SOMEBODY’S
DARLING
A NOVEL
Larry McMurtry
LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION
A DIVISION OF W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
Independent Publishers Since 1923
NEW YORK LONDON
For Polly, and Peter, and in memory of
Bill Brammer
Preface
WRITING SOMEBODY’S DARLING TAUGHT ME A LESSON IN timing, or perhaps I should say in mis-timing.
In 1970 I rapidly wrote a novel called All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers (published 1972) about a young writer named Danny Deck. Though deeply Texan, Danny is trying out life in California. He lives in San Francisco, but his first novel is sold to the movies and he is obliged to visit Los Angeles to discuss writing the screenplay.
While in Los Angeles, he meets a young woman named Jill Peel, an artist and film maker who has just won an Oscar for a brilliant animated film called Mr. Molecule. Jill and Danny soon fall in love, but it is a troubled love, and, in the end, they part. All of Danny’s loves are troubled—and most of Jill’s as well.
When I finished the novel I had satisfied myself where Danny was concerned, but I did not feel through with Jill Peel. Her sensibility intrigued me, and I had the strong sense that I wanted to give her a novel of her own, immediately, if possible.
This is the point at which my timing slipped, at least as regards Jill Peel. All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers was the second volume of a trilogy, the first volume being a very long novel called Moving On. I had written All My Friends (as I’ve taken to calling it, for short) while coasting on the considerable momentum I had built up writing Moving On.
Ideally, I should have tried to ride through a short, spare novel about Jill—at the time she was a rather spare woman—but in fact I had no more momentum to ride. I was tired, and wrote nothing much for the next year or two.
When I began to feel some stirrings of new energy, around 1974, they focused themselves upon the abundantly energetic Aurora Greenway and her daughter Emma, rather than upon Jill Peel. Chance took me to Italy and Switzerland that year, where I wrote Terms of Endearment, the final volume in what I like to think of as my Houston trilogy.
Freed at last, after almost ten years, from Patsy Carpenter, Danny Deck, and the Greenway women, I bethought myself once again of Jill. The time had finally come to give her her book.
Though I didn’t admit it, or perhaps even recognize it, the best time to give her her book had not only come but gone. I still liked Jill, and was still interested in her, but I had also grown rather tentative about her. In 1971 she had briefly resided at the center of my imagination—she had the main room. But, by 1976, when I came back to her, she seemed slightly less vivid, as will frequently be the case with people one neglects for five years.
Because of the way Somebody’s Darling is structured—with the three principal characters each being given a section—I was not immediately aware that my interest in Jill was less acute than it had once been.
That was because Jill herself had the last section in the book. The first part is written from the point of view of a refugee from Moving On, an aging screen-and-TV writer named Joe Percy—my version of the Wise Hack that Gore Vidal is always calling on when he needs an opinion about Hollywood.
Although Joe had figured in several likable scenes in Moving On, he hadn’t been allowed much page time (the literary equivalent of screen time), and his natural loquacity had been somewhat suppressed.
It has since become evident that I was more charmed by Joe’s natural loquacity than was the book-buying public—I suppose a capacity to be charmed by my characters explains why they become my characters.
One problem I was aware of, even as I was being charmed, was that Joe’s appeal to some extent pulled against my deeper instinct in regard to point of view.
Combining three first-person sections was exactly the strategy I had settled on in my second novel, Leaving Cheyenne. I have an almost exaggerated horror of self-repetition; occasional thematic repetitions—representing the author’s most consistent preoccupations—will undoubtedly slip in, but I resist, when possible, repeating strategies.
In the case of Somebody’s Darling, the obvious line of resistance was to write it in the third person, which is what I felt I should do. But, if I feel even the slightest bit unconfident of a theme or a story, I am likely to avoid the third person, at least in a first draft, simply because it’s harder. The sea of options it affords one is so vast that I often find myself treading water for such long stretches that I lose all sense of direction.
I think the fact that I was writing about Hollywood, rather than Texas, produced just enough lack of confidence to cause me to skirt the third person. By 1976 I had been in and out of Los Angeles for fifteen years, but in-and-out is not the same as living there. I had some doubt as to whether I really possessed the depth of reference to write about the city well.
This lack of confidence, plus the fact that Joe Percy’s voice was treacherously easy to catch, swept me so far down the path of the first person that I lost the will to struggle back to the third.
I have, on occasion (e.g., The Last Picture Show), written books in first person and then translated them into third, and I told myself through most of the first draft that this was what I would do with Somebody’s Darling.
Then I finished the draft and faced a dilemma. Jill’s section, and that devoted to her producer manqué/lover Owen Oarson, might have profited from a translation into third person, but Joe Percy’s section would not have. His was the opening section, too—the one whose responsibility it would be to suck the reader in.
What to do? Should I risk any inconsistency? Have one section in first person and two sections in third? Or should I risk losing some of the appeal of my Wise Hack by treating him, too, from the third person?
In the end I did neither. I felt that I had paid my debt to Jill Peel, rather too dutifully, without the high enthusiasm I could once have brought to the opportunity. I usually hate finishing books—separating from my characters leaves me empty and depressed. But I was happy to be done with Somebody’s Darling. I liked much of it then, and I like much of it now, but I left it with the weary sense that it was a book I had essentially finished several years before I got around to writing it down.
Larry McMurtry
August 1986
BOOK I
1
“ALL I’VE LEARNED ABOUT WOMEN IS THAT WHATEVER IT IS they want it’s what I don’t have,” I said, to see what kind of rise it would get.
“Don’t have it—never had it—can’t get it,” I added, a little portentously.
I was talking, as usual, mostly to hear myself talk. Declarations of that nature cut no ice with my companion, and I knew it. She was cradling a coffee cup in her hands and looking out the window of the restaurant. For all practical purposes, she was absent—a woman enjoying her coffee—but that was all right. It was Sunday noon, a time when almost everyone in Hollywood might be described as absent. Probably the health freaks were out, chasing one another around Westwood, but they didn’t count. The true lotus-eater were still in their mansions and bungalows, in the hazy hills, languid from all-night drinking, all-night doping, and all-night TV. Some few of them may even have got fucked, from what one hears, but I wouldn’t bet on it. By noon they would have begun to grope around in their vast beds, flopping their limbs now and then, blank, spiritless, and slothlike, hoping the phone would ring and summon them back to life. Before the first phone call not many of them would be able to vouch for their own existence, but once the little bell begins to jingle they soon take heart. In an hour or two most of them will be up and about, ready to ch
oke down some more lotus.
Jill kept looking out at the Sunset Strip, which was white with noon sunlight and a little blurry with smog. I pointed my fork at her, meaning to generalize further about the impossibilities of women, but before I could swallow the mouthful of blueberry pancake I was chewing she shifted her gaze abruptly and was looking me in the eye.
“If you stopped chasing rich girls you’d be better off,” she said, as if that were the only sensible statement that could possibly be made about myself and the ladies, now and forevermore.
Well, I was always a sucker for dogmatic women. The absolute and unassailable confidence with which they deliver their judgments on human behavior charms me to my toes—the more so because I’ve noticed that it usually exists side by side with an almost total uncertainty as to how to proceed with their own lives. I like to think, though, that I’ve learned to conceal how charmed I am, appreciation being all too often mistaken for condescension, these days.
Unfortunately, my little efforts at concealment didn’t work with Jill Peel. If her intuition could have been marketed, it would have put radar out of business within a week.
“Talking with you is more like boxing than talking,” I said. “You’re always coming at me with the jab.” I heaved a dramatic sigh—it took as much breath as if I’d heaved a shot put.
Jill kept looking me in the eye, as was her wont.
“I guess you think you’re grown up, just because you made a picture,” I said. “I guess now you think you know as much as I do.”
“Nope,” she said. “I don’t know half as much as you do. I just know that if you stopped chasing rich girls you’d be better off.”
“It’s just that they seem to pin all their hopes on pleasure,” I said. “There’s a heartbreaking simplicity in that that I can’t resist. They know it won’t save them, but they don’t know where else to look. I find that very appealing.”
“I think you chase them because they’re usually better looking,” she said casually. “I know you like to have philosophic reasons worked out for everything you do, but that doesn’t mean I have to believe them.”
She went back to looking out the window. Her coffee was too hot to drink, and the coffee cup almost too hot to hold, but the service at the restaurant was so compulsively good that whenever she set the cup down for a moment someone immediately filled it, making it hotter still.
The odd thing about Jill was that almost all her motions, inner as well as outer, were awkward. In appearance she was a neat, fine-boned woman, but about the only things she had ever learned to handle gracefully were the tools of her old trade: pen, pencil, and brush. She drew beautifully, but the confidence with which she drew only served to emphasize the difficulty she had just moving about normally in the world. The easy moves that other women make so naturally—like rising from bed, or picking up a magazine—just wouldn’t come for Jill. Her eyes were the only feature that betrayed her real grace. Otherwise, she was awkward, and the awkwardness seemed to contribute to a kind of bluntness of spirit that she had never lost, and perhaps found necessary.
“That’s not how I am,” she often said, when someone got carried away and tried to overstate her merits. She wouldn’t have it, and in fact was uncomfortable with what physical distinction she did possess. Her efforts to make herself plainer and ever plainer were the despair of her women friends. Instead of contriving to make the most of her looks, as any normal woman would, she contrived to make the least of them, as if that were the only honest thing to do. If she made the least of them, then no unwary man would be misled by dress or makeup or a particularly fetching hairstyle into falling in love with her. The thought that some man might start to love her because she had been able—temporarily and artificially—to give herself the appearance of beauty was an affront to her. She wouldn’t have love if it appeared to be coming from that direction. Where love was concerned, her standards were severe, which was probably the reason she remained so unremittingly critical of me—her oldest, and, I guess, her closest friend.
Myself, I had no standards to speak of—it would never occur to me to apply a word like standards to a happenstance like love. Even less would it occur to me to look askance at beauty. I have managed to love all sorts of beautiful women: tall ones and short ones, dumb ones and smart ones, loyal Penelopes and faithless sluts. Jill has wasted god knows how many hours of her life getting me over various of them, all the while arguing, with impeccable logic and sometimes even wisdom, that there were better things I could do with my life.
There may be, but frankly I doubt it. My wife, a beautiful woman herself, felt I should write a great, or at least a good, novel, but instead of doing that I spent twenty-five happy years yakking with her. Then, offering no excuse except cancer, she died. After her death a great many people made suggestions as to what I could best do with my time, but for some reason I found their suggestions pallid. With Claudia gone, not there to be with, it seemed to me that chasing beautiful women was about the best thing left. I didn’t start immediately, but when I did start I went at it with a will, if not precisely with a heart.
I suppose, if pressed, I might have to admit that beauty isn’t everything, in women; but I admit that reluctantly, and I would still claim that there’s a real sense in which—as some football coach said, in another context—it’s the only thing. Having wrestled with it across many a fetid sheet, and having watched it vanish down many a driveway, I have to think that it offers at least as high a challenge as art. Of course, having little talent, I can’t really claim to have felt the grip of the challenge of art, but it has been a long time since I have been totally free of the grip of womanly beauty, and even at that moment something inside me was being squeezed by the beauty of Jill Peel’s eyes—a beauty that was still being directed out the window, at some fairly tawdry real estate.
Watching her jiggle the coffee cup, I reached over and touched her wrist.
“Would you allow me to tell you something before you start lecturing me?” I asked. “A little later in life, when you’re a world-famous director, you might find it visually useful.”
She brightened at once. “Tell me,” she said.
“Gosh you’re cute when you’re expectant,” I said. “Do you suppose that’s why I sit here doling out the hard-earned secrets of a lifetime, over these fucking pancakes?”
“Yes, that’s exactly why,” Jill said. “What might be visually useful?”
“The way women handle coffee cups,” I said. “It’s out of sight.”
“Stop using those trendy expressions,” she said.
“Pardon me. What I meant to say was that there is something supremely feminine about the way women handle coffee cups. It’s quite delicate. In fact, it’s exactly the way men would like women to handle their toys, if you know what I mean.”
Jill blushed and set her coffee cup down.
“Aw,” I said. “I was just making a scholarly point. It’s not like you suddenly discovered a couple of testicles in your hand.”
“I knew sex was all you ever thought about,” she said. “I just forgot.” But she grinned when she said it and the blush faded, until all that remained of it were some little speckles of color near her cheekbones. “Are you coming to New York with me or not?” she asked.
“If I come to New York with you, it will be for one reason,” I said. “One reason only. You have to try and guess what my reason is.”
“I don’t want to guess,” she said. “I just want you to come. I’m scared of all this.”
She looked at me in the startling, direct way she had. I had been idly thinking of my reason and wasn’t set for such a look—every time she hits me with one I have the sense that once again I’ve bumbled unexpectedly onto a moral battlefield. Was I really her friend or not? the look asked.
Of course I was her friend. I would have rushed off immediately to man any barricade she wanted manned. Still, from blueberry pancakes to a moral battlefield is an awkward move. I swallowed wrong and
was forced to sputter for a bit.
“Of course I’ll go,” I said, when I could speak.
“Good, drink some water,” Jill said firmly. “I didn’t mean to make you choke. I just really want you to go with me. I don’t know what might happen next.”
Who does? I could have said, if I hadn’t been dutifully drinking my water. An Asian waiter stood nearby, poised to refill my glass the moment it left my lips.
“Besides,” Jill said, and stopped.
“Besides what?”
She gave a little shrug of embarrassment. “I’m not familiar with New York,” she said, as if she were referring to a book—some classic she had neglected to read.
I wasn’t familiar with New York either, to tell the truth, but of course I had no intention of telling my darling companion a truth of that sort. Why tell women the truth, anyway? No need to add to their advantages.
I cleared my throat, patted her hand, and summoned my most world-traveled voice. It was just an act, but it was our act, and there were times when we were both almost able to suspend our disbelief in me. At times I was almost able to convince us that I knew what I was talking about, although, for it to work, it was necessary not to say much. If I said anything complex, Jill would methodically pick my statement apart. I would make an ill-considered but grandiose statement and she would calmly reduce it to a rubble of illogic. Somehow or other we had proceeded in that way for a good many years—she was looking at me now, waiting for a grandiose statement, the fine little chisel ready in her mind.
“Say something, Joe,” she said.
“Oh, well,” I said. “I was just going to point out that it’s different.”
“What’s different?”
“New York,” I said. “I remember that much. New York is different from here.”
“Oh. I thought you were going to say something,” she said, and allowed the impatient Asian to pour her some more coffee.
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