by Tom Nolan
Millar kept Ray Sokolov’s favor a secret. When Dick Lid commented on the absence of anything potentially embarrassing in the Newsweek piece (“I think I said to Ken, ‘How great—but that sounds like the picture you wanted to give’ ”), Millar said of Sokolov, “Well, he was a sweet young man, but—he didn’t know anything.”
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Ross Macdonald was Newsweek’s cover subject for March 22, 1971. The magazine bore a close-up color photograph of Millar, one eye enlarged by a Sherlockian magnifiying lens. The Newsweek issue caused as much talk in Manhattan and elsewhere as had Welty’s Times review. “I can’t tell you how proud and delighted I was to read the piece in Newsweek,” Bantam president Oscar Dystel wrote Millar. “Everyone in New York is buzzing about it.” Millar, with his listed telephone number, got an unusual number of long-distance calls this month: sometimes fourteen a day. “I’ll be interested to see what the Newsweek coverage does for the current book,” he wrote von Auw. To Green he observed: “There seems to be a general feeling that this should be the big one. Well, we’ll see.”
He hadn’t long to wait. Knopf’s first printing sold out before publication. The book jumped onto Publishers Weekly’s fiction list in fourth place; a week later it was number two (above Irwin Shaw’s Rich Man, Poor Man, Hemingway’s posthumous Islands in the Stream, and Erich Segal’s Love Story), and the trade journal noted, “Many stores tell us this is their bestselling novel.” In early April, Underground was five on the New York Times list; on the PW chart (known to the trade as a more accurate indicator) it held at two, “selling 4500 copies a week.” Millar seemed quietly dazzled. “I am frankly delighted to be on the big board again,” he admitted to Matt Bruccoli, “and especially in second place.” Time magazine put Underground number three on April 5. Green informed him, “We passed 43,000 on Monday. The book moves to no. 4 on the Times list on April 18, displacing Allen Drury.” To von Auw, Millar wrote, “Well, this is a long-awaited consummation, and a somewhat larger one than I ever looked for.” As the book continued to do “ridiculously well,” the author said he found it all “incredible, but am too old to be spoiled by it.”
Macdonald’s new novel was the book of the hour, and his allies and champions did all they could to signal the occasion. LA Times columnist Art Seidenbaum wrote a piece (“very friendly,” Millar said, “and, I think, perceptive”) connecting the stuff of Macdonald’s fiction to the Southland’s displaced citizens and transient illusions: “Macdonald’s books are full of the wandering hungers of California people, the men who embezzle dreams and then keep running, the women who fade toward old-age still thinking about 40-foot pools in San Marino. . . . The secret reality of sadness is more important than the fantasy of murder.” At the end of a major Sunday review, LA Times critic Robert Kirsch, a longtime Macdonald appreciator, allowed himself a pat on the back for his West Coast perceptiveness: “Critics should not blow their own horns. But perhaps I may be permitted a small peep, for I recognized early the value of Macdonald as a novelist transcending the genre in which he appeared to work. . . . He is a man of sensitivity, sensibility and wisdom, a gifted writer. It is restoring to know that the New York establishment has recognized that something good can come out of California. Many readers out here have known this about Ross Macdonald for years.”
The Underground Man was a runaway best-seller—“the first runaway mystery in many years,” according to syndicated columnist John Barkham—almost the popular-fiction equivalent of a hit rock LP. If Macdonald seemed like a private-eye version of the Beatles this season, the New York Times Book Review was his Rolling Stone magazine, with almost every issue in the spring and summer of ’71 having a new example of his ubiquitous presence in the moment. Macdonald himself wrote important reviews for the Times supplement in April (J. Anthony Lukas’s Don’t Shoot—We Are Your Children! which he praised highly) and May (A Catalogue of Crime, a critical compendium by Jacques Barzun and Wendell H. Taylor, which he gently rebuked). In June the Book Review ran a Macdonald parody (“The Underground Bye-bye”: off-target but indicative of his new celebrity). The Underground Man was included in the Book Review’s June “Selection of Recent Titles”: the weekly’s pick of the year’s best books so far.
Even Macdonald’s ads in the Book Review were exciting. Millar thought Knopf’s bold April Underground full-pager “stunning.” Bantam splashed the covers of ten of its classy new Macdonalds on an April spread quoting Clemons’s February blurb (“Who needs a copywriter—with a review like this”): “Read The Chill. Read also The Zebra-Striped Hearse and The Far Side of the Dollar. You can find most of these in paperback. Get busy.” Bantam paid sixty-five thousand dollars for reprint rights to Underground and several other books. On the West Coast, Harris Seed and agent Lee Rosenberg were negotiating a deal for the new novel with Filmways and producer Marty Ransohoff (“I’d like to see a good movie made,” Millar told Olding); Filmways felt it had enough of a stake in Archer to supplement Knopf’s Underground ad budget. Since the novel was an alternate selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, BOMC ads showed it prominently. Archer at Large, the new omnibus, was featured in Mystery Guild layouts. All the while The Underground Man rode the charts: in early May, as Millar prepared to go to New York for four days, it was number four on both the Times’s and Time magazine’s top ten, number three in PW, and number two on the Western Bestsellers list.
The occasion for his trip was an award from the Women’s Advertising Council of New York, which annually honored practitioners of “the seven lively arts.” Other 1971 recipients included playwright Edward Albee, singer Beverly Sills, poet May Sarton, and TV’s Dick Cavett; last year’s honorees in Macdonald’s category were historians Will and Ariel Durant. “I’m in more distinguished company than I’m used to,” Millar wrote Olding. “I decided I better get my suit pressed.”
Millar purposely scheduled a short trip; he could never sleep in Manhattan. Margaret was supposed to come too, but she used the excuse of a lingering cold to drop out. She’d join him later in the week in Toronto; together they’d go to Kitchener, where a reception in their honor was scheduled at their old town’s new library.
Millar’s thoughts turned often to Canada in this season of great success. Bubbling briefly beneath The Underground Man on the Times best-seller list was the novel Fifth Business, by Canadian Robertson Davies, Millar’s old “Passing Show” column-mate at Toronto Saturday Night, the man who had edited the quips Millar wrote on his Ann Arbor weekends. Davies had written several books, but Fifth Business was his American breakthrough. Millar read it the month it was published. With its plot of murder, obsessive revenge, concealed identity, and violence whose repercussions ripple through decades, Fifth Business had some of the twists and pleasures of a Lew Archer novel; in fact the New York Review of Books called Davies “a Jungian Ross Macdonald.” It was Fifth Business’s Canadian scenes that most affected Millar, sequences set in the early years of the century in the fictional Ontario town of Deptford, based on Davies’s boyhood Thamesville, which was not far from Kitchener as the Canada goose flies. Millar thought Fifth Business remarkably original; “I don’t know of anything else that conveys the ‘nineteenth-century Russian’ quality of twentieth-century Canadian life,” he wrote Bill Ruehlmann; he told Peter Wolfe the book “drives so deep into Canadian experience that it’s making me dream.” One of his waking dreams was a plot, germinating in notebooks, that would draw on his own Winnipeg boyhood and might even involve Archer.
But for the present, The Underground Man demanded his attention. The new book gave Millar much to be happy about when he got to New York on Sunday, May 16. His novel was still number four on the PW list, with fifty-nine thousand copies in print. Shops such as the Village Brentano’s had full window displays of the Macdonald best-seller. Bantam’s stylish Ross Macdonald paperbacks were on sale all over town, even in the littlest stationery stores. These were heady times. “It’s been a great spring for me,” Millar acknowledged to a PW writer, one of four jou
rnalists who interviewed him in four days.
A lot of the nice things happening were thanks to his East Coast benefactors Leonard, Sokolov, and Clemons. The coconspirators worked another good deed while Millar was in New York. They knew Eudora Welty was also here this week—staying in fact, though not for much longer, at the same Algonquin Hotel as Millar—and they thought it would be fine for the two writers to meet. Through Knopf’s publicity people they tracked down Millar on Monday afternoon and told him to rush to the Algonquin, where Welty was about to check out.
“As I came into the lobby and got my key and went for the elevator,” Welty recalled, “a man came across the lobby and said, ‘Miss Welty? Kenneth Millar.’ I just couldn’t believe it! He had registered at the Algonquin the day before, from Santa Barbara. Isn’t this just like a Ken story? You know how he used to say, there’s no such thing as coincidence? So I just saddown in the lobby and threw my coat down and we started talking, and we just didn’t stop for I don’t know how long. We got to be well acquainted, in a couple of days. I put off a trip I was supposed to take, so we could have some more time to talk.”
Alfred Knopf and his second wife, Helen, were giving a cocktail party for Ross Macdonald on Tuesday at five. When Millar arrived at the Knopfs’ place at 24 West Fifty-fifth Street, he had Welty with him. “It was a nice, big old-fashioned city apartment,” Welty said, “right off Fifth Avenue. I was delighted to be there. I don’t go to many parties like that, but—it was in the home of the Knopfs, and he really just threw his house open in honor of Ken.” Sokolov and Clemons were there, and Ivan von Auw (Dorothy Olding was out of town), and (at Millar’s request) Margaret Millar’s Random House editor, Lee Wright. Film producer Marty Ransohoff was a late arrival; he’d recently bought movie rights to The Underground Man and was in negotiations with Harris Seed to enlarge the deal. “Ken was happy about the party,” said Welty. “He said, ‘I think it really meant something to Alfred.’ They’d had such a long relationship, and things had turned out well all around.”
Earlier Knopf had warmly written to Millar, “I need scarcely say how delighted I am by the success of the new book. You seem to be well established now as a master of your craft and a novelist to be taken seriously.” Later Millar would write the Knopfs, “Your party was and will remain one of the high points of my life. It gave me particular pleasure, if I may speak of such things, to spend a little time afterwards with you and feel the happiness that you share. And when Helen put her arms around my good angel Eudora and invited her to come and stay a week, I thought I was in a company of angels, and wasn’t wrong in my thought.”
After the party Millar and Welty went for dinner and then walked around New York, not getting back to the Algonquin until after midnight. “I took him down Broadway,” she remembered, “and he just came to life. He said, ‘Now this is where it is.’ The side streets had been sort of genteel, but here everything was going on. There was a cop chasing a man, shooting; the fire department was whizzing by. In fact I was kind of scared, with people running through the streets. But Ken just said, ‘Oh, my.’ He knew what all that was about. I said, ‘I’ve never seen a man chase another man in public with a gun before.’ He said that was an old story to him. And all this time he was so calm, and rather formal and everything; but he was all eyes and ears. He had a great inner calm, supposedly, but I think actually he was pretty emotional. But he had such control: the most controlled person I ever saw. And he was very patient, although I think inwardly impatient. And he would listen. He didn’t miss anything anyone said. And he thought about it before he answered; that was just his habit. He respected other people, in a very grave way, and he would wait for them to speak.
“I think the thing about Ken was, he had thought about everything himself, probably early in life, about the way things should be. Maybe because he was so poor and had to shift for himself and really educate himself. I had the feeling, from what he’s written and so forth, that he just sat down and weighed the situation: what I can do, what I can’t do, what I may hope to do, and the way to do it. And the answer to everything was to study it and try to master it. I think he applied that to so many other things; that was just a feeling I had. He knew what he had to work with, and it was pretty good. His mind was just splendid, and he knew it; and he made the most use of it that he could. And at the same time he was very ready in his feelings, and very responsive. I can imagine when he was very young that he could be pretty explosive; I don’t know. But one way to solve that was to be so good physically, to do everything; you know, high dive, swim, sail boats; I believe he wrote somewhere that he was a wrestler, back in school. He just decided what he most needed to do, and what would be the most sensible way to go about it, and then he would do it; all very quietly, to himself. He was very private.
“He had a real core of gentleness and sweetness. Really supportive of people: his friends, or strangers. Very supportive of young people. You get that from his books: he cared so much about the young; I’m sure he could see himself, in lots of difficult situations. And he was able to use all of that, in the detective story. And it made him unique, among novelists of all kinds. It was so remarkable, what he did with his life.”
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Millar was only in Canada a week this spring of 1971, but he loved almost every minute there and looked for reasons to return. He and Margaret had a grand time at the three-hour Kitchener library reception in their honor: librarian Dorothy Shoemaker (Margaret’s old Sunday school teacher) presided as dozens of Kitchenerites and other Ontarians lined up to say hi to the local boy and girl made good. “We spent one day driving a 300-mile circuit through the hardscrabble Scots settlements where my father’s people came from,” Millar wrote the Knopfs: “Wiarton, Walkerton, and a bulge in the road named Millarton which hasn’t changed since I was a small boy. Nostalgia hung like a cloud on the horizon, but the emotional atmosphere remained dry. We had lived away long enough and had enough not to belong there any more, to see it with affection but without need.” The only thing that marred their trip was when Margaret walked into a plate-glass door; she passed out in Millar’s arms and had to be taken to the hospital. It wasn’t a bad accident (she was okay in a few hours), but, he wrote Peter Wolfe, “the death of Linda, less than a year ago, invested it with terror.”
The Millars came back to rainy weather in Santa Barbara but sunny news: Marty Ransohoff was offering $1.35 million to film Underground Man and any other six Macdonald books of his choosing, plus twenty years’ exclusive movie and TV rights to Lew Archer.
This was exactly the sort of long-term arrangement Millar had held out for: “Such an overall sale of Archer was necessary before anything large-scale could be done with him,” he told Green. Millar accepted. Terms were complex, with twenty years’ retriggered rights and exercised options; nailing down the details took months. The author sweated the deal all summer, but he put complete trust in Harris Seed, to whom he apologized, “I’m sorry that you should be involved on my behalf with people who seem to have little concern for cooperation or courtesy—qualities in which you yourself are so strong.”
Millar’s attorney remembered with pleasure the last night of reckoning: “I was in Hollywood, in the agent’s office, negotiating with Filmways; and we had reached an impasse on several points that I thought were quite important. I felt strongly about Ken’s side of the argument, and apparently the Filmways people felt very strongly about their side as well. But I knew one thing that they didn’t know, and that was that Filmways had taken out a full-page ad the prior Sunday in the New York Times saying they’d bought the book and were gonna make a picture out of it. So at that point, I got that ad out, and I tacked it to the wall in the agent’s office and said, ‘You explain to your client why you didn’t make the deal—’cause I don’t have to, and I’m not gonna do it. And I’m gonna stand in that doorway until you agree; and if you don’t, I’m goin’ in the other direction, which is home to Santa Barbara.’ One of those incidents you’d love to l
ive forever.” Millar congratulated his lawyer on a finished agreement the client termed “nothing short of historic.”
While these events were highly satisfying, Millar seemed to take equal pleasure in friends’ achievements, as when Herb Harker telephoned from Calgary in June and said Olding had sold his book Goldenrod to Random House. “Of all the good news I’ve had this year, this is the best,” Millar wrote Olding. “I’m deeply grateful to you for my friend, and for myself. It will mean a new life for him.”
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Millar kept in touch with his friends mostly by mail. Nineteen seventy-one, a year when many people wanted to congratulate or do business with Macdonald or make his acquaintance, found Millar “drowning in correspondence.” He wrote his novels in his bedroom, seated in the old stuffed chair; but letter-writing was done at a rolltop desk in the den. Harker said, “I remember one night he patted this big pile of envelopes and said, ‘This is my correspondence, that I work away at when I can, in the evening.’ I know he wrote a lotta letters to all kinds of people.” In 1971 these included Eudora Welty, Julian Symons, Donald Davie, Dorothy Olding and Ivan von Auw (as well as other Ober people), Alfred A. Knopf, Ash Green, Hank and Anna Branson, old Ann Arbor friend Nolan Miller (now teaching at Antioch), Jeff Ring (a northern California junior high student), Peter Wolfe (the young Missouri professor writing a book on Macdonald’s fiction), Steven Carter (who’d done his master’s thesis on the concept of justice in the Archer books), Ralph Sipper (a Bay Area bookseller keenly interested in Ross Macdonald’s work), Matt Bruccoli, MWA colleagues Michael Avallone and Edward D. Hoch, and (after a seven-year silence they coincidentally both broke in the same week) Robert Ford, Canada’s ambassador to Russia. “The letters I get from young people, ranging in age from fifteen up, are the ones that for some reason mean most to me,” Millar told Nolan Miller, “and the ones I answer first.”
