale. Having lived here a year without incident and finally able to sell their Menlo Park property (it’s nice to note a Mrs. Hammett played a part in that Bay Area deal), they made their Santa Barbara move permanent by buying a home in the wooded, low-rent section of high-class Montecito.

  Chelham Way, their new street, was off Sycamore Canyon. The house at 840 was small but nice enough, with a narrow garden in back and a ravine that became a creek in summer. The Millars moved in on December 1, 1958. Millar built himself a downstairs apartment with bath in part of the garage, laying the plumbing himself. As if to publicly declare his presence in town, Millar put his name, address, and telephone number in the Santa Barbara Yellow Pages, where it stayed listed for years, the sole entry (between “Wrecking Contractors” and “X-Ray Apparatus”) under “Writers.”

  Like all the Millars’ houses, Chelham Way was modestly furnished; for Ken and Margaret, the only essentials were bookcases. “Material things never mattered to them,” Betty Lid said. “The sofa would look like it belonged in an office anteroom. But they had a great sense of place because they worked at home, and you just didn’t call during those hours.”

  “They weren’t together that much,” noticed Dick Lid, who visited often. “Maggie was a very early riser, and she’d be through writing by noon; Ken didn’t write until after noon. So they had their days organized that way; it was a very circumscribed life. Her path in the afternoon was to the Coral Casino and then home. She wanted to shield herself. I usually went to Chelham Way alone and at night. There was a lower lanai level that was enclosed; Ken and I used to sit down there and talk, drink beer or whisky, play Ping-Pong. It was a very relaxing type of evening. We spoke a lot about Fitzgerald, and some about Hemingway. And Faulkner. I remember Ken saying, ‘If you want to see great structuring of a book, look at Sanctuary: he saves the story of Popeye’s life for the final chapter. Now that takes skill.’ ”

  The Millars had been at Chelham Way a month and a half when CBS-TV’s Pursuit broadcast its one-hour, live version of “Find the Woman.” Michael Rennie starred as Rogers, with Rick Jason, Sally Forrest, Joan Bennett, and Rip Torn in support. Millar thought the show poorly done; when its woman producer hinted she might want to do an Archer series, he was noncommittal. A query from New York intrigued him, though: a theater producer affiliated with Dashiell Hammett’s friend Lillian Hellman had read The Galton Case and told von Auw that Archer would be great for TV (“he thinks that this is the most imaginative character, etc., etc. since Sam Spade”). Millar spent a couple months working up story ideas, but this New York operator’s conditions proved so onerous the author finally cut off talks. West Coast nibbles at Archer from Screen Gems and MCA-TV also came to naught, reinforcing Millar’s caution.

  “His opinion,” said Pearce, “was that Hollywood people were not to be trusted; that you had to scrutinize, with the help of a good lawyer, every sort of dealing with them because they just wanted to get their mitts on your material and exploit it any way they could. And he said there was nobody worse in the whole commercial entertainment industry than these television people.” Pearce witnessed Millar “negotiating” by phone with one such type: “He was sitting on his living room sofa, chewing out this person in the most sarcastic terms. Ken was getting wryer and wryer: ‘So that is all you are going to offer me, is it? Here I am a writer of a dozen books, and you think I will fall all over you and be thrilled and delighted to have you milk everything you can get out of me? I know the kinds of terms you people set up, and they’ve gotta be an awful lot better than they are right now before you will interest me.’ He got much rougher than that, ending up sort of firmly nasty before hanging up the receiver with a harsh clack.” As visions of a Lew Archer show vanished, ABC (as Millar read in the MWA newsletter) planned production of a series based on Chandler’s Philip Marlowe.

  Raymond Chandler was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America in February, succeeding Rex Stout (who’d succeeded Margaret Millar). The honor came just in time. Chandler died of bronchial pneumonia in March. His affairs were in disarray. Hasty arrangements led to his being buried at San Diego in a virtual pauper’s grave. Only seventeen mourners (including Ned Guymon) were present as Raymond Chandler was put to rest in Mount Hope, the same cemetery where Jack and Annie Millar buried a stillborn daughter in 1913.

  Three days after Chandler’s death, James Sandoe (the critic who’d first brought Macdonald to Chandler’s disapproving attention) reviewed The Galton Case in the New York Herald Tribune; Sandoe wrote, “There has been a singularly involving excitement about Ross Macdonald’s recent novels that is difficult to describe save by saying that the last page leads one back to the first all over again. It is a curious, provocative, often unattractive milieu but one compulsively present and quite possibly more real, in its pinch and propulsion, than every day. Whatever the condition of the spell, gritty and compassionate, angry and dismayed, it is a proper enchantment.”

  Other reviewers, from the San Francisco Chronicle to the New Yorker, gave The Galton Case ringing endorsements. Oddly, though, Tony Boucher, usually Macdonald’s biggest fan, was less than enthusiastic about Galton, apparently because of its cover notes: “For the jacket of Ross Macdonald’s new novel, The Galton Case, his publisher has supplied ecstatic blurbing: ‘a novelist of explosive excitement . . . a rising master of a complex and colorful art . . . speaks to people of all sorts, powerfully and imaginatively, about the basic hopes and dreads of life.’ Such remarks are not mere blurb-burbling but perfectly true; and my only complaint is with, ‘We feel that this book achieves a new maturity’—Macdonald has been this good for ten years now, and I’m glad his publisher has finally noticed it. . . . Some of Archer’s other cases (notably last year’s The Doomsters) have seemed to me to impinge more directly on ‘the basic hopes and dreads.’ ” Shockingly, Boucher omitted Galton from his 1959 “best of the year” lists in the New York Times.

  Knopf promoted Galton with a good ad in the Times Book Review, but a week after publication Alfred reported only thirty-five hundred copies had been shipped: a decline even from The Doomsters’s disappointing advance sale. “For some reason this struck me as laughable,” Millar wrote von Auw. “So did Boucher’s review, probably because I wrote that blurb myself. If Boucher ever found out, he’d have a cat-fit. He probably got mad because he wasn’t, for once, quoted on the jacket,” while Sandoe and others were. “We’ll have to remember that next time.”

  Despite Galton’s poor showing, Millar was in no mood to complain. As he told von Auw, “One way and another, I do feel my name is being made, and the hard way is really more interesting than the easy way. Am I getting wise, or punchy?” He had a new non-Archer manuscript under way, Margaret’s latest novel (The Listening Walls) was getting fine notices, and thanks to his Pocket Books deal Millar was out of debt for the first time in three years. Best of all, as Millar wrote von Auw in March, “Lin’s doing extremely well at school—head student in her Psychology course, for instance, and a very interesting person all around. I believe we’re all over the hump, and trust that isn’t hybris.”

  But the doomsters were waiting in the wings.

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  * * *

  * * *

  “What is man?” the tragic poet asks through a Lear or a Hamlet, and answers: A being who can learn through suffering. Suffering does not teach, perhaps; it does induce a willingness to learn.

  —Kenneth Millar, San Francisco Chronicle, July 1959

  To paraphrase an old line from THE GREEN HAT, the Millars are never let off anything.

  —Ivan von Auw, July 1959

  It was true that Linda was doing well academically at UC Davis: she earned entry to an honor society in her freshman year. But within two months of taking up residence on the conservative Davis campus, she violated the school’s behavior code. After partying one night in town
with a couple of air force fellows, she came back to school drunk and was campused (“I can assure you that’s the last time I’ll ever miss my lockout,” she wrote her parents, who weren’t told the worst of it). In January 1958 (near the accident’s two-year anniversary), Linda was again drunk at school and put under official censure. Once more she promised to behave and on her own initiative began consulting a Sacramento psychiatrist. In May 1959, though, as finals week approached, she was seen drinking beer in a dorm stairwell and reprimanded by the dean, who scheduled the incident for disciplinary committee review. Linda was sure (despite the dean’s reassurance) she’d be expelled, causing her to violate probation and be sent to jail. Her psychiatrist thought a desire to be punished caused her to get into trouble; then when trouble occurred, she panicked. In May a school-friend told the dean that Linda was “falling apart.” Her Sacramento doctor warned that if that hearing wasn’t canceled, Linda would likely run away or commit suicide; she was already asking him to “hide her out.”

  Her parents didn’t know much of this, partly because Linda begged the dean not to tell them, partly because her doctors felt it crucial she keep some psychological distance from her folks. Don Pearce recalled an occasion before she went to college when Ken Millar seemed to smother Linda with fatherly concern: “I was driving the two of them somewhere, with Linda in the backseat and Ken in the front, when Linda made some fairly routine little self-disparaging reference to ‘my typical way of goofing up.’ Ken turned around immediately and grabbed her hand and held it and talked over anything she was saying, and kept on talking, about how it wasn’t her fault, how everything was fine, she was perfectly okay, he understood better than anybody and she was back with him and it was all swell again, and she need not feel any guilt and he knew why she would feel that way. It came in waves, and it just kept on coming as he held her hand tightly, turned fully around in his seat. His concern was understandable enough, but in my opinion she did not need that much assurance. She had only made a simple remark, something a teenager might ordinarily say, especially one who’d been through something; but it seemed to have opened oceans of concern for Ken. I felt he was overdoing it; it should have been just a pat on the shoulder. Instead she then had to handle his concern, so to speak, inside of herself.”

  On the other hand, once Linda was at Davis, the Millars perhaps overestimated how well she was coping. But as parents in more than one Macdonald book say, You can’t live their lives for them; you can’t lock them in their rooms forever.

  In her intensifying anxiety fugue, Linda accepted a spur-of-the-moment invitation on Saturday, May 30, to drive with a nonstudent she knew and his male friend to the Harrah’s casino at Stateline on the Nevada border, a hundred miles east. Signing out of her dorm, she lied and said she was going to Sacramento. At 7 P.M. Linda drove off in a white Simca sports car. Like the other Hughes Hall residents, she was expected back by 2:30 A.M.

  When she hadn’t returned by Sunday morning, her house mother informed the dean of women and telephoned Linda’s parents. Linda had missed lockout before; campus people honored the Millars’ request not to publicize her absence. But probation officials had to be told. The Santa Barbara judge in Linda’s case issued an all-points bulletin for her as a probation violator, which the News-Press reported. Monday came, then Tuesday (the Millars’ twenty-first anniversary), with no sign of Linda. On Wednesday, Ken Millar took a United flight to Sacramento, bound to find his daughter.

  At the Davis campus, Millar spoke with Linda’s girlfriends, learned of her disturbed frame of mind and of the quick departure to Harrah’s. He went to Stateline, Nevada, checked in at the El Dorado Motel, and contacted law enforcement officers in Stateline and the nearby towns of Lake Tahoe, Reno, and Carson City. Millar got a Reno doctor to monitor admissions at psychiatric hospitals: maybe Linda would find her way to such a clinic—if she hadn’t taken off with someone in a car or met with foul play. “S.B. police should forward full teletype with description marked Attention Reno P.D.,” Millar noted in a daybook, “(and I think too Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, & San Francisco). Also fingerprints to all interested stations. Maggie send all available pictures to me by special delivery at El Dorado Motel, Stateline Calif.”

  Lew Archer’s creator needed a private eye. Police and casino security referred Millar to Armand Girola of Reno’s National Detective Agency: a two-person team of Girola and wife Thelma, also a licensed PI. During the week the Girolas tracked down losers who ducked out on casino debts; on weekends they held a pro bono people’s court for their working-class neighborhood. Girola was short and nondescript: “good and gentle,” Millar noted, “profoundly offended by violence.” (Macdonald later based the semi-recurring character of Archer’s Nevada colleague Arnie Walters on Girola: “He was a short broad man in his early fifties who looked like somebody you’d see selling tips at a race track. But he had the qualities of a first-rate detective: honesty, imagination, curiosity, and a love of people. Ten or twelve years in Reno had left him poor and uncorrupted.”) Millar hired him. The writer and the detective went together to Sacramento; and on Friday, June 5, at Woodland, near Davis, interviewed one of the men who’d taken Lin to Stateline.

  This fellow told them what he’d told police: he and his friend had picked up Linda at 7 P.M. Saturday and driven in the friend’s Simca toward Nevada, stopping en route to buy two six-packs of beer, which they drank in the car. They reached Stateline around eleven and went straight to Harrah’s. At eleven-thirty Linda was anxious to start back for her lockout; the driver was gambling and put her off. Linda grew upset. When her friend wouldn’t hot-wire his buddy’s car and take her back alone, she left to find another ride. Around 5 A.M. one of the men finally went looking for Linda but didn’t find her.

  Millar was disgusted with Linda’s “friend” (a married man) and hoped to press charges, but that could wait. He paid Girola a hundred sixty dollars cash, and the detective returned to Reno-Tahoe to search for Linda. Millar stayed in Sacramento, to convince the university people Linda was absent through no fault of her own; he hoped to counter stories in the Santa Barbara press implying she was a runaway.

  Saturday morning he met with Linda’s Sacramento psychiatrist, who told him school officials had ignored his pleas that they hospitalize Linda. Her Santa Barbara psychiatrist suggested that Linda, acting on a “self-debasing tendency,” might be looking for work as a waitress or chambermaid. The Girolas followed up several such leads: the young woman with brown hair and a slight stutter who asked for a maid’s job at the Totem Pole Motel on Tahoe Vista, the “Lin” who applied as a waitress at a Truckee restaurant, the lone female who turned up at the Tahoe Tavern. None panned out. Millar was relieved when nothing came of a more awful chance: the Girolas viewed the nude corpse of a young woman found near Lake Mead and reported it wasn’t Linda.

  It was seven days since she’d left Davis. A frantic, frustrated, angry Millar showed up at eight o’clock Saturday night at the Yolo County sheriff’s office in Woodland and confronted Lieutenant James L. Gorman, who wrote, “Mr. Millar (missing girl’s father) came into this office stating he was quite dissatisfied with the progress the authorities were making in the search for his daughter. He was informed that we were trying to keep her disappearance as quiet as possible to save the girl any undue publicity. He disagreed, stating he wanted it publicized, because he definitely believed there was possibility of foul play. He stated why keep it quiet here when it is in all the Santa Barbara and Los Angeles papers. I told him it was O.K. if he wanted it that way and I turned Mr. Millar over to a newspaper reporter, Mr. Bob Slayman, who was in the sheriff’s office at the time.” Slayman, of the Woodland Democrat, had time to write and file a brief piece for his Sunday paper. Millar then had Gorman phone the head of the Santa Barbara probation office at home at 9:30 P.M. and advise him that as far as the Woodland police knew, Linda had had no intention of not returning to Davis when she left.

  Millar continued his campaign for press coverage Saturd
ay night, calling Reno and Sacramento papers and TV stations. Bill Hogan, the Chronicle book editor, was startled to get a late-night call from Millar at his home in Mill Valley: “He said, ‘Look, can any of your people try and get a line on Linda?’ He thought she was somewhere between Santa Barbara and Reno. I said, ‘Ken, what about the Highway Patrol?’ He says, ‘Oh, yeah yeah, I’ve done all that.’ He was hoping some journalist might track down this girl. I thought to myself, ‘My God, this sounds like a Ross Macdonald novel’—you know: ‘Get a newspaper guy on this.’ ”

  In fact it was like two specific Macdonald novels: The Barbarous Coast, in which Archer combs a casino town for a missing young woman, and the current The Galton Case (set partly in Reno), where a distraught father waits word of a daughter last seen in a northern California city. A couple of Macdonald short stories also involved vanished girls: the recently televised “Find the Woman” had a missing daughter, “The Suicide” a sister missing in Nevada. Current events in Millar’s life were even more eerily similar to ideas in recent plot notebooks, where the teenager-gone-from-college notion had replaced the hit-and-run theme as the story Millar now most often toyed with. Some of Margaret’s books foreshadowed Linda’s new trouble too: 1952’s Rose’s Last Summer had a daughter named Lora who vanished; her latest, The Listening Walls, involved a missing woman.

  Don Pearce came to Sacramento to give Millar moral support. Millar especially wanted Pearce with him for a Sunday-morning meeting with the UC Davis chancellor and the college’s public relations officer; the presence of UC professor Pearce would show Millar’s standing and give weight to his demands. “Ken was his usual darkly defensive self,” Pearce recalled. “He said, ‘What have you done here at the university to find Linda? What have you done to cause this thing to happen to her, anyway?’ And the chancellor said to him, ‘I have to point out to you, Mr. Millar, sorry as we are about all this, you can’t a priori consider the university at fault in this instance.’ It depended what a person meant by ‘at fault’ and so on, and he said, ‘And that is a question of semantics.’ And Ken said, ‘Don’t try using expressions like semantics on me! I know what semantics are, I took a whole year of study in semantics, I know all about it! Don’t try using fancy terms on me!’ And he said, ‘If my daughter is not found, and if the university proves to be guilty in this matter, you will never get over the day that I will make for you.’ ”