Ross MacDonald

by Tom Nolan

  Brooks Atkinson learned that New York Times man Robert Phelps and his wife, an avid birder, were planning a West Coast vacation; he urged they contact Millar, who invited the Phelpses for lunch at the Coral Casino. Phelps, later the Times’s Washington bureau editor, recalled their initial exchange: “When I sat down with him, he said, ‘Do you know who I am?’ I felt a little embarrassed, although Brooks Atkinson had described him to me as a fine writer. I said, ‘Well, I know you write mystery stories.’ He says, ‘No. I’m a novelist, who writes with a mystery theme.’ ”

  Millar guided the Phelpses to Ian “Ike” McMillan’s ranch in Shandon, near San Luis Obispo, where the Phelpses sighted the California condor. Phelps got permission from Times national editor Harrison Salisbury to do a piece on the endangered birds, in which Millar was quoted for three paragraphs. Not a passive interviewee, Millar read the piece beforehand and critiqued it, Phelps said: “He suggested I change a verb here, a paragraph there.”

  Millar gave money as well as time to the condor cause. When Olding wired in April asking if it was okay to sell Cosmopolitan condensation rights to the new Archer novel The Far Side of the Dollar (the fourth Macdonald in a row bought by Cosmo) he telegraphed back: OF COURSE PLEASE ACCEPT RAPID COSMO OFFER FOR FAR SIDE OF DOLLAR AND KEEP CONDORS FLYING LOVE KEN. Millar had backed his beliefs with cash even in times when he couldn’t afford to, Margaret said: “I remember one Christmas when we were really strapped for dough, and we had a little girl, and there just wasn’t any money. Nobody was going to get a present. And just at the last minute I got five hundred dollars from my agent in New York. Well, Ken took a hundred dollars and gave it to CARE! I was mad as hell. But afterwards it occurred to me this was a good thing to do, very good; so I was proud of him. But even though I’m not known to be stingy, I don’t think I’d have done that.”

  Millar was also generous with help to fellow writers, such as Bob Easton, whose cowritten book on the condors he unofficially edited and then got Brooks Atkinson to write a preface for. Millar vetted all Easton’s manuscripts for years with an unselfishness his friend marveled at: “It was rather strange to me when I first knew him because he was extremely hard-pressed for time, and yet he was giving me a lot of the very meager time he had. He was terribly stressed really to produce an Alfred Knopf-quality book every year—and he had to produce one a year to live on, so his time was carefully measured. And his health was never very good, so his strength was limited too.”

  Others who received Millar’s frequent editorial help included Wilbur H. “Ping” Ferry, a former corporation PR man who’d looked up Millar at Alfred Knopf’s urging when he moved to Santa Barbara to work for a think tank called the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. An intellectual provocateur in the Swiftian tradition, Ferry once suggested a way to avoid atomic war: have the U.S. president and the Soviet premier agree to murder fifty children from each other’s country before pushing the button. A poker-faced gadfly with a wardrobe that ran to pink shirts and yellow polka-dot bow ties, Ferry found the low-key Millar “about as colorful as a window shade”; yet they got along famously.

  “We were good friends; I saw quite a lot of him,” said Ferry, adding quickly (like most of Millar’s friends), “I never got to know him. He was quite a private man. I don’t think he had any really close friends. Except his wife, maybe. He was a sort of loner. He had no social life at all that I know of. He and Maggie never went out after dark; Maggie I think was afraid of the dark in some curious way. I don’t recall they ever accepted a dinner invitation. It was a very curious couple you’re dealing with. He was vastly amused by Maggie, and she was vastly taken by Ken; they were very much drawn together. I went out for dinner with Ken a few times when he wanted to see a movie, but those were his only after-dark excursions, I believe. He liked those writers’ lunches every other Wednesday, which I attended, at the restaurant downtown; but he didn’t contribute much there except his presence. He just looked, and listened. He and Barnaby Conrad were the stars of the table. Barnaby talked a lot, but Ken would never say anything; he just kind of sat there sphinxlike. Ken was the icon. He was the successful writer. He was the man who, without making a lot of fuss about it, kept writing those books and getting those very good reviews.”

  Millar’s silence didn’t make him poor company, Ferry insisted: “Despite his withdrawnness, he was very pleasant to be with. It allowed one to talk, to talk loud, to spread himself before a very sympathetic listener. He was a very warm friend.” Ferry, author of a constant stream of speeches and papers, asked Millar early on to read something he’d written: “I said, ‘Look, I’d like you to go over this, both the ideas and the language.’ In a couple of days he called and asked me to stop by; he handed it back, and in this very spidery and light writing were these rather diffident but very cogent suggestions. It was a very good editing job, and he improved my prose a great deal. He started being a sort of advisory editor to me. He was a marvelous critic. Gradually I got better and better. So I owed him a lot.

  “He asked me to do the same thing for him, but—as Alfred Knopf told me, ‘You know, we’d never need to have any editors in this shop if every author was like Ken Millar. We never have to touch a word of his; no question is ever raised. This is the ideal author, from a publisher’s point of view.’ Alfred was as complimentary as could be. I remember only one substantial correction I made in anything of Ken’s: it had to do with the position of the tollbooth on the San Francisco bridge; he had it at the wrong end. And he was delighted I’d found that!”

  Ferry’s center hosted talks and panels with such figures as Alfred Knopf, Alex Comfort, and Linus Pauling. Millar went to the hilltop center a few times but didn’t take to the crowd there, Easton recalled: “He regarded them as misguided academics dreaming quite literally in the clouds and looking down their noses at ordinary life and people including perhaps himself. I once attended a meeting with him at the Center, a kind of symposium they were sponsoring. We were escorted through hushed rooms, dined in a hall fit for ambassadors. One woman came up to Ken and asked effusively, ‘What do you do?’ ‘I’m a novelist,’ he replied dryly. ‘Oh,’ she said, giving him a queer look, ‘one of those!’ At any rate, when Ken became famous and some of the academics and Center people warmed toward him, Ken had the satisfaction of maintaining his coolness.”

  Millar found more pragmatic ways of being useful: writing letters to the News-Press on local or national issues, attending state Democratic conventions, campaigning for candidates he believed in, matching writer friends with agents, and editing colleagues’ manuscripts (in 1964 he edited Hank Branson’s Civil War novel by mail). “I think Ken regarded public and artistic service as a moral duty,” Easton said. “He felt it was a real moral imperative. That’s how he gave back, you see. He had no organized religion that I know of. But I think this was a deep aspect of his personal belief: to give back, in full measure. And he really did it.”

  * * *

  Their bird-watching took the Millars to Alberta and British Columbia in spring 1964 for a journey that came to seem like one of Lew Archer’s forays into a suspect’s or victim’s history: those counterclockwise loops in time in which the more the past is penetrated the faster the future approaches, until the two fuse abruptly in the present. In Medicine Hat, Millar visited his aunt Laura, fifty when he lived with her for his fourteenth year, eighty-five now “and still reading”—Laura, whose late husband, Fred, had assembled the leading collection of beetles in western Canada, which he left to the University of Alberta. Millar was moved when he visited scenes from his youth such as the South Saskatchewan riverbank he’d hiked. The coincidences began in Edmonton, where the Millars stayed at the Macdonald Hotel. They met an Edmonton bird-club member whose husband worked at the university; it turned out he curated Uncle Fred’s beetle collection. Better yet, the woman herself had attended the University of Western Ontario, as had her older sister—who’d been in Western’s production of Twelfth Night with Millar. In Van
couver, Millar chanced to speak on the airport bus with an Australian grad student attending Alberta; did he know the professor who curated Uncle Fred’s beetle collection? Millar asked. Yes, the professor was supervising his doctoral studies. “Life is very interwoven, is it not,” Millar marveled.

  The journey had other highlights: harlequin ducks on the Athabasca River, the pileated woodpecker at Elk Island, Edmonton nighthawks. The Millars met an English teacher near Edmonton who showed them around his own eighty-acre bird and wildlife sanctuary. A Canadian National Railroad conductor guided them into some nearly untouched country on the CNR line. Millar found the trip thrilling and would happily have extended it, but (although she liked it too) Margaret found it wearing; they returned to Santa Barbara “early as usual,” ten days sooner than planned.

  Travel with Margaret was always a challenge; and mishaps (a lost purse, a wasp sting necessitating a five-hundred-mile dash to “the first competent doctor,” a sudden “flu”) often cut journeys short. “M. is rather allergic to travel,” Millar concluded. He catered to her whims, maximizing the couple’s opportunities to do things together. After Kennedy’s death reminded them both of their mortality, the Millars together gave up smoking: life was so enjoyable now that they hoped to prolong it. Both were doting grandparents (“Perhaps I could believe you were really a grandfather if I could see you being grandfatherly,” Olding wrote Millar). They shared a love of good popular music, from Broadway to Brubeck to (later) the Beatles to (always) Ellington. When Margaret took up cycling on a collapsible bike, Ken did too, reporting to Alfred Knopf, “My good wife . . . has covered 500 miles on that vehicle in the past three months, and has an odometer to prove it.” (Knopf responded, “Margaret on a bicycle simply staggers me.”) In correspondence Millar spoke of his wife with pride, humor, resignation, and admiration. He coined pet names for her, some with comic bite: “my shrieking violet,” “the Bird Lady of Chelham Way,” “my lemon” (a play on the Old English endearment “my leman”).

  He was aware that his career had in some ways overtaken hers. Maggie was paid about the same hardcover advance money as he, their backlists were in equal demand in Europe, they both sold regularly to Cosmo, and each got excellent reviews (Boucher said Margaret’s latest, The Fiend, was “something extraordinary . . . even by Mrs. Millar’s high standards”). But Maggie’s novels didn’t always make it to paperback (her lack of a series hero hurt her), and ideas for her one-of-a-kind tales were occurring less often: a two-year gap between books was now common. With The Far Side of the Dollar Millar again drew even with his wife: each of them had nineteen published books. Millar was childishly excited about this, like an Ontario boy in a swimming race; but he was old enough to know it was the competition that was fun, not the winning. He didn’t want Margaret lagging far behind.

  Their Hollywood representation had become a sensitive matter. After her early Iron Gates success, nothing happened for Margaret at the studios except the television assignments she’d pursued (though recently Swanson had sold two of her books to TV anthology shows for about four thousand dollars each). Millar was still anxious to get something going with Archer in Hollywood, but he didn’t want to hurt his wife’s chances or pride. “It seems a healthy thing for me and M. to have separate Hollywood agents,” he wrote von Auw. Keeping his and her dealings apart led Millar in and out of complicated entanglements, one of which cost him dearly when his (and Archer’s) long-awaited Hollywood ship came in.

  All this was made more complex by the bicoastal communication (or lack of it) between Ober in New York and Swanson in LA, and by Millar’s vacillations. With Margaret’s Hollywood interests being newly handled in early 1964 by Evarts Ziegler, her husband wrote Olding, “One question which I’d like to get the answer to straight. Swanee is handling The Chill, isn’t he? If so, I want to write and urge him to do a selling job, since it would make a hell of a movie or something.” Knopf was promoting The Chill with a quarter-page ad in the New York Times, and the author was keen to capitalize on the stir it might create. Yes, Olding wrote Millar, Swanee was handling The Chill and would continue to, “unless you want us to withdraw it from him. . . . By all means urge him to do a selling job because the book damn well deserves it.” But after phoning Swanson, Millar told her, “He didn’t know he was representing The Chill. I told him he was. It would be untidy to take it from him now. I hope he has copies. He said he had ‘stopped work’ on it. Oh well.”

  The Chill was creating its own interest: a producing team at Twentieth approached both Ober and Swanson about buying rights for fifteen thousand dollars. Millar, and Swanson, thought that too low; as Millar pointed out to von Auw: “Ferguson sold for $16,500 cash. Chill is a very much better story, and I am very much better recognized now, and am due for even more recognition.” But author and agent kept the Twentieth channel open. Meanwhile Swanson talked with some Paramount people about a possible Archer TV series, while another would-be producer asked about rights to The Zebra-Striped Hearse.

  The most promising nibble seemed the one from Paramount producer Gordon Carroll and his partner George Axelrod, currently making the feature How to Murder Your Wife. Carroll suggested maybe Millar/Macdonald could write an Archer pilot script based on The Barbarous Coast. Millar, bearing a typed copy of The Far Side of the Dollar, drove to Hollywood in the spring of 1964 to meet Carroll. He later wrote this no-names-please account for Show magazine:

  A producer who last year was toying with the idea of making a television series featuring my private detective Lew Archer asked me over lunch at Perino’s if Archer was based on any actual person. “Yes,” I said. “Myself.” He gave me a semi-pitying Hollywood look. I tried to explain that while I had known some excellent detectives and watched them work, Archer was created from the inside out. I wasn’t Archer, exactly, but Archer was me.

  The conversation went downhill from there, as if I had made a damaging admission.

  Carroll pled difficulties with his movie project and backed away from Archer. The producers sniffing at The Chill begged off for lack of funds. Millar claimed to von Auw not to be greatly let down: “I suppose because I’m well satisfied with the way my writing career is going and there is a sense in which you pay for money, I believe.” To Olding he was more sour: “Nothing good ever happens in Hollywood anyway.”

  But Hollywood still seemed intrigued with Archer. The next expression of interest came from some independent producers at Universal regarding Zebra. So far so good, Millar told Olding, but “of course I had to turn the negotiation over to Swanee and that is probably the end of that. His ‘cash-on-the-drum’ (I quote) method doesn’t seem to work too well with the delicate independents.” Millar asked Olding to recommend a new Hollywood agent for The Far Side of the Dollar. A few days later, though, the author was seeing things Swanee’s way: the fellows who wanted Zebra were after a free six-months’ option, and Millar (and Swanson) didn’t want to give them one. Meanwhile Margaret had broken with Evarts Ziegler, and Millar asked Olding to suggest another good (non-Swanson) agent for her, “though God knows it’s no responsibility of yours.” He took a different tack after her The Fiend got excellent reviews, writing Olding, “If there should be any movie interest I assume your office can handle it without getting entangled with Hollywood.” (Olding noted resignedly to her partner, “Ivan—Here we go again.”)

  Nothing happened with The Fiend in Hollywood, though, and things got quiet on the Archer front—until near the end of 1964, when Swanson told Millar one of the would-be producers formerly chasing The Zebra-Striped Hearse was now offering five hundred dollars against a purchase price of ten thousand dollars for a six-month option on (of all books) The Moving Target. Swanson said unless a better bid was made, “we can forget this cat.” But Millar, as he wrote von Auw, admired this suitor’s persistence (the man came to Santa Barbara to see him) and wanted to take a chance: “The Moving Target is not exactly a sought-after property. Most important, I’d like to see something done in the movies with m
y work, and it has to start somewhere. I don’t really see what I can lose by going along with this on an old book.” Millar stunned his New York agents by stating he was sticking with Swanee for the time being, mainly because Margaret wasn’t with Swanson; and would they please send Swanee copies of Far Side to show at the studios?

  Von Auw wrote back quickly to say he and Olding thought Millar had definitely decided to go with Evarts Ziegler—and Ziegler had been working on Far Side in Hollywood for four months! Fair enough, said Millar—he knew Ziegler was a good agent—but, “do you tell Swanee or do I? If you do, please make it clear that I haven’t been playing a double game with him.” And the Target deal already in the works belonged to Swanee, he emphasized. Unless his New York and Hollywood agents told him it was very wrong, Millar intended to okay the Target option. Von Auw voiced no objection, and Swanson seemed agreeable, negotiating the purchase price to $12,500 and telling Millar, “We hope we’ll be able to get you a decent and proper contract on this.” That was that.

  * * *

  The ocean was where Millar washed away everyday mental grime. He was at peace in the sea, as if he belonged there. Memories of his childhood were inextricably a part of this: wading on the Vancouver beach with his mother, sailing with his dad. Millar had a swimming style all his own, his ex-friend Don Pearce saw: “He had a long stroke: first the left hand would go over and down and into the water very deliberately like a paddle wheel, with his body and shoulders sort of rotating—then the other arm would come up and over and down. He’d roll through the water with this graceless but seemingly tireless stroke, a stroke so slow that if I swam in rhythm to it I’d sink. But somehow he stayed afloat with this long stroke; it was a puzzle. And he’d go for great distances. He always looked happy in the water—not exactly with a smile on his face, but happy. I asked him once how he kept from being bored when swimming, and he said, ‘Oh, that’s frequently when I get my best ideas for books. I often write whole paragraphs, swimming in the ocean.’ ” Millar swam in most weather and almost all temperatures. In the summer of 1964, with the sea warm, he got his 105-pound German shepherd, Brandy, to do his daily half-mile in the ocean with him: “It’s all I can do to keep up with him,” he told Knopf.