by Robert Stone
seemed a liquidation was being conducted under the appearance of a potlatch, in a welter of flacks, agents, and bimbos, security guards, sadhus, bare-breasted Scottish girls in boots, riveted into their Shetland-hide breeches. There were English Hell’s Angels and Cali- fornia ones, a young woman who said she had climbed Annapurna solo, another who claimed she’d been shot in the wrist with a dart gun. People introduced their songs and disappeared forever. Or else were never thereafter to be out of sight or hearing. In other words it was a music-business publicity-happy media circus. There were many venues and charged sites—after Savile Row, the Round House, after the Round House, the Albert Hall, after that, Stonehenge. Kesey wanted to organize a trip to Egypt with the Grateful Dead. Something kept happening or, more precisely, kept going on, taking its course, as Beckett put it. Tabloids commercial and irregular kept trying to describe it. It might have been summa- rized as fucking, drug taking, drinking, press agentry, but above all it was not writing—nobody, nothing. Kesey not writing. Brooks not writing. Stone not writing. We were still young enough to enjoy ourselves. For a while we left the Angels and Kesey in residence at the Hampstead flat. The generosity and good humor of our Redington Road neighbors in accepting our guests (who were themselves most gracious) was one of the great good things we were blessed with in that time. When things settled down I found a middle ground between writing the second book and not writing it: freelance journalism and the occasional short story. Some of the journalistic pieces were celebrity puffs and travel pieces, but at the same time I was learning to execute the short story, a form for which I had been raised to have a crippling, exaggerated respect. One of the valid criticisms of writ- prime green: remembering the sixties 175
ing programs as places to write and study is that the pieces taken as exemplars, the canon of Hemingway, Joyce, and so on, are often so magisterial as to be inapproachable. The result can be that the stu- dent is dumbstruck by the science he’s supposed to be examining. I did begin to write some decent stories in London. Maybe I required the flakiness and time wasting to lose some of the awe with which writing was still surrounded for me. It’s hard to make that sound convincing. I am not a writer who believes that journalistic writing is a way to learn “economy” or of “approaching essentials” or any of the other piously wholesome-sounding simplicities. Journalism does provide some useful exposure to the world and how people go around in it. Some writers take a lot from the distance journalism requires be- tween writer and subject. Speaking for myself, I don’t believe I ever learned anything at all, stylistically, from my years of newspaper and magazine pieces. Which is not to say I think they’re all without merit. Some I enjoyed very much, and doing them was doing the right thing for a change. The lessons to be learned from writing fic- tion and nonfiction—the lessons, I mean, to be learned about each from writing the other—consist in learning how to look at them. The best nonfiction writers—John McPhee, for example—create multidimensional characters, and set scenes in dialogue that have their highest accuracy in the reader’s recognition of life and speech. George Orwell, we know, changed minor circumstances in The Road to Wigan Pier. Orwell was a journalist of such scruples that he noted the variances in his journals. In fact, his only agenda was the scene itself, the human situation. It was all that could be required of him. So much can be said about the intersections of life and language, the degree to which language can be made to serve the truth. By the 176 robert stone
truth I mean unresisted insight, which is what gets us by, which makes one person’s life and sufferings comprehensible to another. We take an experience, or a character, an event, and so to speak we write a poem about it. The experience, the voices and personalities, pass from primary process to language. If instructors in journalism, editors and so on teach useful short- cuts, they may be earning their salary, but they’re no professional help to their writers. If, on the other hand, they insist on vivid and clear description, they are useful guides. I took something from that otherwise unprofitable time. I might have served art and insight more perfectly if I had thought twice about what lay behind the possibility of movie deals. I was just back from Sweden, where I had been listening to four long-winded U.S. Navy deserters explaining the moral imperatives behind their jumping ship in Japan to protest the Vietnam War, when my London telephone rang. I think there’s a tradition that telephone calls from Hollywood come in the middle of the night. I was sitting up in the wintry dawn listening to the tapes I’d made of the sailors in Stockholm when the polite but insistent ring-ring of our battered black telephone sounded. Indeed it was Hollywood on the line. Paul Newman wanted to make a film of A Hall of Mirrors. Actually he was not speaking from California but from Westport, Connecticut, where he was between movies. While the sky light- ened over the city, I found myself talking what seemed sheer fantasy. Newman proposed to acquire A Hall of Mirrors and perform in it as one of the principal characters. His wife, Joanne Woodward, would play another. The Newmans had always been known for their left-liberalism, and filming A Hall of Mirrors was seen by them and everyone con- nected with the project as a political gesture. In America, both the prime green: remembering the sixties 177
Right and the Left were organizing for the period of polarization that lay ahead. The Vietnam War was beginning to sear the edges and seams of America; in fact, our conversation took place just a few months before a major news event of that war—the surprise Com- munist offensive timed for the Tet New Year’s truce, and the politi- cally vital series of battles near South Vietnam’s cities. A Hall of Mirrors is, among other things, a catastrophic love story within a political setting. It’s about three white people, two rootless, one perhaps too profoundly rooted in the old soil. Their fortunes are acted out against the background of the struggle over segregation in the Deep South. I had been years working on it. Over those years I had run into many individuals in the saloons of various bohemias with novels-in-progress in tow. One knew with a dismal certainty that these works were bound to fade away in longhand. My foot on the bar rail as I talked away what I should have been writing, I had always secretly believed I was that kind of writer. In spite of all the grief I ought to have seen coming, I was well pleased at the idea of a film of my novel. Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward were not only the biggest stars in America then, but con- scientious and gifted artists, and politically involved. The film would be a labor of love for these two. Serious attention would be guaranteed. As for the pitfalls of Hollywood, of movies, I knew what everyone thought they knew about the picture business. The movies were fun in something of the same way as comic strips. There were exceptions—mainly foreign productions, a few American classics. These easy attitudes did not deter me. For one thing I had par- taken of the current notion that the world was changing. The scales of decadent convention were supposed to be falling away every- where. Et cetera. A casting-off of convention, self-consciousness, and clichéd attitudes was working out a general liberation. The truth 178 robert stone
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was supposedly emerging in some way, making people free. I like to think I did not believe this as intensely as some of my contempo- raries did, but I did believe it to some degree. And I believed it would have its effect on movies. The tyranny of the unlettered, conservative moguls and the Catholic Legion of Decency, of whom they lived in dread, would wither. Nor was I deterred by the apparent fact that American films of the middle sixties were among the worst ever made. I put this down to the influence of television and hackery, but most of all to the fact that the older generation of American filmmakers were con- fused by social change and the expectations of their young audience. They simply had not found the range. They were firing blind, try- ing to get hip. This phase, I assumed, would soon be over. The adaptation of books like mine, scripted by people like me, with the assistance of the best that Hollywood had, was going to change things. Being in London also had an effect. Hollywood, in between clink- ers, was getting by on huge spectacle costume mo
vies, some of which, like Lawrence of Arabia, were very good indeed. Although the British film industry as such was still moribund, British actors and technicians, less costly, were at work everywhere. There seemed to be a common culture informing these films, the English theater, and even British television, one less patronizing to audiences. Movies, I think, don’t lend themselves to innovation, but some of what the younger English directors were doing approached it and impressed me considerably. Nicolas Roeg’s truly harrowing Perfor- mance, starring Mick Jagger and James Fox, achieved ultimate cult status. Using these two actors, one apparently a natural, the other equipped with extraordinary range, Roeg used druggy surrealism as verisimilitude to create a picture postcard from what might be prime green: remembering the sixties 179
called (with a cringe) the harder side of those dear dead London days and nights, as vivid, evocative, and convincing as a head butt to your perforated septum. In the 7-Up series, Michael Apted forced a cam- era beyond its rational limits, into a narrative structure beyond film’s most extreme possibilities. These two films alone might rekindle whatever romance anyone might have conducted with movies. There was a darker dimension. Selling my first book to the movies was going to buy me time to write my second novel—or to put it another way, to not write it. Once again the illusion of action could substitute for the production of fiction. Offered the prospect of writ- ing the screenplay, I accepted without much reflection. I was not above hoping that the screenplay would take us to Hollywood and make us rich. So over the short days of London winter I wrote the script. It was far too long, as is usual with first script attempts, but I planned to cut it down. Paul Newman himself sent me a telegram in reply to it. He said he liked it very much. They were, it seemed, going to make my worn, wine-stained, scribbled, and pecked pages into a major motion picture. I was flown to Indiana, where Newman was filming a picture about the Indianapolis 500, along with Joanne Woodward and R. J. Wagner. We hung out and talked about the possibilities. It was heady stuff. I really had not known what to expect from him. I thought his politics pretty agreeable, and I knew he could command his space. This could be misleading, I thought; he might prove to be a swaggering superbo and a hectoring know-it-all. Newman, as I met him, in his forty-fourth year, turned out to be an obviously shy and considerate man, of grace and reserve. I thought there was a lot of the Midwest about him; that emerged years later, I think, when 180 robert stone
he played Mr. Bridge in the film of Evan Connell Jr.’s novels. The better I got to know him, the more I liked and respected him. Finally, in winter 1969, I arrived in Los Angeles. I had been there a couple of times before, once to visit someone I knew in Boyle Heights. I remembered walking by the lake out there. The first gang graffito I ever saw was on a palm tree. It was only a number. Illuminated, it seemed like a medieval manuscript. The number, I later learned, was the listing of the law against murder in the state criminal code. I remembered the good, cheap cafeteria on MacArthur Park. The L.A. I was arriving in this time was another story. The ride from the airport provided, appropriately enough, movielike scenes. It struck me that the nocturnal exterior of the Beverly Hills Hotel, lit green and yellow, seemed familiar in the way that often photographed settings do. I thought I had stumbled on a small truth about movies. Represented in a film, it seemed to me then, the Parthenon in Athens has no greater iconic weight than the Parthenon in Nashville. On a movie screen Shah Jahan’s Taj Mahal is no more moving and majestic than Mr. Trump’s in Atlantic City. Trump reduces the Taj to kitsch; on a screen a copy of it is elevated to social commentary. It seemed like a truth worth embracing at the time. I was taking it all too seriously. Another strange process of recognition was the sight of the hotel’s midget bellman in his bright buttons, chin strap, and pillbox hat, a figure whom I associated with a call for Philip Morris, and whom I was astonished to see as a real person in adulthood. I mean in my adulthood. This was all very blissful until I was shown my room, which was distressingly small. I have to say it was nicely decorated and had a window on Sunset, but still, here it was my night of nights, my sort prime green: remembering the sixties 181
of Star Is Born moment, so I thought, and I was presented by this sinister movie-German porter with a closet. I was cool; I behaved as though, like all the in-crowd, I knew perfectly well the secret of the Beverly Hills, which was that all the rooms were six by eight and that was what the midget in the lobby signified. I hastened to over- tip Gerhart Eisler for carrying my bag and for not spitting directly in my face. Waking up the next morning I tried to make it come out okay, that, as Alice said, there was plenty of room. Still, there wasn’t. I couldn’t for the longest time imagine what honor required. To call up and complain about the size of my room somehow seemed tri- fling, effete, absurdly self-important. At other times, not to do it seemed timid, overborne, supine. I decided, with no great confi- dence in my decision, to complain. When it seemed that no response was forthcoming from the management, I called Coleytown Produc- tions, Paul Newman’s company at the Paramount lot. I felt humili- ated in two dimensions. Anyway, speaking with John Foreman, Coleytown’s producer, I let it be known that I was addressing him from a tangerine-tinted little-ease. With great courtesy he drove over, and I was extremely relieved to see that he was shocked. “I didn’t know they had rooms like these,” John said. However, they had them for me. I changed rooms, then rented a car and drove around with no sense of quite where to go. There was an office for me on the Paramount lot where I could work on rewrites of my script, but before setting out on the changes, I had a long se- ries of planning conversations with Paul, with John Foreman, and with the director, Stuart Rosenberg, whom they had chosen for A Hall of Mirrors, aka Untitled. (Actually, Untitled seems in retrospect rather a better title than any of the other monikers pinned on it at different times. Untitled, conjuring up the image of a late Garbo 182 robert stone
silent, the story of a woman who traded a coronet for a doomed love.) I didn’t have to talk to Stuart very long to find out that we had very little in common in terms of the stories we wanted to tell the world. Our relations were cordial. I was thirty years old; I had al- ways looked younger and, I guess, gave the appearance of a not very with-it graduate student. Hitchhiking through the South, in the days when the roads could be dangerous to outlanders, I had worked up an invisibility suit which enabled me to disappear like a squid in threatening situations. It was a Fisher Body cap, a blue work shirt over a white undershirt, jeans, and Sears work boots. In Movieland I was wary, and I tended to wear the outfit I’d worn in Mississippi. If it didn’t transform me into an outright comic yokel, it did give me a distinctly out-of-town quality that would have been spotted and mocked by Nathanael West. To my astonishment, a full-scale reproduction of the house Janice and I had lived in on St. Philip Street in New Orleans was being constructed on a Paramount soundstage. It was a very peculiar fris- son. Somehow I knew it augured bad luck. My favorite recollection about Paramount was that immediately outside its Spanish grill- work gates, on Western Avenue, was a Mexican restaurant called Oblath’s which had what I remember as wonderful food and terrific margaritas. I would spend some of my long expensive afternoon drinking the margaritas, and then walk over to the soundstage where the interior patio of 612 St. Philip was standing. One time, after incidental production had started, I strolled over to find an as- sistant director supervising two grips who were provoking a cat- fight. Each grip held a cat, and at the signal “Action!” each would toss his tom at the other. There would be yowling and hissing, but one cat would always chicken out too fast. I stood watching the prime green: remembering the sixties 183
stunt kitties guided to their marks for take after take. I was still stunned at the sight of my reanimated house. Finally, the AD asked me who I was, and the nature of my business. He had apparently taken me for a geek saboteur from the Friends of Cats. I moved into the Chateau Marmont Hotel, which in those days was extremely trendy but a little run down, with kitchenettes in every minisuite but no restaurant or
bar. Part of the trendiness was its popularity with European film actors of that era who could be seen daily in the elevator, the likes of Maximilian Schell, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Elke Sommer. I remember sharing it once with the En- glish actress Susannah York, who seemed barely upright and as beautiful as anyone could ever be. Having made the polar nonstop from London several times, I always thought it odd that the Chateau was such a preferred destination for Europeans, since the long flight could arrive at any hour and the hotel had nowhere to eat or buy a drink. It does actually resemble a chateau, and is very luxurious and elegant now, complete with catering. Over my first weeks in Hollywood, shuttling between the Chateau on Sunset and the Paramount lot, I occupied myself with work. My local geography consisted of the director Stuart Rosen- berg’s house, bounded like Kipling’s British Empire by Palm and Pine; a couple of bars; a club that Paul Newman and some of his friends owned; and the Newmans’ house up Benedict Canyon. So I was somewhat “in,” as they say, and also raggedly lonely. Janice was still in London. She was waiting for the end of the children’s school term before bringing them to California. What’s more, I kept hav- ing these curious contretemps with technicians and other various movie professionals. Why was this constantly happening to me? Was it my simple expression and country face? Of course it was 184 robert stone
